Women do make men throw caution to the wind, research confirms

The presence of an attractive woman elevates testosterone levels and physical risk taking in young men, according to a recent study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Multifunctional polymer neutralizes both biological and chemical weapons

In an effort to mirror the ability of biological tissues to respond rapidly and appropriately to changing environments, scientists have synthesized a single, multifunctional polymer material that can decontaminate both biological and chemical toxins.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Gene is linked to lung cancer development in never-smokers: one third have gene variant

A study that scanned the genomes of thousands of "never-smokers" diagnosed with lung cancer as well as healthy never smokers has found a gene they say could be responsible for a significant number of those cancers.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Chemical that may protect hearts of muscular dystrophy patients discovered

Researchers have discovered a chemical that may, over the long term, protect the hearts of Duchenne muscular dystrophy patients -- a fatal and most common form of muscular dystrophy in children.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Early galaxy went through 'teenage growth spurt,' scientists say

Scientists have found a massive galaxy in the early universe creating stars like our sun up to 100 times faster than the modern-day Milky Way.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

New bacteria strain points the way toward 'super sourdough' bread

Researchers have unveiled a potentially additive-free, more healthful sourdough loaf that could even taste better. More healthful breads of other kinds could be baked using a new bacterial ingredient in sourdough as well.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Researchers discover two new ways to kill TB bacteria; Findings could help tame extremely drug-resistant strains

Researchers have found two novel ways of killing the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, a disease responsible for an estimated two million deaths each year.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Mar 2010 | 6:00 am

Brewing up a gentler java: Dark-roasted coffee contains stomach-friendly ingredient

Stomach irritation preventing almost two out of every 10 people from enjoying coffee. Now, scientists report the discovery of several substances that may be among the culprits responsible for brewing up heartburn and stomach pain in every cup.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Mar 2010 | 6:00 am

Seaweed to tackle rising tide of obesity

In a new study, scientists in the UK have shown that by adding seaweed fiber to the diet you can reduce fat digestion by up to 75 percent.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Mar 2010 | 6:00 am

Health-care worker vaccination rates remain perilously low

Health-care personnel influenza immunization rates have remained low, despite recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other leading health-care organizations that all health-care personnel receive annual flu vaccines. Experts say these levels are perilous. Increasing vaccination rates substantially improves patient safety, lowering flu deaths by 40 percent.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Mar 2010 | 6:00 am

UN rejects Tanzania request for one-off ivory sale (AP)

AP - A proposal by Tanzania to weaken the 21-year ban on ivory sales was rejected by a U.N. conservation meeting over fears the African country has been failing to crack down on rising incidents of poaching.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Mar 2010 | 4:12 am

Rarest sparrow nest sites found

New nesting sites of one of the world's rarest birds, the Worthen's sparrow, are found in Mexico.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 Mar 2010 | 3:51 am

Sandstorms across China prompt health warnings (AP)

AP - Sandstorms whipping across China shrouded cities in an unhealthy cloud of sand and grit Monday, with winds carrying the pollution outside the mainland as far as the island of Taiwan.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Mar 2010 | 3:18 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Gloomy weather conditions were forecast across the eastern third of the nation Monday, though temperatures were expected to remain on the mild side.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Mar 2010 | 2:58 am

Climate change uncertainty is no reason for inaction since we can't rule out risk | Tim Palmer

We don't have to believe that our house will burn down to take out insurance. So why delay taking action to reduce emissions?

Climate change is sometimes presented in simple black and white terms. You either believe it or you don't. Perhaps after the recent controversies over email leaks and melting Himalayan glaciers, some may have decided to change camp.

