Carrots Are Better Than Sticks For Building Human Cooperation, Study Finds

Rewards go further than punishment in building human cooperation and benefiting the common good, according to new research. While previous studies have focused almost exclusively on punishment for promoting public cooperation, here rewards are shown to be much more successful.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm

Genetic Cause For Type Of Deafness Identified; Discovery Could Lead To New Therapies For Progressive Hearing Loss

Scientists have discovered a genetic cause of progressive hearing loss. The findings will help scientists better understand the nature of age-related decline in hearing, and may lead to new therapies to prevent or treat the condition.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm

Magnetic Monopoles Detected In A Real Magnet For The First Time

Researchers have for the first time observed magnetic monopoles and how they emerge in a real material. Magnetic monopoles are hypothetical particles proposed by physicists that carry a single magnetic pole, either a magnetic north pole or south pole. In the material world, this is quite exceptional because magnetic particles are usually observed as dipoles, north and south combined.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm

It Pays To Quit Smoking Before Surgery

People who start nicotine replacement therapy at least four weeks before surgery can halve their risk of poor wound healing, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm

New Open-source Camera Could Revolutionize Photography

Computational photography researchers have built an open-source digital camera. Anyone will be able to create new features for the camera by writing aps that will control all the camera's functions -- focus, exposure, shutter speed, flash, etc. Cameras could be taught new tricks with downloadable apps, analogous to iPhone apps. No longer will camera owners be limited to the features installed by the manufacturer. Sky's the limit.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm

New Design Keeps Buildings Standing And Habitable After Major Earthquakes

A new earthquake-resistant structural system for buildings, just successfully tested in Japan, will not only help a multi-story building hold itself together during a violent earthquake, but also return it to standing up straight on its foundation afterward, true and plumb, with damage confined to a few easily replaceable parts. During testing on a massive shake table, the system survived simulated earthquakes bigger than either the 1994 Northridge earthquake or the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm

Europe's First Farmers Were Immigrants: Replaced Their Stone Age Hunter-gatherer Forerunners

Analysis of ancient DNA suggests that Europe's first farmers were not the descendants of the people who settled the area after the retreat of the ice sheets. Instead, the early farmers probably migrated into major areas of central and eastern Europe about 7,500 years ago, bringing domesticated plants and animals with them. DNA analysis reveals little evidence of a direct genetic link between the hunter-gatherers and the early farmers.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Sep 2009 | 9:00 am

Protein Believed To Protect Against Cancer Has A Mr. Hyde Side

In a biological rendition of fiction's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, researchers have found that a protein thought to protect against cancer development can actually spur the spread of tumors.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Sep 2009 | 9:00 am

Breast Cancer: Risk Increases For Smokers And Overweight Women

A recent study has reinforced the correlation between being overweight, smoking and breast cancer. What makes this study unique is how test subjects were not diagnosed for BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations, which predispose women to breast cancer.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Sep 2009 | 9:00 am

Vitamin C Deficiency Impairs Early Brain Development, Guinea Pig Study Finds

New research from Denmark shows that guinea pigs subjected to vitamin C deficiency have 30 percent less hippocampal neurones and markedly worse memory than guinea-pigs given a normal diet. Like guinea pigs, humans are dependent on getting vitamin C through their diet, this leads to the speculation that vitamin C deficiency in pregnant women may also lead to impaired early brain development.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Sep 2009 | 9:00 am

The Nation's Weather (AP)

AP - The Western U.S. was forecast to see some big changes Friday as an early season Pacific storm slammed into the Northwest.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Sep 2009 | 3:27 am

Our telepathic future

In his book Imagined Worlds, Dyson glimpses a distant future in which humans communicate by radiotelepathy and terrestrial life has spread out across the galaxy

Next month: The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

You can't keep a good man down. In the current New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson uses his assessment of Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder (already known to club members) to propose that we might be about to enter a new Romantic age, driven by biology and computing, in which a new generation of artists would "write genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses".

Dyson was ever one to contemplate the very long-term potential of science. In 1972, before even the first genetic manipulation experiments, delivering the Bernal lecture at Birkbeck College in London he promised his audience that humankind would one day learn to grow trees on comets: it would only be a matter of redesigning the skin of the leaves to make them impervious to ultraviolet and to retain water, and a few other details.

Then, free of gravitational constraint, trees with compound leaves could grow to immense heights. "Seen from far away, the comet will look like a small potato sprouting an immense growth of stems and foliage. When man comes to live on the comets, he will find himself returning to the arboreal existence of his ancestors," he said.

