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The Northwest Passage is about to be ice-free for the second year in the row, as seen on satellite images released today by the European Space Agency. The less direct Amundsen Northwest Passage has already been passable for about a month.

Last September scientists were very concerned when the Arctic ice pack shrunk to its smallest size since satellite measurements began almost 30 years ago. This year the ice has already claimed the title of second smallest ice pack with three weeks of its melting season left to go.

Usually at this point in the season he melting rate would begin to slow, said Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Data Center in Boulder Colorado. Instead it sped up.

The results are disquieting. Researchers are trying to create new models to reflect how thin the ice has really become. According to a UK Guardian article:

[T]he most important of these computer studies of ice cover was carried out a few months ago by Professor Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Using US Navy supercomputers, his team produced a forecast which indicated that by 2013 there will be no ice in the Arctic - other than a few outcrops on islands near Greenland and Canada - between mid-July and mid-September.

The same article also quotes Mark Serreze:

"We always knew [the Arctic] would be the first region on Earth to feel the impact of climate change, but not at anything like this speed. What is happening now indicates that global warming is occurring far earlier than any of us expected."

Satellite measurements have been very useful for tracking data in the difficult-to-access polar region, especially since satellite radar can work through clouds and darkness-- conditions frequently encountered in the Arctic.

ESA will expand its climate change monitoring capabilities with Cryosat-2 set to launch in 2009. The new satellite will be able to measure the rate at which both ice cover and ice thickness are diminishing.

An AP article on the recent UN climate meetings in Ghana quotes Bill Hare, Greenpeace Climate Policy Director, as saying that there have been "alarming" reports in the past few days of methane "burps" in the Arctic as well.  These latest reports from a Russian research vessel in the Arctic sea are consistent with concerns voiced in previous papers about the danger of warming releasing methane stored in Arctic permafrost and undersea gas hydrates. Methane is 23-25 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and is found in great abundance in frozen reserves in the Arctic.

The concern is that methane, unlike carbon dioxide can create a non-linear warming trend. That is very dangerous and could result in a 10-degree rise in temperature on a very short time scale, according to a Nature paper Wired Science covered in May. Others say that methane oxidizes in the atmosphere in seven to eight years and is not a long-lasting problem (CO2 lingers for almost a century). The bad news is that when methane oxidizes, it produces CO2.

The point? Keep your eye on methane in the Arctic. The fact that the UN IPCC considers methane to be one of the wild cards of climate change is enough for me to want to know more.

Arctic Ice on the Verge of Another All-Time Low [ESA]
As Arctic Sea Ice Melts, Experts Expect A New Low [New York Times]
Methane: a Scientific Journey from Obscurity to Climate Super Stardom [NASA GISS]

See Also:

• Arctic Sea Ice Melting Faster Than Expected (2007)
• Northwest Passage, through Arctic, Opened by Thaw (2007)
• Could Methane Trigger a Climate Doomsday Within a Human Lifespan?
• NASA Goddard Institute Director Predicts Global Warming 'Tipping Point'

Image courtesy of European Space Agency

Tropical storm Gustav appears to be gaining strength near Jamaica as it makes its way towards the Gulf Coast. As we've noted, it could have a major impact on the short-term viability of the Gulf energy infrastructure, so we're tracking it closely.

Here, we've assembled some of the data from the National Hurricane Center's data on wind speed probability into a little Google Widget that lets you compare the probability of different maximum wind speeds over the next few days.We'll keep it updated with the latest info from NOAA.

Note: Due to a quirk in Google Docs, I could only put in data in days, so the data from 12 hours and 36 hours in the chart below is not included in the chart. 

See Also:

• Tropical Storm Gustav Threatens US Energy Infrastructure
• Hurricane's Deep-Ocean Roar Sounds Its Strength
• What the Southeast Really Needs is a Hurricane
• Global Warming Makes Hurricanes Worse: No! Yes! No! Yes!

Image: National Hurricane Center

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.

Chemists have finally succeeded in breaking down a famously unalterable molecule -- and persistent greenhouse gas -- at room temperature.

The molecules, known as fluorocarbons, are found in plastics, clothing and refrigerants. At their heart is a union of carbon and fluorine -- a union that, thanks to their atomic configurations, is one of the strongest molecular unions known in nature.

Under standard conditions, fluorocarbons are impervious to acids and bases. They don't give or receive electrons, the very currency of molecular reconfiguration. Breaking them down is possible only at temperatures approaching 2000 degrees Fahrenheit.

In some situations, that stability is a blessing: Teflon is made from fluorocarbons. But so are the hydrofluorocarbon coolants in refrigerators and air conditioners -- and when released, those become greenhouse gases that can circulate for thousands of years.

Though now found only in trace amounts in the atmosphere, scientists fear their accumulation.

"They're not the major contributor to global warming, but per molecule they're much more potent than carbon dioxide," said Brandeis University chemist Oleg Ozerov. "They're so stable that, unless we decompose them, they're pretty much here to stay."

In a study published today in Science, Ozerov and fellow Brandeis chemist Christos Douvris discovered a chemical reaction by which fluorocarbons can finally be decomposed.

