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Prenatal Exposure To Flu Pandemic Increased Chances Of Heart DiseasePeople exposed to a H1NI strain of influenza A while in utero were significantly more likely to have cardiovascular disease later in life.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Oct 2009 | 9:00 am Despite Size, NFL Players Not More Likely To Develop Heart Disease, Even After RetirementFormer professional football players with large bodies don't appear to have the same risk factors for heart disease as their non-athletic counterparts, researchers have found in studying a group of National Football League alumni.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Oct 2009 | 9:00 am New Way To Monitor Faults May Help Predict EarthquakesScientists have found a way to monitor the strength of geologic faults deep in the Earth. This finding could prove to be a boon for earthquake prediction by pinpointing those faults that are likely to fail and produce earthquakes. Until now, scientists had no method for detecting changes in fault strength, which is not measurable at the Earth's surface.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Oct 2009 | 9:00 am Raining Pebbles: Rocky Exoplanet Has Bizarre Atmosphere, Simulation SuggestsTidally locked with its star and orbiting very close to it, the exoplanet Corot-7b is hot enough to melt rock on its star-facing side. Its atmosphere consists of the components of silicate rocks in gaseous form and, simulation suggests, periodically rains pebbles or grains of sand onto the molten surface below.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Oct 2009 | 9:00 am Strep Throat Does Not Appear To Cause OCD, Tourette SyndromeNew research shows that streptococcal infection does not appear to cause or trigger Tourette syndrome or obsessive-compulsive disorder. Researchers found that people with OCD or Tourette syndrome and tics were no more likely to have had possible strep infections compared to people without these disorders at two years and five years.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Oct 2009 | 9:00 am Increase In 'Academic Doping' Could Spark Routine Urine Tests For Exam StudentsThe increasing use of smart drugs or "nootropics" -- to boost academic performance -- could mean that exam students will face routine doping tests in future, suggests a recent paper.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Oct 2009 | 9:00 am Mystery Solved: Marine Microbe Is Source Of Rare NutrientA new study of microscopic marine microbes, called phytoplankton, has solved a 10-year-old mystery about the source of an essential nutrient in the ocean.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Oct 2009 | 6:00 am Rediscovering The Dragon's Paradise Lost: Komodo Dragons Most Likely Evolved In Australia, Dispersed To IndonesiaThe world's largest living lizard species, the Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis), is vulnerable to extinction and yet little is known about its natural history. New research by a team of palaeontologists and archaeologists from Australia, Malaysia and Indonesia, who studied fossil evidence from Australia, Timor, Flores, Java and India, shows that Komodo Dragons most likely evolved in Australia and dispersed westward to Indonesia.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Oct 2009 | 6:00 am Calcium Scans May Be Effective Screening Tool For Heart DiseaseA simple, non-invasive test appears to be an effective screening tool for identifying patients with silent heart disease who are at risk for a heart attack or sudden death. Coronary artery calcium scans can be done without triggering excessive additional testing and costs, according to the multi-center study.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Oct 2009 | 6:00 am New Knowledge About Bone Marrow Transplants Can Help Leukemia PatientsAcute lymphatic leukemia is the most common form of blood cancer in children. Even though chemotherapy is improving, the cancer often returns. New research shows that cancer cells that have been exposed to chemotherapy and survived are less vulnerable to chemotherapy, and more aggressive as well. But this research also yielded discoveries that should be able to enhance our treatment of the disease.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Oct 2009 | 6:00 am Death toll in Samoas tsunami reaches 150 (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 1 Oct 2009 | 3:46 am For some, US remains villain at UN climate talks (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 1 Oct 2009 | 3:38 am EU unveils more precise satnav system (AP)AP - The European Union has unveiled an updated satellite navigation system that is up to five times more precise than the current GPS system.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 1 Oct 2009 | 3:37 am The nation's weather (AP)AP - Wet weather was forecast to sweep through the Central U.S. on Thursday as a strong low pressure system pushed off the Rockies and into the Plains.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 1 Oct 2009 | 2:57 am EPA moves to regulate smokestack greenhouse gases (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 1 Oct 2009 | 1:56 am Sugar beets spur county to reconsider biotech food (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 1 Oct 2009 | 1:05 am Ecuador: 1 dead, at least 49 wounded in protest (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 1 Oct 2009 | 12:04 am Why disease could save the UK's red squirrelsA new study will investigate how red squirrels get the pox, an insight that may help save those left in the UK.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Sep 2009 | 10:14 pm Study conducted into honey beesResearchers embark on a three-year study into how food supplies affect honey bees and their resistance to disease.