Another look at Chandra's black hole. Click for a larger version ~73 k. Credit: X-ray (NASA/CXC/SAO/Li et al.), Optical (DSS)

Some interesting information on the black hole at the center of the Andromeda Galaxy.

The Chandra press release:

The large image here shows an optical view, with the Digitized Sky Survey, of the Andromeda Galaxy, otherwise known as M31. The inset shows Chandra X-ray Observatory images of a small region in the center of Andromeda. The image on the left shows the sum of 23 images taken with Chandra’s High Resolution Camera (HRC) before January 2006 and the image on the right shows the sum of 17 HRC images taken after January 2006. Before 2006, three X-ray sources are clearly visible in the Chandra image, including one faint source close to the center of the image. After 2006, a fourth source, called M31*, appears just below and to the right of the central source, produced by material falling onto the supermassive black hole in M31.

A detailed study of Chandra observations over ten years shows that M31* was in a very dim, or quiet, state from 1999 to the beginning of 2006. However, on January 6, 2006, the black hole became more than a hundred times brighter, suggesting an outburst of X-rays. This was the first time such an event had been seen from a supermassive black hole in the nearby, local universe. After the outburst, M31* entered another relatively dim state, but was almost ten times brighter on average than before 2006. The outburst suggests a relatively high rate of matter falling onto M31* followed by a smaller, but still significant rate.

Just like the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, M31* is surprisingly quiet. In fact, Andromeda’s black hole is ten to one hundred thousand times fainter in X-ray light that astronomers might expect given the reservoir of gas around it. The black holes in both Andromeda and the Milky Way provide special laboratories to study the dimmest type of accretion ever seen onto a supermassive black hole.

Didgeridoo playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome: randomised controlled trial.

“OBJECTIVE: To assess the effects of didgeridoo playing on daytime sleepiness and other outcomes related to sleep by reducing collapsibility of the upper airways in patients with moderate obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome and snoring. DESIGN: Randomised controlled trial. SETTING: Private practice of a didgeridoo instructor and a single centre for sleep medicine. PARTICIPANTS: 25 patients aged > 18 years with an apnoea-hypopnoea index between 15 and 30 and who complained about snoring. INTERVENTIONS: Didgeridoo lessons and daily practice at home with standardised instruments for four months. Participants in the control group remained on the waiting list for lessons… …RESULTS: Participants in the didgeridoo group practised an average of 5.9 days a week (SD 0.86) for 25.3 minutes (SD 3.4). Compared with the control group in the didgeridoo group daytime sleepiness (difference -3.0, 95% confidence interval -5.7 to -0.3, P = 0.03) and apnoea-hypopnoea index (difference -6.2, -12.3 to -0.1, P = 0.05) improved significantly and partners reported less sleep disturbance (difference -2.8, -4.7 to -0.9, P < 0.01). There was no effect on the quality of sleep (difference -0.7, -2.1 to 0.6, P = 0.27). The combined analysis of sleep related outcomes showed a moderate to large effect of didgeridoo playing (difference between summary z scores -0.78 SD units, -1.27 to -0.28, P < 0.01). Changes in health related quality of life did not differ between groups. CONCLUSION: Regular didgeridoo playing is an effective treatment alternative well accepted by patients with moderate obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome. ”

Read the full article here.

Image: flickr/B Rosen

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In the Spider-Man comics, the titular hero ensnares criminals by shooting lines of sticky liquid from devices in his hands, which quickly harden into solid threads. In the real world, a group of animals called velvet worms use a similar technique for a more sinister purpose – to trap their prey. Unlike Spider-Man’s synthetic webs, a velvet worm’s glue is entirely biological and an Australian scientist Victoria Haritos has uncovered its secret. This is an animal that uses disorder as a weapon.

Velvet worms, or onychophorans, are some of the oldest animals to walk the Earth. They were ambling around 500 million years ago, when most life was still confined to the oceans. They look like caterpillars but they belong to a completely separate group from the insects that they hunt. Their weapons are a pair of limbs on either side of their heads that have been converted into slime guns. They shoot slime that immobilises prey, giving a velvet worm enough time to sidle up and inject its victim with digestive enzymes.

