from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Cathal Garvey's home laboratory in Cork, Ireland, is filled with makeshift equipment. His incubator for bacteria is an old Styrofoam shipping box with a heating mat and thermometer that he has modified into a thermostat. He uses a pressure cooker to sterilize instead of an autoclave. Some instruments are fashioned from coffee cans.
In the burgeoning world of citizen science, where the ethos is closer to scout manual than peer-reviewed journal, Mr. Garvey, a 26-year-old geneticist who worked in a cancer research center for about four years after earning a graduate degree, is something of a hero. He is perhaps best known for inventing the DremelFuge, a small centrifuge that can be fabricated by a 3-D printer. His plans are freely available online, so anybody who has the desire and the resources to make one can do so.
He and other scientific improvisers, or bio-hackers, are part of a movement called DIYbio, short for do-it-yourself biology, which 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.
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from Nature News
The origin of multicellular life, one of the most important developments in Earth's history, could have occurred with surprising speed, US researchers have shown. In the lab, a single-celled yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) took less than 60 days to evolve into many-celled clusters that behaved as individuals. The clusters even developed a primitive division of labour, with some cells dying so that others could grow and reproduce.
The study, by William Ratcliff and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, is published online today [January 16] in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Referring to the origin of multicellularity, Richard Lenski, an evolutionary biologist from Michigan State University in East Lansing who was not involved in the study, says: "This has long been viewed as difficult transition, but these experiments show it might not be quite as difficult as assumed."
Ratcliff came up with the concept for the experiment with his colleague Michael Travisano. "We were talking about the coolest work that we could do," says Ratcliff. "We ruled out the origin of life as too difficult, but thought that evolving multicellularity would be feasible."
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from Scientific American
A failed Russian Mars probe came crashing back to Earth Sunday (Jan. 15) in a death plunge over the Pacific Ocean, according to Russian news reports.
After languishing in Earth orbit for more than two months, the 14.5-ton Phobos-Grunt spacecraft fell at around 12:45 p.m. EST (1745 GMT) Sunday, apparently slamming into the atmosphere over an empty stretch of the Pacific, Russian officials told the Ria Novosti news agency.
"Phobos-Grunt fragments have crashed down in the Pacific Ocean," Alexei Zolotukhin, an official with Russia's Defense Ministry, was quoted by Ria Novosti as saying. Zolotukhin said that the spacecraft crashed about 776 miles (1,250 kilometers) west of the island of Wellington, the news agency reported.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
Have you ever wondered what a virus sounds like? Or what noise a bacterium makes when it moves between hosts? If the answer is yes, you may soon get your chance to find out, thanks to the development of the world's tiniest ear. 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 suggest the work could open up a whole new field of "acoustic microscopy," in which organisms are studied using the sound they emit.
The concept of the nano-ear began with a 1986 invention known as optical tweezers. The tweezers use a laser beam focused to a point with a lens to grab hold of tiny particles and move them around. They've become a standard tool in molecular biology and nanotechnology, helping researchers inject DNA into cells and even manipulate it once inside.
Optical tweezers can also be used to measure minuscule forces acting on microscopic particles; once you've grabbed hold of your particle with the laser beam, instead of moving it yourself, you simply use a microscope or other suitable monitoring apparatus to watch whether it moves of its own accord. That's where the nano-ear comes in.
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from Nature News
British scientists are fundamentally failing to deal with research misconduct, which is widespread in the country, leading experts have warned. At a conference in London yesterday, participants were united in calling for more action on the issue.
"There is a recognition that we have a problem," said Fiona Godlee, editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and one of the driving forces behind the meeting.
Coinciding with the meeting, a BMJ survey of 2,782 doctors and medical academics showed that 13% claimed to have firsthand knowledge of "inappropriately adjusting, excluding, altering or fabricating data." Six per cent said that they were aware of cases of possible research misconduct at their institutions that they thought had not been properly investigated.
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from Science News
A simulation of the early universe using string theory may explain why space has three observable spatial dimensions instead of nine. The leading mathematical explanation of physics goes beyond modern particle theory by positing tiny bits of vibrating string as the fundamental basis of matter and forces. String theory also requires that the universe have six or more spatial dimensions in addition to the ones observed in everyday life. Explaining how those extra dimensions are hidden is a central challenge for string theorists.
"This new paper demonstrates, for the first time, that our 3-D space appears naturally ... from the 9-D space that string theory originally has," says Jun Nishimura of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan. He and his colleagues will publish their findings in an upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters.
