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Biotransformed Blueberry Juice Fights Fat And DiabetesJuice extracted from North American lowbush blueberries, biotransformed with bacteria from the skin of the fruit, holds great promise as an anti-obesity and anti-diabetic agent. The study was conducted by researchers who tested the effects of biotransformed juices compared to regular blueberry drinks on mice.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm Dynamic Changes In DNA Linked To Human DiabetesNew research may give new meaning to the adage "You are what you eat." The DNA isolated from the muscles of people with diabetes bears chemical marks not found in those who respond normally to rising blood sugar levels, according to the study. The epigenetic marks in question are specifically found on a gene that controls the amount of fuel, in the form of glucose or lipids, that cells burn.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm High School Put-downs Make It Hard For Students To Learn, Study SaysHigh-school put-downs are such a staple of teen culture that many educators don't take them seriously. However, a study suggests that classroom disruptions and psychologically hostile school environments can contribute to a climate in which good students have difficulty learning and students who are behind have trouble catching up.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm New iPhone App 'Outbreaks Near Me' Locates H1N1 (Swine Flu), Infectious DiseasesA new iPhone application, created by researchers at Children's Hospital Boston in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab, enables users to track and report outbreaks of infectious diseases, such as H1N1, on the ground in real time.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm Mice Living In Sandy Hills Quickly Evolved Lighter ColorationIn a vivid illustration of natural selection at work, scientists have found that deer mice living in Nebraska's Sand Hills quickly evolved lighter coloration after glaciers deposited sand dunes atop what had been much darker soil.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm Monkeys Get A Groove On, But Only To Monkey MusicNew research shows that a monkey called the cotton-top tamarin responds to music. The catch? These South American monkeys are essentially immune to human music, but they respond appropriately to "monkey music."Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm A Lost Picasso? Alloy Composition Profiles Could Help Identify, Date And Authenticate BronzesHow do you tell when, where and how a Picasso or a Matisse sculpture was cast? Could bronze sculptures have their very own DNA? Researchers have completed the first comprehensive survey of the alloy composition of a large number of cast bronze sculptures by major European artists from the first half of the 20th century.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 Sep 2009 | 9:00 am Gene Contributes To Two Different, Common Neurological Movement DisordersResearchers have discovered that a single gene promotes development of essential tremor in some patients and Parkinson's disease in others. These are two common but distinct neurological disorders. Notably, patients with essential tremor shake when they move, and Parkinson's disease patients shake when they are at rest.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 Sep 2009 | 9:00 am Giant Galaxy Hosts Most Distant Supermassive Black HoleAstronomers have discovered a giant galaxy surrounding the most distant supermassive black hole ever found. The galaxy, so distant that it is seen as it was 12.8 billion years ago, is as large as the Milky Way galaxy and harbors a supermassive black hole that contains at least a billion times as much matter as our Sun.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 Sep 2009 | 9:00 am Weight Gain In Adulthood Associated With Prostate Cancer Risk; Patterns Differ By EthnicityBody mass in younger and older adulthood, and weight gain between these periods of life, may influence a man's risk for prostate cancer. This risk varies among different ethnic populations, according to results of a new study.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 Sep 2009 | 9:00 am China detains 15 parents for lead poison unrest (AP)AP - Police in central China detained 15 parents for blocking roads and damaging government offices in a protest over factory pollution that left hundreds of local children with lead poisoning, villagers said Wednesday.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Sep 2009 | 4:20 am Pigeons' wings sound the alarmStartled pigeons produce a whistling alarm call with their wings as they take off that causes other birds to flee, a study reveals.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Sep 2009 | 4:19 am Great Barrier Reef under serious threat: report (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Sep 2009 | 4:16 am BP announces 'giant' oil discovery in Gulf of Mexico (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Sep 2009 | 3:58 am The Nation's Weather (AP)AP - Scattered showers and thunderstorms were expected over the Southeast again Wednesday, while a low pressure system continued to move off the Rockies and into the Plains.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Sep 2009 | 3:27 am Panic as major quake hits Indonesia (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Sep 2009 | 3:18 am Albatrosses set breeding recordA group of albatrosses has set up home in the Antarctic, the southernmost breeding location ever recorded.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Sep 2009 | 2:42 am Arctic thaw brings global consequences: WWF report (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Sep 2009 | 2:42 am Astronauts complete first Discovery mission spacewalk (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Sep 2009 | 2:35 am US researcher sees life through a lensLast year we reported on the work of Babak Parviz, an electrical engineer at the University of Washington who is building bionic contact lenses - little gizmos you can pop in your eye that contain tiny circuits and LED displays. Now Parviz has written a detailed account of his work in IEEE Spectrum, which is well worth a read. In it he outlines some of the work his team has done, as well as the problems they are facing (including the manufacturing process and safety). There's definite potential to use these for augmented reality, he suggests - and since there's lots of chatter about AR at the moment, it's a useful angle to draw some attention to his research. But it's also worth noting that augmentation doesn't have to be flashy or highly visible in order to be effective:
