from Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society Today's Headlines - March 19, 2010
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Borrowing methods developed to study the genetics of human disease, researchers have concluded that dogs were probably first domesticated from wolves somewhere in the Middle East, in contrast to an earlier survey suggesting dogs originated in East Asia.
This finding puts the first known domestication -- that of dogs -- in the same place as the domestication of plants and other animals, and strengthens the link between the first animal to enter human society and the subsequent invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago.
A Middle Eastern origin for the dog also fits in better with the archaeological evidence, and has enabled geneticists to reconstruct the entire history of the dog, from the first association between wolves and hunter gatherers some 20,000 years ago to the creation by Victorian dog fanciers of many of today's breeds.
http://snipr.com/uxhzq
from the Guardian (UK)
The financially troubled Royal Institution sank deeper into crisis today as senior members clashed over moves to oust the organisation's ruling council en masse. Moves to replace the entire governing body were drawn up in protest after the Institution's director, Lady Susan Greenfield, was made redundant in January without the membership being consulted.
The Institution, the oldest independent research body in the world, will hold a vote on the proposals at a special general meeting on 12 April, but documents circulated by the council to its 2,400 members warned supporters they risked causing "immense harm" to the organisation and would "threaten its financial stability."
Rebel members said much-needed benefactors would have greater confidence in their proposed replacement council, which they would like to see include Julian Hunt, the former head of the Met Office; John Stein, professor of physiology at Oxford University and Baroness Sally Greengross.
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from ABC News
Stephen Neiley's first seizure happened when he was 39 years old, while he was having dinner with his family. It would be far from his last. From then on, for the next 13 years, Neiley, a former San Diego contractor, would have a grand mal seizure ... every two to three days.
He would have petit mal seizures--in which one seems to freeze for a few seconds--every other day. Treatment with drugs did not work. He said he had surgery that removed about one-third of his brain tissue, but the seizures continued. Diagnosed with epilepsy, he returned to his hometown of Towanda, Pa.
... But Neiley, now 57, says an invasive and risky but promising procedure has given him his life back. Five years ago, he had a deep brain stimulation device implanted in his head by Dr. Michael Kaplitt at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. He said the device, normally associated with treatment for Parkinson's disease, has greatly reduced the seizures that had ruled his life.
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from Nature News
The editor of what is perhaps the world's most controversial medical journal has pledged to resist attempts by its publisher to implement radical changes to its approach.
Bruce Charlton, who is professor of theoretical medicine at the University of Buckingham, UK, has staunchly defended his journal, Medical Hypotheses, saying that it has for 35 years followed "a radical and dissenting agenda" and "tries to favour unfashionable and unpopular views."
The journal's publisher Elsevier is seeking major changes to Medical Hypotheses in the wake of a furious row over the publication last year of a paper claiming that there is no proof that HIV causes AIDS. A key part of these changes will be to implement peer review in place of the current editorial review. Elsevier also says there will be "especially careful review" of potentially controversial articles.
http://snipr.com/uxi63
from ScienceNOW Daily News
For women, genetic screening offers the hope of better understanding the likelihood that they'll develop breast cancer. But reality doesn't match that dream, at least not yet. Scientists at the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) Wednesday reported that DNA doesn't predict breast cancer risk much better than a questionnaire. The small improvement does not yet justify the cost of introducing the technique into the clinic, they say.
In recent years, several gene mutations have been discovered that increase a woman's risk of breast cancer. ...In theory, testing for these genes could allow women to make more informed choices about how often to undergo routine mammograms, for example, or, more radically, whether to take anticancer drugs like tamoxifen prophylactically.
These decisions are currently made by patients, in consultation with clinicians, based on a predicted risk of cancer provided by the so-called Gail model. This model calculates a risk based on the answers to seven questions, including the age at which a woman began menstruating, the age at which she had her first child, and the number of relatives with breast cancer.
