This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
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This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
Andy Coghlan, reporter
At long last, after years of debate, the US Food and Drug Administration appears to have concluded that it's too risky for American farmers to carry on giving their animals antibiotics simply to make them grow fatter, faster.
The reason is to break the link between development of farmyard bacteria resistant to antibiotics and the spread of these "superbugs" through the food chain to hospitals and human communities.
The FDA concludes:
"This loss of antibiotic effectiveness poses a serious public health threat."
Paul Marks, chief technology correspondent
Remember Amazon's controversial turn-of-the-century patent for buying something online with one click of a mouse button? For years patent lawyers, software makers, biotech executives and the like have been arguing over the validity of patenting such business methods.
Most expected that a US Supreme Court ruling this week would finally settle that argument. In the end, however, the decision did little to clarify matters.
The case before the court involved the patent application for a method of managing energy prices depending upon weather patterns, invented by one Bernard Bilski.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm Monday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
Gareth Morgan, technology editor
With its essential Internet Content Provider licence up for renewal on 30 June and Chinese officials still fuming about the search engine's decision to stop censoring results, Google last night announced a change of tack on its official blog.
In effect, the company is so desperate to continue operating its Google.cn site that it's willing to serve up a drastically scaled-back version of its product. Google's chief legal officer said in the blog:
"Without an ICP license, we can't operate a commercial website like Google.cn - so Google would effectively go dark in China."
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm Friday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
Debora MacKenzie, consultant
To say Frank Fenner is no fool is without doubt an understatement. He is an accomplished scientist, and that rarity in modern science, a polymath. As a virologist he helped lead the eradication of smallpox, while as a human ecologist he set up the respected Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at the Australian National University.
So how worried should we be that Fenner told an Australian newspaper that humanity will be extinct within a century because of our failure to deal with global warming?
All is not necessarily lost, at least according to Stephen Boyden, Fenner's colleague at the John Curtin School of Medical Research, ANU, who told the same paper there is still time to prevent our extinction. The problem, he says, is to do it we will need to pull off "revolutionary changes necessary to achieve ecological sustainability". Still hardly an optimistic view.
And it's not just Fenner and Boyden who are gloomy about the future of our species.
Update: BP has announced that the containment cap was reattached at 6.30pm local time. The Discover Enterprise is now collecting oil once more.
Peter Aldhous, San Francisco bureau chief
BP's efforts to capture oil spewing from its blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico have hit a snag, after a robot collided with a containment cap, forcing its removal for inspection.
The glitch halted pumping of oil to the Discover Enterprise, the larger of two vessels currently collecting a fraction of the gushing oil. The vessel is capable of capturing 2.86 million litres of oil a day, a fraction of the 5.56 to 9.54 million litres now estimated to be flowing each day.
The Los Angeles Times' Greenspace blog explains that the cap was removed to check for the formation of gas hydrate crystals after the collision. These could clog the collection apparatus, and were the main reason that earlier containment efforts failed.
If no hydrates have formed, the cap could be replaced within a matter of hours. But if hydrates are present, the equipment will have to be cleaned, and the pipeline connecting the vessel to the containment cap reinserted.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, who is coordinating the US government's response, said: "that will take a considerable amount longer".
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent
To be a fly on the wall inside Google's legal department right now: the firm is about to find out whether or not its data sniffing activities - involving recording some of the data sent by domestic Wi-Fi routers - were legal.
Google's tactic of extreme openness over what it says was a mistaken data gathering operation involving its Street View car fleet doesn't seem to have helped much: information protection authorities around the world are apoplectic.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm Friday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
David Shiga, reporter
How soon should the US send astronauts to the moon, asteroids and Mars?
The White House wants to delay work on missions to beyond low Earth orbit - which are pricy - until after 2015, but needs congressional approval to do this. Now a senator who oversees NASA policy says that work on a powerful new rocket that would enable such missions should begin next year.
Under former president George W. Bush, NASA focused on building the Ares I rocket to send astronauts to the International Space Station after the space shuttle fleet retires. There were also plans to build a more powerful Ares V rocket to fly astronauts to the moon and beyond.
Barack Obama's White House wants to cancel both Ares rockets. Under its new plan, commercial space taxis would be used to ferry astronauts to the space station. A so-called heavy-lift rocket with similar capabilities to the Ares V would be developed to fly astronauts to asteroids and ultimately to Mars, but that costly effort would not begin until 2015.
