from Wired
By comparing how a gene critical for language works in humans and chimpanzees, researchers have identified an entire network of genes involved in the incredible linguistic powers of Homo sapiens.
The findings don't explain how language functions at the biological level, or exactly what changes were needed to put an otherwise unremarkable monkey on its chattering, Earth-dominating trajectory. But they do give researchers a foundation for investigating these questions.
... The target of the analysis was FOXP2, a gene that rose to scientific prominence during the study of a London-based family afflicted by hereditary speech disorders.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Reporting from New Orleans -- Federal officials announced Wednesday that they were removing the brown pelican from the endangered species list, capping a century-long recovery that started under President Theodore Roosevelt.
The brown pelican is a fixture in Southern California and along the Gulf of Mexico from Texas to Florida, where Roosevelt established the first national wildlife refuge on Pelican Island to protect the bird from human slaughter.
It is an icon in Louisiana, where it is the state bird and where Interior Department officials assembled Wednesday at the Big Branch Marsh National Wildlife Refuge near New Orleans to proclaim the brown pelican "fully recovered" and no longer in need of federal protection.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
GREENPORT, N.Y. -- Bone-tired but grinning, Peter Wenczel and his son Ben eased their 26-foot work boat toward the dock here one recent afternoon, its deck piled high with bags of scallops. "We got limit!" Ben Wenczel, 22, shouted, referring to the state's daily limit of 10 bushels per person for commercial scallop fishing.
For the baymen of Long Island's eastern shore, out in force this month in their orange waterproof jumpsuits and knee-high galoshes, the November opening of the scallop season has not always been so rewarding. Beginning in 1985, multiple surges in toxic marine algae known as brown tide have decimated Peconic Bay's scallop population, resulting in years of dismal, economically devastating harvests.
But last year, the baymen realized that the scallops might finally be making a comeback. The yield was more than three times that of 2007, and this year's harvest is expected to be at least as good if not better, scientists working in the area say.
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from the Cleveland Plain Dealer
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- On the day before Halloween, as grim-faced detectives and crime scene investigators searched the foreboding house where suspected serial killer Anthony Sowell lived, a man arrived carrying a folded butterfly net and a small blue fishing tackle box filled with glass vials and surgical tweezers.
Joe Keiper spends most of his days in a basement lab at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, a bright space that holds cabinets stuffed with hundreds of thousands of carefully preserved insects. It's a bug-lover's dream. This afternoon, Keiper descended into a nightmare. In the dank basement, police had unearthed a decomposed body from the dirt floor.
... As one of two dozen or so U.S. entomologists with forensic experience, Keiper occasionally works as a law enforcement consultant. He uses his knowledge of the types of bugs that dead bodies attract, the timing of their arrival, and the rate of their reproduction and growth to judge how long a victim likely has been dead, among other things.
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from New Scientist
... Any day now, if all goes to plan, proton beams will start racing all the way round the ring deep beneath CERN, the Large Hadron Collider's home on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland.
Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg is worried. It's not that he thinks the LHC will create a black hole that will engulf the planet, or even that the restart will end in a technical debacle like last year's. No: he's actually worried that the LHC will find what some call the "God particle," the popular and embarrassingly grandiose moniker for the hitherto undetected Higgs boson.
... Why so? Evidence for the Higgs would be the capstone of an edifice that particle physicists have been building for half a century--the phenomenally successful theory known simply as the standard model. ... It is also manifestly incomplete. We know from what the theory doesn't explain that it must be just part of something much bigger. So if the LHC finds the Higgs and nothing but the Higgs, the standard model will be sewn up. But then particle physics will be at a dead end, with no clues where to turn next.
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from the Times (London)
A gene therapy that increases the size and strength of muscle tissue could soon be used to treat neuromuscular disorders such as muscular dystrophy, according to scientists.
In a study on monkeys, the treatment, which modifies the body's natural regulation of muscle growth, was found to have long-lasting effects on muscle mass and tone. The treatment produced no obvious negative side-effects and clinical trials are expected to start next year.
