Link between human birth defect syndrome, cancer metastasis explored

Some cells are natural rule-breakers. Neural crest cells for example, not only migrate throughout the body during development (most cells are more selective in their wandering), they are also more developmentally flexible than their predecessors (a no-no for nearly all cell types). Now researchers have shown that a protein that controls DNA accessibility is responsible for the cells' unruly ways.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Spherical cows help to dump metabolism law

Apparently, the mysterious "3/4 law of metabolism" -- proposed by Max Kleiber in 1932, printed in biology textbooks for decades, and described as "extended to all life forms" from bacteria to whales -- is just plain wrong. "Actually, it's two-thirds," says University of Vermont mathematician Peter Dodds. A new paper of his helps overturn almost 80 years of near-mystical belief in a 3/4 exponent used to describe the relationship between the size of animals and their resting metabolism.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Pay it forward: Elevation leads to altruistic behavior

Seeing someone perform a virtuous deed (especially if they are helping another person), makes us feel good -- a positive, uplifting emotion, known as "elevation." New findings suggest that elevation may lead to helping behavior: participants who viewed an uplifting TV clip spent almost twice as long helping a research assistant than participants who saw a neutral TV clip or a comedy clip.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Baker's yeast: A promising, natural therapy for cancer?

Researchers are investigating the potential use of nonpathogenic baker's yeast as a promising, natural therapy for cancer.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Learning from climate's sedimental journey

By analyzing sediments up to 4,000 years old, an environmental scientist is hoping to provide a tool to help predict future climate change. Ancient records of what was happening with climate conditions can be used with regional climate models to tell a story of what happened in the past and to correlate it to the present and the future. Current models typically use data only for the last 100 years or less and may miss wet and dry periods from past millennia.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Scientists map epigenome of human stem cells during development

Singapore and US scientists have mapped major components of the epigenome and DNA methylation for the entire human DNA sequence, and compared three cell types representing three stages of human development.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Magnetic nanoparticles show promise for combating human cancer

Scientists at Georgia Tech and the Ovarian Cancer Institute have further developed a potential new treatment against cancer that uses magnetic nanoparticles to attach to cancer cells, removing them from the body. The treatment, tested in mice in 2008, has now been tested using samples from human cancer patients.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Feb 2010 | 12:00 pm

Immune protein fends off exotic virus

A study shows that antiviral proteins called type I interferons (IFNs) are needed to fend off infection with an exotic mosquito-borne virus called Chikungunya virus. This pathogen, which causes high fevers and severe joint pain, triggered a recent epidemic in Southeast Asia, infecting more than 30 percent of the population in some areas.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Feb 2010 | 12:00 pm

Laboratory 'gunfights' show that movement is swiftest in response to events in the environment

Scientists have carried out "laboratory gunfights" to show that we move faster when we react to something in our environment than we do when we initiate the action ourselves -- an idea inspired by cowboy movies but in reality more useful for avoiding oncoming traffic.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Feb 2010 | 12:00 pm

Scientists find ideal target for malaria therapy

Scientists have identified a protein made by the malaria parasite that is essential to its ability to take over human red blood cells.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Feb 2010 | 12:00 pm

Toyota says Prius had brake design problems (AP)

AP - Toyota acknowledged design problems with the brakes in its prized Prius, adding to the catalog of woes for the Japanese automaker still reeling from massive gas-pedal recalls in the U.S.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Feb 2010 | 3:31 am

Challenger shuttle disaster amateur video discovered

Video of the 1986 disaster was locked in Florida man's basement for almost 25 years

Never-before-seen video of the Challenger space shuttle disaster has surfaced after almost a quarter-century locked away in a Florida basement.

The chilling amateur footage was recorded by retired optometrist Jack Moss on his new home video camera on the morning of 28 January 1986.

The four-minute film captures the moment the shuttle exploded, 73 seconds after launch from Florida's Kennedy Space Centre, killing all seven astronauts on board and setting Nasa's manned spaceflight programme back years.

It is believed to be the only amateur film in existence of the world's worst space disaster, recorded in an era before mobile phone cameras, when even home camcorders were rare.

"I don't think Mr Moss thought it was anything significant. He put it down in his basement with other tapes he had and just forgot about it," said Wessels, executive director of the Space Exploration Archive, a Kentucky-based group that collects space memorabilia for educational purposes.

"It's a unique vignette of a moment in history. We've seen the pictures from the ground at the point of explosion at Cape Canaveral, but never anything like this. It's remarkable raw footage."

The tape surfaced after Moss told Wessels last year that he had watched the launch from the front yard of his house in Winter Garden, Florida, about 80 miles from Cape Canaveral.

"I said we needed to talk about it and he just said casually, 'Yeah, I even have it on video'," said Wessels, who was also Moss's pastor before he died from cancer in December.

"He said I could have the tape when he died. It took a while to find someone with an old Betamax video player, then I had to watch four hours of gameshows and sitcoms from the 1980s, but when I found the Challenger film my reaction was that people really have to see this."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Feb 2010 | 2:56 am

Toyota recall bill could hit $2 billion (AFP)

AFP - Toyota Motor said Thursday it was staring at a $2 billion hit from a global safety recall that has now spread to Britain and battered the credibility of the world's biggest carmaker.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Feb 2010 | 2:33 am

Will We See the Dawn of Cyborg Astronauts?

Guest contributor Greg Fish ponders the future of 'human' spaceflight. To survive the rigors of the cosmos will we need a few upgrades?
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Feb 2010 | 2:20 am

Shell's profit dives 75% (AFP)

AFP - Energy giant Royal Dutch Shell said Thursday that fourth-quarter adjusted net profit slumped 75 percent due to weak demand in the downturn, adding it would axe 1,000 jobs amid an uncertain outlook.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Feb 2010 | 1:31 am

Sarah Boseley on researchers who communicated with man in vegetative state

Sarah Boseley on researchers who 'talked' with a man in a vegetative state

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Feb 2010 | 1:21 am

Pandas leave DC, Atlanta for new homes in China (AP)

AP - The time has come for two American-born giant pandas to go home to their species' native land.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Feb 2010 | 1:15 am

The green debate goes tribal | Giles Wilkes

Climate change believers and sceptics are two sides of the same coin – it is logical that one will always hate the other

What recession? From where I sit in south-west London, there doesn't seem to have been one. Restaurants have stayed full, houses still sell for millions, and the traffic is dreadful. In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if the government cooked up the idea, just so they could further their plans for a socialist utopia.

Of course, only the utterly deluded would judge the economy from a pile of selectively remembered anecdotage. But despite the empirical revolution ushered in by the Royal Society, people still need rules of thumb to reach complex beliefs. Foremost of these is to follow a trusted consensus. I believe that smoking causes tumour growth because the medical community has told me; it's not because I myself have met a statistically significant number of lung cancer victims.

But this vital shortcut leaves huge gaps for human prejudice. In the words of a recent paper from Nature, "People endorse whichever position reinforces their connection to others with whom they share important commitments". Unfortunately, humans are hard-coded to make instant judgments about the character and motivation of other people, and stick to their beliefs with tribal tenacity. Hatred plays a huge part. If Harry thinks X is true and important, and Brian hates Harry's guts, then Brian has a great reason to deny X – it proves what an idiot and scoundrel Harry has always been.

These motivations have clearly taken over in the global warming debate. No one can have a native "feeling" about climate change. I can't tell through my T-shirt how hot the planet is getting, although if I were a spectacular idiot I might make inferences from London's weather. Even if I could, I would still lack the ability to determine causes.

This complexity has allowed the debate to be deeply influenced by the predispositions of the antagonists. I myself have always hated the contortions of conspiracy theorists: people scarcely able to comprehend the concept of statistical variation, but with the most wonderful belief in the Machiavellian genius and discipline of their opponents. Dissent is good; but for every Galileo boldly denying the consensus, there are 99 attention-seeking fools.

As a result, I trust that the vast scientific consensus is not either (a) incompetent in an amazing, synchronised way or (b) somehow corrupted into lying about something so important. I trust that politicians with far greater access to the science are not determined to crater the economy just for the fun of it. But I am also revealing my predisposed dislike of rightwing-nuttery. If Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh believe something, I sure won't, until hell freezes over.

