Can't place that face?

Researchers are trying to understand the mechanisms at work in the face area of the brain called the "fusiform gyrus" by combining cognitive psychology with techniques like brain imaging and electrophysiology. This research may help business executives better match names with faces, and can lead to better facial recognition software to identify terrorists or criminals.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 29 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am

An HPV vaccine cheap enough for the developing world? Could be

Vaccine manufacturers in India and other developing countries may be able to produce a lower-cost HPV vaccine in spite of the complicated array of patent protections on the technology, say researchers.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 29 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am

Brainstem, spinal cord images hidden in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco

Michelangelo, the 16th century master painter and accomplished anatomist, appears to have hidden an image of the brainstem and spinal cord in a depiction of God in the Sistine Chapel's ceiling, a new study reports. These findings by a neurosurgeon and a medical illustrator may explain long controversial and unusual features of one of the frescoes' figures.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 29 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am

Planets found in unusually intimate dance around dying star

Astronomers have found two extrasolar planetary systems with gas giant planets locked in an orbital embrace. In one system -- a planetary pair orbiting the massive, dying star HD 200964, located roughly 223 light-years from Earth -- the intimate dance is closer and tighter than any previously seen.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 29 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am

Sleep disorder may signal dementia, Parkinson's disease up to 50 years early

A new study shows that a sleep disorder may be a sign of dementia or Parkinson's disease up to 50 years before the disorders are diagnosed.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 29 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am

NASA simulates space exploration at remote Arctic crater site

NASA personnel are among a group of international researchers who are in the Canadian Arctic assessing concepts for future planetary exploration as part of the Haughton-Mars Project, or HMP-2010. Scientists are using the arid, rocky environment of the Haughton Crater on Devon Island, Canada to simulate conditions that might be encountered by explorers on other planetary bodies. The latest edition of the HMP-2010 began July 19 and includes three weeks of crew and mission control activities and robotic testing.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 29 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am

Birth of a hurricane

Summer storms are a regular feature in the North Atlantic, and while most pose little threat to our shores, a choice few become devastating hurricanes. To decipher which storms could bring danger, and which will not, atmospheric scientists are heading to the tropics to observe these systems as they form and dissipate--or develop into hurricanes.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 29 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

Women with gestational diabetes have increased risk of recurrence in subsequent pregnancies, study finds

There is an increased risk of recurring gestational diabetes in pregnant women who developed gestational diabetes during their first and second pregnancies, according to new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 29 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

Quantum phenomenon observed: Atoms form organized structure from unorganized one

Physicists have experimentally observed a quantum phenomenon, where an arbitrarily weak perturbation causes atoms to build an organized structure from an initially unorganized one.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 29 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

Dense bones linked to raised risk for prostate cancer

Men who develop prostate cancer, especially the more aggressive and dangerous forms that spread throughout the body, tend to retain denser bones as they age than men who stay free of the disease, suggests new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 29 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

Deal finalised on fusion reactor

The European Union and six member states have reached a deal on the experimental nuclear fusion reactor they are backing.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 29 Jul 2010 | 3:59 am

HSBC tapped to sell BP stake in Vietnam gas project - sources (Reuters)

Reuters - BP has tapped HSBC to sell its stake in the Nam Con Son gas project in Vietnam as it scrambles to hive off $30 billion of assets to pay for the clean-up of the worst oil spill in U.S. history, three sources said.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Jul 2010 | 3:45 am

Feds, farmers create habitats for migrating birds (AP)

AP - Water gurgling from a well is flooding Craig Gautreaux's rice and crawfish fields, turning the farm into a wetland for migratory birds whose usual Gulf of Mexico wintering grounds are threatened by the oil spill.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Jul 2010 | 3:43 am

BP aims for quick well kill and weighs asset sales (Reuters)

Reuters - BP Plc may permanently shut the well that caused the worst off-shore oil spill in U.S. history as early as Monday, the company said as speculation grew over assets it might sell to cover mounting costs.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Jul 2010 | 3:15 am

Mental health diagnoses mask the real problems | Dorothy Rowe

A textbook of mental health disorders makes it far too easy for doctors to label patients – and disregard the roots of suffering

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, whose updated fifth edition will include a range of new diagnoses, is a mythology, not a scientific text. It is created by American psychiatrists who meet in groups to consider whether or not a certain diagnosis should be included in the DSM. These groups meet a number of times so that they can say that their agreement about a certain diagnosis is reliable. Thus they could reliably agree that there is a mental disorder called Guardian Readers' Personality Disorder with the symptoms of a need to read this paper regularly, an overvaluation of the Guardian, and so on. Who knows, it might already be in the most recent version of the DSM.

In their book, Making Us Crazy: DSM – The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders – which won the Mind Book of the Year Award in 1999 – Herb Kutchins and Stuart A Kirk wrote: "DSM is a book of tentatively assembled agreements. Agreements don't always make sense, nor do they always reflect reality. You can have agreements among experts without validity. Even if you could find four people who agreed that the earth is flat, that the moon is made of green cheese, that smoking cigarettes poses no health risks, or that politicians are never corrupt, such agreements do not establish truth."

For any statement to be valid there has to be evidence for that statement outside of the statement itself. Thus any textbook of physical disorders will list not just the symptoms of each illness but evidence that exists separate from those symptoms and that is derived from a wide variety of tests. Apart from the disorders listed in the DSM as the result of brain trauma, there are no physical tests for any of the disorders listed in the DSM. No physical cause has been found for any of these mental disorders. The diagnosis you receive from a psychiatrist is no more than the psychiatrist's opinion of what you have told him. Go to another psychiatrist and you're likely to get a different diagnosis.

Why do psychiatrists accept such an unscientific document as the DSM? In her book, The Users and Abusers of Psychiatry, my colleague Lucy Johnstone wrote, "To admit the central role of value judgments and cultural norms [in the creation of the DSM] is to give the whole game away. The DSM has to be seen as reliable and valid, or the whole enterprise of medial psychiatry collapses."

Legal cases and medical insurance require any doctor or psychologist filling in the necessary forms to state a diagnosis. In the UK many psychiatrists, GPs and psychologists now see applying a DSM diagnosis to a patient as a pointless exercise, but feel that it is not in their patient's interest to refuse to fill in this part of the form. However, there are still far too many doctors and psychologists who are too intellectually lazy to think about patients as individuals, or too fond of the many freebies that the drug companies provide for them. These are the ones who spring to the defence of the DSM.

The people who come to the attention of psychiatrists and psychologists are feeling intense, often severe mental distress. Each of us has our own way of expressing anxiety and distress, but when under intense mental distress our typical ways become exaggerated. We become self-absorbed and behave in ways that the people around us find disturbing. Believing that when we're anxious it's best to keep busy can mean that our intense mental distress drives us into manic activity. A tendency to blame yourself and feel guilty can transmute into depression. A desire to keep things under control can become obsessions and compulsions. We need someone to help us to make sense of the terror that can come over us and assure us that we can survive what we are experiencing. When we keep making a mess of our life we need someone to help us face the truths about which we've been lying to ourselves. But when we are given a diagnosis we disappear behind that diagnosis, and the diagnosis is all the unthinking people see.

