In anthropology departments, the debate has long simmered: Was it an improvement in manual dexterity or intelligence that allowed our human ancestors to begin making sophisticated stone tools?

According to one group of scientists, figuring out the answer required only a pair of high-tech gloves and a trained craftsman who could make both simple stone knives and more complicated hand axes. The craftsman wore gloves studded with electronic sensors that tracked his his hand movements. Lead researcher Aldo Faisal of Imperial College London found that simple and complex tools required the same amount of dexterity to produce.

“From these results, dexterity can be ruled out, and we can infer it has something to do with the complexity of the task,” says Faisal. Axes are made in several stages, which requires switching between tasks, suggesting that a higher level of complexity is required in the brain. [New Scientist]

Making complex stone tools was part of a huge evolutionary leap for humans, coinciding with the development of language and increased brain power. The axes improved humans’ hunting abilities, and is thought to have led to better nutrition and improved socialization in the form of group hunts and the division of labor.

Human tool-making began over 2 million years ago with Homo habilis, who made delicate stone flakes. It wasn’t until 500,000 years ago that the human ancestor Homo erectus advanced tool-making to the stage of elegant, detailed hand axes. Faisal’s findings suggest that hominid intelligence needed to evolve before they could build better tools. This supports earlier brain imaging work linking complex tool-making to key areas in the right hemisphere of the brain, including language centers like Broca’s area.

“The advance from crude stone tools to elegant handheld axes was a massive technological leap for our early human ancestors. Handheld axes were a more useful tool for defence, hunting and routine work,” said Faisal, whose study appears in the journal PLoS ONE. “Our study reinforces the idea that toolmaking and language evolved together as both required more complex thought, making the end of the lower paleolithic a pivotal time in our history. After this period, early humans left Africa and began to colonise other parts of the world.” [The Guardian]

Related content:
80beats: Artifacts Show an Advanced Stone Age Toolmaking Repertoire
80beats: Neanderthal Tools Were a Match for Early Homo Sapiens’
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Chimps use Swiss army toolkit to rob beehives
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Fishing for fat: why learning to use tools is worth it for the New Caledonian crow
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Chimps show that actions spoke louder than words in language evolution
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Language evolution witnessed in lab experiments

Image: PlosONE/Aldo Faisal

America’s current plans for human space exploration seem horribly slow, considering we won’t leave Earth’s orbit until 2025 and won’t reach Mars until 2035. Worse than that, solar radiation spikes could keep us grounded for decades more.

The Sun emits a steady stream of potentially deadly cosmic radiation. As long as humans remain within the Earth’s atmosphere, the threat posed by this radiation is practically nil, but any extended trips into deep space require careful shielding to protect astronauts from the threat of radiation sickness or cancer. The exact levels of radiation vary depending on the severity of solar activity, which falls into a number of predictable cycles.

That’s where the problem starts, according to a new study by NASA scientist John Norbury. We already know about the Schwabe cycle, which shows sunspot activity reaches its peak, known as the solar maximum, every 11 years. When this occurs, there’s a big increase in solar flares and coronal mass ejections, which together spread deadly radiation throughout the solar system. The last solar maximum was reached in 2002, so we’re headed for more in 2013, 2024, and 2035. Those last two dates are worrying, considering the current “2025 out of orbit/2035 to Mars” plans of the United States.

Of course, if solar flares really are a problem, then it’s easy enough to adjust the years slightly to avoid them. But we might be dealing with an even bigger problem: there’s also the Gleissberg cycle, which is a longer cycle where the intensity of the solar maximums themselves wax and wane over a period of about 80 to 90 years. That means all flares would be significantly more deadly, the radiation would be greater, and any trips beyond Earth’s orbit incredibly, perhaps impossibly, dangerous.

So when is the next time we hit the peak of the Gleissberg cycle? That’s the problem: we don’t know, at least not exactly. In order to know the exact timing of the next Gleissberg maximum, we would have to know when the last ones occurred, and that would require sunspot records going back centuries, which is something we don’t have. However, there are some indirect ways to estimate when the previous maximums occurred, mostly involving carbon-14.

