Quiz: name that synonym! | Mind your language

Jamie Fahey: Now you know your popular orange vegetables from your war-torn republics, can you work out what these phrases refer to?

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 1 Jun 2011 | 5:55 am

Vigorous exercise strengthens hip bones in young children

Researchers in the UK have presented evidence that vigorous physical activity in young children results in stronger hip bones.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Jun 2010 | 3:00 pm

Adolescent brains biologically wired to engage in risky behavior, study finds

There are biological motivations behind the stereotypically poor decisions and risky behavior associated with adolescence, psychologists reveal.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Jun 2010 | 3:00 pm

Most kidney dialysis patients not prepared for emergency evacuation, study finds

A survey of kidney dialysis patients finds that most have not taken the emergency preparedness measures that would enable them to survive a hurricane or any other disaster that disrupts power and water services.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Jun 2010 | 3:00 pm

Lead in ammunition contaminates game meat

Eating the meat of animals hunted using lead ammunition can be more dangerous for health than was previously thought, especially for children and people who consume large quantities.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Jun 2010 | 3:00 pm

Robots big and small showcase their skills

Two robotics events were designed to prove the viability of advanced technologies for robotic automation of manufacturing and microrobotics.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Jun 2010 | 3:00 pm

Body's own proteins may lead the way in global fight against tuberculosis

Scientists hope to counter the re-emerging threat of tuberculosis with help from proteins within our bodies. In new research, scientists show how the protein CCL5 plays a protective role in helping the body ward off TB in early stages of infection. CCL5 is a member of a large family of proteins responsible for immune cell migration toward infection sites.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Jun 2010 | 3:00 pm

Scientists break barrier to creating potential therapeutic molecules

Scientists have created a novel technique that for the first time will allow the efficient production of a molecular structure that is common to a vast array of natural molecules. This advance provides a means to explore the potential of this molecular substructure in the search for new therapies.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Jun 2010 | 9:00 am

Making enough red blood cells: Scientists identify molecules that ensure red blood cell production

Scientists have identified two small RNA molecules which ensure that enough red blood cells are produced efficiently, by fine-tuning a number of different genes involved in this process.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Jun 2010 | 9:00 am

Newborn and carrier screening for spinal muscular atrophy now possible, say scientists

Scientists studying spinal muscular atrophy have concluded that the technology now exists to carry out nationwide screening of newborn children and pregnant mothers. The study reveals that effective screening may allow parents to find proactive treatments before the symptoms become irreversible.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Jun 2010 | 9:00 am

Oil spill puts commercially significant cold-water reefs in peril

Thousands of barrels of oil are leaking out of the Deepwater Horizon site each day. The oil ascends from depths of approximately 1502 m. (4928 ft.), but not all of it reaches the sea surface. The stratified seawater of the Gulf of Mexico captures or slows the ascent of the oil, and the addition of dispersants near the oil source produces tiny droplets that float for a considerable time in the water column and may never reach the surface. According to a group of Florida researchers, the oil that remains in suspension in the water column and creates plumes poses a serious risk for the planktonic and benthic (sea floor) life throughout the region, including the deep-sea reefs they study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Jun 2010 | 9:00 am

BP cap catches '10,000 barrels'

BP's latest bid to cap a ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico is now capturing more than half the estimated leak, it tells the BBC.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 6 Jun 2010 | 4:18 am

Oil spill cap catching about 10,000 barrels a day: BP (AFP)

AFP - BP's oil spill cap, designed to stop a huge leak from a ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico, is currently catching around 10,000 barrels a day, its chief executive Tony Hayward told the BBC Sunday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Jun 2010 | 3:52 am

Gulf containment cap closely watched in 2nd day (AP)

AP - A containment cap that sucked some of the oil from a blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico offered a small sign of progress for a region that has seen its wildlife coated in a lethal oil muck, its fishermen idled and its beaches tarnished by the nation's worst oil spill.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Jun 2010 | 3:26 am

Apologetic BP ads get criticism, not sympathy (AP)

AP - An apologetic advertising campaign by BP for causing the biggest oil spill in U.S. history has earned the company more criticism than sympathy as the pollution spreads across the Gulf Coast from Louisiana into Alabama and Florida.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Jun 2010 | 3:26 am

BP cap 'catching 10,000 barrels of oil a day' (AFP)

AFP - BP's oil spill cap, designed to stop huge leaks from a ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico, is currently catching around 10,000 barrels a day, the firm's chief executive Tony Hayward told the BBC Sunday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Jun 2010 | 3:12 am

