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Gene Blamed For Immunological Disorders Shown To Protect Against Breast Cancer DevelopmentResearchers are voicing alarm that drugs to treat a wide variety of allergies, asthma and autoimmune diseases now in human clinical trials may errantly spur development of breast tumors.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Oct 2009 | 12:00 pm 200,000-year-old Cut Of Meat: Archaeologists Shed Light On Life, Diet And Society Before The DelicatessenNew findings from the Qesem Cave archaeological dig in Israel indicate that during the Lower Paleolithic Period people prepared and shared meat differently than in earlier times, providing new clues into our evolutionary development, economics and social behaviors.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Oct 2009 | 12:00 pm Tiny But Adaptable Wasp Brains Show Ability To Alter Their ArchitectureFor an animal that has a brain about the size of two grains of sand, a lot of plasticity seems to be packed into the head of the tropical paper wasp Polybia aequatorialis.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Oct 2009 | 12:00 pm More Infants Surviving Pre-term Births Results In Higher Rates Of Eye ProblemsAs more extremely pre-term infants survive in Sweden, an increasing number of babies are experiencing vision problems caused by abnormalities involving the retina, according to a new report.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Oct 2009 | 12:00 pm China's Acid Rain Control Strategy Offset By Increased Nitrogen Oxide Air PollutionScientists are reporting the first evidence that China's sharp focus on reducing widespread damage to soil by acid rain by restricting sulfur dioxide air pollution may have an unexpected consequence: Gains from that pollution control program will be largely offset by increases in nitrogen emissions, which the country's current policy largely overlooks.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Oct 2009 | 12:00 pm Colombian Guerrillas Help Scientists Locate Literacy In The BrainA unique study of former guerrillas in Colombia has helped scientists redefine their understanding of the key regions of the brain involved in literacy. The study has enabled the researchers to see how brain structure changed after learning to read.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Oct 2009 | 12:00 pm Culture Is More Important Than Genes To Altruistic Behavior In Large-scale SocietiesSocially learned behavior and belief are much better candidates than genetics to explain the self-sacrificing behavior we see among strangers in societies, from soldiers to blood donors to those who contribute to food banks.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Oct 2009 | 9:00 am Gene Mingling Increases Sudden Death RiskMedical researchers report that variations in the gene NOS1AP increase the risk of cardiac symptoms and sudden death in patients who have an inherited cardiac disease called congenital long-QT syndrome. The findings will help in assessing the risk of sudden death -- and assigning therapy -- in patients with this syndrome.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Oct 2009 | 9:00 am What Drives Our Genes? Researchers Map The First Complete Human EpigenomeAlthough the human genome sequence faithfully lists (almost) every single DNA base of the roughly 3 billion bases that make up a human genome, it doesn't tell biologists much about how its function is regulated. Now, researchers provide the first detailed map of the human epigenome, the layer of genetic control beyond the regulation inherent in the sequence of the genes themselves.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Oct 2009 | 9:00 am Earlier Flu Viruses Provided Some Immunity To Current H1N1 Influenza, Study ShowsResearchers studying the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus, formerly referred to as "swine flu," have identified a group of immunologically important sites on the virus that are also present in seasonal flu viruses that have been circulating for years. These molecular sites appear to result in some level of immunity to the new virus in people who were exposed to the earlier influenza viruses.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Oct 2009 | 9:00 am The toad that throws itself down a mountain - and survivesThe pebble toad of Venezuela curls up like a ball and throws itself down the side of a mountain.