SCIENCE News Summaries, Volume 332, Issue 6025
dated April 1 2011, is now available at: - http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol332/issue6025/news-summaries.dtl
A copy of the "SCIENCE News This Week" section has been appended below.
SCIENCE News This Week
April 1 2011, 332 (6025)
NEWS OF THE WEEK
This Week's Section Follow the links below for a roundup of the week's top stories in science, or download a PDF of the entire section.
Around the World In science news around the world this week, the U.K. is boosting its science budget slightly, tiger numbers may be up in India, oceanographers are scouring the sea floor off Brazil's northeast coast for the flight recorders from a doomed 2009 flight, a venerated volcano has inspired a rare attempt at scientific partnership on the divided Korean peninsula, the faculty senate of the University of Johannesburg voted to terminate a collaborative research agreement with the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, some of Europe's top scientists will be getting financial help to take their discoveries to the marketplace, and a trove of vintage primate data will be digitized at Duke University. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6025/18-b?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/1-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6025.18-b
Random Sample Cornell University's Lab of Ornithology has launched a popularity tournament featuring North American birds. And archaeologists and volunteers are conducting an experiment to see whether the people who occupied hill forts along the Welsh-English border some 2500 years ago could have seen each other and maybe even sent signals with fire. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6025/18-c?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/1-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6025.18-c
Newsmakers This week's Newsmakers are Cornell ecologist and evolutionary biologist Thomas Eisner, who died last week at age 81 of complications from Parkinson's disease; topologist and dynamical systems theorist John Milnor, who has won the 2011 Abel Prize in mathematics; entomologist May Berenbaum, who will receive the 2011 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement; and physical chemist Bai Chunli, who was appointed president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences last month. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6025/20?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/1-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6025.20
FINDINGS
How a Dinosaur Is Like a Vacuum Cleaner Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6025/21-a?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/1-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6025.21-a
Test Tells If the Heart Fits Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6025/21-b?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/1-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6025.21-b
NEWS & ANALYSIS
Scientific Consensus on Great Quake Came Too Late Dennis Normile An obscure paper about an earthquake in 869 C.E. that destroyed a castle town in northeastern Japan and a subsequent tsunami that inundated the surrounding area is now at the center of a growing debate about how quickly scientific findings can and should influence disaster-mitigation policies. A few years before the magnitude-9.0 Tohoku earthquake struck northeastern Japan on 11 March, a scientific consensus had begun to coalesce around the idea that a Jogan-like event could happen again. But that consensus did not influence seismic risk assessments, tsunami preparedness, or a review of the hardiness of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The need to revise earthquake probability analyses extends far beyond Japan. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6025/22?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/1-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6025.22
In Indus Times, the River Didn't Run Through It Andrew Lawler Along the course of the now-dry Ghaggar-Hakra River system in today's India and Pakistan are scattered settlements of the Indus civilization. At a meeting last week, three independent teams offered preliminary evidence that the Ghaggar-Hakra was at most a modest seasonal stream during and after the Indus flourished from 2500 B.C.E. to 1900 B.C.E. The findings puzzle and intrigue archaeologists. If the river was dry or only seasonal, it may prompt a re-evaluation of how Indus peoples acquired water for agriculture. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6025/23?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/1-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6025.23
Pool at Stricken Reactor #4 Holds Answers to Key Safety Questions Eli Kintisch* Of all the terrible news from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, reports about the spent fuel storage pool for reactor #4 may be among the most disconcerting for scientists. The pool held the entire complement of fuel rods from the reactor's core, which had been emptied 3 months before the 11 March earthquake and tsunami struck. And yet on 15 March the building exploded, apparently fueled by hydrogen, leaving nuclear engineers to speculate about the source. Adding to the confusion are reports of fires in the pool, a worst-case scenario that had never before occurred in a working nuclear plant. Unraveling the mysteries surrounding the #4 pool will require discovering why water levels there fell so quickly and whether the 230 tons of spent nuclear fuel melted in addition to catching on fire. * With reporting by Dennis Normile in Tokyo. * With reporting by Dennis Normile in Tokyo. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6025/24?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/1-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6025.24
