Guardian Science
Country diary: Wenlock Edge: The willy lily on the wild side of the fence
Wenlock Edge: This extraordinary plant's erotic reputation was enhanced in a 1655 translation of Dioscorides, which claimed it 'stirrs up affections to conjugation being dranck with wine'
My lords-and-ladies, I am the vulgar spirit of rustic insolence hiding in the bushes who calls you cuckoo pintle, Jack-in-the-pulpit, willy lily; I am the ribald namer of wild things to embarrass you toffs who decide which side of the fence I'm on; I am the fly in the ointment. So might say the fly, dancing around the erect spadix-maypole-phallic-thing as a burst of May sunlight shines through the spathe and this common flower looks like such a holy place. Rude names may be a way for the downtrodden to take their revenge through language, but it is an extraordinary plant with its blotched spear-shaped leaves and cowled bloom, later jewelled with bright red berries. Its erotic reputation was enhanced when John Goodyer translated Dioscorides in 1655, claiming it "stirrs up affections to conjugation being dranck with wine".
For all this Arum maculatum belongs on the wild side of the fence – the coarse, untended shadows under leafing trees and may blossom hedges in spattering rain. On the other side of the fence, the old order remains properly intact. Keep out: the fields are green and fertilised with chemicals; thistles and nettles have been sprayed with herbicide; hedges flailed, trees trimmed and dead wood taken away; lush grass is grazed by plump lambs and long-suffering ewes. This is bucolic on an industrial scale.
But in a corner of the field, subversives gather. Rabbits nibble the landlord's grass, constantly a-twitch for signs of danger; they have the impudence to have survived centuries of guns, dogs, railways, roads, disease and rotten weather to steal a living from the land. In the skies above, the swifts have come back to scream around the roofs of Wenlock as if they owned the place. Lords-and-ladies, our sly rebellion may not shock but it's not gone away, says the fly.
Paul Evansguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Huey Morgan and Joey Barton: why are men so angry on Twitter?
The Twitterverse has been ablaze with blokes getting things off their chests. Is it a guy thing?
It's been a shrill week for male rage on Twitter. Sony award loser Huey Morgan ranted about radio colleagues (Lauren Laverne: "Ask me to cover for her and up her ratings. F*ck that sh*t"; Fearne Cotton: "sh*t is fake") followed reliable Twitterranters Joey Barton (Gary Lineker is an "odious little toad") and Giles Coren, who called a critic of his Times column a "barren old hag".
If aggression is any act intended to do physical, emotional or psychological harm then women are just as aggressive as men, believes Cynthia McVey, associate fellow of the British Psychological Society. The differences lie in how we are socialised to express anger. It was once pistols at dawn for men while women sniped in tearooms. Now men brawl via an iPhone and women arch a condescending textual eyebrow. "Women tend to be better at understanding the social nuance of things," says McVey. A perfect example was Laverne's majestic tweet to Morgan: "Please stop being weird."
Psychologist Alan Redman says Twitter is an ideal platform for deindividuation – that sense of losing your identity in a group which, alongside anonymity, and not facing the person you are attacking, encourages more verbal aggression. Testing this hypothesis, I tweet Coren, who suggests I man up and call him.
Blustering male tweeters are basically road-ragers or those people who barge your shoulder on a Saturday night, Coren screams/says meekly. Unlike them, he is nothing like his Twitter persona. He simply wants to flog some books and so, despite his wife's pleas, won't quit Twitter until his next tome is published. "If I could have one wish from God it would be that Twitter would be uninvented," he says. That's because Twitterrage only wounds the aggressor. Coren endured a miserable weekend after he discovered his barren old hag was actually a thoughtful and attractive 23-year-old with lots of friends. "I adopt positions sometimes which are designed to be controversial and a bit dickish. Then, when people shout at me, I'm upset," he says. "I'm a terrible combination of attention-seeker and thin-skinned."
That probably applies to every celebrity. And thanks to the Twitterverse, we are all pumped-up little celebrities now.
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Doctors 'rewire' hands of paralysed man
Man, 71, regains some use of hands after surgeons use healthy nerves to bridge damaged area between brain and forearm
A man who was paralysed in a car crash four years ago has regained some use of his hands after doctors rewired the nerves in his arms.
In a pioneering operation, US doctors took healthy nerves from the man and used them to bridge the damaged wiring that stopped signals getting from the man's brain to his hands.
Surgeons at Washington University's school of medicine said the operation may prove to be a breakthrough for some patients paralysed by spinal cord injuries.
The 71-year-old broke his neck in a car crash in 2008 that left him unable to walk. Though he could still move his arms, he had lost the ability to grasp or hold things in either hand.
In the operation surgeons used healthy nerves to bypass the damaged area and connect working nerves above the spinal breakage to those in the anterior interosseous nerve in the forearm that ultimately controls hand movement.
The man received extensive therapy after the operation and began to move the thumb and fingers of his left hand eight months after surgery. He could move the fingers of his right hand 10 months afterwards.
The patient can now feed himself and write to some extent. Though slight, his improvement is nonetheless remarkable, given the severity of the injury and the 22 months that passed before surgery.
"To our knowledge, this is the first reported case of thumb and finger flexor reinnervation after a spinal cord injury. While the results in this patient are usually modest, due to the severe joint stiffness, his function has improved significantly with his ability to feed himself," the team writes in the Journal of Neurosurgery.
"The use of nerve transfers may represent a significant breakthrough toward improved independent function in select patients with cervical spinal cord injuries," the authors said.
Despite their success, doctors said the procedure would never restore normal function to patients. The limited improvement came after the patient learned to use a nerve that normally bends the arm at the elbow to make hand grasping movements.
Mark Bacon, director of research at the charity Spinal Research, told the BBC: "One of the issues with techniques such as this is the permanence of the outcome – once done it is hard to reverse.
"There is an inevitable sacrifice of some healthy function above the injury in order to provide more useful function below. This may be entirely acceptable when we are ultimately talking about providing function that leads to a greater quality of life.
"For the limited number of patients that may benefit from this technique this may be seen as a small price to pay."
The operation is only suitable for those patients who suffered damaged spines at the base of the neck.
When injuries are higher, there are no nerves to tap into to bypass the damage. And if the spinal cord is severed lower down, the patients are unlikely to lose the use of their hands.
Doctors said further research was needed to work out how reliable the procedure was in patients and the best time to perform surgery.
Ian Sampleguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
A mock funeral is not the right way to make scientists' voices heard
Science for the Future has won extensive media coverage with its stunt, but hyperbole has damaged its cause
When Vince Cable made his first major speech on science in September 2010, it was too much for Jenny Rohn, a cell biologist at University College London. Stung by the business secretary's implication that "mediocre" British science deserved significant cuts in the forthcoming comprehensive spending review, she blogged: "Sod it. Let's march on London … Who's in?"
She got a surprising answer. A month later, more than 2,000 people gathered outside the Treasury at the Science is Vital rally, chanting "Hey, Osborne, leave our geeks alone!" to the tune of Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall. A petition with 33,804 names was delivered to Downing Street, arguing that cutting science funding would amount to cutting off the economy's nose to spite its face.
And it worked. When George Osborne, the chancellor, announced in the spending review that science funding would be frozen, but not cut, he explained: "Britain is a world leader in scientific research, and that is vital to our future economic success."
Today, protesting scientists have been back in Westminster. Upset by the funding policies of the government's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), a new group called Science for the Future staged a mock funeral for British research. A petition was delivered to Downing Street in a coffin on a horse-drawn hearse, carrying a wreath spelling the word "Science". One of the group's leaders likened the EPSRC's decisions to Stalin's.
The message could not have been starker. The government's funding strategy "puts the future of British science in mortal danger".
