News in perspective

Upfront–

FOR decades, posters depicting

rabbits with inflamed, reddened

eyes symbolised campaigns

against the testing of cosmetics

on animals. Now the most severe

of those tests are to be banned

across the European Union.

The so-called Draize tests are

a series of notorious procedures

that involve applying cosmetics

ingredients to the eyes and skin

of live laboratory rabbits. The

animals’ reactions are used to

gauge whether the ingredient

is an irritant or not. However,

on 27 April the independent

scientific advisory committee

of the European Centre for the

Validation of Alternative Methods

(ECVAM) in Ispra, Italy, approved

a series of humane alternatives.

Two use waste animal tissue

reclaimed from slaughterhouses

to replace live animals in tests of

whether chemicals might severely

irritate the eyes. Two more will

replace live animals with in vitro

cell cultures for determining

whether chemicals irritate the

skin – procedures that are

performed on an estimated

20,000 animals in Europe each

year. A fifth alternative test, to

identify whether chemicals

will cause skin allergies, will

spare hundreds of thousands

of mice a year.

These humane alternatives

have been available for

commercial use for years, but to

enforce their use, ECVAM has had

to show they are as good as or

better than the procedures on live

animals they are to replace. Now

that the committee has validated

the alternatives, it will become

illegal under the European

Cosmetics Directive for cosmetic

companies to continue to use

live animals, and regulatory

authorities in each member state

will be forced to outlaw their use.

Despite these changes,

cosmetics companies will still

be allowed to test relatively mild

chemicals on the eyes of live

animals until further alternative

tests are approved, or until 2009,

when most cosmetic tests on live

animals will be banned in Europe,

regardless of whether alternatives

have been approved or not.

FLOODS along the Bristol Channel

killed nearly 2000 people in

1607, but experts still can’t agree

on what caused Britain’s worst

natural disaster.

The prevailing view blames

a storm on 30 January 1607.

However, Edward Bryant of the

University of Wollongong in

Australia thinks a tsunami was the

real culprit. He says the tsunami

hit when “the storm had peaked

[and] people were beginning to

go about their business”. Bryant

and his colleagues studied the

movement of boulders, coastal

erosion and the sculpting of

bedrock along the channel, and

believe they could only have been

caused by a tsunami (The Journal of Geology, vol 115, p 253).

Kevin Horsburgh of the

Proudman Oceanographic

Laboratory in Liverpool, UK,

disagrees. He says that the storm

coincided with “the highest tide

for a century”, and the resulting

surge breached the channel’s

embankments. Once this happens,

the water “will move cows, houses

and rocks”, says Horsburgh. “The

hydrodynamics of inundation

does not care about the

provenance of the water.”

AMATEUR BOXING TAKES A HITIt will come as a body blow to supporters

of amateur boxing. Unpaid exponents

of the noble art suffer brain damage

just like their professional colleagues,

despite wearing headgear.

Max Albert Hietala at Sahlgrenska

University Hospital in Gothenburg,

Sweden, and his colleagues examined

the cerebrospinal fluid of 14 amateur

boxers. Levels of neurofilament light

(NFL), a marker for neuronal damage,

were four times as high in boxers after

a fight as in healthy non-athletes, and

up to eight times as high in boxers who

had taken more than 15 high-impact

hits to the head. Levels took three

months to return to normal, they told

a meeting of the American Academy of

Neurology in Boston on Wednesday.

“There is probably no safe dose

of blows to the head,” says Vivienne

Nathanson, head of science and ethics at

the British Medical Association, which is

campaigning for a total ban on boxing.

A BRIEF INTERLUDE IN ZERO-G

“An alternative test to identify skin allergens will spare 240,000 mice each year”

Having spent his life studying the

bone-crushing gravity of black holes,

cosmologist Stephen Hawking last week

revelled in the exact opposite: the

liberating feeling of zero gravity.

Along with an entourage of carers,

Hawking took off from the Kennedy

Space Center in Florida in a modified

Boeing 727. As the jet flies in a parabolic

arc between altitudes of 24,000 and

34,000 feet, its occupants experience

about 30 seconds of free fall, or zero

gravity. The jet carrying Hawking

performed eight of these manoeuvres,

giving him 4 minutes of weightlessness

in total. “It was amazing,” Hawking

said afterwards.

Earlier, Hawking had acknowledged

that experiencing weightlessness, even

for a few seconds, would be sweet relief

from a life immobilised by a debilitating

neuromuscular disorder. “I have been

wheelchair-bound for almost four

decades and the chance to float free

in zero-g will be wonderful,” he said

at a pre-flight news conference.

A day before his flight, Hawking

spoke about his fears for the human

race if we fail to colonise space. “Life

on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk

of being wiped out by a disaster such

as sudden global warming, nuclear war,

a genetically engineered virus or other

dangers,” he said. “I therefore want

to encourage public interest in space.

A zero-g flight is the first step.”

Hawking’s experience, meanwhile,

has only whetted his appetite. He hopes

to be aboard a commercial suborbital

space flight being developed by

Virgin Galactic. “Space, here I come,”

said Hawking.

ZERO

GRA

VITY

–Four minutes of floating free–

4 | NewScientist | 5 May 2007 www.newscientist.com

Tests outlawed Ye olde tsunami

070505_N_p4_5_Upfront.indd Sec1:4070505_N_p4_5_Upfront.indd Sec1:4 1/5/07 5:43:33 pm1/5/07 5:43:33 pm