Over the past decade, researchers have developed a variety of reliable real-time and archival instruments to study sounds made or heard by marine mammals and fish. These new sensors are now being used in research, management and conservation projects around the world with some very important practical results. Among them is improved monitoring of endangered North Atlantic right whales in an effort to reduce ship strikes, a leading cause of their deaths. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Dec 2009 | 12:00 pm
Researchers have developed a rapid, automated system to differentiate strains of influenza. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Dec 2009 | 12:00 pm
Scientists are developing new scaffolding technology which could be used to grow tissues such as skin, nerves and cartilage using 3D spaghetti-like structures. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Dec 2009 | 12:00 pm
An ultra-high-resolution imaging technique using X-ray diffraction is a step closer to fulfilling its promise as a window on nanometer-scale structures in biological samples. Researchers report progress in applying an approach to "lensless" X-ray microscopy that they introduced one year ago, with the potential to yield insights for evolutionary biology and biotechnology. They have produced the first images, using this technique, of biological cells -- specifically the intriguing polyextremophile Deinococcus radiourans. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Dec 2009 | 12:00 pm
The past year has been marked by a series of moral transgressions by powerful figures in political, business and celebrity circles. New research explores why powerful people -- many of whom take a moral high ground -- don't practice what they preach. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Dec 2009 | 12:00 pm
Pre-market approval by the FDA of cardiovascular devices is often based on studies that lack adequate strength or may have been prone to bias, according to a new study. Researchers found that of nearly 80 high-risk devices, the majority received approval based on data from a single study. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Dec 2009 | 12:00 pm
Researchers have discovered how an oncogene gets activated in mature B cells, suggesting a new target for therapy in B cell lymphomas. The study marks the first time researchers have understood how the over-activation of c-myc can lead to blood-related cancers. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Dec 2009 | 9:00 am
Humans share at least 97 percent of their genes with chimpanzees, but, as a new study of transcription factors makes clear, what you have in your genome may be less important than how you use it. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Dec 2009 | 9:00 am
Scientists have identified the dominant odor naturally produced in humans and birds that attracts the blood-feeding Culex mosquitoes, which transmits West Nile virus and other life-threatening diseases. The groundbreaking research explains why mosquitoes shifted hosts from birds to humans and paves the way for key developments in mosquito and disease control. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Dec 2009 | 9:00 am
Obese patients taking medications to lower their blood pressure and cholesterol levels are less likely to reach recommended targets for these cardiovascular disease risk factors than their normal weight counterparts, according to new research. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Dec 2009 | 9:00 am
A new carbon tax set for the new year in France has been struck down, in a blow to President Nicolas Sarkozy. Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Dec 2009 | 2:49 am
AP - Two mysteries surround a huge herd of sea lions that were hanging out on a pier in San Francisco Bay: Why did so many show up, and why did so many leave at once?
AFP - Angolan energy firm Sonangol initialled two deals with Iraq on Wednesday to develop oil fields in the north of the country, oil ministry spokesman Assem Jihad said.
And the most embarrassing example has been the rise of 'fake science', which values naivety over facts – a bit like Sarah Palin
Much criticism – positive and negative – has already been ladled on Ego "James" Cameron's latest film, Dancing with Smurfs, aka Avatar. But one point that has not been discussed is how much Sarah Palin would enjoy it.
On the one hand, considering that this movie features the most simplistic racial stereotypes since Star Wars' Jar Jar Binks did his best Butterfly McQueen impression for George Lucas, Avatar is an obvious winner for Palin. After all, she is the woman who, according to her father, left Hawaii University because there were too many Asians there for her liking: "They were a minority-type thing and it wasn't glamorous, so she came home," said Chuck Heath.
On the other hand, as Avatar comes weighed down with anti-war sentiments, topped with some environmental awareness waffle (if discussions about trees having "energy" count as environmental awareness, as opposed to cod-spiritual ethno-tourism you might expect from Sting and Trudie Styler), this may not be the obvious festive outing for la famille Palin. Sarah, of course, doesn't really believe in silly-billy man-made "climate change", describing it instead as "doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood". Doomsday? Priesthood? Has someone been reading Dan Brown?
All of this dovetails with the most important issue of the week: how to define the past decade. After all, the 80s had bling (according to Jay McInerney), the 90s had grunge (according to Winona Ryder). The noughties, or whatever we end up calling them, were surely defined by fakery: fake celebrities (anyone who came from reality TV); fake "reality" (see previous); faked news stories (Balloon Boy, which has since been compared to Orson Welles's War of the Worlds stunt – although, as far as I know, Orson wasn't trying to regain the power he had when he appeared on Wife Swap, as Balloon Boy's father, Richard Heene, was); fake fashion designers (any celebrity who sewed their name into the back of a badly made dress); fake friends (Facebook); and fake communication ("social" networking sites which tend to involve people sitting at home, alone, and not speaking). Sure, some of these things were around before Millennium New Year. But it was only afterwards that they became so ubiquitous and were given so much leeway.
