Rapid genome sequencing process effectively identifies hereditary genetic diseases, study shows

Scientists have shown for the first time that it is possible to identify any genetic disease in record time using a powerful and reliable exome sequencing method. The exome, a small part of the genome, is of crucial interest with regard to research on genetic diseases as it accounts for 85 percent of mutations.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 12 Jun 2010 | 12:00 pm

Family carers share the illness experience of the dying patient

Family carers need to be supported throughout the whole illness of their loved ones as they witness and share much of the experience of the dying person, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 12 Jun 2010 | 12:00 pm

NASA helps in upcoming asteroid mission homecoming

The space and astronomy worlds have June 13 circled on the calendar. That's when the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) expects the sample return capsule of the agency's technology demonstrator spacecraft, Hayabusa, to boomerang back to Earth. The capsule, along with its mother ship, visited a near-Earth asteroid, Itokawa, five years ago and has logged about 2 billion kilometers (1.25 billion miles) since its launch in May 2003.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 12 Jun 2010 | 12:00 pm

Botox eases nerve pain in certain patients

Made popular for its ability to smooth wrinkles when injected into the face, Botox -- a toxin known to weaken or paralyze certain nerves and muscles -- may have another use that goes beyond the cosmetic.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 12 Jun 2010 | 12:00 pm

Monoclonal antibodies: Short-term therapy for long-term treatment of chronic viral infections?

Monoclonal antibodies are the largest class of biotherapeutic drugs. When administered to infected organisms to blunt the propagation of pathogenic viruses, they may also induce a long-lasting and protective antiviral immune response similar to that achieved by vaccination. These results raise hopes for the treatment of certain severe and chronic viral infections.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 12 Jun 2010 | 12:00 pm

Zooming in on an infant solar system: For the first time, astronomers have observed solar systems in the making in great detail

Astronomers have observed in unprecedented detail the processes giving rise to stars and planets in nascent solar systems. The discoveries lay the groundwork for probing the formation of planets with the potential for life.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 12 Jun 2010 | 12:00 pm

Hot spots where heatwaves could pose greater health risk

Heatwaves could especially pose an increased health risk this century in Southern European river valleys and along the Mediterranean coast, a new study has revealed.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 12 Jun 2010 | 6:00 am

Flu's evolution strategy strikes perfect balance

Scientists have uncovered how the flu virus effectively evolves within and between host species. These findings overturn long-held assumptions about how the virus spreads. Better understanding how the flu replicates and evolves to infect new hosts will help scientists find new ways to fight the flu. One option is the development of therapies that take advantage of the new findings by promoting mutagenesis -- treatments designed to generate increased mutations that will ultimately kill the virus.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 12 Jun 2010 | 6:00 am

Tiny insect brains capable of huge feats

Insects may have tiny brains the size of a pinhead, but the latest research from Australia shows just how clever they really are.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 12 Jun 2010 | 6:00 am

Popular cancer drug can cause kidney damage, study finds

The widely used cancer drug bevacizumab may cause severe loss of protein from the kidney into the urine that can lead to significant kidney damage and can compromise the efficacy of cancer treatment, according to a new study. The results suggest that physicians should monitor patients' kidney health when prescribing this angiogenesis inhibitor.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 12 Jun 2010 | 6:00 am

Obama, British PM to discuss BP's Gulf oil spill (AP)

AP - The Gulf oil spill, with a British company the villain, is raising tensions on both sides of the Atlantic.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 12 Jun 2010 | 3:55 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - More stormy weather was in the forecast for the central U.S. on Saturday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 12 Jun 2010 | 2:52 am

New UN science body to monitor biosphere

'IPCC for biodiversity' approved after long negotiation<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/1rJGm8zkuH4" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 12 Jun 2010 | 2:31 am

BP cleanup cost soars as spill estimates double (AFP)

AFP - BP's liabilities have sky-rocketed in tandem with estimates of the growing scale of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, as analysts believe the company may eventually pay out more than four billion dollars.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 12 Jun 2010 | 1:50 am

Spill oil to seep into supply chain as BP sells it (AP)

