First partial transplant of a bioengineered larynx

EARLIER this year came news of a second successful voice box transplant. But the recipient, Brenda Jensen, was able to have a new larynx only because she was already taking immunosuppressant drugs to stop her transplanted kidney and pancreas being rejected.

Now Paolo Macchiarini of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and colleagues in Italy are developing a technique to treat the donor larynx so that the recipient's body accepts it as its own - and they have just announced their first successful partial transplant.

For a transplant to work, recipients usually have to take immunosuppressants for life to avoid rejecting the foreign tissue. The trouble is that these drugs can reduce life expectancy by 10 years, making it difficult to justify a larynx transplant in an otherwise healthy person when it's not critical for their survival, says Peter Belafsky at the University of California, Davis, who operated on Jensen.

Macchiarini's technique solves the rejection problem by stripping the donor tissue of cells and DNA before reseeding it with stem cells taken from the recipient's bone marrow. His team previously pioneered this bioengineering technique for human windpipe transplants.

"But the larynx is more complex than a windpipe," says Macchiarini. To find out if the technique could be adapted, his team gained consent to remove the larynxes from five cadavers and treated them with enzymes and detergents to remove donor cells. Tests showed that just 0.001 per cent of donor DNA remained - quantities small enough to suggest they could be transplanted without rejection.

The larynx contains two types of cartilage - elastic and hyaline - each with distinct properties. The stripped larynxes showed similar mechanical properties to those of a normal larynx, suggesting they could perform with the same degree of versatility after transplant.

Finally, the researchers showed that blood vessels would regrow in the treated larynxes, making it easier for them to integrate with the recipient's body after transplant (Biomaterials, DOI: 10.1016/j.biomaterials.2011.02.055).

In work still to be published, the team describe how they transplanted the cricoid into a patient. This lower section of the larynx is simpler than the upper part and mainly provides structural stability.

They stripped the donor's cells from the cricoid and seeded its outer surface with the recipient's adult stem cells to grow chondrocytes, the cells found in cartilage. "Stem cells were also used to flush the internal surface and seed islets of respiratory cells," says Macchiarini, before the cricoid was transplanted.

Although the researchers are still some way from a full bioengineered larynx transplant, Belafsky is impressed. "It's light years ahead of anything that anyone else is doing," he says.

Original New Scientist article 

Circumcision ban will go to vote in San Francisco

Sujata Gupta, contributor
San Franciscans will be given the chance in November to vote on whether to ban male circumcision - pitting evidence that circumcising boys is the best way to reduce the spread of HIV against concerns that the process is a form of culturally accepted genital mutilation.

For several weeks, a group of individuals who call themselves "intactivists" have fanned out across San Francisco, clipboards in hand. Their goal: to collect enough signatures to get a measure to ban circumcisions in the city on a November ballot. The intactivists surpassed their goal this week, collecting more than 12,000 signatures - 4000 more than the minimum required to make the ballot.

Intactivists say circumcision is a form of torture and liken the practice to female genital mutilation. They also point to studies showing that the foreskin enhances sexual sensitivity and may protect against infections.
"The US is the only developed country in the world to routinely practice circumcisions for non-religious reasons," says Jonathon Conte, one of the signature gatherers.

The ballot measure has raised the ire of public health professionals, who say that a large body of research suggests that circumcising boys is crucial to preventing the spread of HIV. Intactivists respond by pointing out that some in the medical community question the importance of circumcision for HIV prevention.
If voters approve the measure in November, any city resident who circumcises a boy under the age of 18 could be subject to a $1000 fine and imprisoned for up to a year.

Jews and Muslims communities, who routinely circumcise baby boys for religious reasons, say that banning circumcision violates religious freedoms guaranteed by the first amendment to the US constitution.
But even without a ban, the number of circumcisions in the US has been dropping. Part of that decline is due to monetary reasons. Several states have stopped directing Medicaid funds to circumcisions to save money. California is on that list and today only 10 per cent of the boys born in San Francisco leave the hospital circumcised. "We hope to protect that last 10 per cent," Conte says.

Original New Scientist article

Unexpected fungus decimates Australia's pistachio crop

Australia's pistachio farmers were expecting a bumper crop this year, but a fungus has decimated the harvest.

Curiously, it had infected the nuts only rarely until now. Is a genetic mutation or a spate of bad weather to blame?