All of us are already are in the fourth edition of the DSM. According to my copy, on page 673, it states, "301.9 Personality Disorder Not Otherwise Specified". That's you.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 Jul 2010 | 3:00 am

Deep blue fuels

Russian sub searches Lake Baikal for energy reserves
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 29 Jul 2010 | 2:58 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Active weather was forecast to continue throughout the eastern half of the nation Thursday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Jul 2010 | 2:46 am

Shell profit climbs to $4.39 billion in quarter (AFP)

AFP - British oil giant Royal Dutch Shell reported on Thursday a 15-percent jump in net profits to 4.393 billion dollars (3.377 billion euros) in the second quarter, on cutting costs and raising output.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Jul 2010 | 1:51 am

Chemicals washed into China river

Rescue teams in northeast China are working to retrieve 3,000 barrels of chemicals washed into a major river, state media says.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 29 Jul 2010 | 1:17 am

Cheetah will run again in India

The cheetah, eradicated in India by hunting nearly a century ago, will run again in the country, as three sites are earmarked for its reintroduction.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 29 Jul 2010 | 12:49 am

After the burning, a raft of IVF horror stories to come | Zoe Williams

The abolition of the HFEA will leave a major policy vacuum in biotech ethics. Without intervention, it'll be filled by the Daily Mail

George Osborne promised us a bonfire of the quangos, and you have to admit, that sounded quite cool: like a cross between a party and the execution of a heretic. I can't remember now why I didn't vote for him. What has emerged is a bit damper than a bonfire – within the NHS, the number of "arm's length bodies" will go down from 18 to between eight and 10. The changes will come about gradually between now and the end of parliament – which timespan is not very helpful (who knows how long this Brokeback coalition will last? The film felt pretty long …).

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Agency is definitely for the chop: put more delicately, it will have its functions transferred by the end of parliament. Hardly a squeak from the body itself: in a press release, it said it would strive to deliver "the organisational change that the government has decided on and to ensure the continuity of the very high standard of regulation". It's the kind of statement a person might write under torture. But they're probably just being mature – and there's no point agitating when you might dust yourself down to find that you're still in the same job, only now your office is called the Care Quality Commission.

By the way, no announcement can ever be made about the HFEA or, for that matter, the Human Tissue Authority, also under review, that doesn't stress how "sensitive" and "complicated" these matters are. I'm going to take as read that we all know it's complicated, none of us is in favour of mating a horse with a pig, and nobody's arguing for limitless IVF, to limitlessly old women, of a limitless number of foetuses.

So here's how it works: the HFEA regulates fertility organisations, puts ideas out to consultation, does what they call "horizon scanning" for biotechnological advances and provides information, for policy framers and for people seeking fertility treatment, donor-conceived people and donors. They actually charge clinics, private and NHS – £104 for an IVF cycle, £52 for donor insemination – which covers the cost of regulation. So, let's say the regulatory aspect is taken on by the Care Quality Commission (that's the intention) – if it gets cheaper, they'd have to drop the fee (it's often passed on to the patient, this cost, so it would be very unfair to skim a profit off it).

The CQC is already an amalgam, set up in 2008 and combining three separate commissions. The dangers of such a structure are straightforward: what some call "unnecessary bureaucracy" others call "specialist expertise". Detail is flattened out, some agendas necessarily take priority over others and, most vexing, it rarely saves that much money. The laughable finances of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission – established in part to halt the financial sprawl of three separate commissions – are a pretty good example.

But let's imagine that it works well. Let's imagine also that the HFEA and the HTA merge, in effect, even though the government tried to do that three years ago and got as far as announcing a chairman before they realised that it was a contravention of European law. But never mind that: the Con-Dems tweak the nose of Brussels and laugh in the face of bureaucracy (even the word sounds foreign). Let's imagine, finally, that the research arm of both bodies is successfully taken over by the Academy of Medical Sciences.

You still have this major gap: Donna Dickenson, emeritus professor of medical ethics at the University of London, points out that a fundamental part of the HFEA's work is consultative, taking the cultural temperature on issues like animal-human hybrid embryos and donor anonymity. Ethicists don't always agree with the results. It was felt in some quarters that on the issue of hybrid embryos, the HFEA asked the public, the public said "no, that's disgusting", and the agency was just going to keep on asking until they came back with a better answer – which they did, finally, in 2007, and it was licensed in 2008. The measures are never without controversy, not even the move to end donor anonymity.

So this function is vital: there will always be biotechnological advance, and there will always be ethical concern. Nobody else synthesises these. Dickenson comments: "We don't have a statutory national ethics commission. Almost every other European country does … the consultative function [of the HFEA] is very important: it's notorious that biotechnology moves very fast, and outstrips legislation. It's very hard for the public to keep up because the science is changing all the time."

It's difficult to predict what the result would be of the discursive vacuum left by a disbanded agency. Someone will occupy that space: it's possible that a clear-eyed, neutral party might step in to present evidence in an unsensational way. But it's more likely to be the Daily Mail, with a raft of IVF horror stories. A small but noticeable amount of the HFEA's time has gone in correcting misleading stories from the press. It's interesting to consider whether IVF could ever have become so acceptable a procedure without these interventions.

Putting a value on the subtle negotiations between science, government, public opinion and ethics is not easy; but we can say for certain that they're not without value. The last thing the conversation calls for is pyromaniacal abandon.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 Jul 2010 | 12:30 am

Canadian archeologists find lost ship in Arctic

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canadian archeologists have discovered the wreckage of the ship that has been credited with discovering the fabled Northwest Passage, saying the vessel remains in good condition after being abandoned more than 150 years ago in the Arctic ice.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 28 Jul 2010 | 9:50 pm

Litter picking on the sea bed

A team of divers - known as Neptune's Army of Rubbish Cleaners - are stepping up efforts to keep Britain's coastline clean and litter free.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 28 Jul 2010 | 9:37 pm

Mushrooms Turned into Green Packaging (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - In addition to tomatoes and peppers, your next garden could grow packaging materials.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 28 Jul 2010 | 8:35 pm

NYC looks to stop spreading bedbug infestations (AP)

AP - One of every 15 New Yorkers battled bedbugs last year, officials said Wednesday as they announced a plan to fight the spreading infestation, including a public-awareness campaign and a top entomologist to head the effort.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 28 Jul 2010 | 7:53 pm

Photoshop of Horrors: Wired Readers Show BP How It’s Done

We asked you last week to help us show BP that when hiring unethical photographers (or photo editors) in the future, they should look for Photoshop proficiency on their resumes.

In response, you put the company’s pathetic photo-doctoring of oil-cleanup press photos to shame. Your work was not only more skilled, it was far more imaginative. Why just remove the ground beneath a parked helicopter when you could put that chopper on the moon instead?

