This week’s biggest stories
The potential for a massive shakeup of the dinosaur family tree (including a possible common ancestor from Scotland) was mooted this week – will a new classification come in and overturn over a century of evolutionary assumptions? Stay tuned, dino-lovers. In the meanwhile, I may have to reverse my personal policy on our eight-legged friends with the news that and ingredient in funnel web spider venom can protect cells from being destroyed by a stroke. Alongside this is the news that a new test can predict age when Alzheimer’s disease will appear. It’s based on 31 genetic markers could be used to calculate any individual’s yearly risk for onset of disease. So all this is great news, but I’ve saved the best ‘til last: we might even be en route to understanding how to undo the ravages of time, as a new study has show that purging the body of ‘retired’, or senescent, cells could reverse ageing. Mice today, me tomorrow? I don’t know how long we could expect to live if they perfect the technique, but chances are that none of us will look as good after 700 years as the Cambridge man whose face has been brought to life in a detailed reconstruction. It’s part of a research project aimed at gaining insights into the anonymous poor of the medieval city. And finally, a low-cost but high-tech breakthrough could mean that fertility testing for men could become as simple and affordable as home pregnancy testing. A gadget designed to clip onto a smartphone has been shown to detect abnormal sperm samples with 98% accuracy in trials. Great news for those struggling to conceive but nervous or embarrassed by clinics.
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Straight from the lab – top picks from our experts on the blog network
How the media warp science: the case of the sensationalised satnav | Brain flapping
There’s a famous cliché which says “If you like sausage, you should never see one being made”. Well, earlier this week I saw how a science news story occurred, from experiment to media coverage, and I think the same applies here.
Walking in the footsteps of giants – and gerbils | Lost Worlds Revisited
As fossil footprints cannot tell us definitively which animals made them, they are of limited use for answering questions about diversity, population numbers, or distributions of extinct creatures. For every animal that lived on earth there is one chance of leaving a body fossil, but in a lifetime they may have left a multitude of footprints. There is information trackways can provide that body fossils rarely can: evidence of behaviour.
Drug scandals and the media – the unresolved case of Primodos | The H word
The thalidomide disaster is the best-known drug scandal involving birth defects, but it is not the only one. In the late 1960s, suspicion fell on Primodos, a hormonal pregnancy-test drug marketed by the German pharmaceutical company Schering (now Bayer). I have previously written on the origins of Primodos and the still unresolved debate over whether the British government should have allowed it to remain on the market until 1978, despite widespread safety concerns and the existence of a highly reliable and perfectly harmless alternative: the laboratory urine test. As with thalidomide, the media played and continues to play a crucial role in the campaign for compensation for those who say they have been harmed by Primodos.
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ESRC science writing prize
Every two years, the Economic and Social Research Council runs a writing prize for current PhD students. The idea is to get students thinking about how to share their research with the public, who both pay for it and benefit from it but are rarely given an insight into honest-to-goodness research. This week Lab notes is proud to bring you the pieces written by one of the joint winners, Lauren White, one of the joint runners-up Max Gallien – next week we’ll have work by the other two winners.
Living and looking for lavatories – why researching relief is so relevant | Lauren White
Some would argue that bathrooms and toilets are the backstage of social life. However, there are many performances still going on within the toilet cubicle: the holding on until another person has left the toilet; waiting until the hand dryer goes on; blaming the time spent in the toilet on a fictional queue.
From smugglers to supermarkets: the ‘informal economy’ touches us all | Max Gallien
As I talk to him, Ahmed pulls his chair into his store to escape the hot Tunisian sun. He is a retired teacher – the years of screaming children can be counted in the rings framing his eyes. Behind him is his merchandise. To make up for a small pension, Ahmed is selling kitchenware in a market near the Libyan border, over four hundred tiny concrete garages surround him, goods piled high: clothes, bags, microwaves. It looks like any other market, but note an invisible detail: everything sold here is illegal. Every good in this market has been smuggled into Tunisia. Ahmed, though he may not look the part, is a smuggler.
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Science Weekly podcast
One recent estimate suggested that as many as 60% of the hearts and lungs donated for transplantation are discarded each year. But a new technology could be about to change this: whole-organ cryopreservation. In this week’s podcast, Hannah Devlin looks at recent advances in the field of cryopreservation.
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Eye on science – this week’s top pictures
Some absolute gorgeousness for cloud-lovers (and, really everyone) here. The International Cloud Atlas, that dates back to the 19th century, has been updated and made digital ... Enjoy!
