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Study points out risks of nonromantic sexual relationshipsA study has found that one-third of sexual relationships in the Chicago area lack exclusivity. One in 10 men and women reported that both they and their partner had slept with other people. Lovers in "friends with benefits" situations or those "hooking up" with a stranger or acquaintance proved much more likely to have multiple partners.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Apr 2010 | 3:00 pm Marathon runners should pick cherries for speedy recoveryScientists examined the properties of Montmorency cherries in a study that found that athletes who drank the juice recovered faster after Marathon running than a placebo controlled group.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Apr 2010 | 3:00 pm Treatment checklists may cut hospital deathsPatient deaths at three London hospitals have been cut by almost 15 percent after introducing treatment checklists (known as care bundles), a new study finds.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Apr 2010 | 3:00 pm Traces of early Native Americans -- in sunflower genesNew information about early Native Americans' horticultural practices comes not from hieroglyphs or other artifacts, but from a suite of four gene duplicates found in wild and domesticated sunflowers. Scientists learned duplications of the gene flowering locus T, or FT, could have evolved and interacted to prolong a flower's time to grow. A longer flower growth period means a bigger sunflower -- presumably an attribute of value to the plant's first breeders.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Apr 2010 | 3:00 pm Weak link in Alzheimer's drug candidates: Some may cause further neural degenerationSome current therapies being investigated for Alzheimer's disease may cause further neural degeneration and cell death, according to a breakthrough discovery.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Apr 2010 | 3:00 pm Electronic medical records may accelerate genome-driven diagnoses and treatmentsA new study reveals an exciting potential benefit of the rapidly accumulating databases of health care information, the ability to make unprecedented links between genomic data and clinical medicine. The research supports the idea that large scale DNA databanks linked to electronic medical record (EMR) systems provide a valuable platform for discovering, assessing and validating associations between genes and diseases.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Apr 2010 | 3:00 pm Plastic electronics could slash the cost of solar panelsBy producing plastics that are translucent, malleable and able to conduct electricity, researchers have opened the door to broader use of the materials in a wide range of electrical devices.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am Mars rover Spirit may have begun months-long hibernationThe most powerful camera aboard a NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars has returned the first pictures of locations on the Red Planet suggested by the public.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am Metabolic disease: Differential drug response in lean and obese patients explainedOne thing that predisposes individuals who are obese to type 2 diabetes is the persistent, low-level inflammation that results, in part, from dysregulation of the function of white fat tissue in the abdominal cavity between the internal organs (visceral white fat tissue). New insight into the signaling pathways that contribute to visceral white fat tissue dysregulation has now been provided by researchers who determined that the PPAR-gamma signaling pathway operates differently in the visceral white fat tissue of lean and obese mice and humans.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am Anti-HIV drugs inhibit emerging virus linked to prostate cancer and chronic fatigue syndromeFour drugs used to treat HIV infection can inhibit a retrovirus recently linked to prostate cancer and chronic fatigue syndrome, researchers have shown. The findings suggest that if XMRV (xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus) is proven to be a cause for prostate cancer or chronic fatigue syndrome, those illnesses may be treatable with drugs already approved for treating HIV.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am The nation's weather (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Apr 2010 | 3:29 am Conservation calls as Canada bear hunt season opens (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Apr 2010 | 2:36 am Russia to help Venezuela's nuclear bid: Chavez (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Apr 2010 | 1:15 am The absurdity of patenting genes | Bad ScienceA court has overturned patents owned by Myriad on the BRCA1 breast cancer gene. But such patents can have a chilling effect on research This week the Association for Molecular Pathology, working with the American Civil Liberties Union, won a major victory, overturning some of the patents owned by a company called Myriad on the BRCA1 gene for breast cancer. There are three reasons why gene patents like these are stupid: only the last one is funny. Patents are a sensible idea, because people are more likely to invest in innovation if they believe it will give them a competitive advantage over other people, and because patents allow people to share their discoveries safely, instead of monetising their advantage by keeping a discovery secret. But patents also act as a barrier to innovation, and gene patents bring these disadvantages into stark relief. Different people have slightly different