Genetically-modified mice reveal another mechanism contributing to heart failure

Scientists at the Robarts Research Institute at the University of Western Ontario, working in collaboration with researchers in Brazil, have used a unique genetically-modified mouse line to reveal a previously unidentified mechanism contributing to heart failure. The study, led by Marco Prado, Robert Gros and Vania Prado of London, Canada and Silvia Guatimosim of Brazil, shows how the decreased release of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, a chemical messenger which slows cardiac activity, contributes to heart failure.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Feb 2010 | 12:00 pm

New research rejects 80-year theory of 'primordial soup' as the origin of life

For 80 years it has been accepted that early life began in a "primordial soup" of organic molecules before evolving out of the oceans millions of years later. Today the "soup" theory has been overturned in a pioneering article which claims it was the Earth's chemical energy, from hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, which kick-started early life.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Feb 2010 | 12:00 pm

New brain research: Hunger for stimulation driven by dopamine in the brain

Our need for stimulation and dopamine's action upon the brain are connected, which explains why people who constantly crave stimulation are in danger of addictive behavior such as drug abuse and gambling.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Feb 2010 | 12:00 pm

Tobacco plant-made therapeutic thwarts West Nile virus

A new therapeutic made from tobacco plants has been shown to arrest West Nile virus infection, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Feb 2010 | 12:00 pm

Applied electric field can significantly improve hydrogen storage properties

An international team of researchers has identified a new theoretical approach that may one day make the synthesis of hydrogen fuel storage materials less complicated and improve the thermodynamics and reversibility of the system.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Feb 2010 | 12:00 pm

Mechanical forces could affect gene expression

Researchers have shown that tension on DNA molecules can affect gene expression -- the process at the heart of biological function that tells a cell what to do.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Feb 2010 | 12:00 pm

Smoking cessation significantly increases cardiac health later in life

New research finds that quitting smoking after a heart attack has about the same positive effect as other major interventions such as lipid-lowering agents like statins or more invasive procedures.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

Eco-friendly way of decomposing BPA-containing plastic

Just as cooking helps people digest food, pretreating polycarbonate plastic -- source of a huge environmental headache because of its bisphenol A content -- may be the key to disposing of the waste in an eco-friendly way, scientists have found.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

Acetaminophen protects kidneys after muscle injury

Severe muscle injuries -- such as crush injuries suffered in earthquakes, car accidents and explosions, and muscle damage from excessive exercise or statin drug interactions -- can cause life-threatening kidney damage. Treatment has been limited to intravenous fluids and dialysis, but a new study suggests that the commonly used pain reliever acetaminophen may protect the kidneys from damage.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

Ancient crocodile relative likely food source for Titanoboa, largest snake ever known

A 60-million-year-old relative of crocodiles was likely a food source for Titanoboa, the largest snake the world has ever known. Paleontologists found fossils of the new species of ancient crocodile in the Cerrejon Formation in northern Colombia. The site, one of the world's largest open-pit coal mines, also yielded skeletons of the giant, boa constrictor-like Titanoboa, which measured up to 45 feet long.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Wet weather was expected to continue in the Pacific Northwest on Wednesday, while another low pressure system was forecast to move into the Southwest from Mexico.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Feb 2010 | 3:18 am

Iran launches new research rocket into space (AP)

AP - Iran announced Wednesday it has successfully launched a 10-foot-long research rocket carrying a mouse, two turtles and worms into space — a feat President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said showed Iran could defeat the West in the battle of technology.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Feb 2010 | 3:10 am

Britain ignoring its dementia crisis, Oxford study finds

Disease costs more than cancer and heart disease combined but receives a fraction of research funding

Britain's dementia crisis is worse than feared and costs Britain £23bn a year – more than cancer and heart disease combined – but receives a fraction of the funding, according to a study published today.

The number of people with dementia, at 822,000, is 17% higher than has previously been estimated and will pass the 1 million mark before 2025, the Oxford university study has found.

Researchers calculated that for every pound spent on dementia studies, £12 is spent on investigating cancer and £3 on heart disease. They said the ageing population was largely behind the rise in dementia and public attitude contributed to the relative lack of research funding.

"People do consider dementia as an inevitable part of getting old. People who reach the age of 65 have a one in three chance of having dementia before they die," said the report's author, Professor Alastair Gray of the university's Health Economics Research Centre.

The Dementia 2010 report compares the condition's overall annual cost of £23bn with £12bn for cancer care and the £8bn for heart disease.

The £23bn includes £9bn for social care, £12bn for unpaid care and £1.2bn in healthcare costs.

At £590m, cancer research funding is 12 times the £50m devoted to dementia, while heart disease receives more than three times as much. Stroke research receives less.

The health minister, Phil Hope, said dementia was "one of the most important issues we face as a population".

"I want to see an increase in the volume, the quality and the impact of dementia research.

"We have identified the importance of research in the dementia strategy I published last year..

"We have identified the key areas we need to take forward around the causes for dementia and the possible cures for it and how we can better care for people, to help them live well with dementia."

The report calculates that £295 is spent on research for every person with cancer, compared with £61 for each person with dementia.

"The true impact of dementia has been ignored for too long," said Rebecca Wood, the Alzheimer's Research Trust chief executive. "The UK's dementia crisis is worse than we feared. This report shows that dementia is the greatest medical challenge of the 21st century.

"If we spend a more proportionate sum on dementia research we could unleash the full potential of our scientists in their race for a cure. Spending millions now really can save us crippling multi-billion pound care bills later."

Each dementia patient costs the economy £27,647 each year, researchers found, nearly five times more than a cancer patient and eight times more than someone with from heart disease.

The expense is driven mainly by the extent of unpaid care and long-term institutional care – in contrast to cancer and heart disease, where costs are mainly taken care of by the NHS.

The report documents a "diagnosis gap", between the expected number of people with dementia and the number of patients with dementia on GP registers.

In England it is estimated 31% of people with dementia are registered on GP lists. Reasons for the low rate include GPs' lack of training and low confidence in diagnosing dementia.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Feb 2010 | 3:09 am

Toyota's safety woes spread to Prius brakes (AFP)

AFP - Toyota Motor, reeling from a public-relations fiasco over accelerator problems, on Wednesday reported dozens of complaints in North America and Japan about brake failure on its popular Prius hybrid.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Feb 2010 | 3:02 am

Chinese language tutor sought for US-born panda (AP)

AP - Ni hao — hello — Mei Lan! Chinese zookeepers are advertising for a tutor to teach Chinese to an American-born giant panda arriving this week in her parents' homeland.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Feb 2010 | 2:53 am

Me and my homeopathic overdose | Hadley Freeman

How I knocked back a bottle of homeopathic 'medicine' and lived to tell the tale

I had a great weekend, thanks for ­asking. A bunch of like-minded souls and I got together in a frosty square in central London and took a massive overdose. Now, I should add at this point that I have not joined an extreme Christian cult (I couldn't – the Christian bit would upset my ­parents too much), and, as you can guess from the fact that I am writing this, the overdose was unsuccessful. I was at one of the many "mass homeopathic overdoses" taking place around the country to prove that homeopathy has as much effect on one's health as ­being hit in the face with a twig.

Whereas many of my fellow overdosers were protesting against the availability of homeopathic remedies at Boots, this doesn't bother me so much. If I felt outrage at the thought of Boots selling something that didn't live up to its promises, I'd have taken to the streets over several moisturisers years ago. ("Really? Literally reverse time?") What does offend me, though, is that this stuff is available on the NHS.

As a vegetarian who has been known to go to a fashion show and a yoga class in her time, I might seem a likely ­candidate for slapping on the arnica. But I feel about homeopathy the way Sarah Palin feels about climate change: shock that anyone in the modern world is daft enough to believe this rubbish. If I go to a fashion show or a yoga class, chances are I'll get a return on my investment: I'll see some fashion or I'll do some yoga. Buy a homeopathic remedy and will I be remedied? Maybe. But probably not. And unlike fashion shows, homeopathic treatments are available on the NHS, at a cost of £4m a year. This may seem a lot to anyone who has never been in a health food store; anyone who has will be saying, "They must have got one heck of a discount – honestly, last time I went in there to stock up on extract of cranberry, CQ10 vitamins and selenium supplements it cost me seven gajillion pounds."

A senior nurse makes at most £25,000 a year. Because I haven't been taking my Omega 3 supplements as regularly as I no doubt should, I can't work out how many more nurses the health service would be able to afford if it passed on the pollen extract without my brain exploding. But hopefully not for much longer. Next week a House of Commons select committee is publishing its findings on the use of ­homeopathy in the NHS. If this should turn out to be ­anything other than "please stop", I shall be tempted to pull a Billy Bragg and refuse to pay my ­income tax.

