Oldest brain in Britain 'found'

London (PTI): Archaeologists have discovered the remains of what could be the first brain of Britain, which they claim survived 2,000 years in an Iron Age skull. In fact, a team at York Archaeological Trust found the oldest surviving human brain inside a decapitated skull in a field near York, where it was buried 2,000 years ago during the Iron Age.

"It jogged my memory of a university lecture on the rare survival of ancient brain tissue. We gave the skull special conservation treatment as a result and sought expert medical opinion," team leader Rachel Cubitt said.

Subsequently, the skull was sent to the York Hospital, where a CT revealed a blob of tissue around a third the size of a normal brain with patterns and folds closely resembling a modern human organ, the 'Daily Mail' reported.

"This brain is particularly exciting because it is very well preserved, even though it is the oldest recorded find of this type in the United Kingdom and one of the earliest worldwide," Dr Sonia O'Connor of Bradford University, who studied the remains, said.

According to the archaeologists, the brain appears to come from the late Iron Age between 300 BC and one BC, and the the victim probably died by beheading or that the head was cut off soon after death.

Dr Richard Hall, Director of Archaeology at the York Archaeological Trust, said: "From the size, it was probably an adult but we can't say whether it was a man or woman. There is no obvious cause of death because the skull is still intact.

"The skull must have been removed from the body. We are confident that the skull was buried in this small pit and that it has lain undisturbed since the Iron Age. It's possible that a living person has been killed and their head put into a pit for some religious purpose."

Slowdown has not affected Indian science: Expert

Bangalore (IANS): Science and technology has seen a steady growth in India this year despite the economic slowdown, thanks to resurgence of youngsters' interest in research and development, a top scientist said in Bangalore on Thursday.

"Science and technology has done well and shown steady growth despite economic slowdown in the country. For instance, many positive developments have taken place in the field of nanotechnology because of young scientists evincing great interest in research and development (R&D)," said C.N.R. Rao, who heads the Science Advisory Council to the prime minister, at a special session on nanotechnology.

Projecting bright prospects in nanotechnology, Rao said large-scale applications are waiting to happen in the emerging field that would have a direct bearing on the quality of life, healthcare and material sciences.

With about 65 per cent of its population aged below 25, India is better suited than any other country for making rapid strides in the new frontier of science and technology, he said.

"Nanotechnology has tremendous potential and I see a lot of young people taking a keen interest in this field. Though science is not very attractive monetarily, many youngsters are showing interest in R&D in it of late," Rao said.

Cautioning students to beware of institutions offering master's degree in the specialised field, Rao said since nanotech was still in a nascent stage in India, a master's degree in the subject was far-fetched.

"One cannot give a master's degree in nano yet. R&D is fine. We have a long way to go before offering a post-graduate course in such a highly specialised subject," he said.

To ensure nanoscience and nanotechnology are pursued as a research specialisation with greater scope to develop products and solutions, Rao suggested that colleges and university departments should continue to focus on basic sciences so that students with exceptional interest and talent in the field could prepare for a career in nanotechnology.

"It is better to pursue nanoscience and nanotechnology as research specialisation than as degree courses. Unfortunately, science colleges and science departments in universities want to offer courses in nanotechnology and biotechnology. And students join the courses in the hope of getting jobs quickly,” Rao observed.

US-based Rice University professor Pulickel M. Ajayan said the major challenge facing the nano industry was nano-engineering, as developing applications using carbon nano tubes required a blend of the traditional top-down approach and the bottom-up approach.

The technical sessions in nanoscience and nanotechnology are being held as part of the second 'Bangalore Nano 2008' event from Saturday in India's silicon hub.

To be inaugurated by Vice-President Mohammad Hamid Ansari, the premier conference-cum-exposition will showcase advances made in nanotechnology and address various issues pertaining to biotechnology, health, pharma, manufacturing, agriculture, chemicals, materials, energy, environment and greentech.

The four-day event is being organised by Karnataka in association with the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Science Research and Indian Institute of Science (IISc).

What it costs a turtle hatchling to dash to sea

Sydney (IANS): A turtle hatchling's first swim is the most critical of its life. Having run the gauntlet of air and land predators to make it to the sea, the tiny voyager must also evade hungry fish patrolling the beaches in its bid for freedom.

For youngsters hatching on the Great Barrier Reef's coral cays, the risks are high. As many as 30 out of a 100 perish as they head for safe deep waters.

But how much does this headlong dash through the waves cost the intrepid hatchlings?

