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

Helping hearts, spinal cords and tendons heal themselves

A Canadian researcher is hoping that in about 10 years a tendon, spinal cord or heart valve will be able to regenerate itself after an injury or disease. The chemical engineer is currently trying to develop microscopic polymer fibers to help rebuild human tissue and speed the healing process.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jun 2010 | 12:00 pm

Plastic antibody works in first tests in living animals

Scientists are reporting the first evidence that a plastic antibody -- an artificial version of the proteins produced by the body's immune system to recognize and fight infections and foreign substances -- works in the bloodstream of a living animal. The discovery, they suggest, is an advance toward medical use of simple plastic particles custom tailored to fight an array of troublesome "antigens."
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jun 2010 | 12:00 pm

Sleep preference can predict performance of Major League Baseball pitchers

In early games that started before 7 p.m., the earned run average (ERA) of pitchers who were morning types (3.06) was lower than the average ERA of pitchers who were evening types (3.49); however, in games that started at 7 p.m. or later, pitchers who were evening types performed slightly better (4.07 ERA) than morning types (4.15 ERA). The study involved 18 pitchers from five MLB teams, using the players' statistics from the 2009 season.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jun 2010 | 12:00 pm

'Instant acid' method offers new insight into nanoparticle dispersal in the environment and the body

Using a chemical trick that allows them to change the acidity of a solution almost instantly, researchers have demonstrated a simple and effective technique for quantifying how the stability of nanoparticle solutions change when the acidity of their environment suddenly changes.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jun 2010 | 12:00 pm

Bacteria converted into ‘mini-factories’ for biofuels and vaccines

Scientists have manipulated simple bacteria into constructing internal compartments where biofuels and vaccines can be produced. These micro-compartments eventually occupy almost 70 percent of the available space in a bacteria cell, enabling segregation of metabolic activities and, in the era of synthetic biology, representing an important tool by which defined micro-environments can be created for specific metabolic functions.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jun 2010 | 12:00 pm

New type of human stem cell may be easier to manipulate

Researchers have a developed a new type of human pluripotent stem cell that can be manipulated more readily than currently available stem cells.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jun 2010 | 12:00 pm

Single-molecule devices can serve as powerful new science tools

With controlled stretching of molecules, researchers have demonstrated that single-molecule devices can serve as powerful new tools for fundamental science experiments. Their work has resulted in detailed tests of long-existing theories on how electrons interact at the nanoscale.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jun 2010 | 9:00 am

Making cancer killers: Reprogramming immune system cells to produce natural killer cells for cancer

A team of researchers has developed a method to produce cells that kill tumor cells in the lab and prevent tumors forming in mouse models of cancer. Although the current work is in cells and mice, if the research transfers to human biology, the new type of cell could be a new source for cell-based anticancer therapies.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jun 2010 | 9:00 am

Potential new target for schizophrenia drugs identified

Scientists have identified a protein that boosts the signaling power of a receptor involved in relaying messages between brain cells, a finding that suggests a new target for the development of treatments for schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease. The protein, called Norbin, directly interacts with a receptor for the neurotransmitter glutamate, which is critical to the process by which individual brain cells send messages to one another and plays a key role in learning and memory.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jun 2010 | 9:00 am

Polyphenols in red wine and green tea halt prostate cancer growth, study suggests

In what could lead to a major advance in the treatment of prostate cancer, scientists now know exactly why polyphenols in red wine and green tea inhibit cancer growth. This new discovery explains how antioxidants in red wine and green tea produce a combined effect to disrupt an important cell signaling pathway necessary for prostate cancer growth.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jun 2010 | 9:00 am

Japan unfurls solar sail in orbit

Japanese scientists celebrate the successful deployment of their solar sail Ikaros.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 11 Jun 2010 | 4:18 am

Scientists wait in Outback for Japanese spacecraft (AP)

AP - Scientists camping out in the Australian Outback this weekend will be eagerly scanning the night sky for the long-delayed return of the first spacecraft to complete a round-trip journey to an asteroid.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Jun 2010 | 4:02 am

Comets 'have extra-solar origin'

Many famous comets, including Halley and Hale-bopp, may have formed in other Solar Systems, a new theory proposes.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 11 Jun 2010 | 3:54 am

BP spill 'double early estimates'

The BP oil spill may have sent twice as much leaking into the Gulf of Mexico as previously thought, US experts estimate.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 11 Jun 2010 | 3:50 am

Just like pelicans, people can't avoid oil either (AP)

AP - So the Gulf oil spill has you ready to quit petroleum cold turkey? Louisiana's brown pelicans have more of a chance of avoiding Big Oil than you do.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Jun 2010 | 3:38 am

With each look at oil flow, the numbers get worse (AP)

AP - With each new look by scientists, the oil spill just keeps looking worse.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Jun 2010 | 3:28 am

UK backing lifts BP shares but spill looks worse (Reuters)

Reuters - Supportive comments from the UK government lifted BP Plc's battered shares on Friday, outweighing news that the British oil company's Gulf of Mexico spill is much bigger than previously estimated.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Jun 2010 | 3:16 am

Fabric of Reality: Beyond the realms of imagination

There are moments in The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch (Penguin, 1998) when Tim Radford felt perilously out of his depth. But the adventure was exhilarating

From Friday 16 July, the club will be discussing Naturalist by EO Wilson (Island Press, 2006)

All good books test the imagination. When you open them you must imagine for yourself Raymond Chandler's rainy Los Angeles in the 1930s, or Terry Pratchett's turtle-backed Discworld. You cannot in reality go to either place, but in another sense you can.

This book is different. It requires you to imagine a truly unimaginable world, which turns out to be the one that you already inhabit.

On page 44 of the Penguin edition, David Deutsch describes the interference pattern from a single photon passing through a single slit and infers from this experiment "the existence of a seething, prodigiously complicated, hidden world of shadow photons" and goes on from that to further infer "a huge number of parallel universes, each similar in composition to the tangible one, and each obeying the same laws of physics, but differing in that the particles are in different positions in each universe."

Welcome to the multiverse. This isn't the same multiverse as the other one you've been told about. In that one, brand-new universes spontaneously bud off from each other, so many bubbles in the champagne fountain of eternity. Some of these bubble universes are snuffed out swiftly and some last ever such a long time, and some might even be hospitable to intelligent life. But we could never know anything about any of the others, only this one.

Deutsch's multiverse is different. It is co-incident with, somehow contiguous with, and weakly interacting with, this one. It is a composite, a layer cake, a palimpsest of universes very similar but not quite identical to each other.

The number of these shadow universes is enormous (on page 44 Deutsch reasons from the one-photon experiment that there must be a trillion of them, and later in the book airily invites a quantum computational calculation involving 10⁵⁰⁰ universes, which is another number I cannot imagine.

But my inadequate imagination is my problem, not his: Deutsch has thought through what he wants to say about the nature of the reality we share, and he makes his points with patience and clarity. He wants not to explain the universe, but to understand it: to understand everything. And there are several eerie moments in this book when you think that he might, just might, be about to convince you that you, too, could follow his reasoning.

