Humans could regrow their own body parts like some amphibians, claim scientists

Regenerating your own amputated arms and legs, broken spines and even damaged brains is the stuff of superheroes – but it could one day be a reality, claim scientists.
 
Telegraph | Jul 1, 2009

By Richard Alleyne

Researchers looking into how salamanders are able to to regrow their damaged bodies have discovered that the “almost magical ability” is closer to human healing then first thought.

They believe that one day they will be able to completely unlock the secret and apply it to humans, reprogramming the body so it can repair itself perfectly as if nothing had happened.

The amphibians are almost unique in that if they lose a limb, a small bump forms over the injury called a blastema.

Within about three weeks this blastema transforms into a new, fully functioning replacement limb without any scarring.

At first it was thought that the ability was so alien to human healing that, outside of science fiction novels, it could never be transformed into a useful treatment for damaged human bodies.

But researchers at the University of Florida have discovered that it is not as remarkable as first thought and we could learn how to replicate it in people.

“I think it’s more mammal-like than was ever expected,” said Professor Malcolm Maden, author of the paper. “It gives you more hope for being able to someday regenerate individual tissues in people.”

Scientists, studying the Axolotl salamander, native to Mexico, had long thought the amphibious creature’s capabilities were down to so-called “pluripotent” cells, which had the uncanny ability to morph into whatever appendage, organ or tissue happens to be needed or due for a replacement.

But a paper in the journal Nature debunks that notion, discovering that the regenerative process is like a much more sophisticated version of healing in humans and other mammals.

They found that repairs were down to much more standard stem cells – like those in mammals – but with the ability to reorganise themselves in the correct order to rebuild the body.

Standard mammal stem cells operate in the same way, albeit with far less dramatic results – they can heal wounds or knit bone together, but not regenerate a limb or rebuild a spinal cord.

The scientists says that what’s exciting about the new findings is the suggestion that harnessing the salamander’s regenerative wonders is at least within the realm of possibility for human medical science.

Also, the salamanders heal perfectly, without any scars whatsoever, another ability people would like to learn how to mimic, Prof Maden said.

He said the findings will help researchers “zero in” on why salamander cells are capable of such remarkable regeneration. “If you can understand how they regenerate, then you ought to be able to understand why mammals don’t regenerate,” he said.

Genetically modified monkeys raise ethical questions

Genetically modified monkeys pass new genetic profile to offspring

Washington Post | May 27, 2009

By Rob Stein

WASHINGTON — Scientists have created the first genetically modified monkeys that can pass their new genetic attributes to their offspring, an advance designed to give researchers new tools for studying human disease but one that raises a host of thorny ethical questions.

In this case, the Japanese researchers simply added genes that caused the animals to glow green under a fluorescent light and beget offspring with the same spooky ability in order to test a technique they hope to use to produce animals with Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and other diseases.

The work, described in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, was hailed by some medical researchers as a long-sought milestone that could lead to crucial insights into a host of ailments and provide invaluable ways to test new treatments.

But the research was condemned by animal rights proponents, who said it paves the way for the producing colonies of primates conceived expressly to suffer a plethora of cruel illnesses and undergo potentially painful and dangerous medical experiments.

Because the work marks the first time a species so closely related to humans has been genetically altered in this way, some also worried the same techniques would be used on chimps or other primates even closer to humans or to try to endow people with desirable genetic traits.

“It’s hard to put your finger on what is it about this research that is likely to stimulate ethical debate besides the sort of gut feeling that this is not the right thing to do,” said Mark Rothstein, a bioethicist at the University of Louisville. “But I think we’d better contemplate where this research is going and develop policies to deal with it before it slaps us in the face.”

Scientists have genetically engineered many other species to be as research tools. Mice in particular have been created with a wide assortment of characteristics and diseases that mimic human ailments. But because mice are so genetically different from humans, scientists have long sought to breed primates to provide better disease “models.” Although scientists have been able to genetically modify individual monkeys, they had never before succeeded in getting the new traits to pass down through generations — a crucial step for creating large enough numbers for research.

In the new work, Erika Sasakim of the Central Institute for Experimental Animals in Kawasaki, and her colleagues conducted a series of experiments using marmosets, a small monkey common in South America that matures and reproduces quickly.

The researchers modified a virus called a lentivirus to carry a jellyfish gene known as GFP (for green fluorescent protein) into the genetic material of the marmosets’ cells. The gene is used commonly in research because it is easy to track — cells where the gene is active glow green when exposed to fluorescent light.

