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Haiti's cholera outbreak will go from bad to worse
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Political rocketry
survive where other species might not, such as mice and ryegrass, also happen to be the best reservoirs for infection, Keesing’s team found. She believes this is because weed species tend to live fast and die young, putting their energy into rapid growth and reproduction instead of immunity. There are too many examples of both plants and animals for this to be just coincidence, she says. Diseases of wildlife can jump to people. Keesing says we need to find landscapes that maintain enough biodiversity to keep a lid on them.
60 Seconds
into law in October legally requires the use of the motors, but in fact the law leaves a significant loophole. It says NASA should use existing technology from the shuttle and the now-defunct Ares
POLITICAL clout may play a role in the design of NASA’s next heavy-lift launcher. Congressmen from Utah are pressuring NASA to promise that “Utah Congressmen want the rocket will use solid-fuel motors like those produced by the NASA to promise that Utah firm ATK. They recently met its next rocket will use with NASA chief Charles Bolden to solid-fuel motors” “explain [our] interest in ensuring launchers – both of which use that Utah’s solid rocket motor solid rocket boosters – “to the industry is protected”, Senator extent practicable”. Orrin Hatch said. The US’s previous heavy-lift The delegation claims that launcher, the powerful Saturn V, the NASA authorisation bill that did not use solid rockets. President Barack Obama signed
Haiti’s cholera set to soar
Meteorite lightning
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
SPACE debris falling into CHOLERA in Haiti is spreading faster than expected, with the World Health the atmosphere may cause Organization now predicting 400,000 mysterious ball lightning. cases before this outbreak subsides, Thousands of people have seen half of these in the next three months. floating orbs of light, sometimes The count stood at less than 100,000 during thunderstorms, but their as New Scientist went to press. origin has never been established. Only 2.3 per cent of the sick are The weather was clear when Don dying, partly because of prompt Vernon, a farmer in Queensland, rehydration therapy. But, ominously, Australia, spotted two green reports suggest doctors are already balls descending from the sky struggling to cope with the existing on 16 May 2006. Oddly, the number of cases. United Nations’ second rolled down a hill, officials and aid groups have issued bounced and then vanished. pleas for more international aid. Stephen Hughes, an The epidemic could be slowed if astrophysicist at the Queensland many Haitians could be given one University of Technology in of the three oral cholera vaccines Brisbane, says the first was available – but there are no plans probably a bright meteor caused for this as there are “too few by debris from Comet 73P, which came closer to Earth at that time than any other comet in 20 years. The second, he says, was ball lightning triggered by the meteor. The cometary debris ionised the atmospheric gas it passed through, boosting the current that normally flows between the ionosphere – an electrically charged region in the upper atmosphere – and the ground, Hughes believes. When this “supercharged” conduit hit the soil, it formed a plasma ball, he argues (Proceedings of the Royal Society A, DOI: 10.1098/rspa.2010. 0409). Impacting space junk might –Prompt therapy saves lives– also produce the effect, he says.
doses on hand”, says Peter Hotez at George Washington University in Washington DC. People in regions in which cholera is prevalent do not use much vaccine as vaccine immunity is brief. Vaccines are mostly used by travellers, so only small amounts are made. Hotez and others are calling for a global stockpile for emergencies. Some scientists have suggested that Haiti’s cholera originated with natural populations of marine bacteria. Matt Waldor, a cholera specialist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, calls this “wrong”, and says “the genetic and epidemiologic evidence that human activities account for the introduction… is overwhelming”. See page 26 for more on the outbreak’s origins.
Rise of the dinos The collapse of tropical rainforests 300 million years ago paved the way for the rise of the dinosaurs. As the forests died back, early reptiles evolved a host of new lifestyles to cope, including eating plants and hunting each other (Geology, vol 38, p 1079).
Toxic snow on Everest Following in Edmund Hillary’s footsteps? Don’t drink the water on your way up. Dangerous levels of arsenic and cadmium have been found in snow samples from Mount Everest, 7000 metres above sea level. Pollution from Asian industry is probably to blame (Soil Survey Horizons, vol 51, p 72).
Extreme HIV evolution Just a century after making the leap from chimpanzees to humans, HIV-1 has evolved into an astonishing 48 new strains, according to a history of the virus. Substantially different forms of HIV could evolve in the future, making it more difficult to combat (The Lancet Infectious Diseases, DOI: 10.1016/S14733099(10)70186-9).
Red dwarf bounty The universe contains three times as many stars as we thought. For the first time, astronomers at Yale University have identified the faint signature of red dwarfs outside the Milky Way. In eight nearby elliptical galaxies, the researchers found that the low-mass, dim stars were more bountiful than expected (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature09578).
Car bomb kills physicist Majid Shahriari, a nuclear physicist at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, Iran, has been killed in a bomb attack in the capital. In January, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, a particle physicist at the University of Tehran, was also killed in a car bomb attack. Iran says the killings are linked to its nuclear programme.