forms of the BRCA1 gene, and these confer different risks for breast cancer, so doctors like to run tests and see which form you have. Myriad were not granted a patent on these tests: instead they got a patent on the BRCA1 genes themselves, which are out there, present in humanity, and naturally-occurring. This has had a chilling effect on clinical activity and research. One of the plaintiffs in the case against them, for example, is a patient who had a BRCA1 test from Myriad, and would like it independently verified by someone else's test of the same gene. She cannot have such a test: in the US only Myriad are allowed to offer BRCA1 tests (and they charge over $3,000). The company has gone after people developing tests for risk of cancer using the BRCA1 gene, and this has retarded the development of new tests. In fact, a survey in 2003 of all leading laboratory directors in the US looked at the extent of this research chill in all areas of medicine from gene patents, and found that 53% had "decided not to develop or perform a test/service for clinical or research purposes because of a patent". This is not surprising, as a study from 2005 found that about a fifth of all the 23,688 genes in the human genome – the code that makes up you — have already been patented. But these tests are just the tip of the research iceberg. Almost all basic science research on the BRCA1 breast cancer gene over the past 12 years has infringed Myriad's patent, and although the company has tended not to go after basic science researchers, they have never promised that they won't in the future, so this academic research on a major risk factor for a major killer — the most common cancer in women worldwide — continues only with Myriad's indulgence, making it risky work. But that's only the half of it. A paper titled "Metastasizing patent claims in BRCA1", just published in the journal Genomics, examines the true extent of the BRCA1 patents granted in 1998, and they are laughably absurd. The authors examine patent #4,747,282. This makes claim to any sequence of 15 nucleotides, the "letters" of the genetic code, coding for any part of the protein made by the BRCA1 gene. First they calculate how absurdly broad this claim is, from first principles. There are about 1.6 million different 15-nucleotide sequences that could code for some part of the BRCA1 protein. There are 1.07 billion possible different 15-nucleotide sequences in total. Therefore, this patent covers roughly one in every 600 of all imaginable 15-nucleotide DNA sequences. As a typical human gene is a sequence of about 10,000 nucleotides, then on average (if you assumed that human genes were random strings of nucleotides) you would expect every human gene to contain about 15 of the 15-nucleotide sequences claimed under the BRCA1 patent. Then they tested their model against reality: in a giant computing task, they took all the 15-nucleotide sequences from the BRCA1 gene, and searched for them, just on chromosome 1: they found 340,000 matches, roughly the same as their theoretical prediction, and the equivalent of 14 infringing sequences on every human gene. The BRCA1 gene, incidentally, is on chromosome 17. The claims in this patent therefore extend, if properly enforced, to almost every single gene, in every single person on the planet. There is a moral and practical argument to be had about patenting nature, but the rights conferred in this patent are basically absurd. 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 | 3 Apr 2010 | 1:00 am Exotic 'Electroweak' Star PredictedWhen a star dies, depending on its mass, it will form a white dwarf, neutron star or a black hole. Or will it? Perhaps there's an intermediate "electroweak" phase that may save the remnant from black hole doom.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 2 Apr 2010 | 10:16 pm Parkinson's Linked to Genetic Mutation (HealthDay)HealthDay - FRIDAY, April 2 (HealthDay News) -- New details about how a mutation in a gene called LRRK2 may cause Parkinson's disease have been uncovered by U.S. researchers.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Apr 2010 | 9:48 pm Russia offers Venezuela nuclear help, Chavez says (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Apr 2010 | 9:48 pm Putin bolsters oil, defense ties with Venezuela (Reuters)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Apr 2010 | 7:36 pm iPad's Comfort Factor Questioned (LiveScience.com)LiveScience.com - The iPad wait ends Saturday as consumers finally get their hands on Apple's latest creation. But how comfortable will the iPad actually be to play with and work on? Some inauspicious clues come courtesy of the "guided tour" videos posted on the Apple Web site this past Monday. The short clips suggest how people might go about using an iPad for doing everything from checking email to watching videos to putting together presentations. Overall, the videos reveal that the iPad may not be as physically kind to a user as one might expect. ...Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Apr 2010 | 7:31 pm Why the Younger Dryas MattersWhat caused the last great stab of cold 13,000 years ago? Almost overnight, it seems, something drove the gradually warming Northern Hemisphere back into the ice age for 1,000 years or more until warming resumed. People researching the behavior of ...Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 2 Apr 2010 | 6:03 pm No more disappointments: Choose the sex of your childIt's one thing to wish for a baby boy or girl, quite another to make it happen. Amanda Mitchison meets the couples heading abroad – where the sex selection business is booming Susan Gunn is a slender, pretty woman married to Robert, an investment manager. Robert is a martial arts fiend and has a coiled-up, physical intensity that suggests he could, with one flick of his pinkie, pluck out your carotid artery. Of course he wouldn't – he's a most genial man – but that impression must help in his line of work. The Gunns live in a nice suburban street in the south of England with their three small boys, but there is not a toy or half-chewed rusk to be seen. We sit around a glass coffee table. The room is clean and modern, the furnishings are that chicken soup colour favoured by architects – and expensive private clinics. Which is just where they are heading. The Gunns want a baby girl. They are off next week to California to undergo in vitro fertilisation using a screening process called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). The couple seem slightly bemused. Not so much because they are travelling halfway round the world for a fantastically expensive and invasive treatment. But because they can't quite understand how they ended up having three boys in the first place. "Robert had always wanted a girl," Susan says. "We learned that our first child was a boy, and that was fantastic, and we kind of expected the next one to be a girl." Robert adds: "We were on the 'girl diet' for months. No red wine, no red meat, no coffee, and you had to have white rice and fish and chicken. It was quite bizarre. My friend was on it, too. He had a girl." Robert and Susan had a second boy. "But in my family, and in Robert's, there are two boys and then two girls," Susan says. "I looked at my Christmas card list. Very weirdly, most of our friends have got two boys, and the ones who did go on to have a third child had a girl. Irrationally, I began to think to myself, 'Oh, this is how it is going to be… you have two boys and then you get a girl.' " But the Gunns got a third boy. They are, of course, thrilled. But, Susan says, "I got sick of walking down the high street past BabyGap and seeing these delightful little girl outfits in the window and just getting this pang. This is an area of our lives that we can't influence unless we pay for it. Hmm, that doesn't sound very nice but…" Robert, head down, shoulders hunched, adds: "We often get what we want in our lives. But we work for it." And they did work for it. They trawled the internet and found the Fertility Institutes clinic in Los Angeles, run by Doctor Jeffrey Steinberg. They spoke to him on the phone. They booked in. Susan had the blood tests and has started the course of drugs, and soon they'll be off to LA. They'll take the boys with them, and visit Disneyland between the egg harvesting and implantation. Steinberg's clinic is a slick operation. It provides payment plans, a travel agent, a list of restaurants and hotels, and a babysitting service. Total cost: £25,000-£30,000. The couple have told a couple of close friends, and Susan's mother. Nobody else. Robert says, "I won't tell my parents because my mother would use it as a dinner party conversation." The issue does come up at dinner parties. "Once they've done, 'Ohmigod, you've got three boys!' they do, 'Are you going to try for a girl?' " Susan says. "People have said, 'Oh, I've heard you can do it abroad now. Why don't you just go abroad?' And we just kick each other under the table." Nicola and Michael Trathen run a property empire and live on the outskirts of Plymouth in a huge, opulently decorated manor house that doubles as a wedding venue. Hosting weddings is just one of Nicola's businesses. Another is a cosmetic surgery clinic offering skin tightening and laser liposuction. A side benefit is treatment on the house. Nicola lifts up her shirt to reveal a perfectly flat, bronzed tummy. "Not bad for six children," she beams. Ten years ago, the Trathens were in much the same position as the Gunns. They had three boys and wanted a girl. Then Nicola got pregnant again. At 27 weeks she had a private scan to find out the sex of the child. "They were 98% positive it was a girl. But I didn't do the pink nursery thing. I did it all in mint and lemon, just in case." Which was just as well: the fourth baby turned out to be a boy. "I was shocked," she says. "But it was my little boy, and quite naturally I absolutely adored him. I thought, 'It was you I loved for the last nine months, not a little girl called Zara!'" So Zara became Adam. And Michael had a vasectomy. "I can remember lying on the bed and just crying because we had decided we weren't going to have any more children and I couldn't have a girl," Nicola says. "I remember seeing someone in town with a little girl all dressed up. I thought, 'I'm never going to have that.' You're not upset with what you have got. You are traumatised by what you haven't got – rightly or wrongly. And that isn't an emotion you can control." Then came a moment of revelation: "It was April and Adam was two months old. I was sitting there feeding him, the TV was on, and I caught the tail end of this documentary. [Dr] Paul Rainsbury was talking about gender selection and he said it was possible to choose the sex of your child 100%. And it was like a bolt – oh my gosh! I called Mike and said, 'That has got to be fate.'" Although Michael had had a vasectomy, they were able to extract his sperm, and Nicola went for the initial treatment at the Rainsbury Clinic in London. She had IVF, and went to Spain for PGD treatment. Seven weeks later, Nicola found out she was pregnant with twin girls. She had the nursery prepared – special lights in the shape of the girls' initials, pale, rose-pink walls chosen by a French designer, a bespoke circular cot with a little