The process involves trialkylsilium -- a powerful acid -- and triethylsilylium hexachlorocarborane, a catalyst that speeds the reaction. The acid bonds with a fluoride molecule from the fluorocarbon, in the process emitting a carbon atom. The carbon bonds with the catalyst, emitting a silylium ion that bonds with another fluoride atom.

"It's sort of a shuffle. A merry-go-round," said Robin Perutz, a University of York chemist who was not involved in the study. "The key is the efficiency of the catalyst. This one goes around for many cycles: you don't need much of it. Previously you could do nothing useful with these molecules at room temperature."

Ozerov cautioned that the process has yet to be scaled to industrial levels.

If that can be done, "it's a good thing," said Dave Hamilton, director of the Sierra Club's Global Warming and Energy Program. "It begins to solve a thorny global warming problem."

Hydrodefluorination of Perfluoroalkyl Groups Using Silylium-Carborane Catalysts [Science] [not yet online]

A Catalytic Foothold for Fluorocarbon Reactions [Science] [not yet online]

Image: Eric Crowley. These refrigerators are actually old and probably ran on chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs -- a type of fluorocarbon that was outlawed after its ozone layer-eating effects were revealed. Chlorofluorocarbons were replaced with hydrofluorocarbons, which turned out to be greenhouse gases; it's these that Ozerov and Douvris broke down.

See Also:

• A Cheap, Natural Way of Cutting Greenhouse Gas
• China Takes Greenhouse Gas Lead
• Cheap Catalyst Could Turn Sunlight, Water Into Fuel

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

If you really want to go green, advised a recent British Medical Journal editorial, then help the population-booming developing world have fewer kids.

It's interesting advice, but I'm somewhat ambivalent about the editors' focus on making contraceptives universally available.

When countries prosper, birth rates fall: this is a well-known, global trend. The reasons are many, and certainly involve access to contraceptives -- but there are economic reasons, too. In developed countries, children aren't seen as potential sources of labor income.

Universal contraception is a good first step. But if developed countries want to go green by reducing global population, they should help accelerate the developing world's trek to prosperity.

(Of course, let's just hope those prosperous people of the future don't consume resources like the prosperous people of today. But that's another issue.)

Population growth and climate change [British Medical Journal]

Image: davidChief

See Also:

• China: The Wrong Way to Do Population Control
• Indian Authorities Pay Couples to Stay Childless

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

Recently-discovered Amazonian settlements could be a new type of metropolis, unseen elsewhere in the world and hidden until recently in the Kuikuro jungle, say anthropologists.

Revealed by overgrown earthworks, the 100 square-mile urban units consist of clusters of interconnected villages ranging from 50-150 acres in size. The town-nodes were arranged along a highly-regular pattern of roads built around a central plaza about 500 feet across. The cities appear to have been at their height between the 13th and 17th centuries.    

"No single Xingu settlement merits the term 'city.' But what do you do with a core of five settlements are few kilometers away from each other?" Michael Heckenberger, a University of Florida anthropologist currently in Brazil, told Science. "A fast walk from one to another would take you 15 minutes, maximum."

Heckenberger co-authored a new paper in the journal Science about the work with a current resident of the region Afukaka Kuikuro, who helped locate and identify the old sites. The work details the shapes, sizes and patterns of the villages, building on the original discovery that they existed, first published in Science in 2003.

The work suggests that the Amazon basin, particularly the Xingu region, may have been more populated than previously thought, but without the traditional city structures that mark other old urban civilizations in other parts of the world.

Before the discovery of the new settlement pattern, estimates of the habitability of the Amazon basin based on European development models had found that as few as 1000 people might have been able to live in the entire region. Heckenberger's work could cause a major revision of those numbers upward and highlight a new type of medium-density urban settlement.

"I think he really does great work," said Anabel Ford, an archaeologist at the University of California-Santa Barbara, who has conducted similar research on the jungle site El Pilar in Guatemala.

Ford did question, however, Heckenberger's use of the term "urban" to describe the settlements.

"What is urban? I'd certainly want to see things a little more dense than things are here to call them urban," Ford said. "Still, he's got lots of settlements. It doesn’t matter how you look at them, he's got a lot of them."

While the roads connecting the villages seem to indicate that they were part of a larger urban unit, Ford noted that the finding remained provisional.

"It's very easy for one to be lulled into thinking that the settlement pattern reflects those kinds of things," she said. "Obviously smaller [villages] had to be organized and if they are all together, it's not illogical."

Heckenberger's research was driven by local knowledge combined with global satellite imaging technology and GIS mapping. As can be seen in the top photographs, the roads and ditches that define the limits of the city have now been mapped onto the terrain, but they were only discovered with help from locals who knew the locations of the artifacts.

The unique model of urban or quasi-urban life that emerges from the anthropological work could provide a low-impact model for current Amazon-dwellers.

"Some of the practices that these folks hammered [out] may provide alternative forms of understanding how to do low level sustainable development today," Heckenberger said in a release.

