President Obama fires a marshmallow gun and lets robots roam his White House at the White House Science Fair.

Three-year-old Danielle Fairchild probably can’t grasp the magnitude of what she’s enabled. The little girl adopted by Fred and Dale Fairchild in Duluth, Georgia was born with half a thumb and no fingers on her right hand. Half-way across the country a smart teenager and five other girl scouts were looking for a science and technology project to complete.

Danielle Fairchild Writes with Help of Prosthetic Hand

Dale Fairchild contacted Kate Murray and the troop of The Flying Monkeys and a partnership was born. 13-year old Murray was born with a thumb but no fingers on her left hand. Despite this digital abnormality she took up the violin five years ago using a device that clips to the bow and wraps around her left palm. And she thought she could help someone else learn to write.

Upon hearing about little Danielle The Flying Monkeys flew into action, learning all they could about prosthetic limbs, talking to doctors and learning how to build one from scratch.

Fast forward to February 7 as Kate Murray, Gaby Dempsey and Mackenzie Gewell present their prosthetic hand device to President Obama in the White House at the second White House Science Fair.

As the President held the BOB-1.2 plastic device in his hand, he said, “This is outstanding.”

President Obama Pumps Air Cannon at White House Science Fair

The Flying Monkeys won a $20,000 Innovation award from For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Lego League. FIRST is the non-profit organization started by inventor Dean Kamen, who famously brought us the Segway. And for Murray a trip to the White House is “super exciting.”

She says, “I want to be a mechanical engineer when I grow up. I want to design cars to be more fuel efficient and/or rely entirely on wind or solar energy.”

14-year old Joey Hudy unwittingly stole the show providing spectacular photo opportunities as President Obama listened the story about how the Phoenix teen built his marshmallow air gun from PVC pipe with the help of employees at his local Home Depot. Then he asked if the device was operational and decided on the spot that the two should fire it together.

The President asked that everyone in the line of fire move back because this was an improvised activity while strolling through the student exhibits and talking to the winners of over 40 science fairs and competitions.

Joey Hudy with President Obama Impressed by Power to Shoot a Marshmallow Missile

When the gun popped, press cameras clicked wildly and they caught the child-like wonderment in the eyes of the President, which encapsulated the entire White House science fair.

Clearly, the President was impressed by the caliber of projects presented and the students themselves. He said, “Now, as I was walking around the science fair, I was thinking back to when I was your age. And basically, you guys put me to shame.”

President Obama lauded the whip smart students and their clever projects. But he was struck by something more.

He said, “It’s the fact that you recognize that you’ve got a responsibility to use your talents in service to something bigger than yourselves.”

He said some students will develop new products that change the way we live. He pointed out Hayley Hoverter, the winner of the 2011 Network For Teaching Entrepreneurship’s National Challenge. The 16-year-old Los Angeles resident invented a flavorless, colorless sugar packet that dissolves in hot water.

About her invention the President said, “It could potentially save up to two million pounds of trash each year — and that’s just at Starbucks.” Mastercard gave the teen $10,000 to turn her concept into a working business.

Next the President said that some students will see a problem in their town or city and do something about it. After 14-year old Benjamin Hylak was worried that seniors in nursing homes would get lonely he built a robot attached to a computer monitor. His telepresence robot which moves around the center and allows seniors to connect via Skype with their family and friends qualified him as a BROADCOM Masters Competition 2011 finalist.

Angela Zhang Explains Her Nanoparticle Cancer Treatment

President Obama said, “Inventions like Benjamin’s could make life better for millions of families.”

The same holds for the three representatives from California.

Angela Zhang of Cupertino, who has proposed a potential cure for cancer. This year, she won a $100,000 grand prize in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology for her nanoparticle cancer treatment. She says, “I keep saying 60 years from now I will probably be telling my grandkids everything that happened when I was 17.”

Hayley Hoverter of Los Angeles, who developed sugar packets that dissolve in hot drinks is the now the 16-year old CEO of Sweet (dis)SOLVE. She spoke at TEDx SoCal last year.

Neil de Grasse Tyson with Braeden Benedict at White House Science Fair

Braeden Benedict of Ranchos Palos Verdes designed a device to detect concussions in athletes after one of his football teammates experienced prolonged concussion symptoms and had to stop playing contact sports. The 15-year old designed a helmet-mounted sensory detector that turns red when an athlete is hit hard enough to cause a concussion.

He took the top prize in America’s 2011 Top Young Scientist competition at the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge where he won $25,000 for his efforts.

The President spoke of the adversity several groups of students overcame just to be at the science fair. A rocketry team from Presidio, Texas came from the 4th poorest school district in the nation where most students speak English as a second language. Parents raised money to help the students make the trip to Washington D.C. Mr. Obama said they even sold a goat to make the journey to the White House.

He applauded the winners of the Michigan Regional Contest of the National Engineers Week Future City Competition. Three Detroit students imagined a clean energy future for their city and while they were doing so their school burned down, forcing them to merge with another school while they completed their project. The team said, “(Future City) helps me make a better city to live in.” They designed there vision around a city following the theme of “Fuel Your Future: Imagine New Ways to Meet Our Energy Needs and Maintain a Healthy Planet.”

Samantha Garvey Tells President Obama about Mussels

The President also acknowledged 18-year old Samantha Garvey, who has spent a lot of time with the President lately. The high school senior from New York made headlines after winning a spot in the semi-finals of the Intel science talent search. But more than her ingenious project studying mussel predation on Long Island she captured the attention of America because when she found out she was a semi-finalist she was homeless.

Since then she has appeared on television and sat in the First Lady’s box at the State of the Union Address last month. At the White House science fair the President announced that the teen would like to work for NOAA or EPA some day. Pointing at them he said, “This is Dr. Lubchenco. She is the head of NOAA. Lisa Jackson, right there, head of EPA. You might, you know, just want to hook up with them before you leave.”

The President said that all the students who participated in the science fair inspired him. He said, “It’s young people like you who make me so confident that America’s best days are still to come.”

President Obama Tells Science Fair Students They Are Paving the Way to the Future

Dale Fairchild says that before The Flying Monkey’s created BOB-1 for little Danielle to use as she learns to write the toddler used her right hand like a flipper. But after the molded plastic device arrived, complete with a Vel-cro(TM) strap to attached a plastic pencil holder, the girl began using her fingerless hand to pick things up.

The teen engineers have never met Danielle Fairchild but their prosthetic hand device is going through the expensive and lengthy patent process, placing the teen inventors on track to help many more people besides the little girl in Georgia.

C-SPAN coverage of President Obama’s speech to the White House Science Fair, Feb. 7, 2012. (15:13)

When George Clooney was recovering from his second bout of malaria after vising Sudan last year he demonstrated that the tropical infectious disease can create a very unpleasant ten days but they don’t have to be life-threatening.

But in many parts of Africa, South America and Asia, it is a killer. The presumption is that malaria kills mostly children under 5. And that’s in part why the World Health Organization which tracks the disease placed its annual death toll at about 655,000. But new research just doubled the annual malaria kill to 1.2 million people per year.

The news comes as a punch to the gut of large malaria eradication programs around the world. A study in the British journal The Lancet found that 42 percent of cases in 2010 appeared in people older than five who were previously uncounted by other tracking methods.

Dr. Christopher Murray, the Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington and the study’s lead author says, “You learn in medical school that people exposed to malaria as children develop immunity and rarely die from malaria as adults.”

But that’s not what the new numbers are saying. This information is sure to be controversial but could shift the malaria prevention efforts to include adults instead of just children.

Immediately following the announcement last week, the WHO disputed the new numbers, saying IHME used unreliable verbal testimony, rather than clinical autopsies, to arrive at its figure. But this is not the first time IHME and the WHO have butted heads. Last year, the WHO quietly adjusted down their maternal mortality numbers by a whopping 34 percent (from over 500,000 to about 350,000) after the IHME released the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors 2010 Study in the spring of 2010.

Tom Paulson from Seattle-based blog Humanosphere says numbers in global health flow like the tide. He says, “When an organization wants to ask for help and more money to its cause, the numbers showing the need tend to rise. When you want to show that your project to reduce death or disease is working, the numbers tend to ebb.”

The IHME is an independent global health research center that began in 2007 with a $105 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which also funded this malaria study.

While the study found the overall number of malaria deaths is higher than in earlier reports, the trend in malaria deaths is following a consistent downward pattern. Starting in 1985, malaria deaths grew every year before peaking in 2004 at 1.8 million deaths worldwide. Then the death rate began to fall. Between 2007 and 2010, the decline in deaths was more than seven percent each year.

Insecticide on Bed Nets Kills Malaria Carrying Mosquitoes

Insecticide-coated bed nets and anti-malarial drugs get the credit for reducing the malaria mortality since 2004. And the global health community has spent billions of dollars trying to reduce those numbers to zero.

Dr. Alan Lopez, Head of the School of Population Health at the University of Queensland and one of the study’s co-authors says, “We have seen a huge increase both in funding and in policy attention given to malaria over the past decade, and it’s having a real impact.”

He credits programs like Nothing But Nets, Malaria No More, World Health Organization’s Roll Back Malaria, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria with keeping the malaria mortality rate on a downward trajectory.

According to current IHME estimates, when the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria began in 2001 the world spent about $250 million a year fighting the disease. In 2009 that number rose to more than $2 billion a year.

India is in the process of revising its malaria mortality numbers, possibly up to 40 times what it was reporting. The Times of India says that health officials will revise the number of Indians who die from the mosquito-borne disease every year to 40,297. Overall, the number of malaria infections hovers around 9.75 million per year.

The IHME study found that malaria killed 46,800 Indians in 2010. But the official numbers from India show those numbers at 1,023.

India’s National Vector Borne Disease Control Programme agrees with Dr. Murray’s study figures. It says only 11 percent of malaria deaths in India were in children. An official tells the Times of India, “As against Africa where most malaria deaths occur among the pediatric age group, in India it is mostly adults who succumb to malaria infection.”

Even the WHO says India has been under-reporting its malaria deaths. The WHO places malaria deaths somewhere in the 15,000 range still far fewer than the IHME study. India only counts a malaria death if the case goes to the hospital and the malaria parasite is found in the blood of the victim at the time of death.

The IMHE study uses a new method called a verbal autopsy. This includes asking the friends or relatives of the deceased if the patient had died of malaria. IHME and collaborators around the world published a series of articles in a special edition of Population Health Metrics in August 2011 focused on advancing the science of verbal autopsy. In poor countries, the cause of death is often misidentified due to broken or incomplete medical infrastructure.

The WHO refutes the new malaria numbers largely because of the verbal autopsy, which it considers an unreliable verbal diagnosis not particularly effective when it comes to identifying adults with malaria.

WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl says, “Basically, there is no diagnosis done in laboratory or after death of how a person actually died. He says, “You rely on the verbal record of a friend or relative saying that X person died of fever, for example. However, we know that there are many different diseases which cause fever.”

And when learning about infectious diseases in medical schools doctors-in-training are taught that most people who survive malaria in the first five years of life have a much higher immunity to the mosquito-borne disease later in life.

Hartl says it is important to look more carefully at the sources and the quality of data before arriving at any conclusions that will require a policy revision.

In Africa, malaria is blamed in 25 percent of all deaths in children under 5. There a child dies from the disease every 30 seconds, according to accepted WHO figures. But that’s also where the progress of malaria drugs and mosquito nets can bee seen. According to the IHME study Tanzania and and Zambia saw malaria deaths fall by more than 30 percent between 2004 and 2010.

But Dr. Stephen Lim, University of Washington Professor of Global Health and IHME study co-author is worried that economic troubles in Africa could destabilize the progress being made against malaria. Between 2009 and 2011 IHME found that development aid for global health slowed. And in November the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria announced it would cancel its next round of funding, casting doubt over the future of malaria control.

Dr. Lim says, “If the Global Fund is weakened, the world could lose 40 percent of all the funding dedicated to fighting malaria.” He adds, “We need to think of ways to fill funding deficits in order to ensure continued progress on malaria mortality.”

Perhaps that’s why in the conclusion of the 30-year analysis of malaria mortality the researchers find, “Donor support, however, needs to be increased if malaria elimination and eradication and broader health and development goals are to be met.”

Alex Perry at Time magazine’s blog, Global Spin explains that this isn’t the first time the people running developing world health campaigns have been shown to have only the loosest understanding of the problems they are tackling.

In 2005 India briefly held the top spot for number of AIDS patients at 5 million. By 2007 that number was revised to 2.5 million. Similarly Perry saw a statistic in 2009 that said there would be 5 million AIDS orphans in South Africa by 2015. He says this year that figure was quietly cut by three quarters.

He says, “Some people look at these statistical about-turns and smell a rat.” They blame global health campaigners for manipulating numbers to fulfill their own agenda — thereby creating the perception of a crisis to drive fund-raising.

He says, “But the disputed malaria figures would seem to reveal a different truth. In a world that sometimes seems wondrously connected, and where people worry about information overload, it’s a sobering thought that, more often than we’d like, we really don’t know what’s going on out there.”

Malaria Plasmodium Falciparum Parasite in Blood under a Microscope

Dr. Bernhards Ogutu at Kenya’s Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) says malaria figures are just as elusive there as the plasmodium parasite itself. He says he hears people say they have malaria when they may have another fever-causing disease. He believes that may lead to overestimating the malaria problem in some places.

IHME is advocating for more resources to fight what it believes is a bigger problem. But Perry says, “That seems premature before the WHO and the IHME have even figured out who is right.”

When legendary marine biologist Sylvia Earle started exploring the ocean 50 years she couldn’t fathom anything people could do to hurt the pristine blue waters that dominate the globe. In her 2009 TED Prize talk she says, “Then, not Jacques Perrin, Jacques Cousteau or Rachel Carson could imagine we could do anything to harm the ocean by what we put into it or what we took out of it.”

Back then, she says the leading oceanographic minds considered the world’s ocean to be a sea of Eden. But now she says, “We are facing a paradise lost.”

As the recipient of a TED Prize, she called upon the world to recognize that we have fished 90 percent of the big fish in the last 50 years. We are losing sharks, squid, blue fin tuna and other species at a rapid rate. There are dead zones appearing in the oceans that affect not just the animals and plants that call it home but all of us.

She says, “I hope for you help to explore and protect the wild ocean in ways that will restore the health and in so doing secure hope for human kind. Health to the ocean means health for us. And I hope Jill Tarter’s wish to engage Earthlings like us includes dolphins, whales and other sea creatures in this quest to look for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. And I hope Jill that we will find evidence one day that there is intelligent life among humans on this planet.”

She says, “Nothing else will matter if we fail to protect the ocean. Our fate and the ocean are one.”

As the winner of a TED Prize, Dr. Earle received $100,000 and a wish to change the world.

Young Sea Turtle Swims in Sea of Plastic

After her inspiring talk the work to fulfill her wish began immediately. VeriSign (the web encryption software) founder Addison Fischer gave $1 million to fund a project which grew into Mission Blue Voyage. The TED Prize team worked with Fischer and other offers to build on Earle’s wish.

Then just 14 months after she made her wish Sylvia Earle led a four-day Galapagos sea-voyage of 100 peopleLeonardo DiCaprio, Edward Norton, Glenn Close, Elizabeth Banks, Steve Case, Ted Waitt, Bill Joy, Jackson Browne, Damien Rice, Chevy Chase, Jean-Michel Cousteau and 30 of the world’s leading marine scientists.

That’s where Jackson Browne began thinking about the role of the ocean in our lives and that connection to Sylvia Earle and her TED wish prompted him to go on to write his song, If I Could Be Anywhere.

Browne says he started the song on the Galapagos trip but finished it the night before presenting at TEDx Great Pacific Garbage Patch in November 2010.

His song grew out of a talk that Jeremy Jackson gave on the trip. Browne says, “When he said we need to change who we are I really got that.” He says we are going to have to eat differently, consume differently and travel differently because business as usual is hurting the planet and the ocean in particular.

Since that trip Browne, who has long been a supporter of the environment and social movements (including Occupy Wall Street) has begun touring on a bus powered by biodiesel and he has banned all disposable plastic backstage at his concerts.

He says, “I’m committed to carry as much of what I’ve learned here and heard here back into my everyday life and my work.”

Huffington Post Interview with Jackson Browne aboard the National Geographic Endeavor, April 2010.

Plastic in the Ocean

In 2010 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute published a 22-year study that found a huge amount of plastic accumulation in the western North Atlantic and Caribbean Sea in addition to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch we’ve been hearing about for years. In this study, the researchers examined their haul of 6136 surface plankton net tows between 1986 and 2008. During that time they found over 60 percent of them contained some plastic. Students sifted through and hand-picked the millimeter-sized fragments with tweezers. They collected over 64,000 pieces in total.

