Quantum simulations uncover hydrogen's phase transitions

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and is a major component of giant planets such as Jupiter and Saturn. But not much is known about what happens to this abundant element under high-pressure conditions when it transforms from one state to another.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm

The image in the mirror and the number on the scale both count

Adolescent girls who think they are overweight, but are not, are at more risk for depression than girls who are overweight and know it, according to sociologists.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm

Model predicts individual's vitamin D needs

Your skin tone and the amount of sunshine you receive -- in addition to what foods you eat -- all can influence the amount of vitamin D that your body has on hand for optimum health. Scientists have now developed a preliminary model that predicts an individual's vitamin D requirements.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm

Mayan king's tomb discovered in Guatemala

A well-preserved tomb of an ancient Mayan king has been discovered in Guatemala. The tomb is packed with carvings, ceramics, textiles, and the bones of six children, who may have been sacrificed at the time of the king's death.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm

Chemists grow crystals with a twist -- and untwist

Chemists have created crystals that can twist and untwist, pointing to a much more varied process of crystal growth than previously thought. Their work may explain some of the properties of high-polymers, which are used in clothing and liquid crystal displays, among other consumer products.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm

Redundant genetic instructions in 'junk DNA' support healthy development

Seemingly redundant portions of the fruit fly genome may not be so redundant after all. Repeated instructional regions in the flies' DNA may contribute to normal development under less-than-ideal growth conditions by making sure that genes are turned on and off at the appropriate times, according to new research. If similar regions are found in humans, they may hold important clues to understanding developmental disorders.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm

New toxin may be key to MRSA severity

A research project to identify all the surface proteins of USA300 -- the most common community-associated strain of the methicillin-resistant form of the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus -- has resulted in the identification and isolation of a plentiful new toxin that laboratory studies indicate is a potent killer of human immune cells. Scientists say the toxin could be a key factor in the severity of MRSA infections in otherwise healthy people.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

Breakthrough achieved in explaining why tectonic plates move the way they do

Geophysicists have developed a new theory to explain the global motions of tectonic plates on the earth's surface. The new theory extends the theory of plate tectonics -- a kinematic description of plate motion without reference to the forces behind it -- with a dynamical theory that provides a physical explanation for both the motions of tectonic plates as well as motion of plate boundaries.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

Nature's insect repellents discovered

Two compounds emitted by mosquito predators that make the mosquitoes less inclined to lay eggs in pools of water may provide new environmentally friendly tactics for repelling and controlling disease-carrying insects.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

Investigators perfect new version of blood-regulator thrombin

Molecular biologists have discovered a way to harness the enzyme thrombin's anti-blood clotting properties.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Storms are expected to persist Saturday in the Southeast as a trough of low pressure developing over the Gulf of Mexico spreads warm, humid air over Gulf coast states.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 Jul 2010 | 3:13 am

BP oil well cap holds despite pressure anomaly (AFP)

AFP - Engineers probed BP's ruptured Gulf oil well for leaks on Saturday but said a giant cap placed on it two days ago appears to be holding despite puzzling pressure readings.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 Jul 2010 | 2:17 am

BP, scientists try to make sense of well puzzle (AP)

AP - Engineers kept vigil Saturday over the massive cap holding back oil from BP's busted Gulf well, their eyes glued to monitors in a faraway control room that displayed pressure readings, temperature gauges and underwater images.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 Jul 2010 | 1:57 am

Diabetes drug 'victory' is really an ugly story about incompetence | Ben Goldacre

Rosiglitazone has been a magnet for disappointing behaviour since it was first marketed in 1999

This week the US Food and Drug Administration voted not to ban GlaxoSmithKline's diabetes drug rosiglitazone (brand name Avandia). Their vote has been reported as a victory for the company. I don't think so: this saga tells an ugly story about our collective medical incompetence.

Rosiglitazone was first marketed in 1999. From the outset it was a magnet for disappointing behaviour. That first year Dr John Buse discussed an increased risk of heart problems at a pair of academic meetings. He was silenced. GSK made direct contact, then moved on to his head of department. Buse felt pressured to sign various legal documents and after wading through documents for several months, in 2007 the US Senate committee on finance released a report describing the treatment of Dr Buse as "intimidation".

In 2003, the Uppsala drug monitoring group of the World Health Organisation contacted GSK about an unusually large number of reports associating rosiglitazone with heart problems. GSK conducted two internal meta-analyses of their data in 2005 and 2006. These showed the risk was real, but although both GSK and the FDA had these results, neither made any public statement, and they were not published until 2008.

Why then? In 2004 GSK were caught ‑ famously - hiding data showing side effects of the antidepressant paroxetine in children: a court settlement required them to post all clinical trial results voluntarily on a public website.

Using this data source, cardiologist Prof Steve Nissen and colleagues published a landmark meta-analysis in 2007 showing a 43% increase in the risk of heart attack on rosiglitazone. People with diabetes are already at increased risk of heart problems.

The FDA found a similar risk in their own calculations, but voted in 2007 to keep the drug on the market. This is not insane: diabetes is tricky, 300 million people have it worldwide, a great many die from it, and rosiglitazone is unusually good at controlling blood sugar. Lots of dangerous drugs are kept on the market and then used less frequently, in extreme circumstances.

