Barn personnel experience higher-than-average rates of respiratory symptoms

The estimated 4.6 million Americans involved in the equine industry may be at risk of developing respiratory symptoms due to poor air quality in horse barns, according to a questionnaire study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Nov 2009 | 3:00 pm

Brain disease 'resistance gene' evolves in Papua New Guinea community; could offer insights into CJD

A community in Papua New Guinea that suffered a major epidemic of a CJD-like fatal brain disease called kuru has developed strong genetic resistance to the disease, according to new research by scientists in the UK.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Nov 2009 | 3:00 pm

Why can't some people give up cocaine?

Drug dependency is a recurrent but treatable kind of addiction. However, not all people who are drug dependent progress in the same way once they stop taking drugs. A new study shows that, in the case of cocaine, a high score on the so-called ‘scale of craving’, an antisocial personality type and previous heroin abuse are the factors most commonly involved in people falling back into the habit.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Nov 2009 | 3:00 pm

Hidden threat: Elevated pollution levels near regional airports

Scientists are reporting evidence that air pollution -- a well-recognized problem at major airports -- may pose an important but largely overlooked health concern for people living near smaller regional airports. Those airports are becoming an increasingly important component of global air transport systems. The study, one of only a handful to examine airborne pollutants near regional airports, suggests that officials should pay closer attention to these overlooked emissions, which could cause health problems for local residents.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Nov 2009 | 3:00 pm

Saliva proteins change as women age

In a step toward using human saliva to tell whether those stiff joints, memory lapses, and other telltale signs of aging are normal or red flags for disease, scientists are describing how the protein content of women's saliva change with advancing age. The discovery could lead to a simple, noninvasive test for better diagnosing and treating certain age-related diseases in women, they suggest.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Nov 2009 | 3:00 pm

Software knowledge unnecessarily lost

All too often the knowledge acquired by software architects is unnecessarily lost. Moreover, it is difficult to simply and quickly assess the quality of software. According to researchers these problems can, however, be easily resolved. They investigated how architectural knowledge can be better disseminated and retrieved.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Nov 2009 | 3:00 pm

An atomic-level look at an HIV accomplice

Since the discovery in 2007 that a component of human semen called SEVI boosts infectivity of the virus that causes AIDS, researchers have been trying to learn more about SEVI and how it works, in hopes of thwarting its infection-promoting activity.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Nov 2009 | 9:00 am

Why bird flu has not caused a pandemic

Bird flu viruses would have to make at least two simultaneous genetic mutations before they could be transmitted readily from human to human, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Nov 2009 | 9:00 am

Watching a cannibal galaxy dine

A new technique using near-infrared images, obtained with ESO's 3.58-metre New Technology Telescope (NTT), allows astronomers to see through the opaque dust lanes of the giant cannibal galaxy Centaurus A, unveiling its "last meal" in unprecedented detail -- a smaller spiral galaxy, currently twisted and warped. This amazing image also shows thousands of star clusters, strewn like glittering gems, churning inside Centaurus A.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Nov 2009 | 9:00 am

Small nanoparticles bring big improvement to medical imaging

Scientists have discovered a method of using nanoparticles to illuminate the cellular interior to reveal the slow, complex processes taking place in a living cell.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Nov 2009 | 9:00 am

Europe: Proton beams circulate in Big Bang machine (AP)

AP - Scientists switched on the world's largest atom smasher for the first time since the $10 billion machine suffered a spectacular failure more than a year ago, circulating beams of protons in a significant leap forward for the Large Hadron Collider.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Nov 2009 | 3:14 am

Race to recreate Big Bang conditions reignited

ZURICH (Reuters) - After a year's delay, scientists at the world's biggest accelerator have restarted an experiment to recreate "Big Bang" conditions that had sparked suggestions the earth would be sucked in by millions of black holes.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 21 Nov 2009 | 3:09 am

Astronauts gear up for 2nd spacewalk of mission (AP)

AP - An astronaut is gearing up for the first spacewalk of his career while awaiting the imminent birth of his daughter.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Nov 2009 | 2:29 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Heavy rains was forecast to continue over the Gulf States on Saturday while the Pacific Northwest was expected to see scattered precipitation.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Nov 2009 | 1:51 am

Harrabin's notes

Arguments over hacked climate change e-mails
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 21 Nov 2009 | 1:42 am

Researcher: Faint writing seen on Shroud of Turin (AP)

AP - A Vatican researcher has rekindled the age-old debate over the Shroud of Turin, saying that faint writing on the linen proves it was the burial cloth of Jesus. Experts say the historian may be reading too much into the markings, and they stand by carbon-dating that points to the shroud being a medieval forgery.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Nov 2009 | 11:24 pm

Museum: Galileo's fingers, tooth are found (AP)

AP - Two fingers and a tooth removed from Galileo Galilei's corpse in a Florentine basilica in the 18th century and given up for lost have been found again and will soon be put on display, an Italian museum director said Friday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Nov 2009 | 8:53 pm

Restart for 'Big Bang' experiment

The Large Hadron Collider experiment, designed to shed light on the cosmos, restarts after 14 months of repairs.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 20 Nov 2009 | 7:21 pm

In pictures

Smashing! Cern's particle cruncher finally restarts
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 20 Nov 2009 | 7:15 pm

The march of the cyclamen | Noel Kingsbury

Shady, wintry spots will soon be full of these diminutive flowers, from deepest purple to pristine white

Hardy cyclamen used to be the preserve of enthusiasts who swapped plants and seed with elaborate collectors' numbers and went on seed-collecting trips to Turkey. But now cyclamen have crept out of the cold frames of the elite into the borders of the many, and no wonder – they can create a splash in shady places where not much grows and when little else is hardy enough to flower.

I'm not talking about Cyclamen persicum, the tender plants sold in the thousands by florists and garden centres for temporary winter colour, but the tougher, more diminutive species, which are increasingly mass-produced by nurseries in a wide range of leaf and flower colours. And once you have hardy cyclamen in your garden, they'll spread themselves about. This starts slowly, with the occasional appearance of dark green, ivy-like leaves in borders or cracks in paving – flowers usually follow the year after.