The slime is incredible stuff. It leaves the worm’s nozzles as twin streams of sticky liquid. But once it touches the target, it hardens almost immediately into a stiff, hard gel that is neither sticky nor soluble in water. It’s an incredible transformation and for the prey, it’s a fatal one. By ‘milking’ an Australian velvet worm called Euperipatoides rowelli and studying its slime, Haritos has discovered that its properties come from a special type of chaotic protein.

Proteins are long chains of amino acids that typically fold into complex three-dimensional structures. The exact sequence of amino acids determines the form that this molecular origami will take. One mistake can render the protein useless. But the velvet worm’s slime proteins have evolved to be disordered – while other proteins are like tangled bundles of uncooked noodles, those in the slime are like the cooked sinuous strands.

These proteins are loaded with amino acids that repel one another, and they’re short of the water-repelling ones that help other proteins to establish a solid core. Rather than folding, they adopt open and random structures that are extensively coated with water molecules. Indeed, when the slime leaves the velvet worm’s nozzles, it consists of 90% water and just 3-5% protein. Their watery sheaths prevent the protein molecules from interacting with one another. They can only do so when the water disappears.

And that’s exactly what happens when the slime hits its target. Insects are covered in waxy, water-repellent shells, but the velvet worm’s slime contains fat and detergent molecules that break past this defence. These chemicals, and the sheer force with which the slime is shot, means that it spreads all over the victim. The insect’s struggles seal its fate by drawing the slime into threads. Spread over a large surface area, the water in the slime quickly evaporates, unsheathing the proteins and leaving them to mingle for the first time. They form tight chemical bonds with one another and the once-liquid slime hardens into a gel.

Until now, scientists thought that the slime contains long, highly structured proteins that were probably like collagen. It was a decent guess, but the reality is very different and no other animal uses biological glue that works in the same way. The proteins within the silk of spiders, for example, are highly structured – a long way from the disordered mess within the velvet worm’s slime. As far as chemical weapons go, it’s a one-of-a-kind innovation.

Reference: Proc Roy Soc B http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2010.0604

More on incredible predators:

• Moray eels attack with second pair of ‘Alien-style’ jaws
• Neck-breaking, disembowelling, constricting and fishing – the violent world of raptors
• Carnivorous dung beetle shuns dung and decapitates millipedes
• Groovy teeth, but was Sinornithosaurus a venomous dinosaur?
• Predatory slime mould freezes prey in large groups
• Singaporean spiders spit venomous glue, work together, eat each other

A few years ago I had the pleasure of asking the famed geneticist L. L. Cavalli-Sforza some questions. Here’s part of the Q & A which is germane to my post from a few days ago:

7) Question #3 hinted at the powerful social impact your work has had in reshaping how we view the natural history of our species. One of the most contentious issues of the 20th, and no doubt of the unfolding 21st century, is that of race. In 1972 Richard Lewontin offered his famous observation that 85% of the variation across human populations was within populations and 15% was between them. Regardless of whether this level of substructure is of note of not, your own work on migrations, admixtures and waves of advance depicts patterns of demographic and genetic interconnectedness, and so refutes typological conceptions of race. Nevertheless, recently A.W.F. Edwards, a fellow student of R.A. Fisher, has argued that Richard Lewontin’s argument neglects the importance of differences of correlation structure across the genome between populations and focuses on variance only across a single locus. Edwards’ argument about the informativeness of correlation structure, and therefore the statistical salience of between-population differences, was echoed by Richard Dawkins in his most recent book. Considering the social import of the question of interpopulational differences as well as the esoteric nature of the mathematical arguments, what do you believe the “take home” message of this should be for the general public?

Edwards and Lewontin are both right. Lewontin said that the between populations fraction of variance is very small in humans, and this is true, as it should be on the basis of present knowledge from archeology and genetics alike, that the human species is very young. It has in fact been shown later that it is one of the smallest among mammals. Lewontin probably hoped, for political reasons, that it is TRIVIALLY small, and he has never shown to my knowledge any interest for evolutionary trees, at least of humans, so he did not care about their reconstruction. In essence, Edwards has objected that it is NOT trivially small, because it is enough for reconstructing the tree of human evolution, as we did, and he is obviously right.