As Kanye West would probably tell BP, “Ima let you finish your top kill, but … ”

We’ve got some of the best, most clever and funniest of your work in this gallery, but if you want to see more, including some great ones that were too small to include here, check out the submissions at the bottom of last week’s call for submissions.

The titles and captions were written by the artists.

Above:

BP Encounters an Act of God…

…zilla

Submitted by cybersox13

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 28 Jul 2010 | 5:57 pm

WWF sorry for Saudi Arabia insult

Environmental group WWF apologises to Saudi Arabia after one of its workers vandalised the country's nameplate at a climate conference.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 28 Jul 2010 | 5:16 pm

Rabbits grow their own joint replacements in study

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Rabbits implanted with artificial bones re-grew their own joints, complete with cartilage, researchers reported on Thursday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 28 Jul 2010 | 4:32 pm

Huge Star Burns Fast and Furious in Photo (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - A rare specimen of massive stars that live fast and die young has been photographed by a European observatory in Chile.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 28 Jul 2010 | 4:32 pm

British Minister: Photos Dangerous to Body Image

A British minister proposes health warning labels on fashion photographs, concerned about their influence on young women. But what does the science show?
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 28 Jul 2010 | 4:25 pm

Undersea Mics Listen for Gulf Whales Threatened by Oil Spill

Whale calls provide information about the animals' abundance in oil-ravaged waters.
Source: Livescience.com | 28 Jul 2010 | 4:02 pm

Photons meet with three-way split

Method that generates photon triplets could be a boon for quantum information.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/AqK5d8lMuW0" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 28 Jul 2010 | 3:43 pm

Ocean greenery under warming stress

A century of phytoplankton decline suggests that ocean ecosystems are in peril.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 28 Jul 2010 | 3:33 pm

Alien Planets Gather Close Around Dying Star

A pair of alien planets is locked in an orbital embrace around a dying star, a new study discovered.
Source: Livescience.com | 28 Jul 2010 | 3:29 pm

Corrections

Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 28 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm

Food: The global farm

With its plentiful sun, water and land, Brazil is quickly surpassing other countries in food production and exports. But can it continue to make agricultural gains without destroying the Amazon? Jeff Tollefson reports from Brazil.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 28 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm

Food: An underground revolution

Plant breeders are turning their attention to roots to increase yields without causing environmental damage. Virginia Gewin unearths some promising subterranean strategies.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 28 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm

Food: The growing problem

World hunger remains a major problem, but not for the reasons many suspect. analyses the trends and the challenges of feeding 9 billion by 2050.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 28 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm

Food: Inside the hothouses of industry

Feeding the world is going to require the scientific and financial muscle of agricultural biotechnology companies. Natasha Gilbert asks whether they're up to the task.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 28 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm

Study changes picture of U.S. quake hazards

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The risk of earthquakes in the U.S. Midwest may be more widespread than geologists have believed, but a "big one" may be less likely at Missouri's New Madrid fault, researchers said on Wednesday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 28 Jul 2010 | 2:49 pm

Worst Oil Spill in Midwest Raises Pipeline Concerns

The oil spill in Michigan, though small compared to the Deepwater Horizon, raises questions about the country's network of oil and gas pipelines.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 28 Jul 2010 | 2:18 pm

Shuttle contractor laying off 1,400 workers (AP)

AP - The private contractor that handles the bulk of the work servicing NASA's space shuttle fleet is notifying 1,400 employees in Florida, Texas and Alabama that they will be laid off in the fall.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 28 Jul 2010 | 2:17 pm

Freedom of spill research threatened

Scientists call for impartial funding and open data as BP and government agencies contract researchers.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 28 Jul 2010 | 2:00 pm

Warming of Oceans Will Reduce and Rearrange Marine Life

The warmth of the ocean is the critical factor that determines how much productivity and biodiversity there is in the ocean, and where.

In two separate studies, researchers found that warming oceans have led to a massive decline in the amount of plant life in the sea over the last century, and that temperature is tightly linked to global patterns of marine biodiversity.

“We are just now understanding how deeply temperature affects ocean life,” said biologist Boris Worm of Dalhousie University, a co-author on both papers appearing July 28 in Nature. “It is not necessarily that increased temperature is destroying biodiversity, but we do know that a warmer ocean will look very different.”

In one study that looks at historical records of algae abundance over the last hundred years, Worm and his co-authors found that warming ocean temperatures are correlated to a massive decline in the amount of marine algae, or phytoplankton. Marine algae are the base of the entire ocean food chain, and were also responsible for originally creating oxygen on the planet.

The study estimates the decline in marine algae has been approximately 40 percent since 1950.

“I think that if this study holds up, it will be one of the biggest biological changes in recent times simply because of its scale,” said Worm. “The ocean is two-thirds of the earth’s surface area, and because of the depth dimension it is probably 80 to 90 percent of the biosphere. Even the deep sea depends on phytoplankton production that rains down. On land, by contrast, there is only a very thin layer of production.”

The study on marine phytoplankton is the first to look at changes over the last century at a global scale with data from as far back as 1899. Similar models have been made using satellite data, but that data only extends back to 1979.

“One of the most important aspects of the new paper is that they’ve come up with the same answer but from a different approach than we saw from space,” said marine botanist Michael Behrenfeld of Oregon State University. “I think that we should be concerned that this convergence of multiple approaches sees a reduction in the phytoplankton pigments as the ocean warms. If we continue to warm the climate we will probably see further reductions.”

In a study of general marine biodiversity, scientists have made the first global map of the biodiversity of the oceans for more than 11,000 marine species, from tiny shrimp-like creatures to whales, building on 6.5 million records from the Census for Marine Life and other databases. Of all the factors they looked at to explain why some regions had more or fewer types of creatures, the only factor that consistently explained the patterns for the 13 groups of marine life they studied was temperature.

“It was surprising that we found such a strong correlation to marine biodiversity and temperature,” said biologist Derek Tittensor of the University of Dalhousie, lead author of the marine biodiversity map study. “You might expect a different response to temperature from cold and warm-blooded animals, for example.”

Ocean temperature had different effects on the number of different creatures in coastal habitats versus open-ocean habitats. The biodiversity hotspots for coastal marine ecosystems were mostly near the equator where ocean temperatures are warmest, much like on land.

But for open ocean ecosystems, which included many deep-sea creatures, whales and big fish like tuna, the hotspots for diversity were at the mid-latitudes, where temperatures were slightly cooler.

“What we can draw from this study is that it is very likely that we will see a reorganization of biodiversity in the ocean from a warming ocean, but right now it’s very hard to predict exactly what that reorganization will be,” said Tittensor.

The hotspots in biodiversity are also the areas that have attracted the most human impacts, such as fishing and habitat destruction, meaning that we are harming the areas that we should be trying to conserve.

By mapping where the biodiversity of marine life is today, scientists now have a baseline for comparing species distributions in the future. Understanding these changes will help them understand how marine biodiversity is being affected by changes in the amount of marine algae, for example.

“In order to understand life in the ocean, we need to understand where it is,” said Worm. “It’s a basis for understanding and also managing ocean life.”

