Sustainable Fertilizer: Urine And Wood Ash Produce Large Harvest

Results of the first study evaluating the use of human urine mixed with wood ash as a fertilizer for food crops has found that the combination can be substituted for costly synthetic fertilizers to produce bumper crops of tomatoes without introducing any risk of disease for consumers.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm

Single Missing Protein May Result In Down Syndrome And Other Human Chromosomal Birth Defects

Using yeast genetics and a novel scheme to selectively remove a single protein from the cell division process called meiosis, a cell biologist found that when a key molecular player known as Pds5 goes missing, chromosomes fail to segregate and pair up properly, and birth defects such as Down syndrome can result.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm

Early Life On Earth: Could Salt Crusts Be Key Ingredient In Cooking Up Prebiotic Molecules?

German scientists investigating the complex chemical mixture thought to be present in the early Earth's oceans have found that amino acids can be 'cooked' into many other important chemical building blocks of life when embedded in salt crusts.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm

Quality Of Early Child Care Plays Role In Later Reading, Math Achievement

Using information from the longitudinal study of early care and youth development, researchers found that children who spent more time in high-quality child care in the first five years of their lives had better math and reading scores in middle childhood. Researchers also found that low-income children who attended high-quality child care programs before the age of five performed similarly to their affluent peers. These findings have implications for the role of child care in the creation of anti-poverty policies.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm

Nanoparticle Treatment For Burns Curbs Infection, Reduces Inflammation

Treating second-degree burns with a nanoemulsion lotion sharply curbs bacterial growth and reduces inflammation that otherwise can jeopardize recovery, scientists have shown in initial laboratory studies.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm

New Air Force Magnetron May Help Defeat Enemy Electronics

Researchers funded by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research have invented a new type of magnetron that may be used to defeat enemy electronics. A magnetron is type of vacuum tube used as the frequency source in microwave ovens, radar systems and other high-power microwave circuits.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Sep 2009 | 12:00 pm

Gene Variation That Lets People Get By On Less Sleep Transferred To Create Insomniac Mice

Sleep experts have identified a genetic variation in humans, which the scientists also developed in mouse models, that allows a rare number of people to require less sleep than others.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Sep 2009 | 9:00 am

On-the-job Pesticide Exposure Associated With Parkinson's Disease

Individuals whose occupation involves contact with pesticides appear to have an increased risk of having Parkinson's disease, according to a new report.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Sep 2009 | 9:00 am

Gene Mutation Causes Severe Epilepsy, Febrile Seizures In Thousands Of Infants Worldwide

Medical researchers have identified a gene with mutations that cause febrile seizures and contribute to a severe form of epilepsy known as Dravet syndrome in some of the most vulnerable patients -- infants 6 months and younger.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Sep 2009 | 9:00 am

Chinks In ISS Armour Deliver Data On Space Junk Impacts

Speeding along in orbit at more than seven kilometres per second, the International Space Station has its surfaces carefully shielded against potentially catastrophic collisions with micrometeoroids or man-made debris. Except that is for a trio of unprotected panels until recently attached to external payload platform of ESA’s Columbus module, specifically intended to sustain impacts from tiny specks of space dust.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Sep 2009 | 9:00 am

Warming Arctic 'halts migration'

Milder winters in the Arctic region means fewer Pacific brants - a species of goose - are migrating southwards, say researchers.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 17 Sep 2009 | 3:39 am

Greenland icesheet could melt faster than thought: study (AFP)

AFP - The Greenland icesheet responded to global warming over the past 10,000 years more quickly than thought, according to a study released Wednesday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 Sep 2009 | 3:15 am

The Nation's weather (AP)

AP - Unsettling weather activity was forecast to persist Thursday in the southeastern quadrant of the nation due to a stubborn storm system.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 Sep 2009 | 3:13 am

World's key polluters start climate talks in US (AFP)

AFP - Representatives of the world's 17 biggest carbon polluters were due Thursday to kick off a week of high-level and high-stakes talks on climate change at a meeting in Washington.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 Sep 2009 | 3:02 am

Rare bird gets twitchers flocking

Birdwatchers flock to see a Pacific seabird's first visit to Britain.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 17 Sep 2009 | 2:16 am

China picks first female astronaut candidates (AP)

AP - China's military-backed space program has selected 45 astronaut candidates, including its first women hopefuls, for a training program less than a year after the country completed its first spacewalk.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Sep 2009 | 11:36 pm

