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CREDITS (TOP TO BOTTOM): EOS/UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE; DAVE WEATHERALL/UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA; JOM/WIKIPEDIA; 2012 © EVA GRIFFETH, COURTESY OF NSTA agencies pulled their polio staff members from the fi eld. No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks. In a statement, Nigerian Health Minister Muhammad Ali Pate promised an aggressive investigation, describing the “heinous” attacks as part of a “long standing cycle of violence that has engulfed [the northern states] in recent months.” Nigeria is one of three countries, with Pakistan and Afghanistan, where polio remains endemic. Cases are concentrated in the north, which is largely Muslim. Efforts to wipe out the virus there have been hobbled by rumors that the vaccine is part of a Western plot to sterilize Muslim children. Strasbourg, France 5 Inching Toward E.U. Fisheries Reform The European Parliament approved a plan on 6 February to reform the European Union’s Common Fisheries Policy by a 502-to-137 vote. The plan aims to improve the muchcriticized policy, last reviewed in 2002, by capping catches at sustainable levels, banning discards of unwanted species, and making better use of scientifi c data for longterm planning. According to the European Commission, 68% of the European Union’s stocks are overfi shed. Under the revamped rules, starting in 2015 regulators would set catch limits using a data-driven standard known as maximum sustainable yield that is commonly used in fi sheries regulation in the United States. If fully adopted, the rules will allow fi sh stocks to “recover by 2020, enabling us to take 15 million tons more fi sh and create 37,000 new jobs,” predicted Ulrike Rodust, a German member of the Parliament who was responsible for revising and offering a legislative proposal originally developed by the European Commission in July 2011. The reform plan still has to be discussed with governments from the European Union’s 27 member states. If they reach an agreement by the end of June, the plan could come into force next year. http://scim.ag/EUfi sh NEWSMAKERS ‘Arab Nobels’ Honor Genetics Of Obesity, Superfast Physics Score a “twoonie” for Canada. Paul Corkum, a Canadian physicist at the University of Ottawa, and Ferenc Krausz, a Hungarian- Corkum Austrian physicist of both the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, and Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany, have won the 2013 King Faisal International Prize for Science for their independent work on ultrashort pulses of laser light. Such work has enabled scientists to track the motion of electrons within atoms and molecules. The two will share the roughly $200,000 prize, which is awarded annually and is sometimes called an “Arab Nobel Prize.” Meanwhile, American Jeffrey Michael Friedman, a geneticist with Rockefeller University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in New York City, and Canadianborn Douglas Coleman, retired from Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, share the 2013 King Faisal International Prize for Medicine for their pioneering work together on the hormone leptin and the genetics of obesity. Friedman and Coleman have racked up several prizes in recent years. David Evans to Lead U.S. Science Teachers Group David Evans has never taught science at the precollege level. Nor has he carried out research on how to improve science teaching and learning. But the new executive director of the National Science Teachers Association says he sees value in bringing a fresh eye to the rapidly changing fi eld. Evans “Information is much more accessible, and people can get it in a variety of new ways,” says Evans, who last week took the helm at the 60,000-member society, based in Arlington, Virginia. He says Ribbon ‘Round The Solar System NEWS More than 3 years ago, stunned space physicists reported the discovery of a narrow band of sky lit up in the cameras of NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX). The spacecraft’s cameras, trained toward the outer edge of the heliosphere where the sun’s wind of charged particles encounters the oncoming magnetic field that courses between the stars, were observing a mysterious ribbon of high-powered hydrogen atoms streaming inward from that boundary. A dozen theories later, a pair of IBEX researchers reports this week in The Astrophysical Journal that the interstellar magnetic fi eld (thin gray lines wrapping around the region filled by solar wind in the image) may be temporarily trapping and concentrating outbound particles. The trapping would be most effective where the solar wind squarely crosses interstellar magnetic fi eld lines (gray “life preserver”). IBEX “sees” those particles that escape the trap as the ribbon, here rendered in reds, yellows, and greens. two important changes for teachers— whom he calls “classroom teachers of science rather than science teachers, because not all of them have a background in the subject”—are the proliferation of free online courses and the arrival later this year of the Next Generation Science Standards, a national effort to get states to voluntarily adopt improvements in teaching science in elementary and secondary schools. Trained as a physical oceanographer, the 66-year-old Evans spent 2 decades with the federal government, including a stint as undersecretary for science at the Smithsonian Institution. http://scim.ag/EvansNSTA www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 339 15 FEBRUARY 2013 743 Published by AAAS on February 14, 2013 www.sciencemag.org Downloaded from
