Science Headlines for April 4, 2010

More than one-quarter of elderly patients lack decision-making capacity at death, study finds

More than one in four elderly Americans lacked the capacity to make their own medical care decisions at the end of life, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Apr 2010 | 3:00 pm

Early detection of age-related memory deficits in mice

By studying the aging of memory in the mouse, researchers have developed an experimental protocol that can detect age-related memory deficits at an early stage. They have shown that even at 10 months, which corresponds to a third of their life expectancy, some mice present with age-related memory disorders. This work opens new perspectives for an understanding of the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the aging of memory and for the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Apr 2010 | 3:00 pm

Next decade offers promise for treatment of spinal cord injuries

Although new developments in the management of spinal cord injuries (SCI) are on the horizon, any eventual cure for the condition is more likely to involve a multidisciplinary approach, drawing from expertise in several fields, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Apr 2010 | 3:00 pm

Out of this world: New study investigates infection of human cells in space

In a first-of-its-kind experiment, the unique conditions of spaceflight will be used to examine how cells remain healthy or succumb to disease, particularly in the face of stress or damage. Researcher hope to provide fundamental new insight into the infectious disease process, and further understanding of other progressive diseases, including immune disorders and cancer.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Apr 2010 | 3:00 pm

Racetrack ion trap is a contender in quantum computing quest

Physicists have built and tested a device for trapping ions that potentially could process dozens at once with the most versatile control of any trap demonstrated to date, an advance towards the ultimate goal of building a practical quantum computer.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Apr 2010 | 3:00 pm

Essential oils to fight superbugs

Essential oils could be a cheap and effective alternative to antibiotics and potentially used to combat drug-resistant hospital superbugs, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Apr 2010 | 3:00 pm

Brain development: Floor plate tissue derived from embryonic stem cells

Researchers have used human embryonic stem cells to derive floor plate tissue, an important signaling center during brain development. This is the first study shown to derive floor plate tissue from hESCs. Floor plate development is essential in the development of the brain. Understanding how the brain develops is key to understanding how brain diseases occur.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am

New method for producing proteins critical to medical research

Scientists have developed a new method for producing proteins critical to research on cancer, Alzheimer's, and other diseases. The chemical method yields hundreds-fold more ubiquitylated proteins than current approaches. Such proteins may hold the key to revealing such mysteries as how cancer cells gain resistance to cancer drugs.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am

Significant step toward lightweight batteries

Researchers have made significant progress on a technology that could lead to batteries with up to three times the energy density of any battery that currently exists.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am

Thyroid condition increases stroke risk in young adults

Young adults with overactive thyroid face a 44 percent increased risk of stroke compared to those with normal thyroid function, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am

Russian spacecraft docks at orbiting station (AP)

AP - A U.S.-Russian space team sent their Easter greetings down to Earth Sunday after their Soyuz spacecraft docked flawlessly at the International Space Station.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Apr 2010 | 2:56 am

New Crew Arrives at Space Station on Russian Spacecraft (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - A Soyuz spacecraft carrying an American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) on Easter Sunday, boosting the orbiting lab's population up to six people just one day ahead of NASA's planned launch of the shuttle Discovery toward the outpost.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Apr 2010 | 2:31 am

U.S.-Russian crew dock at space station

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A U.S.-Russian crew in a Russian Soyuz space ship docked at the International Space Station on Sunday, the Russian space agency Roscosmos said.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 4 Apr 2010 | 1:43 am

Officials Fear Ship Breaking Apart on Barrier Reef

A Chinese ship has run aground on the Great Barrier Reef, prompting fears of environmental damage.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Apr 2010 | 1:20 am

Officials fear ship breaking apart on Barrier Reef (AP)

AP - A coal-carrying ship that ran aground and was leaking oil on Australia's Great Barrier Reef was in danger of breaking apart, officials said Sunday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Apr 2010 | 12:40 am

Air Force to launch robotic winged space plane (AP)

AP - After a decade of development, the Air Force this month plans to launch a robotic spacecraft resembling a small space shuttle to conduct technology tests in orbit and then glide home to a California runway.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Apr 2010 | 10:27 pm

Concern over non-native species

A conservation charity warns that a number of non-native mammal species are damaging the UK countryside.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Apr 2010 | 7:33 pm

IMAX puts 3D spin on science films with "Hubble 3D"

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - IMAX has returned to outer space with the movie "IMAX: Hubble 3D," a documentary that harks back to IMAX's roots in science films, but spins into a 3D, Hollywood orbit.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 3 Apr 2010 | 5:58 pm

The government's determination to control its drugs advisors meant I had no choice but to resign

The seven resignations from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs are symptomatic of scientific advisors' anger at being forced to toe an official line

Two more resignations from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, the government's key advisory committee on drugs, in just three days – mine and Eric Carlin's. Seven resignations since the summary dismissal of the former chairman, Professor David Nutt, last November.