So plastic does break down in the ocean. Generally it breaks into smaller and smaller pieces until plastic particles resemble jellyfish food, plankton or even grains of sand. And over 400 years the material does degrade fully. But in the meantime it is contributing to the deaths of albatrosses on low-lying atolls. It is killing turtles and other surface-dwelling creatures who get tangled or just slurp up some plastic with a fish they are eating. Larger plastic gets lodged in animal throats while babies often get fed plastic by their mothers which leads them to starve since there is no nutritional value in plastic.

Five Ocean Gyres and Home of Five Global Garbage Patches

After learning about the gyres and the vast amount of plastic pollution, Jackson Browne was moved to sing about the dire straits of the ocean.

If I Could Be Anywhere

Music and Lyrics by: Jackson Browne

Sliding through the shimmering surface between two worlds
Standing at the centre of time as it uncurls
Cutting through a veil of illusion
Moving beyond past conclusions
Wondering if all my doubt and confusion will clear

If I could be anywhere,
If I could be anywhere
If I could be anywhere right now, I would want to be here

Searching for the future among the things we’re throwing away
Trying to see the world through the junk we produce every day
They say nothing lasts forever,
But all the plastic ever made is still here
No amount of closing our eyes will make it disappear

If I could be anywhere,
If I could be anywhere
If I could be anywhere in history, I would want to be here

The Romans, the Spanish, the British, the Dutch
American exceptionalism, so out of touch
The folly of empire, repeating its course
Imposing its will and ruling by force
On and on through time

But the world can’t take it, very much longer
We’re not gonna make it, unless we’re smarter and stronger
The world is gonna shake itself free of our greed somehow

If I could be anywhere,
If I could be anywhere in time
If I could be anywhere and change things, it would have to be now.

They say nothing lasts forever,
but all the plastic ever made is still here
No amount of closing our eyes will make it disappear

And the world can’t take it, very much longer
It’s not gonna make it, ‘less we’re smarter and stronger
The world is gonna shake itself free of our greed somehow

And the world can’t take it, that you can see
If the oceans don’t make it, neither will we
The world is gonna shake itself all the way free somehow

If I could be anywhere, If I could be anywhere in time
If I could be anywhere and change the outcome, it would have to be now.

After several deaths of people in Cambodia, Vietnam and China recently, the bird flu is making a comeback in public discourse. Concerns are growing about the H5N1 strain of the influenza virus. A few years ago the world-sweeping swine flu stole headlines but the bird flu, which is much more virulent than it’s porcine cousin, has been spreading from poultry to people.

An 18-year-old duck farmer in Vietnam died last week, becoming the first bird flu fatality in that country in two years. The World Health Organization also reports that a two-year-old boy in Cambodia died from bird flu after being exposed to sick poultry in his village. Those deaths follow quickly on the heals of a 39-year-old Chinese bus driver dying on December 31 just outside of Hong Kong. And a 24-year-old man and five-year-old toddler in Indonesia also reportedly died from the bird flu this year.

The WHO says that makes 343 deaths from 582 cases of bird flu since 2003 when the virus first began hopping from birds to people.

But now growing fear over the necessary research to better understand this pathogen, which has a 60 percent mortality rate, is forcing bird flu scientists to take a 60-day break.

Researchers studying a more deadly version of the H5N1 virus that can be spread through the air voluntarily suspended their research for two months after bioethicists raised concerns of the virus being turned into a bioweapon.

Electron Micrograph of the H5N1 Influenza Virus

This deep concern began in late December when a U.S. federal government scientific advisory board asked two peer-review journals not to publish the papers if they explained how they were able to genetically modify the current, naturally-occurring strain of bird flu. The government scientists made the virus even more deadly by making it airborne.

Just days after that announcement and before the papers could be published, government advisers demanded the details be kept secret and not published in scientific journals to keep the information from falling into the wrong hands.

The scientists who created the deadlier H5N1 in the lab say they needed to know if the current strain has the potential to mutate into an airborne one. It does. They just sped up the process. Knowing that key piece of information will allow countries to take more severe measures to eradicate the newly emerging illness.

Now the story about bird flu has mutated as well, raising concerns that the manmade strain of the virus is now a bigger threat than the naturally-occurring one, which seldom hops from poultry to people.

In a letter that appeared in both journalsScience and Nature, several key bird flu researchers explain why they are temporarily halting their research.

The principal investigators at the labs where the bird flu research is being conducted say that perceived fear of the new manmade strain of the flu virus escaping the lab is making them push the pause button for 60 days.

Drs. Ron Fouchier, Adolfo García-Sastre, Yoshihiro Kawaoka and 36 others recognize that they and the rest of the scientific community need to more clearly explain the benefits of bird flu research and reassure the public that the biosafety measures taken minimize its possible risks.

They say, “We have agreed on a voluntary pause of 60 days on any research involving highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 viruses leading to the generation of viruses that are more transmissible in mammals.”

The controversial research that prompted government warnings and the voluntary research suspension centered around ferrets. The researchers proved that viruses possessing a haemagglutinin (HA) protein from highly pathogenic avian H5N1 influenza viruses can become transmissible in ferrets.

Scanning Electron Microscope Image of H5N1 Avian Flu Virus

But now the perceived fear of the ferret-infected virus escaping from the secure labs is creating a fear pandemic instead.

They continue, “We would like to assure the public that these experiments have been conducted with appropriate regulatory oversight in secure containment facilities by highly trained and responsible personnel to minimize any risk of accidental release.”

The scientists agree their research is absolutely necessary to help to public health efforts detect when the H5N1 influenza virus might change in the wild, sparking a human pandemic. But Fouchier of Erasmus Medical College in the Netherlands, Garcia-Sastre of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the lead authors on the letter in Science and Nature nevertheless are voluntarily suspending it so public perception can catch up.

Censorship in Science

When a U.S. government advisory panel told the editors of Science and Nature to censor a submitted bird flu paper, the complex issue also enjoined the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The reason for asking for censorship was noble. Biosecurity experts fear an airborne version of the H5N1 flu virus that becomes transmissible between humans could create a pandemic worse than the 1918-19 outbreak of Spanish flu that killed between 20 million and 40 million people.

The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) made the following recommendations about the publication of two papers submitted on the highly pathogenic avian influenza, H5N1:

1. Neither manuscript should be published with complete data and experimental details.

2. Conclusions of the manuscripts be published but without experimental details and
mutation data that would enable replication of the experiments.

a) Text should be added describing: 1) the goals of the research, 2) the potential
benefits to public health (including informing surveillance efforts, pandemic
preparedness activities, and countermeasure development and stockpiling efforts), 3)
the risk assessments performed prior to research initiation, 4) the ongoing biosafety
oversight, containment, and occupational health measures, 5) biosecurity practices
and adherence to select agent regulation, and 6) that addressing biosafety, biosecurity,
and occupational health is part of the responsible conduct of all life sciences research.

b) The NSABB should develop a statement that explains their review process and
rationale for the recommendations. This statement will be provided to the journals to
consider for publication.

c) The USG should encourage the authors to submit a special
communication/commentary letter to the journals regarding the dual use research
issue.

In other words, don’t publish the whole genome and don’t explain exactly how this mutation occurred.

Both journals responded by agreeing to the recommendations in part.

Science writer Carl Zimmer sums it up best. He describes the journals’ response, “In essence, “We haven’t decided yet. It would be nice if you let us know how responsible scientists could get hold of the data.”

Since science is rooted in reproducibility this type of censorship flies in the face of the method.

But the U.S. government does have a history of censoring sensitive science, including the recipe for nuclear fission and fusion. And now the formula for ferret to ferret transmission of bird flu.

Columbia University virologists Vincent Racaniello tells Zimmer the censorship move doesn’t make any sense. He says, “The point of a science paper is to enable others to duplicate the findings. Are we going to set a new precedent, where security matters override the reason for publication? This is setting a very dangerous precedent for virology and biological sciences in general.”

But in the end, the scientists themselves agreed to grudgingly redact contested parts of the papers.

Albert Osterhaus of Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands says this type of activity is unprecedented. He believes that public health is best served by making the information widely available. A spokesman for Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin, Madison also says the lead author will modify the paper and resubmit it.

Meanwhile the editors of Nature and Science are working with government officials to iron out a “written, transparent plan” for relevant scientists to have access to the critical details of this research, which will likely not make the published version of the papers. Science editor-in-chief Bruce Albersis confident that this all can be resolved in a couple of weeks.

For years, scientists have been talking about the era of personalized medicine. While many preparations are underway, the biggest hurdle to widespread adoption has been the prohibitive cost to read a person’s entire DNA. Our genetic code provides a full road map to preventing and treating disease. We just don’t know how to read it yet.

Since the first entire human genome was sequenced in 2000, the price and time it takes has tumbled into affordability.

But the entire biotechnology industry has rested on the belief that personalized medicine won’t work until it takes a day or less to map a whole human genome and the cost reaches the $1,000 price point.

Well, 2012 is the year. At this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Life Technologies unveiled its latest gadget, a $150,000 high-speed gene sequencer, which allows entire human genome sequencing for $1,000 per genome.

Outfitted with a semiconductor chip instead of tiny microscopes, the Benchtop Ion Proton sequencer is ready to read our DNA fast and cheap. That means this technology will quickly move from the research lab to the doctor’s office where patients will pay a little more than the $1,000 it costs to sequence a full genome.

There are companies already doing some high-speed, fast-turnaround gene sequencing. But they rely on just pieces of a genome, looking for particular markers to identify risk for specific diseases. No company until now has been able to run a full genome for $1,000 in less than a day.

Life Technologies’ Dr. Robert Bennett says, “For the first time, you’ll be able to sequence an entire human genome in a matter of a few hours.”

Immediately following the announcement, the company said that Baylor College of Medicine, Yale School of Medicine, and The Broad Institute have signed on as the first three customers of the new semiconducting gene sequencer.

Dr. Richard Gibbs, Director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor says, “A genome sequence for $1,000 was a pipe-dream, just a few years ago.”

Not to be outdone, another company that builds gene sequencers also just announced that its new generation of machine will read an entire genome in less than 24 hours. Illumina hasn’t announced how much it will cost on a per genome basis.

It’ll be a year or so before these lightweight machines will begin showing up in doctor’s offices. But when they do it is still unclear what running a person’s genome will show.

Doctors must first be trained to use the new technology. The power of personalized medicine and the promise of rapid, inexpensive gene sequencing lies in being able to identify genetic mutations to make medicine more effective, reduce drug interactions, improve preventive health and give the patient more information about his or her health.

But this kind of broad ability could also open up a pandora’s box of privacy concerns. Namely, how much of a person’s genetic information should be accessible to insurance companies, which conceivably could discriminate against people with predisposed genetic risks for certain diseases.

Regardless of any controversy, reaching the genome milestone of $1,000 per genome is changing the face of medicine forever.

Richard Lifton, Chair of the Department of Genetics at Yale School of Medicine says, “The technological advances in the new instrument promise to be game-changing for both research and clinical applications.”

Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Or an adult human for that matter. New research from England shows that not only can we learn throughout our lives but that learning can change the structure of our brains as well.

Eleanor Maguire from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London took adults training for the toughest taxi job and watched how their brains changed as they learned the ins and outs of London over four years.

For those that don’t know, The Knowledge is the test given to all taxi drivers in London who are licensed to drive the famous black cabs. But this is no ordinary test. It is perhaps the biggest spatial memory test available.

To get a taxi license to drive in all of London, drivers must know all 25,000 streets within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross, the spot known as the center of London. They must also know the locations of 20,000 landmarks and know the shortest routes to get from point to point.

According to Dr. Maguire’s research all of this acquired knowledge increases the size of the hippocampus, the region of the brain associated with memory.

Professor Maguire and her colleague Dr. Katherine Woollett followed a group of 79 trainee taxi drivers and 31 controls (non-taxi drivers). Periodically they took snapshots of their brain structure over time using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and studying their performance on certain memory tasks.

Only 39 of the group passed the tests and went on to qualify as taxi drivers, which is about the norm for given the difficulty of The Knowledge.

By looking at the structure of the brain, the neuroscientists saw remarkable changes in the brain structure of the 39 who passed the taxi driver test. They saw an increase in grey matter — the nerve cells in the brain where processing takes place — in the posterior hippocampus.

Dr. Maguire says, “The human brain remains ‘plastic’, even in adult life, allowing it to adapt when we learn new tasks.”

But The Knowledge may come at a price. Besides the 3-4-year study period where prospective drivers say they lost touch with friends, ignored holidays and had no social life, this research which appears in the journal Current Biology found that though at the end of the training, those who pass The Knowledge have an imprinted map of London in their heads, they tend to have a weaker complex visual memory.

This study supports increasing evidence that learning can help our brains grow even into adulthood. This is encouraging news for lifelong learning and the potential for rehabilitation after brain damage.

Last week, a Minnesota science class got more than they bargained for when a combustible demonstration being done by the physical sciences teacher caught chemicals on a lab table on fire and burned several students, including 15-year-old Dane Neuberger.

The burned student says, “I started screaming and he was on me fast to put the fire out and my shirt and face were on fire.” The 9th Grade teacher, Matt Achor wrapped Neuberger in a fire blanket, smothering the flames as soon as they erupted.

The student was sitting in the front row of his science class with three others when a methanol experiment went terribly awry, putting him in the hospital with second-degree burns covering his hands, face and neck. Luckily the resilient teen is stable and could be released by mid December and doctors say he may not require skin grafts and could have no permanent scarring.

But the Maple Grove Junior High School teacher who conducted the experiment is on paid administrative leave until the school can conduct a full investigation of the accident.

Neuberger’s father wants the school to implement stricter safety policies governing science labs.

A week after Thanksgiving students gathered in Mr. Achor’s class for a final at the end of the term. After the test was over the teacher rewarded the students with a dangerous display, demonstrating how methanol vaporizes into the air and becomes combustible. This demonstration is dangerous and should only be conducted under the proper circumstances. And even then, something can go wrong.

In this case, left over chemicals from another experiment dotted the lab table where the combustion experiment was being done. The flash of methanol flame didn’t stay in the five gallon water jug as planned. It escaped and mixed with the chemical residue on the lab table, burning the students closest to the flash fire.

Neuberger says it caught his shirt and some papers on fire. A fire extinguisher in the room was used to stop the burning papers.

The school district says the school is no longer conducting the lab experiment that led to the students getting burned.

The Internet has about 300 videos of this experiment being done, including one by science educator Steve Spangler. He suggests the demonstration makes a great classroom experiment because it allows a teacher to show students how combustion works. They get to see a flash of fire and an impressive spectacle. But they also learn that the fire which heats the vaporized methanol releases carbon dioxide and leaves water as a byproduct.

The first scientific team to sequence the genomes of 100 one-hundred year olds wins $10 million. It’s the latest offering from the science competition organization, X Prize Foundation, a non-profit designed to spur science and technology by awarding big cash prizes for significant breakthroughs.

Their most famous and first prize was the Ansari X Prize which started the commercial race to space.

Now the foundation is challenging biologists to sequence the genetic code of 100 centenarians in an effort to learn something new about longevity. Is there a longevity gene or are these folks just doing the right combination of eating right and exercising to get the most out of their lives?

Studies of very healthy elderly people show that they don’t eat a vegetarian diet. They are often obese, smoke and drink and get little exercise. Those who study the healthy elderly find there is something inexplicable that prevents them from getting diseases like Alzheimer’s and they just don’t age like other people.

With more people living longer, the new X Prize genomics competition will shed some light on aging and to see if the secret to a long life is written in our DNA.

Dr. Thomas Perls, an Alzheimer’s researcher at Boston University is the director of the New England Centenarian Study, the largest study of centenarians in the world. He is thrilled that Archon Genomic X Prize is focusing on sequencing the genomes of 100 centenarians.

And he is helping the competition find the one-hundred-plus year olds, drawing from his own study which has a minimum age requirement of 105 to participate.

He says, “It’s very hard to get there without some genetic advantages.”

Noted biologist Craig Venter is co-chairing the Archon Genomics X Prize, which will be judged on accuracy, completeness and the speed and cost of sequencing.

He says, “We need 10,000 genomes, not 100, to start to understand the link between genetics, disease and wellness.” This X Prize is merely the first step in revealing the genetic secrets of a long life.

Irving Kahn, oldest living financial analyst

In 1978, he began his own firm, which now manages more than $700 million in assets. He adapts to the changing times and now communicates with friends and clients all over the world via the Internet. BBC News interviewed him about the 2008 financial crisis in 2008.

If you know people like Irving, send them to the Medco 100 over 100. That’s the search to find the 100 centenarians to have their genomes sequenced.

These people could hold the secrets to better health for us all, hidden within our own genetic code. This prize could also unleash the era of personalized medicine where health and disease treatment will vary based on a person’s DNA.

