Human genetic vulnerabilities may underlie infectious diseases, scientist argues

Infectious diseases in the general population depend to a large extent on underlying genetic vulnerabilities, an expert in innate immunity says. While microbes are required for infection, he says, one's genetic background could make the difference between fighting an infection and succumbing to it.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

How far should neuroscience evidence go in court trials?

Although MRI scans showing a malfunctioning brain could conjure empathy and a finding of innocence for a criminal defendant, they might just as well lead jurors and judges to opt for convictions and long sentences, the law professor says.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Fetal surgery continues to advance

Repairing birth defects in the womb. Inserting a tiny laser into the mother's uterus to seal off an abnormal blood flow and save fetal twins. Advancing the science that may allow doctors to deliver cells or DNA to treat sickle cell anemia and other genetic diseases before birth.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Pinch away the pain: Scorpion venom could be an alternative to morphine

Researchers are investigating new ways for developing a novel painkiller based on natural compounds found in the venom of scorpions. These compounds have gone through millions of years of evolution and some show high efficacy and specificity for certain components of the body with no side effects.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Massive stars’ magnetically controlled diets

Astronomers have shown that magnetic fields play an important role during the birth of massive stars. Magnetic fields are already known to strongly influence the formation of lower-mass stars like our Sun. This new study reveals that the way in which high-mass and low-mass stars form may be more similar than previously suspected.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Orange peels, newspapers may lead to cheaper, cleaner ethanol fuel

Scientists may have just made the breakthrough of a lifetime, turning discarded fruit peels and other throwaways into cheap, clean fuel to power the world's vehicles.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

New material mimics bone to create better biomedical implants

A "metal foam" that has a similar elasticity to bone could mean a new generation of biomedical implants that would avoid bone rejection that often results from more rigid implant materials, such as titanium. Researchers have developed the metal foam, which is even lighter than solid aluminum and can be made of 100 percent steel or a combination of steel and aluminum.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

Minor variations in one gene may be associated with endurance running

A few minor variations in one gene may make a difference in athletic endurance, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

Heart failure worse when right ventricle goes bad, study suggests

New research suggests that the ability of right side of the heart to pump blood may be an indication of the risk of death to heart-failure patients whose condition is caused by low function by the left side of their heart.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

Cellular mechanism that protects against disease discovered

Researchers have discovered a new mechanism within human cells that constantly protects us against disease.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Wet and wintry weather was forecast to persist Sunday over the southern part of the nation. Multiple troughs of low pressure were to combine as one moved eastward over the Southern Rockies and another moved in from Mexico.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Feb 2010 | 3:07 am

Geo-engineering: the planet's savior or untested danger? (AFP)

AFP - US researchers are studying the steam from ships, condensation trails of airplanes and volcanic eruptions as they try to understand how and even if the fledgling science of geo-engineering could slow global warming.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Feb 2010 | 2:56 am

Drugs 'could stop spread of Aids'

Anti-retroviral treatments (ARVs) could stop the spread of Aids in South Africa within five years, a top scientist says.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 21 Feb 2010 | 1:14 am

Feds outline plan to nurse Great Lakes to health (AP)

AP - The Obama administration has developed a five-year blueprint for rescuing the Great Lakes, a sprawling ecosystem plagued by toxic contamination, shrinking wildlife habitat and invasive species.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Feb 2010 | 1:05 am

Japan says Australia whaling threat 'unfortunate' (AFP)

AFP - Japan's foreign minister Sunday described Australia's threat of legal action against its controversial whaling activities as "unfortunate" but said he did not believe it would hurt ties.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Feb 2010 | 12:34 am

Singing 'rewires' damaged brain

Teaching stroke sufferers to sing "rewires" their brains and help them recover their speech, researchers say.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 20 Feb 2010 | 10:24 pm

US lunar pull-out leaves China shooting for moon (AFP)

AFP - China aims to land its first astronauts on the moon within a decade at the dawn of a new era of manned space exploration -- a race it now leads thanks to the US decision to drop its lunar programme.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Feb 2010 | 9:31 pm

32 Dead as Violent Storm Hits Madeira

Floods and landslides demolish houses and hospitalize 68 people on the Portuguese island off the northwest coast of Africa.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 Feb 2010 | 9:27 pm

US scientists warn of fraud of stem cell 'banks' (AFP)

AFP - Clinics that offer to "bank" stem cells from the umbilical cords of newborns for use later in life when illness strikes are fraudsters, a top US scientist said.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Feb 2010 | 7:23 pm

Weather Uncertain For Space Shuttle's Sunday Landing (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - Astronauts aboard NASA's space shuttle Endeavour are preparing their spaceship for a planned landing in Florida Sunday night, but low clouds and rain may keep them in space an extra day.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Feb 2010 | 6:16 pm

Yes, Twitter really is out of this world…

Thanks to the social networking tool, we can now see instant photographs of Earth taken by two astronauts

It is an intriguing combination of two technologies in action. As the $100bn International Space Station, scheduled for completion over the next 12 months, circles the planet, its astronauts relay the wonders of living on board history's most expensive construction site by using Twitter to communicate with the world.

