Flower power may reduce resistance to breast cancer drug tamoxifen

Combining tamoxifen, the world's most prescribed breast cancer agent, with a compound found in the flowering plant feverfew may prevent initial or future resistance to the drug, say researchers. The finding provides new insight into the biological roots of that resistance, and also tests a novel way to get around it.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Malicious software: Hiding the honeypots

Armies of networked computers that have been compromised by malicious software are commonly known as Botnets. Such Botnets are usually used to carry out fraudulent and criminal activity on the Internet. Now US computer scientists reveal that the honeypot trap designed to protect computers from Botnets are now vulnerable to attack because of advances in Botnet malware.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Others may know us better than we know ourselves, study finds

Humans have long been advised to "know thyself," but new research suggests we may not know ourselves as well as we think we do. While individuals may be more accurate at assessing their own neurotic traits, such as anxiety, it seems friends, and even strangers, are often better barometers of traits such as intelligence, creativity and extroversion.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Computer simulation of protein malfunction related to Alzheimer's disease

Researchers created a computer modeling of the structural malfunctioning of the ApoE4 protein when it enters into contact with the amyloid beta molecule, the main cause of Alzheimer's disease. The research supports experimental evidence that links ApoE4 with this pathology and opens up new exploration possibilities in understanding and fighting against the disease.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Increasing neurogenesis might prevent drug addiction and relapse

Researchers hope they have begun paving a new pathway in the fight against drug dependence. Their hypothesis -- that increasing the normally occurring process of making nerve cells might prevent addiction -- is based on a rodent study demonstrating that blocking new growth of specific brain nerve cells increases vulnerability for cocaine addiction and relapse.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Climate change and coral reefs: Coral species has developed the 'skills' to cope with rising temperatures

Marine reserves are increasingly important for species that are being forced by climate change to move to a new home, adapt to new conditions or die. Biologists have now compared the relative benefits of large and small protected areas in perpetuating populations. Interestingly they have also found a coral species that has developed the "skills" to cope with rising temperatures.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

A primer on migraine headaches

Migraine headache affects many people and a number of different preventative strategies should be considered, according to a new article.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

Lack of morning light keeping teenagers up at night

The first field study on the impact of light on teenagers' sleeping habits finds that insufficient daily morning light exposure contributes to teenagers not getting enough sleep.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

Threat to monkey numbers from forest decline

Monkey populations in threatened forests are far more sensitive to damage to their habitat than previously thought. Numbers closely related to the type of habitat found between forest fragments, rather than the distance that separates them.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

Gene signature may improve colon cancer treatment

A gene signature, first identified in mouse colon cancer cells, may help identify patients at risk of colon cancer recurrence, according to a recent study. The findings could help personalize treatments for colon cancer -- the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States -- by identifying patients most likely to benefit from chemotherapy.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

Huge earthquake hits Chile, 17 reported dead (Reuters)

Reuters - A massive magnitude-8.8 earthquake struck south-central Chile early on Saturday, reportedly killing 17 people, triggering a tsunami and rattling buildings in the capital Santiago.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 Feb 2010 | 3:06 am

The old doctrines are not enough | Tom Sutcliffe

The church must provide a valid assertion of truth about life that can stand comparison truths and wisdom drawn from science

On the final day of the recent Church of England General Synod meeting there was a rather worthy debate about how the claims of science are affecting belief in God. At no point did any of the speakers remark on the surely important fact that the public square these days is crowded with religions. Clearly, religious belief is not incompatible with science. However, people in a multicultural society, who respect the beliefs of all, must inevitably observe that all religions are similarly non-scientific in the way they furnish different, often incompatible explanations about the meaning of life, whereas science is systemically consistent. And this must account for the different ways that people treat scientific truths and what are claimed as religious truths.

Science is a method applied to whatever can be tested and observed. It makes no claims save in those terms. Human knowledge, and the science that extends it, is finite. But the boundaries of what is known continue to expand. As the Bible says – "No man has seen God" in a scientific sense. So God seems, in a way, to be diminishing in significance, becoming more remote and much less persuasive. Unavoidably, science now suggests to some – as it always has – that God is not an objective necessity. Wisdom is no church monopoly. Lucretius in De Rerum Natura doubted whether anything humans could do would have any effect on the gods, rather in the same way that one may be at a loss when one seeks a present for somebody much richer who has everything already. A being who cannot be seen or known cannot be tested scientifically.

It is impossible to evaluate the truth claims of different world religions. But they do have one thing in common: they are centred on the human being. Religions perceive the goodness which they acknowledge as the focus of the divine (of which God can seem to be a personalisation) in terms of a profoundly humane vision. Religions, with their mostly overlapping sets of shared beliefs, seem to reflect human culture as much as divine revelation. Perhaps, as has been suggested by some, the human mind is hardwired to resonate philosophically with the idea of God.

But what kind of God do we believe in? – as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has put it, when explaining the various kinds of God he does not believe in. I myself find the leap of faith increasingly difficult. Since I joined the General Synod almost 20 years ago, I have constantly been asking myself whether I should be there at all, something which fellow members may have been asking about me too. I know that my personal idea of Christianity is unorthodox, though I am thankful to find a home in the Church of England which is a national church where the thought-police are not bothered by whatever a lay cradle Anglican does or does not believe. I see that faith stories need to be accepted – just as attending Hamlet or The Ring involves suspending disbelief, and going along with the story. I also appreciate there are many faithful Christians who are blissfully certain about the classic church doctrines: resurrection, incarnation, virgin birth, trinity.

Yet something has changed radically and cannot be restored by traditional services, hymn-singing, or resolute assertive preaching. A very large number of people today, many of them members of Christian churches, some of them Anglican priests, do not believe in the afterlife, heaven, or hell. When I die I may alarmingly discover that death is not the end. I am not an atheist, but I am agnostic about eternity. St Paul felt the promise of an afterlife made all the difference, but I incline to David Jenkins's teaching about the resurrection. Why would God, or we ourselves, benefit from our eternity? For me, much of the doctrinal edifice developed during the decades and early centuries after the crucifixion has crumbled. One life is enough for most, too much for some.

I believe God to be a powerful, dangerous, potentially crucial idea. God exists in the minds of millions of human beings. Perhaps he put himself there. Nobody can wholly agree (save in worked-out, traditional religious positions) who he is or what he or she wants. But that's the whole point. Nobody owns God. God is the discourse of our existence.

What matters is what God would want. And our views about what God should want need to acknowledge what the tradition has maintained about God, since wisdom is distilled by long usage. Yet a belief in God and the afterlife that is unmodulated by proper doubts and questioning can be extremely dangerous. It justified violence and cruelty long before present day jihads.

I continue to be profoundly attracted to the teaching and person of Jesus, and try to follow him as a "living lord" in my own way. He constantly provokes and challenges, as he did in his lifetime. He is, in that sense, risen again – and even sometimes, through his spirit, clearly leading our church which is his resurrection body.

But these are mere words. The challenge for the church is to translate the crumbling edifice of traditional Christian belief into a valid assertion of truth about life that can stand comparison with the equally valid truths and wisdom drawn from scientific perception and deduction. The General Synod debate seemed desperately naive to me because it was around a motion asking for robustness in preaching the compatibility of science and religion without any admission that the plethora of religions in itself renders the claims of all religions implausible and wobbly to most ordinary people – compared with the comparative coherence of what can be scientifically established.