If similar results are seen in human trials, the technique could transform treatments for a range of muscle-wasting diseases. "If we can improve the strength of muscles we can make a difference to the lives of these patients," said Professor Jerry Mendell, a specialist in muscle disease at Ohio State University and a co-author on the study.
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from Science News
Astronomers have identified an easy-to-measure chemical fingerprint for determining which sunlike stars are likely to host planets. The marker--a low abundance of lithium in the atmosphere of these stars--could prove an invaluable guide for planet hunters trying to determine which of the myriad sunlike stars to select for long-term study.
In their study, Garik Israelian of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Tenerife, Spain, and his colleagues relied on data from a census of 133 sunlike stars, most of them monitored for several years with the European Southern Observatory's HARPS spectrograph at the La Silla observatory in Chile. Tiny wobbles in the motions of 30 of these stars indicate the gravitational tug of unseen planets.
In the Nov. 12 Nature, Israelian and his colleagues report that the majority of sunlike stars hosting planets in the HARPS sample have, on average, one-tenth the amount of lithium of those without planets. It's been known for decades that Earth's sun shows such a depletion.
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from BBC News Online
Researchers have discovered a fossil skeleton that appears to link the earliest dinosaurs with the large plant-eating sauropods. This could help to bridge an evolutionary gap between the two-legged common ancestors of dinosaurs and the four-legged giants, such as diplodocus.
The remarkably complete skeleton shows that the creature was bipedal but occasionally walked on all four legs. The team reports its discovery in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B.
"What we have is a big, short-footed, barrel-chested, long-necked, small-headed dinosaur," explained Adam Yates, the scientist from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg who led the research.
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from the Telegraph (UK)
British researchers have found that a drug destroys tumours in a form of inoperable lung cancer that kills more than nine out of 10 sufferers. The treatment works by blocking the growth of the cancer cells and eventually causing them to self destruct.
In more than 50 percent of the trials, the treatment, which appears to have no side effects, killed all traces of the disease. "We are very excited about it," said Professor Michael Seckl, the molecular oncologist who led the study at Imperial College London.
... The researchers behind the new study, published in the journal Cancer Research, have identified a drug that, in half of the mice treated, was able to completely shrink tumours away. It was also able to stop tumours from growing back and it helped other forms of chemotherapy to work more effectively.
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from the Tampa Tribune
VATICAN CITY (Associated Press) -- E.T. phone Rome. Four hundred years after it locked up Galileo for challenging the view that the Earth was the center of the universe, the Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and its implication for the Catholic Church.
"The questions of life's origins and of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe are very suitable and deserve serious consideration," said the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, an astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory.
Funes, a Jesuit priest, presented the results Tuesday of a five-day conference that gathered astronomers, physicists, biologists and other experts to discuss the budding field of astrobiology--the study of the origin of life and its existence elsewhere in the cosmos.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
The American Medical Assn. on Tuesday urged the federal government to reconsider its classification of marijuana as a dangerous drug with no accepted medical use, a significant shift that puts the prestigious group behind calls for more research.
The nation's largest physicians organization, with about 250,000 member doctors, the AMA has maintained since 1997 that marijuana should remain a Schedule I controlled substance, the most restrictive category, which also includes heroin and LSD.
In changing its policy, the group said its goal was to clear the way to conduct clinical research, develop cannabis-based medicines and devise alternative ways to deliver the drug.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
Exposure to high levels of a controversial chemical found in thousands of everyday plastic products appears to cause erectile dysfunction and other sexual problems in men, according to a new study published Wednesday.
The study, funded by the federal government and published in the journal Human Reproduction, is the first to examine the impact of bisphenol A, or BPA, on the reproductive systems of human males. Previous studies have involved mice or rats.
The research comes as government agencies debate the safety of BPA, a compound that is found in thousands of consumer products ranging from dental sealants to canned food linings and that is so ubiquitous it has been detected in the urine of 93 percent of the U.S. population.
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from National Geographic News
Migrating northern elephant seals slowly drift downward to rest in the ocean depths, according to a new study of the animals' dive patterns. Moving from their breeding colonies in California to their wintering areas in the mid-Pacific and around Alaska, the seals spend two to eight months at sea without a single pit stop.