At the time, such proposals sounded out of this world. They still do. But to call people like Freeman Dyson unworldly is to miss the point. Dyson had always argued that it is far better to be wrong than to be vague.

In Imagined Worlds (and the title is its own clue to the Dyson approach) the author thinks big: he takes an idea from somebody else, makes it his own and extends it further into the future than the rest of us could possibly imagine. For instance, in Last and First Men (1931) Olaf Stapledon imagined Martians as little green clouds composed of tiny droplets – sub-vital units that could transmit and receive fields, and serve as muscles and nerves to make the cloud behave as a coherent individual. It was a nice, spooky idea more than once picked up by movie-makers, but Dyson turns it into neurophysiology.

To understand what is going on in the brain we need "observing instruments that are local, non-destructive, and non-invasive, with rapid-response, high-bandwidth and high spatial resolution. We need to invent the terrestrial equivalent of a Martian sub-vital unit." And then he adds "There is no law of physics that declares such an observational tool to be impossible." And then with help from his sub-vital units, he proposes communication by radiotelepathy.

The difference between Freeman Dyson and people who write science fiction is that when Dyson talks about the laws of phsyics, you have no choice but to believe him. If the man who had an office down the corridor from Albert Einstein doesn't know the laws of physics, who does? So the contract between writer and reader in such cases moves to a different level. The imagination problem becomes not his, but ours.

Imagined Worlds dates from 1997: it's a case study in the limits of what even the finest scientists can foresee. The human genome project in that year was regarded as costly, clumsy and far from certain: many people thought it lunatic. Dyson imagines a world in which the genomic data becomes available at ever greater speeds, but he doesn't expect anyone to understand the architecture of inheritance in a hurry.

He also contemplates the enduring mysteries of galactic dark matter, but he is a year or so from knowing anything about the immensely more difficult problem of dark energy, the first intimation of which appeared in 1998. So he gets some things right, but is trumped by the discovery that 96% of the universe is composed of mysterious stuff, most of which has yet to be detected, let alone identified.

But so what? At bottom, Imagined Worlds is about what how we confront discovery: Dyson evokes HG Wells and The Time Machine; he examines Daedalus, a 1923 masterpiece of futurology by that great scientist and writer JBS Haldane, another man interested in the moral dimension of science; he takes a look at Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. He also quotes Bruce Chatwin, Saul Bellow, WH Auden and Neville Shute. He doesn't say so, but Dyson reminds us that he is in good company: Wells, Haldane and Huxley got things wrong, but they too preferred to be wrong rather than vague.

Dyson also takes his own direct look at the future, on scales of ten, a hundred, a thousand years when population, resources and living space will have grown by a factor of 500 million ("when life and industrial activities are spread out over the solar system, there is no compelling reason for growth to stop") and 10,000 years, and so on.

He also identifies the central problem for any intelligent society: the problem of sanity, which he defines as "the ability to live in harmony with Nature's laws", and yes, he finds the Gaia theory "plausible". He also thinks Gaian principles might operate beyond this planet, so that Earthling descendants and beings in other galaxies can cooperate "in large scale engineering projects to keep the universe in trim and maintain the optimum conditions for life".

The chapter on ethics is a reminder that scientific daydreams can be as wild as you like, but scientific reality operates in a world of evil and good, and as a general rule "science works for evil when its effect is to provide toys for the rich." He is thinking of nuclear weaponry, but fill in your own favourite misuse here.

I started re-reading this book expecting to be provoked into exasperation (Dyson once said that it was much more fun to be contradicted than ignored) but ended with a different response. The philosophical principle of maximum diversity, says Dyson, states "that the laws of Nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible."

I've never heard of the principle of maximum diversity. Maybe Dyson just made it up. But there's nothing dull about a universe with people like Dyson in it, and this book is as good a summary of the evidence for that statement as you could hope to find.

Next month: The Periodic Table by Primo Levi, named 'the best science book ever' by the Royal Institution of Great Britain

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Sep 2009 | 2:00 am

Astronauts install coolant tank at space station (AFP)

AFP - Swedish and US astronauts finished installing a coolant tank for the International Space Station despite an approaching piece of space debris.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Sep 2009 | 1:56 am

Orbiting junk expected to pass near space station (AP)

AP - A piece of orbiting junk was expected to pass near the international space station Friday, but NASA said it would stay a safe distance away from the station and docked shuttle.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Sep 2009 | 1:22 am

