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Volcano “well overdue” in southern Australia
Yuriko Nakao /reuters
UPFRONT
Rare earths aplenty THE deep sea gold rush has just got more frenzied. Copious reserves of “rare earth” mineral deposits have turned up in sediments at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. These metals are vital to many green-energy and electronic technologies, such as hybrid car batteries. They were thought to be in short supply: a recent US Geological Survey estimate put world reserves at 100 million tonnes. But now Yasuhiro Kato of the University of Tokyo, Japan, and his team have found the minerals in such high density that a single square kilometre of ocean floor could provide one-fifth of annual world consumption. Two regions near Hawaii and Tahiti might contain as much as 100 billion tonnes (Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1185).
Kato was led to the sea floor when it occurred to him that many land-drawn rock samples containing metals were originally laid down as ocean sediments. “It seems very natural to find rare-earth elementrich mud on the sea floor,” Kato says. At present China controls 97 per cent of the world’s supply. Mining from the ocean floor will open up the market – but will it also cause environmental destruction? “It depends on the nature of the habitats,” says Jon Copley, an oceanographer at the University of Southampton, UK. The rare-earth minerals are in large “abyssal plains”, which are relatively easy to access without causing excessive damage, but that is no reason for complacency, Copley warns.
Autism in the air
environmental factors – genes accounted for 37 per cent (Archives of General Psychiatry, DOI: 10.1001/ archgenpsychiatry.2011.76). In the same journal, Lisa Croen at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland, California, found that children are twice as likely to develop autism if their mother took antidepressants in the 12 months before giving birth. The team cautions, however, that a mother and fetus may be at risk if the mother’s mental health disorder goes untreated (DOI: 10.1001/ archgenpsychiatry.2011.73).
–Not so rare after all–
Freeze on warming
“The Pacific has taken heat from the atmosphere for a decade, but it will soon swing back the other way” from burning coal, levels of incoming radiation from the sun, and the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) – a cyclical change in the behaviour of the Pacific Ocean. 4 | NewScientist | 9 July 2011
steven david miller/naturepl.com
EVEN a cloud of pollution has a silver lining. Global warming temporarily ground to a halt over the last 10 years because of increased pollution from countries like China, coupled with trends in the El Niño system. Although we keep on pumping huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, between 1998 and 2008 global temperatures held steady. To try to explain why, Robert Kaufmann at Boston University and colleagues took data collected between 1998 and 2008 on several factors that can affect the climate, including greenhouse gas emissions, sulphur pollution
When they plugged the information into a statistical model, they found that it predicted steady global temperatures for the period (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1102467108). But ENSO, which has seen the Pacific take heat from the atmosphere for a decade, will soon swing back to warming the air again. And China, a heavy consumer of coal over the decade, is planning to cut pollution from its coal power plants, so the plateau looks to be temporary.
ENVIRONMENTAL factors may have a bigger impact on whether or not a child develops autism than previously thought. The genetic factors that underpin autism have been much studied, but when Joachim Hallmayer of Stanford University, California, and colleagues analysed identical and nonidentical twins to tease out the genetic and environmental influences on autism, they found that 55 per cent of the variation in autism risk was down to shared
Lava forecast SOUTH-EASTERN Australia’s long-dormant volcanic province is overdue an eruption, but the nation is completely unprepared for such an event. So says Bernie Joyce from the University of Melbourne, who has documented the region’s volcanic history over the past 5 million years. Over that time there has been an eruption roughly every 12,500 years, Joyce says – but –Mount Gambier looks quiet now…– recently, the region has been more
For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
Paperless pupils
active. “For around 20,000 years an eruption has occurred every 2000 years.” The last volcano to erupt was mount Gambier, some 5500 years ago. While a future eruption is likely to be small, “it could cause devastation to thousands of people”, Joyce says. Several towns, including Colac – where 10,000 people live – lie within the danger zone, and Melbourne lies near historically active areas. “So far we have no action plans in place if eruptions occur,” he told the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics General Assembly in Melbourne this week.