Seven die as Typhoon Koppu hits China (AFP)

AFP - Seven people have died and six others are missing after Typhoon Koppu slammed into south China, causing torrential rain, mudslides and an oil spill, the government and state media said Thursday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Sep 2009 | 11:31 pm

Time is Right to See the Zodiacal Light (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - One of the least known components of our solar system is the interplanetary dust that fills the disk in which the inner planets revolve. These microscopic dust particles can be seen only under special circumstances. They are very small and very few and far between, but numerous enough to cause most of the meteors that we see streaking through the night skies.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Sep 2009 | 10:02 pm

Found: Firm place to stand outside solar system (AP)

AP - Astronomers have finally found a place outside our solar system where there's a firm place to stand — if only it weren't so broiling hot.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Sep 2009 | 9:59 pm

Hurricanes Spawning More U.S. Tornadoes (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Tornadoes that are spun off by hurricanes as they make landfall are on the rise, a new study finds.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Sep 2009 | 9:51 pm

Viking silver

The skills that prepare dark ages treasure for display
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 16 Sep 2009 | 8:20 pm

Hubble Goes Deep, Finds Farthest Galaxies Yet

Just days after NASA released the first cosmic dreamscapes taken by the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope three teams of astronomers have used the rejuvenated observatory to find what appears to be a bounty of the most distant galaxies known.

Analyses of infrared images of these galaxies captured in late August and early September with the newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 suggest there were fewer bright galaxies early in cosmic history and those galaxies formed stars at an unexpectedly low rate.

Because the researchers do not yet have measurements of the wavelengths that make up the starlight from these galaxies, they do not directly know how far away the galaxies lie. But the starlit bodies’ colors suggest that about 16 reside roughly 12.9 billion light-years from Earth and another five or so sit even further, a record-breaking 13.1 billion light-years away.

“We are looking back 13 billion years and seeing galaxies just 600 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was like a 4-year-old,” says Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, a member of one of the discovery teams.

The galaxies all lie within a small patch of the southern sky, called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, that has already been imaged by Hubble and a slew of other telescopes.

It’s the new camera’s greater sensitivity, as well as its larger field of view, that has enabled scientists to rapidly find what appear to be extremely remote galaxies, says Richard Ellis of Caltech in Pasadena, a coauthor of two of four papers that the three teams recently posted online at arXiv.org.

“This is a golden moment,” Ellis says. “All the groups independently analyzed the data with different software and broadly speaking, we’re all in agreement.”

A team that includes Illingworth and Rychard Bouwens, also of UC Santa Cruz, posted its findings on September 11. Ross McLure and James Dunlop of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, along with Ellis and their colleagues, posted their report on September 15. A team led by Andrew Bunker of the University of Oxford in England, again including Ellis, also posted an analysis of the new Hubble data on September 15.

The researchers all find a marked downturn in the number of bright galaxies as the telescope peers farther away and thus further back in time. That decrease in the galactic population is expected from current models of galaxy formation, comments Harry Ferguson of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who was not a member of any of the teams.

The findings “appear to show that galaxy formation is just starting at these [early times],” comments Simon White of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany.

Because the Hubble Ultra Deep Field is tiny — one one-hundred-fiftieth the apparent area of the full moon on the sky — and because the Wide Field Camera 3 has only just begun taking pictures, it is difficult to know how representative the findings are of the rest of the universe at these early cosmic times, Ferguson and Ellis both caution.

Ellis notes that the new findings also hint at a puzzle. His team estimates that the distant galaxies, which are too tiny to be clearly resolved by Hubble, are making stars at a puny rate. In some cases, that rate is as low as the mass equivalent of 0.0025 suns per year. According to current models, that rate couldn’t have generated enough ultraviolet starlight for a critical milestone in the evolution of the universe — the wrenching apart of neutral hydrogen atoms into their subatomic constituents.

About 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the cosmos had cooled sufficiently for protons and electrons to recombine into atoms. But the universe has long been reionized, with hydrogen atoms once again split into protons and electrons. Many astronomers have assumed that ultraviolet light from the first galaxies did the splitting.

This is not yet an astronomical crisis, Ellis says. It may be that the first stars were more efficient than expected at producing ultraviolet radiation. Another possibility is that ultraviolet light more easily escaped these early galaxies than it did from later galaxies.

Another possibility, comments White, is that “there might be enough undetected very small galaxies to do the job.”
New data is just starting to pour in that may solve this and other cosmic riddles, Ellis says. “This is a very exciting time.”