The deniers exhibit belief-by-hatred even more strongly. Free-market libertarians, horrified by the collectivist solutions proposed by Greens, miraculously coalesce around a particular view on the heating trend of six billion trillion tonne rock. Somehow, similar views on tax policy and the reliability of globally-scattered weather stations inhabit the same people.

Take the blog of James Delingpole. Read the last 20 posts. How much science is there? Unsurprisingly, not much – whenever deniers attempt this, it tends to be dismissed rather easily. Delingpole's scepticism has to be premised on the bad faith of his opponents. There is no other way to tackle such a huge consensus. Instead of a painstakingly constructed theory of how the first law of thermodynamics doesn't apply here, he needs an even more unlikely account of how countless scientists are all duped or duping.

It is certainly nothing to do with access to data that has somehow evaded most of the scientific community but ended up squarely in the lap of a Telegraph blogger and a few shock-jocks. No– it is all about the opposition; in his own words, Delingpole loves winding up lefty liberals. And, in a way, I don't blame him - they are a pompous bunch, and equally capable of falling for conspiracist melodrama when it suits their stance. I share Delingpole's irritation at the sanctimonious hatred of capitalism in which environmental miserabilists love to wallow.

Where does this leave us? Given the dismaying revelations about bias in the AGW camp, it would be tempting to throw hands in the air, crying: "They're all the same!" But this goes too far. As Fred Pearce argues , nothing in a few leaked emails contradicts the warming of the world. However, some scientists are now demonstrating similar motivations and approaches to their antagonists. This must stop. If the science is robust, there should be no harm in including sceptics in the bodies investigating climate change. In fact, the honourable tradition of scientific inquiry demands it.

The two sides in this debate possess the same human frailties, the same tribal urge to hate, belittle and ignore their opponents. But there are differences. Believers in global warming do so because a painstakingly built up body of theory and evidence points towards a disaster of catastrophic scale. The deniers bend over backwards to disbelieve them, fearing the challenge to free market orthodoxies – and because the greens are some of the most annoying people on the planet. In a way, they're both right.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Feb 2010 | 1:00 am

Climate consensus under strain

We ask a range of experts: what damage has been done by recent criticisms of climate science credibility?

George Monbiot

Tremendous damage is done

These scandals have done tremendous damage. This is not because they threaten the canon of climate science – that would require similar exposés of tens of thousands of scientific papers – but because they create an atmosphere of opacity and evasion. Rajendra Pachauri's initial dismissal of questions over the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Himalayan glacier date suggests a failure to listen, which is inimical to scientific discourse. I am also amazed to learn that the IPCC doesn't pay its chairman, obliging him to work elsewhere, which has caused the other scandal in which he's embroiled. Anyone would think that running the organisation was a full-time job. This isn't a task for amateurs.

Throughout the hacked emails scandal, the University of East Anglia has failed to engage with public concerns or to offer convincing explanations. Its latest statement fails to address any of the major points made in the Guardian's report. The attempts by Phil Jones to block or delete material subject to a freedom of information request are indefensible: if your data isn't public and contestable, it's not scientific. Science cannot be allowed to proceed like some kind of masonic conspiracy. It is part of the common treasury of humankind and should belong to everyone from conception to publication. All data, and the statistical tools used to analyse them, should be produced at the time of publication, and I hope that one of the outcomes of this scandal is that this becomes routine. Never again should people have to use FoI requests to find out what scientists have been up to, let alone have them refused.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Vicky Pope

The essential science is robust

For Britain's climate science community the last few months have been a time of immense frustration. All the attention on a few ill-advised emails and a small number of errors in the IPCC report are distorting the debate on climate change. None of the mistakes call into question the fundamental science. The UEA temperature record is one of three independent records that all show clearly that global-average temperature has increased over the past century and that warming has been particularly rapid since the 1970s. Mistakes identified in the IPCC report have been investigated and publicly corrected if appropriate. These mistakes have all been about the impacts of climate change – perhaps one of the most difficult areas of research and one which is evolving rapidly.

The key finding that "warming is unequivocal and very likely due to man's activities" remains robust. The basic physics tells us that increasing greenhouse gases cause global warming – and we are likely to pay a heavy price if we keep emitting them.

I know that I speak for my colleagues in the Met Office, and I hope for other scientists, when I say that all this attention makes us even more determined to be rigorous and open in our approach to the science. The principles of peer review are essential, as is appropriate open access to methods and data. We also welcome rational public debate.

Vicky Pope is the head of climate change advice at the Met Office

Mike Hulme

Science cannot dictate policy

There is no doubt that the events of the last three months are leading people to ask questions about the status of scientific knowledge about human-induced climate change. Can the science reported by the IPCC be trusted? Are the processes used by the IPCC to assess knowledge trustworthy? Over the years the IPCC, and its various statements, have been endowed with ever greater authority – by governments, by media commentators and by various interest groups (including the Nobel Prize Committee). Sometimes the IPCC itself has actively claimed such an authoritative position – "speaking for science". It is therefore incumbent on the IPCC to ensure that it earns this trust and status that it has gained.

Advocates of various climate policy prescriptions – including those who advocate no policy – also should learn from this moment. The scientific process offers a wonderful method for probing, critical and fearless inquiry into the way the physical world works. But scientific knowledge can never determine policy. Policy emerges through political processes, where interpretations, judgments and compromises are made by individuals and groups of individuals as they weigh uncertain and changing scientific knowledge against normative criteria. It is foolish to state "the science demands" anything. It is people who demand things, not science. We need more honesty about what climate science can offer society – and what it can't.

Mike Hulme is professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia

Mark Lynas

Beware the misinformation

Anyone who believes that climate scientists at the UEA and elsewhere have been conspiring to fake global warming data should take some time to read the hacked emails – preferably in their entirety. The picture they reveal is fascinating, and should quickly lay to rest any half-baked sceptical conspiracy theories. (This might be a forlorn hope: last time I checked in to www.eastangliaemails.com the most popular search terms included "hoax", "lying" and "world government".) The picture they reveal is a revealing insight into the everyday business of professional science – the jockeying for status, the to-ing and fro-ing over obscure statistical methodologies, the sniping and the gossip, and the constant battle to get the latest work past the reviewers and into the various learned journals. But the UEA emails also reveal something else: this was a group of academics who felt under siege from, as Mike Mann (of "Hockey stick" fame) put it in June 2008, sceptics who were "not interested in the truth... [but] just looking for another way to try to undermine confidence in our science".

This siege mentality led to corners being cut, and the development of a paranoid them-and-us mentality which worked to the detriment of good science. This was unfortunate – but perhaps unavoidable, given the bitter nature of the sceptics v science battle. Public confidence will need to be restored, but this will be very difficult in the context of an ongoing misinformation campaign by dedicated and highly politicised global warming denialists.

Mark Lynas is an environment writer

Roger Pielke Jr

IPCC credibility is eroding fast

A human influence on the climate system is very real. Climate policy is important. So too is advice from experts to inform climate policy deliberations. Consequently it is of utmost importance that leading institutions of climate science – including of course impacts, adaptation and economics – have processes and procedures in place to sustain credibility and trust in their work. Regrettably, the IPCC has not met these high standards. The solution is obvious – to bring the archaic policies and procedures that govern the IPCC into the 21st century. To date the IPCC has been far too ad hoc and unaccountable. We would not accept this from scientific advisory ­processes that inform decision-making on pharmaceuticals, vaccines for children or military intelligence. As we look for ways to improve the scientific ­advisory processes related to climate, lessons from these other contexts will provide a useful guide. Meantime, the IPCC would best serve the interests of climate science and policy by moving beyond the denial of a problem before its credibility erodes even further.

Roger Pielke Jr is a professor at the ­Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

Roger Highfield

Give the panel a makeover

It makes me cringe to see public confidence in climate science shaken so badly after such a long, hard haul. When global warming became an issue in the 1980s, scientists were careful not to say it was caused by human activity, only that there was a suggestive link. The IPCC deserved the Nobel prize in 2007 for its heroic work to conclude – with very high confidence – that humankind has warmed the planet. Good science thrives on scepticism and this consensus crystallised after much argument and deliberation by thousands of scientists. Alas the consensus view has given the public the false impression that the IPCC is a priesthood, handing down tablets of wisdom. The unfolding drama of email-gate suggests that researchers are secretive and that they used dodgy data, as reported this week in the Guardian by the New Scientist's environment consultant. Nor did it help that an IPCC "fact" was based on a non-peer-reviewed source: a report in New Scientist. The IPCC needs a makeover. The panel must embrace the wider availability and review of data made possible by the web to make the scientific process transparent and foster confidence. As we wrote in a recent editorial, climate science is useless if no one trusts it.

