from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)
MOSCOW (Associated Press) -- Russia should build a new nuclear-powered spaceship for prospective manned missions to Mars and other planets, the nation's space chief said Thursday.
Anatoly Perminov first proposed building the ship at a government meeting Wednesday but didn't explain its purpose. President Dmitry Medvedev backed the project and urged the government to find the money.
In remarks posted Thursday on his agency's Web site, Perminov said the nuclear spaceship should be used for human flights to Mars and other planets. He said the project is challenging technologically, but could capitalize on the Soviet and Russian experience in the field.
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from the Scientist
In a room full of clinical veterinarians and animal-care technicians, everybody is about to play a game. ... Each of the 15 or 20 teams will receive a species designation (monkey, mouse, rabbit, dog, pig, rat), a piece of posterboard, a magic marker, and an index card that describes a study using that species. ... Teams will then have about 30 minutes to think up and draw some device or toy that improves the cage environment for the animals in a manner appropriate for each species--an activity that generally falls under the heading of "enrichment." ...
The general reasoning behind enrichment is that it will improve the welfare of animals in captivity. There's been little systematic study, though, of how specific enrichment practices affect lab animals--arguably less for rodents (the vast majority of animals used in research) than for other species, such as primates and dogs, for which some basic enrichment practices have generally been required by law in most countries.
The European Union is debating changes to a directive on laboratory animal care that would mandate specific rodent enrichments; so far there are no such stipulations in the United States. "Mice and rats were left in the dark," says Michele Cunneen, founder and president of Animal Research Consulting, a Massachusetts-based company that sets up animal research facilities primarily for start-up biotech companies.
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from the Wall Street Journal
ARCADIA, Fla. -- The Obama administration launched a clean-energy blitz Tuesday, with President Barack Obama sweeping into this Central Florida hamlet to unveil $3.4 billion in stimulus grants for advanced electricity-grid projects and Vice President Joe Biden traveling to his home state of Delaware to open an electric-automobile plant.
The administration Tuesday released a list of about 100 companies and communities in 45 states and territories that will receive federal subsidies to modernize the electric grid. The administration promised the projects would create "tens of thousands of jobs."
Among the big winners are companies and communities in Florida, which received more than $267 million in grants, and North Carolina, which got more than $400 million, including more than $200 million for units of utility giant Duke Energy Corp., which has supported administration efforts to modernize technology and cap greenhouse-gas emissions.
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from BBC News Online
It has often been said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. For the internet, that first step was more of a stumble.
At 2100, on 29 October 1969, engineers 400 miles apart at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and Stanford Research Institute (SRI) prepared to send data between the first nodes of what was then known as Arpanet.
It got the name because it was commissioned by the US Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa).
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Astronomers announced Wednesday that a race halfway across the universe had ended in a virtual tie. And so the champion is still Albert Einstein--for now.
The race was between gamma rays of differing energies and wavelengths spit in a burst from an exploding star when the universe was half its present age. After a journey of 7.3 billion light-years, they arrived within nine-tenths of a second of each other in a detector on NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, at 8:22 p.m., Eastern time, last May 9.
Astronomers said the gamma-ray race was one of the most stringent tests yet of a bedrock principle of modern physics: Einstein's proclamation in his 1905 theory of relativity that the speed of light is constant and independent of its color, energy, direction or how you yourself are moving.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
Most women have their last child before age 40. Why would Darwinian evolution favor such a cutoff, especially when most other mammals reproduce until they die?
A new study finds support for the "grandmother hypothesis," the idea that older women spread their genes most effectively by helping their daughters take care of their children.
In 1998, behavioral ecologist Kristen Hawkes of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and her colleagues proposed that grandmothers lend their skill and experience to the rearing of their grandchildren. Hawkes and others cited the Hadza, a modern foraging society in Tanzania, in which grandmothers search for tubers while their daughters are breastfeeding their babies.
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from National Geographic News
"Mummified" trees that lived during Viking times have been discovered near a fjord in southwestern Norway, scientists say.
Dated to the early 1200s, the 40 dead Scotch pines were found scattered among living trees in what was once a dense forest that supplied wood for medieval boats and churches.
The trees appear to have died from natural causes after living out their several-hundred-year life spans. But somehow the dead trees "survived"--they apparently have never rotted.
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from the Guardian (U.K.)
More than half of British adults think that intelligent design and creationism should be taught alongside evolution in school science lessons - a proportion higher than in the US.
An Ipsos Mori survey questioned 11,768 adults from 10 countries on how the theory of evolution should be taught in school science lessons.
About 54% of the 973 polled Britons agreed with the view: "Evolutionary theories should be taught in science lessons in schools together with other possible perspectives, such as intelligent design and creationism."
