from the Charlotte Observer
State lawmakers are considering a measure that would limit how North Carolina prepares for sea-level rise, which many scientists consider one of the surest results of climate change. Federal authorities say the North Carolina coast is vulnerable because of its low, flat land and thin fringe of barrier islands. A state-appointed science panel has reported that a 1-meter rise is likely by 2100.
The calculation, prepared for the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission, was intended to help the state plan for rising water that could threaten 2,000 square miles. Critics say it could thwart economic development on just as large a scale.
A coastal economic development group called NC-20 attacked the report, insisting the scientific research it cited is flawed. The science panel last month confirmed its findings, recommending that they be reassessed every five years.
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from BBC News Online
"Washing" lungs before they are transplanted could increase numbers of the organs suitable for donation, according to doctors in Newcastle. Only one in five donated lungs are good enough to be transplanted safely.
A trial, being led by Newcastle University, is trying to improve the quality of the lungs by pumping nutrients and oxygen through them. The British Transplantation Society said the technique could "dramatically" increase the number of lungs used.
Around a quarter of people waiting for an organ transplant die in the first year on a transplant list. The lungs are delicate organs and the events which lead to a donor's death can also damage the lungs. It is why so few can be transplanted.
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from the Guardian (UK)
It's the cinemas that the nutrition adviser Susan Jebb worries about most. People do not generally buy cola in supersized buckets, but in the cinema we do, along with vast tubs of popcorn. A large 16oz cup of cola contains 16 teaspoons of sugar, according to the Harvard School of Public Health. That is a potentially considerable problem for the waistline.
"Because it is in liquid form, the evidence is that [a sugary drink] doesn't fill you up," says Jebb. "They seem to supplement our food rather than substitute. If people have 400 calories of Jelly Babies or 400 calories of drink, they may eat less after the Jelly Babies, but they don't decrease their calories at all after the drink."
Sugary drinks are increasingly indicted as partly responsible for the expanding girth of western nations. Jebb, head of diet and population health at the Medical Research Council Human Nutrition Research unit in Cambridge, is excited by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan to ban sugary drinks being sold in containers larger than 16oz. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/may/31/soft-drink-obesity
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
Connective tissue holds our bodies together, but in a condition called fibrosis, an overabundance of the material devastates organs such as the liver, heart, and lungs. A new study suggests that fragments of a promising cancer drug can rein in fibrosis, which is currently untreatable.
Fibrosis occurs when cells pump out excess collagen and other connective tissue proteins, which harm organs. Pulmonary fibrosis, for example, stiffens the lungs, eventually suffocating patients unless they receive a lung transplant. In people with cirrhosis, connective tissue crams into the liver. Heart and kidney disease can also be caused by fibrosis. So far, no drugs to stop or reverse fibrosis have won approval in the United States.
Cell and molecular biologist Carol Feghali-Bostwick of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in Pennsylvania and colleagues decided to test whether endostatin, a drug undergoing clinical trials as a treatment for various cancers, also has an effect on fibrosis. Endostatin is one of the so-called angiogenesis inhibitors, a group of much-touted drugs that block the formation of new blood vessels that tumors need for growth. Endostatin also occurs naturally in the human body, and patients with lung fibrosis have up to 20 times the normal levels in their blood or lungs. That observation raised the possibility that the protein is a natural defense against connective-tissue overgrowth, says Feghali-Bostwick.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
BOZEMAN, Mont. -- High in the Wallowa Mountains of northeastern Oregon, Raina K. Plowright and other researchers blindfolded and hobbled a herd of bighorn sheep in a corral so blood samples could be taken and their noses and throats swabbed.
"There's lots of places for pathogens to hide in the nasal cavity," said Dr. Plowright, a wildlife scientist with the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Penn State who is based in Bozeman.
Peering into the nostrils of wild sheep is part of the nascent field of eco-immunology, which seeks both to understand the immune systems of wild animals and to use that knowledge to gain a better understanding of human immune systems. Until recently, this kind of knowledge has been gleaned almost exclusively by studying pampered, genetically similar lab animals, which don't reflect a real-world scenario.
