from Nature News
The infectious romp that the measles virus takes through the body doesn't need to involve the airways, as was previously thought. Instead, the virus prefers to replicate in immune cells.
This finding potentially paves the way for new and better cancer treatments that use a modified version of the measles virus to focus on the immune system.
Measles was thought to spread by first infecting the cells that line the airways before going on to attack the immune cells. An alternative suggestion, that the virus is carried primarily by lymphatic immune cells, was tested by Roberto Cattaneo at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and colleagues.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
As greenhouse-gas emissions rise, North America is likely to experience more droughts and excessive heat in some regions even as intense downpours and hurricanes pound others more often, according to a report issued [last week] by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program.
The 162-page study, which was led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, provides the most comprehensive assessment yet of how global warming has helped to transform the climate of the United States and Canada over the past 50 years -- and how it may do so in the future.
Coming at a time when record flooding is ravaging the Midwest, the new report paints a grim scenario in which severe weather will exact a heavy toll. The report warned that extreme weather events "are among the most serious challenges to society in coping with a changing climate."
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
That black hole that was going to eat the Earth? Forget about it, and keep making the mortgage payments - those of you who still have them.
A new particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider scheduled to go into operation this fall outside Geneva, is no threat to the Earth or the universe, according to a new safety review approved Friday by the governing council of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or Cern, which is building the collider.
"There is no basis for any concerns about the consequences of new particles or forms of matter that could possibly be produced by the LHC," four physicists who comprised the safety assessment group wrote in their report.
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from National Geographic News
Recent photos of an uncontacted tribe firing arrows at a plane briefly made these Amazon Indians the world's least understood media darlings.
Contrary to many news stories, the isolated group has actually been monitored from a distance for decades, past and current Brazilian government officials say.
No one, however, is known to have had a face-to-face meeting with the nomadic tribe, which lives along the Peru-Brazil border. And no one knows how much, if anything, these rain forest people know about the outside world.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
As President Bush calls for repealing a ban on drilling off most of the coast of the United States, a shortage of ships used for deep-water offshore drilling promises to impede any rapid turnaround in oil exploration and supply.
In recent years, this global shortage of drill-ships has created a critical bottleneck, frustrating energy company executives and constraining their ability to exploit known reserves or find new ones.
Slow growth in oil supplies, at a time of soaring demand, has been a major factor in the spike of oil and gasoline prices.
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from the Associated Press
WASHINGTON (Associated Press) - An outbreak of one of the most contagious animal diseases from any of five locations the White House is considering for a new high-security research laboratory would be more devastating to the U.S. economy than from the isolated island laboratory where such research is now conducted, says a new report published Friday.
The 1,005-page Homeland Security Department report said chances of such an outbreak - with estimated loses of more than $4.2 billion - would be "extremely low" if the research lab were designed, constructed and operated according to government safety standards.
Still, it calculated that economic losses in an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease could surpass $4 billion if the lab were built near livestock herds in Kansas or Texas, two options the Bush administration is considering.
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from BBC News Online
A space mission that will be critical to our understanding of climate change has launched from California.
The Jason-2 satellite will become the primary means of measuring the shape of the world's oceans, taking readings with an accuracy of better than 4cm. Its data will track not only sea level rise but reveal how the great mass of waters are moving around the globe.
This information will be fundamental in helping weather and climate agencies make better forecasts. The satellite left Earth at 0746 GMT atop a Delta-2 rocket from the Vandenberg Air Force Base.
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from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Registration Required)
Researchers have uncovered a new clue to the cause of Alzheimer's disease.
The brains of people with the memory-robbing form of dementia are cluttered with a plaque made up of beta-amyloid, a sticky protein. But there long has been a question whether this is a cause of the disease or a side effect.
... Now, researchers have caused Alzheimer's symptoms in rats by injecting them with one particular form of beta-amyloid. Injections with other forms of beta-amyloid did not cause illness, which may explain why some people have beta-amyloid plaque in their brains but do not show disease symptoms.
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from ScienceDaily
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Research misconduct at U.S. institutions may be more common than previously suspected, with 9 percent of scientists saying in a new survey that they personally had seen fabrication, falsification or plagiarism. ...