A consensus algorithm from the American Diabetes Association and the European Association for the Study of Diabetes, meanwhile, unanimously recommended against rosiglitazone. Although annual sales for rosiglitazone fell, they still remained over $1bn (£650m). Concerns continued to mount. So did the bad behaviour. In 2007, Nissen caught GSK out discussing a copy of his unpublished paper, which they had obtained improperly.

Then on 28 June this year Nissen published an updated meta-analysis of 56 trials in over 35,000 patients. Again it found an increased risk of heart problems. GSK's response to all this has been like the responses you get from homeopaths. There are seven trials since 2007, they said, showing no excess risk: fine, except there are 56 which collectively do show an excess risk. There is this other meta-analysis, they said, which looked at 164 trials: fine, except it's published in a fairly obscure journal, and it looked at trials lasting more than four weeks, when the others set the bar at trials over 24 weeks, because a heart risk takes time to develop. In any case, this other meta-analysis is not brilliant for GSK's case, since it points out that the company denied access to data from six trials which we know to have taken place. There is no excuse for companies withholding data from academics and doctors. But most revealingare the deep-rooted flaws this story exposes in our rather ad hoc systems for gathering, analysing, and disseminating evidence on risks and benefits of treatments.

This drug has been on the market since 1999, and it has seen billions of dollars of sales every year. There has been plenty of real patient experience of this treatment, but we have failed to capture it for analysis. Most of the trials included in these meta-analyses were not specifically designed to look at heart problems, and so the data on these is unpredictably inaccurate.

In an ideal world, for every patient, wherever possible, we could be gathering anonymised outcome data and comparing this against medication history. In an ideal world, wherever there is genuine uncertainty about which treatment is best, a patient would be randomised to one treatment, and their progress monitored. In an ideal world, these notions would be so embedded in our notion of what healthcare looks like that no patient would be bothered by it.

This isn't fanciful, or difficult, or disproportionately expensive. Instead we have a hotchpotch of incomplete monitoring systems and unforgivable secrecy.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 17 Jul 2010 | 1:00 am

Australian PM calls poll, vowing to 'move forward' (AFP)

AFP - Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard Saturday called an August 21 election, vowing to tackle the flashpoint issues of refugees, the economy and global warming, just weeks after taking power.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 Jul 2010 | 12:50 am

Virgin Galactic spacecraft makes 1st crewed flight (AP)

AP - A company working to send tourists on suborbital flights says it has tested its spacecraft with a crew for the first time.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 Jul 2010 | 12:15 am

Capped BP Gulf well under scrutiny (Reuters)

Reuters - The cap on BP Plc's stricken Gulf of Mexico oil well appeared to hold on Friday, but officials intensified monitoring after a critical test showed pressure rising slower than they hoped.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Jul 2010 | 8:14 pm

French scientists crack secrets of Mona Lisa (AP)

AP - The enigmatic smile remains a mystery, but French scientists say they have cracked a few secrets of the "Mona Lisa." French researchers studied seven of the Louvre Museum's Leonardo da Vinci paintings, including the "Mona Lisa," to analyze the master's use of successive ultrathin layers of paint and glaze - a technique that gave his works their dreamy quality.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Jul 2010 | 7:38 pm

Capped well not leaking, BP says

Oil company BP says there are no signs of leakage from its recently capped well in the Gulf of Mexico, a day after the flow was staunched.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 16 Jul 2010 | 7:35 pm

A Giant Plastic Island to Cure the Garbage Patch

A group of architects have a radical new idea for cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: turn it all into a giant island the size of Hawaii's Big Island.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 16 Jul 2010 | 6:43 pm

Ecologists shun the urban jungle

Only one in six papers tackles inhabited areas.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/MjdIh87---A" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 16 Jul 2010 | 5:56 pm

Not so common

Endangered species finally get English names
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 16 Jul 2010 | 5:40 pm

Judge allows Nevada wild horse roundup to resume (AP)

AP - A government roundup of wild horses can resume in Nevada, a judge ruled Friday, dealing a setback to animal rights activists who had hoped to halt it after 13 mustangs died.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Jul 2010 | 5:12 pm

The Hunt for Black Holes

Astronomer Steve Eikenberry at the Univ. of Florida is on the hunt for black holes. Using a custom built camera affixed to the Gemini South telescope in Chile, he is honing in on the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Jul 2010 | 4:34 pm

What Now for the Gulf Oil Gusher?

Now that the Gulf oil spill is capped, we answer some pressing questions about what to expect next.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 16 Jul 2010 | 4:26 pm

Virgin Galactic's Private Spaceship Makes First Crewed Flight (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - A private suborbital spaceship built for the space tourism firm Virgin Galactic made its first flight with a crew onboard Thursday as it soared over California's Mojave Desert beneath its enormous mothership.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Jul 2010 | 4:15 pm

Like 'Inception,' Scientists See Inside Dreamers' Minds (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - In the movie "Inception," the characters enter and manipulate other people's dreams. Today's real scientists can't do that, but by using brain imaging technology, they are getting closer to being able to tell whether a person is doing math calculations, talking, reading, or is frightened in their dreams.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Jul 2010 | 2:45 pm

Science Nation

Science for the People: Surprising discoveries and fascinating researchers.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Jul 2010 | 2:35 pm

Sea-Level Rise Will Be Worse for Some, We Just Don’t Know Who

The Seychelles could see up to 10 percent more sea-level rise than the global average. Or the sea level around the islands could drop. It depends on who you ask.

