Camera traps yield first-time film of tigress and cubs

Camera traps deep in the Sumatran jungle have captured first-time images of a rare female tiger and her cubs, giving researchers unique insight into the elusive tiger's behavior. Specially designed video cameras installed by WWF-Indonesia's researchers caught the mother tiger and her cubs on film as they stopped to sniff and check out the camera trap.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jan 2010 | 9:00 am

Predicting survival for pulmonary arterial hypertension patients

Setting out to determine the survival of patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), researchers have discovered that an equation used for more than 20 years to predict survival is outdated. Accordingly, they developed a new survival prediction equation that will impact clinical practice and the drug development process.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jan 2010 | 9:00 am

Growing nanowires: European research paves way for faster, smaller microchips

European researchers have developed state-of-the-art nanowire 'growing' technology, opening the way for faster, smaller microchips and creating a promising new avenue of research and industrial development in Europe.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jan 2010 | 9:00 am

Early lessons from the H1N1 pandemic: Critical illness in children unpredictable but survivable

Lessons learned from the first 13 children at Johns Hopkins Children's Center to become critically ill from the H1N1 virus show that although all patients survived, serious complications developed quickly, unpredictably, with great variations from patient to patient and with serious need for vigilant monitoring and quick treatment adjustments.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jan 2010 | 9:00 am

Primates' social intelligence overestimated: Primates groom others if afraid they'd lose fight

The grooming behavior displayed by primates is due to less rational behavior than often thought. According to a computer model, one basic rule explains all possible grooming patterns: individuals will groom others if they're afraid they'll lose from them in a fight.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jan 2010 | 9:00 am

Paper strips can quickly detect toxin in drinking water

A strip of paper infused with carbon nanotubes can quickly and inexpensively detect a toxin produced by algae in drinking water.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jan 2010 | 9:00 am

A virtual liver, a better chance of life

Surgeons can now use 3-D, accurate images of the liver to rehearse keyhole tumor removal before real surgery -- reducing the risk to the patient and enabling them to take expert advice.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jan 2010 | 6:00 am

Deep brain stimulation successful for treatment of severely depressive patient

Neurosurgeons and psychiatrists have for the first time successfully treated a patient suffering from severe depression by stimulating the habenula, a tiny nerve structure in the brain.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jan 2010 | 6:00 am

'Fossil' fireballs from supernovae discovered by Suzaku observatory

Studies of two supernova remnants using the Japan-US Suzaku observatory have revealed never-before-seen embers of the high-temperature fireballs that immediately followed the explosions. Even after thousands of years, gas within these stellar wrecks retain the imprint of temperatures 10,000 times hotter than the sun's surface.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jan 2010 | 6:00 am

Coal from mass extinction era linked to lung cancer mystery

The volcanic eruptions thought responsible for Earth's largest mass extinction -- which killed more than 70 percent of plants and animals 250 million years ago -- is still taking lives today. That's the conclusion of a new study showing, for the first time, that the high silica content of coal in one region of China may be interacting with volatile substances in the coal to cause unusually high rates of lung cancer.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jan 2010 | 6:00 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - The cold outbreak was forecast to continue in the East, but the coldest air was expected to shift toward the eastern seaboard as Sunday progressed. This was expected to allow slightly warmer air to move into the Plains, bringing an end to the outbreak in the middle portion of the country.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Jan 2010 | 2:42 am

Governors facing troubles as economy hits home (AP)

AP - Like many Democratic governors today, Iowa's Chet Culver won in 2006 on the strength of ambitious and expensive promises such as universal preschool and a plan to bolster the state's alternative energy industry.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Jan 2010 | 1:17 am

Hurricane propels Jackson's justice quest at EPA (AP)

AP - More than four years after Hurricane Katrina, the single-story brick rancher in Pontchartrain Park where Lisa Perez Jackson grew up stands empty.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Jan 2010 | 1:15 am

Biographical information on EPA's Lisa Jackson (AP)

AP - NAME — Lisa P. Jackson.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 Jan 2010 | 10:00 pm

Doctors seek source of mystery cancers

Charity tries to save the 10,000 patients a year whose carcinomas are of unknown origin

Jo Symons was 46 when her cancer was diagnosed. Medical scans showed that her back pain, coughing and a lump in her neck were caused by tumours that had spread to her chest, lymph nodes and other parts of her body.

