Science

Airport laser interrogator gives you back your bottle

2012-01-29T00:51:00.000-08:00

Sick of having to ditch your bottled water, booze and toiletries at the airport security post? That appalling hassle should end by April next year, when airports are supposed to start screening the contents of bottles for explosives.

But they can only do this if the bottle-scanning technologies currently being trialled are up to the job. This week, Cobalt Light Systems of the UK says its explosives detector has passed all its European civil aviation security tests - which means the end should be in sight for bottle-dumping at airport security.

The rule that no bottles larger than 100 millilitres can be carried on aircraft followed the failed 2006 attempt by 17 would-be terrorists who conspired to carry hydrogen peroxide-based liquid explosives onto aircraft in Britain.

The key to getting rid of the subsequent ban on all but the tiniest bottles is revealing what bottles contain without opening them. Cobalt Light Systems - a spinoff from the Central Laser Facility in Harwell, UK - uses a microwave oven-sized machine that uses a near-infrared laser to interrogate the liquid, powder or gel molecules in a bottle and reveal what they are chemically.

The technique, called spatially offset raman spectroscopy, shines the near-infrared laser into the bottle at a number of points. A small proportion of the light reflected back at each point is shifted in wavelength by the energy levels in the liquid molecules, and this small shift reveals what the substance is. Within five seconds of placing a bottle in the machine, a simple readout says: "marmite" or "hydrogen peroxide". See a video of the machine in action.

Crucially, Cobalt's newly-approved technology has a low rate of false alarms - it gives less than 0.5 per cent false positives - and reveals the seemingly innocent precursor chemicals that could be mixed inflight to create a potent explosive, says CEO Paul Leoffen.

Costa Concordia cruise ship pictured from space

2012-01-27T05:25:00.000-08:00

The huge scale of the Costa Concordia disaster is apparent in this satellite image of the stricken cruise ship just off the Italian island of Giglio.

The oil boom that aims to protect the coast from fuel leaks from the ship's giant tanks is visible trailing along the left-hand side. The island and its surrounding waters are part of the Tuscan Archipelago National Park, which is home to the endangered Mediterranean monk seal.

The ship is in a precarious position after swiftly capsizing on an undersea ridge after striking the rocks on Friday. Within 45 minutes of the crash, it was listing at an angle too steep for lifeboats to be lowered from its port side. Rescue work has been suspended since the ship slipped, amid fears it could slide into deeper waters.

This image was captured by WorldView-1, a commercial imaging satellite operated by DigitalGlobe.

Bird flu researchers stand down for 60 days

2012-01-25T00:48:00.000-08:00

The world's top flu virologists have vowed to stop working on any experiments that could lead to the H5N1 bird flu virus becoming more transmissible – at least, for the next 60 days. It's a good gesture, but whether 60 days is enough to really deal with the Pandora's box they have opened is another matter.

As we reported in September, two labs – in the Netherlands and the US – finally breached the genetic barrier that stopped H5N1 bird flu from spreading easily through the air between mammals – in this case, ferrets, who get flu a lot like we do.

H5N1 hasn't done that in nature, which is what stops it from going pandemic in mammals like us. Frighteningly, the virus was just as deadly in ferrets after it became easy to catch. Now, H5N1 kills around half the humans who catch it. If H5N1 stayed that lethal and became as easy to catch as ordinary flu – as the ferret virus did – civilisation might not survive the resulting pandemic.

The journals and the research and biosafety community in the US are now debating how to publish that research, which details to withhold about what made the virus transmissible (just in case a bioterrorist is interested), and paradoxically, how to make those details available to virologists who must now look for the mutations in H5N1 in the wild. Virologists must also, as Ron Fouchier of the Dutch lab noted yesterday, ensure that they don't inadvertently create H5N1 viruses with those mutations in low-containment labs. He checked, and apparently someone had a virus with four of the five mutations required. Eek.

So virologists have pledged to stop for a bit while they decide, I hope, who will do what and with what safety precautions. Sixty days doesn't seem very long for that. Certainly not long enough to bring all the scientists who might do this work into an organisation where peer pressure and careful deliberation will establish norms and guidelines that will, with luck, prevent anyone from releasing a killer.

Previous efforts at corralling researchers for the greater good have taken more than just two months. In 1973 US researchers started to worry that their experiments putting novel combinations of DNA into living bacteria might inadvertently create a monster. In July 1974, Paul Berg of Stanford University – who went on to win a Nobel in 1980 – called on the world's scientists to observe a moratorium on all such work until they could discuss what safety guidelines were needed.

Smart Metering

2012-01-25T00:21:00.000-08:00

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Cell recycling makes exercise good for you

2012-01-23T05:23:00.000-08:00

of Texas in Dallas discovered that, in mice, autophagy - the process by which a cell recycles dispensable components for extra energy - increases 30 minutes into exercise.

Exercise protects against diabetes by increasing glucose uptake. Levine's team wondered whether autophagy might be involved, so compared the effects of exercise on normal mice and mutant mice that could not increase autophagy. The normal mice shed excess fat and reversed early signs of diabetes, while the mutants only lost fat .

Rather than just providing fuel, exercise-induced autophagy appears to help cells fine-tune their glucose metabolism. Drugs that boost autophagy may mimic these effects, says Levine.

New cracks found on Airbus A380 jets

2012-01-21T08:47:00.000-08:00

The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) today ordered detailed inspections on the wings of the Airbus A380 jumbo jet after cracks were found in brackets that secure the wing's skin to the aircraft. "This condition, if not detected and corrected, could potentially affect the structural integrity of the aeroplane," the safety watchdog warns.

EASA says two types of cracks have been found in the L-shaped brackets, called rib feet, that join the A380's wing surface to the ribs whose profile defines the wing's cross sectional shape. The first type of rib foot crack was found when the aircraft damaged in last November's A380 engine-loss incident was being checked out after repairs.

But after subsequent checking of more of the fleet, engineers found a "more significant" form of cracking has developed on the rib feet of some of the aircraft. So EASA has ordered "detailed visual inspections" within the next six weeks for A380 aircraft that have flown between 1300 and 1799 takeoffs and landings - and within just four days for those with over 1800 flight cycles.

There's a good reason safety watchdogs take no chances with even the smallest of cracks: it was cracks caused by the then unknown phenomenon of metal fatigue that caused the fatal midflight breakups of the De Havilland Comet, the first world's pressurised, aluminium-skinned jetliner, in the 1950s. Tiny cracks around window portholes eventually propagated, bursting the fuselage, after a certain number of flight pressurisations and depressurisations.

While EASA has not said what might happen if A380 rib feet fail owing to cracking, if a section of wing skin were to separate from the plane the debris could potentially damage any critical structure it collides with - like the tailfin.

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2012-01-21T08:46:00.001-08:00

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Astrophile: How to spot a dark-matter galaxy

2012-01-21T05:10:00.000-08:00

If we could don dark matter glasses and look at the universe around us, we might see thousands of miniature galaxies swarming about the luminous spirals that make up the Milky Way and Andromeda.

We can't – but we have the next best thing. A technique known as gravitational lensing has allowed one of these dark dwarfs to be glimpsed, suggesting the Milky Way isn't as lonely as it looks to us Earthlings.

Astronomers think that galaxies usually grow by devouring smaller nearby clusters of stars called dwarf galaxies, no bigger than 100 million times the mass of the sun. According to this theory, the Milky Way and all other full-size galaxies should keep company with thousands of dwarfs. However, only 30 such companions have been spotted in our neighbourhood.

Where are all the missing minis hiding? One explanation is that they're mostly made of dark matter, the mysterious, aloof substance thought to make up 83 per cent of the mass in the universe but which is reluctant to interact with regular matter.

Why scarab beetles dance on a ball of dung

2012-01-19T05:10:00.001-08:00

The ancient Egyptians would have nodded sagely: scarab beetles perform a dance to the sun atop a ball of dung. They're not worshipping a sun god, though: the beetles dance to orient themselves and – crucially – to roll their dung ball in a straight line.

Dung beetles were sacred in ancient Egypt, their dung-rolling linked with the nocturnal activity of Khepri, the god of the rising sun. Khepri was supposed to roll the sun through the underworld at night, pushing it over the horizon in the morning. Now Emily Baird of Lund University in Sweden and colleagues have shown that a diurnal dung beetle in South Africa (Scarabaeus nigroaeneus) uses celestial cues to ensure it keeps going in a straight line away from the dung pile.

Beetles collect dung from a pile and form it into manageable balls. Making a ball costs time and energy, and competition for dung can be intense, so it's best for a beetle not to hang around when it's got a precious new ball ready to roll.

"As a fresh dung pat can attract many beetles, it is necessary for individual beetles to try to avoid the others that may try to steal their ball," says Baird. "To do this, the beetles roll their ball away from the dung pile in the most efficient manner possible. That is, in a straight line."

Avnish Goyal

2012-01-19T05:07:00.001-08:00

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Disease-ridden societies could be more murderous

2011-11-29T00:04:00.000-08:00

DOES the threat of rampant disease leave people more likely to commit murder? It's a provocative suggestion, that, if correct, should provide even more incentive to improve the quality of public healthcare in countries where disease is rife.

Randy Thornhill, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, has spent years amassing evidence for his "parasite stress" model of human society, which considers all disease to be a parasite on human society. He has already used it to predict that people in disease-ridden regions will be more xenophobic, and prefer to associate with relatives and close neighbours. These "collectivist" societies opt for strongly conservative values and autocratic governments, which Thornhill says minimises the risk of contracting diseases. By contrast, people in countries with low disease rates tend to be more individualistic and democratic, he says.

With Corey Fincher, also at the University of New Mexico, Thornhill has now found a link between disease and violence. The pair compared murder and disease rates from 48 US states and found that high disease rates correlated with high murder rates. The pattern held even when they took into account economic inequality within the society, which also increases the murder rate (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2011.0052).

The idea tallies with what we know about different countries' murder rates, says Martin Daly of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. A recent study identified a link between collectivist societies and murder rates, but did not look at disease rates (Homicide Studies, DOI: 10.1177/1088767911406397).

"Thornhill has pretty convincingly established a link between parasite stress and violence," says Carlos David Navarrete of Michigan State University in East Lansing.

Others are not yet ready to accept the link, though. "It's fascinating and I'd like it to be true," says Val Curtis of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, but she points out that there may be other factors at work. For instance, although the research takes into account relative economic inequalities within the society, it does not consider absolute wealth. Poverty itself may lead to higher murder rates - but because poor societies are likely to have relatively weak healthcare systems and higher levels of disease, there might still be a strong correlation between disease and murder.

If Thornhill's hypothesis is right, it should be possible to see a change in the murder rate as a society faces a reduced or heightened disease risk even as the levels of wealth in the society remained constant. The US data was not detailed enough to allow such an analysis. He predicts that simply investing in healthcare - but not necessarily any other aspect of society - could have an effect on the murder rates.

"If you clean up the diseases you'll reduce the rates of homicide," he says. He predicts that reducing disease rates should cut the murder rate within 20 years as a new generation grows up in a healthier environment.

"I'm not sure about that," says John Archer of the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, UK. He says social systems can linger for decades, even if the original cause disappears.

"The place to try this out is Africa," Curtis says. There are many projects under way to improve public health in disease hotspots, and it would be simple to track any effects on violence, she says.

The riddle of free will goes unsolved

2011-11-27T00:03:00.000-08:00

Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga's Who's In Charge? Free will and the science of the brain is fascinating, but doesn't deliver on its promise

ABOUT half way through this fascinating book, Michael Gazzaniga harks back to his previous one, Human. He wanted to call it Phase Shift, he says, but his publisher overruled him.

Gazzaniga - one of the giants of modern neuroscience - tells this story to illustrate a point about the difference between animal and human brains, but by the end of the book it has taken on a different complexion. Because while Who's In Charge? is full of wonderful material, anybody expecting an answer to the vexing question of free will is going to come away disappointed.

The book is based on Gazzaniga's contribution to the Gifford lecture series, established in 1887 at four prestigious British universities to "promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term". It romps around the intersection of neuroscience and the human condition, from Gazzaniga's own astonishing work on split-brain patients to social neuroscience, consciousness, morality and more. Free will gets a look in, but is far from the centrepiece. To subtitle the book Free will and the science of the brain frankly sets up expectations that are never met, and which prove very distracting.

As one example of how the title does disservice to the content, Gazzaniga opens his final chapter with the harrowing story of Lawrence Singleton, who in 1978 raped a teenage girl in California, hacked off her forearms with an axe and left her to die by the roadside. She survived, and her testimony helped put Singleton away. He got 14 years but served just eight. After being released for good behaviour, he went on to murder a prostitute. He died on death row in 2001.

As I read this horrific tale, I was expecting it to be the point where Gazzaniga finally takes on the problem of free will. Singleton's acts were monstrous, but was he really responsible? Frustratingly, the story turns out to be a preamble for a discussion of how our brains deal with justice and retribution. Interesting stuff, but my own brain was plotting a bit of justice and retribution of its own for being misled.

So what of free will? The problem is a familiar one. We live in a deterministic universe. Given enough information about its present state, we could extrapolate to any past or future state with 100 per cent accuracy. Everything that has or will happen was determined at the big bang - and given that our brains are part of the physical universe, free will does not exist. Depressingly, neuroscience itself offers little comfort that this isn't the case.

Gazzaniga's solution is also a familiar one. Post-Newtonian physics has retreated from strict determinism in the form of quantum mechanics, chaos theory and emergence. Perhaps neuroscience can use them to rescue free will? Gazzaniga throws all of these at the problem but ultimately they bounce off, leaving determinism's hard and unforgiving core intact.

There is a great book waiting to be written on free will. This isn't it, but it's worth reading all the same.

Google lets Wi-Fi network owners opt out of mapping

2011-11-25T00:02:00.000-08:00

Simply adding "_nomap" to the name you've given your domestic WiFi network will prevent Google Maps-equipped cellphones using your home as a position fix, Google announced last night. The idea is to allow people the chance to opt out of helping provide Google's commercial positioning service - even though doing so is likely to degrade its accuracy.

Google announced the opt-out option on its blog today in a further move to assuage the criticism it faced over its infamous Wi-Fi data sniffing operation carried out in 2010. When Google's Street View cars photographed our streets and used laser radar to get the shapes of buildings right in Google Earth, it also sniffed the air for two key ID numbers on the Wi-Fi networks at each property: the router's hardwired Media Access Control (MAC) address and the Service Set Identifier (SSID) - the name you've given your network. However, lax controls on the MAC/SSID sniffing software resulted in Google also acquiring personal data, such as snippets of our emails and web requests - leaving it censured by data protection authorities.

Why use Wi-Fi data for positioning? When phones can't get a GPS satellite fix in a built-up area, triangulating signals from either cellphone antennas and/or Wi-Fi routers can provide a reasonably accurate position fix. So, Google and rival providers like Skyhook look for and store our MAC and SSID data on their location servers.

