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Whale meat busts suggest
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DEEP-POCKETED donors are inadvertently encouraging governments to slow their health spending in parts of the developing world. Government spending on healthcare in developing countries
junko kimura/getty
Aid gone wrong
Ice triggers tsunami
“Quote to go in here over four lines range left like this Quote to go in her like this xxxxx”
“For every $1 of aid, poorer countries cut their own health contribution by nearly 50 cents” between 1995 and 2006 doubled to $18 billion, with one-third of these increases coming from foreign governments and aid organisations. Christopher Murray’s team at the University of Washington in Seattle collected a range of data on health spending and then created a model to describe the relationship between foreign aid and domestic health funding. Although domestic health spending increased overall, it fell as a proportion of total budgets. Murray’s team found that for every $1 of health aid developing countries received, they cut their own contribution by nearly 50 cents. Sub-Saharan African countries made the deepest cuts. Meanwhile countries in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East tended to increase their own health spending along with increased aid (The Lancet, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(10)60233-4).
60 Seconds
A massive chunk of glacier plunged into a Peruvian lake on Sunday, triggering a tsunami. The wave breached levees 23 metres high, causing mudslides near the town of Carhuaz, 300 kilometres north of Lima. The mud swept away houses and destroyed a water-treatment plant. Glaciers in the Andes have lost 20 per cent of their volume since the 1970s. Researchers say the trend is linked to climate change.
Batteries for eggs Nuclei from fertilised human eggs
–Is it legal?– have been transferred into donor
Whale on the menu PROPOSALS to resume commercial whaling have been dealt a blow by DNA detective work showing that restaurants in the US and South Korea illegally sold whale meat from Japan. In June, Japan, Iceland and Norway are expected to ask the International Whaling Commission (IWC) for permission to resume commercial whaling. They say they can prevent smuggling by matching the DNA
“Whale meat sold outside Japan came from the same animal as that sold inside, showing it was illegal”
Voisin/Phanie/Rex Features
of whale meat sold in markets to a register of all legally caught whales. But all have refused to make their DNA registers public. To find out the origin of whale meat being sold outside Japan, Scott Baker of Oregon State University in Corvallis and colleagues secretly took samples from two restaurants, one in Santa Monica, California, and another in Seoul, South Korea. They compared the DNA with that from samples bought in Japan, and found that they came from the same animals – proving that meat from whales hunted in Japan’s scientific programme – May harm more than germs– have been illegally sold abroad
(Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/ rsbl.2010.0239). The findings resulted in police raids on the restaurants last month. Baker says the monitoring system can only work if Japan, Iceland and Norway make their DNA registers publicly available, and hand them over to an independent body like the IWC so routine checks can be carried out.
Deep volcanic vents AT 5000 metres beneath the Caribbean waves – where the water pressure is equivalent to the weight of five hefty men bearing down on each square centimetre of rock – a submersible has discovered the world’s deepest volcanic rift, spewing water that is hot enough to melt lead. “It was like wandering across the surface of another world,” says Bramley Murton of the international collaboration InterRidge, who filmed the vents from a remotely operated submarine. “The rainbow hues of the mineral spires and the fluorescent blues of the microbial mats covering them were like nothing I had seen before.” The InterRidge team will be exploring the ridge until 21 April, and hopes to dive to 6000 metres. The previous deepest known vent was 4200 metres down on the Mid-Atlantic ridge.
eggs, leaving the old mitochondria behind (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/ nature08958). Mitochondria are the powerhouses of a cell – by replacing faulty mitochondria with fresh ones in the new egg, it might be possible to prevent mitochondrial diseases from being passed onto children.
How arsenic kills cancer Now we know how arsenic trioxide successfully treats 90 per cent of people with a rare blood cancer called promyelocytic leukaemia. The chemical binds to and disables a protein that otherwise prompts the cancer cells to grow and multiply (Science , DOI: 10.1126/ science.1183424).
Pollute thy parent A generation of Earth-like planets seem to be polluting their parent stars. Jay Farihi of the University of Leicester, UK, studied 146 white dwarfs, and found that many had atmospheres rich in heavy elements. These must have come from vaporised rocky planets, Farihi told the National Astronomy Meeting in Glasgow, UK.
This lady’s not returning An attempt to shake up the venerable Royal Institution, London, by ousting its council and reinstating its ex-director, Susan Greenfield, has failed. Instead, 81 per cent of members voted to retain the council.