Curious to know, David Booth from the University of Queensland decided to measure hatchling turtles' oxygen consumption rates as they swam for safety.

Travelling north to the university's research station on Heron Island, Booth was fortunate enough to have a lab within metres of a green turtle nesting beach.

Visiting the beach as the mothers-to-be lumbered up on to the sand, Booth was able to collect several clutches of eggs and move them to the edge of the nesting site for safety from other egg-laying mothers.

Returning to the site several months later as the eggs were about to hatch, Booth intercepted several youngsters before they reached the sea.

Transporting them 100 metres up the beach to the research station, he fitted each hatchling with a lycra swim suit with a cord attached to a force transducer before setting the youngster free in a seawater aquarium.

As soon as they entered the water, the youngsters began swimming frantically with their large front flippers, pulling against the force transducer as if they were swimming out to sea, according to a Queensland release.

Meanwhile, Booth measured the youngsters' oxygen consumption as they swam for 18 hours to find out how hard they were working.

Watching the youngsters' swimming style, Booth could see that initially the animals swam very hard using their front flippers with their heads down, only switching to a 'doggy paddle' as they came up for air before returning to frenzied front-flipper swimming.

But as time drew on, the youngsters' activity slowed. They spent more time doggy paddling and less time pulling with their front flippers until they eventually began taking the odd break after about 12 hours.

Analysing the hatchlings' oxygen consumption, Booth found the same trend with oxygen consumption falling rapidly during the first half hour before declining more slowly and eventually levelling off after 12 hours. So what does this mean for a young turtle as it thrashes to safety?

Calculating the amount of energy that the hatchlings consumed during their 18-hour-swim, Booth realised that the turtles carry almost 10 times as much energy in their yolk remnants as they needed to reach safety.

So the youngsters aren't at risk of running out of energy before making it to safety and Booth suspects that they can probably survive 14 days in the open ocean before finding food.

These findings were published Friday in The Journal of Experimental Biology.

What are we going to be frightened in 2009?

London (GUARDIAN NEWS SERVICE): Apart from terrorism, the growth of our waistlines after Christmas, thecredit crunch and its effect on our jobs and wallets, you mean? There aregoing to be plenty of things online to fret about, say internet securitycompanies.

Top of the list of scary things is cloud computing, claim security providers Websense and Lumension. They reckon that the cloud - where software and data is held on servers owned by a third-party provider such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services - gives the bad guys more opportunities to steal sensitive data and trade secrets.

A total of 61% of those responding to Lumension's survey said they were concerned about the possibility, while Websense predicts a rise in misuse of the cloud - either as a vector for more spam or as a place where malicious software can be hosted.

Outsourcing is already a worry, says Lumension, which warns that the chilly economic climate means that businesses will try to reduce their IT spend by relying even more on outsourcing. It says that the main concerns are people outside the organisation having access to sensitive data and the possibility that the data might not be adequately protected while it's being moved around - shades of lost CD-Roms spring to mind.

And as those who still have jobs increasingly work away from the office, Lumension warns that next year there will more concerns about authenticating an increasing number of users as they log on remotely.

"Securing an organisation's IT environment is an uphill battle," says Larry Poneman, the founder of Lumension.

Websense is also worried about the growth of browser-based web technologies such as Google Gears, Adobe's Air and Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight.

Gazing into its crystal ball, it says: "We predict that in 2009 we will see some large-scale attacks using exploits found within the core Rich Internet Application components as well as user-created services that allow attackers to remotely execute code on users' machines."

Finjan, another security provider, agrees that Flash and its counterparts are going to cause problems next year. "Using rich content applications such as Flash files to distribute malicious code has become the latest trend in cybercrime," says Yuval Ben-Itzhak of Finjan.

And try not to annoy your IT guys in what's left of this year: Finjan reckons that unemployed former IT professionals will be joining forces with the bad guys. Cybercriminals will deploy "the latest technologies, especially sophisticated data-stealing Trojans," warns Ben-Itzhak.

It might even be dangerous to visit reputable websites, says Websense: it predicts that 80% of malicious content will be sneakily hosted on big news and sports sites. Suddenly, worrying about your waistline seems pretty minor. Merry Christmas.

Problems accessing phonebook info

Cambridge (GUARDIAN NEWS SERVICE): I have a phone that will take photographs, function as a GPS device, store 8Gb of music, access the internet, run three different sorts of messaging system, make ordinary phone calls, fit in a shirt pocket ... all that it won't do is keep a phonebook. Keeping contacts accessible is one of the few things that even the most primitive phone used to be able to do without trouble.

