Planet Nature

All Nature’s swine flu coverage is collected on our news special page. These regular updates on The Great Beyond round up the latest from other news sources around the globe.

The UK has decided that it cannot contain swine flu, and has moved its health service onto a treatment footing instead.

Health minister Andy Burnham told the House of Commons yesterday that over the last week a “considerable rise” in H1N1 with several hundred new cases every day.

“Cases are doubling every week, and on this trend we could see more than 100,000 cases per day by the end of August—although I stress that that is only a projection,” he said. “As cases continue to rise, we have reached the next step in our management of the disease.”

A fourth person in the country died from the virus today.

Apollo 11 astronauts would leave a miniature inscription, an American flag, and a plaque on the Moon to commemorate their landing, according to a NASA press release.

The inscription contained quotations from US Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, messages of goodwill from the leaders of 73 countries, the names of congressional leaders and members of four congressional committees responsible for NASA legislation and the names of NASA’s management, past and present. The message was shrunk 200 times and etched on a 3.6 cm silicon disc using electronic circuit-board-making techniques.

The crew would also erect a US flag held up with tubing.

Finally, the descent stage of the Eagle, which would be left behind, bore a plaque with images of the Earth and read: "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind." President Nixon's name appeared beneath the names of the Apollo 11 crew.

Photo: NASA

“We plan to use the sequence to establish a breeding programme for bluefin tuna as most aquaculture farmers presently use wild juveniles. We want to establish a complete aquaculture system that will produce fish that have good strength, are resistant to disease, grow quickly and taste delicious.”
Kazumasa Ikuta, director of research at the Yokohama-based Fisheries Research Agency, says he expects to have sequenced the bluefin tuna genome within two months (Daily Telegraph).

“The dinosaurs have been nicknamed after characters created by poet Banjo Paterson who is said to have written Waltzing Matilda in Winton in 1885.”
Anna Bligh, premier of Queensland, announces the discovery of three new dinosaurs in Australia: Australovenator wintonensis, Diamantinasaurus matildae and Wintonotitan wattsi (Brisbane Times).

“This is a pattern that we hadn’t really recognized before.”
Chris Landsea, atmospheric scientist at the hurricane research division of NOAA in the US, comments on a new paper about El Niño and hurricanes (Science News).

“[We need a] network of people involved in intelligence-gathering to be able to deal swiftly with even the faintest hint of revolution.”
An un-named vice-chancellor at a UK university reveals his paranoia (The Times Higher).

Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman took a "sight-seeing" tour of the Soviet Union in the early summer of 1969. His visit coincided with the Moon landing, the culmination of the long space race, but on 3 July his focus was on lobbying for a joint Soviet-American mission, a topic his Soviet counterparts had alternately encouraged and discouraged in previous years.

The two countries did eventually run a joint mission, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, docking a surplus Apollo command module from a cancelled lunar mission to a Soyuz capsule in1975. NASA provides a history here: http://bit.ly/xIIDP with specific reference to the personal relationships between astronauts and cosmonauts here: http://bit.ly/pxLvp

Just in case the world’s public were growing inured to tales of rising sea level, drought and crop failure, scientists have come up with a new reason climate change is bad. It makes sheep shrink.

Despite the fact that larger sheep are more likely to survive when young, the Soay sheep (Ovis aries) on the Scottish island of Hirta have been shrinking in size over the last 20 years. Tim Coulson, of Imperial College London, UK, and his colleagues have been working out which of the myriad of possible factors is most responsible for this change.

In Science they report their analysis of the body-weights and life-history of female sheep from Soay. They found that the animals are not growing as quickly as they once were and that more of the smaller sheep were surviving their early years.

“In the past, only the big, healthy sheep and large lambs that had piled on weight in their first summer could survive the harsh winters on Hirta,” says Coulson (press release).

“But now, due to climate change, grass for food is available for more months of the year, and survival conditions are not so challenging – even the slower growing sheep have a chance of making it, and this means smaller individuals are becoming increasingly prevalent in the population.”

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has sent back its first pictures since it went into orbit round the Moon.

“Our first images were taken along the moon’s terminator – the dividing line between day and night – making us initially unsure of how they would turn out,” says Mark Robinson of Arizona State University in Tempe. principal investigator for the probe’s camera (press release).

“Because of the deep shadowing, subtle topography is exaggerated, suggesting a craggy and inhospitable surface. In reality, the area is similar to the region where the Apollo 16 astronauts safely explored in 1972.”

The pictures, he says, show that LRO is nearly ready to get on with its mission of looking for potential landing sites and resources for any future return of humans to the Moon.