We Christians can only show how our religion adds up through the way we live our lives, and through such interpretations of theological or biblical ideas as ring true. The Bible and Qur'an are there, like Shakespeare and like the theories of science, for human nourishment and freedom – not to imprison us. What matters is what we can believe to be truth. That is what sets us free. Belief systems and doctrines are not an end but a profound means. The command to love what is good and to love your neighbour promotes ideas that are not easy to reconcile. That, nevertheless, is the essence of communion.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 27 Feb 2010 | 3:00 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - More wintry weather was forecast for the Northeast on Saturday while rain was expected along the Gulf Coast and Florida and a Pacific storm was to keep slamming the West.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 Feb 2010 | 2:59 am

Indian festival goers warned about water wastage (AFP)

AFP - A chronic water shortage in the Indian city of Mumbai could put a dampener on a popular Hindu festival normally celebrated with wild "rain dances" and riotous fights using powdered paint.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 26 Feb 2010 | 10:12 pm

Genes Behind Tooth Development Discovered (HealthDay)

HealthDay - FRIDAY, Feb. 26 (HealthDay News) -- Genes that influence tooth development in the first year of life have been identified by British and Finnish researchers.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 26 Feb 2010 | 9:50 pm

Travel Light and Stay Connected (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Preparing for a long trip can be a pain, but technology can help. With preparation and the right equipment, tech can keep you entertained, connected and on the right track from start to finish.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 26 Feb 2010 | 7:25 pm

Iceberg breaks in Antarctica not where expected (AP)

AP - With the dramatic crash of an iceberg against a glacier that dislodged a massive new chunk of ice, the mysterious continent of Antarctica once again did the unexpected.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 26 Feb 2010 | 7:14 pm

7 Surprising Uses of Oil

Products and byproducts of petroleum are found in many items in and around the modern-day home that may surprise you.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 Feb 2010 | 5:29 pm

Thanks, but science funding is still at risk

Phil Burnell (Letters, 25 February) seems to have reacted to my letter (24 February) from some sense of lack of appreciation of his personal efforts on our behalf while working for funding bodies such as the EPSRC during the times of plenty. He seems to think we should stop complaining or all leave, while he pulls up the drawbridge at the Channel. The country is in a serious plight economically because of mismanagement in the financial service industry. If it's more gratitude that Phil Burnell wants, then may be he could direct his attention to the bankers who took our money, lots of it, and for which he and I, as taxpayers, have never received any thanks. And by the way, it would only take a handful of bankers' bonuses this year to get us out of the immediate mess which my science, physics, faces. In the meantime, until this problem is addressed, the knowledge economy of the future falters, may even be in terminally decline – which is the point, thanks or no thanks

Professor John Dainton

Sir James Chadwick professor of physics, University of Liverpool

• While I'm sure the bare figures support an increased spend on research over the past decade, I can assure Mr Burnell that we have not all prospered from this. We have not seen any improvement in funding, and while more funds may have been made available, these have either been extremely thinly spread over a burgeoning scientific research community, or thickly spread over a select few. Either way we have not benefited from the feast and we are hoping not to suffer too much from the famine to come.

Chris Exley

Reader in bioinorganic chemistry,

Keele University

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 26 Feb 2010 | 5:09 pm

This column will change your life: Is it really hip to be glum? | Oliver Burkeman

The surlier creative types and celebrities appear, the more we seem to revere and imitate them. But is there good reason to do so?

Every few days, I seem to come across another example of what is, surely, the crowning cultural achievement of the internet era: the Ridiculously Specific Single-Topic Blog. Consequently, I've spent far too much time perusing Angry ­People In Local Newspapers, Goths In Hot Weather and Glum Councillors ­(glumcouncillors. tumblr.com), each of which consists of news stories featuring exactly what the title implies.

But none has left an imprint on me so much as Unhappy Hipsters, a compendium of photo-shoots from high-end interiors magazines, showing the aforementioned hipsters relaxing in vast, minimalist slate-and-glass homes and all, without exception, looking absolutely miserable. In one picture, a fashionably spectacled man mopes beneath an all-white painting. "At the art opening," the satirical ­caption reads, "he'd been convinced that the blank canvas symbolised endless possibilities. Back at home, it was just one more reminder of his own desperation." Unhappy Hipsters isn't funny. It's haunting.

Why the long faces? In Psychology Today, the designer Ingrid Fetell speculated that modernist spaces might be inherently ­depressing. "Desaturated" colours may mute our autonomic nervous systems, making us less animated; there's also evidence that angular shapes trigger an unconscious fear response, perhaps because we've evolved to associate angles in nature – cliffs, rocks – with danger. But I reckon the hipsters are one more example of a ­phenomenon that, though well-known, remains mysterious: the link between gloominess and cool. Looking happy isn't hip. When did you last see a catwalk model ­grinning? No less a celebrity frowner than Victoria Beckham has labelled this the "miserable cow syndrome", and seems to appreciate its ironies. "People would be quite upset if I ­actually smiled," she said.

US psychologists have ­studied this puzzle: they cropped pictures of models in ads so only their faces were visible, then asked people to rank them in order of mood. Overwhelmingly, models ­advertising pricier brands were judged to look glummer. This is probably down to signalling, noted ­researcher ­Timothy Ketelaar: smiling indicates eagerness to please, ­suggesting low status. If a Prada model isn't smiling, she clearly doesn't need to, implying high status. Brands that target less wealthy ­customers use smiling ­models, suggesting lower status, and thus affordability.

More broadly, being happy is seen as indicating silliness, boringness or lack of creativity. ("To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for ­happiness," groused Flaubert, "though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.") The image of the brooding artist is compelling; cheeriness ­betokens a failure to comprehend the horrors of existence.

But this is backwards. Over­whelmingly, psychology's lesson is that we're drawn to happy people. Even if it's true that the most creative minds are unhappy, it doesn't follow that becoming unhappy will make you creative: that's like imagining that wearing a Nike headband will turn you into Roger Federer. I want to say to those uptight hipsters: ­Relax! Loosen up! Dance like no one's watching and – actually, ignore that last one. That glass-topped ­coffee ­table looks sort of fragile.

oliver.burkeman@guardian.co.uk

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 26 Feb 2010 | 5:05 pm

Professor Robert Winston on innovation

Lord Winston talks about the need for better communication in the scientific community

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 26 Feb 2010 | 5:05 pm

No Lie! Your Facebook Profile Is the Real You

“On the Internet,” one dog tells another in a classic New Yorker cartoon, “nobody knows you’re a dog.”

The internet is notorious for its digital dens of deception. But on Facebook, what you see tends to be what you get — at least in one study of tailless, two-legged young adults.

College-age users of Facebook in the United States and a similar social networking site in Germany typically present accurate versions of their personalities in online profiles, says psychologist Mitja Back of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. People use online social networking sites to express who they really are rather than idealized versions of themselves, Back and his colleagues conclude in an upcoming Psychological Science.

“Online social networks are so popular and so likely to reveal people’s actual personalities because they allow for social interactions that feel real in many ways,” Back says.

Back’s team administered personality inventories that evaluated 133 U.S. Facebook users and 103 Germans who used a comparable social-networking site. Inventories focused on the extent to which volunteers endorsed ratings of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional instability and openness to new experiences.

The subjects — who ranged in age from 17 to 22 — took the inventory twice, first with instructions to describe their actual personalities and then to portray idealized versions of themselves.

Then, undergraduate research assistants — nine in the United States and 10 in Germany — rated volunteers’ personalities after looking at their online profiles. Those ratings matched volunteers’ actual personality descriptions better than their idealized ones, especially for extraversion and openness.

Facebook is so true to life, Back claims, that encountering a person there for the first time generally results in a more accurate personality appraisal than meeting face to face, going by the results of previous studies.