After the healthy centenarians have been selected the teams will race for the $10 million prize, which will be given to the first team that accurately sequences the whole genome of 100 subjects within 30 days for $1,000 or less per genome, at an error rate no greater than one per million base pairs (that’s 98% accuracy).

The human genome contains more than six billion pairs of nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA. Ultimately, the competition looks to usher in a new era of personalized medicine through sequencing the whole human genome to a level of fidelity never before measured.

Kahn, the oldest living money manager says, “I’m at the stage in life where I get a lot of pleasure out of finding a cheap stock.”

With the new twist on the genomics X Prize, science will begin taking stock of healthy elderly people and study their secret to a long and healthy life.

History of the Archon Genomics X Prize
The $10 million Archon Genomics X PRIZE presented by Medco was originally launched in
October 2006, its purse underwritten by a generous donation from Dr. Stewart and Marilyn
Blusson, challenging scientists and engineers to sequence 100 whole human genomes in 10
days or less for less than $10,000 per genome at an unprecedented rate of accuracy.
In the following years, sequencing technology progressed through multiple platforms, carving
out niche research markets, each with its strengths and weaknesses. Teams originally registered
to compete were not yet able to meet the requirements.

In 2010, Grant Campany, who has 20 years of experience in the life sciences industry, signed on
as Senior Director for the Archon Genomics X PRIZE. A new approach to the competition was
developed by Mr. Campany, X PRIZE Foundation leadership and the competition’s Scientific
Advisory Board, including Dr. Venter, X PRIZE Foundation Scientific Advisory Co-Chair, and
one of the first to sequence the human genome in 2000 and create the first cell with a synthetic
genome in 2010. Recognizing that no single technology was serving medical/clinical
requirements, the Archon Genomics X PRIZE presented by Medco was revitalized to be more
inclusive, relevant and robust.

John Long is a geologist for Osborn Heirs, an oil and gas exploration and development company in San Antonio, Texas. When the earth started rumbling beneath is office he had a pretty good idea why. The answer he says is hydraulic fracturing or hydrofracking.

He says, “Anytime you take fluid or add fluid to the Earth in this particular area it seems like it leads to earthquakes.”

The epicenter of the rare 4.8 quake last week is in the middle of the Fashing, 56 oil field, an area, Long says that workers have been blasting with chemicals and water to break the rock deep below the surface to reach oil and gas deposits more easily. Then then those fracking fluids are reinjected into wells when they can longer be used.

This process has been ongoing in this area for about 50 years and Long believes fracking has caused earthquakes in the past, dating back to the 1970s.

The quake that was felt across San Antonio and its surrounding counties may have started when a sleeping fault was forced awake from hydrofracking along its spine.

Most of the concerns over hydrofracking, which is becoming a widely used technique for extracting natural gas and oil locked in rock formations have centered around water quality and contamination of the environment.

Hydraulic Fracturing Process in Marcellus Shale

But a few geologists are watching the increase in fracking activity to see if it corresponds with an increase in earthquake activity.

Democratic members of the House Energy & Commerce Committee have asked 14 oil and gas companies for details about their fracking techniques. In a recent letter (PDF) Reps. Henry Waxman, Ed Markey and Diana DeGette sent to Lisa Jackson, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, they asked the leading gas and oil companies to provide amounts of diesel fuel they used in hydrofracking.

According to the letter, hydrofracking is ongoing in 20 states and between 2005 and 2009 32.7 million gallons of diesel fuel were used as part of the injection process.

But so far no one is asking about drilling-induced earthquakes.

In late May, England stopped operation of its only hydrofracking project after two earthquakes near the site within an eight-week period. Dr. Brian Baptie, the seismology project leader for the British Geological Survey says, “It seems quite likely that they [the hydrofracking project and the earthquake] are related.”

And for the last few years Arkansas has been plagued by earthquake swarms. After two injection wells used to dispose of fracking fluid were shut down the earthquakes subsided.

Even Shane Khoury, the deputy director for the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission says preliminary reports showed evidence potentially linking injection activities with more than 1,000 mostly minor quakes in the region between October 2010 and March 2011.

Both Chesapeake Energy and Clarita Operating, the two companies with the injection wells maintain the earthquakes are from natural causes and not the result of drilling in the area.

The Center for Earthquake Research and Information recorded around 100 earthquakes in the seven days preceding the shutdown in early March, including a magnitude 4.7 quake on Feb. 27, which is the largest quake to hit the state in 35 years. Over a dozen quakes registered more than magnitude 3.0.

The week after the two wells went offline earthquake frequency dropped by half to 50. Once the wells were shut down, only two quakes have been magnitude 3.0 or greater. The majority were between magnitudes 1.2 and 2.8.

Scott Ausbrooks, a geo-hazards supervisor for the Arkansas Geological Survey, said the area’s seismic activity has dramatically declined since the injection well closures.

“We’re still having earthquakes, but that’s not unexpected,” he said. “We’ve definitely seen a marked decrease in the number of earthquakes since the shutdown, especially the larger ones.”

The Geology

Shale is the most abundant sedimentary rock. It is found in sedimentary basins worldwide. Shales that house significant quantities of natural gas are rich in organic material. They are usually found in mature petroleum sources where high heat and pressure have converted oil to natural gas. The rocks are sufficiently brittle and rigid enough to maintain open fractures. But the gas is locked in the rocks, which is why hydraulic fracturing is required to access the energy supply.

For the last ten years, natural gas production in shales has been growing rapidly. The Marcellus Shale is the largest natural formation believed to house up to half of the gas in North America. There are at least 30 major shale formations in the U.S. and many more nearby in Canada and Mexico.

Shale Gas Formations in the U.S., courtesy of Energy Information Administration

The Fayetteville Shale in Arkansas is an organically rich rock formation underlying the region. It also serves a major source of natural gas in Arkansas. Drillers free up the gas by using hydraulic fracturing or fracking, which requires injecting pressurized water to create fractures deep in the ground. The two injection wells at issue dispose of “frack” water when it can no longer be reused by injecting it into the ground.

Anti-hydraulic Fracturing Protest in Philadelphia, PA

Hydrofracking Safety

After the very rare 5.8 magnitude Virginia earthquake that shook the Atlantic coast in late August people began asking if fracking in Virginia was the cause. The short answer is no, because there was no such drilling going on within 100 miles of the Mineral, VA epicenter.

According to its Earthquakes Hazards Program, the U.S. Geological Survey says it is possible for human activity to cause earthquakes. It says, “Earthquakes induced by human activity have been documented in a few locations in the United States, Japan, and Canada. The cause was injection of fluids into deep wells for waste disposal and secondary recovery of oil, and the use of reservoirs for water supplies.”

After a series of similar small quakes near Dallas in 2009, Cliff Frohlich from Southern Methodist University worked as part of team that found a relation between seismic activity and hydraulic fracturing. Nothing conclusive points to the drilling as the cause of the quakes. If anything scientists are focused on the injection of frack water back into the ground as the most likely culprit.

Better understanding how geology of a region reacts to fluids pumped into formations is important especially as scientists figure out how to store carbon dioxide in a process called carbon sequestration.

Frolich says, “It’s important we understand why and under what circumstances fluid injection sometimes causes small, felt earthquakes so that we can minimize their effects.”

Jeffrey Smith has written the book on genetically modified foods (GMOs). Now he’s on a crusade to rid the U.S. of unhealthy food hybrids that not even animals choose to eat.

He tells the story of a farmer who was growing corn for his cows. The farmer grew non-GMO corn next to corn that had been modified by Monsanto, a large agriculture company. First, he grew the corn independently and then when it was ready for the big cow taste test he separated the corn and gave the cows a choice of which feed they wanted.

He says that without fail the cows chose the regular old non-GMO variety, AKA corn. He says the cows would approach the modified corn and sniff it before walking out of their way to reach the non-GMO corn trough.

Smith believes that if only humans had the sense of cows, we wouldn’t have any genetically modified ingredients in the food supply. He says, “It turns out there’s only nine food crops that are genetically engineered but they’re pretty widespread because soy and corn in particular are practically omnipresent in processed foods.”

Other countries have banned GMOs. Zambia, Venezuela India and all of Europe are GMO-free. But in the U.S. up to 70 percent of processed foods contain one or more genetically modified food ingredients.

What is a GMO?

A genetically modified organism is an organism that has been genetically altered using engineering techniques. In foods, the most common technique is called recombinant DNA technology, where molecules from different plant species are combined into a single hybrid with a new set of genes.

Some GMOs are transgenic, meaning that they have intact DNA segments or functional genes from another organism inserted into them.

Food expert Elisa Zied is the author of Nutrition at Your Fingertips. She says, “If a food is genetically modified it means that its genes are altered. DNA from one species is inserted into DNA of another species to create a unique genetic combination that doesn’t occur in nature.”

There are only a handful of crops that have been genetically modified. They include corn, canola, cotton, and soy. However, those are the plants whose derivatives are found in just about all processed foods.

In addition, recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) is commonly injected or fed to cows which then genetically alters the milk they produce. That hormone is often blamed in part for human obesity. After all, the hormone stimulates milk production in cows. Imagine what it does in people.

Food Fight

The big fight over GMO foods was fueled by a single Supreme Court ruling in 1980, which allowed companies to patent lifeforms for commercialization.

California company Calgene began selling the the first genetically modified food in 1994. It was the flavrSavr tomato, which was more resistant to rotting than its unaltered version. No special labeling was required and the FDA took a wait and see approach to new gene-modified foods.

Then came insect-resistant cotton and soybeans that could tolerate a potent chemical herbicide, both in 1996. Then thousands of patent applications poured forth starting a GMO frenzy.

According to the Grocery Manufacturers of America in the U.S. by 2009, genetically modified varieties dominated 89 percent of the planted area of soybeans, 83 percent of cotton, and 61 percent of corn.

Dr. Mae-Wan Ho is a geneticist and biophysicist who runs the Institute for Science in Society. She says, “Genetic engineering is inherently dangerous, because it greatly expands the scope for horizontal gene transfer and recombination, precisely the processes that create new viruses and bacteria that cause disease epidemics, and trigger cancer in cells.”

But well-meaning scientists invented genetically modified food crops as a means to common crop problems. GMO plants are resistant to disease and they can tolerate herbicides. They can also become more nutritious when vitamins are added.

However, most anti-GMO activists say the danger far outweighs the benefits and that a worldwide ban on GMO foods must be levied before it’s too late.

The U.K. Greenpeace website calls GMOs an utter disaster. It says, “The science of taking genes from one species and inserting them into another was supposed to be a giant leap forward, but instead they pose a serious threat to biodiversity and our own health.”

The debate rages on and for now GMO is making its way into our grocery stores and our stomachs.

Jeffrey Smith, anti-GMO activist and author of Seeds of Deception says, “I would say 70 to 80 percent of the food sold in the supermarket has some derivative of genetically modified food crops. In addition you have alfalfa, which is used as hay for animals, a little bit of zucchini, crooked neck squash and Hawaiian papaya. There’s also a genetically engineered drug for cows that increases milk supply, but also creates a hormone in the milk that many doctors and scientists think is quite unhealthy.”

No Laws Against GMO in the U.S.

Some consumer advocates estimate as many as 30,000 different products on grocery store shelves are contain genetically modified ingredients. That’s largely because many processed foods contain soy. And, half of North America’s soy crop is now genetically engineered.

Now, 93 percent of soy, canola oil and cottonseed, 86 percent of corn and 95 percent of sugar beets are genetically modified and they are base ingredients in most of the foods we eat and find in grocery stores.

Smith says just nine food crops have been approved for genetic modification but many others have been affected in the process.

Honey - Honey can be produced from GM crops. Some Canadian honey comes from bees collecting nectar from GM canola plants. This has shut down exports of Canadian honey to Europe.

Cotton - Resistant to certain pesticides – considered a food because the oil can be consumed. The introduction of genetically engineered cotton plants has had an unexpected effect on Chinese agriculture. The so-called Bt cotton plants that produce a chemical that kills the cotton bollworm have not only reduced the incidence of the pest in cotton fields, but also in neighboring fields of corn, soybeans, and other crops.

Rice - Genetically modified to contain high amounts of Vitamin A. And rice containing human genes is being grown in the U.S. but destined to treat infant diarrhea in the developing world.

Soybean - Genetically modified to be resistant to herbicides – Soy foods including, soy beverages, tofu, soy oil, soy flour, lecithin. Other products may include breads, pastries, snack foods, baked products, fried products, edible oil products and special purpose foods.

Tomatoes - Made for a longer shelf life and to prevent a substance that causes tomatoes to rot and degrade.

Corn - Resistant to certain pesticides – Corn oil, flour, sugar or syrup. May include snack foods, baked goods, fried foods, edible oil products, confectionery, special purpose foods, and soft drinks.

Sweet corn – genetically modified to produce its own insecticide. Officials from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have said that thousands of tonnes of genetically engineered sweetcorn have made their way into the human food supply chain, even though the GMO crop was approved only for use in animal feed. Monsanto says that about half of the U.S. sweetcorn acreage has been planted with genetically modified seeds.

Canola - Canola oil. May include edible oil products, fried foods, and baked products, snack foods.

Potatoes - (Atlantic, Russett Burbank, Russet Norkatah, and Shepody) – May include snack foods, processed potato products and other processed foods containing potatoes.

Flax - More and more food products contain flax oil and seed because of their excellent nutritional properties. No genetically modified flax is currently grown. An herbicide-resistant GM flax was introduced in 2001, but was soon taken off the market because European importers refused to buy it.

Papaya - The first virus resistant papayas were commercially grown in Hawaii in 1999. Transgenic papayas now cover about one thousand hectares, or three quarters of the total Hawaiian papaya crop. Monsanto, donated technology to Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore, for developing a papaya resistant to the ringspot virus in India.

Squash - (yellow crookneck) – Some zucchini and yellow crookneck squash are also GM but they are not popular with farmers.

Cotton seed oil – Cottonseed oil and linters. Products may include blended vegetable oils, fried foods, baked foods, snack foods, edible oil products, and smallgoods casings.

Meat - Meat and dairy products usually come from animals that have eaten GM feed.

Sugarbeets - May include any processed foods containing sugar.

Dairy Products – About 22 percent of cows in the U.S. are injected with recombinant (genetically modified) bovine growth hormone (rbGH).

Vitamins - Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) is often made from corn, vitamin E is usually made from soy. Vitamins A, B2, B6, and B12 may be derived from GMOs as well as vitamin D and vitamin K may have “carriers” derived from GM corn sources, such as starch, glucose, and maltodextrin.

How can the public make informed decisions about genetically modified (GM) foods when there is so little information about its safety? The short answer is labeling. But efforts thus far to pressure the FDA have fallen short.

According to the FDA and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), there are over 50 new plant varieties that have completed all of the federal requirements for commercialization and are waiting to go into production.

Just Say “No” to GMO Rap, by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

Every year about 10-15 people in the U.S. contract the plague. Just the sound of the world plague sounds ominous. But the illness is much less of a death sentence than it was during the Dark Ages. Now, a quick dose of antibiotics and the plagued person is right as rain.

After completing the first reconstruction of the plague’s genome, scientists have discovered why the Black Death is just an annoying bug to us now. They discovered that the disease itself hasn’t changed much in hundreds of years but we have.

After extracting DNA from dried blood in the teeth of Londoners who died from the Black Death which killed nearly half of 14th Century Europe, scientists reconstructed the genome using only skeletal remains.

Kirsten Bos, a PhD candidate at McMaster University in Ontario played dentist to the plague victims. The anthropologist who specializes in skeletal pathology and infectious disease in past human populations. She then removed 40 teeth from some of the 600 skeletons housed in the Museum of London, drilled into the pulp inside the teeth to extract a black powdery material, which was likely dried blood that contained DNA from the plague bacteria.

And when she was done, Bos returned the teeth, minus a little DNA, to the skeletons at the museum.

While studying the genome of the original Black Death bacteria and the strain commonly found today, the science team discovered astonishing similarity between them. The strain that ravaged Europe, killing 50 million Europeans between 1347 and 1351 and the plague strain today which sickens about 2,000 people each year are almost the same.

Scientists found only a few dozen changes among more than 4 million building blocks of DNA. And they found no discernible reason why the virulent pathogen of yore is so tame today.

Johannes Krause of the University of Tubingen in Germany says, “They’re almost identical. Even a mother and a child show more genetic differences than the ancient Black Death strain and modern plague strain.”

In the intervening years, the bacteria has changed very little while humans have changed a lot. Changes in medical treatment, sanitation and economics put people in a stronger position to fight the plague, which is generally passed from fleas on rodents to people or livestock.

The study authors say that the plague was so deadly because circumstances then were different not because the bacteria was particularly lethal.

