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Short Sharp Science: A New Scientist blog

September 2009 archive

Peter Aldhous, San Francisco bureau chief

When a biotech company fires its CEO and other senior staff, and announces that it is "no longer relying on...any of the previously announced test data" for its key product, you know it's in serious trouble.

The current woes of Sequenom of San Diego, which has just completed an investigation of "mishandled" research results, surround a new test for Down's syndrome, intended to avoid the risk of miscarriage associated with the leading current method - which involves inserting a needle through a pregnant woman's belly to extract amniotic fluid.

Sequenom is developing a test based on a simple blood sample from the expectant mother. Invented by Dennis Lo of the Chinese University in Hong Kong, the test examines RNA from part of chromosome 21 that is expressed only in fetuses. By looking at genetic markers called SNPs, it determines whether the fetus carries an extra copy of chromosome 21 from the mother or father.

Debora MacKenzie, correspondent

Following the tragic death of a 14-year-old girl in Coventry, UK, shortly after receiving the vaccine for human papilloma virus (HPV), NHS Coventry, the government health service for the city, has now stated that the vaccine may not have been to blame.

In a statement it said:

"The preliminary post mortem results have revealed a rare serious underlying medical condition which was likely to have caused death. We are awaiting further test results which will take some time. However indications are that it was most unlikely that the HPV vaccination was the cause of death."

I hope NHS Coventry tells us exactly what went on. For one thing, if this underlying condition was exacerbated by the relatively mild stress of vaccination, other parents, whose kids may also have this condition, surely need to be warned.

Linda Geddes, reporter

A project to use DNA and isotope analysis to help evaluate the claims of asylum seekers, and decide who can enter the United Kingdom, is underway.

So says Science magazine, which obtained UK Border Agency documents showing that isotope analyses of hair and nail samples will be conducted "to help identify a person's true country of origin". A DNA-based program to identify nationality was also recently revealed by the UK newspaper The Observer.

It's not clear just what stage the project has reached, but scientists have understandably reacted with concern.

What caused the Samoa islands tsunami?

Richard Fisher, deputy news editor

A tsunami has devastated the coasts of Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga. On the morning of 30 September, the death toll was thought to be around 85 people, but this was expected to rise, according to the BBC. Many have been left homeless, and entire villages have been destroyed, says Samoa's deputy prime minister Misa Telefoni.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center recorded a wave height of around 1.5 metres greater than sea level in American Samoa, around 70 centimetres in Samoa, and half a metre in Tonga. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has recorded a 16-centimetre wave reaching Honolulu, Hawaii - see a map of the sea-level rise across the Pacific here.

The magnitude-8.0 earthquake that caused the tsunami struck at around 7 am local time (6 pm GMT) on 29 September, 196 kilometres south of Apia, the Samoan capital, according to the United States Geological Survey. The quake was followed by 14 aftershocks of magnitude 5.0 or higher, but it appears these did not generate significant waves.
From Debora MacKenzie, consultant

A 14-year-old girl has died in Coventry, UK, shortly after receiving the vaccine for human papilloma virus (HPV). Predictably - given that this has happened in the country that fostered the MMR/autism debacle, and for a vaccine already attacked by religious extremists - the reaction has been huge. All cervical cancer vaccinations across Coventry have been suspended, and the batch of vaccine has been taken out of service. The authorities are calling for calm.

Vaccination is one of the greatest success stories medicine has ever had. Yet you can understand why people worry. You're giving an invisible treatment, usually to a healthy person, often a trusting, dependent child, in hopes that it will prevent a disease that may or may not have happened otherwise.

HPV vaccine is more problematic than some others: although the virus is very common, only a few women who are infected will go on to develop cervical cancer. So the benefit of vaccination is late, and doesn't apply to everyone.

All medicine is based on a calculation that the benefits outweigh the risks. In poor countries, where cervical cancer deaths are soaring and the alternative - regular cervical tests and surgery for any cancer detected - are limited, HPV vaccination will obviously save lives. Those benefits won't be apparent, however, until the girls being vaccinated now reach the advanced age when cancer would otherwise have developed.

In rich countries such as the UK, there are tests and surgery, so the added benefit of the vaccine will be less. It has to be pretty safe to meet those standards.