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from the San Francisco Chronicle
Los Angeles (Associated Press) -- The small pads that doctors use to scribble out prescriptions, a seemingly innocent part of the medical profession, have played a role in the surge of prescription drug abuse.
Take a diagnostic imaging center in the San Fernando Valley where investigators in March found thousands of unsigned pads that were stored there as part of a suspected Medicare fraud scam. Or the case of Dr. Lisa Barden in Riverside County, where authorities found she had pads stolen from a dozen doctors to obtain Vicodin and OxyContin.
There's a growing sentiment among law enforcement and some legislators that in the computer age it no longer makes sense to rely on paper "scripts" that drug abusers and pill pushers can steal or fabricate to get what they want. Those who are trying to combat prescription drug abuse believe creating a system that provides a direct link from a doctor to a pharmacy may be the best and more cost-effective solution.
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from BBC News Online
Dormice use their whiskers to help them climb trees, researchers say. By twitching them upwards, outwards and straight ahead up to 25 times a second, they sense where they are going, a University of Sheffield team has found.
The process, called whisking, is used by some other rodents, and by whiskered mammals including seals and walruses. Dr Robyn Grant, from the university's Active Touch Laboratory says whisking is "a parallel sense to our sense of touch".
She says hazel dormice (Muscardinus avellanarius) use their whiskers, or vibrissae, in a similar way to how people use their eyes--scanning to recognise what is in front of them. "Because of the uneven surface on branches, they vibrate them to find where to put their feet, as well as to work out where there's a gap and where to change branches," says Dr Grant. Dormice are endangered in the UK and hibernate most of the year in small nests on the ground, but in the summer they live in trees.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
LOUISA, Ky. -- For generations, coal has been king in this Appalachian town. It provided heat, light and jobs for the hundreds of people who worked in the nearby coal mines and the smoke-coughing Big Sandy power plant that burned their black bounty.
But now, coal is in a corner. Across the United States, the industry is under siege, threatened by new regulations from Washington, environmentalists fortified by money from Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York City, and natural gas companies intent on capturing much of the nation's energy market.
So when the operator of the Big Sandy plant announced last year that it would be switching from coal to cleaner, cheaper natural gas, people here took it as the worst betrayal imaginable.
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from the Denver Post
COLORADO SPRINGS -- George Bye and Ron Oholendt are a couple of retired "flyboys" who share the same dream of getting an unmanned airship to the stratosphere.
The former Air Force entrepreneurs think that StarLight--a two-stage system with a planelike vehicle suspended below a massive gas-filled balloon--is the answer to a longtime challenge. There had to be a less-costly way to send instruments for surveillance and telecommunications into the upper atmosphere where they could operate for long periods.
"The problem was people took what worked in low altitude and tried it at high altitude, and that didn't work," said Oholendt, president of Global Near Space Services of Colorado Springs. Oholendt and Bye, chief executive of Bye Aerospace of Englewood, discarded a 70-year-old design for an airship that resembles a blimp. Instead, Oholendt's company turned to a "lighter-than-air" concept of a 300-foot-long, 290-foot-high and 90-foot-thick balloon.
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from BBC News Online
The successful sequencing of the tomato genome will lead to tastier varieties within five years say scientists. They believe that the elusive flavour of home grown tomatoes will by then be widely available in supermarkets. Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers say the genetic information could reduce the need for pesticides.
The authors believe the genome will also boost conventional breeding techniques over genetic modification. While the sheer numbers and varieties of tomatoes available in UK shops have increased substantially in the past 20 years, many consumers would complain that this growth has been at the expense of flavour.
Scientists like Professor Graham Seymour at the University of Nottingham would tend to agree. "In the early 1990s what changed the tomato industry was the use of non-ripening mutant genes, genes that came from natural mutations that have been used to extend shelf life in the fruit.
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from Nature News
Scientists have developed a way to carve shapes from DNA canvases, including all the letters of the Roman alphabet, emoticons and an eagle's head.