How to Make a Bigger Black Hole Jet

Astronomers from NASA and MIT think they have found a way to explain the vast zoo of jets blasting from black holes in some active galaxies.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 5 Jun 2010 | 6:33 pm

Nuclear fusion dream hit by EU's cash dilemma

£1bn funding shortfall jeopardises hopes of producing cheap, non-polluting power

A £15bn international bid to harness the fusion process that powers the Sun is facing a major funding crisis. Scientists have revealed that the cost of the International Thermonuclear Experiment Reactor (Iter) has trebled from its original £5bn price tag in the past three years. At the same time, financial crises have beset all the nations involved in the project.

As a result, construction of Iter – at Cadarache in France – has already been pushed back from 2015 to 2019, and further delays are likely. Some scientists say there is a risk that the entire project could be cancelled.

Because it is hoped that fusion plants could one day supply the world with cheap, non-polluting power, the crisis facing Iter represents a substantial threat to plans to tackle the planet's energy and climate problems.

Much of Iter's difficulties stem from Europe, with the EU – which is struggling to prevent financial crisis spreading through its member states – having been warned last month that it will have to find an extra £1bn to plug a shortfall in construction funds by the end of next year.

An EU memo has called on the 27 member states to "provide the additional resources necessary" for the project, just as these nations are desperately trying to cut their own domestic budgets. "I think the momentum of the project may be in very deep trouble," one Iter scientist told the journal Nature last week. "Time is pressing."

Harnessing the process of nuclear fusion has been a scientific dream since the second world war. Unlike nuclear fission, which powers traditional nuclear reactors and which involves the splitting of uranium atoms, fusion involves combining atoms of hydrogen to create helium, a process that releases vast amounts of energy.

However, fusion occurs only at very high temperatures, and massive amounts of electricity are needed first to heat hydrogen isotopes – deuterium and tritium – to 100,000,000C so that fusion can take place. In addition, a powerful electromagnetic field has be generated to contain the superhot plasma that is created inside a fusion plant.

To date, all prototype fusion plants have consumed more energy than they have generated. Iter is intended to be the first that will actually make excess power and is intended to help scientists design a future generation of plants, each capable of generating as much electricity as a large nuclear reactor, but without producing large amounts of radioactive waste. Iter's chief executive officer, Kaname Ikeda, says: "It's an exciting project, the fruit of more than 50 years of research."

The Iter project is backed by most major industrial powers, including the US, Europe, Russia, China, South Korea and Japan. When plans were drawn up for its construction, two prospective sites were chosen, one at Cadarache and one at Rokkasho in Japan. To ensure that the project was built in Europe, the EU pledged to pay the largest slice of its construction – 45% – with the rest being shared among the five others. That move has now come back to haunt Europe.

"We need to build all the major buildings that will house the project and that money is needed now," said a spokesman for Iter. "The problem is that, when we looked at the detailed design of the project, it was found that costs had been badly underestimated. Now we are having to ask European Union member states to find that extra money at a time when they are having to cope with their own domestic financial problems. Yes, this is crisis, but I am sure that the project will still go ahead in the long run."

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

Space, the final frontier of Chinese news manipulation

Lecture gives Chinese public rare insight into way the state stage-manages events, including space exploration and riots

As the nation held its collective breath, China's first astronaut, Yang Liwei, floated back to the motherland, having orbited Earth 14 times in Shenzhou 5, or Divine Capsule. It was October 2003, and the national broadcaster carried live coverage of the momentous event, from Yang's famous pleasantries in space – "I feel good" – to the instant the capsule door opened to reveal the pale but smiling face of a hero, offering irrefutable evidence that China's maiden manned space voyage had gone off without a hitch. Or had it?

In a lecture he gave to a group of journalism students last month, a top official at Xinhua, the state news agency, said the mission was not so picture perfect. The official, Xia Lin, described how a design flaw had exposed the astronaut to excessive G-force pressure during re-entry, splitting his lip and drenching his face in blood. Startled but undaunted, workers quickly mopped up the blood, strapped him back in his seat and shut the door. Then, with cameras rolling, the cabin door swung open again, revealing an unblemished moment of triumph.

The content of Xia's speech, transcribed and posted online by someone who attended the lecture at Tianjin Foreign Studies University, has become a sensation, providing the Chinese a rare insight into how their news is stage-managed.