However, pressure groups like Privacy International complain that databases of Wi-Fi IDs were surreptitiously compiled and that people should be able to opt out. This is what Google has provided today. But while adding _nomap to your SSID will prevent passing Google devices using your network, it won't stop its rivals using it. But Google hopes the opt-out format will be adopted by its rivals, too.

Defence witnesses testify in Nature libel trial

2011-11-23T00:01:00.000-08:00

A libel case brought against the scientific journal Nature by an independent physicist is hearing statements from defence witnesses this week in London. Mohamed El Naschie, a former editor of the physics journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, is claiming that an article published in Nature in November 2008 damaged his reputation. The article is currently unavailable on the Nature website.

The article questioned the peer-review process at Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, where El Naschie served as editor and published many of his own papers. Peer review is at the heart of science publishing: research papers submitted to journals are assessed by scientists who are experts in the relevant field.

The Nature article also reported that several of El Naschie's claims of affiliation with academic institutions could not be verified.

The trial started in London's High Court on Friday, although El Naschie, who is representing himself, has not been present during the proceedings.

Humans killing at least 750 Bornean orang-utans a year

2011-11-21T00:59:00.000-08:00

Indonesians are killing endangered orang-utans at an alarming rate. At least 750 were killed in one recent year, according to a new survey.

The survey focused on Bornean orang-utans (Pongo pygmaeus) living in Kalimantan, the Indonesian side of the island of Borneo. Led by Erik Meijaard of People and Nature Consulting International in Jakarta, Indonesia, researchers interviewed 6983 people from 687 villages between April 2008 and September 2009 about bushmeat.

Tallying up individual accounts, they estimate that between 750 and 1800 orang-utans were killed in the year leading up to April 2008. In previous years, however, things were even worse: the researchers calculate that between 1950 and 3100 were killed each year.

Interviews suggest 54 per cent were killed for food and eaten by local people. Conflict between humans and orang-utans also seems to be a factor: 10 per cent of orang-utans were said to have been killed because they were raiding crops, and 15 per cent of respondents said the orang-utans had come into conflict with local people.

Even without the threat of becoming bushmeat, Bornean orang-utans are already endangered, with no more than 69,000 left in the wild. The main culprit is habitat loss, with expanding palm-oil plantations often blamed. The high rate of killing only adds to the pressure on the species.

Seventy-three per cent of respondents knew that orang-utans were protected by Indonesian law. "If people are found holding a dead orang-utan they should be prosecuted," says Ashley Leiman, director of the Orangutan Foundation in London. But that is not the case, she says. Killing orang-utans is illegal, but the Indonesian government rarely prosecutes or punishes perpetrators. She is aware of just one successful prosecution; another case is pending.

Burt Rutan's boat-plane retirement project

2011-11-19T00:59:00.000-08:00

Bored in retirement, legendary aerospace engineer Burt Rutan is working on a new project, a high-speed winged boat that can double as a seaplane, so he can fly between lakes and rivers near his new home in Coeur d'Alene, a lakeside resort in northern Idaho.

Famed for designing a series of innovative aircraft and spacecraft, Rutan began building planes of his own design in the late 1960s while working as a project engineer for the US Air Force. He founded Scaled Composites in Mojave, California in 1982, where he became famous for designing Voyager, the first plane to fly around the world without refuelling in 1986. More recently, Rutan designed a flying car, which got off the ground for the first time in July.

However, his crowning achievement was SpaceShipOne, which in 2004 became the first privately funded craft to fly a human into space. A follow-on design, SpaceShipTwo, is intended to carry six space tourists to altitudes of about 120 kilometres, but so far has only glided in the air.

Having sold Scaled Composites to Northrop Grumman, Rutan retired in April, although his flying car design remains in development. But he isn't done yet - he has his sights set on designing a short-takeoff and landing (STOL) plane. "Getting out and exploring little lakes and rivers in a STOL seaplane is a fantasy, I think, for a pilot," he told the Experimental Aircraft Association.

But when Burt Rutan says "seaplane", you know he's not thinking of the propeller-powered pontoon planes that have been flown for decades. Instead, his plans draw inspiration from large wing Russian ships or "ekranoplans" built during the Cold War (see below). Essentially boats with wings and aircraft engines, they could rise up to 20 or 30 metres above the water. Rutan is thinking of a much smaller wing-boat that could reach high speeds in boat-mode on the water then take off and fly.

Test all kids for cholesterol, says US government

2011-11-17T00:58:00.000-08:00

Here's a school-age test that requires no studying to pass. The US National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute wants all children aged 9 to 11 to be screened for high cholesterol levels.

"The reason to start this young is that atherosclerosis, the disease process leading to heart attacks and strokes, starts this young," says Stephen Daniels of the Children's Hospital Colorado in Aurora, chair of the NHLBI panel.

Since 1992, children from families with a history of high cholesterol have been screened, but a report last year suggested the strategy misses one-third of high-risk cases. Testing all children should catch those cases.

But not everyone thinks the approach makes sense. "We have not seen evidence to suggest that screening the entire population of 9 to 11-year-olds would throw out the types of benefits sought," says a spokesman for the British Heart Foundation.

Fin massage relieves stress in surgeonfish

2011-11-15T11:55:00.000-08:00

Life on the reef can be stressful. Fortunately for some of its fishy inhabitants, they can call on a masseur to soothe their nerves – the first non-primate known to do so.

Surgeonfish (Ctenochaetus striatus) make regular use of cleaner wrasse (Labroides dimidiatus) to remove their parasites and dead skin. Marta Soares of the ISPA University Institute in Lisbon, Portugal, noticed that the cleaners seem to offer another service too: they can placate an agitated surgeonfish by rubbing back and forth on its pelvic and pectoral fins.

Soares and her team set out to see if it was the social interaction or the feeling of the massage that kept the surgeonfish at ease. "We know that fish experience pain," says Soares. "Maybe fish have pleasure, too."

To test this, they studied two groups of eight surgeonfish. The team confined each fish in a small bucket for a short period to simulate the stresses they would encounter in the wild – predation, conflicts with cleaner fish or competition for food, for instance. They then placed the surgeonfish into tanks with a model cleaner fish. One group was given a stationary model, the other a model that moved back and forth, and so could provide physical stimulation.

All the surgeonfish readily approached the model, but those in the tank with the moving model were able to position themselves beneath it and use its fake fins to gain a back rub. These fish were more relaxed, as measured in terms of the steroid hormone cortisol, which is released in response to stress.
The touch of your fin

Todd Anderson, a biologist at San Diego State University, California, who studies the ecology of reef fishes, says he's surprised that physical contact lowers stress in fish.

"Normally I would think that physical contact would elevate stress in fish, as it should, for example, in prey experiencing attempted capture by a predator," Anderson says. "However, the contact [in this study] is initiated by the client fish for an often beneficial relationship [that includes] removing parasites."

Soares says that the tactile stimulation by cleaner fish may now be seen as more than purely exploitative, because it offers the client surgeonfish a benefit. She also says this research may mean that pathways for sensory information processing in fish are more similar to humans that previously thought.

"Humans go to have massages when we feel sick or just to feel better, so maybe the reasons are basically the same," she says.

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2011-11-15T11:18:00.000-08:00

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The first reptile with a true placenta

2011-10-20T00:08:00.000-07:00

In evolution, as in life, some things are easier than others. It seems to be pretty straightforward to evolve complex eyes, which have turned up dozens of times.

Similarly, for some groups of animals it's easy to stop laying eggs and start giving birth to live young. Backboned animals have evolved live birth no fewer than 132 times, and nowadays a fifth of lizards and snakes give birth. Human mothers may disagree, but live birth is clearly not that difficult.

What is difficult, however, is nourishing unborn young the way mammals do. A female mammal allows each embryo to burrow deep into the wall of her womb, where it takes nutrients straight from her blood. This intimate arrangement was long thought to have only evolved once, in mammals.

Not so. It now appears that it evolved at least twice: once in mammals, and once in an obscure African lizard called Trachylepis ivensii.

Ancient cave paintings threatened by tourist plans

2011-10-18T00:08:00.000-07:00

Prehistoric paintings in northern Spain could be irreparably damaged if plans to reopen the Altamira cave to tourists go ahead. Local officials want to reopen the cave to boost the local economy, but visitors could heat the caves and introduce microbes that destroy pigments.

The Altamira cave paintings were discovered in 1879 and are thought to be at least 14,000 years old. The paintings have attracted huge numbers of visitors – 175,000 in 1973, the busiest year on record. But the cave was closed to the public in 2002 after photosynthetic bacteria and fungi were found to be consuming pigments at alarming rates.

Plans to reopen the caves could restart the damaging processes. A team from the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid have modelled the effect of visitors over a number of years and say that tourists would increase the temperature, humidity and carbon-dioxide levels in the cave, creating conditions in which microbes would thrive.

In addition, visitors would bring with them organic matter in the form of skin flakes, clothing fibres and dust, which microbes can consume. Air turbulence created by moving people would spread bacterial and fungal spores to other, previously unaffected spaces.

Diabetic rats cured with their own stem cells

2011-10-16T00:07:00.000-07:00

A cure for diabetes could be sitting in our brains. Neural stem cells, extracted from rats via the nose, have been turned into pancreatic cells that can manufacture insulin to treat diabetes.

Beta cells in the pancreas produce insulin, which regulates glucose levels. People with diabetes either have type 1, in which native beta cells are destroyed by the immune system, or type 2, in which beta cells cannot produce enough insulin.

To replace lost or malfunctioning beta cells, Tomoko Kuwabara of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba Science City, Japan, and colleagues turned to neural stem cells in the brain.
First, they extracted a tiny amount of tissue from the rats' olfactory bulb, the part of the brain which deals with smell, or from the hippocampus, involved in memory. Each area is accessible through the nose, both in rats and humans.

Next, the team extracted neural stem cells from the tissue and exposed them to Wnt3a – a human protein that switches on insulin production – and to an antibody that blocks a natural inhibitor of insulin production.

After multiplying the stem cells for two weeks, they placed them on thin sheets of collagen which act as a removable scaffold. This allowed the team to lay the sheets incorporating the cells on top of the rats' pancreas without harming the organ itself.

Within a week, concentrations of insulin in the blood of both type 1 and type 2 rats that had received treatment matched those in non-diabetic rats. Elevated blood glucose concentrations also returned to normal.

The cells successfully tackled diabetes for 19 weeks until researchers halted the treatment by removing the sheets of cells, after which the rats' diabetes returned.

Russian tigers threatened by dog disease

2011-10-14T00:06:00.000-07:00

Wild Amur tigers in Russia are falling victim to a viral infection transmitted by stray dogs. The same disease has taken its toll on the lions of the Serengeti, and a mutated version threatens seals around the world. However, vaccination could halt the spread of the virus.

Over the past decade there have been two confirmed cases of Siberian tigers falling victim to canine distemper. The virus causes muscle twitching and confusion, and eventually fatal seizures.

In November 2003 a wild tigress wandered into the village of Pokrovka in Khabarovskiy Krai in the far east of Russia. She was captured by Wildlife Conservation Society staff and treated, but died in captivity (Journal of Wildlife Diseases, vol 46, p 1252). Then last year another tigress entered a different village, Terney. She was shot dead by local police after repeated attempts to capture her failed.

Samples from the two tigers confirm that they were carrying the distemper virus, says Denise McAloose of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York. McAloose is studying samples from four more Amur tigers that showed similar symptoms, and suspects that some will also turn out to have had distemper. She presented her findings at an international symposium devoted to the International Year of Forests in Ussuriysk, Russia.

Why size matters in the plant world too

2011-10-12T00:06:00.000-07:00

Over 60 years ago, evolutionary biologist Bernhard Rensch calculated that males are typically the larger sex in big-bodied species such as humans, whereas females outdo them in small-bodied species such as spiders. Now it turns out that many plants obey Rensch's rule too.

Most plants produce both male and female sex organs, but around 7 per cent are dioecious, meaning individuals are purely male or female. Kevin Burns and Patrick Kavanagh at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand measured the leaf and stem sizes of 297 plants from 38 dioecious plant species in herbarium collections of the National Museum of New Zealand and discovered that they follow the sex-size rule.

Why? "Females need to hold the seeds and the fruit," Burns says, adding that female stems also must be large enough to display the fruit and support the animals that spread the pollen or seeds. If metabolism, predators or climate promote the evolution of smaller plants, however, males can shrink because their gametes are smaller.

The sticky bit, says Burns, is why males produce larger leaves in bigger species. Martin Burd at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, says Rensch's rule can be explained in animals because males compete for females and often the larger fellows win.

"It's possible that successful male plants produce larger flowers or more flowers to attract more pollinator visits," says Burd. Bigger stems and leaves would therefore be needed support the floral display, but this needs to be tested, he adds.

Size might not be the only such gambit adopted by plants and animals to successfully reproduce. Burd has preliminary evidence that both birds and plants evolved similar tactics – of cramming flowers with ovules or increasing egg number per nest – to capitalise on unpredictable changes in their food supply.

New Aurora Pictures

2011-10-10T00:02:00.000-07:00

Green auroras illuminate the sky over Whitehorse, in Canada's Yukon Territory, on Monday.

Such auroral displays are triggered when clouds of charged particles from the sun—known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs)—slam into Earth's magnetic field.

A "severe" CME hit September 26, sparking auroras at both Poles and inducing light shows visible in five U.S. states, including Michigan, New York, South Dakota, Maine, and Minnesota, according to NASA.

As solar particles get funneled along Earth's field lines toward the Poles, they collide with molecules in the atmosphere, infusing them with extra energy. The molecules in turn release the energy as light.

Capturing the above aurora required "a long night of waiting-but the activity picked up," photographer Jonathan Tucker wrote on SpaceWeather.com.

Physics Nobel Explainer: Why Is Expanding Universe Accelerating?

2011-10-08T10:01:00.000-07:00

New Nobel laureates Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess of the U.S. and Brian Schmidt of Australia contributed to the discovery that the universe is not only expanding but also speeding up.

The finding led to the now widely accepted theory of dark energy, a mysterious force that repels gravity. Measurements show that dark energy accounts for about 74 percent of the substance of the universe.

But more than a decade after the Nobel-worthy find, scientists are still trying to pin down exactly what dark energy is and and thus solve what some experts call "the most profound problem" in modern physics.

(Also see "New Galaxy Maps to Help Find Dark Energy Proof?")

Does Gravity Work Differently?

Until dark energy, physicists were convinced that gravity should be causing the expansion rate of the universe to slow.

"When I throw my keys up in the air, the gravity of the Earth makes them slow down and return to me," said Mario Livio, a theoretical physicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Maryland, said during the Decade of Dark Energy Symposium, held in 2008.

But by studying the light from distant supernovae, astronomers saw that the supernovae's host galaxies are flying away from each other at increasing speed.