60 Seconds
textbooks currently in use so they can be read on a variety of devices, including computers, interactive whiteboards, iPad-like tablets and smartphones. Classes will also be video-streamed online so children who can’t come in due to poor
THE fusty aroma of old textbooks may take you back to your school years, but children starting school after 2015 in South Korea are more likely to recall the smell of an overheating tablet computer. “E-textbooks and videoThat’s because the education streaming classes will stop ministry intends to transform children who can’t come to schools into paperless digital school from missing out” operations by then, according to Korean news site The Chosun Ilbo. health or weather don’t miss out. Under its Smart Education Children with disabilities may programme, announced on 1 July, the ministry is to spend 2.2 trillion also benefit: e-books could be controlled by eye-tracking or Won ($2 billion) digitising all elementary and secondary school gesture recognition, for example.
Chop for death drug Out with nuclear, in with gas
Victoria Bonn-Meuser/dpa/Corbis
ANOTHER drug used by US GERMANY’S clean, nuclear-free future may have a difficult birth. executioners just got the chop. Angela Merkel’s government Lundbeck of the Netherlands has claimed to be “ushering in the age of announced that it will not sell renewables” as German MPs passed pentobarbital to prisons in US legislation this week to phase out states with the death penalty. nuclear power by 2022 – but the basic Pentobarbital is an anaesthetic arithmetic of the energy switch used to sedate condemned policy suggests Germany will prisoners before two further struggle to fill the hole left by nuclear drugs stop their breathing and and emissions may rise in the interim. heartbeat. Lundbeck said it was The vote means that by early “opposed to the use of its product next decade Germany will lose for the purpose of capital 20 gigawatts of nuclear power, which punishment”. The firm will supplied the country with 23 per cent now only supply pentobarbital of its electricity last year, with through a specialist pharmacy renewables supplying 17 per cent. that will distribute it to companyapproved hospitals and treatment Together they made up 40 per cent of the country’s total. centres. The drug is essential for Under existing targets, which the treatment of life-threatening epileptic seizures, says the American Epilepsy Society. Lundbeck’s decision comes six months after US-based firm Hospira said it would no longer manufacture sodium thiopental, an anaesthetic that has also been used in lethal injections. In response, several death penalty states switched to pentobarbital. Supplies for executions will start to run out. Pentobarbital is a generic drug, however, so others could make it. “We expected generic competition a long time ago,” says Lundbeck spokesman –Nuclear makeover: Kalkar fun fair– Mads Vindahl Kronborg.
pre-date the nuclear U-turn, the government plans to double renewable electricity to 35 per cent in 2020, which would still leave a 5 per cent energy gap. To make matters worse, energy from renewables requires far more generating capacity than the technology it replaces as wind and solar are intermittent. Germany will plug the gap by building coal and gas-fired power plants with a combined capacity of 20 GW for cloudy days. As such the country will at best have about the same level of zero-carbon generation in 2020 as today – 40 per cent. Had Germany retained its nuclear capacity and achieved its renewables target, the zero-carbon share could have risen to 58 per cent.
Bipolar discipline Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston has disciplined three child psychiatrists for failing to declare payments worth millions of dollars from drug companies. The most prominent, Joseph Biederman, pioneered drug treatment for bipolar disorder in children. The three have apologised and say their “mistakes were honest ones”.
We heart you, pi A backlash has begun against a proposal to replace the constant pi. Tau supporters say their constant, equal to two pi, makes calculations simpler. Now a website called The Pi Manifesto, written by the creator of the Spiked Math web comic, suggests that tau is misleading and actually makes some calculations more complex.
Black Yellowstone Thousands of litres of oil have gushed into the Yellowstone river from a ruptured pipeline owned by Exxon Mobil in Laurel, Montana. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that as much as 160,000 litres of oil have escaped since the pipe split on 1 July.
Go on, use that phone Adult cellphone users are unlikely to face extra risks of developing brain tumours, concludes a review in Environmental Health Perspectives (DOI: 10.1289/ ehp.1103693). Last month, the World Health Organization classified phones as only a “possible carcinogen”, the same as bathroom talcum powder and coffee.
Polluted brains Is air pollution harming our brains? Mice exposed to air pollution for nine months had problems with spatial learning and memory, and displayed more “depressive” behaviours. They also had damage to their hippocampi, parts of the brain involved in learning (Molecular Psychiatry, DOI: 10.1038/mp.2011.76).