More
New focus on the Moon – Arizona State
Hi def Moon shots from 2007 Japanese Moon mission – The Great Beyond
From 2008: a newly processed 42-year-old Moon image taken in 1966 by the Lunar Orbiter 1 (LO1) – The Great Beyond

Image: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University

Ian Fleming is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Chemistry in the University of Cambridge, and worked on a range of topics in the general area of synthetic organic chemistry. He is best known as a pioneer in applying organosilicon chemistry to control the regio- and stereo-chemistry of a variety of organic reactions.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

A short answer is: because it was transparently interesting. But it is much harder to identify why I found it so. When I was eleven or so, I had a chemistry set - an almost useless one - which I augmented with purchases from a chemist's shop over the road from my school, with a Bunsen burner, conical flasks, glass tubing, funnels etc., and with a few items my father brought home from his work as a metallurgist, like copper sulfate, and concentrated hydrochloric and sulfuric acid. The first few years of school chemistry seemed to me obvious. The chemistry master, Mr Timbrell, had written an excellent book with the School Certificate syllabus in it; I read it, understood it and remembered it. I repeated what I could of it at home, and at school sat at the back of the class playing chess while he droned on and on. The subject really came alive when we got to organic chemistry in the sixth form, taught by Stan Featherstone, who arranged for me to stay after school and carry out experiments from Mann and Saunders' textbook. I had made about 50 organic compounds by the time I left school, more than all the ones I made as an undergraduate, so I was an experienced practical chemist early on. My other subject was biology, which I fully expected to be a part of my career, but when I met biochemistry at Cambridge I soon realised that the only part I found interesting was metabolic pathways - the chemistry. At the same time, in my second year, we met organic reaction mechanisms, first from Peter Sykes and then more compellingly from Malcolm Clark, and molecular orbital theory from Christopher Longuet-Higgins. The subject began to have a satisfying intellectual structure, and I was hooked. From then on, and especially in the next four or five years, I was able to order all my organic chemical knowledge into a coherent framework, to which I've been adding all the time. So a second short answer is: Stan Featherstone, Malcolm Clark and Christopher Longuet-Higgins.

2. If you weren't a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be - and why?

Realistically, of course, I would have been something close to a chemist: a biochemist or even maybe a doctor, but that is not interesting. Moving away from science, and choosing something from within my competence, I might have liked to be a photojournalist, because you get to see extraordinary things and people. I might equally have answered a film director, if I were allowed to interpret the words "could do" in the question to mean that I had magically been given the talent.

3. What are you working on now, and where do you hope it will lead?

I am rewriting my textbooks - I've finished and published the sixth edition of the Spectroscopic Methods book that Dudley Williams and I wrote, and am now putting the finishing touches to two versions of a book to replace my Frontier Orbitals book, which is now an astonishing 33 years old. I have a 300-page "student" edition at the same level as the Frontier Orbitals book, and a 550-page "library" version, with all the references and much more material, for those who want more. As before, it treats the subject without mathematics for the benefit of all those organic chemists like me who have little mathematical aptitude but want to understand the subject in a physical way. The new versions will be called Molecular Orbitals and Organic Chemical Reactions, with less emphasis on the Frontier Orbitals. My next task will probably be to look again at an even older book of mine: Selected Organic Syntheses.

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with - and why?

Samuel Johnson was arguably the wisest man ever, and good company. But a great many other names come to mind: Queen Elizabeth I, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Orson Welles, Shakespeare, Billy Wilder? What a dinner party.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab - and what was it?

Some of my later co-workers may remember my showing them how to get crystals - a lost art it seems, but I don't think that counts as an experiment. The last preparation I remember was the preliminary work for the indole syntheses that Mike Woolias developed, when I prepared the way for him, by establishing that the reaction worked. It involved an amino group displacing an aryl halide, long before Buchwald and Hartwig, and without any transition metals being necessary. I remember leaving a reflux going to open an epoxide with benzylamine in ethanol, while I went to the Oxford Synthesis Meeting in July 1973, and coming back to find that not only had the epoxide been opened but the intramolecular displacement of the ortho bromide had also taken place.

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one music album would you take with you?

It's always difficult to restrict oneself to one. It would have to be big. War and Peace, perhaps, or is one allowed the whole of Shakespeare? For music, it would have to be the late Beethoven quartets.

7. Which chemist would you like to see interviewed on Reactions - and why?

David Evans of Harvard, because he is inspirationally thoughtful in teaching and research.

The World Conference of Science Journalists 2009 is over. Next time such a large group of science hacks meet together will be in 2011 in Cairo.

I only managed to attend the final day of the conference, and was left feeling that science journalism is in pretty good shape, particularly after hearing from Laura Chang, editor of the New York Times's science section, James Harding, editor of The Times, Fran Unsworth, head of newsgathering at the BBC and John Rennie, former editor-in-chief of Scientific American. These editors all conceded that times were tough for journalists now, but that science is of increasing importance and interest to their readers. Rennie was the one panelist who was more pessimistic, saying that the media is facing a mass extinction event, and that the question to ask is whether specialist science media deserves to survive.