Inevitably, the homeopaths have been fighting their corner with a ­tenacity that belies their reliance on ­ineffective nutritional supplements and there has been much talk in the press about the value of garlic, ­cranberries and what have you. Here, the ­homeopaths don't actually help their case ­because cranberries/goji ­berries/insert name of this month's trendy fruit are very ­unlikely to be present in the final ­product because it has been so heavily diluted. Instead, homeopaths claim that the active ingredient imprints itself on the water's memory by a very special shaking ­process, a theory that sparks two obvious questions: if water has memory, does that mean vegetarians aren't allowed to drink it? And is this special shaking process similar to a ­toilet flushing? Because if so, ­presumably all drinking water must carry ­cherished memories of several generations of sewage. Pass the Evian.

Homeopathy styles itself as the ­caring, natural side of healthcare, ­removed from dangerous chemicals and nasty pharmaceutical companies. Quite how giving questionable hope with ­inflated price tags to people counts as caring or ­natural is never ­really ­explained. That homeopathy is ­promoted by the likes of Prince Charles is reason enough to be sceptical of it.

In a revealing ­moment, Senator Tom Harkin, the man behind the ­National Center for Complementary and ­Alternative Medicine in the US, last year ­confessed that he was ­disappointed with the organisation he helped ­establish because "one of the purposes of this centre was to investigate and validate alternative approaches. Quite frankly, I must say publicly that it has fallen short." Instead the NCCAM has been "disproving things rather than seeking out and approving things".

So back to what we'll call "Me and My Overdose". On the count of 10 we all knocked back bottles of ­homeopathic remedies. In fact, we all overdosed five times for the sake of the ­newspaper ­photographers present and still ­remained unaffected. But there was a good reason for that, claimed the two homeopaths who turned up to watch proceedings: it's not the amount you take, it's how long you take it for ­(making me wonder if this is just the length of time it takes for an illness to ease on its own); and second, it didn't work ­because it wasn't prescribed to us ­(making me wonder if it only works if someone has told you it will). They also wheeled out – twice – the ­alleged fact that there are "400,000 ­homeopathic doctors in India", as though the proof was not so much in the pudding, but in there being a chef in the kitchen in the first place.

So in the name of science, I ­conducted an experiment. That night, I took a sleeping pill. I hadn't been ­prescribed it, so presumably it shouldn't work. But guess what? I went to sleep! I pondered the wisdom of ­taking the whole bottle to see if this would make no difference to the result – as was the case with my bottle of arnica – but by then I was too tired to follow through. Anyway, I'd already taken one overdose that day.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Feb 2010 | 2:00 am

Obama plan worries cities that rely on space jobs (AP)

AP - President Barack Obama's decision to scrap NASA's back-to-the-moon program in favor of private spacecraft created an outrage in places like Huntsville, where jobs depend on a return lunar trip.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Feb 2010 | 1:48 am

New Look at Big Bang Radiation Refines Age of Universe

Six papers posted online present new satellite snapshots of the earliest light in the universe. By analyzing these images, cosmologists have made the most accurate determination of the age of the cosmos, have directly detected primordial helium gas for the first time and have discovered a key signature of inflation, the leading model of how the cosmos came to be.

The analysis, based on the first seven years of data taken by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, also provides new evidence that the mysterious entity revving up the expansion of the universe resembles Einstein’s cosmological constant, a factor he inserted but later removed from his theory of general relativity. In addition, the data reveal that theorists don’t have the right model to explain the hot gas that surrounds massive clusters of galaxies.

Researchers studying the light, which was generated at the birth of the cosmos but was seen by the satellite as it appeared when it first escaped into space about 400,000 years later, unveiled the findings in six papers posted online January 26. The ancient light, known as the cosmic microwave background, is peppered with hot and cold spots, signs of the tiny primordial lumps from which galaxies grew.

To calculate the age of the universe, scientists including David Spergel of Princeton University and Charles Bennett of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore compared the size of those hot and cold spots today with the size of the spots when the radiation was first released into space. Using data from WMAP along with studies of distant supernovas and other phenomena, the team finds that the universe is 13.75 billion years old, give or take 0.11 billion. (By comparison, the team’s previous calculation, which used the same method but included only five years of satellite observations, had pegged the universe at 13.73 billion years, plus or minus 0.12 billion.)

Data from the WMAP satellite supports the idea that the early universe inflated rapidly, Bennett says. Inflation theory, which posits that the universe ballooned from subatomic scale to the size of a soccer ball during its first 10-33 seconds, has had great success in explaining the structure of the universe. According to the theory, fluctuations in the intensity of microwave background radiation over larger spatial scales should be slightly bigger than those on smaller scales. The satellite, which was launched in 2001 and will make its last observations this fall, has confirmed that behavior.

“This is a really strong endorsement for the theory,” says Scott Dodelson of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill.

The standard model of cosmology — replete with inflation, invisible material known as dark matter and something called dark energy, which is believed to accelerate cosmic expansion—“is a wild idea,” admits Bennett. But with the newest analysis of the satellite observations “we have confronted the model against the data in a substantially new way… and this picture is holding up very well.”

By using the satellite data to measure the speed of acoustic oscillations — the cosmic equivalent of sound waves — astronomers have confirmed that the early universe forged helium in addition to hydrogen, just as the Big Bang theory has long predicted. Previous studies were based on the amount of helium present in the cosmos’ oldest stars rather than a direct detection of the gas in the early universe.

“This opens up a new window for measuring primordial helium,” Dodelson comments.

The detection “is not a surprise, but it’s nice to have confirmation,” Spergel says.

Researchers also analyzed the satellite data to discern the diversity of neutral elementary particles called neutrinos in the universe. Physicists know of three types—the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino and the tau neutrino. But the current data would be consistent with the existence of either three or four types. The analysis of an additional two years of observations from the satellite may settle whether a fourth type exists, says Bennett.

In a separate finding, WMAP detected the abundance of microwave background photons in the vicinity of galaxy clusters. Here, the satellite has come into conflict with theory. Energetic electrons associated with galaxy clusters are known to interact with some of the microwave background photons, kicking the photons to higher energies than the probe can detect. As a result, the probe ought to record fewer microwave-energy photons in the vicinity of clusters.

The probe indeed records a deficit, but it’s only about half the amount predicted by galaxy cluster theory. The South Pole Telescope, a ground-based experiment that also studies the cosmic microwave background, also finds a lower-than-expected deficit. The mismatch suggests that theorists will have to revise their understanding of galaxy clusters, says Bennett.

Image: NASA/WMAP Science Team

See Also:

• Age of Solar System Needs to Be Recalculated
• Earth Gets Billion-Year Life Extension
• Listening to The Big Bang
• Last Days of Big American Physics: One More Triumph, or Just …

Follow us on Twitter @betsymason and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 3 Feb 2010 | 1:41 am

UK 'could face power shortages'

The UK could face power shortages in the years ahead, according to the energy regulator, Ofgem.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Feb 2010 | 1:13 am

Toyota hit by over 100 Prius brake complaints (AP)

AP - Toyota Motor Corp. has been hit by over 100 complaints in the U.S. and Japan about brake problems with the popular Prius hybrid, the latest in a spate of quality troubles for the automaker as it grapples with massive global recalls.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Feb 2010 | 12:30 am

Cargo ship carries supplies to space station

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia launched a cargo vessel loaded with supplies for the International Space Station and its crew on Wednesday, space officials said.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 2 Feb 2010 | 11:58 pm

Why the good guys always draw faster in gunfights – but not fast enough

Gunslingers who wait for their opponent to draw first in a gunfight are faster, psychologists have found. But they're still dead meat

Ever since cowboys first swaggered onto the silver screen, scientists have been struggling to solve a conundrum. Why do the bad guys always get shot in a gunfight when they're the ones who reached for their guns first?

The Nobel laureate and quantum physicist Niels Bohr was so intrigued with the puzzle he came up with a theory: the one who draws second moves faster because he reacts without thinking.

Research by psychologists at Birmingham University has shown that Bohr was right, at least up to a point. In mock gunfights, volunteers were 10% faster when they drew second than when they made the first move.

One of the researchers, experimental psychologist Andrew Welchman, said our brains seem to be wired up in a way that makes reactions faster than conscious thought.

"In our everyday lives, some of the movements we make come about because we decide to make them, while others are forced on us by reacting to events. Bohr's suggestion reflects this everyday intuition. We wanted to know if there was evidence for these reactive movements being swifter than the equivalent proactive ones," Welchman said.

However, the research suggests that for gunslingers chivalry is not the secret to a longer life. Welchman's study found that while a gunslinger moved faster when they drew second, the difference was on average only 21 milliseconds – too slow to beat someone who had already pulled a gun.

"You move faster if you draw second, but you're still going to die," Dr Welchman said. "You'll die satisfied that you were quicker, but that's not much use to you."

Niels Bohr, who worked on the structure of the atom at the beginning of the 20th century, tested his theory by staging his own mock duels with toy guns at his institute in Copenhagen. His gunslinging partner, the Russian-born George Gamow, drew first and lost every time.

