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Air pollution causes dangerous blood clots
News in perspective
MICHAEL QUINTON/MINDEN
Upfront– CLIMATE THREAT TO MIGRATION Could the flocks of migrating birds we associate with the changing seasons disappear? It’s a distinct possibility if they fail to adapt to changing weather patterns, as a result of climate change. High winds and atmospheric instability could make it impossible for small birds to muster the energy needed to fly the long distances to and from their winter feeding grounds. A study that tracked the heart rate of 15 Swainson’s thrushes as they migrated the 4800 kilometres from Panama to Canada, which takes 42 days, found that avoiding high winds and turbulence during migration reduces the energy expenditure of the thrushes (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002154). This means they could struggle if climate change made such conditions more
frequent, says Melissa Bowlin of Princeton University, who led the study. Worse flying conditions could mean “these birds are going to run out of energy sooner – and that’s bad news if they’re flying over ecological barriers like the Mediterranean Sea,” she said. Though Swainson’s thrushes migrate individually, rather than in flocks, Bowlin says the findings may also apply to other species of small migratory birds. “These results confirm how finely balanced the life cycles of migratory birds are,” says Paul Donald, a senior researcher at the UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. “Many longdistance migrant birds in Europe are suffering long-term population declines, and these results suggest an additional danger posed to them by climate change.”
Baby death rate
23 weeks, 19 per cent survived in the earlier period and 18 per cent in the most recent (BMJ, DOI: 10.1136/bmj.39555.670718.BE). Neena Modi of Imperial College London says the results are the most reliable yet because they record the survival rate from all births over an entire district. High survival rates cited by anti-abortionists usually come from specialist centres, she says. These receive babies from other hospitals, so those that had already died are not recorded. This falsely inflates the survival rate. The findings could influence debate in the UK parliament this week about whether to lower the 24-week abortion limit to 20 weeks.
–Running out of stamina?–
GAS from rotting manure could fuel the future. Biogas digesters, devices that turn decomposing manure into fuel, are costeffective, environmentally friendly and improve the health of rural people who use them. In the first rigorous study on their costs and benefits, Govindasamy Agoramoorthy of Tajen University in P’ingtung, Taiwan, and Minna Hsu of National Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, found that rural Indian families with biogas plants used 60 per cent less firewood and kerosene (Human Ecology, DOI: 10.1007/s10745008-9163-8). Many rural families own cows and buffaloes, which provide a few dozen kilograms of manure
“Families using biogas digesters made half as many visits to the doctor” a day, and the fuel savings mean that the $250 biogas plants pay for themselves within two years. Before they had the digesters, many families could not afford to buy enough fuel and scavenged 6 | NewScientist | 17 May 2008
firewood illegally from forests. Burning kerosene and firewood is linked to respiratory disease, a leading cause of death for rural villagers, especially in women and children. Because the cleaner-burning biogas reduces indoor air pollution, families made half as many visits to the doctor for smoke-related health problems as they had done before. The study is the first to draw a solid link between installation of a biodigester and health benefits, says Peter Haas of the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group, a non-profit organisation that operates in Guatemala and Haiti. CNRI/SPL
Future gas
CONTRARY to the claims of antiabortionists, the survival rate of extremely premature babies is not improving. If they are born before 24 weeks, babies are just as unlikely to live today as they were 12 years ago. David Field and colleagues at Leicester Royal Infirmary, UK, recorded the outcomes of births between 1994 and 1999 from all hospitals and clinics in a region in central England, and compared these with outcomes between 2000 and 2005. None of the 150 babies born at 22 weeks survived in either period. Of infants born at
Danger in the air IT’S the latest in a growing list of health problems linked to air pollution: dangerous blood clots triggered by smog from traffic and factories. If a deep vein thrombosis (DVT) breaks loose from where it forms in the lower leg or thigh and travels to the lungs, it can cause breathing problems and sometimes death. Andrea Baccarelli and colleagues at Harvard School of Public Health monitored the air quality in –Pollution gives you blood clots– different parts of the Lombardy www.newscientist.com
60 SECONDS region of Italy. They also collected the home addresses of 870 people from the region diagnosed with DVT between 1995 and 2005, and 1200 healthy controls. When they controlled for socio-economic factors, they found that living in an area with 25 per cent more particulate pollution than the average for big European cities increases the risk of DVT by 70 per cent compared with the average for the whole population (Archives of Internal Medicine, vol 168, p 920). Lombardy is prone to pollution because the nearby Alps block the flow of air. Past studies have linked particulate pollution to a greater risk of heart attack and delayed mental development in children.
