Prion leaves lasting mark on memory

Prions are a special class of proteins best known as the source for mad cow and other neurodegenerative diseases. Despite this negative reputation, a prion may also have important and very positive roles in brain function. The researchers suggest that a prion-like protein may participate in memory in higher eukaryotes, from sea slugs on up.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Feb 2010 | 6:00 pm

Scientists map out regulatory regions of genome, hot spots for diabetes genes

Researchers have generated a complete map of the areas of the genome that control which genes are "turned on" or "off." The discovery, made in pancreatic islet cells, opens new avenues for understanding the genetic basis of type 2 diabetes and other common illnesses.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Feb 2010 | 6:00 pm

Commercial fishing endangers dolphin populations, new study finds

Extensive commercial fishing endangers dolphin populations in the Mediterranean, according to a new study by researchers in Israel.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Feb 2010 | 6:00 pm

New system provides hybrid electric autos with power to spare

An advancement in hybrid electric vehicle technology is providing powerful benefits beyond transportation.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Feb 2010 | 6:00 pm

Couples who say 'we' do better at resolving conflicts

People often complain about those seemingly smug married couples who constantly refer to themselves as "we." But a new study suggests that spouses who use "we-ness" language are better able to resolve conflicts than those who don't.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Feb 2010 | 6:00 pm

'Zen' bats hit their target by not aiming at it

New research shows Egyptian fruit bats find a target by NOT aiming their guiding sonar directly at it. Instead, they alternately point the sound beam to either side of the target. The new findings suggest that this strategy optimizes the bats' ability to pinpoint the location of a target, but also makes it harder for them to detect a target in the first place.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Feb 2010 | 6:00 pm

How sperm get a move on; discovery suggests new target for male contraception

Most of us probably think of sperm as rather active little cells, swimming with quick movements of their "tail" or flagella. But actually sperm's motility is in fact short lived. When in the male reproductive tract they have to rest easy, lest they wear themselves out prematurely and give up any chance of ever finding an egg.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

'Artificial pancreas' a step nearer for children with type 1 diabetes

Scientists have made a significant step towards developing a so-called "artificial pancreas" system for managing type 1 diabetes in children. The team has developed and successfully tested a new algorithm, providing a stepping stone to home testing for the artificial pancreas.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Madly mapping the universe

It takes special software to map the universe from noisy data. Scientists have developed a code called MADmap to do just that for the cosmic microwave background, then posted it on the web for other interested sky mappers. Scientists probing the sky with the PACS instrument aboard the Herschel satellite have adapted MADmap to make spectacular images of the infrared universe.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Melatonin precursor stimulates growth factor circuits in brain

N-acetylserotonin, the immediate precursor to melatonin, activates the same growth circuits in the brain as BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor). The results have implications for how some antidepressants function and suggest that the molecules and pathways involved in mood regulation and circadian rhythms are intertwined.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Toyota chief to address safety as Prius recall eyed (Reuters)

Reuters - Toyota Motor Corp President Akio Toyoda will front up on Friday for the first time over a string safety issues rocking the company as it prepared to recall its iconic Prius hybrid over braking problems.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Feb 2010 | 3:29 am

Toyota woes deepen as Prius recall looms (AFP)

AFP - The crisis rocking Toyota escalated Friday as the Japanese automaker looked set to recall several hundred thousand Prius hybrids and was slapped with a US lawsuit alleging it covered up safety problems.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Feb 2010 | 3:25 am

Spaceman

The Yorkshireman who's about to leave Planet Earth
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 5 Feb 2010 | 3:07 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Two major storms were expected to hit the U.S. on Friday, including one that could bury the Mid-Atlantic under more than a foot of snow.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Feb 2010 | 2:54 am

Toyota CEO to speak on quality woes (AP)

AP - Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda will speak about quality control Friday in his first — and long awaited — news conference since the automaker issued massive global recalls last month.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Feb 2010 | 2:51 am

Explorers' century-old whisky found in Antarctic (AP)

AP - This Scotch has been on the rocks for a century.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Feb 2010 | 2:49 am

Embattled climate chief supported

India gives its full support to embattled climate change chief Rajendra Pachauri, under attack over recent scientific errors.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 5 Feb 2010 | 2:35 am

1 killed in Cyclone Oli in French Polynesia (AP)

AP - An official in French Polynesia says swelling ocean waters driven by Cyclone Oli have left at least one person dead on the South Pacific archipelago.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Feb 2010 | 2:27 am

American-born pandas reach their new home in China (AP)

AP - Two American-born giant pandas arrived at their new China home Friday to find just what they'd left in the United States — live TV coverage and a passionate crowd.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Feb 2010 | 2:01 am

Russia 'dumped waste in Baltic'

The Russian military dumped nuclear waste into the Baltic Sea in the early 1990s, Swedish media reports say.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 5 Feb 2010 | 1:31 am

Protein Supplement Myth Revealed by Body of Work (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Most health stores are tainted with the irony that so few of their products are actually healthy, from herbal potions of unknown purity and utility to dietary supplements capitalizing on recent trends in weight loss or hair gain.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Feb 2010 | 12:50 am

Emails cannot destroy proof that humans are warming the planet

Lab doors should be forced open whether scientists like it or not, if only to prove there is no conspiracy in climate research

The emails stolen from the University of East Anglia in November have cast an uncomfortable light on the behind-the-scenes actions of some of the most senior and respected climate scientists in the world. The affair raises serious questions about access to data and the way scientific peer review can be used to stifle dissent. But is the science of climate change fatally flawed by the climategate revelations? Absolutely not. Nothing uncovered in the emails destroys the argument that humans are warming the planet.

None of the 1,073 emails plus 3,587 files containing documents, raw data and computer code upsets the 200-year-old science behind the "greenhouse effect" of gases like carbon dioxide, which traps solar heat and warm the atmosphere. Nothing changes the fact that carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere thanks to human emissions from burning carbon-based fuels like coal and oil. Nor the calculations of physicists that for every square metre of the earth's surface, 1.6 watts more energy now enters the atmosphere than leaves it.

And we know the world is warming as a result. Thousands of thermometers in areas remote from any conceivable local urban influences tell us that. The oceans are warming too. And we have the evidence of our own eyes. The great majority of the world's glaciers are retreating, Arctic sea ice is disappearing, sea levels are rising ever faster, trees are climbing up hillsides and permafrost is melting. These are not statistical artefacts or the result of scientists cherry-picking their data.

Equally, many of the most widely publicised claims from sceptics about what is in the emails are demonstrably unfounded. There is no conspiracy to "hide the decline" in temperatures. Nor that a lack of warming in the data is a "travesty" – still less of attempts to fix the data.

But, within the narrower confines of assembling a reliable history of global temperature, the emails have done significant damage to the credibility of scientists. They show that in their desire to give the world a clear message that humans are heating the planet here and now, a group of scientists cut corners and down-play uncertainties in their calculations. Their opponents charge that they then covered their tracks by being secretive with their data and suppressing dissent.

Taken with the recent revelations about shortcomings in reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this suggests a wider problem of scientific sloppiness, but not of outright fraud. Many scientists believe their community has to own up to that, and put its house in order.

Part of the problem is secrecy in science. Climatologist Judy Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology, who has been trying to make peace between her colleagues and the sceptics, says the various data sets connected to the famous "hockey stick" temperature graph and Phil Jones's thermometer data sets "stand out as lacking transparency". Science is too much of a closed shop, she says. Outsiders need to be let into the ivory towers for the good of science itself. "Einstein didn't start his career at Princeton, but rather at a post office." Bring on the bloggers. Maybe there's an Einstein among them.

The doors of the labs are being opened whether scientists like it or not. The Information Commissioner's office last week released a statement saying that the University of East Anglia had "not dealt with [FoI requests] as they should have been under the legislation". There is evidence in the emails that some scientists at the Climatic Research Unit wanted to delete files rather than hand them over – although it is not clear whether any deliberate deletions actually happened.

Probably nobody anticipated that a law intended to unwrap state secrets might end up freeing data from scientists' computers. But the science community now urgently needs to figure out how to respond to this altered landscape – or scientists will end up in court before long.

