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Beyond Carbon: Scientists Worry About Nitrogen’s Effects
By RICHARD MORGAN, The New York Times, September 2, 2008
TOOLIK FIELD STATION, Alaska — As Anne Giblin was lugging four-foot tubes of Arctic lakebed mud from her inflatable raft to her nearby lab this summer, she said, “Mud is a great storyteller.”
Dr. Giblin, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., is part of the Long Term Ecological Research network at an Arctic science outpost here operated by the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
Public discussion of complicated climate change is largely reduced to carbon: carbon emissions, carbon footprints, carbon trading. But other chemicals have large roles in the planet’s health, and the one Dr. Giblin is looking for in Arctic mud, one that a growing number of other researchers are also concentrating on, is nitrogen.
( Read More... )
Europeans’ Genomes Reveal Their Geographic Origins
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, September 2, 2008
Europe has a rich history of wars, invasions and migrations, seemingly enough to have mixed its population pretty thoroughly. But it turns out that there is a geographical pattern to European genetics. By analyzing people’s genomes, geneticists can tell roughly where in Europe they come from.
The genetic differences across Europe are so slight that examining them just one at a time would mean almost nothing. But a new generation of gene chips — devices that test the DNA at specific sites along the genome — can assess 500,000 of the genome’s 3 billion units at a time. When all these differences are added together, a striking linkage emerges between genetics and geography.
( Read More... )
Kenya: Google’s Philanthropy Arm Leads Effort to Use Weather Data to Fight Disease
By ELIZA BARCLAY, The New York Times, September 2, 2008
DERTU, Kenya — After three months of unusually heavy rainfall in late 2006, an outbreak of Rift Valley fever in Kenya left 118 people and hundreds of cattle dead. Kenya’s Meteorological Department predicted the outbreak, but health officials failed to act on the warning until it was too late.
This month Google.org, the technology company’s philanthropic arm, is convening African health, weather, insect and climate experts in Nairobi to identify research gaps and opportunities for collaboration. In many countries, meteorological systems set up in colonial times have deteriorated, and the scant data gathered never reaches the health officials who could use it in an early warning system.
( Read More... )
Vital Statistics: The Odds It Will Kill You? See New Charts
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR, The New York Times, September 2, 2008
A 55-year-old man who smokes is as likely to die in the next 10 years as a 65-year-old who has never smoked. Less than 1 woman in 1,000 younger than 50 will die in the next decade from cervical cancer. A 35-year-old nonsmoking man is five times as likely to die in an accident before 45 as he is to die of heart disease, and a 35-year-old woman is twice as likely to die accidentally by 45 as she is to die from breast cancer.
New risk charts in a paper published in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute provide a broader perspective than most of the risk calculators on the Internet, because they cover the risks for 10 different causes of death, and for all causes combined, while differentiating by age and between smokers, nonsmokers and former smokers.
( Read More... )
By RICHARD MORGAN, The New York Times, September 2, 2008
TOOLIK FIELD STATION, Alaska — As Anne Giblin was lugging four-foot tubes of Arctic lakebed mud from her inflatable raft to her nearby lab this summer, she said, “Mud is a great storyteller.”
Dr. Giblin, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., is part of the Long Term Ecological Research network at an Arctic science outpost here operated by the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
Public discussion of complicated climate change is largely reduced to carbon: carbon emissions, carbon footprints, carbon trading. But other chemicals have large roles in the planet’s health, and the one Dr. Giblin is looking for in Arctic mud, one that a growing number of other researchers are also concentrating on, is nitrogen.
( Read More... )
Europeans’ Genomes Reveal Their Geographic Origins
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, September 2, 2008
Europe has a rich history of wars, invasions and migrations, seemingly enough to have mixed its population pretty thoroughly. But it turns out that there is a geographical pattern to European genetics. By analyzing people’s genomes, geneticists can tell roughly where in Europe they come from.
The genetic differences across Europe are so slight that examining them just one at a time would mean almost nothing. But a new generation of gene chips — devices that test the DNA at specific sites along the genome — can assess 500,000 of the genome’s 3 billion units at a time. When all these differences are added together, a striking linkage emerges between genetics and geography.
( Read More... )
Kenya: Google’s Philanthropy Arm Leads Effort to Use Weather Data to Fight Disease
By ELIZA BARCLAY, The New York Times, September 2, 2008
DERTU, Kenya — After three months of unusually heavy rainfall in late 2006, an outbreak of Rift Valley fever in Kenya left 118 people and hundreds of cattle dead. Kenya’s Meteorological Department predicted the outbreak, but health officials failed to act on the warning until it was too late.
This month Google.org, the technology company’s philanthropic arm, is convening African health, weather, insect and climate experts in Nairobi to identify research gaps and opportunities for collaboration. In many countries, meteorological systems set up in colonial times have deteriorated, and the scant data gathered never reaches the health officials who could use it in an early warning system.
( Read More... )
Vital Statistics: The Odds It Will Kill You? See New Charts
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR, The New York Times, September 2, 2008
A 55-year-old man who smokes is as likely to die in the next 10 years as a 65-year-old who has never smoked. Less than 1 woman in 1,000 younger than 50 will die in the next decade from cervical cancer. A 35-year-old nonsmoking man is five times as likely to die in an accident before 45 as he is to die of heart disease, and a 35-year-old woman is twice as likely to die accidentally by 45 as she is to die from breast cancer.
New risk charts in a paper published in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute provide a broader perspective than most of the risk calculators on the Internet, because they cover the risks for 10 different causes of death, and for all causes combined, while differentiating by age and between smokers, nonsmokers and former smokers.
( Read More... )
