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Pesticide worm killer could end poverty trap
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60 SECONDS
Fighting Spirit
The event could affect ocean currents and marine life. While attached to the Antarctic ice shelf, the ice tongue had helped hem in an area of open water surrounded by ice. Known as polynias, such areas encourage the formation of dense, highly saline water which sinks to the seabed, and are oases of marine life. Whether the event is linked to climate change is a matter of dispute. Some climatologists see it as part of the normal course of events, while others say it is consistent with observations that a large part of Antarctica’s ice shelf is warming rapidly.
scientist Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, told the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, this week. In January and February, NASA coaxed the rover backwards by
DEAR Spirit rover, your refusal to bow out gracefully is making things a mite awkward back on Earth – we’ve been writing your obituary for years. But the Mars rover’s death is as distant as ever: it should wriggle free of its sandy “As long as it survives the winter, the rover has a trap after all. good chance of backing In April 2009 Spirit became mired in loose sand on Mars. After out of the pit” months of trying to free the rover, NASA declared on 26 January that 34 centimetres, a big advance on Spirit was stuck, but could at least the millimetres it had managed before. As long as it survives the continue taking measurements. winter, the rover should back But the announcement was “a out of the pit, says Arvidson. little bit premature”, rover
Worm killer
Add oxygen to speed sobriety
REUTERS/NGUYEN HUY KHAM
IT WORKS for crops. Now a BOOZE that has been treated so that you sober up faster afterwards may common organic pesticide could sound like a drinker’s dream, but cure hundreds of millions of could end up being their downfall people of intestinal worms, if if it encourages heavy drinkers to cash can be found for trials. consume even more alcohol. More than 1 billion people, Kwang-il Kwon and his colleagues almost all of them living below at Chungnam National University in the World Bank’s poverty line, are Daejeon, South Korea, gave 30 men infected with nematodes. While and 19 women 360 millilitres of a the worms don’t usually kill, they drink containing 19.5 per cent alcohol stunt growth, cause anaemia and by volume, about the strength of impair cognitive development. fortified wine or sake. The drinks All this helps to “trap the ‘bottom also contained 8, 20 or 25 parts per billion’ in poverty”, says Peter million of dissolved oxygen, which Hotez, a specialist in tropical is known to play a role in alcohol diseases at George Washington breakdown by the body. University in Washington DC. The It took about 5 hours for the blood current treatment doesn’t work alcohol levels of volunteers to reach well on all types of worms – and zero. But Kwon’s team found that on resistance is emerging. Now Raffi Aroian at the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues have shown that the protein Cry5B, produced by the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis and used as a crop pesticide, could act as an effective drug. An oral dose cleared around 70 per cent of the worms from infected mice (PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, DOI: 10.1371/ journal.pntd.0000614.t002). Cry5B is about three times as effective as tribendimidin, the leading drug in development. A big obstacle is a dearth of funding –Air’s to you – for human trials, says Aroian.
average, those whose drinks contained 20 or 25 ppm of oxygen went to zero 23 minutes and 27 minutes faster respectively than those who had the lowest-oxygen drinks (Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, DOI: 10. 1111/j.1530-0277.2010.01155.x). The researchers suggest that enriching alcoholic drinks with oxygen might “allow individuals to become sober faster”. “The reduced time to a lower blood-alcohol concentration may reduce alcoholrelated accidents,” they write. A spokeswoman for the British Medical Association was unimpressed. “We wouldn’t want a situation where people drank more simply because they would recover quicker.”
Count your way to hella We need a way to describe superhigh numbers. So says an online petition with over 20,000 supporters, advocating the prefix “hella” for 1027. Yotta (1024) is the largest prefix in the International System of Units, but hella units could prove handy for numbers such as the sun’s wattage, says physics student Austin Sendek of the University of California, Davis.
Titanic survival A study of shipwrecks shows that speed of capsize dictates who survives. Able-bodied men were less likely to survive than women and children on the Titanic, which sank in 2 hours and 40 minutes. The opposite was true on the Lusitania, which sank in 18 minutes. Benno Torgler of Queensland University of Technology, Australia, says selfsacrifice trumps self-preservation if a ship takes longer to sink.
Vaccine fear persists Although there is no evidence for a link between autism and vaccines, about 1 in 10 US parents still refused a vaccine for their children in 2009 because of safety fears. A quarter believe vaccines can cause autism, according to a survey of 1552 parents of under-17s by researchers at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Flu shot from tobacco The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is ploughing $40 million into the possibility of growing flu vaccine in genetically modified, low-nicotine tobacco plants. It hopes this will make it easier to produce large amounts of vaccine at short notice than by the egg-based method used today.
Collider thaws out The Large Hadron Collider is out of hibernation. After a winter break, the first beam of 2010 was circulated on 28 February. It will initially run at 0.9 teraelectronvolts, gradually increasing to 7 TeV in the coming weeks – half its designed energy.