The need to open up science is made all the greater by the question raised in the emails about the "gold standard", the peer review system. In many fields of research, peer review creates serious conflicts of interest in which, as the emails have revealed, senior researchers can act in a way that could have the effect of blackballing the research papers of their critics. The dangers are all the greater when, again as the emails show, the conventions of anonymity in peer review are not rigorously upheld.

Finally, "climategate" raises questions about the IPCC report-writing process, in which many of the emailers have been involved. Governments set up the IPCC 20 years ago to get scientists to speak with one voice on climate change. But often there is no clear consensus. Scientists are trained to disagree. That's how science advances. The tensions created by the pressure to agree are clear in dozens of the emails.

One of Jones's colleagues at the University of East Anglia, climatologist Mike Hulme, says: "Climate scientists will have to work harder to earn the warranted trust of the public – and maybe that is no bad thing." And he thinks the IPCC may have run its course.

While science gets its house in order, we need some perspective. In the midst of a cold winter it may be hard to convince ourselves, but the world is still warming. Humanity is still to blame. And we still, urgently, need to do something about it.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 5 Feb 2010 | 12:00 am

Australia to 'cash in on Indian growth' (AFP)

AFP - Australia's coal and liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to India are set to climb as the South Asian nation's economy undergoes rapid growth, Australia's central bank said Friday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Feb 2010 | 11:57 pm

Russian cargo ship docks at International Space Station (Reuters)

Reuters - A Russian cargo ship delivered food, water, fuel and other supplies to the International Space Station on Friday, space officials said.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Feb 2010 | 11:14 pm

Russian cargo ship docks at International Space Station

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian cargo ship delivered food, water, fuel and other supplies to the International Space Station on Friday, space officials said.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 4 Feb 2010 | 11:14 pm

Hubble shows Pluto 'turning red'

Nasa scientists say that dwarf planet Pluto, on the edge of our solar system, is becoming increasingly red.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Feb 2010 | 9:36 pm

Leaves Show Looped Networks May Be Better Than Branched

Tree branches have inspired efficient transit networks, but a new study finds inspiration in leaves. The curvy, connected leaf veins found in some plants are an efficient way to circumvent damaged areas and channel nutrients, report researchers led by Eleni Katifori of the Rockefeller University in New York City.

“It’s obvious that if you look at leaves, they have a lot of loops,” Katifori says. To find out how the looped networks may be beneficial for the plants, the researchers created a computer model to compare how efficiently different branching patterns could do the job of leaf veins, which move water and nutrients around. “The question we’re asking is, what’s the best network we can build?” Katifori says.

In the simulations, the looped network performed better than nonlooped ones in several important ways, the team reported Jan. 29 in Physical Review Letters. Damage from hungry insects, cold weather or parasites can interrupt leaves’ normal venation patterns. Connected circular veins allowed the flow of water and minerals to circumvent areas where veins were destroyed, the team shows. The looped network also allowed leaves to easily adjust the flow rate of water through veins, which can help leaves conserve water on a hot day, Katifori says.

Loop networks aren’t found just in tree leaves. Blood vessels in the retina, structural veins in insect wings and the architecture of certain corals are all based on loops, the researchers write. Understanding the benefits of such networks might lead to more efficient man-made network designs.

Videos: 1) Looped vein network grows around a damaged spot./Eleni Katifori. 2) Straight veins are stopped by a damaged spot./Eleni Katifori.

See Also:

• Magnetic Leaves Could ID Most Polluted Routes
• Plants Have a Social Life, Too
• Plants Know Their Relatives — And Like Them!
• In the Bowels of Carnivorous Plants, a Tiny Model of the World
• Crowdsourcing for Plants

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 4 Feb 2010 | 9:21 pm

Cassiopeia A Makes Beautiful Music

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the amazing sounds of Saturn's rings, and how they have inspired composers to create their own "music of the spheres." Apparently the supernovae were feeling a little left out. This week brings ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Feb 2010 | 6:04 pm

'That Looks Like Trouble....'

It's been a good long while since the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in mid-air a few minutes after launch on January 28, 1986, killing all the astronauts (and one schoolteacher) aboard. Now some new homemade footage of the crash has ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Feb 2010 | 5:44 pm

Test of "artificial pancreas" offers diabetes hope

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have used an "artificial pancreas" system of pumps and monitors to improve blood sugar control in diabetes patients in the first study to show the new device works better than conventional treatment.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 4 Feb 2010 | 5:10 pm

Letters: The realities of scientific research

So, Fred Pearce has discovered that "a close reading of the hacked emails [from the University of East Anglia] exposes the real process of science, its jealousies and tribalism" (UK scientist 'hid' climate data flaws, 2 February). A more sensible view would be that if that is all a bunch of ill-intentioned hackers found out of 10 years of emails, there's not that much wrong with the Climate Research Unit.

Pearce seems to have fallen in line with Sarah Palin in assuming that scientific research is a process of revelation of the truth based on incontrovertible findings, which will come crashing down the moment any flaws are discovered. The reality is messier, and yes, sometimes researchers are not completely upfront with the limitations of their findings. And yes, there are power games. Science doesn't advance knowledge because scientists are honest, altruistic people, but because it's in the interest of other scientists to produce better research. Untenable findings get found out in the end.

Hidden away among the claims about Phil Jones's research, Pearce quietly recognises that "the dramatic revision of the estimated impact of urbanisation on temperatures in China does not change the global picture of temperature trends". Perhaps you should inform your readers about the way scientific research really works, instead of using the kind of lurid headlines which will inevitably mislead about the state of climate change research.

Jonathan Hopkin

Department of government, LSE

• Global warming is causing such public debate because there is simply no piece of killer evidence for it. As a result, almost no one can reasonably make an informed opinion. As a scientist-programmer who has the ability (but not the time) to reproduce the climate simulations of the IPCC, I find it frustrating that only years of study of the most subtle factors would allow me to decide one way or the other. Like everyone else, I have to trust the experts – and this is why the UEA emails are so damaging. We all have to trust these people, not be convinced by them. We need them to be more rigorous, more open, more scientific, than any other group of scientists. The IPCC's behaviour has damaged its cause more than the deniers could ever do.

Dr David Rawlinson

Billingshurst, West Sussex

• In the area of science in which I work and publish (astrophysics), peer-review anonymity is not always required. I'm sometimes told the name of the referee of my paper, and when I act as referee I'm sometimes asked if I wish my name to be made known to the author. One advantage is that if an unfavourable report is received from someone whom the author feels might be biased then review by another referee can be requested.

Dr David Moss

Rochdale, Lancashire

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Feb 2010 | 5:06 pm

Response: Europe is not heading for a population collapse

There may be a slow decline in the number of people, but it should be welcomed

Fred Pearce vividly portrays population collapse in the town of Hoyers­werda in eastern Germany and links it with a likely future for Europe: "Europe's population is, right now, peaking, after more than six centuries of continuous growth. With each generation reproducing only half its number, this looks like the start of a ­continent-wide collapse in numbers. Some predict wipeout by 2100" (Lonely planet, G2, 1 February).

As a demographer specialising in fertility and population trends in Europe I find it unsettling that so much attention is paid to overblown claims of the continent's population demise. Yes, Europe as a whole is projected to experience a gradual decline of its population, from 732 million now to 691 million in 2050 according to the United Nations. But, although further decline after 2050 will most probably follow, this gets nowhere close to a collapse.

In addition, fertility rates in Europe are currently above 1.5 children per woman. As a rate of 2.1 is needed in the long run to replace population in the absence of migration, each European generation is reproducing about three-quarters of its number, not a half. In some of the richer countries – such as France, the UK and Sweden – the fertility rate is around 2.

Pearce says: "Demographer Peter McDonald calculates that if Italy gets stuck with recent fertility levels, and fails to top up with foreign migrants, it will lose 86% of its population by the end of the century, falling to 8 million compared with today's 56 million. Spain will lose 85%, Germany 83% and Greece 74%." I ran such a scenario for Italy, using fertility data for 2007 when the total fertility rate there was at 1.37. This concluded that by 2100 Italy's population would fall to 23 million, almost three times higher than McDonald's reported number.

This is all theory, however, since birth rates are notoriously unstable and Europe is likely to face continued immigration in the coming decades. For example, Spain has had low fertility rates since the 1980s, and many projections assumed its slow population demise.