Roger Highfield edits the New Scientist

Richard Tol

The IPCC bureau should resign

Only Working Group 1 (science) of the IPCC adheres to the strictest scientific standards. Working Groups 2 (impacts) and 3 (policy) are sloppy and biased in parts. The media have revealed only some of the errors in the impact report, and have yet to focus on the policy report, which also contains errors. These errors are well known within the academic community but ignored by the IPCC leadership.

IPCC leaders have communicated badly. One error was admitted, the rest flatly denied. This is partly because of arrogance and laziness, but lies were told as well. The IPCC chairperson openly admits to being an advocate rather than an academic, and has clear conflicts of interest.

The reputation of the IPCC has been severely damaged, but not yet irreparably so. The IPCC bureau should resign as they have failed to remove Dr Pachauri before it was too late. The rigorous standards of Working Group 1 should be applied to Working Groups 2 and 3. IPCC authors should be selected by the national academies strictly on academic standards, disregarding political colour. The International Union of Academies should acquire an oversight role.

The IPCC should take dramatic action soon so that climate policy can proceed.

Richard Tol is with the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin and the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam

Bryony Worthington

Don't defend the indefensible

Recent revelations about unsubstantiated claims in IPPC reports and seemingly dodgy practices at the UEA are bound to have an impact on public confidence in the science supporting man-made climate change.

It is already very difficult to engage the public as the impacts of our actions occur over long time scales and in such a diffuse way. Our day-to-day experience of weather also serves to confuse. The fact that "global warming" could deliver colder winters or wetter summers is already a hard argument to sell.

Climate science is contentious and there are powerful vested interests seeking to prove that change is not man-made. High levels of scrutiny are to be expected. These relatively minor squabbles over a small number of indiscretions are a deliberate diversion. No major climate conspiracy has been uncovered and the vast body of evidence still suggests the same thing: our actions are causing change and we should act swiftly to minimise the risks we are exposing ourselves to. A healthy perspective on this issue needs to be maintained but that is no reason for inaction. Reports of one or two rotten apples do not mean the whole barrel should be jettisoned, but it would clearly be better if the bad apples were weeded out. ­Mistakes have been made, changes should follow as a result. Any attempt to defend the indefensible will only make matters worse.

Bryony Worthington founded the ­Sandbag Climate Campaign

Myles Allen

Pathetic efforts to discredit

Over 15 years ago, I co-authored a paper on global change detection with John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Back in 1994, John was firmly convinced that trends estimated from the satellite temperature record were accurate to well under one hundredth of a degree per decade. This mattered, because if the satellite data were as accurate as John claimed, then both the surface record and the climate models had to be wrong.

It turns out that John's early confidence was mistaken: once various errors were corrected or accounted for in the analysis of the satellite data, the discrepancy disappeared, at least at the global level (there are still some niggling questions about the tropics). Am I now saying John should retract or resign? Of course not. This is not to say the satellite data was not a big deal. It was a huge deal: one of the key obstacles to our drawing stronger conclusions about human influence on climate in the IPCC Third Assessment in 2001. But it has been resolved, and science has moved on.

Contrast this with the breathless revelations emerging from the UEA email affair. To date, as far as actual numbers are concerned, they have revealed ... what, exactly? A problem with the treatment of average climate in some Australian data which makes no difference to estimated trends (and is nothing to do with UEA or Phil Jones), and now an excuse to resurrect a two-year-old story about poor record-keeping on Chinese weather stations. By stating "The IPCC's 2007 report used the study to justify the claim that 'any urban-related trend' in global temperatures was small," Fred Pearce cunningly implies that the IPCC's conclusion somehow depended on those Chinese stations. What he fails to mention is that China was one of three regions studied in that 1990 paper, which was corroborating an earlier study of US data, and scores of other papers since then have also concluded that the "urban heat island" effect is small.

John Christy took a lot of heat over the satellite data, but nothing remotely like what is being turned on Phil Jones. It would have been romantic if John's error had been uncovered by journalists combing through stolen emails, or members of the public issuing freedom of information requests. But it wasn't. It was found by the US government funding a painstaking independent analysis of the satellite record, with John's co-operation, just as Phil has said he would be happy to co-operate with an impartial and scientific re-analysis of the surface temperature record, if anyone wants to fund such a thing. No doubt Fred Pearce in the Guardian, Newsnight and others are hoping against hope to turn up something similarly important: a genuine error which fundamentally alters conclusions based on the surface temperature record. But they haven't, and their efforts are starting to look rather desperate (complaining about procedures, picking holes in irrelevant software).

The most effective people at finding errors in scientific research are scientists: it was professional glaciologists, after all, who exposed the error in the IPCC 2007 case study of Himalayan glaciers. Of course, the bloggers will argue we are all in this conspiracy together, just as the moon landings were actually enacted in a car park in Nevada. In the meantime, the spectacle of journalists acting out their fantasies at the expense of both Phil Jones and their readers is looking increasingly pathetic.

Myles Allen heads the Climate Dynamics group at Oxford University

Jim al-Khalili

Scientists must up their game

There will always be those who deny the evidence no matter how overwhelming it is, but a wider public backlash against the harsh realities of climate change is both dangerous and foolish. Even if the truth of climate change really were in the balance, doing nothing would still be too big a gamble.

When I hear a moon-landing denier or an evolution theory sceptic, or just a homeopathy advocate, I smile, take a deep breath and try to explain to them how science works. If I cannot convince them, then so be it. But with climate change deniers, there is no smile – the matter is too serious for that.

As for the latest controversies surrounding the inadequacies of a scientific paper published 20 years ago, or an exaggerated claim in an international report, or accusations of suppression or manipulation of data in emails of course this is a major cause for concern, but it does not negate the mountain of accumulating data on how we are changing our planet, and the catastrophic consequences this could lead to. The government chief scientific adviser, John Beddington, is right: scientists have to make their case with more honesty and clarity, and acknowledge that our understanding of how the earth's climate is changing is bigger than science.

Jim Al-Khalili is a physicist, author and broadcaster

Fiona Fox

Time for an amnesty on doubt

It's hard to argue that public trust in science has not been damaged by recent events but scientists have learned valuable lessons from being at the heart of a media storm before.

One lesson should be that the benefits of being open in the media about scientific uncertainty always outweigh the risks. Gavin Schmidt, a leading climate modeller, last week admitted to Nature that the "insane" culture of suspicion that climate researchers are working in is "drowning our ability to soberly communicate gaps in our science". But failing to be open about these gaps has only played into the sceptics' hands and undermined public trust.

We need an "amnesty on uncertainty" where scientists tell us what they do know, admit to what they don't know and come clean on the areas of disagreement. In return, the sceptics could agree to stop bombarding respected researchers with FOIs and seizing on every error as proof that scientists are lying to us; the media could agree to go easy on the climate porn with all the "tipping points","countdowns" and "points of no return" and start to convey the nuances and uncertainties in this especially complex area of science; and politicians could agree to stop demanding a level of certainty on environmental impacts that computer models can never provide. In a week where we have finally drawn a line under the MMR scare after 12 years, maybe all concerned could use this crisis to reflect on how to do this science story better.

Fiona Fox heads the Science Media Centre

Ben Pile

Hear climate's hollow politics

Things just keep getting worse for the chair of the IPCC. Even the UK government – who have in recent years become greener-than-green – don't seem to be backing him. The institutions that have been created by climate politics have suffered successive blows to their credibility in recent months. Climategate, the failure of Copenhagen, the apparent failure of IPCC to ensure the quality of its reports, and his own incautious remarks have created a difficult climate for Rajendra Pachauri.