The observation that the universe's expansion rate is actually speeding up, Livio said, is as if "the keys suddenly went straight up toward the ceiling."

So far, one of the biggest challenges for dark energy researchers is marrying observations to theory.

"We have two known, totally unsatisfactory explanations," said Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago.

One possibility is there is no dark energy, and gravity works differently than scientists think.

(See "Dark Energy's Demise? New Theory Doesn't Use the Force.")

But "physicists are conservative. We don't want to throw away our theory of gravity when we might be able to patch it up," Nobel co-winner Riess, an STScI cosmologist, told National Geographic News.

"Basically it all comes down to the fact that there's one relatively simple equation we work with to describe the universe," Riess said.

"Because we see this extra effect, we can either blame it on the left-hand side of the equation and say we don't understand gravity, or we can blame it on the right-hand side and say there's this extra stuff."

Dark Energy a Product of Quantum Vacuum?

The extra stuff—and a leading contender for explaining dark energy—is quantum vacuum energy.

The idea is tied to quantum mechanics, which predicts that even in the vacuum of space, particles are constantly winking in and out of existence, generating energy.

(Related: "Dark Matter Is an Illusion, New Antigravity Theory Says.")

The trick is that no one has been able to unify the math used in quantum mechanics, which describes the physics of the very small, with the equations in general relativity, which deal with large-scale interactions.

"The two theories use two different sets of rule books, [and] we've always known that these two books are incompatible," Riess said.

Unfortunately, "dark energy is one of the few cases in nature that really requires us to [somehow] use both sets of rules."

Life Ingredients Found in Superhot Meteorites

2010-12-30T00:04:00.000-08:00

Hot on the heels of finding arsenic-loving life-forms, NASA astronomers have uncovered amino acids—the fundamental foundation for life—in a place where they shouldn't be.

The acids—precursors of proteins—have been unexpectedly found inside fragments of previously superheated meteorites that landed in northern Sudan in 2008, a new study says.

Amino acids have already been found in a variety of carbon-rich meteorites formed under relatively cool conditions. (See asteroid and comet pictures.)

But this is the first time the substances have been found in meteorites that had been naturally heated to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,100 degrees Celsius). That extreme temperature which should have destroyed any hint of organic material inside, said study leader Daniel Glavin, an astrobiologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

"Previously, we thought the simplest way to make amino acids in an asteroid was at cooler temperatures in the presence of liquid water," Glavin said in a statement. "This meteorite suggests there's another way involving reactions in gases as a very hot asteroid cools down."

The discovery also "provides additional support for the theory that life's ingredients were delivered to the Earth by asteroids," he said.

ET Amino Acids a "Big Deal"

The meteorites came from a 13-foot-wide (4-meter-wide) parent asteroid that entered an Earth-crossing orbit in 2008.

A collision about 15 million years ago sent the 59-ton asteroid closer to Earth—and provided scientists the first opportunity to observe a celestial object before it entered our atmosphere in October 2008.

(See "Meteorites in Africa Traced to Asteroid 'Parent.'")

During desert treks, scientists later recovered nearly 600 meteorite fragments from the meteor shower.

"Finding evidence for the extraterrestrial amino acids in this meteorite is a big deal," Glavin said, "since we can learn about the chemistry that took place in space prior to the origin of life on Earth."

Likewise, "these meteorites would have contributed to the amino acid inventory of the early Earth and other planets in our solar system, including Mars."

This may mean that organic compounds such as amino acids—delivered via asteroids—may have been much more pervasive throughout the solar system than thought, he said.

The new meteorite research is featured in 20 papers published this week in an issue of the Meteoritical Society's journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science.

See What You Slept Through

2010-12-28T00:15:00.000-08:00

A full moon winks at Washington, D.C. during last night's total lunar eclipse. Pictured alongside the business end of the Washington Monument, the moon is shown just shy of totality, when the entire orb is engulfed by Earth's shadow and takes on a rusty glow.

Coinciding with the winter solstice for the first time since 1638, the December 21, 2010, lunar eclipse was anything but ordinary.

Around 1 a.m. ET, the moon began going slightly shady, marking the arrival of Earth's faint outer shadow, or penumbra. Shortly after 1:30 a.m. ET, the first signs of a dim "bite"—Earth's dark umbra—began advancing across the moon from the left.

Totality began at about 2:40 a.m. ET, turned the moon a photo-friendly red, and lasted a little over 70 minutes. The full show—the moon's passage through penumbra, umbra, and penumbra again—lasted about three and a half hours.

Giant Mars Pits Revealed in Sharp Detail

2010-12-26T00:11:00.000-08:00

Looking like space slug hidey-holes, huge pits gouge a bright, dusty plain near the Martianvolcano Ascraeus Mons in a picture taken between October 1 and November 1 by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

Released in December, the image is among a series of new views snapped by MRO's HiRISE camera that show intriguing geological features on Mars. Each image covers a strip of Martian ground 3.7 miles (6 kilometers) wide and can reveal a detail about as small as a desk—and so far no sign of Star Wars monsters.

MRO's sister orbiter, Mars Odyssey, first noticed the two deep pits—which are about 590 feet (180 meters) and 1,017 feet (310 meters), respectively—a year earlier using its infrared camera, THEMIS. (Related: "Seven Great Mars Pictures From Record-Breaking Probe.")

"When compared to the surrounding surface, the dark interiors of the holes gave off heat at night but were cool by day," said Alfred McEwen, principal investigator on the HiRISE camera.

"So we then decided to target these with MRO because this thermal information may be evidence for these being caves—but the jury is still out on that."

(See "Mars Has Cave Networks, New Photos Suggest.")

The MRO has been studying Mars since 2006, beaming back more data than all other past and current missions to the planet combined.

Lightning Captured by X-Ray Camera

2010-12-24T06:10:00.001-08:00

The first x-ray images of a lightning strike have been captured by a, well, lightning-fast camera, scientists say. The pictures suggest a lightning bolt carries all its x-ray radiation in its tip. (Get lightning facts.)

During recent thunderstorms in Camp Blanding, Florida, the camera's electronic shutter "froze" a lightning bolt—artificially triggered by rockets and wires—as it sped toward the ground at one-sixth the speed of light.

"Something moving this fast would go from the Earth to the moon in less than ten seconds," said Joseph Dwyer, a lightning researcher at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne.

Scientists have known for several years that lightning emits radiation, said Dwyer, who revealed the photos at an annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco earlier this month.

But until now scientists didn't have the technology to take x-ray images quickly enough to see where the radiation comes from, he said.

(Read "New Lightning Type Found Over Volcano?")

Lightning Imaged by 1,500-Pound Camera

Making a camera capable of taking such quick images was an achievement in and of itself, Dwyer emphasized.

"You can't just go buy a camera and point it at lightning," he said. "We had to make it."

The resulting 1,500-pound (680-kilogram) camera—created by Dwyer's graduate student Meagan Schaal—consists of an x-ray detector housed in a box about the size and shape of a refrigerator. The box is lined with lead to shield the x-ray detector from stray radiation.

X-rays enter the box through a small hole that in turn focuses them, like an old-fashioned pinhole camera.

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"Fake Diamond" Star Discovered

2010-12-17T00:04:00.000-08:00

Dubbed LS IV-14 116, the faint, blue star lies about 2,000 light-years from the sun. Detailed new measurements reveal the star to be the most zirconium-rich known to date, with levels more than 10,000 times higher than those in our sun.

While real diamonds are made of carbon, jewellers make false diamonds out of zirconium dioxide crystals, aka cubic zirconia. The mineral zirconium silicate, or zircon, is also widely used as a gemstone. (Related: "'Diamond Planets' Hint at Dazzling Promise of Other Worlds.")

In addition to zirconium, astronomers studying LS IV-14 116 found chemical signatures for high amounts of three other elements rarely seen in stellar atmospheres: strontium, germanium, and yttrium.

"It really is quite an oddball," said team member Simon Jeffery of Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland.

An In-Between Star

Jeffery and colleagues found the high amount of zirconium while studying the chemistry of LS IV-14 116. Previous measurements had indicated the star is a rare, helium-rich hot subdwarf.

When less massive stars die, they swell up and start shedding their outer layers of gas, becoming red giants. When all the gas is released, the leftover core of the dead star is called a white dwarf.

Hot subdwarfs represent a phase of evolution for some stars that comes between red giants and white dwarfs, so studying them will give scientists greater insight into how stars live and die. (Related: "Red Giant Sun May Not Destroy Earth.")

Using the Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales, the team took a closer look at LS IV-14 116's spectral lines, the frequencies of light emitted by the star, as determined by the elements and molecules present.

The spectral line for zirconium was not only strong, it corresponded to a form of the metal that exists only at temperatures above 20,000 degrees Celsius. This form had previously never been seen in any astronomical object

Cosmic 'enlightenment' dawned slowly

2010-12-15T00:33:00.000-08:00

The end of the universe's "dark age" was long and drawn out, according to the first direct measurement of the period when the first stars and galaxies heated up intergalactic gas.

Right after the big bang, the universe was a roiling soup of subatomic particles. These cooled and coalesced into neutral atoms within 400,000 years, beginning the cosmic dark age. This only ended when ultraviolet light from the first stars and giant black holes had once again ionised the fog of neutral atoms filling the universe. How long this process of "re-ionisation" took isn't clear.

To find out, Judd Bowman of Arizona State University in Tempe and Alan Rogers of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology deployed a small radio antenna called EDGES in Western Australia.

The telescope detects radio waves that have been emitted by neutral hydrogen atoms. These have a wavelength of 21 centimetres when they are emitted, but this gets stretched as they travel across space due to the universe's expansion.
Slow and steady

Based on the amount of stretch, the team knew that EDGES measured light released when the universe was a few hundred million to a billion years old. It did not find a sudden decrease in the brightness of the light emitted by neutral hydrogen atoms at any point in that period, suggesting that re-ionisation did not occur suddenly.

"I'm excited," says Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "It's the first time we have a constraint on the duration of re-ionisation."

"It's also nice to see two people getting a result before the big teams that have much more money," Loeb adds. A range of large radio telescope arrays are under construction, such as the LOFAR telescope in the Netherlands and Germany. These projects, which consist of hundreds or thousands of antennas, will attempt to take high-resolution maps of the hydrogen.

EDGES, which measures the total amount of radiation from hydrogen atoms over a large swathe of the sky, cannot image the gas in detail. But the small telescope may be better at looking even farther into the past than the larger arrays, allowing it to look at hydrogen atoms heated by the very first stars, Bowman says.

Quartet of giant planets puzzles astronomers

2010-12-13T00:32:00.000-08:00

The discovery of a fourth giant world around the star HR 8799 is straining the two leading theories of how planets form.

Planets are thought to coalesce from a dusty disc around a young star. One model, called core accretion, says that giant planets form when the dust gathers into a rocky core, which then draws in gas to form a massive atmosphere. Another, called disc instability, says that these planets collapse suddenly from sections of the disc.

HR 8799's four planets, each five to 13 times Jupiter's mass, are too far apart to be explained easily by either model, say Christian Marois of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and colleagues.

"This is the widest range of orbital radii of any planetary system known," Marois told New Scientist. His team imagedMovie Camera three planets around the star in 2008 and has now found the fourth.

The outermost planet is nearly 70 times as far from its star as the Earth is from the sun. At that distance, dust moves so slowly that by the time it had snowballed into a rocky core, the star would already have blown away most of the gas in the disc around it. That would have prevented a giant planet from forming in the core accretion model, the researchers say.

The newly discovered innermost planet challenges the rival disc instability model. It orbits at 15 times the Earth-sun distance – where the star's heat would prevent the disc from collapsing, the researchers argue.

It is unlikely that a mixture of the two processes would have produced planets with such similar masses, they say. Instead, the planets may have formed further in or out and then migrated through the gassy disc to their current positions.

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Fetal genome mapped from mother's blood for first time

2010-12-11T00:31:00.000-08:00

For the first time, a fetus has had its entire genome mapped from a sample of its mother's blood. This technical tour de force could open the door to new methods of prenatal genetic diagnosis.

In 1997, researchers led by Dennis Lo of the Chinese University of Hong Kong showed that "floating" fetal DNA can be detected in maternal blood plasma – it passes across the placenta from fetal cells that have broken down.

Lo's discovery sparked a lot of interest, because it raised the possibility of diagnosing genetic problems in a fetus without the need for invasive procedures such as chorionic villus sampling (CVS) or amniocentesis to extract fetal cells, both of which carry a small risk of inducing a miscarriage.

But it's hard to distinguish fetal sequences from the larger quantity of a woman's own DNA. This has so far largely limited practical applications of the technique to unambiguous situations in which particular fetal genes are not carried by the mother. For instance, fetal sex can be determined by detecting sequences from the male Y chromosome. It's also possible to identify fetuses at risk of rhesus disease, where the mother's immune system attacks a protein on her fetus's red blood cells, by looking for the gene for this rhesus protein in the blood of women who are rhesus negative.

Lo has previously worked on methods to detect fetuses with Down's syndrome from floating fetal DNA. Now, through a combination of brute-force DNA sequencing and sophisticated bioinformatics, his team has shown that it should be possible to detect any genetic disease from a sample of a pregnant woman's blood.

Blue whale feeding methods are ultra-efficient

2010-12-09T09:29:00.000-08:00

Blue whales are the biggest and perhaps most efficient animals alive. Their method of filter-feeding takes in 90 times more energy than it uses.

The enormous mammals dive up to 500 metres beneath the surface, then lunge into the swarms of tiny krill above them at several metres per second. As they strike, their massive mouths fill with huge volumes of water, including plenty of krill. The water is pushed out through the filters, or baleen, in each whale's mouth, trapping the krill.

This feeding technique takes a lot of effort due to the energy needed for the lunges. "We wondered how they coped," says Robert Shadwick of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Shadwick's colleague Jeremy Goldbogen of the University of California, San Diego, led a team who set out to track blue whales as they fed. In small boats they zoomed up alongside surfacing whales and attached tracking devices to them using suction caps.
Energy efficient

In total the team tracked 265 blue whales as they carried out 200 foraging dives and 654 lunges. From the speeds the whales reached while lunging, they calculated that each lunge used about 3200 kilojoules of energy.

That may seem high, but it was dwarfed by the amount of energy the whales got from their food. Based on known krill densities in the whales' feeding grounds, each lunge netted between 34,000 and 1,912,000 kJ – up to 237 times the energy used. Even when the energy costs of diving are included, the whales still gained 90 times the energy they used.

Shadwick says the results could explain how blue whales survive their migratory lifestyles. They feed in Antarctic waters in the summer, then head north to their tropical breeding grounds where little food is available. Even so, the females must still produce enormous volumes of milk for their calves. "This explains how they can cope with seasonal starvation," Shadwick says.

Foraging whales must have high densities of krill for their feeding methods to be effective, says Alejandro Acevedo-Gutiérrez of Western Washington University in Bellingham. Lunge feeders "have to get more bang for the time underwater, so to speak", he says.

