Are the world’s most popular search engine and the world’s most populous country headed for a breakup? That’s the word reverberating around the Internet today after Google said it would no longer put up with the Chinese government’s demands to censor the Internet and the rampant hacking attempts against it, which could result in the company ending its Chinese operations.
The announcement came as a stunning reversal for Google, which had capitulated to the government’s wishes to gain access to China’s fast-growing population of Internet users. Since arriving in 2006 under an arrangement with the government that purged its Chinese search results of banned topics, Google has come under fire for abetting a system that increasingly restricts what can be read online [The New York Times].
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On January 7, 1610, Galileo Galilei pointed his “spyglass” to the heavens and stared up at Jupiter, one of the brightest lights in the evening sky, and noted what he at first assumed to be three bright stars near the planet. But over the following nights, he realized that those three bright bodies weren’t fixed in the heavens like stars, but rather seemed to dance around Jupiter along with a fourth, smaller body.
Galileo triumphantly announced his discovery of four “planets” that revolved around Jupiter in his March treatise, Starry Messenger [pdf]. Thinking of his pocketbook, he dutifully proposed naming them the Medicean Stars in honor of his patron, Cosimo de Medici. But the name didn’t stick, and today we honor the scientist rather than the patron by calling Jupiter’s four largest satellites the Galilean moons.
The discovery dealt a death blow to the Ptolemaic understanding of the universe, in which all planets and stars were believed to orbit the Earth. For, as Galileo wrote in his treatise, “our own eyes show us four stars which wander around Jupiter as does the moon around the earth.”
In the 400 years that have passed since Galileo first laid eyes on them, we’ve learned a great deal about the moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto (all named after the mythological paramours of Jupiter). If all goes according to plan we’ll soon get to know them much more intimately–NASA and the European Space Agency are currently planning missions to closely observe three of the moons. Click though this gallery to view NASA’s most stunning photos of the four satellites, and to find out what we’ve discovered in the four centuries since Galileo began the work.
(For more on Galileo’s discovery and what it meant to science, check out this post from DISCOVER’s Phil Plait.)
Image: NASA/JPL/DLR
Back and forth go the studies investigating whether cell phone uses increases the risk of brain cancer (the latest one to get major press, released last month, found nothing there). This week, though, new research has grabbed the headlines by declaring that our ubiquitous communication and time-wasting devices could actually provide a health benefit.
In a study set to come out today in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (and funded in part by the National Institute on Aging), a group led by Gary Arendash argues that the radiation from cell phones that we’ve been worrying about could protect against Alzheimer’s Disease. But it’s far too soon to advise people to start medicating themselves by talking even longer on the phone.
Researchers at the Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center arranged about 70 mouse cages in a circle around a central antenna that emitted electromagnetic waves typical of what would emanate from a phone pressed to a human head. They were exposed to the radiation for two hours a day over seven to nine months. About two dozen other mice served as controls [Los Angeles Times]. Arendash’s team used mice they had genetically engineered to develop the brain buildups and memory problems typical of Alzheimer’s when they got older. The team says that the memory problems of those mice exposed to the radiation began to disappear during the study. Not only that, but normal mice (that hadn’t been genetically engineered) also showed memory improvements after exposure.
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It’s a classic case of bolting the barn door after the horses are gone. Politicians are angry that the “crotch bomber” (who tried to blow up an airplane of Christmas day) got through airport security with his explosives undetected, and have demanded that full-body scanners be placed in all airports. So far, 19 U.S. airports are using the scanners, and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) hopes to put hundreds more in airports across the country.
Proponents of this technology argue that it’s worth sacrificing privacy (and modesty) for safety. But in their rush to do something policymakers be ignoring five big problems with rolling out this technology:
1. Manufacturers aren’t willing to fill orders. According to a spokesperson for Smiths Detection, a manufacturer of millimeter-wave body scanners, the scanner technology has not yet been certified as fit for purpose by national governments – and manufacturers will not invest in mass production until it has [New Scientist]. Until the TSA and the European Union certify the technology, don’t expect manufactures to rush into production, seeing as how the scanners cost around $125,000 each.
