from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
For more than three months, the world has waited for a permanent fix to the BP oil leak. It may not have to wait much longer. As early as Sunday evening, the oil giant will take the first steps in a weeks-long process that, though highly complex, has a simple idea at its core: to cram a leaky hole full of cement.
It's the preferred, time-tested method for taming a wild well, and it is absolutely necessary, experts say. Even though no oil has flowed into the Gulf of Mexico since a sealing cap was installed over the gusher July 15, they say it will take a cement job to shut the well for good.
... The first step of the "static kill" operation will involve sending dense, specially formulated drilling mud, weighing 13 pounds per gallon--about 1.5 times the weight of a gallon of seawater--from ships down a mile-long drill pipe and eventually into the well through a valve. This will reestablish control over the high-pressure oil and gas that was lost by the operators of the Deepwater Horizon on April 20 ...
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from BBC News Online
The amount of phytoplankton--tiny marine plants--in the top layers of the oceans has declined markedly over the last century, research suggests. Writing in the journal Nature, scientists say the decline appears to be linked to rising water temperatures.
They made their finding by looking at records of the transparency of sea water, which is affected by the plants. The decline--about 1% per year--could be ecologically significant as plankton sit at the base of marine food chains.
This is the first study to attempt a comprehensive global look at plankton changes over such a long time scale. "What we think is happening is that the oceans are becoming more stratified as the water warms," said research leader Daniel Boyce from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
The nation's ability to identify the source of a nuclear weapon used in a terrorist attack is fragile and eroding, according to a report released Thursday by the National Research Council.
Such highly specialized detective work, known as nuclear attribution, seeks to study clues from fallout and radioactive debris as a way to throw light on the identity of the attacker and the maker of the weapon. In recent years, federal officials have sought to improve such analytic skills, arguing that nuclear terrorism is a grave, long-term threat to the nation.
The major goals of the federal efforts are to clarify options for retaliation and to deter terrorists by letting them know that nuclear devices have fingerprints that atomic specialists can find and trace. The report, "Nuclear Forensics: A Capability at Risk," was made public by the National Research Council, the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences. It summarizes a secret version completed in January.
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from National Geographic News
"Global warming is undeniable," and it's happening fast, a new U.S. government report says.
An in-depth analysis of ten climate indicators all point to a marked warming over the past three decades, with the most recent decade being the hottest on record, according to the latest of the U.S. National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration's annual "State of the Climate" reports, which was released Wednesday. Reliable global climate record-keeping began in the 1880s.
The report focused on climate changes measured in 2009 in the context of newly available data on long-term developments. For instance, surface air temperatures recorded from more than 7,000 weather stations around the world over the past few decades confirm an "unmistakable upward trend," the study says. And for the first time, scientists put data from climate indicators--such as ocean temperature and sea-ice cover--together in one place. Their consistency "jumps off the page at you," report co-author Derek Arndt said.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
For anyone trying to save a victim of cardiac arrest, the questions used to be: How many breaths do I give? How many chest compressions? And do I really want to do this in the first place?
New research published Thursday, however, adds to growing evidence that cardiopulmonary resuscitation could be far simpler and less off-putting. For adults in cardiac arrest, mouth-to-mouth breathing might not be needed--or even helpful. Two studies in which telephone dispatchers instructed bystanders how to perform CPR found that patients who got only chest compressions were as likely to survive as ones getting conventional CPR that included rescue breathing.
About one-quarter of people who collapse away from a hospital get CPR before paramedics arrive, which roughly doubles their chance of survival. The fraction of bystanders too squeamish to begin CPR because of mouth-to-mouth contact isn't known. But researchers are betting it's high.
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from SciDevNet
Concerns that research fraud is on the rise have led science leaders from across the world to put together a set of principles and a voluntary code on research integrity.
The principles, intended to serve as a "guide for professionally responsible research practices throughout the world," were debated at the Second World Conference on Research Integrity, in Singapore last week (21-24 July) and will be published in a few weeks as the 'Singapore Statement on Research Integrity.'
They will aim to rise above cultural differences over definitions of misconduct and to have a broader appeal than existing codes, drawn up by the European Science Foundation and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Today's codes fail to account for nascent science structures in developing countries or the research aspirations of emerging nations in Asia and Latin America, the conference heard.
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from Nature News
Companies that sell direct-to-consumer (DTC) gene-testing kits have had a tumultuous time in the past ten days. On 19 and 20 July, at a hearing held by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), regulators heard comments from stakeholders about how the government might best oversee the validity and accuracy of such tests and other in vitro diagnostics.
