GOCE satellite determines gravitational force in the Himalayas

Researchers report the first interim results of the ESA mission GOCE, the Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer. Evaluations of the first data from the satellite indicate that current models of Earth's gravitational field in some regions -- the Himalayas, for example -- can be fundamentally revised. The results could contribute to better understanding of many geophysical processes.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 May 2010 | 3:00 pm

Whole body MRI is highly accurate in the early detection of breast cancer metastases

Whole body magnetic resonance imaging should be the imaging modality of choice for the detection of breast cancer metastases (when the cancer has spread beyond the breast) as it is highly accurate and can detect bone metastases while a patient is still asymptomatic (shows no symptoms), according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 May 2010 | 3:00 pm

Brain's master switch is verified

The protein that has long been suspected by scientists of being the master switch allowing brains to function has now been verified. New research shows that the protein called synaptotagmin1 is the sole trigger for the release of neurotransmitters in the brain.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 May 2010 | 3:00 pm

Gender specific disease risks start in the womb

Pregnancy places competing demands on a mother’s physiology: Her body wants to produce a healthy baby but not at the expense of her own health. Therefore, she passes so-called “imprinted genes” on to her child to protect her body from excessive demands from the child. Genes inherited from the father, however, aim at getting as many resources for the fetus as possible. This battle of genes might be at the root of later life diseases.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 May 2010 | 3:00 pm

How does ice flow? First results of a new measurement method in Antarctica

Researchers in Germany report results from an environmentally friendly measurement method used on an Antarctic ice-shelf for the first time in early 2010. The method supplies data that are input to models for the ice mass balance and thus permit better forecasting of future changes in the sea level.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 May 2010 | 3:00 pm

Sponsoring by the pharmaceutical industry can bias the results of drug studies, study suggests

Drug studies financed by pharmaceutical companies frequently show positive results in favor of the sponsor. In a new study, a research team in Germany describes the influence of sponsoring on the results, protocol and quality of drugs studies.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 May 2010 | 3:00 pm

Seeing into the heart of planetary systems

Using four of the world's largest telescopes, scientists have obtained the most detailed information yet from the regions around two young stars tens of light years away, finding compact discs of rocky and dusty material at distances comparable to that from the Earth to the Sun.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 May 2010 | 9:00 am

Biologists discover an extra layer of protection for bacterial spores

Bacterial spores, the most resistant organisms on earth, carry an extra coating of protection previously undetected, a team of microbiologists reports. Their findings offer additional insight into why spores of the bacteria that cause botulism, tetanus, and anthrax survive methods to eradicate them.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 May 2010 | 9:00 am

Simple gene test identifies clinically important subtypes of breast cancer

A simple genetic test that uses just three genes is among the most effective means of classifying breast cancer into subtypes.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 May 2010 | 9:00 am

Fragile X syndrome gene's role in shaping brain uncovered

Researchers have discovered how the genetic mutation that causes Fragile X syndrome, the most common form of inherited mental retardation, interferes with the "pruning" of nerve connections in the brain.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 May 2010 | 9:00 am

Powerful quake hits Indonesia's Aceh (AFP)

AFP - A powerful quake with a magnitude of at least 7.2 hit the Indonesian province of Aceh on Sunday, causing panic in an area that was devastated by the killer waves of the 2004 tsunami.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 May 2010 | 4:05 am

Let's improve medical science, for free | Jamie Horder

Making ineffective treatments seem to work is bad for everyone's health but simple legislation offers a cheap solution

What will the election mean for British health, science and education? One thing everyone agrees on is that the next few years will be a time for belt-tightening, and the issue of funding and cuts has dominated debates so far. But there's one simple thing that the next government can do to improve our health, and ensure we get value for money from British medical research: a law requiring the registration of clinical trials.

Randomised, placebo-controlled trials are the foundation of modern medical science. They are how we know which treatments work. A drug must pass a certain number of trials before it's approved to be sold, and the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (Nice) uses trials to make its often controversial decisions about which drugs are worth the money. Clinical trials determine almost every aspect of the treatment we receive.

Yet there's a big problem with the current system of clinical trials: selective publication. Suppose a company runs a trial of a new drug it has just developed, but unfortunately, the results show that the drug doesn't work – people taking the drug did no better than people given placebo sugar pills.

If people found out about that data, it would be bad news for the company: drugs that don't work don't sell. So there would be a strong incentive not to release the findings. Instead, it could file the inconvenient results away and run another trial, and if necessary another, until, just by chance, the drug seems to work – and then publish those positive results. Even for drugs that do work, publishing only the most positive results makes them seem to work better than they really do.

This is called publication bias. It's bad for science, and bad for everyone's health. By making ineffective treatments seem to work, making expensive new drugs seem to be better than old, cheap ones, and concealing evidence of side effects, selective publication undermines the whole point of doing research in the first place.

By its nature, publication bias is difficult to detect. We'll probably never know the full extent of the problem, but studies have shown that it has happened, and continues to happen, on a large scale. Contrary to popular belief, drug companies are not the only culprits. One recent study found evidence that it occurs in trials of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for clinical depression, and publication bias in trials of complementary and alternative medicine has also been reported. It's everywhere.

Yet it's legal, almost everywhere in the world. By contrast, if someone were to simply make up some positive results, or go through data fiddling the numbers to make them "better", that would be scientific fraud, an extremely serious matter. Doing several trials and only publishing the best ones is, in its effects, just as misleading – but it's allowed.

Fortunately, there's a simple, powerful, and cheap solution. In 2007, the US passed a pioneering law called the Food and Drug Administration Amendment Act (FDAAA). This requires anyone running a trial of an investigational drug or medical device, that includes any American patients, to register the details of the study in a public database before it starts.