Scientists are fairly sure the last maximums were in 1790, 1870, and 1950. That seems to put the next Gleissberg maximum at right around 2030, with a total danger zone of about 20 years from 2020 to 2040. That’s precisely when the United States—not to mention China and other countries—hope to send astronauts back to the Moon and onto Mars. If radiation levels are lethally high, a Mars mission could be a horrific failure, as astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell explains:

“The worse-case scenario is that if you radiate a crew sufficiently, they’d all succumb to radiation sickness within a few days and essentially vomit and diarrhoea themselves to death within an enclosed capsule.”

If all these fears of increased radiation come to pass, it still might be possible to send astronauts to Mars, assuming radiation shielding can be suitably improved. But that’s going to take serious investment in new technologies that can repel the cosmic rays without creating secondary radiation. Honestly, it might just be easier to get to Mars by the end of the decade. Hey, it worked for the Apollo project…

[Advances in Space Research via Physics World]

This post originally appeared on io9.

io9. Escape to the world of tomorrow.

The clock is suddenly ticking for the U.S. Department of the Interior to defend its classification of the polar bear as “threatened,” rather than the more protective “endangered” classification.

The “threatened” designation dates back to the George W. Bush administration, but in response to a series of lawsuits concerning the polar bear, U.S. District of Columbia District Judge Emmet Sullivan said this week that the government needs to review that decision, because it was not based on a proper reading of the Endangered Species Act.

In his decision, Judge Sullivan said that the agency was wrong to conclude that a species had to be in imminent danger of extinction in order to qualify as an endangered species. He said that the Endangered Species Act was ambiguous as to whether a species had to be on the brink of extinction in order to be considered endangered. He did not rule on the merits. [Wall Street Journal]

If the bears were moved to “endangered,” that switch could bring with it a wave of legal wrangling about how to protect them. Under the current rule, federal regulators can’t set climate policy in order to protect the bears, even though greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for the melting of their sea ice habitat.

The Obama administration upheld the Bush-era policy, declaring that the endangered species law can’t be used to regulate greenhouse gases emitted by sources outside of polar bears’ habitat. If the bears are found to be endangered, however, that could open the door to using the Endangered Species Act to regulate greenhouse gases. [Washington Post]

The Interior Department has until December 23 to respond.

Up in the Arctic, there’s a bit of good news for the bears—and their new prey. Increasingly, polar bears are beginning to rely on the eggs of snow geese as a major foodstuff. But if the bears devour all the eggs and wipe out the geese, that wouldn’t be such a great outcome for either one. Researchers who modeled the predator-prey relationship, along with expected environmental change from global warming, write in the journal Oikos that the bears may indeed devour many of the eggs.

However, climate change will also cause increased variability from year to year, and as a result, there will be some years when there is no overlap at all — either because the geese have fledged earlier, the bears have come ashore later, or both. Those periodic years of “mismatch” will, they conclude, enable snow goose numbers to rebound again. [Discovery News]

Polar bears aren’t the only massive mammal trying to beat the heat of a warming world. Check out the new DISCOVER article on walruses trying to adapt—and the adventures of the scientists who try to study them.

Related Content:
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Image: iStockphoto

Some things on the ‘net make me laugh, and I make no apologies for them.

I’ve seen this all over the place now, but I saw it first at reddit.

William Easterly asserts that David Brooks illustrates how clueless Easterners can be without local knowledge about My Midwest:

A frequent theme in this blog is the importance of local knowledge for development. David Brooks helpfully illustrated in his column today on my home region the Midwest. He brilliantly demonstrates how outsiders can get lost in the jungle in a region not their own.

Brooks’ Midwest is:

that region of America that starts in central New York and Pennsylvania and then stretches out through Ohio and Indiana before spreading out to include Wisconsin and Arkansas.

Mr. Brooks is apparently unaware from his vantage point on the Far Eastern Coastal Rim that central New York is still in the East, not the Midwest. And there has never been a single Midwesterner in two centuries who ever thought they were in the same region as Arkansas.

