from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Two research teams have independently decoded the entire genome of patients to find the exact genetic cause of their diseases. The approach may offer a new start in the so far disappointing effort to identify the genetic roots of major killers like heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer's.
In the decade since the first full genetic code of a human was sequenced for some $500 million, less than a dozen genomes had been decoded, all of healthy people. Geneticists said the new research showed it was now possible to sequence the entire genome of a patient at reasonable cost and with sufficient accuracy to be of practical use to medical researchers. One subject's genome cost just $50,000 to decode.
"We are finally about to turn the corner, and I suspect that in the next few years human genetics will finally begin to systematically deliver clinically meaningful findings," said David B. Goldstein, a Duke University geneticist who has criticized the current approach to identifying genetic causes of common diseases.
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from BBC News Online
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) must close at the end of 2011 for up to a year to address design issues, according to an LHC director. Dr Steve Myers told BBC News the faults will delay the machine reaching its full potential for two years. The atom smasher will reach world record collision energies later this month at 7 trillion electron volts.
But joints between the machine's magnets must be strengthened before higher-energy collisions can commence. The Geneva-based machine only recently restarted after being out of action for 14 months following an accident in September 2008.
Dr Myers said: "It's something that, with a lot more resources and with a lot more manpower and quality control, possibly could have been avoided but I have difficulty in thinking that this is something that was a design error." He said: "The standard phrase is that the LHC is its own prototype. We are pushing technologies towards their limits."
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
People who donate a kidney to a sick friend or relative live at least as long as others in the general population and may live somewhat longer because they tend to take better care of themselves after the procedure, researchers reported Tuesday.
"We have intuitively ... felt this way, and hoped that this operation is safe, but this is the first time that we have been able to demonstrate it in a national representation of live donors," said Dr. Dorry L. Segev of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, lead author of the report in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.
Live-donor transplants have become increasingly common in recent years because of the large number of people who need kidneys and the limited availability of cadaver organs.
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from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
A series of highly publicized errors in a landmark report about manmade global warming--and lingering controversy over hacked e-mails between climate scientists--is eroding public confidence in the research and could further stall efforts in Congress to pass climate legislation.
The errors--involving projections, citations of source materials, and geography--have been seized on by skeptics of the scientific consensus that the burning of fossil fuels is almost certainly the most significant cause of earth's rising temperature. Now, there are signs the critics are succeeding at raising doubts.
In recent weeks, Texas, Virginia, and Alabama officials filed challenges to the Environmental Protection Agency's finding that manmade greenhouse gases threaten public health, and Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat from the coal state of West Virginia, introduced a bill to postpone for two years EPA rules stemming from that determination.
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from the Columbus Dispatch
...Many women who have had a C-section aren't encouraged to try vaginal delivery or are barred from it at smaller hospitals where surgeons and anesthesiologists aren't immediately on hand.
The issue is controversial and prompted the National Institutes of Health to convene experts this week in hopes of helping guide the future of vaginal births after C-sections, a practice also known as VBAC.
In the past 15 years, the practice has declined significantly, from about three in 10 potential VBAC births to about one in 10. Since 1996, about a third of hospitals and half of physicians no longer offer women the option of attempting labor, according to the panel's report. Yesterday, the experts said they agree that most pregnant women who have had a Caesarean delivery should be given the option of attempting labor and vaginal delivery.
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from the Times (London)
The United Nations is to announce an independent review of errors made by its climate change advisory body in an attempt to restore its credibility.
A team of the world's leading scientists will investigate the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and ask why its supposedly rigorous procedures failed to detect at least three serious overstatements of the risk from global warming.
The review will be overseen by the InterAcademy Council, whose members are drawn from the world's leading national science academies, including Britain's Royal Society, the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The review will be led by Robbert Dijkgraaf, co-chairman of the Interacademy Council and president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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from the Guardian (UK)
Scientists have collected DNA from the fossilised eggshells of birds that died hundreds and in some cases thousands of years ago. The oldest eggshell to yield DNA came from an Australian emu that died around 19,000 years ago. It is the first time that scientists have succeeded in extracting ancient DNA from the fossilised eggshells of a bird.