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Sep 2009 | 8:35 pm Roman find may tell Imperial taleArchaeologists unearth an amphitheatre at an ancient port in Rome which may have played host to its emperors.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Sep 2009 | 8:30 pm The story of lifeThe astonishing 1960s photographs that changed for ever the way we think about unborn children When Lennart Nilsson's haunting photographs were first published in 1965, they caused a sensation. Charting pre-natal life from conception to birth in unprecedented detail, the magazine that printed them, Life, sold 8m copies in four days. In the 1970s, the photographs even formed part of an interstellar message to other life forms when they were sent into space on the unmanned Voyager I and Voyager II probes. Four decades on, the images – now republished in a new book – have lost none of their power. From the initial journey of a transluscent egg down the fallopian tube to the mysterious terrain of the mucous membrane, they reveal in breathtaking detail the strange beauty of a human foetus as it grows. Some of the images of delicate embryos were taken by a regular Hasselblad camera with macro lens. For others, the Stockholm-born Nilsson used a specially built endoscope with a tiny lens or scanning electron microscopes, to capture activity on a cellular level. He would go on to use ultrasound techniques to create three-dimensional images of unborn children, but these photographs remain the most iconic pictures of reproduction ever taken. Over the years, they have fuelled the abortion debate by demonstrating how early physical human characteristics can be seen, raising questions about when life starts. When asked for his opinion, Nilsson pointed out that brain cells are in place at three weeks – but said it was up to everyone to form their own opinion. In fact, some of his pictures were of dead foetuses from ectopic pregnancies, while others show living foetuses in the womb. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 30 Sep 2009 | 7:41 pm Climate control debate heats up in the Senate (Reuters)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Sep 2009 | 6:47 pm Winds of changeMalawi boy whose windmills could fan Africa's destinySource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Sep 2009 | 6:19 pm Tamiflu in Rivers Could Breed Drug-Resistant Flu Strains
The premier flu-fighting drug is contaminating rivers downstream of sewage-treatment facilities, researchers in Japan confirm. The source: urinary excretion by people taking oseltamivir phosphate, best known as Tamiflu.
For their new study, Gopal Ghosh and his colleagues at Kyoto University sampled water discharged from three local sewage treatment plants and water at several points along two rivers into which the treated water flowed. Sampling started early in December 2008, as flu season got underway. The researchers sampled again at the height of the seasonal flu’s onslaught in early February and again as infection rates waned. Tamiflu’s active form, oseltamivir carboxylate or OC, turned up in the treated sewage on every occasion, the researchers report online September 28 in Environmental Health Perspectives. Values were in the low nanograms per liter range during the first and last samplings, and reached a high of almost 300 ng/L at one outflow during the flu’s peak, a week when there were 1,738 recorded flu cases in Kyoto. River residues showed up during only that second sampling — from low nanogram levels at most sampling points to a high of 190 ng/L in a portion of the Nishitakase River where treated sewage accounts for 90 percent of the flow. Computer modeling has shown that OC should survive sewage treatment, notes Wolf von Tümpling Jr. of the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research, a federal institute in Magdeburg, Germany. Ghosh’s team is now the first to confirm this, he says. Von Tümpling’s own data show that once exposed to sunlight, OC will break down, albeit slowly. Concentrations would fall at best by half every three weeks, he says. If correlations predicted by earlier studies are correct, concentrations measured at some river sites in the new Kyoto study seem “high enough to lead to antiviral resistance in waterfowl,” Ghosh says And the Kyoto team didn’t test during a pandemic, when Tamiflu prescription rates might be 10 times higher, von Tümpling notes.
Indeed, the expected coincident hits by seasonal and H1N1 swine flu this winter, could send Tamiflu use skyrocketing. In a July 14 letter, Food and Drug Administration deputy commissioner Joshua Sharfstein noted that “there is no adequate, approved and available alternative to the emergency use of certain oseltamivir phosphate products for the treatment and prophylaxis of influenza.” Once ingested, virtually all Tamiflu will end up in the environment in the active form, notes environmental chemist Jerker Fick of Umeå University in Sweden. The reason: Tamiflu becomes active once the body converts it into a carboxylate form. Roughly 80 percent of an ingested dose becomes this OC, which the body eventually excretes. The body sheds the remaining 20 percent of Tamiflu in its original form, but this phosphate form is immediately turned into the active, carboxylate form when it reaches a water treatment plant, he says. Two years ago, Fick’s team published data showing that most sewage-treatment technologies will remove “zero percent” of any OC present. And ducks love hanging out around warm, nutrient-rich outflows of treated water during winter-flu season. While sampling for waterborne OC last year in Japan, “I saw it myself,” he says. If Tamiflu resistance does develop in exposed birds, the affected flu strains will probably be conventional seasonal and avian flu strains, which claim thousands of lives each year, and not H1N1. That’s because H1N1 seems to bypass birds as it spreads among people, notes William Schaffner, chair of preventive medicine at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tenn. He also notes that U.S. policy is more conservative than Japan’s when it comes to Tamiflu use. Federal guidelines, he says, recommend that “Tamiflu be reserved for treatment of the very sick and anyone who is immunocompromised.” Image: Flickr/Karmor See Also:
