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11/21/11--13:02: First ever image of fourth-order rainbow (chan 2542549)

Jeff Hecht, contributor

(Image: Michael Theusner)

Double rainbows became an internet meme when a man placed a video of one on YouTube -  complete with his hilariously exaggerated reaction, and sobbing voice, in the background.

Now a German sky photographer has gone not just one, but two, better: this photo reveals the first fourth-order rainbow ever reported - and only the second third-order rainbow to be photographed. It comes hot on the heels of the first ever photograph of a third-order rainbow - taken by another German sky photographer.

It's not obvious just by looking at the image, taken by Michael Theusner, that these two bows are tertiary and quaternary. That's because the image does not capture the primary and secondary (first and second order) rainbows, which are on the other side of the sky and so don't fit in the shot. But there is a clue that this is indeed what they are. 

Rainbows form when light is reflected to our eyes from inside falling raindrops.  A single reflection inside the drop produces a bright primary rainbow, which appears on the opposite side of the sky from the sun. Two reflections inside the drop form the fainter secondary bow, which is outside the primary rainbow, but still on the same side of the sky, opposite the sun. Although very beautiful, such double rainbows are fairly common.

By contrast, three reflections inside the drop produces the tertiary rainbow, which are much fainter and so rarely seen - and because those reflections take the light most of the way around the drop, it appears on the same side of the sky as the sun (this also makes it even harder to see).

Four reflections produce the fourth-order rainbow, close to - but even fainter than - the tertiary rainbow. Because this photo is taken into the sun, it must be a third and fourth order rainbow - as Theusner reports (Applied Optics, DOI:10.1364/AO.50.00F129).

As well as being the first image of a fourth order rainbow, it is also the first time the phenomenon has been reported seen in nature. Laboratory experiments with bright light sources have revealed even higher-order rainbows, but they aren't observed in nature because they are faint compared to the background sky.

The story of how Theusner bagged his bows begins with another German sky photographer, Michael Grossmann. On May 15 2011, he rushed to his favourite observation site as a rainstorm swept through. "I saw beautiful specimens of the primary and secondary rainbow," he wrote in his blog a few months ago.

When the rain came down harder he saw a dark cloud bank on the left side of the sun, "providing ideal conditions for a possible sighting of the third order rainbow", he wrote. He thought he saw a very faint arc in the proper place, and snapped a series of photos with his digital camera. Initially the images showed nothing, but after a bit of digital processing, "I saw it immediately. A bow!".

This time-lapse animation shows the original shot and three different processed versions:




He describes the details in Applied Optics (DOI:10.1364/AO.50.00F134).  

A month later, Theusner was photographing a similar late-afternoon storm. When the primary rainbow appeared, he realised that dark clouds near the sun created the same conditions Grossmann had seen, so he snapped a series of photos trying to capture the tertiary rainbow, although he did not see it visually. 

At home, he stacked the photos together and, with a little adjustment, saw a tertiary rainbow, which you can see faintly here. In his blog he writes that an unsharp mask, the same technique used by Grossmann, "revealed something unexpected in one of the stacked images ... another rainbow close to the 3rd order bow, but, with reversed colours" (that image can be seen here and below). That, he realised, was the fourth-order rainbow.

A bit more processing produced the photo at the top by enhancing the rainbows and making the foreground look more natural.

Next internet meme, anyone?




11/21/11--13:02: Australia's abused asylum seekers paid multi-millions (chan 2542549)

Wendy Zukerman, Asia-Pacific reporter

The Australian government has been forced to pay A$23 million (£14.7 million) since 2000 to asylum seekers as compensation for being unlawfully detained or for sustaining injuries in government-run detention centres.

According to The Sydney Morning Herald, reports released by the Australian government under freedom-of-information legislation show that there have been 404 claims for compensation from people in detention centres since 2000, including 293 claims of unlawful detention and 111 claims of negligence.

Another report, released by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, shows that there are currently more than 4000 people in immigration detention.

Under Australian law, an asylum seeker - someone seeking international protection who has not yet been adjudged a refugee - is immediately placed in detention while their application for refugee status is processed.

"The majority of people that we represent have been injured psychologically through post-traumatic stress disorder or depression," says Elizabeth O'Shea, a social justice lawyer at Maurice Blackburn Lawyers in Melbourne, Australia. Whether these problems are a result of detention or from previous experiences, she says the government owes all detained asylum seekers a duty of care to avoid mental and physical injury that could reasonably be foreseen.

