Rare objects harder to find

Screeners searching for weapons like guns or bombs are more prone to error when the incidence of such threats is small, say US researchers.

When people look for something rare - like a gun or knife or an explosive device hidden in a suitcase - they often have trouble spotting it, researchers have found.

The reverse is also true. When something is very common, people tend to see it everywhere they look, even when if it is not there, says Professor Jeremy Wolfe of Harvard Medical School, whose study appears in the journal Current Biology.

"It is clear that if you don't find it often, you often don't find it," he says.

That means that if you look for 20 guns in a stack of 40 bags, you'll find more of them than if you look for the same 20 guns in a stack of 2000 bags.

"We really want to understand why that is happening," says Wolfe.

For the current study, Wolfe and his colleagues worked with the US Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Laboratory. The department sent Wolfe's team images of empty suitcases and images of items typically found in them.

"We have software that basically packs bags. It takes an empty bag and throws some clothes in it and maybe some odds and ends - and maybe it throws a gun or a knife in there," Wolfe said. "We either had those show up 50% of the time or 2% of the time," he says.

Then they recruited 13 volunteers to look for guns or knives in the bags.

Nature's 'smart bomb' genome revealed

The genetic mapping of a tiny, venomous parasitic wasp could lead to chemical-free pest control and provide insights into how the environment contributes to human disease.

The claim is made by a group of 157 scientists from around the world, who took four years to sequence the genetic map of three species of the Nasonia wasp.

They also say the sequencing shows Nasonia has potential to become a model genetic system for understanding evolutionary and developmental genetics.

In today's Science journal, the team, including Australian researchers, show some of the key genes involved in making the wasp such an effective killer.

Parasitoids such as the Nasonia wasp inject venom into their prey, then lay eggs on or inside the host, which is then eaten and eventually killed by the developing young.
Pest control

"There are over 600,000 species of these amazing critters, and we owe them a lot. If it weren't for parasitoids and other natural enemies, we would be knee-deep in pest insects," says Nasonia Genome Working Group team leader Professor John Werren, of the University of Rochester in New York.

Parasitoid wasps are like "smart bombs" that seek out and kill only specific kinds of insects, says Werren.

"Therefore, if we can harness their full potential, they would be vastly preferable to chemical pesticides, which broadly kill or poison many organisms in the environment, including us."

Professor Ryszard Maleszka of the Research School of Biology at the Australian National University, says the research is likely to be used to develop non-chemical pest controls.

Mega-quake building off Indonesia

As the search for survivors from the Haiti earthquake continues, experts warn another devasting earthquake and tsunami could strike off the island of Sumatra.

The group, led by a prominent scientist who predicted a 2005 Sumatran quake with uncanny accuracy, issued the warning in a letter to the journal Nature Geoscience.

The peril comes from a relentless build-up of pressure over the last two centuries on a section of the Sunda Trench, one of the world's most notorious earthquake zones, which runs parallel to the western Sumatra coast, they say.

This section, named after the Mentawai islands, "is near failure," the letter warned bluntly.

"The threat of a great tsunamigenic earthquake with a magnitude of more than 8.5 on the Mentawai patch is unabated ... There is potential for loss of life on the scale of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami."

The letter gave no timeframe for this event but warned starkly of the danger for Padang, a city of 850,000 people that lies broadside to the risky segment.

"The threat from such an event is clear and the need for urgent mitigating action remains extremely high," it says.

More than 220,000 people lost their lives in the killer wave of 26 December 2004 when a 9.3-magnitude earthquake, occurring farther north on the Sunda Trench, ruptured the boundary where the Australian plate of Earth's crust plunges beneath the Eurasian plate.
Previous predictions

The authors of the letter are led by Professor John McCloskey of the Environmental Sciences Research Institute at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland.

In March 2005, McCloskey warned that the 2004 Boxing Day quake had built up major stress in an adjoining part of the fault to the south. He declared a temblor in the region of 8.5 magnitude with the capacity to generate a tsunami was imminent and urged the authorities to beef up preparations.

Such predictions are extraordinarily rare in the world of seismology. Knowledge of where earthquakes strike is extensive, but the ability to say when they will occur remains elusive.

But McCloskey was proven right within two weeks. On 28 March 2005, a quake measuring 8.6 erupted at Simeulue island, generating a three-metre tsunami.

In the letter to Nature Geoscience, his team explain their calculations for the vulnerable Mentawai segment in the aftermath of a 7.6-magnitude quake that occurred 60 kilometres near Padang on 30 September last year, killing more than 1000 people.

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Solar system 'on fire' burned up Earth's carbon

FIRE sweeping through the inner solar system may have scorched away much of the carbon from Earth and the other inner planets.

Though our planet supports carbon-based life, it has a mysterious carbon deficit. The element is thousands of times more abundant in comets in the outer solar system than on Earth, relative to the amount of silicon each body contains. The sun is similarly rich in carbon. "There really wasn't that much carbon that made it onto Earth compared to what was available," says Edwin Bergin of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

The conventional explanation for the deficit argues that in the inner region of the dust disc where Earth formed, temperatures soared above 1800 kelvin, enough for carbon to boil away. But observations of developing solar systems suggest that at Earth's distance from the sun the temperature would be too cool to vaporise carbon dust.

Now a team of astronomers says that fire is to blame. Hot oxygen atoms in the dusty disc would have readily combined with carbon, burning it to produce carbon dioxide and other gases, say Jeong-Eun Lee of Sejong University in Seoul, South Korea, and colleagues, including Bergin, in a paper to appear in The Astrophysical Journal Letters (arxiv.org/abs/1001.0818). Any solid carbon in the inner solar system would have been destroyed within a few years, they calculate.

Tentacled snakes feel their way to a midnight feast

The mysterious moustache of an aquatic snake may help it "see" in murky waters by detecting subtle currents generated by its prey.

Ken Catania and colleagues at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, used a hair to deflect the upper-lip tentacles of tentacled snakes (Erpeton tentaculatum), and recorded the resulting nerve activity. The tentacles proved to be exquisitely sensitive to even the tiniest deflection.

Mapping the path of the tentacle nerves showed that they feed into an area of the brain that processes sensory signals, close to where it responds strongly to visual signals. "This suggests that [the snakes] are putting the two parts of the information together," Catania says.

To test how well the snakes could hunt by either sense alone, the team put them in a tank with a clear bottom, through which they displayed a movie of cartoon fish swimming. The snakes struck at the fish accurately, suggesting they can capture prey using vision alone.

