Potentially deadly infection linked to frequent cow exposure

A common bacteria found in many healthy adult females that can cause life-threatening infections when passed to newborns could be introduced to some women through frequent contact with cows, according to a new research. Group B streptococcus could be a zoonotic disease -- transmitted between different species -- which may have significant public health implications.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Feb 2010 | 12:00 pm

Viruses helped shape human genetic variability

Viruses have played a role in shaping human genetic variability, according to a new study. The researchers used population genetics approaches to identify gene variants that augment susceptibility to viral infections or protect from such infections.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Feb 2010 | 12:00 pm

Happiness is ... looking forward to your vacation

It takes more than a vacation to make people happy. Indeed, vacationers tend to be happier than non-vacationers in the lead up to their break, but once they are back, there is very little difference between the two groups' levels of happiness.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Feb 2010 | 12:00 pm

Personalized blood tests for cancer using whole genome sequencing

Scientists have used data from the whole genome sequencing of cancer patients to develop individualized blood tests they believe can help physicians tailor patients' treatments. The genome-based blood tests, believed to be the first of their kind, may be used to monitor tumor levels after therapy and determine cancer recurrence.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Feb 2010 | 12:00 pm

Flu-induced stress response is critical for resistance to secondary infection

A new study reveals how infection with the influenza virus impacts the way that the immune system responds to subsequent infections. The research provides a new understanding of the physiological and pathological consequences of the flu.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Feb 2010 | 12:00 pm

Electric avenue: Electric cars on a two-way street?

Think of it as the end of cars' slacker days: no more sitting idle for hours in parking lots or garages racking up payments, but instead earning their keep by helping store power for the electricity grid.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Feb 2010 | 12:00 pm

Scientists discover how protein trips up germs

If bad bacteria lurk in your system, chances are they will bump into the immune system's protective cells whose job is gobbling germs. The catch is that these do-gooders, known as macrophages, ingest and destroy only those infectious invaders that they can securely hook and reel in. Now, scientists have shown that a healthy immune response depends on a protein called TRPV2 which, they discovered, is the means by which macrophages capitalize on brief and accidental encounters with nasty bugs.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

Genetic link to leukemias with an unknown origin discovered

Although leukemia is one of the best studied cancers, the cause of some types is still poorly understood. Now, a newly found mutation in acute myeloid leukemia patients could account for half of the remaining cases of adult acute leukemia with an unknown origin.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

Youngest extra-solar planet discovered around solar-type star

Astronomers have discovered the youngest extra-solar planet around a solar-type star, named BD+20 1790b.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

Chemical tags likely to affect metabolism, cancer development

New research suggests that the addition or removal of a certain type of chemical tag -- called an acetyl group -- onto metabolic enzymes plays a key role in how cellular metabolism is regulated. The finding gives researchers vital clues to understand how normal cells respond to nutrient changes and how the process by which normal cells turn cancerous, and could one day lead to new drugs that starve cancer cells into submission.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

Archaeologists reveal the correct location of the Battle of Bosworth

The true site of one of the most decisive battles in English history is revealed after a major study by archaeologists.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 19 Feb 2010 | 3:20 am

Earth Watch

Climate chief's departure leaves many questions
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 19 Feb 2010 | 2:51 am

Census finds 5,000 marine species

A preview of the Census of Marine Life has revealed that the project has discovered over 5,000 new species.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 19 Feb 2010 | 2:37 am

Endeavour astronauts say goodbye to space station (AP)

AP - The crews of the linked space shuttle and space station embraced and said farewell Friday as they prepared for Endeavour to begin its two-day trip home after "a mission of Olympic proportions."

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 19 Feb 2010 | 2:30 am

Australia warns Japan to stop whaling ahead of visit (AFP)

AFP - Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd bluntly told Japan on Friday to commit to stop whaling or face international court action this year, just a day before a visit by Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 19 Feb 2010 | 2:19 am

Dolphins have diabetes off switch

A study in dolphins has revealed genetic clues that could help medical researchers to treat type 2 diabetes.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 19 Feb 2010 | 2:18 am

Australian study uses cat food in war on cane toad (AP)

AP - Forget cricket bats, golf clubs and carbon dioxide. Australia has found a new weapon in its war on the dreaded cane toad: cat food.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 19 Feb 2010 | 2:12 am

Australia threatens Japan over whaling program (AP)

AP - Australia's prime minister on Friday set a November deadline for Japan to stop its research whaling program that kills hundreds of whales a year in Antarctic waters, or else face international legal action.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 19 Feb 2010 | 1:52 am

Guns, Germs and Steel – and a ploughman's lunch

The world's inequalities began because some people had the means to make a lunch of bread and cheese, while others did not. Tim Radford reviews Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

Oh, for more history written by biologists. The great thing about Guns, Germs and Steel is the detail: Jared Diamond starts with a proposition every good Guardian reader would wish to believe – that all humans are born with much the same abilities – and then proceeds to argue, through meticulous and logical steps, that the playing field of prehistory was anything but level.

The inequalities kicked off with the development of agriculture in one small part of the world, the so-called Fertile Crescent in what is now western Asia. Agriculture stimulates increasing population density, which means disease, which means acquired immunity. Civilisation requires the food surplus only agriculture can provide, but it also imposes a need for specialisation, for technology, for ingenuity. Competing civilisations (and they turned up soon enough in Europe and the Middle East) provoke an arms race.

So you start with stone tools and the raw materials for a Welsh rarebit and you end up with galleons, guns and measles, all of which helped 168 Spanish conquistadores in 1532 to overthrow an army of 80,000 Incas half way around the world.

But what was so special about the Fertile Crescent?

It had emmer and einkorn, species of grass with heavy seeds. Some individuals in these wild wheat ancestors had developed mutations that boded ill for their evolutionary survival. Instead of spilling their seed upon the ground, these doomed stalks kept their ears pricked, so to speak: their seed heads stayed neatly on the stem, long past ripening. This accident made them dish of the day for foraging nomads, and then ideal for the first, tentative plantations by the hunters and gatherers who so casually launched human civilisation some time after the end of the last ice age.

Pretty much the same mutation then occurred in certain wild pulses, which stayed in the pod, as a kind of packed lunch, rather than falling to the soil to multiply.

But it took more than one or two convenient plants that were ripe for the picking to get civilisation off the ground. The shuffling of the evolutionary pack dealt the hunter gatherers who happened to be living in eastern Turkey, the Levant and the valley of the Euphrates a whole suite of wild staples, all in that one huge curve of valley, hillside and floodplain: barley and lentils, olives, figs, sweet almonds, chickpeas, mustard and so on.

The seeds of wild wheat were not just big and easy to gather, they delivered the best nourishment. And not far away, contentedly chewing on a choice of the other wild grasses and pulses, were wild cattle, sheep and goats all suitable for domestication, and potentially docile swine as well.

So the groundbreaking farmers of the Fertile Crescent, with their makeshift mattocks, stone sickles and crude pestles and mortars, already had about them the makings of the first ploughman's lunch of bread and butter and cheese and beer; the first Mediterranean diet of wine, olive oil, peas and prosciutto; and everything for a beefburger except the tomatoes, ketchup and mayo.

Agricultural settlement also began independently in China and Mexico, because these places also had little packages of this and that – rice and soya, maize, beans and squash – from which to construct a cuisine and a culture.