Unlawful detention claims arise when a person is given refugee status but is not freed, as a result of an administrative error, for example. A spokesman for the Department of Immigration and Citizenship says that unlawful detention actions often include other claims, such as allegations of personal injury.

A decade ago, an alliance of Australian doctors lobbied for improved conditions for asylum seekers, but little has changed since then. A key issue is delays in processing applications.

Statistics from July show that more than two-thirds of Australia's asylum seekers had then been in detention for six months or longer and more than a third had been detained for a year or more.

"The longer they are in detention, the more problems are likely to develop," says Kathy Eagar at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia. According to Eagar, asylum seekers' psychiatric problems arise from the ongoing uncertainty of their claims for refugee status and are often compounded by the traumatic experiences they have left behind.

A review in The Lancet on the mental health of refugee children, published earlier this year, confirmed that detention after migration can be psychologically more harmful than the adversity suffered before migration.

Several mental-health groups are now calling for increased access to psychiatric services for asylum seekers in Australia.




11/21/11--13:02: Radiation in Tokyo not from Fukushima (chan 2542549)

Melissae Fellet, reporter

A radioactive hotspot was discovered on Thursday along a Tokyo sidewalk.

The mayor of Setagaya, a residential neighbourhood in the city, said the radiation was likely to have come from old bottles underneath a nearby abandoned house, according to the Japan Times.

A local radiation-monitoring group alerted local officials to the site last week. The officials measured 2.7 microsieverts of radioactivity an hour along a fence next to the sidewalk.

Exposure at that rate would lead to a yearly radiation dose of 14 millisieverts. The Japanese government evacuates an area when the yearly radiation exposure exceeds 20 millisieverts.

The Japanese education ministry speculates that the bottles contain radium-226, according to Japanese government broadcaster NHK. That makes it unlikely that the radiation is fallout from the Fukushima plant disaster in March.

Caesium and iodine, the main radioactive elements released from the nuclear plant, have travelled around Japan and have even reached California.

The bottles could have been under the house for some time and only detected now because more residents have personal radiation monitors.

It's not clear where the bottles came from, and the presence of radium has not yet been confirmed. But radium was in common use in the early 1900s in medicines and glow-in-the-dark paint for clocks, watches and instrument gauges in old aircraft. If it is radium, it makes sense that it's still radioactive - the half-life for radium-226 is 1600 years.

"I love networks of radiation detectors," Ferenc Dalonki-Veress, a scientist at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, in California. "But there's also a negative side. Something like this may have been there before Fukushima and then it gets blamed on Fukushima."




11/21/11--13:02: As Bangkok evacuates, city could be flooded for a month (chan 2542549)

Wendy Zukerman, Asia-Pacific reporter

(Image: Altaf Qadri/AP/PA)


Bangkok's main river broke its banks overnight forcing thousands of residents to flee the flooding Thai capital.

Last week, Thailand's government was confident that Bangkok's elaborate scheme of flood walls, canals, dikes and underground tunnels would protect the city of nine million people from flooding.

But quoting governor Sukhumbhand Paribatra, Reuters reports that 90 per cent of Bangkok's northern Don Muang district is under water and another fifteen city districts were threatened by floods this weekend. "Massive water is coming," Sukhumbhand said.


Chao Phraya River, which snakes around Bangkok, swelled after floodwaters from the north teamed with increasingly high tides. The BBC reports that Sukhumbhand issued an evacuation alert for residents in three northern districts. "This is the first time I am using the term 'evacuation', the first time I'm really asking you to leave," Mr Sukhumbhand said.

Thailand's prime minister, Yingluck Shinwatra, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that much of Bangkok is now expected to see floodwaters of between 10 centimetres and 1.5 metres depending on area, diversion strategies and the strength of dykes. "After assessing the situation, we expect floodwater to remain in Bangkok for around two weeks to one month before going into the sea," she told reporters on Wednesday.

According to Reuters, this deluge is caused by unusually heavy monsoon rain.

It is Thailand's worst flooding in fifty years. Since mid July 373 people have died, and the waters have disrupted the lives of nearly 2.5 million. More than 113,000 people are in shelters and 720,000 people seeking medical attention.




