Scientists discover heavenly solar music

Musical sounds created by longitudinal vibrations within the Sun's atmosphere, have been recorded and accurately studied for the first time by researchers, shedding light on the Sun's magnetic atmosphere.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Jun 2010 | 6:00 pm

Competition puts the brakes on body evolution in island lizards

Millions of years before humans began battling it out over beachfront property, a similar phenomenon was unfolding in a diverse group of island lizards. Often mistaken for chameleons or geckos, Anolis lizards fight fiercely for resources, responding to rivals by doing push-ups and puffing out their throat pouches. But anoles also compete in ways that shape their bodies over evolutionary time, says a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Jun 2010 | 6:00 pm

Ear tubes appear safe for children with cochlear implants

A history of ear tubes to treat infections does not appear to adversely affect children with cochlear implants, regardless of whether the tubes are left in place or removed before implantation, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Jun 2010 | 6:00 pm

Citizen science: Birders contribute valuable data on invasive plant species

In an effort to assess ties between birds' feeding habits and the spread of nonnative invasive plants, researchers provided ornithologists from four US states with questionnaires on daily bird-plant encounters. The 1,143 unique interactions reported by the birders laid the groundwork for a study on the role of native birds in the seed dispersal of invasive plants throughout the US.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Jun 2010 | 6:00 pm

Lemurs lose weight with 'life-extending' supplement resveratrol

The anti-obesity properties of resveratrol have been demonstrated for the first time in a primate. Researchers studied the compound, generated naturally by plants to ward off pathogens, which has received much interest as a dietary supplement for its supposed life-extending effects.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Jun 2010 | 6:00 pm

People who suppress anger are more likely to become violent when drunk

A new study reveals that drunkenness increases the risk for violent behavior, but only for individuals with a strong inclination to suppress anger.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Jun 2010 | 6:00 pm

Well-defined quantity of antioxidants in diet can improve insulin resistance, study finds

A diet rich in natural antioxidants improves insulin sensitivity in insulin-resistant obese adults and enhances the effect of the insulin-sensitizing drug metformin, a preliminary study from Italy finds.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Jun 2010 | 3:00 pm

Portable media players associated with short-term hearing effects

Temporary changes in hearing sensitivity are associated with potential harmful effects of listening to an MP3 player, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Jun 2010 | 3:00 pm

Brain signs of schizophrenia found in babies

Researchers are the first to identify brain abnormalities in children at high risk for schizophrenia shortly after birth. The finding could lead to earlier detection of schizophrenia and enable better prevention and treatment.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Jun 2010 | 3:00 pm

Jumbo jellyfish or massive star?

Some might see a blood-red jellyfish in a forest of seaweed, while others might see a big, red eye or a pair of lips. In fact, the red-colored object in this new infrared image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is a sphere of stellar innards, blown out from a humongous star.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Jun 2010 | 3:00 pm

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Scattered storms were forecast to persist over the Great Lakes and Midwest on Tuesday as a low pressure system slowly moved through the Central U.S.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Jun 2010 | 4:09 am

Oil threatens key Gulf algae and its ecosystem (AP)

AP - It looks dirty and muddy, a brown mass of weeds with gas-filled berries that allow it to float on the Gulf of Mexico's waters. Sometimes it washes ashore, getting caught in the toes of barefoot beachgoers or stuck to the bottom of flip-flops.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Jun 2010 | 4:00 am

Pakistani PM ignores US warning on Iran gas deal (AP)

AP - Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani says Pakistan will go ahead with a plan to import natural gas from Iran even if the U.S. levies additional sanctions on the Mideast country.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Jun 2010 | 3:58 am

Payback time

Cost is king when it comes to domestic energy efficiency
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 Jun 2010 | 3:45 am

Whale talks 'secrecy' condemned

A key meeting on plans to regulate whaling begins, with critics condeming the decision to hold talks behind closed doors.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 Jun 2010 | 3:44 am

Q&A: Whaling

What is being negotiated at the whaling meeting?
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 Jun 2010 | 3:37 am

Hayward's stand-in heckled at London oil meeting (AP)

AP - The owner of the broken Deepwater Horizon rig spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico criticized President Barack Obama's six-month ban on deepwater drilling and a BP executive was heckled Tuesday at a major oil conference.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Jun 2010 | 3:32 am

Tracking trees

Scientists take to the skies in CO2 absorption study
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 Jun 2010 | 2:48 am

Climate credibility under review

Most climate experts who publish papers on the topic support the idea of human-induced climate change, a study suggests.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 Jun 2010 | 2:47 am

Gazprom reduces gas supply to Belarus by 30% (AFP)

AFP - Russia on Tuesday reduced natural gas supplies to Belarus by 30 percent after Minsk failed to settle a debt, Gazprom chief executive Alexei Miller said.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Jun 2010 | 2:46 am

Loss of bees a blow to UK economy

If bees and other pollinators were to disappear completely, the cost to the UK could be up to £440m per year, say scientists.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 Jun 2010 | 2:36 am

UK patients 'have genes mapped'

A hospital begins decoding all the genes of individual patients, 10 years after the publication of the first human genome sequence.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 Jun 2010 | 1:34 am

150,000 marooned by Bangladesh floods (AFP)

AFP - At least 150,000 people have been marooned and thousands of hectares of crops destroyed by floods after weeks of heavy rain in Bangladesh's northeast, an official said Tuesday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Jun 2010 | 1:29 am

Bee decline could be down to chemical cocktail interfering with brains

£10m Insect Pollinators Initiative will look at the multiple reasons thought to be behind devastation of bees, moths and hoverflies

• Ask Leo: Is there any hope out there for our ailing bee populations?

A cocktail of chemicals from pesticides could be damaging the brains of British bees, according to scientists about to embark on a study into why the populations of the insects have dropped so rapidly in recent decades. By affecting the way bees' brains work, the pesticides might be affecting the ability of bees to find food or communicate with others in their colonies.

Neuroscientists at Dundee University, Royal Holloway and University College London will investigate the hypothesis as part of a £10m research programme launched today aimed at finding ways to stop the decline in the numbers of bees and other insect pollinators in the UK.

Insects such as bees, moths and hoverflies pollinate around a third of the agricultural crops grown around the world. If all of the UK's insect pollinators were wiped out, the drop in crop production would cost the UK economy up to £440m a year, equivalent to around 13% of the UK's income from farming.

Pollinators are also crucial for the quality of fruits and vegetables. Perfectly shaped strawberries, for example, are created only if every single ovary has been pollinated by an insect. And the number of seeds in a pumpkin depends on the number of species of insects that have pollinated the plants. "If you've got 10 pollinators, you'll get more seeds in the pumpkin than you would have got if you've just got one pollinator," said Giles Budge of the Food and Environment Research Agency. "It is important to have that diversity in a pollinating population."

