The psychology of food cravings

Why do we get intense desires to eat certain foods? Food cravings are a common experience and recent studies have been examining the psychology underlying food cravings and how they may be controlled.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 18 May 2010 | 12:00 pm

Low umbilical cord pH at birth linked to death and brain damage

Low umbilical cord blood pH at birth is strongly associated with serious outcomes such as infant death, brain damage and the development of cerebral palsy in childhood, concludes a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 18 May 2010 | 12:00 pm

New 'Tree of Life' established for one of the largest groups of bacteria

A new "tree of life" has been constructed by researchers for the gamma-proteobacteria, a large group of medically and scientifically important bacteria. By building powerful phylogenetic trees, scientists are able to quickly identify similarities and differences between the make-up of many different organisms, crucial information in the search for treatments to fight anything from the bugs that cause food poisoning to the pathogens that cause life-threatening diseases.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 18 May 2010 | 12:00 pm

Invasive kudzu is major factor in surface ozone pollution, study shows

Kudzu, an invasive vine that is spreading across the southeastern United States and northward, is a major contributor to large-scale increases of the pollutant surface ozone, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 18 May 2010 | 12:00 pm

Scientists identify mechanism T-cells use to block HIV

Scientists have found a new role for a host protein that provides further insight into how CD8+ T-cells work to control HIV and other infections. Study authors say the finding may yield new strategies for prevention or treatment.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 18 May 2010 | 12:00 pm

Physicists' findings about helium could lead to more accurate temperature

Most of us know helium as a gas for filling party balloons or for making your voice temporarily sound like a cartoon character's. Now researchers report new findings about helium that may lead to more accurate standards for how temperature and pressure are measured.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 18 May 2010 | 12:00 pm

Eating processed meats, but not unprocessed red meats, may raise risk of heart disease and diabetes, study finds

In a new study, researchers have found that eating processed meat, such as bacon, sausage or processed deli meats, was associated with a 42 percent higher risk of heart disease and a 19 percent higher risk of type 2 diabetes.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 18 May 2010 | 9:00 am

Estrogen may reduce airway constriction in women patients with asthma

Female sex hormones may work with beta-agonists in reducing airway constriction, according to new bench research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 18 May 2010 | 9:00 am

Newborn infants learn while asleep; Study may lead to later disability tests

Sleeping newborns are better learners than thought, according to new research. The study could lead to identifying those at risk for developmental disorders such as autism and dyslexia.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 18 May 2010 | 9:00 am

Warmest April Global Temperature on Record, NOAA says

The combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for both April and for the period from January-April, according to NOAA. Additionally, last month's average ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for any April, and the global land surface temperature was the third warmest on record.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 18 May 2010 | 9:00 am

Invasive plant 'increases ozone'

A fast growing invasive plant spreading through parts of the US could increase ozone pollution near the ground, a study warns.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 18 May 2010 | 3:52 am

BP says more oil contained; U.S. to probe spill (Reuters)

Reuters - Energy giant BP said on Tuesday it was now able to siphon off about 40 percent of the oil gushing from a ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico but has not been able to stop the leak, as President Barack Obama is to create a commission to probe the spill.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 May 2010 | 3:50 am

Shuttle Astronauts to Install New Russian Room on Space Station (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - Astronauts aboard the space shuttle Atlantis plan to install a new Russian research room on the International Space Station Tuesday.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 May 2010 | 3:45 am

NASA wants mission to bring Martian rocks to Earth (AP)

AP - For the past decade, NASA's Mars exploration strategy was to follow the water.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 May 2010 | 3:42 am

Space dust

Infrared space telescope's first year of images
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 18 May 2010 | 2:56 am

Climate link to lizard extinction

Climate change could wipe out 20% of the world's lizard species by 2080, according to a global-scale study.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 18 May 2010 | 2:47 am

Beijing lessons can forge Games "health legacy": WHO (Reuters)

Reuters - Public health in Beijing benefited greatly from the Olympics and the city's experience can act as a lesson for the development of a "health legacy" for future major sporting events, the WHO said on Tuesday. China spent an estimated $40 billion on hosting the Olympics in 2008, including many projects which had a direct benefit to public health like attempts to reduce Beijing's notorious air pollution.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 May 2010 | 2:44 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Scattered showers were forecast to persist in the East, while snow would fall over the Rockies on Tuesday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 May 2010 | 2:42 am

Key oil oversight official steps down following spill (AFP)

AFP - Chris Oynes, a top official overseeing offshore energy for the US Minerals Management Service -- an agency blamed for lax inspection in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill -- announced his retirement Monday, his agency said.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 May 2010 | 2:36 am

Female insects prefer hot males

Female damselflies prefer hot males, scientists discover using specialised thermal cameras.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 18 May 2010 | 2:35 am

Political fallout grows from Gulf spill (AFP)

AFP - The US interior secretary faces lawmakers Tuesday over a huge and growing Gulf oil spill that engineers are struggling to control and now threatens Florida's coral reefs.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 May 2010 | 2:02 am

Astronauts giving space station extra compartment (AP)

AP - The International Space Station is about to get bigger.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 May 2010 | 2:00 am

Poor weather halts Venus mission

Japan's space agency postpones the launch of a Venus probe because of bad weather at its Tanegashima base.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 18 May 2010 | 1:35 am

The battle of the Miliband brothers

The Miliband brothers have declared they are best friends. But can their impressive relationship survive what will surely be an intense public fight for the Labour leadership? Stuart Jeffries delves into the dark psychology of sibling rivalry

Five years ago at the Hay literary festival, the famous feuding Hitchens brothers were inveigled by the Guardian to share a platform. The meeting followed a four-year mutual sulky silence prompted by what Peter may (or may not) have said about Christopher being a Stalinist. It was a remark that, even if it was never made, rekindled a vexed sibling rivalry, most of it to do with their intense competition to be the most opinionated Englishman alive. There was, for instance, a symbolically overburdened childhood moment, recalled by Christopher at Hay, in which he was sitting in the garden admiring stuff when he saw a shadow looming, a shadow that he claims was that of Peter wielding a rake. Peter, incidentally, denies looming or wielding.

Are you friends, the brothers were asked? "No," replied Peter. "There was an old joke in East Germany that went, 'Are the Russians our friends or our brothers? And the answer is, they must be our brothers because you can choose your friends." "The great thing about family life," agreed Christopher, "is that it introduces you to people you'd otherwise never meet." At the end of the exchange, an audience member asked the two to do what they had not done during the afternoon, namely, look each other in the eye. They briefly did, then Peter said: "They want everything to be all right." "They want a happy ending," agreed Christopher. "That's their problem."

The Hitchens brothers seemed comfortable in their sibling loathing. In this they are akin to Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks, whose long-term, and creatively useful, brotherly hate sustained them over the decades. The Kinks even wrote a song about their mutual contempt on their last album, Phobia. The song was called Hatred, and went a little like this: "Hatred, hatred, is the only thing that keeps us together/Hatred, hatred, is the only thing that lasts for ever."