In the simulation, the universe starts off as a tiny blob of strings that is symmetric in nine different dimensions. As the strings interact, a random energy fluctuation--provided by the quantum laws that govern these small scales--breaks the symmetry. Three dimensions balloon outward, leaving the other six stunted at a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a centimeter, far too small to be detected.
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from New Scientist
Whether you want to know about black holes, the brain, genes or imagination, there's one for you in our list of books we can't wait to read this year.
Ignorance: How it Drives Science by Stuart Firestein, Oxford University Press. In this provocatively titled book, Stuart Firestein, chair of biological sciences at Columbia University in New York City, promises to disabuse readers of the myth that the scientific quest for truth is propelled by understanding. Instead, he emphasises, it is the very fact of not knowing that spurs scientists on--groping for scraps of insight and grappling with befuddling mysteries.
Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer, Canongate/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Science writer Jonah Lehrer's last book, The Decisive Moment, examined when we should let instinct run the show and when we should allow reason to take over, with exceptional results. Our hopes are high for Imagine, in which Lehrer sets out to understand human creativity, and dispenses with oversimplifications about creative "types."
17 Equations that Changed the World by Ian Stewart, Profile Books/Basic Books. We had a sneak peek at Ian Stewart's latest offering and found his shortlist of the most influential equations so compelling we have asked him to tell you more about them himself. Look out for his feature in our 11 February issue.
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from the Baltimore Sun
NEW YORK (Reuters) -- From Darwinian evolution to the idea that personality is largely shaped by chance, the favorite theories of the world's most eminent thinkers are as eclectic as science itself.
Every January, John Brockman, the impresario and literary agent who presides over the online salon Edge.org, asks his circle of scientists, digerati and humanities scholars to tackle one question. In previous years, they have included "how is the Internet changing the way you think?" and "what is the most important invention in the last 2,000 years?"
This year, he posed the open-ended question "what is your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation?" The responses, released at midnight on Sunday, provide a crash course in science both well known and far out-of-the-box, as admired by the likes of Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, physicist Freeman Dyson and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.
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from Scientific American
In a study published in late 2011 in Nature, Stanford University geneticist Anne Brunet and colleagues described a series of experiments that caused nematodes raised under the same environmental conditions to experience dramatically different lifespans. Some individuals were exceptionally long-lived, and their descendants, through three generations, also enjoyed long lives. Clearly, the longevity advantage was inherited. And yet, the worms, both short- and long-lived, were genetically identical.
This type of finding--an inherited difference that cannot be explained by variations in genes themselves--has become increasingly common, in part because scientists now know that genes are not the only authors of inheritance. There are ghostwriters, too. At first glance, these scribes seem quite ordinary--methyl, acetyl and phosphoryl groups, clinging to proteins associated with DNA, or sometimes even to DNA itself, looking like freeloaders at best.
Their form is far from the elegant tendrils of DNA that make up genes, and they are fleeting, in a sense, erasable, very unlike genes, which have been passed down through generations for millions of years. But they do lurk, and silently, they exert their power, modifying DNA and controlling genes, influencing the chaos of nucleic and amino acids. And it is for this reason that many scientists consider the discovery of these entities in the late 20th century as a turning point in our understanding of heredity, as possibly one of the greatest revolutions in modern biology--the rise of epigenetics.
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from National Geographic News
Three new planets found outside our solar system are the smallest exoplanets yet discovered--each of them tinier than Earth, astronomers announced today. The tiny worlds are clustered around a red M-dwarf star called KOI-961 that is itself among the more diminutive stellar objects in the universe. The star is just a sixth as wide as our sun, or about 70 percent bigger than Jupiter.
"It's almost like you took your shrink gun and set it to seven and zapped the planetary system--the whole thing shrunk," said study co-author John Johnson, a researcher with NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology.
All three of the KOI-961 planets are thought to be rocky, like Earth and Mars. But they circle fairly close to their star, taking roughly two days to complete their orbits. That means, even though the host star is dimmer than our sun, the planets are far too hot for liquid water--and thus life as we know it--to exist on their surfaces.
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from Scientific American
An international research team has tracked down and measured an elusive molecule that rapidly breaks down pollution in the atmosphere, turning it into clouds that actually help cool the Earth.
