Fleischmann and Pons’s Cold Fusion

While the conditions required to create nuclear energy usually require extreme temperatures—think of the processes that power the sun—the theory of cold fusion states that such a reaction is possible at room temperature. It’s a deceivingly simple concept, but the implications are spectacular: if a nuclear reaction could occur at room temperature, then an abundance of energy could be created without the dangerous waste that results from nuclear power plants. This groundbreaking theory briefly seemed to have become a reality in 1989, when the electro-chemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons published experimental results suggesting that they had achieved cold fusion—and the precious “excess energy” it was hoped to produce—in an experiment where an electric current was run through seawater and a metal called Palladium. The response to Pons and Fleischmann’s claims by the media and the scientific community was overwhelming. The experiments were hailed as a turning point in science, and it was briefly believed that with cold fusion energy would be cheap, clean, and abundant.
How it was Proven Wrong:
The fervor over cold fusion died down as soon as other scientists tried to replicate the experiment. Most failed to get any kind of similar results, and after their paper was closely studied, Fleischmann and Pons were accused not only of sloppy, unethical science, but were even said to have stretched the truth of their results. For years after, the idea of cold fusion became synonymous with fringe science. Still, despite the stigma attached to it, many have argued that there was never anything necessarily wrong about cold fusion as a theory. In recent years, scientists have once again started to experiment with new ways of achieving a so-called “tabletop nuclear reaction,” with some even claiming to have achieved surprising success.

Einstein’s Static Universe

Prior to scientists embracing the notion that the universe was created as the result of the Big Bang, it was commonly believed that the size of the universe was an unchanging constant—it had always been the size it was, and always would be. The idea stated that that the total volume of the universe was effectively fixed, and that the whole construct operated as a closed system. The theory found its biggest adherent in Albert Einstein—the Static Universe is often known as “Einstein’s Universe”—who argued in favor of it and even calculated it into his theory of general relativity.
How it was Proven Wrong:
The theory of a static universe was problematic from the start. First of all, a finite universe could theoretically become so dense that it would collapse into a giant black hole, a problem Einstein compensated for with his principle of the “cosmological constant.” Still, the final nail in the coffin for the idea was Edwin Hubble’s discovery of the relationship between red shift—the way the color of heavenly bodies change as they move away from us—and distance, which showed that the universe was indeed expanding. Einstein would subsequently abandon his model, and would later refer to it as the “biggest blunder” of his career. Still, like all cosmological ideas, the expanding universe is just a theory, and a small group of scientists today still subscribe to the old static model.

Phrenology

Although it is now regarded as nothing more than a pseudoscience, in its day phrenology was one of the most popular and well-studied branches of neuroscience. In short, proponents of phrenology believed that individual character traits, whether intelligence, aggression, or an ear for music, could all be localized to very specific parts of the brain. According to phrenologists, the larger each one of these parts of a person’s brain was, the more likely they were to behave in a certain way. With this in mind, practitioners would often study the size and shape of subjects’ heads in order to determine what kind of personality they might have. Detailed maps of the supposed 27 different areas of the brain were created, and a person who had a particularly large bump on their skull in the area for, say, the sense of colors, would be assumed to have a proclivity for painting.

How it was Proven Wrong:
Even during the heyday of its popularity in the 1800s, phrenology was often derided by mainstream scientists as a form of quackery. But their protests were largely ignored until the 1900s, when modern scientific advances helped to show that personality traits could not be traced to specific portions of the brain, at least in not as precise a way as the proponents of phrenology often claimed. Phrenology still exists today as a fringe science, but its use in the 20th century has become somewhat infamous: it has often been employed as a tool to promote racism, most famously by the Nazis, as well by Belgian colonialists in Rwanda.

The Blank Slate Theory

One of the oldest and most controversial theories in psychology and philosophy is the theory of the blank slate, or tabula rasa, which argues that people are born with no built-in personality traits or proclivities. Proponents of the theory, which began with the work of Aristotle and was expressed by everyone from St. Thomas Aquinas to the empiricist philosopher John Locke, insisted that all mental content was the result of experience and education. For these thinkers, nothing was instinct or the result of nature. The idea found its most famous expression in psychology in the ideas of Sigmund Freud, whose theories of the unconscious stressed that the elemental aspects of an individual’s personality were constructed by their earliest childhood experiences.
How it was Proven Wrong:
While there’s little doubt that a person’s experiences and learned behaviors have a huge impact on their disposition, it is also now widely accepted that genes and other family traits inherited from birth, along with certain innate instincts, also play a crucial role. This was only proven after years of study that covered the ways in which similar gestures like smiling and certain features of language could be found throughout the world in radically different cultures. Meanwhile, studies of adopted children and twins raised in separate families have come to similar conclusions about the ways certain traits can exist from birth.