Anyone can view the database online. No more disappearing trials. Trial sponsors are also required to release the results when they become available, whether they're positive or not. Failure to comply can be punished by fines, and/or withdrawal of funding.

The FDAAA is an important piece of legislation. However, neither Britain, nor the EU, has an equivalent system in place. There's already an EU clinical trial database, but unlike the American one, it's not open to the public. Government health authorities have access to it, but doctors, scientists and patients don't. This largely defeats the point.

There are also a number of international public databases, and since 2005 the editors of most of the world's top medical journals have refused to publish trials that weren't appropriately pre-registered. This was a good step, and a welcome sign that publication bias is being taken seriously. But it's not enough, because plenty of other journals still publish unregistered trials.

Ultimately, only governments can stop publication bias. The next parliament should follow the American example and require public registration and data reporting for all clinical trials involving British patients. It would hardly cost anything. It would, at a stroke, improve British science, and everyone's health.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 9 May 2010 | 4:00 am

Where is Dark Matter Hiding?

According to a highly sensitive particle detector, dark matter particles don't appear to exist. However, dark matter detection reports from another, less sensitive instrument suggests otherwise. What is going on?
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 9 May 2010 | 3:45 am

No proposal for special OPEC meeting: Qatar (AFP)

AFP - Qatari Energy Minister Abdullah al-Attiyah said on Sunday there was no proposal to hold an extraordinary meeting of the oil cartel OPEC in light of falling prices.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 May 2010 | 3:16 am

India minister says chance of climate deal 'remote' (AFP)

AFP - India's environment minister warned Sunday that there was little prospect of a breakthrough in efforts to forge an international agreement this year to fight global warming.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 May 2010 | 2:37 am

Expect no climate deal this year: Indian minister (AP)

AP - The chance of a climate change agreement this year is remote because the United States and China are unwilling to make more commitments during the talks, India's environment minister said Sunday.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 May 2010 | 1:50 am

1st try to divert oil fails; tar blobs hit Ala. (AP)

AP - BP's first attempt to divert a massive oil leak has failed, leaving its mission in doubt as thick blobs of tar start to wash up on Alabama's white sand beaches.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 May 2010 | 1:10 am

Wave Hello to Tidal Power

“Underwater kite” will generate power from tidal currents.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 8 May 2010 | 9:14 pm

Montserrat’s Monster: Scientists Map Volcanic Deposits

Underwater volcanic deposits may collapse and cause tsunamis in the Caribbean.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 8 May 2010 | 8:57 pm

From Oil Spill to Economic Kill - What's It Going to Cost Us?

The oil spill hurts a lot more than the environment: It gets your pocketbook, too.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 8 May 2010 | 8:39 pm

At 25, the Ozone Hole Still Matters

Reflecting on our past success in fixing the hole in Earth's ozone layer could help us fight climate change.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 8 May 2010 | 5:47 pm

A little pill that could cure alcoholism

When an alcoholic doctor began experimenting with Baclofen, he made what could be the medical breakthrough of the century

The Hotel Lutetia is a beautiful belle époque building in Paris's sixth arrondissement. It's a place steeped in history: Josephine Baker was a resident, and it was here that General de Gaulle spent his wedding night. It was also here, on 26 January 2000, that Dr Olivier Ameisen, first official physician to the prime minister of France under Raymond Barre, noted cardiologist at Cornell University, talented pianist and friend of both Nobel Peace Prize-winner Elie Wiesel and record producer Arif Mardin, received the Légion d'Honneur for his "contribution to the image of France abroad and to cardiology".

A proud moment in a life of excellence and achievement, you would imagine, but you'd be wrong. Sitting in the bar of the Lutetia 10 years later, Ameisen, now 57, recalls how he felt: "When Barre and all those guys were kissing my cheeks, I thought: 'Where are their brains?' I mean, when I was accepted at Cornell I looked at those guys and I thought that they were mediocre – that if those guys want me, they are idiots."

The truth was that Ameisen, for all his successes in life, was consumed with self-loathing and shame. He was a hopeless alcoholic – hopeless in the sense that, though he seemed able to achieve anything else he put his mind to, he could not stop drinking. Despite running a thriving private practice in New York, in his late thirties he had become a binge drinker and by 1997 was regularly being admitted to hospital. He tried any treatment available: tranquillisers including Valium and Xanax, antidepressants and specific alcohol medications including Antabuse and Acamprosate. He underwent acupuncture and hypnosis, took regular exercise and practised yoga. He attended cognitive behavioural therapy and up to three meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous a day. But his drinking only got worse: "The more I drank to ease my anxiety, stave off panic and counter draining insomnia, the more I had to drink for the same effect." No longer trusting himself to treat his patients responsibly, he stopped working altogether. Finally his doctors told him he had "at best" five years of life left.

It's a dramatic but not unusual story. According to the World Health Organisation, approximately two million people around the world die from the effects of alcohol each year, more than from any single form of cancer. In the UK, government figures estimate that one in 13 people is dependent on alcohol. For all the efforts of doctors, therapists, social workers and support groups, only a fraction of those addicted to alcohol manage to stop drinking and remain abstinent for a significant period.

It's not extraordinary that, despite all his efforts and his obvious intelligence and commitment, Dr Ameisen failed to overcome his addiction. What is extraordinary is that he eventually discovered a drug he claims has cured him of alcoholism and that he claims can cure all addictions, including cocaine, heroin, smoking, bulimia and anorexia, compulsive shopping and gambling. Because that is, according to all other schools of thought, simply impossible.

The Ameisen sitting beside me in the bar of the Hotel Lutetia is as far from the popular conception of the alcoholic as it's possible to get. Dressed in a dark blue suit and tie, tanned, relaxed and distinguished, he is very much the successful doctor, rather than the ruined drunk who was in and out of rehabilitation units and even a psychiatric ward. As a recovering alcoholic myself, I no longer expect all addicts to be tramps, but he is certainly a good advert for his method.

