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NASA bids farewell to Phoenix lander
News in perspective
DAMON WINTER/NYT/REDUX/EYEVINE
Upfront– HISTORIC DAY FOR FORECASTERS Barack Obama’s win was as much a triumph for mathematicians. For all the inherent uncertainties in electoral outcomes, the 2008 contest may be the one that established election forecasting as a powerful predictive science. Even pollsters who predicted Barack Obama’s smooth ride to the White House were aware of a possible fly in the ointment: the so-called Bradley effect, in which white voters say they will vote for a black candidate for fear of seeming racist if they admit otherwise. Statisticians are still crunching the data, but say that only a weak effect has emerged. Pollsters say this is because voters could cite valid reasons for preferring John McCain – such as Obama’s relative lack of experience. Harvard historian Allan Lichtman predicted Obama’s win back in 2006
on the basis of previous election trends, such as a tendency for voters to favour the opposition in hard economic times. It is the seventh consecutive election that Lichtman has correctly forecast, though he admitted that since Obama was the first black presidential candidate there was no precedent with which to assess the effect of race. Meanwhile Nate Silver, a baseball statistician turned political pundit, called the result to within 1 per cent. Silver relied on poll data, using a variety of statistical techniques to smooth out the errors that plague survey results. The winning statisticians? The PollyVote website combined Lichtman’s and Silver’s methods, plus predictions made by political scientists, to produce a perfect 53 per cent forecast.
Flu hits
Google Flu Trends can detect an outbreak days before it shows up in the weekly CDC reports, says Ferguson. The extra warning time won’t stop outbreaks altogether but could play an important role in helping hospitals prepare for a surge in patient numbers, he suggests. “Even outside of pandemics, just with seasonal flu the severe years can really stress healthcare systems.” If Google’s approach is successful in combating flu, it could be applied to other diseases around the world. It might help to prevent new infectious diseases from taking root, says Larry Brilliant, head of Google.org.
–Obama effect trumps Bradley effect–
AFTER global markets were hit by what may be the worst financial crisis of our times, environmental groups pointed out that an “ecocrunch” would hit even harder. Just how hard is the subject of a new report. Estimating the cost of environmental crises is difficult. In 2006, economist Nicholas Stern rocked the world by putting a £2.3 trillion price tag on the consequences of ignoring climate change. “He may have been right – who knows? – but Stern had a huge effect” in communicating the scale of the problem, says Nick Johnstone, an economist at the OECD, which produced the new report: Costs of Inaction on Key Environmental Challenges. Johnstone and his team
“Mismanaging natural disasters costs the poorest countries 13 per cent of their GDP” compiled research on air and water pollution, climate change, groundwater management, industrial hazards and natural disasters to estimate the costs of inaction for each problem. 6 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008
But, unlike the Stern review, their report gives no global figure of predicted financial doom. Instead, it calculated the economic damage on a countryby-country basis. Mismanaging natural disasters costs the poorest countries more than 13 per cent of their GDP, for example, and air pollution costs China about 3.8 per cent of GDP in poor health. Johnstone says the report gives environment ministers bargaining chips. For example, attempts to reduce air pollution would be more compelling if the treasury can be persuaded that the initiative will cut national health bills and other costs. NASA/JPL-CALTECH/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
Costly eco-crunch
WHEN the next flu outbreak begins, the first alert may come from a flurry of Google searches. Google Flu Trends, created by the company’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, provides daily estimates of the number of flu cases in the US, based on trends in flu-related internet searches such as queries about symptoms. The estimates made by Google’s new software match the weekly flu statistics compiled by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from doctors’ reports, says Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London.
End of a lander “I CAME, I saw, I dug.” That was the most popular epitaph for the now-defunct Phoenix Mars lander in an online poll last week. On Monday, NASA said that it had lost contact with the lander, bringing the mission to an end. Despite attempts to contact it using two orbiting spacecraft, Phoenix has been silent since 2 November. “We’re pretty much convinced that the vehicle is no longer available,” says NASA’s –The sun has set on Phoenix– Barry Goldstein. www.newscientist.com
60 SECONDS Phoenix’s end came three weeks earlier than anticipated. The craft’s solar power had been dwindling as the Martian winter approached, and a dust storm late last month accelerated decline by darkening the skies. Phoenix is not expected to survive the Martian winter, when temperatures will drop below -150 ˚C. The solar arrays “will likely crack and fall off the vehicle”, says Goldstein. Still, the team plans to check again in October 2009, when enough sunlight returns to power the lander. “This vehicle has been so superlative in the way it’s been behaving since it landed, nothing would surprise me,” says Goldstein.
