Science in the News Weekly is a weekly digest of science
news stories appearing in the mainstream media. It is produced
every Tuesday morning as part of Sigma Xi's public understanding
of science program area, in conjunction with American
Scientist magazine. To subscribe, send an e-mail to enews@americanscientist.org.
For more information, please see the Sigma Xi Web site. Keep up
with "Science
in the News", updated every weekday.
In This Issue
South Korean Scientists Clone Human Embryo
South Korean researchers announcedthe
first successful cloning of a human embryo and the
production of associated stem cells. Reported in the
Feb. 13 issue of the journal Science, the achievement
marks a breakthrough in therapeutic cloning, the search for a
way to produce transplantation cells that won't be rejected by
human recipients. The Korean embryos were kept alive
just long enough to produce usable stem cells, but ethicists
raised concerns that the new technique was creating life
and then destroying it. Further, "anyone who is
irresponsible enough could put them in a womb," said
Richard Doerflinger, deputy director of pro-life activities at
the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "These
blastocysts are not intended to be inside the human body,"
countered Northwestern University bioethicist Laurie Zoloth.
"They don't have the equivalent moral status to a child.
Once you turn away from thinking about them as fully ensouled
human babies, then the duty to heal becomes the overriding consideration."
Congress Hears Testimony on Space Exploration Proposal,
Hubble The House Science Committee examined
President Bush's proposed plan to send a human to Mars and
questioned NASA's plan to cancel a shuttle mission to repair
the Hubble Space Telescope. Bush's proposal
would phase out the space shuttle program and retire Hubble,
replacing these programs with a human visit to the moon and,
later, to Mars. Of the new plan, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe
said, "It's achievable, it's ambitious, it's focused, it's
affordable." Critics had questioned the cost when the
country is running a budget deficit. John Marburger,
director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy,
testified that canceling
a space shuttle mission to service Hubble was justified.
Without needed maintenance the telescope may not remain
operational beyond 2007. Questions were raised about
abandoning Hubble when an anonymous NASA engineer circulated
documents challenging the space agency's assertion that a
servicing mission would be too dangerous. NASA prepared a point-by-point
rebuttal defending its decision.
NASA Rovers Continue to Explore Mars
The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity continued their careful survey on opposite sides of the Red Planet, with only temporary setbacks, NASA team leaders said.
The rover Spirit froze briefly when its mast shaded its antenna's motors, preventing communication, but the sun eventually warmed the motors and Spirit covered another 80 feet in a 1,122-foot journey toward a crater.
The other rover, Opportunity, ran into trouble navigating the sandy slopes of another crater, but some quick Earthside experimentation with dry sand turned up a more effective technique.
Opportunity's data are revealing a complicated martian geology shaped by wind or water. Especially mysterious are some BB-sized granules dotting the layered rock. "I am stumped," said scientist Wendy Calvin of the University of Nevada, Reno. "I have no idea how they got there."
In a related story, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe told Congress that the launch of the space shuttle Atlantis will likely be delayed from its September target while the space agency works to meet new safety mandates imposed after shuttle Columbia broke up last February.
Peer Review Faults USDA Estimate of U.S. Mad Cow
Risk The U.S. Department of Agriculture relied
on flawed analysis in estimating the chance of a U.S.
outbreak of mad cow disease, according to an expert
review of the methods involved, The Denver Post
reported. Last December a Holstein was found in Washington
state with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a fatal,
brain-wasting illness. In judging the risk of further outbreaks,
the USDA relied on a November 2001 report by the Harvard Center
for Risk Assessment. But a five-member panel of peer reviewers
had earlier informed the USDA the Harvard report focused on the
wrong factors. In particular, the reviewers charge that the
Harvard group: - underestimated
"enormously" a number of Swiss mad-cow cases in
its mathematical modeling.
- assumed that once mad cow is
found in the United States, conditions affecting its spread
won't change for 20 years.
- failed to consider the risk
that infected material could be imported from sources other
than the United Kingdom.
The USDA released the
peer review, compiled in October, 2002, only after Freedom of
Information Act requests were filed by The Denver Post
and others. The Agriculture Department said it stands behind its
risk analysis and that the peer reviewers' points were minor.
"They did not identify any fatal flaws in the [risk
assessment] model," said USDA senior staff veterinarian
Lisa Ferguson. "We believe the model is effective, and we
stand behind its use as a tool."
Livermore Whistleblowers Allege Wrongful
Termination Two former employees of Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory filed suit on Tuesday, claiming they were fired
for raising safety concerns about the lab's star
project, the National Ignition Facility, a superlaser used
for investigating nuclear fusion. Les Miklosy and
Luciana Messina allege that "there were serious potential
safety problems in the [laser] target chamber and ... the entire
project was being run in a non-scientific manner,"
according to a statement issued by their attorneys. Miklosy says
he was fired abruptly when he approached a manager about the
matter. Messina, who shared similar concerns, quit when she
concluded she would be fired. Chris Harrington, a
spokesman for the University of California, which runs the lab,
said the project "is one of the most thoroughly reviewed
scientific projects in the nation. Since 2000, NIF has met and
exceeded all of its milestones. It gets high marks for project
management, for engineering safety, for technical
achievement." The allegations come at a sensitive time
for the University of California. Congress recently voted to
hold national competitions for running five national labs,
including the three run by UC. Late last week UC settled out of
court for $3.9 million, without admitting wrongdoing, when the
Energy Department investigated reports of inappropriate billings
for workers' hours at Livermore.
