An experimental drug that boosts production of the immune system protein interferon worsens tuberculosis in mice, according to scientists. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 13 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm
A physics professor sees the use of terahertz rays as a critical technology in the defense against suicide bombers and other terrorist activities. He recently described experimental results from a digital video camera invented in their laboratory that uses a terahertz imaging system. One day such a device could be used to scan airport passengers quickly and efficiently. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 13 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm
The molecular machinery that switches on a gene known to cause breast cancer to spread and invade other organs has been identified by an international team of scientists. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 13 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm
Most studies of food webs look at how predators at the top of the food chain control prey and plant populations below them. But a new study shows how plants at the bottom of the food chain have evolved mechanisms that influence ecosystem dynamics as well. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 13 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm
Scientists have made the first direct observations of charged particles that lead to some of the brightest aurora using the Cluster spacecraft. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 13 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm
It is often thought that smoking is used as a coping strategy to deal with work stress. However, the pressures of work can actually lower a smoker's nicotine dependence, contrary to popular belief. The surprising finding contradicts even the study researchers' hypothesis. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 13 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm
The organelles of photosynthesis -- the chloroplasts -- have their own DNA, messenger RNA and ribosomes for forming proteins. Scientists have now discovered how to regulate the formation of proteins in the chloroplasts. They can use so-called riboswitches to switch the genes in the chloroplasts of tobacco plants on and off. These riboswitches could provide future benefit by making plants capable of delivering drugs or raw materials, or by improving the biological safety of genetically modified plants. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 13 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am
A novel vaccine may help reduce the number and severity of exacerbations in patients with severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 13 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am
A new test developed by Japanese scientists may revolutionize how and when physicians diagnose Alzheimer's disease. According to new research, the new test measures proteins in the spinal fluid known to be one of the main causes of brain degeneration and memory impairment in Alzheimer's patients: high molecular weight A-Beta oligomers. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 13 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am
Working in a rare, "natural seafloor laboratory" of hydrothermal vents that had just been rocked by a volcanic eruption, scientists have discovered what they believe is an undersea superhighway carrying tiny life forms unprecedented distances to inhabit the post-eruption site. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 13 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am
SPACE.com - HOUSTON
Two shuttle astronauts ventured outside the International Space Station (ISS)
early Tuesday to complete work to replace a new massive coolant tank during the
third and last spacewalk of their mission. Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 13 Apr 2010 | 3:01 am
SPACE.com - Comet
McNaught, the so-called Great Comet of 2007, has been
identified as the biggest comet measured to date, according to scientists,
whose calculations were based on the comet's overall influence in space. Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 13 Apr 2010 | 3:01 am
AFP - Pakistan's prime minister on Monday defended his country as a responsible nuclear power, shooting down concerns at a major security summit that extremists could seize loose weapons.
AP - Scattered showers and thunderstorms were expected to develop across the Plains and Upper Midwest on Tuesday due to a large low pressure system moving off the Rockies.
AP - A pair of astronauts finished installing a fresh storage tank outside the International Space Station on Tuesday, accomplishing a main mission objective that required three spacewalks.
AP - Having a bad reaction to penicillin as a child doesn't guarantee you're still allergic decades later. And if the oncologist says you have to switch chemotherapies because of an allergic reaction, well, maybe not. Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 13 Apr 2010 | 1:15 am
The incredible ambition of the Large Hadron Collider has fired our imagination; physicists have become cult TV stars; dramatic new pictures from space grace a million computer screensavers. Is this a golden age of science?
Brian Cox, Physicist
Over the last few years, I have definitely noticed a shift in the public's attitude towards science: from viewing it as a useful sideline in society – a valuable pursuit for the boffinous few, that ultimately looks after itself – to a cause worth fighting for, which has the power to change society for the better.
No sensible person or politician has ever argued that science is not useful, but many take its contribution for granted. Did you know, for example, that Britain's entire science budget was £3.3bn last year, out of a total government spend of £621bn? And that physics-based industry alone contributes 6.4% of our GDP – comparable to the much vaunted and rather more costly financial services sector – yet no party is committed to protecting it after the next election?
A growing appreciation of the low-cost, high-value and good old-fashioned solidity of science and engineering relative to finance has, I believe, contributed to the new public mood, but as with all paradigmatic cultural shifts, there is more to it. Simon Singh's libel tussle with the British Chiropractic Association has brought together an unusual alliance of comedians and scientists in support of a broad, rationalist agenda. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been a rollercoaster ride of success and engineering difficulty, but the sheer ambition and scale of the project has fired the imagination of many. The dramatic pictures of the Martian surface from the Opportunity and Spirit rovers, and the unparallelled beauty of Saturn and its moons as seen by the ongoing Cassini mission, grace a million computer screensavers.
This confluence of factors has seeded a fragile but strengthening movement. There is a desire to look to the tangible world of science and engineering to replace the perceived smoke and mirrors of the financial sector. There is a recognition that the real world, revealed to us by machines such as the LHC and Cassini, is more rich, beautiful and satisfying than the vacuous meanderings of pseudoscience – and a realisation that we must fight for science and rationality in our society if we want to preserve them, because they are both fragile and immensely valuable. If my unscientific feeling is right, then these gentle shifts may herald a new golden age of science in the UK, simply because we, as a society, want it to happen.