steeple from which to hang a princess train. When the twins were born, she called them Georgia and Danielle. They are, says Nicola, "completely different from the boys in every respect. The boys are rough and running around with guns. The girls are usually attached to my side, drawing, doing make-up, nail varnish, watching princess movies and just chatting constantly. Ah! I can hear Danielle." Out in the hallway are two pretty six-year-old girls in pink shifts. They take me to their bedroom, a bower of pinkness, with a pink plastic princess palace and two pink double buggies, for Georgia and Danielle's twin girl baby dolls. The twins wriggle and clamber and tumble around the room. They are lovely, lively girls. One has straight blond hair, the other is a curly brunette. One is academic, the other sporty. Nicola gestures to the two little heads. "You see, a mini me and a mini Daddy – but a beautiful mini Daddy." Mini Daddy still looks less than pleased: "Don't want to be a mini Daddy." "That's all right, darling. You can be a mini Mummy, too." The Gunns and Trathens could never have their sex selection treatment in this country. Unless there are serious medical grounds – such as a parent being a carrier for a sex-linked genetic disease – it is illegal in the UK to choose the sex of your child. The original law, passed in 1993, was further scrutinised in 2003 when the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the regulatory body for reproductive medicine in Britain, held a year-long public consultation. Any discussion of sex selection is haunted by the spectre of the millions of missing girls of India and China. The 2000 Chinese census showed there were 117 boys under the age of five to every 100 girls. A similar trend is reported in India, which also has a deep-seated cultural preference for boys. So one fear was that, with sex selection, the population of Britain would become unbalanced. But the HFEA quickly concluded this was most unlikely. Although "a disproportionately high" percentage of couples actively seeking sex selection were non-Europeans preferring boys, overall, families seemed to want both sexes. Other reports suggest a mild preference among Caucasians for girls. (Nicola Trathen says she has been contacted by more than 100 women seeking her advice, and most have wanted a girl.) However, the HFEA did encounter another stumbling block: "a general moral consensus" against sex selection. In a Mori poll, 82% of the population opposed sex selection for non–medical reasons. As the report said, "A great many respondents felt that sex selection was unqualifiedly wrong because it involved interference with divine will or with what they saw as the intrinsically virtuous course of nature." There was also mention of sex selection being a little farther down a slippery slope towards designer babies. And then the real clincher: wasn't sex selection for the benefit of the parents, rather than of the child? The report noted that, among some respondents, "The view was that it is one thing to wish to have a child of one sex rather than the other and another thing to take steps to bring it about, since positive intervention in this area changes one's relationship to the outcome, replacing hopes with expectations… Respect for the future child's value as an individual precludes the exercise of control by parents over the kind of child it is to be, including over its sex." The HFEA concluded that the benefits of sex selection were "at best debatable and certainly not great enough to sustain a policy to which the great majority of the public are strongly opposed". The authority recommended a continuation of the ban. In 2007, the law was tightened further. Until then, there had been a loophole. "Sperm sorting" techniques were regulated only in cases where donor sperm was used, meaning that women who used their partner's sperm were exempt from the law. Today, all sperm sorting is banned. So British couples wanting to choose the sex of their child must now go abroad, and the most common choice is the US, where sex selection is legal in every state. There is no way of knowing how many women go – people tend to keep quiet about it. But Steinberg's clinic treats 25 to 30 British patients a year, while Rainsbury sees 70 to 80 women. And the famous Genetics & IVF Institute (GIVF), in Virginia, also has a steady contingent of British patients. There are other clinics, too, so the overall figure is probably in the low hundreds. Steinberg, a bullish, charismatic showman, has been offering PGD for 14 years, but over the last two, he says, "the business has just gone wild". The great majority of his sex selection cases are couples coming for "family balancing". It is rare, he says, for people to sex select when they have no children already. He says he treats these cases with some caution and recommends counselling. (Some clinics, such as GIVF, will carry out only "family balancing", and restrict treatment to couples who already have at least one child of the other sex.) Ninety per cent of Steinberg's Chinese families come for boys and, for reasons he hasn't fathomed, 70% of his Canadian patients are trying for girls. "The Brits are fairly evenly split, perhaps slightly favouring girls," he says. "When people come in, we can often tell what sex they want before they tell us," he adds. "We find that if it's the woman who makes the first appointment, 70% of the time they're going to be wanting a girl. If the man calls up, 90% of the time it's for a boy." The ban on sex selection in the UK provides Steinberg with a brisk business. But he is puzzled by the British attitude. "I trained in Cambridge. The British