from Science News
If asked to name stupendously amazing things in space, most people would probably pick black holes. These evil-tinged clowns of the universe are definite wows. Insatiable is their middle name.
Grand and merciless, voracious and monstrous, pure appetite and deep mystery. The biggest fatten themselves in galaxy cores mainly via a seemingly limitless hunger for a main source of sustenance: fat, circular wads of gas that gather around the black holes and are sometimes given a name to delight any glutton, Polish doughnuts.
Black holes cloak their innards behind an “event horizon,” from inside which no message can be sent (which explains the one-liner physics joke: “Two protons walk into a black hole”). What a parade of jaw-droppers that is. Well listen up, this just in: It looks like there is a limit to the superlatives. Black holes can’t eat everything.
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from New Scientist
A former member of one of the most prominent stem-cell research teams has been found guilty of falsifying data.
New Scientist explains why the group's work is important, looks at where the findings stand now, and asks: what are the implications for the rest of stem cell biology?
Why is this research team so well known? The team, led by Catherine Verfaillie of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, claimed to have isolated a rare type of cell from bone marrow that could develop into most, if not all, of the body's tissues. Previously, only embryonic stem cells (ESCs) had been shown to be this versatile.
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from the Scientist (Registration Required)
... Venture capital investment in medical technologies has boomed over the last decade, jumping 45% in a single year, from $2.9 billion in 2006 to $4.1 billion in 2007, according to figures from the National Venture Capital Association. (Investment in the biopharma sector grew at a much less dramatic rate during that period: 13%- from $4.6 to $5.2 billion.) Still, some industry experts suggest inventors ... face an uncertain future.
As recently as 10 years ago, an inventor with a great idea could expect to be able to raise tens of millions of dollars to finance a project, and see it tested and commercialized within four to six years. Since then, however, some industry experts contend that both the time and money required to bring a product to market in the United States have, on average, doubled.
"Now it's taking 5, 7, 9 years" to bring a product to market, says Ross Jaffe of the venture capital firm Versant Ventures. "Where it used to take $20 to $40 million in capital, now it's taking $70-100 million."
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from Nature News
Astronomers searching for evidence of the mysterious energy that is speeding up the expansion of the Universe have discovered three new galaxy clusters. They used a microwave survey technique that could rival existing ways of searching for dark energy.
The discovery is the first step towards a catalogue of thousands of galaxy clusters, whose evolution in the early Universe reflects the tug of war between gravity and dark energy, the repulsive force that seems to make up three-quarters of the total mass-energy in the Universe.
The astronomers found the three clusters by searching for shadows in the cosmic microwave background, the relic radiation of the Big Bang, using a microwave telescope located at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica.
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from the Irish Times
Listening to personal music devices such as iPods at high volume over a long period can permanently damage hearing, according to a new EU study. Research carried out by the EU Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks (SCENIHR) has found that up to 10 percent of listeners risk permanent damage to their hearing if they listen to a personal music player for more then an hour a day over successive weeks at high volume.
An EU safety standard currently restricts the noise level of personal music players to 100 dB, but there is now concern that new measures may have to be introduced to further restrict volume levels in light of the latest research.
SCENIHR's research indicates that users of personal music players who listen to over five hours of music a week at high volume (exceeding 89 decibels) would exceed the current limits in place for noise allowed in the workplace. Listening for longer periods over 5 years can risk permanent hearing loss, the authors of the study say.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Energy drinks are the target of many complaints: too much sugar, too much caffeine and too many herbal extracts with dubious claims. Now, researchers say the drinks may lead to drug abuse.
In a paper published online last month in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence, Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins' School of Medicine in Baltimore and his coauthors highlighted the risks of consuming too much caffeine via energy drinks, including caffeine toxicity and dependence.
Last week, Griffiths also sent a letter, signed by 97 other experts in addiction and drug abuse policy, to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration calling for federal regulation of the labeling and content of energy drinks.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
STAR CITY, Russia— ... Everyone who works with the Russian space program has stories to tell of implacable bureaucrats, byzantine rules and decisions that seem capricious at best. And many of those stories are played out here in Star City, where cosmonauts and, now, astronauts from all over the world train to fly on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to go to the $100 billion International Space Station.