The researchers used the genetically engineered virus to insert the jellyfish gene into 80 marmoset embryos, which they then transferred into the wombs of 50 females. Seven pregnancies resulted in five offspring, four of which showed signs of the jellyfish gene in their hair roots, skin, blood cells and other tissues. Under fluorescent light, the skin on the soles of their feet glowed bright green.

Most importantly, eggs from one of the females and sperm from one of the males had the gene, and the researchers reported in the scientific paper that male’s sperm was used to produce at least one second-generation offspring with the gene — a male named Kouichi whose skin glowed green under the light.

In a telephone briefing for reporters, the researchers said they had since produced four offspring — two from the male and two from the female — three of which glowed green.

“We believe this is the first case that is ever established in the world that has an introduced gene that is successfully translated to the next generation in a primate,” said Hideyuki Okano of Keio University School of Medicine.

Some other researchers said the work marked a crucial landmark.

“The birth of this transgenic marmoset baby is undoubtedly a milestone,” wrote Gerald Schatten of the University of Pittsburgh and Shoukrat Mitalipov of the Oregon Health and Sciences University in an article published with the Japanese paper.

But others criticized the work.

“These non-human primates already suffer in laboratories when we infect them with diseases and when we use them in toxicology tests,” said Eric Kleiman of In Defense of Animals, an international animal protection organization based on San Rafael, Calif. “Instead of manipulating the genes of marmosets or other non human primates, why aren’t scientists harnessing the power of the human genome or any of the other technology that has exploded over the last 10 years. This is a step backward, not a step forward.”

Even some who do not necessarily oppose the use of animals in research said the work raised concerns, including whether the technique could blur the lines between species.

“At some point, how many human genes in a marmoset or rhesus monkey or macaque or whatever does it take to form a new species — a species that is part human at its basis?” Rothstein said.

Even though there has long been a taboo against making genetic changes in people that could be passed down through generations, the new work makes that prospect more likely, others said.

“This is proof-of-concept in a closely related species,” said Lori Andrews, who studies reproductive technologies at the Chicago Kent College of Law of the Illinois Institute of Technology. “It would be easy enough for someone to make the leap to trying this on humans.”

“There’s clearly the potential to try to use this to try to upgrade people,” Andrews said. “Some in the future might want to put a gene into humans to give them the running speed of a cheetah, for example, or maybe create the potential for night vision. There is a huge market — bigger than Prozac or Viagra.”

Andrews noted that reproductive technologies are largely unregulated in the United States.

“This is just another reason why we need to go behind the doors of the IVF clinics and create an oversight mechanism that works,” Andrews said.

“There are always people who want to improve the human race. It’s called eugenics and it has a bad history,” said Stuart Newman, a professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College “Every time I see a piece of technology that facilitates possibly genetically engineering humans I’m concerned about it.”

Other researchers agreed that animal research should be kept to a minimum but argued that it is impossible to get answer many key questions any other way. Creating better animal models could end up reducing the overall number of animals needed for research, they said.

“In the end, if we have good models, we may end up using less animals and we may end up having better answers to for what we are looking for,” said Anthony Chan, a geneticist at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University who helped create a rhesus monkey with Huntington’s disease.

But Chan agreed that steps should be taken to make sure the technology is not used on people.

“We should never do it in humans,” Chan said. “We don’t want to change our evolutionary path. That would have a profound impact on the next generation.”

H. G. Wells: The Godfather of American Liberalism

After his customary denunciation of parliamentary politics as an anachronism, he let out his frustrations, calling for fascist means to serve liberal ends by way of a liberal elite as “conceited” and as power-hungry as its rivals. “I suggest that you study the reinvigoration of Catholicism by Loyola,” Wells said. “I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti.” It was also to Communism that “we shall have to turn—we outsiders, that is, the young people with foresight for enlightened Nazis; I am proposing that you consider the formation for a greater Communist Party; a western response to Russia.”

