The nation's weather (AP)

AP - A storm that has soaked areas of the Southeast will continue to do so on Sunday, as a low pressure system makes its way northeastward into the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 Jan 2010 | 3:03 am

Yemen ups security at energy facilities (Reuters)

Reuters - Yemen has boosted security at energy installations to guard against militant attacks, a government official said on Sunday, as Sanaa escalated its war against al Qaeda. "The security measures have been strengthened for some time. But we took additional measures around oil institutions and the gas project in Shabwa," the official told Reuters, speaking on customary condition of anonymity.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 Jan 2010 | 2:26 am

Internet allowing illegal wildlife trade: activist (AFP)

AFP - Illegal wildlife traders are turning to the Internet to reach a wider customer base, circumvent laws and evade authorities, an animal rights activist told a conference on Sunday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 Jan 2010 | 1:51 am

Fast, Huge, and Almost Gone

Submitted by guest blogger Debbie Salamone of the Pew Campaign to End Overfishing in the Southeast. One of the fastest fish in the sea may not be quick enough to escape a proposal that could hasten its demise. Although there ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 16 Jan 2010 | 8:43 pm

Poverty is world's biggest problem: BBC poll (AFP)

AFP - Poverty is the most serious problem facing the world, according to a major worldwide poll out Sunday which put the issue well ahead of climate change, terrorism and war.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Jan 2010 | 5:12 pm

Are your friends making you fat?

How can someone you'll never know make you fatter, happier and even sexier? Simon Garfield meets the Harvard professor exploring the amazing power of social connections

A couple of months ago, about 80 people – some of whom knew each other and some of whom did not – gathered in a small lecture room at Nuffield College, Oxford, to hear a man give a lecture about how, if one of them suddenly got fat, the chances are that others would get fat, too. The same applied to happiness: if someone in the room spent the next week elated, that joy would probably become infectious. And the same for smoking: if a man in the room finally managed to quit, the chances were good that his friend sitting two rows in front of him would quit as well. And then, a short while later, a friend of his friend whom he didn't know would do the same thing.

The lecture was given by Dr Nicholas Christakis, a professor from Harvard who had flown over to expand on theories that he once thought of as "cockamamie". His talk examined the power of social networks to influence our behaviour, and suggested that our actions were only partly determined by our own free will. Increasingly, something he called "social contagion" seemed to be getting the upper hand.

Some of Dr Christakis's theories seemed obvious – the chances of becoming obese because we hang around with obese friends who like eating cake – but some are more surprising, including his findings that we may become obese just by knowing someone who knows someone who is fat.

One person at the lecture, who's not obese, was Dr Ben Goldacre, author of Bad Science, the bestselling exposure of quackery and lazy research. He kept his mouth shut during the talk, which was not necessarily a sign of approval, but probably indicated a certain level of intrigue in what was being delivered.

Dr Christakis, who is 47 and has grey hair and a gregarious outlook, describes himself "both as someone who craves solitude, but also as someone who is energised by the contact with friends and family; my wife thinks I am an extrovert, and I guess I am". Recently he has become a bit of a media star in the United States, not least upon the publication of his book Connected (written with his colleague James Fowler, a professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego). Connected is one of those popular social science books, like The Tipping Point or Freakonomics, that attempts to explain how we live and how the herding instinct of the crowd influences our actions. It has not yet sold quite as well as the others, although its contents seem to have featured on almost every talk show in the United States as well as the cover of the New York Times Magazine. Last year Time magazine named Dr Christakis in its list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Connected, which is published in the UK next month, makes many claims, and many startling observations. Christakis sums them up thus: "People affect each other even in things [like body size or emotional states] that many readers would not necessarily expect." He calls these things "emotional stampedes" and "a social chain reaction". The authors believe that at least some part of this is deeply embedded in our genetic heritage, which is, as Christakis points out, "a non-trivial finding".

Dr Christakis is nothing if not an entertainer, and Connected is nothing if not diverting. It is not all about getting plump and happy; it is also about sex and making money. At Nuffield, Christakis tells the story of a friend of his, Brian Uzzi, who has used the impact of social networks to analyse the success or otherwise of Broadway musicals. "He finds that if the key players – the director, costume designer, sound person, producer, etc – all worked together before, and everyone knows everyone else, then the show is a flop. He also finds that if you put together a group of people, who have never worked together before, the show is also a flop. But if you put together a group of people some of whom have worked together and some who haven't, then the show is a runaway critical success with enormous financial rewards."

He had told me the same story when we had met a few hours before for a chat in the Nuffield College common room. He picked up his book repeatedly as he spoke, pointing to the coloured diagrams that show the distribution of obesity, happiness, sexual activity and smoking among groups of hundreds or thousands of people. Clusters of red, green and blue nodes spread out seemingly randomly towards the edges of their pages. But they are not random; they are connected and to some extent predetermined, and they are the cause of zealous excitement.

"We're not just social animals in the conventional way that people think," Christakis says. "It's not just a bunch of us who hang out together. We have a very specific pattern of ties, and they have a particular shape and structure that is encoded in our genes. It means that human beings have evolved to live their lives embedded in social networks."

