Health

There's an idea - common, but not popular in scientific circles - that all life on Earth was seeded from comets, asteroids or meteors which struck the planet and contained the building blocks necessary to kickstart the evolutionary process.

It's called "panspermia" and it caused an all-in boffin barney some 15 years ago when several scientists backed claims there was evidence of life in a Martian meteorite found in the Allan Hills in Antarctica.

It's been proven that life can survive in space, just as it's been proven that the interior of the Mars meteorite never rose above 50C during its journey to Earth.

Unfortunately for alien-spotters, those cells can also be found on Earth, so the argument's never been settled.

Then in July 2001, the rain turned red in India.

And not just red - The Hindu claimed witness reports of yellow, green and black rain in the months that followed.

The first theory to emerge was that it was simply sand or dust picked up from a desert, but a local physicist, Godfrey Louis, found that under a microscope, the water contained cells that looked like bugs.

Five years later, he published a theory suggesting the bugs that turned the rain red in India may have come from a comet that exploded above the Earth and seeded clouds.

Today, after a further four years of studying the cells, joined by a leading panspermia theorist from the UK, Chandra Wickramasinghe, Professor Louis has published claims that they are unlike anything found on Earth.

He says the cells - inert at room temperature - begin to reproduce at 121C.

Within two hours of being exposed to the heat, "daughter cells appear within the original mother cells and the number of cells in the samples increases with length of exposure", they say in the new report.

While many spores on Earth can survive that kind of extreme heat, none have yet been discovered that can reproduce in those conditions, much less require it to begin reproducing.

The team also found an unusual pattern in the way the cells changed colour under UV light, known as "fluorescence behaviour".

They said it was "in remarkable correspondence" with red emissions from the Red Rectangle planetary nebula some 2300 light years away, "suggesting, though not proving, an extraterrestrial origin".

While the panspermia angle is already being rejected by the scientific community at large, there's plenty of interest in the final finding of Prof Louis's team - the cells contain no DNA.

"As a biologist, let me assure you that a cell-sized and shaped organism that reproduces, lives off LB and doesn't appear to have any nucleic acid template (DNA or RNA) is a revolutionary discovery in and of itself," one commenter wrote at TechnologyReview.

The only lifeforms that occur on Earth without DNA, according to another commenter, are proteins known as "prions", best known on Earth as the cause of Mad Cow Disease.

As the privacy controversy around full-body security scans begins to simmer, it’s worth noting that courthouses and airport security checkpoints aren’t the only places where backscatter x-ray vision is being deployed. The same technology, capable of seeing through clothes and walls, has also been rolling out on U.S. streets.

American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents, Joe Reiss, a vice president of marketing at the company told me in an interview. While the biggest buyer of AS&E’s machines over the last seven years has been the Department of Defense operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Reiss says law enforcement agencies have also deployed the vans to search for vehicle-based bombs in the U.S.

“This product is now the largest selling cargo and vehicle inspection system ever,” says Reiss.

Here’s a video of the vans in action.



The Z Backscatter Vans, or ZBVs, as the company calls them, bounce a narrow stream of x-rays off and through nearby objects, and read which ones come back. Absorbed rays indicate dense material such as steel. Scattered rays indicate less-dense objects that can include explosives, drugs, or human bodies. That capability makes them powerful tools for security, law enforcement, and border control.

It would also seem to make the vans mobile versions of the same scanning technique that’s riled privacy advocates as it’s been deployed in airports around the country. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is currently suing the DHS to stop airport deployments of the backscatter scanners, which can reveal detailed images of human bodies. (Just how much detail became clear last May, when TSA employee Rolando Negrin was charged with assaulting a coworker who made jokes about the size of Negrin’s genitalia after Negrin received a full-body scan.)

“It’s no surprise that governments and vendors are very enthusiastic about [the vans],” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of EPIC. “But from a privacy perspective, it’s one of the most intrusive technologies conceivable.”