That this decade should be summed up with the epithet of Fake is not so surprising, though, considering that we entered it with a fake – or "New" – Labour government, and then followed this with the fake election of a fake American president in 2000.
Yet perhaps the most embarrassing, not to mention damaging, fakery has been the rise of "fake science", which stems entirely from a fear of science and leads inexorably to no science at all. We saw this on a terrifying scale when George W Bush banned federal funding for stem cell research, and we see it on a pathetically comical scale with Prince Charles selling Duchy Herbals Detox Tincture. Sales of these kinds of supplements rise exponentially every year, just as stories about acai berries/pomegranates/whatever-the-trendy-fruit-is-this-week curing diseases continue to make headlines in respectable and unrespectable papers every week.
Michael Specter writes about the rise of fake science in his gripping new book, Denialism. Although Specter generally keeps his palpable anger at bay, it breaks through in his chapter about the MMR jab furore, with particular ire reserved for certain well-known names connected to it; namely, the actors Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy, and Tony Blair. Yes, Blair is grouped with Ace Ventura and his girlfriend, the latter of whom has insisted that she knows the MMR jab causes autism because "there is an angry mob on my side". Specter writes (to Britain's shame): "What does it say about the relative roles that denialism and reason play in a society when a man like Blair, one of the democratic world's best-known and most enlightened leaders, refused at first to speak in favour of the MMR vaccine?"
That the MMR jab does not cause autism has been definitively proven by now, despite what McCarthy's angry mob maintains (she is said to be getting her own talk show, produced by that unfortunately frequent promoter of fake science, Oprah Winfrey). But fear of the jab has led to the rise of another illness: there were more cases of measles in 2006 and 2007 in England and Wales than in the previous 10 years combined.
Fake science values naivety over knowledge, as it harks back to a non-existent age of innocence before the so-called corrupting influence of modern medicine. Palin, too, has used this modus operandi: she is qualified to speak precisely because she is unqualified. She is untainted by biased things such as facts and experience. And that is why she would like Avatar: its depiction of "the noble savages" is, no doubt, a well-intended argument against the destruction of rainforests, but add in a couple of orange brush strokes and you have a Gauguin painting. It is patronising, simplistic and offensive, like Palin and fake science.
Last year, incidentally, Palin sneered at the allocation of federal funds to projects such as "fruit fly research". Unfortunately for her, to say nothing of her Down's Syndrome son, these silly fruit fly studies have led to a greater understanding of diseases such as, um, Down's Syndrome. Isn't science annoying?
Penguins at a Leicestershire zoo are helping scientists with a new project to track the movements of their cousins in Antarctica. Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Dec 2009 | 12:38 am
Anyone hoping for something special in 2010 will get started on the right foot: a rare blue moon will grace the skies New Year’s Eve, an event that happens only once every 19 years. Blue moons aren’t really blue. They’re ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Dec 2009 | 11:47 pm
For nearly 20 years, a government laboratory built a living, respiring library of carefully collected organisms in search of something that could grow quickly while producing something precious: oil.
But now that collection has largely been lost.
National Renewable Energy Laboratory scientists found and isolated around 3,000 species algae from construction ditches, seasonal desert ponds and briny mashes across the country in a major bioprospecting effort to find the best organisms to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into fuel for cars.
Despite meager funding, the Aquatic Species Program (.pdf), initiated under President Jimmy Carter, laid the scientific foundation for making diesel-like fuel from the fat that microscopic algae accumulate in their cells. Fifty-one varieties were carefully characterized as potential high-value strains, but fewer than half of those remain.
“Just when they started to succeed is when the plug got pulled,” said phycologist Jeff Johansen of John Carroll University, who collected algal strains for the program in the 1980s. “We were growing them in ponds and we were going to grow enough to have them made into a diesel fuel.”
The program was part of the huge investment that Jimmy Carter made into alternative energy in the late 1970s. All kinds of research avenues were explored, but when the funding shriveled during later years, knowledge, experts and know-how were lost. The setback highlights the problems created by inconsistent funding for energy research. Now, President Obama has trumpeted the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as the stimulus package, as the largest increase in scientific research funding in history. Scientists roundly applauded the billions of dollars that went into energy research, development and deployment. But what about when the stimulus money runs out in two years?
“One caution is that much of this has been funded with the stimulus package,” said Ernie Moniz at a Google-hosted panel on energy in late November. “So, we’re going to have to see what happens after these next two years, because what we need is not a drop, but a further increase in R&D commensurate with the task at hand.”
And that’s exactly what didn’t happen in the last big energy R&D push.
