Rocks on Mars may provide link to evidence of living organisms roughly 4 billion years ago

A new paper reveals groundbreaking research on the hydrothermal formation of Clay-Carbonate rocks in the Nili Fossae region of Mars. The findings may provide a link to evidence of living organisms on Mars, roughly 4 billion years ago in the Noachian period.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am

Calcium supplements linked to increased risk of heart attack, study finds

Calcium supplements, commonly taken by older people for osteoporosis, are associated with an increased risk of a heart attack, a new study finds.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am

Audubon's first engraving of a bird discovered

In 1824, John James Audubon (1785-1851), the eminent American artist, created a drawing of a running grouse for use in the design for a New Jersey bank note. Although the artist mentions the drawing and the resulting engraved paper money in two separate diary entries, no one has ever been able to locate or identify such an illustration. Until now.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am

Resting brain activity associated with spontaneous fibromyalgia pain

A recent study provides the first direct evidence of linkage between elevated intrinsic (resting-state) brain connectivity and spontaneous pain intensity in patients with fibromyalgia. This research shows an interaction of multiple brain networks, offering greater understanding of how pain arises.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am

Most youth hockey injuries caused by accidents, not checking, study shows

Hockey fans likely would assume that body-checking -- intentionally slamming an opponent against the boards -- causes the most injuries in youth ice hockey. But they would be wrong.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am

Black carbon implicated in global warming

Increasing the ratio of black carbon to sulfate in the atmosphere increases climate warming, suggests a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am

Fluorescent biosensor to aid in drug development

Scientists have developed a new fluorescent biosensor that could aid in the development of an important class of drugs that target a crucial class of proteins called G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). GPCRs are popular drug targets because of the pivotal role they play in cells' communication circuits responsible for regulating functions critical to health, including circuits involved in heart and lung function, mood, cognition and memory, digestion and the inflammatory response.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

Brown dwarf found orbiting a young sun-like star

Astronomers have imaged a very young brown dwarf, or failed star, in a tight orbit around a young nearby sun-like star. The discovery is expected to shed light on the early stages of solar system formation.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

Cell-of-origin for human prostate cancer identified for first time

Scientists have identified for the first time a cell-of-origin for human prostate cancer, a discovery that could result in better predictive and diagnostics tools and the development of new and more effective targeted treatments for the disease.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

Vascular-targeted photodynamic therapy for localized prostate cancer

NYU Langone Medical Center has begun a clinical trial offering vascular-targeted photodynamic therapy to patients with localized prostate cancer. This novel, minimally invasive procedure uses a light-activated drug to deliver light energy waves by way of laser fibers in order to destroy prostate cancer cells.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

Zedonk, zebra and donkey hybrid, born in US

A donkey has given birth to a zedonk at Chestatee wildlife preserve in Georgia, after mating with a zebra

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 30 Jul 2010 | 4:00 am

BP Oil Spill: Has Environmental Damage Been Exaggerated? (Time.com)

Time.com - So far, predictions of ecological catastrophe on the Gulf Coast following the BP oil spill seem overblown

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Jul 2010 | 3:10 am

Less oil on surface means less work for fishermen (AP)

AP - Even when the oily sheen starts fading from the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, it manages to become bad news for fishermen.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Jul 2010 | 1:19 am

Greek dolphin park welfare row

Animal welfare groups in Greece are calling for the closure of the country's first dolphinarium and urging schools not to visit the attraction.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 29 Jul 2010 | 11:54 pm

House to take up offshore drilling reform bill (Reuters)

Reuters - Three months after the catastrophic oil rig explosion that sent millions of gallons of crude spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. House of Representatives was poised on Friday to debate legislation clamping down on the industry's offshore drilling practices.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Jul 2010 | 11:02 pm

Judge: FWS plan excluded possible lynx habitat (AP)

AP - A federal judge has ruled that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service arbitrarily excluded "critical habitat" that could be occupied by the elusive Canada lynx.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Jul 2010 | 10:43 pm

Donkey's Wild Ass Ancestor Confirmed (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Five thousand years ago, in North Africa, humans formed an alliance with the wild ancestors of the donkey, twice.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Jul 2010 | 9:31 pm

BP lawsuits over oil spill take center stage (Reuters)

Reuters - More than 2,000 miles from the Gulf of Mexico shoreline, a panel of U.S. judges heard arguments from lawyers on Thursday on how piles of oil spill-related lawsuits against BP Plc should be merged.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Jul 2010 | 5:35 pm

Mars site may hold 'buried life'

Researchers identify rocks that they say could contain the fossilised remains of life on early Mars.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 29 Jul 2010 | 5:09 pm

Country diary: Shetland

The fleeting never-quite-dark nights of the Simmer Dim are some weeks past, but after a beautiful sun-filled day the light still lingers long after the sun has set. Now, at 1.30 in the morning, the sky already glows peach pink anticipating the sunrise in a few hours' time. The hills with their undulating skyline are dark – a sharply incised silhouette against the brightness.

I step outside into a still hush. The dewfall has laid a faint silver over the grasses and the only sound to be heard is the tranquil background murmur of the sea. The honeysuckle tumbling in profusion over the garden wall is heavy with flowers. Earlier, in the warmth of the evening, their perfume had been heavy and intoxicating, and even now the scent still lingers on the cool night air.

Moths, dark arches I think by their size, are busy working the garden. All night their heavy bodies have pinged against the brightly lit windows of the kitchen where I have inadvertently sat so late engrossed in a book.

Overhead, the sky is barely dark enough for the summer stars to show, and those that are visible appear as if behind a fine veil. Even the Plough, low in the sky, is so faint as to be hard to find. Other constellations are still harder to pick out, the hazy stars appearing and disappearing again behind passing wisps of high cloud.

The stars may be elusive but Jupiter is a bright constant, hanging like a distant lamp over the bay. Through binoculars I search for its circling moons. One farthest out is clearly visible and, leaning against the doorpost to steady the wavering image, I make out one, possibly two more.