11/21/11--13:02: Bison migration triggers annual hunting season (chan 2542549)

Chelsea Whyte, contributor



(Image: Norbert Rosing/ National Geographic/Getty)

For the wild bison herds of Yellowstone National Park, home on the range may be a little less cosy this time of year. Several hundred bison could be culled in a controversial programme aimed at limiting the spread of disease to cattle as the herds migrate out of the park's high altitudes and down into the warmer climes of Montana.

The state has approved the annual cull to reduce the chance of spreading brucellosis, which can cause miscarriage, to cattle. The disease has been eradicated in the US except in the Yellowstone region.

In a proposal obtained by the Associated Press, state officials have called for the removal of 200 female bison, 50 calves, 50 yearlings, and 60 bull bison. They may be shot by hunters or captured for relocation or slaughter, with animals that test positive for disease exposure being targeted for slaughter.

But others say the threat of brucellosis transmission is overblown. Stephany Seay, a spokeswoman for the Buffalo Field Campaign, told West Yellowstone News that the cull is "a political tactic used by the cattle industry to maintain control over land use. In fact, there has never been a documented case of wild bison transmitting brucellosis in the state of Montana."

The first bison has already been taken down 16 kilometres outside of West Yellowstone, Montana, by first-time bison hunter Bobby Sutton. Sutton estimated the animal weighed about 800 kilograms.

Tens of millions of bison once roamed North America, but only about 20,000 wild bison remain.




11/21/11--13:02: Egyptian mummification method resurrected in the UK (chan 2542549)

Jo Marchant, consultant



(Image: Channel 4: Mummifying Alan: Egypt's last secret)

If you're at all squeamish, please look away now. A pair of British scientists - closely followed by a film crew - have tested their theories on ancient Egyptian mummification by making a human mummy of their own.

The volunteer was Alan Billis, a taxi driver from Torquay, UK, who donated his body to the project after being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. He died in January.



(Image: Channel 4: Mummifying Alan: Egypt's last secret)

Stephen Buckley, a chemist at the University of York, UK, has been studying ancient Egyptian mummification practices for the last two decades. Working with archaeologist Jo Fletcher, also at the University of York, he has analysed tissue samples from mummies using techniques such as gas chromatography mass spectrometry to identify the materials used, including salt, beeswax, oils and resins.

The pair have also experimented with hundreds of pigs' legs (apparently a close substitute for human tissue) in a shed equipped with a heater and dehumidifer to recreate the hot, dry conditions of Egypt.

Just how the ancient Egyptians preserved bodies so well has always been a bit of a mystery. They never wrote down how they did it, but the Greek historian Herodotus described the process in 450 BC. He said that the key ingredient was natron - a form of natural salt found in Egypt.



(Image: Channel 4: Mummifying Alan: Egypt's last secret)

Historians had assumed that dry salt was used to draw water out of the corpse, but Buckley and Fletcher have another theory, that the body was placed in a bath of liquid natron solution, before being dried out afterwards.

They've tested their idea on Billis, in a mummification process that took three months. Experts in human decomposition seem impressed by how well his body is preserved, with Billis's wife Jan also satisfied with the result. "I'm the only woman in the country who's got a mummy for a husband," she says.

But will he last as well as pharaohs such as Tutankhamun? We'll only have to wait 3300 years to find out.

Mummifying Alan: Egypt's last secret will air on Channel 4 in the UK at 9 pm on Monday 24 October



(Image: Channel 4: Mummifying Alan: Egypt's last secret)




11/21/11--13:02: Today on New Scientist: 7 October 2011 (chan 2542549)

Full text RSS - You can now subscribe to the full text of Today on New Scientist.

Astrophile: Star exploded? Just another day in Arp 220

If our galaxy was a couple of kids with sparklers, Arp 220 would be the most eye-popping fireworks display you've ever seen

Post-doc: Career uncertainty is wearing us down

A new report reveals high levels of dissatisfaction with the structure of scientific careers - what are the pressures on young scientists?