If climate change is, as has been claimed, "the biggest challenge facing mankind", then the IPCC is by inference mankind's most important institution. Those standing behind the green agenda will doubtlessly want to protect its credibility from the ascendant climate sceptics, who, smelling blood, seem to be going after the head of the beast. But is Pachauri really responsible for the IPCC's oversight, and will the climate change agenda really be saved by personalising the debate, and making a public sacrifice?

In fact, the case for political action on climate change has rarely depended on the credibility that it has with the public. Nobody ever voted for climate change legislation, because no party has ever stood against it. Climate change politics and its institutions have been established "above" democratic politics. Governments – particularly those such as the UK's – have suffered a lack of credibility all by themselves, and so have sought authority and legitimacy in these supra-national planet-saving institutions. But as long as the establishment are all agreed that the world is about to end, then it matters not a jot what the public thinks. Pachauri's exit will simply demonstrate to the public what they already knew: that climate change politics is merely a symptom of today's hollow politics, same as any other.

Ben Pile co-edits Climate-resistance.org

Ed Miliband

More rigour, but no retreat

Two things should guide us as we consider the science of climate change: maximum openness and rigour in our approach and a focus on the overall picture that the science paints. Correcting the error over glacier melting and investigating the issues arising from the UEA emails demand the willingness to learn lessons and make any reforms that are required. Those who believe that climate change is real and man-made have nothing to fear and everything to gain from maximum transparency.

But just as we must address these issues, we must not let them undermine the overwhelming scientific case for action. The vast majority of climate scientists are clear about the threat climate change poses. Some people will tell us there is an easy way out and we can wish the problem away. This would be profoundly irresponsible and we should say so.

Those who believe in the case for action do need to do a better job of explaining the risks of failing to act and also of communicating the benefits of action. Over the coming decades, a shift to low carbon can create high-quality jobs in new industries, ensure we live in better insulated, more comfortable homes and take us towards a fairer society. That is the case we must make and the argument we must win.

Ed Miliband is the secretary of state for energy and climate change

Bjorn Lomborg

Halt alarmism on all sides

East Anglia University's leaked emails and revelations about the IPCC's lack of scientific rigour have been disturbing and disappointing. The evidence remains overwhelming that global warming is real and man-made, but these events accentuate the point that some of the more spectacular alarmism is not well-founded.

At a time when opinion polls reveal rising public scepticism about climate change, attempts to replace scientific rigour with spin are unhelpful. The UEA emails show some of the world's most influential climatologists trying to disguise flaws in their work, blocking scrutiny, and plotting together to enforce what amounts to a party line on climate change.

The IPCC's unsubstantiated claim about the Himalayan glaciers is all the more troubling for being accompanied by a string of further problems, including the baseless assertion that 40% of the Amazon rainforest is at imminent risk of disappearing and the false claim that the cost of weather disasters has been rising because of climate change. To maintain credibility, the IPCC must be more than an echo chamber for those who think the best way to make public policy is to scare people.

There have long been polarising and bitter clashes between climate change deniers and alarmists. The truth is that exaggeration in either direction is unhelpful in informing us how best to respond to climate change. We require level heads and honesty from climatologists and the IPCC.

Bjorn Lomborg is the author of The ­Skeptical Environmentalist

Yang Ailun

I have witnessed the reality

In 2007, Greenpeace led an expedition team to the Himalaya to document the impacts of global warming on glacier retreating. We went there, with a picture of the Himalayan glacier taken in 1968, to take a comparison picture from exact the same angle. But it was not possible any more because the glacier on which the photographer stood when taking the 1968 image had already gone. The same glacier in front of us was hardly recognisable – standing at 5,800 metres above most of the human world, we were shocked by the consequences of human activities.

Thanks to my job, I've travelled to many places in China to witness the impacts of climate change. I've seen farmers who have lost their livelihoods because there was no water to irrigate their lands; I've seen villages forced to move after houses were destroyed by landslides caused by increasing number of storms; I've seen the same fishing village hit by severe typhoons two times in three years.

In China, the equivalent to climate scepticism is the belief that "climate change is a western conspiracy to hinder China's development". I wish to send both the sceptics and the conspirators to where climate impacts could already be so badly felt, so that they could see with their own eyes what is happening.

Yang Ailun is head of climate and energy, Greenpeace China

James Garvey

Is it all about psychology?

Public confidence is on the wane, and recent news stories have something to do with it – but they can't have everything to do with it. What really follows from these stories? On one hand you have virtually the entire scientific community backing the IPCC's report that there's a 90% chance that human beings are driving climate change, and on the other questionable emails and a mistake about glaciers. Can anyone really believe that a dark plot orchestrated in East Anglia has hoodwinked the world's scientific community? Is the glacier business actually on a par with a cover up like Watergate? If reasonable people base their beliefs on evidence, why do we latch on to a few news stories when the evidence for anthropogenic climate change is overwhelming? Maybe we're not entirely reasonable. Psychologists go on about denial as a defence mechanism. When facts are difficult for us we are good at looking elsewhere, inflating an inconsequential claim at the expense of a painful truth. Maybe the public's perception of settled scientific opinion on the basic facts of climate change will always be blurry. News stories can make things worse, but we might always struggle to get around natural psychological barriers to clear thinking about climate change.

James Garvey is author of The Ethics of Climate Change

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Feb 2010 | 12:00 am

Teleporting Energy

Whenever anyone asks me what my superpower of choice would be, I always tell them: teleportation. Think of all the time we waste moving from Point A to Point B, when it would be so much easier just to be ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 3 Feb 2010 | 11:54 pm

Genes in mother, baby raise risk of preterm birth (Reuters)

Reuters - Genes in the mother and the fetus play a role in the risk of preterm labor, a leading cause of infant death and disability, U.S. government researchers said on Thursday.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Feb 2010 | 10:04 pm

Very Obese People May Be Missing Genes (HealthDay)

HealthDay - WEDNESDAY, Feb. 3 (HealthDay News) -- Adding more evidence to theories linking DNA to weight, European scientists report that a genetic variation seems to virtually guarantee that a person will become obese.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Feb 2010 | 9:49 pm

Cassini Saturn Probe Gets 7-Year Life Extension (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - NASA's Cassini Saturn probe has been granted new life around the ringed planet thanks to an extension of its mission through 2017.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Feb 2010 | 9:31 pm

Brain scan allows unconscious patient to communicate

Imaging technique pierces vegetative state.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/58YJImc5g4M" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 3 Feb 2010 | 8:33 pm

The Sunshine Coliseum

Here's an idea for a power plant: the solar-powered sports coliseum. What if you skinned an entire stadium with solar such that it could satisfy its own ginormous appetite for power when filled with spectators, but when idle (which is ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 3 Feb 2010 | 7:17 pm

Spray-On Glass Coats Any Surface

Would you coat a living plant in glass to keep it free of fungus? What about coating a counter in glass to keep it sterile? It sounds highly unusual, but the German company, Nanopool, is about to market liquid glass ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 3 Feb 2010 | 6:26 pm

Close encounters with Japan's 'living fossil'

BBC News has a rare "up close and personal" look at one of the planet's oldest and oddest creatures, the giant salamander.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Feb 2010 | 6:02 pm

How Your Biometrics Can Make Super Bowl Ads Better

Brian Levine is going to tell me what commercials I like without asking my opinion. He doesn’t have to ask. With the biometric toolkit developed by his company, he says that my own subconscious impulses will give it away. My heart rate, the sweatiness of my hands, and how I’m sitting in my seat will give me away. 

While he set up an eye-tracker in Wired’s offices, I changed into the vest and T-shirt he gave me. I attached two sticky electrodes attached to my breast bone and one beneath my rib cage on the left side of my body. The T-shirt had special holes cut into it, so that the wires could poke through from the electrodes, and plug into the vest. A small monitor was strapped onto my finger. 

Levine plugged all the wires now running out from my body into a fanny pack with a little PDA in it, which transmitted wirelessly to a laptop. After a little tinkering, my body’s basic data appeared on the screen in an endlessly scrolling set of scribbly lines.

Then I sat down in front of a computer screen and watched a series of video clips of cute little babies, Dexter, a video of myself (!), and random people dancing at a wedding. The whole time, I hoped Levine couldn’t somehow read an undiagnosed pathology from the the lines on his screen or figure out exactly the sort of advertising that would press my buy button — fears shared by neuroethicists.