As I watch, a moving point of light comes into view – not a shooting star for it doesn't vanish after a brief blaze but continues far dimmer and steady in its progress until it fades from view – a man-made satellite tracking its way across the heavens.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 Jul 2010 | 5:05 pm

How the Mississippi River Triggers Earthquakes

Scientists think Ole 'Miss is behind the strange, devastating earthquakes that rocked Missouri in the early 1800's
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Jul 2010 | 4:35 pm

Galapagos Islands Kicked Off International Endangered List

Conservationists call the move premature, saying the delicate ecosystem is still in peril.
Source: Livescience.com | 29 Jul 2010 | 4:02 pm

Mouse pain study stirs debate

Canadian scientists vindicated after being accused of mistreating laboratory animals.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/tvMqI6HvPCA" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 29 Jul 2010 | 3:37 pm

Under Pressure

My latest article for Wired is now online. It’s about baboons, stress vaccines and the often dangerous effects of glucocorticoids. One of the subplots of the article is the severe health consequences of the social hierarchy, which I mostly discuss in the context of the Whitehall Studies:

For the past 25 years, Michael Marmot has been running the Whitehall study, an exhaustive longitudinal survey launched in 1967 that has tracked some 28,000 British men and women working in central London. What makes the Whitehall study so compelling is its uniformity. Every subject is a British civil servant, a cog in the vast governmental bureaucracy. They all have access to the same health care system, don’t have to worry about getting laid off, and spend most of their workdays shuffling papers.

The British civil service comes with one other feature that makes it ideal for studying the health effects of stress: It’s hierarchical, with a precise classification scheme for ranking employees (in other words, it’s the human equivalent of a baboon troop). At the bottom are messengers, porters, and security guards. Just above them are the clerical officers, followed by staff scientists and other professionals. This last group implements the policies dictated by powerful administrators who run the governmental agencies. Marmot wanted to investigate how differences in status “in people who are neither very poor nor very rich” might lead to measurable differences in health.

The differences are dramatic. After tracking thousands of civil servants for decades, Marmot was able to demonstrate that between the ages of 40 and 64, workers at the bottom of the hierarchy had a mortality rate four times higher than that of people at the top. Even after accounting for genetic risks and behaviors like smoking and binge drinking, civil servants at the bottom of the pecking order still had nearly double the mortality rate of those at the top.

What, then, determines our health? Why were people in the lower ranks of Whitehall dying at a younger age? Marmot was forced to conclude that the significant majority of health variation is caused by psychosocial factors, most notably stress. People of lower status in the Whitehall study experienced more negative stress, and this stress was deadly. (To take but one data point: Fully two-thirds of an individual’s risk of stroke was attributable to the person’s socioeconomic status.) In fact, we’re so sensitive to the effects of status that getting promoted from the lowest level in the British civil service reduced the probability of heart disease by up to 13 percentage points. Climbing the social ladder makes us live longer.

However, the Whitehall results aren’t a straightforward analysis of stress, at least not as it’s usually defined. After all, people in leadership positions often describe their jobs as extremely stressful. They work longer hours and have more responsibilities than those at the bottom of the bureaucratic hierarchy. Consider the self-report of Nigel, a high-status administrator: “There were 2,000 people, and I was responsible for all the personnel aspects, contracts, and all the common services … It had every sort of challenge that you could ever wish to meet. A very active job and a lot of stress, but a very enjoyable job, and you got a tremendous amount of satisfaction from doing a good job.”

Notice the reference to stress; undoubtedly Nigel thought of himself as a person under lots of pressure. In contrast, here’s the self-report of Marjorie, a lowly typist: “I went to the typing pool and sat there typing documents. Which was absolutely soul-destroying … The fact that we could eat sweets and smoke was absolute heaven, but we were not allowed to talk.”

The recurring theme in the self-reports of people like Marjorie isn’t the sheer amount of stress — it’s the total absence of control. Researchers call it the “demand-control” model of stress, in which the damage caused by chronic stress depends not just on the demands of the job but on the extent to which we can control our response to those demands. “The man or woman with all the emails, the city lawyer who works through the night has high demands,” Marmot writes. “But if he or she has a high degree of control over work, it is less stressful and will have less impact on health.” (This helps explain why the women with mean bosses and menial work showed the highest incidence of heart disease.) The Whitehall data backs up this model of workplace stress: While a relentlessly intense job like a senior executive position leads to a slightly increased risk of heart disease and death, a job with no control is significantly more dangerous.

The same effect applies even to the rich and famous. A few years ago, Donald Redelmeier, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, led a study of Academy Award-winning actors. His hypothesis was that having an Oscar gave people more control over their stressful careers. Instead of being forced to accept bad roles or work on mediocre movies just for the money, these stars could pick and choose their parts. This creative control, in turn, would lead to improved health outcomes. Redelmeier compared the award winners to two groups: (1) actors who had appeared in the same film as a nominated actor and didn’t get a nomination and (2) actors who had been nominated for an Academy Award but never won. The results were clear: People with Oscars lived, on average, four years longer than their less-successful peers, which represented a 28 percent reduction in death rate. As Redelmeier notes, this longevity boost is roughly equal to the effect that would come from “curing all cancers in all people for all time.”

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 29 Jul 2010 | 3:07 pm

Mars Rover Opportunity Finally Sees Martian Dust Devil (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - After more than six years roaming the surface of Mars, NASA's Mars rover Opportunity has spotted its first dust devil on the red planet.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Jul 2010 | 2:45 pm

Consumer gene testing in the hotseat

A week of hearings sows uncertainty for the fledgling consumer genomics industry.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 29 Jul 2010 | 2:19 pm

Antarctica Experiment Discovers Puzzling Space Ray Pattern

A detector designed to search for neutrino particles instead found an intriguing signal from cosmic rays flying in from space.
Source: Livescience.com | 29 Jul 2010 | 2:09 pm

Giant Sand Dunes on Titan Shaped by Backward Winds

Gusty winds that blow in reverse of prevailing weather on Saturn's largest moon Titan appear to shape some of the moon's odd equatorial sand dunes, a new study finds.
Source: Livescience.com | 29 Jul 2010 | 1:40 pm

What Will Happen During the Next 100 Days of the Oil Spill?

What Will Happen During the Next 100 Days of the Gulf Oil Spill?
Source: Livescience.com | 29 Jul 2010 | 1:38 pm

X Prize for oil spill solutions

The X Prize foundation, best known for launching the private spaceflight industry, launches a $1.4 million oil clean-up challenge.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 29 Jul 2010 | 1:38 pm

What Caused the Stormy "Snowpocalypse" of 2010?

Researchers examine the unusual conditions behind the cold and stormy winter of 2010 across the U.S. Mid-Atlantic.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Jul 2010 | 1:00 pm

Being mad is one thing, going mad quite another | Darian Leader

Many are worried that the latest edition of the psychiatrist's 'bible' labels everyone as ill – but this has an upside

Each edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has a massive impact on psychiatric practice and medical education around the world. The book lists mental disorders and explains how to diagnose them. Seen as a gold standard, it dictates diagnostic practice in mainstream medicine.

