Archive for the ‘Science’ Category

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FLU VIRUS SHOWS TWIST IN TAIL

Monday, December 11th, 2006

– One of the potential elements of the Perfect Storm is a pandemic like the one that swept the world in 1917. The current Avian Flu Virus, H5N1, could, with just another mutation, learn to jump from human to human instead of from bird to bird and ignite such a calamity. In the face of this possibility, the news in this article is good, indeed. They may have found a way to defang flu viruses in general.

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PARIS (AFP)—Biochemists in the United States believe they may have found the Achilles heel of the H5N1 virus—and not just of the bird flu pathogen but of a wide range of other influenza strains.

The potential target is a long, flexible protein tail which is essential for virus replication, they report on Thursday in Nature, the weekly British science journal.

The so-called nucleoprotein (NP) plays its role after a virus has hijacked a host cell and subverted it into a virus-making factory.

The NPs come together in small rings, stacking up one atop the other to form a column. The virus’ RNA genome twists around this column before being shipped out of the cell in copies that go on to infect other cells.

The team, led by Yizhi Jane Tao of Rice University in Houston, Texas, believe the weak point is the tail’s loop.

Just a single mutation in the amino acids comprising the loop is enough to prevent the NPs from forming the building blocks.

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Unique Marvel of Ancient Greek Technology Gives Up New Secrets

Thursday, November 30th, 2006

The most sophisticated mechanical device of ancient Greece may finally be giving up its secrets. Researchers have long known the so-called Antikythera mechanism was a calendar of sorts that represented the positions of the sun and moon using a series of gears. In its complexity it outshined all other objects for a thousand years following its creation sometime around the second century B.C. Now an international consortium of researchers has probed the machine’s corroded fragments with sophisticated x-ray and light imaging tools to uncover the true sophistication of this geared wonder.

The device could predict eclipses as well as reproduce a subtle irregularity in the moon’s orbit, they reveal. Moreover, it may have been able to represent the motions of the planets, although the necessary gears seem to be long gone. They also confirm a prior hypothesis that the device relied on spiral grooves to count off certain lunar cycles. “We don’t know what it was for but we do believe we know what it did,” says astronomer Mike Edmunds of Cardiff University in Wales.

Divers recovered the Antikythera instrument in 1901 from a 2,000-year-old shipwreck that had sunk beneath the Mediterranean Sea, midway between Greece’s Peloponnesian peninsula and the island Crete. What they found was a hunk of calcified bronze gears and other fragments, along with a decayed wooden box that had housed the mechanism. In pioneering work begun in the 1950s (and first described in a 1959 Scientific American article), the late science historian Derek Price reasoned that this encrusted mess was a solar-lunar calendar. The box would open in the front to reveal a dial with rotating gear-driven pointers to mark off the sun’s position and the phases of the moon. The back of the device contained two dials that counted off other cycles.

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EXPERTS WANT TIGHTER CONTROLS ON NANOTECHOLOGY

Thursday, November 30th, 2006

– It is one of the signature attributes of mankind that as we’ve used our intelligence to bull our way to dominance of the planet and the biosphere, that we’ve repeatedly underestimated the effects of our actions on the world around us.

– Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring was, perhaps, our first major wakeup call in this regard. Today, the world’s soil, streams and oceans swarm with chemicals of all sorts that have no analogues in the natural world and are, in many cases, having unexpected and damaging effects on the planet’s biological forms – including us.

– Reviewing Kurt Vonnecgut’s 1963 book Cat’s Cradle in which in introduced us to the hypothetical Ice-Nine is instructive at this point as we embark on releasing larger and larger numbers of nanotechnlogical materials into the natural environment and, once agin, assuming that all will be alright. An amazing assumption that we seem to make over and over again so that caution will not get in the way of profits.

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WASHINGTON (AFP)—Nanotechnologies pose real threats to health and the environment and need prompt testing and oversight, but government and industry are moving slowly on the issue, scientists and environmentalists said.

Speaking after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency took its first step to regulate a nanomaterial–near atomic-sized particles of silver being used as pesticide in products from shoes to a washing machine–experts told AFP that nanotechnology is already producing materials that can harm the environment and human health.