He addresses Darwin and Dawkins and makes a profound and fresh case for saluting the importance of life. The mass of the human brain may be trifling but the knowledge it contains encompasses the universe and the notion of at least a trillion others. Knowledge is not a simple thing, and it is not passive. The knowledge implicit in DNA, and all the environmental niches that are host to evolutionary life, has shaped the world, and will reshape it.

Deutsch plays beautifully with the Newtonian and the commonsense concepts of time (both of which are wrong and of course he is hardly the first to say so) and although at the end of this section this reader was still confused about the nature of time, Deutsch's summation is almost serenely clear. "Time does not flow. Other times are just special cases of other universes."

This is a deep and ambitious book and there were plenty of moments when I was out of my depth (the Platonic dialogue between Deutsch and a Crypto-inductivist left me with a pronounced sinking feeling). But the sheer adventure of thinking not just out of the envelope but right out of the Newtonian universe is exhilarating.

The chapter on time travel is a delight, although I was a little thrown by the line "Future-directed time travel, which essentially requires only efficient rockets, is on the moderately distant but confidently foreseeable technological horizon," in which almost every word demands a gloss, footnote or qualification.

That said, he becomes wonderfully clear when he addresses the Grandfather Paradox. No time traveller can visit Shakespeare's time clutching a copy of the Complete Works, and help a struggling author to complete Hamlet. Or rather he can, but in the multiverse view the traveller has not come from the future of that copy of Shakespeare.

This book wasn't my idea – it was suggested by the club member TopTroll – but I am delighted by the choice. Terms such as quantum computing, virtual reality, Turing machines, mathematics, induction and epistemology all have acquired fresh meaning and palpable importance.

And just as you begin to think The Fabric of Reality will conclude with a somewhat solemn philosophical summation about the fabric of reality, it changes course, and makes a cheerful study of Frank Tipler's 1995 vision of the final collapse of the universe, The Physics of Immortality.

Tipler proposed the big crunch as the Omega point, a moment near the end of spacetime in which those characteristics identified with God – omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence – will fleetingly be possible, along with the resurrection of the dead.

One guesses they won't be possible, but what a brilliant vehicle for a climactic ending to Deutsch's book. A study that brings together the multiverse of physics, mathematics, computation, epistemology, philosophy, history, evolution and time travel closes with the biggest bringing-together of all time, right at the end of space and time itself.

Now that's what I call a really big picture.

Next: Keep the suggestions coming, but since there have not been any lately, what about something creative from EO Wilson, novelist, entomologist and prophet of ecological disaster? His 1994 autobiography Naturalist may not be a science book in its strictest sense, but it is certainly a book about the making of a scientist.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 11 Jun 2010 | 2:51 am

Prehistoric pelican had big beak

Pelicans have sported big beaks for at least 30 million years, the discovery of the oldest known pelican fossil reveals.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 11 Jun 2010 | 2:27 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Stormy weather was forecast to persist in the Midwest on Friday, as a low pressure system pushed a warm front through the region.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Jun 2010 | 2:23 am

Asian rivers face mixed futures

Melting glaciers in the Himalayas will have varying impacts on food security the region's major river basins, a study says.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 11 Jun 2010 | 2:16 am

SKorea recovers possible debris from fallen rocket (AP)

AP - A South Korean navy ship on Friday recovered what is believed to be debris from a rocket that apparently blew up shortly after liftoff, as experts tried to find the cause of the latest setback to Seoul's space ambitions.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Jun 2010 | 2:03 am

BP weighs dividend cut as US doubles oil leak estimate (AFP)

AFP - BP said Friday it is considering cutting its dividend payments, as US officials more than doubled the estimated size of the Gulf of Mexico oil leak soiling fragile shores.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Jun 2010 | 1:52 am

On the trail of the otter

From the point of near extinction in England, the otter has made an extraordinary comeback. But just how easy is it to spot one? Jon Henley hunkers down to wait

So here we are on a pin-bright, late-May morning, Kevin O'Hara and I, squatting in the mud beneath a small humpbacked bridge over the River Lynne, half an hour from downtown Newcastle, looking for poo. Not just any poo, mind. A special kind of poo. Otter poo.

"Now this," O'Hara had declared, pulling off the road in the 4x4, "is a perfect little ottery sort of a river. Just look at it. Clear, clean water: full of brown trout. Reeds, bushes, trees, good habitat. And 15 years ago this river was orange. 'No otter in its right mind would ever live here,' one local naturalist wrote, a man who knew his stuff. Let's see now."

We clamber over the fence, through knee-high nettles and down a steep bank rich in wildflowers whose names I wouldn't pretend to know. "Aha," says O'Hara, pointing to a sudden splash of bright green amid the gloom beneath the parapet. "That's good: where they crap a lot, you get this green flush from the nutrients. And here we are: look! Here we go."

The poo (or spraint, as it is technically known) is small, black and crumbly. O'Hara picks it up, places it carefully in the palm of his hand, and sniffs. "They say it smells like jasmine tea," he says. "It smells like otter crap. Lovely, though." He pulls out a small magnifying glass and pokes at it. "Brown trout scales and stickleback bones," he says. "Magic."

Not many people in this country know more about otters than Kevin O'Hara. He saw his first when he was a child, on holiday in the Lake District in the early 70s, back when everyone thought they were headed for extinction. He was fishing, and this shape just slid off the bank into the water, slipping beneath his rod in a blur of sleek brown pelt and silvery water.

He was hooked. "Don't know why, particularly," he says. "They're a remarkable animal. Formidable creature. Doesn't matter how many of them I see." His dissertation, at the University of Sunderland, was on otters in the river Wear (this was in 1991, by which time, basically, there weren't any). And since then he's worked at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, the Environment Agency, and now the Northumberland Wildlife Trust, pretty much always with otters.

We're otter-spotting now for several reasons. First, because Britain's fifth national otter survey, to be published later this summer, will confirm that otters have, in the last decade or so, made the most extraordinary comeback, almost from the dead, and are continuing to fare well in almost all areas of the UK. They are one of our very rare natural success stories.

Second, because this year marks the 50th anniversary of Gavin Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water, which – once we had all dried our tears; remember the ditch-digger's spade coming down? – was the book (and film) that won even the hardest hearts over to the idea that otters are the cutest mammals imaginable (they are not, of course; they are extraordinarily efficient killing machines, but more of that later).

And third (I cannot tell a lie), because I've never seen one outside a zoo, and I want to. So O'Hara picks me up in the 4x4, and we head off for Druridge Bay. It's seven in the evening, clear sky, no wind, sun's warmth still lingering, midges everywhere. We settle into a wooden hide on Druridge pools, part of a glorious coastal wetland reserve run by the trust. A couple of hundred yards away, beyond the dunes, the surf rumbles.

There were otters here every day last week, O'Hara says. You could set your watch by them.

