Category Archives: science & technology

Contamination fears over two-headed Australian fish

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Toxic chemical contamination was the likely cause of fatal fish mutations in northern Australia in which thousands of bass larvae spawned with two heads, an expert said Wednesday.

Matt Landos, an aquatic animal specialist and member of the Australian College of Veterinarian Scientists, said the mutant larvae at a Noosa River fish farm survived just 48 hours and were dying en masse.

“When we used the water on-site or have taken bass from the Noosa River those fish appear to have been contaminated and they give rise to deformed or convulsing larvae,” he told AFP.

“I have been working in aquaculture for 10 years and this is the first time I have ever seen anything like it.”

Tests had excluded the presence of a virus or bacteria, leading Landos to suspect that pesticides from a neighbouring macadamia nut farm were to blame.

“It leaves us sitting with toxic chemical contamination as a likely cause,” he said. “I believe that it’s some of these chemicals at very low levels that are impacting on the breeding ability of these fish.”

Deformities in the fish had increased as the neighbouring macadamia nut plantation had expanded in the past two years to virtually border the hatchery on three sides, said Landos.

Rapidly developing pest-control technology also meant smaller particles of pesticide could travel further.

Chickens, horses and sheep at the hatchery were also experiencing birth defects and foetal deaths at abnormally high rates, he said.

The organophosphates in question — carbendazim and endosulfan — had been recognised as potentially dangerous and even banned in some countries, but were still recommended for use in Australia, said Landos.

The Queensland state government said tests gave no indication that the macadamia farm was using the chemicals against the manufacturers’ instructions.

The local fisheries department is investigating, and expects to receive results from tests of dead fish specimens next month.

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Scant evidence herbal remedies ease menopause: study

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There is little or no evidence to back claims that herbal treatments can alleviate the symptoms of menopause, according to a medical review published on Wednesday.

The paper appears in the Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin, published by the British Medical Association (BMA).

It looks at clinical studies into plants whose extracts are becoming increasingly popular among women eager to ease mood swings, tiredness, hot flushes, loss of libido and other outcomes of the hormone changes that occur at menopause.

The main herbs are black cohosh (Actaea racemosa); red clover (Trifolium pratense); dong quai, also spelt as dong gui (Angelica sinensis); evening primrose (Oenothera biennis) and ginseng (Panax ginseng).

The authors say much research falls short of scientific criteria when it comes to assessing these herbs for effectiveness and safety.

For instance, the number of participants in many studies is too small, and the duration of the trial is too short to get a definitive answer.

Of those trials deemed acceptable, the evidence is equivocal for black cohosh, they say. Some trials suggest the herb is beneficial, while others suggest it is not.

Watchdogs in Britain have given “traditional herbal registration” to a product containing black cohosh as a menopausal treatment, but have also said women who take the plant should be warned of its potential toxicity for the liver.

“There is no convincing evidence that red clover extracts have a beneficial effect (and) there is little evidence for or against benefit with other herbs commonly used for menopausal symptoms, such as gong quai, evening primrose oil, ginseng, wild yam, chaste tree, hops and sage,” the paper adds.

The review notes that herbal products can be easily purchased at shops or over the Internet and are often assumed to be “safe” on the grounds that they are “natural.”

“In reality, herbal medicines have pharmacological actions, and so can cause unwanted effects and have potentially dangerous interactions with other medicines,” both herbal and conventional, it warns.

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Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s skycar

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A British adventurer plans to set off Wednesday in a home-made vehicle which can transform itself from a car into an aircraft in minutes destination Timbuktu.

On the ground the Skycar runs on a biofuel-powered engine, and can accelerate from zero to 100 kilometres (60 miles) per hour in 4.5 seconds.

But with a powerful fan on the rear its take-off speed is 60 kph (37 mph), and once in the air it can fly at speeds of up to around 110 kph (70 mph), cruising at 2-3,000 feet with a paraglider-style canopy holding it aloft.