These networks can harbour a flow of generally undesirable things – violence, germs, sexually transmitted diseases, suicide, unhappiness. But good things also flow – happiness, love, altruism, valuable information on how to find a job. "It is the spread of the good things that vindicates the whole reason we live our lives in networks," Christakis says. "If I was always violent to you or gave you germs, you would cut the ties to me and the network would disintegrate. In a deep and fundamental way, networks are connected to goodness, and goodness is required for networks to emerge and spread."

Christakis's work is new in its scope and ingenuity, but his interest in human interaction has many forebears, stretching back at least as far as Aristotle. Academic interest in the impact of social networks goes back at least a century, to the work of Georg Simmel, the German sociologist who became interested in triads, extending the study of relationships between two people to three. From the 1950s to the 70s this interest broadened, and people began to map networks of between 30 to 100 people, most famously studies of how a group of 30 monks in a monastery and 70 people in a karate club interacted with each other.

In the 1990s the study of large US networks took a huge leap forward when a group of physicists began borrowing modelling techniques from social scientists and mathematicians, and turning their gaze towards newly interesting things – neurons, genes, computers. An advance in conceptual ideas accompanied a revolution in statistical tools, not least the worldwide digital traces offered by email and other online activity.

Christakis's multidisciplinary background (he is a qualified clinical doctor as well as a social scientist and healthcare adviser) set him up as an ideal candidate to exploit these developments. For several years he had worked as a hospice doctor in London, examining how doctors made predictions about life expectancy. He was also looking at the health benefits of marriage, and the old problem known as the Widow Effect, first studied in England in the 19th century, asking why an elderly person's death was so frequently swiftly followed by the death of their spouse. This was a non-biological spread of disease from one person to another, and it was crucial in what was to follow. After Christakis had published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine studying 1 million married couples, it dawned on him that this most basic of social networks could be agglomerated to form structures of greater complexity. "It was the simple idea that I'm connected to you, and you to others, on endlessly into the distance," he remembers. "And then these patterns could branch and form these incredibly complicated networks. I became very interested in this rippling effect – how a health phenomena could affect not just one person, but hundreds or thousands."

In one sense this was a grand extension of Six Degrees of Separation, the concept that we are all just six links away from being connected to everyone else in the world. But now the connections didn't come in straight and direct links but in fuzzy multiples, and Christakis and Fowler were trying to demonstrate something equally stunning: "three degrees of influence". But there was a problem with this thinking: how to prove anything. Christakis needed well-established research groups with hundreds and thousands of people in them. These people should not be lone individuals but somehow linked, and would have to be studied across time. Fortunately, such a group of people already existed.

In Framingham, Massachusetts, the Framingham Heart Study had tracked the cardiovascular health of more than 5,000 people since 1948. It had also kept extensive and interlinking personal records of its patients across three generations.

In 2001, Dr Christakis moved from the University of Chicago to Harvard, and it was here that he met his long-term collaborator James Fowler. Fowler was studying the classic problem of why people vote. (The classic conundrum: everyone knows that a single vote is highly unlikely to have any decisive bearing on an election, so why does anyone bother? The uniform conclusion had been that voting makes no rational sense. Fowler concluded that we vote because other people do – a clear influence of the effects of social connectivity.)

To prove their emerging network theories, the two professors hatched an ambitious plan for a long-term study involving thousands of people, at an estimated cost of $25m. The National Institute on Aging gave them an initial grant of $2m, too little to set up their own new research project but enough to start remodelling what was already out there. So they contacted Framingham, and found its basement records far more useful than its founders had ever anticipated. Every participant had logged their spouse, their children, their friends and their work details, and by doing so had also logged their ties with others in the study. "Previously they had only been examined as individuals," Christakis says, "but our insight was that you could take that population and reconstruct the network. I knew that [from these records] we could get 32 years of social network data if we just spent the money." In 2004 they began the digital reconstruction of about 50,000 social network ties involving 5,000 people.

The digitisation of the records began in 2004, and the reconstruction of the links among the participants began to take shape. The network pictures in Christakis and Fowler's book all originate from the Framingham Heart Study, and have since become famous.

"This is a social cluster of 22,000, mapping obesity," Dr Christakis says, pointing to an illustration. "Or this image here is one of my favourites – mapping happiness. We think of happiness being an individual phenomenon, but think about this: why do you show your emotions? Evolutionarily it would be to our advantage to hide fear or sadness. But we show those emotions on our faces, and surprise and joy, and not only do you read it on my face, but you copy it. An emotional contagion takes place. This suggests that emotion should have a collective existence." The picture shows clusters of happy and unhappy people within the network, and suggests that our happiness is connected with the happiness of people three degrees removed from us; whether we're happy or not depends in part on our friends' friends' friends.

