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Good news at last for fisheries
REUTERS
UPFRONT
Fungus at Afghan border SPRING rains brought a bumper wheat harvest to Afghan farmers this year, and the opium poppies were safely brought in because US president Barack Obama withdrew troops he had sent to destroy drug crops. But the beleaguered country can’t rest easy. The Ug99 wheat rust, a virulent fungus that wipes out entire crops, is poised to cross the border from Iran. Fungal spores have been spreading on the wind from Uganda, where the disease was first discovered in 1999. They reached the wheat fields of Iran two years ago, prompting scientists to warn that millions in Asia were at risk of starvation. If the epidemic reaches Afghanistan, its effects would be catastrophic. “Nearly all farmers in Afghanistan grow wheat for food or sale,” says Mahmood Osmanzai, a
scientist working for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in the country. Most of the wheat varieties grown in Afghanistan, and indeed around the world, are vulnerable to Ug99. The fungus could undermine US efforts to help the nation. Obama’s special representative in Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, said last week that trying to eradicate the country’s profitable poppy crop had “driven people into the hands of the Taliban”. Now, he said, the money was being spent on agricultural assistance for food crops, including finding local wheat varieties resistant to Ug99. The aim is to make wheat more profitable than poppies. If the fungus arrives first, those efforts could well go to waste.
Clam busts bird flu
bivalves that concentrate harmful viruses can poison birds or humans that eat them, but these clams somehow deactivated H5N1. “Birds that were fed clams exposed to the virus for 48 hours didn’t get flu,” says Faust. Nor did ducks suffer if they drank water filtered by the clams, but all ducks that drank unfiltered water died, the team reports in Proceedings of the Royal Society B (DOI: 10.1098/ rspb.2009.0572). Introducing these clams into lakes and rivers might hamper the spread of flu, though ecological studies would be needed first.
–A bumper wheat crop for now–
Stem cell infamy
“If the people that have been arrested have done something illegal, their arrest is good news” However, the university said that “no questions have been raised about the science conducted or the conclusions of the research”. Over in the US, meanwhile, new questions raised by New Scientist 6 | NewScientist | 8 August 2009
STEVEN KAZLOWSKI/STILL PICTURES
IT HAS been a bad couple of weeks for stem cells. Police in Hungary have arrested four people they suspect of running an illegal centre in Budapest for treatments using stem cells. The police said that the treatments were unproven, used stem cells taken from embryos or aborted fetuses, and cost as much as $25,000 per person. In the UK, researchers at Newcastle University who claimed last month to have made sperm from stem cells have agreed to withdraw their paper reporting the breakthrough, admitting that the first couple of paragraphs had been plagiarised.
are being considered at the Stem Cell Institute of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (see page 12). Mainstream stem cell researchers alarmed by the reports from Hungary have praised the police. “If the people that have been arrested have done something illegal, their arrest is good news,” says Robin Lovell-Badge of the National Institute for Medical Research in London. “I hope it scares others from offering untested treatments and will be a cautionary tale to the public.”
SWINE flu is hogging the headlines, but the much more lethal H5N1 avian flu hasn’t gone away, nor has the possibility that the two viruses could create a still more dangerous hybrid strain. Now evidence has emerged that some clams can clear water of the avian flu virus. A team led by Christina Faust of the University of Georgia in Athens tested the effect of the Asiatic clam (Corbicula fluminea) with wood ducks, which are highly susceptible to avian flu. Other
Fish on the mend IT IS one of those glass half-full moments. Commercial fish stocks in many threatened ecosystems are on the mend, thanks to good stewardship, while 63 per cent are still being fished at unsustainable levels, says a new survey. This is a considerably rosier picture than the one painted by a 2006 study that projected a worldwide collapse of fisheries by 2048, based on current trends. –Recovering– Ray Hilborn of the University of
For daily news stories, visit www.NewScientist.com/news
60 SECONDS
Reefer gladness
Washington in Seattle teamed up with the author of the 2006 report to measured the biomass of species caught each year. They compared this to estimates of sustainable fishing levels (Science, vol 325, p 578). Half of surveyed regions in North America, northern Europe and Oceania showed signs of improvement, but the outlook for sustainable fishing in Africa was bleak. “There are extensively overfished stocks, but there are some examples of decent management and reason for hope,” says Peter Kareiva of the Nature Conservancy in Seattle, Washington.
