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Bear necessities
News in perspective
STEPHEN SIMPSON/TAXI
Upfront– CLEAN POWER UNDER OUR FEET America can kick its addiction to fossil fuels by drilling more wells, says a panel of experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Not for oil, but to tap Earth’s heat. Converting geothermal heat into electricity by pouring water onto hot rocks underground and using the steam to turn turbines is arguably the most promising – and renewable – source of “green” energy on the planet. So concludes the MIT experts’ report, released on Monday, which examines what geothermal energy could do for the US in the 21st century. The 18-member panel calculated that there is more than enough extractable hydrothermal energy available to generate the entire 27 trillion kilowatthours of energy consumed in the US in
2005. In fact, a conservative estimate of the energy extractable from the hot rocks less than 10 kilometres beneath American soil suggests that this almost completely untapped energy resource could support US energy consumption, at its current clip, for more than two millennia to come. Developing a new generation of geothermal plants is thus a top priority for tackling global warming, the panel says. “By any kind of calculation, this is an extremely large resource that is technically accessible to us right now,” says the study’s lead author, Jefferson Tester. “It doesn’t require new technology to get access to it. And there’s never going to be a limitation on our ability to expand this technology because of limits of the resource.”
Tsar punished
soft-drink and food companies Sysco and Pepsico while chairing an FDA working group on obesity in 2004. “It does not take a lawyer to determine that the country’s obesity tsar should not own stock in corporations that produce fast food, junk food and soft drinks,” says the attorneys’ sentencing advice to the court. As New Scientist went to press, it looked likely that Crawford would escape jail because he had declared and sold shares in drug companies before taking up his post. His recommended sentence was probation, community service and a fine of $50,000.
–Global warming, in a good way–
FORCIBLY detaining people infected with a deadly strain of drug-resistant tuberculosis may be the only way to stop its spread. So say AIDS specialists in South Africa, where cases of extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB) are spiralling out of control. In KwaZulu-Natal, the province hardest hit by South Africa’s HIV epidemic, 30 new cases of XDR-TB are being reported each month. HIV makes people easy prey to the disease, which is resistant to most anti-TB drugs and kills almost everyone it infects within 16 days. “If XDR-TB is not contained, completely drug-resistant TB is waiting in the wings to take its place,” says Jerome Singh at the Centre for AIDS Programme of
reported all over the country but there are currently no infection control centres, except at King George V Hospital in Durban, which is treating just 11 patients. Singh wants South Africa to follow the example of New York state in the 1990s, where forcible confinement and treatment of people with TB cut infection rates. To sweeten the pill, the South African government needs to provide welfare benefits to XDR-TB patients while they are in hospital, so they don’t lose out on wages, Singh says. Such measures “can help contain the spread although they won’t stop it completely”, he warns. STEVEN KAZLOWSKI/STILL PICTURES
No choice with TB
“In New York state, forcible confinement and treatment of TB cut infection rates” Research in South Africa, based in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, who is calling for the government to take firmer action (PLoS Medicine, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0040050). Cases of XDR-TB have been –A boost for the Kermode bear– 4 | NewScientist | 27 January 2007
070127_N_Up_p4_5.indd 4
IT WASN’T quite as bad as putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop. Still, the law takes a dim view when the head of the US Food and Drug Administration fails to own up to profiting from soft drinks and food while determining policy on obesity. Lester Crawford this week paid the price for this notable lapse. Crawford, who headed the FDA from 2002 to 2005, was due to learn his punishment on Tuesday after pleading guilty last year to conflict-of-interest charges. The most alarming was his failure to declare ownership of shares in the
Bear necessities How much money would it take to turn the world’s largest temperate rainforest, currently a loggers’ paradise, into a conservation-based economy? Greenpeace calculated that it would cost some C$120 million (US$100 million) to work that transformation on the 64,000 square kilometres of the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia. Coincidentally that’s the exact sum that has now been pledged by Canada’s environment www.newscientist.com
23/1/07 5:51:24 pm
60 SECONDS minister, John Baird. The new deal is a combined effort, with C$30 million each from the federal and provincial governments and C$60 million from conservation groups. Temperate rainforest is one of the most endangered types on the planet, and Great Bear Rainforest is home to grizzly and Kermode bears, as well as numerous migratory birds and 20 per cent of the world’s wild salmon stocks. Some 80 per cent of the land is vulnerable to clear-cutting, sport hunting, fish farming and mining. The latest pledge should help create jobs in First Nation communities in areas such as sustainable fisheries, forestry and tourism.
