Surprise! Human Babies Should Drink Human Milk
May 7 at 6:06pm by Aileen
Michael Kramer, a professor of pediatrics at McGill University reported this week that breastfeeding raises children’s IQ and improves their academic performance later in childhood.
Their study evaluated children in 31 Belarusian hospitals and clinics. Half of the women were directly encouraged to breastfeed exclusively, the other half did things the ‘normal’ way (for Belorussia). Six and a half years later the children’s IQs were tested and their teachers submitted academic performance ratings. Scores on both were significantly higher for the children of women encouraged to breastfeed, though there is no indication that the researchers confirmed how many of those mothers actually did breastfeed or for how long.
“Our study provides the strongest evidence to date that prolonged and exclusive breastfeeding makes kids smarter,” Kramer said.
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Where Have All the Salmon Gone?
May 5 at 4:04pm by Aileen
A declaration of commercial fishery failure by Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez has paved the way for Congress to allot funds for alleviating financial hardship among the West Coast’s commercial Chinook salmon fishing industry off California and Oregon. The crisis has been building steadily every year since 2000, culminating in this latest action - the commercial salmon fishing industry has essentially been shut down.
National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA] researchers suggest that changes in ocean conditions - possibly due to global warming - are to blame, along with loss of freshwater habitat for salmon spawning, a chronic problem.
There will be some coho salmon fishing allowed off the coast of Washington and northern Oregon, but there will be financial hardship in that industry as well due to strict limits. This crisis has been building for years, attempts along the way to mitigate it have proven to exacerbate the situation, such as the introduction of farmed salmon. Fish stock collapses in traditionally abundant fisheries off both coasts and elsewhere in the world bode ill for the seafood component of the human food supply, just as the worldwide food crisis heats up around the world for staple crops like corn and wheat and rice.
We could be beyond a tipping point right now, and things could get a bit more than just ‘interesting’ over the next months. Will science be able to come to the rescue, or will it remain helpless to mitigate the collapse of world food supplies? Stay tuned…
Links:
“Fishery Failure” Declared for West Coast Salmon Fishery
Hatchery Controversy Takes on New Significance as Wild Chinook Populations Crash
Escaped Farmed Salmon Infiltrate Fitter Wild Populations
Dramatic Declines in Wild Salmon Populations Linked to Farmed Salmon
Biotech Propaganda Meets Scientific Reality
Apr 29 at 6:06pm by Aileen
In its mad bid to privatize and control the world’s agriculture and food supply with its patented biotech seeds and cushy revolving door within governmental regulatory agencies, Monsanto cannot be very happy with a recent Soil Association report that shows GM crops decrease yields, whether it’s cotton or soybeans or corn.
As reported in The Washington Post, the biotech industry immediately released yet another bought-and-paid-for report claiming totally opposite conclusions (some things don’t change just because the science is against you). The Soil Association report took a serious look at reality, something quite refreshing in this field. The material included among other citations:
• a 2007 study from Kansas State University that showed Roundup Ready soy has suffered “yield drag” since it was introduced, producing an average of 9-25% less per acre than conventional soy.
• a rigorous independent US study under controlled conditions demonstrating that Bt corn yields up to 12% less than conventional corn.
• an article in Nature Biotechnology reporting that Bt cotton doesn’t even express the engineered pesticide in 25% of some varieties sold under exclusive license.
The crop failures and their tragic effects on farmers in poorer nations may be a product of the technology itself according to some analysts.
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World’s Oldest Tree is a Spruce in Sweden
Apr 21 at 9:09pm by Aileen
Most school children have at one time or another encountered a photo of a twisted bristlecone pine tree in California purporting to have begun its life before Abraham left Ur [the ‘Methuselah’ tree at ~4767 years old]. Science Daily reported last week that a spruce tree has been discovered in the Dalarna province of Sweden that is twice that age!
Yes, this not very old-looking little tree has been dated by researchers at Umeå University’s physical geography department at ~9550 years old. Just as interesting is that this ancient tree is a genetically identical clone of a previous tree - from whose roots it sprouted all those many years ago - and which left a few scraps of old wood in the area for researchers to analyze and a laboratory in Miami, Florida to date via C-14.
Researchers combing the Swedish mountains from Lapland to Dalarna have discovered a cluster of about 20 spruces that are all more than 8,000 years old. Which has to qualify the grove as the most ancient stand of virgin timber on the planet.
Nature’s Oldest Profession
Apr 16 at 4:04pm by Aileen
Just Like Penguins and Other Primates, People Trade Sex for Resources
A research scientist at UMich School of Public Health has established through interviews with 475 undergraduates that humans exchange resources (or merely clout) for sex, just like penguins, hummingbirds and other species of beings on this planet. His paper, “Young Adults Attempt Exchanges in Reproductively Relevant Currencies,” is published in this month’s Journal of Evolutionary Psychology.
Not that the idea of trading sex for resources is something unheard of in human society. Or even that in cultures where marriages are arranged among parents and grandparents before the young are old enough to walk, the arrangements are all about relative wealth and social standing - things considered valuable in the societies.
It is interesting that biologists (yes, the evo-psych folks too) have just recently figured out that their traditional reliance on exclusivity in sexual selection as a primary mechanism of directional evolution is not nearly as cut and dried as they long assumed it was. Given that cheating on spouses and general promiscuity have turned out to be fairly rampant in birds and beasts - the beauty of that peacock’s tail or the size of that ape’s manly parts doesn’t prevent lesser males from getting their genes into the pool after all…
There’s a reason we call it “The Oldest Profession.” Turns out, it’s even older than humans!
