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WILL this be the end of an old foe? A new global assault on polio will involve the biggest roll-out of a vaccine ever attempted.

Until now, the World Health Organization’s eradication drive has used a vaccine made from weakened live virus. It is cheap and effective, but the virus in it can sometimes revert to causing disease – and spread. Circulating vaccine-derived polio viruses (cVDPV) now cause more outbreaks of polio than wild virus.

The original plan was for every country to stop using live vaccine when wild polio disappeared, switching to a killed vaccine that would protect children as cVDPV died out. But if either virus

returns after that, we will need live vaccine to contain it. By then, drug firms will not be making it, says Bruce Aylward, head of the WHO’s polio programme.

Polio: the last salvo The new plan, launched this week, is for the 140 countries at most risk of polio resurgence to start giving killed vaccine once the wild virus is largely gone. They will also use live vaccine effective against two of polio’s three strains. Virtually all cVDPV is type 2 – which was eradicated in the wild in 1999. By using live vaccine made with types 1 and 3, countries can maintain immunity while cutting off the source of cVDPV.

All 140 countries will have to switch vaccines at the same time. “Nothing like that has ever been done before,” says Aylward.

Asbestos tradeDO HOLD your breath. An attempt to blunt the threat of asbestos in developing countries has failed.

Russia and six allies last week blocked a move to have chrysotile, or white asbestos, listed under a United Nations convention that requires member countries to decide whether or not to risk importing it.

More than 107,000 people die every year from asbestos-related lung cancer, mesothelioma and asbestosis, according to the World Health Organization.

Five of the six forms of asbestos are already listed under the UN Rotterdam Convention. Chrysotile cement is, however, still in use – particularly in Asia, Russia and eastern Europe.

Russia, the world’s leading exporter, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Zimbabwe, India and Vietnam blocked the move to list the mineral at a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, arguing that it would increase shipping and insurance costs.

“This is a human tragedy,” says Kathleen Ruff of the Rotterdam Convention Alliance.

Quantum face-offGO, GO quantum gadget! For the first time, a commercially available quantum computer has been pitted against an ordinary PC – and it left the regular machine in the dust.

D-Wave of Burnaby, Canada, has been selling what it calls quantum computers since 2011. The firm’s devices are designed to solve an optimisation problem that crops up in applications such as image-recognition and machine learning.

–An idea with legs-

–Are you in there, entanglement?–

Wing, leg or carapace?IT’S cricket crumble for dinner. We should all be eating more insects, because doing so is better for the planet than tucking into conventional meat like beef.

In a new report entitled “Edible Insects: Future prospects for food and feed security”, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says that farmed insects could make a big contribution to our diets – they contain lots of protein and are cheap to produce. They also have major environmental benefits.

Conventional meat is not an efficient way to get nutrients because animals must be fed on crops, and much of the energy that goes into cultivating the crops is wasted. To produce 1 kilogram of beef, for example, you need 10 kg of feed,

whereas 1 kg of crickets requires just 1.7 kg. What’s more, 80 per cent of a cricket is edible compared with just 40 per cent of a cow. The FAO therefore calculates that crickets are 12 times as efficient at converting feed into meat as cows. By farming insects, we could get more meat from the same amount of grain, use less land for agriculture and cut pollution.

The problem is that most people in the developed world are reluctant to eat creepy-crawlies. “On paper, insects are fantastic, but on a plate most people won’t touch them,” says Aran Dasan of Ento, a London company specialising in insect-based foods. “I don’t think we can sell insects based on their sustainability,” Dasan says. Instead Ento targets foodies with bite-sized morsels.

“ All 140 countries must switch vaccines at the same time. Nothing like that has been done before”

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D-Wave uses a non-mainstream method called adiabatic quantum computing, which caused critics to doubt that its chips are truly quantum. In March, two tests of D-Wave showed indirect evidence for quantum entanglement.

Now Catherine McGeoch of Amherst College, Massachusetts, a D-Wave consultant, has pitted the device against three algorithms for solving the optimisation problem on a high-end PC. McGeoch claims that the D-Wave machine was about 3600 times faster than the best algorithm. She will present the results this week at a conference in Ischia, Italy.

