Earth’s plants are countering some of the effects of climate change

A feast in the air

IN 1972, on their way to the Moon, the crew of Apollo 17 snapped what would become one of the most famous photographs ever taken. The “Blue Marble” shows Earth as it looks from space: a blue sphere overlaid by large brown swatches of land, with wisps of white cloud floating above.

But times change, and modern pictures of Earth look different. A wash of greenery is spreading over the globe, from central Africa to Europe and South East Asia. One measurement found that between 1982 and 2009 about 18m square kilometres of new vegetation had sprouted on Earth’s surface, an area roughly twice the size of the United States.

The growth in greenery is a consequence of climate change. As the planet heats up, places that were once too chilly for most plants to grow have become steadily more hospitable. That extra vegetation, in turn, exerts its own effects on the climate. According to a team led by Trevor Keenan of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California, who have just published their findings in Nature Communications, the plant growth caused by climate change…Continue reading
Source: Economist

How to enrol your dog in a cancer-drug trial

An idea with legs

DRUG development is a risky—and costly—business. Many promising compounds fail to cut the mustard when put through clinical trials. One reason is that drugs which work on laboratory animals may not work quite so well in human tests. Being able to pick winners and losers as early as possible would save money, and the One Health Company, based in Philadelphia, thinks it may have found a way. It is offering to help pharmaceutical firms test their wares on sick pets. Its first guinea pigs, as it were, will be dogs suffering from cancer.

There are several benefits, says the firm. By treating animals with existing cancers, it hopes to dodge a problem with modern animal research, which is that the “model” animals and diseases that are used to test drugs are not always good stand-ins for the natural illness. For example, mice used to test cancer drugs may have had their tumours grafted surgically into their bodies, and their immune systems knocked out with drugs or by genetic engineering.

Another plus is that pet owners tend to be dedicated carers who are very knowledgeable about their four-legged…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Chilling time for cars

AFTER seven years of frustrated effort, climate negotiators from the 197 countries that signed the 1987 Montreal Protocol—an international treaty designed to end the use of chemicals that deplete the ozone layer—have agreed to phase out the global-warming chemicals known as hydrofluorocarbons. HFCs are the fastest-growing sector of greenhouse gases. Their use around the world is increasing by 10%-15% a year, as popular household goods that use them as refrigerants (eg, fridges and  air-conditioning equipment) or propellants  (eg, aerosol sprays) spread to even the remotest parts of the planet.

Though HFCs do not deplete Earth’s ozone layer in the way the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) they replaced back in the mid-1990s did, they contribute disproportionately to global warming, being far more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide is. One of the most widely used HFCs, R-134a, a refrigerant used in the air-conditioning equipment of cars, has a global warming potential (GWP) of 1,430—ie, weight for weight, it is 1,430 worse than carbon dioxide. All told, R-134a is the most abundant HFC in the atmosphere, accounting for a quarter of…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Missile tracking

MANY anti-cancer drugs are packaged for delivery into tiny fatty envelopes called liposomes. Because tumour cells are bound more loosely than healthy cells, liposomes squeeze between them more easily. They thus tend to accumulate in cancerous tissue and so, when they degrade, release their payloads there rather than in healthy tissue—to which many of the drugs concerned are equally dangerous.

Such medical missiles can, however, go astray. Even when the same drug in the same sort of packaging is used against the same sort of cancer, the degree to which it strikes its target differs markedly from patient to patient. A way of discovering where the liposomes are going in a particular individual might permit treatments to be tailored to that patient’s needs. And, as they write in ACS Nano, Rafael de Rosales of King’s College, London, and Alberto Gabizon of the Shaare Zedek Medical Centre in Jerusalem, think they have found one.

Many anti-cancer drugs bind readily to metal ions, including those of copper, manganese and zirconium. That interested Dr de Rosales and Dr Gabizon, because these three elements all have radioactive isotopes that release a particle called a positron as part of their decay. Positrons, which are antimatter versions of electrons, are the agents of a body-scanning technique called positron-emission tomography,…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Depths of imagination

WIND farms and solar-energy plants have the advantage that their fuel is free, but the disadvantage that the availability of that fuel may change from minute to minute. If they are to become the large-scale contributors to power generation that their boosters suggest, then cheap and reliable means of smoothing their output, by storing surpluses for use during times of scarcity, need to be developed.

At the moment, there is only one good way of saving surplus grid electricity, regardless of how it is generated. This is pumped storage. It requires two reservoirs at different elevations, linked by tunnels and pumps in order to create a head of water whose pressure, when released, can drive the pumps backward, to act as generating turbines.