the corner (The Socionomist, July 2009). “The current mood is very similar to the 1930s,” says Wilson. He argues that during economic downturns people have more serious worries, and view drug use as relatively innocuous, while
MARIJUANA fans take heart. It seems that when times are hard, liberal attitudes to drugs tend to prevail. Euan Wilson of the Socionomics Institute in Gainesville, Georgia, finds that anti-drug laws in the US “During downturns people have more serious worries tend to coincide with high share and view drug use as prices, and legalisation with low. relatively innocuous” Comparing today’s situation with alcohol prohibition in the US between 1920 and 1933, Wilson says drug-runners become more desperate and violent as their that just as alcohol was legalised markets shrink, making society when the economic slump more willing to end the bloodshed reached its nadir, so concessions to marijuana use could be around by lifting prohibition.
Baby steps to Mars
Ship drills deep into Earth’s crust
THEY’RE obscure, small and airless: who’d want to visit an asteroid? NASA astronauts might, because taking a trip to some nearby space rocks could help them learn how to fly to Mars. That’s the view of the committee appointed by the White House to review NASA’s aims, said committee member Edward Crawley of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at a public meeting last week in Cocoa Beach, Florida. The idea is to send astronauts on progressively longer space trips – including visits to asteroids and fly-bys of Venus – to prepare for a landing on Mars. The first mission would fly by the moon. Later missions would include rendezvousing with one or more of the many asteroids whose orbits bring them close to Earth. Asteroid missions would take several months each. Later, astronauts could fly by Venus and Mars, and touch down on Mars’s moon Phobos, which is 27 kilometres across at its widest. Each of these missions would take more than a year. Although Crawley did not say when the first human visit to an asteroid might be, he said it could happen within six years of starting a project to accomplish this goal.
A JAPANESE research ship has drilled a 1.6-kilometre-deep hole in the sea floor while floating on 2 kilometres of ocean – making it the deepest hole ever drilled from a ship. The Chikyu research vessel, operated by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, uses a technique known as riser-drilling, which recirculates viscous “drilling mud” to maintain pressure balance in the borehole. According to Bill Ellsworth of the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, petroleum drilling on land and from stable ocean platforms regularly reaches depths of between 5 and 8 kilometres. The deepest land-based hole, drilled for research purposes on the Kola JAMSTEC/IODP
peninsula in Russia, goes down more than 12 kilometres, but drilling from a ship is a different matter, he says. Nancy Light of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program in Washington DC, which coordinates research drilling projects like Chikyu, says that the new vessel is designed to drill to depths of 12 kilometres beneath the sea floor, while floating on very deep, sometimes tumultuous, seas. The team aims to put pressure and temperature sensors in the borehole to collect signals that may one day help predict earthquakes. The hole is in the subduction zone created by the Philippine plate slipping beneath the Eurasian plate, a geological process that periodically unleashes massive earthquakes and large tsunamis.
Return of El Niño The “child” El Niño is back. Meteorologists say the weather event will be weak to moderate at first, but may strengthen later this year. The effects of El Niño include powerful storm systems in the western US, floods in Central and South America, and droughts in south-east Asia. The last event was in 2006.
Oysters back too After decades of overharvesting, oysters are returning to Chesapeake Bay on the US east coast. Experimental reefs created five years ago are now home to more than 185 million native oysters, say researchers at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg (Science, DOI: 10.1126/ science.1176516).
Bomb pull-forward The US Department of Defense has asked Congress for an extra $68 million to develop a 13-tonne “bunker-busting” bomb called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. The Pentagon declined to say why it now wants the bomb by July 2010 – a year earlier than planned.
Vampires with SARS? Vampire bats in Brazil carry a virus resembling the one that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). The virus doesn’t hurt the bats, but further tests by Paulo Eduardo Brandão and his colleagues at the University of São Paulo should reveal whether it could cause SARS or any other disease in humans.
Alternative bonanza Americans spent $33.9 billion on complementary and alternative medicine in 2007, amounting to 11.2 per cent of total personal expenditure on medicines. About 38 per cent of the adult population bought complementary and alternative products, according to a report released on 30 July by the US National Center for Health Statistics.