A few years later, more appear, sometimes in bizarre places – some have just turned up in one of our window boxes. Cyclamen seeds are too heavy to be scattered far from the parent plant; they are coated in a sweet substance that ants find irresistible and go to great effort to carry them many metres.

One of the first signs of autumn is the swaths of C. hederifolium beneath trees in older gardens – each one a perfect pink miniature version of a shop-bought cyclamen at about 8cm tall. The leaves tend to emerge later and cover the ground all winter with a carpet of silver-marked dark green. Like snowdrops, every plant has differently-marked leaves.

There is a white form, too – 'Album', which is particularly lovely if allowed to spread to form drifts. In the garden they will flourish beneath trees and shrubs, even conifers if the shade is not too deep. Since grass grows weakly in shade, they can be planted in lawns and allowed to seed and spread (known as naturalising), but you'll need to stop mowing from August to May while the cyclamen are in leaf. The flowers of the later-blooming C. coum (each one no more than 1.5cm on 6cm-long stems) vary from deep dark magenta through every shade of pink to pure white.

In January and February it is the brightest and most reliable splash of colour to be had – during frosts, flowers and leaves wilt, but they perk up as soon as the temperature rises above freezing. As plants grow and seedlings spread, their characteristic dobs of pink can do so much to liven up both gardens and containers. The magenta forms in particular look very good with snowdrops.

Most C. coum have dark green leaves, but some forms – known as the pewter or silver group – have striking silver leaves. C. coum has colour, hardiness and reliability, so the dumpy shape of its flowers is easily forgiven.

By March, another species – C. repandum – is ready to take over to finish the cyclamen season. With large and elegantly shaped pink flowers, it makes an impact close to, but at 12cm tall it is too easily overwhelmed by the tulips and daffodils of the spring garden. Unlike many spring bulbs, however, it will self-seed and spread like the other hardy cyclamens I have mentioned earlier.

Cyclamen care

All hardy cyclamen grow best in well-drained, humus-rich soil. While they will thrive in full sun, most gardeners prefer to grow them in the shade of deciduous trees and shrubs. What they dislike most (apart from soggy, wet soil) is disturbance and competition – which rules them out of planting among perennials in the border.

The places they thrive tend to be unattractive for many larger and later-flowering plants. They can be planted beneath shrubs, especially if these have their lower branches removed; and can be combined with other late-winter and spring-flowering plants such as snow-drops, scillas, pulmonarias and dwarf daffodils. In containers they are best grown in their own pot sunk into the compost – when they have finished flowering, lift out the cyclamen in its pot and plant it in a shady spot for summer.

Suppliers Ashwood Nurseries; Broadleigh Bulbs; Tile Barn Nursery.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Nov 2009 | 5:10 pm

Face to faith: The real challenge to the biblical literalism held dear by creationists is in the Bible itself, says Judith Maltby

The real challenge to the biblical literalism held dear by creationists is in the Bible itself

An academic conference in Louisville, Kentucky, provided me with an opportunity to visit the Creation Museum in nearby Petersburg with a friend who is also an Anglican priest. Opened in 2007, this $25m museum's mission is not only to prove the veracity of a literal reading of Genesis but also to present Darwinism as one the most dangerous and corrupting ideologies yet known to humankind.

The museum is not for woolly-minded creationists. The six days of creation are six 24-hour days (no fudge there) and the earth is just over 6,000 years old. The cosmic contest is between the word of God and human reason. Intelligent design is dismissed as a mere concession to frailty. The museum is really the Museum of Biblical Literalism: Darwinism is responsible for war, drug abuse, societal breakdown and racism. The account of racism and the ways in which evolutionary theories fuelled notions of racial superiority in the 19th and 20th centuries does have a degree of historical traction to it. But the existence of all these evils, including slavery, before the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859 is strangely absent from the analysis.

One of things that struck us as visitors is just how many dinosaurs were about in Eden – and there is nothing like some animatronic dinosaurs for appealing to schoolchildren, or to a pair of priests. Especially toothy creatures look benignly at Adam and Eve as they relax in what appears to be a prelapsarian Jacuzzi. Much to our surprise, we learned that the dinosaurs survived Noah's flood – it didn't provide a convenient way to write them out of the narrative. We should have known better: as Genesis maintains that "two of every kind" made it on to the ark, this included a pair of Tyrannosaurus rexes, blessedly vegetarian before the flood like every other living creature, clearly shown by the size and shape of their teeth in the fossil record.

That our world is now impoverished by the absence of dinosaurs is the result of either human beings hunting them to extinction (our fault) or climate change (definitely not our fault). The point at which we both needed a cup of tea was the short film explaining how legends such as Saint George and the dragon might well be a fragment of collective human memory of dinosaurs, since the flood was less than 4,000 years ago.

All this is easy for a smug Anglican like me to mock, although the recent appointment of a bishop for Peterborough who is in print as saying "what the Bible teaches us about history or geography … all this is to believed and obeyed without reservation" takes some wind out of my denominational sails. And I can already hear the "sky-pixie" brigade rushing to tell me that what I believe is no different in kind from the beliefs of the creationists and that the last 200 years of scholarly biblical criticism is just a form of cheating for people who don't have the courage of their convictions.

But the real challenge to biblical literalism and fundamentalism is to be found in the Bible itself. The first two chapters of Genesis contain two creation stories, not one. In Genesis 1-2:3, the earth, the plants, the animals and the first two human beings ("male and female he created them in his own image and likeness") are created in that order. In the rest of Genesis 2, Adam is made first, then all plants and animals, and then Eve. Awkward. This crucial and intriguing feature of the Genesis text is ignored in the Creation Museum presentation – perhaps reading the first 1,500 words of the Bible carefully is giving in to human reason. For those who believe as I do, that the Bible is be to read both as a historically conditioned set of texts and as the word of God, Genesis chapters 1-2 can be seen as an inspired elephant trap – or should I say an inspired dinosaur trap? – for biblical literalism.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Nov 2009 | 5:05 pm

Dithering over statins' side-effects label finally ends

The pharmaceutical industry has taken almost two years to disseminate important information

Once your medicines regulator decides it should change the side-effect warnings contained in the patient information of a drug taken by millions of people, how long do you think it would take for that change to be implemented?