Scientists also discovered that by being so devastating the plague essentially changed the human immune system. Study co-author Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University says, “It changed the human immune system, basically wiping out people who couldn’t deal with the disease and leaving the stronger to survive.”

Julian Parkhill, a disease genome expert at the UK Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute wasn’t involved in the Black Death genome project but has studied the bacteria. He says, “Getting an effectively complete genome sequence of a bacterium that lived nearly 700 years ago is incredibly exciting.”

Chris Chase, a veterinarian from South Dakota State University says this research has promise for understanding livestock diseases too. He says, “I could see that it could have big effects on cattle diseases that have been with us for a long time, pathogens like brucellosis and tuberculosis, and how they have changed under vaccine pressure from their ancestors. That can that help us to design new vaccines.”

This is the first time a science team has been able to reconstruct an pathogen of this size. Several years ago a team rebuilt the 1918 influenza virus contained in the lungs of frozen Eskimos. The genome of the plague bacterium is much larger than the flu virus.

Genome Sizes:
Black Death — 4,367,867 base pairs
1918 Flu — 582,970 base pairs
Human — 3,000,000,000 base pairs

Base Pair Basics

In molecular biology and genetics, the linking between two bases on opposite complementary DNA strands that are connected via hydrogen bonds is called a base pair (often abbreviated bp).

In basic Watson-Crick DNA base pairing, adenine (A) forms a base pair with thymine (T) and guanine (G) forms a base pair with cytosine (C). In RNA, thymine is replaced by uracil (U).

Some DNA- or RNA-binding enzymes can recognize specific base pairing patterns that identify particular regulatory regions of genes.

The size of an individual gene or an organism’s entire genome is often measured in base pairs because the structure of DNA is usually a double helix. Hence, the number of total base pairs is equal to the number of nucleotides in one of the strands (with the exception of non-coding single-stranded regions of telomeres).

Seven billion is a big number. It looks like this: 7,000,000,000. According to National Geographic magazine If you started counting out loud to 7 billion, it would take you 200 years. And, If you took 7 billion steps it would take you around the globe 133 times.

By the end of October, that’s how many people will inhabit Earth. This symbolic population milestone comes with a list of caveats and some opportunities as well. The lucky 7 billionth planetary citizen will likely be born in India or China, the leaders in global population.

We add 80 million people per year as water tables are falling, soil is eroding, glaciers are melting, and fish stocks are vanishing.

China is number one with 1.34 billion, followed closely by India with over 1.2 billion while the U.S. is a distant third with 312 million.

However, demographers at the United Nations Population Fund estimate that we are adding 219,000 people to the planet per day, which puts on target to reach 8 billion by 2025 and 10 billion people by 2083.

With all those people and a finite supply of space and resources, there are some challenges that lie ahead. Namely, poverty, access to food and water and a hope for a clean environment.

In Sub-Saharan Africa 900 million people suffer under the double burden of the world’s highest birthrates and the world’s deepest poverty. In 40 years that region will house almost 2 billion people, accounting for almost half of the projected growth, according to the New York-based Population Council.

Rural families flock to cities. Now 21 cities have populations larger than ten million. Over 335 cities have more than one million. And only 9 of those cities are in the U.S.

John Bongaarts, a spokesman for the research organization tells the Associated Press, “Most of that growth will be in Africa’s cities, and in those cities it will almost all be in slums where living conditions are horrible.”

The International Water Management Institute predicts that by 2025 1.8 billion people will live in places from severe water scarcity.

Many African nations are realizing that smaller families are more favorable for food production and access to water.

Lagos, Nigeria is about to overtake Cairo, Egypt as Africa’s biggest city. There, the former Nigerian health minister says reaching the 7 billion global population number should be a wake up call. He supports formal education for girls, getting teenage girls to stay in school and for women to control the number of children they have.

Babatunde Osotimehin says, “It’s an opportunity to bring the issues of population, women’s rights and family planning back to center stage.” He says there are over 215 million women worldwide who need family planning but don’t have access. He adds, “If we can change that, and these women can take charge of their lives, we’ll have a better world.”

But around the world, the challenges of a growing population are different. In Europe population numbers are barely growing and that’s only because of immigration, which in itself is highly controversial. The death rates in developed countries are outpacing birthrates. But shifting populations from around the world are offsetting those losses and creating steady population growth.

In India, there is a population imbalance. More than half of India’s population is under 35. This “youth dividend” could either be a boon to the Indian economy or it could zap their resources and slow the nation’s population growth, which by 2025 could be 1.6 billion people, making it the most populous country.

A population demographer in New Delhi says, “If the young population remains uneducated, unskilled and unemployable, then that dividend would be wasted.”

India also has a growing gender gap, where boys are outpacing girls in the latest census data. Indian families are showing a preference for sons and because of a surge in sex selection tests, many female fetuses are being aborted.

In China, after decades of forced family planning where urban families are allowed on child and rural families two children, the population growth has slowed rapidly. Perhaps too rapidly. Soon, China will have a shortage of young people to take care of a massive elderly population.

Like India, China has a gender gap. The United Nations says there are 43 million missing Chinese girls because parents restricted to one child opted to abort female fetuses.

In the western world France and the U.S. have the steadiest growth rates, both bolstered by immigration. Italy and Spain are both facing people shortages to help with a rapidly aging population. For the last consecutive four years more people have died in Italy than have been born.

But Lagos, Nigeria is clipping along at a six percent annual population growth. With 15 million and growing in the capital city, Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country with over 160 million. In Nigeria, 60 percent of the population is under 30 and needs education, training and access to healthcare.

Ndyanabangi Bannet, the U.N. Populations Fund’s representative in Nigeria says, “It is a plus if it is taken advantage of but if it is not harnessed, it can be a challenge, because imagine what hordes of unemployed young people can do.”

A recent article in the journal Nature suggests that with drastic changes in agriculture we can accommodate a bigger population. University of Minnesota ecologist Jonathan Foley says there are five key changes we need to make to boost food output and accommodate a bigger global population.
1. Stop farming in places like tropical rainforests, which have high ecological value and low food output
2. Improve crop yields in regions of Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe where farmland isn’t meeting its potential
3. Change farming practices to better manage water, nutrients, and chemicals
4. Shift diets away from meat
5. Stop wasting food (up to one-third of all food grown is wasted either in production, transport, or after purchase)

But with 696,000,0000 million able bodies under the age of 30 in India and Nigeria alone, we have the opportunity to change the world for the better before the next 3 billion arrive.

The voice of nature Sir David Attenborough is featured explaining Iceland musician Bjork’s latest venture — Biophilia. It’s part music album reflecting the connection points between sound, nature and technology. It’s an app for iPhones and iPads. It’s a creation generator for fans of Bjork’s music to tinker and play with sound to make an instrumental backdrop for the singer’s powerful a capella voice.

…but much of nature is hidden from us, that we can neither see nor touch. Like the one phenomenon that can be said to move us more than any other in our daily lives: sound. Sound, harnessed by human beings, delivered with generosity and emotion, is what we call music. And just as we use music to express parts of us that would otherwise be hidden, so too can we use technology to make visible much of nature’s invisible world. In Biophilia, you will experience how the three come together: nature, music, technology. Listen, learn, and create. — Sir David Attenborough, intro to Biophilia

This experiment is described as a multimedia exploration mother application, comprising a suite of original music, and interactive, educational and musical artifacts.

The journey begins deep in the cosmos where galaxies form. Fly through homemade constellations that connect to ten songs, each with a different app and activity. The theme song Cosmogony plays as users decide where to begin their experience.

Biophilia Project Moon App

In Moon, Björk explores the lunar cycles and the effect they have on Earth. The song is based on four different sequences played by four different harpists: Zeena Parkins, Shelley Burgon, Sara Cutler, Carol Emanuel.

About the song, Björk explains, “With each new moon we complete a cycle and are offered renewal — to take risks, to connect with other people, to love, to give. The symbolism of the moon as the realm of imagination, melancholy, and regeneration is expressed in the song.”

The sequences of the song repeat, reflecting the lunar cycles.

18-year-old programmer Max Weisel designed the Moon app for Biophilia. The song is constructed in 17/8 time measure, a far cry from the musical standard 4/4 time. For that reason the app features a musical sequencer with 17 musical moons. Change the position of each moon to change the note it produces. Anyone can create a new melody each time which can be played with Björk’s voice.

Biophilia Virus App

In Virus, Bjork tells the love story between a virus and a cell. And of course the virus loves the cell so much that it destroys it. An interactive game in the app challenges the user to halt the attack of the virus, although the result is that the song will stop if the player succeeds. In order to hear the rest of the song, the players will have to let the virus take its course. Taking some artistic license, the cell nuclei will also mouth along to the chorus.

In her song Thunderbolt the Icelandic impresario uses arpeggios, inspired by the time between when lightning is seen and thunder is heard. She also demanded the creation of new instruments in order to properly show the interdependence of nature, innovation and technology. When she debuted Thuderbolt at the Manchester International Festival in June, she used two Tesla coils as core instruments.

Biophilia Crystalline App

Cyrstalline is the lead single on the Biophilia album and it required a new instrument as well. For this Bjork created the gameleste, a hybrid created by combining a gamelan (gong) and a celesta (organ), giving the singer the option of playing the gong remotely like an organ from her iPad. Crystalline tells the story of structure.

Bjork says of the app, “Travel through tunnels and collect crystals to make your own structure of the song.” Each move changes the way the song plays as you pick crystals along the way. Different crystals have a different effect, making the song a living, evolving structure. At the end, each play sees the crystal aggregation they have made and can save and share their structure with others.

The song and app explore structural similarities in crystals and music, using them to express changes between closed and open systems and emotional states in an effort to unify the external and internal worlds.

Cosmogony embodies the harmony of musical and planetary systems. It’s a song inspired by wonder at the cosmos and the question of how the universe came to be. the app acts as the navigation tool to explore the universe of Biophilia in 3D audio by traveling with your fingertips through space.

Bjork Cosmogony Cover

The Cosmogony app also alerts users when new apps are available, by highlighting them within the constellations. It exists to expand on the cosmological and unifying aspects of the mother app function and draws on the lyrics of the song which center around creation myths from different cultures.

Laura Sterritt at Transchordian says, “In this sense, ‘mother’ app takes on an additional meaning by relating to the birth of the universe.”

With her Biophilia project Bjork is embracing technology, collaborating with Apple and National Geographic to break new ground merging music with science to create a new appreciation for both.

Bjork Rocks Science with Biophilia

She tells the Guardian she has a three-year educational tour planned, inspired by Biophilia. The paper reports that in addition to the album, the free mother app and its 10 accompanying song apps, the Icelandic singer is mapping out a string of eight six-week residencies, comprising live performances, scientific expositions, and children’s workshops on nature and music.

Growing up, Bjork says, “My rock star was David Attenborough”. Now the rockstar is helping to reinvent the rockstar, herself.

According to Corey Tate at Spacelab, “The Biophilia experience will have central themes of science, earth, and space; it seems to be at the forefront of the new interactive music cool, with the combination of digital music and interactive experiences on the rise.”

Through 2014, Bjork will visit eight cities around the world, spending a month and a half in each. She will do twice-weekly performances of the album and host scientific exhibitions and classes for students. She says, kids will be able to “try out the instruments on the iPad and write songs and take them home.”

Pee pressure, beer bottle-humping beetles and a wasabi-flavored fire alarm were among the top prizes awarded at Harvard University’s 21st Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, a more laid back version of the Nobel Prize ceremony. Nobel Prize laureates present the Ig Nobels to scientists and philosophers who have made legitimate contributions toward the sillier side of science.

Top honors in literature went to a researcher who 15 years ago wrote a paper about procrastination. Waiting a ridiculous amount of time before honoring the man is indicative of the Ig Nobel prizes. His theory holds that even the best procrastinator can successfully execute a complex task if he believes that he is working on it to avoid an even greater task.

Stanford University philosophy professor John Perry says, “To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that’s even more important.”

A Japanese team decided that during an emergency people would much rather be awoken or alerted using a fire alarm that produces the horseradishy smell of wasabi rather than a blaring sound. They won the Ig Nobel Chemistry prize for determining the correct and patent-pending density for airborne wasabi, a feat fit for a sushi restaurateur.

A group from the beer-swilling nations of Australia, Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. stumbled upon a species of beetle that is convinced it can mate with beer bottles. And not just a particular brand either.

Male Jewel Beetle Mates with Stubbies

Another Ig Nobel prize went to an international team from Europe, the U.S. and Australia who tested the idea that people with an overwhelming need to urinate make decisions differently. During their full-blattered research they discovered that those in greatest need to relieve themselves actually exhibited the same level of clarity as a drunk person. One of the papers is titled “Inhibitory Spillover.” (PDF) Just don’t hold it and drive.

Finally, the Math prize went to a group of people predicting the Apocolypse, including Dorothy Martin of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim of KOREA (who predicted the world would end in 1992), Credonia Mwerinde of UGANDA (who predicted the world would end in 1999), and Harold Camping of the USA (who predicted the world would end on September 6, 1994 and later predicted that the world will end again on October 21, 2011). They won the prize “for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.”

The Nobel laureates who physically handed the Ig Nobel Prizes to the new winners:

Dudley Herschbach (chemistry, 1986)
Rich Roberts (physiology or medicine, 1993)
Roy Glauber (physics, 2005)
Eric Maskin (economics, 2007)
Peter Diamond (economics, 2010)
Louis Ignarro, (physiology or medicine, 1998)

Cover Photo: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania and winner of the Ig Nobel Peace Prize for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank.

A pioneering researcher was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Monday, three days after dying of pancreatic cancer without ever knowing he was about to be honored for his immune system work that he had used to prolong his own life.

Ralph Steinman, 1943-2011

Cell biologist Ralph Steinman died just three days before he won the coveted science prize. When the announcement was made this morning, the committee held an emergency meeting since Nobel Prizes are given to living scientists. But they decided to award the prize to Dr. Steinman despite his untimely death because the prize was made in good faith while he was still alive. Only the announcement followed his death.

He shares half of the prize with Bruce Beutler who holds joint appointments at University of Texas Southwestern and at University of California San Diego Scripps Research Institute and with Jules Hoffman, a French researcher who is also the form head of the French National Academy of Sciences.

The Canadian-born Steinman made his mark in 1973 when he discovered a new type of cell called the dendritic cell that has a unique ability to activate immune cells called T-cells.

Dendritic Cell, discovered by Nobel Prize winner Ralph Steinman

Both Drs. Beutler and Hoffman made their contributions in the late 1990s. First, Hoffman studied how fruit flies fight infection in 1996. Two years later Beutler discovered similar findings in mice, demonstrating that flies and mammals activate innate immunity in similar ways when attacked by germs.

Gerold Schuler, head of the department of dermatology at the University Hospital Erlangen in Germany and Steinman’s former post-doc, told The Scientist magazine that Steinman’s work is worthy of the Nobel Prize. He says Steinman’s advances, “are now crucial to understanding and fighting diseases, notably for designing better vaccines.”

Mouse geneticist Alexander Poltorak at Tufts University says the work that Beutler does is a rare example of exploratory research. While looking for cell receptors for a bacterial byproduct that produces septic shock, Beutler and his team observed that mice with a mutation in a particular gene were resistant to septic shock, a potentially fatal over-stimulation of the immune system.

That gene happened to be quite similar to the Toll gene which Hoffman had discovered in fruit flies a couple years before.

Poltorak, who was the lead author on Beutler’s groundbreaking 1998 Science paper says, “We didn’t have any hypothesis, and that’s the beauty of it.”

Since then, scientists have reported about a dozen discoveries of various Toll-like receptors in humans and mice, each of which recognizes certain types of microbial molecules.

This research is important because mutations in any of these receptors can increase the risk of infections or chronic inflammatory diseases like rheumatoid arthritis.

It would be so much easier to replay dreams, record thoughts and communicate without speaking. But this type of futuristic technology was always thought to be a dream of a far away future or the plot of a science fiction movie.

Hollywood Movie clip (L), fMRI image of same clip (R)

Researchers at University of California Berkeley have figured out how to scan the brain and produce blurry images based on thought patterns. Just as a television image is comprised of pixels, these neuroscientists have discovered that images that begin as thoughts in the brain are composed of 3-D voxels.

The scanning equipment and the playback are definitely in their infancy with each producing crude renditions of what’s actually happening. But it is a start. Even blurry, somewhat confusing images of thoughts can be useful for interpreting dreams or filling in forgotten thoughts or memories.

But doctors have a much more practical use in mind — helping stroke patients and others who can’t communicate by speaking.

Routine use of this technology is decades away. But a brain cap captured the very first image that corresponded to a thought just a couple of years ago. And now we have full pictures of blurry images with a pretty good level of accuracy. With thoughtful focus on this area of neuroscience improving resolution and voxel quality could be just a matter of someone dreaming a little bigger.