H. G. Wells: novelist, historian, authoritarian, anticapitalist, eugenicist, and advisor to presidents

City Journal | May 22, 2009

By Fred Siegel

A generation of American liberals, including Walter Lippmann, Margaret Sanger, and the editors of The New Republic, regarded Wells as a visionary. The Granger Collection

Modern American liberalism, as it emerged in the 1920s, was animated by a revolt against the masses. Liberal thinkers accused the great unwashed of smothering creative individuals in a blanket of materialist, spiritually empty cultural conformity. The liberal project was, so to speak, to refound America by replacing its business civilization—a “dictatorship of the middle class,” as Vernon Parrington put it—with a new, more highly evolved leadership. But along with the ideal of the spontaneous, creative individual, liberals also embraced government economic planning, which depended on making people more predictable. The tension between the two aspirations was resolved, rhetorically at least, by proposing to place power in the hands of scientists, academics, artists, and professionals, a new and truly worthy aristocracy that could govern based on what was good for both leaders and the led.

These antidemocratic and elitist assumptions were nowhere better illustrated than in the extraordinary career of a Briton, H. G. Wells. Wells is best remembered today as the author of such late-nineteenth-century socio-scientific fantasies as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The Invisible Man. But he was much more than that. His political writing achieved extraordinary influence in America, not just through his defense of liberal freedoms such as free speech but through his hostility to population growth, capitalism, and democracy itself.

Herbert George Wells was already a renowned writer of fiction when in 1901 he published the nonfiction work Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought. The book’s scientific prescriptions to cure social diseases turned the novelist into a seer, both in England and in America, where Anticipations had already been serialized in the North American Review. More than any other intellectual of the time, Wells spoke to two enormous nineteenth-century shifts: the growth of giant industries, which undercut the old assumptions about the sovereignty of the individual; and Darwinism’s concussive reassignment of humanity from the spiritual to the natural world, which begged for prophets of a naturalized humanity.

Numerous fin de siècle writers had looked backward at a century of material and mechanical progress, both to praise its achievements and to condemn its running sore, the seemingly permanent misery of the urban working class. But Wells looked ahead, asserting that the future as well as the past had a pattern. He argued inductively about the nature of what was likely to come, based on the way the telephone, telegraph, and railroad had shrunk the world, and he populated his predictions with a dramatic cast of collective characters. Some he loathed: the idle, parasitic rich; the “vicious helpless pauper masses,” the “People of the Abyss”; and the yapping politicians and yellow journalists whom he considered instruments of patriotism and war.

But if these people were leading the world on the path to hell, there were also the redeemers, the “New Republicans,” the “capable men” of vision who might own the future. These scientist-poets and engineers could, Wells thought, redirect the Darwinian struggle away from a descent into savagery and toward a new and higher ground. Building on the social and sexual ideals of nineteenth-century utopian reformers, Wells generated a complete cosmology, a scientific socialism to compete with Marxism, which, he thought, reduced the complexities of life to simpleminded slogans of class war. Outflanking the Marxists on their own ground, he called for a different kind of struggle, a “revolt of the competent” against the confines of conventional middle-class morality.

The conventions of Anglo-American family life, Wells believed, blocked the path toward a more highly evolved future. On one side was a “normal, ordinary world which is on the whole satisfied with itself” and encompasses “the great mass of men”—the bovine “Normal Life” of workers, clerks, and small businessmen. Opposite it stood an “ever advancing better world, pushing through this outworn husk in the minds and wills of creative humanity,” a “Great State” led by the creative class, a richly textured life that might be possible if only the new men of science could displace the vote-buying of electoral politics.

Well before Mussolini, still a revolutionary socialist in the early twentieth century, and at roughly the same time as Lenin, Wells—in the book that he called the “keystone to the main arch of my work”—gave up not only on democracy but on organized labor as a transformative force. All three men rejected what might be described as social democracy, that is, the attempt to use political means to redress the inadequacies of capitalism. Instead, each proposed a new class, a vanguard to carry forward a postcapitalist social order.

In A Modern Utopia, written in 1905, Wells updated John Stuart Mill’s culturally individualist liberalism in light of the horizons opened by Darwin and Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics. Biologically, argues the book’s narrator, the “species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.” That means, he says, that the “people of exceptional quality must be ascendant.” Further, “the better sort of people, so far as they can be distinguished, must have the fullest freedom of public service.”

What provides the possibility for such freedom is eugenics. Wells has no use for the iron laws of Marxism, but he replaces them with the iron laws of Malthus and Darwin. “From the view of human comfort and happiness, the increase of population that occurs at each advance in human security is the greatest evil of life,” he writes. “The extravagant swarm of new births” that created the masses was “the essential disaster of the 19th century.” Man’s propensity to reproduce will always outstrip his productive capacity, even in an age of machinery. Worse, the “base and servile types,” who are little more than the “leaping, glittering confusion of shoaling mackerel on a sunlit afternoon,” are the most fecund.