Instead, Spain witnessed an unprecedented immigration wave, and a gradual increase in birth rates. Despite low fertility, the Spanish population jumped fastest in Europe in the last decade, from 40 million to 46 million. There is no indication, save the short-term impact of the recent economic crisis, that this migration stream is going to end: since 2000 the EU has recorded a net migration gain of 15 million, more than during the previous four decades combined.

There will be countries and regions that will suffer long-term depopulation due to low fertility and emigration – but a combination of the two phenomena is mostly concentrated in eastern Europe, particularly in eastern Germany, Bulgaria and Ukraine. But the European population will also continue to age, and some demographers predict that babies born in the first decade of this century will live to an average age of 100.

Since the late 19th century, when a massive decline in birth rates began in most of Europe, some demographers and long-forgotten futurologists have been busy envisioning an inevitable demise of Europe and "western civilisation". However, it is not population size but affluence and technology that make some countries more powerful than others. Switzerland, with a population of 8 million, is globally more significant than, say, Bangladesh, with a population 20 times larger. In any case, a slow decline in European population should be cheerfully welcomed by all who care about climate change and global pressure on resources.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Feb 2010 | 5:05 pm

In praise of… ponds

If it's bigger than a puddle and smaller than a couple of football pitches, and if it's wet for at least four months of the year, then it's a pond. It might be a natural hollow that holds water in the winter months, or an old gravel pit that has filled with ground water, or a lovingly created pool of reflective water in your garden, or even the pond on the city common where cattle and sheep on the way to market once watered. They are all capable of supporting hundreds of different species: ponds are second only to cowpats for the speed with which they turn into rich ecological sites. From water fleas and great crested newts to creeping bent grass and the almost-extinct star fruit (Damasonium alisma), even the smallest area of still water can be a treasury of biological diversity, part of the poetry of the biological world. And they are also under threat as never before. According to a report published yesterday by the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and Pond Conservation, as many as four-fifths of the UK's 500,000 ponds are polluted, some by industry and many more by agricultural waste and the impact of fertiliser being washed into the water system. Where ponds are closer to streams they are healthier. The charity Pond Conservation, which is campaigning to double the number of ponds , says that ponds and pond margins often provide shelter for species that are otherwise locally rare. They are also, as every humble office worker knows, an indispensable element in the food chain. No ponds, no pond life.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Feb 2010 | 5:05 pm

Guardian Daily: Climate science under siege

As the consensus on climate change comes under sustained attack following more revelations from leaked emails and a climbdown on melting glaciers from the UN climate agency we ask: can the trust in the science be restored and how solid is the consensus?

We hear from the Guardian's environment team who have worked on the story since it broke last year.

James Randerson is the editor of environmentguardian.co.uk,
David Adam is environment correspondent, and Suzanne Goldenberg is US environment correspondent, based in Washington DC.

For more on the hacked climate science emails click here.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Feb 2010 | 5:01 pm

Moths catch the wind to speed migration

Understanding how insects travel might help to predict pest invasions.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/_h-iGP8oBTo" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 4 Feb 2010 | 5:00 pm

Yellowstone is Rumbling. We are NOT Doomed.

This is normal. Most of the 1,600 or so quakes since January 17 have been very mellow. Yeah, it sounds like a lot of qukes to have happen in a couple of weeks, but the vast majority of these have ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Feb 2010 | 4:43 pm

Open-source science takes on neglected disease

Chemist launches collaborative project to make more potent form of much-needed drug.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 4 Feb 2010 | 3:52 pm

Feds Worry iPad Could Clog Wireless Networks

Government officials warned today that Apple's new iPad device could lead to further congestion on wireless networks.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Feb 2010 | 3:27 pm

Dinosaur had colourful feathers

A study of a 150 million year old dinosaur fossil has revealed it had striking multi-coloured feathers
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Feb 2010 | 2:47 pm

Best View Yet of Pluto Shows Rapidly Changing Surface

After more than four years of processing on 20 hand-built computers, the best views ever captured of Pluto are now available.

Working from 384 images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in which the image of Pluto itself was just a few pixels across, astronomer Marc Buie and his team at the Southwest Research Institute stitched together the maps of Pluto you see here.

“It also shows you what I consider to be my best guess for what the true color of Pluto would be if you were puttering around near it in a spacecraft,” Buie said in a NASA teleconference.

Pluto has mostly been in the news in recent years for its demotion from planet to dwarf planet and subsequent attempts to get it lumped back in with the bigger, round objects of the solar system.

But astronomer Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology, aka @PlutoKiller on Twitter, said the question of the classification of the celestial body doesn’t merit the attention it’s gotten.

“That’s really not an interesting question to ask,” said Brown, who was not involved with the research. “It’s a great place to study.”

Specifically, what’s fascinating to Brown and Buie is the tremendous amount of change that has been observed on Pluto, particularly between images obtained in 1994 and 2003. Based on the new processing of the photos, there has been more change on Pluto than Earth or Mars.

“You’re looking at the surface in the solar system where there are the biggest changes we’ve ever seen,” Brown said.

The color of the surface of Pluto changed so markedly, particularly between 2000 and 2002, that Buie has spent years checking and rechecking his work, just to make sure the differences weren’t an artifact of faulty equipment or calculations.

“I got that result years ago but it’s just so hard to understand and believe that I’ve been checking everything that I can think of,” he said. “I’m still nervous about it. It could be that I’ve just completely screwed this up, but I can’t find where.”

One thing that gives him confidence is that one of Pluto’s moons, Charon, is also in the image they have of the dwarf planet and its color remained constant as Pluto’s changed. That makes it less likely that something went haywire in the instrumentation or processing.

The computing power necessary to turn the pixels of Pluto into the global map seen above is considerable. Buie hand-wrote all the code in a combination of IDL, a scientific programming language, and C. But when he finished and began to crunch the data, it appeared that it would take decades for the calculations to complete.

So, he took the funding he had and scraped together 20 computers to do the work in parallel.

“I bought these little shuttle boxes and a processor and memory. I got [the price] down to $450 per computer and I had enough to buy 20 computers and have them all grind,” he said. “That’s about the cheapest supercomputer you can manage.”

Planet or not, Pluto will now provide a lens for studying the rest of the objects in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune.

“Even though Pluto is not the biggest one, it’s the closest one and the best one to study,” Brown said, “and to help us interpret all these other things we’re seeing in the outer solar system.”

Image and Video: NASA, ESA, and M. Buie (Southwest Research Institute)

See Also:

• Space Probe Gets Halfway to Pluto in Record Time
• Underdog Planet: Why We Love Pluto
• Pluto 2015: Journey to the Rim of the Solar System
• The Fight for the Ninth Planet
• ‘When I Was Your Age, Pluto Was a Planet
• Pluto Probe’s Jupiter Flyby Found Moon, Planetary Surprises
• More Stories on the Kuiper Belt

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 | 4 Feb 2010 | 2:43 pm

The big El Niño that nobody saw

One of the biggest, meanest El Niño episodes of the 20th Century came and went and almost nobody noticed. It was 1918, a year when many people had their hands full just staying alive. The first World War was ravaging ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Feb 2010 | 2:35 pm

Genes Help Explain Who Gets Fit

Scientists have identified genes that can partly predict how much we respond to exercise
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Feb 2010 | 2:34 pm

Dinosaur Fossil Reveals True Feather Colors

Another week, another colorful feathered dinosaur. Hot on the heels of a recent report identifying pigments in fossilized dino feathers and filaments (SN Online: 1/27/10), a different team of scientists says that it has mapped the full pattern of plumage sported by the oldest known feathered dinosaur.

Paleontologists first described Anchiornis huxleyi, which lived in what is now northeastern China between 151 million and 161 million years ago, in September (SN: 10/24/09, p. 8). Reports of the lithe, peacock-sized dinosaur caused quite a stir, not least because the feathered creature was older than Archaeopteryx, which is considered by many scientists to be the oldest known bird.

Now, analyses of fossil feathers from all parts of A. huxleyi’s body — reported online Feb. 4 and in an upcoming Science — provide a detailed look at the dino’s color scheme. The new findings also bolster the notion that feathers first evolved for a purpose other than flying, scientists say.