were the pioneers in in vitro technology. They were the most dynamic and aggressive practitioners and now… Tch. Well, it's a British thing." But a change in attitudes, Steinberg believes, is inevitable. He recalls the public furore 30 years ago when human in vitro fertilisation was first introduced. "I remember somebody left a note on my car saying, 'Test tube babies have no souls.' And now? Now it's a non-issue." Last year, Steinberg announced his clinics would soon be offering his PGD patients the chance to select not only the sex of their babies, but also their eye and hair colour, and complexion. The public response was not positive, and a month later he backed down. "We dropped it. I'm very open. OK, fine. I realise this is not the correct thing to be doing now." Note that "now". Whether current science is really able to isolate eye or hair colour – and other fertility experts express doubt – doctor Steinberg's assumption that the public eventually will adopt new technologies, however outlandish they may first appear, rings true. We modify, we adapt and we build new rituals. Sex selection may not be dinner party conversation just yet, but its normalisation is already under way. GIVF gives each family a framed picture of their embryos just before implantation. The institute also holds annual baby reunions, and families come back year after year with their kids. Recently, the institute's first IVF baby got married and a GIVF founder walked the bride down the aisle alongside her father. We follow advances in medicine, and we are also pushed. Take the foetal ultrasound. Fifteen years ago, when I was pregnant with my first son, every mother had a scan at 18-20 weeks of gestation – it was a standard part of obstetric practice, as it still is today (there is also now an earlier scan at eight to 14 weeks). We were asked if we wanted to know the sex of the child, and some people said yes. Some people, not most. Since then, there has been a subtle shift. Today, most women know the sex of the child they are carrying – because they can know. The Gunns have always found out the sex of their babies. Susan says, "I used to be a CEO of a company and Robert is a managing director. So can you imagine coming from that mindset and having a baby in your body, and your baby holding a secret and you don't know? In the nicest possible way, I needed to know." Today, those who decide they would rather wait until their baby is born to discover the sex can feel they are "holding out". Lisa Weinbrenn, a 37-year-old television executive, is pregnant. She says, "I can't tell you what I'm having, and I think that is pretty unique. If I knew, I would have projected a whole future for him or her. I'm excited about that lack of control." But women such as Weinbrenn seem increasingly to be in the minority. The website in-gender.com gets more than 10,000 British emails a year. The site acts, in part, as a confessional where women – usually with children of the other sex already – post to say that they are devastated not to have a baby girl or a baby boy. Usually it's a girl. There is a lot of sadness and guilt and desperation. Women express feelings they might not share with their partners, families or, in some cases, with their better selves. The replies are universally supportive. Last month, "English Rose" wrote that she was contemplating getting pregnant and aborting the foetus after the first scan if it wasn't a girl. The replies weren't: "Get a grip, woman! That's illegal." They were more along the lines of, "I'm so sorry you are going through this." These communities act as a hothouse for what in the past might have gone unsaid. A desire becomes a need, and then that need becomes pathologised. From reading these sites, you might think these women suffered from an illness. Like all good syndromes, this one has its own initials: GD (Gender Disappointment) – sometimes even EGD (Extreme Gender Disappointment). A researcher from the department of sociology and anthropology at the University of Guelph, in Canada, is currently carrying out a survey of GD sufferers. It is a desire not restricted to go-getting types such as the Trathens or the Gunns, either. Dr Gary Harton, who runs the PGD clinic at GIVF, says, "We get regular workaday folk. He's a cop. She's a schoolteacher. It's just very, very important to them. People will take out mortgages, they'll borrow from relatives. They'll do anything." At the moment, the cost of IVF treatment is prohibitive, and sperm sorting remains too hi-tech to be reduced to a DIY kit you can buy at the chemist. But, sooner or later, the law in the UK may change. The HFEA is not standing on very firm ground – it does not claim an overriding moral objection, but bases its decision on the fact that most people don't really like the idea of sex selection. This may be true now, but for how long? As our society becomes ever more commodified, and our sense of self-entitlement grows, so in every field of life we are making that little gear change from hope into expectation. It may be only a matter of time before women are demanding PGD sex selection on the NHS. If the state will fund IVF for a baby, why not for a baby girl? Or a baby boy? But at the heart of this debate remains the fact that every child, while belonging to one sexual group or another, is unique. When you have a child, you open yourself to that uniqueness – our most intimate of relationships is with a person who starts out unknown to us. So you choose your child's sex at a price. You compromise a little bit of that unknownness. You chip away at the idea of their uniqueness. And when you do have your baby, you don't get a generic girl. You get Susan. Or Jane. Or Eleanor. Or Ted. It is the end of the day and I've just collected Ted, the younger of my two sons, from his school. In the car, I tell him I've been writing about people choosing the sex of their children. He says, "What did you want?" "I don't know," I reply. Of course I know. "Before you were born, Granny used to say you'd be 'a little brown-eyed sister for Sam'. And then out came Ted!" I look at my lovely son. Brown hair, freckles, lunch stains down his front, shirt hanging out. He's fiddling with the radio controls. He always fiddles. He says, "I mean, if you had a baby now?" "Well, of course I'd want a girl!" He says, "Hmm." "Girls are less trouble, you know." "Yeah," he says. "But boys are funner." • Robert and Susan Gunn are pseudonyms. 