“The ocean is something that we’re not very good at thinking about,” Worm added. “It is one of those things that is so big to see that it has been hard to see it until now.”

Images: 1)Phytoplankton Bloom Near Norway/ NASA Earth Observatory Collection. 2) Biodiversity map of coastal and oceanic marine creatures, red boxes mark hotspots/ Tittensor. 3) Papua New Guinea coral reef, A.A. Rosenfeld/Marine Photobank

Citations: 1) Daniel Boyce, Marlon Lewis and Boris Worm. “Global phytoplankton decline over the past century.” Nature, July 28. 2) Derek Tittensor, Camilo Mora, Walter Jetz, Heike Lotze, Daniel Ricard, Edward Vanden Berghe, and Boris Worm. “Global patterns and predictors of marine biodiversity across taxa.” Nature, July 28.

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 28 Jul 2010 | 1:43 pm

Dark Dust Trails Form When Whirlwinds Suck Sand Grains Clean

The ephemeral dark trails left in desert sand by dust devils are produced when the whirlwinds blow tiny particles of lighter-colored silt and dust off larger sand grains, a new study shows. Even removing a layer of dust and silt only a few micrometers thick can produce a dark trail visible with satellites, recent field studies suggest.

Dust devil trails have been spotted on space-based images of both Mars and Earth (SN: 5/8/04, p. 302). Oddly, scientists are much more familiar with the phenomenon on Mars, says Dennis Reiss, a geographer at Westfälische Wilhelms Universität Münster in Germany.

Not only are dust devils larger and the resulting trails wider on the Red Planet, the atmospheric processes that erase such blemishes are weaker there. While Martian trails may persist for weeks, those on Earth typically disappear in a day or two. “We’re lucky to see them at all on Earth,” Reiss adds.

In the July 28 Geophysical Research Letters, Reiss and his colleagues document their analyses of a fresh dust devil trail. For their first-of-its-kind field study, the researchers went to a desert region of northwestern China, where such trails are commonly seen on satellite images and are easily detected at ground level. After finding a dark trail that hadn’t been seen the previous afternoon, they used handheld microscopes to look at sand in the trail and at a comparable site just a few meters outside the dark streak.

While much of the sand outside of the trail was coated with micrometer-sized particles of silt, clay and dust, most of the sand inside the trail had been whisked clean of such particles. Because those tiny surface particles typically are light-colored, the cleansed sand, when seen from a distance, appears much darker than the nearby material, says Reiss. The team estimates that if the material removed by the dust devil were instead spread evenly over the whirlwind’s path, that layer would measure about 2 micrometers thick.

Scientists have made similar observations of a dust devil trail on Mars using instruments on a robotic rover, but those sensors didn’t have nearly the resolution of the microscopes used in the field study in China, says Reiss.

The team’s new observations confirm what’s been seen on the Red Planet but “are much more ‘up close and personal’ than what’s been done on Mars,” says Steve Metzger, a geologist from Reno, Nev., who is affiliated with NASA’s Planetary Science Institute.

While some of the tiny particles clinging to sand grains could have been blown free by the highly variable winds inside the dust devil, most were probably pounded loose from the sand grains as they saltated, or bounced along the ground, says Metzger. Via this “impact splash” phenomenon, a dust devil can easily loft several cubic meters of dust into the air, he notes.

And while large quantities of the dust and silt likely ended up airborne, some of the tiny particles could have been driven down into the gaps between sand grains, he notes. With the data gathered so far, it’s difficult to estimate what fraction of dust and silt might be driven into those subsurface voids, says Reiss.

Image: Dark dust trails on Mars/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 28 Jul 2010 | 1:34 pm

River Gets Blame for Giant 1811 Earthquakes

Earth snapped like a twig — after 16,000 years of bending.
Source: Livescience.com | 28 Jul 2010 | 1:02 pm

Retraction recommended for enzyme-chip paper

Reactome array study should not have been published, says ethics committee.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 28 Jul 2010 | 1:00 pm

Marsupial DNA Redraws Family Tree

The kangaroo’s twisted marsupial family tree is now in order thanks to — you guessed it — jumping genes. Genetic evidence shows that a South American ancestor gave rise to all Australian marsupials, and that the South American opossums were the earliest group to branch off from the other six marsupial clans.

Distinctive for raising their live-born young in protective pouches, marsupials all trace back to a common ancestor that split off from the rest of the mammals about 130 million years ago. But fossil and genetic evidence conflict about which marsupial species evolved first, and where.

Jumping genes provide new clues for solving the puzzle. These “junk” bits of DNA make copies of themselves to reinsert randomly in the genome. Half of the marsupial genome consists of jumping genes, so researchers have plenty to work with. Gene-jumping is rare, and each jump is a unique event unlikely to happen again. So if two species share a jumping gene, scientists can deduce that they inherited it from a common ancestor.

Maria Nilsson and her colleagues at Westfälische Wilhelms Universität Münster in Germany looked at similarities and differences in jumping genes in the seven main branches of marsupials. In the July PLoS Biology, the team presents a new marsupial family tree with slightly different familial relationships than other research had predicted.

“It’s a different type of data, and it’s much cleaner [than fossil and genetic data],” says evolutionary biologist David Pollock of the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver, who was not involved with the research.

According to the new tree, all Australian marsupials arose from a single South American ancestor. In addition, their data puts the gray, short-tailed South American opossum on the earliest branch of the marsupial tree.

There’s always the potential for error in molecular studies, says mammologist Ines Horovitz of the University of California, Los Angeles. But she says the study “contributes new data, and that’s always important.”

Next, Nilsson says she wants to use jumping genes to probe the relationships among the Australian marsupials to see exactly how they’re related.

Image: Koala in Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary, Queensland, Australia./Flickr/Erik Veland.

See Also:

• Think Koalas Are Cute? Thank Eucalyptus and Evolution
• The Extreme Mammal Hall of Fame
• Opossum Provides Insight into Human Evolution

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 28 Jul 2010 | 12:55 pm

Mental health experts ask: Will anyone be normal?

LONDON (Reuters) - An updated edition of a mental health bible for doctors may include diagnoses for "disorders" such as toddler tantrums and binge eating, experts say, and could mean that soon no-one will be classed as normal.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 28 Jul 2010 | 12:07 pm

News briefing: 23–29 July 2010

The week in science.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 28 Jul 2010 | 12:00 pm

Raymond Allchin obituary

He was a leading figure in the archaeology and culture of India and the sub-continent

The archaeologist Raymond Allchin, who has died aged 86, first became fascinated with the cultural history of India while stationed there with the Royal Corps of Signals towards the end of the second world war. Indian partition and independence in 1947 threatened to extinguish British involvement in the study of the region's archaeology, but Raymond did much to sustain it by training generations of lecturers, field archaeologists and curators, first at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) in London, and then at Cambridge University.

