from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
A common vaccine given to children to protect them against measles, mumps and rubella is not linked to autism, a study published [Wednesday] concludes. The findings contradict earlier research that had fueled fears of a possible link between childhood vaccinations and a steep increase in autism diagnoses.
In February 1998, the Lancet journal published a study by British researcher Andrew Wakefield of 12 children with autism and other behavioral problems that suggested the onset of their behavioral abnormalities was linked to receiving the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine.
The new study comes as the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington is in the midst of evaluating evidence on whether children's vaccines are implicated in causing autism.
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from Science News
New radio wave observations are giving astronomers their closest look yet at the supermassive black hole believed to be lurking at the center of our galaxy.
Reporting in the Sept. 4 Nature, a team has, for the first time, resolved features as small as the black hole’s event horizon—the gravitationally warped region from which nothing, not even light, can escape.
“We have now entered a new era, one in which we can directly image structure at the event horizon of a black hole,” asserts Christopher Reynolds of the University of Maryland in College Park in a commentary accompanying the Nature report.
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from the Seattle Times
WASHINGTON—Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine have linked a chemical found in everyday plastics to problems with brain function and mood disorders in monkeys, the first time the chemical has been connected to health problems in primates.
The study is the latest in an accumulation of research that has raises concerns about bisphenol A, or BPA, a compound that gives a shatterproof quality to polycarbonate plastic and has been found to leach from plastic into food and water.
The Yale study results come as federal toxicologists Wednesday reaffirmed an earlier draft-report finding that there is "some concern" bisphenol A can cause developmental problems in the brain and hormonal systems of infants and children.
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from USA Today
A radioactive tracer that "lights up" cancer hiding inside dense breasts showed promise in its first big test against mammograms, revealing more tumors and giving fewer false alarms, doctors reported Wednesday.
The experimental method—molecular breast imaging, or MBI—would not replace mammograms for women at average risk of the disease.
But it might become an additional tool for higher risk women with a lot of dense tissue that makes tumors hard to spot on mammograms, and it could be done at less cost than an MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging.
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from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)
Attacked by Bacillus anthracis in its most virulent form, the human body is no match. White blood cells dispatched to kill the pathogen wind up transporting anthrax spores back to key organs, where the bacteria burst forth in multitudes, flooding the bloodstream with death-dealing toxins.
By the time many victims realize they're infected, they're already doomed. Anthrax is an old nemesis.
... Robert Koch, a pioneer in microbiology, finally isolated the bacterium in 1877, helping launch a scientific effort to understand and overcome the microbe. That effort continues around the world, including inside labs at San Diego State University and the University of California San Diego. A driving motivation is fear, of course.
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from the Scientific American
When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) begins smashing protons together this fall inside its 17-mile-circumference underground particle racetrack near Geneva, Switzerland, it will usher in a new era not only of physics but also of computing.
Before the year is out, the LHC is projected to begin pumping out a tsunami of raw data equivalent to one DVD (five gigabytes) every five seconds. Its annual output of 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) will soon dwarf that of any other scientific experiment in history.
The challenge is making that data accessible to a scientist anywhere in the world at the execution of a few commands on her laptop. The solution is a global computer network called the LHC Computing Grid, and with any luck, it may be giving us a glimpse of the Internet of the future.
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from the Economist
There is a branch of science fiction that looks at the Earth’s neighbours, Mars and Venus, and asks how they might be made habitable. The answer is planetary engineering. ... So, fiddle with the atmospheres of these neighbours and you open new frontiers for human settlement and far-fetched story lines.
It is an intriguing idea. It may even come to pass, though probably not in the lifetime of anyone now reading such stories. But what is more worrying—and more real—is the idea that such planetary engineering may be needed to make the Earth itself habitable by humanity, and that it may be needed in the near future.
Reality has a way of trumping art, and human-induced climate change is very real indeed. So real that some people are asking whether science fiction should now be converted into science fact.