In Anticipations, Wells had already argued horrifyingly that the “nation that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, or poisons its People of the Abyss” would be ascendant. For the base and servile types, death would mean merely “the end of the bitterness of failure.” It was “their portion to die out and disappear.” The New Republicans would have “little pity and less benevolence” for the untermenschen, “born of unrestrained lusts . . . and multiplying through sheer incontinence and stupidity.”

In A Modern Utopia, Wells, stung by criticism of Anticipations, backed off, but only partway. “Idiots,” “drunkards,” “criminals,” “lunatics,” “congenital invalids,” and the “diseased” would “spoil the world for others,” Wells again argued. But their depredations required “social surgery,” not total extermination. That meant preventing people below a set income and intelligence from reproducing, as well as isolating the “failures” on an island so that better folk could live unfettered by government intrusion. Remove the unfit, and there will be no need for jails or prisons, which are places “of torture by restraint.” Illiberalism enables liberalism.

Wells’s “Samurai,” an updated version of the New Republicans, would keep track of their charges through a centralized thumbprint index of all the earth’s inhabitants. Latter-day Puritans in everything except sex, the Samurai would lead lives of irreproachable rectitude, abjuring tobacco, alcohol, trade, and games, which they could neither join nor watch. These elect, “the clean and straight” men and women capable “of self-devotion, of intentional courage, of honest thought, and steady endeavour,” would rule in the name of the new godhead: Progress through Science. As Wells would later put it, science was to be “king of the world.”

Wells saw America, which wasn’t weighted down by ancient traditions, as the best chance for his ideas to come to fruition. A host of British visitors, from Fanny Trollope and Charles Dickens to Robert Louis Stevenson, could barely contain their disdain for their backwoods American cousins. But Wells—an anti–Henry James who saw himself as a self-made man—exulted in the absence of an established church, the embodiment of the irrational past. “Up to the point of its equality of opportunity,” he wrote, “surely no sane Englishman can do anything but admire the American state.” His 1904 nonfiction book Mankind in the Making welcomed a possible reunion of Britain and the United States based, as he saw it, on their common racial stock.

At the same time, Wells showed deep concerns about America. A socialist critic of American capitalism, he was revulsed by the “inhuman energy” of New York’s immigrant masses. In the Days of the Comet (1906) portrayed overproduction by a rapacious “gang of energetic, narrow-minded” American ironmongers as a threat to English social stability. Wells also thought that American democracy provided too much leeway to the poltroons who ran the political machines and the “fools” who supported them. The “immigrants are being given votes,” he argued, but “that does not free them, it only enslaves the country.”

In The Future in America, an account of his first trip to these shores in 1906 that was serialized in American and British magazines, Wells rightly pointed out that America was essentially “the central part of the European organism without either the dreaming head or the subjugated feet.” But that wasn’t a good thing, he claimed. In England, modern men of money “had become part of a responsible ruling class”; in America, the absence of an aristocracy had left the country without that sense of “state responsibility” that was necessary “to give significance to the whole.” The upshot was that “the typical American has no sense of the state. . . . He has no perception that his business activities, his private employments, are constituents in a larger collective process.” Further, Wells argued, America’s can-do commercialism was “crushing and maiming a great multitude of souls.” “The greatest work which the coming century has to do,” he wrote, “is to build up an aristocracy of thought and feeling which shall hold its own against the aristocracy of mercantilism” and its allies “materialism and Philistinism.”

In the course of his visit to the U.S., Wells was befriended by Jane Addams, Upton Sinclair, and Lincoln Steffens, who arranged for a visit to the White House. Teddy Roosevelt, an avid reader, was delighted to talk for hours with Wells about the growing class divisions in America, which had been exacerbated by the confluence of rapid industrialization and rapid immigration. Roosevelt had rightly read The Time Machine as an anticipation of deepened class divisions hardened over time into an overworld and an underworld. The president became “gesticulatory,” his voice “straining,” Wells remembered. “Suppose after all,” Roosevelt said slowly, “that should prove to be right, and that it all ends in your butterflies and morlocks. That doesn’t matter now. The effort’s real”—Roosevelt’s reform effort to curb the power of giant monopolies, that is. “It’s worth going on with. It’s worth it—even then.”

