Science News back issues from September 2007:
Share alike: genes from bacteria found in animals.(This Week)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Some insects and roundworms pick up DNA from bacteria living within their cells, new research shows. The DNA transfer occurs in the animals' egg cells, so the genetic modification passes between generations. The mechanism therefore provides an alternative to mutation of existing ...
Barely alive: ancient bacteria survive in the slow lane.(This Week)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Microbes in 500,000-year-old permafrost breathe, although at a very slow pace, and show other signs of life, according to a new report. If confirmed, the findings would be the first evidence of metabolism remaining active over geologic time scales. Previously, researchers had ...
Cretaceous corsages? Fossil in amber suggests antiquity of orchids.(This Week)
Sep 01, 2007; ... The first undisputed fossil of an orchid part has enabled scientists to estimate that the prized flowers appeared on the botanical scene around 80 million years ago. With more than 25,000 species, orchids are the largest and most diverse group of flowering plants. Although most ...
Oxygen rocks: volcanoes spurred early atmospheric change.(This Week)
Sep 01, 2007; ... The young Earth supported little multicellular life until its atmosphere acquired a healthy portion of oxygen. That change has been credited to the rise of cyanobacteria, known as blue-green algae, that produce oxygen by photosynthesis. Now, scientists argue that oxygen couldn't have built ...
No-fight zones: school programs reduce violence in all grades.(This Week)
Sep 01, 2007; ... As students head back to school this week, violence will follow a sizable number of them. Roughly 13 percent of public high school students report having had a fight on school property during the past school year. About 8 percent say that they were threatened or injured with a weapon at ...
Dawn of a disk: water vapor pours down on embryonic star.(This Week)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Even as it forms within a cloud of gas and dust, a nascent star develops a doughnut-shaped disk around it. This is the "proto-planetary disk" that might spawn planets. Using an infrared telescope to peer inside a dusty stellar womb 1,000 light-years from Earth, astronomers say that they ...
Bad bug: microbe raises stomach cancer risk.(This Week)(Helicobacter pylori)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Some strains of a common bacterium harbor a gene that may underlie a huge share of stomach cancers, a new study finds. The bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, has been linked to gastritis, ulcers, and stomach cancer. But while H. pylori infects, by some estimates, more than half the ...
Rethinking bad taste: how much mimicry is outright cheating?
Sep 01, 2007; ... Talking to evolutionary biologists Hannah Rowland and Mike Speed can shake your faith in a supposedly settled area of science. Generations of textbooks have presented animal mimicry as one of the marvels of evolution, allowing two species to confound their predators by looking alike ....
The wealth of nations: a country's competitive edge can spread industry to industry, like a disease.(economic conditions of developing countries)
Sep 01, 2007; ... The economies of poor and developing countries often depend almost exclusively on a single product-perhaps timber or coffee--or on a handful of products at most. That's hardly a startling observation, but what's puzzled economists over the years is why it's been so difficult for these ...
When antioxidants go bad.(BIOMEDICINE)(Brief article)
Sep 01, 2007 ... Antioxidants are good for your health in many ways. But too much of them can lead to disease, new research shows. People with an inherited mutation of a gene called alpha-B crystallin can suffer progressive heart failure, but nobody has known why. Now it appears that the ...
Believers gain no health advantage.(BEHAVIOR)(health and religious orientations of patients)(Brief article)
Sep 01, 2007 ... Among depressed or socially isolated heartattack survivors, those who hold spiritual beliefs, regularly attend religious services, or frequently pray or meditate experience new cardiac symptoms and die from various causes at the same rate as their nonreligious counterparts do, researchers ...
Bats hum for sugar too.(ZOOLOGY)(food and nutrition of fruit bats)(Brief article)
Sep 01, 2007 ... Researchers report for the first time that some nectar-feeding bats metabolize sugar at the same frantic rate as hummingbirds do. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Like hummingbirds, South American long-tongued bats (Glossophaga soricina) hover at flowers and feed on sugar-rich ...
Arctic snow was dirtier in early 1900s.(EARTH SCIENCE)(Brief article)
Sep 01, 2007 ... The amount of soot wafting to the Arctic has increased significantly since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution but isn't nearly as high now as it was a century ago, an ice core from Greenland suggests. Greenland has always received some soot from Canadian wildfires, says ...