A. huxleyi had black and gray body plumage, the team’s investigations suggest. And while the long feathers on the front and side of the creature’s crest were gray, those sprouting from the top and back of its head were reddish-brown. Along with reddish-brown spots on its head and neck, A. huxleyi sported white racing stripes on its legs and its winglike forelimbs.

Paleobiologist Jakob Vinther of Yale University and his colleagues took a microscopic look at fossilized feathers at 29 sites on a specimen of A. huxleyi unearthed early last year. Some analyses focused on the small, simple feathers that covered the creature’s body and skull, and others targeted the longer, more complex feathers that adorned its forelimbs, legs and feet. “There was hardly any part of the creature that wasn’t feathered,” Vinther notes.

Almost all of the feathers the team scrutinized contained well-preserved remnants of pigment-bearing structures called melanosomes. Feathers lacking melanosomes were probably white, the researchers note. By comparing the size, shape, density and arrangement of melanosomes in each fossil feather with those in variously colored feathers of modern birds, the team then sketched out what A. huxleyi looked like. “Using those comparisons, we can reliably predict [the creature’s] color and map the whole animal,” Vinther says.

The team’s analyses “reveal an enormous array of information,” says Michael Benton, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol in England. The black-and-white bars on A. huxleyi’s forelimbs, as well as its colorful crest, are reminiscent of similar features in modern birds, he adds.

Knowing when color appeared in feathers or filaments may help solve the conundrum of why those structures evolved in the first place, Benton says. After all, he notes, A. huxleyi’s feathered forelimbs weren’t sufficiently large enough to carry the creature’s weight in flight. “What’s the function of half a wing?” he asks. The fact that feathers appear in the fossil record long before flight-capable birds suggests that feathers initially served a behavioral function, possibly one related to sending visual signals, and only later began to serve an aerodynamic function.

Philip J. Currie, a paleontologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, agrees: “Ancient creatures didn’t just sprout feathers and start flying. The feathers were there for another reason first.” Fossils reveal that dinosaurs often had very large eyes and sizable optic lobes in their brains. “Dinosaurs were very visual animals, just like birds are,” he adds.

Bold patterns of plumage, such as those seen in A. huxleyi, could have served any of a number of functions, Vinther and his colleagues speculate. Besides communicating to members of its own species — a “come here, cutie” to members of the opposite sex, say, or a “back off” message to rival suitors — a quick flash of boldly colored plumage could startle an attacking predator or flush prey out of hiding, the researchers say.

Images: 1) © 2010 National Geographic. 2) Jakob Vinther/National Geographic. 3) Jakob Vinther/National Geographic.

See Also:

• Four-Winged Fossil Bridges Bird-Dinosaur Gap
• Fancy Feathers Predated Flight in Dinosaur-Bird Hybrid
• Paleontologists Find Dinosaur Protofeather
• Fossil Catches Dinosaur Red-Handed, Evolving Into Bird
• Video: Model Dinosaur Tests Four-Winged Flight
• Feathered Dinosaurs Were Venomous Predators

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 4 Feb 2010 | 2:21 pm

Scientists, you are fallible. Get off the pedestal and join the common herd

Climatologists above all need to rediscover the virtue of self-criticism - or others will continue to question their evidence

So scientists are human after all. They are no different from bankers, politicians, lawyers, estate agents and perhaps even journalists. They cheat. They make mistakes. They suppress truth and suggest falsity, especially when a cheque or a plane ticket is on offer. As for self-criticism, that is for you, not me.

I am just ready to believe that the antics of the climate change scientists, revealed in this week's Guardian and elsewhere, have no impact on the facts of global warming. But then I must rely on those same scientists to say so. The Yamal-12 larches may be dodgy, the hockey stick limp and the Amazon stats subject to re-evaluation. The date of 2035 for a Himalayan apocalypse may have been a misprint for 2350 and 40,000 comments didn't spot it. But so what, they all say? The world is coming to an end because we are scientists and, like Nostradamus, we know.

What any layman must find alarming is the paranoia and exclusivity of the climate change community. The preparation of the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was apparently like that of a party manifesto. Data was suppressed and criticism ignored. The IPCC's chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, dismissed sceptics as adherents of "voodoo science". Dark hints were made of commercial interest and Holocaust denial.

Now barely a week passes without another of the "thousands and thousands of papers" Pachauri calls in evidence having its peer-review credentials questioned. Their authors may plead that the evidence remains strong and theirs is no more than what lawyers call "noble cause corruption". Anyone reading the University of East Anglia emails might conclude they would say that, wouldn't they. Yet Pachauri this week issued a Blairite refusal of all regrets for the chaos into which his sloppiness has plunged his organisation.

Climatology is not the only scientific discipline whose dirty linen is flapping in the wind. The wildly exaggerated flu scares promoted over the past decade by virologists and their friends in government have so undermined trust in epidemiology that people are refusing flu vaccination. In the case of the MMR scare, it took London's Royal Free Hospital a shocking 10 years to investigate the scientists responsible, and the General Medical Council to discipline them.

Last week 14 stem cell researchers accused the science journals on which their reputation (and money) depends of corrupting the peer-review process. They protested at their papers being sent for vetting to known rivals. "Papers that are scientifically flawed or comprise only modest technical increments often attract undue profile," they said, while original new material was delayed or suppressed. Sending research papers to rivals in a field of potential profitability is like asking General Motors to pass judgment on the latest Ford.

Science enjoys extraordinary privilege in Britain. The media treats it with the deference of a new clerisy. The BBC devotes exhaustive and uncritical ­coverage to its most obscure doings. Melvyn Bragg dances attendance on the Royal Society. Carol Vorderman is recruited by David Cameron to teach the Tories maths. Fairs and prizes are showered on budding scientists. There are no young bankers of the year, no young management consultants, but young scientists galore. The Times newspaper even boasts a column with the desperate title, Sexy Maths.

I devour popular science, finding its history and its wonder a constant delight. But the public has been asked to put faith in a single profession that it cannot sustain. It is a mystery how so many science teachers can be so bad at their jobs that most children of my acquaintance cannot wait to get shot of the subject. I am tempted to conclude that maths and science teachers want only clones of themselves, like monks in a Roman Catholic seminary.

Criticise any field of science these days and you grow accustomed to such gentilities of academic discourse from the laboratory cloister as, "How dare you", "Get off our patch" and "Jenkins, you are a grade-one ­arsehole". If you report those who regard wind energy as a costly irrelevance to global warming, you cannot discern from the abuse who does and does not have a financial interest in it. (The same is true of blogs.) If you ­question anti-nuclear scaremongering, the threats are little short of "We know where your children live".

Two decades of uncritical flattery appear to have eroded what should be science's central tenets: questioning evidence and challenging assumptions. In the bizarre case of the Himalayan glacier, enough climate change believers wanted cataclysm to be true for none of them to question the evidence, however implausible. Hence the scientist who told a New York Times reporter: "You are about to experience 'the Big Cutoff' from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you."

My acceptance of the human causation of global warming has, as yet, not been dimmed by the shenanigans of the IPCC or the chicanery of the University of East Anglia. Nor is the reality of flu undermined by the World Health Organisation and its allies in the drugs industry. Nor should stem cell research be balked by the shortcomings of peer review. I can read the material myself.

What is alarming is the indifference of the leaders of science to the damage done to their cause. The top professional body, The Royal Society, has shown no inclination to judgment on the climate change controversy. Its ­website remains a bland cheerleader for the IPCC alarmists. The Royal Society took no steps of which I am aware to investigate the scandal of pandemic epidemiology, or the allegations against stem cell peer review. Ethics is not a strong suit of so-called big science. It gets in the way of money.

Science demands, and gets, a weight of expectation. It wants the public to regard its role in society and the economy as axiomatic – with no obligation to prove it. Government buys into this. While the humanities and even social sciences are dismissed as "consumption goods", science is an "investment in our future". A student of English or history is a drone, but a student of science is a hero of the state.

If global warming is as catastrophic as its champions in the science community claim – and as expensive to rectify – its evidence must surely be cross-tested over and again. Yet it has been left to freelancers and wild-cat bloggers to challenge the apparently rickety temperature sequences on which warming alarmism has been built.