The survey of 2,212 mainly biomedical scientists at 605 universities and other research institutions, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, also showed that researchers are very reluctant to report bad conduct.
Thirty-seven percent of cases of suspected misconduct were never reported to the institution involved for investigation, perhaps due to fear of reprisals for turning in a colleague or a desire to protect the flow of research money.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
After a decade of shouting, "Follow the water!" in its exploration of Mars, NASA can finally say that one of its spacecraft has reached out, touched water ice and scooped it up. ...
Now, scientists will be able to tackle the main question they hope to answer: Did the ice ever melt and turn Mars into a habitable place? In a photograph released Thursday evening of a trench that the Phoenix Mars lander has dug into the Martian soil, some white patches that were seen earlier in the week have shrunk, and eight small chunks have disappeared.
Until now, scientists were not sure if the white material was ice or some kind of salt. When exposed to air, water ice can change into water vapor, a process known as sublimation. Salt, on the other hand, is not capable of such a vanishing act.
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from the Economist
Titan is a bit of a hulk. It can lift a BMW into the air with just one arm, swing it around and then set it down again in exactly the same spot with barely a quiver. Moving cars is a piece of cake for the world's strongest robot. ...
... At just 1.4 metres in height, Partner Robot is a wimp - but its talent is versatility, not strength. Made by Toyota, Partner Robot is humanoid. Rather than being bolted to the floor like Titan, it can walk on two articulated legs.
... As different as these two machines are, they share a common ancestor: the industrial robot. The first factory robots appeared in the 1960s. They could do only simple, monotonous and mundane things, like moving objects from one production line to another - they were drudges, like the slaves Karel Capek described in 1920 in the play that coined the term from the Czech word robota, or "forced labour."
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from the BBC News Online
A scratchy recording of Baa Baa Black Sheep and a truncated version of In the Mood are thought to be the oldest known recordings of computer generated music. The songs were captured by the BBC in the Autumn of 1951 during a visit to the University of Manchester. ...
The recording has been unveiled as part of the 60th Anniversary of "Baby", the forerunner of all modern computers. The tunes were played on a Ferranti Mark 1 computer, a commercial version of the Baby Machine.
"I think it's historically significant," Paul Doornbusch, a computer music composer and historian at the New Zealand School of Music, told BBC News. "As far as I know it's the earliest recording of a computer playing music in the world, probably by quite a wide margin."
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration required)
Gastric bypass surgery -- a treatment for obesity that is already known to reduce heart disease and diabetes -- decreases the incidence of cancer by 80 percent over the five years following the procedure, Canadian researchers reported Wednesday. ...
The incidence of two of the most common tumors, breast and colon, was reduced by 85 percent and 70 percent, respectively, Dr. Nicolas Christou of McGill University in Montreal said.
The study confirms the findings of two papers issued in August that showed the surgery reduced overall deaths from cancer. The new study goes a step further by showing reductions in the incidence of several specific types of cancer ...
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from Nature News
China wants everything to be under control at the opening of the Beijing Olympic Games on 8 August - even the weather. The chance of rain that day is 47 percent, according to the Beijing Meteorological Bureau. ...
The iconic 91,000-seat main stadium, nicknamed the 'bird's nest' because of its interlacing steel beams, has no roof. So Chinese meteorologists will use weather-modification technologies to try to stop rain from spoiling the party.
Beijing's plan for the games is the most conspicuous example of the country's massive weather-modification efforts. Most of the time, the focus is not on keeping things dry, but on making it rain in places that desperately need the water.
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from New Scientist
However hard you stare, you would still miss it. Researchers have found a way to generate the shortest-ever flash of light - 80 attoseconds (billionths of a billionth of a second) long. ...
Such flashes have already been used to capture an image of a laser pulse too short to be "photographed" before. The light pulses are produced by firing longer, but still very short laser pulses into a cloud of neon gas. The laser gives a kick of energy to the neon atoms, which then release this energy in the form of brief pulses of extreme ultraviolet light.
The trigger pulses fired at the neon cloud are themselves only 2.5 femtoseconds, billionths of a millionth of a second, long, says team member Eleftherios Goulielmakis at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany.