Image: A previous image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field taken in 2004./NASA

See Also:

• Hubble Is Back! With New Stunning Images
• Hubble Snaps Sharpest Image Yet of Jupiter Impact
• Hubble Snaps Image of Triple Galaxy, as Ordered by the People
• Hubble Captures Image of Strange Giant Galaxy
• Hubble Snaps Fantastic Galaxy Collision
• Oh, Hubble, Can This Really Be the End?
• Science News stories on Wired.com

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 16 Sep 2009 | 6:50 pm

Rockets vie in simulated lunar landing contest (AP)

AP - A privately built rocket vying for NASA prize money lifted off in the Mojave Desert and flew half of a simulated lunar lander mission Wednesday before an engine problem forced its developers to call off the attempt until next month.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Sep 2009 | 6:18 pm

Jupiter’s Magnetic Moon Generates Spectacular Light Show

Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, is also its only moon with a strong magnetic field. Now, using thousands of images from the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have discovered that the spectacular auroras seen at Jupiter’s poles are generated in part by the pull of Ganymede’s magnetosphere.

Both Ganymede and the volcanically active moon Io interact with Jupiter’s plasma as they orbit around the planet, generating bright spots at the poles called “auroral footprints.” Until now, however, no one knew how big Ganymede’s footprint was or why the moon caused these beautiful light shows.

By analyzing the Hubble images, researchers measured the exact size of Ganymede’s footprint and determined that it’s too big to be a projection of the planet itself, but corresponds almost perfectly with the diameter of the moon’s protective magnetic field. Scientists also measured the size and shape of Io’s footprint, which is caused by charged particles ejected from its many active volcanoes.

“Each of these auroral structures is telling an ongoing story about vast transfers of energy taking place far away from the planet,” astrophysicist Denis Grodent of the University of Liege in Belgium said in a press release. “By analyzing the exact locations of these features and how their shape and brightness changes as Io and Gaynmede move in their orbit around Jupiter, we have created the most detailed picture to date of how Jupiter and these moons are electromagnetically interconnected.” Grodent presented his research Thursday at the European Planetary Science Congress in Germany.

In addition to linking Ganymede’s footprint with its magnetic field, Grodent and his team discovered unexpected periodic variations in the brightness of the moon’s aurora, happening on three different timescales. The researchers think each variation reflects a specific interaction between Jupiter’s plasma and Ganymede’s magnetic field, but they don’t yet know what’s causing the interactions.

Image 1: Grodent/Hubble Space Telescope Team; HST program GO-10862, May 2007. Image 2: Grodent/Hubble Space Telescope Team; HST Program GO-10140, PI: Denis Grodent (ESA Univeristy of Liege), filter F125LP, exposure time 110 sec, April 2005.

See Also:

• Jupiter’s Moon Plays Peekaboo With Hubble
• Tiny Saturn Moon ID’d As Good Candidate For Alien Life
• Underground Sea in Jupiter Moon?
• Jupiter’s Moons Are Weird Places
• ‘New Horizons’ Captures Stunning Images of Jupiter and Moons …
• Pluto Probe’s Jupiter Flyby Found Moon, Planetary Surprises …

Follow us on Twitter @wiredscience, and on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 16 Sep 2009 | 6:01 pm

Videos of 1930s Surgeries on the Brain, Belly and Tonsils

In this collection of silent films from the 1930s, surgeons from the British Medical Association demonstrate how to remove an enormous ovarian tumor, excise tuberculosis from the brain and deliver a baby by Caesarean section. Some aspects of the 1930s operating room don’t look so different from what you might see today — scalpels, forceps and patient draping haven’t changed much — but of course there’s no electrocautery device to stop bleeding or laparoscopic camera for minimally invasive surgery. And today you might get in trouble for dropping your surgical instruments in boiling water! The videos are part of a collection of historical images and films hosted by the Wellcome Library and recently made available to the public via their YouTube channel.

WARNING: Some of these videos are graphic, and not for the faint of stomach.

Removal of a Tuberculoma From the Brain (1933)

In this video, surgeons perform brain surgery to remove a large tumor caused by tuberculosis, called a tuberculoma. These non-cancerous growths result from infection with the bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which can cross the blood-brain barrier and end up in the central nervous system. Before the advent of antibiotics to treat tuberculosis, tuberculomas were fairly common and resulted in symptoms similar to a brain tumor, such as severe headache, seizures and cognitive changes. Today, tuberculomas in the brain are extremely rare, except in immunocompromised individuals.

