Researchers pin down long-elusive protein that's essential to 'life as we know it'

A team of researchers is being recognized for devising a new way to study a human protein that long has evaded close scrutiny by scientists investigating its role in the communication of important genetic messages inside a cell's nucleus to workhorse molecules found elsewhere.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 Jan 2010 | 3:00 pm

Milky Way's magnetic attraction ten times stronger than rest of galaxy

The magnetic field in the center of the Milky Way is at least 10 times stronger than the rest of the galaxy, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 Jan 2010 | 3:00 pm

How people work ... and the fingerprint mystery

Why do we chew our food? Research has shown that it is not, as has long been presumed, to make chunks of food small enough to swallow without choking. Biomechanics, who have modelled the cohesive strength of food after a certain amount of chewing, have shown that we actually chew our food to ensure it is in a firm blob and, therefore, safe to swallow.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 Jan 2010 | 3:00 pm

Birds fight alien parasites: Darwin's finches develop antibodies to flies, pox virus

Unlike Hawaii and other island groups, no native bird has gone extinct in the Galapagos Islands, although some are in danger. Biologists have found that finches -- the birds Darwin studied -- develop antibodies against two parasites that moved to the Galapagos, suggesting the birds can fight the alien invaders.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 Jan 2010 | 3:00 pm

Astronomers get new tools for gravitational-wave detection

A breakthrough in discovering new millisecond pulsars is providing astronomers a greatly improved capability to use those natural cosmic tools to make the first direct detections of gravitational waves.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 Jan 2010 | 3:00 pm

A solution to obesity? Muscles that act as an energy drain

Many people have traded in their gas-guzzling old "clunkers" for newer and more efficient models or cut back on energy use at home by opting for Energy Star appliances and compact fluorescent light bulbs. But, when it comes to our muscles, a little less efficiency might be just what the doctor ordered, suggests new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 Jan 2010 | 3:00 pm

It's good to talk: Changing how nerves communicate in congestive heart failure

A team of researchers has now determined in rodents how congestive heart failure triggers substantive changes to the nerves that control heart function.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 Jan 2010 | 12:00 pm

Cell phone exposure may protect against and reverse Alzheimer's disease

The millions of people who spend hours every day on a cell phone may have a new excuse for yakking. A new indicates long-term exposure to electromagnetic waves emitted by cell phones may protect against and reverse Alzheimer's disease.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 Jan 2010 | 12:00 pm

Stomach-cancer bug linked to cancer-promoting factor

Researchers report that Helicobacter pylori, the only bacterium known to survive in the harsh environment of the human stomach, directly activates an enzyme in host cells that has been associated with several types of cancer, including gastric cancer.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 Jan 2010 | 12:00 pm

Sun glints seen from space signal oceans and lakes

In two new videos from NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft, bright flashes of light known as sun glints act as beacons signaling large bodies of water on Earth. These observations give scientists a way to pick out planets beyond our solar system (extrasolar planets) that are likely to have expanses of liquid, and so stand a better chance of having life.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 Jan 2010 | 12:00 pm

A brief history of snow

Britain's recent cold snap is nothing on the 16th century's Little Ice Age, or even New York's notorious 1888 blizzard, but we could learn a lot from past snow events

The early 20th-century Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson relates a salutory technique used by the Inuit to deal with a blizzard, a common phenomenon in the Canadian north. When an Inuit becomes lost, he will make himself comfortable and conserve energy, perhaps building an igloo, perhaps sitting with his back to the wind, moving around only occasionally to keep himself from freezing, sleeping if possible. Then, when the storm has passed and he can see again, he will carry on to his destination.

A European, by contrast, will instinctively thrash on, building up a sweat with his exertions. As he exhausts himself, the sweat generated will turn to ice, which in all likelihood will kill him.

I like Stefansson's story for what it says about the Inuit, but also because the blizzard reveals something of the nature of the person stuck within it. I think of it often when a snowstorm strikes Britain, when there is chaos on the railways and the roads, a shortage of salt and grit and gas, and a lack of foresight by whomever it was. As schools shut, the recriminations begin about slack attitudes, the cost to society and things not being what they were.

In the long history in which humans have been getting caught in snowstorms, the way we have reacted to snow and interpreted it has shifted radically from place to place and era to era. For the Impressionists and the Japanese ukiyo-e artists, it was a force for beauty and contemplation. For the inhabitants of the Alps in the middle ages and after, it was associated with evil and witchcraft. Each society has interpreted the unusual and often spectacular event of a snowfall in a different way.

Perhaps the best way to track the cultural significance of snow is through art. Until the 16th century, artists showed little interest except where it had a religious context. Then came the shocking winter of 1564-5, the longest and most severe for more than a hundred years, and the first great winter of the intensely cold period in northern Europe that we now call the Little Ice Age.

For the next 150 years, the winters in Europe were extremely cold. It was the most sustained period of low temperatures in Europe since the last major ice age: crops failed, winter snowfall increased and Alpine glaciers advanced down the moutainsides, swallowing pastures, eradicating communities and gouging ever deeper features in the landscape.

The inhabitants of the Alpine Chamonix valley petitioned their lords to do something to alleviate the effects of the climate: "We are terrified of the glaciers . . . which are moving forward all the time and have just buried two of our villages and destroyed a third." The talk in the inns and the pulpits and the government would have been of the changing climate.