Rennie also said that science news should be redefined, and should move away from the current model of reporting the 'big paper of the week'. This model feeds into the debate on embargoes which continues to rage in this profession. But Rennie's tone was generally positive, or at least it seemed to be.

But my mood of optimism might have been wrong. From talking to other delegates who had been at the conference all week, I got a different impression, one of deep pessimism, perhaps. Fears that the future for science journalists looks bleak have been hanging over the conference. Freelancers are having a tough time, staff reporters are being laid off, and it isn't clear how traditional forms of media will survive.

In this mixed mood, the conference ended with a plenary session that included John Beddington, the UK government's chief scientific adviser, and his equivalent from Ireland, Patrick Cunningham, plus Tidu Maini, executive chairman of Qatar science and technology park. The main point to come from the session was the absence of an independent science adviser in the EU, something that Beddington feels is very wrong.

I expect that the organisers of the conference will be congratulating themselves today, possibly with a sore head or two. They deserve these congrats, not least for persuading such influential people to sit on the panels for the sessions. Cairo in 2011 has a lot to live up to. It will be a very different conference, perhaps more able to embrace reporters from developing countries. I look forward to it.

Here are the highlights from yesterday's tweets from the 2009 Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting

7.43am Final day of lectures here in Lindau (although not the final day of the meeting), and this morning will be a GFP extravaganza!

8.02am Shimomura is first up - telling us about the chemistry of bioluminescence

8.19am Interesting fact of the day from Shimomura who tells us that krill is the most abundant animal on the earth

8.31am Chalfie - I'm the accidental Laureate that got into the middle of this - he works on sensory mechanotransduction

8.33am Chalfie has spent a lot of his career 'tickling worms' - C. elegans that is - to find out how they respond to touch

9.08am Students and postdocs are the real innovators in science according to Chalfie

9.13am Final lecture of the 1st session is given by Roger Tsien - who will tell us about some of the mistakes he made & where he got lucky

9.48am Tsien - 'normally there is nothing green inside a mouse'!

9.51am Tsien has yet to run a gel or do a PCR reaction in his life - if he had to hire himself, he wouldn't do it!!

10.01am Schrock takes the stage - co-recipient of the 2005 chem prize (http://bit.ly/axqQt) - apologises for not being at the whole meeting

10.34am Schrock shows some 14 electron Mo catalysts that have 4 different groups on the metal centre - chiral metal catalysts on the way?

10.42am Take home message from Schrock - air-sensitive catalysts are good (not bad) if they can do something other catalysts can't

10.46am Final formal lecture of Lindau 09 given by Werner Arber, Laureate in Physiology or Medicine from 1978 (http://bit.ly/g1V74)

10.52am Arber is using a computer slideshow for his talk on 'Molecular Darwinism' - but all the slides are drawn by hand!

This weekly Nautilus column highlights some of the online discussion at Nature Network in the preceding week that is of relevance to scientists as authors and communicators. Readers are welcome to join any of these discussions by visiting the links provided. The Nature Network week column is archived here.

Ruth Wilson is going to Istanbul later this month to give a talk at the Equal Opportunities Conference. She'll speak about the steps she and her colleagues at the UK Resource Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology have taken to help women scientists connect online. To gather information for her talk, she asks Nature Network users for their views and experience of whether blogging, twittering, and other social media help women’s careers in science, engineering, technology. Is this male-dominated area any less so in online environments? Are there online facilities or developments that would help women wanting to start/develop their careers? Ruth welcomes your views at the Women in Science forum (views from men are as welcome as those from women).

Do we need a scientific literature? The answer might seem obvious, but Bob O'Hara gets to the basics of "why we consider peer-reviewed research so important". It's a very well-argued post, covering access to the literature itself and to what it says once you have access to it. Unusually for a blog post, a diverse range of commenters broadly agree with it, in a discussion of a range of "accessibility" issues. Please join in.

Cath Ennis gets to grips with the writing style itself. "It began with the phrase “The human genome is a motley harlequin”, and became even more eccentric as it progressed. It was wonderful stuff. I loved it. But I knew I couldn’t use it. A little part of me died as I took out my red pen and rewrote his words in a more conventional academic style." Read on at Cath's blog post 'Resistance is futile', which refers to Jennifer Rohn's stimulating post about "the untold narrative of the precise dryness of scientific papers".

The writing process will be further dissected at Second Life on Tuesday (7 July), where visitors can join Tom Levenson, professor of science writing at MIT, who will be talking about his new book, Newton and the Counterfeiters. Professor Levenson will be taking questions from the audience on the book, his career as a writer, or anything else. See Joanna Scott's blog for more details of the event itself and of how to set up an account on Second Life.

