- Email: [email protected]
Taser beats baton
REUTERS/HO NEW
UPFRONT
Don’t expect the earth… IT’S official: the organisers of the Copenhagen climate conference conceded last weekend that it cannot deliver a final, legally binding deal. Danish prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the conference host, is hoping for a “political deal”, followed by a legal one in 2010. The question now is how specific the political deal will be. Speaking at a meeting of Asian leaders in Singapore, Rasmussen said the Copenhagen agreement should be “precise on specific commitments and binding on countries committing to reach certain targets. We need the commitments. We need the figures. We need the action.” His climate minister, Connie Hedegaard, says it is “most important that the US commit to bring specific numbers to Copenhagen”. Will it? That’s in the balance. Though
keen to agree a climate treaty, President Barack Obama is thought to be reluctant to make promises Congress will not let him keep – as Al Gore did in Kyoto in 1997 when he was vice-president. Obama wants the climate change bills before Congress to pass before making firm pledges. This won’t happen before Copenhagen. If or when they do pass, much could change. In Singapore, President Hu Jintao of China again insisted that his country will not commit to reducing its carbon intensity unless the US is fully committed to cutting emissions. Optimists say that if Obama can get a bill through Congress, an international deal that now looks impossible will be eminently doable next year. For the pessimists, climate talks just ran into the sand.
Water, water…
course, and on the way measured more than 100 kilograms of water ice in the part of the plume it observed. “We didn’t find just a little bit. We found a significant amount,” says LCROSS principal investigator Anthony Colaprete of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. This confirms that the moon’s poles contain stores of water ice – more than the traces found by India’s Chandrayaan-1 probe in September. “LCROSS has now made that definitive discovery, says Greg Delory of the University of California, Berkeley.
–Messages from Singapore–
HIV vaccine fears
“Vaccines containing cold viruses prime the immune system to produce cells HIV prefers to infect” suggested that recipients who had previously been exposed to the adenovirus had a heightened susceptibility to HIV infection, but two studies published in July 6 | NewScientist | 21 November 2009
DAVID SANDELL/AP/PRESS ASSOCIATION IMAGES
HIV vaccines based on the cold virus could make people “sitting ducks” for HIV infection. A study led by Steven Patterson of Imperial College London revives an earlier theory that adenoviruses cause an immune “own goal” by priming people’s immune systems to produce CD4 cells, the cells HIV prefers to infect. Since the viruses are also used in vaccines against malaria and tuberculosis, the finding could be a major blow. The problems were first raised in 2007, when the trial of an HIV vaccine that used an adenovirus was stopped after more subjects than expected became infected with HIV. At the time it was
contradicted that (New Scientist, 25 July, p 14). In the latest twist, Patterson’s team took CD4 cells from 20 healthy volunteers and exposed them to adenoviruses. They found that CD4 cells from people who had previously been exposed to the viruses increased by up to 8 per cent, while cells from those who hadn’t been exposed did not multiply. This suggests that reexposure makes people more vulnerable to HIV infection, the team say (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0907898106).
EVERYWHERE? Not quite, but NASA’s LCROSS mission did kick up a few bucketfuls after all when it collided with the moon. On 9 October, the LCROSS team smashed a spent rocket stage into the moon. The idea was to kick up a plume of material that could be analysed for water. Earth-based observers had trouble seeing the ejecta, partly because it was hidden by a ridge. The shepherding spacecraft told a different story: it followed the rocket stage on its collision
Taser beats baton USING a Taser to subdue a suspect is safer than police batons and fists. That is the unexpected conclusion of a study of incidents in which US police used force to tackle a person who was resisting arrest. Several people have died in the US after being tasered, and human rights groups have spoken out against the weapons. But John MacDonald of the –Weapon of choice?– University of Pennsylvania in
For daily news stories, visit www.NewScientist.com/news
60 SECONDS
China’s green plans
Philadelphia and colleagues have found they seem to result in fewer injuries than more conventional methods such as batons. The team examined over 24,000 cases where police had used force, including almost 5500 involving a Taser. After controlling for factors such as the amount of resistance shown by the suspect, they found that Taser use reduced the overall risk of injury by 65 per cent (American Journal of Public Health, vol 99, p 2268). However, MacDonald is careful to note that the study does not shed light on why some deaths have been linked to Tasers.