According to the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, three of the 25 British species of bumblebees are already extinct and half of the remainder have shown serious declines, often up to 70%, since around the 1970s. In addition, around 75% of all butterfly species in the UK have been shown to be in decline. The new £10m Insect Pollinators Initiative (IPI), the largest programme to date of its kind, will look at the multiple reasons thought to be behind this devastation in insect population.

Chris Connolly of Dundee University's Centre for Neuroscience has been awarded £1.5m to lead the work on whether pesticides are having an affect on the brains of bees. Pesticides could be blocking the electrical and chemical signals between neurons, he said, and only subtle changes may be required to produce serious brain disorders. These problems might stop bees identifying the best sources of nectar, or it might affect their ability to navigate to nearby food source and back home again.

Brain disorders in bees might also interfere with their ability to communicate with nest-mates using the "waggle dance", where bees come back to their hive and spread information about the food sources they have found.

The IPI will bring together ecologists, molecular biologists, mathematicians and computer experts to study the decline of honeybees and other insect pollinators from a range of different angles.

"The landscape has changed considerably over the last 30-40 years, we've seen well-documented changes in our birds, our flora and also in some of our insects but now there's a growing concern that our insect pollinators are also in decline, whether that's in terms of the number of honeybees, number of bumblebee species, butterflies and hoverflies," said Andrew Watkinson, director of the Living with Environmental Change programme, which is part of the IPI.

Jane Memmott of the University of Bristol has been awarded a £1.2m grant to identify the hotspots of insect biodiversity in Bristol, Reading, Leeds and Edinburgh. "We're divvying the cities up not just into gardens – we'll look at bits of wasteland, industrial estates, shopping malls – to ask where there are the little oases for plant pollinators. We'll ask what we can do in cities to make them more pollinator-friendly?"

Claire Carvell of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology will use her £500,000 award to analyse DNA from live wild bees to track how far and wide queen bees fly to start new nests and how far worker bees fly to look for food. "Bumblebees live in colonies of a few hundred workers and a queen. If we want to conserve their populations, we need to think about the number of nests and not just the number of individual bees. But we're faced with a challenge – it's almost impossible to find bumblebee nests in the wild."

The IPI has been funded by the Natural and Environmental Research Council (Nerc), the UK government's department for environment, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Scottish Government and the Wellcome Trust. Alan Thorpe, chief executive of Nerc, said: "We can take for granted the variety of vegetables, fruits and flowers that we can enjoy every day but some of the insect pollinators on which they rely are in serious decline. Understanding the complexities of environmental ecosystems is a priority that will help to ensure the survival of pollinators and the benefits they provide."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 21 Jun 2010 | 11:00 pm

Medical Ethics: Prenatal Dexamethasone Use Questioned (Time.com)

Time.com - Bioethicists question medical practices surrounding a widely prescribed prenatal drug treatment to fix sex-organ deformities in babies with a congenital disorder
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Jun 2010 | 9:45 pm

White House stalls oil-slick research

Half-billion-dollar BP fund put on hold.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/nflYcqMeqcE" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 21 Jun 2010 | 6:22 pm

Life-extending Drug May Also Combat Obesity (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - The compound resveratrol, which is present in red wine and gained fame for its supposed life-extending properties, might also help combat obesity, a new study in animals suggests.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Jun 2010 | 5:55 pm

Science: Beyond reason

Tomorrow's problems will not be solved by abandoning science, but by embracing it, and applying it for the good of all

Reason is the ability to draw conclusions and foresee outcomes. It is sometimes called common sense. Science is reason squared: observations become data, and hypotheses are accepted as theory after being tested by repeated experiment. Using reason, humans associated disease with an invisible agency, which is why malaria has its name, from mal aria (bad air). Using science, humans grasped the fact that malaria was a microscopic infection delivered by an identifiable insect in particular climatic conditions, one that could be treated and prevented. Reason took humans as far as the Renaissance and a global population numbered in hundreds of millions, with a life expectation of perhaps 40 years. Science has doubled life expectancy, taken the global population towards 7 billion, and equipped almost 5 billion with mobile phones.

The question raised by Martin Rees, astronomer-royal and president of the Royal Society, in his Reith lectures – the last of which is broadcast on Radio 4 today – is whether humans are smart enough to make the best of the accelerating advance of science. Lord Rees's book, Our Final Century, speculates that human civilisation may not survive another 90 years. The cocktail of modern biology and information technology could advance human prospects, or as easily deliver oblivion. Even the benign momentum of extended lifespan and economic growth will provoke other hazards: an energy crisis, climate change and mass extinction.

The Earth has existed for 45 million centuries, he says. "But this is the first when one species, ours, can determine – for good or for ill – the future or the entire biosphere." Tomorrow's problems will not be solved by abandoning science, but by embracing it, and applying it for the good of all. In effect, the problems are political: science is good if people use it wisely and share its benefits. That is common sense. It stands to reason. But here is the paradox: scientists since Galileo have repeatedly overturned common sense, and shown that reason without secure knowledge is an uncertain guide. Politicians are chillingly willing to invoke common sense and reject science when it suits them. So those senators, congressmen and parliamentarians who implicitly endorse electromagnetic theory whenever they read messages on a mobile phone also feel free to dismiss climate change as uncertain or a simple conspiracy.

This really is irrational: the scientific method behind meteorology, molecular biology and quantum mechanics is the same. The past 50 years have seen a matchless growth in scientific discovery. It would be good for politics – and good for everybody – if the rest of us understood a little more not just about the results of science, but about how they were achieved.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 21 Jun 2010 | 5:52 pm

Not for Public Display: Backstage at the American Museum of Natural History

NEW YORK CITY — You could spend three or four days in the American Museum of Natural History and still not see all the dinosaur fossils, meteorites, butterflies, lizards, diamonds and historical artifacts it has to offer. But even if you could, you would only have seen one face of the museum. In the basement, attic, turrets, back hallways and closets there’s an equally dizzying array of awesome stuff.

Wired Science recently took a tour of the museum-behind-the-museum to learn about the science, art, construction and collection that make up the heart of the 140-year-old institution. From cutting-edge cryogenic tissue storage to decades-old, handmade, fossil-preparation equipment to the Big Bone Room, we learned how the museum helps discover, advance and preserve the knowledge it is best known for putting on display.

Frozen Tissue Laboratory

Getting to the various labs and back rooms of the museum involves navigating a confusing agglomeration of large spaces lined with tall cabinets containing all manner of beetle, bird and badger specimens; riding in oversized elevators; and walking down long, cluttered hallways with exposed pipes and a strange mix of outdated, faded science and safety posters on the walls. So entering the sterile, spare, high-tech frozen-tissue laboratory is like stepping into another world.