He was also active in the field, his first independent project tackling the problem of the interpretation of the ash mounds in Mysore and Andhra Pradesh, in southern India. These enigmatic circular mounds survived up to 10 metres in height and were known to be formed of alternating layers of ash and vitrified materials. Some previous investigators had suggested that they were the sites of medieval iron-working.

Raymond selected one of the best-preserved, Utnur, and began to excavate. In a single season in 1957, he cut through metres of cinder and ash, and discovered that the mounds were formed by series of superimposed burnt circular stockades. Disproving the medieval hypothesis, he dated them far earlier, to the neolithic of south India (c3000BC), on account of the associated polished stone axes.

He interpreted them as annual cattle camps, whose accumulations of dung were burnt at the end of each grazing season, thus creating a regular sequence of ash and cinder. This discovery allowed him to distinguish a distinct cultural sequence for peninsular India from its neolithic to its iron-age megalithic cemeteries, as well as providing him with the opening to his report Neolithic Cattle-keepers of South India (1963): "This is a book about cow-dung, or rather the ash of cow-dung."

Raymond later developed a keen interest in the archaeology of the early historic period (c900BC-AD350), notably as to whether the Persian empire had founded the region's earliest cities in the sixth century BC, a model favoured by Sir Mortimer Wheeler. He focused on the early urban evidence from north-west Pakistan and the cultural links between the Taxila valley's sequence of three great early-historic cities – the Bhir Mound, Sirkap and Sirsukh – and the earlier series of megalithic cemeteries in the northern valleys of Swat, Dir and Chitral, collectively termed the Gandharan grave culture. Despite the clear later links between Taxila and those northern valleys, as epitomised by its shared Buddhist Gandharan style of sculpture, earlier evidence remained elusive, until Raymond and his wife, the prehistorian Bridget Gordon, wandered out eastwards from the Taxila site museum one February morning in 1980.

During their walk, they discovered numerous shards of a distinctive, highly burnished red ware at the foot of a spur called Hathial. Raymond immediately recognised that these shards belonged to the burnished red ware associated with the Gandharan grave culture, and dating to the beginning of the first millennium BC. By demonstrating the presence of a substantial settlement at the site, he concluded that the urban sequence of Taxila, and by extension south Asia, was under way long before Persian contact, going back to the late chalcolithic (copper age) and iron age.

Raymond made his work accessible through a series of sole, joint and edited publications. The Birth of Indian Civilisation (1968), written with Bridget, remained popular, being superseded only by their books The Rise of Indian Civilisation in India and Pakistan (1982) and The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia (1995). His research interests beyond archaeology ranged from his critical translation of Tulsi Das's Sanskrit classic Kavitavali to epigraphy – the study of inscriptions – and the Indian origins of distillation.

Such work attracted research students and postdoctoral fellows from across the UK and Asia to Raymond's office in Cambridge, filled with shards, sculpture and a particularly large and animated scene of an Indic hell. He was never surprised by new or unexpected archaeological results, and this, combined with his suspicion of theoretical trends, kept his mind open and his publications up to date.

Born in Harrow, north-west London, Raymond was educated at Westminster school and had enrolled at the Regent Street Polytechnic to train as an architect when he was posted to India in 1944. On his return, he embarked on a BA in Hindi and Sanskrit at Soas, followed by a PhD in 1954, the year he was appointed a lecturer in Indian archaeology there. He moved to Cambridge in 1959 and, following a career of fieldwork and research across India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, retired with the title of emeritus reader in south Asian archaeology in 1989. He was appointed a fellow of the British Academy in 1981.

He committed the next two decades to the work of the Ancient India and Iran Trust, providing visiting academics and students with open access to books, lectures, seminars, debates and tea parties.

Raymond and Bridget were married in 1951. She survives him, as do their children, Sushila and William.

• Frank Raymond Allchin, archaeologist and writer, born 9 July 1923; died 4 June 2010

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 28 Jul 2010 | 11:59 am

Marine Biodiversity Threatened, Study Finds

New map shows where ocean species dwell.
Source: Livescience.com | 28 Jul 2010 | 11:26 am

Base of Ocean Food Chain Is in Decline, Study Finds

Microscopic marine plants dwindling in warming seas.
Source: Livescience.com | 28 Jul 2010 | 11:24 am

Plankton declining across oceans

The amount of plankton in the oceans has declined markedly over the last century, with warming identified as a cause.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 28 Jul 2010 | 11:23 am

New Discovery Irons Out Physics of Wrinkles

While it won't smooth out face wrinkles, the findings explain the physics involved in flattening out wrinkly surfaces.
Source: Livescience.com | 28 Jul 2010 | 11:17 am

Social Media: Huge, and Here to Stay

Social media has overtaken porn as the number one activity on the Web.
Source: Livescience.com | 28 Jul 2010 | 11:14 am

Birth Control Messes With Monkey Business

The powerful hormones in birth-control drugs change how lemurs smell, radically altering the subtle chemical cues that guide their attraction and communication.

Research on a 2-foot-tall primate shouldn’t be extrapolated directly to humans, but the findings resonate with studies in people, which have come largely from behavioral observations and are just beginning to quantify the chemistry.

“I’m not telling people not to take birth control. But what we found in lemurs needs to be studied in humans,” said Christine Drea, a Duke University reproductive biologist.

Hormone contraceptives work by tricking bodies into thinking they’re pregnant, thus preventing the release of eggs. However, these hormones are powerful. Possible side effects include sexual and romantic dysfunction. And researchers studying the broader effects of contraceptives have noticed an apparent interference with women’s taste in men.

When asked to rate the attractiveness of male odors, women are generally more attracted to men whose scents signify an immune system quite different from their own. Such a preference ostensibly leads to children with the most versatile disease defenses possible. That preference seems lessened when women take hormone contraceptives, possibly because women’s noses can’t properly calibrate if their own scent has been changed.

Men’s responses may also be scrambled. In one infamous study, men gave more money to strippers when they approached ovulation, and very little money if they were on the pill.

Such studies are compelling, but ambiguous. Does preference for certain immune-system profiles, as identified from sweat-soaked T-shirts, translate to real-world behavior? The results appear mixed. Do men really smell something, or did women dance differently? It’s hard to tell. And mate choice is just one of the animal kingdom’s many roles for scent.

Studies like Drea’s, published July 27 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, don’t answer all these questions, but they do add chemical detail. And Drea found that the chemical changes were even more powerful than expected.

“That a contraceptive affects fertility cues might be expected, because it changes a female’s internal hormonal state,” said Drea. “But the fact that it obliterated all the other cues contained in odors is quite remarkable.”

Drea specializes in communication among ring-tailed lemurs, 2-foot tall primates that live in large colonies, with complex social behaviors heavily mediated by scent. Drea gave injections of Medroxyprogesterone, a contraceptive marketed by Pfizer as Depo Provera, to 13 female lemurs, then analyzed their chemical secretions.

Compared to their pre-contraception state, the chemical profiles changed radically. Of the hundreds of chemicals identified, the abundance of entire classes plummeted. What had been a highly diverse assortment became relatively homogeneous, and it was much harder to chemically distinguish females from each other.

