from Nature News
Brendan Foley peels his wetsuit to the waist and perches on the side of an inflatable boat as it skims across the sea just north of the island of Crete. At his feet are the dripping remains of a vase that moments earlier had been resting on the sea floor, its home for more than a millennium. "It's our best day so far," he says of his dive that morning. "We've discovered two ancient shipwrecks."
Foley, a marine archaeologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, and his colleagues at Greece's Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities in Athens have spent the day diving near the cliffs of the tiny island of Dia in the eastern Mediterranean. They have identified two clusters of pottery dating from the first century BC and fifth century AD. Together with other remains that the team has discovered on the island's submerged slopes, the pots reveal that for centuries Greek, Roman and Byzantine traders used Dia as a refuge during storms, when they couldn't safely reach Crete.
It is a nice archaeological discovery, but Foley was hoping for something much older. His four-week survey of the waters around Crete last October is part of a long-term effort to catalogue large numbers of ancient shipwrecks in the Aegean Sea. And the grand prize would be a wreck from one of the most influential and enigmatic cultures of the ancient world--the Minoans, who ruled these seas more than 3,000 years ago.
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from ScienceInsider
TOKYO -- A trio of American researchers will share one of this year's Japan Prizes for bringing their work on a leukemia drug from a basic discovery to a clinical success, while a Japanese material scientist is taking the other prize for a breakthrough with permanent magnets.
Janet Rowley of the University of Chicago, Brian Druker of the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, and Nicholas Lydon of Blueprint Medicines in Cambridge, Massachusetts, jointly won the Healthcare and Medical Technology prize for developing a leukemia drug called imatinib, better known as Gleevec in the United States and Glivec elsewhere....
Masato Sagawa, of Kyoto-based Intermetallics Co., won the prize in the field of Environment, Energy, and Infrastructure for work on the neodymium-iron-boron alloy which constitutes the high-performance permanent magnets at the heart of energy-efficient motors used in everything from hard disk drives to construction equipment. Sagawa did his key research at Fujitsu Ltd. and Sumitomo Special Metals in the 1970s and 1980s.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
A massive explosion on the sun's surface has triggered the largest solar radiation storm since 2005 and has unleashed a torrent of charged plasma particles toward Earth, though the threat to satellites, power grids and other high-tech hardware is believed to be manageable, scientists said.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration detected a solar flare Sunday night that peaked at 7:59 p.m. Pacific time. NOAA satellites traced the bright flash of X-ray light to an area on the sun's surface known as region 1402--the same area that had produced a weaker flare Thursday. A coronal mass ejection--which can hurl billions of tons of plasma up to 5 million mph--quickly followed.
Radiation from the explosion arrived at Earth within hours of the flash, said Doug Biesecker, a physicist with NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo. A burst of charged plasma particles is expected to reach Earth by 6 a.m. Tuesday. That charged plasma is traveling uncommonly fast, making the 93-million-mile trip to Earth in about 34 hours, rather than taking two or more days, as is usually the case, Biesecker said.
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from New Scientist (Registration Required)
Celebrated palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould once wondered what would happen if we could rewind the tape of life. If it were possible to turn the clock back half a billion years and then let evolution happen all over again, what would we see? Gould famously argued that the history of life would not repeat itself. The world would be unfamiliar, and would probably lack humans.
His point was to demonstrate that evolution is not a process of inexorable progress but of contingency. Mutations happen unpredictably. Sexual reproduction combines genes at random. Droughts, ice ages and meteorites strike without warning and kill off fully fit individuals and species.
We tell ourselves stories of evolutionary progress but these are just wishful thinking. Life produces abundant variations; most fail. The few that survive we call the most advanced, but that is a profound error which conflates "latest" with "best." As Gould wrote in his classic book Wonderful Life: "Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress."
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from Nature News
Asking someone to give you a million dollars is not easy. In 1995, Bruce Walker was seeking philanthropic support to expand his HIV research programme at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He had identified a possible donor: a venture capitalist and the brother of one of his patients. He had teamed up with a personal coach in fund-raising and rehearsed his pitch over and over. But during lunch with the prospective donor, he still nearly choked. "I couldn't quite get it out to say, 'Would you give us a million dollars?'," Walker recounts.
Eventually he spat out his request--and was astonished when the venture capitalist agreed to the entire sum. "At that point, I fell off my chair," Walker says. He then raised another US$100 million from philanthropists Terry and Susan Ragon to launch the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 2009. He and his colleagues are now planning a formal seminar series on raising philanthropic support. His success at fund-raising, he says, "is not because there's something special about me. It's because I got a little bit of training and I put in a lot of effort."
