from the New York Times (Registration Required)
... For years, organizations like Breastcancer.org ... have promoted regular screening and an unambiguous message that early detection saves lives. So even though some healthy women were relieved to hear that they might start skipping mammograms with a clear conscience, many cancer advocates rejected the new recommendations.
Some doctors said they would ignore them and continue to advise patients to have mammograms early and often. "I'm riled up; this is a giant step backward and a terrible mistake," said the founder of Breastcancer.org, Dr. Marisa Weiss, an oncologist who practices at Lankenau Hospital in Wynnewood, Pa.
... The new screening guidelines, issued on Monday by the Preventive Services Task Force of the Department of Health and Human Services, recommend against routine screening mammography in women 40 to 49. They would scale back screening for women 50 to 74, to every other year from annually.
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from National Geographic News
How's this for a sweet surprise? A team of researchers in Washington State has found traces of cooking spices and flavorings in the waters of Puget Sound. University of Washington associate professor Richard Keil heads the Sound Citizen program, which investigates how what we do on land affects our waters.
Keil and his team have tracked "pulses" of food ingredients that enter the sound during certain holidays. For instance, thyme and sage spike during Thanksgiving, cinnamon surges all winter, chocolate and vanilla show up during weekends (presumably from party-related goodies), and waffle-cone and caramel-corn remnants skyrocket around the Fourth of July.
The Puget Sound study is one of several ongoing efforts to investigate the unexpected ingredients that find their way into the global water supply.
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from Science News
For chimpanzees living in a forest surrounding the village of Bossou in Guinea, cracking nuts is a serious task with important steps. They are: First, lug large rocks to a spot near a nut-bearing tree, such as an oil palm. Next, gather the nuts and place them on the rocks. Then, obtain a smaller, graspable rock.
Finally, smash the armored treats and let the shells fly. As clutches of apes pound away with devastating precision, these nut bashers create an unholy din akin to a human rock band.
In fact, these West African chimps rock out in a surprising way. In this corner of the jungle, chimps appear to think more carefully about implements and how to assemble them than many scientists had assumed.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
A widely prescribed and expensive cholesterol drug is not as effective as niacin, a cheap vitamin, in helping to unclog coronary arteries in people already taking statins, the standard medicines used to lower cholesterol, according to a new study.
The research, which appeared Monday in the New England Journal of Medicine, is sending rumbles through the medical community because it is the third recent study to raise questions about the effectiveness of Zetia and its sister drug, Vytorin, highly profitable pharmaceuticals made by Merck & Co.
... Last year, physicians in the United States wrote a total of more than 29 million prescriptions for them, and worldwide sales totaled $4.56 billion, according to Merck. Although the drugs have been shown to reduce cholesterol, there is no evidence that they prevent heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular problems. Top Merck executives are vigorously defending their drugs and have dismissed the new research as limited.
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from New Scientist
Something big is out there beyond the visible edge of our universe. That's the conclusion of the largest analysis to date of over 1000 galaxy clusters streaming in one direction at blistering speeds. Some researchers say this so-called "dark flow" is a sign that other universes nestle next door.
Last year, Sasha Kashlinsky of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and colleagues identified an unusual pattern in the motion of around 800 galaxy clusters. They studied the clusters' motion in the "afterglow" of the big bang, as measured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). The photons of this afterglow collide with electrons in galaxy clusters as they travel across space to the Earth, and this subtly changes the afterglow's temperature.
The team combined the WMAP data with X-ray observations and found the clusters were streaming at up to 1000 kilometres per second towards one particular part of the cosmos. Many researchers argued the dark flow would not turn up in later observations, but now the team claim to have confirmed its existence.
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from the Economist
The connection between an 18th-century savant called Joseph-Louis Lagrange and the problem of landing safely at Hong Kong International Airport may not, at first, be obvious. But there is one.
Hong Kong airport is notorious for rocky and sometimes aborted landings caused by the disturbed air flow from nearby mountains. Though laser technology is deployed alongside its runways to monitor changes in wind speed and thus forewarn pilots, that is often not enough. What is needed is a better understanding of the theory of the winds themselves.