“There are some very serious concerns about potential health consequences,” said Patrice Simms of the U.S. Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

“We know next to nothing about their potential health effects,” said Simms.

Nanotechnology is the creation and use of materials barely larger than atomic in scale, measuring usually between one and 100 nanometers. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, and a human hair is roughly 80,000 nanometers in width.

At that size–small enough to pass through cell membranes in the body–many materials can take on physical and chemical properties not seen in their larger forms, giving them uses never imagined before.

A Washington-based group, The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, has catalogued 356 products already using nanotechnology, including “breathable” bedsheets, lighter, stiffer golf clubs, skin care creams, computer chips and antibacterial socks.

The technology also promises more substantial “miracle” uses, from health applications like cancer treatments, to drinking water filtration systems for poor countries, to longer-life batteries.

But materials at that size may also pose dangers when they are inhaled, ingested, absorbed through the skin, or spread through nature by wind and water, scientists warn.

“Something different happens when you begin to work at a very small scale,” said Andrew Maynard, chief science advisor at the Project on Emerging Technologies.

“We know that a lot of materials like asbestos and particles affect the health because of their shapes and sizes as well as their chemistry.

“It’s reasonable to assume that some of these new materials are going to do the same thing,” noting that there are a number of new nanomaterials in filament form, like asbestos which causes lung disease.

The problem is that both industry and the government have assumed the existing regulatory framework for chemicals and other materials is adequate, Simms pointed out.

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Mysterious Stabilization of Atmospheric Methane May Buy Time in Race to Stop Global Warming

Tuesday, November 28th, 2006

Since 1978 chemists at the University of California, Irvine, have been collecting air in 40 locations from northern Alaska to southern New Zealand. Using gas chromatography, the scientists have measured the levels of methane–CH4–in the lowest layer of our atmosphere. Although not nearly as abundant as carbon dioxide–CO2–methane remains the second most important greenhouse gas, both because each molecule of CH4 in the atmosphere traps 23 times as much heat as carbon dioxide and it helps create more ozone–yet another greenhouse gas–in the atmosphere. During the two decades of measurements, methane underwent double-digit growth as a constituent of our atmosphere, rising from 1,520 parts per billion by volume (ppbv) in 1978 to 1,767 ppbv in 1998. But the most recent measurements have revealed that methane levels are barely rising anymore–and it is unclear why.

Chemist Isobel Simpson led the research examining samples from 1998 through 2005 and found that methane levels had practically stopped rising, reaching 1,772 ppbv in 2005. During this period some years did see rises while others actually saw slight decreases, according to the paper presenting the result in the November 23 issue of Geophysical Research Letters. By also measuring levels of ethane (C2H6) and perchloroethylene, or perc, (C2Cl4) the researchers determined that these pulses in methane levels during this period could be linked to major forest fires, such as the massive burn in Indonesia from late 1997 to early 1998. “All three of these molecules are removed by the same process–reaction with hydroxyl,” a radical formed from water in the atmosphere, explains Nobel Prize-winning chemist F. Sherwood Rowland, who participated in the research. “Both methane and ethane are produced in biomass burning, but perc is an industrial solvent. If biomass burning is the source, then perc [levels] should behave quite differently from the two hydrocarbons, and this is what we observed.”

But that does not solve the larger question of why methane in the atmosphere seems to have reached a plateau. “The scientific community agrees that the pause is source-driven rather than sink-driven, that is, caused by decreasing emissions of methane,” Simpson says. “I don’t believe we have reached a consensus on which sources have decreased and by how much.” Leading hypotheses include: the collapse of the Soviet Union, which resulted in a decline in energy use in Russia and the other former Soviet republics; repairs to oil and gas lines to prevent leaks; decreasing emissions from coal mining; widespread drought that led to decreased emissions from natural wetlands; and a decline in rice production. “The trends of major man-made sources such as rice fields and cattle have greatly slowed down over the last two decades,” notes physicist Aslam Khalil of Portland State University. “As these–rice and cattle–were once big sources, their lack of continued increase would then cause atmospheric methane to stop increasing as well.”