Flight engineer Soichi Noguchi, a Japanese astronaut on board the station, and US engineer José Hernández, have been particularly adept at using the microblogging service to send hundreds of pictures back to Earth via their accounts. The results provide a dramatic and highly accessible portfolio of images of life in space and of Earth when viewed from a height of 185 miles. Noguchi's efforts include photographs of the shuttle's interior as well as pictures of deserts, islands and ice floes on Earth. Both astronauts' efforts have gone down a treat with space watchers round the globe. "Bellissima foto!" responds one follower; "Buena foto," states another.

As Twitter messages make clear, it's the immediacy of the pictures that causes the real excitement. "I've seen plenty of official space photos that were equally breathtaking, but there's something about getting them from Twitter that makes this feel more intimate," says one of them.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Feb 2010 | 5:50 pm

How a hobbit is rewriting the history of the human race

The discovery of the bones of tiny primitive people on an Indonesian island six years ago stunned scientists. Now, further research suggests that the little apemen, not Homo erectus, were the first to leave Africa and colonise other parts of the world, reports Robin McKie

It remains one of the greatest human fossil discoveries of all time. The bones of a race of tiny primitive people, who used stone tools to hunt pony-sized elephants and battle huge Komodo dragons, were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2004.

The team of Australian researchers had been working in a vast limestone cavern, called Liang Bua, in one of the island's remotest areas, when one scientist ran his trowel against a piece of bone. Carefully the group began scraping away the brown clay in which pieces of a tiny skull, and a little lower jaw, were embedded.

This was not any old skull, they quickly realised. Although small, it had special characteristics. In particular, it had adult teeth. "This was no child, but a tiny adult; in fact, one of the smallest adult hominids ever found in the fossil record," says Mike Morwood, of Australia's University of Wollongong and a leader of the original Flores expedition team.

The pieces of bone were carefully wrapped in newspaper, packed in cardboard boxes and then cradled on the laps of scientists on their journey, by ferry and plane, back to Jakarta. Then the pieces of skull, as well as bones from other skeletons found in Liang Bua, were put together.

The end result caused consternation. These remains came from a species that turned out to be only three feet tall and had the brain the size of an orange. Yet it used quite sophisticated stone tools. And that was a real puzzle. How on earth could such individuals have made complex implements and survived for aeons on this remote part of the Malay archipelago?

Some simply dismissed the bones as the remains of deformed modern humans with diseases that had caused them to shrink: to them, they were just pathological oddities, it was alleged. Most researchers disagreed, however. The hobbits were the descendants of a race of far larger, ancient humans who had thrived around a million years ago. These people, known as Homo erectus, had become stranded on the island and then had shrunk in an evolutionary response to the island's limited resources.

That is odd enough. However, new evidence suggests the little folk of Flores may be even stranger in origin. According to a growing number of scientists, Homo floresiensis is probably a direct descendant of some of the first apemen to evolve on the African savannah three million years ago. These primitive hominids somehow travelled half a world from their probable birthplace in the Rift Valley to make their homes among the orangutans, giant turtles and rare birds of Indonesia before eventually reaching Flores.

It sounds improbable but the basic physical similarity between the two species is striking. Consider Lucy, the 3.2 million-year-old member of Australopithecus afarensis. She had a very small brain, primitive wrists, feet and teeth and was only one metre tall, but was still declared "the grandmother of humanity" after her discovery in Ethiopia in 1974. Crucially, analysis of Lucy's skeleton shows it has great similarities with the bones of H. floresiensis, although her species died out millions of years ago while the hobbits hung on in Flores until about 17,000 years ago. This latter figure is staggeringly close in terms of recent human evolution and indicates that long after the Neanderthals, our closest evolutionary relatives, had disappeared from the face of the Earth around 35,000 years ago, these tiny, distant relatives of Homo sapiens were still living on remote Flores.

The crucial point about this interpretation is that it explains why the Flores people had such minuscule proportions. They didn't shrink but were small from the start – because they came from a very ancient lineage of little apemen. They acquired no diseased deformities, nor did they evolve a smaller stature over time. They were, in essence, an anthropological relic and Flores was an evolutionary time capsule. In research that provides further support for this idea, scientists have recently dated some stone tools on Flores as being around 1.1 million years old, far older than had been previously supposed.

The possibility that a very primitive member of the genus Homo left Africa, roughly two million years ago, and that a descendant population persisted until only several thousand years ago, is one of the more provocative hypotheses to have emerged in anthropology during the past few years," David Strait of the University of Albany told Scientific American recently. This view is backed by Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, London. "We are still grappling with what this discovery has done for our thinking and our conventional scenarios."

In addition, Mike Morwood says he has now uncovered stone tools on nearby Sulawesi. These could be almost two million years old, he believes, which suggests the whole region was populated by very ancient humans for a startlingly long part of human prehistory. "This is going to put the cat among the pigeons," Morwood says.

However, it is the hobbits' similarity to ancient African apemen that provides the most compelling evidence for their ancient origins. In the Journal of Human Evolution, a team led by Debbie Argue of the Australian National University, recently reported that analysis of H. floresiensis shows they most closely resemble apelike human ancestors that first appeared around 2.3 million years ago in Africa. In other words, their stock may be not quite as old as Lucy's but probably comes from a hominid, known as Homo habilis, that appeared on the evolutionary scene not long after Lucy's species disappeared. Homo habilis's features now seem to match, most closely, those of H. floresiensis.