AP - Oil from nation's worst spill could soon end up at gas stations, construction sites and even grocery stores once BP sells the crude taken from a ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico to raise money for wildlife protection.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 12 Jun 2010 | 1:23 am

Scientists in Queen's birthday honours

Pop star turned scientist Brian Cox gets OBE

The OBE awarded to Brian Cox could have been for showbusiness, journalism, broadcasting, or pop music. In fact the former keyboard player for the group D:Ream, increasingly known as a floppy-haired and boyish television presenter, is a particle physicist, a professor at the University of Manchester and a research fellow at the Royal Society, and was honoured for his contribution to science. "I really am chuffed," he said.

Among those honoured for services to science and medicine is Professor Ian Gilmore, an expert on liver disease now based at the Royal Liverpool hospital, who has warned repeatedly of the damage to public health and the cost to the NHS of alcohol misuse in the UK. He sparked controversy by calling for a complete ban on all forms of alcohol advertising, and for pregnant women to give up alcohol completely.

Professor John Beddington, the government's chief scientific adviser since January 2008, who was made Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in 2004 for services to fisheries science and management, also becomes a knight.

Professor Marc Feldmann, an internationally acclaimed expert on auto-immune diseases, who is now professor of cellular immunology at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, London, is also honoured for services to medicine. He was born in France during the second world war to a Jewish family, and emigrated to Australia as a child, before moving to London in the 1970s. Professor Colin Humphreys, director of research at the department of Materials Science and Metallurgy at Cambridge university, a CBE since 2003, is also knighted for services to science. He is also chair of Christians in Science in the UK. Sian Jervis, director of communications at the department of Health, is awarded the Order of the Bath.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 12 Jun 2010 | 1:04 am

The abuses of science

Is the evolutionary argument against God's existence any stronger than Isaac Newton's in favour?

Science really isn't connected to the rest of life half as straightforwardly as one might wish. For instance, Isaac Newton noted gladly that his theory of gravitation gave a scientific proof of God's existence. Today's anti-god warriors, by contrast, declare that Darwin's evolutionary theory gives a scientific disproof of that existence and use this reasoning, quite as confidently as Newton used his, to convert the public.

In both cases the huge prestige of science is being used not for scientific purposes but to defend an existing general world-view. In both cases that defence is found necessary because this world-view, though prevalent and respected, has been coming under attack. And in both cases the supposedly scientific argument provided is weak. It only convinces people who already share that world-view.

Naturally, Newton's arguments scarcely need refuting today. Though he was not a Christian, he reasoned that gravity cannot be physically caused because it acts at a distance and material causes were believed always to work by contact, leaving God – a "god of the gaps" – as the only possible cause. Nobody thinks like this now. But is today's evolutionary argument – which is often treated as fatal not just to Christianity but to religion generally – actually any stronger?

I am not questioning that there can be valid objection to theism. (Buddhists, of course, deploy many of them.) The point is simply that this particular argument is irrelevant to it. Appeals to evolution are only damaging to biblical literalism. Certainly the events described in Genesis 1 are not literally compatible with what science (from long before Darwin's day) tells us about the antiquity of the Earth. But this is not news. The early Christian fathers pointed out that the creation story must be interpreted symbolically, not literally. Its message centres not on the factual details but on gratitude for the intelligible unity of the creation. Later Christian tradition always understood this, even before the historical details began to be questioned.

The contrary, literalist campaign within Christianity is actually quite recent. It developed among more or less extreme Protestants after the Reformation – largely indeed in the last century in the US. It was consciously designed as a competitor with science, providing equal certainty by comparable methods. It is thus a political phenomenon, acting in some ways like a cargo cult. It has enabled relatively poor and powerless people to use their Bibles (which the Protestant Reformers had provided) to shape a rival myth of their own. They see this as an alternative to the materialist glorification of science and technology which they have perceived – with some reason – as the oppressive creed of those in power.

