The BA Science News Digest 23 June 2006
New research methods suggest that the number of giant pandas in a crucial wildlife reserve in western China seems to have doubled since 1998, say researchers in China and Britain. The discovery raises hopes that this iconic species is on the road to recovery.
A Sino-British team of experts carried out an innovative analysis of DNA in the reclusive black and white creatures' droppings.
Pandas are notoriously difficult to track down in their native habitat, the mountainous bamboo forests of southern and central China, meaning that population estimates for the endangered species have been sketchy.
"There are many more pandas in the wild than we thought," says animal geneticist Michael Bruford of Cardiff University, UK, who led the team that carried out the census in Wanglang Nature Reserve. Bruford and colleagues used a new method, which identified 66 different bears, 35 males and 31 females. That's more than double the number of bears found in the 1998 survey. Bruford warns that although the numbers are encouraging, careful monitoring of the panda population is necessary because their habitat is still threatened. "We're not saying that the panda is out of the woods".
********************
Modern medical science has exposed the villainy of the crocodile mummy sellers of Hawara, more than 2,000 years after they defied the edict of a Pharaoh and turned neatly bandaged bundles of rubbish into a nice little earner.
The Guardian reports this evidence, just before the reopening of the Egyptian Galleries this month at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, curators took their animal and human mummies to the city's Addenbrooke's Hospital, as part of a £1.5m re-display of the internationally renowned collection, which dates in part back to the founding of the museum in 1816.
Analysis continues after the mummies were run through a CT scanner and other tests, but the preliminary results were startling. The crocodiles were spectacularly lacking in crocodile: one held a minute vertebra, the other a handful of straw, rags and mud without a scrap of any animal content at all.
There was clearly a history of problems with the animal sellers: a pharaonic decree a century earlier had ordered that each mummy should contain the body of one animal.
********************
A seed Bank to save the World.
The Guardian reports of an ambitious project to safeguard future food supplies which began with the launch of a "Noah's ark" for the world's most important plants.
The new Svalbard International Seed Vault will serve as a repository for crucial seeds in the event of a global catastrophe, said Norway's agriculture minister, Terje Riis-Johansen.
Carved into the permafrost and rock of the remote Svalbard peninsula, it will eventually house 3m seed samples from every country in the world. "This facility will provide a practical means to re-establish crops obliterated by major disasters," said Cary Fowler, the executive secretary of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which will manage the seed bank.
Samples of the world's agricultural biodiversity, including crops such as wheat, apple and potato, are currently scattered across 1,400 seed banks around the world. All these seed banks are at risk from local problems. Mr Fowler cited the example of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the 1994 genocide in Rwanda as times when dozens of unique crops had been wiped out. At the same time, those countries' own seed banks had been destroyed, meaning the genes were lost for ever. "You can use the word extinction in this case," he said. "This would no longer occur once the [Svalbard] seed bank opened."
The new seed bank will store its samples in a reinforced concrete tunnel drilled 70 metres (230ft) into a mountain, guarded by two steel doors and remote-controlled from Sweden. The seeds will be stored in foil packets at -18C, and are expected to remain viable for thousands of years. If a crop is lost through natural disaster or war and a seed bank is destroyed, a government could request replacement seeds from the vault.
The vault will not rely solely on artificial refrigeration systems. The facility's remote location and permafrost will ensure that, even if the power fails, the temperature will never rise above freezing. Though the facility will be fenced in, Svalbard's fierce polar bears, could also act as natural guardians.
The seed bank will start accepting samples in 2007.
********************
Science goes to Hollywood reading film viewers minds…
Cognitive philosophy - "brain science", as its practitioners call it - is a rarefied academic field. But that hasn't prevented Hollywood from optioning Steve Quartz. Not, alas, for a movie (The Wittgenstein Code?) but for the cutthroat business of marketing them. Quartz, it's thought, can forecast what the notoriously unpredictable audience for film "really" wants better than the audience themselves.
In his laboratory, Quartz uses functional brain imaging, or fMRI, to measure humans' responses to such classics as Casablanca. "Essentially, people are placed inside an enormous magnet," he says. "And then we look to see small changes in blood flow. It's a way of tapping, in a totally non-invasive way, into brain activity."
The moneymen in LA were quick to lease his technique. More money was in prospect - and safer money. As Quartz points out, the margin of profit for the industry is "somewhere in the area of 4%". They need all the help they can get.