The secret of his sobriety, as outlined in his book The End of My Addiction, first published in 2008 and reissued in the UK this month, is a drug called baclofen. Formulated in the 1920s, baclofen is a muscle-relaxant more often used to treat spasticity and multiple sclerosis. It came to Ameisen's attention via a story in the New York Times about a paraplegic addict who found his desire for cocaine decreased when taking baclofen for muscle spasms.

Ameisen already suspected that – contrary to Alcoholics Anonymous's belief in a physical condition with a spiritual solution, and the opinion of most therapists and even psychiatrists – the cause of his addiction might be chemical. In fact he pinned his hopes on it. "In the end," he tells me, "I thought: 'I want to commit suicide.' But I did not because I was convinced that the day I died, the next day they would find a cure. As you're being buried, people will think: 'You idiot – you died too early.'"

In his search for a cure, one particular aspect of baclofen caught his attention: that it was a muscle relaxant. He had suffered from anxiety and muscular tension all his life and was convinced it was at the root of his problem: "I knew that nothing – yoga, meditation, I'd tried it all – could relax my muscles. I was tense from morning to evening." He thought that perhaps it was the same for all alcoholics or even all addicts: "Unconsciously, as a physician maybe, I was observing people at the AA meetings and I saw the foot-tapping and the fingers going – the compulsiveness."

Internet research seemed to confirm his hunch: in one study, baclofen was shown to have an effect on panic attacks; in another, "obsessional thinking about alcohol disappeared"; in a third, it suppressed the intake of cocaine in addicted rats. All indications were that it was safe, even in high doses. Eventually, in March 2002, he took the plunge and wrote himself a prescription, starting low and gradually increasing his dose.

Almost at once, the effects were positive: "It controlled my anxiety better than any of the standard anti-anxiety medications. It reduced my craving for alcohol and enabled me to remain abstinent for longer periods." He even found he had lost the urge to shop compulsively. Each time he increased the dose he would feel sleepy, but this wore off after a couple of days. That was until, in February 2004, he reached 270mg – a dose 150-190mg above the maximum dose for most countries. At this level, the sleepiness did not wear off, but he noticed something else: his desire to drink had gone. "I was completely and effortlessly indifferent to it," he wrote.

He called this the "threshold dose" and reduced it until he came down to 120mg a day, a "maintenance dose" on which he remains to this day, occasionally topping up by 20-40mg when he feels particularly anxious. He can now even drink socially – an idea entirely counter to the teachings of AA and most other therapies. "I became disease-free," he says. It seemed he had discovered a treatment that might save millions of lives and improve those of even more.

This story raises many questions, the first of which – at least for an alcoholic – is: how come I don't know about this? "Well, that's the thing," sighs Ameisen. "It's exhausting." Naturally he wanted to share his discovery, even though to do so he would have to declare himself an alcoholic – something no practising doctor had done before. He wrote up his experiment for publication, as a "self-case report", and submitted it to the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism, published by the Oxford University Press. This appeared in December 2004 but barely caused a ripple. Unbowed, he circulated it to anyone who might have an influence. One of these, Nobel Laureate in Medicine Jean Dausset, told him he had discovered the cure for addiction but warned him: "Medical dogma can be slow to change." These would prove to be telling words.

It's not that there is much argument over how baclofen might work. Recent advances in brain imaging have increased knowledge of the function of the pleasure and reward systems, and suggested that addiction interferes with the balance of the neurotransmitters dopamine, glutamate and gamma- aminobutyric acid (GABA). "What baclofen does is stimulate the GABA-B receptors, and you see the release of dopamine and glutamate is slowed, so the reward system is normalised," says Ameisen. It is even widely accepted that baclofen in low doses treats withdrawal from alcoholism, though no more effectively than several other medications. What proved more controversial was Ameisen's theory of the "threshold dose", which he says is "needed to break the cycle of addictive craving, preoccupation and obsessive thoughts" and which moves baclofen from treatment to cure.

Ameisen was disappointed by the professional reaction to his discovery, but he found that potential patients were much more interested. Alerted by occasional mentions in the press, starting with a piece in Business Week in 2005, they began to contact him directly. Some eventually found an addiction specialist or GP willing to prescribe "off label" – to give them the drug for a purpose other than that for which it was intended and/or at a higher dose than recommended, at the doctor's risk. When, after two years of attempting to work within the medical system, Ameisen decided to go round it and wrote The End of My Addiction, published in France as Le Dernier Verre (The Last Glass), this process accelerated. Small groups of addicts using high-dose baclofen began to spring up around doctors who adopted Ameisen's ideas.

This is increasing "exponentially", according to Ameisen: there are 60 cases in Geneva, 50 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, 40 in Chicago, and so on. It's reached Britain, too, with 50 already in Glasgow and others around the country. One who followed his method was 51-year-old Debra, who had relapsed after almost five years' abstinence and was in a state she describes as "absolute bedlam. The first thing, as soon as I got up, was: 'How am I going to get my drink?'" Just after she'd discovered the book on Amazon, she visited her GP and he recommended trying the treatment. "I started on quite a high dose – 30mg in the morning, 30 at lunchtime and 40 at night – but it wasn't enough to get me off immediately. It's not a magic pill – my obsession with drinking was still so strong. It was once my mindset had changed and I'd opened up; baclofen in conjunction with really wanting to stop was when it hit home." After nine months, she says, "I have no cravings now."