It was early in this exceptional winter of 1565 that Pieter Bruegel the Elder created what is regarded as the first winter landscape painting, The Hunters in the Snow. What did he see in this, the earliest detailed account of people's reaction to snow?

He saw the pleasure of snow as much as the pain. These are lean days, as the huntsmen's meagre bag attests, but they are also days of fun and leisure. Apart from the business of hunting and gathering wood, work has largely stopped. People have come out to enjoy themselves on this clear, special day, when snowfall has made the landscape new; they are skating and playing a precursor of ice hockey. It is also a time for children, for innocence and play, romance and games.

Once Bruegel had found snow as a subject, he couldn't stop. Among a number of paintings of ice and snow that survive, he created the first scene with falling snow and the first nativity scene to include snow, The Adoration of the Magi. He also started a vogue for Netherlandish snow painting that endured for a century and a half.

But the largely benign manifestation of snow was not to last. In the growing romantic tradition of the late 18th century, in which nature was employed to dramatise and heighten human emotions, snow was assigned a range of sinister and dangerous roles. No longer suitable for children to be seen playing with, it was more likely to be shown freezing people to death, crushing them under its weight, or drowning horse-drawn carriages in its hungry depths.

In part, this reinterpretation of snow was the result of a new period of extremely cold weather. After a relatively warm period that coincided with the end of the Dutch Golden Age, the temperature began to dip after 1775, heading for a trough that bottomed out in the second decade of the 19th century. In 1809, a series of major volcanic eruptions heralded the arrival of a particularly cold period as the clouds of ash partially blocked out the sun. The decade from 1810 to 1819 was the coldest in England since the 17th century. In 1812, the French Grand Armée was chased from Moscow by the advancing winter – known to the Russians as General Snow.

The new coldness seeped into literature and music as well as art. Dickens experienced six white Christmases in the first nine years of his life (he was born in 1812), which may account for the vivid snowscapes in Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol. The snow in Franz Schubert's Winterreise is the symbol of misery and heartbreak. For the painter Caspar David Friedrich, snow symbolised death. JMW Turner, meanwhile, painted some of snow's most terrifying images. He had witnessed the full violence of snow and ice in his journeys to the Alps: at least twice his carriage was overturned by snow. In 1810, he painted The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons, in which a chalet is obliterated by a white wave of snow.

Avalanches are the most extreme manifestations of terrifying snow, but in the early 19th century they were little understood even in the Alps. A mythology had grown up around them: they were widely believed to be the result of witchcraft. A Swiss legend told of an old woman dressed in black who was seen riding the first wave of an avalanche while quietly turning her spinning wheel. She was grabbed by four men and burned alive.

Alpine residents would protect themselves by burying eggs marked with the sign of a cross at the foot of known avalanche slopes. The avalanche historian Colin Fraser recounts an Alpine adage that sums up the mountain-dwellers' fear of snow: "What flies without wings, strikes without hand and ses without eyes? The avalanche beast!"

Britain's most disastrous avalanche occurred in 1836 in the unlikely town of Lewes in East Sussex, after a phenomenal Christmas storm. It is recounted in a painting by Thomas Henwood now held by the Lewes museum; the Snowdrop Inn stands at the scene of the tragedy.

A violent gale on Christmas night blew the snowfall into a cornice on a cliff's edge 100m above Boulder Row, which had been built for the families of poor workers. The heavy snow and strong winds left the streets 10ft deep, with drifts up to 20ft deep. However, even when a portion of the snow fell from the clifftop into a nearby timber yard, the cottages' transfixed residents refused to leave their homes, and on 27 December, the cornice dropped.

One eyewitness said the snow appeared to hit the houses at the base, heaving them upwards, then breaking over them like a gigantic wave to dash them bodily into the road. When the mist cleared off, there was nothing to see but an enormous mound of pure white. Eight people were killed.

The lesson of the Lewes snow drop, and of other great snowstorms in history, is that the human desire to carry on is foolish. As urban societies grew increasingly complex during the 19th century, they became more vulnerable to snow. Nowhere was this more evident than in New York in March 1888.

The Blizzard of 1888 ranks among the most notorious snowstorms in history. It struck on a Monday – crucially, as cities are always most vulnerable during the working week. The storm dropped 50in in all, but instead of staying at home and sitting out the storm, New Yorkers jumped out of their windows into the drifts in order to get to work. This was later interpreted as hubris.

The result is the stuff of New York folklore. The elevated railways, a new innovation, became blocked with snow and the telegraph cables that kept the stations in contact with controllers broke down. The trains crashed into one another and passengers were stranded. Despite the strong winds, some tried to crawl along the tracks.

The railroads leading into the city were blocked by drifts that were sometimes deeper than the trains were high. Commuters, who were trapped for days, were forced to chop up the train seats and tables to use as firewood while the wind whistled through the cracks in the coachwork. Those who abandoned the trains to walk home found themselves struggling for hours through drifts up to their armpits and suffered forstbite.

In the city centre, the horse-cars found the drifts impassable, and many were abandoned by their drivers. People came across horses that had frozen solid in their harnesses and whose heads stuck up out of the drifting snow. The wind was so strong that unlucky pedestrians were blown into the drifts and found they couldn't dig themselves out. Women, in billowing dresses and high heels, were particularly susceptible. The bodies of men and women who had been pushed by the wind into drifts were discovered hours or days later by an arm or leg protruding from the snow.