Chris Joyce, a pistachio grower and research chair of Australia's Pistachio Growers Association says that the country's pistachio trees produced a lush flowering display last October and because of this growers expected a large crop. But after record rainfall during the Australian summer, over half the nuts – more than 1000 tonnes – were killed by anthracnose, a fungal infection that can be caused by different infective agents. Joyce says many of the surviving nuts are severely infected and unsellable.

Anthracnose infects the skin of ripe fruit, leaving black spots and causing the fruit to quickly rot. Barbara Hall, a plant pathologist with the South Australian government who tested the spoiled goods, says the causative agent here is Colletotrichum acutatum, a widespread fungus that commonly infects almonds, olives and strawberries. But reports of pistachio infections are rare, and outbreaks unheard of. So what went wrong this year?

Scot Nelson at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu suspects a spontaneous genetic mutation allowed the fungus to infiltrate pistachios and rapidly spread. "Because pathogens are able to adapt so quickly, there are new ones developing all the time, so it's not surprising," he says.

According to Nelson, because pistachio trees – like most farmed crops – have a similar or identical genetic make-up to each other, they were sitting ducks for the fungus. "Once the new pathogen could infect one plant, it could infect many," he says.

Blame the Rain

But Hall is unconvinced. She speculates that heavy rain in southern Australia was probably enough to cause the epidemic. "I would suspect the fungus has always been there in a low level, but because the fungus likes wet conditions it became much worse," she says.

According to Hall, fungal outbreaks in several crop types have risen in southern Australia this year. For example, "it's been a bad year for grapes", she says, thanks to the fungus Botrytis cinerea which causes botrytis bunch rot in the fruit.

The pistachio disease might have been prevented by spraying the nuts with fungicides as they grew, says Nelson, and by removing fallen twigs and nuts, which can harbour the fungus. But because the outbreak was unprecedented, farmers were unprepared.

Original New Scientist article

Deliberate inaction judged as immoral as wrong action

DOING nothing to stop a crime can be seen by others to be as bad as committing the crime directly.

So says Peter DeScioli at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, who presented students with a number of scenarios that led to a fatality. An actor whose hesitancy to act led to the death was seen as less immoral than an actor whose direct actions led to the death. But the students judged deliberate inaction that led to the fatality as equally immoral as direct action that caused the death (Evolution and Human Behavior, DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2011.01.003).

DeScioli thinks the results show we see inaction as less immoral only because we typically lack proof that it was deliberate.

Courtesy New Scientist

Freeze Out: Can Polar Bears Survive a Melting Arctic?

Due to climate change substantial amounts of offshore sea ice are melting. Polar bears must swim farther out to sea in search of ice floes where they hunt; some expend all of their energy in doing so and end up drowning.

It’s sad but true that life is getting harder for polar bears due to global warming. Polar bears live within the Arctic Circle and feed primarily on ringed seals. The bears’ feeding strategy involves swimming from the mainland to and between offshore ice floes, poaching seals as they come up to breathe at holes in the ice.
But climate change is heating up the atmosphere and substantial amounts of offshore sea ice are melting. The result is that bears must swim further and further out to sea in search of ice floes; some expend all of their energy in doing so and end up drowning. Scientists first noticed this deadly phenomenon in 2004 when they noticed four drowned polar bears in the Beaufort Sea off Alaska’s North Slope.

More recently, researchers from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) fitted several Alaskan polar bears with tracking collars to find out the extent of their travels and document how much trouble they are having hunting in a warmer Arctic. One of the bears, a mother with a yearling cub on her back, made what researchers are calling an “epic journey in search of food” during September-October 2008. “This bear swam continuously for 232 hours and 687 km and through waters that were 2-6 degrees C,” reports USGS research zoologist George M. Durner. “We are in awe that an animal that spends most of its time on the surface of sea ice could swim constantly for so long in water so cold." During the rest of the two-month tracking period, the bear intermittently swam and walked on ice floes for another 1,200 miles.
But while the mama bear survived the ordeal, she lost 22 percent of her body fat during a crucial time of year for fattening up before a long winter’s hibernation. And her cub was not so fortunate. “It was simply more energetically costly for the yearling than the adult to make this long distance swim,” said Durner, whose findings were published in the January 2011 edition of Polar Biology. The case of this one polar bear and the failure of her offspring to survive in the new environmental conditions of the Arctic doesn’t bode well for the future of the species, especially as Arctic sea ice continues to retreat at a record pace.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which maintains the international “Red List” of threatened species, considers the polar bear “vulnerable” due to climate change-induced retreating sea ice. For its part, the U.S. government listed polar bears as “threatened” in 2008 under the Endangered Species Act. The IUCN website also points out that, while the polar bear has come to symbolize the impact of global warming on wildlife, many other species are similarly affected, including the ringed seal and well-known species like the beluga whale, arctic fox, koala and emperor penguin.
Some argue that, since it is illegal to engage in activities that could harm or kill threatened or endangered species, Americans should be forced to cut their greenhouse gas emissions to preserve polar bear habitat. While such a notion hasn’t forced many of us to voluntarily drive fewer miles or turn down our heat, it might be just what it will take the world’s largest land carnivore from going the way of the dodo.

