Novel negative-index metamaterial bends light 'wrong' direction

Scientists have engineered a type of artificial optical material -- a metamaterial -- with a particular three-dimensional structure such that light exhibits a negative index of refraction upon entering the material. In other words, this material bends light in the "wrong" direction from what normally would be expected, irrespective of the angle of the approaching light. The uniquely versatile material could be used for more efficient light collection in solar cells.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm

Potential for new cancer detection and therapy method described

Scientists have described a potentially new early cancer detection and treatment method using nanoparticles. A new paper illustrates how engineered gold nanoparticles tied to a cancer-specific receptor could be targeted to tumor cells to treat prostate, breast or lung cancers in humans.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm

Rainfall linked to skewed sex ratios in African buffalo

An increased proportion of male African buffalo are born during the rainy season. Researchers collected data from over 200 calves and 3,000 fetuses, finding that rain likely exerts this effect by interaction with so-called sex ratio genes, which cause differences in number, quality or function of X- and Y-bearing sperm.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm

Non-smokers put on less weight, study suggests

A new study links nicotine poisoning with weight gain, and concludes that active smokers, not only those who stop, put on more weight than non-smokers. After four years of analysis, those who put on least weight were those who had never smoked.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm

For children with hearing loss: The earlier the better for cochlear implants, study finds

Receiving a cochlear implant before 18 months of age dramatically improves a deaf child's ability to hear, understand and, eventually, speak, according to a multicenter study led by scientists at Johns Hopkins.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm

Substance in breast milk kills cancer cells, study suggests

A substance found in breast milk can kill cancer cells, reveal a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm

New strain of virulent airborne fungi, unique to Oregon, is set to spread

A newly discovered strain of an airborne fungus has caused several deaths in Oregon and seems poised to move into California and other adjacent areas, according to scientists.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am

Mammographic density and risk of breast cancer

Women who have a breast density of 75 percent or higher on a mammogram have a risk of breast cancer that is four to five times greater than that of women with little or no density, making mammographic breast density one of the strongest biomarkers of breast cancer risk.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am

Brains, worms and computer chips have striking similarities

Scientists have discovered striking similarities between the human brain, the nervous system of a worm, and a computer chip. Using data that is largely in the public domain, including magnetic resonance imaging data from human brains, a map of the nematode's nervous system, and a standard computer chip, they examined how the elements in each system are networked together.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am

Gene test shows who could benefit from statins to reduce colon cancer risk

A genetic test can help determine in which patients cholesterol-lowering statin drugs might have the most benefit in also reducing the risk of colorectal cancer, a new study finds.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am

Oil rig blast prompts environmental concerns (AP)

AP - As hope dimmed for the lives of 11 crew members missing since a drilling rig exploded in flames in the Gulf of Mexico, authorities turned their focus to controlling an oil spill that could threaten the fragile ecosystem of the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 23 Apr 2010 | 4:04 am

U.S. military tests X-37B reusable spaceship

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - An unmanned Atlas rocket carrying a miniature space shuttle blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Thursday on a technology test flight that could last as long as nine months.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 23 Apr 2010 | 3:51 am

Vatican finances adult stem cell research (AP)

AP - The Vatican says it will finance new research into the potential use of adult stem cells in the treatment of intestinal and possibly other diseases.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 23 Apr 2010 | 3:39 am

New whaling plan draws fire from all sides (AFP)

AFP - A "peace plan" by the International Whaling Commission to legitimise but reduce whaling drew fire Friday as Japan demanded higher quotas and environmentalists warned of serious harm to the ocean giants.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 23 Apr 2010 | 3:30 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - The storm that brought severe weather to parts of the Plains on Thursday will move eastward Friday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 23 Apr 2010 | 2:46 am

Here Come the Planet Hunters!

At a very special event in Pasadena, Calif., a panel of top scientists discussed exoplanets and alien life. Fortunately, Jennifer Ouellette was in attendance to keep an eye on the proceeds.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 23 Apr 2010 | 2:23 am

One Step Closer to Understanding Dark Energy

Measuring the influence of dark energy on the universe is a tricky business, but refining our understanding of Type Ia supernovae may uncover the true nature of this mysterious force.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 23 Apr 2010 | 2:07 am

Commission proposes limited commercial whale hunts (AP)

AP - The International Whaling Commission has proposed allowing the animals to be hunted under strict quotas, bringing the world a step closer to the first legal commercial whaling in nearly 25 years.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 23 Apr 2010 | 1:41 am

U.S. military tests X-37B reusable spaceship (Reuters)

Reuters - An unmanned Atlas rocket carrying a miniature space shuttle blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Thursday on a technology test flight that could last as long as nine months.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 23 Apr 2010 | 1:26 am

Endangered sturgeon fish flourishing in Wisconsin (AP)

AP - It's been a tough fight for the whisker-snouted sturgeon.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 23 Apr 2010 | 1:22 am

Lift-off for military spaceplane

A prototype spaceplane developed for the US military has been launched into orbit from Florida.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 Apr 2010 | 11:39 pm

U.S. effort to fight malaria focuses on women (Reuters)

Reuters - The U.S. government announced on Thursday it would focus part of its $63 billion, six-year Global Health Initiative plan to accelerate efforts to fight malaria, mostly in Africa and aimed at women and children.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Apr 2010 | 8:08 pm

Air Force Launches Secretive X-37B Space Plane on Mystery Mission (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - The United States Air Force's secretive X-37B robotic space plane blasted off from Florida late Thursday on a mystery mission shrouded in secrecy for the U.S. military.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Apr 2010 | 6:30 pm

How Does the NFL Draft's Wonderlic Test Work? (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Along with running the 40-yard dash, lifting weights and showing off their football skills, the prospective recruits at the National Football League (NFL) Draft Combine take an intelligence test called the Wonderlic Personnel Test. Through a mixture of simple math and reading questions, the test is designed to measureanalytical skills, decision making ability and pattern recognition aptitude. But experience has shown it may not actually predict NFL success.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Apr 2010 | 6:01 pm

Whaling plan draws greens' anger

Proposals to limit whaling quotas draw fire from environmental groups, though some catches would fall.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 Apr 2010 | 5:59 pm

Urgent refit for space magnet

Particle physicists in a race against time to overhaul US$1.5-billion cosmic-ray detector.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/ZwnZPqvwYC0" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 22 Apr 2010 | 5:56 pm

Oil rig off US sinks after blast

A Gulf of Mexico oil rig that caught fire on Tuesday after an explosion has now sunk, with 11 workers still missing.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 Apr 2010 | 5:13 pm

Orcas are more than one species, gene study shows

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - They may all look similar, but killer whales, also known as orcas, include several distinct species, according to genetic evidence published on Thursday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 22 Apr 2010 | 4:46 pm

Is Time Travel Possible?

Modern culture is inundated with tales of time travel. But is it really possible to travel through time? I talk with theoretical physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies, author of "How to Build a Time Machine," to find out.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 22 Apr 2010 | 4:14 pm

Deadly New Fungus Emerging in Oregon Expected to Spread

A deadly new VGIIc strain of the fungus Cryptococcus gattii has mysterious origins.
Source: Livescience.com | 22 Apr 2010 | 4:02 pm

Tree rings map 700 years of Asian monsoons

Historical rainfall across the region documented for the first time.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 22 Apr 2010 | 4:00 pm

The Nanometer Matterhorn

Those crazy IBM research engineers, what will they create at the nanoscale next? To demonstrate a new material etching technique that could allow for ever smaller computer chip components to be made, they created a model of the Matterhorn that stands just 25 nanometers tall. That’s 17,912,000,000,000 times smaller than the 14, 691-foot real mountain. It is even 1.8 billion times smaller than the Disney’s Matterhorn ride.