He has lost count of the number of otters he has seen. A couple of years ago, when he was Otters and Rivers (he's now Wetland Conservation), O'Hara was so plugged in he could more or less spot them at will. He utters, though, a word of warning: "If they're here, we'll see them. They're not shy, that's so far from the truth it's funny. But they are otters. They can just decide, sod that, I'll go somewhere else today. It's like fishing: if you caught one every time, it wouldn't be called fishing, would it? It'd be called catching."

No respecters of reputation, though, otters. You can wait patiently for hours, weeks even, and never spot one. Then again, O'Hara says, once he was leading an otter safari of 40 people along a remote northern river; he had done his spiel, about how they'd be really lucky to see one, mustn't be disappointed if they don't, all that, and one of the group said: So what's that, behind you, in the water? "It stayed there for 20 minutes, playing to the gallery," O'Hara says. "Unbelievable."

It wouldn't have taken much, though, and none of us would have stood a chance of ever seeing an otter. Once upon a time we hunted them, diligently. The "sport" was only stopped in 1978. As far back as the 12th century, King John kept a pack of otter hounds, and was partial to a spot of otter on Fridays (the church having ruled that since otters lived in water and ate fish, their flesh obviously wasn't meat).

The Victorians were, as in many things, enthusiastic and efficient otter hunters. Otter tails became bell pulls; paws became keepsakes; the dog otter's baculum, or penis bone, was prized as a tie-pin. There are photographs of mutton-chopped Victorian hunting parties standing behind vast mounds of dead otters.

In the north-east at least, O'Hara says, otters were considered a courageous and noble prey, capable of a spirited defence. The Victorians did have the decency to outlaw the barbaric practice of hunting otters with spears and nets, but they still used "stickles" – metal-tipped wooden poles which the advancing line of huntsmen would hammer repeatedly into the gravel, driving a cornered and desperate otter back up to the waiting dogs. An animal that put up a particularly brave fight was said to have "given good law".

(Henry Williamson's Tarka the Otter, which won the Hawthornden prize for literature in 1928, catches the bloodthirstiness – and the unbearably overblown romanticism – of the whole business. "Can't bear it myself," sniffs Kevin. "Too soppy. Though that last passage, the mortal struggle with Deadlock the otterhound, the bubbles that come up to the surface and then no more . . . You'd have to be pretty unfeeling for it not to get to you.")

In the hide, it's getting chilly. The sun is sinking. Swallows arc and dip over Druridge pool; shellduck, a heron and a pair of swans ripple its surface. A bunch of lapwings arrive. Something breaks the water over on the far side – a long, v-shaped wake – and O'Hara stiffens. "Come on," he mutters. "Be what I think you are." But nothing shows. "You'd know all about it if it was an otter," he says. "The birds would go crazy, everything would suddenly take off, there'd be one hell of a racket. Nobody hangs around when Mr Otter shows up."

The real menace to otters, though – the invisible enemy that nearly killed them all off – was not hunting, but chemicals. The species came within a hair's breadth of extinction in England in the 1970s, a victim of intensive farming methods that destroyed their habitat, and particularly of organochlorine pesticides such as dieldrin and aldrin.

Passing lethally up the food chain, they finished in the tissues of so-called top predators such as peregrine falcons, sparrowhawks, foxes – and otters. The consequence was blindness, immune system collapse and breeding failure. By the time of the first national otter survey, in 1977-79, of some 3,000 riverbank and wetland sites examined just 5.8% showed any evidence of otters. Experts reckoned there were maybe only tens left.

But by the last survey, completed in 2002, that figure had risen to almost 35% – a spectacular fivefold increase in barely a quarter of a century. From their last-ditch redoubts in Scotland, Wales and Cornwall, otters have now bounded back into every county in England, and been seen in more than 100 town centres including Stoke, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle and Wolverhampton. There may be 5,000 or more.

People like O'Hara have worked hard to improve otters' habitat, planting thousands of trees, fencing off long stretches of riverbank, digging out ponds, reconnecting oxbows, building breeding and resting sites and neat little under-bridge ledges so otters won't have to cross main roads. But the real difference has been water quality.

The last of the insecticides was banned by 1984; some £30bn has been spent on improving sewage treatment since 1990; and according to the Environment Agency, Britain's waterways are probably now in a better state than they have been at any time since the start of the Industrial Revolution. "Clean water's the thing," says O'Hara. "If you don't have that, you can improve their habitat all you like and they'll never come back."

In fact, otters have come back so successfully that they are now arousing the ire of fishermen, and especially fisheries, furious at the animal's ability to clear an artificially stocked lake of prize fish in a matter of days. Some fisheries have lost tens of thousands of pounds; there are even calls for a cull.

This makes O'Hara very cross. "It's just mad," he says. "Most of those fish shouldn't be there, and they're only that size because of the mountains of artificial bait thrown at them. Otters aren't a problem on a naturally stocked lake or river; the Tyne's full of them, and it's the best salmon river in England. But the main thing is, it's easy to protect a lake from otters. You put a fence round it. These people just don't want to pay. And if you present an otter with an open larder, he'll help himself. He's a predator. It's what he does."

It's cold now, and dark. As we head back to the car, a barn owl, pale and ghostly, floats silently across the path. "We'll come back tomorrow," Kevin says. "This is beyond a joke. I've got a reputation to keep up."

We're back soon after dawn, to a still and beautiful morning. Wagtails, herons, ducks a go-go. No otters. In their absence, O'Hara does his best. In his prime, he says, Mr Otter measures 4ft 6in from tale to snout, and weighs up to 30lbs. He patrols maybe 10-12 miles of riverbank, and can keep three families within that range. He'll visit each in turn, spending up to three months at a time with the youngest: he's a good dad. (Mrs Otter spends up to 15 months with her cubs before they leave home.)

They communicate by high-pitched whistles; short coughs "like an ageing smoker"; and by crapping copiously whenever and wherever another otter will come across it: "For an otter," says O'Hara, "sniffing another otter's spraint is like reading the paper. Full of news." Eighty per cent of their diet is small fish; the rest is what comes along: mice, voles, birds, frogs. The biggest prey O'Hara has ever seen one take is a full-grown swan.

"We anthropomorphise, don't we," he says. "We see the sweet snout, the sleek coat, the button eyes. We think Wind in the Willows, Ring of Bright Water. He looks like a jolly whiskered little chap, we say. Rubbish. Otters are formidable predators. They carry no body fat; when they're not sleeping or resting, they're hunting. They're strong, fast, ruthless. They've been top predator in England since the bears and the wolves went, and they're not about to let anyone forget it."

Except us, of course. They couldn't care less about us. At 10am we give up. O'Hara is disgusted. "Bloody typical," he says. "Otters. Always being otters." On the way back to the station, though, he relents. "The thing is," he says, "in my dissertation in 1991, I wrote: 'The prospects of the otter returning within the next 50 years are very bleak.' I was wrong, and I'm glad. Because we need species like the otter. They give us that little thrill of the wild that we're missing in our 21st-century lives."

