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Medicine residues may threaten fish reproduction, Swedish study findsResearchers in Sweden have discovered that traces of many medicines can be found in fish that have been swimming in treated waste water. One such medicine, the hormone levonorgestrel, was found in higher concentrations in the blood of fish than in women who take the contraceptive pill. Elevated levels of this hormone can lead to infertility in fish.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am For better romantic relationships, be true to yourselfBe true to yourself, and better romantic relationships will follow, research suggests. A new study examined how dating relationships were affected by the ability of people to see themselves clearly and objectively, act in ways consistent with their beliefs, and interact honestly and truthfully with others.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am Cassini Doubleheader: Flying By Titan and DioneIn a special double flyby early next week, NASA's Cassini spacecraft will visit Saturn's moons Titan and Dione within a period of about a day and a half, with no maneuvers in between. A fortuitous cosmic alignment allows Cassini to attempt this doubleheader, and the interest in swinging by Dione influenced the design of its extended mission.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am Bringing dehydrated plants 'back to life': Possible key to desiccation-tolerant plantsDrought can take a toll on plants and animals alike. When cells are deprived of water, they shrink, collapsing in upon themselves and, without water as a medium, chemicals and enzymes inside the cells may malfunction. However, some plants, like the aptly named "resurrection fern," can survive extreme measures of water loss, even as much as 95 percent of their water content. How do the cells in these desiccation-tolerant plants remain viable?Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am Discovery of new group of molecules could help fight spread of cancer and other diseasesA team of scientists has discovered a new group of molecules which could help fight the spread of cancer and other diseases. The new molecules are synthetic derivatives of a natural product known as UDP-Galactose, and block the activity of a group of enzymes called glycosyltransferases.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am Baby's obesity risk: What's the mother's influence?Ongoing studies could provide new insights into recommendations to aspiring moms that they achieve a healthy weight before they become pregnant, and to gain only the recommended amount of weight during their pregnancy.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am Economists need their own uncertainty principleBad risk management contributed to the current financial crisis. Two economists believe the situation could be improved by gaining a deeper understanding of what is not known, as Philip Ball explains.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/s17cSb7sWaM" height="1" width="1"/>Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 5 Apr 2010 | 7:15 am Fermi maps an active galaxy's 'smokestack plumes'If our eyes could see radio waves, the nearby galaxy Centaurus A (Cen A) would be one of the biggest and brightest objects in the sky, nearly 20 times the apparent size of a full moon. What we can't see when looking at the galaxy in visible light is that it lies nestled between a pair of giant radio-emitting gas plumes ejected by its supersized black hole. Each plume is nearly a million light-years long.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 6:00 am Prostate cancer: How two key proteins interact at the molecular levelScientists have determined how two proteins required for the initiation and development of prostate cancer interact at the molecular level, which could lead to improved treatments for the disease.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 6:00 am Premature birth and brain damage: Inflammation may play a roleResearchers have gone some way to explaining what happens during premature births and how brain injury develops in premature babies. New findings show that inflammation in both the amniotic fluid and the baby’s brain has a role to play, new research from Sweden reveals.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 6:00 am Longer-lasting flowers: Fresh Ideas from new researchTomorrow's fragrant bouquets and colorful potted plants might last longer, thanks to new research.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 6:00 am Discovery set for morning launchAstronauts on the space shuttle Discovery are going through their final preparations before launching from Florida.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 5 Apr 2010 | 4:04 am The nation's weather (AP)AP - Another wet and snowy day was expected out West on Monday as a large low pressure system moves over the West Coast and hovers over the Rockies.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 4:04 am NASA readies Discovery takeoff (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 3:59 am Space shuttle crew arrives for pre-dawn launch (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 3:52 am Sequencing the Video Genome
