New Ways To Predict Violent Behavior?

In the future, diagnosing severe personality disorders, evaluating the childhood environment, assessing alcohol consumption and the analysis of the MAOA genotype may provide more accurate means for assessing risk among violent offenders, according to the research carried out jointly at the University of Helsinki, Finland.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Sep 2009 | 3:00 pm

Certain Colors More Likely To Cause Epileptic Fits, Researchers Find

Researchers have discovered that epileptic brains are more ordered than non-epileptic ones and also that certain flicking colors seem more likely to cause fits.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Sep 2009 | 3:00 pm

SMART-1 Images Crash Scene Of Upcoming LCROSS Impact

The European Space Agency's SMART-1 team has released an image of the future impact site of NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS). LCROSS will search for water ice on the Moon by making two impacts into a crater named Cabeus A at the lunar South Pole. The impacts are scheduled for 11:30 and 11:34 am UT on 9 October 2009.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Sep 2009 | 3:00 pm

Heavier Rainstorms Ahead Due To Global Climate Change, Study Predicts

Heavier rainstorms lie in our future. That's the clear conclusion of a new study on the impact that global climate change will have on precipitation patterns.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Sep 2009 | 3:00 pm

Great Tits Eat Bats In Times Of Need

Necessity is the mother of invention: Great Tits eat hibernating common pipistrelle bats under harsh conditions of snow cover. This remarkable newly-acquired behaviour was observed by researchers in a cave in Hungary. When the researchers offered the birds alternative feed, they ate it and showed little or no interest in flying into the cave again.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Sep 2009 | 3:00 pm

Prolonged Stress Sparks Endoplasmic Reticulum To Release Calcium Stores And Induce Cell Death In Aging-related Diseases

Scientists can now explain how prolonged stress sparks the endoplasmic reticulum to release its calcium stores, inducing cells to undergo apoptosis in several aging-related diseases.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Sep 2009 | 3:00 pm

Lab Demonstrates 3-D Printing In Glass

A team of engineers and artists has developed a way to create glass objects using a conventional 3-D printer. The technique allows a new type of material to be used in such devices.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Sep 2009 | 9:00 am

Excess Body Weight Causes Over 124,000 New Cancers A Year In Europe: New Estimates

At least 124,000 new cancers in 2008 in Europe may have been caused by excess body weight, according to estimates from a new modeling study. The proportion of cases of new cancers attributable to a body mass index of 25kg/m2 or more were highest among women and in central European countries such as the Czech Republic, Latvia, Slovenia and Bulgaria.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Sep 2009 | 9:00 am

How Disruption Of Spectrin-actin Network Causes Lens Cells In The Eye To Lose Shape

A network of proteins underlying the plasma membrane keeps epithelial cells in shape and maintains their orderly hexagonal packing in the mouse lens, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Sep 2009 | 9:00 am

Secrets Of The Sandcastle Worm Could Yield A Powerful Medical Adhesive

Scientists have copied the natural glue secreted by a tiny sea creature called the sandcastle worm in an effort to develop a long-sought medical adhesive needed to repair bones shattered in battlefield injuries, car crashes and other accidents.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Sep 2009 | 9:00 am

US says climate bill might not pass in time (AP)

AP - The passage of a U.S. bill capping carbon emissions before a major U.N. climate conference in December would help the United States extract concessions from other countries, though time is running out, the chief U.S. negotiator at climate talks in Bangkok said Sunday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 Sep 2009 | 4:38 am

Philippines seeks typhoon aid, battles to avoid backlash (Reuters)

Reuters - The Philippines appealed for international aid to help tens of thousands marooned by flashfloods, and apologized for the delays in rescue efforts to avoid potential political fallout from the crisis.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 Sep 2009 | 3:11 am

Climate heating up at EU global warming talks (AFP)

AFP - Europe, which hopes to be a model for the world at UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December, is squabbling internally over who cuts what and who pays for it.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 Sep 2009 | 3:10 am

New science centre to inspire children

Teen failure at school picked to lead new Royal Institution project

The Royal Institution, one of the world's most eminent scientific bodies, will open a new centre to inspire children about the subject this week – led by a former teacher who spectacularly failed his A-levels.