Dara Sosulski picks up a bit of pseudoscientific news education, in a week when the sixth World Conference of Science Journalists has been putting science news reporting in the spotlight. There's a discussion in the Nature Opinion forum about Nature' s special issue to accompany the conference - a collection of articles ranging from the evolution of the science journalist from cheerleader to watchdog, to how blogging by audiences at scientific conferences is challenging traditional newspaper reporting. Another aspect of science journalism - scaremongering - was at the heart of the most recent Boston "Skeptics in the pub" meeting, explosively described by Robert Pinsonneault.

Further science-related blog reading and online discussion can be enjoyed at:
Planet Nature
Nature.com's science blogs index and tracker
Nature Publishing Group news at Nature Network

Today a panel of speakers at the World Conference of Science Journalists (WCSJ) turned its attention to the embargo system. Are embargoes good for science journalists - and science - or not?

For the uninitiated, journals such as Nature and Science routinely give information to journalists about forthcoming academic publications before they are released to the wider world. The information is 'under embargo' until a set publication time - at which point newspapers, TV, newswires and the like are free to release their stories. Increasingly, academic institutions do the same sort of deals with the media, too.

The advantage for journalists is that it gives them more time to work on the story, talk to the researchers involved, and get the science right, argued panellist Geoff Watts, a BBC Radio 4 broadcaster.

It also reduces the chances that a poor science hack will miss a good story that their competitors cover, thus incurring the wrath of their news editor.

And it's great for the journals too. By marshalling the coverage of their science papers, big journals can virtually guarantee that their brand is splashed all over the newspapers and the web at the same time every week. They're happy; the journalists have an easier life, and arguably produce better stories; and the scientists involved can point to the coverage in their next grant application as evidence of the importance of and public interest in their work. Everyone's a winner, right?

Wrong, says Vincent Kiernan, associate dean at Georgetown University, journalist, and journalism scholar.

Embargoes have become an addiction for journalists, he said, a set of "velvet handcuffs" that simply eats up time and resources that could be better spent digging up scoops. Not only does it turn journalists into propagandists for scientists and academic journals, it also reduces science to an artificial series of 'eureka' moments.

Indeed, there's no evidence that stories written under embargo are any better than those which are not, he added. And in a time when media companies are struggling, the ones that will survive are those which provide unique content - not those who follow the pack and write the same stories about science that everyone else is writing.

He's even written a book on the subject - Embargoed Science - and his advice to journalists is: "It's time to walk away from the embargo. Just walk away."

So what does Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet - which operates a very strict embargo policy - think? "I'm Richard," he shouts, "I'm 47 and I've been addicted to embargoes for 14 years."

In a remarkable diatribe, delivered at top volume and with tongue only slightly in cheek, Horton explained that embargoes were all "about power and control - my power to control you, turning journalists into agents of propaganda."

Eyes abalaze, he continued, almost mocking the open-mouthed hacks in the audience: "Look at this story, don't you want it? Your rival wants it!" he cried. "But you've sold your soul to publicity masquerading as science."

Ultimately, getting rid of the embargo system would improve the quality of science journalism, he concluded, because it would force editors to employ reporters who actually knew what they were talking about, rather than simply being able to read and regurgitate a weekly press release at leisure.

So, an audience member asked him, if you think embargoes are so damaging to decent journalism, why doesn't The Lancet get rid of them: "Are you afraid of the journalists?"

"No, I'm afraid of Tony [Kirby, The Lancet's chief Rottweiler - er, press officer - and a former colleague of mine]," Horton replied. Despite the fact that the embargo system repels Horton, the reality is that his colleagues tell him it's good for business, he explained.

But Horton has a plan. To test the hypothesis that embargoed journal papers get more, and better-quality, coverage in the popular press, he suggested that all the papers published by The Lancet over, say, a month or two, could be divided into two randomized groups. One set would be press released under embargo; the other merely published by the journal at the usual time.

The audience giggled uncertainly. But talking to Horton after the event, I challenged him to follow through with the plan. After all, it could turn into a fascinating experiment. He promised to discuss it with Tony - so let's see what happens.

2010 marks a fairly ambitious deadline for the globe: no more species going extinct. With six months to go, and human activities continuing their tear through wildlife-rich habitats like rainforests and oceans, it’s pretty clear that we’re going to need an extension. Now the world’s authority on species conservation, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), is waving the latest assessment of its venerable Red List around to raise the alarm.

The 2010 biodiversity target originated in 2001, when the European Council concluded that “biodiversity decline should be halted with the aim of reaching this objective by 2010”. In 2002, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) softened the goal to “a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss”, and a few months later the World Summit on Sustainable Development echoed the CBD’s pledge. In celebration, the UN declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity.