The Ambrose Monell Cryo Collection consists of eight nearly indestructible liquid-nitrogen–fueled cryogenic tanks. Three are already online, preserving 70,000 tissue samples from reptiles, amphibians, mammals, insects, fish and birds. The space can fit four more vats, and at full capacity could store and catalog a million samples.

“We have all taxa. It’s one of the things that makes this collection unique,” said Julie Feinstein, collections manager for the tissue lab. “All of the collections from the museum have samples here.”

The cryovats take the place of the many individual collections that used to be kept in freezers in labs all over the museum. Those samples were vulnerable to power outages and even when they managed to stay frozen, they were kept between minus 4 and minus 112 Fahrenheit, which is not cold enough to prevent all damage and degradation over time. The bottom of the vats are filled with liquid nitrogen that is below minus 300, always keeping the tissue colder than minus 230.

“And the freezers don’t fail,” Feinstein said. Even in the event of a catastrophic power failure, the vats will stay cold for five weeks on their own. And they are on wheels, so the samples can be moved without taking them out of the freezers. There’s also a dedicated staff just for the frozen collection. “So the freezers are not alone.”

The tissue library is also protected against loss and misplacement by a meticulous computer tracking system that involves bar codes and human-readable numbers.

The cryostorage supports the museum’s genetic-analysis and conservation studies, but the lab will store samples for any scientist with a need who is willing to relinquish ownership and share. The types of samples range from mammal blood to bird liver to whale skin. The lab recently received some samples of bats with White Nose syndrome, which threatens bat populations in the eastern United States, and is already receiving requests from other researchers to study them.

It is the premier tissue storage facility in the world, and the Smithsonian, Harvard and Yale natural history museums are hoping to model their own collections after it, Feinstein said.

Photos: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 21 Jun 2010 | 5:30 pm

Meteor Party! David Levy's Leonids

Come to a special invitation-only star party: this one's all about meteors. Dave Brody reports from David Levy's Jarnac observatory in Arizona as the Leonid meteor storm approaches...
Source: Livescience.com | 21 Jun 2010 | 5:14 pm

Life-extending Drug May Also Combat Obesity

The compound resveratrol, present in red wine and also known as a life-extending drug, reduces weight gain in lemurs, a new study finds.
Source: Livescience.com | 21 Jun 2010 | 5:06 pm

Food clampdown could save 'thousands of lives'

Health watchdog attacks food industry in hard hitting report but is dismissed by the government as having over-reached itself

Tens of thousands of lives could be saved if major changes were made to processed and convenience foods, the UK's leading health watchdog will say today, challenging the government and the food industry to act to improve the nation's diet.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) will say in a major hard-hitting report that diet is not just a matter for the individual consumer. In what will be interpreted as a significant attack on the food industry, it recommends a series of changes, including:

• A total ban on trans fats.

• Halving the individual daily salt intake.

• Legislating if necessary to encourage manufacturers to slash the content of hidden saturated fats in all food products.

• Ensuring low fat and low salt foods are cheaper than unhealthier versions.

• Banning television adverts for high-salt and high-fat foods before the 9pm watershed, to protect children.

• Urging local councils to forbid take-aways and junk food outlets near schools.

• Bringing in the "traffic light" colour coding system to show whether a product has high, low or medium levels of salt, fat and sugar.

But the government reaction was unenthusiastic, implying that it was up to the individual to make healthy choices.

"The best way to prevent cardiovascular disease is for people to eat better and be more active," a government spokesperson said. "The NHS provides high quality cardiac care and there has been a reduction in cardiovascular deaths of about 50% over the last 15 years through better prevention and better treatment."

The statement went on to suggest that Nice might have over-reached itself.

"Today's recommendations are extensive and wide ranging, but it is not practical to implement certain proposals in this guidance, for example on the mandatory use of traffic lights alongside GDA [guideline daily allowance] in food labelling. It is extremely important that work by Nice is methodologically robust and includes fully workable proposals,"

Cardiovascular disease is responsible for at least 150,000 deaths a year, mostly through heart attacks and strokes. About 40% of those who die are under 75.

"These are eminently preventable deaths," said Klim McPherson, professor of health epidemiology at Oxford University and chairman of the Nice committee which deliberated for more than two years.

Poorer people have up to a threefold increased risk of heart disease over those who live in more affluent areas of the country. The focus for the Nice committee was safeguarding the population, rather than advising the individual who may have limited options.

"It is about busy people having a lot to do, having to make choices on the fly, making pragmatic choices on how they feed themselves and their children," said McPherson. "Commercial organisations are very good at exploiting people who make choices on price and convenience."

The government would not be breaking new ground if it were to legislate on healthy food, he added. "We think it is commensurate with other bits of policy government gets involved with, like speed limits and clean air," he said.

Simon Capewell, professor of clinical epidemiology at Liverpool University and a public health physician, said the changes would make economic sense too. "We're looking at well over £1bn a year in savings, not just to the NHS." That included, for instance, fewer people being forced to give up work to care for somebody who was disabled through heart disease.

The committee was very concerned about the salt, fat and sugar levels in children's diet, which could predispose them to unhealthy eating patterns and to heart disease from a relatively early age.

The Nice guidance calls for action on the way food is marketed to children – with a 9pm watershed on advertising unhealthy food.

It urges advertising curbs also on non-broadcast media, the internet and mobile phones. It wants an agreed set of principles for food and drinks marketing, "based on a child's right to a healthy diet".

The committee regretted that the EU has decided against traffic light colour-coding to indicate the nutritional content of food products, which it said was the clearest indication to shoppers whether they were buying something good or bad for them.

It urged the government to introduce it anyway through legislation – a suggestion that was immediately rejected by the Department of Health.

Nice also called for transparency in the dealings between government and the food and drinks industry, including "full disclosure of interests by all parties".

The Food and Drink Federation said Nice was out of touch with what was happening, claiming voluntary measures by the industry had already substantially brought down salt, sugar, saturated fat and trans fat levels.