Personally, I’d like to set my DVR to record my dreams so I could watch them back each morning. Wouldn’t you?

Here’s the experiment the Berkeley team conducted by reconstructing brain images from YouTube videos and movie trailers.

It may be the fastest invasion of a slow-moving creature but people in Miami-Dade County are taking care not to mess with the new snail in town.

The east African land snail is making a home in south Florida and causing all sorts of problems. They reproduce at an exponential rate and grow fast. They slime everything they touch, destroy most plants and even eat the stucco off homes to build up their shells.

But the biggest worry for public officials is the health problems the snails pose. They come fully loaded with worms that can pass to humans by just making skin contact with the slow-moving invaders. The worms can get into the brain and cause a type of meningitis that currently has no cure.

So if you are in the south Florida area, steer clear of giant land snails and if you must touch one, use rubber gloves to protect yourself from a serious illness.

Officials are trying to figure out what will best get rid of the invasive pest.

Richard Gaskalla, director of plant industry at the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services says, “It’s us against the snails.”

Here’s what you should know about these snails.

They grow to 10 inches long and four inches wide and are considered one of the most damaging land snails in the world. They eat at least 500 species of plants, lay about 1,200 eggs a year, and can carry a strain of non-fatal meningitis. They are prolific breeders and contain both female and male reproductive organs. And the little house-eating buggers can live as long as nine years.

The outbreak started on September 16, when two sisters waved down a fruit fly inspector conducting a routine check in their neighborhood. They told him that the snails were everywhere. Since local and national agriculture inspectors were alerted ten days ago they have removed over 1,000 snails from a one-square-mile area of Coral Gables.

Some older residents remember the last time there was a giant snail invasion in Miami. It was 1966. After a boy brought three snails back from a trip to Hawaii, his grandmother released them in her garden. It took ten years and $1 million to eradicate the slimy pest and is the only known giant African snail eradication program on record.

Because they are so destructive, the snails are allowed into the U.S. only with special permits and for scientific research.

For years, scientists have been saying that some of the biggest discoveries in science will come from non-scientists. And now that prediction is showing promise as two teams of online video game players have helped solve the structure for an important enzyme found in the HIV virus.

After medical researchers had repeatedly failed to piece together the structure of a class of enzymes called retroviral proteases, they turned to the biology video game Foldit, an online puzzle that has users score points by folding proteins and ultimately helping science make key advances like this. The protease enzyme plays a critical role in how the AIDS virus matures and multiplies.

In the hunt for AIDS drugs and a vaccine, scientists are focused on blocking these enzymes but until now they have been stuck, trying to figure out what the molecule looks like.

Foldit was created in 2008 by computer scientists at the University of Washington Center for Game Science in collaboration with biochemist David Baker’s lab.

In the last three years the game has evolved. To piece together the retrovirus enzyme structure, Seth Cooper, the game’s co-founder says, “Gamers used a new alignment Tool for the first time to copy parts of known molecules and test their fit in an incomplete model.”

The puzzle they were working on was called “Unsolved Monkey Virus Protein” and within three weeks two teams had solved the problem, which Dr. Baker then took from the 3-D computer world into the real world.

For the monkey virus problem, Foldit players began with a scientific rough draft of the protease enzyme. During three weeks of play, hundreds of teams and individuals generated over a million structure predictions. And the solution, found by the winning team in 10 days, is nearly perfect. It gives Baker and his colleagues all the information they needed to pinpoint the structure down to almost the last atom.

Postdoctoral researcher Firas Khatib says, “It’s the power of citizen science.”

Before Foldit launched, Dr. Baker’s lab created a program called Rosetta@home which allowed computers to run simulated protein folding while the machines sat idle. It worked much like the SETI@home screensaver. Instead of searching for extra terrestrial signals from space it ran quick simulations of protein folding. It used distributed processing to crunch massive amounts of data but it was all automated. The user could just sit back and watch the process unfold.

Foldit came into being after some Rosetta users suggested that the computer was making wrong assumptions because it could only follow a logical path. And the solutions to these complex proteins probably required some intuition and exploration, two things a computer can’t stomach.

Once Dr. Baker’s lab combined the power of its artificial intelligence with human intelligence he stumbled on a winning combination that could lead to a cure for HIV and other diseases.

Foldit Contenders Group and Foldit Void Crushers Group are the two teams that received co-authorship on the protease structure paper which was just published in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.

A member from the Foldit Contenders named “Mimi” says, “It is a team thing. Everybody contributes.”

And that’s just the motivation Dr. Baker is using to solve the big biological questions.

He says, “Competitive social interaction is a very strong driving force.”

Video all about Foldit (By the end you’ll want to sign up. It’s infectious.)

NASA says there could be a spectacular show on Friday if someone spots the re-entry of an old satellite. But that is a big if. The space agency is down-playing any danger associated with a 20-year-old, school-bus-sized piece of space junk crashing into a populated area.

But there is still a chance that someone will spot one of the 26 pieces NASA estimates will survive atmospheric re-entry and land somewhere between northern Canada and southern South America. The agency puts those odds at one in 3,200. So not great but not impossible either.

The reason for such uncertainty of the return of the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite is twofold. Sun and rockets. With the solar cycle heating up things are moving faster in space, including orbiting satellites. Solar activity is making it difficult for NASA to pin point the exact time and location of UARS falling to Earth.

Because the satellite was launched on space shuttle Discovery in 1991 it doesn’t have fuel left to push the thrusters to help NASA guide falling debris like this away from people.

Those two factors are making careful prediction of the de-orbiting satellite more difficult. But NASA is hopeful that the pieces will land in the ocean or in desert areas.

NASA is working closely with the Air Force’s Joint Space Operations Center to pinpoint the re-entry locations. By the time the satellite is getting ready to drop into Earth’s atmosphere scientists should have a better picture what to expect. NASA estimates the debris footprint will be about 500 miles long.

Mark Matney from NASA’s orbital debris program says the motion of the satellite is unpredictable but he believes it will come to Earth sometime on Friday. He says, “It’s coming in a little faster than we anticipated.” And since it is an uncontrolled re-entry there is still a lot of uncertainty.

NASA and the joint space operation center will give public updates daily until Friday when updates will come 12, 6 and 2 hours before impact.

Medium-sized pieces of space debris fall to Earth about once a week, generally landing in the ocean. But some of the pieces of this satellite could weigh up to 300 pounds and pack quite a punch if they hit solid ground.

NASA reminds people who find chunks of the satellite in the next few days or weeks to call local law enforcement to report them. After all the burned up satellite is government property. So don’t try to sell it on eBay.

Starting in a couple of years you may be able to let out a big sigh of relief that medical diagnostics are moving away from needles and other invasive ways of figuring out what’s going on in the human body.

New technology that takes detailed readings from our breath are already being tested to determine whether an infection is viral, fungal or bacterial. Heart and cancer patients are also benefiting from such advances.

Even with the proliferation of medical technology in the last decade most patients still have to go to unwieldy machines or send tissue samples collected to labs with similar unwieldy machines. But lab-on-a-chip novel technologies are reducing the size of medical equipment while improving the ability to diagnose with greater accuracy.

In just a few years the advances will make most of the diagnostic equipment handheld. A doctor may have you blow into what looks like a large remote control and then all sorts of information can be gathered by the breath you exhale.

A new non-invasive disease detection facility, developed by the University of Leicester, has just been unveiled.

Students at Leicester University teamed up with researchers from emergency medicine, physics and astronomy, engineering, IT services – among others – to pool their knowledge and resources and create the Star Trek inspired unit.

The new facility is designed to detect the “sight, smell and feel” of disease without the use of invasive probes, blood tests, or other time-consuming and uncomfortable procedures.

Scientists from different disciplines worked closely with new technologies and figured out how to use them to examine patients. Their goal was to combine existing diagnostic tools to create a futuristic hospital bed where everything comes to the patient.

Leicester Royal Infirmary's Star Trek Inspired Sick Bay, courtesy of UKPA

The team from the Chemistry department focused on analyzing a patient’s breath.

Budding astronomers used imaging technology from the Mars rover to search for signs of disease on the surface of a patient’s body.

A third group peered inside the patient to measure blood flow and oxygenation using engineers and information technology monitors.

Chemistry Professor Paul Monks says that all these different projects were working independently when he and others had a eureka moment, realizing they could combine their efforts.

Dr. Tim Coats, who is a professor of medicine at the university and the head of the accident and emergency department at Leicester’s Royal Infirmary says the sci-fi inspired sick bay will be used to to diagnose a wide range of diseases from sepsis to bacterial infections and even some cancers.

He says, “Ultimately in the longer term we would aim to work towards something like the ‘tricorder’ device seen in futuristic science series like Star Trek. What we are developing so far is more like a first attempt at the medical bed in the sci-fi series.”

Already talking to commercial partners, the tricorder team is hoping to move this type of service into hospitals as well as have it available for emergency services in ambulances.

Leicester space scientist Mark Sims co-led the project. He says that years ago doctors would walk up and down the hallways and sniff out disease. Now there are tools to do the sniffing. This project is aiming to connect those technological advances more easily. He says, “Ten years from now it could be routine for diagnostic technology to be combined in this way.”

But for now, it’s another sample of science fiction breathing life into science fact.

When Hurricane Irene began tracking toward New York City, officials feared the worst. In a city full of skyscrapers a hurricane can become a bigger instrument of destruction. Flying glass as windows blow out create dangerous projectiles littering the streets. And the space between highrise buildings which turn into wind tunnels on a windy day can spin up debris that does much more damage.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen in New York. This time. But it did happen further north in Montreal, Quebec. By the time Irene crossed the Canadian border she was downgraded to a post-tropical storm. But she still blew into the French-speaking city with powerful winds.

And there, 300 miles north of New York and with much weaker winds, skyscraper windows blew out and fell to the street. In one building windows on the sixth and 19th floors crashed to the ground. Because it was raining so hard and people were warned to stay indoors, no one was injured. But on a regular day, this heavily trafficked street would have been bustling with pedestrians.

When the National Hurricane Center measures wind speeds for a hurricane, they are the speeds at ground level. In a vertical city like New York, those speeds increase rapidly with altitude. For example, wind speed of 60 miles per hour turn into 90 mile per hour winds on the 25th floor and get stronger the higher you go.

Hurricane Irene hit New York City with winds clocked about 60 miles per hour, too slow to even be considered a hurricane. Remember, those are sustained winds. Gusts blew much higher in short bursts.

Tropical Storm Irene didn’t blow windows from skyscrapers in New York because the storm was weaker than predicted when it hit the Big Apple. But meteorologists recognized her damaging potential.

According to CNN meteorologist and severe weather expert Chad Myers Irene’s pressure was still so low when it reached New York that it still had the necessary energy to do some real damage. He says it was just luck that avoided a glass-shattering disaster.

Even though Irene won’t remembered for her winds, tall buildings in hurricane zones generally come built with windows that can withstand pressure and winds associated with a Category 3 hurricane. But a Category 3 on the ground can be a Category 5 a few hundred feet up.

Tropical Storm Irene entered Manhattan with sustained winds of 60 mph. That means those same winds were 110 mph on the 100th floor of a building.

Cover photo of Houston following Hurricane Ike

According to a new study it could take 1,200 years, 300,000 researchers and $364 billion to identify and catalog all the species on Earth.

New research in the online journal PLoS Biology, a publication of the Public Library of Science uses a new way of calculating just how many plants and animals inhabit Earth. So far of the estimated 8.8 million we have discovered just 1.9 million.

Recent discoveries have been small and weird. They include a psychedelic frogfish, a dime-sized lizard and a blind, hairy lobster found on the ocean floor near Antarctica. Some scientists are actively searching for species to fill in the big gaps on the species pyramid. Others just happen across new species.

Describing the wild world in which we live biologist and study co-author Boris Worm from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia says, “We are fairly ignorant of the complexity and colorfulness of this amazing planet.”

Scientists from the U.S. and Canada who are part of the Census of Marine Life released the study this week. It found the previous estimate of global species a bit too difficult to pin down. The range of 3 million to 100 million didn’t sit well and researchers have been trying to narrow the number.

Using a new computer modeling method Dr. Worm and Camilo Mora from the University of Hawaii now believe the number to be somewhere between 7.5 million and 10.1 million. Even with the more improved method for counting the study admits it could be off by as much as 1.3 million.

In 1758 Carl Linnaeus built the system that is still used today to name, describe and catalog species. In the 253 years since, about 1.25 million species — roughly 1 million on land and 250,000 in the oceans — have been described and entered into central databases. But there are about 700,000 more species that have yet to reach the central databases. They are sitting in limbo between discovery and classification, many waiting patiently in backroom of major museums like the Smithsonian.

Based on the new way of estimating the number of species on Earth, the biologists estimate there are 6.5 million species found on land and 2.2 million or 25 percent living in the ocean depths. They suggest that about 86 percent of all species on land and 91 percent of those in the seas have yet to be discovered, described and catalogued.

According to the Associated Press, evolutionary biologist Blair Hedges from Penn State University says the new study isn’t good enough and could be off by millions. He thinks there are many tiny species lurking in corners of the unexplored Earth. And he should know. In 2001 while rooting around in dead leaves in the Dominican Republic in 2001 he found the world’s smallest lizard, a half-inch long Caribbean gecko. And then in 2008 he discovered a four-inch snake in Barbados that lays a very long egg.

Who Cares?

Scientists don’t want to classify every living creature on Earth just for the sake of saying they did it. They are trying to identify new species which could potentially have benefits for humans, ranging from medicine to climate adaptation.

Famed biologist E.O. Wilson says undiscovered species need to be found before they disappear taking possible cures with them. He says, “We won’t know the benefits to humanity from these species, which potentially are enormous.”

In order to advance medical and other science he says we need to know what’s in the environment.

Dr. Mora says, “Many species may vanish before we even know of their existence, of their unique niche and function in ecosystems, and of their potential contribution to improved human well-being.”

Lord Robert May, a past president of the British Royal Society praised the new system for estimating species numbers. He says, “It is a remarkable testament to humanity’s narcissism that we know the number of books in the U.S. Library of Congress on 1 February 2011 was 22,194,656, but cannot tell you — to within an order-of-magnitude — how many distinct species of plants and animals we share our world with.”

But fledgling projects like the Census of Marine Life and the Encyclopedia of Life are trying to speed the process given that human activity appears to be hastening the demise of habitats that could contain undiscovered species.

If the 8.8 million number is right, Erick Mata says, “Those are brutal numbers.” The executive director for the Encyclopedia of Life says even with an accelerated rate of discovery, “We could spend the next 400-500 years trying to document the species that actually inhabit our planet.”

Do Something that Counts

The International Union for Conservation of Nature monitors 59,508 species and classifies 19,625 as somehow threatened. Right now this is the most sophisticated system for monitoring known species and it is only looking at about one percent of the entire list.

That’s where citizen scientists come in. Scientists believe that some of the yet-to-be-discovered species could be found in our own backyards.

What will you do to help find, describe and catalog species that scientists discover?

The growing garbage problem may have a new solution–fungus that eats plastic. For years mounting mounds of plastic have been choking landfills and polluting the ocean. Now an annual undergraduate trip to the rain forest may have found a solution to the plastic problem.

Unleashing creativity in science sometimes has amazing results. That’s what a group of Yale students discovered after they took a trip to the Amazon rainforest in search of fungus that could hold medical or scientific promise. Upon their return they tested the fungus to see if they could detect any biological activity.

One undergrad started the project in 2010 and then graduated. Another 2011 participant in the Yale Rainforest Expedition and Laboratory course picked up where she left off and that led to the isolation and discovery of an enzyme in a fungus that helps degrade polyurethane and turns it back into carbon.

Dr. Scott Strobel says, “The average third grader asks all kinds of great questions; they probe, poke and manipulate. Then somewhere around fourth grade we drive the interest in science right out of these kids. People conclude they can’t do science, but in reality they have been doing science all their lives.”

He teamed up with Howard Hughes Medical Institute to create the class and create opportunities for students to apply what they learn in the classroom to the real world. HHMI gave a $1 million grant to fund the program for four years.

Yale biochemist Kaury Kucera is a post doctorate researcher who co-leads the annual rainforest trek. She told the New Haven Register, “We take 15 undergraduates into the Ecuadorean rain forest and collect plant samples.”

Each year, students collect organisms called endophytes found in rainforest plants and then take them back to New Haven to test them for biological activity. The whole program is student-generated so they decide what they want to study. Once back in the lab, students analyze the endophytes that show biological activity to see whether they might have any medical or other practical use.