Spacewalkers Install Massive Cooling Tank on Space Station (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - Two spacewalking astronauts tackled a tough coolant tank swap at the International Space Station late Thursday, one that required them to move hefty components as massive as small cars.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Sep 2009 | 1:15 am

Prius top-selling car in Japan for 4th month (AP)

AP - Toyota's hugely popular Prius ranked as Japan's best-selling car in August, keeping the top spot for the fourth consecutive month with the help of government subsidies and tax breaks, an auto industry group said Friday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Sep 2009 | 1:14 am

Health Tip: Eating Fish and Shellfish (HealthDay)

HealthDay - (HealthDay News) -- Mercury is an element found in the environment, from natural sources and as a byproduct of man-made pollution.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Sep 2009 | 9:49 pm

NASA tracks space junk headed toward space station

HOUSTON (Reuters) - The International Space Station might have to fire its thrusters to avoid a piece of space junk that could pass within two miles of the orbiting complex and its 13 astronauts, NASA said on Wednesday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 3 Sep 2009 | 8:44 pm

Seizure Makes Woman Mistake Herself For a Man (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - For the first time, scientists report an instance of a brain seizure making someone believe they underwent a sex transformation.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Sep 2009 | 8:16 pm

Study finds potential way to make an AIDS vaccine

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The discovery of immune system particles that attack the AIDS virus may finally open a way to make a vaccine that could protect people against the deadly and incurable infection, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 3 Sep 2009 | 8:08 pm

San Diego Zoo's new panda cub is a boy (AP)

AP - The panda cub born at the San Diego Zoo nearly a month ago is a boy.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Sep 2009 | 5:50 pm

Your Brain Is Organized Like a City

Neurobiologist Mark Changizi sees strikingly real similarities between the two.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Sep 2009 | 5:46 pm

Antibodies 'may aid HIV jab hunt'

Two powerful new antibodies to HIV have been discovered which could aid development of a vaccine, researchers say.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Sep 2009 | 5:28 pm

Do big thighs keep heart disease at bay?

Stop trying to slim down those thunder thighs – they may be protecting you from major health problems, according to new research. Surprisingly, it found that people with thinner-than-average thighs may have a higher risk of heart problems or an earlier death.

However, the link between thigh circumference and heart health doesn't seem firm enough to help doctors predict who's at risk of heart disease.

What do we know already?

It's useful for doctors to know how likely their patients are to suffer heart problems or a stroke. People most in danger can get treatment or change their lifestyles to cut their risk: for example, by reducing their cholesterol level or blood pressure.

Signs that you have a higher risk of heart and circulation problems include older age, high blood pressure, or an unhealthy balance of cholesterol. Body measurements can also be an indicator. A bigger waist measurement or a high body mass index (calculated using your height and weight) can lead to a higher risk.

Researchers are trying to develop more accurate ways of predicting cardiovascular risk, to make sure the right people get treatment. A new study has looked at around 3,000 adults between 35 and 65, to see whether the circumference of their thighs, measured just below the bottom, was linked to their risk of getting heart problems or dying in the next 10 or 12 years.

What does the new study say?

Contrary to what you might expect, thinner thighs were linked to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease. The average measurement around people's thighs was 55 centimetres (22 inches). Thinner thighs than this were linked to a higher risk of getting heart problems or dying during the study. Having thighs larger than 60cm made no difference to people's risk.

People were most at risk if they had a thigh measurement of less than 46.5 centimetres (18 inches). This group had roughly double the chances of getting heart and circulation problems or dying during the study. However, only 2.5 percent of the people fell into this category.

The findings held true even when the researchers took account of other risk factors, such as waist measurement and cholesterol levels.

How reliable are the findings?

With any research like this, it's difficult to know whether a link means one thing has caused the other, whether there's a chance relationship, or even whether it's a statistical fluke. In this case, the result is pretty much the opposite of what you might expect. It would seem logical to assume that people with bigger thighs are carrying more body fat, and have a higher risk of heart problems, not lower.

There are a couple of possible explanations. People with smaller thighs might have less muscle mass. This means they may not be able to deal with insulin properly, which could put them at risk of diabetes and therefore heart disease. Or less muscle might be a sign that someone does less exercise. Unfortunately, the researchers didn't measure whether people's thighs were composed of fat or muscle, so we've no way of knowing.

Where does the study come from?

The researchers were based in Denmark, and funded by the Danish Medical Research Council. Their study was published in the BMJ (British Medical Journal), which is owned by the British Medical Association.

What does this mean for me?

