Science News

By Sharon Weinberger

By highlighting the limits of traditional military technology, the drawn-out conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have spurred the U.S. [More]

By Peter Griffiths

LONDON (Reuters) - An inquiry cleared British climate researchers of wrongdoing on Wednesday after their emails were hacked, leaked and held up by skeptics as evidence they had exaggerated the case for man-made global warming.

* Thousands injured after series of quakes, aftershocks

* Schools cave in, some students trapped

One main goal in the renewable energy field is to find an efficient, inexpensive way to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen could then be used as a fuel source for vehicles or fuel cells. Typically, an electric current breaks the water down. Now, there’s a new water-splitter: a virus. M.I.T.’s Angela Belcher took her cue from plants, where special pigments capture solar energy in photosynthesis, involving the splitting of water. [More]

Six days from now, every one of the billions of phytoplankton alive today will be dead--eaten by zooplankton or having drifted to the bottom of the sea . In fact, some of these microscopic plants, which collectively perform as much as photosynthesis as all of Earth's land-based plants, live for just two days. [More]

There is ample evidence that men and women think, express themselves and even experience emotions differently (for more details, read on through this issue). But in the area of sensory perception, psychologists are hard-pressed to identify major discrepancies. By and large, the way the two genders experience the sounds, sights and smells of life is quite similar. The most striking exception may be found, at least for some, in the perception of colors.

Seeing in color is a complex process, as you may remember from your school days. It starts with the delicate lining of the eyes, a structure called the retina. Retinal tissue contains light-sensitive cells that absorb wavelengths in the visible spectrum and convert them into electrical signals. The brain interprets this information as the riot of colors we consciously experience. The retinal cells called cones come in three varieties. The S-type cone is maximally sensitive to light in the short-wavelength (blue) part of the visible spectrum, the M-type cone responds best to medium wavelengths, and the L-type to long, reddish wavelengths. People with normal color vision are known as trichromats because they possess these three kinds of photosensitive cone cells.

As I type this column, several recent storms are weighing on my mind. Winter snowfalls around the country have sparked questions about climate change yet again. Skeptics ask, How can warming be happening if we’re getting big snows? As if we could determine the world’s condition during a single season. In fact, one symptom of a changing climate could be more varied or more extreme weather--but a couple of heavy snows wouldn’t prove that either. January was slightly warmer in the U.S. than average, in any case.

Another storm surrounds “Climategate.” More than 1,000 private e-mails were stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and publicly released last November. Climate doubters have asserted that the e-mails prove that science surrounding global climate change is not settled and that the data in favor of it were misrepresented.

A new online global map could soon help scientists better track and predict outbreaks of infectious diseases like H1N1 much the same way meteorologists can study and forecast the weather. The "Supramap" application illustrates the spread of pathogens and key mutations across time, space and various hosts on a Google Earth map, researchers reported April 9 in the early online edition of Cladistics . [More]

By Brendan Borrell

President Barack Obama last week announced the full membership of his bioethics advisory council, unveiling a more diverse body and one that is likely to have a greater impact on policy than its predecessor.

In the past decade, ethical questions in science have made headlines on issues such as the patenting of human genes, financial conflicts of interest in biomedical research and risk assessments related to environmental exposure to chemicals.

These issues were largely ignored by the bioethics commission established by President George W. [More]

The plaster face cast of a large-nosed Neanderthal stares out into space. The extra cavities in his sinus helped trap air, which was subsequently humidified. There's nothing quite like having a warm pocket of air close to the brain to keep away the chill of the ice age, says Rick Potts , head of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History .

The skulls of our closest ancestors tell the tale of human origins and the closeness of our evolutionary history to climate change , Potts said. The Smithsonian exhibit at the Hall of Human Origins, of which Potts is curator, explores the idea that defining evolutionary events like the discovery of fire or migration out of Africa could be direct results of a changing climate.