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from the BBC News Online
Arctic sea ice is melting even faster than last year, despite a cold winter.
Data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) shows that the year began with ice covering a larger area than at the beginning of 2007. But now it is down to levels seen last June, at the beginning of a summer that broke records for sea ice loss.
Scientists on the project say much of the ice is so thin as to melt easily, and the Arctic seas may be ice-free in summer within five to 10 years.
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from the Scientific American
EAST AMWELL, N.J. - Mike Strizki has not paid an electric, oil or gas bill - nor has he spent a nickel to fill up his Mercury Sable - in nearly two years.
Instead, the 51-year-old civil engineer makes all the fuel he needs using a system he built in the capacious garage of his home, which employs photovoltaic (PV) panels to turn sunlight into electricity that is harnessed in turn to extract hydrogen from tap water.
Although the device cost $500,000 to construct, and it is unlikely it will ever pay off financially ..., the civil engineer says it is priceless in terms of what it does buy: freedom from ever paying another heating or electric bill, not to mention keeping a lid on pollution, because water is its only by-product.
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from the San Francisco Examiner
LONDON (Associated Press) - In a cramped, humid laboratory in London, mosquitoes swarming in stacked, net-covered cages are being scrutinized for keys to controlling malaria.
Scientists have genetically modified hundreds of them, hoping to stop them from spreading the killer disease. Faced with a losing battle against malaria, scientists are increasingly exploring new avenues that might have seemed far-fetched just a few years ago.
"We don't have things we can rely on," said Andrea Crisanti, the malaria expert in charge of genetically modifying mosquitoes at London's Imperial College. "It's time to try something else."
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from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Registration Required)
WASHINGTON (Associated Press) - A cyclone wrecks coastal Myanmar, spawning outbreaks of malaria, cholera and dengue fever. Flooding inundates Iowa, raising an array of public health concerns. With climate change comes new threats to life, and scientists hope to be able to better predict them as they forecast the weather.
"Everything is connected in our earth system," Conrad C. Lautenbacher, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said at a panel on "Changing Climate: Changing Health Patterns."
The key is bringing all types of data together—health, weather, human behavior, disasters and others—"it's science without borders," Lautenbacher said. He said 73 countries and more than 50 international organizations are currently participating in the Global Earth Observation System of Systems and more are expected to join.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Intricate as the mating dance may be among people, for other primates like chimpanzees and baboons it is even more complicated. This is evident from the work of researchers who report that the distinctive calls made by female chimpanzees during sex are part of a sophisticated social calculation.
Biologists have long been puzzled by these copulation calls, which can betray the caller's whereabouts to predators. To compensate for this hazard, the calls must confer a significant evolutionary advantage, but what?
... [The] study, by Simon Townsend, Tobias Deschner and Klaus Zuberbühler, shows that in making calls or not, the females take the social situation into account.
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from USA Today
An experimental drug for Alzheimer's disease patients showed promise in Phase II clinical trials and is moving into final-stage trials, Wyeth and Elan, the makers of bapineuzumab, announced Tuesday.
Bapineuzumab is designed to fight beta amyloid, a toxic protein that clumps together in the brains of Alzheimer's patients.
In the early studies, conducted around the USA, 240 people with early- to moderate-stage Alzheimer's disease were either assigned bapineuzumab or a placebo. Researchers reported that non-carriers of a gene considered to be a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, called ApoE4, showed "clinically meaningful benefits" in a battery of tests used to track the progression of Alzheimer's disease.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
Cambridge, Mass.—Out on a lawn at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with joggers and traffic passing nearby, Spencer Ahrens is demonstrating what looks like either the future of solar power—or perhaps a death ray.
Thrusting a 12-foot board up into the air in front of a large mirror-covered satellite-type dish, Mr. Ahrens, an MIT graduate student, waves the board, looking for an elusive sweet spot where reflected sun rays converge.
With three student teammates looking on, he steadies the board once its tip begins to glow. Shining white in the reflected solar rays, the wood suddenly bursts into flames. Students laugh as smoke billows in the breeze. This burning-board trick may seem like a YouTube stunt, but it's actually a visceral demonstration of a device with a serious purpose: to make super-cheap solar heat.