The famously non-feuding Miliband brothers are certainly not like the Hitchenses or the Davieses, however – at least not in public. When David, 44, declared his candidacy for the Labour leadership election, he announced that "brotherly love is more important than politics". Earlier, Ed, 40, now standing against his brother, declared, David is "my best friend in all the world. I love him dearly".

Don't the Milibands understand that we the media – and by extension, you, the equally toxic reading public – want the brothers to come over all Old Testament? That we demand a contest as satisfyingly unwholesome and rancorous as Cain and Abel, not something as nauseatingly wholesome and harmonious as Abel and Cole? The only real difference between Adam and Eve's kids and Marion and Ralph's over-achieving sons is that while the first murderer (Cain) slew Abel because, according to Genesis, the latter was favoured by God, David might have to slay Ed for being favoured by Labour party members. This, by the way, is an eventuality that is growing increasingly likely: Ed started off at 8-1 with the bookies but his odds have narrowed to 3-1, while David remains 8-11 favourite.

The British electorate is already having to endure the grotesque spectacle of Clegg and Cameron doing coalition business like – God, isn't it awful that modern Britain has come to this? – sophisticated continentals. Surely there is no more space in British politics for such grownup behaviour. Could this really be the most positive political leadership campaign ever? Can't they behave honourably, at least for the duration of the contest, like sporting siblings who may have tolerably fond relations in peacetime, but mutual hatred while battle rages? Think of the sinister, staring eyes of Phil Neville whenever Everton take on Man Utd and his first duty is to clatter brother Gary in the first 15 minutes, or of Venus Williams walloping a two-handed backhand to take the smug smile off sister Serena's face. More of that please, Milibands.

Psychology Today reported at the end of last year that more than a third of us have a distant relationship with our brothers or sisters as adults because of a childhood rivalry that never fully dissipated, while any hopes of an ultimately long-term ceasefire tends to arrive only in our dotage. The Miliband brothers, whom cartoonists still put in short trousers, are clearly not contemplating dotage just yet, and so surely their gooey professions of love should be set aside for the sterner dictates of combat.

Not only does their fondness for each other make for dull reading, but it's implausible. Clinical psychologist Dorothy Rowe, author of My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend: Making and Breaking Sibling Bonds, thinks the truth of most sibling relationships is the steel of hatred concealed in the velvet of gloved fist, or vice versa – hence the oxymoronic title of her book.

The brothers' maturity and emotional warmth are also inimical to the demands of our media age. It is absolutely intolerable in these circumstances for Ed over the weekend to make the annoyingly disarming joke that he expects his mother to vote for John Cruddas (the fifth favourite, just behind Andy Burnham). How improperly well adjusted.

Rowe points out that there is an especially dreary possible outcome to the contest, namely that "they could both lose and comfort each other". This is a scenario that Ed Balls (the third favourite) doubtless dreams about these days, now he has got over the nightmare scenario of being beaten to the job by his wife, Yvette Cooper. (It's worth pointing out that while it seems to be tolerable for a younger sibling to stand against his brother, it is not yet acceptable for a wife to stand against her husband. Perhaps it's a social taboo, but, if so, it just goes to show how much more work feminists have to do to end male oppression.)

But, Rowe adds, the Miliband contest is different from most sibling rivalries: "The good thing about this contest is that we are going to see what happens. In most relationships we don't see the resentments and the wounds. This is going to be acted out on our TV screens."

What relationship can survive such a visible, fraught contest? Rowe believes that David and Ed have the maturity to have considered all possible eventualities in the looming contest and so will be in good position to deprive fate of its power to sting. After all, she says: "They will have quite a lot of experience of fighting each other over their entire lives, at university and then in politics. It's not that they've got a grudge to work out. We can't assume it will end up in a nasty fight." No, but we can dream.

But even if they do end up publicly fighting, that needn't mean the Milibands hate each other. "Brothers who like one another still fight a lot – it's what young boys do," says Rowe. Or as Noel Gallagher once said: "Sure I love Liam, but not as much as I love Pot Noodles." Ironic understatement conceals real affection (particularly for the Englishman).

But the contest has begun with a happy, totally unBritish start. Is it bound to go awry as soon as battle commences? Will the Milibands' declarations of love be their hostage to fortune, prideful devotion before a fraternal fallout or, even better, a Gallagher-esque ding-dong.

"Not if they're telling the truth," says Rowe, whose new book Why We Lie: The Source of our Disasters is published next month. "If you tell the truth and say, 'I care, but I'm envious,' then you're OK. If they have lied they have given hostages to fortune." But, boringly, there is no reason to think they have lied, no reason to think they have already seeded their campaigns with thrilling disasters.

And yet. Both are politicians who, while not necessarily liars, must be accustomed to being economical with the actualité. "It's in each of their own interests to be seen to behave well," says Rowe. "Most of us like to be seen to behave well, even if in private we're not. If you lead a public life you will have developed lots of strategies for not letting your real resentments show." Unless you're Gordon Brown, perhaps.

"We don't know how things are going to turn out. They have appeared to be starting out with everything in their favour. The question is what event they encounter that might destabilise what they have said." Good point: either could be poised to fall into a Brown-like gaffe-chasm of seeming Rochdale bigotry. And that stumble could be something that would make the Milibands go all Gallagher. What a diverting summer that would be!

"We have talked very frankly and openly to each other because we love each other as brothers," said David over the weekend. "The most important thing for both of us is that the family remains strong — and I'm absolutely confident that's going to happen." Can that happen? Has it happened before? There are few examples of siblings whose political ambitions have clashed quite so directly as the Milibands and who might therefore give us precedents for how their relationship will work, if – as seems likely – one leads his party and the other has a senior position in Labour's shadow cabinet.

Jeb and George W Bush's relationship offers few pointers. Perhaps the close collaboration between the identical twins Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his late brother Lech, with the former serving as Poland's prime minister and the latter as the country's president, might show how brothers can work together in political office.

Or let's consider President Kennedy and his brother Bobby Kennedy, who served as attorney general in his older brother's doomed administration. RFK reportedly adored JFK, while the latter was capable of snarling putdowns that surely betokened a fragile sense of self-worth pathetic in the most powerful man on the planet. "There's only one way for you to go," Jack said to Bobby, "and it ain't up".

These are words that one can imagine Labour leader Ed saying to junior recycling secretary David or, if the bookies are right, David saying to Ed when his brother makes him deputy undersecretary for West Midlands fishing. And then one or the other will have to plot some revenge – if they could only yield to the shameful feelings that lurk (don't they?) in all of us. Christopher Hitchens was wrong: we don't always want a happy ending.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 18 May 2010 | 1:00 am

Online fora for flora and fauna

If you want to learn about the flora and fauna around you, there are myriad forums and support groups to help you

• How are your identification skills? Try our quiz

There is a long-established interest and passion for natural history in the UK which can be traced back to at least the middle of the 17th century. Charles Darwin, Nicholas Culpeper, Leonard Plukenet, and Gilbert White may immediately spring to mind, but arguably the father of English natural history was John Ray, who busily banged out books on plants, animals and "natural theory" and leaves his legacy, the Ray Society, that continues to do the same today.