PCA plots show you variation that occurs in a correlated fashion across a set of genes. In other words, they’re large systematic signals within the sea of noise genetic variation. They can tell us a great deal, in concert with other techniques, about the history of our species, and the nature and extent of the relationship between populations within in our species. The reason that there is correlated variation across a subset of genes which are highly informative in regards to population identity is simple: human population groups generally have a common shared history. They have been subject to the same evolutionary dynamics, and those dynamics, from drift to selection, have particular effects on the nature of genomic variation (or lack thereof).

My point in my previous post was to emphasize that this information needs to be integrated into the bigger picture in a nuanced fashion. Broad systematic population wide patterns of variation, and between population variation, is important, and of great evolutionary interest. But the genetic uniqueness within families, from recent unique de novo mutations (operationally, family scale private alleles), is also of great interest and importance. PCA plots such as the ones above are naturally not going to tell us much about this aspect of human variation. In the “thought experiment” I presented I indicated that focus on the largest signals of between population variation alone can miss a great deal.

The sheer jarring starkness of it makes this photo look Photoshopped. But the massive sinkhole that collapsed into being in Guatemala City this weekend is deadly real.

The seemingly never ending hole appears to be about 200 feet deep, according to numerous reports [Los Angeles Times].

Tropical Storm Agatha pounded the Central American country, and as of this afternoon the death toll stands around 175. Some of that death and destruction came via mudslides and flooding. However, this gaping hole has captured the world’s attention.

In the northern part of Guatemala City, the downpour created a sinkhole the size of a street intersection. Residents told CNN that a three-story building and a house fell into the hole [CNN].

Unfortunately, the sight is not unfamiliar in Guatemala. The country experienced a similarly daunting sinkhole in 2007 (see photos). A ruptured sewer line caused that one by releasing too much water and softening the ground. It’s not out of the question that the same thing could have happened here, hydrogeologist James Currens says.

A burst sanitary or storm sewer may have been slowly saturating the surrounding soil for a long time before tropical storm Agatha added to the inundation. “The tropical storm came along and would have dumped even more water in there, and that could have been the final trigger that precipitated the collapse,” Currens said [National Geographic].

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Image: Guatemalan government

I was going to wait to write about this, but I’m getting a lot of emails about it, so I’ll say something now, and followup when I get more information.

The story:

BABloggee Alereon (and many others) sent me to an interesting site: Life After the Oil Crash Forum — a forum that apparently has a lot of doomsday-type scuttlebutt posted to it.

An anonymous poster there says he has heard that the star Betelgeuse is about to go supernova, maybe as soon as a few weeks:

I was talking to my son last week (he works on Mauna Kea), and he mentioned some new observations (that will no doubt get published eventually) of “Beetlejuice”; it’s no longer round. This is a huge star, and when it goes, it will be at least as bright as that 1054 supernova…except that this one is 520 light years away, not 6,300 [...]

When it collapses, it will be at least as bright as the full moon, and maybe as bright as the sun. For six weeks. So the really lucky folks (for whom Betelgeuse is only visible at night) will get 24 hour days, everybody else will get at least some time with two suns in the sky. The extra hour of light from daylight savings time won’t burn the crops, but this might. Probably, all we’ll get is visible light (not gamma rays or X-rays), so it shouldn’t be an ELE. It’s sure gonna freak everyone out, though…..

Then it will form a black hole, but we’re too far away for that to matter.

The buzz is that this is weeks/months away, not the “any time in the next thousand years” that’s in all the books.

The basic takeaway:

OK, folks, first: when news like this comes from an unnamed source on some random forum, and that source is not even a primary one, and that secondary source quoted is also unnamed, and that person heard it from a third party that is also unnamed… well, oddly enough my skeptic alarm bell in my head rings loudly enough that my eardrums explode outward in every direction at the speed of light.

I hope I’m being clear here.

The first important thing to note here is that if Betelgeuse explodes, we’re in no danger at all. It’s too far away to hurt us. Got that? It’s the most important thing to remember here, because I’m quite sure this story will get wildly exaggerated as it gets repeated.

So, what’s the deal with Betelgeuse? What is it, will it explode, and if so, when?

The details:

Betelgeuse is one of the brightest stars in the sky. That’s because it’s an intrinsically luminous star, and one that’s relatively close by. By luminous, I mean something like 100,000 times that of the Sun, and by close I mean roughly 600 light years away if not more. That’s 6 quadrillion kilometers, or almost 4 quadrillion miles. In other words, quite a hike.