Adriana Manago, a psychology graduate student at UCLA, calls the new findings “compelling” but incomplete. College students on Facebook and other online social networks often augment what they regard as their best personal qualities, Manago holds. In her view, these characteristics aren’t plumbed by broad personality measures like the ones measured in Back’s study. And students’ actual personality descriptions may have included enhancements of their real characteristics, thus inflating the correlation between observers’ ratings and students’ real personalities, Manago notes.

“Online profiles showcase an enhanced reflection of who the user really is,” Manago proposes. In a 2008 study, she and her colleagues found that 23 college students sometimes used another online social networking site, MySpace, to enhance their images, say by Photoshopping acne out of a picture or posting a video of themselves driving a sports car at high speeds.

Still, the new findings make sense, remarks psychologist Sandra Calvert of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She emphasizes that social-networking sites have fostered a new type of communication among teens and young adults, in which one person can create personal content that gets broadcast to a multitude of friends.

In a 2009 study of Facebook use among 92 college students, Calvert’s team found that young women reported a whopping average of 401 online friends, while young men reported an average of 269.

Image: escapedtowisconsin/Flickr

See Also:

• Twitter, Facebook Won’t Make You Immoral — But TV News Might
• Your Mom’s Facebook Status: I’m Crunching Climate Data!

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 26 Feb 2010 | 4:41 pm

Flash-Freezing Technique May Boost Egg Survival Rates

A new study has identified the best way to flash freeze living tissue, which could lead to better human egg and stem cell storage.

The technique could dramatically improve the odds that frozen, unfertilized eggs could be thawed out and still be healthy enough to be fertilized. That would reduce how many eggs must be harvested, raising success rates and lowering the number of costly, painful procedures women must endure to get pregnant.

Freezing tissue is so difficult because the water in cells expands as it freezes. “That will mean the cell membrane is ruptured, like the coke you forgot in the freezer that explodes,” said bioengineer Utkan Demirci of Harvard Medical School Brigham and Women’s Hospital, lead author of the study Feb. 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While oocyte, or egg, freezing is commercially available, the success rate is low, Demirci said.

“With 20 eggs from a female, you pick only two and one of them gets to be fertilized, so it’s really important to have the technologies that are going to further the success rate in oocyte preservation,” he said.

Preventing frost damage requires surrounding the cells with cryoprotectants, or toxic chemicals like antifreeze, said biomedical engineer Xiaoming He of the University of South Carolina, who was not involved in the study. For sperm cells, which contain very little water, scientists can use smaller amounts of the chemicals. But delicate embryonic stem cells, or large, water-filled cells like eggs require much more protection and are usually damaged during freezing. Using less of the chemicals could help these sensitive cells fare better while frozen in storage.

In previous work, scientists developed a technique to halt ice crystal formation and make the cells glassy instead, a process called vitrification.

“To vitrify a liquid, you have to pull the heat out of a liquid as fast as possible so it doesn’t have time to crystallize,” Demirci said.

In the technique, droplets of eggs encapsulated in a protectant shoot out into a bath of ultracold liquid nitrogen, at a temperature of -321 F. The relatively hot droplet evaporates nearby nitrogen. The vapor pushes the droplet up, levitating it above the surface for several seconds (see video below). The nitrogen vapor layer also forms a barrier that shields the droplet from the surrounding cold.

Until now, no one had figured out a good way to vitrify cells with low levels of protectants. Hoping to find an answer, Demirci’s group analyzed what happened to different sizes of droplets once they were vitrified. After droplets froze and sank back into the nitrogen, they measured the droplets and used a microscope to determine how crystallized they were.

They found smaller droplets were almost completely vitrified, while larger droplets formed damaging ice crystals. That was because the larger droplets had more surface area to prevent heat from escaping, so they froze more slowly, Demirci said. Using smaller droplets of about the width of a human hair prevents the cells from crystallizing, which means they are more likely to survive the process.

The technique raises the chances of eggs making it through the freezing process alive. It can also be automated to freeze millions of cells per second, making it cost-effective, Demirci said.

The team is currently freezing mouse eggs. “Once we can generate some baby mice with this platform, then we are moving forward to use some discarded human eggs,” Demirci said.

“It’s one of the important breakthroughs in vitrification procedures,” said veterinarian and cryobiologist Yuksel Agca of the Unviersity of Missouri-Columbia, who was not involved in the study.

“The downside is that the procedure uses direct injection into the liquid nitrogen,” which can sometimes be contaminated. “But there are ways to sterilize liquid nitrogen.”

See Also:

• Lasers Can Chill Stuff Super Fast
• Mice Cloned After 16-Year Freeze; Mammoths Next?

Image: Human egg/ euthman/Flickr
Video: Droplet levitating on liquid nitrogen/PNAS

Citation: “Vitrification and levitation of a liquid droplet on liquid nitrogen,” Young S. Song, Douglas Adler, Feng Xu, Emre Kayaalp, Aida Nureddin, Raymond M. Anchan, Richard L. Maas, Utkan Demirci, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 22 Feb. 2010.

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 26 Feb 2010 | 4:14 pm

Astronaut Makes Sushi in Space (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi may be far from home, but not from his country's trademark dish. He is making sushi in space while floating weightless aboard his current post on the International Space Station, and even wears a chef's hat while he does it.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 26 Feb 2010 | 3:45 pm

Friday News Feedbag for Feb. 26, 2010!

If this is your first exposure to the Friday News Feedbag...we're glad to have you in the club. Welcome to Feedbag Nation, which stems from our weekly science news podcast that you can subscribe to here on iTunes and chat ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 26 Feb 2010 | 3:44 pm

3 Best Standard-Definition Camcorders with Hard Drives

Shopping for a video camera? Here is a comparison of three of best out there.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 Feb 2010 | 3:32 pm

Homeopathy: Are the claims for other medicines any better?

Drug ads that don't back up their claims show how dumb doctors can be about evidence and how lax regulation has become

After the Commons science and technology committee report this week, and the stupidity of "we bring you both sides" media coverage, you are bored with homeopathy. So am I, but it gives a simple window into the wider disasters in medicine.

Homeopathy is a small sector of the pharmaceutical industry, a few sugar pill companies worth a couple of billion pounds a year in Europe. Overall, trials show their pills perform no better than placebo. All claims to the contrary are rubbish, but rubbish tolerated by plenty of MPs, huge swaths of the media, a fair few GPs and, most worryingly, the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authority, who permit homeopathy pill companies to list diseases they say they can treat on the bottle, with no requirement that they provide evidence their treatments work.

This doesn't only tell you a story about homeopathy; this tells you how doctors, politicians, the media and regulators deal with the issue of evidence in medicine.

How closely do the great and the good, for example, scrutinise the promotional material for medical drugs? The latest paper looking at this question is published this month. Researchers in Holland went through the world's biggest medical journals – the Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, and so on – between 2003 and 2005. Adverts were included, once each, if they made a claim about the effect of a drug. For all the claims, they checked the references, found the trials referred to, and gave them out to easily exploited assessors: 250 medical students who'd just finished their evidence-based medicine teaching.

Each student independently assessed two trials, and associated adverts, following a questionnaire and a well-established scoring system to assess quality of trials. Scores were given for factors including:

• Whether the method of randomly assigning patients to one treatment or another was adequate, and clearly described.

• Whether patients could know which treatment they were getting.

• Whether drop-outs were appropriately included in the analysis, and so on.

These are good measures of whether a trial is a fair test of a treatment.