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 30 Sep 2009 | 6:10 pm Tsunami Warning System Didn't Help SamoansEven before the first warning was issued, it was too late for the inhabitants of the island American Samoa.Source: Livescience.com | 30 Sep 2009 | 6:04 pm Britons creating 'more emissions'UK greenhouse gas emissions are probably twice as bad as figures suggest, says the government's chief energy scientist.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Sep 2009 | 5:53 pm Hopi, Navajos say environmentalists not welcome (AP)AP - The leader of the country's largest Indian reservation threw his support behind the neighboring Hopi Tribe, whose lawmakers declared environmental groups unwelcome on the reservation.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Sep 2009 | 5:31 pm Conditions combined for devastating tsunami (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Sep 2009 | 5:25 pm Lost world unearthed at site of port• Amphitheatre and palatial rooms at harbour site British archaeologists have unearthed a Roman amphitheatre overlooked by previous excavations at a site to the north of the Tiber that once served as the maritime gateway to imperial Rome. During their three-year dig close to Rome's Fiumicino airport, the researchers also found a shipping canal, luxuriously decorated rooms and a colonnaded garden, suggesting the port was a regular way station for Roman emperors. Portus, ancient Rome's Mediterranean harbour, now lies two miles inland because of sedimentation. But it was once a basin a little over a mile wide serving 350-tonne vessels unloading grain, silk and wild animals. The £1m dig, led by the University of Southampton, assisted by Cambridge University and the British School at Rome, focused on the remains of a palace built between the port's main basin and a hexagonal inner harbour where goods were unloaded into 300-metre-long warehouses supported by 15-metre brick arches before being transferred by canal to the Tiber for transport to Rome. While researchers had uncovered warehouses previously, the presence of a theatre was only hinted at by the archaeologist Rodolfo Lanciani during an 1860 excavation, the last big dig at the site. This time, the British team, aided by the archaeology superintendent of Ostia, brought in magnetic sensors, ground radar and metal probes. "The current passes between the probes and we can see the resistance from buried remains," said Graeme Earl, one of the team leaders. The careful search disclosed the curved walls of the amphitheatre, dated by the project's director, Professor Simon Keay, to the 3rd century AD. "Its design, using luxurious materials and substantial colonnades, suggests it was used by a high-status official, possibly even the emperor himself … it could have been games or gladiatorial combat, wild beast baiting or the staging of mock sea battles. But we really do not know." The ground scans revealed a garden, cisterns, a 250-metre by 60-metre room attached to the palace and a 90-metre-wide canal linked to nearby Ostia. Keay also found a head – using the more low-tech method of almost tripping over it. "The bulldozer was clearing topsoil and I saw to my horror a human face looking at me. It is one of the most spectacular finds to date," he said. The exquisite sculpture, which could depict Ulysses, "was the property of someone with a lot of culture and disposable income", said Keay. The luxury fittings extend to fine blue and white marble in a lavatory. "There was probably running water beneath the marble toilets to prevent smells," said Rose Ferraby, an archaeologist. Holes in the front panel of the loo seat let users clean themselves with a brush, she added. Built by Claudius in AD46, Portus was expanded by Trajan in the second century. The importance of grain shipments getting through to Rome became clear in AD62 when a storm sank 200 ships in the main harbour, prompting bread shortages and riots. "By that time Rome had long outgrown Italy's ability to feed it and the city owed its existence to the port," said Keay. "That makes Portus one of the most important archaeological sites in the world." guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 30 Sep 2009 | 5:05 pm Mercury Probe Shuts Down During Key FlybyThe MESSENGER Mercury probe abruptly shut down during a key pass.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 30 Sep 2009 | 4:00 pm Numbers Guy Tackles Security and Health ConcernsComputer scientist tackles issue from airport security to vaccine stockpiling.Source: Livescience.com | 30 Sep 2009 | 3:24 pm Two South Pacific earthquakes unlikely to be connectedThe earthquakes in the South Pacific occurred in a region of extraordinary geological activity called the Ring of Fire, which stretches from Indonesia to the coast of Chile. Several tectonic plates converge and create enormous pressure in the Earth's crust. Nine out of 10 earthquakes in the world happen in the region. It is unlikely the two latest earthquakes are connected, according to seismologists. They were caused by slippages in faults that took place 16 hours and 10,000km apart on two different tectonic plates. The first earthquake, recorded as magnitude 8.0, happened on Tuesday at 6.48am local time around 200km off the coasts of Samoa and Tonga. Because the earthquake was only 10km beneath the Earth's surface, it caused the seafloor to deform, triggering a tsunami that battered the Samoan capital of Apia. Most earthquakes in