From organism to oil
Turning pond scum into oil isn’t easy, but as a hypothetical energy system, it’s elegant. The theory is that algae will produce more burnable fuel on less land than regular crops, perhaps something like a thousand gallons of oil per acre instead of a few dozen from conventional plants. The food-versus-fuel debates that plague biofuels like corn-based ethanol would disappear. Plus, it’s possible the algae could be engineered to make high-energy fuels suitable even for airplanes. It’s these possibilities that sold the Carter administration’s energy officials.
Phycologists, the people who study algae, discovered that under certain circumstances, some algae start cranking out far more oil than normal. Restrict their nutrients, and for some reason they start producing lots of oil. But they also stop growing. If the scientists could keep the algae multiplying and pull the “lipid trigger” anyway, they’d be in fat city. But their understanding of the biology was incomplete, and the task wasn’t easy. It would take some time and effort to know if and when their the process would become cheap enough to compete with crude.
Another challenge was getting the algae to keep growing without injecting a lot of energy into the system. They installed large open ponds near Roswell, New Mexico, and began trying to produce tiny algae at oil tanker scales. It worked, but there were problems. Again, it would take some time and effort to know if and when everything would work together.
The program did not get time or the money to find out. By the time Bill Clinton took office, funding for the program had dwindled to a trickle, and in 1996, the Department of Energy abandoned the program to focus all its biofuel efforts on ethanol. A dark decade fell upon the field of algal biofuel. There wasn’t even money available to take care of the algal collection that had been so painstakingly created.
In an effort to salvage some of the science, a few hundred strains of algae were sent to the University of Hawaii, but the refuge proved less than ideal. When a National Science Foundation grant ran out in 2004, it became difficult to continue the laborious work of maintaining the collection. The organisms sit in rows of test tubes living and reproducing. Every two months, they have to be transferred, “passaged,” to a new nutrient-rich tube. Random genetic mutations can enter a population and lead to permanent genetic changes. The algae can die.
It’s not exactly clear how it happened, but a review released earlier this year found that more than half the genetic legacy (.pdf) of the program had been lost. Only 23 of the 51 strains that were extensively studied during the program remain alive and extant. The losses to the rest of the algal cultures in the collection have been even worse.
“The really bloody shame is that of those 3,000, there are maybe 100 to 150 strains that remain at the University of Hawaii,” said Al Darzins, who heads up the resurgent algal biofuels research program at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
The way R&D funding has been used in the United States has hurt the efficiency of the research. Programs that started during the late ’70s and early ’80s were stopped in the years of low energy prices that followed. Despite the best efforts of cash-strapped researchers, not everything can be preserved and recovered, frozen cryogenically while awaiting fresh funding.
Algae comes back
While the valuable NREL archive of algae biodiversity languished in a Hawaii basement, the world around it changed. Genetic and genomic research and understanding skyrocketed. Oil demand grew, particularly in massive developing countries like China, India and Indonesia. Oil usage outpaced new oil field finds. Interest in algae-based biofuels exploded. Venture capital and corporate money flowed back into the field. On January 2, 2008, oil hit $100 a barrel for the first time. Despite some ups-and-downs, the price of oil remains substantially higher than it was through much of the 1990s. As a result, more than 50 companies are now at work on some aspect of biofuel production from algae.
In the latest move, Exxon Mobil decided to invest $600 million into a joint venture with Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics for research into next-gen algal fuels.
Over the past few years, Darzins has revived the program at NREL. They’ve been hard at work on the biology of microalgae. Graduate student Lee Elliott of the Colorado School of Mines has collected 500 new species in just the last year and a half. To a certain extent, the problems of maintaining a microorganismal library have been solved. Cryogenic freezing techniques were developed at the University of Texas UTEX Culture Collection of Algae. The NREL team has been able to freeze and then revive 91 percent of their microorganisms.
Despite the lost decade, algal oil makers are optimistic that they are about to ride a steep cost curve down to much, much cheaper biofuel. As they apply new biological knowledge and optimize growing algae, the cost will drop. And as they capture economies of scale, the costs will drop again. In the best-case scenario, when all is said and done, algal biofuel could cost $50 per barrel. But that won’t happen anytime soon, and it could take a decade.
Or maybe it will remain expensive for a long, long time. There are some legitimate reasons to be skeptical of algal biofuel’s potential for large-scale oil production.
So far, nobody has been able to make fuel from algae for a cost anywhere close to cheap, let alone competitive. Some researchers question whether any kind of energy-conversion process based on photosynthesis will ever play a major role in our transportation energy system. One life-cycle analysis found algal biofuels would not have a positive energy balance, in other words, you’d have to put more energy in than you would get out. The prominent startup GreenFuel, which grew out of Harvard and MIT research, went bust earlier this year after blowing through $70 million.
We just don’t know how well algal biofuel production might work. It’s true that the 18 years of research at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory yielded a lot of knowledge, but it resulted in nothing resembling a commercial product or process.
“The cultivation of microalgae for production of biofuels generally, and algal oils specifically, is not a near-term commercial prospect,” John Benemann, an algae scientist who worked on the final report of the Aquatic Species Program, wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. “Larger-scale algal biofuels production still requires considerable, long-term R&D.”