In my new book, The Geek Manifesto, I argue that it's essential for scientists, and those of us who care about science, to find a stronger political voice. When governments let science down, they do it not because they are following an "anti-science" agenda, but because indifference to the needs and demands of the scientific community does not appear to carry a political cost.
It is encouraging that scientists who feel strongly about the way their discipline is managed are making themselves heard. As Science is Vital showed, rallies and petitions that convey the strength of scientific opinion can make a difference, especially when they are backed by a strong argument and effective behind-the-scenes lobbying, as happened before the spending review.
Mock funerals and comparisons to Stalin, however, are not the right way to go about this. In hiring a public relations company to dream up a visually impressive stunt, Science for the Future has succeeded in winning extensive media coverage for its campaign. But in taking a tool from the Greenpeace campaigning kit, this new lobby group has turned to hyperbole that will do nothing to change the minds that matter or further its cause.
The EPSRC's focus on asking scientists to predict the impact of their research, in line with wider government policy, does raise legitimate questions about the future of funding for basic science that may have unexpected spinoffs. But it is ridiculous to claim that this strategy could leave the whole of British science on life support.
By making an argument that is transparently absurd, and by engaging in strident personal criticism of the EPSRC's leaders, this campaign is inviting ministers and the agency's officials to reject their more measured concerns. Science is Vital was careful to be polite and not to over-claim. Science for the Future is setting itself up to be ignored.
Worse, these campaigners' message - that science administration is broken and that a research council cannot be trusted to spend its money wisely - could actually be harmful to the wider interests of British science.
James Wilsdon, professor of science and democracy at Sussex University, pointed out today on Twitter that the Whitehall lobbying that accompanied Science is Vital succeeded in winning the spending freeze in part because it persuaded the Treasury that resources invested in science are invested with great efficiency. Science for the Future is muddying the waters in ways that could be used against science when the next spending review gets under way next year.
I'm all for robust campaigning on the issues that affect the health of British science: it will be necessary if ministers are to be persuaded of the strong case that increased investment in both basic and applied research is among the best ways to drive economic growth. But that campaigning has to be grounded in the facts that those of us who care about science hold dear.
As Evan Harris, the former Lib Dem science spokesman, says in The Geek Manifesto: "We are held back by the circumspection and rationality with which we speak, handicaps that do not encumber our opponents." It's an axiom that every science campaign should bear in mind.
Mark Hendersonguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Cancer death rates fall among 50-somethings
Deaths from cancer in Britain have fallen 40% in people aged 50 to 59, according to figures produced by Cancer Research UK
Deaths from cancer among 50-somethings have fallen to their lowest level in 40 years, thanks to better diagnosis, fewer people smoking and new drugs improving patients' chances of survival.
In 1971 over 21,300 people in the UK aged between 50 and 59 died of cancer, but in 2010 a total of just under 14,000 did so - a fall of 40% - according to new figures produced by Cancer Research UK (CRUK).
The overall rate of people in that age group dying from the disease has dropped from 310 per 100,000 people to 185 per 100,000 people over that period. For example, the proportion of 50 to 59-year-olds dying of either stomach cancer or Hodgkin's lymphoma has dropped by more than 75%. While about 25 people in every 100,000 died of stomach cancer in 1971, that had fallen to 4.2 by 2010. Similarly, the rate of deaths from Hodgkin's lymphoma has dropped from more than two per 100,000 to 0.5 per 100,000.
Among men, the biggest drops have been seen in stomach, testicular and lung cancer and Hodgkin's lymphoma, while among women it has been in cervical, stomach and bowel cancer, and Hodgkin's lymphoma.
"Our latest figures show that for the first time in the last four decades cancer deaths among people aged 50-59 have dropped below 14,000 a year. This is really encouraging news and it highlights the huge progress we have made", said Professor Peter Johnson, CRUK's chief clinician.
The gradual decline in smoking which began about 1970 has also been "a big help", said Johnson, as well as the fact that "we are also better at diagnosing cancers early and better at treating them whether by surgery, radiotherapy or chemotherapy", he added, stressing the role of CRUK research in breakthroughs.
The discovery of new drugs such as tamoxifen, which is used to treat breast cancer and the introduction of screening for various forms of cancer have also played a part.
Dr Harpal Kumar, the charity's chief executive, said that despite these improvements "there is still much more to do. Smoking remains the largest cause of cancer, which is why CRUK is petitioning the government to bring in plain packaging of tobacco, so children are less likely to be seduced by the sophisticated marketing techniques designed to make smoking attractive to youngsters."
But the Department of Health said that despite these improvements, the chances of patients in England surviving cancer were still not good enough. "These figures reflect advancements in cancer services, but our survival rates still lag behind comparable countries", said a spokeswoman.
"That's why we are investing more than £750 million to make sure people are diagnosed with cancer earlier and have better access to the latest treatments. Through our investment our aim is to save 5,000 more lives [in England] every year by 2015 - closing the gap in cancer survival between us and the best-performing countries in the world", she added.
Denis Campbellguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Scientists stage mock funeral outside parliament in funding protest
Science for the Future claims funding policies risk plunging British science and industry 'back into the Dark Ages'
More than 100 scientists took part in a mock Victorian funeral procession in Westminster on Tuesday morning to protest against a science funding policy they claim "puts the future of British science in mortal danger".
The scientists staged a rally outside parliament before delivering a petition in a coffin to Downing Street. Around 25 scientists also met their MPs to ask them to sign an early day motion about their concerns.
Most of the protesters were organic chemists, but there were also physicists and mathematicians. They argue that funding decisions are affecting fundamental research and claim that if the current policy – which asks grant applicants to predict the benefits of their research in advance – had operated in the past then penicillin and lasers would not have been developed.
The funeral procession marked the foundation of a new lobby group, Science for the Future. The group is backed by nine Nobel laureates, who yesterday wrote a letter to the Telegraph calling for reform of the government agency that allocates funds for chemistry research, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The authors claimed the EPSRC is "squandering British taxpayers' money".
"Leading scientists, including several Nobel laureates, have come together to call on the government to immediately reform the EPSRC's policies and secure the UK's competitive edge in science innovation," said Professor Anthony Barrett, director of Science for the Future. "If we do not succeed, the future of British science and industry will be irreversibly damaged and plunged back into the Dark Ages."
The EPSRC issued a statement saying that it "is committed to ensuring that the UK continues to have an enviable international research reputation, punching above its weight in quality, and maximising the societal and economic benefits of what we invest in".
During the rally, the research council said on Twitter that it was a "myth" that the EPSRC no longer uses excellence as a funding criterion.
The body has been under fire from scientists since launching its new funding strategy last year, named "Capability Shaping". The initiative is designed to help the EPSRC cope with government cuts of up to 15% in real terms. Among other things, the council wants to reduce funding for synthetic organic chemistry.
"Historically, we reject two-thirds of the applications that come in to us," said EPSRC chief executive David Delpy, "so there will always be some who are dissatisfied with the decision we made."
The EPSRC claimed that Tuesday's protest represented a slim proportion of all the researchers it funds, which last year totalled 8,000. But Barrett put down the small turnout to fear of "retribution" among researchers. "They're concerned that their future grant proposals will be in danger," he said.
Barrett and Science for the Future have been criticised by science policy academics. "There isn't a cat's chance in hell of the government scrapping EPSRC or forcing it to change its policies ahead of the next election," said James Wilsdon, professor of science and democracy at the University of Sussex.
He said the protest represented "sour grapes from a few research groups who consider themselves to have lost out".
Adam Smithguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Sexual correctness gone mad
Are lads' mags, tabloids or the porn industry doing a better job of informing us which women we're allowed to call 'sexy', and what our sexual preferences should be?
