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Paying for polio shots

Billionaire Bill Gates has said he will help pay for injectable polio vaccines in India, one of the last countries where the disease persists. The current oral treatment has not been successful due to the prevalence of chronic diarrhoea, which prevents the vaccine from working.

Obesity drug heartbreak

Many people who took the anti-obesity drug fenfluramine before it was banned in 1997 carried on developing damage to their heart valves long after stopping the medication, a study of 5743 former users reveals (BMC Medicine, DOI: 10.1186/1741-7015-6-34 ). Of these, 20 per cent of women and 12 per cent of men were affected. For all ex-users, the chances of needing surgery for valve damage was seven times normal .

In a lather over hair

The evolution of hair needs a rethink. Hair proteins called keratins have been found in chickens and lizards , indicating that they did not evolve after mammals had diverged from reptiles and birds, as was thought. Lizards have the highest concentration of the proteins in their toes, suggesting that they are important for claw formation.

India circles the moon

India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft entered orbit around the moon last Saturday. On 15 November, it will send a mini-probe plummeting towards the surface to beam back video and other observations during a 25-minute descent. Once over, the plan is to turn on the main spacecraft’s instruments, including cameras, spectrometers and radar.

Test nanomaterials now

More and more nanomaterials are creeping into consumer products and need urgent testing for safety and environmental impact, says the UK’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. For example, bactericidal nanosilver used in clothing may affect aquatic life. The commission wants Europe’s regulatory rules for chemicals to be extended to such materials.

Phoenix’s end came three weeks earlier than anticipated. The craft’s solar power had been dwindling as the Martian winter approached, and a dust storm late last month accelerated decline by darkening the skies.

Phoenix is not expected to survive the Martian winter, when temperatures will drop below -150 ̊ C. The solar arrays “will likely crack and fall off the vehicle”, says Goldstein. Still, the team plans to check again in October 2009, when enough sunlight returns to power the lander. “This vehicle has been so superlative in the way it’s been behaving since it landed, nothing would surprise me,” says Goldstein.

PIGS really could save our bacon. Organs that are invisible to our immune system and so won’t be rejected when they are transplanted could be ready within 10 years, thanks to a faster way of genetically engineering pigs .

Progress towards these “xenotransplants” has stalled through lack of funding and problems with the cloning technique used to engineer the pigs. Now there is a simpler way. The new technique will alter the DNA in a boar’s sperm cells, and therefore in any future offspring, by injecting a virus into its testicles carrying the desired genes – such as those used to “disguise” pig organs. When the boars breed naturally, they should pass on the genetic changes to their piglets.

Robert Winston of Hammersmith Hospital in London, who is developing the technique with Carol Readhead of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, revealed at a press conference in London last week that they have got their technique to work in six boars. The pigs’ sperm carried a jellyfish “marker” gene that glows green. The plan is to test tissue from piglets sired by the boars to see if they inherited the gene.

AFTER years of often violent opposition, a controversial British medical research lab opened this week, but few were celebrating.

The University of Oxford’s Biomedical Sciences Building suffered a series of setbacks due to threats and criminal damage until new laws stifled violent protests in 2005. It opened on Tuesday, but the university has cautioned against triumphalism. “We would not describe this as a victory, as we never sought a battle,” it says.

Meanwhile, the violent element of the anti-vivisection movement is growing in the US and mainland Europe . Figures

from the Foundation for Biomedical Research (FBR) in Washington DC show that US animal activists have committed 508 illegal acts since 2003. In the previous five years, the number was 138. The most recent was a

firebomb attack in August on the homes of two researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “It is critical that the FBI apprehend the people who committed these felonies,” said FBR president Frankie Trull.

“We would not describe this as a victory, as we never sought a battle”

The health of Australia’s Murray-Darling river system, already shockingly poor, has just taken a turn for the worse. In the past month, tracts of wetland at the mouth of the Murray have become as corrosive as battery acid, forming a yellow crust of sideronatrite, a mineral that only forms in extremely acid soil.

This latest indicator of the river’s decline is detailed in reports to be released this week by the CSIRO Land and Water research institute in Adelaide, South Australia. For years drought and mismanagement have reduced water flows in the Murray-Darling system, altering salinity, temperature and nutrient levels. But in July last year, a team led by Rob Fitzpatrick, who wrote the new reports, found a new problem: falling water

levels in Lakes Alexandrina and Albert at the Murray’s mouth in South Australia were exposing the surrounding soils, rich in iron sulphide, to the air.

This has led to the production of 240,000 tonnes of sulphuric acid, says Fitzpatrick. “Acid dissolves aluminium, arsenic, zinc and lead, which could contaminate water supplies,” he adds. The discovery of sideronatrite will fuel fears that the acid will seep into the lakes, killing aquatic life.

Fitzpatrick says a proposal to flush out the acid with seawater would only be a short-term fix, making the river even saltier than the sea . Two alternatives are being tested around Lake Albert: spreading lime and growing acid-resistant plants to neutralise the acid in the soil.

MURRAY’S MOUTH TURNS TOXIC

JEAN

PAU

L FE

RR

ERO

/AR

DEA

–Acid wash–

‘Invisible’ organs

Animal lab opens

www.newscientist.com 15 November 2008 | NewScientist | 7