from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Just over two years ago, Rajendra K. Pachauri seemed destined for a scientist's version of sainthood: A vegetarian economist-engineer who leads the United Nations' climate change panel, he accepted the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the panel, sharing the honor with former Vice President Al Gore.
But Dr. Pachauri and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are now under intense scrutiny, facing accusations of scientific sloppiness and potential financial conflicts of interest from climate skeptics, right-leaning politicians and even some mainstream scientists. Senator John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, called for Dr. Pachauri's resignation last week.
Critics, writing in Britain's Sunday Telegraph and elsewhere, have accused Dr. Pachauri of profiting from his work as an adviser to businesses, including Deutsche Bank and Pegasus Capital Advisors, a New York investment firm--a claim he denies.
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from BBC News Online
The results from the highest-energy particle experiments carried out at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in December have begun to yield their secrets.
Scientists from the LHC's Compact Muon Solenoid detector has now totted up all of the resulting particle interactions.
They wrote in the Journal of High Energy Physics that the run created more particles than theory predicted. However, the glut of particles should not affect results as the experiment runs to even higher energies this year.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Women who give birth after age 40 are nearly twice as likely to have a child with autism as those under 25, but it is unlikely that delayed parenthood plays a big role in the current autism epidemic, California researchers reported Monday.
The findings were expected to draw widespread attention because of the intense public interest in autism, but their true impact was expected to be simply in suggesting further avenues of research.
Surprisingly, the age of the father plays little role unless the mother is younger than 30 and the father is over 40, according to the analysis of all births in California in the 1990s.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
The Obama administration proposed a new climate service on Monday that would provide Americans with predictions on how global warming will affect everything from drought to sea levels.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Service, modeled loosely on the 140-year-old National Weather Service, would provide forecasts to farmers, regional water managers and businesses affected by changing climate conditions.
The move is essentially a reorganization of NOAA, and would bring the agency's climate research arm together with its more consumer-oriented services. It would not come with a boost in funding. A Web portal launched Monday at www.climate.gov provides a single entry point to NOAA's climate information, data, products and services.
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from USA Today
The dead of winter may not be the time when most people's thoughts turn toward the allure of a hamburger on the grill. But from a food safety standpoint, it's probably the safest time there is to eat ground beef.
"The theory is that animals are carrying higher levels of E. coli during the summer months, and sometimes they may overwhelm the systems in place to control pathogen contamination in (processing) plants," says James Marsden, a professor of food safety and security at Kansas State University.
... So industry and researchers are turning their sights to new technologies being deployed on the farm, the feedlot and at the slaughterhouse to knock E. coli O157:H7 down to winter levels all year round.
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from BusinessWeek
People who down two or more soft drinks a week may have double the risk of developing deadly pancreatic cancer, compared to non-soda drinkers, new research suggests.
But the overall number of people developing the malignancy remains low, with the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) estimating 42,470 new cases last year.
"Soft drinks are linked with a higher risk of pancreatic cancer," said Noel Mueller, lead author of a study appearing in the February issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. "We can't speculate too much on the mechanism because this is an observational study, but the increased risk may be working through effects of the hormone insulin."
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
This is a story about a waterfall, the World Bank and 4,000 homeless toads. Maybe the story will have a happy ending, and the bright-golden spray toads, each so small it could easily sit on a dime, will return to the African gorge where they once lived, in the spray of a waterfall on the Kihansi River in Tanzania.
The river is dammed now, courtesy of the bank. The waterfall is 10 percent of what it was. And the toads are now extinct in the wild. But 4,000 of them live in the Bronx and Toledo, Ohio, where scientists at the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Toledo Zoo are keeping them alive in hopes, somehow, of returning them to the wild. This month, the Bronx Zoo will formally open a small exhibit displaying the toads in its Reptile House.
Meanwhile, though, the toads embody the larger conflicts between conservation and economic development and the complexity of trying to preserve and restore endangered species to the wild. Their story also raises questions about how much effort should go to save any one species.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
Americans love turkeys, so it's surprising how little researchers know about the birds' early relationship to humans.
Many archaeologists credited Mesoamericans--who lived in the area extending from present-day Mexico to Honduras--with bringing domesticated turkeys to North America sometime between 200 B.C.E. and 500 C.E., much like they brought maize, beans, and squash.
But a new study shows that Native Americans in what is now the southwestern United States likely tamed turkeys on their own.
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from National Geographic News
The first vertebrates to walk the Earth emerged from the sea almost 20 million years earlier than previously thought, say scientists who have discovered footprints from an 8-foot-long prehistoric creature.
Dozens of the 395-million-year-old fossil footprints were recently discovered on a former marine tidal flat or lagoon in southeastern Poland.
