Science/AAAS Webinar
New technologies for translational research: Applying high-content screening in cancer research and personalized medicine
Learn how high content screening and novel computer modeling are being applied to systems biology, translational cancer research, and personalized medicine.
Register to view TODAY: webinar.sciencemag.org
Produced by the Science/AAAS Custom Publishing Office and sponsored by PerkinElmer.
|
|
 |
Science
Weekly News
|
|
|
|
|
|
| A roundup of the week’s top stories in Science:
|
|
| In Brief |
|
In science news around the world, a mystery illness is devastating the endangered saiga antelopes of Central Asia, while South Korea and China are scrambling to contain a deadly human outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome. A new study has demonstrated the benefits of early HIV treatment, the Great Barrier Reef has been spared an embarrassing “in danger” listing by UNESCO, and an Islamic State commander has said that the military group will not destroy archaeological sites in the Syrian city of Palmyra. Also, the United States has strengthened its watershed protections, the European Commission is shielding basic science from cuts to its Horizon 2020 research program, and a new species of dinosaur, related to Triceratops, has been discovered.
|
|
| In Depth |
|
Climate Science
Carolyn Gramling
What if the missing heat has been there all along? In 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change flagged an odd phenomenon: Atmospheric temperature data collected over the past few decades suggested that global warming had slowed down beginning around 1998. Global warming skeptics crowed, and scientists delved into the global climate system to find out where the missing heat had gone. But a new analysis suggests that the real culprits are the data themselves. When better corrections for various sources of bias are applied to the data, the authors say, the so-called global warming hiatus vanishes—and in fact, they argue, global warming may have sped up.
Science Policy
Vladimir Pokrovsky
Last week, Russia’s justice ministry branded Russia’s only private research funder, the Dynasty Foundation, a “foreign agent.” The move threatens to strangle the foundation in red tape and ostracize future grantees. The designation infuriated Dynasty’s founder, telecom tycoon Dmitry Zimin, who has vowed to stop financing the foundation, which spent $10 million last year on 20 projects supporting young researchers (mainly mathematicians and physicists), competitions for science teachers, science festivals, and public lectures by world-class researchers. Dynasty’s imminent demise is sending shock waves through the scientific community. Prominent researchers have vowed to stage a rally in Moscow on 6 June to protest the government’s “disrespect to science and education” and “consistent elimination of the seedlings of civil society.”
Genetics
Yulia Smirnova and Angelina Davydova
In September 1941, German troops and Finnish allies encircled Leningrad, trapping 3 million residents in the Baltic city famed for its canals, which is now called St. Petersburg. Food shortages grew acute; some inhabitants resorted to cannibalism. By the time the siege ended 872 days later, as many as 1.1 million people had starved to death. But hundreds of thousands survived—and Russian researchers think they’ve identified what gave some people an edge. Survivors they studied are more likely than controls to have three gene variations, or alleles, associated with more economical energy metabolism in humans starved for calories. The small pool of survivors makes the results difficult to interpret. But the team is enrolling more survivors and developing new ways to probe their genetics.
Astronomy
Adrian Cho and Ilima Loomis
A proposed solution to the impasse over construction of the mammoth new Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano is less bold than it seems—and potentially more difficult. The proposal, to dismantle one-quarter of Mauna Kea’s 13 existing telescopes in return for allowing construction to proceed, would only accelerate vague existing plans to shutter some of the telescopes. Yet it promises no end of political pain, forcing researchers from different institutions and countries to compete over which telescopes to keep alive. And it may not defuse the protests that have blocked the TMT project. The proposed culling is one of 10 new conditions on the mountain’s use that Hawaii Governor David Ige (D) announced during a 26 May press conference. The measures aim to address the concerns of Native Hawaiian protesters who claim the mountain as sacred ground and have blocked access to the TMT construction site.