IT’S a road map that will only allow green cars. By 2050, all new power sources in China will be either renewable or nuclear – and this change to a low-carbon future can take place while boosting economic growth. China’s low-carbon road map, presented to the Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development in Beijing last week, claims that the global shift towards lowcarbon technology “will allow China to capitalise on new growth opportunities as a
Double jeopardy
supplier to satisfy increasing global demand” for such technologies. To achieve a low-carbon economy by 2050, the report says the country must cut back its mining industry, introduce energy
“China can capitalise on the global shift to low-carbon technology by supplying such devices to the world” efficiency measures, construct compact eco-cities, invest in public transport and renewable energy, and install carbon capture and storage facilities.
NASA seeks its one true glove
NASA
THE US Food and Drug WOULD you pay $250,000 for a pair of gloves? That’s what NASA is Administration is unimpressed offering to the winners of its by the fad for drinks that contain a double hit – alcohol and caffeine. Astronaut Glove Challenge. Bending fingers inside Unless makers supply the FDA pressurised gloves in space is with scientific evidence that the difficult – a day’s worth of precision drinks are safe they could be work often results in bruises, banned within months. abrasions and damaged fingernails. The agency is worried that So NASA is holding a competition consuming the drinks – which can this week in Titusville, Florida. mask the effect of alcohol – leads At least two teams are expected to rash behaviour, car crashes, to compete. Among them will violence and assaults. The FDA be engineer Peter Homer, who took issued the ultimatum last week in home $200,000 at the first challenge response to a request made by the in 2007 and is now developing his National Association of Attorneys glove for use on suborbital flights. General. “Caffeine added to Unlike the previous competition, alcohol poses a significant public this year’s competitors have health threat,” said a task force been asked to include the glove’s headed by the attorney-generals of Utah, Guam and Connecticut. The FDA allows caffeine concentrations of up to 200 parts per million in soft drinks, but adding caffeine to alcohol is unregulated. At least two of the 27 companies contacted have already withdrawn their drinks. In 2006, Cecile Marczinski and Mark Fillmore of the University of Kentucky found that consumers of the drinks felt they were less inebriated than when imbibing alcohol alone, even though they made just as many errors in standard tests –Try fixing a telescope in these– of alertness and reaction time.
outermost layer, the thermal micrometeoroid garment. This layer is designed to provide insulation from temperature swings and solar radiation and to protect against micrometeoroids and space debris. To qualify for a prize, competing gloves will have to best the performance of NASA’s current model. Gloves will be evaluated on how easily they can be bent while pressurised and how well competitors are able to perform 30 minutes of dexterity tests. The gloves will also be filled with water to test their strength. NASA will award $250,000 to the top performer and $100,000 to the runner-up. An additional $50,000 will go to the best outer layer design.
Not too old to grow Earth’s oldest trees are experiencing a growth spurt. A tree ring study suggests the Great Basin bristlecone pines of the western US have grown faster in the past 50 years than they have in 3.7 millennia because of rising temperatures (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0903029106).
…nor too big Something else has got bigger in recent years: Russia’s landmass. Geologists say an earthquake on Sakhalin Island in 2007 and a volcanic eruption on Matua Island in 2009 increased the nation’s size by 4.5 square kilometres. The earthquake lifted part of the sea floor and turned it into dry land.
Allergy surge The number of American children diagnosed with food allergies soared by 18 per cent between 1997 and 2007. Allergies now affect 4 per cent of under-17s (Pediatrics, DOI: 10.1542/peds.2009-1210). The problem may be worse: one study cited by the researchers found that 9 per cent of children tested positive for antibodies to peanuts.
Food for life on Titan? Saturn’s moon Titan may be better suited to life than we thought. Titan’s hydrocarbon lakes are loaded with acetylene, which could serve as food for cold-resistant life, says Daniel Cordier of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie in Rennes, France. His team calculated the lake’s composition using data from the Cassini-Huygens probe (arxiv. org/abs/0911.1860).
End of DeCode DeCode Genetics, based in Reykjavik, Iceland, has filed for bankruptcy. Set up 13 years ago, the firm aimed to uncover links between genes and disease by analysing the health records and DNA of Icelanders. It discovered genes linked to several diseases, including osteoporosis.