Artificial Leaf Turns Sunlight Into a Cheap Energy Source Robert F. Service Nearly all the energy we use on this planet starts out as sunlight that plants use to knit chemical bonds. Now, for the first time, researchers have created a potentially cheap, practical artificial leaf that does much the same thing. The new device is a silicon wafer about the shape and size of a playing card. Different catalysts coat each side of the wafer. The silicon absorbs sunlight and passes that energy to the catalysts to split water into molecules of hydrogen (H2) and oxygen (O2). Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6025/25?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/1-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6025.25
Army Missed Warning Signs About Alleged Anthrax Mailer Yudhijit Bhattacharjee A new report detailing the mental health problems of U.S. Army researcher Bruce Ivins, the alleged perpetrator of the 2001 anthrax attacks, blames the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) for not scrutinizing Ivins's background adequately before hiring him and providing him with the security clearances that allowed him to work with anthrax. The report says that if USAMRIID managers had looked at Ivins's psychiatric records, which they had the authority to access, they would have spotted behavioral red flags that would have automatically disqualified him from working in a biocontainment suite. The report's findings have rekindled a debate over how funding agencies, institutions, and labs should screen and monitor researchers with access to dangerous pathogens. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6025/27?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/1-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6025.27
NEWS FOCUS
The Rise of Animal Law Greg Miller Animal law is a relatively new area of study that examines—and often challenges—how the law treats animals. Some of those who teach animal law courses describe themselves as activists; others shy away from that label. But many take issue with a legal system that treats animals as property and provides few mechanisms for protecting their interests in court. Some of these legal scholars have proposed strategies for advancing animal rights through steppingstone cases that erode the notion of animals as property and grant them some of the same protections people have. Others, drawing inspiration from the antislavery and civil rights movements, advocate a more direct effort to establish fundamental rights for animals—at least for more cognitively sophisticated species such as great apes and cetaceans (see sidebar). No one is arguing that orangutans should be given the right to vote, but some legal scholars see no reason why apes shouldn't have rights similar to those of a child or a person in a coma. If these efforts succeed, there could be repercussions for everyone who works with animals—including scientists. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6025/28?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/1-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6025.28
A Road Map for Animal Rights Greg Miller For 30 years, Steven Wise, a lawyer, legal scholar, and founder of the Nonhuman Rights Project, has been working toward the goal of establishing personhood and legal rights for animals. Wise now says his group is close to filing lawsuits on behalf of intelligent animals such as chimpanzees and dolphins in an attempt to convince courts that at least some nonhuman animals meet the requirements of legal personhood and should be accorded certain basic rights. As improbable as it may sound, there's a chance he will succeed, other legal scholars say. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6025/30?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/1-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6025.30
Girth and the Gut (Bacteria) Elizabeth Pennisi Five years ago, researchers made a surprising discovery: The guts of obese mice and people harbor an array of microbes different from that of their lean counterparts. Moreover, when they gave lean mice certain gut-dwelling microbes, the rodents became fat. The findings fueled popular speculation that manipulating gut bacteria might keep weight down in people. Another researcher who was struck by how successful farmers are at increasing the growth rates of livestock by adding low doses of antibiotics to their feed began to wonder whether antibiotic use, particularly in children, might affect the long-term establishment of a balanced microbial community in the human gut, eliminating bacteria there that could help ward off obesity. He and several other groups started conducting mouse studies to examine the hypothesis. These and other intriguing obesity-related findings were presented at a meeting last month on the microbiome, the bacteria that live inside the guts and other tissues of animals. Yet many in the field caution that it remains difficult to determine whether changes in gut microbes drive or contribute to obesity or whether the excess weight itself triggers those changes. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6025/32?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/1-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6025.32
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