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Upfront–

Convention on Human Rights under Article 2 (“right to life”) and Article 8 (“right to respect for private and family life”). Three days later the court rejected their plea for an injunction. The group’s appeal now joins over 100,000 others to be decided by the court.

“We fully understand our need to respond to legitimate scientific concerns,” says CERN’s John Ellis. “But our scientific arguments cannot counter irrational fears, no matter how hard we try.”

As New Scientist went to press, a court in Hawaii was hearing a similar case brought against the US Department of Energy in March for its role in the LHC.

IS OWNING a gun foresight or folly? One potential consequence is that it may make you more likely to kill yourself.

Matthew Miller of the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, looked at suicide rates between 2001 and 2005 in the US. In the states with the most gun owners there were around 14,000 gun suicides by males, over four times as many as in the states with the fewest gun owners . Women in these gun-happy states were eight

A NEW method of forensic DNA analysis has created an unexpected headache for researchers studying the genetic roots of disease. To protect the privacy of research volunteers, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has abruptly pulled data off the web.

David Craig of the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, and his team have devised statistical algorithms which could help police to identify individual DNA profiles from a mixture comprising samples from more than 1000 people. While conventional forensic genetic markers can be difficult to identify in samples containing several people’s DNA, Craig’s algorithms analyse up to 50,000 genetic

variants called single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) (PLoS

Genetics, DOI: 10.137/journal.pgen1000167 ).

Researchers, though, use SNPs to locate genes associated with

disease susceptibility, often posting their results on the web. Someone armed with an individual’s SNP profile, or that of a close relative, could use Craig’s method to analyse pooledresults to determine whether the person had taken part in a genetic study, and whether they were in the group diagnosed with the disease .

The privacy threat is small as it is unlikely that someone would possess a volunteer’s DNA profile. “NIH did the right thing in applying the precautionary principle,” says Kathy Hudson, director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC.

YOU can give them this: the doomsayers convinced that the Large Hadron Collider will kill us all certainly have a flair for drama.

Last week a group in Austria and Germany, some of them scientists, tried to persuade the European Court of Human Rights that the LHC should not power up on 10 September. They fear the experiment will spawn planet-munching black holes, or “killer strangelets”, as well as the new nightmare of bosenovas – tiny explosions in atomic systems at a few billionths of a kelvin.

The group cited the European

Gustav was no Katrina, but the hurricane

put New Orleans’s emergency strategy to

its first real test for three years.

Dubbed “the storm of the century”

before it made landfall by mayor Ray

Nagin, Gustav was actually not the most

demanding of tests. Katrina reached the

maximum intensity of category 5 over

open ocean and made landfall at a

powerful category 3, but Gustav packed

a weaker punch, hitting land at category

2 on Monday. While Katrina passed east

of New Orleans, whipping up the waters

of Lake Pontchartrain, which flooded the

city, Gustav passed to the south-west,

leaving the lake largely undisturbed.

The good news is that post-Katrina

upgrades to flood walls did mitigate

Gustav’s impact. Katrina’s waters

overtopped the walls and scoured

NEW ORLEANS PASSES EASY TESTout their bases, causing breaches.

Although Gustav’s waters slopped over

the western flood wall of the city’s

Industrial Canal, they fell on concrete

pads that prevented scouring.

In terms of evacuation, Gustav was

an apparent victory, with 95 per cent

of affected residents gone before the

storm hit. But although the hurricane

caused very few deaths directly, the

evacuation itself killed 10, including six

“medically fragile” hospital patients.

Joseph Kelley at the University of

Maine in Orono questions whether

evacuation on this scale can be

repeated. With Gustav failing to live

up to fears, “you’re going to get

evacuation fatigue”, he warns, and as

memories of Katrina fade, fewer people

will evacuate next time.

ESSD

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SUAR

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–Triggering suicide?–

ZED

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/GET

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“Armed with someone’s DNA profile you could determine whether they had a disease”

No gene snooping End not nigh

Loaded question

6 | NewScientist | 6 September 2008 www.newscientist.com

–No panic this time–

60 SECONDS

Water, water everywhere

The US south coast wasn’t the only place to experience mass evacuations due to severe weather this week. Hundreds of thousands of people in north-east India have been forced from their homes by heavy rains and rising flood waters. In the eastern Indian state of Bihar, the floods have displaced around 3 million people and at least 90 have died.