Consider those hobbit feet, for example. The skeleton unearthed on Flores had a foot that was 20cm in length. This produces a ratio of 70 per cent when compared with the length of the hobbit's thigh bone. By contrast, men and women today have foot-to-thigh bone ratios of 55 per cent. The little folk of Flores had singularly short legs and long, flapper feet, very similar to those of African apemen, even though limbs like these would have made their long march from Africa to Flores a painful business.

Similarly, the hands of H. floresiensis were more like apes than those of evolved humans, their wrists possessing trapezoid bones that would have made the delicate art of stone tool-making very difficult. Their teeth show primitive traits while their brains were little bigger than those of chimpanzees, though CT scans of skull interiors suggest they may have had cognitive skills not possessed by apes.

Nevertheless, this little apeman, with poor physique, a chimp-sized brain and only a limited ability to make tools, now appears to have left Africa, travelled thousands of miles and somehow colonised part, if not all, of south-east Asia two million years ago.

Scientists had previously assumed only a far more advanced human ancestor, such as Homo erectus, was capable of undertaking that task and only managed to do so about a million years ago when our predecessors had evolved powerful physiques, a good gait and the beginnings of intellect. Without these, we would have got nowhere, it was implied.

Then along came little H. floresiensis which, quite simply, has "no business being there," says Morwood. And you can see what he means. Apart from the sheer improbability of a jumped-up ape travelling from Africa to Indonesia, there is the particular puzzle of how it got to Flores.

Primitive hominids were almost certainly incapable of sailing. So how did it arrive on the island in the first place? It is a puzzle, although Stringer believes the region's intense tectonic activity is significant. "After the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, people were found far out at sea clinging to rafts of vegetation. Things like that could have happened regularly in the past and people could have been swept out to sea and washed ashore on Flores. Alternatively, there could have been short-lived connections between now separate islands."

Thus, ancient African apemen travelled half the world, made homes across Indonesia and, in one case, were washed out to sea to end up colonising a remote island that was already populated with pygmy elephants, called stegadons, and giant Komodo dragons, which are still found on the island. It is a truly fantastic tale, worthy of Rider Haggard, and it has turned the study of human evolution on its head.

And then there is the report that dates the stone tools found on Flores as being 1.1 million years old. "That is utterly remarkable on its own," adds Morwood. "Until we found these dates, the longest period of island isolation that we knew about occurred on Tasmania where the aboriginal people were cut off from mainland Australia 11,000 years ago. We thought that was an amazing length of time. But now we have found an island where early humans were cut off from the rest of evolution for more than a million years." In addition, there are those completed digs carried out by Morwood which suggest that some type of human being was making stone implements up to two million years ago.

A crucial aspect to this remarkable story is the region's geography, Morwood believes. The ocean currents and the remoteness of Flores make the island difficult to get to, so once a species does get there, it will remain well protected on it, he argues. "Flores seems to protect species that are long past their use-by dates. There were those pygmy elephants, and the Komodo dragon, for example. And now we have Homo floresiensis. It may be that only a few animals get there but when they do arrive they tend to survive for a long time, which has been science's good fortune."

That is putting it mildly. Had not the original Australian team, led by Morwood, uncovered those hobbit remains in 2004, the story of humanity's African exodus would have been considered a fairly simple affair.

According to this version of events, Homo erectus evolved from apemen predecessors, such as Australopithecus africanus, in Africa and then headed off around the Old World more than a million years ago, armed with a great physique and a modest intellect. These allowed it to settle across Africa, Asia and Europe. This diaspora was then followed by a second wave of humans – our own species, Homo sapiens – which emerged from Africa 100,000 years ago and took over the planet, replacing all pockets of its predecessors it encountered.

Now a far more complex picture is emerging. Ancient apemen, who might have been thought to lack the nous for global conquest, appear to have done the trick almost a million years earlier. One of the major tenets of human evolution, the story of our world conquest, is now urgently in need of revision.

As to the fate of H. floresiensis, that is unclear. The species disappears abruptly from the archaeological record 17,000 years ago. But why? They had apparently survived quite happily on the island for more than a million years. So what did for them in the end?

There are two competing answers. The first suggests that the species, after all the good fortune that had helped it endure the vicissitudes of life in the Malay Archipelago, ran out of luck. "There is a thick layer of ash in the Liang Bua cave above the most recent hobbit remains," says Stringer. "We now know this was caused by a major volcanic eruption which occurred about 17,000 years ago. So it may be that they were just unlucky with the local geology." According to this vision, the little folk of Flores were wiped out by choking plumes of volcanic ash or died of starvation on an island denuded of vegetation.

It would have been a pretty terrible way to go. Yet neither Stringer nor Morwood is convinced that was what happened, despite the tight link between dates of eruptions on the island and the disappearance of the species from the fossil record. Instead, they suspect a very different agent: the bloody hand of modern humans. "Look at our track record," says Morwood. When Homo sapiens entered Europe 40,000 years ago, on its route out of Africa, they would have encountered the continent's original inhabitants, the Neanderthals. Within a few millenniums, the Neanderthals had been rendered extinct.