Walker is not the only one with a determined approach to philanthropy. As public funding for research dwindles, scientists are increasingly seeking private benefactors. But they have a lot to learn if they are to win trust and money: how to schmooze contacts, promote their science and deliver results to deadline--all without over-promising on the work. Much of this does not come naturally to scientists. "You have to sell yourself," says Cheryl McEwen, who, with her husband Rob, donated US$10 million to found the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine in Toronto, in 2003. "But if you can build a case that we can understand, we'll be there for you."
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from BBC News Online
NEOShield is a new international project that will assess the threat posed by Near Earth Objects (NEO) and look at the best possible solutions for dealing with a big asteroid or comet on a collision path with our planet.
The effort is being led from the German space agency's (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin, and had its kick-off meeting this week. It will draw on expertise from across Europe, Russia and the US.
It's a major EU-funded initiative that will pull together all the latest science, initiate a fair few laboratory experiments and new modelling work, and then try to come to some definitive positions.
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from ScienceInsider
Last week, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that the success rate for research grants, a closely watched indicator of how well investigators are doing in the struggle for funds, fell to an all-time low in 2011: 18%. At first glance, the drop appears to be due to increased competition, reflected in a steep rise on applications last year. But several other factors are also at play, including budget decisions made years ago, says NIH extramural research chief Sally Rockey.
The success rate is the number of funded grants divided by reviewed applications. The 18% success rate, announced by Rockey on her blog, is down 3% from 2010 and is slightly higher than a preliminary estimate last fall. It continues a decline from success rates of around 30% a decade ago when NIH's budget was growing. Part of the explanation is that the denominator is larger: Investigators sent a record 49,592 research grant proposals to NIH last year, an 8% rise.
But that's not the whole story, Rockey says in a blog post today. Much of the rise is explained by a 17% increase in proposals for a specific category of funding--short-term R21 grants. The mainstay for most labs is the larger R01, NIH's individual investigator-initiated grant, for which the success rate slid from 22% in 2010 to 18% in 2011. Applications rose 3% for R01s. Another reason for success rate slippage is that NIH funded fewer R01 grants compared with 2010. That's partly because the size of the average grant grew slightly and because NIH had less to spend overall on R01s (its budget was cut 1% last year).
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from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram
GAUSE -- For the first time since Thanksgiving, commercial beekeeper Clint Walker III is working with his colonies of honeybees scattered across Central Texas ranchland.
By April 1, Walker hopes to triple the size of his hives that are currently pollinating yaupon holly trees several miles from the Brazos River. A few hundred yards from a herd of grazing cattle, Walker, who runs the honey business started by his father in 1938, is checking on the colonies' health and giving them nutrients to stimulate the queens to start laying eggs.
Unlike those of most U.S. commercial beekeepers, Walker's hives are staying home this winter. For the second straight year, he won't be shipping bees to California for February's annual pollination of the almond crop.
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from the (Raleigh, N.C.) News and Observer
These days, downtown Durham is better known for its burgeoning cuisine scene and modernized, reclaimed spaces than its long history with cash crops. The storied days of tobacco curing in the city's brick factories have been replaced with technology research that could, scientists say, bolster the biofuel industry while creating stronger crops.
Inside its redesigned, sustainable lab space near the Durham Performing Arts Center, GrassRoots Biotechnology uses patented research methods to study plant genes. The goal, said company co-founder Philip Benfey, is to pinpoint ways to strengthen plants considered useful in biofuel production, such as switchgrass.
"With this research, we're looking toward the future," said Benfey, a genomics professor with Duke University Institute for Genome & Science Policy. "Over the past five or six years, as the price of oil has risen, there's been increased interest in the idea of biofuels. There's an opportunity to use the discoveries we've made in the academic lab in the commercial system.
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from BBC News Online
A nesting site for dinosaur eggs found in South Africa is 100 million years older than the previous oldest site. Palaeontologists found 10 separate nests, each containing clutches of up to 34 eggs measuring 6-7cm. The fossils are of the prosauropod Massospondylus, a relative of the long-necked sauropods such as Diplodocus.
