NewsMarket: February 2012

Monday, February 20, 2012

Canadian to 'command world spaceship'

Astronaut Chris Hadfield already has a number of firsts to his name.

Chris Hadfield became the first Canadian to walk in space during his 2001 shuttle mission

undertake a spacewalk; and he was the first and only Canadian to board the Russian Mir space station.

He was also the first Canadian to operate his country's major contribution to the space shuttle - its robotic arm, or "Canadarm".

Now, he is about to become the first Canadian to command the International Space Stations (ISS).

"I'm being asked to command the world's spaceship; it's a big responsibility," Hadfield said.

"The leading nations of the world have built a laboratory with no gravity, at huge cost and toil. I'm only one of many commanders in a sequence; I recognise my relative importance. But it doesn't decrease the level of responsibility for the time that I'm the commander.

"So, my number one job of course is to maintain the health of the crew. We need to keep the people healthy and alive and productive onboard. Number two is the health of the spaceship, to keep the space station productive and functioning."

The former Royal Canadian Air Force colonel has been talking about his upcoming mission here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

To date, only one national outside of the US and Russia has been given the status of commander on the ISS, and that was a European Space Agency (Esa) astronaut, the Belgian Frank De Winne, who took the helm of the orbiting outpost in 2009.

Hadfield's big moment will begin when he launches to the station on a Soyuz rocket at the end of this year.

For three months, the 52-year-old will serve as a flight engineer in the Expedition 34 crew. Then, in March 2013, he will assume command of Expedition 35 for three months, before returning to Earth in his Soyuz capsule.

"We run about 100 experiments [on the ISS] consistently, rotating them all the time but there are about 100 experiments up there.

"So, the job of the commander is to build a group of people, both the astronaut crew and the ground crew that supports us, that can successfully execute the six months I'm up there - the three months that I'm the commander - to get those primary objectives done. Crew health and safety, vehicle health and safety, and then all the science and engineering and experimentation that comes with it."

It will be Chris Hadfield's third trip into orbit. His first was a little more than 16 years ago when he flew on space shuttle Atlantis to the Mir space station.

The Sarnia, Ontario-born astronaut then made his only other flight in 2001, when, as part of the shuttle Endeavour crew, he delivered Canadarm2 to the space station. Canadarm2 is a bigger, more sophisticated version of the robotic arm fitted in the shuttles.

It was during this mission that Hadfield undertook the first ever Canadian spacewalks.

Lab-grown meat is first step to artificial hamburger

The first strips of muscle have been grown in a project to develop a new way to produce meat

Dutch scientists have used stem cells to create strips of muscle tissue with the aim of producing the first lab-grown hamburger later this year.

The aim of the research is to develop a more efficient way of producing meat than rearing animals.

At a major science meeting in Canada, Prof Mark Post said synthetic meat could reduce the environmental footprint of meat by up to 60%.

"We would gain a tremendous amount in terms of resources," he said.

Professor Post's group at Maastricht University in the Netherlands has grown small pieces of muscle about 2cm long, 1cm wide and about a mm thick.

They are off-white and resemble strips of calamari in appearance. These strips will be mixed with blood and artificially grown fat to produce a hamburger by the autumn.

The cost of producing the hamburger will be £200,000 but Professor Post says that once the principle has been demonstrated, production techniques will be improved and costs will come down.

At a news conference, Prof Post said he was even planning to ask celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal to cook it.

“Start Quote

In the beginning it will taste bland. I think we will need to work on the flavour”

Prof Mark PostUniversity of Maastricht

"The reason we are doing this is not to show a viable product but to show that in reality we can do this," he told BBC News.

"From then on, we need to spend a whole lot of work and money to make the process efficient and then cost effective."

So why use such high tech methods to produce meat when livestock production methods have done the job effectively for thousands of years?

It is because most food scientists believe that current methods of food production are unsustainable.

Some estimate that food production will have to double within the next 50 years to meet the requirements of a growing population. During this period, climate change, water shortages and greater urbanisation will make it more difficult to produce food.

Prof Sean Smukler from the University of British Columbia said keeping pace with demand for meat from Asia and Africa will be particularly hard as demand from these regions will shoot up as living standards rise. He thinks that lab grown meat could be a good solution.

Demand for meat will increase at a time when it will be harder than ever for farmers to boost production

"It will help reduce land pressures," he told BBC News. "Anything that stops more wild land being converted to agricultural land is a good thing. We're already reaching a critical point in availability of arable land," he said.

