NanoSapiens » Guardian

Seed swaps breed biodiversity | Peter Giovannini

Peter Giovannini — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 15:00:01 +0000

Freezing seeds is all very well, but we must encourage the exchange of knowledge with events like Seedy Sunday

I pay £1.50 at the door and a long-haired woman wearing colourful clothes stamps “Outlawed” on my hand. But this is no clandestine rave – I am in a big town hall, the type you might go to for a classical music concert. As I get closer to one of the tables at the centre of the hall, I see plenty of people busy browsing material and talking to the staff at the desks.

A few steps away is a desk stacked with boxes full of little envelopes. Some of these are of brownish recycled paper, others are more colourful, illustrated with images of plants. They carry names like “Marina di Chioggia pumpkin“, “aubergine Black Beauty“, “Saint-Esprit à Oeil Rouge Bush Bean“, followed by the year of collection.

This friendly and diverse crowd was participating in a community seed swap fair known as “Seedy Sunday“, which has been taking place in Brighton every year since 2001. The idea is that growers (farmers, allotment holders and garden holders) can exchange seeds of different varieties to enrich their gardens with more diversity. But why are these people bothering to exchange seeds instead of buying them from retailers – and why is this important or even interesting?

Farmers in pre-industrial societies around the world have selected, bred and swapped varieties adapted to different ecological situations and cultural needs and in doing so have produced an immense wealth of agricultural biodiversity – agrobiodiversity. Agrobiodiversity is the raw material that agriculture needs to be able to adapt to a changing environment.

The industrialisation of agriculture has caused an erosion of the diversity of crop varieties. Agrobiodiversity is declining at an alarming rate because growers are increasingly relying on purchased seeds, and the dynamic process that produces and conserves agrobiodiversity has been suddenly interrupted. EU seed marketing regulations have also contributed to this decline by imposing criteria for the commercialisation of seed varieties that are rarely met by locally adapted varieties or landraces. Indeed, seed swappers refer to the seed varieties that are not admitted in the national official lists, which list the varieties that can be sold, as “outlawed”.

Many international organisations, recognising the value of agrobiodiversity for the future of humankind, are promoting the conservation of local varieties of crops. Seed banks – huge freezing facilities – have been created to conserve seeds outside their natural habitat (ex situ). Kew Millennium Seed Bank, based in Wakehurst, is the largest ex situ conservation project and an incredibly valuable effort in the preservation of biodiversity on Earth.

However, to conserve agrobiodiversity it is not enough to simply conserve the seeds, it is also necessary to conserve the local knowledge concerning their use and the process of exchange between growers. If we conserve only the seeds but not the process that has in the past created them, we will end up relying only on the breeding of new varieties that occurs in the laboratories of universities and companies. The conservation community is now realising the importance of conserving local seed varieties in their habitat and an increasing number of projects around the world are dealing with this issue.

While Seedy Sundays started just a few years ago, they replicate and continue a tradition of exchanging plant material and knowledge that is at least as old as agriculture itself. The event also highlights the need for regulations and policies that foster the exchange of plant material instead of restricting it. In this sense, events such as the seed swap fair in Brighton are important grassroots initiatives to foster the conservation of the genetic diversity of crops within their habitat – without just locking them in a big freezer.

Peter Giovannini

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Chromium-6 and clean water | Rebecca Sutton

Rebecca Sutton — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 13:30:01 +0000

As the Environmental Working Group found, carcenogenic contamination is a real issue. We need to go back to the source

The Environmental Working Group welcomes informed scrutiny of our recent study on hexavalent chromium (chromium-6) in tap water. We detected this probable human carcinogen in the water of 31 of 35 American cities tested.

We now know that chromium-6 exposure is not limited to communities like Hinkley and Kettleman City, California, victims of extreme industrial pollution and corporate malfeasance. Our results show that communities across the United States, and probably around the world, may be exposed to low levels of this toxin. Worldwide, known hotspots of chromium-6 contamination include Glasgow, Oinofita, Greece and parts of India, China and Australia.

The US Environmental Protection Agency reacted swiftly to our study with a four-point plan to help water utilities nationwide monitor and assess chromium-6 levels, and EPA chief Lisa Jackson has pledged to move quickly to set a nationwide safety standard.