Think organisms are the only ones with genomes? Researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology are sequencing the “video genome” to put an end to video piracy on the internet. The technique works by detecting features that remain basically unchanged by typical color and resolution manipulations. Current methods rely on action recognition algorithms, which match video sequences by the movement they contain. Think of three sample clips: the original lightsaber fight scene from Star Wars, a low quality video of the scene playing on TV and a home video of you and your brother reenacting it with plastic lightsabers. Action recognition algorithms would see all three clips as similar, but video genome analysis would only match the first and the second. Brothers Alexander and Michael Bronstein and their advisor Ron Kimmel are able to make this distinction using gene sequence matching and alignment algorithms borrowed from the field of bioinformatics. Their research was posted on ArXiv.org on March 27. “We realized that many problems that exist in the analysis of video match nicely to applications and problems that exist in the analysis of sequences,” Michael said.
The technique rests on the idea that changes like clipping and cropping of video are analogous to mutations in DNA. The “DNA” of video clips can be aligned the same way that biological DNA sequences can, using bioinformatics, even with the addition of commercials, deletion of scenes or changes to color or resolution. “Looking at a very short piece of video, we are able to tell where it comes from, independently of the transformations it may undergo,” Alexander said. For example, when a camcorder is used to capture the video from a movie screen, the camera may be shaking, the colors might be different, the resolution may vary, but the video DNA sequence would still be similar. The video’s features are translated into a string of information, like a genome is read as a DNA nucleotide sequence. This video genome is made up of a group of features including boundaries and shapes, in the same way that search algorithms use a group of words to find similarities in text. These features don’t change during normal video manipulations. “You can think of modifications a video can undergo as analogous to mutations,” Michael said. For example, an advertisement would be like an insertion mutation, and removal of content for rating would be a deletion. The frequency of features in each frame is graphed and translated into a 64-bit binary word. When this information is played over time, the clip’s video genome can be compared to a database using bioinformatic analyses. The video genome takes up about one millionth the bandwidth of DVD quality video, and can be translated in real time. The technology could potentially be used to detect pirated content on YouTube, or to match metadata, like subtitles, user-generated notes or comments, to any version of a video. Theoretically, thousands of hours of video could be processed in a matter of days, with greater than 99 percent matching accuracy. Though the idea is promising, there are some drawbacks to the technology. While the video genome can be created in real time from video, matching the genome to entries in the database cannot. The team is currently working to simplify and speed up the database search process, so matches can be made in a fraction of a second. Via the physics arXiv blog, MIT Technology Review Image: Bronstein See Also:
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Source: Wired: Wired Science | 5 Apr 2010 | 3:30 am Mind your language | David MarshThe style guide editor on … knowing what day it is I sent my annual Easter message to Guardian subeditors last week, gently reminding them to call yesterday Easter Day, in line with our style, and not "Easter Sunday". To be honest, I can't actually remember why I am so keen on this, as most people seem perfectly happy to call it Easter Sunday, but there must be some reason for it, and after so many years it would be confusing if I suddenly told everyone to say Easter Sunday after all. It occurs to me that I'm doing one of the few jobs where "you don't know what day it is" is not so much an insult, more a statement of fact. Allow me to explain. Long ago, when the web was just something spun by spiders, life on a morning newspaper was simple: we were trained to put "yesterday" - or even better, "last night" - near the top of every story, to make the news sound reasonably topical when it landed on your breakfast table 10 or 12 hours after it was written. This is why so many reports begin like this: "Gordon Brown last night insisted that he was on course for ... " (A style satirised by the subeditor turned bestselling author Bill Bryson, who wrote: "Anyone not acquainted with journalists could be forgiven for assuming that they must talk something like