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 15 Oct 2009 | 3:08 am Arctic to be ice-free in summer in 20 years: scientistLONDON (Reuters Life!) - Global warming will leave the Arctic Ocean ice-free during the summer within 20 years, raising sea levels and harming wildlife such as seals and polar bears, a leading British polar scientist said on Thursday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 15 Oct 2009 | 2:46 am Arctic to be ice-free in summer in 20 years: scientist (Reuters)Reuters - Global warming will leave the Arctic Ocean ice-free during the summer within 20 years, raising sea levels and harming wildlife such as seals and polar bears, a leading British polar scientist said on Thursday.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 Oct 2009 | 2:46 am The nation's weather (AP)AP - An Alberta Clipper from southern Canada was forecast to drop into the northern tier of the nation Thursday.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 Oct 2009 | 2:37 am Science as artBeauty revealed under the microscopeSource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 15 Oct 2009 | 1:54 am Gates pledges millions to African, Indian farming (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 Oct 2009 | 1:20 am Gold rushCalifornia sees the return of gold fortune-seekersSource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 15 Oct 2009 | 12:30 am Australia 'open' to atomic energyMore Australians - nearly half - view nuclear power as useful in the fight against climate change, a new survey suggests.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 15 Oct 2009 | 12:20 am Banana marks seed bank milestoneAn international seed bank has hit its target of containing 10% of all the world's wild plant species, researchers announce.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Oct 2009 | 11:03 pm Gene Therapy Shows Promise for Parkinson's (HealthDay)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Oct 2009 | 9:49 pm Bird species 'sharing nest boxes'The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) says some species are adopting surprising living arrangements.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Oct 2009 | 7:17 pm Explorers: North Pole summers ice free in 10 years (AP)AP - The North Pole will turn into an open sea during summer within a decade, according to data released Wednesday by a team of explorers who trekked through the Arctic for three monthsSource: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Oct 2009 | 6:59 pm Vatican to host Galileo exhibitThe Catholic Church, which once denounced Galileo as a heretic, is to open an exhibition at the Vatican.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Oct 2009 | 6:21 pm Arctic to be 'ice-free in summer'The Arctic Ocean could be largely ice free and open to shipping in summer in as little as ten years' time, an expert says.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Oct 2009 | 5:27 pm Her Eyes Say Yes, But Her Pheromones Say No
Honey’s sweet smell attracts more flies than does vinegar’s sour odor, but the ultimate fruit-fly magnet is eau de nothing.
“It’s a very careful paper,” says Nicolas Gompel, a neurogeneticist at the Developmental Biology Institute of Marseilles-Luminy in France. “I think it’s raising the bar in the field because of the clarity of the analysis.” Typically fruit flies meet each other over rotten fruit. Often several species of fruit flies mill about the same location. Many of the species look very similar,at least to human eyes. “We geneticists can hardly tell them apart unless we dissect them,” Gompel says.
It was a mystery how fruit flies could tell their own species from others. Scientists thought that sight and sound probably played big roles in distinguishing both species and gender. For instance, male fruit flies serenade females during courtship and each species’ love song is different. A male fly’s “music” and appearance would also probably keep other amorous males from approaching him. Scientists knew that chemicals called pheromones are important in telling males from females and one species from another, but no one knew how to interpret the message the flies were sending in a mix of 30 or more pheromones. To decipher the message, Levine and his colleagues used a genetic trick to selectively kill special pheromone-producing cells called oenocytes that are usually part of the flies’ abdomens. The team essentially created scentless flies. Surprisingly, the lack of a come-hither signal was more of an aphrodisiac for male