this particular region of the Ring of Fire are caused by the Pacific plate pushing underneath the Australia plate, but Tuesday's quake was different. "This time, as the Pacific plate bent under the Australia plate, it essentially cracked and caused this earthquake," said Stuart Sipkin, a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey in Colorado. The tremors were consistent with slippage along a 100km-long crack. The Pacific plate moves westwards under the Australia plate at the rate of about 9cm a year. The second earthquake happened on Wednesday about 30 miles from Padang in Sumatra at 5.16am local time. The magnitude 7.6 quake was much deeper, about 80km beneath the seafloor, which is too deep to cause a tsunami. In Sumatra and elsewhere in Indonesia, all of the damage was caused by tremors. Experts have warned that a major earthquake is long overdue in the region, but those fears centred on a build-up of stress in another subduction zone, where the Australia plate pushes under the neighbouring Sunda tectonic plate. In the past decade, there have been large earthquakes north and south of the Indonesian islands, leading seismologists to expect more in between. The earthquake on Wednesday happened much deeper than expected. In the days following the earthquakes, the main concern among seismologists is the risk of aftershocks that can bring further destruction to affected areas. The Samoan earthquake has already been followed by a series of aftershocks but none large enough to cause a second tsunami. The greater danger is to Sumatra and other Indonesian islands where aftershocks are expected to cause more damaging tremors. A magnitude 5.5 aftershock struck off the coast of Sumatra at 5.38pm local time yesterday, and more are expected. Sipkin said there were broadly two ways an earthquake can trigger another elsewhere, but neither seem likely in the Samoan and Sumatran cases. In one scenario, slippage in one region causes stresses to build up further along a fault. If a part of the fault nearby is primed to slip, the extra stresses can trigger a full-blown earthquake. In other situations, fast-moving surface waves that spread out from the epicentre of an earthquake can cause others as they pass over. "I'd say it is really unlikely these two earthquakes are linked. They are too far apart for stresses to be responsible, and surface waves would have reached Sumatra long before the earthquake there," Sipkin said. Bill McGuire, director of the Aon Benfield Hazard Research Centre at University College London, said: "This most recent tsunami shows there are lessons we yet need to learn from 2004. Most critically, populations living close to faults capable of producing earthquakes that trigger tsunamis must be taught to self-evacuate when the ground shakes or the sea recedes. Waiting for a warning from a central monitoring station could mean the difference between life and death." guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 30 Sep 2009 | 2:56 pm Do Polynesian Canoes Evolve Like Finch Beaks?
Despite the popularity of cultural evolution as an idea, with cultures as organisms and memes as genes, the actual science has lagged. But by applying the tools of population genetics to Polynesian boat designs, researchers show that cultural evolution might be studied as rigorously as the beaks of finches. “Evolution is a logical way of looking at change over time,” said Deborah Rogers, a Stanford University evolutionary biologist. “There’s nothing inherently biological about it. The logic can be applied to cultural change. Biology was just the first place that people ran with it.” Working with fellow Stanford researchers Marcus Feldman and Paul Ehrlich, Rogers converted archaeological records of Polynesian canoes, the design of which varied between islands and tribes, into standardized descriptions. The structure of that dataset was described in a paper published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the latest study, published in the November Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the researchers ran their data through a program of the sort typically used to analyze genetic information, inferring trees of relationships from patterns of inherited biological difference. The resulting cultural tree suggests that New Zealand was at least partially settled from Hawaii, a hypothesis that fell from favor in the early 20th century. It also suggests a course of Polynesian settlement that started in the far western islands, jumped to the far eastern, then worked backwards to the original point of origin. Those interpretations won’t settle anthropological argument over Polynesian migrations, which have lasted for decades. But “what we’re excited about isn’t specifically what we found for Polynesia, but what we found out about our ability to use cultural data to infer historical patterns,” said Rogers. Earlier generations of anthropologists lacked both the tools of population genetics and the sheer computational power necessary for this study, which involved number-crunching through 10 million possible configurations of canoe taxonomy. According to Rogers, their methods could be applied to anything from pottery design and fishhook construction to social and legal structures — anything that changed over time, and left a record of itself. She next hopes to investigate the cultural evolution of class structure and social inequality. “If culture changes based on some type of model that we can understand, we can understand where we came from,” said Rogers. Image: PNAS See Also:
Citation: “Inferring population histories using cultural data.” By Deborah S. Rogers, Marcus W. Feldman, and Paul R. Ehrlich. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Vol. 276 No. 1674, November 7, 2009. Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecosystem and planetary tipping points.