Reading the customer's brain will, Quartz believes, replace the clipboard and stop-you-in-the-street market survey and other primitive research techniques that commerce relies on to get its act right.
********************
Eggs have long been demonised as being bad for the heart. Yet the Daily Mail has reported on new research which suggests that this is not only untrue, but that eggs could even be considered a 'superfood'.
Eggs could actually protect against heart disease, breast cancer and eye problems and even help you to lose weight.
For years people assumed eggs were bad for cholesterol levels. But a review just published in the British Nutrition Foundation’s Nutrition Bulletin found they ‘have no clinically significant impact’ on heart disease or cholesterol levels.
Dr Bruce Griffin of the University of Surrey’s school of biomedical and molecular science analysed 30 egg studies, among them one from Harvard University which showed people who consumed one or more eggs a day were at no more risk of suffering from cardiovascular disease than non-egg eaters.
Eggs are actually good for you. ‘They are rich in nutrients,’ says Joanne Lunn, nutrition scientist at the British Nutrition Foundation. One egg provides 13 essential nutrients; all in the yolk (egg whites contain albumen, an important source of protein, and no fat).
Teenage girls who eat an egg a day may give themselves additional protection against breast cancer in later life, according to a study in the journal Breast Cancer Research.
********************
Women with damaged or missing wombs could, within five years, have transplants that would allow them to have children naturally, scientists said yesterday in reports from the Telegraph.
Researchers said experiments carried out in animals had brought them a step closer to being able to carry out womb transplantation in humans.
Uteruses removed and later restored in sheep have for the first time been shown to be functioning normally. The procedure would give the approximately 200 UK women per year who attempt to have their own biological children using surrogate mothers the chance to give birth naturally themselves.
Professor Mats Brannstrom, of the department of gynaecology at the Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden, presented the findings of his research on sheep at the annual meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology (Eshre) in Prague yesterday.
Three years ago Professor Brannstrom announced that he had performed successful womb transplants in mice that then gave birth to healthy offspring.
Before trying to use the technique on humans, work will be required in primates.
Other reports from the World of Medical Science suggest Leading British surgeons are debating plans for the first face transplant in Britain. The ethical committee of the Royal Free Hospital in London is to consider granting permission for the operation.
No recipients have yet been selected, but several possible patients have been seen by doctors. Consultant plastic surgeon Peter Butler has spent the past 14 years looking at the possibility of carrying out the procedure, reports Ananova.
If approval is granted by the hospital's ethical committee, the process to identify a suitable patient could begin. But a spokesman stressed that even if permission was granted it would not mean a transplant was imminent as patient selection could take up to a year.
Simon Weston, who suffered terrible burns in the Falklands War, is expected to explain why he thinks doctors should be allowed to perform face transplants in Britain. Mr Weston was initially against the procedure but has now come down in favour. Although it has been technically possible to carry out the operation for several years, ethical concerns have prevented surgeons from doing so.
Last November the world's first partial face transplant took place in France.
********************
The Science of penalties, it is the World Cup moment that all England football supporters are dreading: when the chosen players step up to the spot for the almost inevitable penalty shoot-out.
However, a timely scientific study can offer some help. It has confirmed what every schoolboy is told: decide where you are going to kick the ball beforehand - and never change your mind.
As David Beckham's team face the possibility of another penalty shoot-out in the World Cup knock-out stages, research reported in the Telegraph demonstrates that players who stick to a target picked before their run-up are more likely to score than those who try to outwit the goalkeeper at the last second.
Scientists observed 10 "intermediate level" footballers taking penalties with two different strategies, described as "keeper-independent" and "keeper-dependent".
In the keeper-independent strategy, the penalty-taker shot at one of two specified targets to the right and left side of the goal, as if ignoring the goalkeeper's actions during the run-up. In the keeper-dependent strategy, the target was switched to a different side of the goal during the run-up, so the player had to change the direction of his kick, as if reacting to the goalkeeper's movements.
The results were published in the Journal for Sports Science, which stated that when players used the keeper-independent strategy, they were 100 per cent accurate, always choosing the correct side and shooting on average 90cm from the middle of the target.
The names of the players who missed past penalties are etched on fans' hearts: Chris Waddle, Stuart Pearce, Gareth Southgate, Paul Ince, David Batty, David Beckham, and Darius Vassell.