Genetic material from the Madagascan elephant bird, the heaviest bird that ever lived, was also recovered, along with DNA from Australian owls, New Zealand ducks and flightless moas.
Elephant birds were native to Madagascar but had gone extinct by the 17th century. The ostrich-like creatures grew to around 3 metres tall and weighed up to half a tonne. Their eggs were bigger than footballs.
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from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)
On Sunday, when daylight-saving time takes effect, people will spring forward to turn their alarm clocks ahead one hour. Adjustments to their biological clocks might take a bit longer.
That single hour of lost sleep and the groggy grumpiness that inevitably seems to follow show just how much humans are influenced by cycles of time. These circadian rhythms can be as obvious as night and day or as mysterious as the internal oscillations of a cell.
"The biological clock in humans plays a central role in whether we gain or lose weight, when we fall asleep and wake up, how likely we are to have accidents or how we respond to disease," said Susan Golden, a biology professor at the University of California San Diego. Scientists have discovered that biological clocks of all kinds govern the well-being and behavior of remarkably diverse forms of life, from bacteria and plants to mice and men.
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from Wired
Wind power has made incredible inroads into the U.S. energy system thanks to big, efficient machines standing hundreds of feet tall. But the future of wind power may be underground.
In the abandoned mines and sandstones of the Midwest, compressed-air storage ventures are trying to convert the intermittent motions of the air into the kind of steady power that could displace coal.
Compressed-air energy storage plants use compressors to store electricity generated when it's not needed. The air, pumped into large underground formations, is like a spring that's been squeezed and when it's needed, it can deliver a large percentage of the energy that it received. The first and only such plant in the United States went online in 1991, and though the technology didn't take off, it did prove that it worked. And now, combining cheap wind energy and compressed-air storage could create a potent new force in the electricity markets.
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from Scientific American
The forward momentum of medical progress is manifest, it could be argued, in the $50 billion spent in 2008 on pharmaceutical research and development in the quest to bring new drugs to market. But little scientific or governmental infrastructure exists to ensure that each new treatment is actually an improvement over existing therapies--and to tease out what therapies are best for which patients.
People facing tough medical decisions, such as cancer patients, often have to work with their doctors to decide what combination of surgery, chemotherapies, radiation, lifestyle changes or other treatments will likely be the most effective choice.
The array of options can be dizzying and most patients, and even some doctors, are ill-prepared to do the background research to glean an answer. And in many cases there is often no data available that compares the effectiveness of various drugs and other treatment options.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
It was "Mad Men" meets "Flash Gordon." The years from 1957 to 1962 were a golden age of science fiction, as well as paranoia and exhilaration on a cosmic scale. The future was still the future back then, some of us could dream of farms on the moon and heroically finned rockets blasting off from alien landscapes. Others worried about Russian moon bases.
Scientists debated whether robots or humans should explore space. Satellites and transistors were jazzy emblems of postwar technology, and we were about to unravel the secrets of the universe and tame the atom (if it did not kill us first).
Some of the most extravagant of these visions of the future came not from cheap paperbacks, but from corporations buffing their high-tech credentials and recruiting engineering talent in the heady days when zooming budgets for defense and NASA had created a gold rush in outer space.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
Red grouper are known for a few key characteristics--their hue, which can range from pink to bright orange; their tastiness, whether they're grilled or sautéed; and their predation method, in which they ambush fellow sea creatures and swallow them whole.
But their least-known attribute might be the most valuable of all: They operate as underwater architects, transforming the seascape for myriad other forms of underwater life, rather than just residing there.
That surprising discovery is forcing scientists and policymakers to recalibrate their approach to preserving the ocean's natural order--and heightening tensions with those who fish for a living or as a hobby.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Women who drink moderate amounts of alcohol don't gain as much weight in midlife as those who abstain, a study has found. However, drinking should not be heralded as a new diet, said the authors and alcohol abuse experts.