And this is where Lagrange comes in. He was a pioneer of the study of moving fluids (among many other things), but his ideas outran the computational tools of his day. Only now, with supercomputers available to help with the calculations, is it possible to explore those ideas completely. What is emerging is a picture of fluid dynamics more subtle and more complex than anything dreamed of even a decade ago.
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from Scientific American
The long search for an AIDS vaccine has produced countless false starts and repeated failed trials, casting once bright hopes into shadows of disenchantment. The now familiar swings appeared in high relief this past fall, with news of the most recent, phase III trial in Thailand. Initial fanfare for a protective outcome gave way to disappointment after reanalysis showed that the protection could be attributed only to chance.
But rather than dashing all hopes for an AIDS vaccine, the trial has heartened some researchers, who see new clues in the battle against the fatal illness.
Costing $150 million and enrolling more than 16,000 subjects, the Thai clinical trial was the largest AIDS vaccine test to date. It began in 2003, and early results released in September showed a slim but statistically sound benefit from the vaccine (a series of inoculations with drugs known as ALVAC-HIV and AIDSVAX B/E).
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from BBC News Online
The giant deer, also known as the giant Irish deer or Irish elk, is one of the largest deer species that ever lived. Yet why this giant animal, which had massive antlers spanning 3.6m, suddenly went extinct some 10,600 years ago has remained a mystery.
Now a study of its teeth is producing tantalising answers, suggesting the deer couldn't cope with climate change. As conditions became colder and drier in Ireland at the time, fewer plants grew, gradually starving the deer.
The discovery is published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. The giant deer (Megaloceros giganteus) has become famous over the past few centuries.
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from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)
In 1950, when he was 3½ years old, Rick Kneeshaw contracted polio. Within days, the healthy toddler was crippled, paralysis quickly numbing and immobilizing his left leg, hip and parts of his back. Over the next 12 years, Kneeshaw would endure many operations, each attempting to restore at least partial muscle and nerve function. Between surgeries, Kneeshaw would spend hours in physical therapy, going and growing through countless braces, crutches and other supports.
"By the time I was 16, I figure I'd spent a quarter of my life in hospitals," he said. The payoff was partial recovery. He was able to walk without braces or crutches--at least on level surfaces for short distances. "It gave me nighttime mobility at least. I could get out of bed, go to the bathroom. That was something."
But something changed in 1971. ... Kneeshaw knew he had never actually conquered polio, but he thought he had put it behind him. He had moved on, becoming an electrical engineer, marrying, having children. Polio caught up.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Zahi Hawass regards the Rosetta Stone, like so much else, as stolen property languishing in exile. "We own that stone," he told Al Jazeera, speaking as the secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.
The British Museum does not agree--at least not yet. But never underestimate Dr. Hawass when it comes to this sort of custody dispute. He has prevailed so often in getting pieces returned to what he calls their "motherland" that museum curators are scrambling to appease him.
... These gestures may make immediate pragmatic sense for museum curators worried about getting excavation permits and avoiding legal problems. But is this trend ultimately good for archaeology?
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Many people are worried about an apocalypse in 2012 purportedly predicted by the Mayan calendar, according to a report by National Geographic News. Survival kits, documentaries, a movie and nearly 200 books are helping to fuel the anxiety.
Meanwhile, researchers have discovered what is being described as a "missing link" dinosaur skeleton that could link the earliest dinosaurs with the large plant-eating sauropods.
And scientists said an asteroid that collided with the Earth almost 2 billion years ago, in what is known as the Sudbury impact, may have stirred the seas worldwide and delivered a huge amount of oxygen to the deep ocean.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
A landmark antidiscrimination law--the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act--will take effect in the nation's workplaces next weekend, prohibiting employers from requesting genetic testing or considering someone's genetic background in hiring, firing or promotions.