At the end of the week 400 people had been killed, 198 ships sunk or damaged in or around New York harbour, and 800 bodies were waiting to be buried in the city's cemeteries.

The newspapers blamed late 19th-century New York's advances in infrastructure and engineering for the city's catastrophic exposure to the weather: the city's transport system simply hadn't been designed to function in the extreme conditions of the storm. One newspaper, the Hartford Courant, ran an editorial that captured the public mood: "It is the boasting and progressive 19th century that is paralyzed, while the slow-going 18th would have taken such an experience without a ruffle . . . There comes a snowstorm – there is no railroad, no telegraph, no horse-car, no milk, no delivery of food at the door. We starve in the midst of plenty . . . it is only a snowstorm, but it has downed us."

Britain has had its deep-frozen winters in the last 100 years – 1940, 1947, 1963 and 1979 among them. In 1979, I recall being driven through the Scottish borders and seeing the drifts left by the snowplough stretch way above our heads. At the start of the 21st century, however, the principal meaning of the succession of paltry British snowfalls has been as an indicator of the warming climate.

Not long ago, in early summer, I walked deep into the Cairngorm mountains on the shoulder of Braeriach to see the last patches of perennial snow in the country. Here, in a secluded gully, lie two very special snow patches, known by the rock formations above them: Pinnacles and Sphinx. These patches contain the longest-lasting snow in Britain, with the Sphinx patch having melted completely just five times since the mid-1800s. Three of those occasions were after 1995: in 1996, 2003 and 2006. Perhaps this year we will be lucky, and the Sphinx patch will last through to next winter – as it used to.

But this week, with Basingstoke cut off and our motorways turning into car parks, it is perhaps worth reflecting on New York's experience in 1888 – as it is on Stefansson's story about the Inuit in the blizzard. We have become accustomed, in our millions, to travelling long distances each day in cars and trains and planes, come rain or shine or snow. It is only a snowstorm, but we should not be surprised that it has downed us again.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 7 Jan 2010 | 2:00 am

New Zealand, Australia to probe whaling protest collision (AFP)

AFP - New Zealand and Australia said Thursday they would investigate a Japanese whaling ship's alleged ramming of a protest boat in Antarctic waters, as activists claimed only luck prevented someone being killed.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 7 Jan 2010 | 1:17 am

Breakfast briefing: Microsoft opens CES, pi gets bigger

• CES opened on Wednesday as Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Robbie Bach took the stage to reveal... and what did they show off? Slate PCs from Hewlett Packard, though precious few details were revealed about when they might be available, for how much or - to be honest - what they really do.

• For gamers the big news was that Project Natal, the company's motion sensitive gaming system that is intended to take on the Wii, should be available by Christmas. Still no price, though.

• Away from CES, mathematicians were celebrating (as much as mathematicians ever celebrate) over the news that pi has been calculated to nearly 2.7 trillion digits. That's some serious number crunching: and the man behind it, Fabrice Bellard says the results take more than a terabyte of storage. Good times.

You can follow our links and commentary each day through Twitter (@guardiantech, or our personal accounts) or by watching our Delicious feed.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 7 Jan 2010 | 1:00 am

Experts: Cold snap doesn't disprove global warming (AP)

AP - Beijing had its coldest morning in almost 40 years and its biggest snowfall since 1951. Britain is suffering through its longest cold snap since 1981. And freezing weather is gripping the Deep South, including Florida's orange groves and beaches.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Jan 2010 | 9:50 pm

Smog Standards Need Tightening, Activists Say (HealthDay)

HealthDay - WEDNESDAY, Jan. 6 (HealthDay News) -- A coalition of clean air advocacy groups wants the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to propose new standards that would reduce allowable levels of smog-causing ozone.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Jan 2010 | 9:49 pm

Milky Way Could Have Over 100 Million Solar System Analogs

Besides his Calabash pipe, Sherlock Holmes is always caricatured as having a huge magnifying glass to hunt for clues. Astronomers attending the American Astronomical Society Meeting in Washington D.C. say that they have used nature’s magnifying glass to hunt for ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 6 Jan 2010 | 9:44 pm

New Sky-Mapping Infrared Telescope Sees First Light

NASA’s WISE eyes are open.

After a successful launch on December 14, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer is poised to begin the most thorough survey yet of the infrared universe. The telescope’s first image, a field of about 3,000 stars in the constellation Carina, was released January 6 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

From a polar orbit 196 kilometers above Earth, WISE will snap a picture in heat-sensitive wavelengths every 11 seconds during its nine-month mission. At this rate, the telescope will scan the entire sky one and a half times, seeking asteroids, brown dwarfs and distant galaxies.

But the star region captured in the first image was selected because it lacks these features. The image spans a swath of sky about three times the size of the full moon and was chosen for its safety — unusually bright objects could damage the telescope’s detectors if gazed at for too long. Staring at a single, safe patch of sky gives the WISE team a chance to calibrate the spacecraft.

This first image is a good sign of things to come, said WISE mission scientist David Leisawitz of NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md. It shows that the telescope is in focus and picking up details in infrared wavelengths.

“Every dot in that patch is undoubtedly interesting for some reason or another,” Leisawitz said.

The WISE team will release preliminary survey images in April 2011 and a final atlas and catalog in March 2012. But interested onlookers won’t have to wait that long for more pictures — the team plans to release more images to the public starting in February.

“WISE is now poised to deliver on its promise,” Leisawitz said. “It is a pristine, beautiful new observatory ready to deliver to the astronomical community and the world inspiring new pictures and intriguing new information.”