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from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required)
WASHINGTON (Associated Press)—Scientists have mapped the cascade of genetic changes that turn normal cells in the brain and pancreas into two of the most lethal cancers. The result points to a new approach for fighting tumors and maybe even catching them sooner.
Genes blamed for one person's brain tumor were different from the culprits for the next patient, making the puzzle of cancer genetics even more complicated. But Friday's research also found that clusters of seemingly disparate genes all work along the same pathways.
So instead of today's hunt for drugs that target a single gene, the idea is to target entire pathways that most patients share. Think of delivering the mail to a single box at the end of the cul-de-sac instead of at every doorstep. The three studies, published in the journals Science and Nature, mark a milestone in cancer genetics.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Suicides among U.S. adolescents dropped in 2005 after a sharp rise the previous year, but the number still remained high compared with historical trends, researchers said Tuesday.
The youth suicide rate had been falling steadily for a decade, but shot upward by 18% in 2004, boosted, according to some experts, by a government warning about antidepressants that led patients to stop taking the drugs.
The latest study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that the reaction triggered by the warning has subsided and patients are being treated with antidepressants or other therapies.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
A new study finds that the strongest of hurricanes and typhoons have become even stronger over the last two and a half decades, adding grist to the contentious debate over whether global warming has already made storms more destructive.
“I think we do see a climate signal here,” said James B. Elsner, a professor of geography at Florida State University who is the lead author of the paper, being published in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.
The study, which also found that more typical, less powerful tropical storms had not become stronger over the 26-year period studied, is consistent with other researchers’ hurricane models, Dr. Elsner said.
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from the BBC News Online
The ice shelves in Canada's High Arctic have lost a colossal area this year, scientists report. The floating tongues of ice attached to Ellesmere Island, which have lasted for thousands of years, have seen almost a quarter of their cover break away.
One of them, the 50 sq km (20 sq miles) Markham shelf, has completely broken off to become floating sea-ice. Researchers say warm air temperatures and reduced sea-ice conditions in the region have assisted the break-up.
"These substantial calving events underscore the rapidity of changes taking place in the Arctic," said Trent University's Dr Derek Mueller. "These changes are irreversible under the present climate."
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from the Guardian (UK)
Sixty thousand years ago, a small group of African men and women took to the Red Sea in tiny boats and crossed the Mandab Strait to Asia. Their journey-of less than 20 miles-marked the moment Homo sapiens left its home continent.
The motive for our ancestors' African exodus is not known, though scientists suspect food shortages, triggered by climate change, were involved. However, its impact cannot be overestimated. Two thousand generations later, descendants of these African emigres have settled our entire planet, wiped out all other hominids including the Neanderthals and have reached a population of 6.5 billion.
Now scientists are completing a massive study of DNA samples from a quarter of a million volunteers in different continents in order to create the most precise map yet of mankind's great diaspora. Last week, in Tallinn, Estonia, they outlined their most recent results.
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from Science News
If two physicists are right, a single electron might know more about numbers than all of the world’s mathematicians. In an upcoming Physical Review Letters, the researchers hint that the dynamics of an electron can embody the solution to the nearly 150-year-old Riemann hypothesis, a crucial unsolved problem that has wide and deep consequences for number theory.
Germán Sierra of the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid and Paul Townsend of the University of Cambridge in England have proposed that when an electron is confined to moving in two dimensions, its possible energy level values might encode the key to the Riemann hypothesis.
“They have gone a step forward toward giving a physical description of the Riemann hypothesis,” comments Jonathan Keating of the University of Bristol in England. He warns, though, that the problem may not have gotten any easier as a result.
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from the Scientific American
Within hours of his demise in 1955, Albert Einstein’s brain was salvaged, sliced into 240 pieces and stored in jars for safekeeping. Since then, researchers have weighed, measured and otherwise inspected these biological specimens of genius in hopes of uncovering clues to Einstein’s spectacular intellect.