this: I last night went to bed early because I this morning had to catch an early flight.") Nowadays most news stories are published on our website as soon as they are written, so if the prime minister says something at 9pm, the web version of the story will begin "Gordon Brown tonight insisted ... " whereas the newspaper version next day will say "Gordon Brown last night insisted ... " The confusion arises because we now have millions of readers in different time zones around the world, for whom yesterday, today and tomorrow will not necessarily mean the same thing. This is not a matter of arcane detail: if we claim to report the news accurately, people are entitled to know when it happened. Different approaches are being adopted to deal with this problem. Since February, the Los Angeles Times has stopped using today and yesterday to reference the day of the week, both in the paper and on the web. It explained: "Our decision reflects the growing intersection of our online and print journalism and the problems caused by 'today', 'this afternoon' and so forth, in particular when we move material between one medium and the next. "Our concerns are philosophical as well, given that readers come to us from all over the world. 'Today' may invite confusion, whereas the day of the week should be unambiguous." So the LA Times now gives the day of the week a story took place (and where necessary, the month and date as well). If we adopted the same style, our report would read: "Gordon Brown insisted on Monday ... " This would have the virtue of consistency: whether you were reading the Guardian in print, or online; on the day of publication, or later; in Surrey, in Sydney or in San Francisco, you would know exactly what day of the week we were talking about. Too many "on Mondays" can clutter up stories, however, and read distinctly oddly if you are actually reading the story on a Monday. The production editor of guardian.co.uk prefers the way the BBC website handles the problem, by not mentioning any date or time in the intro (first paragraph) to the story. So our report might read: "Gordon Brown has insisted that he is on course for ..." and the dateline at the top (eg "Monday 5 April 2010 11.09 BST") would be the one, clear point of time reference. We are discussing the best way to deal with this issue, although whatever is decided we will still need to make clear precisely when an event took place. You are likely to be reading "yesterday" in newspaper stories for a good while yet. • If you have enjoyed these columns (or, more likely, enjoyed saying how much you disagree with them), I hope you will join us to continue the discussion at the Mind Your Language blog - guardian.co.uk/mindyourlanguage - to be launched later this week. Sorry I can't be more specific - it won't surprise you to know I don't know yet what day it is. But you can follow us on Twitter @guardianstyle for updates. 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 | 5 Apr 2010 | 2:59 am Australia rushes to contain Barrier Reef oil spill (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 2:13 am Shuttle Crew Boards for LaunchThe four-man, three-woman crew slated to fly aboard shuttle Discovery this morning are climbing aboard their ship, aiming for a 6:21 a.m. EST blastoff. The shuttle is slated to spend 13 days in orbit, nine of them at the International ...Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 5 Apr 2010 | 1:29 am Mephedrone: the anatomy of a media drug scareHysteria and inaccuracies have been the main ingredients of the media coverage of mephedrone Nic Fleming Even Chris Morris might have had trouble making it up. In 1997, the celebrated satirist tricked public figures including Rolf Harris, Noel Edmonds and David Amess MP into warning Britain's teenagers of the dangers of taking "cake", a new "made-up pyschoactive compound" also known as Basildon puke plates and loony toad quack. Bernard Manning told how one girl had thrown up her own pelvis. Amess later tabled a parliamentary question asking the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs to look into banning cake. Thirteen years on and the ACMD is in the news again, this time advising the government to ban the all-too-real drug mephedrone (on Friday, Eric Carlin, an ACMD member, resigned in protest). Most people in the UK had not heard of the substance until three weeks ago, when police said they believed Louis Wainwright, 18, and Nicholas Smith, 19, had taken it shortly before being found dead on 15 March. The media went into overdrive, reporting a suspected death toll of six within a week and 26 within a fortnight. Children as young as eight were reported to be on it and 180 pupils from just one school in Leicestershire had apparently gone off sick after taking it. The Sun launched a campaign for a ban. Last Monday, Professor Les Iversen, the ACMD chairman, said the substance had been implicated in 26 deaths in England and Scotland. This formed part of the evidence in the ACMD report advising the home secretary, Alan Johnson, that mephedrone should