The compound is part of a class of molecules called "Criegee biradicals," named after the scientist Rudolf Criegee, who predicted their existence in 1949. The biradicals are intermediates in reactions, meaning they are steppingstones in processes where one compound becomes another.
In this case, they form naturally as ozone--a high-energy oxygen molecule--reacts with carbon chains that have double bonds, forming a compound that has two reactive pairs of electrons. The intermediates have high energies and are unstable, reacting quickly with other molecules, making them difficult to analyze.
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from Science News
AUSTIN, Texas -- Scientists are beginning to sort out the stellar ingredients that produce a type 1a supernova, a type of cosmic explosion that has been used to measure the universe's accelerating expansion.
Two teams of researchers presented new data about these supernovas at the American Astronomical Society meeting on January 11. One team confirmed a long-held suspicion about the kind of star that explodes, and the second provided new evidence for what feeds that star until it bursts.
"This is a confirmation of a decades-old belief, namely that a type 1a supernova comes from the explosion of a carbon-oxygen white dwarf," said Joshua Bloom, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley.
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from New Scientist
One of Europe's largest cruise ships, the Costa Concordia, carrying 4200 passengers and crew, suffered a fatal and spectacular accident on Saturday. The vessel was holed on rocks off the Italian island of Giglio--and then quickly keeled over, preventing lifeboats on its port side from being lowered and trapping some passengers and crew in the bowels of the ship. At 12:00 GMT today, six people had been confirmed dead and a further 15 were missing. So how stable and safe are these vertiginous floating multistorey hotels?
Why was this massive ship so close to shallow rock outcrops? Mark Staunton-Lambert, technical director of the London-based Royal Institution of Naval Architects, says this is the main question investigators will want answered. GPS and sonar instruments should have warned of the danger, he says.
Why might the Costa Concordia's depth-sounding sonar have been ignored? Like aviation, seafaring is in the midst of major computerisation, with bridges in modern ships like Costa Concordia becoming "glass cockpits." The transnational maritime trade union Nautilus International says that the technology at the heart of this--the Electronic Charts Display and Information System (ECDIS), which marries GPS and seabed sonar data in one screen--can be a problem. First, it says that the data on seabed obstacles can be out of date; second, the system generates too many alarms that can lead mariners to ignore them. "The ECDIS screens are only as good as the data that goes into them," says Nautilus spokesman Andrew Limington. "And there are major problems with their user interfaces and ergonomics."
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
Sepsis isn't just one of those old-time diseases that people used to die from before the discovery of antibiotics. It's still a major killer. Now, a new study shows that immune cells known as B cells forestall sepsis in mice, a discovery that may help researchers devise better treatments for the illness.
Each year, up to 1 million people in the United States fall victim to sepsis, a runaway infection coupled with bodywide inflammation. Despite antibiotics and other treatments, about 25% of sepsis patients die, notes infectious disease researcher Steven Opal of Brown University, who wasn't involved with the study. "Sepsis is a huge problem that we've had great difficulty solving," he says.
At first glance, B cells don't look like part of the solution. Their most familiar job is to pump out defensive proteins called antibodies. Immunologist Filip Swirski of Harvard Medical School in Boston and colleagues discovered the cells' involvement in sepsis by accident. Swirski has been probing the role of immune cells called macrophages in cardiovascular disease. He and his colleagues were trying to pin down the cells that manufacture granulocyte macrophage colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF). This protein exerts a big influence on white blood cells, spurring some of them to mature and switching on pathogen-fighters such as neutrophils. Swirski says that researchers thought that macrophages or other non-B cells were the source of GM-CSF. Yet in mice, the team found, most of the GM-CSF-making cells in the spleen were B cells.
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from Nature News
Students walking out of classrooms when global warming is mentioned; teachers pressured to change lesson plans to avoid the subject or portray it as speculative rather than a matter of scientific consensus. For Eugenie Scott, the stories and anecdotes fit a familiar pattern. Scott is executive director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) an organization based in Oakland, California, with a reputation for doggedly defending the teaching of evolution in US classrooms.
But a growing impression that climate science is facing a similar struggle, together with entreaties from educators and textbook authors, has helped to convince her that the NCSE should expand its mandate to include the politically charged issue of global warming.
"I think we can make an important contribution," says Scott. "If teachers understand that there is a place that they can go to for help, we can use some of the expertise that we've gained over the years dealing with evolution to apply to this related problem."