In February 2008 the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) published Drug Safety Update, Volume 1, Issue 7 (a boring government document). After a review of clinical trial data, spontaneous reports of suspected adverse drug reactions, and published literature, the agency concluded: "Product information for statins is being updated to reflect a number of different side-effects as class effects of all statins."

Everyone likes to be informed, and many people make an informed decision to stop taking statins because of well-documented side effects such as muscle problems.

What was the MHRA going to put on the new labels? "Patients should be made aware that treatment with any statin may sometimes be associated with depression, sleep disturbances, memory loss and sexual dysfunction." It also planned a warning to explain that – very rarely – statin therapy might be associated with interstitial lung disease.

Now, before we go any further, we should be clear on one thing. There are lots of people who want to tell you that statins do more harm than good, and many of these people have vitamin pills and magic diet books to sell.

Back in the real world, the evidence shows that statins are effective: they reduce your risk of having a heart attack, and your risk of death over a given time period, but they reduce these risks as a proportion of your pre-existing risk, so if you are at high risk of having a heart attack to start with, a statin is more worthwhile than if you're moderate risk. Although, of course, you still have to decide if you're the kind of person who feels enthusiastic about taking a preventive drug every day for years on end.

And we should also remember that some of these new side-effects, like many of the zillions of side-effects listed on patient leaflets, are only weakly associated with the drug. These are warning notices and some of them are based on circumstantial evidence, speculation and preliminary data.

But this side-effects information is made available for all drugs, because it's strong enough to be worth sharing, because it might be useful to somebody somewhere, because it might make doctors more inclined to take a specific side-effect more seriously from patients, because they might act as a focus for more detailed quantitative work.

This is not the new thalidomide and it is not a story about how statins are a hidden killer: this is, rather, a story about how risk information is disseminated to patients and doctors, and how it can be disappeared.

The decision to add these new side-effects to the label was made in February 2008, but in November 2009 the labelling implementation has just been announced, a full 21 months later.

Why did it take so long? the MHRA – the regulator of the pharmaceutical industry, which is funded by the pharmaceutical industry – delayed for one reason: "One of the innovator MA [marketing authorisation] holders was not in agreement with this wording."

So a drug company has been able to delay the inclusion of safety warnings on a drug prescribed to 4 million people for 21 months because it didn't agree with the wording. There is no conceivable world in which this is a good thing.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Nov 2009 | 5:05 pm

This week's events previews

Social Science, Glasgow

You would be wrong in thinking the Glasgow Science Centre was a place only for packed lunches, playtime and Nina the Neuron. This Friday, a new night offers a unique opportunity for adults to create a playground all for themselves, minus the kids. Social Science follows the unexpected success of similar such nights in London where over-18s are invited to participate in a range of interactive exhibits and activities. Try your skill at The Custard Run, Fly Me To The Moon and Be Fast To Be First before taking a well-deserved break at the fully stocked bar and buffet. Also on the agenda is a preview of the Scottish Ballet's Nutcracker and a private showing of Disney's 3D Christmas Carol film.

Glasgow Science Centre, Fri, vist glasgowsciencecentre.org or call 0141-420 5003

Allison Cole

Victorian Festival Of Christmas, Portsmouth

This weekend of historic frolics promises to give you a genuine taste of Dickensian Christmas, though children may be pleased to learn it's not limited to giving them sixpence before shoving them up a chimney. What they will witness instead are snowy pavements, a festive fairground and carol singers, though adults who whisper "humbug" can console themselves with mince pies, mulled wine and some bawdy music hall entertainment. You may even spot Queen Victoria wandering around the festive market.

Historic Dockyard, Fri to 29 Nov, visit christmasfestival.co.uk

Iain Aitch

Hyde Park Winter Wonderland, London

The build up to Christmas promptly kicked off this year around two months before the big day. While we could possibly do without sales on holiday decorations before we've managed to haul out the winter coats for a dry-clean, Hyde Park's Winter Wonderland is one event that couldn't come quickly enough. Boasting one of London's largest temporary ice rinks, a German market and a giant observation wheel, plus new attractions for this year, it's an ideal place to slip in to seasonal revelry.

Hyde Park, W1, Sat to 3 Jan, visit hydeparkwinterwonderland.com

Allison Cole

OUT AND ABOUT

Saturday, Birmingham

The Supreme Cat Show 2009

Catch sight of some of the country's most admirable felines. Includes Pedigree, Persian, Oriental and even Household Pet selections.

NEC, call 0871-945 6000 or visit supremecatshow.org

Wednesday to 29 Nov, Birmingham

BBC Good Food Show

Join Gordon, Jamie, The Hairy Bikers and friends for this taste bud extravaganza featuring a Masterchef cook-off and plenty of tannin-testing.

NEC, call 020-8267 8300 or visit bbcgoodfoodshow.com

Thursday, London

Serpentine Dialogues: Konstantin Grcic & Alice Rawsthorn

The German industrial designer who curated the Serpentine Gallery's Design Real exhibition (opening Thursday) discusses ingenious product design.

Lecture Theatre, Victoria & Albert Museum, SW7, £8/£6, call 020-7942 2211 or visit vam.ac.uk

Friday, London

The Red Ape Debate – The Future For The Orang-Utan

A panel of experts discuss the conversation of our red, fluffy forest friends.