9 July 2011| NewScientist | 5
UPFRONT
Rare earths aplenty THE deep sea gold rush has just got more frenzied. Copious reserves of “rare earth” mineral deposits have turned up in sediments at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. These metals are vital to many green-energy and electronic technologies, such as hybrid car batteries. They were thought to be in short supply: a recent US Geological Survey estimate put world reserves at 100 million tonnes. But now Yasuhiro Kato of the University of Tokyo, Japan, and his team have found the minerals in such high density that a single square kilometre of ocean floor could provide one-fifth of annual world consumption. Two regions near Hawaii and Tahiti might contain as much as 100 billion tonnes (Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1185).
Kato was led to the sea floor when it occurred to him that many land-drawn rock samples containing metals were originally laid down as ocean sediments. “It seems very natural to find rare-earth elementrich mud on the sea floor,” Kato says. At present China controls 97 per cent of the world’s supply. Mining from the ocean floor will open up the market – but will it also cause environmental destruction? “It depends on the nature of the habitats,” says Jon Copley, an oceanographer at the University of Southampton, UK. The rare-earth minerals are in large “abyssal plains”, which are relatively easy to access without causing excessive damage, but that is no reason for complacency, Copley warns.
Autism in the air
environmental factors – genes accounted for 37 per cent (Archives of General Psychiatry, DOI: 10.1001/ archgenpsychiatry.2011.76). In the same journal, Lisa Croen at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland, California, found that children are twice as likely to develop autism if their mother took antidepressants in the 12 months before giving birth. The team cautions, however, that a mother and fetus may be at risk if the mother’s mental health disorder goes untreated (DOI: 10.1001/ archgenpsychiatry.2011.73).
–Not so rare after all–
Freeze on warming
“The Pacific has taken heat from the atmosphere for a decade, but it will soon swing back the other way” from burning coal, levels of incoming radiation from the sun, and the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) – a cyclical change in the behaviour of the Pacific Ocean. 4 | NewScientist | 9 July 2011
steven david miller/naturepl.com
EVEN a cloud of pollution has a silver lining. Global warming temporarily ground to a halt over the last 10 years because of increased pollution from countries like China, coupled with trends in the El Niño system. Although we keep on pumping huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, between 1998 and 2008 global temperatures held steady. To try to explain why, Robert Kaufmann at Boston University and colleagues took data collected between 1998 and 2008 on several factors that can affect the climate, including greenhouse gas emissions, sulphur pollution
When they plugged the information into a statistical model, they found that it predicted steady global temperatures for the period (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1102467108). But ENSO, which has seen the Pacific take heat from the atmosphere for a decade, will soon swing back to warming the air again. And China, a heavy consumer of coal over the decade, is planning to cut pollution from its coal power plants, so the plateau looks to be temporary.
ENVIRONMENTAL factors may have a bigger impact on whether or not a child develops autism than previously thought. The genetic factors that underpin autism have been much studied, but when Joachim Hallmayer of Stanford University, California, and colleagues analysed identical and nonidentical twins to tease out the genetic and environmental influences on autism, they found that 55 per cent of the variation in autism risk was down to shared
Lava forecast SOUTH-EASTERN Australia’s long-dormant volcanic province is overdue an eruption, but the nation is completely unprepared for such an event. So says Bernie Joyce from the University of Melbourne, who has documented the region’s volcanic history over the past 5 million years. Over that time there has been an eruption roughly every 12,500 years, Joyce says – but –Mount Gambier looks quiet now…– recently, the region has been more
For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
Paperless pupils
active. “For around 20,000 years an eruption has occurred every 2000 years.” The last volcano to erupt was mount Gambier, some 5500 years ago. While a future eruption is likely to be small, “it could cause devastation to thousands of people”, Joyce says. Several towns, including Colac – where 10,000 people live – lie within the danger zone, and Melbourne lies near historically active areas. “So far we have no action plans in place if eruptions occur,” he told the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics General Assembly in Melbourne this week.