They were then put with live fish in a pitch-black tank, and filmed with an infrared camera. Although the snakes struck out less often, they could "strike at and capture fish swimming several centimetres from the head and tentacles", Catania says.

Catania suggests the tentacles may enable snakes to catch prey at night or in murky waters.

Why the Haiti quake killed so many

Last week's earthquake in Haiti has been described by the United Nations as the worst humanitarian crisis in decades, with estimates of the number of dead ranging from 50,000 to 200,000. The UN blames the fact that the quake hit a densely populated capital city, knocking out many of the agencies that would have dealt with disaster relief.

Geologists speaking to New Scientist explained some of the other reasons why the quake was so bad, and warned that more shocks may come, because not all the pent-up seismic energy was released in the tragedy.

First, the quake was "shallow source" and so allowed less warning time to get out of buildings than deep quakes. And Port au Prince is built not on solid rock but on soil, which collapses when shaken. Finally, building standards were not adequate for major earthquakes.

If a similar quake occurred in California, the death toll would almost certainly have been much lower. "Better buildings would have saved lives," says Chuck DeMets, a tectonic geologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Fog Seen on Saturn Moon Titan--A First

Earth-like fog shrouds chilly lakes on the south pole of Saturn's moon Titan, scientists say. (See a Titan picture.)

On Earth, fog typically forms when moisture-rich air cools rapidly, which reduces the air's ability to hold water vapor.

"But on Titan, you can't do that," said study leader Mike Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology.

"It's already very cold there and it's hard to cool [the air] down any further. So the only way to make fog is to have the air be in contact with liquid on the ground."

(Related: "Huge Space Lake Confirmed on Saturn's Moon Titan.")

The team thinks liquid evaporating from Titan's lakes makes the surrounding air increasingly humid. When moist air then brushes the cool surfaces of the lakes, the otherworldly fog is born.

Fog on Titan confirms that at least some of the moon's lakes are filled with liquid methane and not the chemical ethane, which can't evaporate in Titan's cold temperatures.

"For a long time we've been pretty sure that there are liquid lakes on Titan," Brown said. "But if the lakes were all just ethane, it would be a very inactive place."

Instead, the presence of fog confirms that Titan has an active "methane-cycle" similar to Earth's water cycle, he said.

Foggy Patches

The team detected the fog in data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which has been exploring the Saturnian system since 2004.

Brown and colleagues first looked at the data using a digital filter they developed that reveals details only on the moon's surface.

In the filtered images, the fog appears during the moon's late southern summer as bright, reddish-white patches hovering above the surface of lakes.

Those patches are not visible in images filtered to show only higher altitudes of the same region, thus ruling out the patches as clouds, which have been seen before on the large moon.

As the fog dissipates, Brown suspects, methane vapor rises higher in Titan's atmosphere to form the clouds, which to the naked human eye would look identical to clouds on Earth.

Previous studies have suggested that those clouds, in turn, pelt the surface with cold methane rain—maybe even enough to occasionally create new lakes on the Saturn moon.

North Magnetic Pole Moving Due to Core Flux

Earth's north magnetic pole is racing toward Russia at almost 40 miles (64 kilometers) a year due to magnetic changes in the planet's core, new research says.

The core is too deep for scientists to directly detect its magnetic field. But researchers can infer the field's movements by tracking how Earth's magnetic field has been changing at the surface and in space.

Now, newly analyzed data suggest that there's a region of rapidly changing magnetism on the core's surface, possibly being created by a mysterious "plume" of magnetism arising from deeper in the core.

And it's this region that could be pulling the magnetic pole away from its long-time location in northern Canada, said Arnaud Chulliat, a geophysicist at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris in France.

Finding North

Magnetic north, which is the place where compass needles actually point, is near but not exactly in the same place as the geographic North Pole. Right now, magnetic north is close to Canada's Ellesmere Island.

Navigators have used magnetic north for centuries to orient themselves when they're far from recognizable landmarks.

Although global positioning systems have largely replaced such traditional techniques, many people still find compasses useful for getting around underwater and underground where GPS satellites can't communicate.

The magnetic north pole had moved little from the time scientists first located it in 1831. Then in 1904, the pole began shifting northeastward at a steady pace of about 9 miles (15 kilometers) a year.

In 1989 it sped up again, and in 2007 scientists confirmed that the pole is now galloping toward Siberia at 34 to 37 miles (55 to 60 kilometers) a year.

A rapidly shifting magnetic pole means that magnetic-field maps need to be updated more often to allow compass users to make the crucial adjustment from magnetic north to true North.

Wandering Pole

Geologists think Earth has a magnetic field because the core is made up of a solid iron center surrounded by rapidly spinning liquid metal. This creates a "dynamo" that drives our magnetic field.

(Get more facts about Earth's insides.)

Scientists had long suspected that, since the molten core is constantly moving, changes in its magnetism might be affecting the surface location of magnetic north.

Although the new research seems to back up this idea, Chulliat is not ready to say whether magnetic north will eventually cross into Russia.

"It's too difficult to forecast," Chulliat said.

Also, nobody knows when another change in the core might pop up elsewhere, sending magnetic north wandering in a new direction.

"Blue Moon" to Shine on New Year's Eve

A blue moon isn't actually blue—as commonly defined, the name reflects the relative rarity of two full moons in a month and is linked to the saying "once in a blue moon."

With this New Year's Eve blue moon, "there is nothing scientific about it, and it has no astronomical significance," said Mark Hammergren, a staff astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Illinois.

"But I believe it does give us some insight into history and makes us think of how our calendar system has derived from motions of objects in the sky."

Blue Moon Error

The popular definition of a blue moon isn't the only one—and it's one that's based on an editorial error, astronomers contend.

The widespread definition of the second full moon in a month stems from errors made in an astronomy magazine, when a writer misinterpreted how the term was used in the Maine Farmer's Almanac.

Later studies of almanacs published from 1819 to 1962 revealed that the term "blue moon" actually refers to the "extra" full moon that can occur in a year due to differences between the calendar year and the astronomical year.

(Related: "Leap Year—How the World Makes Up for Lost Time.")

Most years on average have 12 full moons, with 1 appearing each month.

That's because the lunar month—the time it takes the moon to cycle through its phases—corresponds closely to the calendar month.

But the calendar year is actually based on the solar cycle, or the time it takes Earth to make one trip around the sun. This means a year is not evenly divisible by lunar months, so every three years or so there are 13 full moons.

The farmer's almanac further divided the year into four seasons, with each season lasting three months. When a given season saw four full moons, the almanac dubbed the third moon as a blue moon.