Geophysics
Eric Hand
The Ross Ice Shelf, a thick, floating tongue of solid ice the size of Spain, is the biggest of the many such barriers that ring Antarctica and keep its ice sheets from sliding into the sea. Yet the shape of the sea floor beneath—a critical factor in how fast the shelf might melt—is virtually unknown. The ice keeps sonar-carrying ships out, and the water beneath it blocks radar. Now, geophysicists at Columbia University”s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, plan to fill in the giant blank spot, using an ultrasensitive airborne gravity detector. The sensor detects tiny changes in gravity: the boosts caused by the extra mass of seafloor hills and the decreases from troughs. The team plans to crisscross the Ross shelf in 36 flights over two 3-week-long campaigns, one in November and a second in 2016. They hope to map features as small as 50 meters tall—dramatically better than the present map, which scientists pieced together in the 1970s by setting off small explosions on the ice every 50 kilometers and recording the echoes.
|
|
| Feature |
|
Andrew Lawler
Villagers along the muddy banks of the Curanja River in the remote Peruvian Amazon are reporting frequent sightings and even raids by a mysterious, isolated tribe that lives deep in the rainforest. These isolated people rely on their deep knowledge of the ecosystem for food, medicines, and goods; now, pressures on the forest may be pushing them into the outside world. The events along the Curanja are the last, lingering echoes of the collision of cultures that began in 1492, in which an estimated 50 million to 100 million native people perished, and entire cultures vanished. Anthropologists and officials wonder if they can minimize the human toll of this final act. Lacking immunity to common pathogens and requiring large tracts of intact forest for their way of life, the isolated tribes are some of the world’s most vulnerable people.
Andrew Lawler
As a child, Marcelino Pinedo Cecilio lived in a huge longhouse in the Amazon rainforest with his family and tribe. They grew manioc, yucca, peanuts, corn, and jungle potato, sometimes using a root with spines to clear fields. Then, one day in the 1950s, an outsider visited their village. Soon after, villagers developed a sore throat and burning fever. Many died, and the tribe scattered. Like so many indigenous peoples since the arrival of Europeans, Cecilio’s group was likely struck down by a common Western disease—maybe influenza or whooping cough—inadvertently carried by the visitor. It is an old story, repeated often since 1492. Today’s isolated tribes are in the same position as New World peoples 5 centuries ago, with immune systems naïve to Western pathogens.
Andrew Lawler
The only way to get to the frontier town of Puerta Esperanza, Peru, is by infrequent airplane flights or a monthlong river trip through Brazil. Miguel Piovesan, the town priest, says the isolation has left townspeople without access to medical care or modern conveniences. Piovesan wants a road, as do other priests, local small businessmen, and politicians keen to develop the Amazon. But advocates for the environment and for indigenous people decry the plan for the road. If built, it would cut through a long swath of the protected land, and bring a flood of outsiders, pathogens, alcohol, and material goods, they say. In this view, a road will simply destroy the forest on which indigenous people, both isolated and not, depend.
Heather Pringle
Brazil’s system of protecting isolated tribes has been hailed worldwide; it serves as a model for countries like neighboring Peru, where isolated populations are emerging. But as the pace of economic activity in the Amazon accelerates, some experts say that the protection system that was once the envy of South America is falling apart. Public and private enterprises are pushing deeper into the Amazon, and drug smugglers cross isolated groups’ territories. The rate of contact seems to be rising, and in the past 18 months, three groups initiated contact in Brazil. Last summer, near the border with Peru, for example, isolated tribespeople spontaneously made contact, saying that they were fleeing attacks by outsiders. Brazilian officials helped manage the contact, but critics say that the young tribesmen did not receive medical care immediately when needed. They charge that Brazil is unprepared for a spate of contacts.
Heather Pringle
To coax isolated Amazonian tribes into contact in the early 20th century, Brazilian missionaries and government officials planted gardens and tied metal tools and pots to clotheslines. Then they let the tribes take the food and goods as needed. Eventually, the tribespeople made contact, and their way of life change irrevocably. The “attraction fronts” drew isolated people into missions for conversion and transformed them into a settled workforce capable of building telegraph lines and roads in the Amazon’s harsh conditions. Many saw the policy as enlightened. But for indigenous groups, the attraction fronts were often the beginning of disease and dependence, as pathogens were passed along with the goods.
|
|
|
|
|
Science/AAAS Webinar
New technologies for translational research: Applying high-content screening in cancer research and personalized medicine
Learn how high content screening and novel computer modeling are being applied to systems biology, translational cancer research, and personalized medicine.
Register to view TODAY: webinar.sciencemag.org
Produced by the Science/AAAS Custom Publishing Office and sponsored by PerkinElmer.
|
|
|
|
Science and the future 