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 | 2 Apr 2010 | 5:13 pm This column will change your life: Is self-discipline the key to success? | Oliver BurkemanEven a committed hedonistic life requires plenty of self-discipline: you need it actually to book the flight to Bali or to arrange the circumstances for wild sexual encounters Self-discipline, as human virtues go, is a pretty bloody annoying one. It has a pinched, goody-two-shoes, pleasure-denying air about it; it is the voice of the moralising teacher, or of the rightwing commentator who prescribes it as a remedy for every social ill but whose private life, one suspects, is a quagmire of neurosis and self-hate. Put it this way: you don't look forward to a big party at the weekend because you've been told all the self-disciplined people are going to be there. And yet – this is the annoying part – it's arguably by far the most important quality to cultivate. With enough of it, most desirable things (fulfilling relationships or work, happy moods, lots of money) are attainable; without it, none is. Even a committed hedonistic life requires plenty of self-discipline: you need it even to book the flight to Bali, to obtain those recreational drugs or to arrange the circumstances for wild sexual encounters. Otherwise inertia will out and you'll end up on the couch, half-dressed, watching reruns of Antiques Roadshow and eating baked beans. I speak, as ever, from experience. It's with all this in mind that I've been testing the Pomodoro Technique, a productivity method that has recently achieved quasi-cult status online. Its originator, Francisco Cirillo, has been teaching it for 10 years, but it has now spawned several web-based fan groups and at least three iPhone apps. Adherents use words such as "godsend" to describe its effect on their ability to focus. In truth, it's unmiraculous, but then so are most genuinely useful things. Here's what you do: you pick a task, then set a timer – a tool celebrated previously in this space – for 25 minutes, no exceptions. Cirillo uses a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato, and is Italian, hence "pomodoro". Work. When it rings, stop for five minutes. Repeat three more times, then take a longer break. That's just about it. Yet it works. Half of all those reading that last paragraph will blink in confusion: "Why do you need a technique? Why can't you just do stuff?" But the rest of us know that such tricks can be hugely effective, slowly strengthening the self-discipline muscle. They are, literally, tricks: the ticking clock takes an internal desire to get something done and fools some part of the brain into thinking it's external, that the clock must be obeyed. (Stopping dead at 25 minutes also creates useful momentum for starting again five minutes later.) Even the hokey language – Cirillo calls each 25-minute period a pomodoro – helps, by making the time-blocks seem like "things", out in the world. Another geeky productivity scheme with an online following, Autofocus achieves something similar using cleverly structured to-do lists to "force" the user to confront the tasks they've resolutely been avoiding. The illusion, voluntarily swallowed, is that choice has been removed – that there's something stopping you from choosing to abandon your focus and default to whatever inertia would have you do: daydream, websurf, beerdrink. Some people take this too far, establishing inner mental drill sergeants to yell at them all day, sapping the joy from life. Judiciously applied, though, this mental trickery is too useful a resource to ignore. Our brains are so easy to fool that it's borderline embarrassing; you might as well salvage some self-respect by exploiting that fact. oliver.burkeman@guardian.co.uk 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 | 2 Apr 2010 | 5:10 pm Unthinkable? Britain on the moon | EditorialThe UK's record in space is one of dwindling ambition and big mistakes, but a new mission is a chance to change that The European Space Agency has invited enterprising engineers to devise a machine to land on the moon. It must fly to the lunar south pole, decide for itself on a safe place to touch down, and carry detectors sensitive enough to monitor any potential hazards while prospecting for water and minerals that future European lunarnauts might exploit. The lander must think for itself because it will be in territory that cannot be observed directly from Earth, and it will prospect for ice in frosty craters and crevices where the sun never shines. President Obama cancelled Nasa's own back-to-the-moon Constellation programme in February, but India is working with the Russians on a robot moon lander, and China plans not only a soft lander but, in a decade or so, its own lunarnaut mission. Because launch costs are so high, such missions are powered by vaulting ambition and very small hardware. Alas, Britain's record in space is one of dwindling ambition and big mistakes: this nation launched one satellite, Prospero, aboard just one British rocket, Black Arrow in 1971, and for decades after invested half-heartedly in the great European partnership. But Britain is a member of the European Space Agency, and has just launched, at last, a UK Space Agency. Now there is a chance to land something made in Milton Keynes or Manchester amid the sunless craters and rugged ridges of the moon. It will be, literally, a leap into the unknown. For once, the cliched question seems entirely proper: are we up to it? 