Similar cases aren't hard to find. Another British patient who began taking the drug in April 2009 kept a detailed blog under the name Baclofenremedy. Though he started on 300mg – 30mg more than Ameisen's threshold dose – his early entries describe a cycle of relapse, anger, self-loathing, denial and despair that is a familiar tale for any alcoholic: "At 5am I drank six cans of beer, 3 San Miguel and 3 Gold Label, ******* idiot." About two months in, however, the tone changes: "I don't have to try and not have a beer, I just don't think about it the way I used to." Eventually, although his intention had been to drink "normally", he finds himself, just like Ameisen, totally uninterested in alcohol. "I just cannot picture [drinking]. It's like I don't agree with it any more personally," he writes.

Baclofenremedy's NHS GP did not wish to be interviewed for this piece, but confirmed that he had "prescribed baclofen at above maximum dose following Dr Ameisen's regime and that the treatment has worked very well for the one patient I have used it for". But not everyone can find a doctor who will prescribe the drug. Many alcoholics and addicts have taken to buying baclofen over the internet and conducting their own version of Ameisen's DIY treatment, exchanging information on websites such as the French alcool-et-baclofene.fr, the German baclofen-forum.com and English-language mywayout.org. This has gathered such momentum that Dr Fred Levin, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Northwestern Medical School, one of Ameisen's greatest champions and the doctor responsible for the 40 cases in Chicago, made it known on one website that he was willing to advise self-experimenters over the phone, out of hours, to ensure they treated themselves safely.

As yet, though it is increasingly widely accepted that all addictions and compulsive behaviours work on the same neurotransmitters, the use of high-dose baclofen on addictions to cocaine, heroin, nicotine or in eating disorders has not taken off in the same way. That said, Dr William Bucknam, the addiction psychiatrist in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who picked up Ameisen's method, counts cocaine addicts, smokers and binge eaters among the 50 he treats. There have also been positive studies on baclofen's effect on heroin in a 2007 Italian study, on cocaine in a small placebo-controlled trial at UCLA, California, in 2003 and on binge eating in New York and Pennsylvania in 2007, as well as several animal tests for cocaine, heroin, nicotine and dextroamphetamine.

These can be added to studies on alcoholics, most recently Ameisen's own, conducted on 100 patients over three months with Dr René de Beaurepaire of Le Centre Hospitalier Paul-Guiraud in Villejuif, near Paris, and published in February. This showed 88% either stopped drinking, regained control of their drinking or reduced it significantly, with thresholds reached at doses varying from 60mg to 300mg. These are significant figures, but it's clear, as it has been since Ameisen's self-case report was published, that until there has been a rigorously conducted double-blind placebo trial – a test whereby both the drug and a placebo are handed out at random, with neither patient nor doctor knowing which is which – few in medicine are going to take much notice.

For that, a number of factors would need to align. The first is funding, which would usually be provided by a drug company. The problem here is that baclofen is an old drug; although this means that Ameisen has been able to amass data from over 50 years' usage, it is also out of patent, and drug companies therefore have no incentive to trial it. And there's no shortage of drugs being trialled for alcoholism and addiction treatment that would bring profits. In February, Reuters reported 24 in development for alcoholism alone, while for addiction in general a 2006 piece in the New York Times said that America's National Institute of Drug Abuse was studying 200.

The second factor is the acceptance of the medical establishment. Ameisen has built up a network of supporters, some of them in senior, influential positions – Jerome Posner, chair of Neuro-oncology at the prestigious Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and Jean Dausset, for example. When we meet, he is about to fly to America to speak at the McLean Hospital Division of Alcohol and Drug Abuse of Harvard University, and reports on his return that they have "asked me to write them my protocol on a piece of paper, which I did, and that they will simply start prescribing". He has also been made a visiting professor at State University of New York which, as he points out, is "not out of charity".

But there are doubts. Even Professor Jonathan Chick, the Edinburgh-based psychiatrist who, as editor-in-chief of Alcohol and Alcoholism, published Ameisen's self-case report, is cautious. "It's a very moving, wonderful story, as indeed is his book," he says, "but we always have to realise in a single-case report there are factors that may be important that aren't necessarily being examined and therefore we can't conclude anything definite – for example, that the baclofen high dose made this remarkable change in him. One needs to conduct a randomised controlled study."

Professor Chick is treating 50 patients for alcoholism with baclofen, but not in the high doses of Ameisen's method; he stays within the maximum dose drawn up by the British National Formulary of 100mg a day. "We've been very encouraged by patients who had failed with previous attempts to abstain from alcohol who with baclofen have remained abstinent," he says. "We're not saying they've been cured for life; I don't think it's possible to say that. Professor Ameisen might say that we haven't used sufficiently high doses." And he is currently unwilling to go above the 100mg dose: "I do actually have some concerns about unwanted effects in larger doses. I don't want to give details to you – this is all rather provisional. This is a drug which is active in the brain, and there are concerns about some unwanted effects of higher doses in a very few people."

For Ameisen, this is a frustration. "In the nearly 50 years that baclofen has been prescribed, including at high dose – much higher than Dr Chick's maximum – I challenge you to find any report of any side effect that was severe or not reversible within 24 or 48 hours. Trust me, had there been one such report, I would have been demolished since 2004."

Ameisen has not hidden the fact that baclofen can have side effects, particularly if not managed properly, including sleepiness (or somnolence), dizziness, nausea, violent dreams, headaches and bouts of depression, or that sudden withdrawal is unsafe. He has also stated that: "No medication works effectively for everyone, and baclofen is surely no exception." With no official figures and many taking it without medical supervision, it's impossible to assess baclofen's success rate accurately. There's also no definitive way to measure success: anecdotal evidence suggests that those who don't achieve abstinence stop taking the drug because they find the side effects off-putting, and who's to say they wouldn't eventually have been cured if they had continued? "So far it seems to work in all types except for one," says Ameisen, "and that's people who turn up once and don't come again. But it's not one size fits all; you have to refine it. Not to say that I'm a great doc, but every time I'm on the case I've yet to find a patient where it's not a success. I've been playing with this medication for 10 years."