Royal Geographical Society, SW7, call 01986-874422 or visit worldlandtrust.org

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Nov 2009 | 5:05 pm

NASA: Birth of Astronaut's Daughter Delayed (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - NASA has joined astronaut Randy Bresnik, who is in orbit now, in the waiting game for the birth his daughter, just one day before the spaceflyer is poised to make his first spacewalk.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Nov 2009 | 4:46 pm

The Day Global Warming Stood Still (Investor's Business Daily)

Investor's Business Daily - Climate Change: As scientists confirm the earth has not warmed at all in the past decade, others wonder how this could be and what it means for Copenhagen. Maybe Al Gore can Photoshop something before December.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Nov 2009 | 4:40 pm

Shroud of Turin May Hold Death Certificate

The debate over the Shroud of Turin is reignited by alleged writing on the artifact.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 Nov 2009 | 4:16 pm

Measure to change U. of Neb. stem-cell rule fails (AP)

AP - The University of Nebraska's governing board on Friday voted not to place tighter restrictions on embryonic stem cell research than those outlined under federal guidelines, which were expanded after President Barack Obama took office.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Nov 2009 | 4:07 pm

Nebraska ethanol plant fire produces lawsuit (AP)

AP - The owners of a Lexington ethanol plant and their insurer are suing a subsidiary of a Houston-based natural gas provider they say is responsible for an explosion and fire that shut down the plant for weeks.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Nov 2009 | 3:51 pm

NASA unleashes the Galactic Ghoul?

As I've mentioned before, I love a good outrageous space headline -- and the more they personify science or mold it to sound like a space opera, the better. But it's interesting to note that the "great galactic ghoul" traces ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 Nov 2009 | 3:36 pm

Firing Up the Large Hadron Collider... Again

If all goes well, the Large Hadron Collider will soon be smashing subatomic particles together as they travel near the speed of light around the 16.8 mile circumference of the world's most complicated machine. Scientists hope the Large Hadron Collider ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 Nov 2009 | 3:29 pm

Astronauts Unfazed by False Alarms in Space (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - Astronauts on the linked shuttle Atlantis and International Space Station said Friday that they're not worried about recent false alarms that disrupted their sleep with erroneous reports of calamity.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Nov 2009 | 2:45 pm

Art collector finds Galileo's lost tooth, fingers

ROME (Reuters) - An art collector has found a tooth, thumb and finger of the renowned Italian scientist Galileo Galilei who died in the 17th century, Florence's History of Science museum said on Friday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 20 Nov 2009 | 2:44 pm

Behind Oprah Winfrey's Power of Persuasion

Oprah Winfrey announced yesterday that after 25 years on the air, she would end her beloved talk show in September 2011. This announcement caused visceral reactions among my Facebook "friends." Several status updates read "Oprah, NOOOOOOOOOOOO," or "Why Oprah, Why?" ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 Nov 2009 | 2:34 pm

One Tiny Step for Spirit

NASA’s stuck Mars rover Spirit took the tiniest of steps to free itself from a sand trap that brought it to a standstill six months ago. After spinning its wheels for the equivalent of 8.2 feet, the rover moved about ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 Nov 2009 | 2:30 pm

Large Hadron Collider Circulates Proton Beam

For the first time since September 2008, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has circulated a beam of protons fully around its 17 mile-long ring of supercooled electromagnets. The last time this happened was shortly before the LHC suffered a devastating ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 Nov 2009 | 2:03 pm

Bob Ward: This climate email-hacking episode is generating more heat than light

Another skirmish has broken out in the long-running battle between climate scientists and so-called sceptics, and this one is likely to lead to more public confusion

Another skirmish has broken out in the long-running battle between climate scientists and so-called sceptics, with the hacking of email messages between some of the world's leading researchers on global temperature trends. But as usually happens in the blogosphere, this episode is generating more heat than light and is likely to lead to more public confusion over the causes of climate change.

For the past few years, a small group of climate change 'sceptics' have been poring over scientific journal papers that report historical trends in temperatures from around the world, as recorded by directly by thermometers and other instruments, and by 'proxies', such as tree rings. Their primary objective has been to seek out evidence that global warming has been invented by climate researchers who fake their data.

Among their main targets have been papers published by research teams led by Michael Mann at Pennsylvania State University and Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia, and particularly those featuring the famous 'hockey stick' graph, showing that average temperature in the northern hemisphere was relatively stable and constant for most of the last couple of millennia, but rose dramatically upwards in the last 100 years. This graph appeared prominently in the landmark Third Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2001, which concluded that "most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations".

The attacks on the hockey stick graph led the United States National Academy of Sciences to carry out an investigation, concluding in 2006 that although there had been no improper conduct by the researchers, they may have expressed higher levels of confidence in their main conclusions than was warranted by the evidence.

The 'sceptics' believe they have been vindicated and have presented the hockey stick graph as proof that global warming is not occurring. In doing so, they have ignored the academy's other conclusion that "surface temperature reconstructions for periods prior to the industrial era are only one of multiple lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that climatic warming is occurring in response to human activities, and they are not the primary evidence".

More importantly, these skeptics have not overturned the well-established basic physics of the greenhouse effect, namely that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and increasing its concentration in the atmosphere causes the earth to warm. They also have not managed to make melting glaciers and rising sea levels, or any other evidence of warming, disappear into thin air. But they have managed to confuse some of the public about the causes of climate change.

Over the past five years, Mann and Jones in particular have been subjected not only to legitimate scrutiny by other researchers, but also to a co-ordinated campaign of personal attacks on their reputation by 'sceptics'. If the hacked e-mails are genuine, they only show that climate researchers are human, and that they speak badly in private about 'sceptics' who accuse them of fraud.

It is inevitable as we approach the crucial meeting in conference in Copenhagen in December that the sceptics would try some stunt to try to undermine a global agreement on climate change. There is no smoking gun, but just a lot of smoke without fire.

• Bob Ward is Policy and Communications Director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Nov 2009 | 1:40 pm

Harnessing Wave Energy

Energy from ocean waves seems like the ultimate in renewable fuel, yet research lags behind studies of solar and wind power. Research now underway is based on ocean buoy generators. As ocean swells hit the buoy, electrical coils create electricity.
Source: Livescience.com | 20 Nov 2009 | 1:01 pm

Darwin at the movies: A festival of apes, aliens and troglodytes

Would we have had Alien, Planet of the Apes and The Time Machine if it weren't for a certain bearded Victorian?

Darwin, Evolution and the Movies is a one-off festival of film and live comedy to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species on 24 November 1859.

Over this weekend the festival is running at three separate venues across London. Classic films you rarely get a chance to see on the big screen, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and brand new shorts commissioned as part of Darwin200 make up this small but perfectly formed festival.