Bryan Wei, a postdoctoral scholar at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleagues make these shapes out of single strands of DNA just 42 letters long. Each strand is unique, and folds to form a rectangular tile. When mixed, neighbouring tiles stick to each other in a brick-wall pattern, and shorter boundary tiles lock the edges in place.
In their simplest configuration, the tiles produce a solid 64-by-103-nanometre rectangle, but Wei and his team can create more complex shapes by leaving out specific tiles. Using this strategy, they created 107 two-dimensional shapes, including letters, numbers, Chinese characters, geometric shapes and symbols. They also produced tubes and rectangles of different sizes, including one consisting of more than 1,000 tiles. Their work is published in Nature.
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from ScienceInsider
The discovery of trans-Neptune bodies, breakthroughs in understanding protein folding, and pioneering work in a mathematical technique known as deformation quantization have won this year's Shaw Prizes in, respectively, the categories of astronomy, life science and medicine, and mathematical sciences. The prizes, which include $1 million cash in each category, were announced yesterday in Hong Kong.
David Jewitt of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Jane Luu, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge share the astronomy prize for discovering and characterizing trans-Neptune bodies, or those objects in the solar system orbiting just beyond Neptune. Virtually unknown until their joint discovery in 1992 by Jewitt and Luu, these 1200 or so objects are relics of the formation of the solar system and supply short-period comets.
Protein folding is at the heart of many cellular functions. Franz-Ulrich Hartl, of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany, and Arthur Horwich of Yale University--first as a team and then independently--studied the role of "chaperones" in guiding protein folding in vitro and in vivo. Their work has helped to explain normal protein folding as well as what goes wrong in cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer's and Huntington's diseases.
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from the Scientist (Registration Required)
When people die from breast cancer, it is mostly because their original tumours have metastasized to other organs. However, clinical trials for cancer drugs are focused on shrinking existing tumors, not preventing cancer spread. According to Patricia Steeg from the National Cancer Institute, this emphasis is stifling the discovery of chemicals that could prevent metastasis--costing money and patient lives.
In a comment piece, published in Nature, Steeg calls on the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to usher in a new type of randomized clinical trial that will demonstrate if drugs could stop breast cancer from spreading.
Animal studies have identified several compounds could potentially prevent metastasis, but these chemicals often do not kill cancer cells or tumors that have already spread. When they make it to phase II clinical trials, which are designed to test their effectiveness, they fail to shrink established tumors and are no longer pursued as potential cancer treatments. As Steeg wrote in her piece, "the drug company loses the money invested in development; the scientists who worked on these compounds lose a potentially valid clinical lead compound; and the patients continue to lose their lives."
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
ST. LOUIS -- With fluorescent yellow eyes and tufts of hair sticking straight up behind their ears, Bonner and Etienne look like slightly crazed old men. These riotous and chatty lemurs--known for elaborate rituals that include grooming and braying--once ranged across eastern Madagascar.
Now scores of these black-and-white ruffed lemurs are being bred here at the St. Louis Zoo and at other zoos across the United States as part of a broader effort to prevent their extinction.
But Ozzie, a lion-tailed macaque, will never father children. Lion-tails once flourished in the tops of rain forests in India, using their naturally dark coloring to disappear into the height of the jungle. Though there are only about 4,000 remaining in the wild, not one among Ozzie's group here in St. Louis will be bred. American zoos are on the verge of giving up on trying to save them.
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from BBC News Online
Irish mathematicians may have solved the mystery of why bubbles in stout beers such as Guinness sink: it may simply be down to the glass. Simulations suggest an upward flow at the glass's centre and a downward flow at its edges in which the liquid carried the bubbles down with it.
But the reasons behind this flow pattern remained a mystery. Now a study on the Arxiv server reports simulations and experiments showing the standard glass' shape is responsible.