David Porter got an O grade in physics A-level – effectively a fail – and Fs in maths and biology, and considered himself lucky to have found a job as a lab technician at the Royal Veterinary College before his results came out. Despite this setback, he still dreamed of a career in science, and through a combination of day release and night school went on to gain A-grade A-levels, a physics BSc and then, aged 31, a place at Oxford University to study teaching.

After 15 years teaching physics, he decided to change direction, and beat dozens of other candidates to become project manager of the L'Oréal Young Scientist Centre at the Royal Institution, in Mayfair, London, which opens on Tuesday. The RI is the oldest independent research body in the world and is a leading centre for science education and debate.

Porter, 48, said he was not intimidated by working with such intellectual giants. "The varied experiences I've had allow me to interact successfully with a wide range of people," he said. "I have had the honour of working with professors and many other talented people, but always feel my views and perspective are useful.

"The whole purpose of the Royal Institution is to communicate science to the public and young people – I really wanted the job and I think that shone through."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 26 Sep 2009 | 5:07 pm

Film review: Creation

Charles Darwin's inner turmoil is laid bare in a subtle and persuasive biopic, says Philip French

In the year in which we're celebrating the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the first edition of On the Origin of Species, it's a pity that no one has mounted a season of movies touching on his life and work. The centrepiece would be Jon Amiel's admirable if somewhat mistitled Creation, adapted by the novelist, doctor and former Observer medical correspondent John Collee from Randal Keynes's book Annie's Box.

It could begin in a lighthearted vein with the Marx Brothers' movie Horse Feathers (1932), which starts with Groucho being appointed president of Huxley College and ends with him playing in a survival-of-the-fittest football match with the rival Darwin College. Then there would be the simple but ambitious British movie The Darwin Adventure (1972) that in a breathtaking 90 minutes takes in Darwin's career-shaping, five-year voyage on the Beagle to South America and the Galapagos Islands, the seminal discoveries that lead to his theory of evolution, his conflict with Captain Fitzroy, the Beagle's God-fearing skipper, his marriage to his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, his problems in producing his classic book and the epoch-making debate it provoked.

This could be followed by the excellent film version of AS Byatt's novella Angels & Insects (1995), about the effect of the industrial revolution and the ideas of Darwin on the inhabitants of a grand Victorian country household. The next film would be Inherit the Wind (1960), Stanley Kramer's earnest, heavy film of the Broadway play currently being revived at the Old Vic, centring on the Dayton Monkey Trial in backwoods Tennessee in 1925. In this courtroom where a schoolmaster is on trial for teaching evolution, the agnostic lawyer Clarence Darrow confronts the fundamentalist politician and one-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, virtually replaying the Oxford debate between Darwin's chief 1860 advocate TH Huxley and the Church of England's stalwart Bishop Wilberforce.

After Inherit the Wind, a little intelligent levity might be introduced by a screening of Peter Weir's nautical adventure Master and Commander (2003) featuring Paul Bettany as the naturalist and cerebral surgeon of the HMS Surprise, Stephen Maturin, who managed while fighting the French in 1805 to put into the Galapagos, the film's only landfall, and conduct research that wittily and cheekily foreshadows Darwin's discoveries there some 30 years later. This would bring us to Creation, a quiet, subtle chamber work starring a persuasively inward-looking Bettany as Darwin and largely set in Darwin's fine country home in Kent in the late 1850s.

He's not the archetypal, heavily bearded Victorian sage he became in his later years. He's a clean-shaven man in his late 40s, neurotic, melancholic, guilt-ridden, troubled in mind and body as so many intelligent, sensitive, middle-class professional people were in a time supposedly devoted to the idea of robust, muscular Christianity preached by Dr Arnold of Rugby.

He feels guilty over what the propagation of his ideas may do to conventional beliefs and organised society, over the rift they're creating with his protective, deeply Christian wife (Jennifer Connelly) and what he sees, absurdly, as his responsibility for the death seven years earlier of their bright 10-year-old daughter Annie (a sparkling performance of intellectual eagerness and filial devotion by Martha West).