Later in the same week, at a congressional hearing, the US Government Accountability Office presented results from a damning year-long investigation into the DTC gene-testing industry that characterized some of the tests as "misleading" and "of no practical use," and the marketing surrounding them as deceptive and fraudulent.
Many in the field of genomics and personalized medicine--in both academia and industry--concede that regulation is necessary. ... The fear, however, is that government backlash against questions over the tests' validity and inconsistent results from different companies will lead to an overly strict regulatory framework that will crush scientific innovation.
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from NPR
You could say human evolution started when the first brave ape came down from the trees. But scientists have long said that it was making tools that really set humans apart. And if tools define our species, then it's our hands we have to thank.
It took millions of years for our hands to go from grasping tree limbs to writing poetry. And scientists believe that making stone tools helped propel that evolution.
At George Washington University, anthropologist Erin Marie Williams is trying to find out how that evolution took place. How did tool-making help shape our hands and wrists? She studies flint-knapping--the art of making stone tools the way our ancestors did.
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from New Scientist
... For the past two decades, Alzheimer's research has been dominated by the "amyloid cascade hypothesis": the idea that it is the plaques themselves that lead to the cognitive problems of Alzheimer's. They are aggregations of a protein called amyloid beta, which forms naturally in the brain, but whose production somehow goes into overdrive during Alzheimer's disease. The proteins clump together to form plaques, which are toxic to neurons, eventually killing them, or so the theory goes.
... The excitement has faded fast. So far, at least, none of the treatments derived from the amyloid hypothesis has ever resulted in significant clinical improvement in clinical trials. "It has been a problem for people working on [the amyloid plaque theory] for 20 years--the drugs that have come out of it have all failed at stage II or III of clinical trials," says Susanne Sorensen, head of research at the UK's Alzheimer's Society. Sorensen has never seen a trial that reported people getting better.
Take b-mab, for example. This drug was developed to clear amyloid plaques from the brain, but results released in 2008 showed that it had no significant effect on the rate of cognitive decline (Neurology, vol 73, p 2061). That raised a question. Was b-mab failing to clear the plaques, or were the plaques themselves not the problem?
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
... The BP oil spill has sent millions of barrels gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, focusing international attention on America's third coast and prompting questions about whether it will ever fully recover from the spill. Now that the oil on the surface appears to be dissipating, the notion of a recovery from the spill, repeated by politicians, strikes some here as short-sighted. The gulf had been suffering for decades before the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20.
"There's a tremendous amount of outrage with the oil spill, and rightfully so," said Felicia Coleman, director of Florida State University's Coastal and Marine Laboratory. "But where's the outrage at the thousands and millions of little cuts we've made on a daily basis?"
The gulf is one of the most diverse ecosystems in the hemisphere, a stopping point for migratory birds from South America to the Arctic, home to abundant wildlife and natural resources. But like no other American body of water, the gulf bears the environmental consequences of the country's economic pursuits and appetites, including oil and corn.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
The lakes of southern Titan are shrinking. The level of Ontario Lacus, the largest lake in the southern hemisphere of this Saturnian moon, has fallen by some 15 feet over the last four years, causing its shore to recede by as much as 6 miles in some places. Other lakes nearby have similarly receded, according to radar measurements made by the Cassini spacecraft.
However, if prolonged spells of 90-degree temperatures have you yearning for a refreshing icy dip, there are still plenty of bathing opportunities on Titan. Of course the lakes there are made of liquid methane--and the 90 degrees of temperature are on the Kelvin scale, near enough to absolute zero to challenge even the most cosmically adept polar bear. The atmosphere is nitrogen and methane.
Titan is the only body in the solar system other than Earth that has been found to harbor liquid on its surface, leading many planetary scientists and aspiring astrobiologists to speculate that the same organic chemical processes that led to life on Earth are occurring in a frozen slush of hydrocarbons on Titan.
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from Nature News
It started with a story in the Press-Register of Mobile, Alabama. On 16 July, the paper reported that beleaguered oil giant BP was hurriedly signing up scientists to gather data for the company, to aid its defence in cases arising from the Deepwater Horizon spill. The catch was that these lucrative contracts also restricted the scientists' freedom to publish their research. Within a week, headlines around the world were accusing BP of 'gagging' scientists.
But researchers in the Gulf of Mexico region describe a more complex situation. Scientists, they say, are being trapped in the middle of a scramble by BP and the federal government to round up expert witnesses. The rush is being driven by the Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA), a process defined by US federal law, in which those responsible for the spill, along with state and federal agencies, collect data to assess the environmental impact of the accident.