England's marksmen will have to be ready, all the more so because Beckham's team could play Germany in the quarter-finals. If past form is anything to go by, it is almost certain to end in the dreaded penalties.
Good Luck England!
***************
A Sino-British team of experts carried out an innovative analysis of DNA in the reclusive black and white creatures' droppings.
Pandas are notoriously difficult to track down in their native habitat, the mountainous bamboo forests of southern and central China, meaning that population estimates for the endangered species have been sketchy.
"There are many more pandas in the wild than we thought," says animal geneticist Michael Bruford of Cardiff University, UK, who led the team that carried out the census in Wanglang Nature Reserve. Bruford and colleagues used a new method, which identified 66 different bears, 35 males and 31 females. That's more than double the number of bears found in the 1998 survey. Bruford warns that although the numbers are encouraging, careful monitoring of the panda population is necessary because their habitat is still threatened. "We're not saying that the panda is out of the woods".
********************
Modern medical science has exposed the villainy of the crocodile mummy sellers of Hawara, more than 2,000 years after they defied the edict of a Pharaoh and turned neatly bandaged bundles of rubbish into a nice little earner.
The Guardian reports this evidence, just before the reopening of the Egyptian Galleries this month at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, curators took their animal and human mummies to the city's Addenbrooke's Hospital, as part of a £1.5m re-display of the internationally renowned collection, which dates in part back to the founding of the museum in 1816.
Analysis continues after the mummies were run through a CT scanner and other tests, but the preliminary results were startling. The crocodiles were spectacularly lacking in crocodile: one held a minute vertebra, the other a handful of straw, rags and mud without a scrap of any animal content at all.
There was clearly a history of problems with the animal sellers: a pharaonic decree a century earlier had ordered that each mummy should contain the body of one animal.
********************
A seed Bank to save the World.
The Guardian reports of an ambitious project to safeguard future food supplies which began with the launch of a "Noah's ark" for the world's most important plants.
The new Svalbard International Seed Vault will serve as a repository for crucial seeds in the event of a global catastrophe, said Norway's agriculture minister, Terje Riis-Johansen.
Carved into the permafrost and rock of the remote Svalbard peninsula, it will eventually house 3m seed samples from every country in the world. "This facility will provide a practical means to re-establish crops obliterated by major disasters," said Cary Fowler, the executive secretary of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which will manage the seed bank.
Samples of the world's agricultural biodiversity, including crops such as wheat, apple and potato, are currently scattered across 1,400 seed banks around the world. All these seed banks are at risk from local problems. Mr Fowler cited the example of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the 1994 genocide in Rwanda as times when dozens of unique crops had been wiped out. At the same time, those countries' own seed banks had been destroyed, meaning the genes were lost for ever. "You can use the word extinction in this case," he said. "This would no longer occur once the [Svalbard] seed bank opened."
The new seed bank will store its samples in a reinforced concrete tunnel drilled 70 metres (230ft) into a mountain, guarded by two steel doors and remote-controlled from Sweden. The seeds will be stored in foil packets at -18C, and are expected to remain viable for thousands of years. If a crop is lost through natural disaster or war and a seed bank is destroyed, a government could request replacement seeds from the vault.
The vault will not rely solely on artificial refrigeration systems. The facility's remote location and permafrost will ensure that, even if the power fails, the temperature will never rise above freezing. Though the facility will be fenced in, Svalbard's fierce polar bears, could also act as natural guardians.
The seed bank will start accepting samples in 2007.
********************
Science goes to Hollywood reading film viewers minds…
Cognitive philosophy - "brain science", as its practitioners call it - is a rarefied academic field. But that hasn't prevented Hollywood from optioning Steve Quartz. Not, alas, for a movie (The Wittgenstein Code?) but for the cutthroat business of marketing them. Quartz, it's thought, can forecast what the notoriously unpredictable audience for film "really" wants better than the audience themselves.
In his laboratory, Quartz uses functional brain imaging, or fMRI, to measure humans' responses to such classics as Casablanca. "Essentially, people are placed inside an enormous magnet," he says. "And then we look to see small changes in blood flow. It's a way of tapping, in a totally non-invasive way, into brain activity."
The moneymen in LA were quick to lease his technique. More money was in prospect - and safer money. As Quartz points out, the margin of profit for the industry is "somewhere in the area of 4%". They need all the help they can get.
Reading the customer's brain will, Quartz believes, replace the clipboard and stop-you-in-the-street market survey and other primitive research techniques that commerce relies on to get its act right.