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from BBC News Online
Members of the public are being asked to join the hunt for nearby planets that could support life. Volunteers can go to the Planethunters website to see time-lapsed images of 150,000 stars, taken by the Kepler space telescope.
They will be advised on the signs that indicate the presence of a planet and how to alert experts if they spot them. "We know that people will find planets that are missed by the computer," said Chris Lintott from Oxford University.
"When humans have looked at data, we know they find planets that computers can't."
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Type 1a supernovae, exploding stars that can outshine entire galaxies, were instrumental to the Nobel Prize-winning discovery that a mysterious "dark energy" is fueling the expansion of the universe. But astronomers haven't been able to pin down what causes these massive stellar explosions.
Now, after studying a Type 1a supernova in a nearby galaxy, two researchers say that they must be the result of a collision between two white dwarf stars. They made their case in the journal Nature.
Pinning down the origins of these so-called standard candles, which can be used to help determine the brightness of other objects, may aid scientists in sharpening their understanding of the nature of dark energy. As astronomers map out the known universe, it can be hard to tell whether a tiny speck of light is from an object that is bright but far away or dim but nearby. Type 1a supernovae, on the other hand, are thought to all shine at the same peak brightness, which allows scientists to determine how far away they are.
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from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Surgeons in Sweden have replaced the cancerous windpipe of a Maryland man with one fabricated in a laboratory and seeded with his own cells.
The windpipe, or trachea, made from minuscule plastic fibers and covered in stem cells taken from the man's bone marrow, was transplanted successfully in November. The patient, Christopher Lyles, 30, who had a type of tracheal cancer normally considered inoperable, arrived Wednesday back home in Baltimore. It was the second procedure of its kind, and the first in an American.
"He went home in very good shape," said Paolo Macchiarini, director of the Advanced Center for Translational Regenerative Medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
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The long campaign to eradicate polio faces a crucial turning point this month. In January, the 34 countries represented on the World Health Organization's executive board will be asked to ditch the vaccine that has cut polio cases by 99 percent since 1988. The aim is to prevent the vaccine itself from defeating the whole effort.
In other biomedical news, Scottish scientists say they have found a key genetic indicator of how long an individual will live. They say the lengths of tiny pieces of DNA called telomeres indicate whether a young creature is likely to live into old age.
A new study shows that people grieving the death of a close loved one could have a heart attack risk that is 20 times higher than normal.
It seems a long time since it was announced that the first draft of the human genome had been completed. Knowing the "genetic blueprint" of human beings promised to usher in a new era of molecular medicine, bringing new ways to diagnose and treat disease. Almost 12 years on, you could perhaps be forgiven for thinking it's been a long time coming.
Nicotine gum and patches that millions of smokers use to help kick the habit have no lasting benefit, according to the most rigorous, long-term study to date of nicotine replacement therapy.
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A California biotechnology company announced last week that it has developed a machine to decode a person's DNA in a day for $1,000, a long-sought price goal for making a person's genome useful for medical care. Life Technologies Corp. said it was taking orders for the technology, which it expects to deliver in about a year.
In other technology news, the L.A. Times was among the media outlets to cover the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. What attendees and analysts are looking for is that sought-after, life-changing digital device that will define the show. Not going to happen, some analysts have said. Still, the show does have devices that could change, if not the world, your small corner of creation.
An Irish mathematician has used a complex algorithm and millions of hours of supercomputing time to solve an important problem in the mathematics of Sudoku, the game popularized in Japan that involves filling in a 9x9 grid of squares with the numbers 1-9 according to certain rules.
A pair of Newport Beach, Calif., entrepreneurs has been testing a wave-powered turbine near Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach (a famous bodysurfing spot) for years and have now approached city officials for permission to set up a more permanent prototype.
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The L.A. Times reported that a property owner in Huntington Beach, Calif., was fined $430,000 last week for unearthing artifacts at a 9,000-year-old Native American village site near the Bolsa Chica wetlands. The excavation was conducted without the state's authorization and without a Native American monitor present, a requirement under state law.
In other news of the ancient past, scientists have identified the earliest known example of aerobic metabolism, the process of using oxygen as fuel. The discovery may even provide clues as to where the oxygen came from in the first place.
Bigfoot. Sasquatch. Yeti. The Abominable Snowman. Such a giant, mythical ape is not real--at least, not anymore. But more than a million years ago, an ape as big as a polar bear lived in South Asia, until going extinct 300,000 years ago.