"[Bohr] can't have won because he was quicker in reacting," Welchman said. "It must be that he was a really good shot as well as a really good physicist."

The study is published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

The researchers simulated gunfights by sitting volunteers opposite each other and asking them to hit a sequence of buttons as soon as the other person moved. They then looked at which was faster overall: initiating the "gunfight" or reacting.

"As a general strategy for survival, having this system in our brains that gives us quick-and-dirty responses to the environment seems pretty useful. It probably wouldn't save you in a Wild West duel because your brain takes around 200 milliseconds to respond to what your opponent is doing, but it could mean the difference between life and death when you are trying to avoid an oncoming bus," Welchman said.

The research suggests there might be two different circuits in the brain, one for reacting to an external stimulus and the other for starting movements.

Some evidence for this is seen in people with Parkinson's disease who can find intentional movements far more difficult than reactive ones. The study suggests it might be possible to develop strategies to ease movement in such patients.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 2 Feb 2010 | 10:00 pm

Video: Why the good guys draw faster in a gunfight

Mock gunfights at the University of Birmingham prove that subconscious reactions are faster than deliberate actions

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 2 Feb 2010 | 9:50 pm

Future Soldiers May Get Brain Boosters and Digital Buddies (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - The soldiers of the future might controversially boost their brains with drugs and prosthetics, augment their strength with mechanical exoskeletons, and have artificially intelligent "digital buddies" at their beck and call, according to the U.S. Army's Future Soldier Initiative.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Feb 2010 | 9:20 pm

Brazil uproar over massive Amazon dam plan (AFP)

AFP - Environmentalists, indigenous groups and British rock star Sting have denounced a government plan to build the world's third largest hydroelectric dam in the Amazon river basin, which they claim will devastate the region.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Feb 2010 | 7:33 pm

Cot death victims make less serotonin

Mysterious infant deaths linked to chemical deficiency.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/Azs3VkPByfw" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 2 Feb 2010 | 7:00 pm

Haiti earthquake may have primed nearby faults for failure

Geologists say it's time to start preparing for the next big one.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 2 Feb 2010 | 6:11 pm

Study sheds light on the shoot-out

Research inspired by Hollywood cowboy films shows people move 10% more quickly when reacting to a situation.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Feb 2010 | 5:29 pm

Notes and queries: Vincent van Gogh's bilingual letters to Theo

Vincent van Gogh's bilingual letters to Theo; A brief history of South Finchley; How to get the mix in a pill right

Vincent van Gogh and his brother Theo were Dutch, so why did they ­usually write to each other in French?

It is understandable to write in French when the alternative is double Dutch.

Brigid Browne, Calne, Wilts

The short answer is, they usually didn't. From Vincent's first surviving ­letter to Theo, written from The Hague on 29 September 1872, until he joined Theo in Paris in the early spring of 1886, the brothers corresponded in Dutch. When Vincent moved to Arles in the south of France in February 1888 he started writing to Theo in French, and Theo replied in kind. They wrote to each other in French from then on, until Vincent's death in July 1890. As to why – they were both living in France, speaking French every day, so it ­probably seemed more natural. 

Lynne Richards (translator, Van Gogh Letters), Seaford, East Sussex

Middlesex, Wessex, Sussex, Essex – what happened to Nossex?

If Nossex became Norfolk (N&Q, 27 January), why didn't Sussex become Suffolk?

Allan Ramsay, Buxton

I don't know about the missing South Finchley (N&Q, 27 January), but when it comes to Acton there's South, North, East, West, Central, Town and Mainline. Does any other place in the world have more stations named from it?

Roger Backhouse, Ilford

If you look on the map, East Finchley is South Finchley. There used to be three villages, North End (North Finchley), East End (East Finchley) and Church End (Finchley Central). Anyone born there still calls it Church End. My grandmother used to walk on paths ­between the three villages.

Jane O'Mahoney, Launceston, Cornwall

The history of these compass-point areas of London suburbs ­often lies in their transport development. North Finchley was the name given to a tram terminus, while the railway station at East Finchley was originally known as East End, Finchley; the company changed the name of the station, and thus of the suburb. This was a frequent process.

There is a West Finchley station but no South Finchley station. At Harrow, the District Railway built its station in Roxeth and named it South Harrow, while in the hamlet of Hooking Green the Metropolitan Railway called its ­station North Harrow. The same ­railway also coined West Harrow, but there has never been an East Harrow.

Michael J Smith, Derby

Where does the "curry" in to curry ­favour originate from?

The curry has nothing to do with Indian food – it comes from the Old French meaning "to prepare" or "to put in order". We retain it today when referring to the rubbing down and dressing of horses, as in curry-combing. Interestingly, the "favour" part of the phrase is a corruption of Favel, a chestnut horse in a 14th century French romance that became a symbol of cunning and duplicity; hence "to rub down Favel" meant to use the cunning that he personified, and to "curry favour" has come to mean to ingratiate oneself through ­obsequious behaviour.

Nader Fekri, Hebden Bridge, W Yorks

How do pill manufacturers ensure that the chemicals are evenly distributed? What percentage error, if any, is allowed?

They stir it, exactly the same as any cook. A properly made Christmas cake requires stirring, stirring, ­stirring, and when that includes ­particles of very different sizes – flour and sultanas – it is a harder task than mixing ­powders and crystals.

But just as a commercial cake ­manufacturer will use industrial-scale ­stirring, the science and technology of pharmacological stirring is quite a science. The enquirer should consult the Handbook of Industrial Mixing: Science and Practice.

John Davies, Haverbreaks, Lancaster

Why are there no female Formula One drivers?

I'd like to think it's because women have more sense, but I suspect it's because the racing fraternity couldn't handle being beaten by a woman.

Gordon Vassell, Hull

Because we have better things to do than drive round and round in circles.

Sue Rowlands, Chorlton, Ches

It couldn't have anything to do with Max Mosley, could it?

Geoffrey Rider, Ripon, N Yorks

Any answers?

Why are bad reviews more fun to read than good ones?

Phil Watts, London SE11

Did Genghis Khan know that what he was doing was wrong?

Edward Hubbard, Tamworth, Staffs

When did corks start to be used in wine bottles? What was used before cork?

Robin Reeves, London SW19

Send questions and answers to nq@guardian.co.uk. Please include name, address and phone number.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 2 Feb 2010 | 5:05 pm

Reactions Faster than Actions, Study Finds

People move faster when reacting than when initiating the same movement.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Feb 2010 | 5:02 pm

NASA: New Space Plan Will Take Months (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - NASA and President Barack Obama's administration expect to spend months working out the specifics for their new plan for U.S. space exploration, even as some within the space agency mourn the loss of its current effort to send astronauts back to the moon.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Feb 2010 | 5:00 pm

Is 'Water Birth' Safe?

Supermodel Gisele Bundchen used a water birth to bring her son Benjamin into the world.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Feb 2010 | 4:40 pm

Obama: cap-and-trade may be separate in Senate bill (Reuters)

Reuters - President Barack Obama acknowledged on Tuesday that a controversial "cap-and-trade" mechanism to fight climate change could be separated from other aspects of an energy bill before the U.S. Senate.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Feb 2010 | 4:18 pm

Tsunami Warning System: Can it Save Indonesia?

For all of the hell that Indonesia's been though in the past five years, its people sure could use some good news. Unfortunately, the latest round of reports are a mixed bag, and a fairly ominous one at that. First, ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 2 Feb 2010 | 3:41 pm

New 'Underwater Plane' To Explore Ocean Depths

U.K. company Virgin Limited Edition recently announced the Necker Nymph, a three-person "aero-submarine" that can dive to depths of 36,000 feet.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Feb 2010 | 3:16 pm

New Spider-Man Device Could Let Humans Walk on Walls

A new high-tech suction device could allow humans to walk on walls like Spider-Man.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Feb 2010 | 3:07 pm

US retreat leaves China in pole position for return to moon

New age of space exploration beckons, say experts, as Nasa pullout leaves door open for other countries

The Chinese space agency could land its first astronauts on the moon within a decade in a move that would mark the beginning of a new age of lunar exploration, experts said today.

The decision by the Obama administration to scrap Nasa's plans to return to the moon leave China well placed to become the second nation to land humans on the lunar surface. "The moon is an obvious target for China and they could be there in 2020," said Ken Pounds, professor of space science at Leicester University.

The US president's budget proposal, unveiled on Monday, lacked the funds to sustain Nasa's $81bn Constellation programme, the spaceships and rockets designed to put humans back on the moon by 2020. But the decision to scrap Nasa's plans for a permanent return has left the door open for other countries.

China has lifted astronauts into orbit and sent its first robotic missions to the moon. India found water on the surface with its first lunar mission last year, and plans to launch astronauts into Earth orbit in 2016. Japan, too, has sent a satellite to the moon, returning extraordinary HDTV video of the surface.

