the-BA : Science News Digest

In the news this week, nuclear power gets the go-ahead, bionic brain implants expand the mind and there are revolutionary developments for IVF treatment. Plus dying frogs, flying spiders, inflatable spacecraft and how to get drunk without getting a hangover.

Dominating the headlines this week was the publication of the government’s long-awaited energy review, a comprehensive analysis of UK energy policy produced by a cross-departmental team within the Department of Trade and Industry. As BBC News Online reports, the 216 page document, entitled ‘The Energy Challenge’, supports the combined use of nuclear and renewable energy supplies and proposes the rapid development of new nuclear power stations and onshore wind farms, despite objections from environmental campaigners and local residents. In a Commons statement on the review, Alistair Darling, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, emphasised that “a mix of energy supply is essential and we should not be over dependent on one source.”
The review has already attracted widespread criticism. London Mayor Ken Livingstone called the decision to embrace nuclear power “a colossal mistake,” and stated the need for “a solution to the climate change that protects the environment rather than threatens it, and one that does not literally cost the earth.”

In a breakthrough that could mean the beginning of the end for male infertility, scientists have created artificial sperm from embryonic stem cells and used them to produce live offspring for the first time, reported the Guardian on Tuesday.
A team of researchers led by Professor Karim Nayernia of the University of Newcastle isolated stem cells from mouse embryos and used them to grow sperm cells in the laboratory. These artificial sperm were injected into female mouse eggs that were then transplanted into female mice to produce seven babies, six of which survived to adulthood. Unfortunately, all of the animals born during the study were infertile and suffered from physical abnormalities, probably a result of genetic defects introduced during the creation of the sperm cells.
If the technique can be perfected and adapted for use in humans, it could become a treatment for men who are infertile, allowing them to produce healthy sperm and father a child.

Just when a solution to the problem of male infertility might be just around the corner, it turns out that men may not be needed as fathers at all if proposed amendments to embryology law receive government approval. The Times reports that Public Health Minister Caroline Flint has announced a radical shake-up of the 1990 Fertilisation and Embryology Act that will allow clinics to provide IVF and sperm donation services without having to consider a child’s need for a father. The reforms, expected to be set out in a White Paper by the end of the year, will give single women and lesbians the right to seek fertility treatment but will still oblige doctors to think of the welfare of any children that might be born, perhaps replacing the “need for a father” with the “need for a family.”

With the launch of a test spacecraft on Wednesday, a Las Vegas property tycoon and space entrepreneur has moved a step closer to fulfilling his dream of opening an orbiting space hotel, reports New Scientist. The Genesis I vehicle, the first in a series of six to ten test craft designed to prove the feasibility of inflatable space stations, took off from a site in Yasny, Russia and had reached its target orbit 547km (340 miles) up by lunchtime on Thursday. The craft was then inflated to its final sausage shape and began sending back images from its 13 onboard cameras. Bigelow Aerospace, the company which owns and built the spacecraft, hopes to launch a functional space station as early as 2012.

In other space news, the Guardian reports that British-born astronaut Piers Sellers became a record breaker on Saturday, when he logged a six-and-a-half hour spacewalk outside the International Space Station. He has now recorded more than 26 hours in total, beating veteran astronaut Michael Foale for the most ‘extra-vehicular activity' ever completed by a Briton. As the Guardian also reports, the Discovery astronauts have been getting out of a few sticky situations with the help of one piece of hardly space-age technology: a roll of duct tape. Shuttle crew members used the tape to secure Piers Sellers to his jet-propelled backpack after two of its four anchor points failed on Monday.

Returning to Earth, BBC News Online reports that scientists have developed new insights on how spiders are able to travel epic distances, even hundreds of kilometres over water, by ‘ballooning’ on strands of floating silk. A team from Rothamsted Research in the UK has updated a mathematical model showing how small spiders, seeking new territory or a mate, will cast silk into the air and use turbulent air currents to “parachute” to a new location.

Staying in the animal kingdom, the Telegraph reports that scientists are asking for £200 million in aid to save frogs and other amphibians from extinction. The appeal, presented in the journal Science this week, comes from fifty of the world’s leading amphibian researchers who want funding to establish the Amphibian Survival Alliance. Their aim is to reduce and prevent extinction caused by disease, habitat loss, invading species and other causes, which currently threatens 32.5 percent of the 5,743 known species of amphibians.

After the story on artificial limbs attached directly to the skeleton, highlighted in last week’s Science News Digest, this week we take another step towards technologically-enhanced humans. On Thursday the Independent reported on a 25-year-old American patient, Matthew Nagle, who was paralysed after having his spinal cord severed in a knife attack five years ago, but is nevertheless rebuilding his life thanks to electrodes embedded in his brain. Matthew, who has no limb movement at all, has had a device, known as a neuromotor prosthesis (NMP) attached to his motor cortex, the region of the brain responsible for voluntary movement. The NMP transmits electrical currents from Matthew’s brain to external processors, which convert them into signals that can be recognised by a computer. As a result, Matthew is able to open e-mails, change the channel on television, play simple computer games and even move and pick up objects using a robotic arm. Although it still needs many years of development, the team behind the device, who are based in Massachusetts and have published their work in the journal Nature, hope that it can be incorporated into the body to restore movement to paralysed limbs themselves.

In other science news…

The Guardian reports that an experimental vaccine which targets the lethal H5N1 strain of the avian flu virus is ready for its first human trials, according to a British drug company.

The British government has warned that climate change is likely to have a devastating effect on Africa, cancelling out all the benefits of Western aid agreed by the G8 nations last year, reports the Independent.

The Guardian science correspondent Alok Jha has been having a look at a collection of newly released letters written by Albert Einstein to his family. The correspondence sheds new light on the life of the world’s most famous scientist, including his extramarital affairs, his bad financial investments and his devotion as a father.

And finally…

The Daily Mail reports that scientists are working on new drugs that will mimic the buzz of drinking alcohol, without any of the unpleasant side effects the morning after. Neuropsychopharmacologists (try saying that three times fast) in the United States have tested compounds on rats that prevent alcohol from making them clumsy and drowsy, while scientists at the University of Bristol have had promising results with drugs that block receptors in the brain and preserve memory after a heavy drinking session. Another piece of marvellous medicine, being developed by researchers in California, has the ability to sober up drunken lab rats within minutes by dislodging ethanol from the brain. Make mine a red pill, with a twist of lime...