Stringer agrees. Homo sapiens left Africa about 100,000 years ago and by the time hobbits became extinct on Flores, modern humans were all over south-east Asia. "I cannot see Homo floresiensis keeping modern humans off the island. There must have been encounters between them and us. It is wonderful to speculate what might have happened when they met up, but I suspect that those moderns used up the resources that the hobbit needed to survive."

Robin McKie is the science editor of the Observer

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Feb 2010 | 5:49 pm

Met Office forecasts storm warnings over its accuracy

They are among the most respected, scientific and accurate forecasters in the world. Yet to the British public they are a joke. Tim Adams visits the Met Office's HQ in Exeter to meet the people for whom the outlook is always gloomy

The walls of the hi-tech head-quarters of the Met Office in Exeter are decorated with wisdom about the weather. The words tend to act as a comic counterpoint to the work that goes on in the building. The meteorologists who wander the glassy corridors with one eye on the ever-changing Devon skies outside will tell you that the job of forecasting is becoming incrementally more exact with every new satellite and software update, but the walls invariably tell you something different. In the lobby, a quotation from Hansard of 1854 recalls parliament's reaction to the apparently wild suggestion of Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy that, with the appliance of scientific study, "we might know in this metropolis the condition of the weather 24 hours beforehand": uproarious laughter. As I am being led through some of the rigorous logic of the current mapping systems by the heirs to FitzRoy (the manic-depressive commander of Darwin's Beagle), I can't help glancing over their shoulders to a quotation from Paul Cézanne: "We live in a rainbow of chaos."

Perhaps because it remains a part of the Ministry of Defence (albeit a pretty much self-sufficient part), the Met Office borrows some of the language of the military ("warm fronts" and "cold fronts" were coined during the First World War, when such waves of offence were much on meteorologists' minds). This mindset is useful because, from the outside at least, the Met Office can seem almost permanently embattled. When meteorologists are not engaged with the elements, they are traditionally in conflict with the great British press (or, on occasion, with each other). One of the few things that any British weather forecaster can predict with absolute certainty is the round of headlines that will accompany any forecast that goes awry.

This winter they have seen something of a perfect storm of such coverage. Following on from its "odds on" suggestion that 2009 would be a barbecue summer, the Met Office suggested back in October that we were likely to be due for an unusually mild winter. January's record-breaking Big Freeze, which, as it actually unfolded, the Met Office got pretty much spot on, nevertheless became another opportunity to blame the forecasters for the vagaries of the weather. The Sun, a title that loves a tale of meteorological meltdown, offered its readers a weather dart board in the belief it might do a better job than the Met Office's new supercomputer. Elsewhere the mild-winter forecast and the Great British Blizzard were tenuously linked by sceptics with the failures of the Copenhagen summit and the leaked emails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia (a Met Office partner) to suggest the Met Office was so preoccupied with potential warming in 50 years' time that it had lost sight of next week's wind chill.

This cycle of stories gathered pace and deepened when it was revealed that the BBC, another institution experiencing some ongoing turbulence, had made the decision to put the contract for its weather broadcasting, which the Met Office has held for 90 years, out to tender, with whispers that the New Zealand-based service Metra is being considered to replace the current provider. All in all, it has been the most unsettled couple of months in the institution's history since Michael Fish's hurricane in 1987, and the Bill Giles bullying scandal which followed close behind (after allegations by weather forecasters of a climate of fear that existed beyond the Velcro clouds – allegations that were overturned on appeal).

If Rob Varley, the recently appointed director of forecasting, feels himself to be in the eye of this storm, then he doesn't show it. Varley was born to this job. His father was a forecaster with the Met Office for 34 years, and he has already put in nearly three decades himself. He has overall responsibility for getting the weather right for a range of clients that includes half the world's commercial aviation and the military in Afghanistan, as well as commuters on the M6 and schoolboys hoping their match won't be called off, and he is impressively sanguine about the task. His ultimate responsibility, he suggests, is winning the daily struggle to make perfect sense of a vast global atmosphere of swirling fluid. "If you went up to Dartmoor," he says, "and you dropped a small stick in the River Dart at Dartmeed and you drove to Newbridge, 10 miles down the road, and waited for the stick to arrive, and then had a go at predicting precisely where along the bridge the stick would pass through, bearing in mind all the factors and currents and obstacles that might affect it on the way, that is about what we are trying to do every hour…"

Meteorologists, as every weatherman's favourite joke goes, do it with models. To aid in the understanding of this wantonly fluid system – Edward Lorenz proved chaos theory using infinitesimal modifications to weather systems – the Met Office is now equipped not only with 1,800 staff but a £33m IBM computer that can make 1,000,000,000,000,000 calculations a second, through code that enables it to project weather systems forward in time an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year and a century – and all places in between.

At any one point – though the central problem with the weather is that it does not have a beginning or an end, it is all middle – several dozen potential weather scenarios will be running through this endlessly refined programme, each one based on the incoming minute-by-minute data from thousands of weather stations across the globe, supplemented with observations from aircraft and radar and weather balloons and anchored vessels in the oceans, all set against a framework of patterns from orbiting satellites in the heavens. And even then, as Varley concedes, no one alive can tell you absolutely for certain whether you'll need an umbrella if you go out at lunchtime.

