Men and women may respond differently to danger

Researchers using functional magnetic resonance imaging to study brain activation have found that men and women respond differently to positive and negative stimuli, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Nov 2009 | 9:00 am

Over-the-counter eye drops raise concern over antibiotic resistance

The use of antibiotic eye drops for conjunctivitis has increased by almost half since they became available over the counter at U.K. pharmacies in 2005.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Nov 2009 | 9:00 am

Scientists explain puzzling lake asymmetry on Saturn's moon Titan

Researchers suggest that the eccentricity of Saturn's orbit around the sun may be responsible for the unusually uneven distribution of methane and ethane lakes over the northern and southern polar regions of the planet's largest moon, Titan. On Earth, similar "astronomical forcing" of climate drives ice-age cycles.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Nov 2009 | 9:00 am

Past regional cold and warm periods linked to natural climate drivers

Intervals of regional warmth and cold in the past are linked to the El Niño phenomenon and the so-called "North Atlantic Oscillation" in the Northern hemisphere's jet stream, according to a team of climate scientists. These linkages may be important in assessing the regional effects of future climate change.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Nov 2009 | 9:00 am

Plasma produces KO cocktail for MRSA

Two prototype devices have been developed: one for efficient disinfection of healthy skin (e.g. hands and feet) in hospitals and public spaces where bacteria can pose a lethal threat; and another to shoot bacteria-killing agents into infested chronic wounds and enable a quicker healing process.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Nov 2009 | 9:00 am

New culprit for viral infections among elderly -- an overactive immune response

Researchers have found that exaggerated responses of the immune system explain why the elderly succumb to viral infections more readily than younger people. The study bucks the general belief that declining immune responses are to blame for susceptibility to viral infections.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Nov 2009 | 9:00 am

New brain connections form rapidly during motor learning

New connections begin to form between brain cells almost immediately as animals learn a new task, according to a study in which researchers observed the rewiring processes that take place in the brain during motor learning.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am

New tools for prediction of disease progression in acute childhood leukemia

Researchers have devised powerful new tools for typing cells from children with acute lymphatic leukemia and for prediction of how children with leukemia will respond to chemotherapy.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am

New fossil plant discovery links Patagonia to New Guinea in a warmer past

Fossil plants provide clues as to what our planet looked like millions of years ago. Identifying fossil plants can be tricky, however, when plant organs fail to be preserved. Researchers recently discovered abundant fossilized specimens of a conifer (previously known as "Libocedrus" prechilensis) found in Argentinean Patagonia. Characteristics of these fossils match those currently found only in tropical, montane New Guinea and the Moluccas. This discovery helps to explain the remarkable plant and insect diversity found in Eocene Patagonia.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am

High salt intake directly linked to stroke and cardiovascular disease

High salt intake is associated with significantly greater risk of both stroke and cardiovascular disease, concludes a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am

Atom-smasher sets energy record

The Large Hadron Collider sets a new world record for the energy of its particle beams, officials say.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Nov 2009 | 2:57 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - The Eastern U.S. was expected to kickoff the work week with significant weather activity as a long and powerful front trekked toward the East Coast on Monday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Nov 2009 | 2:54 am

CERN: Big Bang machine sets power record (AP)

AP - Scientists say the world's largest atom smasher has broken the record for proton acceleration, sending beams of the particles at 1.18 trillion electron volts.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Nov 2009 | 2:51 am

Our own witlessness is much scarier than Paranormal Activity | David Cox

The most profitable film in history owes its success to a mysterious blind spot in the contemporary human mind

Nowadays vampires are heart-throbs, monsters are neurotics, zombies are comic turns, serial killers are bores and aliens are cutie pies. So what's left to scare us?

If the remarkable success of Paranormal Activity is anything to go by, the answer's to be found in the spirit world. We're not talking about ghosts, who seem to have become almost as endearing as those other now threadbare bogeymen. This film makes it clear that its own baleful spectre is no mere unquiet revenant, but a fully-fledged fiend.