The study, published Tuesday in the Archives of Internal Medicine, is the first to find that alcohol may curb weight gain in women.
Typically, alcohol consumption is not advised for people trying to lose or avoid gaining weight. A 5-ounce glass of wine contains about 125 calories, and a regular 12-ounce beer has about 150.
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from USA Today
As deaths from heart disease and many types of cancers have dipped, living longer is putting more people at risk for Alzheimer's disease, the brain-wasting condition that a new report shows African-Americans and Hispanics are particularly vulnerable to as they grow older.
According to the Alzheimer's Association's report released today, "2010 Alzheimer's Disease Facts and Figures," 5.3 million people are living with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia.
African Americans are almost twice as likely as whites to have Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia, and Hispanics are about one and a half times more likely to be stricken with it.
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from BBC News Online
Minuscule tubes coated with a chemical fuel can act as a power source with 100 times more electrical power by weight than conventional batteries.
As these nano-scale "fuses" burn, they drive an electrical current along their length at staggering speeds. The never-before-seen phenomenon could lead to a raft of energy applications.
Researchers reporting in Nature Materials say that unlike normal batteries, the nanotubes never lose their stored energy if left to sit. The team ... coated their nanotubes--cylinders just billionths of a metre across--with a chemical fuel known as cyclotrimethylene trinitramine.
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from the Seattle Times
STOCKHOLM (Associated Press) -- A dozen centuries-old shipwrecks--some of them unusually well-preserved--have been found in the Baltic Sea by a gas company building an underwater pipeline between Russia and Germany.
The oldest wreck probably dates back to medieval times and could be up to 800 years old, while the others are likely from the 17th to 19th centuries, Peter Norman of Sweden's National Heritage Board said Tuesday.
... Thousands of wrecks--from medieval ships to warships sunk during the world wars of the 20th century--have been found in the Baltic Sea, which doesn't have the ship worm that destroys wooden wrecks in saltier oceans.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
In the Iranian desert, at a sprawling industrial site ringed by barbed wire and antiaircraft guns, a shift in the enrichment of uranium is producing global jitters because it could shorten Iran's path to the acquisition of nuclear weapons.
It is also illustrating one of the peculiarities of uranium enrichment, a version of the rich getting richer, really fast. The tricky process accelerates as it moves ahead.
"The higher the concentration, the easier it gets," said Houston G. Wood III, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Virginia who specializes in nuclear enrichment. The process is, as scientists like to say, nonlinear.
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from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)
(Associated Press) -- First the ground shook in Haiti, then Chile and now Turkey. The earthquakes keep coming hard and fast this year, causing people to wonder if something sinister is happening underfoot.
It's not. While it may seem as if there are more earthquakes occurring, there really aren't. The problem is what's happening above ground, not underground, experts say.
More people are moving into megacities that happen to be built on fault lines, and they're rapidly putting up substandard buildings that can't withstand earthquakes, scientists say. And around-the-clock news coverage and better seismic monitoring make it seem as if earthquakes are ever-present.
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from Science News
One form of a common genetic variant may ratchet up pain sensitivity in people who have it, researchers report online March 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The discovery could lead to more powerful pain treatments that lack the debilitating side effects of current drugs.
"We could fill our clinics many times over with people with chronic pain that we can't help with our current medications," says neurologist and neuroscientist Stephen Waxman of Yale University School of Medicine and the Veterans Affairs Connecticut Hospital in West Haven.
In the new study, researchers ... examined the DNA of 578 people with the painful condition osteoarthritis. [They] searched for genetic variations that might be linked to how much pain a patient reported feeling--a subjective measure ... but currently the best researchers can do.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
Harrison Schmitt's credentials as a space policy analyst include several days of walking on the moon. The Apollo 17 astronaut, who is also a former U.S. senator, is aghast at what President Obama is doing to the space program. "It's bad for the country," Schmitt said. "This administration really does not believe in American exceptionalism."
