This week in European sciences -- week 42
 

Overview
Die Zeit is concerned about GM crops, and manipulation of flue viruses. La Repubblica writes about high-speed internet transmission. FAZ focuses on upcoming fears with nanotechnology. Der Spiegel describes cutting down nitric oxide emissions of lorries refuelled with urea. Svenska Dagbladet on the endangered blue crab, and studies how birds manage to fly. Dagens Nyheter writes about Nobel laureate Vitalij Ginzburg and science in Russia, and research with magnetic resonance imaging. NewScientist on the death toll of the recent heatwave in Europe. In addition: NY Times reports on the revival of silicon for breast implants. Also NY Times about the Chinese's first space tour, and recent news on West Nile Virus. Wall Street Journal writes about attempts for weather-modification. Also Wall Street Journal on a new attempt for human cloning. Time Magazin on possible links between antibiotics and allergies with children.
 

Of Bio-Killers and Gen-Food

In the german weekly Die Zeit (October 16, 2003), the discussion about GM crops is continuing. Joachim Fritz-Vannahme describes again the problems of the EU nations to implement the guideline from Brussels. The moratorium is coming to an end and the nations are obliged to open their boarders to GM crops. Questions of adhesion are still open and the assurances refuse to assure the farmers on a potential damage. At the same time the results of a new british farmland study offers a disaster for GM proponents. "Advantages: None!", Vannahme writes in his article.
In addition, Hans Schuh writes about the attempt to reconstruct the virus of the "Spanish influenza". Peace-activists are concerned about a new bio-hazard from the labs. But nature is faster than every genetic lab and produces new viruses every second. So it seems to be more dangerous to eat a peace of meat on an oriental market.
 

Speedy Internet

CDs and DVDs could be downloaded in a flash if a new speed record becomes the standard transmission rate of the internet, Alessio Balbi writes in La Repubblica (October 16, 2003). For now, though, the mind-boggling transfer rate of 5.4 Gigabytes per second recently reported (20,000 times faster than your average high-speed internet connection) will be reserved for high-energy physicsts who need to share huge amounts of data in order to collaborate efficiently. Having achieved the feat of transferring one Terabyte of data (or, in more convenient units, 1,5 million times the content of Dante's Divine Comedy, as Balbi comments) between Geneva and CalTech in Pasadena in just under half an hour, Harvey Newman and Oliver Martin will receive a prize from Cern in Geneva on Friday. But they won't stop here: their final aim is to achieve a speed of 10 Gigabytes per second. And, with a bit of luck, that will also be available to ordinary users in the near future.
 

F.D.A. Panel Backs Breast Implants Made of Silicone

Big breasts are common in the United States. But many times, if they are not obtained naturally or by being overweight, women undergo surgery. However, a few years ago, the Food and Drug Administration banned the use of silicone implants due to health concerns. Now silicone is back. The New York Times (October 16, 2003) reports on its front page about the big comeback of silicone implants. Gina Kolata reports that an advisory panel to the Food and Drug Administration recommended they "be allowed back on the market after an 11-year hiatus." The safety of silicone implants was questioned in the early 1990s after a closer look at health reports of implant recipients. "This was a triumph of wishful thinking over science," Dr. Diana Zuckerman of the national Center for Policy and Research for Women and Families is being quoted.
 

Fears From the Small World

Nanotechnology is the science of tiny things below 100 nanometers (millionth of a millimeter) in length. At this size, close to the realms of quantum physics, materials acquire new qualities that make engineers and company CEOs enthusiastic. But for the new technology in sight there might also be some drawbacks as yet not addressed by the proponents: What happens when nanoparticles are released into the environment? What do nanoparticles do inside the human body? Martin Lindinger writes in FAZ (October 15, 2003) that the small amount of data available on the small world technology leaves enough room for horror and fears. He assumes that nanotech might have the same potential for heated controversies as the GMO debate. Lindinger takes it for granted: a broad debate with the public, who will later buy the nano-products, is unavoidable.
 