Black Britain
Genetically green
NOW WITH MORE PEP PER PUFF
IF 4 million cars were taken off the road in a single year, stopping Finding it hard to give up smoking? 9 billion kilograms of carbon Perhaps it’s because cigarettes are dioxide being discharged, most becoming more addictive. environmentalists would whoop The amount of nicotine that smokers with joy. But what if the same typically inhale increased by 11 per cent saving came from planting per cigarette between 1998 and 2005, genetically modified crops? according to data supplied by tobacco This is the claim of an annual companies to the Massachusetts audit of GM crops by the Department of Public Health. International Service for the The increase is due both to higher Acquisition of Agri-Biotech concentrations of nicotine in cigarettes Applications (ISAAA), which is and to a reduced burn rate, which funded largely by the GM industry. allows more puffs per cigarette. “It’s The audit, published on 18 not an accident,” says Gregory Connolly, January, bases its estimate on GM director of tobacco-control research at planting in 2005 in the US, Canada the Harvard School of Public Health, and Argentina. Graham Brookes which analysed the companies’ figures. of PG Economics in Dorchester, “It’s time we had the Food and Drug UK, who supplied the data, says Administration step in and make this 85 per cent of the savings come product less addictive.” from the fact that farmers growing weedkiller-resistant GM crops don’t have to plough their fields to get rid of weeds, so organic matter in the soil is not exposed to the atmosphere. This, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, prevents the release of 300 kilograms of CO2 per year per hectare. The rest of the figure is from fuel savings (Agbioforum, vol 9, p 139). Gundula Azeez of the Soil Association, which represents UK organic farmers, says the ISAAA is only interested in promoting GM crops. –They aren’t what they used to be– www.newscientist.com
070127_N_Up_p4_5.indd 5
Power to the planet French President Jacques Chirac is to call for the formation of a United Nations Environment Organisation that, unlike the current UN Environment Programme, would have regulatory powers. He will make the plea on 2 February at an international conference on the environment that he is due to host in Paris.
“Black people lived in Britain in significant numbers far earlier than the 1950s”
Payback time
significant numbers far earlier than the first modern wave of immigration in the 1950s. “This study further debunks the idea that there are simple and distinct populations, or ‘races’,” says co-author Mark Jobling.
The Democrat-led US House of Representatives has socked it to the big oil companies. Last week it passed a bill to recoup $14 billion in unpaid royalties and end tax subsidies that the companies have enjoyed under the Republicans. The Democrats intend to use the money to boost renewable energy. The bill can be vetoed by President George Bush.
The study was based on machine tests that simulate smoking. They do not reveal if people smoke any fewer cigarettes to compensate for the extra hit from the higher nicotine levels. A bill that would have given the FDA extensive authority over the sale, distribution and advertising of tobacco products failed to pass in 2004. Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy plans to reintroduce it this month. Meanwhile, a recently approved anti-smoking drug called varenicline, which partially blocks nicotine in the nervous system, triples the odds of a person quitting smoking, according to a review of studies involving nearly 5000 people (Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD006103.pub2).
Tuna rules In Kobe, Japan, the five regional organisations that manage the world’s tuna fisheries are meeting for the first time to establish a global management plan. The fisheries face potential commercial extinction. Japan consumes more than half the world’s tuna catch, but demand from other countries, such as China, is rising fast.
Measles on the run
ERIC GAILLARD/REUTERS
RACISTS won’t like it, but some white-skinned Englishmen are descended from black Africans who came to Britain anything from 300 to 1800 years ago. Geneticists at the University of Leicester, UK, made the discovery by studying links between the DNA of 2500 British men and their surnames. One man with an unusual surname stood out because his Y chromosome carried a gene variant called hgA1 previously found only in 28 black Africans. “He just looks like your average English white guy,” says Turi King, who carried out the study, to be
published in the European Journal of Human Genetics. King traced a further 18 people with the same surname and found six had the hgA1 variant. None was black. She concludes that black people lived in Britain in far more
An international vaccination programme to combat measles has exceeded its target of halving global measles deaths. Figures released by the Measles Initiative on 18 January show that deaths fell from 873,000 to 345,000 between 1999 and 2005 – a drop of 60 per cent.
Viagra ads trigger lawsuit A leading AIDS charity this week launched a lawsuit against Pfizer, claiming its adverts for the erectiledysfunction drug Viagra promote its use as a party drug. The AIDS Healthcare Foundation says that the ads could encourage risky sexual behaviour that would spread sexually transmitted diseases. Pfizer denies promoting recreational use of its drug.