Animal lab opens
‘Invisible’ organs
MURRAY’S MOUTH TURNS TOXIC
PIGS really could save our bacon. Organs that are invisible The health of Australia’s Murray-Darling to our immune system and so river system, already shockingly poor, won’t be rejected when they has just taken a turn for the worse. In are transplanted could be ready the past month, tracts of wetland at the within 10 years, thanks to a mouth of the Murray have become as faster way of genetically corrosive as battery acid, forming a engineering pigs. yellow crust of sideronatrite, a mineral Progress towards these that only forms in extremely acid soil. “xenotransplants” has stalled This latest indicator of the river’s through lack of funding and decline is detailed in reports to be problems with the cloning released this week by the CSIRO technique used to engineer the Land and Water research institute in pigs. Now there is a simpler way. Adelaide, South Australia. For years The new technique will alter the drought and mismanagement have DNA in a boar’s sperm cells, and reduced water flows in the Murraytherefore in any future offspring, Darling system, altering salinity, by injecting a virus into its temperature and nutrient levels. But testicles carrying the desired in July last year, a team led by Rob genes – such as those used to Fitzpatrick, who wrote the new reports, “disguise” pig organs. When found a new problem: falling water the boars breed naturally, they should pass on the genetic changes to their piglets. Robert Winston of Hammersmith Hospital in London, who is developing the technique with Carol Readhead of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, revealed at a press conference in London last week that they have got their technique to work in six boars. The pigs’ sperm carried a jellyfish “marker” gene that glows green. The plan is to test tissue from piglets sired by the boars to see if they inherited the gene. –Acid wash– www.newscientist.com
Paying for polio shots Billionaire Bill Gates has said he will help pay for injectable polio vaccines in India, one of the last countries where the disease persists. The current oral treatment has not been successful due to the prevalence of chronic diarrhoea, which prevents the vaccine from working.
“We would not describe this as a victory, as we never sought a battle”
Obesity drug heartbreak Many people who took the anti-obesity drug fenfluramine before it was banned in 1997 carried on developing damage to their heart valves long after stopping the medication, a study of 5743 former users reveals (BMC Medicine, DOI: 10.1186/1741-7015-6-34). Of these, 20 per cent of women and 12 per cent of men were affected. For all ex-users, the chances of needing surgery for valve damage was seven times normal.
firebomb attack in August on the homes of two researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “It is critical that the FBI apprehend the people who committed these felonies,” said FBR president Frankie Trull.
In a lather over hair
levels in Lakes Alexandrina and Albert at the Murray’s mouth in South Australia were exposing the surrounding soils, rich in iron sulphide, to the air. This has led to the production of 240,000 tonnes of sulphuric acid, says Fitzpatrick. “Acid dissolves aluminium, arsenic, zinc and lead, which could contaminate water supplies,” he adds. The discovery of sideronatrite will fuel fears that the acid will seep into the lakes, killing aquatic life. Fitzpatrick says a proposal to flush out the acid with seawater would only be a short-term fix, making the river even saltier than the sea. Two alternatives are being tested around Lake Albert: spreading lime and growing acid-resistant plants to neutralise the acid in the soil.
The evolution of hair needs a rethink. Hair proteins called keratins have been found in chickens and lizards, indicating that they did not evolve after mammals had diverged from reptiles and birds, as was thought. Lizards have the highest concentration of the proteins in their toes, suggesting that they are important for claw formation.
India circles the moon
JEAN PAUL FERRERO/ARDEA
AFTER years of often violent opposition, a controversial British medical research lab opened this week, but few were celebrating. The University of Oxford’s Biomedical Sciences Building suffered a series of setbacks due to threats and criminal damage until new laws stifled violent protests in 2005. It opened on Tuesday, but the university has cautioned against triumphalism. “We would not describe this as a victory, as we never sought a battle,” it says. Meanwhile, the violent element of the anti-vivisection movement is growing in the US and mainland Europe. Figures
from the Foundation for Biomedical Research (FBR) in Washington DC show that US animal activists have committed 508 illegal acts since 2003. In the previous five years, the number was 138. The most recent was a
India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft entered orbit around the moon last Saturday. On 15 November, it will send a mini-probe plummeting towards the surface to beam back video and other observations during a 25-minute descent. Once over, the plan is to turn on the main spacecraft’s instruments, including cameras, spectrometers and radar.
Test nanomaterials now More and more nanomaterials are creeping into consumer products and need urgent testing for safety and environmental impact, says the UK’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. For example, bactericidal nanosilver used in clothing may affect aquatic life. The commission wants Europe’s regulatory rules for chemicals to be extended to such materials.