Betelgeuse is a red supergiant. It has a mass of something like 20 times the Sun’s, and is near the end of its life. When it dies, it will explode as a supernova, a titanic event that is among the most violent in the Universe. For details on how this happens, read this essay I wrote about it.

It’s hard to know just when a star will explode when you’re on the outside. Betelgeuse might go up tonight, or it might not be for 100,000 years. We’re just not sure.

Betelgeuse isn’t round, and it’s shrinking!

In the bulletin board post, he talks about the star not being round. It’s unclear, but it sounds like he’s referring to observations which show that there is a big plume coming from the surface of Betelgeuse. That was exciting news when it was released, but not hugely surprising; stars are active, and massive stars even more so. Also, note that those "new" observations are a year old!

That image above is from even earlier, and shows a Hubble observation of Betelgeuse taken in 2005. Note here that the star doesn’t look round, but that’s an illusion. The image shows a hot spot in Betelgeuse’s swollen atmosphere, and that makes it look like a bump is hanging of the side. In reality, that’s just because of the way the image is printed, and isn’t an actual physical bump. But the hot spot (probably due to a big ol’ bubble of hot gas rising near the surface) in itself shows that things on the star change all the time; just recently two such spots were found.

The post also talks about Betelgeuse shrinking. That claim is from observations made over the course of many years. Those data indicate the star is shrinking, but it’s unclear what they mean. While it may mean the star is in fact shrinking, starspots (sunspots on another star) may be fooling us, for example. Also, red supergiants aren’t like marbles, with a clean, sharp surface. They are balls of gas, extended and bloated, so there is no real surface. It’s therefore entirely possible the astronomers aren’t even really measuring the surface of the star at all, and it’s just the highly extended atmosphere that’s changing.

Surface tension, rotten to the core

The point I’m making is that a lot of stuff can happen on the surface of the star that has nothing to do with the core. Since it’s the core that generates the star’s energy and eventually causes it to explode, what’s happening on the surface is not an indication of any impending explosion.

Mind you, the surface and the core do "talk" to each other, though slowly. As the core changes, that information does leak to the surface, but it takes centuries. Until, that is, the core collapses. When that happens, the shock wave takes hours or days to get to the surface, and the star explodes. But that’s hardly a slow event taking decades! So any changes we see happening now probably have little to do with what’s happening hundreds of millions of kilometers deep in the star.

Also, it’s been known for a long time that Betelgeuse is a variable star; its light output changes. This shrinking may just be a part of that natural cycle, and again no indication of an explosion.

Having said all that, I’ll note that someday, Betelgeuse will explode. That’s for certain! But it’s also way too far away to hurt us. A supernova has to be no farther than about 25 light years away to be able to fry us with light or anything else, and Betelgeuse is 25 times that distance (which means its power to hurt us is weakened by over 600x). It’s the wrong kind of star to explode as a gamma-ray burst, so I’m not worried about that either.

At that distance, it’ll get bright, about as bright as the full Moon. That’s pretty bright! It’ll hurt your eyes to look at it, but that’s about it. The original post says it may get as bright as the Sun, but that’s totally wrong. It won’t even get 1/100,000th that bright. Still bright, but it’s not going to cook us. Even if it were going to explode soon. Which it almost certainly isn’t.

Conclusion:

So my personal opinion is that this is just another breathless rumor of astronomical doomsday that we get every couple of years. Even if any of the science of it is right, it doesn’t mean Betelgeuse is about to explode any day now. And since this is a rumor three times removed, I don’t put any stock in it. I’ll wait until I hear from named scientists with published or publishable data before I start to wonder if the star is about to blow.

And if and when it does explode, it can’t hurt us. Someday it will — maybe not for a hundred thousand years, but someday — and every astronomer on the planet hopes it happens in their lifetime! It will be a scientific bonanza unlike any ever seen.

Image credits: NASA, ESA, ESO

For the first time, physicists say they have witnessed a subatomic particle change its “flavor.” Physicists at OPERA, run by Italy’s national nuclear physics institute, announced yesterday that they have observed one neutrino change its type, or flavor, spontaneously. The experiment solves a 50-year-old physics mystery, and may uncover some of the universe’s hidden mass.