“My hero in the confused drama of human life,” Wells wrote in The Future in America, “is intelligence; intelligence inspired by constructive passion. There is a demi-god imprisoned in mankind.” Three years before Herbert Croly’s pathbreaking book The Promise of American Life totemized Roosevelt as the incarnation of a new liberal politics that deployed Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends, Wells presented TR as the demigod incarnate, the very symbol of “the creative will in man.” Here was the man of the future—“traditions,” noted Wells, “have no hold on him”—a model of the Samurai. “I know of no other,” said Wells, “a tithe so representative of the creative purpose, the goodwill in men as he.”

Continues

‘Innocent people are branded as criminals’

DNA pioneer is outraged by government’s policy

Observer | May 24, 2009

By  Robin McKie

Ministers’ decision to keep the profiles of more than 800,000 innocent people on the national DNA database for the next six to 12 years threatens the use of genetic fingerprinting to solve serious crimes, Sir Alec Jeffreys warned last week.

The inventor of DNA fingerprinting, which has transformed forensic investigations, told the Observer that police retention of profiles – even those belonging to people never charged with any crime – had created intense grievance.

“I am getting lots of emails from innocent people whose profiles are kept on the database. I have also met many of them,” said Jeffreys. “There is real upset out there. Some people are seriously distressed. They feel they are being branded as criminals when they are innocent.”

In the past, Jeffreys said, people had been willing to give samples to help hunt down rapists and murderers. These included the 4,000 men who volunteered blood in 1987 as part of a police search that led to the conviction of Colin Pitchfork – the first person to be convicted of murder based on DNA evidence.

Today many potential volunteers would refuse to co-operate, Jeffreys said, because it was likely their DNA profiles would be kept by police for years to come. “This is compromising the use of DNA profiles,” added Jeffreys. “Certainly, if I was asked now to give a blood sample to help solve a crime, I would have serious doubts about supplying it.”

The national DNA database contains the profiles of more than 5 million individuals, the largest in the world per head of population. But last December the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg condemned England, Wales and Northern Ireland for the “blanket and indiscriminate” inclusion of 857,000 innocent citizens’ profiles. As a result, the Home Office announced in April that it would remove these profiles, a move that was welcomed by civil liberties groups – until it emerged the government would not start the procedure for another six to 12 years. This revelation outraged many organisations and individuals, including Jeffreys.

“The government – having invested all this money putting 800,000-plus innocent people on the database – seems determined to keep that information for as long as they possibly can, rather than putting their hands up and admitting this is morally wrong,” he said. “DNA profiles carry familial information. They reveal a person’s biological relationship with others. Storing that data, from innocent people, is a straight violation of their rights to have private family lives.”

The police in England, Wales and Northern Ireland – but not Scotland, which has a less draconian system for retaining profiles – say individuals can apply to have their DNA taken off the database. But Jeffreys ridiculed this idea: “You can write to your chief constable, but you will get a standard letter back saying your circumstances are not exceptional or appropriate. You try telling that to a kid who has just been busted for nicking 50p worth of Smarties.”

However, Jeffreys stressed his criticisms were directed mainly at politicians, not at the police. “The police have got this fantastic tool and they will do whatever the legislation allows. Politicians are the ones to blame. However, I have spoken to several senior policemen over the past few years, and I get the feeling they are starting to get uneasy about having innocent people on the database – that the blanket approach of grabbing just about anybody off the streets and putting them on the database may not lead to the greatest sympathy from the public.”

Pentagon Preps Soldier Telepathy Push

Wired | May 14, 2009

By Katie Drummond

Forget the battlefield radios, the combat PDAs or even infantry hand signals. When the soldiers of the future want to communicate, they’ll read each other’s minds.

At least, that’s the hope of researchers at the Pentagon’s mad-science division Darpa. The agency’s budget for the next fiscal year includes $4 million to start up a program called Silent Talk. The goal is to “allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals.” That’s on top of the $4 million the Army handed out last year to the University of California to investigate the potential for computer-mediated telepathy.

Before being vocalized, speech exists as word-specific neural signals in the mind. Darpa wants to develop technology that would detect these signals of  “pre-speech,” analyze them, and then transmit the statement to an intended interlocutor. Darpa plans to use EEG to read the brain waves. It’s a technique they’re also testing in a project to devise mind-reading binoculars that alert soldiers to threats faster the conscious mind can process them.

The project has three major goals, according to Darpa. First, try to map a person’s EEG patterns to his or her individual words. Then, see if those patterns are generalizable — if everyone has similar patterns. Last, “construct a fieldable pre-prototype that would decode the signal and transmit over a limited range.”

