|
|
|
|
Blood-thinning copycat enters malaria fightNew treatments for malaria are possible after scientists found that molecules similar to the blood-thinning drug heparin can stop malaria from infecting red blood cells.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 Jun 2010 | 6:00 am Unique eclipsing binary star system discoveredAstrophysicists have identified two white dwarf stars in an eclipsing binary system, allowing for the first direct radius measurement of a rare white dwarf composed of pure helium.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 Jun 2010 | 6:00 am New blood thinners can cause dangerous drug interactions, study findsThree new oral blood-thinning drugs nearing approval by the Food and Drug Administration are more convenient than the standard drug Coumadin because they do not require monthly visits to adjust doses. But the promising drugs also could be subject to dangerous interactions when taken alongside widely used prescription drugs, over-the-counter medicines such as aspirin and even herbal supplements such as St. John's Wort, according to a new study.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 Jun 2010 | 6:00 am 520 days on a simulated flight to MarsOn June 3, 2010, six 'astronauts' will commence a virtual trip to Mars. Sealed into a cramped container at the Moscow Institute of Biomedical Problems for 520 days, they will experience the rigors and isolation of long-duration spaceflight.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 Jun 2010 | 6:00 am Unique computer model used to predict active 2010 hurricane seasonScientists who have developed a unique computer model with a knack for predicting hurricanes with unprecedented accuracy are forecasting an unusually active season this year.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 Jun 2010 | 6:00 am TV food advertisements promote imbalanced diets, study findsMaking food choices based on television advertising results in a very imbalanced diet, according to a new study comparing the nutritional content of food choices influenced by television to nutritional guidelines.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 Jun 2010 | 6:00 am US begins criminal probe of spillOil firm BP says its latest attempt to cap the oil spill is under way, as the US government announces a criminal investigation.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Jun 2010 | 4:05 am From the archive, 31 May 1924: A good word for slangOriginally published in the Manchester Guardian on 31 May 1924 FLEET STREET, FRIDAY. With reverent faces the audience at the meeting of the English Society at Bedford College this evening settled themselves to hear Mr. John Galsworthy, the retiring president, deliver an address on expression. Mr. Galsworthy delighted and amused them. He danced over his subject, covering a wide area and flinging darts of criticism as he went. The soul of good expression, he said, was an unexpectedness which still kept to the mark of meaning and did not betray truth; neither at the expense of significance nor to the detriment of verity; never, in fact, just for the sake of being unexpected. Speculating on the connection between expression and character drawing in prose fiction, he said that some characters, as those of Rabelais and Dickens, owed their survival to happy extravagance, and those of Fielding, Jane Austen, and Anatole France to ironical tincture. Tolstoy's characters were inhabited by what one might call "familiar spirit." Such characters convinced the reader that he might meet and recognise them walking the everyday world. This quality demanded an unself-consciousness rare in English novelists – perfectly simple expression without trick, manner, or suspicion of desire to seem clever, modern, or aesthetic. The most perfect example of familiar spirit was Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn". Had Shakespeare inspired or discouraged the writer of English? [His] genius exhausted the possibilities of expression. He even gave us our slang. Slang was at least vigorous and apt. "I am waiting," said Mr. Galsworthy, "to see the expression 'Gets my goat' academised by Professor Saintsbury." "Dare we condemn Cockney?" he asked – "a lingo whose waters in Southern England seem fast flooding in over the dykes of the so-called Oxford accent and such other rural dialects as are left." Which of these two forms of English was the more desirable as a national form of speech? The spirit of the age seemed to favour Cockney, and certainly it was glibber on the tongue. Perhaps some day our educational authorities might make both forms of linguistic disease notifiable and isolate the sufferers. No event of dramatic moment occurred without the press somewhere inflating the word currency. All over-expression, whether by journalists, poets, novelists, or clergymen, was bad for the language and for the mind. By over-expression he meant the use of words running beyond the sincere feeling of writer or speaker, or beyond what the event would sanely carry. The biographies of statesmen abounded in praises of superb orations, but when you read them you were often bored to tears by their prolixity. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 2 Jun 2010 | 3:54 am Close encounter with a bizarre venomous beastA close encounter with one of the worlds weirdest mammals the Hispaniolan solenodon.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Jun 2010 | 3:43 am Huge order for Iridium spacecraftThe mobile satellite services provider Iridium orders 81 spacecraft to upgrade its global network in a $2.9bn deal.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Jun 2010 | 3:39 am UK research leads to blood test for early detection of cancerA ground-breaking blood test promises to aid the detection of cancer as much as five years earlier than current testing methods such as mammography and CT scans. Physicians will know the result of their patient’s test within one week of sending in a blood sample, according to researchers.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 Jun 2010 | 3:00 am PET scanning probes reveal different cell function within the immune systemA commonly used probe for positron emission tomography (PET) scanning and a new probe reveal different functions in diverse cells of the immune system, providing a noninvasive and much clearer picture of an immune response in action.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 Jun 2010 | 3:00 am 'Little brown balls' tie malaria and algae to common ancestor, researchers findInconspicuous "little brown balls" in the ocean have helped settle a long-standing debate about the origin of malaria and the algae responsible for toxic red tides, according to a new study.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 Jun 2010 | 3:00 am Patients who refuse prostate cancer surgery have worse long-term survival, study findsMen who refuse surgery for prostate cancer and instead opt for "watchful waiting" have a significantly worse long-term survival rate than those patients that choose radiotherapy, according to researchers. The study found that patients who refused any treatment for their prostate cancer had a 10-year overall survival rate of 51 percent, compared to 68 percent for those who chose radiation treatment.