Genetically modified rats produced using novel sperm stem-cell technique

For two decades, the laboratory mouse has been the workhorse of biomedical studies and the only mammal whose genes scientists could effectively and reliably manipulate to study human diseases and conditions.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 May 2010 | 3:00 pm

New horned dinosaur: Two-ton plant-eater lived 78 million years ago in Montana

A new horned dinosaur, Medusaceratops lokii, has been discovered. Approximately 20 feet long and weighing more than 2 tons, the newly identified plant-eating dinosaur lived nearly 78 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous period in what is now Montana. Its identification marks the discovery of a new genus of horned dinosaur.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 May 2010 | 3:00 pm

New source of stem cells form heart muscle cells, repair damage

A new and noncontroversial source of stem cells can form heart muscle cells and help repair heart damage, according to results of preliminary lab tests.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 May 2010 | 3:00 pm

Clocks in the Americas and the Caribbean Islands now ticking in unison

Clocks in the Americas and the Caribbean Islands are now ticking in unison thanks to the work of the Sistema Interamericano de Metrologia (SIM), a regional metrology organization that works to promote accurate measurements throughout the Americas.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 May 2010 | 3:00 pm

Consumers: Why do you like what I like, but I don't like what you like?

When we like a product, do we think others will like it, too? And when we believe others like a product, do we like it as well? A new study says these two questions are fundamentally different.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 May 2010 | 3:00 pm

Understanding the relationship between bacteria and obesity

Research sheds new light on the role bacteria in the digestive tract may play in obesity. The studies paint a picture that may be more complex than originally thought.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 May 2010 | 3:00 pm

Those with allergic asthma face double trouble during flu season, findings suggest

New research suggests that allergic reactions to pet dander, dust mites and mold may prevent people with allergic asthma from generating a healthy immune response to respiratory viruses such as influenza.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 May 2010 | 9:00 am

How RNA viruses copy themselves: Hijack cellular enzyme to create viral replication factories on cell membranes

Researchers have made a significant new discovery about RNA (ribonucleic acid) viruses and how they replicate themselves. Certain RNA viruses -- poliovirus, hepatitis C virus and coxsackievirus -- and possibly many other families of viruses copy themselves by seizing an enzyme from their host cell to create replication factories enriched in a specific lipid. The scientists have uncovered that certain RNA viruses take control of a cellular enzyme to design a replication compartment on the cell's membrane filled with PI4P lipids. Those lipids, in turn, allow the RNA viruses to attract and stimulate the enzymes they need for replication.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 May 2010 | 9:00 am

New explaination of how certain cancers develop

Researchers have discovered a new interaction between a cell signaling system and a specific gene that may be the cause of B-cell lymphoma. The finding suggests a similar interaction could be occurring during the development of other types of cancer, leading to further understanding of how cancer works -- and how it might be stopped.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 May 2010 | 9:00 am

Coastal birds carry toxic ocean metals inland

Biologists has found that potent metals like mercury and lead, ingested by Arctic seabirds feeding in the ocean, end up in the sediment of polar ponds.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 May 2010 | 9:00 am

'Top kill' fails to stop oil leak

Oil giant BP says its latest attempt to stop the leak in the Gulf of Mexico has failed, and it will try another technique.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 May 2010 | 3:55 am

BP turns to next attempt after top kill fails (AP)

AP - Yet another mix of risky undersea robot maneuvers, containment devices and longshot odds is being prepared to fight the uncontrolled gusher feeding the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 May 2010 | 3:32 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - The main weather producer was forecast to be a developing cold front that would move through the Plains on Sunday toward the Upper Midwest and Mississippi Valley.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 May 2010 | 2:48 am

Agatha leaves at least 12 dead in Guatemala (AP)

AP - Torrential rains brought by the first tropical storm of the 2010 season pounded Guatemala and southern Mexico, triggering deadly landslides. The death toll stood at 12 early Sunday but authorities said the number could rise.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 May 2010 | 2:41 am

Oil Spill Flow Rate: How Experts Measure the Disaster (Time.com)

Time.com - The government and a team of experts have come to the same conclusion: the Gulf oil spill is much worse than what BP originally estimated
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 May 2010 | 1:30 am

Gulf residents eye slow fix for historic oil spill (Reuters)

Reuters - BP Plc's "top kill" oil well plug failed on Saturday, practically killing any optimism among Gulf coast residents that the mammoth spill fouling their coast and fishing industry will end any time soon.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 May 2010 | 11:08 pm