At 9:00 am (0900 GMT) Wednesday, inventor Giles Cardozo will leave the British capital for the 6,000-km (3,750-mile) trip through France, Spain and

north Africa, across the Sahara to the fabled desert city of Timbuktu in Mali.

The journey is expected to take some 40 days, during which they plan to soar over the Pyrenees, and the Straits of Gibraltar between southern Spain and Africa.

With four-wheel drive it can allegedly deal with the most rugged terrain, starting on the city streets of London and ending in the sands of the Sahara.

“It’s not like a car — it’s more like a dune buggy,” said Cardozo. “But no other dune buggy or car has flown like this thing before. It flies brilliantly.

“It flies at about 70 mph (110 kph) and drives at 120 mph (193 kph), so it’s a really cool bit of kit,” added the 29-year-old, whose trip is backed by famous British explorer Ranulph Fiennes as patron.

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A supercar that runs on wind energy

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Get ready for a supercar that could reach a top speed of 155mph without harming the environment, for it runs on wind energy.

Designed in California, the environmentally friendly Formula AE car will initially use a solar-powered battery to move, but later depend upon the airflow around it to power a turbine.

The high performance car will take less than four seconds to accelerate from 0 to 60 mph.

The car is expected to cost around 100,000 pounds when it hits the market.

The two-seater’s bodywork boasts paper-thin solar panelling that could fully charge the battery in just 1.5 hours.

However, this time will be reduced to just six minutes with a new prototype battery.

A full battery would enable the drivers to cover more than 200 miles or to race around a track for at least an hour.

An advanced alternating current induction motor with a power output of 212 kilowatts will propel the Formula AE.

In fact, the chassis will be constructed from lightweight aluminium and super strong steel in a Formula 1-style monocoque shell. Rory Handel and Maxx Bricklinas from Beverly Hills, California designed the sleek motor of the car, and they expect the prototype to be completed in August.

“The Formula AE car embraces a rarely thought of alternative source of energy,” the Telegraph quoted a RORMaxx spokesman as saying.

He said: “The target market would be the sports car, track day, eco-concerned auto-enthusiast. In addition, those enthusiasts who support and would want to promote the future development of revolutionary green technologies.”

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Experts plead to save tropical forests in peril

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:US experts on Monday pleaded for boosted efforts to protect tropical forests, which are key to ensuring biodiversity and fighting climate change but are increasingly threatened by deforestation.

“I am gravely concerned about what is happening with tropical forests,” William Laurance, a researcher with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama told AFP.

“There is a very high rate of destruction of the old growth, ancient forests.”

He said the equivalent of 50 football pitches of virgin rainforest was being destroyed every minute amid global warming, large scale habitat fragmentation, and changes in rainfall.

Intense hunting in areas of the tropics was also leading to the disappearance of “hundreds of species of amphibians,” he said.

“Now we have synergy among those different threats,” Laurance said.

“So when you talk about global warming for example because it’s getting hotter, species in the tropics, where it’s possible, will naturally try to move up to higher elevations where it’s a little bit cooler.

“In many cases they will be trapped by habitat construction, cattle pass, degraded lands,” he warned.

Laurance is one of the authors of a report presented Monday to a conference organized in Washington by the Smithsonian Natural History museum.

“Indonesia is now in terrible shape, losing more than two million hectares (4.9 million acres) of forest per year. Borneo is being devastated,” he said.

More than half of the planet’s 20 million square kilometers (eight million square miles) of rainforests has already been cleared for human use, while another five million square kilometers (two million square miles) has been selectively logged, said Greg Asner from the Carnegie Institution.

But he said major swathes of land, or some 350,000 square kilometers (140,000 square miles), have been abandoned by human inhabitants and are beginning to grow back.

“Moreover, the regrowth is relatively quick. The forest canopy closes after just 15 years. After 20 years, about half of the original biomass weight has grown back,” he said.