The troubles of the AMCD are symptomatic of a deeper less visible crisis in the process by which the government uses evidence and expert advice.

Eric Carlin and I resigned for what appear to be very different reasons, but we share fundamental concerns. I stood down because the government has failed to guarantee the academic freedom and independence of its science advisers. Eric was frustrated with the way the ACMD has been pushed around by the government in its desire to throw juicy criminalisation to the baying media hounds, and with the lack of political interest in any other approach to prevention and treatment.

David Nutt was fired because he expressed views the government found uncomfortable, and because those opinions were reported by the media. Professor Nutt is an internationally respected expert in psychopharmacology – the study of drugs that affect the brain. He presented his own research results, as scientists do, in academic publications and seminars. It began in February 2009 with a research paper in a respected, peer-reviewed scientific journal, making statistical comparison between deaths and illness resulting from taking ecstasy and horse riding. This was intended as a vivid, but factual, way of illustrating how the public perception of risk is coloured by factors other than scientific evidence and that any attempt to explain relative risk often leads to a tabloid storm.

David ended up in a tabloid storm and instead of being defended by the government, he was ordered by Jacqui Smith to apologise to the parents of children who had died after taking ecstasy (though not, curiously, to the victims of horse-riding accidents).

He subsequently gave an academic lecture – attended and cleared by the Home Office secretariat – describing how the harm from legal and illegal substances might be assessed. When the lecture was published, months later, Alan Johnson sacked him by email.

The conduct of advisory committees is tightly specified by a weighty code of practice, which demands honesty and integrity from advisers, but which specifically protects, indeed facilitates, their right to inform the public about their interpretation of evidence. No breach of the code of practice by David has ever been cited by the government.

Two senior and highly respected scientist members of the council immediately resigned in protest, to be followed by three more at the end of a meeting of the council with the home secretary last November. Several other members, myself included, pledged to wait for the government's response to the proposed Principles for the Treatment of Scientific Advice, drawn up by the scientific community in response to the sacking of David Nutt, and communicated to the prime minister by the president of the Royal Society. I and my colleagues reserved the option to resign if the response to this initiative proved unsatisfactory.

Last week, on Budget Day, the government published its final version of the Principles. It contains an arbitrary requirement, not in the existing code of practice, that advisers must not "undermine trust". The scientific community, including scores of members of government advisory committees, had criticised this clause when it appeared in the government document circulated for consultation. But that objection has been ignored. If implemented, the government's Principles will allow advisers to be fired on the grounds that a minister has decided that they are undermining trust! This is unacceptable.

Expert advice is without value unless it is truly independent. It should not be given to ensure the trust of politicians or to fit the mood of the day's press.

I spent last weekend agonising, and concluded that I could not continue to serve the government on these terms. While my resignation was nothing to do with the – yet to be given – advice on mephedrone, my concerns were reinforced by accounts of the meeting of the ACMD last Monday. Shorn of half its scientific members, including the chair of the mephedrone working group, Dr Les King, the council considered a report on mephedrone. This was tabled on the day and which was still being considered when the chairman had to leave to tell the home secretary what we had decided in time for, of all things, a press conference.

This was a direct breach of the home secretary's own commitment to the ACMD last November that "the ACMD would publish its advice concurrently with its presentation to the home secretary" and that the Home Office "would give appropriate consideration of the advice before issuing its response".

Indeed, it rode roughshod over the commitment in the government's new Principles, published just a few days earlier, that "the timing of the government's response to scientific advice should demonstrably allow for proper consideration of that advice".

Such behaviour is not appropriate for any expert committee that is responsible for presenting objective evidence to government, least of all a committee giving advice on matters of public health and the potential criminalisation of hundreds of thousands of young people. The new rules on timing and publication were designed by the government to apply to this situation and yet the government has failed to abide by them.