By now you will rightly be worrying that medical students – although cheap and easy to come by – are not reliable raters, so you will be pleased to hear that each trial was scored by between two and six students, and any discrepancy reviewed by a panel of four academics.

The results were abysmal. Only half of the claims in the adverts were supported by the specific trials referenced and, of all the trials, only 55% got a score of "high quality". Overall, only 39.2% of these adverts referenced a high-quality trial which supported their claim.

This is not the first time such a study has been conducted. Villanueva and colleagues, in 2003, published a paper in the Lancet assessing claims for cardiac medication adverts in six Spanish medical journals: of the 102 references they could trace, 44% did not support the promotional statement. Similar results have been found in psychiatric drug adverts, and in the field of rheumatology.

To offset any suggestion that I am cherry-picking, a review in the Public Library of Science's open access journal PLoS One found 24 similar studies, and overall only 67% of the claims in adverts were supported by a systematic review, a meta-analysis or a randomised control trial.

Quacks see shortcomings in medicine as justification for their own dubious behaviour, but the horror is this: homeopathy is the tip of the iceberg. It is the simplest story of how bad things are, how dumb doctors and politicians can be about evidence, and how lame regulation has become. But it is only the most obvious illustration of the fearsome depths into which these problems extend. We are in very big trouble.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 26 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

A CoGeNT result in the hunt for dark matter

An underground experiment may have detected a type of dark-matter particle.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/Er96GJQ4Lqs" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 26 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

'Tuned' images from water mission

The first fully calibrated images from the European Space Agency's Smos satellite have now been released.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 26 Feb 2010 | 2:20 pm

Carbon credits proposed for whale conservation

Stopping whale hunting could help sequester millions of tonnes of carbon.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 26 Feb 2010 | 2:00 pm

Human Teeth Reveal History of Catastrophes (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Teeth are a window into our past, storing a record of the environmental pollutants and radiation they've encountered. Now scientists are developing tools to use teeth enamel to test how much radiation a person has been exposed to in the case of a major emergency, like a dirty bomb explosion.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 26 Feb 2010 | 1:55 pm

Which Intel Core Chip Is Best for You?

What's the difference between the new processor chips from Intel?
Source: Livescience.com | 26 Feb 2010 | 1:47 pm

Still No Signal from Frozen Mars Lander (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - NASA is once again listening for any signs that its Phoenix Mars Lander has resurrected itself after the long Martian winter, but so far, the frozen lander has remained silent.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 26 Feb 2010 | 1:45 pm

Biological Clocks

Everything from the mysterious phenomenon of "early morning" heart attacks in humans -- to how tiny nocturnal mammals evade predators -- to the blooming of plants -- is regulated by an organism's internal "biological clock."
Source: Livescience.com | 26 Feb 2010 | 1:18 pm

Stress in Womb Can Alter Life Later

Stress in pregnancy might lead to cognitive problems for children, but good parenting could cancel out the stress effects, a new study says.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 Feb 2010 | 1:09 pm

Packing With Shrooms, Not Styrofoam

Recycled cardboard is a decent replacement for styrofoam packaging, but what about heavy items that stronger protection? A company called Ecovative Design is banking on mushroom roots. "We should make products that fit into nature's recycling system," Ecovative Design cofounder ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 26 Feb 2010 | 12:58 pm

ADHD Girls Grow Up with Mood Problems

Girls with ADHD as children may grow up to have anxiety and other mental health problems.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 Feb 2010 | 12:52 pm

Killer Whale Show to Go On; Tilikum Is 'An Important Part of Our Team'

Jim Atchison, president and CEO of SeaWorld Parks and Entertainment, led a press conference today concerning the death of killer whale trainer Dawn Brancheau. He spoke in front of a see-through tank wall, so inquisitive killer whales viewed the proceedings ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 26 Feb 2010 | 12:48 pm

'Sasers' set to stun

Sound-based lasers could improve imaging and electronics.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 26 Feb 2010 | 12:30 pm

Prince's Palace Found in Volcanic Crater

The residence of Sextus Tarquinius, the prince who sparked the revolt that led to the foundation of the Roman Republic, may have been found.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 26 Feb 2010 | 12:25 pm

Human remains found on wreck

Predecessor of Nelson's Victory went down in violent storms off Channel Islands

Human remains have been found in the deep sea wreck of one of the mightiest and most advanced fighting ships to have served in the Royal Navy.

A skull and rib bones were discovered under a cannon by marine archaeologists investigating the wreck of HMS Victory - the direct predecessor of Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar - which went down during violent storms in 1744.

In its day, the 1744 Victory was the biggest and most powerful ship in the world with a mighty 110 guns and fought during the War of the Austrian Succession. It is historically significant but also financially important - there could be as much as £700m worth of gold bullion on board.

The discovery of Victory - by some of the world's most successful marine marine archaeologists, Odyssey Marine Exploration - solved a 265-year mystery of where the ship went down when news was released a year ago.

Greg Stemm, chief executive officer of Odyssey, said: "This is the first time that we have come across a human skull and remains of this type." It is highly unusual for remains to be found in a wreck so deep, they would normally be eaten by the crabs, eels and fish.

Victory was commanded by the highly regarded admiral, Sir John Balchin and was on its way back from duty which included helping to pierce a French blockade of the Tagus estuary in Portugal.

On 3 October, Victory and the other ships of the line sailed into an almighty storm in the Channel Islands. All the ships returned, albeit limping - dismasted or with leaks - apart from the Victory. All 1,100 men were lost and only the ship's main topmast was ever found, washed up on Guernsey.

It is now up to the government to decided what to do with the human remains. Among its options are asking for them to be recovered so they can be re-interred. Or they can be studied.

"There's a huge amount we can learn," said Stemm. There may even be DNA samples which could allow investigators to find out who he was, what diseases he might have had, what foods he might have eaten or his nationality.

Two cannon have already been recovered from the Victory - a twelve pounder (5kg) and an enormous 42 pounder (the "nuclear deterrent of its day)."

A decision is due in the summer from the Ministry of Defence on whether to sign an agreement with Odyssey similar to one it signed in 2002 for the HMS Sussex, whereby it excavates the wreck in exchange for a cut of the profits.

Oceans Odyssey: Deep-Sea Shipwrecks in the English Channel, the Straits of Gibraltar and the Atlantic Ocean is edited by Greg Stemm and Sean Kingsley, and available from Oxbow Books for £25

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 26 Feb 2010 | 12:22 pm

Travel to Mars in 39 Days?

Reaching the Red Planet could take dramatically less time than once thought using the high-tech VASIMR rocket, according to one scientist.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 26 Feb 2010 | 12:18 pm

UN climate heads call for consensus and urge attempts to rebuild trust

UN climate chiefs meet in Bali, admitting they face 'existential challenge' after failure of Copenhagen climate change talks

Environmental officials on Friday urged industrialised and developing countries to stop bickering in climate change negotiations, as a Chinese delegate accused rich nations of reneging on commitments to fight global warming.

Officials from more than 100 countries are attending an annual UN environmental meeting on Indonesia's resort island of Bali. They said trust must be restored among nations following the failure at talks in Copenhagen in December create a binding accord on cutting CO2 emissions.

"There was a very strong message from many countries that this is actually an existential challenge," Indonesian foreign minister Marty Natalegawa told a news conference.

"One overriding sentiment" expressed by many countries "was the need to rebuild confidence, to address the question of trust deficit," he said.

At Copenhagen, nations only agreed on a voluntary plan to tackle climate change. Representatives from more than 190 nations will meet in Cancún, Mexico, in November for another attempt to reach a binding agreement.

