from the Telegraph(UK)
A massive impact with an asteroid that measured around 400 miles across is the reason that Mars is a planet of two distinct halves, where the northern and southern hemispheres look different.
This strange feature was first observed by Nasa's Viking missions to Mars in the 1970s and ever since scientists have puzzled over why there are relatively young, smooth, low-lying plains in the north and relatively old, heavily cratered highlands in the south.
The mystery deepened 20 years later, when the Mars Global Surveyor probe showed that the crust of the planet is much thicker in the south and also revealed magnetic anomalies in the southern hemisphere but not in the north.
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from National Geographic News
The fishlike ancestors of humans and other land animals were a surprisingly diverse bunch, according to a new fossil reconstruction of the transitory species Ventastega curonica.
The aquatic creature, which lived during the late Devonian period about 365 million years ago, represented an evolutionary midpoint between Tiktaalik, one of the earliest fish to clamber onto land, and primitive four-legged land animals, or tetrapods.
"Ventastega gives clues to what the very earliest tetrapods looked like," said study leader Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University in Sweden. Ventastega was first described from a few bone fragments unearthed in Latvia in 1994, but it took additional years of excavation and the discovery of remains from many more individuals before scientists had a good idea of what the creature looked like.
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from Nature News
Last Wednesday, as California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger prepared to tell a biotechnology industry convention in San Diego that his state "is one of the best places to set up shop," Kári Stefansson was opening a letter that had just landed on his desk at deCODE genetics in Reykjavik, Iceland.
The letter read: "It has come to the attention of the California Department of Public Health…that deCODEme Genetics is in violation of California law" for failing to have a clinical laboratory licence in the state and offering genetic tests to consumers resident in the state without a physician's order.
It gave deCODE until 23 June to submit a plan showing how it would correct the situation, or face "civil and/or criminal sanctions." Stefansson's high-profile company is one of 13 genetic-testing firms that have been targeted during the past two weeks by the California agency with a letter to "cease and desist" selling tests to California's residents. The directive poses a serious challenge to plans for a new era of Internet-based, direct-to-consumer genetic testing.
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from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required)
ATLANTA (Associated Press) - The number of Americans with diabetes has grown to about 24 million people, or roughly 8 percent of the U.S. population, the government said Tuesday.
A report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based on data from 2007, said the number represents an increase of about 3 million over two years. The CDC estimates another 57 million people have blood sugar abnormalities called pre-diabetes, which puts people at increased risk for the disease.
The percentage of people unaware that they have diabetes fell from 30 percent to 25 percent, according to the study. Dr. Ann Albright, director of the CDC Division of Diabetes Translation, said the report has "both good news and bad news."
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from the Christian Science Monitor
Forecasting climate change is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle when you don't know its overall pattern. Sometimes you find a piece you didn't even know was missing.
A discovery that arid deserts may be soaking up a lot of carbon dioxide is a case in point. And other times you see a puzzle piece in a helpful new perspective. That has just happened in a study of how nitrogen fixation affects the CO2-absorbing capacity of forests.
The latter takes some explaining. It involves subtleties of plant and soil chemistry that scientists are just beginning to appreciate.
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from the San Francisco Chronicle
An international team of researchers has spotted a previously unknown genetic mutation that can raise the risk of Alzheimer's disease by 44 percent and is carried by about a quarter of the U.S. and European populations studied.
It is only the second gene ever linked to so-called late-onset Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of the devastating brain-wasting condition that afflicts 5.2 million Americans and creates untold heartache for victims and their families.
The first gene linked to the late-onset condition, which affects people over age 65 - was discovered 15 years ago. That finding has yet to lead to meaningful therapies. Researchers said the newly implicated genetic flaw, a mutation in a gene called CALHM1, plays a role in biological processes within the brain that may be more amenable to treatment.
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from the News and Observer(Raleigh, N.C.)