These early naturalists and countless others who followed have successively spawned and inspired future generations. For today's naturalists, the accumulated efforts of these trailblazers amounts to an inheritance of the most well understood and documented flora and fauna known to the world.

Today though, there are concerns that after centuries of such effort and enthusiasm, the numbers of naturalists and memberships of ancient societies are dwindling and the future of this pursuit is somewhat tremulous – will there be any experts, specialists and societies in the future?

Gone are the days of smaller and regional natural history societies who meet in dark and draughty church halls serving lukewarm tea and biscuits, remaining stoically wedded to their slide projectors and whose only nod towards the 21st century is the chocolate hobnob.

But running in parallel to these Victorian societies there is a thriving and vibrant network of study groups and recording schemes. With the help of the internet, these have grown in strength and number to create the most staggering assemblage of recorders of natural history the UK has ever known.

So how can you improve your natural history knowledge?

Get involved. You need not go far; start in your back garden, park, allotment, in other words: anywhere. Don't just walk or cycle past things but investigate under logs and stones, among leaves on trees and leaf litter from the ground. Take creatures home in matchboxes, plastic food pots or jam jars. Take photos of flowers and trees that please or intrigue you. Then bring your finds and pictures home and identify them to the best of your abilities, which you can do with just a few good field guides (a few are listed here).

If you get stuck or need verification, don't panic! You can ask the experts – there are myriad dedicated online natural history forums, including the Natural History Museum's own forums, Yahoo and Flickr groups, where the vast army of friendly UK naturalists will be more than willing to share their knowledge. These groups are a great way to infiltrate the network as each website usually provides recommended links to other connected groups. Bookmark your favourites and those that prove most useful and build your own online reference guides and support network.

Use reference collections. Most town or city museums hold natural history collections that should be available to use for reference purposes; contact the curators. You can also visit the UK collections at the Natural History Museum's new Angela Marmont Centre for UK Biodiversity. Enrol on an identification course or workshop. Many recording groups and schemes organise workshops at a variety of levels and many run in association with the Field Studies Council.

Useful links

Natural History Museum Identification Forums

UK Moths

British Bugs

The Open Air Laboratories Network

London Wildlife Trust guide to garden wildlife

Amateur Entomologists' Society Bug Club

Recording Schemes and study groups

Online surveys

Natural History Museum bluebell survey

Natural History Museum cherries survey

Harlequin Ladybird survey

Big Garden Birdwatch

RSPB Make Your Nature Count

Bioblitz

• Stuart Hine is the manager of the Angela Marmont Centre for UK Biodiversity at the Natural History Museum, London, which launches today. The centre is a new resource centre for anyone with an interest in UK natural history. It aims to nurture, inspire, excite and support naturalists of all ages and levels of interest.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 18 May 2010 | 12:00 am

Closing in on an Aids vaccine

Seth Berkley, president, CEO and founder of IAVI, the Aids vaccine initiative, explains in a guest blog how these are exciting times for scientists engaged in one of the most important quests of our age.

Today is World AIDS Vaccine Day. It marks the day, 13 years ago, when U.S. President Bill Clinton challenged the world to develop an AIDS vaccine within a decade.

The timeframe may in hindsight seem overly optimistic but most of us could not have conceived how difficult the task would prove to be. We found out soon enough. A year after Clinton's speech, the first large-scale AIDS vaccine study was launched, and the experimental vaccine failed to show efficacy.  So did the second AIDS vaccine candidate targeting a different arm of the immune system and thought to be promising and tested in an efficacy trial. By late 2008, many of the champions of the global AIDS vaccine effort had gone from being cautiously optimistic to grimly determined—what alternative was there? No number of failures can change the fact that vaccines hold the greatest promise for ending the AIDS pandemic.
Then came RV144.

A joint project of the US and Thai governments, this study in Thailand evaluating a two-step regimen of two different AIDS vaccine candidates came up positive late last year. This is not to say that we now have a vaccine ready for market. The regimen provided about 30% protection from HIV, not enough to satisfy public health authorities. What it has given us, however, is the first demonstration that a vaccine can indeed protect humans from HIV infection. That affirmation sent ripples of excitement radiating out across a field in need of a morale-booster.

Because the Thai trial results were a surprise—many researchers had predicted no protective effect against HIV infection--there is renewed interest in the efficacy testing of other existing or newly modified experimental AIDS vaccines. The RV144 results illustrate that HIV vaccine candidates with sound hypotheses must be evaluated in humans before conclusions can be drawn about their effectiveness. After all, earlier studies (including with individual vaccine components) had suggested that the RV144 regimen did not hold much promise.

At the same time, the HIV vaccine field could do with some new approaches. New approaches are coming. Those targeting the cellular immunity arm of the immune system look far better than the first generation candidates in the best of the animal models; these will be going into human trials in the next few years.  However, even more important, is the quest to design vaccines that harness the antibody response, a vital aspect of vaccine-induced immunity that has long been stymied by the extreme mutability of HIV: every time the body figures out how to target and neutralize HIV, it simply changes it structure to evade the antibody response. But a subset of antibodies, known as broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs), which are capable of preventing a wide range of HIV variants from infecting cells, hold clues to the design of potentially powerful HIV vaccines. Until recently, only four antibodies widely regarded as broadly neutralizing had been isolated from HIV-positive individuals in the developed world and these were relatively weak.

That, too, changed last year when researchers at and affiliated with the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative discovered two new and highly potent ones from a volunteer in Africa as well as the site on HIV to which they attach. This site provides researchers with a promising model to use to design a vaccine against AIDS. Since then, still more bNAbs have been discovered by researchers affiliated with IAVI and the U.S. National Institutes of Health—and more are coming each month.  In combination, these antibodies neutralize virtually all strains.

With these discoveries, HIV vaccine researchers are gearing up for an exciting decade. Of course, considerable work remains to be done to convert these discoveries into vaccines that can be widely used, and resources must be mobilized to fund it. The feasibility of financing mechanisms for the development of new health tools and technologies to combat the diseases of poverty are being discussed this week at the World Health Assembly in Geneva.  Such mechanisms are needed to help ensure that investments in the health of vulnerable populations are not subject to the vicissitudes of the market or the sour politics of economic downturns. However, we now see that investments in HIV vaccine development are paying off (including long term support from the UK DFID), as illustrated by the scientific advances of recent months. This hard-won momentum must be sustained.

If we do not sustain it, we may never rid the world of the unspeakable misery of AIDS.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 17 May 2010 | 11:00 pm

Mount St. Helens Still Recovering 30 Years Later

A look at the recovery of the animals, forest around Mount St. Helens 30 years after fateful eruption.
Source: Livescience.com | 17 May 2010 | 10:06 pm

Oldest Mesoamerican pyramid tomb found in Mexico (AP)

AP - Archaeologists in southern Mexico announced Monday they have discovered a 2,700-year-old tomb of a dignitary inside a pyramid that may be the oldest such burial documented in Mesoamerica.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 May 2010 | 7:33 pm

Judge Issues Legal Opinion in Brooklyn fMRI Case

The judge in a recent Brooklyn case in which brain scan evidence was offered has delivered an opinion on why he ultimately excluded the fMRI data.