They suggest that Massospondylus returned to the site repeatedly, laying their eggs in groups in the earliest-known case of "colonial nesting." The 190-million-year-old finds also included embryonic dinosaur skeletons, and are described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
They were found in a 25m stretch of rock in South Africa's Golden Gate Highlands National Park. The researchers suggest that many more sites remain embedded in the rock, which will be exposed as natural weathering processes continue.
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from Nature News
An uncharted trawl through thousands of small molecules involved in the body's metabolism may have uncovered a potential route to treating pain caused by nerve damage.
Neuropathic pain is a widespread and distressing condition, and is notoriously difficult to treat. So Gary Siuzdak, a chemist and molecular biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and his team decided to take an unusual route to finding a therapy. Their results are published in Nature Chemical Biology.
They took rats with surgically damaged paws, who were consequently suffering from neuropathic pain, and instead of analysing changes in gene expression and proteins in the animals, focused on metabolites--the biochemical intermediates and end-products of bodily processes such as respiration and the synthesis and breakdown of molecules. The science that looks at the body's metabolite composition is known as metabolomics. Using mass spectrometry, which can detect many different chemicals simultaneously, the researchers were able to identify the metabolites present in these animals 21 days after surgery.
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from the Scientist (Registration Required)
The geometric visuals and vivid imaginings experienced by those tripping on mushrooms are not, as scientists had suspected, the result of increased brain activity, according to a report out today (23 January) in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Instead, under the influence of psilocybin--the psychedelic component of magic mushrooms--brain activity and connectivity decrease. The reduced connectivity might be what frees people's minds from normal constraints, the researchers propose.
"It was often thought to be the case that these classic hallucinogens must increase brain function--you know, they expand awareness, expand consciousness--but in fact what we see is decreased activity," said Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, who was not involved in the study.
"I have to say this was totally unexpected," said David Nutt of Imperial College London, who led the study. But, he added, "when you get exactly the opposite result to what you predict, you know it is right, because there is no bias."
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
"Well, here it is," said aerospace engineer William Ailor as he paused next to the hulking metal shells arrayed along the plaza outside a visitors entrance at Aerospace Corp.'s El Segundo headquarters.
The stuff is junk. But, Ailor said, it's no ordinary junk. This garbage has traveled to space and back. A 150-pound hollow sphere of blackened titanium is all that remains of a motor casing from a Delta II rocket that fell to Earth in 2001, landing in the Saudi Arabian desert west of Riyadh.
A 600-pound stainless-steel fuel tank, also from a Delta II rocket, sits nearby, dented, gashed and rusty--scarred by its descent from space to a farm near Georgetown, Texas, in 1997.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
LOS ANGELES -- A treatment for eye diseases that is derived from human embryonic stem cells might have improved the vision of two patients, bolstering the beleaguered field, researchers reported Monday.
The report, published online in the medical journal The Lancet, is the first to describe the effect on patients of a therapy involving human embryonic stem cells.
The paper comes two months after Geron Corporation, a stem cell industry pioneer, cast a pall over the field by abruptly halting the world's first clinical trial based on embryonic stem cells--one aimed at treating spinal cord injury. Geron, which has not published results from the aborted trial, also said it would abandon the entire stem cell field.
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from BBC News Online
UK scientists have detected a huge dome of freshwater that is developing in the western Arctic Ocean. The bulge is some 8,000 cubic km in size and has risen by about 15cm since 2002.
The team thinks it may be the result of strong winds whipping up a great clockwise current in the northern polar region called the Beaufort Gyre. This would force the water together, raising sea surface height, the group tells the journal Nature Geoscience.
"In the western Arctic, the Beaufort Gyre is driven by a permanent anti-cyclonic wind circulation. It drives the water, forcing it to pile up in the centre of gyre, and this domes the sea surface," explained lead author Dr. Katharine Giles from the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM) at University College London.
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from the Telegraph (UK)
While it is sometimes said men can't take pain as well as women, because they don't go through childbirth, researchers found that not to be the case.
When they looked at the pain scores of more than 72,000 patients, across 47 common health problems, they discovered that on average women reported feeling more pain in 39 of them.
Atul Butte from Stanford University in the US, the senior author of the study, said: "We saw higher pain scores for female patients practically across the board. "In many cases, the reported difference approached a full point on the one-to-10 scale."
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from BBC News Online
Scientists in Glasgow, Scotland, have created the first 3-D image of a key protein which can help prevent cancer.
c-Cbl controls cell growth which, when unregulated, causes cells to divide excessively and can lead to cancer. It can be defective in leukaemia patients. By mapping the protein researchers at the Beatson Institute have found it changes shape when working properly.