The researchers don’t know enough about individual chemicals to know their precise functions, but they’ve studied the lemurs long enough to appreciate their role not only in mate choice, but in establishing identity, relatedness and genetic health.

As for the male lemurs, they started spending less time with females after they’d been dosed. “It could be they’re showing less interest because the females are not showing immediately fertility. Or maybe the females just smelled weird,” Drea said.

Whether similar chemical fluctuations happen in people is far from certain, but the findings seem to fit with the behavioral research. They also suggest new targets for chemical monitoring.

“I’m not saying there are negative health consequences, but they could have effects on other aspects of physiology and behavior,” said Drea. “Contraception could have effects beyond those we traditionally think of.”

Image: Christine Drea.

See Also:

• Scientists Agree: It’s in His Kiss
• Pharmaceutical Love Potion: Not Yet…
• Antidepressants May Thwart Quest for True Love
• New Smell Drives Evolution of New Moth Species
• The Last Frontier: Our Stinky, Sexy Sweat

Citation: “Smelling wrong: hormonal contraception in lemurs alters critical female odour cues.” By Jeremy Chase Crawford, Marylene Boulet and Christine M. Drea. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, published online, July 27, 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 | 28 Jul 2010 | 11:07 am

2010 temperatures hit record highs

Scientists from two leading climate research centres publish 'best evidence yet' of rising long-term global temperatures

• Jeffrey Sachs: Obama must take a lead on climate change

Global temperatures in the first half of the year were the hottest since records began more than a century ago, according to two of the world's leading climate research centres.

Scientists have also released what they described as the "best evidence yet" of rising long-term temperatures. The report is the first to collate 11 different indicators – from air and sea temperatures to melting ice – each one based on between three and seven data sets, dating back to between 1850 and the 1970s.

The newly released data follows months of scrutiny of climate science after sceptics claimed leaked emails from the University of East Anglia (UEA) suggested temperature records had been manipulated - a charge rejected by three inquiries.

Publishing the newly collated data in London, Peter Stott, the head of climate modelling at the UK Met Office, said despite variations between individual years, the evidence was unequivocal: "When you follow those decade-to-decade trends then you see clearly and unmistakably signs of a warming world".

"That's a very remarkable result, that all those data sets agree," he added. "It's the clearest evidence in one place from a range of different indices."

Currently 1998 is the hottest year on record. Two combined land and sea surface temperature records from Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and the US National Climatic Data Centre (NCDC) both calculate that the first six months of 2010 were the hottest on record. According to GISS, four of the six months also individually showed record highs.

A third leading monitoring programme, by the Met Office, shows this period was the second hottest on record, after 1998, with two months this year – January and March – being hotter than their equivalents 12 years ago.

The Met Office said the variations between the figures published by the different organisations are because the Met Office uses only temperature observations, Nasa makes estimates for gaps in recorded data such as the polar regions, and the NCDC uses a mixture of the two approaches. The latest figures will give weight to predictions that this year could become the hottest on record.

Despite annual fluctuations, the figures also highlight the clear trend for the 2000s to be hotter than the 1990s, which in turn were clearly warmer than the previous decade, said Stott.

"These numbers are not theory, but fact, indicating that the Earth's climate is moving into uncharted territory," said Rafe Pomerance, a senior fellow at Clean Air Cool Planet, a US group dedicated to helping find solutions to global warming.

The Met Office published its full list of global warming indicators, compiled by Hadley Centre researcher John Kennedy. It formed part of the State of the Climate 2009 report published as a special bulletin of the American Meteorological Society by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which runs the NCDC temperature series.

Seven of the indicators rose over the last few decades, indicating "clear warming trends", although these all included annual fluctuations up and down. One of these was air temperature over land – including data from the Climatic Research Unit at the UEA, whose figures were under scrutiny after hacked emails were posted online in November 2009, but the graphic also included figures from six other research groups all showing the same overall trends despite annual differences.

The other six rising indicators were sea surface temperatures, collected by six groups; ocean heat to 700m depth from seven groups; air temperatures over oceans (five data sets); the tropospheric temperature in the atmosphere up to 1km up (seven); humidity caused by warmer air absorbing more moisture (three); and sea level rise as hotter oceans expand and ice melts (six).

Another four indicators showed declining figures over time, again consistent with global warming: northern hemisphere snow cover (two data sets), Arctic sea ice extent (three); glacier mass loss (four); and the temperature of the stratosphere. This last cooling effect is caused by a decline in ozone in the stratosphere which prevents it absorbing as much ultraviolet radiation from the sun above.

One key data set omitted was sea ice in the Antarctic, because it was increasing in some areas and decreasing in others, due to reduced ozone causing changes in wind patterns and sea-surface circulation. This data set showed no clear trend, said Stott. These figures were also in the last report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007.

"It's not that the IPCC didn't look at this data, of course they did, but they didn't put it all together in one place," he added.

The cause of the warming was "dominated" by greenhouse gases emitted by human activity, said Stott. "It's possible there's some [other] process which can amplify other effects, such as radiation from the sun, [but] the evidence is so clear the chance there's something we haven't thought of seems to be getting smaller and smaller," he said.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 28 Jul 2010 | 11:02 am

Warming threat to marine food chain

Numbers of phytoplankton - the microscopic organisms that sustain the marine food chain - are plummeting as sea surface temperatures rise

Phytoplankton might be too small to see with the naked eye, but they are the foundations of the ocean food chain, ultimately capturing the energy that sustains the seas' great beasts such as whales.

A new study though has raised the alarm about fundamental changes to life underwater. It warns that populations of these microscopic organisms have plummeted in the last century, and the rate of loss has increased in recent years.

The reduction – averaging about 1% per year – is related to increasing sea surface temperatures, says the paper, published tomorrow in the journal Nature.

The decline of these tiny plankton will have impacted nearly all sea creatures and will also have affected fish stocks.

Phytoplankton provide food – by capturing energy from the sun – and recycle nutrients, and because they account for approximately half of all organic matter on earth they are hugely important as a means of absorbing carbon.

"This decline will need to be considered in future studies of marine ecosystems, geochemical cycling, ocean circulation and fisheries," add the paper's authors, from Dalhousie university in Nova Scotia, Canada.

The researchers looked at measurements of ocean transparency and tested for concentrations of chlorophyll, which gives large numbers of phytoplankton a distinctive green sheen. They said that although there were variations in some areas due to regional climate and coastal run-off, the long-term global decline was "unequivocal".