In Judge Robert H. Miller’s written opinion, obtained by Wired.com, he decided that under the Frye test, which is slightly different from the Daubert standard used in federal court, lie detection evidence contravenes a jury’s key right to decide the credibility of witnesses.

The plaintiff in Miller’s case had attempted to establish a key witness was telling the truth.

“Since credibility is a matter solely for the jury and is clearly within the ken of the jury, plaintiff has failed to meet this key prong of the Frye test and no other inquiry is required,” Miller wrote. “However, even a cursory review of the scientific literature demonstrates that the plaintiff is unable to establish that the use of the fMRI test to determine truthfulness or deceit is accepted as reliable within the relevant scientific community.”

The rest of the short opinion is embedded below.

Image: flickr/Katherine Kenney

See Also:

• Lie-Detection Brain Scan Could Be Used in Court for First Time …
• Brain Scan Evidence Rejected by Brooklyn Court
• Scanning Dead Salmon in fMRI Machine Highlights Risk of Red …
• MRI Lie Detection to Get First Day in Court
• Jury Reaches Decision in Brain-Scan Test Case

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and forthcoming book on the history of green technology; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 17 May 2010 | 6:36 pm

Americans Give Up Landlines for Cell Phones (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Results of a new study show in detail what many have suspected all along: Mobile phones will be the death of the landline.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 May 2010 | 6:25 pm

Face of medieval knight revealed after six centuries

The face of a medieval knight whose skeleton was discovered at Stirling Castle is reconstructed after six centuries.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 17 May 2010 | 5:47 pm

Eyewitness Account of ‘Watershed’ Brain Scan Legal Hearing

The very first federal admissibility hearing for fMRI lie-detection evidence wrapped up May 14 in a Tennessee court room. The decision, expected in a couple weeks, could have a significant influence on the direction that brain scan evidence takes in the courtroom.

A special session was held to determine whether brain scans that were generated by the company Cephos could be entered as evidence in the federal court case of Lorne Semrau, whom the government has accused of defrauding Medicare and Medicaid.

FMRI brain scan evidence has yet to be admitted for lie detection in court, and this case is the most serious consideration yet of the technique in an American court.

“It’s in some ways a potentially watershed moment,” said Owen Jones, a professor of law and biological sciences at Vanderbilt University, one of the few hearing observers in the nearly empty court room. “I had the sense throughout that, whichever this court decides, this was going to be a significant moment.”

In federal court, the admissibility of scientific evidence is governed by the Daubert standard, first established in the early 1990s. To be entered into the record, scientific evidence has to be empirically testable, subjected to peer review, have a calculable error rate, and be generally accepted by a relevant scientific community. Through a pretrial hearing, a judge decides whether the evidence offered meets these criteria.

In the Semrau case, Steven Laken, CEO of Cephos, is the expert witness whom the defense would use to bring in the brain scan evidence. He testified at the Daubert hearing on May 13 and 14. He was followed by plaintiff’s witnesses’ Marcus Raichle, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis, and Peter Imrey, a biostatistician at the Cleveland Clinic.

A transcript will likely become available, but in the meantime, Wired.com spoke with Jones, who is also the incoming director of the MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience Project.

Wired.com: What was the tack the defense took in making its case?

Owen Jones: Their basic effort was devoted to demonstrating two things. First, that fMRI technology itself is sound, and second, that this specific application of fMRI to lie detection is sound and scientifically credible. There was much discussion of publications. Through Laken, the defense walked the judge through understanding a bit about how the technology worked and how the test was administered and why some people in the lie-detection community consider this technique to be scientifically valid.

Wired.com: What points did the prosecution focus on in cross-examination?

Jones: They focused on the fact that this would be the first case in which fMRI brain scan evidence like this would be admitted. Reference was made to the recent Brooklyn case, where it was not admitted. And there was some discussion about the extent to which Cephos stands to gain financially if this technique becomes widely acceptable. One of the things highlighted was the seeming inconsistency between some scans Cephos did of Semrau, some of which suggested that he was lying and some of which suggested that he was telling the truth. There was much discussion on Laken’s basis for discounting the scan session in which the conclusion was that the defendant was lying. Laken discounted the evidence because of the alleged fatigue of the defendant.

There was discussion on cross on general ecological validity, which means the degree to which real-world situations conform to the experiments done in the laboratory. The prosecution pointed out that there was a long duration between the event in question and the scan itself, roughly six to eight years. There was also much discussion about the difference in age between the defendant and the maximum and also median ages of subjects in published research studies. Semrau is 63 or 64, and in prior studies the oldest subjects were 50.

Certainly there was a lot of discussion about the alleged accuracy rates of the technology. And that’s obviously one of the important factors in the Daubert standard. The scientific expert is claiming that they have 100 percent accuracy at finding liars.

There was also discussion about the nature of the questions administered. Some of the questions were short. Some were long. Some were highly detailed. Others were quite general. So, there were questions about the methodology of the test and whether they were sound.

There was also a heavy emphasis on the extent to which the published studies do not have subjects for whom there are real and significant consequences for failing the truth verification tests. That very specifically raises the question about whether the published studies are at all relevant to this particular case.

Wired.com: What was Laken’s response?

Jones: My recollection is that Dr. Laken pointed out, as did his attorney, that no tests are perfect, and it is very difficult to imagine a realistic scenario in which one could study in a scientifically controlled way people who have very large stakes in the outcomes of their testimony. Laken’s argument was, in part, that there is no present reason to believe that the areas of the brain involved in [lie detection] are meaningfully different if one does or does not have high stakes involved in the issue.

Wired.com: In the recent Brooklyn case, an attorney successfully had fMRI evidence excluded arguing that it was the fundamental right of juries to decide the credibility of witnesses, so machine lie detection should always be excluded. Did the lawyers in this case raise that point?

Jones: Well, the issue is not so much whether machine lie detection should always be excluded. It’s whether there’s any sound scientific reason to think that a machine is more reliable at discovering lies than a member of the jury. The legal system tries to let the jury be the arbiter of what is and is not true – and that will still be true, ordinarily, even if the brain-scan evidence is admitted. A jury could choose to disregard it, or adopt the interpretation of the opposing party. The Daubert standard requires the judges to be gatekeepers of the quality of information that reaches the jury. One of things you see here is that the prosecution will analogize the fMRI to discredited polygraphy and the defense will analogize fMRI lie-detection to widely accepted DNA forensic tests.

Wired.com: The prosecution, which is trying to exclude the fMRI evidence, called Marcus Raichle and Peter Imrey, a neuroscientist and statistician, respectively.

Jones: Raichle is an extremely distinguished neuroscientist and is considered to be among the founders of functional brain imaging generally. [I should acknowledge both he and Imrey are colleagues of mine, within the Law and Neuroscience Project.] He testified about the extent to which fMRI had not been adequately tested in real world contexts.