Clearly a long, long way to go until a technology like this becomes mass market. But there's progress being made. 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 | 2 Sep 2009 | 2:00 am Oil industry marks 150 years since first well (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Sep 2009 | 1:38 am A Stem Cell Discovery Could Help Diabetics (Time.com)Time.com - Harvard stem cell scientists have created the first insulin-producing cells from skin cells of type 1 diabetes patients -- and gained a deeper understanding of the diseaseSource: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Sep 2009 | 1:20 am Outlook "poor" for Great Barrier Reef: studyCANBERRA (Reuters) - Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest living organism, is under grave threat from climate warming and coastal development, and its prospects of survival are "poor," a major new report found on Wednesday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 2 Sep 2009 | 12:49 am Spacewalkers Remove Massive Tank From Space Station (SPACE.com)SPACE.com - Two spacewalkers carefully removed a massive tank from its mooring outside the International Space Station late Tuesday as their crewmates unpacked a treadmill named after comedian Stephen Colbert.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 1 Sep 2009 | 11:02 pm Spacewalking astronauts briefly lose ground linkCAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Spacewalking astronauts outside the International Space Station lost touch with ground controllers for 33 minutes on Tuesday when a storm knocked out their radio link.Source: Reuters: Science News | 1 Sep 2009 | 9:00 pm Spaceship passes critical reviewThe Orion spacecraft, which Nasa is developing to replace the shuttle, passes a critical development milestone.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 1 Sep 2009 | 8:42 pm Woman gives birth to world's first baby from IVF egg-screening techniqueThe technique screens eggs for chromosome abnormalities before implantation as part of IVF, and has the potential to double any couple's chances of conceiving A British woman who became the first in the world to conceive using a pioneering IVF technique has given birth to a healthy baby boy. The 41-year-old woman was treated by doctors in Nottingham after suffering two miscarriages and having 13 courses of IVF, none of which led to a baby. The boy, named Oliver, was born two months ago after doctors screened the woman's eggs for chromosomal abnormalities and identified two that had a good chance of leading to a successful pregnancy. Five other women, all of whom have a history of unsuccessful IVF treatment, are now pregnant after receiving the treatment. Simon Fishel, director of the Care Fertility Group, said the new technique could potentially double pregnancy rates among couples regardless of whether or not they have fertility problems. The technique allows doctors to check a woman's eggs for defective chromosomes, the structures that carry the human genetic code. Having the wrong number of chromosomes can cause an embryo to miscarry, or lead to serious medical conditions such as Down's syndrome. Up to half the eggs of young women and up to 75% of those in women over 39 have abnormal chromosomes. A healthy egg carries 46 chromosomes arranged in 23 pairs, but before it can be fertilised it needs to ditch one of each pair. The unwanted chromosomes are pushed out of the egg into a structure called the polar body. The new technique checks the chromosomes in the polar body. Doctors at the clinic collected eggs from the woman after stimulating her ovaries with hormones used in standard IVF treatment. Of the eight eggs they screened, six were found to have serious genetic abnormalities. Two healthier-looking eggs were fertilised and implanted into her womb last autumn. "All the team at Care have been waiting for this very special baby to be born," said Professor Fishel. "Oliver's birth is an important landmark in shaping our understanding of why many women fail to become pregnant." The technique, called array comparative genomic hybridisation, is believed to be the first that can screen all of the chromosomes in an egg to see if any are missing or are present as extra copies. The treatment costs £1,950 on top of standard IVF fees. To check an egg for chromosomal abnormalities, doctors use a laser to make a small incision in the outer membrane, which allows them to extract the polar body and the chromosomes it contains. The chromosomes are then checked using a computerised screening procedure. Fishel said that chromosomal abnormalities in eggs account for more than 80% of the genetic defects that can arise in an embryo. The remainder are either caused by abnormalities in the sperm that fertilise the eggs, or occur when the embryo divides and grows. Fishel's clinic has a licence from the government's fertility watchdog, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, to offer chromosome screening to its patients, but because the procedure is experimental there are no plans to make it available on the NHS. 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 | 1 Sep 2009 | 5:05 pm Monkeys Appreciate Monkey Music and MetallicaCotton-top tamarin monkeys have an ear for music created using their own calls -- and Metallica.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 1 Sep 2009 | 5:01 pm Monkeys Don’t Go For Music — Unless It’s Made for Them