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 6 Jan 2010 | 9:22 pm

1 dead in pipeline explosion at La. Air Force base (AP)

AP - The military says a natural gas pipeline explosion at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana has killed a civilian.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Jan 2010 | 8:08 pm

US breaks with 'drill anywhere' energy policy: official (AFP)

AFP - The United States is moving away from the "drill anywhere, whatever the cost" energy policy of the previous administration, officials said Wednesday as they announced reforms in the way oil and gas leases are attributed.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Jan 2010 | 5:23 pm

Response: This use of 'war' and 'struggle' helps me cope with cancer

Fighting talk may not always bring medical benefits, but it can give hope to patients, their family and friends

Having been diagnosed as having advanced prostate cancer last spring I was very taken by what Mike Marqusee, who has multiple myeloma (cancer of the blood), had to say about the notion of a "battle" against cancer from a patient's point of view (I don't need a war to fight my cancer – I need empowering as a patient, 30 December).

Some of what he said chimed with my own experience, and even more with that of my mother, Margaret, who died of a very aggressive form of lung cancer in 1987. She would have echoed Mike's words, that "the stress on patients' 'bravery' and 'courage' implies that if you can't 'conquer' your cancer, there's something wrong with you, some weakness or flaw". As she approached death she told me how she found it an extra burden to face the unstated question, in Mike's words, "If your cancer progresses rapidly, is it your fault? Does it reflect some failure of willpower?"

So this pre-occupation with "fighting" cancer could actually be somewhat oppressive. On top of the distress of dealing with a possibly fatal disease, people can be made to feel they must show a fighting spirit. As it happens my mother did indeed show great dignity and an unselfpitying composure in her last days, and on her death her doctor told us she had been "one of the bravest cancer sufferers" he'd known.

When I learned that I myself had cancer I wondered if I would find the same pressures to be "courageous". Now well into my treatment, I have a slightly different view from Mike. At the level of public health policy and medical practice he may well be right that there are all sorts of problems with conceptualising the struggle to defeat this terrrible disease as a "war". But I have come to see that on a day-to-day basis the concept of struggle is a comforting notion for friends and family desperately searching for words to express their concern and sense of powerlessness. It helps give a feeling that there is something they can do to help.

In my experience the most common use of the "fighting" metaphor involves this now long-established notion of staying positive, which comes up in almost every discussion with friends.

But the thing is, people really don't know quite what else to say. They really do take heart from this notion that keeping positive can help. In a sense it doesn't matter whether it is true or not, medically; it's just a formula people can introduce whenever other words fail. I have seen friends cross the road to avoid having to ask about my cancer, so I understand just how uncomfortable the whole subject can be for some.

I have been incredibly lucky in the way I have been treated as a patient at the Royal Marsden cancer hospital in west London by staff at all levels, to whom I will always remain deeply grateful. But beyond the benefits of "empowering" interactions with sensitive medical staff of the kind Mike rightly seeks, it's impossible to exaggerate the value of support from friends and loved ones. Sometimes the language of battles and struggles and, yes, "staying positive", is what helps them to help you. I'm positive of that.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 6 Jan 2010 | 5:05 pm

New York governor outlines measures to revive economy (Reuters)

Reuters - New York's declining upstate economy can be revived by luring back-office jobs and a failing business tax credit program should be replaced with incentives for biotech and clean energy, Governor David Paterson said on Wednesday.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Jan 2010 | 5:00 pm

Lew Allen Jr., ex-spy chief and JPL director, dies (AP)

AP - Retired Air Force Gen. Lew Allen Jr., who led the mammoth National Security Agency through a period when congressional scrutiny brought its domestic eavesdropping activities out of the shadows and who later became director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has died. He was 84.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Jan 2010 | 4:57 pm

Cell Phone Radiation Might Improve Memory (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Amid ongoing claims that long-term cell phone radiation may lead to brain tumors comes a new study suggesting the radio waves may protect and even reverse Alzheimer's disease, at least in mice.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Jan 2010 | 4:16 pm

Cell Phone Radiation Might Improve Memory

Radiation from cell phones may protect against Alzheimer's disease, at least in mice, a new study finds.
Source: Livescience.com | 6 Jan 2010 | 4:08 pm

Ecology: Wish you were here

An annual excursion to an exclusive Caribbean island has yielded an impressive body of ecological fieldwork. Just don't call it a holiday, says Mark Schrope.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 6 Jan 2010 | 4:00 pm

Smart grids: The energy storage problem

Renewable energy is not a viable option unless energy can be stored on a large scale. David Lindley looks at five ways to do that.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 6 Jan 2010 | 4:00 pm

NASA hauls shuttle to launch pad, despite cold

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The space shuttle Endeavour was hauled out to its launch pad on Wednesday, despite freezing temperatures that had technicians spelling each other after 30 minutes to ward off the cold.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 6 Jan 2010 | 2:48 pm

4-legged animals emerged earlier than thought (AP)

AP - The water-dwelling ancestors of modern-day mammals, reptiles and birds emerged onto land millions of years earlier than previously believed, researchers reported.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Jan 2010 | 2:39 pm

Inflatable Female Toads Call the Shots

The female cane toad doesn't let her smaller, male counterparts get fresh with her.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 6 Jan 2010 | 2:35 pm

Will Earth 'Be Wiped Out' by a Supernova?