He testified that in his view the peer review and publication prong of Daubert — particularly with respect to the difference between group averaged studies and claims about individual states of turthtelling or lying – was not sufficiently satisfied. And with respect to general acceptance, Raichle offered compelling evidence that although there were consistencies in the findings, they were not necessarily applicable to lie detection in a particular case. The cross examination focused on the extent to which fMRI is generally accepted.

Imrey gave a masterful overview of biostatistics as applied to the lie detection context. And basically encouraged the court to think about the extent to which the relevant question was whether or not this lie detection technique as used by Cephos is sufficiently valid. In his view, it suffered many statistical failings including selection bias, measurement bias, confounding and chance. He emphasized the extent to which the error rate was not sufficiently known for the court to conclude that the testimony was admissible. There was much discussion of the extent to which Dr. Laken may be overinterpreting the statistics

Wired.com: After the prosecution’s witnesses, Laken got recalled on Friday. Were there any fireworks there?

Jones: In much of this part of the testimony, Dr. Laken described why he did not believe his study was vulnerable to the criticisms that Dr. Imrey and Raichle had leveled at it. There were many technical statistical points to which he and Dr. Imrey obviously disagree. For example, he believes that the sample sizes in the relevant studies were enough and that the individual in appropriate circumstances can serve as his own control for both lying and truth telling. In that respect, it’s important to mention that Dr. Semrau had been asked to answer each of the questions in both the affirmative and in the negative.

Wired.com: Now that the hearing is over and we expect a ruling within a couple of weeks, do you have any impressions about who might win the motion? I’m asking explicitly for your opinion here as a professor of both law and biology.

Jones: Both sides presented strong cases and strong testimony. The defense expert was very polished and thorough. The prosecution experts were very knowledgeable and specific. Both sides presented the judge with a great deal of relevant evidence. At the end of the day, the government will probably win the recommendation to exclude this evidence. This is in part because it is probably the case that fMRI lie detection is, though promising, insufficiently sound at present to pass the Daubert admissibility test.

It is also relevant to consider that if this evidence were admitted for this purpose, it would be the first known time in the United States that the jury would hear fMRI lie-detection evidence. The significance of that is that courts tend to move slowly with respect to new technologies.

Wired.com: Does fMRI brain scan evidence getting its first Daubert hearing say anything about the state of the technology?

Jones: The fact that this court chose to hold a Daubert hearing has no precedential value with regard to other courts. What is significant about this case is that whichever way the recommendation comes out, there is likely to be more litigation both in this case and future cases over the admissibility of fMRI lie detection. If it’s admitted, it has some persuasive, though not precedential value for other judges. If it is not admitted the reasons will be specified and those attempting to perform more studies of fMRI lie detection and to have it admitted in the future will have a bit of a roadmap of what to do to increase the chances of getting it in.

Wired.com: Is there anything special about the way the defense is trying to use fMRI in this case?

Jones: One of the things about this case that has gone undernoticed is that even though fMRI lie detection has not yet been admitted, the purposes for which people are seeking to admit it are already rapidly evolving. In this case, the defense is not attempting to introduce fMRI lie detection for purposes of verifying what was at some past time an external state of the world as, for example, when a hypothetical defendant says he was in his house at the time of the alleged murder. That would be a natural context to use lie detection. You’d ask, “Were you home? Are you lying?”

In this case, the defense is taking it to the meta-level. They are using a scan as evidence of a person’s prior state of mind. What’s at issue is whether the defendant knowingly and willfully did what he did. The defense is therefore attempting to offer fMRI to demonstrate his past state of mind. The report actually says, “Doctor Semrau’s brain indicates he is telling the truth in regards to not cheating or defrauding the government.” It means that we’re introducing evidence of the brain’s current assessment of the brain’s former mental state. That’s one of the things that makes it tricky. He’s trying to have his brain testify as to the prior state of his brain.

For fMRI to have already reached that level of complexity in the first case in which there has been a Daubert hearing gives some indication of how much more future litigation there is likely to be in this arena.

Image: flickr/stephenhampshire

See Also:

• Brain Scan Evidence Rejected by Brooklyn Court
• MRI Lie Detection to Get First Day in Court
• Jury Reaches Decision in Brain-Scan Test Case
• Courtroom First: Brain Scan Used in Murder Sentencing

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and forthcoming book on the history of green technology; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 17 May 2010 | 5:30 pm

Algae Biofuel Production Targets Waste

On the surface, algae is an attractive fuel source, especially since it doesn't cut into food crops. The problem isn't that the algae doesn't grow quickly--the high yield is remarkable--it's that production still requires lots of water and nutrients. An ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 17 May 2010 | 5:04 pm

Striking Images of Mount St. Helens Before, After and Now

Images from NASA's Landsat satellite documents the destruction and recovery at Mount St. Helens.
Source: Livescience.com | 17 May 2010 | 4:46 pm

Atlantis astronauts complete walk

Astronauts on the shuttle Atlantis's latest mission to the space station make their first spacewalk on Monday.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 17 May 2010 | 4:22 pm

No link found between mobile phones and cancer

Claims that mobile-phone use causes cancer are shown to be overblown.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/78wpJNH9-UY" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 17 May 2010 | 3:50 pm

Gulf looks to science to turn desert to farmland

ABU DHABI (Reuters) - Gulf nations hope science will turn desert areas into arable land to boost food security and avoid the risks inherent in buying farmland abroad, industry insiders said Monday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 17 May 2010 | 3:48 pm

BP Authorized to Dump New Chemicals into Gulf; Danger to Wildlife Unknown

The EPA and the US Coast Guard have authorized BP to use oil-dispersing chemicals from a controversial product line that some believe may harm Gulf wildlife.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 17 May 2010 | 3:41 pm

Americans Give Up Landlines for Cell Phones

Mobile phones will be the death of the landline.
Source: Livescience.com | 17 May 2010 | 3:39 pm

Study Funded by Cell Phone Industry Says, 'No Cancer'

The first results of the long-awaited, 10-year, international Interphone study finds little evidence that cell phones cause either glioma or meningioma, the two most common types of brain cancer.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 17 May 2010 | 2:31 pm

Robot Conducts Wedding Ceremony in Tokyo

Both the bride and groom work in robotics, so it was only fitting that a robot bring them together.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 17 May 2010 | 1:15 pm

What Is The Higgs Boson?