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 Jun 2010 | 3:00 am Russian Soyuz returns from space station mission (Reuters)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Jun 2010 | 2:49 am Russian Soyuz returns from space station missionKOROLYOV, Russia (Reuters) - A Russian Soyuz spacecraft containing an international trio of astronauts who oversaw the final assembly stage of a $100 billion space station landed safely on Kazakhstan's steppe on Wednesday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 2 Jun 2010 | 2:49 am World stocks lower amid Europe, US jitters (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Jun 2010 | 2:47 am The nation's weather (AP)AP - Severe weather was forecast to continue developing along a warm front tracking through the Midwest on Wednesday.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Jun 2010 | 2:41 am BP's Top Kill to Quell Oil Spill Begins in Gulf (Time.com)Time.com - In a May 27 press conference, 25 hours after the top-kill procedure was begun, BP said there would be least one more day of uncertainty in the GulfSource: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Jun 2010 | 2:30 am Hay Festival video: On the power of cab drivers | Nassim Nicholas TalebVideo: Nassim Nicholas Taleb on knowledge, power and why a cab driver knows as much as a political scientist about what is going to happen tomorrow Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 2 Jun 2010 | 2:10 am BP tries again to curb oil spill (Reuters)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Jun 2010 | 2:04 am BP shares fall drastically on spill fears (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Jun 2010 | 1:37 am Stripes may not be bees' defenceUK researchers have found that birds avoid bumblebees even when the insects do not have the classic black-and-yellow stripes.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Jun 2010 | 1:35 am How hedgehogs live the town lifeFemale hedgehogs prefer gardens of semi-detached and terraced houses, finds the first study of how they have adapted to urban life.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Jun 2010 | 1:33 am Science and the mediaAstronomer Royal Martin Rees decries the tendency for debates to be run by 'celebrities and newspaper people,' writes Elisabeth Mahoney Martin Rees, giving the first of his Reith Lectures (Radio 4), spoke to Sue Lawley about the daily reality of being Astronomer Royal. He must get letters, she suggested, from people who claim to have discovered dark secrets about the universe. "You do best to tell them to write to each other," Rees replied, setting off the first of many chuckles in the audience. It was striking that a Wordle of the lecture, produced as it ended, featured the word "laughter" quite large. The tone and style were amiable, but the content was serious, tussling with issues about science and public policy, the lack of scientists in government, the relationship between science and the media. Rees argued that we should worry less about low consequence phenomena, and more about "low probability, high consequence" ones, and decried the tendency – say, in the MMR debate – for people to listen "to celebrities, to newspaper people". This year's presentation urged listeners to debate as the lecture unfolded, and there was lively comment on Twitter. Mostly the response was positive for Rees, and it sparked up when David Nutt asked a question. Lawley referred to him as having resigned. "No, no," he countered, "I was sacked." Rees, going for another gag, declined to comment on what has "come to be called the Nutt Case". guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 2 Jun 2010 | 12:59 am In pictures: Satellite eye on Earth - May 2010Oil slicks, plankton blooms and ash clouds were among the images captured by European Space Agency and Nasa satellites during May Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 2 Jun 2010 | 12:00 am One Gecko Turns Out to Be Four Different SpeciesA single gecko has just multiplied by four, since scientists have determined "it" actually represents four different species.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 1 Jun 2010 | 11:25 pm 'First' Neanderthal tool evidenceArchaeologists have found what they say is the earliest evidence of Neanderthals living in Britain.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 1 Jun 2010 | 10:36 pm Russian Soyuz Spacecraft Lands Safely with Station Crew (SPACE.com)SPACE.com - A Russian Soyuz spacecraft landed safely in Kazakhstan late Tuesday to return a cosmonaut and two astronauts back home from the International Space Station after nearly six months in space.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 1 Jun 2010 | 10:15 pm Lazy crows pitch in when it countsHard times bring out the best in idle birds.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/9TaTbTe-IKc" height="1" width="1"/>Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 1 Jun 2010 | 10:01 pm Unattractive male fish boast 'better quality sperm'In a study of tropical guppies, scientists find that less attractive males have "better sperm".Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 1 Jun 2010 | 9:47 pm Crews probe Guatemala sinkhole as neighbors flee (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 1 Jun 2010 | 9:15 pm Military to Adopt NFL's Instant Replay Technology (LiveScience.com)LiveScience.com - The same video technology the NFL uses for instant replay during football games could soon help monitor battlefields in Afghanistan.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 1 Jun 2010 | 8:45 pm Cancer-Causing Agents Higher in Some U.S. CigarettesSome U.S. cigarette brands contain higher levels of some cancer–causing chemicals than some foreign brands.Source: Livescience.com | 1 Jun 2010 | 8:32 pm FDA Approves Osteoporosis InjectionProlia treats postmenopausal women with osteoporosis who are at high risk for fractures.Source: Livescience.com | 1 Jun 2010 | 7:30 pm FDA Warns Against Toxic 'Medicated Oil'FDA warns consumers not to purchase or use a product called Arrow Brand Medicated Oil & Embrocation.Source: Livescience.com | 1 Jun 2010 | 7:22 pm Long-Necked Dinosaurs Held Heads High (LiveScience.com)LiveScience.com - The long necks of the largest dinosaurs that ever lived might have been raised high after all, a new study now suggests.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 1 Jun 2010 | 6:50 pm Cancer Patients Should ExerciseCancer patients should be physically active both during and after treatment.Source: Livescience.com | 1 Jun 2010 | 6:31 pm Supplemental Calcium Use Behind Increased Bad EffectsTaking too much supplemental calcium is causing a rise in negative health effects, scientists argue.Source: Livescience.com | 1 Jun 2010 | 6:24 pm Just One-Third of Young Women Get Cervical Cancer VaccineOnly about a third young women have received the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine to help prevent cervical cancer.Source: Livescience.com | 1 Jun 2010 | 6:15 pm Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson Plan High Frequency Concert for DogsLou Reed and his composer wife, Laurie Anderson, are planning a high-frequency concert for dogs.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 1 Jun 2010 | 5:26 pm Fruitfly larvae smell the lightGenetic tweak fools flies into mistaking light for unpleasant odours.Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 1 Jun 2010 | 5:13 pm Long-Necked Dinosaurs Held Heads HighLong-necked dinosaurs held their heads straight up, a costly posture that is only worth if it the sauropod's food is spread out.Source: Livescience.com | 1 Jun 2010 | 5:09 pm Arms spending unaffected by financial crisis, says thinktankWorldwide annual military budget rose 5.9% in real terms according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
