from BBC News Online
It seems a long time since Tony Blair and Bill Clinton announced 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, they promised. Almost 12 years on, you could perhaps be forgiven for thinking it's been a long time coming.
Here's one of the big dreams. One day every newborn will have their entire genetic code mapped. Then, if a doctor ever needs that information, they can check for secrets to molecular diseases buried in our DNA.
Here's another. A patient is diagnosed with cancer. During their biopsy, a tiny sample of the tissue sent to pathology is used to read all the billions of the genetic letters in the human genome. A clinician can then use that information to prescribe the right drugs.
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from the Seattle Times
The nicotine gum and patches that millions of smokers use to help kick their habit have no lasting benefit and may backfire in some cases, according to the most rigorous, long-term study to date of nicotine replacement therapy.
The study, released Monday, followed nearly 2,000 people over a period of years and is likely to inflame a long-running debate about the value of nicotine alternatives. In medical studies, the products have appeared effective, making it easier for people to quit, at least in the short term. Those earlier, more encouraging findings were the basis for federal guidelines that recommended the products for smoking cessation.
But in surveys, smokers who have used the over-the-counter products, either as part of a program or on their own, have reported little benefit. The new study followed one group of smokers to see whether nicotine replacement affected their odds of kicking the habit over time. It did not, even if they also received counseling with the nicotine replacement.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
Sticky underground leaves help a Brazilian plant to capture and digest worms, a hitherto unknown way for carnivorous plants to catch victims, scientists find.
The rare plant Philcoxia minensis is found in the tropical savannas of Brazil, areas rich in biodiversity and highly in need of conservation. Although some of the plant's millimeter-wide leaves grow above ground as expected, strangely, most of its tiny, sticky leaves lie beneath the surface of the shallow white sands on which it grows.
"We usually think about leaves only as photosynthetic organs, so at first sight, it looks awkward that a plant would place its leaves underground where there is less sunlight," said researcher Rafael Silva Oliveira, a plant ecologist at the State University of Campinas in Brazil. "Why would evolution favor the persistence of this apparently unfavorable trait?"
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from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Steven Little wants to make medicine as smart as the human body. When something goes wrong with our bodies today, medicine's solution is often to cut it out, burn it out or treat it with medication.
But the goal of the Little Lab at the University of Pittsburgh's Swanson School of Engineering is to enhance the body's already highly intelligent healing mechanisms, Mr. Little said in an interview last week. Last month, the national Society for Biomaterials announced that Mr. Little, 34, who has a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had received its Young Investigator Award for 2012.
Since coming to Pitt six years ago, the chemical engineering professor has pulled in more than $4.5 million in grants and has mentored nearly 50 researchers. Much of his lab's work is focused on developing synthetic substances that can deliver drugs or natural substances inside the body at precise places and times.
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from The Scientist (Registration Required)
Inflammation is correctly blamed as one of the root causes of both acute and chronic pain--and more. Not only does chronic inflammation underlie disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, and other autoimmune diseases, it has also been implicated in the pathogenesis of cancer, chronic heart failure, and neurological disorders such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases.
These conditions affect millions, and carry high health-care and socioeconomic costs. And yet, inflammation is an important physiological response that jump-starts tissue repair and more carefully tunes immune reactions. Without it, we could not fight off infection or heal from injury. Why and how does this powerful ally turn into a foe?
...While the causes of chronic pain are many and diverse, the pervasive effect it has on a patient's life--including inability to work, anxiety, depression, and even post-traumatic stress disorder--is universal.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
The Consumer Electronics Show for 2012 has kicked off in Las Vegas, and it has new offerings that may knock some socks off. What attendees and analysts are looking for right now 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.
Gaze-interaction technology, which tracks eye movements, allows a user to navigate the Web using just his or her eyes. The technology obviously has wider implications than the Asteroids video game that Tobii Technology was using at the convention to demonstrate its software.
Allure Energy Inc.'s "wireless energy network" is part of the intelligent-home movement. You can use your mobile phone to communicate with your house, such as heating it or cooling it for when you get home. Automating energy use by hooking up appliances, thermostats, etc., to the Internet can help cut down on costs.
