Subject: [Norton AntiSpam] Fwd: Science in the News

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2005 14:53:47 EST

Subject: Fwd: Science in the News
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2005 13:50:04 -0500

This newsletter is funded by Sigma Xi.--Mary

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Stauffer <[email-masked]>
To: Sigma Xi's daily news bits:;
Sent: Mon, 28 Mar 2005 09:50:43 -0800
Subject: Science in the News

  To all,
   The NAS warns about the dangers of storing spent nuclear fuel in 
pools of water; bird flu continues to kill in Indochina; if you have 
bees, watch out for Varroa jacobsoni, which is devastating hives in 
California; algal "red tides" release a nasty airborne neurotoxin, 
which can make beachgoers sick; Britain's Astronomer Royal speculates 
on future evolution (do we want to know?); and two women science 
prioneers die--Georgeanna S. Jones and Katherine A. Lathrop.
  Peter

 P.S. - Sorry about the "big sky" layout--I didn't do it!

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 Today's Headlines - March 28, 2005

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  STORAGE OF NUCLEAR SPENT FUEL CRITICIZED from The Washington Post 
(Registration Required)

  A classified report by nuclear experts assembled by the National 
Academy of Sciences has challenged the decision by federal regulators 
to allow commercial nuclear facilities to store large quantities of 
radioactive spent fuel in pools of water.

  The report concluded that the government does not fully understand the 
risks that a terrorist attack could pose to the pools and ought to 
expedite the removal of the fuel to dry storage casks that are more 
resilient to attack. The Bush administration has long defended the 
safety of the pools, and the nuclear industry has warned that moving 
large amounts of fuel to dry storage would be unnecessary and very 
expensive.

  The report was requested by Congress after the terrorist attacks of 
Sept. 11, 2001, as homeland security officials sought to understand the 
potential consequences of a Sept. 11-scale attack on a nuclear facility.

 http://snipurl.com/dp2y

  17-YEAR-OLD GIRL DIES OF AVIAN FLU IN VIETNAM from The Los Angeles 
Times (Registration Required)

  A 17-year-old girl in northern Vietnam has died of avian influenza, 
the 48th official bird flu fatality in Southeast Asia since outbreaks 
began 18 months ago, local authorities said Friday.

  The girl's death followed an announcement a day earlier by Cambodian 
health officials that a 26-year-old man there had died of the disease, 
the country's second fatality.

  The man lived in the southern province of Kampot, close to where the 
nation's first confirmed bird flu victim, a 25-year-old woman, became 
ill. The woman died in a Vietnamese hospital Jan. 31 after crossing the 
border to seek care.

 http://snipurl.com/dp31

 BEE PARASITE POSES MAJOR PROBLEMS

 from The San Francisco Chronicle

  Buzzing bees and blooming trees are, to Dan Cummings, what life is all 
about.

  So the owner of 4,500 acres of almond orchards in and around Chico 
doesn't take kindly to a pint-sized mite that is threatening to suck 
the life out of his livelihood.

  The parasite, Varroa jacobsoni, attaches itself to honeybees and their 
developing larvae and slurps up their bodily juices. The tiny arachnid 
has been around for nearly two decades, but has now developed a 
resistance to the pesticides used to control it and is endangering 
orchards and crops around the country that rely on honeybees for 
pollination.

 http://snipurl.com/dp33

 TIDE'S TOXINS TROUBLE LUNGS ASHORE

 from The Boston Globe (Registration Required)

  SARASOTA, Fla. -- A massive red tide off the beaches of southwest 
Florida is causing an outbreak of wheezing and coughing among 
beachgoers, and new evidence suggests that the effects of an airborne 
neurotoxin the tide produces may be more harmful than health officials 
previously thought.

  Since early January, a large algae bloom stretching from the mouth of 
Tampa Bay to Sanibel Island has been releasing into the air odorless 
toxins that waft onto beaches with every onshore wind. Red tide occurs 
nearly every year, but this year's bloom is unusually persistent, 
parking itself in coastal waters and failing to dissipate.

  Calls about the toxins have poured into hospitals, doctors' offices, 
and poison control centers, and some doctors say the current algae 
bloom is producing more reports of health difficulties than any other 
red tide they can remember.

 http://snipurl.com/dp34

 SCIENCE VS. RELIGION

 An Opinion Column by Brian Walden

 from the BBC

  Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, wrote something recently that 
chilled me to the bone.

  Sir Martin is the winner of the Michael Faraday Prize awarded annually 
by the Royal Society for excellence in communicating scientific ideas 
in lay terms. In my case he did almost too good a job.

  He pointed out that though the idea of evolution is well-known, the 
vast potential for further evolution isn't yet part of our common 
culture. He then gave an example. He said: "It will not be humans who 
witness the demise of the Sun six billion years hence; it will be 
entities as different from us as we are from bacteria."

 http://snipurl.com/dp35

 GEORGEANNA S. JONES, IN VITRO CONCEPTION PIONEER, DIES AT 92

 from The New York Times (Registration Required)

  Dr. Georgeanna S. Jones, who was half of a husband-and-wife team that 
created the first program for in vitro fertilization in the United 
States and its first "test tube" baby, died on Saturday at a hospital 
in Norfolk, Va. She was 92 and lived in Portsmouth, Va.

 The cause was cardiac arrest, said her husband, Dr. Howard W. Jones.

  Dr. Georgeanna Jones, one of the country's first reproductive 
endocrinologists, was a quiet leader in her field for four decades at 
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where she taught and conducted 
research. But she unwittingly stepped into the national spotlight when 
she and her husband, a gynecological surgeon, moved to Eastern Virginia 
Medical School in 1978 and set out to open a clinic that would allow 
conception outside a mother's body.

 http://snipurl.com/dp37

 KATHERINE LATHROP, PIONEER IN ISOTOPIES, IS DEAD AT 89

 from The New York Times (Registration Required)

  Katherine A. Lathrop, a pioneering researcher in nuclear medicine and 
a member of a University of Chicago team that developed an isotope 
widely used to locate and diagnose cancers, died on March 10 at a 
nursing home in Las Cruces, N.M. She was 89.

  The cause was advanced dementia, her family said. A versatile 
scientist with degrees in biology, chemistry and physics, Ms. Lathrop 
was named a professor of radiology at Chicago, where she taught for 
four decades, without having received a doctorate.

  In 1945 and 1946, she participated in the Manhattan Project as a 
junior chemist in the metallurgical laboratory in Chicago, studying the 
effects of radioactive materials on animals. Later, as part of a 
research effort led by Dr. Paul V. Harper, she investigated the 
qualities of technetium, a radioactive element discovered in the 1930's.

 http://snipurl.com/dp3a

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