Ultimately, a blue moon as defined by the calendar isn't that rare, added Hammergren. The term's significance instead lies in the way it links people to the motions of the cosmos.

"Just being able to recognize that we can have a full moon twice in a month and have [folklore] attached really highlights the fact that humans have been astronomers their entire existence," he said.

Isaac Newton: Who He Was, Why Google Apples Are Falling

Legend has it that Isaac Newton formulated gravitational theory in 1665 or 1666 after watching an apple fall and asking why the apple fell straight down, rather than sideways or even upward.

"He showed that the force that makes the apple fall and that holds us on the ground is the same as the force that keeps the moon and planets in their orbits," said Martin Rees, President of Britain's Royal Society, the United Kingdom's national academy of science, which was once headed by Newton himself.

"His theory of gravity wouldn't have got us global positioning satellites," said Jeremy Gray, a mathematical historian at the Milton Keynes, U.K-based Open University. "But it was enough to develop space travel."

Isaac Newton, Underachiever?

Born two to three months prematurely on January 4, 1643, in a hamlet in Lincolnshire, England, Isaac Newton was a tiny baby who, according to his mother, could have fit inside a quart mug. A practical child, he enjoyed constructing models, including a tiny mill that actually ground flour—powered by a mouse running in a wheel.

Admitted to the University of Cambridge on 1661, Newton at first failed to shine as a student.

In 1665 the school temporarily closed because of a bubonic plague epidemic and Newton returned home to Lincolnshire for two years. It was then that the apple-falling brainstorm occurred, and he described his years on hiatus as "the prime of my age for invention."

Despite his apparent affinity for private study, Newton returned to Cambridge in 1667 and served as a mathematics professor and in other capacities until 1696.

Isaac Newton: More Than Master of Gravity

Decoding gravity was only part of Newton's contribution to mathematics and science. His other major mathematical pre-occupation was calculus, and along with German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, Newton developed differentiation and integration—techniques that remain fundamental to mathematicians and scientists.

Meanwhile, his interest in optics led him to propose, correctly, that white light is actually the combination of light of all the colors of the rainbow. This, in turn, made plain the cause of chromatic aberration—inaccurate color reproduction—in the telescopes of the day.

"Lost" Amazon Complex Found; Shapes Seen by Satellite

Hundreds of circles, squares, and other geometric shapes once hidden by forest hint at a previously unknown ancient society that flourished in the Amazon, a new study says.

Satellite images of the upper Amazon Basin taken since 1999 have revealed more than 200 geometric earthworks spanning a distance greater than 155 miles (250 kilometers).
Now researchers estimate that nearly ten times as many such structures—of unknown purpose—may exist undetected under the Amazon's forest cover.

At least one of the sites has been dated to around A.D. 1283, although others may date as far back as A.D. 200 to 300, said study co-author Denise Schaan, an anthropologist at the Federal University of Pará in Belém, Brazil.

The discovery adds to evidence that the hinterlands of the Amazon once teemed with complex societies, which were largely wiped out by diseases brought to South America by European colonists in the 15th and 16th centuries, Schaan said.

Since these vanished societies had gone unrecorded, previous research had suggested that soils in the upper Amazon were too poor to support the extensive agriculture needed for such large, permanent settlements.

"We found that this picture is wrong," Schaan said. "And there is a lot more to discover in these places."

Wide-reaching Culture

The newfound shapes are created by a series of trenches about 36 feet (11 meters) wide and several feet deep, with adjacent banks up to 3 feet (1 meter) tall. Straight roads connect many of the earthworks.

Preliminary excavations at one of the sites in 2008 revealed that some of the earthworks were surrounded by low mounds containing domestic ceramics, charcoal, grinding-stone fragments, and other evidence of habitation.

But who built the structures and what functions they served remains a mystery. Ideas range from defensive buildings to ceremonial centers and homes, the study authors say.

It's also possible the structures served different purposes over time, noted William Woods, a geographer and anthropologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence who was not involved in the research.

"For example," he said, "in Lawrence there's a Masonic temple—it is now a bar. There was a bank—it is now a restaurant called Tellers. These things happen."

What most surprised the research team is that the earthworks appear in both the region's floodplains and the uplands.

In general, the Amazon's fertile floodplains have been popular sites for ancient civilizations, while the sparser uplands have been thought to be largely devoid of people, the researchers say.

What's more, the earthworks in both regions are of a similar style, suggesting they were built by the same society.

"In Amazonian archaeology you always have this idea that you find different peoples in different ecosystems," study co-author Schaan said.

"And so it was kind of odd to have a culture that would take advantage of different ecosystems and expand over such a large region."

Yearlong Star Eclipse May Help Solve Space Mystery

While relatively few people were looking, an unusual eclipse darkened New Year's Day.

On January 1 a giant space object blotted out our view of Epsilon Aurigae, a yellow supergiant star about 2,000 light-years from Earth. Based on studies of Epsilon Aurigae's previous eclipses, astronomers expect the star won't fully regain its bright shine until early 2011.

Normally the star is so bright it can be seen with the naked eye even by city dwellers. For all but the most rural star-gazers, though, the mystery object that eclipses the star causes it to vanish for about 18 months every 27.1 years.

Ever since the star's periodic eclipses were first recorded in 1821, astronomers have been puzzling over how Epsilon Aurigae pulls off its lengthy disappearing act.

Now, "using data from the Spitzer Space Telescope, we've reached a solution to a nearly two-century-old mystery," study leader Don Hoard, of the California Institute of Technology, said today at an American Astronomical Association press briefing in Washington, D.C.

According to the new model, Epsilon Aurigae is a dying star being orbited by another star, and that stellar dance partner is cloaked in a wide disk of dark dust.

Based on the new Spitzer data, Hoard's team thinks the eclipse lasts so long because the dark disk is about 744,000,000 miles (1,197,351,936 kilometers) across—eight times as wide as the distance from Earth to the sun.

Earliest Known Galaxies Spied in Deep Hubble Picture

Compact, ultra-blue galaxies spied for the first time in the deep universe are the most distant—and therefore the earliest—galaxies anyone has ever seen, astronomers announced today.

These galaxies started forming just 500 million years after the big bang, which is thought to have occurred around 13.7 billion years ago. That pushes back the known start of galaxy formation by about 1.5 billion years.

The objects were spotted in pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3, a new camera installed in 2009. (See some of the first pictures taken by the upgraded Hubble.)

The Hubble images, combined with data from the Spitzer Space Telescope, show that the newfound galaxies are relatively small, and they appear very blue, a color linked to lighter elements such as hydrogen and helium.

