Science Headlines for March 21, 2010

Frequency and cost of copying college homework revealed

The history of students who copy homework from classmates may be as old as school itself. But in today's age of lecture-hall laptops and online coursework, how prevalent and damaging to the education of students has such academic dishonesty become? According to new research, it turns out that unnoticed student cheating is a significant cause of course failure nationally.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Mar 2010 | 3:00 pm

Tryptophan-enriched diet reduces pig aggression

Feeding the amino acid tryptophan to young female pigs as part of their regular diet makes them less aggressive and easier to manage, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Mar 2010 | 3:00 pm

Plant's ability to identify, block invading bacteria examined

Understanding how plants defend themselves from bacterial infections may help researchers understand how people and other animals could be better protected from such pathogens. That's the idea behind a study to observe a specific bacteria that infects tomatoes but normally does not bother the common laboratory plant arabidopsis.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Mar 2010 | 3:00 pm

Omega 3 curbs precancerous growths in those prone to bowel cancer, study suggests

A purified form of an omega 3 cuts the number and size of precancerous bowel growths (polyps) in people whose genetic makeup predisposes them to bowel cancer, finds new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Mar 2010 | 3:00 pm

Children with insomnia may have impaired heart rate variability

Children with insomnia and shorter sleep duration had impaired modulation of heart rhythm during sleep, researchers report.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Mar 2010 | 3:00 pm

Bully galaxy rules the neighborhood

In general, galaxies can be thought of as "social" -- hanging out in groups and frequently interacting. However, a new Hubble Space Telescope image highlights how some galaxies appear to be hungry loners. These cosmic oddities have set astronomers on the "case of the missing neighbor galaxies."
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Mar 2010 | 3:00 pm

Barnacles prefer upwelling currents, enriching food chains in the Galapagos

The barnacle, a key thread in the marine food web, was thought to be missing along rocky coasts dominated by upwelling. Now a research team has found the opposite to be true: Barnacle populations thrive in vertical upwelling zones in moderately deep waters in the Galapagos Islands.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Evolution of fairness and punishment

A new study suggests that the cooperative nature of each society is at least partly dependent upon historical forces -- such as religious beliefs and the growth of market transactions.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Children and teens less likely than young adults to die of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma

Young adults diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma appear to have a higher risk of dying from the disease than do children and teens.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Variability as well as high blood pressure holds high risk of stroke

Three new articles show that it is variability in patients' blood pressure that predicts the risk of a stroke most powerfully and not a high average or usual blood pressure level.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Demise of coral, salamander show impact of Web (AP)

AP - Conservationists say the Internet has emerged as one of the greatest threats fueling the illegal wildlife trade, making it easier to buy everything from live baby lions to wine made from tiger bones, conservationists said Saturday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Mar 2010 | 3:36 am

Lebanon's liquid treasure is just trickling away (AFP)

AFP - Rose Hatem's home overlooks the Mediterranean and is just a short distance from one of Lebanon's longest rivers. But twice a week the 60-year-old has to buy water for her daily needs.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Mar 2010 | 2:57 am

Japan planning 14 nuclear plants: report (AFP)

AFP - Resource-poor Japan is planning to build at least 14 nuclear power plants over the next 20 years to reduce its reliance on other countries for its energy needs, a report said Sunday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Mar 2010 | 1:06 am

Albert Einstein: 'Dear Ma, sorry you're ill – p.s. I'm a genius'

How Einstein told his ailing mother of his breakthrough on relativity

As an introduction to one of science's most revolutionary theories, one postcard from Albert Einstein – now on display at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem as part of its 50th anniversary celebrations – is gloriously incongruent. "Dear Mother!" he writes. "Today some happy news. Lorentz telegraphed me that the British expeditions have verified the deflection of light by the sun." So sorry, by the way, to hear that you are not feeling well, he adds.

Thus Einstein reveals to his ailing Jewish mother that he has become famous as a genius, a man who has been vindicated over his claim that gravity can distort the space-time continuum. All that is missing is her reply. "He never writes, he never calls, and suddenly he's cleverer than Isaac Newton," she might have written. Sadly, we will never know.

The rest of the exhibition is made up of cabinets that display all 46 pages of his great work, The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity, which forced scientists to redefine gravity, predicted the existence of black holes and revealed how galaxies are formed. Einstein wrote his theory between November 1915 and May 1916 in his Berlin apartment. Later it was presented to the Hebrew University and is now displayed so that visitors can attempt to follow the thinking of the great scientist. Each page has its own case, each lighted dimly in a room that has been darkened to protect the paper. "We have set [the pages] up like the Dead Sea Scrolls, to protect them but also to give the feeling of entering a kind of holy of holies, which is how we view it," says curator Hanoch Guttfreund. "You can see Einstein work as you look at the pages."

And this is probably the most fascinating part of the show. The pages have many cross-outs and insertions in meticulous penmanship – with an open acknowledgment that some of the maths was beyond even him. His great idea, although startling at the time, has endured. His mother would have been proud.