The speech was intended to help budding journalists understand Xinhua's dual mission: to give Chinese leaders a fast and accurate picture of current events and to deftly manipulate that picture for the public to ensure social harmony, and by extension, the Communist party's hold on power. Xia's journalism lecture included other examples of Xinhua's work, notably coverage of ethnic rioting in the far west of China last summer that left nearly 200 people dead.

Xia explained how Xinhua concealed the true horror of the unrest for fear that it would set off violence beyond Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region. Rioters burned bus passengers alive, he told the class, raped women and decapitated children.

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

Breaking news; The Reith Lectures; Micky Flanagan: What Chance Change? | Radio review

When it came to covering the Cumbria shootings, Radio 5 Live was far more immediate than its television counterparts, says Miranda Sawyer

Half-term and a sweet-scented, sun-drenched garden is an Agatha Christie-esque setting for tales of random murder. Tuning into The World at One on Wednesday, the first hot day of the week, you heard Martha Kearney warning everyone in the Lake District to stay indoors. From then on, I listened to 5 Live, with Rachel Burden, Richard Bacon, Peter Allan and Aasmah Mir gradually totting up information, in between analysis of the England World Cup football team (such is the weird world of 5 Live).

All did well, striking the right balance between news gathering and shock as to the grisliness of events, though one reporter, rushed to the scene from a city beat, got inappropriately overexcited as he told us that what he'd found striking about being in Cumbria on such a day was the sound of birdsong.

Other than that, however, 5 Live got it right. At 2pm, we were informed that the corpse of the gun man, Derrick Bird, had been found, in a boot. A car boot? No, in the village of Boot. Such Chinese whispers are the stuff of the internet: online news feeds insisted, for a while, that Bird had killed his mother, which he hadn't.

TV's response, meanwhile, seemed ponderous and silly. BBC1's six o'clock news gave us a correspondent who informed us that "people were walking down the road" before switching to irrelevant recaps of Hungerford and Dunblane. In contrast, 5 Live's six o'clock news was peppered with direct quotes from witnesses. Barrie Moss came face to face with Bird. "He had a massive sniper rifle," said Moss. "It was pointing down… he stared at me." It wasn't until the taxi driver drove off that Moss saw the body of a woman lying on the ground.

Let's turn our minds to loftier, less frighteningly human matters. The annual Reith Lectures started on Radio 4, with astronomer royal Martin Rees introduced by Sue Lawley, her bell-like tones ringing out like a 1950s schoolma'm. Rees was less arresting: not soporific exactly, but his cosy delivery did recall Oliver Postgate.

His first lecture was a stall set-out of how science interacts with the everyday. All a mite generalised for me, though there were shocking nuggets: on climate change, always a controversial scientific topic, Rees informed us that, indisputably, the amount of CO₂ in the earth's atmosphere is the highest it has been in a million years, "mostly due to the burning of fossil fuels". And it's rising.

The questions are always the best bit of the Reith Lectures and there were revealing digs from the audience about MMR and how to present the complexities of scientific argument to a public that wants "the right answer right now" (that from the always ace Lisa Jardine). Rees was reasonable throughout, if not exactly inspiring. Having read his next three lectures, I can say that he gets more political with his wishes, especially with reference to our collective approach to the CO₂ increase. Good on him.

Just time for a mention of Micky Flanagan's Radio 4 comedy series, What Chance Change? I saw Flanagan's stand-up recently and his riffs on life in the yummy mummy enclave of East Dulwich, south London, had the audience roaring. What Chance Change? takes that routine's premise – how strange it is for a boy from the markets in the East End to move up a social class – and expands on it.

It's excellent, funny and poignant, though you can't help feeling that Radio 4's traditional audience is not quite who Micky is aiming to inspire.

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

Anthill: a six-legged adventure from science to fiction

How leading biologist EO Wilson turned his passion for ants into a best-selling novel

EO Wilson, the world's most evolved biologist, has more than a passing interest in arguments about nature and nurture. He has, he tells me from his office at Harvard, often been asked what it was his parents gave him that made him what he has become. Wilson is now 81, and over the years he has given this question a good deal of thought. The answer he comes up with these days is this: "I had the early divorce of my mother and father when I was seven; I spent time at military school where I was very lonely; we moved around a lot; I would go out into the woods alone for adventure and very early on I became bonded with the natural world. What did my father and stepmother give me? Simple: they left me entirely alone. They let me walk out in the morning after breakfast and they didn't ask me where I was going, and when I got back for supper they didn't ask where I had been."

