1976 'swine flu' shot linked to stronger immune response to 21st century pandemic flu

New evidence shows immunization against "swine flu" in 1976 might provide individuals with some protection against the 2009 pandemic H1N1 influenza virus.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Apr 2010 | 3:00 pm

Galaxy merger dilemma solved

Scientists have solved a long-standing dilemma about the mass of infrared bright merging galaxies. Because galaxies are the largest directly observable objects in the universe, learning more about their formation is key to understanding how the universe works.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Apr 2010 | 3:00 pm

Safe weight gain for heavier moms-to-be depends on level of obesity, study suggests

How much weight obese women should safely gain during pregnancy is often controversial, with current guidelines suggesting a single range of 11-20 pounds. A new study suggests instead that optimal weight gain for obese mothers-to-be depends on level of obesity. Also, weight loss or very minimal weight gain may be detrimental to newborn health, except in the case of extremely obese women.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Apr 2010 | 3:00 pm

Deer honesty: Mating deer calls change year-by-year with status of deer

The vocalizations or "groans" of male fallow deer provide rivals and potential mates with an honest account of the emitting animal's competitive abilities. A study describes how the acoustic qualities of a deer's call change year by year and reflect changes in status and age.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Apr 2010 | 3:00 pm

Mathematicians offer elegant solution to evolutionary conundrum

Researchers have proffered a new mathematical model that seeks to unravel a key evolutionary riddle -- namely what factors underlie the generation of biological diversity both within and between species.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Apr 2010 | 3:00 pm

Microfluidic integrated circuit could help enable home diagnostic tests

As a way to simplify lab-on-a-chip devices that could offer quicker, cheaper and more portable medical tests, researchers have created microfluidic integrated circuits.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Apr 2010 | 3:00 pm

Particulate matter from fires in the Amazon affects lightning patterns

Data on lightning patterns in the Amazon show how clouds are affected by particulate matter emitted by the fires used for slash-and-burn foresting practices. These findings could be used by climate change researchers trying to understand the impact of pollution on global weather patterns.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am

NASA's Swift catches 500th gamma-ray burst

In its first five years in orbit, NASA's Swift satellite has given astronomers more than they could have hoped for. Its discoveries range from a nearby nascent supernova to a blast so far away that it happened when our universe was only 5 percent of its present age.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am

People with diabetes are at higher risk of atrial fibrillation

People with diabetes have a 40 percent greater risk of developing atrial fibrillation, the most common type of chronically irregular heartbeat, according to a new study. Researchers found this risk rises even higher the longer people have diabetes and the less controlled their blood sugar is.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am

Extremely preterm children are three times as likely to have psychiatric disorder

Significant advances in the neonatal intensive care have resulted in increased survival rates of children who are born at less than 26 weeks of gestation, so termed "extremely preterm children." Notably, however, improved survival rates have been accompanied by a higher risk for later cognitive, neuromotor, and sensory impairments in these children.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am

Some lava, less ash from Iceland volcano

REYKJAVIK (Reuters) - A small amount of lava is now flowing from the Icelandic volcano that disrupted air traffic across Europe last week, and the ash production that caused the problems has diminished.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 25 Apr 2010 | 3:39 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - A strong low pressure system that brought severe storms to the Southeast was headed toward the Eastern Seaboard on Sunday. The front will move off the coast, ending the threat of severe weather by late morning. Rain, thunderstorms and the threat of tornadoes will linger in the East before the front moves into the Atlantic.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Apr 2010 | 3:36 am

Story on toxic waste wins Pearl reporting award (AP)

AP - A joint report by European journalists on the dumping of toxic waste in Ivory Coast has won the Daniel Pearl Award for international investigative reporting.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Apr 2010 | 2:36 am

Sandstorm, snow close air link to China quake zone (Reuters)

Reuters - A choking sandstorm and heavy snow have severed a vital air link to the remote quake-hit Chinese county of Yushu, severely affecting relief efforts, state media said on Sunday.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Apr 2010 | 1:18 am

Climate bill placed on hold over Senate dispute (AP)

AP - Long-awaited climate change legislation was put on hold by its authors Saturday when a dispute over immigration politics and Senate priorities threatened to unravel a bipartisan effort that took months of work.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Apr 2010 | 1:15 am

Revolutionary Hubble space telescope turns 20 (AFP)

AFP - Astronomers around the world this weekend mark the 20th anniversary of the launching of the iconic Hubble, NASA's first orbiting space telescope that has revolutionized human understanding of the universe.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Apr 2010 | 10:55 pm