The author's first paper on obesity was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007 and was downloaded 120,000 times. No wonder: the research contained some remarkable figures. If someone on the Framingham study became clinically obese, their friends were 57% more likely also to become obese. A friend of a friend of that obese person was about 20% more likely to become fat, and this was the case even if the weight of the linking friend remained unaltered.

A year later came their paper on smoking, which contained similarly arresting ties. If a person began to smoke for the first time, the chances of their friend doing the same increased by 36%. "The impact surprised us," Christakis says. "We got very lucky."

Christakis and Fowler suggest that human beings in many ways behave like the flocking of birds and the schooling of fish – changing direction all of a sudden. "It's not always explicable in terms of individual actions," Christakis argues. "It would make as much sense to ask an individual smoker: 'Why did you quit?' as it would to ask a single buffalo in a stampeding herd: 'Why are you running to the left?'"

I suggested that a group of people who suddenly quit smoking might have other external causes – an advertising campaign, perhaps, or a plot in a popular soap opera. "Overall, smoking is in decline," Christakis concedes. "But it's patchy. We are often misunderstood in our work. Just because we say networks are important doesn't mean that networks explain everything. We're just adding additional information. Networks don't work like a match – they work like a magnifying glass."

Dr Christakis is keen to emphasise that not everything spreads in networks, and that not everything that spreads in networks spreads the same way. Germs spread differently to emotions, which spread differently to ideas. And online ties spread differently to those we encounter face to face. Christakis has done less conclusive work here, hampered partly by the fact that the definition of "friend" is very different online, and connections tend to be accumulated and then rarely abandoned. But he has produced one intriguing bit of research about Facebook. If a member lists a favourite musical artist on their page, it is unlikely to influence or reflect the choices of their friends. But there are two exceptions. List the Beatles or the Killers, and their popularity on your friends' lists will increase crazily overnight.

Recently, Christakis and Fowler have begun to wonder if we have purposely evolved to live in certain networks. Last year, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published its first study of the network genetics, suggesting that about 30% of our social ties to others may be embedded in our DNA. This is a profound claim, with a number of implications, and it has led to a search for possible genetic determinants. The authors suggest there may be three: sociability, transitivity and centrality.

The first concerns how many friends we have. "People are genetically programmed to vary in this," Christakis suggests. "Some people are shy, others outgoing. Historically it could be valuable to have more or less friends. Sometimes having more can be very useful – to your health, finding a job. But it can also be costly – they make demands on you, they might want you to lend them money, they can be a pain in the butt." Transitivity is concerned with whether one's friends know each other. Christakis and Fowler contend that people have a genetic predilection to introduce their friends or not, and this too has a basis in evolution. "If you want to hunt a mastodon," Christakis says, "it's really good if all your friends know each other because you can work closely together to kill it. But if you want to find a mastodon, it's much better if your friends don't know each other – because they'll all have the same information. If you don't know your friend's friend, the chances are he will be able to tap more distant regions of the network." Finally, the notion of centrality defines where you are in a network. If a germ enters a connected group, it is preferable to be a loner on the periphery; but if you want to be in on the gossip, its helps to be with more friends in the middle.

Critical reaction to Christakis and Fowler's work has been generally enthusiastic. Reviews of Connected have called it "obvious and brilliant" (New York Times) "unsettling" (FT) and "alluring… another way of seeing the world" (New Scientist). Online criticisms tend to focus on cause and effects, suggesting that their findings are predominantly caused by factors other than our social ties. "The social network wasn't needed to make people fat," one person observed on Wired.com. "The high fructose corn syrup did that for them."

Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary biology at Oxford, told me in an email that he found the work of Christakis and Fowler "absolutely fascinating". He believed that healthcare educators have "completely ignored the extraordinarily strong effect of very close relationships in influencing our actions. This effect must apply more widely – to, for example, antisocial behaviour as well as health patterns." Sanjeev Goyal, the professor of economics at Cambridge who has conducted his own pioneering work into networks, also told me that Connected raises timely and fundamental questions about public health policies. If further research proves the author's work to be true, Goyal suggests that our provision of healthcare may have to be reformulated.

At the end of his lecture in Oxford, Dr Christakis put up a final slide of the jacket of his book. The UK title of Connected has changed slightly from the US one, and will now appear with a deftly hyped-up sub-heading: "The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks" has become "The Amazing Power of Our Social Networks". But ultimately its success will depend not on hyperbole, but on something far more embedded in the reading public's natural habits: the amazing power of word-of-mouth. If one of your friends' friends reads the book, it may be only a matter of time before you read it, too – the social network effect that extends as far back as Gutenberg.★

Connected by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler is published next month by Harper Press, £12.99. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6847

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 16 Jan 2010 | 5:10 pm

Ringtones? They're so Neanderthal

We now know that our ancient forebears used make-up. But they foreshadowed the modern world in countless other ways

Apparently, we've been underestimating the Neanderthals. An expedition led by João Zilhão, professor of palaeolithic archaeology at the University of Bristol, claims that they were much more intelligent than we thought and the proof is that they had make-up. In a cave in Spain, the team discovered a decorative sea shell, probably part of a necklace, and a tiny quantity of what they have concluded is stone-age slap.