27 January 2007 | NewScientist | 5
23/1/07 5:51:52 pm
STEPHEN SIMPSON/TAXI
Upfront– CLEAN POWER UNDER OUR FEET America can kick its addiction to fossil fuels by drilling more wells, says a panel of experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Not for oil, but to tap Earth’s heat. Converting geothermal heat into electricity by pouring water onto hot rocks underground and using the steam to turn turbines is arguably the most promising – and renewable – source of “green” energy on the planet. So concludes the MIT experts’ report, released on Monday, which examines what geothermal energy could do for the US in the 21st century. The 18-member panel calculated that there is more than enough extractable hydrothermal energy available to generate the entire 27 trillion kilowatthours of energy consumed in the US in
2005. In fact, a conservative estimate of the energy extractable from the hot rocks less than 10 kilometres beneath American soil suggests that this almost completely untapped energy resource could support US energy consumption, at its current clip, for more than two millennia to come. Developing a new generation of geothermal plants is thus a top priority for tackling global warming, the panel says. “By any kind of calculation, this is an extremely large resource that is technically accessible to us right now,” says the study’s lead author, Jefferson Tester. “It doesn’t require new technology to get access to it. And there’s never going to be a limitation on our ability to expand this technology because of limits of the resource.”
Tsar punished
soft-drink and food companies Sysco and Pepsico while chairing an FDA working group on obesity in 2004. “It does not take a lawyer to determine that the country’s obesity tsar should not own stock in corporations that produce fast food, junk food and soft drinks,” says the attorneys’ sentencing advice to the court. As New Scientist went to press, it looked likely that Crawford would escape jail because he had declared and sold shares in drug companies before taking up his post. His recommended sentence was probation, community service and a fine of $50,000.
–Global warming, in a good way–
FORCIBLY detaining people infected with a deadly strain of drug-resistant tuberculosis may be the only way to stop its spread. So say AIDS specialists in South Africa, where cases of extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB) are spiralling out of control. In KwaZulu-Natal, the province hardest hit by South Africa’s HIV epidemic, 30 new cases of XDR-TB are being reported each month. HIV makes people easy prey to the disease, which is resistant to most anti-TB drugs and kills almost everyone it infects within 16 days. “If XDR-TB is not contained, completely drug-resistant TB is waiting in the wings to take its place,” says Jerome Singh at the Centre for AIDS Programme of
reported all over the country but there are currently no infection control centres, except at King George V Hospital in Durban, which is treating just 11 patients. Singh wants South Africa to follow the example of New York state in the 1990s, where forcible confinement and treatment of people with TB cut infection rates. To sweeten the pill, the South African government needs to provide welfare benefits to XDR-TB patients while they are in hospital, so they don’t lose out on wages, Singh says. Such measures “can help contain the spread although they won’t stop it completely”, he warns. STEVEN KAZLOWSKI/STILL PICTURES
No choice with TB
“In New York state, forcible confinement and treatment of TB cut infection rates” Research in South Africa, based in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, who is calling for the government to take firmer action (PLoS Medicine, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0040050). Cases of XDR-TB have been –A boost for the Kermode bear– 4 | NewScientist | 27 January 2007
070127_N_Up_p4_5.indd 4
IT WASN’T quite as bad as putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop. Still, the law takes a dim view when the head of the US Food and Drug Administration fails to own up to profiting from soft drinks and food while determining policy on obesity. Lester Crawford this week paid the price for this notable lapse. Crawford, who headed the FDA from 2002 to 2005, was due to learn his punishment on Tuesday after pleading guilty last year to conflict-of-interest charges. The most alarming was his failure to declare ownership of shares in the
Bear necessities How much money would it take to turn the world’s largest temperate rainforest, currently a loggers’ paradise, into a conservation-based economy? Greenpeace calculated that it would cost some C$120 million (US$100 million) to work that transformation on the 64,000 square kilometres of the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia. Coincidentally that’s the exact sum that has now been pledged by Canada’s environment www.newscientist.com
23/1/07 5:51:24 pm
60 SECONDS minister, John Baird. The new deal is a combined effort, with C$30 million each from the federal and provincial governments and C$60 million from conservation groups. Temperate rainforest is one of the most endangered types on the planet, and Great Bear Rainforest is home to grizzly and Kermode bears, as well as numerous migratory birds and 20 per cent of the world’s wild salmon stocks. Some 80 per cent of the land is vulnerable to clear-cutting, sport hunting, fish farming and mining. The latest pledge should help create jobs in First Nation communities in areas such as sustainable fisheries, forestry and tourism.