Every media mention of DSM calls it the "bible" of mental health, and, like the latter, it generates passionate controversy. Proposals for the next edition, due in 2013, have sparked international protest, as DSM-5 looks as if it will lower the threshold of what counts as mental disorder. Critics have argued that new categories like "psychosis risk syndrome", "temper dysregulation disorder", and "binge eating" threaten to pathologise the human condition, turning clinically insignificant behaviour into illness.

People with no signs of distress may be encouraged or coerced to have therapy or take medication, with diagnoses such as "psychosis risk syndrome" being made even if a psychosis has not appeared. With the ramification of diagnoses, stigmatisation and discrimination would snowball. After DSM-5, no one will be normal again.

These critiques are both enlightening and obfuscating. The new DSM follows the logic of its predecessors: disorder is defined in terms of behaviour, so that visible aspects of our lives are used to define clinical categories. If you're nervous and shy, rather than seeing this as the symptom of an underlying clinical category to be discovered, it becomes a clinical category in itself: social phobia.

Gone is the idea of complex psychical causality or even of an interior life. For DSM, only two kinds of causes exist: biological and stress-related. The new diagnoses are made on surface symptoms that can be swiftly classified rather than invisible structures that can only be diagnosed after considerable time. As one American psychiatrist put it, using the ever-expanding diagnostic system of DSM was like trying to carve the Thanksgiving turkey according to its feathers rather than its bone structure.

This expansion cannot be denied. The first edition of DSM in 1952 was a mere 129 pages, with a few basic diagnostic categories. By the 1980s it had grown to over 900 pages, and the 180 categories of mental disorder present in 1984 would more than double over the next decade. What could explain this exponential increase in the number of mental disorders we supposedly suffer from?

DSM followed a market-led vision of the psyche in which symptoms were isolated entities that could be locally targeted. A symptom was not seen as a general problem in a person's existence which, if unravelled, might lead to the unravelling of the self, but as a local disturbance that could be managed and put right. It reflected not only today's atomisation of the self but also the belief that we can change parts of ourselves without affecting other parts.

Changes in drug legislation also played a part. Each new product had to define its active ingredients, the outcomes sought and the delivery period for attaining them. This meant a new kind of surface precision. Drugs would have to prove through expensive trials that they were more effective than placebo and did better than other drugs. It was the drug industry that created the new diagnostic categories. With each new category came a new medication.

Exacerbating this problem is the fact that in many parts of the US, a clinician will only receive reimbursement if they make a prescription, which means making a diagnosis. Like drugs themselves, clinical categories become objects in the marketplace, wielding economic power. The result is that the patient's underlying problems may well be neglected in favour of surface diagnoses that are both unscientific and misleading.

Curiously, the uproar over the DSM-5 proposals does bring a key clinical issue into focus. Critics complain that no one will be normal, as the threshold for disorder will be so low. But shouldn't this make us question the usefulness of talk of normality or, indeed, of "mental health"? Have these terms ever really helped anyone, beyond reinforcing the prejudices of "us" and "them"?

It is true that many people diagnosed with a so-called "mental illness" find the label helpful, allowing them to see their difficulties on a par with a physical illness, to be recognised and treated. But who are the "normal" people we would set them up against? Clinically, normality and psychosis are often the same thing. Someone may complain that everything is the neighbour's fault, not theirs, or that a plot has been hatched against them. Old psychiatry recognised this innocence of some psychotic subjects. Clinicians also know that it is in the most serious cases that a childhood is described as happy or uneventful.

Realising that no one is healthy and normal does not have to mean pathologising or medicating them. On the contrary, it can introduce a more humane approach to so-called "mental illness". Even Eugen Bleuler, who popularised the term "schizophrenia", argued that the most common form of this condition was latent. Once we accept that we can have disorders that don't activate – or to put it another way, that there is a difference between being mad and going mad – we might study what allows one person to function and another not to.

This is what old psychiatry once explored with detail and passion: the lifestyle choices, activities, roles or other solutions that people found to avoid breakdown. Studying these restitution mechanisms can help us to work with those who have not been so fortunate, and who find their lives shattered by the outbreak of psychosis.

The imperative to make people normal – rather than recognise the fault lines in all of us and strive to make them more bearable – is a constant pressure for a mental health force already overburdened by a focus on categorisation rather than on humane interactions and the uniqueness of an individual's story. Multiplying labels will not reduce the distress of those suffering most in our society: it can only serve to mask the lack in what we provide.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 Jul 2010 | 1:00 pm

150-Year-Old Lost Ship Found in Arctic

In 1850, the vessel embarked on a search mission to follow the trail of a doomed expedition to find the Northwest Passage.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Jul 2010 | 1:00 pm

Prostate Cancer 'Cell of Origin' Identified

Scientists watched as healthy cells embedded in mice grew into prostate tumor cells.
Source: Livescience.com | 29 Jul 2010 | 12:59 pm

World's most ancient creatures found in Scottish field

Two colonies of age-old and endangered tadpole shrimps discovered alive and well near Solway coast

A field near Gretna in Dumfriesshire might not be an obvious place to find the world's oldest living creatures, but a team of scientists has done just that.

Two colonies of a prehistoric shrimp that evolved when the dinosaurs ruled the Earth have been found alive and well in the Caerlaverock nature reserve on the Solway coast.

The discovery has led experts to think there could be more of the little crustaceans, which are listed as endangered species, elsewhere in the area.

The ancient creatures, known as Triops cancriformis or tadpole shrimps, are thought to have the oldest pedigree of any living animal. Fossil evidence suggests they have hardly changed in the more than 200m years that they have been around.

Wild tadpole shrimps can grow to more than 10cm long and are remarkable in surviving three major extinctions in the Earth's history. The shrimps have an extraordinary lifecycle. They live in temporary pools of water in which they lay eggs. When the pools dry out, the adults die off, but their eggs remain dormant until the pools fill up again.

Researchers at Glasgow University discovered the rare shrimps after collecting samples of mud, which were dried out and then made wet again before being placed in glass tanks. A fortnight later Elaine Benzies, a research student, noticed a tadpole shrimp swimming around in one of the aquariums. "I hadn't expected to find it and was just going in to check on the heat and lights. It was great to see everyone in the lab gathering round and peering into the tank to look at this ancient survivor from the past," she said.

Until recently, researchers believed the ancient shrimps lived only in a single pond in the New Forest in Hampshire. Six years ago, Larry Griffin, a scientist at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, discovered what appeared to be an isolated colony of the creatures in a pool at Caerlaverock.