The act also prohibits health insurers and group plans from requiring such testing or using genetic information--like a family history of heart disease--to deny coverage or set premiums or deductibles.
"It doesn't matter who's asking for genetic information, if it's the employer or the insurer, the point is you can't ask for it," said John C. Stivarius Jr., a trial lawyer based in Atlanta who advises businesses about the new law.
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from Science News
Unlike most Western guys and gals looking for love, Africa's Hadza foragers pair up without regard to each other's size and strength, a new study finds. And that stature-may-care approach underscores the often unappreciated variety of human mating strategies, the researchers say.
Hadza marriages don't tend to consist of individuals with similar heights, weights, body mass indexes, body-fat percentages or grip strengths, say behavioral ecologist Rebecca Sear of the London School of Economics and anthropologist Frank Marlowe of Florida State University in Tallahassee. Neither do Hadza couples feature a disproportionate percentage of husbands taller than their wives, as has been documented in some Western nations, the researchers report in the Oct. 23 Biology Letters. ...
People everywhere seek healthy, fertile marriage partners, Sear proposes. "But I suspect there may not be a preference for one particular signal of health in mates across every population," she says.
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from Wired
There is water on the moon, NASA confirmed [Friday], and lots of it. In the first look at results from the LCROSS mission, which sent a probe crashing into the Cabeus crater near the moon's south pole, NASA's main investigator said their instruments clearly detected water, despite the underwhelming plume.
Within the field of view of their instruments, the team measured approximately 220 pounds or about 26 gallons of water. Next, the team will try to understand how the compounds they saw in the plume relate to what's actually embedded in the lunar regolith at the bottom of the permanently shadowed crater.
"We need to take all the information--the amount of ejecta, the size of the crater--and reconstruct the entire event and understand how it all fits back into the ground," Colaprete said at a NASA Ames press conference.
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from Seed
In 1976, NASA's twin Viking landers arrived on Mars, equipped with four experiments designed to offer foolproof evidence of life on the Red Planet. They were looking for biosignatures, or fingerprints of life. As they took their first scoops of Martian soil, the whole world held its breath.
The first experiment incinerated a sample of soil and analyzed the resulting hot gas for organic carbon, but none was detected. The second and fourth sprinkled nutrients and then carbon on two more soil samples, hoping to incite a feeding frenzy in any dormant Martian microbes, but the results were the same as with controls.
But it was the third--the labeled release experiment--that found something in the sere red dirt would absorb a tracer of radioactive carbon and send it up in a steady plume of carbon dioxide, just as a living, respiring cell would. There was life on Mars, or so it would seem.
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from the Boston Globe
Thomas Kunz emerges from Aeolus cave in East Dorset, Vermont, with a half-dozen metal ID bands--smaller than SpaghettiOs--cupped in the palm of his latex-gloved hand. They're tiny emblems of death, having once been affixed to the forearms of little brown bats.
The renowned bat biologist from Boston University, who bears a passing resemblance to Harrison Ford, minutes earlier had recovered the bands while trudging, like a real-life Indiana Jones, through a slippery mud-like ooze of rotting bat carcasses, liquefied internal organs, toothpick-sized bones, piles of guano, and a strange white fungus on the cave floor. If bats had come out of hell, it couldn't have been worse than this.
"What we saw was bat soup. There were a lot of bones of wings and skulls and emulsified bodies," Kunz says. "There were dead bats--decomposing bats--hanging from the walls of the cave."
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from Time
Every year, thousands of workers arrive at the sapphire and ruby mines of Pailin, Cambodia, risking their lives to unearth gems in the landmine-ridden territory. Soon, however, they could be the ones to put millions of others at risk.
On the Thai-Cambodian border, a rogue strain of malaria has started to resist artemisinin, the only remaining effective drug in the world's arsenal against malaria's most deadly strain, Plasmodium falciparum.