With the US space agency out of the running, the leading contender for a return to the moon is China. In 2004, government officials announced an unmanned lunar exploration programme that would put satellites in lunar orbit, touch down on the surface and finally bring home up to two kilograms of rock samples before 2020.

The second probe in the programme is expected to launch in October this year. It will scan the surface of the moon from an altitude of 60 miles and look for suitable landing sites for future missions.

The Chinese human spaceflight programme has progressed at speed on $2bn a year, roughly one tenth of the budget Nasa receives. After only four unmanned test flights, the first Chinese astronaut flew in Earth orbit in 2003. Five years later, China became only the third country to complete a spacewalk, paving the way for work on a space station.

Since then the Chinese space programme has grown to include plans to launch three space stations between 2011 and 2015 and, if funding permits, to send a crewed mission to the moon, perhaps as early as 2022. Development of the first Chinese lunar rover is under way and it is scheduled to launch on a three-month mission to the lunar equator in 2013.

Experts are waiting to see how the Chinese space agency reacts to Obama's plans for Nasa.

"China might rub their hands and think this is their chance to head for the moon, or they might see that the pressure is off and not rush things," said Pounds.

The former chief administrator at Nasa, Michael Griffin, has already criticised Obama's plans as an admission that Nasa will not be a significant player in human space flight for the foreseeable future.

Giving testimony to the Senate in 2007, he said it was likely that "China will be able to put people on the moon before we will be able to get back". He added: "I admire what they have done, but I am concerned that it will leave the United States in its wake." Pounds said: "The Americans are the only ones who can say 'we've been there, done that,' but the point is they are not there now.

"The moon is very visible and any proposition by another country to set up a permanent presence there would be unacceptable to the Americans."

A crewed mission to the moon in the 21st century will be a different beast from the Apollo programme. The blurred images would be replaced by colour HDTV footage. The communications would be clear and frequent. From a permanent base, astronauts would truly explore the moon instead of only scratching the surface. The venture could be commercial and scientific in ways that were not possible 40 years ago.

"The pictures from Apollo wouldn't compare with what we might get from Chinese rovers on the surface," said Pounds. "The Obama administration has made the decision as if they are the only ones doing human spaceflight. If they were, it might make sense to go on to an asteroid or one of the moons of Jupiter, but they're not. The moon is going to be a target for other countries and having a presence there is going to be a political issue."

Space races

• China was the third country to launch its own manned space missions in 2003 and is now talking of a space station by 2020. Beijing is also in early stages of planning a lunar mission.

• India began satellite missions to the moon in 2008 and plans to send its own astronauts into space by 2016. Rakesh Sharma became the first Indian in orbit in 1984 on a Soviet mission.

• Russia will taxi US astronauts to the international space station when the space ­shuttle programme ends. It plans a mission to Mars, but going to the moon seems a lower priority.

• The European Space Agency concentrates on partnership in the international space station and at present has an eight strong astronauts corps. It has recently – but before Obama's announcement – talked about grabbing a seat on someone else's moon mission.

• Brazil is behind in the space race but is hoping to relaunch an unmannned programme that has been on hold since a launchpad disaster killed 21 people in 2003. It also plans a new generation of satellites to monitor agriculture, territory, deforestation and mineral rescources.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 2 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Obama budget backs basic science

Climate and clean energy receive a boost but NASA's Moon mission bites the dust.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 2 Feb 2010 | 2:52 pm

Smashed asteroids may be related to dinosaur killer

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Astronomers have found a comet-like object they believe was created by the collision of two asteroids, possible siblings of the rogue rock blamed for killing the dinosaurs millions of years ago.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 2 Feb 2010 | 2:17 pm

No apology from IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri for glacier fallacy

Head of UN climate change body 'not at fault' for false claim Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035

The embattled chief of the UN's climate change body has hit out at his critics and refused to resign or apologise for a ­damaging mistake in a landmark 2007 report on global warming.

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said it would be hypocritical to apologise for the false claim that ­Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035, because he was not personally responsible for that part of the report. "You can't expect me to be personally responsible for every word in a 3,000 page report," he said.

The IPCC issued a statement that expressed regret for the mistake, but Pachauri said a personal apology would be a "populist" step.

"I don't do too many populist things, that's why I'm so unpopular with a certain section of society," he said.

In a robust defence of his position and of the science of climate change, Pachauri said:

• The mistake had seriously damaged the IPCC's credibility and boosted the efforts of climate sceptics.

• It was an isolated mistake, down to human error and "totally out of character" for the panel.

• It does not undermine the "basic truth" that human activity is causing temperatures to rise.

• That he would not resign and was ­subject to lies about his personal income and lifestyle.

Pachauri spoke as the second day of the Guardian's investigation into the emails stolen from the University of East Anglia reveals how climate scientists acted to keep research papers they did not like out of academic journals. One UEA scientist, Dr Keith Briffa, wrote to a colleague to ask him for help rejecting a paper from a journal which he edited. "Confidentially I now need a hard, and if required, extensive case for rejecting." The request apparently broke the convention that the review process should be independent and anonymous. Briffa was not able to comment because of an ongoing independent review into the stolen emails.

In another email, sent in March 2003, the leading US climate scientist Prof Michael Mann suggested ostracising a journal for publishing a paper that attacked his work.

"I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues … to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal." Mann denies any attempt to "stifle legitimate sceptical views".

The emails also reveal that one of the most influential data sets in climate science – the "hockey stick" graph of temperature over the past 1,000 years – was controversial not just with sceptics but among climate scientists themselves. "I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story [in the forthcoming IPCC report], but in reality the situation is not quite so simple," wrote Briffa in September 1999.

In his Guardian interview, Pachauri defended the IPCC's use of so-called "grey literature" – sources outside peer-reviewed academic journals, such as reports from campaign groups, companies and student theses. The false Himalayan glacier claim came from a report by the green group WWF. He said reports of further errors in the IPCC report linked to grey literature were ­spurious and the result of a "factory" of people "only there to create pinpricks and get attention".

Stories that claimed errors about losses from natural disasters and Amazon destruction were false, he said. "We looked into that [Amazon claim] and we're totally satisfied that what's been stated in the report is totally valid."

The IPCC is beginning work on its next climate report, and Pachauri said it would stress to authors and reviewers the importance of checking sources. "Our procedures are very clear on the use of grey literature. Whenever an author uses grey literature they need to double check the source of information is authentic and defensible. People have been using grey literature for quite some time now. Apparently in this [Himalayan glacier] case there has been a failure because authors did not follow the procedures required."

To exclude such reports, he said, would give an incomplete picture. "The reality is that in several parts of the world, which will be influenced by the impacts of climate change, it's an unfortunate fact that we just don't have peer-reviewed material available."

Pachauri also rebutted newspapers' claims that he lives a lavish lifestyle and wears $1,000 suits. He said: "It's ridiculous and it's a bunch of lies."

His salary from the research institute that employs him is fixed in the range of 190,000 rupees (£2,600) a month, he said, while he receives only travel expenses for chairing the IPCC.

He added: "There is a tailor who stitches all my suits for 2,200 rupees (£30)."

The panel's report at the centre of the controversy said: "The likelihood of them [the Himalayan glaciers] disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high," a statement referenced to a report by WWF, which had taken it from a magazine article. It was subsequently found to be wrong.

Questions were raised about the glacier claim in an article in the US journal Science in November, and again by the BBC on 5 December, leading to allegations that Pachauri had been told by Pallava Bagla, the Indian journalist who wrote both, that it was problematic, but failed to act.

But Pachauri said he had not become aware of the problem until January. "If he [Bagla] sent me an email and I didn't see it, I can only say that I'm sorry that I didn't see that email. A lot of my emails are handled by my office and I don't get to see them personally."

Pachauri also said he was taking steps to strengthen the staff employed by the panel. "We're in an information society today and we have to respond adequately and professionally. We've been weak in that regard to be honest. The IPCC is starting to realise we're living in a very different world to what we had in 1988.

"I think this [glacier] mistake has certainly cost us dear, there's no question about it," he said. "Everybody thought that what the IPCC brought out was the gold standard and nothing could go wrong. But look at the larger picture, don't get blinded by this one mistake.

"The larger picture is solid, it's convincing and it's extremely important. How can we lose sight of what climate change is going to do to this planet? What it's already doing to this planet?"

• The standfirst of the original version of this story included the phrase "Himalaya ice caps". That has now been corrected.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 2 Feb 2010 | 1:31 pm

The 'New' NASA Will Look Back at Earth

New NASA budget gives $1.8 billion to Earth and climate science, including re-flying of carbon observatory.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Feb 2010 | 1:28 pm

Video: Solar Eclipse Seen From Space

A European satellite launched late last year has returned a new animation of the annular solar eclipse that occurred on Jan. 15.