It is now time for all those scientific advisers who care about the integrity of the science advisory system to think about what they should do. In the absence of even a willingness of the government to look again at this problem, collective action is needed. Perhaps an old-fashioned "work to rule" of science advisers is what is required to save the system.

Everyone agrees that the government has to decide whether to accept the advice it is given. But if it is to command the respect of its advisers, it must have the decency to consider properly the advice it has commissioned, and to allow its independent advisers to explain their views to the public.

I am sad to have left the ACMD. Its members work extremely hard and their work is not easy, especially given the sensitivity of the drug issue. They are unpaid, but they give their time and expertise because they are passionately concerned to help the government to make the best possible decisions in this difficult area.

But I had to stand up for my convictions. Good policy depends on good advice. Experts are willing to give their knowledge and their time, but they must not be – or allow themselves to be - treated as the puppets of government.

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Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Apr 2010 | 5:10 pm

Libel reform: curbing litigation is the only way we can truly have free speech | editorial

Simon Singh's victory is encouraging, but politicians must commit to libel reform or censorship will prevail

Defenders of free expression have long criticised the use of English libel law to stifle investigative journalism. No less worrying than the judges' willingness to allow oligarchs and petro-billionaires to impose gagging orders and extraordinary costs on their critics, has been their complicity in the chilling of scientific debate. The courts allowed the NMT medical conglomerate to sue the Shrewsbury physician Peter Wilmshurst for doing his scientific duty and questioning the effectiveness of its heart treatments. Mr Justice Eady denied Simon Singh the defence of fair comment for claiming that there was no evidence that chiropractic "alternative" treatments for sick children worked.

How encouraging, then, to see the Court of Appeal's landmark ruling in the Singh case that "scientific controversies must be settled by the methods of science rather than by the methods of litigation". How pleasing to hear modern judges defend free speech by quoting John Milton's denunciation of the silencing of Galileo by the Inquisition.

The verdict is a triumph for Singh, who has been willing to sacrifice a small fortune and years of his life in the defence of free inquiry. But his case is not over and nor is the struggle for a country that treats free speech with due respect. Labour and the Conservatives must join the Liberal Democrats in making manifesto commitments to libel reform. They should understand that in the 21st century, millions will be writing on the internet. Like writers for academic journals, book publishers and, increasingly, national news organisations will not be able to resist demands from powerful people to censor their work because they will not be able to face the costs of legal action and a law biased against defendants. Politicians must learn what Milton knew, and acknowledge that it is better to allow free citizens to argue before the court of public opinion than menace them with the court of Mr Justice Eady.

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Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Apr 2010 | 5:10 pm

Let's lighten up on the British summertime debate | the big issue

The benefits for most people of extra daylight in the evenings would greatly outweigh any disadvantages of changing from GMT

Your leader ("It wouldn't take long to make us all happier – just 60 minutes") rightly highlights darker mornings, especially in Scotland, as the prime reason for opposing the proposal to put our clocks one hour ahead of their current setting in both winter and summer. This objection overlooks the fact that everyone will be able to enjoy an extra hour of daylight in the latter part of the day on every day of the year. The darker mornings will only be experienced on winter days: for most of the year, nearly everyone gets up well after sunrise.

As our 1988 and 1993 comprehensive studies showed, the benefits, particularly the improved well-being of the great majority of the population, far outweigh this relatively small disadvantage. Remarkably, the change would be costless, simply requiring a majority of MPs in the next parliament to walk through the House of Commons' "Ayes" lobby. What a bargain waiting to be picked up!

Dr Mayer Hillman

senior fellow emeritus,

Policy Studies Institute

London NW3

The change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752 was made for sound astronomical reasons. The adoption of Greenwich Mean Time for the whole country was made for practical reasons, but results in all the parts of Britain west of the Greenwich meridian using a clock that says 12 o'clock midday up to half an hour before the Sun reaches its zenith. British summertime compels people living in Cornwall, the west of Wales and Scotland to pretend that midday occurs at 10.30am by astronomically correct time. Why should they should work to a system of double summertime that puts midday at 9.30am, for the convenience of Londoners?

If the Scots have the option of sending their children to school an hour later, by the same token, the southern English have the option of sending their children to school an hour earlier. Is it fair to question why we don't like the idea of sending children to school at 8am, but are quite happy to do it if 8am is called 9am?

John Tuck

Swindon, Wilts

The prospect of having to go through next winter with the clocks set to BST fills me with dread. Several grinding months of having to get up in the dark and cold only to put the clocks forward another hour at the first glimmer of morning light certainly will not increase my sense of well-being.