Demons have an impressive record of delivering the spine-chilling goods. Lots of people consider The Exorcist to be the most frightening film ever made. However, like many other supernatural scarers, The Exorcist was able to tap into the residue of terror instilled in us over the centuries by the priestly guardians of our souls. Paranormal Activity, on the other hand, has no truck with our Satanic heritage.

You might have expected its tormented protagonists to call in the Catholic church, what with that outfit's unmatched expertise in onscreen exorcism. This never occurs to them. They, and the only qualified mentor they manage to summon up, maintain a ruthlessly secular attitude towards the unearthly peril confronting them.

So we're dealing simply with a dislocated, disembodied entity defined and motivated solely by its own malevolence. It doesn't even try to be original. Believe it or not, what seems universally considered to be the most terrifying big-screen apparition since 1973 relies on moving bunches of keys around work surfaces, opening doors which ought to be shut, switching lights on and off and even going bump in the night – literally.

Which raises a question: why is this thing so scary when so many of our other one-time hair-raisers have lost their moxie? The evidence points to an unsettling possibility – that we actually believe in poltergeists, in a way that we don't believe in more physically tangible bogeymen.

About half of us seem prepared to tell pollsters that spirits do indeed exist, or at least might do. But just try asking people who dismiss the idea as nonsense if they fancy playing with a Ouija board or spending the night in a supposedly haunted house. Even those for whom alien abduction and mutant crustaceans hold no terrors can turn surprisingly chary.

Just why this should be the case in our supposedly sceptical age is far from clear. Evolutionary theorists suggest that hypersensitivity to indeterminate threat may have helped our ancestors evade swift, guileful and deceptive predators. All the same, we've had plenty of time to get used to what are now readily available explanations for apparently paranormal experiences.

Perceptions don't just reflect relays of environmental stimuli to networks of active brain cells. Memory and emotion pollute the flow from an early stage. Raw sensation is thus fighting a constant battle with internal inputs to shape cognitive awareness.

But many things can disrupt the balance between these two which prevails most of the time. Sensory deprivation or overload, poisons, oxygen deprivation, hyperventilation, hypoglycemia, fever, pain, fasting, dehydration and social isolation can all trigger hallucinations. So too, however, can less obvious influences. A relationship has been established between the incidence of bereavement apparitions and global geomagnetic activity. In the laboratory, the application of magnetic fields to the right hemisphere of the brain can evoke the sense that another being is present.

The whole point of the videotaping project in which Paranormal Activity's hero engages is to get round such spoilsport information. Sadly, convincing footage of ectoplasmic entities seems to turn up more often on cinema screens than on actual camcorder viewfinders.

Doubtless we'll be seeing more of it. Home video mocumentary spookery has indeed lighted upon a mysterious phenomenon. The Blair Witch Project laid it bare, while Paranormal Activity was but an infant phantasm in a software programmer's mind. It's that in this strange corner of movie-making, a tiny budget can generate wildly disproportionate box office revenues. The big screen, we must therefore assume, will be further addling both hemispheres of a great many brains for a long while to come.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 30 Nov 2009 | 2:30 am

Large Hadron Collider Makes History with 1.18 TeV Protons

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has made history and become most powerful particle accelerator on the planet. In the early hours of Monday morning local time, the LHC accelerated protons to a record-breaking 1.18 TeV (tera-electronvolts). The previous record sat ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 30 Nov 2009 | 2:18 am

China must show climate change leadership, EU says (AFP)

AFP - The European Union said Monday that cataclysmic climate change cannot be averted without Chinese leadership but Beijing stood firm in pushing for the rich world to take the lead.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Nov 2009 | 1:58 am

Tata says plans Nano hybrid cars - paper (Reuters)

Reuters - Tata Group is planning to produce hybrid versions of its Nano, billed as the world's cheapest car, to join in the environment-friendly trend, its chairman said in an interview with a South Korean newspaper.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Nov 2009 | 1:43 am

Large Hadron Collider Sets New World Record

 

CERN announced early Monday that the Large Hadron Collider has become the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator. The LHC pushed protons to 1.18 TeV (trillion electron volts), surpassing the previous record of 0.98 TeV held by Fermilab’s Tevatron.

