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Lunar ice? No dice
60 SECONDS there show signs of the killer lung disease asbestosis. It is one of the most dangerous industries to work in, says Paul Bailey of the International Labour Organization, especially as the vast majority of ships are now being scrapped in developing countries. As well as asbestos ships often contain PVC, heavy metals and antifouling agents. Asbestos is legal to import and reuse in India. “They import hundreds of thousands of tonnes each year,” says Bailey. Banning import and requiring pre-cleaning wouldn’t help, he believes: owners would just take their ships elsewhere, so the responsibility must rest with them, he says.
DON’T say cloning, say somatic cell nuclear transfer. That at least is the view of biologists who want the term to be used instead of “therapeutic cloning” to describe the technique that produces cloned embryos from which stem cells can then be isolated. This, they argue, will help to distinguish it from attempts to clone a human being. But will it? Kathy Hudson and her colleagues at the Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC asked more than 2000 Americans whether they approved of deriving stem cells from embryos produced by
Lunar ice? No dice
SEEING RED BRINGS HUNGER
“Thick deposits of ice that could be a usable resource seem to be ruled out” Nature this week (DOI: 10.1038/ nature05167) that unusual radar signals formerly attributed to water ice are also reflected from sunlit areas where ice could not survive. “There could be ice in small grains,” Campbell told New Scientist, but thick deposits that could be a usable resource seem to be ruled out. The same conclusion was reported a few days earlier by David Paige of the University of California, Los Angeles, whose team calculated temperatures around the lunar south pole and found that most of the “cold traps” could not be filled with ice. www.newscientist.com
The four horsemen of the apocalypse are said to ride together. Now it seems that at least in the case of war, famine and death, it’s true. That’s the overwhelming message from a global analysis of malnutrition by the International Food Policy Research Institute. Perhaps unsurprisingly, nine of the 12 countries with the severest hunger were racked by civil war or violent conflict. Many of the countries that score worst are in sub-Saharan Africa, marked in red on the map. “It demonstrates there should be a focus on conflict prevention and resolution,” says project leader Doris Wiesmann. “But even under difficult conditions, investment in
“Using the term ‘SCNT’ instead of ‘cloning’ dramatically raised approval ratings”
Supersized element By firing calcium-48 nuclei at a target made of californium-245, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have made element 118, the heaviest yet. The team claims 99.99 per cent certainty, based on three separate observations of the decay products of the 118 nucleus. A similar report by a different team in 1999 was later retracted.
cloning. For half of the sample they used the term “SCNT” instead of “cloning”, and this raised approval ratings from 29 per cent to 46 per cent, Hudson told a meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics in New Orleans last week. SCNT would also be used in any attempt to clone a human being, so Hudson also asked about creating babies using SCNT. This too raised the approval rate from 10 per cent to 24 per cent – which is not what scientists had in mind.
Korea confirmation US officials have confirmed that an underground detonation in North Korea was indeed a nuclear explosion of “less than a kiloton” in yield. The confirmation was based on radioactive by-products present in air samples gathered by American aircraft.
Calling the shots
infrastructure, health and education can be beneficial.” Wiesmann says the analysis carries extra weight because the “global hunger index” that she used combines three major indicators of hunger into a single measurement – child mortality, child malnutrition and estimates of the proportion of calorie-deficient people in each country. Wiesmann also found “hotspots” of hunger in south-east Asia, despite huge progress overall in the region thanks to the transformation of agriculture during the “green revolution” of the 1970s. These include parts of India, where women and children often go hungry because men traditionally get to eat their fill first, she says.
The US military is to resume mandatory vaccination against anthrax for 200,000 troops in Iraq, Korea and Afghanistan. In 2004 a federal court ordered vaccination to be voluntary pending safety assessments, after many soldiers complained of serious side effects. The authorities now insist it is safe.
China’s patent surge Evidence of China’s rapid technological expansion appears in a report showing that patent filings by Chinese residents soared fivefold to 65,786 between 1995 and 2004, according to an analysis issued by the World Intellectual Property Organization. China’s patent office is now the fifth-largest in the world, behind Japan, the US, South Korea and Germany.
GLOBAL HUNGER INDEX
Food in the bank
Excluded
No data
Low to moderate
Serious
Alarming
Extremely alarming
SOURCE: FAO 2005, WHO 2006, UNICEF 2005
MOONBASE planners hoping they might get oxygen and fuel as well as water from ice near the lunar poles have seen the idea melt away over the past two weeks. Using the giant Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, Donald Campbell of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and colleagues have obtained the highestresolution radar imagery ever of the shadowy craters near the moon’s south pole thought to harbour ice. They report in
Drop the c-word
Access to genes from the world’s key food crops has been granted to plant breeders, farmers and researchers. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization marked World Food Day on Monday by signing agreements with agricultural research centres holding collections of around 600,000 plants. The aim is to ensure that the genetic resources these plants contain are conserved and sustainably used.