The mini-mountain was created using scanning-probe lithography: a tiny, heated stylus carved the mountain into a film of glass 100 nanometers thick. The whole operation took 120 distinct steps. The research was reported in the journal Science Thursday.

It got us wondering. What are the best things that have ever been carved or etched at the nanoscale? The classic thing to do is write the letters of your company (IBM) or university (MIT). But stranger things abound like the nanobama tiny presidential portrait. Let us know if your lab has done something interesting. We’d love to publish your nanoart weirdness.

“Nanoscale Three-Dimensional Patterning of Molecular Resists by Scanning Probes”
by David Pires, James L. Hedrick, Anuja De Silva, Jane Frommer, Bernd Gotsmann, Heiko Wolf, Michel
Despont, Urs Duerig, Armin W. Knoll in Science Express doi: 10.1126/science.1187851

See Also:

• Nano-Scale Glassblowing Makes DNA Funnel
• Nanobama: World’s Tiniest Candidate Portrait
• The Smallest Welding Job Ever

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 22 Apr 2010 | 3:53 pm

How Does the NFL Draft's Wonderlic Test Work?

The Wonderlic is the NFL's version of an IQ test.
Source: Livescience.com | 22 Apr 2010 | 3:00 pm

Oregon Fungus Spreading South

A virulent, airborne fungus that infects both humans and animals is spreading towards California.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 22 Apr 2010 | 3:00 pm

Modified viruses 'can destroy cancer cells'

Development could lead to treatments tailored to different diseases, say research groups

Viruses can be modified to seek out and destroy cancer cells, scientists said today. Laboratory tests at Leeds University have shown how proteins can be added to a virus to enable it to recognise unique markers on the surface of tumours.

Campaign and research groups believe the development could benefit patients and lead to treatments tailored to different diseases. They say the findings show a method of delivering gene therapy more efficiently and individually to the cancers they are intended to treat.

Now the researchers are hoping to move from the laboratory and begin human testing. Dr John Chester, who led the Cancer Research UK-funded study, published in Gene Therapy, said the modified viruses deliver genes which could make cancer cells more sensitive to drugs.

They could also introduce "suicide" genes to cancer cells or replace the missing and defective genes which caused the cancer to develop, with an approach known as gene therapy.

Chester said: "Gene therapies have been out of fashion over the last couple of years. This isn't an indication that they don't work, just that we haven't found the best way to use them yet.

"Our research points to a new method to optimise viruses for gene therapy and has so far been promising in the lab. We now need to test these gene therapies in patients to see if they are as effective at treating cancer as our research suggests."

The Leeds team has engineered a range of "re-targeting" proteins which recognise and attach to the markers on the cancer cells. These proteins can be added to a virus so that it recognises and infiltrates cancer cells.

The researchers worked on bladder cancer cells but say the treatment could potentially apply to any kind of cancer.

Chester said gene therapy had had limited success so far mainly because its delivery had not been efficient or specific enough to target only tumour cells. This breakthrough should mean these re-targeting proteins could be combined with existing gene therapy viruses.

Also, by examining the markers on an individual patient's tumour it would be possible to add a re-targeting protein – designed specifically for their cancer – to a gene therapy virus.

He said: "We also found that we weren't limited to using only one targeting protein for each virus. We were also able to combine the virus with two different targeting proteins so that our virus can target a range of different tumour markers.

"This approach could be a step forward for gene therapy, particularly as it is quicker, easier and cheaper to mix and match the targeting proteins rather than engineer a completely new gene therapy virus."

Dr Lesley Walker, from Cancer Research UK, said: "This exciting early laboratory work points to a new way of attacking cancer cells by targeting the unique markers on cancer cells. It could have real benefits for patients, with treatments tailored to their cancer, but we first have to test it through clinical trials."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 22 Apr 2010 | 2:41 pm

Flying Car Could Transform Warfare

DARPA’s looking to equip soldiers with a flying car that will cruise in the air like a plane and drive on the ground like an SUV.
Source: Livescience.com | 22 Apr 2010 | 2:28 pm

Top 5 Animals that Recycle

During this Earth Day week, we've been introducing you to visionaries whose work has contributed to the green movement. Today, however, I'd like to celebrate non-human organisms that help to keep our planet environmentally sound. All species play important roles ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 22 Apr 2010 | 2:05 pm

'Let the pilots handle ash'

As with terrorism, swine flu and now aviation, the scientists offer absolutes rather than probabilities and the authorities panic

There are two skies up there overhead. There is one for the rich and another for the rest of us. The jet charter business has just had the week of its life. It assesses risk for itself and spent the Icelandic eruption finding ways round it. From the moment Europe's transport ministers went collectively mad last Thursday, not a small jet was idle.

One Gulfstream pilot reportedly said: "The ash scare was the sickest joke in years." Another remarked that the entire first-class market simply transferred to small operators. While regulators flustered and haggled, executive jets were dodging the denser ash cloud, finding unregulated air corridors and congenial airports across continental Europe. Los Angeles has been awash in such enterprise, with a secondary market in seats from $6,000 to $20,000. Propeller planes could cross the Channel from more liberal France under the commercial flight paths.

While small planes are not big ones, risk appears to be a matter not of science but of wealth. Cheap and big is clumsy and slow. Ministers have admitted that they overreacted to the Iceland crisis. The Met Office's volcano advice centre in Exeter, custodian of the computer models that closed British airspace last week, was not strictly in error. It gave "forecasts" to the Civil Aviation Authority which converted them into "science", stirred in some 1980s engineering and passed them on to air traffic control. Each step was based, as a Brussels official admitted, "on mathematics not evidence". No one flew up to test the cloud when the volcano erupted.

Whatever the risks of flying near this ash, they clearly failed the test of credibility, as one test flight after another showed. It does not take a volcanologist to understand that ash clouds can be more or less dense depending on where they congregate. There are degrees of risk. Ministers seemed to understand this on Tuesday only after being beaten over the head with the blunt instrument of hundreds of thousands of stranded passengers and an ultimatum from BA.

The 90 jets throughout history that have encountered volcanic ash – surely enough to yield reliable science – had one thing in common. They all reportedly passed through dense ash concentrations and not one crashed. Hurricanes and electric storms must have killed thousands of air passengers over the years, but skies are not closed for the risk from them.

Lawyers may be smacking their lips over transport secretary Lord Adonis's brave admission of overcaution. This could see the first significant class action against "hypersafe" regulation in history – and most significant it would be. The airlines claim to have been punished to the tune of £1.7bn by the government's mistake, but the secondary cost in lost business, ruined freight, insurance and general mayhem must be as high as that of bailing out a bank – another result of regulatory dysfunction.

A decision cannot be validated just because no planes crashed. Such absolutism is now casually used to justify any amount of over-regulation, such as the absurd measures taken against terrorism, swine flu and such menaces to the official peace of mind as from male teachers, swimming pools, scaffolding and stale food. So long as no one dies, ministers are comfortable. Protest the cost and you are damned for "putting a price on human life", which is what good risk assessors do all the time.

Once again we are torn between blaming scientists and blaming weak ministers, whose job is not to pass the buck to "my advice" but to consider it and then judge public risk. We elect ministers and pay public servants not to eliminate risk but to assess it. Safety can never be "absolute". Road travel is the most dangerous thing most of us do. Were government to close every road that had no central divider, we would deride the overreaction. We oppose seat belts in buses for the same reason. Danger lurks in everything we eat, everyone we meet and wherever we travel. Were the government to ban unprocessed food, dating agencies and travel to Africa, we would think it mad.