The LHC has had a rough beginning, suffering a mechanical failure just a week after it started up for the first time in September 2008. Now, 10 days after it turned on again, scientists are celebrating with their fingers crossed that the machine is safely on its way to the physics experiments they plan to start next year when the LHC has reached its target energy of 7 TeV.

“We are still coming to terms with just how smoothly the LHC commissioning is going,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer in a press release Monday. “However, we are continuing to take it step by step, and there is still a lot to do before we start physics in 2010. I’m keeping my champagne on ice until then.”

The first beam was injected on November 20, and two beams sped around the 17-mile ring in opposite directions three days later. All four of the LHC’s detectors recorded data from the collision of those two beams.

The first to announce the record may have been the scientists running the CMS detector through their Twitter feed:

@CMSexperiment: World Record!! Tonight at about 22:00 the LHC accelerated a beam of protons to 1180 GeV - a new record energy!

Next, the intensity of the beams will be increased for about a week, and then collisions to calibrate the machine will be carried out through December.

Image: CERN

See Also:

• Last Days of Big American Physics: One More Triumph, or Just Another Heartbreak
• Large Hadron Collider: Best- and Worst-Case Scenarios
• Top 8 Large Hadron Collider Videos
• High-Energy Particle Physics Demystified
• An Insider’s Guide to the Large Hadron Collider

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 30 Nov 2009 | 1:08 am

Australian PM to meet Obama for talks (AFP)

AFP - Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd visits the White House Monday for talks with US President Barack Obama set to be dominated by climate change and the conflict in Afghanistan.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Nov 2009 | 12:30 am

Anatomy training facts, how to donate (AP)

AP - Learning anatomy with cadavers is a centuries-old rite of passage that once again is getting a face-lift as medical schools struggle to mix this core knowledge with an explosion of new information from the genetics revolution.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Nov 2009 | 10:02 pm

Mini Microbe Portraits From the Micropolitan Museum

Tired of the portraits, landscapes and abstract art that peppers the walls of most art museums? According to Dutch photographer Wim von Egmond, there’s one art subject that has been ignored for centuries and finally deserves its due: microscopic organisms.

As the head of the Institute for the Promotion of the Less than One Millimetre, von Egmond has created the Micropolitan Museum of Microscopic Art Forms, an online gallery of all creatures tiny and tinier. To gather his collection, von Egmond sampled organisms from anywhere he could find water, scooping up critters from urban puddles and country ditches as well as the ocean. From desmids to diatoms, he captured all the stunning features of these normally invisible creatures using a standard light microscope. Here, we’ve chosen a few of our favorite itty-bitties for your viewing pleasure.

The medusa Obelia
This odd-looking creature is a hydrazoan, a tiny relative of the jellyfish measuring just 1 millimeter wide. Like most jellyfish, the Obelia has two life stages, a free-swimming phase called the medusa stage (above) and a stationary phase called the polyp stage (below). During the medusa stage, the creature feeds from the yellow, star-shaped mouth at the center of its body and reproduces sexually using the four gonads surrounding its mouth. Eggs produced during the medusa phase will develop into larvae and then attach themselves to a surface, eventually turning into the stationary broom-shaped polyps pictured below.

Photos: Wim von Egmond/micropolitan.org

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 29 Nov 2009 | 10:00 pm

Historic science papers go online

The Royal Society marks the start of its 350th year by putting 60 of its most memorable research papers online.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 29 Nov 2009 | 6:58 pm

Eureka moments

Audio slideshow: Royal Society's 350 years of discovery
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 29 Nov 2009 | 6:55 pm

Philosopher AC Grayling defends human free will

Philosopher and author AC Grayling is our special guest for this week's podcast as we discuss extraterrestrial life, free-thinking, Cern and climate change.