The miracle-cure aspect of the treatment has certainly provoked some addiction experts, though. In December 2008, for example, Dr Nicholas Pace, a clinical professor of medicine at New York University, told ABC News: "I have studied alcoholism for the past 40 years, and there is no single magic bullet. This is a complex disease, and you can't just flip one switch. The idea that an alcoholic can drink socially is simply a lot of bull." This kind of reaction, says Ameisen, comes from feeling threatened. "When you question a dogma, you're very vulnerable," he says. "People in the field feel stupid. The animal data was there for 30 years – I didn't invent this. I used a model; I did what they should have done." Plus, he says, "if baclofen works, then their specialism is going to fall apart. There are those who want trials to be blocked – it's not good for their business."

An alternative reason might be that they've heard claims like this before. Since the 1990s, several drugs introduced to treat alcoholism, such as Antabuse, Naltrexone and Campral, have proved disappointing. Before then, barbiturates, benzodiazepines such as Valium and antidepressants such as Prozac were each hyped as an end to addiction. In 2007, Prometa, a treatment for methamphetamine, alcohol and cocaine, was launched with claims of an 80% success rate but no double-blind testing, and was shot down almost at once.

Around the same time, ibogaine, a psychoactive substance used in African ceremonies, was hailed by a senior member of the American National Institute on Drug Abuse as the most promising anti-addiction medication he had seen, but has since been connected to 12 deaths. So when Dr Fred Levin said in April that "virtually every patient I've ever [treated with high-dose baclofen] has gotten well", it sounded too good to be true. As he said himself: "All of us in medicine are very sceptical when someone says something has approximately 100% success rate."

One psychiatrist I spoke to, who wished to remain anonymous because of his own alcoholism, told me: "There's been the emergence in the past few years of a number of drug therapies for alcoholism which are promising. But if you rated them on a level from one to 10, where 10 was 'complete cure' and 0 was 'doesn't work at all', most of the drugs in psychiatry are about 3 or 4, and drugs for addiction are more like a 2 or 3, or even 1 and 2. So anyone who insists that one of these medications is a wonder drug, a panacea or a cure, he probably has either got the patent for the medication or is trying to make a name for himself."

Ameisen has filed a patent application, but for "prevention of relapse on baclofen". He says this was solely to block rehab centres from doing so, and that he is dropping it because it is "costly and useless". Though he could have done so, he says, he never applied for a patent for his treatment.

There is also the question of whether a drug that you take for ever – the "maintenance dose" – is a cure at all. Ameisen says that the correct equivalent is a drug for high blood pressure or diabetes, but this might be questionable if there is always the option of "topping up", as when he says: "I sometimes think of alcohol and I take a pill and within 30, 40 minutes it's gone."

"'Whatever works' is my response," says Julian Keeling, a therapist with Tony Adams's Sporting Chance Clinic and a former drugs counsellor at Wandsworth Prison, "but there is the idea of taking a drug in order to come off a drug. There's a parallel with methadone, which I was on, a heroin substitute that has a much longer half-life and much less euphoria, so your life stabilises. It doesn't address underlying issues, though, and most people don't tend to destroy their life with alcohol and drugs unless they've got some fairly pronounced emotional disturbances that they're trying to escape from and medicate."

Could this attitude be due to the general acceptance that the 12-step programme and therapy are the treatment for addiction? Ameisen insists that his cure would not replace therapy or AA – "On the contrary, it will make all these programmes more effective" – but a medical cure would make AA, with its ideas of "defects of character" and "amends", seem like ancient superstition. "If I find a drug that works for me then I'm going to be psychologically addicted to it even if I'm not physically addicted to it, and it will do for me what I feel I ought to be doing for myself," says Keeling. "It's like that Louis Theroux documentary about medicated children: on the one hand, if you had a nightmare kid, why wouldn't you put him on Ritalin? But you look at it and some part of you says it's wrong. But do I have that reaction because I have a puritan view of medication due to 12-step brainwashing? I don't know."

As an addict, it's hard to decide about Dr Ameisen's treatment. Would I take it? Should I take it? Part of me – no doubt the part that has seen lives turned around in just that way – believes that Ameisen might have been able to recover with Alcoholics Anonymous alone. He says: "If someone managed through willpower to quit drinking, then great – he probably has something smaller than I had, because I was unable. Every disease has mild and severe cases – some people get the flu and die; some get it and don't even notice." He may well be right – I'd certainly agree he had (or has) it worse than me. But AA is based on surrender, on suppression of the ego and a very old-fashioned leap of faith; Ameisen found his cure through his refusal to surrender, listening to his ego, and through science. The problem is that science needs proof.

The End of My Addiction: How One Man Cured Himself of Alcoholism by Olivier Ameisen (Piatkus Books, £9.99) is published on 13 May

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 8 May 2010 | 5:07 pm

Welcome to a new Eden – two billion miles from Earth

No other body in the solar system more closely resembles Earth than Saturn's moon, Titan. It has methane lakes and seas and scientists now believe that an underground ocean could even harbour life, says Robin McKie

Five years ago, several hundred scientists gathered at the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, to witness a remarkable event: the reception of the first signals to be sent from the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

It had taken engineers a decade to plan and construct Huygens, Europe's unmanned mission to this mysterious world. In addition, the probe's 2-billion-mile journey there, on board its Nasa-built mother craft, Cassini, took a further seven years. A great many careers depended on the mission's success. Hence the tension in the control room on 14 January, 2005.

"If Huygens had failed, it would have been a disaster. We knew we wouldn't get another shot at Titan for 20 years," says Professor John Zarnecki. His Open University team designed key instruments for the probe, which is named after the 17th-century Dutch astronomer Christopher Huygens who discovered Titan.