21 November 2009 | NewScientist | 7
UPFRONT
Don’t expect the earth… IT’S official: the organisers of the Copenhagen climate conference conceded last weekend that it cannot deliver a final, legally binding deal. Danish prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the conference host, is hoping for a “political deal”, followed by a legal one in 2010. The question now is how specific the political deal will be. Speaking at a meeting of Asian leaders in Singapore, Rasmussen said the Copenhagen agreement should be “precise on specific commitments and binding on countries committing to reach certain targets. We need the commitments. We need the figures. We need the action.” His climate minister, Connie Hedegaard, says it is “most important that the US commit to bring specific numbers to Copenhagen”. Will it? That’s in the balance. Though
keen to agree a climate treaty, President Barack Obama is thought to be reluctant to make promises Congress will not let him keep – as Al Gore did in Kyoto in 1997 when he was vice-president. Obama wants the climate change bills before Congress to pass before making firm pledges. This won’t happen before Copenhagen. If or when they do pass, much could change. In Singapore, President Hu Jintao of China again insisted that his country will not commit to reducing its carbon intensity unless the US is fully committed to cutting emissions. Optimists say that if Obama can get a bill through Congress, an international deal that now looks impossible will be eminently doable next year. For the pessimists, climate talks just ran into the sand.
Water, water…
course, and on the way measured more than 100 kilograms of water ice in the part of the plume it observed. “We didn’t find just a little bit. We found a significant amount,” says LCROSS principal investigator Anthony Colaprete of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. This confirms that the moon’s poles contain stores of water ice – more than the traces found by India’s Chandrayaan-1 probe in September. “LCROSS has now made that definitive discovery, says Greg Delory of the University of California, Berkeley.
–Messages from Singapore–
HIV vaccine fears
“Vaccines containing cold viruses prime the immune system to produce cells HIV prefers to infect” suggested that recipients who had previously been exposed to the adenovirus had a heightened susceptibility to HIV infection, but two studies published in July 6 | NewScientist | 21 November 2009
DAVID SANDELL/AP/PRESS ASSOCIATION IMAGES
HIV vaccines based on the cold virus could make people “sitting ducks” for HIV infection. A study led by Steven Patterson of Imperial College London revives an earlier theory that adenoviruses cause an immune “own goal” by priming people’s immune systems to produce CD4 cells, the cells HIV prefers to infect. Since the viruses are also used in vaccines against malaria and tuberculosis, the finding could be a major blow. The problems were first raised in 2007, when the trial of an HIV vaccine that used an adenovirus was stopped after more subjects than expected became infected with HIV. At the time it was
contradicted that (New Scientist, 25 July, p 14). In the latest twist, Patterson’s team took CD4 cells from 20 healthy volunteers and exposed them to adenoviruses. They found that CD4 cells from people who had previously been exposed to the viruses increased by up to 8 per cent, while cells from those who hadn’t been exposed did not multiply. This suggests that reexposure makes people more vulnerable to HIV infection, the team say (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0907898106).
EVERYWHERE? Not quite, but NASA’s LCROSS mission did kick up a few bucketfuls after all when it collided with the moon. On 9 October, the LCROSS team smashed a spent rocket stage into the moon. The idea was to kick up a plume of material that could be analysed for water. Earth-based observers had trouble seeing the ejecta, partly because it was hidden by a ridge. The shepherding spacecraft told a different story: it followed the rocket stage on its collision
Taser beats baton USING a Taser to subdue a suspect is safer than police batons and fists. That is the unexpected conclusion of a study of incidents in which US police used force to tackle a person who was resisting arrest. Several people have died in the US after being tasered, and human rights groups have spoken out against the weapons. But John MacDonald of the –Weapon of choice?– University of Pennsylvania in
For daily news stories, visit www.NewScientist.com/news
60 SECONDS
China’s green plans
Philadelphia and colleagues have found they seem to result in fewer injuries than more conventional methods such as batons. The team examined over 24,000 cases where police had used force, including almost 5500 involving a Taser. After controlling for factors such as the amount of resistance shown by the suspect, they found that Taser use reduced the overall risk of injury by 65 per cent (American Journal of Public Health, vol 99, p 2268). However, MacDonald is careful to note that the study does not shed light on why some deaths have been linked to Tasers.