Debora MacKenzie, correspondent
We have explained why the sound of vuvuzelas irritates so many people. Interestingly, they sound like a swarm of angry bees (they use the same note, B-flat) - and that noise scares elephants.
Love 'em or hate 'em, however, it may be going a bit far to blame the vuvuzela for spreading disease, as this AP story suggests. What the story amounts to is this unsurprising finding: blowing a prolonged raspberry through a tube spatters lots of tiny spit droplets around.
These droplets admittedly can spread germs - and right now it is flu season in the southern hemisphere, this year featuring swine flu.
Droplets may also carry tuberculosis (TB), including the drug-resistant kind found in South Africa.
However, there is no evidence that tooting a vuvuzela broadcasts germs any better than talking, screaming or singing.
Anyway, catching TB normally takes more exposure than ninety minutes and stoppage time. Even passing your vuvuzela around probably won't add much to the germ contact you already have with fellow fans.
Nic Fleming, contributor
Forget working out how healthy your food is - now you can work out how healthy your cellphone is. Phone stores in San Francisco will have to prominently display labels showing the radio-wave emission levels of the different models they sell from next year. The provisional legislation is the first of its kind to be introduced anywhere in the US, and possibly anywhere in the world.
It comes a month after the long-delayed publication of the major $30 million "Interphone" study into links between brain tumours and cellphone use. The results were inconclusive: some of the 50 scientists involved claimed an association with long-term use, but others dismissed the suggestion out of hand.
The preliminary law was passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors by a margin of 10 to 1, despite opposition from cellphone industry representatives, who argued the measure could be seen as supporting the view that higher emissions might be linked to health risks.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
Andy Coghlan, reporter
Enthusiasts of creationism on the fringes of the American evangelical movement now have the strangest new allies - in a nation that made atheism its state religion.
Yes, creationism has now reared its ugly and evolving head in Russia, the heart of the "Godless communism" that prevailed in the Soviet Union.
And, as pointed out in a superb blog by Michael Zimmerman in the Huffington Post, the Russian rhetoric sounds strangely familiar.
Ewen Callaway, reporter
The sun is about to set on the Wild West that is "direct-to-consumer" genetics.
Playing the role of sheriff is the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which recently sent letters to several firms, including 23andMe, DeCODE genetics and Navigenics.
The letters make clear that the FDA considers their products to be medical devices that require the agency's approval before they can be sold. It says:
"You should take prompt action to respond to this letter."
These letters come on the heels of an FDA warning to one firm, Pathway Genomics, that its tests may require approval. Congressional investigators also turned up the heat on genetics testing firms, sending their own demand for answers.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm Friday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
Wendy Zukerman, Australasian reporter
Japan's tactics in attempting to overturn the ban on commercial whaling have come under fresh scrutiny following an undercover investigation by UK newspaper The Sunday Times.
Opponents of whaling have long accused Japan of offering foreign aid to small, poor countries if they joined the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and vote to resume whaling. But hard evidence of Japan's tactics have not been documented until now.
The Sunday Times used undercover reporters, posing as representatives of a billionaire conservationist, to approach officials from pro-whaling countries. They offered them aid packages in exchange for their votes.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
Kate McAlpine, reporter
Deepwater Horizon is spewing oil at about 40,000 barrels per day according to a new US government estimate - eight times the 5000-barrel figure that stood for most of May.
This means that, despite the latest cap placed over the top of the failed blow-out preventer, at least 20,000 barrels of oil are leaking into the ocean each day.
The problem is that the Discoverer Enterprise drill ship, which is collecting the oil surging out of the well and up the pipe to the surface, can only collect and process oil at a rate of about 18,000 barrels per day, according to the Washington Post.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
Celeste Biever, physical sciences news editor
It is highly heritable, yet autism's genetic underpinnings have remained tough to pin down. Now a study in Nature, focusing on a particular type of genetic variant, has revealed a host of new, rare genes linked to the mysterious condition.
The identification of these so-called copy number variations or CNVs - in which the number of copies of a particular gene is either vastly reduced (deletions) or increased (duplications) - should allow us to piece together the complex biochemical pathways that lead to autism.
The findings also point to the development of drugs that target these pathways, and to the first biochemical diagnostic tests. Until now, such drugs have been elusive because the biochemistry of autism was unknown, while diagnosis has relied on behavioural measures.