The gulf in risk assessment is not between safety and danger but between familiarity and ignorance. From all we have heard this week, pilots with experience of volcanos can handle the danger when informed of it. Most, if not all, regarded the blanket ban as ridiculous. The science offered absolutes rather than probabilities and those in charge panicked, with no thought of the cost of so doing. Once again, there must be a better way of handling science's contribution to public policy, whether in the field of security or medicine or natural disasters. Recent ambiguous advice on drug classification showed how helpless policy could be when lacking a firm framework for risk assessment.

One trouble is that British people are remarkably unsceptical of the edicts of authority, and tolerant of any resulting mistakes and inconvenience – unlike the freer spirits in Europe and America. At the very moment on Tuesday when meteorologists were reporting new eruptions and denser clouds, Britons watched alien vapour trails crisscrossing their clear skies as the rest of Europe's airlines returned exasperated to work.

Everything in regulation is relative. Safety can never be complete. There is not a terrorist or a paedophile or an earthquake round every corner, whatever it may suit the Home Office budget to pretend. Whatever the lawyers say, accidents still happen. The horrendous cost that Osama bin Laden continues to impose on air travel is beyond all reason. I am sure if he could invent a sneeze bomber someone would demand sniffle tests at airports.

A feature of government risk assessment is that one risk fits all. Hence the crudeness of the blanket ban. If private jets could trust their pilots to fly round ash clouds, why not airlines? Like many modern professionals – teachers, doctors, care workers – commercial pilots rightly complain they are being stripped of a sense of personal responsibility and plunged into a Bermuda triangle of regulators, politicians and lawyers.

We should never leave any service entirely to the mercy of the private sector. We know from the history of shipping, drugs and cigarettes that profit is too powerful an inducement to cut corners. It has been reported that airlines were themselves partly to blame for resisting a more careful regime for flying near volcanos, though that too was due to the related curse of negligence litigation, which no government has found a means of regulating.

Yet there is also risk in straying too far in the opposite direction. There is a known danger in hypersafety. Bureaucratic gigantism swamps risk management at the frontline, sweeping up the innocent and leaving terrorists running free. Many industries are now besieged by crippling regulations that defy common sense. The safety rules for tunnelling have made new underground railways impossibly expensive. Anything to do with water, from river transport to lily ponds, seems to induce regulatory paranoia.

Playing safe in every area of public and private life has become a McCarthyism of terror. Industries grow fat on the security/surveillance state and exploit fear to grow fatter, pervading every corner of modern life. We have seen another instance this week, yet I feel no safer as a result.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 22 Apr 2010 | 2:00 pm

Nasa readies jumbo eye in the sky

Nasa unveils the new craft that will be the centrepiece of its mission to unveil the secrets of the Universe.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 Apr 2010 | 1:35 pm

Success in Earth's Shadow

On this Earth Day in the year 2310 we honor our former planet, that Great Brownish-Gray Marble, by looking further out into space where resources are bountiful and plenty. The universe is full of opportunities to ensure humanity's survival. Here ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 22 Apr 2010 | 1:12 pm

Losing Weight Helps Immune System

Losing a moderate amount of weight could reverse harmful changes in the immune system that often occur in obese people
Source: Livescience.com | 22 Apr 2010 | 1:01 pm

Volcano Shockwaves Shred Atmosphere: Video

As the ash cloud dissipates, the threat to air travel is waning. But eruption of Eyjafjallajokull has entered a new phase of jaw-dropping pyrotechnics.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 22 Apr 2010 | 12:51 pm

Mysterious Sheep-Pig Creature's True Identity Revealed

Photos of a sheep-pig creature are circulating the internet. It's a pig, called a mangalista.
Source: Livescience.com | 22 Apr 2010 | 12:39 pm

Health of 250,000 mobile phone users to be tracked

Scientists to look for increased risk of a range of conditions in study spanning five countries, including Britain

A quarter of a million mobile phone users are to have their medical records tracked for more than 20 years in the world's largest study into the health effects of the devices.

Network operators, including Vodafone and O2 in the UK, have agreed to invite a random selection of customers aged 18 to 69 to take part in the study, which will look for increased rates of cancer, dementia and other conditions, such as depression and sleep disorders.

The cohort study on mobile communications (Cosmos) is the latest to be funded by the government's mobile telecommunications health research programme (MTHR), set up after the Stewart inquiry into mobile phones and health in 2000.

Then it was concluded that, while there was no evidence mobile phones were dangerous, more research was needed to rule out an increased risk of brain tumours and other cancers over the long term. As a precautionary measure, the report advised against children using mobile phones unless essential.

Mobile phone ownership has soared since the mid-1990s to more than 70m in the UK – more than one handset for every individual. Because cancers grow slowly, any increase due to mobile phone use is unlikely to have become apparent yet.

"The balance of scientific evidence to date does not suggest that mobile phones cause cancer but, because of the uncertainty, we cannot rule out the possibility that it might," said Professor Lawrie Challis, of the MTHR management committee.

"With many cancers it takes 10 or 20 years for symptoms to show, and most of us have not had mobile phones that long. There just hasn't been enough time for cancer to develop."

The £3.1m British arm of the study, running alongside others in the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, will follow the health of at least 90,000 people for up to 30 years.

With participants' approval, scientists led by Paul Elliott at Imperial College, London, will gather information from network providers on how much people use their mobile devices for making calls, texting and surfing the net, and compare this with their medical records over the duration of the study.

Unlike previous studies, scientists will look for an increased risk of a broad range of medical problems, including brain tumours, leukaemia, multiple sclerosis, motor neurone disease, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, heart disease and psychological conditions. A report focusing on cancer risk is expected within 10 years.

Previous studies claim to have found evidence suggestive of an increased risk of brain tumours with mobile phone usage, but many scientists say the results are inconclusive.

"Cosmos aims to fill in important gaps in our knowledge of mobile phones and health. By looking at large numbers of people across Europe over a long period of time, we should be able to build up a valuable picture of whether or not there is any link between mobile phone usage and health problems over the long term," said Prof Elliott.

The Cosmos study will not look at the effects of mobile phone use among children, although some experts believe they may be especially vulnerable to mobile phone radiation, because they have thinner skulls and still-developing immune systems.

Prof Challis said it was unrealistic to prevent older children and teenagers from using mobile phones, but suggested parents might want to keep children under the age of 11 from using the devices. "I think it's better if they don't use them, but it's up to parents," he said. "Generally I would think that's not a bad line to follow, but I'm a scientist, not a risk manager."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 22 Apr 2010 | 12:33 pm

Bolivia's fight for survival can help save democracy too | Naomi Klein

The people's summit to tackle climate change is a radical, transformative response to the failure of the Copenhagen club

It was 11am and Evo Morales had turned a football stadium into a giant classroom, marshalling an array of props: paper plates, plastic cups, disposable raincoats, handcrafted gourds, wooden plates and multicoloured ponchos. All came into play to make his main point: to fight climate change "we need to recover the values of the indigenous people".

Yet wealthy countries have little interest in learning these lessons and are instead pushing through a plan that, at its best, would raise average global temperatures 2C. "That would mean the melting of the Andean and Himalayan glaciers," Morales told the thousands gathered in the stadium, part of the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. What he didn't have to say is that the Bolivian people, no matter how sustainably they choose to live, have no power to save their glaciers.