It's very easy to get worried when you hear that a star could explode "with the force of 20 billion billion billion megatons of TNT" and the explosion is going to detonate so close to us that it "could strip ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 6 Jan 2010 | 2:16 pm

New Sky-mapping Telescope Takes First Photo (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - A sea of stars takes center stage in the very first photo released from NASA's newest space telescope built to map the entire sky.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Jan 2010 | 1:46 pm

Airport Body Scanners Not Harmful, Groups Say

The radiation from airport full body scanners is less than what you get during a flight.
Source: Livescience.com | 6 Jan 2010 | 1:31 pm

EU to hand out Galileo contracts

The first contracts will be awarded on Thursday to build an operational satellite-navigation system for Europe.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 6 Jan 2010 | 1:24 pm

Alien World a Volcanic Nightmare

A rocky exoplanet likely actively volcanic, even more unfriendly to life.
Source: Livescience.com | 6 Jan 2010 | 12:57 pm

Could Apple Tablet Change Comic Book Industry?

The Apple iSlate, much rumored to be coming soon, could be a game-changer for comics.
Source: Livescience.com | 6 Jan 2010 | 12:53 pm

NASA Hauls Shuttle to Launch Pad

Despite frigid weather, NASA on Wednesday hauled space shuttle Endeavour to its seaside launch pad in preparation for the first mission of the new year next month. It was 29 degrees Fahrenheit at the launch pad overnight -- extremely cold ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 6 Jan 2010 | 12:44 pm

Costa Rican Volcano Burps, Tourists Gasp

One of Costa Rica's most active volcanoes, Poas, erupted over Christmas, sending ash and steam thousands of feet in the air. As far as volcanoes go, it was nothing but a tiny burp. But a couple from Georgia on vacation ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 6 Jan 2010 | 12:14 pm

Study turns up 10 autism clusters in California

CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. researchers have identified 10 locations in California that have double the rates of autism found in surrounding areas, and these clusters were located in neighborhoods with high concentrations of white, highly educated parents.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 6 Jan 2010 | 11:55 am

Do Men Get Osteoporosis?

Men do get osteoporosis, but women are at greater risk.
Source: Livescience.com | 6 Jan 2010 | 11:34 am

Record–Breaking Snow and Cold Reminiscent of the Late '70s

Record-breaking cold and heavy snow this winter is unusual but not unprecedented, climate expert says.
Source: Livescience.com | 6 Jan 2010 | 11:33 am

First steps on land, giant leap for evolution | Adam Rutherford

The discovery of fossil footprints of the first known walking land creature proves us wrong – and that couldn't be more exciting

Life on Earth began in the seas, around 4bn years ago. Skip forward a few billennia and the oceans are teeming with creatures, but until around 400m years ago the land of our largely blue planet remained bereft of large animal life. The step in that perfect unbroken chain of evolution that resulted in your existence on terra firma began with a fishlike ancestor wading out of the shallows, and finding that breathing air had its own advantages.

What took those first steps on land, and when, remain two of the great questions in evolution. We know that four-legged animals were firmly established 365m years ago, adapted for a life primarily on Earth. And in 2006 we discovered the perfect transitional beast, Tiktaalik, who lived 10m years earlier. This ugly brute is a scientific beauty, with some fish-like traits (such as gills), some land-lubbing traits (such as lungs), and some that were in between (a wrist joint connecting to fins). But Tiktaalik did not have feet, was not a tetrapod. It was capable of waddling and pushing itself up above the surface to suck in some air. But its limbs, while on an evolutionary path to becoming legs, were definitely fins.

Today in a new paper in Nature, a team led by Swedish researcher Per Ahlberg has forced a seismic shift in this fascinating story. In a miserable disused Polish quarry researchers Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki and Piotr Szrek stumbled across a set of footprints stamped into rock that is securely dated to be 395m years old. And they are certainly footprints: there are visible toe holes. These new tracks suggest that the current model of the transition from water to land is significantly wrong both in time and environment. And there's nothing more exciting in science than when what we knew turns out to be wrong. This creature had toes, 20m years before anything we currently know had toes. Unlike Tiktaalik, it was walking the walk.

Discoveries where the being itself is absent are called ichnofossils. It's a bit like seeing a star go supernova: the star is long gone, but the trace burns brightly, or in this case, is carved into the rock. Footprints are among the most stunning trace fossils. In Laetoli, Tanzania in 1976, two fossil hunters were chucking elephant poo at each other after a dig. After ducking a zinger of faeces, Andrew Hill face-planted on two sets of footprints set in the stone. It turned out to be the echo of two human ancestors – probably like the famous specimen "Lucy", Australopithecus afarensis – strolling on two feet 3.7m years ago. Just last year in France, the largest dinosaur prints ever were found by a couple of amateur fossil hunters, measuring a startling 2m across.

The Polish beast in question remains unknown: it is what's known as a "ghost lineage". So we now know "when" more accurately, but "what" is now a quest with a clue. Almost 400m years ago, this creature, about the size of a crocodile, slunk about on a beach, pushing its toes into the soft mud, waddling its hips like a giant salamander. Somewhere, we hope, its remains are waiting to be discovered.