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But EPIC’s Rotenberg says that the scans, like those in the airport, potentially violate the fourth amendment. “Without a warrant, the government doesn’t have a right to peer beneath your clothes without probable cause,” he says. Even airport scans are typically used only as a secondary security measure, he points out. “If the scans can only be used in exceptional cases in airports, the idea that they can be used routinely on city streets is a very hard argument to make.”

The TSA’s official policy dictates that full-body scans must be viewed in a separate room from any guards dealing directly with subjects of the scans, and that the scanners won’t save any images. Just what sort of safeguards might be in place for AS&E’s scanning vans isn’t clear, given that the company won’t reveal just which law enforcement agencies, organizations within the DHS, or foreign governments have purchased the equipment. Reiss says AS&E has customers on “all continents except Antarctica.”

Reiss adds that the vans do have the capability of storing images. “Sometimes customers need to save images for evidentiary reasons,” he says. “We do what our customers need.”

A federal judge's decision Friday to undo the government's five-year-old approval of genetically modified sugar beets, from which roughly half of U.S. sugar is derived, won't disrupt supplies for at least a year, but could pose headaches for food companies after that.

The order by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White—who had concluded in September 2009 that the U.S. Department of Agriculture hadn't lived up to its obligation to fully consider whether the weedkiller-tolerant sugar beets might harm the environment—effectively blocks farmers from planting the seed next spring, but leaves alone the crop already in the ground, which can be harvested this fall, processed and sold as sugar.

"In the short term, at least, we're aren't going to see any disruption in the marketing of this year's crop," said Luther Markwart, executive vice president of the American Sugarbeet Growers Association, a Washington, D.C., trade group.

However food companies that depend on a steady supply of U.S. sugar face uncertainty over where they will source their sugar beets after next year.

It is far from clear how soon U.S. sugar-beet farmers can return to planting the seeds, which are genetically modified the same way as the vast majority of the corn, soybeans and cotton grown in the U.S. The plants are genetically modified with Monsanto Co. genes that give them immunity to glyphosate-based herbicide, which the St. Louis biotechnology company sells as Roundup weedkiller.

The Roundup-resistant trait is popular with many farmers—it is present in 95% of the sugar-beet plants grown in the U.S.—because it enables them to chemically weed their fields without harming their crops, saving time and the expense of mechanical cultivation.

Monsanto licenses several sugar-beet seed companies to use its herbicide-tolerance gene in their breeding programs. The business isn't big enough to be material to the company's financial results.

The lawsuit against the USDA was filed by activist groups including the Center for Food Safety and the Sierra Club, among others. Biotechnology critics worry that the transplanted gene could spread to conventional sugar-beet plants through cross-pollination, and that the herbicide-tolerance trait permits a heavy enough use of Roundup to spur the evolution of weeds that can survive glyphosate, the active ingredient in the weedkiller.

Glyphosate-tolerant weeds are already appearing in southeast U.S. farm fields where farmers have long grown Roundup-tolerant cotton and soybeans.

Sugar-beet industry officials say it would be difficult for U.S. farmers to quickly switch back to non-genetically modified seed. Some farmers have already sold off their cultivation equipment—which kills weeds by digging into the dirt—and it isn't clear how much conventional seed is available anymore.

Genetically modified sugar-beet seed won't be legal to plant again until the Agriculture Department repeats its regulatory review process. Sugar-industry officials widely expect the USDA's biotechnology regulators—who are charged with protecting U.S. agriculture from plant pests—to come to the same conclusion and eventually re-clear the seed for planting. But getting there again will include the time-consuming process of writing the environmental-impact statement ordered by Judge White, who sits in San Francisco.

The draft environmental-impact statement that the USDA published in December on Roundup–tolerant alfalfa, for example, ran to about 1,500 pages. The USDA has estimated that completing an environmental-impact statement on Roundup-tolerant sugar beets could easily take until April 2012.

Sugar-industry officials say they believe the USDA has the authority to implement interim measures to permit some planting of the genetically modified sugar beets. A USDA spokesman said the agency was "reviewing the judge's order in order to determine appropriate next steps."