BP 'top kill' fails, piling more pressure on Obama (Reuters)

Reuters - BP Plc said on Saturday its complex "top kill" maneuver to plug the Gulf of Mexico oil well has failed, crushing hopes for a quick end to the largest oil spill in U.S. history already in its 40th day.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 May 2010 | 9:03 pm

'Top Kill' Fails to Stop Gulf Oil Leak

BP called off its most recent attempt to stop the oil leaking into the Gulf, though it had said "Top Kill" was its best option.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 May 2010 | 5:31 pm

Fish oil helps schoolchildren to concentrate

US academics discover high doses of omega-3 fish oil combat hyperactivity and attention deficit disorder

Children can learn better at school by taking omega-3 fish oil supplements which boost their concentration, scientists say.

Boys aged eight to 11 who were given doses once or twice a day of docosahexaenoic acid, an essential fatty acid known as DHA, showed big improvements in their performance during tasks involving attention.

Dr Robert McNamara, of the University of Cincinnati, who led the team of American researchers, said their findings could help pupils to study more effectively and potentially help to tackle both attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and depression. The study, reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, is important because a lack of DHA has been implicated in ADHD and other similar conditions, with poor maternal diet sometimes blamed for the child's deficiency.

ADHD affects an estimated 4%-8% of Britons and can seriously impair a child's education because they have trouble concentrating and are often disruptive in class. A lack of DHA has also been associated with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

"We found that, if you take DHA, you can enhance the function of those brain regions that are involved in paying attention, so it helps people concentrate," said McNamara. "The benefit is that it may represent an intervention that will help children or adults with attention impairments."

The researchers gave 33 US schoolboys 400mg or 1,200mg doses of DHA or a placebo every day for eight weeks. Those who had received the high doses did much better in mental tasks involving mathematical challenges. Brain scans showed that functional activity in their frontal cortex – which controls memory, attention and the ability to plan – increased significantly.

The results, and fact that many people eat too little fish to get enough DHA through their diet, meant it could help all children to improve their learning, added McNamara. "The primary benefit is to treat ADHD and depression, but it could also help people with their memory, learning and attention," he said.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 May 2010 | 5:06 pm

The remains of the dodo

Why human history's most famous extinct animal is the centrepiece of celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of Oxford University's Museum of Natural History

Home of the best preserved remains of the dodo, Oxford University's Museum of Natural History is about to gain a new lease of life. The building – which contains some of Britain's earliest natural history specimens including the first scientifically described remains of dinosaurs – is at the centre of celebrations that started this week to mark its 150th anniversary. Events include lectures by Sir David Attenborough and the unveiling of a plinth to commemorate the debate on evolution between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Sam Wilberforce, which took place in the building in 1860. However, most of the celebrations will focus on the museum's special wildlife specimens and, in particular, its dodo.

The dodo, the most famous of all animals to have become extinct in human history, was discovered by Europeans in 1598 on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Dogs and rats introduced to the island by humans then started to destroy the birds' nests and eggs and by 1680 the last dodo was dead. The bird became a curiosity in Europe and its preserved remains were sought out by collectors, including Elias Ashmole who brought one to Oxford.

Today only its mummified head and foot remain. Although minimal, these represent the most complete remains of a single dodo anywhere in the world and have proved to be of particular value to science. (And they are kept under lock and key: the dodo pictured here beside a model is the one on public display in the museum, but it is a composite of different skeletons.) In particular, the soft tissue of the Oxford dodo recently provided scientists with a sample of dodo DNA. When researchers compared this DNA with that from other birds, they found that the closest living relative to the dodo is the Nicobar pigeon from south-east Asia.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 May 2010 | 5:05 pm

The number crunchers who are saving lives

Ten years on from the revelation that scientists had cracked the human genome, the phenomenal capacity of modern computers is starting to exploit the potential of that discovery for the fight against disease

A 20ft banner hangs down a high, wood-panelled wall in the lofty entrance of the Sanger Institute in Cambridgeshire. With its delicate bands of pink, grey and green, it looks like a enormous, abstract watercolour. Closer inspection reveals its true nature, however. Those pale stripes are made up of streams of different coloured letters.

More than a million – 1,346,000 to be precise – are printed on the banner. And not just any old letters. Only As, Cs, Gs and Ts, each representing one of the chemical bases of DNA, the stuff of our genes, are inscribed there. This is no giant "watercolour", but a print-out of part of an X-chromosome, one of the packets of genetic material that lie curled within our cells and which direct chemical operations inside our bodies.