The clip opens with X-rays of the patient’s head and text explaining how the tumor has affected the patient’s brain. After surgeons remove the top of the patient’s skull, they carefully dissect the tumor away from surrounding brain tissue. The patient makes a complete recovery and is left with only a few minor movement problems, as shown at the end of the video.

Video: British Medical Association/ Wellcome Trust

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 16 Sep 2009 | 6:00 pm

Can Robots Make Ethical Decisions?

Morality is no longer the exclusive realm of human philosophers. Now what?
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Sep 2009 | 5:51 pm

Monkeys Cured of Color Blindness

Gene therapy can allow colorblind squirrel monkeys to see in full color.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 16 Sep 2009 | 5:15 pm

'Safe' lead levels harm children

So-called "safe" levels of lead in the blood are harming young children's development, UK researchers say.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 16 Sep 2009 | 5:01 pm

Teen Birth Rates Higher in Highly Religious States

The more religious a state the higher the teen birth rate.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Sep 2009 | 5:00 pm

Engine Leak Stalls Xombie Rocket's Bid for NASA Cash (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - A privately-built rocket nicknamed Xombie suffered an apparent engine leak Wednesday that stalled its attempt to win $150,000 in a NASA contest to fly mock moon landers.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Sep 2009 | 4:45 pm

Most Powerful MRI Has Stronger Magnet Than the LHC’s

The world’s most powerful MRI machine used on humans packs a 45-ton magnet that generates a 9.4-Tesla magnetic field.

If you’re counting Teslas at home — which are a standard measure of magnetic force — that’s stronger than the magnets in the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider. (Of course, there are thousands of LHC magnets.)

Instead of using that power to accelerate particles, the MRI machine, located at the University of Illinois, Chicago, is used to peer into the human brain. And it’s already yielding new insights.

With the ultrapowerful MRI, the scientists can measure sodium concentration, oxygen consumption and the brain cells’ energy usage. When combined, the three “bioscales” provide a detailed picture of tissue health within the brain, possibly allowing scientists to pinpoint neurodegenerative disease long before symptoms show up.

Only four of the 9.4-Tesla machines exist. The MRI machine that your favorite local linebacker gets plunked into packs a measly three Tesla.

“Without this magnet we wouldn’t have gotten this far so fast,” said Keith Thulborn, director of the UIC Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, in a press release. “It would have taken years and years to develop the insight and understanding to overcome the hurdles using the more widely available 3-T diagnostic MRI.”

Though the 9.4-Tesla magnet is strong, it’s nowhere near the record for a manmade continuous magnetic field of 45 Teslas. Even levitating a mouse takes a 17-Tesla magnetic field.

See Also:

• MRI Lie Detection to Get First Day in Court
• Harvard Scientists Build a Device to Smoke Weed During Brain Scan …
• Could Medical Gadgets Have Saved Tim Russert? Probably Not
• The Most Important Psychology Experiment That’s Never Been Done …
• Scientists Link Brain Symmetry, Sexual Orientation
• Superstrong Space Magnets Are Just as Weird as We Thought
• Large Hadron Collider

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 | 16 Sep 2009 | 3:21 pm

BLOG: Military Robot Leaps Over Walls

The Precision Urban Hopper, a robotic military vehicle, can jump over walls in a single bound.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 16 Sep 2009 | 3:00 pm

Did Venus Once Hold Water?

Venus, often characterized as the planet from hell, may have been lush with water.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 16 Sep 2009 | 3:00 pm

Medical Imaging Skills Harnessed to Understand the Sun

Solar physicist uses imaging techniques to better understand sun's behavior.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Sep 2009 | 2:35 pm

Trafigura knew of waste dangers

E-mails obtained by BBC Newsnight reveal that oil-trading company Trafigura knew that waste dumped in Ivory Coast in 2006 was hazardous.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 16 Sep 2009 | 2:29 pm

How Last.fm inspired a scientific revolution

I first saw Mendeley pitch two weeks ago – now it is on the way to changing the face of science

The music radio site Last.fm is one of the great ideas from the UK during the first dotcom boom. Users can listen to their own songs and other tracks recommended by Last.fm's algorithms based on their tastes, including iTunes, and those of friends. It could easily have been a one-trick pony. But now a few academics have applied its serendipity to scientific research. Why can't researchers, instead of waiting anywhere up to three years for their papers to jump all the hurdles, be part of a real-time market place – a fusion of iTunes and Last.fm for science? They pitched the idea, among others, to two of Last.fm's investors: Spencer Hyman and Stefan Glaenzer, newly enriched by the sale of Last.fm to CBS. They bought into the idea of using the site's principles to aggregate users' data (anonymously) while building up a databank of articles. Now the show is on the road and expanding fast. It is free, but a premium version will be added soon.

