SCIENCE IN THE NEWS
from Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society


Today's Headlines - January 2, 2008

FDA Flip-Flop Mobilizes Prostate Cancer Patients to Activism

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

He'd been fighting prostate cancer for 12 years, and his doctor told him
the disease was spreading, but Ted Girgus still had hope.

In 2006, the retired college administrator had moved from Ventura County
to
Bellingham, Wash., to be closer to his three sons, his daughter and his
wife's family as his health worsened. While there, however, he learned
of ... a new kind of cancer therapy, one that might extend the lives --
at
least by a couple of months -- of men who had exhausted all other
options.

...In March, an FDA advisory committee voted to recommend approval of
the
therapy, a cancer vaccine genetically engineered to prod the patient's
immune system to attack the disease with renewed vigor. But, in May, the
FDA announced that it would require more data on the therapy -- called
Provenge and made by Dendreon Corp. -- before reconsidering approval.

To read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/scimedemail/la-he-
prostate31dec31,0,7170177.story

Or: http://snipurl.com/1wcu6


New Zealand Builds a Nest Big Enough to Save Kiwis

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand - In the thousand or so years since humans
discovered the remote islands that make up New Zealand, three-quarters
of
the indigenous bird species have been driven to extinction, and until
recently, it looked as if the kiwi could follow.

That would be a loss for the environment, but also for national pride;
the
kiwi, a small flightless bird that nests in burrows, is the national
bird
and has become something of an improbable national symbol. The country's
dollar is named after it, and New Zealand's residents are often
labeled "kiwis" by outsiders.

Now, environmentalists are becoming more hopeful that a project started
in
1994 will pull the beady-eyed bird back from the brink. Kiwi numbers
have
declined rapidly over the past century, as populations struggled with
the
twin threats of shrinking habitat and expanding legions of new
predators.

To read more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/28/world/asia/28newzealand.html

Or: http://snipurl.com/1wctj


Showing Mushrooms' True Colors

from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

Taylor Lockwood never paid much attention to mushrooms. But when he
moved
from Los Angeles to the redwood-carpeted northern California community
of
Mendocino during the warm, wet winter of 1984, he found himself
surrounded
by them. Thus began an unabashedly obsessive love affair between the
photographer and one of nature's strangest and most diverse life forms.

Mushrooms are fungi, a kingdom apart from plants, and they are
underappreciated in our "fungiphobic" culture, Taylor says. That's a
situation he aims to rectify.

...Most underappreciated, he says, is that many mushrooms are extremely,
even ridiculously, pretty. They are polka-dot and striped, smooth as
skin
and jagged as the moon. They are red, green, orange, yellow and even
blue.

To read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2007/12/30/AR2007123001751.html

Or: http://snipurl.com/1wcui


Radio Wave Technique May Help Heart Attack Survivors

from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

Treating heart attack victims with radio waves helps reduce the
likelihood
that implantable defibrillators will need to jolt ailing hearts into
beating properly, researchers reported last week.

The radio-wave technique involves sending a probe into the heart,
finding
scar tissue from an earlier heart attack, and using radio waves to
destroy
the portion of that scar that can catastrophically disrupt the
heartbeat.

A team led by Dr. Mark Josephson of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
found that 64 heart attack patients who were first treated this way were
less likely to develop a deadly rhythm than another 64 also given an
implantable cardioverter defibrillator, or ICD, but who were not treated
with radio ablation.

To read more:
http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2007/12/31/radio_wave_techni
que_
may_help_heart_attack_survivors/

Or: http://snipurl.com/1wcur


Antarctica May Contain "Oasis of Life"

from National Geographic News

Antarctica is not a barren polar desert but a rich, complex environment
that may contain a thriving "oasis of life," experts say.

Researchers have uncovered a complex subglacial system miles under the
ice
where rivers larger than the Amazon link a series of "lake districts,"
which may teem with mineral-hungry microbes. This watery environment may
be
more than one-and-a-half times the size of the United States, scientists
say, which would make it the world's largest wetland.