Many stout beers contain nitrogen as well as the carbon dioxide that is present in all beers. Because nitrogen is less likely to dissolve in liquid, that results in smaller and longer-lasting bubbles. But it is the sinking bubble that has confounded physicists and mathematicians alike for decades.
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from the Guardian (UK)
The 1761 transit of Venus was a watershed moment in the history of astronomy. It was the first time astronomers would have the opportunity to measure accurately the size of the solar system. The distance between the Earth and the Sun had been estimated, with variable degrees of success, since the Greeks, but this was different.
Thanks to a rare celestial alignment, Venus was to pass in front of the Sun, taking about six hours to cross the fiery disc. By recording the times of the start and end of the event from widely separated locations around the globe, trigonometry could be used to calculate the distance to Venus and the Sun. With that, Kepler's laws of planetary motion could be used to calculate the orbits of all the planets out to Saturn, the outermost known planet.
For societies that were still struggling with inadequate maps of their own countries, it was an unimaginable leap forward.
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from Science News
People who strongly resist data indicating that human-induced climate change could spell catastrophe aren't ignorant about science or numerical reasoning. Quite the opposite, a new study finds: High science literacy actually boosts the likelihood that certain people will challenge what constitutes credible climate science.
Who will be receptive to climate science, the study found, depends more on cultural factors such as attitudes toward commerce, government regulation and individualism than on scientific literacy. "Simply improving the clarity of scientific information will not dispel public conflict" over climate, the study's authors conclude online May 27 in Nature Climate Change.
There has been a prevalent view among scientists that skeptics of climate change and its ramifications would come around if they understood the facts, says Dan Kahan of Yale Law School. But studies by his group and others have shown that cultural factors can strongly influence what people accept as truth about certain technical issues.
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from BBC News Online
A study of more than 300 Neolithic skeletons suggests evidence of "hereditary inequality" among farmers 7,000 years ago, researchers claim. Archaeologists from Cardiff University led a team who studied the skeletons from across Europe. They say evidence suggests farmers buried with tools had access to better land than those buried without.
Dr Penny Bickle, of Cardiff University, said community diversity "probably occurred through inheritance." The research was conducted by archaeologists from Cardiff, Bristol and Oxford universities, and others across Europe.
The project was led by Professor Alasdair Whittle from Cardiff University's school of history, archaeology and religion, and involved studying more than 300 skeletons across central Europe. The researchers claim to have evidence which suggests "differential land use among the first farmers of Europe, called the Neolithic period."
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from NPR
April and May are fairly quiet times for Maine lobstermen and women, with the height of the summer season still a couple of months away. This year, strange things are happening on the ocean floor. Many of the lobsters have prematurely shed their hard shells, and lobstermen are hauling large numbers of soft-shelled lobsters much earlier than usual.
"That is definitely not normal," says Steve Train, who's been hauling traps for 35 years in Casco Bay, near Portland. He usually sees hard-shell lobsters at this time of year, instead of these "shedders"--lobsters that have abandoned their old casing to grow into a new, hard one.
This year, many lobstermen began catching shedders in April--four to six weeks ahead of the normal time. Train says they're outnumbering hard-shell lobsters about two to one in his traps, and he's puzzled. "We didn't expect them," he says. "I don't know if they'll be there next haul. We might go out next week and they'll be gone." The early shed surprised biologists, too.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
Do our brains continue to produce neurons throughout our lifetimes? That's been one of the most hotly debated questions in the annals of science. Since the 1950s, studies have hinted at the possibility, but not until the late 1990s did research prove that the birth of new neurons, called neurogenesis, goes on in the brains of adult primates and humans.
Now a surprising new study in humans shows that in the olfactory bulb--the interface between the nose and the brain and an area long known to be a hot spot of neurogenesis--new neurons may be born but not survive. The finding may rule out neurogenesis in this area, or it might show only that some people don't stimulate their brains enough through the sense of smell, some researchers say.