Luminiferous Aether

The aether, also known as the ether, was a mysterious substance that was long believed to be the means through which light was transmitted through the universe. Philosophers as far back as the Greeks had believed that light required a delivery system, a means through which it became visible, and this idea managed to persist all the way through to the nineteenth century. If correct, the theory would have redefined our entire understanding of physics. Most notably, if the aether were a physical substance that could exist even in a vacuum, then even deep space could be more easily measured and quantified. Experiments often contradicted the theory of the aether, but by the 1700s it had become so widespread that its existence was assumed to be a given. Later, when the idea was abandoned, physicist Albert Michelson referred to luminiferous aether as “one of the grandest generalizations in modern science.”
How it was Proven Wrong:
In traditional scientific fashion, the notion of a luminiferous aether was only gradually phased out as more sophisticated theories came into play. Experiments in the diffraction and refraction of light had long rendered traditional models of the aether outdated, but it was only when Einstein’s special theory of relativity came along and completely reconfigured physics that the idea lost the last of its major adherents. The theory still exists in various forms, though, and many have argued that modern scientists simply use terms like “fields” and “fabric” in place of the more taboo term “aether.”
through which light was transmitted through the universe. Philosophers as far back as the Greeks had believed that light required a delivery system, a means through which it became visible, and this idea managed to persist all the way through to the nineteenth century. If correct, the theory would have redefined our entire understanding of physics. Most notably, if the aether were a physical substance that could exist even in a vacuum, then even deep space could be more easily measured and quantified. Experiments often contradicted the theory of the aether, but by the 1700s it had become so widespread that its existence was assumed to be a given. Later, when the idea was abandoned, physicist Albert Michelson referred to luminiferous aether as “one of the grandest generalizations in modern science.”

The Martian Canals

The Martian canals were a network of gullies and ravines that 19th century scientist mistakenly believed to exist on the red planet. The canals were first “discovered” in 1877 by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli. After other stargazers corroborated his claim, the canals became something of a phenomenon. Scientists drew detailed maps tracing their paths, and soon wild speculation began on their possible origins and use. Perhaps the most absurd theory came from Percival Lowell, a mathematician and astronomer who jumped to the bizarre conclusion that the canals were a sophisticated irrigation system developed by an unknown intelligent species. Lowell’s hypothesis was widely discredited by other scientists, but it was also popularly accepted, and the idea managed to survive in some circles well into the 20th century.
How it was Proven Wrong:
Quite unspectacularly, the Martian canals were only proven to be a myth with the advent of greater telescopes and imaging technology. It turned out that what looked like canals was in fact an optical illusion caused by streaks of dust blown across the Martian surface by heavy winds. Several scientists had proposed a similar theory in the early 1900s, but it was only proven correct in the 1960s when the first unmanned spacecraft made flybys over Mars and took pictures of its surface.

Phlogiston Theory

First expressed by Johan Joachim Becher in 1667, phlogiston theory is the idea that all combustible objects—that is, anything that can catch fire—contain a special element called phlogiston that is released during burning, and which makes the whole process possible. In its traditional form, phlogiston was said to be without color, taste, or odor, and was only made visible when a flammable object, like a tree or a pile of leaves, caught fire. Once it was burned and all its phlogiston released, the object was said to once again exist in its true form, known as a “calx.” Beyond basic combustion, the theory also sought to explain chemical processes like the rusting of metals, and was even used as a means of understanding breathing, as pure oxygen was described as “dephlogistated air.”
How it was Proven Wrong:
The more experiments that were performed using the phlogiston model, the more dubious it became as a theory. One of the most significant was that when certain metals were burned, they actually gained weight instead of losing it, as they should have if phlogiston were being released. The idea eventually fell out of favor, and has since been replaced by more sophisticated theories, like oxidation.

The Expanding Earth

Our modern understanding of the interior and behaviors of the Earth is strongly based around plate tectonics and the concept of subduction. But before this idea was widely accepted in the late 20th century, a good number of scientists subscribed to the much more fantastical theory that the Earth was forever increasing in volume. The expanding Earth hypothesis stated that phenomena like underwater mountain ranges and continental drift could be explained by the fact that the planet was gradually growing larger. As the globe’s size grew, proponents argued, the distances between continents would increase, as would the Earth’s crust, which would have explained the creation of new mountains. The theory has a long and storied past, beginning with Darwin, who briefly tinkered with it before casting it aside, and Nikola Tesla, who compared the process to that of the expansion of a dying star.
How it was Proven Wrong:
The expanding Earth hypothesis has never been proven wrong exactly, but it has been widely replaced with the much more sophisticated theory of plate tectonics. While the expanding Earth theory holds that all land masses were once connected, and that oceans and mountains were only created as a result of the planet’s growing volume, plate tectonics explains the same phenomena by way of plates in the lithosphere that move and converge beneath the Earth’s surface.