It's almost impossible to know which women are sexy. Until now I've had to discreetly compare lovers to the life-sized cardboard cut-out of Wonder Woman that stands next to my bed; but thankfully, the good folks at FHM have produced a definitive guide to sexiness that we can measure all women against. Their ingenious approach: asking thousands of judgmental young wankers to whom they would most like to masturbate. The result: women need to be more like somebody called Tulisa.
There's an early episode of Star Trek, "Mudd's Women", that features three mysterious and beautiful women whose overpowering sexuality exerts a near-catastrophic effect on the helpless men of the Enterprise. A key moment occurs during the middle-third, when a frustrated Captain Kirk turns to Dr. McCoy, grasping for some sort of explanation: "What is it? Is it that we're tired, and they're beautiful?" asks Kirk, "They are incredibly beautiful."
"Are they, Jim?" retorts McCoy, as Spock looks on approvingly, "Are they actually more lovely, pound for pound, measurement for measurement, than any other women you've known? Or is it that they just... well, act beautiful?"
By the end of the episode we discover that the women have no special power after all; their impact on men is the result of a kind of placebo effect. The women are conventionally attractive, but not extraordinarily so; they are perceived as goddesses simply because they are presented as goddesses. That, and liberal use of misty 1960s soft-focus technology.
McCoy's words brought shape to a thought that had been scratching away in my subconscious mind since I first picked up a "lads' mag" in my mid-teens; that once you strip away the poses, the make-up, the clothes, the presentation and expectation, there's nothing objectively extraordinary about these women at all.
The only difference between the girls - always 'girls' - of FHM and the women I meet in real life, is that real life is a lot more diverse. My friends have dimples, and freckles, and curvy bits, and complicated personalities; they make amusing facial expressions, and one has ginger hair. Qualities which are ruthlessly purged from FHM's parade of near-identical Stepford wank subjects.
Nobody I've ever seen really looks like Cheryl Cole, and that includes Cheryl Cole. Yet almost everybody in FHM's list looks a bit like Cheryl Cole, with only minor variations allowed in age, breast size, body shape or even skin colour: it seems Beyonce marks the acceptable limit of darkness for black people.
FHM have made sexy boring. Girl on the Net describes it perfectly as "the tedium that comes with consensus,":
"That's just what happens when you get thousands of people to choose sexiness based on pictures of women they've seen in magazines. Their sample is limited, for a start, and there are so many people voting that things will eventually work their way towards a democratic middle-ground – the breadth and variety of human sexual preference won't get a look in. You'll inevitably end up with 100 beautiful yet very similar singers/models/actresses in their pants.
"When you ask people a question – an open one – about what they find attractive, 'sexiness' becomes far more inclusive. "
FHM's 'study' uses a cohort of men self-selected according to their preference for the kind of women who feature in FHM, conditions them with a monthly barrage of images labeled 'sexy', and then asks them to name some sexy women. Even if you accepted the bogus premise that sex appeal could be ranked on a universal scale, this would be a rubbish way to do it.
To see just how rubbish, here's an experiment you can try at home: go to any porn site that ranks its most popular clips, and have a look at the top 100 clips that men actually pay for - the range of outfits, body types, situations, ages and skin colours far exceeds anything you'll find in FHM's list. When it comes to what people find sexy, there's a truth in porn considerably purer than the sterile, manufactured consent of glossy magazines. The predictable industry counter-argument, that lads' mag editors select cover girls who drive sales, scarcely deserves the effort required to insert a link to recent figures showing their vertiginous downturn in circulation.
There are more than 650 categories of porn listed at some of the amateur clip sites, and their indices swell each day, engorged with the fresh blood of new ideas from imaginations unleashed by inexpensive and easy-to-use modern production and distribution technology. Yet even as this Cambrian Explosion in porn continues, mainstream media outlets are engaged in an extraordinary effort to define and enforce incredibly narrow standards for sexual behaviour, preferences and beauty, to the detriment of both women and men.
Forget political correctness, we live in the era of sexual correctness gone mad. A stream of dubious research - often based more on PR than science - is regurgitated by the press: informing women how much they should weigh (to two decimal places), what their hip-to-waist ratio should be (0.7), how long they should allow their face to grow ("ratio of the length of the face to the width of the face should be 1.6") and giving much-needed advice on nipple placement ("The ideal is a 45 to 55 per cent proportion - that is the nipple sits not at the half-way mark down the breast, but at about 45 per cent from the top.").
Similarly high standards are enforced on our behaviour, with anything outside a narrow norm classed as deviant and immoral by large swathes of the press. Max Mosley's high court victory against the News of the World in 2008 provoked outrage from journalists like the Mail's Paul Harris, furious that the judge "championed his right to hold a spanking and bondage orgy with five prostitutes." Latent homophobia riddles the press, and forms the basis for the hateful campaign against marriage equality. In 2012, magazine editors believe it's valid to ask moronic questions like,"Who's having normal sex?" while the mythical g-spot is promoted as the one true way to achieve orgasm - god forbid women might have individual sexual preferences. If the lady still isn't happy, just try the new anti-nagging medicine ludicrously promoted in The Express; but get her under control quickly, before the slag starts drinking beer.
Sexual correctness is a fundamental failure of journalism, and not just in the moralistic right-wing end of the press. I can't remember the last time I saw an informed discussion of porn in a mainstream news publication. Many of those touted as 'sexperts' simply aren't; a situation not helped by the craven attitude of bodies like the British Psychological Society. Features on alternative sexual choices, lifestyles or fetishes invariably resort to cheap smirks at the expense of its subjects; while journalists interviewing figures in the adult entertainment industry seem compelled to demand that they justify their 'aberrant' behaviour.
We deserve better. We deserve editors and journalists who have some vague understanding of sex and sexual health, and can report it in a grown-up way. We deserve respite from the barrage of messages declaring that those whose tastes sit outside a narrowing mainstream are deviant; to be smirked at, stared at, or feared. I'm not convinced it's good for our collective sexual health if young men are brought up with the implied message that only certain types, shapes and even colours of women are socially acceptable to call 'sexy'. Aside from anything else, it's just really, really boring.
Follow me on Twitter: @mjrobbins
Martin Robbinsguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Flipper cleared! Dolphins are not gay or bisexual rapists after all
Dolphins have been defamed. Six weeks ago, the Daily Mail informed us about The dark side of Flipper: He's a sexual predator who resorts to rape to get his way.
And the Daily Telegraph also told a similar tale: "according to scientists", dolphins resort to "rape" to assert authority.
Other news outlets around the world carried similar reports. Examples: bisexual and exclusively gay dolphins (MSN); male dolphins are bisexual, US scientists claim (Australia's News Ltd); and male bottlenose dolphins engage in extensive bisexuality (ZeeNews, India).
These reports appear to be follow-ups to an article on Discovery.com that said male bottlenose dolphins engaged in extensive bisexuality, combined with periods of exclusive homosexuality.
The allegation was included in Discovery's otherwise reasonable account of an academic study into the behaviour of 120 or so adult dolphins in Western Australia led by Professor Richard Connor from the University of Massachusetts and Dr Bill Sherwin of the University of New South Wales.
But the gay-bisexual-rapist dolphin story turns out to be bunkum. According to postings by Sherwin's university colleagues, Rob Brooks (here) and Stephen Hamblin (here), it is due to a misreading of the serious scientific paper by Connor, Sherwin and others called A novel mammalian social structure in Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins: complex male-male alliances in an open social network.
Brooks writes: "The whole circus arose from a misconstrual of a simple phrase in the paper, 'bisexual philopatry.'"
He says that Sherwin explained that the bisexual philopatry simply means: "males stay near where they were born, AND females stay near where they were born". Sex, gay, straight or otherwise, is not involved. Nor are the animals rapists.
Perhaps the dolphins might like to make a formal complaint to the PCC, aka the Pisces Complaints Commission.
And please, please don't all rush to tell me that dolphins aren't fish.