Previous studies have found evidence of neurogenesis in the olfactory bulb of adult humans. But those studies measured only proteins produced by immature neurons, leaving open the question of whether these youngsters ever grew up to connect with other cells to form functional networks, says neuroscientist Jonas Frisén of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. If new olfactory neurons really reached adulthood throughout a person's life, researchers should find neurons of a variety of ages in this region.
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from Science News
As the days become longer in spring, plants know to bloom thanks to an interaction between several crucial proteins and blue light, scientists report in the May 25 Science. The new work describes the molecular mechanics that enables a light-sensitive protein to help switch on a suite of genes that control flowering. Understanding the biology of how plants regulate flowering could be useful for tweaking crops to start producing food earlier in the year.
"We might be able to grow three times or twice as much in a season," says study coauthor Takato Imaizumi, a molecular biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Generally, plants need to start blooming around the time when most pollinating insects will be buzzing around--such as in early spring--to maximize their chances of reproducing. Scientists have known that plants have higher levels of the blue-light sensitive protein FKF1 toward the end of the day and that the protein is important for tracking day length. It's also been shown that another protein, called CO, plays a key role in turning on flowering genes.
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from Smithsonian
When the human genome was first sequenced about a decade ago, the achievement took years and cost $1 billion. Now, scientists and entrepreneurs are predicting that the task will soon take just under 6 hours, with a price tag of just $900. A company called Oxford Nanopore Technologies claims it will accomplish this feat using a device that can plug into your computer's USB port.
The key to this remarkable rate of progress? A technology called nanopore sequencing, which allows researchers to determine the sequence of base pairs in an individual's DNA without taking it apart.
Traditional DNA sequencing techniques involves making many copies of an individual's genome, cutting it into millions of small fragments, and using radioactively-labelled bases to determine the exact sequence of the four bases that make up DNA--adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine, often abbreviated A, G, C and T. Currently, sequencing using advanced versions of this technique takes about a week and costs roughly $18,000. The equipment takes up a lab bench and requires technicians to process the DNA sample before and after sequencing.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
When one fish is injured, others nearby may dart, freeze, huddle, swim to the bottom or leap from the water. The other fish know that their school mate has been harmed. But how?
In the 1930s, Karl von Frisch, the famous ethologist, noted this behavior in minnows. He theorized that injured fish release a substance that is transmitted by smell and causes alarm. But Dr. von Frisch never identified the chemical composition of the signal. He just called it schreckstoff, or "scary stuff."
Schreckstoff is a long-standing biological mystery, but now researchers may have solved a piece of it. In a study published in February in Current Biology, Suresh Jesuthasan, a neuroscientist at the Biomedical Sciences Institutes in Singapore, and his colleagues isolated sugar molecules called chondroitins from the outer mucus of zebra fish.
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There are thousands of sites in the Arctic where methane that has been stored for millennia is bubbling into the atmosphere. The methane has been trapped by ice, but is able to escape as the ice melts. Researchers say this ancient gas could have a significant impact on climate change.
In other environmental news, Los Angeles has become the largest city in the U.S. to approve a ban on plastic bags at supermarket checkout lines. The City Council voted to phase out plastic bags over the next 16 months at an estimated 7,500 stores, meaning shoppers will need to bring reusable bags or purchase paper bags for 10 cents each.
Periodic increases in the flow of Colorado River water through the Grand Canyon are designed to alleviate the environmental disruption caused by the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona in the 1960s. By mimicking the river's original dynamics, federal officials said, the flows could help restore the backwater ecosystems in which native fish are most at home.
A pan-European project has devised a much-anticipated way to differentiate marine populations of the same species with up to 100% accuracy. It will help managers tell the difference between, for example, an illegally harvested Northeast Arctic cod and a perfectly legal Eastern Baltic cod. The new approach relies on genetic variants called single-nucleotide polymorphisms.
An autonomous robotic fish designed to sense marine pollution is lurking in the waters of the port of Gijon, Spain. The robots will continuously monitor the water, letting the port respond immediately to the causes of pollution, such as a leaking boat or industrial spillage, and work to mitigate its effects.