The premise of Levine’s company, Innerscope, is that running this data through algorithms can tell advertisers which commercials work and which don’t. They can quantify your subconscious responses to advertisements without resorting to the messiness of human language. 

“We really look at unconscious measures compared to conscious measures,” said Innerscope co-founder Carl Marci, director of the Social Neuroscience for the Psychotherapy Research Program at Massachusetts General Hospital. “We know that 5 to 25 percent of brain processing is dedicated to conscious processing. The rest is unconscious, and about half of that is emotional processing. You’re talking about a massive amount of brain processing.”

Some companies in the new neuromarketing field have tried to peer directly into the brain looking for clues to how consumers work. They use fMRI and EEG brain scans and other measures of what’s happening in your gray matter.

The field remains “in its infancy,” though, according to a 2008 Journal of Consumer Behavior review. It’s hard to know how well data captured inside an fMRI machine at a laboratory relates to how your brain would function at a sports bar, for example.

Innerscope relies on less-fancy techniques, ones that have been proven to correlate with emotional response, but that technological advances have made much easier to deploy on, say, 50 people watching a football game. 

What they’re looking for is the magnitude of increase in the biomeasurements and how synchronized a bunch of study participants are in experiencing that response. 

So, while my test setup was realtively true to reality, it was just a demonstration. Normally, Innerscope uses only aggregate data from a group, not an individual, and the situation is much more tightly circumscribed. (My co-workers wandered in to peer at me in the funny vest and laugh at my fanny pack.)

It’s the aggregated reactions that allows Innerscope to separate spikes in biometric response that are positive from those that are negative.

When people love an ad, their biomeasurements go up — and they sustain their attention to it. When people hate an ad, or find it disgusting, Innerscope has found that some of them stop watching or turn away.

What advertisers are after are the moments that command a coherent positive reaction from the group.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 3 Feb 2010 | 5:57 pm

Why spider webs glisten with dew

Two driving forces acting on wet spider silk help it to capture water.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 3 Feb 2010 | 5:14 pm

Moon probe makes soft landing

Originally published on 4 February 1966

Luna-9 made a soft landing on the moon just after 6.45 last night. This triumph for Russian technology, a step forward in space exploration even greater than the journey of the American Mariner Mars probe last year, was confirmed by observations made from Jodrell Bank.

The 1½-ton spacecraft's retro-rockets fired at 6.44, and the landing was made one and a half minutes later.

After a short silence, the spacecraft transmitted a series of television pictures. These signals ceased shortly after 7pm, and although it is not yet clear what pattern of transmissions will follow, there is no doubt that some at least of the equipment on board is operating satisfactorily.

The landing itself is an achievement of great magnitude, for it will provide the first close studies of the nature of the moon's surface, which are of importance not simply to the moon race but to science itself.

Clearly, the area of the surface chosen for the landing – in the Ocean of Storms, west of the Reigner and Marsa craters – has no great depth of dust.

The Russians have made no statement about the kind of equipment on board, although there is no doubt that it will send back information about temperatures, the residual atmosphere, radiation, the magnetic field, and possibly surface materials.

The most eagerly awaited items, however, will be the television pictures, for they should show surface details sufficiently fine to distinguish structure, and both the attitude and depth of sinking of the craft will probably be in itself revealing – at least to the Russians. In the meantime, the Americans, whose surveyor moon-landing programme is just getting into its stride, will express admiration, suppress the natural jealousies, and perhaps accelerate their own activity.

Throughout their moon-landing programme, the Russians have worked methodically. This, the fifth attempt, follows within three months of an almost successful landing in December.

Technique mastered

Having mastered the technique – and the progression suggests a mastery, not a stroke of good fortune – it seems probable that further instrumented landings, using exploring automated laboratories, will follow fairly quickly.

With experience of surface effects on machinery and equipment then the stage will be set for a manned landing. Whether the first men down are American or Russian hardly matters now. The Russian flag is already there and apparently waving.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Feb 2010 | 5:05 pm

What price safety?

Do the new body scanners at airports expose travellers to excessive radiation?

So-called "naked" body-­scanning machines at airports, the latest defence against would-be plane bombers, have already raised concern for breaching flyers' privacy and, potentially, feeding the voyeurism of security officials. But could being screened also pose a health risk?

The question arises because one of the two types of new ­scanner – those that deploy "back-scatter" x-ray technology – uses ionising radiation to generate the images that indicate if someone is concealing something dangerous. The Department for Transport, which ordered the introduction of whole-body scanners at all UK airports after the plot to blow up an aeroplane over Detroit on Christmas Day, says that they are completely safe.

"The level of radiation that you usually receive from a back-scatter machine is equivalent to what you would naturally receive [from the sun] from two minutes of flying at about 35,000ft," says a DfT spokesman. He points to a report this week by the Health Protection Agency, which says that standing to be examined by back-scatter technology involves ­receiving a dose of just 0.02 micro­sieverts or less of radiation, a tiny fraction of the 2,700 microsieverts that a typical Briton is ­exposed to naturally every year from sources such as radon gas, cosmic rays and building materials.

"That's a very small dose of radiation," says Professor Richard Wakefield, a radiation expert at Manchester University's Dalton Nuclear Institute. "I can't say that these scanners pose no risk, but at the doses you are talking about it's verging on the ridiculous to be worried about them." Many of us may well prefer the notional risk from those minute doses to the risk of being on a plane that is blown up, anyway.

But Douglas Boreham, professor in medical physics and applied radiation sciences at ­McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, cautions that there is a small possibility of harm for frequent flyers or those who are sensitive to the effects of radiation. Radiation from x-ray scanners could be more highly concentrated than radiation encountered naturally at high altitudes, he says. He wants the possible impact to be monitored. "We don't have enough information to make a decision on whether there's going to be a ­biological effect or not," he says.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Feb 2010 | 5:05 pm

Brain Waves Allow Vegetative Patients to 'Talk'

Some patients in vegetative states are showing signs of consciousness.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 3 Feb 2010 | 4:55 pm

Ill leader, violence and oil woes plague Nigeria (AP)

AP - Nigeria's president has been away ill for more than two months. A militant group vows to renew its war against the oil industry. And Muslim-Christian violence has drawn a threat of jihad from an al-Qaida-linked group.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Feb 2010 | 4:46 pm

'Hockey stick' graph creator Michael Mann cleared of academic misconduct

The American scientist who produced the "hockey stick graph" showing a sharp rise in global warming was largely cleared of misconduct by an academic investigation today.

The board of inquiry at Pennsylvania State University said it found no evidence that Michael Mann, a leading climatologist, had suppressed or falsified data, tried to destroy data or emails, or misused information. It will convene a second panel to investigate whether he had violated academic practices, including those governing exchanges between scholars.

The university ordered the investigation by three senior faculty members after Mann's name appeared in more than 375 of the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia's climate research unit. Climate change sceptics jumped on one email which describes Mann's solution to a problem as a "trick", a shorthand among scientists and mathematicians, as evidence of an effort to distort data.

The panel dismissed the charge. "The so-called 'trick' was nothing more than a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion by a technique that has been reviewed by a broad array of peers in the field," the panel said.

It also cleared Mann of purposely hiding or destroying email relating to an IPCC climate change report.

It said it found nothing to support the charge that Mann had conspired with like-minded scholars to block competing scholars.

Mann said he was pleased with the decision. "After a thorough review, the independent Penn State committee found no evidence to support any of the allegations against me. Three of the four allegations have been dismissed completely," he said. "Even though no evidence to substantiate the fourth allegation was found, the university administrators thought it best to convene a separate committee of distinguished scientists to resolve any remaining questions about academic procedures. This is very much the vindication I expected since I am confident I have done nothing wrong."

Environmental organisations also welcomed the decision, saying the controversy over the climate hack had been a dangerous distraction.

"This is a step in the right direction that should help us move past the manufactured controversy over the stolen emails," said Peter Frumhoff, director of climate policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "The truth is that global warming is here, it's dangerous, and it is already affecting us."