But this is a false dichotomy. Indeed the notion of "belief" plays no role at all in science, whether about climate change or anything else. The Royal Society, the UK's national academy of science, was founded 350 years ago on this very basis, with the motto Nullius in verba, or "take nobody's word for it". The founders took nothing for granted and chose to investigate observations and search for the conclusions that best fit them. The notion that these conclusions can never be considered certain and immutable, underpinned both their actions and those that came after them. As James Gleick wrote about the great 20th century theoretical physicist Richard Feynman; he believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish on our ability to know, but as the essence of knowing.

Modern day weather prediction is inherently uncertain. Every day, weather forecast centres will generate an ensemble, typically of 50 individual weather predictions, in order to assess uncertainty in the weather up to a week or more ahead. The individual predictions have very slightly different starting conditions, reflecting the fact that the weather observations which generate a forecast's initial state are neither complete nor wholly accurate. When the atmosphere is in a predictable state, all 50 predictions are more or less identical for the coming week and the forecaster can say with great confidence what the weather will be like. On the other hand, when the atmosphere is in a chaotic state, the best the forecaster can talk about are probabilities of different outcomes.

Some, perhaps those without scientific training, may see probabilistic predictions as an evasion of responsibility. However, in reality, probabilistic predictions embody the scientific method. In any case, what is better for decision making, a forecast with some realistic measure of uncertainty, or some grossly overconfident prediction with no hint of uncertainty? Worldwide, probabilistic weather forecasts are now used by those making decisions to evacuate people exposed to river flooding, or to intense storms. For better or for worse, they are also central to who trade on future energy prices and other weather-sensitive commodities.

Similar "ensemble" methods are used to predict climate change, except here it is also critical to vary uncertain parameters in the climate models as well as uncertain estimates of how greenhouse gas emissions will change over the course of the century. As with the weather forecasts, contemporary climate predictions are essentially probabilistic. Hence for example, based on the ensemble of the world's climate models, we can estimate that over the Asian monsoon region, a season that was so wet it would only have a 1 in 20 chance of occurring in the 20th century, could have a 1 in 3 chance of occurring by the end of the 21st century.

We don't have to believe that our house will burn down in the coming year to take out insurance. Similarly we don't have to believe that dangerous climate change will occur to take action to cut emissions. A key question that everyone concerned by the climate change issue should ask, particularly those who are sceptical, is this. How large does the probability of serious climate change have to be before we should start cutting emissions? To be specific, how large does the probability have to be that by the end of this century, large parts of Bangladesh will under water because of sea level rise and a substantially more intense monsoon system? Or that the Amazonian rainforest will die because of shifts in rainfall patterns over South America? Or that the type of drought that plagued sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s will become a quasi-permanent feature? 0.1%, 1%, 10%, 50%? Considered this way, it's clear that the dichotomy between the "climate believers" vs "climate sceptics" is indeed a false one.

The scientific method is sometimes described as "organised scepticism", and this, rather than some logical progression from one certainty to the next, characterises the inherently uncertain path of scientific progress. As one leading climate scientist put it: "In truth, we are all climate sceptics." However, despite the climate scientists' best efforts at scepticism, it simply has not been possible to rule out the risk of the sort of climate changes discussed above.

Handling uncertainty is key to the scientific method, but, conversely, the existence of uncertainty is not itself cause for inaction.

• Tim Palmer is a Royal Society 2010 Anniversary Research Professor at the Unversity of Oxford, and is organiser of a two-day discussion meeting at the Royal Society (22-23 March) on Handling Uncertainty in Science. The meeting includes speakers as diverse as Professor Sir Roger Penrose, eminent cosmologist and theoretical physicist, and Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 22 Mar 2010 | 1:30 am

Hong Kong air pollution hits record levels (AFP)

AFP - Hong Kong's air pollution soared to record levels Monday, the Environmental Protection Department said, warning that a toxic stew enveloping the city was a danger to the public.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Mar 2010 | 1:14 am

Signs of spring 2010 readers' photographs

Here is a shortlist of the best snaps from our signs of spring 2010 Flickr group

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 22 Mar 2010 | 1:00 am

Wind contributes to ice loss in Arctic sea

New research does not question climate change is also melting ice in the Arctic, but finds wind patterns explain steep decline

Much of the record breaking loss of ice in the Arctic ocean in recent years is down to the region's swirling winds and is not a direct result of global warming, a new study reveals.