Ahlberg is keen to point out that the prints were found because they had the temerity to look in a place where they shouldn't find them. "If you're thinking of applying to a research council for a grant to do that," he told Nature, "you are virtually certain to be turned down. But you need to have the opportunity to do what might seem to be crazy things. It's only by doing this kind of stuff that wildly unexpected things can be discovered." It was the intellectual freedom of pure research that led them to this awesome discovery. This principle applies across all scientific disciplines, and must be upheld, enshrined and protected. The efforts by the UK government in recent years to restrain so-called "blue-skies" research in favour of "goal-oriented" research are specious and foolish, and reveal a conservative ideology that would specifically curtail this type of discovery. The same principle applies to particle physics, astronomy, molecular biology; to science.

Seven days into the new decade and we're hit with a colossally exciting discovery. It's pure science, has no application, and was found by challenging the status quo. Only with this intellectual freedom can we answer one of the most important questions in the universe: how we came to be what we are.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 6 Jan 2010 | 11:30 am

Our galaxy's 'hidden matter' revealed as beach ball

The halo of dark matter surrounding our galaxy is shaped like a "squashed beach ball", according to astronomers.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 6 Jan 2010 | 11:11 am

Tracks record oldest land-walkers

The earliest evidence of a four-legged animal walking on land is discovered in a disused Polish quarry.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 6 Jan 2010 | 11:05 am

Hiroshima, Nagasaki Survivor Dies at 93

Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a double atomic bomb survivor and outspoken critic of nuclear weapons, has died.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 6 Jan 2010 | 11:05 am

Four-legged Creature's Footprints Force Evolution Rethink

Fossil footprints suggest four-legged creatures were around much earlier than thought.
Source: Livescience.com | 6 Jan 2010 | 11:00 am

Footprints show tetrapods walked on land 18m years earlier than thought

Fossil footprints in an old quarry lead to a radical rethink of the evolution of the first four-legged animals or 'tetrapods'

The oldest footprints ever made by four-legged creatures have been discovered by scientists, forcing them to reconsider a critical period in evolution: the point at which fish crawled out of the water onto land to evolve into reptiles, mammals and eventually humans.

The "hand" and "foot" prints are 18m years older than the earliest, previously confirmed fossil remains of "tetrapods" or four-legged vertebrates and were left by lizard-like creatures up to 2.5 metres long.

The discovery, reported in tomorrow's issue of the journal Nature, was made in a former quarry in the Holy Cross Mountains in south-eastern Poland. The fossil footprints can be reliably dated to the early Middle Devonian period, around 395 million years ago.

Philippe Janvier of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris said the finding was as significant as "the first footprint of Neil Armstrong on the moon" and described its effect as akin to "lobbing a grenade" into the previous consensus of when the shift from water to land occurred.

Until now, experts had believed that the earliest tetrapod fossils, traced to about 375 million years ago, had split from their fishy ancestors a few million years earlier and then gone on to conquer the land.

"These prints push back the divergence of fish and four-legged vertebrates by almost 20 million years," said Janvier. "The evolutionary tree as we consider it now remains the same, but the timing of the tree changes."

Tetrapods are thought to have evolved from a family of fish known as elpistostegids, which had a similar body and head shape to tetrapods, but paired fins rather than four feet.

However, the footprint tracks are 10 million years older than the oldest elpistostegid body fossils. They suggest that the fossil elpistostegids were late-surviving relics rather than transitional forms.

Janvier, who said he is convinced that no animal other than an "elusive tetrapod" could have left such imprints, said: "It's really the first evidence we have of an animal with legs and digits walking on land at that time."

The paper's co-author, Professor Per Ahlberg from Uppsala University in Sweden, describes several tracks of different sizes and characteristics as well as a number of isolated prints around 15cm wide. There are distinct "hand" and "foot" prints, with no evidence of a dragging body or tail, because the animals' body weight would have been partly supported by water.

Ahlberg and his co-authors, mainly from the Polish Geological Institute in Warsaw, say their findings highlight how little we know of the earliest history of land vertebrates. They write that the prints "force a radical reassessment of the timing, ecology and environmental setting of the fish-tetrapod transition, as well as the completeness of the body fossil record".

The prints will further "shake up" scientific thinking over human origins, said Janvier, because they show tetrapods thrived in the sea, which is at odds with the long-held view that river deltas and lakes were the necessary environment for the transition from water to land during vertebrate evolution.

"The closest elpistostegids were probably contemporaneous with these tracks," he said. "We now have to invent a common ancestor to the tetrapods and elpistostegids."

Jenny Clark, a palaeontologist at Cambridge University, echoed Janvier's belief that the findings would force scientists to re-examine their beliefs about the timing of the transition to land. "It blows the whole story out of the water, so to speak," she said.

Clark added that it may also give pause for thought over what drove fish from water to land in the first place. Some theorised that tetrapods originally went ashore to lay their eggs out of reach of aquatic predators, or that their ancestors grew legs to scurry from pool to pool. She had favoured the notion that fish emerged from oxygen-deprived waters in order, quite literally, to catch their breath.

None of those theories was supported by the Polish find, she said.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 6 Jan 2010 | 11:00 am

Right and wrong types of snow

It can blanket the ground, or melt on impact. A lot can depend on when and where it falls

The snowy scenes of a winter wonderland can be harder to create than you may think. There is the type of snow for starters. While rail operators are routinely lampooned for blaming inappropriate varieties of snow for the breakdown of their equipment, the white stuff does come in many shapes and sizes, which do behave differently.