********************
Eggs have long been demonised as being bad for the heart. Yet the Daily Mail has reported on new research which suggests that this is not only untrue, but that eggs could even be considered a 'superfood'.
Eggs could actually protect against heart disease, breast cancer and eye problems and even help you to lose weight.
For years people assumed eggs were bad for cholesterol levels. But a review just published in the British Nutrition Foundation’s Nutrition Bulletin found they ‘have no clinically significant impact’ on heart disease or cholesterol levels.
Dr Bruce Griffin of the University of Surrey’s school of biomedical and molecular science analysed 30 egg studies, among them one from Harvard University which showed people who consumed one or more eggs a day were at no more risk of suffering from cardiovascular disease than non-egg eaters.
Eggs are actually good for you. ‘They are rich in nutrients,’ says Joanne Lunn, nutrition scientist at the British Nutrition Foundation. One egg provides 13 essential nutrients; all in the yolk (egg whites contain albumen, an important source of protein, and no fat).
Teenage girls who eat an egg a day may give themselves additional protection against breast cancer in later life, according to a study in the journal Breast Cancer Research.
********************
Women with damaged or missing wombs could, within five years, have transplants that would allow them to have children naturally, scientists said yesterday in reports from the Telegraph.
Researchers said experiments carried out in animals had brought them a step closer to being able to carry out womb transplantation in humans.
Uteruses removed and later restored in sheep have for the first time been shown to be functioning normally. The procedure would give the approximately 200 UK women per year who attempt to have their own biological children using surrogate mothers the chance to give birth naturally themselves.
Professor Mats Brannstrom, of the department of gynaecology at the Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden, presented the findings of his research on sheep at the annual meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology (Eshre) in Prague yesterday.
Three years ago Professor Brannstrom announced that he had performed successful womb transplants in mice that then gave birth to healthy offspring.
Before trying to use the technique on humans, work will be required in primates.
Other reports from the World of Medical Science suggest Leading British surgeons are debating plans for the first face transplant in Britain. The ethical committee of the Royal Free Hospital in London is to consider granting permission for the operation.
No recipients have yet been selected, but several possible patients have been seen by doctors. Consultant plastic surgeon Peter Butler has spent the past 14 years looking at the possibility of carrying out the procedure, reports Ananova.
If approval is granted by the hospital's ethical committee, the process to identify a suitable patient could begin. But a spokesman stressed that even if permission was granted it would not mean a transplant was imminent as patient selection could take up to a year.
Simon Weston, who suffered terrible burns in the Falklands War, is expected to explain why he thinks doctors should be allowed to perform face transplants in Britain. Mr Weston was initially against the procedure but has now come down in favour. Although it has been technically possible to carry out the operation for several years, ethical concerns have prevented surgeons from doing so.
Last November the world's first partial face transplant took place in France.
********************
The Science of penalties, it is the World Cup moment that all England football supporters are dreading: when the chosen players step up to the spot for the almost inevitable penalty shoot-out.
However, a timely scientific study can offer some help. It has confirmed what every schoolboy is told: decide where you are going to kick the ball beforehand - and never change your mind.
As David Beckham's team face the possibility of another penalty shoot-out in the World Cup knock-out stages, research reported in the Telegraph demonstrates that players who stick to a target picked before their run-up are more likely to score than those who try to outwit the goalkeeper at the last second.
Scientists observed 10 "intermediate level" footballers taking penalties with two different strategies, described as "keeper-independent" and "keeper-dependent".
In the keeper-independent strategy, the penalty-taker shot at one of two specified targets to the right and left side of the goal, as if ignoring the goalkeeper's actions during the run-up. In the keeper-dependent strategy, the target was switched to a different side of the goal during the run-up, so the player had to change the direction of his kick, as if reacting to the goalkeeper's movements.
The results were published in the Journal for Sports Science, which stated that when players used the keeper-independent strategy, they were 100 per cent accurate, always choosing the correct side and shooting on average 90cm from the middle of the target.
The names of the players who missed past penalties are etched on fans' hearts: Chris Waddle, Stuart Pearce, Gareth Southgate, Paul Ince, David Batty, David Beckham, and Darius Vassell.
England's marksmen will have to be ready, all the more so because Beckham's team could play Germany in the quarter-finals. If past form is anything to go by, it is almost certain to end in the dreaded penalties.
Good Luck England!
***************
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