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
A big earthquake and resultant fire could trigger potentially deadly releases of radioactive materials from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico due to "major deficiencies" in the nuclear weapons lab's safety planning, federal safety experts warned Tuesday.
The warning from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board was sent to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, urging him to "execute both immediate and long-term actions."
A spokeswoman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, a part of the Energy Department, said, "We are currently evaluating the board's recommendation and preparing a formal response."
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from National Public Radio
Special genes inserted into crop plants have a way of leaking into the environment. That much scientists know for sure. What they're less certain about is what effect those genes have on plants growing in the wild.
Andrew Stephenson is interested in answering that question. He's a plant ecologist at Penn State University. Plant breeders put things called transgenes into plants to give them desirable properties such as disease resistance.
"People were concerned that when the transgene escapes into the wild populations, it will provide a fitness advantage," says Stephenson.
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from the San Francisco Chronicle
A research team of UC scientists has decoded the words in the secret chemical language of Argentine ants - a discovery that could lead to an environmentally benign pesticide against the insects that march into Bay Area homes every time the weather turns cold or wet.
The researchers found special signaling chemicals on the bodies of one aggressive group of the ants, and then synthesized the chemicals to induce peaceable members of the same species to turn them into highly aggressive beasts, perhaps leading them to turn on each other.
The experiments with the hydrocarbons that trigger the ants' silent battle calls cost tens of thousands of dollars, and the difficult experiments led by UC Berkeley evolutionary biologist Neil D. Tsutsui, often risked failure before they succeeded.
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from BBC News Online
One starfish has a remarkable strategy to avoid overheating in the sun, scientists have discovered.
The starfish pumps itself up with cold seawater to lower its body temperature when exposed to the sun at low tide. It is equivalent to a person drinking seven litres of water before heading into the midday sun, scientists say.
However, global climate change may drastically interfere with this vital mechanism by increasing sea temperatures, the researchers warn.
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from Time
Critics are calling it a two-tier health system--one for the politically well connected, another for the hoi polloi. As Germany launched its mass-vaccination program against the H1N1 flu virus on Monday, the government found itself fending off accusations of favoritism because it was offering one vaccine believed to have fewer side effects to civil servants, politicians and soldiers, and another, potentially riskier vaccine to everyone else.
The government had hoped that Germans would rush to health clinics to receive vaccinations against the rapidly spreading disease, but now rising anger over the different drugs may cause many people to shy away.
Amid growing fears of a possible global flu pandemic, the German government prepared for its mass-vaccination campaign earlier this year by ordering 50 million doses of the Pandemrix vaccine, enough for a double dose for 25 million people, about a third of the population. The vaccine, manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline, contains an immunity-enhancing chemical compound, known as an adjuvant, whose side effects are not yet entirely known.
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from Nature News
The global financial crisis is hampering plans to revive African science, researchers and policy-makers said last week in Durban, South Africa. Slashed donor funding, slowing foreign investment and competing budget priorities are the main culprits; hardest hit are the poorest countries and continent-wide projects.
"Our countries are in crisis, philanthropists are in crisis and the aid agencies are in crisis," Jean-Pierre Ezin, commissioner for science, technology and human resources for the African Union, said at a conference organized by TWAS, the academy of sciences for the developing world, based in Trieste, Italy.
In 2007, an African presidential summit on science saw funders falling over each other to offer assistance on science and technology programmes. Today the funding situation has changed dramatically.
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from the San Diego Union Tribune (Registration Required)
WASHINGTON -- Have you heard that the world is now cooling instead of warming? You may have seen some news reports on the Internet or heard about it from a provocative new book. Only one problem: It's not true, according to an analysis of the numbers done by several independent statisticians for The Associated Press.
The case that the Earth might be cooling partly stems from recent weather. Last year was cooler than previous years. It's been a while since the super-hot years of 1998 and 2005. So is this a longer climate trend or just weather's normal ups and downs?
In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.
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from the New Yorker
Born in Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia, Maja Mataric originally wanted to study languages and art. After she and her mother moved to the United States, in 1981, her uncle, who had immigrated some years earlier, pressed her to concentrate on computers.
As a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mataric wrote software that helped robots to independently navigate around obstacles placed randomly in a room. For her doctoral dissertation, she developed a robotic shepherd capable of corralling a herd of twenty robots.