Far from being a source of dismay, Wilson regrets the fact that this kind of freedom has been lost to children in most of the developed world because parents "are so concerned about their kids fitting into an urban or suburban culture… there are almost no opportunities for a child to explore a universe that belongs to him or her alone." He mourns this not only because he believes that exploring the natural world is a fundamental stage of cognitive development that our brains have evolved to expect and need, but also because in the absence of this bonding, we are far more likely to misunderstand and abuse the ecology of which we are all a part.

The world that Wilson discovered for himself as a child was the swampland of Florida and Alabama, where he did most of his growing up. In his wonderful memoir Naturalist, he wrote of a kind of Wordsworthian "fair seed time for his soul" in which his sense of kinship with the world around him was fostered and nurtured in wilderness.

"By the time I was about 15 years old," he tells me, "I had a swamp of my own, near a small town called Brewton, Alabama. It was my own tract, which no one knew about, no one had explored and it was wild enough country around there that I never saw another soul; I could spend hundreds of hours out there collecting insects and snakes, studying them, letting them go; it was a constant surround of experience that was always new, and it gave me a sense of wonder in which I would lose myself completely. That was the period when I first knew I would spend a lifetime devoted to doing science."

That lifetime has mostly involved the comprehensive study of a particular world that first intrigued him way back when: the world of ants. Much of what we know about social insects and the "superorganism" of the hive and nest has been a result of Wilson's research and observation. Over six decades and 20 books he has detailed every aspect of ant societies: how they divide labour and spread knowledge, how they mate and fight, live and die. Wilson has used this wisdom – "sociobiology" – to make arguments about genetics and conditioning that have applications thoughout the living world, and which extend to our understanding of human nature and society. Much of that wisdom he has now brought to bear on Anthill, his debut novel, which has at its heart an extraordinary ant's eye view of the world, a social realist book-within-a-book of the rise and fall of a particular ant colony.

The novel was something of a homecoming, returning the biologist, along overgrown neural pathways, to that Alabama swampland of his teenage awakening. In the 59 years he has been at Harvard, Wilson says he has always felt "dissatisfied, incomplete even" to have been uprooted from his southern home. "Part of the ambition for the novel," he says, "was that it allowed me to close a circle and regain that childhood experience, which was very much like growing up in another country..."

In his book he reimagines his younger self in Raff Cody, a kind of Huck Finn figure, with a deep relationship with his environment, who leaves "Clayville, Alabama" only to return as a lawyer to fight the encroachment of the developers' bulldozers. Ecology, casually endangered by condominiums, comes to be represented in the novel by the ant colony. "I have written many books that are open polemics about our relationship with nature," Wilson explains. "What I ended up doing in Anthill was to lay a polemic into the foundation of the book. I tried to depict the remnant ecosystems, their importance, even their sacredness, and transmit that through the language of the novel. The great crisis for the American south is no longer civil rights but what is happening to the land, which is being gobbled up and built over."

The central section is an extraordinary act of what you might call species empathy, of the biologist imagining exactly what it is like to be an ant. Wilson invokes the poet Homer in his introduction, suggesting that ant "histories are epics that unfold on picnic grounds", in which "ants are a metaphor for us, and we for them." By concentrating on the struggles of the ant colony in this way, he makes the ecosystem virtually a character in the book, to which the ants give body and life.

Wilson sensed that this would work as effectively as it does "because ants are so complex in their societies, so intricate in the way they communicate and fight among themselves..."

He carefully avoids the temptations of anthropomorphism to give vivid insight into the life of the threatened nest, its anxieties and its battles. Did he ever fear he was risking his sober scientific credentials, I wonder, in this leap of imagination?

He laughs. "There was a point that I realised I was pushing it," he says, "when I tried to work out how to convey that ants could be conscious of their predicament in the way of remembering the previous year's experiences. And I suppose I gave them recognisable emotions, at least in the sense that emotion – anxiety, anger – is energised into activity. I waited for the response from my more literal- minded entomologist colleagues, but so far nothing has come back but praise..."