In 2008 Pria Anand was part of the trip to Ecuador where she gathered plants and later extracted part of a fungus to test its affect on plastic. Her goal was to help reduce the piles that are swelling in landfills, also known as bioremediation. She graduated in 2010 before getting the results she wanted.

Jeffrey Huang in the same class was studying which endophytes were most effective at breaking down chemical bonds.

This year, Jonathan Russell tested one of Huang’s best endophytes on Anand’s bioremdiation task. From there Russell focused on locating the enzyme in the fungus that is most effective on breaking down plastic.

All three undergrads are listed as lead authors on the forthcoming paper Biodegradation of Polyester Polyurethane by Endophytic Fungi in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

This is not the first time a particular agent has broken down polyurethane. But this enzyme can operate in an oxygen-free zone, such as those found underground in landfills.

Since the discovery students in another class are looking at different endophytes to see which if any will be most effective at dissolving polystyrene or styrofoam, one substance that is designed to stick around indefinitely.

Two different Yale students in the 2009 Rainforest Expedition class have had other fungal breakthroughs which could lead to a new “myco-diesel” biofuel and another which could protect agricultural farms from pathogens.

Breaking Down the Degradation of Common Items in Landfills

Decomposition Timeline, from Dungeness National Wildlife Refuge, WA, photo by: Hadley Maris

*Undergraduates at Yale are working to find enzymes in rainforest fungus to reduce the decomposition timeline

Ultrathin, flexible circuit boards that attach to the skin could replace conventional wired medical equipment, especially when it comes to monitoring vital signs.

New electronic tattoos, also known as epidermal electronics are taking state-of-the-art wireless medical technology and sticking it to a patients’ skin, much in the same way a temporary tattoo is applied.

University of Illinois researcher John Rogers is co-author of the paper which appears in the current issue of Science. He shows how scientists created s-shaped circuits which can bend and flex with the elasticity of skin.

The thin-skinned electronic medical device can last up to two weeks and in the short term could replace bulky devices that monitor a patient’s heart rate, blood pressure, brain activity or other vital signs.

In preliminary tests if the tattoo is attached to a video game player’s throat, muscle contractions in the neck can be translated to allow limited vocabulary in controlling the movement in the game. This can also be used to help people with disorders of the larynx speak again.

Not everyone is hailing this breakthrough in electronics. Some conservative Christian groups are terrified that this scientific advance could also be interpreted as the Mark of the Beast described in the Bible, signaling the end of days.

And at least one bioethicist is already concerned that while voluntary monitoring of someone’s condition is a good use of this technology, forcing another person to wear an electronic tattoo to see if they are taking their medication or present a security risk is another story altogether.

Northwestern University civil and environmental engineering professor Yongang Huang explains the interest in combining flexible electronics with the human body. He’s and Dr. Rogers have been working on this technology for six years.

Already heralded as the biggest step in cancer research in decades, a new cancer treatment is forcing conservative doctors and scientists to use words like, “Amazing.”

It’s premature to call this new treatment a cure since it has only been tried in three patients, all of whom have experienced either full remission or seen a significant drop in the number of cancer cells.

The experimental treatment boosts a leukemia patient’s own immune system by turning infection-fighting T-cells into cancer cell serial killers.

The process involves taking the patient’s own blood, removing the T-cells and replacing them with a harmless, modified version of the HIV virus. Then the genetically engineered treatment is infused back into the patient where the army of cancer fighters are unleashed on cancer tumors and cells as they form.

For two weeks after the treatment was given to the patients there was no reaction. Then the patients became violently ill, which meant the treatment was working. Reporting the worst flu symptoms of their lives, the patients were flushing all the cancer out of their bodies and it made them sick.

After that episode, two patients remain cancer free one year post-treatment and the third is much improved. All three patients had late-stage leukemia with few other treatment options.

Doctors are cautiously optimistic. They don’t know how long the genetically engineered cells will remain in the body or if the cancer will return after a certain period of time. But already this treatment is being explored to fight pancreatic, brain and other cancers to see if it has the same results.

Dr. Carl June and a research team at University of Pennsylvania discuss new leukemia cancer treatment using modified HIV virus. (5:26)

Many doctors aren’t prescribing biotech company Dendreon’s experimental prostate cancer drug. The company’s stock shares dropped sharply after it announced it was firing workers and lowering its revenue forecast for the year. But the drug is hailed as a powerful, yet complicated way to fight cancer.

Two million men live with prostate cancer. Each year another 217,000 men are diagnosed and for 100,000 of them, it is in late stage and spreading. For them, there is little treatment hope. Or was until Provenge came along last year.

It works by teaching the cancer patient’s own immune system to attack tumors. Provenge has been lauded as an extremely innovative drug and Dendreon was hailed known as the darling of biotech companies.

Provenge is the first FDA approved prostate cancer immunotherapy treatment. Because prostate cancer cells and hide from or trick immune system T cells, Dendreon has created a unique personalized therapy that uses the patient’s own natural defenses combined with a unique protein to help immune cells find the cancer cells.

“For years scientists have been attempting to achieve an elusive goal — to stimulate the body’s immune system against cancer.” Dave Urdal, Chief Scientific Officer, Dendreon

Doctors seem to be getting sticker shock because Provenge costs $93,000 and until last month Medicare and Medicaid weren’t reimbursing for it.

According to information on the Provenge website, the drug vaccine teaches the immune system to attack cancer like it would any other non-lethal infection.

The company says it is moving into a big marketing push to get doctors in private practice to begin prescribing the expensive but effective drug. The median life expansion for men using Provenge is 4.1 months. It may not seem like a long survival time but many patients live much longer.

Over 177 million people in 34 states are talking about the heat dome that is parked over one million square miles of the U.S. and sending temperatures and heat indices into dangerous triple digit territory.

A heat dome is a common summertime occurrence when heating on land occurs faster than over the ocean. This year, drought conditions in Texas and Oklahoma created the perfect conditions for rapid heating and a large dome began forming a few weeks ago. The Jet Stream in the upper atmosphere which usually pushes these high pressure systems across the country within a few days has been stuck up north in Canada, unable to move the growing lid of heat.

Eli Jacks at the National Weather Service tells the Associated Press, “When a high pressure system develops in the upper atmosphere, the air below it sinks and compresses because there’s more weight on top, causing temperatures in the lower atmosphere to heat up.” He adds, “The dome of high pressure also pushes the jet stream and its drier, cooler air, farther north — it’s now well into Canada — while hot, humid air from the Gulf of Mexico circulates clockwise around the dome, traveling farther inland than normal.”

Underneath the lid, people from Kansas to Maine are shriveling as record temperatures fall like dominoes. To add insult to sweaty injury high humidity and almost no wind are making temperatures feel far hotter than they actually are. And on top of all of that misery, there is little relief at night. In fact, since the dome began super-heating the upper mid section of the country, 98 cities set record high nighttime temperatures in the last week while over 1,000 new high temps have been recorded.

Places like Dallas have been trapped under the immobilized high pressure system. There temperatures have been consistently over 100 degrees for 18 days. In Oklahoma City, residents have had only two days this month when temperatures didn’t reach 100. On those days they were 97 and 99.

A few days ago the stagnant mass of hot air began to slowly edge its way east, heating up urban areas in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and Washington D.C. where high air-conditioner use could create power problems. Already Detroit has begun implementing rolling brown outs.

Over 20 people have been killed by the excessive heat while hundreds have been hospitalized or treated for heat wave related illnesses.

According to NOAA’s State of the Climate report, before this heat wave the first half of 2011 ranked as the 11th warmest January to June period on record. June was the 7th warmest June on record and the 316th consecutive month above the 20th Century average temperature. The last time the average monthly temperature dipped below the 20th Century average was in February 1985.

Extended forecasts show this heat dome shrinking to its northeastern corner offshore of New England by mid next week but then another high pressure system begins to reform in the west, possibly creating a repeat of this sticky situation.

Gender stereotypes about math and science abound. Boys are known for performing better in math and science while girls tend to excel in history and language arts. Though the U.S. still leads the world in scientific discovery and vision, another stereotype is that the U.S. education system is failing students and allowing other countries to out compete citizens for global jobs.

The results of the six-month long Google Science Fair blew both of those stereotypes right out of the water. Three girls, all from the U.S. won the first annual science competition. They beat out 10,000 other students from 90 countries, demonstrating female and U.S. prominence in science.

But perhaps more notable than breaking stereotypes is the potential real science that these young women are doing. One has discovered a way to make ovarian cancer treatments more effective. Another wants to revise the Clean Air Act using her model, quantifying air pollution among asthmatics. And the third winning project could lead to a barbeque meat marinade that reduces carcinogens.

Shree Bose, Age 17

When not in the cancer lab, Bose enjoys a good cattle drive near her home of Fort Worth, Texas.

For her ground-breaking science project, she won $50,000 from Google as well as a trip to the Galapagos Islands on the National Geographic Discovery research ship. She will also have an opportunity to have a once in a lifetime internship experience at CERN, the nuclear physics lab in Switzerland.

Alice Bell, one of the judges for the Google Science Fair and a writer for the UK paper The Guardian says that the teens she met through the judging process are not the public. She says, “It is perhaps best to think of schoolchildren as holding a liminal position with respect to science and the rest of society. They are not quite inside the scientific community or squarely outside it either. They are both science and ‘the public’, and they are neither of these things, yet. Their lives could go in a range of directions.”

One thing is for sure, after winning this new scientific accolade, none of these girls lives will ever be the same.

Naomi Shaw, Age 16

In her project she quotes a common saying among environmentalists, “The genetic make-up is like loading a gun. The environmental pollutants represent the trigger!”

Shah noticed that doctors are quick to prescribe steroids and other inhalers, instead of addressing the quality of the air asthma sufferers are breathing. She learned that’s because nobody had figured out how much air pollution affects lung function. So she did.

Online environmental magazine Grist calls Shah awesome, not because she is a budding scientist but because she “let’s her green flag fly.” Shah describes herself as an environmentalist as well as an objective scientist in training.

She says, “Air quality doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves, and should be one of the top sustainability goals for the coming future.”

Shah took first place at the Intel Science Fair earlier this year. Since then she has sent President Obama and Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Lisa Jackson a letter asking for her mathematical model to be used to revise the Clean Air Act.

Lauren Hodge, Age 14

She found that lemon juice and brown sugar cut the level of carcinogens sharply, while soy sauce increased them.

Shah and Hodge each received $25000 scholarships and internships at Google and LEGO.

Girl power ruled the day at the first Google Science Fair.

Bose is proud of that fact. She told the New York Times, “Personally I think that’s amazing, because throughout my entire life, I’ve heard science is a field where men go into.” She added, “It just starts to show you that women are stepping up in science, and I’m excited that I was able to represent maybe just a little bit of that.”

Google science fair judge Vint Cerf was secretly pleased by the female sweep in all three age groups. Of the 15 finalists, there were 9 boys and 6 girls.

Though the competition was completely gender neutral, he says, “I was secretly very pleased to see that happen. This is just a reminder that women are fully capable of doing same or better quality work than men can.”

Psychologists have learned that the Internet is becoming a primary form of transactive memory, meaning the information is external or stored outside of the person.

For some it is becoming far easier to reach for a keyboard than to try to extract a piece of information from the brain. Google and Yahoo! are among the first words people in a new study thought of when asked a trivia question.

Researchers say that rather than knowing the answer to a question we are learning how to seek the answer and fast. Over the last few decades intelligent quotients have been gradually rising but many people don’t feel any smarter.

But the research from Columbia University finds that the Internet is already changing the way we remember. Betsy Sparrow asked a bunch of trivia questions (including, which Best Picture nominee lost the Academy Award to Gone with the Wind in 1939?)

She is studying memory, specifically types of external memory, ranging from other people to the Internet. In this study, Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips, which is published in the current issue of the journal Science she looked at whether people think about their computers when they don’t know the answer to something.

She says, “We found that they do. Secondly, we found that people when they don’t expect to have access to information later remember it better than if they do expect to have that access.”

Before the Internet, we still relied on outside resources to find information. We called them other people. Other research shows that after the death of a spouse or even divorce, some people experience memory loss because they have lost their partner, a memory resource.

Now we are offloading much of the information we used to hold in our working memories and shifting to create memories of how to access the information rather than the information itself.

“We also found that people tend to prioritze where to find things over the things themselves, which is adaptive in this case I think.” — Betsy Sparrow, Columbia University

Is this part of our natural evolution or is technology driving the change? Please leave your comments below.

Few people have ever heard of the cookiecutter shark. They are prevalent in the deep, tropical ocean but they are not very large predators. In fact, the fish measures just a couple of feet long. But don’t be fooled by its size. This is a saw-toothed fish that bites dolphins, whales, nuclear submarine seals and now at least one person.

Maui man Mike Spalding becomes the first documented case of a human being bitten by the cookiecutter shark. He was swimming in deep water at night between the big island of Hawaii and Maui when he felt a pin prick in this chest followed by searing pain in his leg.

The tiny shark took a sizable chunk out of his calf muscle and the injury took months to heal. That was in 2009. Now several years later, scientists are taking a closer look at this small, ferocious shark.

The Florida Museum of Natural History houses a cookiecutter shark specimen but few people have ever heard of the species. the museum’s shark attack expert George Burgess says, “They have the biggest teeth of any shark in relation to the size of their jaws.”

As one of the co-authors of the new study that appears in the journal Pacific Science (PDF), Burgess wants people to know that humans entering deep ocean waters away from shore at twilight and nighttime hours should do so knowing that cookiecutter sharks are a potential danger, particularly during periods of strong moonlight, in areas of manmade illumination, or in the presence of bioluminescent organisms such as glowing squid.

Spalding’s attack happened around sunset during a 30-mile long distance swim. He says he began seeing the bright bioluminescence of squid before the shark attacked. These sharks hide among glowing squid because they have glowing spots on their skin. When a larger animal feeds on the squid, the shark goes in for a wounding bite.

Spalding was swimming through a group of cuttlefish when he was probably mistaken for a dolphin or whale.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s curator of field operations John O’Sullivan says, “These animals are very small and very aggressive in behavior. People say, ‘Thank God these things don’t get big.’” He’s been trying capture a live cookiecutter shark for several years because he is fascinated by the small shark’s interesting behavior. But he says it’s “turning out to be more difficult than our white shark program.”

The study was led by Randy Honebrink of the Hawaii Division of Aquatic Resources and co-authors include Robert Buch of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the Florida Museum and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Service, and physician Peter Galpin of Maui Memorial Hospital.

When the final mission of the U.S. space shuttle program blasted off flawlessly on Friday, over one million onlookers gathered in Florida for the launch. Tens of millions more watched on television. But what they couldn’t see amid the liftoff fire and smoke was all the science that was en route to the International Space Station.

Space Shuttle Atlantis has a lot of experiments, including one from a Hawaiian biotech company called Tissue Genesis Incorporated. The company has been working with NASA for ten years to study the effects of microgravity on stem cells regenerated from fat tissue.

The research can be applied to fight vascular disease, improve heart bypass surgery and orthopedics.

Houston’s Odyssey Space Research put two Apple iPhones on the last shuttle mission, not so they can phone home from space but to conduct experiments using mobile applications.

Astronauts will use an app called SpaceLab. The experiment app was built to test iPhone cameras and gyroscopes as well as test the effects of radiation on the devices.

Others hope that iPhones will be able to replace some of the expensive and faulty navigation equipment that generally accompanies most space missions.

Besides biotech and high tech companies sending experiments into space the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program has sent a few projects as well.

A mini lab, about the size of a brick contains both professional and student science experiments. The Materials Dispersion Apparatus (MDA) houses about 90 different experiments, including 11 student experiments.

Ranging from yeast to tomatoes and from goldfish eggs to mouth bacteria student experiments will study the effects of microgravity by comparing samples on the ground to those that flew into space. Students will look for differences in cell structure, behavior or growth of their samples.

And though it is the last shuttle mission to the ISS, one experiment will perform a white-glove test of the space station to see if it is remaining biological clean after years of use. a state of the art lab on a chip will be able to detect biological and chemicals on any surface.

Another novel experiment comes from Arizona State University, where Cheryl Nickerson is working on developing next generation vaccines.

The microbiologist has been studying infection in microgravity and has already discovered that the salmonella bacteria becomes more virulent in zero-gravity.

She says, “Our earlier work showed the potential for spaceflight to provide novel insight into the mechanisms of microbial virulence that may lead to innovations in infectious disease control here on Earth.”

Now Nickerson and her colleague Roy Curtiss III, the director of the Biodesign Institute are hoping to find cures to hepatitis B, tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid fever, AIDS and pneumonia by enlisting the help of salmonella.

When the final flight of Atlantis returns she and Curtiss will examine their Recombinant Attenuated Salmonella Vaccine (RASV) payload to determine if microgravity makes the experimental vaccine that already proves powerful against pneumonia even stronger after going to outer space.

