science news 7.2.2019

Today's selection of science news (I had to skip yesterday's, sorry!). Links are normally to press releases on EurekAlert (at the bottom end I may also add a couple of newspaper stories). I include quotes from the summary (using quotation marks) in cases where the title alone doesn't reveal what the story is about.


astrobiology

Massive collision in the planetary system Kepler 107


climate

Diffusing the methane bomb: We can still make a difference
"The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, causing the carbon containing permafrost that has been frozen for tens or hundreds of thousands of years to thaw and release methane into the atmosphere, thereby contributing to global warming. The findings of a study that included researchers from IIASA, however, suggest that it is still possible to neutralize this threat."


Cracks herald the calving of a large iceberg from Petermann Glacier
The Petermann Glacier is in the far northwest reaches of Greenland, in case you wondered.

Study shows that Vikings enjoyed a warmer Greenland


evolution

Research explains how snakes lost their limbs

Researchers investigate a billion years of coexistence between plants and fungi



Stropharia fungus on wood chips exemplifying the evolution of fungal ability to break down the cell wall lignin and to help recycle plants. This feature was instrumental in the emergence of woody plants and forest systems.
Credit: Tom Wieboldt


animals

Study confirms beaked whales' incredible diving abilities

The black storks in Estonia are suffering from loneliness


A scientific study reveals the enigmas on social behavior of western lowland gorillas
"A new study reveals one of the enigmas related to the social behavior of the western lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) in the heart of the African equatorial rainforest. These primates show a dynamic social structure -- individuals change frequently between families -- with a high degree of tolerance and peaceful coexistence among the members."


humans

Touch biographies reveal transgenerational nature of touch

Endocannabinoid system, a target to improve cognitive disorders in models of Down syndrome
that's mouse models, but still intriguing

New music styles: How the challenger calls the tune

the inverted helix

It is a fact widely ignored by people who design covers for science books and journals, but let me say it loud and clear, the normal version of the DNA double helix is RIGHT-HANDED, i.e. it is like an ordinary screw in that if you look down the axis and follow the ridge clockwise, the movement will lead away from you (see this example from the Ashmolean Museum's collection of glassware).

If, however, you take a picture of a DNA double helix and mirror it, you end up with something blatantly WRONG like the examples below:







PS in order to inject some scientific method into my rant, I've just done a Google image search for "DNA" and checked the first 30 double helix images shown. Giving those where the chirality isn't easy to see the benefit of the doubt, I have spotted three images with left-handed helices, so the error rate seems to be around 10%, even on websites that get high PageRank.

bhopal - the disaster continues

Following on from my earlier rant re. the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, there is further depressing news about this in yesterday's Guardian. A trial has come to an end but the disaster continues.

Seven convicted over 1984 Bhopal gas disaster (news report re. the outcome of the trial)

Editorial including an enlightening comparison with the current BP disaster.

Comment by Indra Sinh who says: "The people most responsible for the disaster in Bhopal were not in the courtroom today when the verdict against eight Indian employees of Union Carbide India Limited was announced."

more dubious cancer genomes

Update 15.6.2010:
A paper studying a lung cancer genome the way it should be done, using fresh samples from a live patient with known smoking record has appeared in Nature on 27.5., page 473. Of course, as the papers using cell lines got the scoop, this one wasn't hyped or reported in the press, so I managed to miss it and only discovered it when going back to the issue to look up something else. Goes to show that cutting corners pays off nicely in science. Still, lots more studies like this one are needed before one can arrive at definitive conclusions.

The current issue of Nature includes a news piece relating criticism of "cancer genome" sequences based on cell lines, which I have also voiced here. After some ifs and buts, the piece fails to come to a clear conclusion.

Personally, I wouldn't mind people sequencing the old cell lines if they think it helps them understand all the research that has been done on them in the past decades. What annoys me is the claim that this is "the cancer genome" and tells us something important about how cancer works. If the papers appeared in some middling journal for the record, that would be fine. But as articles in Nature, they are automatically overhyped in the press.

I think to find out something meaningful about real cancers, one would need to advance a bit more carefully and study proper cancer cells (the argument that in real tumours cancer cells are mixed with healthy cells doesn't stand up, as 1) it is now possible to sequence DNA on single molecule basis, thus from single cells, and 2) if they want lots of cancer cells, they just have to sort them out).

And of course, after all that huffing and puffing, the journal goes ahead and publishes another big "article" by the same people, also based on cell lines. I still think this is just cutting corners to be quicker than the people who do the research properly, and to get all the rewards that come with a "first" being published in Nature or Science. (And I am speaking as someone who has also been a co-author of an "article" in Nature in my time, and I'd also be happy to tell you what was wrong with that paper!)

responsibility of chemists

This time of the year, 25 years ago, I was a first term chemistry student, and one morning our inorg. chemistry prof put the periodic table aside to give us a stern lecture on our future responsibility as chemists. That's about the only thing I remember of the Bhopal disaster, which remains to this day (luckily, in a way) the worst industrial accident ever.