See Also:

• The Sixth Extinction: Yawn
• Amazon Tribe Shakes Foundation of Modern Linguistics
• Yucatan Jungles Are Feral Maya Gardens
• A Wiki for the Planet: Clay Shirky on Open Source Environmentalism

Images: Courtesy of Science.

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.

Do enough cocaine, and your brain tries to protect itself.

The findings don't justify cocaine abuse: as countless addicts have shown, the brain's self-defense doesn't prevent long-term damage. They could, however, help scientists develop treatments for recovering drug abusers.

Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern found that cocaine reduced expression of the MEF2 protein in mice. The protein typically blocks the formation of neuronal connections; thus limited, brain wiring increases.

When the researchers increased MEF2 expression, fewer neuronal connections formed in the mice, who then proceeded to display more addictive behaviors.

“Our findings suggest that increased brain connections during chronic drug use may actually limit behavioral changes associated with drug addiction, rather than support them,” said University of Texas Southwestern psychiatrist Christopher Cowan in a press release. “If we understand which genes are influenced by MEF2, we can intervene."

The findings were published today in Neuron.

Cocaine Regulates MEF2 to Control Synaptic and Behavioral Plasticity [Neuron]

Video: Eddie Murphy and the late Rick James sing "Party All the Time."

See Also:

• Memory Disruption Could Aid Addicts
• The New Way to Kick a Coke Habit: Mixing Tranquilizers with ...
• Chem Lab: Chinese Herb Sucks the Fun out of Blow
• The Drug Residue on Your Money Just Got Way More Incriminating

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

For everyone who's blown out their ears with loud music, a bit of good news: gene therapy might rejuvenate your hearing.

By adding a gene to embryonic mice, researchers led by Oregon Health and Science University biologist John Brigande coaxed the growth of tiny hairs that coat the inner ear, picking up vibrations and signaling the brain's auditory processors.

Loss of these hairs is a major cause of deafness, both genetic and acquired, and the cause of tinnitus -- phantom roars and rings experienced by some 50 million Americans.

But if this news seems like license to stick your head in a speaker, take heed: it's still very preliminary.

Describing the technique in a paper published yesterday in Nature, Brigande's team wrote that it "will enable the design and validation of gene therapies to ameliorate hearing loss in mouse models of human deafness."

In other words, it doesn't just need to be translated to humans; it needs to be translated to more mice. And when it comes to gene therapy, people with non-life-threatening conditions might want to wait until techniques are refined.

Functional auditory hair cells produced in the mammalian cochlea by in utero gene transfer [Nature]

Image: Engineered cells fluoresce in the inner ears of developing mice, courtesy of David Woessner, John Mitchell, and John V. Brigande.

See Also:

• Better Bass: Skip the Subwoofer, Hack Your Hearing?
• FDA Warning: Erectile Dysfunction Drugs Can Cause Sudden Loss of ...
• Gene Therapy's Lessons for Stem Cell Treatments
• Controversial Gene Therapy Trial Restarts
• Possible Gene Therapy Death Media Roundup
• Gene Therapy Death Still a Mystery

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

Two biotech companies have developed quick blood tests for dengue fever, which kills about twenty-five thousand people per year -- mostly children.

Both of the new tools could be tremendously helpful in undeveloped countries. They will allow doctors to identify the deadly disease without using fancy lab equipment.

Philippe Dussart and Laurence Baril, scientists from the Pasteur Institutes of Guyane and Dakar, reviewed the medical gadgets for the current issue of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

To evaluate the assays, Dussart and Baril obtained hundreds of serum samples taken from people with severe infections, and checked them with kits made by Bio-Rad and Panbio.

The better product, which operates like a home pregnancy test, worked in just 15 minutes. It could recognize the disease over 80 percent of the time, and was never fooled by blood from people who were not infected by the nasty bug. 

When someone has an acute case of dengue fever, a protein called NS1, which is a part of the virus, will be drifting around in their blood. The new tests use Y-shaped molecules, called antibodies, to detect the telltale substance.

In the Bio-Rad kit, those antibodies are attached to tiny gold particles that reside within a test strip.

When a doctor wets the end with a sample from an infected patient, the antibodies will stick to the NS1 from their serum. As the liquid creeps up the test strip, any of the gold particles that are towing the viral protein will get stuck along an indicator line. A colored mark, made by the piled up particles, will appear if the patient has the disease.

There is no cure or vaccine for dengue fever, but a clear diagnosis will help doctors decide how to manage the symptoms. Armed with that information, they may be able to save a lot of lives.

Image: The Stegomyia aegypti mosquito carries dengue virus. provided by the Centers for Disease Control.

UPDATE (8:35 AM Pacific): Tropical storm Gustav continues to track towards the Gulf's energy infrastructure and with an intensity that suggests it will become a category-3 hurricane with sustained winds of 115 miles per hour, according to a National Hurricane Center update issued this morning. The storm's most likely path is now slightly to the west of New Orleans as seen in the updated picture above.

Three days before the three-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall, the Gulf of Mexico is bracing for another hurricane that could hit the energy industry particularly hard.

Tropical storm Gustav is headed straight for the heart of the Gulf's oil-producing infrastructure, according to early government forecasts, and it could become a very strong hurricane.