But Mann has become a favourite target of climate change deniers because of the powerful image of his hockey stick graph, which shows a sharp rise in average global temperature in the 20th century – and they are unlikely to stop now. The graph assembled data from hundreds of studies of past temperatures using tree rings, lake sediment, and glacier ice cores. It was first published in 1998.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Feb 2010 | 4:43 pm

Moon Tourism by 2020, Entrepreneurs Predict (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - Leading space entrepreneurs said they are ready, willing and able to fill the U.S. spaceflight gap after NASA retires its space shuttles this year.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Feb 2010 | 4:30 pm

How to Pick the Perfect Super Bowl TV (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Hey, Couch Coach, here's your Fantasy Football draft challenge: Pick the perfect HDTV to bring home to watch Super Bowl XLIV this Sunday. Here's what you should look for and what can you expect to pay.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Feb 2010 | 4:03 pm

Think tennis for yes, home for no

• Brain-injured patient's thoughts 'read' by scanner
• Technique provides hope for others in similar state

For seven years the man lay in a hospital bed, showing no signs of consciousness since sustaining a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. His doctors were ­convinced he was in a vegetative state. Until now.

To the astonishment of his ­medical team, the patient has been able to ­communicate with the outside world after scientists worked out, in effect, a way to read his thoughts.

They devised a technique to enable the man, now 29, to answer yes and no to ­simple questions through the use of a hi-tech scanner, monitoring his brain ­activity.

To answer yes, he was told to think of playing tennis, a motor activity. To answer no, he was told to think of wandering from room to room in his home, visualising everything he would expect to see there, creating activity in the part of the brain governing spatial awareness.

His doctors were amazed when the patient gave the correct answers to a series of questions about his family. The ­experiment will fuel the controversy of when a patient should have life support removed.

It also raises the prospect of some form of communication with those who have been shut off from life, perhaps for years.

"We were astonished when we saw the results of the patient's scan and that he was able to correctly answer the questions that were asked by simply changing his thoughts," said Dr Adrian Owen, ­assistant director of the Medical Research Council's cognition and brain sciences unit at ­Cambridge University.

"Not only did these scans tell us that the patient was not in a vegetative state but, more importantly, for the first time in five years it provided the patient with a way of communicating his thoughts to the outside world."

Dr Steven Laureys, from the University of Liège in Belgium and co-author of the paper on the patient, said: "It's early days, but in the future we hope to develop this technique to allow some patients to express their feelings and thoughts, control their environment and increase their quality of life."

The patient has not been identified, but his family was said to have been happy with the outcome. "That's not unusual," said Owen. "The worst thing in this sort of situation is not knowing."

He said that as many as one in five patients in a vegetative state may have a fully functioning mind.

The British and Belgian teams studied 23 patients classified as in a vegetative state and found that four were able to generate thoughts of tennis or their homes and create mind patterns that could be read by an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanner – although only one was asked specific questions.

Owen said that misdiagnosis of vegetative state was fairly common: in about 40% of cases people are later found to be able to communicate in some way.

He said he believed that the patients who responded in the study were probably "perfectly consciously aware", although he knew others would disagree.

"To be able to do what we have asked, you have got to be able to understand instructions, you have to have a ­functioning memory to remember what tennis is and you have to have your attention intact. I can't think of what cognitive functions they haven't got and still be able to do this," he said.

When it was suggested that to be ­conscious but trapped in an inert body might be a worse fate than to know nothing, Owen said: "On the plus side we are making enormous advances. Things have changed so much in the last few years."

Owen was speaking from Austria, where he had travelled for a conference on the latest in brain-operated technology – ­computerised devices powered by thought – which is attracting interest, including from the games industry.

"Perhaps some of these patients could benefit from some of these activities," he said. In the meantime, doctors will at least be able to ask patients if they are ­experiencing pain.

The paper, published tonight in the New England Journal of Medicine, generated immediate excitement.

"These findings have broad ­implications, not just for concerns about the accurate assessment of vast numbers of patients in custodial care situations, but in the context of any clinical encounter where we currently rely on behavioural assessment alone to identify consciousness," said Dr Nicholas D Schiff, associate professor of neurology and neuroscience at Weill Cornell medical college in New York.

He called for urgent efforts to identify and help such patients.

"The most important question left unanswered by these findings is what mechanism accounts for the stunning dissociation of behaviour and integrative brain function. I think we can be sure that as the biological answers underlying this question become more clear this will have a profound impact across medicine."

Professor Chris Frith, of the Wellcome Trust's centre for neuroimaging at University College London, said Owen and his colleagues had opened the way to communicating with patients in a vegetative state.

"It is difficult to imagine a worse experience than to be a functioning mind trapped in a body over which you have absolutely no control," he said.

"Obviously, more technical ­development is required, but we now have the distinct possibility that, in the future, thanks to Owen and colleagues' work we will be able to detect cases of other patients who are conscious, and what's more, we will be able to communicate with them."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Feb 2010 | 3:37 pm

Cassini Gets Life Extension to Explore Saturn Until 2017

NASA gave its Cassini spacecraft mission a 6 ½-year life extension to continue exploring Saturn and its moons.

Cassini launched in 1997 and first arrived at Saturn in 2004 after flying by Earth, Venus and Jupiter. It carried the Huygens probe on board, which it sent to the surface of the moon Titan in December 2004. The mission was originally slated to end in 2008, but got its first reprieve with 27 months of additional funding to study the planet during its equinox, when the sun is directly above the planet’s equator, which happens once every 15 Earth years.

The spacecraft has captured some of the most stunning images ever seen of the solar system, and space enthusiasts everywhere, including here at Wired Science were dreading the mission’s end. With the Cassini’s new lease, those images will continue wowing us into Saturn’s summer solstice.

“Cassini has been an adventure of a lifetime, an extraordinary exploration of the most enchanting place in all the solar system,” said Carolyn Porco, leader of the Cassini Imaging Team. “It is a very happy day for us, knowing that Cassini lives and the adventure continues.”

Cassini has already traveled 2.6 billion miles, and captured 210,000 images, but is in remarkably good shape. In the next seven years, it will orbit the planet 155 more times and complete 54 flybys of Titan and 11 flybys of our favorite moon, Enceladus. It will dive between Saturn and its iconic rings, gathering more data on the planet’s magnetosphere. 

“The extension presents a unique opportunity to follow seasonal changes of an outer planet system all the way from its winter to its summer,” Bob Pappalardo, Cassini project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a press release. “Some of Cassini’s most exciting discoveries still lie ahead.”

One of the mysteries Cassini could help solve is the source of the jets emanating from Enceladus. Scientists suspect they are fed by a subsurface ocean that could possibly be a haven for life.

“This extension is important because there is so much still to be learned at Saturn,” Bob Mitchell, Cassini program manager at JPL, said in a press release. “The planet is full of secrets, and it doesn’t give them up easily.”

 Images: NASA/JPL/CICLOPS

See Also:

• Cassini Spacecraft Spots New Object in Saturn’s Rings
• Cassini Dives Through Ice Geyser Live on NASA.gov
• Cassini Trick or Treats Around Saturn
• Cassini Photo Gallery: The Month in Saturn
• Voters Pick Best Saturn Photos From Cassini Mission
• An Interactive Look at Saturn, Over Cassini’s Shoulder
• Cassini Delivers Up-Close Images of Saturn Moon
• Tiny Saturn Moon ID’d as Good Candidate for Alien Life
• Hunt for Life on Saturnian Moon Heats Up
• Close Encounter with Saturn Moon’s Fantastic Plumage

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 3 Feb 2010 | 3:14 pm

Scan unlocks vegetative patients

Scientists have been able to reach into the mind of a brain-damaged man and communicate with his thoughts.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Meteorites: Who owns what now?

Who owns a meteorite? Well, it depends on who you ask. Scientists, hobbyists, governments, quacks, museum curators and unscrupulous scavengers all have their own opinion.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 3 Feb 2010 | 2:53 pm

How to Pick the Perfect Super Bowl TV

TV sales spike around Super Bowl time. Here's how to pick the best TV for your needs.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Feb 2010 | 2:48 pm

Climate change researchers must be more open, says chief scientist

John Beddington tells the Guardian researchers must be more transparent when they make errors in data

• Climate scientists contradicted spirit of openness by turning down FoI requests
• Leaked climate change emails scientist 'hid' data flaws

The government's chief scientist has called on climate researchers to be more open when dealing with critics and transparent when they make errors.