Governments around the world might be heralding an age of austerity, and warning citizens that they will need to cut public services, but the aftershocks of the global financial crisis have had little impact on military budgets, a leading thinktank says . Last year, $1.5 trillion (£1tn)was spent on weapons, an annual increase in real terms of 5.9%, according to the latest report by Sipri, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The US accounted for more than half of the total increase, though arms spending increased fastest in Asian countries, with China raising its military expenditure most, followed by India. Global spending has risen by nearly 50% over the past decade, said Sipri. The US headed the list of the world's top 10 arms buyers last year, spending $661bn on military equipment. It was followed by China (spending an estimated $100bn), France ($63.9bn), Britain ($58.3bn), Russia (an estimated $53.3bn) and Japan ($51.8bn), according to the report. Though some large-scale weapons programmes were cancelled in the latest US budget plans, notably the F22 stealth fighter, more money was earmarked for other projects, including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and cyberwarfare, said Sipri. The British government is likely to follow suit in the forthcoming strategic defence review, though it is expected to make significant cuts in the number of F35 Joint Strike Fighters proposed for the Royal Navy's two planned large aircraft carriers. Sipri notes that the US has actually increased its JSF programme. Of European countries, Britain accounted for the biggest absolute increase (of $3.7bn) followed by Turkey and Russia. Cyprus increased military spending most in real terms, taking inflation into account. Given its financial woes, Greece, which has traditionally devoted a higher percentage of its wealth to defence than most Nato countries, has already decided to cut military spending this year, the report says. Natural resources, notably oil, can be a source of international or national conflict, inevitably leading to higher military spending. Sipri points to Nigeria where, it says, "the massive environmental damage caused by oil extraction and the lack of benefit to oil-producing regions has generated grievances", and to Brazil, which has justified planned purchases of submarines "in terms of the need to protect newly discovered underwater oil fields". It adds that in Afghanistan, where the conflict has fuelled global arms production, insurgent groups and warlords have been collecting up to $400m a year from the opium poppy harvest. Only six of the biggest armed conflicts last year concerned territority, with 11 fought over the nature and makeup of a national government, according to Sipri's report. It said that only three of the 30 big conflicts over the past decade were between states. Sipri's 2010 Yearbook also says that eight states - the US, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel - possess between them nearly 8,000 operational nuclear weapons. Britain deploys 144 nuclear warheads, it says. William Hague, the foreign secretary, told the Commons last week that Britain's total number of nuclear warheads would not exceed 225, including the maximum 160 already declared as operationally available. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 1 Jun 2010 | 5:01 pm Fears of ecological tipping pointIxtoc 1 collapse caused largest peacetime spill and was a lesson-packed forerunner of BP disaster Juan Antonio Dzul was a teenager when the Ixtoc 1 oil rig collapsed in June 1979 in the Gulf of Mexico, 70 miles from the fishing town of Champotón where he grew up and still lives. The memory of the huge spill that followed is etched on his mind. "The oil covered the reefs and washed up on the shore. Fish died and the octopuses were buried under the oil that filled the gaps between the rocks where they live," he recalled in a phone interview. "Even today you can find stains on rocks a few centimetres deep, and if you stick something metal in them the smell of oil still escapes." Champotón was one of the first and worst-hit areas reached by the estimated 3m barrels of oil that poured into the sea over the next nine and a half months. The Ixtoc disaster is still by far the largest peacetime spill, as well as a lesson-packed forerunner of the disaster in progress, as the Deepwater Horizon also exploded and sank after a blowout preventer failed. The parallels are most striking in the methods that failed to cap the damaged well head beneath. "They tried to put a funnel on top of it, injected mud and saltwater and cement, but everything they tried to put in the well was forced out by the pressure," says Abundio Juarez. He was one of the top engineers in the state-owned company, Pemex, that was exploring the Ixtoc deposit at the time, although he was not directly involved in the control effort. He says the company also tried golf balls. "We sent divers down and today they have robots, but the only solution then, and now, is a relief well and that takes time." Pemex also used booms and skimmers, and dumped chemical dispersants on the slicks. That, the scientists say today, helped reduce the amounts reaching the shore but sent encapsulated oil down to the sea bed with some initially devastating effects, particularly for shrimp larvae. Meanwhile, the oil was washing up all along the gulf, a foot deep in some places, as it was pushed northwards by prevailing winds and currents until it finally crossed the Texas border two months later and eventually coated almost 170 miles of US beaches. The beach that caused most international concern in Mexico was Rancho Nuevo, a key nesting ground for critically endangered Kemp's Ridley sea turtles which had already lumbered up the sand in their hundreds to lay eggs. By the time the eggs hatched, the oil was lapping at the shore. Had an emergency US-Mexican operation not airlifted them over the spill to cleaner waters beyond, a generation might have been wiped out. But although Ixtoc was a big disaster, it did not develop into the long-term catastrophe that scientists