Nobel Intent

When it infects humans, the avian flu is unusually lethal, killing over half the people who come down with symptoms. But, so far at least, the virus has only spread from birds to humans, and not between humans. Recently, some labs evolved a version of the avian flu that can be transmitted among ferrets while retaining its lethal nature. The researchers who did this work sequenced the flu genome, identified all the genetic changes, and sent publications in to Science and Nature.

That's where things got complicated, with the journals delaying publication and the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity stepping in. The end result was a moratorium on further research, with the journals discussing publishing a censored form of the original papers. During this pause, the World Health Organization convened its own panel of experts who released a statement on Friday, calling for the moratorium on new research to be extended, and saying that the papers should be published in full, even if that means an extensive delay.

Not wasteful, but unethical: why we hate crippled products: It has become commonplace for a company to offer a range of products built from a common base. But the companies have to be careful about how they make the different versions, or risk consumer ire.

Leaked docs: Heartland Institute think tank pays climate contrarians very well (updated): Someone has leaked internal documents from the Heartland Institute, a thinktank that apparently funds climate contrarians very well, and is planning on developing its own school curriculum.

The DNA sequencing systems on the market produce their output by synthesizing new DNA in a way that allows them to read the identity of the base that's added. There have been a few ideas floated around that involved reading the bases directly from existing molecules, but the technical challenges of doing so have kept anyone from bringing these technologies to market. Now, a company called Oxford Nanopore has announced that it will be selling a DNA-reading machine before the year is over. Not only does this represent an entirely new sequencing technology, but the systems will be sold as rack-mounted hardware that can be clustered.

The basic principle behind nanopore sequencing is pretty simple (we've got more detail if you're interested). An external voltage forces DNA molecules to snake their way through a narrow protein pore embedded in a membrane. As each base passes through, its distinct chemical properties cause changes in the voltage difference across the membrane. By tracking the local voltage changes, it's possible to identify each base as it slides through the pore.

The Crab Nebula (also designated M1 or NGC 1952) is visible through small telescopes, which has allowed astronomers to observe its growth and evolution since the supernovae that created it became visible in 1054 CE. A pulsar was found in the center of the Crab in 1968. This rapidly rotating neutron star is the core of the star that went supernova to make the nebula. In the intervening decades, X-ray, gamma ray, and radio observations have mapped the region of the nebula closest to the pulsar. During that mapping, it became apparent that the Crab pulsar is one of the brightest sources of gamma rays observable from Earth.

Despite all of those observations, we still don't fully understand the Crab's precise gamma ray spectrum, particularly recently observed pulses of intense gamma radiation seen by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Existing models certainly do well at describing much of the complex interplay between the intense magnetic fields of the pulsar and the winds of charged particles flowing outward. But no single scheme seems sufficient to cover all the observed phenomena. 

A potentially promising new model, proposed by F. A. Aharonian, S. V. Bogovalov, and D. Khangulyan, may fill in some of these blanks. It proposes that areas near the pulsar are acting as rapid particle accelerators, but don't boost electrons and heavier particles to the same extent.

One of the key concepts in physics is that of a phase transition. Ice melting to form water is one example; another is the transition between magnetic and non-magnetic forms of iron. The underlying physics of these transitions is a story about correlations. Understanding a phase transition and, indeed, a phase of matter, is all about understanding the growth of correlations.

You would think that one of the cleanest and best understood physical systems wouldn't have a lot to offer physicists in terms of understanding correlations that develop through a phase transition. However, physicists got a bit of a surprise when they looked at particular correlations that arise as a dilute gas is cooled down until it forms a Bose Einstein condensate (BEC).

During the middle of the 19th century, a star system known as Eta Carinae suddenly became the second-brightest star in the night sky, then gradually faded again. Known as the Great Eruption, this event released about 10 percent of the energy that would have been liberated if the star had gone supernova, and caused the star to shed approximately 10 Suns' worth of mass. Yet somehow, Eta Carinae survives to this day. Understanding the behavior of Eta Carinae (which is estimated to still hold at least 100 times the mass of our Sun) will provide astronomers with knowledge of the end-stages of very massive stars, and allow them to distinguish between eruptions and supernova explosions.

