from the San Francisco Examiner
BANGKOK, Thailand (Associated Press) - Long-tailed macaque monkeys have a reputation for knowing how to find food - whether it be grabbing fruit from jungle trees or snatching a banana from a startled tourist. Now, researchers say they have discovered groups of the silver-haired monkeys in Indonesia that fish.
Groups of long-tailed macaques were observed four times over the past eight years scooping up small fish with their hands and eating them along rivers in East Kalimantan and North Sumatra provinces, according to researchers from The Nature Conservancy and the Great Ape Trust.
The species had been known to eat fruit and forage for crabs and insects, but never before fish from rivers.
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from the Economist
... Once it was only AIDS activists ... who criticised the mandarins of the AIDS establishment. Even then, the criticisms mostly boiled down to two things: "you're not acting fast enough," and "you're not spending enough money."
Now, insiders, too, are ... accusing the World Health Organisation (WHO) and UNAIDS, in particular, of sloppy methodology, of the selective presentation of data, and of kowtowing to political correctness in a way that has distorted priorities for the treatment and prevention of the disease.
Ironically, this is happening at a time when the desire of the activists - treatment for all - no longer looks like a pious hope. It may take longer than those activists would wish. And the definition of "all" may not quite be the one in the dictionary. But the treatment of AIDS is steadily improving.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
From its diminutive lavender flowers to its straggly windblown stalks, there is nothing about the beach weed known as the Great Lakes sea rocket to suggest that it might be any sort of a botanical wonder. Yet scientists have found evidence that the sea rocket is able to do something that no other plant has ever been shown to do.
The sea rocket, researchers report, can distinguish between plants that are related to it and those that are not. And not only does this plant recognize its kin, but it also gives them preferential treatment.
If the sea rocket detects unrelated plants growing in the ground with it, the plant aggressively sprouts nutrient-grabbing roots. But if it detects family, it politely restrains itself.
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from USA Today
OAK BROOK, Ill. (Associated Press) - McDonald's (MCD), Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) and other restaurant and grocery chains have stopped selling certain tomatoes as U.S. health officials work to pinpoint the source of a Salmonella outbreak.
McDonald's, the world's largest hamburger chain, stopped serving sliced tomatoes on its sandwiches as a precaution until the source of the salmonella is known, according to a statement Monday from spokeswoman Danya Proud.
McDonald's will continue serving grape tomatoes in its salads because no problems have been linked to that variety, Proud said. The source of the tomatoes responsible for the illnesses in at least 16 states has not been pinpointed.
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from BBC News Online
The world's most advanced, commercially available, bionic hand has won the UK's top engineering prize.
The i-LIMB, a prosthetic device with five individually powered digits, beat three other finalists to win this year's MacRobert award.
The technology has been fitted to more than 200 people, including US soldiers who lost limbs during the war in Iraq. The device started life in Scotland in 1963 as part of a project to help children affected by Thalidomide.
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from National Geographic News
Federal officials in the U.S. have confirmed what biologists have long thought: The Caribbean monk seal has gone the way of the dodo.
Humans hunting the docile creatures for food, skins, and blubber left the population unsustainable, say biologists, who warn that Mediterranean and Hawaiian monk seals could be the next to go.
The last confirmed sighting of a wild Caribbean monk seal was in 1952 in the waters between Jamaica and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Fisheries Service confirmed last Friday that the species is now extinct.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
American workers are hurting. The country is in an economic slump, thousands of people are being laid off, and hundreds of companies are retrenching. With house values falling in many parts of the country and with gas prices soaring, many people are struggling from paycheck to paycheck.
The unfolding shakeout might ultimately be good for the economy, but it can be extremely painful for individuals. For companies, managing change is very important, not only for the well-being of their employees but also because to succeed, they need employees who are engaged, enthusiastic and energized -- and not burned out.
A pair of psychologists recently evaluated hundreds of employees at a large North American university that was in the grip of painful change. The researchers wanted to find out whether there were factors that explained why some employees successfully weathered the transition and reengaged with their jobs, while others spiraled into cynicism and exhaustion -- the classic signs of burnout.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
In a series of maneuvers that sounds more like cooking class than research on Mars, scientists said Monday they would try one more time to shake bits of the clumpy Martian soil into a test oven on NASA's Phoenix lander before switching to a backup strategy that called for dribbling the soil into the oven.
Scientists have failed in two attempts to inject soil from the Martian north pole into one of eight tiny ovens designed to test for organic compounds that would prove Mars' suitability for life.
The problem is, the opening to the oven is about the thickness of a pencil lead. The Martian soil is proving to be much clumpier -- cemented, in scientific terms -- than expected.
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from BBC News Online
A Nobel Prize-winning scientist says it could be tougher than first thought to harness the healing power of stem cells in medicine.