The images returned by the Proba 2 mission are the first of their kind and part of the first set of data released by the European Space Agency. A similar, more robust sun-observing platform, the Solar and Helisopheric Observatory, is unable to see eclipses.

The images that compose the animation were taken about one minute apart. The eclipse was viewable from Earth for more than 11 minutes.

The new satellite is just beginning its lifespan and was largely conceived as a test of new hardware more than a scientific mission. But the small satellite — a bit smaller than a cubic meter (or about 35 cubic feet) — will also deliver this kind of novel view of the sun.

Via Space.com

See Also:

• Eclipse Shadow on Earth Seen From Space
• Solar Eclipse Images Show Dazzling Corona Detail
• Tonight’s Lunar Eclipse: Last Chance Until 2010
• Eclipse of the Century Live Online Tonight
• Exploratorium Broadcasts Total Solar Eclipse From China

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 2 Feb 2010 | 1:03 pm

NASA picks 5 firms for commercial spaceflight plan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. space agency on Tuesday awarded $50 million in grants to five private firms in a first step to implement President Barack Obama's vision of turning over space transportation to the commercial sector.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 2 Feb 2010 | 1:02 pm

Game Accessory Manufacturers Make Big Money

Accessories for gaming consoles like the PS3 and Xbox 360 make up a multi-million dollar market that is only expected to grow.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Feb 2010 | 1:01 pm

IPCC flooded by criticism

Climate body slammed for errors and potential conflicts of interest.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 2 Feb 2010 | 12:41 pm

The Potential for a 40-MPH Man

The human frame is built to handle running speeds up to 40 miles per hour, scientists say. The only limiting factor is not how much brute force is required to push off the ground as previously thought, but how fast our muscle fibers can contract to ramp up that force.

“If you just find a way to rev up those contractile fibers for the muscle, then everything else from human biology and gait would allow us to be that fast,” said physiologist Peter Weyand of Southern Methodist University, lead author of a study published Jan. 21 in the Journal of Applied Physiology.

For years, scientists have sought to find the physiological limits of human running speed, and to understand why even the world’s fastest man, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, can’t outrun some animals. Bolt’s top speed of 27.3 miles an hour can’t match that of horses, dogs or the hopping kangaroo, which can travel at 35 miles per hour.

“The current best guess as to why we can’t run any faster is it’s something to do with the maximum force that our legs can impose or experience,” said zoologist Jim Usherwood of the Royal Veterinary College in London.

Earlier studies found that elite sprinters and average sprinters outperformed their mediocre counterparts in two ways: They were able to push harder on the ground in relation to their body’s weight with each step, and they were able to do that in a shorter period of time. For instance, Bolt generates almost a ton of force in his leg in the less than a tenth of a second his foot is on the ground, Weyand said. The force you can generate before leaving the ground is a function of the rate at which muscle fibers generate force multiplied by the time the foot touches the ground.

But the previous work didn’t reveal whether it is the amount of time the foot is pushing on the ground or the maximum force the leg is capable of that limits human running speed.

To get to the bottom of the human speed limit, Weyand and colleagues studied seven athletes, from an all-American track star to a dancer, as they sprinted forward, hopped on one leg and ran backwards on a turbo treadmill outfitted with force sensors. The team measured speed, upward force as each foot struck the ground, and the time the foot spent on the ground between strides.

The one-legged hop generated much more force in the leg than sprinting did, mainly because a runner has to jump higher in order to land on the same foot. Because the athlete’s legs were capable of generating more force than when they run, the amount of force can’t be what’s limiting the runners’ forward speeds.

The backwards run showed that the contact time with the ground was almost identical during each athlete’s fastest forward and backward runs, suggesting contact time was the limiting factor keeping them from going faster in any direction.

This suggests the only way to increase speed is to generate force more quickly during the limited time the foot is on the ground. The key to doing this is increasing how fast the muscle fibers can contract to produce force. If that were possible, Weyand’s team calculated that humans could theoretically run as fast as 35 or 40 miles per hour, based on our gait and the maximum forces our muscles can generate.

One option would be to increase the proportion of ultrafast 2X type muscle fiber, one of three types of mammalian muscle fibers. Studies have shown that athletes can slightly increase their 2X fibers by training intensely and then taking a break for a few weeks, he said.

But even if a training regimen could be designed to quicken our muscle fibers enough to achieve our full running potential, animals like cheetahs and dogs will still leave us in the dust. These animals outrun us not because they have faster muscle fibers, but because of their unique gait, the study concluded.

“When their forelimbs hit the ground, their whole spine just bends like crazy,” Weyand said. That allows them to keep their feet on the ground longer, building up force, while still maintaining a forward momentum.

Usherwood agreed with the basic conclusion of the paper, that “actually we can produce lots more force if we do all sorts of odd things like hopping on one leg. Just the biggest force you can cope with with doesn’t determine how fast you sprint.”

But he’s skeptical about the potential for a 40-mile-an-hour man. ‘The authors are playing a fun game, of ‘what if,’” he said. But even if our muscle fibers were faster, other limitations, like how fast we can swing our legs, are sure to kick in, he said.

Photo of Usain Bolt: antonhazelwinkel/Flickr

Citation: “The biological limits to running speed are imposed from the ground up” Peter G. Weyand, Rosalind F. Sandell, Danille Naomi Leoni Prime, and Matthew W. Bundle, Journal of Applied Physiology, Jan. 21, 2010

See Also:

• Bolt Is Freaky Fast, But Nowhere Near Human Limits
• To Run Better, Start by Ditching Your Nikes
• These Toes Were Made for Running

Follow us on Twitter @tiaghose and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 2 Feb 2010 | 12:15 pm

Climate scientist defends results

The professor at the centre of a row about climate research conducted by the University of East Anglia defends his work.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Feb 2010 | 12:15 pm

Social Networks Attract Criminal Organizations

Gang members are increasingly taking to Twitter and Facebook, inadvertently providing invaluable information to law enforcement.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 2 Feb 2010 | 12:10 pm

Plant-Virus Tricks Teach Evolutionary Pest Management

The cucumber mosaic virus uses a clever subterfuge to spread — it changes the way host plants smell. It’s a neat example of evolutionary exploitation and a lesson in how managing the dynamics of evolution may help control pests.

The virus causes plants to produce aphid-attracting odors. At the same time, it makes the plant sickly. Bugs arrive at the plant, find it a poor home, and quickly depart. But their brief landing is sufficient to pick up the virus, which they carry to other, healthier plants.

“The mode of transmission is a major factor influencing the effects of pathogens on plants,” said Mark Mescher, a Penn State University chemical ecologist. “In human and agricultural systems, it’s time to start moving beyond thinking how to directly manage a pest or pathogen, and towards managing their evolution.”

Mescher, who describes the transmission of the cucumber mosaic virus in a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, specializes in the chemical cues plants use to communicate. These are surprisingly sophisticated: His earlier work involved predator-attracting chemicals released by plants when eaten by grazers.

In the PNAS study, Mescher’s team showed how aphids — tiny, ubiquitous insects that feed on plant sap — preferred infected squash plants, though they left shortly after landing. This is likely because chemical cue production was doubled in infected plants: Though withered and sickly, they smelled large and healthy from a distance.

The findings add to a growing body of research on odor-changing diseases. Trees afflicted by Dutch Elm disease produce insect-attracting chemicals, as does wheat infected with rust fungi. In the animal world, research has found that hamsters infected with Leishmaniasis, a flesh-eating disease common in much of the developing world, attract disease-spreading sandflies. Another study found that mosquitoes appear drawn by smell to people with malaria, though the disease is as dangerous to them as to us.

Studies like these hint at little-appreciated disease dynamics, in which pathogens have evolved subtle ways of spreading themselves, with their ostensible targets just one stop in a network of transmission. They may also suggest new targets for controlling diseases that have evaded standard treatments.

Mescher, who is now studying malarial odor changes, said that such interventions represent a comprehensive approach to disease. “We need to think of what the transmission dynamics are that lead to more harmful pathogens, and what dynamics lead to less harmful pathogens,” he said.

Image: (A) A healthy cucumber plant; (B) an infected plant; (C) aphids; )D) aphids./PNAS

See Also:

• Amazing Parasites Turn Ants Into Berries
• Plants Have a Social Life, Too
• Butterfly and Wasp: A Devious, Deceitful Cycle of Life

Citation: “Deceptive chemical signals induced by a plant virus attract insect vectors to inferior hosts.” By Kerry E. Mauck, Consuelo M. DeMoraes, and Mark C. Mescher. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 107 No. 5, February 2, 2010.

