Science
Alcohol substitute that avoids drunkenness in development
26 Dec 2009
An alcohol substitute that mimics its pleasant buzz without leading to drunkenness is being developed by scientists.
The new substance could have the added bonus of being “switched off” instantaneously with a pill, to allow drinkers to drive home or return to work.
The synthetic alcohol, being developed from chemicals related to Valium, works like alcohol on nerves in the brain that provide a feeling of wellbeing and relaxation.
But unlike alcohol its does not affect other parts of the brain that control mood swings and lead to addiction. It is also much easier to flush out of the body.
Finally because it is much more focused in its effects, it can also be switched off with an antidote, leaving the drinker immediately sober.
The new alcohol is being developed by a team at Imperial College London, led by Professor David Nutt, Britain’s top drugs expert who was recently sacked as a government adviser for his comments about cannabis and ecstasy.
He envisions a world in which people could drink without getting drunk, he said.
No matter how many glasses they had, they would remain in that pleasant state of mild inebriation and at the end of an evening out, revellers could pop a sober-up pill that would let them drive home.
Prof Nutt and his team are concentrating their efforts on benzodiazepines, of which diazepam, the chief ingredient of Valium is one.
Thousands of candidate benzos are already known to science. He said it is just a matter of identifying the closest match and then, if necessary, tailoring it to fit society’s needs.
Ideally, like alcohol, it should be tasteless and colourless, leaving those characteristics to the drink it’s in.
Eventually it would be used to replace the alcohol content in beer, wine and spirits and the recovered ethanol (the chemical name for alcohol) could be sold as fuel.
Professor Nutt believes that the new drug, which would need licensing, could have a dramatic effect on society and improve the nation’s health.
The NHS report Statistics on Alcohol: England, 2009 found more than 800,000 alcohol-related admissions to hospitals in 2007-08 – and more than 6,500 deaths – at a cost to the service of £2.7bn a year.
Some charities estimate that the toll could be up to five times higher. Drink is, for example, a factor in 40 per cent of fatal fires, 15 per cent of drownings, 65 per cent of suicides and 40 per cent of domestic abuse. It also has other costs, including 17 million lost working days a year, worth about £20bn to the economy.
“I’ve been in experiments where I’ve taken benzos,” said Professor Nutt. “One minute I was sedated and nearly asleep, five minutes later I was giving a lecture.
“No one’s ever tried targeting this before, possibly because it will be so hard to get it past the regulators.
“Most of the benzos are controlled under the Medicines Act. The law gives a privileged position to alcohol, which has been around for 3,000 years. But why not use advances in pharmacology to find something safer and better?”
Getting the drug approved could be hard for the team as clinical trials are expensive, and it is not clear who would pay for them, according to Professor Nutt.
He said that the traditional drinks industry has not shown any interest, however some countries might be persuaded to sponsor the team.
Some countries have more liberal regimes than others, though, and Professor Nutt thinks Greece or Spain, within the EU, could lead the way.
The latest Home Office performance figures showed that more than one in four people believe that alcohol is blighting their community.
A survey of every police force area in England and Wales found that 26 per cent of those polled “perceived people being drunk or rowdy in public placed to be a problem in their area” – a slight increase from last year.
The fears over the affects of alcohol range from urban to rural communities, with the worst hit being Manchester, South Wales, London, Northumbria and Gwent.
Forget the Large Hadron Collider. All hail Cern’s new, straight-line atom smasher
One of the super-cooled tubes that make up the Large Hadron Collider
Sunday, 18 July 2010
After decades of bending atoms around giant rings and smashing them apart in search of the secrets of the universe, scientists at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory outside Geneva, are reviving a 1960s technology and going straight.
Their latest ring, the 27km Large Hadron Collider (LHC), only got up to speed in March, yet physicists meet in Paris this week to discuss plans for a new $6.7bn (£4.4bn) experiment – the International Linear Collider (ILC), which they hope to start building in 2012.