But not this Nokia. In my attempts to synchronise with Google contacts it has fluctuated between storing 900 contacts and 256. The right number is something like 500, and of course the 250 contacts that it has lost include most of the really vital ones.

On my previous phone, a Sony Ericsson, there was a wonderful piece of shareware called MyPhone Explorer which kept a reliable synchronisation between Google Calendar and the contacts that I kept in Thunderbird. But it won't run with modern Nokia phones. They come with their own hideous slow and clumsy software. It only synchronises with Outlook or the Windows Address Book, one of which I don't have, and the other of which is useless; I believe it also synchronises with Lotus Notes, which I both don't have and is useless.

The other thing that I don't have (though it would be useful) is the time and patience to poke new contacts directly into the phone, using my forefinger one letter at a time. I prefer to add contact details at a proper keyboard. Since I work regularly at three keyboards - desktop, laptop and wherever I happen to be in the office - I need to be able to putnew contacts somewhere accessible from all of them, which, unless I am crazy, means somewhere in the cloud. That ends up as Google Contacts. They don't work very well either.

Google Contacts is one of those numerous fringe bits of Google which will be great some day, but until then are full of irritating hesitations and inadequacies. It is cumbersome to import to and export from. There is no way to attach notes or meeting information to people; and if you try to access it directly from a phone that isn't running Google's own operating system, the process is so complicated that you might as well fish around in a pocket for the elusive scrap of paper on which the number you want might have been written down. This is the sort of thing from which computers aremeant to have delivered us.

Google Calendar syncs without trouble in many ways to lots of mobile phones, and to desktop calendars and there are two services - ZYB (zyb.com) and GooSync - which claim to be able to synchronise contacts between Googleand a mobile phone. Neither works reliably for me. For a couple of times one or the other may seem to function, but after that they will hang halfway through, and for every hang a duplicate is introduced, until I am looking once more at the 900-entry phone book.

This is all so grotesquely unlike the efficiency of most bits of the web that it must be significant. Of what? The answer comes when you look at the things that do work: money or sex. Corporations have solutions that work perfectly well. When I use the office BlackBerry, it will look up all of the information about all of the contacts to which I am supposed to have access, and it is not impossibly difficult to add new ones. If I used Outlook, and if the office also were plugged into it, I am sure that I could manage the same.

All of the private solutions are designed to make social networks: places where you meet old friends and hope to have sex with strangers.

Services like ZYB or Plaxo keep trying to map networks of friends, and all their activities, not just their address books. They are part of the world in which the screen becomes a window into an eternal cocktail party. What is much harder to find is private and personal information sharing, where my addresses are mine alone, but are available to me wherever I am.

It isn't technically difficult: as I said, there's a program that does it very well on Sony Ericsson phones. But that is maintained by one man, on the donations he gets for it. In the long run, all of our information will be forced into social and corporate networks, because they will be the only things that work.

Genetic mutation linked to eye cancer discovered

Toronto (IANS): Canadian researchers have discovered a gene mutation that can lead to the most common eye cancer.

According to Catherine Van Raamsdonk, an assistant professor of medical genetics at the University of British Columbia who led a team of researchers, a genetic mutation in a gene called GNAQ could be responsible for up to 45 per cent cases of uveal melanoma.

Uveal melanoma is defined as the cancer of the uveal region which is one of the three layers that make up the wall of the eye.

It is caused by unregulated growth of melanocytes which are also found in the skin and are cells linked to a life-threatening form of skin cancer, a university statement in Vancouver said on Wednesday.

"We discovered that GNAQ regulates melanocyte survival," Van Raamsdonk was quoted in the statement as saying.

"When the GNAQ gene is mutated it leads to unregulated growth of melanocytes. Since cancer is a disease of unregulated cell growth, our findings led us to the discovery that a genetic mutation of the GNAQ gene causes uveal melanoma," she said.

Van Raamsdonk added, "Prior to our work, the mutations responsible for uveal melanoma were completely unknown.no other research looked at mutations in GNAQ. The next step is to develop an effective treatment by targeting the specific biological processes that this mutated gene controls."

An aggressive cancer without any effective treatment, uveal melanoma is the most common eye cancer in the U.S.. Researchers also linked this genetic mutation to the development of a skin mole called blue naevi.

The findings have been published in this week's Nature journal.