As seen in the map above, if the storm continues along its currently predicted path, it will slam straight into the oil rigs that dot the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana. If there is a major supply disruption, it could could send gas prices rocketing back up.

"That whole area is just so vulnerable to an intense storm. It's like rolling a bowling ball down an alley. If it hits, it's going to knock some pins down," said Chuck Watson, founder of KAC,  a disaster risk management company which does work for world governments and private enterprises. "You really hope for a gutter ball."

Kinetic Analysis Corporation estimates that there is a one in three chance that Gustav will hit with sufficient force to shut down 10 percent or more of total U.S. oil production this year.

"In a tight market, that's a big hit," Watson said.

In 2005, hurricanes including Katrina, Rita and Wilma caused major supply disruptions, reducing American oil output by a quarter. Production has only recently returned to pre-2005 levels.

The Gulf of Mexico region supplies about a tenth of the 21 million barrels of oil that the United States consumes each day. But Watson said that losing a big chunk of Gulf oil facilities would have an impact on gas prices larger than its share of world oil production.

"When you start looking at the details, [the Gulf] has an impact out of proportion to the percentages because it's close, it's cheap and it's always there," said Watson.

That could mean substantially higher gasoline prices in the United States just as prices have finally crept below four dollars a gallon.

The possibility also exists that one or more refineries could be hit, which would create much longer-term supply problems.

"If it goes into Galveston, Texas, and Beaumont, where the big refineries are, it could be catastrophic," Watson said. "There's limited capacity to absorb damage and repair it quickly."

Right now, how much trouble Gustav could cause is still unclear. The storm isn't expected to make landfall until late this weekend, and Watson said that all hurricane models are far from accurate until a few days before landfall.

"We have a 64-processor Beowulf cluster that does the modeling. We can do differential equations and look at satellite imagery," Watson said. "But these longer-range forecasts --- meh -- we're not that smart."

Nonetheless, fear of supply disruption could be enough to restart the rally in oil prices that had abated since a peak at over $140 a barrel earlier this summer. Apparently spurred by fears of Gustav, crude oil prices pushed higher today to over $118 a barrel.

See Also:

• The Oil Drum, which provides exceptionally deep coverage of energy issues, has put together a list of resources, if you feel like digging into Gulf oil production.
• Video: Installing the World's Deepest Drilling Oil Rig
• A Wiki for the Planet: Clay Shirky on Open Source Environmentalism
• No Quick Energy Fix in Rocky Mountain Oil
• Five Vulnerable Nodes in the Global Energy Network
• Economist Opens Online Debate on Energy

Image: Composite: The larger image is U.S. oil rig data from Watson's Kinetic Analysis Corporation via their Google Earth layer, the smaller image is NOAA's hurricane cone forecast.

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.

Scientists have demonstrated for the first time subconscious learning in humans akin to that detailed in rats and pigeons by the famed-behaviorist B.F. Skinner seventy years ago.

The evidence comes from a cleverly designed experiment that eliminated conscious reasoning as a variable in conditioning. Study participants were shown a cue for less five hundredths of a second, far below the threshold for conscious vision. Then the respondents were asked to "use their intuition" to determine if pressing a button would yield a monetary reward after the cue.

Study participants were able to choose the correct button 63 percent of the time, but only when they received a reward. Without it, participants did not fare better than chance would predict.

Using magnetic-resonance imaging technology, the team of psychologists were also able to pin down the area driving this subconscious learning process: the striatum, a primitive region of the brain. They published their latest research in the journal Neuron.

"For me, it's a fundamental result. We know that the brain can learn subconsciously the connections between subliminal cues and outcomes," said Mathias Pessiglione, co-author of the paper and a neuroscientist at the Centre for Neuroimaging Research in Paris. "For some kinds of tasks, the striatum knows more than you."

Behaviorists have long been able to demonstrate that animals without consciousness can learn shockingly complex behaviors, if they are properly rewarded. Evidence has been mounting from this group of psychologists and others, that humans can learn some things in the same way. The new research even suggests a neurobiological basis for this similarity, despite humans vastly greater conscious processing power.

Takeo Watanabe, a psychologist at Boston University who was not involved with the study said that the new research shows unequivocally that humans can be trained to learn a system they don't understand with cues they can't see.

"They showed associated learning on the basis of a cue which is invisible," said Watanabe. "I think their contribution is very important."

By restricting the amount of time that the clues were displayed to study participants, they ensured that the brain's conscious vision system could not not process the information. Indeed, when shown the cues after the study, participants did not recall having seen any of them before.

Brain scans of participants showed that the cues did not activate the brain's main processing centers, but rather the striatum, which is presumed to employ machine-learning algorithms to solve problems.

"I think everyone more or less agrees that the striatum is very important for learning and given its primitive structure, it's probably machine type learning," said said Chris Frith, a University of College London psychologist and co-author of the Neuron paper.

The evidence suggests that the striatum is the seat of the brain's "gut instinct." But Pessiglione, the neuroscientist, said that his earlier work suggested that conscious thought still played a very important in decision-making. (After all, the striatum was only right about two-thirds of the time.)