Wilson knows that we underestimate ant societies at our – and the planet's – peril. The manifold ant species, evolved over 100 million years, represents nearly two thirds of the world's entire insect biomass. "An individual ant has a brain one millionth the size of our brain, but still they are capable of quite complicated behaviour," Wilson suggests and goes on to explain how "many ant species are capable of learning a maze about half as fast as a rat." Or how "they can retain five locations where they can get food, and they can recall how to get there, and retain what time of day the food is offered if it comes regularly." In addition to that, of course, there is such a thing as the mind of the colony, which has been utilised by computer designers and brain scientists, at least as a metaphor. Each ant nest has a distributed intelligence that fits together through complex interactions to become a communal will. "If you have a group of ants that are foraging," Wilson says, "that group has, in its communal mind, a pretty clear idea of every square inch of the terrain around the nest. Then there is a lot of experience in the colony among ants who only nurse larvae, or who only build the nest, or who only manage disposal of the dead. If you put all that together and grant that ants can communicate knowledge very quickly with pheromones [their complex hormonal language of scent] then what you've got is a super organism, an impressive community..."

In explaining what a superorganism is, Wilson has in the past created a set of "functional parallels" between an individual human organism and the superorganism that is an ant colony. In this model individual ants function like cells, and experience a comparable mortality rate: depending upon the species, perhaps 10% of the entire worker population of a colony dies each day. The more specialised ant batallions – nurses, farmers, soldiers, and queens – have a correlation to our organs: the queen ant, almost stationary throughout her life, lays dozens of eggs every minute for all of her decade-long life, much like our own reproductive organs. The Anthill chronicle begins, dramatically, with the death of the queen and the subsequent, almost Shakespearean, tumult that event unleashes on the life of the colony. The parallels between ant colony and man extend into genetics: Wilson has argued persuasively that not only is a co-operative spirit of altruism hard-wired, but also an aggressive war-mongering capacity; "within those two facts we see the whole human dilemma," he says, now, in passing.

Novels, I suggest, have always been much concerned with fate, with the ways in which character dictates biography. Has our understanding of genetics given a proper scientific basis to that authorial design?

"In the broad cycles of life I think it has," he says. "Obviously as individuals we have choices, but this is a biological world and we are constrained in many ways. Considering it statistically against human limitations, I think fate is a useful term to work with…"

Alongside those dry inevitabilities, however, Wilson has clearly never lost his ingrained sense of amazement at the complexities of the worlds he divides his time between – the "brainy anthill" of Harvard Yard, and the workaholic ingenuity of the superorganism. Have any of these things, I wonder, become less strange and magical to him the longer he has studied them?

"I think people who have spent their lives studying social insects remain full of wonder," he says, "but I have been doing this since I was 16, and I'm now 81, and I feel I know ants well enough to not be surprised at least by what their limits are collectively and individually..."

He talks of the "sacred" element of their existence and survival – does that translate to a spiritual, even religious impulse in him?

He answers as a biologist: "I think science is in the process of hollowing out traditional organised religion," he says. "There will be a residue of spirituality, which appears to have a genetic basis. Group selection in human beings has led to a genetic predisposition to empathy, to a greater degree of understanding in social relations. And to altruism. We won't lose the impulse to spirituality, but it is my hope that it develops as a kind of ecological sense…"

Wilson has always given nature a capital "n"; though it is clearly based in teeming diversity, does he see nature as always working toward harmony?

"When you have studied these systems for as long as I have," he says, "and even experimented on ecosystems, back in the 60s, removing life and watching it be replaced, you see that there is such a thing as equilibrium. Individual species may come and go, and there is a continual sweeping up and down, and abundancies of certain species, so when you look at it closely it seems chaotic. But if you take it as a whole it is remarkably stable."

He has just returned from a field trip to an ancient forest, in the north of Florida, not too far from the landscape of his book. "It is moist and cool and has been since the last ice age. In that ravine is a relict northern forest, the same one that was there 10,000 years ago. You realise when you see it from that perspective that nature does endure far longer than any human societies do, and that must be a source of – how shall I put it? – spiritual consolation."

This consolation seems more than enough to keep Wilson going. I don't imagine he is a biblical scholar, but he seems to have long taken to heart that line from Proverbs: "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise." With his first novel entrenched in the New York Times bestseller lists he is about to embark on a book- length argument that will, he suggests, overturn conventional thinking on the origins of altruism. I guess he is never lost, in his work, for examples of industry. "I think I am a workaholic," he says. "I'm not ashamed. As you know, we workaholics, we run the world and turn the wheels…"

Anthill: A Novel, by EO Wilson, is published by Norton

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

Sinotympana incomparabilis

This entirely new genus and species of cicada from southern China was discovered among specimens at the Institut Royal des Sciences naturelles de Belgique in Brussels

Sinotympana incomparabilis is a new genus and species of cicada. Although from southern China, the new species was discovered among unidentified specimens in the Institut Royal des Sciences Naturelles de Belgique, Brussels. Most insect songs, for example in crickets and kadydids, are produced by stridulation – rubbing two body parts together. Male cicadas, in contrast, "sing" by rapidly vibrating special ribbed membranes on their exoskeleton called tymbals. Their noise is unusually loud, as a result of amplification by internal resonance chambers, and can reach 120 decibels in some species. Both males and females hear the songs via another set of membranes called tympana. The life cycle of this Chinese species is not yet known, but most cicadas live two to five years. In the extreme case of certain periodic cicadas, synchronized broods emerge once each 13 or 17 years.

