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Hacked E-mails Fuel Climate Change Skeptics

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Andrew C. Revkin - Nov. 21 (News Report) - The e-mails and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university will undoubtedly raise questions about the actions of some scientists.

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Data breach at climate research center in U.K

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Juliet Eilperin - Nov. 20 (News Report) - Hackers broke into the electronic files of one of the world's foremost climate research centers this week and posted an array of e-mails in which prominent scientists engaged in a blunt discussion of global warming research and disparaged climate-change skeptics.

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The Dirt on Worms

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

agweb.com - By Pam Smith - Nov. 18 (News Report) - The earthworm has long been considered the farmer’s friend. Their burrowing has always been thought to aerate the soil while their droppings provide fertilizer. No-till farmers count on these tireless workers to improve soil tilth. And on their worst day, earthworms sacrifice everything to land us a lunch from our favorite fishing hole

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Phthalate exposure linked to less-masculine play by boys

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Science Daily - Nov. 15 (News Report) - A study of 145 preschool children reports, for the first time, that when the concentrations of two common phthalates in mothers' prenatal urine are elevated their sons are less likely to play with male-typical toys and games, such as trucks and play fighting.

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Greenland ice loss 'accelerating'

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

BBC News - Nov. 12 (News Report) - The Greenland ice sheet is losing its mass faster than in previous years and making an increasing contribution to sea level rise, a study has confirmed. Published in the journal Science, it has also given scientists a clearer view of why the sheet is

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Scientists: Nuke panel owes Utahns an apology

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Salt Lake Tribune - By Judy Fahys - Nov. 09 (News Report) - Three scientists say federal nuclear regulators owe Utahns an apology -- and a policy change -- for allowing shallow burial of depleted uranium, including the 49,000 tons already at EnergySolutions Inc.'s landfill in Tooele County.

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Making Health Care Better

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By David Leonhardt - Nov. 08 (Special Report) - The American health care system is more expensive than any other, without providing better results. The cure, says Brent James, is measurement.

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Judge OKs Challenge to Human Gene Patents

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Wired - Nov. 03 (News Report) - A federal judge ruled Monday that a lawsuit can move forward against the Patent and Trademark Office and a research company awarded exclusive rights to human genes known to detect early signs of breast or ovarian cancer. The first-of-its-kind lawsuit

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Googling Fights Dementia, Study Suggests

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

National Geographic - By Ker Than - Oct. 20 (Special Report) - Using search engines may help stave off dementia and memory loss, a new brain-scan study suggests. Scientists found that middle-aged and older adults with little Internet experience showed increased activity in key brain regions after surfing the Web

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The Big Business of Swine Flu

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

ABC News - By Dalia Fahmy - Oct. 14 (News) - Americans are still debating whether to roll up their sleeves for a swine flu shot, but companies have already figured it out: vaccines are good for business. Drug companies have sold $1.5 billion worth of swine flu shots, in addition to the $1 billion for seasonal flu they booked earlier this year. These inoculations are part of a much wider and rapidly growing $20 billion global vaccine market.

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For First Time, AIDS Vaccine Shows Some Success in Trials

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. - Sep. 25 (News Report) - A new AIDS vaccine tested in Thailand has protected a significant minority against infection, the first time any vaccine against the disease has even partly succeeded in a clinical trial.

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A world first: Vaccine helps prevent HIV infection

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By Marilynn Marchione, Michael Casey - Sep. 24 (News Report) - For the first time, an experimental vaccine has prevented infection with the AIDS virus, a watershed event in the deadly epidemic and a surprising result. Recent failures led many scientists to think such a vaccine might never be possible. The World Health Organization and the U.N. agency UNAIDS said the results "instilled new hope" in the field of HIV vaccine research, although researchers say it likely is many years before a vaccine might be available.

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Darwin's complex loss of faith

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Nick Spencer - Sep. 17 (Special Report) - It is easier to make a film about a man who allegedly "killed God" than one who studied barnacles for eight year years. The new film about Charles Darwin, Creation, does the former and although it has been criticised for historical inaccuracy, it remains a beautiful, moving and eminently watchable movie. Darwin himself never thought his theory killed God, writing towards the end of this life "It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent theist and an evolutionist." It didn't even kill his own religious faith. But it did wound it severely. Up until his return from the Beagle in 1836, Darwin considered himself an "orthodox" Christian. There is no reason to doubt this although it is important to recognise that his orthodoxy was a specific early 19th century, rational, demonstrable, civilised, gentlemanly kind of orthodoxy. In particular, it was heavily influenced by William Paley whose Natural Theology confidently argued that nature contains "every manifestation of design… [that] design must have had a designer … That designer must have been a person [and] that person is God." Christianity for Darwin was primarily a proof to be established and Paley did that admirably. When his emerging theory began to undermine these ideas, it also undermined the Christianity that was built on them. It didn't happen immediately. Darwin's notebooks show him trying to accommodate an intellectually credible idea of God and his new theory – in many ways successfully.