Like cargo cults, however, this Bible worship is also a spiritual phenomenon, a message felt in the heart. Despite its confusions, it involves a genuine response to the real wisdom which can also be found in the Bible. Serious attempts to answer it need, therefore, to acknowledge that wisdom. They must try to show ways of combining it with more modern thinking.

Belief in God is not an isolated factual opinion, like belief in the Loch Ness monster – not, as Richard Dawkins suggests, just one more "scientific hypothesis like any other". It is a world-view, an all-enclosing vision of the kind of world that we inhabit. We all have these visions. Though they are always loaded with lumber and often dangerous, we need them. So, when we try to relate and improve them we have to treat each of them as a whole. We would not be right, any more than Newton was, to start by taking our own standpoint as infallible.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 12 Jun 2010 | 1:00 am

Least Healthy More Apt to Think Genes Explain Disease Risk (HealthDay)

HealthDay - FRIDAY, June 11 (HealthDay News) -- A new survey shows that the recent deluge of scientific discoveries of links between specific genes and many chronic diseases might be providing the least healthy people with something they don't need: an excuse for their medical woes.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Jun 2010 | 9:49 pm

Knighthood for UK chief scientist

The UK chief scientist John Beddington receives a knighthood in the Queen's Birthday Honours list.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 11 Jun 2010 | 7:19 pm

Why Did Jupiter Flash?

Last week, two amateur astronomers saw a flash on Jupiter. It was assumed to be an impact of a comet or asteroid, but is there another explanation?
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 11 Jun 2010 | 6:49 pm

Diplomatic Dolphins: Special Call Diffuses Tension (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Dolphins make a special diplomatic sound to diffuse tension in difficult situations, scientists have found.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Jun 2010 | 6:35 pm

Britain sticks up for BP amid spill (Reuters)

Reuters - Britain stuck up for beleaguered BP Plc on Friday against American criticism over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, while the company ramped up efforts to siphon more crude from its gushing well.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Jun 2010 | 6:27 pm

Flash floods kill at least 16 at Ark. campground (AP)

AP - Floodwaters that rose as swiftly as 8 feet an hour tore through a campground packed with vacationing families early Friday, carrying away tents and overturning RVs as campers slept. At least 16 people were killed, and dozens more missing and feared dead.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Jun 2010 | 5:50 pm

What is Killing the Lobsters?

The Caribbean Spiny Lobster has been a mainstay of the Florida seafood industry for decades, but the harvest went off a cliff about a decade ago, declining about 30%, and has never rebounded. Biologists think the culprit is a virus called PaV1.
Source: Livescience.com | 11 Jun 2010 | 5:07 pm

Being superstitious brings luck

In laboratory conditions, people who are superstitious can succeed. Does that apply in real life?

As someone who strives – sanctimoniously – to be right, I'm a masochistic fan of research showing that people who are wrong have better lives than I do. This is why I particularly enjoyed a study from Psychological Science showing that being superstitious improves performance in a whole string of different tasks.

Now, I'm always a bit conflicted about this kind of psychology research. On my left shoulder is an angel who points out it's risky to extrapolate from laboratory conditions to the real world; that publication bias in this field (the phenomenon where uninteresting findings get left in a desk drawer unpublished forever) is probably considerable; and that it's uncommon to see a genuinely systematic review of the literature on these kinds of topics, bringing together all the conflicting research in one place. I am not Malcolm Gladwell, if that helps to frame the issue more clearly, and I think his books are a bit silly and overstated. On my right shoulder is a devil who thinks this stuff is all really cool and fun. He is typing right now.

The researchers did four miniature experiments. In the first, they took 28 students, more than 80% of whom said they believed in good luck, and randomly assigned them to either a superstition-activated or a control condition. Then they put them on a putting green. To activate a superstition, for half of them, when handing over the ball the experimenter said: "Here is your ball. So far it has turned out to be a lucky ball." For the other half, the experimenter just said: "This is the ball everyone has used so far." Each participant had 10 goes at trying to get a hole in one from a distance of 100cm (39in). And lo, the students playing with a "lucky ball" did significantly better than the others, with a mean score of 6.42, against 4.75 for the others.

