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Nuclear budget explodes

The US government spent $52.4 billion on nuclear weapons in 2008, according to US think tank the Carnegie Foundation. This is twice the total spend on science, space and technology, and 14 times the budget for energy research. While $47 billion goes towards maintaining the US arsenal, only $5 billion is spent on preventing nuclear threats.

Brown revolution begins

African scientists this week began a project to boost food production by compiling a digital map of the continent’s horrendously depleted soils. Launched by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Nairobi, Kenya, the map will show which compounds – such as phosphate – are needed where to restore soil fertility.

Telescope marathon

Astronomers looked set to break records this week by monitoring three quasars for 33 hours – the longest time this has been achieved “live”. On 15 and 16 January, telescopes from Asia, Australia, Europe and the Americas were due to stream data via high-speed fibre links directly to a supercomputer – creating the biggest real-time telescope ever.

Goats against clots

A drug expressed in the milk of genetically engineered goats has won a favourable review from the US Food and Drug Administration. Made by GTC Biopharmaceuticals of Rockville, Maryland, antithrombin prevents blood clots during surgery or childbirth in people with a rare clotting disorder. It received European approval in 2006.

Cancer-free baby?

The first baby to be screened as an embryo for the presence of a gene that raises the risk of cancer has been born. Paul Serhal’s team at University College London discarded six embryos with the BRCA1 gene, which raises the risk of breast cancer by 80 per cent, and implanted two lacking it, resulting in one birth.

and ecologically unsustainable.Tequila’s blue agave plant takes

six years to mature, leading to an unstable local supply. This, plus a huge leap in demand for the drink since the 1990s, has driven many liquor companies to grow their own near Jalisco (Journal of Rural Studies, DOI: 10.1016/j.jrurstud.2008.07.003).

This has led to “environmental degradation and the elimination of traditional practices”, says Bowen. Tequila – the first GI granted outside Europe – should be a lesson to other poor nations, says Bowen. “The specification of sustainable production practices within [the GI] legal framework is essential,” she says.

NASA’s financial watchdog is a toothless organisation that does not understand the role of an auditor. That is the scathing conclusion of a report from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO).

NASA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) is charged with improving the space agency’s efficiency while also identifying any mismanagement or abuse of its $17 billion annual budget. Yet out of the 71 NASA programme audits carried out between 2006 and 2007, only one identified any potential cost savings, claims the GAO report. This makes NASA’s inspectorate poor value for money, say the authors, who calculate that the OIG recoups only 36 cents for every dollar it costs to run, compared with an average of $9.49 for those overseeing other US agencies.

Most of the blame is directed at Robert Cobb, head of the OIG, for choosing investigations not intended to save money. He counters that the GAO report is flawed because it uses “selective and incomplete data”. Politicians may have had enough, however. Bart Gordon, chairman of the US House Committee on Science and Technology, wants Barack Obama’s administration to remove Cobb from his post .

WOMEN in pain during childbirth now have one less thing to worry about. The most comprehensive study into the risks posed by epidurals concludes that they are safer than previously thought.

Estimates of the risk of lasting harm from these spinal injections, often offered to women in labour to numb the pain of childbirth, vary quite a bit, but a figure used widely was 1 in 25,000.

Now a panel led by Tim Cook of the Royal United Hospital in Bath, UK, has collected information from all National Health Service hospitals in the UK that carry out the procedure. It concludes that

the chance of lasting harm from a spinal anaesthetic is between 1 in 50,000 and 1 in 23,000 (British Journal of Anaesthesia, DOI: 10.1093/bja/aen360). If only women in childbirth are considered, it is between 1 in

320,000 and 1 in 80,000 . “Past results have been

very variable, which has been confusing for anaesthetists and made it difficult for them to communicate the risk to patients,” says Cook.

“Past results were variable, which has been confusing for anaesthetists and patients”

Legal controversy surrounds the largest ever “iron-seeding” experiment to geoengineer the climate as it sets sail from South Africa.

Within weeks, a team led by Victor Smetacek of the Alfred Wegner Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, hopes to dump 20 tonnes of ferrous sulphate into the Southern Ocean. The aim is to trigger a plankton bloom that will suck carbon out of the air and lock it up at the bottom of the ocean .

After a company called Planktos sparked controversy in 2007 with plans to dump iron filings in the Galapagos, both the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity recommended that governments restrict such activities because they could have

detrimental effects on ecosystems. The IMO’s rules on marine protection do not cover experiments like Smetacek’s, but “it will be in clear defiance of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity”, warns Jim Thomas of environmental research organisation ETC Group .

Smetacek says his expedition has been approved by the German government, which helped define the UN guidelines. Others point out the experiment is unlikely to cause harm. “Twenty tonnes of iron particles in the vast ocean is very much a drop in the bucket,” says Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University in California. “The rational concern is that experiments will lead down some slippery slope – that small experiments could be scaled up without any regulation.”

IRON-SEEDING SHIP SETS SAIL

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–Blooming disaster?–

Watchdog’s woes

Epidural safety

www.newscientist.com 17 January 2009 | NewScientist | 5