They say the discovery is a step towards designing more effective cancer drugs in the future. The Cancer Research UK team used hi-tech X-ray analysis to map out the structure of the protein.
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from the Guardian (UK)
A mysterious virus that causes abortions and birth deformities in farm animals including sheep and cattle has been confirmed in the UK. Four sheep farms in Norfolk, Suffolk and East Sussex are known to be harbouring the disease, which is believed to be transmitted by midges.
The microbe has been given the provisional name Schmallenberg virus and first surfaced in the Netherlands and Germany in August 2011. Since then, hundreds of farms across those countries and Belgium have been affected. The disease is difficult to detect in adult animals and only becomes apparent after affected livestock give birth. There is no treatment or vaccine for the newly emerged disease.
The government's Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency (AHVLA) in Weybridge, which conducted the laboratory tests confirming that Schmallenberg virus is now in the UK, said in a statement: "Although there are still some uncertainties, the risk to human health from Schmallenberg virus is likely to be very low."
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from Nature News
Obsessive gamers' hours at the computer have now topped scientists' efforts to improve a model enzyme, in what researchers say is the first crowdsourced redesign of a protein.
The online game Foldit, developed by teams led by Zoran Popovic, director of the Center for Game Science, and biochemist David Baker, both at the University of Washington in Seattle, allows players to fiddle at folding proteins on their home computers in search of the best-scoring (lowest-energy) configurations.
The researchers have previously reported successes by Foldit players in folding proteins, but the latest work moves into the realm of protein design, a more open-ended problem. By posing a series of puzzles to Foldit players and then testing variations on the players' best designs in the lab, researchers have created an enzyme with more than 18-fold higher activity than the original. The work is published today in Nature Biotechnology.
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from Science News
Seaweed has long made biofuel prospectors drool, but they hadn't figured out how to efficiently chew through the stuff--until now. Researchers have engineered a bacterium that can break down and digest seaweed's gummy cell walls to yield ethanol and other useful compounds. If scientists can make the process work at larger scales, seaweed could soon be a serious contender as a source of renewable fuel.
The new research "makes a pretty large leap forward," says metabolic engineer Hal Alper of the University of Texas at Austin. Unlike corn and many other biofuel feedstocks, seaweed doesn't need arable land, fertilizer or freshwater. If seaweed can be efficiently munched into ethanol, it broadens the biofuel horizon, says Alper, who was not involved in the research. Seaweed, he says, may be "that new source for unconventional carbon that everyone's been looking for."
Scientists from Bio Architecture Lab, a biofuel and renewable chemicals company headquartered in Berkeley, Calif., were interested in creating a biofuel bacterium that is a one-stop shop: They wanted a microbe that could efficiently digest the seaweed cellular building block alginate without pretreatment with chemicals or heat. Alginate is commonly used in ice creams and some textiles, but has proved difficult to break down and metabolize into fuel.
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from Nature News
Scientists have been reflecting on the astonishing gains that the Egyptian revolution has delivered them, as the first anniversary of Egypt's Tahrir Square uprising approaches next week.
Over the past year, the science budget has increased by more than a third, salaries have risen and plans have been made for a science and technology city.
"Change has begun on both financial and administrative levels," Maged El-Sherbiny, president of the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology (the government body responsible for funding research in Egypt), told SciDev.Net.
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from NPR
Humans are complicated genetic jigsaw puzzles. Hundreds of genes are involved in determining something as basic as height.
But man's best friend is a different story. New research shows that almost every physical trait in dogs--from a dachshund's stumpy legs to a shar-pei's wrinkles--is controlled by just a few genes.
Writer Evan Ratliff has been looking into dog genetics for National Geographic Magazine. He tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz that that quirk makes it extremely easy for breeders to develop new, custom-designed dogs--like the German hunters who bred the original dachshunds a few hundred years ago.
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A new study shows that immune cells known B cells forestall sepsis in mice, a discovery that may help researchers devise better treatments for the illness. Despite antibiotics and other treatments, about 25% of sepsis patients die.
In other biomedical news, the fruitfly genome has been mapped in three dimensions, an important step towards understanding whether, and how, the structure of the genome affects its function.
Surgeons replaced the cancerous windpipe of a Maryland man with one made in a laboratory. They synthetic windpipe, or trachea, made from minuscule plastic fibers and covered in stem cells taken from the man's bone marrow, was transplanted successfully in Sweden.
