from the New York Times (Registration Required)
When the journal Science published an attention-grabbing study last fall linking chronic fatigue syndrome to a recently discovered retrovirus, many experts remained skeptical--especially after four other studies found no such association.
Now a second research team has reported a link between the fatigue syndrome and the same class of virus, a category known as MRV-related viruses. In a paper published Monday by The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists found gene sequences from several MRV-related viruses in blood cells from 32 out of 37 chronic-fatigue patients but only 3 of 44 healthy ones.
The researchers did not find XMRV, the specific retrovirus identified in patients last fall. But by confirming the presence of a cluster of genetically similar viruses, the new study represents a significant advance, experts and advocates say.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
"We have a tsunami coming at us, and we're sitting in a rowboat," says neurologist Richard Mayeux of New York's Columbia University. The surge that worries Mayeux is Alzheimer's disease: In 2050, 13.5 million Americans may have it, at an annual health-care cost of more than $1 trillion, according to the Alzheimer's Association.
"Alzheimer's could bankrupt Medicare and Medicaid," says Howard Fillit of the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation.
The impending epidemic, combined with emerging technologies, is driving a transformation in the fight against the disease: Instead of beginning treatment after symptoms appear, the idea is to detect and respond to the disease in the earliest, previously undetectable stages, before it can irretrievably ravage the brain. Researchers say that, based on current estimates of life expectancy, delaying the onset of Alzheimer's by an average of five years could reduce the number of patients by half.
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Scientists say that the far-flung floods and heat waves over the summer are probably exactly the kind of weather extremes to be expected from global warming. And warmer ocean waters appear to be taking a toll on Indonesia's coral reefs.
In other environmental news, researchers say they may have solved the mystery of why Antarctic sea ice has grown in a warmer world. Studies show that ocean warming in past decades boosted precipitation in the upper atmosphere over the Antarctic region, which fell as snow.
Nature News looked at ocean dead zones, where oxygen levels have dropped below the point where fish can survive.
And an Associated Press investigation found that utilities across the U.S. are building dozens of old-style coal plants "that will cement the industry's standing as the largest industrial source of climate-changing gases for years to come."
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
Hundreds of kilometers off the coast of southern California lies the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vast soup of degraded plastic fragments. On the other side of the country, tiny flecks of floating plastic swim in a swath of seemingly pristine Atlantic Ocean at least two-thirds the size of the United States. Oceanographers have quantified trends in one of these "plastic soups" for the first time, and they've come to a surprising conclusion: The amount of plastic has remained steady for 2 decades despite a steep rise in industrial plastic production. That suggests that either people are keeping their trash on land or plastic is going to some unknown destination in the sea.
Since 1986, students on research sailing trips led by Sea Education Association (SEA) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, have been documenting plastic snagged in their plankton nets in the western North Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea. The students and scientists tow a net behind their ship for about 2 kilometers, then use tweezers to pick out and hand-count trapped plastic pieces, most no larger than your pinky fingernail.
In their first publication of these data since the late 1980s, the SEA team reports that it found plastic in more than 60% of 6136 tows over 22 years. The levels are low close to shore but rise hundreds of kilometers off the coast between 22 and 38 degrees latitude (roughly from the Bahamas to Baltimore).
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Reporting from Atlanta and New Orleans -- BP and government officials said Thursday that they planned to remove the damaged existing blowout preventer on top of the company's troubled oil well and replace it with a new, stronger one--a move they said would allow them to safely carry out the final "kill" of the well, but would delay the ultimate fix until after Labor Day.
Earlier in the crisis, BP had estimated that it would be able to complete the final step to plug the well, called the "bottom kill," in mid-August. But because the well has not been spewing oil since July 15--when crews affixed a giant cap on the blowout preventer--federal and company experts have decided to move slowly and carefully, preparing thoroughly for possible complications.
"We're taking a little more time than we would have otherwise to make sure we've got everyone on board with what we're doing in a very systematic approach," said BP Senior Vice President Kent Wells.
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from Scientific American
Before a fight, many animals size up their opponents--however briefly. Even a once-over can provide crucial information about whether to stay and risk injury or turn and flee. Some animals have evolved telltale signs or behaviors that allow them to efficiently judge one another's strength and avoid any unnecessarily costly battles. Deer assess their peers' antlers, and some birds and lizards intimidate one another with prominent patches of color.
