Official "Science News" Thread

[cheesehead]

"Mars' mystery cloud explained"

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news...loud-explained

Originally Posted by Alan Boyle

A week ago, amateur astronomers were marveling over a curious cloud that they spotted on the[sic] Mars — and now the professionals are focusing in on an explanation.

The cloud was intriguing because it was most noticeable along the very edge of the Martian disk, and seemed to project high into the atmosphere. Some suspected that it might be a cloud of dust thrown up by an impact on the Red Planet. So, over the past week, professionals and amateurs have been working together to collect imagery and analyze the hazy spot.

"It's most likely a condensate cloud/haze, H2O in composition," Bruce Cantor, senior staff scientist at Malin Space Science Systems, said in an email that was circulated to other experts. "Similar type of phenomena have been seen in early-morning orbital observations in the past."

. . .

Bottom line? The likeliest explanation for the mystery cloud seems to be the one Cantor came up with: It's a seldom-seen but far from unprecedented manifestation of Martian morning weather. ...

[davieddy]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

"Mars' mystery cloud explained"

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news...loud-explained

Whatever it was, that problem had been troubling me for years.

David

[cheesehead]

"Researchers recreate bee collapse with pesticide-laced corn syrup"

http://news.mongabay.com/2012/0405-h...esticides.html

(Note what they say at the end about why the link was not understood sooner!)

Scientists with the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) have re-created the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder in several honeybee hives simply by giving them small doses of a popular pesticide, imidacloprid. Bee populations have been dying mysteriously throughout North America and Europe since 2006, but the cause behind the decline, known as Colony Collapse Disorder, has eluded scientists. However, coming on the heels of two studies published last week in Science that linked bee declines to neonicotinoid pesticides, of which imidacloprid is one, the new study adds more evidence that the major player behind Colony Collapse Disorder is not disease, or mites, but pesticides that began to be widely used in the 1990s.

Past research has shown that neonicotinoid pesticides, which target insects' central nervous system, do not instantly kill bees. However, to test the effect of even small amounts of these pesticides on western honeybees (Apis mellifera), Harvard researchers treated 16 hives with different levels of imidacloprid, leaving four hives untreated. After 12 weeks, the bees in all twenty hives—treated and untreated—were alive, though those treated with the highest does of imidacloprid appeared weaker. But by 23 weeks everything had changed: 15 out of the 16 hives (94 percent) treated with imidacloprid underwent classic Colony Collapse Disorder: hives were largely empty with only a few young bees surviving. The adults had simply vanished. The hives that received the highest doses of imidacloprid collapsed first. Meanwhile the four untreated hives were healthy

"There is no question that neonicotinoids put a huge stress on the survival of honey bees in the environment," lead author Chensheng (Alex) Lu, an associate professor at the HSPH, told mongabay.com. "The evidence is clear that imidacloprid is likely the culprit for Colony Collapse Disorder via a very unique mechanism that has not been reported until our study,"

That mechanism? High-fructose corn syrup. Many bee-keepers have turned to high-fructose corn syrup to feed their bees, which the researchers say did not imperil bees until U.S. corn began to be sprayed with imidacloprid in 2004-2005. A year later was the first outbreak of Colony Collapse Disorder.

It doesn't take much to eventually kill the bees accord to Lu, who said an incredibly small amount (20 parts per billion) of imidacloprid was enough to lead to Colony Collapse Disorder within 6 months.

More evidence

Lu's research follows two widely-reported studies last week that also linked Colony Collapse Disorder to neonicotinoid pesticides.

. . .


Their findings imply that neonicotinoid pesticide weakens a bees' homing ability, so instead of returning to the hive, the bee gets lost and perishes. This would explain why hives impacted by Colony Collapse Disorder are found largely empty of worker bees: the pesticide theoretically impacts their ability to find their way home.

It has taken a long time to understand the link between Colony Collapse Disorder and neonicotinoid pesticides, because scientists were looking for an instant-killer, and not something that caused slow deaths over several months, says Lu. In addition he adds that scientists ignored "the fact that the timeline of increasing use of neonicotinoids coincides with the decline of bee populations."

Lu says policy makers "need to examine the effect of sub-lethal doses of pesticides throughout the life cycle of the test model (in this case honey bees)." He further notes the depending on LD50 findings (i.e. a lethal dose that results in the death of half of the specimens tested) "is not relevant to the modern day chemical toxicity testing." In other words, regulators need to start testing the long-term impacts of chemicals in the environment, and not simply focused on whether or not they instantly kill test subjects.