Prof Grayling will be interviewing some of the world's top scientists in the coming weeks for a series called Exchanges at the Frontier on the BBC World Service. (2:00)

To mark the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society, its president Prof Martin Rees trawls through the institution's archives in search of historical nuggets. (12:50)

We look at the fallout from the climate change emails row as scientists at the University of East Anglia deny their leaked correspondence provides evidence of collusion by climatologists to fix data. (20:54)

We went along to the UK launch of the UN year of biodiversity at London's Natural History Museum. We hear from Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, and Huw Irranca-Davies MP, the minister for marine and natural environment. (29:59)

Prof Edward Wilson, the ecologist described as "Darwin's natural heir", is demanding that a panel similar to the International Panel on Climate Change be set up to help preserve biodiversity. (33:30)

Listen to the entire interview with EO Wilson in the latest Science Weekly Extra podcast.

And from Darwin's natural heir to the great Victorian himself. Podcast regular James Randerson describes how he marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by visiting Darwin's publisher at 50 Albermarle Street, London.

A new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection explores the concept of individuality. It's called Identity: eight rooms, nine lives. Observer science editor Robin McKie takes a peek inside the DNA room. (38:20)

View our video of the installation.

Guardian science corespondent and podcast stalwart Ian Sample joins us in the studio.

Post your comments below.

Join our Facebook group.

Listen back through our archive.

Follow the podcast on our Science Weekly Twitter feed and receive updates on all breaking science news stories from Guardian Science.

Subscribe free via iTunes to ensure every episode gets delivered. (Here is the non-iTunes URL feed).

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 Nov 2009 | 5:14 pm

From Mozart to black holes, 350 years of the Royal Society

Britain's academy of the sciences marks anniversary with online archive including letters from Newton and Captain Cook

Isaac Newton held a clear glass prism to the sunbeam that penetrated the shutters of his darkened room and watched in awe as the wall of his office danced with all the colours of the rainbow.

The 28-year-old physicist at Trinity College, Cambridge, was the first to show that white light is a blend of primary colours, a discovery that explains why grass is green and the sky is blue.

His written account of the experiment in 1671 is among the oldest in a collection of scientific milestones described in Letters to the Royal Society, which are made public today to celebrate the 350th anniversary of Britain's academy of science. The documents are released through an online library project called Trailblazing, a name inspired by Newton's famous nod to the work of his predecessors in a note to his rival Robert Hooke: "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

The letters to the society record the march of science from the earliest blood transfusions, and attempts to capture lightning, to the confirmation of Einstein's theory of relativity, the discovery of DNA and Stephen Hawking's first musings on black holes. The letters reveal a history of failure eclipsed by success, and the maturation of science from a haphazard amateur pursuit to the systematised professionalism of today.

"At that time the only scientists who were in any sense professionals were astronomers and maybe medical doctors, and of the two, the astronomers were the only ones who probably did more good than harm," said Professor Martin Rees, the astronomer royal and president of the society. "If you look at these records, you can't help but notice the immense range of interests they had. They were motivated by curiosity."

There is the letter from the chemist Robert Boyle, asking the physician Richard Lower about the consequences of transfusing blood from one animal into another. Does a dog lose its quirks after transfusion and gain those of the donor? Does blood from a big dog make a small dog grow? Can you safely replace a frog's blood with blood from a calf, and might that change one species into another? The answers were no, no, no and no.

That did not stop Lower moving on to human experiments, paying an "addle-brained" man 20 shillings to receive blood from a lamb. There were hopes it might cure the man's mental condition, but when Samuel Pepys, a president of the society, questioned the physician afterwards, Lower noted that his subject was still "a little cracked in the head".