The allure of creating things hasn't let go of Joseph DeSimone since he concocted a vial of purple crystals in high school. A co-founder of Liquidia Technologies and a chemist who holds posts at two Triangle [North Carolina] universities, DeSimone is caught up in experimenting as national attention for his work and his collection of accolades continue to grow.
Wednesday, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named DeSimone, 44, the winner of this year's Lemelson Prize. Known as the "Oscar for inventors," the award pays $500,000 cash.
... DeSimone won the award because of his diverse contributions in the field of polymers, man-made materials better known as plastics. He has coaxed these materials to dissolve, fill microscopically small molds and protect the environment.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
To save chocolate lovers from the agony of a potential candy bar shortage, McLean candy giant Mars is investing $10 million in a five-year project to develop cacao trees that fight drought, disease and poor harvests.
Mars will announce today that it is partnering with IBM and the Department of Agriculture to sequence and analyze the entire cocoa genome. The team will be identifying the characteristics that make a better cacao tree. Then it plans to breed the genetically superior specimens to battle the foes that have shrunk the number of beans to make chocolate over the years.
... Unlocking the secrets of the genome and eliminating the guesswork in traditional breeding could bring economic stability to the 6.5 million small family cocoa farmers around the world and help fend off the environmental assaults that inflict $700 million to $800 million in damages to farmers each year ...
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Ramona Lamascola thought she was losing her 88-year-old mother to dementia. Instead, she was losing her to overmedication.
Last fall her mother, Theresa Lamascola, of the Bronx, suffering from anxiety and confusion, was put on the antipsychotic drug Risperdal. When she had trouble walking, her daughter took her to another doctor ... who found that she had unrecognized hypothyroidism, a disorder that can contribute to dementia.
Theresa Lamascola was moved to a nursing home to get these problems under control. But things only got worse. ... The psychiatrist in the nursing home stopped the Risperdal, which can cause twitching and vocal tics, and prescribed a sedative and two other antipsychotics.
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from the Miami Herald (Registration Required)
ELLINGTON, Fla. (Associated Press) - In one of the biggest conservation deals in U.S. history, the nation's largest producer of cane sugar reached a tentative agreement Tuesday to get out of the business and sell its nearly 300 square miles in the Everglades to the state of Florida for $1.75 billion.
The deal with U.S. Sugar Corp. results from a convergence of interests: The state is trying to restore the Everglades and clean up pollution caused by Big Sugar and other growers, while the American sugar industry is being squeezed by low-price imports.
Republican Gov. Charlie Crist declared the agreement "as monumental as the creation of our nation's first national park, Yellowstone." Under the deal, the state would buy U.S. Sugar's holdings in the Everglades south of Lake Okeechobee, including its cane fields, mill and railroad line. U.S. Sugar would be allowed to farm the 187,000 acres for six more years, after which it would go out of business.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Apart from its sadness, Tim Russert's death this month at 58 was deeply unsettling to many people who, like him, had been earnestly following their doctors' advice on drugs, diet and exercise in hopes of avoiding a heart attack.
Mr. Russert, the moderator of "Meet the Press" on NBC News, took blood pressure and cholesterol pills and aspirin, rode an exercise bike, had yearly stress tests and other exams and was dutifully trying to lose weight. But he died of a heart attack anyway.
An article in The New York Times last week about his medical care led to e-mail from dozens of readers insisting that something must have been missed, that if only he had been given this test or that, his doctors would have realized how sick he was and prescribed more medicine or recommended bypass surgery. Clearly, there was sorrow for Mr. Russert's passing, but also nervous indignation. ... People are not supposed to die this way anymore ...
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from the San Francisco Examiner
WASHINGTON (Associated Press) - Exactly 20 years after warning America about global warming, a top NASA scientist said the situation has gotten so bad that the world's only hope is drastic action.
James Hansen told Congress on Monday that the world has long passed the "dangerous level" for greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and needs to get back to 1988 levels. He said Earth's atmosphere can only stay this loaded with man-made carbon dioxide for a couple more decades without changes such as mass extinction, ecosystem collapse and dramatic sea level rises.