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Bombing Earth-bound Asteroids a Viable Option, Experts Say

2010-10-31T00:07:00.000-07:00

In the movies, a bomb is usually the most effective way of stopping an asteroid from wiping out life on Earth. But real scientists have had their doubts about bombing the potentially hazardous objects. (See asteroid and comet pictures.)

Now, however, some researchers are finding evidence that an explosion might not, as feared, make a bad situation worse by sending a huge cloud of harmful debris raining down on the planet.

And other scientists are suggesting that, despite previous assumptions, we wouldn't need an impossibly powerful bomb to destroy a threatening asteroid.

Considering the damage a large asteroid strike could do to humanity, bombing any so-called near-Earth objects, or NEOs, headed our way might be a viable last resort "if we have the international political will," said Robert Weaver of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

In such a case, "my calculations show that we have the means."

(Related: "NASA to Visit Asteroid Predicted to Hit Earth?")

Asteroid Bombing Wouldn't Require Monster Nukes

Although the exact nature of asteroids is still poorly understood, scientists think the objects fall into two broad categories: solid space rocks and loose "rubble piles" held together by gravity.

(Related: "Asteroid Probe Offers New Views of Near-Earth Object.")

It had always been assumed that explosives would be more effective at blowing apart an asteroid if inserted deep in the body's interior, Weaver said.

But in his new calculations—presented last week at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Sciences in Pasadena, California—Weaver found that the bombing option wouldn't require any drilling to get the job done.

According to his models, a nuclear explosion equal to one megaton of TNT would blow a solid asteroid to smithereens whether the bomb was placed on the asteroid's surface or deep inside the space rock. Some countries' arsenals already include nukes of that power.

The researcher also found that destroying rubble-pile asteroids would be even easier, at least in terms of the power needed to blow them apart.

His computer programs predicted that the asteroid Itokawa—a loose pile shaped like a 1,000-foot-long (300-meter-long) potato—would be broken to bits by an explosion of just 500,000 tons of TNT. Bombs big enough to create such a blast are relatively common.

The new models are the first to incorporate sophisticated shockwave physics that have been validated with laboratory experiments, Weaver said.

Saturn's "Walnut" Moon Mystery Cracked?

2010-10-29T00:04:00.000-07:00

Saturn's moon Iapetus looks like a walnut because it lies in a "Goldilocks zone" around the giant planet, new research suggests. The moon was once a fast-spinning blob of rock and ice, but its location was just right for locking an unusual feature in place as the spin slowed.

In general, moons that form around planets—rather than those believed to be captured objects—spin due to the motion of debris as it consolidates into a larger orbiting body.

Unlike Saturn's other spherical or ellipsoid moons, Iapetus has a unique, slightly squashed shape with an 8-mile-high (13-kilometer-high) mountain range running around much of its middle, like the cusp where the halves of a walnut shell join.

(Related: "Saturn's Largest Moon Has Ingredients for Life?")

Previous theories had suggested this odd ridge formed via plate tectonics or volcanoes. Those models tended to produce a broader "ridge zone" rather than a single narrow feature, noted co-author Mikhail Kreslavsky of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

In their new model, Kreslavsky and UCSC colleague Francis Nimmo suggest Iapetus formed in a region where the moon was far enough from the planet to retain a lot of its initial spin even after it was fully grown. However, the moon was close enough that Saturn's gravitational forces eventually slowed things down.

(Find out about a related theory that suggests Iapetus has its overall shape because it was "cryogenically preserved" when it was young.)

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Universe's Most Distant Object Spotted

2010-10-27T00:04:00.000-07:00

Astronomers spotted a faint glimmer of infrared light from this primitive galaxy, called UDFy-38135539, using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile.

Because of the time it takes for the distant galaxy's light to reach Earth, the recently captured signal is thought to have been emitted when the universe was only 600 million years old. That means the find can help scientists better understand the so-called era of reionization, the study authors say.

For about the first billion years after the big bang, the universe was filled with an opaque fog of neutral hydrogen. As the very first stars and galaxies formed out of this fog, their radiation charged any nearby hydrogen. This ionization transformed the fog into the optically transparent interstellar medium that exists today.

(Related: "Big Bang Ripples Formed Universe's First Stars.")

"The universe at the time was quite an interesting place, as progressively more and more galaxies were formed, while the existing galaxies were merging together and growing in size and luminosity," said Michele Trenti, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Colorado in Boulder who was not involved in the study.

"The photons emitted from these galaxies were stripping off electrons from the hydrogen atoms in the interstellar gas, creating bubbles of ionized gas surrounding these [galaxies].

"This bubble"—the one surrounding the newfound galaxy—"is proof that after about 600 million years from the big bang, stars in galaxies have almost completed the process of hydrogen reionization."

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Cosmic Spiral

2010-10-25T00:04:00.000-07:00

In a blending of old and new, images from a camera recently removed from the Hubble Space Telescope were combined with pictures from its replacement camera to create this composite view of the spiral galaxy NGC 3982, released Tuesday.

The pictures, taken between March 2000 and August 2009, come together to reveal colorful details in the star-forming galaxy, which lies 68 million light-years away. The galaxy's dusty arms are lined with young star clusters (blue) and glowing hydrogen clouds (pink) where new stars are being born.

Moon's Silver Hints at Lunar Water Origins

2010-10-23T08:46:00.001-07:00

It's not just poetic to call it a silvery moon: In addition to water, a NASA probe that crashed into a lunar crater last year churned up unexpected concentrations of silver and mercury, aka quicksilver, a new study says.

The metals had been found before in moon rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts, but the elements had appeared in only trace amounts. (Also see "Water Found in Apollo Moon Rocks.")

The new data, derived from the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission, show much higher amounts of silver and mercury in debris from the crash, which happened inside the south-pole crater known as Cabeus.

The surprising find hints at out how water may have arrived on the moon and why it become concentrated at the poles, astronomers say.

When impactors strike the lunar surface, the moon's easily vaporized metals, such as mercury and silver, tend to migrate—atom by atom—toward the cooler poles, much as water vapor in Earth's atmosphere condenses on cold surfaces.

Water and other volatile compounds brought in by asteroids and comets would similarly experience this "cold sink" effect. (See "Water Discovered on an Asteroid—A First.")

"The silver is like a tracer," said study leader Peter Schultz of Brown University in Rhode Island. "It tells us where [moon water] probably came from, and I think it's telling us that it came from comets and asteroids colliding with the moon."

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Solar System "Force Field" Shrinks Fast

2010-10-22T00:26:00.000-07:00

As charged particles flow out from the sun, they eventually bump up against interstellar medium—the relatively empty areas between stars. These interactions "inflate" a protective bubble that shields Earth and the entire solar system from potentially harmful cosmic rays (solar system pictures).

Now IBEX has surprised astronomers by showing that this force field-like structure, the heliosphere, is an unexpectedly dynamic, unpredictable boundary.

"If we've learned anything from IBEX so far, it is that the models that we're using for interaction of the solar wind with the galaxy were just dead wrong," David McComas, principal investigator for the IBEX program, said during a NASA press conference Thursday.

Heliosphere Changes Fast

For starters, it's been assumed that the heliosphere's expansion and contraction follows the sun's roughly 11-year activity cycle, during which the flow rate of charged particles, or solar wind, fluctuates.

But when scientists compared IBEX maps of the heliosphere taken just six months apart, the researchers found that it had shrunk to a much greater extent than expected. (See "Sun's Power Hits New Low, May Endanger Earth?")

This quick shrinkage could be a concern for astronauts, said McComas, of the Southwest research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. That's because, as the heliosphere shrinks, it lets in more cosmic radiation, which can compromise the body's immune system.

(Related: "Solar System Is 'Bullet Shaped.'")

Among IBEX's other new surprises: a long, mysterious ribbon of uncharged particles found last year that has apparently lost its brightest, most energetic region since its 2009 discovery.

"What we're seeing is the knot pull apart as it spreads across a region of the ribbon," McComas said in a press statement.

"To this day the science team can't agree on exactly what causes the knot or the ribbon, but by comparing different sky maps, we find the surprising result that the region is changing over relatively short time periods. Now we have to figure out why."

Bull ants have right eye for the job

2010-10-21T00:21:00.000-07:00

Worker bull ants have military-style night vision, while their higher status winged nest mates see best during the day, Australian researchers have discovered.

The research led by Dr Ajay Narendra from the Australian National University and colleagues is published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

It is the first research to show that individual ants of the same species living in the same colony have huge variation in the structure of their eyes, depending on what job they do and when they do it.

A colony of bull ants contains three types or castes: sterile female workers who forage on the ground, fertile females who briefly fly then live in the dark nest as queens for up to 15 years, and winged fertile males who have a short life on the wing searching for a queen to mate with, before dying.

Biologists already puzzle over how a single colony of genetically identical ants can have such different body shapes. But now it seems even the fine structure of the eye can show dramatic variation.

The team studied four different species of bull ant (Myrmecia) living in eucalypt forests on the outskirts of Canberra.

They recorded at what time of day or night each caste member of each species was active. They then preserved the eyes of the insects and examined the fine structure under a microscope.

Pulsating Aurorae Secrets Revealed

2010-10-19T00:18:00.000-07:00

Scientists have found the elusive trigger that sets off the most striking visual outbursts, known as pulsating aurorae or blinking lights around Earth's polar regions. (See aurorae pictures.)

Though typical auroras usually stretch more than 620 miles (a thousand kilometers), and last only minutes at a time, pulsating aurora are small glowing patches of light about a 62 miles (a hundred kilometers) wide that flash on and off every 5 to 40 seconds. This flickering gives the appearance of exploding lights in the sky.

"The driver behind auroral pulsation has been a long-standing question in the auroral physics community for more than four decades," said project leader Toshi Nishimura, a researcher at University of California, Los Angeles.

But Nishimura and colleagues discovered the driving force behind the unusual cosmic fireworks appears to be a particular type of electromagnetic wave that originates in Earth's protective, bubble-like magnetosphere.

Solar Wind Collisions Create Bursts of Light

When solar wind—a stream of charged particles released from the sun—strikes our planet's magnetic field, the wind gets funneled down into the atmosphere.

The heaviest animal in the air

2010-10-17T00:04:00.000-07:00

At first glance it looks like a squashed ostrich, strutting proudly across the Spanish plain with its head held high. Then it takes off.

The great bustard is probably the heaviest living animal that can fly. The males normally weigh between 10 and 16 kilograms, but some can reach 21 kg. For comparison, the wandering albatross has a larger wingspan, but only the biggest reach even 16 kg.

Female great bustards are much more petite creatures, normally weighing no more than 5 kg. This is the largest size disparity of any bird species, and it can mean only one thing: females prefer chunky males. But the females aren't just picking the males for their weight. They have an eye for their necks and whiskers too.
Great bustards are a lekking species. At the start of the mating season all the males in an area gather at one site, the lek, to compete for females. The females have the chance to check out all the local males, and to choose the best to father their chicks.

The males arrive first, in January, and the females turn up in March or April. Before they do, the males compete and may even fight to establish their place in the hierarchy. The stakes are high: come the mating season, less than half the males will even attempt to copulate, and less than 10 per cent will succeed. Among males, only the most dominant pass on their genes.

Male peacocks have fantastically coloured tails, but male great bustards make do with white whiskers. Actually thin feathers, they can be 20 centimetres long and have no practical function other than to look good to females. During display sessions, the males lift them to show off their size.

During the mating season, males also develop conspicuous plumage on their necks. Instead of the usual plain grey, they acquire a two-tone pattern: white on the throat, chestnut brown towards the base. Their necks also swell up, and two stripes of bare blue skin appear down their length. As if that weren't enough, the males have bright white tails that they aim towards the sun to attract females from a distance.

How to find out if exo-Earths host life

2010-10-15T00:59:00.000-07:00

SO CLOSE, yet so far. Gliese 581 g is the first planet discovered that is the right mass and distance from its star for the surface to be awash with liquid water and perhaps life. Chances are we'll never know for sure without an armada of space telescopes, and their future looks uncertain. But a 2014 mission could tell us whether any habitable worlds with better viewing angles have signs of life.

Gliese 581 g is 20 light years from our solar system and three to four times as massive as Earth. The planet is likely to be rocky and lies squarely in the habitable zone around its star, where temperatures are just right for liquid water to exist on its surface.

To find evidence for life we would need to measure the light spectrum of the planet's atmosphere and look for the signature of water vapour, as well as possible by-products of life, such as oxygen and methane.

That would mean launching an expensive array of space telescopes to tease out the faint glow of the planet from the powerful glare of its star. NASA and the European Space Agency were hoping to launch such a mission in 2014, called the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF), or Darwin.

But in 2006 NASA backed away from the mission, postponing it indefinitely to free up more funds for human space exploration. Darwin/TPF was dealt another blow this August, when a key panel of US astronomers failed to recommend its construction in the next decade.

All is not lost, however, according to Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC, co-discoverer of the new planet. He says the ground-based instruments that helped him discover it should soon turn up a flood of worlds in the habitable zones of their stars. "Over the next 10 years, I would be shocked if there weren't many tens of these things," he says.

About 5 to 10 per cent of these should, unlike Gliese 581 g, pass in front of their parent stars as seen from Earth, making it easier to measure their atmospheric spectra, Butler says. The James Webb Space Telescope could make such observations after it is launched in 2014, at least for the nearest stars (New Scientist, 16 May 2009, p 10). We may not have to wait too long before we see signs of a planet with life.

Eco-engineering on a giant scale

2010-10-13T00:07:00.000-07:00

The disagreement underscores a debate that has been raging over marsh restoration for decades. Even before the spill, the marshes were disappearing at an alarming rate - the consequence of the dams, levees and canals built to provide shipping channels and protect New Orleans from flooding. Without intervention Louisiana's bayous could become open water within 50 years.

As a result, support has been growing for a suite of projects to resurrect the marshes (see map). At one end of the spectrum are those who advocate minimal intervention and letting nature take its course. At the other, the call is for yet more engineering: new, hardier breeds of grasses, seeding from the air and artificial reefs to shore up the sinking sediment.

Ultimately, the marshes are vanishing because sediment is in short supply. Wind and waves constantly erode the shoreline, and dams and levees hold back sediment flowing down the Mississippi. What's more, a network of canals dredged by the oil and gas industry carry saltwater inland, killing freshwater marshes. Add to all this rising sea levels and the largest oil spill in US history and the situation is desperate. Without its marshes, Louisiana's thriving seafood industry would crumble and the state's coast would lose its natural defences against the powerful storms that blow in from the Gulf of Mexico.

Turner advocates small-scale intervention: filling in thousands of kilometres of abandoned canals with the dredged sediment that is still piled up alongside them. He also favours helping sediment flow to the marshes. Historically, when the Mississippi's waters ran high, "crevasses" appeared in the river banks and carried sediment into the deltas. Dams and levees now prevent this, so Turner suggests punching holes in the river's embankment to spur the process. "So many marsh restoration ideas assume we can do better than nature," says Turner. "I think that's pretty arrogant."