No professional body is checking all this. Assertions are treated as scientific fact even when they come from such lobbyists as the World Wildlife Fund (on whose politics see Raymond Bonner's At the Hand of Man). If their conclusions are wrong, they are demanding money with false menaces. If they are right, their abuse of evidence and political naivety jeopardises life on earth. The chief government scientist, John Beddington, might have opined last week that "there is fundamental uncertainty about climate change predictions". What is he going to do about it?

I regard journalism as fallible and its regulation inadequate. But at least, like most professions, it has some. Only when science comes off its pedestal and joins the common herd will it see the virtue in self-criticism. Until then, sceptics must do the job as best they can.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Feb 2010 | 2:00 pm

Detectives question scientist over email leaks

University of East Anglia scientist Paul Dennis denies leaking material, but links to climate change sceptics in US drew him to attention of the investigators

A scientist at the University of East Anglia has been questioned by detectives ­investigating how controversial emails were leaked from the campus's climate research unit.

Norfolk police have interviewed and taken a formal statement from Paul Dennis, 54, another climate researcher who heads an adjacent laboratory.

The leaked emails from the head of the unit, Professor Phil Jones, surfaced just before the Copenhagen conference in December and caused a furore because they suggested that data which did not support theories of global warming was being deliberately withheld. Dennis denies leaking the material. But it is understood that his links with climate change sceptic bloggers in North America drew him to the attention of the investigating team, and have exposed rifts within the university's environmental science faculty.

Dennis refused to sign a petition in support of Jones when the scandal broke. He told friends he was one of several staff unwilling to put their names to the Met Office-inspired statement in support of the global warming camp, because "science isn't done by consensus".

University sources say the head of department, Professor Jacquie Burgess, received a letter from Dennis at the height of the email uproar, calling for more open release of data. He appears to have disapproved of the way Jones resisted FoI requests.

Dennis's own research, which dates fluctuating temperatures in ice cores stretching back thousands of years, does not support the more catastrophic current predictions of runaway global warming.

He has a history of contact with the American bloggers who bombarded Jones's unit with FoI requests, and were the first to receive the leaks. The ensuing global row led to Jones standing aside from his post. Last week he was rebuked by the Information Commissioner's office for apparent breaches of FoI rules.

One piece of information that led police to question Dennis was the discovery of emails between him and Stephen McIntyre, who runs a sceptic blog in Toronto called Climate Audit. Climate Audit was the first to receive an anonymous link to the leaked data. Dennis subsequently emailed McIntyre to alert him to a Norwich University message confirming that a leak had occurred.

The scientist also had contact with Patrick Condon, an aeronautical engineer in Morris, Illinois, who runs a similar maths-oriented sceptic blog called Air Vent, and criticises "leftists" who promote global warming theories.

A third blogger with whom Dennis has posted is Anthony Watts, a weatherman for a California radio station who is involved in a sometimes vituperative sceptic blog called Watts Up with That. He has had a book published by the Heartland Institute, a denialist organisation which until 2006, received funding from ExxonMobil.

All three American bloggers, McIntyre, Condon and Watts, were initially sent links to the cache of CRU leaked material, via anonymous servers, on the same day, Tuesday 17 November.

McIntyre then received a message from Dennis in Norwich. According to files obtained by police, he wrote: "Hi Steve, Yesterday we received the following email, sent to all staff in environmental sciences and the climatic research unit. I have no idea what stuff was collected or where it was posted, but interesting nonetheless!"

The attached message from Prof Alastair Grant, deputy head of department, said: "A large volume of files and emails from computers in ENV and CRU have been posted on to a website, apparently by climate change sceptics."

The university's move followed a tipoff from a Nasa climate scientist, Gavin Schmidt, in New York. Schmidt said his own blog, called Realclimate, had been temporarily taken over by a hacker posting a link to the university's internal emails.

Staff at the beleaguered environmental sciences department say they have been asked not to talk to the media. But Dennis has now posted an account of his police interview at a British website run by a sceptic accountant, Andrew Montford.

He told Montford's blog, called Bishop Hill: "They thought I might have some information on the basis that I had sent [Condon] a copy of a paper I had published on isotopes and climate at the southern end of the Antarctic Peninsula … and I had exchanged emails with Steve McIntyre over the leak/hack.

"Clearly they've trawled through the UEA mail server and checked for key words … The police left me very much with the impression that they were working on the theory that this was an outside hack and was done deliberately to disrupt Copenhagen."

Norfolk police have discounted tabloid stories of links to Russian intelligence, despite claims this week by the former government chief scientist Sir David King. He said only foreign intelligence agencies or US lobbyists had the resources to make the "highly sophisticated" selection of embarrassing phrases and correspondence dating back to 1996 in the leaks.

But a technical analysis by the Guardian shows the process could have been much more straightforward. The files were all in one place on a backup server, according to UEA, and all it took to sift them was a series of simple searches using keywords such as "Yamal" [the name of a controversial research project], "tree rings", or "Phil Jones". This would explain why many of the published emails and documents contain such keywords.

On at least two previous occasions, in 2008 and July 2009, data on the CRU ­servers turned out to be accidentally accessible to the probing bloggers – simply thanks to weak security.

The police have now moved on to a series of "very detailed" approaches to the overseas bloggers and members of their chat forums, asking if they had access to university passwords, and if they have any theories of their own.

"The police really don't know what happened," says Condon, who was emailed by investigators after Christmas. He told the Guardian: "It seems to me more like a prank than anything else."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Feb 2010 | 1:51 pm

Pluto turning brighter and redder, pictures show

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Pluto is turning brighter and redder as its 248-year-long rotation around the sun changes its seasons, NASA reported on Thursday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 4 Feb 2010 | 1:08 pm

Compare Aerial Images of World War II Destruction With Today in Google Earth

Aerial imagery of Europe in 1943 that shows the devastation of World War II is now available in Google Earth. Comparing photos such as those above Warsaw before the war, immediately after the war and today really brings to life the incredible destruction and amazing recovery of bombed European cities.

Around three dozen cities have images available from 1943 in Google Earth’s historical imagery feature including Lyon, France; Naples, Italy; and Stuttgart, Germany, all pictured below. The aerial perspective highlights the extent of the demolition.

One of the most striking sets of photos is of the Warsaw ghetto below in 1935, 1943 and present day. It was the largest ghetto in Europe and hundreds of thousands of Jewish people were deported from there or killed there.

The images above show the same time sequence for Warsaw’s Old Town at top and Warsaw University.

Via Google Lat Long Blog

Warsaw ghetto 1935, 1943 and present day

Naples, Italy in 1943 and present day

Stuttgart, Germany in 1943 and present day

Lyon, France in 1943 and present day

Images: Google

See Also:

• Satellite Photos of Haiti Before and After the Earthquake
• NASA Sends Airborne Radar to Map Haiti Faults in 3-D
• Asteroid Impact Craters on Earth as Seen From Space
• Erupting Volcanoes on Earth as Seen From Space
• Huge Holes in the Earth: Open-Pit Mines Seen From Space
• Eclipse Shadow on Earth Seen From Space

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 4 Feb 2010 | 12:51 pm

Shark Attack on Kite Surfer Extremely Rare

Shark attacks are rare. Kite surfer Stephen Schafer was very unlucky.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Feb 2010 | 12:30 pm

Athletes Beware, Scientists Hot on Gene Doping Trail

After warning for years that athletes would try to dope their genes, scientists are finding ways to catch them. The tests are still being refined in animals, but will likely be run years from now on samples taken at the upcoming Winter Olympics and stored.

The tests reflect a new approach to doping detection: Rather than targeting specific, easily masked chemicals, they look at system-wide changes in gene expression and protein production.

“Before, drug testers took a toxicological approach,” said Olivier Rabin, science director at the World Anti-Doping Agency. “Now we’re on much more of a medical and forensic approach.”

The International Olympic Committee formally banned gene doping in 2003, when gene therapy and gene-targeting therapeutics were mostly a matter of medical prediction. Since then, they’ve moved to the edge of medical reality. Most advances are still limited to lab animals, but that hasn’t stopped athletes from hoping for an early if unproven edge.

Bodybuilding magazines already carry advertisements for DNA-tweaking drinks and pills. Experts say these are fraudulent, but reputable researchers are routinely contacted by coaches and athletes wondering if their animal treatments can be given to humans.