"At the time it seemed that the Caerlaverock colony was a vulnerable historic outlier," he said. "But now that we know how this curious creature survives, we have realised that there's a good chance there are more populations out there.

"Triops matures rapidly and produces hundreds of eggs in just a couple of weeks. The pond they live in may dry out, but the eggs can survive in the mud for many years. Although in the UK they are all females, they have both male and female reproductive parts, so just one egg needs to survive to regenerate a whole population."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 Jul 2010 | 12:55 pm

Giant Sand Dunes on Titan Shaped by Backward Winds (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - Gusty winds that blow in reverse of prevailing weather on Saturn's largest moon Titan appear to shape some of the moon's odd equatorial sand dunes, a new study finds.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Jul 2010 | 12:45 pm

Genome Surprise: Guinea Pigs Have Ebola!

The ebola virus is one of the nastiest pathogens known to man. It corrodes blood vessels and stops clotting, leaving most of its human victims bleeding to death through their pores. And guinea pigs — along with opossums, wallabies and insect-eating bats — have it in their genes.

A genomic hunt for virus genes traced sequences to Ebola and the closely related Marburg virus in no fewer than six vertebrate species. Echoes of the less-gruesome borna virus family appeared in 13 species, including humans. The genes appear to have been mixed in about 40 million years ago, and have stuck around ever since.

“Some of these sequences have been conserved,” and that’s almost certainly not a coincidence, said cell biologist Ann Marie Skalka of the Fox Chase Cancer Center. “We speculate that some of these must have provided an evolutionary advantage.”

Skalka specializes in RNA viruses, which unlike most common viruses are made from single strands of primitive genetic material, rather than DNA.

Common viruses, better known as retroviruses, insert their DNA into the genomes of infected cells. They hijack its function and, should the cell survive, leave pieces of themselves behind. Retroviral leftovers have accumulated for hundreds of millions of years in animal genomes; they account for about 8 percent of the human.

RNA viruses, however, were long thought to leave no leftovers. They float outside a cell’s chromosomes, hijacking its machinery from afar and ostensibly leaving genomes intact. But that assumption proved wrong.

In 2007, Israeli scientists studying a bee-infecting RNA virus noticed that some colonies were unusually resistant. When they analyzed the bees’ genomes, they found fragmented gene sequences resembling those from the virus. The match wasn’t exact; instead, the fragments seemed to date from some ancestral infection.

The findings spurred Skalka to compare more animal genomes to other RNA virus sequences. She wasn’t alone: While writing the latest paper, published July 29 in Public Library of Science Pathogens, researchers from the University of Texas published a landmark finding of ancient borna virus genes in the human genome.

While those findings stole the thunder from the latest study, Skalka’s work has now expanded the evidence for genomic RNA viral fossils across the animal kingdom. “We were amazed at how many we found,” she said.

Skalka’s team found evidence of 80 ancient RNA viral jumps in 19 of 48 vertebrate genomes, from lampreys to cows and humans. With two exceptions — genes from the little-known Midway virus in zebrafish, and Tamana bat virus genes in a fish called the Medaka — the genes came from borna viruses or filoviruses, a family containing the dread Ebola and Marburg.

In addition to the aforementioned guinea pigs, insect-eating bats, opossums and wallabies, shrews and palm-sized primates called tarsiers contained filovirus fragments. Among the species joining humans in carrying borna virus fragments are cows, lemurs and mice.

How these gene fragments jumped from viruses to vertebrates is a matter of speculation. Skalka suspects that malfunctioning machinery in sperm or egg cells could have copied RNA virus genes, then slipped them into chromosomes later duplicated during reproduction.

Also speculative is what these viral fragments did — or still do, given their conspicuous lack of random mutations that gather in unused genes — for their unwitting recipients.

In the Israeli bees, the RNA virus genes appear to be protective; they may act like a vaccine, or jam invading viruses with almost-but-not-quite-alike proteins. That could also be the case with humans, who are generally resistant to borna virus infection, and other animals flagged by the study.

“You could imagine that the proteins made by these genes would look like the virus proteins, but they’re not exactly the same. And if these funny proteins are there, maybe they muck up the works,” said Skalka, who plans to focus her research on fragments in the human genome. “There would be a real advantage to that.”

According to Ian Lipkin, a genetic epidemiologist at Columbia University, Skalka’s “elegant study” underscores the complicated, species-spanning nature of our bodies.

“The more we delve into genomics the more we become uncertain as to who and what we are,” said Lipkin. “Fragments of retroviruses represent up to 10 percent of the human genome. The number of bacteria on and in our bodies outnumber human cells by 10 to 1. These are not silent passengers.”

Images: 1) An ebola virus particle./University of Waterloo. 2) A phylogenetic tree of vertebrates with approximate dates of borna (circle) and ebola (triangle) virus insertions./PLoS Pathogens.

See Also:

• Synthetic Viruses Could Explain Animal-to-Human Jumps
• Human Genome Is Part Bornavirus
• Complex Life Traced to Ancient Gene Parasites

Citation: “Unexpected Inheritance: Multiple Integrations of Ancient Bornavirus and Ebolavirus/Marburgvirus Sequences in Vertebrate Genomes.” By Vladimir A. Belyi, Arnold J. Levine, Anna Marie Skalka. Public Library of Science Pathogens, Vol. 6 No. 7, July 29, 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 | 29 Jul 2010 | 12:28 pm

Huge Chilean Earthquake Raised Country's Coast

The temblor also moved cities and sank inland areas.
Source: Livescience.com | 29 Jul 2010 | 12:25 pm

Scientists Look to Spiders for Hi-Tech Fibers

Unlock spider silk secrets can open the door to better brain implants, new drug-delivery systems, and degradable and flexible electronics.
Source: Livescience.com | 29 Jul 2010 | 12:23 pm

Donkey's Wild Ass Ancestor Confirmed

The Nubian wild ass indeed was domesticated into some of today's donkeys
Source: Livescience.com | 29 Jul 2010 | 12:10 pm

All set for synthetic silk?

Synthetic silks have a great future – if only scientists can unlock the chemistry of natural silk

It's tougher than Kevlar and stronger than steel, and no one really knows how to make it. Except spiders of course. And silkworms.

Scientists have been trying to mimic the remarkable properties of natural silk for years, with varying success. New approaches are needed to break the deadlock, argue Fiorenzo Omenetto and David Kaplan of Tufts University in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science.

Omenetto and Kaplan say reconstituted silks could have a wide range of applications, from implantable drug delivery systems to optical and electronic devices.

