By Geoff Brumfiel of Nature magazine England’s West Country is a bucolic landscape of winding country lanes and gently rolling pastures. But as autumn darkens into winter, a war, complete with armed marksmen and camouflaged saboteurs, is about to erupt from the hedgerows. Both sides claim science as their ally. At issue is the badger (Meles meles), one of the largest predators left in the British Isles after millennia of human occupation....
A tool known as a liquid biopsy—which finds signs of cancer in a simple blood sample—promises to solve those problems and more. A few dozen companies are developing their own technologies, and observers predict that the market for the tests could be worth billions. The technique typically homes in on circulating-tumor DNA (ctDNA), genetic material that routinely finds its way from cancer cells into the bloodstream. Only recently have advanced technologies made it possible to find, amplify and sequence the DNA rapidly and inexpensively....
The oilmen were drilling deep below the Gulf of Mexico when a rise of pressure from natural gas blew out the wellhead. A safety device intended to seal the well failed, and tens of thousands of barrels of oil a day began to shoot up into the Gulf waters. Engineers tried stopping the flow with mud and junk and lowering a cap over the leak. They spent months digging relief wells to plug the hole....
Stem cells can transform into whatever cell the body tells them to. Unfortunately, scientists have yet to master that particular gift of gab. But investigators at Stanford University may soon crack the language with tiny “chat rooms” for stem cells. In their natural milieu, stem cells have a variety of neighbors that pass on chemical messages at exact spots at particular times in specific amounts to guide the cells’ development into a given cell type....
The human brain is an incredible energy drain. Taking up only about 2 percent of the body’s mass, the organ uses more than a fifth of bodily energy. Ever more accurate calculations of its energy budget at the level of the neuron (nerve cell) are important to researchers ranging from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analysts to evolutionary biologists. Fifty-seven years ago, Nobel laureates Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley came up with a model to calculate the power behind electrochemical currents in neurons—a great step forward in understanding how the brain worked and how it divvied up resources....
SOFT LANDING SYSTEM: Project engineers are developing an air-bag system (above) that inflates underneath the Orion crew module to cushion the shock of landing on hard terrain, if the vehicle should do so. If the air-bag technology proves unsuitable, however, they have several alternatives in the works, including retrorocket systems. OVERALL TRADE-OFFS: Engineers must find the optimal balance between the maximum payload masses that the Ares boosters can deliver, on the one hand, and the combination of the widest safety margins, greatest system redundancy and most useful crew accommodations on the other....
Companies in the U.S. natural gas industry have begun to scale up a program to sell methane that’s recycled from sources like hog-feeding farms and sewage plants as a replacement for natural gas drawn from wells. It offers an opportunity to reduce a potent greenhouse gas while creating a source of revenue for the growing number of companies, cities and farmers becoming engaged in the budding process. A “methane tracker” report released in January by the International Energy Agency calculated that the warming power of the invisible and hard-to-detect gas can be as high as 87 times more powerful than carbon dioxide during its first 20 years of life....
Students are told to “sleep on it,” because many experiments have shown an early stage of sleep helps consolidate the memory of recently learned facts. Now German neuroscientists have found that stimulating the sleeping brain with external electric fields can further boost memory performance. Jan Born and his colleagues at the University of Luebeck gave a simple memory test—sets of word pairs—to 13 volunteer medical students and then let them fall asleep....
This spring the World Health Organization (WHO) celebrated the early completion the 2015 development goal of bringing improved drinking water to an additional two billion people since 1990. “Today we recognize a great achievement for the people of the world,” United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said at the occasion. “The successful efforts to provide greater access to drinking water.” The feat was a landmark in securing what the U.N. General Assembly declared in 2010 was a universal human right: “access to safe and clean water....
The Interior Department moved closer to establishing habitat protections for the polar bear yesterday by sending its proposed rule to the White House Office of Management and Budget for review. The habitat protections will add another layer in what has become a complicated process for protecting the bear, fraught with concerns and legal complaints from environmentalists and industry groups. The Bush administration listed the polar bear as a threatened species last year because of its melting ice habitat....