be a class B drug. Johnson promptly announced the government's intention to seek all-party agreement for emergency legislation. So everyone should be happy. The reality is that there is yet to be a single death that a coroner blamed primarily on mephedrone. Leicestershire county council says there is no school at which 180 pupils have gone off sick. And no teenagers from Durham or anywhere else have attempted to rip off their own scrotums while on the drug. The media's coverage has angered some who work in the drugs policy field. "The misreporting of mephedrone deaths is a crass example of the potentially lethal alliance between press and politicians that by default ends in a ban that often creates far greater harms than those caused by use," said Danny Kushlick, of the drugs charity Transform, which opposes prohibition. The most widely reported mephedrone case before March was that of Gabrielle Price, a 14-year-old who died "after taking" mephedrone in November. Few papers bothered to record the results of toxicology tests released in December showing the cause of her death was "cardiac arrest following broncho-pneumonia which resulted from streptococcal A infection". Her case was included as one of 27 mephedrone-implicated deaths compiled by the National Programme on Substance Abuse Deaths. In one case, a woman died as a result of the "adverse effects of [the heroin substitute] methadone and mephedrone". Of the remaining 25 deaths yet to be ruled on by a coroner, the presence of mephedrone has been demonstrated in 10 cases, with test results pending in the others. "I'm not saying that 18 deaths in England can be attributed to misuse of mephedrone," Iversen said on Monday. "We don't know that yet, so let's not be too hasty in our conclusions." In November last year, the Sun published a story under the headline: "Legal drug teen ripped his scrotum off". Quoting a police report, the paper said an unnamed teenager from Durham needed hospital treatment after mephedrone made him him "rip off his own scrotum". An internal police report had said: "One individual states that after using it for 18 hours his hallucinations led him to believe that centipedes were crawling over him and biting him, and this led him to receive hospital treatment after he ripped his own scrotum off." However, it carried on: "This information was taken from an internet blog and as such it should be treated with the credence such information deserves." The officer said he took the story from a website that sells mephedrone, and that his warning was not printed. The owner of the website that hosted this blog, mephedrone.com, says the posting was a joke. Drugs advisers fear further escalation in the drugs war ahead of an election. A spokesman for the Home Office said: "The advice and recommendations made by the ACMD are based on evidence from academic experts, police and customs data, toxicology reports, scientific papers and overseas organisations." 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 | 5 Apr 2010 | 12:00 am Libel reform: a victory for Simon Singh but a setback for Jack StrawJustice secretary's plan to limit success fees faces parliamentary hitch The most disparaged parliament in living memory may end its life this week in characteristic style. A small band of refusenik MPs are planning to stay behind to prevent one last piece of business from being passed. These are plans, presented by Jack Straw, the justice secretary and a latter-day convert to libel reform, to limit the success fees won by avaricious legal firms in cases conducted under conditional fee agreements (CFAs), better known as "no win, no fee". In one fell swoop, and somewhat hastily, Straw has sought to cut back the costs that law firms can charge the other side after successful cases – from 100% to 10%. Reform of CFAs has been an important part of our broader campaign with English PEN and Sense about Science to change England's hideous libel laws, which are skewed towards the rich and powerful and have helped to chill free expression in the UK and around the world. The issue is complex. The original idea behind "no win, no fee" was admirable, allowing ordinary and often impecunious people either to defend themselves or to sue for damage to their reputations. However the system is open to abuse, with law firms cherry-picking risk-free cases and wealthy individuals using CFAs to bully people into submission. Last week, it was assumed that Straw's plans would go through easily. But this did not take into account the small number of MPs nursing resentments over the way the media have treated them during the expenses scandal. Several of them, led by Tom Watson, a close ally of Gordon Brown, have won defamation cases against newspapers. They belong to the old school that sees the fourth estate as a feral beast needing to be tamed, rather than understanding the extent to which robust investigative journalism and fair comment have been silenced in recent years. They also ignore the significant impact of costs on NGOs investigating corruption, as well as on