Europe and North America Science News

A Georgia court this week halted construction of a new 1,200-megawatt coal-fired power plant on the Chattahoochee River, dubbed Longleaf, because backers failed to provide a plan to limit climate change–causing carbon dioxide emissions from it. [More]

FLORENCE, TEX.--"Look at that--isn't it gorgeous?" Sandy Peck asks as she rinses dirt from a flaked stone about the length and width of a pinky finger. Peck runs a hose over soil on a fine-mesh screen, prodding at stubborn clods of clay with a muddy glove. "Look, there's another one."

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The first flyby of the planet Mercury in more than 30 years is resolving some long-standing puzzles about the closest planet to the sun. Among the findings: the planet's iron-rich core seems to be shrinking, causing its crust to buckle and crack. [More]

What makes the unique sound of a Stradivarius violin?The wood, of course. Using x-ray images taken from multiple different angles, radiologist Berend Stoel of Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands proved that the spruce and maple wood used in five violins made either by Antonio Stradivari or Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù--the rival master luthiers of Cremona--had fewer variations in their density than that in seven contemporary violins. The density of the wood determines how a violin resonates with sound, which may explain why Stradivarius and Guarnerius violins are coveted by musicians worldwide and fetch prices of several million dollars. It may also allow modern instrument makers to finally match the perfection of past masters. [More]

In a major step toward controlling the spread of tree-destroying gypsy moths, China has agreed to allow scientists to inspect forests near shipping ports to gauge the risk of the pests there hitching rides on ships to the U.S.

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Editor's Note: This story will be published in the next issue of Scientific American Mind.

The deadliest and most common type of brain cancer has a strange bedfellow: cytomegalovirus, a kind of herpes present in about 80 percent of the U.S. population. Now scientists are exploiting this coincidence to treat the cancer with a vaccine that targets the virus and slows tumor regrowth.

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]

It took 13 years and countless hours of research to unravel the human genome. Now neuroscientists want to do their field’s version. A small group of researchers is advancing the emerging field of what they call “connectomics.” As genomics moved from individual genes to the entire genome, so connectomics wants to take us from individual neurons in our brain to the connections and wiring in the entire nervous system network. That involves nerve cells, the axons that stretch out like wires, the synapses that transmit information.

Capital punishment is legal in 36 states, but that does not necessarily mean all of the condemned will be executed. Some will languish behind bars for life and others may actually be exonerated and set free. Now researchers say they have built a computer system that can predict with 92 percent accuracy which death row inmates are most likely to be executed, a development they hope will lead to a fairer appeals process. [More]

Dear EarthTalk: How is it that hydrogen can replace oil to run our cars? There seems to be a lot of controversy over whether hydrogen can really be generated and stored in such a way to be practical? -- Stephane Kuziora, Thunder Bay, ON

Talk about milking an issue. Adding a new twist to the debate over the safety of hormones in milk, a new industry study concludes that injecting cows with a growth hormone known as recombinant bovine somatotropin (rbST) designed to increase their milk production is environmentally friendly. Why? Because it has the potential of reducing the number of greenhouse gas–emitting dairy cows on the planet without decreasing milk production. [More]

Hurtling through space 31 years after its launch, the Voyager 2 spacecraft has sent back the most detailed view yet of the shock wave that marks the thinning of the solar wind, the charged particles streaming from the sun. [More]

To wear the winner's distinctive yellow jersey when this year's Tour de France ends in Paris on July 27, cyclists must make every second count throughout the race's 21 stages and 2,208 miles (3,554 kilometers). A bad day biking through the Alps can push a rider off the leader's list and deep into the pack, which makes access to the latest high-tech cycling equipment crucial.

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Dear EarthTalk: What initiatives are taking place on college campuses to reduce the footprints of these large users of energy and other resources?-- Shawna Smith, Hamilton, NY

The number 14 turns up conspicuously in discussions of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the soon-to-be world's biggest particle accelerator. Construction of its underground, 17-mile (27-kilometer) ring on a site near Geneva, Switzerland, has taken 14 years. It is designed to reach energies of 14 tera- (trillion) electron volts (TeV), or about seven times that of the Tevatron, the world's currently reigning accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.

And project leaders at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced today that next month workers should be done chilling the machine's 50,000 tons of magnets to temperatures colder than deep space--a bracing –456.3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.9 kelvins)--making them ready to whip opposing beams of protons to near light speed and collide them so researchers can pick over the debris.

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]

Methane is a greenhouse gas that traps heat even better than carbon dioxide. It comes from a variety of sources, including fossil fuel production and even farming. Cows give off methane, ya know, after they eat. Even the surface waters of the ocean contain substantial amounts of this gas. But where that marine methane comes was a mystery. Until now.

In 1962 someone at the Genetics Institute in Pavia, Italy, turned up the temperature in an incubator holding fruit flies. When Ferruccio Ritossa, then a young geneticist, examined the cells of these “heat shocked” flies, he noticed that their chromosomes had puffed up at discrete locations. The puffy appearance was a known sign that genes were being activated in those regions to give rise to their encoded proteins, so those sites of activity became known as the heat shock loci.

The effect was reproducible but initially considered to be unique to the fruit fly. It took another 15 years before the proteins generated when these chromosome puffs appear were detected in mammals and other forms of life. In what is certainly among the most absorbing stories in contemporary biology, heat shock proteins (HSPs) have since been recognized as occupying a central role in all life--not just at the level of cells but of organisms and whole populations.

If humans could reanimate one of our ancient ancestors, we could quickly learn much more about how people once went about their lives than any study of dusty bones and artifacts would reveal. Our forebear might even teach us a few old tricks that could be used to help the living.

That is in essence what researchers in Germany and Hungary were after when they re-created Harbinger3_DR, a long-extinct precursor of at least two modern human genes: they wanted to watch it operate inside living cells. Not just any DNA relic, Harbinger3_DR is an ancient transposon--a so-called jumping gene, able to cut itself out of an organism’s genome and reinsert itself in a different location. Modern scientists would love to master its secrets so they could more precisely control where genes introduced for gene therapy incorporate themselves into a patient’s DNA strand.

Readers of this column will recall from last month Sir Birnie, the aristocratic landowner whose bequests used geometry to define his heirs' inheritance. When his first great-grandchild, Emma May, came of age, there was again great excitement. The fortunes of the family had risen and his eldest grandchild, Johanna, had been able to buy out the southern neighbor, so the entire property shown in the original map now belonged to the family--although only after the former neighbor to the south had heavily logged his portion. YZ was now clearly marked and the property extended a full kilometer to the east of the intersection and a half-kilometer to the west.

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People who took magic mushrooms were still feeling the love more than a year later, and one might say they were on cloud nine about it, scientists report in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

"Most of the volunteers looked back on their experience up to 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives," comparing it with the birth of a child or the death of a parent, says neuroscientist Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who led the research. "It's one thing to have a dramatic experience you say is impressive. It's another thing to say you consider it as meaningful 14 months later. There's something about the saliency of these experiences that's stunning."