New Science/AAAS Webinar
Advancing precision medicine through multi-omics: An integrated approach to tumor profiling
Wednesday, September 16, 2015, at 9 a.m. Pacific, 12 noon Eastern, 5 p.m. UK, 6 p.m. Central Europe
Hear the experts discuss how a multi-omics approach to cancer research can advance our understanding of cancer biology and uncover new biomarkers.
Register TODAY: webinar.sciencemag.org Produced by the Science/AAAS Custom Publishing Office and sponsored by Affymetrix. |
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Science
Weekly News
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| A roundup of the week’s top stories in Science:
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| In Brief |
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In science news around the world, the IS group destroys an ancient temple in Palmyra, Syria, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves a “female Viagra” drug, eight protestors are arrested in Hawaii attempting to block construction of the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, a new quantum processor breaks the “1000-qubit barrier,” and more. Also, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declares the deaths of 30 large whales in the Gulf of Alaska since May an “unusual mortality event,” triggering a focused investigation into the cause of the deaths. And Science chats with Jorge Cham, creator of the comic Piled Higher and Deeper (PHD), about his new, upcoming movie.
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| In Depth |
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Brazil
Herton Escobar
Brazilian scientists are facing one of the nation’s worst funding climates in decades. Battling a slumping economy and debt, Brazil’s federal government has taken an ax to spending, and it isn’t sparing science. President Dilma Rousseff’s administration has cut by 25% the Ministry of Science’s projected 2015 budget, and sliced 9% from the budget of the Ministry of Education, which plays an important role in funding graduate students. Research agencies are withholding money for grants that have already been awarded, and have canceled or postponed new calls for proposals. And Rousseff is redirecting funds once earmarked largely for research to send Brazilian students abroad to study. The funding climate is “the worst in 20 years,” says Helena Nader, president of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science. At the root of the problem are changes in how Brazil’s government spends the royalties generated by Brazil’s lucrative offshore oil fields, which have been a major source of funding for science and technology development. In recent years, Brazil’s government has redirected much of the oil revenue to other priorities, including health care and education.
Reproducibility
John Bohannon
The largest effort yet to replicate psychology studies has yielded both good and bad news. On the down side, of the 100 prominent papers analyzed, only 39% could be replicated unambiguously, as a group of 270 researchers describes on page 943. On the up side, despite the sobering results, the effort seems to have drawn little of the animosity that greeted a similar replication effort last year. This time around, even some of the original authors see the replications as a useful addition to their own research. “This is how science works,” says Joshua Correll, a psychologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and one of the authors whose results could not be replicated. “How else will we converge on the truth? Really, the surprising thing is that this kind of systematic attempt at replication is not more common.” That’s encouraging news to Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville who led the mass replication effort, which began in 2011 with the goal of putting psychological science on more rigorous experimental footing.
Neuroscience
Emily Underwood
It is famous for robbing Lou Gehrig of his life and Stephen Hawking of his mobility and voice, but just how amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) destroys motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord remains a mystery. Now, scientists are converging on an explanation, at least for a fraction of the ALS cases caused by a mutation also associated with a kind of dementia. In cells with the mutation, the new work shows, pores in the membrane separating the nucleus and cytoplasm become clogged, preventing vital molecules from passing through and creating a fatal cellular traffic jam. For now, the work applies only to the mutation dubbed C9orf72—a DNA stutter in which a short nucleotide sequence, GGGGCC, is repeated hundreds to thousands of times in a gene on chromosome 9. Nor do the multiple labs reporting results this week agree on exactly what plugs those nuclear pores and how the cells die. Still, many in the field are calling the work a major breakthrough, and say the findings could point to new therapies, as well as a novel mechanism for neurodegeneration.