White blood cells 'eat' and gas bacteria

Sydney (IANS): Poisonous gas used as a potent weapon during World War 1, also helps the body fight invading bacteria and controlling infection.

This latest research significantly advances previous findings which demonstrated that our bacteria-fighting foot soldiers, or white blood cells (WBCs), actually use the equivalent of chlorine bleach to kill invading bacteria.

University of Otago University scientists Tony Kettle and doctoral candidate Melanie Coker, have discovered that a part of this bacteria killing process may involve gassing the invading bacteria within (WBC) itself, after bacteria have been enveloped and 'eaten' by scavenging neutrophils.

The scientists have shown that the interaction between proteins and hypochlorous acid (household bleach) in WBCs, results in the production of toxic chloramine gas, which has a lethal effect on any bacteria.

Although this finding has not been proven within living cells it has been replicated in the lab using proteins from human cells and hypochlorous acid.

WBCs or neutrophils, surround and consume potentially damaging bacteria, and deliver the final 'coup de grace' through the actions of bleach, said an Otago release.

While attacking bacteria, WBCs are also known to cause inflammation in chronic diseases like rheumatoid arthritis or cystic fibrosis; besides promoting cancers.

The discovery has been featured as a cover story in the American journal, Chemical Research in Toxicology.

Biofuels may harm environment: Experts

Panama City (IANS): Extensive cultivation of biofuel crops, aimed at reducing the greenhouse gas or carbon emissions, have posed the "risk of ultimately harming the environment", experts have said.

Scientists taking part in an ecology conference here said that deforestation and land-use changes for biofuel crops are harming environment as much as fossil fuels like coal and petroleum, EFE reported on Sunday.

The forum was organised by the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI).

STRI scientist William Laurance said the diversion of farm belts to biofuel crops also is leading to large increases in the prices of corn, soy and palm oil.

"Looking 30 years ahead, creating energy with palm oil will reduce carbon emissions by 30 tons per hectare, but that doesn't take into account forest loss," said biologist Renton Righelato of the organization World Land Trust, which protects habitats at risk.

Although the biofuel production process generates less carbon, the long-term effects are more harmful than those associated with fossil fuels, the experts said.

According to Righelato, in the process of forest conversion to produce these fuels, "more carbon would be emitted than what is saved (by avoiding fossil-fuel production)."

Biofuel is often touted as an environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuels but palm oil or soy plantations can harm the environment when they replace tropical forests, which are efficient carbon-storage tools.

Tropical forests are estimated to store around 46 percent of terrestrial carbon, while 25 percent of total net global carbon emissions may stem from deforestation.

Righelato also cast doubt on the capacity of biofuels to substitute the diesel fuel currently being used.

"To replace 60 percent of the global transport fuel would require planting all the arable land we now have in the world and using it to generate biofuels," Righelato said.

Philip Fearnside, of Brazil's National Institute of Amazonian Research, said "deforestation is advancing at an alarming rate" in Brazil because of the government's policy of encouraging biofuel farming.

"The demand for these fuels also is increasing and the forecasts say that the total of 20 billion liters (5.3 billion gallons) required today will rise to 52 billion in 2017," he added.

Ageing brains unable to cope with distracting information

Toronto (IANS): Older adults aren't able to filter out distracting information as readily as youngsters and this effects their ability to memorise things, according to new research.

Scientists at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto, Canada say that annoying noise is behind their latest discovery of unique brain activity underlying memory encoding failure, which appears to occur only in older brains.

Volunteers for the study had their brains scanned inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. While the powerful technology can yield remarkable computerised images of the brain working to form a new memory, the high-powered magnet has an inconvenient quirk - it's noisy, especially if you're inside it.

As part of the study, 12 younger adults (average age 26) and 12 older adults (average age 70) took part in a face recognition task that involved having their brains scanned with fMRI while they were shown pictures of faces and later again when trying to recall whether they'd seen each face before, said a Rotman release.

Researchers found that when younger and older adults had difficulty encoding a new memory (certain face), it was marked by decreased activity in brain regions important for encoding, such as the hippocampus. The researchers weren't surprised by this based on an abundance of scientific evidence indicating the importance of hippocampus for making memories.

But the older brains showed additional increased activation in certain regions during memory encoding failure that was not found in younger brains. This was because they were unable to filter unnecessary information since they were distracted by the noise.

"The older brains showed increased activation in certain regions that normally should be quieter or tuned down," said Dale Stevens, who led the study as a doctoral student at Rotman Research Institute.