Albert Einstein

Robin McKie

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Mar 2010 | 6:08 pm

Patients left in the dark over life-saving drug tests

Red tape means that too few have access to details of clinical trials

Tens of thousands of patients are missing life-saving treatments because they are not being told about vital research, according to a new report.

The government has said it wants information about clinical trials to be made available to patients to give them the option of becoming involved. But a report in the British Medical Journal warns that the fragmented and bureaucratic system surrounding trials, and Whitehall's reluctance to change it, means that many remain in the dark.

Taking part in medical research can give patients access to treatments that may not yet be available on the NHS. And studies show that patients are keen to be involved not just for their own benefit but to help others and advance scientific knowledge.

Dr Fiona Godlee, the BMJ's first woman editor and co-author of the report, said: "The demand from patients for information has been clear and growing for many years, particularly among the many patients with less common illnesses where we don't have all the answers about their condition.

"However, finding out about ongoing medical trials even for the most informed people can be extremely difficult. It is largely hidden away and very difficult to access. You would assume in the UK, where we have a national health service, we would have the potential to have comprehensive data about clinical trials – it seems extraordinary that we don't. Instead we rely on staff from voluntary organisations and patient groups to pass on this information."

The report, co-authored by Sir Iain Chalmers, a long-standing advocate of openness on the effectiveness of medical treatments, concludes that the problem is caused by fragmented leadership.

There are currently four public bodies in England involved in providing information about medical research – the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), the National Research Ethics Service, NHS Choices and NHS Evidence – each of which reports to different officials in the Department of Health.

There is also no statutory obligation on researchers to register a trial, the report states. Thousands do register their research on international databases. However, there seems to be confusion about who should register the trial, how to do it, and on which register, the report says. It calls for a single champion to co-ordinate those involved.

Despite its rhetoric, the government has not been willing to to fund a patient register of clinical trials, the BMJ article argues. Setting up such a register would be costly, it says. A website run by Cancer Research UK, which provides information about 180 new clinical trials each year to cancer patients, employs the equivalent of five full-time editors.

The report says that much of the information is already in the public domain. The National Research Ethics Service already requires lay summaries of all studies that have received ethical approval and these could be used on a patient register.

"No one disputes that giving patients information about clinical trials is a good thing – we are all signed up to that," said Godlee. "However, making it happen requires hard graft, money and clear leadership, and currently the will is not there. The frustrating thing is that the information about clinical trials in the UK already exists but it is too often neither publicly available nor patient-friendly."

The BMJ article concludes: "By joining up existing resources the NHS could create a one-stop shop for researchers registering their trials and a one-stop shop for patients, members of the public, and professionals seeking information about ongoing trials. But this will require political will and an end to fragmented leadership. A champion of sufficient seniority should now be appointed and given responsibility to ensure these bodies work more effectively together."

The Medical Research Council, a publicly funded research organisation, said last night that all its trials were registered on the International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial Number Register.

Professor Max Parmar, director of the MRC Clinical Trials Unit, said: "Providing accessible information on clinical trials is important for patients, clinicians and researchers. From a scientific perspective, registering clinical trials puts a clear responsibility on those running the trial to disclose and report the results, whether they are positive or negative."

The drug company GlaxoSmithKline, which spent £1.6bn on research and development in the UK last year, is the country's leading private sector funder of research.

Dr Pim Kon, its medical director, said: "We would look at any proposals to have a UK-wide register with interest, but meanwhile it's important that patients know about the website clinicaltrials.gov, which contains details of the trials that are funded internationally by government, industry and non-governmental organisations."

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Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Mar 2010 | 6:07 pm

The dotcom millionaires launching their own private space race

As the space shuttle ages and Nasa's funding is cut, America's technology entrepreneurs are building a new generation of rockets with their own money to fill the gap – and make a profit

For the past few weeks, engineers have been carrying out detailed tests on a pencil-slim rocket sitting on launch pad 40 at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. In a few days, the team will leave the site and begin final preparations for the 54m (178ft) launcher's blast-off.

Rocket take-offs are not exactly rare at the space centre, of course. Yet the launch of Falcon 9 will be followed with extreme interest. Many believe its success could transform space travel and save America's space programme from oblivion; others have dismissed the flight as dangerous "cure-all hype".

The launch of Falcon 9 is controversial for a simple reason: its design and construction has been carried out by private enterprise. The rocket is the idea of SpaceX, the company established by South African dotcom entrepreneur Elon Musk. Angered by the price he was being asked to put a payload into space, Musk, 38, decided to transform the launch business and so designed the Falcon. If he succeeds, companies like SpaceX could be running deliveries and taxi rides for astronauts within a few years, he believes. "Our success is vital to the success of the US space programme," Musk said last week.

His confidence has been boosted following last month's decision by President Barack Obama to drop funding for the Constellation programme – the Nasa spacecraft intended to replace the space shuttle, which is to be grounded later this year. Instead, Obama called for the space agency to invest around $6bn (£4bn) over the next five years in private launch companies such as SpaceX. Space travel is being privatised – it's as simple as that.