Their cerebral explorations are part of a century-long effort to uncover the neural basis of high intelligence or, in children, giftedness. Traditionally, 2 to 5 percent of kids qualify as gifted, with the top 2 percent scoring above 130 on an intelligence quotient (IQ) test.
A high IQ increases the probability of success in various academic areas. Children who are good at reading, writing or math also tend to be facile at the other two areas and to grow into adults who are skilled at diverse intellectual tasks. Most studies show that smarter brains are typically bigger—at least in certain locations.
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from the Scientist (Registration Required)
While women are entering the sciences and health professions in record numbers, the percentage that achieves positions of leadership lags far behind that of male scientists. This deficit of high-ranking female science leaders represents both a business and equity issue.
Diversity, including gender diversity, has come to be recognized as an essential component in the development and maintenance of strong, creative, and competitive organizations. This is achieved not through tokenism but by the presence of a "critical mass" of women and other minorities in leadership roles.
An increasing number of programs address the "pipeline" issue - ensuring that there are capable, qualified women and minority scientists in entry-level positions. Several programs ... have been successful in training and supporting women at the beginning to midlevel stages of their careers. Unfortunately, the pipeline leaks.
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from the Oregonian
Government toxicologists have reiterated safety concerns about a chemical used in baby bottles and food containers, just weeks after the Food and Drug Administration declared the substance safe.
A report issued Wednesday said there is "some concern" that bisphenol A can cause developmental problems in the brain and hormonal systems of infants and children.
The conclusion from the National Toxicology Program repeats initial findings issued in April. The group -- which includes scientists from the National Institutes of Health and other agencies -- said bisphenol's risks to humans cannot be ruled out, but acknowledged its concerns are based on the findings of studies on animals.
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from National Geographic News
Deep inside an underwater cave in Mexico, archaeologists may have discovered the oldest human skeleton ever found in the Americas.
Dubbed Eva de Naharon, or Eve of Naharon, the female skeleton has been dated at 13,600 years old. If that age is accurate, the skeleton—along with three others found in underwater caves along the Caribbean coast of the Yucatán Peninsula—could provide new clues to how the Americas were first populated.
The remains have been excavated over the past four years near the town of Tulum, about 80 miles southwest of Cancún, by a team of scientists led by Arturo González, director of the Desert Museum in Saltillo, Mexico.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
As anybody who has grieved inconsolably over the death of a loved one can attest, extended mourning is, in part, a perverse kind of optimism. Surely this bottomless, unwavering sorrow will amount to something, goes the tape loop. Surely if I keep it up long enough I’ll accomplish my goal, and the person will stop being dead.
Last week the Internet and European news outlets were flooded with poignant photographs of Gana, an 11-year-old gorilla at the Münster Zoo in Germany, holding up the body of her dead baby, Claudio, and pursing her lips toward his lifeless fingers.
Claudio died at the age of 3 months of an apparent heart defect, and for days Gana refused to surrender his corpse to zookeepers, a saga that provoked among her throngs of human onlookers admiration and compassion and murmurings that, you see? Gorillas, and probably a lot of other animals as well, have a grasp of their mortality and will grieve for the dead and are really just like us after all.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
NEW HAVEN—By day, Thomas Near studies the evolution of fish, wading through streams in Kentucky and Mississippi in search of new species. By night, Dr. Near, an assistant professor at Yale, is a heavy-duty gamer, steering tanks or playing football on his computer. This afternoon his two lives have come together.
On his laptop swims a strange fishlike creature, with a jaw that snaps sideways and skin the color of green sea glass. As Dr. Near taps the keyboard, it wiggles and twists its way through a busy virtual ocean. It tries to eat other creatures and turns its quills toward predators that would make it a meal.
... Dr. Near has spent a few evenings testing out Spore, one of the most eagerly anticipated video games in the history of the industry. ... It starts with single-cell microbes and follows them through their evolution into intelligent multicellular creatures that can build civilizations, colonize the galaxy and populate new planets.