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from Science News
Ten of the nation's most innovative scientists convened in Washington this week to receive their version of Olympic Gold -- temporarily putting aside their homework to do so. Erika DeBenedictis, 18, of Albuquerque won first place in the Intel Science Talent Search, a prestigious competition for high school seniors, at a gala held the evening of March 16.
DeBenedictis earned a $100,000 scholarship from the Intel Foundation for her work designing an autonomous navigation system that could help spacecraft travel swiftly and efficiently along an "interplanetary superhighway," using planets' gravity to catch a ride. Second place and a $75,000 scholarship went to David Liu, 18, of Saratoga, Calif. Liu wrote software to automatically search and organize digital pictures.
He trained a computer algorithm to recognize when certain features, like buildings, faces or the color green, were present in a picture, and wrote a program to display similar pictures in linked groups. ... Akhil Mathew, 18, of Madison, N.J., won third place and a $50,000 scholarship for his work on a class of complex numbers called Deligne categories, which combined algebraic geometry, representation theory and category theory.
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from National Geographic News
Newfound stone tools suggest the evolutionary history of the "hobbits" on the Indonesian island of Flores stretches back a million years, a new study says--200,000 years longer than previously thought.
The hobbit mystery was sparked by the 2004 discovery of bones on Flores that belonged to a three-foot-tall, 55-pound female with a grapefruit-size brain. The tiny, hobbit-like creature--controversially dubbed a new human species, Homo floresiensis--persisted on the remote island until about 18,000 years ago, even as "modern" humans spread around the world, experts say.
Found in million-year-old volcanic sediments, the newly discovered tools are "simple sharp-edged flakes" like those found at nearby sites on Flores--sites dated to later time periods but also associated with hobbits and their ancestors--said study co-leader Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at the University of Wollongong in Australia, via e-mail.
http://snipr.com/uxi88
from the New York Times (Registration Required)
MOSCOW -- When the Soviet Union introduced its Alfa class submarine -- at the time, the world's fastest -- the subs were the bane of American sailors. Now, the reactors that powered those submarines are being marketed as the next innovation in green power.
Environmentalists say the technology is outdated and potentially dangerous, and marketing it as green energy is an abuse of nuclear power's good green name. The Russians are not alone in pushing the idea that the next generation of nuclear reactors should have more in common with the small power plants on submarines than the sprawling installations of today. The kinds of marine reactors the Russians are promoting, though, also happen to create a byproduct -- used fuel -- that no one knows how to handle. Right now, that spent fuel is being stored at naval yards in the Russian Arctic.
http://snipr.com/uxi8x
from the Minneapolis Star Tribune (Registration Required)
Breast cancer researchers say they could cut years off the time required to test new drugs for treating certain kinds of tumors under a study about to begin at the University of Minnesota and the Mayo Clinic.
The study, being launched at 17 centers nationwide, is among the first of its kind, researchers from a national consortium said Wednesday. Known as I-SPY2, the study is designed to compare several experimental drugs at once and tailor them to the breast cancer patients who are most likely to benefit.
Thanks to technological advances, researchers say, they will quickly identify which drugs are effective for different groups of patients, based on the genetic or molecular makeup of their tumors. At the same time, drugs that show no benefit can be quickly dropped, without wasting years and millions of dollars on further study.
http://snipr.com/uxi9h
from BBC News Online
Europe's Planck observatory has given another brief glimpse of its work. The space telescope's main goal is to map the "oldest light" in the Universe, but this data is being kept under wraps until the surveying is complete.
Instead, Planck scientists have released a snapshot of the colossal swathes of cold dust that spread through the Milky Way galaxy. Such imagery will be very useful to astronomers seeking to understand star formation.
It is in the regions of space that are most dense in terms of gas and dust that are likely to give rise to new suns. The latest Planck pictures will be of special interest to researchers working on the European Space Agency's (Esa) other great telescope, Herschel. This observatory is investigating processes that trigger the creation of stars.
http://snipr.com/uxia2
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