One result of this is that criticism, like that which has come the Met Office's way recently, goes with the territory. "When you get a foot of snow in one place overnight there will inevitably be disruption. That's just life. But of course it's frustrating and we want to blame someone for it. We are an easy target." The long-range forecasts, of barbecue summers and mild winters, were unfortunate, but Varley stresses, "for most people, we try to make it clear there is no usefulness whatsoever in those forecasts. If I'm booking a holiday, I would love to know whether June will be warmer than August, but the seasonal forecast will not tell you."

So why do them?

"If you look over a number of years, roughly two times out of three the thing we say most likely turns out to be right," he says, "so it is better than chance – and in some industries that margin is crucial." He would much rather the forecasts never made it into the press, however, "but the information is out there, so what can you do?"

Varley doesn't believe, though, that negative publicity has contributed to the BBC's decision to consider their relationship. "The BBC reviews its contracts from time to time, and rightly so," he says. "The point is, we don't want to be delivering services out of some obligation, but because people know we are the best at it in the world."

What really annoys Varley is the suggestion that because of the seasonal forecasts there were "some aspersions about the quality of our climate science" – the "If they can't tell what it's going to be like this winter, how do they know what it will be like in 2050?" argument, which ignores the fact that long-term temperature trends and knowledge about the effects of CO₂ in the atmosphere are much more reliable than multifaceted local weather systems. The Hadley Centre, the Climate Change wing of the Met Office which was established by Margaret Thatcher 20 years ago, was recently deemed in an independent study to be the most reliable of 43,500 geoscience institutes around the world. "You don't get to that position by being imprecise," Varley says, precisely. "The fact is, the things we are trying to do are very difficult. Our reputation around the world is second to none, and yet in the UK we are all too often a target for criticism. That is so painful to us."

It is perhaps inevitable that we should require the bringers of our weather news to suffer for their science: we need them to share our pain. There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that all of our behaviour is intimately linked to small shifts in the weather. Recent research suggests the stock market is far more bullish on cold days than on warm ones (a fact that holds true from Taiwan to Sweden). Our moods come and go like scattered showers. I was moving house from one end of the M4 to the other in the week of January's heavy snow, watching the hour-by-hour forecast unfold with the zeal of an entrail-gazing druid, now clicking on snowflake icons, now desperately shovelling grit on to the road as a hopeless offering, now stopping to thrill at the view.

The BBC understands this love-hate obsession like nothing else. It persists in calming us to sleep on our damp island with the Forties Cromarty Rockall lullaby of the shipping forecast; offering the comfort of far-off storm warnings. On the night of the winter's heaviest snow, the corporation's reporters were predictably sent en masse to survey the nation's drifts in their North Face jackets and their Berghaus hats in order to say nothing at all – just so we could see them being snowed on for once in the land of dull drizzle and patchy cloud. The ritual – like the belittling of forecasters – is part of the nation's idea of itself.

The uncertainty of our weather engenders both a need to know what comes next and a deep-seated anxiety that we will never know, not exactly; it is in this gap that the Met Office lives. In recent years our obsessive weather watching has taken on a medieval, apocalyptic tone as each extreme-weather event seems a portent, and all of them at least partly our fault. The weather has become personal. As Martin Amis pointed out in an interview earlier this month: "Don't you sense the incredible potential for violence in the weather, already — the storms, the snow? You can see the nature of what the future will be, and it's all terror and boredom all over again. You will be massively inconvenienced and appalled by the power of the weather…"

Well, maybe, you might say. The institution of the Met Office is a strangely seductive idea precisely because it is a physical dramatisation both of our knowledge of the unpredictability of the future and our stubborn efforts to make it known. It attempts, in a somewhat heroic way (from its earliest incarnation as a lifesaver for seamen), to bureaucratise chaos, to systematise doubt, and it sometimes comes close to doing so. It not only shows us on a weekly basis the limits of science, but also the human need for the ingenuity to overcome these limits.

It is not an exact discipline but it is certainly an exacting one. Anyone who believes that dis-crepancies in climate models are down to some arcane global conspiracy should, for example, meet Stuart Goldstraw, observations manager at the Met Office, and have him explain with diehard enthusiasm the extraordinary lengths he explores in order to eliminate error from global weather statistics.

Goldstraw outlines at length the detail of this endeavour to me, standing on a small hillside behind the looming Met Office building, among measuring instruments old and new. On the one hand, massive dishes stand alert for satellite information from the upper atmosphere; on the other are thermometers and rain gauges in louvred boxes. Collecting weather data, which for more than a century was a resolutely human enterprise, has lately become almost wholly mechanised, and the shift is his biggest headache.

How do you create machines that can exactly replicate the human eye? Which can see fog in a valley or judge visibility? You can't – but the important thing is to know exactly where the limitations lie and to weight the information accordingly. Goldstraw points me toward a "present weather centre" which sends an infra-red beam out between two arms and examines what interrupts that beam. The machine is confident when it comes to snow or drizzle or rain, but sleet is beyond it. "In that case it will say 'precipitation of an unknown type'," he says, "and that's when the forecasters have to guess the uncertain boundaries between snow and rain and the no man's land of sleet."

Temperature, which can be influenced by all sorts of local factors – from urban creep to flaking paint on instrument boxes – is often even harder to ascertain. "Climate with a capital C is our big challenge," Goldstraw concedes. For comparative purposes the climatologist is looking for accuracy to at least 0.1 of a degree, and any error in the way data is collected totally undermines that. "It's only the very best," Goldstraw suggests, somewhat despairingly, "that can meet that challenge over a long period."

