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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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When Ironies Make Perfect Sense

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Science - By Anne Sasso - Feb. 27 (Special Report) - Traveling to California to find yourself is a '60s cliché. But for Gina Wingood, a professor at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta, Georgia, the trip to Berkeley, California, where she attended graduate school, set the course for the rest of her life. She found her life's work: designing AIDS-intervention programs for African-American women. She tapped into a hidden vein of solidarity with her black sisters that transcended her white-immersion upbringing and economic status. And she met the man who would become her closest scientific collaborator and her husband.

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The Bigger Questions - Science Careers

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Science - By Susan Gaidos - Feb. 27 (Special Report) - Prather says that as one of two minority female faculty members in her department, she is sought out by students from underrepresented groups. She frequently participates in programs aimed at reaching these students. Indeed, the opportunity to reach out to women and minority students--and teach them--was among the factors that drew her back to academia. "I really felt like, if it was just about research, I could do that at other places. But teaching students, and reaching out to women and minority students, is important to me, because I know that there is this pipeline problem for women and minorities, particularly in science and engineering."

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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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All in the Stroma: Cancer's Cosa Nostra

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Science - By Jean Marx - Apr. 05 (News Report) - Cancer biologists have recently been coming to grips with the fact that tumor cells get a lot of help from the cells around them. Such collusion is not the source of disease: More than 30 years of research have shown that mutations in a cell's own DNA initiate the changes that put it on its destructive path. But "people are realizing that the tumor environment is a coconspirator," says Zena Werb of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). "There's been a clear shift in interest."

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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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Building a Better Tumor Killer

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 02:48:54 -0700

Science - By Jocelyn Kaiser - Aug. 31 (News Report) - In a first for gene therapy, researchers have successfully treated cancer patients by genetically modifying their immune cells to attack tumors. Although the treatment worked in only two of 17 patients, the researchers say this proof of concept, reported online today in Science, should pave the way for more gene-therapy cancer cures. Steven Rosenberg's group at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Bethesda, Maryland, has been working on ways to rev up immune cells to vanquish cancer for 2 decades. A few years ago, the researchers removed tumor-attacking immune cells called T cells from melanoma patients, grew more in the lab, and reinjected them into the patients. The influx of additional tumor-attacking cells pushed the cancer to regress in about half the patients (Science, 25 October 2002, p. 850). But only about half of melanoma victims have these tumor-fighting T cells, and the cells are very scarce in other kinds of cancer.

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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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Gay or Straight? The Nose Knows

Tue, 09 May 2006 00:31:14 -0700

Science - By Laura Blackburn - May. 09 (Special Report) - When it comes to responding to pheromonelike chemical signals, lesbian women are much more like heterosexual men than their straight counterparts, according to a new study. The findings could lead to new insights into the neural basis of sexual preference and behavior, say the researchers. Pheromones are the ultimate aphrodisiacs. Many animals use the sex-specific scents to sniff out their partner of choice. The pheromones of female moths, for example, can attract a mate from several kilometers away. Whether the substances also play a role in human mating is less clear. Potential candidates include AND, a progesterone-derived molecule found in men's sweat, and EST, which is related to estrogen and found in pregnant women's urine. But neither has yet met the strict criteria that would define it as a pheromone.

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The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change

Sun, 05 Feb 2006 16:20:37 -0800

Science - By Naomi Oreskes - Feb. 05 (Special Report) - [Some] suggest that there might be substantive disagreement in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This is not the case... Human activities ... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy... Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect.

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