As it stands, doctors predict people's risk of heart problems based on factors such as your waist measurement, blood pressure and cholesterol levels, and whether or not you smoke. The new study is interesting, but for the moment your doctor is unlikely to start measuring your thighs. The link isn't strong enough to make it a useful way of predicting people's risk of heart problems.

What should I do now?

Assuming that the researchers are on to something when they suggest that lack of muscle might be the problem, you could try to build up your thigh muscles with exercise. However, we already know that exercise helps to keep your heart healthy, and at the moment there's no reason to assume that building up your thighs would be any better than any other kind of workout.

From:

Heitmann BL, Frederiksen P. Thigh circumference and risk of heart disease and premature death: prospective cohort study. BMJ. 2009; 339: 3292.

© BMJ Publishing Group Limited ("BMJ Group") 2009

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Sep 2009 | 5:00 pm

Ribbon Seal Protection Sought by Activists

Ribbon seals are under threat from global warming and require protection, say advocates.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Sep 2009 | 3:15 pm

Use Your iPhone to Help Scientists Track Crickets in NYC

If you’ve got a cellphone and a good pair of ears, you can help with the first-ever comprehensive cricket census of New York City.

On Sept. 11, biologists from the US Geological Survey are asking citizen scientists from the Big Apple to help them track the city’s cricket and katydid population. Participants in the NYC Cricket Crawl will go out between dusk and midnight to record cricket calls for one minute, and then immediately send their results and location to the scientists by cellphone.

The researchers are hoping to find evidence that the Common True Katydid, once plentiful in New York City but now rare, is still thriving in some regions of the city.

“This katydid is essentially the most countable thing in the world,” said USGS biologist Sam Droege, who’s leading the Cricket Crawl project. “Under the conditions of a warm night and no rain, it basically calls all the time and never stops.”

Droege came up with the idea for the Cricket Crawl after reading a brief report on the mysterious disappearance of the common katydid on Staten Island, written in 1920 by biologist William T. Davis.

“Why it has died out is not known,” wrote Davis, “except possibly the air is no longer as pure as formerly, for there are now numerous factories along Arthur Kill, the smoke from which may have affected the foliage on which it feeds.” Although nearly 90 years have passed since Davis’ account in the Journal of the New York Entomological Society, no one has solved the mystery of the missing katydid.

“Nobody really knows whether they’ve stayed disappeared or whether they’ve come back,” Droege said. But because there are plenty of common katydids in upstate New York and in other parts of New England, it’s hard to get funding for a katydid survey in New York City.

“In the best of all worlds, you’d have information prior to a crisis,” Droege said, “but you can never get that funded by the federal government. We don’t have the money to be proactive.” He says that’s where citizen scientists come in. By creating an event like the Cricket Crawl and involving ordinary citizens, scientists can get the survey data they’ve always wanted but never had the money to pay for.

In addition to answering scientific questions, the researchers hope the Cricket Crawl will serve as a new model for citizen survey projects around the country. Unlike most surveys, which can go on for months and take years to compile the data, analysis of the Cricket Crawl will happen in real time.

“The idea here is to get all the data in, get it all uploaded, have it all visible right away and have an analysis by dawn,” Droege said. “By the time all the crickets have gone to bed, we’ll have a report of what happened.”

You don’t need any special equipment to become a Cricket Crawler, and there are two options for submitting your data: Either ID your own cricket songs and call or text in the results, or if you have access to a phone or digital camera with video, you can record what you hear and send the file directly to the scientists. For voice calls, the researchers have set up a special phone number connected to a drop.io account, and they’ve set up an email address to accept video files. Real-time cricket census data and interactive maps will be available as the night continues.

Before heading out to record critter songs, participants will have to familiarize themselves with different types of insect calls. The survey focuses on seven species of crickets and katydids, but there are plenty of other bugs who might be singing on Sept. 11. To learn to distinguish the elusive Common True Katydid from its cousin the Conehead Katydid, for instance, scientists recommend downloading the bug songs to your iPhone and practicing ahead of time.

To sign up, send an email to cricket_crawl@yahoo.com, or visit the Cricket Crawl web page.