Roy Greensladeguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Resolute explorers of the Arctic
Canadian base in Inuit village has provided logistic support for over a half-century of expeditions
Daniel Fortier, a geographer at Montreal University, says: "It's incredible! All our research work fits into this warehouse." It is July 2011 and we are at Resolute Bay, on Cornwallis Island on the 75th parallel. Fortier, an Arctic specialist, is making his final preparations before setting out with a team from the province of Quebec for Ward Hunt island, the last speck of Canadian land before the North Pole.
Resolute Bay, an Inuit village in Nunavut territory, is on the edge of the mythical Northwest Passage and home to a key component in the Canadian government's Polar Continental Shelf Programme (PCSP), a facility that has been providing logistic support to Arctic science for the past 54 years. It takes care of the material side of research projects in an area reaching from the border with Alaska to the Arctic Circle. It is here that expeditions start and finish.
The warehouse holds much of the equipment needed for these ventures, anything from portable latrines to hi-tech instruments. Research teams store heavy gear and precision tools in wooden crates from one year to the next. Quads and snow-scooters await their turn to be loaded on to a plane, with a stack of tents and scientific equipment.
The geomorphologists from the Northern Ellesmere Island in the Global Environment project weigh everything before making tough decisions. Their Twin Otter plane can only carry 1,080kg, passengers included. They must lighten the load before a 10-day stay on Ward Hunt Island. Michel Paquette makes a list of absolute essentials then consults Fortier, who heads the team. Out of a crate containing six heavy ice-core drills (for taking permafrost core samples), they keep only three. Even a thermometer has to be negotiated. Fortier sets aside a shovel, but Paquette protests: "You can't have a geomorphologist without a shovel."
Six students and two Earth scientists from the University of Calgary are completing careful preparations. Led by Benoît Beauchamp, they are about to leave for a six-week expedition to Borup Fiord Pass, on Ellesmere Island. They will be studying tectonics and sedimentation in the high Arctic.
Fortier laughingly points out that "to know which teams get the most research funding, just look at their boxes". The least well endowed only have plastic crates; the rich have lightweight German cases; and in between are the good old wooden crates favoured by geologists. "You can always repair them too," Fortier adds. Beauchamp dismisses the slur of being "rich", pleading that "appearances can be deceptive". He switched to aluminium containers after returning to base the previous year with a batch of wrecked plastic crates. "The new ones cost $8,000 but they're worth it," he says.
In 2010 the federal government invested about $84m in research infrastructures in the Arctic, including $11m to refurbish the PCSP facility at Resolute Bay. It has made a big difference to the base, which has twice as many beds – 100 – thanks to a new galvanised iron building, a cafeteria, leisure areas, a kitchen and an exercise room. "We wanted to make the researchers more comfortable," says manager Tim McCagherty.
Close to the warehouse, another building houses brand new laboratories. The team led by Christopher John Mundy, an oceanographer at the Marine Science Institute (Ismer) in Rimouski, was one of the first to use it in 2011, for the Arctic marine ice-associated ecosystem in a changing environment (Ice) project. "It is spacious and very well equipped," says Virginie Galindo, a French PhD student at Laval University. Despite having camped for nine weeks on the pack ice off Resolute Bay, she still thinks the laboratory is "more important than being able to spend a night in a real bed from time to time".
McCagherty is pleased too: "Before, it was cramped, with scientists sharing the upper floor of the warehouse with us." That part has since become the headquarters of the base. Basic operations are directed from here, but also the movements of planes and helicopters ferrying research teams back and forth, and supplying all the scientific outposts during the brief Arctic summer. The base uses 75 aircraft, including several Twin Otters chartered from Kenn Borrek Air. "Their pilots are some of the best in the world," says McCagherty, standing in front of a huge map of the Canadian north. Thirteen coloured pins mark the location of scientific camps already operating north of the Polar Circle.
The scientific season only starts at the end of June. "We are entering the base's most active phase," McCagherty explains. "From 1 July to 15 August it's crazy here." Otherwise, from February to September a dozen staff members do six-week shifts, working 10- to 12-hour days, seven days a week. The budget for operating the base is $6m. "It's not much," he reckons, "to sustain more than 165 research projects, involving 1,100 researchers and students."
Scientists file their applications in November. "By February the teams have been selected," McCagherty explains. "We have to regroup the ones going to the same place, organise flights, book planes and helicopters, order any equipment that's missing. Our schedule has to be both precise and flexible, because some teams or their gear don't show up at Resolute Bay on schedule. The weather changes very quickly in the Arctic and when you have a week-long blizzard, like last year, no aircraft can take off at all."
About 50 teams are deployed each year in the Arctic with logistic support from the base. Projects have a wide range of aims: to map the continental shelf in the Arctic; to study the mercury content of water from melting permafrost; to research the effects of climate change on tundra ecosystems.
For days or weeks on end the teams operate completely on their own, in a difficult environment. So the two daily radio check-ins are quite an event. The top priority is of course safety. "We check they're OK," McCagherty says, "but during the [ice] hockey season, it's impossible not to give them the results!" Glenn Parsons, one of the two cooks at the base, is the regular contact person for outlying camps. When he goes on the air every morning, his voice carries a long way: "Roger, Roger! Do you have any traffic today?" Often the only response is a laconic "All well", before he tunes into another camp. It all helps to keep in touch with civilisation.
This article originally appeared in Le Monde
Anne Pélouasguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
India loses faith in GM cotton
Maharashtra state government orders German seed company to compensate farmers as cotton hybrids fail to deliver
Ten years after it was introduced to India, genetically modified cotton is not living up to its promise. It is vulnerable to new diseases and yields are not as great as expected.
The government of Andhra Pradesh announced that for almost two-thirds of land under cultivation, the 2011 harvest was down by half on the previous year. In a departure, the government of Maharashtra state, and a court in neighbouring Madhya Pradesh, have ordered the German seed company Bayer CropScience to pay more than $1.1m in compensation to more than 1,000 farmers for cotton hybrids that did not deliver the promised yields.
Bayer CropScience has denied any responsibility and blamed "inadequate crop management and adverse environmental conditions". It is preparing an appeal.
Since the introduction of GM cotton in 2002, harvests in India have doubled and the country ranks as the world's second-largest producer. But the "white revolution" prompts distrust. Opponents of GM crops claim the increased yields of the early 2000s were due to better irrigation and favourable weather. Over the past six years average yields per hectare have barely changed, despite a fourfold increase in the use of GM cotton.
In 2011, the head of the Central Institute for Cotton Research, Keshav Raj Kranthi, issued a warning on hybrid cotton's increased vulnerability to bacteria.
"Productivity in north India is likely to decline because of the declining potential of hybrids; the emerging problem of leaf curl virus on the new susceptible Bt-hybrids; a high level of susceptibility to sucking pests (straight varieties were resistant)," Kranthi explained in a paper published in June 2011. He also pointed out that GM varieties consume more water and nutrients, leading to soil depletion. This in turn means that fertilisers are needed to achieve optimal yields.
Fertilisers, insecticides and GM seed all come at a cost. Farmers must borrow money, often from local loan-sharks or the seed and fertiliser merchants themselves. Unfavourable weather conditions or a tiny drop in the world price of cotton can sometimes spell disaster. In 2006, in the Vidarbha area, some farmers unable to repay their debts committed suicide by swallowing pesticide.
GM cotton is a new technology that demands a certain know-how to yield good results. Each of the 780 varieties available on the Indian market corresponds to a particular type of soil and different fertiliser requirements. To prevent diseases or insects developing resistance to GM varieties, local seed must be planted in just the right proportions.
"Small farmers have no idea what they're buying and even less idea how to grow these new varieties. Their traditional know-how is disappearing," says Sridhar Radhakrishnan, of the Coalition for a GM-Free India.