The fact that oceans will rise in a warming world is well established, but depending on how wind patterns change, climate change could mean quick inundation or more beach space for different coastlines. Wind patterns maintain height differences between different regions of the ocean, and if altered or intensified, they would push water from one part of the ocean to another.

The resulting sea-level changes could be up to 30 percent more, or less, than the global average in some regions, says oceanographer Axel Timmermann.

The problem is that scientists are just beginning to understand what will happen to climate at scales smaller than entire continents or ocean basins.

The 5th Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, slated for 2011, will have an entire chapter devoted to the subject of regional differences in climate change and sea level. But so far, the estimates of regional sea level rise are preliminary at best, and in some cases completely contradict each other.

Two studies released this year on patterns of sea-level rise in the Indian Ocean are a case in point. One, published July 11 in Nature Geoscience predicts future patterns of sea-level rise using a combination of recorded changes and climate modeling to simulate the last 50 years of change.

The other, in press at The Journal of Climate, used a different ocean and climate model to look at how changing wind patterns have influenced past and future sea-level rise.

The scientists agree on one thing: The Indian Ocean has heated by about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past 50 years, partially due to human-generated greenhouse gases (also reported by the 2007 IPCC report). But in their estimations of how wind patterns will change due to climate change, they come to almost completely opposite conclusions.

“I was really, really amazed when Han [lead author of the Nature Geoscience paper] said that the Seychelles will see no sea-level rise,” said Timmermann, lead author of The Journal of Climate paper, from the University of Hawaii.

“We’re saying they should be really worried.”

The cause of the disagreement is a discrepancy between the wind pattern changes that most climate models, including Timmermann’s and the 22 different models used in the IPCC report, predicted for the last 50 years in the Indian Ocean, and the actual observed changes. The models show more warming near the equator and on the western side of the ocean basin. But the observed warming has been on the eastern side.

There are two possible reasons the models’ predictions don’t match reality. Timmermann suspects the actual changes in sea surface temperature are due to natural variability in the ocean that canceled out the human-caused changes predicted by the models.

The other possibility is that the climate models don’t do a good job for this part of the ocean, and that we should expect the future to be more in line with the real changes we’ve seen so far, as oceanographer Weiqing Han from the University of Colorado suspects.

“It has been really challenging to simulate atmospheric wind-pattern change over the Indian Ocean because the system is very, very complicated because of the land,” Han said.

Both Timmermann and Han agree that the key to solving the differences will be understanding the natural variability in the ocean at finer scales so that the human-caused and natural changes can be teased apart from one another. To do that, researchers need to continue reconstructing past ocean temperatures using coral reefs and ocean sediments in different parts of the ocean to help models do a better job.

Until that happens, inhabitants of low-lying islands shouldn’t count on the wind to keep them dry.

Images: 1) Island in the Seychelles (ISS022-E-21185)./Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center. 2) Observed changs in sea-level height in the Indian Ocean during 1961 to 2008. /Weiqing Han.

See Also:

• EPA Scientist Says East Coast Beaches Threatened by Sea Level, But Nobody’s Listening
• Your Neighborhood, Underwater: Interactive Sea-Level-Rise Map
• The Coming Tide of Global Climate Lawsuits
• Betting on Climate Change: Corporations Stand to Make or Lose
• Treating Climate Change as a Curable Disease

Follow Jess McNally on Twitter @jessmcnally, and Wired Science @wiredscience.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 16 Jul 2010 | 2:32 pm

Gene Makes Some Drink More When Other Boozers Are Around

Here’s some not-so-sobering news for party people, barhoppers and clubgoers. Individuals who inherit a particular gene variant that tweaks the brain’s reward system are especially likely to drink a lot of alcohol in the company of heavy-boozing peers.

That’s the preliminary indication of a new study directed by psychology graduate student Helle Larsen of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Adults carrying at least one copy of a long version of the dopamine D4 receptor gene, dubbed DRD4, imbibed substantially more alcohol around a heavy-drinking peer than did others who lacked that gene variant, Larsen’s group reports in a paper published online July 7 in Psychological Science.

“Carriers of the long gene may be more attuned to, and influenced by, another person’s heavy drinking than noncarriers are,” Larsen says.

Her study provides the first evidence that a gene influences human alcohol use in social situations.

Scientists have yet to decipher the precise brain effects of DRD4’s long form. Larsen hypothesizes that in the presence of heavy drinkers, the gene variant may increase dopamine activity in brain areas that amplify alcohol’s appeal as a rewarding social activity.

“If this gene-environment interaction stands, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t, there is every reason to expect the effect would extend to drugs besides alcohol, as well to many motivated pursuits,” remarks biopsychologist Kent Berridge of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who was not involved with the new study.

Sociologist Michael Shanahan of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill lauds the new study for ruling out the possibility that carriers of the key gene simply like to drink a lot of booze and tend to do so with other heavy drinkers. Instead, alcohol use jumped among volunteers with a long DRD4 gene who happened to see a stranger imbibe heavily for a brief time.

Larsen and her colleagues asked 60 women and 53 men to evaluate advertisements for an alcohol-abuse prevention campaign. Each volunteer entered a room that had been furnished as a typical Dutch pub, accompanied by a person of the same sex who the volunteer thought was another participant but who was actually working with the researchers.

In between two 10-minute evaluation sessions, volunteers and the researchers’ confederates were given a break. An experimenter asked them to sit at a bar stocked with peanuts, beer, wine, soda and mineral water and to drink whatever they wanted.