Others say we need to think big. "Over the years, we've done all kinds of patchwork projects," says Harry Roberts, a retired sedimentary geologist at LSU. "They're not long-term solutions." Roberts has calculated that 18 to 24 billion tonnes of sediment will be needed to maintain the delta as the sea level rises in the next century (Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/NGEO553). Small crevasses can never meet that demand, he says.

For researchers like Roberts the question has become not how to restore Louisiana's lost Eden but how to create a new, improved one. As part of that, in April, a $23 million project kicked off to pipe mud more than 6 kilometres from Cote Blanche Bay to Vermilion Bay's Marsh Island Wildlife Refuge. The aim is to recreate 160 hectares of marsh.

Sun's activity flies in face of climate expectations

2010-10-11T00:07:00.000-07:00

IF NEW satellite data can be trusted, changes in solar activity warmed the Earth when they should have cooled it.

Joanna Haigh of Imperial College London studied satellite measurements of solar radiation between 2004 and 2007, when overall solar activity was in decline. The sun puts out less energy when its activity is low, but different types of radiation vary to different degrees. Until now, this had been poorly studied.

Haigh's measurements showed that visible radiation increased between 2004 and 2007, when it was expected to decrease, and ultraviolet radiation dropped four times as much as predicted.

Haigh then plugged her data into an atmospheric model to calculate how the patterns affected energy filtering through the atmosphere. Previous studies have shown that Earth is normally cooler during solar minima.Yet the model suggested that more solar energy reached the planet's surface during the period, warming it by about 0.05 °C (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature09426).

The effect is slight, but it could call into question our understanding of the sun's subtle effects on climate. Or could it? Stefan Brönnimann of the University of Bern in Switzerland says Haigh's study shows the importance of looking at radiation changes in detail but cautions that the results could be a one-off. He points out that the sun's most recent cycle is known to have been atypical

Grey wolf hunt creates bitter row in US

2010-10-09T00:56:00.000-07:00

THE iconic grey wolf of the wild, wild west is the subject of a bitter row in the US. Idaho and Montana both established hunting seasons in 2009, after the US Fish and Wildlife Service decided the states' wolf populations were no longer endangered. But in August a federal judge ruled the decision illegal, halting the 2010 hunts.

Both states are now appealing that ruling. Officials argue that hunting has little effect on populations because many wolves die anyway of starvation or disease, and females can compensate by producing more young. These assumptions are wrong, says Scott Creel of Montana State University in Bozeman.

He analysed the findings of previous studies of 21 North American wolf populations, and found that hunting increased overall death rates and also reduced population growth rates (PLoS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0012918).

A combination of sport hunting and state-sponsored culls killed 63 per cent of the Montana population last year. Creel calculates that humans should only take 22 per cent for the population to remain stable.

Vague carbon emission checks put deal in balance

2010-10-07T06:56:00.001-07:00

CHINA is this week playing host to the last stage of preparatory climate talks before delegates gather at the annual United Nations climate change summit, in Cancún, Mexico, in December. They will attempt once again to reach a deal on limiting emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

But any deal may fail because those emissions cannot yet be measured with sufficient accuracy. This has been a significant sticking point in talks. The world badly needs an independent carbon police to check the figures and catch the carbon frauds. Can science deliver?

Even the easiest emission to assess - CO2 from burning fossil fuels in developed nations - may only be known to within 10 per cent, according to Gregg Marland of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. And a report by energy consultant Irving Mintzer for WWF, published in June, found that China does not record CO2 emissions from its small coal-burning factories and long-standing fires in mines, which may result in under-reporting by as much as 20 per cent.

The uncertainties for other greenhouse gases are even greater. Globally, declared nitrogen dioxide emissions are less than half those known to reach the atmosphere.

Verifying national emissions requires both "bottom-up" independent oversight of the inventories, and better "top-down" monitoring of the atmosphere, says Matthias Jonas of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenberg, Austria.

The first step will be to add to the global network of some 150 stations measuring CO2 and other gases in the atmosphere, run by the World Meteorological Organization. This logs gas levels at places distant from major pollution sources, but what is now needed is the exact opposite - stations sniffing the air close to major sources. Such a network is being discussed by the WMO.

As well as this, there should be more research aircraft doing spot checks. This summer, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration flew aircraft downwind of refineries and power stations in California. Their preliminary results suggest that methane emissions from Los Angeles are a third higher than expected.

Also needed are more flights to remote regions. Last year, a research flight by the US National Center for Atmospheric Research discovered methane leaking out of the Arctic Ocean. The race is on to find out if the source is new gas fields off Alaska or melting permafrost.

A new climate treaty will also need carbon sniffers in tropical forests, especially in countries that sign up to a part of the deal called REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation). REDD would offer cash to countries that conserve their forests so they can soak up atmospheric CO2. This means knowing how much carbon is actually being absorbed by the forests. In August, a study of Peruvian forests by Greg Asner of Stanford University, California, found existing estimates of carbon stored and released could be out by as much as 50 per cent.

Desert Roads Lead to Discovery in Egypt

2010-09-20T00:07:00.000-07:00

Over the last two decades, John Coleman Darnell and his wife, Deborah, hiked and drove caravan tracks west of the Nile from the monuments of Thebes, at present-day Luxor. These and other desolate roads, beaten hard by millennial human and donkey traffic, only seemed to lead to nowhere.
In the practice of what they call desert-road archaeology, the Darnells found pottery and ruins where soldiers, merchants and other travelers camped in the time of the pharaohs. On a limestone cliff at a crossroads, they came upon a tableau of scenes and symbols, some of the earliest documentation of Egyptian history. Elsewhere, they discovered inscriptions considered to be one of the first examples of alphabetic writing.

The explorations of the Theban Desert Road Survey, a Yale University project co-directed by the Darnells, called attention to the previously underappreciated significance of caravan routes and oasis settlements in Egyptian antiquity. And two weeks ago, the Egyptian government announced what may be the survey’s most spectacular find.

Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the archaeologists had uncovered extensive remains of a settlement — apparently an administrative, economic and military center — that flourished more than 3,500 years ago in the western desert 110 miles west of Luxor and 300 miles south of Cairo. No such urban center so early in history had ever been found in the forbidding desert.

Dr. John Darnell, a professor of Egyptology at Yale, said in an interview last week that the discovery could rewrite the history of a little-known period in Egypt’s past and the role played by desert oases, those islands of springs and palms and fertility, in the civilization’s revival from a dark crisis. Other archaeologists not involved in the research said the findings were impressive and, once a more detailed formal report is published, will be sure to stir scholars’ stew pots.

The 218-acre site is at Kharga Oasis, a string of well-watered areas in a 60-mile-long north-south depression in the limestone plateau that spreads across the desert. The oasis is at the terminus of the ancient Girga Road from Thebes and its intersection with other roads from the north and the south.

A decade ago, the Darnells spotted hints of an outpost from the time of Persian rule in the sixth century B.C. at the oasis in the vicinity of a temple. “A temple wouldn’t be where it was if this area hadn’t been of some strategic importance,” Ms. Darnell, also trained in Egyptology, said in an interview.

Then she began picking up pieces of pottery predating the temple. Some ceramics were imports from the Nile Valley or as far away as Nubia, south of Egypt, but many were local products. Evidence of “really large-scale ceramic production,” Ms. Darnell noted, “is something you wouldn’t find unless there was a settlement here with a permanent population, not just seasonal and temporary.”

Feast of Data on BPA Plastic Yields Few Answers

2010-09-18T00:04:00.000-07:00

The research has been going on for more than 10 years. Studies number in the hundreds. Millions of dollars have been spent. But government health officials still cannot decide whether the chemical bisphenol-A, or BPA, a component of some plastics, is safe. The substance lines most food and drink cans, and is used to make hard, clear plastic bottles, containers and countless other products. Nearly everyone is exposed to it.
Concerns about BPA stem from studies in lab animals and cell cultures showing it can mimic the hormone estrogen. It is considered an “endocrine disruptor,” a term applied to chemicals that can act like hormones. But whether it does any harm in people is unclear.

Where science has left a void, politics and marketing have rushed in. A fierce debate has resulted, with one side dismissing the whole idea of endocrine disruptors as junk science and the other regarding BPA as part of a chemical stew that threatens public health.

About half a dozen states have banned BPA in children’s products, and Senator Dianne Feinstein hopes to accomplish the same nationwide, with an amendment to the food safety bill scheduled for a vote in the Senate next week.

This year, a presidential panel on cancer and the environment said there was a “growing link” between BPA and several diseases, including cancer, and recommended ways to avoid BPA, like storing water in bottles free of it and not microwaving food in plastic containers. Some cancer experts said the report overstated the case against chemicals, but the concerns it raised seemed to reflect growing public worries.

Eternal black holes are the ultimate cosmic safes

2010-09-16T00:04:00.000-07:00

If you wanted to hide something away for all eternity, where could you put it? Black holes might seem like a safe bet, but Stephen Hawking famously calculated that they leak radiation, and most physicists now think that this radiation contains information about their contents. Now, there may be a way to make an "eternal" black hole that would act as the ultimate cosmic lockbox.

The recipe for this unlikely object was discovered by looking at an even more abstruse entity, the white hole. White holes are black holes that run backwards in time, throwing out matter instead of sucking it in. Where a black hole might form from a collapsing star, a white hole would explode and leave a star in its place. White holes have never been observed, though general relativity predicts they could exist in principle.

Stephen Hsu of the University of Oregon in Eugene wanted to caculate whether a white hole would emit radiation like a black hole. He considered the special case of a white hole sitting in a perfect vacuum, and calculated that when it spits out its contents, there is a burst of radiation essentially identical to a black hole's Hawking radiation

Swarming spacecraft to self-destruct for greater good

2010-09-14T00:04:00.000-07:00

uture space probes that operate in cooperative swarms must commit hara-kiri if they begin to fail and risk damaging their comrades, says a recent patent application by NASA.

The agency foresees a day when space missions are undertaken not by one large spacecraft but by swarming formations of much smaller, cheaper ones. Such craft could collectively provide a "floating optics" system for a space telescope comprising separate craft flying in formation, for instance.

However, should one spacecraft in such a swarm begin to fail and risk a calamitous collision with another, it must sense its end is nigh and put itself on a course that takes it forever away from the swarm – for the greater good of the collective.

Failing that – perhaps because it has too little fuel to move – it must "passivate" itself by deactivating all its systems. This would mean discharging its batteries so as to pose no risk of shock in a collision, and venting any last vestiges of fuel that could explode in a crash. Then its neighbours would be programmed to navigate around the lifeless satellite.

Locust brains could thwart superbug plagues

2010-09-12T00:04:00.000-07:00

Extracts from the brains of locusts and cockroaches can kill hospital superbugs. Work is under way to identify the active ingredients, which could ultimately result in the first antibiotics originating from insects.

Nine distinct chemical extracts from the locust brain killed Escherichia coli, which can cause food poisoning, and seven killed Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), the problematic superbug sweeping hospitals and communities throughout the western world.

Researchers screened brains, along with other tissues, for antibacterial activity on the grounds that the brain is the most vital organ for locusts to protect. "Without [the brain] they die, whereas they can survive losing limbs such as legs," says Simon Lee of the University of Nottingham, UK. "From the locust's point of view, it's important that the central nervous system is protected all the time against bacteria and other pathogens," he says. As he expected, only brain extracts were active.

Lee is currently conducting further analyses to identify the active components of the extracts, thought to be proteins because they stopped working when exposed to protein-degrading enzymes. He has also shown that the extracts don't harm human cells. "But we're a long way from these being active drugs," he says.

What can deliver snakebite medicine where it's needed?

2010-09-10T00:07:00.000-07:00

SNAKEBITE is one of the world's most neglected health issues. In 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it a "neglected tropical disease". Yet this devastating problem is ignored by governments, research funders and public health organisations, leaving millions without adequate treatment.

In allowing this tragic situation to exist, governments are not only ignoring persuasive moral and economic reasons to improve treatment, but may also be in violation of legal obligations to provide access to antivenom.

The extent of the problem is difficult to quantify, but the WHO estimates there are 5 million cases annually worldwide, with up to half of victims experiencing effects from venom. Snakebites cause at least 100,000 deaths and up to 400,000 amputations each year. Millions more are bitten by spiders, scorpions and other venomous creatures, also without access to adequate medical care.

It is probable that snakebite causes more deaths and disability than many other tropical diseases, including dengue fever, Chagas' disease and leishmaniasis (The Lancet, vol 375, p 89). Despite this, snakebite treatment programmes receive little public health funding and struggle to attract the research effort and political resolve necessary to improve treatment options.

Antivenoms are a proven approach to reducing death and disability from snakebites, but safe and effective sources are in decline. In many parts of the developing world, access to antivenom is virtually impossible. Even where it is available it is sometimes not used, or used inappropriately, because of inadequate experience and a lack of equipment to administer it.

CERN collides with a patent reality

2010-09-08T00:04:00.000-07:00

You might imagine that vast patent royalties flow into the organisation that invented the touchscreen and the World Wide Web. But the atom-smashing outfit CERN, cradle of both these technologies, doesn't make a bean from either.

The particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, has been reluctant to patent the inventions it creates in pursuit of exotic subatomic entities. But it hopes that will soon change: last week, it struck a deal with the United Nations' World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to ensure that it profits better from its engineers' innovations in fields like imaging, computing, particle detection and superconducting magnets, says international relations adviser Maurizio Bona.

CERN owes its historic aversion to patenting to its 20 European member states, says spokesman James Gillies. They pump millions of euros into the organisation every year to help develop new technologies – and don't want to have to pay to use the inventions in their own country. "So we have to square a circle: how do we protect the technology without double-billing member states?"

Thank mothers for large ape brains

2010-09-06T12:41:00.000-07:00

Humans, apes and monkeys have their mothers to thank for their large brains.

It takes a lot of energy to make and run a brain, so large ones should only have developed in animals with fast metabolisms. But according to Vera Weisbecker of the University of Cambridge and Anjali Goswami of University College London, that's only part of the story.

The pair looked at the brains of 197 marsupials and 457 placental mammals, and could find a link between metabolic rate and brain size only in placental mammals. This suggests that parenting strategies play a key role.

"Placental babies are connected to their mothers via the placenta for a long time," says Weisbecker. "So if she has a high metabolic rate, the baby is more likely to benefit." By contrast, marsupial babies are born while they are still very small, then spend a long time feeding off their mothers' milk – a slower way to grow a large brain. Placentas offer a continuous supply of rich nutrients.

However, the pair found no difference in the average brain sizes of marsupials and placental mammals – as long as they excluded primates. These, it seem, got their disproportionately large brains from a double maternal boost. They are supplied with large amounts of energy by their mothers during gestation, and then receive additional months or even years of care after birth.