Annie is a central figure in the process by which Darwin comes to terms with his ideas, their delivery to the world and their likely consequences. She's untainted by social conventions and received beliefs and closer to him than to her mother. In flashbacks, he turns his work during the Beagle expedition and with the orang-utan Jenny into bedtime stories for her and later for her brothers and sisters. Annie understands his revolutionary interpretation of existence, because she looks clearly at the world around her. When she returns to him as a ghost, this is not that traditionally consoling Hollywood figure, the heavenly visitor, but the embodiment of the humanistic notion of the dead remaining alive in the minds of the living.

There is a lively intervention from the outside world when his allies, the aggressive Thomas Huxley (Toby Jones) and the diplomatic Joseph Hooker (Benedict Cumberbatch), drop in on Darwin to stir him into publishing his book. Apart from the moment when the family cook knocks on the great man's study door saying: "Come along, Mr Darwin, your dinner's getting cold", this is the closest the film comes to a 1930s Warner Brothers type of conventional biopic.

Otherwise, it's a complex, truthful work that does justice to Darwin's theories and their implications. Particular attention is given to books and learned papers at a time when scientific advance came from individual research conducted privately, rather than, as now, done by teams working for institutions.

Seeing Darwin writing with pen and ink and his loving wife eventually sending off his manuscript to the publisher, we think of the power of the word and the individual mind, an activity examined by Stanley Edgar Hyman in his neglected classic The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers. It was ultimately through the power of their prose that those great thinkers impressed their ideas upon a larger public.

But the battle of ideas goes on. We entered the 21st century with a British prime minister who came to countenance creationism and he was joined by a US president who endorsed it. Creation, a carefully reasoned movie that places close to its centre an intelligent, reasoning child, struggled to find an American distributor.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 26 Sep 2009 | 5:07 pm

Pointless studies are the key to human evolution

The demise of the silly survey strikes at the heart of being civilised

A newspaper headline chilled me to the bone: "New panel to weed out 'pointless' studies," it read. Pointless studies are meat and drink to columnists like me. Not the fillet steak and vintage claret of Gordon Brown audibly farting in the Commons or Jeremy Clarkson being attacked by a miniature poodle, but a Peperami and Fanta snack that keeps the wolf from the door in the leaner times. Without a constant supply of scientific research claiming that chocolate makes you romantic, white wine enhances sarcasm or automatic transmission makes your cock go floppy, I'd have to take a lot more weeks off.

I know that there are always world events to comment on but, if you feel on shaky ground discussing North Korea, that jokes about helicopter shortages in Afghanistan might be taken amiss or that any mention of Baby P by a comedian will cause hysteria (if reading online, see comments below), then a lot of news is ruled out.

Strange though it may sound, politicians and celebrities don't always make dicks of themselves. As the old Lib Dem press office saying goes: "Some weeks Charles Kennedy keeps his shit together." Not all opposition statements are laughably craven, the public reaction to the weather is not always humorously irrational and not every new government policy contains a glaring logical inconsistency.

Luckily for me, this one does. The article under the terrifying headline was about the proposed new system for allocating government money for academic research, the Research Excellence Framework. It wants to weed out pointless studies by favouring research that looks like it's going to be of economic or social use.

Hooray! That won't harm the comedy studies at all! When Professor Sponsored Link of the University of Twix announces that anti-wrinkle cream gives women the confidence to have cleverer children, he's not being funded by the government but by a cosmetics manufacturer trying to grab a headline.

All the "flowers/chocolate/ice cream bringing happiness/better orgasms/an enhanced sense of perspective" studies are entirely self-financing. They may add little to the sum of human knowledge; the fact that academics are reduced to them may show how eroded our respect for learning has become, but they're not a drain on the taxpayer – they all get paid for out of various multinationals' marketing budgets.