That means out of 12,000 global sites producing weather data they "can generally trust only 500, and the subset of those we absolutely rely on is much reduced again, and sites drop out even of that group; it is a continual, daily battle, and then there are gaps – particularly in Africa, where we don't have much reliable data at all".

If Stuart Goldstraw is the pragmatist of this process, then the blue-sky thinker is Brian Golding, head of research, who takes all that data and runs it through the model that describes chaos. Golding takes me down to the basement level of the Met Office building, where the supercomputer, in its grey rows of tombstone cabinets, hums to itself. Golding has been developing this model for 37 years. He is a meteorologist who can do maths, rather than vice versa, he says, so it is a practical model, the only integrated one of its kind, by which he means it can be used to study not only what will happen in half an hour, but also, by asking it very different questions, what will happen in 50 years' time.

Golding is a spirited, focused man, and his work has focused the understanding of what occurs in the swirls of air approaching our island. When he started out, the reference points on the UK's mapping grid were spaced at 100km; in the 1980s Golding led the team to a global first, a grid length of 15km; he has just implemented the third generation of this, which is a 1.5km model for the whole of the country.

The effect of this, he suggests, should eventually be a fineness and accuracy of information about what will almost certainly be the increasing wetness of Britain: "If you look at how we did in the Cumbrian floods [in 2009], the forecasts were brilliant, but they were still at the scale of Cumbria. With the 1.5km scale model we could come down to individual river catchments, which means you could accurately predict the height a river will rise to – which might have meant the bridge the poor policeman [PC Bill Barker] was standing on was closed before it collapsed."

The weather forecast might soon, he says, be able to move from the level of depressions and fronts to very local squalls and thunderstorms, to say whether it is going to rain over this hill or that one, but that is a whole new strata of unpredictability. "Mostly," Golding says, brightly, explaining his life's work, "you have a fairly predictable uncertainty up to some point, and then you get to an unpredictable event, and there is a dividing of possibility and then there are two groups of solutions and then one or both of those will divide into more. And typically, chaos happens with these multiple bifurcations." Generally this first splitting of possibility happens after two or three days. And after that, it will always be trickier to know.

It is somehow gratifying to know that despite all this computer power, the forecasts we hear still come down to a bloke sitting in front of a map and wondering whether on this occasion the model's billions of calculations have really got it exactly right. All of the data collection and exponential number crunching eventually ends up in front of the chief forecaster, who, on this day, is a man called Frank Saunders, who is staring at a screen in the middle of the operations room – from which half the world's weather is forecast, from which aircraft are grounded and gritters dispatched – and looking vaguely alarmed.

When I visit the Met Office in the first week of February, there is some snow around in the north of England, but the temperature is hovering around freezing point, so trying to work out where it is falling is an informed guessing game. Saunders is trying to work out exactly how Manchester is going to receive the "unknown precipitation event" while keeping an eye on storm surges around the coast and the changing information about overnight ice. "My intuition," he says, "suggests it is being slightly overdone in the observations and it will fall as rain." Get that intuition wrong, though, and what falls as a centimetre of rain will work out to 10cm of snow, the difference between drizzle and gridlock.

It is Saunders's job to convey the nuance of this message to all the nation's broadcasters in an hourly conference-call briefing. For all the science, if he gets the emphasis wrong, or a word out of place, sunshine can quickly become showers. The chief forecaster is not for nothing known as God. As Saunders prepares for his briefing he accidentally knocks a cup of water over his desk, and I wonder for a moment how the subliminal stress of that particular precipitation event will play out in the nation's skies.

Einstein once observed: "Before I die, I hope someone will clarify quantum physics for me. After I die, I hope God will explain turbulence to me." An explanation for turbulence is what we have come to expect, though, and we have little patience when our prophets fail us. In an effort to deflect criticism when what falls from the air does not match what we have been told to prepare for, the Met Office is planning to introduce a more "probabilistic" element to forecasting, offering you percentage chances rather than a definitive symbol of cloud or rain. One of the elements of their ongoing contract discussions with the BBC is how this can best be done.

Almost uniformly the people I speak to at the Met Office believe the probabilistic method will finally allow them to convey the subtleties of the systems they are describing, the probabilistic will allow them to be right nearly all the time, the probabilistic will prevent the forecast coming back to bite them. I hesitate to point out that in America, where this style has long been employed, it was recently shown that only 50% of people understood what a 30% chance of rain actually meant and were therefore more likely to take their umbrella on the off-chance than ever before. As the man said, there is never any such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes.

When they got it wrong

August 2004 The Cornish village of Boscastle was deluged with more than a month's rain in seven hours. The medium-term forecast had been a modest 30-50mm of rainfall, but 133mm fell between 11am and 6pm. As villagers paddled down the streets, the Met Office declared: "No one could have forecast 133mm in seven hours. This was a freak event."

May 2009 Bournemouth tourism officials were furious about a bank holiday forecast that predicted pouring rain and thunderstorms for the southeast. Town traders claimed they lost 25,000 would-be visitors – who would have basked in 22C sunshine.