2. They won’t actually catch that many threats. According to a spokesperson for QinetiQ, another body scanner manufacturer, airport body scanners would be “unlikely” to detect many of the explosive devices used by terrorist groups [BBC News]. QinetiQ said the technology probably wouldn’t have detected the Christmas day underwear bomb. Neither would the scanners have caught the explosives from the 2006 airliner liquid bomb plot, nor the explosives used in the 2005 London Tube train bombing. The body scanners aren’t very useful for detecting liquids and plastics and can only help spotlight irregularities under a person’s clothes, said the spokesperson. Singling out every irregularity for further screening will place a heavy burden on airport security (read: bring a pillow with you to the airport).
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1. A tower in Dubai that opens today has earned the title of world’s tallest building with a height of 2,717 feet (828 meters). That’s more than half a mile high. Actually, it grabbed that title during construction back in July 2007 when it passed Taipei 101, which stands 500 meters tall.
2. Until its official opening today, the building’s exact height was a closely held secret known by only a few people. The building’s architects, Chicago-based Skidmore, Owings, and Merril, speculated last week that someone might try to steal the thunder from the big announcement by measuring the building’s shadow to figure out its height.
3. The opening ceremony included another surprise. The tower, which had been known as the Burj Dubai, was renamed the Burj Khalifa, in honor of Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the president of the neighboring emirate Abu Dhabi. The last-minute switch carries a symbolic weight in light of the billions of dollars oil-rich Abu Dhabi has poured into Dubai in order to cover its debts [The New York Times].
4. The Burj is not only the tallest building in the world, it’s also home to the highest observation deck, swimming pool, elevator, restaurant, and fountain in the world.
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Let the Copenhagen fallout continue.
Friday night, after a two-week diplomacy fest that could be called “difficult” at best, leaders of some of the most powerful countries in the world announced that they reached an 11th hour agreement to conclude the United Nations Copenhagen climate summit. After speaking to the assembly, President Barack Obama spent the day going in and out of meetings with Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao. They met later with Mammoghan Singh of India, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, and South African President Jacob Zuma, before a White House official leaked that these big players had reached an agreement.
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Krypton and xenon make up trace amounts of the Earth’s atmosphere—about one part per million for the former, and even less for the latter. But these minor components could have a major impact in scientists’ understanding of how the atmosphere came to be. According to findings published in Science, many of the atmosphere’s gases that you’re breathing right now might have come from outer space rather than inside the Earth, as previously thought.
Researchers believed that when the Earth congealed from the gas and dust cloud that formed the solar system, some gases got trapped in the planet’s mantle. Then, over hundreds of millions of years, volcanic eruptions returned the gases to Earth’s surface, where gravity kept them from drifting off into space. The mixing of these gases–along with the oxygen and other molecules added by life–created the atmosphere we have today [ScienceNOW Daily News]. That’s been the common wisdom, anyway.
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If you read this blog last week, you might have seen us cover a study suggesting that South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius ought to be allowed to compete in the same track and field events as everyone else because his prosthetic legs confer no advantage over a sprinter with biological legs. But if you saw a study cited by the Associated Press and many other publications yesterday, you might think that Pistorius would soon be banned from competitions, because his “blades” let him swing his legs far faster than even the world’s fastest man, Usain Bolt. So what the heck is going on?
The AP’s study isn’t actually a “study,” per se. Rather, what the Journal of Applied Physiology published was a point-counterpoint (pdf), now freely available for anyone to read. In in, Peter Weyand and Matthew Bundle argue that Pistorius’ prosthetics are a huge advantage, particularly in what matters most: how fast he can move his legs. Weyand and Bundle say that the lightweight blades allow Pistorius “to reposition his limbs 15.7 percent more rapidly than five of the most recent former world-record holders in the 100-meter dash” [AP].