The aim is to keep the global average temperature from rising more than 2C above pre-industrial levels.

UN scientists have said any temperature rise above that figure could lead to catastrophic sea-level rises, threatening islands and coastal cities.

Despite the call for harmony, Chinese foreign ministry official Guo Zaofeng said developed countries had not lived up to their past commitments to cut greenhouse gases, nor had they provided funds and technology to poor countries grappling with climate change.

"This way, they've broken the atmosphere of trust," Guo said. "This is why we did not get quicker progress during the negotiations."

China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has already said it would cut its "carbon intensity" – a measure of CO2 emissions per unit of production – by 40-45% by 2020, from 2005 levels.

The head of the US delegation in the Bali meeting, Kerri-Ann Jones, refused to comment on Guo's remarks. She said the Copenhagen meeting had made progress, citing a plan for aid and technological support for poor countries.

"It's a very difficult challenge that we're facing," Jones said. "We have to keep working on the positive side. I think we can advance."

UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said on Thursday it was unlikely that a binding agreement could be forged in the Cancún meetings.

"It's very close to the deadline, and that's a problem," de Boer said. He said the focus should shift toward reaching an agreement at a summit in South Africa in 2011 before the Kyoto protocol, which set emissions targets for industrial countries, expires in 2012.

De Boer, who helped kickstart the climate talks in 2007 on replacing the Kyoto protocol, last week announced he would leave the job in July, but said his decision had nothing to do with the outcome of the Copenhagen meeting.

Following talks at Copenhagen, 60 nations – including China, the United States and the 27-member European Union – last month submitted non-binding pledges to the UN for cutting emissions.

Together, the countries produce 78% of the world's greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 26 Feb 2010 | 11:20 am

Blood-Chilling Device Could Save Stroke Victims From Brain Damage

SAN ANTONIO — Cool runnings, indeed. A tiny device placed inside a central vein can safely refrigerate blood as it flows through stroke patients, lowering their temperature and raising the possibility that they might gain brain protection from hypothermia without having to be packed in ice.

Although the trial didn’t find that stroke patients getting their blood cooled fared any better or worse than a comparison group of patients who weren’t cooled, the technology proved safe enough to clear the way for testing the device in a much larger group, said Thomas Hemmen, a neurologist at the University of California, San Diego Medical Center who presented the data Feb. 25 at the International Stroke Conference.

The new results also demonstrate that stroke patients can be cooled down to 91.4 degrees Fahrenheit safely while they are receiving a powerful clot-busting drug called tPA, the standard treatment given to patients during the first few hours of a clot-induced stroke.

“Cool temperatures have been associated with better outcomes,” said Daniel Lackland, an epidemiologist at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. “We’re seeing some excitement about an intervention with this device.” If further trials support use of this kind of cooling therapy, he said, “that would be a great finding — it’s a relatively easy thing to do.”

Induced hypothermia is mainly used for cardiac arrest patients who have had their hearts restarted but are comatose and risk delivering a shortage of blood to the brain. Because they are unconscious, those patients can be packed in ice.

But stroke patients are awake during treatment, which makes being packed in ice extremely uncomfortable. In the new study, Hemmen and his colleagues teamed with a company called InnerCool Therapies to test a device only a half-centimeter in diameter that causes less discomfort by chilling the blood as it flows through the vena cava, a huge vein that carries blood into the heart from the upper part of the body.

The study included 58 stroke patients who were an average of 66 years old and had been referred to university hospitals around the United States. All of the patients received tPA, and 28 of them were also randomly chosen to get blood cooling. At a checkup 90 days later, seven controls and five of the hypothermia group were judged as having little or no disability — not a substantial difference.

Hemmen said this recovery rate for both groups is worse than the average seen in stroke patients nationwide, because many of the patients referred to this study by physicians had severe strokes and previous medical problems. Patients undergoing cooling were more likely to develop pneumonia during recovery, but this didn’t affect their status on average when assessed 90 days after treatment.

Regulators overseeing the study required a one-hour delay from the point at which tPA was given before cooling could be started, which might have limited the benefits of the treatment, Hemmen said.

These preliminary results might rejuvenate the idea of cooling stroke patients. “I kind of thought that hypothermia for stroke had actually gone by the wayside. I’m really pleased it’s come back,” said neurologist Cheryl Bushnell of Wake Forest University Health Sciences in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “Overcoming the technological issues of cooling is a major benefit.”

The protective effects of cooling are well-documented in incidents of drowned people being revived with little brain damage after falling though the ice on frozen lakes. But the precise biological mechanism responsible for this benefit is poorly understood. Slowing metabolism may limit cell death, Bushnell said.

Hemmen said a randomized trial of 400 first-time stroke patients is being planned that will start cooling and administration of tPA simultaneously.

Image: Seattle Municipal Archives/Flickr

See Also:

• Old, Brutal Surgeries Inspire Elegant Modern Devices
• Complex Medical Test Made From Paper and Tape for Three Cents
• Gadgets and Ideas to Revolutionize Healthcare
• Contact High: Lenses That Deliver Drugs
• The Next Hacking Frontier: Your Brain?

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 26 Feb 2010 | 11:19 am

A Sexy Partner Can Make You Seem More Attractive

A study shows that a good-looking significant other will cause other potential mates to find you more desirable.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 Feb 2010 | 11:05 am

Human Teeth Reveal History of Catastrophes

Scientists are developing tools to use teeth enamel to test how much radiation a person has been exposed to in the case of a major catastrophe.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 Feb 2010 | 10:38 am

Yemen threatens to chew itself to death over thirst for narcotic qat plant

Water already causes armed conflict in the capital, but there is worse to come for a hungry country when the oilfields run dry

There's something a bit different about the three Rafik brothers as they show off their fields of lanky green trees, grown from the rich and rare soils of Wadi Dahr.

Unlike three-quarters of Yemeni men on the afternoon of a day off, there are no little green flecks around the teeth of Abdullah, Nabil and Ahmed: they are not chewing qat – they are growing it.

The bitter and mildly narcotic leaf is key to Yemen's economy, and yet its enormous need for water is on course to make the capital, Sana'a, the first in the world to die of thirst. With the problem extending across the nation, the country is almost literally chewing itself to death.

From high on the scorched brown rock face that surrounds the Wadi Dahr valley, half an hour's drive north-west of Sana'a, the fertile carpet of vegetation below looks miraculous. Like most of Yemen, these northern mountains are a dry and barren land. But the irrigation needed to grow qat, coupled with an exploding population, means Sana'a's water basin is emptying out at a staggering rate: four times as much water is taken out of the basin as falls into it each year.

Most experts predict Sana'a, the fastest-growing capital in the world at 7% a year, will run out of economically viable water supplies by 2017. That is the same year the World Bank says Yemen will cease earning income from its oil, which currently accounts for three-quarters of the state's revenues.

The cost of water in some suburbs of Sana'a has tripled in the last year, and armed conflicts over water resources around the city are increasing. Shortages in the summer months leave thousands of families with taps run dry, forcing them to spend a third of their meagre incomes on buying water from trucks.

According to Mahmoud Shidiwah, chair of the Yemeni government's water and environment protection agency, 19 of the country's 21 main water aquifers are no longer being replenished after a long drought and increasing demand. He says Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world, receives under 200 cubic metres a person a year, well below the international water poverty line of 1,000 cubic metres. The water basin in Taiz, one of Yemen's largest cities, has already collapsed. Neighbouring Amran is close, as is Saada in the north.