Hydrogen fusion inside active stars creates heavier elements such as iron and nickel, which get spread across the universe when massive stars explode.

These elements cause modern galaxies to glow in a rainbow of colors, so the extreme blueness of the newfound galaxies suggests that they formed before very many massive stars had lived and died.

"We are looking back 13 billion years and finding extraordinary objects," said Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), and leader of one of Hubble's survey teams.

"We are looking back through 95 percent of the life of the universe."

Tiny Galaxies Were Only the Beginning

The deep Hubble view also reveals that the newly illuminated region is extremely active, said Rogier Windhorst of Arizona State University, leader of one of the other teams that analyzed the new data.

"If you look hard enough, you can see galaxies of almost every shape."

The snapshots represent an epoch in the early universe when galaxies were believed to be tiny toddlers. Most were just 5 percent the size of the Milky Way with one percent of its mass, UCSC's Illingworth said.

These galaxies are likely the beginnings of the theorized process of galaxy growth in which small galaxies gradually assemble into bulkier objects. "These are the seeds of the great galaxies today," Illingworth said.

Cosmic Heat Wave

The galaxy find, presented today at the 215th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, is one piece in a larger puzzle related to the origins of the universe: What caused the major re-ionization event 400 to 900 million years after the big bang?

During this event, something triggered a heat wave that stripped electrons from the neutral hydrogen that filled the universe.

The charged gas shifted rapidly from being opaque to being transparent, ending what's known as the cosmic dark ages and giving rise to the types of galaxies, stars, and other objects familiar today.

(Read: "Most Distant Object Found; Light Pierced 'Dark Age' Fog.")

The mystery is a "whodunit that is essential to understanding the formation of the structure of the universe," Illingworth said.

A steady increase in starlight from early galaxies is the prime suspect for generating the needed heat.

But so far, the concentration of galaxies in the universe appears to drop off the further back in time astronomers look, and the new findings confirm that theory.

If the truly primordial galaxies—which are as-yet unseen—were very dense, experts say, they could have had the critical mass necessary to trigger the re-ionization event.

The James Webb Space Telescope, due to launch in 2014, may identify the culprits for the re-ionization event by spotting these primordial objects.

Until then, Illingworth said, "we're pushing Hubble to the limit to find these objects."

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Smart balls reveal skills of better bowlers

IF YOUR tenpin bowling is a bit off-target a smart training ball might one day keep your shots out of the gutter.

Sports scientist Franz Fuss of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia fitted aluminium tubes in the thumb and finger holes of a regular bowling ball. Each tube had a strain gauge at the bottom to measure and log the forces the players' fingers were applying on each shot.

Ten players of differing abilities used the ball to attempt various shots. Fuss found that the strain gauge measurements from the ball enabled him to identify the characteristics of successful shots (Sports Technology, DOI: 10.1002/jst.104). For instance, better bowlers consistently pinch the ball with much greater force immediately prior to release, to allow a faster delivery.

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Designing highways the slime mould way

A SLIMY road planner has rearranged the UK's motorway network - and all in exchange for a hearty meal. A corrupt politician at work? No, it's Physarum polycephalum, a yellow slime mould normally found growing in piles of rotten leaves and logs.

Jeff Jones and Andrew Adamatzky, specialists in unconventional computing at the University of the West of England in Bristol, wondered if biology could provide an alternative to conventional road planning methods. To find out, they created templates of the UK using a sheet of agar on which they marked out the nine most populous cities, excluding London, with oat flakes. Then, in the place of London, the pair introduced a colony of P. polycephalum, which feeds by spawning tendrils to reach nutrients, and recorded the colony's feeding activity (see picture).

Most of the resulting "maps" mimicked the real inter-city road network, but some offered new routes. For instance, the motorway between Manchester and Glasgow passes along the west coast of the UK, but the slime mould preferred to travel east to Newcastle and then north to Glasgow (arxiv.org/abs/0912.3967). "This shows how a single-celled creature without any nervous system - and thus intelligence in the classical sense - can provide an efficient solution to a routing problem," says Jones.

Debate heats up over IPCC melting glaciers claim

Glaciologists are this week arguing over how a highly contentious claim about the speed at which glaciers are melting came to be included in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In 1999 New Scientist reported a comment by the leading Indian glaciologist Syed Hasnain, who said in an email interview with this author that all the glaciers in the central and eastern Himalayas could disappear by 2035.

Hasnain, of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, who was then chairman of the International Commission on Snow and Ice's working group on Himalayan glaciology, has never repeated the prediction in a peer-reviewed journal. He now says the comment was "speculative".

Despite the 10-year-old New Scientist report being the only source, the claim found its way into the IPCC fourth assessment report published in 2007. Moreover the claim was extrapolated to include all glaciers in the Himalayas

Scientists Discover Origin of a Cancer in Tasmanian Devils

The Tasmanian devil, the spaniel-size marsupial found on the Australian island of Tasmania, has been hurtling toward extinction in recent years, the victim of a bizarre and mysterious facial cancer that spreads like a plague.

Now Australian scientists say they have discovered how the cancer originated. The finding, being reported Friday in the journal Science, sheds light on how cancer cells can sometimes liberate themselves from the hosts where they first emerged. On a more practical level, it also opens the door to devising vaccines that could save the Tasmanian devils.

“It’s a great paper,” said Katherine Belov, a geneticist at the University of Sydney who was not involved in the study. “Previously, we were stumbling in the dark.”

The cancer, devil’s facial tumor disease, is transmitted when the animals bite one another’s faces during fights. It grows rapidly, choking off the animal’s mouth and spreading to other organs. The disease has wiped out 60 percent of all Tasmanian devils since it was first observed in 1996, and some ecologists predict that it could obliterate the entire wild population within 35 years.

When the tumor disease was discovered, many scientists assumed that it was caused by a rapidly spreading virus. Viruses cause 15 percent of all cancers in humans and are also widespread in animals.

But subsequent studies failed to turn up a virus. Instead, Anne-Maree Pearse and Kate Swift, of the Department of Primary Industries, Water and Environment in Tasmania, discovered something strange about the tumor cells. The chromosomes looked less like those in the animal’s normal cells and more like those in the tumors growing in other Tasmanian devils.

Super-Earths found orbiting nearby stars

The race to find Earth-like planets around stars similar to our Sun progressed further with the announcement of up to six 'super-Earths' found orbiting sun-like neighbour stars.

The smallest of the bunch weighs in at about five times the mass of Earth and orbits a star known as 61 Virginis, which is visible with the naked eye in the constellation Virgo. The star is 28 light-years from Earth and closely resembles the sun in size, age and other attributes.