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2010-09-06T12:37:00.001-07:00

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Power Surges

2010-08-03T00:07:00.000-07:00

The space weather report for Mercury: stormy, with a chance of power surges.

New data from the third and final flyby of the MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) spacecraft have revealed surprisingly intense electromagnetic storms in Mercury's magnetic "tail," part of the planet's magnetic field.

(Related: "Magnetic Twisters 'Dance' Across Mercury, Study Says.")

Such tails form when the solar wind—charged particles streaming from the sun—pushes on a planet's magnetic field. The deformed field flows around the planet in a windsock shape, like river water flowing around a rock.

All eight planets in the solar system except Mars and Venus have magnetic fields and tails, although Mercury's field is the smallest and weakest.

But during a September 29, 2009, flyby of the tiny planet, MESSENGER watched as Mercury's magnetic tail collected enormous amounts of energy from the solar wind.

In just 90 seconds, the tail increased magnetic field power by 200 percent during an event known as a magnetic substorm. The tail then snapped back to normal, dissipating the energy over the next minute and a half.

On Earth, a similar process—called tail loading—takes an hour and increases the magnetic field's energy by only about 10 percent.

"This is all very curious," said Jim Slavin, a solar physicist at NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center and lead author of a new paper describing the finding.

"We have very weak solar wind conditions, yet we're seeing more tail loading than what we see on Earth. What's going to happen when the [solar] wind conditions pick up?"

MESSENGER may have a chance to find out: The space probe will settle into a stable orbit around Mercury in 2011, just in time for a predicted peak in solar activity in 2012 or 2013.

Long odds of finding ET

2010-08-01T00:05:00.000-07:00

The odds of successfully eavesdropping on the daily radio traffic of extraterrestrial life forms have been calculated by a pair of UK scientists to be astronomically small.

The calculation is presented in a paper accepted for publication in the International Journal of Astrobiology and appearing on the pre-press website arXiv.org.

Duncan Forgan, from the University of Edinburgh and Professor Bob Nichol from the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, used a computer modelling technique, called Monte Carlo Realisation, to simulate the growth and evolution of intelligent life in our galaxy.

They combined this with previous research showing the next-generation Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope will be able to pick up radio traffic from ET up to distances of 300 light years from Earth.

They calculated that the probability of picking up such transmissions as being extremely low - 1 in 10 million, to be precise.

Forgan and Nichol assume that ET will only "leak" radio signals for about 100 years of its civilisation.

They say humans have been leaking signals from TV and military radar for that length of time, but are now becoming "radio quiet" as signals move to lower power.

Gorillas learn to play fair by playing tag

2010-07-29T00:05:00.000-07:00

There's more to an innocent game of tag than meets the eye. When gorillas play the playground favourite, it teaches them a valuable life lesson about unfairness, social boundaries and retaliation. That, at least, is the conclusion of the first study to observe the primates' reactions to inequity outside a controlled laboratory setting.

Young gorillas often engage in play fights that resemble what children do in a game of tag: one youngster will run up to another and hit it, then run away. The other gorilla then gives chase and hits the first one back (see video, above).

Marina Davila-Ross of the University of Portsmouth, UK, and colleagues studied video footage of six groups of gorillas in zoos. Twenty-one juveniles – both males and females – were observed chasing one another in a total of 86 games.

They found that the gorilla that did the hitting almost always moved to run away before its victim started moving. The researchers argue that this means the hitter is expecting retaliation and has therefore learned something about acceptable social behaviour.

It was a different story, however, when the gorillas played the game more gently, grabbing each other rather than hitting. Then the "grabber" was not the first to run – perhaps because the gorillas saw the gentler act as less aggressive. "Apes use play to explore the ramifications of unfair social situations," says Davila-Ross.

Heart of darkness could explain sun mysteries

2010-07-27T00:04:00.000-07:00

IS DARK matter lurking at the centre of our bright sun? Yes, say two research groups who believe the elusive stuff is cooling the solar core.

The insight doesn't significantly affect the sun's overall temperature. Rather, a core chilled by dark matter would help explain the way heat is distributed and transported within the sun, a process that is poorly understood.

Dark matter doesn't interact with light and so is invisible. The only evidence for its existence is its gravitational effects on other objects, including galaxies. These effects suggest dark matter makes up about 80 per cent of the total mass of the universe.

The idea that it might lurk at the heart of the sun goes back to the 1980s, when astronomers found that the number of ghostly subatomic neutrinos leaving the sun was only about a third of what computer simulations suggested it should be. Dark matter could have explained the low yield because it would absorb energy, reducing the rate of the fusion reactions that produce neutrinos.

However, the problem was solved another way when it was found that neutrinos oscillate between three kinds, only one of which was being detected on Earth. As a result, the idea of solar dark matter was dropped.

Now it is being resurrected in the light of recent searches for dark matter, which have put limits on the mass of the particles that it is made of and shown that it interacts only very weakly with ordinary matter. These led Stephen West of Royal Holloway, University of London, and his colleagues to explore what would happen if particles that fell within these limits exist in the sun.

Their simulations show that gravity would pull such dark particles to the centre of the sun, where they would absorb heat. Some of these dark matter particles would then carry this heat from the core to the surface, decreasing the core temperature

Let there be night, for wildlife's sake

2010-07-25T00:04:00.000-07:00

IT IS time to take back the night for wildlife. That was the rallying call from a landmark session on light pollution at the Society for Conservation Biology .

The disruptive effects on animals of our penchant for bright lights has rarely impinged on public consciousness. Notable exceptions are when turtle hatchlings head inland to the bright lights of a beach resort instead of the safety of the moonlit sea, or birds collide en masse with brightly lit buildings.

It is rapidly becoming clear, though, that light pollution subtly interferes with the growth, behaviour and survival of many nocturnal species - not just those that hit the headlines.

The threats posed by the humble street lamp do not rival the wholesale destruction of tropical forests and other habitats, or indeed the threat of climate change. But participants in the session at the Edmonton meeting agreed that planners should spare a thought for wildlife when installing lighting. "We've taken away the night," warns Travis Longcore of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who chaired the session.

For instance, Emma Stone of the University of Bristol, UK, has shown that high-pressure sodium street lights can divert lesser horseshoe bats from their usual routes between roosts and foraging grounds. Such diversion may be energetically costly - all the more of a worry as the bats in the study were pregnant.

Fluorescent felines

2010-07-23T00:04:00.000-07:00

The fluorescent cat on the left, whose skin glows in ultraviolet light, is one of two created at Gyeongsang National University in Jinju City, South Korea, in 2007.

The gene for the fluorescent protein was added to skin cells, which were then cloned by transferring their nucleus to empty eggs.

The cats were a practice run; using fluorescent proteins make it very obvious when animals have been successfully modified.

Gulf turtle evacuees could get lost at sea

2010-07-21T00:50:00.000-07:00

Turtles are being relocated from the US Gulf coast to save them from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill – but this may scramble their navigating skills, marine biologists warn. As a result, the animals could lose their way to their nursery grounds.

The turtles – mostly threatened loggerheads, as well some endangered Kemp's ridley, green and leatherback turtles – use the Earth's magnetic field to navigate often hazardous migration routes. They travel from their birthing beaches of Florida and Alabama to the open sea and then on to their nursery grounds around the Azores and Canary Islands, where they live for years before returning to their home beaches to nest as adults.

The first batch of evacuated sea turtles, rescued as eggs from the oil-drenched Florida Panhandle and Alabama beaches, to hatch at Kennedy Space Center in Florida were released into the Atlantic Ocean on Saturday. The evacuation was part of a campaign spearheaded by the US Fish and Wildlife Service to move all Gulf coast turtles' eggs – there are at least 50,000 – from their native breeding grounds to the unaffected Atlantic shores of Florida.

The eggs are being evacuated 50 to 53 days after laying, in the final stages of their 60-day incubation. Immediately after hatching they will be released along Florida's Atlantic beaches. But some researchers are warning that releasing Gulf coast turtles straight onto the sand on the other side of Florida could interfere with their navigational skills.

Air pollution

2010-07-19T00:47:00.000-07:00

Air pollution doesn't just make it hard to breathe – it may also increase the risk that people will take their own lives.

A new study in seven cities across South Korea has uncovered a clear association between suicide and spikes of particulate pollution. Meanwhile, researchers who in the 1990s linked air pollution to asthma in a large group of Taiwanese children have now found that those with the condition were subsequently more likely to have killed themselves.

Suicide is a big problem for South Korea, where the rate per 100,000 people rose from 14 in 1996 to 23 in 2006 – the largest increase in the developed world.
Soot and suicide

To examine the role of pollution, researchers led by Chang Soo Kim of Yonsei University in Seoul linked records of more than 4000 suicides to measurements of PM10 – airborne particles with a diameter of 10 micrometres or less, which include the soot from vehicle exhausts.

Kim's team found that suicides were more common in the two days following a spike in pollution. They considered PM10 measurements on a scale from the highest and lowest levels recorded, calculating that people were 9 per cent more likely to kill themselves following a spike in pollution rising across the middle 50 per cent of recorded values. For people with cardiovascular disease, which has already been linked with particulate pollution, the increase was almost 19 per cent.

South Korea's cities, like many in Asia, are badly blighted by air pollution, and it is unclear whether the effect would be so dramatic in cities that have tighter pollution controls. "Further investigations of low-level exposure to particular matter are needed," says Kim.

Grow-your-own approach to wiring 3D chips

2010-07-17T00:07:00.000-07:00

When the island of Manhattan became too crowded, architects responded by building skyscrapers. The increasing density of components on "flat" computer chips is encouraging similar ideas, building upwards to create three-dimensional chips. But moving from flat interconnecting wires to 3D ones to link up different "storeys" has proved a tricky business – until now.

Instead of soldering prefabricated wires in place, as is traditionally done to connect two parts of a chip, Min-Feng Yu and Jie Hu at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a technique to grow tiny 3D wires in situ which are tailor-made for their location.

Yu and Hu's technique is a modified form of electroplating, in which an electric current is used to coat a conductive surface with a thin layer of metal, deposited from a liquid electrolyte. Such a technique theoretically offers a way to directly "write" metal wires onto a surface.

Super goby helps salvage ocean dead zone

2010-07-15T15:33:00.001-07:00

A resilient fish is thriving in an inhospitable, jellyfish-infested region off Africa's south-west coast. And crucially it is helping to keep the local ecosystem going, and to preserve an important fishery.

The Benguela ecosystem lies off the coast of Namibia. It exists in waters only 120 metres deep that used to be a rich sardine fishery, but in the 1960s the sardine population crashed because of overfishing and environmental factors, and the region was invaded by algal blooms and swarms of jellyfish.

The algae have used up almost all the oxygen in the water, leaving the bottom half with oxygen levels below 10 per cent, far too little for most sea creatures. At about 80 per cent, levels are almost normal in the upper waters – but those regions are thick with jellyfish and algae, and therefore unwelcoming to most other life.

What's more, when the algae die they sink to the bottom and decay, releasing large quantities of the poisonous gas hydrogen sulphide. Nevertheless, local fish called bearded gobies have flourished in Benguela. Until now, nobody has understood how they survive it.

Crabs caught spying on rivals' love claws

2010-06-21T00:04:00.000-07:00

Male fiddler crabs spy on their competitors to work out when a potential female mate is around, Australian researchers have found.

Their findings are reported today in Biology Letters.

"Males will use other males as female detectors," says behavioural ecologist Richard Milner of the Australian National University in Canberra.

"They'll eavesdrop on other males' courtship displays to detect the presence of a female."

Milner carried out the research for his PhD under the supervision of Associate Professor Patricia Backwell and Professor Michael Jennions.
Long arm of love

Male fiddler crabs have a large specialised claw that they use to fight and wave around to attract mates.

"When a female approaches a group of males they'll all start waving in synchrony and they'll all start trying to attract her," says Milner.

But knowing when females are around in the first place can be tricky because females are well camouflaged.

"The males are ridiculously conspicuous but the females look very bland," says Milner.

Milner wanted to see if males would use waving by other males as a sign there was a female around and start waving before they could actually see the female.

This would enable them to detect the presence of a female earlier than they otherwise would.

Study finds US cigs highest in chemicals

2010-06-19T00:04:00.000-07:00

Americans inhale more cancer-causing agents with their cigarettes, while smokers in Canada, Britain and Australia get less, US researchers report.

Their study also demonstrated that the amounts of these carcinogens in a smoker's cigarette butts directly correlated with tell-tale compounds in the smoker's urine.

The study, published in the June issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, could help researchers trying to trace the harmful effects of smoking.

"We know that cigarettes from around the world vary in their ingredients and the way they are produced," says Dr Jim Pirkle of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who heads a lab using a mass spectrometer to measure levels of chemicals in people's bodies.

"All of these cigarettes contain harmful levels of carcinogens, but these findings show that amounts of tobacco-specific nitrosamines differ from country to country, and US brands are the highest in the study," says Pirkle.

CDC's David Ashley and colleagues did in-depth tests using 126 smokers in the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia.

"Seventeen eligible cigarette brands (between three and five brands from each country) were selected on the basis of national sales and nicotine yield to identify popular brands with a range of ventilation," the researchers write. Ventilation is how much air is mixed in with the smoke from the cigarette as it is inhaled.

The volunteers had their saliva and urine tested and also turned over their used cigarette butts to the researchers.

Caffeine addicts get no real perk

2010-06-17T00:04:00.000-07:00

Caffeine addiction is such a downer that regular coffee drinkers may get no real pick-me-up from their morning cup, according to a British study.

Researchers from Bristol University found that drinkers develop a tolerance to both the anxiety-producing and the stimulating effects of caffeine, meaning that it only brings them back to baseline levels of alertness, not above them.

"Although frequent consumers feel alerted by caffeine, especially by their morning tea, coffee, or other caffeine-containing drink, evidence suggests that this is actually merely the reversal of the fatiguing effects of acute caffeine withdrawal," write the scientists, led by Professor Peter Rogers.

The team asked 379 adults - half of them non/low caffeine consumers and the other half medium/high caffeine consumers - to give up caffeine for 16 hours, and then gave them either caffeine or a dummy pill known as a placebo.

Participants rated their levels of anxiety, alertness and headache. The medium/high caffeine consumers who got the placebo reported a decrease in alertness and increased headache, neither of which were reported by those who received caffeine.

But measurements showed that their post-caffeine levels of alertness were actually no higher than the non/low consumers who received a placebo, suggesting caffeine only brings coffee drinkers back up to "normal".

The researchers also found that people who have a genetic predisposition to anxiety do not tend to avoid coffee.

In fact, people in the study with a gene variant associated with anxiety tended to consume slightly larger amounts of coffee than those without it, Rogers writes in a study in the Neuropsychopharmacology journal, published by Nature .