As instructed, confederates took the initiative and drank either two sodas, one alcoholic drink and then one soda; or three alcoholic drinks for women and four alcoholic drinks for men over a 30-minute period.

DNA analyses of saliva identified 31 volunteers as carriers of the long DRD4 gene, which contains an amino acid sequence that repeats seven times.

When confederates stuck to sodas or drank one alcoholic beverage, long-gene carriers and noncarriers alike limited themselves to an average of less than half a glass of wine or half a bottle of beer.

When confederates quaffed multiple alcoholic drinks, carriers of the gene variant consumed an average of almost two wine or beer servings, versus almost one serving for noncarriers.

These results held for men and women, all of whom said they drink socially, regardless of how much alcohol they reported drinking weekly.

Deceptive research techniques can backfire if volunteers see through them and don’t admit it to researchers (SN: 6/20/98, p. 394). But when interviewed after testing, none of the participants guessed the study’s real aim or the confederate’s agenda.

Other researchers need to confirm these findings, Larsen says. Some attempts to replicate findings from other studies of gene-environment interactions have yielded mixed results, including follow-up work on a study by researchers from Duke University in Durham, N.C., that found that another gene variant promotes depression in people who experience stress (SN: 7/18/09, p. 10).

Image: Flickr/Mourner

See Also:

• An Emptied Flask Makes for Empty Promises
• Dark Liquor Makes For Worse Hangovers
• Gallery: The Making of a Prehistoric Brew
• Malaysian Shrew Survives on Booze
• Why Geologists Love Beer

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 16 Jul 2010 | 1:12 pm

Like 'Inception,' Scientists See Inside Dreamers' Minds

In the movie "Inception," the government has developed a way to enter people’s dreams. Is this technology possible?
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Jul 2010 | 1:10 pm

Bionic Devices Let Injured Animals Roam Again

The rise of creature-tailored prosthetics for animals might lead to breakthroughs in rehabilitating people.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Jul 2010 | 1:02 pm

New Study Charts Effects of Each Degree of Warming

Experts bring new focus to human impacts on climate and warn of changes that will last for many generations.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 16 Jul 2010 | 12:42 pm

Residents hope oil nightmare is over

Thousands of residents and businesses earn their livelihoods along the Gulf Coast and are dependent on the oil spill finally ending.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 16 Jul 2010 | 12:32 pm

Geoneutrinos Could Help Predict Earthquakes

Scientists have detected "geo-neutrinos" deep within the Earth's interior, using a giant underground detector as a kind of "telescope," commonly used to detect solar and cosmic neutrinos.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 16 Jul 2010 | 12:32 pm

Alexander the Great Killed by Toxic Bacteria?

The Styx River, the legendary portal to the underworld, harbors a deadly bacteria that may have ended Alexander's life.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 16 Jul 2010 | 12:30 pm

Economics Harnessed to Study Drug Cravings

Those who crave alcohol willing to spend more on their favorite beer.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Jul 2010 | 10:41 am

One Sperm Gene For All Animals

What do squirrels, corals, beetles and man have in common? Sperm.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 16 Jul 2010 | 10:19 am

When Was the Last Earthquake Near Washington, D.C.?

The mild earthquake that rattled Washington, DC and surrounding areas early this morning had a magnitude of 3.6.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Jul 2010 | 10:10 am

Girls with high-pitched voices go nuts over deep-voiced men

It looks like women are more complicated than we thought, says Cian O'Luanaigh. Their preference for silver-tongued men with deep voices is dependent on the pitch of their own voices

It's not easy choosing a guy. Do you go for the big man with the deep voice, strong jawline and pugnacious streak, or the nice sensitive chap with the squeaky voice who'll take good care of you, but then run away when there's a fight in the offing?

Researchers at Aberdeen University have confirmed that women are attracted to guys with deep voices – as long as they say nice things. But it seems a woman's preferred pitch in a man's voice depends on the pitch of her own voice.

The researchers measured the average voice pitch of 113 heterosexual female undergraduates as they spoke vowel sounds, read a standard sentence and a standard passage of text.

The women then listened to recordings of four men saying either "I really like you", or "I really don't like you", and scored their preferences. The voice recordings had been digitally altered to sound more masculine or more feminine by increasing or decreasing their pitch.

The women generally preferred deeper "masculinised" voices to the higher-pitched, more "feminine" recordings. But when the men were saying "I really like you", it was the women who had the highest-pitched voices who had the strongest preference for men with deep voices.

When the statement was "I really don't like you", the relationship between the woman's own voice pitch and her preference disappeared.

So women aren't just attracted to a deep voice, lads. You have to say nice things too.

The preference didn't depend on the woman's age, what point she had reached in her menstrual cycle or whether she was on the pill.

"We have shown in previous studies that women's voices with relatively high pitch tend to be judged as attractive," said Ben Jones of Aberdeen University's Face Research Lab, who led the study. Voice pitch indicates a woman's average oestrogen levels and so might be a cue advertising her health and fertility. The pitch of a woman's voice is highest at ovulation and her preference for men with "masculine" traits is also at its greatest.

Previous research at the Face Research Lab has shown that women perceive lower male voices to be more masculine. "Our new research shows that women with attractive voices have particularly strong preferences for masculine men," said Jones.