Ice blown out of the region by Arctic winds can explain around one-third of the steep downward trend in sea ice extent in the region since 1979, the scientists say.

The study does not question that global warming is also melting ice in the Arctic, but it could raise doubts about high-profile claims that the region has passed a climate "tipping point" that could see ice loss sharply accelerate in coming years.

The new findings also help to explain the massive loss of Arctic ice seen in the summers of 2007-08, which prompted suggestions that the summertime Arctic Ocean could be ice-free withing a decade. About half of the variation in maximum ice loss each September is down to changes in wind patterns, the study says.

Masayo Ogi, a scientist with the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology in Yokohama, and her colleagues, looked at records of how winds have behaved across the Arctic since satellite measurements of ice extent there began in 1979.

They found that changes in wind patterns, such as summertime winds that blow clockwise around the Beaufort Sea, seemed to coincide with years where sea ice loss was highest.

Writing in a paper to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the scientists suggest these winds have blown large amounts of Arctic ice south through the Fram Strait, which passes between Greenland and the Norwegian islands of Svalbard, and leads to the warmer waters of the north Atlantic. These winds have increased recently, which could help explain the apparent acceleration in ice loss.

"Wind-induced, year-to-year differences in the rate of flow of ice toward and through Fram Strait play an important role in modulating September sea ice extent on a year-to-year basis," the scientists say. "A trend toward an increased wind-induced rate of flow has contributed to the decline in the areal coverage of Arctic summer sea ice."

Ogi said this was the first time the Arctic winds have been analysed in such a way.

"Both winter and summer winds could blow ice out of the Arctic [through] the Fram Strait during 1979-2009," she said.

A number of other factors were also responsible for ice loss, including warming of the air and ocean, she added.

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic sea ice "is in a state of ongoing decline". Since 1979, the ice has shrunk by about 10% a decade, or 28,000 square miles each year. The ice reaches its minimum extent each September, when it begins to reform as the freezing Arctic winter takes hold.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 22 Mar 2010 | 1:00 am

Rights group uses satphones for N. Korean news (AFP)

AFP - A Seoul-based rights group said Monday it has supplied contacts in North Korea with satellite phones to expand news coverage of the secretive communist state and minimise the use of riskier cellphones.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Mar 2010 | 12:02 am

Infertility clue to prostate cancer

Infertile men 2.6 times as likely as others to suffer from aggressive form of disease, according to research

Infertile men have a much higher risk than normal of developing an aggressive form of prostate cancer, according to medical researchers. Men unable to father children are 2.6 times as likely to suffer from high-grade prostate cancer, which is more dangerous because it grows and spreads quickly.

Research published in Cancer, the journal of the American Cancer Society, made the link between the two conditions after studying 22,562 men who were assessed for infertility in California between 1967 and 1998.

"The results of the current study provide novel evidence of a potential link between male factor infertility and aggressive prostate cancer risk," said a team led by Dr Thomas Walsh, of the University of Washington school of medicine in Seattle. "Male infertility may be an early and identifiable risk factor for the development of clinically significant prostate cancer."

It may be useful to screen infertile men for prostate cancer to identify and treat those with the riskier form of the disease, the authors suggest.

There is no prostate cancer screening in the UK, though government advisers are looking into whether a programme should be set up.

The disease is the most common cancer among British men. About 35,000 a year are diagnosed with it, and it kills about 10,200. The most common risk factors are believed to be age, family history and ethnicity: those of west African and Caribbean origin are at greater risk than white men.

Previous recent research has linked fatherhood status to a man's chances of getting prostate cancer. But while some studies have found that childless men were less likely to get the disease than fathers, others found no association. Confusingly, other researchers have said that men with fewer male children, or whose child is stillborn, have a greater chance of getting the disease.