17 April 2010 | NewScientist | 5
DEEP-POCKETED donors are inadvertently encouraging governments to slow their health spending in parts of the developing world. Government spending on healthcare in developing countries
junko kimura/getty
Aid gone wrong
Ice triggers tsunami
“Quote to go in here over four lines range left like this Quote to go in her like this xxxxx”
“For every $1 of aid, poorer countries cut their own health contribution by nearly 50 cents” between 1995 and 2006 doubled to $18 billion, with one-third of these increases coming from foreign governments and aid organisations. Christopher Murray’s team at the University of Washington in Seattle collected a range of data on health spending and then created a model to describe the relationship between foreign aid and domestic health funding. Although domestic health spending increased overall, it fell as a proportion of total budgets. Murray’s team found that for every $1 of health aid developing countries received, they cut their own contribution by nearly 50 cents. Sub-Saharan African countries made the deepest cuts. Meanwhile countries in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East tended to increase their own health spending along with increased aid (The Lancet, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(10)60233-4).
60 Seconds
A massive chunk of glacier plunged into a Peruvian lake on Sunday, triggering a tsunami. The wave breached levees 23 metres high, causing mudslides near the town of Carhuaz, 300 kilometres north of Lima. The mud swept away houses and destroyed a water-treatment plant. Glaciers in the Andes have lost 20 per cent of their volume since the 1970s. Researchers say the trend is linked to climate change.
Batteries for eggs Nuclei from fertilised human eggs
–Is it legal?– have been transferred into donor
Whale on the menu PROPOSALS to resume commercial whaling have been dealt a blow by DNA detective work showing that restaurants in the US and South Korea illegally sold whale meat from Japan. In June, Japan, Iceland and Norway are expected to ask the International Whaling Commission (IWC) for permission to resume commercial whaling. They say they can prevent smuggling by matching the DNA
“Whale meat sold outside Japan came from the same animal as that sold inside, showing it was illegal”
Voisin/Phanie/Rex Features
of whale meat sold in markets to a register of all legally caught whales. But all have refused to make their DNA registers public. To find out the origin of whale meat being sold outside Japan, Scott Baker of Oregon State University in Corvallis and colleagues secretly took samples from two restaurants, one in Santa Monica, California, and another in Seoul, South Korea. They compared the DNA with that from samples bought in Japan, and found that they came from the same animals – proving that meat from whales hunted in Japan’s scientific programme – May harm more than germs– have been illegally sold abroad
(Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/ rsbl.2010.0239). The findings resulted in police raids on the restaurants last month. Baker says the monitoring system can only work if Japan, Iceland and Norway make their DNA registers publicly available, and hand them over to an independent body like the IWC so routine checks can be carried out.
Deep volcanic vents AT 5000 metres beneath the Caribbean waves – where the water pressure is equivalent to the weight of five hefty men bearing down on each square centimetre of rock – a submersible has discovered the world’s deepest volcanic rift, spewing water that is hot enough to melt lead. “It was like wandering across the surface of another world,” says Bramley Murton of the international collaboration InterRidge, who filmed the vents from a remotely operated submarine. “The rainbow hues of the mineral spires and the fluorescent blues of the microbial mats covering them were like nothing I had seen before.” The InterRidge team will be exploring the ridge until 21 April, and hopes to dive to 6000 metres. The previous deepest known vent was 4200 metres down on the Mid-Atlantic ridge.
eggs, leaving the old mitochondria behind (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/ nature08958). Mitochondria are the powerhouses of a cell – by replacing faulty mitochondria with fresh ones in the new egg, it might be possible to prevent mitochondrial diseases from being passed onto children.
How arsenic kills cancer Now we know how arsenic trioxide successfully treats 90 per cent of people with a rare blood cancer called promyelocytic leukaemia. The chemical binds to and disables a protein that otherwise prompts the cancer cells to grow and multiply (Science , DOI: 10.1126/ science.1183424).
Pollute thy parent A generation of Earth-like planets seem to be polluting their parent stars. Jay Farihi of the University of Leicester, UK, studied 146 white dwarfs, and found that many had atmospheres rich in heavy elements. These must have come from vaporised rocky planets, Farihi told the National Astronomy Meeting in Glasgow, UK.
This lady’s not returning An attempt to shake up the venerable Royal Institution, London, by ousting its council and reinstating its ex-director, Susan Greenfield, has failed. Instead, 81 per cent of members voted to retain the council.
17 April 2010 | NewScientist | 5