‘God lab’ unveiled
IVF viability hope
LIFT-OFF FOR JAPAN’S MILITARY
Why did the earthquake that struck China on 12 May cause so many deaths? Because it was just 10 kilometres below the surface, there was less of a chance for the seismic wave’s energy to dissipate than in a deeper quake. What’s worse, buildings in the densely populated Sichuan province were only built to withstand a quake roughly a fifth as powerful, says Hong Hao at the University of Western Australia in Perth.
“The move follows a US court ruling that ID is a religious idea not a scientific one” work has already been critiqued and discredited, with a couple of new faces added for novelty,” says Barbara Forrest, a philosopher who studies the creationist movement at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond.
A BIG goal in IVF research is a test that reliably sorts dud embryos The Japanese military looks likely to kept under civilian control because from those likely to develop into be allowed to operate in space for the of Japanese laws governing the use babies. Now differences in gene first time, in response to growing of space. That could soon change, expression that seem to predict domestic concern over the threat posed following a decision by a committee of which embryos will go to term are by North Korea and China. Japanese MPs to revise the legislation bringing this a step closer. North Korea now has a ballisticto give the military access to space. Doctors usually decide which missile system capable of striking Japan The new bill will allow the Japanese embryos to transfer to the uterus and the west coast of the US, and China defence ministry to deploy satellites based purely on their appearance. rattled nerves in the region last year by for non-aggressive missions, including Yet as only about 30 per cent of destroying one of its orbiting weather communications, surveillance and them fully develop, women often satellites using a ground-based missile. weather observations, as other undergo multiple treatments or Japan has responded by developing countries’ military agencies do. The have several embryos implanted an anti-missile capability of its own, use of weapons in space will still be at once, which carries risks to both based on US technology. In December banned under Japanese law. the mother and her embryos. 2007, it successfully destroyed a missile “This is a major change in Japanese To try to improve the selection in flight over the Pacific Ocean using a space policy,” says John Logsdon, a space process, Gayle Jones at Monash ship-launched interceptor. It has also policy expert at George Washington University in Melbourne, built and launched a number of spy University in Washington DC. It will also Australia, and colleagues removed satellites to monitor the region. dramatically raise the profile of the cells from the early embryos of Until now, the programme has been Japanese space programme, he says. 48 women undergoing IVF in Greece, 25 of whom went on to have babies. By comparing the babies’ DNA and the genetic material in the early embryonic cells, the researchers identified 7317 sets of genetic instructions expressed by the viable embryos but not by those that failed to go to term (Human Reproduction, DOI: 10.1093/humanrep/den123). They now hope to whittle down the list to about 10 genes that strongly predict which embryos will become babies. A test could be ready for use by doctors in two years, they say. –The Selene lunar probe shows Japan’s potential– www.newscientist.com
Double trouble in China
ME’s not all in the mind Chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME, has seven genetic profiles, say researchers from London’s St George’s Hospital. Their findings confirm that it has a biological component rather than being purely psychological. The results could lead to a diagnostic test for the illness.
Bees dying in droves in US One in three beehives in the US has emptied of bees since last year. A third of the colonies were destroyed by an unpredictable disease that forces bees to abandon their homes. The US has about 2.4 million commercial beehives, and this is the second year running that bee-keepers have sustained such tremendous losses.
Microscopic hunt for lander
KYODO/REUTERS
THE cat-and-mouse contest between science and creationism took a new turn this week with the unveiling of a “God lab” ostensibly set up to search for scientific evidence for intelligent design. The move follows a 2005 US federal court ruling that ID is a religious idea not a scientific one. The Biologic Institute in Redmond, Washington, has been shrouded in secrecy since it was established more than a year ago by the Discovery Institute, an organisation which claims ID is a scientific theory (New Scientist, 16 December 2006, p 8). Its existence was finally made public
on 10 May, when details of the project were published online at www.biologicinstitute.org. Most scientists remain unimpressed. “A cursory inspection of its staff roster reveals the same ID creationists whose
Fetch the magnifying glass – there’s a Mars lander to find. Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona in Tucson is asking the public to scan images of the region where NASA’s failed Mars Polar Lander is thought to have crashed in 1999. Spotting it won’t be easy, though: the wreck will be only a few pixels across, and the landscape is dotted with features roughly the same size.
Carbon high The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached record levels, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The concentration of CO2 measured by scientists at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii now stands at 387 parts per million, the highest level for at least 650,000 years.