Walsh's team rule out infertility treatment as the reason for the apparent greater risk of the more lethal sort of prostate cancer. "A more plausible explanation is that a common exposure underlies both infertility and prostate cancer," they say.

Genetic abnormalities, especially involving the Y chromosome, could be involved in the development of both diseases, their study states.

Dr Helen Rippon, of the Prostate Cancer Charity, said it was hard to draw firm conclusions from the new study because too few men in it developed higher-grade prostate cancer.

Meanwhile, brain cancer sufferers have claimed that many GPs are too slow to spot signs of the disease, which is the biggest cancer killer among children and under-40s.

One in four patients had to visit their GP at least four times, and almost one in 10 sufferers needed more than eight consultations, before their symptoms led to their being referred to a specialist, according to the Samantha Dixon Brain Tumour Trust. More than 30% waited at least four months before being diagnosed, a trust study of 350 sufferers and their carers found.

Brain tumours can take three times as long to be diagnosed in the UK as elsewhere, research has shown.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 22 Mar 2010 | 12:00 am

News Flash: Einstein Is Still Right

After analyzing 70,000 galaxies within 3.5 billion light years from Earth, physicists show that Einstein's theory of general relativity still holds strong.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Mar 2010 | 11:32 pm

Channeling Earth: Rivers Seen From Space

Rivers connect Earth’s mountains and lakes to its oceans, creating lifelines that provide water, food, transportation and recreation along the way. Some rivers, like the Nile, bring life to barren landscapes that would otherwise be uninhabitable. Others, like the Mississippi, defy our best efforts to tame them.

Rivers carve their way across the continents, some becoming ever more entrenched while others meander freely across the surface. The myriad paths they carve make patterns that are best seen from above.

In this gallery, we’ve collected images from satellites and astronauts of some of the longest, twistiest, most beautiful and interesting rivers in the world.

Click on any image in this gallery for a high-resolution version.

Rio Negro, Argentina

The Rio Negro in Argentina is a beautiful example of how mobile some rivers are. This is one of the most meandering rivers in South America. In the image above, taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station on January 4, the river has left scars all across the floodplain as it moved and carved new channels. Some of the old river channels still have water in them and are known as oxbow lakes.

Image: NASA

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 21 Mar 2010 | 10:00 pm

Iceland fears 2nd, even larger volcanic eruption (AP)

AP - A volcano in southern Iceland has erupted for the first time in almost 200 years, raising concerns that it could trigger a larger and potentially more dangerous eruption at a volatile volcano nearby.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Mar 2010 | 6:09 pm

Science Weekly: The world's funniest joke

Prof Richard Wiseman from the University of Hertfordshire is an expert on laughing, giggling and guffawing. He even has his own iPhone app. He's giving a talk at the Royal Institution on Wednesday 31 March.

We also reveal the world's funniest joke as told by people on the streets of London.

The European premier of the new Imax film, Hubble 3D, has taken place at London's Science Museum. David Brower tells us about the complexity of rendering some of the fly-throughs, including the 'star' of the show, the Orion nebula.

A new exhibition at the Royal College of Art attempts to predict some of the ways current research will help create future technologies. Producer Andy visited Impact.

Nell Boase is your host while Alok is away.

Feel free to post some of your terrible (but clean) jokes on the blog below.

Join our Facebook group.

Listen back through our archive.

Follow the podcast on our Science Weekly Twitter feed and receive updates on all breaking science news stories from Guardian Science.

Subscribe free via iTunes to ensure every episode gets delivered. (Here is the non-iTunes URL feed).