Images: 1) The common true katydid, photographed by Kim Phillips. 2) NYC Cricket Crawl logo.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 3 Sep 2009 | 3:11 pm

Hurricane Jimena kills one in northern Mexico (Reuters)

Reuters - Hurricane Jimena killed an elderly man who drowned when floodwater surged into his home in Mexico's Baja California peninsula, the first casualty of the weakening storm, officials said.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Sep 2009 | 3:06 pm

Arctic 'warmest in 2,000 years'

The Arctic region cooled for two millennia, research reveals, before warming abruptly in the last century.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Sep 2009 | 2:29 pm

Arctic reverses trend, is warmest in two millennia (AP)

AP - The Arctic is warmer than it's been in 2,000 years, even though it should be cooling because of changes in the Earth's orbit that cause the region to get less direct sunlight. Indeed, the Arctic had been cooling for nearly two millennia before reversing course in the last century and starting to warm as human activities added greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Sep 2009 | 1:35 pm

Osiris stem cell platform success hinges on 2 trials

BANGALORE (Reuters) - Osiris Therapeutics Inc, which is developing a drug to treat a rare condition that affects bone marrow transplant patients, is poised to unveil results from a late-stage trial that could pave the way for the first approved drug in that indication and instill investor confidence in the company.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 3 Sep 2009 | 1:30 pm

Computer algorithm to decipher ancient texts

BEERSHEBA, Israel (Reuters) - Researchers in Israel say they have developed a computer program that can decipher previously unreadable ancient texts and possibly lead the way to a Google-like search engine for historical documents.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 3 Sep 2009 | 1:23 pm

Arctic Temperatures Highest in 2,000 Years

The Arctic is warmer than it's been in 2,000 years, reversing a long cooling trend.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Sep 2009 | 1:15 pm

Wolves Beat Dogs on Logic Test

Wolves do better on some logic tests than dogs, a new study found.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Sep 2009 | 12:11 pm

Arctic Temperatures Are Warmest in 2,000 Years

Temperature records show Arctic cooling until global warming pattern emerged in 20th century.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Sep 2009 | 12:03 pm

Circuit-Tweaking Reverse Engineers a Gene Network

Cells act like tiny computers, and finally, scientists are figuring out what makes their genetic circuits blink on and off.

Like ENIAC troubleshooters of old, biologists reverse-engineered the way that an immune cell’s genetic network recognizes invading diseases by turning off its circuits one by one.

“It’s the cell as computer. You tweak the things inside, tweak them outside, and see what happens,” said Nir Hacohen, an immunologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and co-author of the new study, published Thursday in Science. “In a computer, if you came with a voltage meter and there were 17 parts to a circuit, you’d cut the parts one by one, and see how the others lit up.”

The network could help researchers better understand how the immune system functions, but the approach could be used to investigate the workings of any set of genes working in concert.

Researchers have long had difficulty making sense of the complicated choreography of genetic activity in living cells. One gene might call for a protein that triggers two other genes to call for proteins, which in turn trigger even more genes — and on and on, for hundreds or thousands of genes.

Thousands of such networks guide every cellular function, but have been largely impenetrable in complex mammalian cells. Researchers have been left with lists of genes relevant to disease or development, but little idea of what they actually do.

“At the level we’re trying to understand them, almost no network is understood,” said Aviv Regev, a Broad Institute cell biologist and co-author of the Science paper.

To make sense of their network, Regev and her colleagues used a pair of biotechnological tricks. The first was RNA interference, in which single-stranded DNA snippets are used to turn genes on and off. The other was fluorescent DNA probes that change color when exposed to the protein products of active genes.

After exposing immune system-calibrating cells, called dendritic cells, to E. coli bacteria and viruses, the researchers identified several hundred genes that appeared central to immune function. Then they used RNA interference to turn the genes off one by one, at each step measuring the effect on other genes as the cells were exposed to pathogens.

In the new study, the researchers describe how different parts of the network are involved in recognizing different pathogens. About 100 genes appear to be “central regulators,” modulating the activity of dozens of other genes. Some of these were not previously implicated in immune function. One gene, called Timeless and known almost entirely for its role in circadian rhythm maintenance, affected 200 other genes.

“It’s an excellent example of using systematic perturbation to reveal an underlying regulatory network,” said Trey Ideker, a University of California, San Diego geneticist who was not involved in the study. “Mammals are the ultimate target from a human health standpoint, but systematic network mapping approaches have been more difficult to implement” in their cells.

In future experiments, the researchers plan to turn off more than one gene at once, and to measure activities in cell cultures that contain more than one type of immune cell. Ultimately they hope this will provide drug developers with better targets, or even lead to diagnostic tests of a patient’s cell networks.

But the researchers say the study’s most important part isn’t the immune system findings, but the approach they used.

“We’ve been able to measure the expression of each gene in a cell for more than a decade now, but figuring out what contols that expression has proved much more challenging,” said Hacohen. “You can do this for any biological process.”