The new machine will be a straight-line tunnel, 31km long, and will use super-conducting magnets to accelerate electrons and positrons, their antimatter equivalents, towards each other at close to the speed of light.
“To explore what the LHC discovers in more detail, you need an electron collider,” says Professor Brian Foster, the European director of the ILC project. Part of the report to the Paris conference will be “a blueprint for how you would set up an ILC lab”. More than 700 people at 300 laboratories and universities around the world are already working on the accelerator. The only other high-energy linear electron smasher is the Stanford Linear Accelerator in California, a 3.2km track built in 1962.
Both the existing LHC and the planned ILC are trying to solve fundamental physics questions, including – what happened in the Big Bang? Where did all the antimatter go? How many dimensions does space have? Why are there so many different sub-atomic particles? And, most famously, what does a Higgs particle look like?
While the 12 subatomic components of matter have all been found, including quarks and neutrinos, the Higgs has proved more elusive. The leading theory of how the universe works says that the Higgs gives matter mass, and therefore gravity. Its discovery could point the way to unifying the two great 20th-century theories of physics – quantum and general relativity.
It may also help solve the mystery of the missing 96 per cent of the universe. When astronomers estimate the mass of galaxies, including stars, planets, nebulas and black holes, they find that they are so light they should fly apart as they spin. The extra mass needed to keep them together is thought to be hidden in as yet undiscovered “dark matter”.
Although a location for the new device has not been decided, Cern is a likely contender, if only because most of the physicists who might want to use it are already there, along with the infrastructure they need.
Cern’s LHC uses protons made from atoms of the lightest element, hydrogen, by stripping off their electrons in a strong magnetic field, and accelerating them to 99.9999991 per cent of the speed of light.
By the time they enter the LHC, Einstein’s equation, E=mc2, is in play. Since the protons can’t be made to go any faster, pumping additional energy in makes them more massive. In the LHC, they can be pushed to 7 trillion electron volts. When two beams, rotating in opposite directions, cross, the energy released from a single pair could be as high as 14 TeV.
But proton crashes are “dirty”. “It’s like colliding two oranges together at 45mph,” says Professor Foster. “Sometimes the pips hit each other, but usually it’s just a spray of juice.” The pips, in his analogy, are the trio of quarks that make up a proton and which cause the most interesting smashes. Typically, only one quark from each proton in a collision will hit head on, while the other four will miss each other.
Worse, although scientists know how much energy they’ve put into each proton, they don’t know how it is distributed between the pips. One quark could have most of it, or all three could have roughly equal amounts. At best, researchers can tell the maximum amount of energy a collision might involve. Still, the LHC produces billions of bangs a second so they know roughly what energy levels give them interesting results.
But for a more precise exploration of the high-energy frontier, they will need the ILC. Electrons are 2,000 times smaller than protons, and do not have an internal structure. When two of them run into each other, the energy released is known exactly.
But electrons are not perfect. When particles are bent by magnetic fields, they emit X-rays. For relatively massive protons, this is not a problem, but for the lighter electrons it’s a huge obstacle. Most of the energy pumped into an electron in the LHC would merely replace that lost to radiation.
And so, scientists are returning to the linear design of half a century ago. The exact specifications will have to wait until the LHC has identified which energy ranges are of interest, but the ILC as envisioned will have energy levels of around 0.5TeV.
Construction of the new accelerator is expected to take seven years. No one would be surprised if, during that time, plans emerge for an even more powerful, next-generation accelerator.
Indigenous tribes more vulnerable in swine flu outbreaks
Pandemic expected to hit remote, poverty-stricken communities far harder than wealthy Westerners
Sunday, 11 October 2009
The only road to St Theresa Point in north-eastern Manitoba is made of ice and lasts just two months. The remote community’s 3,200 people, most of them Cree Indians, are squeezed into 530 homes, more than half of them without running water. Until June, a doctor flew in once a week for three days. But since an outbreak of swine flu left more than 200 people ill and sent 12 by air ambulance to Winnipeg, 600km (375 miles) away, Health Canada has been ferrying in more doctors. This autumn, in preparation for the flu season, it is also delivering something else: a supply of body bags.