How does it work? At the basic level, students can "drag and drop" research papers into the site at mendeley.com, which automatically extracts data, keywords, cited references, etc, thereby creating a searchable database and saving countless hours of work. That in itself is great, but now the Last.fm bit kicks in, enabling users to collaborate with researchers around the world, whose existence they might not know about until Mendeley's algorithms find, say, that they are the most-read person in Japan in their niche specialism. You can recommend other people's papers and see how many people are reading yours, which you can't do in Nature and Science. Mendeley says that instead of waiting for papers to be published after a lengthy procedure of acquiring citations, they could move to a regime of "real-time" citations, thereby greatly reducing the time taken for research to be applied in the real world and actually boost economic growth. There are lots of research archives. For the physical (but not biological) sciences there is ArXiv, with more than half a million e-papers free online – but nothing on the potential scale of Mendeley. Around 60,000 people have already signed up and a staggering 4m scientific papers have been uploaded, doubling every 10 weeks. At this rate it will soon overtake the biggest academic databases, which have around 20m papers.

This startup is fascinating for a few reasons. First, it shows the second phase of the dotcom boom is throwing up great, practical ideas. Second, the technology transfer involved – from music to science – is innovative and raises the question of how many other disciplines could adopt it. Could there be a rival for Google by gearing search not to links to a website, but to the thinking of like-minded people? Third, this is another example of "Wimbledonisation", (a reference to the tennis tournament) in which Britain may not win the competition but gets the economic benefits of hosting the tournament. Mendeley, though based in Clerkenwell in central London, was founded by three German academics – Jan Reichelt and Victor Henning (interviewed here) and Paul Foeckler – confirming London's dominant position for European entrepreneurs as well as footballers. Investors told them it was the centre of the best research hub outside Boston and a magnet for recruitment. When I heard their five-minute pitch in a noisy room recently I hadn't realised how fast they were moving nor that they were about to be named one of the top 10 in Tech Media Invest 100, sponsored by the Guardian.

Small wonder that it has already got some of the world's leading universities on board, including Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge and Imperial, all by word of mouth. Dr Werner Vogels, chief technology officer of Amazon, reportedly said of Mendeley that if they got it right they could change the face of science. They seem to be well on the way.

twitter.com/vickeegan

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 16 Sep 2009 | 2:00 pm

Jury still out on music's benefits for preemies

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - There is no high-quality evidence that listening to music helps tiny babies born prematurely cope with pain, feed better and calm down, according to a review of studies.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 16 Sep 2009 | 1:51 pm

Best View Ever of a Galaxy Near You

NASA’s Swift satellite has captured the best view of a neighboring spiral galaxy that we’ve seen yet.

Between May and July of last year, Swift took 330 ultraviolet images of our closest spiral neighbor, the galaxy M31 in the constellation Andromeda. Compiling all 85 gigabytes of image data resulted in the highest-resolution ultraviolet picture of a galaxy that scientists have ever had, and researchers say the new mosaic will give them a closer look at how stars are born in the Andromeda galaxy, 2.5 million light-years away.

“Of particular importance is that we have covered the galaxy in three ultraviolet filters,” said NASA scientist Stefan Immler in a press release. “This will let us study M31’s star-formation processes in much greater detail than previously possible.”

In this image, Andromeda’s central bulge appears smooth and reddish because it contains older, cooler stars. Most new stars, which sparkle bright blue in the photo, are born in the galaxy’s spiral arm where there’s plenty of gas and dust necessary for star formation.

See a high-resolution version of this image and a flyby video.

Image: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler (GSFC) and Erin Grand (UMCP)

See Also:

• Hubble Is Back! With New Stunning Images
• Dec. 30, 1924: Hubble Annnounces Andromeda Is a Galaxy
• Brilliant 360-Degree Panorama of the Milky Way
• Star Factory Shows Off Three Kinds of Nebulae
• X-Ray Telescope’s First 10 Years of Awesome Images

Follow us on Twitter @wiredscience, and on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 16 Sep 2009 | 12:51 pm

The Science of Hunger: What 1 Billion People Feel

What hunger does and how people around the world suffer its consequences.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Sep 2009 | 12:44 pm

Colour blindness breakthrough in gene therapy experiment

Two squirrel monkeys that were colour-blind from birth have had their vision restored after receiving gene therapy.