"There was another nagging worry. We had talked up Titan as an incredibly exciting place in order to get the space agencies to fund Huygens. Yet we only had the word of the theoreticians that this orange fuzzball, as it appeared in our best images, was interesting. If it turned out to be dull and boring, we would have egg all over our faces."

Then the data arrived and from the very first results, greeted with jubilation at Darmstadt, it was clear that the European Space Agency's probe had performed superbly. More to the point, Titan appeared to be a very exciting place indeed. Photographs revealed shorelines bounding dark lakes while the surface was found to have a crunchy constituency, likened by one researcher to creme brulee.

Since then, scientists have been studying signals sent back by Huygens during its two-and-a-half-hour parachute descent through Titan's thick, orange-coloured, nitrogen-rich atmosphere. These provided enough data to fill no more than a simple memory stick, making Huygens's results some of the most expensive and precious to be collected by scientists.

At the same time, its mother ship, Cassini, has continued its camera and radar sweeps of the haze-covered moon to uncover key surface features. In combination, these two sets of results – only recently fully analysed – have uncovered a world far more extraordinary than ever suspected.

"There are lakes and seas that make Titan the only other place, other than the Earth, in the solar system with large, stable bodies of liquid on its surface," says Zarnecki. "There are also river channels; great stretches of dunes; weather and meteorology; complex hydrocarbons; and – most excitingly – powerful signs that Titan has a subsurface ocean that could provide a home for primitive life. Titan turns out to be an incredible place. It's a moon that would be a planet."

In fact, Titan looks like Earth in many ways – with one critical exception. It is extraordinarily cold, with atmospheric temperatures 200 degrees below that of our planet. Ten times further from the Sun than Earth, Titan consequently receives a hundredth of the solar heat that bathes our world. There may be complex organic material littering the place, but conditions are simply too cold on Titan for life to evolve from this material on the surface.

It turns out that those rivers, lakes and seas on the surface are not watery affairs but are made of methane which plays the same meteorological role on Titan as water does on Earth. It evaporates from great seas of liquid methane, like the giant Kraken Mare. Then it condenses and falls as methane rain, sometimes setting off flash floods that carve out riverbeds like the ones picked out by the cameras on Huygens.

"Water exists in three forms on Earth: liquid, vapour and ice," says Zarnecki. "The same is true for methane on Titan. Hence its role in driving the moon's weather systems."

As for the existence of Titan's complex hydrocarbons, these are formed in its upper atmosphere where the Sun's weak, ultra-violet radiation breaks down methane into molecules that re-form into more complex, petrol-like hydrocarbons. These are responsible for much of the haze that has hidden Titan's surface like a smog over Los Angeles. Devices on board Huygens have detected ethane, acetylene and other complex hydrocarbon molecules – an oilman's dream. These hydrocarbons are then swept to the ground by the moon's rain, though gravity on Titan is so weak that the resulting oily droplets would be far larger than raindrops on Earth.

These seas and lakes don't tell the whole story, however. As Huygens settled on the moon's surface, it photographed a landscape of pebbles that turn out to be made not of stone, but of ice, evidence that water exists at least in one form on Titan.

The fact is that if Titan were not so cold, it would probably be bursting with life, so plentiful are its supplies of organic raw materials, scientists suggest. The moon is, in effect, a chilled leftover from the formation of the early solar system. It is, therefore, of enormous scientific importance, according to Al Diaz, science associate administrator of Nasa, which collaborated with Europe on Huygens. "Titan is a time machine that gives us a chance to look at conditions that existed on early Earth," he said after Huygens's results were received.

In any case, this moon may yet have its day as a home of complex lifeforms. "In a couple of billion years, our Sun will expand to become a type of star called a red giant and will envelop Earth in superhot plasma," says Zarnecki. "Our oceans will boil off and the Earth will become a very unpleasant place to live. By contrast, temperatures will go up nicely by a couple of hundred degrees on Titan. This will be the new Eden."

Crucial to this scenario are Cassini's radar observations which reveal that Titan has a highly irregular rotation. "All planets and moons have slight spin irregularities, including Earth," explains Zarnecki. "This lengthens or shortens our day by a microsecond or two. But on Titan the effect is much greater, suggesting the existence of an underground ocean which separates the moon's crust from its core. This layer acts as the fluid in a giant ballbearing which allows Titan's crust and core to spin at different rates, hence those irregularities."

As for the make-up of that liquid layer, evidence points to water as the prime candidate. And that, in turn, has exciting consequences, say scientists. Titan probably has a hot core which is keeping that layer of water in a warm liquid state. Thus, we have the prospect of a rich soup of hydrocarbons filtering through Titan's crust to a subterranean ocean.

"These discoveries make Titan very interesting biologically. We have got loads of organics on the surface and liquid water down below. Can the two mix? Have they been mixing for billions of years? In other words, are there thriving colonies of bugs down there, crawling about and living very happily below Titan's surface?"

Not surprisingly, such a prospect is fuelling scientists' appetites for a return mission to Titan. Several probes are being planned including a joint European-American mission that would carry airships and balloons. These would take advantage of the moon's thick atmosphere, which is denser than Earth's, and its low gravity, which is a seventh of ours.

"Flying on Titan should be easy and by following its winds, we should be able to sail round it in a couple of weeks, looking for promising places to land and investigate," says Zarnecki. "We could also sail robot ships on its methane seas and become the first extraterrestrial mariners. Most important, however, we could try and find signs of simple biology on Titan. That would be pure gold."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 8 May 2010 | 5:06 pm

Book review: Angels and Ages

The far-from-obvious parallels between Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin are teased out in this fine book, says Robin McKie

The fact that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were both born on 12 February 1809 doesn't at first seem in any way significant. One was a humble-born, self-educated lawyer who became a great statesman. The other was an affluent Victorian gentleman whose ideas revolutionised science and religion. Not much in common there, it would seem, other than a shared star sign and the demonstration of considerable ambition. But Adam Gopnik disagrees. He believes the two figures are linked in a subtle, yet distinctive manner, one that speaks volumes about the political and philosophical changes that swept America and Europe in the 19th century. And, on closer examination, you can see his point or, at least, some of it.