But wait. There's a postscript (or two). On the train, I get a text from O'Hara: "Just had a call – otter 'performing' right now, bang in front of visitors centre at Hauxley nature reserve, two miles from where we were. Typical." And 10 minutes later, just as we're pulling out of Durham station, high on an embankment, I glance down. A small river (the Browney, I later calculate) winds through a watermeadow.

There's a small patch of exposed mud and gravel and weed and stuff on the inside of one bend, and I think to myself, O'Hara's words still in my head: well, that's an ottery kind of a place. And something, quite big, brown, long, shifts and shrugs and slides into the water and is gone. Was it? I don't know; I saw it for less than a second. O'Hara thinks it might have been. "Typical," he says.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 11 Jun 2010 | 1:00 am

Confidence in climate science remains strong, poll shows

Survey shows 71% of Britons are concerned about climate, despite hacked emails, failure at Copenhagen and cold weather

Climate science's winter of discontent has not made a large impact on the British public's attitudes to global warming, according to poll of over 1,800 people.

The poll, by researchers at the University of Cardiff, showed a small drop in public acceptance of climate change but not the major falls that some observers had predicted after a series of media controversies over the actions of climate scientists, combined with the failure of the Copenhagen summit and the record-breaking cold temperatures.

"By no means has there been a collapse in confidence in climate science," said Professor Nick Pidgeon, who led the study. "If I was in policy circles I would not be complacent, but reassured that it has not been as serious as many thought it would be."

The survey showed that almost three-quarters (71%) of Britons are concerned about climate change. Some 78% think the climate is changing, which is down from 91% who said it was in a similar poll in 2005. Pidgeon said there were a number of possible explanations for the decline, including the economic crisis. "There is a theory that there is a finite pool of worry that anyone has."

The poll, carried out with Ipsos Mori, surveyed 1,822 people across England, Scotland and Wales. It took place from January to March this year, following the high-profile release of emails from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia, which critics claimed showed collusion and conspiracy among researchers, and the discovery of a mistake in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Green campaigners said the controversy of the UEA emails had set back efforts to tackle global warming by 20 years, while media commentators blamed it as the issue fell down the political agenda post-Copenhagen.

Pidgeon said it was difficult to examine the reasons for people's attitudes in quantitative surveys such as this. But he said unpublished work from a series of parallel focus groups with people in Bristol showed that many thought the media had exaggerated the seriousness of the email scandal. The most likely effect of the release of the emails would have been to reinforce people's existing attitudes to the issue, he said.

The poll showed that most people (71%) remain fairly or very concerned about climate change, compared to 82% in 2005. Some 40% said that the seriousness of climate change is exaggerated, while 42% disagreed. Just 20% thought there was serious disagreement among scientists about whether climate change is caused by humans, despite efforts by climate sceptics to undermine the consensus that greenhouse gas emissions drive global warming. Some 70% of people said it was their responsibility to act on climate change, while 63% thought they could change their behaviour to help. More than two-thirds (68%) said they would vote in favour of spending taxpayers money on British projects to tackle climate change.

The poll also examined people's attitudes to nuclear power and found it had become slightly more acceptable to the public, in particular as part of efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But there was still "no ringing endorsement" for expanding nuclear, Pidgeon said.

The results come as a similar survey in the US shows that public concern about global warming is on the rise. The research, from experts at Yale and George Mason universities, showed that belief among the US public that global warming is happening has risen 4% since January, to 61%. Those who accept it is caused by human activity rose 3% to 50%. And the number of US citizens who said that the issue is personally important to them rose 5%, to 63%.

"The stabilisation and slight rebound in public opinion is occurring amid signs the economy is starting to recover, along with consumer confidence, and as memories of unusual snowstorms and scientific scandals recede," said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. "The BP oil disaster is also reminding the public of the dark side of dependence on fossil fuels, which may be increasing support for clean energy policies."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 11 Jun 2010 | 12:00 am

Thoroughly Modern Mary | Radio review

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ann Widdecombe's thoughts on the Virgin Mary were rather different to those of Richard Dawkins. Theirs and others made for a fascinating little series

Just about every viewpoint on the Virgin Mary has been included in Thoroughly Modern Mary (Radio 4), a vivid series of short programmes this week. There's presenter Rosie Goldsmith, with her extensive collection of Mary mementoes ("statues and lamps and photographs and postcards and slightly embarrassing Madonna and child jewellery") and an obsession not supported by deeply-held faith: "I do love her but I don't quite know why; I don't know why she moves me in this way".

Then there's Ann Widdecombe, all admiration ("she had one heck of a life") and forthright belief ("people think you're a nutter if you have certainty"). Or Richard Dawkins, pithily dismissing Mary as "a submissive cosmic doormat" and Immaculate Conception as "a disgusting theological idea".

Between these extremes, artists, academics and writers spoke about what Mary means to them, and there was a striking richness and malleability about their musings about her.

There were some lighter interludes, too, such as when Goldsmith met a priest at the Walsingham shrine to Mary. The moment was beautifully put together by producer Sarah Cuddon, with a clunk of a heavy church gate opening and the soothing sound of birdsong in an otherwise silent landscape. Then the priest drew Goldsmith's attention to his car number plate: BVM. "Blessed virgin Mary," Goldsmith explained with a delighted chuckle.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 10 Jun 2010 | 11:45 pm

Study: Shrinking glaciers to spark food shortages (AP)

AP - Nearly 60 million people living around the Himalayas will suffer food shortages in the coming decades as glaciers shrink and the water sources for crops dry up, a study said Thursday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Jun 2010 | 9:55 pm

Physicist Calls UFO Cover-up a 'Cosmic Watergate' (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Stanton Friedman is convinced that extraterrestrial aliens are visiting us, and have been for a long time. There's nothing odd about that; many people believe in UFOs and aliens.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Jun 2010 | 9:50 pm

Genes May Be a Source of Vitamin D Deficiency (HealthDay)

HealthDay - WEDNESDAY, June 9 (HealthDay News) -- Nutrition and sun exposure are both prime influences on an individual's vitamin D level, but a new study suggests that genetics could help determine a person's risk for vitamin D deficiency.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Jun 2010 | 9:48 pm

Feeling fishy - seal whiskers sense faraway prey

Harbour seals are able to detect fish that are up to 100m away using only their whiskers, say scientists.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 10 Jun 2010 | 9:33 pm

Insects Inspire Flying Robots

Itai Cohen studies all kinds of motion, from hovering flies to darting atomic particles.
Source: Livescience.com | 10 Jun 2010 | 8:59 pm

4 Feasible Oil-Spill Ideas from the Public

BP has solicited more than 80,000 ideas from the public on how to stop the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Many of them are being tested in the field right now.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Jun 2010 | 8:02 pm

The Enduring World of Jacques Cousteau

On the 100th anniversary of his birth, a tribute to Jacques-Yves Cousteau.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Jun 2010 | 6:38 pm

Seals' Whiskers Can Track Fish From Hundreds of Feet Away

Blindfolded seals use whiskers to track subs from 130 feet away and fish even farther away.
Source: Livescience.com | 10 Jun 2010 | 5:31 pm

World Cup Kicks Off With Green Kits

When Team USA plays in the 2010 FIFA World Cup, they'll be sporting high-performance kits made from recycled plastic bottles. For this international month-long competition, green is the goal.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Jun 2010 | 4:28 pm

Random Guy Allegedly Steals Astronaut Sally Ride’s Flight Suit

A Texas man was indicted for stealing one of famed astronaut Sally Ride’s flight suits.