Bolivia's climate summit has had moments of joy, levity and absurdity. Yet underneath it all you can feel the emotion that provoked this gathering: rage against helplessness. It's little wonder. Bolivia is in the midst of a dramatic political transformation, one that has nationalised key industries and elevated the voices of indigenous peoples as never before. But when it comes to Bolivia's most pressing, existential crisis – the fact that its glaciers are melting at an alarming rate, threatening the water supply in two major cities – Bolivians are powerless to do anything to change their fate on their own.

That's because the actions causing the melting are taking place not in Bolivia but on the highways and in the industrial zones of heavily industrialised countries. In Copenhagen, leaders of endangered nations like Bolivia and Tuvalu argued passionately for the kind of deep emissions cuts that could avert catastrophe. They were politely told that the political will in the north just wasn't there.

More than that, the United States made clear that it didn't need small countries like Bolivia to be part of a climate solution. It would negotiate a deal with other heavy emitters behind closed doors, and the rest of the world would be informed of the results and invited to sign on, which is precisely what happened with the Copenhagen accord.

When Bolivia and Ecuador refused to rubberstamp the accord, the US government cut their climate aid by $3m and $2.5m respectively. "It's not a freerider process," explained US climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing. (Anyone wondering why activists from the global south reject the idea of "climate aid" and are instead demanding repayment of "climate debts" has their answer here.)

Pershing's message was chilling: if you are poor, you don't have the right to prioritise your own survival. When Morales invited "social movements and Mother Earth's defenders … scientists, academics, lawyers and governments" to Cochabamba for a new kind of climate summit, it was a revolt against this experience of helplessness, an attempt to build a base of power behind the right to survive.

The Bolivian government got the ball rolling by proposing four big ideas: that nature should be granted rights that protect ecosystems from annihilation (a "universal declaration of Mother Earth rights"); that those who violate those rights and other international environmental agreements should face legal consequences (a "climate justice tribunal"); that poor countries should receive various forms of compensation for a crisis they are facing but had little role in creating ("climate debt"); and that there should be a mechanism for people around the world to express their views on these topics ("world people's referendum on climate change").

The next stage was to invite global civil society to hash out the details. Seventeen working groups were struck and, after weeks of online discussion, they met for a week in Cochabamba with the goal of presenting their final recommendations at the summit's end. The process is fascinating but far from perfect (for instance, as Jim Shultz of the Democracy Center pointed out, the working group on the referendum apparently spent more time arguing about adding a question on abolishing capitalism than on discussing how in the world you run a global referendum). Yet Bolivia's enthusiastic commitment to participatory democracy may well prove the summit's most important contribution.

That's because, after the Copenhagen debacle, an exceedingly dangerous talking point went viral: the real culprit of the breakdown was democracy itself. The UN process, giving equal votes to 192 countries, was simply too unwieldy – better to find the solutions in small groups.

Even trusted environmental voices like James Lovelock fell prey: "I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war," he told the Guardian recently. "It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while." But in reality, it is such small groupings – like the invitation-only club that rammed through the Copenhagen accord – that have caused us to lose ground, weakening already inadequate existing agreements. By contrast, the climate change policy brought to Copenhagen by Bolivia was drafted by social movements through a participatory process, and the end result was the most transformative and radical vision so far.

With the Cochabamba summit, Bolivia is trying to take what it has accomplished at the national level and globalise it, inviting the world to participate in drafting a joint climate agenda ahead of the next UN climate gathering in Cancun. In the words of Bolivia's ambassador to the United Nations, Pablo Solón: "The only thing that can save mankind from a tragedy is the exercise of global democracy."

If he is right, the Bolivian process might save not just our warming planet, but our failing democracies as well. Not a bad deal at all.

• A version of this column is published in the Nation.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 22 Apr 2010 | 12:04 pm

Sea Creatures Travel Far to Colonize After Volcanic Eruptions

When volcanic eruptions wipe out life at hydrothermal vents, some of the new species that set up camp afterward may come from as far as 200 miles away.

“We don’t understand how they get from one vent to another,” said biological oceanographer Lauren Mullineaux of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. “But because we now see that they can move these long distances, it expands the scale of connectedness between different vents.”

Living at the intersection of tectonic plates, organisms that colonize hydrothermal vents are faced with some of the most extreme conditions on earth, including complete darkness and extreme chemicals spewing from the ocean floor. They can also be wiped out instantly by volcanic eruptions along the fault lines.

Sometime between late 2005 and January 2006, a set of these eruptions rocked 9 miles of the East Pacific Rise just south of Acapulco, Mexico.  The eruption paved over some of the area’s hydrothermal vent communities with lava. The vents, which are usually teeming with life, were destroyed as fully as a clear-cut forest covered over with concrete.

Six months later when Lauren Mullineaux and her team arrived at the ridge to study the organisms there, they were faced with a serendipitous natural experiment created by the eruption.

“This kind of opportunity rarely comes up,” said Mullineaux, co-author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences April 12. “The combination of this eruption happening and us being geared up to study it was really exciting. It put us in a really unique position to look for changes.”

Mullineaux monitored the vents to see what organisms settled there. She expected the species that recolonized the vent would be similar to the organisms that had populated the area after previous eruptions in 1991.

Instead, the team discovered the vent had been taken over by two species of sea snails known as limpets, Ctenopelta porifera and Lepetodrilus tevnianus, which hadn’t been prominent in the area before the eruption. The closest known populations of C. porifera were over 200 miles to the north, a distance longer than the state of New Hampshire. How they traveled that far is a mystery.

“We know from oceanographic studies that there are jets, relatively fast currents oriented along the crest of the ridge, which could be a way they could travel quickly,” Mullineaux said. “But when you do the calculations about how far they get, it doesn’t really fit.”

While jets of water can propel them through the ocean at speeds of up to 4 inches per second, they would need to be going about 50 percent faster to reach the vent before they die. Mullineaux believes the effects of mesoscale eddies, large-scale currents generated at the ocean surface, can extend into the abyss of the sea floor more than a mile and a half below the surface.

“I think it’s a wonderful start and the hypotheses are interesting, yet I’m not convinced,” said evolutionary biologist Robert Vrijenhoek of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, who has some reservations about Mullineaux’s conclusions. ”We’ve found many other limpets that were previously thought to be restricted to vents living in a variety of other marine environments. Until they can prove that this species is limited to vents, the argument is weak.”

Vrijenhoek has studied the vents 200 miles away that Mullineaux suggests are the source of the new species, and has never detected C. porifera in the area.  The lack of data about their abundance at the vent makes him doubtful. “For a limpet, it would be really surprising for it to have made it that far, and that makes me skeptical,” he said.

Not much is known about the larvae’s metabolism, but it’s possible they may enter a catatonic state to extend their range.

“If they can arrest development, that would be very interesting,” said Vrijenhoek. “We don’t know any of these snails that do that, but that might be a statement of ignorance. We just don’t know a whole heck of a lot about that snail.”

Also surprising is that larvae from closer vents didn’t move in and colonize the area. One hypothesis for the colonization of the area by the distant C. porifera is that the eruption altered the chemical and structural environment at the vent. Some pre-eruption organisms might not have been able to survive in the new landscape, leaving the area open for the newcomers.

But Mullineaux doesn’t think this is the case, because she and her team have recently found these pioneer organisms proliferating at nearby vents that weren’t changed by the eruption. The team will continue to monitor these communities to learn if the organism composition changes over time and if those changes lead it back to its pre-eruption ecosystem.