If the crops fail the Indian government has made no legal provision for farmers to obtain compensation. The nine states using Bt seed should pass laws so that if "something goes wrong [...] if farmers suffer, there has to be provision where the company pays compensation", the agriculture minister, Sharad Pawar, told parliament in March.
Ten years after the introduction of GM cotton, local seed varieties have virtually disappeared. The GM-seed market, launched with a massive advertising campaign, is now worth an estimated $364m. The seed companies have promised to introduce new varieties, which offer even greater resistance, while consuming less water and fertiliser. Their opponents are calling for a moratorium on GM cotton in India.
This article originally appeared in Le Monde
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Gene variant enhances memory and increases risk of post-traumatic stress disorder
The downside to having a good memory
A genetic variant associated with an enhanced capacity for emotional memories is also linked to increased susceptibility to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to new research published yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study, led by Dominique de Quervain of the University of Basel, used a combination of behavioural genetics and functional neuroimaging, and was carried out in three phases, two involving healthy European volunteers and the third involving Rwandan refugees who fled the 1994 civil war. I describe the work in more detail in this news story for Nature.
It's widely believed that memories are formed by the strengthening of connections within distributed networks of neurons. This process involves the orchestrated activity of dozens of proteins – the neurotransmitter receptors embedded in the nerve cell membranes, and their "effectors," the components of the biochemical signalling pathways inside the cells that are activated by the receptors. These molecules work together to make the signalling between neurons more efficient, so that synapses are strengthened.
The gene in question here, called PRKCA encodes an enzyme called protein kinase C-α (PKCα), and contributes to these processes by chemically modifying the receptors and their effectors. It does so by catalysing a reaction called phosphorylation, in which a phosphate group – a small organic compound consisting of one phosphorous and four oxygen atoms – is added to specific sites on the target protein. This enhances the activity of the protein, but the reaction is reversible – the phosphate group can be removed by another enzyme, called a phosphatase, which has the opposite effect on the function of the target protein.
In 2007, de Quervain and his colleagues reported that variations in the gene encoding the α2B-adrenoreceptor are related to emotional memories, and that the variants are associated with differences in susceptibility to stress but not with an increased risk of PTSD.
In their latest study, the researchers found that a variant of the PRKCA gene is associated with an enhanced capacity for emotional memories in a large group of healthy Swiss volunteers. In phase two, they showed that the same variant is also linked to differences in brain activity during memory encoding. Finally, they examined the DNA of a large group of Rwandan refugees, all of whom had experienced multiple traumatic events during the civil war, and found that those carrying the variant were twice as likely to suffer from PTSD than those who don't.
The variant is referred to as the A allele, because it contains an adenine residue at a specific position in the DNA sequence. The G allele, by contrast, has a guanine residue at the same position, but was not linked to enhanced memory. Intriguingly, the effect of the A allele on memory was dose-dependent – it was, in other words, influenced by the number of copies of the A allele that an individual carries. People with two copies of the A allele performed best on the memory test, and those carrying two copies of the G allele performed worst. The performance of people carrying one copy of each was somewhere in between.
It's almost certain that these variants encode slightly different versions of the PKCα that function differently from one another. The A allele may, for example, encode a version that is more active than the one encoded by the G allele, and this is something that can easily be tested. Exactly how this would lead to increased activity in the brain networks encoding emotional memories is, however, a more difficult question to answer, but this will probably be addressed in future work.
"This is an elegant study that uses multiple measures to validate the genetic findings with fMRI and behavior, and replicates the observations in a traumatized group," says neuropsychiatrist Rachel Yehuda, director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. She urges caution, however, about how the findings could translate in the clinic.
"Most of the time, the distress of PTSD is caused by avoidance of traumatic memories, or the inability to remember key aspects of the trauma," she says, "so while it is important to gain as much understanding as possible of the biological basis of PTSD, we have to be careful to not misinterpret the findings to suggest that treatment involves tampering with or obliterating memory."
Reference: de Quervain, D. J. -F., et al. PKCα is genetically linked to memory capacity in healthy subjects and to risk for posttraumatic stress disorder in genocide survivors. PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1200857109 [PDF]
Mo Costandiguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Harmful household chemicals must be banned – health before commerce | Andreas Kortenkamp
The UK should ignore economic pressure to water down a European ban on chemicals linked to disease
It has emerged that chemicals found in everyday household products may be contributing to rising rates of cancer, diabetes, brain diseases and fertility problems. Foetal development is particularly sensitive.
Environmental watchdog the European Environment Agency (EEA) has launched a report saying that products that disrupt the hormone system (known as endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or EDCs) should be treated with caution until their true effects are better known. This comes at a time of important changes in chemicals legislation, with the European parliament deciding that pesticides should be banned if they possess endocrine-disrupting properties. An intense debate about defining the criteria that should be used to classify a chemical as an EDC has ensued between EU member states, industry and environmental groups.
The stakes are high. Depending on how strictly the criteria are defined, the chemical industry will not be able to market certain pesticides. An example is the fungicide prochloraz which is widely used in agriculture and gardening. Other chemicals present in household plastics, such as certain phthalates, might be placed on severe restrictions.
In the UK, though, it seems that commercial interests are more important. The Health and Safety Executive's chemicals division has, together with German authorities, tabled proposals for regulating pesticides that closely follow those developed by industry. Identifying a substance as an EDC will have a great financial impact, they say, so only the most potent substances should be given endocrine disrupter status.
This view does not take sufficient account of recent research, which has made great progress in defining the scale of the problem. For example, it is now estimated that more than 2,000 chemicals in use today could interfere with the male sex hormone. The implications for young men could be serious: potential consequences include impaired fertility, malformations of sex organs and testicular cancer.
Similarly, there are EDCs that disrupt female hormone systems, with consequences for breast cancer and fertility. Several studies found that dioxins, the drug DES and PCBs increase the risk of breast cancer. Pesticide spraying by farm workers in the US has been linked in some studies to prostate cancer. These days it is hard to find a river in Britain where male fish are not feminised by EDCs in waste water from our houses.
Research has also made progress in dealing with the issue of cocktails of EDCs – many chemicals can contribute to an overall effect, even at exposures where each of these substances alone does not cause harm. This makes it extremely difficult to identify safe exposures, and means that apparently low levels could contribute to risks.
The EEA report, to which I contributed, emphasised the knowledge gaps that still exist. It is fiendishly difficult to identify the true extent of risks to humans and wildlife, because the number of relevant EDCs is unknown. Furthermore, even with today's analytical technologies it is almost impossible to fully understand the exposures that occurred in the womb, because by the time diseases become apparent many of the potentially causative substances have disappeared from our bodies. In these situations, scientists have to fall back on laboratory studies with rodents even though adequate tests do not exist for many diseases of the endocrine system.
So what level of proof should be required before the use of EDCs can be restricted? The EEA advocates a precautionary approach until the effects of these chemicals are better understood. By contrast, the chemical industry wants a high level of proof before imposing any restrictions.
If we're to properly protect the public, it's clear that economic pressures should be secondary to health protection needs. The HSE's website says its primary aim is to ensure health protection of people and the environment, but by focusing only on the most potent EDCs, it's clear that the bias is already strongly in favour of commercial interests. Only a few chemicals would qualify for restriction if the UK criteria were to be adopted, as shown by an analysis from the Danish government. Most EDCs would remain unregulated.
Considering the high stakes for human and wildlife health, and the vast costs of dealing with the diseases likely to be attributed to these chemicals, the UK authorities have to be more cautious. Even without the help of the HSE, industry is already lobbying hard for its own interests. Who in government lobbies equally hard for health protection and the environment?
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Andreas Kortenkampguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Statesmen and stature: how tall are our world leaders? | Datablog
It seems we like our political giants to be just that – giants – according to research. So how does France's new president François Hollande compare to past leaders?