The Nice report was supported, however, by the European Society of Cardiology and the British Heart Foundation.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 21 Jun 2010 | 5:01 pm

Africa's next top hominid

Ancient human relative could walk upright.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 21 Jun 2010 | 5:00 pm

Sequencing Napoleon's nemesis

Body-louse genome offers a glimpse into the genetic legacy of life as a permanent parasite.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 21 Jun 2010 | 5:00 pm

The satellite on a mission to map the Earth in 3D

Germany's TanDEM-X satellite blasts into orbit on a mission to acquire the most precise 3D map of the Earth's surface.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 21 Jun 2010 | 4:47 pm

Court lifts limits on GMO alfalfa pending USDA (Reuters)

Reuters - A Supreme Court ruling in a case pitting environmentalists against biotech seed giant Monsanto Co could speed up a resumption of sales of genetically altered alfalfa, though any commercialization still depends on action by U.S. regulators.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Jun 2010 | 4:41 pm

Buzz Lightyear's Out-of-This-World 'Toy Story' Told by Boy's Space Patch (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - In Disney's "Toy Story 3," Buzz Lightyear once again faces identity issues between being a real space ranger or being a toy. For at least one 11-year-old fan who designed the mission patch for Lightyear's real-life space adventure, the answer must seem clear: the animated astronaut is in fact, both.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Jun 2010 | 4:30 pm

Stem cells made without new genes

Human pluripotent cells have been created using a virus alone.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 21 Jun 2010 | 4:00 pm

Court overturns Monsanto seed ban

The US Supreme Court has overturned a ruling barring Monsanto from selling genetically modified seeds until they can be tested.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 21 Jun 2010 | 3:55 pm

Row over Meteosat project settled

The long-running dispute over the contract to build Europe's next weather satellite's is settled.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 21 Jun 2010 | 3:49 pm

Lucy's Ancestor, 'Big Man,' Revealed

The discovery could reshape what scientists know about Lucy and her species.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jun 2010 | 3:15 pm

Kuwait's lost treasures

Hundreds of artefacts were plundered during Gulf war, and project to repatriate them is ongoing

In a spacious but frugal office in Kuwait, a glossy catalogue lists the dozens of reasons why Kuwait and Iraq are still at daggers drawn after all these years.

Sheikha Hussa Salem al-Sabah thumbs through the pages of the booklet, pointing out the most egregious cases – page upon page of priceless treasures looted by Saddam Hussein's invading army 20 years ago and still missing: a dazzling 234-carat emerald the size of a paperweight; a slightly smaller gem inscribed with exquisite Arabic calligraphy; Mughal-era ruby beads.

"The Iraqis still don't understand the damage they did to us, not just financially, but for our souls," says the daughter-in-law of Kuwait's emir Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, who maintains the dynasty's heirlooms. "It was emotionally wrenching and still is."

Though many of the priceless treasures have been returned to the collection in the bitter decades since, up to 57 remain missing – perhaps lost for ever. At the National Museum across town, they report that the whereabouts of another 487 treasures remain unknown.

Many of the pieces, Kuwaitis believe, now form the core of private collections in post-Saddam Iraq and around the Arab world. To the victims of the 1990 invasion they remain the central reason of a failure to close the unfinished business of the first Gulf war – just as the second one is beginning to wind down.

In the seven years since Saddam was ousted, Iraq has been obliged to settle United Nations-prescribed debts of $43bn (£29bn), and compensations to private families totalling several hundred million dollars more, before being welcomed as a fully-fledged member of the so-called community of nations.

It is a burden that has proven difficult to bear for a brittle state still ravaged by war and chaos and deeply resentful of the fact that Kuwait was not invaded in the name of the current regime in Iraq.

To Iraq's wealthy southern neighbour though, neither 20 years nor the time after Saddam has diminished the desire to reclaim what was lost.

With a higher per capita income than most other Gulf petro-states, Kuwaitis remain sensitive to the claim that their residual hostility is all about getting even richer. "This is about principle," says Sheikha Hussa. "It remains a huge dilemma for us. The people here have a say in everything we do and the parliament does also. This is part of Kuwait's rights and we will continue to press them."

At the National Museum, which was ravaged by marauders who seemed to know what they were looking for as they packed items into cushioned crates before driving them to Baghdad,a plethora of irreplaceable pieces remain missing. The lost artefacts mainly date from the Moghul dynasty and include around 20 gold bracelets, necklaces and ankle rings, pottery, arrow heads and Korans.

Staff handed over a list of loot and mentioned a theory often discussed in Kuwait that much of what was stolen remains in a warehouse north of Baghdad, where it is being used as leverage in any eventual settlement between the two countries.

Three months of inquiries by the Guardian with officials in Iraq's government, military and police seem to rule out that there is such a central repository of loot in Iraq.

"Anything that was stolen was taken to Saddam's palaces and the offices of his high officials," said one Kuwaiti MP. "There were antique cars stolen by Uday [Hussein, Saddam's psychopath son] that were sold in Europe at auction, paintings and heirlooms. But after the American invasion it was a free-for-all. Everything was stolen again then and there was no control over who took it, or where it went."

Between the first and second Gulf wars, there were attempts by Saddam's regime to put things right, with Kuwaiti officials under UN supervision being invited to the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad to reclaim some stolen Kuwaiti pieces that had been on display there.

The private art world also turned up the occasional treasure. In 1996, a jewel-encrusted Moghul dagger, which had been on the cover of a Sotheby's catalogue, was taken off the market and returned to the Dar-al-Athar collection. Financial compensation has been paid, according to Sheikha Hussa. Butthe far more important repatriation of priceless pieces has been rare.

Two years ago, parts of a giant archive of Kuwait's history, known as the Prince's Archive, were returned from Baghdad after being kept in the home of a civil servant who had little idea of the value of his souvenirs. Recently, a well-known Iraqi actor and her husband made contact with an Iraqi now living in Kuwait in an attempt to sell another part of the collection.

Iraq hopes that a steady repayment of the billions owed – $23bn has been handed over so far – will boost its credentials. It also appears to be hoping that a steady repayment of the debt will stop Kuwait from pressing claims through international courts for the seizure of Iraqi assets.

Twice in recent months the state-owned Kuwait Airways has moved to seize an Iraqi Airways plane that had landed in London as part of a new passenger route from Baghdad. That action has led Iraq to suspend the route only weeks after it was opened. Baghdad also says it is now looking at ways to privatise the airline.

Iraq's monthly repayments are pegged by the United Nations at 5% of its oil revenue. "Last month they paid $520m as part of the United Nations Compensation Commission obligations," said the chairman of a Kuwaiti public authority established to process compensation claims from Iraq's invasion. "They have been co-operating with us in meetings lately. But it takes time, it will need another generation to forget. There are also the remains of fallen soldiers and POWs yet to be returned."

In Baghdad, the speaker of the Iraqi parliament, Ayad al-Sammaraie, said things were now moving quicker than at any other time since 1990. He said: "Both countries are willing to sort things. But there is a remaining bitterness. Resolving this is complicated and needs a realistic perspective. Our fishermen are worried at repeated interceptions by the Kuwaitis in the Gulf.

"Our farmers in the south are worried about border claims. And we are concerned about having good relations again."

Asked about the ancient treasures that in some ways hold the key to goodwill, he said: "There was no [sovereign] Iraq from 2003 for three years and we had no ability to look for them. But really, Iraq is sincere and willing to return them."

Missing

Qur'anic emerald

An 18th-century emerald centrepiece from the Indian Mughal or Deccan eras, the 73.2 carat stone is diamond-engraved with the Throne Verse from chapter 2, verse 255 of the Qur'an.