June 2001 In May the Met Office was spreading joy – it was going to be a long hot summer. Three months later Scotland was in the grip of horrendous electrical storms: 9,000 homes without electricity, hailstones the size of golf balls, transport chaos and, horror of horrors, 500,000 viewers left without TV for more than three hours when lightning struck a major television transmitter.

When they got it right

December 2004 A bad winter for the bookies – but a good winter for the Met Office. Scotland enjoyed its first official white Christmas in three years and bookies cried into their porridge. The Met Office had predicted that "much of Scotland, Northern Ireland, northwest England and Wales are likely to see a white Christmas".

June 1997 As Pete Sampras limbered up for his fourth Wimbledon title, Britain was on course for the wettest June in six years. While fans dreaded the inevitable Cliff Richard (right) sing-alongs, the Met Office had a spring in its step: "We forecast showers for 30 days, and we were right for 22 of them."

January 1990 Forty-seven people died in the Burns Day Storm, when 104mph winds uprooted 3m trees, buildings collapsed, and the damage cost insurers £3.37bn. Unlike the infamous hurricane of '87, however, the Met Office had given plenty of warning – four days before the storm hit, severe gale warnings were issued on TV.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Feb 2010 | 5:35 pm

Let the Met Office shine on | editorial

There's a big difference between the weather and the climate. And the Met Office is good at predicting both

"Climate is what we expect," Mark Twain observed, "weather is what we get." At a time when both terms have become politically charged, it's more important than ever to observe the distinction.

The Met Office, whose story is told in the Observer magazine today , started out saving the lives of those in peril on the sea. Today it finds itself in the stormy waters of the news agenda, making judgments on when to dispatch gritting lorries in winter and whether barbecues will be fired up in summer, while predicting average temperatures in 50 years' time. It is ignored when right, pilloried when wrong.

Much as we would like to believe forecasting is an exact science, some parts of it are always going to be more precise than others. Nobody is better than the Met Office at telling you what will happen in your back garden in the next three days, or better qualified to predict the kind of climate we can expect in a decade, or a century. They might sometimes make mistakes, but we should still look to them for guidance and remember that the alternative is looking at the sky in ignorance.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Feb 2010 | 5:35 pm

Acidified landscape around ocean vents foretells grim future for coral reefs

Underwater vents allow scientists to assess the acidic effect of carbon dioxide on ocean life

Huge vents covering the sea-floor – among the strangest and most spectacular sights in nature – pour carbon dioxide and other gases into the deep waters of the oceans.

Last week, as researchers reported that they had now discovered more than 50,000 underwater volcanic springs, they also revealed a new use for them – as laboratories for measuring the impact of ocean acidification on marine life.

The seas are slowly being made more acidic by the increasing amounts of carbon dioxide from factories and cars being pumped into the atmosphere and then dissolved in the sea. The likely impact of this acidification worries scientists, because they have found that predicting the exact course of future damage is a tricky process.

That is where the undersea vents come in, says Dr Jason Hall-Spencer of the University of Plymouth. "Seawater around these vents becomes much more acidic than normal sea­water because of the carbon dioxide that is being bubbled into it," he told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego, California, last week. "Indeed, it reaches a level that we believe will be matched by the acidity of oceans in three or four decades. That is why they are so important."

As part of his research, Hall-Spencer has scuba-dived into waters around vents and used submersibles to study those in deeper waters. In both cases the impact was dramatic, he told the conference.

"The sea floor is often very colourful. There are corals, pink algae and sea urchins. But I have found that these are wiped out when the water becomes more acidic and are replaced by sea grasses and foreign, invasive algae.

"There is a complete ecological flip. The seabed loses all its richness and variety. And that is what is likely to happen in the next few decades across the world's oceans."

Hall-Spencer also noted that in acidic seawater a type of algae known as coralline algae – which act as the glue holding coral reefs together – are destroyed.

"When coralline algae are destroyed, coral reefs fall apart," he said. "So we can see that coral islands like the ­Maldives face a particularly worrying future. ­Rising sea levels threaten to drown them, while acidic waters will cause them to disintegrate.

"It is a very worrying combination."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Feb 2010 | 5:09 pm

The Music Instinct by Philip Ball

Science can't explain why we value music so highly, says Guy Dammann. But it's part of what makes us human

In How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker laid down the evolutionary-psychological law about music. "Music," he put it, "is auditory cheesecake." For those who avoid cheesecake, whether administered orally or aurally, he added: music is "a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest … to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once".

Understandably, some people took against this remark. Humanity accords cheesecake (and even recreational drugs) a certain respect, but to equate them with music? A universal element of human culture that is at the same time unknown in animal societies, music seems to reach to the very core of what it means to be human. The sense of communal identity in many tribal societies is built and maintained through musical activity, while the average western citizen allows music a role in his or her sense of individual identity vastly more formative than any other art form.

Those taking umbrage at Pinker's cheesecake quip fell into two opposing camps. On the side of evolutionary science, many thought he had simply failed to grasp the nettle: since it is indisputably the case that humankind in some sense needs music, there must be an evolutionary account that explains this need along the lines attempted by Darwin's theory of sexual selection. On the side of the humanities, Pinker had gone wrong in appearing to trivialise music simply because science, rather like all British governments since Thatcher, proved unable to offer a convincing explanation as to why we should value it.