"These genetic findings help us understand the underlying biology of autism, which can lead to the development of novel treatments," said study author Andy Shih of Autism Speaks, a US lobbying and fundraising group, in an interview with CNN.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm Friday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
Jessica Hamzelou, reporter
Continued reliance on oil is risky and expensive for business, say the authors of a new report from Lloyd's global risk assessment department, 360 Risk Insight, and UK think tank Chatham House.
The way forward for businesses, the report says, is renewable energy - but the chaos and uncertainty following the Copenhagen climate summit has stifled investment.
Antony Froggatt and Glada Lahn warn businesses that oil prices are set to soar over the next couple of years due to increasing demand. Rising car ownership and subsidised fuel prices in developing countries, they say, will contribute to the increase, along with a demand "rebound" once we're out of the recession.
In a "business as usual" scenario, the authors predict global energy demand will increase by 40 per cent by 2030. But it's unlikely that we'll be able to meet these demands.
Kate McAlpine, reporter
Want to feel a part of the last space shuttle missions? NASA will give you an honorary presence on one of the final two flights to the International Space Station. Upload a head shot to their website, choose your mission, and they'll put your face in space.
The method of transport for the images isn't clear, but judging from previous efforts, odds are they'll be digital. The Stardust mission carried a million names written to a microchip to comet Wild 2 and the Cassini orbiter took 616,400 signatures recorded on a DVD to Saturn.
Peter Aldhous, San Francisco bureau chief
Imagine receiving the results of a genetic test that suggests that your son is not your son. Was there a mix-up in the maternity ward?
Fortunately, in this case it was a slip-up in the genetics lab contracted by personal genomics company 23andMe to process its customers' samples. But the news that the Californian firm has supplied 96 people with someone else's results will add to the pressure for more regulation of this emerging industry.
23andMe's announcement is available to customers logged in on its website, who are told:
Up to 96 customers may have received and viewed data that was not their own. Upon learning of the mix-ups, we immediately identified all customers potentially affected, notified them of the problem and removed the data from their accounts. The lab is now concurrently conducting an investigation and re-processing the samples of the affected customers and their accurate results will be posted early next week. We expect the investigation will be complete over the next several days and we will provide further details when we have them.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm Friday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
Gareth Morgan, technology news editor
As daily clean-up costs to BP spiral to $37 million per day and its chief executive is vilified in the press, the company is trying to fight back - by buying search terms.
So each time someone enters a relevant query - say "oil spill" - into a search engine such as Google, Yahoo or Bing, their results also include a paid-for link from BP. Typically, these sponsored links sit above the genuine results.
Studies of the effectiveness of sponsored links suggests perhaps as many as 30 per cent of people will head to their marketing material.
BP must hope that its marketing campaign to stem criticism produces results faster than its efforts to stop the leak. It has been suggested that the media coverage is more damaging than the slick.
Debora MacKenzie, consultant
The parade of accusations surrounding the swine flu pandemic continues. The latest, published in the journal BMJ, claims the scientists who advised the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare H1N1 swine flu a pandemic were in the pay of companies that stood to profit from the resulting sales of antiviral drugs and vaccines.
The piece, by Deborah Cohen from BMJ and Philip Carter from a privately funded British non-profit called the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, says such conflicts of interest could be handled better. Fair enough, but it also says more: that the scientific advice given to the WHO on flu has been dishonestly slanted since 1999 to profit companies. This would be important if the journalists supported their case. I don't think they do - making this a troubling smear on science.
In 1999, the WHO started planning global advice on responding to pandemic flu. Cohen and Carter castigate by name scientists who wrote the plans, because at certain times they were also paid to do various jobs by companies that make flu drugs and vaccines.
Sounds wrong, doesn't it? Scientists recommend massive purchases of goods made by companies that pay them. Hard to resist such a great story.
Small problem: this is the only thing they could possibly recommend.
Kate McAlpine, reporter
For the record: The relief wells mentioned below do not work by relieving the pressure inside the well. Rather, they allow engineers to pump a specialised heavy liquid into the flowing well to bring it under control. The liquid is denser than oil and so exerts pressure to stem the flow of oil. This makes it possible to pour cement in through the relief well to seal the well off for good.
BP's efforts to stem the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico continue, with the third capping attempt. And it's looking promising - so far.