A group of central Ontario parents is demanding their children's schools turn off wireless internet before they head back to school next month, fearing the technology is making the kids sick.

Some parents in the Barrie, Ont., area say their children are showing a host of symptoms, ranging from headaches to dizziness and nausea and even racing heart rates.

They believe the Wi-Fi setup in their kids' elementary schools may be the problem.

The parents complain they can't get the Simcoe County school board or anyone else to take their concerns seriously, even though the children's symptoms all disappear on weekends when they aren't in school.

"Parents are getting together and realizing this is the pattern," said Rodney Palmer of the Simcoe County Safe School Committee.

"We went to the school board and they did nothing."

The symptoms, which also include memory loss, trouble concentrating, skin rashes, hyperactivity, night sweats and insomnia, have been reported in 14 Ontario schools in Barrie, Bradford, Collingwood, Orillia and Wasaga Beach since the board decided to go wireless, Palmer said.

"These kids are getting sick at school but not at home," he said.

"I'm not saying it's because of the Wi-Fi because we don't know yet, but I've pretty much eliminated every other possible source."

The Simcoe County school board could not be reached for comment Friday because their offices were closed.

The parents group has offered to pay for wired connections if the board switches off the Wi-Fi, Palmer said.

"They didn't even say no," he said. "They ignored it and … reaffirmed their position supporting Wi-Fi.

"They are culpable and … they have the gall to go on the record and say they haven't had any doctor's notes. Well what doctor has been schooled about the rate of microwave infections?"

Susan Clarke, a former research consultant to the Harvard School of Public Health, said Wi-Fi technology alters fundamental physiological functioning and can cause neurological and cardiac symptoms.
Young kids most susceptible

"We have the physics that show that children, especially young children, are going to absorb much more radiation than older children and adults because of their thinner skulls and because the size of their brains more closely approximates the size of the wavelength being deployed," Clarke said.

Wireless technology also wastes energy, is less secure than wired connections, could be violating a student's right to a safe environment and should be turned off in schools, Clarke added.

"The simple solution is plug back in the wired, ported system that's already there and unplug the wireless," she said. "It's real easy and it costs nothing. In fact, it will save money."

Professor Magda Havas of Trent University in Peterborough, Ont., who does research on the health effects of electromagnetic radiation, issued an open letter to parents and boards saying she is "increasingly concerned" about Wi-Fi and cellphone use at schools.

Claims by Health Canada that Wi-Fi is safe provided exposures to radiation are below federal guidelines are "outdated and incorrect," based on the growing number of scientific publications reporting adverse health and biological effects, Havas wrote.

"It is irresponsible to introduce Wi-Fi microwave radiation into a school environment where young children and school employees spend hours each day."

The Ontario Ministry of Education said it has heard from the parents in Simcoe County and received a complaint passed along from a Peterborough family worried about Wi-Fi in schools. But the ministry said it is up to local school boards to deal with the issue.

"The boards, the principals and the teachers should work together to address those concerns," said ministry spokeswoman Erin Moroz.

The provincial New Democrats said they too had been hearing from parents worried about the effects of wireless technology on children, and called on the chief medical officer of health to investigate.

"Within a few months of Wi-Fi being installed, stories start coming forward with kids complaining about headaches, neurological effects, loss of balance and problems with fine motor skills," said NDP health critic France Gelinas.

"There is enough anecdotal evidence from parents that this is worth looking into."

Palmer plans to find alternate schools or even home school his two children this fall if the board doesn't agree to turn off the Wi-Fi and said other parents will likely follow suit if the symptoms return.

"If they're going to continue to endanger the health of children, I can predict that many of the parents who are now writing us saying their kids have been fine all summer are going to have a change of heart about the third week of September when their kids are coming home from school with these problems, particularly the ones that are passing out and falling down, hitting their head on the gym floor," he said.

While parents worry about younger children, concerns about the health effects of wireless technology prompted Lakehead University to virtually ban Wi-Fi from its campuses in Thunder Bay, Ont., and Orillia, Ont.