Corny collagen.(BIOTECHNOLOGY)(Brief article)
Sep 01, 2007 ... Slaughterhouse leftovers such as skin, tendons, bone, and cartilage are often processed into gelatin that's used in many products, including pill coatings and capsules. The primary protein in gelatin, collagen, can now be extracted from an engineered strain of corn, researchers report, ...
Light switch.(GENE CONTROL)(Brief article)
Sep 01, 2007 ... Switching off a gene is now as simple as flicking on a light. Working with zebrafish, a favorite model organism for biologists, Ilya A. Shestopalov and his colleagues at Stanford University showed that, once activated by ultraviolet light, a molecule called a photoeaged ...
Tiny tubes, big pollution.(ENVIRONMENT)(effects of carbon nanotubes )(Brief article)
Sep 01, 2007 ... A tiny industry has a big problem: pollution. In the first study of its kind, researchers have found that the manufacture of carbon nanotubes produces airborne carcinogens and other pollutants. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Thousands of times thinner than a human hair, ...
Urine tests for cities.(PUBLIC HEALTH)(testing of wastewater)(Brief article)
Sep 01, 2007 ... A new method of analyzing sewage may offer near real-time monitoring of community-level drug use. The technique can detect mere nanograms of drugs or drug-breakdown products per liter of wastewater. Environmental chemist Jennifer Field of Oregon State University in Corvallis, ...
Waistland: The (R)Evolutionary Science behind our weight and Fitness Crisis.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
Sep 01, 2007 ... WAISTLAND: The (R)Evolutionary Science behind our weight and Fitness Crisis DEIRDRE BARRETT [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The incidence of obesity in the U.S. population is greater than ever. In this book, Barrett, a Harvard psychologist, describes why maintaining a healthy ...
The Unnatural History of the Sea.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
Sep 01, 2007 ... THE UNNATURAL HISTORY OF THE SEA CALLUM ROBERTS [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The modern fishing industry has reached a level of unprecedented efficiency. Overfishing, however, is not new; it began in 11th-century Europe. Roberts, a professor of marine conservation in ...
Talking Hands.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
Sep 01, 2007 ... TALKING HANDS MARGALIT FOX [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This book takes readers to a living laboratory for the study of language and the ways in which its acquisition reflect the workings of the human brain. Fox focuses on the difference between spoken and nonauditory ...
The New Time Travelers: A Journey to the Frontiers of Physics.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
Sep 01, 2007 ... THE NEW TIME TRAVELERS: A Journey to the Frontiers of Physics DAVID TOOMEY [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] H.G. Wells' classic 1895 novel The Time Machine sparked the imaginations of millions of people, Among them were a handful of scientists who took Wells seriously and ...
Don't Try This At Home: The Physics of Hollywood Movies.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
Sep 01, 2007 ... DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME: The Physics of Hollywood Movies ADAM WEINER [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Many of the sequences in today's action movies, which feature such escapades as driving a car on an asteroid, drilling to the core of Earth, or surviving a horrific crash with ...
Risk reversal?(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
Sep 01, 2007; ... "Diabetes drug might hike heart risk" (SN: 6/23/07, p. 397) reports 86 heart attacks among 15,560 rosiglitazone (Avandia) users, versus 72 others in a control group of 12,283. A study coauthor then says that "after statistical adjustment, that yields a 43 percent higher risk of heart ...
Let's be careful.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
Sep 01, 2007; ... "Crossing the Line: Technique could treat brain diseases" (SN: 6/23/07, p. 387) describes attaching a drug molecule to a molecule from the rabies virus that enables the drug to cross the blood-brain barrier. This suggests a possible danger if the ability to produce the ...
By the book.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Your review of Alex Vilenkin's book Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes (SN: 6/30/07, p. 411) contained an often-made error. In Guth's inflation model, during the first ...
Gems with impact.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
Sep 01, 2007; ... With respect to the article on kimberlites, diamonds, and mantle fractures ("A Gemstone's Wild Ride," SN: 6/30/07, p. 412), may I suggest that the fractures in question emanate from hypervelocity bolide impacts on Earth. There is ...
Hive scourge? Virus linked to recent honeybee die-off.(This Week)(Israeli acute paralysis virus)
Sep 08, 2007; ... A little-known virus has been tagged as a suspect, or maybe just an opportunistic marker of disease, in the recent unexplained disappearances of honeybees. During the past year, an estimated 23 percent of U.S. beekeeping operations saw worker bees vanish over the course of a few ...