In an interview with the Guardian, John Beddington urged scientists to share data freely even though some sceptics sought to cherry-pick facts to fit a ­political ­argument. He said: "Scepticism and criticism is the way science grows. Where at all possible, data and analyses should be available so that people can do the challenging in an unhindered way."

He said that as climate science became a more politically charged issue demand for public scrutiny would grow. "In general, there's got to be a predilection for being as open as possible."

Beddington was speaking as the third part of a Guardian investigation of emails stolen from the University of East Anglia in November revealed the extraordinary lengths scientists went to in order to frustrate Freedom of Information Act requests for data and email correspondence. The hacked emails reveal the intense and prolonged pressure the scientists were under from a small but determined group of climate sceptics and their extreme resistance to sharing information.

• In December 2008, Dr Phil Jones, the head of the Climatic Research Unit wrote to colleagues about Steve McIntyre, a blogger who had made repeated requests: "I am supposed to go through my emails and he can get anything I've written about him. About two months ago I deleted loads of emails, so have very little – if anything at all." Jones says this was a routine deletion and not connected to any FoI request.

• In another email CRU deputy director Dr Keith Briffa expressed resistance to revealing emails. "Our private inter-collegial discussion is just that – PRIVATE ... none of us should submit to these requests."

• Back in February 2005, before the UK's FoI Act came into force, Jones foresaw the danger it posed to scientists. "[Climate sceptics] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone."

Last week the Information Commissioner's Office released a statement condemning the university for its handling of FoI requests from the climate sceptic David Holland. The UN's climate change body and its chief, Rajendra Pachauri, meanwhile remained under pressuretonight after a defiant interview in the Guardian in which he refused to resign or personally apologise for a false statement about Himalayan glaciers in the IPCC's 2007 report.

Though a number of senior scientific figures, including Beddington, said they did not believe Pachauri should resign, several urged the IPCC to address unanswered questions and set out measures to avoid repeating damaging mistakes.

Bob Watson, who preceded Pachauri as IPCC chair, said it remained unclear how the Himalayan glacier claim, that all could melt by 2035, was published. "Was it missed by all experts and all governments? Or did someone spot it and comment on it and then it was ignored by the authors?" he told the Guardian. "And, if so, why didn't someone react to it? All of this is meant to be heavily documented."

One of Pachauri's closest associates said today that a way of dealing with mistakes was needed. "Something we need and do not have is a process that lets us move aggressively in admitting an error has occurred," said Chris Field, co-chair of Working Group II, which oversaw the 2007 report containing the glacier claim – though Field assumed the post after 2007.

Beddington said: "Mistakes have been made so there is a need to think about the procedures. As set out, they're probably OK but one needs to be thinking and posing to the IPCC in the future, how are you going to avoid these sorts of mistakes?" He stressed that while "large proportions" of climate science were unchallengeable, other areas were uncertain and scientists should acknowledge that.

Campaigners were split on what needed to be done to restore the IPCC's credibility. "The person at the top ... will make mistakes, everybody does," said John Sauven, head of Greenpeace. "Can Pachauri be trusted to be honest, open and transparent if a mistake is made? Does he have the confidence not only of the scientific community but the wider public?"

But another NGO, which requested anonymity, said the public perception of climate science was damaged: "Pachauri is the problem. He has to go. This has set everything back years."

Additional reporting: Suzanne Goldenberg, Juliette Jowitt, John Vidal

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Feb 2010 | 2:43 pm

Meet Dennis Hong's Robots

I received an email from Dennis Hong, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech. He said: "Hi Tracy. Just wanted to let you know about an exciting YouTube clip that robotics people may enjoy -- all the cool RoMeLa ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 3 Feb 2010 | 2:11 pm

Exoplanet gas spotted from Earth

Astronomers have used a new ground-based technique to study the atmospheres of planets outside our Solar System.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Feb 2010 | 1:53 pm

Debarking Surgery Quiets Fido

Animal activists and vets are say debarking surgery is inhumane.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Feb 2010 | 1:43 pm

Watching the White Lizards of White Sands

Evolution of white lizards in desert unraveled.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Feb 2010 | 1:19 pm

"Big Bang" collider may reveal mystery particle

GENEVA (Reuters) - Scientists operating the "Big Bang" particle collider at CERN could solve the mystery of what gives mass to matter during a nearly two-year non-stop run lasting until late 2011, a spokesman said on Wednesday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 3 Feb 2010 | 1:12 pm

More Telescopes Join in Planet Hunt

The search for alien worlds -- and alien life -- just got a little easier.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 3 Feb 2010 | 1:10 pm

Luxor's 'Sphinx Avenue' to Be Restored

A site in Luxor, Egypt will become one of the world's largest open-air museums when part of a $11 million project is complete in March, Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) said today in a statement. Excavation work along the ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 3 Feb 2010 | 1:00 pm

Everywhere in a Flash: The Quantum Physics of Photosynthesis

By hitting single molecules with quadrillionth-of-a-second laser pulses, scientists have revealed the quantum physics underlying photosynthesis, the process used by plants and bacteria to capture light’s energy at efficiencies unapproached by human engineers.

The quantum wizardry appears to occur in each of a photosynthetic cell’s millions of antenna proteins. These route energy from electrons spinning in photon-sensitive molecules to nearby reaction-center proteins, which convert it to cell-driving charges.

Almost no energy is lost in between. That’s because it exists in multiple places at once, and always finds the shortest path.

“The analogy I like is if you have three ways of driving home through rush hour traffic. On any given day, you take only one. You don’t know if the other routes would be quicker or slower. But in quantum mechanics, you can take all three of these routes simultaneously. You don’t specify where you are until you arrive, so you always choose the quickest route,” said Greg Scholes, a University of Toronto biophysicist.

Scholes’ findings, published Wednesday in Nature, are the strongest evidence yet for coherence — the technical name for multiple-state existence — in photosynthesis.

Two years ago, researchers led by then-University of California at Berkeley chemist Greg Engel found coherence in the antenna proteins of green sulfur bacteria. But their observations were made at temperatures below minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit, useful for slowing ultrafast quantum activities but leaving open the question of whether coherence operates in everyday conditions.

The Nature findings, made at room temperature in common marine algae, show that it does. Moreover, similar results from an experiment on another, simpler light-harvesting structure, announced by Engels’ group last Thursday on the pre-publication online arXiv, suggest that photosynthetic coherence is routine.

The findings are wondrous in themselves, adding a new dimension to something taught — incompletely, it now seems — to every high school biology student. They also have important implications for designers of solar cells and computers, who could benefit from quantum physics conducted in nonfrigid conditions.

“There’s every reason to believe this is a general phenomenon,” said Engel, now at the University of Chicago. He called Scholes’ finding “an extraordinary result” that “shows us a new way to use quantum effects at high temperatures.” 

Scholes’ team experimented on an antenna protein called PC645, already imaged at the atomic scale in earlier studies. That precise characterization allowed them to target molecules with laser pulses lasting for one-quadrillionth of a second, or just long enough to set single electrons spinning.

By analyzing changes to a laser beam sent through the protein immediately afterwards, the researchers were able to extrapolate what was happening inside — an ultra-high-tech version of shadows on a screen. They found that energy patterns in distant molecules fluctuated in ways that betrayed a connection to each other, something only possible through quantum coherence.

“It’s the same as when you hit two tuning forks at the same time, and hear a low-pitched oscillation in the background. That’s the interference of sound waves from the forks. That’s exactly what we see,” said Scholes.

According to Scholes, the physics of photosynthetic proteins will be further studied and used to improve solar cell design. Engels suggested their use in long-promised but still-unworkable quantum computing. “This allows us to think about photosynthesis as non-unitary quantum computation,” he said.

Quantum-physical processes have been observed elsewhere in the biological realm, most notably in compass cells that allow birds to navigate by Earth’s geomagnetic fields. Researchers have also proposed roles for quantum physics in the animal sense of smell and even in the brain. Engels predicts the emergence of an entire field of quantum biology.

“There are going to be some surprises,” said Scholes. “Who knows what else there is to discover?”