Calvin Dale Smith kept the one-piece garment in a suitcase for an unknown number of years, federal investigators allege. He is believed to have obtained the suit during a stint working for the Boeing division that was tasked with caring for the NASA flight suits. Smith pleaded not guilty on May 27, and the case has a July 12 court date. He faces up to 10 years in prison.

Smith’s estranged wife turned him in to the police after discovering the suitcase. Smith was in prison following an incident of domestic violence with a firearm. The suit could be worth more than $2,500, according to Robert Pearlman, a space collectible expert who authenticated the flight suit for the FBI NASA Office of the Inspector General. There is a substantial market for space program objects, but no serious collector would have touched a suit without proper documentation of its provenance.

“When collectors purchase valid items, they learn the chain of ownership, so they can show it off and not have questions asked about it,” Pearlman said.

But Smith’s motives may not have been financial. According to KHOU TV, the CBS affiliate in Houston, Smith’s daughter said he had “a crush” on Ride.

As the first American woman in space, Ride became a 1980s icon. She entered near-earth orbit on June 18, 1983, 20 years after the first woman in space, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova.

The U.S. actually had female astronauts way back in the late 1950s, but the Woman in Space Program was canceled in 1961, despite the excellent, and in some cases, superior performance of the women on NASA’s grueling physical tests.

While Smith awaits trial, media outlets and collectors alike are wondering how a random Boeing employee walked out with not just the space suit but a host of valuable space program items without being detected. According to court documents, “Among the assorted items [Smith's wife] had gathered was an Omega watch, various specialized machined parts used in the NASA space program, to include an ‘ERCM Safety Tether Assembly’ and three ‘airlock parts’ (similar to couplers), as well as other items of NASA property.”

Pearlman offered one suggestion: Given the number of shuttle missions, there were simply a lot of things to keep track of.

“At one point, it was probably one suit of hundreds. If you were maintaining back-up and flown suits and educational and display suits, you would have a very large closet of light blue flight suits hanging around,” Pearlman said. “In that regard, if one suit were to go missing, and you had no reason to access that area, I would suspect that it wouldn’t be the first thing to pop up on the radar.”

Even Ride undoubtedly owned at least a handful of suits, although the exact number is unknown. What we do know, Pearlman said, was that the allegedly pilfered light-blue get-up never flew in space.

Image: NASA. Sally Ride and the crew of STS-7, an early shuttle mission.

Via CollectSpace

See Also:

• For Sale: Slightly Used Spacesuit, $500K OBO
• NASA Garage Sale Includes Shuttles, Engines, Space Suits
• How to Maneuver in a Space Suit Using the ‘Apollo Number’
• Skydiver Aims to Jump From 120000 Feet, Break the Sound Barrier
• Scientists Create Sleek Spacesuits Just Like in the Movies

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 10 Jun 2010 | 4:24 pm

Global warming's impact on Asia's rivers overblown

Freshwater flow dominated by monsoon rains rather than glacier run-off.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/nJjDSoduAiA" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 10 Jun 2010 | 4:14 pm

The Sun as comet snatcher

Most of the Solar System's comets may have been stolen from other stars.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 10 Jun 2010 | 4:00 pm

Sharks Have Math Skills

These apex predators use mathematical strategies when they're on the hunt for food.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Jun 2010 | 3:59 pm

St. Rose Died of Heart Attack, Analysis of Mummy Shows

For centuries, people claimed tuberculosis killed Saint Rose of Viterbo. They were wrong.
Source: Livescience.com | 10 Jun 2010 | 3:28 pm

OPERA Finds a Tau Neutrino

Big news emerged last week from the OPERA experiment at Gran Sasso National Laboratory: researchers there made the first direct observation of one of the rarest events in high-energy physics: a specific kind of neutrino oscillation, in which one type ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Jun 2010 | 3:23 pm

Asteroid probe begins return from rendezvous

But is Japan's Hayabusa capsule carrying any precious asteroid dust?
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 10 Jun 2010 | 2:53 pm

Timing is everything for sharks that smell in stereo

Sharks sniff out their prey using the timing of scents, not concentration.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 10 Jun 2010 | 1:58 pm

Tobacco Plants Provide New Beauty Secret?

Will tobacco plants provide the next cosmetic filler? Very possibly, according to a new transgenic technique.
Source: Livescience.com | 10 Jun 2010 | 1:46 pm

Mysterious Mountains Hidden Beneath Antarctic Ice Revealed

New images of mountains buried under Antarctic ice revealed.
Source: Livescience.com | 10 Jun 2010 | 1:39 pm

Expert: Backlash Against iPhone 4 Display May Be Unwarranted

It's not surprising to see some backlash against the recently announced iPhone 4.
Source: Livescience.com | 10 Jun 2010 | 1:31 pm

16-Year-Old Sailor Feared Lost at Sea

The parents of a 16-year-old girl who was attempting an around-the-world solo sailing trip and who now is feared lost at sea have posted an update on the rescue effort to reach their daughter. Laurence and Marianne Sunderland say that ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Jun 2010 | 1:29 pm

Revolutionary War Document Found on Teacher's Bookshelf

Some schools may hang on to textbooks or other learning materials well past their shelf life. However, it looks like a fourth-grade teacher at a school in Peabody, Mass., has just stumbled upon a document that's not even from the ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Jun 2010 | 1:20 pm

Shrinks Diagnose Darth Vader's Inner Demons

Anakin Skywalker, the boy who became Darth Vader, suffered from borderline personality disorder, according to a new study.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Jun 2010 | 1:00 pm

Oil Disaster Shows Need for Endangered Species Act Overhaul

Of the many regulatory problems that helped make the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster possible, the Endangered Species Act’s shortcomings have received little attention — but fixing its flaws and loopholes could help prevent future catastrophes.

Oil companies never considered the impacts of a massive spill on the Gulf’s sperm whales or five sea turtle species. They didn’t have to, because the law doesn’t require it.

“We need to include disaster planning in the Endangered Species Act consultation process,” said environmental lawyer Keith Rizzardi. “We can learn from experience.”

So far, critics have focused on the Mineral and Mining Services’ evasion of National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to evaluate environmental impacts when making decisions. The MMS essentially operated in collusion with the oil industry in what one federal investigator called “a culture of ethical failure,” allowing drilling to proceed without NEPA review. Those approvals have continued, with at least 19 environmental waivers granted since the April 20 explosion.