'Stop being beastly to hens'

Animal behaviour scientist Jonathan Balcombe says that our treatment of animals remains medieval despite a flood of studies shedding light on how they experience the world

Chickens recognise human beauty, starlings can be pessimistic and elephants grieve for their fallen comrades: these are the perhaps surprising claims of Dr Jonathan Balcombe, an independent animal behaviour research scientist. In a new book, he argues that a flood of studies of species ranging from minnows to monkeys adds up to a revolution in our understanding of the way other animals experience the world. "Just 30 years ago, it was scientific heresy to ascribe such emotions as delight, boredom or joy to a non-human," he writes in Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals (Palgrave Macmillan). "[But now] researchers have found that there is more thought and feeling in animals than humans have ever imagined."

For Balcombe, who was born in the UK and now lives on the east coast of the States, this new understanding leads to radical conclusions.

So the idea that chickens have an aesthetic sense, for instance... we should pay attention to this because it seems to have profound implications for the way in which we treat animals.

For much of the 20th century, it was taboo to ask questions about what animals think and what they feel. That's changed; now we have a spate of studies of phenomena that show that animals are, in all the important ways, sentient in the manner that we are. They may not lead the same sorts of lives that we have, but they feel pleasure and pain just as intensely. They have just as acute emotional experiences as we do – there are studies showing that there are real inner lives to these animals.

What does this say about our relationship to animals? The paradox is that as our knowledge of animals increases, our treatment of them falls further behind because we still live according to a might-makes-right strategy, which is the kind of thinking that justified colonialism and slavery. Unfortunately, our treatment of animals remains pretty much medieval.

Could you clarify this point about sentience?

Sentience is the capacity for feeling things, usually pleasures and pains – but it's a very broad concept, ranging from grief to optimism, from positive to negative feelings. The key is that it's the bedrock of ethics: humans are moral beings, what the philosophers would call moral agents, who are able to make moral decisions, and sentience is what makes those moral systems. It's what makes a human life important – it's what makes murder, ultimately, a terrible crime. It's because you've deprived the individual of a future life. Given that animals are acutely sentient in the important ways – I'm not talking about building computers or reading books – we need to expand our moral circle to include them.

In a study titled "Chickens prefer beautiful humans", human faces were photographed and digitised, so they could be presented to undergraduates, who then rated them according to attractiveness. The male faces were rated by female students and vice versa. They came up with a gradation of the most and least attractive. Then chickens were presented with the same faces and strikingly, the chickens' preferences in binary choices, for whatever reason, showed a 98 per cent overlap with the humans' ratings.

It doesn't necessarily mean that the chickens found those faces more attractive – though that's what the authors seem to suggest. What meaning that has in a chicken's world I don't know. But what it does say to me is that they're very perceptive about cues and those perceptions are very similar to ours in terms of aesthetics.

In your book you write: "Why should chickens find us beautiful at all? Today in the US we kill and cause suffering to more chickens than there are human beings on the entire planet." Surely there's a danger of taking individual studies and over-interpreting them, reading too much into them. This particular study had six chickens in it: to go from the preferences they exhibited to an idea about beauty, isn't that a bit of a leap?

In the time it took you to ask that question, about 3,500 chickens were slaughtered in the US, so that gives an idea of the scale of the killing of these particular animals. Some biologists would call them the most successful animals on earth because there are so many of them now, but I would call them the least successful because the vast majority lead such short, miserable lives. If you look at it from a population outcome, it's a very different outcome than if you look at it as individuals, but it's individuals who are sentient.

But just because chickens rate humans in the same way as humans do in this particular study that doesn't mean their sentience is the same as ours, and I certainly wouldn't claim that. Although I wouldn't necessarily claim that they're less sensitive to the pain of a broken wing than we are to the pain of a broken arm: that can be debated. That is accessible to science. But what the study does say – and this is just one study of many – is that chickens have lives that matter. And this gets to the heart of some of the cognitive and emotional studies that I'm trying to bring to light: animals don't merely live in the moment. They have lives, moods and dispositions. They really have a welfare in the richest sense of the term. That means we have to look hard and reconsider the current relationship we have with them.

People tend to see faces in clouds or hear voices in draughty buildings; we're very good at anthropomorphising our surroundings. Whether what we now believe that animals experience is really the same thing as human emotions is a very open question, isn't it?