The Venter decryption: biologist decodes his own genome.(This Week)(J. Craig Venter)
Sep 08, 2007; ... For the first time, scientists have decoded and published a nearly complete readout of both sets of chromosomes in an individual. The diploid genome, of biologist J. Craig Venter, reveals much more human genetic variation than scientists had expected. In 2001, two competing ...
Killer collision: dino demise traces to asteroid-family breakup.(This Week)
Sep 08, 2007; ... A huge chunk of rock hit Earth 65 million years ago, setting off events that wiped out the dinosaurs. That chunk, astronomers now say, was a wayward fragment from a collision between two giant asteroids in the inner part of the asteroid belt, which lies between Mars and Jupiter. The new ...
Live wires: axons can influence nerve impulses.(This Week)
Sep 08, 2007; ... The "wires" that carry electrical signals among nerve cells in the brain can influence the threshold at which the cells will send those signals, research on mouse-brain tissue shows. The finding challenges the conventional view of nerve cells, or neurons. In that scenario, ...
Role change: mast cells show an anti-inflammatory side.(This Week)
Sep 08, 2007; ... As anyone who has reacted to poison ivy can attest, the plant can induce maddeningly itchy skin. Researchers have now found that a cell once thought to be one of the chief perpetrators of this immune overreaction may actually keep the reaction from getting out of hand. ...
Sonic sands: uncovering the secret of the booming dunes.(This Week)
Sep 08, 2007; ... Marco Polo, Charles Darwin, and other adventurers marveled at the loud, thrumming sounds that emanate from sand dunes in certain desert locales around the world. Now, researchers say that they've solved the mystery of how the dunes produce their mysterious tones. So-called ...
Bipolar express: mental ailment expands rapidly among youth.(This Week)(bipolar disorder )
Sep 08, 2007; ... The rate of bipolar disorder diagnoses for children and adolescents seen as outpatients by physicians shot up dramatically between 1994 and 2003, raising new concerns about possible overdiagnosis of this severe mood disorder among young people. National medical surveys done ...
What goes up: big-city air pollution moves to the burbs and beyond.
Sep 08, 2007; ... Jeffrey S. Gaffney, a sunburn-prone atmospheric scientist, set off one morning in March 2006 for a day of field work in Mexico City--without his hat and sunscreen. At Mexico City's altitude, 2,240 meters above sea level, sunlight beating down through the thin air delivers as much as 30 ...
Genome 2.0: mountains of new data are challenging old views.(human genomes and genetic research)
Sep 08, 2007; ... When scientists unveiled a draft of the human genome in early 2001, many cautioned that sequencing the genome was only the beginning. The long list of the four chemical components that make up all the strands of human DNA would not be a finished book of life, but a road map of an ...
A different view of Uranus' rings.(PLANETARY SCIENCE)(Brief article)
Sep 08, 2007 ... As seen from Earth, the rings of Uranus are now precisely edge on. It's the first time this alignment has occurred since Uranus' rings--now known to number 13--were discovered in 1977, and the event is providing an unprecedented view of the planet's small, inner rings. ...
HIV is double trouble for brain.(NEUROSCIENCE)(Brief article)
Sep 08, 2007 ... People who live a long time while infected with HIV sometimes develop dementia. The virus that causes AIDS is known to damage brain cells, and it now appears that the virus halts the creation of new neurons as well. A single protein in the virus' outer shell triggers both ...
Men's fertile role in evolving long lives.(ANTHROPOLOGY)(Brief article)
Sep 08, 2007 ... Well past age 50, men can still impregnate women of childbearing age. That lengthy period of fertility spurred the evolution of relatively long lives in both sexes, a new study suggests. In modern hunter-gatherer societies, a substantial number of men in their 60s and 70s ...
Virus thrives by hiding.(MICROBIOLOGY)(virus replication)(Brief article)
Sep 08, 2007 ... After invading a cell, some viruses cozy up to it's internal membranes before reproducing, but scientists haven't been sure why. Now they've seen that one such microbe, the flock house virus, reproduces in cocoons within the membranes. The cocoons are havens where the virus can ...