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from New Scientist
The collision of entire clusters of galaxies has helped set the strongest limit yet on the amount of antimatter in the universe. The research suggests that if antimatter exists in large amounts, it may have been pushed to the far reaches of the universe in the moments after the big bang.
In the early universe, the theory goes, matter and antimatter–which has the same mass as matter, but the opposite charge–should have been created in equal amounts. But as far as we can tell, our universe is made of matter.
In our galaxy, for instance, no primordial anti-protons or anti-helium atoms have been found by satellite or balloon-based experiments. "It's clear to a very high level of precision that our galaxy is made of [what] we by convention call 'ordinary matter'," says Gary Steigman of Ohio State University in Columbus.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
Men are more likely to be devoted and loyal husbands when they lack a particular variant of a gene that influences brain activity, researchers announced [Monday]—the first time that science has shown a direct link between a man's genes and his aptitude for monogamy.
The finding is striking because it not only links the gene variant—which is present in two of every five men—with the risk of marital discord and divorce, but also appears to predict whether women involved with these men are likely to say their partners are emotionally close and available, or distant and disagreeable.
The presence of the gene variant, or allele, also seems predictive of whether men get married or live with women without getting married.
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from USA Today
Cases of chickenpox—a childhood infection that was once nearly universal—have fallen 57% to 90% in communities across the USA since a vaccine was introduced in 1995, a new report shows.
Before the vaccine, 4 million Americans a year came down with chickenpox, nearly 11,000 were hospitalized and more than 140 died, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in today's Pediatrics.
The vaccine has reduced infections in every age group, including among babies under 1 year old, who are too young to be vaccinated, says study author Jane Seward of the CDC's National Center for Immunizations and Respiratory Diseases. These babies are being protected by "herd immunity," which results when vaccines reduce the opportunities for infection in a community.
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from the BBC News Online
A new study by climate scientists behind the controversial 1998 "hockey stick" graph suggests their earlier analysis was broadly correct. Michael Mann's team analysed data for the last 2,000 years, and concluded that Northern Hemisphere temperatures now are "anomalously warm."
Different analytical methods give the same result, they report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The 1998 hockey stick was a totem of debates over man-made global warming.
The graph—indicating that Northern Hemisphere temperatures had been roughly constant for 1,000 years (the "shaft" of the stick) before turning abruptly upwards in the industrial age—featured prominently in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) 2001 assessment. But some academics questioned its methodology and conclusions, and increasingly strident condemnations reverberated around the blogosphere.
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from Science News
Children born to older fathers might have an increased risk of developing bipolar disorder, Swedish researchers report in the September Archives of General Psychiatry.
The finding is a statistical association drawn from a large population survey. But it falls in line with earlier studies suggesting that children sired by older men face a greater-than-average risk of being stillborn, miscarried or having schizophrenia, cancer or autism.
The theory linking paternal age with an offspring’s health rests on the genetics of aging sperm. Spontaneous mutations can accumulate in the genes of a man’s sperm cells as he ages. These cells divide as many as 660 times by the time a man reaches 40, by some estimates. Each division increases the risk of acquiring a harmful mutation from erroneous gene copying, the theory holds.
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from the Scientific American
Confounded by the inexhaustible array of choices available when you stroll through a supermarket today? Well, here's another one to add to the list: How would you like your environmental degradation?
By land or by sea? Whether it's pesticides and fertilizers leaching out of croplands or marine fish stocks vanishing by the boatful, every food purchase carries increasingly visible ecological costs. Against this backdrop, a growing cadre of academics, farmers and aquaculturists is working to refine and popularize a technique that could slash those costs for both fish and vegetable products.
The technique, dubbed "aquaponics," integrates fish farming and hydroponic agriculture in a sort of closed, symbiotic loop—the fish serve as fertilizer factories, the plants as water purifiers. The idea is to maximize food production while minimizing environmentally taxing inputs and potentially polluting outputs—a sustainable approach to growing healthy food.