Monkeys don’t care much for human music, but apparently they will groove to their own beat. Previous experiments have shown that tamarin monkeys prefer silence to Mozart, and they don’t respond emotionally to human music the way people do. But when a psychologist and a musician collaborated to compose music based on the pitch, tone and tempo of tamarin calls, they discovered that the species-specific music significantly affected monkey behavior and emotional response. “Different species may have different things that they react to and enjoy differently in music,” said psychologist Charles Snowdon of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who published the paper Tuesday in Biology Letters with composer David Teie of the University of Maryland. “If we play human music, we shouldn’t expect the monkeys to enjoy that, just like when we play the music that David composed, we don’t enjoy it too much.” Indeed, the monkey music sounds shrill and unpleasant to human ears. Each of the 30-second pieces below were produced with a cello and Teie’s voice, based on specific features from recordings of tamarin monkey calls. The first “song” is based on fear calls from an upset monkey, while the second one contains soothing sounds based on the vocalizations of a relaxed animal. Fearful monkey music: Happy monkey music: “What David has done is to create compositions that are based on structural aspects of the calls but aren’t directly mimicking the calls,” Snowdon said. “These are compositions that are intended to test whether we can convey emotional meaning and induce emotional states in other species.”
The researchers played each piece, as well as several samples of human music, for 14 tamarin monkeys that hadn’t heard music before. An independent observer recorded monkey behavior for five minutes before and after playing each selection. The monkeys didn’t respond at all to Nine-Inch Nails, Tool or Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” but oddly enough, they did become slightly calmer after listening to “Of Wolf and Man” by Metallica. Monkey music, on the other hand, had a significant and predictable effect on behavior. After listening to the fear-based track, the animals became anxious and upset, as indicated by increased activity and nervous behaviors like urination and scent marking. After hearing the calm music, the monkeys became more relaxed and social. “It’s not obvious that this would happen, but I don’t think it’s terribly surprising,” said neuroscientist Josh McDermott of New York University, who studies primates and music but was not involved in this study. Because the researchers designed the sounds to share acoustical properties with the noises monkeys make to express emotions, McDermott said it’s natural the animals would respond emotionally. “I think that the most interesting thing that has come out of this study is some suggestions for animal care,” he said. “It’s very common for people to play music for animals that are in captivity, because they figure that they’ll be interested in it or enjoy it. But our work suggests that they aren’t that interested in human music or prefer not to listen to it at all.” However, if music was tailored specifically to the kinds of sounds that animals are used to hearing, McDermott thinks it might have a more positive effect. Teie, a cellist in the National Symphony Orchestra, came up with the idea of composing music for monkeys because he wanted to test his theories about how certain basic elements of music can be used to manipulate emotions. But because most people have been listening to music for so long, and therefore have significant likes and dislikes that color their emotional responses, he decided to test his ideas on a totally different species. Teie contacted Snowdon to access a library of monkey recordings, and he quickly realized that some components of monkey communication are similar to the musical features found in human voice patterns. “I sent him sound files of monkey calls,” Snowdon said, “and without explanation or any context, he was able to listen to them and tell what the context was.” Although the tamarin songs don’t sound much like music to us, Teie said he wasn’t just imitating the monkey’s calls. “The very nature of music itself is that it’s stylized, that it almost extracts the emotional parts of the sound and makes it impossible to identify.” Teie used the same patterns to create the monkey music as he uses when composing human music, and he wrote out each song for the cello so that other cellists could play it too. Next, the researchers want to find out whether other animals respond to species-specific music. “One of the implications of this research is that we’ve been mindlessly playing human music and assuming that other species will react to it,” Snowdon said. “But we just don’t know.” Teie has been in touch with the National Zoo about composing music for wild animals in captivity, and he’s already created a company that markets melodies made specifically for felines (musicforcats.com). Stay tuned for canine classical and rabbit rock. Image: Bryce Richter/University of Wisconsin-Madison. Audio: Copyright David Teie/University of Maryland. See Also:
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 1 Sep 2009 | 5:00 pm BLOG: Origin of Dogs DeterminedA new study claims to have found the original date and birthplace of the first dogs.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 1 Sep 2009 | 5:00 pm Scientists create music that helps monkeys chill outMonkey melodies inspired by the animals' calls had a calming effect, hinting at how human music may have evolved Music inspired by the soothing calls of contented monkeys relaxes the animals when it is played back to them, researchers have discovered. Researchers composed "monkey melodies" to investigate whether non-human primates are capable of responding to music with the same emotions as people. They found that while monkeys were left cold by human music, they reacted emotionally to tunes that incorporated features commonly heard in monkey calls, such as rising and falling tones. Tamarin monkeys lounged around and ate more when they heard music inspired by the calming sounds the animals make when they are safe, the study found. Music based on more fearful monkey calls made the animals