The Mystery

Neutrinos, which come in three different flavors, can have fairly violent births: they can come into the world via nuclear reactions in the sun, particle decay, or collisions in particle accelerators. But, once formed, they seem to ignore almost everything around them, including magnetic fields, electric fields, and matter. In fact, there are trillions of them zipping through each of us every second; they go right through our bodies and keep on moving through the planet itself.

The mystery of “neutrino oscillations” began with the number of neutrinos that should be coming from the sun. Theory predicted a certain number of various flavors to arrive, but observation showed much less:

The neutrino puzzle began with a pioneering and ultimately Nobel Prize winning experiment conducted by US scientist Ray Davis beginning in the 1960s. He observed far fewer neutrinos arriving at the Earth from the Sun than solar models predicted: either solar models were wrong, or something was happening to the neutrinos on their way. [CERN]

In 1969, Bruno Pontecorvo and Vladimir Gribov theorized that the neutrinos weren’t disappearing, they were changing their flavors mid-journey. Though physicists were looking for one type, they weren’t finding what they ordered.

The Experiment

For the past three years, CERN has fired a beam of muon neutrinos (one of the kinds that fall out of decaying muons) from Geneva, Switzerland to the OPERA experiment in a laboratory near Italy’s Gran Sasso mountain. After three years and billions of billions of muon neutrinos in and muon neutrinos out, for the first time, the OPERA physicists saw something else arrive in Italy. After the 450-mile, 2.4-millisecond voyage, a muon neutrino appears to have transformed into a tau neutrino. Researchers are 98 percent sure that this is true neutrino presto-chango:

“You have to be sensitive to even one single neutrino that has been transformed,” says OPERA spokesman Antonio Ereditato at the University of Bern in Switzerland…. “It’s like a murder. You have the murder scene, but now we have found the first part of the body.” [New Scientist]

The Meaning

If this is true neutrino oscillation, this experiment does more than confirms Pontecorvo and Gribov’s theory. It means changes for the organizing theory of particle physics, called the Standard Model. The nitty-gritty of neutrino oscillation theory requires that neutrinos have mass, but the Standard Model assumes that they have none. If neutrinos do have mass, this could explain some of what cosmologists call dark matter, the 25 percent of the universe’s mass that we believe should exist, but can’t seem to find.

“This will be the long-awaited proof of this process. It was a missing piece of the puzzle,” said Antonio Ereditato, a researcher at the Institute and spokesman for the OPERA group that carried out the study. “If true, it means that new physics will be required to explain this fact,” he said by phone…. “Whatever exists in the infinitely small always has repercussions in the infinitely big.” [AFP]

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Image: The Detector OPERA

These researchers want to take their butterflies to the bank. They’ve found a way to mimic the nanostructures responsible for giving butterfly wings their colors, and they think butterfly-inspired money designs might hinder counterfeiters.

“We still need to refine our system, but in future we could see structures based on butterflies wings shining from a £10 note or even our passports,” said Mathias Kolle in a university press release. Kolle researched the butterfly’s wing structure with Ullrich Steiner and Jeremy Baumberg at the University of Cambridge.

Butterfly wings don’t use traditional pigment for their flair. Instead, they rely on the way light bounces off tiny multilayer structures on their wings. These micro- and nanostructures come in a variety of shapes (see the “egg carton-like” scanning electron microscope picture below), and scientists have long had inklings as to how different structures result in different colors. But Kolle and colleagues have gone one step further, managing the elusive task of copying this craft.

They studied the swallowtail butterfly (Papilio blumei), and rebuilt the butterfly’s stunning molecular-scaled wing structures. Nature Nanotechnology recently published their findings and a description of their techniques.

Not using pigment may be a way to keep butterflies safe, as the color reflecting from those tiny structures appears differently to different viewers, perhaps camouflage green to predators, but bright blue to mates.

Adopting their techniques could also protect money, if researchers figure out ways to use their wing-mimicing structures to encrypt information in optical signatures. And that means that copying currency would produce a lot more butterflies in counterfeiters’ stomachs.

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Images: Mathias Kolle, University of Cambridge

I have to agree with Jerry Coyne here: the program on Faith and Science at this year’s World Science Festival is a mistake. I went to last year’s Festival, and I have great respect for Brian Greene and Tracy Day for bringing together such a massive undertaking. It would be better if they didn’t take money from the Templeton Foundation, but money has to come from somewhere, and I’m not the one paying the bills. I don’t even mind having a panel that talks about religion — it’s a big part of many people’s lives, and there are plenty of issues to be discussed at the intersection of science and religion.