Courtesy Scientific American

China's Energy Dragon Looks Tamer to One Forecaster

A revised forecast has China's energy growth tapering off decades earlier than previously thought, with implications for climate and diplomacy.

Chinese skylines are defined by construction cranes and the din of jackhammers. China produces 50 percent of the world's cement [pdf]—the next largest producer, India is responsible for just 6 percent—to build seemingly endless tracts of high rises, railroads, parking lots, highways, airports and shopping malls. But all booms end—and China's may end sooner than most people think.
A study released on April 27 by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab's (LBNL) China Energy Group says that this high-growth phase of China's development could wind down in less than two decades. China's energy use will cease to be a great unknown, threatening and shape-shifting as a dragon, and become something that is, if not tame, at least simpler to predict.

The LBNL forecast is the first such survey that attempts to come to grips not only with China's energy and resource needs during the current era of rapid development, but also attempts to pinpoint when that era will end. "Most conventional forecasting techniques use a process that assumes the future is going to look like the past—they establish certain relationships between energy and economic activity, and project forward what will be energy uses in the future," explains LBNL staff scientist and report co-author David Fridley. (He is referring specifically to energy forecasts by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and two scenarios prepared by the Energy Research Institute (ERI), a Beijing think tank affiliated with the Chinese government.) Yet the relationship between economic growth and energy demand is not just a straight line. "Nothing can grow exponentially forever."

Current thinking says China's energy demand will only go up and up throughout this century. The LBNL report, however, projects that after rising steeply for the next 15 years, China's energy growth curve will bend and begin to plateau; demand will then peak by 2050 at between 4.5 billion and 5.5 billion tons coal equivalent (depending on the government's success implementing various energy efficiency targets). That is considerably less than the amount if you simply extended other surveys forward. The report forecasts that energy use per person in China will rise to about 40 percent of what Americans consume.
The insights underlying the LBNL forecast are simple. First, the study simply extends further into the future than many forecasts. (The International Energy Agency's most recent "World Energy Outlook" only looks to 2035 and shows no sign of China's energy demand beginning to level off.) Second, their research takes account of what China Energy Group director Mark Levine calls "saturation points." That is the point at which energy demand in a given sector levels off. In a country where still more than half the population is rural, many people have yet to purchase even basic appliances. "But once you have a refrigerator, you don't need another," he says. The concept is simple, but actually integrating it into forecasting requires looking at the dynamics of each sector, and gathering data that can be hard to come by in China. "What makes our model unusual is that we actually account for the specific number and size of refrigerators, televisions, air-conditioners, and more per household," he says. "If you don't do that, you can't know there's a saturation point."

Take, for instance, the energy needs of China's massive infrastructure build-out. Currently 70 percent of China's energy demand is attributable to industry, and of that, fully 40 percent goes into the production of cement and steel. Yet at some point, China won't need to build as many new highways, bridges and parking lots. To envision the future, the LBNL team examined the total mileage of road networks in developed countries with comparable population densities. Then they mapped out just how many additional roads they think China will need—and estimated when the convoys of cement trucks will at last slow down.

China will then be more like developed countries, in which energy demand is flat —or rising at about 1 percent a year—even as standards of living continue to increase. The need for new infrastructure will have diminished, while the replacement of old technologies with newer energy-efficient ones will offset rising consumption. (From 1975–1986, energy in the U.S. did not increase at all, even while GDP increased 35 percent, Levine says.) China's city skylines will no longer feature rows of cranes.