"We're toast if we don't get on a very different path," Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences who is sometimes called the godfather of global warming science, told The Associated Press. "This is the last chance."
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from USA Today
Tropical diseases that ravage Africa, Asia and Latin America commonly occur among the poor in the USA, leaving thousands of people shattered by debilitating complications including mental retardation, heart disease and epilepsy, an analysis showed Monday.
The diseases, caused by chronic viral, bacterial and parasitic infections, disproportionately strike women and children and are largely overlooked by doctors, says author Peter Hotez of the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases, part of Sabin Vaccine Institute.
Hotez says the diseases go untreated in hundreds of thousands of poor people who live mainly in inner cities, the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia and the Mexican borderlands.
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from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Later this year, a plant in China will begin churning out liquid fuel made from coal, a technology that - if all breaks right for the coal industry - is headed to American shores.
From the CTLtec Americas 2008, which begins today at the Omni William Penn Hotel, Downtown, to Capitol Hill, coal-to-liquids is a popular topic, spurred by rising gasoline prices and this country's ever-present need to wean itself from oil imports.
Coal-to-liquid proponents insist that the technology would strengthen national security and be a cheaper alternative than current petroleum. ... Still, coal-to-liquid plants would cost several billion dollars to build, and if the whims of OPEC were to drive down oil prices, there would be little market for a more expensive domestic product. That's why the coal industry has taken its case to Washington.
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from the Baltimore Sun
On a typical weekday, Richard Bauer jogs 2 1/2 miles near his White Marsh home and then drives to Baltimore, where he is a first-year radiography student. After a full day of lectures, he likes to relax by reading Japanese Performance and Motorcyclist.
... Life wasn't always this way for Bauer. In recent years, he couldn't muster the strength to get out of bed. In 2004, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of multiple sclerosis, which left him paralyzed and in a wheelchair for more than a year. Then Bauer tried an experimental drug regimen, and his body reacted in a manner that surprised everyone: The debilitating symptoms of MS almost disappeared.
Writing this month in a medical journal, Johns Hopkins researchers reported unexpected success in the treatment of Bauer and other MS patients who received a high dose of an immunosuppressant drug known as cyclophosphamide.
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from Nature News
In November 2004, Christian Wheeler stood in line at a local church and waited to cast his ballot in the US presidential election, which pitted President George W. Bush against the democratic candidate, John Kerry. As Wheeler waited, his thoughts began to wander.
"I was thinking about the election and how Bush was highly affiliated with religion," says Wheeler, "and it occurred to me that this church couldn't possibly be a neutral location. This has to be affecting people’s thoughts."
So Wheeler, a professor of marketing at Stanford University in California, decided to study whether the location of a polling station can influence how people vote. The results, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that his early musings may have been correct: in an Arizona election, those who voted in schools were slightly more likely to support a proposition to increase funding for education.
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from the Scientific American
Millions of people have been perplexed at one time or another by Rubik's Cube, a fascinating puzzle that took the world by storm in the 1980s. ... The object of the puzzle is to put an arbitrarily scrambled cube back into its original state, one solid color per face, thereby "solving" the cube.
Rubik's Cube, Rubik’s polyhedra and all the many knockoffs that have appeared in the cube's wake are known as permutation puzzles because they are based on moves that rearrange, or permute, the puzzle pieces ... Permutation puzzles are closely related to a mathematical entity called a permutation group, the set of all the sequences of allowable moves that lead to distinct arrangements of the objects in the puzzle.
... A new set of puzzles inspired by Rubik's Cube offers puzzle lovers the chance to get acquainted with the secret twists and turns of mathematical entities called sporadic simple groups.
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from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
People who stop breathing during sleep are more likely to lose their expected - and beneficial - drop in nighttime blood pressure, according to a new study by University of Wisconsin researchers.