At the end of her graduate training, Mataric, influenced by her knowledge of cognitive science, became interested in how people could benefit from interacting with robots. Now forty-four and a professor of computer science at the University of Southern California, she has begun working with stroke and Alzheimer's patients and autistic children, searching for a way to make machines that can engage directly with them, encouraging both physical and cognitive rehabilitation.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Despite a six-year effort to build trusted computer chips for military systems, the Pentagon now manufactures in secure facilities run by American companies only about 2 percent of the more than $3.5 billion of integrated circuits bought annually for use in military gear.
That shortfall is viewed with concern by current and former United States military and intelligence agency executives who argue that the menace of so-called Trojan horses hidden in equipment circuitry is among the most severe threats the nation faces in the event of a war in which communications and weaponry rely on computer technology.
As advanced systems like aircraft, missiles and radars have become dependent on their computing capabilities, the specter of subversion causing weapons to fail in times of crisis, or secretly corrupting crucial data, has come to haunt military planners. The problem has grown more severe as most American semiconductor manufacturing plants have moved offshore.
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from New Scientist
As the US government ponders a strategy to deal with threatening asteroids, a dramatic explosion over Indonesia has underscored how blind we still are to hurtling space rocks.
On 8 October an asteroid detonated high in the atmosphere above South Sulawesi, Indonesia, releasing about as much energy as 50,000 tons of TNT, according to a NASA estimate released on Friday. That's about three times more powerful than the atomic bomb that levelled Hiroshima, making it one of the largest asteroid explosions ever observed.
However, the blast caused no damage on the ground because of the high altitude, 15 to 20 kilometres above Earth's surface, says astronomer Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario (UWO), Canada.
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from USA Today
People who live in Western culture may get depressed more than those from East Asian culture because Westerners don't have the cultural support that can protect them from a genetic vulnerability to depression, suggests a new study from Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill.
Researchers say Western culture is more individualistic and more concerned with "me" while East Asian culture is more collectivistic and focused on "we."
Psychologist Joan Chiao, the study's lead author, says those from more collectivist cultures are more likely to value social harmony over individualism and support behaviors that increase group cohesion and interdependence. She says more collectivist cultures may give individuals who are genetically susceptible to depression an implied or expressed social support which buffers them from depressive episodes.
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from Science News
Many young children and adolescents taking drugs for severe psychiatric problems gain substantial weight and, in some cases, show increased levels of LDL cholesterol and triglycerides in their blood, researchers report in the Oct. 28 Journal of the American Medical Association.
Although the data from this study need to be replicated over a longer time frame, the findings nonetheless raise worrisome questions about anti-psychotic drugs that often benefit children who have schizophrenia, autism, tics, severe bipolar disorder or aggressive behavior.
"We are between a rock and a hard place here," says study coauthor Christoph Correll, a psychiatrist at the Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, N.Y. These mental disorders are severe and can lead to suicide or to educational problems and emotional scars, he says. On the other hand, weight gain during youth predisposes an individual to chronic health problems later in life, he says.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
In what they called a medical first in a toddler, surgeons at Stanford University's Lucile Packard Children's Hospital have implanted a telescoping artificial prosthesis in the arm of a 3-year-old to replace a humerus that was removed because of cancer. Nearly a year later, Mark Blinder is thriving and cancer-free.
Mark, now 4, developed pain in his right arm in April of last year. By July, oncologists had diagnosed Ewing's sarcoma, a rare bone tumor. Chemotherapy reduced the pain but did not eradicate the tumor. Radiation would have destroyed the growth plates in the bone, producing a physical impairment as the boy grew. The other common alternative is amputation.
Orthopedic surgeon Dr. Lawrence Rinsky of Stanford convinced parents Alla Ostrovskaya and Gene Blinder to consider a third option, an artificial bone produced by Biomet Inc. of Warsaw, Ind. Biomet produces artificial joints, which are quite common, and artificial bones, which are less so. The titanium/cobalt chrome expandable bone designed specifically for Mark was rare, spokesman Bill Kolter said.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
It's a vexing problem - how to keep the public and policymakers informed and engaged on what many scientists say is the primary long-term challenge to humanity's well-being: global warming.
You could invite folks to burrow into the most recent 998-page climate-change opus by 620 leading scientists and editors. Or, for lighter reading, peruse the 34-page "frequently asked questions" primer on that same 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
But to capture public attention while avoiding the need for a PhD on sea-ice thickness, glacier melt rates, and carbon dioxide concentrations, you could just put that data into a single index that tracks the pulse of climate change as it happens.
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from Science News
Phantoms take many forms--headless horseman, ghost ships, murdered fathers--and they can even reach out and grab the living: many people who have had an arm or leg amputated feel the limb is still present. The phantom pain that often accompanies these limbs has been successfully treated by using visual feedback from mirrors to trick the brain.