International Institute for Species Exploration, Arizona State University

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

GM lobby helped draw up crucial report on Britain's food supplies

Email trail shows how biotech group helped watchdog to draw up analysis of GM crops ... and prompted two advisers to quit

A powerful lobbying organisation representing agribusiness interests helped draft a key government report that has been attacked by environmentalists for heavily favouring the arguments of the genetically modified food industry.

The revelation comes after the resignation of two government advisers who have criticised the close relationship between the Food Standards Agency (FSA), the body that oversees the UK's food industry, and the GM lobby.

Emails between the FSA and the Agricultural Biotechnology Council (ABC) show the council inserted key sentences strengthening the case for GM food that ended up in the final report.

The report, "Food Standards Agency work on changes in the market and the GM regulatory system", examines how GM products are entering the UK, where the growing of GM products is banned, through the animal feed system. It acknowledges food prices could go up if GM products continue to be excluded.

Emails from the council – which represents leading GM food companies such as Monsanto and Bayer – to Dr Clair Baynton, the then head of novel foods at the FSA, show a close dialogue between both sides between 2008 and August 2009, when the report was published.

On 19 November 2008, Baynton sent the council a draft of the report, saying: "I am happy to discuss… if that would be helpful."

In response, the council suggested a series of changes that emphasised how GM food was playing an increasingly important role in global agriculture and helping bring down food prices. Some of the amendments were rejected by the FSA, but others were accepted.

One accepted alteration acknowledged the GM lobby's argument that GM food is inevitable in the European Union because of its ubiquity elsewhere. It stated that "retailers were concerned they may not be able to maintain their current non-GM sources of supply as producers increasingly adopt GM technology around the world".

And the FSA also accepted the suggested amendment that soya protein (which can be grown as a GM crop) remains "the most cost-effective method of supplementing animal feed at present". Baynton replied a few days later: "Many thanks for your comments on the draft report", and asked the council for help in finding evidence of the prevalence of GM foods, "either authorised or being considered for authorisation in Argentina, Brazil and the US".

Months later, the council sent Baynton, a former employee of GM food producer Syngenta, a list of whom it wanted on a steering group overseeing a "public engagement exercise" on GM food. The email stated: "We believe GM must be presented as an option within the wider context of food security as part of a solution to feeding a growing population."

The FSA was due to start the public engagement exercise, which is expected to cost the taxpayer £500,000, this month. But the move is being seen in some quarters as a "rigged" exercise.

Two members who sit on the FSA's steering group have resigned in protest. Dr Helen Wallace, director of Genewatch UK, a scientific pressure group opposed to GM, stepped down last month. Last week, the group's vice-chairman, Professor Brian Wynne, an expert on public engagement with science, resigned, complaining that the FSA had adopted a "dogmatically entrenched", pro-GM attitude.

Wallace said the emails "expose how the Food Standards Agency is acting as a puppet of the GM industry, by colluding with foreign GM companies to undermine people's access to GM-free food supplies in Britain". The FSA is chaired by former Labour minister Lord Rooker, a GM enthusiast, who has attacked its critics as "anti-science".

A confidential bid document to win the contract to run the engagement exercise, submitted by the polling company Ipsos MORI, acknowledges the sensitivity of the initiative. "There will be no active seeking of media interest in relation to this project," it explains.

The bidding document states that it works on behalf of a "multinational agro-chemical and seed company" and warns: "Campaign organisations who may feel that the 'battle' was won in 2003 could decide to try and hijack the process to ensure GM food does not get a chance to be reintroduced into the UK."

An FSA spokesman defended its decision to include the GM lobby's suggested changes in the final report.

"In order to obtain an accurate picture of the situation, the FSA held a series of meetings with stakeholders before drafting this report," the spokesman said. "As the report was concerned with the markets for food and animal feed, the biotech industry had not been involved in these meetings. However, in order to ensure the report was balanced and not to exclude this relevant stakeholder group, the view of the ABC was also sought. Their comments were taken on board in the final draft, as were the comments by other stakeholders."