Zilhão explains: "The idea that came to our minds was that it was some kind of glitter or make-up, like the shimmery stuff that people were wearing a few years ago." Well, it seems the recent glitterbugs were inadvertently affecting Neanderthal chic. Even I'm more in vogue than that.

But what an exciting development! Having thought of Neanderthals as backward, brutish and doomed, we now, on the discovery that they had cosmetics, realise how great they were. What clearer sign of their sentience, their immortal souls, the fact that they too gazed at the stars and wondered, than their proclivity for tarting themselves up? For where there is make-up, then high heels, piercings, tattoos and push-up bras must surely follow.

Certainly, being self-conscious enough to use cosmetics to try to improve one's appearance is a sign of intelligence. Deep in their lumpy craniums, the Neanderthals were beginning to realise just how much they minged. Maybe that's why they died out. A more common theory is that they were killed and eaten by modern man. To us, their vain attempts to make the best of themselves were just serving suggestions – like a turkey donning a bacon waistcoat as a mating ritual.

In how many other ways have we failed to do justice to our sexy and delicious cousins? What other hallmarks of a sophisticated culture might they have invented thousands of years before our arrival presaged their doom? I asked some experts.

Drinks umbrellas

"I'll tell you what I told the scientific community at the time," says the archaeologist who claims to have found a fossilised Neanderthal cocktail adorned with a tiny animal skin umbrella. "Yes, Campari were pleased I found it. No, the fact that they paid for the expedition didn't compromise my findings. To hear some people talk, you'd think I was claiming they had curly straws!" He calmed down after a drink. "They liked a drink and they liked a classy drink. It shows they had leisure time and had worked out how to use it. Cheers. Drink Campari."

Loyalty cards

Quite how these worked in a barter-based economy is unclear but, according to Luton University's professor of retail archaeology and litter, the ­discovery of hundreds of small, portable, apparently useless flat stones in Neanderthal caves cannot be adequately explained in any other way. "Maybe a notch would be put on your card every time you exchanged, say, an animal fur for a hunk of meat, and when the card was full of notches you got a free cappuccino or food mixer. We think they didn't have cappuccinos or food mixers, which may be why the system broke down."

Ringtones

With thousands of years to wait for the first mobile phone, this is remarkably advanced. "We can't prove that they had ringtones," admits a member of the research team, "but there's no other explanation for the different and unique chains of dangly, jingly objects that we keep finding. We think these could be concealed in a pair of mammoth skin trousers, or normal-sized skin trousers, and covertly jangled at awkward social moments, allowing Neanderthals to excuse themselves from meetings. They may even have had 'phones' – not communication devices as we know them but just small pieces of bone that could be pressed to the ear in a comforting way or as an excuse not to interact with other people. Increasingly, that's how Homo sapiens uses the mobile phone today."

Smoking ban

"There's no evidence of ashtrays in their caves so it stands to reason they must have smoked outside," is the view of the head of paleontological marketing at Superkings. "Their knowledge of fire would have enabled them to create the equivalent of outside heaters." When asked to explain the absence of pipes or fossilised cigarette ends, he gives his answer in the form of an offer: "Cigar?"

Daytime television

"Well, that's perhaps a slightly sensationalist way of putting it," admitted the originator of the theory on This Morning, "but I think it's reasonable to infer that some days would have hung as heavy for a Neanderthal cave dweller as they do for the housewives, students, freelance writers, drug addicts or all four who watch daytime TV today. And how else could that be combated other than with, albeit rudimentary, lifestyle advice, makeover rituals and quizzes? With no broadcast technology, this would have been informal and, pre-capitalism, I don't imagine anything as complex as Homes Under the Hammer or Deal or No Deal – but Jeremy Kyle seems to get where the Neanderthals were coming from."

Acupuncture

"I'll admit this is very difficult to prove," says the author of In Sickness and in Wealth: A History of Alternative Medicine, "but I think the evidence is compelling. We know they had sharp objects – flint, thorns, etc – we know they will have pricked themselves. That's acupuncture. The only question remaining is whether they saw any point in it. I meant that pun – it's ­copyright."

Snooker

Professional snooker's heritage tsar is bullish in the face of scepticism: "Well, I've seen a picture of dogs ­playing it so I don't see why Neanderthals wouldn't."

Misery memoirs

Pre-literate as the Neanderthals were, no one's suggesting they were able to publish books, but the concept of guiltily wallowing in someone else's horrific problems, like Simon Bates's "Our Song" writ large, was very familiar to them. "As Neanderthal communities came under more pressure from early modern man, their need for escapism intensified. One can imagine them sitting round the camp fire, listening to one another's troubles. Alternatively, one can buy my book in which there's a drawing," says the author of 50,000 Years of Misery: Our Narrative Urge Explained. His theory is that self-pity is what did for the cavemen in the end, which he backs up with the ­assertion that diamonds are really ­fossilised tears.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 16 Jan 2010 | 5:07 pm

Engineers work out how to rebuild Haiti to withstand future shocks

Construction techniques and practices will have to change

The international effort to rebuild Port-au-Prince will be the biggest civil engineering project in the Caribbean for the next decade. That is the stark view of experts who have studied the devastation inflicted on the Haitian capital last week and concluded that only a full-scale reconstruction of the city, to robust quake-proof standards, will prevent future catastrophes.

