6 | NewScientist | 13 March 2010

IF YOU’RE going to try to reform society’s most dangerous members, do it properly. That’s the message from a new review of the Dangerous People With Severe Personality Disorder programme , run over the past decade in two jails and two secure hospitals in England.

The progamme was launched by the UK Ministry of Justice following a vicious 1996 crime. A man diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder attacked a woman and her two daughters with a hammer, killing two and leaving the surviving child with severe head injuries.

Under the programme, some 450 men considered to have a

“dangerous and severe” personality disorder, or DSPD, have received intensive cognitive-behavioural therapy.

But after 10 years and despite

Dangerous failure a budget of around £200 million, there is scant evidence of its effectiveness, says a group of psychiatrists and psychologists in a paper to appear in Medicine,

Science and the Law .Lead author Peter Tyrer of

Imperial College London says there were problems from the start. Not only was there no established clinical diagnosis of DSPD, but each centre followed a different pattern of treatment, and the authorities did not allow offenders to be randomly sent to different centres. This made it impossible to determine whether any differences in outcomes were due to the different treatment patterns or other factors.

What’s more, many offenders seem to have been enrolled into lengthy treatment as they neared the end of their sentences. Tyrer and his colleagues fear that the programme has sometimes been used simply to keep dangerous people off the streets, rather than to improve people’s mental health.

The Ministry of Justice declined to comment on the paper, but says that a full evaluation of the programme is under way.

Space reboot

NASA’s jettisoning of the rocket programme that would return it to the moon has been called everything from “a brave reboot” to “a giant step from greatness to mediocrity”. One figure has yet to comment on NASA’s future – the US president. That could change next month, when Barack Obama will attend a major meeting in Florida to flesh out the agency’s new plans.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration axed the

Constellation programme, a scheme to replace the space shuttle with rockets capable of taking astronauts into orbit and the moon. Private firms will cover routine space travel, freeing NASA to explore deeper space.

Yet some politicians in Congress are far from pleased and they have to approve it. Some fear loss of jobs. Others doubt private companies are up to the job. Last week, a leaked email suggested NASA chief Charles Bolden has a “plan B” to retain parts of Constellation, but he denied this.

–Starting to blow?–

Arctic Ocean’s gas attackWHILE the world bickers over the

extent and effects of climate change,

an expanse of Arctic Ocean seabed is

quietly bubbling methane into the air.

It’s the first time that the ocean has

been caught releasing this powerful

greenhouse gas on such a scale.

The discovery will rekindle fears

that global warming might be on

the verge of unlocking billions of

tonnes of methane from beneath the

oceans, which could trigger runaway

climate change. The trouble is,

nobody knows if the Arctic emissions

are new, or indeed anything to do

with global warming.

Natalia Shakhova of the University

of Alaska Fairbanks and colleagues

collected 5000 samples of seawater

over the East Siberian Arctic Shelf

and measured the levels of methane

at different depths. The team located

more than 100 hotspots where

methane is leaking from seabed

permafrost; most of the water in the

region had methane concentrations

more than eight times the normal

amount in the Arctic Ocean (Science,

DOI: 10.1126/science.1182221).

The team calculate that the region is

releasing about 7 million tonnes of the

gas a year – about 2 per cent of overall

methane emissions to the atmosphere,

half of which result from human

activity. But as the Arctic warms, it

could release more and more. “Only

a small fraction of the methane held

in the ice shelf could trigger abrupt

climate warming,” says Shakhova.

As yet, it is not known whether the

venting is an ongoing phenomenon

or the start of a larger release.

“There was no established clinical diagnosis of dangerous and severe personality disorder”

GIRAFFES, elephants, humans – and

now giant squid. Anatomist Gunther

von Hagens has “stuffed” two of

the cephalopods with silicone at a

plastination facility in Dalian, China.

Plastination is a preservation

technique that replaces the water in

a body with silicone. With fragile skin,

no skeleton and more body water to

replace, the squid were a challenge

for von Hagens and his team, who

spent several years working out how

to deal with them.

Radical plastic surgery for squidWIN-INITIATIVE/GETTY

A ship carrying one of the squid

is set to arrive in New Zealand this

month, says Steve O’Shea, a squid

expert at the Auckland University

of Technology who donated the

specimens. The second plastinated

squid will travel the world with von

Hagens’s Body Worlds exhibitions.

The next challenge? To plastinate

a sperm whale, known to have a taste

for giant squid. “We could have the

predator and the prey together,”

says O’Shea. “In a battle posture.”

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