initially thought was inevitable. "This is not to say there were no consequences. Just that the evidence is that these are not as dramatic as we feared," says Luis Soto, a marine biologist from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. "After about two years the recuperation was well on the way." Wes Tunnell, now at the Texas Harte Research Institute, took samples before and after the oil arrived in Texas that showed an immediate 80% drop in the number of organisms living between the grains of sand that provide food for shore birds and crabs. "Sampling a couple of years after the spill indicated the populations were back to normal," he says. Six years after Ixtoc 1 exploded it was hard to find any evidence of the oil, he says. "It is rather baffling to us all. We don't really know where it went." But although their message is hopeful, those who studied the Ixtoc disaster warn against assuming the gulf is automatically heading for another quick comeback. Ixtoc 1 stood in just 50 metres (165ft) of water, while Deepwater Horizon was drilling 1,500 metres below the surface. It is also likely that the quantity of chemical dispersants being used today is significantly larger, potentially blocking the work of the oil-eating micro-organisms. But what worries Tunnell most is that over-fishing may have reduced the ability of the gulf to bounce back. "It was much more resilient 30 years ago than today. My fear is it is reaching a tipping point." guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 1 Jun 2010 | 4:59 pm New Test Reveals Good vs. Bad SpermA new test can separate healthy sperm from sperm with damaged DNA with 99-percent accuracy, upping chances of successful IVF procedures.Source: Livescience.com | 1 Jun 2010 | 4:58 pm Elusive Neutrino Change-Up Finally Detected
In a truly transformative event, physicists have for the first time found direct evidence that a neutrino, a ghostly elementary particle that barely interacts with matter, morphs from one type into another. The finding, announced May 31 in a news release, provides additional support for the notion that neutrinos have mass, a property that requires an explanation beyond the realm of the standard model of particle physics.
Those experiments revealed a lower-than-predicted abundance of a certain type of neutrino compared with the number produced at the neutrinos’ source. The abundance of that type had clearly declined, but it wasn’t clear which type of neutrino they had transformed into. The new experiment not only shows a strong hint of just such a transformation but also identifies tau neutrinos as the type produced. The finding is based on three years of neutrino data recorded by the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus, or OPERA, at the underground Gran Sasso National Laboratory near Rome.
Theorist Rabindra Mohapatra of the University of Maryland in College Park, not a member of the discovery team, calls the result a “magnificent confirmation” that neutrinos oscillate among three types. “The OPERA detector was built with that purpose, and clearly they have succeeded,” he says. OPERA uses as its source an intense beam of pure muon neutrinos generated at CERN in Geneva. The analysis indicates that a muon neutrino changed into a tau neutrino sometime during the roughly 730-kilometer, 2.4-millisecond journey of the high-speed particles from Switzerland to Italy. In 2001, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Ontario found both a deficit of identifiable electron neutrinos emitted by the sun and a commensurate increase in a mixture of tau, muon and electron neutrinos (SN: 6/23/01, p. 388), says astrophysicist Michael Turner of the University of Chicago. That experiment, unlike OPERA, could not identify which types of neutrinos the electron neutrinos had transformed into. “The importance of this observation is that for the first time a [specific] new flavor of neutrino has been seen to appear,” says theorist John Ellis of CERN, also not part of the experimental team. “We now know where those missing neutrinos [in past experiments] have been going. It’s a bit like a shopkeeper discovering that cash keeps disappearing from the till. She couldn’t charge the cashier with theft until she finds some money in his pocket.” While not a breakthrough, Turner says, the new finding is “a very important step on the path to understanding how neutrinos have shaped our universe.” Neutrinos play a key role in triggering supernova explosions, which seed the universe with the bulk of its heavier elements, and may also contribute to dark matter, the invisible material that accounts for 85 percent of the mass of the cosmos. Because the OPERA finding is but a single detection among billions of neutrino events, it will require confirmation with about five or six additional events, cautions OPERA spokesman Antonio Ereditato of the University of Bern in Switzerland. The presumed transformation has a 98 percent chance of being correct, the team said. Detecting a transformation is notoriously difficult because neutrinos are nearly massless and have no charge. About 50 trillion pass unimpeded through a human body each second. OPERA searches for the interaction and decay of tau neutrinos within 150,000 “bricks” — layered units of lead plates and photographic film. The experiment’s underground location shields it from cosmic rays, energetic charged particles from space that can interfere with the operation of electronic detectors associated with the bricks. The first neutrino oscillation experiments, dating back some 15 years, were conducted to understand a longstanding puzzle about why nuclear burning at the sun’s core seemed to be producing substantially fewer electron neutrinos than predicted. The experiments revealed that about one-third of the electron neutrinos had disappeared on their way to Earth, presumably because they had transformed into another type of neutrino. Before the OPERA result, some researchers had suggested that a fraction of the missing neutrinos might have disappeared into a proposed fourth type, known as a sterile neutrino, which would not have shown up in any detector, notes particle theorist Joseph Lykken of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, who is not a participant in the experiment. Sterile neutrinos have been suggested as a way of understanding the results of neutrino oscillation experiments such as Fermilab’s Mini-Boone, or booster neutrino experiment, which don’t seem to fit the standard neutrino model. “With only one neutrino appearance event, OPERA does not yet tell us anything new about sterile neutrinos, but it is an important step towards getting a direct handle on this exciting possibility,” says Lykken. Several other questions remain in trying to understand neutrinos, says theorist Joshua Frieman, also of Fermilab. Researchers would like to determine if the lightest neutrino consists mainly of an electron neutrino and if the heavier ones are mixtures of the muon and tau neutrinos. In addition, physicists want to know if neutrinos and antineutrinos behave differently when they decay, a phenomenon known as CP violation. “These questions are motivating the design of new long-baseline neutrino-oscillation experiments,” Frieman says. One such experiment would shoot a neutrino beam from Fermilab to a huge detector in a proposed underground lab in South Dakota, he says. Image: The likely conversion of a muon neutrino (vertex at left) into a tau neutrino, predicted but never before seen, is marked by the light blue horizontal line with a gap in it, as shown in this computer reconstruction of a detection in the OPERA experiment./OPERA/Gran Sasso National Lab See Also:
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 1 Jun 2010 | 4:10 pm Researchers track path of oil from rig spillOfficials desperately seek answers on where the slick will head.Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 1 Jun 2010 | 3:27 pm Public urged to record bird sightings to save speciesBy recording their everyday sightings of birds, the public could help limit future extinctions, a study suggests.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 1 Jun 2010 | 3:04 pm Fossils Suggest Menu That Made Humans Possible
New fossils have provided a snapshot of proto-human diets during a critical evolutionary moment, when better fare helped our small-brained ancestors boost their cognitive capacity. Two-million-year-old bones that belonged to fish, crocodiles and turtles — aquatic animals rich in brain-fueling fatty acids — were found together with stone tool fragments near Kenya’s Lake Turkana. “We know that the hominin brain was growing at this time, but we’ve had little evidence that people were able to increase the quality of their diets,” said University of Cape Town archaeologist David Braun. “It may be that this was part of a broader hominin pattern.” Preserved in sediments left by sudden flooding and described June 1 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the fossil trove could have been left by any of several hominid species – Homo habilis, Homo rudolfiensis, Paranthropus boisei — who once lived around Lake Turkana. One of these small-bodied, small-brained hominids evolved into the bigger-brained, bigger-bodied Homo erectus, a definite human ancestor that likely possessed language and lived in hunter-gatherer tribes. How that evolutionary jump happened is, however, a mystery. The brain is an extremely energy-intensive organ. If chimpanzees are any indication, the early hominid diet consisted of fruits, plants and insects. Large brains couldn’t have evolved on such low-energy fare. “It looks like our diet would have had to go up a trophic level in order to support such an expensive organ,” Braun said. As early hominids didn’t yet have the tools or social organization necessary for significant hunting or fishing, some anthropologists think they scavenged animal carcasses. According to Braun, that would have put them in direct competition with “a lot of large carnivores, which would have been dangerous.” Instead, Braun thinks river and lake floodplains of the sort that preserved his fossils gave early hominids a low-risk hunting opportunity. “As lakes and rivers flooded and receded, animals could have been caught. The remains could be easily collected,” he said. Humanity’s ancestors “could have entered the higher trophic level without taking on the risks.” Image: Photograph and scanning electron microscope image of a reptile bone scored by cuts./PNAS See Also:
Citation: “Early hominin diet included diverse terrestrial and aquatic animals 1.95 Ma in East Turkana, Kenya.” By David R. Brauna, John W. K. Harris, Naomi E. Levin, Jack T. McCoy, Andy I. R. Herries, Marion K. Bamford, Laura C. Bishop, Brian G. Richmondg, and Mzalendo Kibunjia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 107 No. 22, June 2, 2010. Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecological tipping points.
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 1 Jun 2010 | 2:58 pm New Antarctic Animals Look Like PlantsSix new animals found in Antarctica look more flora than fauna.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 1 Jun 2010 | 2:26 pm Funky FoodsIsraeli farmers are redefining our perception of food with mini watermelons and worm-shaped berries.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 1 Jun 2010 | 2:13 pm Esa chief set to continue in roleThe European Space Agency's director general Jean-Jacques Dordain is backed to stay in office.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 1 Jun 2010 | 2:12 pm Study: Wikipedia Pretty Accurate, But Hard to ReadYou might learn something on Wikipedia, if you don't fall asleep first.Source: Livescience.com | 1 Jun 2010 | 2:02 pm Education Helps Slow DementiaEducation not only delays the early symptoms of dementia, but can also delay the development of the disease, a new study has determined.Source: Livescience.com | 1 Jun 2010 | 1:45 pm Jet-Mounted Telescope Sees First Light
A new flying observatory snapped its first pictures of the infrared night sky last week. The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, a joint project between NASA and the German Aerospace Center, saw heat escaping from clouds in Jupiter’s atmosphere and the star-forming heart of galaxy M82 on its maiden voyage May 26. SOFIA is a hacked Boeing 747SP jetliner with a 16-by-23-foot door cut in its side to let a 17-ton, 100-inch diameter telescope take in views of the universe that are impossible to get from the ground. The airborne observatory’s altitude — up to 35,000 feet on the first flight, and possibly as high as 45,000 feet on later flights — takes it above 99 percent of the water vapor in the atmosphere that blocks and scatters light on its way to the surface. And as a mobile telescope, SOFIA can catch transient events like supernovae and comets that grounded telescopes and space telescopes in a fixed orbit might miss. The first flight took off from NASA’s Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, California, with a crew of 10 scientists, engineers and technicians from NASA, Universities Space Research Association, the German SOFIA Institute (DSI) and Cornell University. Over the following six hours, the crew used a camera called FORCAST, or Faint Object infraRed CAmera for the SOFIA Telescope, to capture images in a few minutes that would have taken hours from the ground. “The flight exceed even my most optimistic expectations. FORCAST and the observatory worked virtually flawlessly,” Terry Herter of Cornell University, the principle investigator for FORCAST, told Wired Science. “I hope this is the first step in many successes for SOFIA.” The telescope is capable of seeing wavelengths from 0.3 micrometers (slightly longer than the human eye can see) to 1600 micrometers, but the team observed Jupiter in just three of those wavelengths: 5.4 micrometers (blue), 24 micrometers (green) and 37 micrometers. The white stripe in the center of the image is an area of relatively transparent clouds, where scientists can see heat that has been trapped since the planet formed leaking out into space.