I grant the point about Arkansas. But I think Brooks may be on more solid ground about central New York and Pennsylvania. On a biographical note I’ve lived in upstate New York, but near the border with New England (this is why I am a Celtics fan). I’ve also lived in western Pennsylvania, north of Pittsburgh (I’m a Steeler’s fan, and suspicious of the Browns). As a matter of geography Pittsburgh and Buffalo are Northeastern cities, but as a matter of cultural sensibility they’re classic Rustbelt metropolises. They are technically outside the Midwest, but they are most definitely part of the Great Lakes Region. Syracuse may be a liminal in terms of identity, but I don’t think Brooks is totally off base assuming that its sensibility is more with the Midwest than the East.

Local knowledge matters. Most Americans are conscious of the fact that though Florida is in the South, in reality it is the northern part of Florida which is of the South. Fewer Americans are aware of the fact that though southern Illinois is in the Midwest its cultural sensibilities reflect the South more than the North. There are historical reasons for this. The southern two thirds of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio were settled by whites from the South; Scots-Irish from the Border States, but also aristocratic low-country gentleman such as William Henry Harrison. In contrast, the northern portions of Illinois, the Upper Midwestern states of Minnesota and Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio’s northern Western Reserve region, were populated by Yankees. Importantly these Yankees may have ultimately had their origins in New England, but secondarily many of them were from the Yankee de facto colony of western New York.

The historical connection between western New York and the Midwest can be traced out in the early Mormon migration. Palmyra, New York, Kirtland, Ohio, and Independence, Missouri. The Mormons were mostly Yankees of New England stock, and they followed the paths which other Yankees had already trod. Notably in Missouri some of their conflicts with the earlier white population was explicitly sectional, as the locals were by origin Southerners who disliked the Mormons as Yankee cultists.

But to resolve the issue about where the Midwest starts, I think you need a real social metric.

Obviously the map doesn’t perfectly match our preconceived categories of region. But the shift in terminology in western New York and Pennsylvania is very striking, and something people in the are are very conscious of. I haven’t heard of a good explanation why coastal Wisconsin and a penumbra around St. Louis stands out anomalously in the Midwest. Though it has been pointed out to me that the original elite of St. Louis had pretty strong New England connections.

If you’re going to be in western Georgia on Tuesday, November 9, why not drop by the University of West Georgia and come to my "Death from the Skies!" talk? The lecture (I hate calling them that; it’s not like I’m chiding anyone) starts at 8:00 p.m., is open to the public, and will include my usual smart-assery, as well as information about whether or not we’ll all be killed by an asteroid impact^*. Tickets are $3 for students and $5 for the hoi polloi.

For more information or to purchase tickets, call the Townsend Center at 678-839-4722. I hear a bunch of Atlanta skeptics are coming as well, so this’ll be fun. Hope to see some BABloggees there!

By Rose Eveleth

Bomb squads have long used metal detectors, x-ray machines, and dogs to uncover threats. Without these tools, authorities may not have intercepted some of the thirteen homemade explosives that froze Greece’s outgoing mail earlier this week. But soon they may have a new tool to help find the bad guys and their bombs: microscopic worms.

In a paper published last month, researchers at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization described the effectiveness of Caenorhabditis elegans–a millimeter-long, mud-loving nematode–in detecting chemicals associated with explosives. If they’re right, bomb detection could get cheaper and easier. But not everyone is convinced.

This nematodes isn’t the first organism investigated for its keen sense of smell. Dogs, rats, pigs, cows, insects, bacteria, and even plants have been used to find explosives. So far, nothing has worked as well as the trusty canine snout.

But according to lead researcher Stephen Trowell, a machine that uses his worms could surpass all these in sensitivity. “All signs are that it’s as good as it gets,” he said.

The nematodes smell chemicals like nitroglyceride and cyclohexanone—both found in the air around homemade C4 explosives—through tiny scent organs on the sides of their mouths called amphids. Each amphid has twelve different kinds of receptors that relay signals to the brain.

Trowell thinks he can extract these receptors from the nematode and incorporate them into a portable testing device, removing the organism from the process entirely. To do so, researchers will have to couple the receptors to an electric signal, so their response would be readable by the machine. The specifics of the apparatus are still under wraps; Trowell won’t give any details until a paper describing the mechanics is published.

So should bad guys really be worried? Glen Rains doesn’t think so. “There’s always talk about doing this electronically eventually,” said Rains, a biological and agricultural engineer at the University of Georgia in Athens, who has been working on training wasps to detect everything from explosives to crop disease. But, he said, the mechanization of these odor responses “will be further down the road than some people realize.”