Mughal dagger

With a blade of Jawhar steel, the late 16th-century Indian dagger is overlaid with gold and set with rubies, turquoise and emeralds.

A huge emerald

A priceless 234-carat emerald that is the size of a paperweight was one of the biggest prizes for Saddam's looters.

Jewelled dish

A plate from the Indian Mughal period in the first quarter of the 17th century and is set with rubies and emeralds. It appeared with the dagger above in Sotheby's London catalogue in 1996 and was returned to the Dar-al-Athar museum collection.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 21 Jun 2010 | 3:09 pm

Cartoon Characters Influence What Kids Eat

Any parent who has ever gone to the grocery store with a young child knows the horrors of what happens when they see their favorite junk food. Their eyes grow wide, their bottom lip quivers and their sweet little voices ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jun 2010 | 2:48 pm

Cassini Skims Through Titan’s Upper Atmosphere

The Cassini spacecraft made its deepest dip ever into the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, at 8:28 p.m. Eastern time on June 20. The data it collected will help determine whether the moon has its own magnetic field.

“For Titan scientists, this is one of the most anticipated flybys of the whole mission,” wrote space physicist Cesar Bertucci of the Institute of Astronomy and Space Physics in Buenos Aires, Argentina in a blog post. That’s saying something, as Cassini has already orbited Saturn for six years and may last seven more.

The flyby took Cassini within 547 miles of Titan’s surface, about two and a half times the altitude of the International Space Station. Although this distance shaved only 43 miles off the next nearest approach, the flyby was the first to take the spacecraft below Titan’s ionosphere, a layer of charged particles in the upper atmosphere. The ionosphere shielded the spacecraft from Saturn’s much larger magnetic field, allowing scientists the first hints of whether Titan has a magnetic field of its own.

Earlier measurements by the Voyager spacecraft and an earlier Cassini flyby at 590 miles showed that Titan’s magnetic field is weak at best, and certainly no match for Saturn’s. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there, Bertucci said. “We’d like to know what the internal field might be, no matter how small.”

Measuring the field will provide insight into the moon’s internal structure. In planets like Saturn or Earth, long-lived magnetic fields are driven by currents in a metallic, liquid core. These currents arise as the planet rotates. With its thick atmosphere of nitrogen and methane and its liquid hydrocarbon lakes, Titan resembles the early Earth more than any other body in the solar system, making the moon an ideal natural laboratory for studying the origins of life. If Cassini picks up a magnetic field, it might mean that Titan, like Earth, has a liquid core.

But it might not. There are two other explanations for a magnetic Titan, Bertucci wrote. Like Mars, Titan may once have had a liquid core that has since frozen, leaving behind residual magnetism in the crust. Or, if a conducting layer like an ocean lies on or below the crust, part of the surface could have temporarily picked up some of Saturn’s magnetism before Cassini got there.

The data should finish its downlink to Earth by the end of today, and a preliminary report on all the measurements from the flyby should be available by the end of the week, Bertucci told Wired Science.

Image: NASA/Cassini

See Also:

• Photo: Shining Lake Confirms Presence of Liquid on Titan
• Titan's Strange Shape May Explain Polar Lakes
• Titan's Organic Hydrocarbons Dwarf Earth's Oil Reserves
• The Lagoons of Titan: Oily Liquid Confirmed on Saturn Moon
• First-Ever Photo of Liquid on Extraterrestrial World

Follow us on Twitter @astrolisa and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 21 Jun 2010 | 2:39 pm

California Might Turn License Plates into Mini Billboards

A new proposed bill in California would put digital advertisements on vehicle license plates to help pull the cash-strapped state out of dept.
Source: Livescience.com | 21 Jun 2010 | 2:25 pm

Jaws - You Weren't Always Scary

Happy Birthday Jaws! You showed up in theaters 35 years ago today and have pwned beachgoers ever since. Since the summer of 1975, you've made swimmers, divers, boaters and small-town police chiefs think twice about going in the ocean. You ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jun 2010 | 2:08 pm

Hunt for the God particle

We have all heard of 'dark matter'. But what about dark galaxies, dark planets - even dark people? Ian Sample reports on the new holy grail of physics

Durham, northern England, December 2009. The largest meeting of particle physicists in the country is underway and James Wells, a leading theorist at Cern, the European nuclear research organisation near Geneva, is beguiling his audience with an idea that has all the makings of the next great revolution in science.

Wells, a tall, softly-spoken 44-year-old from Tampa Bay, Florida, begins with an uncomfortable home truth. Particle physicists have a problem, he says. They are an anthropocentric bunch, too preoccupied with the particles and forces that impinge on humanity. They have spent so much time unravelling mysteries such as the structure of atoms and why the sun shines that they have neglected other avenues of inquiry. They need to broaden their horizons, Wells says. To think beyond the world we see and touch.

If that was the stick, next came the carrot. Our knowledge of the cosmos tells us that the stuff around us, from plants and people to stars and planets, is made from just a handful of elementary particles. On top of these, there is a small number of forces that make nature run smoothly, doing things like keeping planets in their orbits and ensuring everyday objects don't suddenly collapse into a pile of atoms. But how do we know, asks Wells, that there isn't much more going on than this? Our knowledge of nature and how it works is based on observations. What if we can't see everything? What might we be missing out on? There could be a "hidden world" out there, Wells says, where particles and forces are busily at work, all around us, but beyond the realm of our senses.

The phrase "hidden world" sounds like a science-fiction cliche, but it simply means that there may be more particles and forces at work in the world – and the cosmos at large – than those we see when we look around. They are so aloof, so hidden from our daily experience, that they go completely unnoticed.

"It would be strange if we were so special that we could feel and observe everything that is going on out there," says Wells, who is one of a growing number of physicists working on the hidden worlds idea. "We are lumps of clay swirling on a little blue marble in an overwhelming vastness of universe. We have to envision that there is more going on. There really should be additional particles and forces," he says.

Six months after his Durham lecture, Wells is back in his office at Cern. For hundreds of scientists like him, June is turning out to be a hectic month. One of the most important meetings in the academic calendar, the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Paris, is only weeks away and this year is the first time that physicists at Cern will unveil results from their shiny new machine, the $6bn Large Hadron Collider (LHC). People are furiously writing up papers and cross-checking data. Heads are down; blood pressure is up.

While many of his colleagues are busy writing up results from the LHC's first few months of running, Wells is preparing another lecture, this time on using the LHC to find evidence for a hidden world. The LHC, it turns out, is perfectly placed to be the first instrument in history that could shed light on whether a hidden world exists.