Is Iran trying to build a nuclear bomb?

Debora MacKenzie, correspondent

In what might be described as a bombshell, the International Atomic Energy Agency has announced that Iran had informed the agency earlier this week that it has a covert underground uranium enrichment plant in addition to the one known at Natanz.

The admission to the IAEA in Vienna comes on the heels of reports that the US, Britain and France were about to reveal the plant's existence at the meeting of the G-20 this week in Pittsburgh.

The revelation will make it harder than ever for Iran to claim its uranium enrichment programme is for peaceful purposes. Natanz itself was a secret until rumbled in 2003, and put under inspection by the IAEA. It is hard to imagine why Iran would need to keep yet another enrichment plant, near the holy city of Qom, a secret if it was merely to make yet more fuel for its still-uncompleted nuclear power plants.

Peter Aldhous, San Francisco bureau chief





Paul Marks, technology correspondent



Mystery surrounds 'plague death' victim

Debora MacKenzie, consultant

Before Malcolm Casadaban died on September 13, the 60-year-old microbiologist at the University of Chicago had been suffering from flu-like symptoms.

Another victim of swine flu? Perhaps - but an autopsy revealed he had plague bacteria in his blood.

Casadaban was reported to have been working with a weakened vaccine strain of Yersinia pestis, intended for the development of vaccines against plague. However, doctors are not sure the bacilli in Casadaban's blood were the cause of death, or how they got there. So what's going on?

A dangerously explosive book?

Paul Marks, technology correspondent

Barack Obama may have instructed the Pentagon to prepare for massive cuts to the US nuclear arsenal, but a book published in Brazil has sparked fresh worries about nuclear proliferation.

The book, by physicist Dalton Barroso, is called The Physics of Nuclear Explosions (translation from the Portuguese "A Física dos Explosivos Nucleares") and explains some of the physics required to engineer both fission and fusion bombs, from the dynamics of detonation to the plasma physics of the core.

The publication of is said by Brazilian media to have alarmed the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Pentagon because it may mean Brazil has a fresh interest in developing such nuclear weapons - despite being a signatory to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty.

But Barroso has hit back.

Climate: good news at last

Nic Fleming, contributor


In the first major study of the effect of the recession on climate change, the International Energy Agency (IEA), which advises its 28 member countries on policy, is predicting a drop in carbon dioxide emissions of around 2.6 per cent in 2009 - the largest in 40 years.

Was Egypt right to slaughter its pigs?

Debora MacKenzie, consultant

Complexity is a funny thing. Last year, I wrote about its scarier implications in the event of a deadly pandemic (much deadlier, please note, than the flu pandemic now under way), and, taking things a bit further, for what might make civilisation collapse. Both investigations found that, the more complex our social systems, the more likely that: a. you can't predict what will happen when you change even a seemingly small bit of it; and b. what does happen may hurt.

Does global warming need a porn name?

Shanta Barley, reporter

"What's in a name?," Juliet famously asked of Romeo. Rather a lot, according to Rajendra Shende, head of the UN's OzonAction.

The war on ozone-depleting CFCs was only won when the media coined the "scientifically imprecise, but emotionally powerful" term, the "ozone hole," Shende said at an event at Peking University to celebrate Ozone Day.

"It made people feel there was a hole in the roof of their home," said Shende, pointing out that it wasn't actually a hole, but a "higher rate of depletion in the Antarctic sky."

So, what should we call global warming to provoke a similarly passionate response from the apathetic masses, asks The Guardian? Global melting? Global boiling? Global burning?

Uncle Sam looks to tidy up space




Ewen Callaway, reporter

The latest weapon in the battle over the legitimacy of some functional brain scanning studies is a dead fish.

In study titled "Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon", researchers scanned 1.7 kg (3.8 pounds) of a dead salmon while it was shown images of humans in various social situations. It's not clear how long the salmon had been dead by the time it was studied, but Craig Bennett at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says he scanned it about an hour after picking it up from the supermarket, so it was definitely already a goner.

So what did he and his colleagues find? Bizarrely, a region of the dead salmon's brain lit up during the task.

reCAPTCHA captured by Google

catpcha.jpgColin Barras, online technology reporter

News broke last night that Google has captured reCAPTCHA - or as the San Francisco Chronicle put it, "the outfit that makes those squiggly word boxes for websites".