Schmitt's harsh words are part of a furious blowback to the administration's new strategy for NASA. The administration has decided to kill NASA's Constellation program, crafted during the Bush administration with an ambitious goal of putting astronauts back on the moon by 2020. Obama's 2011 budget request would nix Constellation's rocket and crew capsule, funnel billions of dollars to new spaceflight technologies, and outsource to commercial firms the task of ferrying astronauts to low-Earth orbit.
The new strategy, however, has been met with outrage from many in the aerospace community. The entire congressional delegation from Florida, Democrats and Republicans alike, has sent a letter of protest to the president. Doubters fill op-ed pages and space blogs.
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from Science News
Mathematics is art, and art is mathematics. So claim the father-son pair of Erik and Martin Demaine of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "Our math and our art have blended together so much we can't tell them apart anymore," Martin Demaine says.
The Demaines were among a number of artist-mathematicians whose work appeared in the Mathematical Art Exhibition at the Joint Mathematics Meetings held in San Francisco in January.
Their sources of inspiration ranged from debugging computer code, to the mathematical principles underlying economics, to the folds of origami. But all of the creators agree that a conversation between math and art can inform both disciplines.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
Powerful anti-HIV drugs have come tantalizingly close to eradicating the virus from people, driving the blood level of HIV so low that standard tests cannot detect it. But no one has been cured: the virus comes roaring back in everyone who stops taking the drugs.
A new study has identified one of HIV's main hideaways, raising intriguing possibilities about how to remove it. The work addresses a mystery first reported in 2006 by the lab of Robert Siliciano, a virologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who has developed the most sensitive test to find HIV.
... The researchers identified some white blood cells with CD4 receptors--the conductor of the immune system's orchestra and the main target of the virus--that held identical HIV sequences in their chromosomes. But in most people they studied, the virus in the blood did not match the sequence in the CD4 cells, indicating that HIV was hiding elsewhere. A team led by virologist Kathleen Collins of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, now has evidence that HIV hangs out inside bone marrow.
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from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
PETERSHAM -- As Chris Matera reached a barren hilltop on state land near the Quabbin Reservoir, he swept his arm toward 2 acres of oak stumps and scattered gray tree skeletons. "This is a clear-cut," the Northampton resident said angrily. "Is this really what the public wants on its land?"
Matera and other conservationists have found and photographed similarly altered landscapes across Central and Western Massachusetts: a 50-acre opening on October Mountain. More than 15 acres in Savoy State Forest. Swaths near Windsor Jambs State Park and Chester-Blandford State Forest with virtually every tree gone. A patchwork of half-acre to 2-acre clear-cuts on other Quabbin lands.
... The controversy is occurring as logging and preservation interests increasingly collide in the Northeast's forests, most of which were once abandoned farmland. ... How Massachusetts--the nation's eighth-most-forested state and the third-most-densely populated--resolves that conflict could serve as an example for other Eastern states.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
... Human-flesh search engines--renrou sousuo yinqing--have become a Chinese phenomenon: they are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath.
The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, run out of town. It's crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online--with offline results.
There is no portal specially designed for human-flesh searching; the practice takes place in Chinese Internet forums like Mop, where the term most likely originated. Searches are powered by users called wang min, Internet citizens, or Netizens.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
In what could be the ultimate marine smack-down, great white sharks off the California coast may be migrating 1,600 miles west to do battle with creatures that rival their star power: giant squids. A series of studies tracking this mysterious migration has scientists rethinking not just what the big shark does with its time but also what sort of creature it is.
Few sea denizens match great white sharks and giant squids in primitive mystique. Both are the subject of popular mania; both are inscrutable. That these two mythic sea monsters might convene for epic battles in the stark expanses of the Pacific is enough to make a documentarian salivate.