The eyes have it.

A couple of years ago former Baltimore Orioles coach Buck Showalter appeared on ESPN during a Baseball Tonight segment called Scouting the Body, all about what recruiters look for physically in an ideal baseball player. He pointed out that the best players have brown eyes. While there are great green and blue-eyed players, Showalter says, “Scouts don’t like to see hitters in a perfect world have anything other than brown eyes.”

In the last couple of weeks the very blue-eyed Texas baseballer Josh Hamilton began using special contacts to improve his daytime batting average. He blames his eye color for the disparity between his day and night time batting averages. And, now doctors are backing up that theory.

Dr. Richard L. Ison is the Hamilton’s optometrist outside of Dallas who agrees that light-eyed people have more difficulty deflecting glare. This is especially true for baseball players.

Dr. Ison says, “”Because of the lack of pigment in lighter color eyes, like blue or green eyes as opposed to brown, you get a lot more unwanted light and that can create glare problems.”

The phenomenon is called intraocular light scatter or straylight. According to several eye studies light transmittance through the iris is higher in light-blue-eyed people than in dark-brown-eyed people. Many eye doctors think that different eye colors influence straylight by reflection from the fundus oculi. A retinal pigment epithelium in the fundus oculi absorbs light and to prevent light scattering. In dark-eyed people, the color of fundus oculi is brownish-red in it is orange in light blue-eyed Caucasians.

So there is real science to back up Hamilton’s claim. While blue-eyed people may be more predisposed for sensitivity toward bright light because they scatter more light than they absorb, is this why Hamilton’s daytim batting average is one-third of his nighttime average?

Dave Cameron over at FanGraphs.com says unequivocally no. After first hearing of the Hamilton story, he asked his audience to help him crowdsource all the blue-eyed baseball hitters and run their averages to see if this was a real trend. He was quite impressed with the rapid response which allowed him to quickly conduct his experiment using a sample size of 25 players with blue eyes.

He says, “The sample of blue-eyed players we looked at follows the trend established by the rest of Major League Baseball.”

After looking at batting averages for 47,000 daytime appearances and 100,000 nighttime games, he found the blue-eyed baseballers hit just about the same during the day and during the night.

He says, “This non-difference matches up with the rest of the population, as there is no consistent historical day/night split for Major League hitters over the years.”

Among his sample of blue-eyed batters, Cameron says they split evenly, with 13 hitting better during the day and 12 hitting better at night.

One of the players Cameron singled out was Mark Grace, a blue-eyed former Chicago Cub. He says, “Grace is perhaps one of the most interesting cases, as his eyes are very blue and he spent the majority of his career with the Chicago Cubs, who play more day games than any other franchise in baseball.” Yet Grace collected the most hits (1,754) in the 1990s.

Calvin D. Esbaugh told MSNBC.com “The deal is, if someone has less pigment in their iris, they could potentially be more sensitive to sunlight.”

After wearing contacts that tint his eyes red, Hamilton reports that his daytime vision is better, making it easier to hit the ball. He says the glare from home plate and the brightness of the ball are not as bad as they were.

Cameron says, “Maybe Hamilton is the outlier here. Maybe his eyes are especially sensitive, and he’ll sustain a large day/night split going forward. It seems more likely, however, that we’re just looking at noise generated by looking at a sample of fewer than 600 career plate appearances, and Hamilton was looking for a reason to explain something that goes beyond randomness.”

More than straylight, Hamilton may be suffering from photophobia, or light sensitivity.

Dr. Esbaugh says, “Although not every blue-eyed person would be equally affected there are other factors involved in light sensitivity besides eye color, such as the density of rods and cones — the light receptors — in your retina.”

A blogger known as Baseball Guru says, “Mickey Mantle and George Brett both had blue eyes, and both performed slightly better during the day. While optomotrists have sided with Hamilton and said that it is true, I am a skeptic and not a believer, for the Mickey Mantle and George Brett reasons.”

The record snow pack melt combined with cool, heavy spring rains forced reservoirs in northern states to release extra water into rivers, creating a big flood which is now surging south, from North Dakota to Nebraska where the Missouri River is over its banks and threatening two nuclear power plants.

The Ft. Calhoun plant near Omaha has been offline for maintenance since April, after getting a bad safety report card last year. One of the marks against the plant was lax flood protection, which is now being tested as the Missouri River laps at its front and back doors, leaving part of the facility swamped while the rest stands like a castle surrounded by a moat.

Downriver, the Cooper Nuclear Station has built a ten-foot wall and is still operating normally. That station looks to be adequately protected from the rising flood waters.The head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is visiting the power plant personally to inspect the facility, himself.

A no-fly zone was imposed over the Ft. Calhoun plant a few days ago but regulators say that no radioactive material has escaped. It was likely imposed to prevent news helicopters from flying too close to the facility and into power lines as they do flood coverage.

In northern New Mexico, it is fire not flooding that has members of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Radiological Assistance Program heading for Los Alamos National Laboratory. The team will assess whether any danger exists for radioactive material to escape into the atmosphere from the encroaching 93 square mile wildfire.

As power plants face eminent threats from fire and flood, a year-long investigation by the Associated Press has found that the licensing process at the nation’s 104 nuclear power plants is not very strict.

Most of the nuclear power plants were built during the 1960s and early 1970s. At the time it was common knowledge that nuclear reactors were built to run for 40 years and then be replaced. That entire life-span was based on the assumption that major upgrades and improvements would be made along the way.

Now the Associated Press is saying that nuclear regulators and the nuclear power industry are rewriting history. The AP says industry and regulators are telling a different story — that reactor units were built with no expiration date.

This historical about face is making it easier for plant owners to automatically extend the lives of dozens of reactors in a licensing process that amounts to a nuclear rubber stamp.

The AP’s investigation uncovered documents showing that the process lacks independent safety reviews. It relies on paperwork, especially from NRC, which sometimes matches verbatim language used in the plant operator’s application. The AP also discovered the relicensing process required very little on-site verification or inspection.

The AP found that 66 of the 104 U.S. reactors have been granted license renewals — most for an extra 20 years of operation. The NRC has yet to reject a single application.

Regulators say that the 40-year lifespan was chosen for economic reasons and to satisfy antitrust laws not for safety reasons. The AP reports that regulators insist nuclear reactors have no technical limits on their use.

But engineers, including those who designed many of these plants, tell a different story.

In 1982, Clark Gibbs was the chair of an early nuclear industry group’s safety committee. The AP quotes him, saying, “Most nuclear power plants, including those operating, under construction or planned for the future, are designed for a duty cycle which corresponds to a 40-year life.”

International Atomic Energy Agency Deputy Director General for Nuclear Energy Yury Sokolov told a nuclear industry conference in Shanghai in February that plant life management (PLiM) is a an effective tool to safely and cost effectively manage aging effects in systems, structures, and components. He says, “Even though the design life of a nuclear power plant is typically for 30 or 40 years, it is quite feasible that many nuclear power plants will be able to operate in excess of their design lives.”

Last September Germany decided to extend the life of its aging nuclear power plants by as much as 12 years, even though a poll of Germans found that 6 in 10 want the plants phased out by 2020. Chancellor Angela Merkel says that renewable energy sources are not developed enough yet to get rid of nuclear power.

Then in March, everything changed. When Japan faced a significant nuclear crisis in the wake of the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that shook the island nation to its core, other nation’s rattled by what happened in Japan reconsidered their nuclear power position.

Since then, Germany closed seven plants and will phase out all nuclear power plants by 2022 Earthquake-prone Chile is considering doing the same and China put 50 power plant applications on hold. But the U.S. is still gung-ho for nuclear power.

In a report from Scientific American last week science investigative journalist Karl Grossman says President Obama embraced nuclear power — even picking a pro-nuclear Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu — after initially expressing concerns about its safety while he was running for office in 2007.

Two weeks after the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant crisis in Japan, President Obama pledged that nuclear power should be revived in the U.S., as it provides “electricity without adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.”

Congressman Edward Markey has asked for a moratorium on nuclear licenses until new safety standards can be put in place, incorporating the lessons learned in Japan.

Now floods from the north, fires in the southwest and a relaxed relicensing process — in addition to tornadoes, earthquakes and tsunamis — threaten the future of nuclear power in this country and our safety. Nuclear power currently provides about 20% of the nation’s electricity.

An exhibition which doubles as a huge, interactive science experiment has opened in New York. The Dublin Science Gallery’s Biorhythm: Music and the Body show immerses its visitors in a world of sonic experiences to see how they respond to different musical stimuli. Tara Cleary from Reuters reports.

But it’s not just all fun. The exhibition is also a giant science experiment, gathering physical responses to music and measuring that against how people report they feel about the music.

Ben Knapp, the research director at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast, Ireland wires listeners up and then studies their reactions, their galvanic skin resistance and their heart rate as they listen to different kinds of music. The experiment called Emotion in Motion also records the listeners feelings about the music and compare that data to what their body says.

Knapp says the Internet and social media have created a social chasm where people prefer virtual relationships over real ones. This project will pinpoint empathy through music. He believes songs that make one person feel sad could be used to convey empathy to another person if they are unable to do so on their own.

He says, “If my physiology plays a particular song that’s sad for me, that may not make you sad. But if I then know what song makes you sad and I can say ‘Oh, okay, I’ll play this for you, maybe now we can identify more together.’”

The exhibition Biorhythm: Music and Body runs now through August 6 in New York City at the Eyebeam Art + Technology Center.

For over 30 years the Food and Drug Administration has been wrestling with the rules governing suntan lotion. About five years ago, the federal agency began urging sunscreen companies to give consumers better information about sun protection products.

Now, the FDA is announcing new rules this week that make deciphering sunblock much easier.

Since it began overseeing sunblock makers the FDA only required companies to protect against ultraviolet (UV) B rays. Those rays cause painful sunburns. But the other UVA rays are the bits of solar radiation that cause skin cancer.

Now, the FDA has created the term “broad spectrum” which will begin appearing on sunscreen labels in the next few weeks. Any product that meets the broad spectrum standard is deemed to help block both types of solar rays, UVA and UVB. The FDA is limiting the top Sun Protection Factor (SPF) rating to 50+.

Scientists have not been able to prove that sunblock above SPF 50 protects wearers any better. But the FDA is leaving the door open so if future research finds that SPF 100 is much better at blocking UVA rays than SPF 50 labels may change again.

Most companies knew this change was coming and have begun putting protective information about UVA and UVB rays on packaging for several years. Any sunscreen between SPF 2 and SPF 15 that doesn’t meet the broad spectrum requirement will get a warning label, saying the product has not been shown to prevent skin cancer or early skin aging.

Many dermatologists recommend using sunblock with a minimum of SPF 30 to protect from harmful cancer causing UVA rays and painful UVB ray sunburns. They used to recommend a minimum of SPF 15 for extended sun exposure. Now they are suggesting using sunscreens with a higher SPF and to reapply lotions and sprays often.

It sounds like something from science-fiction — but it’s actually the latest brainchild from town planners in the western French town of La Rochelle. Small electric cars without drivers steer themselves through the streets taking locals and tourists around town in the first driverless car pilot program.

French law prevents vehicles without drivers from traveling on expressways so when those tests begin later this year, they will have a person in the vehicle as backup in case something goes awry.

The system works much like an elevator. A screen at stations allows passengers to enter their destination and the nearest vehicle comes to pick them up. Civic leaders want to add more automated vehicles to the fleet of five to reduce wait times at stations and get people where they need to go faster.

New Rochelle is hoping to roll out more driverless vehicles in time for the Christmas holidays.

In the U.S. tech giant Google is pressing Nevada to change state law and allow driverless vehicles on state roads and highways. The company would like to get permission to test its location software on driverless cars but must get permission from the state legislature before conducting any tests.

Volvo’s Senior Safety Engineer Thomas Broberg says that driverless cars will become a reality as they are a big part of the company’s initiative to eliminate fatalities in any of its cars by 2020.

Update:
Preliminary tests prove negative for E. coli in bean sprouts from an organic farm in the Uelzen district of the German state of Lower Saxony. 23 out of 40 sprout samples from the farm came back negative for the bacteria. 17 samples are undergoing further testing which won’t be available for 7-10 days.

Hamburg, Germany is the epicenter for what is now the deadliest E. Coli outbreak in modern history. 21 people have died and 2,200 people have fallen ill, including over 600 with a rare disease that causes kidney failure and other dangerous symptoms.

While German health officials haven’t ruled out tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce entirely, they are confident that the bacterial outbreak originated in 17 different kinds of bean sprouts on an organic farm. So they took the popular salad item off the menu across the country until further notice.

Bean sprouts are the perfect incubator for E. coli and they have been linked to previous outbreaks, including one in Japan in 1996. According to the Lower Saxony Agriculture Ministry Gert Lindemann, the farm grows 18 types of sprouts and cultivates them in liquor barrels at a temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Then the sprouts are watered with steam.

“Those are also optimal conditions for the germ of all germs.” — Gert Lindemann, Lower Saxony Agriculture Minister

U.S. health officials periodically warn people against eating bean and alfalfa sprouts since both are known to carry E. coli.

This strain is new and scientists say it combines the genes of two other strains of E. coli to create a deadly bacteria.

As of Wednesday afternoon officials said 17 people had died in Germany and one in Sweden. A recent E. coli outbreak across Europe is believed to have started in northern Germany but it appears to be causing people to fall ill all around the world, including two cases in the U.S.

The unusually virulent strain of the bacteria commonly found in animal stomachs, including our own, has contaminated fresh vegetables and forced many markets to stop selling cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce. At first, Germany pointed a finger at cucumbers imported from Spain but later withdrew the accusation.

Officials are worried that they may never know the cause of the food-borne illness, which has sickened over 2,000 people in under a week.

While e. coli bacterial outbreaks occur periodically from poorly handled produce, this outbreak has health officials and scientists more concerned. For one it is striking healthy adults over age 20 and is causing kidney failure, stroke and some patients to lapse into comas. That makes this much more serious than typical outbreaks which cause gastrointestinal distress for most and are more tend to be more serious for the elderly and children.

Scientists immediately ran a gene sequence of the new bacteria and found it is a new strain of E. coli, which had mutated from two other strains to combine their poisonous effects and become much more deadly.

Hilde Kruse, a food safety expert at the World Health Organization says, “This is a unique strain that has never been isolated from patients before.” And she adds, “Various characteristics that make it more virulent and toxin-producing.”

According to health experts this outbreak is already the third largest, following a 1996 Japanese outbreak and a 2000 Canadian outbreak. And it may be the deadliest.

The new European E. coli strain shows the presence of genes typically found in two different types of E. coli: enteroaggregative E. coli (EAEC) and enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC).

Because many people likely ate contaminated vegetables but didn’t have strong reactions, doctors believe the outbreak may be much larger. Those with mild responses to the bacteria probably wouldn’t seek medical attention. They may stay home from work and recover quickly, thinking they had the flu.

The WHO put information about haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS) and enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) on its website after most people in Germany developed those two diseases from exposure to the bacteria.

A WHO statement says that as of May 31, nine of the patients in Germany had died of HUS and six of EHEC. It goes on to say, “There are many hospitalized patients, several of them requiring intensive care, including dialysis.”

NBC News reported that according to doctors, two-thirds of patients in Hamburg, Germany, were suffering from severe neurological problems such as language difficulties and seizures.

For years scientists have argued that cell phones could be harmful to our health. But it wasn’t until last year that the first long term study suggested a relationship between prolonged cell phone use and brain cancer. And even that preliminary finding didn’t get people to turn off their cell phones.

Earlier this year, a National Institutes of Health study showed that cell phones caused an increase in brain activity and glucose metabolism.

Now, a new study from International Agency for Research on Cancer involving 31 researchers(PDF) from 14 countries assembled by the World Health Organization says that cell phones are carcinogenic(PDF). Actually it says, “radiofrequency electromagnetic fields are possibly carcinogenic to humans based on an increased risk for glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer, associated with
wireless phone use.”

The organization puts them in the same category (2B) as gasoline fumes and pesticides. Serious but not that serious if you limit your exposure.

Dr. Keith Black, the head of neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, who was not involved in the study says using a cellphone is about as safe as sticking your head in a microwave oven. He says that the radiation cell phones emit makes water in the brain vibrate. That vibration has the potential to heat up or cook the brain over time just like food in a microwave. And that causes cells to form improperly which leads to cancer.

Right now over 5 billion cell phones are in use around the world. But doctors believe that even if cell phones do pose the cancer risk that long term studies are now beginning to see, brain cancer is a very rare disease. And cell phone use doesn’t cause cancer it just may increase the risk.

One thing that the scientists do agree upon is that cell phone use by children should be limited to prevent radiation from seeping into their still forming brains. Since children’s skulls are thinner than adults they can allow in five times as much radiation as an adult brain.