There's no land to climb on along the roughly 2,000- to 3,000-mile voyage, and the seabed is often miles below the surface. The marine mammals' grueling trek had many researchers wondering: When and how do elephant seals sleep?
It's long been known that, during the seals' epic migrations, the animals engage in repetitive dives down to depths of 984 feet or more. Now a study of young elephant seals has revealed that during some of these dives, elephant seals roll on their backs and allow themselves to sink.
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from USA Today
Nearly half of breast cancer survivors suffer from persistent pain, even two to three years after surgery, a study shows. Almost 60% of the 3,253 women surveyed experience other symptoms of nerve damage, such as numbness or tenderness, according to a study of all Danish women treated for breast cancer in 2005 and 2006.
Women under 40 and those who have more extensive surgery, such as a mastectomy, and radiation are the most likely to report pain, says the University of Copenhagen's Henrik Kehlet, senior author of the report in today's Journal of the American Medical Association.
Women also have more pain if surgeons remove many of the lymph nodes in their armpits, a common place for breast cancer to spread, the study says. Fortunately, most breast cancer patients can ease their symptoms with over-the-counter pain relievers, says Loretta Loftus of Tampa's H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center, who co-wrote an accompanying editorial.
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from Scientific American
The discovery of mirror neurons in the brains of macaques about ten years ago sent shockwaves through the neuroscience community. Mirror neurons are cells that fire both when a monkey performs a certain task and when it observes another individual performing that same task.
With the identification of networks of similarly-behaving cells in humans, there was much speculation over the role such neurons might play in phenomena such as imitation, language acquisition, observational learning, empathy, and theory of mind.
Several research groups have observed the activity of mirror neuron networks indirectly in humans through the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). ... Experiments using fMRI have demonstrated that there is more activation in the human mirror system when people observe movements with which they are familiar. ...
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
ABOARD THE ALGUITA, 1,000 miles northeast of Hawaii -- In this remote patch of the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from any national boundary, the detritus of human life is collecting in a swirling current so large that it defies precise measurement.
Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas.
But one research organization estimates that the garbage now actually pervades the Pacific, though most of it is caught in what oceanographers call a gyre like this one--an area of heavy currents and slack winds that keep the trash swirling in a giant whirlpool.
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from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
Pity the Boston car salesman who negotiated across the table from Charles A. Nelson III, a Harvard neuroscience professor who runs the nation's top laboratory studying how people learn to decode facial expressions.
As the two men faced off in the showroom last month, the salesman insisted to Nelson that he had just offered the absolute lowest price for the German car in question, declaring, "This is it."
Then the salesman's eyes darted to a vacant corner, his nose and mouth taking on a configuration that shouted "Bluff." The professor ultimately left the dealership smiling, holding a contract to buy the car at a far lower price, a bargain in his estimation. Such is one ancillary benefit of Nelson's exhaustive research, which unfolds every day in his $1.5 million cognitive neuroscience laboratory at Children's Hospital Boston, where he studies just when and how humans learn to read faces.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
...[There] is one important way in which medicine never quite adopted the scientific method. The explosion of medical research over the last century has produced a dizzying number of treatments for different ailments. For someone with heart disease, there is bypass surgery, stenting or simply drugs and behavior changes. For a man with early-stage prostate cancer, there is surgery, radiation, proton-beam therapy or so-called watchful waiting.
To enter mainstream use, any such treatment typically needs to clear a high bar. It will be subject to randomized trials, statistical-significance tests, the peer-review process of academic journals and the scrutiny of government regulators.
Yet once a treatment enters the mainstream--once we know whether it works in certain situations--science is largely left behind. The next questions--when to use it and on which patients--become matters of judgment, not measurement. The decision is, once again, left to a doctor's informed intuition.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
There are those who served at the battlefront and witnessed first-hand the ugliness of war. And there are the rest of us who experience it from behind exhibition glass.
This month in New Orleans, however, The National World War II Museum is opening the doors to a new $60 million complex that will feature as its centerpiece a 35-minute film designed to virtually transport viewers 70 years into the past through technology marketed as "4-D cinematics," including special lighting, fog, stage snow, moving props, surround sound, and digital animation.