scientists, academics, publishers and authors. If these malcontent MPs succeed, they will have made a small dent in the bigger campaign. The battle for free expression in the UK has become attritional. The forces of resistance have begun to organise, and they are lobbying hard in parliament, particularly targeting the Tories. While Labour have belatedly joined the Lib Dems in committing themselves to the principle of libel reform, the Tories remain unclear in their intentions, with several key figures enjoying close relations with the law firms at the heart of the problem. Yet for every setback there is a cause for celebration. On Thursday, the scientist Simon Singh secured an important victory when the court of appeal ruled that his negative remarks about chiropractors were "honest opinion" rather than fact. In other words, he does not have to provide hard evidence to support his claims against the British Chiropractic Association. The specifics of the judgment are welcome. Arguably even more important is the language used. In their ruling, the judges not only dismiss the arguments used by Justice Eady in his initial ruling last May. They point to broader ramifications. For nearly two years since publication of Singh's Guardian article, they say: "it seems unlikely that anyone would dare repeat the opinions expressed by Dr Singh for fear of a writ. Accordingly this litigation has almost certainly had a chilling effect on public debate which might otherwise have assisted potential patients to make informed choices." That is a devastating indictment. The judges go further, saying of Singh's piece: "The opinion may be mistaken, but to allow the party which has been denounced on the basis of it to compel its author to prove in court what he has asserted by way of argument is to invite the court to become an Orwellian ministry of truth." This ruling just may be part of a pattern. Already one or two cases that might have been brought by foreign litigants – using the UK, as ever, for what has come to be known as "libel tourism" – have been rejected on grounds of jurisdiction. Judges are sensing the public mood and moving with it. Yet it could all unravel quite quickly with an incoming government asking for yet another review, giving time for the law firms' lobbyists to cash in and wreck reform. The litigant companies will move back on to the offensive, sniffing their chance to regain lost ground, and lost profits. The battle for libel reform has barely begun. John Kampfner is chief executive of Index on Censorship (indexoncensorship.org) 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 | 5 Apr 2010 | 12:00 am NASA fuels space shuttle Discovery for launchCAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA fueled space shuttle Discovery for launch early on Monday, hoping to kick off a 13-day resupply flight to the International Space Station.Source: Reuters: Science News | 4 Apr 2010 | 11:46 pm 13 Glaring iPad Shortcomings (LiveScience.com)LiveScience.com - The iPad shows great promise. It's thin and sleek and not like any other gadget out there. It was also more hyped than any new device in recent memory. But is it worth buying?Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Apr 2010 | 11:10 pm 13 Glaring iPad ShortcomingsThe iPad shows great promise. It's thin and sleek and not like any other gadget out there. It was also more hyped than any new device in recent memory. But is it worth buying?Source: Livescience.com | 4 Apr 2010 | 11:02 pm Shuttle to Launch 'Plug and Play' Micro-LabsShuttle Discovery will carry equipment and experiments to the space station on Monday. However, one payload is particularly exciting. Discovery News speaks with the president of Kentucky Space to find out more.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Apr 2010 | 9:09 pm EIA to make gas data revisions: report (Reuters)Reuters - The U.S. Energy Department is preparing to make large revisions to its U.S. natural-gas production data, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Apr 2010 | 6:31 pm Magnitude-7.2 Quake Strikes Baja CaliforniaThe earthquake hit near the U.S.-Mexico border, approximately 100 miles southeast of San Diego.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Apr 2010 | 5:59 pm Science Weekly: What are animals thinking?Jonathan Balcombe, a former animal behaviour researcher, discusses animal emotions and whether they have virtue. His new book Second Nature – The Inner Lives Of Animals is out now. The Large Hadron Collider is finally up to speed, reaching a record energy level last week. Tom Whyntie from Imperial College London, who works at Cern in Geneva, tells us why this is a significant moment in particle physics. Tom's about to start studying the data the LHC is churning out for his PhD. Peter Hadfield is attempting to debunk science myths through YouTube. His channel, potholer54, has 28,000 subscribers and his films have been watched 2.5m times. He says honesty is the best policy. Nell Boase is your host while Alok is away. WARNING: contains strong language. Feel free to