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from New Scientist
An evil mastermind is set on bringing about global war. Only one man can stop him: Sherlock Holmes, with the help of his partner in crime-solving, Dr. Watson. But in the latest Holmes flick, "Sherlock Holmes: A game of shadows," they don't just need their trusty revolvers and Holmes's trademark prescient fight scenes, they also need to grasp some mathematics.
The villain is Holmes's nemesis, James Moriarty, a professor of mathematics and all-around evil genius. In the book The Final Problem, he is described by Holmes himself as "a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order."
But behind the wit of the character in the film lies the mathematical know-how of a team at the University of Oxford. Alain Goriely and Derek Moulton at Oxford's Mathematical Institute have been hard at work behind the scenes helping to formulate a believable mathematical villain. Initially, the filmmakers approached the mathematicians to ask them to fill Moriarty's blackboard with equations. Not only did they have to be real, they had to be historically accurate, based on a 19th-century understanding of the field.
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from Science News
Rats dosed with a compound isolated from an ancient herbal remedy appear all but impervious to quantities of alcohol that put their compatriots under the table. Rodents on the drug can drink large quantities of alcohol without passing out, show fewer signs of hangover and even fail to become addicted to alcohol after weeks of drinking, researchers report in the Jan. 4 Journal of Neuroscience.
If the compound proves to have similar effects in humans, it may offer a powerful way to combat alcohol's dizzying effects, the dreaded hangover and even alcohol dependence. "I think it's really pretty incredible that one study opens up avenues for so many angles," says neuroscientist A. Leslie Morrow of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill.
Researchers led by Jing Liang of the University of California, Los Angeles began by surveying herbal compounds that reportedly have antialcohol effects. A promising candidate caught the researchers' eyes: an extract isolated from the seeds of the Asian tree Hovenia dulcis, first described as a primo hangover remedy in the year 659.
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from Scientific American
Stephen Hawking turns 70 on Sunday, beating the odds of a daunting diagnosis by nearly half a century.
The famous theoretical physicist has helped to bring his ideas about black holes and quantum gravity to a broad public audience. For much of his time in the public eye, though, he has been confined to a wheelchair by a form of the motor-neuron disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). And since 1985 he has had to speak through his trademark computer system--which he operates with his cheek--and have around-the-clock care.
But his disease seems hardly to have slowed him down. Hawking spent 30 years as a full professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge. And he is currently the director of research at the school's Center for Theoretical Cosmology. But like his mind, Hawking's illness seems to be singular. Most patients with ALS--also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, for the famous baseball player who succumbed to the disease--are diagnosed after the age of 50 and die within five years of their diagnosis. Hawking's condition was first diagnosed when he was 21, and he was not expected to see his 25th birthday.
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from Nature News
An Irish mathematician has used a complex algorithm and millions of hours of supercomputing time to solve an important open 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.
Gary McGuire of University College Dublin shows in a proof posted online on 1 January that the minimum number of clues--or starting digits--needed to complete a puzzle is 17; puzzles with 16 or fewer clues do not have a unique solution. Most newspaper puzzles have around 25 clues, with the difficulty of the puzzle decreasing as more clues are given.
The emerging consensus among mathematicians at a conference in Boston, Massachusetts, on 7 January was that McGuire's proof is probably valid and an important advance in the growing field of Sudoku maths.
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from ScienceInsider
The National Science Board has made two subtle but potentially important changes in how grant applications are reviewed at the National Science Foundation (NSF). And while those procedural changes may seem relevant only to those hoping to win NSF funding, they also add to the never-ending debate about how best to measure the results of federally funded research.
A new report from NSF's oversight body, approved last month, attempts to clear up ambiguous language on how proposal writers and reviewers should interpret a criterion NSF adopted in 1997 asking reviewers to evaluate the so-called "broader impacts" of the proposed research. To help applicants and reviewers with what is the second of two criteria used to evaluate proposals, NSF guidelines currently provide eight examples of possible outcomes. They range from attracting more women and minorities into science to fostering ties between academia and industry. The list has become a de facto definition of broader impacts, in other words, a blueprint of the ideas investigators believe NSF is most likely to fund.