The LHC is aptly named. The machine sits in a giant circular tunnel with a five-mile diameter that crosses the French-Swiss border 100m beneath the Cern campus. Inside the machine, subatomic particles, protons, are whipped up to within a whisker of the speed of light and slammed together in head-on collisions. These orchestrated acts of violence recreate conditions that prevailed in the first moments of the big bang.

Physicists have a lengthy shopping list of new phenomena they want the LHC to find, but most prominent is the Higgs boson, an elusive particle dreamt up in the 1960s that is believed to give mass to other particles. The Higgs boson is a glittering prize in its own right, but to Wells and many other physicists, it has an added appeal. The Higgs particle should be influenced by what happens in the hidden world. As such, it could act as a kind of bridge or window into the unknown world.

"The LHC will likely be the first collider in history to be able to see the Higgs boson and so illuminate this bridge," Wells says. "We may be on the brink of discovering new worlds by means of it."

The idea of a hidden world might sound absurd, but physicists have good reason to believe it exists. Even with today's most advanced telescopes, astronomers can see only 4% of what makes up our cosmic neighbourhood. The rest is invisible to us, revealing itself only by the effects it has on the galaxies we can see. Around 70% of the unseen universe is labelled as "dark energy", a mysterious force that drives the expansion of the universe, making galaxies race away from us. The remaining quarter is chalked up as "dark matter", an obscure substance that clings to galaxies and exerts an unmistakable gravitational pull on them. The word "dark" means we cannot see it, but it also means scientists haven't the faintest clue what it is. Last week, British scientists reported a new analysis that suggests dark matter and dark energy might not even exist, though other researchers reject the findings. Charles Bennett at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore has worked on both. "We unequivocally stand by our results," he says.

As the Milky Way spins on its axis, our planet passes through vast stretches of dark matter – if it does exist – without us even noticing. And though dark matter is part of the hidden world, it is only a part. "The likely existence of dark matter suggests that there is more stuff out there that we do not know than we do know," says Wells.

Ask physicists to speculate about a hidden world – and that is half the fun of theoretical physics – and the possibilities of what might be lurking beyond the reach of our senses are endless. "Once you start considering these ideas actively, there's no theoretical reason to rule out a very interesting, dynamic and diverse dark or hidden world," says Neal Weiner, a physicist at New York University. "It leads to all sorts of conversations about the possibilities of dark people and dark planets. Now that is extremely unlikely, but it's something to think about. Once you open the box, it's not obvious where it will end."

What is more likely, according to physicists working in the field, is that the hidden world is filled with a wispy fog of dark matter and puny dark forces that are incapable of forming dark planets and more exotic objects like dark life. When normal planets form, cosmic matter has to cool down and coalesce into enormous lumps of rock, but it can only do this by losing heat. As far as we know, dark matter doesn't cool down: if it did, we would see the heat if gives off. It would glow.

Other particles might flit in and out of existence in the hidden world, just as they do in ours. Of all the particles physicists have found in nature – often in cosmic rays and particle colliders like the LHC – only a tiny fraction are stable enough to form long-lasting objects. The rest decay immediately, into lighter, more durable particles.

The uncertainty over what exists in the hidden world has done nothing to dampen physicists' enthusiasm for the idea. John March-Russell, a theoretical physicist at Oxford University, says proof of a hidden world could become the central plank of a scientific revolution that rivals any in history. When Copernicus put the sun at the centre of the solar system in the 16th century, and when Charles Darwin described evolution in the 19th century, they both knocked humans down a peg or two. The discovery of a hidden world would force us to reassess our place once more. The cosmos as we know it – with all its stars and planets – might turn out to be nothing more than a mediocre microcosm of a far richer and more complicated universe.

"Just as the Copernican revolution told us that the Earth isn't special, the same could be true for everything that we've so far discovered," says March-Russell. "All of this stuff around us, the stuff of our reality, is it the dominant and most complex part of the universe? It might not be."

It's a view that Weiner shares. "If evidence for a hidden world started showing up in experiments, you would unleash a huge amount of experimental creativity on the problem. If we find dark forces it would be a sea-change. I don't think it's hyperbole to say it would be one of the most important discoveries in particle physics."

Frank Wilczek is a theoretical physicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and considered one of the most brilliant minds in physics. At the age of 21, he developed a theory about the so-called "strong force" that holds the innards of atoms together. The work was so groundbreaking he was awarded the Nobel prize in physics for it in 2004. Two years after receiving the award, Wilczek and his student at MIT, Brian Patt, coined the phrase "Higgs portal" in a theoretical paper that fleshed out how the Higgs boson could be used to study hidden worlds. Wilczek forgets how they came by the name, but it means the same thing as the "bridge" Wells described earlier. "The Higgs particle is special because it is more open to influence from the hidden world," says Wilczek. "It might be that the Higgs decays into particles that are invisible, in which case it will look as though it has just disappeared." This would not leave physicists as stuck as it might seem. The LHC would register that some energy – that wrapped up in the Higgs particle - had gone missing. The vanishing act could be intriguing evidence, at least, that a hidden world is real.

Another possibility is that the Higgs boson collapses into particles from the hidden world, which themselves decay back into real-world particles we are more familiar with. This would really give scientists at the LHC something to think about. Their detectors would flash with bursts of particles that seem to come out of nowhere. The crucial point is that by studying how the Higgs boson behaves in the LHC, physicists should be able to build up a picture of the particles and perhaps even forces at work in the hidden world.

One of the most compelling aspects of the hidden world idea is that it doesn't require physicists to tear up all the work they have already done in describing how the universe works. "Physics has advanced so far that it's not easy to take things on in a way that is consistent with what we already know. The hidden world idea at least passes that test. It's easy to add all of this stuff into our existing theoretical framework," says Wilczek.

So when is the LHC going to find this thing? The short answer is that nobody expects the Higgs boson to be discovered any time soon. To find it physicists need a collider that has enough energy to make the particle, but how much is enough is not clear. They then need to find the telltale signature of the Higgs particle among the subatomic detritus spewed out by collisions in the machine, which is a formidable task. The last major collider at Cern, which shut down in 2000, came up empty-handed despite a lengthy search for the particle. Another atom smasher, the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago, has been hunting the Higgs particle for a while, but is due to close within a year or so. Many physicists believe the LHC is guaranteed to find the Higgs boson, but not for three or four years. In 1993, the American Nobel prizewinning physicist Leon Lederman gave the Higgs boson a nickname: the God particle, because he considered it critical to our understanding of matter. Considering the wait, a more appropriate nickname might be the Godot particle.

Finding the Higgs boson will end one of the greatest hunts in modern physics, but as that chapter closes, a new one will open. Wrapping up his talk in Durham in December last year, Wells issued a rallying call. The Higgs particle could help them get over their anthropocentric ways and open up vast new territories of hidden worlds. "And that would only be the beginning," says Wells.