Brian Cox is professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester, and works at Cern's Large Hadron Collider
Martin Rees, Astronomer
Science shouldn't be just for scientists, and there are encouraging signs that it is becoming more pervasive in culture and the media. Spectacular images from space, and the razzmatazz of the LHC, have broadened public awareness of the fundamental mysteries of the cosmos and the microworld. The Darwin anniversary year raised the cultural profile of science. And technology, in symbiosis with science, advances at an unprecedented rate. Computer power grows according to Moore's law, as does the sophistication of handheld devices.
But there is a quite different technology that's advancing even faster: genome sequencing. This is now a million times cheaper than 10 years ago. Its spinoffs – post-genomic science – could be as astonishing as those from the microchip have been in the last two decades.
What will surely enhance everyone's focus on science is the imperative to provide energy and food for a world population destined to rise to nine billion by mid-century. This challenge will be aggravated by climate change – so climate science needs better data, and modelling that can reliably predict regional impacts. And sustainable agriculture, in a world of water shortages and climate change, requires new technologies – genetic modification among them. We also need to preserve biodiversity and prevent a "sixth extinction".
Where in the world will the leading-edge science be done? The internet has levelled the playing field, allowing far more people to participate. And the world's intellectual capital will be increasingly concentrated in east Asia. In these countries, science is prominent on politicans' radar screens – as it is in some western countries.
The US, France, Germany and Canada have all responded to the financial crisis by boosting rather than cutting their science funding. The UK has not. In the last decade, government policies strengthened our science base. But it will be in jeopardy if other countries become more attractive to mobile talent. Leadership, once lost, would be hard to recover in a "scientific century", when other nations are forging ahead.
Martin Rees is the astronomer royal, and president of the Royal Society
Alok Jha, Science writer
On the morning of 30 March, as the LHC finally geared up to collide protons with an energy that had not been witnessed in the universe since moments after the big bang, Twitter was ablaze with excitement.
"First time in the history!!!!!!!!!!!! World record!!!!!!!!" tweeted the physicists in the Cern control room, as the particle beams reached full power. "Pardon me, LHC up and running now. I expect a Higgs Boson by teatime," said realbillbailey. Elektr0nika was also impatient for Cern to locate the fundamental particle that confers mass on to everything else: "Come on, Higgs-Boson. If Ricky Martin can come out, you can do it, too."
Hundreds of messages an hour relayed, commented on and celebrated the biggest science experiment in the world, built to examine the most abstract and fundamental science imaginable. That morning, particle physics was the coolest thing on the planet.
The Cern laboratory, near Geneva, is no stranger to the internet. Back in 1989, this is where Tim Berners-Lee wrote the computer code that gave birth to the world wide web – but even he would have struggled to predict how this would alter the way science is done and, importantly, talked about. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Digg and countless other social networks have given anyone interested in science (a group far wider than just the scientific community) a faster and easier way to share the best ideas, and find like-minded people to geek on about some favourite subject.
Scientists have always spoken to each other, of course, but these networks mean they can speak direct to everyone else, too. For years they had to watch, probably in deep frustration, as ill-informed journalists would make mincemeat of their carefully crafted research. With their own blogs and social networking tools to spread and discuss their ideas, they could tell their side of the story, unfettered by space restrictions or misunderstandings.
Within an hour of Cern's announcement that it had reached full power, a new profile had appeared on Twitter. HiggsMatter's first message: "Hello world!" Alok Jha is a science and environment correspondent at the Guardian
Kevin Fong, Astrophysicist
Things change. When I was at college at the start of the 1990s, being an astrophysicist was something one didn't readily own up to. The government took a dim view, too. Science for the sake of knowledge was seen as an anachronism: good enough for Newton and Einstein, but useless to the needs of the modern British economy. And while this mindset persists today among some in the Westminster bubble, the tide of public opinion has turned.
Maybe people needed something they could rely upon for a change; something more dependable than their banks and politicians. Maybe it's the long awaited backlash against Simon Cowell culture: careers in science being the perfect antithesis to his snake-oil formula of instant fame and vast wealth without effort. It might simply be that many of yesteryear's übernerds have become today's multibillionaire tech gurus. Or that the fabric of the digital age, which underweaves everything from our trading desks to home entertainment, was a throwaway gift, stumbled upon by some folk while they were about the business of colliding subatomic particles at Cern.
This is science's time. The community is stronger than ever and more vocal, all in pursuit of a single goal – to make the world understand what Einstein always knew; that curiosity has its own reason for existing.
Kevin Fong is honorary senior lecturer in physiology at University College London
Dara O Briain, Comedian
I think most of the credit for science getting cool has to go to Gillian McKeith. The rise of the "poo lady", as Ben Goldacre calls her, was probably the point at which a lot of nerds, such as myself, cried out: "Enough! This bullshit has got to stop!"
Hand-in-hand with the exciting advances in proper science, there has been an explosion in the public's hunger for some proper rational thinking, and an end to the unfettered rubbish being unquestioningly allowed into our culture. There was a large and previously quiet majority out there, growing increasingly tired of the parade of psychics, nutritionists, astrologers and homeopaths sitting on couches on daytime telly spouting off.