Here's an example of an emotional study that's based on rigorous science. It's a study of the chacma baboon. These particular populations have been studied in Botswana for 30 years by the same scientists, so you have long-term observational and experimental studies with animals in their own milieu. It's known that for women who lose an infant, it's a terrible, traumatic, sad event. It's known that they grieve, naturally, and that grief is reflected physiologically by an increase of glucocorticoid hormones in their blood for a month or more. These baboons show a similar pattern of behaviour; if a baboon mother in the Okavango Delta in Botswana loses her baby, the scientists are able to measure the hormone levels in her blood in a very non-invasive way. They don't have to take a blood sample, they simply keep an eye out and when the female defecates they shout: "Oh, Lucy just shat, go get that!" and they analyse the faeces.

This shows that their glucocorticoid levels also go up for about a month. And the levels of their closest associates, of the female baboons which they relate to and have friendships with, also go up: there's an osmotic effect. Again in parallel with humans; humans rally round, support each other, increase our social networks. Baboons show a similar pattern. Females who have lost an infant will groom more during that month and receive more grooming. It's thought to be a form of therapy to help overcome the grief that presumably they're experiencing.

This is the challenge with emotions: they're private feelings – and that's why science did neglect these questions for a long time.

There are all sorts of nasty things that go on with predators catching prey, male lions killing the young when they join a new pride. Do animals have any kind of moral responsibility?

Absolutely. One of the frontiers of science is this study of virtue in animals: increasingly it's coming to light that animals have a moral awareness, or a moral consideration about how they behave. This is particularly the case with social animals, who've evolved to live in groups. Living in groups is full of compromise, you give and take and you want to sustain good relationships with others or you may be an outcast, and that's not in your self-interest – so one can make genetic arguments for the evolution of virtue and moral behaviour – certainly we manifest it in many ways.

A recent study of dogs shows they have what's called inequity aversion – that is to say a fairness awareness. If you you have two dogs sitting next to each other, and you offer to shake their paws, and you only reward one of the dogs when they both shake paws, after about 10 or 12 trials the one who's not getting the treat will refuse to shake paws. Whereas the other one will continue happily to shake paws. In control experiments, when there's only one dog not getting any treats, he will continue shaking the paw much longer. So it's not just fatigue or frustration, there's an awareness that this is not correct – "He's getting rewarded for what he's doing and I'm not getting rewarded for doing the same thing."

Do plants have an intrinsic value?

Albert Schweitzer advocated an idea of "reverence for life". He coined that phrase in 1915 and I love it. It speaks to plants because plants are also living organisms. We could quibble about whether or not they're sentient, although most scientists would say they're not. But even if they aren't sentient, we should respect them and that relates to the broader issues of our relationship to animals.

People often ask me as a vegetarian – a vegan in fact – "What about plants? If you're a vegetarian, you're consuming plants!" But if you're a meat-eater you're indirectly consuming many more plants, because you're higher on the food chain and cows have to eat plants to make muscle. Being a vegetarian is a more plant-friendly way of life anyway. I believe in respecting all life – I don't want to see trees uprooted any more than I want to see cows slaughtered, but there is a moral difference because cows are sentient and a plant is not.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 24 Apr 2010 | 5:09 pm

Wanted: one foolhardy OAP

Scientists are suggesting older people take up judo. Back to the drawing board, chaps

You are 85. You've had a long, hard life. There have been some great moments along the way (ah, how fondly you remember that hot night in Morocco), but there's been a lot of struggle.

These days, you worry about money. You've counted out the penny jar and it doesn't have £8,000 in it. Nobody sounds very positive about "social care". None of the noisy political parties seems to consider you anything but a liability.

You worry about your health. Your eyesight isn't what it used to be. You feel clumsier. You stumble a lot. To cap it all, you've got osteoporosis.

What is the one thing above all that you really, really want?

That's right. Judo.

That is what's missing from your life! Hobbling to a rundown gym and being thrown to the ground by a giant Swede in a pair of pyjamas. Of course!

So, what are you doing, sitting there all comfy with your cup of tea and your sudoku? That's no use to you. Bin it. Get up off your old arse and drag it down to LA Fitness, where a martial arts instructor can kick you up it.

This was, essentially, the advice given in newspapers last week ("How a spot of judo could do wonders for the frail"), based on a scientific study lifted from the journal BMC Research Notes.

You couldn't blame an old chap for thinking: "I know what would do wonders for me: dropping a quick note to the scientists telling them where they can stick it, then seeing if I can still neck a bottle of Famous Grouse in under an hour."