Music has been understood as lying at the origins of distinctively human culture – or at the heart of our attempt at self-definition – for centuries. In the 18th century, both Condillac and Rousseau identified music, alongside language, as separating man from animal, substituting biblical legends of the fall of man with something both more secular and optimistic. Indeed, Rousseau went so far as to suggest that music's importance lay precisely in offering alienated modern man a kind of spiritual link with his less depraved ancestors. Since then, of course, Darwinian accounts of man's ascent have flourished, but it is only recently that advances in cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology have suggested the possibility of providing scientific answers to the question of why the play of abstract sounds should have become something, in Philip Ball's phrase, "we can't do without".

Ball is an award-winning popular science writer. His "biography" of water stands as an exemplar among the glut of synecdochic histories of this kind, and the more recent Universe of Stone, about the cathedral at Chartres, succeeds admirably in communicating to its readers the same sense of wonder that allowed medieval minds to conjure heaven in stone and glass.

His latest book is exemplary for different reasons. While the title obviously nods in the direction of Pinker's book The Language Instinct, his method is much more modest, taking the form of a survey of current knowledge and, more importantly, its limits.

Much as in a primer in the old-fashioned sense, Ball flits between rudimentary briefings on chords, scales and sound-waves, to accounts offered by scientists, philosophers, musicologists and (for once) musicians themselves, trading narratives against each other rather than sculpting a grand one of his own. Popular songs are used to label theories: the theory that music is instrumental in group selection and survival is advanced under the banner of the New Seekers' "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing", while the "Ronettes theory" ("Be My Baby") covers the idea that adult musicality is an extension of the process of cognitive stimulation that begins with the sounds mothers (historically) and fathers (more and more) make to soothe and excite their infant offspring. The pace is kept fast throughout, with pull-out boxes to fill knowledge gaps where necessary – useful even for specialist readership: though a professional writer on music myself, I have somehow managed to get by without bothering to learn how the human ear works.

Despite its breezy tone, The Music Instinct's greatest virtue consists in conveying the impression that answers to genuine questions about music won't come to anyone in too much of a hurry. Music, after all, is something we spend time engaged in playing, listening to, studying, practising and loving. Indeed, it is the necessarily temporal structure of musical experience, and the way that musical "ideas" cannot be reduced to instantly communicable concepts, that guarantees its importance to us.

We do not love music because it exercises our brains or makes us more attractive to members of the opposite sex, but because we have lived with it since we came into being: it is entwined in our common and individual consciousness to the extent that, simply put, we would not be ourselves without it. In contemplating the mysteries of music we are also thereby contemplating the mystery of ourselves. Because of this, easy answers tend to be irrelevant. Ball, thankfully, doesn't try to provide any, but rather sends the reader back to the music a better listener.

Guy Dammann lectures on music and philosophy at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Feb 2010 | 5:08 pm

Attacks on climate change research are damaging the public's faith in science

Leading scientists have called for fundamental changes in the structure of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Leading scientists in Britain and America have warned that recent controversies over research into climate change are damaging the public's faith in science.

The group – which included Lord Rees, head of the Royal Society and Ralph Cicerone, president of the US National Academy of Sciences – believes the fallout will continue as sceptics keep up their attacks on climate science.

Only fundamental changes in the structure of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) would bring an end to the problem and improve public confidence, they said.

"There has been a widespread deterioration in the public's attitude to science not only in the US but in many other countries in the past three months," Cicerone told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego. "As to how long it will last, there is no way of knowing. It can only do harm, however."

The public's sudden loss of faith in science was reflected in polls and in media commentaries, the group said, and could be traced directly to recent revelations that the last IPCC climate assessment report had exaggerated the rate at which Himalayan glaciers were melting and by the leaking of email exchanges between climate scientists.

Oceanographer James McCarthy, the AAAS's president-elect, said that after initial successes in tripping up the IPCC, sceptics will redouble their efforts to highlight other errors.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Feb 2010 | 5:06 pm

NASA: Weather iffy for space shuttle return Sunday (AP)

AP - Space shuttle Endeavour aimed for a Sunday night landing back at NASA's spaceport, but rainy and cloudy weather threatened to delay the astronauts' homecoming.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Feb 2010 | 4:42 pm

Floods kill at least 32 on Madeira (Reuters)

Reuters - At least 32 people have been killed by torrents of water and mud unleashed by a violent rainstorm on the Portuguese resort island of Madeira, officials said on Saturday.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Feb 2010 | 3:09 pm

Climate science alive and well despite scandals: scientists (AFP)

AFP - Climate science is alive and well despite the scandal of leaked emails in Britain and "glitches" in a report by the UN climate change panel, top scientists said Friday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Feb 2010 | 10:05 am

Blue Marble: Looking Back at Earth from Space

The third rock from the sun has many sides to its personality, as shown in these snapshots.
Source: Livescience.com | 20 Feb 2010 | 5:10 am

Science 'damaged' by climate row

Recent controversies surrounding climate research have eroded public trust in scientists, says a leading US scientist.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 20 Feb 2010 | 5:05 am

This Is What It's All About

Let's take five minutes to forget the politics. Forget the economics. Forget the arguments, broken promises and canceled rockets. This is a snapshot from the International Space Station by Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi of NASA's Stephen Robinson playing his guitar ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 20 Feb 2010 | 3:19 am