The Higgs boson is theorized to give all matter mass, but in an effort to find this elusive particle, the most powerful and expensive particle accelerator had to be built. How will the quest to find the Higgs impact our everyday lives?
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 17 May 2010 | 1:15 pm

Pesky Kudzu Vines Could Increase Ozone Pollution

Major kudzu invasion could cause more ozone pollution, study finds.
Source: Livescience.com | 17 May 2010 | 1:06 pm

Mediterranean most at risk from European heatwaves

Increased heat and humidity predicted to have biggest health impact in valleys and coastal cities.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 17 May 2010 | 1:06 pm

Happiness Comes With Age, Study Reveals

Older people in their mid to late 50s are generally happier, and experience less stress and worry than young adults in their 20s, a new study finds
Source: Livescience.com | 17 May 2010 | 1:03 pm

Babies Learn Quickly While Sleeping

Babies learn while sleeping, according to a study measuring brain activity in sleeping infants.
Source: Livescience.com | 17 May 2010 | 1:02 pm

Invasive Plant Poisons Our Air

Kudzu vines are not only dominating our landscapes with the help of global warming; they're also increasing ozone pollution.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 17 May 2010 | 1:01 pm

Brainy bugs may revolutionise medicine

New research could lead to cells learning how to do things by themselves – including body repair

"When I started thinking about how to do this project, I got colleagues from six universities in Europe to meet up in Manchester and said, 'I want to build a bacterial brain in a dish'.

"Everyone went very quiet, thinking, 'We've come all the way to Manchester and now it turns out this guy's insane'."

Dr Martyn Amos, senior lecturer in computing and mathematics at Manchester Metropolitan University, sounds entirely unrepentant, possibly even gleeful.

His brain in a dish idea, he says, was intended to be provocative, but in essence, that's what he and academics from universities in France, Spain, Belgium and Germany are now hoping to create. Their three-year "synthetic biology" project has 2 million euros (£1.8m) of EU funding, and involves engineering living cells in the hope of persuading them to do certain human-defined tasks.

The more colloquial name for synthetic biology is "bacterial computing". It sounds a bit messy, and, according to Amos, it is.

"It currently works rather like a scrapheap challenge, where scientists add genetic parts to a basic bacterial 'chassis', then bash the whole thing with a chemical 'hammer' to make it work," he explains.

However, this approach is rather time-consuming and very hit-and-miss, so Amos and his team have decided to try a different tack. What the team will be doing over the next three years is harnessing evolutionary processes to get bacteria to perform jobs to which traditional silicon-based computers are poorly suited. Environmental clean-up is just one example of how bacterial computing could help in the future.

"In places such as Bangladesh, drinking water is often contaminated with arsenic and villagers have little choice but to use it," says Amos. "Arsenic poisoning causes terrible damage to people, and detecting it is fraught with practical problems such as how to get rid of waste products safely. A brilliant team of undergraduates at Edinburgh have developed a prototype arsenic detector, based on engineered bacteria that recognise the contaminant and flag up its presence. In principle, it's cheap and easy to use, and its waste products are harmless."

The key difference with his research, says Amos, is that bacterial cells will not only be tasked with a job and given the genes that allow them to do it: where it gets clever is that Amos's team will harness cells' inherent evolutionary qualities so that each subsequent generation gets better and better at doing that job.

How will this "selection" happen then, in the not-very-natural environment of a Petri dish?

Well, says Amos, let's start by imagining that the job is to get a population of bacterial cells to fluoresce in response to a pulse of light.

"On-off, on-off, like Christmas tree lights but made of bacteria?" I ask.

"That kind of principle," he says, kindly.

"To help them do the job, we might throw into a dish of E coli the genes for detecting light, the genes for emitting a response, and the genes that would allow the cell to connect those two things," he continues. We then let the cells suck them up, and see what happens."

Because of a special "comparator" component his team is working on, which also goes into the mix, each cell will then be able to tell whether it has done the job well or badly.

"Most of the results will be rubbish. A cell might suck in a lot of light-detecting components but no responder ones and no connectors. But another cell might take a detector and a responder and manage to form some sort of connection, and will therefore give a feeble response to a pulse of light.

"Going with Richard Dawkins's observation on how evolution works, ie, that even a very poor eye is better than no eye at all, we'll have created an internal system in our Petri dish that says, 'Right, you, not-very-well-functioning fluorescing cell, you've done better than the others, so you get to survive to the next generation'."

Those successful cells, he says, will replicate lots of copies of their "good-at-the-job" DNA, which will then be taken up by other cells and used to piece together slightly better solutions next time round.

"What we hope to see is the fitness of the population improving as the cells get better at solving the problem of how to do the job," he explains.

Apart from bio-remediation of drinking water, what could these clever bacteria be used for?

"This is really speculative," says Amos, reluctantly, aware of the dangers of promising too much, "but there's the possibility, way in the future, of taking cells from a patient and re-engineering the cell so it can detect a problem and construct its own chemical response.

"Once reinserted, that means that the cell – which wouldn't be rejected, as it's the patient's own – could act at the site of the problem. You wouldn't need to blast someone with antibiotics, for instance – it's a much more exquisite solution."

What does he anticipate the scientists on his project will struggle with?

"The main risk is that the comparator doesn't work," he says. "That would mean the cells can't tell how well they're doing at the task, so the ones that perform well couldn't be 'rewarded'. And then we're stuffed."

And what would success look like – on a trivial note, might we see fluorescing bacterial Christmas tree lights?

"Well, actually, bacterial Christmas tree lights have already been done," he says with a laugh. "But they were made by researchers manually engineering cells to do the job. Success for us would be to get our cells 'learning' how to be Christmas tree lights all by themselves."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 17 May 2010 | 1:00 pm

Fears of brain drain as top scientists move to Canada

Uncertainty over science funding has led top researchers to accept C$20m awards from the Canadian government in what may be first sign of a brain drain

Britain is to lose several of its foremost scientists next year following a recruitment drive to attract top brains to Canada.

The four researchers will leave their posts at UK universities for better-funded positions in institutions across the country.

The British researchers won four C$20m (£13m) awards created by the Canadian government, the most by any country outside the US, which is to lose nine scientists to the scheme.

Adrian Owen, who helped set up the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre at Cambridge University and has risen to become one of neuroscience's brightest stars, will move to the University of Western Ontario, along with five of his research staff.

Howard Wheater, director of the Environment Forum at Imperial College London, will take up a chair in water security at Saskatchewan University; Graham Pearson from Durham University will move to the University of Alberta for a chair in Arctic resources; and Patrik Rorsman is leaving Oxford for Alberta University, where he will be professor of diabetes.

The moves come after several senior scientists in Britain warned that a brain drain was imminent as the new government prepares to make swingeing cuts in public spending that are likely to have a heavy impact on research funding.

"This comes with some sadness, but it's an amazing opportunity for me," Dr Owen said, who has worked at Cambridge since 1996.

"UK science is going through a period of uncertainty, and many of my more senior colleagues said this might not be a bad time to be leaving," Dr Owen said. "There's nobody in the UK putting down $20m saying 'we think what you're doing is really cool, come and do it here.'"

In 2006, Dr Owen's group became the first in the world to communicate with patients in a persistent vegetative state, research that raised profound ethical questions over the ongoing medical care of such patients.

Dr Owen has been awarded Canadian C$20m over seven years to move his research team and set up a world-leading programme to focus on acute brain injury. Some of his work will look at developing brain-machine interfaces that allow brain-injured patients to communicate.

Canada has created a substantial fund to attract foreign scientists to the country. Dr Owen will take one of 20 Canada Excellence Research Chairs that have been set up to entice top-ranking researchers. He is due to start his new job in January next year.