If Darwin had chickened out in 1859 and decided to put his dusty manuscript back in the drawer, allowing Alfred Russel Wallace to take the fame, and the flack, the genre of science fiction that we take for granted probably would not have evolved to become the seductive, cultural force that it is.

Wallace was younger than Darwin and as a self-made scientist he was an intellectual outsider. It is possible that opponents of the theory of evolution may have been able to silence and suppress his lone voice. If this had happened the narratives of evolutionary themes that today's lovers of science fiction readily embrace, such as the threat of future evolutionary changes, metamorphosis and man's descent into savagery, would not have the cultural prominence they do.

Charles Kingsley was an ardent supporter of Darwin and in 1862 wrote The Water Babies, in part to praise Darwin.

HG Wells – who had been taught at school by TH Huxley, Darwin's "bulldog" – was directly influenced by the notion of evolutionary change over geological timescales and in 1895 published The Time Machine.

In 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs explored atavisms and evolutionary regression in Tarzan of the Apes, and Arthur Conan Doyle speculated about a world in which dinosaurs have survived in The Lost World. These novelists directly inspired later generations of science-fiction writers such as Arthur C Clarke and Michael Crichton.

By the 1930s science fiction filmmaking had become big business. Darwin, Evolution and the Movies is London's only film festival celebrating Darwin's contribution to fiction.

What would civilisation on Earth be like if evolution transformed nonhuman apes into the superior species? The festival will screen the original Planet of the Apes movie. This film was so popular (1968 Academy award winner for make-up) that sequels and several TV series followed. But the original was never surpassed.

It explores the compelling themes of the threat of future evolution and man's descent into savagery by offering a neat reversal of primate dominance. Orang-utans are cast as conspiratorial elders, gorillas as aggressive law enforcers, chimpanzees as sinister intellectuals and humans as the dumb animals.

If we believe Darwin's theory that natural selection is an inevitable, self-propelling phenomenon that gives rise to divergent species, we must also believe the process isn't limited to Earth. It is estimated planets number millions of billions in the universe and as the iconic poster and trailer for Alien states, "In space no one can hear you scream ... "

For the movie HR Giger designed a parasitic killing machine with a segmented exoskeleton of great beauty. In its adult form the alien is reminiscent of a terrestrial vertebrate, but its highly acidic blood suggests internal organs distinct from life on Earth. The lifecycle of the alien is integral to the narrative, as the creature develops from egg, to face-hugger, to chest-buster, to devastating adult alien.

Director Ridley Scott had wanted to conclude Alien with the creature biting off Ripley's (Sigourney Weaver's) head and then making the final log entry in her voice. But the producers refused, (spoiler alert!) believing the alien had to die at the end of the film.

Since 1979 many aliens have perished and Ripley has died and been cloned back to life. The three sequels have taken these beings on a symbiotic journey of selection, culminating with Ripley and the alien genetically becoming one.

Darwin's theory of sexual selection is frequently overlooked in discussions of evolution. I've tried to redress the balance in my own comedy show Carole Jahme is Sexually Selected, which will also feature in the festival, at The Shortwave Cinema.

Darwin, Evolution and the Movies runs from 20 to 22 November 2009 (and late night at The Rio on the 28 November).

Check individual programme details at:

The Lexi Cinema
The Rio
The Shortwave Cinema

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Nov 2009 | 1:00 pm

Science Nation

Science for the People: Surprising discoveries and fascinating researchers.
Source: Livescience.com | 20 Nov 2009 | 1:00 pm

Dogs Sniff Dung to Find Really Rare Rhinos

Two dogs are helping scientists figure out how many Javan rhinos are left in the wild.
Source: Livescience.com | 20 Nov 2009 | 1:00 pm

Istanbul Opens World’s Largest Earthquake-Safe Building

The world’s largest seismically isolated building, the new international terminal at Istanbul’s Sabiha Gökçen Airport, is now complete and open for business.

Stretching across more than 2 million square feet, the terminal doesn’t sit directly on the soil, but rather on more than 300 isolators, bearings that can move side-to-side during an earthquake. The whole building moves as a single unit, which prevents damage from uneven forces acting on the structure.

“What an isolation system does is that it enables the building to move through large displacements in unison, and in doing that, you absorb earthquake energy,” said Atila Zekioglu, the engineer at the firm Arup, who designed the building.

Earthquakes accelerate buildings laterally, whipping them back and forth. Isolators (see photo below) slow down the motion of the building. In the case of the new terminal, the building will only have to withstand one-fifth of the acceleration that it would have had to without the earthquake proofing.

A devastating magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck Istanbul on August 17, 1999 killing 17,000 people and causing billions of dollars in property damage. Scientists estimate it’s more likely than not that the city will be hit by another large quake in the next 30 years. Istanbul is located near the confluence of the Arabian, African, and Eurasian plates. The North Anatolian Fault runs less than 15 miles south of the city. So, like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and a host of other Pacific Rim cities, Istanbul’s builders and planners have to take major earthquake precautions.

Luckily, designing structures for that kind of performance has become cheaper and easier. Increased computing enables better simulations of how buildings will act when an earthquake hits.

Zekioglu and his team ran their building designs through 14 different simulations of earthquakes.

“What we have done over the years is that there are many tests going around the globe in terms of shake tables, testing labs, and what we do is we take that data… test the ability of our seismic simulation software,” he said.

This software, called Dyna, was originally developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the 1970s. It can be used to model what will happen to materials under all kinds of conditions from car crashes to earthquakes to bomb blasts.

The software has allowed engineers like Zekioglu to go beyond simply satisfying the building codes to designing buildings that will really meet the objectives of the structure’s owners. You don’t just want an airport (or a hospital) to stay standing after an earthquake, you want it to be functional.

The Istanbul project is quite similar to what was done with the San Francisco Airport’s international terminal, said Michael Constantinou, a seismic isolation expert at State University of New York at Buffalo, but it uses a newer kind of seismic isolation device.

“This is one of the first projects, at the time they started this thing, to use this advancement,” Constantinou said.