Lack of oxygen stunts fish reproduction.(ENVIRONMENT)(effect of hypoxia)(Brief article)
Sep 08, 2007 ... Seasonal hypoxia, when dissolved oxygen concentrations in water drop below 2 milligrams per liter, is a normal summer occurrence in estuaries. Over the past 20 years, however, pollution has increased the severity and frequency of hypoxia in waters worldwide. That trend could put a crimp in ...
Orangutans hand it to researchers.(BEHAVIOR)(Brief article)
Sep 08, 2007 ... Orangutans try to communicate by gesturing in the same way as people do, researchers find. In a series of sessions with captive female orangutans, Richard Byrne and his colleagues at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland offered individual animals a whole serving of a ...
Aura origins show the way in epilepsy surgery.(NEUROSCIENCE)(Brief article)
Sep 08, 2007 ... Epileptic seizures are often preceded by auras, which patients experience in many ways: visual disturbances, butterflies in the stomach, or even deja vu. An aura can reveal which part of the brain is spawning a seizure, but multiple auras in a person have heretofore offered little guidance ...
Laser printers can dirty the air.(ENVIRONMENT)(Brief article)
Sep 08, 2007 ... The smaller an air-pollution particle is, the more likely it will be inhaled deep into the lungs, where it can trigger disease. A new study finds that office laser printers can spew especially small particles. Lidia Morawska of the Queensland University of Technology in ...
112 Mercer Street: Einstein, Russell, Godel, Pauli, and the End of Innocence in Science.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
Sep 08, 2007 ... 112 MERCER STREET: Einstein, Russell, Godel, Pauli, and the End of Innocence in Science BURTON FELDMAN, KATHERINE WILLIAMS, EDS. In 1943, Albert Einstein invited three friends--pacifist and philosopher Bertrand Russell, physicist Wolfgang Pauli, and mathematician ...
How Mathematicians Think: Using Ambiguity, Contradiction, and Paradox to Create Mathematics.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
Sep 08, 2007 ... HOW MATHEMATICIANS THINK: Using Ambiguity, Contradiction, and Paradox to Create Mathematics WILLIAM BYERS Many people assume that mathematicians' thinking processes are strictly methodical and algorithmic. Integrating his experience as a mathematician and a Buddhist, ...
Of A Feather: A Brief History of American Birding.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
Sep 08, 2007 ... OF A FEATHER: A Brief History of American Birding SCOTT WEIDENSAUL Birding, which began as an eccentric pastime, has become one of the most popular forms of outdoor recreation in the United States. Weidensaul reviews the history of birding, beginning with the ...
Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
Sep 08, 2007 ... SUPER CRUNCHERS: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart IAN AYERS Conventional wisdom dictates that experience and intuition are unfailingly valuable when it comes to making decisions. Ayers, an econometrician and a lawyer, makes a case that may ...
Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
Sep 08, 2007 ... WHY BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE HAVE MORE DAUGHTERS ALAN S. MILLER AND SATOSHI KANAZAWA Ever wonder why people act the way they do? The question remains one of life's mysteries, and for good reason. Although scientists have paid great attention to the way in which learning and ...
Patent pending.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
Sep 08, 2007; ... If Drs. Glass and Venter succeed in assembling a viable synthetic bacterial genome ("Life Swap: Switching genomes converts bacteria," SN: 6/30/07, p. 403), will the genome or the new life form itself be patentable? ...
Whisky or sour?(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
Sep 08, 2007; ... It has been reported that vinegar, taken before a meal, can lower postmeal blood glucose. If so, the lowering of postmeal blood glucose by alcohol, as reported in "Alcohol Answer? Drinks lower glucose to protect heart" (SN: 6/30/07, p. 405), may be the result of the alcohol being ...
One more thing.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
Sep 08, 2007; ... "Antibiotics in infancy tied to asthma" (SN: 7/7/07, p. 14) offers two explanations for the correlation of asthma with early infancy antibiotics: a need for the immune system to be trained by early exposure to microbial toxins and a need for normal ...
Corrections.(LETTERS)(Correction notice)
Sep 08, 2007 ... "New Clues: Gene variations may contribute to MS risk" (SN: 8/4/07, p. 70) reversed the possible relationship between sun exposure and multiple sclerosis (MS) risk. The story should have said that a ...
Alliance of opposites: electrons and positrons make new molecule.(This Week)
Sep 15, 2007; ... By soaking a silica sponge with antimatter, physicists have made the first matter-antimatter molecules. With further refinement, the technique might be used to briefly condense antimatter into fluid or solid states or even to create the first gamma-ray laser. About 10 years ago, ...