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from the Baltimore Sun
For the first time in a single study, Johns Hopkins scientists have found that diabetes contributes to depression and vice versa, confirming long-held assumptions about the intertwined nature of two diseases that affect millions of Americans.
The research, published [Tuesday] in the Journal of the American Medical Association, provides added proof that diabetes plays a role in depression and depression plays a role in diabetes. Previous studies have looked at only one aspect of the link.
For years, researchers had assumed that diabetes led to depression, said University of Michigan epidemiologist Briana Mezuk. The new research provides evidence.
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from BBC News Online
Scientists claim they have cured advanced skin cancer for the first time using the patient's own cells cloned outside the body.
The 52-year-old man involved was free of melanoma two years after treatment. US researchers, reports the New England Journal of Medicine, took cancer-fighting immune cells, made five billion copies, then put them all back.
Scientists in the UK warned that further trials would need to be done to prove how well the treatment worked.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
Tumorex, Immune Ace, Ellagic Insurance Formula, PC Hope, Pacific Ocean Shark Cartilage, Breast Cancer Tea Formula. They are all products sold to desperate cancer patients or people worried they might become one.
[On Tuesday], the Food and Drug Administration told the companies selling them to stop asserting that their products will work like drugs or face seizures—and possibly criminal charges as well.
"The claims are unproved and unreliable, and they are unkind to the patient who is seeking health," said David Elder, director of FDA's Office of Enforcement. "Some of the products may also present a direct safety hazard."
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from Scientific American
When Apple's iPhone hit the streets last year, it introduced so-called multi-touch screens to the general public. Images on the screen can be moved around with a fingertip and made bigger or smaller by placing two fingertips on the image's edges and then either spreading those fingers apart or bringing them closer together.
The tactile pleasure the interface provides beyond its utility quickly brought it accolades. The operations felt intuitive, even sensuous.
But in laboratories around the world at the time of the iPhone's launch, multi-touch screens had vastly outgrown two-finger commands. Engineers have developed much larger screens that respond to 10 fingers at once, even to multiple hands from multiple people.
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from New Scientist
It's no secret that a healthy lifestyle can slow the progression of cancer, but how this happens has been a mystery. Now new evidence suggests an answer: dieting and exercise may turn crucial genes on and off.
In a pilot study involving 30 men with early-stage prostate cancer, Dean Ornish and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, US, tested the effects of a dramatic lifestyle change on gene expression in the prostate.
Biopsies taken before and after 3 months of healthy eating, moderate exercise, stress management and psychotherapy showed a significant change in the expression of hundreds of genes.
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from National Geographic News
Earth's early atmosphere may have been highly corrosive to rocks, gradually dissolving away all but the toughest of minerals, a new study suggests.
The findings could explain a gap in Earth's geologic record that has puzzled scientists.
"It's possible that [the new study] answers the riddle," said Takayuki Ushikubo, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin, who led the study published online in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
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from BBC News Online
Plans to use a state-of-the-art camera onboard a satellite to monitor deforestation levels in Africa's Congo Basin have been unveiled.
The high resolution RALCam3 camera, designed and built by UK scientists, will provide the first detailed view of the area's rate of forest cover loss. The project is part of the Congo Basin Forest Fund, a 108-million [British pound] joint-initiative by the UK and Norwegian governments.
The fund aims to curb climate change by preventing deforestation in the region. Speaking at the launch of the scheme, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown said: "We are pledging to work together to secure the future of one of the world's last remaining ancient forests."
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from the Miami Herald (Registration Required)
NEW YORK (Associated Press) - Chester Santos has been training his brain for seven years. At 32, he's not worried about losing his memory. He's taking advantage of a growing market in "brain fitness" spurred by aging baby boomers.
Teenagers cramming for tests and people worried about "senior moments" can now turn to an explosion of brain-assisting video games, such as Nintendo's Brain Age; puzzles that are said to ward off dementia, such as Sudoku and crosswords; and online tips that claim to train the brain.
..."People are worried," says Dr. John Hart Jr., medical science director of the Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas at Dallas. "You have a large group of the population getting to the age where they are sort of vulnerable to degenerative neurological diseases that seem to be prevalent."
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