For more reserved scientists, the possible link between sharks and squid, suggested by marine ecologist Michael Domeier of the Marine Conservation Science Institute in Fallbrook, is just one part of emerging research that has altered their understanding of the great whites.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
TALCA, CHILE -- When an aftershock nearly as big as Haiti's earthquake jolted this city on Friday, those already reeling from last month's huge quake shuddered in fear. But Jeff Genrich, a 53-year-old earthquake scientist from California, lolled in bed. Staying still, Genrich said he tried to estimate the power of the seismic waves....
Most people here are thoroughly rattled after an 8.8-magnitude quake, one of the most powerful on record, struck this swath of south-central Chile on Feb. 27, killing more than 450 people, buckling bridges and downing buildings. But earthquake scientists, many of them from the United States, immediately flocked to Chile to search for clues that will help them determine the coming of the next big one.
... The sheer size of the quake, along with aftershocks so powerful they could be considered significant quakes in their own right, is providing scientists with a rare opportunity. Bevis, who is in the capital, Santiago, organizing teams of American scientists for field work, said the objective is to install sensors and collect data about post-quake ground movements.
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from USA Today
All Americans are struggling to get more snooze time, but a report out today shows that race and cultural differences play a role in sleep-related habits.
Monday, the National Sleep Foundation released its annual "Sleep in America Poll," which reveals how much sleep Americans are getting, what their bedtime habits are, and who's seeing the doctor and taking medications when sleep is elusive. This year, for the first time, the report explored differences in the sleep habits of different ethnic groups: Asians, African Americans, Hispanics and whites.
"We expected culture would have an effect, but the differences between cultures are probably bigger than the genetics of people," says Thomas Balkin, chairman of the foundation's board. Overall, no one's getting enough sleep, he says. Fewer than half--only about four in 10--of respondents from each ethnic group say they get a good night's sleep on most nights.
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from BBC News Online
Scientists may have identified the first specks of interstellar dust in material collected by the US space agency's Stardust spacecraft. A stream of this dust flows through space; the tiny particles are building blocks that go into making stars and planets.
The Nasa spacecraft was primarily sent to catch dust streaming from Comet Wild 2 and return it to Earth for analysis. But scientists also set out to capture particles of interstellar dust.
The material was gathered by the Stardust probe in a seven-year, 4.8-billion-km (2.9 billion miles) interplanetary voyage. It extended a retractable device containing cells filled with a material called aerogel, a porous substance designed to trap dust molecules. A capsule containing the precious samples was then returned to Earth in January 2006.
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from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Registration Required)
GENEVA (Associated Press) -- The world's largest atom smasher could generate its first scientific breakthrough later this year when operators hope to make discoveries into the elusive nature of dark matter, the director of the European Organization for Nuclear Research said Monday.
Rolf-Dieter Heuer said the Large Hadron Collider would be ramped up to world record power later this month. At 7 trillion electron volts, that will be three times more energy than the record set in November by Heuer's organization--known by its French acronym CERN.
By crashing high energy beams of protons into each other in a 27-kilometer (17-mile) tunnel under the Swiss-French border at Geneva, CERN's scientists hope to gain key insights into the makeup of matter and the creation of the universe billions of years ago in the moments after the Big Bang. There have been no discoveries so far with the LHC, Heuer said. But he predicted breakthroughs soon into the mysterious dark matter that scientists believe comprises a quarter of the whole universe.
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from NPR
...Over the last four decades placebos have come to play an enormous role in the scientific process. So enormous that people ... are willing to tolerate literal holes in the head because they believe that it's only through testing against placebos that scientists are able to understand what is really going on.
But some recent studies are turning up something extremely unexpected about the placebo effect: our response to placebos seems to be changing over time. In fact the placebo effect, some researchers say, appears to be getting stronger.
To understand why it is that the placebo response might be changing, you first have to understand the role that placebos play in our research process. Because doctors know that any kind of medical intervention--even a fake one--can cause people to improve, they use placebos like sugar pills or fake surgery to understand whether or not a treatment is really working.
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