Citation: “Unbiased reconstruction of a mammalian transcriptional network mediating the differential response to pathogens.” By Ido Amit, Manuel Garber, Nicolas Chevrier, Ana Paula Leite, Yoni Donner,Thomas Eisenhaure, Mitchell Guttman, Jennifer K. Grenier, Weibo Li, Or Zuk, Lisa A. Schubert, Brian Birditt, Tal Shay, Alon Goren, Xiaolan Zhang, Zachary Smith, Raquel Deering, Rebecca C. McDonald, Moran Cabili, Bradley E Bernstein, John L. Rinn, Alex Meissner, David E. Root, Nir Hacohen, Aviv Regev. Science, Vol. 325 No. 5945, September 3, 2009.

Image: Science

See Also:

• Next Big Thing in Biotech: RNAi
• MicroRNA Is a Big Topic in Bio
• MicroRNA and the Importance of Basic Research
• To Understand the Blueprint of Life, Crumple It

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 3 Sep 2009 | 12:01 pm

Global warming has made Arctic summers hottest for 2,000 years

The Arctic has warmed as a result of climate change, despite the Earth being farther from the sun during summer months

Warming as a result of increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has overwhelmed a millennia-long cycle of natural cooling in the Arctic, raising temperatures in the region to their highest for at least 2,000 years, according to a report.

The Arctic began to cool several thousand years ago as changes in the planet's orbit increased the distance between the sun and the Earth and reduced the amount of sunlight reaching high northern latitudes during the summer.

But despite the Earth being farther from the sun during the northern hemisphere's summer solstice, the Arctic summer is now 1.2C warmer than it was in 1900.

Writing in the US journal Science, an international team of researchers describe how thousands of years of natural cooling in the Arctic were followed by a rise in temperatures from 1900 which accelerated briskly after 1950.

The warming of the Arctic is more alarming in view of the natural cooling cycle, which by itself would have seen temperatures 1.4C cooler than they are today, scientists said.

"The accumulation of greenhouse gases is interrupting the natural cycle towards overall cooling," said Professor Darrell Kaufman, a climate scientist at Northern Arizona University and lead author of the study.

"There's no doubt it will lead to melting glacier ice, which will impact on coastal regions around the world. Warming in the region will also cause more permafrost thawing, which will release methane gas into the atmosphere," he added.

Scientists fear that warming could release billions of tonnes of methane from frozen soils in the Arctic, driving global temperatures even higher.

On a tour of the Arctic this week, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon urged nations to support a comprehensive accord to limit greenhouse gas emissions ahead of the organisation's climate summit in Copenhagen in December. The accord has been drawn up as a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

The latest study comes months after scientists at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) warned that within the next 30 years Arctic sea ice is likely to vanish completely during the summer for the first time.

Kaufman and his colleagues reconstructed a decade-by-decade record of the Arctic climate over the past 2,000 years by analysing lake sediments, ice cores and tree rings. Computer simulations of changes in seasonal sunlight levels caused by the Earth's elliptical orbit and the shifting tilt of its axis verified the long-term cooling trend.

The scientists showed that summer temperatures in the Arctic fell by an average of 0.2C every thousand years, but that this cooling was swamped by human-induced warming in the 20th century.

"This study provides a clear example of how increased greenhouse gases are now changing our climate, ending at least 2,000 years of Arctic cooling," said Caspar Ammann, a climate scientist and co-author of the report at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

The Arctic began cooling around 8,000 years ago as natural variations in the Earth's orbit and angle of tilt reduced the amount of sunlight reaching high latitudes. Today, the planet is one million kilometres farther away from the sun during the northern hemisphere's summer solstice than it was in 1BC. This natural cooling effect will continue for 4,000 more years.

Previous research has shown that temperatures over the past century rose nearly three times as fast in the Arctic as elsewhere in the northern hemisphere. This is due to an effect called Arctic amplification, whereby highly reflective sea ice and snow melt to reveal darker land and sea water, which absorb sunlight and warm up more quickly.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm

What Was the Worst Nuclear Accident in History?

The blast, which blew the 2,000-ton lid off the reactor, sent out 400 times more radioactive fallout than the Hiroshima bomb.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Sep 2009 | 11:35 am

POLL: Are Humans Causing Global Warming?