This constituency has now found its voice, whether on blogs or in events such as Robin Ince's Nine Carols and Lessons for Godless People – originally started as a celebration of an atheist Christmas but which, because of demand, became a week-long, sell-out festival of rationalism and science instead.
"Nerdstock", as I like to call it, is probably the only gig I can open by shouting "what's e to the i pi?" and get the correct answer from the crowd. It's also a chance for comedians like Ricky Gervais and Tim Minchin to share a bill with Richard Dawkins and Brian Cox, and for audiences to enjoy them equally.
Even in my normal theatre shows, though, crowds are unfazed by more technical information. I followed up my initial McKeith routine with a longer piece in my 2008 tour on evidence-based medicine versus quackery. This year's show manages to draw in Neutrinos, the hormone Oxytocin and the efficacy of chiropracty on infants; all without coming close to scaring the crowds away.
There are a whole new generation of real scientific communicators to explain this stuff properly; Jim Al-Khalili on quantum physics; Marcus du Sautoy on mathematics, Alice Roberts on anthropology. My experience simply illustrates that audiences are more than happy to handle the "difficult" stuff. Thanks, Gillian.
Dara O Briain is a comedian and Guardian columnist
Tim Radford, Science writer
Every moment in science has seemed bigger than the last for more than 40 years. When the Beatles sang Love Me Do in 1963, there was an argument for a big-bang moment of creation, but also for an eternal, steady-state universe. And there was no satisfactory explanation as to why the continents seemed to have migrated around the planet, crashing into each other like dodgem cars for the last few billion years. Yet by the time the Beatles tuned in with Eleanor Rigby in 1966, both problems had been settled.
Now, in little more than half a lifetime, physicists have a confident, although not necessarily correct, history of the universe for the last 13.7bn years – with some amazing mysteries in the first trillionth of a second, when the universe was about the size of a beachball. (It was to tackle these that thousands of physicists lobbied for the LHC.)
Also in the mid-1960s, geologists, geophysicists and planetary scientists began assembling a complete theory of the Earth, which accounted for sea shells in the Alps, fossilised trees in Antarctica, and earthquakes in Japan. In the same decades, medical scientists extinguished smallpox, all but obliterated polio, and extended life expectancy even for the poorest nations. Geneticists sequenced DNA, confirmed it as a universal code of life, and used it to create new treatments, solve crimes, and even confirm at least one hitherto unknown recent human species.
What has happened in computing and communications in the last five decades has exceeded anyone's wildest dreams; and while space exploration hasn't quite caught up with the fantasies of Dan Dare or Star Trek, the rewards so far have been spectacular. So now is always more astonishing than then.
But right now? When a quarter of all Americans still cannot grasp the genius of Darwin, thus rejecting all the supporting evidence from physics, biology, physiology, genetics, geology, palaeontology and even astronomy? While very influential politicians and commentators feel free to reject two decades of consistent research into climate change from thousands of competing meteorologists, oceanographers, naturalists and glaciologists? How cool can science be, when so many feel so lukewarm? Tim Radford was science editor of the Guardian until 2005
Sam Wollaston, TV critic
It's certainly appears to be science's big moment on the telly. Bang Goes the Theory on BBC1 is doing it for the kids, testing things by blowing them up, hands-on – so much more fun than Tomorrow's World ever was; like Top Gear with a white coat and safety specs. And just as science reacts to Top Gear, so Top Gear reacts to science (Newton's third law of motion), with Richard Hammond exploring his Invisible Worlds (also on BBC1), zooming in and zooming in some more so he can write his name on the platelet of a human hair.
For the more advanced, BBC4 has been taking things beyond GCSE level. Jim Al-Khalili, a physicist, confusingly (these pointyheads are very adaptable), did his fascinating Chemistry: A Volatile History. And Sadeq Saba made a lovely programme about Omar Khayyam. That's a brave commission in the era of Celebrity Love Island: a profile of a Persian astronomer and mathematician who lived nearly 1,000 years ago.
Then, pitched somewhere between Hammond and Al-Khalili, at AS level difficulty, is Brian Cox. Chris Evans described his Wonders of the Solar System series as "literally the best hour of TV I have ever seen", and the BBC has already commissioned a followup.
But TV's new love of science isn't just about dedicated science programmes. It's already well established in crime (CSI, Waking the Dead), is creeping into drama (Breaking Bad), even cooking (Heston Blumenthal). It's not just Brian Cox who's (maybe) cool, it's science itself.
Sam Wollaston is TV critic for the Guardian
Laura Spinney, Science writer
A country's visibility on the international science scene is measured by its publications in high-impact, peer-reviewed journals. Given that Britain has reaped more of those in the last decade than it strictly deserves, based on its share of global science funding, the view from abroad is that for a small island, it has a big output.
It has an important advantage, of course: English is the language of science. But it's a tenuous advantage: currently, it's Mandarin-speakers who struggle to translate novel concepts in molecular biology into English, but it could be the other way round.