"This is essentially a whole new world that ten years ago we didn't know
existed," said Michael Studinger, a geophysicist at the Lamont-Doherty
Earth Observatory of Columbia University in New York. "If you peel back
the
ice sheet, you would expect a watery landscape similar to what we would
see
on the surface of Earth."

To read more: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/12/071227-
antarctica-wetland.html

Or: http://snipurl.com/1wcwu


Seventeenth-Century Couple Left US Cancer Legacy

from New Scientist

A married couple who sailed to America from England around 1630 may be
the
ancestors of thousands of people in the US at higher risk of a
hereditary
form of colon cancer who are alive today, researchers said on Wednesday.

US scientists traced a so-called founder genetic mutation found among
two
large families currently living in Utah and New York to the couple.
Cancer
researchers at the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Utah say thousands of
people across the country may have the mutation that spread widely as
the
couple's descendants branched over many generations.

"The fact that this mutation can be traced so far back in time suggests
it
could be carried by many more families in the United States than is
currently known," says Deborah Neklason, who led the study. "In fact,
this
founder mutation might be related to many colon cancer cases in the
United
States."

To read more: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13131-
seventeenthcentury-couple-left-us-cancer-legacy.html

Or: http://snipurl.com/1wcxa


Bodies Point to Alaska's Past

from BBC News Online

It is not the type of a call that an archaeologist receives every day.
There are bodies, the voice on the end of the line told Anne Jensen; we
don't know who they were, or why they are here.

"People started noticing stuff eroding out of the bluff," she recalls,
"and
I got called out, along with the police, the real estate people and so
on.
It was very clearly an archaeological burial. And the bluff was
collapsing
quickly, so we just got the contents out."

The bluff lies virtually at the end of the Americas, on a narrow, hooked
spit projecting northwards from Barrow. It marks the join of the
Beaufort
and Chukchi seas, and is prey to the temperamental vagaries of both. Now
known as Point Barrow, the settlement on it was Nuvuk for at least 1,000
years ...

To read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6902858.stm

Or: http://snipurl.com/1wcvi


2007: A Year of Stunning Progress in the Science of Life

from the Guardian (UK)

When the human genome was sequenced seven years ago, scientists knew
that
most of the major scientific discoveries of the 21st century would be in
biology.

This was particularly true of 2007, which saw huge leaps in our
understanding of how genes cause disease and how life works (and can be
manipulated) at its most fundamental level.

There has been steady progress ever since 2000 in identifying what
different genes do, but it was only in 2007 that this crucial labelling
of
the genome really took off.

To read more:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jan/01/science.review.2007

Or: http://snipurl.com/1wcvw


Wandering Magnetic Poles Help Reveal History of Earth and Humans

from Science News

Hikers in the wilderness often place their faith in a trusty compass.
But
any navigator worth his salt knows that compasses can't truly be
trusted:
Only along certain longitudes in the Northern Hemisphere does a compass
needle point due north.

In other locales, a compass needle slews either to the left or the right
of
true north by a certain angle, a process commonly known as declination.

... What many scientists didn't appreciate until the 1600s, after they
had
compiled a few decades' worth of precise measurements at astronomical
observatories, was that declination varied through time. ...A slowly
wandering magnetic pole is a boon for archaeologists and other
researchers
who study the past.

To read more: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20071222/bob9.asp

Or: http://snipurl.com/1wcwe


Study of ERs Reports Racial "Gaps"

from the Seattle Times

CHICAGO (Associated Press) - Emergency-room doctors are prescribing
strong
narcotics more often to patients who complain of pain, but minorities
are
less likely to get them than whites, a new study finds. Even for the
severe
pain of kidney stones, minorities were prescribed narcotics such as
oxycodone and morphine less frequently than whites.

The analysis of more than 150,000 ER visits over 13 years found
differences
in prescribing by race and ethnicity in urban and rural hospitals, in
all
U.S. regions and for every type of pain.

...The study appears in today's Journal of the American Medical
Association. Prescribing narcotics for pain in emergency rooms rose
during
the study, from 23 percent of those complaining of pain in 1993 to 37
percent in 2005.

To read more:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2004103399_pain02.html

Or: http://snipurl.com/1wcxs