–Chikyu is exploring a subduction zone– 8 August 2009 | NewScientist | 7
UPFRONT
Fungus at Afghan border SPRING rains brought a bumper wheat harvest to Afghan farmers this year, and the opium poppies were safely brought in because US president Barack Obama withdrew troops he had sent to destroy drug crops. But the beleaguered country can’t rest easy. The Ug99 wheat rust, a virulent fungus that wipes out entire crops, is poised to cross the border from Iran. Fungal spores have been spreading on the wind from Uganda, where the disease was first discovered in 1999. They reached the wheat fields of Iran two years ago, prompting scientists to warn that millions in Asia were at risk of starvation. If the epidemic reaches Afghanistan, its effects would be catastrophic. “Nearly all farmers in Afghanistan grow wheat for food or sale,” says Mahmood Osmanzai, a
scientist working for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in the country. Most of the wheat varieties grown in Afghanistan, and indeed around the world, are vulnerable to Ug99. The fungus could undermine US efforts to help the nation. Obama’s special representative in Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, said last week that trying to eradicate the country’s profitable poppy crop had “driven people into the hands of the Taliban”. Now, he said, the money was being spent on agricultural assistance for food crops, including finding local wheat varieties resistant to Ug99. The aim is to make wheat more profitable than poppies. If the fungus arrives first, those efforts could well go to waste.
Clam busts bird flu
bivalves that concentrate harmful viruses can poison birds or humans that eat them, but these clams somehow deactivated H5N1. “Birds that were fed clams exposed to the virus for 48 hours didn’t get flu,” says Faust. Nor did ducks suffer if they drank water filtered by the clams, but all ducks that drank unfiltered water died, the team reports in Proceedings of the Royal Society B (DOI: 10.1098/ rspb.2009.0572). Introducing these clams into lakes and rivers might hamper the spread of flu, though ecological studies would be needed first.
–A bumper wheat crop for now–
Stem cell infamy
“If the people that have been arrested have done something illegal, their arrest is good news” However, the university said that “no questions have been raised about the science conducted or the conclusions of the research”. Over in the US, meanwhile, new questions raised by New Scientist 6 | NewScientist | 8 August 2009
STEVEN KAZLOWSKI/STILL PICTURES
IT HAS been a bad couple of weeks for stem cells. Police in Hungary have arrested four people they suspect of running an illegal centre in Budapest for treatments using stem cells. The police said that the treatments were unproven, used stem cells taken from embryos or aborted fetuses, and cost as much as $25,000 per person. In the UK, researchers at Newcastle University who claimed last month to have made sperm from stem cells have agreed to withdraw their paper reporting the breakthrough, admitting that the first couple of paragraphs had been plagiarised.
are being considered at the Stem Cell Institute of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (see page 12). Mainstream stem cell researchers alarmed by the reports from Hungary have praised the police. “If the people that have been arrested have done something illegal, their arrest is good news,” says Robin Lovell-Badge of the National Institute for Medical Research in London. “I hope it scares others from offering untested treatments and will be a cautionary tale to the public.”
SWINE flu is hogging the headlines, but the much more lethal H5N1 avian flu hasn’t gone away, nor has the possibility that the two viruses could create a still more dangerous hybrid strain. Now evidence has emerged that some clams can clear water of the avian flu virus. A team led by Christina Faust of the University of Georgia in Athens tested the effect of the Asiatic clam (Corbicula fluminea) with wood ducks, which are highly susceptible to avian flu. Other
Fish on the mend IT IS one of those glass half-full moments. Commercial fish stocks in many threatened ecosystems are on the mend, thanks to good stewardship, while 63 per cent are still being fished at unsustainable levels, says a new survey. This is a considerably rosier picture than the one painted by a 2006 study that projected a worldwide collapse of fisheries by 2048, based on current trends. –Recovering– Ray Hilborn of the University of
For daily news stories, visit www.NewScientist.com/news
60 SECONDS
Reefer gladness
Washington in Seattle teamed up with the author of the 2006 report to measured the biomass of species caught each year. They compared this to estimates of sustainable fishing levels (Science, vol 325, p 578). Half of surveyed regions in North America, northern Europe and Oceania showed signs of improvement, but the outlook for sustainable fishing in Africa was bleak. “There are extensively overfished stocks, but there are some examples of decent management and reason for hope,” says Peter Kareiva of the Nature Conservancy in Seattle, Washington.