Images: 1. Bùi Linh Ngân/Flickr
2. Antenna protein: Light-harvesting molecules are red./Greg Scholes
3. Graph of energy wave interference inside the antenna protein/Nature

See Also:

• Reverse-Engineering the Quantum Compass of Birds
• Quantum Entanglement Visible to the Naked Eye
• “Sudden Death” Threatens Quantum Computing
• Green Sea Slug Is Part Animal, Part Plant

Citations: “Coherently wired light-harvesting in photosynthetic marine algae at ambient temperature.” By Elisabetta Collini, Cathy Y. Wong, Krystyna E. Wilk, Paul M. G. Curmi, Paul Brumer & Gregory D. Scholes. Nature, Vol. 463 No. 7281, Feb. 4, 2010.

“Long-lived quantum coherence in photosynthetic complexes at physiological temperature.” By Gitt Panitchayangkoon, Dugan Hayes, Kelly A. Fransted, Justin R. Caram, Elad Harel, Jianzhong Wen, Robert E. Blankenship, Gregory S. Engel. arXiv, Jan. 28, 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 | 3 Feb 2010 | 12:40 pm

Migrating Cranes Get a Little Ultralite Assistance

Each year in late January, an ultralight aircraft descends on Florida with a flock of young whooping cranes in tow. The birds, which are from central Wisconsin, follow the aircraft across the country to one of two wildlife preserves in ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 3 Feb 2010 | 12:13 pm

Gay and Lesbian Teens Bullied More than Heterosexuals

Bullies target gay and lesbian teens more than heterosexuals.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Feb 2010 | 12:09 pm

Saturn mission 'extended again'

The US space agency (Nasa) has extended the Cassini-Huygens mission to explore Saturn once again.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Feb 2010 | 11:39 am

Cyber-warfare 'is growing threat'

International Institute for Strategic Studies says cyber attacks could become weapon of choice in future conflicts

Cyber-warfare attacks on military infrastructure, government and communications systems, and financial markets pose a rapidly growing but little understood threat to international security and could become a decisive weapon of choice in future conflicts between states, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies warned yesterday.

IISS director-general John Chipman said: "Despite evidence of cyber attacks in recent political conflicts, there is little appreciation internationally of how to assess cyber-conflict. We are now, in relation to the problem of cyber-warfare, at the same stage of intellectual development as we were in the 1950s in relation to possible nuclear war."

The warning accompanied yesterday's publication of the Military Balance 2010, the IISS's annual assessment of global military capabilities and defence economics. The study also highlighted a series of other security threats, including the war in Afghanistan, China's military diversification, the progress of Iran's suspect nuclear programme, and the impact of terrorist groups in Iraq and elsewhere.

Future state-on-state conflict, as well as conflicts involving non-state actors such as al-Qaida, would increasingly be characterised by reliance on asymmetric warfare techniques, chiefly cyber-warfare, Chipman said. Hostile governments could hide behind rapidly advancing technology to launch attacks undetected. And unlike conventional and nuclear arms, there were no agreed international controls on the use of cyber weapons.

"Cyber-warfare [may be used] to disable a country's infrastructure, meddle with the integrity of another country's internal military data, try to confuse its financial transactions or to accomplish any number of other possibly crippling aims," he said. Yet governments and national defence establishments at present have only limited ability to tell when they were under attack, by whom, and how they might respond.

Cyber-warfare typically involves the use of illegal exploitation methods on the internet, corruption or disruption of computer networks and software, hacking, computer forensics, and espionage. Reports of cyber-warfare attacks, government-sponsored or otherwise, are rising. Last month Google launched an investigation into cyber attacks allegedly originating in China that it said had targeted the email accounts of human rights activists.

In December the South Korean government reported an attack in which it said North Korean hackers may have stolen secret defence plans outlining the South Korean and US strategy in the event of war on the Korean peninsula. Last July, espionage protection agents in Germany said the country faced "extremely sophisticated" Chinese and Russian internet spying operations targeting industrial secrets and critical infrastructure such as Germany's power grid.

One of the most notorious cyber-warfare offensives to date took place in Estonia in 2007 when more than 1 million computers were used to jam government, business and media websites. The attacks, widely believed to have originated in Russia, coincided with a period of heightened bilateral political tension. They inflicted damage estimated in the tens of millions of euros of damage.

China last week accused the Obama administration of waging "online warfare" against Iran by recruiting a "hacker brigade" and manipulating social media such as Twitter and YouTube to stir up anti-government agitation.

The US Defence Department's Quadrennial Defence Review, published this week, also highlighted the rising threat posed by cyber-warfare on space-based surveillance and communications systems."On any given day, there are as many as 7 million DoD (Department of Defence) computers and telecommunications tools in use in 88 countries using thousands of war-fighting and support applications. The number of potential vulnerabilities, therefore, is staggering." the review said.

"Moreover, the speed of cyber attacks and the anonymity of cyberspace greatly favour the offence. This advantage is growing as hacker tools become cheaper and easier to employ by adversaries whose skills are growing in sophistication."

Defensive measures have already begun. Last June the Pentagon created US Cyber Command and Britain announced it was opening a cyber-security operations centre attached to GCHQ at Cheltenham, in coordination with MI5 and MI6.

William Lynn, US deputy defence secretary, described the cyber challenge as unprecedented. "Once the province of nations, the ability to destroy via cyber now also rests in the hands of small groups and individuals: from terrorist groups to organised crime, hackers to industrial spies to foreign intelligence services … This is not some future threat. The cyber threat is here today, it is here now," Lynn said.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Feb 2010 | 11:13 am

Link Between Vaccines and Autism Retracted

The only scientific study strongly suggesting a link between vaccines and autism has been retracted by the journal.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Feb 2010 | 10:55 am

France backs ban on tuna exports

France backs calls for a ban on the global trade in bluefin tuna, the numbers of which have dwindled through overfishing.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Feb 2010 | 10:47 am

Top astronomer suspended after leak allegation

Row may impact on South Africa's bid to host the Square Kilometre Array telescope.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 3 Feb 2010 | 10:14 am

Harrabin's Notes

What do report errors mean for UN's climate chief?
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Feb 2010 | 9:59 am

45-foot Ancient Snake Devoured Crocs

A newly discovered species of an ancient crocodile relative was likely prey for the largest snake the world has ever known.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Feb 2010 | 8:52 am

New Test Could Keep Spam Bots Out of Web Sites

A new visual recognition test easy for humans but hard for software to solve could offer a new source of “captchas” for online security and services.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Feb 2010 | 7:47 am

Couples Who Say 'We' Fare Better in Fights

Couples who refer to themselves as "we" may fair better during conflicts than those who don't
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Feb 2010 | 6:55 am

Brute Force: Humans Can Sure Take a Punch

Human bones are incredibly strong, but as we know they can break. The forces involved.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Feb 2010 | 6:10 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 | 3 Feb 2010 | 4:59 am

Telescope Finds Galaxy’s Most Massive Star Yet

This glowing stellar nursery is home to the most massive star yet found in the Milky Way galaxy.

Captured by the European Southern Observatory’s 27-foot-diameter Very Large Telescope at Cerro Paranal, Chile, the image above combines data taken with violet, red and infrared filters.

The nebula, NGC 3603, is surrounded by a cloud of glowing gas and dust in the Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy, about 20,000 light-years from Earth in the Carina constellation. This active star-forming region is one of the brightest and most compact star clusters in our galaxy. The cosmic nursery is teeming with thousands of young, massive suns, including several blue supergiants and three massive Wolf-Rayet stars. These brilliant stars eject huge amounts of mass before blazing out in spectacular supernova explosions. The most massive star in the cluster is 116 times as massive as the sun.

The photo below shows the broader area around the NGC 3603 nebula.

Images: ESO

See Also:

• Glowing Hydrogen Highlights Cat’s Paw Nebula
• Star Factory Shows Off Three Kinds of Nebulae
• Hubble Explains Nebula’s Ruddy Complexion
• Spectacular Wide-Field View of Eagle Nebula in High-Res
• Zoom In on Lagoon Nebula with Super-High-Res Image

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 3 Feb 2010 | 4:00 am

Fears over future power shortages

Britain could face power shortages in the years ahead, according to the energy regulator, Ofgem.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Feb 2010 | 3:47 am

Wolverine numbers 'melting away'

A significant decline in predatory wolverines across North America is linked to melting snowpacks, say researchers.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Feb 2010 | 3:46 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