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In the beginning
60 SECONDS
In the beginning GEORGE SMOOT will be relieved. From now on he’ll be known as a Nobel laureate, rather than the man responsible for saying “if you are a religious person it’s like seeing the face of God”, when describing ripples in the radiation left over from the big bang. On Tuesday, Smoot, of the University of California, Berkeley, and John Mather of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, were awarded the physics Nobel for their work on the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the afterglow of the big bang. The Nobel prize committee credited Mather with being “the true driving force” behind COBE, NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer satellite. Mather was also in charge of the instrument that confirmed the elegant fit between the theoretical curve for “black body” radiation at a temperature of 2.7 kelvin, and the CMB – thus proving that the universe is a near-perfect black body. Smoot was responsible for the other significant experiment on COBE, which mapped the tiny temperature variations in the CMB in different directions. These are a result of fluctuations in the density of the early universe, which were amplified by gravity to give rise to stars and galaxies. www.newscientist.com
061007_N_Ufronts_p6_p7.indd 7
Fusion frenzy IT SOUNDED too good to be true – and it was. When the Chinese news agency Xinhua announced on 29 September that researchers had initiated thermonuclear fusion in a brand-new reactor, news organisations worldwide ran with the story. “During the experiment, deuterium and tritium atoms were forced together at a temperature of 100 million Celsius,” Xinhua reported. There was just one problem: nothing of the kind took place. “The reports were totally wrong,” Jiangang Li, director of the Institute of Plasma Physics in Hefei, Anhui province, told New Scientist. The Chinese researchers had, for the first time, managed to inject a plasma of ionised hydrogen into the Experimental Advanced
“Fusion always causes a lot of media hype because people really want it to happen”
US wins biotech dispute After eight years of wrangling, a trade dispute between the US and Europe over genetically modified crops has reached a conclusion. In a ruling issued on 29 September, the World Trade Organization broadly backed claims by the US, Canada and Argentina that in 1998 Europe illegally introduced a moratorium on approvals of GM crops.
Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), a doughnut-shaped machine designed to confine super-hot plasmas magnetically, and the plasma sustained currents of 250,000 amps for up to 3 seconds. But no attempt was made to introduce deuterium or tritium into the plasma, so no fusion can have occurred. Not everyone swallowed the stories. “I didn’t believe the online reports,” says Chris Carpenter at the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion research centre in the UK. “Fusion is always something that causes a lot of media hype because people really want it to happen.”
Martian Spirit intact The Mars rover Spirit has survived the planet’s winter. NASA announced on 29 September that the rover’s solar power rose to around 296 watt-hours this week, up from a winter low of 275 watt-hours on 18 August. NASA has uploaded new software to Spirit and says the rover is operating well.
Record ozone hole
AND FOR MY NEXT FIX… No wonder appetite-suppressants don’t work. It turns out that obese people are as addicted to food as junkies are to their drugs. Gene-Jack Wang at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, and his colleagues scanned the brains of seven obese people who had had electrodes implanted in their stomachs to trigger the nerves involved in digestion and fool them into thinking they were full. The scans revealed that the same areas of a brain region called the hippocampus were activated in the
The ozone hole over the South Pole reached record proportions on 2 October. The European Space Agency’s Envisat satellite found that the hole was big enough to hold 40 million tonnes of ozone, exceeding the previous record of 39 million tonnes set in 2000. The hole is typically biggest in September and persists until November or December.
obese people as in drug addicts craving their next fix (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0601977103). “They can’t suppress their craving,” says Wang. Perhaps, therefore, it is not surprising that yet another appetitesuppressing drug has failed to deliver. MK-0557 is designed to block a hunger signal that the stomach delivers to neuropeptide receptors in the brain. Although people did lose weight while taking the drug, it wasn’t enough to make a meaningful difference Cell Metabolism (vol 4, p 275).
No creationism please
GETTY
supply of new guns to criminals in the city by 44 per cent. While the shop was selling the handguns, it took 90 days on average before police confiscated them from criminals. Now that the store’s cheapest gun costs $350, the average period is five and a half years, says Milton “Mick” Beatovic, the store’s co-owner. “Almost exactly to the date of the change in sales practices, we saw virtually no more of these junk guns being recovered from criminals,” says Daniel Webster of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who led the new research, published in the Journal of Urban Health (DOI: 10.1007/s11524-006-9073-2).
Christians and atheists joined forces last week to urge the British government to prevent creationism infiltrating school science classes. The UK Christian think tank Ekklesia and the British Humanist Association wrote a joint letter to the Department for Education and Skills after an anti-evolution group distributed materials to UK schools.