Government agencies typically rely on their own scientists, whereas responsible parties consult with firms that have in-house scientific expertise, says Michael Wascom, a coastal and ocean management lawyer at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge. The size of this spill is unprecedented, however, so academic scientists are increasingly being called on.
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from Time
A healthy social life may be as good for your long-term health as avoiding cigarettes, according to a massive research review released Tuesday by the journal PLoS Medicine.
Researchers at Brigham Young University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill pooled data from 148 studies on health outcomes and social relationships--every research paper on the topic they could find, involving more than 300,000 men and women across the developed world--and found that those with poor social connections had on average 50% higher odds of death in the study's follow-up period (an average of 7.5 years) than people with more robust social ties.
That boost in longevity is about as large as the mortality difference observed between smokers and nonsmokers, the study's authors say. And it's larger than differences in the risk of death associated with many other well-known lifestyle factors, including lack of exercise and obesity.
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from BBC News Online
The characteristic koalas, kangaroos, possums and wombats of Australia share a common American ancestor, according to genetic research from Germany. A University of Muenster team drew up a marsupial family tree based on DNA.
Writing in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology journal, they suggest a single marsupial species moved from the Americas to Australia. Marsupials differ from other mammals in that mothers carry their young in a pouch after birth.
As well as the familiar Australian species, the family includes the opossums and shrew opossums of North and South America, and also has a presence in Asian countries including Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. "I think this is pretty strong evidence now for the hypothesis of a single migration [to Australia] and a common ancestor," said Juergen Schmitz, one of the research team.
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from USA Today
Laboratory tests found high levels of the estrogen-like chemical bisphenol A on 40% of cash register receipts from major U.S. businesses, the Environmental Working Group today reports.
BPA levels higher than those in canned foods, baby bottles and infant formula were detected on at least one of several receipts from Chevron, McDonalds, CVS, KFC, Whole Foods, Safeway, the U.S. Postal Service, Walmart and the U.S. House of Representatives cafeteria, according to the private Washington-based research group.
In contrast, receipts from Target, Starbucks, Bank of America ATMs and the U.S. Senate cafeteria were BPA-free or contained only trace amounts. BPA, a plastic hardener linked to breast cancer, heart disease, diabetes and other health problems, reacts with dye to form black print on receipts handled by millions of Americans every day.
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from Discovery News
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, dogs often shower us with praise. New research has just determined dogs automatically imitate us, even when it is not in their best interest to do so.
The study, published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B, provides the first evidence that dogs copy at least some of our body movements and behaviors in ways that are spontaneous and voluntary.
In other words, they can't really help themselves when it comes to copying people. "This suggests that, like humans, dogs are subject to 'automatic imitation;' they cannot inhibit online, the tendency to imitate head use and/or paw use," lead author Friederike Range and her colleagues conclude.
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from Scientific American
A deadly infectious disease once thought to be exclusively tropical has gained a toehold in the Pacific Northwest, and health experts suspect climate change is partially to blame. Last week the CDC issued a report warning U.S. doctors to be alert for patients showing signs of a cryptococcal infection.
The infection is spread by a fungus, Cryptococcus gattii, that attacks the nasal cavity and spreads to other body sites, causing pneumonia, meningitis and other lung, brain or muscle ailments. The disease also affects animals.
Until 1999 most human cases were limited to Australia and other tropical and sub-tropical regions, including Asia and Africa, along with parts of southern California. But in 2004 the first case was reported in Oregon, and as of July 60 cases in the Pacific Northwest have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of the 45 cases in the region with known outcomes, nine patients died because of the infection and another six died with it, the CDC reported.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
The rapid growth of wind farms, whose output is hard to schedule reliably or even predict, has the nation's electricity providers scrambling to develop energy storage to ensure stability and improve profits.
As the wind installations multiply, companies have found themselves dumping energy late at night, adjusting the blades so they do not catch the wind, because there is no demand for the power. And grid operators, accustomed to meeting demand by adjusting supplies, are now struggling to maintain stability as supplies fluctuate.
On the cutting edge of a potential solution is Hawaii, where state officials want 70 percent of energy needs to be met by renewable sources like the wind, sun or biomass by 2030. A major problem is that it is impossible for generators on the islands to export surpluses to neighboring companies or to import power when the wind towers are becalmed.
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from National Geographic News
The recent decoding of a cryptic cup, the excavation of ancient Jerusalem tunnels, and other archaeological detective work may help solve one of the great biblical mysteries: Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?
