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Famous meteorites fail to make a sale
60 SECONDS various terrains and distances. Armadillo ran into trouble early, when a fuel-line blockage prevented the vehicle’s engine from starting. On its second flight, the vehicle came tantalisingly close to a soft landing, but plummeted the last few metres after running out of fuel, which had leaked from a crack in its engine. The following day, its replacement engine also sprang a leak. In a last-ditch attempt, Armadillo swapped the engine once more, but this one exploded at launch. The fire burned out with no injuries. “We’ll nail it next time,” promised Armadillo vicepresident Neil Milburn.
Meteorites bomb
What wasn’t said
EUROPEAN DUCKS HAVE H5N1
THE White House has already been accused of gagging the US H5N1 bird flu could become endemic in Environmental Protection Agency Europe – if it isn’t already. Researchers at and NASA on the subject of global the Friedrich-Loeffler Institute in Insel warming. Now the US Centers for Riems, Germany, have found antibodies Disease Control may have to H5N1 in apparently healthy ducks at suffered the same fate. two farms near Nuremberg in southern On 23 October, CDC director Germany, close to a farm where ducks Julie Gerberding addressed the US fell ill with the virus in August. The UN Senate on the health effects of Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) global warming. It has emerged says this should be seen as a wake-up that her original speech was cut call, showing that “surveillance and virus from 12 pages to six by the White search strategies should be reviewed”. House’s Office of Management The existence of infected but and Budget, which is authorised apparently healthy domestic ducks is to vet presentations to the Senate thought to be the main reason why H5N1 by government agencies. has persisted in east Asia. The FAO warns Among the passages omitted that some countries in eastern Europe from the final speech were details also have dense populations of domestic of how global warming may affect ducks and geese, which are in contact millions of Americans through with migrating birds. They fear H5N1 more frequent heatwaves, increased air pollution and the spread of waterborne diseases. Although Gerberding and the CDC say there has been no censorship, others disagree. Senator Barbara Boxer of California wrote to the White House demanding that it release a copy of the original draft, to reveal exactly what was left out. “This isn’t a country that should be censoring science,” she says. The White House says that some predictions were omitted because they were global rather than US-specific. –A pandemic in the making?– www.newscientist.com
Puss in genes Soon we will know what makes Tiddles tick. The genome of the domestic cat has been sequenced, revealing that one of our favourite pets has a putative 20,285 genes (Genome Research, vol 17, p 1675). The sequence, from researchers at the US National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Maryland, is of a 4-year-old Abyssinian cat named Cinnamon.
“Bidding for both rocks stalled at around one-third of their valuations”
Clam that’s old!
may have pushed prices down, but apathy may also play a part. “Some meteorites were last on the market in the post-war years, when public interest in space was at an all-time high.” People are more blasé about space today, he says.
A clam has smashed the record for the oldest living animal. The ocean quahog (Arctica islandica) survived in 80-metredeep water off Iceland for 405 years before being dragged to the surface by researchers from Bangor University, UK, who examined growth rings in its shell. The previous record of 220 years was held by a clam of the same species.
Dino vs volcano
could lurk undetected in these domestic fowl, causing periodic outbreaks of bird flu across Europe. The more outbreaks there are in birds, the greater the chances that the virus will mutate to become readily transmissible between people. Genetic similarities among H5N1 viruses this year and last year in both wild and domestic birds in Europe and Asia suggest the virus is circulating widely and moving east to west. Yet only a few national surveillance programmes are picking it up. Of the 306 dead wild birds with H5N1 reported to the European Commission so far this year, 298 were found in Germany, the rest in France and the Czech Republic. “There could be more virus circulation in Europe than is currently assumed,” says Jan Slingenbergh of the FAO.
Volcanic eruptions might have killed the dinosaurs after all. Geologists have blamed the Deccan Traps volcanoes in India before, but dated the eruptions 300,000 years too early. Now microfossils above the lavas show the eruptions coincided with the main extinction peak, according to research presented at a Geological Society of America meeting in Denver, Colorado, this week.
Bees croaking by the hive
FRISCO GENTSCH/CORBIS
FIFTEEN minutes of fame doesn’t always translate into big bucks. This was spectacularly true of two meteorites which, though exceptional in size, failed to fetch sky-high prices at auction on Sunday. Bidding for both rocks stalled at around one-third of their valuations, and they were withdrawn from sale at Bonhams auction house in New York. The Brenham meteorite, which was found in Kansas in 2005 and is the largest of its kind, was expected to attract bids of $700,000, while a chunk of the 15.5-tonne Willamette Meteorite, which was found in Oregon in
1902, was valued at $1.3 million. “So few big meteorites go up for sale that no one really knows what to expect,” says Derek Sears at the University of Arkansas. He feels that an increase in finds from Antarctica and from deserts
Bees have once again begun dying en masse in Florida, the state where the devastating “colony collapse disorder” originated almost a year ago. Jeffrey Pettis of the Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, said on 25 October at a conference in Washington DC that studies are under way to see if Israeli acute paralysis virus, the suspected cause of last year’s deaths, is responsible.