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from the Economist
...Poverty has many causes, and no simple cure. But one massive problem in India is that few poor people can prove who they are. They have no passport, no driving licence, no proof of address. They live in villages where multitudes share the same name. Their lack of an identity excludes them from the modern economy. They cannot open bank accounts, and no one would be so foolish as to lend them money.
The government offers them all kinds of welfare, but because they lack an identity, they struggle to lay hands on what they have been promised. The state spends a fortune on subsidised grain for the hungry, but an estimated two-thirds of it is stolen or adulterated by middlemen. The government pays for an $8 billion-a-year make-work scheme for the rural poor, but much of the cash ends up in the capacious pockets of officials who invent imaginary "ghost workers."
Suppose those thieving middlemen were obliged to deliver grain, not to poor people in general but to named individuals who could confirm receipt by scanning their fingerprints? And suppose those ghost workers had to undergo an iris scan before being paid? If poor Indians each had an identity number tied to unique biometric markers, it would be much harder for the powerful to rob them. Sceptics will scoff that the Indian government is far too incompetent to implement such a scheme. But the sceptics are wrong.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
WASHINGTON -- A flash point has emerged in American science education that echoes the battle over evolution, as scientists and educators report mounting resistance to the study of man-made climate change in middle and high schools.
Although scientific evidence increasingly shows that fossil fuel consumption has caused the climate to change rapidly, the issue has grown so politicized that skepticism of the broad scientific consensus has seeped into classrooms.
Texas and Louisiana have introduced education standards that require educators to teach climate change denial as a valid scientific position. South Dakota and Utah passed resolutions denying climate change. Tennessee and Oklahoma also have introduced legislation to give climate change skeptics a place in the classroom.
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from The Scientist
In the wake of news last month that researchers had created a version of the deadly bird flu that was easily transmissible by air, a heated debate has arisen in the scientific community about whether or not the research should be published. But some experts are taking the discussion a step further back, and wondering why the research was conducted at all.
"Why should our tax dollars be used to create new pandemic pathogens?" said Richard Ebright, a chemical biologist at Rutgers University.
The bird flu breakthrough came from two separate groups, one at Erasmus University in the Netherlands and another at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who announced that they had successfully converted H5N1 into a form that can be transmitted between ferrets in droplets through the air. Soon after, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, an advisory group to the US government, took the unusual step of asking Science magazine to censor specific details of the methodology.
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from PRI's The World
The price of orange juice on the global markets has hit a record high, after surging over the past few days.
There are two major orange producing countries: Brazil and the United States. Both are involved in the current price spike.
Last week, Florida experienced prolonged temperatures below freezing, enough to cause some crop damage and to give traders the jitters. Florida produces most of the oranges in the US, and the US produces about 15 percent of the world's supply. But with 33 percent it's Brazil that's the biggest orange-grower, said Michael Smith of T&K Futures and Options in Florida.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Researchers at I.B.M. 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.
The findings, being reported Thursday in the journal Science, could help lead to a new class of nanomaterials for a generation of memory chips and disk drives that will not only have greater capabilities than the current silicon-based computers but will consume significantly less power. And they may offer a new direction for research in quantum computing.
"Magnetic materials are extremely useful and strategically important to many major economies, but there aren't that many of them," said Shan X. Wang, director of the Center for Magnetic Nanotechnology at Stanford University. "To make a brand new material is very intriguing and scientifically very important."
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
Scientists in northern Europe are scrambling to learn more about a new virus that causes fetal malformations and stillbirths in cattle, sheep, and goats. For now, they don't have a clue about the virus's origins or why it's suddenly causing an outbreak; in order to speed up the process, they want to share the virus and protocols for detecting it with anyone interested in studying the disease or developing diagnostic tools and vaccines.
The virus, provisionally named "Schmallenberg virus" after the German town from which the first positive samples came, was detected in November in dairy cows that had shown signs of infection with fever and a drastic reduction in milk production. Now it has also been detected in sheep and goats, and it has shown up at dozens of farms in neighboring Netherlands and in Belgium as well.
According to the European Commission's Standing Committee on the Food Chain and Animal Health, cases have been detected on 20 farms in Germany, 52 in the Netherlands, and 14 in Belgium. Many more suspected cases are being investigated. "A lot of lambs are stillborn or have serious malformations," Wim van der Poel of the Dutch Central Veterinary Institute in Lelystad says. "This is a serious threat to animal health in Europe."
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