Despite being a responsible chemist and all that, I never looked all that closely at what happened and why, until reading this piece on the 25th anniversary.

Bhopal: 25 years of poison, by Indra Sinha

Reading this, you're left wondering whether the event should have been prosecuted as manslaughter, murder, or genocide, but the fact of the matter is that nobody has been prosecuted to this day. (Essentially, an extremely labile and dangerous substance was stored in a large tank, and somebody decided to switch off the cooling for that tank, to save costs, then water accidentally entered the tank and started a reaction -- there are several outrageously wrong decisions in this story that must not be allowed to happen inside a chemical factory.) And people in the area still ingest the poison and get diseases and birth defects from it.

Chemistry aside, what most angers me about these things is the inherent racism assuming that it's no big deal if 20,000 people die in India from negligence of a US-owned factory, while the deaths of 3,000 people in the US are an outrage that can be used as an excuse to invade two countries (again at the cost of tens of thousands less important lives). Clearly, all men are not created equal ...

in praise of placebos

The UK parliament's Science and Technology Sub-Committee debated homeopathy this morning, you can watch it here.

I have to admit I'm a bit softer on this point than many scientists. I think we should appreciate that the placebo effect is real. The belief that you are doing something to treat your malady can mobilise the body's defences and induce a real improvement in some people's condition, so if something "only works as well as placebo", that means it does something. And as medical doctors aren't allowed to give you a sugar pill and pretend it's a drug, we need people who can apply placebos and actually believe in them. Which is what homeopaths do. As long as they aren't stopping people from getting a better treatment where one exists, I don't mind them doing what they do.

busy

... no time for meaningful blogging today, but do check my tweet feed. Had great fun on Twitter last week, thanks to the home secretary and his inspired decision to shoot the messenger when he didn't like the message. The #NuttSack affair rumbles on ...

summing up the Nutt sack affair

(--> deutsche Version)

I don't know whether anybody outside the UK noticed, but we've had a big debate here over the head of the government's drugs advisory body, David Nutt, who was sacked by the home secretary, Alan Johnson, last Friday (30.10.). Essentially, he was fired because he had insisted that the real danger posed by drugs is completely unrelated to the ABC classification used for law enforcement. (e.g., both cannabis and ecstasy are less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco). By firing him, Johnson unleashed a major science v. politics clash.

It was great fun watching this drama onfold on twitter -- the twitter-using science minister, Paul Drayson (@lorddrayson) was caught out by it on a visit to Japan, tweeted his support to the enraged scientists back home, but as soon as he was back in London and under cabinet control order, he fell silent.

Soon there was a petition on the gov. website to get Prof. Nutt reinstated, and the brilliant twitter-hashtag #NuttSack. The tabloid press went berserk: "Cannabis scandal expert admits: My children have taken drugs", but among the serious newspapers, even the conservative ones (Times, Telegraph) backed the scientists side. The collected stories in the Guardian are here.

I think it was ultimately a positive thing, as the scientific evidence about the real dangers of drugs got acres of media coverage rather than being swept under the rug by the government. Plus, the government will probably have to reorganise the way it commissions expert advice on drugs, and it will have to do so under public scrutiny. Thus in a political sense, this was a major own-goal for the home secretary (and Gordon Brown as well who backed him, rather than the science minister who tried to get the decision reversed).

Editorials summarising the whole affair are now appearing, e.g. by David Colquhoun in the British Medical Journal, and by David Nutt himself in New Scientist. Only trouble is that the Tories, who are likely to win the next elections, are just as blockheaded about this as the current home secretary. So scientists will have to vote Lib Dem next time ...


PS the most revealing contribution re. the misunderstanding of science was probably made by the Daily Mail columnist who called scientists (all of them) the "arrogant gods of certainty". Could someone pop down to Waterstones and get him a copy of Popper ? (more about risk and uncertainty in the Times)

the true cost of smoking

The Guardian is the best paper we have here, but it still publishes the odd bit of rubbish dressed up as science. On Tuesday 9.6., it proclaimed "Smoking costs NHS £ 5bn a year" (page 11 of main section). If you think about this for a second, it certainly doesn't. Treating smokers may cost this amount, but if none of these people had ever smoked, they would still get ill and die, just with different diseases at later times. In a cradle-to-grave cost comparison, these people would surely cost the NHS a comparable amount of money if they had never smoked, possibly even more. Many smokers die of heart attacks (a comparatively cheap way to go), and even treatment for lung cancer must be less expensive than spending 10 years in a care home with dementia. My gut feeling is that smokers save the NHS money even before you take into account the extra tax they pay for their addiction.

The headline claim "smoking costs £ 5bn" is based on a comparison where giving up smoking makes you live forever and never get ill, which is clearly not the way it works in the real world.

Where is Ben Goldacre when we need him to stop bad science from being printed in the Guardian and dig out more meaningful figures ?!