Spontaneous Generation

Although it might seem a bit ludicrous today, for thousands of years it was believed that life regularly arose from the elements without first being formed through a seed, egg, or other traditional means of reproduction. The main purveyor of the theory was Aristotle, who based his studies on the ideas of thinkers like Anaximander, Hippolytus, and Anaxagoras, all of whom stressed the ways in which life could spontaneously come into being from inanimate matter like slime, mud, and earth when exposed to sunlight. Aristotle based his own ideas on the observation of the ways maggots would seemingly generate out of dead animal carcass, or barnacles would form on the hull of a boat. This theory that life could literally spring from nothing managed to persist for hundreds of years after Aristotle, and was even being proposed by some scientists as recently as the 1700s.
How it was Proven Wrong:
It was only with the adoption of the scientific method that many of the classical theories like spontaneous generation began to be tested. Once they were, they quickly crumbled. For example, famed scientist Louis Pasteur showed that maggots would not appear on meat kept in a sealed container, and the invention of the microscope helped to show that these same insects were formed not by spontaneous generation but by airborne microorganisms.

The Discovery of Vulcan

Vulcan was a planet that nineteenth century scientists believed to exist somewhere between Mercury and the Sun. The mathematician Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier first proposed its existence after he and many other scientists were unable to explain certain peculiarities about Mercury’s orbit. Scientists like Le Verrier argued that this had to be caused by some object, like a small planet or moon, acting as a gravitational force. La Verrier called his hypothetical planet Vulcan, after the Roman god of fire. Soon, amateur astronomers around Europe, eager to be a part of a scientific discovery, contacted Le Verrier and claimed to have witnessed the mysterious planet making its transit around the Sun. For years afterward, Vulcan sightings continued to pour in from around the globe, and when La Verrier died in 1877, he was still regarded as having discovered a new planet in the solar system.
How it was Proven Wrong:
Without La Verrier acting as a cheerleader for Vulcan’s existence, it suddenly began to be doubted by many notable astronomers. The search was effectively abandoned in 1915, after Einstein’s theory of general relativity helped to explain once and for all why Mercury orbited the Sun in such a strange fashion. But amateur stargazers continued the search, and as recently as 1970 there have been people who have claimed to see a strange object orbiting the sun beyond Mercury. Amusingly, the entire would-be discovery’s greatest legacy today is that it inspired the name of the home planet of the character Spock from Star Trek.

Wylie Coywolf: The coyote-wolf hybrid has made its way to the Northeast

Bigger than coyotes but smaller than wolves, their howl is high-pitched and their diet includes deer and small rodents. They are "coywolves" (pronounced "coy," as in playful, "wolves"), and they are flourishing in the northeastern U.S., according to a study published today in Biology Letters.

Although coyote–wolf breeding has been reported in Ontario, where coyotes started migrating from the Great Plains in the 1920s, this study provides the first evidence of coywolves—also known as coydogs or eastern coyotes—in the Northeast. And even though they are more coyote (Canis latrans) than wolf (gray wolves are Canis lupus, and red wolves are Canis rufus), the expansion of these hybrids into western New York State marks the return of wolves to the Empire State.

Stem cells bring new insights to future treatment of vision--and neural--disorders

BALTIMORE—Deep in the brain, buried in the hippocampus and subventricular zone, reside adult neural stem cells, cells that retain the ability to become other types of neural cells and could serve as possible treatments for ailments ranging from vision impairment to Parkinson's to spinal cord injuries. Doctors, scientists and patients, however, are understandably hesitant to go digging around for them, their location being "a great deterrent," Sally Temple, founder of the New York Neural Stem Cell Institute, said at the 2009 World Stem Cell Summit here on Wednesday.

Researchers, therefore, are anxious to uncover other, more accessible neural stem cell candidates. Temple and her team have turned their sights to the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), a layer of tissue at the base of the retina that comes into being within 30 to 50 days of conception, before many other parts of the neural system differentiate. Cells from this area of the eye can be easily harvested from retinal fluid that is usually discarded during retinal surgery, she explained.

Meteorite impacts turn up nearly pure water ice in Mars's mid-latitudes

Planetary scientists looking for water ice on Mars have employed a number of tactics to great success in their search. The Phoenix lander dug it up; orbiting radar measurements have seen it under insulating blankets of debris. (Frozen water sublimates to vapor in Mars's climate and so is not stable when exposed at the surface.)