Other places were not so fortunate. The entire continent of Africa produced a few scattered plants – coffee, millet, sorghum, groundnut and yams – but these species did not share the same climate so they could not all be grown in the same place. And not one large African mammal has ever been satisfactorily domesticated, even now. Meanwhile, the Fertile Crescent had four of them at the end of the last ice age, mooing and bleating and oinking for human attention.

And the same package of plants and animals that flourished in the Fertile Crescent could – with a bit of adjustment – do just as well on both sides of the Mediterranean, in the Alpine valleys, on the great European plain, and all the way to the Breton coast.

So the ploughman's lunch was not just a local meal: it could be exported from Nineveh to Nuneaton.

This is an exhilarating book. Not all the argument is quite as beautifully constructed as the passages that deal with plants and animals. Diamond's foray into human prehistory provoked the American Anthropological Association into devoting a whole session to examining the ideas he sets out in this book and more especially its sequel, Collapse.

The latter then became a scholarly Cambridge text which was reviewed in Science on 22 January. This particular issue of Science might have been edited with our club's choice in mind. The big feature focuses on evidence for permanent houses of stone, built by hunter-gatherers in the Fertile Crescent 14,500 years ago, long before the emergence of agriculture.

Another feature is devoted to the disappearance of Australia's giant marsupials, 40,000 years ago, around about the time the first bands of human hunters turned up. These extinctions – and similar megafaunal massacres happened in Eurasia too – left Australia and North America with no candidate creature for domestication, which is why the locals were better off with their old skills of hunting and gathering.

If I have a problem, it is with Diamond's prologue. On page 22 of Guns, Germs and Steel, he argues that people in New Guinea today who have never been exposed to passive televisual entertainment, and with every stimulus to think for themselves, might even be, because of their environment, mentally more able than Westerners. This seems to concede that some lineal groups can be innately "better" than others, which is the starting point for all racist claims.

Damn, can he have meant that? Surely it was to see off such thinking that prompted a club member to propose this book in the first place?

For March, something that really does add up. Ian Stewart, in a recent book, suggested that even his fellow scientists didn't really appreciate the profound importance of mathematics. Professor Stewart has recently delivered his own two-fisted mathematical punch with his Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities (2008) and Hoard of Mathematical Treasures (2009). Both are huge fun. Grab one and enjoy it. I'll look at both next month

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 19 Feb 2010 | 1:44 am

Australia uses cat food in fight against cane toads

Researchers have found that cat food attracts meat ants which attack baby cane toads in attempt to curb toxic amphibians

Forget cricket bats, golf clubs and carbon dioxide. Australia has found a new weapon in its war on the dreaded cane toad: cat food.

Researchers with the University of Sydney found that a few tablespoons of cat food left next to ponds in the Northern Territory attract fierce Australian meat ants, which then attack baby cane toads as they emerge from the water. The results of the study were published in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology this week.

It is the latest idea in Australia's seemingly endless battle against the cane toad, which was introduced from Hawaii in 1935 in an unsuccessful attempt to control beetles on sugarcane plantations. The toads bred rapidly, and with their population now in millions they threaten many species across Australia.

Early cane toad killing methods included whacking the creatures with golf clubs or cricket bats. In recent years, most groups dedicated to fighting the pests have turned to freezing or gassing them with carbon dioxide. Still, the toads' population continues to explode.

Cane toads emit a poison that attacks the heart of would-be predators. But the University of Sydney researchers found that meat ants are impervious to the toads' poison, said Rick Shine, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Sydney who supervised the research.

"A single toad can have 30,000 eggs in a clutch, so there's a heck of a lot of tadpoles turning into toads along the edge of a billabong," he said. "You can literally have tens of thousands of toads emerging at pretty much the same time. They are vulnerable to meat ants if the colony discovers there is a source of free food."

Between July and September 2008, researchers studied tens of thousands of cane toads emerging from cat food-lined ponds and found that 98% of them were attacked by meat ants within two minutes. Of the toads that escaped, 80% died within a day from ant-inflicted injuries.

The baby toads are around 1cm in size, about the same as a meat ant. The aggressive ants have strong jaws and can kill even larger animals by sheer numbers.

"It's a pretty unequal fight," Shine said. "The toads have this terribly stupid response to attack – which is just to freeze and do nothing."

Not all think the study is valuable. Graeme Sawyer, an official with Frogwatch, an environmental group dedicated to wiping out the toxic amphibian, said the cat food technique just isn't powerful enough.

"The impact of meat ants on cane toads can be significant with a small number of cane toads, but when you get areas where there are large number of cane toads it doesn't seem to make any difference at all," he said.

Australia's Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals said encouraging ants to attack cane toads is inhumane.

"RSPCA Australia recognises that cane toads must be controlled, but urges researchers to concentrate on identifying effective methods that do not cause unnecessary pain or distress," the group said in an email.

Shine acknowledged the study doesn't have all the answers.

"You'd have to be a desperate optimist to think that we'll ever see the end of cane toads in Australia," he said.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 19 Feb 2010 | 1:35 am

Meteorologists to crack down on 'cowboy' weather forecasters

Royal Meteorological Society says 'we have a duty to protect people' from the sloppy predictions of unqualified forecasters

Britain's top weather experts are to crack down on rogue forecasters who sell substandard predictions of sunny periods and heavy showers.

The Royal Meteorological Society (RMS) says it wants to protect the public from unqualified firms that issue sloppy forecasts to people planning events such as weddings and holidays. Experts say the number of such companies has grown rapidly recently, and the society is worried their poor predictions could undermine already shaky public confidence in weather forecasts.

Dr Liz Bentley, head of communications at the RMS, said: "There are cowboy operators out there. Lots of people have set up on the web and push forecasts out, but not only do they have poor-quality data, their people are not qualified." The society is working with several large forecast firms to draw up voluntary standards for the industry.

"We want to set a minimum bar that people have to meet, to make sure the public can have confidence in weather forecasters," Bentley said. "The level won't be that hard to meet. We don't want to squeeze out newcomers and minimise commercial activity, but we have a duty to protect people. We have to get the balance right."

The society is still examining how its plan would work, but one option is a kitemark-style badge that approved forecasters could display.

Chris Blowes, director of forecast firm Weather Commerce, which is involved with the planned RMS standards, said: "There are now lots of amateurs in this game who are very good at IT and can come up with all sorts of kinky websites that produce automatic forecasts, but they're being a bit naughty, really, as you couldn't use those forecasts to plan anything."

Many sites source their weather data from the US National Weather Service, which must place them into the public domain under federal laws.

Blowes says: "There is a difference between weather data and a weather forecast. You can have as much numerical data as you want, but if you can't turn it into a reliable forecast then you shouldn't be in this game."

Pete Inness, a lecturer at the Department of Meteorology at Reading University, said the results from a single weather centre, such as the US service, are not always reliable.

"Each has its own [weather] model that can produce a slightly different forecast and at other times can produce very different forecasts," he said. "If five or six models all say the same thing, then you can have quite a lot of confidence in your forecast. But sometimes three can say one thing and another three say something totally different." Forecasters must then step in to make sense of the conflicting information.

Bentley says the planned RMS standards will ensure that forecasters must demonstrate these skills, perhaps through a NVQ qualification. Those who work on high-altitude weather for airlines must already hold professional chartered status.

The RMS move follows reports that the BBC could drop an underperforming Met Office, which wrongly predicted a "barbecue summer", from its bulletins and has invited other forecasters to bid for the contract for the first time.

One source at a rival company said: "We don't think the BBC will ditch the Met Office, but this is a warning for them to get their act together."