"When you become aware of the associations between the cues and the outcomes, you amplify the phenomenon," Pessiglione said. "You make better choices."

Pessiglione also indicated that he didn't see any practical applications of the findings, say, for advertisers. But there are certain limited human situations where trusting your gut makes sense. The striatum is best in high-reward, simple decision making where subconscious cues could be conveying information that your conscious inspection would miss, for example, "tells" in poker.

"The situation where you are playing poker and something tells you that [another player] is bluffing," he said. "You have the intuition that you have to raise and you don't know why, but you're rewarded because you get money. It seems to be implemented in the striatum."

Just as some are better at poker than others, some participants in Pessiglione's study were far superior at using their intuition to win money. It was the subjects who believed that they had better intuition or "special powers," as he put it, that did actually have the best intuition.

"These subjects were convinced that they had special powers," he said. "They had that kind of subpsychotic talking."

That led Pessiglione to wonder if schizophrenics, who often believe they have special powers, could actually possess at least one: highly-developed intuition.

"We haven't tested schizophrenic patients but maybe they are better than normal people on this task," Pessiglione said.

Image: Courtesy of Neuron.

Citation: Subliminal Instrumental Conditioning Demonstrated in the Brain

See Also:

• Is Free Will an Illusion?
• Find Your Inner Spock: Jonny Magic's Logic Tips
• Rubber Hand Trick Reveals Brain-Body Link
• Uncle Sam Wants Your Brain
• Scientists Link Brain Symmetry, Sexual Orientation
• Brains Are More Than the Average of Their Parts
• Magic Tricks Reveal Inner Workings of the Brain

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.

Embryonic stem cells are best! No, adult stem cells are! De-differentiation! Transformation!

It's often hard to evaluate the competing claims made for stem cells, which -- thanks to the necessity of destroying embryos to make embryonic stem cells -- have been the scientific centerpiece of the culture wars for nearly a decade.

With research funding limited and politics at stake, the portrayal of the science -- if not the science -- has been skewed. Researchers themselves are the first to say that all types of stem cell research deserve funding, and that none are yet a magical regenerative bullet: but pundits and politicians have been quick to praise one type and downplay another.

But all that may soon come to an end, said University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Art Caplan.

Whoever wins the Presidential election, he said, is likely to increase funding for all forms of stem cell research.

Between federal funding and money spent by states and private companies, "there will be a lot of money on the table. The question is, who will deliver? In one sense, the ethics will take a back bench to the practical questions," he said. "It'll be an interesting time, and I think the science will now be the determinant."

But what about all the bioethicists, commentators and journalists who won't know what to do with themselves in the absence of ethical battles? Not to worry: ethics questions won't go away. They'll just shift.

"The next big ethics question isn't going to be whether cloning can be used. It's over when it's time to push some of the techniques into clinical experiments in humans. The expectations are high: many people with the diseases being targeted are very sick, terminally ill, and there will be enormous pressure to rush into trials," said Caplan.

He continued, "Ethically, we have to be on the lookout that we don't rush into human experiments and do some harm before these things have been developed and tried in animals."

Granting access to experimental drugs is already a controversial issue: patients say they have nothing to lose, but companies worry that rushing could produce early failures that stunt the development of promising treatments.

There's plenty of questions, and no easy answers.

Videos: National Banana; McCaskill4Missouri

Note: I spoke to Caplan in the context of the latest regenerative medicine breakthrough: cellular transformation without the involvement of stem cells.

See Also:

• Going From One Cell Type To Another Without Using Stem Cells
• Despite Breakthroughs, Embryonic Stem Cells Still Needed
• Skin Cell-to-Stem Cell Alchemy 'Like Turning Lead Into Gold'
• Hacking the Hack of Stem Cell Reprogramming
• Bush Praises Skin to Stem Cell Breakthrough in State of the Union
• Too Soon to Give Up on Embryonic Stem Cells
• From Mice to Men: Tracing the Skin Cell to Stem Cell Path

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

The transformation of pancreas cells from one type to another has been hailed as a breakthrough: until now, such tricks required of scientifically -- and sometimes ethically -- tricky stem cells.

But for all its promise, the new technique -- like de-differentiation before it -- won't replace embryonic stem cells, and wouldn't have been possible without them.

"We wouldn't be where we are today without working with human embryonic stem cells. They provide a unique window into human development and disease. We still need those," said Douglas Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and co-author of the transformation paper, published today in Nature.

As of now, Melton's technique doesn't appear to have provoked the same commentary as de-differentiation, in which adult cells are reprogrammed into an embryonic state. When that feat was announced in November, President Bush hailed it in his State of the Union address as an alternative to embryonic stem cells, and many conservatives followed suit.

Scientists soon pointed out that de-differentiated cells were unproven -- and, that aside, de-differentiation wouldn't have been possible without insights generated from the research that embryonic stem cell critics had condemned. The same holds true for the latest breakthrough.

"The goal of regenerative medicine is to make useful cells," said Melton. "I'll use induced pluripotency, embryos, direct reprogramming -- if I knew which path worked best, I'd try it, but I'm not smart enough. So we're trying all ways. I'm obsessed with beta cells, and I'll try any way of making them."