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 21 Mar 2010 | 6:01 pm

Internet 'threatens' rare species

The internet has emerged as one of the biggest threats to endangered species, conservationists meeting in Doha say.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 21 Mar 2010 | 5:56 pm

Mars sublime: Stunning new pictures

One of the greatest reports the spoof newspaper the Onion ever produced was about the moon landings. "Holy shit," the headline screamed. "Man Walks On Fucking Moon". Underneath, the story informed us that Neil Armstrong's first words on touching the lunar surface were "Holy living fuck!"

As well as being funny, this pointed to a truth: what else does landing on the moon boil down to? I experienced a version of those feelings myself last week, looking at new photographs beamed back from the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter satellite. I was transfixed. I don't think I've seen images more beautiful and affecting for a long time.

One shot, from Mars's north pole, shows an ice formation two miles thick: colossal grey-white slabs of frozen carbon dioxide shelving irregularly, their vertical faces powdered with rust by the Martian wind. Another shows linear dunes like planetary corduroy. There is an impact crater, serrated at its edges, bowl-smooth within, a honeycomb pattern deep in its base like something mycelial, or the surface of tripe.

Elsewhere there are what appear to be vertical mineral formations bristling from the lines of ridges, like stands of trees; in fact, they are the tracks of debris released by melting ice, tumbling down the dunes. Another image shows salt flats – perhaps miles across, yet looking like close-up photographs of salt-crystals. A sand dune in Proctor Crater has the sinuous geometry of a Bridget Riley, and is surrounded by a pattern of ripple-textures like the marks left when you pull a piece of paper off the surface of thick paint. It has been coloured steel-blue.

Then there are the moons: Phobos, photographed from no further away than the distance between London and New Delhi, grey-white, like a knob of bone; or Deimos, a pebble in space only a few miles across, with every intricate little pockmark and scar visible.

These are tens of millions of miles away from earth. You feel it shouldn't be possible to see these things. What is it that makes them so powerful? As images alone they have an impersonal beauty, a compelling stillness and strangeness. Some of them look a lot like abstract art, even though they are representative: a compilation of terabits of data sent back by the HiRise (High Resolution Imagine Science Experiment) telescope, translated into the visible spectrum.

Part of their power is, I think, to do with scale. Thanks in part to the computer colouring and the almost unnatural-seeming level of resolution, many of these photographs look like images from electron microscopy. The surface of a moth's wing suddenly looks like the surface of a planet; the surface of a planet looks like a moth's wing. Look at these photographs of Mars, and you often can't tell if you're looking at miles, or metres, or microns. It's a scale with nothing human to anchor it. It suggests an unsettling kinship between the alienness of both the very tiny and the very large.

Time, as well as physical scale, plays a part. The poet Elizabeth Bishop used to say that when she was miserable, as she frequently was, she felt comforted by thinking about things in terms of geological time. There's a special kind of shiver in the idea that these steppes of frozen CO₂ were there, and that these curved dunes were shifting millions of years before humans existed – just as there is in knowing that the night sky is punctuated with the light from dead stars.

But these images are especially potent because we know they are from Mars. Outer space now holds a place in the collective imagination – and in our art and literature – that, in previous centuries, was held by the sea: a repository of everything that is threatening and enticing and other. Outer space is the locus, as the sea was for island people writing Anglo-Saxon poems, of the idea of a special sort of loneliness, a confrontation with the sublime.

Mars, especially among the planets, has taken the place of the mythic island: of Ultima Thule. Carl Sagan once said that Mars was "a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our earthly hopes and fears". This is the Mars not of comical little green men, but of Ray Bradbury's haunting stories – Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed, for instance. It's the Mars Doctor Manhattan visits when he leaves Earth in Watchmen. It's the Mars, emotionally, of the chorus in David Bowie's Life on Mars.

These photographs inspire not only awe and wonder, but also a sort of longing. None of us alive at this moment – possibly no human ever – will see these landscapes with our own eyes. And yet here are the pictures. For me, they have the same effect as great paintings or photographs – a feeling that something impossible has been made present, while remaining just out of reach. That a man and a woman are standing in a room that has never existed, or that a moment in time, irretrievably lost, is just the other side of a pane of glass. It comforts and it saddens. Holy shit, indeed.