To be fair to the scientists (which newspapers never are), the original published research did nothing more than posit a theory that people with osteoporosis might benefit from learning how to fall safely.

Of course, they didn't actually test this on elderly people with bone disease. That would be stupid. They tested the impact of "normal" falls relative to judo-trained falls on the hips of healthy young people. Get in touch if you want to be the first arthritic octogenarian to find out if smashing your body weight on to a mat would prove equally harmless to you.

That responsible reporting of the judo study followed hot news of another scientific breakthrough: "brain-training" games such as sudoku, logic problems or the popular Einstein Mind Trainer do nothing to improve brain power after all.

Bollocks, I say. Empirically, I know that they do. When I have been playing poker for hours, really concentrating on the odds and the bets – or doing crosswords or playing Scrabble – I can feel my brain working faster and more enthusiastically than before.

I play poker in my local club with many sharp-witted elderly people, as quick with the funny ripostes as they are to win money at this challenging game of maths and logic, and I'm sure the cards are a factor in keeping them spiky. I will never meet "control" versions of them who eschewed poker and spent their retirements sitting on park benches staring silently at the dahlias, but my strong intuitive guess is that those versions wouldn't be half so smart, engaged or happy.

Scratch the surface of this "scientific study" and you'll see that the researchers simply found that six weeks playing these games did not improve the memory skills of a sample group.

So what? Maybe six weeks isn't long enough. Maybe their memories didn't improve, but, without the games, would have worsened. And who said it was all about memory? Exercising your brain with games is about keeping it lively and interested, busy and quick.

This all feels to me like pouring cold water, unnecessarily, on a harmless new fad that gave hope and purpose to people who felt their mental skills might be fading. Rushing to publicise the narrow, negative findings is mean-spirited and cynical. It's not like they were advocating a better way, they were just telling people not to do something fun. "Thought you were staving off the Alzheimer's with your silly little machine, did you, Grandpa? Ha! Think again, you hoodwinked old fool."

Well, Grandpa, I say that anything that makes you feel good is good. Ignore this hope-crushing, baseless nonsense. You're no fool; you'll know there's something dodgy about these negative findings when I tell you the study was conducted in tandem with the BBC1 series Bang Goes the Theory.

You don't have to be Einstein, or his Mind Trainer, to spot the problem there.

I'll tell you who doesn't need a brain-training machine: Michael O'Leary of Ryanair. That man's so sharp you could slice smoked salmon on him.

On Wednesday morning, newspapers widely reported his shock announcement that no stranded passengers would be compensated. On Thursday night, news channels widely reported his shock announcement that actually they would. What an incredible way to milk double headlines from the non-news that his company would be abiding by European law just like everyone else's.

Last year, Ryanair announced to massive publicity that they'd be charging a pound to use the loo. Then they announced they wouldn't. Two weeks ago, the news was again that they would. I wrote about it disapprovingly. I got a furious email from their press officer saying, actually, no, it's not decided yet.

So, I am responsibly reporting that it's not decided yet, fully expecting an immediate email from Ryanair saying that it is. No it's not. Yes it is. It's going to be two pounds! Five pounds! No pounds! We'll pay you to wee! No we won't. Yes we will. No we won't.

God bless British Airways.

www.victoriacoren.com

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 24 Apr 2010 | 5:08 pm

Stem cell breakthrough gives heart patients hope

Veins left over from surgery provide scientists with vital material

Scientists have extracted stem cells from blood vessels removed during operations and used them to stimulate the growth of new arteries.

The development has been hailed by researchers who say it could provide doctors with a revolutionary way to repair hearts damaged by coronary attacks. Injections of stem cells, extracted from old blood vessels, could soon be exploited to nourish ailing hearts, they say.

"This very encouraging and important advance brings the possibility of 'cell therapy' for damaged hearts one step closer," said Professor Peter Weissberg, medical director of the British Heart Foundation. "And if the chemical messages produced by the cells can be identified, it is possible that drugs could also be developed to achieve the same end."

The stem cell study, which was published last week in the journal Circulation, involved using blood vessels left over from heart bypass operations and was carried out by Professor Paolo Madeddu and his colleagues at Bristol University.

"Around 20,000 people have heart bypass surgery in Britain every year," said Madeddu. "The procedure is now standard. A section of vein from a patient's leg is cut out and is grafted on to a diseased coronary artery. It is then used to divert blood around a blockage or dangerous narrowing of a blood vessel and restore blood supply.