The new clues hint that the scrolls, which include some of the oldest known biblical documents, may have been the textual treasures of several groups, hidden away during wartime--and may even be "the great treasure from the Jerusalem Temple," which held the Ark of the Covenant, according to the Bible.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered more than 60 years ago in seaside caves near an ancient settlement called Qumran. The conventional wisdom is that a breakaway Jewish sect called the Essenes--thought to have occupied Qumran during the first centuries B.C. and A.D.--wrote all the parchment and papyrus scrolls. But new research suggests many of the Dead Sea Scrolls originated elsewhere and were written by multiple Jewish groups, some fleeing the circa-A.D. 70 Roman siege that destroyed the legendary Temple in Jerusalem.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
Why does human conversation come so easily? A new study chalks it up to a sort of "mind meld" between participants. Researchers have found that the brains of speakers and listeners become synchronized as they converse and that this "neural coupling" is key to effective communication.
Scientists have traditionally considered talking and listening to be two independent processes. The idea is that speech is produced in some parts of the brain, including a region known as Broca's area, and understood in others, including a region known as Wernicke's area. But recent studies suggest that there's actually much more overlap. For example, partners in a conversation will unconsciously begin imitating each other, adopting similar grammatical structures, speaking rates, and even bodily postures.
This overlap helps people establish a "common ground" during conversation and may even help them predict what the other is going to say next, argue psychologist Martin Pickering of the University of Edinburgh and psychologist Simon Garrod of the University of Glasgow, both in the United Kingdom. Some researchers think that so-called mirror neurons, which fire when one individual observes the actions of another, might be involved in these interactions.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be dissolving far more rapidly than anyone expected, a piece of good news that raises tricky new questions about how fast the government should scale back its response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
The immense patches of surface oil that covered thousands of square miles of the gulf after the April 20 oil rig explosion are largely gone, though sightings of tar balls and emulsified oil continue here and there.
Reporters flying over the area Sunday spotted only a few patches of sheen and an occasional streak of thicker oil, and radar images taken since then suggest that these few remaining patches are quickly breaking down in the warm surface waters of the gulf.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
With no warning one weekday morning, investigators entered an organic grocery with a search warrant and ordered the hemp-clad workers to put down their buckets of mashed coconut cream and to step away from the nuts.
Then, guns drawn, four officers fanned out across Rawesome Foods in Venice. Skirting past the arugula and peering under crates of zucchini, they found the raid's target inside a walk-in refrigerator: unmarked jugs of raw milk.
... Cartons of raw goat and cow milk and blocks of unpasteurized goat cheese were among the groceries seized in the June 30 raid by federal, state and local authorities--the latest salvo in the heated food fight over what people can put in their mouths.
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from ABC News
Many men being treated aggressively for low-grade prostate cancer--particularly if it was detected during prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening--are unlikely to benefit from the intervention, a new study suggests. Men with screen-detected cancer and PSA levels below 4 ng/mL were less likely to have high-grade tumors, disease outside the prostate, or tumors larger than 0.5 cubic centimeters.
Yet, they were nearly 1.5 times more likely to undergo radical prostatectomy than men who had prostate cancer that was not detected by screening, Yu-Hsuan Shao of the Cancer Institute of New Jersey in New Brunswick and colleagues reported in the July 26 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine. They were also more likely to have radiation therapy.
Although the relative five-year survival for prostate cancer increased from 69 percent in 1975 to nearly 99 percent in 2003, concerns about overdiagnosis and overtreatment have arisen.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
ALBUQUERQUE -- Her car is racing at a terrifying speed through the streets of a large city, and something gruesome, something with giant eyeballs, is chasing her, closing in fast.
It was a dream, of course, and after Emily Gurule, a 50-year-old high school teacher, related it to Dr. Barry Krakow, he did not ask her to unpack its symbolism. He simply told her to think of a new one. "In your mind, with thinking and picturing, take a few minutes, close your eyes, and I want you to change the dream any way you wish," said Dr. Krakow, founder of the P.T.S.D. Sleep Clinic at the Maimonides Sleep Arts and Sciences center here and a leading researcher of nightmares.
... The technique, used while patients are awake, is called scripting or dream mastery and is part of imagery rehearsal therapy, which Dr. Krakow helped develop. The therapy is being used to treat a growing number of nightmare sufferers. In recent years, nightmares have increasingly been viewed as a distinct disorder, and researchers have produced a growing body of empirical evidence that this kind of cognitive therapy can help reduce their frequency and intensity, or even eliminate them.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
Mathematician-turned-university-president Freeman A. Hrabowski III is known for encouraging minority students to pursue science and engineering careers. When the head of University of Maryland Baltimore County started as vice provost in 1987, black and Hispanic students were struggling in science at the school, he says.