Image: Pancreas tissue cells transformed into insulin-producing beta cells at work, courtesy of Nature.

See Also:

• Going From One Cell Type To Another Without Using Stem Cells
• Skin Cell-to-Stem Cell Alchemy 'Like Turning Lead Into Gold'
• Hacking the Hack of Stem Cell Reprogramming
• Bush Praises Skin to Stem Cell Breakthrough in State of the Union
• Too Soon to Give Up on Embryonic Stem Cells
• From Mice to Men: Tracing the Skin Cell to Stem Cell Path

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

In an unprecedented flourish of genetic alchemy, scientists used a virus to coax one type of cell to become another, without the intermediate stem cell step.

The research, conducted with cells from the pancreas, could soon be used to treat people with diabetes -- but its long-term impacts could be even greater.

"This represents a parallel approach for how to make cells in regenerative medicine," said Douglas Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. "And now that it's shown that you can turn one of your cells into another, it makes you think of what other cells you'd like to convert."

Cell transformation has traditionally been accomplished by harvesting and reproducing stem cells. These are able to become other types of cells, raising the much-anticipated possibility of replacing disease-damaged and age-ravaged organs and tissues.

But stem cells are tricky. Using highly-versatile embryonic stem cells requires embryo destruction, a steady supply of human eggs and potentially dangerous hormone treatments for the women who produce those eggs. Adult stem cells, though ethically uncontroversial, are also hard to handle. Another technique, known as de-differentiation, can turn skin cells to stem cells -- but tends to introduce cancer-causing mutations.

Melton's team avoided stem cells, and their baggage, altogether by using a virus to tweak three developmental genes in pancreatic tissue cells in mice. Three days later, these became insulin-producing beta cells, and appear free from the complications that have frustrated stem cell researchers.

If the technique, described today in Nature, is replicated in humans, it could be used to treat insulin deficiencies in people with diabetes -- and that's just the start.

"Neurodegenerative diseases come to mind, as does cardiovascular disease," said Melton.

Arthur Caplan, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist who wasn't involved in the study, called the findings a "breakthrough" for both diabetes and the field of regenerative medicine.

"It's a system that's easier to manipulate than getting a new stem cell to turn into something you want," he said. "The kind of work done here has the promise to go into clinical practice in a relatively short time."

Caveats remain, the foremost being the replication of the work in human tissue. The team managed to cause the transformation inside the mice, but in humans the transformation will need to be done in a tissue culture, producing cells than can be injected into recipients.  And though Melton's team used a safe and well-characterized virus to induce the changes, the long-term safety of the new cells isn't proven.

Melton must also coax the transformed cells into forming groups known as islets, which produce the insulin used in humans.

"We've made a cell type, but we haven't yet made a whole tissue," said Melton. "But we're reasonably confident."

Melton's team is also seeing whether the same kind of cell transformation can be achieved in liver cells, or triggered by drugs.

Other researchers, he said, will apply the technique to other diseases.

"If you've got extra cells of one type and need another, why go all the way back to a stem cell?" said Melton.

In vivo reprogramming of adult pancreatic exocrine cells to b-cells  [Nature]

Image: Courtesy of Nature, standard beta cells (left) and beta cells produced by reprogramming (right). In terms of shape and structure, researchers call them "indistinguishable."

See Also:

• Skin Cell-to-Stem Cell Alchemy 'Like Turning Lead Into Gold'
• Hacking the Hack of Stem Cell Reprogramming
• New Method for Controversy-Free Embryonic Stem Cells
• Bush Praises Skin to Stem Cell Breakthrough in State of the Union
• Too Soon to Give Up on Embryonic Stem Cells
• From Mice to Men: Tracing the Skin Cell to Stem Cell Path

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

This week marked the first time the Phoenix lander saw the sun set since landing on May 25th.
Summer is over in the Martian arctic; gone are the 'sols' of 24.6 hours of sunlight, time to start getting ready for winter.

August 25th would have been the end of the mission too, had mission managers not extended it through late September. This is good news for Phoenix as it allows for some additional sampling and testing before the winter sun gets too weak to power the mission.

Yesterday, Phoenix collected a sample from a 7-inch hole -- the deepest yet -- to deliver to the Microscopy, Electrochemistry, Conductivity Analyzer (MECA). The sample is from the rocky area between two polygons, a patchwork ground pattern that is typical in permafrost after many freeze-thaw cycles. MECA has four soil analysis chambers: The first was used for a surface sample from the middle of a polygon and the second analyzed from the soil ice interface 2 inches down in the middle of a polygon. The samples turned out to be very similar, and now the team hopes to get a unique sample by digging in the trench between polygons where lots of material can get trapped.

Ice Cold Sunrise on Mars [NASA JPL]
Digs Deeper as Third Month Nears End [NASA JPL]

See Also:

• Frost Sparkling on Mars Phoenix Lander Mirror
• Mars Phoenix Tweets: "We Have ICE!"
• Wired Science Scores Exclusive Twitter Interview with the Phoenix Lander

Photo courtesy NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Thomas Weller, the Nobel laureate whose work made vaccines for polio, chicken pox and measles, has passed away.