The MMS also ignored the Endangered Species Act, which demands consideration of impacts on endangered species. Since January 2009, the MMS has approved 346 drilling plans without getting required permits — but even if they’d followed the Act’s letter, it probably wouldn’t have mattered.

Reviews would only have considered the physical footprints of wells, ship traffic and other relatively small impacts. That’s because the Endangered Species Act only requires consideration of events that are “reasonably certain to occur.” That a wellhead would blow — as happened 36 times in the Gulf between 1992 and 2006 — and release a steady stream of oil was not so far-fetched as the industry insisted, but it wasn’t reasonably certain.

Rizzardi intends to discuss changes to the Act at the next meeting of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Fisheries Advisory Committee, of which he is a member. Congress has the ultimate responsibility for changing the law, which would be relatively easy, requiring little more than amendments to its wording. “It’s more a matter of politics than law,” said Penn State environmental law professor Jamison Colburn.

Environmental law specialist J.B. Ruhl of Florida State University said that planning for every conceivable disaster would be difficult, and that far-fetched possibilities might discourage legitimate development. But he agreed that considering catastrophic risk is “a valid question,” and Rizzardi said that amendments needn’t paralyze development, but would simply require foresight and planning.

In the event of disaster, agencies and companies could say, “We can’t guarantee that it won’t cause extinction — but we can do everything possible to mitigate the disaster,” said Rizzardi. “We don’t do any of that now.” The lack of planning has been painfully evident in the Gulf, where deployment of obvious, first-line relief measures — oil skimmers, containment structures, chemical dispersants — were logistically delayed and poorly understood. Had the Endangered Species Act demanded it, those plans might have been made.

In addition to considering catastrophes, the Endangered Species Act also needs to restrict what’s called segmented consultation, in which impacts are evaluated only in incremental blocks — over, say, the first few years of a project, rather than its expected lifetime. That makes it easy to avoid thinking about long-term problems.

“Incremental step consultation is most appropriate for long-term, multi-staged activities for which agency actions occur in discrete steps, such as the development of oil and gas resources on the Outer Continental Shelf,” reads the ESA now. “Segmentation into oblivion goes on all the time,” said Colburn.

But Colburn warned that amendments are only a first step. Endangered Species Act enforcement is woefully underfunded. Total federal spending on endangered species amounts to about $562 million, including what’s given to NOAA and the Fish and Wildlife Service, who are responsible for protecting the animals and evaluating plans submitted by other federal agencies.

Both NOAA and FWS are barely able to handle what’s already asked of them, and have more incentive to complete reviews and reduce backlog than to do their jobs right, said Colburn.

“Americans don’t want to spend more money for environmental protection, but they have to,” said Colburn. “If you want to have a market economy with agents like BP out there, you need to have well-funded environmental enforcement.”

Image: International Bird Rescue Research Center/Flickr.

See Also:

• Controversy Erupts Over Captive Endangered Bat Colony
• DNA Testing Finds Endangered Whale Meat in Restaurants
• See Them While You Can: Endangered Butterfly Gallery
• Gulf Coast May Be Permanently Changed by Oil Spill

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 | 10 Jun 2010 | 12:56 pm

Bizarre Lightning Caught on Tape

Strange lightning called elves and sprites was caught on video erupting high in the atmosphere by researchers.
Source: Livescience.com | 10 Jun 2010 | 12:23 pm

Chip Advance Could Lead to Faster Computers

A novel method of circuit board production could lead to a new generation of faster, smaller and more energy-efficient computers.
Source: Livescience.com | 10 Jun 2010 | 12:16 pm

Exoplanet Hunters Finally Catch One in a Star’s Debris Disk

A giant planet lurks in the dust and debris surrounding a young, nearby star — and astronomers have finally seen it in action.

Using the Very Large Telescope in Chile, astronomers took infrared images of the planet in two different positions around its star in 2003 and late 2009.

“It’s so exciting that we can see it,” said astronomer Paul Kalas of the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the new work. “We’ve been looking a long time.”

The discovery, announced June 10 in Science, proves that giant planets can form quickly around young stars and suggests that dust disks are signposts for stars hosting giant planets.

Beta Pictoris, a star almost twice the mass of the sun and located 63 light-years away, has been a celebrity among planet hunters since the 1984 discovery of a wide halo of dust and rocky debris that could eventually coalesce into planets. Later observations showed that the disk was oddly warped, and that it had a big hole near the center.

Theoretical models predicted that a planet around five to 10 times the mass of Jupiter could make both the warp and the hole. But when Anne-Marie Lagrange of the Grenoble Observatory in France, first author of the new paper, and her colleagues observed the star in 2003, they saw nothing.

“The tools we had in 2003 were not precise enough,” she said.

After Kalas’s group and another team released images of planets around the stars Fomalhaut and HR 8799 in November 2008, Lagrange and colleagues tried again. They used newer techniques to cancel out the light from the star, allowing the planet to shine through.

The image showed a bright object next to Beta Pictoris, but whether it was a planet or another star in the background was unclear.

“Frankly, if I had a bet on whether or not they’d actually seen a planet back in 2003 … I would definitely bet it was not a planet,” said astronomer Ben Zuckerman of the University of California, Los Angeles, who was involved in imaging the planets around HR 8799.

Follow-up observations in late 2008 and early 2009 also came up empty. Finally, in October 2009, the planet re-emerged on the other side of the star. Lagrange and colleagues kept taking images until March 2010 to confirm that the object was a planet.

“We spent a really long time, nights and days, to check it,” she said. “It really shows that when we see disks, we have to look at every detail, because they can indicate the presence of a planet.”

Because Beta Pictoris is such a young star — about 10 million years old, or two thousandths the age of the solar system — studying its planetary system can help astronomers decide between competing models of planet formation. For instance, earlier theoretical work showed that debris disks around stars broke up fairly quickly, within a few million years. Some theorists worried that massive planets wouldn’t be able to form fast enough, but the planet around Beta Pictoris is proof that they can.

“It’s taking a snapshot of another solar system right after it’s born,” Kalas said. “The other alternative is to invent a time machine and go back 4.5 billion years and look at our own Jupiter when it just formed. But obviously we can’t do that.”

The planet weighs in between six and 12 times the mass of Jupiter, similar to the models’ predictions. It orbits its star at about the orbit of Saturn, between eight and 13 times the distance from the Earth to the sun, making it the closest planet to a star ever imaged. It also means the planet makes a complete circuit around its star every 17 to 30 Earth years, well within human lifetimes.

“Eventually, we’ll have a movie of this planet going around Beta Pic,” Kalas said. By contrast, the planets around HR 8799 and Fomalhaut take between 100 and 870 years to complete an orbit.

The next step is to observe the planet in more wavelengths to get an idea of what its atmosphere is made of, Lagrange said. And with new instruments like the Gemini Planet Imager coming online, the next few years should see even more direct images of extrasolar planets.

“The future is really bright,” said astronomer Christian Marois of the National Research Council of Canada’s Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics. “It’ll be a really interesting field in the next two or three years.”