Immersive film experiences are usually reserved for wide-screen nature documentaries at science museums or concert films featuring megabands like the Rolling Stones or U2. "Beyond All Boundaries," the film that will run in perpetuity in New Orleans at the 250-seat Victory Theater, is the first designed to teach history, in particular of a war about which most Americans remain especially reverent.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
The U.S. military said last week that it is tracking 800 maneuverable satellites on a daily basis for possible collisions and expects to add 500 more non-maneuvering satellites by year's end.
The U.S. Air Force began upgrading its ability to predict possible collisions in space after a defunct Russian military communications satellite and a commercial U.S. satellite owned by Iridium collided on Feb. 10.
Gen. Kevin Chilton, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, called the collision the "seminal event" in the satellite industry during the past year and said it destroyed any sense that space was so vast that collisions were highly improbable. He said military officials had wanted to do a more thorough analysis of possible collisions in space but had lacked the resources.
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from National Geographic News
It's almost the end of the world, according to purported Maya predictions, and the 2012 apocalypse business is booming.
Survival kits, documentaries, and nearly 200 books presenting the "real" 2012 story are all on offer. And you could probably surf the Web from now until Armaggedon--tentatively slated for December 21, 2012--and still see just a fraction of the Web sites and products devoted to the topic.
But amid all the hype--including a viral marketing campaign for 2012, the disaster movie opening Friday--some people are developing honest "end times" anxiety that has experts seriously concerned. NASA's Ask an Astrobiologist Web site, for example, has received thousands of questions regarding the 2012 doomsday predictions--some of them disturbing, according to David Morrison, a senior scientist with the NASA Astrobiology Institute.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
CHICAGO -- Pitcher's thistle, whose fuzzy leaves and creamy pink puffs once thrived in the sand dunes along several of the Great Lakes, was driven by development, drought and weevils into virtual extinction from the shores of Lake Michigan decades ago.
But in the 1990s, seeds collected from different parts of the thistle's range were grown at the Chicago Botanic Garden and planted with the help of the Morton Arboretum along the lake, in Illinois State Beach Park, north of Chicago near the Wisconsin state line. The plants from Indiana's dunes to the south are doing well; the plants that had come from the north are failing.
With those mixed results in mind, scientists from the botanic garden are sending teams out across the Midwest and West to the Rocky Mountains and Great Basin to collect seeds from different populations of 1,500 prairie species by 2010, and from 3,000 species by 2020. The goal is to preserve the species and, depending on changes in climate, perhaps even help species that generally grow near one another to migrate to a new range.
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from New Scientist
To ancient Romans the Phlegraean Fields hosted the entrance to Hades. In modern times it is better known as the site of a "supercolossal" volcanic eruption 39,000 years ago.
Will we see the next disaster coming? That's one of the questions an ambitious drilling project hopes to answer by sinking boreholes into Campi Flegrei, as the giant collapsed volcanic crater is now called. Starting as early as next month, the Campi Flegrei Deep Drilling Project is planning to drill seven holes in the region.
Though the researchers on this particular project point out that any risk is small, it will begin amid debate about whether such endeavours are safe, given the unknowns of a volcano's interior. A few say drilling might even trigger a major eruption.
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from Science News
The collision of a large extraterrestrial object with Earth almost 2 billion years ago may have stirred the seas worldwide and delivered a huge serving of oxygen to the deep ocean.
The Sudbury impact, named after the Canadian city located near the center of what remains of the ancient crater, happened around 1.85 billion years ago. Despite erosion since then, the impact structure--at least 200 kilometers across--is recognized to be the second-largest on the face of the planet, says William Cannon, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, Va., and coauthor on a paper in the November Geology.
The event fundamentally affected the concentrations of dissolved oxygen in the deep sea--enough to almost instantly shut down the accumulation of marine sediments known as banded iron formations, report Cannon and coauthor John F. Slack, also of the USGS in Reston.