agitated and anxious when it was played in their enclosure. The study, published today in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, will help psychologists understand the evolutionary roots of music and its effect on the brain, the authors said. "The emotional components of music and animal calls might be very similar, and from an evolutionary perspective, we are finding that the note patterns, dissonance and timing are important for communicating affective states in both animals and people," said Chuck Snowdon, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The findings suggest that the vocal characteristics of tamarin calls evolved to spread calming or anxious feelings throughout groups of the animals. Snowdon teamed up with David Teie, a cellist with the American National Symphony Orchestra, to investigate whether humans were alone in responding emotionally to music. In the study, 14 cotton-top tamarins were played 30-second blasts of music while the researchers noted any changes in their behaviour. The animals were played Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings and a soft piano piece from The Fragile by rock band Nine Inch Nails, followed by Metallica's Of Wolf and Man and an excerpt from The Grudge by rock band Tool. They then heard the specially composed monkey music. The only human music that elicited any response was the heavy metal band Metallica, whose music had the unexpected effect of calming the monkeys. The research could lead to a rethink of animal husbandry guidelines, as it showed that monkeys rarely respond positively to human music. "Lots of primate research laboratories use radios to provide what is called 'enrichment' for their animals, but you can't expect another species to be interested in our music just because we are human," Snowdon said. "Why should a tamarin find our music comforting? I find the monkey music quite irritating," Josh McDermott, an expert on music perception in primates at the Centre for Neural Science at New York University, agreed. "This work shows monkeys don't respond to human music. They might be more comforted if these more familiar sounds were played to them." 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 | 1 Sep 2009 | 4:00 pm iPhone App Finds Disease Outbreaks Near You
Want to know if there’s been an outbreak of swine flu or equine herpes virus in the neighborhood? There’s an app for that.
“What we were envisioning is things like … say, you’re in a clinical setting as a patient or clinician and seeing lots of unusual cases of something,” Clark Freifeld, a founder of HealthMap and Ph.D. student in MIT Media Lab’s New Media Medicine Group. “You’d be able to note that down and submit it into the system.” But, will people actually submit valuable information? The submission process is clean and simple, but the number of contributions from average users looks to be limited at least by the necessity of having the (good?) fortune to stumble upon a disease indicator and recognize it as such. Freifeld and his HealthMap partner, John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, aren’t sure how or how many people might use their app, but they’d rather build the option in and let their users decide. “We’re really just putting it out there,” Freifeld said.
The submissions will be just one more input into the HealthMap model. The service sucks in all kinds of information and pumps it through algorithms that try to find signals in the noise. Freifeld said that as users submit useful information, they’ll gain authority within the system. Over time, even a small number of reliable users could become an important, previously untapped resource. Brownstein, who installed the app on the phones of willing workers at the Centers for Disease Control yesterday, said just a few hours after the public release of the app, they’d already received word of an illness at a school. “I haven’t even gotten back to the office, and we’re already getting some pretty useful data,” he said. Obviously, Outbreaks Near Me won’t replace existing tools for spotting disease, but like HealthMap itself, it could provide people with targeted warnings about impending health threats before the official channels can act on the problem. “It’s about empowering citizens in the cause of public health to both provide them with information and allow them to contribute information to share with others,” Freifeld said. Now, it’s citizens’ turn to decide just how engaged they’d actually like to be with public health — or whether they’re OK with the professionals handling that whole swine flu tracking thing. Images: 1. tukatuka/Flickr 2. Screenshot, Alexis Madrigal/Wired.com. See Also:
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 | 1 Sep 2009 | 2:55 pm Geo-Engineering May Be Planet's Last HopeRisky attempts to engineer Earth's climate may be the only way to cool the planet.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 1 Sep 2009 | 1:30 pm Why Pacific Hurricanes Hit the Americas So RarelyConditions in the Atlantic favor landfalling hurricanes, while those in the Pacific keep storms away from land.Source: Livescience.com | 1 Sep 2009 | 1:10 pm Human Size Consistency Baffles Scientists
Crunch the numbers on the animal kingdom’s sizes and shapes, and humans differ from each other far less than most species. The reason why is a mystery. “We don’t have an answer. We have this interesting observation, but the explanation is an open hypothesis,” said evolutionary biologist Andrew Hendry of McGill University. Hendry and Queens University biologist Ann McKellar combed through the scientific literature on body size and length in more than 200 species, from insects to fish to birds and, of course, humans. In terms of sheer mass, humans variation was par for the animal course. So was the height difference between populations — between, say, the average Maasai man and the average Australian aborigine. But when it came to variation within a population, such as that Maasai or aboriginal village, humans had less variation than 95 percent of all the species studied. The results were published Tuesday in Public Library of Science ONE.