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 30 Sep 2009 | 2:44 pm T. Rex Likely Cut Down by Tiny ParasiteTyrannosaurus rex and its relatives suffered from a potentially life-threatening disease.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 30 Sep 2009 | 2:30 pm Cambridge role in 'innovation nation' at risk as private sector cash dries upCambridge Enterprise says laboratory 'spin-outs' draw record income, but researchers worry about commercial pressure When Lord Mandelson laid out his vision for an "innovation nation" this week, scientists at the University of Cambridge will have listened to the message with mixed feelings. The home of groundbreaking discoveries, from the electron to DNA, is enjoying unprecedented commercial success with some of its latest laboratory breakthroughs. The city has attracted venture capitalists, industry sponsors and management teams, all looking to share in the success of the "Cambridge Cluster" and its spin-outs. But at the same time, private sector funding for hi-tech start-ups has slumped. The public sector faces huge cuts and academics fear that what government money is available will be increasingly constrained to funding research with a clear commercial application. As ministers hoping to reduce our dependence on financial services push for a knowledge economy and closer links between universities and business, scientists worry that the kind of blue-sky research that enabled the DNA breakthrough is in jeopardy. For now, the mood in Cambridge is optimistic. Taking a lesson from America, universities across Britain have set up frameworks to take discoveries out of the lab and library and turn them into successful businesses in medicine, the environment and other areas. Cambridge has been a leader here. The university's commercial arm, Cambridge Enterprise, announced record income of £10m in its latest financial year from licensing discoveries and inventions, encouraging experts to do consultancy work and from equity realisations in five companies. The organisation's director, Teri Willey, joined from an American early-stage venture fund focused on university spin-outs. She paints a positive picture. "On the spin-outs side we are possibly ahead of the US. The top universities here are approaching a place like MIT in terms of the number of deals, they are not there in terms of income yet," she says. "Cambridge Enterprise is operating at the same level as the top 10% of US universities." Cambridge Enterprise's goal is to help inventors and entrepreneurs at the university make their concepts more commercially successful. It helps with funding, provides advice on how to look after intellectual property and acts as an agent for academics who wish to work as consultants for businesses. Academics say the result of such a focus has been to create a virtuous circle. Success stories, such as breakthroughs in genome mapping and plastic electronics, draw in talented entrepreneurs, and their successes bring in more people. "It's encouraging that in the 80s and 90s people would have gone off to California," says Ian Leslie, pro-vice-chancellor for research at Cambridge. He stresses the need for new industries in the UK, and says Cambridge and others are creating bases for those. "We are building up a body of people with experience." Successes Recent Cambridge successes include Orthomimetics. Born out of a PhD project that managed to merge two materials, the company is using cutting-edge technology to come up with treatments for knee damage. Another area of focus for Cambridge is plastic electronics. Leslie flags up the example of Plastic Logic, which evolved from work on plastic semiconductors started in the 1980s. The firm is now trialling an electronic reader (eReader) that is set to go into commercial production next year. One of the investors in the company was Hermann Hauser, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and a founder of Acorn computers. He says Cambridge has a world-class technology base and an increasingly entrepreneurial spirit. "I actually feel that for the first time, Cambridge is firing on all cylinders," he says. When his Amadeus Capital Partners first invested in Cambridge start-ups in the late 1990s, 17% of deals were with serial entrepreneurs. For his latest fund, that number was 70%. "Now there are so many people who have done it before and so are better managers," he says. "And we have managed finally to be able to attract some of the world's best management talent to Cambridge." Survival While Cambridge Enterprise is keen to point out that it has attracted more than £60m into 22 of its portfolio companies in the past 10 months, Hauser is worried about the overall funding outlook and the survival of many start-ups. Stian Westlake, head of research and policy at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta), has similar concerns. "Nesta research has shown, partly as a result of the credit crunch and from a long-term trend, in the last 12 to 18 months venture capital funding has fallen off a cliff. It's extremely difficult to secure funding for good ideas." Luckily the government has come up with the UK Innovation Investment Fund, which will put in matching funding of £150m alongside private sector investors. But for all the government's support for science, there is a worry among the academics that funding is becoming more short-termist. Leslie says he expects venture capital funds to pick up, but the tightening of public purse strings will last longer. "I am much more worried about a reaction in the public sector to move towards the short term. During times of crisis hard questions have to be asked and it's an opportunity for people who think that universities should be doing short-term research to put their case." guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 30 Sep 2009 | 2:02 pm Data-Mining Medical Records Could Predict Domestic Violence
To a busy emergency physician, a split lip or a case of poisoning is just one of those things they deal with. But to a computer mining the patient’s medical history, it could be the last diagnosis needed to decipher a pattern of domestic violence.