Lab-grown meat could eventually become more efficient than producing meat the old fashioned way, according to Prof Post. Currently, 100g of vegetable protein has to be fed to pigs or cows to produce 15g of animal protein, an efficiency of 15%. He believes that synthetic meat could be produced with an equivalent energy efficiency of 50%.

So what is the synthetic burger likely to taste like?

"In the beginning it will taste bland," says Prof Post. "I think we will need to work on the flavour separately by trying to figure out which components of the meat actually produce the taste and analyse what the composition of the strip is and whether we can change that."

Prof Post also said that if the technology took off, it would reduce the number of animals that were factory farmed and slaughtered.

The BBC's Pallab Ghosh reports from Duggie's Dogs hot dog restaurant in Downtown Vancouver

But David Steele, who is president of Earthsave Canada, said that the same benefits could be achieved if people ate less meat.

"While I do think that there are definite environmental and animal welfare advantages of this high-tech approach over factory farming, especially, it is pretty clear to me that plant-based alternatives... have substantial environmental and probably animal welfare advantages over synthetic meat," he said.

Dr Steele, who is also a molecular biologist, said he was also concerned that unhealthily high levels of antibiotics and antifungal chemicals would be needed to stop the synthetic meat from rotting.

Ants remember their enemy's scent

Tropical weaver ant (Oecophylla smaragdina) (c) Antweb

Weaver ant "major workers" aggressively defend their colony from intruders

Ant colonies - one of nature's most ancient and efficient societies - are able to form a "collective memory" of their enemies, say scientists.

When one ant fights with an intruder from another colony it retains that enemy's odour: passing it on to the rest of the colony.

This enables any of its nest-mates to identify an ant from the offending colony.

The findings are reported in the journal Naturwissenschaften.

For many ant species, chemicals are key to functioning as a society. Insects identify their nest-mates by the specific "chemical signature" that coats the body of every member of that nest.

The insects are also able to sniff out any intruder that might be attempting to invade.

This study, carried out by a team from the University of Melbourne in Australia, set out to discover if ants were able to retain memories of the odours they encounter.

The researchers studied the tropical weaver ant (Oecophylla smaragdina), which builds is home in trees; one nest can contain up to 500,000 workers.

The team set up a "familiarisation test" to allow ants from one nest to encounter intruders from another.

Over a series of trials, they placed an ant from a "focal nest" into a tiny observation arena with an ant from another nest.

After 15 of these familiarising face-offs, the team set up a fake ant invasion.

They placed 20 worker ants from the now "familiar" nest on or near the focal nest.

"These intruders were typically attacked by the resident workers," the researchers reported in their paper.

Corporate wisdom

The ants recognise nest-mates by smell

The ants defending their colony reacted much more aggressively towards intruders from a nest that a few of their workers had been familiarised with.

The team explained that "this increased aggression was... specifically targeted toward the 'familiar' colony, and persisted for at least 6 days" after the familiarisation trials.

Lead researcher Prof Mark Elgar explained to BBC Nature that all of the ants in the colony were able to draw on the experience of one worker.

He described this as collective or "corporate wisdom".

In human terms, he explained, "[imagine] you have had an unsavoury experience with a particular group of people with a distinguishing feature - perhaps they all wear the same coloured scarf of their football team.

"And you warned your colleagues to look out for people wearing that coloured scarf.

"One of the colleagues that heard you might subsequently tell another colleague who wasn't in the room when you made your comment.

"That colleague has acquired the information indirectly from the collective memory of you and your work colleagues.

"Change colleagues to ants, and scarf colour to odour and you've got our story."

Digital tools 'to save languages'

There's an app for everything - even an endangered language like Tuvan

Facebook, YouTube and even texting will be the salvation of many of the world's endangered languages, scientists believe.

Of the 7,000 or so languages spoken on Earth today, about half are expected to be extinct by the century's end.

Globalisation is usually blamed, but some elements of the "modern world", especially digital technology, are pushing back against the tide.

North American tribes use social media to re-engage their young, for example.

Tuvan, an indigenous tongue spoken by nomadic peoples in Siberia and Mongolia, even has an iPhone app to teach the pronunciation of words to new students.

"Small languages are using social media, YouTube, text messaging and various technologies to expand their voice and expand their presence," said K David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College and a National Geographic Fellow.

"It's what I like to call the flipside of globalisation. We hear a lot about how globalisation exerts negative pressures on small cultures to assimilate. But a positive effect of globalisation is that you can have a language that is spoken by only five or 50 people in one remote location, and now through digital technology that language can achieve a global voice and a global audience."

Harrison, who travels the world to seek out the last speakers of vanishing languages, has been describing his work here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

With National Geographic, he has just helped produce eight talking dictionaries.