But Wallace was critical of the decision. "The stakeholder meeting was transparent – the changes made behind the scenes at the industry's request were not," she said. "The report fails to represent the vast majority of GM-free farmers, who will have to pay a heavy price if their crops or seed are allowed to become contaminated with GM crops or seed."

The row came as the environment secretary, Caroline Spelman, who used to work as director of a biotech lobbying firm, said that she was in favour of GM foods "in the right circumstances".

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 5 Jun 2010 | 5:04 pm

The Big Personality Test: A Child of Our Time Special; Genius of Britain; The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister; Britain's Got Talent; BBC News | Television review

Britain had plenty of talent and genius but it was mainly to be found on BBC2 and Channel 4

Poor old BBC1, trying so hard, burdened by so much money. The week began badly for them, as so many seem to, with Robert Winston and Sophie Raworth trying to present something about personality. How the corporation loves these Big Tests which purport to offer you some big conclusion about the Way We Are, but in the end hint only at small things, very few of them pleasant, about the smugness of the producer's lazy knowing smile in the pub the night he got it commissioned.

In The Big Personality Test we were meant to be finding out, I think, how personalities shape our lives; inherent personality rather than, say, geography or upbringing. I say "I think" because it was impossible to really find out; impossible, almost, to think. There were hordes of children in the studio having to run from one side to another as expensive graphics popped up shouting out slogans of nebulous cod psychology, linked only, apparently, by their hatefulness: "High in openness/ Low in conscientiousness" and the like. As so often, the more the "creatives" were allowed to have a hand in explaining, the more complicated it all got: see the recent interactive graphs at election time. At one point the children had to get in lifts, to show how one thing was rising while another did something else: then they all had to open coloured umbrellas for a bird's-eye panning camera to show which way they had voted, or something. I tried to understand, honestly, but would have had more chance if a large clever ant had come round to draw a couple of little lines in HB on a pad of paper for me.

As so often these days, to feel treated like a grown-up you had to ski across to Channel 4, which gave us an utterly splendid week on science entitled Genius of Britain, and did so by letting grown-up people talk. Admittedly, they were very good grown-up people. Even James Dyson. I have always entertained a gentle and entirely unscientific dislike of Mr Dyson, possibly because – not really his fault – he seems to come high in those depressing men's mag surveys asking the kind of men who read men's mags who they'd like to be, after of course Richard Branson, and possibly because I don't think his hoovers are that brilliant. I wanted, of course, to say that he sucked. But his passion and lucidity when describing the life, setbacks and breakthroughs of, among others, Frank Whittle, was awesome. The other presenters were equally impressive, talking with similar passion of the likes of Brunel, Faraday, Turing and James Clerk Maxwell, and talking in such a way as to express refreshingly exuberant disregard for stupid people, ie unafraid to explain neurons, or the aerodynamics of propellers, or the simple beauty of Maxwell's light/ electricity/ magnetism equations, in words and occasional simple graphics, rather than shouting "Look look, durr-brain, colour colour shiny shiny" at us. Jim Al-Khalili, Kathy Sykes, Richard Dawkins, all are natural presenters as well as roughly OK scientists, which was an interesting discovery in itself.

This series told us little new about any of the individual thinkers. Its genius lay in linking and counter-linking all their developments, showing, for the first time, how few of them could have done it alone, and how passionate scientific cooperation and synergy – Maxwell's equations, influenced by Faraday, leading to Marconi: Kelvin's transatlantic telegraph needing Brunel's boat to lay it. An absurd delight of a series. How could I understand all of this so easily, almost (as ever) to the point of understanding relativity, yet still not know what that BBC1 programme with the kids was, actually, at all, about? And don't say it's because I'm a durr-brain.

Maxine Peake's face, even her name, were simply made for playing Anne Lister (BBC2), the land-owning Yorkshire entrepreneur and predatory Regency lesbian – yes, that old cliched couplet – whose story made the drama of the week. Lister detailed, in her diaries, with a reasonably complex code of Greek and algebraic characters for all the naughty bits, how she had seduced about half the society ladies of the day, for love and, from time to time, for profit.