A slower growing China has implications for climate scenarios. In 2010, China pumped about 3 billion tons coal equivalent into the atmosphere. The IEA extrapolates this would hit 5.5 billion tons by 2030 and would double by 2050. China's ERI shows about 6.1 billion tons coal equivalent in 2035. But the LBL study finds China's total carbon output, after roughly plateauing from 2030 to 2035, could be as low as 4.5 billion tons coal as far out as 2050. For China's carbon emissions to increase 50 percent between now and then is no small problem, but it's less of a problem than previously thought. "Will China overwhelm the world with its greenhouse gas emissions?" says Levine. "No, not necessarily."

Of course, the outlook is still dire—a 50 percent rise in China's energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions is tremendous. By identifying a future horizon point, the study may help international climate negotiators press Beijing to commit to absolute targets for reducing carbon emissions, which Beijing has staunchly resisted in favor of relative targets linked to domestic GDP.
The planet's most populous country is now laying the foundation for its future. The window of opportunity is very small. The time when China's planners, and their international advisors, can take steps to ward off future catastrophe—by ensuring that all those shiny new buildings, power plants and transportation systems are as energy efficient and environmentally sound as possible—is now, before the cement has dried.

Christina Larson, a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine, has reported extensively on environment and energy from across China. She is also a fellow at the New America Foundation.

Courtesy Scientific American

Michio Kaku - "Physics of the Future: How Science Will Change Daily Life by 2100"

The New York Times bestselling author of Physics of the Impossible gives us a stunning and provocative vision of the future. 
Rating  73.4%

 
Based on interviews with over three hundred of the world’s top scientists, who are already inventing the future in their labs, Kaku—in a lucid and engaging fashion—presents the revolutionary developments in medi­cine, computers, quantum physics, and space travel that will forever change our way of life and alter the course of civilization itself.
His astonishing revelations include:
•  The Internet will be in your contact lens. It will recog­nize people’s faces, display their biographies, and even translate their words into subtitles.
•  You will control computers and appliances via tiny sen­sors that pick up your brain scans. You will be able to rearrange the shape of objects.
•  Sensors in your clothing, bathroom, and appliances will monitor your vitals, and nanobots will scan your DNA and cells for signs of danger, allowing life expectancy to increase dramatically.
•  Radically new spaceships, using laser propulsion, may replace the expensive chemical rockets of today. You may be able to take an elevator hundreds of miles into space by simply pushing the “up” button.

Like Physics of the Impossible and Visions before it, Physics of the Future is an exhilarating, wondrous ride through the next one hundred years of breathtaking scientific revolution.
Courtesy of Good Reads 

From Publishers Weekly

Kaku (Physics of the Impossible), a professor of physics at the CUNY Graduate Center, gathers ideas from more than 300 experts, scientists, and researchers at the cutting edge of their fields, to offer a glimpse of what the next 100 years may bring. The predictions all conform to certain ground rules (e.g., "Prototypes of all technologies mentioned... already exist"), and some seem obvious (computer chips will continue to get faster and smaller). Others seem less far-fetched than they might have a decade ago: for instance, space tourism will be popular, especially once a permanent base is established on the moon. Other predictions may come true—downloading the Internet right into a pair of contact lenses—but whether they're desirable is another matter. Some of the predictions are familiar but still startling: robots will develop emotions by mid-century, and we will start merging mind and body with them. Despite the familiarity of many of the predictions to readers of popular science and science fiction, Kaku's book should capture the imagination of everyday readers.

From Booklis

Following in the footsteps of Leonardo da Vinci and Jules Verne, Kaku, author of a handful of books about science, looks into the not-so-distant future and envisions what the world will look like. It should be an exciting place, with driverless cars, Internet glasses, universal translators, robot surgeons, the resurrection of extinct life forms, designer children, space tourism, a manned mission to Mars, none of which turn out to be as science-fictiony as they sound. In fact, the most exciting thing about the book is the fact that most of the developments Kaku discusses can be directly extrapolated from existing technologies. Robot surgeons and driverless cars, for example, already exist in rudimentary forms. Kaku, a physics professor and one of the originators of the string field theory (an offshoot of the more general string theory), draws on current research to show how, in a very real sense, our future has already been written. The book is lively, user-friendly style should appeal equally to fans of science fiction and popular science. --David Pitt 

 

 

Mike Matas: A next-generation digital book

Software developer Mike Matas demos the first full-length interactive book for the iPad -- with clever, swipeable video and graphics and some very cool data visualizations to play with. The book is "Our Choice," Al Gore's sequel to "An Inconvenient Truth."