The earthquake that struck on Tuesday measured 7.0 on the Richter scale. This is severe, although the figure is far below the 9.3 event that caused the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. That released a thousand times the energy of the Haiti quake. Indeed, magnitude-7 earthquakes are relatively common. There are about 16 to 18 around the world every year.

Several aggravating factors combined to make the Haiti quake particularly deadly, and these will be the focus of careful attention by the planners and engineers who rebuild Port-au-Prince.

For a start, there is the proximity to the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden geological fault which runs east-west along the southern part of Haiti. The fault line separates two tectonic plates where vast slabs of the Earth's surface grind past each other in a horizontal motion. After 250 years without movement, the plates suddenly shifted last week, causing the earthquake.

"The epicentre was not only very close to the surface, it was close to the city, about 10km away from its centre," said Viggy Lubkowski, a geotechnical engineer who worked on the rebuilding of Aceh, the Indonesian city devastated by the 2004 tsunami. "That meant the earthquake would have struck with considerable energy."

When a small earthquake occurs, there are usually three or four cycles of movement – up and down and also from side to side – in the ground. In the Haiti quake, there would have been at least 30 cycles. "If you shake or bend anything for that number of times, its weak spots will inevitably be exposed and there is a good chance they will break or collapse," added Lubkowski. "When the city is rebuilt, construction teams will have to be careful to ensure this problem is kept to a minimum."

Expensive measures are beyond the means of Haiti, one of the world's poorest nations. Nevertheless, some key ideas are being discussed: ensuring a strip of land 30m-40m wide is kept clear of buildings on both sides of the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault; preventing construction on hilly ground so that buildings will not fall on top of each other; and not using land prone to water-logging, which tends to liquefy when shaken during a major quake.

Care needs to be taken with the techniques employed in putting up buildings. The steel bars used to make reinforced concrete should be barbed to prevent them slipping easily from their cement cases and buildings should be designed to take maximum shaking. Beams and columns need to be strong, while windows and doors should be regularly spaced. "Essentially, the city's new buildings should be erected to a proper seismic code," added Lubkowski.

Special care should be taken with the construction of government buildings such as hospitals, police stations and army barracks. These provide safe havens where displaced people can gather during emergencies, he added.

A very different approach would be to try to predict when an earthquake is going to occur and so give local people a chance to evacuate. Given the enormous complexity of the behaviour of tectonic plates, such a prospect remains a remote one, say seismologists – despite intense efforts over the years.

"A network of fault lines radiate away from the main fault that separates tectonic plates. When strain is released when two plates slip, this is often redistributed down this network, making it extraordinarily difficult to predict where and when an earthquake will take place," said Roger Searle, professor of geophysics at Durham University.

"That means our best protection against earthquakes is to be well ­prepared. Apart from ensuring building codes are followed, there should be regular drills in schools and elsewhere to teach the safest response during an earthquake – stay indoors until the quake ends; shelter in a doorway or under a table. It is also important to have robust infrastructure, so that landslides don't block roads or disrupt supplies of water and electricity."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 16 Jan 2010 | 5:06 pm

Pashtun clue to lost tribes of Israel

Genetic study sets out to uncover if there is a 2,700-year-old link to Afghanistan and Pakistan

Israel is to fund a rare genetic study to determine whether there is a link between the lost tribes of Israel and the Pashtuns of Afghanistan and northern Pakistan.

Historical and anecdotal evidence strongly suggests a connection, but definitive scientific proof has never been found. Some leading Israeli anthropologists believe that, of all the many groups in the world who claim a connection to the 10 lost tribes, the Pashtuns, or Pathans, have the most compelling case. Paradoxically it is from the Pashtuns that the ultra-conservative Islamic Taliban movement in Afghanistan emerged. Pashtuns themselves sometimes talk of their Israelite connection, but show few signs of sympathy with, or any wish to migrate to, the modern Israeli state.

Now an Indian researcher has collected blood samples from members of the Afridi tribe of Pashtuns who today live in Malihabad, near Lucknow, in northern India. Shahnaz Ali, from the National Institute of Immuno­haematology in Mumbai, is to spend several months studying her findings at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa. A previous genetic study in the same area did not provide proof one way or the other.

The Assyrians conquered the kingdom of Israel some 2,730 years ago, scattering 10 of the 12 tribes into exile, supposedly beyond the mythical Sambation river. The two remaining tribes, Benjamin and Judah, became the modern-day Jewish people, according to Jewish history, and the search for the lost tribes has continued ever since. Some have claimed to have found traces of them in modern day China, Burma, Nigeria, Central Asia, Ethiopia and even in the West.

