Rare objects harder to find

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nature's 'smart bomb' genome revealed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mega-quake building off Indonesia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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