So what sort of pointless study is this new system going to weed out? Why, all the ones that don't have a solid social or economic goal, of course. The government isn't going to pay for clever people just to sit in universities indulging their curiosity. No, they should be allocated something useful to discover and then research as hard as they can in that direction. Nothing good ever got invented by accident, apart from some silly fun stuff like the slinky, post-it notes, penicillin, warfarin and X-rays.

That breakthroughs often come by accident rather than design, from a desire for knowledge rather than a gap in the market, is so well established it's a cliche – it's one of the things that every schoolboy used to know. Why doesn't anyone at the Department of Education? Is it linked to the fact that nowadays every schoolboy barely knows how to count to the number of A*s he's just been awarded?

The trouble is that, for a moment, it sounds perfectly sensible to demand that researchers justify their means in terms of their projected ends, but so, for a moment, does Noddy's idea of building the roof of a house first so that it keeps the rain off while you build the walls.

Academic research with a demonstrable economic goal is not the sort that most needs government help. If you'd said 20 years ago: "I'd like to develop a drug that cured erectile dysfunction in men", I imagine you'd have got plenty of private sector takers. As it happens, Viagra was also discovered by accident, when someone was trying to develop heart medicine, but you get the idea.

Research which will obviously make money if it comes off will always find private funding and so should not be prioritised for public money. In fact, it's the very place that public money should never go – it'd be like spending the Arts Council budget on profit-making pantos instead of opera or pouring the licence fee into Quiz Call rather than BBC Four. Public money should be made available for research that would otherwise not happen. Research of economic value is outside this category.

To be fair, the greatest factor which will determine whether research deserves funding will, thankfully, even under this new system, still be peer review. But this greater emphasis on making academics justify their work in terms that results-obsessed government bodies will understand is worrying.

And that's where the talk of research of social value comes in. It's a sop to the arts side. They're trying to find a way to quantify the usefulness of a greater insight into paintings, books or historical events because they know they're not of much economic value, other than to get the odd documentary commissioned, but have a vague memory of someone saying at a dinner that they mattered. They're trying to squeeze them into a plus column in their new spreadsheet of learning. Well, if that's their only way of according knowledge worth, then they're the wrong people to be making the decisions.

What separates us from the beasts, apart from fire, laughter, depression and guilt about killing the odd beast, is our curiosity. We've advanced as a species because we've wanted to find things out, regardless of whether we thought it useful. We looked at the sky and wondered what was going on – that's why, for better or worse, we've got DVD players, ventilators, nuclear weapons, global warming, poetry and cheese string. And it's for better, by the way.

The Research Excellence Framework is starting to ask what sorts of curiosity our culture can afford, and that scares me even more than the demise of the silly survey because it strikes at the heart of what it means to be civilised, to have instincts other than survival. If academic endeavour had always been vetted in advance for practicality, we wouldn't have the aeroplane or the iPhone, just a better mammoth trap.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 26 Sep 2009 | 5:07 pm

French PM confirms EDF chairman to be replaced (AFP)

AFP - French Prime Minister Francois Fillon confirmed in an interview to be published on Sunday that Pierre Gadonneix will be replaced as chairman of energy giant EDF, but he did not name his successor.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 26 Sep 2009 | 3:30 pm

Why People Hoard Stuff (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - People who compulsively acquire and hoard clutter to the extent that it impairs their daily activities are labeled "compulsive hoarders." The condition is classed as a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), present in 30 to 40 percent of individuals affected with OCD. It may damage relationships, cut the individual off from society, and even endanger lives.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 26 Sep 2009 | 3:25 pm

Climate activists in Copenhagen protest coal use (AP)

AP - Hundreds of climate activists protested Saturday against the use of fossil fuels, but were blocked from entering a coal-firing plant they had hoped to shut down by chaining themselves to conveyor belts.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 26 Sep 2009 | 1:57 pm

Nearly 70 percent of Argentine forests lost in a century (AFP)

AFP - Argentina has lost nearly 70 percent of its forests in a century, the Environmental Secretariat said at a UN conference on desertification.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 26 Sep 2009 | 1:09 pm

China to build, launch satellite for Laos (AFP)