IT’S a road map that will only allow green cars. By 2050, all new power sources in China will be either renewable or nuclear – and this change to a low-carbon future can take place while boosting economic growth. China’s low-carbon road map, presented to the Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development in Beijing last week, claims that the global shift towards lowcarbon technology “will allow China to capitalise on new growth opportunities as a
Double jeopardy
supplier to satisfy increasing global demand” for such technologies. To achieve a low-carbon economy by 2050, the report says the country must cut back its mining industry, introduce energy
“China can capitalise on the global shift to low-carbon technology by supplying such devices to the world” efficiency measures, construct compact eco-cities, invest in public transport and renewable energy, and install carbon capture and storage facilities.
NASA seeks its one true glove
NASA
THE US Food and Drug WOULD you pay $250,000 for a pair of gloves? That’s what NASA is Administration is unimpressed offering to the winners of its by the fad for drinks that contain a double hit – alcohol and caffeine. Astronaut Glove Challenge. Bending fingers inside Unless makers supply the FDA pressurised gloves in space is with scientific evidence that the difficult – a day’s worth of precision drinks are safe they could be work often results in bruises, banned within months. abrasions and damaged fingernails. The agency is worried that So NASA is holding a competition consuming the drinks – which can this week in Titusville, Florida. mask the effect of alcohol – leads At least two teams are expected to rash behaviour, car crashes, to compete. Among them will violence and assaults. The FDA be engineer Peter Homer, who took issued the ultimatum last week in home $200,000 at the first challenge response to a request made by the in 2007 and is now developing his National Association of Attorneys glove for use on suborbital flights. General. “Caffeine added to Unlike the previous competition, alcohol poses a significant public this year’s competitors have health threat,” said a task force been asked to include the glove’s headed by the attorney-generals of Utah, Guam and Connecticut. The FDA allows caffeine concentrations of up to 200 parts per million in soft drinks, but adding caffeine to alcohol is unregulated. At least two of the 27 companies contacted have already withdrawn their drinks. In 2006, Cecile Marczinski and Mark Fillmore of the University of Kentucky found that consumers of the drinks felt they were less inebriated than when imbibing alcohol alone, even though they made just as many errors in standard tests –Try fixing a telescope in these– of alertness and reaction time.
outermost layer, the thermal micrometeoroid garment. This layer is designed to provide insulation from temperature swings and solar radiation and to protect against micrometeoroids and space debris. To qualify for a prize, competing gloves will have to best the performance of NASA’s current model. Gloves will be evaluated on how easily they can be bent while pressurised and how well competitors are able to perform 30 minutes of dexterity tests. The gloves will also be filled with water to test their strength. NASA will award $250,000 to the top performer and $100,000 to the runner-up. An additional $50,000 will go to the best outer layer design.
Not too old to grow Earth’s oldest trees are experiencing a growth spurt. A tree ring study suggests the Great Basin bristlecone pines of the western US have grown faster in the past 50 years than they have in 3.7 millennia because of rising temperatures (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0903029106).
…nor too big Something else has got bigger in recent years: Russia’s landmass. Geologists say an earthquake on Sakhalin Island in 2007 and a volcanic eruption on Matua Island in 2009 increased the nation’s size by 4.5 square kilometres. The earthquake lifted part of the sea floor and turned it into dry land.
Allergy surge The number of American children diagnosed with food allergies soared by 18 per cent between 1997 and 2007. Allergies now affect 4 per cent of under-17s (Pediatrics, DOI: 10.1542/peds.2009-1210). The problem may be worse: one study cited by the researchers found that 9 per cent of children tested positive for antibodies to peanuts.
Food for life on Titan? Saturn’s moon Titan may be better suited to life than we thought. Titan’s hydrocarbon lakes are loaded with acetylene, which could serve as food for cold-resistant life, says Daniel Cordier of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie in Rennes, France. His team calculated the lake’s composition using data from the Cassini-Huygens probe (arxiv. org/abs/0911.1860).
End of DeCode DeCode Genetics, based in Reykjavik, Iceland, has filed for bankruptcy. Set up 13 years ago, the firm aimed to uncover links between genes and disease by analysing the health records and DNA of Icelanders. It discovered genes linked to several diseases, including osteoporosis.
21 November 2009 | NewScientist | 7