Science in the News Weekly is a digest of science news stories appearing in the mainstream media. It is delivered every Monday afternoon (or Tuesday afternoon in the case of a Monday holiday) as part of Sigma Xi's public understanding of science program area, in conjunction with American Scientist magazine.

Science at the Top of the News for February 1-8

Last week National Geographic's collection of prize-winning pictures of fluid motion became the most viewed article by subscribers to Science in the News Daily. The other top items involved whether ancient golden artifacts at the University of Pennsylvania's archaeology museum came from the fabled city of Troy and why water is the strangest liquid. Subscribe now for free daily updates.

Penn State Climatologist Cleared of Scientific Misconduct

Pennsylvania State University climatologist Michael E. Mann was largely cleared of wrongdoing by an academic panel over controversial e-mail messages hacked from the University of East Anglia in England, but a second panel will determine whether his conduct undermined public confidence in the science of climate change.

Meanwhile, the Guardian looked into whether Phil Jones, the British climate scientist at the center of the leaked e-mail controversy, stymied public information requests by withholding key temperature data on which some of his work was based.

In other climate and environmental news, the New York Times looked at the ecological consequences of the spread of coal mining in southeastern Australia's Upper Hunter Valley.

And International Paper Co. and MeadWestvaco Corp. plan to transform tree farming in the southeastern U.S. by replacing native pine with genetically engineered eucalyptus, a rapidly growing Australian tree. A controversial gene splice will restrict the trees' ability to reproduce, which the companies hope will quiet fears that the eucalyptus will overrun native forests.

NASA's Future, Pluto's Closeup, Australia's Violent Past

President Obama's plans for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, unveiled last week, include a push to find new ways of going into space.

In other space news, new images of Pluto taken by the Hubble Space Telescope have revealed that it is a dynamic world that undergoes dramatic atmospheric changes that are seasonal.

Evidence of possible impact craters off the coast of Australia has led a researcher to theorize that pieces of a giant asteroid or comet may have crashed there about 1,500 years ago.

Meanwhile, the Hubble Space Telescope captured the image of two asteroids shortly after they collided head-on between Mars and Jupiter at more than 11,000 miles per hour. At first astronomers mistook the scattered debris for a comet's tail.

And a new ground-based technique to study the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system was used by a group of astronomers to spot methane gas on an exoplanet. They say the technique could be used by many other earth-bound telescopes.

LHC Starts Up Again—at Half Power

CERN's problem-plagued Large Hadron Collider will finally become operational later this month, but officials there said last week that it will operate at only half power for the next two years. Researchers hope the enormous machine will eventually reveal the secrets of primordial forces and perhaps even new laws of physics.

Power companies are exploring new technologies known collectively as the "smart grid," which promises to give customers remote control of their home energy use through the Internet and can even sense when a fallen tree has interrupted service and reroute power to inconvenience the fewest customers.

In other technology news, leaks of radioactive water at U.S. nuclear power plants in recent years have raised questions about the nation's aging nuclear facilities at a time when many argue that nuclear power should play a greater role in fulfilling our energy needs.

And this looks to be the year when the next generation of hybrid electric cars begin to appear in driveways across America. Although only slightly more than 10,000 will be available next fall, it will mean a major reality check with American buyers.

And, finally, New Scientist looked at the vulnerability of digital information storage and what it could mean for the long-term preservation of human knowledge.

A Westerner in Ancient Mongolia

DNA analysis recently revealed that a skeleton found in a 2,000-year-old cemetery in eastern Mongolia belonged to a man of European descent. What's more, scholars believe he had a prominent position in the Xiongnu Empire, which included ethnically diverse nomadic tribes.

In other news of the distant past, parts of an ancient Roman law text thought to have been lost forever have turned up in the bindings of other old books. The Codex Gregorianus was compiled in the third century A.D. and began a long tradition of collecting Roman emperors' laws in a single volume.

Researchers have taken an unusual approach in trying to determine how a cat-sized, winged dinosaur flew. They built a life-size model from a beautifully preserved fossil skeleton found in China.

And, finally, a study of rotting fish has given scientists insight that could help them better interpret some of the oldest known fossils. They observed particular patterns of decay that should help them more accurately identify very early marine fossils.

The Heroic Cells of an Unwitting Donor

Many modern medical breakthroughs have come about thanks to laboratory research that relied on an immortal cell line known as HeLa, which stands for Henrietta Lacks, the woman from whom the cells came. A new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, was much in the news last week, thanks to reviews and author interviews.

In other biomedical news, the American Psychiatric Association plans to release a draft of the fifth version of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders this week, the subject of an article by the Economist.

A new study found that four out of 23 patients diagnosed as being in a vegetative state showed signs of consciousness on brain-imaging tests, and one was even able to answer yes-or-no questions using the researchers' technique.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel looked at a stem cell treatment in China for a rare neurological disorder, one of dozens of medical treatments overseas that are sidestepping Western standards and enticing desperate patients and their families.

Meanwhile, the British medical journal Lancet retracted a controversial 1998 paper that claimed a link between vaccines and autism. But the New York Times reported that the retraction is unlikely to sway many parents who blame vaccinations for their children's mental problems.

Another new study found that infants who died of SIDS had low levels of serotonin, a brain chemical that helps the brainstem regulate breathing, temperature, sleeping, waking and other automatic functions.

And in what could turn out to be a landmark study, researchers found that sex education classes that focus on abstinence can convince a significant proportion of sixth- and seventh-graders to delay sexual activity.

Nobrow Cartoons by Mark Heath

Nobrow Cartoons

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