Why size matters in the plant world too

Male animals are typically larger in big-bodied species, but females outdo them in smaller species. It turns out that many plants also obey "Rensch's rule"

Peter Atkins reveals the private life of atoms

Chemist Peter Atkins explains why he decided to illustrate his own book to reveal the hurly-burly life of atoms

Friday Illusion: Dizzying silhouettes change direction

Watch a quartet of rotating people twirl together and see how your mind interprets the motion

Cheatobiotics: Send in the subversive superbugs

Breeding strains of bacteria too lazy to attack us could help the fight against deadly bugs like MRSA. Clare Wilson reports

Photo reveals turbulent gas in the void between stars

The first picture of the roiling gas that fills the space between stars reveals a turbulent expanse

Russian tigers threatened by dog disease

Wild Russian tigers are the latest victims of canine distemper, which has long been a scourge of wild animals

Diabetic rats cured with their own stem cells

The cells, taken from the brain via the nose, have been coaxed into becoming insulin factories in the rat pancreas

Venus has an ozone layer, too

Its discovery on the hellishly hot planet suggests that astrobiologists must tread carefully when using ozone as a potential signpost for life

Ancient cave paintings threatened by tourist plans

Prehistoric art could be irreparably damaged if the Altamira cave in Spain is opened to the public

NASA's winning electric aircraft take flight

The winning planes at the NASA Green Flight Challenge consumed the electrical equivalent of about two litres of gas per passenger for a 322-kilometre flight




12/04/11--08:27: Neutrino fever produces media storm (chan 2542549)

Lisa Grossman, reporter

The internet is hungry for news about neutrinos, and it is being fed – even if that news is, well, old.

Last week, the OPERA collaboration announced the results of new tests that bolstered their stunning result, first announced in September, that neutrinos go faster than light.

The saga of those Einstein-defying neutrinos appeared to take a dramatic turn today, with a flood of news stories reporting that a second experiment in the same lab showed that the subatomic particles are obeying the speed limit after all.

Time and repeated experiments will tell which group is right. But it bears mentioning that the results of the second experiment are not new. A number of outlets – including New Scientist – reported it a month ago after a paper about it was posted online.

The feeding frenzy seems to have been sparked by a press release that landed in our inboxes this morning from the UK Science Media Centre, "an independent venture working to promote the voices, stories and views of the scientific community to the national news media when science is in the headlines". The centre offered a comment from physicist Jim Al-Khalili of the University of Surrey, who, when the initial news broke in September, had publicly vowed to eat his boxer shorts on live television if the result held up.

When the news broke on Friday that the OPERA team had redone their experiment with a new and improved particle beam, and the troubling neutrinos didn't go away, Al-Khalili's inbox apparently overflowed with people demanding he follow through. As he blogged on Friday:

"I have been prompted to write this blog, instead of chilling with a glass of wine after a busy week and watching a movie on TV, because of the flurry of comments via email and Twitter that I have received today regarding the latest news from the Opera neutrino experiment... Now, many people mistakenly believe that this second repeated experiment is the confirmation needed for me to fetch the ketchup."

He went on to explain how a pair of theorists at Boston University, Andrew Cohen and Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow, predicted on 29 September – less than a week after OPERA announced their original results – that such speedy neutrinos should leave a tell-tale trail of particles in their wakes. As we wrote at the time:



In the paper, Glashow and Cohen point out that if neutrinos can travel faster than light, then when they do so they should sometimes radiate an electron paired with its antimatter equivalent – a positron – through a process called Cerenkov radiation, which is analogous to a sonic boom. Each electron-positron pair should carry away a large chunk of the neutrinos' energy: Cohen and Glashow calculated that at the end of the experiment, the neutrinos should have had energies no higher than about 12 gigaelectronvolts. But OPERA saw plenty of neutrinos with energies upwards of 40 GeV.

The ICARUS collaboration, which has been studying the same beam of neutrinos as OPERA since last year, looked for just that sort of radiation, and didn't find any. They put out a paper on 17 October saying: "Our results therefore refute a superluminal interpretation of the OPERA result." Again, we and others wrote about it at the time.

Al-Khalili is not a member of the OPERA or ICARUS teams, and the memo from the Science Media Centre was presented as an "expert reaction". But many in the media reacted as if the ICARUS paper was hot off the press, even as they linked to an updated preprint dated 22 October and physics blogs from the same week.

It just goes to show how desperate we all are to hear something definitive about these neutrinos. Stay tuned to our ultimate guide to neutrino news.




12/04/11--08:27: Flerovium and livermorium may join periodic table (chan 2542549)

Jeff Hecht, contributor

It's time to pencil flerovium (Fl) and livermorium (Lv) at the bottom of the periodic table. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry announced the proposed names today for elements 114 and 116, which were discovered more than 10 years ago, but only formally accepted as valid in June. Final approval will come only after a five-month comment period.