flies than pheromones were. Normal male flies were more attracted to both male and female flies lacking pheromones than to normal females. Males from three other Drosophila species also courted scentless D. melanogaster females, something they would not do in the wild. The team could then use the scentless flies as a Rosetta stone to help translate the specific messages sent by different pheromones. Adding back a female pheromone thought to be an aphrodisiac, (7Z,11Z)-heptacosadiene or 7,11 HD, to scentless flies didn’t make them any more attractive if worn alone. A male pheromone called cis-vaccenyl acetate or cVA, which male flies pass to females in ejaculate to warn other males away, made both normal and scentless females unattractive to males. But if the perfume blend contained both cVA and 7,11 HD, the female chemical could “counter the chemical chastity belt imposed by cVA,” Gompel writes in a commentary appearing in the same issue of Nature. “Males are only after one thing. They want to mate,” Levine says. Even in the face of conflicting signals, the males “would rather hedge their bets and go for it,” than go without a mate. In addition to identifying gender, the researchers found that just one pheromone created a barrier to mating between species. Adding 7,11 HD — which is not made by other Drosophila species — to scentless melanogaster females erected the species barrier that had been torn down by removing the oenocytes. “7,11 HD says, ‘she’s not one of them,’” Levine says. These findings indicate that the chemical signals outweigh sight and sound in helping a male choose a mating partner, and that female pheromones may also serve as “slow down” or “back off” messages to keep males from getting too amorous, Levine says. Females are more discriminating. Given a choice, normal female fruit flies chose males that produce pheromones over unscented males. “She will not go for the guy who has no odors,” Levine says. That could mean that male pheromones put females in the mood. “We expected the chemicals would play a role,” Levine says. “What we didn’t expect was how much you could account for with only the chemicals. … We had no reason to think that the effects we saw would be so strong.” n the absence of pheromones, flies engage in unnatural courtship behavior. In this movie, two males attempt copulation with each other’s heads. Image: Jean-Christophe Billeter. Video: Jean-Christophe Billeter et al., Nature 2009. See Also:
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 14 Oct 2009 | 4:35 pm The Electric InterGrid - Why A Smart Power Grid is EssentialAmerica's electric infrastructure is undergoing a massive make-over. To save energy and cut carbon, it must develop Internet-style intelligence. Part 1 of 2Source: Livescience.com | 14 Oct 2009 | 4:14 pm Blazing Meteor Captured on Video (SPACE.com)SPACE.com - A streaking meteor that that recently appeared 100 times brighter than a full moon was caught on video camera, scientists announced last week.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Oct 2009 | 4:02 pm Plant Siblings Play Nice, Share Their Dirt
Unlike many human brothers and sisters, plant siblings appear to do their best to get along, sharing resources and avoiding competition. In a study of more than 3,000 mustard seedlings, scientists discovered that the young plants recognize their siblings — other plants grown from the seeds of the same momma plant — using chemical cues given off during root growth. And it turns out mustard plants won’t compete with their brethren the way they will with strangers: Instead of rapidly growing roots to suck up as much water and minerals as possible, plants who sensed nearby siblings developed a shallower root system and more intertwined leaves. “It’s possible that when kin are grown together, they may balance their nutrient uptake and not be greedy,” plant biologist Harsh Bais of the University of Delaware said in a press release. The work will be published in an upcoming issue of Communicative and Integrative Biology. Two years ago, co-author Susan Dudley of McMaster University in Canada observed a similar pattern in the sea rocket, a common seashore plant that also appears to favor its siblings. But the initial studies of kin recognition have been criticized for failing to control for complicating factors, such as resource depletion caused by competition between the unrelated plants. And until now, the researchers didn’t know how plants managed to identify their kin.