Velvet worm's deadly slime revealed

2010-06-15T00:04:00.000-07:00

Scientists have discovered that the ancient velvet worm uses a glue unlike anything seen before in nature.

The glue, which is easy to replicate, could have a range of applications, such as a medical glue for open wounds and burns.

CSIRO Entomology scientist Dr Victoria Haritos, who uncovered the worm's secret, says "it's a case of using disorder as a weapon."

Haritos who is looking for new types of silk, milked an Australian species of velvet worm called Euperipatoides rowelli.

She found the silk produced by the worm isn't silk at all - it's the exact opposite.

Silk is made up of well ordered, structured proteins forming molecules with the molecular shape determined by the way the proteins amino acids are sequenced.

According to Haritos the sticky slime produced by the velvet worm is neither structured nor well ordered.
Getting slimed

The worm rapidly spits out slime from tubes on either side of its head. This quickly covers it prey and immediately begins to set hard, going very stringy and rope-like.

"It gets harder and harder and very sticky, immobilising the victim," says Haritos.

She says the key ingredient in the slime is water. "In fact the slime consists of 90% water and just 3% to 5% protein."

"As long as the proteins are covered in a film of water, they remain inert, the watery sheaths keeping the structure open and random. This prevents the protein molecules from interacting with one another.

"But once it hits the victim, this thin film of water quickly evaporates letting the proteins get tangled together to form tight chemical bonds and making them go sticky and hard."

The evaporation process is helped by the prey's waxy, water-repellent shell.

Stem cells turn into seek-and-destroy cancer missiles

2010-06-13T00:05:00.000-07:00

GENETICALLY modified stem cells are to be injected into the brains of cancer patients, where they will convert an inactive cancer drug into a potent and targeted tumour-killing agent.

Stem cells are strongly attracted towards cancer cells, so it is hoped that as well as homing in on the main tumour, they will also be drawn to secondary growths, or metastases. This will enable higher doses of drug to be delivered to cancer cells while minimising the risk of side effects in the rest of the body.

A team led by Karen Aboody at the City of Hope Beckman Research Institute in Duarte, California, used neural stem cells originally derived from human fetuses which had been genetically engineered to produce cytosine deaminase. This is an enzyme that converts a drug called 5-fluorocytosine (5-FC) into an active chemotherapy drug, 5-fluorouracil (5-FU), but only in the immediate vicinity of the stem cell.

The team then injected the modified stem cells into the brains of mice with glioma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. The animals were subsequently given 5-FC. Treated mice saw a 70 per cent reduction in tumour mass compared with untreated animals. "In effect, we're allowing a much higher dose of chemo to be localised to the tumour site," says Aboody, who presented the results in May at an international brain tumour conference in Travemünde, Germany.

The US Food and Drug Administration has granted Aboody approval to carry out a safety trial of the therapy in up to 20 patients with recurrent glioma, for whom life expectancy is just three to six months. The stem cells will be injected into the tumour cavity following surgery to reduce its mass, and then given four days to home in on any remaining cancer cells. Patients will then be treated with daily 5-FC for one week.

All you need to know about the hurricane season

2010-06-11T00:04:00.000-07:00

The North Atlantic hurricane season officially began on 1 June, and the US National Hurricane Center expects it to be a busy one. It forecasts a 70 per cent chance of eight to 14 storms reaching hurricane strength, and three to seven becoming dangerous "major" hurricanes of category 3 and above. Reaching the upper end of that range would make 2010 one of the most active hurricane seasons on record. What does that mean for residents of the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of the US, worried about oil spreading from the Deepwater Horizon blowout?

Wasn't 2005 "a once in a century" hurricane year? Why are a similar number of storms forecast this year?

If hurricane numbers were purely random, there would be a 1 in 100 chance of a hundred-year storm being followed the next year by a second hundred-year storm. However, the number of hurricanes is far from random.

Hurricane formation in the north Atlantic and the Caribbean is linked to a cycle called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. In a cycle lasting 20 to 40 years, sea-surface temperatures from Greenland to the equator rise and fall by about 0.5 °C. During the warm phases, about twice as many weak tropical storms grow into severe hurricanes as during the cooler phases.

The last rise in sea-surface temperatures and hurricane numbers came in the mid-1990s, so the average number of storms now is above the long-term average, and well above the relatively low numbers from the 1960s to the mid-1990s. The number of hurricanes was higher than average from the 1940s to the early 1960s. Those shifts roughly kept pace with the sea-surface temperature cycle.

shake nature's constants

2010-06-09T00:04:00.000-07:00

The basic constants of nature aren't called constants for nothing. Physics is supposed to work the same way across the universe and over all of time. Now measurements of the radio spectra of a distant gas cloud hint that some fundamental quantities might not be fixed after all, raising the possibility that a radical rethink of the standard model of particle physics may one day be needed.

The evidence comes from observations of a dense gas cloud some 2.9 billion light years away which has a radio source, the active supermassive black hole PKS 1413+135, right behind it. Hydroxyl radicals in the gas cloud absorb the galaxy's radio energy at certain wavelengths and emit it again at different wavelengths. This results in so-called "conjugate" features in the radio spectrum of the gas, with a dip in intensity corresponding to absorption and an accompanying spike corresponding to emission.

The dip and spike have the same shape, which shows that they arise from the same gas. But Nissim Kanekar of the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics in Pune, India, and colleagues found that the gap in frequency between the two was smaller than the properties of hydroxyl radicals would lead us to expect.

The gap depends on three fundamental constants: the ratio of the mass of the proton to the mass of the electron, the ratio that measures a proton's response to a magnetic field, and the fine-structure constant, alpha, which governs the strength of the electromagnetic force. The discrepancy in the size of the gap thus amounts to "tentative evidence" that one or more of these constants may once have been different in this region of space, Kanekar says.

Space taxi reaches orbit in first flight test

2010-06-07T07:48:00.001-07:00

A private company has launched a new rocket that may carry NASA astronauts to orbit after the space shuttle's retirement.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Friday at 1845 GMT (1445 EDT), reaching orbit 9 minutes later.

The rocket lofted an uncrewed mockup of SpaceX's Dragon capsule, which is designed to one day carry both crew and cargo to orbit. "This has been a good day for SpaceX and a promising development for the US human space flight programme," said Robyn Ringuette of SpaceX in a webcast of the launch.

In a teleconference with the media on Thursday, SpaceX's CEO, Paypal co-founder Elon Musk, said he would consider the flight 100 per cent successful if it reached orbit. "Even if we prove out just that the first stage functions correctly, I'd still say that's a good day for a test," he said. "It's a great day if both stages work correctly."

SpaceX hopes to win a NASA contract to launch astronauts to the International Space Station using the Falcon 9. US government space shuttles, which currently make these trips, are scheduled to retire for safety reasons at the end of 2010.

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2010-06-07T07:45:00.000-07:00

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Immune system could be used to test for TB

2010-06-02T00:10:00.000-07:00

Two immune system molecules could form the basis of a new test to quickly detect whether tuberculosis is dormant or active and infectious, say US researchers.

Dr Jason Stout of Duke University, presented his findings at the current American Thoracic Society meeting in New Orleans.

"A rapid test that could tell the difference between latent and active tuberculosis would be a major step forward," says Stout.

He says doctors could more quickly treat active infections, helping to limit the spread of the disease.

Current blood tests can distinguish between people who are infected with TB and those who are not but they cannot tell whether an infection is active or dormant. It takes a culture test that grows the TB bacilli to show if it is active or not, and that can take weeks.

Stout and colleagues collected blood samples from 71 people with active TB, latent TB or no infection at all.

They added a bit of TB bacteria to the blood samples to stimulate an immune response, then measured the activity of 25 immune signalling chemicals called cytokines to try to identify a pattern that could be used as a signature of active TB infection.

"We found that a pattern of two cytokines, called MCP-1 and IL-15, was reasonably good at differentiating between persons sick with TB and persons infected but not sick," says Stout.

A third cytokine called IP-10 also showed promise at sorting between people who are infected and those who are not.

Stout says other studies have pointed to these three cytokines individually as possible TB markers, but his is the first to put all three together as a possible TB test.

"These findings could lead to earlier diagnosis of active tuberculosis, which could be beneficial for both the sick person and others around her or him who might be spared from infection," says Stout.

Tuberculosis killed 1.8 million people in 2008, or nearly 5,000 people a day. It is caused by the Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria. More than 2 billion people, or about a third of the world's population, are thought to be infected.

It is not only a scourge in poor countries but also in the West, where it has flared anew in the last 20 years because of AIDS, which weakens the immune system.

TB can be cured with antibiotics, but they need to be taken daily for months to be effective.

Because people often skip doses, multiple drug resistant forms are spreading and the World Health Organization says the hard-to-treat infection is spreading.

Mobile phone cancer link unclear, study

2010-05-31T00:08:00.000-07:00

The largest study to date on the safety of mobile phones has found no clear link to brain cancer, but researchers say further research is needed given the increasingly intensive use of the technology.

The study, by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), appears this week in International Journal of Epidemiology.

"The results really don't allow us to conclude that there is any risk associated with mobile phone use, but... it is also premature to say that there is no risk associated with it," says IARC's director Dr Christopher Wild.

The study looked at almost 13,000 mobile phone users, including 2,708 people with glioma tumours and 2,409 people with meningioma tumours in 13 countries.

It found no increased risk of glioma or meningioma tumours after 10 years of using a mobile phone, although it found "suggestions of higher risk" for the heaviest users.

The heaviest users who reported using their phones on the same side of their heads had a 40% higher risk for gliomas and 15% for meningiomas, but the researchers said "biases and errors" prevent making a causal link.

Given that the heaviest users in the study talked an average of half an hour per day on their mobile phones, a figure which is not heavy by today's standards, the researchers recommend further research.

The research, involved 21 scientists from the Interphone International Study Group, which received 19.2 million euros (A$27 million) in funding, around 5.5 million euros (A$7.7) of which came from industry sources.

Water Discovered on an Asteroid—A First

2010-05-29T00:05:00.000-07:00

Water has been spotted on an orbiting asteroid for the first time, according to a new study of a space rock that appears to be coated with frost.

What's more, the frost seems to be mixed with carbon-bearing material, according to results from two independent teams studying the asteroid, which is known as 24 Themis.

"We report the first detection of water ice and of organic molecules on an asteroid, and they are both on the same asteroid," said Humberto Campins of the University of Central Florida, leader of one of the teams.

Both teams used NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii to watch how sunlight reflected off the asteroid at different wavelengths, revealing the watery signature.

A closer look at similar asteroids, perhaps during a proposed NASA mission, could help reveal whether the water we drink—and maybe even the building blocks of life—were delivered to Earth by impacting space rocks. (See "Comet Swarm Delivered Earth's Oceans?")

Asteroid Water Ice Exposed by "Impact Gardening"?

Asteroids are believed to be the leftovers of planet formation, with compositions that have remained almost pristine for 4.6 billion years.

The asteroid 24 Themis orbits about x million miles (480 million kilometers) from the sun. It's one of the largest asteroids in the main asteroid belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. (Explore an interactive solar system).

Unlike comets, which originate from beyond the orbit of Neptune, asteroids are thought to be relatively dry, since they orbit much closer to the sun.

But previous theories have suggested that ice could still exist in the main asteroid belt if it's buried below the surfaces of the space rocks. (See asteroid and comet pictures.)

In fact, two nearby "relatives" of 24 Themis are members of a strange group called main-belt comets, which are known to leave dust tails that may be fueled by water ice sublimating, or turning directly from a solid into a gas. (Related: "Strange 'Comet' May Be Asteroid Collision Debris.")

The discovery of frost on 24 Themis means that the asteroid "represents a 'living' window into the early solar system in the form of ice that, according to conventional wisdom, should have been long gone," astrophysicist Henry Hsieh, of Queen's University Belfast, wrote in a commentary on the new study.

On 24 Themis, the frost might be coming from subsurface ice that sublimates when sunlight warms up the asteroid, sending vapor to the surface. The gas then recondenses on the surface when darkness falls and temperatures dip, study author Campins said.

Or micrometeorites may practice "impact gardening," churning the surface enough to gradually uncover a layer of preserved subsurface ice.

Or the answer may be something else entirely, Campins admits: "One of the fun things about having so little information is how much one can speculate," he said.

Hubble Telescope Catches Superfast Runaway Star

2010-05-27T00:03:00.000-07:00

A stellar speed demon racing away from its home may be a never before seen type of runaway star, astronomers have announced.

Dubbed 30 Dor 016, the massive star is whipping through space at a record-breaking 250,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) an hour. The fugitive already appears to have traveled 375 light-years from its birthplace: a star cluster called R136 deep in the Tarantula Nebula.

(Related: "Mystery Space Object May Be Ejected Black Hole.")

Astronomers caught the stellar runaway in Hubble Space Telescope data taken shortly after the last space shuttle servicing mission in May 2009. (See pictures taken by the upgraded Hubble.)

The team chose the star as a target to help calibrate the newly installed Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), an instrument designed to look at the light signatures—or spectra—of very distant, faint objects.

After looking at the light coming from 30 Dor 016, the scientists "knew immediately that it was a massive star that had stellar winds blowing at breakneck speeds," said study co-author Danny Lennon, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

"Given that the mass of the star is proportional to the velocity of the material being expelled, we knew right away that its wind was the fastest ever seen."

Such powerful wind means that the star is incredibly massive: Lennon and colleagues calculate that the runaway is roughly 90 times the mass of our sun.

Mystery Space Object May Be Ejected Black Hole

2010-05-25T00:02:00.000-07:00

Then again, the strange body could be a rare type of supernova or an oddball "midsize" black hole—more massive than black holes born when single stars explode but "lighter" than the supermassive ones at the centers of galaxies.

"All three of those [options] are exotic and have something peculiar to them," said study co-author Peter Jonker, an astronomer with the Netherlands Institute for Space Research in Utrecht.

Off-center Black Holes Wanted

Jonker and his colleagues found the mystery object while on the hunt for off-center supermassive black holes that are thought to form when two galaxies merge. (Related: "Colossal Four-Galaxy Collision Discovered.")

Most, if not all, galaxies are thought to have supermassive black holes at their cores. Recent computer simulations suggest that when two galaxies merge, so do their central black holes.

But the newly formed black hole combo "actually receives a kick" from gravitational forces generated by the galactic merger, Jonker said. The kick, according to the models, "launches this newly formed black hole out of the center of the galaxy." (See "Hundreds of 'Rogue' Black Holes May Roam Milky Way.")

Sorting through archived data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the team found an interesting candidate in a galaxy half a billion light years away from Earth. The extremely bright x-ray object is about ten thousand light-years from its galactic center.

Based on the Chandra data, however, the astronomers couldn't rule out the possibility that the newfound object actually lies behind the galaxy in question.

So the team compared their x-ray information with archived optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope. They found that the mystery object emits a bright blue light in visible wavelengths. (See NASA astronomer's picks for the top Hubble pictures of the past 20 years.)