The names recognise the two groups which collaborated on the discovery, from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. The team crashed ions of calcium, element 20, into a target of curium, element 96, to form element 116, which quickly decayed into element 114. They also produced element 114 directly by firing calcium ions at plutonium.

Flerovium is named after the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, part of the Joint Institute in Dubna, where the short-lived atoms were made. That lab was named for Russian physicist Georgiy Flerov, a pioneer in heavy-ion research, who established the US-Russia research partnership in 1989 together with Ken Hulet of Livermore. Flerov died in 1990; Hulet died last year.

Livermorium was named for the Livermore lab, established by Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller in 1952. Element 103, Lawrencium, was named in 1965 for Lawrence, who received the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for inventing the cyclotron and died in 1958 at the age of 57. Element 52, tellurium, has nothing to do with Teller; it was named in 1798 after the Latin word "tellus" for earth, more than a century before the controversial father of the US hydrogen bomb was born in 1908.

Too few atoms of the new elements have been produced to study their chemistry, but flerovium is just below lead in the periodic table, and livermorium is just below polonium and tellurium. Elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 also have been reported, but remain unnamed.

Researchers hope that flerovium and livermorium are stepping stones to an "island of stability" where heavier elements would have isotopes with long enough lifetimes to be studied more extensively or used practically.




12/12/11--09:19: Neutrino misbehaviour suggested 50 years ago (chan 2542549)

Michael Brooks, consultant

Read more: "Neutrinos: Complete guide to the ghostly particle"

Can neutrinos travel into the past? That's the title of a New Scientist news article from 1963. It reports on a fascinating paper: "Neutrinos and the Arrow of Time in Cosmology", which suggests an experiment involving a neutrino emitter and detector – unimaginable at the time.

The author of the 1962 paper was Jayant Narlikar, a Cambridge physicist who, along with Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi, believed there was no start to the universe – no "big bang", as Hoyle so memorably (and mockingly) put it.

Space-time in an expanding universe changes over time, so the full quantum description of a neutrino in that type of universe is different in the past and the future. The paper analyses how neutrinos would behave in both expanding and unchanging "steady state" universes.

Narlikar found that in a universe that is expanding after a big bang event, neutrinos would turn up at a detector before they were emitted. "Only future-going neutrinos were possible in the steady state cosmology while the ever-expanding big bang models gave neutrinos travelling into the past," Narlikar told me. If you see firm evidence of neutrinos arriving at the detector before they are sent, that can't happen in a steady state cosmology, so the big bang has to be right. Or equivalently, no faster-than-light neutrinos, no big bang.

New Scientist declared that the paper, "when stripped of its mathematics, reads like high-class science-fiction". The writer points out that "no practical details are given so now it is presumably up to the experimental physicists."

The experimental physicists took half a century, but we can now measure the comings and goings of neutrinos – as shown by all the fuss surrounding the faster-than-light neutrinos supposedly seen in Italy's Gran Sasso lab.

In fact, faster-than-light neutrinos can be interpreted as travelling into the past, as this Guardian Q&A describes.

According to Narlikar's 1962 paper, the Gran Sasso results could be seen as tentatively offering support for the big bang theory – if we could find a way to test that they are indeed travelling backwards in time. "I have not been able to relate the idea to the 'faster than light' neutrinos since there are no causality checks to decide if they are travelling in the past," Narlikar told me.

Narlikar's idea may not solve the mystery of faster-than-light neutrinos, and it may not even shed much light on it – the details of the analysis might be wrong, or be filled with old-fashioned ideas. But I thought it was fascinating that a 50-year-old New Scientist story touched on a topic that is all over the headlines today.

The other interesting thing is that, apart from a few die-hards, no one now doubts the big bang theory is correct anyway. Almost everyone doubts the Gran Sasso results. Welcome to science: it's not about cast-iron, dictatorial results that leave no room for doubt. Instead, we weigh the merits of each piece of evidence.

The widespread acceptance of the big bang is due to the cosmic microwave background radiation, discovered not long after Narlikar's paper was published. Science built on the discovery of this radiation, the first light to travel through space after the big bang, has allowed us to reconstruct the entire history of the universe.