As seedlings grow, their developing root system gives off a variety of chemical signals, and the researchers guessed that these secretions might play a role in sibling recognition. To test their theory, the scientists grew wild Arabidopsis thaliana in a sterile liquid containing root extracts from sibling plants, unrelated plants or their own roots. Because each plant was grown in a highly controlled setup, the researchers could be sure any changes in growth were due to differences in the root extracts. As shown in the time-lapse videos below, the seedlings exposed to root secretions from unrelated plants grew significantly longer and more elaborate root systems than those grown in secretions from their siblings. The top video shows unrelated plants, while the bottom one shows siblings. However, when the scientists blocked root secretions using a chemical called sodium orthovanadate, the differences disappeared, suggesting that the sibling identification system indeed depends on chemicals released by growing roots. The researchers say their results may have significant implications for farming and agriculture. Although no one knows for sure how sibling recognition would affect crops grown in large monocultures, some researchers think that decreased competition among plants from identical seeds may make monocultures more susceptible to insects and disease. However, Bais says that the effect of growing a plant with its siblings is likely to be species-dependent, as initial studies have been contradictory. “There is a possibility that the explanation of the trade-offs is not that simple,” he wrote in an e-mail. “We have found that plants could resist pathogens better when grown with siblings compared to strangers, so I would take this with caution and not stretch it to all the plant species.” Regardless of how sibling recognition affects agriculture, it may be an important consideration for the home gardener. “Often we’ll put plants in the ground next to each other and when they don’t do well, we blame the local garden center where we bought them or we attribute their failure to a pathogen,” Bais said in the press release. “But maybe there’s more to it than that.” Photo: An Arabidopsis plant. See Also:
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Source: Wired: Wired Science | 14 Oct 2009 | 4:01 pm BIG PIC: Could Observatory Lasers Damage Satellites?Observatories that use powerful lasers are at odds with the U.S. Air Force.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 14 Oct 2009 | 3:00 pm Guerrillas Help Scientists Study LiteracyScientists have located the parts of the brain involved in literacy by studying former guerrillas.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 14 Oct 2009 | 3:00 pm NASA Opens Space Shuttle Launch to Twitter Fans (SPACE.com)SPACE.com - Here's something to tweet about: NASA has invited some Twitter followers to view the November launch of space shuttle Atlantis in person during a NASA "tweetup."Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Oct 2009 | 2:16 pm 'Magnetic electricity' foundResearchers discover a magnetic equivalent to electricity: single magnetic "charges" that behave and interact like electrical ones.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Oct 2009 | 1:53 pm NASA invites Twitterers to next shuttle launch (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Oct 2009 | 1:33 pm USGS reports 6.0 magnitude earthquake off tsunami-hit Samoa (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Oct 2009 | 1:06 pm Physicist: Studying Lizards Since Age 5Physicist continues childhood study of lizards by examining how they move through sand.Source: Livescience.com | 14 Oct 2009 | 1:01 pm Scientists Make Desktop Black Hole
Two Chinese scientists have successfully made an artificial black hole. Since you’re still reading this, it’s safe to say that Earth hasn’t been sucked into its vortex. That’s because a black hole doesn’t technically require a massive, highly concentrated gravitational field that prevents light from escaping, as postulated by Albert Einstein. It just needs to capture light — or, to be more precise, electromagnetic radiation, of which visually perceived light is one form.
Together, the patterns completely absorbed microwave radiation coming from any direction, and converted their energy to heat. Like a near-black hole designed earlier this year and made from photon-absorbing carbon nanotubes, the material could be used in solar energy panels. Image: arXiv See Also:
Citation: “An electromagnetic black hole made of metamaterials.” By Qiang Cheng and Tie Jun Cui. arXiv, October 12, 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 | 14 Oct 2009 | 12:51 pm You Stink: Odorprints RevealedChemical biomarkers can reflect your state of health or state of mind.Source: Livescience.com | 14 Oct 2009 | 12:38 pm Long-term monkey tests back Oxford's gene therapyLONDON (Reuters) - Long-term tests on monkeys using Oxford BioMedica's gene therapy ProSavin suggest it can treat Parkinson's disease without causing the jerky, involuntary movements associated with current drugs, researchers said on Wednesday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 14 Oct 2009 | 12:37 pm Long-term monkey tests back Oxford's gene therapy (Reuters)Reuters - Long-term tests on monkeys using Oxford BioMedica's gene therapy ProSavin suggest it can treat Parkinson's disease without causing the jerky, involuntary movements associated with current drugs, researchers said on Wednesday.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Oct 2009 | 12:37 pm The Link Between Parkinson Disease and FarmingFarmers may have a higher risk of getting Parkinson disease.Source: Livescience.com | 14 Oct 2009 | 12:18 pm Wired.com’s Crazy Flyer Survives with Mental Health Intact — Mostly
Wired.com’s Terminal Man appears to have passed the ultimate mental health test — 30 days without leaving an airport terminal except by plane — with his sanity completely intact. Wired Science conducted a highly unscientific study of Brendan Ross’s mental health status (i.e., we gave him several self-administered exams to take before and after the big adventure), and it turns out he’s a pretty stable human being. Despite enduring a month of constant noise, gross public bathrooms and chronic sleep deprivation, Brendan’s stress score bumped only 11 points, from 3 to 14 out of a possible 168. According to Psychology World, a website that publishes an online version of the stress test, his second score still puts him well below the reported national average of 50. Similarly, Brendan’s score on a multiple-choice anger test jumped by 50 percent, from 20 to 30 out of a possible 250, but he says he never came close to screaming at a flight attendant or fellow passenger. “It’s not in my nature to snap and start screaming at somebody, I guess,” wrote Brendan in a follow-up survey. “There were people who rubbed me the wrong way, sure, but it never came to that. Maybe it was because I knew they’d make good material for the blog, like the ‘air marshal’ from my last post.”