Now a team of researchers has let meteorite impacts do the digging for them—a paper in this week's Science presents observations of fresh impacts and what they turn up from below the surface.

Using instruments on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), a group led by Shane Byrne, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, found five recent impact craters in the Martian mid-latitudes, near the boundary where subsurface ice is thought to be no longer tenable. All were relatively small, ranging in size from about four to 12 meters across.

AIDS vaccine surprises scientists, proves partially successful

In an early-morning announcement today, researchers reported that an experimental HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) vaccine effectively reduced the number of people who contracted the virus by nearly a third.

Tested in a U.S.-sponsored trial that involved more than 16,000 volunteers in Thailand, the vaccine was administered in six injected doses starting in 2006 to half of the group, and the other half received a placebo. Seventy-four people in the placebo group had contracted HIV by the end of the trial, whereas only 51 of the vaccinated group tested positive.* The injections consisted of two vaccines that had proven unsuccessful on their own: Sanofi-Aventis SA's ALVAC and VaxGen Inc.'s AIDSVAX.

The results came as a surprise to HIV-vaccine skeptics in the AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) research field, whose numbers have increased after years of failed vaccine trials. "It's safe to say that the scientific community is caught off-guard," Mitchell Warren, director of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, told Bloomberg News. Before the announcement, Marie-Paule Kieny, director of the World Health Organization's Initiative for Vaccine Research, told the news service: "I don't think that there is a lot of expectation that the efficacy of this vaccine will be very high." A 2007 clinical trial of a vaccine made by Merck was stopped when researchers found that, in fact, more people who received the active vaccine (49) than the placebo (33) had contracted HIV.

Uncharted waters: Hydrogen and the "law of unintended consequences"

 A team of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute students are traveling up New York's Hudson River this week on the New Clermont, a 6.7-meter boat outfitted with a pair of 2.2-kilowatt hydrogen fuel cells to power the boat's motor. Their journey began September 21 from Manhattan's Pier 84 and will cover 240 kilometers (at a projected speed of 8 kilometers per hour). After making several stops along the way, the crew expects to arrive back at Rensselaer Polytech's campus in Troy, N.Y., on September 25. This is the third of Scientific American.com's blogs chronicling this expedition, called the New Clermont Project.


The New Clermont Project crew is learning valuable lessons about what it will take to make hydrogen power not only possible but practical as well. After losing both hydrogen fuel-cell-powered boat motors Tuesday, the New Clermont spent Wednesday docked in Beacon, N.Y., while the Rensselaer students figured out what went wrong.

Steven Chu to greenhouse gases: We will bury you

The U.S. Secretary of Energy—channeling former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev perhaps?—has one thing to say in this week's Science to the greenhouse gases emitted by coal-fired power plants: We will bury you. Nobel laureate Steven Chu's department has funneled $3.4 billion in stimulus dollars to research and develop the technology known as carbon capture and storage (CCS).

But to give you a sense of the challenge, here are his estimates of the scale of the challenge: six billion metric tons of coal burned every year, producing 18 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide and requiring an underground storage volume of 30,000 cubic kilometers per year with untold consequences on subsurface pressure, mineral composition and the like. And we are nowhere near that scale: "We now sequester a few million metric tons of CO2 per year," he wrote, largely from cleaning natural gas or so-called "enhanced oil recovery" efforts, in which CO2 is pumped down to flush out more of the valuable petroleum (and therefore not as useful, from a climate perspective, as sequestration for its own sake).

New worm species found in unusual habitat: Dead whale carcasses

Living whales may seem scarce in the world's vast oceans—and their carcasses even more rare. But to animals and bacteria that feed on these graveyards, they are a rich source of life. And to one doctoral researcher in Sweden, they proved to be a source of several new species. 

In her dissertation for the University of Gothenburg, Helena Wiklund describes nine new species of polychaete worms found living in whale carcasses and other nutrient-rich areas off the coast of Sweden, Norway and California.

A whale carcass can bring as much nutrition to the seafloor as would otherwise take some 2,000 years to filter down. Wiklund and her coauthors note that although the worms seem to be especially adapted to live in environments such as whale falls, where they feed off the bacteria that cover the bones, they seem to also be thriving in bacteria-rich areas of waste resulting from human activity, such as below fish farms and even pulp mills.

Pigging out on licorice

Most U.S. livestock farms administer low doses of antibiotics to ward off infections that might limit their animals’ growth. Japanese scientists report preliminary data online December 22 in the Animal Science Journal that indicate certain natural products — such as licorice and seaweed — enhance the immune systems of pigs. It’s possible, they conclude, that including such products in animal feed could limit the overuse of antibiotics in agriculture, a practice that has been charged with fostering the development of resistant microbes that can later infect people.