"The crucial point is that surgeons always cut out a longer piece of vein than they need, so there is always a leftover piece. We looked to see if we could get stem cells from those leftovers."

Scientists believe that stem cells have considerable potential as sources of new medicines and have separated them into two basic types. First, there are adult stem cells, which are known to act as a pool from which the body can repopulate itself with cells when old ones die. Adult skin stem cells operate as a source of new skin cells, for example.

By contrast, the other type of stem cells – embryonic stem cells – are created in the first two weeks of life and act as the source of all cells that make the growing foetus. However, the use of embryonic stem cells has raised ethical issues because embryos are destroyed in their creation in the laboratory.

Those isolated by Madeddu consisted of adult stem cells. He and his colleagues found – to their considerable surprise – that when they tested small sections of veins, those that had been left over from heart bypass operations, they could extract quite sizeable amounts of stem cells from them.

"We got a few thousand stem cells," he said. "That is not nearly enough for treatments. However, it provided us with a source from which we could get those cells to proliferate. We seeded the stem cells in special plates and were able to grow them until we got samples of 50m to 60m cells – which was enough to use as treatments."

In tests on mice, the researchers discovered that these cells were able to stimulate new blood vessel growth. As a result, the team has launched experiments aimed at showing that the cells could now help human patients to recover from coronary attacks by stimulating the growth of blood vessels around their hearts.

One aim of the project would be to allow a person receiving bypass surgery to be given treatments of stem cells that would have been isolated and grown from the vein that was used as part of their operation.

"We have found we can get stem cells from veins taken from 80-year-old patients," added Madeddu. "We did not expect that. It was a considerable surprise. From those cells we should be able to create treatments, made up of the patient's own cells, after they have had heart attacks. Further into the future, we might even be able to freeze these cells and store them so that they can be used to treat anyone who has serious coronary problems."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 24 Apr 2010 | 5:07 pm

Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos | Book review

David Bodanis grapples with inventive new ways of making the world add up

There's a great scene in the film Amadeus where Mozart's nemesis, the court composer Salieri, holds a sheaf of Mozart's manuscripts. They're just squiggles of black ink on paper, but as Salieri stares at them, he hears the magnificent music that Mozart has described. He is overcome by a sense of awe and the pages fall from his hands.

Generations of mathematicians have tried to get ordinary people to hear the beauty of numbers in the same way. Their failure has been close to total. Alex Bellos, a former foreign correspondent for the Guardian and the Observer, had an idea for doing a better job. Returning from several years as a reporter in Brazil, he decided to apply his journalistic skills to a very different territory: the landscape of mathematics.

When his book works, he's like an intrepid cosmic explorer, floating in an airship over a strange planet, and describing the fascinating things he sees. Down there, for example, on the eighth-century Northumbrian coast, he spots the Venerable Bede, who has worked out a way to count to a million simply by holding parts of his body. Small numbers and tens go on the left fingers and thumb, up to thousands he uses the right hand, and for bigger numbers ... well, Bede may here have betrayed a lack of human company, because to represent 90,000 he explained that you "grasp your loins with the left hand, the thumb towards the genitals". The contortions involved in counting even higher were ones he might well have been willing to study, alone, long into the night.

In Papua New Guinea, Bellos sights the Yupno people. They, too, count the lowest numbers on their fingers, and when it comes to higher numbers they use nostrils, eyes, nipples and bellybuttons. The left testicle is 31, 32 the right. At the apex of their system – 33 – a certain coyness enters. Rather than naming it, the number 33 is referred to as "the man thing". Bellos reports: "Researchers were unable to discover whether women use the same terms, since they are not supposed to know the number system and refused to answer questions."

If Bellos had left it here, his stories would be interesting but wouldn't add up to much. Luckily, he knows the field thoroughly - he studied mathematics at Oxford - and puts Bede and the Yupno in the context of a discussion of how any counting system must be arranged. In English, we count in groups of 10, as most societies do, for it matches our 10 fingers. In French, there's a leftover from a different system, in which counting occurred in 20s, which is why 80 is described as quatre-vingt ("four twenties"). It's not possible to be entirely random, because human beings have only limited memories. In our base 10 system, we can construct the names of most large numbers from just 10 words. Thus "45" doesn't need a special name, but is easily understandable in the garbled blur "fo(u)r-t(en)-five", or "forty-five".

It seems wrong that something as universal as mathematics should be limited by the quirks of our physical bodies – and it doesn't have to be. Bellos shows us the 17th-century German diplomat, philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz, who became convinced of the merits of a counting system composed entirely of 0s and 1s.