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Spacecraft 'could surf gravitational tubes' to make solar travel more efficient

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Daily Telegraph - By Andy Bloxham - Sep. 12 (News Report) - Scientists in the US are trying to map the twisting "tubes" so they can be used to cut the cost of space travel. Each one acts like a gravitational version of the Gulf Stream, created from the complex interplay of forces between planets and moons.

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Colony Collapse and Ruptured Ribosomes; Minding Darwin's Bees Wax: Scientific American Podcast

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

scientificamerican.com - By Steve Mirsky - Aug. 25 (News Analysis) - John Williams, the beekeeper at Down House in England, talks about Darwin's bees. And May Berenbaum, entomologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, talks about the latest publication related to colony collapse disorder and ribosome damage in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Websites related to this episode include www.bee-craft.com

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Methane seeps from Arctic sea bed

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

BBC News - Aug. 18 (News Report) - Methane bubbles observed by sonar, escape from sea bed as temperatures rise Scientists say they have evidence that the powerful greenhouse gas methane is escaping from the Arctic sea bed. Researchers say this could be evidence of a predicted positive

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Scientists in a flap over dinosaur nesting

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

bozemandailychronicle.com - By Gail Schontzler - Aug. 11 (News Report) - The science of the living and the science of the dead clashed Monday at a Museum of the Rockies symposium on dinosaur nesting and whether the creatures brooded on their nests like gigantic chickens. It was all very civilized, but it was hard not to miss a few feathers flying.

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Fast-spinning black holes might reveal all

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Scientist - By Marcus Chown - Aug. 09 (News Report) - It is the ultimate cosmic villain: space and time come to an abrupt end in its presence and the laws of physics break down. Now it seems a "naked" black hole may yet emerge in our universe, after spinning away its event horizon. In 1969, physicist Roger Penrose postulated that every singularity, or black hole, must be shrouded by an event horizon from which nothing, including light, can escape. His Cosmic Censorship Conjecture has it that singularities are always hidden.

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Warning green fears could make farming more industrialised

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

nzherald.co.nz - By Geoff Cumming - Aug. 09 (News Report) - Images of carefree cows roaming free, chewing grass or silage year round (well, almost), used to be the green selling point of New Zealand's dairy industry. Not for us those "factory farms" of the Northern Hemisphere where the poor cows are consigned to sheds and fed grain for long periods.

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Clever rooks repeat ancient fable

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

BBC News - Aug. 06 (News Report) - Footage of clever rooks reveal that one of Aesop's fables may be based on fact, scientists report.

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Is Google Killing General Knowledge?

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

moreintelligentlife.com - By Brian Cathcart - Aug. 05 (Special Report) - The average student, though better-informed than the earl’s daughter appears to be, seems not to value general knowledge. If asked a factual question, they will usually click on a search engine without a second thought. Actually knowing the fact, committing it to memory, does not seem to be a consideration.

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Mystery deepens on Mars methane

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

BBC News - By Judith Burns - Aug. 05 (News Report) - Martian surface is very hostile to organics say scientists Methane on Mars is produced and destroyed far faster than on Earth, according to analysis of recent data. Scientists in Paris used a computer climate model for the Red Planet to simulate

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Unpopular Science

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Chris Mooney, Sheril Kirshenbaum - Aug. 04 (Special Report) - We live in a time of pathbreaking advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology, of private spaceflight and personalized medicine, amid a climate and energy crisis, in a world made more dangerous by biological and nuclear terror threats and global pandemics. Meanwhile, advances in neuroscience are calling into question who we are, whether our identities and thought processes can be reduced to purely physical phenomena, whether we actually have free will. The media ought to be bursting with this stuff. Yet precisely the opposite is happening: even in places where you'd expect it to hold out the longest, science journalism is declining.

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Knowing How to Pick a Fight

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seed - By Steve Olson - Aug. 04 (Special Report) - For decades, right-wing commentators have heaped abuse on Paul Ehrlich. He has been derided as a “stupendously bad prophet” by the Wall Street Journal, “always wrong” by Investor’s Business Daily, a “doom-monger” by the Hoover Institution. When I repeat some of these characterizations to Ehrlich over lunch at a Palo Alto cafe, he laughs. “I don’t give a shit what people like Ann Coulter think of me,” he says. The opinions that he cares about are those of his fellow scientists, and they are, fortunately, far less caustic. “They might say, ‘Ehrlich is more pessimistic than I would be,’ or ‘Ehrlich has not valued the green revolution as much as I would have,’” he says. “But I don’t think I’ve seen a single scientific review of something I’ve written that says, ‘This is wrong.’”

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'Organic has no health benefits'

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

BBC News - Jul. 29 (News Report) - Organic food is no healthier than conventionally produced food, a large independent review has concluded.

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