This article was amended on 22 June 2010. The original referred to Copernicus putting the Earth at the centre of the solar system. This has been corrected.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 21 Jun 2010 | 2:00 pm

Rise of the Undead Sea

Plans are afoot to divert waters from the Red Sea into the Dead Sea, but preliminary experiments in mixing the waters yielding strange results.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jun 2010 | 1:59 pm

Video: How Leaping Fish Species Left the Water — For Good

          

Using high-speed video, researchers have revealed the biomechanical tweaks that allow a little-known fish called the leaping blenny to thrive on land.

Propelled by a twisting motion that turns their tails into springboards, leaping blennies have colonized rocky intertidal areas across the South Pacific. Closely related species still live in the ocean, but leaping blennies only go back by accident.

“None of the blennies were observed voluntarily entering the water during low or high tide,” wrote Temple University biomechanicist Tonia Hsieh in a study published June 18 in Public Library of Science One.

Tsieh is one of a handful of researchers to study leaping blennies, formally known as Alticus arnoldorum. They’ve escaped scientific attention in part because blennies live among rocks buffeted by large, violent waves. It’s a niche shared only with limpets and crabs, which could explain the evolutionary pressures favoring A. arnoldorum’s terrestrial migration.

          

In the latest study, Hsieh studied leaping blennies and five closely-related species. Each can breathe through blood vessel-rich skin while out of water, allowing them to survive indefinitely if intermittently splashed, but only A. arnoldorum and one other blenny, Praealticus labrovittatus, venture onto land.

Hsieh used high-speed video and force-measuring plates to compare the locomotion of the different species. She found that A. arnoldorum and P. labrovittatus begin their leaps by curling their bodies into a C-shape. It’s a shape seen often in the aquatic fish world as a reflexive response to danger, preceding a burst of escaping speed. The two blennies have brought it under intentional control.

Hsieh also found that A. arnoldorum has literally added a twist, rotating its tail fin sideways for extra push. This added boost likely explains its wholly terrestrial tendencies; P. labrovittatus, with its basic C-shape, is merely amphibious, and still returns regularly to the ocean.

“The terrestrial blennies have co-opted this for movement on land,” Hsieh said.

Hsieh next plans to study the genetic relationships between the species, determining how the terrestrial blennies evolved and perhaps guessing how they’ll evolve in the future. She also wants to study the blennies’ impressive climbing abilities, which seem to involve adhesive mucus and suction-forming fins, allowing them to climb slippery, vertical surfaces.

“People say that a fish out of water is a dead fish, and that’s not necessarily true,” said Hsieh.

Videos: 1) Lateral view of jumping in the terrestrial blenny./Tonia Hsieh. 2) Ventral view of a terrestrial blenny, Alticus arnoldorum, climbing up a vertical piece of Plexiglas./Tonia Hsieh.

See Also:

• High-Speed Video Shows How Flies Change Direction So Quickly
• Secret Law of Flying Could Inspire Better Robots
• The Marvelous Muscles of the Mud-Loving Toadfish
• Transitional Whale Species Hunted at Sea, Gave Birth on Land

Citation: “A Locomotor Innovation Enables Water-Land Transition in a Marine Fish.” By Shi-Tong Tonia Hsieh. Public Library of Science ONE, Vol. 5 No. 6, June 18, 2010.

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecological tipping points.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 21 Jun 2010 | 1:28 pm

Robots Hook Up to Fly as a Single Unit

Researchers have created robots that seek each other out and then link up, Voltron-style, to form a larger flying machine.
Source: Livescience.com | 21 Jun 2010 | 1:22 pm

Why don't we trust climate scientists?

New study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals huge disparities in the 'relative scientific credibility' of the opposing sides of the climate change debate

Trust is, perhaps, the most important word within the climate debate at present. "Who do you trust?" is the question that hangs over every discussion on the topic.

Do you trust the vast majority of climate scientists who claim that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are causing a clear and present climatic danger? Or do you trust the much smaller band of sceptical climate scientists who argue that there isn't a problem?

In much of our lives, we rely on the testimony and views of experts. We do so when we feel ill and choose to visit the doctor. We do so when we want to reduce our tax liabilities. We do so when we wish to be ably represented in a court of law. We do so when a strange noise appears from the engine of our car. We will often pay good money to benefit from the many years of training and experience offered by experts in their field - be they doctors, accountants, lawyers or mechanics.

Climate science is a little different, it seems. A notably large – and growing - proportion of society appears to be rejecting the expert view of climatologists and choosing instead to place their trust elsewhere. Needless to say, this has confounded many who work within the climate sciences, but the causes are myriad and much discussed.

But an interesting new study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences throws some new light on the "expertise gap" that some within the climate debate have noted exists between the two increasingly divided factions.

The authors, led by Professor Steve Schneider at Stanford University, have conducted an extensive literature review to establish the identities, views and respective authority of 1,372 climate researchers whose work "constitutes expertise or credibility in technical and policy-relevant scientific research". One of the principal goals of the study, say the authors, was to "examine a metric of climate-specific expertise and a metric of overall scientific prominence as two dimensions of expert credibility in two groups of researchers". In other words, they wanted to provide a tool to those outside the climate sciences to help them better assess which experts to trust.

A broad analysis of the climate scientist community itself, the distribution of credibility of dissenting researchers relative to agreeing researchers, and the level of agreement among top climate experts, has not been conducted and would inform future ACC [anthropogenic climate change] discussions. Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that 1) 97-98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and 2) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.

If you get the chance to read the study in full, please do. It includes a detailed explanation of their chosen methodology, including how they nullified the potential influence of "possible cliques" among published scientists.

But the central idea seems to be that the more a scientist gets their work published and cited in "climate-relevant publications", the more credibility they should be accorded as an "expert" in that field. Nothing revolutionary in this, of course: it's the way it works in any academic discipline. However, it is still illuminating to see their findings laid out so succinctly.

We provide the first large-scale quantitative assessment of the relative level of agreement, expertise and prominence in the climate researcher community. We show that the expertise and prominence, two integral components of overall expert credibility, of climate researchers convinced by the evidence of ACC vastly overshadows that of the climate change sceptics and contrarians. This divide is even starker when considering the top researchers in each group. Despite media tendencies to present "both sides" in ACC debates, which can contribute to continued public misunderstanding regarding ACC, not all climate researchers are equal in scientific credibility and expertise in the climate system. This extensive analysis of the mainstream versus sceptical/contrarian researchers suggests a strong role for considering expert credibility in the relative weight of and attention to these groups of researchers in future discussions in media, policy, and public forums regarding anthropogenic climate change.

One other interesting nugget from the study: "From the ~60% of researchers where year of PhD. was available, mean year of receiving a PhD. for UE [unconvinced by the evidence] researchers was 1977, versus 1987 for CE [convinced by the evidence] researchers, implying that UE researchers should have on average more publications due to an age-effect alone."