post your thoughts 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 | 4 Apr 2010 | 5:01 pm God is attracting more debate than everThe New Atheists did not manage to dent the growth of religion across the world. Instead, they only fed our interest in it One shelf of my bookcase is now groaning under the weight of its contents. It's the God slot, and in the years since the publication of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion in 2006 and Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great in 2007, there has been an addition every few weeks from enraged philosophers, theologians, historians and journalists, all trying to convince readers of the shoddiness of the New Atheists. Peter Hitchens's Rage Against God was the latest arrival last week. So with Easter done and the Catholic church embroiled in one of the most shaming and tumultuous periods of its history, it seems an appropriate moment to reckon on the progress of New Atheism, and take stock of this curious and – in the early 2000s entirely unpredictable – publishing phenomenon. What have all these books, these tons of paper and felled forests achieved? Well, the most obvious achievement has been a lot of sore heads. Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens convey the fury of Old Testament prophets, while their opponents struggle in various well-mannered ways to contain theirs. From my rough survey I would suggest those with philosophical training are the most irritated by New Atheism, while the journalists seem to enjoy the opportunities the row provides; Peter Hitchens explicitly does the "in sorrow not in anger" approach. What staggers the "philosophers" (I use the term loosely to indicate writers who use philosophical arguments) is the sheer philosophical illiteracy of Dawkins. As Terry Eagleton puts it in Reason, Faith and Revolution, "Dawkins's rationalist complacency is of just the sort Jonathan Swift so magnificently savaged". Several centuries on, it appears some have not quite grasped Swift's point. Faced with such ignorance of centuries of philosophical thought, there are two options. Either start from the beginning – Charles Taylor's 800-page A Secular Age or Karen Armstrong's speed history of western thought, The Case for God – or go for clever brevity, elegantly skewering the argument in the style of Eagleton or John Cornwell's Darwin's Angel. The problem with both genres is they don't offer the kind of bestselling strident certainty that brought Dawkins such handsome financial rewards. But perhaps New Atheism's publishing success is a case of winning a battle and losing the war. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge point out in God is Back that the main religions are currently experiencing massive expansion across most of the world. One of the biggest drivers of growth is China; by 2050 it could be the biggest Muslim nation, and the biggest Christian one. What numerous countries are now demonstrating from the US to Asia, from Africa to the Middle East and Latin America, is that modernisation, far from entailing secularisation, is actually leading to increased and intensified forms of religiosity. According to Micklethwait and Wooldridge, the future across most of the globe is going to be very religious. To the sceptical European, this is a lonely and unintelligible prospect. So, scanning my stuffed bookshelf, which of these defences of God are going to help explain this enduring appeal? Start with Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth: "we are meaning-seeking creatures" who "invent stories to place our lives in a larger setting … and give us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life has meaning and value". That helps explain why the bestselling religious book in the US is The Purpose Driven Life (the first chapters of which are published on the net as What on Earth Am I Here For?). The faithful are not mugging up on critiques of reason for an argument with New Atheism, but turning to religion to offer meaning and purpose. The great mistake the atheists made is to claim that religion started out as a clumsy stab at science – trying to explain how the world worked – and is now clearly redundant. That misses the point entirely: religion is not about explaining how an earthquake or flood happens; rather it offers meanings for such events. When someone is killed in a car accident, western rationality is good at analysing how the brakes failed and the road curved, but has nothing to say about why, on that particular day, the brakes failed when it was you in the car: the sequence of random events that kill. This search for meaning is part of what drives the religious spirit. Armstrong distinguishes between two capabilities of the human brain: mythos and logos. The latter is rational, logical; the former generates the mythology "which often springs from profound anxiety about essentially practical problems which cannot be assuaged by purely logical arguments". Death is central to all human mythologies. The second mistake made by the atheists is the