21 October 2006 | NewScientist | 7
DON’T say cloning, say somatic cell nuclear transfer. That at least is the view of biologists who want the term to be used instead of “therapeutic cloning” to describe the technique that produces cloned embryos from which stem cells can then be isolated. This, they argue, will help to distinguish it from attempts to clone a human being. But will it? Kathy Hudson and her colleagues at the Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC asked more than 2000 Americans whether they approved of deriving stem cells from embryos produced by
Lunar ice? No dice
SEEING RED BRINGS HUNGER
“Thick deposits of ice that could be a usable resource seem to be ruled out” Nature this week (DOI: 10.1038/ nature05167) that unusual radar signals formerly attributed to water ice are also reflected from sunlit areas where ice could not survive. “There could be ice in small grains,” Campbell told New Scientist, but thick deposits that could be a usable resource seem to be ruled out. The same conclusion was reported a few days earlier by David Paige of the University of California, Los Angeles, whose team calculated temperatures around the lunar south pole and found that most of the “cold traps” could not be filled with ice. www.newscientist.com
The four horsemen of the apocalypse are said to ride together. Now it seems that at least in the case of war, famine and death, it’s true. That’s the overwhelming message from a global analysis of malnutrition by the International Food Policy Research Institute. Perhaps unsurprisingly, nine of the 12 countries with the severest hunger were racked by civil war or violent conflict. Many of the countries that score worst are in sub-Saharan Africa, marked in red on the map. “It demonstrates there should be a focus on conflict prevention and resolution,” says project leader Doris Wiesmann. “But even under difficult conditions, investment in
“Using the term ‘SCNT’ instead of ‘cloning’ dramatically raised approval ratings”
Supersized element By firing calcium-48 nuclei at a target made of californium-245, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have made element 118, the heaviest yet. The team claims 99.99 per cent certainty, based on three separate observations of the decay products of the 118 nucleus. A similar report by a different team in 1999 was later retracted.
cloning. For half of the sample they used the term “SCNT” instead of “cloning”, and this raised approval ratings from 29 per cent to 46 per cent, Hudson told a meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics in New Orleans last week. SCNT would also be used in any attempt to clone a human being, so Hudson also asked about creating babies using SCNT. This too raised the approval rate from 10 per cent to 24 per cent – which is not what scientists had in mind.
Korea confirmation US officials have confirmed that an underground detonation in North Korea was indeed a nuclear explosion of “less than a kiloton” in yield. The confirmation was based on radioactive by-products present in air samples gathered by American aircraft.
Calling the shots
infrastructure, health and education can be beneficial.” Wiesmann says the analysis carries extra weight because the “global hunger index” that she used combines three major indicators of hunger into a single measurement – child mortality, child malnutrition and estimates of the proportion of calorie-deficient people in each country. Wiesmann also found “hotspots” of hunger in south-east Asia, despite huge progress overall in the region thanks to the transformation of agriculture during the “green revolution” of the 1970s. These include parts of India, where women and children often go hungry because men traditionally get to eat their fill first, she says.
The US military is to resume mandatory vaccination against anthrax for 200,000 troops in Iraq, Korea and Afghanistan. In 2004 a federal court ordered vaccination to be voluntary pending safety assessments, after many soldiers complained of serious side effects. The authorities now insist it is safe.
China’s patent surge Evidence of China’s rapid technological expansion appears in a report showing that patent filings by Chinese residents soared fivefold to 65,786 between 1995 and 2004, according to an analysis issued by the World Intellectual Property Organization. China’s patent office is now the fifth-largest in the world, behind Japan, the US, South Korea and Germany.
GLOBAL HUNGER INDEX
Food in the bank
Excluded
No data
Low to moderate
Serious
Alarming
Extremely alarming
SOURCE: FAO 2005, WHO 2006, UNICEF 2005
MOONBASE planners hoping they might get oxygen and fuel as well as water from ice near the lunar poles have seen the idea melt away over the past two weeks. Using the giant Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, Donald Campbell of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and colleagues have obtained the highestresolution radar imagery ever of the shadowy craters near the moon’s south pole thought to harbour ice. They report in
Drop the c-word
Access to genes from the world’s key food crops has been granted to plant breeders, farmers and researchers. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization marked World Food Day on Monday by signing agreements with agricultural research centres holding collections of around 600,000 plants. The aim is to ensure that the genetic resources these plants contain are conserved and sustainably used.
21 October 2006 | NewScientist | 7