Now, a group of researchers at Harvard University has created the first computer model to automatically detect the risk that a patient is being abused at home. The results were published Sept. 29 in the British Medical Journal. “It’s a great concept,” said Debra Houry, an emergency physician at Emory University, who was not involved in the research. Although around one in four women experience domestic violence at some point in their lives, she says, the problem often goes unnoticed at a doctor’s visit. “It’s one of those hidden epidemics where they don’t come up to you and disclose the issue.” In fact, patients often try to hide the abuse, says Ben Reis, a Harvard pediatrician and computer scientist who designed the new computer model. “Abused people actually go to different emergency rooms each time, so that [the abuse] is harder to track.” To get around this problem, Reis and his colleagues tapped into a public U.S. database containing six years of medical history for around half a million people. They fed a large portion of the database into a simple computer model — known as a naïve Bayesian classifier — which then calculated the abuse risks linked to different diagnoses such as burns, sprains or mental disorders.
That picture is called a risk gel. In essence, it shows the patient’s medical history as a bunch of colored bars representing diagnoses made at various visits. A green bar means the diagnosis is not statistically linked to abuse, while a red bar means it is. When the computer determines that the combined abuse risk based on all diagnoses is high, it sounds the alarm, letting the physician know that a face-to-face meeting is called for. “We see this system as a screening support system,” Reis said. But screening isn’t the end-all, be-all for victims of domestic violence, says Gene Feder of the University of Bristol. He recently reviewed several trials of screening programs and found that none of them measured whether or not screening led to fewer deaths and injuries among abused women. “Is [the new computer model] suitable for implementation in in-patient hospital and ER hospital settings without further testing?” he wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. “Not without suitable training for clinicians in how to ask about abuse of the designated high-risk women and how to manage the women safely.” Still, researchers agree that domestic violence is severely underdetected by health care providers. But it shows up clearly in murder stats. According to the Harvard group, domestic abuse accounts for more than half of the murders of women in the United States. And without detection, there is no chance of helping the victims. Using the new system, the researchers were able to predict abuse an average of two years before the doctor made the diagnosis. Presumably, the computer is picking up signs of ongoing maltreatment the patient hasn’t yet revealed. The researchers also speculate that, in principle, some subtle signal could precede direct abuse. One surprise finding that could be relevant, says Reis, is that infections turned out to be strongly linked to abuse. That might suggest worsening hygiene in the family or increased psychological stress, possible omens of abuse. But at this point, it is anybody’s guess whether true predictions are possible. Predictions or not, with the current model, fewer than 20 percent of the patients flagged as high-risk cases turned out to have a diagnosis of abuse. Part of the problem may be that the system is only as good as the data it was based on. And as Emory University’s Houry points out, that data isn’t up to speed when it comes to diagnosing abuse. The Harvard researchers counter that their approach shows all the more promise because it works even when based on poor, real-world data. Working on a new government grant, they are now trying to improve the model and incorporate more data, a task that will get easier as electronic medical records become widespread among health care providers. Within four years, the group hopes to have a full-fledged system ready, including a user interface optimized for doctors. “The long-term vision is one of predictive medicine, where vast amounts of information are used to improve health care, diagnosis, screening and outcomes,” says Reis. Yet the question remains how to translate a diagnosis into action that will help the victims of abuse. “Identifying in itself is not enough,” says Houry. “But I believe it helps.” Images: 1) “Treemap visualizations of abuse risk associated with different diagnostic categories (for women) / Reis et. al., BMJ. 2) Risk gel visualization / Intelligenthistories.org
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 30 Sep 2009 | 1:58 pm Obama hails Senate climate billUS President Barack Obama welcomes the publication by Senate Democrats of draft legislation to combat climate change.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Sep 2009 | 1:49 pm Big Quakes Weaken Faults on Other Side of EarthStudy finds large quakes can weaken faults around the world.Source: Livescience.com | 30 Sep 2009 | 1:06 pm Earthquakes weaken distant faultsThe major earthquake in Sumatra in 2004 may have weakened California's San Andreas fault 8,000km away.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Sep 2009 | 12:47 pm High-Res Images of New Territory on Mercury
Flying within 228 kilometers of the surface of Mercury on Sept. 29, the Messenger spacecraft snapped portraits of a portion of the planet that had never before been imaged close up.
The Sept. 29 encounter was the third and last flyby and gave the craft the gravitational assistance it needs to settle in March 2011 into a yearlong orbit around Mercury, the solar system’s innermost and least explored planet. The first images from the latest encounter, which detail 5 percent of the planet that hadn’t been examined by spacecraft before, were released on Sept. 30 and more are expected over the next few days. Images: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
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Source: Wired: Wired Science | 30 Sep 2009 | 12:36 pm History of the Lunch BoxFrom tin pail to Hello Kitty, the history of the humble lunch box is explored.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 30 Sep 2009 | 11:10 am Two Deadly Quakes: Is Earth Unusually Active?Multiple strong earthquakes in one year not unusual, though effects and damage can differ.Source: Livescience.com | 30 Sep 2009 | 11:07 am Fault Monitoring Breakthrough May Help Predict QuakesA new way to measure fault strength could help scientists pinpoint future temblors.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 30 Sep 2009 | 11:01 am Moving onStephen Hawking explains his change of jobsSource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Sep 2009 | 10:55 am Tycoon, American and Russian Blast to SpaceA Soyuz crew, including a tourist, is due to reach the space station on Friday.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 30 Sep 2009 | 10:50 am UK mammals have a genetically distinct 'Celtic fringe'Small mammals have a genetically distinct "Celtic fringe". The finding may shed light on the origins of human Celtic populations.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Sep 2009 | 10:34 am Hubble Catches Galaxies Stripping — Ram Pressure Stripping, That Is
Galaxies speeding through clusters of their neighbors were imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope being stripped of their gas.