Two other newly detected planets - each about the size of Neptune - are part of 61 Virginis' family.

Another planet that is 7.8 times larger than Earth orbits HD 1461, a sun-like star located 76 light-years away in the constellation Cetus. Two sibling planets may orbit this same star, though confirmation is still pending, says astronomer Dr Gregory Laughlin of the University of California's Lick Observatory.

"I think this is really the tip of the iceberg," says Laughlin. "There's so many planets that have been detected now; it's completely clear that planets aren't rare. With our program, we've been focusing very intently on finding low-mass planets that orbit very nearby solar-type stars."

An international team of researchers detected the new planetary systems by combining information collected during years of observations at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the Anglo-Australian Telescope in Australia.

Tiny tugs

The astronomers combed the data looking for minute variations in the starlight caused by gravitational tugs of orbiting planets.

"This was not the kind of 'ah-ha' moment where you look into the telescope and see the planet sitting there," says Laughlin. "The signal builds up over time."

Refinements in planet-hunting techniques should make detection of Earth-sized planets possible in about a year, he says.

"The practical limits for finding terrestrial planets around nearby stars is a lot more optimistic than what was thought to be the case a few years ago," Laughlin says.

The newly discovered planets are too close to their parent stars for liquid water to exist on their surfaces, a condition that is believed to be necessary for life.

Still, scientists say the discoveries, announced in this week's edition of The Astrophysical Journal, are paving the way toward finding the first true extraterrestrial Earth.

"These planets are particularly exciting," says Professor Chris Tinney of the University of New South Wales. "It looks like there may be many Sun-like stars nearby with planets of that mass or less."

Dr Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution agrees.

"We are knocking on the door right now of being able to find habitable planets."

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Bad wine makes for good energy

Scientists in the United States and India are using microbes to turn the sugar and vinegar resulting from improper fermentation into electricity and hydrogen.

The technology could provide a new and cost effective way to clean wastewater from wineries and get some value out of a bad bottle of wine.

"There is nothing special about the bacteria," says Bruce Logan, a scientist at Penn State University who recently installed a microbial electrolysis cell at a winery in Napa Valley, California. "We just give them a good environment to grow in."

A good home and plenty of food, that is. It takes a lot of water to grow, harvest, process and ferment the sugar in grapes into the alcohol Americans love to consume by the bottle.

All that wastewater, loaded with unfermented sugar, improperly fermented vinegar, biomass and other contaminants, has to be cleaned, and cleaning wastewater is expensive.

According to Logan's estimates, about 1.5% of all the electricity in the US goes into wastewater treatment. Up to 5% of all the country's electricity goes into our nation's water management systems.

The winery in the study doesn't have specific statistics on how much they pay to treat their wastewater, but it is expensive.

To offset the cost of treatment, its owners installed a 1000-litre, refrigerator-sized microbial electrolysis cell to help treat some of the wastewater. Until this point, Logan's microbial fuel and electrolysis cells have been smaller than a teakettle.

Splitting off hydrogen

Two steps are required to treat the water flowing into the unit. First, one group of bacteria turns unused sugar and unwanted vinegar from improper fermentation into electricity. It's a small amount, but not enough to reach the 1.2 volts necessary to split water; therefore, a little extra electricity from the normal power grid is needed.

Another group of bacteria uses that electricity to split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen, which escape into the atmosphere.

At least, that's the idea. "We are producing more methane than we wanted," says Logan, who is trying to correct the problem.

The scientists could collect the hydrogen for a fuel cell or burn the methane for heat, says Logan, but for now they let it escape into the atmosphere.

The microbial electrolysis cell only treats 0.1% of all the winery's wastewater, most of which flows into a traditional treatment lagoon.

The project isn't meant to save the winery a significant amount of money, just to prove the technology is feasible. Logan estimates it will take three to five years before a commercially viable microbial electrolysis cell is available.

While Logan uses a microbial electrolysis cell to split water, a group of scientists from India recently developed a microbial fuel cell that uses wine to produce energy.

"Sugars like glucose, alcohols and effluents containing sugars or alcohols can be used (to produce electricity)," says Professor Sheela Berchmans of the Central Electrochemical Research Institute in India, who recently co-authored a paper in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Marriage wards off the blues: study

Marriage really is good for you, with a major international study finding it reduces the risks of depression and anxiety, but these disorders are more likely to plague people once the relationship is over.

The study of 34,493 people across 15 countries was led by clinical psychologist Kate Scott from New Zealand's University of Otago, and is based on the World Health Organisation's World Mental Health (WMH) surveys conducted over the past decade and appears in the journal Psychological Medicine.

It found that ending marriage through separation, divorce or death is linked to an increased risk of mental health disorders, with women more likely to resort to substance abuse and men more likely to become depressed.

"What makes this investigation unique and more robust is the sample is so large and across so many countries and the fact that we have data not only on depression... but also on anxiety and substance use disorders," says Scott.

"In addition, we were able to look at what happens to mental health in marriage, both in comparison with never getting married, and with ending marriage."

Good for both sexes

Scott says that the study found that getting married, compared to not getting married, was good for the mental health of both genders, not just women, as previous studies had found.

The study, however, did find that men are less likely to become depressed in their first marriage than women, a factor Scott says was probably linked to the traditional gender roles at home, as other WMH surveys have shown that as women get better educated, depression rates tend to fall.

The other gender difference the study found is that getting married reduces risk of substance use disorders more for women than for men. Scott says this may be explained by the fact that women are usually the primary caregiver for young children.

But, the downside of marriage, the University of Otago study shows, is that ending it has a negative impact on both genders.

"What our study points to is that the marital relationship offers a lot of mental health benefits for both men and women, and that the distress and disruption associated with ending marriage can make people vulnerable to developing mental disorders," says Scott.

Heat-seeking telescope blasts into orbit

NASA has launched its latest space telescope into orbit Earth to scan the sky in infrared light and photograph the glow of hundreds of millions of objects.

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has been called "the most sensitive set of wide-angle infrared goggles ever."

It will orbit 500 kilometres above Earth's surface for 10 months as it hunts for and collects data on dim objects such as dust clouds, brown dwarf stars and asteroids in the dark spaces between planets and stars.

The satellite will map the cosmos in infrared light, covering the whole sky one-and-a-half times and snapping pictures of everything from near-Earth asteroids to faraway galaxies bursting with new stars.

"The last time we mapped the whole sky at these particular infrared wavelengths was 26 years ago," says Edward Wright of the University of California at Los Angeles, who is the principal investigator of the mission.