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecological tipping points.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 2 Feb 2010 | 12:03 pm

No (Primordial) Soup for You: Origins of Life Were Not What you Think

The predominant theory of the origin of life would make a terrific setting for a space horror movie, or a particularly tense episode of Star Trek: picture early Earth, a noxious place devoid of oxygen, its young oceans choked with ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 2 Feb 2010 | 11:53 am

Wiping out human variation | Dan Kennedy

A test allowing people to see if they have 'preventable genetic diseases' gives them the chilling choice of eliminating difference

Two weeks after our daughter was born we saw a geneticist – a polite, well-manicured woman in a business suit who would confirm (or not) our paediatrician's suspicion that our child had achondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism.

The geneticist examined Becky and pointed to several characteristics of achondroplasia: a larger-than-typical soft spot at the top of her head, a slight separation between the third and fourth fingers of each hand (sort of a permanent Mr Spock greeting) and fatty deposits on the small of her back.

Following the examination, she sat us down and began speaking in her best concerned-doctor tone of voice. "I want you to know," she said, "that there really wasn't anything you could have done about this."

What she meant – and what we instantly knew she meant – was that there would have been no way of, and no reason to, screen for achondroplasia ahead of time. No way to terminate the pregnancy and try again, and to hope for something that she believed, or that she assumed we believed, would be better.

We were flabbergasted at the boldness with which she stated her case, but I suppose we shouldn't have been surprised. We have all been culturally conditioned to believe we are entitled to the perfect child. And a little girl who would grow up to be four feet tall with exceedingly short arms and legs does not fit that paradigm.

Seventeen years later, we are on the verge of being able to do something when our image of perfection is threatened. The New York Times reports that a company called Counsyl has developed a genetic test for about 100 genetic conditions. And it's cheap: $349, or $698 for a couple.

The Counsyl test will not be given in utero. Rather, it's designed to determine whether prospective parents are silently carrying any genetic diseases that might convince them they'd be better off adopting, or trying in vitro fertilization, or not having kids at all. And there are some truly horrible genetic diseases on the list – diseases like Tay-Sachs, which leads to death in early childhood.

But when I looked for what Counsyl rather ominously calls "preventable genetic diseases" that are covered by its test, I immediately saw two forms of dwarfism. Achondroplasia wasn't among them, and there is a good reason for that: it's a dominant condition. If you have the gene, you're a dwarf, and you are by definition a carrier.

What was on the list were two recessive forms of dwarfism, diastrophic dysplasia and cartilage-hair hypoplasia, both of which are perfectly compatible with a good quality of life. By way of illustration for you Little People, Big World fans, Matt Roloff has diastrophic dysplasia. His wife, Amy, and their son Zach have achondroplasia.

Moreover, the former head of our Little People of America regional group has cartilage-hair hypoplasia. He's a schoolteacher who rides a customised motorcycle and is married to a woman with achondroplasia.

In other words, these are not conditions that should be labelled as "preventable genetic diseases". That they would be considered as such underscores our conflicted attitude toward difference. We celebrate it, but we fear it as well, and would stamp it out if given the chance.

Nearly a decade ago I was researching my book on dwarfism, Little People, partly a memoir but mostly an extended meditation on the cultural meaning of difference. I had the pleasure of spending the better part of a day with a psychiatrist named Dorothy Wertz. Her husband was dying, and she would be dead within two years. Yet she cut a flamboyant figure, with a strong physical presence and down-to-earth manner.

In the late 1990s Wertz had conducted a study of about 2,000 people – one-half genetics professionals, one-quarter primary care physicians and one-quarter patients. They were asked whether they would choose abortion if achondroplasia were detected in utero. Among the genetics professionals, 57% would opt for termination; among physicians, 29%; and among patients, 24%.

It was a startling finding, made no less so by the fact that a significant minority of all three groups would choose abortion even if they learned their child's only genetic difference was a predisposition to obesity, of all things. In that context it is no wonder Counsyl would label dwarfism a "disease" that is "preventable".

The problem with such an attitude is that it could lead to the elimination of all sorts of genetic variations. Dwarfism isn't exactly a disease, but it does carry with it a variety of physical complications, mainly orthopaedic. Yet it's a normal part of the human spectrum. What implications might there be for the species if it were erased from our collective genome?

And what about other types of human variation that may have some genetic basis, like bipolar disorder, associated with artistic creativity? What about homosexuality – not a disorder at all, but not exactly welcome in many families? Or why go for a kid with average intelligence when you can try again and maybe produce the next Einstein?

Becky today is a happy, healthy high-school junior who takes care of the nursery-school children in church, writes for the school paper and is starting to think about college. There is every reason to believe she'll have as good and successful a life as her average-height 19-year-old brother, Tim.

Yet what if we had been told we were at risk of having a child with a "preventable genetic disease"? What would we have done? I'd like to think the answer would have been "nothing", but who knows? In 1992, we could at least feel secure in the knowledge that there wasn't anything to be done.

In 2010, and in the years and decades to come, we will not only be able to do something, but I fear we will be expected to do something as well. It's a chilling prospect, and one we haven't even begun to talk about. The time to start talking is now.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 2 Feb 2010 | 11:30 am

Climate change emails between scientists reveal flaws in peer review | Fred Pearce

A close reading of the hacked emails exposes the real process of science, its jealousies and tribalism
Read more: doubts about "hockey stick" graph revealed

No apology from IPCC chief Pachauri for glacier fallacy

Scientists sometimes like to portray what they do as divorced from the everyday jealousies, rivalries and tribalism of human relationships. What makes science special is that data and results that can be replicated are what matters and the scientific truth will out in the end.

But a close reading of the emails hacked from the University of East Anglia in November exposes the real process of everyday science in lurid detail.

Many of the emails reveal strenuous efforts by the mainstream climate scientists to do what outside observers would regard as censoring their critics. And the correspondence raises awkward questions about the effectiveness of peer review – the supposed gold standard of scientific merit – and the operation of the UN's top climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The scientists involved disagree. They say they were engaged not in suppressing dissent but in upholding scientific standards by keeping bad science out of peer-reviewed journals. Either way, when passing judgment on papers that directly attack their own work, they were mired in conflicts of interest that would not be allowed in most professions.

The cornerstone of maintaining the quality of scientific papers is the peer review system. Under this, papers submitted to scientific journals are reviewed anonymously by experts in the field. Conducting reviews is seen as part of the job for academics, who are generally not paid for the work.

The papers are normally sent back to the authors for improvement and only published when the reviewers give their approval. But the system relies on trust, especially if editors send papers to ­reviewers whose own work is being criticised in the paper. It also relies on anonymity, so reviewers can give candid opinions.

Cracks in the system have been obvious for years. Yesterday it emerged that 14 leading researchers in a different field – stem cell research – have written an open letter to journal editors to highlight their dissatisfaction with the process. They allege that a small scientific clique is using peer review to block papers from other researchers.

Many will see a similar pattern in the emails from UEA's Climatic Research Unit, which brutally expose what happens behind the scenes of peer review and how a chance meeting at a barbecue years earlier had led to one journal editor being suspected of being in the "greenhouse sceptics camp".

The head of the CRU, Professor Phil Jones, as a top expert in his field, was regularly asked to review papers and he sometimes wrote critical reviews that may have had the effect of blackballing papers criticising his work.

Here is how it worked in one case.

A key component in the story of 20th-century warming is data from sparse weather stations in Siberia. This huge area appears to have seen exceptional warming of up to 2C in the past century. But in such a remote region, actual data is sparse. So how reliable is that data, and do scientists interpret it correctly?

In March 2004, Jones wrote to ­Professor Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, saying that he had "recently rejected two papers [one for the Journal of ­Geophysical Research and one for Geophysical Research Letters] from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised".

He did not specify which papers he had reviewed, nor what his grounds for rejecting them were. But the Guardian has established that one was probably from Lars Kamel a Swedish astrophysicist ­formerly of the University of Uppsala. It is the only paper published on the topic in the journal that year.

Kamel analysed the temperature records from weather stations in part of southern Siberia, around Lake Baikal. He claimed to find much less warming than Jones, despite analysing much the same data.

Kamel told the Guardian: "Siberia is a test case, because it is supposed to be the land area with most warming in the 20th century." The finding sounded important, but his paper was rejected by Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) that year.

Kamel was leaving academic science and never tried to publish it elsewhere. But the draft seen by the Guardian asserts that the difference between his findings on Siberia temperatures and that of Jones is "probably because the CRU compilation contains too little correction for urban warming." He does not, however, justify that conclusion with any data or analysis.Kamel says he no longer has a copy of the anonymous referee judgments on the paper, so we don't know why it was rejected. The paper could be criticised for being slight and for not revealing details about its methods of analysis. A reviewer such as Jones would certainly have been aware of Kamel's views about mainstream climate research, which he had called "pseudo-science". He would also have known that its publication in a journal like GRL would have attracted the attention of professional climate sceptics. Nonetheless, the paper raised important questions about the quality of CRU's Siberian data, and was a rare example of someone trying to replicate Jones's analysis. On those grounds alone, some would have recommended its publication.