So many questions, so little time
Just $25 million was invested over the life of the Aquatic Species Program, which is just 5.5 percent of the total money the DOE dedicated to biofuels over that time. Adjusted for inflation, the program’s total budget in today’s dollars was less than $100 million. To put this tiny number in oil industry context, Exxon Mobil made $142 million in profit each day of 2008.
“They came up with this idea and in four years, they almost demonstrated the technological feasibility, and then the funding fell out,” said Johansen, the phycologist who collected algae for the program. “The maximum of funding was about $4 million a year. When I left, it was $800,000 a year. Now, there is all this biofuel work going on, and they are all going back to that public domain research. It kind of drives me crazy.”
The neglect of the Aquatic Species Program and subsequent resurgence of algal biofuel interest is one of many examples that show that the lack of coherent, consistent energy policy has left the world’s most oil-dependent nation scrambling in times of crisis.
Johansen even went so far as to say that “if the Reagan and Bush administrations had not ended” the growth of the algal biofuels program, our country would have algal biofuels now.
Even under far less optimistic scenarios, if the Aquatic Species Program had been fully funded from its start until now, there is no question that we’d know a lot more about the potential, and limitations, of algal biofuels.
Instead, we’re left with some lessons learned, a partially missing library of microorganisms, and a lot of questions that investors and entrepreneurs want answered before the next oil price spike.
AFP - President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva Tuesday signed a law requiring that Brazil cut greenhouse gas emissions by 39 percent by 2020, meeting a commitment made at the Copenhagen climate change summit.
Spaceport security was tight in the sci-fi movie Total Recall. Unfortunately, modern-day airport security doesn't have this level of scanning technology (yet). On Christmas Day, Nigerian wannabe terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab set fire to his pants on Northwest Airlines Flight ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Dec 2009 | 5:20 pm
OLEDs may soon replace lightbulbs in homes and offices with panels of energy-efficient light built into walls
Wallpaper that can glow with light and bendable flat-panel screens are a step closer thanks to research into organic LEDs (OLEDs), which are widely hailed as the next generation of environmentally friendly lighting technology.
OLEDs use very little power to produce light, even compared with modern energy-saving bulbs. The chemicals they are made from can be painted on to thin, flexible surfaces, allowing them potentially to be used to replace traditional lightbulbs in homes and offices with panels of energy-efficient light built into walls, windows or even furniture. Other uses include flexible display screens, whose very low power consumption would mean they could operate without mains power, for example as roadside traffic warning signs powered by small solar panels.
Lomox Limited, a two-year-old company based in north Wales, awarded more than £450,000 today by the government-backed Carbon Trust to accelerate the development of its OLED technology.
Around a sixth of all the UK's electricity is used for lighting and Lomox claims its OLEDs are 2.5 times more efficient than standard energy-saving lightbulbs. The Carbon Trust said that, if all modern lights were replaced by OLEDs, annual carbon emissions around the world could fall by 2.5m tonnes by 2020 and almost 7.4mT by 2050. Replacing old, incandescent bulbs with OLEDs would generate even greater CO2 savings.
OLEDs have shown much promise in laboratories but must get over two major hurdles to become widespread consumer items: they are expensive to make and they tend to have relatively short lifetimes. "What our technology does, with the seven patents we have, is fix those problems," said Ken Lacey, chief executive of Lomox. He said his company's OLEDs have the potential to last as long as modern fluorescent lights and, for the display sector, as long as LCD panels. Lomox also claims its light matches natural light more closely than other energy-saving bulbs.
The company will focus its efforts on getting the first of its OLEDs to market by 2012, mainly for outdoor lighting. "The early part of the grant is to do the testing and take this out to that marketplace," said Lacey.
Mark Williamson, director of innovations at the Carbon Trust, said: "Lighting is a major producer of carbon emissions. This technology has the potential to produce ultra-efficient lighting for a wide range of applications, tapping into a huge global market. We're now on the look-out for other technologies that can save carbon and be a commercial success."
The grant for Lomox is one of 164 projects supported by the Carbon Trust for small companies working on a range of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies such as fuel cells, combined heat and power, bioenergy, solar power, low-carbon building technologies, marine energy devices and more efficient industrial processes.
AP - Once in a blue moon there is one on New Year's Eve. Revelers ringing in 2010 will be treated to a so-called blue moon. According to popular definition, a blue moon is the second full moon in a month. But don't expect it to be blue — the name has nothing to do with the color of our closest celestial neighbor. Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Dec 2009 | 5:03 pm
AP - Attorneys for an exotic animal dealer have accused an employee of intentionally neglecting animals to further his work as an undercover investigator for an animal rights group.