Survivor: extrasolar planet escapes stellar attack.(This Week)
Sep 15, 2007; ... From the sizzling outer atmosphere of a sunlike star to the chilly surroundings of a dark, stellar cinder, extrasolar planets keep turning up in the darndest places. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Now astronomers have found a large planet that survived a special type of ...
Fish switch: salmon make baby trout after species, sex swap.(This Week)(fish reproduction)
Sep 15, 2007; ... Biologists have implanted male-reproductive tissue from rainbow trout into male and female salmon, which then bred a new generation of baby trout. In male-salmon recipients, the trout tissue produced sperm, but in female salmon, the same tissue produced eggs, says Goro Yoshizaki ...
Debate renewed: diabetes drug ups heart risk.(This Week)(rosiglitazone)
Sep 15, 2007; ... The popular diabetes drug rosiglitazone, marketed as Avandia, more than doubles the long-term risk of heart failure and increases the long-term risk of heart attack by 42 percent, according to a new analysis. Rosiglitazone initially came under scrutiny earlier this year when an ...
Brain sabotage: Alzheimer's protein may spawn miniseizures.(This Week)(Amyloid beta-protein)
Sep 15, 2007; ... A sticky protein implicated in Alzheimer's disease disrupts the brain's circuitry by inducing seizures that give barely an outward sign that they're happening, a study of mice shows. Excessive buildup of a protein called amyloid-beta in the brain is a hallmark of Alzheimer's ...
Grazing on the periodic table: some ancient microorganisms lived on a diet of pure sulfur.(This Week)
Sep 15, 2007; ... Analyses of 3.5-billion-year-old rocks from Australia indicate that some of the microorganisms living when those rocks formed were able to derive energy from sulfur, the first time such a metabolic feat has been chronicled in rocks of that age. Because bacteria have no hard ...
Spot on: printing flexible electronics one nanodot at a time.(This Week)(e-jet printer)
Sep 15, 2007; ... Plastic displays, solar cells, and other kinds of gadgets are attractive for their flexibility and potential low cost. But they rely on materials--polymers, nanoparticles, and carbon nanotubes--that are incompatible with manufacturing processes designed for silicon-based devices. Now, ...
Curry power: an age-old seasoning could help combat Alzheimer's.
Sep 15, 2007; ... Imagine that you're living 3,000 years ago in a village in what's now southern India. When you get sick or injured, you visit the healer, who most likely is a practitioner of the herbal medicine called ayurveda. For whatever ails you, you'll probably get a treatment that includes a bit of ...
Consciousness in the raw: the brain stem may orchestrate the basics of awareness.(hydranencephaly and other brain diseases)
Sep 15, 2007; ... In October 2004, Swedish neuroscientist Bjorn Merker packed up his video camera and joined five families for a 1-week get-together in Florida that featured several visits to the garden of childhood delights known as Disney World. For Merker, though, the trip wasn't a vacation. With the ...
How platelets help cancer spread.(BIOMEDICINE)(Brief article)
Sep 15, 2007 ... As cancer cells migrate in the body from a primary tumor, they're chaperoned by clumps of platelets. These bloodstream particles shield the cells from damage and help them invade new tissues in the process called metastasis. Researchers have now discovered how one molecule helps tumor ...
Major merger.(ASTRONOMY)(collision of galaxies)(Brief article)
Sep 15, 2007 ... Like cosmic bumper cars, four galaxies are ramming into each other in one of the biggest collisions ever recorded. The quartet will ultimately merge into a single galaxy that may be several times as massive as the Milky Way. Kenneth Rines of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for ...
Perfect pitch isn't so perfect in many.(BEHAVIOR)(musical pitch)(Brief article)
Sep 15, 2007 ... People who can name a single musical note played in isolation have what is called absolute, or perfect, pitch. A new study suggests that this uncanny ability might be distorted slightly by a common routine in Western music and could fade with age. Researchers offered an online ...
Advantage: Starch.(EVOLUTION)(human saliva and amylase gene)(Brief article)
Sep 15, 2007 ... New genetic evidence supports the controversial notion that the lowly tuber propelled humans to the top of the evolutionary heap. Human saliva is rich in amylase, an enzyme that breaks starch into glucose before it's swallowed. People carry more copies of the amylase gene than ...