Greenland’s big melt

Greenland’s massive ice sheet may be melting in a more complex fashion than scientists had realized. It’s known that meltwater atop the ice percolates down and lubricates glaciers’ advance, thus hastening ice loss into the ocean. But a team led by scientists at the University of Leeds in England suggests in the Jan. 27 Nature that this is not the whole story. Their studies of six glaciers in western Greenland show that drainage at the glaciers’ bottoms becomes more efficient as summer advances, helping offset melt-induced ice acceleration. The work could improve predictions of how much sea level rise to expect as Greenland thaws. s

A weaker carbon pump

Oceans are a key player in the planet’s carbon cycle, but researchers may have found that one way the oceans store carbon is less significant than thought. A team led by researchers from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, England, report in an upcoming issue of Geophysical Research Letters on new measurements of the “biological carbon pump,” which sequesters small carbon-rich particles that sink from the ocean’s surface to its depths. Using a version of the radioactive element thorium, which sticks to particles and thus traces their movement, the researchers found that much less carbon was sinking than other, indirect, studies have suggested.

Smoke on the water

Fallout from burning coal may have choked the life out of 90 percent of marine species some 250 million years ago, Canadian researchers argue in the Jan. 23 Nature Geoscience. Huge quantities of carbon-rich char fell on the high Arctic prior to the Permian mass extinction of marine organisms, the scientists found. Based on the carbon’s geology and chemistry, the researchers propose that it traces back to the natural combustion of Siberian coal and organic-rich sediments. Being “remarkably similar” to modern coal fly ash, the char would have been toxic to aquatic life and ultimately would have dispersed globally, the researchers say.

Allergic to cancer

Hay fever, dog, peanut and other allergies may protect sufferers from certain types of brain tumors, a new study suggests.

In surveys of hospital patients, individuals with glioma — a common form of brain and spinal cancer — were less likely than cancer-free individuals to report having allergies, University of Illinois at Chicago researchers report online February 7 in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.
Overactive immune systems may protect against certain types of brain tumor

between allergies and glioma, says UIC epidemiologist Bridget McCarthy, who led the study. Her team set out to confirm these results, cobbling together a wide list of variables. The researchers quizzed about 1,000 hospital patients with or without cancer about their allergy histories. Of the 344 patients with high-grade glioma, about 35 percent reported having been diagnosed with one or more allergies in their lifetimes, compared with about 46 percent of the 612 cancer-free respondents. About 10 percent of high-grade tumor patients had three or more allergy diagnoses, as opposed to 22 percent of the controls. “The more allergies you have, the more protected you were,” McCarthy says.

Glioma isn’t the first cancer to be negatively correlated with common allergies, says Michael Scheurer, an epidemiologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Allergy-prone people may fight off colorectal and pancreatic cancer, and even childhood leukemia, better than sniffles-free people, according to some studies. At the other end of the spectrum, allergies that cause asthma may spur lung tumors.
Just why these links exist isn’t clear. Allergy sufferers mount heightened immune responses to some foreign or dangerous cells and chemicals, says Scheurer, who was not involved in the study. And cancer cells are certainly dangerous — human immune systems naturally seek them out. The immune systems in people with allergies may just do it better. “They have an overactive immune system, and maybe that’s been protecting them from the development of tumors,” he says.
In December, Scheurer and his colleagues reported finding a link between risk for one type of glioma and use of the antihistamine drugs like diphenhydramine — the active ingredient in Benadryl. The Chicago team did not find such a link.
Scheurer says Benadryl users shouldn’t worry. “Brain tumors are very, very rare tumors, and a lot of people take antihistamines.” He suspects that in a small set of individuals with a genetic predisposition to brain cancer, antihistamines may slow down the immune response, giving cancer cells an opening. 
These sorts of studies can easily produce varying results simply because there are so few participants, Scheurer adds. His colleague Melissa Bondy at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston has launched an effort to conduct similar surveys of 6,000 glioma patients and a comparison group without the disease. Both McCarthy and Scheurer hope that such efforts will give researchers a better look at what makes brain tumors grow.
Glioma and brain tumors in general are rare, Scheurer says, but devastating. Few patients with high-grade glioma survive longer than five years. So there’s a big need to develop safe and effective treatments. “There’s a strong community of researchers who are interested in brain tumors,” he says. “And we don’t give up.”

The sun, captured from all the angles

When it comes to solar storms, there’s no longer any place to hide. For the first time, solar scientists have obtained simultaneous views of the entire sun, both the front and back sides.

The unprecedented 360-degree panorama, released by NASA on February 6, combines sharp images of the sun’s front side recorded by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory with those from NASA’s twin STEREO spacecraft, which have just begun an 8-year exploration of the rotating sun’s far side. Images of the far side, recorded up to 14 days before they rotate into view from Earth, will enable scientists to better predict solar storms that can damage satellites and disrupt communications and power systems on Earth.