To Leibnitz, this represented how God created our universe from the void: 0 is nothing, and 1 is creation. When he found that the Chinese I Ching could also be broken down into a sequence of 0s and 1s he was overjoyed. It showed, he gushed, that "the substance of the ancient theology of the Chinese ... can be harnessed to the great truths of the Christian religion."

Had Richard Dawkins been around, Leibnitz would no doubt have been given a bracing slap, and told to drop this nonsense right away. Lacking this restraint, Leibnitz went on to create a system of logic based on 0s and 1s. Dawkins would have been appalled by this manifestation of theological fervor, but – and this is where mathematics has its Mozart moments – Leibnitz's binary switches became the basis for much of mathematical logic, the science behind transistor switching networks and the internet.

There's more, lots more, because Bellos is a magpie, with an affection for the denizens of this often neglected world. There's the paradoxical Hilbert hotel, which has an infinite number of rooms, all occupied, yet can accommodate new guests when they arrive simply by making everyone move one room along to the right. There are professors counting cards in Las Vegas, mystics counting Buddha's steps in India and PoWs who used the enforced solitude of the prison camps of the second world war to see if coin flips really come out randomly.

An old Hollywood adage asks: "The movies: they tear you from your home, suck out all your energy – and what do you get for it? A fortune." So it is with Bellos's mathematicians. On the outside they appear very strange people indeed. But what do they get to see? Magnificence.

David Bodanis is the author of E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation. He is finishing a book on the Ten Commandments.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 24 Apr 2010 | 5:07 pm

Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai

A 73-million-year-old dinosaur is finally offering up its secrets

After nearly 25 years of excavations at Pipestone Creek, Alberta, Canada, scientists have discovered hundreds of remains of a previously unknown species of horned dinosaur they have named Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai. About 73 million years ago, a herd of juvenile and adult dinosaurs drowned in a flood, giving scientists a rare glimpse of behaviour and growth patterns. The species was named after Al Lakusta, a science teacher, who discovered the site in 1973.

International Institute for Species Exploration, Arizona State University

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 24 Apr 2010 | 5:06 pm

Airlines were warned about ash in 2007

International watchdog told industry flight bans were possible and called for guidelines three years ago

The body co-ordinating the international response to the spread of volcanic ash has been aware for at least three years of the need for new guidelines setting out the conditions under which aircraft can keep flying after an eruption.

Airlines and tour operators have expressed scepticism that the ash levels in the atmosphere merited the unprecedented closedown of European airspace. The six-day ban cost the airlines around £1.1bn, according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA).

It has now emerged that the International Airways Volcano Watch Operations Group, a division of the International Civil Aviation Organisation, discussed three years ago establishing what might constitute "safe" levels of ash for aircraft to fly in. But the aircraft manufacturers were reluctant to talk about the issue. The revelation came as it emerged that Britons still stranded abroad could be stuck for another week.

Mark Tanzer, chief executive of Abta, the travel association, said: "While most flights are back to normal, and most stranded British passengers will be back this weekend, there is still quite a high level of disruption in some destinations. In some areas of the world there is a significant lack of air capacity to enable British people to be returned quickly."

Minutes of the Volcano Watch group's annual meeting, held in New Zealand in 2007, note: "There is no definition of a safe concentration of ash for different aircraft ... In order to give a reliable and justifiable all-clear, once a plume has dispersed enough to be undetectable, clear limits of ash content are required from both the manufacturers and aviation licensing authorities." It acknowledged that establishing a safe lower limit was a "difficult and longstanding problem".

A working paper, published by the group after the meeting, warned that airspace shutdowns were likely. It stated: "As remote sensing techniques improve, it is likely that the aggregate areas where ash is sensed or inferred will increase, possibly leading to over-warning for ash and cost-blowouts for airlines."

The following year's meeting examined problems with the monitoring of Iceland's volcanoes. It considered a proposal from the Iceland Meteorological Organisation for a second "Doppler weather radar in the eastern part of the country to assist in monitoring the volcanic eruption activity in that area".

The minutes noted "such eruptions could have a major impact on aircraft operations over the NAT [north Atlantic] regions since Icelandic volcanoes were situated close to important air routes". However, the meeting concluded that the proposal required a scientific evaluation which it could not authorise.