Three years ago, German track coach Thomas Springstein was busted after unsuccessfully trying to score Repoxygen, an experimental gene therapy drug that boosts red blood cell production, for his runners. At the Olympics in Beijing, an unidentified Chinese doctor offered stem cell injections to a German journalist posing as a swim coach.

“We have no evidence that any athlete bought or used that stuff,” said Mark Frankel, an American Association for the Advancement of Science bioethicist who studies gene doping. “But the next big movement forward in terms of cheating is very likely to be in the genetic arena.”

The most likely biological targets for cheating are erythropoietin, the protein enhanced by Repoxygen; genes for the production of myostatin and insulin-like growth factor I, which affect muscle production (as in the lower mouse in the photo); and peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors, a family of proteins that regulate metabolism and have been touted as providing “exercise in a pill.”

For now, none of these boosts can be detected. But all of them are being studied by researchers supported by the World Anti-Doping Agency, who have sponsored dozens of test-developing projects.

Some of the tests are aimed at detecting immediate evidence of doping: leftover fragments of engineered viruses used by gene therapists, telltale proteins, obviously modified DNA sequences, and so on.

But this is difficult. Such evidence is hard to find and degrades quickly in the body. Moreover, even if a first generation of tests are successful, they could be tricked by slight changes to gene-modifying approaches.

Instead, researchers are looking for broader changes that are produced by gene modification and can’t be masked. Tweaking insulin-like growth factor, for example, appears to change levels of fatty acid production and body-wide protein expression in ways that can’t be masked.

“The concept is that if you suspect doping, you don’t look for the drug, but for the effects of the drug on global gene expression and proteomic patterns,” said Theodore Friedmann, a University of California, San Diego geneticist who’s now combining results from WADA-supported research into statistical models of cheating. “Even if someone makes a chemical change to a drug to make it invisible to testing, they can’t wipe out the effects of the drug.”

This approach could end up being applicable not only to genetic modification, but to changes produced by traditional performance enhancers, like steroids and growth hormone.

Friedmann cautions that much work remains to be done on these tests, which are still limited to animal studies. But even if they take years to be refined, the tests could be used on biological samples already taken from elite athletes.

“We have to make sure the changes we find aren’t caused by gender or nutrition or training, and there are issues with genetic privacy,” said Friedmann. “But the samples can be put away for up to eight years. We can go back to them later.”

Could even these system-wide tests be duped?

“Anything you do to your body changes your body,” said Rabin. “Is there a perfect crime? Many investigators will tell you no.”

Images: 1. johnthescone/Flickr 2. Regular (top) and myostatin-tweaked mice/PLoS ONE

See Also:

• The Potential for a 40-MPH Man
• Bolt Is Freaky Fast, But Nowhere Near Human Limits
• Study Promises Benefits of Exercise in a Pill
• Graphic Evidence Against Steroid Abuse
• 48-Pound Trout: World Record or Genetic Cheat?

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 | 4 Feb 2010 | 12:27 pm

7 Terrific Toad Survival Tactics

Some ingenious survival tactics have enabled toads to populate most of the world's continents in the relative blink of an eye
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Feb 2010 | 12:02 pm

Insects Actively Surf the Wind

Tiny-brained insects know how to adjust their bodies and ride winds to get to where they want to go.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Feb 2010 | 12:01 pm

Ancient Indian language dies out

The last speaker of the Bo language in India's Andaman Islands dies at the age of about 85, a leading linguist says.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Feb 2010 | 11:28 am

Giant Panda Tai Shan's Life in Photos

Giant pandas Tai Shan and Mei Lan will soon begin their new lives in China, destined for breeding programs that hopefully will improve the population status of their endangered species. At Discovery News, you can read how the bears were ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Feb 2010 | 11:20 am

This Tree's a Lady!

Scientists report the first discovery of the female sex hormone progesterone in a plant.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Feb 2010 | 11:04 am

Evidence of hedge circles at Stonehenge

Survey of landscape suggests prehistoric monument was surrounded by two circular hedges

The Monty Python knights who craved a shrubbery were not so far off the historical mark: archaeologists have uncovered startling evidence of The Great Stonehenge Hedge.

Inevitably dubbed Stonehedge, the evidence from a new survey of the Stonehenge landscape suggests that 4,000 years ago the world's most famous prehistoric monument was surrounded by two circular hedges, planted on low concentric

banks. The best guess of the archaeologists from English Heritage, who carried out the first detailed survey of the landscape of the monument since the Ordnance Survey maps of 1919, is that the hedges could have served as screens keeping even more secret from the crowd the ceremonies carried out by the elite allowed inside the stone circle.

Their findings are revealed tomorrow in British Archaeology magazine, whose editor, Mike Pitts, an archaeologist and expert on Stonehenge himself, said: "It is utterly surprising that this is the first survey for such a long time, but the results are fascinating. Stonehenge never fails to reveal more surprises."

"The time these two concentric hedges around the monument were planted is a matter of speculation, but it may well have been during the Bronze Age. The reason for planting them is enigmatic."

Pitts wonders if the hedges might have been to shelter the watchers from the power of the stones, as much as to ward off their impious gaze.

If the early Bronze Age date is correct, when the hedges were planted the Stonehenge monument already had the formation now familiar to millions of tourists, after centuries when the small bluestones from west Wales and the gigantic sarsens from the Stonehenge plain were continually rearranged.

The survey also found puzzling evidence that there may once have been a shallow mound among the stones, inside the circle. It was flattened long ago, but is shown in some 18th century watercolours though it was written off as artistic licence by artists trying to make the site look even more picturesque. The archaeologists wonder if the circle originally incorporated a mound which could have been a natural geological feature, or an even earlier monument.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Feb 2010 | 11:02 am

Gene Patents Under Legal Attack

Federal court hearings continued Tuesday on a lawsuit that could transform biotechnology in the United States by eliminating gene patents.

The case hinges around the claims of Utah-based Myriad Genetics on BRCA1 and BRCA2, a pair of genes closely linked to breast and ovarian cancer. Myriad “owns” the genes, and says its patents make it possible to profit on diagnostic tests. The company argues that if you remove the patents, the tests — indeed, commercial biotechnology as we know it — will vanish.

A coalition of civil rights, research and women’s health groups is fighting the patents. They argue that Myriad’s claims stifle innovation by discouraging researchers from looking at the genes, which are still not fully understood, and say Myriad’s monopoly limits women’s health choices. More broadly, the claims set a precedent for other gene patents, which now cover about one-fifth of the human genome.

“Allowing patents on genetic material imposes real and severe limits on scientific research, learning and the free flow of information,” said Chris Hansen, an attorney with the America Civil Liberties Union, in a press release.

At Tuesday’s hearing, defense attorney Brian Poissant insisted that “‘women would not even know they had BRCA gene if it weren’t discovered’ under a system that incentivizes patents,” reported GenomeWeb Daily News.

But much of the scientific community rejects Myriad’s case. Roughly 150,000 researchers are represented by associations that have filed court briefs supporting the plaintiffs. Among them are the American Medical Association, American Society of Human Genetics and March of Dimes.

In his recent book, The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins also argued against broad gene patents.

“The information contained in our shared instruction book is so fundamental, and requires so much further research to understand its utility, that patenting it at the earliest stage is like putting up a whole lot of unnecessary toll booths on the road to discovery,” he wrote.

In May, the court rejected Myriad’s request that the case be thrown out without a trial. During Tuesday’s hearing, the plaintiffs asked to be declared victorious without a trial. A decision is expected to take several months.

If the court rules against Myriad, patents involving genes and other biological products won’t be eliminated altogether. Instead, claims will need to be made on specific types of tests or modifications, rather than the discovery of something that exists in nature. The ACLU likened Myriad’s claim to that of someone who patents gold after panning a few nuggets from a stream.

A case memo filed by the plaintiffs called Myriad’s prediction of industry doom “pure hyperbole.” They cited a 1931 Supreme Court decision that struck down the American Fruit Company’s claimed ownership of fresh fruit.

“To be sure, the fruit industry survived,” wrote the plaintiffs.

For full documentation of the case, see “Association for Molecular Pathology, et al. v. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, et al.”

Image: ynse/Flickr

See Also:

• Scientists Apply for First Patent on Synthetic Life Form
• Synthetic Bazaar vs. Cathedral: Intellectual Property and the First Artificial Genome
• Who Owns the Fountain of Youth?