Stop that dam A dam in Iraq is so unsafe it could fail any day, engulfing Mosul, a city of 1.7 million people. That was the warning this week from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, a US Congress advisory group. Last year, the US Army Corps of Engineers called it the “most dangerous dam in the world”.
3 November 2007 | NewScientist | 5
Meteorites bomb
What wasn’t said
EUROPEAN DUCKS HAVE H5N1
THE White House has already been accused of gagging the US H5N1 bird flu could become endemic in Environmental Protection Agency Europe – if it isn’t already. Researchers at and NASA on the subject of global the Friedrich-Loeffler Institute in Insel warming. Now the US Centers for Riems, Germany, have found antibodies Disease Control may have to H5N1 in apparently healthy ducks at suffered the same fate. two farms near Nuremberg in southern On 23 October, CDC director Germany, close to a farm where ducks Julie Gerberding addressed the US fell ill with the virus in August. The UN Senate on the health effects of Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) global warming. It has emerged says this should be seen as a wake-up that her original speech was cut call, showing that “surveillance and virus from 12 pages to six by the White search strategies should be reviewed”. House’s Office of Management The existence of infected but and Budget, which is authorised apparently healthy domestic ducks is to vet presentations to the Senate thought to be the main reason why H5N1 by government agencies. has persisted in east Asia. The FAO warns Among the passages omitted that some countries in eastern Europe from the final speech were details also have dense populations of domestic of how global warming may affect ducks and geese, which are in contact millions of Americans through with migrating birds. They fear H5N1 more frequent heatwaves, increased air pollution and the spread of waterborne diseases. Although Gerberding and the CDC say there has been no censorship, others disagree. Senator Barbara Boxer of California wrote to the White House demanding that it release a copy of the original draft, to reveal exactly what was left out. “This isn’t a country that should be censoring science,” she says. The White House says that some predictions were omitted because they were global rather than US-specific. –A pandemic in the making?– www.newscientist.com
Puss in genes Soon we will know what makes Tiddles tick. The genome of the domestic cat has been sequenced, revealing that one of our favourite pets has a putative 20,285 genes (Genome Research, vol 17, p 1675). The sequence, from researchers at the US National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Maryland, is of a 4-year-old Abyssinian cat named Cinnamon.
“Bidding for both rocks stalled at around one-third of their valuations”
Clam that’s old!
may have pushed prices down, but apathy may also play a part. “Some meteorites were last on the market in the post-war years, when public interest in space was at an all-time high.” People are more blasé about space today, he says.
A clam has smashed the record for the oldest living animal. The ocean quahog (Arctica islandica) survived in 80-metredeep water off Iceland for 405 years before being dragged to the surface by researchers from Bangor University, UK, who examined growth rings in its shell. The previous record of 220 years was held by a clam of the same species.
Dino vs volcano
could lurk undetected in these domestic fowl, causing periodic outbreaks of bird flu across Europe. The more outbreaks there are in birds, the greater the chances that the virus will mutate to become readily transmissible between people. Genetic similarities among H5N1 viruses this year and last year in both wild and domestic birds in Europe and Asia suggest the virus is circulating widely and moving east to west. Yet only a few national surveillance programmes are picking it up. Of the 306 dead wild birds with H5N1 reported to the European Commission so far this year, 298 were found in Germany, the rest in France and the Czech Republic. “There could be more virus circulation in Europe than is currently assumed,” says Jan Slingenbergh of the FAO.
Volcanic eruptions might have killed the dinosaurs after all. Geologists have blamed the Deccan Traps volcanoes in India before, but dated the eruptions 300,000 years too early. Now microfossils above the lavas show the eruptions coincided with the main extinction peak, according to research presented at a Geological Society of America meeting in Denver, Colorado, this week.
Bees croaking by the hive
FRISCO GENTSCH/CORBIS
FIFTEEN minutes of fame doesn’t always translate into big bucks. This was spectacularly true of two meteorites which, though exceptional in size, failed to fetch sky-high prices at auction on Sunday. Bidding for both rocks stalled at around one-third of their valuations, and they were withdrawn from sale at Bonhams auction house in New York. The Brenham meteorite, which was found in Kansas in 2005 and is the largest of its kind, was expected to attract bids of $700,000, while a chunk of the 15.5-tonne Willamette Meteorite, which was found in Oregon in
1902, was valued at $1.3 million. “So few big meteorites go up for sale that no one really knows what to expect,” says Derek Sears at the University of Arkansas. He feels that an increase in finds from Antarctica and from deserts
Bees have once again begun dying en masse in Florida, the state where the devastating “colony collapse disorder” originated almost a year ago. Jeffrey Pettis of the Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, said on 25 October at a conference in Washington DC that studies are under way to see if Israeli acute paralysis virus, the suspected cause of last year’s deaths, is responsible.
Stop that dam A dam in Iraq is so unsafe it could fail any day, engulfing Mosul, a city of 1.7 million people. That was the warning this week from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, a US Congress advisory group. Last year, the US Army Corps of Engineers called it the “most dangerous dam in the world”.
3 November 2007 | NewScientist | 5