Coronavirus threat“CAN transmit from person to person”. That is how the World Health Organization is now talking of the coronavirus that emerged last year in the Middle East.

Clusters of people with the viral infection, dubbed Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), give evidence that it can spread. What’s more, France’s health ministry has reported that a man who fell seriously ill with MERS after a trip to Dubai passed the virus to the person in the next hospital bed. But the virus has not spread widely in the community, and close contact appears to be necessary for transmission, says Keiji Fukuda of the WHO.

However, Fukuda notes that undiagnosed cases may exist, with only mild symptoms. The two earliest known cases were part of a cluster of respiratory infections in April 2012 in Jordan. The others were milder and are thought to have been due to the virus, even though standard tests were negative. Routine tests on the first French patient were also negative, only deep lung sampling uncovered the virus.

Virologists are now working on a test for viral antibodies that can show if someone was infected in the past. That could reveal how widespread the virus really is.

Neutrino eye opensFANCY seeing the sky in neutrino? Supermassive black holes and exploding stars may give up their secrets now that neutrinos from space can be detected.

Until now, the only space neutrinos definitely detected came from the sun and a 1987 supernova explosion. But on Wednesday, the IceCube collaboration, which monitors a cubic kilometre of ice at the South Pole, reported the detection of 28 neutrinos. At least half almost certainly came from outer space, opening up the skies for neutrino astronomy.

Being chargeless, neutrinos zip from a source direct to Earth, so could be used to study supernovae and active galactic nuclei – galaxies powered by huge black holes, both of which produce neutrinos. “If you have something

that looks into the hearts of these beasts, maybe it’ll help untangle what’s going on,” says John Learned at the University of Hawaii, who is not part of IceCube.

“Looking into the heart of beasts like supernovae and galaxies may help us untangle what is going on”

HOT, hot, hot. Fish the world over are migrating to escape global warming.

For several years now, some fishers have been noticing changes in their nets. In places, new species are being caught. Elsewhere, staple catches are vanishing fast. But whether this is a global effect and what is behind the change have been unclear. Are fish being ousted from their original habitats as climate change warms the waters? Are disappearances due to overfishing?

Now, Dan Pauly of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and colleagues have found that the mix of fish in all the world’s major fisheries has changed since 1970, as fish that prefer warmer waters move in. The average

temperature preference of fisheries has risen by nearly 1 ºC in temperate regions (Nature, DOI:10.1038/nature12156). The effect correlated closely with local increases in sea surface temperatures, but not with fishing pressure or other oceanic features such as currents.

Ominously, the temperature preference of tropical fisheries also rose initially, until the 1980s, then levelled off. Cooler-water species moved out, but there are no heat-loving species to replace them, says Pauly’s colleague William Cheung. The species that are abandoning tropical fisheries may also be the most important food species for coastal communities that subsist on fishing.

Fish in hot water leave home

–There’s a catch–

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The only way is upAtmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide hit a high of 400 parts per million above the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii on 9 May. The symbolic milestone highlights the accelerating rise from 280 ppm in pre-industrial times. Stopping all emissions now would give Earth a good chance of keeping global warming below 2 °C.

Jolie cuts cancer riskAngelina Jolie has had a double mastectomy to reduce her risk of developing breast cancer. The actress has a BRCA1 gene mutation associated with an 80 per cent risk of the cancer. A double mastectomy cuts this chance by up to 90 per cent in people at high risk, according to the UK’s National Health Service.

Primes next doorPrime numbers just got less lonely. Yitang Zhang of the University of New Hampshire has proved that an infinite number of primes have a “neighbour” that is also prime – at a distance of 70 million numbers away. The proof is a step towards solving the twin prime conjecture, which asks if there is an infinite number of primes separated by two numbers.

Cosmic magnet originWe can now explain why the universe is magnetic. Leonardo Campanelli at the University of Bari in Italy has shown that tiny fluctuations present in the early universe could have been stretched into the magnetic fields around galaxies and cosmic voids seen today, via the process called inflation.

Everest is meltingThe world’s highest mountain is losing its coat of ice. Satellite data presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Cancún, Mexico, shows that glaciers around Mount Everest have shrunk by 13 per cent in the past 50 years. Rising temperatures have forced the snow line 180 metres uphill.

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