There were a few moments when Brendan felt the fatigue and stress getting to him, however. He says the mood of his fellow passengers greatly influenced his stress level, and he’d find himself getting testy among a crowd of stressed-out passengers waiting for a delayed flight. “Regional attitudes made a difference too,” he said. “I was much more irritable in New York than, say, Florida.”
“Normally, it wouldn’t have been a problem, but stepping up to the ledge, in the midst of the fatigue and weariness, the phobia kicked in full-strength, and I couldn’t do it,” Brendan said. “It was embarrassing — I had to walk back down the stairs. It wasn’t the kind of thing that would’ve happened if I was on a normal sleep schedule, I think.” Wired Science editor Betsy Mason crossed paths with Brendan in New York City’s JFK airport just days before the end of his odyssey. Though he seemed fairly lucid, the weeks of sleep deprivation had definitely taken a toll on his comprehension speed, and probably a little bit on his self -awareness as well, as evidenced by his response to “just look normal” in the photo to the right. And we’re not sure if the fact that he started talking about doing another terminal tour with Brazil’s Azul Airlines on the day his JetBlue tour ended is a sign that he came through with ease, or a sign that he actually has gone crazy. Wired’s determined flier says the only time he considered giving up was at the very beginning of his trip, and even then the thought crossed his mind only briefly. “The closest I came to giving up was on the second day,” he wrote, “when I was looking at a month of doing this. I thought, ‘Wow, this may have been a monumentally stupid decision.’”
But Brendan persevered, kindly providing us with a month of blog posts detailing the ins and outs of America’s airports. For a first-hand report of air rage, however, it turns out we’d have to find a more irritable traveler. Images: 1) Brendan rides in a fire truck at the Long Beach airport fire station./Brendan Ross. 2) Brendan at JFK./ Betsy Mason, Wired.com See Also:
Follow us on Twitter @wiredscience, and on Facebook.
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 14 Oct 2009 | 12:18 pm Scientists Scan the Brains of Mice Playing QuakeBy putting sensors in the brains of mice as they ran through a Quake-derived virtual reality, scientists have found a way to study neurological activity in moving animals.
The setup allows for real-time, almost-real-motion tracking of single neurons. That feat has eluded researchers who have a fuzzy, general understanding of brain systems, but little knowledge of how individual cells actually work. They hope that cell-level details will make sense of motion, cognition and other complex mental functions. “One of the major research areas of neuroscience is the development of techniques to study the brain at cellular resolution,” said Princeton University neuroscientist David Tank, co-author of the study published Wednesday in Nature. “The information of the nervous system is contained in the activity of individual neurons.” Tank’s team studied hippocampal place neurons, which are activated when an animal is in a particular location in its environment. Ever since hippocampal place neurons were identified 40 years go, scientists have wondered exactly what mechanisms make them fire. However, the fMRI machines used to study brain activity in humans only measure the average output of millions of neurons at once. Studying individual neurons has been possible in cell cultures, but brains in a dish behave different than real, living brains. Tracking individual neurons in moving animals has been impossible. “The neurons move back and forth while you’re trying to measure things,” said Tank. “So we developed a way to keep the head fixed in space, but still have mice perform behaviors that are usually studied in mice running through a maze.”