All scientists agree that more research is needed. But since cell phones are so ubiquitous in our lives, it is unlikely that these studies will have a remarkable effect on our cell phone behavior.

For those who are concerned about radiation, limit the amount of time the phone is held to your head. Use a bluetooth or other handsfree device or use the speaker phone function.

University of Washington bioengineering professor Henry Lai told the L.A. Times “I think it’s a very fair conclusion,” Dr. Lai was the first to show cellphone radiation can damage DNA in brain cells. He and his fellow researchers also found memory loss and other learning problems in rats exposed to moderate levels of cellphone radiation.

“At this point, I think the best thing for people to do is limit their exposure to this radiation.” — Henry Lai, University of Washington

Two feisty 15 year olds are pushing Girl Scouts of the USA to remove palm oil from their popular cookies. Rhiannon Tomitshen and Madison Vorva learned that palm oil plantations are used to grow a key ingredient in all girl scout cookies and that ingredient requires farmers to destroy rainforests to make room for the palm plantations.

The two girls take the Girl Scout oath of protecting the environment and limiting resources seriously. Now they want the cookie maker Kellogg’s to follow the same rules and use a blend of different oils that don’t destroy the environment but still taste good and are healthy.

After being inspired by Dr. Jane Goodall work with chimpanzees the girls wanted to raise awareness about orangutans which are often displaced when rainforests are cut down to make room for palm oil plantations in Indonesia. Pygmy elephants and Sumatran tigers are also under threat by the expansion of palm oil plantations.

The rapid growth of the use of palm oil by food manufacturers is in large part due to the fact that the oil contains no trans fats. As more and more companies and food producers remove trans fats from their ingredient list palm oil is becoming a staple. But it does so at the cost of the environment.

After going public with their campaign to remove palm oil from Girl Scout cookies Kellogg’s pledged to buy green palm certificates to invest in the transition to sustainable palm farming. While Tomitshen sees this as a great step in the right direction she won’t be satisfied until the company removes palm oil from Girl Scout cookies and the rest of their products.

She says, “Kellogg’s has the moral authority to remove palm oil from the cookies and do the truly right thing.”

Palm oil is a common ingredient in cookies, candy and ice cream that we all eat every day. But as you take a bit of that Kit Kat bar these two girls would like you to take a moment to think about the orangutans and the rainforest.

“Girl Scouts shouldn’t have to think about rainforest destruction and orangutan extinction or having to struggle with not being able to go to camp because they can’t raise the funds.” — Madison Vorva, Girl Scout and environmental activist

Cooked tomatoes and tomato products could possibly be more effective than medication in the fight against high cholesterol and blood pressure.

Doctors used to say, “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.” That was the cure all for patients. Now the pharmaceutical companies have a pill for every occasion and ailment.

Researchers in Australia have found that two ounces of tomato paste or tomato juice contains 15 grams of the natural chemical lycopene. If people with high cholesterol or high blood pressure consume 50 grams of lycopene it could help lower bad cholesterol levels and blood pressure without the dangerous side effects of cholesterol medications.

Dr. Karin Ried from the University of Adelaide and one of the authors of the paper that appeared in the journal Mauritas recommends tomato paste. She says that half a liter of tomato juice or 50 grams of tomato paste daily would provide protection against heart disease.

Researchers conducted a meta analysis, meaning they analyzed existing studies, looking at the effects of lycopene on cholesterol and high blood pressure. The scientists analyzed 14 international studies conducted over 55 years.

They found that in small doses, lycopene has little or no effect on reducing cholesterol or blood pressure. But once the amount of lycopene is increased to above 25 grams per day, the authors started to see slight reductions in both cholesterol and blood pressure. They started to see increased benefit with higher amounts of lycopene.

Not everyone is viewing the tomato as the new wonder drug. the website Todays Vital Health says there have been no direct studies comparing the effectiveness of statins and tomato products in fighting high cholesterol or blood pressure.

Dr. Ried says that lycopene in excess of 25 grams a day can reduce cholesterol and blood pressure by ten percent, eliminating the need for many to take medication, like statins.

“That’s comparable to the effect of low doses of medication commonly prescribed but without side-effects, which can include muscle pain and weakness and nerve damage.” — Dr. Karen Ried, University of Adelaide, Australia

So just consume 6-8 ounces of tomato products a day and you’ll keep the need for statins away.

Chinese farmers are scratching their heads after fields of watermelons turned into exploding land mines. The official cause remains unknown but some believe that the farmers sprayed a rapid growth chemical on the fruit too late in the season and after an extremely wet period. The combination of factors could lead to exploding fruit, as the cells expand so rapidly the fruit bursts out of its rind.

State-run Chinese TV reports that acres of watermelons have been destroyed by the mysterious fruit explosions.

In China the chemical forcholorfenuron is commonly used to give fruits a burst of growth. The chemical is only approved for use on kiwis and grapes in the United States. But using the chemical incorrectly can cause problems — like exploding watermelons.

In 2004 the Environmental Protection Agency added forcholorfenuron to a list of newly created pesticides. The agency classified the growth accelerator as a phenyl urea compound but found that it is unlikely carcinogenic in humans. Due to the small amounts required to accelerate fruit growth, the agency decided to approve the chemical.

Though it did include a warning.

“The Agency‘s major concern is forchlorfenuron‘s persistence and its possible chronic effects to terrestrial organisms. It is highly persistent in the environment with laboratory half-lives ranging from 226-578 days in terrestrial environments and stable in aquatic environments. While forchlorfenuron rapidly photodegrades in sensitized water, the Agency does not believe that this route of dissipation is significant in the environment. Suspended sediment and shading prevent photodegradation.”

This plant growth regulator should be used two to three weeks after bloom. If applied properly (in low amounts) Forchlorfenuron results in an increase in fruit size, but does not affect the number of fruit or the keeping quality of the fruit.

Farmer error is likely behind the Chinese exploding watermelons. Although some Chinese officials say that the seeds, which were imported from Japan, might be the culprit. In ten fields, farmers who claimed not to use forchlorfenuron also experienced combustible fruit.

Former Rhode Island Congressman Patrick Kennedy is trying to unite neuroscientists, government and advocacy groups to improve funding and research in brain science.

On the 50th Anniversary of his uncle John’s moonshot speech that launched the space age, leading scientists, philanthropists and government agencies will call for a new initiative tackling the last frontier of medicine — the brain and neurological disorders.

But instead of going to outer space he wants us all to go to inner space.

The eight-term Congressman has had very public battles with addiction and depression. Now, the son of Edward Kennedy is putting that attention to good use, trying to shine a light in the dark corners of mental health, traumatic brain injuries and brain diseases.

The One Mind for Research campaign kicks off with the invitation-only Next Frontier conference later this month. The conference ends on the anniversary of President Kennedy’s famous speech, which will be celebrated at the JFK Library at Harvard University by Vice President Joe Biden, astronaut Buzz Aldrin and mental health celebrity advocates Glenn Close and Martin Sheetn.

and culminates with the launch of a ten-year, $6 billion program to focus research on the physical causes of mental health and to help cure some of the biggest brain diseases, ranging from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease to depression and post traumatic stress disorder.

“I hear people say that the brain represents the last medical frontier for discovery.” — Patrick Kennedy, founder of One Mind for Research.

Emotional pain, like that associated with a heartbreak hurts with the same intensity as physical pain and it lights up the same part of the brain. Now researchers have discovered that the pain is just as real and can be reduced with a common painkiller.

It’s been said that love hurts, especially a breakup. New research reported in the journal Psychological Science now proves that it does.

By looking at brain scans of people who were enduring the emotional loss of a bad breakup, scientists noticed that the people showed reduced emotional pain and physical pain — like headaches — after being given acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol.

The EPA warns pregnant women or women looking to become pregnant about the dangers of mercury on unborn children. The agency says stay away from big, predator fish like Swordfish, Orange Ruffie and even Ahi tuna. They tend to have the highest mercury concentrations because they feed on smaller fish that are also exposed to mercury.

But it’s not just women. In men, mercury can increase the risk of heart disease.

Trout, Salmon and other fish, including Tilapia contain far less mercury and won’t pose as much risk to seafood lovers.

The Sierra Club has more information about mercury pollution and finding safe fish to eat.

Every year, there are a few cases of leprosy in southern states, where armadillos are as common as squirrels in urban areas. Just being around the odd-looking creatures is not enough to acquire the bacteria but those who hunt the animals, handle their raw meat or eat them could be at higher risk for getting leprosy.

Leprosy experts have known for years that the armadillos carry the leprosy bacteria. In fact, scientists use them to grow the bacteria, which can’t be cultured in the laboratory.

Richard Truman of the National Hansen’s Disease Program in Baton Rouge, Louisiana led the new study. He used DNA testing to show that a strain of Mycobacterium leprae not found anywhere else in the world was present in 28 out of 33 wild armadillos and 25 out of 39 U.S. patients who lived in areas where the animals lived.

Dr.Truman told Reuters, “Around the world, we think of human beings as the only reservoir of Mycobacterium leprae and that leprosy is a human disease.” But now it appears that armadillos are giving the disease back to humans after first receiving it from people coming to the New World from Europe and Africa hundreds of years ago.

Researchers think the reason the leprosy bacteria grow in armadillos, but not most other animals, is due to the armadillos’ lower body temperature of 89 degrees Fahrenheit.

The key to successful stem cell research and treatment is being able to create stable, self-renewing stem cells. For years, scientists have been able to make massive quantities of stem cells to enhance brain activity. The problem was that when they tested their treatments in mice, the stem cells often caused tumors to grow, creating a new disease that is much worse than the original.

Now, a team of 30 researchers at University of California San Diego have made groundbreaking advancements in neural stem cell research which may change the future for patients with vision problems and eventually help those with Parkinson’s disease.

Dr. Kang Zhang has been focused on studying eye problems. The ophthalmologist studies ocular genetics and has a particular interest in stopping macular degeneration, glaucoma and other diseases of the eye.

Now his team has found a way to slow the progression of macular degeneration using the novel stem cell treatment.

The self-renewing stem cell approach that Dr. Zhang’s team created can grow a very large quantity of neural stem cells without the dire consequences of developing tumors.

While Dr. Zhang is busy creating eye-specific neurons to repair the ones lost in diseases like macular degeneration he believes his treatment can be used to fight other neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s or Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

Not everyone is as enthusiastic about this breakthrough. The North County Times talked to two researchers who recognized this advance as an important step but reiterated the incremental nature over the breakthrough.

UC Davis cell biologist Paul Knoepfler says, “The fact that [the] group made the neural progenitors from human embryonic stem cells using only a fairly straightforward chemical cocktail should make this approach one that other researchers in the field can readily replicate.”

Sanford-Burnham Research Institute cell researcher Evan Snyder was less enthusiastic about Dr. Zhang’s development.

He called the research an incremental advance not the big leap forward. He told the newspaper, “The neural stem cell derivatives are still limited in the range of cell types they can yield; the authors are still not seeing the full spectrum of neurectoderm derivatives that they should be seeing — including neural crest and glial cells (that determine neuron function). He adds, “True neural stem cells should be able to give rise to the range of neurectodermal progeny, including glia and neural crest in addition to neurons.

A new report estimates that half the meat and poultry sold in the supermarket may be tainted with the staph germ.

A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases recently found a startling amount of staphylococcus bacteria in grocery store meat. The study included 136 samples from 80 different brands of turkey, pork, chicken and beef from five cities across the country.

Researchers discovered that 47 percent of all samples contained the staph aureus bacteria, which can make people sick if exposed to it. They also found that of all the samples with staph contamination 96 percent were resistant to one common antibiotic and 52 percent were resistant to three or more antibiotics.

Scientists believe the harmful bacteria in the meat is appearing because animals are being exposed to antibiotic-resistant staph on farms. The bacteria does not appear to be from poor food-handling procedures during manufacturing.

But this study does raise concerns about the use of antibiotics in agriculture. Routinely food farmers give their animals antibiotics to fuel growth rather than to fight disease. Now, it appears decades of feeding drugs to animals is creating a microbial chain reaction that will lead to longer, more intensive human illness when these superbugs become drug-resistant.

Currently, the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System is monitoring four pesky bacteria. NARMS is a collaboration of the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The group is watching Enterococcus, Salmonella, Campylobacter and E. coli. It doesn’t currently track staph bacteria or any of its anti-biotic cousins like MRSA.

“Salmonella and Campylobacter, the most common sources of food borne illnesses in the United States, account for well over a million resistant infections in this country each year.” — Margaret Mellon, Union of Concerned Scientists, from her Congressional Testimony, July 2009(PDF).

Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has been ravaging patients in hospitals and become a community health problem. Now that this familiar superbug has been found on meat, research needs to be conducted to see if this is part of the reason for the rise of MRSA.

Since heat kills bacteria, cooking meat and cleaning cutting boards, knives or anything (including hands) that comes into contact with raw meat with hot, soapy water should help prevent the spread of staph. Public health officials are watching these tough bacteria closely.

The World Health Organization, Union of Concerned Scientists and American Medical Association have called for significant restrictions in the use of antibiotics in animals for non-therapeutic purposes. The FDA has even drafted guidelines(PDF) advising food farmers to stop giving animals antibiotics that are used as human medicines but until they become regulations they are just suggestions.

In the meantime, drug-resistant bacteria are moving into our food supply.

“Antibiotic-resistant microorganisms generated in the guts of pigs in the Iowa countryside don’t stay on the farm. They can be transmitted to humans in at least three ways: carried on meat or poultry; colonizing farm workers who transmit them into the community; or moving through water and soil, which can lead to the contamination of fresh produce.” –Margaret Mellon, Director of the Food and Environment Program, Union of Concerned Scientists

Veterinarians say that when antibiotics used in raising food animals such as pigs, cows and chickens are the same as those used in doctors’ offices, those bacteria become impervious to those classes of human drugs.

It sounds like the plotline for a young boy’s bedtime story. But real-life laser weapons are being tested by the U.S. Navy and their first target is modern day pirates who are tormenting shippers and sailors on the northeast coast of Africa.

A ship-based laser could seriously turn up the heat on Somali pirates. Last week the Navy successfully tested a solid-state high-energy laser from a ship.

While it didn’t have the high-pitched movie laser sound found in the movies, the laser was aimed at a small boat and disabled the engines without any other damage. Bullets from traditional guns don’t have the precision of a laser and tend to ricochet off targets and strike bystanders. The new laser can also be dialed up or down to go from lethal beam to just a nuisance, says the Office of Naval Research.

British defense contractor BAE Systems has been working on the non-lethal version of the laser to be used on commercial ships to protect them from pirates.
These Free Electron Laser (FEL) guns are also likely going to be a big part of the Navy’s future fight against pirates.

“From a science and technology point of view, the marriage of directed energy and kinetic energy weapon systems opens up a new level of deterrence into scalable options for the commander.” — Navy Rear Admiral Nevin Carr.

Tokyo Electric Power is putting remote controlled machinery to use at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in northeastern Japan. Helicopters mounted with cameras can safely survey the damaged reactors to give clean up crews a clear view of the mess without exposing them to dangerous radiation, following the 9.0 mega thrust earthquake and tsunami on March 11.

To prevent a worse nuclear disaster, power plant workers allowed several hydrogen explosions to release pressure building inside the disabled nuclear reactors. Now workers nearby are relying on remote-controlled bulldozers, dump trucks and other heavy equipment to drive the clean up process while radiation levels are still too high for humans to be in the area for any length of time.

Why Not Robots?

Japan is known for being on the leading technological edge, with its earthquake early warning system and automatic seismic shutoff system at nuclear power plants. It’s also known for mechanizing the manufacturing process by employing robots do the work of humans, much more efficiently.

So it stands to reason that the now crippled nation would want to send robots to the hobbled Fukushima Daiichi power plant. But there are no robots to handle that kind of a job — yet.

The father of industrial robotics says that it is impossible to anticipate a disaster like this which would make programming a robot for this clean up task equally as impossible. But, Joseph Engelberger also says that now that Japan understands what job a robot could do under these conditions, it should be fairly easy to develop a series of commands to allow the robot to react in specific ways under specific circumstances.

The remote-controlled power plant clean up operation uses humans to control machines, also known as teleoperation. Robots act based on code that creates parameters under which they can operate while teleoperators rely on human-driven decision-making.

So until the robots can be made radiation resistant and get to the Japanese power plant we’ll just have to appreciate their aesthetic value as baby robots dance.

French company Aldebaran Robotics makes Nao human-like robots. Nao in Chinese means brain. These five sychronized robots recently performed at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

The company just opened its first U.S. subsidiary office in Boston this month.

Now, we just need to get them to Japan to sift through radiation-contaminated debris.