Image: C. porifera/Lauren Mullineaux

See Also:

• Green Sea Slug Is Part Animal, Part Plant
• Deep-Sea Snail Shell Could Inspire Better Body Armor
• Arctic Exploring Robots Ready to Take a Dive

Citation: “Larvae from afar colonize deep-sea hydrothermal vents after a catastrophic eruption.” By Lauren Mullineaux, Diane Adams, Susan Mills and Stace Beaulieu. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published online before print, April 12, 2010.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 22 Apr 2010 | 11:43 am

Hubble Space Telescope clocks up 20 years

looks at a troubled history, some remarkable discoveries and the future of the instrument.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 22 Apr 2010 | 11:30 am

Op-Ed: The DIY Genius of the Original Earth Day

I’ve come to believe that Earth Day is the least understood famous event in modern American history. Every April 22, we pay ritual homage to the planet. This year, the 40^th anniversary of Earth Day, the hosannas are likely to be especially loud.  But few people appreciate what made Earth Day great. Even environmentalists have not learned the most important lesson of Earth Day 1970.

The first Earth Day was even bigger than the biggest civil rights march or antiwar demonstration or woman’s liberation protest in the 1960s.  Roughly 1,500 colleges and 10,000 schools held environmental teach-ins. Earth Day activities also took place in churches and temples, in city parks and in front of corporate and government buildings. Though the largest crowds gathered on April 22, many institutions and communities celebrated for a week, not just a day. Millions of Americans took part.

The original event ultimately was about do-it-yourself empowerment, not about education or protest or celebration. In the course of writing a history of Earth Day 1970, I’ve tracked down dozens of people who organized Earth Day events, and I’m impressed by how many still are involved in the environmental cause. They defend rivers, promote green building, administer environmental-protection agencies, host eco programs on radio and television and much more. Some already were environmentalists before Earth Day, but most were not. Earth Day helped to make the first green generation.

Earth Day was superb leadership training. Often, the local organizers worked for months to plan their events. They were tested repeatedly. What counted as an environmental issue? Was the goal to advance an agenda or to involve as many people as possible? Would the emphasis be on education, activism or media spectacle? What relationship would the Earth Day effort have to other social movements, if any? Should the program feature local speakers or outsiders? Were any sources of funding off limits? Almost every question was potentially divisive. Yet the experience of planning Earth Day gave thousands of people a chance to develop the skills, contacts and sense of mission that provided a foundation for future activism.

Earth Day grew out of a call for a national environmental teach-in by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, who was smart enough to let others take ownership of the event. To help promote the teach-in, Nelson hired a group of young activists led by Denis Hayes, and the Hayes group formed Environmental Action after Earth Day to continue to press for change.  But the essential organizing effort came at the grassroots. Tens of thousands of people organized Earth Day events, and the organizational effort transformed many of those involved. What these small, independent networks achieved is startling.

Of course, the sheer scale of Earth Day became the big story. The event was an unprecedented demonstration of public concern about the environment. Though Americans had begun to address many environmental problems before 1970, no one used the phrase “environmental movement” before the planning for Earth Day began. Earth Day gave people a sense that the environment had become a powerful cause.

But even in 1970, only a few activists appreciated the significance of the Earth Day organizing effort. The most notable were the leaders of Environmental Action. In partnership with the United Auto Workers and the social-concern committee of the United Methodist Church, Environmental Action invited about 200 local Earth Day organizers to a follow-up conference at the UAW’s Black Lake education center in July 1970. The goal was to turn the newly empowered organizers into leaders of a true movement.

The Black Lake conference proved a road seldom traveled. In the 40 years since the first Earth Day, the major environmental organizations have devoted few resources to empowering activists. Many of the national groups do not have local affiliates: Their members are a source of funds, not a grassroots force. Even the groups with local chapters have not made a consistent effort to nurture the skills of potential leaders.

That neglect handicaps the cause. Though environmental organizations have millions of members, their members typically lack the deep commitment built by the hard work of organizing. The result is a movement with many highly skilled professionals but without the social base needed to address the many challenges of climate change – perhaps the defining issue of the 21st century.

Unfortunately, Earth Day itself no longer is a force for empowerment. In many communities, Earth Day has become a green trade fair or a corporate-sponsored celebration for kids. But the story of how the first Earth Day was organized still might inspire environmentalists to think more creatively about how to build a more powerful movement. That would be another lasting legacy.

Image: flickr/Documerica.

See Also:

• Op-Ed: Stop Trying to Save the Planet
• Op-Ed: Reversing the Congressional Science Lobotomy
• Op-Ed: Why the Internet Should Win the Nobel Peace Prize
• Op-Ed: What Marmots Teach Us About Terrorism
• Op-Ed: Tornado Scientist Risks Life for Ph.D.
• Op-Ed: Microbes May Be More Networked Than You Are
• Op-Ed: Why the Elevator Floor Is So Interesting

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 22 Apr 2010 | 11:22 am

China Could Wipe Out Recycled Toilet Paper

The paperless, global economy may have an unexpected downside for your backside: The reduction of high-quality white paper use may hurt the quality of the recycled toilet paper made from it.

Printer and copier paper retain the nice, long fibers that make the best recycled toilet paper. But a resurgent Chinese economy and domestic waste reduction efforts are cutting the available supply of the good stuff, said Jeff Phillips, executive vice president of operations at Seventh Generation, a major recycled toilet paper manufacturer.

“The cost of office waste paper has skyrocketed (more than doubled) in the last six months primarily as a result of China re-entering the market,” Phillips wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. “There has [also] been a reduction in availability due to more offices trying to reduce paper consumption and through the use of electronic media.”

Waste paper is stuffed into cargo containers returning to China after dropping off manufactured goods on American shores. Once there, it’s usually recycled into different paper products.

The troubling trend for the domestic bath-tissue industry was highlighted in a recent report in a new report in Chemical & Engineering News.

“We want a recycled paper that has a certain quality,” Martin Wolf, director of product and environmental technology at Seventh Generation, told C&EN. “We look for the longest fiber possible for strength and absorbency, and as flexible a fiber as possible so toilet tissue is soft.”

In the hierarchy of raw material for toilet paper, virgin pulp is the best, followed by office paper, and then other materials like brown bags. But virgin pulp requires cutting down trees, so some companies and users have opted for the stuff made from office paper. Without good office paper, the already tough job of making soft recycled toilet paper will get even harder.

“The biggest challenge, especially for our toilet-paper products, is perceived softness,” Wolf said. “The North American consumer is quite accustomed to pretty soft paper, but there is only a certain amount of softness you can achieve with recycled fibers.”

The only hope, or so Chemical & Engineering News says, is better chemicals and coatings for the rough stuff.

Image: flickr/suavehouse113

See Also:

• Space Station Gets Pee-Recycling System
• The Future of Recycling: Nokia’s New Remade?

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 22 Apr 2010 | 11:03 am

Naps and Dreams Boost Learning, Study Finds

Dreams boost learning and help us make sense of the real world. A new study may be the first to show this connection between dreaming and learning.
Source: Livescience.com | 22 Apr 2010 | 11:03 am

Hoard of 2,000-Year-Old Coins Found in Egypt

Each coin features the Greek-Egyptian god Amun-Zeus, an eagle and the words Ptolemy and king.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 22 Apr 2010 | 11:00 am

Software Turns Your Face into a Na’Vi from ‘Avatar’

A company has designed an interactive display that lets people see what they would look like as Na'vi from Avatar.
Source: Livescience.com | 22 Apr 2010 | 10:54 am

Parenting advice shouldn't use junk sciencee | Ann Robinson

Penelope Leach says it is a fact that leaving a baby to cry for hours is harmful. That's common sense, not science

"It is not an opinion but a fact that it's potentially damaging to leave babies to cry," says parenting guru Penelope Leach, who has a new book to sell. This "statement of fact" pitches her against her fellow guru, Gina Ford, who says babies need to be trained into docility by crying themselves to sleep.