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Hubble telescope will get upgrade

Sunday, November 5th, 2006

– I’m so glad this is happening.   It would have been a huge shame to have let Hubble fall silent and blind before its replacement is in place.  We are at such an incredible place of discovery in human history and Hubble’s work is right on the edge of the excitement.  Maybe you have to have a bit of the scientist in your blood to feel it, but one of the real joys I get out of life is following along, vicariously, as science reveals the inner workings of this beautiful creation we live in.

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US space agency (Nasa) chief Mike Griffin says shuttle astronauts will be sent to service the Hubble telescope.

The orbiting observatory has astounded astronomers and the public alike with its amazing pictures of the cosmos, but its systems are beginning to fail.

Dr Griffin told Nasa employees that recent modifications to the shuttle launch system meant it was now safe to send a crew to work on Hubble.

The mission, which will use the shuttle Discovery, should launch in 2008.

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Women Infected With Toxoplasmosis Are More Likely To Have Boys Than Girls

Tuesday, October 17th, 2006

– The subject of Toxoplasmosis is one we’re written on before here.

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Women infected with dormant toxoplasmosis are more likely to give birth to boys than women who are Toxoplasma negative, according to research by S. Kankova and colleagues from the Departments of Parasitology, Microbiology and Zoology, Charles University; the Centre of Reproductive Medicine; and GynCentrum, in the Czech Republic.

They found that the presence of the parasite Toxoplasma gondii in the mothers’ blood, one of the most common parasites in humans with a worldwide prevalence of 20-80%, increased the likelihood that these women would give birth to a boy. This is the first study [1], published in Springer’s journal Naturwissenschaften this week, to suggest an effect of parasitic infection on the sex of a baby.

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Study finds lice from fish farms kill tiny salmon

Wednesday, October 4th, 2006

This is an example of the Law of Unintended Consequences, which humanity, in its arrogrance about and ignorance of the natural world, stumbles over again and again.

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By JEFF BARNARD
The Associated Press

GRANTS PASS, Ore. – A team of Canadian scientists has found the most direct evidence yet that baby salmon pick up fatal infections of sea lice while swimming past salmon farms in British Columbia’s Broughton Archipelago, and that the more salmon farms the more baby salmon die.

“Before we knew there were potential problems,” said Martin Krkosek, a doctoral student at the University of Alberta who was lead author of the study released Monday by the American journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Now it is very clear we have severe problems here.”

In natural conditions, the adult salmon that carry the sea lice aren’t in the migration channels and rivers at the same time as young pink and chum salmon, so the little fish are not infested, said Mark Lewis, University of Alberta senior Canada research chair in mathematical biology, who oversaw the research.

But fish farms have changed that, raising hundreds of thousands of adults in floating net pens anchored year round in the channels where the young fish migrate. The young pink and chum salmon are only an inch long, and do not yet have scales to protect them from parasites, he said.

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Waging War on Evolution

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006

By Paul A. Hanle of the Biotechnology Institute via the Wasington Post
Sunday, October 1, 2006; Page B04

I recently addressed a group of French engineering graduate students who were visiting Washington from the prestigious School of Mines in Paris. After encouraging them to teach biotechnology in French high schools, I expected the standard queries on teaching methods or training. Instead, a bright young student asked bluntly: “How can you teach biotechnology in this country when you don’t even accept evolution?”

I wanted to disagree, but the kid had a point. Proponents of “intelligent design” in the United States are waging a war against teaching science as scientists understand it. Over the past year alone, efforts to incorporate creationist language or undermine evolution in science classrooms at public schools have emerged in at least 15 states, according to the National Center for Science Education. And an independent education foundation has concluded that science-teaching standards in 10 states fail to address evolution in a scientifically sound way. Through changes in standards and curriculum, these efforts urge students to doubt evolution — the cornerstone principle of biology, one on which there is no serious scientific debate.

This war could decimate the development of U.S. scientific talent and erode whatever competitive advantage the United States enjoys in the technology-based global economy. Already, U.S. high school students lag near the bottom in math skills compared with students in other developed nations, and high school seniors are performing worse in science than they were 10 years ago.