"There will be no Wi-Fi connectivity provided in those areas of the university already served by hard wire connectivity until such time as the potential health effects have been scientifically rebutted or there are adequate protective measures that can be taken," says Lakehead's policy on Wi-Fi and cellular antennas.

BILOXI, Mississippi, Aug 20, 2010 (IPS) - The U.S. state of Mississippi recently reopened all of its fishing areas. The problem is that commercial shrimpers refuse to trawl because they fear the toxicity of the waters and marine life due to the BP oil disaster.

"We come out and catch all our Mississippi oysters right here," James "Catfish" Miller, a commercial shrimper in Mississippi, told IPS. Pointing to the area in the Mississippi Sound from his shrimp boat, he added, "It's the only place in Mississippi to catch oysters, and there is oil and dispersants all over the top of it."

On Aug. 6, Mississippi's Department of Marine Resources (DMR) and the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, in coordination with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, ordered the reopening of all Mississippi territorial waters to all commercial and recreational finfish and shrimp fishing activities that were part of the precautionary closures following the BP oil rig disaster in April. At least five million barrels flowed into the Gulf before the well was shut earlier this month.

But Miller, along with many other commercial shrimpers, refuses to trawl.

Miller took IPS out on his shrimp boat, along with commercial shrimper Mark Stewart, and Jonathan Henderson of the Gulf Restoration Network, an environmental group working to document and alleviate the effects of BP's oil disaster.

The goal was to prove to the public that their fishing grounds are contaminated with both oil and dispersants. Their method was simple – they tied an absorbent rag to a weighted hook, dropped it overboard for a short duration of time, then pulled it up to find the results. The rags were covered in a brown oily substance that the fishermen identified as a mix of BP's crude oil and toxic dispersants.

Miller and Stewart, who were both in BP's Vessels of Opportunity programme and were trained in identifying oil and dispersants, have been accused by some members of Mississippi's state government of lying about their findings.

"Why would we lie about oil and dispersant in our waters, when our livelihoods depend on our being able to fish here?" Miller asked IPS. "I want this to be cleaned up so we can get back to how we used to live. But it doesn't make sense for us or anyone else to fish if our waters are toxified. I don't know why people are angry at us for speaking the truth. We're not the ones who put the oil in the water."

IPS watched Miller and Stewart conduct eight tests in various places around Mississippi Sound. One of them was less than a quarter mile from the mouth of Pass Christian Harbor, and another was less than one mile from a public beach. Every single test found the absorbent rags stained with brown oil.

During an earlier test round, the two fishermen brought out scientist Dr. Ed Cake of Gulf Environmental Associates.

Dr. Cake wrote of the experience: "When the vessel was stopped for sampling, small, 0.5- to 1.0-inch-diameter bubbles would periodically rise to the surface and shortly thereafter they would pop leaving a small oil sheen. According to the fishermen, several of BP's Vessels-of- Opportunity (Carolina Skiffs with tanks of dispersants [Corexit?]) were hand spraying in Mississippi Sound off the Pass Christian Harbor in prior days/nights. It appears to this observer that the dispersants are still in the area and are continuing to react with oil in the waters off Pass Christian Harbor."

Shortly thereafter, Miller took the samples to a community meeting in nearby D'Iberville to show fishermen and families. At the meeting, fishermen unanimously supported a petition calling for the firing of Dr. Bill Walker, the head of Mississippi's DMR, who is responsible for opening the fishing grounds.

On Monday, Aug. 9, Walker, despite ongoing reports of tar balls, oil, and dispersants being found in Mississippi waters, declared "there should be no new threats" and issued an order for all local coast governments to halt ongoing oil disaster work being funded by BP money that was granted to the state.

Recent days in Mississippi waters have found fishermen and scientists finding oil in Garden Pond on Horn Island, massive fish kills near Cat Island and Biloxi, "black water" in Mississippi Sound, oil inside Pass Christian Harbor, and submerged oil in Pass Christian, in addition to what Miller and Stewart showed IPS and others with their testing.