60 Seconds
textbooks currently in use so they can be read on a variety of devices, including computers, interactive whiteboards, iPad-like tablets and smartphones. Classes will also be video-streamed online so children who can’t come in due to poor
THE fusty aroma of old textbooks may take you back to your school years, but children starting school after 2015 in South Korea are more likely to recall the smell of an overheating tablet computer. “E-textbooks and videoThat’s because the education streaming classes will stop ministry intends to transform children who can’t come to schools into paperless digital school from missing out” operations by then, according to Korean news site The Chosun Ilbo. health or weather don’t miss out. Under its Smart Education Children with disabilities may programme, announced on 1 July, the ministry is to spend 2.2 trillion also benefit: e-books could be controlled by eye-tracking or Won ($2 billion) digitising all elementary and secondary school gesture recognition, for example.
Chop for death drug Out with nuclear, in with gas
Victoria Bonn-Meuser/dpa/Corbis
ANOTHER drug used by US GERMANY’S clean, nuclear-free future may have a difficult birth. executioners just got the chop. Angela Merkel’s government Lundbeck of the Netherlands has claimed to be “ushering in the age of announced that it will not sell renewables” as German MPs passed pentobarbital to prisons in US legislation this week to phase out states with the death penalty. nuclear power by 2022 – but the basic Pentobarbital is an anaesthetic arithmetic of the energy switch used to sedate condemned policy suggests Germany will prisoners before two further struggle to fill the hole left by nuclear drugs stop their breathing and and emissions may rise in the interim. heartbeat. Lundbeck said it was The vote means that by early “opposed to the use of its product next decade Germany will lose for the purpose of capital 20 gigawatts of nuclear power, which punishment”. The firm will supplied the country with 23 per cent now only supply pentobarbital of its electricity last year, with through a specialist pharmacy renewables supplying 17 per cent. that will distribute it to companyapproved hospitals and treatment Together they made up 40 per cent of the country’s total. centres. The drug is essential for Under existing targets, which the treatment of life-threatening epileptic seizures, says the American Epilepsy Society. Lundbeck’s decision comes six months after US-based firm Hospira said it would no longer manufacture sodium thiopental, an anaesthetic that has also been used in lethal injections. In response, several death penalty states switched to pentobarbital. Supplies for executions will start to run out. Pentobarbital is a generic drug, however, so others could make it. “We expected generic competition a long time ago,” says Lundbeck spokesman –Nuclear makeover: Kalkar fun fair– Mads Vindahl Kronborg.
pre-date the nuclear U-turn, the government plans to double renewable electricity to 35 per cent in 2020, which would still leave a 5 per cent energy gap. To make matters worse, energy from renewables requires far more generating capacity than the technology it replaces as wind and solar are intermittent. Germany will plug the gap by building coal and gas-fired power plants with a combined capacity of 20 GW for cloudy days. As such the country will at best have about the same level of zero-carbon generation in 2020 as today – 40 per cent. Had Germany retained its nuclear capacity and achieved its renewables target, the zero-carbon share could have risen to 58 per cent.
Bipolar discipline Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston has disciplined three child psychiatrists for failing to declare payments worth millions of dollars from drug companies. The most prominent, Joseph Biederman, pioneered drug treatment for bipolar disorder in children. The three have apologised and say their “mistakes were honest ones”.
We heart you, pi A backlash has begun against a proposal to replace the constant pi. Tau supporters say their constant, equal to two pi, makes calculations simpler. Now a website called The Pi Manifesto, written by the creator of the Spiked Math web comic, suggests that tau is misleading and actually makes some calculations more complex.
Black Yellowstone Thousands of litres of oil have gushed into the Yellowstone river from a ruptured pipeline owned by Exxon Mobil in Laurel, Montana. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that as much as 160,000 litres of oil have escaped since the pipe split on 1 July.
Go on, use that phone Adult cellphone users are unlikely to face extra risks of developing brain tumours, concludes a review in Environmental Health Perspectives (DOI: 10.1289/ ehp.1103693). Last month, the World Health Organization classified phones as only a “possible carcinogen”, the same as bathroom talcum powder and coffee.
Polluted brains Is air pollution harming our brains? Mice exposed to air pollution for nine months had problems with spatial learning and memory, and displayed more “depressive” behaviours. They also had damage to their hippocampi, parts of the brain involved in learning (Molecular Psychiatry, DOI: 10.1038/mp.2011.76).
9 July 2011| NewScientist | 5