One of the roadblocks Trowell and his team might encounter is that the receptors they extract have to keep working outside of the worm. That’s not always the case, said Jeffrey Tomberlin, an entomologist at Texas A&M in College Station. Tomberlin, who trains flies to detect odors, worries that proteins removed from the worm might stop sniffing all together. By taking the components out, he said, “you could lose the true essence of the response.”

The nematodes’ sense of smell is not only highly sensitive, but also specific—they can’t detect everything. In Trowell’s first study, published in PLoS ONE in early September, they only responded to compounds associated with homemade and commercial explosives, and not high-end military bombs. Still, Trowell said, “many of the things that are available to people with bad intentions, we can detect.”

Despite skepticism from others in his field, Trowell’s lab has found no shortage of interest. The Australian Department of Defense recently gave the lab a grant to build a prototype of their bomb-sniffing machine, and the team filed for a patent on similar technology in January. It remains to be seen, however, if their device will actually work.

This article is provided by Scienceline, a project of New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Editor’s note: Crap. I wrote this post within milliseconds after the first of these awesome images came out, but somehow didn’t publish it. Now they are all over the place, and the message is ancient news in internet-time. But the science is timeless!

This tweet by Alicia Chang says it all: “Comet Hartley 2 looks like a peanut.”

This is the first close-up image from a fly-by of the comet by NASA’s Deep Impact mission. Expect more coming in. Despite the delicious appearance, however, it wouldn’t be prudent to take a bite; the comet is spewing out cyanide.

1. First, a post from the past: Why the gods will not be defeated.

2. Weird search query of the week: “coon and friends.”

3. Comment of the week, in response to We live in utopia – part n:

I thank Dave @8 for the name of Lewis Kay; I’m almost entirely innocent of television, even in its YouTube incarnation, and I wondered. Yes, he’s brilliant, especially the incidental pantomime. And just to show exactly how far my ignorance extends, who’s the guy he’s talking to?

4) If you’re a liberal, how do you feel after the elections? Are you angry at Barack Hussein Obama? As a not too politically engaged person, at least in a conventional sense, I’m always a touch interested in the extreme reactions after losses/wins.

5) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:

[UPDATE: And no sooner do I write this than I find out the launch has been postponed until November 30. This decision was made due to the gas leak, but while they were draining the fuel out of the orange external tank, they found a crack in the insulating foam around the tank. This is very serious -- as you may recall, it was a piece of foam coming off the tank that doomed Columbia. This means the crack has to be evaluated, and the entire tank re-examined for any more problems. As it happens, the crack is on the side of the tank with the Orbiter on it, so a piece of foam coming off is very dangerous. Ironically the hydrogen leak (described below) may have saved the mission. So the launch is delayed by several weeks, and I'll post again when I have more information.]

The launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery has been delayed once again, to no earlier than 17:53 UT (12:53 Eastern US time; on Sunday clocks in the US turn back an hour) on Monday, November 8.

It was due to launch today (after weather delays) but a hydrogen gas leak was detected, and NASA takes those very seriously: hydrogen has an unfortunate tendency to explode. It takes time to find the leak and close it up, so the launch has to be pushed back a few days. There is little real danger to the Shuttle by a leak like this as long as it sits on the pad, but launching is another matter, so there it will sit for a while.

This is Discovery’s last scheduled flight. It’s bringing supplies and such to the Space Station.

By the way, the image above of the Shuttle flying into the sunset is from NASA. It shows the Orbiter Endeavour from February 2010, and was taken from the ISS. Click that for much larger versions; they’re quite lovely.

The brown squiggles you see here are ice worms making their living on the surface of the Whitechuck Glacier in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. These relatives of earthworms—seen here alongside a disintegrating balloon littering the ice—are found only on the glaciers of the North American west coast, where they graze on algae and bacteria. Unlike other animals, the worms have a metabolism that seems to increase at lower temperatures; they typically die above 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and their tissues begin to break down at about 70 degrees. Some glaciers house more than 250 worms per square foot of ice, but as glaciers in the region recede, the worms are expected to disappear along with them.