"We've sent samples to all the news media we know, here in Mississippi and in [Washington] D.C.," Stewart, a third generation fisherman from Ocean Springs, told IPS. "We had Ray Mabus's people on this boat, and we sent them away with contaminated samples they watched us take, and we haven't heard back from them."

Raymond Mabus is the United States secretary of the Navy and a former governor of Mississippi. President Barack Obama tasked him with developing "a long-term Gulf Coast Restoration Plan as soon as possible."

Mabus has been accused by many Gulf Coast fishermen of not living up to his task.

Stewart told IPS, "Normally we have a lot of white shrimp in the Sound right now. You can catch 500 to 800 pounds a night, but right now, there are very few people shrimping, and those that are, are catching nothing or maybe 200 pounds per night. You can't even pay your expenses on 200 pounds per night."

"We think they opened shrimp season prematurely," Miller told IPS, "How can we put our product back on the market when everybody in America knows what happened down here? I have seen so many dead animals in the last few months I can't even keep count."

On Thursday, several commercial shrimpers, including Miller and Stewart, held a press conference at the Biloxi Marina. Other fishermen there were not fishing because they feared making people sick with seafood they might catch.

"I don't want people to get sick," Danny Ross, a commercial fisherman from Biloxi told IPS, "We want the government and BP to have transparency with the Corexit dispersants."

Ross said he has watched horseshoe crabs trying to crawl out of the water, and other marine life like stingrays and flounder trying to escape the water as well. He believes this is because the water is hypoxic due to the toxicity of the toxic dispersants, of which BP admits to using at least 1.9 million gallons.

"I will not wet a net and catch shrimp until I know it's safe to do so," Ross added. "I have no way of life now. I can't shrimp and others are calling the shots. For the next 20 years, what am I supposed to do? Because that's how long it's going to take for our waters to be safe again."

David Wallis, another fisherman from Biloxi, attended the press conference.

"We don't feel our seafood is safe, and we demand more testing be done," Wallis told IPS. "I've seen crabs crawling out of the water in the middle of the day. This is going to be affecting us far into the future."

"A lot of fishermen feel as we do. Most of them I talk to don't want the season opened, for our safety as well as others," Wallis added, "Right now there's barely any shrimp out there to catch. We should be overloaded with shrimp right now. That's not normal. I won't eat any seafood that comes out of these waters, because it's not safe."

Researchers in the US have found new evidence that genetically modified crop plants can survive and thrive in the wild, possibly for decades.

A University of Arkansas team surveyed countryside in North Dakota for canola. Transgenes were present in 80% of the wild canola plants they found.

They suggest GM traits may help the plants survive weedkillers in the wild.

The findings were presented at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Pittsburgh.

"We just drew 11 lines that crossed the state [of North Dakota] - highways and other roads," related research team leader Cindy Sagers.

"We drove along them, we made 604 stops in a total distance of over 3,000 miles (5,000km). We found canola in 46% of the locations; and 80% of them contained at least one transgene."

In some places, the plants were packed as closely together as they are in farmers' fields.

"We found herbicide resistant canola in roadsides, waste places, ball parks, grocery stores, gas stations and cemeteries," they related in their Ecological Society presentation.

The majority of canola grown in North Dakota has been genetically modified to make it resistant to proprietary herbicides, with Monsanto's RoundUp Ready and Bayer's LibertyLink the favoured varieties. These accounted for most of the plants found in the wild.

Two of the plants analysed contained both transgenes, indicating that they had cross-pollinated.

This is thought to be the first time that communities of GM plants have been identified growing in the wild in the US.

Similar findings have been made in Canada, while in Japan, a study in 2008 found substantial amounts of transgenic rape - a close relative of canola - around port areas where GM varieties had been imported.

State-wide

What surprised the Arkansas team was how ubiquitous the GM varieties were in the wild.

"We found the highest densities of plants near agricultural fields and along major freeways," Professor Sagers told BBC News.