Inness says that short-term forecasts are generally better than the public believe. "The problem is that people don't really listen to the weather forecast properly. It comes on at the end of the news and it's on in the background like wallpaper. They might hear the odd word like snow, but unless they are really paying attention they can very easily get the wrong end of the stick."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 19 Feb 2010 | 12:00 am

Shuttle Astronauts Pack Up to Leave Space Station (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - Astronauts aboard NASA's shuttle Endeavour packed up their spaceship for the trip home Thursday after more than a week at the International Space Station, but not before holding a grand opening ceremony for the orbiting lab's newest room and stunning observation deck.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Feb 2010 | 11:47 pm

Sexual predators flock to energy boom towns

Oil and gas attract more criminals than tourism or agriculture do.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/oOmzzAfP4Mw" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 18 Feb 2010 | 10:01 pm

Long-Distance Runners May Have Endurance in Their Genes (HealthDay)

HealthDay - THURSDAY, Feb. 18 (HealthDay News) -- Variations in one gene are associated with athletic endurance and may make a difference in a runner's performance, a new study has found.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Feb 2010 | 9:49 pm

Warp Drives: Making the "Impossible" Possible

It's very easy to say that something is "impossible" when talking about technologies that appear to be more at home in science fiction storylines. And when it comes to warp drives -- the staple of Star Trek propulsion systems -- ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 18 Feb 2010 | 9:33 pm

Marine census grows near completion (AP)

AP - From pole to pole, surface to frigid depths, researchers have discovered thousands of new ocean creatures in a decade-long effort now nearing completion, and there may still be several times more strange creatures to be found, leaders of the Census of Marine Life reported Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Feb 2010 | 5:57 pm

Tiger Woods and Sex Addiction: Real Disease or Easy Excuse? (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Tiger Woods is scheduled to break his months-long silence about the sex scandal that has plagued the world's most famous athlete. It's not clear how he will explain himself, though according to some reports Woods has been attending a private rehabilitation clinic in Mississippi that treats addictions - including sex addiction.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Feb 2010 | 5:53 pm

Study shows how viruses changed human evolution

LONDON (Reuters) - Italian scientists said on Friday they had found evidence of how viruses helped change the course of human evolution and said their discovery could help in the design of better drugs and vaccines.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 18 Feb 2010 | 5:05 pm

Tiger Woods and Sex Addiction: Real Disease or Easy Excuse?

Can a person be addicted to sex? Does Tiger Woods have a sex addiction problem?
Source: Livescience.com | 18 Feb 2010 | 5:01 pm

Personalized biomarkers monitor cancer

Pilot study harnesses sequencing power to track tumours.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 18 Feb 2010 | 5:00 pm

Ancient filter feeders found lurking in museums

Fish fossils fill gaps in dinosaur-era ocean food chains.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 18 Feb 2010 | 5:00 pm

First Solar 4Q profits slightly higher (AP)

AP - First Solar Inc. on Thursday predicted the solar power industry will struggle through a rough 2010 as increasing supplies and dwindling European subsidies cut into profits.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Feb 2010 | 4:45 pm

NASA Reveals Winning Patch in End-of-Shuttle Contest (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - A launching space shuttle flanked by an American flag and stars hailing both NASA's orbiter fleet and the astronauts whose lives were lost while flying aboard them has been chosen by the space agency as its official insignia to mark the approaching retirement of the winged spacecraft.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Feb 2010 | 3:31 pm

Altitude Could Limit Some Olympic Performances

Altitude doesn't just affect oxygen delivery in the blood, it also changes the drag affecting winter athletes.
Source: Livescience.com | 18 Feb 2010 | 3:13 pm

Deep-sea trawling is destroying coral reefs and pristine marine habitats

A survey of the world's reefs and submerged mountains has revealed widespread damage from deep-sea trawling

Deep-sea trawling is devastating corals and pristine marine habitats that have gone untouched since the last ice age, a leading marine biologist has warned.

A survey of the world's reefs and seamounts – giant submerged mountains that rise more than a kilometre above the seabed – has revealed widespread damage to the ecosystems, many of which are home to species unknown to science, said Jason Hall-Spencer at Plymouth University in the UK.

Hall-Spencer, a researcher involved with the Census of Marine Life, a worldwide project to catalogue life in the oceans, called for the establishment of an international network of marine reserves where deep-sea trawling was banned.

Deep-sea trawlers use giant, heavy-duty nets that are dragged over the seafloor at depths of more than a kilometre. The nets are fitted with rubber rollers called "rock hoppers", which destroy the corals that provide habitats for fish and other marine organisms.

The technique was developed for use in shallow waters with smooth sea floors, but as fish stocks dwindled and technology improved, fishing fleets began using the nets in much deeper waters.

Hall-Spencer said marine biologists have surveyed fewer than 1% of an estimated 50,000 seamounts in the world's oceans.

"Our research visits have revealed pristine coral reefs and many species that are brand new to science," Hall-Spencer said. "Over the past five years, these surveys have also worryingly revealed that all over the world, deep-sea habitats are suffering severe impacts from bottom trawling.

"It doesn't matter what ocean you go to, these habitats are being trashed by international fishing fleets. What is urgently needed is a network of protected areas where any type of fishing gear that involves dragging equipment across the sea bed is banned."

Each trawler typically crisscrosses an area of ocean around 33 kilometres square. Among the most threatened sites are cold water coral reefs in temperate regions, which are still being discovered. Sizeable areas off the west coasts of Scotland and Ireland have been severely damaged, Hall-Spencer told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego today.

"I've seen areas that are pristine and untouched since the ice age and these are worth protecting," he said. "The coral is white or bright orange, and there are fans as high as your chest. These are particularly vulnerable to trawling. Unlike shallow water reefs, they don't have to be strong enough to withstand large waves and they can't cope."

The Norwegian government has banned deep-sea trawling over the Røst reef, the biggest cold-water reef in the world, which was only discovered in 2002. The three kilometre-wide strip is teeming with life and stretches for almost 40 kilometres at a depth of 450 metres. Similar bans are in place at a number of other sites around the world, but more are needed, Hall-Spencer said.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 18 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Gene test can identify bits of cancer in blood

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A personalized blood test can tell whether a patient's cancer has spread or come back, offering a better way to see if treatments are working, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 18 Feb 2010 | 1:41 pm

Chevy Volt Put to Olympic Test

The Winter Olympics haven't just been a public test of Shaun White's hype, Lindsey Vonn's shin, and Johnny Weir's verve--they've also been a test-run for Chevy's plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, the Volt. GM got in on the very green games ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 18 Feb 2010 | 1:32 pm

New Giant Prehistoric Fish Species Found Gathering Dust in Museums

A fresh look at forgotten fossils has revealed two new species of giant, filter-feeding fish that swam Earth’s oceans for 100 million years, occupying the ecological niche now filled by whales and whale sharks.

Until now, that ancient niche was thought to be empty, and such fish to be a short-lived evolutionary bust.

“We knew these animals existed, but thought they were only around for 20 million years,” said Matt Friedman, a University of Oxford paleobiologist. ”People assumed they weren’t important, that they were an evolutionary failure that was around for a brief time and winked out. Now we realize that they had a long and illustrious evolutionary history.”

In a paper Feb. 18 in Science, Friedman and five other paleobiologists describe Bonnerichthys gladius and Rhinconichthys taylori. They belong to the pachycormid genus, an extinct group of immense fishes that ate by drifting slowly, mouth agape, sucking down plankton and other tiny aquatic life.