The military has been funding a handful of  mind-tapping technology recently, and already have monkeys capable of telepathic limb control. Telepathy may also have advantages beyond covert battlefield chatter. Last year, the National Research Council and the Defense Intelligence Agency released a report suggesting that neuroscience might also be useful to “make the enemy obey our commands.” The first step, though, may be getting a grunt to obey his officer’s remotely-transmitted thoughts.

Indonesian ‘hobbit’ confirmed to be a new species

Half-size humans whose remains were found on the remote Indonesian island of Flores in 2003 have been confirmed to be a new species, and not modern pygmies whose brains had shrivelled with disease.

Telegraph | May 6, 2009

Since the discovery of Homo floresiensis – dubbed “the hobbit” due to its size – anthropologists have argued over the identity and origins of the cave-dwellers.

Measuring just three feet high and weighing 65 pounds, the tiny, tool-making hunters may have roamed the island as recently as 8,000 years ago.

Many scientists have said H. floresiensis were prehistoric humans descended from homo erectus, stunted by natural selection over millennia through a process called insular dwarfing.

Others countered that even this evolutionary shrinking, well known in island-bound animals, could not account for the hobbit’s chimp-sized brain of barely more than 400 cubic centimetres, a third the size of a modern human brain.

And how could such a being have been smart enough to craft its own stone tools?

The only plausible explanation, they insisted, was that the handful of specimens found suffered from a genetic disorder resulting in an abnormally small skull or – a more recent finding – that they suffered from “dwarf cretinism” caused by deficient thyroids.

But two new studies in the British journal Nature go a long way toward ending this debate.

A team led by William Jungers of the Stony Brook University in New York tackled the problem by analysing the hobbit’s foot.

In some ways it is very human. The big toe is aligned with the others and the joints make it possible to extend the toes as the body’s full weight falls on the foot, attributes not found in great apes.

But, in other respects, it is startlingly primitive: far longer than its modern human equivalent, and equipped with a very small big toe, long, curved lateral toes, and a weight-bearing structure closer to a chimpanzee’s.

Recent archeological evidence from Kenya shows that the modern foot evolved more than 1.5 million years ago, most likely in Homo erectus.

So unless the Flores hobbits became more primitive over time – an unlikely scenario – they must have branched off the human line at an even earlier date.

For Prof Jungers and his colleagues, this suggests “that the ancestor of H. floresiensis was not Homo erectus but instead some other, more primitive, hominin whose dispersal into southeast Asia is still undocumented,” the researchers conclude.

Companion studies, published online in the Journal of Human Evolution, bolster this theory by looking at other parts of the anatomy, and conjecture that these more ancient forebear may be the still poorly understood Homo habilis.

Either way, their status as a separate species would be confirmed.

Even this compelling new evidence, however, does not explain the hobbit’s inordinately small brain.

To investigate this, Eleanor Weston and Adrian Lister of the Natural History Museum in London compared fossils of several species of ancient hippos found on the island of Madagascar with the mainland ancestors from which they had evolved.

They were surprised to find that insular dwarfing – driven by the need to adapt to an island environment – shank their brains far more than had previously been thought possible.

“Whatever the explanation for the tiny brain of H. floresiensis relative to its body size, our evidence suggests that insular dwarfing could have played a role in its evolution,” they conclude.

While the new studies answer some questions, they also raise new ones sure to spark fresh debate, notes Harvard professor Daniel Lieberman in a comment, also published in Nature.

Only more fossil evidence will tell us whether the hobbits of Flores evolved from Homo erectus, whose traces have been found throughout Eurasia, or from an even more ancient lineage whose footsteps have not yet been traced outside Africa, he said.

Scientists Bend Laser Beams — and Maybe Lightning

Scientists have found a way to bend lasers — and may use it to bend lightning as well.

Fox News | Apr 16, 2009

A team led by Pavel Polynkin of the University of Arizona sent a special sort of laser beam — pulsed instead of steady, and asymmetrical so that one edge was brighter than the other — through a series of filters.

They found that the beam actually curved a bit, by about 5 millimeters (about 1/5 of an inch) over the total distance of 60 centimeters (2 feet).

“People expect lasers to do certain things, like propagate in a straight line,” Polynkin told Scientific American. “The fact that a laser beam actually curves is quite unusual.”