The prints were made by tetrapods--animals with backbones and four limbs--and could rewrite the history of when, where, and why fish evolved limbs and first walked onto land, the study says.
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from Scientific American
Globally, roughly 13 million hectares of forest fall to the blade or fire each year. Such deforestation has long been driven by farmers eking out a slash-and-burn living or loggers using new roads to cut inroads into pristine forest.
But now new data appears to show that, at least for the first five years of the 21st century, big block clearings that reflect industrial deforestation have come to dominate, rather than smaller-scale efforts that leave behind long, narrow swaths of cleared land.
Geographer Ruth DeFries of Columbia University and her colleagues used satellite images from Landsat, along with the MODIS instrument on Aqua to analyze tree-clearing in countries ringing the tropics, representing 98 percent of all remaining tropical forest.
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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.
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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.
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from Time
Basic biology suggests that plants might grow faster in a world with more carbon dioxide, and field experiments bear that out: when you pump extra CO2 into a field or a forest, trees and other vegetation tend to get bigger.
There are plenty of caveats attached: without other nutrients, the size and health of CO2-enriched plants can be compromised, and in some cases noxious weeds like poison ivy do better than the greenery you might prefer. But perhaps the biggest question of all is how closely such artificial situations translate in the real world.
That question is a long way from being answered, but a study published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences takes a small step in that direction. A team of researchers used 22 years' worth of carefully accumulated measurements of hardwood forests in and near the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, in Edgewater, Md., to show that their growth has accelerated significantly. On average, the stands were expanding at a rate of two extra tons of mass per acre per year, by the end of the study--the equivalent of a single two-foot-diameter tree, if you could grow a tree that big in a year.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Until last week, paleontologists could offer no clear-cut evidence for the color of dinosaurs. Then researchers provided evidence that a dinosaur called Sinosauropteryx had a white-and-ginger striped tail. And now a team of paleontologists has published a full-body portrait of another dinosaur, in striking plumage that would have delighted that great painter of birds John James Audubon.
"This is actual science, not Avatar," said Richard O. Prum, an evolutionary biologist at Yale and co-author of the new study, published in Science.
Dr. Prum and his colleagues took advantage of the fact that feathers contain pigment-loaded sacs called melanosomes. In 2009, they demonstrated that melanosomes survived for millions of years in fossil bird feathers. The shape and arrangement of melanosomes help produce the color of feathers, so the scientists were able to get clues about the color of fossil feathers from their melanosomes alone.
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from National Public Radio
Is the "primordial soup" theory--the idea that life emerged from a prebiotic broth--past its expiration date? Biochemist Nick Lane thinks so. The University College London writer and his colleagues argue that the 81-year-old notion just doesn't hold water.
Lane [says] there's another possible explanation for the emergence of life. But before we get to that, why toss out the soup theory? Lane says the idea of a primordial soup goes back to 1929, and great biologists like J.B.S. Haldane.
"He proposed that the Earth's early atmosphere was composed of simple gases like methane and ammonia. And they would react together under the influence of ultraviolet rays or lightning to produce a thin 'soup'--which became thicker over time--of organic molecules," Lane says.
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from Science News
Sea slugs make memories with a twist. Screwing a normal nerve cell protein into a distorted shape helps slugs, and possibly people, lock in memories, new research shows.
Notably, the shape change also brings a shift in the protein's behavior, leading it to form clumps. That kind of behavior is the sort seen in prions, the misshapen, infectious proteins that cause mad cow disease, scrapie and other disorders. But the new study, published February 5 in Cell, shows a possible normal function for the shape-shifting, suggesting that twists and clumps don't necessarily make prions monsters.
In one sense, prions are machines of "molecular memory," says Yury Chernoff, a biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and editor in chief of the journal Prion. The proteins remember what happened to them--changing shapes--and then transmit that change to other proteins. "But the notion of these machines being used for cellular, and therefore organismal, memory is truly amazing," he says.
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from Nature News
The burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil releases carbon dioxide that alters the balance of carbon isotopes naturally found in the environment--an effect that is now being found in food, reveals a US study.
Modern methods for tracking the origins of processed foods use isotopes--atoms of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons. Of the most common naturally occurring isotopes of carbon ... the heavier carbon-13 isotope is rarer.
... As part of an undergraduate project intended to show how isotope analysis works, geochemist William Peck at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, got his students to analyse maple syrup from different parts of the northeastern United States. "Our intent was really just to see if isotope values varied by geography or if anyone was putting in sweeteners," says Peck.
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from the Times of India
The cutting-edge technology of Bt brinjal [eggplant] has had an unintended consequence. The public outrage that followed the regulatory clearance of the first ever GM food crop has forced environment minister Jairam Ramesh to adopt an innovation in public administration.