The researchers suggest that it may be adaptive for a woman with a high-pitched, attractive voice to prefer deep male voices because she may be more able to attract and hang onto a masculine partner than women with lower, less attractive voices.

The study is published in the current issue of Behavioral Ecology.

"If females prefer men with low voices, that suggests the pitch of the voice gives some sort of indication of the underlying quality of the men," said Dr Alan McElligott of Queen Mary, University of London, "but the exact link between quality of the men and pitch of the voice is not known."

McElligott studies vocal communication in fallow deer, where the females prefer males with deep calls. "Doing this on human speech is very complicated," he said, "but if you compare humans to other large mammals there are lots of similarities"

It used to be thought that voice pitch in mammals relates to body size, but that is no longer believed top be the case. McElligott pointed out that you can have big men with higher-pitched voices, or smaller men with lower-pitched voices, so pitch is not always an indication of body size.

The pitch of a man's voice also changes with stress and in response to the prevailing social hierarchy. But pitch does give females some sort of cue to the quality of males.

"It's tempting to think that differences among people in the types of individuals that they find attractive and unattractive are simply due to rather random aspects of personal taste," said Jones. "But this work, along with a lot of other work that we have published over the last few years, shows that at least some of this personal opinion can be predicted by, for example, measures of women's own attractiveness."

It seems the finding doesn't just apply to young women in Aberdeen. Jones said previous studies, testing thousands of women on the internet, showed a similar relationship between women's beliefs about their own attractiveness and their preferences for masculine characteristics in men's faces.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 16 Jul 2010 | 10:00 am

June was the hottest on record

US government climate data suggests 2010 on course to be warmest year since records began

Last month was the hottest June ever recorded worldwide and the fourth consecutive month that the combined global land and sea temperature records have been broken, according to the US government's climate data centre.

The figures released last night by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) suggest that 2010 is now on course to be the warmest year since records began in 1880.

The trend to a warmer world is now incontrovertible. According to NOAA, June was the 304th consecutive month with a combined global land and surface temperature above the 20th-century average. The last month with below-average temperatures was February 1985. Each of the 10 warmest average global temperatures recorded since 1880 have occurred in the last 15 years with the previous warmest first half of a year in 1998.

Temperature anomalies included Spain, which experienced its coolest June temperature since 1997, and Guizhou in southern China, which had its coolest June on record. According to Beijing Climate Centre, Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang, and Jilin experienced their warmest June since their records began in 1951.

Scientists expressed surprise that the June land surface temperature exceeded the previous record by 0.11C (0.20F). "This large difference over land contributed strongly to the overall global land and ocean temperature anomaly," said John Leslie, a spokesman for NOAA.

Separate satellite data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado shows that the extent of sea ice in the Arctic was at its lowest for any June since satellite records started in 1979. The icy skin over the Arctic Ocean grows each winter and shrinks in summer, reaching its annual low point in September. The monthly average for June 2010 was 10.87 km sq. The ice was declining an average of 88,000 sq km per day in June.

In a further possible sign of a warming world, the Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier, one of the largest in Greenland, lost a 2.7-square mile chunk of ice and retreated one mile between 6-7 July – one of the largest single losses to a glacier ever recorded.

The glacier, a tongue of the Greenland ice sheet, has retreated six miles since 2000 and more than 27 miles since 1850. It is believed to be the single largest contributor to sea level rise in the northern hemisphere.

Greenland's ice sheet, a vast body of ancient ice covering 1.7m sq km, is melting today more rapidly than only a few decades ago. Since 2000, the ice sheet is calculated to have lost about 1,500 cubic kilometres of water– enough to raise global sea levels by 5mm . If the entire ice sheet melted, the world's oceans would rise by over six metres.

Glaciologists expressed surprise at the speed of the break-up of the glacier: "This is unusual because it occurs on the heels of a warm winter that saw no sea ice form in the surrounding bay ... it lends credence to the theory that warming of the oceans is responsible for the ice loss observed throughout Greenland and Antarctica," said Nasa scientist Thomas Wagner.

"These are clear signs of a rapidly warming world and exactly what the climate models have predicted. Thankfully, there is a way out of it if we can get greenhouse gas emissions under control," said Ben Stewart of Greenpeace.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 16 Jul 2010 | 9:29 am

2010 on Track to Be Warmest On Record

The record-breaking highs we're feeling now could soon become the norm.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 16 Jul 2010 | 9:20 am

Digital Age Presents New Problems for Historians

Scholars of a future past will face a challenge very different from the job of contemporary academics.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Jul 2010 | 9:16 am

Malaria-proof mosquito engineered

Geneticists successfully introduce a gene to mosquito larvae that blocks the development of the malaria parasite.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 16 Jul 2010 | 9:03 am

Surprise! Puzzling Three-Horned Dino Is Adult Triceratops

Paleontologists now say that the large-frilled Torosaurus simply represents the mature adult form of the famous three-horned Triceratops, based on microscopic studies of dinosaur skulls.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Jul 2010 | 8:41 am

A Formula for the Perfect Handshake?

Help is finally here for people who are overcome with nerves when faced with this age-old custom.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 16 Jul 2010 | 8:10 am

Meet the queen's executioner beetle

New identity for Megapenthes lugens reflects location, character and appearance, say judges of competition to give common names to 10 rare UK species

• See the full list of winners
• George Monbiot: Ten species now have an identity we can care about

It began with a stark fact – the rapid extinction of animals and plants in England - and has ended with an outpouring of interest, ingenuity, some poetry and even a touch of magic.