Image: ESO/A.-M. Lagrange. This image shows the dust disk around the star (blue light at edges), and the observed position of beta Pictoris b in 2003 and autumn 2009. The light from the star has been blocked out to make the planet visible.

See Also:

• First Direct Image of Multiple Exoplanets Orbiting a Star
• Astronomers Find Hidden Exoplanet in Hubble’s Dustbin
• Most Earth-Like Extrasolar Planet Found Right Next Door
• Aack, No Brakes! Giant New Exoplanet Goes the Wrong Way
• First Direct Measurement of an Exoplanet’s Light Spectrum

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 10 Jun 2010 | 12:08 pm

Love Hormone Could Also Lead to War

The so-called love hormone, oxytocin, may spur defensive aggression against outsiders to protect an individual's social group.
Source: Livescience.com | 10 Jun 2010 | 12:02 pm

How Ancient Sea Reptiles Became Ferocious Predators

Ancient sea monsters were able to chase down prey thanks to a warm body temperature that kept their muscles humming even in cold water.
Source: Livescience.com | 10 Jun 2010 | 12:01 pm

Baby Planet Grew Up Quickly

This newly discovered object suggests planets form much faster than once thought.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Jun 2010 | 12:01 pm

Rich slammed on carbon 'cheating'

Campaigners accuse some rich nations of seeking new rules to try to gain carbon credits for "business as usual".
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 10 Jun 2010 | 11:56 am

South Korea rocket crashes in second straight failure

SEOUL (Reuters) - A South Korean space rocket carrying a scientific satellite exploded two minutes into its flight in the second failure in two tries to put a payload in orbit, dealing a major setback to the country's space program.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 10 Jun 2010 | 11:43 am

No Progress on Better Chemicals for Oil Disaster Cleanup

Almost three weeks after federal orders to find less toxic chemicals to break up oil in the Gulf of Mexico, no progress has been made.

The same dispersant chemicals are still being used. BP barely tried to test an alternative, and the EPA’s own testing results on the toxicity and effectiveness of alternatives are slow in coming. Experts say the tests will only provide a bare minimum of data, far less than they’d like for managing the unprecedented use of dispersants. Nothing is clear, except that too little is known.

“At the end of the day, you’re asked to look at alternatives. Then you find that you don’t know enough about alternatives to make that decision,” said Carys Mitchelmore, a University of Maryland biologist who co-authored a 2005 National Academy of Sciences dispersant report and has testified to Congress about their use during the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Dispersants separate oil into smaller droplets that should biodegrade quickly. They were applied to surface oil in the gulf soon after the disaster began. Their use was unfortunate but arguably necessary: If oil broke down at sea, rather than near shore, damage to prized coastal ecosystems could be reduced. Deep-sea animals would be sacrificed, but the shorelines would be saved.

Many questions surround dispersant use. They’re toxins on their own, their effects on sea life are largely unquantified, and whether they’d work in the gulf as elsewhere is unknown. Nor had dispersants been previously deployed in the volumes needed in the gulf. Their injection directly into the wellhead, a mile beneath the sea, is also unprecedented. Depth and pressure and temperature might alter the interaction of dispersant and oil in unanticipated ways.

None of these questions could be answered. The specific choice of dispersant, however, seemed a more tractable matter, and generated controversy from the start. BP chose two formulations of Corexit, one used during the Exxon Valdez oil spill and another developed in its aftermath. According to EPA data on other dispersants approved for emergency use, 12 were better than Corexit at breaking down gulf oil, at least in laboratory tests. BP argued that Corexit was far better studied than the alternatives, which is true — but the role of former BP executive Rodney Chase as a director of Nalco, Corexit’s manufacturer, raised suspicions.

With public concern growing and the amount of Corexit used approaching one million gallons — it now stands at 1.21 million gallons — the EPA changed course May 20. Agency officials said no damage had been seen, but the massive quantities and many uncertainties justified finding an alternative. They gave BP 72 hours to find a less-toxic, equally effective alternative to Corexit.

Three days later, BP reported that no suitable alternatives existed. EPA chief Lisa Jackson called their response “insufficient,” and accused the company of being “more focused on defending your initial decisions than on analyzing possible better options.” She also announced that the EPA would assess dispersants on its own, and subsequently ordered BP to cease surface dispersant use and cut subsurface use dramatically.

“We said, we are going to do our own science, and also directed BP to conduct more in-depth science of their own. That’s where we are at this point,” said EPA deputy press secretary Brendan Gilfillan.

With Coast Guard help, BP conducted tests of some alternative dispersants — including Dispersit, which ultimately didn’t meet the EPA’s toxicity requirements — early in May, but the results were neither released nor shared with the EPA.

Joannie Docter, president of Globemark Resources, the manufacturer of JD 2000 — one of five dispersants that met the EPA’s toxicity standard — said she was told by BP on May 18 that only Corexit would be used in the gulf. At the time, BP hadn’t even tested JD 2000, which happened only after the EPA’s request. BP’s rejection letter “says there’s not enough information,” said Sinclair. “They did the testing after the fact.”

But though BP appears to have malingered, consideration of alternatives is tricky. Analysis so far has been based on publicly available benchmark tests submitted to the EPA by companies seeking approval for their dispersants. Effectiveness ratings in those tests represented laboratory reference points rather than real-world evaluation. Toxicity measures are equally unreliable.

“The data presented in the tables is a one-time toxicity test. These should be redone,” said Mitchelmore. “The tests will be much more scientifically robust if they’re repeated, which is what the EPA is doing, then expanding on that and doing further chronic toxicity tests.”

Only a smattering of such information exists for dispersants other than Corexit. “There have been way more toxicity studies done on Corexit than anything else, because it’s the dispersant of choice,” said Mitchelmore. “I did all my studies on Corexit 9500. There’s such limited funding out there to do this research. Would I would have liked to screen six dispersants? Yes, but there wasn’t money.”

Meanwhile, as BP pointed out in its response to the EPA, simple tests could miss subtle but important details. For example, some of the ingredients in a seemingly acceptable dispersant called Sea Brat #4 may degrade into nonylphenol, an endocrine disrupter that could bioaccumulate in ever-higher concentrations up the food chain.

While BP knew the ingredients in Sea Brat #4, most dispersant formulations have been kept secret by their manufacturers. Indeed, Nalco kept Corexit’s formulation under wraps and only revealed it to the EPA after extensive negotiations. The ingredients were revealed by the EPA on June 8. Perhaps not coincidentally, on May 28 the agency changed the Toxic Substances Control Act, giving itself power to suspend industry confidentiality claims on chemical compounds. Knowing the identity of each chemical used should help the EPA better characterize each dispersant.

According to Mitchelmore, acute toxicity tests take several days, and chronic toxicity tests between one and three weeks. According to Gilfillan, “We don’t have a hard timeline” on when test results will be obtained. “It looks like sometime in coming days or weeks.”