But it is believed that the tribes were dispersed in an area around modern-day northern Iraq and Afghanistan, which makes the Pashtun connection the strongest.

"Of all the groups, there is more convincing evidence about the Pathans than anybody else, but the Pathans are the ones who would reject Israel most ferociously. That is the sweet irony," said Shalva Weil, an anthropologist and senior researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The Pashtuns have a proud oral history that talks of descending from the Israelites.

Their tribal groupings have similar names, including Yusufzai, which means sons of Joseph; and Afridi, thought by some to come from Ephraim. Some customs and practices are said to be similar to Jewish traditions: lighting candles on the sabbath, refraining from eating certain foods, using a canopy during a wedding ceremony and some similarities in garments.

Weil cautioned, however, that this is not proof of any genetic connection. DNA might be able to determine which area of the world the Pashtuns originated from, but it is not at all certain that it could identify a specific genetic link to the Jewish people.

So far Shahnaz Ali has been cautious. "The theory has been a matter of curiosity since long ago, and now I hope a scientific analysis will provide us with some answers about the Israelite origin of Afridi Pathans. We still don't know what the truth is, but efforts will certainly give us a direction," she told the Times of India last year.

Some are more certain, among them Navras Aafreedi, an academic at Luck­now University, himself a Pashtun from the Afridi tribe. His family trace their roots back to Pathans from the Khyber Agency of what is today north-west Pakistan, but he believes they stretch back further to the tribe of Ephraim.

"Pathans, or Pashtuns, are the only people in the world whose probable descent from the lost tribes of Israel finds mention in a number of texts from the 10th century to the present day, written by Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars alike, both religious as well as secularists," Aafreedi said.

The implications of any find are uncertain. Other groups that claim ­Israelite descent, including those known as the Bnei Menashe in India and some in Ethiopia, have migrated to Israel. That is unlikely with the Pashtuns.

But Weil said the work was absorbing, well beyond questions of immigration. "I find a myth that has been so persistent for so long, for 2,000 years, really fascinating," she said.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 16 Jan 2010 | 5:05 pm

Lasers would never have shone with Mandelson in charge

The laser – first built 50 years ago – is used for everything from the internet to barcodes. Yet science funding allocation today would stop such visionary projects in their tracks

IF YOU'RE planning watch a DVD today, listen to a CD, play a computer game, go to a supermarket, browse the web, or do 100 other everyday tasks, spare a thought for the invention that has shaped our lives and revolutionised our manufacturing industries: the laser.

The name is an acronym for Light Amplification from the Stimulated Emission of Radiation. It works by pumping electrical energy into a "gain medium" (a gas, solid, liquid or plasma). This stimulates the emission of light, which is then amplified by being passed backwards and forwards in a cavity. In its simplest form, this consists of mirrors at either end. Light bounces back and forth off them, each time passing through the gain medium, and is amplified with each pass. Typically one mirror, called the output coupler, is partially transparent, which is how the output laser beam is emitted.

A laser beam is special because it's what physicists call "coherent"; it consists of waves that all have the same frequency and are in step with one another. This makes it different from, say, a flashlight beam, the light waves from which will have different frequencies and typically be out of phase with one another.

The reason we're celebrating the laser this year is that 50 years ago Theodore Maiman, a researcher at the Hughes Research Labs, built the first one, using a ruby crystal to produce a beam of red light. Later the same year, a group of physicists built the first gas laser, using a mixture of helium and neon.

Since then the technology has been developed, miniaturised, commoditised, extended and deployed to the point where it's virtually impossible to find a manufactured product that hasn't encountered a laser at some stage in its creation or use. When you play a DVD, a semiconductor laser less than a millimetre wide scans the disc's surface. The intricate cutting and welding of the steel in your car door was done by lasers. The internet's backbone runs mainly via laser light transmitted along fibre-optic cables. Every supermarket checkout uses a laser beam to scan barcodes. American forces in Afghanistan are now using powerful lasers mounted on Humvees to detonate any roadside bombs ahead of them.

Lasers are thus a critical part of our technological infrastructure, yet no one involved in the research that led to them had any inkling of what their investigations would produce. The original idea goes back to a paper Albert Einstein published in 1917 on "The Quantum Theory of Radiation" about the absorption, spontaneous emission and stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. For 40 years, stimulated emission was of absorbing interest to quantum physicists, but of little interest to anyone else – certainly to nobody in government.

Which brings us to Lord Mandelson, now in charge of all government funding of universities and academic research. He has no personal experience of research in science or technology, but, like many people whose minds are unclouded by knowledge, has strong views on these matters.

In his first speech after taking control of Britain's research spending, for example, he "made no apology for prioritising research that would contribute to Britain's future prosperity". The occasion was the celebration of the centenary of the Science Museum, and Mandy left his listeners in no doubt that he will continue government policy of allocating more of the £6bn science budget to areas with commercial applications – in other words, areas that the government (and its industrial advisers) think will yield short-term benefits for Britain.