We've all watched a spider build a web or lower itself down a delicate thread. You might even have seen a silkworm make a cocoon. It looks simple, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Researchers still do not fully understand the complex chemical changes that turn silk from a concentrated protein solution inside the glands of a spider or silkworm to a high-strength extensible fibre on the outside.

Though synthetic silks have been made in the lab, Omenetto says they fall short of natural silk.

"We don't use synthetic silks [for hi-tech applications] because they're basically not good enough," he said. Instead scientists use reconstituted silk extracted from silkworm cocoons.

"The natural fibre is put in solution and purified, the protein is extracted and essentially you go back to what is in a silkworm gland. That's the 'magic sauce' from which you can make new materials," Omenetto explains.

However, he and Kaplan predict that high-quality synthetic silks, modified for a diverse range of applications, could soon be made on an industrial scale.

"In the next few years, silk sutures, drug delivery systems and fibre-based tissue products that exploit the mechanical properties of silks can be envisioned for ligament, bone and other tissue repairs," the pair write in Science.

Follow-on applications could include degradable electronic displays and implantable optical systems for diagnosis and treatment.

Omenetto believes that silk will be harvested from transgenic plants in the same way as cotton. Researchers have already created transgenic bacteria and fungi in an attempt to increase silk yields.

In 1995, a team of American researchers inserted a synthetic gene for spider dragline silk into the bacterium Escherichia coli, which made the protein. In 2002, a North American team produced spider silk in mammalian cells.

"The remaining challenges are quality control and scale-up," says Omenetto.

Currently silk is harvested by boiling and separating the cocoons of the domesticated silkmoth larva, Bombyx mori, which are reared on farms. The 5,000-year-old process, known as sericulture, provides over 300,000 tonnes of silk per year to the commodity textile and medical suture industries. But the process is labour and time-intensive.

"In a synthetic form we could bypass the purification process and have control over quality and yield," argues Omenetto.

There may be other advantages. Natural silk contains the glycoprotein sericin, which causes an immune response when used in medical sutures. The sutures have to be wax-coated to eliminate this problem, but it makes them non-biodegradable. "With purified silk you could eliminate the immune response and still maintain the mechanical properties of the silk," says Omenetto.

However, others urge caution about the prospects for artificial silk. "There are many applications for such materials, but first we have to be able to make them to order and at reasonable cost, and here we have quite a way to go," says Fritz Vollrath of the University of Oxford's silk research group.

One of the many challenges scientists face is in their understanding of the molecular structure of silk.

Silks are large proteins made from repeating sequences of amino acids flanked by specific side chains that determine the protein's chemical behaviour. Making the correct side chains in synthetic silks is essential to capture the properties of the natural fibre.

Another mystery is how silk protein stays fluid at high concentrations inside the glands of spinning animals. At similar concentrations on the outside, many of the proteins aggregate, coming out of solution to form a gooey mess.

Though the future looks bright for silk-based technologies, it may be some time before silkworms can weave their cocoons in peace.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 Jul 2010 | 12:00 pm

Next Space Telescope Undergoes Brutal Cold Test

The James Webb Space Telescope, set for launch around 2014, has undergone a brutal cryogenics test in preparation for work in space.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Jul 2010 | 11:29 am

Daydream Distractions Depend on How Far Mind Wanders

Daydreams affect your memory. The farther away your mind wanders, in time and space, the harder it is to remember what you just did.
Source: Livescience.com | 29 Jul 2010 | 11:18 am

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 | 29 Jul 2010 | 11:15 am

Galapagos off Unesco danger list

A UN panel votes to remove the Galapagos Islands from a "red list" of endangered heritage sites, to protests from a leading conservation group.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 29 Jul 2010 | 11:11 am

Stealth Funding for NASA's Constellation

A provision in a bill passed by Congress this week that allots $59 billion to amp-up the war in Afghanistan contains orders for NASA to not cancel any contracts in its embattled Constellation moon program.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Jul 2010 | 11:07 am

Controlling Soot Might Quickly Reverse a Century of Global Warming

A massive simulation of soot’s climate effects finds that basic pollution controls could put a brake on global warming, erasing in a decade most of the last century’s temperature change.

Compared to the larger, longer term task of getting greenhouse-gas pollution under control, limiting soot wouldn’t be hard. Unlike new energy technology and profound changes in lifestyle, the tools — exhaust filters, clean-burning stoves — already exist.

“Soot has such a strong climate effect, but it has a lifetime in the atmosphere of just a few weeks. Carbon dioxide has a lifetime of 30 to 50 years. If you totally stop CO2 emissions today, the Arctic will still be totally melted,” said Stanford University climate scientist Mark Jacobson. If soot pollution is immediately curtailed, “the reductions start to occur pretty much right away. Within months, you’ll start seeing temperature differences.”

Jacobson’s simulation, currently in press at the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, is the latest in a line of studies showing a powerful climate role for fine soot, also known as black carbon. (That’s a somewhat misleading appellation, since some carbon is brown, and the pollution in soot contains a host of other compounds.)

Soot comes from the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels, and also from the burning of wood or dung for fuel. Crop residue and forest-burning are another major source. When aloft, the dark particles absorb sunlight, raising local temperatures and causing rain clouds to form, which in turn deprive other areas of moisture. When soot lands on snow or ice, its effects are magnified, because melts reveal fresh patches of heat-absorbing dark ground.

In 2003, a NASA simulation blamed soot for 25 percent of the past century’s observed warming. A study last year suggested that soot was responsible for almost half of a 3.4-degree Fahrenheit rise in average Arctic temperatures since 1890 — a greater rise than anywhere else on Earth.

Soot also appears to be a culprit in drastic melts of Himalayan glaciers which provide water to much of South Asia, and in disrupting the monsoon cycles on which the region’s farmers rely. The United Nations puts the soot-related death toll at 1.5 million people annually.

Jacobson’s simulation, the culmination of 20 years of research on the dynamics of soot and its interaction with local, regional and global climate dynamics, reinforces those findings. It also studies a question implicit in the earlier studies, but not yet modeled: What would happens if soot pollution stopped?

“If you just eliminate soot, you get a significant climate benefit, and you can do it on a short time period, because soot has a life of just a few weeks,” said Jacobson. “You don’t get the full response for a while, as there are deep ocean feedbacks that take a long time, but it’s a lot faster than controlling CO2.”

Jacobson simulated the effects of curtailing soot from fossil-fuel emissions, something that’s already possible with tailpipe and smokestack filters. He simulated the effects of replacing wood- and dung-burning cookfires with clean-burning stoves. And he simulated both advances simultaneously.