The new type, triple friction pendulum isolators manufactured by Earthquake Protection Systems in Vallejo, are more compact and can reduce the cost of constructing a building, he said. Many buildings, including three new hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area, are now incorporating the new isolators.

Constantinou also highlighted a more general advantage that seismically isolated buildings have: They are actually easier to design because it’s very difficult to quantify how and why a structure will collapse.

“You are designing so that the structure will remain undamaged, and that’s much easier to understand,” he said.

The new terminal is designed to withstand an earthquake as strong as 8.0.

Images: 1) The new terminal/ARUP. 2) Seismic situation near Istanbul/USGS. 3) The triple pendulum slider/ARUP.

See Also:

• Massive Fake Quake Shakes 6-Story Condo
• Scientists Drill a Mile Into Active Deep Sea Fault Zone
• NASA Drone Uses Radar to Map Quake Faults in 3-D
• How Earth’s Hum Could Help Us Map Mars
• Man-Made Dam May Have Triggered Great China Quake
• Tsunami Risk for West Coast Higher Than Expected
• Videos Simulate Earthquake in San Francisco Bay Area

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 | 20 Nov 2009 | 12:16 pm

Sushi DNA Tests Reveal Fraud

A biologist walks into a sushi bar and orders some tuna. What does he get? Escolar, a nasty fish with buttery flesh that can cause bizarre episodes of diarrhea, accompanied by a waxy intestinal discharge.

It’s not a joke. It happened five times to the same scientists during a brief research project. The results of that study were published Wednesday in PLOS One.

“A piece of tuna sushi has the potential to be an endangered species, a fraud or a health hazard,” wrote the authors. “All three of these cases were uncovered in this study.”

The team of researchers from Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History ordered tuna from 31 sushi restaurants and then used genetic tests to determine the species of fishes in those dishes. More than half of those eateries misrepresented, or couldn’t clarify the type of fish they were mongering. Several were selling endangered southern bluefin tuna.

Although their results were shocking, exposing sloppy sushi joints wasn’t their main goal. The scientists were trying to improve on a new species-identification technique, called DNA barcoding. A coalition of labs has been collecting fish, reading their genes and uploading the information to a database called FISH-BOL.

Their goal is to build a catalog of every fish species on earth so that anyone with a handheld DNA reader could definitively identify fish within minutes. Wildlife officials could use that technology to spot-check fish markets, and fine people who are selling protected species.

Right now, the FISH-BOL database is roughly 20 percent complete, but zooligsts can’t seem to agree upon the best way to condense the genetic information from each fish into a concise signature. That’s where this study comes into play. By checking 14 carefully selected spots on a gene called cox1 and matching them up with the database, the scientists could accurately identify any kind of tuna.

Citation: Lowenstein JH, Amato G, Kolokotronis S-O, “The Real maccoyii: Identifying Tuna Sushi with DNA Barcodes – Contrasting Characteristic Attributes and Genetic Distances.” PLoS ONE 4, 11, 2009, e7866.

Photo: Spicy tuna roll
stuart_spivack/Flickr

See Also:

• ID Error Leaves Fish at Edge of Extinction
• Tuna Ranch Hormone Cocktail Could Save Bluefin
• Genetic Testing for Tuna: Is It Really Yellowfin?
• Bird Cam Captures Albatross, Killer Whale Rendezvous
• Hacking Salmon’s Mental Compass to Save Endangered Fish
• Saving Fish Is Possible, Unless They’re Past the Tipping Point

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 20 Nov 2009 | 12:14 pm

Serving Up Solar Tech Treats

Think thin-film solar is still eons away from ubiquity? Think again. Seattle-based company LivinGreen has some sweet solar tech that could make manufacturing solar cells cheaper and easier. Dye sensitized solar cells work like photosynthesis in plants. A nanoparticle dye ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 Nov 2009 | 11:33 am

Climate sceptics claim leaked emails are evidence of collusion among scientists

Hundreds of emails and documents exchanged between world's leading climate scientists stolen by hackers and leaked online

Hundreds of private emails and documents allegedly exchanged between some of the world's leading climate scientists during the past 13 years have been stolen by hackers and leaked online, it emerged today.

The computer files were apparently accessed earlier this week from servers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, a world-renowned centre focused on the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.

Climate change sceptics who have studied the emails allege they provide "smoking gun" evidence that some of the climatologists colluded in manipulating data to support the widely held view that climate change is real, and is being largely caused by the actions of mankind.

The veracity of the emails has not been confirmed and the scientists involved have declined to comment on the story, which broke on a blog called The Air Vent.

The files, which in total amount to 160MbB of data, were first uploaded on to a Russian server, before being widely mirrored across the internet. The emails were accompanied by the anonymous statement: "We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it."

A spokesperson for the University of East Anglia said: "We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites. Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all this material is genuine. This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation. We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and have involved the police in this inquiry."

In one email, dated November 1999, one scientist wrote: "I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

This sentence, in particular, has been leapt upon by sceptics as evidence of manipulating data, but the credibility of the email has not been verified. The scientists who allegedly sent it declined to comment on the email.

"It does look incriminating on the surface, but there are lots of single sentences that taken out of context can appear incriminating," said Bob Ward, director of policy and communications at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. "You can't tell what they are talking about. Scientists say 'trick' not just to mean deception. They mean it as a clever way of doing something - a short cut can be a trick."

In another alleged email, one of the scientists apparently refers to the death of a prominent climate change sceptic by saying "in an odd way this is cheering news".

Ward said that if the emails are correct, they "might highlight behaviour that those individuals might not like to have made public." But he added, "Let's separate out [the climate scientists] reacting badly to the personal attacks [from sceptics] to the idea that their work has been carried out in an inappropriate way."

The revelations did not alter the huge body of evidence from a variety of scientific fields that supports the conclusion that modern climate change is caused largely by human activity, Ward said. The emails refer largely to work on so-called paleoclimate data - reconstructing past climate scenarios using data such as ice cores and tree rings. "Climate change is based on several lines of evidence, not just paleoclimate data," he said. "At the heart of this is basic physics."