The images can also capture eruptions on the back side so short-lived that they disappear before that region of the sun rotates into view, says STEREO scientist Joseph Gurman of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. In January, he notes, a solar eruption recorded by STEREO was detected by the MESSENGER spacecraft as a change in the nearby magnetic field. MESSENGER, which is about to enter orbit around Mercury, was not harmed by the event.

The new STEREO images resolve features on the sun about 2,400 kilometers across.

A NASA video shows a 360-degree panorama of the sun and zooms in on storm activity in a magnetically active region.

News in Brief: Humans

Cell phones send messages on the sly — to their owners. People who frequently call and text others with these devices unthinkingly associate keyboard numbers with their accompanying letters, says psychologist Sascha Topolinski of the University of Wurzburg in Germany. Cell slingers recognize words faster after having dialed numbers that correspond to those words, such as 5683 for LOVE, she reports in an upcoming Psychological Science. In other experiments, cell users preferred dialing numbers that denoted positive words (37326 for DREAM) over numbers signifying negative words (75463 for SLIME) and preferred companies with business-related phone numbers, such as LOVE for a dating agency, over companies without them — a result with marketing implications.  —


Eye solutions
People’s eye movements while doing word puzzles suggest that at least partial knowledge of solutions emerges unconsciously, seconds before awareness of correct answers, resea

Adaptive no more

A genetic variation that may increase a woman’s risk of gestational diabetes is widespread today because it was actually beneficial to early agricultural populations, a new study suggests. Pregnant women who carry two copies of a low-activity form of the gene GIP have higher blood-glucose levels — a marker of gestational diabetes risk — Sheau Yu Teddy Hsu of Stanford University and colleagues report online February 7 in Diabetes. But when the gene’s low-activity version arose somewhere in Eurasia an estimated 8,100 years ago, that same glucose-boosting quality may have helped women maintain their pregnancies during lean times.
The new work takes an important step toward characterizing how one particular form of a gene shapes physiology and how evolution may act on that gene, says Joshua Akey, an evolutionary biologist and population geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Hsu and his colleagues recently reported evidence that the low-activity version of the GIP gene first appeared about 8,100 years ago and rapidly became part of the genetic makeup of Eurasians. Today about half of Europeans carry the new form of GIP, while 70 percent or more of Asians do. Only about 5 to 10 percent of Africans have the new form of the gene.
“It arose very fast, so it must have some dramatic effect on human viability,” Hsu says.
GIP helps stimulate insulin production after a meal. Insulin, in turn, helps cells more efficiently use sugars from food. Too little insulin can lead to high levels of sugar in the blood, a symptom of diabetes. But higher blood sugar levels may also help fetuses grow. The new form of the gene may have given people an evolutionary advantage to survive famines, the researchers speculate.
At about the same time that the new form of GIP appeared, people in Europe and Asia were switching from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one based on agriculture. That switch may have exposed people to more frequent periods of famine, such as between harvests or when crops failed. The new version may have kept mothers’ blood sugar levels high enough to provide developing fetuses with energy to survive short periods of famine.
In the new study, the researchers tested whether the new form of the gene had any effect during pregnancy. Study coauthor Chia Lin Chang of Chang Gung University in Taiwan collected routine blood samples from 123 pregnant women. The team analyzed blood sugar concentrations and found that women with the new form of the gene had higher levels than women with the ancestral form.
Now the researchers want to test women from other populations to see if the gene acts the same way in everyone, and if it might help predict who is likely to develop gestational diabetes.
fit in prehistoric lean times, genetic variant may increase risk of gestational diabetes today

Atom & Cosmos

The Cassini spacecraft has measured the abundance and composition of wispy clouds high in the smoggy atmosphere of Saturn’s frigid moon Titan. The cirruslike ice clouds, which Cassini finds throughout the atmosphere, can be used to trace the changing abundance of icy particles — nitrites and hydrocarbons — at different altitudes and with Titan’s seasons, Carrie Anderson of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and Robert Samuelson of the University of Maryland in College Park report in an upcoming Icarus. For instance, because gas moves from warmer to colder regions, the wintry northern hemisphere now harbors more ice clouds than the south. —Ron CowenMassive starbirthing
The European Space Agency’s Herschel infrared telescope has begun mapping dark, cold clouds of gas that are the likely birth sites of the Milky Way’s most massive stars. By measuring the temperature of the clouds, Herschel has now identified which gas clumps have begun to form stars and which ones are likely to be on the verge of doing so, shedding new light on the star-forming process. An international team of researchers posted their study of the cold gas clouds at arXiv.org on January 27. —Ron Cowen
Moon water
Planetary scientists say they have new evidence for the role that the solar wind plays in generating the water recently found on the moon. An analysis of data recorded by India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft strongly suggests that the fine-grained lunar soil traps protons from the wind, and those protons could combine with oxygen in the soil to produce layers of water molecules, Jessica Sunshine of the University of Maryland in College Park and her colleagues report in an upcoming Journal of Geophysical Research–Planets. The same water-generating process is likely to operate on other airless, silicate-rich bodies such as the asteroid Vesta, which NASA’s Dawn spacecraft will visit in mid-2011.