Slimming Alabama

As if being fat in a thin world isn’t penalty enough, Alabama is bringing in a fat tax. Starting in 2011, its 37,000 state employees will have to cough up an extra $25 per month in health insurance payments if their weight is considered unhealthy and they’re not doing anything about it. People with high blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar will also be penalised.

Bluetongue barcodes

Genetically “barcoding” biting midges could help stop the spread of bluetongue in the UK. The technique could tell researchers how the midge species are distributed, which might offer clues about disease transmission. The proposal was discussed at the British Ecological Society’s annual meeting in London this week.

No gold watch for shuttle

Is NASA caving in to political pressure to extend the life of the shuttle after 2010? US senators, including John McCain, havebeen calling for a delay to the shuttle’s retirement to reduce US dependence on Russian vehicles, but NASA has staunchly resisted the idea. Now a leaked email has revealed that NASA is studying the feasibility of an extension.

Cry for me, baby

The brains of mothers who give birth naturally respond more strongly to the cries of their baby than those who have Caesareans. A team led by James Swain of Yale University used MRI to scan mothers’ brains up to a month after birth (The Journal of Child

Psychology and Psychiatry, DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2008.01963.x).

times as likely to commit suicide using a firearm. Rates of non-firearm suicide were the same across the states for both sexes (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 359, p 989).

This contradicts the notion that anyone serious enough to use a gun would find another effective means of suicide if a gun were not available, says Miller. “If people reach for a gun, they don’t get a second chance; if they reach for pills, they do,” he says.

Suicide researcher Karen Norberg of the National Bureau of Economic Research in St Louis, Missouri, says that other factors apart from owning a gun may explain the higher suicide rates.

BARACK OBAMA has proved that politicians do sometimes listen to scientists. The Democratic presidential candidate last week penned his answers to 14 science questions posed by a consortium of scientific organisations.

By the end of 2007, over 38,000 Americans, including Nobel laureates and organisations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, had signed on to Science Debate 2008 , a grass-roots initiative to spur US political debate about science and technology. Its six founders, which include Charles Darwin’s great-great grandson Matthew Chapman and creationism critic and physicist Lawrence Krauss, condensed 3400 questions down to 14 for the presidential candidates to answer.

On Monday Obama responded . He says that if elected president he will attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, reintroduce federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, and make changes to science education and research funding to maintain the US’s competitive edge. His answers also address space technology and healthcare.

Come on John McCain, now it’s your turn – what do you think?

LABORATORY mice beware: the rats are coming. For more than a decade, researchers have studied “knockout mice”, engineered to lack certain genes, with the aim of studying diseases. Now a UK company is well on the way to making the first “knockout rats”.

On Tuesday, Stem Cell Sciences in Cambridge, UK, announced that it had created rats from embryonic stem cells (ESCs) using a technique similar to the one used to create knockout mice. The company isolated rat ESCs, implanted them in foster mothers and mated the resulting offspring with normal rats to produce rats

with genes from the ESCs. The next step will be to switch

off genes in the rat ESCs before implanting them, in order to create true knockout rats for experimentation. Rats have more sophisticated brains than mice

and so make better models of human psychiatric illnesses.

Scientists at the University of Cambridge and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles hold the patents for the knockout rat technique.

“Their sophisticated brains mean rats make better models of psychiatric illnesses”

Indigenous peoples such as Australian Aboriginals have long pressed for the return of ancestors’ remains from museum collections around the world. But some museums strongly resist repatriation requests, claiming they hamper archaeological research. Now there’s a compromise that could keep everyone happy.

Several handovers have been made from Australia and the UK, but the particular conditions a burial site must have mean it becomes ever harder for communities to find reburial sites, especially as no one wishes to disturb existing graves.

This is where the archaeologists can help. In one of the first collaborations of its kind, Lynley Wallis at Flinders University, Adelaide, and her colleagues

teamed up with the Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal community in South Australia to find a site to bury the remains of 374 Ngarrindjeri people, which were returned from the University of Edinburgh in the UK and Museum Victoria in Melbourne in 2006 (Antiquity, vol 82, p 750). They used a standard geophysical survey kit that the team say could in future be given to indigenous communities. This in return means the communities could gather useful data for archaeologists.

Last month, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC became the first US museum to return human remains to another country , when it sent 33 skeletons to Australia. But it did so only after the discovery of an agreement by the original collector to return most of the samples.

BURYING BONES OF CONTENTION

TIM

WIM

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–A proper burial at last–

Political science

Knockout rats

www.newscientist.com 6 September 2008 | NewScientist | 7