But what evolutionary pressures prevent an animal from deceiving its peers by looking like a bully when it's really a pushover? A new study published August 19 in Current Biology suggests that paper wasps control for this kind of deception using social punishment. Wasps beat up phonies.
To help establish stable hierarchies of dominance, highly social paper wasps called Polistes dominulus rely on distinct facial markings--bold black tattoos on their bright yellow faces. Dominant wasps display more fragmented facial patterns than submissive wasps, and the insects use these markings to determine who should submit to whom.
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from Nature News
The capacity of plants to act as a carbon sink could be on the decline.
As global temperatures have risen in recent decades, the amount of atmospheric carbon being converted into plant biomass has increased in step. However, in a paper published [Thursday] in Science, ecologists Maosheng Zhao and Steve Running at the University of Montana in Missoula report a surprising reversal of this trend over the last decade, despite its having been the warmest on record.
In 2003, a study on which Running was a co-author, led by Ramakrishna Nemani, who is also at the University of Montana, reported an increase in plant productivity between 1982 and 1999. The researchers attributed that trend to a warmer climate and increased solar radiation. Zhao and Running expected to find a similar increase for 2000-2009--an expectation that was not met.
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from NPR
Many adolescents are having back-to-school visits with their doctors. That usually means shots--including, for some, the HPV vaccine. It's mainly given to adolescent girls to protect against the human papillomavirus, which causes cervical cancer.
But there's a debate among scientists about whether to immunize boys as well. If this were a high school debate, it would go something like this:
Be it resolved that all adolescent girls and boys should be vaccinated against HPV before they are sexually active, since more than half of all sexually active men and women will get HPV at some point in their lives.
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from BBC News Online
Scientists working in Chernobyl have found a way to predict which species there are likely to be most severely damaged by radioactive contamination.
The secret to a species' vulnerability, they say, lies in its DNA. This discovery could reveal which species are most likely to decline or even become extinct in response to other types of environmental stress.
The researchers published their findings in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.
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from Science News
When it comes to going viral online, it's not how many people you know but who they are, a new study suggests. An analysis of the social networking tool Twitter concludes that having a lot of followers isn't as important to Internet exposure as having discriminating followers to pass the message on.
The results suggest that those trying to communicate through social networking, be they politicians, advertising executives or philanthropic organizations, shouldn't focus their efforts on targeting the masses. Target the influential, and the masses will come.
"It's not only the numbers, the quantity of your audience, but also the quality of your audience," says study coauthor Wojciech Galuba, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.
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from the (Raleigh, NC) News and Observer
RALEIGH -- For most people in North Carolina who are bitten by a mosquito, the result is no worse than an itchy welt. But for people in tropical countries, mosquito bites often cause sickness and death from malaria.
Now an N.C. State University researcher aims to stop the disease spread by halting these insects in their prime, putting a dent in the estimated 243 million cases of malaria reported worldwide.
A mosquito usually lives up to two weeks, just enough time for a malaria parasite to mature and infect the insect's victims. But diatomaceous earth--ground-up fossilized algae that is nontoxic to humans--is an insecticide that can kill mosquitoes in only a few days, said Marian McCord, a textile engineer at N.C. State.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
The human genome is riddled with dead genes, fossils of a sort, dating back hundreds of thousands of years--the genome's equivalent of an attic full of broken and useless junk.
Some of those genes, surprised geneticists reported Thursday, can rise from the dead like zombies, waking up to cause one of the most common forms of muscular dystrophy. This is the first time, geneticists say, that they have seen a dead gene come back to life and cause a disease.
"If we were thinking of a collection of the genome's greatest hits, this would go on the list," said Dr. Francis Collins, a human geneticist and director of the National Institutes of Health.
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from the San Diego
Union-Tribune (Registration
Required)
WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- A
22-mile-long invisible mist of oil is
meandering far below the surface of the
Gulf of Mexico, where it will probably
loiter for months or more, scientists
reported Thursday in the first conclusive
evidence of an underwater plume from the
BP spill.
The most worrisome part is the slow
pace at which the oil is breaking down in
the cold, 40-degree water, making it a
long-lasting but unseen threat to
vulnerable marine life, experts said.
Earlier this month, top federal
officials declared the oil in the spill
was mostly "gone," and it is gone in the
sense you can't see it. But the chemical
ingredients of the oil persist more than
a half-mile beneath the surface,
researchers found.