If soot disappeared overnight, average global temperatures would drop within 15 years by about 1 degree Fahrenheit, maybe a little more. That’s about half the net warming — total global warming, minus cooling from sun-reflecting aerosols — experienced since the beginning of the industrial age. The effect would be even larger in the Arctic, where sea ice and tundra could rapidly refreeze.

“It will take some decades to phase down fossil-fuel emissions, so reducing dirty aerosols [soot] while we are doing that may help retain Arctic sea ice,” said NASA climatologist James Hansen, one of the first researchers to study soot dynamics. But he emphasized that soot control is only a stopgap measure. “We should reduce soot for several reasons, especially its health effects, but it is only a modest help in controlling global warming,” he said.

Nevertheless, soot could ease the delay between controlling greenhouse gas emissions and cooling. It might also help “avoid tipping points — nonlinear, abrupt and potentially irreversible climate change, especially in the Arctic,” said Erika Rosenthal, a climate policy expert at the progressive nonprofit Earthjustice.

Soot-control policy, however, is scattered. According to Jacobson, climate policymakers have paid little attention to soot. Compared to well-studied greenhouse gases, its climate role is new and unfamiliar. “There are international efforts to limit greenhouse gases, but they completely ignore soot as something to control from a climate perspective,” said Jacobson.

The draft international climate treaty negotiated last year in Copenhagen doesn’t contain soot-specific provisions, but the United Nations Environmental Program is meeting in February to discuss policy options on soot. A relatively little-known U.N. effort called the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution has also established a black-carbon working group.

In the United States, a rare bipartisan environmental bill sponsored in 2009 by climate skeptic James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) and environmentalist Barbara Boxer (D-California) foundered after its inclusion in massive energy legislation that recently died in Congress. It would have required the EPA to study and possibly regulate black-carbon emissions.

In anticipation of these legislative difficulties, the EPA was charged this year with launching a black-carbon study. More immediately, Congress is now debating reauthorization of the Diesel Emissions Reduction Act, a federal program that pays for putting clean tailpipes on diesel-fuel–burning automobiles, a prime source of black carbon. According to Rosenthal, the program has been fantastically successful, with retrofit requests exceeding available funds by $2 billion.

Controlling crop and forest burns isn’t so easy, but clean stoves could be provided to the developing world for relatively little money. “We have the technology now. It’s a matter of implementing it,” said Rosenthal.

“It’s low-hanging fruit,” said Jacobsen. “It’s straightforward to address, and it can be addressed.”

Images: 1) Rennett Stowe/Flickr. 2) Average global air temperature decline following elimination of fossil-fuel–based soot (dotted line) and fossil-fuel– plus biofuel–based soot (solid line).

Citation: “Short-term effects of Controlling Fossil-Fuel Soot, Biofuel Soot and Gases, and Methane on Climate, Arctic Ice, and Air Pollution Health.” By Mark Jacobson. Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, in press.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 29 Jul 2010 | 11:05 am

Flash floods kill over 110 in Pakistan, Kashmir (AFP)

AFP - At least 113 people have died and thousands more have been made homeless as flash floods triggered by torrential rains hit northwest Pakistan and Pakistani Kashmir, officials said Thursday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Jul 2010 | 10:46 am

Australian Marsupials Share American Ancestor

DNA data suggests Australian marsupials (kangaroos, koalas, and wallabies) migrated from South America, contradicting earlier theories that the animals originated in Australia.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Jul 2010 | 10:45 am

Spanish Bullfighting: Beginning of the End?

Animal rights activists claim Catalonia's ban will influence other regions to ban bullfighting, but some say it's here to stay.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Jul 2010 | 10:45 am

Protecting child 'witches' in Africa | Joachim Theis

The persecution of children accused of witchcraft is a reaction to the insecurity of modern Africa. We must protect them

Beliefs in witchcraft and other occult forces are widespread in Africa, as they are in many other parts of the world. Animist beliefs consider death, disease, crop failure and other disasters not as natural occurrences, but as the result of the activities of supernatural powers. Families commonly consult traditional healers who divine the cause of the calamity. In some cultures, spirits are held responsible, while in others, individuals are identified as witches and blamed for the misfortune. Usually old and marginalized persons are scapegoated, but in recent years there have been increased reports of children, even toddlers, being accused of witchcraft in parts of Africa. Once accused of sorcery, children are forced to admit to being witches and to reveal the name of the "witch" that has passed on the evil power to them.

In the ensuing process of healing and restoring balance in the community, children accused of witchcraft are beaten, cut, burned, and sometimes killed. Many are chased from their communities. Stigmatized and unable to return to their families, they end up abandoned, on the streets of big cities. Kinshasa (capital of the DR Congo) alone harbours more than 20,000 street children who have been accused of witchcraft. In the Central African Republic it is an offence to be a "witch" and prisons are full of children and adults accused of sorcery.

Claire was only 13 years old when she was accused by her brother of being a witch, beaten and tortured by members of her community, and brought to the police station. In the court of Mbaïki (a little town a hundred km from Bangui) she confessed to being a witch and was found guilty, sentenced to three years in prison. Instead of living in the main prison, she was sent to work at one of the guard's home. She was quickly suspected of practicing witchcraft and sent back to prison. Since the main prosecutor did not consider the prison to be a place for a child, she was sent to a nearby Catholic mission. Two years later, she was accused of witchcraft once again – this time by a novice in the mission who claimed that Claire was trying to devour her heart. She was brought back to prison.

Children accused of witchcraft number in the thousands in the DR Congo, the Central African Republic, southern Nigeria, and parts of Angola. Anthropologists have identified the combination of crises as the underlying cause for the epidemics of witchcraft accusations against children. Economic hardship, conflict, urbanization, displacement, family breakdown and HIV/AIDS have spread insecurity in large parts of Central Africa and have profoundly undermined many communities. In parallel, revivalist and Pentecostal churches have proliferated in many parts of Africa, offering spiritual stability in times of uncertainty.

Some of these churches, run by unscrupulous preachers and self-appointed prophets, have seized upon the fears of the population and are offering exorcism services at exorbitant costs. These rituals subject children to further violence and abuse and have become a lucrative business for some pastors. In Nigeria's Akwa Ibom State in the Niger delta, the explosion of witchcraft accusations against children have been traced back to a film produced by a prominent priestess, which has fuelled popular beliefs in child witchcraft.