In Australia, a similar scenario played out in July. An estimated 400 people out of a population of 3,400, more than 90 per cent of them Aboriginal, caught H1N1 influenza on Palm Island off the Queensland coast. In Brazil, a conference on indigenous education was cancelled in September after seven members of the Matsigenka, a tribe living along the Urubamba river in the Peruvian Amazon, tested positive for swine flu.
As health authorities gear up for the northern hemisphere’s flu season, the new strain of influenza is expected to hit indigenous peoples far harder than it will healthy, wealthy, urban Westerners. If the outbreaks in Canada and Australia are any guide, native communities could find a tenth of their populations sick, and untold numbers dead.
The World Health Organisation warned in its August briefing note on the pandemic that minorities and indigenous peoples face a far higher risk of hospitalisation and death. “In some studies, the risk in these groups is four to five times higher than in the general population,” it said.
Survival International, a London-based charity that tries to protect indigenous peoples, has called on the government of the Andaman Islands to close the Andaman Trunk Road because it runs through land populated by a nomadic tribe. The Jarawa came into contact with outsiders only in 1998; within a year, half of them had suffered respiratory problems after an outbreak of measles.
Glenn Shepard, an anthropologist who works closely with Peru’s Matsigenka, said they are not the only tribe he is concerned about. “The arrival of swine flu among the Matsigenka is especially worrying as they are known to have intermittent contact with quite isolated Indian groups living near by,” he said.
Scientists and medical researchers have two hypotheses to explain the vulnerability of tribal peoples. The first is that those, like the Jarawa, who have had little contact with the global community simply have immune systems that have never been primed. Kevin Paterson, a Canadian doctor, notes that during the 1918 Spanish flu, 8.5 per cent of American Indians died, but among the more isolated Inuit in Nome, Alaska, the toll was 55 per cent. In Hebron, Labrador, 5,000km to the east, 150 out of 220 Innu were killed. Yet the global fatality rate for Spanish flu was just 2.5 per cent.
The other hypothesis applies to those indigenous populations that live on the fringes of Western society, such as the Cree of St Theresa Point and the Aborigines on Palm Island. For them, the problem is poverty, poor general health and crowded living conditions. “We have in excess of 15 people living in a three-bedroom home, which you wouldn’t find in mainstream communities,” said Alf Lacey, the mayor of Palm Island. Although Tamiflu was available, many islanders were unaware of it because they are unable to read.
“Influenza has a cure,” said Dr Paterson. “It’s called affluence.”
Billions wasted on swine flu pandemic that never came
How did the World Health Organisation get its prediction of a 7.5 million death toll so wrong?
By Paul Rodgers and Smitha Mundasad
Sunday, 16 May 2010
The spectre of plague stalked the world last year with its constant companion, fear. Schools and stadiums were closed in Mexico, tourists from Egypt to Singapore were quarantined, and the surgical mask became a universal fashion accessory across Asia. Yet predictions that the global death toll from swine flu could reach 7.5 million were well off the mark. At most, the virus killed 14,000 people, and some of those had pre-existing conditions or had been infected by other dangerous bugs as well. Against a background death toll from seasonal flu of up to 500,000, the new H1N1 strain was invisible.
Professor Ulrich Keil, a World Health Organisation (WHO) adviser on heart disease, said the decision to declare a pandemic had led to a “gigantic misallocation” of health budgets. “We know the great killers are hypertension, smoking, high cholesterol, high body mass index, physical inactivity and low fruit and vegetable intake,” he told the Council of Europe. Yet governments “instead wasted huge amounts of money by investing in pandemic scenarios whose evidence base is weak”.