Call it the easy-bake nanosensor. Researchers report they have built an exquisitely sensitive biological detector from silicon using conventional tools, meaning it could in principle be mass-produced. Relying on standard materials and manufacturing techniques would make it much easier to incorporate a nanosensor with the electronics inside a handheld device, says chemist Mark Reed of Yale University, co-author of a report in this week’s Nature detailing the technology. “This has the ability to scale in power and cost, just like regular electronics,” he says....
THE WOODLANDS, Tex.—Mercury is a world of extremes. Daytime temperature on the planet closest to the sun can soar as high as 400 degrees Celsius near the equator, hot enough to melt lead. When day turns to night, the planet’s surface temperature plunges to below –150 degrees C. But some places on Mercury are slightly more stable. Inside polar craters on the diminutive planet are regions that never see the light of day, shaded as they are by their crater rims....
By Zoë CorbynIt is a widely held stereotype that children who grow up without brothers or sisters may be “oddballs” or “misfits.” But new research undermines that notion–suggesting that any deficiency that does exist in only children’s social skills when they are young has disappeared by their teens.The results of the new study also put social-science research under the spotlight. Just what is the right methodology to study such an emotive topic?...
By Eric Hand of Nature magazineThe Netherlands, one of the most densely populated countries in Europe, would seem to be an inauspicious place to detect radio whispers from the distant Universe. Mobile-phone towers, television transmissions, planes overhead and even the odd burst of noise from a windmill create a background din in the radio sky.But the builders of LOFAR, the Low-Frequency Array of radio receivers centred around the tiny village of Exloo, say that they have found ways to ignore the noise....
Seventy beagle puppies originally intended for pharmacology research were released to adoptive families in India on Saturday, several weeks after activists alerted the Indian government that the animals had been falsely described as “pets” by the contract research organization seeking to import them. The company, Bangalore-based Advinus, had been receiving beagle shipments from the Chinese arm of Marshall BioResources, a major research animal breeder based in North Rose, New York, since at least 2010....
CHICAGO—Warmer temperatures are at least partly to blame for a surge in malaria in East Africa and the increase in drug-resistant strains of the disease, according to a University of Michigan researcher. The malaria parasite is highly sensitive to changes in temperature, and even subtle warming can dramatically increase populations of the mosquitoes that transmit the disease, said ecologist Mercedes Pascual. Some scientists have argued that climate is not involved in the increasing highland epidemics....
Editor’s Note: This story is part of an In-Depth Report on the science of beauty. Read more about the series here. Cosmetics—makeup, creams, fragrances—have been around for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptian and Roman women famously caked on lead-based foundation. (Lead, a metal, can cause nerve, muscle and organ damage.) But surely lead-laden cosmetics have been phased out along with lead-lined water pipes, right? Not necessarily. Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversees the multi-billion-dollar-a-year cosmetics industry but it lacks the power to approve products or ingredients before they hit store shelves, even though their contents have been shown to enter the body....
Key concepts Momentum Inertia Acceleration Introduction Have you ever wondered why figure skaters are able to spin like a top so quickly? In many cases they’re able to increase their speed without pushing off of anything simply by tucking their arms in to add any extra force to the spin. What’s going on? To find out, we’ll mimic the same basic technique figure skaters use and learn about some simple principles from classical mechanics to get to the bottom of how it works....
Studying quantum mechanics, which I’ve been doing for the last two-plus years, has served as an antidote to my tendency toward habituation, taking reality for granted. Wave functions, superposition and other esoterica remind me that this is a strange, strange world; there is a mystery at the heart of things that ordinary language can never quite capture. I’m thus thrilled by this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics. John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger won for experimental probes of entanglement, a peculiar connection between two or more particles....
BEIJING—The plight of stray cats in Beijing has long drawn the sympathy of Juan “Crystal” Wang. The demure, soft-spoken young woman has spent the past few years placing forlorn felines in good homes. View a slide show of the animal market But more recently, she boosted the fortunes of larger cats as well by helping expose the fact that the Xiongsen Bear & Tiger Zoo near the city of Guilin was killing the endangered cats in its “zoo” and serving the meat at its snack bar or dropping the carcasses into vats of wine....