It had been hoped a single "master" cell could potentially be used to repair all damage in a single organ. Professor Mario Capecchi, from the University of Utah, found surprising clues that different stem cells might be working together in the same organ.
This means experimental treatments relying on the wrong type might fail. Professor Capecchi, writing in the Nature Genetics, said the finding suggested stem cell biology could be "more complicated" than previously thought, which could be bad news for patients hoping for the swift arrival of new therapies.
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from New Scientist
A weak mix of pesticides in river water dampens a salmon's sense of smell, say researchers. In experiments, Steelhead rainbow trout exposed to low levels of 10 common agricultural pesticides could not perceive changes in levels of a predator's scent.
"You can imagine if a fish is unable to detect just how close it is to a [wading] bear, it's a problem," says Keith Tierney, a toxicologist who led the study while at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.
A depressed sense of smell might also keep fish from finding mates and food. Trout are closely related to salmon, and, though the theory is unproven, pesticides may be a cause of plummeting salmon stocks in Canada and the US, Tierney says.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Medical researchers are homing in on a wonder drug that may significantly reduce the risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes and many other diseases -- sunshine.
A study released [Monday] found that men who are deficient in the so-called sunshine vitamin -- vitamin D -- have more than double the normal risk of suffering a heart attack.
Just last week, another study found that low levels of vitamin D increase the risk of diabetes, and a study last month linked deficiencies to an increased risk of dying from breast cancer.
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from the Scientist (Registration Required)
Even as political rhetoric and court battles reflect a public struggle over Darwin's theory of evolution as an explanation for the origin of humans, a different struggle is unfolding within science about the adequacy of evolution as a theoretical foundation for biology.
On the surface, the two debates seem to have little to do with one another, but in a subtle way both reflect the need for a richer theoretical biology. The perception of evolution among the wider public might even be improved by better communication of scientific concerns about the limitations of evolutionary theory, and how those concerns are being addressed.
A sympathetic reading of public distrust over evolution would be that a simple theory of change seems too bare to account for the richness of structure we see in the world around us, and for how that structure first came to form.
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From American Scientist
The crack of an iceberg splitting away from the Marr glacier reverberates through the halls of the Bio Lab at Palmer Station, on the western shore of the Antarctic Peninsula. That sound has grown increasingly familiar ....
The retreat of the Marr glacier ... signals ongoing environmental change. The average midwinter temperature here has increased by 6 degrees Celsius since 1950; this is the highest rate of warming anywhere on the planet, five times the global average.
The isolated biological community of the peninsula and its coastal waters evolved in a polar climate that remained relatively stable for many millennia. Now, as the climate shifts, [scientists] are trying to document and understand how the ecosystem responds.
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The story of U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy's brain surgery at Duke University Medical Center continued to be the focus of media attention last week. The 76-year-old senator was said by his doctors to be making "an excellent recovery." He left the medical center June 9 to fly back to Cape Cod.
Meanwhile, Duke researchers reported that a vaccine under clinical trial has been found to double survival time for those who have the most common and aggressive form of brain cancer, glioblastoma multiforme.
And it appears that a drug that prevents bone loss during breast cancer therapy also substantially reduces the risk of the cancer's return. Medical researchers said this was the first large study to affirm wider anti-cancer potential for bone-building drugs called bisphosphonates.
Another study suggests that red wine may be much more potent in slowing the aging process than was previously thought. The New York Times said the study is part of a new wave of research that may increase longevity.
A new survey found that teen sexual activity in the U.S. may be increasing, after a decade-long decline, and that fewer high school students are opting to use condoms. But the survey did not provide sufficient data to indicate a definite trend, officials said.
In does appear, however, that race and where Americans live have a big impact on the quality of medical treatment they receive. Overall, black Americans with diabetes or vascular disease are nearly five times more likely than whites to have a leg amputated, researchers reported.
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Earthquake alert systems were in the news last week. NASA scientists say a possible correlation between electrical disturbances in the atmosphere and impending earthquakes could lead to a space-based early warning system. But some scientists remain "deeply skeptical" about the basic premise.
Meanwhile, a new earthquake early warning system in Japan has gotten off to a rocky start. The system was designed to give two-minute warnings of approaching shock waves, but either missed or was late in sounding the alarm over recent quakes.
In other technology news, scientists have inserted a small piece of DNA into a living bacterial cell, creating a microbial computer to solve a mathematical sorting problem. The study was published in the Journal of Biological Engineering.
Technology giants say they could provide much faster wireless Internet access via unused bandwidth between TV channels. But media leaders are concerned that using those buffers for cell phone and Internet traffic could cause problems for TV signals when they go digital next year.
A preliminary study found that a device that sucks blood clots out of the coronary arteries of heart patients prior to angioplasty reduces the one-year death rate by nearly half. The new devices are already being used in many large medical centers.