The suspicion that the response to the outbreak was an unnecessary panic has been spreading since the virus slipped from the front pages. Even the WHO, the UN body that first punched the big red button, may be having doubts. An external committee has been set up to review its reaction and will deliver an interim report this week, though at the moment no bombshells are expected.
The WHO faces two main charges. The first is that between the first cases of H1N1 being reported in March and the declaration of a full, phase 6 pandemic by its director-general, Dr Margaret Chan, in June, the organisation changed its definition of a pandemic. Critics say the old definition required that a virus result in “enormous numbers of deaths and illness”. The new definition applies only if the virus is new, if it spreads easily between people, and if the population has little or no immunity to it. A bug that causes a mild case of the sniffles could qualify.
A spokesman for the organisation insists there has been no change at all – that the old definition was an error on a single web page about bird flu, the last great influenza scare. But Peter Doshi, a doctoral candidate at MIT whose thesis is on science, politics and influenza policy, argued in a paper in the British Medical Journal in September that the old definition had been widely applied by the WHO since at least 2003.
The second charge, prominently made by Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, the former head of health at the Council of Europe, is that the WHO is unduly influenced by the drugs industry, which stood to make a fortune from selling anti-virals and vaccines. The Swiss giant Novartis, for example, saw its profits jump by nearly a third in the first quarter of this year to $2.95bn, much of it from delivering swine flu vaccines ordered last year. Debate rages over allegations that some experts who recommended the pandemic be declared, have links to drugs companies, although this has been denied. But critics note that it’s hard to become an expert in the field without having some funding from big pharmaceutical companies.
Others say that the problem is due to the spread of false assumptions. Most people think, for example, that when they have flu symptoms they must have influenza. But Dr Tom Jefferson of the Cochrane Collaboration, which reviews the evidence for various medical treatments, notes that more than 200 agents can cause flu-like illnesses. Only 7.5 to 15 per cent of cases are actually influenza. Anti-viral drugs and vaccines are aimed just at this group. “To stop one new case of H1N1, you’d have to inoculate 100 people,” says Dr Jefferson “or you could get four people to wash their hands.” Masks work too, he says, and so does sending people home from work if they have symptoms.
The usual justification for the massive response to H1N1 is that no one wants a repeat of the 1918 pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people. But scientists are not even sure if that plague was caused by influenza at all. The virus was not discovered until 1933. And outbreaks since then have been much milder.
The last time H1N1 showed up was in 1976, at a US army base. Washington ordered the immunisation of 40 million Americans before it discovered that it had only one death from the flu but hundreds of cases of severe side-effects to the vaccine. A review headed by Dr Harvey Fineberg put much of the blame on the “influenza fraternity”, arguing that expert panels tend towards “group think” and should be backed up by independent scientific advice. Dr Fineberg is now chairman of the WHO’s external committee evaluating its response to the 2009 outbreak whose final report next May could well lead to a radical rethink of the world’s reaction to new viruses.
Australia faces worst plague of locusts in 75 years
Ideal breeding conditions for grasshoppersare expected to cost farmers billions
Sunday, 26 September 2010
Australia’s Darling river is running with water again after a drought in the middle of the decade reduced it to a trickle. But the rains feeding the continent’s fourth-longest river are not the undiluted good news you might expect. For the cloudbursts also create ideal conditions for an unwelcome pest – the Australian plague locust.
The warm, wet weather that prevailed last summer meant that three generations of locusts were born, each one up to 150 times larger than the previous generation. After over-wintering beneath the ground, the first generation of 2010 is already hatching. And following the wettest August in seven years, the climate is again perfect. The juveniles will spend 20 to 25 days eating and growing, shedding their exoskeletons five times before emerging as adults, when population pressure will force them to swarm.
It is impossible to say how many billions of bugs will take wing, but many experts fear this year’s infestation could be the worst since records began – 75 years ago. All that one locust expert, Greg Sword, an associate professor at the University of Sydney, would say was: “South Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria are all going to get hammered.”