This brings scientists one step closer to understanding how sleep apnea, characterized by brief pauses in breathing during sleep, contributes to the development of various cardiovascular diseases.
"We and other people have already found that sleep apnea is related to cardiovascular diseases such as hypertension, strokes and heart failure. We're always looking to see what are the mechanisms by which sleep apnea causes bad cardiovascular outcomes," said Khin Mae Hla, professor at UW-Madison and lead author of the study, which is published in the June issue of Sleep.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
LITITZ, Pa. - Dorothy J. Merritts, a geology professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., was not looking to turn hydrology on its ear when she started scouting possible research sites for her students a few years ago.
But when she examined photographs of the steep, silty banks of the West Branch of Little Conestoga Creek, something did not look right. The silt was laminated, deposited in layers. She asked a colleague, Robert C. Walter, an expert on sediment, for his opinion.
"Those are not stream sediments," he told her. "Those are pond sediments." In short, the streamscape was not what she thought. That observation led the two scientists to collaborate on a research project on the region's waterways.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Delving into a 3,000-year-old mystery using astronomical clues in Homer's "The Odyssey," researchers said Monday they have dated one of the most heralded events of Western literature: Odysseus' slaughter of his wife's suitors upon his return from the Trojan War.
According to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the wily hero who devised the Trojan Horse hefted his mighty bow on April 16, 1178 BC, and executed the unruly crowd who had taken over his home and was trying to force his wife into marriage.
The finding leaves many perennial questions unanswered, such as whether the events portrayed actually occurred or whether the blind poet Homer was the author of the tale. But it casts a new sheen of veracity on a story that has existed in a hazy realm of fantasy and history since it was first composed 400 years after the Trojan War.
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from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required)
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. - The great American assault on tooth decay began here 63 years ago, earning Grand Rapids a special place in the annals of dental history: the first city in the world to fluoridate its public water system.
So it is more than a little head-scratching that fluoride, the chemical widely credited with dramatically cutting cavities and promoting oral hygiene, is having its scientific credentials questioned in the city that literally swallowed it first.
The belated questioning of fluoride in the most unlikely of places stems partly from unsettled questions - some new, some old - about possible links to cancer and thyroid and kidney problems if too much fluoride is ingested. But the push here mirrors a spreading nationwide awareness and re-examination of the health impact of a wide variety of chemicals added to food, health-care products and water, as well as the use of pesticides.
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from the Guardian(UK)
In early 1858, on Ternate in Malaysia, a young specimen collector was tracking the island's elusive birds of paradise when he was struck by malaria. 'Every day, during the cold and succeeding hot fits, I had to lie down during which time I had nothing to do but to think over any subjects then particularly interesting me,' [Alfred Russel Wallace] later recalled.
... He began thinking about disease and famine; about how they kept human populations in check; and about recent discoveries indicating that the earth's age was vast. How might these waves of death, repeated over aeons, influence the make-up of different species, he wondered?
Then the fever subsided - and inspiration struck. Fittest variations will survive longest and will eventually evolve into new species, he realised. Thus the theory of natural selection appeared, fever-like, in the mind of one of our greatest naturalists.
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from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
MILLINOCKET, Maine - Mainers call the black fly the state bird.
Residents and tourists have long steeled themselves against the flies' annual warm-weather onslaught, sometimes duct-taping pant legs and wearing screened hoods to keep the deceptively small bugs from delivering bloody bites or crawling into seemingly every body crevice.
But there are now more black flies in more places in Maine, and the reason may be surprising: It's the success of the environmental movement.
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from the San Francisco Examiner
TONASKET, Wash. (Associated Press) - Ray Colbert wanted out after five decades of growing apples, but his son didn't want the farm in northern Washington. No one else did either.
So, Colbert sold the last big piece of his operation, an 80-acre parcel, to a buyer far downstate who wanted what came with the land: water from the Okanogan River.