Black Britain
Genetically green
NOW WITH MORE PEP PER PUFF
IF 4 million cars were taken off the road in a single year, stopping Finding it hard to give up smoking? 9 billion kilograms of carbon Perhaps it’s because cigarettes are dioxide being discharged, most becoming more addictive. environmentalists would whoop The amount of nicotine that smokers with joy. But what if the same typically inhale increased by 11 per cent saving came from planting per cigarette between 1998 and 2005, genetically modified crops? according to data supplied by tobacco This is the claim of an annual companies to the Massachusetts audit of GM crops by the Department of Public Health. International Service for the The increase is due both to higher Acquisition of Agri-Biotech concentrations of nicotine in cigarettes Applications (ISAAA), which is and to a reduced burn rate, which funded largely by the GM industry. allows more puffs per cigarette. “It’s The audit, published on 18 not an accident,” says Gregory Connolly, January, bases its estimate on GM director of tobacco-control research at planting in 2005 in the US, Canada the Harvard School of Public Health, and Argentina. Graham Brookes which analysed the companies’ figures. of PG Economics in Dorchester, “It’s time we had the Food and Drug UK, who supplied the data, says Administration step in and make this 85 per cent of the savings come product less addictive.” from the fact that farmers growing weedkiller-resistant GM crops don’t have to plough their fields to get rid of weeds, so organic matter in the soil is not exposed to the atmosphere. This, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, prevents the release of 300 kilograms of CO2 per year per hectare. The rest of the figure is from fuel savings (Agbioforum, vol 9, p 139). Gundula Azeez of the Soil Association, which represents UK organic farmers, says the ISAAA is only interested in promoting GM crops. –They aren’t what they used to be– www.newscientist.com
070127_N_Up_p4_5.indd 5
Power to the planet French President Jacques Chirac is to call for the formation of a United Nations Environment Organisation that, unlike the current UN Environment Programme, would have regulatory powers. He will make the plea on 2 February at an international conference on the environment that he is due to host in Paris.
“Black people lived in Britain in significant numbers far earlier than the 1950s”
Payback time
significant numbers far earlier than the first modern wave of immigration in the 1950s. “This study further debunks the idea that there are simple and distinct populations, or ‘races’,” says co-author Mark Jobling.
The Democrat-led US House of Representatives has socked it to the big oil companies. Last week it passed a bill to recoup $14 billion in unpaid royalties and end tax subsidies that the companies have enjoyed under the Republicans. The Democrats intend to use the money to boost renewable energy. The bill can be vetoed by President George Bush.
The study was based on machine tests that simulate smoking. They do not reveal if people smoke any fewer cigarettes to compensate for the extra hit from the higher nicotine levels. A bill that would have given the FDA extensive authority over the sale, distribution and advertising of tobacco products failed to pass in 2004. Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy plans to reintroduce it this month. Meanwhile, a recently approved anti-smoking drug called varenicline, which partially blocks nicotine in the nervous system, triples the odds of a person quitting smoking, according to a review of studies involving nearly 5000 people (Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD006103.pub2).
Tuna rules In Kobe, Japan, the five regional organisations that manage the world’s tuna fisheries are meeting for the first time to establish a global management plan. The fisheries face potential commercial extinction. Japan consumes more than half the world’s tuna catch, but demand from other countries, such as China, is rising fast.
Measles on the run
ERIC GAILLARD/REUTERS
RACISTS won’t like it, but some white-skinned Englishmen are descended from black Africans who came to Britain anything from 300 to 1800 years ago. Geneticists at the University of Leicester, UK, made the discovery by studying links between the DNA of 2500 British men and their surnames. One man with an unusual surname stood out because his Y chromosome carried a gene variant called hgA1 previously found only in 28 black Africans. “He just looks like your average English white guy,” says Turi King, who carried out the study, to be
published in the European Journal of Human Genetics. King traced a further 18 people with the same surname and found six had the hgA1 variant. None was black. She concludes that black people lived in Britain in far more
An international vaccination programme to combat measles has exceeded its target of halving global measles deaths. Figures released by the Measles Initiative on 18 January show that deaths fell from 873,000 to 345,000 between 1999 and 2005 – a drop of 60 per cent.
Viagra ads trigger lawsuit A leading AIDS charity this week launched a lawsuit against Pfizer, claiming its adverts for the erectiledysfunction drug Viagra promote its use as a party drug. The AIDS Healthcare Foundation says that the ads could encourage risky sexual behaviour that would spread sexually transmitted diseases. Pfizer denies promoting recreational use of its drug.
27 January 2007 | NewScientist | 5
23/1/07 5:51:52 pm