The water situation is so serious that the government has considered moving the capital, as well as desalinating seawater on the coast and pumping it 2,000 metres uphill to the capital. A third solution would be to transfer water over the mountains from another basin. Shidiwah says: "We have a very big problem. All options have been found to be unacceptable."

The best solution, everyone agrees, is to reduce qat growing, which sucks up the largest share of water use. But this is also fraught with social and political problems, says Shidiwah, because in a country where half the population earn less than $2 a day it provides many jobs.

A meeting of Yemen's Gulf Arab neighbours this weekend in Riyadh, following a conference in London in January, is expected to make pledges of development assistance to the failing state. However, the UN's appeal for $177m in humanitarian aid this year is so far only 0.4% funded, leading the World Food Programme earlier this month to cut back rations for around 1 million Yemenis. A recent WFP survey found that one out of every three Yemenis – 7.5 million people – suffer chronic hunger.

Once a vibrant farming economy, Yemen today imports up to 80% of its food needs. The residents of Rawda, one of six districts that make up the sprawling suburbs of Sana'a known as Beni al Harith, know why.

"In the 1970s this was all covered with trees. We used to grow the most delicious grapes in the republic. Now they come from outside," says Abdel Latif al Oulofi, a community leader.

"In the 1980s the population was 5,000. Now there are more than 100,000 people. We know of 1,500 illegal wells, most of them now dry. People have been drilling with oil rigs, going down 600 metres to try and find water. But the wells are so polluted we have to rely on trucks. Rawda means paradise. It was very beautiful. Now it's like hell."

A further irony is that Yemen is subsidising its own drought. Officials estimate that a billion litres of diesel were used last year just for pumping water for agriculture. As the government subsidises most of the cost of diesel, the state calculates it spent $700m on depleting its own national water resources.

Oulofi promises to set up a meeting later in the afternoon with Rawda's sheikh, or tribal leader, who will be discussing water issues with local families.

But the view over Wadi Dahr shows why little explanation for Yemen's water woes is needed: the rows and rows of green trees below do not bear fruit and vegetables, but solely the qat leaf.

"You know it's ready to harvest when you see the top stalk has two buds," says the youngest of the three Rafiks, 17-year-old Nabil Ali, as he pulls down the bendy trunk of a hamdani tree, one of Sana'a's most popular qat varieties.

Weaving along the heavily potholed track leading out of Wadi Dahr, and the phone rings. It's Oulofi with bad news. The sheikh has been laid up in the local clinic, put on a drip and told to rest for the next two days. He won't be able to discuss water with his community until at least next week. The reason for the sheikh's sudden collapse? Sunstroke and dehydration.

State of crisis

Saudi Arabia is hosting a meeting on Yemen's most urgent development and financial needs as efforts intensify to boost international support for reforms by President Ali Abdullah Salih. Yemen is often described a state in danger of failing. In addition to its acute water crisis, it is also running out of oil — its main source of revenue — and has to support a rapidly growing and young population with high rates of illiteracy, malnutrition and unemployment. International ­interest was galvanised by the abortive attempt to bomb a US airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day, claimed by the Yemen-based al-Qaida in the ­Arabian Peninsula. Under US pressure, Yemeni authorties have targeted al-Qaida more aggressively.

Ian Black

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 26 Feb 2010 | 10:10 am

Much of U.S. Water Safe, But Problems Remain

Environmental engineer Marc Edwards takes a closer look at the nation’s water supply.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 Feb 2010 | 9:51 am

How to Improve U.S. Water Quality

Environmental engineer Marc Edwards, of Virginia Tech University, discusses ways to improve water quality in the United States, such as having more stringent safety regulations and better methods for detecting contaminants, including lead.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 Feb 2010 | 9:41 am

Perfect Insulator Could Eliminate Heating Bills

With this insulator, the body heat produced by one person would be enough to warm an entire home.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 26 Feb 2010 | 9:30 am

Trouble brewing | Open thread

It's a subject close to many Ciffers' hearts: just how do you make the perfect cup of tea? And what are the best kinds?

Controversy has been raging on the 'What do you want to talk about?' thread in recent days over the correct way to prepare tea.

It's a question that has taxed the great and the good, from George Orwell to Evelyn Waugh. Attempts have been made to apply science to the question, but the argument does not seem to have been settled.

So, for Friday teatime, we thought we'd let you thrash it out in an open thread. Milk in first or last? Should the pot be warmed? And what about varieties? Darjeeling or Ceylon? Green or black? Is Rooibos an acceptable caffeine-free alternative or an affront to all right-thinking tea drinkers?

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 26 Feb 2010 | 9:30 am

U.N. to create science panel to review IPCC

NUSA DUA, Indonesia (Reuters) - An independent board of scientists is to review the work of a U.N. climate panel, whose credibility came under attack after it published errors, a U.N. environment spokesman said on Friday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 26 Feb 2010 | 9:29 am

Huge iceberg 'threatens sea-life'

A vast iceberg that broke off eastern Antarctic earlier this month could disrupt marine life in the region, scientists warn.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 26 Feb 2010 | 8:09 am

FUmanoids Prepare for RoboCup 2010

If you're a soccer fan, you can almost taste the excitement, right? I mean, the World Cup is coming up in just a few months time in South Africa. Ah....but it you're robotic soccer fan (and let's face it, who ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 26 Feb 2010 | 7:43 am

Earth Watch

'Tough love' for troubled UN climate panel
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 26 Feb 2010 | 7:13 am

Massive Iceberg Collision Could Alter Ocean Currents

A 60-mile-long iceberg roughly the size of Luxembourg shaved off a new iceberg after crashing into a glacier.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 26 Feb 2010 | 6:40 am

Pieces of rare biblical manuscript reunited (AP)

AP - Two parts of an ancient biblical manuscript separated across centuries and continents were reunited for the first time in a joint display Friday, thanks to an accidental discovery that is helping illuminate a dark period in the history of the Hebrew Bible.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 26 Feb 2010 | 6:23 am

Life is a rat race

Carole Jahme shines the cold light of evolutionary psychology on reader's problems. This week: competition

Under pressure

From an anonymous teen
Dear Carole, I'm in 6th form and ever since GCSE revision I feel I have been on a treadmill. I have to compete in sport against other schools, I've got A-level revision now and college or university is ahead of me, and thus more and more exams to pass, then job-hunting in a recession and more competition. Where is the fun in all this? Who decided this is the way society should be run? Do I have an alternative? I just want to enjoy my life without all this pressure.

Carole replies:
I hear you. Primates are hierarchical and the higher up the hierarchy you are the better your chances of survival. We compete with each other over access to food, access to mates and access to safe sleeping sites. Available resources rarely meet the demands made by wild primates or indeed humans and thus competition is a way of life. It is usually more physically intense among males than females.

If it's any consolation, if you were someone born during a baby-boom era (such as the 1960s and late 1980s in the UK) the competition would be even more intense. Research has shown that baby boomers are more likely to experience aggression and risk-taking than others in less competitive environments.

The generation you were born into will age with you and journey through life alongside you. In your email you clearly highlight various stages of competition. This is ongoing. In old age you will again compete with your generation for the best accommodation in old folks homes.

At first glance hippy trails, communes and alternative societies offer escape from competition with your fellow primates. Experimental economists study the Amish because members of this group obey rules of cooperation that mutually benefit each other and minimise competition. For example, all able-bodied Amish men work as a team to build a house for a newly married couple.

But due to inbreeding the Amish suffer a higher than average incidence of genetic disorders, such as dwarfism, and due to their practice of strict patriarchy there is an increased prevalence of sexual and physical abuse against Amish women and children.

Alternative societies are rarely fun utopias for long – if ever.