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Open-plan office workers sick and stressed: study

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Open-plan offices are making people sick, with workers more likely to suffer stress, catch a cold and be less productive, Australian researchers have found.

A review of global studies into the impact of modern office design found the switch to open-plan spaces had been overwhelmingly negative, with 90 percent reporting adverse health and psychological effects.

High levels of stress and conflict, elevated blood pressure, and rapid staff turnover were associated with open-plan environments, according to review author Vinesh Oommen.

“Employees face a multitude of problems such as the loss of privacy, loss of identity, low work productivity, various health issues, overstimulation and low job satisfaction when working in an open plan work environment,” Oommen wrote in the latest Asia-Pacific Journal of Health Management.

Workers were plagued by insecurity, he said, ever-conscious of their colleagues’ ability to see what they were doing on the computer and eavesdrop on their phone calls.

High noise levels led to impaired concentration and low productivity, he said. There was a higher incidence of workplace conflict, with people sitting so close to their neighbour that even a ringing phone could irritate.

Ease of germ transmission also meant illnesses such as influenza were more swiftly passed around.

“It is estimated that organisations can save up to 20 percent in development costs when creating an open plan work environment,” Oommen wrote.

“(But) workplace design must go beyond cost-saving to cater for the multifaceted social and psychological needs of employees.”

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Lunar material may be used to build future Moon colonies

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Students from the college of engineering at Virginia Tech in the US have made highly durable bricks composed of a lunar rock-like

material, which one day might be used to build dwellings in colonies on the moon.

The invention won the In-Situ Lunar Resource Utilization materials and construction category award from the Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems (PISCES).

The team of students, under the advisement of Kathryn Logan, a professor in the materials science and engineering department, designed the brick as a potential building tool for future colonies on the moon.

Initially designed to construct a dome, the building material is composed of a lunar rock-like material mixed with powdered aluminum that can be molded into any shape.

Design work on the early-development lunar bricks was based on previous work by the college of engineering student team’s adviser Kathryn Logan, a professor of materials science and engineering and the Virginia Tech Langley Professor at the National Institute of aerospace in Hampton, Virginia.

Logan’s prior research entailed mixing powdered aluminum and ceramic materials to form armor plating for tanks funded through a department of defense contract.

“I theorized that if I could do this kind of reaction to make armor, then I could use a similar type of reaction to make construction materials for the moon,” Logan said.

Since actual lunar rock, known as regolith, is scarce, the students used volcanic ash from a deposit on Earth along with various minerals and basaltic glass, similar to rock on the lunar surface, according to Eric Faierson, a doctoral student who led the Virginia Tech team.

During initial experiments, the simulated regolith and aluminum powder were mixed and placed inside a shallow aluminum foil crucible.

A wire was inserted into the mixture, which was then heated to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit triggering a reaction called self-propagating high-temperature synthesis (SHS), according to Logan.

The reaction caused the material to form a solid brick. A ceramic crucible was used in later experiments to form complex curved surfaces.

Once the student team had created a brick, they found that it was almost as strong as concrete under various pressure tests.

According to Faierson, one-square inch of the brick could withstand the gradual application of 2,450 pounds.

This strength would enable it to withstand an environment where gravity is a fraction of the pull on Earth.

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Fruitflies put buzz into Nature vs. Nurture debate

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If you could put an animal in a time machine and send it back to live in the distant past, would its DNA evolve in reverse, returning to the genetic code of its ancestors?

The intriguing idea has been tested by scientists in Portugal and the United States, using the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) as the animal, and a laboratory to recreate the conditions of the past.

The modern-day fruit flies were the distant descendants of an original group that had been harvested in the wild back in 1975.

Over the following decades, 500 generations of flies grew up in different environments.

Different groups of insects were starved, exposed to greater humidity and so on in various research projects, and as a result developed specific characteristics, moulded by these conditions.

Henrique Teotonio and colleagues put these various populations back into the ancestral environment and let them reproduce for another 50 generations.