Reuters - Quebec will become the first province in Canada to adopt California's strict auto emissions standards, the province's environment ministry said on Tuesday. Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Dec 2009 | 3:25 pm
How the mapping of the 3bn letters of the human genome sparked a new age of biology that is only just beginning
It was the decade that launched a new age of science, and it came as no surprise. Researchers had foreseen the rise of biology in the 1990s and expected nothing less than a transformation of modern medicine and giant leaps in our knowledge of life on Earth.
They cannot be disappointed. In the last 10 years, scientists have looked deeper into the mechanics of life than ever before. They have learned how molecules come together to make living organisms, how biological glitches cause common diseases, and have come within a whisker of creating new lifeforms in the laboratory.
Genetics was at the heart of the revolution. Scientific and technological advances allowed researchers to read every letter of an organism's genome. The letters make genes, which are the templates for proteins that make cells. And the cells, in the tens of trillions, build the animals and plants around us.
The first major achievement came in 2001 when the 13-year, $4bn (£2.5bn) human genome project produced the first draft of the human genetic code. The huge task became a race between a global consortium of publicly funded scientists and an American genetics pioneer, Craig Venter. It was, said Venter, "the most important scientific effort humankind has ever mounted".
The human genome project put the essence of humanity into numbers. Our genetic code is 3bn letters long, grouped into around 25,000 genes. Francis Collins, head of the public genome project, declared it the first draft of our own book of life. "We've read it from cover to cover and we've discovered some pretty amazing surprises," he said.
Scientific revolutions have a long history of taking humans down a peg or two. Copernicus declared the Earth to be just another planet orbiting the sun. Darwin painted us as glorified apes, and Watson and Crick said life is but a bag of self-replicating molecules called DNA. The genetics revolution was no different. As more organisms submitted to genetic analysis, scientists learned that humans were not so different from other organisms. We share more than 95% of our genes with chimps and around 30% with bananas. Nematode worms, which grow to 1mm long, have a similar number of genes to humans.
Today, scientists have read the genomes of more than 180 organisms. They include the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, and a host of other pathogens, as well as rice, maize and other food crops. The information gives scientists insights to combat disease and make dietary staples more resilient.
Genetics came into its own when sequencing technology became cheap and fast. It allowed scientists to compare the genomes of tens of thousands of sick and healthy people and find flaws in DNA that lead to a vast range of ailments. The list so far includes defects linked to diabetes, high blood pressure, rheumatoid arthritis and heart disease.
The role of genetics in disease has turned out to be more subtle than many scientists had hoped. Only rarely does one gene cause one ailment. More often several genes play a role, with each raising the risk of illness. Who falls sick is down to a complex interplay between a multitude of genes and environmental factors such as diet and lifestyle.
Scientists now know the picture is more complicated still. Almost every cell in the body contains the genetic code in full but every tissue uses it differently. Some genes are turned up while others are silenced to keep heart cells beating and brain cells firing. Sometimes, this exquisite control breaks down, causing cancers and other common diseases. A global effort to understand this "epigenome" is under way.
As genetic sequencing became more advanced, it was put to use in ways that had only existed in science fiction. In 2008, scientists pieced together the genome of a woolly mammoth dug out of the Siberian permafrost. A year later, researchers extracted fragments of ancient DNA from the fossilised bones of Neanderthals and created the first genetic profile of a human relative. Comparisons revealed genes involved in speech and language that shed light on what it means to be human.
The new age of biology brought scientists into conflict with opponents who considered some of their experiments offensive – above all, the use of embryonic stem cells, collected from embryos left over from IVF treatment, to regenerate damaged or diseased organs. The research was hampered by restrictions laid down by the Bush administration in the US and independently in other countries.
New stem cell technology sidesteps the moral controversy by using genetic tricks to turn adult skin tissue into cells that behave just like embryonic stem cells. Scientists have tailor-made these induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells from patients' own skin. These have enormous advantages. They can be used to study a patient's disease in unprecedented detail, and can potentially grow into replacement tissues that will not be rejected by the immune system.
The invention of iPS cells demonstrated how skilled scientists had become at controlling living tissue. In the next decade, scientists will begin clinical trials to treat patients with iPS cells, a revolution expected to have a profound impact on public health.
Technology is famously neutral. It is how we choose to use it that governs whether it is good or bad for the world. That point was demonstrated unequivocally when several research groups reconstructed lethal viruses in their laboratories. Scientists at the State University of New York built the poliovirus from scratch by stitching genetic sequences together. When they injected it into mice, it caused death and disease. A few years later, scientists with the US army resurrected the 1918 Spanish flu virus, which first time around killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide.
Next year, scientists could reveal the first artificial living organism. Venter, who began the decade with an acrimonious battle over the human genome, hopes to create the first "trillion-dollar organisms" to produce hydrogen for the green economy. If he succeeds, predictions of a new age of biology will look all the more prescient.