At the dawn of African independence it was widely assumed by modern elites and by development agencies that formal education, media, monotheistic religions, economic development and democratic political systems would sweep away traditional African beliefs. Instead, as the case of witchcraft accusations against children shows, traditions are being reinvented and adapted to the challenges and insecurities of a globalised world.

Since the phenomenon of accusing children of witchcraft emerged only within the last 10-20 years (and in Nigeria more recently), there is hope that it has not yet become deeply entrenched. Even if the belief in witchcraft continues, Unicef believes it is no justification for the abuse of children's rights.

From a child protection perspective, witchcraft accusations against children are a form of child abuse. Each "outbreak" of witchcraft accusations has to be studied in order to understand its origins and the forces and interests in society that drive it. Raising public awareness is an important part of prevention, as is the mobilization of church groups, the police and the justice system, as well as traditional healers to take decisive action against the maltreatment of children. Effective support for abused and abandoned children requires functioning child protection systems that ensure children's access to psycho-social, health and educational services, and to justice.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 Jul 2010 | 10:18 am

Internet 'Key Holders' Are Insurance Against Cyber Attack

In a move that seems inspired by "The Lord of the Rings," seven "keys" have been handed out to a trusted circle of people who might get called upon to "save" the Internet in the aftermath of a cyber attack.
Source: Livescience.com | 29 Jul 2010 | 9:48 am

Triceratops 'Secret Location' Found in South Dakota Badlands

An internationally-renowned dinosaur hunter is hoping to bag a Triceratops skeleton at a 'secret location' in the South Dakota Badlands.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Jul 2010 | 9:36 am

Physicists Tackle Wrinkles

Researchers study how folds and other creases disappear in studies that could shed light on how human tissue folds and grows.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Jul 2010 | 8:59 am

Deep blue fuels

Russian sub searches Lake Baikal for energy reserves
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 29 Jul 2010 | 8:06 am

'Welfare Robots' to Ease Burden in Graying Japan

Robotic wheelchairs, mechanical arms and humanoid waiters are among the cutting-edge inventions on show at a robotics fair in Japan, a country whose population is aging rapidly.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Jul 2010 | 8:02 am

The lasting power of oral traditions | Joseph Bruchac

Modern generations are now realising that the immediacy and intimacy of live storytelling cannot be captured by technology

Are oral traditions still relevant? Are they slowly being replaced with technology? In 1992 my son Jesse, the anthropologist Robert Bruce and I drove 400 miles in Robert's beat-up VW van across the dry landscape of southern Mexico into the Chiapas. In the Lacandon jungle, where the first rain we'd seen in two days fell on the heavy vegetation, we came to our destination – the village of Naha. Darkness had fallen as we ducked our heads to enter the main building in the village. A sight that might have been from a 1,000 years ago greeted our eyes. Everyone in the village, all clad in white cotton xikuls (tunics), sat around a fire as the 100-year-old village elder Chan K'in told stories in the peninsular Mayan language.

Later that same year, my other son James and I were in Tireli, a village deep in northern Mali. There we listened raptly to Meninu and Asama, two venerated Dogon elders chosen by the village to share the epic tales of how their people came to be. Their job, they explained, was to teach anyone eager to learn.

Whenever I think of oral tradition, those moments come to mind. I also remember Maurice Dennis, an Abenaki elder who worked for decades at a tourist attraction in Old Forge, NY. Cars roared by on the highway as he carved the figure of a turtle into a basswood log while relating to me the meaning of the 13 plates on its back. I remember Dewasentah, the Onondaga's head clan mother, teaching me stories "to pass on to my grandchildren who are not listening to me right now" as we drank tea in her trading post on the reservation. Then there was Duncan Williamson, pulling me aside at the British Storytelling Festival in London to explain how similar his Scottish traveller clan animals were to those of my own Abenaki Indian people.

Questions about the relevance and persistence of oral traditions are not new. In the late 19th century, trained ethnologists – not just white men and women, but also educated members of indigenous communities – began writing down "vanishing" oral traditions. In the early 20th century, further native stories were captured by wire recorders, then movie cameras. Books and recordings, they assumed, were destined to take the place of storytellers.

But oral traditions have not disappeared. Their settings may change, but their power and use remain. The image of an oral telling may be caught on paper, film or in digital format, but recordings are not the word shared live. The presence of teller and audience, and the immediacy of the moment are not fully captured by any form of technology. Unlike the insect frozen in amber, a told story is alive. It always changes from one telling to the next depending on the voice and mood of the storyteller, the place of its telling, the response of the audience. The story breathes with the teller's breath.

There's a similarity of intent within oral traditions around the world. In American Indian traditions, a story has at least two purposes. The first is to entertain, ensuring it will be heard. This requires awareness and knowledge of the audience – an awareness lacking in any form of recording. Secondly, a story must convey a lesson, one directly appropriate to the needs of the listener. If an Abenaki child was behaving in a selfish manner, for example, one of our traditional tellers might decide to share with that child the story of the monster that tried to keep all of the waters for its own use, was defeated by Gluskonba and turned into a bullfrog.

This is not to say that technology and the oral tradition are separated by a deep divide. Technology is neither good nor bad. It just depends on who's using it and how it's used. Humans have employed technology to hold on to stories for as long as we've had speech. Early on we carved shapes into wood or stone to create mnemonic devices. Here in the north-eastern woodlands of the US we made wampum, shell beads strung in patterns to record events. Now we have books and digital recorders.

Today, many traditional storytellers around the world refer back to books where ancestral wisdom was recorded. They listen to recordings – often in indigenous languages no longer widely spoken. We've passed through a century during which many indigenous languages were wiped out or pushed to the brink of extinction. A new generation of storytellers is bridging the gap between the decades when their elders were forbidden to speak anything but a European tongue and the present by listening to those old recordings and restoring almost forgotten tongues to everyday use.

During the trips I previously mentioned, my sons and I carried a digital recorder with us. Sixty years ago, Maurice Dennis visited every Abenaki elder he could find and taped their stories. Dewasentah's wall was lined with books about Indians. Today, some in our new generation of storytellers are translating stories recorded in English back into native languages – as my son Jesse is doing in Abenaki.

As Chan K'in said that night in Naha, it is all related. The great trees are connected to the distant stars. We humans are part of a circle. If we imagine that we are more important than all other beings, we may be inviting disaster. If we imagine that technology can take the place of the living human presence experienced through oral tradition, then we diminish ourselves and forget the true power of stories.