Pumped storage is cheap to run, but needs convenient geography to build in the first place. Or, rather, it did. For a pair of alternatives to the two-reservoir model, both of which still exploit the power-generating potential of a head of water by pumping fluids around, are now being investigated. One is a year old this month. The other is about to start trials.

The one-year-old project is in Toronto, Canada—or, rather, just offshore, at the bottom of Lake Ontario. It was designed and built by Hydrostor, a company founded by Cameron Lewis, who developed the technology after working in the oil industry. The plant is…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Tested, and found wanting

HALF of clinical trials do not have their results published. Those behind the TrialsTracker, a web tool created by the Evidence-Based Medicine Data Lab, at Oxford University, hope to change this. Using clinicaltrials.gov, an American database that covers 193 countries, Ben Goldacre and Anna Powell-Smith can track automatically whether results have been put into the public domain. Proportionally, the worst culprits are government and academia. In absolute terms, the biggest offenders are two drug giants, Sanofi and Novartis, and the National Cancer Institute, an American government body. Companies that do well include Shire, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Eli Lilly.

Source: Economist

Having no truck with it

“AMATEURS talk strategy, but professionals talk logistics.” That military maxim’s latest consequence is the adoption by the world’s armed forces of three-dimensional (3D) printing on the front line. It will be a while before weapons robust enough for military use can be printed on demand (though civilian ones can be, see article). But if it is a question of replacing a small but crucial component that has broken—the modern equivalent of reshoeing a horse—then making what is needed to order in this way has huge potential. Moving replacement parts through a long supply chain to a far-flung ship or base can take weeks. And, if a war is on, such convoys make tempting targets. Yet it is unrealistic to keep a full range of spares near the front line. Far better to produce what is needed, when it is needed.

Having access to a printer can even encourage innovation. For example, the USS Harry S. Truman, an American aircraft-carrier, took two 3D printers on her most recent tour of duty in the eastern…Continue reading
Source: Economist

The watchers on the Web

MANY scientific studies are flawed. Often, the reason is poor methodology. Sometimes, it is outright fraud. The conventional means of correction—a letter to the journal concerned—can take months. But there is now an alternative. PubPeer is a website that lets people comment anonymously on research papers and so, in theory, helps purge the scientific literature of erroneous findings more speedily.

Since its launch in 2012, PubPeer has alerted scientists to mistakes and image manipulation in papers, and exposed cases of misconduct. But it has also attracted criticism, not least from journal editors, some of whom argue anonymity’s cloak lets vendettas flourish unchecked. Now the site is embroiled in a court case that tests the limits of free speech under America’s First Amendment, and may define what it is permissible for researchers to say online and anonymously about science.

The proceedings centre on discussions that began on the site in November 2013. These highlighted apparent similarities between images showing the results of different experiments in papers by Fazlul Sarkar, a cancer researcher who was then based at Wayne…Continue reading
Source: Economist

How to get the wine you really want

IT’S enough to make sommeliers splutter into their spittoons: a wine-blending machine that lets drinkers craft a glass specifically to their personal palate, rather than having to pick a tipple, possibly as a result of guesswork, from the range a restaurant or bar chooses to keep in its cellar.

Vinfusion, as the machine in question is called, was launched this week by Cambridge Consultants, a technology company based in that British city. In designing it the firm’s researchers first undertook a study of the wines people buy in pubs, bars and restaurants. They found that most customers are stick-in-the-muds. Instead of sampling different regions, grape varieties and vintages, they tend to order the same plonk every time they go out.

Many of the survey’s participants admitted reluctance to ask for advice—often because of the snobbery and mystique that (at least in Britain) surrounds wine drinking. This conservatism does not, however, lead to satisfaction. The survey, which polled 138 drinkers, found that 70% were regularly disappointed by the wines they ordered. But it also found that the idea of having wines customised on the fly…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Flash, bang, wallop, what a picture

THE dark splodge near the top of the enlarged part of this picture of the Martian surface, taken on October 20th by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, an American satellite circling the planet, is thought to be the crash site of Schiaparelli, a European and Russian probe that arrived there on October 19th, but with which contact was lost during its descent to the planet’s surface. The white speck near the bottom is likewise believed to be the probe’s jettisoned parachute.

What went wrong is not clear. Communication with the craft ended 50 seconds before its scheduled touch down. Data transmitted in advance of this loss of contact suggest Schiaparelli jettisoned both its parachute and its heat shield early, and fired its retro-rockets for only three to five seconds, rather than the 30 seconds that had been planned. It probably hit the ground at more than 300kph (200mph).

Since Schiaparelli’s main job was to test the landing gear for a future rover its failure is not, as it were, a complete write-off. It…Continue reading
Source: Economist