A little stress can do us good--it pushes us to compete and innovate. But chronic stress can increase the risk of diseases such as depression, heart disease and even cancer. Studies have shown that stress might promote cancer indirectly by weakening the immune system's anti-tumor defense or by encouraging new tumor-feeding blood vessels to form. But a new study published April 12 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation shows that stress hormones, such as adrenaline , can directly support tumor growth and spread. [More]

Trees once covered almost the entire eastern seaboard of the U.S. Vast forests supported a rich ecosystem, including flocks of the extinct passenger pigeon big enough to blot out the sun. But by the 1920s at least half of this forest was gone--a victim of tree-clearing for farming, forestry or fossil-fuel extraction. [More]

If there is anything about your “self” of which you can be sure, it is that it is anchored in your own body and yours alone. The person you experience as “you” is here and now and nowhere else.

But even this axiomatic foundation of your existence can be called into question under certain circumstances. Your sense of inhabiting your body, it turns out, is just as tenuous an internal construct as any of your other perceptions--and just as vulnerable to illusion and distortion. Even your sense of “owning” your own arm is not fundamentally different--in evolutionary and neurological terms--from owning your car (if you are Californian) or your shotgun (if you are Sarah Palin).

Cheetos Lip Balm. That’s right, you can purchase lip balm imbued with the delicate flavor of Cheetos. Somehow I lived in blissful ignorance of that fact until quite recently, when I discovered that chemists had pulled off this minor miracle back in 2005. As I pondered the idea of a cheese-puffy lip protector, a flood of memories of never having read Proust rose up within me, and I thought of what marvelous recollections he might have come up with had he ever tasted a crunchy curl of faux cheese delicately lifted from a greasy plastic bag, the junkified morsel staining thumb and forefinger a sickly, artificial orange. But I couldn’t think about that for long because I was soon busy thinking about other stuff, stuff I’ll now ask you, dear reader, to think about, too.

Here’s something else I just learned about: in a 2007 poll respondents on average estimated NASA’s funding to be 24 percent of the federal budget. Fixing those busted space toilets is expensive, but not that expensive: NASA has in fact been getting about $18 billion annually in recent years, less than 1 percent of the budget. NASA would get about $1 billion more each year under the draft budget President Barack Obama announced in early February, although that money would go to scientific research and robotic missions rather than sending guys back to the moon to look for Alan B. Shepard’s golf balls. (There are two up there: he shanked his first shot and took the rare moon mulligan.)

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Sporting goods maker Puma will launch eco-friendly packaging for its sneakers next year to reduce its carbon footprint, beating governments to the punch as it kisses old-fashion shoe boxes good-bye.

Puma said it would roll out the new packaging in the second half of next year and that by putting its shoes in cardboard frames wrapped in reusable shoe bags, it would save 8,500 tonnes of paper -- the weight of more than 1,400 adult elephants.

People start stereotyping early. Even toddlers react positively to members of their own race, but often distrust those from different groups. The seeds of racism are planted in most everyone. Everyone, that is, except people with a rare genetic condition called Williams syndrome.

Williams syndrome is marked by heart defects, mental retardation, and a lack of social anxiety that produces exceedingly friendly human beings. And a new study published in the journal Current Biology finds that children with Williams syndrome don’t make racial stereotypes. [See Andreia Santos, Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg and Christine Deruelle, http://bit.ly/9K0YSx ]

To feed an exploding global population, scientists have called for a doubling of food production over the next 40 years. Genetic manipulation might seem the best way to quickly boost characteristics essential to plant growth and crop yields. New findings from different laboratories, however, suggest that fungi, bacteria and viruses could be an exciting alternative to increase agricultural productivity.

Scientists have long known that microbes can work symbiotically with plants. For instance, mycorrhizal fungi, which are associated with 90 percent of land plants, extend from roots to bring in moisture and minerals in exchange for plant carbohydrates. But microbes have recently been found among plant cells themselves and seem to confer benefits, such as more efficient photosynthesis and increased ability to fix nitrogen from the air. In fact, Mary E. Lucero, a biologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Jornada Experimental Range in Las Cruces, N.M., believes that plants actively recruit these microbes rather than simply being passive hosts for them.