They can be hard to photograph, because they avoid light and mostly appear at night. Photographer Ethan Welty: “I’d found balloons snagged on high peaks in the Cascades before, but there was something particularly alarming about the one I found on Whitechuck Glacier, the juxtaposition of the tangly green appendages of the balloon with the delicate black filaments of the surrounding ice worms.”

Ethan Welty/Aurora Photos

On my latest podcast, I talk beer–that marvel of microbiology that people have been swilling for thousands of years. My guide to the brewing cosmos is Charles Bamforth, a professor of brewing science at the University of California, Davis. Check it out.

From Ed Yong:

The vast majority of people who are infected with HIV go on to develop AIDS. Their bodies become riddled with the virus, their immune systems falter, and they are besieged by life-threatening infections. But not everyone shares the same fate. Around 1 in every 300 people infected with HIV carry genetic trump cards that allow them to resist and control the virus. These “HIV controllers” can live with the virus for years. They never develop AIDS and they live long, healthy lives, even if they never take any medication. Their genetic secrets are slowly being revealed.

Researchers studying thousands of people with HIV, some with the controllers and some without, found something surprising:

Amazingly, every single one of these variants sits within a specific part of our sixth chromosome, among a set of genes called class I HLA genes. The proteins they produce form part of the internal security checks that defend us from infections. They grab small pieces of other proteins from inside our cells and display them on the outside, waving them under the noses of passing T-cells. If the T-cells recognise these pieces as parts of bacteria, viruses or other foreign invaders, they tell the infected cell to self-destruct and set the immune system on red alert.

Check out the rest of this post at DISCOVER blog Not Exactly Rocket Science.

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80beats: Gene Therapy Hope for HIV: Engineered Stem Cells Hold Promise
80beats: Did the Eradication of Smallpox Accidentally Help the Spread of HIV?

Image: Wikimedia / HIV Budding

The planet’s tumult never ceases. Hurricane Tomas is bearing down on Haiti right now, and an erupting volcano continues to wreak destruction on Indonesia.

At 8 a.m. EDT on Nov. 5, Tomas’ center was about 80 miles south-southeast of Guantanamo, Cuba and 160 miles west of Port Au Prince Haiti…. Tomas is moving to the northeast near 10 mph, and is expected to speed up over the next couple of days. [NASA Press release]

The hurricane is currently a category one, with sustained winds of 85 miles per hour, and is expected to continue strengthen throughout Friday before weakening on Saturday. The hurricane’s strong winds and flooding may hit the country hard: Haiti’s earthquake in January left the country particularly susceptible to land slides.

“Haiti has a really serious history of big landslides, almost all of them caused by tropical storm or hurricane rainfall,” said geologist David Petley, the Wilson Professor of Hazard and Risk at Durham University in England. [LiveScience]

If the hurricane stays on its current course it will pass just to the west of the small island nation, but there may still be plenty of damage and human misery. Many Haitians whose homes were destroyed in the earthquake are still living in temporary homes that won’t be able to stand up to the winds.

“It’s really very difficult to predict what’s going to happen now,” Petley said, “but the risks are substantial. Our experience elsewhere is that lots of rain in areas that have had earthquakes leads to lots of landslides, so that’s a reason to be very cautious in this case.” [LiveScience]

On the other side of the globe, the Indonesian volcano Mount Merapi erupted last night in the deadliest blast since 1930, killing 64 and causing 160,000 villagers to flee the area.

The head of Indonesia’s Volcanology and Geological Disaster Mitigation Agency, Surono, said the pressure inside the volcano’s chamber is much deeper than in earlier eruptions. As pressure builds deeper it produces more forceful eruptions that release greater volumes of ash and debris. “If the deep volcanic earthquakes increase, in number and in energy, I’m scared Merapi will erupt with a big intensity,” Surono said. [The Christian Science Monitor]

The volcano started spewing hot gas and ash on October 26th, and this latest eruption brings the total death toll to 109. The residents killed by this latest eruption were overwhelmed by a rush of hot gasses that hit the towns of Argomulyo and Bronggang, located about 7.5 miles from the volcano.

