SCIENCE News Summaries, Volume 332, Issue 6028
dated April 22 2011, is now available at: - http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol332/issue6028/news-summaries.dtl
A copy of the "SCIENCE News This Week" section has been appended below.
SCIENCE News This Week
April 22 2011, 332 (6028)
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, officials with Tokyo Electric Power Co. say it could take up to 9 months to end the threat of radioactive releases from the stricken reactors at Fukushima Daiichi, researchers have released new criteria for diagnosing Alzheimer's disease, some 30 ring-tailed lemurs are headed to a private island, deep-sea drilling is 50 years old, a promising HIV strategy has fallen short in trials in Africa, a Canadian safe-injection facility has been found to cut the death rate from overdoses, and the 2011 U.S. federal budget will create a key satellite data gap in 2017. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6028/402-b?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/22-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6028.402-b
Random Sample This week, researchers unveiled the fourth dimension with gigapixel time-lapse movies stitched together from ultrahigh-resolution panoramas assembled from multiple images. A 3-by-4.5-meter ceramic sculpture of a coral reef is being displayed in the marble foyer of the U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C., to promote marine conservation. And this week's numbers quantify new funds committed to the planned UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation and the growth of scientific publication by China-based researchers. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6028/403?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/22-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6028.403
Newsmakers This week's Newsmakers are Lewis R. Binford, champion of the use of the scientific method in archaeology, who died 11 April at the age of 79, and Patricia Ann Jacobs and David Page, winners of this year's March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology, which honors scientific research aimed at improving the health of babies. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6028/404-a?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/22-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6028.404-a
FINDINGS
High-Risk Factor: Off-Label Use Of Clotting Drug Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6028/404-b?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/22-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6028.404-b
Whale 'Pop Songs' Spread Across the Ocean Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6028/405-a?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/22-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6028.405-a
A Moveable Feast Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6028/405-b?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/22-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6028.405-b
NEWS & ANALYSIS
How Science Eluded the Budget Ax—For Now Jeffrey Mervis When details of the 11th-hour budget compromise that kept the U.S. government running emerged last week, it became clear that science programs fared relatively well. True, most research agencies will have less to spend this year than they did in 2010, and the totals generally fall well short of what President Barack Obama had requested when he submitted his 2011 budget 14 months ago. But the legislators and Administration officials who struck the spending deal managed to slice $38.5 billion from a total discretionary budget of $1.09 trillion without crippling research activities. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6028/407?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/22-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6028.407
Controversy Follows Pricey Space Station Experiment to Launch Pad Adrian Cho If all goes as planned, next Friday, NASA's space shuttle Endeavor will carry a massive particle detector to the international space station, some 17 years after the mission was proposed. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer will open a new eye on the cosmos, says Samuel C. C. Ting, a Nobel Prize–winning particle physicist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the indefatigable leader of the project, which seemed moribund 6 years ago after NASA scratched it from its shuttle schedule. Yet, even as the $2 billion experiment sits ready for launch, some scientists question its value. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6028/408?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/22-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6028.408
Spate of Suicides Roils University, Jeopardizing Academic Reforms Dennis Normile* A student's suicide is a tragedy for any university. But the death of a sophomore at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon on 7 April was the fourth suicide of a KAIST student in 4 months. Observers are placing a share of the blame on aggressive measures to improve education quality at KAIST, South Korea's equivalent of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. * With reporting by Ahn Mi-Young in Seoul. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6028/410?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/22-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6028.410
More Megaquakes on the Way? That Depends on Your Statistics Richard A. Kerr Lately, the world has been rocked by more than its usual share of the biggest earthquakes ever accurately recorded: the magnitude-9.0 "megaquake" that just struck off Japan; another one that hit off Indonesia 6 years ago; and sandwiched between them, the great magnitude-8.8 Chilean quake of 2010. Before these three, however, nothing like them had been seen for 40 years. Could these three big quakes be physically connected? Could the first of them somehow have touched off a cluster of great earthquakes spanning the Pacific? And if so, has this cluster played itself out? Experts differ. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6028/411?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/22-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6028.411
NEWS FOCUS
A Remedy at Last for the Ailing Ganges? Richard Stone Every day, more than 200 million liters of sewage and industrial waste—much of it untreated—ooze into the Ganges from the holy Hindu city of Varanasi. But a remedy for the ailing river may be at hand. This spring, India's central government is expected to give final approval for an innovative water-treatment scheme in Varanasi. As part of a $4 billion initiative to cleanse India's rivers by 2020, the government intends to replicate the Varanasi solution in other cities on the Ganges. The project should make an inroad against one of India's biggest killers: waterborne diarrheal illnesses. Chromium from leather tanneries, toxic dyes from silk factories, and pesticides and other runoff from farm fields are also taking a toll on the ecology of the Ganges Basin, home to some 500 million people. The water project will also mark a major milestone in a 30-year-long grassroots campaign to improve the river that began in Varanasi, one of the oldest inhabited cities on Earth. And it would be a personal triumph for the movement's charismatic 71-year-old leader, Veer Bhadra Mishra, an engineer and mahant, or spiritual head, of Varanasi's Sankat Mochan Temple. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6028/412?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/22-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6028.412
Are Telomere Tests Ready for Prime Time? Mitch Leslie Can the length of our telomeres, the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes that wear down as we get old, predict how well our bodies will age and our vulnerability to chronic diseases? Two new companies, both with heavyweight academic backing, are betting on it and have started or are planning to start performing telomere tests for the general public this year. But other leading telomere scientists say such tests are premature, if not virtually useless. On opposite sides of the issue are former collaborators Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider, who, along with Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School, shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their telomere discoveries. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6028/414?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/22-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6028.414
Beneath a Barren Steppe, a Mongolian Surprise When archaeologists recently found a massive settlement in the remote Orkhon Valley in central Mongolia, they assumed it dated from the Mongols' heyday in the 13th century C.E. To their surprise, they discovered that this enormous site and a host of others nearby instead date from the 8th and 9th centuries C.E., the time of the Uigher empire, which was not known to have built large settlements in this remote area, researchers reported at the Society for American Archaeology meeting. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6028/416-a?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/22-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6028.416-a
Early Farmers Went Heavy on the Starch Recent evidence shows that agriculture began in fits and starts in the Near East, more than 10,000 years ago. Now a U.S.-German team is gathering the first comprehensive evidence that the earliest farmers in the Levant ate a wide variety of plants, including starchy tubers, which may have allowed them to experiment with grain cultivation without fear of starvation, the team reported at the Society for American Archaeology meeting. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6028/416-b?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/22-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6028.416-b
Searching for Syphilis's Origins Andrew Lawler Some researchers argue that syphilis and related bacterial illnesses arose in the New World and were transmitted to the Old World via Columbus's crew and that of later ships, while others argue that they were already present in both arenas, or just in the Old World. Syphilis, bejel, and another variant called yaws cause inflammation of tissue around bone, leaving severe scars and cratering on bones that researchers can see in ancient skeletons, although determining exactly which condition afflicted the dead is tricky. But researchers reported at the Society for American Archaeology meeting that they have pinpointed the presence of bejel in the New World before Columbus—and that the wrecks of Japanese junks suggest a mechanism for its transmission from Asia to North America. Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6028/417?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/22-April-2011/10.1126/science.332.6028.417
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