Meanwhile, at the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the geniuses who presided over the disaster of the Research Assessment Exercise – which sets funding to universities based on the perceived "value" of their research – have been adjusting to the Mandel­son line. They are working on a "Research Excellence Framework" which will require applicants for funding to cite "demonstrable benefits to the economy, society, public policy, culture and quality of life". This bodes ill for any scientist or engineer interested in curiosity-driven research.

The laser has become vital for our way of life, yet no researcher who worked on it after Einstein's paper could have predicted what would emerge. If Mandelson had had anything to do with it, we'd be reading barcodes by flashlight.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 16 Jan 2010 | 5:05 pm

Scientists Scramble to Analyze Haiti’s Seismic Risk

Since the ground shook Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, on January 12 and sent the densely populated city into chaos, scientists have been harnessing every possible tool to quickly assemble a detailed picture of a region in which scientific research had already been difficult to conduct.

“The question we are trying to address right now is if there could be other faults nearby or perhaps other portions of the fault to the east or west that could go,” says Eric Calais, a geophysicist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., who has used GPS stations to monitor the area since 2003.

At 4:53 p.m. local time on the day of the quake, a magnitude-7.0 temblor struck just 15 miles west-southwest of Port-Au-Prince, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The shallow quake occurred along the Enriquillo–Plantain Garden fault system, one of several major faults defining the boundary between the Caribbean and North America tectonic plates that move past each other in an east-west direction near Haiti. A section of fault approximately 31 miles long moved during the quake, says Gavin Hayes of the USGS National Earthquake Information Center. The largest amount the fault slipped was 15 feet.

The devastation has been extreme, with poor building construction and dense population making what, by seismic standards, is not a massive earthquake into a major disaster. As of January 15, tens of thousands of people were reported dead.

Now scientists are bracing for what might happen next. “Our folks and others are acquiring all the imagery they can in order to examine possible landslide-dammed drainages that could create subsequent flash flood hazard, identify surface rupture and look for the extent of … ground failure,” says David Applegate, senior science adviser for natural hazards with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Haiti’s political situation had made it a difficult place to do science, Calais says. “A lot of researchers who otherwise would have liked to work in Haiti decided not to…. There is very little science infrastructure.”

Satellites are proving a key tool to understanding the recent earthquake. It will be some time before teams can do crucial field work on the ground, Applegate says. Other plans include close investigations of lifelines; hopes to deploy ocean-bottom seismometers nearby; and strategies for using satellite radar images taken before and after the quake as a way to determine degrees of deformation.

Though the planet is littered with some 4,000 seismic stations that constantly detect waves produced as the Earth’s crust moves and shifts, not one station is in Haiti, the scientists note.

For measuring the big quake, that’s not a problem. “Every sand grain on the planet dances to the music of those seismic waves,” says Ross Stein of the USGS in Menlo Park, Calif., who is part of a team working to quickly model the possible aftereffects of the January 12 quake. But, Hayes says, “there are no local stations in the immediate vicinity of the epicenter from which we can obtain data to help constrain very detailed characteristics,” he says, such as whether shaking was stronger, and damage even more severe, in some areas than others.

Seismic stations nearby, such as in the Dominican Republic, have allowed researchers to record and locate aftershocks as low as magnitude 3.0, Hayes says, but with a certain error.

Most aftershocks are smaller than the first rupture, and they become less frequent with time. But the strength of aftershocks doesn’t necessarily decrease with time, Stein says. “A small percentage of them can be larger than the main shock.” And a large aftershock could still hit a hundred days later, he says.

Researchers are hoping the quake won’t be a repeat of the 1999 Izmit earthquake and subsequent aftershocks, when a magnitude-7.6 on the North Anatolian fault system struck western Turkey and resulted in the deaths of at least 17,118 people, according to the USGS. Three months later, Stein says, an adjacent portion of the fault ruptured in a magnitude-7.0 quake.

The Enriquillo–Plantain Garden fault system and North Anatolian fault system are similar, researchers say. Both are long faults, Stein says, with bumps and bends that can stop a rupture. When the rupture stops at those strong points, Calais adds, the change imparts large stresses that can make those areas of the fault more likely to experience quakes. That’s what happened on the North Anatolian in 1999. “One earthquake tends to trigger the next one within a few years or a couple of decades,” Calais says. “Hopefully this is not the case here.”

For the Enriquillo–Plantain Garden fault system, the early data from other Caribbean seismic stations show aftershocks defining a western limit to the portion of fault that slipped, Hayes says.

It wasn’t until 2003 that researchers were able to begin quantifying the movement along the Enriquillo–Plantain Garden fault system. Calais and fellow researchers began using portable GPS receivers to monitor the motion around the fault. In 2008, the team announced at a meeting of the Caribbean Geological Conference that the fault posed a major seismic hazard.

The team had measured plate motion of 7 millimeters a year, one-fifth of the motion along some portions of the San Andreas, which is a similar type of fault, Calais says. “The problem is the fault had been quiet for a long time.” The last major earthquake on the Enriquillo–Plantain Garden fault system was in 1770, historical accounts show. By January 12, a large amount of stress had built up along the fault, Calais says. “This is the way most faults behave on the planet. Most faults are quiet for a long time.”