A letter from Benjamin Franklin from 1752 dispels the myth that lightning is a supernatural force. He recounts an experiment in Philadelphia that he was lucky to survive, involving a thunderstorm and a kite armed with a long metal spike.

Franklin had a keen eye for the appliance of science. On witnessing the Montgolfier brothers' hot air balloon flight, the polymath declared such a device might be strapped to one's errand boy, so he could hop over hedges more swiftly as he ran from house to house. Or, Franklin mused, it could carry wine to great altitude and keep it cool.

In 1769, the English naturalist Daines Barrington wrote to the society after a barrage of tests confirmed that Mozart was indeed a child genius. Barrington visited the eight-year-old at his parents' home, and asked him to play scores he had never seen and to compose on the spot. "His execution was amazing, considering his little fingers could scarcely reach a 5th on the harpsichord," Barrington wrote on hearing one recital.

He vouched for Mozart's age, by confirming birth certificate detail and documenting his behaviour. "Whilst he was playing to me, a favourite cat came in, upon which he immediately left his harpsichord, nor could we bring him back for a considerable time," he wrote. "He would also sometimes run about the room with a stick between his legs by way of horse."

After a safe return to Britain aboard HMS Resolution, Captain James Cook wrote to the Royal Society in 1776 to disclose how he saved his crew from scurvy by filling the hold with "sweet-wort", sauerkraut, lemons and vegetables. One sailor died of an unrelated disease. "Two others were unfortunately drowned, and one killed by a fall; so of the whole number with which I set out from England I lost only four," Cook wrote.

Scientific progress brought inevitable clashes with scripture. The fossilised remains of elephants, tigers, rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses in Kirkdale, Yorkshire, were not washed there by a biblical flood, but showed life on Earth had existed for millions of years, noted the Rev William Buckland in 1822.

To mark the anniversary, the society is calling leading researchers together to thrash out the biggest issues for modern science. Feeding the world and providing clean, green energy will doubtless feature, as will more basic questions on the nature of ageing and consciousness.

"Our world is completely transformed through the application of scientific concepts which could not even be conceived of at the time the society was founded," said Rees. "New questions come into focus as old ones are answered. The important thing about science is it's an unending quest."

The rise of the 'invisible college'

The Royal Society emerged from an "invisible college" of natural philosophers who met in London in the 1640s to discuss the ideas of Francis Bacon. It became a formal society at Gresham College in November 1660 and included prominent names of the time such as architect Christopher Wren, scientist Robert Boyle and John Wilkins, inventor of the metric system.

The society held weekly meetings where experiments were described or performed before the audience. In a royal charter of 1663, the group was officially named as The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge.

It is the world's oldest scientific academy in continuous existence, with more than 60 Nobel laureates among its 1,400 fellows and foreign members. Since 1967, it has occupied a row of buildings overlooking St James's Park in London.

Every year, the society names 44 scientists as fellows in recognition of their scientific achievements.

The accolade is the highest a scientist can have, short of a Nobel prize. Existing fellows include neuroscientist Dame Nancy Rothwell, astronomer Jocelyn Bell-Burnell and Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 Nov 2009 | 5:05 pm

EO Wilson on 'immense and hidden' crisis in biodiversity

This is an extended extract of a phone interview with biologist, author and conservation campaigner EO Wilson.

The problem of biodiversity loss has been "eased off centre stage" as the spotlight has focused on climate change, according to Professor Edward Wilson, the ecologist described as "Darwin's natural heir".

Biodiversity is one of the hot topics of conversation on this week's regular Science Weekly podcast.

Professor Wilson also discusses conservative religious attitudes to evolution in the US, which he calls "bible literalism".

Post your comments below.

Join our Facebook group.

Listen back through our archive.

Follow the podcast on our Science Weekly Twitter feed and receive updates on all breaking science news stories from Guardian Science.

Subscribe free via iTunes to ensure every episode gets delivered. (Here is the non-iTunes URL feed).