California officials recently lowered the proposed safe level from 0.06 parts per billion (ppb) to 0.02 ppb. The amount EWG found in tap water from one American city, Norman, Oklahoma, was nearly 650 times higher than this. State scientists concluded that the lower goal is necessary to account for the special sensitivity of infants and young children to carcinogens. EWG and many other scientists and public health advocates have urged exactly this approach. Establishing this public health goal is the first step in setting a mandatory safety standard, which, under California law, should have been done by 2004.

The author of a recent opinion piece here argued that the proposed safe level would achieve an insignificant reduction in lifetime cancer risk. Public health agencies disagree. Safety goals are intended to protect people over a lifetime of exposure, not just to chromium-6 but to the many other cancer-causing compounds that commonly contaminate tap water, including chlorination byproducts linked to bladder cancer, and arsenic linked to skin, bladder and lung cancer. Many of these compounds also contaminate food, air and soil, or turn up in consumer products. Over a lifetime, people’s exposures to all these sources add up.

Stringent safety standards aren’t a luxury. Forty-one percent of all Americans will be diagnosed with cancer during their lifetimes. About 21% will die from it, according to the US National Cancer Institute; in 2009 alone, 1.5 million people were diagnosed. Health officials can hardly be too protective when it comes to tap water, which is widely consumed and commonly contaminated. We don’t know how many cancer cases are linked to chemical exposures, but in an April 2010 study the President’s Cancer Panel found that environmental causes of cancer are “grossly underestimated” and “needlessly devastate American lives”.

The case of chromium-6 is particularly troublesome. Both animal and human studies have shown it to be a potent carcinogen. As far back as 1987, researchers documented an increased risk of stomach cancer and a “significant excess of overall cancer mortality” among Chinese villagers whose water had been polluted by chromium-6. In 2008, a gold-standard study (pdf) by federal scientists found increases in gastrointestinal tumors in rats and mice exposed through drinking water. Based on that data, the US National Toxicology Programme found that chromium-6 shows clear evidence of carcinogenic activity.

Certainly, the actions necessary to address the problem will carry significant costs. But the accumulating evidence makes clear that simply ignoring it is not an option. The first step is to identify those water supplies that contain unsafe levels of chromium-6, and the EPA deserves credit for following up promptly on our findings. The second step is to find ways to minimise contamination where it is found.

But providing safe drinking water is not just a matter of treatment or purification. As a nation, we need to protect our water supplies at the source. We spend 1,900 times more to treat drinking water than we do to protect it in the first place. Our priorities are back to front.

Rebecca Sutton

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Making Smart cars smarter – video

Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 12:04:58 +0000

Scientists at Newcastle University are working on a Smart car battery that will allow the electric cars to travel the same distance as petrol and diesel cars without re-charging

Can we feel the future through psi? Don’t rule it out | Ed Halliwell

Ed Halliwell — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 11:21:40 +0000

A study suggesting the existence of precognition should be carefully scrutinised – not dismissed out of hand

A storm is hovering over the editors of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which is to publish a paper offering evidence for precognition – knowledge of unpredictable future events. Feeling The Future, written by Daryl Bem, an emeritus professor of Cornell University, reports the results of nine experiments with more than 1,000 subjects, all but one of which appear to suggest paranormal powers. His findings are due to be published by the respected journal this year, and sceptics have been queueing up to rubbish them.

Among Bem’s contentions is that participants given a memory test were more likely to remember words that they were later asked to practise, suggesting that the effects of this post-test rehearsal somehow reached back in time. He also found that subjects asked to select which of two curtains on a computer screen hid an erotic image were able to do so at a significantly greater rate than chance would predict. Intriguingly, the same experiment didn’t produce any unusual results when the images behind the virtual curtain were less titillating.

The study is striking not so much for its data – anomalous results from smallish one-off experiments can hardly be described as earth-shattering – but for the fact that it comes from such a distinguished source (Bem is a highly acclaimed research psychologist), and because it has been accepted by such a prominent publication, following the usual peer review procedures. But perhaps even more interesting is the reaction it is producing among some critics – Ray Hyman, another emeritus psychology professor has described the publication as “pure craziness … an embarrassment for the entire field“, while Robert Park, a physicist at the University of Maryland called it “a waste of time … it leads the public off into strange directions that will be unproductive“.