Then they moved on to a second experiment. Fifty-one students were asked to perform a motor-dexterity task, an irritating, fiddly Perspex game to get 36 little balls into 36 little holes by tilting the box. Beforehand, they were randomly assigned to one of three groups, each hearing a different phrase just before starting. The superstition activator was "I press the thumbs for you", a German equivalent of the English expression "I keep my fingers crossed". Of the two control or comparison groups, members of one were told "I press the watch for you", with the idea that this implied a similar level of encouragement (I'm not so sure about that) and the others were told "On 'go' you go". As predicted, those who were told someone was keeping their fingers crossed for them finished the task significantly faster.

Then things got more interesting, as the researchers tried to unpick why this was happening. They took 41 students who had a lucky charm, and asked them to bring it to the session. It was either kept in the room or taken out to be "photographed". Then they were told about the memory task they were due to perform, and asked questions about how confident they felt. The ones with their lucky charm in the room performed better in the memory game than those without and also reported higher levels of "self-efficacy", which was correlated with performance.

Finally, they probed these mechanisms even further. Thirty-one students were asked to bring their lucky charm; it was either taken away or not, and they were given an anagram task. Before starting, they were asked to set a goal: what percentage of all the hidden words did they think they could find? Then they began: as expected, participants who had their lucky charm in the room performed better and reported a higher degree of "self-efficacy" as before. But, more than that, they set higher goals and persisted longer in working on the anagram task.

So there you go. Almost everyone has some kind of superstition (mine is that I should mention I noticed this study through my friends Vaughan Bell and Ed Yong on Twitter). What's interesting is that superstition works, because it improves confidence, lets you set higher goals and encourages you to work harder. In a lab. You now know everything you need to decide if this applies to your life.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 11 Jun 2010 | 5:06 pm

5 Reasons to Care About Asteroids (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - On Sunday, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is planning to bring the Hayabusa probe down to Earth in Australia, hopefully bringing bits of an asteroid down with it.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Jun 2010 | 4:45 pm

Amateurs and Professionals Mix at New York Stargazing Event (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - NEW YORK - With a full-scale model of the James Webb Space Telescope in the backdrop, amateur astronomers equipped with personal telescopes gathered last Saturday in New York City's Battery Park for a public evening of stargazing as part of the 2010 World Science Festival.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Jun 2010 | 4:15 pm

An Off-Switch for Cancer?

Thanks to plant genetics, a scientist thinks he may have discovered a way to turn cancer off.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 11 Jun 2010 | 3:58 pm

Cooler Pacific Connected to Medieval Famines

Cooler Pacific Ocean linked to drought conditions, famines.
Source: Livescience.com | 11 Jun 2010 | 3:49 pm

Natalee Holloway: Serial Killer Victim?

Was missing American teenager Natalee Holloway murdered by a serial killer? Possibly.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 11 Jun 2010 | 3:46 pm

Flash Floods Wash Over Arkansas

The flooding swept through campsites and has so far claimed 16 lives.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 11 Jun 2010 | 3:26 pm

Science Nation

Science for the People: Surprising discoveries and fascinating researchers.
Source: Livescience.com | 11 Jun 2010 | 3:09 pm

Buffalo Head Falls, Traps Man In His Recliner Chair

Water buffaloes can be formidable beasts in the wild, but they may also do damage even when dead and mounted on a wall, as one poor Floridian learned today.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 11 Jun 2010 | 3:04 pm

Men, Not Women, More Prone to Relationship Woes

Contrary to popular belief, new research shows men are more susceptible to relationship ups and downs.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 11 Jun 2010 | 3:03 pm

Axe hovers over UK museum jobs

Natural History Museum pre-empts government cuts with attempt at big savings.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 11 Jun 2010 | 2:55 pm

Earliest Beehives Discovered in Ancient Israel

Archaeologists in Israel made a sweet discovery: they unearthed the earliest known beekeeping farm.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 11 Jun 2010 | 2:43 pm

Mystery Explained: How Frozen Humans Are Brought Back

Induced hibernation of yeast and worms through oxygen deprivation sheds lights on rare episodes of humans who recover after apparently freezing to death.
Source: Livescience.com | 11 Jun 2010 | 2:27 pm