Egg payments nixed Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, signed in a law on 26 September forbidding researchers from paying women to donate eggs for embryonic stem cell research. The law also makes it compulsory to warn donors of potential risks and to acquire written and oral consent beforehand. –Feeding a habit– 7 October 2006 | NewScientist | 7
3/10/06 5:19:21 pm
In the beginning GEORGE SMOOT will be relieved. From now on he’ll be known as a Nobel laureate, rather than the man responsible for saying “if you are a religious person it’s like seeing the face of God”, when describing ripples in the radiation left over from the big bang. On Tuesday, Smoot, of the University of California, Berkeley, and John Mather of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, were awarded the physics Nobel for their work on the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the afterglow of the big bang. The Nobel prize committee credited Mather with being “the true driving force” behind COBE, NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer satellite. Mather was also in charge of the instrument that confirmed the elegant fit between the theoretical curve for “black body” radiation at a temperature of 2.7 kelvin, and the CMB – thus proving that the universe is a near-perfect black body. Smoot was responsible for the other significant experiment on COBE, which mapped the tiny temperature variations in the CMB in different directions. These are a result of fluctuations in the density of the early universe, which were amplified by gravity to give rise to stars and galaxies. www.newscientist.com
061007_N_Ufronts_p6_p7.indd 7
Fusion frenzy IT SOUNDED too good to be true – and it was. When the Chinese news agency Xinhua announced on 29 September that researchers had initiated thermonuclear fusion in a brand-new reactor, news organisations worldwide ran with the story. “During the experiment, deuterium and tritium atoms were forced together at a temperature of 100 million Celsius,” Xinhua reported. There was just one problem: nothing of the kind took place. “The reports were totally wrong,” Jiangang Li, director of the Institute of Plasma Physics in Hefei, Anhui province, told New Scientist. The Chinese researchers had, for the first time, managed to inject a plasma of ionised hydrogen into the Experimental Advanced
“Fusion always causes a lot of media hype because people really want it to happen”
US wins biotech dispute After eight years of wrangling, a trade dispute between the US and Europe over genetically modified crops has reached a conclusion. In a ruling issued on 29 September, the World Trade Organization broadly backed claims by the US, Canada and Argentina that in 1998 Europe illegally introduced a moratorium on approvals of GM crops.
Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), a doughnut-shaped machine designed to confine super-hot plasmas magnetically, and the plasma sustained currents of 250,000 amps for up to 3 seconds. But no attempt was made to introduce deuterium or tritium into the plasma, so no fusion can have occurred. Not everyone swallowed the stories. “I didn’t believe the online reports,” says Chris Carpenter at the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion research centre in the UK. “Fusion is always something that causes a lot of media hype because people really want it to happen.”
Martian Spirit intact The Mars rover Spirit has survived the planet’s winter. NASA announced on 29 September that the rover’s solar power rose to around 296 watt-hours this week, up from a winter low of 275 watt-hours on 18 August. NASA has uploaded new software to Spirit and says the rover is operating well.
Record ozone hole
AND FOR MY NEXT FIX… No wonder appetite-suppressants don’t work. It turns out that obese people are as addicted to food as junkies are to their drugs. Gene-Jack Wang at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, and his colleagues scanned the brains of seven obese people who had had electrodes implanted in their stomachs to trigger the nerves involved in digestion and fool them into thinking they were full. The scans revealed that the same areas of a brain region called the hippocampus were activated in the
The ozone hole over the South Pole reached record proportions on 2 October. The European Space Agency’s Envisat satellite found that the hole was big enough to hold 40 million tonnes of ozone, exceeding the previous record of 39 million tonnes set in 2000. The hole is typically biggest in September and persists until November or December.
obese people as in drug addicts craving their next fix (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0601977103). “They can’t suppress their craving,” says Wang. Perhaps, therefore, it is not surprising that yet another appetitesuppressing drug has failed to deliver. MK-0557 is designed to block a hunger signal that the stomach delivers to neuropeptide receptors in the brain. Although people did lose weight while taking the drug, it wasn’t enough to make a meaningful difference Cell Metabolism (vol 4, p 275).
No creationism please
GETTY
supply of new guns to criminals in the city by 44 per cent. While the shop was selling the handguns, it took 90 days on average before police confiscated them from criminals. Now that the store’s cheapest gun costs $350, the average period is five and a half years, says Milton “Mick” Beatovic, the store’s co-owner. “Almost exactly to the date of the change in sales practices, we saw virtually no more of these junk guns being recovered from criminals,” says Daniel Webster of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who led the new research, published in the Journal of Urban Health (DOI: 10.1007/s11524-006-9073-2).
Christians and atheists joined forces last week to urge the British government to prevent creationism infiltrating school science classes. The UK Christian think tank Ekklesia and the British Humanist Association wrote a joint letter to the Department for Education and Skills after an anti-evolution group distributed materials to UK schools.
Egg payments nixed Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, signed in a law on 26 September forbidding researchers from paying women to donate eggs for embryonic stem cell research. The law also makes it compulsory to warn donors of potential risks and to acquire written and oral consent beforehand. –Feeding a habit– 7 October 2006 | NewScientist | 7
3/10/06 5:19:21 pm