But Narlikar, Hoyle and others never accepted that these observations consigned the steady state universe to the dustbin of physics. Narlikar still says the widespread acceptance of the big bang is the result of "prejudice".

Equally, if the Gran Sasso results are disproved to the satisfaction of most, some will always refuse to accept the consensus. And, paradoxically, that is good news: to keep it on track, to stave off error, science requires well-qualified contrarian challengers.

Michael Brooks is a New Scientist consultant and the author of Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science




01/05/12--08:32: Ohio magnitude 4.0 earthquake linked to fracking (chan 2542549)

Michael Marshall, environment reporter

(Image: Amy Sancetta/AP/Press Association Images)

Ohio has suspended work at five deep wells used to dispose of waste water from natural gas extraction, following evidence linking the operations to a magnitude 4.0 earthquake on New Year's Eve.

It is the latest case of an earthquake being linked to the pumping of water into underground wells. Two small earthquakes in the UK last year were also blamed on the process.

Although it was relatively small, the quake will only add to the controversy around fracking, a process used to extract natural gas from otherwise inaccessible deposits. Fracking has also been blamed for contamination of drinking water.

Properly known as hydraulic fracture, fracking involves pumping pressurised water into underground rocks to shatter them and release natural gas trapped inside. But as the Christian Science Monitor points out, it was not this dramatic process itself that was to blame for the Ohio quakes. They appear to have been caused by the disposal of the waste water after fracking. This water is pumped into deep wells, and as more water is added, the pressure can gradually rise to levels high enough to cause relatively large earthquakes.


Scientific American explains how the quake was linked to the disposal wells:

Nine small earthquakes had already occurred between March and November 2011 within an eight-kilometer radius of a wastewater injection well run by Northstar Disposal Services. Because quakes are otherwise rare in the Youngstown area... Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) [placed] mobile seismographs in the vicinity to better determine what was going on... The epicenters of the two holiday quakes were within 100 meters of each other, and within 0.8 kilometer of the injection well... The quakes were caused by slippage along a fault at about the same depth as the injection site, almost three kilometers down.

Reuters adds that the quakes are far from the first case of earthquakes apparently triggered by the disposal of water underground:

A quake of 4.2 magnitude in Ashtabula, Ohio, on January 26, 2001, was believed to be due to deep-well injection... And in 1987 there was an incident with a correlation to high pressure deep well injection.

What's more, NPR notes that gold mining in South Africa in the 1960s was linked to small earthquakes.

According to Arthur McGarr of the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, the size of the earthquake depends on the volume of water injected. When the volume of water doubles, the maximum possible quake magnitude rises about 0.4.




01/23/12--19:59: Obama rejects controversial Keystone oil pipeline (chan 2542549)

Michael Marshall, environment reporter

US president Barack Obama has rejected plans for a vast oil pipeline reaching from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, The Washington Post is reporting.

The Keystone XL pipeline has been criticised by environmentalists, but promoted by Republicans because they argue it would create jobs.

Canadian energy infrastructure firm, TransCanada had applied for a permit to build the pipeline. It would ferry bitumen from the Alberta oil sands to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. Environmentalists cited the enormous greenhouse gas emissions from the fuel that would be produced, as well as the risk to the sensitive ecosystem of the Nebraska Sandhills, through which the pipeline was planned to pass.

Last November the government announced a new environmental review of the project, delaying the final decision until 2013 - after the upcoming presidential election. However, late last year Republicans forced the government to make a decision within 60 days.

The rejection is not final - TransCanada will have the opportunity to reapply for a permit to build the pipeline along a route that avoids the Sandhills region. Still, Republicans - including US presidential candidate Mitt Romney - have reacted by excoriating Obama for his decision.

By turning down the permit, Romney said "the president demonstrates a lack of seriousness about bringing down unemployment, restoring economic growth and achieving energy independence", according to the Post's article.



And Agence France-Presse quotes John Boehner, speaker of the US House of Representatives and a Republican as saying:


If we don't build this pipeline to bring that Canadian oil, and take out the North Dakota oil and deliver it to our refineries in the Gulf Coast, that oil is going to be shipped out to the Pacific Ocean and be sold to the Chinese... This is not good for our country.

Canada is also developing another pipeline to carry bitumen away from the Alberta tar sands. The proposed Northern Gateway would terminate on the West Coast, in British Columbia, where it could be shipped across the Pacific to China.