17 May 2008 | NewScientist | 7
MICHAEL QUINTON/MINDEN
Upfront– CLIMATE THREAT TO MIGRATION Could the flocks of migrating birds we associate with the changing seasons disappear? It’s a distinct possibility if they fail to adapt to changing weather patterns, as a result of climate change. High winds and atmospheric instability could make it impossible for small birds to muster the energy needed to fly the long distances to and from their winter feeding grounds. A study that tracked the heart rate of 15 Swainson’s thrushes as they migrated the 4800 kilometres from Panama to Canada, which takes 42 days, found that avoiding high winds and turbulence during migration reduces the energy expenditure of the thrushes (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002154). This means they could struggle if climate change made such conditions more
frequent, says Melissa Bowlin of Princeton University, who led the study. Worse flying conditions could mean “these birds are going to run out of energy sooner – and that’s bad news if they’re flying over ecological barriers like the Mediterranean Sea,” she said. Though Swainson’s thrushes migrate individually, rather than in flocks, Bowlin says the findings may also apply to other species of small migratory birds. “These results confirm how finely balanced the life cycles of migratory birds are,” says Paul Donald, a senior researcher at the UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. “Many longdistance migrant birds in Europe are suffering long-term population declines, and these results suggest an additional danger posed to them by climate change.”
Baby death rate
23 weeks, 19 per cent survived in the earlier period and 18 per cent in the most recent (BMJ, DOI: 10.1136/bmj.39555.670718.BE). Neena Modi of Imperial College London says the results are the most reliable yet because they record the survival rate from all births over an entire district. High survival rates cited by anti-abortionists usually come from specialist centres, she says. These receive babies from other hospitals, so those that had already died are not recorded. This falsely inflates the survival rate. The findings could influence debate in the UK parliament this week about whether to lower the 24-week abortion limit to 20 weeks.
–Running out of stamina?–
GAS from rotting manure could fuel the future. Biogas digesters, devices that turn decomposing manure into fuel, are costeffective, environmentally friendly and improve the health of rural people who use them. In the first rigorous study on their costs and benefits, Govindasamy Agoramoorthy of Tajen University in P’ingtung, Taiwan, and Minna Hsu of National Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, found that rural Indian families with biogas plants used 60 per cent less firewood and kerosene (Human Ecology, DOI: 10.1007/s10745008-9163-8). Many rural families own cows and buffaloes, which provide a few dozen kilograms of manure
“Families using biogas digesters made half as many visits to the doctor” a day, and the fuel savings mean that the $250 biogas plants pay for themselves within two years. Before they had the digesters, many families could not afford to buy enough fuel and scavenged 6 | NewScientist | 17 May 2008
firewood illegally from forests. Burning kerosene and firewood is linked to respiratory disease, a leading cause of death for rural villagers, especially in women and children. Because the cleaner-burning biogas reduces indoor air pollution, families made half as many visits to the doctor for smoke-related health problems as they had done before. The study is the first to draw a solid link between installation of a biodigester and health benefits, says Peter Haas of the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group, a non-profit organisation that operates in Guatemala and Haiti. CNRI/SPL
Future gas
CONTRARY to the claims of antiabortionists, the survival rate of extremely premature babies is not improving. If they are born before 24 weeks, babies are just as unlikely to live today as they were 12 years ago. David Field and colleagues at Leicester Royal Infirmary, UK, recorded the outcomes of births between 1994 and 1999 from all hospitals and clinics in a region in central England, and compared these with outcomes between 2000 and 2005. None of the 150 babies born at 22 weeks survived in either period. Of infants born at
Danger in the air IT’S the latest in a growing list of health problems linked to air pollution: dangerous blood clots triggered by smog from traffic and factories. If a deep vein thrombosis (DVT) breaks loose from where it forms in the lower leg or thigh and travels to the lungs, it can cause breathing problems and sometimes death. Andrea Baccarelli and colleagues at Harvard School of Public Health monitored the air quality in –Pollution gives you blood clots– different parts of the Lombardy www.newscientist.com
60 SECONDS region of Italy. They also collected the home addresses of 870 people from the region diagnosed with DVT between 1995 and 2005, and 1200 healthy controls. When they controlled for socio-economic factors, they found that living in an area with 25 per cent more particulate pollution than the average for big European cities increases the risk of DVT by 70 per cent compared with the average for the whole population (Archives of Internal Medicine, vol 168, p 920). Lombardy is prone to pollution because the nearby Alps block the flow of air. Past studies have linked particulate pollution to a greater risk of heart attack and delayed mental development in children.