Even though the Great Eruption first became visible in 1838, astronomers are still able to observe its effects today through light echoes: light that has bounced off particles inside the nebula surrounding Eta Carinae for a while, and has reached Earth long after the initial eruption has faded. A new study of the light echoes, performed by A. Rest et al., reveals that Eta Carinae was relatively cool at the time of its brightening. While eruptions observed in other galaxies seem to be driven by thick, opaque clouds of matter being driven away from their progenitor star, the analysis published in the February 16 edition of Nature seems to show that the Great Eruption may actually have been triggered by a blast wave emanating from the surface of Eta Carinae.

Update: The Heartland Institute has acknowledged that some of the documents were theirs, but claims that a strategy document is fraudulent. Although other sources indicate that the Heartland is preparing an educational program, none speak to the motivation behind this program.

The scientific findings relevant to climate change generally appear in journals that the public will never look at. Instead, the public battle over the science and its policy implications often boils down to a battle between scientific societies like the AAAS and National Academies of Science and think tanks like the Cato Institute and Heartland Institute, which contest the scientific consensus. The Heartland has even set up a contrarian counterpart to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, called the NIPCC (for "nongovernmental" and "international," naturally).

Yesterday, a series of documents that allegedly originated form the Heartland were leaked to a prominent climate blog. The documents reveal that most of the funding for its climate activities come from a small range of very generous donors, and that big plans are afoot for 2012. If the Heartland has its way, it will fund the launch of a new website by meteorologist and climate skeptic Anthony Watts, and prepare a school curriculum intended to keep teachers from addressing climate science.

In the world of consumer electronics, it's common for companies to create a range of products that are all variations on a theme, containing slightly faster processors or a bit more memory. These products serve two important functions for their producers: they put the price of entry within reach of more consumers, and they induce those with a bit more cash to take steps up the product ladder and purchase a more expensive version. However, a study that has just been released by the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that the companies that take this tack have to be careful about how they go about things. Creating a product range by crippling an existing product can work against the company if word filters out.

The study was motivated in part because of a classic example that backfired. IBM once produced a pair of laser printers that differed solely in terms of their rate of output. The lower page-per-minute version, however, actually required that IBM install a specialized chip that throttled the normal printer's output—it took more work to produce, and cost more to make. That approach did not go over well with purchasers, and the authors are able to cite a history of similar products that resulted in a distinctive (and derogatory) vocabulary: "crippleware," "product sabotage," "anti-features," "defective by design," and "damaged goods."

One of the most mind-blowing areas of quantum mechanics is entanglement: two or more particles separated in space can have physical properties that are correlated. A measurement performed on one particle will tell us the result of the same measurement taken on an entangled particle. Entanglement is important but difficult to study, both in terms of a theoretical understanding and doing experiments. While entangling relatively small groups of particles has been accomplished several times over the last 30 years (pioneered by Aspect et al. in 1982), scaling these experiments up in sizes sufficient to create quantum computers and other complex systems has eluded researchers.

A significant step forward has been accomplished by entangling eight photons (previously six had been the largest number). Researchers from Shanghai's University of Science and Technology of China created a system where eight photons were equally likely to be polarized in a specific orientation, something known colloquially as a "Schrödinger cat" state. In a paper published in Nature Photonics, authors Xing-Can Yao et al. describe a new technique that uses ultra-bright photon sources to control for some of the problems that plagued earlier entanglement experiments.

Say an EKG machine is monitoring your heart, when it suddenly flatlines. You'd be keenly interested to know whether your heart had stopped or the machine had simply gone on the fritz. Paleontologists have faced a similar (if slightly less urgent) puzzle when it comes to the geologic record of life: does the fossil record we see reflect the state of ancient ecosystems, or is it just the readout from a defective instrument? A recent paper in Science gives reassuring support to the fidelity of the rock record.

It’s fascinating to study how species diversity has changed through time, since we can see the effects of major events in Earth’s past and watch evolution play out. It's literally reading the history of life on Earth. That’s a story we naturally want to know and tell. But fossils are difficult to come by—after all, less than one percent of extinct species are represented in the fossil record. As an imperfect recorder, we have to worry how much the evidence in the rocks is telling us about the organisms, and how much we're just seeing changes in the rocks themselves.

If we want to obtain 20 percent of our electricity from wind power by 2030, the US is going to need at least 50 gigawatts from offshore wind farms, according to the US Department of Energy. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimated that this wouldn’t be a problem—we could provide four times our 2010 electricity generation capacity with offshore wind power alone. The US hasn’t actually built any offshore wind farms yet, although there are at least 20 in the planning stages.