"Infrared technology has come a long way since then. The old all-sky infrared pictures were like impressionist paintings - now, we'll have images that look like actual photographs."

WISE is expected to map the locations and sizes of roughly 200,000 asteroids and give scientists a clearer idea of how many large and potentially dangerous asteroids are near Earth.

WISE will also help answer questions about the formation of stars and the evolution and structure of galaxies, including the Milky Way.

By the end of its mission, WISE will have taken nearly 1.5 million pictures covering the entire sky, says NASA.

Dissent over animal to human transplants

The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council should have consulted the public before giving the green light to xenotransplantation, says a former member of the Council.

The comments come following the NHMRC's announcement last week that it would allow clinical trials involving xenotransplantation for humans to proceed, under strict controls.

Xenotransplantation is the transfer of living tissues, such as stem cells or organs, from one species to another.

"The risks, if appropriately regulated, are minimal and acceptable given the potential benefits," the NHMRC states.

But Adjunct Professor Peter Sainsbury of the University of Sydney's school of public health says the decision should have involved public consultation because the public stand to lose the most if new infectious diseases are unleashed from xenotransplantation.

Sainsbury says in most clinical trials, individual patients bear the risk of the experimental treatment, with the community benefiting from the scientific knowledge gained.

But, he says, in xenotransplantation the situation is reversed.

"All the benefits from xenotransplantation accrue to the individual who gets the transplantation, if it works. But most of the risk, if it occurs, goes to the community," says Sainsbury.

"So it's a complete reversal of normal risk-benefit analysis."
Public concern

Sainsbury was a member of the NHMRC council in 2004 when it placed a moratorium on xenotransplantation following extensive public consultation.

He says, at the time debate was heated.

"There were some strong advocates for xenotransplantation, particularly some clinicians and some patient groups, and there was an immense amount of opposition to xenotransplantation from other members of the public," says Sainbury.

He says some concerns focused on public safety and the lack of proof for xenotransplantation, while others focused on the insertion of human genes into animals, and animal welfare.

"People were very very upset and angry about these issues, much more so than what one would normally see at this sort of public consultation," says Sainsbury, who is now on the Australian Health Ethics Committee, which provides advice to the NHMRC.

"In view of the degree of public concern that was expressed five years ago, it would have been appropriate and prudent to have sought public consultation before making the decision that has been made now."

Getting to grips with why we slip

WINTER: 'tis the season of reduced friction. Depending on where you are, you might be anticipating the first icy days of the year's coldest season, or already be well attuned to its attendant dangers. Ice plus incaution, we all know, equals slips, slides, broken bones and mangled cars and bicycles.

Not your problem, you might think, if you are basking on Bondi beach or sunning yourself in your Florida bolt-hole. You would be wrong. Even in Australia, where ice tends to be confined to the beer cooler, slips on low-friction surfaces such as tiled bathroom floors or oil-slicked filling station forecourts result in a dozen deaths, tens of thousands of injuries and an estimated AU$ 1 billion in lost productivity each year. That's a picture comparable to those in the US and the UK. "Slip resistance is a global problem," says Richard Bowman, a slip consultant at Intertile Research in Melbourne.

That's why, in safety laboratories around the world, fearless researchers are having our accidents for us, slipping and sliding their way, they hope, towards a better understanding of the perils of reduced friction. They do not have it easy. Friction might be everywhere - except where it is suddenly absent - but it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to get to grips with.

Even supercomputers capable of calculating what goes on inside stars or modelling the most complex characteristics of the atomic world slip up on friction's intricacies. "Friction is not a material property, it's a system response," explains Roland Larsson of Luleå University of Technology in Sweden. The amount of friction between two surfaces depends not only on their atomic structures, but also on their context. The presence of a liquid between them can affect it, for example, as can whether they are moving, and if so at what relative velocity.

This means there is no simple formula for how surfaces glide across each other. "If you give me two surfaces and ask me to predict the friction when I rub them together, I just can't: it's too complex," says Larsson.

If the theorists are floored, the experimenters are at sixes and sevens. True, you can ask them to carry out measurements to define the "coefficient of friction" between two surfaces, a number that quantifies the frictional force that arises when you press them together with a certain force. But there's the rub: take any two friction aficionados and you will probably find that they do their measurements in completely different ways - quite possibly reaching two different answers. "There is no overall, agreed way to do this," says Mark Redfern, a bioengineer and slip expert based at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.

High-tech tipples: The future of cocktails

IT WOULD be lovely to have access to chromatography," Spike Marchant tells me wistfully. As a science journalist, it's the kind of remark I expect to hear from the people I interview. But Marchant isn't a scientist, he's a bartender.

A very special breed of bartender, mind you. What Heston Blumenthal, Ferran Adrià and others have done for food, Marchant and his colleagues are aiming to do for booze. "We're not scientists but we use the ideas of scientists," says Tony Conigliaro, the creative force behind 69 Colebrook Row, a cosy cocktail bar in north London where I have come to learn about, and taste, the future of cocktails.

Their quest is a logical extension of the molecular gastronomy movement. Over the past couple of decades, leading chefs and pioneering scientists such as Hervé This have been thinking differently about food and cooking. Just because certain dishes have always been made in a certain way, does that make it the right way? Can science explain, or even improve on, culinary tradition? Thus was born a revolution of mouth-watering tastes and techniques.

That way of thinking is now being applied to mixology, the art of making cocktails. "People are thinking about cocktails in a more experimental and exploratory way," says food and science writer Harold McGee. "It's about tools and ingredients that have not been used in cocktail-making before." Not surprisingly, the term "molecular mixology" is bandied about, though mixologists themselves don't seem to like it.

I am led upstairs to Conigliaro's laboratory - a cramped, low-ceilinged cross between a kitchen and a chemistry lab, stuffed with shiny bits of kit. The first thing he shows me is a temperature-controlled water bath. It would not look out of place on a lab bench, but is actually a piece of kitchen equipment designed for a technique called sous-vide (French for "under vacuum"). In sous-vide cooking, food is sealed in a vacuum bag and gently cooked for hours or even days at low temperatures, typically 70 °C or less. Chefs say it preserves the delicate flavour molecules that are lost at higher temperatures or through typical extended cooking.

Conigliaro uses his to make rhubarb-infused gin. "I discovered that if you cook the fruit in alcohol under vacuum at precisely 52 °C, you get a cleaner, brighter, more accurate flavour," he says. "It's also much better than marination. If you just dunk the rhubarb in, the fruit falls apart." Conigliaro has used this technique to infuse clean flavours into all kinds of spirits - raspberries into tequila, rose petals into vodka, blackcurrants into gin.