Courtesy TED Talks

U.S. Collider Offers Physicists a Glimpse of a Possible New Particle

The soon-to-be-retired Tevatron collider has uncovered an unexplained signal that could be a previously unknown particle

Physicists sifting through data generated by the Tevatron particle collider in Illinois have uncovered a signal that neither they nor the long-standing Standard Model of particle physics can explain.

The international team of researchers work with data from CDF, one of the two Tevatron detectors where protons and their antimatter counterparts collide at nearly light speed. The wreckage of those high-energy collisions produces a variety of short-lived particles, which allows physicists a fleeting glimpse into the inner workings of the physical world. The Tevatron, at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, is the second-most powerful particle collider in the world after the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, Switzerland.

Examining a very specific kind of outcome when protons and antiprotons collide inside the CDF detector, the researchers noticed an unexplained blip in their signal that could be explained by a previously undiscovered elementary particle—but not the Higgs boson, the hotly pursued particle that is theorized to imbue other particles with mass.

The researchers reported their perplexing but unconfirmed new finding in a study posted online April 4 at the physics preprint Web site arXiv.org The researchers have also submitted their results for publication in Physical Review Letters.

The CDF team found that the Tevatron was a bit more prolific than it should be in terms of collisions that yield a heavy elementary particle known as the W boson plus a pair of particulate jets. "What we see is that there a region between 120 and 160 GeV (giga-electron volts) where there is an excess," CDF physicist Viviana Cavaliere of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign explained to a packed Fermilab auditorium April 6. (A giga-, or a billion, electron volts is a unit of particle mass or energy.)

The result is compatible, Cavaliere said, with the collisions producing a W boson plus a hitherto unknown—and even heavier—particle with a mass of about 150 GeV. But that particle appears not to be the Higgs boson, which would be expected to emerge from the collisions alongside a W boson with far less frequency. If CDF has uncovered a new elementary particle, it would be the first such discovery since the tau neutrino was observed at Fermilab in 2000. But in the case of the tau physicists had predicted the particle's existence and had gone out looking for it.

As theorists scramble to figure out just what CDF has found, experimentalists will be working to verify that the detector has found anything at all. The new analysis claims that the data disagree with existing theory to better than three standard deviations, or 3 sigma. Assuming the analysis is correct, that means that there is just a fraction of a 1 percent chance that the effect is a mere statistical glitch. But extraordinary claims demand stronger proof.

"Five sigma is our gold standard," says Brookhaven National Laboratory physicist Sally Dawson, adding that the physics community has seen 3-sigma effects come and go. "If it's true, and if it holds up, it is of course very exciting, because it's completely unexpected," Dawson says. "If it persists, it's very hard to explain theoretically."


"We will learn pretty soon whether it's true or not," says Fermilab theorist Bogdan Dobrescu, who did not contribute to the new study. "This is pretty credible at this stage." If the results hold up, theorists will need to figure out what kind of new particle could fit the bill. "It would be a major breakthrough, especially because this is a particle that no one really predicted to the best of my knowledge," Dobrescu says. "We can try to invent some new particles and see if they have the appropriate properties that we see, but none of the answers are very expected."

The Tevatron, which is slated to shut down for good in the fall, is still collecting data that could strengthen the case for a new particle—or sink it. Cavaliere said that the new analysis began more than a year ago and does not include the latest data from CDF. The team already has already logged a good deal more collisions that await analysis, but Cavaliere cautioned that the expanded data set would not be enough to vault the discovery into the 5-sigma range.

But the physics community will not have to wait long before the new particle gets a reality check. Physicists working with the other detector at the Tevatron, known as DZero, are now replicating the CDF analysis with their own voluminous data set, says Fermilab physicist and DZero co-spokesperson Dmitri Denisov. "We expect we will be able to clarify this topic on a timescale of a few weeks," he says.