Buried microbes coax energy from rock

In experiments, microorganisms stimulate minerals to produce hydrogen, a key fuel for growth.

Here’s yet another reason to marvel at microbes: Buried deep within Earth at temperatures and pressures that would kill most living beings, bacteria and other tiny organisms not only survive but apparently even coax the rocks around them to produce food.
Researchers have found that the mere presence of microbes triggers minerals to release hydrogen gas, which the organisms then munch. “It looks like the bacteria themselves have an integral role in liberating this energy,” says R. John Parkes, a geomicrobiologist at Cardiff University in Wales.
His team’s findings appear in the March issue of Geology.
The work helps explain how microbes can survive up to kilometers deep in a subterranean world far from any sunlight to fuel photosynthesis. Such “deep biospheres” may even exist on other planets, Parkes says, with organisms tucked safely away from frigid temperatures and lethal radiation at the surface.
On Earth, some two-thirds of all bacteria, along with another group of single-celled organisms known as archaea, are thought to lurk underground. Scientists have long wondered where these critters get their energy.
Earlier work showed that the microbes fed, in part, on decayed organic matter that settled to the seafloor and formed thick sediments there — a sort of microbial smorgasbord. ParkBuried microbes coax energy from rock es and his colleagues decided to look instead at inorganic minerals that can wash offshore and also end up in those sediments.
The researchers ground up a variety of minerals, such as quartz, and put them in a sludgy sediment. In some mixtures they added a dash of microbes to start things off. The scientists then heated the mixtures to various temperatures up to 100 degrees Celsius — what might be found 3 to 4 kilometers deep — and waited to see what happened over several months.
Mixtures that contained microorganisms began giving off hydrogen gas as temperatures climbed to 70° C and above, the team found. Mixtures that had been sterilized so that nothing was living in them didn’t produce much hydrogen at all. Somehow, Parkes says, the microbes help stimulate chemical reactions within the minerals that make hydrogen.
"The results are curious, but not compelling," says Steven D'Hondt, an oceanographer and geobiologist at the University of Rhode Island in Narragansett. For instance, he says, scientists would have to run the same experiments without any organic matter in the mixtures in order to be sure that the hydrogen was coming from the minerals and not from the organic matter.
Tological activity often produce hydrogen and other gases, Parkes says, maybe because freshly split rocks and minerals provide a surface that catalyzes chemical reactions, such as the breaking apart of water molecules to produce oxygen and hydrogen. “But people had not linked that to a directBuried microbes coax energy from rock energy source for deep-sediment bacteria, and neither had they shown that the bacteria themselves could actually catalyze this process,” he says. “The fascinating thing is that we have a mechanism of obtaining energy organically in the subsurface which has not really been conBuried microbes coax energy from rock sidered before.”
Bo Barker Jørgensen, a microbiologist at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, says that most buried microbes probably live at shallow depths, not the 3- to 4-kilometer depths simulated in the new study. (The deepest confirmed microorganisms come from 1.6 kilometers in sediments, and 3.5 kilometers in solid rock.) But Jørgensen adds that the new work shows how various groups of subterranean microorganisms thrive at different temperature levels.

Scientific American.com's 60-Second Science blog is now called "Observations" and begets 4 additional blog categories

The 60-Second Science series was created with the intention of providing our audience with bite-size, consume-in-one-minute pieces of scientific coverage. This format has proved ideal for our podcasts, but we've missed the option to write longer news and opinion pieces for the blog. We also wanted a way to better highlight the themes that have emerged within the 60-Second Science blogs. The editors put their heads together and the final result is the introduction of five ScientificAmerican.com blog categories:

1. Observations: Opinions, Arguments & Analyses from the editors of Scientific American
2. Bering in Mind: A Research Psychologist's Curious Look at the Human Mind
3. Extinction Countdown: News and Research about Endangered Species from around the World

Can Electrical Jolts to the Brain Eureca Moments?