No minister has ever before crisscrossed the country to hold a series of public consultations, that too on a policy matter already approved by a statutory regulator. Ramesh has announced that he would present his findings to the prime minister shortly following the last of the seven consultation meetings due in Bangalore on February 6.
Ramesh came up with the device of public consultations on October 15, 2009, just a day after the regulator in his ministry, the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), had given its go-ahead to the commercial cultivation of Bt brinjal. The series of consultation meetings chaired by him, starting in Kolkata on January 13, have turned out to be as dramatic, given the manner in which pro and anti-GM lobbies sought to demonstrate not only the strength of their arguments but also their lung power.
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from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)
The basic physics of sailing seem obvious: A sail catches the wind. The energy is transferred to the hull. The boat is pushed forward.
Of course, any sailor worth his salt knows it's not that simple, and sailing the boats of this year's America's Cup, scheduled to begin today off the coast of Valencia, Spain, may be something akin to rocket science.
By all reports, both vessels in this year's 33rd staging of the America's Cup (racing began in 1851, making it the world's oldest active sports trophy) are capable of sailing two to three times faster than the wind, so fast in fact that "they make their own wind," said Bryon Anderson, a physicist at Kent State University and a longtime sailor.
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from the News and Observer (Raleigh, NC)
PORTLAND, Maine (Associated Press) -- The federal government advises throwing most unused or expired medications into the trash instead of down the drain, but they can end up in the water anyway, a study from Maine suggests.
Tiny amounts of discarded drugs have been found in water at three landfills in the state, confirming suspicions that pharmaceuticals thrown into household trash are ending up in water that drains through waste, according to a survey by the state's environmental agency that's one of only a handful to have looked at the presence of drugs in landfills.
That landfill water--known as leachate--eventually ends up in rivers. Most of Maine doesn't draw its drinking water from rivers where the leachate ends up, but in other states that do, water supplies that come from rivers could potentially be contaminated.
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from BBC News Online
Migrating insects use highways in the sky to speed their journey, according to a study published in Science magazine.
Researchers say moths and butterflies use sophisticated methods to find winds that will take them in certain directions for thousands of kilometres. The little creatures travel on winds of up to 100km (60 miles) per hour.
They use internal compasses to find these fast moving winds to carry them to their journey's end.
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from the Guardian (U.K.)
Scientists have isolated a gene sequence that appears to determine how fast our bodies age, the first time a link between DNA and human lifespan has been found.
The discovery could have a profound impact on public health and raises the best hope yet for drugs that prevent the biological wear and tear behind common age-related conditions such as heart disease and certain cancers.
The work is expected to pave the way for screening programmes to spot people who are likely to age fast and be more susceptible to heart problems and other conditions early in life. People who test positive for the gene variant in their 20s could be put on cholesterol-lowering statin drugs and encouraged to exercise, eat healthily and avoid smoking.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
The world's biggest and most expensive physics experiment will finally be going into regular operation later this month, but it is going to operate at only half power for the next two years, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, said Thursday.
CERN's Large Hadron Collider was built over 15 years and at a cost of $10 billion to accelerate protons to energies of 7 trillion electron volts apiece and then bang them together in a search for primordial forces and new laws of physics. But the machine has been plagued with problems.
In the fall of 2008, after the collider was first turned on, an electrical splice between two of the superconducting magnets that guide the proton beams exploded during a test, casting doubt on the integrity of thousands of such splices in the collider, which is 18 miles around.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Newly computer-processed images of Pluto taken by the Hubble Space Telescope show that it is not simply a ball of ice and rock, but a dynamic world that undergoes dramatic atmospheric changes produced by its seasons, NASA said Thursday.
The images show an icy and dark molasses-colored world that is highly mottled and whose northern hemisphere is now getting brighter.
The images show that the body--once considered the ninth and most distant planet but now reduced to the status of dwarf planet--also turned noticeably redder in the two years after the turn of the millennium for reasons that are not clear, and that its equator features a large bright spot whose origin remains a mystery.
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from the Scientist (Registration Required)
... Drugs can pass through a dozen or more hands on the way to the pharmacy and a consumer's medicine cabinet. The patchiness of the drug distribution network and the absence of a proper paper trail ... has allowed unscrupulous middlemen to launder counterfeit medications within the legitimate supply chain that leads to a local pharmacy. Foreign-produced drugs are also illegally "diverted" into the domestic supply chain.
In the last 10 years, counterfeit pharmaceuticals have become big business. According to the World Health Organization, counterfeit drugs are any medication that is deliberately and fraudulently mislabeled with respect to its true identity or source.
For instance, counterfeits may have packaging that matches a brand-name drug but were produced under appalling sanitary conditions, and may contain no active ingredient or a completely different ingredient. By some estimates, 15-25% of malaria drugs in sub-Saharan Africa are counterfeit or substandard.
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