Those readings were the input for the researchers’ virtual reality software — a modified version of the open source Quake 2 videogame engine, tweaked to project an image on a screen surrounding the mouse. Tank called it “a mini-IMAX theater.” Mice in the study ran through a virtual maze designed in the open source Quake game editor, but rather than earning points or power-ups, they were rewarded with sips of water from a head-side nozzle. Into the hippocampus of each mouse the researchers inserted a glass capillary just one micron wide at its tip and filled with salt water. Known as a whole-cell patch recorder, it detects electrical currents as they pulse through individual cells. “It is difficult to overstate the importance of understanding how the dynamics of electrical activity within single neurons is related to firing patterns among collections of neurons that accompany the performance of complex tasks,” wrote Douglas Nitz, a University of California at San Diego cognitive scientist, in a commentary accompanying the findings. Scientists have proposed at least a half-dozen models of individual neuron behavior to explain the general firing patterns of hippocampal place neurons, whose general behavior is determined by a creature’s specific spatial location. Tank’s team found that individual neurons fired in staccato bursts of varying intensity, a result that fits one of the proposed models. Those results are likely of interest only to neuroscientists, and “to be fair, more work is needed to nail this down,” said Tank. Nitz was less reserved, calling the observations “an exciting result” that “may prove generalizable to other brain structures, in particular the cerebral cortex.” But he too was especially excited by the virtual reality-harnessing methodology. The findings are “a first payment on the promise of the technique,” and “represent a powerful example of what will be learned in decades to come,” wrote Nitz. Image & Video: David Tank See Also:
Citations: “Intracellular dynamics of hippocampal place cells during virtual navigation.” By Christopher D. Harvey, Forrest Collman, Daniel A. Dombeck & David W. Tank. Nature, Vol. 461 No. 7266, October 14, 2009. “The Inside Story on Place Cells.” By Douglas Nitz. Nature, Vol. 461 No. 7266, October 14, 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 | 14 Oct 2009 | 12:03 pm How a genetic tweak can make a fly sexually irresistibleRemoving chemical signals can make fruitflies "irresistible" to other flies - regardless of gender or species, scientists find.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Oct 2009 | 11:47 am Do Cell Phones Cause Brain Tumors? Tough CallA review of existing research discerned no overall link. But some studies found a link.Source: Livescience.com | 14 Oct 2009 | 11:27 am BIG PIC: Andromeda Seen in New LightNASA's Swift Satellite captured a stunning image of our galactic neighbor: Andromeda.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 14 Oct 2009 | 11:25 am Distracted: What Was The Governator Thinking?Calif. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called out his wife for cell-phone use while driving.Source: Livescience.com | 14 Oct 2009 | 10:28 am Possible New Da Vinci Painting FoundA fingerprint suggests a 19th-century painting of a young woman may be by Leonardo.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 14 Oct 2009 | 9:40 am Dinosaur 'Stomping Ground' Found in UtahCrushed bones reveal that some dinosaurs were trampled by their own kind.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 14 Oct 2009 | 9:20 am Natural Nukes May Have Crippled Early LifeAncient nuclear reactors may have cooked microbes trying to get a foothold on Earth.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 14 Oct 2009 | 9:05 am Aging heart can be prevented, say scientistsHONG KONG (Reuters) - Scientists in Japan said they have uncovered evidence that shows it may be possible to delay or prevent heart failure in humans.Source: Reuters: Science News | 14 Oct 2009 | 8:56 am Plight of the honeybee stung by funding from the chemical industrySyngenta produces a pesticide linked to bee deaths. So why has it been allowed to contribute towards research into the collapse of bee colonies? Why are honeybee colonies collapsing? One hypothesis is that bees are bringing into their hives traces of pesticides called neonicotinoids, whose use has expanded greatly in the past few years. Some scientists believe that these damage the development of the bee larvae, and inhibit the queen's production of eggs. As a result, these pesticides have already been withdrawn from sale in France, Germany, Italy and Slovenia. But there are, as yet, no