I am not a Scottish farmer. I live in northern England where summer evenings, as in Scotland, are light enough as it is. I would prefer to keep GMT (our natural time) all year round.

Michael Ramsden

Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire

Why would Scottish livestock farmers be inconvenienced by starting later? Do they have to travel to a place of work by a specific time? No.

And the available hours of daylight will still be the same in the winter months, whatever happens regarding any change in the time shown on a clock.

Ian Cheetham

Glyn Ceiriog, Llangollen

You note that perhaps Scotland could maintain the current position. This should be a simple task. Consider the US which has separate time zones, on top of which individual states can decide whether to have a summer time and native American lands such as the Navaho nation (which straddles states) can make a further choice, making their time uniform throughout their land. Accommodating Scottish time should be no problem for the UK.

Eric Gendle

Middlesbrough

Last week, we were told that both major political parties have plans to increase the hours of daylight. I deduce that there is a better understanding of basic science among the Liberal Democrats, who realise that this is impossible.

David Greene

Harlow, Essex

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 | 5:10 pm

Cows are key to 2,500 years of human progress

Dairy farming is key factor in history of European nutrition, study argues, with Roman empire a net loss

The Romans, as Monty Python famously acknowledged, have done many things for us. Contrary to popular wisdom, however, improving our diet was not one of them.

A study of the remains of almost 20,000 people dating from the 8th century BC to the 18th century AD has found that the Roman empire reduced our level of nutrition, which increased again in the "dark ages".

That is because the key factor in determining average height over the centuries – an indicator of nutritional status and wellbeing – has been an increase in milk consumption due to improved farming. Higher population densities and the need to feed the army during Roman times may have worked against this.

The "anthropometric" approach pursued by Nikola Koepke of Oxford University, which combines biology and archaeology, suggests longer bone length is indicative of improved diet. Koepke's study, presented at the Economic History Society's 2010 annual conference, also challenges assumptions about the effect of the industrial revolution. Urbanisation did not improve wellbeing, she argues, at least as measured by height.

Rather, Koepke says, the key factor in determining average height growth over the past 2,500 years has been the increased consumption of milk as a result of the spread of, and improvements in, farming. She found that overall European living conditions improved slightly in the past 2,500 years even in the centuries prior to the industrial revolution.

Her study is based on data compiled from analysing the skeletal remains of more than 18,500 individuals of both genders from all social classes, from 484 European archaeological dig sites. "Higher milk consumption as indicated by cattle share had a positive impact on mean height," Koepke writes. "Correspondingly, this determinant is the key factor in causing significant European regional differences in mean height."

Jamie Doward

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Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Apr 2010 | 5:08 pm

David Eagleman and his 40 afterlives | Interview

Seeing God as a microbe is just one way the neuroscientist's debut novel gets to grips with the afterlife

In one of the stories in David Eagleman's first work of fiction, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (Canongate), God consoles himself for the mess that is humankind by reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In another, people pay vast sums to ensure the glamorous afterlife they desire, only to find themselves marooned in the most cliched version of heaven, where they sit on white clouds, clad in ill-fitting white robes, strumming harps.

By day, Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, where he specialises in the study of time perception and synesthesia. He also directs the college's Initiative on Neuroscience and Law. Sum is his first foray into fiction – but it has become a word-of-mouth bestseller and earned him plaudits from Stephen Fry and Brian Eno, who called it "as surprising a book as I've read in years".

What leads a neuroscientist to tackle the idea of the afterlife?

I'm using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human – it turns out that it's a great lens with which to understand what matters to us. Every time you go into a book store, you find a lot of books written with certainty – you find the atheist and you find the religious and everybody is acting like they know the answer. I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance. We don't really understand most of what's happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows. We don't have any evidence for it. We don't have any evidence against it. The thing that has always surprised me is that people are always acting as though they know the answer. The idea with Sum was to write 40 mutually exclusive stories, where each story tells a completely different, incompatible version of the afterlife There's a meta-message and that meta-message is that we don't know.

This sphere involves vociferous atheists such as Richard Dawkins on the one hand and the rise of fundamentalist faiths on the other. Was that at all in your mind when writing this book, that backdrop?