The Labour government deserves a lot of the credit for the UK being on such a roll, having steadily increased science funding since it took power in 1997. But how long will it last? Not all British talent is homegrown. The national debt is bigger in relation to its GDP than that of the US or Japan – other scientific leaders – and any future government is likely to make cuts, whichever party forms it. That will make it harder for British universities to attract foreign stars.
It doesn't help that the UK is still perceived as a bad place to do animal research, because of its powerful animal rights lobby, or that British libel laws are less supportive of free speech than those of, say, the US.
On the whole, though, Britain has a lot to be proud of. For decades, scientists tried and failed to shed their fusty old egghead image, then along came CSI, and they became cool. What was it about forensic science that glinted and caught TV's eye? Probably DNA profiling. And who invented that? A Brit.
Laura Spinney is a science journalist and novelist
Ian Sample, Science writer
One morning this January, hundreds of people gathered outside branches of Boots, the chemists, to wolf down bottles of pills they had bought in the stores. None of the mob suffered an overdose, and that was the point the event sought to drive home. The pills were homeopathic and contained no active ingredients. Boots admits to having no evidence the pills work, but makes a tidy profit selling them to people who think they do.
The campaign began in Merseyside, but thanks to a network of self-professed sceptics and the reach of the internet, it quickly became national. And then international. The mass non-overdose in Liverpool was mirrored in Edinburgh, London, Bristol, Madrid, Perth, Sydney and elsewhere.
Did Boots change its ways? Of course not. Was the protest a waste of time? Not at all. Video clips of people cheerfully munching expensive placebos went viral. Who knows, perhaps one or two folk learned more about what they were getting from their high-street pharmacists. A few more may have cottoned on to the value of evidence. In everything.
And this is the reason to celebrate. We are in a golden age of scepticism, and that is a triumph for science and society. Sceptics, many of whom are scientists themselves, have become emboldened thanks to a handful of high-profile cheerleaders, and the world is a better place for it. They are watchful and influential. The government – so fond of proclaiming its dedication to evidence-based policy making – has been taken to task for wasting millions on flawed studies; ignoring scientific evidence on drugs, and allowing scientists and science journalists to be silenced by inappropriate libel cases.
The war is afoot on other fronts. Multinational companies have been embarrassed into dropping unsubstantiated claims from their advertising campaigns. The media, with its consistently dreadful record on scientific accuracy, is mauled for every transgression. All of this is good. People will always profit from peddling nonsense, but MPs, PRs, CEOs, quacks and journalists are now being challenged by a rising army of sceptics. And they won't have the wool pulled over their eyes.
Ian Sample is the Guardian's science correspondent
Alice Roberts, Anatomist
It is very difficult to decide whether science is enjoying a golden moment right now. It's probably something we'll only be able to gauge a few years from now, with the benefit of hindsight.
The pursuit of science helps satisfy our curiosity about the world around us, our place within it, and ourselves. But it also provides real, physical benefits, underpinning medicine, for example, and providing a foundation for our industry and economy. But we also need to accept that science and technology can create problems for us - certainly, there are valid concerns about how we as a society view, fund, and use it.
We all need to have a basic understanding of science, yet I think our education system still encourages us to think of ourselves as either "artists" or "scientists". If society is to be engaged with making decisions about science and technology, then we all need to be scientifically literate. And scientists need to engage with the public – in fact, this is an obligation, as most research is publicly funded.
We seem to have been getting very mixed messages from the government about the value of science to our society. On the one hand, it has launched a campaign to show us that science is important, yet it has also tried to manoeuvre scientists into rubber-stamping political decisions, and has got rid of them if they won't – as we saw with the very public dismissal of its chief drug adviser, David Nutt. And of course, there has been the recent announcement of cuts in higher education.
In the run-up to the election, it will be interesting to see what the various parties promise us when it comes to science funding and education. And I'll make up my mind about whether it's been a golden age for science in a few years' time.
Alice Roberts is an anatomist, author and broadcaster
Lady Susan Greenfield's supporters have failed to win a vote which would have paved the way for her return as director of the UK's Royal Institution. Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 13 Apr 2010 | 12:54 am
Japan's whaling fleet blames "violent interference" from anti-whaling activists as it reports its lowest catch for years. Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 13 Apr 2010 | 12:29 am
The political pundits are out in force – but should we set much store by their predictions? Probably not
Get the towels ready. Stock up on those smelling salts. And water, buckets of water. Whatever you do, prepare yourself – because over the next 23 days, the political pundits are going to give you a battering.
Flick on the radio and a platoon of academics will burst forth, extrapolating from the latest polls. Open the newspaper, and face a shelling by the heavy-lead certainties of commentators and politicians. Settle back in front of the telly, and a battery of experts will pummel you with predictions. Gordon Brown will be deemed be a goner. Unless, that is, the tide turns against David Cameron. The battle will be won in the Midlands. Until Kent is in the limelight. All this will be said in short, declarative sentences. Like these. For extra authority.