Courtesy of Scientific American

Cosmic-ray Detector on Space Shuttle Set to Scan Cosmos for Dark Matter

A fancy cosmic-ray detector, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, is about to scan the cosmos for dark matter, antimatter and more

By George Musser 

The world’s most advanced cosmic-ray detector took 16 years and $2 billion to build, and not long ago it looked as though it would wind up mothballed in some warehouse. NASA, directed to finish building the space station and retire the space shuttle by the end of 2010, said it simply did not have room in its schedule to launch the instrument anymore. Saving it took a lobbying campaign by physicists and intervention by Congress to extend the shuttle program. And so the shuttle ­Endeavour is scheduled to take off on April 19 for the express purpose of delivering the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) to the International Space Station.

 Image: Illustration by Don Foley; Source for ISS model: NASA

Cosmic rays are subatomic particles and atomic nuclei that zip and zap through space, coming from ordinary stars, supernovae explosions, neutron stars, black holes and who knows what—the last category naturally being of greatest interest and the main impetus for a brand-new instrument. Dark matter is one of those possible mystery sources. Clumps of the stuff out in space might occasionally release blazes of particles that would set the detectors alight. Some physicists also speculate that our planet might be peppered with the odd antiatom coming from distant galaxies made not of matter but of its evil antitwin.

Courtesy of Scientific American

Electrical Problems Force Delay in Shuttle Launching

By Henry Fountain

Less than four hours before the scheduled 3:47 p.m. liftoff, National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials announced that it would be delayed at least until Monday afternoon while technicians tried to fix the problem, which affects equipment that supplies hydraulic power to move the shuttle’s engines and flaps during ascent and re-entry.
Officials suggested that the launching could be delayed further. “We will not fly this machine until it is ready,” said Michael D. Leinbach, the shuttle launching director, “and today it was not ready to go.”
The delay frustrated huge crowds that had gathered outside the space center to watch the start of the next-to-last mission in the 30-year shuttle program.
Mr. Obama, who had been scheduled to watch the launching with his wife, Michelle, and daughters, was touring tornado damage in Alabama when the postponement was announced. He decided to visit the space center anyway, arriving about two hours later.

At the launching control center, the president and his wife met for about 10 minutes with Gabrielle Giffords, the wounded Arizona Democratic congresswoman and wife of the mission commander, Capt. Mark E. Kelly.
Just before going in to see Ms. Giffords, Mr. Obama greeted Captain Kelly in a corridor. The men shook hands and embraced.
The Obamas also met with the five other members of the shuttle crew. With their daughters, they toured the building where the Atlantis spacecraft is being prepared for the 135th and final shuttle mission, in late June. They walked under the shuttle, getting a close look at its thermal tiles.
The astronauts are under quarantine rules before a launching and ordinarily their contact with others, even family members, is restricted, but NASA officials said flight doctors had cleared the Obamas to meet with the crew.

Ms. Giffords, who suffered a severe head wound in a shooting in January, had arrived on Wednesday to watch the launching. There was no immediate word as to whether she would stay in Florida or return to the Houston rehabilitation hospital where she has been recovering for the past two months.
The astronauts had undergone final medical checks and donned orange flight suits and were on their way to the launching pad in a van when the postponement was announced. The van made a U-turn and parked briefly at the control center before returning to the astronauts’ quarters.

Whenever it begins, the mission, to the International Space Station, is scheduled to last two weeks. The Endeavour crew will install a $2 billion particle-physics experiment, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, at the space station, where it will search for evidence of the elusive “dark matter” that is thought to be ubiquitous in the universe. The shuttle will also deliver spare parts, and the crew will perform maintenance tasks outside the station in four spacewalks.

Until Friday, preparations for the mission had been relatively smooth, with weather the major concern. But postponements due to equipment problems are not uncommon, and NASA officials had previously said they would not forgo safety procedures just because the president was going to be there.
Mr. Leinbach said the problem that forced the postponement was most likely an electrical short in an area of the shuttle that would take time to reach. Shortly after the decision was announced, technicians drained the spacecraft’s huge external fuel tank, which had been filled with liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuel early Friday. The fuels must be removed before it is safe to work on the spacecraft.
Mr. Leinbach and other officials said that depending on the extent of the problem, a Monday launching might be possible.

NASA has a launching window each afternoon through Wednesday; after that the Endeavour might have to wait until May 9 or 10 to try again.

Helene Cooper contributed reporting.

Courtesy of New York Times

Avi Wigderson Elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Avi Wigderson, Herbert H. Maass Professor in the School of Mathematics, is among the 212 newly elected members of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Established in 1780 by founders of the United States, the Academy is composed of scholars and practitioners from mathematics, physics, biological sciences, social sciences, humanities and the arts, public affairs, and business, giving it a unique capacity to conduct a wide range of interdisciplinary studies and public policy research. Thirteen former Institute Members and Visitors were also elected to the Academy’s 2011 class.