Weller's breakthrough involved the study of viruses in tissue cultures. Now taken for granted, this technique hadn't been developed during the mid-2oth century, when the polio virus ravaged America.

Today's New York Times has an excellent obituary, which also contains this poignant description of the era:

In the 1940s and 1950s, the much-feared and poorly understood poliomyelitis virus was causing tens of thousands of new cases each year of what was then called infantile paralysis in the United States. Rows of iron lungs, breathing machines, filled hospital wards, and worried parents kept children from movie theaters and public swimming pools each summer as researchers sought a test-tube alternative to live monkeys and other animals in which to study the virus.

It took nearly five decades to develop the polio vaccine, and end-stage researchers like Jonas Salk get most of the glory -- but it wouldn't have happened without fundamental advances like Weller's. That's worth remembering as we wait impatiently for an AIDS vaccine and other therapies, and wonder why researchers spend so much time and money on basic research.

Weller's Nobel speech is here (.pdf).

Images: Okanagan School District 67; Office of Medical History

See Also:

• Feverish Computing Leads Biologists Toward a Vaccine
• Crowdsourcing the Flu Vaccine
• Reinventing Gitmo: Vaccine Diplomacy and the War on Terror
• AIDS Didn't Come From a Polio Vaccine
• Experimental AIDS Vaccine May Increase Risk of HIV
• Pediatricians Say Fictional TV Show's Autism-Vaccine Link Could Be ...

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

I had successfully avoided checking out NASA's in depth "multimedia feature" celebrating their 50th anniversary since they launched it earlier this month. But today when their promo featured Astronaut Snoopy-- my Achilles heel-- I caved.   

Adobe awarded them "Site of the Day" August 18th, but could it stand up to Wired Science scrutiny?

The feature is divided up by decade and you default to the 1950's with the jukebox playing and everything in back and white. I jumped to the 1960's to look for Snoopy and was rewarded with the seven original cartoons that Charles Shultz ran in March 1969 when Snoopy became the first beagle on the Moon. The 60's have vinyl playing in the background and if you don't like the song that is on just fast forward to a better track. They have the Stones, Jefferson Airplane, and The Mamas & the Papas to name a few. Don't miss Cronkite's recollecting of Apollo 11 -- it's worth getting choked up over.

The 70's move onto 8-tracks of ABBA, Aerosmith, and Pink Floyd (go NASA). There is an avatar of Carl Sagan that talks about the great Voyager missions and while he may look stiff the authentic Sagan audio track is as melodic and entrancing as ever.

In the 80's there are some great moments, like a tribute to Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. The footage is all original from 1983 with the original voice overs too. It is wonderful to see history in its original context and not skewed through the lens of current events. Each decade features a theater of such gems. It's a lot of fun for those of us who were not there to see and I am sure a nostalgic romp for those who were. Michael Jackson's Thriller is included in the cassette soundtrack along with The Breakfast Club favorite, "Don't You Forget About Me."

The 90's jump to CD's of Lenny Kravitz and Pearl Jam. The DJ's of NASA's virtual radio station spice up the intros to most songs with sound bites about the decades current events and NASA news. For a Twitter-length attention span it is a great way to get people to learn about NASA's past achievements as they bee bop through the landscape.

The 2000's finish with an iPod of Green Day, Nelly Furtado and the Foo Fighters. Although none of the other rockets take you anywhere, I do recommend the big finish of clicking on the Ares I rocket, if only to see the cool bubble city at the lunar south pole. I think that is one of the things missing in NASA's visions of the future-- not enough bubble cities.

So I can't say I am the biggest fan of Automa, the robotic tour guide, and the feature reminds me a lot of a website where you regret clicking the less desirable links, but all in all you can see that a lot must have gone into making it and that they actually had someone with an ear for music involved too, which I can always appreciate. So jump in, check it out, you might even come out with some great Snoopy cartoons you can hang in your cubicle.

See Also:

• NASA: The Next 50 Years
• Google CEO Celebrate's NASA's 50th, Offers Advice
• NASA's In Your Frozen Chicken

Image courtesy NASA

A computer virus was discovered aboard the International Space Station in June, NASA confirmed today.

And as reported on our sister blog Threat Level, it isn't the first time that a worm has made it into orbit.

"This is not the first time we have had a worm or a virus. It's not a frequent occurrence, but this isn't the first time," NASA spokesperson Kelly Humphries told Wired.com's Ryan Singel.

Humphries downplayed the event, suggesting that the virus couldn't have done any real damage, but the event raises the serious question of how secure the IT infrastructure of the space station really is. Take a look at Threat Level's full story story about W32.Gammima.AG, the little worm that took a free ride to space.

See Also:

• International Space Station Computers Restored
• DIY Space Station Repair, Keeping Condensation at Bay
• NASA Solders Fuel Sensor Connectors, Clears Major Hurdle for Feb ...

Image: NASA. Expedition 8 Flight Engineer Alexander Kaleri practices manual docking on a laptop.

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.

The observatory formerly known as the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope unveiled its first images and got a new name today.