By contrast, many environmentalists regard Keystone as a key test of Obama's green credentials, which have taken a battering since he came to office.




01/23/12--19:59: Bird flu researchers stand down for 60 days (chan 2542549)

Debora MacKenzie, contributor



Computer artwork of the bird flu virus (Image: PASIEKA/SPL/Getty)

The world's top flu virologists have vowed to stop working on any experiments that could lead to the H5N1 bird flu virus becoming more transmissible – at least, for the next 60 days. It's a good gesture, but whether 60 days is enough to really deal with the Pandora's box they have opened is another matter.

As we reported in September, two labs – in the Netherlands and the US – finally breached the genetic barrier that stopped H5N1 bird flu from spreading easily through the air between mammals – in this case, ferrets, who get flu a lot like we do.

H5N1 hasn't done that in nature, which is what stops it from going pandemic in mammals like us. Frighteningly, the virus was just as deadly in ferrets after it became easy to catch. Now, H5N1 kills around half the humans who catch it. If H5N1 stayed that lethal and became as easy to catch as ordinary flu – as the ferret virus did – civilisation might not survive the resulting pandemic.

The journals and the research and biosafety community in the US are now debating how to publish that research, which details to withhold about what made the virus transmissible (just in case a bioterrorist is interested), and paradoxically, how to make those details available to virologists who must now look for the mutations in H5N1 in the wild. Virologists must also, as Ron Fouchier of the Dutch lab noted yesterday, ensure that they don't inadvertently create H5N1 viruses with those mutations in low-containment labs. He checked, and apparently someone had a virus with four of the five mutations required. Eek.

So virologists have pledged to stop for a bit while they decide, I hope, who will do what and with what safety precautions. Sixty days doesn't seem very long for that. Certainly not long enough to bring all the scientists who might do this work into an organisation where peer pressure and careful deliberation will establish norms and guidelines that will, with luck, prevent anyone from releasing a killer.

Previous efforts at corralling researchers for the greater good have taken more than just two months. In 1973 US researchers started to worry that their experiments putting novel combinations of DNA into living bacteria might inadvertently create a monster. In July 1974, Paul Berg of Stanford University – who went on to win a Nobel in 1980 – called on the world's scientists to observe a moratorium on all such work until they could discuss what safety guidelines were needed.

There was "widespread consternation" but "the moratorium was universally observed", Berg later recalled. After eight months, DNA scientists met at the seaside town of Asilomar, California, and set up restrictions on handling recombinant organisms that formed the basis for modern biotechnology. Over the next few months, work on recombinant DNA gradually resumed.

Gregory Petsko of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, has observed that it was easy, then, to get everyone doing the work into a room. Today, I'm sure it was quite a feat just getting all the top flu researchers to agree on the moratorium and its wording. If all the people on today's statement were in a plane crash, top-of-the-line flu research would largely shut down for a bit.

But the second string labs would pick it up. That's why it's important that the big cats are calling time out.

Of course, it is also important that they do eventually resume the work. As they say, "more research is needed to determine how influenza viruses in nature become human pandemic threats, so that they can be contained".

But as Petsko also notes, Asilomar worked because the scientists themselves drew up the safety guidelines for the work that followed – and those evolved as the science progressed. That is what we need now. It will take longer than 60 days to arrange a real Asilomar for the world's virologists.

In 60 days maybe you can reassure the public – and that seems to be what this is about. In today's statement the researchers "recognize that we and the rest of the scientific community need to clearly explain the benefits of this important research and the measures taken to minimize its possible risks".

Explain. They need to do way more than explain, frankly. This smacks to me of scientists feeling that all is well, and they must simply take time to explain to uninformed people, who may otherwise cause a fuss, why they should not be worried.

That's not good enough. They need to convince people – including those who are concerned with overseeing biosafety – that they really are taking the best measures they can to reduce the risk while taking the research forward as needed. They need to set up a global consulting mechanism for the world's flu virologists to ensure that the rules are understood, applied and refined. They need an organisational structure that can reach scientific consensus on risks and remedies, and then take that consensus to the governments that enforce safety rules and prepare for pandemics – perhaps a structure similar to what the climate scientists have organised.

But a statement like this, and a moratorium – even if it's only a fraction of an Asilomar moment – is a good start.