4 December 2010 | NewScientist | 7
Political rocketry
survive where other species might not, such as mice and ryegrass, also happen to be the best reservoirs for infection, Keesing’s team found. She believes this is because weed species tend to live fast and die young, putting their energy into rapid growth and reproduction instead of immunity. There are too many examples of both plants and animals for this to be just coincidence, she says. Diseases of wildlife can jump to people. Keesing says we need to find landscapes that maintain enough biodiversity to keep a lid on them.
60 Seconds
into law in October legally requires the use of the motors, but in fact the law leaves a significant loophole. It says NASA should use existing technology from the shuttle and the now-defunct Ares
POLITICAL clout may play a role in the design of NASA’s next heavy-lift launcher. Congressmen from Utah are pressuring NASA to promise that “Utah Congressmen want the rocket will use solid-fuel motors like those produced by the NASA to promise that Utah firm ATK. They recently met its next rocket will use with NASA chief Charles Bolden to solid-fuel motors” “explain [our] interest in ensuring launchers – both of which use that Utah’s solid rocket motor solid rocket boosters – “to the industry is protected”, Senator extent practicable”. Orrin Hatch said. The US’s previous heavy-lift The delegation claims that launcher, the powerful Saturn V, the NASA authorisation bill that did not use solid rockets. President Barack Obama signed
Haiti’s cholera set to soar
Meteorite lightning
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
SPACE debris falling into CHOLERA in Haiti is spreading faster than expected, with the World Health the atmosphere may cause Organization now predicting 400,000 mysterious ball lightning. cases before this outbreak subsides, Thousands of people have seen half of these in the next three months. floating orbs of light, sometimes The count stood at less than 100,000 during thunderstorms, but their as New Scientist went to press. origin has never been established. Only 2.3 per cent of the sick are The weather was clear when Don dying, partly because of prompt Vernon, a farmer in Queensland, rehydration therapy. But, ominously, Australia, spotted two green reports suggest doctors are already balls descending from the sky struggling to cope with the existing on 16 May 2006. Oddly, the number of cases. United Nations’ second rolled down a hill, officials and aid groups have issued bounced and then vanished. pleas for more international aid. Stephen Hughes, an The epidemic could be slowed if astrophysicist at the Queensland many Haitians could be given one University of Technology in of the three oral cholera vaccines Brisbane, says the first was available – but there are no plans probably a bright meteor caused for this as there are “too few by debris from Comet 73P, which came closer to Earth at that time than any other comet in 20 years. The second, he says, was ball lightning triggered by the meteor. The cometary debris ionised the atmospheric gas it passed through, boosting the current that normally flows between the ionosphere – an electrically charged region in the upper atmosphere – and the ground, Hughes believes. When this “supercharged” conduit hit the soil, it formed a plasma ball, he argues (Proceedings of the Royal Society A, DOI: 10.1098/rspa.2010. 0409). Impacting space junk might –Prompt therapy saves lives– also produce the effect, he says.
doses on hand”, says Peter Hotez at George Washington University in Washington DC. People in regions in which cholera is prevalent do not use much vaccine as vaccine immunity is brief. Vaccines are mostly used by travellers, so only small amounts are made. Hotez and others are calling for a global stockpile for emergencies. Some scientists have suggested that Haiti’s cholera originated with natural populations of marine bacteria. Matt Waldor, a cholera specialist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, calls this “wrong”, and says “the genetic and epidemiologic evidence that human activities account for the introduction… is overwhelming”. See page 26 for more on the outbreak’s origins.
Rise of the dinos The collapse of tropical rainforests 300 million years ago paved the way for the rise of the dinosaurs. As the forests died back, early reptiles evolved a host of new lifestyles to cope, including eating plants and hunting each other (Geology, vol 38, p 1079).
Toxic snow on Everest Following in Edmund Hillary’s footsteps? Don’t drink the water on your way up. Dangerous levels of arsenic and cadmium have been found in snow samples from Mount Everest, 7000 metres above sea level. Pollution from Asian industry is probably to blame (Soil Survey Horizons, vol 51, p 72).
Extreme HIV evolution Just a century after making the leap from chimpanzees to humans, HIV-1 has evolved into an astonishing 48 new strains, according to a history of the virus. Substantially different forms of HIV could evolve in the future, making it more difficult to combat (The Lancet Infectious Diseases, DOI: 10.1016/S14733099(10)70186-9).
Red dwarf bounty The universe contains three times as many stars as we thought. For the first time, astronomers at Yale University have identified the faint signature of red dwarfs outside the Milky Way. In eight nearby elliptical galaxies, the researchers found that the low-mass, dim stars were more bountiful than expected (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature09578).
Car bomb kills physicist Majid Shahriari, a nuclear physicist at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, Iran, has been killed in a bomb attack in the capital. In January, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, a particle physicist at the University of Tehran, was also killed in a car bomb attack. Iran says the killings are linked to its nuclear programme.
4 December 2010 | NewScientist | 7