Since the laser pulses are so intense, they zap the air they pass though, leaving behind an ionized plasma trail. That trail might be conductive enough to form a natural pathway for lightning to travel along, points out Jérôme Kasparian at the University of Geneva.

Kasparian, who’s been trying to coax lightning from thunderclouds using straight plasma beams, thinks Polynkin’s curved beams could be used to divert lightning toward or away from specific targets.

“It would be fun to see curved lightning discharges,” he told New Scientist.

Polynkin’s teams’ study was published in the April 10 issue of Science.

Scientists defy the laws of physics by bending laser beams

High-Intensity Lasers Throw Scientists a Curve

Scientific American | Apr 10, 2009

Researchers defy the laws of physics by making a laser beam bend

By Larry Greenemeier

GETTING BENT: The beam travels along a curved trajectory and leaves a bent plasma channel in its wake.

Ultra-intense lasers hold much promise for improving scientific tools such as laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), and deepening researchers’ understanding of atomic, molecular, optical and plasma physics. The enormous intensity of these lasers (attributed to the brief but powerful pulses of energy they emit), however, makes it difficult for scientists to fully characterize and understand them.

Researchers at the University of Arizona in Tucson (U.A.) and the University of Central Florida in Orlando (U.C.F.) report in Science this week that they have found a way to bend a high-intensity pulsed laser beam, a breakthrough they are hoping will help them better understand how ultra-intense laser pulses travel through the air and find potential new uses for the technology.

“People expect lasers to do certain things, like propagate in a straight line,” says lead researcher Pavel Polynkin, an associate research professor at U.A.’s College of Optical Sciences. “The fact that a laser beam actually curves is quite unusual.”

Polynkin and his colleagues were the first to report bending the beam of a pulsed laser. But a U.C.F. team of scientists (including current study co-authors Demetri Christodoulides and Georgios Siviloglou) in November 2007 demonstrated a continuous wave (or steady stream) laser that curved slightly, turning on its ear the assumption that lasers can travel only in straight lines.

The U.C.F. researchers dubbed the set of waveforms making up this curved laser the “Airy” beam, after English mathematician and astronomer Sir George Biddell Airy , who in the 1820s first articulated the science behind rainbows.

Rather than use a steady-stream laser beam, Polynkin and his team used a high-intensity laser that emits short blasts of light, also called “light bullets,” with each blast only 35 femtoseconds in duration. (A femtosecond is equal to one quadrillionth of a second.) Directly from the laser, these bullets are round (about 0.4 inch, or one centimeter, in diameter) and short (about 10 microns), corresponding to the ultrashort duration of the pulses. They resemble pennies, although much thinner and traveling at a speed of light. The researchers reshaped the profile of these pulses into that of an Airy beam using a thin plate of glass with a particular variation of thickness across the plate. “The phase shifts introduced by this plate turn the bullets from round in shape to the Airy beam that looks more like a triangle,” Polynkin says.

Nanotechnology is the next asbestos, union says

Health fear: The union movement is worried that workers in the nanotechnology sector might be facing a health time bomb

abc.net.au | Apr 14, 2009

By Ashley Hall

The union movement is worried that workers in the nanotechnology sector might be facing a health time bomb similar to asbestos.

Nanotechnology is now used in more than 800 everyday items, including car fuel lines, bed sheets, building materials, cosmetics and sunscreens.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) says there are growing fears about the safety of producing and using nano-materials, yet there are few specific protections for workers.

Scientists have been thinking about how to manipulate individual atoms and molecules since the late 1950s but it has only been in the past couple of decades that they have developed equipment that is up to the task of exploring nanotechnology.

Mike Ford is the associate director of the Institute for Nanoscale Technology at the University of Technology in Sydney.

“Nano means 10 to the [power of] minus nine metres, so that’s about one ten-thousandth of the width of a human hair,” he said.

“What we’re trying to do in nanotechnology is be able to engineer and control objects at that scale, so that’s like the scale of atoms and molecules.”

Mr Ford says nanotechnology is used in all sorts of products, some of which are used on the skin.

“Nano-scale sunscreens have been around a long time. They contain zinc oxide nano particles, which are typically 20 nanometres in diameter,” he said.

“And they’re still very, very good at absorbing UV, so [they're] protecting you from the sun’s ultraviolet light, but they’re clear.”

The fear is that nano-particles are so small, they could be easily inhaled, or pass through the skin, possibly causing diseases in a similar way to asbestos.

‘Abundance of caution’

And Mr Ford says familiar materials are reduced to the nano-scale, they can take on a fresh personality.