You'll find CAPTCHA technology in use all over the web; reCAPTCHA is a subtle modification that presents users with two squiggly words instead of one.

The system already "knows" the first word, so entering it correctly proves that you're human to shut out spambots. But the second word is one that has stumped software scanning a book. By translating it correctly for a reCAPTCHA, humans are helping the translation process.
Drayson.jpgShanta Barley, reporter

Some science reporting in Britain is good, but some is rubbish and can kill you. That seemed to be the conclusion reached in a debate yesterday between the UK's Minister of Science, Paul Drayson, and writer and medical doctor Ben Goldacre. At least, that's what I think the conclusion was.

The debate, held in the august surroundings of the Royal Institution in London, was "the scientific equivalent of a Take That concert", mused the moderator, Simon Mayo. (Think science reporters toying with Twitter rather than screaming teenagers baying for Robbie Williams.)

Unashamedly proud of Britain's journalists, Drayson kicked off the debate with the announcement that British science reporting has "got much better," and is for the most part "unmatched in breadth and freedom." Some science reporting is good, some science reporting is bad, he said, but we should celebrate and protect our science writers. Hurrah!

The evolution of the Origin of Species

Darwin's_finches.jpegCharles Darwin may have waited twenty years to publish his most famous book, but the work didn't stop there.

Watch the animation on this page to see how On the Origin... grew under Darwin's supervision from its first edition in 1859 to its sixth in 1872, a period over which it grew by 40,000 words. As Ben Fry, the site's creator puts it:

"We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin's theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin's On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime...In the changes are refinements and shifts in ideas -- whether increasing the weight of a statement, adding details, or even a change in the idea itself."
One small revision to the 5th edition in 1869 turned out to be particularly influential. Adding philosopher Herbert Spencer's phrase "survival of the fittest" was a change that has reverberated down the centuries.

Peter Aldhous, San Francisco bureau chief

The great Korean cloning dogfight has ended - not with a killer bite, but with a snarl and a whimper.

Last year, rival South Korean dog cloners shaped up for a legal battle. In one corner was disgraced biologist Woo Suk Hwang, cloning dogs under contract for a Californian company called BioArts International. In the other were his former colleagues at Seoul National University, offering a rival cloning service through a company called RNL Bio. But now BioArts has withdrawn from the fight, announcing an end to its pet cloning service.

In an interview with New Scientist in summer 2008, BioArts CEO Lou Hawthorne explained how his long quest to clone his mother's dog, Missy, led to his company's service - launched with a high-profile auction of five opportunities for dog cloning, dubbed "Best Friends Again".

big_bang.jpgTom Simonite, online technology editor

Last week we challenged Twitter users to explain the big bang in a single tweet.

We saw more than 500 responses before we called time, although people are still tweeting away on the #sci140 tag.

Kat Austen, letters and comments editor



bones.jpgAndy Coghlan, reporter




Peter Aldhous, San Francisco bureau chief

It's been a bad few weeks for stem cell clinical trials. First Geron of Menlo Park, California, was forced to put a pioneering trial of human embryonic stem cells on hold because of safety concerns. Now Osiris Therapeutics of Columbia, Maryland, is reeling from the failure of large trials of its adult stem cells, known as Prochymal.

Prochymal is a preparation of "mesenchymal" stem cells, found in bone marrow, which can give rise to tissues including fat, muscle and bone. While several companies are working with similar cells, Osiris was the first to move them into the large-scale "phase III" trials needed before a therapy can be approved for market by the US Food and Drugs Administration.

Earlier today, Osiris announced disappointing results from two phase III trials investigating Prochymal's performance in treating graft-versus-host disease (GvHD) - a serious complication of bone marrow transplants in which immune cells from the graft start to attack the recipient's own tissues. The stem cells were supposed to migrate to sites of inflammation and help repair the damaged tissues. 

chandrayaan.jpgRichard Fisher, deputy news editor

It might have been a simple mistake to make, but a fatal error contributed to the premature demise of India's lunar probe Chandrayaan-1. The space agency underestimated temperatures around the moon, so the probe had been overheated for months.

In May, the Indian Space Research Organisation raised the probe's lunar orbit from 100 to 200 kilometres, saying the move would provide a wider view of the lunar surface.