The primary cancer that caused these tumours, however, was never traced. Like 10,000 other individuals diagnosed in Britain each year with carcinomas of unknown primary, or CUP, the original source of her condition could not be pinpointed. As a result, doctors could not direct their treatments precisely. Despite their efforts, she died eight months later, in September 2006.

But now British scientists are to launch a project aimed at tackling this problem by developing techniques for pinpointing primary tumours. "If we can spot a primary cancer quickly, then we can select the best treatments straight away and improve patients' prospects," said Professor Jim Cassidy, of Glasgow University. "It may take five years to develop these techniques, but it is important we do so. Too often, oncologists are having to make educated guesses about treatments."

Cancers arise when a cell in an organ begins to multiply uncontrollably. Often, the cancer remains in that organ and is treated with drugs developed specially to counter that cancer. Chemotherapy for liver cancer is designed specifically for tumours found there, for example.

Some tumours, however, can spread – a process known as metastasis – and start to grow in other organs. "When you treat these secondary tumours, it is best to use drugs designed to treat the primary tumour," added Cassidy. "You might find a tumour in the lungs, but if it originated in the pancreas, it is best to use drugs designed to treat pancreatic cancer, not lung cancer."

The problem is that up to 10% of cancers are CUPs whose primary tumours cannot be identified. As a result, Cancer Research UK has agreed to fund a study to tackle this problem by developing methods to find the molecular signatures of individual tumours. Thus a primary cancer could be identified simply by its DNA. A secondary tumour will reveal its primary source straightaway.

A total of 200 CUP patients will be recruited by the Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre network, which links researchers around the UK. Over the next two years, these patients will be studied using a range of techniques to spot common genetic features of individual cancers so that a molecular test can be developed to identify each cancer.

"Today we treat CUPs by modifying standard chemotherapy treatments to create one that covers all likely sources," said Professor Jeff Evans, also of Glasgow University. "But if we can pinpoint a primary from its molecular signature, we can improve clinical outcomes."

One of those who will be watching the trial closely will be Jo Symons's husband, John. Following her death, he set up a charity, the Cancer of Unknown Primary Foundation. "It proved impossible to pinpoint the primary cancer when treating Jo and so doctors tried several different chemotherapy regimes to try to treat her cancer," he said.

"First she was treated for breast cancer. Then doctors decided pancreatic cancer was the most likely primary. In each case, powerful combinations of drugs were administered. It was the equivalent of 1,000 bombers blasting a single house. The effect on Jo was gruelling. We need a targetted response and hopefully this study will produce one."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 9 Jan 2010 | 5:07 pm

Snow has proved a real ice-breaker

At last, the cold snap has given us Brits an excuse to do what comes naturally: help each other

The man walked out of the chemist's shop, lost his footing and hit the ice with a crack that the two women inside at the fragrance section said they heard. Amazingly, he was OK, but his face registered that look of astonishment caused by only a bullet or the speed with which you are brought from confident upright locomotion to the incredibly hard ground in an ice fall. He picked himself up and brushed snow off while the two assistants cooed concern from the doorway and told him that he should put old socks over his Wellington boots because that would make them grip better, advice I somehow felt was not welcome.

A beat later came the more interesting information, delivered with regretfully folded arms: they could not clear that particularly icy patch outside the shop because they had been told that it would make the business liable for any injury suffered subsequent to the clearing of said icy patch. We wondered if I cleared the path without colluding with the chemist's owner whether he would still be liable, which they thought was an interesting legal point but they weren't willing to test it.

I phoned the council to find out if this was true but no one had managed to get to work. Then the Scottish first minister, Alex Salmond, clarified things by saying that it was "utter nonsense that clearing the bit in front of your house means you can be sued if someone falls over", which must be true of the rest of the country too because it is only sensible; and surely we cannot absent-mindedly have deprived ourselves of the pleasure of helping each other or ourselves.

From a week spent doing very little except walking, digging people out and gritting pathways, I realise that snow melts us; that ice turns out to be the icebreaker and that on the whole people love to help each other and are doing so most of the time, a point that goes almost unnoticed in our pessimistic account of society. The snow provides the pretext and makes it all much more obvious, as people shop for one another, drag cars from ditches, push them in supermarket car parks, offer an arm to an elderly stranger, and exchange glances and commonplaces about the extraordinary change that this frigid, alien beauty has wrought in us.