NEWS OF THE WEEK FINDINGS Sweaty Human Evolution, Through a Mouse Lens Mice are helping scientists learn about the evolution of some humans’ sweat glands. In 2007, computational analyses revealed that some Asians carry a particular version of a gene called EDAR. To learn the effects of that version, called 370A, Harvard Medical School’s Yana Kamberov and her colleagues developed a strain of mice that carried 370A instead of the usual EDAR gene. Those mice have thicker hair, more sweat glands (blue tubes in the mouse footpad, above), denser mammary glands, and smaller fat pads around those mammary glands, the researchers report this week in Cell. The team also evaluated sweat gland density in Han Chinese carrying one or two copies of 370A and found that those with two copies had more sweat glands. Random Sample “It’s one of the fi rst papers that clearly shows that a change that was important in recent human evolution can be modeled in the mouse,” says Wolfgang Enard, an evolutionary geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The analysis suggests 370A arose in Central China 30,000 years ago and may have been favored as an adaptation to the humid environment. http://scim.ag/sweatyev First Evidence of Life Under Antarctic Ice Researchers have gotten the fi rst glimpse of life lurking beneath Antarctic ice. Last month, a U.S. team drilled through 1000 meters of ice to reach subglacial Lake Whillans, part of a complex hydrological system in West Antarctica—and on 7 February the team announced that they now have obtained the fi rst evidence of microbial life in a subglacial Antarctic lake. Last month, a team of Russian scientists announced that they had successfully sampled another subglacial lake located thousands of kilometers away on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet; what microbes might exist in those waters are still unknown. But the two systems are very different: Diamonds Are a Sperm’s Best Friend It’s hard out here for a sperm—even the petri dishes researchers use to store and culture the cells might actually harm their delicate cargo. Researchers in Germany suspect that exposing your standard polystyrene petri dish to water can cause its surface to soften into a layer of toxic goo made of chemicals called reactive oxygen species, or ROS. ROS have been wreaking havoc on sperm and egg cells during in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures for decades, but until now, nobody thought to blame the petri dish. So the researchers, led by materials scientist Andrei Sommer of Ulm University in Germany, came up with a solution that could bring back the sparkle: Make a petri dish out of quartz, and then coat it with a nanolayer of diamond. About 20% more sperm survived for 42 hours in diamond-coated petri dishes than in the polystyrene containers usually used for IVF, the researchers report in the Online Proceedings Library of the Materials Research Society. “It’s an interesting preliminary study,” says Pravin Rao, a urologist at Johns Hopkins’ James Buchanan Brady Urological Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, who was not involved in the study. “The most important thing to see is whether [the diamond-coated dishes] would improve IVF success rates”—particularly in cases complicated by low sperm counts, he says. “If you just have 10 sperm, it’s great if even one extra sperm survives.” http://scim.ag/diamsperm 744 15 FEBRUARY 2013 VOL 339 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org Published by AAAS View from the bottom of Lake Whillans. Unlike Lake Vostok, the Whillans system has been in periodic contact with surface waters, rather than isolated from the rest of the planet for millions of years. The team, which is seeking clues not only to glacial microbiology but also to ice sheet dynamics and the impact of climate change on the continent, hopes the Lake Whillans microbial community can shed light on organisms that can exist in the extreme dark and cold, and how such microbes might affect the chemistry of the ice. Proto-RNA: Clues to Origin of Life Origin of life researchers have long thought that RNA, the molecular cousin of the DNA that encodes our genes, may have played a starring role in the initial evolution of life from a soup of organic molecules. But there are problems with this “RNA World” hypothesis. For starters, in water, the four chemical components of RNA, the nucleotides abbreviated A, G, C, and U, don’t spontaneously assemble to create sizable molecules. So it remains a mystery how the fi rst long gene-length chains of RNA would have ever taken shape in Earth’s ancient environment. Now, researchers led by Nicholas Hud, a chemist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, report in the Journal of the American Chemical Society that they have created a pair of RNA-like molecules that can spontaneously assemble into genelength chains in water. Although it’s likely to be diffi cult to determine whether these proto-RNAs or others like them were present at the dawn of life, the researchers are now working to see if the proto-RNAs can indeed faithfully encode information and evolve toward RNA. http://scim.ag/RNAlife This week, Science is reporting from the AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston. Visit http://scim.ag/aaas_2013 for full coverage. CREDITS (TOP TO BOTTOM): ALBERTO BEHAR/JPL/ASU (UNDERWATER CAMERA FUNDED BY NSF AND NASA); Y. G. KAMBEROV ET AL., CELL 152 (14 FEBRUARY 2013) © 2013 ELSEVIER INC.; ISTOCKPHOTO; COURTESY OF ANDREI P. SOMMER AT ULM UNIVERSITY, GERMANY on February 14, 2013 www.sciencemag.org Downloaded from
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visit the frontiers of science. . .
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