What do you think of the latest evidence?
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Sep 2009 | 11:29 am

What's Wrong with Miyuki Hatoyama's Alien Abduction Story

Miyuki Hatoyama, wife of Japan's Prime Minister-elect, Yukio Hatoyama, says she was abducted by aliens 20 years ago.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Sep 2009 | 10:47 am

Amber Alerts Undermined by False Alarms

Strangely, Amber Alerts sometimes make it more difficult to catch a suspect.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Sep 2009 | 10:15 am

WATCH: Burn Boss Manages Big Blazes

Find out what it's like to set prairie fires for a living.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Sep 2009 | 10:15 am

Some Mice Pig Out But Don't Get Fat

Mice lacking a certain gene can eat junk food without getting fat, a new study finds.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Sep 2009 | 10:01 am

New Origin of Life Proposed: Zinc

A new model for the origin of life says zinc may have played a vital role.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Sep 2009 | 9:40 am

Kepler Telescope Could Find Habitable Moons

Models show Kepler technology capable of detecting moons orbiting exoplanets.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Sep 2009 | 9:32 am

Prehistoric Hand Axes Older Than Once Thought

Scientists have dated what could be the oldest hand axes in Europe.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Sep 2009 | 9:15 am

Acoustic Barrel Grows Materials in Space

A chamber uses beams of sound to suspend materials as they're growing in space.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Sep 2009 | 8:35 am

Spaceman

Nasa's 'stick of a rocket' - will it launch?
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Sep 2009 | 7:38 am

Animals That Favor One Side More Successful

Animals that process information using a preferred side of the brain prove better at problem-solving.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Sep 2009 | 7:05 am

Block Head

Can playing Tetris actually make you more intelligent?
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Sep 2009 | 6:15 am

Golf Courses May Protect Wetland Animals

Amphibians and other wetland animals may benefit from your golf game.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Sep 2009 | 6:05 am

Pestival insect fest launches in London

A new celebration of insects and art at London Zoo and the Soutbank Centre hopes to help our ailing friend, the bee

How Insect Are We? is the title of the symposium that opens Pestival, a three-day festival starting today and running to 6 September to celebrate insects in art, and the art of being of an insect.

80% of creatures on earth are bugs – that's more than a million insect species – without whom humans would not survive. Yet insects are frequently misunderstood, reviled or, at best, ignored by the majority of the human population. Pestival aims to challenge stereotypes about insects and to give them their rightful place in our collective cultural consciousness. Architecture, art, comedy, film, music, sound, technology are coming together to celebrate how much insects shape our world and how humans shape the world of insects.

According to ant biologist and Stanford professor, Deborah Gordon, who has been studying the same ant colony for 20 years in the Arizona desert, new social networks like Facebook and Twitter work very much like insects in swarms and colonies. So at the opening symposium she will be arguing that humans are getting closer to behaving like insects than ever before.

The main theme of Pestival, at the Southbank Centre, is the collapse of bee colonies around the world. To raise awareness of the plight of bees, the Queen Elizabeth Hall is being transformed into the Queen Bee Hall – a giant bee hive hosting talks, discussions and bee-related art and music on the larvae stage. There'll be LottoLab's The Bee Matrix, an exhibit of glass, light and bumblebees – part science experiment, part sculpture. Susanna Soares will showcase her "Pavlov's bee device". Bees have a phenomenal odour perception, meaning they can be trained within minutes using Pavlov's reflex to target a specific odour and their range of detection includes pheromones, toxins and disease diagnosis. Beekeepers will also be on hand to give urban beekeeping advice.

As co-author of A World Without Bees, a book that charts the demise of the honeybee, I have been invited by Pestival founder and director, Bridget Nicholls, to be a virtual queen bee for the day, serving my 50,000-strong colony in a mass roleplay by human beings of a bee colony on Twitter's Tweehive. The idea is to raise bee awareness, wonderment, interest, actions and to generate traffic to bee-related sites and resources.

Outside the Queen Bee Hall a black cab has been transformed into a bumblebee in full flight, complete with a working beehive in the front seat and a mini cinema in the back showing films about bees and beekeeping.

But it's not all about bees. Human-sized chrysalises will be hanging from the ceiling of the Royal Festival Hall, courtesy of artist Jane Wafer and there will be urban insect garden on the balcony. A centrepiece of the event is a huge Termite Pavilion designed by a team of architects and engineers who have scaled up a scan of a central section of a termite mound to a size that allows humans to move through it (below).

Pestival sounds a lot of fun and, if it helps in any small way to raise awareness about the importance of insects, the threats they are facing and why it is important we save them, then it will also make a difference.