Helping each other still comes as naturally to the British as humour, buying birdseed or digging allotments. During the first snows, drivers going down a treacherous hill into a Gloucestershire village at night were met by four or five individuals with lanterns, who guided the cars through the passable bits. Nobody knows who they were: they appeared like figures from a 19th-century ghost story and then vanished. All this week I saw owners of four-wheel drive vehicles rather hopefully patrolling the roads for people to help. Despite the snow storm on the top of the Cotswolds last Monday afternoon, every passer-by stopped to help a rather dithering bloke who was trying to drive back to Hertfordshire and had placed some dead grass under his tyres to get him up the side road.

Not everyone knows how to say thank you, which I suspect is also a rather modern British thing. My friend Tom, who was pushing cars outside his local supermarket, reckoned that only 50% of drivers thanked him, which sounds a little low to me. After I and my philosopher neighbour had helped free a Tesco delivery van on an icy hill, he drove to the top, turned round and stopped his vehicle to get out and shake our hands despite the risk of becoming stuck again. Something else I noticed during the day of clearing a path and drive is that people are full of unreserved views and advice. They were divided into roughly three categories: those who say "you can do my drive/path when you've finished that!" in the fond belief that they are the first to make the remark; those who announce man-made global warming is a hoax; and those who suggest I am making things worse and should leave it to the council.

But gratitude is not the point: connecting with your neighbours is one dividend of this extraordinary weather, particularly in a society that we are told by officials and politicians lacks cohesion, or is completely broken. It is at times like this that, despite their claims, we see that help and thoughtfulness can never be properly mediated by local authorities. Though we are tempted to believe that safety can be guaranteed by a fellow with a clipboard, the pavement outside the chemist or the news of another 10 or 15 centimetres proves it can't, and demonstrates we have to think for ourselves more, which, when it comes down to it, is in defiance of the dependency and helplessness that authorities subconsciously encourage in us all.

Since I was a boy in the hard winter of 1963, snow has always seemed to be a mild blow against authority. It still makes me incredibly happy to see 20 teenagers, who have missed their first day at the local secondary school, sliding down a slope reserved by a disagreeable landowner for pheasant shooting. He may own the land but he doesn't own the snow on it or the extraordinary beauty of the landscape. Unsupervised, the kids were there last week in the perishing cold until well into the dusk and then they tramped home, flushed and excited, and on the way they saw a kestrel hanging like a iron crucifix in the sky, using the light of the snow to hunt for mice. It's been a terrific week for some.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 9 Jan 2010 | 5:07 pm

The resurgence of El Niño means that 2010 could yet be the hottest year on record

Despite the big freeze Britain's climate is getting distinctly warmer – and we may feel it this summer

It may be a hard notion to accept after a week that has seen the nation paralysed by snow and ice. Nevertheless, meteorologists are adamant that our world is still getting warmer. Indeed, many now believe that 2010 may turn out to be the hottest year on record.

Britain may be shivering, the Met Office may have issued emergency weather warnings for the entire country and hundreds of trains and flights may have been cancelled, but our future is destined to be a hot and sticky one. And we are likely to feel the consequences sooner rather than later.

It is a point stressed by Doug Smith, a climate expert at the Met Office. "The hottest year on record was 1998 and some people have argued that if global warming is really taking place, we should have had an even warmer year since then. We haven't, I admit. And yes, the weather is absolutely terrible at present. However, I am sure things will change – and we won't have to wait long either."

Smith and other meteorologists say that for the past few years, temperatures have been prevented from soaring even higher than they did in 1998 thanks to one key factor: the El Niño warming of the Pacific. This phenomenon occurs at irregular intervals of between two and seven years and can last for months, pumping vast amounts of heat into the atmosphere. A strong El Niño occurred in 1998 and played a key role in heating the world to a record-breaking level. (El Niño is Spanish for "the boy", a reference to the birth of Christ, which relates to the fact that this warming period typically begins around Christmas.)

In recent years, however, the Pacific has cooled thanks to a corresponding ocean phenomenon, known as La Niña (Spanish for "the girl"). It depresses sea surface temperatures and has played a key role in limiting global warming since the turn of the century. As a result, global temperatures have been prevented from rising above their 1998 record level. That cooling has now stopped, however, and a new El Niño warming period has just started in the Pacific.

"If that keeps up for the next few months, it will result in a great deal of heat being pumped into the atmosphere," added Smith. "The signs are that it will. If so, our computer models indicate that this year is more likely than not to be the hottest on record. Even if it isn't, I am quite sure a record breaker will still occur in the next few years."

The headlines then will look very different from the "Britain in deep freeze" variety that have appeared over the past few days, though we should note a key caveat here. Soaring global temperatures do not guarantee hot weather for Britain. We may still get a poor summer, but that does not mean the world is not continuing to heat up, a point ignored by most climate-change deniers.