But despite the nominal unity, things are looking pretty grim. On 2 July the IUCN released its assessment of threatened species, which looked at whether the statuses of threatened species were improving or deteriorating. In a laborious analysis, described by its authors as “a labour of love”, the group assessed 1,500 randomly selected species from each species group (e.g. dragonflies, freshwater crabs, gymnosperms). The conclusion: 2010 isn’t going to happen.

The lack of progress doesn’t come as a surprise, considering that the primary driver of species extinction — habitat destruction — continues to charge along, albeit at a slower clip in temperate regions. But the CBD notes that “this may not necessarily translate, however, into lower rates of species loss for all taxa because of the nature of the relationship between numbers of species and area of habitat, because decades or centuries may pass before species extinctions reach equilibrium with habitat loss, and because other drivers of loss, such as climate change, nutrient loading, and invasive species, are projected to increase".

Tomorrow the Lindau Meeting shifts to another island in Lake Constance. Early in the morning, delegates will climb aboard a boat and be ferried across the lake to the island of Mainau - a trip taking more than a couple of hours. Here we will be treated to a panel discussion about 'Global Warming and Sustainability' with quite a distinguished line-up. As well as Laureates Molina and Schrock, the panel also includes Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - which won the Peace Prize in 2007. Other participants include the author Bjorn Lomborg, and Professors William Moomaw and Thomas Stocker.

Because it is unlikely I'll have good web access tomorrow, I figured I should briefly post about Thursday's activities before I go. The first session of lectures amounted to a green fluorescent protein (GFP) extravaganza, with talks from Shimomura, Chalfie and Tsien (last year's recipients of the chemistry prize). We were treated to some very colourful slides, including a green bunny and the incredible hulk! It was nice to hear both Chalfie and Tsien talk about Doug Prasher's contribution to the area - the 'missing' Laureate in GFP research.

Both Chalfie and Tsien had stories to tell about getting their seminal papers published. Editors at a certain high-profile journal objected to Chalfie using the word 'new' in the title of his paper, saying that all work they published was new! Perhaps more amusing, however, was when someone from the art department got in touch with Chalfie about his cover image - they really liked the picture, but there was one colour they didn't really like to use on the cover, so could they get rid of the green...?! 'No', said Chalfie.

Tsien's story about publishing the crystal structure of GFP was one of referee trouble (at the same journal Chalfie struggled with). The first referee said that it was a competent crystal structure, but the protein was not very interesting! The second referee said it was all well and good but the paper didn't answer the most important question about GFP - it's biological role in the jellyfish! The manuscript was rejected and when Tsien appealed, the editor sent it to a third referee. Many months passed, however, and the third referee never replied. Then, on the internet, Tsien found a comment from someone saying that they had solved the crystal structure of GFP and it was coming out the following month in a different journal - Tsien forwarded this to the editor and the paper was accepted the next day! Moral of the story - be careful what you say on the internet...

Both Chalfie and Tsien had some great quotes - I include a few below (I can't guarantee that I have the wording exactly correct, but the meaning remains unaltered):

Chalfie:

It's very hard to tell if an animal is touch-sensitive if it is dead!
I'm the accidental Laureate that got into the middle of this.
Students and postdocs are the real innovators in science.

Tsien:

Biology has the most interesting grand questions in all of science currently doable by individuals.
I was no smarter the day after I received the Nobel prize than the day before, but it made me a lot more famous!
Prizes are ultimately a matter of luck, so avoid being motivated or impressed by them.

After the coffee break, the final two lectures at this Lindau Meeting were delivered by Richard Schrock (Chemistry 2005) and Werner Arber (Physiology or Medicine 1978). Schrock gave us a tour through his Mo and W metathesis catalysts, showing some recent work on being able to make Z-olefins, rather than the more thermodynamically stable E isomers. He was also eager to point out that although his catalysts are air and water sensitive (in contrast to the Ru catalysts of Grubbs and others), this does not matter if (i) you're making a billion-dollar drug or (ii) there is no other way of doing the same reaction. Anyone out there in pharma-land wish to comment on part (i)?

Finally, Countess Bernadotte wrapped up this part of the meeting, thanking the Laureates, the young researchers, the organisers and even the media - very nice to get a mention! We then headed off with Schrock to film with two students, although extracting a Nobel Laureate from adoring fans who want photos and autographs is not an easy task... but eventually we made it to the shoot location in a nearby hotel. Once that was finished, my headache finally got the better of me and I headed out of the heat and back to where I am staying - and now because it's a really early start tomorrow (and I'm not a big fan of those), I'm off to bed...

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

PS: There are lots of other people blogging from the meeting - check out some of these posts and have a poke around at each place for other Lindau entries here, here, here, here and here (apologies to those posts/bloggers I may have missed - feel free to leave links in the comments to this post).