certain answers, and most people agree that several factors are likely to be involved. So a new study by Warwick University, which hopes to unravel the "complex of interacting factors" should sort it all out. Or so you would imagine, in view of the fact that the researchers have been given £1m to do so by the government's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). But while the university says it will investigate "parasitic diseases caused by the varroa mite" and the "link between these diseases and the quality of pollen and nectar that the bees are feeding on", there's no mention of pesticides in its press release. When I phoned Dr David Chandler, one of the Warwick researchers leading the study, he confirmed that there is "no pesticide component in it at all." Odd, you might think. Slightly less odd perhaps, when you see that the award has been granted by the BBSRC "in partnership with Syngenta", which has provided 10% of the project's funding. As Private Eye notes today, Syngenta is the chemicals company that manufactures a neonicotinoid called thiamethoxam, sold as Actara, which has been fingered by a study in Washington state as responsible for incidents of honeybee deaths. Warwick's press release goes on to promote the company's Operation Pollinator, "a 5-year €1M programme in seven European countries (and the USA) to boost pollinating insects by providing wildflower strips". It looks to me like greenwash. The university also describes Syngenta as helping to "protect the environment and improve health and quality of life" - which seems like an unusual way to describe a pesticides company. When I asked Dr Chandler whether there might be a conflict of interest, he told me, "I honestly do not believe that's the case." The BBSRC no longer publishes the CVs of the committee members who decide how public money should be spent. But in 2003, when this information was available on its website, I found that the committees were stuffed with executives from Syngenta, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals, Merck Sharp & Dohme, Pfizer, Genetix plc, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Celltech and Unilever. The funding decisions it made appeared to reflect their priorities rather than the wider public interest. The potential for conflicts of interest is likely only to worsen, because in April this year the research councils introduced a new requirement for people seeking grants: from now on they must describe the economic impact of the work they want to conduct. This is likely to drive scientists to work even more closely with corporations. The big problem with commercial partnerships is not that the corporations might lean on scientists to edit the results (though as Ben Goldacre has shown, this sometimes happens in medical research) it's that they help to set the terms of reference for the research. You would need the self-abnegation of a saint not to recognise that some research topics are more likely to get funded by certain companies than others. I don't know whether or not Syngenta's involvement has affected the framing of the honeybee topic, but wherever scientists are financially dependent on companies, the question arises. Given how little money corporations contribute to British science (Syngenta's 10% is about average), wouldn't we be better served by keeping them out of it, so that we can be sure they can't guide the way research is framed? And while we're at it, how about reducing their influence over the way that public money for science is allocated? 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 | 14 Oct 2009 | 8:47 am Modern Moms: More Work, More GuiltWorking moms torn between career and family.Source: Livescience.com | 14 Oct 2009 | 7:46 am Working Moms: How to Juggle Job and HomeExperts give tips for how women can have it all.Source: Livescience.com | 14 Oct 2009 | 7:44 am Military Fuel-Cell Aircraft Sets RecordThe Navy has built a fuel cell-powered aircraft that can fly all day.Source: Livescience.com | 14 Oct 2009 | 7:33 am Strange Shapes Seen In Milky Way's Tiny NeighborA new image of Barnard's Galaxy, part of the Local Group, is taken by the ESO.Source: Livescience.com | 14 Oct 2009 | 7:30 am Temperature Spike Detected From Lunar CrashAfter a lunar impact, instruments picked up an intriguingly big temperature spike.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 14 Oct 2009 | 7:30 am Dino-Eating Pterosaur Evolved in Unusual WayA prehistoric, flying reptile provides fresh evidence for a controversial type of evolution.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 14 Oct 2009 | 7:00 am
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