But Leach claims she has science on her side. She quotes tests in which levels of the stress hormone, cortisol, are measured in the saliva of babies left to cry. Apparently the levels are high and this can be toxic to the developing brain. Leach says that babies cry to get a response and if they don't get one, they get stressed. Ignoring their needs can contribute to anxiety later in life, she warns.

Leach dispels a few myths: babies don't cry to exercise their lungs and they're not sophisticated enough to cry just to torture their tired carers. Leach has done previous research following 1,200 mother-and-baby pairs from birth to primary school and found that a child's wellbeing is less a matter of who cares for them and more to do with how responsive the carer is to the child's needs.

It's not controversial to say that emotional deprivation is a bad thing. That leaving a baby to scream in its cot for hours on end without finding out what's wrong, is not great parenting, or that those babies are more likely to grow up with psychological problems. But that's common sense so it's not enough to sell a book in a competitive market – especially if you don't have a TV series on the go.

So time to bring out the secret weapon: science. But neuroscience is a more rigorous discipline than the art of parenting, so Leach's assertions warrant some questions:

1. In terms of methodology: how big is the sample; how well matched is the control group; how long is "prolonged" crying; how was the study conducted; how were other variables discounted and where is the study published and peer reviewed?

2. Do measurements of cortisol (a hormone produced by the adrenal gland in response to stressors which play a part in the control of metabolic functions in the body) in salivary swabs correlate with raised blood cortisol levels?

3. Where is the evidence that raised salivary cortisol correlates with toxicity to the brain? How sustained does the rise have to be? How high do the levels have to be? Do the group of babies with prolonged crying show evidence that their cortisol levels are high enough, for long enough, to cause damage.

4. What is the mechanism of damage given that cortisol levels normally fluctuate within a 24-hour period, in response to stressors like a sudden noise and as babies develop.

Leach further asserts that the reason babies raised on a strict regime go to sleep, usually with less and less crying, is because their brains adapt to not being responded to so they are quicker and quicker to give up. This may or may not be true.

The next leap of faith is "that kind of early induced anxiety may relate to anxiety right through adult life". Even if we allow that "prolonged" crying raises salivary cortisol, which is a response to stress, who is to say we can call that "early induced anxiety"? And asking adults who suffer from anxiety whether they cried a lot as a baby is unlikely to yield robust data.

I spent several hours today trawling published, peer-reviewed medical and science journals in the hope of answering these questions. I've left a message for Penelope Leach asking for specific references. Neuroscientist Susan Greenfield said that this is outside her area of expertise and I await comments from two other esteemed neuroscientists. But so far, I've drawn blanks.

I'm pleased this emotive stuff didn't appear when my kids were little. I never left my babies to cry for long because I couldn't bear to. I assumed if they were crying they needed something: feeding, changing, cuddling or something. I never went in for all this parenting malarkey – I always meant to read the books, and Leach would have been my guru of choice, but somehow never got round to it. I just looked after my babies imperfectly but as well as I could. The one thing I would never have done is claim scientific justification for my instinctive responses. Parents who are struggling usually need support and encouragement, sometimes need advice but, surely, never need junk science.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 22 Apr 2010 | 10:36 am

Origin of Life Chicken-and-Egg Problem Solved

A chicken-and-egg paradox at the foundations of life may finally be solved.

Scientists have wondered how the first simple, self-replicating chemicals could have formed complex, information-rich genetic structures, when replication was originally such an error-prone process. Every advance would soon be lost to copying errors.

According to a new study, the answer may lie in the fundamental nature of those chemicals. The errors may have triggered an automatic shutdown of replication. Such stalling would allow only error-free sequences to be completed, giving them a chance at evolving.

“A chemical system with this property would be able to propagate sequences long enough to have function,” wrote researchers led by Harvard University systems biologist Irene Chen. The study was published April 1 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Scientists think life’s first spark came in the form of ribonucleic acid, or RNA. The single-stranded molecular forerunner of the DNA in every animal’s genes, RNA is the basis of the simplest self-replicating structures.

Estimates of error rates in early RNA replication run around 20 percent. For every pair of basic chemical units in a molecule of RNA, there was a one in five chance of getting the match wrong when a copy was made.

Strands of RNA longer than five units would be rare — and even simple RNA structures responsible for improving copy fidelity are 30 units long. Getting to that point would be practically impossible, and error-ridden copies would steal chemical resources from successful molecules.

But researchers have observed that DNA sometimes stalls when an error occurs during self-replication. If that could happen to RNA, then only accurate copies would continue to replicate, reasoned Chen’s team. The paradox would be solved.

RNA proved too unstable to work with, so Chen’s team used simple, short strands of DNA as a proxy. They put the strands in a mixture of organic compounds known to have existed on early Earth, and tagged them with fluorescent proteins that allowed reactions to be tracked.

As the researchers watched, errors caused DNA self-replication to slow. The model system was only an approximation of early Earth chemistry, but if such pauses existed for RNA, they would have allowed RNA to evolve into complicated forms.

“They’ve gone beyond the paradox,” said Bodo Stern, a Harvard University systems biologist who wasn’t involved in the study. “Whether that’s what happened, we don’t know, but it’s a conceptual leap forward.”

Stalling appears to be a natural function of DNA’s geometry. “Imagine that DNA is a zipper. The next piece is the incoming nucleotide. If the next piece is not exactly aligned with the remainder of the zipper, it will have a hard time getting into position,” Chen said.

According to Hans-Joachim Ziock, a protocellular researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory, “anything that can help make correct copies would help, so base mismatches slowing the replication process would be beneficial.” But he said that even without an error-stalling function, nucleic acids may eventually have taken higher forms.

“The world is a huge place and time was no real issue,” said Ziock.

Image: A strand of DNA/Wikimedia commons.

See Also:

• Organism Sets Mutation Speed Record, May Explain Life’s Origins
• A Theory of Evolution for Evolution
• Forgotten Experiment May Explain Origins of Life
• Life’s First Spark Re-Created in the Laboratory
• Scientists Create a Form of Pre-Life

Citation: “Effect of Stalling after Mismatches on the Error Catastrophe in Nonenzymatic Nucleic Acid Replication.” By Sudha Rajamani, Justin K. Ichida, Tibor Antal, Douglas A. Treco, Kevin Leu, Martin A. Nowak, Jack W. Szostak, and Irene A. Chen. Journal of the American Chemical Society, published online April 1, 2010.

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecological tipping points.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 22 Apr 2010 | 10:28 am

Climate scientist sues newspaper for 'poisoning' global warming debate

Climate modeller Andrew Weaver launches libel action in Canada for publishing 'grossly irresponsible falsehoods'

One of the world's leading climate scientists has launched a libel lawsuit against a Canadian newspaper for publishing articles that he says "poison" the debate on global warming.

In a case with potentially huge consequences for online publishers, lawyers acting for Andrew Weaver, a climate modeller at the University of Victoria, Canada, have demanded the National Post removes the articles not only from its own websites, but also from the numerous blogs and sites where they were reposted.

Weaver says the articles, published at the height of several recent controversies over the reliability of climate science in recent months, contain "grossly irresponsible falsehoods". He said he filed the suit after the newspaper refused to retract the articles.

Weaver said: "If I sit back and do nothing to clear my name, these libels will stay on the internet forever. They'll poison the factual record, misleading people who are looking for reliable scientific information about global warming."