However, it is the size, not the content, of the banner that makes it so remarkable – for it turns out those letters represent only a small section of an X-chromosome. A read-out of a whole one would require a further 114 banners, each crammed with more than a million letters. And that is just the start. To display the letters that make up all 23 pairs of chromosomes in the human genome would require a staggering 2,226 banners. The institute would look like a wallpaper factory during a clearance sale.

And that is why the Sanger banner is so important. It vividly demonstrates the human genome's extraordinary complexity and puts into perspective the remarkable effort that went into its unravelling. That task was completed in June 10 years ago when the genome's first rough draft was published. This success was hailed as one of the greatest achievements of modern science, a point that was emphasised this month when US biologist Craig Venter revealed that he had assembled an entire computer-generated synthetic genome – not of a human but of a synthetic "bug" – and inserted it into bacteria which had then begun to replicate. Geneticists were playing at God, claimed newspaper headlines.

This is an exaggeration, but Venter's success does demonstrate how much genetics has changed in the past two decades. This is no longer a lab-bench science that relies on test tubes and pipettes to study living organisms. Instead, it has become utterly dependent on the swelling power of the microprocessor. Look at that banner of genetic data. It could not have been generated without the staggering capacity of modern computers.

The Sanger Institute employs more than 800 scientists and is devoted to the study of biology. Yet its banks of computers now rival those built by Cern in Switzerland to analyse results from the myriad particle collisions produced by its Large Hadron Collider. Each sequencing machine at the centre generates strips of letters from small pieces of DNA and this data is then processed by computers to produce a read-out of a full genome – of a human, or an animal like a dog or a bacterium.

It took almost a decade of processing DNA this way in the 90s to help to produce the 3 billion letters that made up the first sequenced human genome. By 2008, the institute was processing data at a rate of 100 million letters a day, roughly a genome a month, says Phil Butcher, head of IT at the Sanger. "Today, we can handle so much data that we are producing a couple of genomes every 24 hours," he says. "And, of course, we are making improvements all the time."

So vast is the institute's array of computers that it is planning to build its own 2.5MW power station, a combined heat and power unit, which will generate electricity for them. Biology has become as reliant on computer power as hard sciences like particle physics or astronomy. It is an astonishing transformation. The question is: how did it happen? More to the point, what has it achieved so far and what is it likely to achieve in the near future?

Chronic myeloid leukaemia is a cancer of white blood cells that usually occurs in the middle-aged and elderly. It is triggered by a genetic mutation which interferes with chemical messages that help to control cell division, leading to the uncontrolled growth of white blood cells. In the past, prognosis was poor – survival periods of around five months were typical. However, prospects for patients with chronic myeloid leukaemia have changed dramatically in recent years, thanks to doctors' new understanding of the human genome, according to Dr David Adams, a Sanger Institute geneticist and cancer expert. "The drug that has changed everything is called Gleevec," he says, "and it was derived from our new, computer-driven understanding of the genome."

By studying a key section of the human genome, scientists realised that a mutation there produces a specific protein (called "bcr-abl") which in turn triggers a cascade of chemical reactions in a patient's body that results in chronic myeloid leukaemia. Awareness of the protein's role allowed scientists to develop a drug that could block its activity and so halt the proliferation of white blood cells.

"Patients who have the specific mutation that causes chronic myeloid leukaemia will respond to the use of Gleevec and will go into remission quite profoundly," says Adams. "It was understanding the specific genetics of this disease that led to the realisation this drug could help."

It is an encouraging tale that has since been repeated for several other genome-driven anti-cancer drugs, although it is important to note, says Adams, that the success of these drugs is hit and miss – sometimes they produce no effect. But when they do have an impact, it is invariably profound.

This has important consequences, he argues. In the next 10 years, once computing power has reached the stage when it will become possible to provide full read-outs, easily and cheaply, of everyone's genome, doctors will be able to determine exactly who will benefit from specific cancer drugs and who will not. Similarly, other types of medicine will have their efficacy judged in advance. "If you had the full genome sequence of everyone, you would know exactly who will respond to a drug and who will not. It will be of enormous benefit," says Adams.

That goal, although distant, does reveal the importance of scientists' current obsession with decoding not just a single genome but of generating thousands of different ones, a task that now absorbs a host of follow-on projects, including the Cancer Genome Project, the 1,000 Genomes Project and others; these require the constant running of the institute's huge rooms of computers. By pinpointing changes in a few base pairs possessed by some individuals and not by others, scientists can discover why the former group might be prone to a particular disease but not the latter. Another example is provided by Crohn's disease, an extremely painful inflammatory disease of the intestines whose origins have, until recently, defied the attention of scientists.