Through most of human history, it seems that evolution stretched or shrunk people to fit their local environments, then rigidly enforced the size limits. People were no taller or shorter than their neighbors. Hendry speculates reproduction strategies may explain some of the conformity. In species where males are usually large and fight for the chance to mate, small size can help a male sneak around the others. Where males tend to be small and sneaky, a big one can push right through them. Human mating habits don’t work like that. Of course, the same holds for many other species, and they’re not as uniform as we are. Our radical uniformity was probably useful in some way, though we’ve no idea how. Now that selection pressures are less intense, human size patterns could change, said Hendry. Measurements used in the study came mostly from anthropologists studying traditionally isolated groups, who were often direct-line descendants of people with close ties to their natural environments. “You had these differences in, say, the Arctic and the Kalahari, with strong selection for body size in those spaces. But now those selective pressures have been removed. We have heating and air conditioning,” he said. “It’s possible that with time, humans will come to look like other animals.” Hendry said the idea for the study came while watching bicyclists on a path outside his home, and thinking they were remarkably different in size. The study clearly contradicted that observation. Now he wonders how human variation stacks up in other ways. “Are facial features in humans more or less variable than in mice, or in chimps?” he said. “And compared to other organisms that rely on smell or song, are we more variable in our scents, or how we sound?”
Image: McKay Savage See Also: Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes, Wired Science on Twitter.
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 1 Sep 2009 | 12:57 pm Oil shakeClimate activists target energy giant BP over tarSource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 1 Sep 2009 | 11:31 am Royal Society calls for urgent research into geo-engineeringTechniques such as CO2 removal and radiation reflection are 'untested parachutes' until they are rigorously tested, it says Experiments on giant sunshades for the Earth and vast forests of artificial trees must begin immediately, according to the Royal Society, to ensure such mega-engineering plans are available as a safety net in case global talks to combat climate change fail. The scientists spent a year assessing geo-engineering technologies, deliberate planet-scale interventions in the climate system that attempt to counteract global warming. Their report, the most comprehensive to date, concluded that immediate investment is required to discover whether the potential risks outweigh the benefits. "Unless the world community can do better at cutting emissions, we fear we will need additional techniques such as geo-engineering to avoid very dangerous climate change in the future," said John Shepherd of the University of Southampton, who chaired the RS report. "However, we are not advocates of geo-engineering - our opinions range from cautious consent to very serious scepticism about these ideas. It is not an alternative to emissions reductions and cannot provide an easy quick-fix to the problem." Its report, published today, concluded that some approaches – such as capturing CO2 from the atmosphere using artificial trees or shooting tiny particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect away sunlight – looked promising. But all geo-engineering techniques had major uncertainties regarding their own environmental impacts. The Royal Society considered two main categories of the technology. One involves reflecting a small amount, around 2%, of the solar radiation that reaches the Earth, thus preventing the planet from warming up. The other category involves removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. "CO2 removal methods are preferable because removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere addresses the problem at its root and is returning the earth's climate system closer to its natural state," said Shepherd. But he said crucial experimental data in the area was lacking. "We need to initiate research so we can understand the intended and unintended consequences of these methods so that, if we ever do need to deploy them, we can do so in a sensible and effective way." The report calls for about £10m per year to be spent in the UK as part of a global £100m fund. "That's about 10 times what is being spent now and about 10 times less than what we spend on climate change research," said Shepherd. "And it's only 1% of what we spend on new energy technology." Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution in California, said this early-stage research must be carried out as soon as possible. "The worst situation is to not test the options and then face a climate emergency and then be faced with deploying an untested option, a parachute that you've never tested out as the plane's crashing." Among the most promising technologies identified by the Royal Society are techniques to suck CO2 directly out of the atmosphere. The front-runner in this arena is a design by Klaus Lackner of Columbia University in New York. His artificial trees are not yet cost-effective to produce but Shepherd said it was probably just a matter of time. Shooting sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere would also work well, said the Royal Society, as previous volcanic eruptions have showed in the past. When Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in 1991, for example, global temperatures dropped by 0.5C the following year. The costs would be relatively low but the scientists identified questions over potential adverse effects, in particular the destruction of the ozone layer. Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace UK, said: "Geo-engineering is creeping onto the agenda because governments seem incapable of standing up to the vested interests of the fossil fuel lobby, who will use the idea to undermine the emissions reductions we can do safely. "Intervening in our planet's systems carries huge risks, with winners and losers, and if we can't deliver political action on clean energy and efficiency then consensus on geo-engineering is a fantasy." The Royal Society also pointed out that technical and scientific issues may not be the dominant ones when it came to the actual deployment of geo-engineering technology. Social, legal, ethical and political issues would be of equal significance and implementing global-scale projects would require a pre-existing international agreement. "When it comes to techniques that need to be field-tested, and where that will occur in places beyond national jurisdiction, such as sulphate aerosols, then inevitably we're looking at some kind of international governance framework," said Catherine Redgwell, a professor of international law at University College London and a member of the Royal Society working group on geoengineering. At a meeting to launch the report at the Royal Society today, the government's chief scientific adviser John Beddington said the government should be thinking about a modest investment in geoengineering research. "It is appropriate that the UK continues to support international research in this area including the possibility of considering the types of global governance systems that would be needed for geo-engineering," he said. 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 | 1 Sep 2009 | 11:21 am Earth WatchThere's no 'magic bullet' in Planet Earth's Plan BSource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 1 Sep 2009 | 10:15 am Lights Out for Traditional BulbsThe European Union begins its ban on certain incandescent light bulbs.Source: Livescience.com | 1 Sep 2009 | 10:07 am Tightwads and Spendthrifts Attract, Marry, FightWhen it comes to our philosophy on spending, opposites attract.Source: Livescience.com | 1 Sep 2009 | 9:57 am Wildfire Threatens Historic Observatory Used by Edwin HubbleThe fierce wildfire burning north of Los Angeles is increasingly becoming a threat to historic Mount Wilson Observatory.Source: Livescience.com | 1 Sep 2009 | 9:29 am WATCH: Prescribing FiresHow do fire officials purposely and safely burn 80 acres of prairie?Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 1 Sep 2009 | 9:00 am Marriage Works: An Exaggerated MessagePro-marriage and faith-based groups are making dubious claims.Source: Livescience.com | 1 Sep 2009 | 8:13 am Rats Devastating Native Hawaiian SnailsRats are devouring Hawaii's extraordinary range of snail species.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 1 Sep 2009 | 8:07 am INTERVIEW: When Wildfires Threaten TelescopesAn astronomer offers perspective as wildfires threaten a famous observatory.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 1 Sep 2009 | 8:06 am Why Did People Become White?Scientists still can't figure out why humans got lighter.Source: Livescience.com | 1 Sep 2009 | 7:51 am Strange jellies from the icy Arctic depths...Details emerge of the strange jelly-like animals that inhabit the deepest realms of the Arctic ocean.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 1 Sep 2009 | 5:35 am In picturesThe creatures that live in the Arctic's icy depthsSource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 1 Sep 2009 | 5:35 am Engineering Earth 'is feasible'Geo-engineering projects could retard climate change but are no substitute for cutting emissions, a Royal Society report concludes.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 1 Sep 2009 | 5:32 am Astronauts Prepare for SpacewalkTwo astronauts will venture out for a spacewalk to remove an old ammonia tank.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 1 Sep 2009 | 5:00 am London artists plan a giant lunar clock for 2012Scientists and artists plan to build a giant lunar clock by the River Thames.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 1 Sep 2009 | 3:56 am Earth experimentTechnical fixes for climate change 'must be tested'Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 1 Sep 2009 | 3:10 am U.N. chief calls for urgent action on climateLONGYEARBYEN, Svalbard (Reuters) - United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on world leaders on Monday to take urgent action to combat climate change for the sake of "the future of humanity."Source: Reuters: Science News | 1 Sep 2009 | 2:48 am
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