assumption that faith and belief are mental processes akin to opinion. Armstrong runs through the etymology to uncover original meanings: belief is a commitment not a proposition; faith, as in "I have faith in you", is an expression of confidence, not an assertion of the existence of something. Dogma is "a truth which cannot easily be put into words and which can only be fully understood through long experience" – rather like the love of a parent for their child growing into adulthood. The loss of the original meanings of all these words show how religious faith in the west came to be interpreted as a matter of the head and the intellect, and was bound up with the authority of an institution which expected submission: God was regarded as something to think about rather than do in large chunks of western religious practice which, preoccupied with institutional power, ended up in this current cul de sac. (Alastair Campbell's use of the verb in "we don't do God" is actually cutting-edge theology of a practice of love, service of others, search for justice.) Armstrong offers an important insight into the sheer aggressive intolerance of New Atheism when she argues that "the history of religion shows that, once a myth ceases to give people intimations of transcendence, it becomes abhorrent". The shift to monotheism provoked huge struggle among the Israelites, for example, and a deep contempt for anything that might be idolatry. The New Atheists might demonstrate this, suggests Armstrong; Dawkins is rejecting a particular conception of God, the God of a literal reading of the Bible who made the world in six days. What Dawkins would not be aware of (he is proud of never having read any theology) is that he shares this position with prominent 20th-century theologians such as Paul Tillich, who rejected this kind of belief as tantamount to idolatry. So New Atheism could be read as a violent reaction against a corrupted mythology in need of renewal. The paradox of New Atheism is that in its bid to make religion unacceptable, it has contributed to making it a subject that is considered worth talking about again. As Micklethwait and Wooldridge point out, in the US there are now hundreds of thinktanks, institutes and courses dedicated to the subject. Any visitor to Comment is Free is aware of how religion attracts a huge number of posts; literary festivals routinely offer several sessions on religion. Books are churned out. Admittedly the debate can be horribly bad tempered and it is in as much danger of spreading intolerance as it is of enlightenment, but God hasn't attracted this quantity or intensity of debate for decades. 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 | 4 Apr 2010 | 4:00 pm Obama oil-drilling plan small step in climate bill battle (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Apr 2010 | 3:22 pm NASA to Test New Medical Device to Help Sick Astronauts in Space (SPACE.com)SPACE.com - A new water filter system that could pave the way for emergency intravenous (IV) operations to help sick astronauts in space is about to get the ultimate test on NASA's next space shuttle flight.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Apr 2010 | 2:30 pm Which Baseball Team Has the Best Opening Day Record?The answer might surprise you.Source: Livescience.com | 4 Apr 2010 | 1:49 pm Calif. climate law under assault in poor economy (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Apr 2010 | 1:02 pm Arctic thaw frees overlooked greenhouse gas: studyOSLO (Reuters) - Thawing permafrost can release nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas, a contributor to climate change that has been largely overlooked in the Arctic, a study showed on Sunday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 4 Apr 2010 | 12:26 pm Someone Didn't Fasten Their Seat Belt....Most of us rarely get the chance to experience zero gravity for any duration, apart from the occasional "hang time" on a roller coaster at our local Six Flags of something. But it's possible to simulate "zero G" conditions in ...Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Apr 2010 | 11:31 am Speech Recognition for Cell Phones Comes of AgeFor mobile devices, speech recognition is getting better thanks to crowd sourcing and advances in processor power.Source: Livescience.com | 4 Apr 2010 | 10:26 am Obituary: Wallace FoxMedical researcher who revolutionised the treatment of TB Wallace Fox, who has died aged 89, was the leader of the Medical Research Council (MRC) programme that developed the standard worldwide treatment of tuberculosis. TB sanatoriums closed by the end of the 1960s after he showed that home treatment was just as good, and then he shortened the period of treatment from a year to six months. The work he did at the MRC tuberculosis research unit, in collaboration with many researchers elsewhere, helped change TB from being an untreatable disease to one that can be alleviated in both rich and poor countries – a major medical advance. Wallace was born in Bristol, where he attended Cotham grammar school, and