As part of that planning, the Interior Department recently performed a review, concluding there would be no significant environmental or socioeconomic impacts from wind farms off the mid-Atlantic Coast. However, according to a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, we should be worrying the converse: the impact of the environment on the wind farms, from hurricanes in particular. In certain risky offshore regions off the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, there is a high probability that at least one turbine would be destroyed by hurricanes within 20 years, and a smaller chance that half the turbines in a farm would be wiped out.

Last week, the people running the LHC laid out plans for its 2012 schedule. In announcing the results of the 2011 run, physicists indicated that they would have enough data by the end of this year to know whether the Higgs boson exists at around 125GeV, where a tantalizing signal had been spotted. To make sure this comes to pass, the people running the LHC have laid out a schedule that will see the machine pump out three times as many collisions this year as it did in the one just passed. They'll also boost the energy slightly before sending the collider into an extended shutdown that will start next winter.

A catastrophic failure early in the LHC's history revealed a flaw in some of the superconducting hardware that helps keep the protons on track as they circle the accelerator. To compensate, the accelerator has been running with each beam at 3.5TeV (for a combined energy of 7TeV), half its design energy; an extended break would be required to replace the faulty hardware. At the reduced energy, however, the LHC has outperformed most people's expectations, placing a definitive answer on the Higgs within reach. That prospect has caused the LHC management to revise some of its plans in the expectation that the Higgs can be discovered or ruled out before the extended shutdown.

Batteries based on lithium now power everything from our watches to our cars, and we've made major strides towards stuffing more energy into them more quickly over the last several years. But there are limits to how quickly a battery can charge, and pushing past them can cause the lithium to form metallic microstructures within the battery. These can do ugly things like creating a short between the electrodes or puncturing the membranes that contain the battery's electrolyte.

Most techniques that could image these miscrostructures involved taking the battery apart, meaning that we could only take static images of the impact of charge/discharge cycles on the battery. One of the best techniques for non-invasive imaging, NMR, relies on radiofrequency signals that simply don't penetrate beyond the surface of a battery. Now, some researchers have figured out that there are conditions that enable the use of NMR to peek inside a battery—and they happen to be the formation of the microstructures we care about.

Unusual sources of energy were on top of this past week's science news, from a new method that might get us closer to break-even fusion to an approach that lets us treat a cockroach like a living battery. That later research raised some ethical concerns, but not nearly so many as the research that may have created a human-transmissible version of the deadly avian flu.

Revenge is ours: extracting energy from a cockroach: Scientists show that the sugars stored in the abdomen of some insects can be used to generate electricity, which may lead to insect-powered sensors.

Lasers plus a crushing magnetic field may make fusion more efficient : A pair of researchers show how the combination of crushing magnetic fields and lasers may make inertial confinement fusion efficient enough to generate usable energy.

The success of efforts that target polio have raised hopes that it could be the next human disease to be eradicated within the decade. But that's not the only disease that public health officials have targeted. The UN has actually set a goal of eliminating all deaths caused by malaria—by 2015. To reach that goal, development agencies boosted spending on malaria control efforts to over $1 billion annually over the course of the past decade. That has definitely had a significant impact on the disease, as all estimates of deaths due to malaria indicate it has been going down since about 2005. But the latest study of the disease suggests that we've been significantly underestimating how many people it has been killing.

Malaria is an extremely difficult parasite to control, in part because it's a complex organism. In contrast to viral and bacterial pathogens, malaria is caused by eukaryotes (from the genus Plasmodium), which have larger and more complex genomes. The parasites' complex genomes have helped them evolve various mechanisms for avoiding the immune system, as well as evolve resistance to most of the therapies we've developed.

Plasmodium also has a complex life cycle, spreading via mosquitos rather than direct, person-to-person contact. Although this lets us limit the spread of the disease by targeting mosquitos, those organisms have also evolved resistance to the chemicals that once killed them. For example, DDT was once used so indiscriminately that it's now useless against mosquitos in many tropical regions.

An essential part of science involves finding correlations between two sets of measurements and seeking explanations for those correlations. However, relationships can be suggested by data even when they don't actually exist, and correlations may occur due to random fluctuations rather than a deep underlying principle (as the infamous "correlation does not equal causation" cliché suggests). These errors are easy to make, and the scientific literature is full of them.

