NEWS THIS WEEK:
BLEACH BOOSTS POWER OF CANCER VACCINEPlain old bleach could help the body's immune system fight some cancers. Previous attempts at boosting people's immune systems by giving them vaccines based on dead cancer cells have been patchy. Now scientists in London have found that immune cells taken from healthy volunteers reacted far more strongly to dead ovarian cancer cells if they had been killed with bleach. Page 17
STEM CELLS HELP HORSES OVER INJURY HURDLEResults presented this week suggest that stem cells can help racehorses with tendon injuries recover faster than those treated conventionally. The rate of re-injury was also less once they started racing again. The treatment developed by researchers in the UK involved taking bone marrow stem cells from the horse's sternum, which were then multiplied in the lab and injected into the damaged area. Page 17
HUMBLE ORIGINS OF FORCE THAT RULES THE UNIVERSEDark energy, that mysterious stuff that fills all of space and causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate, could have a simple explanation that has been under our noses all along. A team of Italian physicists claim that dark energy may be coming from neutrinos, vast quantities of which were created just after the big bang. Page 14
SAY GOODBYE TO CHEAP CHICKENWith the first serious outbreak of H5N1 bird flu on a turkey farm in France, virologists predict it will be endemic in wild birds across Europe within a few months. Though effective vaccines exist to protect domestic birds against the H5N1, the European Union prohibits its general use. They say vaccination masks the spread of the virus. Instead, any outbreak in the EU will be controlled with culling infected birds and those nearby. But scientists contacted by New Scientist say that some poultry farms are now so large and so close together that the old policies are bound to fail. They say we should be vaccinating susceptible birds in these areas now. Pages 8-9
STEALTH SHARKS TO PATROL THE HIGH SEASA number of groups around the world have gained ethical approval to develop implants that can monitor and control the behaviour of animals, from sharks and tuna to rats and monkeys. A team funded by the US military have created a neural probe that can manipulate a shark's brain signals or decode them to tell us more about how the animals interact with the world. More controversially, the Pentagon hope to use remote-controlled sharks as stealth spies, exploiting their ability to move quietly through water. Pages 30-31
WHY WE CAN'T PREDICT SPINNING BALLSDon't blame professional sports players when they fail to react to a fast-spinning ball coming towards them. According to a psychologist in the UK, the human eye is simply not equipped to track the curved course of balls with side spin. Page 19
GLOBAL WARMING BUBBLES UP FROM THE OCEANResearchers from Germany have found an unlikely source of atmospheric methane - a gas that is responsible for around 15 percent of today's global warming. The team have found a huge column of methane gas bubbles rising to the surface from a mud volcano 1250 metres under the Norwegian Sea. Their research has overturned the assumption that methane from such volcanoes would oxidise long before it reached the surface. Page 11
HUNTERS OF THE SEAS BECOME THE HUNTEDA paper last week warned that sharks and rays have not colonised waters deeper than 3000 metres, making them more vulnerable to fishing vessels. But new projects such as satellite-tagging in Australian waters and the monitoring the illegal trade in shark species by researchers in Florida, will help the development of better protection measures. Page 18
FEATURES:
FINAL RESTING PLACEAs concerns grow over carbon emissions from fossil fuels, there is much talk of a nuclear renaissance. But aren't we forgetting something? Where to dispose of radioactive waste permanently and safely? While most countries are struggling to overcome public opinion, Sweden and Finland have committed firm plans for underground repositories. Here engineers are already testing a full-scale trial burial site, and are confident they will be ready for the real thing by 2017. Pages 38-41
SILT ROADThe Mediterranean's Bronze Age " where Greece rose to become the birthplace of western civilisation " is perhaps the most studied era in the world. But we know little about the sea, the ships (that were clearly important during that time) and their cargoes. A robot called SeaBED is about to unravel many mysteries by navigating around some deep-water Roman-era wrecks and imaging the sites and artefacts with extraordinary precision. And what's more it will accomplish in days what would have taken previous teams decades. Pages 46-49
ALL THINGS BEING EQUALE=mc2 is the equation everybody knows, but it is based on theory. So what happened when two teams set out to test Einstein's famous equation? Pages 42-43
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New Scientist is the world's leading science and technology news weekly, boasting a circulation of 165,000. For breaking news stories everyday visit our online news service: http://www.newscientist.com
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