“Even though they might be dealing with substances that in terms of traditional chemical safety are very well known about, when you make things nanoscopic you turn them into nano-scale objects [and] they can behave in very, very different ways,” he said.

For example, in its standard form, aluminium oxide is considered safe for dentists to use in teeth.

But when it is reduced to the nano-scale, the same substance becomes explosive, so manufacturing and handling guidelines do not properly apply to the nanoscopic form.

The assistant secretary of the ACTU, Geoff Fary, says that is putting workers at risk.

“Remember when asbestos was introduced, it was considered to be a miracle product, and it wasn’t until many years later that we found the devastating effect it had,” he said.

“There should be an abundance of caution with nanotechnology to make sure that we’re not going to reap a similar awful harvest in years to come.

“We just think it’s time to adopt the precautionary principle: stop and have a really close look at what we’re doing.”

Mr Fary says nano-scale chemicals should be classified as new chemicals, and undergo all the appropriate safety checks.

The ACTU also wants the Federal Government to introduce product labelling, to ensure consumers and workers know when they are using goods produced with the help of nanotechology.

And it wants a registry kept of all the companies using nanotechnology.

Mr Fary says the ACTU is keen to see a new regulatory framework up and running before the end of the year.

But a spokeswoman for the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Kim Carr, says while the Government is very concerned for the health and safety of workers, it will not be introducing new regulations.

She says the Government understands that nanotechnology is a rapidly emerging area and says the Government will work to keep pace.

Robot controlled by human thought alone

Honda brain activity measuring device controlling ASIMO robot by human thought alone. (Photo: Business Wire)

Honda, ATR and Shimadzu Jointly Develop Brain-Machine Interface Technology Enabling Control of a Robot by Human Thought Alone

Business Wire | Mar 30, 2009

TOKYO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Honda Research Institute Japan Co., Ltd. (HRI-JP), a subsidiary of Honda R&D Co., Ltd., Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) and Shimadzu Corporation have collaboratively developed the world’s first Brain Machine Interface (BMI) technology that uses electroencephalography (EEG) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) along with newly developed information extraction technology to enable control of a robot by human thought alone. It does not require any physical movement such as pressing buttons. This technology will be further developed for the application to human-friendly products in the future by integrating it with intelligent technologies and/or robotic technologies.

During the human thought process, slight electrical current and blood flow change occur in the brain. The most important factor in the development of the BMI technology is the accuracy of measuring and analyzing these changes. The newly developed BMI technology uses EEG, which measures changes in electrical potential on the scalp, and NIRS, which measures changes in cerebral blood flow, with a newly developed information extraction technology which enables statistical processing of the complex information from these two types of sensors. As a result, it became possible to distinguish brain activities with high precision without any physical motion, but just human thought alone.

The BMI technology announced by HRI-JP and ATR in 2006 used a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner to measure brain activities. The large size and powerful magnetic field generated by the fMRI scanner limited the locations and conditions where it can be used. As the newly developed measuring device uses EEG and NIRS sensors, it can be transported to and used in various locations.

Test procedures for experiments with the new BMI

First, EEG and NIRS sensors are placed on the head of the user. Then, one of four pre-determined body part options is provided to the user. The user imagines moving that body part without making any physical movement. Changes in both brain waves and cerebral blood flow triggered by the brain activity are measured simultaneously. The data obtained are analyzed on a real-time basis to distinguish what the user imagined. Upon receiving the result, Honda’s ASIMO humanoid robot makes corresponding movements such as raising its arm or leg. The world’s highest level accuracy rate of more than 90% was achieved in the tests.

Since 2005, Honda and ATR have been conducting research and development of BMI technology exploring the potential of a new interface which connects people and machines. Honda is looking into the possibility of applying this technology to a people-friendly human interface through integration with other technologies such as artificial intelligence technologies and/or robotics technologies. In May 2006, Honda and ATR successfully developed a BMI technology which utilizes a fMRI scanner and achieved the first success in the world to control a robot hand by decoding brain activities without electrode array implants or special training of the user.

About BMI

While conventional machine-interface uses devices such as switches which need to be operated by a user’s hands or feet, BMI uses brain activity data measured by various devices and enables non-contact control of the machines (such as robots). Invasive BMI, which is widely studied by U.S. and European researchers, requires the surgical implant of electrode arrays, whereas non-invasive BMI uses sensors touching the user’s scalp.