Hole in Space Found by Orbiting Telescope

2010-05-23T00:04:00.000-07:00

The hole lies in a nebula called NGC 1999, a bright cloud of dust and gas in the constellation Orion. The nebula glows with light from a nearby star.

The Hubble Space Telescope first snapped a picture of the nebula in December 1999. Astronomers assumed that an inky spot in the cloud was a blob of cooler gas and dust that's so dense it blocks visible light from passing through. (See a Hubble picture that shows dark globs in another nebula.)

But new pictures from the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory show that the blob really is an empty void. That's because Herschel sees in infrared, which should allow the telescope to peer through dense dust and see any objects inside.

Even to Herschel, however, the blob looked black.

Astronomers think that the 0.2-light-year-wide hole was made by the fitful birthing process of a nearby stellar embryo called V380 Ori. (Related: "Big Bang Ripples Formed Universe's First Stars.")

The protostar is already 3.5 times the mass of our sun. The team thinks the newborn is signaling its near maturity by shooting out superfast columns of gas from its poles that are blasting away any leftover material from the star's formation.

"We think the star is launching a bipolar jet at hundreds of kilometers per second that is punching a gigantic hole in the surrounding cloud," said team leader Tom Megeath of the University of Toledo in Ohio. "Essentially these bolts of gas are being shot forward and are sweeping away all the gas and dust."

Herschel, the Astronomer, Also Saw Space Holes

Megeath added that the telescope that found the hole is named after 19th-century astronomer William Herschel. In his calalogs of the night sky, Herschel recorded several black patches that he thought were holes but which turned out to be dark clouds.

Ball Lightning May Be All in Your Head

2010-05-21T00:07:00.000-07:00

For hundreds of years eyewitnesses have reported brief encounters with the golf ball- to tennis ball-size orbs of electricity. But scientists have been unable to agree on how and why ball lightning forms, since the phenomenon is rare and very short-lived. (See "Ball Lightning: A Shocking Scientific Mystery.")

Ball lightning is often reported during thunderstorms, and it's known that multiple consecutive lightning strikes can create strong magnetic fields. So Joseph Peer and Alexander Kendl at the University of Innsbruck in Austria wondered whether ball lightning is really a hallucination induced by magnetic stimulation of the brain's visual cortex or the eye's retina.

In previous experiments, other scientists had exposed humans to strong, rapidly changing magnetic fields using a medical machine called a transcranial magnetic stimulator, or TMS. The machine's magnetic fields are powerful enough to induce electric currents in human brain cells without being harmful.

Focusing magnetic fields on the visual cortex of the brain caused the subjects to see luminous discs and lines. When the focus was moved around within the visual cortex, the subjects reported seeing the lights move.

In their paper, which appeared online May 7 on the physics research website arXiv.org, Peer and Kendl argue that magnetic fields made by lightning could have the same effect as TMS machines on nearby humans.

In fact, the pair thinks about half of all ball lightning reports are actually tricks of the mind induced by magnetism.

Jupiter Loses Big Belt

2010-05-19T14:50:00.000-07:00

Two wide stripes—known as the equatorial belts—normally circle the huge planet, products of the fast-moving jet streams that roar through Jupiter's atmosphere.

But pictures of Jupiter taken by an amateur astronomer show that sometime during the past couple weeks, the south equatorial belt completely faded from view.

"The basic view of Jupiter is of two dark belts. Now there is only one," said Alan MacRobert, senior editor of Sky & Telescope magazine.

"This is the most obvious change on Jupiter that I can recall," he said, adding that anyone with a backyard telescope should be able to see the difference. "Any instrument powerful enough to show any of Jupiter's surface features will easily reveal the change."

However, the planet's "belt buckle" remains: The lost stripe "means that Jupiter's Great Red Spot is now floating all alone in whiteness, whereas usually it is in an indentation in the south equatorial belt," MacRobert said.

The spot—actually a raging storm three times bigger than Earth—is rarely brick red, he added, and often becomes quite pale. MacRobert characterizes its current color as "somewhat orangy." (Find out why the Great Red Spot has been shrinking.)

Jupiter's Dark Belt Lost to Light Cloud Cover?

Despite the dramatic change on Jupiter, the lost belt doesn't concern experts. The planet has lost this stripe before, most recently in the 1970s and the early '90s. So far, the stripe has always reappeared.

Astronomers are, however, somewhat stumped for a complete explanation.

A dozen or so jet streams move alternately east-west and west-east on Jupiter, said planetary scientist Andrew Ingersoll of the California Institute of Technology. The clouds in between these jet streams create the planet's multicolored stripes and swirls.

Underwater 'microbial mat' size of Greece

2010-04-25T00:40:00.000-07:00

A thick mat of microbes the size of a country has been found in the waters off South America, report scientists.

The find is among the most recent discoveries by the decade-long global Census of Marine Life, which involves more than 2000 scientists from over 80 nations and is in its final year.

"The bacterial mat extends over the size of Greece," says Dr Ian Poiner of Australian Institute of Marine Sciences (AIMS) in Townsville, who is involved in the survey.

Spotted off Chile and Peru by a team led by marine biologist Dr Victor Ariel Gallardo, the mats are made of filamentous bacteria that are 2 to 7 centimetres long and big enough to be seen by the naked eye.

The "Goliath" bacteria live in a part of the ocean that has very little oxygen, relying on hydrogen sulphide instead.

This "oxygen minimum zone" is an ecosystem that is reminiscent of the Proterozoic period 2.5 billion to 650 million years ago.

"These things are ancient forms of life," says Poiner.

"The mats are a very interesting phenomenon that we have to understand."

Bacterial mats can also occur in more shallow water that has been polluted by nutrient run-off.

Silk forms 'intimate' brain connection

2010-04-23T00:39:00.000-07:00

A brain implant made partly of silk can melt onto the surface of the brain, providing an 'intimate' connection for recording signals, report researchers reported on Sunday.

Tests of their device showed the thin, flexible electrodes recorded signals from a cat's brain more accurately than thicker, stiff devices.

Such devices might help people with epilepsy, spinal cord injuries and even help operate artificial arms and legs, the researchers report in the journal Nature Materials.

John Rogers of the University of Illinois, Urbana and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania and Tufts University in Boston made the electrode arrays using protein from silk and thin metal electrodes.

The silk is biocompatible and water-soluble, dissolving into the brain and leaving the electrodes draped over its contours, the researchers report.

The material is also transparent, strong and flexible, and it is possible to control the rate at which it dissolves.

They tested the silk on cats who were anesthetised but whose eyes were functioning. The electrodes recorded the signals from the eyes of the cats as they were shown visual images.

Microbial life discovered in asphalt lake

2010-04-21T14:38:00.001-07:00

Scientists have discovered life in a liquid asphalt lake that is the closest thing on Earth to the hydrocarbon seas of the Saturnian moon Titan.

The find raises questions about the sort of environments capable of supporting life, and whether or not liquid water should still be considered the prerequisite for life to exist.

The discovery was made at Pitch Lake, a poisonous, foul smelling pond on the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago.

Reporting in the physics blog ArXiv, Dr Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University and colleagues found Pitch Lake teeming with microbial life.

Schulze-Makuch says despite the lake being filled with hot asphalt and bubbling with noxious hydrocarbon gases and carbon dioxide, it's full of life.

"Water is scarce in the lake and certainly below the levels normally thought of as a threshold for life to exist," he says. "Yet on average, each gram of 'goo' in the lake contains tens of millions of living cells."
Strange life forms

Schulze-Makuch says his analysis of gene sequences shows many different kinds of microbial species of single-celled organisms such as archea and bacteria.

"Some are methanogens, others thrive on sulfur or iron, and many have never been seen before. They make a living in an oxygen-free environment full of nasty heavy metals, with very little water, eating hydrocarbons and in some cases breathing out metals," he syas.

"They're very different from microbes found in places like the LaBrea tar pits in Los Angeles. Similar strange life forms have previously been seen in hydrocarbon samples from sub sea oil wells. Which is another reason they are of interest.

Schulze-Makuch says how microbial organisms degrade and process oil reservoirs is poorly understood.

"A better understanding could lead to a number of advances in techniques for things like microbial remediation."

Flight Risk

2010-04-07T00:07:00.000-07:00

In space gamma rays—the most energetic forms of light—are created by violent events, such as supernovae, and powerful objects, such as neutron stars.

Scientists have known for decades that thunderstorms on Earth can also create gamma rays, possibly during lightning production. Storms that make gamma rays usually hover about 9 miles (15 kilometers) above Earth, about the same altitude at which many commercial planes fly.

The new study shows that just one of these terrestrial gamma ray flashes, or TGFs, can equal the radiation dosage of about 400 chest x-rays—creating potential hazards for frequent flyers. (Related: "Gamma Ray Burst Caused Mass Extinction?")

In theory, stray gamma rays can alter the structure of human DNA, possibly triggering cancer.

Still, much is unknown about TGFs, including how likely it is for an airplane to fly close to gamma ray sources in storms, noted study co-author Joseph Dwyer, a space scientist at the Florida Institute of Technology.

"I would put this pretty far down on the list [of airplane hazards]," Dwyer said. "I've worked a lot on this, and I would not hesitate to hop on an airplane and fly with my kids across the country."

In fact, people are probably at bigger risk just driving their cars, said Brant Carlson, a TGF expert at Stanford University in California.

"I would say this is a very, very unlikely event, much less likely than many other flight hazards, or the hazards involved in getting to the airport in the first place," said Carlson, who was not involved in the study.

Apollo Moon Rocks

2010-04-06T00:07:00.000-07:00

Hints of water in moon samples first surfaced in a 2008 study in the journal Nature, in which scientists reported having detecting water molecules in lunar glasses from the Apollo missions.

That team, however, hadn't been able to prove the water hadn't been introduced to the moon rocks on Earth, perhaps through sloppy handling.

One way to determine a water sample's birthplace is to measure the amounts of different hydrogen isotopes inside the water—a technique unavailable to the Nature team, said James Greenwood, a professor of Earth and environmental sciences at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

Isotope measurements can serve as fingerprints. Water from Earth's mantle has a different isotope ratio than water from a comet, for example.

When the Nature study came out, Greenwood was pioneering a technique that allowed him to study the chemical makeups of Martian meteorites. He later applied his method to samples of the mineral apatite, culled from a variety of moon-rock types, to determine the fingerprint of the water molecules inside.

The work proves that the moon-rock water "is not from us," he said at a presentation of his findings at the 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas.

Cosmic Scale

2010-04-05T00:07:00.000-07:00

The finding suggests that the invisible substance called dark matter and the even more mysterious force known as dark energy are not just figments of physicists' imaginations.

For centuries Isaac Newton's law of universal gravitation worked well enough to explain gravity on Earth. But astronomers eventually saw discrepancies in the way larger objects such as planets interacted.

Einstein's general theory of relativity, published in 1916, proposed that gravity works on large scales because matter warps the fabric of space and time, also known as space-time. (See "Einstein and Beyond" in National Geographic magazine.)

This notion has been used to successfully explain phenomena in our solar system, such as the slight alterations in Mercury's orbit around the sun, which Newton's gravity couldn't account for.

The existence of dark matter and dark energy is based on the assumption that Einstein's gravity is affecting galaxies billions of light-years from Earth in the same way that it affects objects in our solar system.

Based on general relativity, for example, scientists think dark matter exists because some cosmic objects behave as if they have more mass than we can see.

But until now, tests of general relativity on galactic scales have been inconclusive.

Vision Invented

2010-04-04T00:07:00.000-07:00

The trick is knowing exactly how materials alter light that enters them.

In experiments, the researchers shone a green laser beam at a roughly 80-micrometer-thick layer—that's 80 thousandths of a millimeter—of zinc oxide, a common ingredient in white paints. On the unseen side of the zinc layer were a series of tiny dots.

By analyzing the patterns of light that came through, the physicists generated a complex model called a transmission matrix—essentially a formula decoding the seemingly chaotic way light travels within the opaque material.

By applying the formula, the researchers say, they were able "translate" the green light coming through the zinc oxide, resulting in a digital camera image of dots in shades of green—revealing exactly what was behind the "wall."

(Read about the power of light.)

The team is now attempting to make out far more complex images of familiar objects, though they're awaiting publication before giving specific examples, ESPCI physicist Sylvain Gigan told National Geographic News.

The see-through vision isn't perfect, though, since a lot of light never makes it through to the other side of the opaque material. In more complex, future experiments, this missing "information" might result in grainy images, said Gigan, who co-authored the new study.

Should miaow-miaow be banned

2010-04-03T00:07:00.000-07:00

The "legal high" mephedrone – also known as M-Cat, plant food, and miaow miaow – is getting a lot of attention because a series of deaths have been linked to the drug. Most recently, two teenaged men in the UK died after taking it on Sunday night, although the results of medical tests to determine the causes of their deaths will not be known for several weeks.

It has become the fourth most popular drug in the UK behind cannabis, ecstasy and cocaine over the past year. The British government's official drug advisers are expected to recommend that it be banned, but some drugs policy experts say criminalisation could do more harm than good. Now New Scientist cuts through the hype.

What is mephedrone?

The leaves of the khat plant, Catha edulis, are chewed for the stimulant, amphetamine-like properties of its active ingredients cathinone and cathine, mostly in east Africa and in migrant groups elsewhere. Mephedrone – more properly 4-methylmethcathinone – is the best known of a family of synthetic or substituted cathinones. It is commonly sold as a white powder or in capsules and is usually snorted or swallowed.

Where does it come from?

The vast majority is produced by Chinese chemical companies, which sell it for around £4,000 a kilogram, mostly to European dealers who sell it online for £10 to £15 per gram or less for larger quantities.

Point of nuclear weapons on instant alert

2010-04-02T00:07:00.000-07:00

The NPR is expected to state that the US will not use its nukes to attack a country that does not itself have nuclear weapons - as long as that country complies with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty - and it may renounce nuclear weapons as a response to chemical or biological attack. It may also say 2500 "spare" US nuclear warheads will be destroyed.

But it is not expected to pledge that the US will never be first to launch a nuclear strike, nor that nuclear weapons are only for deterrence or response to nuclear attack. This policy means that the US, along with Russia, will continue to keep 1000 to 1200 nuclear missiles "on alert". For those who support the elimination of nuclear weapons that is a cause for concern. "De-alerting is the key problem," says Ivan Oelrich of the pressure group Federation of American Scientists.

To deter or respond to an attack, nations don't need to keep weapons on alert, says Oelrich. No country could take out all US missiles in a first strike, so a reprisal would not need to be speedy. The only reason to have so many on alert would be to pre-empt a large imminent attack by Russia, says policy analyst James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington DC-based think tank.

Missiles on alert are a worry, partly because a malfunction could lead to accidental launch, or they could be hijacked - but mostly because they could be launched by misinformed or pressurised military leaders or politicians during a fast-evolving situation, Oelrich says.