undertook his medical education in London at Guy's hospital, followed by hospital posts at Guy's, Preston Hall sanatorium, Kent, and then in London at the Hammersmith chest clinic. He caught TB himself soon after medical qualification, and was treated with bed rest for two years at the Bristol Royal Infirmary. He joined the staff of the MRC tuberculosis research unit, directed by Philip D'Arcy Hart, in 1952. At that time, half of those who developed TB died from it, but new anti-bacterial drugs, such as streptomycin and isoniazid, were being introduced to treat the disease. The principal method for TB control then considered by the World Health Organisation (WHO) was BCG (Bacillus Calmette-Guérin) vaccination. But Wallace took an early decision to concentrate on treatment, thus anticipating a later change in WHO policy. TB treatment was primitive. The first clinical trial had shown that treatment with streptomycin alone resulted in drug-resistant tubercle bacilli. But when streptomycin was combined with PAS (para-aminosalicylic acid) or, better, with the more potent isoniazid in Wallace's UK trials, resistance was largely prevented. So Wallace then organised a national survey of drug resistance that led John Crofton to devise a combined drug regimen that became the standard in western Europe for the next 15 years. However, half the patients in a European trial failed to complete the full year of treatment, and the cost of the drugs and hospitals they required made the treatment unavailable in many developing countries. Wallace started collaborations with physicians in east Africa with the aim of finding a cheaper alternative to PAS. Thiacetazone was the answer, but even with cheaper drugs, the cost of hospital care remained prohibitive. In 1956, Wallace and Hart went to India and founded the Tuberculosis Chemotherapy Centre in Madras (now Chennai), to explore the need for hospitalisation when drugs were given in conditions of great poverty. The trial showed no advantage for a sanatorium group, and no added risk of infection was found for the family contacts of those treated at home, so opening the way for vast savings round the world. But a big problem remained. Treatment had to be taken regularly for at least 12 months, to prevent relapse of the disease and the development of drug resistance. Wallace immediately published a paper proposing that treatment should always be given supervised, a proposal taken up many years later through the WHO's Dots programme – directly observed treatment, short course. As the first way of dealing with this problem, drugs were given fully supervised twice or thrice a week instead of daily. More effective in assuring regularity in drug-taking was to shorten the treatment period. Wallace took up this problem when he returned to Britain in 1961, and four years later he was appointed director of the MRC TB research unit. A trial in east Africa established that rifampicin and pyrazinamide could shorten treatment radically, and it became the forerunner of all trials now set up to license new anti-TB drugs. Wallace then formed a network of investigators in east Africa, Hong Kong, Singapore, Prague and Algeria to develop new shortened regimens. Work followed on delineating an early intensive phase and a later continuation phase, on the role of the different drugs and on the optimal duration of treatment. This emerged as the standard six-month course with two drugs – rifampicin and isoniazid – plus pyrazinamide for the first two months, trialled first in Singapore and now recommended worldwide by the WHO. Wallace's multidisciplinary approach involved fruitful collaboration with the MRC unit for laboratory studies of TB, which I directed, and with Ian Sutherland, director of the MRC statistics unit. Though he also made important contributions to the treatments of spinal and pericardial TB and lung cancer, he will best be remembered for his work on pulmonary TB, which brought him a leading role on WHO expert committees. The unit he headed closed with his retirement in 1986. Wallace received numerous medals from learned societies, and in 1973 was appointed CMG. He married Gaye Akker in 1956, in India. She survives him, as do their sons, Adam, Jason and Danial. • Wallace Fox, physician and medical researcher, born 7 November 1920; died 22 January 2010 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 | 4 Apr 2010 | 10:15 am Brain Remembers One Fear vs. Another, Study SuggestsThe brain acts like a filing cabinet to distinguish between different fears.Source: Livescience.com | 4 Apr 2010 | 9:39 am Does Old Age Bring Happiness or Despair?Getting older is not all bad for many people. Mounting evidence suggests aging may be a key to happiness.Source: Livescience.com | 4 Apr 2010 | 8:27 am Alert over Barrier Reef oil leakA Chinese ship sparks fears of a major oil spill in the Great Barrier Reef after running aground.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Apr 2010 | 8:23 am Russian spacecraft docks at orbiting station (AP)
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