This story gripped, and haunted, and was beautifully and cleverly played, and had me wondering furiously how we'd never heard it before, which was why it was so welcome to have bright old Sue Perkins pop up afterwards with a little documentary. Anne's codes had, it turned out, been broken a good few times by researchers down successive generations. But the mores of Victoriana, pulling its shrouds over Yorkshire society in the immediate aftermath of Anne, and of course the equally upright hypocrisies of the 1930s, meant they kept being re-stifled, and it wasn't until the 1980s that we were allowed to know this awesome and surprising story, Sometimes these tagged-on post-drama documentaries can slightly annoy, but this illuminated hugely, and made me think, as with every history programme I've seen, how much less I know than I thought I knew about history.

The early semis of Britain's Got Talent (ITV1) were illuminating too, in an odd way: I realised I had the capacity to feel sympathy for Simon Cowell. Everyone's still going through the paces, and the pretence, and there's still at the time of writing a chance that some genuine talent will pop up by the weekend. But the look on Simon's face, earlier in the week, as he sat through a succession of copyist dance troupes, a man chopping wood, someone gobbing up a swallowed ring, a geriatric leprechaun: all grand fun, far more so than just finding a chap who can hold a note – but Simon may as well have had a huge sign above his head. My God. I. Have. Created. A. Monster.

Not just BBC1's fault here, they're all at it, but, still, their news coverage on Wednesday night managed to be both professional and hard-working (the reporters in Cumbria) yet utterly wrong-headed (the producers, and those corporate training courses which rob reporters of initiative, or the power of thoughtful analysis). Broadcasting of these types of awful events began to go awry a good decade ago, when those with the furry microphones started asking "How do you feel?" rather than "What do you think?", and that was bad enough; but, now, we can't get 10 minutes into any big story without a third question being posed, sometimes insidiously: whom can we blame?

Here, we had frankly way too much talk about the number of helicopters allocated to the Cumbrian emergency services. Questions were asked, either rhetorically or of weary police spokesmen: should they have asked, years before, for more helicopters? Well, yes, obviously, if two things were the case. If a handful more choppers could have somehow spotted and stopped Derrick Bird more easily than a host of police running, driving, communicating on the ground, then yes. And if the police authority, during the 2005 budgeting round, had somehow divined: we probably need more helicopters, to stop that guy killing all those people in Whitehaven in five years' time, then of course yes.

It's why we love the BP story – easy blame – but hated the eruption of Mount Unpronounceable. Sometimes, with these stories, you surely have to accept that the unconscionable has happened; but that is, once in a while, what unconscionable things do: happen, and no one else is to blame. Reporters should be allowed to think this, and when asked, from the studio, more or less subtly, "Whom can we blame?" answer: "The killer. The anger in and madness of the killer. No one else." The writer John O'Farrell entitled one of his books I Blame the Scapegoats; entitled it wittily, yes, but I wonder if he knew how presciently.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 5 Jun 2010 | 5:04 pm

Flood situation critical in Hungary (AFP)

AFP - Several thousands of people were still stranded Saturday in northern Hungary as the flooding situation remained critical after over a month of near-continuous rainfall, authorities said.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Jun 2010 | 1:21 pm

Butterfly Effect Could Improve Security of Money (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Scientists have reproduced the brilliant optical effect of tropical butterfly wings. The advance could lower bank fraud by leading to improved security in the printing of paper money.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Jun 2010 | 12:45 pm

How Early Earth Got Warm and Hospitable (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - Our planet might have kept warm in the super-ancient past when the sun was substantially dimmer than it is today because of a complex brew of global warming gases much like that now enveloping Saturn's moon Titan, scientists reveal.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Jun 2010 | 11:01 am

Washable Keyboards Could Squash Germs in Hospital ERs

turns out that the most germ-infested keyboards in a hospital ER were in non-treatment areas. Washable keyboards there could cut down on the bugs for better staff and patient safety.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Jun 2010 | 8:43 am

S. American critter found sleeping on Ill. porch (AP)

AP - A small, furry, long-tailed critter found napping on a Chicago porch is apparently more than 2,000 miles away from where it belongs. Animal control experts said an exotic kinkajou was found sleeping Thursday in the city's Pilsen neighborhood. Nobody knew what it was until Lincoln Park Zoo experts identified it.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Jun 2010 | 8:43 am

Deadly Superbug's CPU Found

A central processing unit (CPU) of the superbug's weaponry is found.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Jun 2010 | 7:36 am

Walt Whitman Meteor Mystery Solved by Astronomer Sleuths (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - The long-standing mystery over exactly what famed poet Walt Whitman saw streaking though the sky 150 years ago has apparently been solved by a team of bookworm astronomers.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Jun 2010 | 6:31 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Severe weather was expected to stretch from the Midwest into New England on Saturday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Jun 2010 | 3:06 am