However, engineers had miscalculated the radiant heat from the moon's surface and the shift was actually an attempt to cool the probe down, ISRO's T K Alex admitted to The Times of India: "We assumed that the temperature at 100km above the Moon's surface would be around 75 degrees Celsius. However, it was more than 75 degrees and problems started to surface. We had to raise the orbit to 200km."

The story reports:

It now transpires that heating problems on the craft had begun as early as November 25, 2008, forcing ISRO to deactivate some of the payloads - there were 11 in all.

As a result, some of the experiments could not be carried out which raised questions on whether the pre-launch thermal vacuum test done on the spacecraft at the ISRO Satellite Centre in Bangalore was adequate.

Radio contact was lost on 29 August, ending the mission more than a year early.

The communications failure was likely precipitated by the unexpectedly warm temperatures, says Madhavan Nair, chair of the ISRO. According to, he said the "failure rate of devices increases when the temperature goes up". Heat issues, coupled with space radiation, were the cause of the mission's premature termination, he said.

Lisa Grossman and Maggie McKee, Boston

The wildfire that broke out in the Angles National Forest on 26 August has claimed two lives, 600 square kilometres of land and 64 homes – and has now been classified as arson, the Los Angeles Times reported on Thursday.

It's unclear how they came to the arson conclusion. The LA Times reported on Friday that "incendiary material" had been found near the spot where the fire is thought to have gotten started, citing an unnamed source close to the investigation who would not specify what that material was.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca said investigators don't want to release details out of fear they could hurt their ability to find and prosecute an arsonist.

Baca stressed that the homicide probe is still wide-open, saying investigators believe that the fire was set deliberately by someone intent on triggering a devastating blaze but that there is a possibility it could have been sparked accidentally by a negligent person. Either way, the sheriff said the department could pursue homicide charges.

But how do authorities trace the origin of a wildfire in the first place?

Shanta Barley, reporter

India's carbon emissions, which currently account for almost 6 per cent of the world total, will more than triple within the next 20 years.

According to a report compiled by a number of Indian institutions, the country's emissions will soar from 1.2 billion tonnes today to between 4 and 7 billion tonnes in 2030.

Of course, we all know that the average Indian today emits far less carbon dioxide than, say, the average American: 1.2 tonnes of the stuff, or over 16 times less, in fact. And according to the report, even in 2030, the average Indian will be emitting just 2.8 to 5 tonnes of CO2. Peanuts.

The real problem here is not individual greenhouse gas emissions but overpopulation, it seems. Perhaps the Indian Health and Family Welfare Minister's recent suggestion that boosting the availability of late-night television in order to make people too tired for sex might not be such a bad idea after all...

One-shot flu vaccine

Debora MacKenzie, consultant

Finally some good news about swine flu: the Swiss firm Novartis reports today that its pandemic flu vaccine works with only one shot. Half as much dead virus as in regular winter flu shots was needed to give 80 per cent of the adults injected the amount of immune reaction required for ordinary flu vaccines.

This is good news. The low dose of virus means more doses can be made in a short time, especially useful as the vaccine viruses are growing slowly.

But the best news is that one shot works.

When birds and pigs collide

Debora MacKenzie, consultant




Bye bye to the 100W bulb

Shanta Barley, reporter

Europeans bid farewell to the 100 watt bulbs today. From now on, Edison's brainchild can no longer be legally made in or imported into the European Union, thanks to a Union-wide ban which kicks off today.

Shed a tear, but don't let your sentimentality tempt you into smuggling one into the EU under your jumper: you'll be hit with a £5000 fine, according to The Daily Telegraph. That's the price for individuals caught transgressing the ban. Companies will face unlimited fines.

The EU hopes that the ban on incandescent light bulbs will force businesses and consumers to invest in low-carbon Light Emitting Diodes and Compact Fluorescent Lamps, which use up to 80 per cent less energy.

The ban could save the EU anywhere from 15 to 53 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, says Matt Prescott, founder of the Ban the Bulb campaign.

And the UK could save 2 to 5 million tonnes of the stuff, he says. Will it make a difference? You decide: the ban will cut Britain's yearly emissions of CO2 by - oh, about 0.643737355 per cent.
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