These dictionaries contain more than 32,000 word entries in eight endangered languages. All the audio recordings have been made by native speakers, some of whom like Alfred "Bud" Lane are among the last fluent individuals in their native tongues.

Mr Lane speaks a language known as Siletz Dee-ni, which is restricted to a small area on the central Oregon coast.

"Linguists came in and labelled our language moribund, meaning it was heading for the ash heap of history; and our tribal people and our council decided that wasn't going to happen. So we devised a plan to go forward to start teaching our dialect here in the Siletz Valley," he told the meeting.

Mr Lane has sat down and recorded 14,000 words for the online dictionary. "Nothing takes the place of speakers speaking to other speakers, but this bridges a gap that was just sorely needed in our community and our tribe."

Margaret Noori is an expert in Native American studies at the University of Michigan and a speaker of Anishinaabemowin, which is the sovereign language of over 200 indigenous "nations" in Canada and the US. These communities are heavy users of Facebook.

"What we do with technology is try to connect people," Prof Noori said. "All of it is to keep the language."

Dr Harrison says not all languages can survive, and many inevitably will be lost as remaining speakers die off. But he says the new digital tools do offer a way back from the brink for a lot of languages that seemed doomed just a few years ago.

He told BBC News: "Everything that people know about the planet, about plants, animals, about how to live sustainably, the polar ice caps, the different ecosystems that humans have survived in - all this knowledge is encoded in human cultures and languages, whereas only a tiny fraction of it is encoded in the scientific literature.

"If we care about sustainability and survival on the planet, we all benefit from having this knowledge base persevered."

Google cookies 'bypassed Safari privacy protection'

Google says it has now started removing the advertising cookies in question from Safari browsers

Google has been accused of bypassing the privacy settings of users of the Safari web-browser.

The Wall Street Journal said Google and other companies had worked around privacy settings designed to restrict cookies.

Cookies are small text files stored by browsers which can record information about online activity, and help some online services work.

However Google says the story "mischaracterises" what happened.

Advertisers can use cookies to track online behaviour, helping them to target the commercials they show to internet users.

Some think this use of cookies erodes online privacy. In May, European Union laws are due to come into force which will restrict the use of advertising cookies.

But cookies are also essential to some web services like those Google offers.

Cookie control

The Safari browser is produced by Apple, and is the browser used by the iPhone.

By default Safari only allows cookies to be stored by the web page a user is visiting, not from third parties such as advertisers.

However, Stanford University researcher Jonathan Mayer found that advertisers were still able to store cookies on the computers of internet users browsing with Safari.

It was his discovery that formed the basis of the Wall Street Journal's story.

Many Google services use cookies, for example to remember when someone is signed in to a service, but they are also used by the firm to help personalise advertising.

It was when Google attempted to find a way to enable some of its services and personalised advertising to work on Safari that, Google says, it inadvertently stored cookies.

Side-stepping Safari

In a statement, senior vice president Rachel Whetstone said that last year the company had decided to "enable features for signed-in Google users on Safari who had opted to see personalised ads and other content".

“Start Quote

We are aware that some third parties are circumventing Safari's privacy features and we are working to put a stop to it”

Apple spokesman

She added: "To enable these features, we created a temporary communication link between Safari browsers and Google's servers, so that we could ascertain whether Safari users were also signed into Google, and had opted for this type of personalisation."

Ms Whetsone said the company had created new systems to make sure the information it collected was anonymous, but this had led to unintended consequences:

"The Safari browser contained functionality that then enabled other Google advertising cookies to be set on the browser.

"We didn't anticipate that this would happen, and we have now started removing these advertising cookies from Safari browsers. It's important to stress that, just as on other browsers, these advertising cookies do not collect personal information."

The Wall Street Journal reported that Google "disabled the code after being contacted by the paper".

Google declined to provide further comment to the BBC.

Privacy warning

Online privacy advocates were highly critical of Google's actions.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote: "It's time for Google to acknowledge that it can do a better job of respecting the privacy of web users."

Although much of the criticism has been directed at the search giant, the Wall Street Journal said that in addition to Google, a number of advertising companies had been using the work-around which had been known about for some time.

An Apple spokesman said in a statement: "We are aware that some third parties are circumventing Safari's privacy features and we are working to put a stop to it."

Playstation Vita ready for Europe launch

Over half a million Playstation Vitas have been sold in other markets so far

Sony's new handheld console - the Playstation Vita - is set to launch in Europe on Tuesday.

The device launched in Japan last Christmas and Sony say more than half a million units have now been sold.

It will be a rival to Nintendo's 3DS, boasting a quad-core processor and 5in (12.7cm) OLED touch screen.