Star City has become an important second home for Americans working with their Russian counterparts, and it is about to become more important still. During the five-year gap after NASA shuts down the space shuttle program in 2010 and the next generation of spacecraft makes its debut by 2015, Russia will have the only ride for humans to the station.
The gap, which was planned by the Bush administration to create the next generation of American spacecraft without significantly increasing NASA’s budget, is controversial. But it is also all but inevitable, because much of the work to shut down the shuttles is under way, and the path to the new Constellation craft would be hard to compress even with additional financing.
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from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
Scientists have solved a long-standing mystery behind the source of a faint electrical current in trees-and it wasn't as hard as they thought. For years, inventors and scientists have driven nails into trees, wired those nails to nearby metal spikes, and wondered at the faint but predictable electrical current that resulted.
Explanations for the power source ranged from a static energy field in the earth's crust, to the possibility it was generated through rust and corrosion, similar to the old do-it-yourself potato clock experiments.
Now, a team of MIT scientists, using platinum electrodes and everyday ficus house plants, have found that the faint current actually comes from an imbalance in pH between the soil and a living tree. And that discovery is already sparking discussions about novel ways to use that electricity-including as a power source for a tree's own fire alarm.
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Most of the 2008 Nobel Prizes were announced last week. American Yoichiro Nambu at the University of Chicago won half of the physics prize for the discovery of a mechanism called spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics. Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan shared the other half for discovering the origin of the broken symmetry that predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.
German virologist Harald zur Hausen received half the award in physiology or medicine for his discovery of the human papilloma virus, which led to development of a vaccine against cervical cancer. The other half went to French virologists Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for discovering HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The exclusion of American Robert Gallo from the award prompted Scientific American to consider "The Top 10 Nobel Snubs."
The chemistry prize went to Americans Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien, along with Osamu Shimomura of Japan, for their work in isolating and refining the use of green fluorescent protein, or GFP, in jellyfish. GFP is now widely used to illuminate diverse biological systems, from neuronal circuits to cancer.
And today, the prize for economic science went to Princeton University professor Paul Krugman. He received the award for his decades of work on international trade and economic geography, most notably for "having shown the effects of economies of scale on trade patterns and on the location of economic activity," according to the citation.
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Bacteria discovered thriving in isolation in a South African gold mine have gotten the attention of astrobiologists, who say their ability to live without light or oxygen could advance the prospect of life on other planets.
Meanwhile, astronomers have used a new technique that employs gravity from a galaxy as a "cosmic zoom lens" to see a young star-forming galaxy 11 billion light-years from Earth that could provide clues to the formation of the universe.
NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft gave researchers a look at a side of Mercury they hadn't seen before in a flyby that revealed bright craters and long rays. The latest images are the first spacecraft views of the planet's northern region.
And there have been fewer sunspots so far this year than at any time since 1954, but scientists say the significance of this is not clear. The sun has been spotless on more than 200 days in 2008.
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Electric cars were all the rage at the recent Paris Motor Show. The French carmaker Renault announced plans to build an electric version of the Fluence, a mid-size sedan, and sell as many as 40,000 in 2011. That could make the company the largest producer of electric cars.
In related news, researchers said a new generation of hydrogen fuel tanks that store gas inside solids or liquids could represent a breakthrough for the future of hydrogen-powered vehicles.
The world's first computer network protected by unbreakable quantum encryption was unveiled at a scientific conference in Vienna. Using the laws of quantum theory, quantum cryptography is completely different from the standard security schemes used on computer networks today.
The energy crisis has revived a debate from the 1970s on whether we should take the "soft path" of energy conservation and power from the sun, wind and plants, or the "hard path" of nuclear power. The old lessons are as good a guide as any to the future, according to author William Tucker.
And a study released by the Michigan State University Land Policy Institute found that 100,000 wind turbines in the Great Lakes off Michigan's coasts could produce enough electricity for the entire Upper Midwest. But the cost and environmental considerations make such an approach unlikely, researchers concluded.
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One kind of depression leads to another, according to health officials. The plunge in financial markets has sparked a surge in mental health problems around the United States.
Meanwhile, the first long-term study of children diagnosed with bipolar disorder found that they rarely grow out of it. Almost half of those in the study who suffered from the disorder at age 11 were having the same wide mood swings at ages 18 to 20.