Experts say new factories that process quartz into polysilicon will end a shortage of the raw material for solar panels. As a result, the price of solar panels could drop by as much as a third by 2010, which is good news for a promising energy alternative that remains expensive.
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Archaeologists announced new finds in Egypt last week, including a 4,000-year-old "missing pyramid" and more remains of Tharu, an ancient fortified city near the Suez Canal.
The pyramid is believed to have been built by King Menkauhor, an obscure pharaoh. It was found in 1842 by German archaeologist Karl Richard Lepsius, only to be lost later to the desert sands.
The 3,000-year-old fortress city, near the modern border town of Rafah, covered about 31 acres and helped guard the Egyptian empire's eastern front in the Sinai Peninsula.
In other news, scientists presented new evidence suggesting that human settlers did not come to New Zealand until around 1300 A.D., or 1,000 years later than previously believed. This conclusion was based on a four-year studying involving radiocarbon dating of bones and seeds.
Meanwhile, in Peru, scientists say ancient skeletons unearthed at a 4,000-year-old archaeological site about 90 miles from Lima suggest that human sacrifice may have been practiced in the Pre-Ceramic period in the Andes mountains, a time formerly thought to have been relatively peaceful.
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On the surface of Mars, the Phoenix lander experienced a soil-sampling glitch on its first attempt late last week, but scientists don't think it's serious. None of the dirt meant for the spacecraft's oven made it into the tiny chamber, so it couldn't be tested for signs of water or organic compounds.
Over the weekend, NASA delayed the launch of the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) until June 11 due to a battery issue. The telescope is designed to send back detailed data on "the most energetic explosions and flare-ups the cosmos has to offer."
A team of astronauts successfully attached a 15-ton Japanese laboratory to the International Space Station last week. The station's biggest room, it will be used for biomedical and material sciences research.
Further from home, a new map of the Milky Way indicates that our spiral galaxy has two fewer main spokes or arms than previously believed. Based on findings about the structural evolution of the Milky Way, the map was presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
At the same meeting, scientists said that a newfound planet only three times the size of Earth has fueled expectations that Earth-like planets are orbiting stars elsewhere in the universe. The newly discovered planet is the closest in size to the Earth of any extrasolar planet yet found.
And, finally, NASA's STEREO solar satellites have captured images of giant tornado-like jets twisting near the sun's poles. They are estimated to be a thousand times faster than terrestrial tornadoes.
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A major climate change bill was defeated in the U.S. Senate last week, and the Los Angeles Times was among those to point out that the issue was as much about money as about greenhouse gases. The bill proposed new pollution regulations on industries while expanding carbon "offsetting." Detractors said the bill could lead to $8-a-gallon gas, among other economic hardships.
Meanwhile, a NASA investigation found that, for at least two years, political appointees in the agency's public affairs office worked to spin and distort findings by its own scientists about climate change.
The investigation was prompted by reports in the Washington Post and other news outlets that Bush administration officials were trying to muzzle NASA climate scientists.
And the Washington Post also reported last week on the dismal failure of a $58 million state and federal government effort to bring oysters back to the Chesapeake Bay. Official estimates indicate that there are now fewer oysters in the bay and fewer oystermen trying to harvest them than there were when the program began in 1994.
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from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
They like the cold, they don't need much oxygen, and you can fit 62 trillion of them into a teaspoon. They're also 120,000 years old.
Those are the salient characteristics of a new species of ultrasmall bacteria discovered deep inside a glacier by researchers at Penn State University.
The Chryseobacterium greenlandensis were isolated from an ice core from 1.8 miles beneath the surface of a glacier in Greenland. Jennifer Loveland-Curtze, the lead researcher on the Penn State team, said the new species adds one more sliver of enlightenment to the vast and mostly unexplored universe of microorganisms.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
Stockton, Calif. - When seventh graders in Stockton took a field trip this week to see elephant seals, they didn't even step outside their school. Instead, with the help of a projector and a video camera, the students teleconferenced with a state park guide on the California coast.
Across a distance of 100 miles, students on the so-called "virtual field trip" got to talk with the guide, watch seals throw sand on themselves, and hear the blubbery beasts belch and bark - all without a yellow bus or permission slip.
"If you can't go somewhere, this can be the next best thing," says Craig Wedegaertner, an administrator at Marshall Middle School in Stockton. "Or, it can be used to prepare [students] before they go there."
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from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required)
Two large studies involving more than 21,000 people found that those with Type 2 diabetes experienced no reduction in their risk of heart attacks and strokes and no reduction in their death rates if they rigorously controlled their blood-sugar levels.
The results bolster findings reported in February, when one of the studies, by the National Institutes of Health, ended prematurely. At that time, researchers made the surprising announcement that study participants who were rigorously controlling their blood sugar actually had a higher death rate than those whose blood sugar control was less stringent.