Ward pointed out that the individuals named in the alleged emails had numerous publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. "It would be very surprising if after all this time, suddenly they were found out doing something as wrong as that."

Professor Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Centre and a regular contributor to the popular climate science blog Real Climate, features in many of the email exchanges. He said: "I'm not going to comment on the content of illegally obtained emails. However, I will say this: both their theft and, I believe, any reproduction of the emails that were obtained on public websites, etc, constitutes serious criminal activity. I'm hoping the perpetrators and their facilitators will be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows."

When the Guardian asked Prof Phil Jones at UEA, who features in the correspondence, to verify whether the emails were genuine, he refused to comment.

The alleged emails illustrate the persistent pressure some climatologists have been under from sceptics in recent years. There have been repeated calls, including Freedom of Information requests, for the Climate Research Unit to make public a confidential dataset of land and sea temperature recordings that is "value added" by the unit before being used by the Met Office. The emails show the frustration some climatologists have had at having to operate under such intense, often politically motivated, scrutiny.

Prof Bob Watson, the chief scientific advisor at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said, "Evidence for climate change is irrefutable. The world's leading scientists overwhelmingly agree what we're experiencing is not down to natural variation."

"With this overwhelming scientific body of evidence failing to take action to tackle climate change would be the wrong thing to do – the impacts here in Britain and across the world will worsen and the economic consequences will be catastrophic."

A spokesman for Greenpeace said: "If you looked through any organisation's emails from the last 10 years you'd find something that would raise a few eyebrows. Contrary to what the sceptics claim, the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, Nasa and the world's leading atmospheric scientists are not the agents of a clandestine global movement against the truth. This stuff might drive some web traffic, but so does David Icke."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Nov 2009 | 11:15 am

Earth Watch

Korean model for Obama as Copenhagen looms
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 20 Nov 2009 | 11:10 am

Ghostly Bones of Galactic Feast Revealed

A new infrared image of the galaxy Centaurus A reveals the gassy, ghastly bones of a galaxy that it consumed several hundred million years ago.

The parallelogram of stars leftover from the collision had been obscured by dust. But using new processing techniques in the near-infrared part of the spectrum, European Southern Observatory astronomers were able to glimpse the leftovers of the cosmic dinner.

“There is a clear ring of stars and clusters hidden behind the dust lanes, and our images provide an unprecedentedly detailed view toward it,” said Jouni Kainulainen, in a paper on the new data visualized in the image. “Further analysis of this structure will provide important clues on how the merging process occurred and what has been the role of star formation during it.”

The black hole lurking in the center of Centaurus A, 11 million light-years away, is 50 times as massive as the one at the center of the Milky Way. It’s one of the most active source of radio waves in the universe, which is why astronomers have pointed all kinds of telescopes at it and eventually revealed the basic features of the galaxy that Centaurus A had consumed.

Image: ESO using the New Technology Telescope at the La Silla Observatory.

See Also:

• Spectacular New Image of Black Hole Jets
• Scientists Make Desktop Black Hole
• Supermassive Black Holes Collide to Become Even More Super and …
• Strange Eye-Shaped Galaxy Has Black-Hole Iris
• Multi-Galaxy Collision Caught in Action
• Hubble Snaps Fantastic Galaxy Collision

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 | 20 Nov 2009 | 11:08 am

How to Take a Gorilla's Blood Pressure: Very Carefully

For the first time, researchers have obtained blood pressure readings from a gorilla while it was awake.
Source: Livescience.com | 20 Nov 2009 | 10:59 am

Introducing the Mandelbulb

Fractal geometry has broad appeal because of the amazing colorful shapes that can be created, but it's easy to forget that there is actual information -- and some pretty rigorous math -- underlying the pretty pictures. Algebra and geometry are ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 Nov 2009 | 10:37 am

Italy collector finds Galileo's lost tooth, fingers

ROME (Reuters) - An art collector has found a tooth, thumb and finger of the renowned Italian scientist Galileo Galilei who died in the 17th century, Florence's History of Science museum announced on Friday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 20 Nov 2009 | 10:17 am

Climate Not Culprit of Megafauna Extinction

About 15,000 years ago, some of the largest mammals in North America disappeared off the face of the Earth.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 Nov 2009 | 10:09 am

Earth's 'immense and hidden' tragedy

Problem of biodiversity loss has been 'eased off centre stage' by focus on climate change, according to Prof Edward Wilson, the ecologist described as 'Darwin's natural heir'

The diversity of life on Earth is undergoing an "immense and hidden" tragedy that requires the scale of global response now being deployed to tackle climate change, according to one of the world's most eminent biologists.

Prof Edward Wilson, an ecologist who has been described as "Darwin's natural heir" and hailed by novelist Ian McEwan as an "intellectual hero" and "inspirational" writer, told the Guardian that the threat was so grave he is pushing for the creation of an international body of experts modelled on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The IPCC, which is credited with convincing world leaders that the threat from climate change is real, includes about 2,500 scientific expert reviewers from more than 130 countries and was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2007 along with Al Gore. Wilson's proposed organisation – which he names the Barometer of Life – would report to governments on the threats posed to species around the world.

Wilson said the problem of biodiversity loss had been "eased off centre stage" because of the focus on climate change.

"We don't hear as much public concern, protestation and plans by political leaders to save the living environment. It doesn't get anything like the attention the physical environment has," he said.

Since the beginning of the last century, 183 species are known to have become extinct, including the Tasmanian tiger, the Caribbean monk seal and the toolache wallaby. But this number is a gross underestimate of the true number of extinctions, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature species programme.

Wilson was speaking ahead of the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species on Tuesday. The 80-year-old scientist will deliver a lecture via video link to an audience at London's Royal Institution on Darwin's legacy and "the future of biology".

The extent of scientific ignorance about the diversity of life on Earth is vast. Scientists have catalogued about 1.9 m species, but estimate there are about 20m-30m in total (excluding microbes).

Wilson said the scale of the mass extinction now under way was even harder to comprehend.