For more photographs, go to guardian.co.uk/science/space

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 21 Mar 2010 | 4:30 pm

Flood fears recede in Fargo as river hits crest (AP)

AP - The good news was all about things that didn't happen: No floodwaters pushing aside hastily built sandbag walls, no neighborhoods evacuated, no panicked residents wondering if they'd ever see their homes again.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Mar 2010 | 4:20 pm

In pictures: Breathtaking new images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

Breathtaking new images from Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, taken as part of its ongoing study of the planet

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 21 Mar 2010 | 4:15 pm

Another Good Reason Not to Shoot Nukes at Asteroids

A new study suggests that even if you did successfully blow up an asteroid with a nuclear weapon, the newly radioactive asteroid pieces could reform under mutual gravity in an astonishingly fast rate.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Mar 2010 | 4:13 pm

Job Loss Takes a Toll on Mental Health (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - In an era of 9.7 percent unemployment, no one needs to be told that losing your job is bad for your bank account. But unemployment also undermines a less-obvious measure of well-being: mental health.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Mar 2010 | 4:10 pm

Atom bomb tests to help detect wine fraud

'Bomb pulse' in grapes harvested since atmospheric tests can be dated to within a year

A trace of Bikini atoll could join hints of black cherry and complex citrus notes in the sommelier's lexicon for describing fine wines, research has suggested.

Harmless amounts of radioactive carbon have been found in wines made from grapes harvested since the last atmospheric atomic bomb tests were carried out in the 1960s.

But the "bomb pulse" of radioactive carbon lingering in the alcohol of wines produced since could be a good thing for wine dealers and collectors.

Scientists have been able to pinpoint a wine's vintage to within a year by analysing the levels of radioactive carbon in the wine, a technique they say could help detect fraudulent attempts to repackage cheap plonk as a high-end tipple.

Last month, a group of French wine dealers were charged with conning leading US winery E&J Gallo into buying 18m bottles of plonk repackaged as pinot noir.

Some experts claim that around 5% of fine wines currently being sold are faked, either by being diluted with cheaper wines or sold under false labels.

The fraud is driven by the extraordinary prices commanded by top-quality wines. A case of Chateau Lafite Rothschild 1982 – which cost £2,613 in 2000 – sold for more than £25,000 last year.

"The problem goes beyond ordinary consumers being overcharged for a bottle of expensive wine from a famous winery with a great year listed on the label," said Graham Jones, of the University of Adelaide. "Connoisseurs collect vintage wines and prices have soared.", with investment wines selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction."

The wine industry has introduced special seals and labels in an attempt to frustrate fraudsters, but Jones believes analysing a wine's bomb pulse may give people more confidence that they have not been conned.

Almost all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere contains the stable carbon-12 form of the element. Each atom of carbon-12 has six neutrons and six protons in its nucleus. But atmospheric atomic bomb tests, which ended in 1963, released vast amounts of radioactive carbon-14 into the air. A carbon-14 atom has two extra neutrons.

When grapes grow on the vine, they absorb carbon dioxide, which contains both stable carbon and traces of radioactive carbon-14 left over from bomb tests, from the air. As time goes by, carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning dilutes the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere.

Speaking at the American Chemical Society annual meeting in San Francisco today, Jones said his team had been able to date wines by measuring the relative amounts of carbon-12 and carbon-14 in the alcohol produced from the grapes.

"The year that the grapes were grown fixes the age or vintage of the wine," he added.