A one-kilometre wide swarm of locusts can chomp through 10 tons of crops – a third of their combined body weight – in a day. The New South Wales Farmers Association said an area the size of Spain was affected and the Government of Victoria alone forecasts A$2bn (£1.2bn) of damage.
Though locusts move slowly when the sun’s up, at night they can fly high and fast, sometimes travelling hundreds of kilometres. “A farmer can go to bed at night not having seen a grasshopper all year and wake up in the morning to find his fields full of them,” said Professor Sword.
All locusts are grasshoppers, but not all grasshoppers are locusts. The difference is a suite of genetic changes that kick in when population densities cross a critical threshold. In some species, they produce physical transformations – the desert locust of North Africa goes from green to black and yellow, for example – but the Australian plague locust merely reprogrammes its behaviour, from solitary to gregarious.
Swarms probably make use of the available food more efficiently as the leading edge is constantly pushing forwards into new vegetation. It may be fear more than hunger, however, that drives the locusts.
Locusts are highly cannibalistic, says Professor Sword, and any that stay still too long are likely to get nibbled. “Swarms are like lifeboats,” he says, forging a gruesome metaphor. “If you’re the only one in the boat, you could easily starve. But if you’ve got lots of company, you could be the last to survive. We call it travelling with your lunch.”
Controlling the bugs involves spotter planes identifying juvenile bands that can be targets for attack by crop sprayers armed with pesticides. But eastern Australia is struggling to find enough pilots to take on all the work.
And the spraying itself comes at a cost. Apiarists have complained that their bees are in danger from pesticides and ecologists fear for the many animals that treat the locusts as a moving smorgasbord. Concerns have also been raised by bloggers and activists that some of the chemicals used could harm humans.
The best hope for phasing out the chemicals comes from research. But the goal, says Professor Sword, is control not eradication. “They were here long before humans arrived,” he said.
Ten years on, and still the brightest light in space
The International Space Station flies over the UK tonight, so keep your eyes peeled
Sunday, 7 November 2010
The International Space Station is the most expensive object ever built, which has some critics wondering if it is worth $100bn
If you look to the heavens between sunset and moonrise tonight, at 6.20pm in London, the brightest object you’ll see (assuming it’s not cloudy) will be a white spark racing the wrong way across the sky, from west to east. To the naked eye, the International Space Station, humanity’s toehold on the edge of the vast reaches of the cosmos, is easier to see than Venus.
This is not some cramped canister like Mercury or Apollo, where every movement must be carefully choreographed. The ISS is more an artificial island in space than a ship; its 14 modules have more elbow room than a five-bedroom house. Together with its 20 solar power panels, it could stretch the length of a football pitch, weighs as much as 330 cars, and is zooming 230 miles above your head at 17,000mph.
Since America’s William Shepherd and Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev first floated through the Zvezda module 10 years ago last Tuesday, nearly 200 astronauts, cosmonauts and mission specialists from 15 countries have called the ISS home. Four were born in the UK, though parsimonious Britain is not involved in the project. These crews have conducted 150 spacewalks and 600 experiments. And apart from the 2003 crash of Columbia, it has all gone so smoothly that hardly anyone notices any more.
Its success is encouraging in these days of budget cuts, since it emerged as a compromise when the US, Russia, Europe and Japan found they could not afford four separate space stations. Supporters love to hold it up as an example of international co-operation. But it has not been without hiccups. The final component won’t be nudged into place until next year, eight years behind schedule, just as Nasa’s space shuttle programme ends.
Whether the ISS, the most expensive object ever built, is worth $100bn is a contentious issue. Proponents point to the science, though they refuse to place a value on it, arguing that much of the return will come in the future. Critics note that a lot of the research has been into ways people can live in space, knowledge that’s of use primarily if manned space programmes continue.
The ISS will fly for another decade, and may serve as a staging post to the Moon. Until then, perhaps its greatest contribution is as an inspiration, reminding us how high we can aspire.
The ISS is the most expensive object ever built