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 Nov 2009 | 5:01 pm

Antarctic Eye Candy (video)

What better way to end/start your week than an eye-popping video of a seal carcass being devoured by a menagerie of starfish and ten-foot long carnivorous worms? You've got to love the camerawork, especially the stop-motion bits, which makes this ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Nov 2009 | 3:36 pm

Late cancer diagnosis kills 10,000 a year according to government tsar

Patients and doctors to blame for UK's 'unacceptable' record

Up to 10,000 people die needlessly of cancer every year because their condition is diagnosed too late, according to research by the government's director of cancer services. The figure is twice the previous estimate for preventable deaths.

Earlier detection of symptoms could save between 5,000 and 10,000 lives in England a year, Prof Mike Richards will reveal this week. The higher figure is nearly twice his previous calculation, which put the figure at about 5,000.

Richards has revised up his estimate after studying the three deadliest forms of the disease ‑ lung, bowel and breast cancer ‑ which together kill almost 63,000 people a year.

"These delays in patients presenting with symptoms and cancer being diagnosed at a late stage inevitably cost lives. The situation is unacceptable," Richards told the Guardian.

New efforts are planned to educate the public about the signs of cancer, tackle the widespread reluctance to tell their GP if they develop symptoms, and improve family doctors' ability to spot signs of the disease earlier, he added.

Britain is poor by international standards at diagnosing cancer. Richards's findings will add urgency to the NHS's efforts to improve early diagnosis.

They also raise further questions about how often family doctors fail to recognise telltale signs.  

Experts say early diagnosis can be the difference between a patient living for a short or long time or deciding whether they need surgery, such as a mastectomy, or not because quick access to surgery, drugs or radiotherapy greatly improves chances of survival.

In an article in the forthcoming British Journal of Cancer, which is published by Cancer Research UK, Richards will say: "Efforts now need to be directed at promoting early diagnosis for the very large number (over 90%) of cancer patients who are diagnosed as a result of their symptoms, rather than by screening.

"The National Awareness and Early Diagnosis Initiative [NAEDI] has been established to co-ordinate and drive efforts in this area. The size of the prize is large – potentially 5,000 to 10,000 deaths that occur within five years of diagnosis could be avoided every year."

Richards reached his conclusions after analysing one-year survival rates for the three cancers in England and comparing them with those in other European countries in the late 1990s. Previously he had looked at the number of patients who were still alive five years after diagnosis.

One-year survival is now thought to be a much better indicator of whether diagnosis was early or late.

The study focused on Britain's three biggest cancer killers: lung, which killed 34,589 people in 2007; colon (16,087); and breast (12,082). They account for 40% of the 155,484 cancer deaths in the UK in 2007 and, Richards found, about half of all the deaths that could have been avoided if diagnosis was as good as the best- performing European countries.

Richards found that "late diagnosis was almost certainly a major contributor to poor survival in England for all three cancers", but also identified low rates of surgical intervention being received by cancer patients as another key reason for poor survival rates.

Research by academics at Durham University led by Prof Greg Rubin has identified five types of delay in NHS cancer care: "patient delay", "doctor delay", "delay in primary care [at GPs' surgeries]", "system delay" and "delay in secondary care [at hospitals]".

The new initiative is intended to "fix this problem", helping the UK's 53,000 GPs improve their ability to identify patients who may have cancer, said Richards.

With smoking in decline "early diagnosis is our next big challenge in cancer and will be crucial in bringing our survival rates up to the best in Europe",  he added. Prof Steve Field, chairman of the Royal College of GPs, said: "Mike Richards's latest findings on cancer diagnosis are really important information and reinforce the need for GPs to put a lot of effort into ensuring that patients present [their symptoms] and have access to GPs, and that we pick up the symptoms early on, and also reflect if we can do things even better in this crucial area of healthcare, which we can.

"It's wrong to blame GPs for all these deaths, as there are many factors involved, including patients not recognising symptoms of cancer and not talking to their GP about them, especially middle-aged men. But I'm sure that we could all at times be more alert to symptoms and investigate and refer patients quicker," he added.