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François Hollande will step into Nicolas Sarkozy's shoes today when he is sworn in at the Elysée palace, becoming France's first socialist leader in nearly 20 years. But how does he compare to the past leaders in terms of height?
Last year we were told stature really does matter according to a scientific paper published in Social Science Quarterly.
It was an opportunity too good to pass up so we compared the heights of various leaders from different countries and eras. Now we have a new leader in the pack we're asking once again how tall really are our leaders? We've also compared them to the average height of statesmen of their country over the last 40 years.
At 5ft 7ins, Hollande is two inches taller than Sarkozy but also two inches shorter than the average height for French leaders of the past 40 years. Both David Cameron and Barack Obama beat the average height, standing tall at 6ft 1. As the first female Chancellor of Germany, it's not suprising that Angela Merkel stands 5 inches shorter than the average height for German leaders.
In the scientific paper published last year psychologists from Texas Tech University found in a study that almost two-thirds of participants showed a preference to draw larger figures when asked to draw images of leaders. An evolutionary throwback has been suggested as the root of this. Nic Fleming wrote:
It is not for nothing that top politicians are known as political giants or "big beasts". Voters see tall politicians as better suited for leadership, according to a survey of how people visualise their leaders. Psychologists believe the bias may stem from an evolved preference for physically imposing chiefs who could dominate enemies.
Cameron, Obama and Hollande have all beaten shorter candidates in past elections – Gordon Brown at 5ft 11ins, John McCain at 5ft 8ins and Sarkozy at 5ft 5ins.
The work, published by Dr Gregg Murray and J. David Schmitz, found evidence that would suggest physical stature affects people's preferences for political leadership. The paper entitled 'Caveman Politics' on evolutionary psychology relates it back to ideas and beliefs gleaned from our prehistoric ancestors.
Well, apart from Cameron, Obama and Canada's Stephen Harper who all come in at over six foot there are some current political leaders who are rather more diminutive. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is placed at somewhere around the 5ft 2ins mark.
America certainly seem to be following the rule with all but one of the US presidents in our list coming in at six foot or over. The UK have rather a mixed bag from Margaret Thatcher (5ft 5ins) and Winston Churchill (5ft 6ins) to Robert Gascoyne-Cecil who is believed to have been 6ft 4ins.
The table below shows a selection of world leaders, past and present, and their stature. Those in bold are current leaders.
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- Psychology
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- David Cameron
- Gordon Brown
- Barack Obama
- John McCain
- Stephen Harper
- Silvio Berlusconi
- Nicolas Sarkozy
- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
- Dmitry Medvedev
- Margaret Thatcher
- Winston Churchill
- François Hollande
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Sub-Saharan Africa can only grow if it solves hunger crisis – UNDP
Sub-Saharan Africa remains the world's most food insecure region, despite improvements in life expectancy and education
Sub-Saharan Africa cannot sustain its much-heralded economic growth unless it eliminates the hunger that afflicts nearly one in four of its people, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) warns in a report on Tuesday.
Despite boasting some of the world's quickest expanding economies, as well as improvements in life expectancy and schooling, there has not been a corresponding uplift in food security, according to the first Africa Human Development Report.
"Impressive GDP growth rates in Africa have not translated into the elimination of hunger and malnutrition," said UNDP administrator Helen Clark, the former prime minister of New Zealand. "Inclusive growth and people-centred approaches to food security are needed. Building a food-secure future for all Africans will only be achieved if efforts span the entire development agenda."
The Africa Human Development report 2012: towards a food secure future notes that with more than one in four of its 856 million people undernourished, sub-Saharan Africa remains the world's most food insecure region. More than 15 million people are at risk in the Sahel – the semi-arid belt from Senegal to Chad – and an equal number in the Horn of Africa remain vulnerable after last year's food crisis in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia.
The UNDP warns: "Hunger and extended periods of malnutrition not only devastate families and communities in the short term, but leave a legacy with future generations which impairs livelihoods and undermines human development."
African agriculture notoriously performs way below its immense potential, but the report argues that focusing on farming methods alone is not enough. It calls for a rethink of rural infrastructure, health services, social protection and the empowerment of local communities, along with strengthened local government and civil society groups to give poor people a voice.
The accelerating pace of change and new economic vitality on the continent make the time ripe for intervention, the UNDP adds, arguing that food security can be achieved through immediate action in four critical areas:
• Increasing agricultural productivity: "Ending decades of bias against agriculture and women, countries must put into place policies which provide farmers with the inputs, infrastructure and incentives which will enable them to lift productivity. Encouraging the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit of Africa's growing youth population to further stimulate rural economies is particularly important."
• More effective nutrition: "Countries must develop co-ordinated interventions which boost nutrition while expanding access to health services, education, sanitation and clean water. The report cites research showing that mothers' education is a more powerful factor in explaining lower rates of malnutrition in children than is household income."
• Building resilience: "Getting food from field to table in sub-Saharan Africa is fraught with risk. Countries should take measures to lower people's and communities' vulnerability to natural disasters and civil conflict, seasonal or volatile changes in food prices and climate change. The report recommends social protection programmes such as crop insurance, employment guarantee schemes, and cash transfers – all of which can shield people from these risks and boost incomes."
• Empowerment and social justice: "Achieving food security in sub-Saharan Africa will remain out of reach so long as the rural poor, and especially women, who play a major role in food production, do not have more control over their own lives. Ensuring access to land, markets and information is an important step to empowerment. Bridging the gender divide is particularly vital: when women get access to the same inputs as men, yields can rise by more than 20%."
Tegegnework Gettu, director of UNDP's Africa bureau, said: "It is a harsh paradox that in a world of food surpluses, hunger and malnutrition remain pervasive on a continent with ample agricultural endowments. Africa has the knowledge, the technology and the means to end hunger and food insecurity."
The document will be launched by Clark and the Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki in Nairobi on Tuesday.
Its cautious sentiment echoes last week's Africa Progress Panel report which warned that the continent's economic growth is jeopardised by persistent inequality. The panel said: "What we are trying to do is balance the picture of Africa between the hopeless continent of the past decade and the overly euphoric optimism that we see in the press today."
David Smithguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Betty and Beryl of Humberside are northern - and local - stars
Last year the BBC proposed cutting local radio to the bone. After last night's Sony Awards, they must be glad they changed their minds
Local radio, which is one of the Guardian Northerner's favourite things and the subject of one of our recent campaigns, has covered itself in glory at the Sony Awards, especially in the sprightly persons of BBC Humberside's Beryl and Betty.
Their joint age may be 176 (Betty Smith has 90 of those years; her friend Beryl Renwick who she met at a lunch club has 86), but they are every bit as lively as Radio 1 DJs, far less solemn than Radio 4 presenters, and a good deal more 'real' than both.
Admittedly – and speaking as a Sony judge in years past who wasn't altogether impressed by the process – a pair of such broadcasters is a tempting shoo-in for a panel trying to select between all sorts of chalk and cheese. But Betty and Beryl are good. Above all, they have that sense of the genuine article, people just talking naturally, which the artifice inevitable in high quality broadcasting all too often removes.
You can read lots more about them online, and there'll be plenty more to come, but here's what the Sony citation says:
A joyous, entertaining double act, having fun with the medium and unconstrained by any ingrained ideas of what works and what doesn't. They give a voice to a sector of society unrepresented on radio, and do it with a joy that puts many of their fellow broadcasters to shame.
Good to see those two references to joy, which is so often excluded from our contemporary media's obsession with life's downside. Another virtue which could do with a similar airing, and which Betty and Beryl show in their own, robust way, is kindness.
Radio Humberside's station manager Simon Pattern, says:
They have a real local sense of why certain things are important, they are straightforward, pin sharp and will give a view on anything. The show is unscripted, sometimes they'll just have a giggle and other weeks there will be something quite poignant they'll want to discuss.