01/23/12--19:59: 'Newt Skywalker' wins South Carolina primary (chan 2542549)

Peter Aldhous, San Francisco bureau chief



(Image: Richard Ellis/Getty)

Following his stunning victory in the Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich is being dubbed the comeback kid. This famously combative politician, often referred to as the GOP's "attack dog", has another nickname that should amuse New Scientist readers: Newt Skywalker.

The moniker stems from Gingrich's longstanding interest in technology – allied to an expansive vision that sometimes seems to blur the line between science fact and science fiction. As Politico explains:

"Gingrich earned the Star Wars-era nickname in the 1980s and '90s – back when his high-tech, futuristic proselytizing landed his face, bathed in electric lime, on the cover of Wired."

Gingrich was selected by Scientific American earlier this month as the Republican candidate with the most convincing geek credentials. He has enthusiastically backed investment in research and science education as vital to spurring economic growth, and has a passion for zoos and conservation.

But some of Gingrich's wilder statements on technological issues will cause raised eyebrows from those with their feet planted firmly on earth. Gingrich's technological vision has extended to discussing lunar colonies to harvest minerals, deploying lasers to knock out North Korean missiles, and apocalyptic warnings about the US being sent crashing into a new dark age by an electromagnetic pulse from an airborne nuclear blast.

The ease with which Gingrich embraces speculative technologies relates to a more general criticism of the candidate: he is a fount of big ideas, but often has trouble distinguishing those worth pursuing from the mere fanciful.

His shifting position on climate change – apparently to triangulate with the intense scepticism that has become Republican orthodoxy – may also give scientists pause for thought. As recently as 2007, he backed cap-and-trade to control US greenhouse emissions, and in 2008 he made a video for Al Gore's Alliance for Climate protection with Democrat Nancy Pelosi, then House speaker, in which he said:

"[W]e do agree that our country must take action to address climate change ... If enough of us demand action from our leaders, we can spark the innovation that we need."

Now Gingrich says "there is no settled scientific conclusion" on whether human activities are causing global warming, and earlier this month he abruptly cut a chapter contributed by a prominent climate scientist from a book on environmental issues to be published under his name.

This week should provide a good opportunity to judge Gingrich's positions on space exploration, as he is promising a "visionary speech" in Florida, home to NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

Space enthusiasts will be watching closely, given Gingrich's previous withering criticism of NASA. At a debate in December, he had this to say:

"You have a National Aeronautics and Space Administration which has currently got no vehicles that can get to the space station. Has it occurred to you to wonder what the billions are for and what the thousands of employees are doing? They sit around and they think space."

In an interview in Florida a few months earlier, Gingrich emphasised the role of the private sector and set his sights on Mars (giving him some common ground with the Obama administration):

I think that we frankly ought to ... put up a big prize, challenge the private sector, and get back into space within two years, and in an aggressive way. We ought to set a goal of getting to the moon, getting permanently on Mars."

Newt Skywalker, or future president? Voters in the Florida Republican primary will get their say on 31 January.




01/27/12--09:21: Environmental fears may scupper Obama's energy vision (chan 2542549)

Peter Aldhous, San Francisco bureau chief

(Image: SIPA USA/SIPA/Rex Features)

Interactive graphic: "The shale gas boom"

US energy independence, especially through the expansion of natural gas production from deep shale beds, was a major theme of President Barack Obama's 2012 State of the Union address. Addressing both houses of Congress, he said:

"We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years, and my Administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy. Experts believe this will support more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade."

But as New Scientist reports this week, public fears about the health and environmental risks of "fracking", the method used to liberate gas from shale, could undermine those plans. Even though some scientists argue that the risks are overstated, growing opposition threatens to stall the expansion of shale gas production.

Obama's focus on shale gas was not surprising. In an election year, energy and the jobs associated with it are a major battleground. Obama is vulnerable to attacks on the issue following his rejection of plans to build the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have moved bitumen from the Alberta oil sands to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico.

Republican opponents were quick to attack Obama's boasts that domestic oil and gas production have risen during his presidency. After the speech, California Representative Darrell Issa had this to say:

"It's just a blind accident, if in fact we are producing more oil or natural gas than in previous years, because it's not because of any of his efforts."

In his address, Obama talked of "a future where we're in control of our own energy", echoing an energy independence theme adopted by US presidents since Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s. Can he succeed where all his predecessors have failed?