Sara Hiom, director of health information at Cancer Research UK, said GPs faced a difficult task in spotting cancer: "Despite cancer being a common disease, the average GP will only see one case of each of the four biggest cancers each year.

"Many of the symptoms that could be cancer turn out to be something less serious, but it's best to get things like unusual lumps, changes to moles, unusual bleeding or changes to bowel motions checked by a GP."

Early diagnosis usually means that treatment is more effective and milder for the patient, added Hiom.

Katherine Murphy, director of the Patients' Association, said: "Some patients are diagnosed with cancer when they have presented with the same symptoms six months earlier.

"Patients will sometimes tell us that they had been going to see their GP for six to nine months with, say, a pain in their stomach and were told to go to the pharmacy and buy an over the counter medicine [and later are found to have cancer]."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 Nov 2009 | 2:30 pm

Anthony Evans obituary

Materials scientist at the forefront of ceramics research

Anthony Evans, who has died aged 66 of cancer, was a world-leading materials scientist who pioneered the use of brittle materials in such wide-ranging applications as jet engines, space-shuttle tiles, silicon chips and vehicle armour. Writer of over 540 scientific publications, he is one of the most referenced authors in materials science, engineering and physics. He was a fellow of the most distinguished academies of science and engineering in the English-speaking world, including the Royal Society, Royal Academy of Engineering, US National Academy of Sciences and the US National Academy of Engineering, and his name is known to almost every materials scientist alive today.

Tony was born and raised in Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan, younger son of William and Annie Evans. (Tony's elder brother, Alan, died aged 30 in a work-related accident while attempting to secure a dam in Tasmania.) Tony gained a BSc degree in metallurgy at Imperial College London, and in 1967 he married Trisha Cross. After a PhD degree at Imperial, he began work as a ceramicist at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell, in Oxfordshire; at the time it was Europe's most prestigious and best-equipped laboratory.

This was the heyday of the UK nuclear programme, which required the development of new materials for the early reactors. By then, Tony had already established a distinctive and successful style of research: he developed highly innovative experimental and theoretical techniques in order to bring a new understanding to the failure of ceramics. In addition, he bridged the disparate subjects of materials and mechanics, which is now a thriving field of research worldwide. He had that rare ability of inspiring those around him, and his generous spirit led to many productive collaborations around the world. Tony launched and nurtured hundreds of careers as he shared his talents and enthusiasm for learning, always with a smile on his face and the most wonderful spirit of co-operation.

In the early 1970s Tony moved to the US, first to the National Bureau of Standards at Gaithersburg, Maryland, and then to the Rockwell International Science Centre, Thousand Oaks, California. Much of his remaining life was spent working as a professor in California: at the University of California at Berkeley (1978-85) and at the University of California at Santa Barbara (1985-97, and 2002-09). In the mid-1990s, he made a foray back to the east coast of the US: during 1994-98, he was the Gordon McKay professor of materials engineering at Harvard University and from 1998 to 2002 was the Gordon Wu Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University and also director of the Princeton Materials Institute.

Tony was the international authority on the failure of advanced engineering materials such as ceramic composites. Ceramics have the virtue of being stiff, strong and stable at high temperature, but they are notoriously brittle. Consequently, they fail by cracking under mechanical and thermal loads. The failure of the space-shuttle tiles and silicon chips in computers are typical examples. Tony developed the under- lying theories of toughening of ceramics, such as transformation toughening, where a material swells around the crack tip, forcing it shut. More recently, he developed design methods for the high-temperature coatings for the turbine blades of jet engines – these ceramic coatings protect the metallic parts of a gas turbine from the high temperatures associated with fuel combustion, and make for much more efficient engines.