"In the last two years, genome-wide studies at several centres have pinpointed around 30 genes that have variants involved in Crohn's disease," says Nicole Soranzo, who works in the gleaming Sanger labs on the genetics of complex diseases. "This is important because these genes reveal the pathways that lead to Crohn's and are now allowing drug companies to test their different drugs in order to find one that could block that pathway."

If nothing else, these examples show that the sequencing of the human genome is already having a medical impact, particularly in the case of cancer treatment but that the real improvements still remain out of a reach, a point acknowledged by Sir Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust, which funds the Sanger Institute.

"At the start, there was a tendency to say the project would solve all of humankind's evils. However, it has taken longer than everyone expected so there has been a backlash," Walport says. "The reality is somewhere in the middle. No, we cannot yet read our own genomes, but we are discovering networks of genes that influence people's tendencies to develop diabetes, multiple sclerosis and common obesity, which we all hope will be turned into new therapeutic opportunities."

This will not be an easy task. Pick any two individuals at random and you will find 99.9% of their DNA is identical. "Two genomes typically differ by one base in 1,000 or around 3 million bases in total," says Sanger scientist Dr Chris Tyler-Smith. That arithmetic means that if you want to pinpoint where an A base is substituted for a G in a gene, making a person prone to diabetes or obesity, then hundreds of genomes will have to be compared, each one made up of billions of letters.

Only staggering computing power will provide that delicate, elusive information. Most scientists believe this goal can be achieved though there is a danger, says Sir John Sulston, the Nobel prize-winner and former head of the Sanger Institute, that researchers will get lost in the technology and data-crunching. "At the end of the day, we need to keep a perspective on what we do and need to think about the biology involved in our work. Computers are just the means to an end. We should not forget that."

This point is acknowledged by scientists, although they remain confident of success. "Yes, looking for a couple of bases among billions is daunting, especially when you are dealing with hundreds of genomes," adds Walport. "This is a huge informatics challenge but we are dealing with it. We should look at this as a fantastic, mind-boggling phase of scientific discovery."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 May 2010 | 5:05 pm

Newfound Frog Species Threatened by Deadly Fungus (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Two previously unknown frog species have been identified from two sites in Panama, and they are already under threat from the deadly fungus that has wiped out many amphibian species and is poised to threaten many more.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 May 2010 | 3:50 pm

No more eating shark fin in Hawaii after new law (AP)

AP - The $48-a-plate shark fin has been a favorite dish to celebrate 80th birthdays and fete out of town VIPs since Vienna Hou's Chinese restaurant opened 25 years ago.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 May 2010 | 2:34 pm

At NYC sci fest, asking 'What if we're holograms?' (AP)

AP - Brian Greene works in a world where scientific reasoning rules all and imagination leads to the most unlikely truths.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 May 2010 | 1:07 pm

'Space laser tech needed' on ash

Europe requires space-borne laser instruments that can provide information on volcanic ash clouds, a conference hears.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 29 May 2010 | 10:55 am

Cosmic Bullet Fired by Exploding Star (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - A bullet-shaped object can be seen rocketing out of the huge explosion from a dying star in a new image taken by a powerful X-ray space telescope.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 May 2010 | 10:15 am

Harrabin's Notes

Royal Society under fire over climate statements
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 29 May 2010 | 9:44 am

Work starts to get Concorde back in the air

A French Concorde is examined as part of a project aiming to get the supersonic jet back in the air.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 29 May 2010 | 7:32 am

Some Schizophrenia Symptoms Caused by Virus

Cold sore virus is partly responsible for cognitive impairment in schizophrenics.
Source: Livescience.com | 29 May 2010 | 7:06 am

Close Relationship with Mom Leads to Better Romance Later

How well you get along with your parents in your teens might influence your romantic relationships a decade later, a new study suggests.
Source: Livescience.com | 29 May 2010 | 6:33 am

SOFIA Sees Jupiter's Ancient Heat

The aircraft-based telescope has opened its infrared eyes for the first time, peering into the guts of a galaxy and peeking through Jupiter's clouds.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 May 2010 | 3:38 am

In pictures

Thousands flee fury of volcanos in Latin America countries
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 29 May 2010 | 3:20 am