But who are the entrepreneurs with such ambitious designs on the space industry? What motivates them? And what sort of vision do they have for space travel in the 21st century? The answers to these questions are quite unexpected.

Each of them has made his fortune outside the industry, almost invariably in the dotcom bubble with internet and computer-game companies. These space visionaries have made vast sums fulfilling adolescent dreams of hi-tech adventure – sums they are now using to fund the real thing.

A classic example is Musk, one of the creators of, and the largest shareholder in, PayPal, which was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5bn. Similarly, John Carmack used his fortune as co-founder of id Software and programmer of Doom, Quake, and other computer games to set up Armadillo Aerospace, which is developing space launchers designed to be capable of sub-orbital, and later full orbital, space flights.

Then there is the company Blue Origin, currently developing its New Shepard launcher, which was founded by the president, chief executive and chairman of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. In addition, Paul Allen, one of the founders of Microsoft, provided some of the backing that helped Burt Rutan develop his revolutionary spaceplanes for Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic.

"You had to have some kind of pre-boom to supply the capital investment to kick off the rocket boom, and that only happened with computers and the internet," says Musk.

They make a colourful group. But it is Musk – with his fiancée Talulah Riley, the British actor who has appeared in films such as St Trinian's and The Boat That Rocked – who remains the most distinctive face of the private space race. His wealth, glamorous life and industrial might make headlines in the US. He has even served as a model for the big-screen reinvention of Marvel superhero Tony Stark, the industrialist-turned-superhero of the Iron Man series. The SpaceX factory appears in the second film, Iron Man 2, which is due for screening in Britain next month, while Musk has a bit part in the film. Today there is a statue of Iron Man, wearing a SpaceX ID badge, near Musk's office in the headquarters of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation – SpaceX's full name – near Los Angeles international airport.

Musk's interest in space launches also has unusual origins. He originally wanted to send a small greenhouse to Mars – a private experiment designed to see if Earth plants could grow in Martian soil. The experiment could be done for a few million dollars, he realised, but when he looked at the cost of the launch, he discovered the price tag was a prohibitive $65m. So he decided to build his own rockets. These will use Merlin engines, designed at SpaceX, that Musk claims cost a quarter as much as traditional rocket engines. In this way, he intends to make his fortune.

The company has not been without setbacks, however. Falcon 9's predecessor, Falcon 1, suffered three failures before it achieved a successful sub-orbital flight. Now it is the turn of its successor – the craft that Musk and Nasa plan to use to supply the international space station with cargo in the very near future.

If all goes well, these flights could begin before the end of the year. If things go wrong, Musk – who says he has invested more than $100m in SpaceX – claims the company can face four failures of Falcon 9 before having serious problems on its hands.

At the same time, he has made it clear that he wants to turn the Falcon into a craft capable of carrying humans into orbit – providing Nasa with a space taxi service for its astronauts, freeing the agency to develop and launch more far-reaching missions to the outer solar system or to build ambitious orbiting telescopes.

How much money the operators of these space taxis will make is a different matter. Nasa has given out some lucrative contracts: SpaceX will be given $1.6bn to supply the international space station with cargo using the Falcon 9 as transport, for example. Similarly, Blue Origin has been awarded $3.7m by Nasa to develop hardware.

But the costs of spacecraft development are enormous and its financial prospects have yet to be demonstrated. The new wave of entrepreneurs may find the billions they have made in computers and the internet swallowed up by their efforts to reach the stars – a point stressed by Elliot Pulham, chief executive of the Space Foundation, an organisation which represents all sectors of the industry. "There is a basic motto in this trade," he says. "If you want to make a million dollars in the space business, first earn a billion dollars in another industry."

Nevertheless, Musk and the rest remain convinced they will slash launch costs in the same way as private industry has been making revolutionary reductions in computing costs since the 1980s. Space will be opened to a new line of business users in the process, they insist. Not everyone agrees: Republican Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama – home of the Marshall Space Flight Centre, which had been leading the Constellation programme's development – recently described the move towards private space launches as "a death march". He believes that SpaceX and its sister companies lack the basic expertise to put cargo, and later humans, into orbit, and that America will end up without any means to put people or hardware into space.

"I think there is a point here," says Pulham. "It is clear that private launch companies have a real role to play in transforming space travel, but it is also true that too much is being asked of them … They do not have the expertise at present to do this extremely taxing job and it will take a while for them to be completely successful."

The launch of Falcon 9 is therefore going to be an event of considerable interest for politicians and engineers. Over the past 40 years, US spending on space has slumped from almost 5% of the federal budget to around 0.5% and there is a desperate need in the industry for reinvigoration and a return to the glory days of the Apollo missions.

The US space programme needs evidence that it is about to take a dramatic new direction in space travel: a success for Elon Musk and Falcon 9 could provide that signal.

Robin McKie

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 20 Mar 2010 | 6:06 pm