Kamel's paper admits the discrepancy "does not necessarily mean the CRU surface record for the entire globe is in error". But it argues that the result suggests it "should be checked in more regions and even globally". Jones was not able to comment on the incident.

Critics of Jones such as the prominent sceptical Stephen McIntyre, who runs the Climate Audit blog have long accused him of preventing critical research from having an airing. McIntyre wrote on his web site in December: "CRU's policies of obstructing critical articles in the peer-reviewed literature and withholding data from critics have unfortunately placed issues into play that might otherwise have been settled long ago." He also says obstructing publication undermine claims that all is well in scientific peer review.

Dr Myles Allen, a climate modeller at the University of Oxford and Professor Hans von Storch, a climate scientist at the Institute for Coastal Research, in Geesthacht, Germany signed a joint column in Nature when the email hacking story broke, in which they said that "no grounds have arisen to doubt the validity of the thermometer-based temperature record since it began in about 1850." But that argument is harder to make if such evidence, flawed though it might be, is actively being kept out of the journals.

In another email exchange CRU scientist Dr Keith Briffa initiates what looks like an attempt to have a paper rejected. In June 2003, as an editor of an unnamed journal, Briffa emailed fellow tree-ring researcher Edward Cook, a researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, saying: "Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting [an unnamed paper] – to ­support Dave Stahle's and really as soon as you can. Please."

Stahle is a tree-ring professor from the University of Arkansas. This request appears to subvert the convention that reviewers should be both independent and anonymous.

Cook replied later that day: "OK, today. Promise. Now, something to ask from you." The favour was to provide some data to help Cook review a paper that attacked his own tree-ring work. "If published as is, this paper could really do some damage," he said. "It won't be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically, but it suffers from the classic problem of pointing out theoretical deficiencies, without showing that their improved [inverse regression] method is actually better in a practical sense."

Briffa was unable to comment. Cook told the Guardian: "These emails are from a long time ago and the details are not ­terribly fresh in my mind."

Jones did not restrict his harsh criticism of papers he saw as flawed to pre-publication reviews. He and Mann also had a reputation for harsh criticism of journals that published papers they disagreed with.

In March 2003, Mann discussed encouraging colleagues to "no longer submit [papers] to, or cite papers in" Climate Research. He was angry about that journal's publication of a series of sceptical papers "that couldn't get published in a reputable journal", according to Mann. His anger at the journal had evidently been building for some time, but was focused in 2003 on a paper published in January that year and written by the Harvard astrophysicists Willie Soon and Sally Balunias. The pair claimed that Mann's famous hockey stick graph of global temperatures over the past 1,000 years was wrong. After analysing 240 studies of past temperatures from tree rings and other sources, they said "the 20th century is neither the warmest century over the last 1,000 years, nor is it the most extreme". It could have been warmer a thousand years before, they suggested.

Harvard press-released the paper under the headline "20th century climate not so hot", which would have pleased lobbyists against the climate change consensus from the American Petroleum Institute and George C Marshall Institute, both of which had helped pay for the research. Mann told me at the time the paper was "absurd, almost laughable". He said Soon and Balunias made no attempt in the paper to show whether the warmth they found at different places and times round the world in past eras was contemporaneous in the way current global warming is. If they were just one-off scattered warm events they did not demonstrate any kind of warm era at all. Soon did not respond to Guardian requests to discuss the paper.

The emails show Mann debating with others what he should do. In March 2003, he told Jones: "I believed our only choice was to ignore this paper. They've already achieved what they wanted – the claim of a peer-reviewed paper. There is nothing we can do about that now, but the last thing we want to do is bring attention to this paper"

But Jones told Mann: "I think the sceptics will use this paper to their own ends and it will set [the field of paleoclimate research] back a number of years if it goes unchallenged." He was right. The Soon and Balunias paper was later read into the Senate record and taken up by the Bush administration, which attempted to get it cited in a report from the Environmental Protection Agency against the wishes of the report's authors.

Persuaded that the paper could not be ignored, Mann assembled a group of colleagues to review it. The group included regular CRU emailers Jones, Dr Keith Briffa, Dr Tom Wigley and Dr Kevin Trenberth. They sent their findings to the journal's editorial board, arguing that Soon's study was little more than anecdote. It had cherry-picked data showing warm periods in different places over several centuries and had provided no evidence that they demonstrated any overall warming of the kind seen in the 20th century.

The emails reveal that when the journal failed to disown the paper, the scientists figured a "coup" had taken place, and that one editor in particular, a New Zealander called Chris de Freitas, was fast-tracking sceptical papers on to its pages. Mann saw an irony in what had happened. "This was the danger of always criticising the sceptics for not publishing in the peer-reviewed literature. Obviously, they found a solution to that – take over a journal." But Mann had a solution. "I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. ­Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues … to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board."

Was this improper pressure? Bloggers responding to the leaking of these emails believe so. Mann denies wanting to "stifle legitimate sceptical views". He maintains that he merely wanted to uphold scientific standards. "Please understand the context of this," he told the Guardian after the scandal broke. "This was in response to a very specific, particularly egregious incident in which one editor of the journal was ­letting in a paper that clearly did not meet the standards of quality for the journal."

Naturally de Freitas defends his actions during the incident. "I was never ever found to have done anything wrong, even in the rumpus over the Soon and Balunias paper. All accusations against me were fully investigated and my performance as editor of this journal was shown to be flawless."

But many on the 10-man editorial board agreed with Mann. They concluded that their colleague de Freitas had ignored the anonymous advice of four reviewers to reject the paper. There was a revolt. Their chief editor von Storch wrote an editorial saying the Soon paper shouldn't have appeared because of "severe methodological flaws". After their publisher Otto Kinne refused to publish the editorial, von Storch and four other board members resigned in protest. Subsequently Kinne himself admitted that publication had been an error and promised to strengthen the peer review process. Mann had won his argument.

Sceptical climatologist and Cato Institute fellow Pat Michaels alleged in the Wall Street Journal in December last year that the resignations by von Storch and his colleagues were a counter-coup initiated by Mann and Jones. This is vehemently denied by von Storch. While one of the editors who resigned was a colleague of Jones at CRU, von Storch had a track record of independence. If anything, he was regarded as a moderate sceptic. Certainly, he had annoyed both mainstream climate scientists and sceptics.

Also writing in the Wall Street Journal in December, he said: "I am in the pocket of neither Exxon nor Greenpeace, and for this I come under fire from both sides – the sceptics and alarmists – who have fiercely opposing views but are otherwise siblings in their methods and contempt ... I left the post [as chief editor of Climate Research] with no outside pressure, because of insufficient quality control on a bad paper – a sceptic's paper, at that."

The bad blood over this paper lingered. A year later, in July 2004, Jones wrote an email to Mann about two papers recently published in Climate Research – the Soon and Balunias paper and another he ­identified as by "MM". This was almost certainly a paper from the Canadian economist Ross McKitrick and Michaels that returned to an old sceptics' theme. It claimed to find urbanisation dominating global warming trends on land. Jones called it "garbage".

More damagingly, he added in an email to Mann with the subject line "HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL": "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer review literature is!"

This has, rightly, become one of the most famous of the emails. And for once, it means what it seems to mean. Jones and Trenberth, of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, had recently become joint lead authors for a key chapter in the next IPCC assessment report, called AR4.

They had considerable power over what went into those chapters, and to have ruled them out in such a manner would have been a clear abuse of the IPCC process.

Today, neither man attempts to deny that Jones's promise to keep the papers out was a serious error of judgment. Trenberth told the Guardian: "I had no role in this whatsoever. I did not make and was not complicit in that statement of Phil's. I am a veteran of three other IPCC assessments. I am well aware that we do not keep any papers out, and none were kept out. We assessed everything [though] we cannot possibly refer to all literature … Both of the papers referred to were in fact cited and discussed in the IPCC."

In an additional statement agreed with Jones, he said: "AR4 was the first time Jones was on the writing team of an IPCC assessment. The comment was naive and sent before he understood the process."

Some will not be content with that. Jones had been a contributing author to IPCC assessment reports for more than a decade and should have been aware of the rules.

Climate Research is a fairly minor journal. Not so Geophysical Research ­Letters, published by the august American ­Geophysical Union (AGU). But when it began publishing what Mann, Wigley, Jones and others regarded as poor quality sceptical papers, they again responded angrily. GRL provided a home for one of a series of papers by McIntyre and McKitrick challenging the statistical methods used in the hockey stick analysis. When Mann's complaints to the journal were rebuffed, he wrote to colleagues in January 2005: "Apparently the contrarians now have an 'in' with GRL."

Mann had checked out the editor responsible for overseeing the papers, a Yale chemical engineer called James Saiers, and noted his "prior connection" with the same department at the University of Virginia, where sceptic Pat Michaels worked.

He added, "we now know" how various other sceptically tinged papers had got into GRL.

Wigley appeared to agree. "This is truly awful," he said, suggesting to Mann: "If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted."