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 | 4 Feb 2010 | 10:43 am

Meet 'Robonaut 2,' Your Future Co-Worker

Robonaut 2, a cutting edge humanoid machine, may one day come to a factory -- or a space station -- near you.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Feb 2010 | 10:40 am

Carbon trading fraudsters steal permits worth £2.7m in 'phishing' scam

European Commission launches investigation after 250,000 permits stolen from companies in Germany and Czech Republic

Hundreds of thousands of carbon trading permits have been stolen from companies in Germany and the Czech Republic by fraudsters who duped companies into giving their details via a fake website.

Around 250,000 permits worth €3m were stolen from six companies in Germany in last week's "phishing attack", which was first reported to the German national carbon registry on Friday. Permit trading on the German registry was closed immediately but reopened today.

Phishing attacks are similar to online banking scams, in which users are sent emails asking them to enter their details on a facsimile of a website.

Hans-Jurgen Nantke, the head of the German emissions trading authority, said that users had been warned and new passwords set. But he added it would be impossible to track the European emissions trading scheme permits as they would have been traded soon after they left the companies' accounts and changed hands several times since.

He said: "It's not a problem of carbon trading, it's a problem of the internet. The phishing attacks on banks has now spread to carbon trading. The phishers have already earned their money so we can't do anything about the permits. The problem now is to find the culprits and that's police a matter."

Nantke stressed that the German carbon register DEHSt was safe, adding that it has 2,000 companies and only seven were affected. But European carbon trading authorities have not yet confirmed how many companies were affected across Europe.

Europe's main mechanism for reducing emissions from industry has been targeted by criminals before. Last year so-called "carousel fraud" criminals were found to be cashing in on permits bought in countries without paying VAT by selling them on with VAT, and then disappearing without handing the VAT to the tax authorities. Three British men were arrested last month in Belgium and accused of failing to pay VAT worth €3m (£2.7m) on carbon credit transactions.

Barbara Helfferich, environment spokeswoman at the European Commission, said that an investigation had been launched into the phishing attack, but admitted the website had not yet been shut down or the culprits found.

Helfferich said that preventing future attacks was a priority, particularly because of the new European carbon registry scheduled to begin trading in 2012 which will include permits from the aviation industry. "We'll have to look at whether we need to improve security for this registry," she said.

Carbon trading around the world, beyond the European Union's emission trading scheme, is done via an international transaction log run by the UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) under the Kyoto agreement.

The UNFCCC said in a statement on its website: "The secretariat of the UNFCCC has been informed by some national registries operated by parties to the Kyoto protocol that last week, a series of phishing attacks had stolen passwords from some users of these registries.

"The UNFCCC secretariat is collaborating closely with the remaining national registries to ensure that access to their systems is secured. Meanwhile, these registries have been disconnected from the international transaction log (ITL), which is under the control of the secretariat.

"The ITL validates and records all transactions of Kyoto protocol units. It has not been subject to interference and remains fully secure and operational."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Feb 2010 | 10:33 am

Were climate emails really hacked or just sitting in cyberspace?

Slack security or subversion at the university may have led to 'unintentional sharing', making the police investigation pointless

• UK chief scientist admits to speculation over source of hacking
• Climate email hackers had access for more than a month

More than two months after the moment that thousands of confidential emails, documents and computer code from the University of East Anglia (UEA) was released online it remains a mystery who was behind the hack.

Even Sir David King, the government's former chief scientist, remains confused. This week, he sought to blame the leak on a foreign intelligence agency, only to admit later he had no evidence.

The university called in police last November, insisting they were victims of a criminal "theft" of data. Under Superintendent Julian Gregory, a group was pulled together from the counter-terrorism squad and Scotland Yard's electronic crimes unit, which also included two officers from the national domestic extremism team who have expertise in pursuing "climate extremists".

So far, the police investigation has got nowhere. It is not even clear whether the crime of computer data interception has actually occurred. What if the hacker was given a legitimate password? What if the data was accidentally open to public access?

The known facts are these. Over the weekend starting Friday 13 November, someone copied files from a backup server at the UEA's Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Norwich. They were then posted anonymously on the internet and various bloggers were alerted.

Within days, their contents spread around the world and were being hailed by CRU's enemies as evidence of anything from poor science to a full-blown criminal conspiracy.

There were 4,660 files in various folders: 3,587 were documents, raw data and code. Some that list tree-ring data are dated back to to 1991. Another 1,073 were emails, dating from 1996 to 12 November last year.

King suggested earlier this week that these files must have been collected by a highly sophisticated organisation from different places over many years. That is not correct. Nor was the selection of material skilfully arranged to pick out embarrassing items.

UAE has confirmed that all of this material was simply sitting in an archive on a single backup CRU server, available to be copied.

The Guardian has carried out a detailed analysis of the emails and documents.

The emails appear to have been chosen by targeting the backups of a few key personnel wihtin CRU – the director Prof Phil Jones, his deputy Dr Keith Briffa, Dr Tim Osborn and Dr Mike Hulme. Although there are dozens of staff within CRU, only 66 of the 1,073 of the email messages were not directly sent to or from those four people.

The emails may have been filtered by using a few simple scientifically pertinent search words such as "Yamal" – a series of tree ring data from Siberia – or emails directed to US addresses. But many are completely innocuous, or indeed show the climate researchers in a good light, holding rigorous internal debates.

The leaked file was called FOIA.zip and one posting gave a [fake] email address at "foia.org". An abbreviation often used for the US Freedom of Information Act, it suggests again that the leaker was familiar with the attempts by US bloggers and others to get release of tree ring and similar data. Was the leaker American? Was he or she one of the regular readers of the blogs?

These are questions the police now appear to be asking, to judge by their current round of interviews, using the rather limited tools of overseas phone calls and formal email questionnaires.

On Tuesday 17 November, the leaked data was passed anonymously to the small group who, for some time, had been targeting CRU and its director Phil Jones. The technique involved hacking into the server of climate science blog RealClimate, and then extruding the material via a series of exotic foreign "proxy" servers.

This, and the timing immediately before UN's Copenhagen climate summit, has aroused intense suspicions among some. Could a corporation be behind the hack? While the fallout from the hack did not have a direct effect on the Copenhagen negotiations, its timing ensured maximum publicity.

It was also well-timed to influence US senate discussions on a climate change bill. Such a manoeuvre would be consistent with the well-known "stealth" agenda of lobbyists of using citizens groups to spearhead opposition to both health care reform and climate legislation during 2009.

The biggest blog involved was California weatherman Anthony Watts' WattsUpWithThat (WUWT). Watts previously had a book published by the right-wing Heartland Institute, financed by ExxonMobil until 2006. He claims poorly sited US weather stations could in theory be skewing temperature data, although a recent analysis using his data found this was not the case.

WUWT's moderator is Charles Rotter, whose San Francisco flatmate is Steve Mosher, an "open-source software developer", and co-author of an excitable instant book on "climategate".

Information also went that first day to the more technical Climate Audit site of former Toronto mining consultant Stephen McIntyre.

Others in the loop later included Illinois aeronautical engineer Patrick Condon's site the Air Vent and Warren Meyer's Coyote Blog.

The very first release was a sort of prank. Nasa scientist Gavin Schmidt in New York, an opponent of the sceptics, says that at 6.20am his time, someone tried to upload the files onto his own RealClimate website via a Turkish server.

The hacker seems to have used a technique called "privilege escalation vulnerability" to become an administrator, rather than an ordinary user of the site.

Schmidt says the hacker "disabled access from the legitimate users, and uploaded a file FOIA.zip to our server. They then created a draft post".

It read as follows: "We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it. This is a limited time offer, download now: HYPERLINK "http://ftp.tomcity.ru/incoming/free/FOI2009.zip" \t "_blank" http://ftp.tomcity.ru/incoming/free/FOI2009.zip."

There followed 20 "samples" with headline phrases from the emails such as "1059664704.txt * Mann: 'dirty laundry'" and "1075403821.txt * Jones: Daly death 'cheering news'". John Daly was a sceptic whose death the embattled Jones appeared to welcome.