An incurable form of tuberculosis has been identified in India, raising further concerns over increasing drug resistance to the disease. The discovery makes India the third country in which a completely drug-resistant form of the disease has emerged, following cases documented in Italy in 2007 and Iran in 2009.
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Fifteen pounds of rock collected recently in Morocco fell to Earth from Mars during a meteorite shower last July, scientists confirmed last week. No NASA or Russian spacecraft has returned bits of Mars, so the only samples scientists can examine are those that come here in a meteorite shower.
In other space news, Europe's Herschel space telescope has produced a majestic new version of a classic celestial target--the Eagle Nebula. This dense region of gas and dust 6,500 light-years from Earth hosts copious numbers of bright new stars.
A failed Russian Mars probe plunged into the Pacific Ocean on January 15, according to Russian news reports. The 14.5-ton Phobos-Grunt spacecraft slammed into the atmosphere over an empty stretch of ocean.
Three new planets found outside our solar system are the smallest exoplanets yet discovered. Each is smaller than Earth, astronomers announced. The tiny worlds are clustered around a red M-dwarf star called KOI-961, which is just a sixth as wide as our sun, or about 70 percent bigger than Jupiter.
Volunteers are being sought to join the hunt for nearby planets that could support life. The Planethunters website offers time-lapsed images of 150,000 stars, taken by the Kepler space telescope. Participants will be advised on the signs that indicate the presence of a planet and how to alert experts if they spot one.
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Military technologists are building electromagnetic weapons that work by zapping the enemy's electronics, rather than blowing him up. The result could be conflict that is less bloody, yet more effective, than what is now considered conventional warfare.
In other technology news, a California company has announced it will soon launch a "digital health product" in the United Kingdom in collaboration with a pharmacy chain there. Called Helius, the product will include "sensor-enabled tablets" to monitor patients' medication use.
DIYbio, short for do-it-yourself biology, got its official start in 2008 with DIYbio.org, an online hub for sharing ideas. The site has grown to more than 2,000 members since its inception.
The "nano-ear," a microscopic particle of gold trapped by a laser beam, can detect sound a million times fainter than the threshold for human hearing. Researchers say the work could open up a new field of "acoustic microscopy," in which organisms are studied using the sound they emit.
IBM researchers have stored and retrieved digital 1s and 0s from an array of just 12 atoms, pushing the boundaries of the magnetic storage of information to the edge of what is possible.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
In an almost unheard-of move, scientists who study the deadly H5N1 bird flu announced a 60-day voluntary moratorium on studying the virus to allow time "to clearly explain the benefits of this important research and the measures taken to minimize its possible risks."
The statement, released Friday by the journals Science and Nature, comes soon after federal officials had asked the journals and two research teams to withhold details of experiments that showed the virus can be coaxed to a form that passes readily through the air from mammal to mammal.
The request has rekindled a debate among scientists and in the media about how transparently to share delicate information that could help researchers develop ways to prevent and contain a disease threat but could also fall into the wrong hands.
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from Popular Mechanics
In late 2009, a writer, a producer, a director, and three scientists sat in a Los Angeles conference room. They were discussing Marvel's Thor--a film based on a comic book that was in turn inspired by the Norse god of thunder--about an arrogant warrior who, at the start of the film, violates a truce by attacking the Frost Giants.
As the film team described their vision of the fight, Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, knew the filmmakers had a problem. "They wanted the Frost Giants to fall off the edge of a disc-shaped planet," he says. "That makes no sense. Where does the gravity to pull them down come from? Enough people know how gravity works it would throw them out of the movie. You'd get a lot of giggles." Carroll and the other scientists argued their point, even though, Carroll says, "it was clear some people thought we were being uptight killjoys."
But producer Kevin Feige sided with the scientists, and in the final cut, the Frost Giants' planet was spherical. That was just one way that Carroll, a clean-cut 45-year-old who has advised on films such as TRON: Legacy and the TV show Bones, helped the production.
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from Nature News
A strange bacterium found in California's Mono Lake cannot replace the phosphorus in its DNA with arsenic, according to researchers who have been trying to reproduce the results of a controversial report published in Science in 2010.
A group of scientists, led by microbiologist Rosie Redfield at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, have posted data on Redfield's blog that, she says, present a "clear refutation" of key findings from the paper.
"Their most striking claim was that arsenic had been incorporated into the backbone of DNA, and what we can say is that there is no arsenic in the DNA at all," says Redfield.
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