That's a false assumption, says the science board, and one that imposes unnecessary restrictions on the creativity of investigators. Instead, the board stipulates that reviewers should use the same five metrics that they use to assess how well a proposal meets NSF's first criterion--the proposal's intellectual merit. The metrics include the significance of the idea and whether the investigator is qualified and has the resources to carry out the work.
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from Smithsonian
Bigfoot. Sasquatch. Yeti. The Abominable Snowman. Whatever you want to call it, 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.
Scientists first learned of Gigantopithecus in 1935, when Ralph von Koenigswald, a German paleoanthropologist, walked into a pharmacy in Hong Kong and found an unusually large primate molar for sale. Since then, researchers have collected hundreds of Gigantopithecus teeth and several jaws in China, Vietnam and India. Based on these fossils, it appears Gigantopithecus was closely related to modern orangutans and Sivapithecus, an ape that lived in Asia about 12 to 8 million years ago. With only dentition to go on, it's hard to piece together what this animal was like.
But based on comparisons with gorillas and other modern apes, researchers estimate Gigantopithecus stood more than 10 feet tall and weighed 1,200 pounds (at most, gorillas only weigh 400 pounds). Given their size, they probably lived on the ground, walking on their fists like modern orangutans.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Waves at the Wedge are legendary for hurling bodysurfers into the air and sweeping tourists off their feet. But the walls of water that rise up at the end of the Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach also could serve a far more utilitarian purpose: producing electricity.
A pair of Newport Beach entrepreneurs have been testing a wave-powered turbine near the famed bodysurfing spot for years and have now approached city officials for permission to set up a more permanent prototype, possibly off one of the city's two piers.
But because of strict regulations and high costs, Mark Holmes and David New, partners in Green Wave Energy Corp., say it will be a long time before their generators can be used for commercial purposes.
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from BBC News Online
Researchers have released the biggest images yet detailing dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up three-quarters of the Universe's mass. Each image, a billion light-years across, shows vast dark matter clumps and voids scattered through the cosmos.
The team from the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope inferred the dark matter's existence by the way it bends light. The images were presented at the 219th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, US.
The four images were taken at four different seasons of the year, each capturing a swath of the sky about as large as a palm held at arm's length. They are a big step forward in understanding both dark matter itself, and the means by which dark matter influences the way normal matter clumps into the galaxies we see in the night skies.
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The Food and Drug Administration last week ordered farmers to limit the use of a certain type of antibiotics, called cephalosporins, they give livestock. The agency said the antibiotics may make people more resistant to antibiotics they may need to save their lives.
In other biomedical research, drug research routinely is suppressed, harming patients and increasing health care costs, according to new data highlighting an ethical controversy that continues to plague the field of medicine.
A paper on a new cancer biomarker has been retracted by the authors because they could not verify the data. Published in Urology in April 2007 by Johns Hopkins University researcher Robert Getzenberg and his team, the paper reported that a novel protein in blood could be used as a sensitive test for detecting early prostate cancer. Two years later a company called Onconome that helped fund the study and related research sued Hopkins, Getzenberg, and his former institution, the University of Pittsburgh, alleging that the biomarker test was "essentially as reliable as flipping a coin."
When a University of Pittsburgh research team injected prematurely aging mice with stem cells from normal, younger mice, classic signs of aging were delayed in three quarters of the mice. Even more dramatic were the results in another set of mice with a severe mutation that normally caused them to die after just 21 days. When those mice got an injection of the stem cells after 17 days of life, they lived three times as long as normal.
A moss spreading throughout the Hawaiian Islands appears to be an ancient clone that has copied itself for some 50,000 years. It may be one of the oldest multicellular organisms on Earth, a new study suggests.
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A new study suggests that examples of a crystal previously thought to be impossible in nature may have come from space. Quasicrystals have an unusual structure--in between those of crystals and glasses. Quasicrystals were first described in the 1980s by Israeli researcher Daniel Schechtman, who was awarded last year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery.
In other space news, NASA kicked off the new year with a pair of probes circling the moon in the latest mission to understand how it formed.
