Science News

Lorises, tiny nocturnal primates found in southern Asia, are increasingly at risk due to illegal wildlife trade and their use in traditional Asian medicine, a new study finds.

Every year, according to research published in the American Journal of Primatology , thousands of lorises are caught for use in traditional medicine. In countries like Cambodia it is believed that eating loris flesh can treat leprosy. Tonics made from lorises are marketed as a treatment to heal wounds and broken bones or to help women regain strength after childbirth. In Sri Lanka loris body parts are used to ward off the "evil eye" or to cast curses. Loris tears are also an ingredient in love potions.

A strain of mutant mice groom compulsively til they seriously injure themselves. The condition is considered a good animal model for OCD, and it’s similar to the human disorder trichotillomania, where people pull out their own hair. Now researchers have successfully treated this pathological behavior in the mice--with a bone marrow transplant. The work, led by Nobel Laureate Mario Capecchi, was published in the journal Cell . [ http://bit.ly/a4znGN ] [More]

By Christopher Doering

Craig Venter is the Lady Gaga of science. Like her, he is a drama queen, an over-the-top performance artist with a genius for self-promotion. Hype is what Craig Venter does, and he does it extremely well, whether touting the decoding of his own genome several years ago or his construction of a hybrid bacterium this year. In a typical Venter touch sections of the bacterium's DNA translate into portentous quotes, such as this one from James Joyce: "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, and to re-create life out of life."

So I don't fault Venter for hyping his recent achievement, but I do fault others who should know better, such as the bioethicist Arthur Caplan. "What seemed to be an intractable puzzle, with significant religious overtones, has been solved," Caplan proclaims on this Web site . Venter and his colleagues have "created a novel life-form from man-made parts." Caplan warns that "this hugely powerful technology does need oversight" (no doubt by bioethicists like Caplan).

As forests in tropical nations are cleared to make way for large-scale agricultural plots, U.S. farmers may be taking a hit to their wallets.

A new report issued by the National Farmers Union and Avoided Deforestation Partners yesterday finds that hundreds of billions of dollars are lost when forestlands are converted into croplands or cattle feeding grounds. The foreign timber, beef, soy and grain that flood the U.S. market from those fields undercut domestic goods, leading to price hikes, the report warns.

MIAMI--In very rough terms, the sun's activity ebbs and flows in an 11-year cycle, with flares, coronal mass ejections and other energetic phenomena peaking at what is called solar maximum and bottoming out at solar minimum. Sunspots, markers of magnetic activity on the sun's surface, provide a visual proxy to mark the cycle's evolution, appearing in droves at maximum and all but disappearing at minimum. But the behavior of our host star is not as predictable as all that--the most recent solar minimum was surprisingly deep and long, finally bottoming out around late 2008 or so. [More]

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The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are in many ways the Cinderella of international development. When 160 world leaders met at the United Nations in September 2000, they were inspired to adopt the Millennium Declaration, including bold targets in the fight against poverty, disease and hunger (learn more online at www.un.org/millenniumgoals ). Such declarations are usually photo ops and little more. The MDGs, however, have become the belle of the ball. With an upcoming MDG Summit this September on their 10th anniversary, the MDGs can become the historic fulcrum for eliminating extreme poverty.

Two U.N. secretaries-general, Kofi Annan, who introduced the goals, and Ban Ki-moon, who energetically leads the fight for them today, have ensured that the goals embody the international commitment to banish life-and-death poverty. Global efforts are often weak and disorganized, but the MDGs are so straightforward, bold, practical and compelling--and with the legitimacy of universal endorsement by U.N. member states--that they have become the organizing principles of development programs in poor countries, assistance strategies of donor countries, and operational strategies of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) around the world.

Rare tropical orchids can be few and far between in the wild, often separated by spotty landscape and human-made obstacles. But powerful tropical orchid bees do the leg--or wing--work, flying great distances to pollinate isolated flowers and keep the flora gene pool fresh. [More]