The study shows, however, that this is not the case. It's been noted before, of course, that sceptical climate scientists tend to be approaching retirement age, or are, in fact, already retired. What does this tell us? That wisdom comes with age? Or is this evidence of "retired man syndrome"; when scientists who have already seen the best days of their career pass them by develop a contrarian view in an attempt to seek validation and court attention?

Either way, I suspect this intriguing paper will court its own attention given the distrust that permeates in this debate. As ever, sceptics will reject it, whereas those who trust the message that 97% of climate scientists are telling us will nod their heads in acknowledgement.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 21 Jun 2010 | 1:00 pm

Veteran astronaut begs Nasa to keep space shuttle

John Glenn questions US decision to retire entire fleet and rely on Russia for flights to International Space Station

Veteran astronaut John Glenn today questioned the decision to retire the space shuttle fleet and rely on Russia to take astronauts to the International Space Station. "We have a vehicle here, why throw it away? It's working well," the first American to orbit Earth said.

He said he was against paying the Russians $55.8m (about £38m) a person to fly to the station.

"Being, in effect, under control of Russia for our space programme just doesn't sit right with me and I don't think it sits well with the American people," said Glenn, 88, a former senator who rode the shuttle into orbit in 1998 at the age of 77.

Glenn said little if any money would be saved by cancelling the shuttle program, considering all the millions of dollars going to Russia for rocket rides. At least two shuttle flights a year could keep the station going and the workforce employed, until something new came along, he said.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 21 Jun 2010 | 12:52 pm

iPhone App Helps Report Oiled Wildlife in Gulf

The free app allows the user to photograph an oiled animal, pinpoint its location using GPS and transmit the information to an animal rescue network.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jun 2010 | 12:16 pm

Kinks Found In Ocean's 'Conveyor Belt'

The ocean conveyor belt model is far too simplistic
Source: Livescience.com | 21 Jun 2010 | 12:05 pm

Who Invented the Toilet?

Flush what you've heard; it wasn't Thomas Crapper.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jun 2010 | 11:20 am

What Do Thousands of Barrels of Oil Look Like?

Using a violent video game to simulate what 25,000 barrels of oil would look like stacked three miles high brings home the scale of the disaster in the Gulf.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jun 2010 | 11:01 am

Researchers see chimps waging "war"

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Chimpanzees wage war, mercilessly killing members of neighboring groups to expand their own territory, researchers reported Monday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 21 Jun 2010 | 10:51 am

Oldest Baby Mammoth Headed to Paris

The prehistoric monster will be analyzed, treated for germs and eventually placed on display.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jun 2010 | 10:30 am

Chimps expand their territory by attacking neighbours

A study has proved for the first time that groups of aggressive chimpanzees invade the territory of their neighbours in order to acquire more resources or mates

Gangs of chimpanzees carry out violent attacks on individuals from rival groups in order to secure more resources or mates, a 10-year study in Uganda has found.

During that time scientists recorded 18 attacks and found signs of three others carried out by a large, male-dominated community of chimpanzees at Ngogo in Kibale National Park.

In summer last year, the aggressor chimpanzees finally began to occupy the area where two-thirds of their attacks had occurred, expanding their territory by more than a fifth.

According to the scientists, led by John Mitani, a primate behavioural ecologist at the University of Michigan, the chimps then travelled, socialised and ate in the new territory.

"When they started to move into this area, it didn't take much time to realise that they had killed a lot of other chimpanzees there," said Mitani. "Our observations help to resolve long-standing questions about the function of lethal intergroup aggression in chimpanzees."

The findings are published today in the journal Current Biology.

Anthropologists have long suspected that chimpanzees, humans' closest living relatives, kill neighbours for land, but they have lacked any hard evidence until now.

Sylvia Amsler, an anthropologist at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and a member of the research team, said that the attacks usually occured when the chimpanzees were on routine boundary patrols in neighbouring teritory. In one attack that she witnessed, 27 adult and adolescent males and one adult female had been on patrol outside their territory for more than two hours when they surprised a small group of females from a nearby community.

"Almost immediately upon making contact, the adult males in the patrol party began attacking the unknown females, two of whom were carrying dependent infants," she said.

The Ngogo party quickly killed one of the infants and fought for 30 minutes to wrest the other from its mother, but were unsuccessful. After an hour-long break, during which time they held the female and her infant captive, they carried on with their attack. "Though they were never successful in grabbing the infant from its mother, the infant was obviously very badly injured, and we don't believe it could have survived," said Amsler.

Despite their decade of observations, the researchers said they were still not sure if the objective of the attacks had been more resources or more mates.

Mitani warns against using the research to draw conclusions about warfare among humans, instead arguing that his study provides insights into primate teamwork. "Warfare in the human sense occurs for lots of different reasons. I'm just not convinced we're talking about the same thing."

He added: "What we've done at the end of our paper is to turn the issue on its head by suggesting our results might provide some insight into why we as a species are so unusually cooperative. The lethal intergroup aggression that we have witnessed is cooperative in nature, insofar as it involves coalitions of males attacking others. In the process, our chimpanzees have acquired more land and resources that are then redistributed to others in the group."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 21 Jun 2010 | 10:03 am

Chimpanzee Gangs Kill for Land

Chimp-on-chimp attacks could be motivated by chimpanzees' desire to gain new territory from rival chimps.
Source: Livescience.com | 21 Jun 2010 | 10:01 am

Chimps Engage in 'War' for Turf

Chimps, like humans, sometimes kill their neighbors for the spoils of land, improved security, extra food and and better access to females.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jun 2010 | 10:00 am

"Big Bang" research center opens membership to world

GENEVA (Reuters) - Europe's "Big Bang" particle research organization CERN, now conducting mankind's biggest scientific experiment, is to open membership to all countries who qualify to join.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 21 Jun 2010 | 9:47 am

Javan Rhino Deaths Raise Extinction Fears

With the discovery of three dead Javan rhinos in recent weeks – two in Indonesia’s Ujung Kulon park, one in Vietnam – conservationists are stepping up efforts to save one of the most endangered mammals on the planet, the Associated ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jun 2010 | 9:46 am

Can Earth Survive?

Can Earth survive as humans pollute or contaminate its land, water and air?
Source: Livescience.com | 21 Jun 2010 | 8:26 am

Female Viagra Doesn't Improve Sexual Desire

Find out why the FDA didn't approve female viagra.
Source: Livescience.com | 21 Jun 2010 | 8:21 am

Parents Underestimate Weight of Their Obese Children

Most parents can't tell whether their preschool-age child is overweight or obese, a new study suggests.
Source: Livescience.com | 21 Jun 2010 | 7:48 am