The team also observed nearby galaxy M82, sometimes called the Cigar Galaxy, at 20 (blue), 32 (green) and 37 (red) micrometers. The infrared image sees through the gas and dust that chokes the visible light image to the galaxy’s warm core, where stars are being born. SOFIA is expected to fly for another 20 years, during which time it will help scientists study the composition and origins of stars, planets, comets and biogeneic materials in the interstellar medium. “A preliminary examination of the first light data shows that the images are in fact sharp enough to enable cutting-edge astronomy,” said Alfred Krabbe, Director and scientific head of DSI in a press release. “Now at last, the fun begins.” Jupiter Image: Anthony Wesley (visible), SOFIA (infrared) See Also:
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 1 Jun 2010 | 1:41 pm Phoenix Pterosaur Rises Again Out of the SaharaA new pterosaur, named after the mythological Phoenix, has been unearthed in the Sahara desert.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 1 Jun 2010 | 1:30 pm Brain Scan Lie-Detection Deemed Far From Ready for Courtroom
A landmark decision has excluded fMRI lie-detection evidence from a federal court case in Tennessee. The defense tried to use brain scans of the defendant to prove its client had not intentionally defrauded the government. In a 39-page opinion, Judge Tu Pham provided both a rebuke of this kind of fMRI evidence now, and a roadmap for how future defendants may be able to satisfy the Daubert standard, which governs the admissibility of scientific evidence. “It has no automatic binding force on any other court, but because it’s been so carefully done, it will very likely carry a lot of persuasive value,” said Owen Jones, a professor of law and biological sciences at Vanderbilt University, who observed the entire hearing. The specific facts of the Tennessee case revolve around whether defendant Lorne Semrau, CEO of two nursing home facilities, intentionally had his employees fraudulently fill out Medicare and Medicaid forms. Semrau claims he acted in good faith and that the government directions were unclear; the government argues his companies made an extra $3 million by marking up a variety of services beyond their assigned value. The brain scans were intended to show Semrau is telling the truth today about his behavior in the past.
As Jones pointed out to Wired.com in May, with the fMRI scans, “the defense is attempting to introduce evidence of the brain’s current assessment of the brain’s former mental state.” To get the brain scans into Federal court, the evidence had to meet the Daubert standard, so-named for the 1993 Supreme Court case that established rules for scientific testimony. Daubert has multiple prongs, but they don’t form a literal checklist: Judges are allowed to examine the evidence holistically. Judge Pham, who presided over this evidentiary hearing, summarized his reading of Daubert: Reasonable tests to apply and ideas to consider include “(1) whether the theory or technique can be tested and has been tested; (2) whether the theory or technique has been subjected to peer review and publication; (3) the known or potential rate of error of the method used and the existence and maintenance of standards controlling the technique’s operation; and (4) whether the theory or method has been generally accepted by the scientific community.” In walking through the use of fMRI in the case, the judge highlighted multiple areas where it did not meet the standard. First, he called attention to the difficulty of applying laboratory results about lying where the consequences of being caught are nonexistent, versus a real-world situation like the Semrau case. “While it is unclear from the testimony what the error rates are or how valid they may be in the laboratory setting, there are no known error rates for fMRI-based lie detection outside the laboratory setting, i.e. in the ‘real-world’ or ‘real-life’ setting,” Pham wrote in his decision. But Pham did not take his criticism too far. He could imagine, he wrote, that even if we didn’t know how well fMRI worked in the real-world, it could still be deemed admissible. “The court notes that potential or known error rates is but one factor under the Daubert analysis,” Pham wrote, “and that in the future, should fMRI-based lie detection undergo further testing, development, and peer review, improve upon standards controlling the technique’s operation, and gain acceptance by the scientific community for use in the real world, this methodology may be found to be admissible even if the error rate is not able to be quantified in a real world setting.” More damaging to Semrau’s case was that the neuroscience community has not accepted fMRI lie detection as ready for use in real-world situations. “No doubt in part because of its recent development, fMRI-based lie detection has not yet been accepted by the scientific community,” Pham plainly wrote. Pham was also less than impressed with the scientific methodology employed by Cephos, the company who conducted the lie-detection test. After Semrau failed one of the two tests he’d agreed to take, Cephos CEO Steven Laken retested him a third time, claiming his client had been tired. “Assuming, arguendo, that the standards testified to by Dr. Laken could satisfy Daubert, it appears that Dr. Laken violated his own protocols when he re-scanned Dr. Semrau,” Pham wrote. On balance, Hank Greely, Stanford law professor and co-director of the Law and Neuroscience Project, did not find Cephos’ case for its product’s scientific accuracy compelling. “It