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from Scientific American
The Internet grew out of an idea to connect various and disparate sources of data, delivering to researchers around the globe unprecedented access to information via their computer screens. As e-Science evolves alongside Web 2.0, however, some are pushing for a fundamental change in the way the Internet catalogues and organizes data to make it more readily available to the growing number of interdisciplinary and highly specialized researchers who spend their working hours nearly entirely online and who tend to collaborate online.
Whereas this is not a new argument--the idea of a more intuitive "Semantic Web" has been kicked around for years--it has gotten a fresh set of legs thanks to the recent funding of a software development tool kit expected to better connect researchers with the information they seek.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a team of researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., $1.1 million in October to create a software programming tool kit by mid-2010 that scientists and other researchers will be able to use to make data from their work available to a larger number of their peers as well as laypeople, including educators and policymakers.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
The same cells that ravage the cartilage of rheumatoid arthritis patients also carry the disease from joint to joint, a new study suggests. The work points to several possibilities for halting the spread of this crippling condition.
Rheumatoid arthritis typically appears in a single joint at first, but it often spreads throughout much of the body within a few years. The autoimmune disease destroys cartilage padding between bones and causes inflammation in joints, resulting in intense pain and lack of mobility. It differs from osteoarthritis, which is the normal, long-term wearing away of the padding in isolated joints.
Scientists had known that certain types of fibroblasts--cells that help bind wounds and build the connective tissue that supports other cells--are responsible for damaging cartilage, says Elena Neumann, a molecular biologist at Justus-Liebig University in Bad Nauheim, Germany. These rheumatoid arthritis synovial fibroblasts (RASFs) appear in the fluid within joints and secrete enzymes that decompose cartilage.
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from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Registration Required)
KOURE, Niger (Associated Press) -- A crisp African dawn is breaking overhead, and Zibo Mounkaila is on the back of a pickup truck bounding across a sparse landscape of rocky orange soil.
The tallest animals on earth are here, the guide says, somewhere amid the scant green bush on one side, and the thatched dome villages on the other. They're here, but by all accounts, they shouldn't be. A hundred years ago, West Africa's last giraffes numbered in the thousands and their habitat stretched from Senegal's Atlantic Ocean coast to Chad, in the heart of the continent.
By the dawn of the 21st century, their world had shrunk to a tiny zone southeast of the capital, Niamey, stretching barely 150 miles long. Their numbers dwindled so low that in 1996, they numbered a mere 50. Instead of disappearing as many feared, though, the giraffes have bounced miraculously back from the brink of extinction, swelling to more than 200 today.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Peter Pan would be so happy. About a year from now, if all goes well, a box about the size of a loaf of bread will pop out of a rocket some 500 miles above the Earth. There in the vacuum it will unfurl four triangular sails as shiny as moonlight and only barely more substantial. Then it will slowly rise on a sunbeam and move across the stars.
LightSail-1, as it is dubbed, will not make it to Neverland. At best the device will sail a few hours and gain a few miles in altitude. But those hours will mark a milestone for a dream that is almost as old as the rocket age itself, and as romantic: to navigate the cosmos on winds of starlight the way sailors for thousands of years have navigated the ocean on the winds of the Earth.
"Sailing on light is the only technology that can someday take us to the stars," said Louis Friedman, director of the Planetary Society, the worldwide organization of space enthusiasts.
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from BBC News Online
The genome of a domestic horse has been successfully sequenced by an international team of researchers. The work, published in the journal Science, may shed light on how horses were domesticated.
It also reveals similarities between the horse and other placental mammals, such as bovids--the hoofed group including goats, bison and cattle.
The authors also found horses share much of their DNA with humans, which could have implications for medicine. Horses suffer from more than 90 hereditary diseases that show similarities to those in humans.
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from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
AMHERST -- The terrible transfer took only an instant. One mosquito; one hot-blooded human target; one quick puncture of skin. Most likely, our distant ancestor reacted with no more than a scratch and a shrug.
Thus did malaria leap across the "species divide" between chimpanzees and humans, according to new research led by a University of Massachusetts at Amherst scientist.
Additionally, the research suggests the transmission occurred much more recently than many epidemiologists had believed--perhaps as primitive farmers started encroaching on chimp territory by felling trees and digging drainage ditches.
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