Virulent bird flu, a renewable hydrogen fuel source and a melting Alaska draws tourists

Every weekday, Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, picks the raddest articles from the mainstream media so we don't have to. Open wide: It's Science in the News.

British Bird Flu Is H5N1 Strain

from BBC News Online: The type of bird flu found in turkeys on a Suffolk farm is the virulent H5N1 strain, according to government vets. The virus was discovered on Sunday at Redgrave Park Farm near Diss, where all 6,500 birds, most of them turkeys, are being slaughtered. A 3km protection zone and a 10km surveillance zone have been set up and the farm is co-operating with vets. Environment Secretary Hilary Benn said that there might be further undisclosed cases of the disease in the area. Mr Benn told the House of Commons: "I'm not going to speculate as to whether this outbreak is going to get larger. What we're doing is working our darndest to make sure that it stays where it is."

Hydrogen Gas Made From Renewable Organic Material

from National Geographic News: Hydrogen may be getting a step closer to becoming a mainstream, renewable fuel. Researchers have invented a way to harvest protons and electrons from bacteria in a reactor and create small quantities of hydrogen gas. The process can use any biodegradable organic material, potentially freeing the production of clean-burning hydrogen fuel from its current dependence on nonrenewable energy sources such as natural gas. "Hydrogen is an excellent transportation fuel, but you've got to make it in a sustainable way," said study author Bruce Logan of Pennsylvania State University. "We think this is the key method to do that."

A Melting Alaska Draws Visitors

from the Christian Science Monitor: Portage Glacier, Alaska - Tourists still flock to Alaska to see Mount McKinley and ice caves, but a small and steady stream of visitors now head to the last frontier to see thawing tundra, crumbling glaciers, and ailing forests. Take Shishmaref, an Inupiat Eskimo village on the state's remote northwest coast. ... When a team of scientists and religious leaders arrived in August, a highlight of the tour was viewing a house that had tumbled over the edge of the beach bluff; A storm had cut 20 feet from the shoreline previously held fast by frozen permafrost and sea-ice buildup. "To many of us, Alaska is the distant early-warming system for the future of climate change," says Eric Chivian, of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School ...

Sharp Drop Seen in Deaths from Ills Fought by Vaccine

from the New York Times (Registration Required): Death rates for 13 diseases that can be prevented by childhood vaccinations are at all-time lows in the United States, according to a study released yesterday. The study, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, and published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is the first time that the agency has searched historical records going back to 1900 to compile estimates of cases, hospitalizations and deaths for all the diseases children are routinely vaccinated against. In nine of the diseases, rates of death or hospitalization declined more than 90 percent since vaccines against them were approved, and in the cases of smallpox, diphtheria and polio, by 100 percent.

New Blood Substitutes Promise Relief for Sagging Blood Banks

from Scientific American: Researchers are stepping up efforts to develop a safe blood substitute amid a growing demand and dwindling supply of the real thing to treat trauma victims and blood disorders such as potentially deadly types of anemia. Their major hurdle: to come up with a replacement for hemoglobin ... that can be directly introduced into the human circulatory system. The problem is that the body breaks down and eliminates real hemoglobin that is not protected by red blood cells, a process that can be toxic to the kidneys, constrict blood vessels (resulting in hypertension), and cause inflammation. The Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Lubbock and Dallas-based blood substitute developer HemoBioTech, Inc., believe they have a chemically modified bovine hemoglobin called HemoTech that not only suppresses hemoglobin's inherent toxicity but also serves to improve blood flow and even spur the creation of new red blood cells.

Big-Bang Satellite Data 'Not Flawed'

from New Scientist: Data from a satellite probing the early universe is not flawed, cosmologists say, despite one radio astronomer's claim that it is hopelessly contaminated by radiation from our own galaxy. The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite has been investigating the afterglow of the big bang, called the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The CMB was produced just 380,000 years after the big bang, by matter that was hot and glowing at the time. This radiation is extremely uniform in brightness in all directions in the sky, but WMAP has charted tiny variations between different parts of the sky to produce a map of the radiation.

STD Infection Rates Rise in U.S.

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required): The number of newly diagnosed cases of the three most common sexually transmitted diseases rose for the second year in a row in the U.S., driven in part by an increase in risky sexual behavior, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday. "Increases in all three of these STDs ... underscore the need for vigilance," said Dr. John M. Douglas Jr., director of the CDC's division of STD prevention, which produced the report. New cases of chlamydia, the most commonly reported infectious disease in 2006, were diagnosed at nearly three times the rate of gonorrhea, the second most commonly reported infectious disease, Douglas said.

Troops' Mental Distress Tracked

from the Washington Post (Registration Required): Soldiers who have served in Iraq are suffering substantially greater mental distress several months after leaving the combat zone than when they first return home -- with one out of five active-duty Army soldiers and more than 40 percent of Army reservists needing treatment, according to a study by Army researchers published yesterday. The study is the first to examine over time the psychological struggles of soldiers who have been deployed to Iraq, the vast majority of whom have seen people killed and wounded and have themselves felt being in danger of dying. Soldiers were far more likely to report mental health problems ... in a military screening three to six months after returning from Iraq, compared with a screening done immediately after they came home, according to the study appearing in the Nov. 14 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Scientists Claim to Clone Monkey Embryos

from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required): NEW YORK (Associated Press) - Scientists in Oregon say they've reached the long-sought goal of cloning monkey embryos and extracting stem cells from them, a potentially major step toward doing the same thing in people. The research has not been published yet or confirmed by other scientists. But if true, it offers fresh hope in a field that has been marked by frustration and even fraud. The claim of a similar breakthrough with human embryos by a South Korean scientist in 2004 turned out to be false. The hope is that one day, such a procedure could be used to create transplant tissue that's genetically matched to an ailing patient. Because stem cells can form all types of tissue, the approach might one day help treat conditions like diabetes and spinal cord injury without fear of rejection by the patient's body.

Four Patients Get HIV from Organ Donor

from the Miami Herald (Registration Required): CHICAGO (Associated Press) -- A troubling case in which a high-risk organ donor infected four patients with the AIDS virus and hepatitis has led medical ethicists to warn that patients need to know more about whose organs they're getting. Public health officials said Tuesday the Chicago case is the first known instance of HIV transmission through organ transplants since 1986. It's also the first ever known instance in which one organ donor has spread hepatitis C and HIV at the same time, said Dr. Matt Kuehnert of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC and other public health officials are investigating the Chicago cases. But they emphasized that the risk of getting any disease from transplanted organs is less than 0.01 percent. Noting that more than 400,000 transplants have occurred nationwide in the past two decades, they called the transplant system safe.