Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 30 Jul 2010 |
3:31 pm
 AP - Volunteers and government officers scrambled on Friday to save geese and other wildlife damaged by an oil spill in a southern Michigan river as the Canadian company that owns the ruptured pipeline said the crude had been contained.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Jul 2010 |
12:28 pm One of NASA’s six-year-old Mars rovers missed its winter wake-up call, prompting concerns that it may never recover from the frigid cold.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 30 Jul 2010 |
12:26 pm
 AP - BP's incoming CEO said Friday that it's time for a "scaleback" of the massive effort to clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, but stressed the commitment to make things right is the same as ever.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Jul 2010 |
12:12 pm Reuters - BP Plc's delayed a critical first step toward killing its Gulf of Mexico oil leak to clean out debris and sediment at the bottom of a relief well, the top official overseeing the spill response said on Friday.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Jul 2010 |
12:11 pm
 AFP - Incoming BP boss Bob Dudley Friday vowed the British energy giant would stand by Gulf residents for years to come, as engineers fine-tuned plans to kill a ruptured well for good.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Jul 2010 |
12:10 pm The incoming BP chief executive has said it is time to scale back some parts of the oil spill clean-up in the Gulf of Mexico.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 30 Jul 2010 |
12:07 pm SPACE.com - NASA has
issued a new grant that bolsters research into the cosmic building blocks of
life by funding observations of young solar systems throughout the universe,
including our own.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Jul 2010 |
12:06 pm LiveScience.com - Researchers have observed small monkeys called Japanese macaques
going bananas at the sight of a flying squirrel.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Jul 2010 |
11:55 am Land in the north of Chile is "ready" for another major earthquake, say researchers, adding that authorities did not act on previous warnings.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 30 Jul 2010 |
11:39 am MyType application tried to assess personality traits of iPad users and would-be buyers. It doesn't make for pretty e-reading What do Stephen Fry, David Hockney, Duncan Bannatyne and Justin Bieber, not to mention a growing minority of readers of this newspaper, have in common? As iPad owners they're all part of a "selfish elite", finds one US company. MyType, a Facebook application which enables users to answer quizzes to determine their personality type, surveyed 20,000 people to try to determine what kind of people owned an iPad. The answer, it turns out, is pretty straightforward. Horrible people. "iPad owners are an elite bunch," said MyType on its website. "They're wealthy, highly educated and sophisticated. They value power and achievement much more than others. They're also selfish, scoring low on measures of kindness and altruism." The firm surveyed the attitudes of more than 20,000 Facebook users towards the iPad, while also "determining" personalities and values. Of those who replied, 3% planned to buy, or had bought, an iPad. MyType then studied the personality traits of this group. MyType claimed that people within the "selfish elites" group – wealthy, highly educated, sophisticated but lacking in kindness and altruism – were six times more likely to be an iPad owner than the average person. It added: "Those who identified lust as their biggest sin are 70% more likely [to own an iPad], while self-professed gluttons are 88% more likely." But John Grohol, founder of the Psych Central psychology website, responded in a blog saying the surveyors did not "know the first thing about reporting statistics, or basic methodology in its own research". He added: "They tried to summarise a bunch of disparate traits into catchy marketing phrases to make news headlines – phrases that were neither particularly accurate nor particularly scientifically valid." MyType said its data was "collected with reasonable rigour" but not without spin. "Any interpretation … is clearly subjective. MyType made an honest effort to tease out the main themes of the data – but feel free to come to your own conclusions."
Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 30 Jul 2010 |
11:29 am Agony aunt and 'humanzee' Carole Jahme prepares to take audiences on an evolutionary journey in her new show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe I have devised a comic science show to mark the International Year of Biodiversity 2010, Carole Jahme Is Bio-diverse!, which premieres at this year's Edinburgh Festival. I'm taking on the role of a monkey-human hybrid in a bid to help audiences get in touch with their inner apes and understand what makes us who we are. We proudly declared ourselves Homo sapiens, meaning "wise man", and defined mankind with the phrase, "Man the tool-maker". Then it was discovered that chimps also make and use tools to hunt for food. Unabashed, we instead crowed about what we presumed was our lineage's uniquely masterful ability to harness and control fire. But research on the newly discovered primate species Homo floresiensis – commonly known as "the Hobbit" – has shown that this ape-man creature, who is anatomically closer to chimps than to us, adeptly used fire to cook food. When science forces us to compare ourselves to other primates, we prefer to separate ourselves from our cousins with an emphasis on mankind's evolved articulation. "Man the talker", we shout now. But recent genetic research on the FOXP2 gene – a dominant gene for language found on chromosome seven – has revealed that Neanderthals shared this gene with us. Traditionally we have portrayed the Neanderthal as an inferior prototype of ourselves; the Caliban of pre-history. Yet here is genetic evidence showing that Neanderthals were as linguistically sophisticated as we are. Genetics has also revealed that we bred with them and those of us of European descent carry at least 4% Neanderthal genes. Not only were Neanderthals gossiping to us over the cave wall 24,000 years ago, but they were silver-tongued enough to guarantee that a little of them lived on in us. Analysis of chimp and human DNA has revealed how we separated from ancestral apes approximately 10m years ago. But the parallel evolving species of early ape-men and archaic apes continued to breed with each other for at least another 4m years. Not only are we modern Westerners the product of hybridised Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, we are also the progeny of ancestral humans and ancestral chimps. One could even go so far as to suggest that we are in fact a type of evolved "humanzee". A recent survey has highlighted that, of the 634 species of primate, 300 are endangered and 114 are imminently threatened with extinction. Since 2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity, I'm using the medium of theatre to highlight the point. I present Carole Jahme Is Bio-diverse! as a humanzee, describing the problems of growing up as a hybrid with a chimp for a dad and a Homo sapiens for a mum. I'll be taking audiences on a comedic yet authentic simian journey to help them get in touch with the ape inside themselves, while reflecting upon what it might be like to belong to the only primate species left. Bio-genetic engineering is bravely taking us into a new world where approximated reconstructions of creatures that have gone before will be brought back to life. A chicken with teeth in place of a beak has already been bred this way to illustrate how ancestral birds had teeth before evolving beaks. Now that both the chimp and human genome have been mapped, advanced embryological technology will soon see the laboratory giving birth to a creature similar to the Hobbit. After 12,000 years this ape-man species might very well walk again. But when humanzee-like primates are breathing once more, what will we do with them? Put them in zoos? Richard Dawkins has speculated that the creation of a humanzee or the discovery of a primate cryptid "would change everything." According to Dawkins, if a yeti or one of the other anecdotal bipedal ape-men is ever scientifically validated, our self-image would implode. Homo sapiens are good at manipulating their environment and typically we do not leave space for others. Today's global deforestation and loss of biodiversity is stark evidence of this. It is imperative to save what we have rather than relying on future bio-engineering to create laboratory freaks of nature – however fascinating they may be. Discovery of our evolved natures can only be achieved by placing our lineage within the greater, comparative context of the order of primates. But with the loss of our closest surviving species, some of them barely hanging on with their opposable thumbs, knowledge of our rightful place will be lost for good and King Kong will become mightier in our minds as we attempt to fill our concrete emptiness. Support the International Year of Biodiversity, fight to preserve what's left and, most importantly, come to the Edinburgh Fringe to see my show.
Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 30 Jul 2010 |
11:28 am Japanese macaques went bananas when they spotted a flying squirrel, suggesting they either mistook the squirrel for a predator or were trying to impress females in the troop.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Jul 2010 |
11:25 am Scientists have come up with a way to turn jogging into a game involving multiple participants.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Jul 2010 |
11:15 am The Whole Brain Catalog project compiles data from across the research spectrum
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Jul 2010 |
11:08 am Greek lessons will be introduced in the classrooms of inner-city schools to help primary children from deprived backgrounds improve their English. Is this a good idea?
Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 30 Jul 2010 |
10:59 am
 AP - Boats and helicopters struggled to reach hundreds of thousands of villagers cut off by floods in northwest Pakistan on Friday as the government said 430 people had been killed in the deadliest such disaster to hit the region since 1929.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Jul 2010 |
10:20 am Ewaste is a major global problem. But so too is the global trade in the materials that go into our electronics in the first place. Here's a bit more about so-called "conflict minerals."
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 30 Jul 2010 |
10:20 am A brain chemical involved in both learning to be afraid and curbing existing fear might one day serve as a drug to help prevent anxiety and the after-effects of trauma.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Jul 2010 |
10:16 am Acid rain killed the fish, but ecosystems could thrive again.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Jul 2010 |
10:08 am Fishermen have been an integral part of cleanup operations, but they could end up losing their jobs for a second time.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 30 Jul 2010 |
9:45 am The monkeys either mistook the squirrels as a predatory bird or they wanted to flaunt their prowess.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Jul 2010 |
9:44 am Scientists develop a device that allows people with severe disabilities to control a wheelchair and communicate by sniffing.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 30 Jul 2010 |
9:33 am A desalination plant which begins operating in Madras on Saturday will provide some of the cheapest drinking water in India, backers say.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 30 Jul 2010 |
9:26 am The scampering beast lived in an Outback-like environment some 318 million years ago.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Jul 2010 |
9:10 am The largest wildlife census of its kind conducted in Chernobyl reveals evidence of mammals declining in the exclusion zone.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 30 Jul 2010 |
9:00 am 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 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 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 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 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, 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 Nasal neurons could give insights into diseases.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Jul 2010 |
8:59 am SPACE.com - A rare
sun-like star that is both young and relatively close to Earth has been found
to be harboring an even weirder object a failed star locked in a close orbit
around its host, according to a new study.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Jul 2010 |
8:45 am Learn all about sickle cell anemia
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Jul 2010 |
8:36 am The Meta Cookie system, uses virtual reality to try to control the flavor of a cookie.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Jul 2010 |
8:30 am A daydream about a foreign vacation or a long-ago memory prove most likely to help you forget the present..
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 30 Jul 2010 |
7:57 am India recently committed to reintroducing cheetahs to three grassland regions around the country. The speedy cats have been considered extinct in India since 1967.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 30 Jul 2010 |
7:24 am It all comes down to carbon emissions, and even though electric vehicles spew zero emissions, they aren't necessarily carbon neutral.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 30 Jul 2010 |
6:55 am 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 | 30 Jul 2010 |
6:01 am 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 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 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 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 China is struggling with an arduous clean up after the country's worst oil spill, with grim conditions for those involved.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 30 Jul 2010 |
5:49 am Two well-meaning nonprofits working to prevent e-waste vehemently disagree on what should happen to zombie-like TV monitors that are dangerous when they're dead. If only they could both be right.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 30 Jul 2010 |
5:43 am York's Yorkshire Museum has reopened after a major refurbishment – much of the work done through DIY projects. Maev Kennedy takes a look at some of its historical treasures
Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 30 Jul 2010 |
5:01 am This cosmic ballet is reshaping what astronomers thought was possible in solar systems beyond our own.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 30 Jul 2010 |
5:00 am A wildlife reserve in the US has a new star attraction after a donkey there gave birth to a foal with stripy legs.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 30 Jul 2010 |
4:51 am
 AP - Scattered storms were forecast to continue moving through the Central U.S., following a low pressure system in the Northern Plains on Friday.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Jul 2010 |
4:18 am 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 AP - The most threatened tortoise in the world is being sold openly at a plant and animal exposition in the heart of Indonesia's capital, highlighting concerns about the rampant — and growing — illegal pet trade.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Jul 2010 |
12:40 am 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 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 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 The 19th-century artist's first published bird illustration has finally been found on old bank notes.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Jul 2010 |
5:00 pm 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 Canadian scientists vindicated after being accused of mistreating laboratory animals.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 29 Jul 2010 |
3:37 pm 
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 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 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 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 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 
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:
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 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 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 
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
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