But it would be a lot more intellectually respectable to present a balanced discussion of those issues, rather than the one that is actually lined up. The panelists include two scientists who are Templeton Prize winners — Francisco Ayala and Paul Davies — as well as two scholars of religion — Elaine Pagels and Thupten Jinpa. Nothing in principle wrong with any of those people, but there is a somewhat obvious omission of a certain viewpoint: those of us who think that science and religion are not compatible. And there are a lot of us! Also, we’re right. A panel like this does a true disservice to people who are curious about these questions and could benefit from a rigorous airing of the issues, rather than a whitewash where everyone mumbles pleasantly about how we should all just get along.

I’m not as much of an anti-Templeton fundamentalist as some people are; I won’t take money from them, but I will cooperate with institutions and organizations that do take money from them, even as I grumble about it. (Money laundering as the route to moral purity.) But this event is a perfect example of the ultimately pernicious influence that Templeton has. I disagree with Jerry and others who consider Templeton money a “bribe” to people who are willing to go along with their party line; I have no doubt that Ayala, Davies, Pagels and Jinpa will express only views that they sincerely hold and would still hold in the absence of any monetary reward. What Templeton does is that it hands people with those views a giant megaphone. Francisco Ayala is a respected scientist who happens to believe that science and religion complement each other rather than coming into conflict; that’s fine, although somewhat unremarkable. But then he wins the Templeton Prize, and that exact same opinion gets plastered all over the media.

Panels like this one at the WSF are the same story. Maybe exactly the same event would have been organized even if Templeton had nothing to do with the Festival; but I doubt it. Plenty of science festivals and museums seem to get along perfectly well without discussing religion at all. And if you did want to discuss it, there’s no way that an honest investigation into how scientists feel about religion would end up leaving out some fully committed atheists who would be pretty uncompromising towards belief.

Four hundred years after Galileo turned his telescope on the heavens, it’s incredibly frustrating that we still have debates over whether the world can be described in purely naturalistic terms, rather than accepting that insight as an amazing accomplishment and moving on to the hard work of articulating its consequences. It’s a shame that the World Science Festival is helping to keep us back, rather than moving us forward.

Eric Schulze just received his doctorate at the Keck School of Medicine. Asked by his colleagues to give a commencement address, he opted to discuss the things he should’ve been taught about science when he started out. His speech is an excellent introduction into why we need more gifted speakers talking about what science is and isn’t:

At 3:20, he quotes an "eminent cosmologist [sic; the man to whom Eric is referring is actually more of a general astronomer-type and smart ass] and teacher". I’m very sure the man to whom Eric is referring is grateful.

Yes, it’s in the early stages of research. And yes, it’s been tested only on mice. But the procedure developed by Vincent Tuohy and his team, billed as a preliminary breast cancer vaccine, has raised hopes once more that one day in the not-too-distant future such a procedure could be available for humans.

In a study this month in Nature Medicine, Tuohy tested the vaccine on mice genetically engineered to be more cancer-prone. The ones that received the full vaccine, with a protein called a-lactalbumin, didn’t develop breast cancer. All the others did.

Cancer presents a quandary that viruses don’t in terms of developing vaccines, experts point out. While viruses are recognized as foreign invaders by the immune system, cancer isn’t. Cancer is an over-development of the body’s own cells. Trying to vaccinate against such cell over-growth would effectively be vaccinating against the recipient’s own body, destroying healthy tissue [CBS News].

But the a-lactalbumin protein could be a marker that helps to get around that problem. It can be found in most cancerous breast tissue, and healthy women produce the protein only during lactation. The idea, then, is to use a-lactalbumin as an antigen—a molecule that attracts the attention of the immune system. Tuohy says the vaccine trains the body’s immune system to recognize the a-lactalbumin protein as a threat, and prepares it to mount a response to the protein if it’s encountered again. So the body’s natural defenses don’t strike haphazardly at healthy cells, but instead target only the cancerous cells that bear the protein. (Because women do produce the protein during lactation, Tuohy says such a procedure is intended for women who are past child-bearing age; they are at higher overall risk anyway.)

Before medical research moves to human trials, though, the Food and Drug Administration typically requires testing on multiple animal species, so Tuohy says he would most likely test rats next.