Phoenix has been incommunicado since the end of October, the Mars mission ending just before a shell of carbon dioxide ice would entomb the three-legged lander. But the legacy of this little lander that sort of could keeps on living. A suite of papers published today in Science rounds up the lander's greatest hits, all of which had been published as the mission went along. In summary:

All Nature’s swine flu coverage is collected on our news special page. These regular updates on The Great Beyond round up the latest from other news sources around the globe.

The World Health Organisation yesterday announced it has now confirmed 77,201 cases of swine flu and 332 deaths.

Roche pledged to make it easier for developing countries to buy its Tamiflu drug at reduced prices. However, a patient in Denmark was recently discovered to have the first case of Tamiflu-resistant swine flu.

“The goods news is they just found one,” says Carolyn Bridges, from the US Centers for Disease Control (AP). Shortly after that Japan reported its first case of Tamiflu resistant H1N1 (Reuters).

A former University of Tennessee professor has been sentenced to four years in prison for sharing sensitive technologies with his Chinese and Iranian graduate students.

J. Reece Roth, an emeritus professor of electrical engineering, was sentenced yesterday by U. S. District Court, Eastern District of Tennessee for violating the Arms Export Control Act. Roth and a now bankrupt company had been developing ways to reduce the drag on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (pictured right) and improve their take-off and landing capabilities. Roth employed two graduate students, a Chinese and an Iranian national, without obtaining the required license.

Roth, 71, maintained he did nothing wrong when I spoke to him in 2006, and he was unrepentant at sentencing. According to the Knoxville Sentinel he did not admit guilt or apologize for his actions. He told the judge that his wife and he both have health problems. "I would like to respectfully request the court take these into account when passing sentence, and that's all I have to say," Roth said.

He plans to appeal the verdict.

Image: USAF

The Associated Press picked up rumours that the USSR would make a third attempt at a lunar sample-return mission on 10 July, almost a week before Apollo 11's scheduled launch. If successful, the Luna mission would land on the Moon, scoop up some lunar soil and make other measurements while on the surface, and then a small rocket would return the soil sample to Earth for study.

The Soviet space programme made no secret of its secrecy, preferring to hide its failures and bask in the publicity of its successes, but occasionally negative information did leak out. The AP reported that the first Luna mission exploded on the launch pad at Baikonur, the Soviet launch facility, in early April 1969, and the second exploded in flight on 14 June 1969. A source told the AP that Soviet space officials were "very disturbed over the success of the American Apollo program. Losing the moon race will be a terrible blow to them." (Via NASA/Library of Congress history: [pdf])

Here I am at the WCSJ (haven't worked out how to say that as a word yet) in the midst of a scorching warm spell in London.

One of this morning's sessions tackled the thorny, often emotive issue of "big pharma" and whether the media is used merely as an extension of a PR machine for the industry. Feelings ran high in the room, with a wide sweep of panelists. These included Paul Stoffels, head of global pharmaceutical research and development for Johnson & Johnson, and at the other end of the scale Vera Hassner Sharav, founder and president of the alliance for human research protection, a public interest watchdog that wants to stop biomedical research results remaining secret. Between them were John Ilman, a pharma journalist, Sarah Garner from NICE, the UKs drug regulator, and Cripsin Slee, head of PR for the ABPI.

Feelings ran high, and Stoffel gave a good overview of why he believes in the pharmaceutical industry, recounting his years of experience as a physician in AIDS and HIV-ridden Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. He admitted that there is a tension for pharma companies between making money and being a healthcare provider, yet this is what public companies must learn to balance.

Vera Sharav, on the other hand, gave another empassioned presentation, included slide after slide of information telling us how evil pharmaceuticals companies are.

There’s no shortage of reading material on the genes behind schizophrenia this morning. In addition to three papers in Nature announcing the identification of key genetic glitches responsible for increasing the risk of the disease there are at least five different press releases and well over a hundred news articles at the time of writing.

This new research combines DNA data from tens of thousands of people to identify the genetic variations behind schizophrenia risk. It also shows some links between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

“Our findings are a real scientific breakthrough since they tell us a lot more about the nature of the genetic risk of schizophrenia than we knew as little as a year ago,” says a co-author of one of the studies, David St Clair, of the University of Aberdeen (press release).

Here comes the caveat: “However this is not a breakthrough that is going to change clinical practice any time soon,” he adds. “It will still be many years before our findings can be translated into new drug treatments.”

Time-Life, Inc., offered $400,000 for exclusive book rights to the Apollo 11 story, reported the Washington Daily News.

The fee would be split equally into 60 shares for the 52 active astronauts and the widows of 8 deceased astronauts. The arrangement reflected earlier exclusive publishing deals negotiated by Time-Life with the astronauts. Other press outlets complained about the arrangement to NASA, but NASA argued that since the exclusivity only covered the astronaut's private lives, there was no breach of NASA's outreach duty.