NGC 4522, the galaxy pictured above, is traveling at 6.2 million miles per hour, astronomers estimate. It’s about 60 million light-years away in the Virgo cluster. The bright blue areas to the right and left are star-forming regions. Unlike our own Milky Way galaxy with its delicate spiral arms, fast-moving galaxies like NGC 4522 get deformed by the strong winds generated by their movement. The process is known as “ram pressure stripping” and it’s analogous to what would happen were you to hold a dandelion parachute ball out a car window. The lighter parts get stripped away. Galaxy NGC 4402, pictured below, shows off the convex gas and dust disc that is characteristic of galaxies undergoing ram pressure stripping. The hot gas between galaxies in a cluster (known as the intra-cluster medium) actually sweeps the gas away, creating the odd shape in the process. The images were taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys instrument before it suffered a power failure in 2007. The images were recovered when astronauts restored the unit in May of this year on the last Hubble Servicing Mission. Both are deep enough to show distant background galaxies. High-res version of the top photo (40 MB): NGC 4522
Images: NASA/ESA See Also:
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 30 Sep 2009 | 10:04 am Hitler Skull Fragment Belonged to FemaleA piece of skull thought to belong to Adolf Hitler actually came from a woman.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 30 Sep 2009 | 9:00 am Space clown will spin a 'poetic tale' about earthly water shortagesGuy Laliberté, who is heading for the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz rocket, will oversee a global event to raise awareness of the world's growing shortage of clean water The Canadian circus billionaire who founded Cirque du Soleil became the first clown in space this morning when he blasted off for the International Space Station. Guy Laliberté joined two astronauts aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket that lifted off at 8.14am BST from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazhakstan. Laliberté, 50, is the eighth space tourist to visit the orbiting outpost, after paying a reported $35m for a place on the 12-day mission. The entertainer, who is worth an estimated $2.5bn, donned a squidgy red nose before boarding and brought several others for his crewmates, the US astronaut Jeffrey Williams and the Russian Maxim Surayev. Mission controllers reported a smooth nine-minute ascent into orbit and expect the Soyuz capsule to dock with the space station on Friday. Towards the end of his stay, Laliberté plans to oversee a two-hour global artistic event as part of his "poetic social mission" to raise awareness of the world's growing shortage of clean water. "We will travel the world, unveiling part of a poetic tale to a voice of international personality," Laliberté told reporters ahead of the flight. Among those who have agreed to contribute to the production are the Canadian writer Yann Martel, the former US vice-president Al Gore, the Bolshoi ballet dancer Nicolai Tsiskaridze and the singer Shakira. The title of the production, Moving Stars and Earth for Water, will highlight the role of water as "an inspiration and as a source of life", Laliberté said. "My mission is dedicated to making a difference on this vital resource by using what I know best: artistry. This will be the first poetic social mission in space," he added. Laliberté, who started out as an accordionist, stilt-walker and fire-breather, founded the circus arts and theatre performance company Cirque du Soleil 25 years ago. Laliberté may be one of the last paying toursits to visit the space station for several years. Nasa is set to retire its fleet of space shuttles within the next two years, which will increase demand for spaces aboard the Russian Soyuz. Eric Anderson, the chief executive officer of Space Adventures, said his company hoped to make sure at least three tourists visited the space station each year, despite the shuttle's impending retirement. "I keep hearing that space tourism is ending and it never seems to be true," Anderson told the Associated Press. One way to keep the programme alive would be to increase the number of Russian Soyuz missions, Anderson said. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 30 Sep 2009 | 8:50 am SLIDE SHOW: Top Six Tsunami-MakersFew places are free from the risk of tsunamis since many factors can trigger one.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 30 Sep 2009 | 8:45 am University deaths not linked to Rutherford radiation, concludes reportPollution from the Nobel prize-winner's atomic experiments 'unlikely' to be cause of spate of cancer deaths Radiation left over from 100-year-old experiments by Ernest Rutherford, the father of modern nuclear physics, is not responsible for a cluster of deaths at Manchester University, a report has concluded. Professor David Coggon, an occupational epidemiologist from Southampton University, said he was "pretty confident" there were only small health risks to people who worked in the building where the Nobel prize-winning nuclear physicist carried out atomic experiments with materials such as radon and polonium. "By far the most likely explanation for the cluster is that it occurred by chance coincidence," he found. An inquiry in 1999 by the university's radiological protection service found that radiation remained in four Rutherford rooms, including room 2.62, which was used