Science Briefing
Mini ‘big bangs’ created
Physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, said they had created 10 million mini “big bangs” in the first week of mega-power operations of the subterranean Large Hadron Collider.
“It’s all looking pretty good. We are getting a mass of data,” spokesman James Gillies said of the experiments, in which tiny particles are smashed together at a fraction of a second under the speed of light. The collisions create simulations on a tiny scale of the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.
By tracking how particles behave after colliding, researchers hope to unveil secrets such as what makes up dark matter, why matter gained mass, and whether there are more dimensions than the four already known.
New lizard species found
A large fruit-eating lizard that lives in trees on the northern Philippines island of Luzon has been confirmed as a new species, scientists reported this week. Hunted for its tasty flesh, the brightly colored forest monitor lizard can grow to more than 6 feet in length but weighs only about 22 pounds, said Rafe Brown of the University of Kansas, whose team confirmed the find.
“It lives up in trees, so it can’t get as massive as the Komodo dragon, a huge thing that eats large amounts of fresh meat,” Brown said. “This thing is a fruit-eater, and it’s only the third fruit-eating lizard in the world.”
Discovering such a large vertebrate is very rare, Brown said. The lizard, a species of the genus Varanus, is skittish and able to hide from humans, which could explain why it has gone undetected by scientists for so long.
Arsenic shown to fight cancer
Scientists in China have shown how arsenic destroys deadly blood cancer.
Well-known for its toxicity, arsenic has been used for at least 2,000 years in traditional Chinese medicine. In 1992, a group of Chinese doctors reported use of arsenic to treat acute promyelocytic leukemia, a blood and bone marrow cancer.
But the process remained a mystery until this week. In a paper published in the journal Science, Zhang Xiaowei at the State Key Laboratory of Medical Genomics in Shanghai and colleagues described how arsenic attacked specific proteins that would otherwise keep the cancer alive and well.
Bird flu linked to cold snaps
Outbreaks of H5N1 flu among birds in Europe came at the edges of cold fronts that caused wild birds to change migration patterns, scientists said, suggesting cold snaps may signal future outbreaks.
Dutch and American researchers found European outbreaks of avian influenza during the 2005-2006 winter were driven by collective movements of wild water birds to places where the fresh water they need to feed and survive had not frozen.
“Surveillance . . . should target areas where temperatures are close to freezing in winter, especially in poultry-dense regions close to areas where waterfowl aggregate,” the researchers wrote in the journal PloS Pathogens.
-- times staff and wire reports