There is, however, a counterpoint to this argument in the journal piece that yesterday’s news reports neglected, coauthored by Alena Grabowski of the MIT Media Lab (who led the research on Pistorius’ blades that 80beats covered last week). Her team has found that the limiting factor determining an athlete’s top speed was how hard the foot or prosthesis hit the ground. Their study showed this “ground force” was around 9% lower in the prosthetic limb versus the unaffected leg [The Guardian]. Grabowski’s research focused on professional runners with only one prosthetic leg.
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It’s been a bad month for chemicals and masculinity. Last week 80beats covered the discomforting link found between the chemical bisphenol A (BPA), which is found in any number of consumer products, and erectile dysfunction. Now the villains are phthalates, chemicals used to make plastics softer and more flexible. A new study in the International Journal of Andrology has raised a storm of concern that prenatal exposure to these chemicals could make boys less masculine in their play preferences.
Phthalates, which block the activity of male hormones such as androgens, could be altering masculine brain development, according to Shanna H. Swan, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Rochester Medical Center and lead author of the new report [Los Angeles Times]. To test whether that link extended into behavior, Swan’s team tested women for phthalate levels midway through their pregnancy and then checked back in on the children four to seven years later.
The researchers asked parents to report their children’s patterns of play, but they knew they also had to separate any potential phthalate effect from the “nuture ” side of question. To determine how parental views might sway behavior, parents completed a survey that included questions such as, “What would you do if you had a boy who preferred toys that girls usually play with?” They were asked to respond with whether they would support or discourage such behavior, and how strongly [TIME].
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“Nanoparticles can cause DNA damage across a cellular barrier.” That’s the title of a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology that inspired a number of ominous news headlines (two examples: Nanoparticles ‘can damage DNA‘ and Nanoparticles can damage DNA at a distance: study). The stories that followed basically sang the same tune—that nanoparticles can damage our cells’ genetic material even from a distance (a relatively short distance of four cells away). However, experts are speaking up in response to the media hype, and argue that this study should have never been covered in the news. This particular study has little relevance to human exposure risks, experts say, and it is deeply flawed in other ways [ScienceNOW Daily News]. At least one expert called the study “meaningless,” however other scientists were more diplomatic and have pointed to a number of interesting questions the study raises that are worth pursuing.
In the study, researchers exposed a thin “barrier” of four layers of cancer cells to cobalt-chromium ions or particles. Cells close to the nanoparticles experienced signs of mitochondrial damage. But even cells on the other side of the barrier suffered some DNA damage, the team found, despite the fact that there was no evidence that the metals themselves moved through the cells to the other side of the barrier [ScienceNOW Daily News]. Interesting indeed, but experts are pointing out that this set-up is not entirely relevant to humans, or any living organism for that matter.
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Researchers may have taken a step towards curing the rare, inherited brain disease made famous by the movie Lorenzo’s Oil–and also towards ushering a new era of gene therapy. To help two young boys suffering from the disease, researchers tried an experimental treatment using a deactivated version of the HIV virus. The virus delivered working copies of a gene to stem cells from the patients’ bone marrows. The HIV virus, stripped of genetic material that makes it toxic, integrates permanently into the DNA of cells it enters, scientists said. That means the modified gene remains in the blood-forming stem cells for the life of the patient [Bloomberg].
Adrenoleukodystrophy, or ALD, is a progressive disease characterized by the gradual destruction of the myelin sheaths that insulate neurons and nerves, allowing electrical signals to be transmitted through them. The disease is caused by a genetic defect, which prevents cells in the bone marrow from producing a crucial protein necessary for the formation of the myelin sheaths. Typically, children with ALD are given bone marrow transplants to provide them with healthy blood-forming stem cells, but in the two cases described in the study, no matching donors could be found.
In the experimental treatment, described in a paper published in Science, researchers took blood stem cells from the patients’ bone marrow and used the new vector system to genetically alter them by inserting a working copy of the … gene. The modified cells were then put back into the patients [Reuters].