by the physicist and his colleagues from 1906 while they conducted experiments with radioactive material. The radiological protection service advised it would be considered acceptable for occupancy of 40 hours a week, and that it would be prudent to reduce staff and student occupancy for the two most contaminated rooms. The alarm over the deaths was first raised following a separate report into the deaths of lecturers Hugh Wagner, 62, and John Clark, who worked in the building. Dr Wagner died from pancreatic cancer in 2007 after working in room 2.62 for 20 years, while Dr Clark, a psychologist who occupied the room directly below it, died in 1993 from a brain tumour. His son said it had been about six months from diagnosis to death. Three former colleagues in the psychology department produced a report on the possible health risks to the university last June. Following their study it emerged that four other people who worked in the building had died of cancer. Arthur Reader, 69, of Fallowfield, Manchester, who worked in the psychology department from 1969 to 1993, died unexpectedly from pancreatic cancer last September, nine days after he was diagnosed. Former colleague Professor Tom Whiston, 70, who was an honorary professor at the University of Sussex, also died of pancreatic cancer in April. Computer assistant Vanessa Santos-Leitao, 25, died of a brain tumour in February and lab assistant Moira Joy Howard, who worked in the building as a teenager, died from cancer in 1984, aged 48. Professor Coggon, who was assisted by scientists from the Health Protection Agency's radiological protection division, said the largest potential health risk from contamination by radioactive chemicals would be lung cancer for people who had worked for long periods in the most polluted rooms in the building. But he added that the risk was expected to be small even after allowing for uncertainties in the assessment of historical exposures to radiation, and it posed as much a risk as passive smoking. Excessive risks of pancreatic and brain cancer were substantially less than those for lung cancer, he continued. "In particular, the apparent cluster of pancreatic cancer cannot be explained by exposures to radionuclides, mercury or asbestos, either alone or in combination." He continued: "It is unlikely that pollution by mercury has caused any harm to human health that has occurred in the past 20 years, or will occur in the future from mercury contamination of the buildings. In the unlikely events that adverse effects did occur, the impact would probably be minor and reversible following cessation of exposure." Professor Coggon found that, on current evidence, none of the identified contaminants in the building could plausibly account for the cases of pancreatic cancer, brain cancer and motor neuron disease that have occurred among past occupants. The building was surveyed three years ago, when "some minor contamination – below levels reportable to the Health and Safety Executive" was found in a limited number of locations. This was removed by specialist contractors and the building was resurveyed. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 30 Sep 2009 | 8:23 am Fungi-Infected Violins Best StradivariusA violin made from fungi-infected wood outperforms a Stradivarius.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 30 Sep 2009 | 8:15 am South Pacific Coasts Reeling From Tsunami, QuakesA massive tsunami has claimed at least 100 lives on islands off the South Pacific.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 30 Sep 2009 | 8:00 am Canadian circus tycoon makes journey into spaceBAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (Reuters) - Canadian circus billionaire Guy Laliberte blasted off in a Russian Soyuz spaceship from Kazakhstan on Wednesday to become the world's seventh space tourist.Source: Reuters: Science News | 30 Sep 2009 | 7:56 am Kenya seizes massive ivory haulKenyan authorities uncover almost 700kg of ivory, which was reportedly bound for Asia, at Nairobi's main airport.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Sep 2009 | 7:54 am Clock Turned Back on Aging Muscles, Researchers ClaimScientists have found and manipulated body chemistry linked to the aging of human muscle.Source: Livescience.com | 30 Sep 2009 | 7:18 am Speeding Galaxies Distorted by Space WindsA new set of images from the Hubble Space Telescope, taken before its recent servicing mission, reveals strong winds ripping through a pair of galaxies, distorting their shape and halting star formation.Source: Livescience.com | 30 Sep 2009 | 7:14 am Two meter sea level rise unstoppable: expertsOXFORD, England (Reuters) - A rise of at least two meters in the world's sea levels is now almost unstoppable, experts told a climate conference at Oxford University on Tuesday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 30 Sep 2009 | 7:12 am Spiritual Women Have More SexNew research has found that spirituality has a greater effect on the sex lives of young adults.Source: Livescience.com | 30 Sep 2009 | 6:17 am Virus-Like Particles May Fast-Track VaccinesVirus-like particles could accelerate the process of vaccine production.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 30 Sep 2009 | 6:09 am
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At present, medical records, even electronic ones, may be hard to interpret in the limited time a physician has to see a patient. “It’s usually a big, long wine list,” Reis says. “We reduced the entire history to one picture.”