• This article was commissioned after the author contacted us via the You tell us page. If you have a subject that you would like Cif to cover, please visit the latest thread

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 Jul 2010 | 8:00 am

What students really think about God

We want to find exactly out what kind of beliefs students bring to science lessons, and how teachers can deal with them

Alom Shaha recently raised the issue of how science teachers should respond to being asked questions about God that arise in science lessons. Shaha draws attention to an increasingly sensitive issue for teachers already challenged by the ever-shifting demands of curriculum, assessment and other expectations. This became clear two years ago when the education director of the Royal Society, Professor Michael Reiss, a highly respected biologist and science educator, resigned after pointing out that science teachers need to take into account student worldviews in teaching about evolution. Yet one of the central principles of teaching science is that pupils' existing beliefs and understandings will influence their learning, and there is much research to show that teaching which ignores this is seldom effective.

Sadly, Shaha is right. Some young people will come into the school science laboratory assuming that science and religion are necessarily in conflict. This may derive from views at home: but in recent years there have been a number of high-profile television programmes claiming that science has ousted religious superstition with its rational approach. Students from religious communities who have accepted this view are indeed likely to find science an uncomfortable school subject, and so to later avoid further study and employment in science.

As there are many religious scientists, and diverse views about whether science should be seen as in conflict, harmony or dialogue with, or even as totally irrelevant to, religion, it is clearly unfortunate if some children are disengaging with school science because of a popular conception that science and religion are opposed. The arguments for how a supernatural God might relate to a natural world ordered through regular laws are often nuanced, and are seldom encountered by school-age students. This links to understanding about the nature of science itself (its limits, the status of its laws etc), which has recently become a more central theme of the school science curriculum – although this has traditionally been an area of relative weakness in science teaching and learning.

It was concerns such as these which led to the setting up of the Learning about Science and Religion (Lasar) research project, which is a collaboration between researchers at the universities of Cambridge and Reading. The project sets out to explore how secondary age pupils actually do perceive the relationship between science and religion, and how this impacts on their thinking about the science they are taught. The researchers are based in university education departments that are heavily involved in teacher education, and it is hoped that investigating student thinking in this area will enable us to find ways to better support teachers in Shaha's position, whatever their own personal views about the matter.

The researcher leading the project from Reading, Dr Berry Billingsley of the Institute of Education, has previously undertaken research in Australia, where she found that university students generally reported showing limited sophistication in dealing with the issue during their own earlier schooling. Indeed a common response had been to avoid considering a potential conflict by switching into science mode in science lessons, but then to switch away from that way of thinking in other classes. This may be a good coping strategy, but it is not good education. Science teachers desperately want their teaching to influence students beyond the laboratory or examination room. As Shaha points out: scientific ways of thinking are important life skills.

The Lasar research, funded through the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at St Edmund's College Cambridge, is now underway, using both survey methods and detailed interviewing of a sample of secondary age pupils in various parts of England. Our early impressions are that considerable numbers of students do consider science and religion to be in conflict, and that few have developed sophisticated ways of thinking about possible alternatives. A surprising number of Christian students – not just those from more fundamentalist churches – consider that their religion is committed to a six-day creation of the world, including special acts of creation to produce Adam and Eve as progenitors of the human race. That is something I would not have realised when I was a school science teacher, knowing that mainstream churches have no problems with scientific theories of origins. Science teachers currently have little preparation to deal with student questions on the issue. That is something our project intends to address by better informing science teachers about where students' thinking is at, and by making them aware of the full range of positions that different scientists adopt on the issue. Science teachers should neither tell students what to think about God, nor what to think about how science relates to religion. However, they should introduce students to the range of views available. Shaha wants science teachers to equip young people to arrive at their own decisions, and our research is aimed at supporting teachers in this important task.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 Jul 2010 | 7:30 am

'Ancient survivor'

Experts find new colonies of prehistoric shrimp
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 29 Jul 2010 | 7:03 am

Chemicals washed into China river

Rescue teams in north-east China are working to retrieve 3,000 barrels of chemicals washed into a major river, state media say.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 29 Jul 2010 | 7:00 am

British north-west passage ship found in Canada

HMS Investigator was abandoned in 1853 trying to find earlier mission searching for north-west passage across North America

Canadian archaeologists have found a British ship abandoned more than 150 years ago in the quest for the north-west passage, the fabled sea route across North America, the head of the team said.

Marc-Andre Bernier, Parks Canada's head of underwater archaeology, said the HMS Investigator was found in shallow water in Mercy Bay along the northern coast of Banks Island in Canada's western Arctic. The ship had been abandoned in the ice in 1853 while trying to find the doomed earlier expedition of Sir John Franklin.

"The ship is standing upright in very good condition. It's standing in about 11 metre (36 feet) of water," he said. "This is the ship that sailed the last leg of the north-west passage."

The Investigator was one of many American and British ships sent in search of the HMS Erebus and the Terror, vessels commanded by Franklin in his ill-fated hunt for the north-west passage in 1845.

The Canadian environment minister, Jim Prentice, said the British government has been informed of the find, as well as the discovery of the bodies of three sailors.

Captained by Robert McClure, the Investigator set sail in 1850. When McClure brought the ship into the strait that now bears his name, he realised that he was on the final leg of the north-west passage.

But before he could sail into the Beaufort Sea, the ship was blocked by pack ice and forced to winter in Prince of Wales Strait, along the east coast of Banks Island.

The following summer, McClure tried again to sail to the end of the passage, but was again blocked by ice. He steered the ship and crew into a large bay on the island's north coast which he named the Bay of Mercy.

There they were to remain until 1853, when they were rescued by the crew of the HMS Resolute. The Investigator was abandoned.

"This is actually a human history," said Bernier. "Not only a history of the passage, but the history of a crew of 60 men who had to overwinter three times in the Arctic not knowing if they were going to survive."

The Parks Canada team arrived at Mercy Bay on 22 July. Three days later, the ice on the bay cleared enough that researchers were able to deploy side-scanning sonar from a small inflatable boat over the site where they believed the wooden ship had eventually sunk. Within 15 minutes, the Investigator was found.

The masts and rigging have long been sheared off by ice and weather. But the icy waters of the McClure Strait has preserved the vessel in remarkably good condition.

"It's incredible," said Prentice from Mercy Bay. "You're actually able to peer down into the water and see not only the outline of the ship but actually the individual timbers.

The graves of three sailors thought to have died of scurvy have been marked off and will be left undisturbed, said Bernier.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 Jul 2010 | 5:35 am

Saving the great yellow bumblebee

Ben Darvill and Bob Dawson explain why conserving Britain's declining bumblebee population is so important

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 Jul 2010 | 5:00 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

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