Every one of those points was made by the first station manager of BBC Radio Leeds, Phil Sidey, both in his work and in his under-read story of those years, Hello Mrs Butterfield. The book's name came from an inveterate phoner-in, who had much in common with B&B.
Tribute is and should be paid, too, to David Reeves who runs the show with the pair and acts with due modesty. That's the third of the graces which distinguish most of those working in the UK's local media.
Martin Wainwrightguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Behind the scenes at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology hawk cam | video | GrrlScientist
This video captures the time and effort it took to mount a birdcam on a light tower overlooking Cornell University's athletic field
One of the many things that I love about all this newly affordable miniaturised technology is the astonishing number of birdcams that are sprouting up all around the world. These birdcams are providing the general public with an unprecedented "bird's eye view" of a growing number of animal species for the first time in the history of mankind. This can only be good for animals and for conservation.
This video provides a behind-the-scenes look at the expertise and effort that went in to mounting the red-tailed hawk cams on the light tower that is nearly 80 feet (24.4 metres) above Cornell University's athletic field.
This pair of red-tailed hawks, Buteo jamaicensis, has been nesting on this particular light tower for at least the past four years. In 2012, a camera was installed to provide a better look at these birds as they raise their young amid the bustle of a busy campus.
The female is nicknamed "Big Red" in honor of her alma mater. She is slightly larger than her mate, and has a darker head, nape and throat. She is banded on her right leg. According to banding records, she was banded as a youngster during her first autumn in 2003, so she is nearly nine years old. She was banded in nearby Brooktondale, New York.
The male is nicknamed "Ezra" after the co-founder of Cornell University. He has golden-tawny feathers on his face and head, and a paler neck than the female. He is banded on his left leg. According to banding records, He was first banded in 2006 as an adult bird on Judd Falls Road near the Cornell campus, so he is at least seven years old.
Just to whet your appetite for watching a birdcam, here's a video that captures the second chick (eyas [plural: eyasses]; a nestling hawk or falcon) as it hatches on 24 April 2012, with some encouragement from its adorable, fluffy sibling:
It typically takes 6-7 weeks before red-tailed hawk nestlings fledge (fledge: make their maiden flight from the nest), so stay tuned. Maybe you will watch them fledge in real time?
Watch the live streaming feed during the nesting season. (There also are birdcam links for several other nesting species on that page.)
If you are currently watching a birdcam, feel free to share stories about the birds and add the birdcam link in the comments section below. Be sure to preview your comment before publishing it to check that your link has embedded properly.
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Soyuz spaceship blasts off for ISS mission
Since the retirement of the space shuttles, the US is dependent on Russia to fly astronauts to the space station, at £37m each
A Soyuz spaceship carrying two Russians and one American astronaut has blasted off for the International Space Station (ISS) after more than a month's delay over a problem with the hull of the Russian-built capsule.
Nasa astronaut Joseph Acaba, veteran cosmonaut Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin, who is departing on his first space flight, launched in clear skies aboard the Soyuz TMA-04M rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Tuesday.
The trio will berth early on Wednesday, joining Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, Nasa's Don Pettit and European Space Agency astronaut Andre Kuipers aboard the ISS.
Since the retirement of the space shuttles last year, the US is dependent on Russia to fly astronauts to the ISS, which costs $60m (£37m) per person.
Moscow hopes a smooth mission will begin to restore confidence in its space programme after a string of launch mishaps last year.
Tuesday's flight was delayed from 30 March to allow Russia's partly state-owned space contractor, RKK Energia, to prepare a new capsule for launch after an accident during pressure tests damaged the Soyuz crew capsule.
The previous crew of three at the ISS returned from the station in late April, following a delay due to safety fears after an unmanned Russian Progress craft taking supplies to the station broke up in the atmosphere in August.
That was one of five botched launches last year that marred celebrations of the 50th anniversary of Soviet pilot Yuri Gagarin's first human space flight, including a long-awaited unmanned mission to return samples from the Martian moon Phobos.
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DNA origami gets into the fold of drug delivery
Using DNA building blocks that can be manipulated into many complex shapes, scientists are hoping to develop 'nanorobots' that could potentially deliver drugs to target cancer cells
For centuries, Japanese craftsmen have been practising the art of origami by folding paper into cranes, flowers and other intricate shapes. Since 2006, scientists have been doing something similar with DNA.
While scientists have long been reading and manipulating DNA, they are now using it as a construction material. By folding the famous "molecules of life" into intricate contortions, they can build sculptures just nanometres in size. "We use DNA the way a carpenter uses wood," says Paul Rothemund from the California Institute of Technology, who invented the technique, and gave it its name: DNA origami. Although still in its infancy, this practice is already providing scientists with custom-made tools for biological research. Eventually, it might even be used to create containers for packaging and releasing medical drugs.
The technique exploits the fact that DNA's four building blocks – known as bases – naturally pair up with one another. Adenine (A) sticks to thymine (T), and cytosine (C) sticks to guanine (G). If you get the letters right, you can create molecules that zip up in very precise ways.
Ned Seeman was the first to use these properties to mould DNA into specific shapes. His first creation, published in 1991, was a DNA cube. It was simple, but it kick-started an entire field of DNA nanotechnology. Scientists quickly expanded on Seeman's ideas to create simple shapes, including tubes, lattices, and even simple machines such as tweezers. But these structures were laborious to design, hard to make, and restricted in size. Rothemund wanted to scale things up. "At a talk I gave," he recalls, "a grad student said to me: It's nice that you can make these tubes and crystals, but what's the largest structure we could make?"
Rothemund's solution was to fold one long piece of DNA – the genome of a harmless virus – into a two-dimensional shape, like an artist drawing a portrait with one continuous line. This scaffold is held in place by hundreds of small DNA snippets that complement distant parts of the virus's genome and staple its folds together.
While paper origami needs a human's dextrous hands, DNA origami folds by itself. Plug the shape you want into a computer programme, and out comes a suggestion for the right DNA sequence for the scaffold and staples. "When we mix everything together, the different strands self-assemble into elaborate shapes," says Shawn Douglas from Harvard University.
"The efficiency of assembly is amazing," says Kurt Gothelf from the Centre for DNA Nanotechnology in Denmark. "No one dared to believe it would work so well until Rothemund did the experiment."
Rothemund first used DNA origami to create two-dimensional shapes such as maps, snowflakes, smiley faces, and the word 'NED' (in honour of Seeman). Gothelf ushered DNA origami into the third dimension, by creating a box with an opening lid, and Douglas created even more complex structures such as a 20-sided cage. These initial sculptures were just quirky demos to show that the technique had potential. Now, practical applications beckon. "For the field to keep interest, you need to realise applications within the next five years," says Gothelf.
That is easier said than done. The art of DNA origami is so new, that most of its practitioners find it hard to foresee its future. Rothemund calls it a tool in search of an application, while Gothelf does not see any commercial applications in fewer than 10 to 15 years.
Douglas is currently working on one such application: a tube-shaped piece of DNA origami that could deliver payloads of drugs to cancer cells. The tube can open like a clam, but it is clasped shut by two DNA strands called aptamers. The aptamers are designed to recognise molecules on the surface of cancer cells. When they do, they spring apart, opening the tube and releasing the drugs within. Douglas calls it a nanorobot. "It's autonomous," he says. "We make it and it's ready to go. We mix it with cells and it performs the final stages by itself."
The device is a prototype that has only proved its worth against cancer cells in laboratory flasks and it has a long way to go before it could be used inside a human patient. But DNA origami has several features that offer more immediate uses, especially in scientific research.