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from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required)
MUNICH, Germany (Associated Press)—For heart patients with clogged arteries, the choice between bypass surgery or an angioplasty may come down to one question: How many procedures would you like to have?
In research presented Monday at the European Society of Cardiology meeting in Munich, experts concluded that while bypass surgery and angioplasty offer comparable results, patients who have angioplasties are twice as likely to require another procedure within a year.
"If you don't want to have another heart operation for at least a decade, you should pick the surgery," said Dr. Heinz Drexel, professor of medicine at the University of Innsbruck in Austria and spokesman for the European Society of Cardiology. Drexel was not connected to the research.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
TOOLIK FIELD STATION, Alaska—As Anne Giblin was lugging four-foot tubes of Arctic lakebed mud from her inflatable raft to her nearby lab this summer, she said, “Mud is a great storyteller.”
Dr. Giblin, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., is part of the Long Term Ecological Research network at an Arctic science outpost here operated by the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
Public discussion of complicated climate change is largely reduced to carbon: carbon emissions, carbon footprints, carbon trading. But other chemicals have large roles in the planet’s health, and the one Dr. Giblin is looking for in Arctic mud, one that a growing number of other researchers are also concentrating on, is nitrogen.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Raised in poverty, Dr. Shauna Blake Collins fought fear during nearly 14 years of education. A dropout from a South-Central Los Angeles high school, she earned a GED diploma at 22, became a licensed vocational nurse, a registered nurse, and finally, at 41, a physician. Confidence came only during the last two years of medical school.
"Every step of the way, I was petrified," says the Winnetka mother of two toddlers, who recently graduated from UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine. "The pressure I put on myself made me paralyzed."
Students who grow up amid economic insecurity often face many obstacles: overcrowded schools, lack of enrichment activities, violent neighborhoods. Fear and stress can be two more problems. Brain science is showing how these emotions have effects on the brain and how they can directly impede learning.
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In experiments involving mice, Harvard University biologists have transformed one type of adult cell into another. The advance has major therapeutic implications and could avoid the ethical friction generated by embryonic stem cell research.
U.S. health officials said last week that the salmonella outbreak linked to jalapenos appears to be over. It was the largest outbreak of food-borne illness in the past decade. But there are lingering questions over how it was handled.
Also last week, a research team reported the first genetic link to the most common form of progressive blindness, known as dry age-related macular degeneration. About 66 percent of the population has a genetic variant that appears to protect them from the viral damage implicated in the onset of the disease.
Scientists seemed to confirm an odd fact about cows that has been noted anecdotally over the centuries. Satellite images revealed that grazing cattle tend to align their bodies in a north-south direction.
And why should we mourn the possible extinction of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori? It's infamous for causing stomach ulcers and gastric cancer, but it may also bestow certain benefits on its human hosts.
Electron microscopy has revealed that a giant virus called mamavirus, first detected in amoebas from a water-cooling tower in Paris, is itself infected with another tiny virus. The discovery has provided a new wrinkle in the debate over the definition of life.
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Smithsonian Magazine looked at what impoverished Kiribati, a nation of tiny islands in the Pacific, has done to create the world's largest protected area, a marine reserve the size of California.
In a related story, President Bush announced his intention to protect some of the Pacific's most remote and unspoiled islands, atolls and coral reefs from fishing and deep-sea mining.
In other news, botanists and citrus growers in Florida say the world's most destructive citrus disease could decimate the state's groves over the next decade unless a way is found to stop it.
And scientists say birds may be the best hope coffee growers have for combating a tiny insect that's the biggest threat to their crop. The coffee berry borer strikes almost everywhere coffee grows.
On the climate front, researchers reported that sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is at its second lowest level in about 30 years. And new satellite images show a growing crack in an 11-square-mile chunk of the Petermann glacier in northern Greenland.
And at the World Water Week conference in Stockholm, Sweden, a new report blamed water shortages in some parts of the world on corruption driven by mafia-like organizations. The water sector is one of most corrupt, after health and education, the report asserted.
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