A “Swarm” of Earthquakes off Oregon
Apr 14 at 2:02pm by Aileen
Over the last ten days scientists at Oregon State University [Hatfield Marine Science Center] have recorded more than 600 earthquakes emanating from offshore, several of which registered 5.0 or higher. The puzzling aspect of this quake swarm is that they’re not located at the edge of the region’s tectonic plate boundaries, but in the middle of the Juan de Fuca plate itself.
Using hydrophones left over from submarine surveillance during the Cold War, the researchers admit they do not understand what’s happening to cause this seismic activity. The quakes originate about 150 nautical miles southwest of Newport, Oregon in a basin between two subsurface faults where previous earthquake clusters have been recorded.
As magma gets injected into the crust to push the plates apart, quake swarms are fairly common and sometimes lava breaks through onto the sea floor. What sort of tectonic process is causing this swarm in the middle of the plate is unknown, but researchers will be keeping a close eye on it in hopes of finding out.
Links:
Unusual Earthquake Swarm off Oregon
2006 Mexican Tectonic Plate Motion Reversal
The Hindu Goddess Baby
Apr 9 at 11:11pm by Aileen
For something different and profound, consider the case of a baby girl named Lali born near New Delhi, India on March 11. She has a rare birth defect called diprosopus that gave her two faces on one head. ABC News reported that the resident medical officer of the Saifi Hospital where Lali was born has thus far been unsuccessful in his attempts to convince the parents to allow CT scans or MRI to determine whether there are duplicated internal organs or invisible, life threatening deformities that might be corrected by surgery.
Most babies with this condition are stillborn or die shortly after birth, but Lali so far has shown no breathing or digestion difficulties, both mouths are being fed. She was born normally and left the hospital with her mother 8 hours after birth.
This condition is not technically a case of cojoined twinning, where a single embryo duplicates and does not completely separate. Rather, it is due to malfunctioning in the developing embryo of a single protein called Sonic hedgehog homolog [SHH]. SHH protein governs the width of the face and features, and governs proper development of the brain and spinal cord via a signaling cascade.
ScienceDebate2008 Update
Apr 8 at 3:03pm by Aileen
The team at ScienceDebate2008 reports that this cycle’s Presidential candidates have declined to engage in a debate on science policy issues on April 18th in Philadelphia. While not surprising - these are professional politicians trying to sell themselves to a largely science-illiterate public - the importance of staging such a debate with national media coverage has not diminished in the least.
The next target will focus on the Oregon primary venue in May. For the effort ScienceDebate2008 has forged a working relationship with PBS’s NOVA science series and NOW on PBS weekly news program for cosponsorship. NOW host David Brancaccio will moderate, supported by a panel of internationally recognized scientists everyone can agree upon. Three possible dates have been proposed to the campaigns.
Because science is so important to our society and to the livability of our abused planet, it is hoped that the candidates will agree to debate the science issues on one of the possible dates. Again, due to personal ignorance of many of the issues, each candidate should be allowed to bring their primary on-staff science advisor and be able to consult that advisor about details. Simply reading position statements drafted by their campaigns should not be considered sufficient grasp of the issues for the next leader of the free world.
If you would support the effort you can contact the candidates’ campaigns in favor of the initiative. Letters to the editor of local and regional newspapers can also help drum up public interest. And you can contact the debate team from the initiative’s website at ScienceDebate2008.
Busy Week in Astro-News
Apr 4 at 6:06pm by Aileen
The annual meeting of the UK’s Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Belfast this week has produced some cool news items on the astronomical discoveries of the past year. First up, we have some interesting findings in our own neighborhood with research focusing on our sun. An international team announced that they’d discovered the source of the solar wind.
The solar wind consists of electrically charged particles that flow away from the sun in all directions. The scientists working with the Hinode mission and the UK’s Extreme Ultraviolet imaging Spectrometer to determine that the sun’s magnetic fields create bright regions of activity on the solar surface. The edges of these bright regions emit hot gas at high speeds. The magnetic fields connect even in separated regions, and this connection (or collision) allows hot gas to escape from the sun’s gravitational field as solar wind.
Ebola Vaccines Successful in Primates
Mar 31 at 8:08pm by Aileen
Soon to enter human trials
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is reporting this week that researchers from the US and Canada have successfully tested several vaccines for Ebola in primates, and are now seeking to modify them for human use.
This is a significant development not because Ebola in its natural habitat is such a grave danger to humanity, but because it’s got a 90% fatality rate and thus represents a threat to humanity as a bioweapon. While Ebola is not easily spread (direct contact with bodily fluids of an infected person or animal is required), officials have long been concerned that it could be “weaponized” - as has been done with anthrax, for instance - into a form that will be easily infective. There have been just over 1500 documented cases of Ebola in humans, and so far it does not seem to have been used as a bioweapon.
The Federation of American Scientists maintains an Ebola Fact Sheet indicating that the Soviet Union probably investigated weaponizing Ebola. There have been three reported incidents of researchers being infected after being stuck with contaminated syringes. Those in England and the U.S. recovered, one in Russia died. There is no effective treatment for the disease, and while the current research is hopeful, there is no vaccine to prevent it.
The biosafety threat level for Ebola is 4, a rating it shares with the 18 other hemorrhagic fevers it is akin to. Because the dead virus does not produce an effective immune response, researchers have been trying several different recombinant DNA techniques. The latest, most effective candidates are soon to be tested on humans. It is hoped that if the testing proves successful, the techniques will be as useful in developing vaccines for other hemorrhagic fever viruses, HIV and avian influenza.
Links:
Vaccine for Ebola Virus Successful in Primates
Ebola Fact Sheet
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