Both men suffered the trauma of losing a child, for example, and those deaths had profound implications for the way they subsequently dealt with the world. For Darwin, the loss of his daughter, Annie, reinforced his ideas about death's role in winnowing out creatures unsuited to their habitats and in shaping species, while for Lincoln, the death of his son, Willie, in 1862 from a fever created a bond that he could share with thousands of other parents whose sons were being slaughtered during the American civil war.

At the same time, both men were non-believers and both used their considerable linguistic prowess – Lincoln as a speech-maker, Darwin as a writer – to promote their ideas. They brought about profound change in similar ways, as Gopnik argues. "Lincoln and Darwin are both emblematic figures in the spread of bourgeois liberal democracy and the central role for science that goes with it," he states.

It is a compelling thesis and although Gopnik, a staff writer for the New Yorker, does not completely convince with every detail of his argument, he brings enough elan to his prose and insight to the issues he raises to create a thoroughly entertaining romp through the stories of these two great men. If nothing else, he has written the perfect introduction to their lives.

In any case, it is not what Darwin and Lincoln had in common with each other that matters in the end. It is what they have in common with us. As Gopnik says: "We live in a society based on two foundations – scientific  reasoning and democratic politics." Hence our huge debt to both men.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 8 May 2010 | 5:06 pm

Identifying the root of consciousness

The co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science hopes to unravel the mystery of where 'we' exist through studying the brain

Consciousness is the last outpost of pure mystery in our scientific understanding of the brain. We are learning ever more about the brain's physiology and how it controls our bodies, but the idea of where "we" exist, how we develop that sense of self and how it can be explained in terms of the activity of brain cells, all of that is still largely the domain of philosophers rather than scientists.

Anil Seth, co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex, wants to turn that around. The recently opened institute will include neuroscientists, psychiatrists, roboticists, philosophers and a hypnotist. Using brain-scanners and computer algorithms, they will measure, model and characterise what consciousness might be at a physiological level. Seth and his co-director Hugo Critchley then want to take the findings into the clinic, using these ideas to explain whether altered states of consciousness might explain (and help treat) psychiatric conditions.

Why have scientists been so reluctant to study consciousness until now?

A hundred years ago, consciousness was at the heart of psychology, and it was only excluded following the advent of behaviourism, which focused scientific efforts only on what could be observed objectively — behaviour, not experience. But now we recognise it's OK to take people's descriptions of their conscious experiences as proper scientific data.

The study of consciousness may also have been retarded by people worrying about what the philosopher David Chalmers called the "hard problem". This says, let's say we can understand everything about how the brain works, we know how you generate behaviour and perceptions... but we would still have no idea why there was anything like experience generated by this stuff. In other words, why is there consciousness in the universe at all?

Nowadays, more of us realise that we don't need to answer that "why?" question to make a lot of progress. Consciousness exists, we know when we're conscious and when we're not, and what we're conscious of. We can start to study those differences in the same way physicists have made progress without worrying about why there's a universe in the first place.

What do we know so far?

We know quite a lot about which brain mechanisms are necessary: you can get rid of quite large parts of the brain without seeming to affect consciousness. For example, you can lose large parts of the cerebellum and it doesn't seem to affect your conscious experience. But if you lose small parts of the brain, say parts of the thalamus, you lose consciousness forever.

Is consciousness something you can localise to parts of the brain or is it more likely that the senses network together to create it?

Consciousness, since it's generated by the brain, is not likely to be localisable to one region. It's likely to be a distributed process that's going to largely depend on the thalamocortical system, which is a big chunk of the brain but, by no means, all of it.

Do you need to define consciousness before you go looking for it?

There is this idea that, to study something scientifically, you need to have a really explicit definition of it before you get going. But I don't think that's true. With consciousness, you can define it with various levels of specificity. You can distinguish between conscious level — the scale between being completely asleep or in a coma and being completely aware and awake, say — and conscious content, which would be the actual components of a given experience. So, if you were looking at cup of tea. Things that are relevant to conscious level might not be relevant to conscious content. There's another important distinction between primary consciousness – the raw components of an experience – and what people call higher-order or reflexive consciousness, or even self-consciousness. This is the part of our experience that maps onto our concept of "I". There is an experiencing subject for all these experiences we're having.

How will your work be used by doctors?

There hasn't always been as much communication between psychiatry and neuroscience as one might have expected. That's changing now. One reason is that psychiatrists are increasingly interested in the possibility of finding biomarkers for psychiatric disorders. Right now, psychiatric disorders are classified on the basis of symptoms presented in the clinic. There is, in most cases, no other reliable way of making a psychiatric diagnosis. That difficulty maps to treatments as well, which are often based primarily on alleviating symptoms. By thinking of psychiatric disorders as disturbances of conscious experience, and trying to understand the mechanisms that might generate particular patterns you see, you have a new way to diagnose and treat them.

One example comes from schizophrenia, where one of the symptoms is this misattribution of thoughts and actions, so that the person thinks they are being controlled by something else – by the TV or aliens. One possible explanation for that is, our normal experience of thinking and behaving is unproblematic because we can predict the sensory consequences of our own actions. A thought is just like an action that stays in the brain, so if we can predict what's going to happen when we have a thought or perform an action, then we know that they're not caused by anything else.