Western society consists of systems within systems and to succeed among your peers these rules must be followed and at various stages you will be tested and forced to compete against them. I think it is fair to say that not a lot of "fun" was factored into the machine.

Oh, to run away from it all! But where would you go? You are a primate and you cannot run from that.

All primate species are hierarchical. Accounts of the Machiavellian social politics of wild apes are Shakespearean in their plotting and complexity. But your primate cousins do make time for fun. Field primatologists have for years reported accounts of the apes they study forming close bonds, laughing, playing and tickling each other. Love, friendship and pleasure can all be observed in ape behaviour.

So, find friends who share your taste in what constitutes fun. You are born a competitive primate, but you are also born to have fun – you just need to make time for it.

Hiraiwa-Hasegawa, M. (2005) Homicide by men in Japan, and its relationship to age, resources and risk-taking. Evolution and Human Behavior; 26: 332-343.
Souza, M. et al. (2009) Evolution of cooperation under N-person snowdrift games. Journal of Theoretical Biology; 260 (4): 581-588.
McKusick, V. A. (2000) Ellis-van Creveld syndrome and the Amish. Nature Genetics; 24: 203-204.
Koenig, A. (2002) Competition for resources and its behavioural consequences among female primates. International Journal of Primatology; 23 (4): 759-783.
Ross, M. D. et al (2009) Reconstructing the evolution of laughter in great apes and humans. Current Biology; 19 (13): 1106-1111.
de Waal, F. (2000) Primates – a natural heritage of conflict resolution. Science Magazine; 289 (5479): 586-590.

Some people just don't care

From an anonymous female, no age given
Dear Carole, Why is it that some people just don't seem to care about others, and some people care so much? Is it just the people who seem not to care are ignorant of the problems around them or are some people not able to empathise, or are more selfish? I feel very hurt by my friends and relatives when they dont seem to care. How can I stop this feeling of hurt?

Carole replies:
Some believe the "three wise monkeys" of Eastern folklore, who see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil, are wise because they prioritise themselves while ignoring the needs of others. Certainly this is one survival strategy in the game of life.

Yes, some people are intentionally selfish while others are just not wired for altruism and have to be taught the rules of cooperation. Cooperation is essential to all primate species, and has contributed to the success of Homo sapiens, but there is also great variation within species and not all humans are equal in their empathic abilities.

If you are empathic you will be aware when others cannot access your depth of concern and this will leave you disappointed and isolated. If we all acted with each others' best interests at heart the world would be quite different, but in the end the only person you can change is yourself.

Make sure you spend time with other primates who match your depth of sensitivity and try to accept those whose altruism goes no further than their immediate blood relatives.

If you are someone who spontaneously gives on demand you may take on too many causes and too many waifs and strays and become overwhelmed. So try to channel your goodwill into existing charities and pressure groups. This way you can keep the scale of your giving within reasonable limits. You matter too you know.

van Vugt, M, De Cremer, D, Janssen, D (2007) Gender differences in co-operation and competition: The male warrior hypothesis. Psychological Science; 18: 19-23.
Wubben, MJJ et al (2009) How emotion communication guides reciprocity: Establishing cooperation through disappointment and anger. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology; 45 (4): 987-990.
Kerr, NL, Rumble, AC et al (2009) "How many bad apples does it take to spoil the whole barrel?": Social exclusion and toleration for bad apples. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology; 45 (4): 603-613.

Terms and conditions
Please say whether you wish to be named in connection with your enquiry and if so by what name. We reserve the right to edit questions. If you mail us a question, you agree that your email may be published on the site.

We regret that Carole cannot answer all the mails we receive. We cannot provide urgent advice and suggest that if you need such advice you seek it immediately without waiting for a response from Carole. With regards to legal, medical or financial issues, we recommend seeking the advice of a listed professional. We will not be held liable for any loss, damage or injury you incur as a result of using this site or as a result of any advice given. We will not enter into personal correspondence via email.

Carole is UK-based and as such any advice she gives is intended for a UK audience only.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 26 Feb 2010 | 5:24 am

Lasers lift dirt of ages from art

Physicists have applied the same laser techniques commonly used for tattoo removal to clean several famous works of art.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 26 Feb 2010 | 4:57 am

Ancient Bible Manuscript Fragments Reunited

Only a handful of Hebrew biblical manuscripts have survived the era in which they were written.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 26 Feb 2010 | 4:22 am

The odd couple: Warthog befriends huge hornbill

A warthog is pictured being groomed by a huge hornbill bird, a scene never reported before.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 26 Feb 2010 | 3:39 am

What Is Time? One Physicist Hunts for the Ultimate Theory

SAN DIEGO — One way to get noticed as a scientist is to tackle a really difficult problem. Physicist Sean Carroll has become a bit of a rock star in geek circles by attempting to answer an age-old question no scientist has been able to fully explain: What is time?

Here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where he gave a presentation on the arrow of time, scientists stopped him in the hallway to tell him what big fans they were of his work.

Carroll sat down with Wired.com on Feb. 19 at AAAS to explain his theories and why Marty McFly’s adventure could never exist in the real world, where time only goes forward and never back.

Wired.com: Can you explain your theory of time in layman’s terms?

Sean Carroll: I’m trying to understand how time works. And that’s a huge question that has lots of different aspects to it. A lot of them go back to Einstein and spacetime and how we measure time using clocks. But the particular aspect of time that I’m interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is different from the future. We remember the past but we don’t remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet into an egg.

And we sort of understand that halfway. The arrow of time is based on ideas that go back to Ludwig Boltzmann, an Austrian physicist in the 1870s. He figured out this thing called entropy. Entropy is just a measure of how disorderly things are. And it tends to grow. That’s the second law of thermodynamics: Entropy goes up with time, things become more disorderly. So, if you neatly stack papers on your desk, and you walk away, you’re not surprised they turn into a mess. You’d be very surprised if a mess turned into neatly stacked papers. That’s entropy and the arrow of time. Entropy goes up as it becomes messier.

So, Boltzmann understood that and he explained how entropy is related to the arrow of time. But there’s a missing piece to his explanation, which is, why was the entropy ever low to begin with? Why were the papers neatly stacked in the universe? Basically, our observable universe begins around 13.7 billion years ago in a state of exquisite order, exquisitely low entropy. It’s like the universe is a wind-up toy that has been sort of puttering along for the last 13.7 billion years and will eventually wind down to nothing. But why was it ever wound up in the first place? Why was it in such a weird low-entropy unusual state?

That is what I’m trying to tackle. I’m trying to understand cosmology, why the Big Bang had the properties it did. And it’s interesting to think that connects directly to our kitchens and how we can make eggs, how we can remember one direction of time, why causes precede effects, why we are born young and grow older. It’s all because of entropy increasing. It’s all because of conditions of the Big Bang.

Wired.com: So the Big Bang starts it all. But you theorize that there’s something before the Big Bang. Something that makes it happen. What’s that?

Carroll: If you find an egg in your refrigerator, you’re not surprised. You don’t say, “Wow, that’s a low-entropy configuration. That’s unusual,” because you know that the egg is not alone in the universe. It came out of a chicken, which is part of a farm, which is part of the biosphere, etc., etc. But with the universe, we don’t have that appeal to make. We can’t say that the universe is part of something else. But that’s exactly what I’m saying. I’m fitting in with a line of thought in modern cosmology that says that the observable universe is not all there is. It’s part of a bigger multiverse. The Big Bang was not the beginning.