“They lived in a bend in the Gendol River. So when the pyroclastic flow launched down the river, it hit the bend and crashed into the villages,” Mr. [Sutopo Purwo] Nugroho said. “They’d been told to evacuate, there were a lot of soldiers up there to get them out but a lot of people had gone up using small roads so got up there undetected,” he said. [New York Times]

The evacuees are now in new camps located 12.5 miles from the volcano, but there’s considerable confusion as the new camps deal with relocating supplies, shelters, and evacuees from camps that proved to be too close after this latest eruption.

Related Content:
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Microsoft researchers in Beijing are trying to best Google maps by culling knowledge from a mythical beast known as the taxi driver.

The Microsoft folks are trying to improve their online maps using the cabbies’ deep knowledge of Beijing. The problem with typical maps and the directions they offer is that the shortest route isn’t always the fastest route. In big cities, cabbies know which side streets offer shortcuts, and what areas of the city to avoid at which times.

The researchers are trying to rake that data out of the cabbies’ habits by analyzing the GPS data from over 33,000 taxis in Beijing. The group at Microsoft Research Asia, led by Yu Zheng, developed an approach (called T-drive) to analyze and merge this cabbie data with satellite maps to improve the mapping experience and offer faster directions–even if the driver doesn’t engage in the lane swerving, honking, and pedestrian slaloming that give cabbies an edge. As Technology Review reports:

According to the Microsoft researchers, the routes suggested by T-Drive are faster than 60 percent of the routes suggested by Google and Bing maps (which provide essentially the same driving time estimates as each other). Overall, T-Drive can shave about 16 percent off the time of a trip, the researchers say, which translates into about 5 minutes for every 30 minutes of driving.

This approach could work just as well in other dense, cabbie-infested cities. The team is also working on projects that will incorporate real-time accident and traffic data into these “smart” maps.

Technology Review reports that other companies trying to improve maps and directions are taking data from driver’s cell phones in California and Boston, while a person-to-person route sharing application called WAZE allows you to share tips with your social network.

Related content:
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Cosmic Variance: Self-Driving Cars
Bad Astronomer: Astronomer make first map of extrasolar planet!
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Image: Flicrk/Boris van Hoytema

I’ve been told that episode 2 of Bad Universe — Alien Attack! — will air on Discovery Canada on November 7th at 9:00 p.m. Eastern time.

Yay!

Better yet: they’re re-running Episode 1 in the hour before, from 8:00 – 9:00. A double dose of disaster!

They’re not on the online schedule yet, but I trust Canadians. Mark your calendars.

There are a couple of sneak peeks online here and here.

Not only that, but Discovery Channel in the US is rerunning both episodes on the 7th as well, at 4:00 and 5:00 p.m. Eastern time. So, if you missed ‘em the first time around, here’s your chance.

Enjoy!

Via 3 Quarks Daily, an Economist review of what looks like a fun book: Philipp Blom’s A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment.

It is the story of the scandalous Paris salon run by Baron Paul Thierry d’Holbach, a philosophical playground for many of the greatest thinkers of the age. Its members included Denis Diderot (most famous as the editor of the original encyclopedia, but, Mr Blom argues, an important thinker in his own right), Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the father of romanticism, and the baron himself; even David Hume, a famous Scottish empiricist, paid the occasional visit.

I have a special fondness for these guys, having taught a course about them. As much as I am a forward-thinking person, the modern mode of expression by freethinkers (pounding out passionate diatribes on our keyboards) isn’t quite as much fun as gathering in a salon among good food and drink to denounce hypocrisy and spread the Enlightenment message.

Apparently Blom’s historical account has a contemporary message:

Even today, and even in secular western Europe, the bald and confident atheism and materialism of Diderot and Holbach seems mildly shocking. We still cling stubbornly to the idea of an animating soul, a spiritual ghost in the biological machine. For Mr Blom, the modern, supposedly secular world has merely dressed up the “perverse” morality of Christianity in new and better camouflaged ways. We still hate our bodies, he says, still venerate suffering and distrust pleasure.

This is the message of Mr Blom’s book, hinted at but left unstated until the closing chapters. He believes the Enlightenment is incomplete, betrayed by its self-appointed guardians. Despite all the scientific advances of the past two centuries, magical thinking and the cultural inheritance of Christianity remain endemic.