The scientists analysed 20 Australian reds with vintages from 1958 to 1997 and compared their levels of radioactivity with calibrated sources of radiation.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 21 Mar 2010 | 4:00 pm

Purifying the sea one drop at a time

Microfluidic channels offer promise of cheap, portable desalination.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/FVbBWU7ojoo" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 21 Mar 2010 | 4:00 pm

Cancer genes silenced in humans

Tiny particles carrying short strands of RNA can interfere with protein production in tumours.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 21 Mar 2010 | 4:00 pm

Will 'Vooks' be the Kindle Killer?

There’s a new story-telling medium in town that may have the potential to help the iPad put the final nail in Kindle’s coffin: The vook.
Source: Livescience.com | 21 Mar 2010 | 3:16 pm

Demolition Derby is Never-Ending in Saturn's Rings

A billion miles away there is a never-ending demolition derby taking place among myriad flying boulders that have been bumping and grinding inside Saturn’s magnificent rings since the early days of the solar system.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Mar 2010 | 3:13 pm

Tell it to mi duck, love | Ian McMillan

Linguistic variations are a great pleasure. Just do some tab hanging in Derbyshire and you'll see

Official definitions are slippery fish, of course, but Wikipedia describes an isogloss as "the geographical boundary of a certain linguistic feature, such as the pronunciation of a vowel, the meaning of a word, or use of some syntactic feature". I'm a huge fan of the unsung and rarely celebrated isogloss, although I prefer to call it the house/arse interface. It meddles with our daily lives all the time in an entertaining and rewarding fashion, reminding us of the diversity of our humanity in the same way that how we eat a bag of crisps does. (Fingers all the way into the salty cave? Tipping upwards as though drinking mead? Handfuls or a single unit? It's a discussion for another day.)

In Barnsley I call my house my house, but if I went to visit my cousins Ronald and Harry in north Derbyshire, they would meet me at the gate and invite me into their freshly wallpapered arse. If I walked down their street and hung the tab, as they say in those parts, I would hear statements such as "I've just had double glazing fitted in my arse", or "My mother's got a detached arse". And they would be said without any kind of music-hall, spinning bow tie, boom-boom inflection in the voice, because it's just the way people speak round there.

Somewhere between Barnsley and, say, Duckmanton or Clowne, an isogloss happens. There must be an invisible barrier just south of Sheffield where the house becomes the arse. If I measured the language of the speakers I passed with an isoglossotron it would record house/hearse/harse/arse and there would be a line I could draw on the road, perhaps somewhere on the south side of Beighton, with a piece of chalk that I happened to have in my house pocket. Or perhaps the isogloss barrier isn't invisible, but only visible in certain lights, like eclipse-glow or bonfire-gleam. That's more intriguing.

Walking to Derbyshire, though, I would have brushed against a number of isoglosses that would have tickled my face like cobwebs in an abandoned building. I could have left Barnsley saying "Now then" to the other Barnsley denizens I met on the way, and they would have "Now thenned" me back. I would have gone through the village of Birdwell and begun to walk down the A61 towards Sheffield and by the time I passed the Kop end at Hillsborough I would have been saying "Nar Den" to the Sheffielders I met on the way.

Somewhere between Birdwell and, say, Grenoside, "th" hardens to a "d". As I passed Wadsley Bridge (where I once saw two middle aged men in suits having a fight, swinging at each other and then dropping the change out of their pockets and bending down to pick it up before resuming the bout) my vowels would have widened slightly, like a clam opening. I would be saying something like "Knorr den", with a hidden "a" lurking somewhere behind the "o" like a first draft. From "Now then" to "Knorr den" over a few miles of post-industrial England; it's hardly Daniel Defoe's A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, or maybe it is, in miniature.

In Barnsley I would have called everybody, of whatever sex, "love", because living in Barnsley is like being in the rehearsal room of a provincial theatre, without the cravats. When I got within reach of Harry and Ronald I would have been calling everybody "duck".

If I carried on further south I would add a "mi" to the beak end of the duck, so that I called people "Mi duck". My progress southwards, if it was erratic enough, would see me being called a mate, a pal, a butty, a butt, a la' and a lover, as I burst through ranks of isoglosses as if I was bursting through paper walls.