AFP - China will build and launch a communications satellite for Laos, Chinese media reported Saturday, following similar ventures for Nigeria and Venezuela.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 26 Sep 2009 | 9:59 am

Endangered Ugandan gorillas join Facebook, MySpace (AP)

AP - He's hairy, his table manners are atrocious, and he wants to be your friend on Facebook.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 26 Sep 2009 | 8:53 am

Flowers Help Pollinators Get a Grip

Bees can distinguish between normal flowers and mutant flowers.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 Sep 2009 | 8:01 am

India's genes uncovered

Genetic exploration of the subcontinent has been slow to get going – but the latest findings offer some amazing insights

Nowhere is the bewildering diversity of the people of India more apparent than on the Rupee: the value of each banknote is spelt out in 17 languages.

Tracing the origins of this type of diversity has only recently been opened up past the historical. Nowadays, genome analysis has emerged to complement history in understanding our origins: by looking at the individual differences in the genetic code in individuals, we can identify how closely populations and families are related, and infer the migration and mating that brought us into the modern age. Strangely, genetic analysis of the billion strong population of the subcontinent has been slow to kick off. But a new study has revealed that despite the population of India being incredibly diverse, it is in fact derived from just two distinct ancient populations. One of these, from the north, were distant cousins of Europeans and Middle Easterners, whereas those from the south were as different from the northerners as they were from the Chinese.

These distinctions are not visible now, but this ancestry is buried deep in the Indian genome. Almost all sampled showed a blend of these two ancestral groups, but in differing proportions. When David Reich and colleagues sampled people – accounting for geography, language and caste – they found the range of genetic diversity in India is up to four times greater than that found in Europeans: Indians of different groups are less similar than a Scot and a German. I have Indian heritage but no cultural input: I'm as English as cricket. But upon arriving in Mumbai, I had the strange sense that there were many more people there that look a bit more like me than at home. It made me think of the horrific old racist maxim, "they all look the same to me." Of course, this is just plain stupid, but genetically, it couldn't be further from the truth. So, how do you get from two distinct populations to the broad range of genetic diversity?

In a population where there's a range of hair colour, for example, ginger genes might eventually blend in and be lost through breeding with non-redheads. But if a ginger family became isolated (literally or for social reasons) from the rest of the population and could therefore only breed within, then that whole population would be predominantly ginger. In evolutionary terms we call this a "founder event". And it appears that India's genetic spread is a result of many founder events at times during the last 3000 years: small pockets of populations that were endogamous: that is, they didn't breed much beyond their group. I don't expect many of them were ginger though.

There are a number of interesting implications for this. The first is that the consequence of endogamy revealed by this genetic map of a billion people is that we should expect to see a higher frequency of recessive genetic diseases, in the same way that we observe in Ashkenazi Jews or the Finns. Indian scientists are aware of disorders within their populations that rely on a unique genetic heritage, and have attributed it to marriage to close relatives, which is relatively common in the south. But the roots of these diseases may be deeper than cousins marrying.

There's a second socio-political inference. The caste system has existed in India for centuries, and although great efforts have been made to reduce its divisive nature (caste-based discrimination is outlawed under the constitution), it remains active and controversial. It has been suggested that caste was to some degree an invention of (or at least galvanised by) the British during colonialism. What the genetics now says is that this endogamy within castes has kept social groups relatively separate for thousands of years, and hence defined India's population in genetic terms. Reich commented that "There are populations that have lived in the same town and same village for thousands of years without exchanging genes." On top of this, this and other studies have shown a higher proportion of high caste members share genetic traits with those from the northern ancestral group. This may yet prove to be controversial if it can be spun to defend a rigid caste structure.

It's quite clear that India is now emerging as a potential superpower. Yesterday, a long time after the west stopped going there, the first Indian lunar mission claims to have found water on the moon. As India's saga continues, scientists have uncovered the deep roots of a billion individual's social structure by looking in their genes.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 26 Sep 2009 | 6:00 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - The Eastern U.S. will continue to see unsettled weather Saturday as a cold front lingers over the region.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 26 Sep 2009 | 5:35 am