They call it the Lower Marine Riser Package Cap. The project started on Wednesday by cutting the old "riser" pipe off at its base - the one that once carried oil to the surface and recently lay crumpled on the sea floor with oil spilling out of the end and various holes.
By cutting off the pipe, BP simplified the capping task because the spill now comes from a single location. With the aid of undersea robots, technicians placed a cap over the top of the old pipe. A new pipe sticking out the top to is carrying oil to a drill ship on the surface.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
David Shiga, reporter
By an amazing coincidence, Jupiter appears to have been hit by an impactor on Thursday, the very day news came out about what may have slammed into it in July 2009.
Anthony Wesley, the amateur astronomer who alerted scientists to the 2009 impact with his images of the aftermath, reports that he recorded video of a bright flash on Jupiter that he believes was an impact, though there was no immediate sign of a lasting scar. The Planetary Society has posted Wesley's video here (46 MB).
Another amateur astronomer, Christopher Go, also caught video of the flash (see video below).
The flash occurred the same day that researchers announced that the object that smacked into the planet in 2009, leaving a dark bruise, was probably an asteroid.
That determination came from an analysis of ultraviolet Hubble Space Telescope images, which revealed that the aftermath of the 2009 impact was strikingly different from a collision in 1994 by the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. The comet fragments left behind much larger dark patches when the planet was viewed at ultraviolet wavelengths.
That might be because comets have dusty atmospheres, called comae, that are much larger than their solid nuclei. Material from Shoemaker-Levy 9's coma would have rained down over a large area to produce the especially wide dark patches seen in 1994.
The more compact bullet-hole-like scars left by the 2009 impactor were likely caused by an asteroid, which lacks a coma, according to the new Hubble study led by Heidi Hammel of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
The asteroid may have been 500 metres wide, and the collision was powerful – equivalent to the explosion of thousands of nuclear bombs, says a press release from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which manages Hubble's observations.
The release goes on to pick out a likely culprit. Based on the elongated shape of the impact, researchers calculated the possible orbits of the impacting body. "Their work indicates the object probably came from the Hilda family of bodies, a secondary asteroid belt consisting of more than 1,100 asteroids orbiting near Jupiter," the release says.
Thankfully, sizable impacts on Earth are much rarer than on Jupiter, with the last one to cause major damage on the ground occurring in 1908.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm Friday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
Wendy Zukerman, Australasia reporter
Acupuncture stimulates the release of natural pain killers, says a new study, providing a possible physiological mechanism for how the treatment works.
Far from improving energy flow of "chi", the study suggests that pain relief from the ancient Chinese technique, in which fine needles are inserted into the skin, is down to adenosine - a molecule which is known to have anti-inflammatory properties.
Maiken Nedergaard from the University of Rochester Medical Centre in New York, who led the study, induced pain in adult mice before inserting and rotating needles just below the knee every five minutes for half an hour.
In mice with normal levels of adenosine, acupuncture reduced discomfort by two-thirds, with levels of adenosine 24 times greater than before the treatment. In mice that lacked adenosine receptors, treatment had no effect.
Nedergaard then gave mice a cancer drug, deoxycoformycin, which prevents the removal of adenosine from the injury site. In these mice the pain-relieving effects lasted up to two hours longer.
Although the research adds credibility to previous findings that show acupuncture can reduce pain and inflammation, several experts have warned that more clinical trials are needed before accepting that real acupuncture works.
Wendy Zukerman, Australasia reporter
A massive asteroid hit the Timor Sea around 35 million years ago - and the impact apparently contributed to the formation of the Antarctic ice sheets.
So says Andrew Glikson, a specialist in the study of extraterrestrial impacts, from the Planetary Science Institute at the Australian National University in Canberra, who analysed a dome found 2.5 kilometres below the Timor Sea, about 300 kilometres off Australia's north west coast.
Based on the structure of the dome, called Mount Ashmore, there were two obvious explanations for its formation: from a mud volcano or from the movement of tectonic plates.
But using a barrage of tests including scanning electron microscopy and seismic surveys, as well as chemical analysis of the rocks, Glikson concluded that the dome was the result of an asteroid crashing into the Earth at such speeds that it caused the Earth's crust to rebound (Australian Journal of Earth Sciences, DOI: 10.1080/08120099.2010.481327).
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