The Guardian competition to name some lesser-known and threatened insects, lichens and sea-creatures from around the country received more than 3,000 entries, transforming the Philorhizus quadrisignatus into the intriguing Mab's lantern beetle, Peltigera venosa into the otherworldly pixie gowns lichen, and Haliclystus auricula into colourful kaleidoscope jellyfish.

These were just some of 10 winners in the contest to give common names to species that – until now – were known only by their official Latin titles. The overall winner met all the judges' criteria by reflecting its location, character and appearance: the queen's executioner beetle. "I've gone for this for the link to Windsor [the only place in the UK that Megapenthes lugens lives] and the royals," said the winner, greenhitman, via the blog. "The executioner is to represent that it kills and eats the larvae of others, and also links to its black colour – the hood of an executioner is traditionally black." Runners-up in the same category echoed a similar theme, coming up with the Windsor witch beetle and black prince beetle.

"Judging the competition was very hard, as in every case there were at least half a dozen names that deserved to win," said the Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who first suggested the competition. "Not only were they practical and distinctive, many of them also captured the magic and mystery of England's wildlife." Monbiot cites witches' whiskers lichen, winner for naming the medicinal lichen Usnea florida: the name captured its wispy texture, and echoes of the tradition of giving special names to plants and body parts for witches' brews.

The winner that named Philorhizus quadrisignatus as the Mab's lantern beetle refers to the fairy queen, Shakespeare's "fairies' midwife" who gave birth to dreams; lantern to the glowing effect of the pale markings on the insect's back.

The winner for naming Cryptocephalus punctiger was the blue pepper-pot beetle, a name which brilliantly captures the iridescent colour and markings, but also serves as a reminder that this species belongs to the family of pot beetles.

One species, however, has ended up with a name with little or no reference to location or appearance, yet in some indefinable way it seems perfectly appropriate to call the tiny water shrimp, Arrhis phyllonyx, a sea piglet shimp.

Monbiot made his plea for more common names to capture the public imagination after a report by Natural England, the government's countryside and biodiversity agency, revealed that more than two species a year were becoming extinct in England, and nearly 1,000 more were seriously under threat of disappearing.

Natural England jointly organised the competition with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and the Guardian. The winners receive certificates and their names will go on display at the museum.

Tom Tew, Natural England's chief scientist, said the agency was "delighted" with the response, and particularly the quality of suggestions, many of which echoed common names of more famous species, but with a modern twist. Witches' whiskers lichen is reminiscent of the once-popular ladies' bed straw, used by women to scent their mattresses; while the skeetle beetle (Stenus longitarsis), literally describes what it does, escaping predators using natural "jet skis", as the competition entry described them.

"As to whether [the competition] is going to do any good," he continued, "it can't do any harm. These names will now enter the lexicon of British wildlife and you can connect so much when they have a name."

The remaining two category winners were the St John's jellyfish (Lucernariopsis cruxmelitensis) and the scabious cuckoo bee (Nomada armata), the last one nominated by Geoff Vincent, from Virginia Water, Surrey. The insect is from the family of cuckoo bees which lay their eggs in other bees' nests, and it feeds on scabious flowers, explained Vincent, who compared the competition to reality TV shows like Over the Rainbow, which searches for singing stars to lead the cast of popular musicals like The Sound of Music. "It's perfect for catching attention, particularly [to] those things no one sees," he told the Guardian.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 16 Jul 2010 | 7:56 am

Scientists Take Aim at Website Hackers

Computer scientists are fighting back against hackers with the company StopTheHacker.com. The project aims to address the security of websites, which are often unprotected and sitting targets for hackers.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Jul 2010 | 7:51 am

Glacier Once Stuck to Sea Floor, Breaks Loose

Change in iceberg breakage could affect sea level rise.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Jul 2010 | 7:46 am

Solar plane flies for seven days

A UK unmanned solar-powered plane called Zephyr has flown continuously for seven days, and is still in the air.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 16 Jul 2010 | 7:40 am

Human nature: Superpower psychology

In the last of our series on human nature, primate expert Frans de Waal describes what happens when power is concentrated in the hands of an individual - or a nation

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 16 Jul 2010 | 7:32 am

Space Weather Turns into an International Problem

Representatives from more than 25 of the world's most technologically-advanced nations have gathered in Germany today to hear about a problem that may be too big for any one country to handle alone: solar storms.
Source: Science@NASA Headline News | 16 Jul 2010 | 7:20 am

Powerful Cosmic Blast Breaks Records

The burst of X-rays was so strong that it temporarily blinded a NASA satellite.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 16 Jul 2010 | 7:15 am

Relic of Harpocrates, the god of secrecy and silence, found at Silchester

Archaeological dig at abandoned Roman city in Hampshire yields earliest representation of an Egyptian deity found in Britain

A battered and corroded thumb-sized piece of bronze has turned out to be a unique find, the earliest representation of an Egyptian deity from any site in Britain – and appropriately, after almost 2,000 years hidden in the ground, it is Harpocrates, the god of secrecy and silence.

The little figure was found at Silchester, site of an abandoned Roman city in Hampshire, in last summer's excavation, but his identity was only revealed in months of careful conservation work. His Greek and Roman designation as Harpocrates, the god of spymasters, is actually a transcription error.