• Alison Benjamin will be tweeting live from Pestival on our Environment Blog this Saturday

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Sep 2009 | 5:34 am

Elusive UK dolphin re-emerges

A Risso's Dolphin is seen off the UK coast three years after its previous sighting.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Sep 2009 | 5:25 am

400 of Britain's rarest lizard released across UK sites

The endangered lizard has almost disappeared from Britain due to loss of its heath and sandy habitats from agriculture, forest and building developments

Hundreds of sand lizards are being released at sites across England and Wales in an attempt to bring back the UK's rarest lizard to areas where it has disappeared, conservationists said today.

The reintroductions at five sites in Surrey, Dorset and mid Wales are part of efforts to "turn back the clock on amphibian and reptile declines" in Britain, Amphibian and Reptile Conservation said.

Native frogs toads, newts, lizards and snakes have been hit by loss of their habitats, often as a result of changes to agriculture, planting of forests and building developments.

The first release of around 80 2in-long baby lizards, which have been reared in special hatcheries, will take place at a National Trust nature reserve in Surrey today, the newly formed conservation group said.

Almost 400 young sand lizards will be released over the next fortnight.

The sand lizard was once a common sight on heathland across parts of England and Wales, but widespread destruction of its heath and sand dune habitats led to extinctions at many sites.

According to Amphibian and Reptile Conservation, the lizard was lost altogether from a number of counties including Kent, Sussex, Cornwall, Cheshire and north and west Wales, while more than 90% of suitable habitat has vanished from Surrey, Merseyside and Dorset.

But the wildlife group, formed by the merger of charities Froglife and the Herpetological Conservation Trust, said the animals and their habitats were now protected under the law.

The organisation's Nick Moulton said: "It's great to see them going back, now safely protected, where they belong."

The young lizards have been bred in captivity at a number of locations including Chester and Marwell zoos and even specially modified back gardens.

The breeders have had to minimise contact with the animals to prevent them becoming too tame, which would leave them at risk of being eaten by their main predator, the threatened smooth snake, if they were released.

The five nature reserves, managed by the National Trust, Surrey Heath Borough Council, Dorset Wildlife Trust, the Forestry Commission and the Countryside Council for Wales, have all been assessed over a number of years to make sure they provide the right habitat to be the lizards' new homes.

Further releases of captive-bred animals will take place over the next few years.

The reintroduction of the sand lizards is part of a 133-point action plan designed to reverse the declines in the UK's frogs, toads, lizards and snakes, including research, monitoring of species and encouraging land-owners to create habitats such as ponds to help the wild animals flourish.

Dr Tom Tew, chief scientist at Natural England, the government's conservation agency, said: "Reptiles and amphibians are coming under pressure from an increasing number of factors including habitat loss, disease and a future of climate change.

"This important reintroduction programme is an example of the action that must be taken to reverse the decline in England's biodiversity and to conserve the habitats that our unique wildlife relies upon."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Sep 2009 | 4:49 am

Space junk drifts towards space station

Nasa says linked shuttle and international space station may have to change course to avoid debris

A big piece of space junk is drifting toward the shuttle-station complex and its 13 astronauts, though Nasa said it would not delay a spacewalk.

Mission control is keeping close tabs on the piece of European rocket in case it comes too close to the linked space shuttle Discovery and international space station.

The debris is expected to pass within two miles of the space station tomorrow John McCullough, chief of Nasa's flight director office, said last night.

That is five miles closer than earlier projections, but McCullough said it was "looking very positive" that the shuttle and station would not have to change direction to dodge the junk.

The debris' oval-shaped orbit, which stretches as far out as 20,000 miles, has made it especially difficult to monitor.

Experts estimate that the piece of junk – part of a booster on a three-year-old Ariane 5 rocket used to deploy a satellite – has about 18.5 square metres of surface area.

The news did not affect the work of the two crews aboard the complex. They got ready for a spacewalk, moved more cargo into the space station and installed some new items, including a sleeping compartment.

Shuttle astronaut José Hernández, a Mexican-American who grew up in a migrant worker family, also took time out for several TV interviews.

The astronaut sent greetings to the Mexican president, Felipe Calderón, as well as his Aunt Rosa, who promised to have some good meat tacos waiting for him.

Hernández said he bicycled and ran every day, even in space. "That way, I can eat all the Mexican tacos and cornitas and mole," he said.

If mission control decides the shuttle-station complex needs to dodge the orbiting debris, the move into a higher orbit will not happen until after tonight's spacewalk.

The astronauts performed the first of three planned spacewalks on Tuesday, removing an old ammonia tank from the space station. Tonight two spacewalkers will install a new tank to replenish the cooling system of the outpost.

Discovery will remain at the space station until Tuesday.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Sep 2009 | 3:20 am