Then there is the heat content and shape of the ground, which can influence the intensity and duration of the snowfall. Moisture in the air plays a role, as does the temperature. Finally, whether it is day or night can influence whether the snow sticks around or melts away. Call it the wrong time of snow. All of which helps to explain why, as the majority of the country today struggled and snowballed its way through a day of blizzards and gritting, workers in central London who looked out of their office windows could be forgiven for wondering what the fuss was about. As the Guardian went to press, the snow that did fall on the capital had generally failed to settle.

So what went right?

Ewen McCallum, chief meteorologist at the Met Office in Exeter, said: "The snow in London came down during the day and was not particularly heavy. The temperature of the ground would have been warm enough to melt the snow before it could settle." The snow that blanketed the south-west was similar to the falls in London, McCallum said, but came at 4am. Even the meagre sunlight of a winter's day is enough to lift the temperature of the pavements and roads of a city.

Then there is the urban heat island effect, with all the industry and concrete surfaces acting as giant radiators.

The best time for snow to fall and settle on London is during the night, as happened last February.

The colder air of a nighttime snowfall encourages drier, powdery snow – the type beloved by skiers and snowboarders and dreaded by rail companies.

Wetter snow, easy to spot as the falling individual flakes clump together into bigger chunks, comes when the air temperature is higher. Much higher still, and the wet snow turns to sleet and then rain.

At the other end of the temperature spectrum, can it really, as you will inevitably hear, be too cold to snow?

"I've heard that one before," McCallum sighed. "The answer is no – but there is a but." Extremely cold conditions are often down to a lack of water in the atmosphere, which means fewer clouds, and so less snow.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 6 Jan 2010 | 10:38 am

Female toad's inflatable ploy to avoid sex

Female cane toads inflate their bodies to prevent amorous males from maintaining their grasp, say scientists.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 6 Jan 2010 | 10:33 am

Methane release 'looks stronger'

Scientists have uncovered a further apparent increase in the leakage of methane gas that is seeping from the Arctic seabed.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 6 Jan 2010 | 10:17 am

TV Channels Going 3D

With the movie, Avatar, reportedly pulling in more than billion in box office revenue so far, it's no surprise that 3D is capturing the attention of television broadcasting companies. My own company, Discovery Communications, announced yesterday that they were partnering ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 6 Jan 2010 | 9:10 am

"Walking with Dinosaurs" Arena Show Creator Dies

William "Billy" May, who created the Walking with Dinosaurs arena show, died in Australia on New Year's Eve as a result of pneumonia, according to multiple media reports. He was just 56 years old. (May in Las Vegas with Utahraptor; ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 6 Jan 2010 | 8:58 am

Scots power

Scotland looks to profit from green energy era
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 6 Jan 2010 | 8:57 am

Battle Against the Bulge Goes High-Tech

New mobile applications to assist with weight loss could help you drop those holiday pounds.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 6 Jan 2010 | 8:50 am

All Creatures' Calls Are Somewhat Alike

When adjusted for metabolism, the audible calls of insects, fish and mammals all start to sound similar.
Source: Livescience.com | 6 Jan 2010 | 8:25 am

BBC to review impartiality of science coverage

Corporation's governing body to examine impartiality of reporting on topics such as climate change and genetically modified crops

The accuracy and impartiality of the BBC's science coverage, including eco-issues such as global warming, are to be investigated by the BBC Trust.

The BBC Trust said that the review was necessary because science results in some of the "most sensitive editorial issues the BBC faces".

"Heated debate in recent years around topics like climate change, GM [genetically modified] crops and the MMR vaccine reflects this, and BBC reporting has to steer a course through these controversial issues while remaining impartial," said Richard Tait, the chair of the BBC Trust's editorial standards committee. "It is ... important that we look at it [the BBC's reporting of science topics] afresh to ensure that it is adhering to the very high standards that licence fee payers expect".

The area of science has become increasingly controversial in recent years.

In 2007 the BBC cancelled its plan for a Comic Relief-style day of programmes about environmental issues, called Planet Relief, after it came under fire from senior executives Peter Horrocks and Peter Barron, who now works at Google. Channel 4 also sparked widespread controversy, and an Ofcom investigation, with its documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle.

The BBC Trust said today that the review would assess news and factual output that refers to scientific findings, "particularly science output relating to current public policy and matters of political controversy".

The trust added that for the review science will be defined as not just the natural sciences but also "those aspects of technology, medicine and the environment that entail scientific statements, research findings or other claims made by scientists".

This is the third impartiality review that the BBC has carried out, following an investigation of business coverage in 2007 and the devolved nations last year.

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Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 6 Jan 2010 | 8:20 am

Texts Remind U 2 TK UR MEDS

Text messaging can remind patients to take their medication, new research suggests.
Source: Livescience.com | 6 Jan 2010 | 7:22 am

Earliest Four-Limbed Animals Left Mud Tracks

The finding of 395-million-year-old footprints in Poland turns back the clock on the evolution of tetrapods.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 6 Jan 2010 | 5:57 am

Snow, ice and the bigger picture

The cold snap tells us little about climate change, but if you want something to blame it on, try the Arctic oscillation

People across the northern hemisphere are facing the fact that a warming planet doesn't get rid of winter. The woes extend far beyond Britain's extended snow and chill. On Monday the heaviest snow on record plastered Seoul. Later this week the central US will experience its most brutal cold wave in 10 to 20 years. And most of western Europe will be encased in a deep freeze by this weekend.