The Nature article comes as climate scientists published what they said today was the "best ever" collection of evidence for global warming, including temperature over land, at sea and in the higher atmosphere, along with records of humidity, sea-level rise, and melting ice.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 28 Jul 2010 | 11:02 am

Plankton, base of ocean food web, in big decline (AP)

AP - Despite their tiny size, plant plankton found in the world's oceans are crucial to much of life on Earth. They are the foundation of the bountiful marine food web, produce half the world's oxygen and suck up harmful carbon dioxide.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 28 Jul 2010 | 11:01 am

Ocean's Most Abundant Food Source Disappearing

Contrary to what you might believe, a clear, blue ocean isn't necessarily a good thing.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 28 Jul 2010 | 11:00 am

100 Days in, Oil Spill Questions Still Unanswered

The leak itself may be plugged, but the long-term impact of the spill may not be felt for decades.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 28 Jul 2010 | 10:55 am

Kilauea Lava Flows Claim 1 House, 2 More Threatened

A surge of lava flows from Kilauea volcano are threatening the town of Kalapana. One house has already been lost and two more are in immediate danger.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 28 Jul 2010 | 10:39 am

Interactive graphic: Marden Henge – Stonhenge's big brother

Archaeologists have uncovered the site of a prehistoric building that has lain undisturbed for more than 4,000 years

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 28 Jul 2010 | 10:38 am

Was Marden Henge the builder's yard for Stonehenge?

Stone tools, flakes and the remains of a final feast at the site in Wiltshire hint that the huge sarsens that now stand at Stonehenge were brought to Marden Henge first

View an interactive guide to the site

The last revellers seem to have cleared up scrupulously after the final party at Marden Henge some 4,500 years ago.

They scoured the rectangular building and the smart white chalk platform on top of the earth bank, with its spectacular view towards the river Avon in one direction, and the hills from which the giant sarsen stones were brought to Stonehenge in the other.

All traces of the feast – the pig bones, the ashes and the burnt stones from the barbecue that cooked them, the broken pots and bowls – were swept neatly into a dump to one side. A few precious offerings, including an exquisitely worked flint arrowhead, were carefully laid on the clean chalk. Then they covered the whole surface with a thin layer of clay, stamped it flat, and left. Forever.

In the past fortnight, English Heritage archaeologists have peeled back the thin layer of turf covering the site, which has somehow escaped being ploughed for more than 4,000 years. They were astounded to find the undisturbed original surface just as the prehistoric Britons left it.

"We're gobsmacked really," said site director Jim Leary.

Giles Woodhouse, a volunteer digger who must return next week to his day job as a lieutenant colonel in the army bound for Germany and then Afghanistan, has been crouched over the rubbish dump day after day, his black labrador Padma sighing at his side. He has been teasing the soil away from bone, stone and pottery so perfectly preserved it could have been buried last year.

"It gives one a bit of a shiver down the backbone to realise the last man to touch these died 4,500 years ago," he said. His finds, still emerging from the soil, will rewrite the history of the site.

Marden in Wiltshire has been puzzling archaeologists for centuries. It is set almost exactly half way between two of the most famous and tourist-choked sites in Britain, Stonehenge and Avebury, but it is far larger than either. The ragged oval of outer earth banks at Marden, completed by a bend of the Avon, enclose more than 14 hectares, compared with 11.5 hectares at Avebury, where the banks surround an entire modern village.

Famously – to its comparatively few devotees and visitors, that is – it is the biggest henge in Britain that isn't there, surrounding one of the biggest artificial hills in Britain, which isn't there either.

This is the first excavation since Geoffrey Wainwright, former chief archaeologist at English Heritage, explored one small corner of the site in 1969. What stunned the archaeologists when they started work three weeks ago was just how much is left.

Once your eye is in you can see it: the sweep of the ditches, the belt of trees hiding some of the earth bank, which still rises to three metres in some places, the stain in the grass marking the lost barrow and its massive surrounding moat, and the wholly unexpected discovery – the second, smaller henge, so close to the modern houses that the roots of two trees at the foot of a back garden are actually growing into its bank.

The neolithic buildings were not where others have looked for them, on the level in the centre of the henges, but on top of the bank.

"We've all been looking in the wrong place," Leary said, "there will have to be a major rethink about other henges. And it's actually almost terrifying how close to the surface the finds were – there's also going to have to be a major review of our management plans for other sites."

The only known image of Hatfield Barrow – an early 18th century map in the archives of the landowner, Corpus Christi College in Oxford – shows the artificial hill as a jaunty little sandcastle sporting a cockade of trees. It once rose to a height of almost 15 metres, half the height of Silbury near Avebury.

The two antiquarians who burrowed like rabbits through scores of Wiltshire earthworks in the early 19th century, Sir Richard Colt Hoare and William Cunnington, punched a massive shaft through Hatfield Barrow in 1807. Their scrappy records torment the modern archaeologists, including references to animal bones, burned wood, and "two small parcels of burned human bones".

They left the shaft open, possibly intending to return in another season, and the mound collapsed. This is a phenomenon Leary knows well, having led the rescue excavation before the engineering works to stabilise Silbury, which was also left riddled with slowly collapsing holes by Georgian and later diggers.

The farmer at Marden filled in the moat, which an 18th century naturalist recorded as fed by a natural spring and never dry even in the hottest summer, and sold the collapsed hillock as top soil. Leary's massive trench has uncovered barely a trace of hill or moat.

If the hill disappointed, the excavations at one of the original entrances and at the small henge certainly do not. They are revealing what appears to be a broad gravelled ceremonial road leading towards the river. Discovering undisturbed neolithic surfaces and building platforms on this scale counts as a discovery of international importance.

There is no evidence of permanent occupation of the dwellings or the site as a whole. As in the work led by Professor Mike Parker Pearson at Durrington Walls, 20 miles away (he couldn't resist coming over to help dig, and some of his former students had the pleasure of giving him orders) the implication is of people gathering for seasonal rituals and feasting, and maybe a work camp.

"A completely artificial division has been made in the past between domestic and religious, recreation and ritual," Leary said. "We're going to have to rethink all that. It's not one thing or the other, it's everything mixed in together."

If it wasn't a village, or a temple, or a farm, or a cemetery, what was Marden for? Leary suspects the answer may be emerging in stone working tools, and flakes of sarsen, turning up all over the site. If you were going to drag sarsens the size of double decker buses from their original site to Stonehenge, he said, the obvious route is straight through a natural gap in the hilly landscape, which would take them through Marden.

The evidence that Marden was a sort of builder's yard for the most famous prehistoric monument in the world may have been in the mud under the boots of Leary's puzzled predecessors.

So why did the site's temporary occupants leave? Maybe with Stonehenge complete, the sarsens shaped into the giant trilithons that still fill the hordes of modern visitors with awe, their job was done. They tidied up nicely, turned out the lights, and left.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 28 Jul 2010 | 10:28 am

Friends forever | Open thread

Studies have found that having a wide social group reduces mortality risk. Do you have enough friends to survive?

Strong relationships are said to have great health benefits: a review of studies into the impact of relationships on health found that people had a significantly lower risk of mortality if they belonged to a wider social group, be it friends, neighbours, relatives or a mix of these.

These days, with the advent of social networking websites, the concept of friendship can seem slippery. Are you clear about who your friends really are? Would you say you had a wide social group? Or are you happy to dice with death as a loner?