In other biomedical news, researchers reported successfully converting cells from human testes into stem cells that grew into other kinds of tissue. The technique could offer another potential alternative to embryonic stem cells for medical research.
Scientists have discovered, through genetic sequencing, that malaria parasites use the equivalent of "cloaking devices" to hide from the body's immune defenses. The discovery could lead to new vaccines.
Doctors at Duke University reported development of a simple blood test for coronary artery disease. It detects genetic markers that show the presence and intensity of blockages in coronary arteries. They said the test could eventually help many patients avoid more expensive diagnostic procedures.
And a couple of bioethics cases made the news last week. The University of Minnesota concluded that falsified data were used in an article on adult stem cells published by one of its researchers. And an influential psychiatrist at Emory University was alleged to have violated federal and university rules governing outside income from pharmaceutical companies. The New York Times ran a commentary on the Emory case and others of its ilk, under the heading "Diagnosis: Greed."
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Paul Krugman, a professor at Princeton University and an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science on Monday.
“It’s been an extremely weird day, but weird in a positive way,” Mr. Krugman said in an interview on his way to a meeting for the Group of Thirty, an international body from the public and private sectors that discusses international economics.
Mr. Krugman received the award for his work on international trade and economic geography. In particular, the prize committee lauded his work for “having shown the effects of economies of scale on trade patterns and on the location of economic activity.”
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from Science News
A combination of peer pressure, gender stereotyping and low expectations contributes to turning potentially gifted kids—especially girls—away from mathematics, wasting a precious national resource, a new study suggests.
The study, by cancer biochemist Janet Mertz of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her collaborators, appears in the November Notices of the American Mathematical Society.
Mertz’s team tallied the participants in top international competitions for high school students, the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition and the International Mathematical Olympiad, and other data. While girls were underrepresented on all countries’ teams, some countries, including the United States, often had no girls on a team.
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from National Geographic News
A female blacktip shark in Virginia fertilized her own egg without mating with a male shark, new DNA evidence shows. This is the second time scientists have used DNA testing to verify shark parthenogenesis—the process that allows females of some species to produce offspring without sperm.
The female shark, dubbed Tidbit, died during a routine physical exam before the pregnancy was identified. A necropsy—an animal autopsy—after her death revealed she was carrying a near-term pup fetus that was about 12 inches (30 centimeters) in length.
Tidbit was caught in the wild when she was very young and reached sexual maturity in a tank at the Virginia Aquarium in Virginia Beach, where she lived for eight years.
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from the Seattle Times
A few weeks ago, 19 Ecuadorean citizens detained on these world-renowned islands were marched onto a plane and sent back to the continent under armed guard. Their crime? Illegal migration.
So far this year, the government has expelled 1,000 of its citizens from the Galápagos—a living laboratory of unique animal and plant species—who were there without residency and work permits. It also has "normalized" 2,000 others, in effect giving most of them a year to leave.
The migrants are attracted not by the tortoises or blue-footed boobies but by the islands' booming economy, which offers plentiful jobs and good pay. Typical wages run 70 percent higher than on Ecuador's mainland, the public schools are good and violent crime is nonexistent. Last year, Ecuador was stung by a United Nations warning that the islands, whose human population has doubled in 10 years to about 30,000, are at risk from overcrowding and mismanaged tourism.
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from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required)
(Associated Press)—The nation's leading pediatricians group says children—from newborns to teens—should get double the usually recommended amount of vitamin D because of evidence that it may help prevent serious diseases.
To meet the new recommendation of 400 units daily, millions of children will need to take daily vitamin D supplements, the American Academy of Pediatrics said. That includes breast-fed infants—even those who get some formula, too, and many teens who drink little or no milk.
Baby formula contains vitamin D, so infants on formula only generally don't need supplements. However, the academy recommends breast-feeding for at least the first year of life, and breast milk is sometimes deficient.
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from the BBC News Online
US space tourist Richard Garriott has successfully blasted off into space, following in the footsteps of his astronaut father. Mr Garriott has paid about $30m (£17m) for his 10-day trip to the International Space Station (ISS).
The Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft, mounted on a three-stage rocket, launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, at 0701 GMT (0801 BST; 0301 EDT). Richard's father, Owen Garriott, spent 60 days on a US space station in 1973. He took extensive photographs of the Earth's surface during his stay on the Skylab orbital outpost.
Owen, 77, will support his son from mission control in Moscow. Richard Garriott, a 47-year-old computer game designer, is joined on the flight by US astronaut Mike Fincke, who becomes the space station's commander, and Russian flight engineer Yuri Lonchakov.
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from National Geographic News
Scientists believe they have uncovered Earth's oldest known footprints in the mountains of Nevada—a fossil find that suggests animals have been walking around about 30 million years longer than previously thought, according to new research.
The controversial tracks—described by one skeptical scientist as "paired rows of dots"—may indicate animals had legs in the late Protozoic era, about 570 million years ago, according to lead researcher Loren Babcock.
The discovery is the strongest evidence to suggest animals were able to move about on their own appendages during the Ediacaran period, before the Cambrian period "explosion." During the Cambrian complex animals rapidly emerged and replaced simple multicellular animals, said the Ohio State University professor.
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from the New York Times Magazine (Registration Required)
“When we started,” Rajiv Shah recalled over a late-evening coffee at the Serena Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya, “developing-world agriculture seemed very much out of fashion.” That was before the food riots and rice tariffs and dire predictions of mass starvation that accompanied the global rise in food prices last spring.
And it was before the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for which Shah has worked since 2001, made agriculture, particularly African agriculture, a top priority. Agriculture may have been unfashionable four years ago, when Shah and others on the foundation’s “strategic opportunities” team began discussing an agriculture initiative, but it is fashionable now.
This is partly a result of market forces leading to the prospect of severe food shortages; but it is also partly because of the market-making power of the Gates Foundation itself. Bill Gates began this year with a promise to nearly double the foundation’s commitment to agricultural development with $306 million in additional grants.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
The international Cassini space probe flew within 16 miles of the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus last week—a breathtakingly close flyby designed to gather dust and water particles that will help scientists better understand the recently discovered geysers that spew constantly from the moon's south pole.
"Cassini flew closest to the equator of Enceladus to collect those particles and then went into the plume coming out of the south pole at a much greater height," said project scientist Robert Pappalardo.
The main goal of the mission, he said, is to determine if the dust and ice particles drifting above the moon's equator are the same or different from those that spit out of the geysers. "This is how we hope to learn more about the history and evolution of Enceladus, and about whether there's liquid water involved in the generation of the plume," he said.
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from USA Today
Barbara Bradfield has lived to see dramatic changes in breast cancer. When she was diagnosed in 1989, Bradfield's tumor—which produced an overabundance of a protein called HER2—was considered especially deadly. Today, women with tumors like hers have some of the best survival rates in breast cancer.
Experts say the drug that has kept Bradfield healthy for so long, Herceptin, has changed the nature of breast cancer and helped doctors better understand what causes the disease.
In the 10 years since it was approved, doctors say Herceptin also has encouraged the development of a growing arsenal of new therapies that target cancer cells but spare patients from many of the grueling side effects of traditional chemotherapy. Bradfield, who received chemo before and during her Herceptin therapy, developed permanent hearing loss and numbness in her fingers because of those older drugs.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Scientists have converted cells from human testes into stem cells that grew into muscle, nerve cells and other kinds of tissue, according to a study published Wednesday in the online edition of Nature.
The stem cells offer another potential alternative to embryonic stem cells for researchers who aim to treat diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson's by replacing damaged or malfunctioning cells with custom-grown replacements.
Scientists have also derived flexible adult stem cells from skin, amniotic fluid and menstrual blood. The new cells were created from sperm-making cells obtained from testicular biopsies of 22 men. They are theoretically superior to traditional embryonic stem cells because they can be obtained directly from male patients and used to grow replacement tissue that their bodies won't reject, Sabine Conrad of the University of Tuebingen in Germany and her colleagues wrote.
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from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Registration Required)
GREEN SWAMP PRESERVE, N.C. (Associated Press)—Laura Gadd pauses at the edge of a pristine savanna, delicately lifting her feet to avoid trampling any venus flytraps hidden underfoot.