The fault was behaving like most faults, but the quake hit a place unprepared for it. And also, Calais says, “it is only recently that we were able to quantify what’s going on there.… The progress we’ve been able to make has been too slow. The earthquake happened too early.”

Image: Jesse Allen/NASA Earth Observatory

See Also:

• Satellite Photos of Haiti Before and After the Earthquake
• Tweets From the Front Lines of Haiti Relief
• U.S. Diverts Spy Drone from Afghanistan to Haiti
• Earthquake-Hit Haiti Still Offline; Military, Relief Agencies Rush to Rebuild Comms
• Rescue Ops in Haiti: ‘The First 72 Hours Are Critical’
• Gamers Pitch In With Haiti Disaster Relief
• After Massive Quake, Military Stands By to Aid Haiti (Updated)

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 16 Jan 2010 | 3:15 pm

'Nanodragster' races toward the future of molecular machines

Scientists in Texas are reporting the development of a "nanodragster" that may speed the course toward development of a new generation of futuristic molecular machines. The vehicle -- only 1/50,000th the width of a human hair -- resembles a hot-rod in shape and can outperform previous nano-sized vehicles.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 Jan 2010 | 3:00 pm

New computer vision system for the analysis of human behavior

Scientists have developed a cognitive computational system consisting of video cameras and software able to recognize and predict human behavior, as well as describe it in natural language. The applications of this project, called the Hermes project, are numerous and can be used in the fields of intelligent surveillance, protection of accidents, marketing, psychology, etc.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 Jan 2010 | 3:00 pm

Scientists map brain pathway for vocal learning

Scientists have identified neurons in the songbird brain that convey the auditory feedback needed to learn a song. Their research lays the foundation for improving human speech, for example, in people whose auditory nerves are damaged and who must learn to speak without the benefit of hearing their own voices. This work is the first study to identify an auditory feedback pathway in the brain that is harnessed for learned vocal control.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 Jan 2010 | 3:00 pm

Gastroenterologists study mind-body techniques for treating celiac disease

For adults and children diagnosed with celiac disease, the only treatment is a gluten-free diet, which can be very challenging. Gastroenterologists are conducting a new study to see if mind/body techniques could help patients with celiac disease adhere to the very strict diet.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 Jan 2010 | 3:00 pm

New method fixes broken proteins to treat genetic diseases

Researchers have demonstrated how it could be possible to treat genetic diseases by enhancing the natural ability of cells to restore their own mutant proteins. In particular, they found that drugs called proteosome inhibitors could provide one way of manipulating cells into producing more of a so-called chaperone protein, named Hsp70, which helps amino acid chains fold into their proper protein form.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 Jan 2010 | 3:00 pm

Gender-biased heart damage

A man's male hormones may ward off heart damage by helping vessels around the heart regenerate, suggest Australian researchers.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 Jan 2010 | 3:00 pm

EU pushes for deeper carbon emissions cuts (AFP)

AFP - The EU on Saturday stood by its offer to move to a 30 percent cut in carbon dioxide emissions by 2020 despite the failure of last month's UN climate summit to secure a legally-binding deal.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Jan 2010 | 1:06 pm

Moon Shadow Seen From Space (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - On Friday, Jan. 15, a solar eclipse graced parts of Asia and Africa. The moon got between Earth and the sun and blocked out most of the sun.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Jan 2010 | 12:31 pm

Higher temperatures can worsen climate change, methane measurements from space reveal

Higher temperatures on the earth's surface at higher latitudes cause an increase in the emission of methane, a greenhouse gas that plays an important role in global warming. Therefore, higher temperatures are not just a consequence of climate change but can also worsen it, conclude climate researchers in a new study. During their research, the researchers determined methane concentration measurements from the Dutch-German space instrument SCIAMACHY, on board the European Space Agency's environmental satellite Envisat.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 Jan 2010 | 9:00 am

Effectiveness of asthma relief inhalers: Discovery opens new avenues for treatment of poorly controlled asthma

A new study is probing why asthma relief inhalers might actually make asthma worse -- and what can be done about it.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 Jan 2010 | 9:00 am

Parkinson's patients shed light on role of reward bias in compulsive behaviors

New research unravels the brain mechanisms that underlie the ability of a standard drug treatment for Parkinson's to elicit compulsive behaviors in some patients with the disease. The study provides fascinating new insight into the brain mechanisms that underlie a predisposition to behavioral addictions, such as pathological gambling and shopping.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 Jan 2010 | 9:00 am

Program may prevent knee injuries in young female soccer players

A soccer-specific exercise program that includes individual instruction of athletes appears to reduce the risk of knee injuries in young female players, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 Jan 2010 | 9:00 am

Met Office rethink on forecasts

The UK Met Office debates what to do with its long-term and seasonal forecasting after facing criticism.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 16 Jan 2010 | 7:15 am

Angry Flies May Help Explain Human Aggression (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Jan 2010 | 6:35 am