Prior to the paper’s publication, pachycormids were known from fossils of a single species, Leedsichthys problematicus. (The species name derives from the fragmented remains of its first fossils.) Leedsichthys was an impressive creature, reaching lengths of 30 and perhaps even 50 feet, but its fossils have only been found in western Europe and are between 160 and 145 million years old — a brief, relatively unexceptional footnote to animal history.

However, during a chance visit by Friedman to the University of Kansas, researchers from their Natural History Museum told him of odd recoveries from a newly-prepared fossil deposit: delicate plates and long rods of bone, jumbled beyond recognition. As Friedman put the pieces together, he realized that the plates were part of a jaw, and the rods were gills. That configuration was known from Leedsichthys, but this clearly belonged to a new species.

Working with other museums, Friedman found more examples of the species, which he dubbed B. gladius. They had been collected in the 19th century and mistakenly classified as Leedsichthys, or dismissed as uninteresting. By the time he was finished, Friedman found B. gladius fossils as old as 172 million years, and as young as 66 million years. In the dusty recesses of London’s Natural History Museum, He also found another pachycormid species, R. taylori; it had been mischaracterized and forgotten by Gideon Mantell, the English paleontologist credited with starting the scientific study of dinosaurs.

Altogether, the fossils showed that pachycormids were not a footnote, but an evolutionary chapter that spanned more than 100 million years.

“That’s longer than the duration of any living groups of feeders,” said Friedman. “That’s longer than the Cenozoic, when mammals ascended to ecological dominance.”

The disappearance of B. gladius from the fossil record coincides with the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction, which wiped out the dinosaurs and bequeathed terrestrial Earth to birds, mammals and insects. Then, extinction was likely caused by an asteroid strike or period of prolonged volcanic activity that shrouded the planet in dust, or both, causing massive die-offs in bottom-of-the-food-chain plants.

With a diet based on photosynthesizing algae, the pachycormids “had the perfect profile of a victim and became extinct,” wrote Lionel Cavin, a paleontologist at Geneva’s Natural History Museum, in an accompanying commentary.

Ten million years after B. gladius disappeared, sharks and rays rose to prominence. Twenty-five million years after that, modern whales evolved. As described in another Science paper, the whales’ evolution coincided with a rebirth of the photosynthetic algae that had once fed B. gladius and the other pachycormids.

Friedman plans to continue studying the pachycormids, and hopes his story will inspire other researchers.

“We’ve just flagged off a couple examples of these animals,” he said. “We know there must be others in the fossil record. Often, when people are collecting fossils in the field, they leave behind the fish, because they’re not thought to be important. We hope they keep them.”

Images: 1) Robert Nicholls. 2) Bonnerichthys forefin/Matt Friedman. 3) Bonnerichthys jawbones and forefin/Matt Friedman.

See Also:

• Massive Volcanic Eruptions Could Have Killed Off the Dinosaurs
• Freaky New Ghostshark ID’d Off California Coast
• ID Error Leaves Fish at Edge of Extinction
• Transitional Whale Species Hunted at Sea, Gave Birth on Land

Citations: “100-Million-Year Dynasty of Giant Planktivorous Bony Fishes in the Mesozoic Seas.” By Matt Friedman, Kenshu Shimada, Larry D. Martin, Michael J. Everhart, Jeff Liston, Anthony Maltese, Michael Triebold. By Felix G. Marx and Mark D. Uhen. Science, Vol. 327 No. 5968, Feb. 18, 2010.

“On Giant Filter Feedes.” By Lionel Cavin. Science, Vol. 327 No. 5968, Feb. 18, 2010.

“Climate, Critters, and Cetaceans: Cenozoic Drivers of the Evolution of Modern Whales.” By Felix G. Marx and Mark D. Uhen. Science, Vol. 327 No. 5968, Feb. 18, 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 | 18 Feb 2010 | 1:05 pm

Controversy Arises Over King Tut Findings

Dr. Zahi Hawass, the head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, unveiled new evidence for King Tut's lineage and cause of death at a packed press conference on Wednesday. Hawass confirmed the principal conclusions made in a paper published in ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 18 Feb 2010 | 1:05 pm

Pilot Crashes Plane Into IRS Building

The pilot, identified as Joseph Stack, had problems with the IRS and claimed violence "is the only answer" on his Web site.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 18 Feb 2010 | 12:48 pm

Winner (and Losers) of NASA’s Final Shuttle Patch Contest

The final patch design for the Space Shuttle Program has been selected by a NASA committee from a pool of entries by NASA employees and contractors.

It beat out 84 other prospective patches to be the final commemorative token of the program that defined this generation of space travel.

“As the Space Shuttle Program has been an innovative, iconic gem in the history of American spaceflight, the overall shape of the patch and its faceted panels are reminiscent of a diamond or other fine jewel,” wrote the winning artist, Blake Dumesnil a Hamilton Sundstrand employee, who works at Johnson Space Center.

The tradition of creating NASA program and mission patches was borrowed from the military. It began with the Gemini program of the 1960s.

“There’s a long history of patches, so there’s a very rich tradition of when someone says ‘a mission patch’ or ‘a shuttle patch,’ there’s an idea that comes to mind,” said Robert Pearlman, a space historian and creator of collectSPACE.com.

NASA selected 15 patches as finalists, which were then voted on by NASA employees and winnowed down by a committee. The People’s Choice winner above was also the judge’s selection.

Like the other finalists, it hewed very closely to the visual tradition established by NASA’s original Shuttle patch (right) and the more than 130 that have come since. But, outside the top 15 selected by NASA, some would-be patch designers broke the mold and tried to create some innovative and, um … different, patches. Below, are some of our favorite patches that didn’t win. We present the work with the original descriptions by the artists (unnamed by NASA), along with awards for the grooviest, and the most macho and most Soviet patches, among others.

Wired Science Award: Grooviest
“This was a Journey that will be remember for a life time. The goals that was accomplish and the lost of brave people dedicate there lives with the shuttle program. For years of training putting together this greatest technology of wonder. The ISS and Hubble, both fine work. With these’s they will have more great discovery out there more far beyond the universe. With is picture is the memories of our lost and hard work.”

Wired Science Award: Machoest
“The patch depicts a strong American arm with American flag sleeve, placing a Space Shuttle into orbit. In the background is the Earth and the SRBs and External Tank. The International Space Station is also in the background. The patch is a simple depiction of America’s might provided by the most sophisticated spacecraft system built by man … yet!”

Wired Science Award: Abstractest
“The design is to have all five shuttles launching (triangles) with exhaust flames billowing in red/white covering the left side of the patch under the shuttles. Showing the Space telescope (rectangle) and Space Station (the other object) against a blue sky. If there is enough room on the patch a part of the earth could be added to the right side. The astronauts’ names can be added to the outside of the circle. But as this is the last fight you may not want to add the names.”

Wired Science Award: Lovingest
“The dove represents peace.
The nucleus symbol represents science.
The stars represent the 5 shuttles.
The shuttle with wings represents the fallen astronauts.
The purple heart represents the astronaut’s bravery.”

Wired Science Award: Microsoft Paintbrushiest
“• Major successes for Space Shuttle
• 3 symbols represent Spacelab science
• Hubble Telescope
• International Space Station
• Number of Flights – 139
• Name of all shuttles (test & operational)
• 1 star for each lost crew member
• History of shuttle 1977 – 2010
• Main Shuttle launch/landing point marked (KSC)
• Shuttle flying-off into history”

Wired Science Award: Sovietest
No description given.