In fact, there is a world of difference between the British weather at any given time and the inexorable shift that is taking place in the climate of the planet, as Peter Inness, a Reading University meteorologist, makes clear. "Britain covers only a very small part of the globe. It takes up less than one thousandth of the world's surface. The temperature here is almost irrelevant when considering the issue of global climate change."

It is a point that should be kept in mind as councils struggle to grit roads, cars and vans slither on the ice, exams are disrupted, and farmers battle to get food to their animals. Yes, we are feeling the cold but many other parts of the world are having no such problem, as Richard Betts, head of climate impact at the Met Office, argues.

"It is true that Britain is having a spell of extremely cold weather, as is much of northern Europe and the United States. But at the same time, Canada and the Mediterranean region are having unusually warm weather for the time of year. We shouldn't get so absorbed with what is going on in our backyard."

This argument is also made by Inness – though rather more forcibly. "I think it is really stupid to say that the current cold weather proves that climate change is not happening. Climate refers to changes in the weather patterns over a 20- to 40-year period. What is happening in Britain at present represents little more than a point on a graph."

This takes us to the heart of the matter. Meteorologists may make errors with specific long-range forecasts. (This winter was more likely to be mild than severe, they thought.) There is no doubt about the overall trend. Each year, humanity pumps billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The inevitable result will be global warming and major, catastrophic climate change.

It is a bit like playing Pooh sticks, says Betts. "When you throw sticks off a bridge, you know they will all be swept downstream. You just don't know which one will move the fastest. It is the same with climate and the weather. We know the world is warming inexorably but we cannot say specifically which year is going to be the warmest. We can only indicate what are the general prospects of getting a record-breaking year. And despite the horrible weather at present, it is quite possible that we will get one this year."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 9 Jan 2010 | 5:07 pm

Biography of quantum mechanics man scoops Costa award

Ally Carnwath hears from debut biographer Graham Farmelo how the life of an obscure British physicist proved to be award-winningly interesting

Graham Farmelo knew that his interest in physicist Paul Dirac had developed into a full-blown obsession when Dirac's father came to him in a dream. "It was almost like he was saying, 'I'm watching you.' It was when I was writing some eight or nine hours a day on the book. I realised I had to pace my work."

Night-time visitations and five years of hard slog paid off on Monday when Farmelo, a scientist and former restaurant critic, won the Costa Biography Award for his book about Dirac, the scientist described by Stephen Hawking as "probably the greatest theoretical physicist since Newton" but whose name has passed, since his death in 1984, into boffinish obscurity.

Dirac is not, Farmelo admits, the most obvious subject for a prize-winning biography. His shyness was as renowned as his eureka moments; he may have deduced the existence of anti-matter through his theories but he was so bad at small talk that he once sat in silence for half an hour before responding to a question about his holiday plans. Farmelo was told by fellow physicists not to bother writing about him as there was nothing there.

But the more he dug, the more he discovered to refute Dirac's dry reputation: "This X-certificate family life, this poisonous marriage of his parents, becoming a Washington lobbyist, going to the killing fields of Stalin. It's the most extraordinary stuff and it was coming out month after month…"

And the late scientist is still springing new surprises on his biographer: "Genius is posthumous productivity. Last summer I found out that he had anticipated arguably the greatest discovery in theoretical physics of the 1990s so I had to redo that part of the book." Which means he's stuck with Dirac for the rest of his life? "Suits me," Farmelo says.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 9 Jan 2010 | 5:06 pm

Genentech says FDA approves Actemra arthritis drug (AP)

AP - Biotechnology company Genentech Inc. says the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved its new drug to treat rheumatoid arthritis.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 Jan 2010 | 3:34 pm

Record freeze in Florida as Arctic front chills US (AFP)

AFP - A sharp Arctic front sweeping the United States brought unusual snow to many of the deep southern states Saturday, and leaving normally balmy Florida shivering from record icy lows.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 Jan 2010 | 1:37 pm

Snow in Florida: Big chill culling unwanted iguanas and pythons (The Christian Science Monitor)

The Christian Science Monitor - An extended cold stretch gave way Saturday to what early Floridians called an “extraordinary white rain” – snow to the rest of us – as state wildlife biologists reported frozen iguanas falling out of trees, shallow water fish like snook dying in droves, and a record number of rare sea turtles facing the reptile version of hypothermia in St.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 Jan 2010 | 11:28 am