A year after the row erupted, in 2006, Saiers gave up the GRL post.Sceptics have claimed that this was due to pressure from Wigley, Mann and others. Saiers says his three-year term was up. "My departure had nothing to do with attempts by Wigley or anyone else to have me sacked," he told the Guardian. "Nor was I censured, as I have seen suggested on a blog posting written by McKitrick."

As for Mann's allegation, Saiers does not remember ever talking to Michaels "though I did attend a barbecue at his home back in the early 1990s. Wigley and Mann were too keen to conclude that I was in league with the climate-change sceptics. This kerfuffle could have been avoided if the parties involved would have done more to control their imaginations".

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 2 Feb 2010 | 11:27 am

Climate scientists: who's who in the hacked email controversy

Prof Phil Jones

Stepped aside as director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) after more than a thousand of its emails were published online. In charge of assembly of the past 160 years of global temperature records. "I know I'm on the right side and honest, but I seem to be telling myself this more often recently!"

Prof Michael Mann

Paleoclimatologist at Penn State University. Creator of the "hockey stick" graph of temperatures over past 1,000 years. Co-host at RealClimate.org. "This crowd of charlatans ... look for one little thing they can say is wrong, and thus generalise that the science is entirely compromised."

Prof Keith Briffa

Tree ring researcher at CRU, where he is also deputy director. "I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story ... but in reality the situation is not quite so simple."

Dr Tom Wigley

Australian climate scientist. Former director of CRU, now at University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Father figure in many of the emails. "Why, why, why did you ... not simply say this right at the start?"

Dr Kevin Trenberth

Climate scientist at National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Made waves by linking climate change to hurricane intensity in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. "The fact is we can't account for the lack of warming, and it's a travesty that we can't."

Prof Ben Santer

Alumni of CRU. Climate modeller at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Made waves for attributing climate change to discernible human influence in 1996 IPCC report. "[McIntyre] has no interest in rational scientific discourse. He deals in the currency of threats and intimidation."

Steve McIntyre

Former minerals prospector and now full-time scourge of climate science. Runs Climate Audit website. "CRU's policies of obstructing critical articles in the peer-reviewed literature and withholding data from critics have unfortunately placed issues into play that might otherwise have been settled long ago."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 2 Feb 2010 | 11:11 am

Hubble Spots First Potential Asteroid Collision

The X marks the spot of a suspected head-on collision between two asteroids imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope’s new-and-improved Wide Field Camera.

If it’s confirmed by further observations, it would be the first time that scientists have detected the interplanetary collision between objects in the asteroid belt, though they believe that such occurrences are common.

The complex structure of the debris is what makes astronomers think they may be seeing something new around the sun. The main nucleus of the object, P/2010 A2, is actually located outside its dust halo, something that’s never been seen in a comet-like object before.

“The filamentary appearance of P/2010 A2 is different from anything seen in Hubble images of normal comets, consistent with the action of a different process,” said David Jewitt, an astronomer at the University of California Los Angeles, in a press release.

They hypothesize that the filaments are made up of dust and gravel created by a high speed impact that could have occurred at 11,000 miles per hour.

“If this interpretation is correct, two small and previously unknown asteroids recently collided, creating a shower of debris that is being swept back into a tail from the collision site by the pressure of sunlight,” Jewitt said.

Image: NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt. XL version available.

See Also:

• Wednesday’s Near-Earth Asteroid Caught on Film
• Earth to Get Close Shave Wednesday From Newly Discovered Asteroid …
• Video: The Asteroid That Will Almost Hit Earth
• Asteroid Impact Craters on Earth as Seen From Space
• To Deflect an Asteroid, Try a Lasso, Not a Nuke
• How to Defend Earth Against an Asteroid Strike
• NASA Falling Short of Asteroid Detection Goals
• First-Ever Asteroid Tracked From Space to Earth

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 2 Feb 2010 | 11:10 am

Bizarre Asteroid Collision is One For The X-Files

This mystery object, located 100 million miles from Earth, may really be the aftermath of a hypervelocity collision between two asteroids.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 2 Feb 2010 | 11:10 am

NASA Radar Jet Acquires First 3-D Image of Haiti

NASA’s radar-equipped jet has returned its first 3-D image of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. This false-color image clearly shows the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault extending east of the city.

The image supports a Jan. 21 U.S. Geological Survey report that suggested the section of the fault (indicated by the black arrow above) nearest to Port-au-Prince (yellow arrow) did not slip significantly in the magnitude 7 Jan. 12 earthquake.

The new image, taken by JPL’s Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar attached to a modified Gulfstream III jet, shows that the ground rupture moved westward from the epicenter. The section of the fault in the image did not rupture, a situation that increases the risk of another significant earthquake in the future.

The USGS report noted that two large earthquakes struck the area in 1751 and 1770, most likely on the Enriquillo fault, which runs from western Haiti into the Dominican Republic. If a similar succession occurs in the coming years, it could be devastating, particularly if Haiti is not rebuilt with this risk in mind.

The UAVSAR will be flown over the area repeatedly in the coming days. Data from the first flights will be compared to later flights to measure minute changes in the landscape that could reveal how quickly the earth on either side of the fault is moving and building up stress. This will help scientists assess the risk of more quakes.

The colors in the image, which shows a swath of about 12.5 miles, are the result of three different radar polarizations that make vegetation appear green, water appear blue and urban areas look reddish.

After imaging Haiti, the jet will head to Central America on a previously scheduled trip to study volcanoes, forests and Mayan ruins. NASA says the UAVSAR will eventually be adapted to fly in unmanned aircraft such as the Northrop Grumman Global Hawk.

Image: NASA/JPL

See Also:

• Satellite Photos of Haiti Before and After the Earthquake
• New 3-D Aerial Images of Haiti Will Aid Recovery and Research
• Scientists Scramble to Analyze Haiti’s Seismic Risk
• Haiti Aftershocks Will Continue for Months, Maybe Years
• Google Releases New High-Res Satellite Images of Haiti
• NASA Sends Airborne Radar to Map Haiti Faults in 3-D

Follow us on Twitter @betsymason and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 2 Feb 2010 | 11:05 am

Global Warming May Cook Sea Turtle Eggs

Turtle breeding grounds may soon become makeshift ovens.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 2 Feb 2010 | 10:00 am

New Device Could Let Humans Walk on Walls

A new high-tech suction device could allow humans to walk on walls like Spider-Man.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Feb 2010 | 9:54 am

Trees Growing Faster as Planet Warms

Trees growing faster in Eastern United States forest due to climate change.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Feb 2010 | 9:48 am

Bizarre Asteroid Collision is One For The X-Files

I’ve seen thousands of astronomical images over my career, but this is one of the few absolute jaw-droppers: A flying X-pattern with trailing streamers. At first glance it looks like a four-pointed Kohga Ninja throwing star blade. It’s so weird-looking ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 2 Feb 2010 | 9:39 am

Climate retreat

Was Copenhagen the 'Munich of our times'?
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Feb 2010 | 9:36 am

3-D, Interactive Board Games Will Come to Life

Future board game pieces may change from static 2-D tiles to flat virtual displays that contain physics-based interactions normally seen in video games.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Feb 2010 | 9:15 am

Robot Butler "HERB"

His name is HERB and he's a robotic butler designed to open doors, clean tables and even retrieve your slippers. Built on a Segway platform with human-like arms, HERB is designed to one day offer more independence to the elderly and the disabled.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Feb 2010 | 9:11 am

Lancet accepts MMR study 'false'

The medical journal that published discredited research linking autism and MMR issues a full retraction of the paper.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Feb 2010 | 7:22 am

Study calls for EU waste enforcer

The EU needs a dedicated agency to oversee and enforce EU waste legislation, a study recommends.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Feb 2010 | 7:04 am

Has this little rodent got the most advanced animal vocabulary?

A tiny rodent may use the most sophisticated language of any animal, claims a US-based scientist.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Feb 2010 | 5:57 am

Project set to map marks on genome

Consortium sets sights on the differences that make us different.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 2 Feb 2010 | 5:39 am

The Pursuit of Intelligence in Computer Science

We can’t give machines intelligence until we can figure out what roles creativity, inspiration and curiosity should play.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 2 Feb 2010 | 5:23 am

Jason ocean mission secures funds

European nations commit to build the next Jason spacecraft, a key mission to monitor the behaviour of the world's oceans.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Feb 2010 | 5:06 am

Pallab Ghosh

Have measures of scientific quality changed?
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Feb 2010 | 4:49 am

Scotland feels coldest December for a century

Figures from the Met Office reveal that Scotland suffered its coldest December and January winter in almost 100 years.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Feb 2010 | 4:38 am

Super-Hard Diamonds Found in Meteorite

The ultra hard rocks may not end up on your finger, but they could help scientists learn how to create harder diamonds in the lab.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 2 Feb 2010 | 2:17 am