Launched in June, the newly-coined Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope imaged the entire sky in the highest-energy part of the electromagnetic spectrum in just four days. If the image looks familiar, it should. The previous best-in-show gamma ray instrument -- the so-called EGRET -- created a similar image, but it took an entire year.

The Fermi's speed allows astronomers to respond to the rapidly-changing events that characterize the gamma-ray universe. Galaxies with supermassive black holes at their centers flare up sporadically and fade away just as quickly.

"When one of these things goes off, we see it coming, we see it peak and we see it go away," said Peter Michelson, a Stanford physicist and a principal investigator for the mission, in a NASA teleconference. "That will give us tremendous insight into the physics."

The Fermi will spend at least the next five years providing an unprecedented amount of data about gamma rays to cosmologists and astronomers. They hope to learn more about the mechanics of supermassive black holes, how gamma-ray bursts are created and perhaps provide more detail about mysterious dark matter. The new name obviously honors Enrico Fermi, who won the Nobel Prize for physics and developed a workable theory of particle acceleration.

With the torrent of new data streaming from the telescope, it's possible that many current astrophysicial theories will be confirmed or come under renewed scrutiny.

"We don't yet understand the mechanism for how the particles that emit the gamma rays are accelerated. We're not even sure what the nature of the particles are," said Michelson. "But it turns out that many of the theoretical scenarios can be tested [with Fermi]."

So, these first images are just the beginning of a much longer mission to discover more about the violent and highly-energetic corners of the universe. As the mission's chief scientist, Steve Ritz put it, "GLAST has great discovery potential. We're expecting surprises."

See Also:

• GLAST Successfully Launches, Prepares to Scan Sky for Gamma-Rays
• New Gamma-Ray Observatory Launching This Spring
• Gamma-Ray Scope To Peer Into Universe's Corners
• NASA Wants You to Name Its New Telescope

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.

Neanderthals were stupid. They couldn't keep up with quick-thinking Homo sapiens, so they died.

It's a tenet of anthropology -- and new evidence suggests that it's wrong.

After analyzing tools used by Neanderthals, British and American archaeologists say they were just as well-crafted as those used by our ancestors.

Flakes -- wide-bodied stones used for cutting by Neanderthals and Homo sapiens -- are just as useful, if not moreso, than narrow stone blades later favored by modern humans, who charged out of Africa 50,000 years ago and soon replaced their larger, hairier European forerunners.

"It's not a better technology, it's just a different technology," said Metin Eren, a University of Exeter experimental archaeology student.

Eren's team spent spent three years recreating blades and flakes, then measured their cutting power, durability and the amount of effort needed to produce them.

The superiority of blades has long been seen as evidence of human superiority. But according to Eren's team, blades had only one advantage: they can be easily attached to shafts.

"Perhaps modern Homo sapiens were using different hafted tools, and that's why blades were adopted," he said.

But that's not known. Erin's team also hypothesizes that blades were less an improvement than a signifier of difference --  a gadget over which early Homo sapiens could bond.

The findings were published today in the Journal of Human Evolution. Earlier research has shown that Neanderthals hunted and communicated as well as humans.

Whatever the explanation for Neanderthal decline and Homo sapiens primacy, said Eren, archaeologists shouldn't think of it prehistoric manifest destiny.

"We need to reshape the image of the Neanderthals," he said. "We've got to stop thinking of our being the only species of humans on this planet as our right, or as fate. Given different circumstances, perhaps Neanderthals would have gone on to colonize the world."

Are Upper Paleolithic blade cores more productive than Middle Paleolithic discoidal cores? A replication experiment [Journal of Human Evolution] [not yet online]

Full datasets for blade and flake replication tests [Think Computer Corporation]

Images: University of Exeter

Note: The University of Exeter has the world's only experimental archaeology program. Much of the students' research involves learning to live like various members of the human family tree. If I could go to school again, I'd do that.

See Also:

• No Neanderthal In You, Says Ancient DNA
• Roll the Genetic Dice Twice and We Might Be Neanderthals

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

DNA barcoding was advertised as a boon to biologists, food inspectors and anyone interested in organismal identification: with each species assigned a genetic identifier, a handheld DNA tester could quickly identify the provenance of any biological sample.

Not so fast, say National Science Foundation researchers: DNA barcoding makes mistakes.

The technique currently makes an identifying code from a snippet of mitochondrial DNA. However, scientists sometimes take their samples from old-fashioned nuclear DNA. What ensues is a classic supermarket mixup: you want an apple and are charged for an orange.

In a paper published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers say that secondary check codes could solve the problem.

Note: Is this a surprise? Speaking on behalf of everyone who's ever used a self-checkout machine, the choice of "barcoding" as a metaphor pretty much guaranteed problems.

Many species in one: DNA barcoding overestimates the number of species when nuclear mitochondrial pseudogenes are coamplified [PNAS]

Image: Courtesy of Brigham Young University, study co-author Hojun Song, wearing a hat that I suspect was acquired specifically for this picture. I approve.

See Also:

• A New Taxonomy Tries to Change an Ancient System
• Fan Boy Professor Names Newly Discovered Beetle: O. orbisonorum

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.