The experiment paves the way for the treatment of a range of genetic eye disorders in humans, including some that cause full or partial blindness in millions of people worldwide.

Sam and Dalton, two male squirrel monkeys, were able to see the world in full colour five months after being treated, doctors said. The animals were born without an ability to see the colour red.

The therapy targets specialised "cone" cells in the eye which allow animals – including humans – to see in colour.

Genetic damage to cone cells, which causes colour blindness, is the most common type of gene disorder seen in humans. The condition mostly affects men, around 5% of whom are unable to distinguish between red and green hues.

"Although colour blindness is only moderately life-altering, we've shown we can cure a cone disease in a primate, and that it can be done very safely," said William Hauswirth at the University of Florida. "That's extremely encouraging for the development of therapies for human cone [diseases] that are really blinding."

Researchers treated the monkeys by injecting them with a virus that had been modified to carry a corrective gene.

The researchers have begun clinical trials to test the gene therapy as a treatment for a rare form of childhood blindness.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 16 Sep 2009 | 12:26 pm

Monkey Gets Color Vision

After successful gene therapy, this male squirrel monkey that was once colorblind can now pick out red dots from the grey background. When the monkey correctly noses the red patch, a positive tone sounds and the monkey gets a drop of juice.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Sep 2009 | 11:15 am

In pictures: A struggle to thrive

A new wildlife photography exhibition by Conservation international documents species' struggle to survive.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 16 Sep 2009 | 11:10 am

'Gene cure' for colour blindness

Scientists in the United States say they are a step closer to curing colour blindness using gene therapy.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 16 Sep 2009 | 11:03 am

Bite Mark CSI Found Faulty

The use of bite marks to ID perpetrators of violent crime has been called into question.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Sep 2009 | 11:02 am

Therapy Fixes Color Blindness in Monkeys

Gene therapy has given two color-blind monkeys the ability to see red.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Sep 2009 | 11:00 am

Gene Therapy Cures Color-Blind Monkeys

After receiving injections of genes that produce color-detecting proteins, two color-blind monkeys have seen red and green for the first time.

Except in its extreme forms, color blindness isn’t a debilitating condition, but it’s a convenient stand-in for other types of blindness that might be treated with gene therapy. The monkey success raises the possibility of reversing those diseases, in a manner that most scientists considered impossible.

“We said it was possible to give an adult monkey with a model of human red-green color blindness the retina of a person with normal color vision. Every single person I talked to said, absolutely not,” said study co-author Jay Neitz, a University of Washington ophthalmologist. “And almost every unsolved vision defect out there has this component in one way or another, where the ability to translate light into a gene signal is involved.”

The full-spectrum supplementation of the squirrel monkeys’ sight, described Wednesday in Nature, comes just less than a year after researchers used gene therapy to restore light perception in people afflicted by Leber Congenital Amaurosis, a rare and untreatable form of blindness.

Those results were stunning, but they were also achieved in children, whose still-growing brains can rewire themselves on the fly in response to new sources of visual stimuli. By contrast, adult brains were thought to be too fixed and static to develop new pathways. Even if gene therapy healed their eyes, the signals would stall inside them.

“I remember telling them that it was unlikely to work, but it was so exciting they had to try,” said David Williams, director of the University of Rochester’s Center for Visual Science. “It’s just an incredible milestone in the history of color vision. Looking back on this in 50 or 100 years, it will be a landmark paper even then.”

Neitz’s team injected their monkeys’ eyes with viruses carrying a gene that makes L-opsin, one of three proteins released when color-detecting cone cells are hit by different wavelengths of light. Male squirrel monkeys naturally lack the L-opsin gene; like people who share their condition, they’re unable to distinguish between red and green.

At first, the two monkeys behaved no differently than before. Though quick to earn a grape juice reward by picking out blue and yellow dots from a background of gray dots on a computer screen, they banged the screen randomly when presented with green or red dots.

But after five months, something clicked. The monkeys picked out red and green, again and again. At the biological level, Neitz can’t say precisely what happened — the monkeys, named Sam and Dalton, are alive and healthy, their brains unscanned and undissected — but their actions left no doubt.