‘God lab’ unveiled
IVF viability hope
LIFT-OFF FOR JAPAN’S MILITARY
Why did the earthquake that struck China on 12 May cause so many deaths? Because it was just 10 kilometres below the surface, there was less of a chance for the seismic wave’s energy to dissipate than in a deeper quake. What’s worse, buildings in the densely populated Sichuan province were only built to withstand a quake roughly a fifth as powerful, says Hong Hao at the University of Western Australia in Perth.
“The move follows a US court ruling that ID is a religious idea not a scientific one” work has already been critiqued and discredited, with a couple of new faces added for novelty,” says Barbara Forrest, a philosopher who studies the creationist movement at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond.
A BIG goal in IVF research is a test that reliably sorts dud embryos The Japanese military looks likely to kept under civilian control because from those likely to develop into be allowed to operate in space for the of Japanese laws governing the use babies. Now differences in gene first time, in response to growing of space. That could soon change, expression that seem to predict domestic concern over the threat posed following a decision by a committee of which embryos will go to term are by North Korea and China. Japanese MPs to revise the legislation bringing this a step closer. North Korea now has a ballisticto give the military access to space. Doctors usually decide which missile system capable of striking Japan The new bill will allow the Japanese embryos to transfer to the uterus and the west coast of the US, and China defence ministry to deploy satellites based purely on their appearance. rattled nerves in the region last year by for non-aggressive missions, including Yet as only about 30 per cent of destroying one of its orbiting weather communications, surveillance and them fully develop, women often satellites using a ground-based missile. weather observations, as other undergo multiple treatments or Japan has responded by developing countries’ military agencies do. The have several embryos implanted an anti-missile capability of its own, use of weapons in space will still be at once, which carries risks to both based on US technology. In December banned under Japanese law. the mother and her embryos. 2007, it successfully destroyed a missile “This is a major change in Japanese To try to improve the selection in flight over the Pacific Ocean using a space policy,” says John Logsdon, a space process, Gayle Jones at Monash ship-launched interceptor. It has also policy expert at George Washington University in Melbourne, built and launched a number of spy University in Washington DC. It will also Australia, and colleagues removed satellites to monitor the region. dramatically raise the profile of the cells from the early embryos of Until now, the programme has been Japanese space programme, he says. 48 women undergoing IVF in Greece, 25 of whom went on to have babies. By comparing the babies’ DNA and the genetic material in the early embryonic cells, the researchers identified 7317 sets of genetic instructions expressed by the viable embryos but not by those that failed to go to term (Human Reproduction, DOI: 10.1093/humanrep/den123). They now hope to whittle down the list to about 10 genes that strongly predict which embryos will become babies. A test could be ready for use by doctors in two years, they say. –The Selene lunar probe shows Japan’s potential– www.newscientist.com
Double trouble in China
ME’s not all in the mind Chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME, has seven genetic profiles, say researchers from London’s St George’s Hospital. Their findings confirm that it has a biological component rather than being purely psychological. The results could lead to a diagnostic test for the illness.
Bees dying in droves in US One in three beehives in the US has emptied of bees since last year. A third of the colonies were destroyed by an unpredictable disease that forces bees to abandon their homes. The US has about 2.4 million commercial beehives, and this is the second year running that bee-keepers have sustained such tremendous losses.
Microscopic hunt for lander
KYODO/REUTERS
THE cat-and-mouse contest between science and creationism took a new turn this week with the unveiling of a “God lab” ostensibly set up to search for scientific evidence for intelligent design. The move follows a 2005 US federal court ruling that ID is a religious idea not a scientific one. The Biologic Institute in Redmond, Washington, has been shrouded in secrecy since it was established more than a year ago by the Discovery Institute, an organisation which claims ID is a scientific theory (New Scientist, 16 December 2006, p 8). Its existence was finally made public
on 10 May, when details of the project were published online at www.biologicinstitute.org. Most scientists remain unimpressed. “A cursory inspection of its staff roster reveals the same ID creationists whose
Fetch the magnifying glass – there’s a Mars lander to find. Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona in Tucson is asking the public to scan images of the region where NASA’s failed Mars Polar Lander is thought to have crashed in 1999. Spotting it won’t be easy, though: the wreck will be only a few pixels across, and the landscape is dotted with features roughly the same size.
Carbon high The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached record levels, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The concentration of CO2 measured by scientists at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii now stands at 387 parts per million, the highest level for at least 650,000 years.
17 May 2008 | NewScientist | 7