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Chemistry, it seems, is a different beast under high pressure. One team has found a new kind of iron oxide, a compound that somehow had never been seen before, even though it contains two of the most common elements in Earth’s crust. Another group argues that hydrogen’s odd behavior at high pressures means that the cores of giant gas planets, such as Jupiter, are eroding in a slow hydrogen drip.
In other technology news, to make electricity from sunlight you can convert it directly, using a photovoltaic cell. Or you can use the heat of that sunlight to boil water, and then drive a turbine with the resulting steam. These are both established technologies. But there is, in principle, a third way: Use heat directly, without steam or turbines.
Profs Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, from the University of Manchester, two Nobel laureates involved in the creation of graphene, a sheet of carbon just one atom thick, have received knighthoods.
In June, scientists, politicians and campaigners of all stripes will flock to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the fourth Earth summit. NASA's car-sized rover, Curiosity, is set to arrive on Mars in August. And six visionary research proposals will vie for huge grants from the European Commission's Future and Emerging Technologies Flagship scheme. The two winning projects will each receive €1 billion (US$1.3 billion) over the next decade. In the running are projects on graphene; robot companions for the lonely; planetary-scale modeling of human activities and their environmental impact; and autonomous energy-scavenging sensors.
Tsunami-damaged nuclear reactors, Twitter-fueled political uprisings, a possible violation of Einsteinian physics--these and other highlights defined this year in science and technology. Scientific American explores these and other top stories.
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from the San Francisco Chronicle
WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- It's one thing to make an object invisible, like Harry Potter's mythical cloak. But scientists have made an entire event impossible to see. They have invented a time masker.
Think of it as an art heist that takes place before your eyes and surveillance cameras. You don't see the thief strolling into the museum, taking the painting down or walking away, but he did. It's not just that the thief is invisible--his whole activity is.
What scientists at Cornell University did was on a much smaller scale, both in terms of events and time. It happened so quickly that it's not even a blink of an eye. Their time cloak lasts an incredibly tiny fraction of a fraction of a second. They hid an event for 40 trillionths of a second, according to a study appearing in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Reporting from Gallup, N.M. -- Five years ago, the man Elsie Smith loved told her calmly from his hospital bed that it was time for him to go. He died with a hushed goodbye and a squeeze of her hand.
Smith herself had been feeling ill for a while. Her bones ached and she vomited often. She soon mourned him from her own hospital bed.
A doctor explained to the Navajo woman that her lover had died of AIDS. It was important that they check her blood, he said. She agreed. Two days later, the doctor told her that she had HIV. Her tired mind became flustered with questions, but she asked only one. "What is HIV?"
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from NPR
The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments Monday in a case near and dear to EPA haters.
It would seem to be a David-and-Goliath case that pits a middle-class American couple trying to build their dream home against the Environmental Protection Agency. But the couple, Michael and Chantell Sackett, is backed by a veritable who's who in American mining, oil, utilities, manufacturing and real estate development, as well as groups opposed to government regulation.
On one side of the kaleidoscope, this is a case of bureaucratic power run amok. On the other side, it is a trumped-up case aimed at eviscerating the EPA's regulatory powers.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
An octopus dwelling in the frigid waters of the Antarctic doesn't wear gloves on its tentacles, but it has found another way to endure the cold. A new study shows that this animal uses a trick called RNA editing to customize crucial nervous system proteins to work at low temperatures. The paper is the first to reveal that RNA editing, not just changes to a specific gene, can lead to adaptations.
Low temperatures hamper certain proteins that allow the nervous system to send signals. When a nerve cell fires, protein channels in its membrane open or close to allow various ions in or out. And when the electrical charge across the cell membrane returns to normal, the ion channels that let potassium ions out shut. But frigid temperatures can delay the potassium channels' closing, hindering the neuron's ability to fire again. So researchers hypothesized that species inhabiting frigid climates have modified their potassium channels so they work better in the cold.
Molecular neurophysiologist Joshua Rosenthal of the University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus in San Juan and his graduate student Sandra Garrett figured they knew how that adjustment would occur. "We thought we were going to see changes at the level of the gene," Rosenthal says. That is, they expected the potassium channel genes from cold-living species would have evolved so that they produce a slightly different protein that performs better at low temperatures.