Now similar instances of mind over non-matter have been achieved without external help--amputees have learned to mentally manipulate their phantom limbs into anatomically impossible configurations through thinking alone, scientists report October 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"It is very surprising that anybody--amputees or not--can learn impossible movements just by thinking about it," comments neuroscientist Henrik Ehrsson of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm.
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from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
Native American rituals and beliefs have emerged as a surprising last-minute obstacle to federal approval of the nation's first offshore wind farm, threatening to significantly delay the Cape Wind project.
Two Massachusetts tribes say the 130 proposed wind turbines in Nantucket Sound would disturb their spiritual sun greetings and submerged ancestral burying grounds.
The Aquinnah and Mashpee Wampanoag tribes--with help from the main opposition group to Cape Wind--are pushing for the entire sound to be listed as a traditional cultural property on the National Register of Historic Places. A listing by itself would not necessarily stop the project, but would make permitting much more cumbersome.
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from Wired
In the marvelously sensitive eyes of mantis shrimps, scientists have found cells that could inspire an overhaul of humanity's comparatively clumsy communications hardware.
Mechanical analogs of their eyes "are among the most important and commonly used optical components, and the cellular structure we describe significantly outperforms these current optics," write researchers in a study published Sunday in Nature Photonics.
Mantis shrimps are reef-dwelling marine crustaceans who trace their evolutionary lineage straight back to the Cambrian age 500 million years ago, before vertebrates had even evolved. They're so biologically unique that biologists call them "shrimps from Mars."
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
A new examination of skulls from the royal cemetery at Ur, discovered in Iraq almost a century ago, appears to support a more grisly interpretation than before of human sacrifices associated with elite burials in ancient Mesopotamia, archaeologists say.
Palace attendants, as part of royal mortuary ritual, were not dosed with poison to meet a rather serene death. Instead, a sharp instrument, a pike perhaps, was driven into their heads.
Archaeologists at the University of Pennsylvania reached that conclusion after conducting the first CT scans of two skulls from the 4,500-year-old cemetery. The cemetery, with 16 tombs grand in construction and rich in gold and jewels, was discovered in the 1920s. A sensation in 20th century archaeology, it revealed the splendor at the height of the Mesopotamian civilization.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Disgraced South Korean cloning scientist Hwang Woo-suk was found guilty by a Seoul court today of embezzling from his stem cell research fund and illegally buying human embryos.
The court also ruled that the 56-year-old Hwang, who became a national hero after he claimed to be the first to successfully clone human stem cells, had partially fabricated the results of his research. He was given a suspended jail sentence.
"He feels deeply sorry that this case elicited so much criticism in the scientific field and shocked the public. ... His wrongdoing is not minor but does not merit the severe punishment of a prison sentence," the Seoul Central District Court said in the verdict.
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from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)
AKESPE, Kazakhstan (Associated Press) -- Standing on the shore under the relentless Central Asian sun, Badarkhan Prikeyev drew on a cigarette and squinted into the distance as one fishing boat after another returned with the day's catch.
Until recently, this spot where the fish merchant was standing, in a man-made desert at the edge of nowhere, represented one of the world's worst environmental calamities.
Now fresh water was lapping at his boots, proclaiming an environmental miracle-- the return of the Aral Sea.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
With its wrinkled skin and bucked teeth, the naked mole rat isn't going to win any beauty contests. But the burrowing, desert rodent is exceptional in another way: It doesn't get cancer.
The naked mole rat's cells hate to be crowded, it turns out, so they stop growing before they can form tumors. The details could someday lead to a new strategy for treating cancer in people.
In search of clues to aging, cell biologists Vera Gorbunova, Andrei Seluanov, and colleagues at the University of Rochester have been comparing rodents that vary in size and life span, from mice to beavers. The naked mole rat stands out because it's small yet can live more than 28 years--seven times as long as a house mouse. Resistance to cancer could be a major factor; whereas most laboratory mice and rats die from the disease, it has never been observed in naked mole rats.
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from the Scientist
The forensic scientists depicted in popular TV shows CSI and NCIS often work in slick, technologically-decked out labs solving case after scintillating case. But for forensic sculptor Frank Bender, reconstructing the faces of decomposing bodies or skeletons is a much more hands-on, creative process done in his paint-stained, converted-butcher-shop-studio in South Philadelphia.
Through a career that's spanned 33 years, Bender has worked with the Philadelphia police department, the FBI, Scotland Yard, America's Most Wanted and the Mexican government to give faces to unidentified victims. Just don't ask him how many--he's lost count.
His methods are far from traditional--the only scientific forensics data he uses are facial tissue thickness charts, but only as starting points, he said--and have been widely criticized. But his methods, no matter how unusual, work.
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