The university has also hired Dr Owen's wife, Jessica Grahn, a neuroscientist who studies the ties between music and the brain. Dr Grahn, who is interested in how musical rhythm is processed in the brain and how this differs from the processing of other types of temporal sequences, has accepted a job in the university's psychology department.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 17 May 2010 | 12:34 pm

Mobile phone study finds no solid link to brain tumours

Interphone study was delayed for years because scientists failed to agree on its findings

Publication of a landmark study into mobile phones and brain cancer was delayed for years because scientists failed to agree on its findings and whether to issue a warning about excessive use of the devices, the Guardian has learned.

The World Health Organisation's Interphone report [pdf] was due to be published in 2006, but was held up until today because scientists from 13 countries interpreted the results differently.

In the study, more than 5,000 men and women with brain tumours, and a similar number of healthy controls, were interviewed about their mobile phone use. Scientists then looked at whether those who had been diagnosed with tumours used their phones more.

The interviews found no solid evidence that mobile phones increased the risk of brain tumours, but pointed to a slightly greater risk among those who reported using mobile phones the most.

According to the study, the 10% who used their phones the most, racking up at least 1,640 hours of calls, had a 15% greater risk of meningioma and were 40% more likely to develop glioma. These are the two most common brain cancers, although still exceptionally rare, affecting less than seven in 100,000 people in Britain.

The most frequent mobile phone users were also more likely to have a tumour on the same side of their brain as the ear they put their phone to, the study found.

There were disagreements about the severity of flaws in the study, some of which could have led to an artificial rise in cancer risk among the most frequent users. People are poor at remembering for how long they have been on the phone, and only slightly better at remembering how many calls they made. Some participants claimed they used mobiles for more than 12 hours a day, a figure that skewed the results but is unlikely to be true.

Another confusing aspect of the study was that it appeared to show that modest use of a mobile phone actually reduced the risk of brain cancer. The effect may be false and due to volunteers in the control group being healthier than the general population or otherwise unrepresentative.

"We had to find a version everyone could live with," said a researcher. Two appendices that were published online, but not with the main Interphone study, claim the risk of tumours may be higher than the report claims.

As yet, scientists know of no mechanism by which mobile phone radiation could cause cancer. Unlike x-rays, mobile phone radiation is non-ionising, and is too weak to break apart DNA, which is necessary to induce other cancers. Scientists concede, however, that there may be unknown effects that trigger cancer, or that mobile phone radiation speeds the growth of existing brain tumours.

Patricia McKinney, an epidemiologist at Leeds University who led the northern UK part of the study, said: "This research has not shown evidence of an increased risk of developing a glioma or meningioma brain tumour as a result of using a mobile."

In the report, the Interphone study group writes: "There were suggestions of an increased risk of glioma, and much less of meningioma, at the highest exposure levels ... However, biases and errors limit the strength of the conclusion we can draw … and prevent a causal interpretation."

Last month, scientists launched another large study into mobile phones and health. The Cosmos study will follow 250,000 people for more than 20 years to look at cancer and other illnesses.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 17 May 2010 | 12:15 pm

Online Phishing Scams Get Personal, Experts Caution

In a new phishing trend, spammers are focusing on individualized attacks.
Source: Livescience.com | 17 May 2010 | 12:11 pm

New Research Reveals How DNA Could Power Computers

Engineers have long dreamed of using DNA as the backbone for the next generation of computer circuits.
Source: Livescience.com | 17 May 2010 | 12:07 pm

Oceans' Fish Could Disappear by 2050

Without fundamental restructuring of the fishing industry, our oceans could essentially become barren deserts.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 17 May 2010 | 12:05 pm

50 Is the New 20

New research finds that people over 50 are happier than their younger counterparts.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 17 May 2010 | 11:58 am

First Unmanned Aircraft in a Supercell Thunderstorm

Tornado Alley may have just gotten a little safer, thanks to researchers at a couple of Midwestern universities. For the first time, tornado chasers were able to fly an unmanned aircraft (or UA, for short) into the most severe type ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 17 May 2010 | 11:36 am

Pregnant Women Need Dental Checkups, Too

Hormone changes during pregnancy can be bad for the mother's teeth and overall oral health.
Source: Livescience.com | 17 May 2010 | 11:30 am

Ravens Console Each Other After Fights

After ravens see a friend get a beat down, they approach the victim and appear to console it, according to new research.

Orlaith Fraser and her co-author Thomas Bugnyar watched the aftermath of 152 fights over a two year period between 13 hand-reared young adult ravens housed at the Konrad Lorenz Research Station in Austria. What they found was the first evidence for birds consoling one another.

“It’s not a good thing for your partner to be distressed,” Fraser explained. “It’s interesting to see these behaviors in animals other than chimpanzees. It seems to be more ingrained in evolutionary history.”

And there might be a bit of self-interest embedded in the birds’ actions, too. “Maybe if you are involved in a fight they might come and console you,” Fraser said.

Ravens are one species of corvid, a famously smart group of birds, so they are natural study subjects for researchers probing the uniqueness of mammalian behaviors like empathetic consolation. The consolation of fight victims has only been definitely shown in chimpanzees and bonobos. Recent studies show similar behaviors in dogs and wolves, but how consolation works in those animals hasn’t been tested.

Bugnyar noted which ravens were involved in the fights and how bad the fights were. They classified the animals into three categories for each altercation: aggressors, victims and bystanders. They noticed that those birds with whom the victim spent a lot of time were most likely to approach it after a fight. A victim’s “friends” seemed to notice when it was stressed by the fight, said Fraser.

“The findings of this study represent an important step towards understanding how ravens manage their social relationships and balance the costs of group-living,” Fraser and Bugnyar wrote. “Furthermore, they suggest that ravens may be responsive to the emotional needs of others.”

The results from these studies were published May 12 in the open-access journal PLoS One.

Image: Flickr/ingridtaylar

See Also:

• Brainy Crows Finally Stumped by Intelligence Test
• Clever Critters: 8 Best Non-Human Tool Users
• Penis Jousting and 7 Other Great Animal Mating Rituals
• Plants Have a Social Life, Too

Citation: “Do Ravens Show Consolation? Responses to Distressed Others,” by Orlaith Fraser and Thomas Bugnyar. PLoS one Vol. 5 Iss. 5. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0010605

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 17 May 2010 | 11:17 am

'Lost world' of Papua

New species of bats, frogs and geckos are among creatures discovered on a Conservation International expedition to the Indonesian territory.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 17 May 2010 | 11:12 am

Smell the fear - why cats' saliva frighten mice

Scientists have discovered that a chemical signal in cat saliva elicits a fearful reaction in mice.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 17 May 2010 | 11:02 am

Teen Brain Wired to Take Risks

The adolescent brain is extra sensitive to reward signals when pay-off for a risk is higher than expected.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 17 May 2010 | 10:09 am

Scientists find tiny wallaby, spiky nosed frog in Asia

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Scientists exploring a remote Indonesian forest say they have uncovered a collection of new species, including a Pinocchio-nosed frog, the world's smallest known wallaby and a yellow-eyed gecko.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 17 May 2010 | 9:29 am

Space yacht Ikaros ready to cast off

Interplanetary cruise of Japan's solar-powered 'sail craft' aims at deeper knowledge of Venus

Japan hopes to turn the wildest fantasies of science fiction into reality today with a "space yacht" that will draw on the power of the sun to take it to Venus and, perhaps, far beyond.