In the end the isogloss hunter-gatherer like me becomes a character in a Robert Ludlum thriller. As well as the house/arse interface, it's the love/duck conundrum, the breadcake/teacake mystery (with its sequel, the bap/cob conspiracy), the pumps/daps question.

So let's celebrate the isogloss, Guardian readers. Some people, perhaps the same ones who think that childrens' playground games have died, suggest that the isogloss is extinct. Prove 'em wrong. Let's gather up these linguistic variations like those scrappers in suits gathered up their change and collect them in scrapbooks until we've got so many that we need an extension built on our arse.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 21 Mar 2010 | 2:00 pm

Nanotech robots deliver gene therapy through blood (Reuters)

Reuters - U.S. researchers have developed tiny nanoparticle robots that can travel through a patient's blood and into tumors where they deliver a therapy that turns off an important cancer gene.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Mar 2010 | 12:08 pm

Qatar to up LNG supply to India to 11.5 mln tonnes (Reuters)

Reuters - Qatar plans to raise its supply of Liquefied Natural Gas to India to 11.5 million tonnes from 2014, against the current 7.5 million tonnes a year, its oil minister Abdullah al-Attiyah said in New Delhi on Sunday.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Mar 2010 | 11:36 am

Speaking up for scientists

We can be arrogant and nerdish, but overall scientists do not set out to deceive themselves or the public

Last weekend on Cif Nicholas Maxwell accused scientists of "deceiving us and themselves about the nature of science". As an experimental biomedical scientist with 30 years of research experience, I looked for my own experience of science in his critique, but could not find it.

His main criticism is against the use of evidence to support scientific knowledge. He rejects as "nonsense" the idea that "nothing is accepted permanently as part of scientific knowledge independently of evidence". He cites subjects such as physics, where he says unified theories are accepted independent of evidence.

In the biomedical sciences, things are rather different. Research is conducted on the basis of a hypothesis and experiments are designed to probe the hypothesis. The results are analysed using statistical tests to decide whether the data agree or disagree with the hypothesis. Even if we are convinced by the results ourselves, we still need to convince our peers through the peer-review publication process.

This sort of science is not big science; it is incremental science. Each increment in knowledge may seem small, but it contributes to a body of knowledge which may eventually lead to an overarching theory. This evidence-based approach is fundamental to the biomedical sciences and has also transformed the practice of medicine. Maxwell believes scientists see themselves as "seekers after truth". In my view, this is a misrepresentation of the way science works; I prefer to see the scientific process as providing descriptions of natural phenomena that are consistent based on current evidence.

Maxwell goes on to consider "value" in the aims of science. Here I believe he is asking whether experiments performed are worth doing in terms of their outcomes. Most biomedical scientists would consider their work to be of intrinsic value as, by its very nature, biomedical science investigates topics related to human health and disease. But this is not enough and researchers do need to question continually the value of work performed. Some research will lead to high-value outcomes and some will not, but it is difficult to predict this at the outset. One important control of value comes from the peer-review process embedded in publication of results and in the grant review process.

Finally, Maxwell refers to "knowledge of valuable truth", which I believe relates to the dissemination and use by humanity of the results of useful research. Publication is one way of disseminating results, but it does not ensure the results are used well or widely known. High-quality reporting of science in the press (of which there is almost none) would help to disseminate scientific findings. There is also a political dimension as the use of results for the greater good depends in some cases on governments. Climate change is a good example: the scientific results about the effects of anthropogenic global warming are known but governments are sitting on their hands rather than taking difficult decisions.

Finally, let me speak up for scientists. In my experience, the vast majority of scientists are honest, sometimes slightly nerdish people who are grateful to be able to work on something about which they have a passionate interest. Scientists can be arrogant: but overall they do not deceive themselves, or the public.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 21 Mar 2010 | 11:00 am