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from BBC News Online
International researchers say they
have made a "significant step" towards a
predictive blood test for tuberculosis. A
DNA fingerprint in the blood shows
promise in identifying which carriers of
TB will go on to get symptoms and spread
the infection.
Such a test would allow earlier
diagnosis and treatment of the lung
disease, potentially saving many lives.
Experts say the research, published in
Nature, is "remarkable" but
needs to be proven by further work.
Tuberculosis, or TB, is an infectious
bacterial disease of the lungs, causing
symptoms such as coughing, chest pains
and weight loss. Someone in the world is
newly infected with TB every second, with
nearly two million deaths each year.
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from the Chronicle of Higher
Education
Ever since word got out that a
prominent Harvard University researcher
was on leave after an investigation into
academic wrongdoing, a key question has
remained unanswered: What, exactly, did
he do?
The researcher himself, Marc D.
Hauser, isn't talking. The usually
quotable Mr. Hauser, a psychology
professor and director of Harvard's
Cognitive Evolution Laboratory, is the
author of Moral Minds: How Nature
Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and
Wrong (Ecco, 2006) and is at work on
a forthcoming book titled Evilicious:
Why We Evolved a Taste for Being
Bad. He has been voted one of the
university's most popular professors.
... An internal document ... sheds
light on what was going on in Mr.
Hauser's lab. It tells the story of how
research assistants became convinced that
the professor was reporting bogus data
and how he aggressively pushed back
against those who questioned his findings
or asked for verification.
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from the San Diego
Union-Tribune (Registration
Required)
JAKARTA, Indonesia (Associated Press)
-- Coral that survived the 2004 tsunami
is now dying at one of the fastest rates
ever recorded because of a dramatic rise
in water temperatures off northwestern
Indonesia, conservationists said, warning
Wednesday that the threat extends to
other reefs across Asia.
The Wildlife Conservation Society
deployed marine biologists to Aceh
province, on the tip of Sumatra island,
in May when surface waters in the Andaman
Sea peaked at 93 degrees Fahrenheit (34
degrees Celsius)--a 7 degree Fahrenheit
(4 degree Celsius) rise over long-term
averages.
The teams discovered massive
bleaching, which occurs when algae living
inside coral tissues are expelled.
Subsequent surveys carried out together
with Australia's James Cook University
and Indonesia's Syiah Kuala University
showed 80 percent of those corals have
since died.
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from the New York Times
(Registration Required)
In a study that sheds new light on the
effects of end-of-life care, doctors have
found that patients with terminal lung
cancer who began receiving palliative
care immediately upon diagnosis not only
were happier, more mobile and in less
pain as the end neared--but they also
lived nearly three months longer.
The findings, published online
Wednesday by The New England Journal
of Medicine, confirmed what
palliative care specialists had long
suspected. The study also, experts said,
cast doubt on the decision to strike
end-of-life provisions from the health
care overhaul passed last year.
"It shows that palliative care is the
opposite of all that rhetoric about
'death panels,'" said Dr. Diane E. Meier,
director of the Center to Advance
Palliative Care at Mount Sinai School of
Medicine and co-author of an editorial in
the journal accompanying the study. "It's
not about killing Granny; it's about
keeping Granny alive as long as
possible--with the best quality of
life."
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from the Los Angeles Times
(Registration Required)
From the size and shape of the beak,
researchers have always known that the
massive South American "terror bird" was
a predator. Now they know precisely how
the bird killed--wielding its huge skull
and hooked beak like an pickax and
repeatedly chopping at prey until it
succumbed.
The 5-foot-tall, 90-pound
Andalgalornis steulleti, whose
skull was nearly twice the size of a
human's, went extinct millions of years
ago, but Argentine and U.S. researchers
have been using CT scans and
biomechanical reconstructions to deduce
how the flightless predators killed.
Their findings were announced
Wednesday.
The new study "allows researchers to
get down to the real nitty-gritty of the
animal and be more specific about some of
its behavior techniques," said vertebrate
paleontologist Bob Chandler of the
Georgia College & State University in
Milledgeville, Ga., who did not take part
in the study. "This allows us to add
another layer to the biomechanics of
paleontology."
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from the Guardian (UK)
Hundreds of lives a year will be saved
if the National Health Serivce (NHS)
embraces a transplant revolution
involving patients receiving donated
kidneys that were previously rejected as
inadequate, doctors claim today.