The strength of such denunciations are curious. If Bem’s experiments are indicative of ESP, then the implications are fascinating and wide-ranging, and at least worthy of continued investigation. Indeed, part of Bem’s motivation, he says, was to construct easily replicable trial procedures so that interested parties could help build a reliable evidence base. If his trials are flawed, then they should be challenged robustly in the public domain.

Leaps in understanding require daring as well as rigour, and while extraordinary claims may require extraordinary evidence, there does seem to be sufficient data for ESP to at least merit an ongoing debate. Dean Radin’s book The Noetic Universe offers reams of serious studies purporting to show phenomena such as perception at a distance, mind-matter interaction and telepathy – including meta-analyses of apparently well-conducted trials – that appear to add up to something interesting. Radin also suggests that theories underpinning psychic phenomena are no weirder – and indeed potentially compatible with – those regularly put forward and accepted in mainstream physics, or in mind-body medicine.

To the interested observer, the wide divergence of views among psi experts can be as befuddling as the evidence itself. When the people who have devoted their careers either to proposing or debunking the existence of the paranormal can’t agree on the fundamentals of their field, even when presented with the same data, then what chance does the lay observer have? The arguments tend to stand or fall on the finer points of study design or statistical interpretation. One of the main critiques of Bem’s study is not that his results are suspect, but that he has analysed them insufficiently, although it’s worth noting that one of the sceptic re-analyses concludes that his data offers a “surprising degree of evidence” in favour of precognition.

But perhaps the most telling statistic in Bem’s paper is that 34% of psychologists consider psychic phenomena to be impossible. Improbable, maybe. Unproven, perhaps. But impossible? That certainty seems to reflect a clinging to orthodoxy that is as much belief-based as the public’s conviction that psychic powers are real and in our possession (apparently, 62% of us claim to know who’s calling before we pick up the phone).

Daryl Bem’s experiments may or may not give us evidence that precognition exists – but if publication of his paper can show that interest in psychic phenomena isn’t limited to crackpot true believers, and that studies of it are worthy of more than blind dismissal or uncritical acceptance, then it will have more than served a purpose.

Ed Halliwell

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Scientists hail discovery of one-fingered T rex relative

Tania Branigan — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 09:38:10 +0000

Linhenykus, a parrot-sized, two-legged creature, shows that dinosaur evolution was more complex than originally thought, researchers say

It weighed about as much as a large parrot, was related to the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex and boasted just one finger on each hand.

Although it might sound like the punchline to a joke, the Linhenykus monodactylus is an important new discovery, say experts: the first two-legged dinosaur with only one claw on each forelimb.

The species is part of the theropod group – which also included T rex and Velociraptor, and which ultimately gave rise to birds – said Professor Xu Xing, who led the international team of researchers that found the northern Chinese specimen.

“Linhenykus was very small sized, similar to a [large] parrot. We think it lived on ants and other small insects. It might also have been the prey of other kinds of dinosaurs in the area,” added Xu, of the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Paleoanthropology, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Michael Pittman of University College London – another member of the team – told the BBC: “You’d see a very small animal, probably below your hip height, with a very small skull. It’s not very threatening because its teeth are very small compared to other carnivorous dinosaurs.”

Xu said the discovery showed that the evolution of theropods was more complex than originally thought. Some species had a big finger and two small ones. Experts had surmised that the creatures used the large one to dig with and that it became stronger over time while the smaller ones were not used and were eventually lost.

“But for Linhenykus, its big finger is not that strong, while the two other fingers have withered. So this is rather different from what we have always thought and is worth researching. It is far more complicated than we have believed,” said Xu.

The partial skeleton includes vertebrae, a forelimb, part of a pelvis and nearly complete hind legs. It was found in rocks formed between 84m and 75m years ago in Inner Mongolia – close to Linhe, the city after which it is named.

“Linhe is the place where dinosaur fossils from the late Cretaceous period have been best preserved,” said Xu.

“In the late Cretaceous, sandstorms killed many dinosaurs. We discovered the fossil of a group of ankylosaurs and dinosaurs that were sitting on their eggs.

“I think Linhe has got great potential and I am very optimistic about finding more there.”

The researchers discuss their find in this month’s edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Tania Branigan

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