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Hired guns aim to confuse

Thursday, September 21st, 2006

Written by David Suzuki – July 21st, 2006

Al Gore once told me that to get politicians to listen, you have to engage the people first. The former vice president is attempting to do just that this summer with his critically acclaimed global warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” But he’s up against some pretty powerful opponents.His movie, by most standards, is pretty good. Rotten Tomatoes, a website that compiles movie reviews from newspapers, television and the internet, shows that 92 per cent of critics liked it. A story by the Associated Press on experts who critiqued the science behind the movie found that they too gave it a thumbs up for accuracy. Personally, I thought it was brilliant.But shortly after the Associated Press article came out, other articles started popping up that said Mr. Gore’s science was shoddy. People claiming to be experts wrote opinion pieces in newspapers decrying the film, Mr. Gore, and the “theory” of global warming in general. Contrarians, it seemed, were coming out of the woodwork. What happened?

What happened was a well-funded campaign to discredit the film and carpet bomb North Americans with confusing and contradictory information about the science of global warming. It appears to be having an effect too. Recent polls I’ve seen indicate that while the public is very concerned about climate change, they are still confused about the science.

Those who read science journals probably find this public confusion, well, confusing. While there is plenty of discussion in scientific circles about what precisely a changing climate will mean to people in various parts of the world, there is no debate about the cause of global warming (human activities, mostly burning oil, coal and gas), or about the fact that it is already having an effect and that those effects will become more and more pronounced in coming years.

Yet, there they are in the editorial and opinion pages, supposed experts writing about the grand global warming conspiracy perpetuated by Europeans. Or socialists. Or European socialists. Those in the know can laugh off such nonsense. But the problem is, most people aren’t in the know. Average citizens are busy people and they are not experts in climate science, so naturally they tend to defer to people who appear to know what they’re talking about.

Unfortunately, masquerading as an expert in the media is pretty easy. All you need are a few letters after your name and a controversial story to tell. That makes news. And there’s no shortage of public relations people willing to spin a good tale – usually for a tidy profit. Companies pay big bucks to have these spin doctors work their magic and make sure the industry line gets heard.

But even some of public relations’ best-known spin doctors are disgusted by what’s going on right now over global warming. Jim Hoggan is one. He’s a personal friend who happens to be president of one of western Canada’s largest public relations firms, James Hoggan and Associates. And he’s so appalled at what he says is deliberate manipulation of public opinion about this issue that he’s started a website called desmogblog.com to debunk the global warming skeptics.

Jim writes in his blog: “There is a line between public relations and propaganda – or there should be. And there is a difference between using your skills, in good faith, to help rescue a battered reputation and using them to twist the truth – to sow confusion and doubt on an issue that is critical to human survival. And it is infuriating – as a public relations professional – to watch my colleagues use their skills, their training and their considerable intellect to poison the international debate on climate change.”

Well said, Jim. His blog makes fascinating reading. It names names and follows the money trail – often leading back to big U.S. conservative organizations and fossil fuel giants. Jim’s making it his mission to expose the liars and the frauds and he’s doing a pretty good job.

Al Gore was right, the people do have to be engaged before politicians will listen. But engaging the people sometimes requires clearing the air first.

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Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, Climate Change, Politics, Politics - The Wrong Way, Science, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Ice core analysis adds to climate concern

Saturday, September 16th, 2006

Ice core records from Antarctica show the current levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are higher now than at any time in the past 800,000 years and increasing at an unprecedented rate.

The analysis, announced by researchers with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), is further evidence that humans are adding large amounts of the heat-trapping gas to the planet’s atmosphere and causing significant changes to the climate.

The 3.2-kilometre East Antarctica ice core is the deepest ever removed and its air bubbles provide evidence of the composition of the atmosphere over the past 800,000 years ago. BAS scientists report the core shows there have been eight cycles of atmospheric change in that time frame when levels of carbon dioxide and methane, another greenhouse gas, peaked – and each has been accompanied by warming in the climate.

But the current peak levels are far above anything seen in past cycle and the rate of change is alarming, the scientists said.

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