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In an Italian court, a murderer has just had his sentence reduced because the judge agreed that the man’s genes predisposed him to violent behavior.
Abdelmalek Bayout, an Algerian immigrant to Italy, admitted to stabbing and killing Walter Felipe Novoa Perez, a Colombian, when the two men got in a fight over the kohl eye make-up that Bayout was wearing. At trial, the defense team argued that Bayout was mentally ill at the time of the murder; the judge agreed that his psychiatric condition was a mitigating factor, and gave him a reduced sentence of 9 years. But at an appeal hearing, Bayout’s lawyers argued that his sentence should be shortened further based not just on psychiatric evaluations, but also brain scans and genetic testing.
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From an ancient Peruvian civilization comes this warning: Don’t chop down all your trees, or there will be hell to pay.
The Nazca people are famous for the enormous earthworks they carved into an arid plateau, in designs that range from simple geometrical forms to representations of animals like hummingbirds, lizards, and monkeys. They were previously known to have disappeared around A.D. 500, when massive floods powered by El Niño ravaged the valley where they made their home. Now, a new study that examined the pollen in buried layers of soil in order to trace the horticultural history of the land may have revealed why those floods were so devastating.
The Ica Valley, about 120 miles south of Lima, is barren today but was once a riverine oasis — a fertile landscape capable of supporting many people. The key to that fertility was a tree called the huarango [Los Angeles Times]. The huarango tree provided wood for building and fuel, and seed pods that can be ground up and used in flour or beer. Its branches caught the water in morning mists, and its roots stabilized the topsoil. Says lead researcher David Beresford-Jones: “These were very special forests…. It is the ecological keystone species in the desert zone enhancing soil fertility and moisture and underpinning the floodplain with one of the deepest root systems of any tree known” [BBC News].
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New results are in from the Fermi Space Telescope, which settled into orbit in the summer of 2008, and the findings seem to prove Albert Einstein right once again. Man, that guy was good.
The telescope detected and studied a gamma ray burst, one of the massively bright and powerful explosions that occurs when stars go supernova in distant galaxies. Astronomers were interested in the gamma rays of differing energies and wavelengths that were generated by the explosion, and that raced each other across the universe. After a journey of 7.3 billion light-years, they all arrived within nine-tenths of a second of one another in a detector on NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, at 8:22 p.m., Eastern time, on May 9 [The New York Times].
The researchers were wondering if certain gamma rays with both high energies and short wavelengths would arrive last, at the back of the pack. That would suggest that they had violated one of the principles set out in Einstein‘s theory of relativity: that the speed of light is always constant. If researchers could detect a significant lag in some gamma rays, it would also give fresh hope to those ambitious researchers searching for a theory of everything.
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Emphysema and cystic fibrosis patients who need new lungs are faced with a life-threatening problem: more than 80 percent of donated lungs can’t be used—they’re inflamed and barely functional [Scientific American]. Transplanted lungs also fail at a much higher rate than other transplanted organs, as they’re more likely to be rejected by the recipient’s body. But a new procedure that makes use of gene therapy may soon double or triple the supply of undamaged donated lungs, and may also improve their function once transplanted.
In both pre- and post-transplant lungs, the problem is inflammation caused by insufficient amounts of an immune molecule called IL-10. Donated lungs are immediately chilled on ice, which destroys any IL-10 that may remain in the lungs, allowing substantial damage to occur before the organ can be implanted. And a lack of the molecule after transplantation increases the likelihood that inflammation will damage the organ and induce rejection [Los Angeles Times].
To get around these problems, the researchers first built a domed chamber where pig lungs were kept at body temperature with a steady flow of oxygen and nutrients moving through them. That arrangement alone prevented substantial damage to the lungs. Next, in the gene therapy stage, the researchers used a harmless virus to bring a gene that produces IL-10 into the lung cells.
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