The group's fifth meeting, held this year in Chile two weeks before the Icelandic eruption, invited the aircraft manufacturers to discuss what might constitute safe ash levels. However, the minutes reveal: "IATA informed the group about the strong efforts made in order to get representation from the industry at the workshop but unfortunately these efforts had not been successful."

Yesterday Sir Richard Branson criticised the blanket ban and called for the government to compensate the industry. "All the experts were telling us there was no danger," Branson said. "There were plenty of corridors through which the airlines could have flown which would have been quite safe."

Branson added: "A blanket ban of the whole of Europe was not the right decision. The first few days the ash was up at 35,000ft, the planes could have flown below 35,000ft. There were plenty of ways of dealing with it. But actually planes have to put up with sandstorms in Africa; the engines are designed to put up with a lot more than existed."

Denis Chagnon, spokesman for the ICAO, said the current zero-tolerance policy was being addressed. "The new terms of reference are being drafted and will be available next week," he said.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 24 Apr 2010 | 5:06 pm

Nasa probe sends home dazzling pictures of the sun

Amazing images from Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory will enhance our understanding of the sun's impact on our chemistry and climate, writes Robin McKie

This glittering turquoise image reveals our sun in a dramatic and utterly unexpected way. Taken by the newly launched Nasa probe, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, the photograph shows superheated material swirling across the sun's surface in unprecedented detail.

At the top left of the image there is a solar prominence, a huge loop of plasma, that is being blasted into space. Scientists estimate its temperature at around 60,000 celsius. This is relatively cool, it transpires. The rest of the sun's surface depicted here, which has been given false colouring in blues and greens, is made up of plasma that is around one million degrees celsius.

Launched on 11 February on an Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral, the Observatory is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the sun and will operate for the next five years, leading to a new understanding of the role that the sun plays in earth's atmospheric chemistry and climate, say space scientists.

"These images show a dynamic sun that I had never seen in more than 40 years of solar research," said Richard Fisher, director of the Heliophysics Division at Nasa headquarters in Washington. "SDO will change our understanding of the sun and its processes, which affect our lives and society. This mission will have a huge impact on science, similar to the impact of the Hubble Space Telescope on modern astrophysics."

The Observatory is now sending data to earth at the rate of 1.5 terabytes a day, equivalent to the daily downloading of half a million songs to an MP3 player. From this information, researchers will study how solar radiation affects our planet. Extreme events – including massive ejections of material from the sun's corona – have been known to disrupt power lines and trigger widespread blackouts on earth. They can also interfere with communications between planes and ground controllers and also affect mobile phone services. Data from the SDO should help scientists predict these events.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 24 Apr 2010 | 5:05 pm

Plans percolate to revive some SF native creeks (AP)

AP - Riffling through old maps while researching a history project for San Francisco public schools, landscape architect Bonnie Sherk made a discovery: a century ago a creek coursed where two school campuses stand today.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Apr 2010 | 3:58 pm

Tornado Hits Miss., Leaves Swath of Destruction

Tornadoes killed more than six people in Mississippi and injured many others.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 24 Apr 2010 | 2:45 pm

Telescopes, Astronauts, and a Hopeless Romantic

Astronaut Soichi Noguchi took a photograph, from orbit, of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) site high in the Chilean Andes. But the extreme location of ALMA means few astronomers will actually go there.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 24 Apr 2010 | 12:59 pm

Science enthusiasts chase dream

Amateur scientists will investigate snails, clouds and gigs in the final of a BBC competition.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 24 Apr 2010 | 12:19 pm

What to Do After You've Lost Your Cell Phone

Losing a cell phone can be devastating and the after effects can be even worse.
Source: Livescience.com | 24 Apr 2010 | 10:06 am

What to Do Before You Lose Your Cell Phone

Losing a phone can cost more than the price of a replacement and can lead to identity theft. Follow these simple steps to minimize the fallout.
Source: Livescience.com | 24 Apr 2010 | 10:02 am

What to Do Before You Lose Your Cell Phone (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Losing a phone can cost more than the price of a replacement. It can mean the loss of valuable data including contacts, photos, video, music and a personal stash of apps that may have taken months accumulate, and lead to identity theft and all its financial implications. Following some simple steps can minimize the fallout.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Apr 2010 | 9:15 am

How the Hubble Telescope Survived Eye Surgery to Win Our Hearts (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - The Hubble Space Telescope has survived 20 years in space – including unprecedented surgical repairs to its mechanical eyes, heart and brain – to become one of the most beloved astronomical icons in history.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Apr 2010 | 7:15 am

Iran Guards vow to replace Western oil firms (AFP)

AFP - Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guards boasted on Saturday that they can fill the gap in the country's energy sector left by Western oil firms pulling out in the face of new sanctions against Tehran.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Apr 2010 | 7:15 am

How true is the one-in-four mental health statistic?