Neitz thinks the monkeys’ brains didn’t grow new neural circuits. “That’s the way we were thinking about neural plasticity before,” he said. Instead, their brains may have reconfigured themselves, “learning how to use the same old circuits in a new way when the information coming over the lines changed.”

“It’s incredibly cool. It demonstrates a fascinating plasticity in the brain,” said Jeremy Nathans, a Johns Hopkins neurologist regarded as the father of modern color-vision genetics. “We presume that we have that same kind of plasticity as well.”

If so, then gene therapies for severe human forms of color blindness could be successful. So could gene treatments for age-related macular degeneration. Ultra-experimental hacks that confer light- and color-perceiving powers on cells used in other aspects of sight would be that much closer to reality.

Neitz was quick to caution that “there’s a lot of steps before we actually cure a real blindness in people.” Except for the LCA trials, proposed gene therapies for blindness are still in animal-testing stages, if they’ve even progressed that far. The monkeys appear free of any side effects, but safety still needs to be proven.

Williams, however, was quicker to speculate. “Ultimately we might be able to do all kinds of interesting manipulations of the retina,” he said. “Not only might we be able to cure disease, but we might engineer eyes with remarkable capabilities. You can imagine conferring enhanced night vision in normal eyes, or engineering genes that make photopigments with spectral properties for whatever you want your eye to see.”

“This study makes that kind of science fiction future a distinct possibility, as opposed to a fantasy,” continued Williams.

In the meantime, Sam and Dalton remain in Neitz’s lab, drinking grape juice, unable to communicate — at least to us — what it’s like to see color in what was once a gray-yellow wash. “One wonders what the internal representation of color is for them, and how it changed,” said Nathans. “At a certain level, that’s a very difficult question to answer.”

Neitz was less uncertain. “You go out and look at a rainbow, or the fall leaves, or sunset over the ocean, and it’s not something where you just say, ‘I can see colors.’ It has a deep effect on us,” he said. “These emotions are something we inherited from our evolutionary past. I think monkeys have that, too. I think these animals must have the real experience of, ‘Oh! Wow!’”

Citation: “Gene therapy for red–green colour blindness in adult
primates.” By Katherine Mancuso, William W. Hauswirth, Qiuhong Li, Thomas B. Connor, James A. Kuchenbecker, Matthew C. Mauck, Jay Neitz & Maureen Neitz. Nature, Vol. 461, No. 7261, September 16, 2009.

See Also:

• Gene Therapy Restores Sight
• Stem Cells Restore Sight to Mice
• Blind Fish Learn to See
• Blind Mice See Light With Algae Protein Hack
• The Persistence of Vision: A Story of Freakish Perception

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

Images: Neitz Laboratory

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 16 Sep 2009 | 11:00 am

Swine Flu Near? Ask Your iPhone

Those worried about swine flu can track outbreaks through a new iPhone application.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 16 Sep 2009 | 11:00 am

In pictures

New technology widens Kenya's digital divide
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 16 Sep 2009 | 10:01 am

One of the world's most elusive cats caught on camera in Uganda

Extremely rare photographs are taken of one of Africa's most elusive cats, with a surprise conclusion.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 16 Sep 2009 | 9:50 am

BYU Written with DNA

Scientists have used DNA material to write letters.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Sep 2009 | 9:48 am

WATCH: Planets Collide in Cosmic Smash-Up

NASA uncovers evidence of a collision between two planets thousands of years ago.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 16 Sep 2009 | 9:45 am

First tufted puffin spotted in UK

Birdwatchers flock to Kent coast after a reported sighting of the Pacific seabird, never seen before in the UK

Birdwatchers are heading to the Kent coast after reports of a sighting of a Pacific seabird never before seen in the UK, ornithology experts said today.

The sighting of the tufted puffin was reported to birdwatching information service Birdguides this morning, after the bird was apparently seen in the Oare Marshes nature reserve on the Swale estuary.

If verified, it will be the first time the puffin, which is found in the Pacific and is recognisable by its thick red bill and yellow tufts, has been seen in the UK, and possibly the first time in Europe.

Fiona Barclay, of Birdguides, said the puffin was a "completely unprecedented" bird to spot in this country, and the sighting could lead to the biggest "twitch" for years as birdwatchers keen to spot it head to the area.

She said the bird was seen flying up and down the Swale this morning but had not been sighted since.