Finding those Eureka moments that allow us to solve difficult problems can be an electrifying experience, but rarely like this. Richard Chi and Allan Snyder managed to trigger moments of insight in volunteers, by using focused electric pulses to block the activity in a small part of their brains. After the pulses, people were better at solving a tricky puzzle by thinking outside the box.
This is the latest episode in Snyder’s quest to induce extraordinary mental skills in ordinary people.  Snyder has a long-lasting fascination with  people like Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man, who are remarkably gifted at tasks like counting objects, drawing in fine detail, or memorising vast sequences of information.
Snyder thinks that everyone has these skills but they’re typically blocked by a layer of conscious thought. By stripping away that layer, using electric pulses or magnetic fields, we could theoretically release the hidden savant in all of us. Snyder has been doggedly pursuing this idea for many years, with the goal of producing a literal “thinking cap”. He has typically involving small numbers of people.

Early Success for Universal Flu Vaccine

There are signs that one bid to create a universal flu vaccine that would provide protection against all strains of flu is working. And this one might pack some extra evolutionary aces up its sleeve.

The flu vaccines humanity now has at its disposal work only against a few kinds of flu, for a short time. Ordinary seasonal flu continually evolves and changes its surface proteins, so it can get round our immunity to last year's virus, and last year's vaccine. Therefore we constantly need to update flu vaccines and be re-vaccinated to keep from getting flu. 

This is more than just a nuisance. Producing vaccine tailor-made for each new flu virus is such a long,clumsky process that when a really novel virus emerges unexpectedly and goes pandemic, it can kill without a hindrance for months before a vaccine is ready. 

We didn't have significant quantities of vaccine against the 2009 swine flu until after the first, and nearly all of the second, waves were already  in the Americas. 

To overcome this problem, several research groups are trying to make a flu vaccine out of proteins that are the same in all flu viruses, but to which people don't normally mount much of an immune response, in the hope that this will protect us from all flu once and for all. 

Earth's Twin Update:Reflection of Alien Oceans Could Reveal Habitable Planet

  The next generation of telescopes could reveal the reflection of light or "glint" from Ocean surfaces that signal the existence of Earth-like planets outside our Solar System. Scientists hope the reflection of light from mirror-like ocean surfaces could be picked up by the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble's successor, set for launch in 2014. Tyler Robinson at the University of Washington in Seattle is hoping this new technique could be used in the quest to find the Holy Grail for exoplanet astronomers - a possible twin Earth.

 "We're focussing on a class of extra-solar planets yet to be detected, so things comparable in size and composition to the Earth and similar distances from their central star as the Earth is from the Sun," Robinson told BBC News. "The goal is to find something Earth-like in almost every sense of the world so we can even prove it has liquid oceans on its surface."

Atomic Theory

This article focuses on the historical models of the atom. For a history of the study of how atoms combine to form molecules.

In chemistry and physics atomic theory is a theory of the nature of matter, which states that matter is composed of discrete units called atoms, as opposed to the obsolete notion that matter could be divided into any arbitrarily small quantity. It began as a philosophical concept in ancient Greece (Democritis) and India and entered the scientific mainstream in the early 19th century when discoveries in the field of chemistry showed that matter did indeed behave as if it were made up of particles.
The word "atom" (from the ancient Greek adjective atomos, 'indivisible') was applied to the basic particle that constituted a chemical element, because the chemists of the era believed that these were the fundamental particles of matter. However, around the turn of the 20th century, through various experiments with electromagnetism and radioactivity, physicists discovered that the so-called "indivisible atom" was actually a conglomerate of various subatomic particles (chiefly, electrons, protons and neutrons) which can exist separately from each other. In fact, in certain extreme environments such as neutron , extreme temperature and pressure prevents atoms from existing at all. Since atoms were found to be actually divisible, physicists later invented the term "elementry particles" to describe indivisible particles. The field of science which studies subatomic particles is particle physics, and it is in this field that physicists hope to discover the true fundamental nature of matter.

The Shoeveling Winter

The winter of 2010–2011 has been a good one for sledding and snowball fights, as snowstorms have dusted the U.S. from Georgia to New England to the Pacific Northwest. And Tuesday is no exception, with snowstorms forecast for much of the northern U.S.

But good news for snow lovers is not always good news for homeowners. Shoveling the sidewalk, the front steps or the driveway can be a labor-intensive hassle, and, as a new study shows, it also lands a fair number of shovelers—albeit a very small fraction of the population—in the emergency room each year.

In a 17-year study collecting data from hospitals across the country, a group of researchers from Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and the Ohio State University College of Medicine found that approximately 11,500 individuals per year in the U.S. were treated for injuries related to shoveling snow between 1990 and 2006. (The data from a representative sample of 100 hospitals were extrapolated to nationwide estimates.) The research appeared in the January issue of The American Journal of Emergency Medicine.