Apart from being exhausting, this high-intensity forecasting is largely worthless. Cast your mind back to June last year, when yet another Labour putsch was being launched against the prime minister. Trawling through the comment pages published in the week when the coup was at its height – with ministers resigning, and local and European elections looming – I found 20 columns and leading articles in the Times, Telegraph, Independent and Guardian discussing whether Brown would survive. Of those, half predicted he would go, while only a quarter thought he might stay (the rest, perhaps wisely, didn't chance their arm). If the broadsheet fortune-tellers could not assess the outcome of a backroom plot featuring a few ministers and MPs, how far should we trust their judgment on what tens of millions of voters will do?
This is probably unfair, and certainly unscientific. Brown did come close to being toppled last summer, and cabinet conspirators tend to duck out of ICM-style opinion polls. But, on the broad question of whether we should set much store by political predictions, the answer is a flat no.
Just ask Phil Tetlock. A psychologist at Berkeley, he spent two decades asking experts of all stripes and ideological hues – from professors to journalists, Marxists to free-marketeers – to make precise forecasts both within their specialist fields and far outside. He asked them everything from where the Dow Jones would go to whether the Québécois would secede from Canada, amassing a database of 82,361 predictions from 284 experts. Finally, Tetlock compared the forecasts to what actually happened.
The results looked career-threateningly bad. The predictions of the individual experts were only slightly more accurate than guesses made at random – only a bit better, that is, than if a chimp had chucked darts at a board. The experts performed worse than basic computer algorithms. And Tetlock found something else to give Newsnight aficionados pause: those prognosticators with the biggest media profiles were especially bad.
He put his research into a gem of a book called Expert Political Judgement – but woeful forecasters don't dwell solely in Washington or Westminster. Studies show they are also common in psychology, sports, stock markets – so prevalent, in fact, that in 1980 Scott Armstrong, an academic at Wharton business school in the US, came up with the seer-sucker theory. It ran: "No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, suckers will pay for the existence of seers."
The field with the greatest proliferation of seers must be economics, whose blithe confidence contributed to the crash of 2008, and to the disgrace of an entire profession. Last weekend, some of the best-known economists gathered in Cambridge for a conference organised by George Soros to discuss the crisis in their discipline. "Economists didn't see any of this coming," Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz told me. "All their models were too simplistic – and based on the premise that markets worked." And his remedy? "Economics needs to become a lot less theological."
Which is excellent advice for political pundits, too. There is obviously a role for experts – just not as oracles (although Tetlock did note that the group who performed worst of all were undergraduates with no specialism). But being able to analyse what people do, putting it into interesting context, and modestly suggesting how things might be done better, are all valuable skills.
Admittedly, none of this would cut the mustard with Harry S Truman, the US president who asked for a one-armed economist because he was so tired of answers that ran on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other. And clear-cut answers certainly go down better on television, where qualifications are best left to the Open University.
Having strident views, however wrong, is probably also better for an expert's career. After Tetlock presented his findings in San Francisco a few years ago, his host, Stewart Brand, told a story that officials haven't since denied.
In the 1980s, Brand's business partner was asked to speak to the top brass at the CIA about the outlook for the Soviet Union. He ran through a few scenarios, including one in which the Soviet bloc broke up. One sign that this might happen, he said, would be if a relative- unknown called Mikhail Gorbachev rose up through the party ranks.
At this point, one of the CIA analysts jumped in. The presentation was fine, he said, but there was no way the Soviet Union was going to break up – not in his lifetime, not in his children's lifetime.
That analyst's name, said Brand, was Robert M Gates. He is now the US secretary of defence.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Wild ducks that are immune to the effects of H5N1 avian influenza could be spreading the virus far and wide, U.S. government researchers said on Monday.
AP - Director James Cameron said Monday that a real-life "Avatar" battle is playing out in Brazil's Amazon rain forest, where indigenous groups are trying to halt the construction of a huge hydroelectric project.
LiveScience.com - If the economic optimists are right, we may have some music changes on the horizon. Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 12 Apr 2010 | 5:15 pm
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A common antifungal drug can slow tumors growing in mice and should be investigated as a potentially cheap and easy way to fight cancer in people, researchers reported on Monday.
A new technique allows medical records to be used for research on the genetics of disease while still protecting patients from prying eyes.
Databases that link thousands of people’s DNA profiles to their medical histories are a powerful tool for researchers who want to use genetics to individualize the diagnosis and treatment of disease. But this promise of personalized medicine comes with concerns about patient privacy. Now scientists have come up with a way to alter personal medical information so it’s still meaningful for research, but meaningless to someone trying to ID an individual in a database.
“We’re hoping that it’s a game-changer,” says Bradley Malin, a biomedical informatics specialist from Vanderbilt University in Nashville who helped develop the method.
The new method, published online April 12 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, simply disguises parts of the medical history data that are not relevant to a geneticist’s particular research question using an algorithm that combs through health records and makes some aspects of them more general.
For example, if scientists want to examine links between genes and asthma, parts of an individual’s medical record that pertain to asthma are kept intact. But if that asthmatic patient also had a broken arm as a teenager, the algorithm changes the medical code for a broken left forearm to a code that indicates only a broken bone.
“What’s really great about this is even though it anonymizes the data, it still allows you to go in and find an association with medical history,” says Nils Homer of the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved with the research.