15 November 2008 | NewScientist | 7
DAMON WINTER/NYT/REDUX/EYEVINE
Upfront– HISTORIC DAY FOR FORECASTERS Barack Obama’s win was as much a triumph for mathematicians. For all the inherent uncertainties in electoral outcomes, the 2008 contest may be the one that established election forecasting as a powerful predictive science. Even pollsters who predicted Barack Obama’s smooth ride to the White House were aware of a possible fly in the ointment: the so-called Bradley effect, in which white voters say they will vote for a black candidate for fear of seeming racist if they admit otherwise. Statisticians are still crunching the data, but say that only a weak effect has emerged. Pollsters say this is because voters could cite valid reasons for preferring John McCain – such as Obama’s relative lack of experience. Harvard historian Allan Lichtman predicted Obama’s win back in 2006
on the basis of previous election trends, such as a tendency for voters to favour the opposition in hard economic times. It is the seventh consecutive election that Lichtman has correctly forecast, though he admitted that since Obama was the first black presidential candidate there was no precedent with which to assess the effect of race. Meanwhile Nate Silver, a baseball statistician turned political pundit, called the result to within 1 per cent. Silver relied on poll data, using a variety of statistical techniques to smooth out the errors that plague survey results. The winning statisticians? The PollyVote website combined Lichtman’s and Silver’s methods, plus predictions made by political scientists, to produce a perfect 53 per cent forecast.
Flu hits
Google Flu Trends can detect an outbreak days before it shows up in the weekly CDC reports, says Ferguson. The extra warning time won’t stop outbreaks altogether but could play an important role in helping hospitals prepare for a surge in patient numbers, he suggests. “Even outside of pandemics, just with seasonal flu the severe years can really stress healthcare systems.” If Google’s approach is successful in combating flu, it could be applied to other diseases around the world. It might help to prevent new infectious diseases from taking root, says Larry Brilliant, head of Google.org.
–Obama effect trumps Bradley effect–
AFTER global markets were hit by what may be the worst financial crisis of our times, environmental groups pointed out that an “ecocrunch” would hit even harder. Just how hard is the subject of a new report. Estimating the cost of environmental crises is difficult. In 2006, economist Nicholas Stern rocked the world by putting a £2.3 trillion price tag on the consequences of ignoring climate change. “He may have been right – who knows? – but Stern had a huge effect” in communicating the scale of the problem, says Nick Johnstone, an economist at the OECD, which produced the new report: Costs of Inaction on Key Environmental Challenges. Johnstone and his team
“Mismanaging natural disasters costs the poorest countries 13 per cent of their GDP” compiled research on air and water pollution, climate change, groundwater management, industrial hazards and natural disasters to estimate the costs of inaction for each problem. 6 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008
But, unlike the Stern review, their report gives no global figure of predicted financial doom. Instead, it calculated the economic damage on a countryby-country basis. Mismanaging natural disasters costs the poorest countries more than 13 per cent of their GDP, for example, and air pollution costs China about 3.8 per cent of GDP in poor health. Johnstone says the report gives environment ministers bargaining chips. For example, attempts to reduce air pollution would be more compelling if the treasury can be persuaded that the initiative will cut national health bills and other costs. NASA/JPL-CALTECH/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
Costly eco-crunch
WHEN the next flu outbreak begins, the first alert may come from a flurry of Google searches. Google Flu Trends, created by the company’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, provides daily estimates of the number of flu cases in the US, based on trends in flu-related internet searches such as queries about symptoms. The estimates made by Google’s new software match the weekly flu statistics compiled by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from doctors’ reports, says Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London.
End of a lander “I CAME, I saw, I dug.” That was the most popular epitaph for the now-defunct Phoenix Mars lander in an online poll last week. On Monday, NASA said that it had lost contact with the lander, bringing the mission to an end. Despite attempts to contact it using two orbiting spacecraft, Phoenix has been silent since 2 November. “We’re pretty much convinced that the vehicle is no longer available,” says NASA’s –The sun has set on Phoenix– Barry Goldstein. www.newscientist.com
60 SECONDS Phoenix’s end came three weeks earlier than anticipated. The craft’s solar power had been dwindling as the Martian winter approached, and a dust storm late last month accelerated decline by darkening the skies. Phoenix is not expected to survive the Martian winter, when temperatures will drop below -150 ˚C. The solar arrays “will likely crack and fall off the vehicle”, says Goldstein. Still, the team plans to check again in October 2009, when enough sunlight returns to power the lander. “This vehicle has been so superlative in the way it’s been behaving since it landed, nothing would surprise me,” says Goldstein.