seems almost laughable that Cephos could parade this as a great method when, in this very case, they tried it three times and got one result twice and the other one once,” Greely wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. “In the only ‘real world’ test we’ve got evidence about, their accuracy rate was either 66.7 percent or 33.3 percent.” Finally, there was a small twist at the end of the Tennessee’s judge’s opinion where he cited a different evidentiary standard as a second basis for excluding the evidence, completely outside the scientific realm. Rule 403 of the Federal Rules of Evidence provides for the exclusion of evidence “on Grounds of Prejudice, Confusion, or Waste of Time.” In applying rule 403 to this case, Pham compared Semrau’s situation to the case law surrounding polygraphs that are obtained by defendants unilaterally, saying they presented “similar issues.” In those cases, courts did not look kindly on tests performed solely to bolster the credibility of the witness without both prosecution and defense having been involved. “Dr. Semrau risked nothing in having the testing performed, and Dr. Laken himself testified that had the results not been favorable to Dr. Semrau, they would have never been released,” Pham noted. Furthermore, and the judge quoted extensively from the prosecution’s cross-examination on this point, Cephos only claims to be able to offer a general impression of whether someone is being deceptive. While they ask dozens of individual questions, Laken admitted that his company’s method could not be used to tell whether someone was lying or telling the truth on any of specific facts. That is to say, Laken refused to say that Semrau was telling the truth to a question like, “Did you enter into a scheme to defraud the government by billing for AIMS tests conducted by psychiatrists under CPT Code 99301?” but was willing to say that Semrau was “more overall” telling the truth. Given the slipperiness of that method, “the court fails to see how his testimony can assist the jury in deciding whether Dr. Semrau’s testimony is credible,” Pham concluded. Laken’s unwillingness to testify to specific questions — and Pham’s acknowledgment of it — piqued Greely’s interest. “That’s a really interesting critique of the Cephos method — and one that none of us had really noticed before this testimony because we hadn’t realized that Laken would say that he couldn’t give an opinion on individual questions,” Greely said. “If that’s Laken’s final position, it makes a courtroom use of this technology seem unlikely.” All-in-all, the decision found multiple instances where fMRI evidence did not meet the standards of evidence in the United States. While that’s a victory for opponents of the use of fMRI in courts, like Greely, it might also offer proponents a clear path to shoring up the use of lie-detection scans. “There will certainly be further litigation over fMRI lie detection in future cases. I expect that the companies marketing this research for forensic purposes will likely conduct new tests in light of the report recommendation to address some of the articulated weaknesses,” Owen said. Image: flickr/Stephanie Asher The full decision is available below. See Also:
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 | 1 Jun 2010 | 1:20 pm US prepares for climate burdenNational summit paves way for concerted action on global warming.Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 1 Jun 2010 | 1:10 pm Jamestown Trash Reveals Struggling SettlementAn unusually long-lasting drought plagued early colonists of the first permanent British settlement in North America.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 1 Jun 2010 | 1:10 pm Acupuncture for miceStudy hints at biological mechanism for alternative therapy.Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 1 Jun 2010 | 12:57 pm A Deepwater Horizon Spill, Every YearThe oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico pales in comparison to epic scale of pollution in the Niger Delta in Nigeria, one of the richest oil and gas-producing regions in the world.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 1 Jun 2010 | 11:50 am Trafigura toxic waste trial opensDutch prosecutors accuse multi-national oil trading firm Trafigura of illegally exporting hazardous waste to Ivory Coast in 2006.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 1 Jun 2010 | 11:47 am Missing piece found in particle puzzleGENEVA (Reuters) - Research scientists announced on Monday they had identified the missing piece of a major puzzle involving the make-up of the universe by observing a neutrino particle change from one type to another.Source: Reuters: Science News | 1 Jun 2010 | 11:41 am Unearthed Trash at Jamestown Reveals Tough Times for Settlers
Oyster shells excavated from a well in Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent British settlement in North America, bolster the notion that the first colonists suffered an unusually deep and long-lasting drought.
Jamestown was established in 1607. The early years weren’t easy: Many accounts of Jamestown’s early settlers, including journal entries and letters home, chronicled the drought. So did the region’s trees, Spero says. Previous studies based on tree rings and original documents revealed that the first colonists’ arrival coincided with the beginning of a drought that included the driest seven-year interval in almost 800 years. “It was interesting trying to figure out what was happening in the colony at a time when 70 to 80 percent of the colonists were dying,” Spero says. “This was ‘CSI Jamestown’.”