And if that’s true, it changes the question you’re trying to ask. It’s not, “Why did the universe begin with low entropy?” It’s, “Why did part of the universe go through a phase with low entropy?” And that might be easier to answer.

Wired.com: In this multiverse theory, you have a static universe in the middle. From that, smaller universes pop off and travel in different directions, or arrows of time. So does that mean that the universe at the center has no time?

Carroll: So that’s a distinction that is worth drawing. There’s different moments in the history of the universe and time tells you which moment you’re talking about. And then there’s the arrow of time, which give us the feeling of progress, the feeling of flowing or moving through time. So that static universe in the middle has time as a coordinate but there’s no arrow of time. There’s no future versus past, everything is equal to each other.

Wired.com: So it’s a time that we don’t understand and can’t perceive?

Carroll: We can measure it, but you wouldn’t feel it. You wouldn’t experience it. Because objects like us wouldn’t exist in that environment. Because we depend on the arrow of time just for our existence.

Wired.com: So then, what is time in that universe?

Carroll: Even in empty space, time and space still exist. Physicists have no problem answering the question of “If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?” They say, “Yes! Of course it makes a sound!” Likewise, if time flows without entropy and there’s no one there to experience it, is there still time? Yes. There’s still time. It’s still part of the fundamental laws of nature even in that part of the universe. It’s just that events that happen in that empty universe don’t have causality, don’t have memory, don’t have progress and don’t have aging or metabolism or anything like that. It’s just random fluctuations.

Wired.com: So if this universe in the middle is just sitting and nothing’s happening there, then how exactly are these universes with arrows of time popping off of it? Because that seems like a measurable event.

Carroll: Right. That’s an excellent point. And the answer is, almost nothing happens there. So the whole point of this idea that I’m trying to develop is that the answer to the question, “Why do we see the universe around us changing?” is that there is no way for the universe to truly be static once and for all. There is no state the universe could be in that would just stay put for ever and ever and ever. If there were, we should settle into that state and sit there forever.

It’s like a ball rolling down the hill, but there’s no bottom to the hill. The ball will always be rolling both in the future and in the past. So, that center part is locally static — that little region there where there seems to be nothing happening. But, according to quantum mechanics, things can happen occasionally. Things can fluctuate into existence. There’s a probability of change occurring.

So, what I’m thinking of is the universe is kind of like an atomic nucleus. It’s not completely stable. It has a half-life. It will decay. If you look at it, it looks perfectly stable, there’s nothing happening … there’s nothing happening … and then, boom! Suddenly there’s an alpha particle coming out of it, except the alpha particle is another universe.

Wired.com: So inside those new universes, which move forward with the arrow of time, there are places where the laws of physics are different — anomalies in spacetime. Does the arrow of time still exist there?

Carroll: It could. The weird thing about the arrow of time is that it’s not to be found in the underlying laws of physics. It’s not there. So it’s a feature of the universe we see, but not a feature of the laws of the individual particles. So the arrow of time is built on top of whatever local laws of physics apply.

Wired.com: So if the arrow of time is based on our consciousness and our ability to perceive it, then do people like you who understand it more fully experience time differently then the rest of us?

Carroll: Not really. The way it works is that the perception comes first and then the understanding comes later. So the understanding doesn’t change the perception, it just helps you put that perception into a wider context. It’s a famous quote that’s in my book from St. Augustine, where he says something along the lines of, “I know what time is until you ask me for a definition about it, and then I can’t give it to you.” So I think we all perceive the passage of time in very similar ways. But then trying to understand it doesn’t change our perceptions.

Wired.com: So what happens to the arrow in places like a black hole or at high speeds where our perception of it changes?

Carroll: This goes back to relativity and Einstein. For anyone moving through spacetime, them and the clocks they bring along with them – including their biological clocks like their heart and their mental perceptions – no one ever feels time to be passing more quickly or more slowly. Or, at least, if you have accurate clocks with you, your clock always ticks one second per second. That’s true if you’re inside a black hole, here on Earth, in the middle of nowhere, it doesn’t matter. But what Einstein tells us is that path you take through space and time can dramatically affect the time that you feel elapsing.

The arrow of time is about a direction, but it’s not about a speed. The important thing is that there’s a consistent direction. That everywhere through space and time, this is the past and this is the future.

Wired.com: So you would tell Michael J. Fox that it’s impossible for him to go back to the past and save his family?

Carroll: The simplest way out of the puzzle of time travel is to say that it can’t be done. That’s very likely the right answer. However, we don’t know for sure. We’re not absolutely proving that it can’t be done.

Wired.com: At the very least, you can’t go back.

Carroll: Yeah, no. You can easily go to the future, that’s not a problem.

Wired.com: We’re going there right now!

Carroll: Yesterday, I went to the future and here I am!

One of things I point out in the book is that if we do imagine that it was possible, hypothetically, to go into the past, all the paradoxes that tend to arise are ultimately traced to the fact that you can’t define a consistent arrow of time if you can go into the past. Because what you think of as your future is in the universe’s past. So it can’t be one in the same everywhere. And that’s not incompatible with the laws of physics, but it’s very incompatible with our everyday experience, where we can make choices that affect the future, but we cannot make choices that affect the past.

Wired.com: So, one part of the multiverse theory is that eventually our own universe will become empty and static. Does that mean we’ll eventually pop out another universe of our own?

Carroll: The arrow of time doesn’t move forward forever. There’s a phase in the history of the universe where you go from low entropy to high entropy. But then once you reach the locally maximum entropy you can get to, there’s no more arrow of time. It’s just like this room. If you take all the air in this room and put it in the corner, that’s low entropy. And then you let it go and it eventually fills the room and then it stops. And then the air’s not doing anything. In that time when it’s changing, there’s an arrow of time, but once you reach equilibrium, then the arrow ceases to exist. And then, in theory, new universes pop off.

Wired.com: So there’s an infinite number of universes behind us and an infinite number of universes coming ahead of us. Does that mean we can go forward to visit those universes ahead of us?

Carroll: I suspect not, but I don’t know. In fact, I have a postdoc at Caltech who’s very interested in the possibility of universes bumping into each other. Now, we call them universes. But really, to be honest, they are regions of space with different local conditions. It’s not like they’re metaphysically distinct from each other. They’re just far away. It’s possible that you could imagine universes bumping into each other and leaving traces, observable effects. It’s also possible that that’s not going to happen. That if they’re there, there’s not going to be any sign of them there. If that’s true, the only way this picture makes sense is if you think of the multiverse not as a theory, but as a prediction of a theory.

If you think you understand the rules of gravity and quantum mechanics really, really well, you can say, “According to the rules, universes pop into existence. Even if I can’t observe them, that’s a prediction of my theory, and I’ve tested that theory using other methods.” We’re not even there yet. We don’t know how to have a good theory, and we don’t know how to test it. But the project that one envisions is coming up with a good theory in quantum gravity, testing it here in our universe, and then taking the predictions seriously for things we don’t observe elsewhere.

Images: 1) Artist’s rendition of the multiverse./Jason Torchinsky. 2) Diagram of the multiverse./Sean Carroll. 3) Ken Weingart.

See Also:

• High-Energy Particle Physics Demystified
• Physics the Next President Needs to Know
• Last Days of Big American Physics: One More Triumph, or Just Another Heartbreak?

Erin Biba is a Correspondent for Wired magazine who writes about science, technology, popular culture and beer made from 45-million-year-old yeast.

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 26 Feb 2010 | 3:30 am

Whales, Like Trees, Slow Warming

Whales are the largest animals on the planet, and when it comes to storing carbon, they act like trees in a forest.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 26 Feb 2010 | 1:39 am