A NASA history explains that the first deal was set up before Project Mercury even got off the ground:

The astronauts were to receive $500,000, to be divided equally, without regard to who was to be the first American —and, it was hoped, the first human— in space. The stories, to be written by Life staff, were to be presented under first-person bylines, and the astronauts and their wives had final approval over the contents. Life's intention was to make the astronauts and their families look good. The astronaut's wives were full partners in the deal and in the stories that were told." From The Collier as Commemoration: The Project Mercury Astronauts and the Collier Trophy by Jannelle Warren-Findley

Here are the highlights from yesterday's tweets from the 2009 Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting

Wednesday 01 July

8.02am Day 3 begins here in Lindau and first up is Rudy Marcus (http://bit.ly/3tUJT) - sole recipient of the chemistry Nobel Prize in 1992

8.38am Next speaker is Kurt Wüthrich (http://bit.ly/dBaqV) who won a half-share of the 2002 chemistry prize

8.43am Wüthrich uses his belt to represent the human genome... 1.8 m of DNA - although he says his belt is not quite that large (yet)

9.16am The final talk before the coffee break is Sir Harry Kroto (http://bit.ly/Kd08W) speaking about science, society and sustainability

9.22am Kroto just explained chemistry and life in 30 seconds (I think he may have skimmed over a few important bits)

9.40am Kroto - if no-one finds a use for C60 soon, I may have to give the prize back...!

10.23am Coffee break over and Robert Huber - Laureate in '88 (http://bit.ly/2lwtV5) - is speaking about the destruction of molecules

11.13am Coming to the stage now is Walter Kohn - co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1998 (http://bit.ly/dvcaL) with Pople

11.20am Kohn is showing us a film he made called 'The Power of the Sun' - narrated by, if I am not mistaken, John Cleese!

11.44am Kohn would not be surprised if our two major forms of energy are solar and wind after the transition from fossil fuels

11.51am Final speaker today is Peter Agre - Laureate in Chemistry in 2003 (http://bit.ly/J6Hxl) on canoeing in the arctic

12.02pm Agre points out that one of his companions on his Arctic trips deserves a Nobel Prize for baking bread using camp fire & stones!

You can read Stu's full take on yesterday's proceedings in his post Lindau09: And now for something completely different.

NASA has finally worked out how to put fuel in the tank of its space shuttle.

After multiple launch attempts for Endeavour were abandoned due to hydrogen fuel leaking from the external tank the space agency announced that yesterday’s 'tanking test' has been successful.

“There were absolutely no leak indications whatsoever noted on the two leak detectors,” says Launch Director Pete Nickolenko (statement).

“We’ll continue to look at the data, and our next step is to move toward launch.”

All this should mean that Endeavour is good to go on 11 July. As CNET notes though, all this faffing with the fuel means NASA has only a four day window to launch, before having to delay to 27 July in order to make way for a Russian space station resupply mission launch on the 24th.

More coverage
NASA: Fuel test a success, shuttle launch day set – AP
No leaks in Endeavour's fuel tank: NASA – AFP
Shuttle ready for launch after fuel tests, NASA says – Xinhua

Image: work on the Ground Umbilical Carrier Plate of the external fuel tank, suspected source of the fuel leak, on 24 June / NASA - Jack Pfaller

This month's (July) Nature Chemical Biology includes two articles describing how access to the highest quality chemical probes will ensure their prominent position in the biological and drug discovery toolboxes.
Aled M Edwards, Chas Bountra, David J Kerr and Timothy M Willson, in their Commentary (Nature Chemical Biology 5, 436 - 440; 2009) Open access chemical and clinical probes to support drug discovery, say that drug discovery resources in academia and industry are not used efficiently, to the detriment of industry and society. Duplication could be reduced and productivity increased, they write, by performing basic biology and clinical proofs of concept within open access industry-academia partnerships. Chemical biologists could play a central role in this effort.
The authors' main argument is that the development of new medicines is being hindered by the way in which academia and industry advance innovative targets. By generating freely available chemical and clinical probes and performing open-access science, the overall system will produce a wider range of clinically validated targets for the same total resource, arguably the most effective way to spur the development of treatments for unmet needs.
In a related article in the same issue of the journal, 'A crowdsourcing evaluation of the NIH chemical probes', Tudor I. Opera et al. (Nature Chemical Biology 5, 441-447; 2009) write that between 2004 and 2008, the US National Institutes of Health Molecular Libraries and Imaging initiative pilot phase funded 10 high-throughput screening centres, resulting in the deposition of 691 assays into PubChem and the nomination of 64 chemical probes. The authors 'crowdsourced' the Molecular Libraries and Imaging initiative output to 11 experts, who expressed medium or high levels of confidence in 48 of these 64 probes. Crowdsourcing is a cross-disciplinary alternative way to assess confidence for both chemical probes and drug leads: it pools multiple levels of expertise from translational disciplines, providing a rigorous chemical-probe evaluation process.