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 | 2 Apr 2010 | 5:06 pm Et cetera: Steven Poole's non-fiction choice | Book reviewsOn international law, language and Pluto's demotion Victors' Justice, by Danilo Zolo, translated by MW Weir (Verso, £14.99) From the Nuremberg trials to the quasi-judicial killing of Saddam Hussein, the international law of war delivers only "victors' justice", argues this book by an Italian philosopher of law: in particular, the new tribunals and courts are given no powers to prosecute "aggressive war" waged by western powers. The main interest in Zolo's version of this familiar argument is given by his detailed close readings of institutional charters and statutes from the League of Nations onwards, and some boisterously sarcastic demolitions of such figures as the Michaels Ignatieff and Walzer, whom he paints as the modern equivalents of Catholic theologians justifying their kings' raiding parties. He formulates nicely the fundamental contradiction in the ideal of "humanitarian war": "Modern warfare is itself the most radical negation of the rights of individuals, starting from the right to life." Unfortunately, there is throughout an air, too, of special pleading: scholars who agree with him are routinely called "authoritative"; large American bombs are described, bizarrely, as "quasi-nuclear"; Security Council members Russia and China, when disagreeing with the US, are figured complacently as "representing" their populations. The book's polemic is most effective when hewing closest to texts, and in Zolo's persuasive exploitation of Carl Schmitt, a figure often shunned by liberals, yet one who foresaw already in 1950 that war was being transformed into "police bombing", such that "one is compelled to push the discrimination of the opponent into the abyss". A Little Book of Language, by David Crystal (Yale, £14.99) The linguist David Crystal publishes a new book on language roughly every quarter of an hour these days, so one has to admire his undimmed gift for enthusiastic silliness: "We can even make up nonsense words and people will be able to read them. Doolaboola!" This is a gentle introduction to various facets of language study: from language acquisition in babies, to historical spelling change and linguistic evolution, sign language, slang, place-names, new electronic-writing traditions, advertising rhetoric, and so forth. Advertising rhetoric, you say? Well, take this book's jacket copy – the book, it becomes clear, is aimed at school-age readers, but the blurb coyly says only that it's a book "for all ages". It can have a groovy-uncle feel (Crystal advises the reader to invent a band name by spelling words differently, and comes up with the example "Kool Doods"), and seems just to be wrong in calling "imho" and "rotfl" examples of "texting" usage (they originated much earlier in internet discussion groups). Compensation arrives with a striking image: "As we grow up, we build a language wardrobe inside our heads. Instead of clothes, we have styles." Word. The Pluto Files, by Neil de Grasse Tyson (Norton, £11.99) Spacewatching readers will recall the kerfuffle a few years ago when Pluto was stripped of its status as a planet. In this delightful illustrated book, the astrophysicist author conducts a brief historical tour of the discovery of Pluto (as late as 1930); explains the dynamics of celestial bodies; and recounts critically the media excitement over Pluto's demotion, reproducing also some letters he received from schoolchildren (including the impeccably logical advice: "If you make it a planet again all the science books will be right"). Tyson's scientific message is that "counting planets" doesn't really matter; the solar system may be studied through a variety of different taxonomic lenses. Or, as an eight-year-old wrote: "We just have to get over it – that's science." 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 | 2 Apr 2010 | 5:06 pm Ex-LA fire official gets 90 days for dog beating (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Apr 2010 | 4:42 pm Why Volcanic Eruptions Can Spark Lightning
It’s the ultimate love-at-first-sight story: In the middle of the desert, hundreds of miles from anything else, lonely sand grains meet up in a crowd and decide to electrify each other. Sparks fly.
The findings could help combat a wide variety of practical problems, such as the adhesion of charged dust to solar panels on a Mars rover or the generation of dangerous electrical discharges that sometimes occur when a helicopter takes off in the desert. Dust clouds can create problems in grain silos, where charge sometimes builds up and leads to explosions, and in the pharmaceutical industry, where particles of ground-up drugs can become charged and not mix properly, says Hans Herrmann, a materials researcher at ETH Zurich. Herrmann says he became interested in the problem after watching lightning in swirling sands over dune fields at night. “Normally when particles collide, they neutralize,” he says. “How could it be that charges increase?”