Even when the EPA’s tests are finished, however, circumstances will limit their value. There isn’t time to study long-term effects on animals, do ecosystem analyses, or even conduct lab studies on the full range of species affected by dispersants and dispersed oil. That data will be gathered in coming years, as results roll in from the giant laboratory that is now the Gulf of Mexico.

“The EPA is taking some important steps, but a lot of this stuff should have been done years ago,” said Natural Resources Defense Council senior scientist Gina Solomon. “It’s a shame that we have to wait for a crisis before realizing the need to gather toxicity information.”

Image: Dispersant is injected into oil at the wellhead.
Flickr/pppspics.

See Also:

• Gulf Coast May Be Permanently Changed by Oil Spill
• Toxic Oil Dispersant Used in Gulf Despite Better Alternative
• Better Oil Dispersant Tests Delayed in Gulf
• EPA Orders BP to Use Less-Toxic Oil Dispersant
• Gulf Oil Spill Could Spread to Atlantic Coast

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 | 10 Jun 2010 | 11:24 am

Pop science: How physicists burst the bubble mystery

With the help of high-speed video, scientists discover there is far more to bursting bubbles than meets the eye.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 10 Jun 2010 | 10:40 am

New UN climate chief urges action

The incoming head of the UN climate convention says rich nations must pledge bigger emission cuts.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 10 Jun 2010 | 8:53 am

S. Korea Rocket Explodes After Lift Off

Engineers lost all contact with the rocket less than three minutes after blast-off.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Jun 2010 | 8:44 am

Expecting immigrants to speak English is hypocritical | Daniel Trilling

Britain has an appalling track record on languages, and new legislation will simply punish some of the world's poorest people

Anyone who hoped that the Lib Dems' presence in government would lead to a softening of the official rhetoric on immigration should give up just about now. Today, the Home Office announced that it is bringing forward to the autumn a piece of Labour legislation that will deny entry to people from outside the EU who marry British citizens but don't speak English.

At first glance, this seems like an uncontroversial proposal: for immigrants to speak the UK's official language would, indeed, in the words of the home secretary, Theresa May, "help promote integration". But this new law, which requires a command of English to the level "of a five- to seven-year-old", will discriminate against some of the world's poorest people.

The law won't apply to EU citizens, so the people most likely to be affected – as the Home Office has acknowledged – are those coming from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. In these countries, the people least likely to know English, which is widely spoken among the countries' urban elites, are those who live in impoverished rural areas. The right to marry and establish a family is protected by the European convention on human rights, but the government is effectively telling Britons: you can marry who you like, as long as they're not poor and uneducated.

In any case, a new law is unnecessary because we already require immigrants to speak English. Those who marry UK citizens are given spousal visas, which are only valid for two years. After that they must pass a test on life and language in the UK before being given indefinite leave to remain.

If the coalition wants to ensure that new arrivals quickly integrate into British society then it should do something about the sharp decline in provision of adult education that took place under the last government. In 2007, free English (ESOL) lessons were abolished for those not on benefits, meaning that everyone, from cleaners on minimum wage to doctors and lawyers, now has to pay upwards of £900 for a full-time English course.

But the law, which the Home Office anticipates will lead to a drop of around 10% in visa applications, is less about "integration" than fulfilling the Conservative party's pre-election pledge to cap immigration. It is a particularly hypocritical way of achieving it, given Britain's appalling track record where learning other languages is concerned. Of the 900,000 Britons who live in Spain, how many speak reasonable Spanish? Do all of the 500,000 British people living in France speak French to "the level of a five- to seven-year-old"? Perhaps many of them simply follow the time-honoured tradition of Brits abroad by going red-faced in the sun as they slowly repeat "WHERE-IS-THE-NEAREST-TOILET" in increasingly loud and exasperated tones.

Again, this is a problem exacerbated by the previous government, which removed compulsory language GCSEs in 2004. Since then, the number of teenagers taking a modern language has plummeted, according to research published last month. The CBI has said that more than a third of British businesses recruit people with languages, but that they are forced to look abroad to meet this need.

This, and the immigration issue, raises questions about the role Britain wants to play in the world to come. In the face of economic uncertainty, does it pull up the drawbridge and flick two fingers at the foreigners, condemning itself to an isolated future? Or do we learn how to integrate with the majority of the planet, which does not speak English, and extend our solidarity to those caught up in the whirlwind of globalisation?

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 10 Jun 2010 | 7:00 am

EU biofuels 'should be certified'

Plans to certify biofuels to ensure they help cut emissions are announced by the European Commission.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 10 Jun 2010 | 6:59 am

South Korean space rocket explodes

Climate satellite bursting into flames is Seoul's second setback in year as North Korea aims to continue its space programme

A South Korean rocket carrying a climate observation satellite apparently exploded two minutes into its flight today, the country's second major space setback in less than a year.

The two-stage Naro rocket operated normally during and after liftoff from the country's space centre, the minister of education, science and technology Ahn Byong-man said. But then communications with the rocket were lost.

"We believe that the Naro rocket is likely to have exploded," he told reporters. "We are sorry for failing to live up to people's expectations." He said South Korean and Russian experts were trying to find the cause of the problem.

The blastoff at the coastal space centre in Goheung, 290 miles (465km) south of Seoul, was the country's second launch of a rocket from its own territory. In the first attempt last August, the satellite failed to reach orbit because one of its two covers apparently failed to come off after liftoff – despite the rocket launch itself being considered a success.

Since 1992, South Korea has launched 11 satellites from overseas sites, all on foreign-made rockets.

The first stage of the two-stage Naro rocket was designed and built by Russia. The second stage was built by South Korea.

The ministry of education, science and technology, which oversees the space programme, says South Korea plans to develop a space launch vehicle with its own technology by 2020.

China, Japan and India are Asia's current space powers. Japan has launched numerous satellites, while China sent its first astronaut into space in 2003 and carried out its first spacewalk in 2008. India launched a satellite into moon orbit in 2008, but had to abandon it nearly a year later after communication links snapped and scientists lost control of it.

South Korea's launch last year riled its neighbour to the north. Pyongyang said it was unjust for it to be hit with UN sanctions for firing a long-range rocket in April last year, but regional powers saw the launch as a disguised test of a ballistic missile that violated UN measures.

Apart from North Korea, few doubt the South's rocket was for anything but its civilian space programme, although experts said it did raise questions about regional security because it could also enhance Seoul's ability to build ballistic missiles.

The Naro-1, also called the Korea Space Launch Vehicle-1, was 33 metres (108ft) long. The rocket was built at a cost of 502.5bn won (around £270m).

Russia's Khrunichev space production centre built the first-stage booster, conducted tests and provided technical assistance. South Korea has produced several satellites and relied on countries including Russia to put them into orbit.

South Korea wants to build a rocket on its own by 2018 and send a probe to monitor the moon by 2025. It also wants to develop a commercial service to launch satellites.

Budget and legal constraints will weigh on South Korea even as it tries to move forward with the programme, space experts have said.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 10 Jun 2010 | 5:46 am