He helped launch the Meyerhoff Scholars Program for young black males in science and engineering fields in 1988; since then, it has expanded to include people of both sexes and all races. UMBC, a predominantly white university, is now a national leader in the number of minority graduates who go on to earn doctorates in medicine, the sciences and engineering.
Hrabowski, 59, grew up in Birmingham, Ala., where he marched for civil rights and was arrested and jailed for five days at age 12. He graduated from Hampton University in Virginia at age 19 with a mathematics degree. He went on to earn a master's and a doctorate from the University of Illinois. He has been president of UMBC since 1992. In November, Time magazine named Hrabowski one of the 10 best college presidents, and in May Harvard gave him an honorary degree for his work with minority students, among other achievements. The Post spoke to Hrabowski about molding young scientists.
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from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
MEDFORD -- Inspiration for a new generation of soft-bodied robots that could burrow into inaccessible spots for everything from search-and-rescue to medical applications comes from a most unlikely place: the "moth closet'' at Tufts University.
In this nauseatingly stinky room, dozens of two-inch brownish moths cling to the wire-mesh walls of their cage. From the ceiling dangles the prize: Clusters of tiny greenish eggs cover a suspended sponge, providing the seeds of novel ideas about how to design flexible, squishy robots.
To gardeners, the greenish-blue, white-striped tobacco hornworms that will emerge from these eggs are pests. But to scientists, these caterpillars are feats of engineering, and the way their bodies move like accordions and crumple as they crawl has helped inspire several species of soft-bodied robots sitting on the shelves of a nearby laboratory.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
It's being called the largest wind power project in the country, with plans for thousands of acres of towering turbines in the Mojave Desert foothills generating electricity for 600,000 homes in Southern California. And now it's finally kicking into gear.
The multibillion-dollar Alta Wind Energy Center has had a tortured history, stretching across nearly a decade of ownership changes, opposition from local residents and transmission infrastructure delays.
But on Tuesday, the project is officially breaking ground in the Tehachapi Pass, a burgeoning hot spot for wind energy about 75 miles north of Los Angeles. When completed, Alta could produce three times as much energy as the country's largest existing wind farm, analysts said. It's slated to be done in the next decade.
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from BBC News Online
Archaeologists have discovered a 4th Century Roman villa near Aberystwyth. It is the most north-westerly villa found in Wales and has forced experts to reconsider the whole nature of Roman settlement across mid and north Wales.
Findings indicate Abermagwr had all the trappings of villas found further south, including a slate roof and glazed windows. "The discovery raises significant new questions," said Dr Toby Driver and Dr Jeffrey Davies, excavation directors.
The villa is likely to have belonged to a wealthy landowner, with pottery and coin finds on the site indicating occupation in the late 3rd and early 4th Centuries AD. It was roofed with local slates, which were cut for a pentagonal roof. The walls were built of local stone and there was a cobbled yard.
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from Nature News
Every day, Jittawadee Murphy unlocks a hot, padlocked room at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, to a swarm of malaria-carrying mosquitoes (Anopheles stephensi). ... Murphy has been studying mosquitoes for 20 years, working on ways to limit the spread of the parasites they carry. Still, she says, she would rather they were wiped off the Earth.
That sentiment is widely shared. Malaria infects some 247 million people worldwide each year, and kills nearly one million. Mosquitoes cause a huge further medical and financial burden by spreading yellow fever, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis, Rift Valley fever, Chikungunya virus and West Nile virus.
... So what would happen if there were none? Would anyone or anything miss them? Nature put this question to scientists who explore aspects of mosquito biology and ecology, and unearthed some surprising answers.
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p>from Science News
The God particle has fewer places to hide.
New data offer evidence that the heft of the Higgs particle lies somewhere in the low end of the range being probed by particle colliders on two continents. The results also hint that the particle's mass may be consistent with supersymmetry, a theory that gives every particle in the standard model of physics a much heavier partner.
The latest results come from two ongoing experiments at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory's Tevatron particle accelerator in Batavia, Ill., that suggest the elusive Higgs cannot have a mass between 158 billion and 175 billion electron volts. (1 billion electron volts, or 1 GeV, is just slightly heavier than the mass of a proton.) Ben Kilminster of Fermilab reported the finding July 26 at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Paris.
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