The four articles, published from December to February, claimed that Weaver cherrypicked data to support his climate research, and that he tried to blame the "evil fossil fuel" industry for break-ins at his office in 2008 to divert attention from reported mistakes in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, on which he was lead author.

The lawsuit also highlights several claims in the articles that attempt to question or undermine the scientific consensus on climate change, including that annual global mean temperatures have stopped increasing in the last decade and that climate models are "falling apart".

Such statements, the lawsuit says, would lead readers to conclude that Weaver "is so strongly motivated by a corrupt interest in receiving government funding that he willfully conceals scientific climate data which refutes global warming in order to keep alarming the public so that it welcomes... funding for climate scientists such as himself."

Weaver said: "I asked the National Post to do the right thing, to retract a number of recent articles that attributed to me statements I never made, accused me of things I never did, and attacked me for views I never held. To my absolute astonishment, the newspaper refused."

A spokesman for the National Post said: "Beyond saying that we intend to defend the article, we do not comment on such suits."

Weaver is suing for libel three writers at the newspaper, as well as the newspaper as a whole and several, as-yet unknown, posters on the paper's online comment section. Such comments, typical on articles about global warming, included claims that Weaver was "as big a hypocrite as he is a fraudster" and a rat leaving a sinking "ship of lies, red-herrings and hysteria". One poster suggested he should be thrown under a bus.

McConchie Law Corporation, acting for Weaver, said that the National Post articles had "gone viral on the internet" and were reproduced on dozens of other websites, including prominent climate-sceptic sites Climate Audit and Watts Up With That.

The lawsuit says the newspaper "expressly authorised republication" of the articles by including online links that invited readers to email the story to others, and share it through tools such as Facebook.

McConchie Law said it was seeking an "unprecedented" court order that would require the newspaper to help Weaver remove the articles from across the internet. Media law experts said that such demands were becoming increasingly common in complaints to publishers, but this could be the first time they were tested in court.

Weaver's libel action follows an official complaint made last month by a leading UK scientist to the Press Complaints Commission over a story published in the Sunday Times. Simon Lewis, an expert on tropical forests at the University of Leeds, claimed the story published in January was misleading because it gave the impression that the IPCC made a false claim in its 2007 report that reduced rainfall could wipe out up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest. He said he told the newspaper that the IPCC's statement was "poorly written and bizarrely referenced, but basically correct".

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 22 Apr 2010 | 10:01 am

It Only Looks like El Nino

Global warming may look like El Nino, but the way it affects precipitation is very different. Regions used to arid conditions during El Nino may find themselves sopping wet.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 22 Apr 2010 | 9:57 am

Smoke Plume from Oil Platform Fire Seen From Space

The smoke drifting from an oil rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this week has been photographed from space by a NASA satellite.
Source: Livescience.com | 22 Apr 2010 | 9:51 am

On Earth Day, Ecologist Fights for Phosphorus

Ecologists James Elser is advocating for sustainable use of the element phosphorus. This element plays an important role in humans society.
Source: Livescience.com | 22 Apr 2010 | 9:02 am

Earth Day: Pollution Not as Visible, But Threat Remains

Although there are no more polluted rivers catching fire, that doesn't mean the environment is entirely out of the woods yet.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 22 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am

Volcanic link

Studying Iceland's and the UK's volcanic past
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 Apr 2010 | 8:48 am

In Pictures

New species recently discovered on Borneo
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 Apr 2010 | 8:42 am

Taiji hunters

Ex-dolphin trainer on Japanese town's controversial hunt
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 Apr 2010 | 8:32 am

Study to probe mobile health risk

Researchers launch a decades- long study into whether mobile phone use and health problems such as cancer are linked.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 Apr 2010 | 8:31 am

Video: Nasa's SDO spacecraft studies the sun

Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory has produced stunning images of flaring sunspots at temperatures of 50,000C

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 22 Apr 2010 | 8:18 am

SDO reveals the sun in all its glory

Nasa has unveiled the first images from its new Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite, designed to predict solar storms

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 22 Apr 2010 | 6:35 am

Iceland volcano tremors stay strong, ash plume low

REYKJAVIK (Reuters) - Iceland's volcanic eruption was still causing strong tremors on Thursday, though far less ash and smoke was pouring out into the air.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 22 Apr 2010 | 5:51 am

Video: SDO films an eruption on the sun

Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) records video footage of a 'prominence eruption' arcing from the surface of the sun

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 22 Apr 2010 | 5:30 am

Clean burning

How special stoves save lives and emissions in Congo
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 Apr 2010 | 4:56 am

How Marmite spread its way through journalism | Mind your language

Love them or hate them, Marmite comparisons have increased massively since 2006 – why?

After two fairly meaty blogs on electionspeak and swearing (never has there been such well-considered bad language), time for a light, vitamin B-rich snack.

As editors of the style guide, we used to complain about the number of elephants in the room, a language trope that reached its peak in 2006: "Elephants in the room – and sometimes, more precisely, in the living room – have included trade figures, policy, lack of policy, climate change, Iraq, the US, Europe, anti-Americanism, men, women, single women, a new French football league, race, religion, Islam, Catholicism, Tessa Jowell, Andrew Neil, Jimmy Greaves, fatness, thinness, Stalinism, Hitler and Tony Blair's departure from office."

Vince Cable is still at it, as are we, but there are far fewer elephants than there used to be – the expression now spreading its way stickily through articles in the Guardian, Observer and on guardian.co.uk is Marmite.

Love it or hate it – and I am rather bored by it – the habit of comparing people or things to Marmite is unavoidable. Based on the company's advertising slogan, this simile has existed in spoken language longer than in newspapers. The first example in the Guardian archive dates from 7 April 1995, in an article by Andrew Clements about a Wagner season on TV. "The Wagner cult invites that kind of extreme reaction, positive or negative; as someone observes in one of Channel 4's documentaries, 'Wagner is like Marmite, you either love it or you hate it.'"

What turned the comparison into a linguistic phenomenon was a marketing campaign by Marmite that began in March 2006. It brought out a squeezy bottle, pushed the love/hate angle and received much press attention that year, including a leader in the Guardian. There were nine Marmite comparisons that year (George Galloway, Headingley Test matches, Chris Moyles, Keith Allen (on himself), Broadcasting House, Russell Brand, Trinny & Susannah, horseracing, The Archers, winklepinkers, and Lily Allen (had she been listening to her father?).

The following year brought 31 uses – highlights were Lily Allen (again), Thought for the Day, Samim's tech-house hit Heater, shoes and panto. Hazel Blears and the singer Mika both applied the expression to themselves pre-emptively. There were 29 uses in 2008 (highlights: the Times New Roman font, bagpipes, Boris Johnson, Ken Livingstone, and faith schools, according to a leading article in the Guardian). Applications of Marmite rose again to 38 in 2009 (mostly sporting figures but also Twitter, Shirley Bassey, the essential oil ylang ylang and Chris Moyles). There have been 12 so far in 2010, with an emphasis on Marmite design (Central St Giles church, London; the Razor tower block in Elephant and Castle, London, and the designer Ron Arad).

Marmite has previously been used as a comparison, though mostly in reference to its need to be spread thinly (or thickly, if that is what you really like): "It was quite a night for medicine and a little medicine, like Marmite, goes quite a long way," Nancy Banks-Smith, TV review, 22 February 1991. The first mention of "marmite" in the paper was in 1821, the year of the Guardian's foundation and refers to the pot that gave the spread its name: "The following is related as a fact: – There is a very large cauldron in a house at Paris, which is called 'La Marmite Perpetuelle,' from its having been on the fire eighty-seven years; during which time it has boiled more than 800,000 capons, and it boils nothing else."