Exoplanet spotted on the move

Astronomers say they have tracked, for the first time, an extra-solar planet in orbit around a young star.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 11 Jun 2010 | 2:02 pm

Gulfs remain after climate talks

UN climate talks end in Bonn with talk of an improved mood but major gulfs remain between blocs.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 11 Jun 2010 | 2:02 pm

As Corals Die Off, Scientists Watch for Signs of Evolution

Biologist Mikhail Matz studies how corals evolve. He is hoping to catch evolution in action as corals adapt to the ever-changing ocean environment, which gets warmer and more acidic every year
Source: Livescience.com | 11 Jun 2010 | 1:42 pm

Editor's Picks: Teleportation, Dumb Dogs and More

Above, you'll see some of the top images of the week. Click on each one to explore the story behind it. If you were away this week and didn't catch the latest Discovery News content, here is my list of ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 11 Jun 2010 | 12:49 pm

The Science of Flash Floods

Flash floods are the number one cause of weather-related deaths in the U.S., according to the National Weather Service.
Source: Livescience.com | 11 Jun 2010 | 12:48 pm

Jupiter Impact: Mystery of the Missing Debris

On June 3rd, amateur astronomers were startled by a bright flash of light on Jupiter. It appeared to be an impact event--a comet or asteroid hitting the planet's cloudtops. Curiously, though, the "impact" has left no obvious debris. Was it really an impact--or something else? Today's story from Science@NASA discusses the possibilities.
Source: Science@NASA Headline News | 11 Jun 2010 | 12:43 pm

Antidepressant use rises as recession feeds wave of worry

Prescriptions have doubled in decade, NHS figures show, with doctors warning drugs are covering for counselling shortage

The number of antidepressants prescribed by the NHS has almost doubled in the last decade, and rose sharply last year as the recession bit, figures reveal.

The health service issued 39.1m prescriptions for drugs to tackle depression in England in 2009, compared with 20.1m in 1999 – a 95% jump. Doctors handed out 3.18m more prescriptions last year than in 2008, almost twice the annual rise seen in preceding years, according to previously unpublished statistics released by the NHS's Business Services Authority.

The increase is thought to be due in part to improved diagnosis, reduced stigma around mental ill-health and rising worries about jobs and finances triggered by the economic downturn.

But tonight doctors warned that some people are being put on the drugs unnecessarily, especially those with milder symptoms of depression, partly because there is too little access to "talking therapies", which use discussion rather than drugs to tackle problems.

"I'm concerned that too many people are being prescribed antidepressants and not being given counselling and cognitive behaviour therapy, because access to those therapies, while it is improving, is still patchy," said Professor Steve Field, the chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners, which represents the UK's family doctors.

"More people are being diagnosed with depression, but many of them would be treated better by having access to talking therapies, especially those with mild to moderate depression. I'm concerned that these people are being treated with medication unnecessarily," he added.

GPs felt "cornered" into giving patients antidepressants because of a lack of alternatives, he said.

"Talking therapies are just a good [as medication] for treating mild depression, and CBT can be just as good for more serious depression. But the provision for these therapies hasn't been good," said Field. However, more GPs were gaining more of a choice between tablets and talking treatments, he said.

Peter Byrne, the director of public education at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, whose 12,450 members include the UK's 6,300 consultant psychiatrists, echoed Field's concern. It said it was unsurprising that prescriptions were rising after a decade of investment in mental health services. "The optimistic view is that more people are being uncovered and treated. My concern is that people with mild depression should not be put on antidepressants," he said.

Consultant psychiatrist Tim Kendall, director of the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health, which drafts NHS guidance on the drugs, said: "Antidepressants are offered too frequently in primary care because the waiting lists for alternative treatments are too long. Doctors need to think hard about putting people on these drugs because they can be hard to get off and have significant side-effects."

The NHS does not record how many people take antidepressants, but up to one in six people suffers from some form of depression during their life. The recession has produced greater demand for NHS help with mental health problems.