Those happy souls you see dancing through the icicles? They're the ones who believe that humans are now off the hook for climate change, even as greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in our air. Cowering in the corner is another group: those who fear that Greenland's melting ice sheets are already starting to pinch off the Atlantic's warm conveyor belt, a hypothesis explored most luridly in the film The Day After Tomorrow. In real life, any such slowdown would be expected to unfold in decades rather than weeks.

Rather than seeking vindication or catastrophe in this cold snap, now is a good time to remind ourselves that weather, like death and taxes, will always be with us. Spectacular regional swings in temperature and precipitation, sometimes lasting for months, often emerge from the natural jostlings of atmosphere and ocean. By themselves, none of these prove or disprove a human role in climate change.

In any given year, there could be a season as shocking as Britain's epic winter of 1962-63 – when snowdrifts were measured in metres, and temperatures stayed below freezing for most of January – or the summer of 2003, when tens of thousands died in some of the worst heat ever recorded in Europe.

What's different now is that climate change is shifting the odds towards record-hot summers and away from record-cold winters. The latter aren't impossible; they're just harder to get, like scoring a straight flush on one trip to Vegas and a royal flush the next.

It's also critical to remember the "global" in global warming. Even if every inch of land in the northern hemisphere were unusually cold, that would only represent 20% of Earth's surface. There's plenty of warmth elsewhere around the world. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data through November hints that 2009 may end up ranked as the southern hemisphere's warmest year on record. For the planet as a whole, last year falls solidly among the 10 warmest years of the past 100. And despite all the talk about Earth having cooled since the late 1990s, this past decade trumps the 1990s as the warmest on record.

If you're craving a scapegoat for this winter, consider the Arctic oscillation. The AO is a measure of north-south differences in air pressure between the northern midlatitudes and polar regions. When the AO is positive, pressures are unusually high to the south and low to the north. This helps shuttle weather systems quickly across the Atlantic, often bringing warm, wet conditions to Europe. In the past month, however, the AO has dipped to astoundingly low levels – among the lowest observed in the past 60 years. This has gummed up the hemisphere's usual west-to-east flow with huge "blocking highs" that route frigid air southward.

Handy as it is, the AO describes more than it explains. Forecasters still don't know exactly what sends the AO into one mode or the other, just as the birth of an El Niño is easier to spot than to predict. What we do know with crystal clarity is that the atmosphere's load of greenhouse gases is increasing by more than 10 million tonnes every year. The tepid agreements out of Copenhagen are unlikely to change that trend any time soon.

If this winter tells us anything, it's that we'll have to remain on guard for familiar weather risks as well as the evolving ones brought by climate change. Juggling all of these at once will not be an easy task.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 6 Jan 2010 | 4:30 am

NASA’s Contest to Design the Last Shuttle Patch

 

The space shuttle program is on its way out, but the core of people who built and maintained it will live on. To honor them, NASA gave its employees the chance to design the patch that will commemorate the shuttle program, which is slated to end in September, after STS-133 flies.

From the designs of 85 current and former employees, the Shuttle Program Office has selected 15 finalists. The prospective patches, presented here, will be voted on internally by NASA employees and judged by a small panel.

The program patch will help mark the end of the shuttle era. Begun rather enthusiastically in the late 1970s, the program almost didn’t have mission patches, said Robert Pearlman, the space history and memorabilia enthusiast who brought the internal contest to the public eye.

“In 1976, the Space Shuttle program designed a patch, called the Space Shuttle Program logo, which was a single triangle, blue and white. It’s very iconic,” Pearlman said. “And the original idea was that since the space shuttle as of 1976 was going to fly so many times and so often — every couple weeks — you wouldn’t want or need crew mission patches any longer. The idea was we’d do away with mission patches.”

But astronauts and other mission members dissented. By then, the patches had become a popular tradition within NASA, even though they’d only been used for a little more than a decade. In the wake of NASA’s 1965 decision not to allow astronauts to name their own vehicles, one astronaut decided that his Gemini V mission needed a patch.

“Gordon Cooper, looking for a way to keep a personal touch to the mission, borrowed something from the military, and created and fought for a patch,” Pearlman said.

His design, prominently featuring a covered wagon, became the first of hundreds of NASA patches.

So, after some wrangling, NASA decided the shuttle missions could have their own patches after all. The first patch, for STS-1, was designed by Robert McCall, a well-known space artist, Pearlman said. Subsequent works have come together in a variety of ways. Some have been drawn by the astronauts themselves, others by hangers-on or friends. Together, they form an odd pictographic record of a program that has been at the center of the world’s premiere space agency for more than 30 years. One of the 15 entries you see here will be the final installment in the series.

In the patch design at the top of this post, the sunrise/sunset represents the start and finish of the shuttle program, and the stars honor the astronauts who died on Challenger and Columbia. The artist wrote, “I picked the most dramatic angle of the Shuttle I could find to highlight the magnificence of the most complicated space vehicle in the world.”

Captions are summaries of the artists’ explanations. For full captions, go to CollectSpace.com.

Images: NASA.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 6 Jan 2010 | 4:00 am

Japan whalers 'ram' activist boat

Anti-whaling activists accuse a Japanese whaling ship of a ramming attack on one of their boats in Antarctic waters.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 6 Jan 2010 | 3:47 am

Atom bomb survivor dies, aged 93

The only person officially recognised as having survived both atomic bombings in Japan dies, aged 93.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 6 Jan 2010 | 2:48 am