This easy simile is a good contender for the category of snowclone, defined by the professor of linguistics Geoffrey Pullum as "a multi-use, customisable, instantly recognisable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different variants", and has been nominated for inclusion on Language Log's list.

Advertising phrases often find their way quickly into speech and writing – recently a certain car insurance firm's "simples", as noted by David Mitchell – but which others have proved themselves as adaptable as Marmite's? And should they be used sparingly?

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 22 Apr 2010 | 4:05 am

DNA boost in tree killer battle

Researchers sequence the genome of a bacterium that causes a virulent disease in horse chestnut trees.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 Apr 2010 | 4:03 am

Treating Climate Change as a Curable Disease

Nearly 200 scientists from 14 countries met last month at the famed Asilomar retreat center outside Monterey, California, in a deliberate bid to make history. Their five-day meeting focused on setting up voluntary ground rules for research into cloud-brightening, giant algae blooms and other massive-scale interventions to cool the planet.

It’s unclear how significant the meeting will turn out to be, but the intent of its organizers was unmistakable: By choosing Asilomar, they hoped to summon the spirit of a groundbreaking meeting of biologists that took place on the same site in 1975. Back then, scientists with bushy sideburns and split collars — the forefathers of the molecular revolution, it turned out — established principles for the safe and ethical study of deadly pathogens.

The planners of Asilomar II, as they called it, hoped to accomplish much the same for potentially dangerous experiments in geoengineering. Instead of devising new medical treatments for people, the scientists involved in planet-hacking research are after novel ways to treat the Earth.

The analogy of global warming to a curable disease was central to the discussions at the meeting. Climate scientist Steve Schneider of Stanford talked about administering “planetary methadone to get over our carbon addiction.” Others debated what “doses” of geoengineering would be necessary. Most crucially, the thinkers at Asilomar focused on the idea that medical ethics might provide a framework for balancing the risks and benefits of all this new research.

What would it mean to apply the established principles of biomedical research to the nascent field of geoenginering? The ethicists at Asilomar — particularly David Winickoff from Berkeley and David Morrow from the University of Chicago — began with three pillars laid out in the landmark 1979 Belmont Report.

The first, respect for persons, says that biomedical scientists should obtain “informed consent” from their test subjects. The second, beneficence, requires that scientists assess the risks and benefits of a given test before they start. The third, justice, invokes the rights of research subjects to whatever medical advances result from the testing. (The people who are placed at risk should be the same ones who might benefit from a successful result.)

Then Winickoff and Morrow proposed applying the Belmont principles to the study of the most aggressive forms of geoengineering — the ones that would block out the sun like a volcanic eruption, with a spray of sulfur or other particles into the stratosphere. Before we could embark on a radical intervention like that, we’d need to run smaller-scale tests that might themselves pose a risk to the environment. In much the way that a clinical drug trial might produce adverse reactions, so might a real-world trial of, say, the Pinatubo Option. Instead of causing organ failure or death in its subjects, a botched course of geoengineering might damage the ozone layer or reduce rainfall.

The problem, admitted the ethicists, is how to go about applying the Belmont rules outside of medicine. In clinical drug trials, researchers obtain consent from discrete individuals, and they can precisely define the worse-case outcome (like death). But a trial run of hazing up the stratosphere wouldn’t affect specific, identifiable people in any one town, city or state. The climate is interconnected in many ways, some still mysterious to scientists, and so the risks of even a small-scale test in a particular location might apply across the globe. If everyone on Earth could be affected, how do you figure out whom to ask for informed consent?

One possibility would be to require that all nations of the world agree ahead of time on any tests of consequence. To many gathered at Asilomar, however, this seemed naive; speakers repeatedly invoked the failure of all-inclusive talks to cut global carbon emissions, and it would presumably be much tougher to secure an agreement on work that might damage crop yields or open a hole in the ozone. A more pragmatic approach would be to set up something like a U.N. Planet Hacking Security Council, comprising 15 or so powerful nations whose oversight of research tests would take into account the concerns of a broad swath of countries. But that undemocratic approach would surely face howls of protest.

The principle of beneficence may be just as difficult to follow. Under the Belmont guidelines, doctors must balance the particular risks of a clinical trial with the potential benefit to any individual who might participate. Since it would be impossible to make such a calculation for every person on Earth, planet-hackers could at best choose the experiments that minimize harm to the most vulnerable communities — like people living on the coasts of Southeast Asia. But we may not know enough about the risks of geoengineering to make any such credible calculation when the time comes.

Consider the Pinatubo Option, by which scientists would mimic the cooling effect of volcanoes. Putting particles in the stratosphere could reduce the total amount of energy that strikes the earth. Some climate modelers say this would disrupt rainfall by reducing moisture in the atmosphere obtained by evaporation. Others say that geoengineering droughts and famines would be less harmful than those caused by unchecked warming. Right now, no one can agree on the nature of the risks, let alone the degree to which they would apply to particular communities.

And what about justice? Among the disruptions that could result from testing the Pinatubo Option is a weakening of the Asian monsoon, a source of water for hundreds of millions of people in India. Those in developing countries will “eat the risk” of geoengineering trials, shouted one of the climate scientists at Asilomar during his presentation.

If representatives from just a small set of countries were appointed as doctors to the planet, then the less powerful nations might end up as the world’s guinea pigs. Of course, the citizens of those nations also would seem to have the most to lose from uninterrupted global warming. These two dangers would have to be measured one against the other — and compensation as part of the experimental program could be one way of making tests more fair.

If medical ethics aren’t quite up to the task of guiding our forays into geoengineering, what other sort of principles should we keep in mind? One important danger to be aware of is the moral hazard that might come with successful trials: Protective circumstances or actions can encourage people to take undue risks. For instance, government insurance of banks led to risky investments that caused the savings and loans crisis in the 1980’s.

Moral hazard looms particularly large for geoengineering studies since medium-scale field tests could prematurely give us the sense that we have a low-cost technical fix for global warming, no emissions cuts needed. (Moral hazard isn’t quite as potent in medical research. The availability of cholesterol-lowering drugs may well discourage people from maintaining healthy diets, but it’s unlikely that mere clinical trials would have the same effect.)

Another ethical principle that might apply to geoengineering is minimization — the idea that, a priori, it’s better to tinker at the smallest-possible scale to answer vital scientific questions. This notion comes from the ethics of animal experimentation; now we might apply it to planetary systems and the environment more broadly. Up until now, the medical ethics frame for geoengineering has guided discussions of how geoengineering might affect people in various countries. Perhaps we should be talking about how it affects the planet itself.

By that token, we might gain something by thinking of the Earth as a patient on its own terms. The rules and regulations we come up with for tests of geoengineering should take into account the way those experiments might affect ecosystems and non-human animals, both under threat from warming. And so maybe the most famous piece of medical ethics ought to apply: the Hippocratic oath. “First, do no harm,” is the crux of the original, but an updated version exhorts doctors to avoid “the twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.”

The climate crisis may force us to act despite myriad ethical challenges, for our benefit and for the planet’s.

This story was produced by Slate for the Climate Desk collaboration.

Image: zpeckler/flickr

See Also:

• License to Green: Clean Energy vs. Patents
• Betting on Climate Change: Corporations Stand to Make or Lose Billions
• Attractive Nuisance: Should Judges Help Tackle Climate Change?
• The Coming Tide of Global Climate Lawsuits

Eli Kintisch is a reporter at Science, and author of a new book on geoengineering, Hack the Planet.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 22 Apr 2010 | 4:00 am