Courtesy Institute for Advanced Study

Angela Belcher: Using nature to grow batteries

Inspired by an abalone shell, Angela Belcher programs viruses to make elegant nanoscale structures that humans can use. Selecting for high-performing genes through directed evolution, she's produced viruses that can construct powerful new batteries, clean hydrogen fuels and record-breaking solar cells. At TEDxCaltech, she shows us how it's done.

Courtesy TED Talks

Court Lets U.S. Resume Paying for Embryo Study

By GARDINER HARRIS

WASHINGTON — Government financing of human embryonic stem cell research can continue, a federal appeals court ruled Friday. The decision was an important victory for the Obama administration in a legal battle that is far from over.

The 2-to-1 ruling, by a panel of judges from the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, blocks a lower-court decision last August holding that such research is illegal under a law that bans public spending on research in which human embryos are damaged or destroyed.
The stem cells are derived from donated human embryos left over from fertility treatments; the embryos are destroyed in the process, leading some opponents of abortion to liken the research to murder.
But the appellate court said Friday that because the law is written in the present tense, “it does not extend to past actions.”

Samuel B. Casey, a lawyer for two scientists who sued the government to stop paying for research into human embryonic stem cells, said that he was “a little disappointed” but also pleased that the appeals court kept his suit alive, and that he was considering an appeal.

Representative Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado, said she was “extremely pleased with this decision.” But she promised to push for unambiguous legislation that would allow such research to continue.
The ruling sends the case back to Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth of Federal District Court in Washington, who concluded in August that the Obama administration was so unlikely to win the case that he issued an immediate ban on any federal spending on human embryonic research.

That decision shocked government scientists, who said it would force the cancellation of dozens of experiments on an array of diseases, from diabetes to Parkinson’s. The government appealed, and the appeals court stopped the ban from going into effect while it heard arguments in the case. Friday’s ruling is the end of the first phase of the litigation.

“This is a momentous day not only for science but for the hopes of thousands of patients and their families who are relying on N.I.H.-funded scientists to pursue life-saving discoveries and therapies that could come from stem cell research,” said Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health.
David A. Prentice of the Family Research Council, an anti-abortion group, said he was disappointed. “Federal taxpayer funds should go towards helping patients first, not unethical experiments,” he said.

The research potential for embryonic stem cells, which were discovered in 1998, arises from their ability to morph into any cell in the body and possibly form new organs.
President George W. Bush was the first to allow federal financing of human embryonic stem cell research, but he limited the research to 21 cell lines already in existence to discourage further destruction of embryos.
President Obama promised in his campaign to expand the research and ordered the health institutes soon after his inauguration to do just that.

Judge Lamberth’s ruling was so sweeping that the Obama administration interpreted it as a ban on all stem cell research, including projects that passed muster under his predecessor.
Dr. George Q. Daley, director of the stem cell transplant program at Children’s Hospital Boston, said he was happy with the ruling. “But it’s tempered by the fact that there’s a court case that is still pending,” he added.
Dr. Daley’s laboratory is using embryonic stem cells to research cures into bone marrow failure, a rare genetic condition sometimes called “bubble boy disease” because it forces children to live in sterile environments.

His lab is also comparing the relative properties of embryonic stem cells and so-called pluripotent stem cells derived from adult tissue; some anti-abortion activists say the pluripotent cells, which have the potential to turn into the many kinds of specialized cells in the body, are an ethical alternative to the embryonic kind.
The plaintiffs in the case are two scientists, Theresa Deisher and Dr. James L. Sherley, who use only adult stem cells in their research. They argue that the administration’s policy puts their own research at a disadvantage in the competition for government financing.

Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, the dissenter in Friday’s appeals court ruling, wrote that her colleagues “perform linguistic jujitsu” to arrive at their conclusion.
The plain language of the law bars financing for all research that follows the destruction of embryos, she wrote, and it is meaningless to try to separate the process of destruction from the use of the stem cells that result from that destruction.
Mr. Casey, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, said Judge Henderson’s dissent might lead him to ask the full Court of Appeals to reconsider the case.
“But my mother told me to always sleep on these things, so that’s what we’re going to do,” he said.