Fog Seen on Saturn Moon Titan--A First

On Earth, fog typically forms when moisture-rich air cools rapidly, which reduces the air's ability to hold water vapor.

"But on Titan, you can't do that," said study leader Mike Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology.

"It's already very cold there and it's hard to cool [the air] down any further. So the only way to make fog is to have the air be in contact with liquid on the ground."

The team thinks liquid evaporating from Titan's lakes makes the surrounding air increasingly humid. When moist air then brushes the cool surfaces of the lakes, the otherworldly fog is born.

Fog on Titan confirms that at least some of the moon's lakes are filled with liquid methane and not the chemical ethane, which can't evaporate in Titan's cold temperatures.

"For a long time we've been pretty sure that there are liquid lakes on Titan," Brown said. "But if the lakes were all just ethane, it would be a very inactive place."

Instead, the presence of fog confirms that Titan has an active "methane cycle" similar to Earth's water cycle, he said.

Foggy Patches

The team detected the fog in data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which has been exploring the Saturnian system since 2004.

Brown and colleagues first looked at the data using a digital filter they developed that reveals details only on the moon's surface.

In the filtered images, the fog appears during the moon's late southern summer as bright, reddish-white patches hovering above the surfaces of lakes.

Those patches are not visible in images filtered to show only higher altitudes of the same region, ruling out the possibility that the patches might be clouds, which have been seen before on the large moon.

As the fog dissipates, Brown suspects, methane vapor rises higher in Titan's atmosphere to form the clouds, which to the naked human eye would look identical to clouds on Earth.

Previous studies have suggested that those clouds, in turn, pelt the surface with cold methane rain—maybe even enough to occasionally create new lakes on the Saturn moon.

North Magnetic Pole Moving Due to Core Flux

The core is too deep for scientists to directly detect its magnetic field. But researchers can infer the field's movements by tracking how Earth's magnetic field has been changing at the surface and in space.

Now, newly analyzed data suggest that there's a region of rapidly changing magnetism on the core's surface, possibly being created by a mysterious "plume" of magnetism arising from deeper in the core.

And it's this region that could be pulling the magnetic pole away from its long-time location in northern Canada, said Arnaud Chulliat, a geophysicist at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris in France.

Finding North

Magnetic north, which is the place where compass needles actually point, is near but not exactly in the same place as the geographic North Pole. Right now, magnetic north is close to Canada's Ellesmere Island.

Navigators have used magnetic north for centuries to orient themselves when they're far from recognizable landmarks.

Although global positioning systems have largely replaced such traditional techniques, many people still find compasses useful for getting around underwater and underground where GPS satellites can't communicate.

The magnetic north pole had moved little from the time scientists first located it in 1831. Then in 1904, the pole began shifting northeastward at a steady pace of about 9 miles (15 kilometers) a year.

In 1989 it sped up again, and in 2007 scientists confirmed that the pole is now galloping toward Siberia at 34 to 37 miles (55 to 60 kilometers) a year.

A rapidly shifting magnetic pole means that magnetic-field maps need to be updated more often to allow compass users to make the crucial adjustment from magnetic north to true North.

"Blue Moon" to Shine on New Year's Eve

A blue moon isn't actually blue—as commonly defined, the name reflects the relative rarity of two full moons in a month and is linked to the saying "once in a blue moon."

With this New Year's Eve blue moon, "there is nothing scientific about it, and it has no astronomical significance," said Mark Hammergren, a staff astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Illinois.

"But I believe it does give us some insight into history and makes us think of how our calendar system has derived from motions of objects in the sky."

Blue Moon Error

The popular definition of a blue moon isn't the only one—and it's one that's based on an editorial error, astronomers contend.

The widespread definition of the second full moon in a month stems from errors made in an astronomy magazine, when a writer misinterpreted how the term was used in the Maine Farmer's Almanac.

Later studies of almanacs published from 1819 to 1962 revealed that the term "blue moon" actually refers to the "extra" full moon that can occur in a year due to differences between the calendar year and the astronomical year.

(Related: "Leap Year—How the World Makes Up for Lost Time.")

Most years on average have 12 full moons, with 1 appearing each month.

That's because the lunar month—the time it takes the moon to cycle through its phases—corresponds closely to the calendar month.

But the calendar year is actually based on the solar cycle, or the time it takes Earth to make one trip around the sun. This means a year is not evenly divisible by lunar months, so every three years or so there are 13 full moons.

The farmer's almanac further divided the year into four seasons, with each season lasting three months. When a given season saw four full moons, the almanac dubbed the third moon as a blue moon.

Ultimately, a blue moon as defined by the calendar isn't that rare, added Hammergren. The term's significance instead lies in the way it links people to the motions of the cosmos.

"Just being able to recognize that we can have a full moon twice in a month and have [folklore] attached really highlights the fact that humans have been astronomers their entire existence," he said.

Feeding the birds changes species

It seems innocent enough but new research has found feeding birds can alter their migratory pattern, which may cause them to develop into a separate species.

The research, published in today's edition of Current Biology, shows humans can have a significant influence on the evolution of animals.

Dr Gregor Rolshausen of the University of Freiburg in Germany and colleagues studied a population of blackcap birds in central Europe and found that in only 30 years, part of the population had established a new migratory route.

"The new wintering area is 1200 to 1800 kilometres northwest of the traditional Mediterranean overwintering sites," they write.

For more than 30 generations the separated populations of blackcaps have interbred, leading to substantial genetic and physiological changes between the birds.

Ornithologist and evolutionary biologist Dr Leo Joseph of CSIROsays the research team first published results on the genetic divide between the European blackcap population 10 to 15 years ago.

He says the study now shows even more genetic differences and significant physical differences between the two groups.

"Blackcaps migrating along the shorter northwestern route have rounder wings, which provide better maneuverability but make them less suited for long-distance migration," write the study authors.

They also have narrower beaks and differ in beak and plumage colour from their southwest-migrating counterparts.

Human influence

Rolshausen and colleagues believe the migratory divide occurred when humans began offering the birds food in winter.

"[The divide] was favoured by warmer climate and increasing food supply provided by humans", they write.

Associate Professor Steve Cooper of the South Australia Museum says the research is very interesting.

He says the data collected on birds is generally "quite solid because people pay a lot of attention to them".

Cooper agrees that the physical differences between the two populations was triggered by the migratory divide, which caused the two populations to breed in isolation.