China Sends Man Into Orbit, Entering U.S.-Russian Club

The first manned Chinese spacecraft has received plenty of media coverage in the United States, among them a front-page mentions in The Wall Street Journal and in The New York Times (October 15, 2003). Staff writer Jim Yardley pointed out the political significance the space flight has, "The mission also carries broad political significance for the Chinese government, which opens to win good will and inspire nationalism in its citizens, many of whom regard the Communist Party as an increasingly irrelevant political dinosaur." Yardley further reports that Chinese top officials also wanted to show the country's place in world power by being equal to the United States. In a follow-up article on October 17, Yardley reports that the Chinese leadership plans to return to space within the next two years.
 

Researchers Get Their First Close-Up Look at West Nile Virus

This year's West Nile Virus season has experienced more cases, but less deaths compared to last year. However, the season only ends with the first frost, which will kill mosquitoes carrying the disease. Symptoms of West Nile virus are similar to the flu, but about one percent of all cases lead to meningitis, which can kill a person. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, so far 6,977 cases of West Nile Virus have been registered, 149 people died. Last year's numbers registered 4,156 cases with 284 deaths nationwide. The disease also shifted westward, meaning that last year the states with the highest cases were Illinois, Michigan and Louisiana, this year they are Colorado, Nebraska and South Dakota. Kenneth Chang reports in The New York Times (October 14, 2003) that for the first time researchers could visually identify the deadly virus, which has a shape similar to a golf ball. "This is a small virus," Dr. Richard J. Kuhn, a professor of biological science at Purdue University, says of the virus, which is only one five-hundred-thousandsth of an inch wide. Kuhn and his team "chilled the fragile virus to about minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit in liquid ethane, a hydrocarbon, then bombarded it with high-energy electrons," Chang writes. "The deflection of electrons off the virus' atoms produced the images." These images could help scientists to understand the structure of West Nile and find vulnerabilities in its life cycle. The virus appeared for the first time in 1999 in New York.
 

Weather-Modification Research is Backed by U.S. Science Panel

A National Academy of Science panel recommends "that the U.S. resume experiments with cloud seeding and other weather-modification techniques to see if some drought conditions and violent weather patterns can be eased," John J. Fialka reports in The Wall Street Journal (October 14, 2003). The report found that federal spending for weather-modification research has steadily decreased from $20 million per year in the 1970s. Furthermore, the panel notes there are more than 100 weather experiments in 24 foreign countries and 66 studies in the United States. Most of the U.S. studies look at how hail-suppression or snow- and rain-enhancements work. But most studies are financed through private grants or moneys from state or local governments. However, the panel found that weather studies should be encouraged because of modern technology.
 

Fertility Breakthrough Raises Questions About Link to Cloning

Chinese and American scientists "are expected to report on Tuesday that they have created the first human pregnancy using a DNA-swapping technology similar to that which created Dolly the sheep," Antonio Regalado and Karby Leggett write in The Wall Street Journal (October 13, 2003, front page). However, while Dolly was a clone, the embryos the scientists created from the swapping procedure include genetic material from three people. A clone, however, uses only a single source. "It's close, very close to human cloning," Jose B. Cibelli, an embryologist at Michigan State University, is being quoted. Cibelli was not a part of the research team, which works in China. The experiment would have been banned in the United States under 1998 legislation. While China has not been overly strict with its laws concerning reproductive research, China's Ministry of Health "announced broad new restrictions on reproductive medicine" Friday. With these new rules, which ban the nuclear-transfer technique, further advances in reproductive research are being challenged.
 

Urea Makes Lorries Clean

It sounds like WC, but doesn't smell like it. Lorries are due to get refuelled with urea to cut nitric oxide emissions according to European legislation, explains Christian Wüst in Der Spiegel (October 13, 2003). About two liters per 100 kilometers are injected into the exhaust system. There, the urea converts into ammonia and neutralizes the nitric oxides. In theory, this works well in a highly industrialised country like Germany or the UK: The engine management may be set up und optimised for the urea converter to cut down emissions. But, for instance, in Eastern Europe, where urea is not available at the filling stations or people are not willing use it, lorry emissions may be higher than today - worse still, most people won't care about it, Wüst assumes.
 