The FDA has granted approval to two cancer-prevention vaccines: cervical and liver cancer. However, these vaccines target viruses, while the one tested by the Cleveland Clinic targets cancer formation. If any human testing proves successful, the strategy would be to vaccinate women 40 and over as well as younger women with a heightened risk of breast cancer [CNN].

Also, this spring the FDA approved the prostate cancer treatment Provenge, which is often referred to as a prostate cancer vaccine. Provenge takes a somewhat similar approach to the new breast cancer treatment in that it trains the body’s immune system to fight cancerous cells.

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Image: iStockphoto

I swear, I had nothing to do with this.

It looks suspicious, I know. But to be honest, I’d rather wait until we can bring back tons of Moon rocks at a time. It might make them less valuable, but no less cool.

[UPDATE: The rock, apparently, has been found. Thanks, Barstein!]

Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to Fark.

It’s a good thing that the early English settlers of America were hardy and stubborn, because they certainly didn’t have good timing. The settlers who established the Jamestown colony in Virginia is 1607 arrived during a historic drought, according to the records kept in tree rings, the worst in the area in 800 years. And now researchers have created an even more detailed picture of the dire climate situation those colonists stumbled into, and they did it with the colonists’ trash.

Oyster shells, to be exact.

The telltale oysters were unearthed from a well that sat within the fort at Jamestown, about 100 yards from the [James] river. Among other material dumped into the well, the shells came from three distinct layers up to 3.5 meters deep. The well’s water level originally sat deeper, at a depth of about 4 meters, so Spero and his colleagues suggest that the settlers abandoned the well — which either ran dry during the drought or was infiltrated by salty groundwater — and converted it into a trash pit [Science News].

Oyster shells work as record-keepers because the levels of the oxygen-18 isotope in them depends upon the temperature and saltiness of the water in which they grew. For the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Howard Spero’s team compared the shells recovered from the Jamestown well—which they dated to 1611 and 1612—to shells from the same area today.

They found that the winter salinity of the river was much higher during the early 1600s than it is today. This suggests winter rainfall was considerably lower than modern levels, confirming historical accounts of drought conditions at the time [BBC News].

With salty river water and little rainfall, augmented by bad luck and leadership and attacks from the Native Americans, it’s no surprise that the early years of Jamestown were so trying, and deadly.

In an interesting twist, it was that increased salinity that extended the oysters’ range so far into the James River. So, the shells that the colonists discarded after they ate the oysters tell the tale of the drought that led the colonists to eat the oysters in the first place.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: The Traveler’s Tale, on the connection between Jamestown and Shakespeare
DISCOVER: Colonial Tough Guys
DISCOVER: The Not-So-Dumb Englishmen
80beats: Oysters on the Comeback in Chesapeake Bay, Thanks to Elevated Homes

Image: flickr / mrpbps; Wikimedia Commons

On a midday stroll through Park City, Utah, you decide to turn onto the quaint-sounding Deer Valley Drive. You see this:

If you think you should turn back, you are not the intrepid Lauren Rosenberg. Armed with a Blackberry and Google Maps, she marched on, and could not believe when Patrick Harwood struck her with his car. According to Search Engine Land, which first broke the story, Rosenberg is now suing both Harwood and Google.

As CNET reports:

Perhaps some of you might think of Rosenberg as just a perambulating chaser. Yet she and her lawyers reason that Google’s walking directions were “careless, reckless, and negligent providing of unsafe directions.”

But what about Google Maps’ warning to such adventure-seekers? There’s a yellow box that appears whenever you request walking directions using their website: “Walking Direction are in Beta. Use caution–This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths.”

Apparently this isn’t enough. On Rosenberg’s Blackberry, the route lacked the warning. She feels this entitles her to over $10,000 in medical expenses.

Though GPS victims haven’t won in similar suits, Rosenberg’s turn in court will soon come. Here’s hoping someone drives her to the hearing.