Nature Chemical Biology website.
Nature Chemical Biology guide to authors.
Nature Chemical Biology focuses and supplements.
Nature Chemical Biology symposium 2009: Chemical biology in drug discovery.

Wednesday morning at the Lindau meeting saw a full slate of talks from half-a-dozen Chemistry Laureates: Marcus (1992), Wüthrich (2002), Kroto (1996), Huber (1988), Kohn (1998), Agre (2003) - and some of the highlights are covered below...

Marcus joked that he was going to speak for a couple of hours, but finished exactly on time after 35 minutes, giving us a tour of catalysis in many different forms, such as the 'on-water' work by Sharpless through to single-molecule enzyme catalysis. The next lecture was from Wüthrich, who started off by telling us that 'NMR' does not stand for 'no meaningful results' and then proceeded to take off his belt - and fortunately he stopped there! He then went on to use his belt to illustrate the human genome.

The final talk of the first session was from Kroto, who spoke on themes of science, society and sustainability. His lecture was a barrage on the senses (albeit a very entertaining one), with slides popping up at a high rate of knots, with occasional sound effects to boot. We were shown examples of artwork that Kroto had produced, including stamps, and even a new design for the flag of Japan. He then moved on to topics such as creationism and religion in general, Web 2.0 opportunities for science and scientific education, and the fact that he may have to give his prize back if no one finds a use for C60 in the near future! Kroto left the stage to the longest and loudest applause of the meeting so far.

After the coffee break, Huber was the first speaker, although the computer on which the presentations were loaded would not play ball. Problems finally solved, he went on to tell us about protein degradation. Kohn was next up and apart from a brief intro and wrap up, his 'lecture' consisted of showing a film he had made, called 'The power of the sun' - narrated by John Cleese of Monty Python fame. No ex-parrots in sight unfortunately! The final talk of the day was given by Agre, who told us about his canoeing trips in the arctic and sub-arctic. Although he tied his talk to environmental themes and climate issues, such as the changing migration paths of caribou and the impact on native hunters, it was hard not to think that we were just seeing his holiday snaps (very pretty ones, nonetheless!).

Lectures over for the day, I went to help out the film crew once more. The first shoot was a conversation between one of the young researchers (Tyler) and Ernst. As the storm clouds gathered in the distance and the thunder got louder, lightning crackled across the sky and the heavens opened - making filming impossible. With lots of camera equipment and a Nobel Laureate in tow, we tried to take the most direct (and driest) route back inside the conference venue. Our way was barred by the conference stewards, who probably assumed we wanted to film the afternoon discussions (which is not allowed - in fact, no press are allowed in those sessions at all) - whereas all we wanted to do was get inside to then go and find a new location. Tyler came to the rescue — his German being better than any of ours — and finally persuaded the stewards to let us in... he pointed out that we had a Laureate with us, who probably shouldn't get soaked in a thunderstorm. So, there you have it, getting the call from Stockholm can open doors for you!

Two shoots later, with Ciechanover and Tsien, it was time to wind down for the day and plan our activities for Thursday - just one shoot I need to be at today, so may have a little free time later this afternoon to explore Lindau. There may not be a post tomorrow, as we're off to the island of Mainau and away from the wireless access here in the Inselhalle, but they'll be a couple of more Lindau posts at some point.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Why carbon dioxide concentrations over the past 24 million years or so have never dropped below 200 parts per million, despite environmental conditions that have been favourable for CO2 drawdown by rock weathering and sedimentation, has always been a bit of a mystery.

Now scientists suggest an almost provocatively simple mechanism that might have kept the planet from cooling more severely than it actually did during past glacial climates: Changes in terrestrial vegetation stopped the weathering-driven decline in atmospheric CO2 concentrations which else would have turned Earth into a lifeless freezer.

Weathering is known to be largely controlled by vegetation. So the team, led by Mark Pagani of Yale University, describes in a paper in Nature today a negative feedback whereby limited plant growth during cold conditions slows down the rate of weathering and sedimentation, thus preventing carbon dioxide levels from dropping even further. An editor's summary of the paper is here.

This “bold and provocative” hypothesis provides an “elegant twist” on existing ideas about climate-vegetation interactions, Yves Goddéris and Yannick Donnadieu write in an accompanying News and Views article (subscription required).

But the proposed feedback mechanism raises contentious issues as well. For example, Goddéris and Donnadieu argue that in the tropics the role of vegetation cover in the climate system might not be as significant as proposed.

Quirin Schiermeier