Scientists have concluded that fresh water demand is driving sea-level rise faster than glacier melt. The massive impact of the global population's growing need for water on rising sea levels is revealed in a comprehensive assessment of all the ways in which people use water.
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Solar cells could become much cheaper thanks to improvements in a more than 20-year-old solar technology that captures light with dye molecules. The advance is "one of the most important breakthroughs in dye cells in the last several years," says a chemist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park.
In other technology news, two researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (N.J.I.T.) have devised a direct-contact membrane distillation (DCMD) system that can efficiently wring drinking water out of up to 20 percent-salt-concentrated brine.
Two scientists at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have designed a metamaterial that stretches when compressed, and vice versa, under any circumstances. "What is interesting is that they study systems that are not responding to a vibration but to a steady applied force," says John Pendry of Imperial College London.
As a Houston computer scientist has developed his ideas over nearly a decade, he has found increasing acclaim for his "inexact" computer chips. At a major computing conference in Italy, Rice University's Krishna Palem unveiled his newest chips that trade a bit of accuracy for better efficiency.
When Clarence Birdseye figured out how to pack and freeze haddock, using what he called "a marvelous new process which seals in every bit of just-from-the-ocean flavor," he essentially changed the way we produce, preserve and distribute food.
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A private cargo rocket built by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. of Hawthorne, Calif. blasted off last week, headed to the International Space Station. The rocket carried only about 1,000 pounds of cargo. The importance of the launch was more technical and symbolic.
In other space news, stargazers will have a chance on June 5 to glimpse a transit of Venus, in which the planet passes directly between Earth and the sun. Venus will take six hours to march across the star's face, appearing as an inky black dot in silhouette against the solar disk.
The moon nearly blotted out the sun last week, creating a blazing "ring of fire" eclipse visible in many parts of the world.
In 2019, a spacecraft known as Euclid will begin a mission to study dark energy. But it is being launched by the European Space Agency, not NASA, with American astronomers serving only as very junior partners.
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from the Economist
ACCORDING to Joseph Henrich and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia, most undergraduates are WEIRD. Those who teach them might well agree. But Dr Henrich did not intend the term as an insult when he popularised it in a paper published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 2010. Instead, he was proposing an acronym: Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic.
One reason these things matter is that undergraduates are also psychology's laboratory rats. Incentivised by rewards, in the form of money or course credits, they will do the human equivalents of running mazes and pressing the levers in Skinner boxes until the cows come home.
Which is both a blessing and a problem. It is a blessing because it provides psychologists with an endless supply of willing subjects. And it is a problem because those subjects are WEIRD, and thus not representative of humanity as a whole. Indeed, as Dr Henrich found from his analysis of leading psychology journals, a random American undergraduate is about 4,000 times more likely than an average human being to be the subject of such a study. Drawing general conclusions about the behaviour of Homo sapiens from the results of these studies is risky.
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from Scientific American
Since launching in February 2004, Facebook has proved highly effective at creating opportunities for the average Web user to create campaigns that reach a mass audience. Most recently such opportunities have extended to organ donation, an area that could benefit from the social network's attention--controversy over its recent initial public offering aside, Facebook's membership is more than 900 million and growing.
Indeed, with demand for healthy organs for transplantation growing worldwide, Facebook has already become a popular channel for people soliciting kidneys, livers and other potentially lifesaving organs. Earlier this month the social network began offering members the ability to identify themselves as organ donors on their Facebook pages and to locate state organ-donation registries if they would like to become donors.
Last October a team of researchers at Loyola University Medical Center began tracking how Facebook was being used as a tool for connecting potential donors with those in need of an organ. The researchers focused on kidney solicitations in particular and studied 91 Facebook pages seeking kidney donations for patients ranging in age from two to 69. Of the Facebook pages studied, 12 percent reported receiving a kidney transplant and 30 percent reported that potential donors had stepped forward to be tested to determine whether they were compatible, the researchers recently reported at a meeting of the National Kidney Foundation. One page reported that more than 600 people had been tested as potential donors for a young child.
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