They then took a close look at a telltale stretch of DNA, on Chromosome 3, to see whether “reverse evolution” had taken place.

The answer: Yes, it had, but only up to a point.

Once the flies had adapted comfortably to their new environment, the backwards-winding clock of evolution came to a halt, according to their paper, published on Sunday in the journal Nature Genetics.

“Reverse evolution seems to stop when the populations of flies achieve adaptation to the ancestral environment, which may not coincide with the ancestral [genetic] state,” said Teotonio.

“On average, only half of the gene frequencies revert to the ancestral gene frequencies. Evolution is contingent upon history at the genetic level, too.”

The work also suggests evolution is rather more complex and less linear than is generally thought, Teotonio said.

For one thing, it shows that species can evolve from generation to generation by reshuffling variant forms of a gene, rather than introducing new mutations of it, he said.

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First Internet car radio a hit at consumer electronics show

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German audio equipment maker Blaupunkt and Australia’s miRoamer have teamed up to produce the first Internet car radio, giving drivers access to tens of thousands of Web radio stations.

George Parthimos, chief executive of miRoamer, said the Blaupunkt 600i is the first “purpose-built Internet car radio, where the Internet radio capabilities are an ingredient part of the actual unit itself.”

“It will have everything you’d expect to find in a medium- to high-end radio — AM/FM, CD, MP3 — with the added ingredient of Internet radio,” he said of the device, which was unveiled at the annual Consumer Electronics Show here.

A 3G mobile phone with a data plan is needed to connect the radio to the Internet, Parthimos said, and the company estimates the average user would consume around two gigabytes of data a month.

“It uses Bluetooth connectivity to connect to a cellphone and then the cellphone connects to a cellular network,” he said. “The mobile is purely used to connect to the Internet.

“The actual radio itself is where all your settings and all your user experience happens,” Parthimos said. “As soon as you jump in your car your mobile will automatically synch to the radio itself.”

Parthimos, whose Melbourne-based company is an online aggregator of radio content, said Blaupunkt expects to launch the radio in the second half of the year, initially in the United States and Europe.

“As for in-car installs, we’ve been inundated with a lot of companies who are interested in this,” he said, declining to name the interested automobile manufacturers. “I would imagine that that would probably happen in 2010.”

Parthimos said Blaupunkt expects the radio to cost around 399 dollars.

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New way to repair heart attack damage

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British scientists have developed a stem cell treatment that could dramatically boost the body’s ability to repair itself.

The treatment, which makes the bone marrow release a flood of stem cells into the bloodstream, could heal serious tissue damage caused by heart attacks and even repair broken bones.

Scientists already use stem cell therapy to treat leukemia patients, getting the marrow to release a type of stem cell that can only make fresh blood cells. British researchers said, “They have found a way to get the bone marrow to release two other types of stem cell that can repair bone, blood vessels and cartilage.”

“The bone marrow of treated mice released 100 times as many stem cells, which help to regenerate tissue”, said Sara Rankin who led the research team at Imperial College. “We hope that by releasing extra stem cells, as we were able to do in mice in our study, we could potentially call up extra numbers of whichever stem cells the body needs, in order to boost its ability to mend itself and accelerate the repair process,” she said.

The group hopes to begin trials later this year to investigate how effective it is at repairing tissue damage in rodents. “All the evidence suggests these cells will make a significant difference to the natural repair process,” Rankin said.

Peter Weissberg, medical director at the British Heart Foundation, which co-funded the research along with the Welcome Trust, said: “It now seems increasingly likely that the bone marrow also contains cells that have the capacity to repair damaged internal organs, such as the heart and blood vessels, but that too few of them are released to be effective.”

He further added, “This research has identified some important molecular pathways involved in mobilizing these cells. It may be possible to develop a drug that interacts with these pathways to encourage the right number and type of stem cells to enter the circulation and repair damage to the heart.”

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