Grahame Madge, of the RSPB, said of the sighting: "If it's accepted it will be a first for Britain and will obviously attract a great deal of attention. It's possibly the first time it's been seen in Europe too, though I haven't had that confirmed yet. It's something that's clearly significant, to get a seabird from another ocean in the north Atlantic."

He said that, if verified, the bird's arrival would be the latest in a run of such seabirds turning up in the Atlantic.

Some people believe there could be a corridor of open water opening up to the north of Canada as a result of melting ice in the Arctic, allowing a northern route through for seabirds from one ocean to another, he added.

While the bird is a similar size to puffins found in the UK, it differs in its plumage, which in the breeding season includes blond tufts on its head.

Madge said it would be surprising to see any puffins, which are sea-going birds, in an estuary area such as the Swale, and suggested it could be because the bird was hungry or exhausted after its long journey.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 16 Sep 2009 | 9:42 am

Chronic Pain Makes 50-year-olds Feel 80

People who suffer chronic pain tend to have general physical capabilities similar to those decades older.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Sep 2009 | 9:28 am

Last Letter of Mary Queen of Scots Goes on Display

Last letter of Mary Queen of Scots goes on display.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Sep 2009 | 9:10 am

Rocky Planet Found Outside Solar System

Astronomers have just discovered the first extrasolar planet with a firm place to stand.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 16 Sep 2009 | 9:00 am

SLIDE SHOW: Space Station Perks

Forget five stars; you can see thousands of them from this orbital destination.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 16 Sep 2009 | 8:45 am

Sceptics seize on climate cooling model

Research suggesting that global temperatures may fall is being used by deniers and sceptics to dismiss the entire canon of climate science

Could it be true that global temperatures will fall before they rise? That's the thrust of a presentation at last week's World Climate conference. Mojib Latif of Kiel University in Germany suggested that cooling caused by natural factors could suppress global temperatures for several years, after which they will start to rise again.

His presentation, first reported by the eagle-eyed Fred Pearce in the New Scientist, has been seized upon by sceptics and deniers all over the blogosphere. It was picked up this morning by the BBC's Today programme, which invited my old friend Philip Stott (who spends his time championing such dubious productions as The Great Global Warming Swindle and Michael Crichton's State of Fear) to raise questions about the global warming thesis.

Professor Latif suggested that the long-term warming trend could be masked - perhaps for as long as 10 or 20 years - by a temporary cooling caused by natural fluctuations in currents and temperatures called the North Atlantic oscillation. "Thereafter," he told the Today programme, "temperatures will pick up again and continue to warm."

Could Latif be right? Who knows? As far as I can tell, his paper has not yet been published, so other scientists haven't had the opportunity to see how strong it is. Vicky Pope of the Met Office suggested this morning that his model might not be as accurate as hers, as it measures only sea-surface temperatures, while the Met Office also takes temperatures below the surface into account.

We know that the world's climate system is a noisy one, in which natural variations of all kinds jostle constantly with the man-made warming signal. No one ever proposed that the global warming trend would be a smooth one, in which temperatures move up a notch every year. What we have seen so far are minor fluctuations weaving around a solid long-term trend. Nor does anyone claim that climate models are perfect. They need to be constantly refined and updated as new information comes to light. But in seeking to predict the future, you have only two options: wild guesswork, supported by a feeling in your bones, or models incorporating all the data scientists can lay their hands on. Those who reject modelling altogether must propose a better means of prediction. Seaweed, entrails and crystal balls don't qualify.

But Latif's presentation is being used by the deniers to dismiss the entire canon of climate science. They choose to overlook the inconvenient fact that he is also a climate scientist, who believes that the warming trend caused by human actions will bounce back as the oscillation moves into another phase.

People demand certainty, but the future resists it. All we can do is to make use of the best available information. And this tells us that we must act.

monbiot.com

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 16 Sep 2009 | 8:30 am

Arctic Geese Skip Migration as Planet Warms

An Arctic geese known to winter in sunny Mexico now stay put in Alaska during winter.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 16 Sep 2009 | 8:19 am

Earth Watch

Champagne for ozone treaty - but what hangover?
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 16 Sep 2009 | 8:13 am

Killer Whales Die Without King Salmon

Killer whales die when abundance of their favorite prey, Chinook salmon, declines.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 16 Sep 2009 | 6:54 am

Scientists say "super-Earth" has rocky surface

LONDON (Reuters) - Detailed data about the smallest planet ever found outside our solar system suggest it is a rocky "super-Earth" world very like our own, European astronomers said on Wednesday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 16 Sep 2009 | 5:37 am