Schmidt swiftly spotted the hack and took it down. He also alerted CRU in Norwich. But even as he did that, a cryptic comment appeared on McIntyre's site. "A miracle has happened," it said, providing a link via the RealClimate website which immediately led to four unidentified downloads. McIntyre says he never noticed this posting at the time, and like all the other bloggers, denies all knowledge of its origin.

As dawn broke in California, the link to the Russian server was next posted to WUWT, where Rotter alerted Watts. Awaiting approval to put it on the site, Rotter says he gave a CD copy to Mosher, who began poring over its contents.

Mosher called him in Toronto, says McIntyre. "I couldn't believe my ears. Mosh ... asked me to confirm emails attributed to me – which I did. They didn't give me the email link." Links were next posted to the Air Vent via a Saudi server, and to Meyer's Coyote Blog in Arizona.

Not until 19 November did a key email arrive for McIntyre from England. It was from his own contact at UEA, the isotope specialist Paul Dennis.

With the subject line "Interesting!", it attached the text of an alert from Dennis's own head of department at Norwich. This warned that "climate change sceptics" had obtained and posted up a "large volume of files and emails", and urged colleagues to check for viruses.

The bloggers say this gave them the confirmation they had been waiting for. "These actions reassured Mosher that the files were genuine", explains McIntyre.

Mosher says he also received a posting direct from the secret leaker, complaining that nothing was happening. He replied, he says: "A lot is happening behind the scenes. It is not being ignored. Much is being co-ordinated among major players and the media. Thank you very much. You will notice the beginnings of activity on other sites now. Here soon to follow."

But McIntyre was meanwhile guarded with his source in Norwich. He emailed him back: "I haven't seen such a website. You'd think there'd be discussion on the blogs of something like that. I'll definitely stay tuned!!" Only after the bloggers had launched their great scoop did he inform Dennis.

The use of foreign servers proved to be a red herring. The Mail on Sunday claimed the Russians must therefore be behind it, and King speculated about a "highly sophisticated" cyber attack. In fact the use of so-called "open proxy" servers to remain anonymous is on page one of any whistleblowers' manual.

A programme called TOR, for example, can be downloaded which will automatically switch between a random variety of servers. Digital forensic examination of the archive of emails and documents suggests that it was first created around 30 September, and subsequently added to during October and finally in November – when one of Osborn's sets of program code was added – just ahead of the full-blown leak.

Significantly, that analysis suggests that the archive was created on a machine running five hours behind GMT, which would put it on the east coast of North America.

The leaker therefore knew something about computers, just as they knew something about climate science. But it didn't require the skills of Government Communications Headquarters or a foreign intelligence agency, as has been suggested. The hacking of the RealClimate blog exploited the fact that its wordpress flatform has security holes well known to hackers.

Some commentators point to a previous pattern of leaks that is strikingly similar to what happened in November. On 24 July, McIntyre says he received a freedom of information (FOI) refusal from CRU. He announced it on his website. The next day McIntyre announced that he had got hold of a mass of data.

He was initially coy about it. He said: "Folks, guess what. I'm now in possession of a CRU version giving data for every station in their station list."

The next day he said: "I learned that the Met Office/CRU had identified the mole. They are now aware that there has in fact been a breach of security … My guess is that they will not make the slightest effort to discipline the mole."

This was a tease. There was no human "mole", just a security breach. Rotter in San Francisco later blogged that "In late July I discovered they had left station data versions from 2003 and 1996 on their server without web page links but accessible all the same. They were stale versions of the requested data ... just sitting in cyberspace waiting for someone to download."

McIntyre later admitted that "I downloaded from the public CRU ftp site ... No hacking was involved".

David Holland, a British engineer who had been making FOI requests, says he too found CRU files accidentally open. In December 2008 he notified the university that "the search engine on your home page is broken and falling through to a directory". They thanked him and said it was caused by a "misconfiguration of the webserver". Holland says he didn't download anything since he knew it could be traced back to his computer.

After the July incident, perhaps CRU failed to batten down the hatches, either through technical failings or because someone inside was subverting the efforts. So what happened in November?

Rotter blogged his theory last year. "In the past I have worked at organisations where the computer network grew organically in a disorganised fashion. Security policies often fail as users take advantage of shortcuts ... one of these is to share files using an ftp server ... This can lead to unintentional sharing with the rest of the internet."

He added that files were perhaps put "in an ftp directory which was on the same central processing unit as the external webserver, or even worse, was on a shared driver somewhere to which the webserver had permissions to access. In other words, if you knew where to look, it was publicly available".

If this hypothesis turns out to be true, UEA may end up looking foolish. For there will be no one to arrest.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Feb 2010 | 10:14 am

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Obese People Lose Weight at High Altitudes

High altitudes may help people lose weight, a new study says.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Feb 2010 | 7:33 am

Altitude Causes Weight Loss Without Exercise

Just a week at high altitudes can cause sustained weight loss, suggesting that a mountain retreat could be a viable strategy for slimming down.

Overweight, sedentary people who spent a week at an elevation of 8,700 feet lost weight while eating as much as they wanted and doing no exercise. A month after they came back down, they had kept two-thirds of those pounds off. The results appear in the Feb. 4 Obesity.

“What is nice about this paper, is that it clearly demonstrates that there’s a lasting effect of decreased caloric intake, that people eat less even a month after they come out of high altitude,” said Massachusetts General Hospital anesthesiologist Kay Leissner, who studies high altitude physiology, but was not involved in the study.

Since a 1957 study, scientists have known that animals lose weight at high altitudes. Mountaineers also shed pounds during expeditions to 12,000 feet or more, though the exertion of climbing a mountain clearly played a role.

But the obese are more likely to suffer severe altitude sickness, in which low oxygen pressure causes dizziness, nausea and more serious problems like edema or heart attacks, Leissner said.

So a  team at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich wanted to see if the pounds also melted away with a safer, sedentary stay at somewhat lower altitude.

The scientists ferried 20 overweight, middle-aged men by train and cable car to a research station perched 1,000 feet below the peak of Germany’s highest mountain, Zugspitze. During the week-long stay, the men could eat and drink as much as they liked and were forbidden from any exercise other than leisurely strolls. The team measured the men’s weight, metabolic rate, levels of hunger and satiety hormones before, during, and after their mountain retreat.

After a week up high, the subjects lost an average of 3 pounds.  A month later, they were still 2 pounds lighter. The sceintists’ data showed this was likely because they ate about 730 calories less at high altitudes than they did at normal elevations. They may have felt less hungry, in part, because levels of leptin, the satiety hormone, surged during the stay, while grehlin, the hunger hormone, remained unchanged. Their metabolic rate also spiked, meaning they burned more calories than they usually did.

A high-altitude weight loss strategy could be viable, though studies have shown peoples’ appetites bounce back after about six months at high elevation, Leissner said. “If you could do intermittent periods for one week, then go down, and then go back up, this might actually be helpful.”

One limitation of the study, however, is that it didn’t show whether the men lost mostly muscle mass,  fat, or water weight, Leissner said.

And the study didn’t show that the stay at 8,700 feet was actually safe for the participants, University of Geneva exercise physiologist Bengt Kayser said in an e-mail.

New research into why the overweight are prone to heart attacks, diabetes, and other inflammatory diseases, suggest it could be some fat cells grow so rapidly that blood vessel growth can’t keep up, and that leads to pockets of oxygen-starved fatty tissue, Kayser said. ” This causes local inflammation because immune cells get activated.”

If that’s the case, then shuttling the overweight to even a moderate altitude may worsen inflammation and increase their chances of heart attack or other serious problems.

“So for the moment one has to remain very careful,” Kayser said, ”and evaluate the question a few more times before migrating all obese Americans to Colorado!”

Image: Zugspitze, Stephan A./flickr

Citation: “Hypobaric Hypoxia Causes Body Weight Reduction in Obese Subjects,” Florian J. Lippl, Sonja Neubauer, Susanne Schipfer, Nicole Lichter, Amanda Tufman, Bärbel Otto, and Rainald Fischer. Obesity, 4 February 2010.

See Also:

• Nitric Oxide Is Zen: Molecule Could Explain Tibetans’ High-Altitude Ease
• Fight Fat With More Fat
• Wall-E’s World? 86% of Americans Could Be Fat by 2030
• Scientists Make a Fat-Burning Fat

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