the-BA : Science News Digest

In the news this week: snip for victory in the fight against HIV, the drought disrupts wildlife and why floods are no problem for GM rice. Plus: an algorithm for enhanced beauty and why science and the arts do mix.

The executive director of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, has stated that the protection which male circumcision provides against HIV transmission is set to change global attitudes to the operation, whose popularity has declined in recent years. Research conducted in 2005 suggested that removing the foreskin hardens the head of the penis, making it less permeable to viruses and reducing the transmission of HIV from women to men during sex by 60 per cent. A study published last month calculated that if all men in sub-Saharan Africa were circumcised, nearly six million new cases of HIV infection could be prevented and three million lives could be saved over the next 20 years. Speaking in the Independent on Wednesday, Dr Richard Feachem said: “Circumcision fell out of favour in North America and the UK as an unnecessary operation. Following this research, I think it extremely probable that parental demand for infant male circumcision will grow as a consequence.” Dr Feachem also said that the finding was one of the most significant in the battle against Aids and offered real hope of slowing the spread of the virus. The issue is set to be debated at the World Aids Congress, opening in Toronto next week.

The current drought, which may now be the worst Britain has experienced for a hundred years, is not only interfering with human water use but poses a severe threat to wildlife, according to The Environment Agency. As water courses in England and Wales run dry, rivers are silting up, trees have started to shed their leaves earlier and low water levels are killing fish and ducks, filling ponds with green algae and stranding aquatic insects. David King, the agency's director of water management, said that: “…the continued lack of rainfall, low water levels and recent high temperatures have put pressure on the environment right across England and Wales,” as evidenced by over 100 incidents of serious effects on wildlife reported in the Telegraph. Phil Burston, the Royal Society's water policy officer, said that in order to cope with the drought conditions, urgent action was needed to stem: “the huge volumes of water squandered through the madness of leaking pipes, water-greedy housing and over-zealous land drainage.”

Following the UK’s first licensed scheme to compensate women undergoing IVF treatment for contributing their eggs to cloning and stem cell research, a leading bioethicist has defended the idea that women should be paid for donating their eggs, reports the Times. In a commentary in the journal Nature, Dr Insoo Hyun, of Case Western Reserve University in the US, argues that it should be acceptable to compensate those donating eggs for their time and effort and for the inconvenience and discomfort surrounding the invasive procedures involved, just as it is for participants in other scientific experiments.
In Britain, direct payment for donating eggs, whether for fertility treatment or medical research, is either tightly restricted or banned altogether, whereas people who take part in scientific trials are paid routinely. Clinics, however, are being allowed to offer discounted treatment to women having IVF if they agree to “share” some of their eggs with other couples or, most recently, if they donate them for therapeutic cloning research.

Plans for mass evacuation of one of Britain’s most high-risk flood areas are being prepared in readiness for the highest tides in 20 years, expected to occur between September 7 and 13 and October 6 and 11. There are fears that the high tides, which are linked to the autumn equinox, will combine with storms and strong northerly winds, to create a storm surge that could defeat sea defences, reports the Telegraph. The Environment Agency is holding road shows to alert people in the most vulnerable, low-lying areas of East Anglia, where tides are expected to be up to 16ft compared with the average of 11ft, and is encouraging them to register to receive direct flood warnings.

In an unrelated development, BBC News reports that scientists from the University of California, Davis and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines have developed a strain of genetically modified (GM) rice that can withstand flooding for up to two weeks. A “submergence gene”, known as Sub1A-1, was identified in an old rice strain that has been abandoned by farmers and introduced into a modern, widely-grown variety, allowing it to survive complete immersion in water for twice as long as before. Speaking in the journal Nature, the researchers say that this is the first in a series of genes that could be introduced into modern rice varieties to make them more resilient to environmental hazards. Farmers in south-east Asia lose an estimated £524m ($1bn) each year when rice crops are destroyed by flooding.

Unfortunately this week’s GM news isn’t all positive: in the USA a strain of GM grass created for golf courses has caused alarm by escaping into the wild and growing three miles outside its Oregon test site, reports the Daily Mail. The strain has been engineered to have increased resistance against the powerful weed-killer glyphosate, enabling golf clubs to spray their fairways and kill the weeds without harming the grass. In response to the escape, the US Department of Agriculture is running its first full environmental impact assessment of a GM plant, amid fears that the grass could transfer its chemical resistance to wild plants and create weeds that could dominate vast areas.

In other science news…

The Independent reports that scientists have identified a contagious form of cancer that is spread between dogs by sex or close contact. The cancer is generally non-fatal but may have implications for the transmission of human tumours.

The world’s second largest ice cap may be melting three times faster than previously estimated, according to research published in the journal Science. The rate at which mass is being lost from The Greenland Ice Sheet is accelerating in accordance with the increased global warming of recent years, reports New Scientist.

New Scientist also reports that a “digital beautification” algorithm, created by a team at Tel Aviv University in Israel, is able to morph photographs of human faces into subtly more attractive versions of themselves without significantly altering the person’s appearance.

Computer software is also being used by scientists in Italy to transform the inaudible seismic waves produced by volcanoes into musical scores, reports BBC News. The scores are being analysed by researchers in an attempt to improve the prediction of volcanic eruptions.

And finally…

Whoever said that science and the arts don’t mix? Two stories in the news this week certainly do a good job of proving otherwise. The Independent reports that scientists at the University of Birmingham have analysed the position of the sun in paintings of the Houses of Parliament by Claude Monet and used calculations of solar geometry to assess the time and place where they were made. Dr Jacob Baker and Dr John Thornes now hope to use the colours in the paintings to analyse the atmospheric state and the type of pollution that caused the fogs over Victorian London.

In addition, BBC News reports that Cobalt green (also known as Rinmann's green), an unpopular pigment used by artists in the 18th Century, is being investigated by researchers in the US because it has special magnetic properties that could make it important for the production of faster and more efficient computer microchips.

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