State regulators signed off on the buyer's request to transfer the rights to the water and let it flow hundreds of miles down river, figuring the deal was good for fish and wouldn't hurt anyone else's water supply. Local officials, however, fear such deals will dry out their rural farming community.
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from New Scientist
A controversial decision to halt commercial and recreational fishing across vast areas of the Great Barrier Reef has proven remarkably effective for reviving coral trout numbers. "Everyone is a little surprised," admits Garry Russ, a marine biologist at James Cook University in Townsville.
"We've seen a consistent pattern of recovery of coral trout from just north of Cairns to as far south as Heron Island," he says. "It's an extraordinarily large area."
In mid 2004, the Australian government rezoned the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park to create the world's largest network of marine "no-take" zones.
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from the BBC News Online
Dozens of tools thought to have belonged to Neanderthals have been dug up at an archaeological site called Beedings in West Sussex.
Dr. Matthew Pope, of University College London, said the discovery provided new insights into the life of a thriving community of hunters at the site. The tools could have been used to hunt horses, mammoth and woolly rhinoceros.
The archaeologists, funded by English Heritage, have been carrying out their investigations over the last few weeks. It is the first modern scientific investigation of the site since it was discovered in 1900. "It's exciting to think that there's a real possibility these were left by some of the last Neanderthal hunting groups to occupy northern Europe," said Dr. Pope.
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from the Scientific American
Roughly 14,700 years ago the weather patterns that bring snow to Greenland shifted from one year to the next - a pattern of abrupt change that was repeated 12,900 years ago and 11,700 years ago when the earth's climate became the one enjoyed today - according to records preserved in an ice core taken from the northern island.
These speedy changes - transitions from warming to cooling and back again - in the absence of changes in greenhouse gas could presage abrupt, catastrophic climate change in our future.
"What made these abrupt climate changes were circulation changes, and these changes took place from one year to the next more or less," says glaciologist Sune Olander Rasmussen of the Centre for Ice and Climate at the University of Copenhagen ...
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from the New York Times Magazine (Registration Required)
Off Gore Point, where tide rips collide, the rolling swells rear up and steepen into whitecaps. Quiet with concentration, Chris Pallister decelerates from 15 knots to 8, strains to peer through a windshield blurry with spray, tightens his grip on the wheel and, like a skier negotiating moguls, coaxes his home-built boat ... through the chaos of waves.
... A 55-year-old lawyer with a ... private law practice in Anchorage, Pallister spends most of his time directing a nonprofit group called the Gulf of Alaska Keeper, or GoAK (pronounced GO-ay-kay).
... In practice, the group has, since Pallister and a few like-minded buddies founded it in 2005, done little else besides clean trash from beaches. All along Alaska's outer coast, Chris Pallister will tell you, there are shores strewn with marine debris, as man-made flotsam and jetsam is officially known. Most of that debris is plastic, and much of it crosses the Gulf of Alaska or even the Pacific Ocean to arrive there.
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from Science News
Scientists would like to take your breath away. Literally. Exhaled vapor holds clues to your health, revealing much more than just what you ate for lunch.
In recent years, researchers have been scrutinizing the misty mixture of molecules with fervor, seeking evidence of conditions ranging from sleep apnea to cancer.
Breath can also reveal exposure to pollutants such as benzene and chloroform, providing a measure of internal dose that is missed by sampling polluted air.
http://snipurl.com/2mxkl
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
The look of fear is unmistakable: wide eyes, raised brows, a dropped jaw. But is it more than a social signal?
In [last] week's journal Nature Neuroscience, University of Toronto researchers reported that fearful expressions evolved to heighten the senses and improve detection of physical threats.
Scientists asked 20 college students to assume fearful and neutral faces and measured their field of vision each time. Fearful expressions enlarged the vision field by 7.6 percent compared with a neutral expression, presumably making it easier to spot an attacker.
http://snipurl.com/2mxc8
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