Every weekday, Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, picks the raddest articles from the mainstream media so we don't have to. Open wide: Today's Science in the News is piping hot.
U.S. Close to Decision on Polar Bears
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required): The Bush administration is nearing a decision that would officially acknowledge the environmental damage of global warming, and name its first potential victim: the polar bear. The Interior Department may act as soon as this week on its year-old proposal to make the polar bear the first species to be listed as threatened with extinction because of melting ice due to a warming planet. Both sides agree that conservationists finally have the poster species they have sought to use the Endangered Species Act as a lever to force federal limits on the greenhouse gases linked to global warming, and possibly to battle smokestack industry projects far from the Arctic.
Physicists Hope U.S. Budget Will Mean an End to Research Cuts
from the New York Times (Registration Required): Under President Bush's proposed federal budget announced on Monday, research in the physical sciences would receive a hefty boost. That is welcome news to physicists in a broad swath of fields, from those who study the tiniest of fundamental particles to those trying to understand basic science that could lead to future energy sources. It is especially welcome after two years of tight financial constrictions resulting from money wrangling between Congress and the White House that have turned off some experiments, delayed others and left some scientists unemployed.
Building at World Trade Center Is a Showcase of Terrorproof Technologies
from the Christian Science Monitor: New York - When a documentary crew wanted to film the emergency glow-strips that line the expansive stairwells in 7 World Trade Center, Dara McQuillan called down to the security desk and asked them to flick off the lights. Moments after the stairwell went dark, however, a backup power system switched on and ruined the shot. Mr. McQuillan ... called again, but when the security desk shut down the backup system, this time a battery-powered generator flooded the stairs with light. The crew never got its dramatic glow-in-the-dark shot. It has been hailed as the safest building in the world, its 52-stories of glass elegance belying a concrete core built to be a bunker in the sky. It is the first skyscraper to be completed at the World Trade Center site, and ... its innovative architecture and endlessly redundant security features ... offer a template for high-rise buildings in a post-9/11 world.
Iran Launches Rocket for Homegrown Satellite
from New Scientist: Iran launched a rocket on Monday designed to carry its first locally-made research satellite in 2009, showing the country's advances in ballistics at a time when Western powers are already jittery about its nuclear plans. The US, the Islamic Republic's arch foe, called the rocket test "unfortunate" and said it would only further isolate Tehran from the international community. ... The technology used to put satellites into space could also be used for launching weapons, but analysts voiced different opinions about the significance of Iran's latest announcement.
from Nature News: In 1918, German chemists Paul Rabe and Karl Kindler published a method for the final steps in making the potent antimalarial drug quinine. Little did Rabe know that 90 years later his lab books would be reopened and his procedure recreated, to help end a 60-year dispute about the synthesis of what was once the most potent antimalarial drug available. Quinine is extracted from the bark of the cinchona tree, and despite over a century of trying, no synthetic recipe has been found that is cheaper and easier than the natural extraction. The first production of the compound came in 1944, during an intense effort to make a synthetic version of the antimalarial during the Second World War, when the trade of natural products was blocked.
Getting Old, Faster and Faster
from Science News: It's not so obvious how old a 60-year-old is. Ask most 60-year-olds these days and they'll say they still feel pretty young, since they're healthy and expect many active years to come. In 1900, though, a 60-year-old was, well, old. This simple fact has big ramifications for demographers. Demographers have long known that on average people are getting older all around the world, and they have worked to assess the likely social impacts of that aging. For example, relatively few young people are around to support old people's pensions. But increased longevity counteracts those impacts by making people of any age in effect younger than they used to be, for example increasing the number of years they are capable of working. So it has been hard to assess how big the impact of an aging population is likely to be.
Unquiet Ice Speaks Volumes on Global Warming
from Scientific American: As our P-3 flying research laboratory skimmed above the icy surface of the Weddell Sea, I was glued to the floor. ... In the mid-1980s all our flights were survey flights: we had 12 hours in the air once we left our base in southern Chile, so we had plenty of time to chat with the pilots about making a forced landing on the ice shelves. It was no idle chatter. More than once we had lost one of our four engines, and in 1987 a giant crack became persistently visible along the edge of the Larsen B ice shelf, off the Antarctic Peninsula - making it abundantly clear that an emergency landing would be no gentle touchdown. The crack also made us wonder: Could the ocean underlying these massive pieces of ice be warming enough to make them break up, even though they had been stable for more than 10,000 years?
Inhaling Pig Brains May Be Cause of New Illness
from the Washington Post (Registration Required): Fittingly, the first person to detect a faint signal in all the noise was the interpreter. The 33-year-old woman who worked for eight years working with Spanish-speaking patients at a medical clinic in southern Minnesota noticed something familiar as she translated the story of a young meatpacker last September. Earlier last summer, she had heard a version of it from two other workers at the same slaughterhouse, and had told it to their doctors, who were different from her current patient's. When the consultation was over, she pointed this out. The interpreter's insight set in motion a story, still unfolding, that may be making envious the ghost of Berton Roueche, the legendary chronicler of medical mysteries at the New Yorker magazine. A new disease has surfaced in 12 people among the 1,300 employees at the factory run by Quality Pork Processors about 100 miles south of Minneapolis.
An Altar Beyond Olympus for a Deity Predating Zeus
from the New York Times (Registration Required): PHILADELPHIA - Before Zeus hurled his first thunderbolt from Olympus, the pre-Greek people occupying the land presumably paid homage and offered sacrifices to their own gods and goddesses, whose nature and identities are unknown to scholars today. But archaeologists say they have now found the ashes, bones and other evidence of animal sacrifices to some pre-Zeus deity on the summit of Mount Lykaion, in the region of Greece known as Arcadia. The remains were uncovered last summer at an altar later devoted to Zeus. Fragments of a coarse, undecorated pottery in the debris indicated that the sacrifices might have been made as early as 3000 B.C., the archaeologists concluded. That was about 900 years before Greek-speaking people arrived, probably from the north in the Balkans, and brought their religion with them.
Scientists Isolate Areas Most at Risk of Climate Change
from the Guardian (UK): Scientists have long agreed that climate change could have a profound impact on the planet; from melting ice sheets and withering rainforests, to flash floods and droughts. Now a team of climate experts has ranked the most fragile and vulnerable regions on the planet, and warned they are in danger of sudden and catastrophic collapse before the end of the century. In a comprehensive study published today [in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences], the scientists identify the nine areas that are in gravest danger of passing critical thresholds or "tipping points," beyond which they will not recover.
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