At the start of the Neolithic period – about 9500BC – scientists estimate that species were becoming extinct at a rate of 20-30 per year. Since the population explosion of modern humans, that is estimated to have increased to 20,000-30,000. Most have never been documented by scientists. And in a couple of decades, Wilson reckons this will have increased to 200,000-300,000. Wilson's proposed international initiative, which he has developed with Simon Stuart, the chairman of the Species Survival Commission, would document this species loss and work out how to tackle it.

"Darwin would be simply appalled by what humanity had done to the richness and diversity of natural life," said Randal Keynes, one of Darwin's great-great-grandsons, who is helping to coordinate the 150th anniversary with the British Council. "He would be in the lead of campaigning on the preservation of biodiversity."

Some of the species that played a central role in the formulation of Darwin's theoryof evolution by natural selection are now either extinct or severely threatened. The Floreana mockingbird, that lives on the island of the same name in the Galapagos, was one of a handful of related species that first gave Darwin the idea that species could change (it is a myth that finches were the crucial group).

Reflecting on the similarities and differences between mockingbirds on different islands and on the mainland, Darwin gave the first vague hint of his later theory in his notes on the Beagle voyage that "such facts would undermine the stability of species".

Today, the Floreana mockingbird is classed as "critically endangered" and exists in two populations numbering 200 and 49. The giant tortoise that Darwin encountered on the same island – Geochelone elephantopus – was driven extinct by hungry whalers who enjoyed eating its meat in soup.

Wilson said conservation efforts around the world were far from adequate. "Right now we are just piddling around with efforts here and there, some of them strong and dedicated, the aggregate of which is not even close to what we need.""The benefits for humanity [of a concerted international effort on biodiversity] would be enormous ... the discovery of the rest of life on Earth and fuller evaluation of it is going to result in all sorts of very valuable knowledge," said Wilson, pointing at new crops, products and biotechnology advances.

A year of celebration of Darwin's achievements (and his 200th birthday) is drawing to a close and will segue neatly into the International Year of Biodiversity in 2010.

"The public recognition of the importance of biodiversity as an issue is very poor, very low," said Kenyes, "I think Darwin would want everyone to pick up that agenda and give it all the support they can."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Nov 2009 | 9:36 am

Thanksgiving Food Sources Can Be Tracked Online

From Western Illinois University: Once upon a time, in order to trace the path of a meal from your table to the source, you may only have had to take a short jaunt to a nearby field. But in these ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 Nov 2009 | 9:28 am

Wiring the Wilderness

A wireless "backbone" in the wilderness brings the power of the internet to remote locations.
Source: Livescience.com | 20 Nov 2009 | 9:27 am

Most beautiful and most wonderful

Winning entries of a photographic competition celebrating the birth of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Nov 2009 | 8:47 am

Giant Cannibal Galaxy's Last Meal

New images show results of collision between giant galaxy and smaller neighbor.
Source: Livescience.com | 20 Nov 2009 | 8:42 am

Astronaut in space while wife giving birth

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Shuttle Atlantis astronaut Randy Bresnik can be forgiven if he's having a tough time focusing on work -- his wife is due to give birth on Friday to a baby girl.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 20 Nov 2009 | 8:17 am

Controversial Stem Cell Experiment Could Treat the Blind

New and controversial transplant operation uses stem cells derived from spare human embryos.
Source: Livescience.com | 20 Nov 2009 | 7:58 am

Robotic Spy Planes Go Green

Military vehicles powered by alternative energy provide more than environmental benefits.
Source: Livescience.com | 20 Nov 2009 | 7:32 am

Zap! Light Used to Paralyze Tiny Creatures

A new technology can temporarily disable life forms.
Source: Livescience.com | 20 Nov 2009 | 7:16 am

UK climate unit's e-mails hacked

The e-mail system of one of the world's leading climate research units has been breached by hackers.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 20 Nov 2009 | 7:13 am

Two of Hubble's instruments to go on display at US museum

Two of the longest-serving instruments from the Hubble telescope have taken up residence in a museum in the US.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 20 Nov 2009 | 6:09 am

Sand dams voted best solution in water crisis debate

Technique developed by the Romans has potential to give up to 3 million people access to clean water in the drylands of Africa, says winner

An ancient water-saving technique thousands of years old that could save millions of people from drought last night won the ringing endorsement of an audience at the Geographical Society in London.

Sand dams, which are constructed out of concrete barriers 1-5m high and backfilled with sand, were voted as the best idea from five different proposals. Each idea had a champion who argued how they would use the virtual prize of $1bn at the Earthwatch debate entitled From tsunami to drought to solve the world's water crisis.

When seasonal rains fall, water collects behind the dam. The sand acts like a sponge and filters the water and slows evaporation. Clean water can be drawn for up to several months after the rains have fallen through pipes underneath the dams or by digging a hole in the sand.

Simon Maddrell, the executive director of Excellent Development, won the prize after pitching his idea to three experts - John Burton from the World Land Trust, Mark Shearer from Project Dirt, and Rick Bauer, a water expert from Oxfam - who quizzed each of the presenters in a "Dragons' Den" style panel.

Maddrell said that the technique was developed by the Romans in 400BC but was proving very effective today. The charity has built 250 sand dams in Africa already, providing water for 250,000 people. Maddrell said the sand dams had the potential to give up to 3 million people access to clean water in the drylands of Africa, and would be of particular benefit to women.

"Women in Africa do most of the farming. Sometimes they have to spend up to 5-6 hours a day just collecting water. Sand dams near to their village would reduce this to an hour a day. They are quite simply a miracle."

Other ideas competing for the notional prize were a Global Water Partnership Fund to measure and monitor water use around the world presented by Tom Le Quesne from WWF-UK; a demonstration project to build a waterway between Milton Keynes and Bedford presented by Professor Paul Leonard; a technical strategy presented by Professor Howard Wheater of Imperial College, and a plan to scrap subsidies to water companies from Robert Pendray, a 20-year-old student at Merton College, Oxford.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Nov 2009 | 5:33 am

Giraffes use 'supercharged' heart

Giraffes use a small, powerful, supercharged heart to pump blood up the neck to the head, new research reveals.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 20 Nov 2009 | 5:07 am