See Also:

• NASA’s Contest to Design the Last Shuttle Patch
• NASA’s Most Awesomely Weird Mission Patches
• For Sale: Slightly Used Spacesuit, $500K OBO

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 | 18 Feb 2010 | 12:44 pm

Fossil evidence reveals giant fish swam in prehistoric seas

New fossil evidence shows that prehistoric seas were filled with giant plankton-eating fish, academics say.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 18 Feb 2010 | 12:12 pm

SUV-Sized Fish Were Earliest Filter-Feeders

Giant whales are known for filter feeding, but the technique was likely devised by humongous fish that lived during the Mesozoic.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 18 Feb 2010 | 12:00 pm

Cancer's genetic fingerprint could personalise treatments

Personalised blood tests will mean doctors can monitor how well a particular patient's cancer is responding to surgery or therapy

A personalised blood test that monitors cancer in the body and spots when it has returned after treatment has been developed by scientists.

Researchers believe the test will give doctors a way to tailor cancer treatments to individual patients by monitoring how well their tumour has responded to surgery or therapy and picking up the early signs of a recurrence.

In principle, the test could be used to keep watch over any kind of cancer that scientists can collect cells from.

Scientists developed the test after deciphering the full genomes of tumour tissue taken from six patients. Most cancers contain large-scale rearrangements of genetic material that aren't seen in healthy tissue, so they can be used as a genetic "fingerprint" for the tumour.

A patient who has recently been diagnosed with cancer will have high levels of a tumour's genetic fingerprint in their blood, because cancers shed cells and DNA into the bloodstream.

When a cancer is operated on or treated with radio- or chemotherapy, the levels of the fingerprint should fall, and vanish altogether if the tumour has been eradicated.

A team led by Victor Velculescu, professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, developed individual tests for six patients, four of whom had bowel cancer and two breast cancer.

Genetic tests on one patient with bowel cancer, for example, revealed that a chunk of one chromsome in the tumour had fused with another chromosome. This huge genetic glitch or "biomarker" was a major part of the tumour's genetic fingerprint.

Doctors found that after surgery, levels of the biomarker dropped in the patient, but then rose again, suggesting the cancer remained in their body. After chemotherapy and further surgery, the biomarker levels dropped substantially but not to zero. The residual level of cancer was traced back to a tumour that had spread to the patient's liver.

Scientists liken the technique to "searching for the genetic breadcrumb trail left by lingering cancer cells after surgery or during drug therapy". The work was announced today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego and appears in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The test, known as personalised analysis of rearranged ends (Pare), could potentially be developed for any kind of cancer, according to Velculescu. "There is currently no test for cancer patients that provides personalised biomarkers for clinical management of disease, and we feel this is an important step," he said.

Reading the full genome of a patient's cancer currently costs around £3,200, but the price of the technology is falling rapidly as it improves. The researchers believe the Pare test will eventually be more cost-effective than standard hospital CT (computerised tomography) scans, which are less able to detect microscopic cancers.

The test relies on identifying rearrangements of large chunks of DNA rather than single-letter changes in the genetic code, which are more difficult to spot. "These alterations, like the re-ordering of chapters of a book, are easier to identify and detect in the blood than single-letter changes," said Bert Vogelstein, a co-author on the study.

The scientists began each test by first checking the tumour's genome for areas where it had too few or too many copies of DNA, and where large regions of chromosomes had fused.

These regions were analysed further to identify DNA sequences with incorrect ordering, orientation or spacing. Between four and 15 rearrangements were found in each of the six patients.

By amplifying tiny amounts of DNA in the patients' bloodstream that had the same rearrangements, the test was able to monitor changes in the size of the tumour.

"Eventually we believe this type of approach could be used to detect recurrent cancers before they are found by conventional imaging methods, like CT scans," said Luis Diaz, an oncologist at Johns Hopkins who took part in the study.

Professor Peter Johnson, chief clinician at Cancer Research UK, said: "This is another exciting step down the road towards personalised cancer medicine. The detection of DNA changes unique to individual cancers has proved to be a powerful tool in guiding the treatment of leukaemia. If this can be done for other types of cancer like bowel, breast and prostate it will help us to bring new treatments to patients better and faster than ever."

Dr Caroline Wright, head of science at UK health charity the Foundation for Genomics and Population Health, agreed. "This novel application of next generation sequencing technology potentially has enormous clinical benefits for monitoring treatment response and screening patients in remission," she said.

"However, evidence is still needed to show that this approach would actually allow recurrent cancers to be detected before they could be found by other conventional methods, such as imaging, and then treated before causing symptoms."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 18 Feb 2010 | 11:59 am

When Does an Otter Look Like a Drowning Man?

A group of people thought a sea otter was a drowning snowmobiler in desperate need of help.
Source: Livescience.com | 18 Feb 2010 | 11:55 am

Coming Without Warning

Since the recent discovery of abrupt climate change -- that big changes can come quickly -- researchers have been looking for "warning signs" to help us avert "regime shifts" that could suddenly alter things we take for granted, such as ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 18 Feb 2010 | 11:42 am

Geoffrey Burbidge obituary

Astrophysicist who showed how elements were formed in the stars

Geoffrey Burbidge, who has died aged 84, co-authored the most seminal astrophysical paper of the past 60 years, made significant individual contributions to the early study of radio galaxies, and steadfastly criticised the prevailing paradigm of big bang cosmology.

In 1957, Geoff, his wife Margaret, the astronomer Fred Hoyle and the US physicist ­William Fowler showed how almost all of the chemical elements are formed by nuclear reactions taking place inside stars in the course of stellar evolution. More or less violent events then propel those elements into space, providing the seeds for newborn stars and, ­ultimately, for us. These scientists and their ­monumental 104-page paper, published in Reviews of Modern Physics, have been known ever since by the acronym "B²FH".

Between 1956 and 1960, Geoff studied the energy requirements of the giant radio galaxy M87 and much more ­distant, even stronger, radio sources. The kind of radiation producing their radio "noise" required enormous, continuously present, energy in both particles moving at near the speed of light, and in the well-ordered, strong magnetic fields needed to bend their motion. (Similar radiation is only ­produced on Earth by very ingeniously constructed "synchrotron" accelerators that similarly bend the paths of injected particles having extremely high speeds. Yet nature is evidently doing that, on its own, out in deep space.) Geoff showed that the total energy requirement was at a minimum when both the particles and the magnetic fields had comparable energies. Even that minimum energy was astonishing – up to something like the total energy emitted in 100m or more supernovae. Such energies were completely unexpected then, but his startling result has since been confirmed many times.

In 1958, Geoff also produced an intriguing argument involving helium enrichment in galaxies. If the currently observed light output of galaxies comes mainly from the conversion of hydrogen into helium in their stars, those same luminosities maintained throughout galactic lifetimes would imply a very small increase in their helium content, much smaller than the amount of helium they apparently possess. At that time, Geoff interpreted this as possible evidence that galaxies must once have been very much brighter, probably for a short time in the distant past.

Ironically, both his conclusions are now generally accepted lore, if not for the reasons he advanced. His enrichment argument came to be seen as ­evidence that helium in the universe could not have come from stellar nucleosynthesis alone; instead, it is conventionally believed that most of the helium emerged from the primeval big bang. And it is thought that many, ­possibly most, galaxies go through a very bright, quasar phase early on, quasars themselves involving central black holes and the conversion of ­gravitational energy into other forms. At the time Geoff formulated his ideas, ­neither quasars nor black holes had been discovered.