Working with ETH colleague Thomas Pähtz and Troy Shinbrot of Rutgers University’s campus in Piscataway, New Jersey, Herrmann developed a model to explain how the charging happened. Before colliding, the grains have an overall neutral charge but are polarized by a background electric field, with a negative charge toward the top of the grain and a positive charge toward the bottom, relative to the ground. Upon colliding, the particles neutralize each other at the point of contact, but when they separate again they became further polarized, with additional charges building up on the grains’ edges. “Every time there’s a collision you end up pumping charge from the top to the bottom,” says Shinbrot. The researchers ran computer simulations and then a series of experiments with glass beads to confirm the theory. Daniel Lacks, a materials physicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, says the new study could be identifying one of several mechanisms at work in particle clouds. In earlier work, Lacks showed that electrical charging depends on the size of particles in question, with smaller particles tending to charge negatively and larger particles tending to charge positively. “The bottom line is that something is needed to break the symmetry when two particles of identical composition collide, in order for one particle to charge negatively and the other to charge positively,” he says. For particles of different sizes, he says his mechanism might be in play; for identically sized particles, the new model might explain it. Some challenges remain, such as explaining where the background electric field that charges the particles came from. But Herrmann says the work is philosophically satisfying, in answering a long-held question, and may yet have practical applications. Image: Oliver Spalt/Wikimedia Commons
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 2 Apr 2010 | 3:38 pm How Should Earth Respond When Aliens Say Hello? (SPACE.com)SPACE.com - If mankind ever does receive a signal from extraterrestrials, one of our first decisions may be what to write back.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Apr 2010 | 3:30 pm iPad's Comfort Factor QuestionedHow comfortable will the iPad actually be to play with and work on?Source: Livescience.com | 2 Apr 2010 | 3:29 pm iPad to Shake Up Comic Books IndustryA new iPad app could help update comic books for the 21st century.Source: Livescience.com | 2 Apr 2010 | 3:19 pm NYC study: 50 native plants disappearing (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Apr 2010 | 3:17 pm How to Choose the Right iPadThere are six iPad models, but which one should you pick?Source: Livescience.com | 2 Apr 2010 | 1:25 pm Inca Skeletons Show Evidence of Spanish Brutality
If bones could scream, a bloodcurdling din would be reverberating through a 500-year-old cemetery in Peru. Human skeletons unearthed there have yielded the first direct evidence of Inca fatalities caused by Spanish conquerors.
Surprisingly, though, no incisions or other marks characteristic of sword injuries appear on these bones, according to a team led by anthropologist Melissa Murphy of the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Spanish documents from the 16th century emphasize steel swords as a favored military weapon.
Skeletons in the Inca cemetery, as well as at another grave site about a mile away, display a gruesome array of violent injuries, many probably caused by maces, clubs and other Inca weapons, the researchers report. Those weapons may have been wielded by Inca from communities known to have collaborated with the Spanish, or might have been borrowed by the Spanish, they posit. “The nature and pattern of these skeletal injuries were unlike anything colleagues and I had seen before,” Murphy says. “Many of these people died brutal, horrible deaths.” Little is known about early European dealings with the Inca, remarks anthropologist Haagen Klaus of Utah Valley University in Orem. “Murphy’s data show the types of violence that emerged from the first moments of contact between Spaniards and the Inca,” Klaus says. Pottery and artifacts at the sites date to between 1470 and 1540, placing the deaths close to when Spaniards captured the Inca emperor around 1532. It took the invaders nearly another 40 years to control all Inca lands.
Murphy’s team assessed skeletons of 258 Inca individuals, age 15 or older, excavated several years ago at the two cemeteries. In one cemetery, bodies had been hastily deposited in shallow graves. One-quarter of 120 skeletons displayed head and body injuries inflicted at the time of death, as indicated by a lack of healed bone and other clues. That’s a conservative estimate, Murphy notes, since soft-tissue damage doesn’t show up on bones. “I’m struck by the severity of violence in certain individual cases, where the skull was essentially crushed, repeatedly stabbed or struck, or shot through by gunshot,” comments archaeologist Steven Wernke of Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Whoever killed these individuals wanted to intimidate survivors as well, he asserts. One man’s skull contained two holes and radiating fractures consistent with damage produced by early guns that shot ammunition at low velocities. Another male skull sported three small rectangular openings in the back of the head. These injuries resemble those on skulls from a 1461 battlefield cemetery in England, Murphy says. Medieval weapons tipped with steel spikes or sharp beaks probably caused these wounds, she proposes. Three other skeletons exhibited injuries likely due to Spanish weapons. Other skeletons contained head and body fractures probably inflicted by attackers bearing Inca weapons. Individuals placed in this cemetery may have been slain in a documented 1536 Inca uprising against Spanish rulers in nearby Lima, Murphy suggests. Family members collected their bodies and buried them quickly near previously deceased relatives, she speculates. At the second Inca cemetery, 18 of 138 skeletons showed definite signs of violent death, all from Inca weapons. That supports a scenario in which social turmoil around the time Spaniards arrived triggered conflicts between Inca communities, Murphy says. Images: Melissa Murphy See Also:
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Many Spaniards who helped Francisco Pizarro conquer the Incas were fortune-seekers, not soldiers, “so the absence of sword injuries makes some sense,” Murphy explains.