"In Egyptian mythology the figure is known as Horus, the child of Isis and Osiris," said Professor Mike Fulford of the University of Reading, director of the Silchester excavation. "He is often shown with his finger in his mouth, a gesture that in Egypt represented the hieroglyph for his name, but was misinterpreted by the Greeks and Romans, resulting in his adoption as the god of silence and secrecy."

He was originally an ornament on an object, which is itself unique. "The figurine was attached to part of a charcoal-burning brazier which would have been used to provide heating and lighting. This brazier is the only one found in England so we are doubly excited," Fulford said. "The brazier, the sort of thing you would expect to find in Pompeii, is the first evidence of such a luxurious item from Roman Britain."

The context of the find suggests the brazier was imported, and later thrown out into a rubbish pit, in the first century AD.

Silchester is one of the most enigmatic Roman sites: after it was abandoned in the 7th century, with houses tumbled and the wells filled in, it was never reoccupied. A medieval abbey and manor farm clipped only a corner of the site; today, it remains open farmland surrounded by spectacular ruined Roman walls, still 20ft high in places.

Fulford has been digging at Silchester for half a lifetime and now returns every summer for training digs with his students and volunteers from all over the world. They are gradually peeling back the layers of an extraordinary history.

He now believes it was an iron age city of up to 10,000 people, the oldest and largest in Britain, built on the regular grid pattern which historians had believed arrived with the Romans. The evidence suggests Silchester never regained its wealth and power after the Roman invasion, and may have been burned to the ground and rebuilt in the Boudiccan rebellion of 60AD.

Among its puzzles are the dog skeletons which turned up all over the site, one found carefully buried standing upright, still on guard after 2,000 years. Other skeletons show cut marks from flaying, suggesting the inhabitants had a flourishing craft industry of making puppy-fur cloaks.

Harpocrates will be returning to his home of the last two millennia this weekend: he will be on display at Silchester as the site opens to visitors on Saturday and Sunday – complete with Roman legionaries, the Legio Secunda Augusta, who will be pitching their tents beside the site and breaking the tedium of camp chores with a little light gladiatorial combat.

Open days at Silchester mark the start of the Festival of British Archaeology, the largest event of its kind in the world. Over the next fortnight, hundreds of historic sites, excavations, archaeology stores and museums will welcomethe public, with events including re-enactments, lectures and a chance to try skills, from flint knapping to dowsing.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 16 Jul 2010 | 7:06 am

Bee Venom Can Improve Brain Function

Honey bee venom may be the key to treating diseases like muscular dystrophy, dementia and depression.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 16 Jul 2010 | 6:34 am

The parts science cannot reach

We need to distinguish in detail all the different sorts of explaining we do in life. No one key opens every lock

The question: Can science explain everything?

There has been a great deal of philosophical work on the concept of explanation, and Wittgenstein's opinion is widely accepted (I certainly accept it) that it does not make sense to say that one sort of explanation will fit every case. Explanations in quantum physics, for example, rely on complex mathematical techniques and specialised observations in carefully controlled laboratory conditions. The experiments are repeatable in principle, the controlled conditions are specified closely, and equations predict precise (even if probabilistic) events which obey general laws governing relations between measurable physical properties like spin, charge, and mass.

Compare this with, for example, explaining why there was a partial collapse of the banking system at a specific time. No such explanation is accepted by all economists, there are no controlled experimental conditions, the events in question cannot be repeated, no precise predictions are forthcoming, and there are no measurable physical properties involved.

It would not seem right to say "science cannot explain this". But it would be right to say that most natural sciences (for instance, physics and chemistry) would not be involved in such explanations. Of course you can always extend the meaning of "science" so that it covers any systematic investigation involving careful observation. Then science would cover stamp-collecting and train-spotting.

Would it cover religion? Suppose that we want to explain why Christians developed the idea that Jesus is both divine and human. We would need to enquire into what is meant by various words and phrases – how far they are metaphorical, what metaphors might mean, how they could be interpreted in different ways, and so on. It is surely right to say that we are trying to explain what words and ideas mean. Again, it is not that science "cannot" explain this. The fact is that trying to explain meanings is just a different sort of activity, a different sort of explanation, from what the typical scientist who investigates physical features is interested in.

As Wittgenstein said, explaining meanings is explaining, trying to make sense of, forms of life and different ways of understanding the world. We need to distinguish in detail all the different sorts of explaining we do in life. People who are not scientists certainly try to explain lots of things that happen, and why should we deny they are using explanations, but not as a professional scientist would?

Consider just two examples that make my point quite well. If you ask me to explain why Fermat's last theorem took so long to solve, I can do so. I will do so by teaching you what deduction is, what different sorts of mathematical axioms there can be, and how mathematics involves creative postulates as well as algorithmic procedures. At no point will I appeal to observation or experiment, or to any laws according to which the physical world behaves.

If you ask me to explain how it is that the existence of evil is compatible with the existence of a good God, I can offer various explanations, by exploring the entailments of particular concepts of a creator God, and by entertaining various hypotheses which provide possible reasons (not physical causes according to general laws) for the existence of suffering in the universe. I will not appeal to experiments or provide any new predictions, but I may succeed in explaining the problems involved, and in showing that they can, or that they cannot, be resolved. I can distinguish between sophisticated and silly explanations, and between plausible and implausible explanations. But I will not expect to produce universal agreement. That is part of the nature of explanation in religion, in philosophy, in morality, in aesthetics, and in the understanding of language generally.