I think so. I think the first decade of this century is going to be remembered as a time of extremism. But, as Voltaire said, "uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd position". The books by the neo-atheists like [Richard] Dawkins and [Daniel] Dennett and [Christopher] Hitchens are fantastic, very important – but the public has gone away with a misconception that scientists have thrown away the baby with the bathwater, where the baby is all of the awe and wonder and mystery of what's going on. So some people have the impression that over here on the atheist camp it's "OK, we've got it all figured out, there's nothing else to discuss". The fact is, we know too little about what's going on in the cosmos to commit to that sort of strict atheism. On the other end of the spectrum, we know way too much to commit to a particular religious story. These stories are often very beautiful and they crystallise a lot of wisdom but they're much too small-thinking to possibly be correct, given everything we know now about the size of the universe and the biological algorithms and computations and so on.

So we're stuck in a position where we know too little to commit to atheism and we know too much to commit to religion. That put me somewhere in the middle. I don't prefer the term agnostic because agnosticism is often used as a weak term that means I'm not sure if the guy with the beard on the cloud exists or doesn't exist. So I call myself a possibilian. The idea with possibilianism is to explore new ideas and to shine a flashlight around the possibility space to really understand what the size of that space is. The idea is not to commit to any particular story, it's not the end goal to say "OK, we're going to figure it out and commit to it" because it's simply past the toolbox of science. The best we can do, and I find it a wonderful pursuit, is to just try and understand what the possibilities are.

In one of the stories, you imagine God to be a metaphysical scientist who has completely messed up and comforts himself by reading Frankenstein. It made me laugh. And when He does make a fleeting appearance in the stories He tends to be scratching His head, wondering where He's gone wrong.

That's right. There are many different flavours of stories but that's a theme I keep coming back to and exploring. In some of the stories, God is a female and in some stories God is actually a married couple. In one, God is the size of a microbe and we exist at the wrong spatial scale and so he doesn't know about us.

In another story you write: "We are finally able to determine our own hereafter. It has become privatised and computerised. For a reasonable price you can download your consciousness into a computer to live forever in a virtual world." Could that point be close?

I think so. Neuroscience over the next 50 years is going to introduce things that are mind-blowing. We don't know which ones will work and which won't yet – like the possibility of being able to download your consciousness into a computer someday, maybe not 50 years from now but maybe 200. If that works that means we're sort of the last bit of the biological era where people have to die. In the future you won't die, you'll just download yourself.

Somewhere in your belief system do you hope that our consciousness continues after we die physically?

I'm not certain. By the way, I don't have a belief system, I only have a possibility system! But I do hope that consciousness will survive our bodies.

Would you really want to live forever ?

For better or worse we probably have no choice. Option one is we might just die and shut off like going to sleep. Possibility number two is there might be something much bigger than us, in which case we don't have a choice about it anyway – we'll just find ourselves there.

What do you do when you're not writing fiction?

During the day, what I try to figure out is how the brain works and specifically this issue of how the brain constructs reality. How do you put together hundreds of billions of cells and get it to have a private subjective experience? Consciousness. In other words, if I gave you a hundred billion Tinkertoys and asked you to put them together in a complicated fashion, the question is at what point would you add one more Tinkertoy and suddenly it is having a private subjective experience. It can experience the colour red and the feeling of pain or the taste of feta cheese. Not only do we not have a theory of that but we don't even know what a theory of that would look like. That's the situation we're in in modern neuroscience. What we are doing is seeking any sort of inroad and I recognise that with synesthesia, where people have a mixture of the senses. Your neighbour's reality can be very different than your reality. The same stimuli in the world can be inducing very different experiences internally and it's probably based on a single change in a gene. What I am doing is pulling the gene forward and imaging and doing behavioural tests to understand what that difference is and how reality can be constructed so differently.

I direct the [college's] Initiative on Neuroscience and Law which asks how does modern neuroscience affect the way we think about criminal behaviour and criminal punishment and new ideas of rehabilitation – even how jurors and judges make decisions? It's really getting at the heart of understanding human behaviour better and how that affects the legal system. My dream is to reform the legal system over the next 20 years.

Have you had any rumbles of discontent with Sum in America? Have you had believers coming up and saying "how dare you?"

Here's been the most amazing part about what's happened. This book has been well received by both the atheists and the religious. I think why the religious like it, is that it allows them to wrestle with the notion of God and it stretches them mentally and spiritually. Sum was named one of the top 10 spiritual books of 2009, which really cracked me up.