The researchers tested their algorithm against potential hackers using information from more than 2,600 patients. The team assumed a hacker might know a patient’s identity, some of their medical history and maybe some of the medical codes associated with that history. The technique stymied efforts to ID an individual based on that information, the researchers report.
“There is definitely a need to de-identify individuals,” says Homer, who was part of a team that demonstrated two years ago that it is possible to trace a genetic signature back to an individual even when that person’s DNA profile was buried in a pool of thousands. The finding prompted the National Institutes of Health to restrict access to genetic databases that had previously been available to anyone with Internet access.
Genome-wide association studies, which comb through these giant databases looking for links between genetic and physical traits, have the potential to generate clinically valuable information. Establishing such links could help doctors understand, for example, why patients respond differently to certain drugs.
Reuters - U.S. officials will study oil and natural gas royalty collection systems used in other countries to determine whether the government can boost revenue from energy leases, the Interior Department said on Monday. Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 12 Apr 2010 | 3:45 pm
CHICAGO (Reuters) - A diet rich in olive oil, nuts, fish, poultry and certain fruits and vegetables may have a powerful effect at staving off Alzheimer's disease, researchers reported on Monday.
• Board's removal may have helped Susan Greenfield return • Motion to support existing council won by 484 to 137 votes
An attempt to oust the governing council of the Royal Institution (RI), one of Britain's most revered scientific establishments, failed at a meeting in London tonight.
Rebel members of the 211-year-old institution called for the removal of the entire board of trustees, a move that would have paved the way for the return of the former director, Lady Greenfield, who was made redundant in January.
But hundreds of members who attended the secret ballot at the institution's historic premises in Mayfair voted overwhelmingly to reject the rebel motions and backed the existing council.
The decision to support the existing council, which forced Greenfield to leave in January, was backed by several leading scientists, including the Nobel prizewinner Sir Harry Kroto and Richard Catlow, a former director of the institution's Davy Faraday research laboratory.
"You have my assurance we will not only listen, but we will also act. We will do our level best not to let you down," said Adrian de Ferranti, chair of the council, after the vote was called 484 to 137 in favour.
Richard Catlow, former director of research at the RI, said: "I'm sad that we had to go through this, but I'm relieved and I hope we can now put this episode behind us."
The RI council said the result showed members endorsed its plans to deliver "leadership and a strong financial future" for the organisation: "We are delighted with the result and extremely pleased the members have given their support to the council and staff. Now we can focus on bringing back the much needed financial stability and strong scientific leadership that this great institution deserves."
The RI has been riven by infighting since the council axed the director's job following a review of its finances that revealed the organisation was £2.5m in debt.
AP - Scientists using a remote-controlled submarine have discovered the deepest known volcanic vent and say the superheated waters inside could contain undiscovered marine species and perhaps even clues to the origin of life on earth.
Our tech writer Eric Bland pointed me to this story today in The Register: a Navy-operated pilotless helicopter, called Fire Scout, was engaged in a routine test flight when its mothership, the USS McInerney, detected a speedboat on its radar. ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 12 Apr 2010 | 2:53 pm
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Ice deposits at least 6 feet thick can be found in some small craters on the moon, researchers reported Monday in one of two studies showing more evidence of water on the moon and Mars.
LONDON (Reuters) - Africa's contribution to the global body of scientific research is very small and does little to benefit its own populations, according to a report from Thomson Reuters released on Monday.
Baroness Susan Greenfield says she believes that her sacking as director of the Royal Institution earlier this year was "unfair". Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 12 Apr 2010 | 2:25 pm
Tiny life forms at the site of a volcanic eruption suggest an eddy-fueled undersea superhighway exists. Source: Livescience.com | 12 Apr 2010 | 2:10 pm
Those bulky, bulletproof vests could become a thing of the past. Their replacement: Your t-shirt, that is with a special coating. Source: Livescience.com | 12 Apr 2010 | 1:22 pm
World leaders and top officials from 47 countries will descend on Washington, D.C., this week for a conference on how to halt the production of nuclear weapons and keep them out of the wrong hands. (For a comprehensive guide to ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 12 Apr 2010 | 1:16 pm
A vast series of earth mounds on the eastern coast of South America may be living landscape fossils of a forgotten civilization’s agriculture.
People raised the mounds between 1,000 and 700 years ago in order to create cropland in terrain that is flooded for half the year, and parched for the other half. New insect ecosystems formed on the mounds, further enriching the soils and keeping them fertile for centuries, long after their human stewards had vanished. This lost agricultural system could be a model for modern farmers, according to a new study.
“Today these lands are used for cattle ranching or hunting. People think agriculture must not be possible in these areas,” said ecologist Doyle McKey of the University of Montpellier in France, co-author of a study published April 12 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The common conception is that these areas are wastelands.”
McKey and a team of archaeologists, paleobiologists and soil scientists describe the earthworks, which run for 360 miles from the Berbice River to Cayenne, the modern-day capital of Guyana.
The study is part of a fast-growing body of research on the pre-Columbian world of the Amazon basin. Historians and anthropologists once thought it inhabited only by small bands of primitive hunters and gatherers, with interior jungles and coastal floodplains unable to support large-scale agriculture and complex societies. That picture no longer seems accurate.