Allergies: The Two-Dog Trick

Children and antibiotics don't mix well. According to an article in Time magazine (October 13, 2003), "researchers at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit found that by age 7, children who received antibiotics such as penicillin in their first six months were 1.5 times as likely to develop allergies and more than twice as likely to develop asthma as kids who didn't get the drugs." Other risk factors for developing allergies include breast-feeding for more than four months, and family history of allergies. While researchers don't understand the link between antibiotics and allergies, they recommend having two pets (cats or dogs) around in a child's first year.
 

"Momentum paradox" of bird flight solved by Swedish Researchers

Svenska Dagbladet continues to follow its obstinately independent line and does not mention the Nobel Prizes at all in its science supplement.
Instead, Markku Björkman reports (October 12, 2003) how pollution and increased coastal building activity threatens the basis of the traditional Cajun-food in Louisiana and Alabama. Research around this problem area is conducted at Dauphin Island Sea Laboratory (www.disl.org), which collaborates with Gothenburg University. The Swedish marine biologist Per-Olav Moksnes investigated which factors determine the population dynamics of the economically important blue crab Callinectes sapidus. The crab larvae grow up in large fields of seaweed and as the extent of these fields declines, the young crabs resort to cannibalism. This cannibalism limits the population size of the blue crab and, according to Moksnes, the seaweed therefore requires urgent protection.
In a small piece, Ingrid Persson writes that researchers at Lund University have finally solved the "momentum paradox" of bird flight. Previous energetic studies of bird flight consistently weren't able to find the required momentum for supporting the flying bird's weight. By using a new technique of flow visualization, Anders Hedenström and Mikael Rosén managed to calculate the energy contained in the wake of flying birds and were thus able to find the long-missing momentum.
 

Ginzburg: Russian Science Follows Fads

Michael Winiarski presents in Dagens Nyheter (October 12, 2003) a portrait of 87-year old Vitalij Ginzburg, one of this year's Nobel prize winners in Physics. Ginzburg strongly rejects the claim that in the past Soviet and Russian science was neglected by the Nobel committees for political reasons. He states that although science was of top rank in some areas, not many breakthroughs occurred. Under Stalin and later as well most ressources went into military and not into fundamental research. Ginzburg is concerned that Russian science is still too keen to follow fads: "Under Stalin we had Lysenko and other charlatans. Now we have 'researchers' at Moscow University who investigate with state support children that are able to 'see' blindfolded. And in the defence department there is an astrological unit." Two articles describe recent research, which makes use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Per Snaprud describes a study, published in Science, by Matthew Lieberman from the University of California, who conducted brain imaging with persons that were "frozen out" of a computer game by their virtual game partners. The frustrated players showed high activities on parts of the brain, which are also active when a person is physically hurt. It seems that social and physical pain are very similar on the brain level.
And finally, Karin Bojs reports on a study carried out by Swedish and American researchers. MRI shows that patients with chronic back pain display a more general pain sensitivity than healthy persons. Alf Nachemso, leader of the Swedish group, cautions, however, that the study does not reveal the direction of the causal arrow, but that the research can still lead in the long-term to new therapeutic methods.
 

According to the Earth Policy Institute (EPI) about 35,000 people died as a result of the heatwave that hit Europe this August, reports Shaoni Bhattacharya in NewScientist (October 10, 2003). The death toll is taken from eight European countries with data available: France (14,000), Germany (7000), Spain and Italy (4200 each), England (2000). "Though heatwaves rarely are given adequate attention, they claim more lives each year than floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes combined," warns the EPI. It's a silent killer, mostly affecting the elderly, the very young, or the chronically ill.
The story was covered by Spiegel online (October 13, 2003).
EPI at www.earth-policy.org.
 

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