Sounds pretty darn accurate. Let’s order some bottles of wine and get this job finished!

The results were so staggering that they stopped the study ahead of schedule to get the word out: A giant study by the National Cancer Institute of more than 50,000 heavy smokers has found a 20 percent reduction in deaths among patients who received a CT scan to catch potential cancer as opposed to a simple X-ray.

“This is huge,” said Dr. Reggie Munden, a University of Texas M.D. Anderson diagnostic radiologist who led the research conducted at the Houston cancer center, one of 33 sites nationally. “It’s a massive ray of hope that we can now offer a scientifically proven test to people at risk of lung cancer and pick up tumors before they’re considered lethal.” [Houston Chronicle]

Participants in the study, which began in 2002, had smoked about a pack a day for at least 30 years (or the equivalent—two packs for 15 years). They received a screening via either CT scan or X-ray three times a year. While the X-ray group lost 442 people to lung cancer, the CT group saw only 354 lung cancer deaths.

The technology involved in the screening is called low-dose spiral CT imaging, in which a complete three-dimensional image of the chest cavity can be produced during the duration of one held breath. The technology is much more sensitive than a conventional chest X-ray, but also exposes the patient to much more radiation — about the same amount associated with a conventional mammogram, according to Dr. Denise R. Aberle of UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, the principal investigator of the study. [Los Angeles Times]

Now, though, the NCI’s exciting finding gets into the nitty-gritty of health care: money. A CT scan costs $300-400 or more, and at present, most insurance doesn’t cover the test for a lung cancer screening. That could change based on studies like this, but with millions of smokers and former smokers in the United States, it could add up to yet another gigantic medical expense.

And while the CT scans were a clear success in finding early lung cancer, there’s always the concern of too much of a good thing:

Some expressed concern that the findings might lead to an increase in the number of people undergoing unnecessary screening. The scans found abnormalities in about 25 percent of those screened, but most turned out to be false alarms. “As with any study of screening, there are also potential harms to be considered, such as potential overdiagnosis and needless surgeries,” said Otis W. Brawley, the American Cancer Society’s chief medical officer. “We have learned from the long-term analysis of other screening tests, such as mammography, that it is important to consider both benefit and harms associated with the test.” [Washington Post]

Related Content:
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Image: iStockphoto

No, really.

I’m a bit late with this, but I’m proud to feature in Geek Calendar, a celebration of British geekery that has already raised £10,000 in support of a most worthy cause: libel reform. For those who aren’t aware of the problem, English libel laws are basically arcane strictures which ensure that people can be very easily sued for doing little more than speaking critically, even if what they speak is the truth. It prevents freedom of expression, which is bad news for science, journalism and skepticism.

To raise awareness and money, three uber-geeks – Alice Bell, Louise Crane and Mun-Keat Looi – created Geek Calendar. It’s a collection of really very good photos of some British uber-geeks including Ben Goldacre, Brian Cox, Simon Singh, Petra Boynton, Imran Khan, Evan Harris, Adam Rutherford, and others. From the press release:

“The GEEK CALENDAR showcases 20 of the UK’s geek heroes in ways you’ve never seen before. It features interesting photos of intriguing people, reminding us of the human capacity for ideas, achievement and creativity. Some geeks are on TV, some are not, some are scientists, some are artists. All are nerds to the core.”

In my case, the way you’ve never seen me before is “perched at the end of a park bench”. Playing off the idea that today’s news is tomorrow’s chip paper, I met up with ace journos Mark Henderson, Roger Highfield, Hannah Devlin and Nigel Hawkes to be photographed eating chips out of cones made from our respective publications. Mine was initially made from a print out of my blog, but that idea was soon abandoned in favour of more visual gags on the blogger/journo divide/meld.

I’m very pleased with the final photo. I’m particularly amused at what shall henceforth be known as the Paywall Pigeon, swooping down to despoil Mark Henderson’s head…

There are also many great outtakes that didn’t make the final cut which I’ve been allowed to put up here:

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Enjoy.

And if you like that, you’ll love these:

- The blue and the green
- Square Circle Spiral
- Hidden circles illusion
- A lunar illusion you’ll flip over
- Why does the Moon look so huge on the horizon?