"They're not interbreeding in the way they were previously, they're only mating within the same pool of individuals who are on the same migrating route," he says.

CO2 warming stronger than thought

Carbon dioxide indirectly causes up to 50% more global warming than originally thought, a finding that raises questions over targets for stabilising carbon emissions over the long term, a study says.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, British scientists say a tool commonly used in climate modelling may have badly underestimated the sensitivity of key natural processes to the warming caused by CO2.

As a result, calculations for anthropogenic global warming on the basis of carbon emissions may be underpitched by between 30% and 50%, they say.

The study is coincidentally published on the eve of a 12-day UN conference in Copenhagen aimed at providing a durable solution to the greenhouse-gas problem.
Long term

The authors stress that the more-than-expected warming would unfold over a matter of hundreds of years, rather than this century.

The findings do not mean that the predictions for temperature rise by 2100, established by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), should be rewritten, they say.

"We don't want to be overly alarmist here," says lead author Dr Dan Lunt of the University of Bristol.

"But if people are thinking about stabilising CO2 at a certain atmospheric level, or putting together a treaty, or having a debate about what the levels should be, it really is important to know what the long-term consequences of those emissions are going to be, because CO2 hangs around for so long."
Pliocene warming

Lunt and colleagues decided to test a widely-used climate model on an epoch called the mid-Pliocene warm period, about three million years ago, when Earth heated up in response to natural processes.

Cores drilled from ocean sediment provide a good idea about atmospheric carbon levels and temperature at the time.

What the team found, though, was that the CO2 levels in the Pliocene - around 400 parts per million - were not consistent with the warming, which was around 3°C higher than today.

The difference could only be fully explained by the long-term loss of icesheets and changes in vegetation, says the paper. These changes cause earth's surface to absorb more solar radiation, which causes more warming, and so on.

When applied to what awaits us this century, the adjusted model suggests that nothing significantly different will happen compared to what has already been estimated.

"In that time scale, we don't think the Greenland icesheet is going to melt completely or that East Antarctica will melt. That was what we saw in the model for three million years ago, but it is unlikely to take place in the next century," says Lunt.
Setting targets

Where it poses a dilemma, though, is how to fix a target for stabilising CO2 emissions so that future generations, centuries from now, are not hit by this long-term warming mechanism.

A popular goal is to limit warming since pre-industrial times to 2°C, a figure that in mainstream climate models typically equates to about 450 ppm. At present, earth's CO2 concentrations are at around 387 ppm.

Lunt says that today's level may already be too high in this context.

"Our work says that at 400 parts per million, you are looking at more than 2°C.

"To stabilise at 2°C, you would have to aim for something like 380 ppm. But remember, this is the sort of level that applies if you want a long-term commitment that goes on for centuries, for generations to come."

Biggest Star Explosion Seen; Was Rare, "Clean" Death

The biggest star explosion yet seen may be the best known example of a rare type of star death that leaves no "body" behind, astronomers say. The unusual blast, dubbed SN 2007bi, appears to be a textbook example of a pair-instability supernova, a theoretical type of explosion proposed for very massive stars—those more than 140 times the mass of the sun.

Although most supernovae leave behind black holes or dense stellar corpses called neutron stars, pair-instability explosions would be so intense that the whole star would be obliterated.

Pair-instability supernovae have been hard to spot, however, because stars more than a hundred times the sun's mass are extremely rare.

Spied in images of a distant dwarf galaxy taken by an automated telescope, SN 2007bi was about 40 times brighter than a typical supernova, and it took about three times longer to reach its maximum brightness.

"Anything that takes that long to rise and is that bright has to have a lot of mass," said study co-author Peter Nugent, an astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory in California.

Hot Core, Unstable Star

Massive stars normally die when they run out of material to sustain nuclear fusion, and all that's left in their cores is inert iron.

This means the core is no longer producing a steady stream of photons, which in a living star creates outward pressure, keeping the star from being crushed by its own gravity.

Without this stable outward pressure, the star collapses, generating a supernova in which the core gets crunched down to form a black hole or a neutron star.

(Related: "New Type of Supernova Discovered.")

But for even more massive stellar titans, astronomers think the cores quickly get so hot that their photons start to split apart into pairs of electrons and positrons.

This leads to an instability between the star's temperature and pressure, sparking a devastating explosion that flings the star's remains into space.

The star effectively vanishes, although a lingering cloud of expanding gas can remain visible for a while.

Where you live can affect your genes

The findings, published in today's edition of Nature Genetics, are further evidence that our environment and lifestyle play a key role in our genetics.

Geneticist and supervising author Dr Greg Gibson of Georgia Tech in the US says they recruited 200 Moroccan individuals from two ethnic groups - Arab and Berber - for their study.

"The Amazigh Berbers are descendants of the first modern humans who populated north Africa 35,000 years ago. The Arabs moved into southern Morocco between the 7th and 11th centuries," write the authors.

Gibson says many of the Amazigh and Arabic people in Morocco live in villages, but some have relocated to cities.

The aim of the research says Gibson, was to examine both populations and determine the effect of "nature, nuture and culture on human physiology".

He says the environment includes "the complex mix of what you eat, how stressed you are and where you live".

For the study, blood samples were taken from individuals living in both the city and villages.

Statistical geneticist and co-author Professor Peter Visscher of the Queensland Institute of Medical Research says there has been a lot of research on gene expression in an experimental setting.

But that only shows an artificial effect of the environment, he says.

Natural setting

Visscher says their study was designed to examine the gene expression of those living in the city, in high density areas, compared with those people living in villages.

"The underlying hypothesis is that there would be more exposure to things like infectious diseases [for people living in high density cities] because it spreads more easily."

He says they found two classes of genes, which are known to have roles in viral infection and renal health, that were expressed very differently in people living in the city compared to those living in villages.

Overall the study found "gene expression differed between the two locations in up to a third of all transcripts".

"The main conclusions showed that, which genes are expressed and how much of each gene is expressed depends primarily on where you live and what lifestyle you live," says Visscher.

He says they then used genome-wide association studies, which can link specific traits or disease conditions to specific gene regions, to assess to what extent genetics determines gene expression.

Not just environment

Visscher says if you look at a group of people with similar lifestyles or locations a lot of the gene expression variations are genetic.

He says that's because the major environmental differences no longer exist between people who live in the same region or have a similar lifestyle.

"If we are going to think about [people's] disease susceptibility it's not enough just to look at the genotype, we need to consider those in the context of the environment," says Gibson.

Gibson says the research team are now studying a wide range of population groups to further assess the effect the environment has on gene expression.