. . .

[cheesehead]

"Can a Dirt-Cheap Diabetes Drug Fight Cancer?"

http://news.health.com/2012/04/06/metformin-cancer/

FRIDAY, April 6, 2012 (Health.com) — Each year billions of dollars are spent in the search to find new cancer drugs. Very few of these would-be treatments end up being approved by the government and entering widespread use, which makes it all the more intriguing that one of the most promising new cancer drugs in years is, in fact, an old drug.

Metformin, a diabetes drug, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1995, and since then tens of millions of Americans with diabetes have taken it daily to control their blood sugar. The first hint that metformin might also have anticancer properties came a decade later, when two research teams separately reported that diabetes patients were less likely to develop cancer, and less likely to die from the disease, if they were taking the drug.

. . .

Over the past several years, studies in cell cultures and animals have found that metformin appears to slow or stop the growth of a wide range of cancer cells, including those associated with breast, prostate, lung, and endometrial cancer. And the pace of research has picked up. This week, at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) in Chicago, researchers presented preliminary results from no fewer than 20 studies on metformin, including some in humans.

. . .

The promising study findings aren’t the only cause for enthusiasm among doctors. Metformin’s decades-long history as a diabetes drug—it entered the U.K. market back in 1958—suggests that it’s generally safe. It’s also extremely cheap. The U.S. patent on metformin expired in 2002, so the drug is now available in various generic versions that cost just pennies per pill.

. . .

... Pharmaceutical companies that spend billions to develop patented—and expensive—cancer drugs have little incentive to fund or conduct studies on generics like metformin. As a result, metformin researchers have struggled to scrape together the money needed for clinical trials, which can run into the millions. Many of the ongoing metformin studies around the world are “being done on a shoestring budget, in a sort of informal way,” Pollak says.

“I imagine that if [metformin] was a proprietary drug owned by a major pharmaceutical company, they would be developing it very aggressively, because all of the indicators point in the same direction, and that’s unusual,” Goodwin says.

. . .

A recent shift in thinking at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which includes the NCI, seems to be working in metformin’s favor.

In 2011, NIH director Francis Collins, M.D., said that “drug rescue and repurposing” would be a major focus of the agency, with the goal of investigating new uses for already approved or abandoned drugs. A few days later, the agency’s associate director for science policy, Amy Patterson, M.D., mentioned metformin as a prime example of this approach. Two-thirds of the NCI-funded clinical trials of metformin now under way were initiated in 2011 or later.

. . .

[science_man_88]

More Than Mere Magic Mushrooms

This week we're talking about fungus two ways. One that can survive exclusively on polyurethane and another that can replace Styrofoam.

[xilman]

I just found this new result: http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v108/i13/e130501

We're getting there, slowly.

[science_man_88]

Originally Posted by xilman

I just found this new result: http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v108/i13/e130501

We're getting there, slowly.

Physicist claims victory over traffic ticket with physics paper

(It's also posted with a date of April 1, so downloader beware.)

[Dubslow]

Originally Posted by xilman

I just found this new result: http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v108/i13/e130501

We're getting there, slowly.

And that wasn't even using Shor's algorithm?

Edit: My uni's library site:

Physical review letters [0031-9007]
Full text available via American Physical Society [PROLA]
- Available from 1958 volume: 1 issue: 1
- Most recent 4 year(s) not available
Subjects (If Available):
Physics: Applied Physics
Physics: General and Others

:headdesk:

[science_man_88]

Super Secret Hypersonic Aircraft Flew Out of Its Skin

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, has made public its best guess about what might have caused its unmanned arrowhead-shaped Hypersonic Technology Vehicle (HTV-2) to suddenly lose contact and crash in the Pacific just a few minutes after slicing through the sky at Mach 20 last August: it was going so fast its skin peeled off.

[xilman]

More probably technology and economics but I couldn't find a more appropriate location than here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17827347

They appear to be realists: "We're in this for decades. But it's not a charity. And we'll make money from the beginning."

[Dubslow]

Originally Posted by xilman

More probably technology and economics but I couldn't find a more appropriate location than here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17827347

They appear to be realists: "We're in this for decades. But it's not a charity. And we'll make money from the beginning."

This is one of those things that makes me happy I'm relatively young: I may not have been around for the Apollo missions or the majority of the STS years, but I can't wait to see where we are 20 years from now.