Scientists have shown that now-vanished people transformed the Amazon, using biochar to nourish jungle soils, and moving floodplain soils to create irrigation channels and planting beds. McKey’s findings expand the range of known coastal agriculture and take an in-depth look at the beneficial ecological changes it created.
“Human engineering, if we do it cleverly, can work together with natural ecosystem engineering,” said McKey.
In addition to 100-foot-long, water-diverting berms, they identified expanses of mounds covering hundreds of acres. From the air, the mounds were too symmetrical to be natural. On the ground, soil samples returned fossilized evidence of maize, squash and manioc.
The mounds appear to have been constructed from layers of surrounding topsoil, which was shoveled out and layered like cakes. That formed the basis of the mounds, which put crops above the flood line but that was only one part of the agricultural trick.
Species of ants and termites settled in the mounds, where their colonies wouldn’t flood. Their burrowing aerated the soil, and plant matter foraged from surrounding areas enriched it further. As a result, the mounds acted like sponges for rainfall, and outsourced insect labor made them rich in key fertilizer nutrients of nitrogen, potassium and calcium. The root systems of perennial plants kept the mound structures intact, and likely did so when mounds were rotated out of production.
McKey is reluctant to speculate on how many people were supported by mound agriculture. A conservative guess based on crop yields from modern raised-bed farming experiments put the figure at one person for every two acres of farmland. That’s a very rough estimate, but enough to suggest that the farmers were not just small, family-based tribes.
More important than exact numbers is the evidence of agricultural success in a region that’s not considered suitable for modern agriculture. McKey thinks today’s farmers could learn from ancient tricks, and supplement them with modern tools.
As for the original inhabitants, little is known. They belonged to so-called Arauquinoid cultures, which emerged 1,500 years ago and vanished shortly before the arrival of Europeans. Whether they left descendants is unknown. They’re known only from a single wooden shove, some ceramic fragments and their farms.
“When people modified these ecosystems long ago, they changed the way the ecosystems work. We can use that knowledge,” said McKey.
Images: 1) Farm mounds from above and the ground./PNAS. 2) A map of northeastern Amazon coastal earthworks./PNAS. 3) Satellite and interpretive imagery of a site near Kourou, Frency Guiana/PNAS.
Citation: “Pre-Columbian agricultural landscapes, ecosystem engineers, and self-organized patchiness in Amazonia.” By Doyle McKey, Stéphen Rostain, José Iriarte, Bruno Glaser, Jago Jonathan Birk, Irene Holst, Delphine Renard. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 107 No. 15, April 12, 2010.
X-rays show in stunning detail the interior of the skull of a new human-like creature found in South Africa. Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 12 Apr 2010 | 12:40 pm
Huge new baby stars shine bright in this image of the Rosette Molecular Cloud.
The previously undiscovered protostars are the small points of orangey light in the center of the image. They are up to 10 times more massive than the sun.
The Herschel Space Observatory, operated by the European Space Agency, obtained the new image, which is a composite of three different wavelengths of light all in the infrared part of the spectrum. Infrared light waves are longer and scatter less than visible light, allowing scientists to probe dust-shrouded areas of space. In this image, the shortest wavelength is blue, the medium green, and the longest red.
The intense star-forming region of the Milky Way is about 5,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Monoceros, the Unicorn. This image shows only part of the massive cloud of dust. If the whole thing, seen below, were visible to the naked eye, it would be large in the sky, appearing around five times the size of a full moon.
In the depths of the Caribbean Sea, explorers have found the deepest hydrothermal vents on the planet. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 12 Apr 2010 | 12:08 pm
The Cryosat radar instrument that will map the Earth's ice cover has been switched on and is reported to be working well. Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 12 Apr 2010 | 11:49 am
WASHINGTON — A new computer-based technique is exploring uncharted territory in the fruit fly brain with cell-by-cell detail that can be built into networks for a detailed look at how neurons work together. The research may ultimately lead to a complete master plan of the entire fly brain. Mapping the estimated 100,000 neurons in a fly brain, and seeing how they interact to control behavior, will be a powerful tool for figuring out how the billions of neurons in the human brain work.
The program has already found some new features of the fruit fly brain, said study coauthor Hanchuan Peng of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Va. “We can see very beautiful and very complicated patterns,” said Peng, who presented the results April 9 at the 51st Annual Drosophila Research Conference. “If you look at neurons at a better resolution, or look at regions you’ve never looked at before, you’ll find something new.”
Peng and his colleagues developed a method, also described in the April Nature Biotechnology, which incorporates many different images of fruit fly brains. The brains come from flies that were genetically programmed so that select neurons glow when struck with a particular type of laser light. By combining thousands of these digital images from different flies, the researchers can create maps of how these different neuronal populations fit together. The full map of the fly brain isn’t yet complete, but it will grow as more images are added.
These kinds of large-scale studies that focus on how neurons are connected are “very important for the future,” commented geneticist Wei Xie of Southeast University in Nanjing, China. Understanding how all of the neurons work together is much more meaningful than studying how a single brain cell connects to another cell, Xie said. “Just a neuron is not enough.”