So how can researchers establish if a correlation is both real and meaningful? In a Perspective in the February 10 issue of Science, Michael P.H. Stumpf and Mason A. Porter examine the type of correlation known as a power law, where one set of measurements is related to a second via an exponent. They argue that two things must be in place for a power law to be valid as a predictive model: it must hold over a wide range of data to eliminate chance associations, and it must have a plausible mechanism to explain why the correlation showed up in the data.

Transparency is generally a property of a material's density or crystal structure, and varies depending on the wavelength of light. However, transparency can also be achieved by exploiting quantum interference between energy level transitions in atoms. Up until now, such transparency has been confined to optical wavelengths, due to the typical energies of atomic transitions.

Transitioning between energy levels within atomic nuclei (instead of electron transitions) involves much higher energies, corresponding to hard X-ray frequencies. Ralf Röhlsberger, Hans-Christian Wille, Kai Schlage, and Balaram Sahoo of the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Germany have induced transparency in iron-57 nuclei, using an X-ray laser to drive the nuclei to resonance. The experiment not only made the iron nuclei nearly vanish, but also slowed the X-ray photons to a small fraction of their usual speed. This result holds out the tantalizing possibility of quantum optics in the nuclear regime, providing us new ways of manipulating light at far higher energies than have previously been possible.

Understanding dunes is important, since he who controls the Spice controls the Universe… That’s the last Dune joke, I promise.

Understanding the mechanisms behind desert sand dune formation and evolution actually is useful, since migrating dune fields threaten agricultural areas and human habitats. At the edges of dune fields, habitats can transition from lifeless deserts to areas covered in vegetation over fairly short distances. Various factors, such as the supply and transport rates of sand and groundwater, along with vegetation density, have all been proposed as key influences on this transition point, but nobody has come up with a model describing the evolution of dune fields.

Until now, that is. A team led by Douglas Jerolmack, joined by others at the Universities of Pennsylvania, Alabama, and Temple University, published a paper in a recent issue of Nature Geoscience that focused on the gypsum dunes of White Sands National Monument, New Mexico. The team came up with a model describing both the transport of the sand that forms the dunes and the changes in vegetation, relating to the levels of groundwater underneath the sand.

The release of excess CO2 from the combustion of fossil fuels, deforestation, and other processes doesn’t just affect our air; it also affects our oceans. The oceans absorb as much as 30 percent of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which lowers their pH. Thus, our emissions have two large consequences for our oceans: warmer temperatures and increased acidity.

These changes may have a profound effect on coral growth, since corals are sensitive to both temperature and pH. There is mounting evidence that coral health has been declining in recent years. But what, exactly, is affecting coral? A new study in Science shows that current changes in coral growth may have more to do with the ocean’s temperature than its pH.

Ever since I first heard about the idea, I have loved inertial confinement fusion. The basic concept involves blowing stuff up with lasers to get some energy, then doing it again and again as fast as possible. What more could a 38-going-on-5-year-old want? Well, what I might also want is a fusion reaction that generates more energy than you put in to it.

One thing that lets me down about inertial confinement fusion is that the implosion that gets the fusion reaction going also acts to stop the fusion. One idea for improving the fusion reaction that has been floating around for a while is to use magnetic fields in place of lasers to increase the efficiency of the fusion burn. But until recently, no one could figure out how to make it work properly.

Microscopically, glasses are solids that look more like liquids—they lack a regular crystalline structure. The liquid character is no accident, since a typical glass is made by cooling a fluid rapidly. If done in the right way, this skips the usual crystallization that occurs at the freezing point of the material, leaving a disordered state. If we want to create a glass with specific properties, we need precise control over the fluid-to-glass transition, but that has proven very difficult to achieve in practice.

To this end, Yunlong Guo et al. have developed a way to produce stable glasses made of polymers. As described in a Nature Materials paper published February 5, the resulting glasses are extremely lightweight, have a higher transitional temperature, and maintain their properties up to a higher temperatures than normal glasses. The researchers made the glasses by deposition rather than cooling, using a technique known as matrix-assisted pulsed laser evaporation, or MAPLE. The result is a glass built up of nanoscale globules, a material with interesting theoretical properties as well as potential applications.