Now the federal researchers are publishing detailed data from that study. Researchers in the second study, from Australia and involving participants from 20 countries, are also publishing their results on blood sugar and cardiovascular disease.
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from the Times (London)
As a great port on the East of England, Dunwich was nothing short of a medieval metropolis. Eight churches, eighty ships, five religious orders - including the Benedictines, Dominicans and Franciscans - and prosperity to rival London from its trade in wool, grain, fish and furs.
Such was the city's prestige that, under Edward I, it was granted two seats in Parliament.
But that was before Dunwich was swallowed by the sea. [Last week], more than five centuries after the last of a succession of storms and sea surges battered the Suffolk city into little more than a village, a research team will set sail to discover the secrets of a British Atlantis.
Using the latest acoustic imaging technology ... the researchers hope to reveal Dunwich in its prime.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
SAN FRANCISCO - An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.
The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, N.M. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion.
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from BBC News Online
Natural carbon dioxide vents on the sea floor are showing scientists how carbon emissions will affect marine life.
Dissolved CO2 makes water more acidic, and around the vents, researchers saw a fall in species numbers, and snails with their shells disintegrating.
Writing in the journal Nature, the UK scientists suggest these impacts are likely to be seen across the world as CO2 levels rise in the atmosphere. Some of the extra CO2 emitted enters the oceans, acidifying waters globally.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
TEHRAN - As Burton Richter, an American Nobel laureate in physics, entered the main auditorium of Tehran's prestigious Sharif University, hundreds of students rose to give him a loud and lengthy ovation. But Richter, wearing a white suit and leaning on a cane, said he was the one who should be awed.
"The students here are very impressive," Richter said, lauding the high level of education at Sharif. "I expect to hear a lot more from you all in the future."
The students ... giggled in their seats. A woman took pictures of the Stanford professor emeritus, whose visit last month was part of a privately funded academic program run by the National Academies of the United States and universities in Iran.
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from the San Francisco Examiner
PHOENIX (Associated Press) - The first sample of Martian dirt dumped onto the opening of the Phoenix lander's tiny testing oven failed to reach the instrument and scientists said Saturday they will devote a few days to trying to determine the cause.
Photos released by the University of Arizona team overseeing the mission showed a scoopful of dirt sitting on and around the open oven door after being dumped by the craft's 8-foot robot arm.
But none of it made it past a screen and into the tiny chamber, one of eight on the craft designed to heat soil and test gasses for signs of water or organic compounds that could be building blocks for life.
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from the Los Angeles Times
Using stem cells from umbilical cord blood and bone marrow, researchers have apparently cured a fatal genetic disease in a 2-year-old Minneapolis boy, which could open the door for other stem cell treatments.
For the first time in his life, Nate Liao is wearing normal clothes, eating food that has not been pureed, and playing with his siblings.
... Nate suffers from recessive epidermolysis bullosa, which affects 1 in 100,000 children. They lack a critical protein called collagen type VII that anchors the skin and lining of the gastrointestinal system to the body. Their skin is extraordinarily fragile.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
WASHINGTON - Cutting carbon dioxide emissions is a fine idea, and a lot of companies would be proud to do it. But they would prefer to be second, if not third or fourth. This is not a good way to get started in fighting global warming.
As efforts to pass a global warming bill collapsed in the Senate last week, companies that burn coal to make electricity were looking for a way to build a plant that would capture its emissions. There is a will and a way - several ways, in fact - to do just that.
Capturing carbon from these plants may become a lot more important soon. Emissions from coal-fired power plants already account for about 27 percent of American greenhouse emissions, but as prices for other fuels rise, along with power demand, utilities will burn more coal.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
Quartz, the raw material for solar panels, is one of the most abundant minerals on earth. But for years, the solar industry has faced a bottleneck in processing quartz into polysilicon, a principal material used in most solar panels. The problem stalled a steady decline in prices for solar panels.
Now the silicon shortage may be coming to an end, predict some solar analysts, thanks to new factories coming online.
If true, the price for solar panel modules could start falling by as much as a third by 2010, says Travis Bradford, president of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development in Cambridge, Mass. That’s good news for an industry that remains one of the most expensive power sources.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
The nation's campaign to get more teenagers to delay sex and to use condoms is faltering, threatening to undermine the highly successful effort to reduce teen pregnancy and protect young people from sexually transmitted diseases, federal officials reported yesterday.
New data from a large government survey show that by every measure, a decade-long decline in sexual activity among high school students leveled off between 2001 and 2007, and that the rise in condom use by teens flattened out in 2003.
Moreover, the survey found disturbing hints that teen sexual activity may have begun creeping up and that condom use among high school students might be edging downward, though those trend lines have not yet reached a point where statisticians can be sure, officials said.
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