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Bad Decisions May Be Contagious

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Science - By Michael Torrice - Nov. 10 (News Report) - Like the flu, a person's emotional state can be contagious. Watch someone cry, and you'll likely feel sad; think about the elderly, and you'll tend to walk slower. Now a study suggests that we can also catch someone else's irrational thought processes.

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Forest a Desert, Cool the World

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Science - By Mason Inman - Sep. 16 (Special Report) - For more than a century, a few scientists have occasionally daydreamed of transforming much of the Sahara desert green, with a lush inland sea or vast tracts of farmland. Now researchers say they have actually found a way to make such a scheme work with forests across the desert--and to slow climate change in the process.

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India's Groundwater Disappearing at Alarming Rate

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Science - By Richard A. Kerr - Aug. 10 (Special Report) - For the first time, satellite remote sensing of a 2000-kilometer swath running from eastern Pakistan across northern India and into Bangladesh has put a solid number on how quickly the region is depleting its groundwater. The number "is big," says hydrologist James Famiglietti of the University of California, Irvine--big as in 54 cubic kilometers of groundwater lost per year from the world's most intensively irrigated region hosting 600 million people. "I don't think anybody knew how quickly it was being depleted over that large an area."

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Warming Spells Trouble for Fish

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Science - By Christopher Pala - Jul. 10 (Special Report) - Global warming of the oceans will likely cause the extinction by 2050 of dozens of fish species that cannot migrate to colder waters, according to a study presented here yesterday at the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium. "The loss of biodiversity will be considerable, and replacing them with new species would take millions of years," says co-author Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada.

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Philip Morris Pulls the Plug on Controversial Research Program

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Science - By David Grimm - Mar. 08 (News Report) - Philip Morris has ended a controversial 8-year-old program that supported research at dozens of U.S. universities.... "It's a big shift," says K. Michael Cummings, head of the Tobacco Control Program at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York. He accuses Philip Morris--the largest tobacco-industry sponsor of U.S. academic studies--of having supported "bogus" research. Now, he says, the company is retreating from a public relations fiasco. UC and other universities have been fighting internal battles for years about whether to ban tobacco-industry money, leading to "unseemly" coverage in the news, he says. Philip Morris spokesperson William Phelps, who confirmed last week that the company has ended its external research program, defended the quality of the research. He says that future support will be aimed at studies on "reducing the harm of smoking." He declined to say how much would be spent at universities.

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How the Elderly Stay Positive

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 11:29:30 -0700

Science - By Matt Kaplan - Aug. 31 (News Report) - uch of the media exploits what psychologists call the "negativity bias": our tendency to pay more attention to the bad than to the good. This bias plays a role in a wide range of cognitive areas, making a headline about a murder more attention grabbing than one about a marriage, for example. However, in recent years, research has revealed that as we get older our emotional responses to the world around us become more positive and that the stereotype of the "grumpy old man" may actually be a myth. A number of studies have found that older people typically report a higher sense of well-being than younger people. But is that because the negativity bias declines with age, or does the brain become more responsive to positive stimuli?

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Science Podcast: Breakthroughs of the Year 2006

Fri, 22 Dec 2006 06:04:02 -0800

Science - By Donald Kennedy - Dec. 22 (Special Report) - Science Editor-in-Chief Donald Kennedy overviews the big stories from 2006 covered in this year's Breakthrough issue.

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Could Bioterror Warnings Make You Sick?

Fri, 22 Dec 2006 08:26:54 -0800

Science - By Rhitu Chatterjee - Dec. 22 (Special Report) - In the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the 2001 anthrax letters, the U.S. public has been bombarded with information about the dangers of bioterrorism. But some say that the messages often overstate the risks and hurt more than they help. Now, these critics have some data to back up their claim: A small study shows that reading scary information about bioterrorism can actually lead to increased anxiety and stress levels.

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Underestimating the Benefits of Clean Air

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 03:01:20 -0700

Science - By Erik Stokstad - Sep. 27 (News Report) - When officials at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced last week that they were not tightening an air quality standard for soot, they cited scientific uncertainty (ScienceNOW, 21 September). Yet later that day, the agency quietly released a report in which outside experts agree that cleaning up soot would prevent substantial numbers of premature deaths. Environmentalists say the report will strengthen future lawsuits challenging the standard as too lax. EPA has attracted controversy over its air quality standards for particles smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter (PM 2.5). The agency proposed a new legal limit in December, which would reduce the average daily amount of soot and other particles allowed in the air. But the standard, which was finalized last week, kept the average annual amount at the existing standard of 15 micrograms per cubic meter (µg/m³)--rather than lowering it to 13 to 14 µg/m³ as recommended by the agency's own scientific advisory committee (ScienceNOW, 21 December 2005).

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Life from Arrested Development?

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 22:11:01 -0700

Science - By Constance Holden - Sep. 22 (News Report) - Scientists have been working feverishly in recent years on methods to create lines of human embryonic stem (ES) cells that do not involve the destruction of human embryos. Now, researchers in Europe report they can get new lines from "arrested" embryos--early embryos that have ceased to develop but that contain individual cells that can be induced to grow separately. They and others say that the technique should satisfy people who object to stem cell research on the grounds that it harms potential human life. The team, headed by biologist Miodrag Stojkovic, who has labs at the Principe Felipe Research Centre in Valencia, Spain, and at a company called Sintocell in Serbia, obtained 161 embryos that had been donated for research at the University of Newcastle in the U.K. Of these, thirteen had stopped developing at 6 to 7 days after fertilization, when they were at the 16-24 cell stage, and 119 had stopped developing a few days after fertilization. In a paper published online yesterday in Stem Cells, the researchers report that they succeeded in generating pluripotent human ES cell lines--i.e., cells that can develop into many different kinds of cells-- from one of the 13 late-arrested embryos. To ascertain that they had stopped growing permanently, the scientists waited up to 2 days after the last cell division before trying to cultivate them. They then plated the embryos on a growth medium. Five of the 13 cultures generated outgrowths. And of these, two developed cells with ES cell characteristics. One of these was cultivated into a "fully characterized" human ES cell line, proving that it could differentiate into all three germ layers both in the dish and in live mice. The earlier-arrested embryos did not produce ES cell lines.

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The Billion-Ton Biofuels Vision

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 13:46:14 -0700

Science - By hris Somerville - Jun. 02 (Editorial) - A recent analysis* concluded that the United States could produce about 1.3 billion dry tons of biomass each year in addition to present agricultural and forestry production. Because it is theoretically possible to obtain about 100 gallons of ethanol from a ton of cellulosic biomass (such as corn stover, the stalks remaining after corn has been harvested), the United States could sustainably produce about 130 billion gallons of fuel ethanol from biomass. In addition to a positive effect on the release of greenhouse gases, a biofuels program on this scale would have substantial economic and strategic advantages.

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