“What we want to do in the next few years is to add more and more neuron reconstructions into this map,” Peng said. He likened the process to a Google Earth resource. “If you think about the fruit fly brain as the Earth, the little neurons will be the streets. We want to map a lot of neuron streets onto the Earth,” he said.
Peng and his colleagues have started combing their preliminary brain map for interesting features and comparing different flies’ brains to one another. For the most part, patterns of neuron-connecting pathways don’t vary much from brain to brain, the researchers found.
On the other hand, the shapes of cells in the same brain structure can differ dramatically. For example, the variety of shapes found in the neurons of a wheel-shaped brain structure called the ellipsoid body “are just amazing,” Peng says. In the same fly, some of the cells spread inside the ring, while others point outward in a complex lock-and-key arrangement.
The results are preliminary, but finding such unexpected variation could mean that these neurons — which were thought to be nearly carbon copies of each other — have important functional differences.
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.
Physicists have long puzzled over why sand grains and other small particles can build up electrical charges as they collide with one another, sometimes to the point of discharging lightning in dust storms or plumes of volcanic ash. Now, a paper in an upcoming issue of Nature Physics suggests that particles transfer electrical charge vertically during a smashup, such that positive charges move downward and negative charges move up in the cloud.
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.
A new study finds that lifestyle changes can cut women's cancer risk by a third. So why are some doctors reluctant to tell their patients? Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 12 Apr 2010 | 9:57 am
Part of an ankylosaurid skull has likely just been found by a persistent high school science teacher whose hobby is dinosaurs, according to a report in Grand Junction, Colorado's The Daily Sentinel. If verified, the fossil would be among the ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 12 Apr 2010 | 8:49 am
CAIRO (Reuters) - Egyptian archaeologists carrying out excavations at the site of a planned youth center have found 14 tombs dating back to the third century BC, including one with a female mummy adorned with jewelry.
Monday marked the 49th anniversary of the first human spaceflight and the 29th anniversary of the first shuttle launch. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 12 Apr 2010 | 8:35 am
Twenty major U.S. streams and rivers have warmed significantly over the last few decades, according to research. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 12 Apr 2010 | 8:06 am
The remnants of a bacterial-decayed brain are found in the skull of a 1.9-million-year-old ancestor. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 12 Apr 2010 | 6:01 am
These elusive animals may be camera shy, but their unique singing voices are drawing scientists' attention. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 12 Apr 2010 | 5:00 am
A synthetic, free-floating nanosheet just two molecules thick may provide the perfect substrate for creating future electronic devices.
The biologically inspired sheet is made of polymers, or long molecules with repeating units, that mimic the precision and order seen in proteins and crystal structures. But these synthetic sheets are made of molecular building blocks that are more durable than their natural counterparts.
“We’re making molecular plywood — a flat piece of building material that you can build nanoscale structures with,” said chemist Ronald Zuckermann of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, coauthor of a study April 11 in Nature Materials. “This study will open people’s eyes and make them talk about proteins and plastics in the same sentence.”
Zuckermann’s team made the discovery by stumbling upon a particular sequence of repeating units that formed perfectly aligned two-dimensional crystals. “Ours is the largest and thinnest two-dimensional self-assembled organic crystal known,” he said.
Proteins are made of a chain of amino acids that fold up into three-dimensional structures, such as alpha-helices and beta-sheets. Zuckermann had previously developed polymers that mimic alpha-helices, and here for the first time he has developed a material that mimics beta-sheets.
“This study is a great advancement,” said materials scientist Yi Cui of Stanford University. “The fact that they can produce a really large sheet on a nanometer-scale is really surprising.”
By using only two types of molecular building blocks, the team dramatically reduced the number of possible sequences and simplified the self-assembly of the polymers into larger structures, such as sheets. They created 3-nanometer-thick sheets with hydrophobic, or water-fearing, chemical groups facing the inside and hydrophilic, or water-loving, molecular units on the surface.
The team systematically adjusted the hydrophilic and hydrophobic groups until they discovered a pattern of molecular sequences that self-assemble into layered sheets. The sheets resemble a plasma membrane, the bilayered structure made of lipids and proteins that surrounds cells.
When Zuckermann looked at the polymer chains directly under the most powerful electron microscope in the world, he observed them wiggling around like little worms as they slid against each other. The idea of using high-resolution electron microscopy to visualize the shape of individual polymer chains was previously unheard of, he said
“It completely blew us away that these crystallizine sheets are so well-ordered and have very straight edges, even though their component polymer chains are flexible and spaghetti-like,” Zuckermann said. “It was a real thrill to figure out how to really order material in a precise way at the atomic level.” His team knows exactly where each atom is located in the structure, so it’s possible to chemically engineer the material to serve specific functions.
A smooth, layered surface may be ideal for building flat electrical components, such as photovoltaic devices, batteries and fuel cells, Zuckermann said. Decorating the hydrophilic surface of the sheet with molecules that specifically bind to proteins may be useful for biosensing applications, such as developing catalysts and recognizing molecules, he added.
What’s more, the sheets form layers that can separate and selectively transport different materials. He foresees developing more complicated three-dimensional structures using the same technology. Scientists may also one day use the technology for biological applications, such as drug delivery or tissue engineering.