Related content:
DISCOVER: Think Tech A GPS to Augment Your Entire Reality
80beats: Lost in Space: GPS System May Soon Begin Deteriorating
Discoblog: Teen Sues Mom for Hacking His Facebook Account
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Google Earth shows that cow and deer herds align like compass needles

Image: Google Maps / Danny Sullivan

Well, I'm back. Over the past month, the devastating BP spill that began April 20th has become catastrophic in scale. And that's an understatement. When I checked on my inbox early May, it was overflowing with questions from our readers about oil's impact on the marine realm, its potential to spread, and the long-term possibilities across sectors. Foremost, I want to thank Wallace J. Nichols and Philip Hoffman for posting in my absence when I asked them to provide details. Chris has also done a good job covering the reasons we should all be concerned about the 2010 hurricane forecast. In short, the BP oil spill is as bad as it gets. It's an unprecedented social, environmental, and economic disaster in the US. And it's not over. The public seems to have expected that scientists and engineers would have a quick fix immediately--not surprising given that on television, problems take less than an hour to solve (with commercials). Now any fix will do, but no one's sure what we're dealing with 5000 feet below sea level. I haven't kept up with all of the coverage while overseas, though I'm sure much of what I'd say about the tragedy itself would be repetitious. ...

At this point the question “now what?” has reached a sort of repetitive absurdity in the Gulf of Mexico. With BP having failed to stop its oil leak with robots and failed with containment domes and failed with the “top kill” maneuver, the company has decided it’s going to try the dome approach again.

On Monday, engineers positioned submarine robots that will try to shear off a collapsed 21-inch riser pipe with a razorlike wire studded with bits of industrial diamonds. If that is achieved, officials will need at least a couple of days to position a domelike cap over the blowout preventer [The New York Times].

The cap is called the lower marine riser package (LMRP), and—stop me if you’ve heard this one—it’s never been tested at the depth of 5,000 feet, so BP has no idea whether it will work. The previous version of the containment dome had the same goal: establishing a seal on the seal and piping the oil up to a tanker on the surface. But because of buildup on the dome, that first attempt in early May was unsuccessful.

Meanwhile, the disastrous numbers just get worse. The oil spill is now worse than the Exxon Valdez and increasing in size by the day. Yesterday wind patterns from the south threatened to carry more oil toward Mississippi and Alabama. The fishing ban has been extended to nearly 62,000 square miles, or about a quarter of the Gulf.

And as more people clamor for President Obama to step in and do more, given BP’s ineptitude, it’s become clear that there’s not a lot he can do.

The public anger and frustration over the spill poses a major domestic challenge for Obama, who has been forced to admit publicly that the U.S. government and military do not have the technology to plug the leaking well and must leave this to BP and its private industry partners [MSNBC].

While Washington can’t stop the oil, one thing they can do is question and investigate the leaders of the companies involved. Today Obama meets with the leaders of the commission he formed two weeks ago to investigate the spill. And Eric Holder, the attorney general, is traveling to meet leaders and government prosecutors in the region, another hint that the Obama Administration is considering a criminal investigation of the Deepwater Horizon incident.

The opening of a criminal investigation or civil action against BP, if either were to happen, would create the unusual situation of the federal government weighing charges against a company that it is simultaneously depending on for the most critical elements of the response to the record oil spill [Washington Post].

Last week’s top kill maneuver failed, BP says, because the pressure of the gushing oil and gas was too intense to overcome with injections of heavy mud. As with that top kill effort, we’re now left with not much to do but hope for the best for BP’s current containment attempt. If it doesn’t work, there might not be another “now what?” other than waiting until drills finish the relief wells in August (supposing their work isn’t interrupted by hurricane season or some other new calamity).

Recent posts on the Gulf oil spill:
80beats: This Hurricane Season Looks Rough, And What If One Hits the Oil Spill?
80beats: We Did the Math: BP Oil Spill Is Now Worse Than the Exxon Valdez
80beats: “Top Kill” Operation Is Under Way in Attempt to Stop Gulf Oil Leak
80beats: Scientists Say Gulf Spill Is Way Worse Than Estimated. How’d We Get It So Wrong?
80beats: 5 Offshore Oil Hotspots Beyond the Gulf That Could Boom—Or Go Boom

Image: U.S. Coast Guard

Bacteria and other microbes suck up and blast out vast amounts of greenhouse gases. Over at Yale Environment 360, I take a look at how they will behave in a world warming up as we inject carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Will they draw down some of the extra CO2, or will the heat spur them to spew out more? Or both? The answer isn’t clear yet, but it’s important. After all, it’s a microbial planet, and we just live on it. Check it out.

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