Buried below wisps of wire grass, a few of the plants advertise their presence with a single white flower—perched atop a long stem like a flag of surrender. Gadd finds a half-dozen this day, enough to warrant a spray of glue and inconspicuous powder used to identify the plants and track down poachers who pluck them.
... One of nature's most recognized wonders, the venus flytrap's ability to snatch living prey makes it a favorite of elementary school science classes everywhere. ... Booming growth and development along the coast threatens to overrun the few sensitive and thin populations of venus flytraps that still exist in the wild.
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from National Geographic News
Malaria parasites use elaborate forms of deception, such as molecular mimicry, to fool the human immune system, new gene studies say. The discovery could lead to new vaccines for the disease, which kills millions and is rapidly becoming resistant to treatment.
Gene sequencing of two parasites, Plasmodium vivax and Plasmodium knowlesi, comes six years after researchers unraveled the genome of Plasmodium falciparum, the malaria parasite that causes the most fatal infections worldwide. Gene sequencing determines the order of chemical building blocks in a species's DNA.
While P. vivax is rarely fatal and causes less severe infections, it accounts for more than a third of about 500 million infections, most of them in Asia.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
George Soros, the prominent financier, avoids using the financial contracts known as derivatives “because we don’t really understand how they work.” Felix G. Rohatyn, the investment banker who saved New York from financial catastrophe in the 1970s, described derivatives as potential “hydrogen bombs.”
And Warren E. Buffett presciently observed five years ago that derivatives were “financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.”
One prominent financial figure, however, has long thought otherwise. And his views held the greatest sway in debates about the regulation and use of derivatives—exotic contracts that promised to protect investors from losses, thereby stimulating riskier practices that led to the financial crisis. For more than a decade, the former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has fiercely objected whenever derivatives have come under scrutiny in Congress or on Wall Street.
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from New Scientist
A bug discovered deep in a goldmine and nicknamed "the bold traveller" has got astrobiologists buzzing with excitement. Its unique ability to live in complete isolation of any other living species suggests it could be the key to life on other planets.
A community of the bacteria Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator has been discovered 2.8 kilometres beneath the surface of the Earth in fluid-filled cracks of the Mponeng goldmine in South Africa. Its 60°C home is completely isolated from the rest of the world, and devoid of light and oxygen.
Dylan Chivian of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California, studied the genes found in samples of the fluid to identify the organisms living within it, expecting to find a mix of species. Instead, he found that 99.9% of the DNA belonged to one bacterium, a new species. The remaining DNA was contamination from the mine and the laboratory.
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from the Economist
In economic theory the winner’s curse refers to the idea that someone who places the winning bid in an auction may have paid too much. Consider, for example, bids to develop an oil field. Most of the offers are likely to cluster around the true value of the resource, so the highest bidder probably paid too much.
The same thing may be happening in scientific publishing, according to a new analysis. With so many scientific papers chasing so few pages in the most prestigious journals, the winners could be the ones most likely to oversell themselves—to trumpet dramatic or important results that later turn out to be false.
This would produce a distorted picture of scientific knowledge, with less dramatic (but more accurate) results either relegated to obscure journals or left unpublished. In Public Library of Science (PloS) Medicine, an online journal, John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Ioannina School of Medicine, Greece, and his colleagues, suggest that a variety of economic conditions, such as oligopolies, artificial scarcities and the winner’s curse, may have analogies in scientific publishing.
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from the Scientific American
Four years after she nearly died from rabies, Jeanna Giese is being heralded as the first person known to have survived the virus without receiving a preventative vaccine. But Giese (pronounced Gee-See) says she would gladly share that honor with others if only doctors could show that the treatment used to save her could spare other victims as well.
"They shouldn't stop 'till it's perfected," said Giese, now 19, during a recent interview about physicians' quest to refine the technique that may have kept her alive. Giese's wish may come true. Another young girl infected with rabies is still alive more than a month after doctors induced a coma to put her symptoms on hold, just as they did with Giese.
Yolanda Caicedo, an infectious disease specialist at Hospital Universitario del Valle in Cali, Colombia, who is treating the latest survivor, confirmed reports in the Colombian newspaper El País that the victim is an eight-year-old girl who came down with symptoms in August, about a month after she was bitten by an apparently rabid cat.
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