Now, oysters independently confirm the tale from trees and historical accounts, comments William M. Kelso, an archaeologist at Preservation Virginia’s Jamestown Rediscovery project who was not involved in the study. “We’re getting a consistent story from science and the humanities,” he notes. “It’s pretty fantastic.” The telltale oysters were unearthed from a well that sat within the fort at Jamestown, about 100 yards from the river. Among other material dumped into the well, the shells came from three distinct layers up to 3.5 meters deep. The well’s water level originally sat deeper, at a depth of about 4 meters, so Spero and his colleagues suggest that the settlers abandoned the well — which either ran dry during the drought or was infiltrated by salty groundwater — and converted it into a trash pit. Historical accounts suggest that settlers dug the well sometime between 1609 and 1617, but items unearthed from the well narrow that window considerably, Spero says. For one thing, ratios of different forms, or isotopes, of oxygen in the shells suggest that the mollusks were harvested before the drought ended in late 1612. One archaeological artifact found beneath the oyster shells, a ceremonial item linked to a particular nobleman from England, couldn’t have been present in Jamestown before he arrived in June 1610 and probably wouldn’t have been discarded in the well until after that nobleman’s return to England in April 1611. That data, plus the pattern of isotope variations in the oyster shells — which reveal the season when those shells were harvested — hint that the mollusks were gathered and eaten between late fall 1611 and summer 1612. Analyses of the oyster shells have raised another mystery, Spero says. The oxygen-isotope ratios in the middle layer of shells are substantially different from those in the upper and lower layers, which other data suggest were gathered locally. That disparity indicates that the middle oysters, which were shucked in March and April of 1612, were gathered elsewhere, Spero says. Further analyses of trace elements in those shells should reveal whether the oysters were gathered in another part of the James River watershed or were collected elsewhere along the Mid-Atlantic coast and brought to Jamestown by sailors on an English supply ship. Image: Ruins at Jamestown, Virginia from “A pictorial description of the United States” (s.n., 1854), pg. 315./Robert Sears. See Also:
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 1 Jun 2010 | 11:01 am Temperatures reach record high in PakistanMeteorologists record a temperature of 53.7C (129F) in Mohenjo-daro as heatwave continues across Pakistan and India Mohenjo-daro, a ruined city in what is now Pakistan that contains the last traces of a 4,000-year-old civilisation that flourished on the banks of the river Indus, today entered the modern history books after government meteorologists recorded a temperature of 53.7C (129F). Only Al 'Aziziyah, in Libya (57.8C in 1922), Death valley in California (56.7 in 1913) and Tirat Zvi in Israel (53.9 in 1942) are thought to have been hotter. Temperatures in the nearest town, Larkana, have been only slightly lower in the last week, with 53C recorded last Wednesday. As the temperatures peaked, four people died, including a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder and an elderly woman. Dozens are said to have fainted. The extreme heat was exacerbated by chronic power cuts which have prevented people from using air-conditioning. The electricity has cut out for eight hours each day as part of a severe load-shedding regime that has caused riots in other parts of Pakistan where cities are experiencing a severe heatwave with temperatures of between 43C and 47C. "It's very tough," said M B Kalhoro, a local correspondent for Dawn.com, an online newspaper. "When the power is out, people just stay indoors all the time." The blistering heat now engulfing Pakistan stretches to India where more than 1,000 people have reportedly died of heatstroke or heart attacks in the last two months. Although Europe and China have experienced cooler than average winters, record or well-above average temperatures have been recorded in Tibet and Burma this year. Southern Europe was yesterday rapidly warming after a particularly cool winter. Thirteen provinces in southern Spain, including Andalucia, Murcia and the Canary islands, were put on "yellow alert" after meteorologists forecast temperatures rising to 38C (99F) in Cadiz, Córdoba, Jaén, Malaga and Seville. According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), the national climate monitoring service that measures global temperatures by satellite, 2010 is shaping up to be one of the hottest years on record. The first four months were the hottest ever measured, with record spring temperatures in northern Africa, south Asia and Canada. The global temperature for March was a record 13.5C (56.3F) and average ocean temperatures were also the hottest for any March since record-keeping began in 1880. As a result of high sea surface temperatures, the Atlantic hurricane season, which officially started today is now expected to be one of the most intense in years. Last week NOAA predicted 14 to 23 named storms, including eight to 14 hurricanes, three to seven of which were likely to be "major" storms, with winds of at least 111mph. This is compared to an average six-month season of 11 named storms, six of which become hurricanes, two of them major. On Sunday, scientists reported that Africa's Lake Tanganyika, the second deepest freshwater lake in the world, is now at its warmest in 1,500 years, threatening the fishing industry on which several million lives depend. The lake's surface waters, at 26C (78.8F), have reached temperatures that are "unprecedented since AD500," they reported in the journal Nature Geoscience. Some scientists have suggested that the warming experienced around the world this year is strongly linked to warmer than usual currents in the Pacific Ocean, a regular phenomenon known as El Niño. Others say that it is consistent with long-term climate change. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 1 Jun 2010 | 10:53 am Friday News Feedbag for May 28, 2010If this is your first exposure to the Friday News Feedbag... we're glad to have you in the club. Welcome to Feedbag Nation, which stems from our weekly science news podcast that you can subscribe to here on iTunes and ...Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 1 Jun 2010 | 10:50 am Surviving the AntarcticA new digital library brings some of the world's most incredible tales of adventure and survival at sea available with the click of your mouse.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 1 Jun 2010 | 10:07 am Animal Screams Manipulate Movie AudiencesOne reason why "The Exorcist" and "The Shining" scared audiences so much is that both had a lot of animal screaming in the soundtracks.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 1 Jun 2010 | 10:07 am What's your accent? | Open threadWest Country, geordie, estuary, Morningside, RP – diversity abounds in the English spoken word. How do you speak? The Guardian's David Marsh writes today about a US archive of 1,300 English speakers uttering the same paragraph. Here on Cif we can't hear your vowel sounds. What do you sound like? Phonetic renderings of your speech are allowed, if not encouraged … guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 1 Jun 2010 | 9:00 am
|