A Mitsubishi H-2A rocket carrying Ikaros (an acronym for Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation of the Sun) is set to blast off from Tanegashima island in south-west Japan at 6.44am local time.

The long-awaited launch is seen as part of a mission that could change the course of interplanetary exploration.

If it is successful, Ikaros will be carried through deep space at high speed with the help of a 20-metre sail, propelled by the pressure from solar particles.

The flexible membrane sail, which at 32.5 micrometers is about half the thickness of a human hair, is covered with thin-film solar panels that will create a hybrid of electricity and pressure, according to Jaxa, the Japanese space exploration agency.

Solar photons will bounce off thousands of tiny mirrors to give Ikaros the thrust it needs to complete manoeuvres such as rotating and hovering.

"This will be the world's first solar-powered sail craft employing both photon propulsion and thin-film solar power generation during its interplanetary cruise," Jaxa said on its website.

Although the name of Japan's craft may give rise to anxiety (Icarus, the figure from Greek mythology, having fallen into the sea after flying too close to the sun) Jaxa officials say they are confident the high-tech version will stick to its planned trajectory.

The craft will spend a few weeks rotating before unfurling its sail. If all goes to plan, the craft will use draw on the energy provided by the sun's photons to gather speed during its six-month journey. Experts believe that by developing hyper-powerful sails drawing on laser light instead of sunlight, solar yachts could one day reach speeds of 500,000mph.

After passing Venus, Ikaros is expected to continue its voyage for three years towards the far side of the sun, although contact is likely to be lost after a year.

Jaxa officials say that, if the technology proves viable, they could send a similar craft, Akatsuki, to Jupiter by 2020.

That mission could deepen our understanding of how Venus, thought to have once resembled Earth, became the mysterious, cloud-covered, planet of today. The probe is equipped with instruments that will observe the planet's atmosphere from distances of between 186 miles and 49,710 miles.

"Once we can explain the structure of Venus, we will be able to better understand Earth," said Akatsuki's project scientist, Takeshi Imamura. "For example, we may discover the reasons that only Earth has been able to sustain oceans, and why only Earth is abundant in life."

The $16m project will be the first to deploy the new technology deep in space. Previous space yachts have achieved no more than orbiting Earth, while Nasa and Europe's space agency appear to have resigned themselves to losing out to Japan in the race to test solar sails in outer space.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 17 May 2010 | 9:26 am

LHC's particle search 'nearing'

The Large Hadron Collider could soon be exploring a domain where new sub-atomic particles are predicted to exist.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 17 May 2010 | 9:08 am

Which U.S. Volcanoes Are Most Dangerous Right Now?

There are currently 65 volcanoes in the United States that scientists consider to be active, including Mount St. Helens.
Source: Livescience.com | 17 May 2010 | 8:32 am

Spike-nosed tree frog and tame woolly rat

Conservationists offer latest dispatch from jungle paradise in Foja mountains that offers vision of life on earth without humans

• Gallery: New species discovered on Foja expedition
• Gallery: Lost land of the volcano

Those who have been there call it a lost world and the closest thing on Earth to the Garden of Eden. Undisturbed for thousands of years, the mist-shrouded Foja mountains of Indonesian New Guinea offer a vision of a planet without human influence. Dripping with life, the pristine forested slopes harbour a bewitching display of spectacular species, many of which are new to science.

Today, conservationists offer the latest dispatch from this jungle paradise. An expedition to the remote mountains by experts from Conservation International and the National Geographic Society has revealed a stunning diversity of flora and fauna, including several expected new species.

The finds include a bizarre spike-nosed tree frog, a huge tame woolly rat, a yellow-eyed gargoyle-like gecko and a tiny forest wallaby, the smallest documented member of the kangaroo family.

"While animals and plants are being wiped out across the globe at a pace never seen in millions of years, the discovery of these absolutely incredible forms of life is much needed positive news," said Bruce Beehler, a senior research scientist with Conservation International who took part in the expedition. "Places like these represent a healthy future for all of us and show that it is not too late to stop the current species extinction crisis."

The Foja mountains, located in the Indonesian province of Papua on the island of New Guinea, cover an area of more than 300,000 square hectares of unroaded, undeveloped and undisturbed rainforest. The region is recognised by scientists as a productive species generator because of its relative isolation, elevation and tropical environment.

The latest expedition, which took place in November 2008, is the third of its kind since 2005. It was part-funded by the National Geographic Society, and a special feature on the visit, "Discovery in the Foja Mountains," appears in the June issue of National Geographic magazine.

"The Foja mountains are a virtual island where species have evolved for millennia," said John Francis, vice-president for research, conservation and exploration at National Geographic.

The conservationists say they are highlighting the new discoveries to encourage the government of Indonesia to bolster long-term protection of the Foja area, which is classified as a national wildlife sanctuary.

The tree frog, found sitting on a bag of rice in the campsite, has a Pinocchio-like protuberance on its nose that points upwards when the male calls, but deflates and points downwards when he is less active.

Other discoveries recorded during the survey included a new blossom bat, which feeds on rainforest nectar, a small new tree-mouse, a new black and white butterfly related to the common monarch, and a new flowering shrub.

In addition to the new kangaroo-related dwarf wallaby, scientists obtained the first photographs of a free-ranging individual of the extremely rare golden-mantled tree-kangaroo, which is critically threatened by hunting in other parts of New Guinea. They also spotted a pair of new imperial pigeons with rusty, whitish, and grey-coloured feathers.

The biologists on the expedition, including scientists from Indonesia, endured torrential rainstorms and life-threatening flash floods, which saw rivers swell by more than two metres in less than 30 minutes, as they tracked species from the low foothills to the top of the range, at an altitude of 2,200 metres. Poor weather made helicopter journeys haphazard, which left the scientists short of food and forced to journey by foot.

The discoveries were announced as reports show that world governments have failed to reduce the rate of loss of biodiversity, as pledged in targets set in 2002. In October, officials from around the world will meet in Japan to discuss new targets for the next 40 years.

To help stem the losses, Conservation International said it intended to double or triple the number of species discovered over the next few years through collaborations to allow scientists to visit more unexplored places. Many new species may help benefit human health or help protect food and fresh-water security, it said, and could prove important for conservation.

The discoveries

Spike-nosed tree frog

Discovered in the campsite, the male frog's nasal protrusion swells and points up when he calls.

Imperial pigeons

This novel bird was spotted several times on the expedition, but missed previously, which suggests a very low population.

Tree-kangaroo

First photograph of a wild and extremely rare golden-mantled tree kangaroo, critically threatened by hunting

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Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 17 May 2010 | 8:20 am