My conclusion is that we should not expect one key to open every lock. We should not expect any specific type of scientific explanation to explain everything. So to say that "science explains everything" is just the hypostatisation of an abstraction. It is not so much that it is false as that it lacks meaning.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 16 Jul 2010 | 5:30 am

Creatures of the deep

Bizarre creatures on the Great Barrier Reef caught on camera
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 16 Jul 2010 | 5:13 am

Everest photos 'confirm ice loss'

Photos taken by a mountaineer on Everest from the same spot where similar pictures were taken in 1921 reveal an "alarming" ice loss.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 16 Jul 2010 | 4:48 am

A love affair with life

In E O Wilson's autobiography Naturalist we learn of the great ant man's enchanted childhood and development into one of the patron saints of conservation

Edward O Wilson is one of the architects of that bleak philosophy called sociobiology. In his 1978 classic On Human Nature, Wilson describes the human mind as a device for survival and reproduction, with reason as just one of its various techniques.

"The first dilemma, in a word, is that we have no particular place to go. The species lacks any goal external to its own biological nature."

He spells it out: all the drive, wit, love, pride, anger, hope and anxiety that characterise the species Homo sapiens are simply there to perpetuate the biological cycle.

All of which makes it even more fun to discover that this seemingly austere nihilism flowered from an enchanted childhood enriched by a passion for the fauna of the old American South, and then – only notionally – impoverished by the loss of an eye to a spine from a poisonous little fish; by a grateful experience of ramrod military education; by compulsive achievement in the Boy Scout movement; by a sincere investment in the hymns and passions of the Southern Baptist Church; and by an old-fashioned Tom Sawyer faith in the ideals of honour, duty, courage and standing up to bullies.

The story could as easily have been an exculpation of failure: a sorry chronicle of a lonely boy, child of divorced parents, son of an ultimately suicidal depressive alcoholic, farmed out to strangers, bullied at school, left to his own devices, allowed to play with guns and knives, dragged from town to town and school to school, increasingly obsessed with insects, snakes and amphibians.

But nothing in Wilson's telling makes it seem unhappy, or at least not for very long: here is a resourceful, resilient child who makes the best of his surroundings. It is a sunlit story of the warm south: Mark Twain rather than Tennessee Williams, complete with drive, wit, love, pride, hope and so on.

And it is beautifully written. The story opens with the memories of a seven-year-old on Paradise Beach in Florida, mesmerised by a medusa, which he describes with delicacy and precision. Somehow this early fascination with life's prodigality, with wet, slimy or creepy-crawly things, becomes systematised and methodical.

The young Wilson learns quite early on that he wants to be a scientist. He is in luck: he meets people who encourage him; he works his way through college; he becomes what he dreamed of becoming, a myrmecologist (specialising in ants); he ends up at Harvard and his increasing expertise in the ant world of the Americas and the Pacific somehow enables him to begin to see the big picture: the puzzle of life on Earth.

It isn't clear, despite the clarity of the memoir, quite how the dreamy child turns into the focused scientist – some dreamy children just become dreamy adults - but these steps from daydream to determined endeavour usually involve a mix of random encounter, enthusiasm and opportunism.

Wilson becomes more than just a great ant man. He extends the lessons of the ant heap to the panorama of evolution. He becomes a theorist of biodiversity, evolutionary biology and biogeography, and one of the patron saints of conservation science.

Ironically, as he becomes a scientist, he begins increasingly to write like one. "I believed deeply in the power of reductionism, followed by a reconstitution of detail by synthesis," he declares in his chapter on island biogeography, and in the same paragraph a colleague becomes "enamoured of" a subject.

On the other hand, who could not applaud a Harvard don who writes of another Harvard don, his contemporary the double helix discoverer James Dewey Watson: "I found him the most unpleasant human being I had ever met."

But such episodes are just turbid pools in the limpid stream of memoir. Wilson goes around the world, grubbing for ants in Mexico, New Caledonia, the New Hebrides and Australia, makes ant history in Sri Lanka, marries happily, wins academic awards, writes great books, and wins a Pulitzer prize.

He gets involved in furious ideological debate about genetic determinism. On a public platform somebody literally pours cold water on him and his arguments – one forgets how polarised the politics of biological science then seemed – but he says, "I received almost no hate mail, and never a death threat." Right to the end, he maintains the old-fashioned courtesy of the South.

He concludes that he would do it all over again, but this time as a microbial ecologist, and begin his research not in the jungles of the Pacific but rather cut his way "through clonal forests sprawled across grains of sand" and travel in "an imagined submarine through drops of water proportionately the size of lakes".

Naturalist is an unfinished story about a profound and increasingly thoughtful love affair with life itself: all life.

It isn't obvious that this literary biophilia – the word is Wilson's own coinage – somehow enhances my chances of reproductive survival, but it certainly enhanced my summer.

Thanks for several ideas for books to debate (and I know that at least two of you suggested another Wilson title). But club member Hypocorpse got in promptly with a request for Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth by James Lovelock (1979). It's not a big book, but it certainly punched above its weight.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 16 Jul 2010 | 3:16 am

Red Sea coral 'feeling the heat'

A species of coral in the Red Sea could stop growing by 2070 if the current warming trend continues, say scientists.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 16 Jul 2010 | 3:10 am