But if our predictions are awry, possibly because our internal timing mechanisms are screwed up, we might not be able to predict the consequences of our own actions so the brain is then forced to find some other cause for these things that are happening.

So it's possible that underlying some of the symptoms seen in schizophrenia, there might be a disorder of making fine time judgments or predictions.

What clinical work will you focus on first?

One phenomenon we're studying is depersonalisation, a fascinating condition where the world or the self loses its subjective reality. There's evidence that those brain areas responsible for integrating external perceptions with internal ones are less active in people with depersonalisation. We want to extend this work into clinical contexts such as the early stages of schizophrenia.

Do you think that consciousness will be reducible by science?

In terms of how the world works, ontologically, consciousness must be. Otherwise, something dualistic is going on, there's something about consciousness that's different from the universe that is not part of the natural world. Consciousness is dependent on the laws of physics, chemistry and biology and we may not know all of those laws yet but we're not going to need anything else.

The right level at which to explain the phenomenon is a different question. I'm less confident that the right level to explain how brains generate consciousness is going to be at the level of this neurotransmitter or this molecule or something like that. It may turn out that the best explanation comes at a higher level.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 8 May 2010 | 5:06 pm

Deep-Sea Ice Crystals Stymie Gulf Oil Leak Fix

A slushy mix of deep-sea water and oil is hindering attempts to slow the Gulf of Mexico leak.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 8 May 2010 | 5:04 pm

Are 'I Love Mom' Tattoos Still Popular? (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - The time-honored "I Love Mom" tattoo is deeply ingrained in our culture - celebrities such as Sean Connery, Kelly Osborne and even Bart Simpson have one. It seems the iconic bright red heart, encircled in a banner ribbon emblazed with "Mom," has been around forever, and according to tattoo artists, it isn't going anywhere.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 May 2010 | 2:10 pm

Radiation death sparks Indian safety enquiry

University of Delhi sold off a radioactive source for scrap.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/p2nHBhyPWpA" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 8 May 2010 | 1:16 pm

NASA to Go Boldly to the Bottom of the Sea (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - Two astronauts, a veteran undersea engineer and an experienced scientist will soon find themselves in the ocean depths off the east coast of Florida in a mock space mission to test exploration concepts and learn more about working in an unforgiving, treacherous environment.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 May 2010 | 11:45 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Stormy weather was forecast to move into the Northeast and New England on Saturday, while cool temperatures were to move into the Northern Plains and Upper Midwest.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 May 2010 | 3:15 am

For election data that matters, we have our nerds to thank | Ben Goldacre

Need to know who won where, or what dodgy statistics politicians deployed? Then don't expect the state to provide

Data matters. We use it to understand what has happened in the world and it to make decisions about what to do next. But in among the graphics and electoral cock-ups lies a terrible truth: a small army of amateurs are doing a better job of collecting and disseminating political data than the state.

Chris Taggart blogs at CountCulture and was baffled to discover that there is no central or open record of local election results. The Electoral Commission's website passes the buck to the BBC, where you can find seat numbers for each area, but not how many votes were cast for each candidate. Plymouth University holds an unofficial database of results, and pays people to type them in, painstakingly. They charge for access, which is perfectly understandable. So for democracy, open analysis and public record, it might as well not exist.

"Want to look back at how people voted in your local council elections over the past 10 years?" asks Chris: "Tough. Want to compare turnout between different areas, and different periods? No can do. Want an easy way to see how close the election was last time, and how much your vote might make a difference? Forget it."

Like so many data problems, all that's needed is a tweak: all this information is known to someone, somewhere and it's all been typed in, several times over, in several places – local websites, newspapers and so on. Taggart is pushing a simple solution, common throughout IT: a standard set of invisible tags on all local authority results webpages, so that the data can be consistently read and understood by computers, and collated for analysis by anyone who wants it. It costs nothing, it's already compulsory for public consultation data, and Chris is making headway, pushing his simple idea, to solve a huge problem.

Until the StraightChoice project was set up by idealistic nerds, nobody kept a record of the election materials distributed to the public across the country. Anyone could send them in as an image and Julian Todd now has an archive political librarians would cry for – and it betrays many crimes.

There are dodgy graphs, with parties using playfully distorted axes, and even European and local election figures where it suits them (a Conservative leaflet in Holborn and St Pancras demotes the Liberal Democrats from their actual second place to third, and so on). They want a system where copies of every leaflet are formally sent to the Electoral Commission, as with copyright libraries, and regulations which are enforced to forbid graphs which mislead tactical voters.

Beside evidence of sneakiness, these volunteer projects are generating data that provides a valuable insight into how politics works, on a par with the stuff you'd find on UKDA, the UK Data Archive for academics. StraightChoice has found a huge variation in activity, from a single leaflet in a safe Liverpool seat to 51 in the nearby marginal Liverpool of Wavertree.

What about policies? Francis Irving is one of the founders of MySociety, a charity set up to facilitate public engagement with democracy. They built TheyWorkForYou, which tells you more about parliamentary activity than Hansard, using the same dataset. "Wouldn't it be nice," he asks, "to have structured data on what the candidates think on a series of local and national issues?"

Neither academics, nor parties, nor the media have achieved this: but 6,000 activists around the country have worked on a crowd-sourcing operation built around DemocracyClub, again set up by two volunteers, Seb Bacon and Tim Green. With the help of mySociety, they populated the YourNextMP database of candidates, itself the baby of another volunteer, Edmund von der Burg. This data is now freely available, a resource for any political theorist or technically capable adolescent, down to its rawest form.

Data is the fabric of our lives, and everywhere around us: but to be analysed, so it can generate knowledge and understanding, it must be corralled. In an ideal world, these empty frameworks would be built by national institutions: until they wake up, we have our nerds.

• More Guardian election comment from Cif at the polls

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 8 May 2010 | 2:28 am