Animal lab opens
‘Invisible’ organs
MURRAY’S MOUTH TURNS TOXIC
PIGS really could save our bacon. Organs that are invisible The health of Australia’s Murray-Darling to our immune system and so river system, already shockingly poor, won’t be rejected when they has just taken a turn for the worse. In are transplanted could be ready the past month, tracts of wetland at the within 10 years, thanks to a mouth of the Murray have become as faster way of genetically corrosive as battery acid, forming a engineering pigs. yellow crust of sideronatrite, a mineral Progress towards these that only forms in extremely acid soil. “xenotransplants” has stalled This latest indicator of the river’s through lack of funding and decline is detailed in reports to be problems with the cloning released this week by the CSIRO technique used to engineer the Land and Water research institute in pigs. Now there is a simpler way. Adelaide, South Australia. For years The new technique will alter the drought and mismanagement have DNA in a boar’s sperm cells, and reduced water flows in the Murraytherefore in any future offspring, Darling system, altering salinity, by injecting a virus into its temperature and nutrient levels. But testicles carrying the desired in July last year, a team led by Rob genes – such as those used to Fitzpatrick, who wrote the new reports, “disguise” pig organs. When found a new problem: falling water the boars breed naturally, they should pass on the genetic changes to their piglets. Robert Winston of Hammersmith Hospital in London, who is developing the technique with Carol Readhead of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, revealed at a press conference in London last week that they have got their technique to work in six boars. The pigs’ sperm carried a jellyfish “marker” gene that glows green. The plan is to test tissue from piglets sired by the boars to see if they inherited the gene. –Acid wash– www.newscientist.com
Paying for polio shots Billionaire Bill Gates has said he will help pay for injectable polio vaccines in India, one of the last countries where the disease persists. The current oral treatment has not been successful due to the prevalence of chronic diarrhoea, which prevents the vaccine from working.
“We would not describe this as a victory, as we never sought a battle”
Obesity drug heartbreak Many people who took the anti-obesity drug fenfluramine before it was banned in 1997 carried on developing damage to their heart valves long after stopping the medication, a study of 5743 former users reveals (BMC Medicine, DOI: 10.1186/1741-7015-6-34). Of these, 20 per cent of women and 12 per cent of men were affected. For all ex-users, the chances of needing surgery for valve damage was seven times normal.
firebomb attack in August on the homes of two researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “It is critical that the FBI apprehend the people who committed these felonies,” said FBR president Frankie Trull.
In a lather over hair
levels in Lakes Alexandrina and Albert at the Murray’s mouth in South Australia were exposing the surrounding soils, rich in iron sulphide, to the air. This has led to the production of 240,000 tonnes of sulphuric acid, says Fitzpatrick. “Acid dissolves aluminium, arsenic, zinc and lead, which could contaminate water supplies,” he adds. The discovery of sideronatrite will fuel fears that the acid will seep into the lakes, killing aquatic life. Fitzpatrick says a proposal to flush out the acid with seawater would only be a short-term fix, making the river even saltier than the sea. Two alternatives are being tested around Lake Albert: spreading lime and growing acid-resistant plants to neutralise the acid in the soil.
The evolution of hair needs a rethink. Hair proteins called keratins have been found in chickens and lizards, indicating that they did not evolve after mammals had diverged from reptiles and birds, as was thought. Lizards have the highest concentration of the proteins in their toes, suggesting that they are important for claw formation.
India circles the moon
JEAN PAUL FERRERO/ARDEA
AFTER years of often violent opposition, a controversial British medical research lab opened this week, but few were celebrating. The University of Oxford’s Biomedical Sciences Building suffered a series of setbacks due to threats and criminal damage until new laws stifled violent protests in 2005. It opened on Tuesday, but the university has cautioned against triumphalism. “We would not describe this as a victory, as we never sought a battle,” it says. Meanwhile, the violent element of the anti-vivisection movement is growing in the US and mainland Europe. Figures
from the Foundation for Biomedical Research (FBR) in Washington DC show that US animal activists have committed 508 illegal acts since 2003. In the previous five years, the number was 138. The most recent was a
India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft entered orbit around the moon last Saturday. On 15 November, it will send a mini-probe plummeting towards the surface to beam back video and other observations during a 25-minute descent. Once over, the plan is to turn on the main spacecraft’s instruments, including cameras, spectrometers and radar.
Test nanomaterials now More and more nanomaterials are creeping into consumer products and need urgent testing for safety and environmental impact, says the UK’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. For example, bactericidal nanosilver used in clothing may affect aquatic life. The commission wants Europe’s regulatory rules for chemicals to be extended to such materials.
15 November 2008 | NewScientist | 7