As a student of Hoyle's, I had the ­privilege of seeing B²FH working together from the early 1960s. Later, visiting my former Cambridge flatmate Peter Strittmatter in La Jolla, California, I saw Geoff at work there. Like Toscanini encouraging his orchestra, he would urge his postdoctoral colleagues and graduate students to expand their horizons, tackle new problems, and quickly write up their results for ­publication. "Do it now!" was one of his most ­frequent, and rather loud, ­exhortations.

He also possessed great good humour and exceptional wit. In 1965, Strittmatter and I were invited to share Christmas dinner with the Burbidges and their house guest, Hoyle. We gave Geoff a stack of telegram forms, arguing that "letters to Nature" were clearly too slow a form of scientific communication for him. He enjoyed this joke at his expense. (Margaret received a red nylon, shoulder-to-knee night robe – "the largest red shift we could find".)

Geoff was born in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, the son of a builder who was a local tennis champion. His father took him to Wimbledon many times, leading to his lifelong interest in the game. At Chipping Norton grammar school Geoff excelled in history and mathematics, but learned of a wartime opportunity to study physics at Bristol University. He obtained a very good honours degree in 1946. Subsequent practical experience in a ballistics ­laboratory gave him a taste for highly explosive events.

As a graduate student in physics at University College London in 1947, he met Dr Margaret Peachey, the assistant director of the University of London Observatory and a distant relative of the famous astronomer Sir James Jeans. Geoff later declared that he became an astronomer because he ­married one. They would become the most celebrated partnership in their field, and the most efficient since the siblings John and Caroline Herschel. At times, while Margaret observed, Geoff did diamond plate-cutting and other darkroom work, putting expertise learned in his father's business to scientific use. In the late 1950s, they began a decade-long research programme, observing galaxies and deducing their masses from their measured rotation speeds. Their almost 40 papers together, many with Kevin Prendergast, broke the back of this subject.

Geoff and Margaret held a number of ­positions before permanently joining the new UCSD (University of ­California, San Diego) campus at La Jolla in 1962. With the discovery of quasars around the same time, Geoff's fortunes began to take a different turn. With his friend Hoyle, he became increasingly disenchanted with both the conventional interpretation of ­quasars as very distant objects with large ­cosmological red shifts, and with the big bang implications that others saw in the discovery of the so-called cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965. He remained a vociferous challenger of ­conventional interpretations of these discoveries. In 2000, he, Hoyle and Jayant V Narlikar published a ­substantial book detailing their objections and presenting their own interpretations (A Different Approach to Cosmology).

Geoff was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1968. He and his wife were jointly awarded the American Astronomical Society's Warner prize and the Royal Astronomical Society's gold medal. He received a number of other awards and honours. From 1978 to 1984 he served as a notably effective director of the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. He was the editor of the Annual Reviews in Astronomy and Astrophysics for more than 30 years.

Those lucky enough to be invited to join him and his associate editors for a full day of planning future volumes saw him in a role few others did, encouraging open discussion, judiciously choosing topics and potential contributors, and displaying a wide breadth of knowledge of ­subjects and their practitioners across the entire field.

He is survived by Margaret, whom he married in 1948, and by their daughter, Sarah.

•Geoffrey Ronald Burbidge, astrophysicist and cosmologist, born 24 September 1925; died 26 January 2010

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 18 Feb 2010 | 11:27 am

'Speed Gene' Helps Pick Pony's Perfect Race

Knowing a horse's genome could pay off big at the race track.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 18 Feb 2010 | 11:01 am

'Koala AIDS' Spreading at an Alarming Rate

At least 3.1 million people die of AIDS each year, reports Yale AIDS watch, and scientists have identified a comparable disease, dubbed "Koala AIDS" or "KIDS," which is spreading among the gentle, cuddly marsupials at an alarming rate, according to ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 18 Feb 2010 | 10:22 am

Tests show King Tut died from malaria, study says

CHICAGO (Reuters) - King Tutankhamen, the teen-aged pharaoh whose Egyptian tomb yielded dazzling treasures, limped around on tender bones and a club foot and probably died from malaria, researchers said on Tuesday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 18 Feb 2010 | 10:04 am

Memory-Erasing Drugs Could Result from New Brain Discovery

A brain mechanism that erases memories to help make way for new ones could lead to the development of memory-erasing drugs.
Source: Livescience.com | 18 Feb 2010 | 10:01 am

Subtropical Water Melts Greenland's Fjords

Warmer, subtropical waters flowing into Greenland fjords, contributing to acceleration of glacier melt.
Source: Livescience.com | 18 Feb 2010 | 10:00 am

Indian wild cats caught on film

One of the world's highest number of wild cat species is recorded in India's Eastern Himalayan rainforest.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 18 Feb 2010 | 9:45 am

Brits Release UFO Docs

Today, the British Ministry of Defence and the British National Archives released 24 files containing more than 6,000 pages of UFO-related information to the public. The material covers reports of sightings between 1994–2000 and includes eyewitness accounts and sketches... like ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 18 Feb 2010 | 9:10 am

Pollution Problem Looms From Discarded 'Boob Tubes'

CRTs are gradually being phased out worldwide, but demand in Asia still drives the need for CRT recycling.
Source: Livescience.com | 18 Feb 2010 | 7:44 am

Drug firm drops libel case against scientist

GE Healthcare says it did not mean to stifle academic debate with action against radiologist Henrik Thomsen

A US corporation, GE Healthcare, has dropped the controversial British libel action it brought against a scientist who criticised one of its drugs, saying the firm did not mean to stifle academic debate.

Lawyers for leading Danish radiologist Henrik Thomsen said today: "He will be obviously relieved. Now he won't have to worry about his future financial position, and won't have to keep looking over his shoulder before he says anything."

At a 2007 Oxford medical conference, Thomsen criticised use of Omniscan, GE's best-selling contrast agent injected into patients so their tissues show up better during MRI scans.

Use of the drug, which contains a toxic metal, gadolinium, has now been halted for a small group of patients with previously malfunctioning kidneys, after hundreds of them developed permanently crippling side-effects from a condition called NSF.

The financial terms of the settlement were secret, Thomsen's lawyer, Andrew Stephenson of Carter-Ruck, said yesterday. But the solicitors had defended the case on a no-win no-fee basis, so it is expected by observers that they will have gained a sizeable payment.

In agreed statements released today, Thomsen said: "I stand by my publicly expressed opinion, based on my experience and research on published papers, that there is an association between the chemical formulation of gadolinium-based contrast agents and NSF."

He added: "It was not my intention to suggest on the basis of the evidence then available to me that GE Healthcare had marketed Omniscan knowing that it might cause NSF."

The company, a subsidiary of the giant US corporation General Electric, said it had not intended to "stifle academic debate" by suing Thomsen for libel, and accepted that his concerns were expressed in good faith: "GE Healthcare objected to statements made by Professor Thomsen which it interpreted as suggesting that it had known from the outset that Omniscan caused NSF."

The company said it welcomed what it called a "principled debate" about safety issues.

A British NSF sufferer, Margaret Roxburgh from Glasgow, is attempting to gain compensation after she was injected with Omniscan in 2006. Her lawyer, Cameron Fyfe, says Scottish authorities are currently refusing legal aid on the grounds the case would be too expensive to pursue. She is one of 28 alleged British victims. A series of lawsuits are also being brought against GE in the US.