Major breakthroughs of the decade
Cosmology
In 2003, scientists unveiled the most detailed map of the cosmic microwave background – the light emitted by the universe moments after the big bang. It reveals that only 4% of the universe is ordinary matter. A quarter is dark matter. The rest is mysterious dark energy that drives the expansion of the universe.
Cloning
In 2004, South Korean researchers claimed to have cloned a human embryo. But the research, led by Woo Suk Huang, became a scandal when it emerged the results were fabricated.
Space
The international space station (main picture) welcomed its first inhabitants, while missions to the moon and Mars both detected frozen water. Planet hunters spotted hundreds of worlds beyond our solar system, including some that may be habitable.
Scientists find evidence that schizophrenia, dyslexia and Tourette syndrome are caused by faulty wiring in the brain. Other research shed light on how the brain stores memories.
The European Nuclear Research Organisation near Geneva started up the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator. Discoveries at the laboratory will decide the direction of physics for the next two decades.
Human origins
The remains of Ardi, a 4.4m-year old female and the oldest putative human ancestor, left, were unearthed in Ethiopia. Short for Ardipithecus ramidus, the skeleton dates back to the dawn of humanity. In 2003, the remains of a diminutive and hitherto unknown species of human were unearthed on the Indonesian island of Flores. The discovery of Homo floresiensis, or "hobbit", is regarded as the most important anthropological find in 50 years. Adults of the species stood just 1m tall and lived as recently as 13,000 years ago.
Mathematics
In 2006, the reclusive Russian genius Grigori Perelman solved the Poincaré conjecture, which deals with abstract shapes in 3D space, more than 100 years after it was first proposed.
• This article was amended on Wednesday 30 December 2009. In the article above we made several corrections. Our genetic code is 3bn letters long, not 6bn. There was an editing error in the subsection that was headed 'Cloning' and Ardipithecus was misspelt.
What kind of gloves go best with a space suit? Well, scientists and futurists are still working on that one, but the answers have ranged from crude mechanical claws to high-tech mits that simulate the sensation of touch. Come inside ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Dec 2009 | 2:12 pm
LiveScience.com - 'Tis the season to indulge. 'Tis also the season to scour the
Internet for some quick fix for the pounding headache and acute
sensitivity to all things louder than a fruit fly, brought on by the
previous night's adventure with alcohol. Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Dec 2009 | 2:01 pm
Every surgery to get new software that spots early symptoms and predicts risk
GPs are to start predicting whether a patient has the early symptoms of cancer using a computer program that calculates risk, under plans to prevent the 10,000 unnecessary deaths a year caused by late diagnosis.
The new approach by the NHS means that doctors will tell patients their percentage chance of having cancer, based on factors like their age, weight and symptoms such as bleeding or sudden weight loss.
Professor Mike Richards, the government's cancer tsar, who unveiled the move in an interview with the Guardian, said that within five years every GP in England should be using the software as part of a new drive to reduce the huge toll of avoidable cancer deaths.
Computer-assisted cancer risk assessment will help GPs estimate whether a patient's symptoms could indicate the presence of a cancer and decide whether they needed to refer them for urgent tests in hospital, Richards said.
The computer would assess a patient's age, weight and symptoms – such as rectal bleeding and constant fatigue – and if the risk were above a certain level, the person would be referred to hospital for urgent exploratory tests within two weeks.
Cancer is the UK's biggest killer after heart disease and strokes. Every year 293,000 people are diagnosed with cancer, and about 155,000 die of it. GPs are vital because they spot the signs of cancer in 90% of patients, with screening picking up the other 10%. But a typical GP sees only eight or nine cases of cancer a year.
Britain is far worse than many European countries at diagnosing cancer early, when it is more likely to be treatable and the patient has a much better chance of surviving. That is partly because some patients who develop symptoms delay seeking help, but also because GPs sometimes fail to correctly identify signs of cancer.
Support technology is needed because of that poor record, the difficulty of diagnosing cancer and the sheer number of other ailments that GPs have to know about, Richards said.
There are more than 200 forms of cancer, and many of their symptoms are the same as for a range of other, often less serious, conditions. Computers could help doctors get it right more often when deciding whether to investigate a patient further, discharge them or refer them to hospital.
"This is helping GPs because none of us can retain this sort of information [about cancer symptoms] and having to retain it for bowel cancer, lung cancer and ovarian cancer, as well as for heart disease, it would take a remarkable human brain to be able to do that, so why not get computers to support it?" said Richards.
"The benefit of this will be that GPs will know who should be investigated and who shouldn't. It will also help patients to know that whether they are being reassured, or referred, or getting a test, that is the right thing to do."
Richards said the system would mean "better decision-making by GPs, leading also to earlier diagnosis of cancer patients".
Professor Steve Field, chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners, welcomed the move. "The future of medicine will be that GPs will be using more and more computer-aided diagnostic tools for more and more conditions, and ultimately in years to come genetic information will be part of that," he said.
"GPs will welcome this because it will make their diagnoses quicker and better. Over time this will save lives."