In his final years, he developed the theory for failure of ceramic armour on military vehicles, as used in the current asymmetric wars, in which the military might of opposing sides differs significantly. He had a major influence upon international materials research as a leader of multidisciplinary research teams. He was vice-president of the American Ceramic Society (1984-88 and 2002-09) and for four years was chair of the US Defence Sciences Research Council. He was the founding chairman of the materials department of the University of California at Santa Barbara, which went on to become the leading materials department of the US.

Tony's enthusiasm, intellectual curiosity and willingness to share ideas were inspirational. He treated students as equals, listening rather than telling. He had that wonderful ability to get the best out of everyone. Tony devoted his life to his family and to his work, and could be found engaged in the classroom, writing papers or planning future research projects, until his final days.

He is survived by Trisha and their three daughters.

• Anthony Glyn Evans, materials scientist, born 4 December 1942; died 9 September 2009

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 Nov 2009 | 11:33 am

Flood Insurance, Climate Change, and the "Public Option"

As the idea of a "public option" for health insurance has risen to become one of the most contentious political issues of the decade in America, perhaps it would be useful to point out a rarely acknowledged fact: we already ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Nov 2009 | 10:52 am

Leaked emails won't harm UN climate body, says chairman

Rajendra Pachauri says there is 'virtually no possibility' of a few scientists biasing IPCC's advice, after UAE hacking breach

There is "virtually no possibility" of a few scientists biasing the advice given to governments by the UN's top global warming body, its chair said today.

Rajendra Pachauri defended the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the wake of apparent suggestions in emails between climate scientists at the University of East Anglia that they had prevented work they did not agree with from being included in the panel's fourth assessment report, which was published in 2007.

The emails were made public this month after a hacker illegally obtained them from servers at the university.

Pachauri said the large number of contributors and rigorous peer review mechanism adopted by the IPCC meant that any bias would be rapidly uncovered.

"The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report," he said.

"Every single comment that an expert reviewer provides has to be answered either by acceptance of the comment, or if it is not accepted, the reasons have to be clearly specified. So I think it is a very transparent, a very comprehensive process which insures that even if someone wants to leave out a piece of peer reviewed literature there is virtually no possibility of that happening."

The IPCC, which was set up by the UN in 1988, is the world's leading authority on climate change. It advises governments on the science behind the problem and was awarded the Nobel peace prize along with Al Gore in 2007.

Pachauri was responding to one email from 2004 in which Professor Phil Jones, the head of the climatic research unit at UEA, said of two papers he regarded as flawed: "I can't see either … being in the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

Pachauri said it was not clear whether the wording of the emails reflected the scientists' intended actions, but said: "I really think people should be discreet … in this day and age anything you write, even privately, could become public and to put anything down in writing is, to say the least, indiscreet … It is another matter to talk about this to your friends on the telephone or person to person but to put it down in writing was indiscreet. If someone was to say something like this in an IPCC authors' meeting then there are others who would chew him up."

Jones has denied any suggestion that he tried to suppress scientific evidence he disagreed with or that he manipulated data.

Some commentators, including the former chancellor Nigel Lawson and the environmental campaigner and Guardian writer George Monbiot, have called on Jones to resign but Pachauri said he did not agree. He said an independent inquiry into the emails would achieve little, but there should be a criminal investigation into how the emails came to light.

Pachauri said he doubted that trust in the IPCC would be damaged by the affair. "People who are aware of how the IPCC functions and are appreciative of the credibility that the IPCC has attained will probably not be swayed by an incident of this kind," he said.

He pointed out that five days after the emails were made public, Barack Obama announced a major commitment to cutting greenhouse gas emissions ahead of the UN climate summit in Copenhagen.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 Nov 2009 | 10:03 am

Chimps Enjoy a Good Tune, Too (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Love of music is universal among people, but when did that taste evolve? Do other primates share our preference for consonant rather than dissonant chords?
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Nov 2009 | 6:32 am

Muck into brass

A guide to making your fortune, from BBC Ethical Man
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 29 Nov 2009 | 2:38 am