The use of British libel laws against scientists by commercial organisations has been the subject of increasing controversy, and a Ministry of Justice working party is considering reforms.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 18 Feb 2010 | 7:44 am

Shaking Brain Cancer Cells to Death

Nano-sized discs can destroy cancer cells by shaking them to death
Source: Livescience.com | 18 Feb 2010 | 6:50 am

Top UN climate official resigns

Yvo de Boer, the UN's top climate change official has said he will resign after nearly four years in the post.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 18 Feb 2010 | 6:30 am

sOccket: Soccer Ball by Day, Light by Night

Every great once in a while, you come across something that makes you slap your head and say, "That's...just...brilliant." No, I don't mean the soccer ball pictured here. Well, actually, I DO mean the soccer ball pictured here. Although, this ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 18 Feb 2010 | 6:18 am

New Bosworth battle site revealed

Nasa has published the first images from a spacecraft which has been scanning the skies since January.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 18 Feb 2010 | 5:56 am

In pictures: Meet the world's endangered primates

Nearly half of all primates are in danger of becoming extinct. Here are some of the species under threat

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 18 Feb 2010 | 5:00 am

Archbishop in genome study

Scientists analyse the genomes of five southern Africans, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 18 Feb 2010 | 3:43 am

Fear of Spiders Can Develop Before Birth

Humans may be born with a fear of spiders and snakes, healthy phobias that up the odds of survival in the wild.
Source: Livescience.com | 18 Feb 2010 | 3:18 am

Banded brothers

The hidden life of the banded mongoose
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 18 Feb 2010 | 3:13 am

The First and Last Meeting of Everyone with a Fully Sequenced Genome

Nearly every person who has had their entire genome sequenced will gather in a single room near Boston on April 27. It’s the last time this will ever happen.

Within a year, the dozens of people in this elite group will have been joined by a thousand or more people. Soon after that, hobbyists may be roaming the streets with handheld DNA analyzers, high school athletes may experiment with gene therapy to enhance their performance and pharmacists might check our genetic records before filling prescriptions.

“There was a time that only guys in white labcoats had the credentials and training to operate computers,” said Jason Bobe, co-organizer of the GET conference, where the fully sequenced group will meet. ”Nowadays, we’re all experts to some degree. This is happening in genetics too.”

Bobe hopes to recruit 100,000 people to donate their genetic information to create a public database for medical research.

The next five years will bring massive genetics experiments and breakthroughs in personalized cancer treatment, according to Harvard University geneticist George Church. Doctors will test medications on stem cells derived from their patients to check whether they will work.

The first human genome sequence, finished in 2003, cost an estimated $2.7 billion. Today, the price has dropped below $1,500 for a complete sequence, and it’s on the way to becoming so inexpensive that most everyone will be able to afford it.

But it’s not clear how we will use all of that information. Personalized medicine may be the most important use of DNA analysis, but many industries will be affected by the plummeting costs of gene reading equipment.

“Lets not overlook the ways that genomics will be incorporated into other aspects of our lives,” Bobe said, “like our foods, our households, our backyards, consumer goods, our identities and social interactions.”

The shelves of most big grocery stores are already lined with products that contain genetically modified vegetables. Students have used DNA bar code analysis to identify fake tuna in fancy sushi restaurants. And anyone can sign up for a dating website that matches people based on their genetic traits.

“Genetics know-how will have spread even faster than the rise of computers from obscurity in 1980 to access for everyone today, even in developing nations,” Church said.

Access to the event, however, will be limited. Only two-hundred people can attend, and tickets will cost $999. But anyone will be able to watch video clips of the best discussions for free.

Images: 1) The LavaAmp is an experimental DNA copying machine that could cost less than $100 and allow hobbyists to do genetic tests at home./Aaron Rowe. 2) A $68,500 genome sequence from Knome comes on one of these fancy flash drives./Knome

See Also:

• Sushi DNA Tests Reveal Fraud
• The Cheapest Genome Sequence Ever: For Real?
• Why Early Detection Is the Best Way to Beat Cancer
• You’ve Got Drug-Resistant TB! The Ultimate Diagnostic Device.
• 23AndMe Will Decode Your DNA for $1000. Welcome to the Age of Genomics

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 18 Feb 2010 | 3:00 am

Is the great white shark in danger?

Few creatures provoke as much naked fear as man-eating sharks, yet they are at far more risk from humans

Mike Rutzen offers his hands as evidence that he knows what he is talking about. They have the ­texture of ­chopping-boards: 34 scars inflicted by the "sushi knife'' teeth of great white sharks, including a twice-­severed index finger on his left hand. "We should not be worrying about sharks killing bathers but about ­humans killing great whites," says the former fisherman, who runs a cage-­diving company at the southern tip of South Africa. "They are apex predators that are ­crucial to our biodiversity, yet ­humans continue, primitively, to hunt them for their fins and their $50,000 jaws."

Lloyd Skinner cannot be consulted. Last month, on the sweltering summer afternoon of 12 January, this fit, 37-year-old tourist swam out from busy Fish Hoek beach, near Cape Town. Wearing goggles and trunks, the Zimbabwean was barely out of his depth – in about 7ft of water – when a great white charged him. The attack, which lasted three minutes, was watched by ­hundreds of horrified holidaymakers, ­including children playing bat-and-ball on the sand and bodyboarders only yards away. One witness tweeted in disbelief: "Holy shit. We just saw a gigantic shark eat what looked like a person in front of our house." And then: "We are dumbstruck, that was so surreal. That shark was HUGE. Like dinosaur huge."

The 15ft shark reportedly returned five or six times to eat its prey. All that remained were Skinner's flip-flops, towel and the box for his goggles, left with his shirt on the beach.

His death – the second in this spot in six years – reignited the debate about whether shark tourism, particularly cage diving from boats, is ­encouraging great whites to regard humans as a food source. The cage-dive operators, some of whom ­collaborate with conservationists to assemble valuable ­research data on the sharks, deny this vehemently. But the tension between tourism and conservation is complicated; shark nets that will protect surfers and swimmers can kill scores of dolphins, otters, seals and shark ­species that are harmless to humans.

"Our coastline is unique in the world because we have fish for the sharks to feed on," Rutzen explains. "Until 1994, apartheid closed our coastal waters and slowed seaside development, so this became a haven for sealife. We also have several large seal colonies close to the coast, which means we are the only place in the world where you can easily watch sharks breaching [jumping out of the water]. My business gives the great whites a value alive, whereas ­previously their only value was their fins and jaws."

Rutzen's Shark Diving Unlimited has been going for 16 years – one of eight cage-diving companies in Gansbaai, a three-hour drive east of Cape Town. With the decline of fishing over the last 15 years, the tiny port has come to depend on shark tourism, and pays tribute to the predator via shop names such as Sharky's Pizzas and shark-shaped Christmas lights, which are still hanging in February.

Around 32,000 people cage dive with great whites every year at Gansbaai and nearby Mossel Bay – a pursuit worth an estimated 48m rands (£4m), part of South Africa's growing marine eco-tourism industry that, including whale-watching and trips to seal colonies, is worth more than £10m per year. Prince Harry has paid his 1,350 rands (£110) to get into Rutzen's cage and, to judge from photographs in the shop, so have Matt Damon, Brad Pitt and ­Leonardo DiCaprio.

Rutzen's first contact with great whites was as a fisherman catching ­yellowtail. "The sharks loved that fish so much that they would throw themselves on deck to try to eat our catch." Nowadays he is devoutly ­conservationist. Rutzen, 39, has dived without a cage with more great whites than any person in history (around 800 hours), and insists the animals find ­humans bony to eat. "They prefer fish and seal blubber," he announces as a dozen of us sign indemnity forms ­before heading out on his dive boat. "Humans are the slowest form of ­available protein. Given what an easy catch we are, they would eat us in large numbers if they were interested."