It is known from earlier studies that older adults are more easily distracted, but this was the first to look at what is going on in the brain when people try to form a memory and fail, said Stevens.

While older adults performed as well as their younger cohorts in the number of faces correctly recognised, older adults forgot more faces overall than younger adults. The study was published in the November issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

Technology feeds grassroots media

noIt is not an impact on the epic scale of an asteroid smashing into the Earth and killing off the dinosaurs, but the collision of technology and media is having profound effects on a more modern ecosystem.



Media are becoming democratised, and a global conversation is emerging.

The tools of production - used to create digital content such as blogs, podcasts, wikis, discussions, multiplayer games, mashups (I'll describe each of those in more detail below) - are increasingly powerful and easy to use, yet decreasingly expensive.

Distribution is also becoming less expensive and easily arranged. The internet is a global platform, and the most important one for the future. But mobile-phone networks are part of the overall communications ecosystem, too, and for many on this planet a primary means of contact.

The democratisation of media is also, fundamentally, about the people we once called mere consumers. Their role is evolving from a passive one to something much more interactive, but they are blessed (or cursed, depending on one's viewpoint) with an unprecedented variety of voices and services.


HAVE YOUR SAY
The vast majority of blogs are self-indulgent ramblings
Mike Woof, London

One thing that does surprise me ... is the amount of personal information people are prepared to make available
Tim Dennell, Sheffield UK

Read more of your comments
The democratisation of media creation, distribution and access does not necessarily foretell that traditional media are dinosaurs of a new variety. If we are fortunate, we'll end up with a more diverse media ecosystem in which many forms - including the traditional organisations - can thrive. It's fair to say, though, that the challenges to existing businesses will be enormous.

For my part, the most exciting aspect of this change is in the emerging conversation. Bottom-up media tools are conversational in nature, even though they can be used in a top-down mode. (It is more accurate, actually, to think of these tools as "edge-in", deployed and used from the edges of networks.)

Let's look at several of the most important tools in today's evolving media sphere.

Blogs

Blogs, short for weblogs, are getting the most attention, and for good reason. They are all about a web that is "read-write" as opposed to the mostly "read-only" medium of the 1990s.


The most important aspect of a good blog is its humanity
What is a blog? Nothing more than an online journal in reverse chronological order on the page, that is, where the most recent updates are at the top. They typically have hyperlinks, or web pointers, to other sites. Many blogs also solicit comments from readers.

The most important aspect of a good blog is its humanity: It has a distinctly human voice, even if the postings are being done by a group instead of an individual.

Remember: The conversation is an essential part of the process.

Wikis

A wiki is a website on which anyone can edit any page. This sounds like an anarchy, but it doesn't have to be: the Wikipedia project - an online encyclopedia with more than a million articles in a number of languages - is far from perfect, but it's a remarkably valuable addition to the reference universe.

Wikis may turn out to be most useful inside networks, such as at corporations, where people can work together on project planning and other common interests.

At the University of Hong Kong, where I've taught part-time for the last few years, my co-lecturer and I have gotten excellent results in planning class projects with wikis.


Podcasting

The word "podcast" is a combination of two concepts - broadcasting and the Apple iPod music player.

Circuit board projected on hand
Technology allows media consumers to have more of a say
That's a mistaken word pairing, given that podcasting is about the ability of almost anyone to create audio content that typically has a small audience for any individual program, and then sending it to any digital device, portable or not.



The actual human voice has its own power over the written word. We get different nuances from audible speech, and they can often tell us things the printed page cannot.

Video podcasts will be the next generation of this genre. But given the difficulty of creating and editing a video that anyone (other, perhaps, than our families) might want to watch, it will probably be some time before this medium takes off. (I may well prove to be wrong about this.)

Web mashups

In Silicon Valley, the current rage is called "web 2.0" - a reference to the web as a computing platform in its own right.

As more and more companies give third parties a way to combine their web-based data and services with other companies' data and services, clever folks are mashing things together in remarkable ways. For example, check out ChicagoCrime.org, which puts government-provided crime data on Google maps and lets people drill down into detail.

Now add to this the idea that everyday folks can start annotating maps and other kinds of information on their own. The possibilities seem endless.

Those are just a few of the concepts in the new world of media.

In coming months, we'll talk about how people inside and outside of the media business are putting these tools to work. We'll also look at some of the difficult policy questions, such as copyright and privacy, that will need resolution. For anyone who cares about the future of media, these are complicated times - and great fun as well.