For six decades, malaria drugs like chloroquine and mefloquine have fallen impotent in this Southeast Asian border area, allowing stronger strains to spread to Burma, India and Africa. But this time there's no new wonder drug waiting in the wings. "It would be unspeakably dire if resistance formed to artemisinin," says Amir Attaran, a professor of law and medicine at the University of Ottawa who has written extensively on malaria issues.
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from BBC News Online
There is a clear link between living to 100 and inheriting a hyperactive version of an enzyme that prevents cells from ageing, researchers say. Scientists from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the US say centenarian Ashkenazi Jews have this mutant gene.
They found that 86 very old people and their children had higher levels of telomerase which protects the DNA. They say it may be possible to produce drugs that stimulate the enzyme.
Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team say they studied the Ashkenazi Jewish community because they are closely related so it is easier to identify disease causing genetic differences.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Alcoholic energy drinks, marketed under provocative names such as Evil Eye, Max Fury and Slingshot Party Gel, have quickly gained a foothold among younger drinkers.
Now the producers of those beverages have a new, perhaps unwanted audience. The Food and Drug Administration on Friday requested proof from the companies that their products, which blend caffeine and alcohol, are safe.
The FDA never has approved the addition of caffeine to an alcoholic beverage, and a task force of state attorneys general and other officials has urged the agency to scrutinize the combination.
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from National Geographic News
By modifying a single gene, scientists have made Hobbie-J the smartest rat in the world, a new study says.
A similar gene tweak might boost human brainpower too, but scientists warn that there is such a thing as being too smart for your own good.
For years scientifically smartened rats have skittered through movies and books such as Flowers for Algernon and The Secret of NIMH. But Hobbie-J is anything but fiction. The lab rat can remember objects three times longer than her smartest kin, the study says. Thanks largely to this memory boost, she's also much better at solving complex tasks, such as traveling through mazes using only partial clues to find rewards--a key method for measuring rat intelligence.
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from the Guardian (U.K.)
Barack Obama acknowledged [Sunday] that time had run out to secure a legally binding climate deal at the Copenhagen summit in December and threw his support behind plans to delay a formal pact until next year at the earliest.
During a hastily convened meeting in Singapore, the US president supported a Danish plan to salvage something from next month's meeting by aiming to make it a first-stage series of commitments rather than an all-encompassing protocol.
Postponing many contentious decisions on emissions targets, financing and technology transfer until the second-stage, leaders will instead try to reach a political agreement in Copenhagen that sends a strong message of intent.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
A high-fat, high-sugar diet does more than pump calories into your body. It also alters the composition of bacteria in your intestines, making it easier to gain weight and harder to lose it, research in mice suggests. And the changeover can happen in as little as 24 hours, according to a report Wednesday in the new journal Science Translational Medicine.
Many factors play a role in the propensity to gain weight, including genetics, physical activity and the environment, as well as food choices. But a growing body of evidence, much of it accumulated by Dr. Jeffrey I. Gordon of Washington University in St. Louis, shows that bacteria in the gut also play a key role.
Humans need such bacteria to help convert otherwise indigestible foods into digestible form.
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from BBC News Online
The key to preserving the old, degrading paper of treasured, ageing books is contained in the smell of their pages, say scientists.
Researchers report in the journal Analytical Chemistry that a new "sniff test" can measure degradation of old books and historical documents. The test picks up and identifies the chemicals that the pages release as they degrade.
This could help libraries and museums preserve a range of precious books. The test is based on detecting the levels of volatile organic compounds. These are released by paper as it ages and produce the familiar "old book smell."
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from National Geographic News
Solving a longstanding puzzle among bird experts, scientists have found that the sharp, violin-like sounds of a South American songbird come not from the beak but from a suite of specially evolved, vibrating feathers.
A new study offers the first hard evidence that birds use feathers for audible communication as well as for flight and warmth.
In 2005 Kimberly Bostwick theorized that the male club-winged manakin--a tiny bird of the Andean cloud forest--was vibrating a club-shaped wing feather against a neighboring, ridged feather to "sing" when trying to attract females. Proving the feather-song connection, though, would be a huge challenge.
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