IOM Panel Ponders Vaccination-Autism Link The
decades-long surge in the number of autism cases diagnosed among
children has troubled researchers, parents and advocates.
Although a broader definition of the disease accounts for some
of the increase, a seeming synchronous tie between childhood
vaccination and the onset of symptoms of autism leads some to
conclude a link between the two. So the Institute of
Medicine—at the request of the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, which is worried about public health
consequences if fearful parents don't vaccinate their
children—last week convened researchers to
present their findings on the matter. The IOM
panel heard from researchers on both sides, including the
authors of a Danish study involving roughly half a million
children that found no evidence of a correlation between
vaccination and autism. Other researchers presented studies that
suggested a link, and pointed the finger at thimerosal, a
preservative once widely used in vaccines that contains mercury.
The IOM committee will release a report based on the hearings in
several weeks.
Report Finds Holes in FBI Bullet-Matching Analysis
A report by forensic scientists calls
into question the validity of a bullet-matching method
used as evidence by the FBI in hundreds of criminal cases, and
could undermine the verdicts the technique supported.
The National Research Council, an arm of the National Academies
of Sciences, issued a report that did not condemn the method,
called bullet-lead analysis, but did propose changes to the way
the method’s findings are represented in court.
Bullet-lead analysis measures trace elements found in bullets or
fragments recovered from a crime scene, then compares those
measurements with ones taken from bullets in a suspect’s
possession. For about 40 years, in cases where the
measurements are similar, the FBI has testified that the bullets
are "analytically indistinguishable." Although the
report determined that the FBI’s testing methods were
valid, it insisted that the probability that the bullets came
from the same stock could not be measured.
U.S. Infant Mortality Sees First Increase in 44
Years A new report by the Centers for Disease Control
finds that infant
mortality in the United States in 2002 increased for the
first time since 1958. This result likely
reflects some recent underlying social trends, researchers said.
Teenage pregnancies dropped by 30 percent over the last 10
years, and births among women ages 35 to 44 were at their
highest levels in 30 years. The children of these older mothers
are significantly more likely to be born prematurely or with
birth defects. Also, older women may have more trouble
conceiving and turn to fertility drugs, increasing the chance of
multiple births, which are more often premature and of low birth
weight. Early data for 2003 suggest the reversal may simply
mark a momentary deviation in the long downward trend in infant
mortality. And U.S. life expectancy reached an all-time high of
77.4 years.
Cancer-Causing Gene Defect Traced to 18th-Century
Immigrant A team at Ohio State University determined
that a significant fraction of U.S. colorectal cancers can
be traced to a German couple who immigrated to Pennsylvania
in 1727. In the study, published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association, Albert
de la Chapelle and his colleagues traced a mutant gene to the
immigrant couple, who produced 11 children. The researchers
tested 566 living descendants and found that 44.5 percent of
them carry the mutation and are thus susceptible to hereditary
nonpolyposis colon cancer, which carries an 80 percent risk of
colon cancer. Nearly 150,000 cases of colorectal cancer
occur each year in the United States, and about a quarter of
them are hereditary.
Scientists Detect Crystalline Carbon in Cooling Star
In a fitting announcement for Valentine's Day, scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced that that core of a cooling white dwarf star 50 light-years from Earth is made up almost entirely of crystalline carbon, making it essentially a diamond 2,500 miles across.
The investigators found that the largest known white dwarf, known as BPM 37093, emits vibrations at frequencies that indicated a solid core, though the surface still emits light and sound. "Because it was so massive, it was becoming crystalline even while it was still pulsating," said center astrophysicist Travis Metcalfe. White dwarves, the remains of collapsed stars, pulsate as they cool over billions of years.
"It's not exactly the same structure as diamond," said University of Texas astronomer Don Winget. "But it's real close." Scientists said the object weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds or, in diamond terms, 10 billion trillion trillion carats.
About Sigma Xi
Founded in 1886, Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society is a
non-profit membership society of more than 70,000 scientists and
engineers who were elected to the Society because of their
research achievements or potential. Sigma Xi has more than 500
chapters at universities and colleges, government laboratories
and industry research centers. In addition to publishing
American Scientist, Sigma Xi awards grants annually
to promising young researchers, holds forums on critical issues
at the intersection of science and society and sponsors a
variety of programs supporting honor in science and engineering,
science education, science policy and the public understanding
of science. For more information about the benefits of
membership, visit the Sigma
Xi Web site. Need assistance? Please use the links
below or contact us by email at enews@americanscientist.org.
We welcome your feedback at inthenews@sigmaxi.org.
| 