Energy
Daniel Clery
Nuclear fusion has always required titanic machines and vast amounts of public money—and success is always decades away. Now, a privately funded company has taken what some physicists say is a significant step toward mastering fusion energy with a smaller, cheaper, faster approach. Tri Alpha Energy announced this week that it has built a machine that forms a ball of gas—superheated to about 10 million degrees Celsius—and holds it steady for 5 milliseconds without decaying. Those conditions are well short of what is needed for fusion, but the feat shows for the first time that Tri Alpha’s unorthodox approach can trap hot fusion gas in a steady state. Now, the scientists hope to scale up the technique toward times and temperatures that cause atomic nuclei in the gas to fuse together, releasing energy.
Botany
Erik Stokstad
With more than 25,000 species, orchids are the largest group of plants. A new family tree shows how they owe their diversity to a series of innovations that individually or jointly touched off explosions of new species. The pace of diversification rose after orchids developed a way to lump their pollen into balls called pollinia, which allowed them to exclusively rely on certain insect species for pollination. Many lineages benefited from the evolution of a kind of water-saving photosynthesis. A shift to living in trees opened up many niches, as did a move into tropical mountains such as the Andes.
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Emily DeMarco
In North America, crayfish have diversified into roughly 400 species—two-thirds of the world’s total—and live mainly in the southeast. Biologists estimate nearly half of U.S. species are imperiled, whereas about a third of the world’s crayfish are. Spurred by growing concerns that pollution, habitat destruction, and other threats are placing many crayfish species in harm’s way, federal officials are taking a hard look at whether to give legal protection to two: the Guyandotte River crayfish found in southern West Virginia and the Big Sandy crayfish found in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia. If the listings go through, a broad range of economically important activities that affect the crayfish, including mining, logging, and recreation, could feel an impact. So government officials are proceeding with care, seeking to learn as much as possible about the enigmatic invertebrates before making decisions—and they are asking researchers like West Liberty University’s Zachary Loughman for help.
Lizzie Wade
Today’s most successful religions have one thing in common: moralizing gods that care about how people treat one another and will punish those who are selfish and cruel. But for most of human history, these “big gods” were the exception. If today’s hunter-gatherers are any guide, for thousands of years our ancestors conceived of deities as utterly indifferent to the human realm, and to whether we behaved well or badly. Now, to crack the mystery of why and how people around the world came to believe in moralizing gods, researchers are using a novel tool in religious studies: the scientific method. By combining laboratory experiments, cross-cultural fieldwork, and analysis of the historical record, an interdisciplinary team has proposed that belief in judgmental deities was key to the cooperation needed to build and sustain large, complex societies. And once big gods and big societies existed, their moralizing deities helped religions as dissimilar as Islam and Mormonism to spread by making groups of the faithful more cooperative and therefore more successful. Critics say the big gods team is projecting modern values onto ancient cultures, and that belief in moralizing deities is a byproduct of other social changes. To settle the debate, researchers are looking for quantitative data in novel places, including the historical record.
Lizzie Wade
To test his hypothesis about how moralizing, prosocial religions evolved, University of British Columbia psychologist Ara Norenzayan needs help from the humanities. Did moralizing gods, community-wide rituals, and supernatural punishment emerge before or after societies became politically complex? Has any large-scale society succeeded without prosocial religion? And what does “moralizing” really mean at different times and in difficult cultures? To answer these questions in a rigorous, scientific way, he and his colleagues are trying to convince historians to turn the nuanced knowledge in their heads into the kind of data scientists need: a database’s binary code of yes/no answers. By creating the Database of Religious History, the big gods team is attempting to bridge the gulf between humanistic and scientific scholarship—but success hinges on enticing leading historians and religious studies scholars to join them.
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New Science/AAAS Webinar
Advancing precision medicine through multi-omics: An integrated approach to tumor profiling
Wednesday, September 16, 2015, at 9 a.m. Pacific, 12 noon Eastern, 5 p.m. UK, 6 p.m. Central Europe
Hear the experts discuss how a multi-omics approach to cancer research can advance our understanding of cancer biology and uncover new biomarkers.
Register TODAY: webinar.sciencemag.org Produced by the Science/AAAS Custom Publishing Office and sponsored by Affymetrix. |
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Science and the future 