"In 2009 all of us – whether we work in general practice, general hospitals or specialist services – are seeing an increase in referrals from the recession. The stresses of the downturn are the last straw for many people," said Byrne.

The Labour government invested hundreds of millions of pounds in "talking therapies", in an effort to help jobless people with chronic problems get back into work and couples negotiate relationship difficulties. The Lib-Con coalition has promised to continue prioritising such treatments. But Byrne disputed claims about long waiting times.

The falling cost of antidepressants may have an effect. Ten years ago each prescription cost £16, but this has fallen to just £6 today, which means the NHS spend has fallen, from £315m in 1999 to £230m last year.

Dr Hugh Griffiths, the government's mental health tsar, said that while the causes of, and risk factors for, depression were complex "the recession can have an impact. A rise in prescriptions might also reflect a greater awareness and willingness to seek support and better diagnosis by GPs".

"Psychological therapies, which can be offered alongside or as an alternative to medication, provide choice in treatment. We are closely looking at how we can improve access", said Griffiths.

A survey in March for the mental health charity Mind, which asked people if they had sought help for work-related stress since the downturn began, found 7% had begun medical treatment for depression and 5% had started counselling.

A spokeswoman for Mind, Alison Cobb, said the fact antidepressants are now licensed for use in a wider range of conditions, such as social anxiety and post traumatic stress, was also a factor.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 11 Jun 2010 | 12:13 pm

Diplomatic Dolphins: Special Call Diffuses Tension

Bottlenose dolphins have a special sound for social situations
Source: Livescience.com | 11 Jun 2010 | 11:58 am

Sudden oak death reaches Wales

A deadly tree and plant disease first found in the UK in 2002 has spread to Wales, the Forestry Commission says.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 11 Jun 2010 | 11:06 am

Depression Leads to Weight Gain, Study Confirms

Depression is linked to weight gain, particularly abdominal obesity.
Source: Livescience.com | 11 Jun 2010 | 11:05 am

How Crude Oil Can Harm You

Crude oil is a complex mixture of chemicals that can affect your brain, skin, lungs and nervous system.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 11 Jun 2010 | 10:34 am

The Odd Development of Saturn's Baby Moons

Saturn's icy moonlets orbiting close to the gas giant are an odd bunch. They shouldn't exist -- pulverized by extreme tidal forces. Now astronomers think they are there because they're young. Very, very young.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 11 Jun 2010 | 10:32 am

BP spill 'double early estimates'

The BP spill may have sent twice as much oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico as previously thought, US experts estimate.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 11 Jun 2010 | 10:28 am

Japan unfurls solar sail in space

The public want a say in how research in to "synthetic life" is conducted, according to a new report.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 11 Jun 2010 | 10:11 am

Killer Tornados Spin Up from Supercell Thunderstorms

Violent twisters kill people and destroy property. Tornado chasing scientist Josh Wurman, of the Center for Severe Weather Research, explains how gigantic supercell thunderstorms spawn the funnel clouds that become marauding murderers.
Source: Livescience.com | 11 Jun 2010 | 9:47 am

Back to the future

Wave energy device updates 1985 technology
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 11 Jun 2010 | 9:09 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 | 11 Jun 2010 | 8:55 am

Young Men More Sensitive than Women to Relationship Quality

Despite their blasé demeanors, young men are more affected by the ups and downs of romantic relationships than their girlfriends, a new study suggests.
Source: Livescience.com | 11 Jun 2010 | 8:46 am

Badger cull 'on hold' for appeal

A cull on badgers in Wales is to be delayed pending an appeal, the Welsh assembly's rural affairs minister announces.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 11 Jun 2010 | 7:34 am

South Korea rocket 'debris' found

A South Korean navy ship has recovered debris apparently from a failed rocket launch from the South Korean space centre at Goheung on Thursday.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 11 Jun 2010 | 7:27 am

Polar diary

Daily updates from key polar science conference in Oslo
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 11 Jun 2010 | 7:25 am

Beyond imagination

There were 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 up: 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 (Island Press, 2006) 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