It's taken as fact that one in four people will suffer a mental health problem, but the research is less conclusive

How many people in the UK will suffer a mental health problem at some point in their lives? The most popular answer is one in four. For years, this statistic has been quoted by everyone from mental health charities to government ministers. The ongoing national Time to Change anti-stigma advertising campaign is awash with one in fours. But where does this number come from?

There is actually no hard evidence for one in four – or any other number – because there's never been any research looking at the overall lifetime rates of mental illness in Britain. The closest thing we've had is the Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, run by the Office of National Statistics. The latest survey, done in 2007, found a rate of about one in four, 23%, but this asked people whether they'd suffered symptoms in the past week (for most disorders).

We don't know what the corresponding rate for lifetime illness is, although it must be higher. Several such studies have been done in other English speaking countries, however. The most recent major survey of the US population found an estimated lifetime rate of no less than 50.8%. Another study in Dunedin, New Zealand, found that more than 50% of the people there had suffered from mental illness at least once by the age of 32.

So can half of us really expect to experience mental illness? Maybe, but some experts have another interpretation of these startlingly high figures. For example, in their book The Loss of Sadness, American sociologists Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield argued that the high rates of clinical depression seen in surveys like these are largely a reflection of flaws in the diagnostic criteria used to define and detect this condition. According to the most widely used criteria, you have clinical depression if you have two or more weeks in which you experience five or more symptoms from a list of nine, such as decreased motivation and difficulty sleeping. But the criteria don't consider why you might be feeling that way (the one exception being grief following bereavement).

So feeling temporarily down about a loss, stresses, or personal troubles is classed as "depression", even if most people would see such cases as a normal emotional response. Horwitz and Wakefield's argument applies to other common disorders, such as anxiety, as well. A very large proportion of people meet the criteria for these illnesses, but this doesn't necessarily mean they're ill. At present, the most used diagnostic system is the DSM-4 handbook produced by the American Psychiatric Association. The draft of the new DSM-5 criteria was recently been made available online and has provoked further debate over the dangers of "medicalising" normality.

This doesn't mean mental illnesses don't exist. In many cases, they're serious diseases, which require treatment and care. But unfortunately, we don't really know how common these diseases are, because the criteria upon which almost all the research is based are so broad. Why, then, has the one in four figure become so widespread? I think the answer is that it appeals to advocates for those who suffer mental illness. It's a nice quotable statistic, not so high that it raises sceptical eyebrows (as 50% does), but high enough to get across the message that mental illness is "normal", and that those who experience it are not some rare and dangerous other species.

This is an important message. People who experience mental illness often face stigma and discrimination, and it's right to oppose this. But stigma is wrong whether the rate of mental illness is one in four, or one in 400. We shouldn't need statistics to remind us that mental illness happens to real people. By saying that mental health problems are nothing to be ashamed of because they're common, one in four only serves to reinforce the assumption that there's something basically shameful about being "abnormal".

One in four also implies that mental illness is no big deal, since so many people experience it and manage to get by OK. Again, this is useful to an extent, as an antidote to the myth that those who experience mental illness will never be able to enjoy any kind of a usual life. However, it risks going too far in the other direction. Clinical depression, for example, really is more than just the everyday ups and downs that everyone goes through, which is why sufferers need treatment rather than advice to just "pull themselves together" or "deal with it".

What's worse, by quoting high prevalence figures as fact without reference to their controversial origins, mental health campaigners may be unwittingly helping those who have an interest in selling treatments to the masses – whether they be drugs, psychotherapy, or self-help books. This blurring of the line between health and illness can only hurt those who are genuinely ill, by diverting money and attention away from them. Mental health services are stretched enough as it is, without being asked to care for one in four of us, and in the light of fears that NHS budget cuts could have devastating consequences for the seriously mentally ill, can we afford to cast the net of "illness" so wide?

• This article was commissioned after the author contacted us via a You tell us thread. If you have your own subjects that you would like Cif to cover, please visit the latest thread

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 24 Apr 2010 | 6:00 am

Inventions: the weird and the wonderful

Highlights from the International Exhibition of Invention in Geneva, which has more than 700 exhibitors from 45 countries

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 24 Apr 2010 | 4:22 am