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EuroScience.Net newsletter - this week in European sciences - www.euroscience.net Adolescence
with H.I.V. New York Times 26.6.2005 With ever better treatment of H.I.V. and Aids
children born with the virus now get into their adolescence. Jonathan Dee
reports in the NY Times magazine (26.6.2005) about the emerging challenges of
doctors and psychologist treating this new class of patients: "Children
born with the virus also aren't born with the knowledge that they carry it;
this was a nonissue when few survived infancy, but
as their prognosis improved, the whole issue of disclosure - of what they
know about their own disease, and who tells them, and when, and how - began
to reveal its intricacies." Without
a Cause: Parents Campaign Against Science New York Times 25.6.2005 A bitter battle is going on in the U.S. between
parents with autistic children and, well, science. Gardiner Harris and Anahad O'Connor report in the NY Times (25.6.2005) about
the issue. Parents suppose a preservative compound in vaccines, called thimerosal which contains mercury, as a cause for autism.
Five scientific studies from the U.S., Britain, Denmark and Sweden didn't
show up a link. The parents insist of their view now backed by eminent
politicians. Heat -
How Global Warming is Changing the World The Guardian 30.6.2005 In a supplement the Guardian (30.6.2005) reports on
all facets of global warming, including regional temperature shifts, melting
glaciers, health effects of scorching summers, China's economic growth effect
on the environment, transport and traffic, what we can do, and more. Chimeras
with us New Scientist 25.6.2005 Sounds like science fiction, but is actually true
for the uninitiated: Scientist mix animal and human cells for better human
health. In real life chimeric creatures are
commonplace like mice with human immune systems, kidneys or skin, writes
Jamie Shreeve in New Scientist (25.6.2005). But get
one step further and modify a mouse with 10 percent of its brain replaced by
human cells, or even more. When does the mouse starts to behave like a human?
Actually scientists don't expect that, but nobody knows exactly. Shreeve delves into the moral minefield. Mystery
of Time New York Times 28.6.2005 Dennis Overbye in the NY
Times (28.6.2005) about time travel, the arrow of time and causality. Travels
in time, however, give many logical problems, for instance, regarding your
own identity when there're two of you around. Physicists claim that the laws
of physics don't prohibit time traveling, but most
think it's not feasible due to technical reasons. You would need wormholes or
more fantastic cosmological arrangements to make it. But it's all interesting
as an experiment of thought. 45
Health Projects Get $437 Million New York Times 28.6.2005 To tackle the greatest health threats in poor
countries, the William and Melinda Gates Foundation spends 437 Million
dollars for 43 projects, writes Donald McNeil in the NY Times (28.6.2005). The
projects are said to be "very visionary" and high in risk, hence,
the success isn't guaranteed but the prospects are worth the investments. "The
foundation, which in just a few years has become one of the driving forces in
global health, has in the past given grants of $1.5 billion to help existing
vaccines reach more of the world's children, $150 million to find a malaria
vaccine, $127 million to find an AIDS vaccine and $200 million to stop the
spread of AIDS in India," writes McNeil. A Case
of Transparency vs. Obscurity New York Times 29.6.2005 A bioterrorist attack to the American milk supply
was described by Stanford mathematician Lawrence Wein
in a paper submitted to a journal of the National Academy of Sciences, but
first put on hold. Governmental officials demanded not to publish the paper,
writes Scott Shane in the NY Times (29.6.2005), because it could terrorists
hints on weak points of societal security. After evaluating pro and con of a
release, the Academy decided for transparency: The information might be used
for concrete steps to safeguard the milk supply. Fusion
Reactor ITER to be Build in France Nature online 28.6.2005 The next experimental fusion reactor ITER will be
build in France, according to a governmental agreement between the European
Union, especially France, and Japan. Duclan Butler
and Geoff Brumfiel stress at Nature online
(28.6.2005) the key advantages of the prospected fusion reactor to present
nuclear power stations: "Unlike fission plants, a fusion reactor would
not be vulnerable to meltdowns and its fuel could not be turned into nuclear
bombs. Perhaps the biggest attraction of fusion is that the waste from a
plant would only be radioactive for about a hundred years, rather than for
hundreds of thousands of years." A major goal for ITER (International
Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) is the demonstration that power output
exceeds input. This achieved a prototype reactor DEMO is scheduled for a
decade or two later. Now all governments involved have to sign the agreement. Hitch
Hiking Invaders Spiegel online 27.6.2005 Scientists warn of invading species that may turn
into pests for agriculture or the landscape. Chris Löwer
reports in Spiegel online (27.6.2005) about a funny path: seed that do a
hitch and travel by car from region to region. Researchers at Technical University Berlin collected dust and seeds along German roads and thus tried to track
the spread of the invaders. They collected the seeds in road tunnels where
they are unlikely to get deposited by birds or by wind. Interestingly the
researchers also found salt water weeds along the road due to winter de-icing
salts. Google's
Opinions New Scientist 25.6.2005 Search engine results are under attack by spammers:
They try to boost websites with pornographic content or shopping sites to the
first ten ranks of the Google results lists. Celeste Biever
reports in New Scientist (25.6.2005) on the methods used. However, the battle
between search engines and optimizers is as old as search engines exist. On
the one side there're marketing companies, 'whitehats',
that legally optimize the code of a website for easy access by the search
bots. On the other side, 'blackhats' cloak websites
(showing the search engines a different site as the general user) or install
link farms to cheat the search algorithms. Those algorithms are kept secret
by Google & Co. and are legally considered as opinions. Hence, nobody can
suit the search engine companies for falling off from rank 10 to 1000 after a
revision of the algorithm. Galileo
on its Way Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung
26.6.2005 Thomas Heeg bring in FAZ
on Sunday (26.6.2005) an update on the scheduled Galileo satellite navigation
system. This week will see the decision on the 'Galileo joint untertaking', the project managing consortium. Now the
two bidding organisations, Inavsat and Eurely, submitted a joint proposal for the contract,
obviously due to political reasons: The German minster
of traffic groaned that sufficient money has to become redirected to Germany
that contributes 20 percent of Galileo's budget and is only present in the Eurely organisation. Heeg also
writes that so-called killer applications for the paid-for services of
Galileo are still needed. Pebbles
Tell Their Stories Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung
19.6.2005 Ulf von Rauchhaupt writes
in FAZ on Sunday (16.6.2005) a nice piece on pebbles. Boring stuff? No! While
children know too little about the pebbles to find them boring, scientists
know to much to put them aside: Every pebble tells a story. Rescue
Vessels for High Buildings The Economist 23.6.2005 Think of an umbrella, turn it upside-down, throw it
out of a window, and, well, take your seat: That's the principle of an
inflatable escape pod from tall buildings in case of an emergency like fire. Parachutes
won't work because they may not open properly, but the operational principle
of the escape pod, now demonstrated at the Paris air show by a Russian
company, seems worth considering, writes the Economist (23.6.2005). Weapons,
from Farms to Labs Science magazine 24.6.2005 Robin Coupland and Kobi-Renée Leins write in an
editorial for Science magazine (24.6.2005) about the Geneva Protocol that
prohibits the bacteriological and chemical warfare. A conference on the
Biological Weapons Convention is scheduled this month in Geneva. The authors
are concern whether recent major advances in chemistry, microbiology or
nuclear physics may be used in weapons programmes. They address the awareness
and responsibility of scientists for their work: "They should make any
effort to ensure that the outcome of their research serves only to advance
humanity." Treaties like the 1925 Geneva Protocol have a deep resonance
in human morality, history and psychology as for similar prohibitions of
poisoning were also known from the Greeks and Romans, or Saracens. GM Crops
in China Financial Times 24.6.2005 "China has quietly established itself as a
capable competitor in GM crops," writes Geoff Dyer in the FT
(24.6.2005). The Chinese government regards GM crops as important for future
agriculture, for food safety and farmer's income. The technology is
aggressively pushed, says an official with the Center
of Chinese Agricultural Policy. Dyer describes the GMO controversy from a
Western point of view: generally you attach the opponents Monsanto and
Greenpeace as key stakeholders in the issue. Now China threatens both: the
country will support its own companies, also the argument of Greenpeace 'GMO
are a tool of transnational corporate interests'
goes wrong. Machines
with a Virtual Self The Guardian 23.6.2005 Igor Aleksander, retired
professor of electrical engineering at Imperial College London, attempts to
bring consciousness in a machine. Alok Jha profiles the Croatian-born researcher in the Guardian
(23.6.2005). Don't mix Aleksander's approach with
artificial intelligence. A term he doesn't like because artificial systems,
say machines, perform very, very simple things. Consciousness consists out of
five features, according to Aleksander: "a
sense of self, imagination, focused attention, forward planning ad
emotion." Well, if scientists were to find bees with all those features,
"then you can safely say that that organism is conscious." His team
at Imperial College is now trying to implement these axioms of consciousness
into virtual machines. However, there're more questions than answers. Natural
Counting The Guardian 20.6.2005 Ben Goldacre tells in the
Guardian (20.6.2005) why we should count in natural frequencies. That's the
best way to make people understand probabilities, risks and the outcomes of
scientific studies, adding "So if anyone is listening, this is the
information I want from a newspaper, to help me make decisions about my
health: I want to know who you're talking about (eg
men in their 50s); I want to know what the baseline risk is (eg four out of 100 will have a heart attack over 10
years); and I want to know what the increase in risk is, as a natural
frequency (two extra men out of that 100 will have a heart attack over 10
years); and I want to know exactly what's causing that increase in risk - an
occasional headache pill or daily pain relief for arthritis. Health
journalists are perfectly well paid, and the ones I know get paid more than
the NHS pays me; it's not too much to ask." --- |
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