Family doctors rather than computers will continue to make the key judgments, even after software has become routine in surgeries, Richards emphasised.
"The GP will always have the final say. If he wants to refer a patient to hospital, he will always have the right to do so," he said.
England is understood to be the first country in the world to move to introduce such technology, according to the Department of Health. A number of GP practices across the country will take part in a pilot programme to assess the effectiveness of assisted cancer risk assessment, starting in the spring. GPs have recently begun using similar software to help them assess a patient's risk of developing cardiovascular disease. It analyses blood pressure, family history, cholesterol, smoking history and current symptoms before producing an odds ratio.
The plan to extend the approach to cancer is underpinned by a series of recent DH-funded research studies by Dr Willie Hamilton, an Exeter GP and expert in cancer diagnosis at Bristol University. Richards said the tests had shown, for example, that a man aged over 40 who develops diarrhoea has less than a 1% chance of that indicating bowel cancer, but two visits to the GP with the same symptom produce a 1.5% risk. This rises to 3.4% if there is a combination of diarrhoea and rectal bleeding and 6.8% if he visits his GP twice with rectal bleeding.
Lord Naren Patel, the chairman of the NHS's National Patient Safety Agency, said: "This is a very good idea, to try to improve the early diagnosis of cancer, because we know that when cancers are diagnosed early that extends a patient's survival."
Sarah Woolnough, head of policy at Cancer Research UK, said: "We welcome any initiative that encourages the earlier diagnosis of cancer. Late diagnosis is the reason behind thousands of avoidable cancer deaths every year so it has to be a huge priority to make every effort to diagnose cancer earlier. We need to think imaginatively and innovatively about how we encourage earlier diagnosis, so initiatives like this are very promising for the future."
LONDON (Reuters) - Individually designed music therapy may help reduce noise levels in people suffering from tinnitus, or ear ringing, German scientists said on Monday.
The fastest man-made object ever built, the Pluto-bound New Horizons probe, is now closer to the former planet than Earth, just a little under four years after its launch.
It’s currently traveling at about 31,000 miles an hour and is located about 1.527 billion miles from Earth.
Unlike an orbiter, much of the New Horizons action will come in an action-packed nine day period around July 14, 2015 when the craft approaches and then passe by Pluto. During that time, the probe will capture 4.5 gigabytes of data, which it will have to keep sending the four-and-a-half hours back home for months.
With its main mission accomplished, the craft will keep moving away from the sun, following in the extrasolar footsteps of the earlier Pioneer and Voyager missions, drifting ever farther away from us.
Instead of the plaques attached to the earlier ships, which presumably identify the spacecraft as artifacts of Earthly civilization, New Horizons carries a DVD inscribed with 450,000 names of supporters and some of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930.
Using the martial metaphor for something as complex as cancer makes the disease ripe for political and financial exploitation
Obituaries routinely inform us that so-and-so has died "after a brave battle against cancer". Of course, we will never read that so-and-so has died "after a pathetically feeble battle against cancer". But one thing that I have come to appreciate since being diagnosed with multiple myeloma (a cancer of the blood) two years ago is how unreal both notions are. It's just not like that.
The stress on cancer patients' "bravery" and "courage" implies that if you can't "conquer" your cancer, there's something wrong with you, some weakness or flaw. If your cancer progresses rapidly, is it your fault? Does it reflect some failure of willpower?
In blaming the victim, the ideology attached to cancer mirrors the bootstrap individualism of the neoliberal order, in which the poor are poor because of their own weaknesses – and "failure" and "success" become the ultimate duality, dished out according to individual merit.
It also reinforces the demand on patients for uncomplaining stoicism, which in many cases is why they are in bad shape in the first place. Late diagnosis leads to tens of thousands of avoidable deaths in the UK each year. For those who have been diagnosed it remains a barrier to effective treatment. The free flow of information between patient and doctor is a scientific necessity, and a reluctance to complain inhibits it.
For a start, why must every concerted effort be likened to warfare? Is this the only way we are able to describe human co-operation in pursuit of a common goal? And who are the enemies in this war? Cancer cells may be "malignant" but they are not malevolent. Like the wars on "drugs" and "terror", the war on cancer misapplies the martial metaphor to dangerous effect. It simplifies a complex and daunting phenomenon – making it ripe for political and financial exploitation.
In the war on cancer, the search for the ultimate weapon, the magic bullet that will "cure" cancer, overshadows other tactics. Nixon promised "a cure for cancer" in 10 years; Obama promises one "in our times". But there is unlikely to be a single cure for cancer. There are more than 200 recognised types, and their causes are myriad. As a strategic objective, the search for the ultimate weapon distorts research and investment, drawing resources away from prevention and treatment, areas where progress has been and can be made.
Like other wars, real and imagined, the "war on cancer" is a gift to opportunists of all stripes. Among the circling vultures are travel insurers who charge people with cancer 10 times the rate charged to others; the publishers of self-help books; and the promoters of miracle cures, vitamin supplements and various "alternative therapies" of no efficacy whatsoever.