6 March 2010 | NewScientist | 5
60 SECONDS
Fighting Spirit
The event could affect ocean currents and marine life. While attached to the Antarctic ice shelf, the ice tongue had helped hem in an area of open water surrounded by ice. Known as polynias, such areas encourage the formation of dense, highly saline water which sinks to the seabed, and are oases of marine life. Whether the event is linked to climate change is a matter of dispute. Some climatologists see it as part of the normal course of events, while others say it is consistent with observations that a large part of Antarctica’s ice shelf is warming rapidly.
scientist Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, told the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, this week. In January and February, NASA coaxed the rover backwards by
DEAR Spirit rover, your refusal to bow out gracefully is making things a mite awkward back on Earth – we’ve been writing your obituary for years. But the Mars rover’s death is as distant as ever: it should wriggle free of its sandy “As long as it survives the winter, the rover has a trap after all. good chance of backing In April 2009 Spirit became mired in loose sand on Mars. After out of the pit” months of trying to free the rover, NASA declared on 26 January that 34 centimetres, a big advance on Spirit was stuck, but could at least the millimetres it had managed before. As long as it survives the continue taking measurements. winter, the rover should back But the announcement was “a out of the pit, says Arvidson. little bit premature”, rover
Worm killer
Add oxygen to speed sobriety
REUTERS/NGUYEN HUY KHAM
IT WORKS for crops. Now a BOOZE that has been treated so that you sober up faster afterwards may common organic pesticide could sound like a drinker’s dream, but cure hundreds of millions of could end up being their downfall people of intestinal worms, if if it encourages heavy drinkers to cash can be found for trials. consume even more alcohol. More than 1 billion people, Kwang-il Kwon and his colleagues almost all of them living below at Chungnam National University in the World Bank’s poverty line, are Daejeon, South Korea, gave 30 men infected with nematodes. While and 19 women 360 millilitres of a the worms don’t usually kill, they drink containing 19.5 per cent alcohol stunt growth, cause anaemia and by volume, about the strength of impair cognitive development. fortified wine or sake. The drinks All this helps to “trap the ‘bottom also contained 8, 20 or 25 parts per billion’ in poverty”, says Peter million of dissolved oxygen, which Hotez, a specialist in tropical is known to play a role in alcohol diseases at George Washington breakdown by the body. University in Washington DC. The It took about 5 hours for the blood current treatment doesn’t work alcohol levels of volunteers to reach well on all types of worms – and zero. But Kwon’s team found that on resistance is emerging. Now Raffi Aroian at the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues have shown that the protein Cry5B, produced by the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis and used as a crop pesticide, could act as an effective drug. An oral dose cleared around 70 per cent of the worms from infected mice (PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, DOI: 10.1371/ journal.pntd.0000614.t002). Cry5B is about three times as effective as tribendimidin, the leading drug in development. A big obstacle is a dearth of funding –Air’s to you – for human trials, says Aroian.
average, those whose drinks contained 20 or 25 ppm of oxygen went to zero 23 minutes and 27 minutes faster respectively than those who had the lowest-oxygen drinks (Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, DOI: 10. 1111/j.1530-0277.2010.01155.x). The researchers suggest that enriching alcoholic drinks with oxygen might “allow individuals to become sober faster”. “The reduced time to a lower blood-alcohol concentration may reduce alcoholrelated accidents,” they write. A spokeswoman for the British Medical Association was unimpressed. “We wouldn’t want a situation where people drank more simply because they would recover quicker.”
Count your way to hella We need a way to describe superhigh numbers. So says an online petition with over 20,000 supporters, advocating the prefix “hella” for 1027. Yotta (1024) is the largest prefix in the International System of Units, but hella units could prove handy for numbers such as the sun’s wattage, says physics student Austin Sendek of the University of California, Davis.
Titanic survival A study of shipwrecks shows that speed of capsize dictates who survives. Able-bodied men were less likely to survive than women and children on the Titanic, which sank in 2 hours and 40 minutes. The opposite was true on the Lusitania, which sank in 18 minutes. Benno Torgler of Queensland University of Technology, Australia, says selfsacrifice trumps self-preservation if a ship takes longer to sink.
Vaccine fear persists Although there is no evidence for a link between autism and vaccines, about 1 in 10 US parents still refused a vaccine for their children in 2009 because of safety fears. A quarter believe vaccines can cause autism, according to a survey of 1552 parents of under-17s by researchers at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Flu shot from tobacco The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is ploughing $40 million into the possibility of growing flu vaccine in genetically modified, low-nicotine tobacco plants. It hopes this will make it easier to produce large amounts of vaccine at short notice than by the egg-based method used today.
Collider thaws out The Large Hadron Collider is out of hibernation. After a winter break, the first beam of 2010 was circulated on 28 February. It will initially run at 0.9 teraelectronvolts, gradually increasing to 7 TeV in the coming weeks – half its designed energy.
6 March 2010 | NewScientist | 5