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Green and pleasant landing

A “green valley” on the Red Planet is to be the landing site of NASA’s Phoenix probe, which will arrive in Mars orbit in two months. That is 20 kilometres from the site it was originally headed for, which images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show are too rocky for a safe landing.

Watch out EPA

The US Environmental Protection Agency is under scrutiny. In December, it blocked California’s sweeping state regulations aimed at reducing vehicle emissions. The chairman of the congressional Committee on Oversight and Government Reform suspects the White House meddled in the decision, and has requested all related documents to find out.

Bombed-out coral

What does a coral reef look like 50 years after being nuked? Not so bad, it seems. Ecologists say 65 per cent of the species have returned to the 2-kilometre-wide crater left by nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll (Marine Pollution Bulletin, DOI: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2007.11.018).

Pioneer mystery explained?

An explanation of why NASA’s Pioneer spacecraft are mysteriously drifting off course comes from Slava Turyshev of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He reckons uneven heat emission within the probes may be slowly changing their trajectory. He described his findings at a meeting of the American Physical Society in St Louis, Missouri.

Dumb Neanderthals

What would a Neanderthal sound like? A computer model based on the vocal tracts of fossil Neanderthals created by Robert McCarthy of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton shows that they lacked the sound called a “quantal vowel”, without which speech is restricted. He presented the findings at a meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Columbus, Ohio.

as part of the Scottish Health Surveys , carried out every few years. Some 3200 respondents reported suffering from anxiety or depression, but those who regularly wielded the mop or the tennis racket were least likely to suffer, the researchers report (British Journal of Sports Medicine, DOI: 10.1136/bjsm.2008.046243).

One 20-minute session of housework or walking reduced the risk of depression by up to 20 per cent. A sporting session worked better, reducing risk by a third or more. Failing housework or sport, says Hamer, try to find something physical to do. “Something – even for just 20 minutes a week – is better than nothing.”

ARE Canadians about to be turned into guinea pigs for testing drugs? Or will they be blessed with a pioneering system of “smart” regulation that sweeps aside the usual obstacles between new drugs and patients?

The only certainty is that the Canadian government’s Foodand Consumer Safety Action Plan, discussed in parliament on 8 April, is dividing opinions within Canada and beyond.

The plan’s so-called “progressivelicensing” system will break new ground by streamlining the usual requirements for proving that a drug works and is safe before approval. But the quid pro quo is that once a drug is approved, pharmaceutical companies will be obliged to continue tracking it forever.

One justification is that exposing the entire population to a drug will reveal adverse reactions and rare effects in groups such as children faster than through traditional clinical trials. Some think this is reckless, though. “It’s turning the Canadian population into guinea pigs,” says Michael McBane of the Canadian Health Coalition in Ottawa, Ontario. JamesWright of Columbia University, New York, doubts whether relying on drug firms to report adverse events will protect people.

BAD news for Californians. The US Geological Survey has released its first ever earthquake forecast for the whole state, and the odds don’t look good.

The three-year study , commissioned by insurance conglomerate the California Earthquake Authority, combined empirical evidence on prior earthquakes with the physical data from various fault lines in the region and precise satellite information about movements of the Earth’s surface.

According to the study, there is a 99.7 per cent chance of a quake of magnitude 6.7 or greater hitting

California by 2037. Those in Los Angeles have a 67 per cent chance of such a quake in that time and the people of San Francisco have a 63 per cent chance.

Disturbingly for southern Californians, it seems they are

more vulnerable to a catastrophic quake than those living in the north – with a 37 per cent chance of a quake greater than magnitude 7.5 before 2037, which is more than twice the probability for the north.

“The odds don’t look good, especially for those living in southern California”

Lean times lie ahead for fishermen in California and Oregon. Last week, US regulators decided to cancel the entire salmon season for this year. The long-term prospects for the salmon themselves are unclear.

The salmon stocks are certainly in bad shape right now, especially in California’s Sacramento river, where the autumn run of Chinook salmon is expected to be less than one-tenth the size of recent years. Hydroelectric dams, agricultural pollution and the diversion of river water for irrigation are all likely to have contributed to the crisis by reducing salmon survival in fresh water.

However, nearly everyone agrees that the biggest reason for the current collapse is that the annual upwelling of nutrient-rich waters off the Californian

coast was much weaker than usual in 2005 and 2006 – when this year’s breeding salmon would have entered the ocean as juveniles. This devastated marine food chains, probably leading to widespread starvation of young salmon.

Last year’s upwelling approached normal strength, suggesting salmon populations will recover and the fishery will be able to reopen in a few years.

In the long term, however, the future of the salmon, and the people that rely on them, may depend on climate change. Some climate models predict that the eastern Pacific upwelling will get stronger as the world warms. “If that’s true, the salmon will do just fine,” says Bill Peterson at the National Marine Fisheries Service in Newport, Oregon.

SALMON STOCKS BOTTOM OUT

FOLR

ENCE

LOW

/SAC

RAM

ENTO

BEE

/ZUM

A PR

ESS

–Where’s everyone else?–

Guinea-pig state?

Quakes in the sun

www.newscientist.com 19 April 2008 | NewScientist | 5