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from BBC News Online
America's classified X-37B spaceplane is probably spying on China, according to a report in Spaceflight magazine.
The unpiloted vehicle was launched into orbit by the U.S. Air Force in March last year and has yet to return to Earth. The Pentagon has steadfastly refused to discuss its mission but amateur space trackers have noted how its path around the globe is nearly identical to China's spacelab, Tiangong-1.There is wide speculation that the X-37B is eavesdropping on the laboratory.
"Space-to-space surveillance is a whole new ball game made possible by a finessed group of sensors and sensor suites, which we think the X-37B may be using to maintain a close watch on China's nascent space station," said Spaceflight editor Dr. David Baker.
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from Science News
For the first time, scientists have created primates whose cells carry one of several sets of genetic instructions instead of one consistent assemblage of DNA. The three rhesus monkeys are chimeras, conglomerates of cells from up to six genetically different embryos.
Creating the monkey chimeras was much harder than achieving a similar result in mice, suggesting that embryonic stem cells from primates, probably including humans, are less flexible than their mouse counterparts. Those findings could have implications for regenerative medicine, which seeks to create replacement organs and cells from stem cells--efforts often first tested in mice.
Some people have worried that scientists working with embryonic stem cells, which have the potential to develop into any type of cell in the body, might inadvertently grow a human fetus in the lab. The new work shows that's probably not going to happen, says developmental biologist Gerald Schatten of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. It also means stem cells are less likely to run wild, creating tumors or growing into the wrong type of cell once implanted in a patient.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
PEOPLE wear 3-D glasses for new movies like "The Adventures of Tintin." But for medical school?
The answer is yes at the New York University School of Medicine, which is using 3-D technology to update a rite of passage for would-be doctors: anatomy class.
In a basement lab at NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan last month, students in scrubs and surgical gloves hovered over cadavers on gurneys, preparing, as would-be doctors have for centuries, to separate rib cages and examine organs. But the dead are imperfect stand-ins for the living. Death--and embalming fluid--take a toll.
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from Nature News
An entire genus of ants, comprising more than 1,000 species, has been found to have a hidden ability to make 'supersoldiers'--larger-than-average soldier ants that defend the nest against invaders. And all it takes is a dab of hormone.
A few ant species of the Pheidole genus were already known to produce supersoldiers that deter invading army ants by blocking nest entrances with their enormous heads. Scientists have only ever seen these supersoldiers in 8 out of 1,100 Pheidole species. But a new study now makes it clear that the entire genus has the potential to create this subset of the generic worker caste.
The eight species that routinely produce supersoldiers are found only in the southwestern United States and in northern Mexico. But Ehab Abouheif, a developmental biologist at Canada's McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, who led the study, spotted the same oversized individuals among colonies of a ninth species, Pheidole morrisi, found in New York. "I've been collecting these things for 15 years. One day, I was looking at a wild colony and saw that it contained these monstrous soldiers," he says. "They have larger jaws. If they get you between the fingers, it really hurts."
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from BBC News Online
Human emissions of carbon dioxide will defer the next Ice Age, say scientists. The last Ice Age ended about 11,500 years ago, and when the next one should begin has not been entirely clear.
Researchers used data on the Earth's orbit and other things to find the historical warm interglacial period that looks most like the current one. In the journal Nature Geoscience, they write that the next Ice Age would begin within 1,500 years--but emissions have been so high that it will not.
"At current levels of CO2, even if emissions stopped now we'd probably have a long interglacial duration determined by whatever long-term processes could kick in and bring [atmospheric] CO2 down," said Luke Skinner from Cambridge University.
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from Wired Science
The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) in Paris--the grand arbiters of time on our big blue marble--has declared that a leap second will be introduced on 30 June, 2012.
So what on Earth is a leap second? We used to use the Earth's dutiful rotation as a way of measuring time. It pirouettes on its axis once every 24 hours, which can then be divided into minutes and seconds. But the Earth's rotation is annoyingly irregular, with some days ending up being a tiny bit longer or shorter than others.
There's nothing science hates more than unpredictability, so in the 1950s atomic clocks were introduced to keep time.
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