Courtesy New York Times

Court reverses US funding ban on embryonic stem cells

Peter Aldhous, San Francisco bureau chief

US government cash for research on human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) is safe for now, thanks to a ruling by judges sitting in the US Court of Appeals in Washington DC.
Last August, a lower court granted an injunction blocking new grants to hESC research. The ruling came in response to a suit brought by two scientists who claim that President Barack Obama's policy to widen funding for the research is illegal.
The injunction caught scientists and the US National Institutes of Health by surprise, and was based on a controversial interpretation of a law called the temporarily lifted the injunction back in September. Today's appeals court decision, made by a 2-1 majority, overturns the injunction. On behalf of the majority, Justice Douglas Ginsburg wrote:

"We conclude the plaintiffs are unlikely to prevail because Dickey-Wicker is ambiguous and the NIH seems reasonably to have concluded that, although Dickey-Wicker bars funding for the destructive act of deriving an ESC from an embryo, it does not prohibit funding a research project in which an ESC will be used. We therefore vacate the preliminary injunction."

However the case brought by the two scientists, James Sherley of the Boston Biomedical Research Institute in Watertown, Massachusetts, and Theresa Deisher of AVM Biotechnology in Seattle, is not over and could go all the way to the Supreme Court. Both scientists oppose research on hESCs on moral grounds and argue that an expansion of funding for this work threatens their own ability to obtain grants for research on adult stem cells.
Rounding up reactions to today's news, USA Today led with Lisa Hughes, president of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research:

"This is a victory for patients all across America, and sends a message that frivolous attacks on important biomedical research will not be tolerated."

NIH director Francis Collins was similarly pleased, releasing the following statement:

"I am delighted and relieved to learn of the decision of the Court of Appeals. This is a momentous day – not only for science, but for the hopes of thousands of patients and their families who are relying on NIH-funded scientists to pursue life-saving discoveries and therapies that could come from stem cell research."

However, in a statement emailed to reporters, Alan Trounson, president of the San Francisco-based California Institute for Regenerative Medicine – itself a major funder of research on hESCs – warned supporters of the research not to get carried away:

"The fight for embryonic stem cell research in the United States is not over. While this recent Court of Appeals decision is very welcome, it is simply one step towards US researchers being able to feel that they can proceed with this groundbreaking research."

On the other side of the debate, David Prentice of the Family Research Council vowed to continue its opposition:

"We believe that further court decisions will support Congressional protections of young human life and divert federal funds toward lifesaving adult stem cells."

 Courtesy of New Scientist

That's what she said: Software that tells dirty jokes

Double entendres have been making us laugh since the days of Chaucer and Shakespeare, but up until now computers weren't in on the joke. Chloé Kiddon and Yuriy Brun, two computer scientists at the University of Washington, have developed a system for recognising a particular type of double entendre - the "that's what she said" joke, in which seemingly innocent sentences can be transformed into lewd utterances by appending just four short words.

The pair describe the "TWSS problem" as recognising when it is funny to follow a sentence with "that's what she said" - they give "Don't you think these buns are a little too big for this meat?" as one example. The equivalent in the UK is appending sentences with "as the actress said to the bishop" and is used in the same way.

Automating this process means identifying sentences that contain potential euphemisms and follow a particular structure - a "hard natural language understanding problem", say the researchers. Kiddon and Brun began by analysing two different bodies of text - one containing 1.5 million erotic sentences, and another with 57,000 from standard literature.

They then evaluated nouns, adjectives and verbs with a "sexiness" function to determine whether a sentence is a potential TWSS. Examples of nouns with a high sexiness function are "rod" and "meat", while raunchy adjectives are "hot" and "wet".

Their automated system, known as Double Entendre via Noun Transfer or DEviaNT, rates sentences for their TWSS potential by looking for particular elements such as nouns that can be interpreted in multiple ways. The researchers trained DEviaNT by gathering jokes from twssstories.com and non-TWSS text from sites such as wikiquote.org.

The system turned out to be around 70% accurate, but the pair say this is deceptively low because much of the training data did not consist of TWSS jokes, and with a more even data set it could achieve 99.5% precision.

The results will be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in June. Future work could also see DEviaNT extended to identify other kinds of jokes, say the researchers, writing "The technique of metaphorical mapping may be generalised to identify other types of double entendres and other forms of humor".

That's what she said.

Courtesy of New Scientist