We board the blue-hulled Barracuda, a 12-metre, purpose-built motorboat carrying an oblong cage made of thick wire woven into A4-size squares. I ­reassure myself that a great white's jaw must surely be wider than a piece of paper. Our 7ft-high, 16ft-wide cage is open-top, but at least there will be other specimens of slow protein in there with me to improve my odds.

I have covered war zones all over ­Africa, but am no great fan of swimming; nor have I ever been brave enough to watch Jaws. My knowledge of great whites is Wikipedic: I know they ­possess a terrifying 240 serrated teeth, and have been around for 430 million years – long before the first dinosaur – yet still we know little about their ­social, hunting or migration habits. ­Estimates of the population left in the world's oceans vary from 2,600 to just 800; Rutzen puts the figure at 1,000, and claims it is falling unchecked as humans deplete the oceans.

"Now that we see factory ships in South African waters, I rarely see my old friends return from one season to the next," he says. "Compared to 1994, the situation is dire. We are lucky if we see five babies in a year.''

Great whites are, none the less, ­difficult to love. No one has ever filmed these "killing machines" mating, but they are assumed to use an ocean form of date-rape called tonic immobility: the male knocks the female into a trance-like state then plunges his two sperm-­delivery "claspers" into her. Gestation takes a year and, in some species, the strongest foetuses eat their weaker siblings in the womb.

As we speed out to sea for about 20 minutes, the swell grows. Contrary to my expectations, none of the ­passengers – a German, a couple of Americans and a majority of South ­Africans – ­admits to a daredevil desire to push the boundaries of nature. In fact, most of them reveal that they will not be getting in the cage at all and have only come along to watch. "It's a surprise present from my father- in-law," says one.

The outboard motors are cut, an ­anchor thrown. No sharks to be seen. "They are pretty shy, but they are also inquisitive. We saw five sharks at this spot yesterday," says Rutzen. His crew produce a plastic box full of huge, stinking tuna heads – the controversial "chum". A head is attached to a cork floater and thrown into the ocean on the end of an orange nylon rope. A man in the aft ladles fish blood into the ocean. Wetsuits, booties, masks and weights are handed out, along with cans of ginger beer for those, like me, who are about to revisit their breakfast. I remember thinking how pale DiCaprio looked in the photo, and realise this probably had less to do with coming cheek-to-gill with a great white than with seasickness.

A shoal of mullet circles us, attracted by the fish blood. "They are of no ­interest to the great whites," says ­Rutzen. Those of us now dressed in black wetsuits – a more than passable seal disguise – take that to mean we are of greater interest. A lone, grey dorsal fin accompanied by a long dark shadow beneath the surface has begun circling the boat; it moves slowly and assuredly. We are to perch like frogs in the top of the cage, our heads above water and knees resting on a horizontal cross bar, until given the order to hold our breath and dip down. Oh, and no touching the animal.

"Shark!" comes the shout and down we go, to be treated to a flash of the great white's gills, swimming from right to left in front of us. It seems large but, perhaps because the belly is white, less threatening than when glimpsed from above. We don't see its teeth, and it is gone in a jiffy. We repeat the exercise five or six times before the 16C water becomes too cold. The ­experience is brief, undramatic and, for me, dominated by queasiness caused by the swell and the stench of chum, not the fear of sharks.

The baiting aspect of cage diving has been said to habituate the great whites to humans. Rutzen denies this emphatically and is supported by most scientists, including Leonard ­Compagno, one of the world's leading shark experts. "Fishermen have been baiting sharks for generations, and sharks regularly break open trawler nets," he says. "I don't see that ­chumming for cage-­diving is a particular culprit. There are far more serious concerns, such as man depleting the fish stocks that sharks feed on, and ­marine pollution.''

Compagno, 67, is a Californian marine biologist who advised Steven Spielberg on Jaws – the film that sealed the great white's place as the ultimate bad guy – before marrying a South African expert on giant squid and settling in Cape Town in 1982. "When we made that film, we did not realise how gentle great whites are. Now we know that you can hand-feed them. In evolutionary terms, they are the most successful of marine animals, dating back to the ­beginning of the Devonian period. But the film turned the great white into a demonic man-eater, and the image has stayed with us."

Since 1991, after a campaign led by Compagno, great white sharks have been listed among 5,000 endangered animal species by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered ­Species. They are prized mainly for their jaw bones, which can fetch ­between $50,000 and $100,000 (up to £60,000). At any one time, Compagno says there may be 200 great whites in False Bay, where Fish Hoek is situated. "Most of the time they are just eating tuna, yellowtail and rays. They are ­unpredictable. But so are humans, who can turn round and punch you. What is worse, being bitten by a cobra, hit by a car or eaten by shark? The shark is just messier."

Shark nets are used to protect ­swimmers and surfers in Australia and along 38km of South Africa's Indian Ocean coast. But Rutzen calls them "protection through extermination", and Geremy Cliff, head of research at the KwaZulu Natal Sharks Board in Durban, admits they are cruel. "Our nets kill up to 600 sharks, dolphins, ­otters, turtles and rays every year. We are trying different methods to reduce fatalities, such as underwater sirens, because we cannot defend nets in ­ecological terms. Putting down shark nets – or the exclusion nets that are used in Hong Kong to ­create pools in the sea – is an economic decision based on the value of beach tourism."

More than 700,000 tourists visit Cape Town each year, but due to the cold water conditions of the Atlantic Ocean they are not, in the main, beach tourists, says the city's head of environ­mental policy and strategy, Gregg Oelofse. "Our 300km coastline, including Cape Point, is a marine ­protected area. Imagine the outcry if we put down nets and a southern right whale died in them.''

After swimmer Tyna Webb died in a great white attack at Fish Hoek beach in November 2004, the city ­employed 19 shark spotters and ­increased signage in False Bay. Since then, more than 570 sightings of great whites have been recorded, and an ­enhanced ­system of flags and sirens put in place to warn beach users. No ­siren was sounded ahead of the ­attack on Skinner, but a Cape Town City ­investigation concluded that the spotters were blameless. It said the attack was ­"sudden and explosive"; that "the shark emerged from deep ­water and was not visible prior to the attack".

The family of Skinner, an engineer who was on holiday, have since laid a wreath in the water at Fish Hoek and thanked the spotters for their vain ­efforts to recover the body. The beach was closed for two days after the ­attack, and local tourism officials say bookings were not affected, perhaps principally because the killing ­happened at the end of the Christmas ­holiday season.

Oelofse concludes that the attack was a "regrettable but random" event, probably caused by the fact that the shark was in predatory mode and that Skinner had the misfortune to be swimming between it and a shoal of fish: "The shark saw him as prey, or as a rival predator." His view is supported by Compagno and Rutzen.

Defenders of great whites point out that attacks are rarer than electrocutions by toasters, deaths from falling vending machines and lightning strikes. The reason we fear them, Spielberg aside, is because we have not yet mastered the oceans. Humans keep rhinoceroses and lions "in the wild", but even gameparks the size of small countries, such as South Africa's Kruger National Park, have fences around them.

In our collective imagination, sharks remain dragons of the deep. The fact that they are older than the dinosaurs only makes them scarier. "People think it is shocking that you can still be eaten alive in a city," says Oelofse. But if you ask Rutzen and Compagno, it is the great whites who have much more to fear.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 18 Feb 2010 | 2:00 am