DNA folds so precisely that it can produce sculptures of a guaranteed size. Friedrich Simmel from the Technical University of Munich in Germany has exploited this property to make a DNA origami ruler. This is a rectangle with glowing molecules at either end, precisely 100 nanometres apart, which could be used to measure the gaps between molecules or calibrate powerful microscopes.
DNA origami can also stick to other molecules, and position them in a precise and orderly way. William Shih at Harvard University thinks that this could help scientists who are trying to decipher the complex three-dimensional shapes of our proteins, to understand how they work and why they malfunction. Such studies involve the laborious and difficult task of growing the proteins as pure crystals. Shih thinks that DNA origami could make the job easier, by positioning the proteins into orderly sheets and grids.
In the meantime, there are many technical hurdles to address. Rothemund's initial flat designs assembled with remarkable ease and speed, but both pace and efficiency fall dramatically as the structures get bigger and three-dimensional.
Stability is also an issue. DNA may be biological, but the immune system will destroy it if it is found in the wrong place in the human body, drifting in the bloodstream for example. This is a problem for researchers such as Douglas, who are trying to turn DNA origami into tools for packaging drugs. "We need to figure out how to temporarily evade the clearance mechanism long enough to make a device that can perform its function," he says.
Gothelf is working on sticking other molecules to the surface of his DNA creations to render them invisible to the immune system. These coatings might also prevent other molecules from diffusing through the origami: DNA, it seems, is a somewhat leaky building material.
Safety, however, is less of a problem than one might imagine. Even though the origami is built from the stuff of genes, it is not alive or capable of reproducing. "You could eat them," says Rothemund. Even his original designs, fashioned from a virus's genome, cannot do anything on their own without a squad of other genes and proteins. "People often say they're scared of building nanotech with DNA because it seems unnatural," says Douglas. "But since we're designing it, we have really good control over what the devices can and cannot do."
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Heartland Institute grows isolated as three more donors disassociate
Ultra-conservative climate sceptic thinktank continues to lose mainstream support, damaging its prospects of expansion
Heartland Institute was cut off by three more corporate donors on Monday, further isolating the ultra-conservative thinktank from the mainstream business world.
The defections reinforce the sense of Heartland's isolation, ahead of its major climate contrarian conference in Chicago next week. A number of prominent speakers also pulled out of the conference after Heartland put up a billboard on a Chicago expressway suggesting believers in climate change were akin to serial killers.
In statements to advocacy groups, pharmaceutical giant Eli Llily, BB&T bank and PepsiCo confirmed they would not fund Heartland in 2012 – dealing a blow to the thinktank's plans of building long-term relationships with major corporations.
The three were the latest in a rush of companies to distance themselves from Heartland after the ad campaign featuring Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.
"Lilly is not funding Heartland in 2012 and has no plans to do so in the future," David Marbaugh, communications director of Corporate Responsibility for Eli Lilly informed Forecast the Facts by email. "That type of ad is not consistent with how Lilly engages in public debate."
In purely monetary terms, Monday's defections will have very little effect on Heartland.
None of the three had contributed to Heartland in 2011, according to confidential documents obtained by the water scientist Peter Gleick, and released without the thinktank's permission.
PepsiCo's contributions in 2010 amounted to only $5,000. Eli Lilly donated $25,000 in 2010 and BB&T $16,105.
However, they make it very difficult for Heartland to pursue its expansion plans for 2012 and disprove its efforts to project itself as a mainstream organisation seeking to act as an honest mediator in debates over climate policy.
The Heartland budget and ambitious expansion plans for 2012 had been predicated on returning those donors to the fold. It had projected a $3m budget increase for 2012, based on those plans.
Specifically, Heartland had hoped to raise $1.5m or half of those funds from "lapsed" corporate donors like Eli Lilly.
But it appears that the exposure of Heartland's key mission of discrediting climate change – including a project to influence kindergarteners – has turned off public corporations.
Many publicly traded companies outwardly endorse climate change and sustainability as part of their corporate brand – and that makes association with Heartland politically awkward.
Those contradictions intensified after the Gleick leak last February when advocacy groups began focusing more intensely on Heartland's corporate donors – even those funding programmes that have nothing to do with clinate change.
Pepsi made up its mind to steer clear of Heartland well before the Kaczynski ad.
"As previously stated, our relationship ended in 2011," Paul Boykas, vice-president of public policy and government affairs for PepsiCo told Forecast the Facts by email. The advocacy group noted the PepsiCo's website reaffirms its belief in climate change.
BB&T told Greenpeace, meanwhile, it had not received requests for 2012 funding.
"We do not have any active request from or any planned contribution to Heartland Institute in 2012," Maria Lachapelle, vice-president of corporate communications for BB&T, told Greenpeace by email.
In another blow to Heartland, a meterologist from the National Hurricane Center on Monday publicly disassociated himself with the organisation.
Chris Landsea, the hurricane centre's science and operations officer, asked Heartland to remove him from its website, the Washington Post reported on Monday.
It quoted a posting from Landsea to the website BigCityLib Strikes Back saying: "The billboard campaign that you all have recently been displaying is not in good taste nor is it furthering the advancement of better undstanding of how our climate fluctates and changes. Please remove my name from your list of experts."
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Letters: Orthodoxy prevails amid a climate of academic fear
Aditya Chakrabortty (The academics show their anger but they can't answer my criticism that there's too little analysis of our current crisis, G2, 7 May) raises the question of the relationship between intellectual radicalism and historical crisis, and how perhaps this has been dulled because of the "publish or perish" conditions of modern academia.
To use an observation from one neo-Marxist not-so-radical, Jürgen Habermas, the original purpose of social science was to offer critiques of social and economic crises, having developed from the terrible conditions of 19th-century capitalism. With now the longest recession since 1870 resulting from a sovereign debt crisis caused by the conspicuous consumption of debt generated by an unfettered global finance, you'd think the conditions would be prime for a shift in the zeitgeist, with old thoughts and models swept away.
I got out of the self-enclosed world of the conference circuit a few years ago (a time which included a rather soporific British Sociological Association annual conference). For all the perfectly respectable work being done, like Chakrabortty, I don't get any sense that contemporary analyses of our current crisis are being forged from the furnace and caster of a new age. No more seeds of its own destruction, the logic of modern capitalism seems to prevail more than ever.
Dr James Driver
London
• Aditya Chakrabortty is correct – university economics departments are largely a closed shop, having uncritically bought into neoliberal ideology en masse, alongside its methodologies, such as quantitative analysis, game theory, rational choice, econometrics. These are pursued at the expense of studying economic history and/or economic theory – breezily dismissed as "irrelevant" or "irrational". He is also right to point to the work of Hugh Willmott and colleagues at Cardiff Business School as countering this orthodoxy, alongside Prem Sikka, Ha-Joon Chang and the team at Cresc. Special mention should additionally be made of Massimo De Angelis (University of East London) and Guy Standing (University of Bath), whose book The Precariat is recommended to anyone who needs to work, whether current or prospective – ie the majority of us.
Dr Andy Knott
Brighton
• First I read Aditya Chakrabortty's almost despairing article concerning the lack of real challenge from academia over the current economic situation and alternatives to austerity and cuts. Phrases such as "intellectual cleansing" and "forced to conform" paint a picture of a climate of academic fear. This is not healthy in such turbulent times. Next I read in the Education section an article ('We thought we would be left alone', 8 May) that in itself is a concern. (Are schools being forced into academy status? I think they probably are and on the basis of an ideological position.) The real issue of concern, however, is that the headteachers quoted in the article feel they are not able to speak out openly, but must hide behind pseudonyms.
How far we have travelled under a coalition government with no true mandate. How much further are we going to travel? Mr Gove calls those who oppose academies "Trots" and those who disagree with him "enemies of promise" (Report, 1 February). This is not democratic language. The tyranny of fear is not a democratic process. Academics need to speak out.
Bill Moore
Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire
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