But most of all, there's the pharmaceutical industry, which manipulates research, prices and availability of drugs in pursuit of profit. And with considerable success. The industry enjoys a steady return on sales of some 17%, three times the median return for other industries. Prices do not reflect the actual costs of developing or making the drug but are pushed up to whatever the market can bear.
Exorbitant drug prices are at the root of recent controversies over the approval by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) of "expensive" cancer drugs – notably Revlimid, a therapy used in the later stages of a number of cancers, including mine – and top-up or "co-payments" (allowing those who can afford it to buy medicines deemed too expensive by the NHS). "We are told we are being mean all the time, but what nobody mentions is why the drugs are so expensive," said the Nice chairman, Professor Michael Rawlins. "Pharmaceutical companies have enjoyed double-digit growth year on year, and they are out to sustain that, not least because their senior management's earnings are related to the share price."
Many cancer therapies are blunt instruments. They attack not only cancer cells but everything else in sight. This is one reason people fear cancer: the treatment can be brutal. Making it less brutal would be a huge stride forwards for people with cancer. And that requires not a top-down military strategy, with its win or lose approach, but greater access to information, wider participation in decision-making (across hierarchies and disciplines) and empowerment of the patient.
Because I live in the catchment area for Barts hospital in central London, I find myself a winner in the NHS post code lottery. The treatment is cutting-edge and the staff are efficient, caring and respectful. What's more, I live close enough so that I can undergo most of my treatment as an outpatient – a huge boon.
Cancer treatment involves extensive interaction with institutions (hospitals, clinics, social services, the NHS itself). Even in the best hospitals, the loss of freedom and dependence on anonymous forces can be oppressive. Many cancer patients find themselves involved in a long and taxing struggle for autonomy – a rarely acknowledged reality of the war on cancer, in which the generals call the shots from afar.
As Susan Sontag noted, in the course of the 20th century cancer came to play the role that tuberculosis played in the 19th century – as a totem of suffering and mortality, the dark shadow that can blight the sunniest day. But the ubiquitousness of cancer in our culture is of dubious value to those living with the disease. The media love cancer scares and cancer cures; they dwell on heroic survivors (Lance Armstrong) and celebrity martyrs (Jade Goody). But as Ben Goldacre has shown in his Bad Science column, they routinely misrepresent research findings, conjuring breakthroughs from nothing and leaving the public panicked, confused or complacent.
What we need is not a war on cancer but a recognition that cancer is a social and environmental issue, requiring profound social and environmental changes.
Carbon dioxide could make an underappreciated form of renewable energy much more efficient. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Dec 2009 | 12:05 pm
SPACE.com - In a
cosmic version of the old needle-in-a-haystack finding, astronomers have
spotted an object less than a mile wide that is 4.2 billion miles away, in the
outer solar system. Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Dec 2009 | 11:45 am
The words "self healing grid" are an instant lure, but grid experts would be happier if we stopped throwing the term around. What actually happens is lighter on the magic, heavier on the helpful. In recent years, utilities added distributed ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Dec 2009 | 10:42 am
A lot of products tout the ability to help you feel better should you go overboard in toasting in the New Year. Source: Livescience.com | 29 Dec 2009 | 10:07 am
There's been a lot of chatter over the last few days about a YouTube video (below) demonstrating an HP web camera that can detect the face of a white woman but fails to see the face of a black man. ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Dec 2009 | 9:53 am
Explore what ancient hieroglyphics reveal about the Mayan religion through the life of a high priest. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Dec 2009 | 9:35 am
[Editor's note: See the whole Decade's Top 10 Earth Stories] Viewed from space, perhaps, or the disinterested bird's eye views of computer simulations, the great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake of 2004 would've been a quiet, curious event; a seismic pebble dropped in ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Dec 2009 | 8:26 am
SPACE.com - This year provided plenty of cosmic eye-openers for astronomers and casual stargazers alike. Neighborhood planets such as Mercury and Jupiter received makeovers in both a scientific and literal sense. The discovery of water on the moon and Mars provided clues to the past, not to mention hints for the future of space exploration. A class of newly-detected "Super-Earth" planets around alien stars may ultimately prove more habitable than Earth. And a growing fleet of existing, new and revived space telescopes promises another stellar year ahead. Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Dec 2009 | 7:45 am
AFP - Russia and Ukraine agreed new terms on Tuesday for oil transit to Europe, averting the threat of another year-end energy crisis after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin accused Kiev of "abuse" on the deal.
Tracy Staedter chats with face recognition expert Rob Jenkins, department of psychology at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Dec 2009 | 5:29 am
Humans may be reluctant to floss their teeth, but this Japanese macaque doesn't seem to mind. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Dec 2009 | 5:00 am
“Today, 29 Dec 2009, 