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 28 Jul 2010 | 10:00 am

My First Act of Free Will

The British philosopher Galen Strawson doesn’t think much of free will. His argument is fairly straightforward. It goes something like this:

1) I do what I do because of the way I am. If I want to eat Honey Nut Cheerios for breakfast, or listen to Blonde on Blonde, it’s because I prefer, at this moment, the taste of that cereal and the sound of that album.

2) If I’m going to be responsible for my choices, then I also have to be responsible for the way I am.

3) But I’m not responsible for the way I am! At some point, my wants and needs – the stew of factors behind my preferences – are beyond my control. They’ve been programmed by natural selection and embedded in my genes; they’ve been influenced by my parents, and shaped by my siblings and peers and all those commercials on television.

4) Ergo, I can’t be ultimately responsible for my choices. I don’t want Cheerios because I want them. Instead, my preferences have been shaped by a million little forces that have nothing to do with me. I can’t be the cause of myself.

Over at The Stone, Strawson elaborates on this bleak view of human freedom. While most conversations about free will are framed in terms of scientific determinism – we’re either constrained by the rigid laws of physics, or those neural circuits that precede conscious awareness – Strawson thinks the worry over determinism misses the point:

Some people think that quantum mechanics shows that determinism is false, and so holds out a hope that we can be ultimately responsible for what we do. But even if quantum mechanics had shown that determinism is false (it hasn’t), the question would remain: how can indeterminism, objective randomness, help in any way whatever to make you responsible for your actions? The answer to this question is easy. It can’t.

And yet…There’s a certain frivolousness to all these eloquent arguments over free will. The fact is, we are deeply wired to believe in our freedom. We feel like willful creatures, blessed with elbow room and endowed with the capacity to pick our own breakfast cereal. Furthermore, there’s probably a very good reason why this belief is so universal. Consider this recent study by the psychologists Kathleen Vohs, at the University of Minnesota, and Jonathan Schooler ,at the University of California at Santa Barbara. They gave a few dozen subjects a short passage from The Astonishing Hypothesis, a popular science book by Francis Crick. Half of the participants read a paragraph insisting that free will is a romantic illusion:

You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.

Crick then discusses the neural basis of choice, before claiming that “although we appear to have free will, in fact, our choices have already been predetermined for us and we cannot change that.” The other subjects got a passage that was similarly scientific-sounding – it was filled with references to neurons and cortical oscillations – but it was about the importance of studying consciousness. There was nothing about the will.

Here’s where things get interesting. After reading the passages, the subjects were then told to complete twenty arithmetic problems that would appear on the computer screen. But they were also told that after the question appeared, they needed to press the space bar, otherwise a computer glitch would make the answer visible on the screen. The participants were told that no one would know whether or not they pushed the space bar, but they were asked not to cheat.

You can probably guess what happened: Those who read the anti-free will text cheated more often. Instead of pressing the space bar, they tended to let the answer appear. Furthermore, Vohs and Schooler found that the amount of cheating was directly correlated with the extent to which the subjects rejected free will. (Everybody was given a survey after reading the passages.) In a second experiment, the psychologists found that subjects exposed to determinism also overpaid themselves for performance on a cognitive task, at least when compared to subjects who read a control paragraph. These experiments suggest that our faith in freedom is intertwined with ethical behavior. (Of course, the data also implies that modern neuroscience is slowly eroding our morality, or at least making us more likely to cheat.)

Strawson ends his essay with a literary flourish. He quotes the novelist Ian McEwan on the necessity of assuming responsibility for our actions even if we don’t actually control them:

“I see no necessary disjunction between having no free will (those arguments seem watertight) and assuming moral responsibility for myself. The point is ownership. I own my past, my beginnings, my perceptions. And just as I will make myself responsible if my dog or child bites someone, or my car rolls backwards down a hill and causes damage, so I take on full accountability for the little ship of my being, even if I do not have control of its course. It is this sense of being the possessor of a consciousness that makes us feel responsible for it.”

Of course, this debate isn’t going to disappear anytime soon. Some scientists continue to search for the neural correlates of freedom, and even argue that our will is simply an evolved elaboration of circuits that exist in fruit flies. Others insist, pace Laplace, that physics and neuroscience are slowly whittling away the illusion and, at some point in the future, we’ll finally realize that we’re about as free as a video game character. All I know is that all the sophistry doesn’t really matter. We’ll continue to believe we pick Cheerios for the simple reason that we want to eat Cheerios; I feel like the cause of myself, even if I “know” that I have many other causes, from my genetic inheritance to the marketing team at General Mills. William James, as usual, said it best. After struggling through a dark depression, James came to the following conclusion:

“I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier’s second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will — ‘the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts’ — need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present — until next year — that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 28 Jul 2010 | 9:58 am

Mushrooms Turned into Green Packaging

The foamy product requires one-eighth the energy to make as traditional shipping materials.
Source: Livescience.com | 28 Jul 2010 | 9:55 am

Spain's Catalonia Region Bans Bullfighting

Catalonia's move to outlaw the centuries-old tradition may have more to do with regional identity than animal rights.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 28 Jul 2010 | 9:55 am

Baby Month Is Almost Here!

In most recent years, summer months have been the top months for births in the United States, according to federal statistics. But what month is currently leading the way in birth rates?
Source: Livescience.com | 28 Jul 2010 | 9:38 am

How Facebook Complicates Romance

Lovers face a complicated tangle of social media choices and no standard etiquette when it comes to relationships and breakups.
Source: Livescience.com | 28 Jul 2010 | 9:37 am

Scientists inch towards finding "God particle"

PARIS (Reuters) - Scientists working with particle accelerators in Europe and the United States said on Monday they may be closing in on the elusive Higgs Boson, the "God particle" believed crucial to forming the cosmos after the Big Bang.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 28 Jul 2010 | 9:21 am

Fly Eyes Used For Solar Cells

A special mold constructed from fly eyes coated in nickel could improve solar cell efficiency.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 28 Jul 2010 | 9:14 am

'Pampered' pigs are optimistic

Pigs feel optimistic or pessimistic about life depending on how pleasant their environment is, researchers at Newcastle University have discovered.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 28 Jul 2010 | 9:04 am

Ansel Adams Photos Turn up at Garage Sale

The buyer paid $45 for a collection worth an estimated $200 million.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 28 Jul 2010 | 8:45 am

Higgs hunters meet at ICHEP in Paris

Particle physicists mull over the latest data from Fermilab and Cern at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Paris

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 28 Jul 2010 | 8:17 am

DIY Kit Puts Satellites Into Orbit for $8,000

For extreme hobbyists, the new kit offers a chance to launch personal projects into space.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 28 Jul 2010 | 7:30 am

How midges select their victims

Midges have been blighting summers in the Scottish Highlands for generations, but new research suggests that the insects aren't as indiscriminate in their choice of victims as previously thought.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 28 Jul 2010 | 6:55 am

Pampered pigs 'feel optimistic'

Pigs feel optimistic or pessimistic about life depending on how pleasant their environment is, researchers at Newcastle University find.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 28 Jul 2010 | 4:37 am