Since the 1970s almost all kidney
transplants using organs from the
deceased have come from "brain dead"
donors, who have typically been involved
in a car crash, brain haemorrhage or
severe head injury in a fall or
industrial accident. But the supply of
available organs from such people is
declining, not least because there are
fewer deaths in road accidents.
In an attempt to tackle this ...
surgeons at several NHS hospitals have
been pioneering the use of kidneys from
people who have died from major heart
failure following severe brain injury.
The orthodox view has been that
DCD--donation after cardiac
death--kidneys are far inferior to those
from "brain dead" donors. But research
published Thursday in the Lancet
shows that kidneys from either source are
equally good at prolonging the life of
patients whose condition would otherwise
kill them.
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from ScienceNOW Daily
News
The International Mathematical Union
(IMU) doled out seven prizes, including
the brand-new, $500,000 Chern Medal
Award, in opening ceremonies at its
quadrennial International Congress of
Mathematicians (ICM) Thursday in
Hyderabad, India.
Also at the meeting, IMU elected its
first woman president, Ingrid Daubechies
of Princeton University. Four
mathematicians received the prestigious
Fields Medal, long regarded as
mathematics' version of the Nobel Prize.
Elon Lindenstrauss of Hebrew
University of Jerusalem and Ngô Bao Châu
of Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France,
took the prize for analytic work with
applications to number theory. Stanislav
Smirnov of the University of Geneva,
Switzerland, and Cedric Villani of the
Henri Poincaré Institute in Paris won for
theoretical work in statistical
physics.
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from Science News
A giant earthquake that triggered a
deadly southwest Pacific tsunami was
actually two great temblors, finds a pair
of new studies in the Aug. 19
Nature. These results uncover an
unusual sequence of geological events
that is the first of its kind to be
observed by scientists, the study authors
say.
The earthquakes, which likely struck
within two minutes of each other on
September 29, 2009, spawned a tsunami
that killed nearly 200 people in Samoa,
American Samoa and Tonga. Scientists
assumed that a single quake under the
ocean floor had caused the devastation,
but the pattern of far-flung aftershocks,
aberrant tsunami waves and the
inexplicable movement of a Tongan island
cast doubt on that simple
explanation.
"We knew right off the bat that
something was weird about this
earthquake," says geophysicist Eric Geist
of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo
Park, Calif. Geist wasn't involved in the
current studies but has puzzled over the
anomalous signs produced by the quake.
"This is a very complicated event, and
these studies, for me, really helped
explain a lot."
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from Smithsonian Magazine
... Tetsuro Matsuzawa and the dozen
scientists and graduate students who work
with him are peering into the minds of
our closest relatives, whose common
ancestor with humans lived some six
million years ago, to understand what
separates them from us. He and his
co-workers probe how chimpanzees
remember, learn numbers, perceive and
categorize objects and match voices with
faces.
It's a tricky business that requires
intimate relationships with the animals
as well as cleverly designed studies to
test the range and limitations of the
chimpanzees' cognition. ... Matsuzawa's
star research subject is a chimp named
Ai, which means "love" in Japanese.
Ai arrived at the Primate Research
Institute, part of Kyoto University, in
1977, when she was 1 year old and
Matsuzawa was 27. Matsuzawa had done some
basic studies with rats and monkeys, but
he knew little about chimpanzees. He was
given the job of training her. Years
later, he wrote an account of their first
meeting: "When I looked into this
chimpanzee's eyes, she looked back into
mine. This amazed me ..."
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Most research on renewable energy has focused on making electricity, which now comes from burning coal and natural gas. But the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the reliance on Middle East imports and the threat of global warming are reminders that oil is also a pressing worry. A lot of problems could be solved with a renewable replacement for oil-based gasoline and diesel in the fuel tank--either a new liquid fuel or a much better battery.
Yet, success in this field is so hard to reliably predict that research has been limited, and even venture capitalists tread lightly. Now the federal government is plunging in, in what the energy secretary, Steven Chu, calls the hunt for miracles.
The work is part of the mission of the new Advanced Research Projects Agency--Energy, which is intended to finance high-risk, high-reward projects. It can be compared to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the Pentagon, which spread seed money for such projects and incubated a variety of useful technologies, including the Internet.
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