the corner (The Socionomist, July 2009). “The current mood is very similar to the 1930s,” says Wilson. He argues that during economic downturns people have more serious worries, and view drug use as relatively innocuous, while
MARIJUANA fans take heart. It seems that when times are hard, liberal attitudes to drugs tend to prevail. Euan Wilson of the Socionomics Institute in Gainesville, Georgia, finds that anti-drug laws in the US “During downturns people have more serious worries tend to coincide with high share and view drug use as prices, and legalisation with low. relatively innocuous” Comparing today’s situation with alcohol prohibition in the US between 1920 and 1933, Wilson says drug-runners become more desperate and violent as their that just as alcohol was legalised markets shrink, making society when the economic slump more willing to end the bloodshed reached its nadir, so concessions to marijuana use could be around by lifting prohibition.
Baby steps to Mars
Ship drills deep into Earth’s crust
THEY’RE obscure, small and airless: who’d want to visit an asteroid? NASA astronauts might, because taking a trip to some nearby space rocks could help them learn how to fly to Mars. That’s the view of the committee appointed by the White House to review NASA’s aims, said committee member Edward Crawley of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at a public meeting last week in Cocoa Beach, Florida. The idea is to send astronauts on progressively longer space trips – including visits to asteroids and fly-bys of Venus – to prepare for a landing on Mars. The first mission would fly by the moon. Later missions would include rendezvousing with one or more of the many asteroids whose orbits bring them close to Earth. Asteroid missions would take several months each. Later, astronauts could fly by Venus and Mars, and touch down on Mars’s moon Phobos, which is 27 kilometres across at its widest. Each of these missions would take more than a year. Although Crawley did not say when the first human visit to an asteroid might be, he said it could happen within six years of starting a project to accomplish this goal.
A JAPANESE research ship has drilled a 1.6-kilometre-deep hole in the sea floor while floating on 2 kilometres of ocean – making it the deepest hole ever drilled from a ship. The Chikyu research vessel, operated by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, uses a technique known as riser-drilling, which recirculates viscous “drilling mud” to maintain pressure balance in the borehole. According to Bill Ellsworth of the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, petroleum drilling on land and from stable ocean platforms regularly reaches depths of between 5 and 8 kilometres. The deepest land-based hole, drilled for research purposes on the Kola JAMSTEC/IODP
peninsula in Russia, goes down more than 12 kilometres, but drilling from a ship is a different matter, he says. Nancy Light of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program in Washington DC, which coordinates research drilling projects like Chikyu, says that the new vessel is designed to drill to depths of 12 kilometres beneath the sea floor, while floating on very deep, sometimes tumultuous, seas. The team aims to put pressure and temperature sensors in the borehole to collect signals that may one day help predict earthquakes. The hole is in the subduction zone created by the Philippine plate slipping beneath the Eurasian plate, a geological process that periodically unleashes massive earthquakes and large tsunamis.
Return of El Niño The “child” El Niño is back. Meteorologists say the weather event will be weak to moderate at first, but may strengthen later this year. The effects of El Niño include powerful storm systems in the western US, floods in Central and South America, and droughts in south-east Asia. The last event was in 2006.
Oysters back too After decades of overharvesting, oysters are returning to Chesapeake Bay on the US east coast. Experimental reefs created five years ago are now home to more than 185 million native oysters, say researchers at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg (Science, DOI: 10.1126/ science.1176516).
Bomb pull-forward The US Department of Defense has asked Congress for an extra $68 million to develop a 13-tonne “bunker-busting” bomb called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. The Pentagon declined to say why it now wants the bomb by July 2010 – a year earlier than planned.
Vampires with SARS? Vampire bats in Brazil carry a virus resembling the one that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). The virus doesn’t hurt the bats, but further tests by Paulo Eduardo Brandão and his colleagues at the University of São Paulo should reveal whether it could cause SARS or any other disease in humans.
Alternative bonanza Americans spent $33.9 billion on complementary and alternative medicine in 2007, amounting to 11.2 per cent of total personal expenditure on medicines. About 38 per cent of the adult population bought complementary and alternative products, according to a report released on 30 July by the US National Center for Health Statistics.
–Chikyu is exploring a subduction zone– 8 August 2009 | NewScientist | 7