"But we were also finding plants in the middle of nowhere - and there's a lot of nowhere in North Dakota."
Canola seeds The GM seeds seem to be competitive, allowing a plant community to survive

Canola seeds are especially prone to dispersal, through blowing in the wind or through falling from trucks, as the seeds weigh just a few thousandths of a gram.

The changes in Kiera’s body scared her parents. Though the 8-year-old seemed her usual chipper self, she’d started to develop headaches and acne. More alarming to her mom, Sharon, were the budding breasts on Kiera’s thin little chest.

“I thought, she’s too young,” remembers the Pittsburgh mom. “She’s still fearful about sleeping by herself. An 8-year-old just isn’t mature enough to handle this.”

For Kiera, whose last name is being withheld to protect her privacy, it was all so embarrassing. None of her friends seemed to be experiencing what she was. When they asked about the acne and her expanding chest, Kiera was evasive. “I didn’t want to tell them what was going on,” says the Pittsburgh girl, now age 9. “So I had to kind of lie to them.”

When Kiera’s parents took their daughter to the doctor, he assured them that nothing was wrong with the girl. Kiera was simply starting puberty early.

As it turns out, puberty at age 7 or 8 isn’t so unusual these days. A new study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, shows that more American girls are maturing earlier and earlier. Typically, U.S. girls hit puberty around age 10 or 11.

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To take a long-term look at the impact of puberty and other factors on breast cancer, researchers enrolled 1,239 girls between the ages of 6 and 8 from three sites in the U.S.: New York’s East Harlem, the greater Cincinnati metropolitan area and the San Francisco Bay area.

The study revealed a surprisingly large bump in the number of girls going through puberty between the ages of 7 and 8. For example, the researches found that 10 percent of 7-year-old white girls had some breast development as compared to 5 percent in a study published in 1997. Similarly, 23 percent of the 7-year-old black girls had started puberty as compared to 15 percent in the 1997 study.

Nobody’s sure what is driving the declining age of puberty. But the rise in obesity could be at least partly to blame, says the study’s lead author, Dr. Frank Biro, director of adolescent medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.

That makes a lot of sense to Dr. Luigi Garibaldi, a professor of pediatrics and clinical director of pediatric endocrinology at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Back in the 1700s, girls didn’t start to menstruate till they were 17 or 18, Garibaldi says. That had a lot to do with malnutrition. The assumption is that the steady decline in age since then has to do with more abundant food.

There may be other environmental factors at work, too, says Dr. Stanley Korenman, an endocrinologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

For example, Korenman says, environmental exposure to estrogens in plastics, chemicals and foods has been going up. “And estrogens do stimulate breast development,” he adds.

Until we know what the cause is, the best way to slow puberty may be to “start living green,” says Biro. “It may help for families eat together and to consume well-balanced diets. Regular physical activity may help, too.”

Another finding from the study may back that concept up. The rate of early puberty was much lower in the San Francisco group: 7 percent among white 7-year-olds from northern California versus 14 percent among Ohioans of the same age. Among black 7-year olds, 27 percent of Californians hit puberty early as compared to 31 percent of the New Yorkers. Northern California’s temperate climate fosters more outdoor activities and the emphasis on healthy foods results in a better diet.

If you think that the upcoming energy shortage is going to be bad, it will pale in comparison to the next water crisis....

One theory about the endless wars in the Middle East since 1918 is that they have really been over water rights. Although Earth is often referred to as the water planet, only 2.5% is fresh, and three quarters of that is locked up in ice at the North and South poles.

In places like China, with a quarter of the world’s population, up to 90% of the fresh water is already polluted, some irretrievably so.

Some 18% of the world population lacks access to potable water, and demand is expected to rise by 40% in the next 20 years.

Aquifers in the US, which took nature millennia to create, are approaching exhaustion. While membrane osmosis technologies exist to convert sea water into fresh, they use ten times more energy than current treatment processes, a real problem if you don’t have any, and will easily double the end cost to consumers.

While it may take 16 pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef, it takes a staggering 2,416 gallons of water to do the same.