However, it is entering a competitive market as mobile casual gamer space becomes increasingly dominated by game applications for smartphones.

Two different versions of the device will go on sale: a model with wi-fi connectivity for £229 and an enhanced version that also uses the 3G mobile network.

Johnny Minkley, from video gaming website Eurogamer, said the Vita was "the most competent handheld gaming system ever made", but he believed price would be an issue.

Some gaming industry pundits have questioned Sony's use of proprietary memory cards

"It is a high-end device and Sony has shot itself in the foot with the proprietary memory cards [on which the many of the games come], which is an added expense which everyone needs to make on day one," he added.

Launch line-up

When Nintendo launched its 3DS system last year, sales were poor, forcing the company to slash 40% of the price, despite critical acclaim.

It was not until games such as Mario Kart were launched that sales of the 3DS started to pick up.

In contrast, the Vita will have 30 different games available at launch. Some will be full-price commercial titles, while others are third-party downloads priced at under £10.

The device has had mostly positive response from the gaming media. Tech Radar gave it four-and-a-half stars out of five and said it took "gaming to a new level".

However, CNet gave it an distinctly average three out of five starsand said it was "bulky with an unimpressive battery life".

The site added: "All but the most hardcore gaming nuts would be better served by something like the iPod touch."

Jim Ryan, president and CEO of Sony Europe, told the BBC the device would stand out among smartphones and tablets.

Viva PS Vita or death to all its friends?

"Gaming on the smartphone and tablet is a reality and it would be foolish to stick our heads in the sand," he said.

"We have to demonstrate that our device and the gaming experience is differentiated and we provide great value to justify the financial outlay they have to make to buy into Vita."

'Pent-up demand'

Piers Harding Rolls, an analyst with Screen Digest, said CNet had highlighted a problem that, longer term, Sony may have to face up to.

"There are plenty of other devices out there offering games content, so the market is very competitive.

"Our sales figure prediction is not a small amount by any means, but if you compare it to smartphones, it is but a subset," he added.

As well as traditional rivals like Nintendo, the Vita will also face a growing smartphone gaming market

Sony said that, for the first two years, it would be targeting its core demographic: 18 to 25-year-old males who were gamers first and foremost.

"When we get to year two and year three, we will try to broaden the demographic to bring in the younger consumer - the more casual consumer, perhaps," said Mr Ryan.

How Sony will achieve that remains to be seen.

"Many people have smartphones so already have games on the move," said Mr Minkley.

"The biggest questionmark is, who is it for, outside of gamers. Where does Vita fit in? Right now, I really don't know."

Body clock 'alters' immune system

Will the time affect medicine?

The time of the day could be an important factor in the risk of getting an infection, according to researchers in the US.

They showed how a protein in the immune system was affected by changes in the chemistry of the body through the day.

The findings, published in the journal Immunity, showed the time of an infection changed its severity.

An expert said drugs were likely to take advantage of the body clock in the near future.

Plants, animals and even bacteria go through a daily 24-hour routine, known as a circadian rhythm. Jet lag is what happens when the body gets out of sync with its surroundings after crossing time zones.

It has been known that there are variations in the immune system throughout the day. Researchers are now drilling down into the details.

The immune system needs to detect an infection before it can begin to fight it off. Researchers at Yale University School of Medicine were investigating one of the proteins involved in the detection process - Toll-like receptor nine (TLR9), which can spot DNA from bacteria and viruses.

In experiments on mice, the scientists showed that the amount of TLR9 produced and the way it functioned was controlled by the body clock and varied through the day.

Immunising mice at the peak of TLR9 activity improved the immune response, the researchers said.

They said humans with sepsis, blood poisoning, were known to be at a greater risk of death between 02:00 and 06:00.

Time link

When testing mice, the severity of sepsis depended on the time of day infection started and coincided with changes in TLR9 activity.

Prof Erol Fikrig, who conducted the study at Yale University, said they had found a "direct molecular link between circadian rhythms and the immune system", which could have "important implications for the prevention and treatment of disease".

He added: "It does appear that disruptions of the circadian clock influence our susceptibility to pathogens."

Dr Akhilesh Reddy, who is researching circadian rhythms at the University of Cambridge, said it was "known long ago" that timing had an impact on the immune system, but this was "one of the first forays" into the reasons why.

The implications for healthcare could mean that drugs need to be given at certain times of day in order to make them more effective, or drugs could be made which actually target the body clock to put the immune system into its most active phase.

Dr Reddy said drug companies were "all switching onto this" and were "now screening drugs at different times of the day".

He could see the body clock impacting medicine "within 10 years".