20 July 2013 | NewScientist | 5

with a specific gene turned off. A lucrative industry has sprung up to supply them. Phil Simmons of Sage Labs, St Louis, Missouri, a commercial supplier, estimates that the industry’s worldwide turnover is $50 million a year.

By 2016, each of the mouse’s 20,000 genes will have been turned off, if work by the International Knockout Mouse Consortium goes to plan. It has received $150 million in funding from the US National Institutes of Health and the European Union.

Cheap the mice ain’t: a bespoke knockout mouse typically costs around $45,000.

Quiet sun won’t lastTHOSE hoping the sun will save us from climate change are in for disappointment: a recent lapse in solar activity is not the beginning of a decades-long slump that might have cooled the planet.

Sunspots are the seat of solar activity and can affect Earth’s climate in a number of ways, although the extent is debated. Sunspot numbers wax and wane in a cycle that lasts 11 years or so.

The current cycle should be at its peak now. But sunspots have been scarce since 2008, leading to speculation that we are about to enter a prolonged quiet spell. The last such event coincided with the worst winters of the Little Ice Age, which began in the 16th century.

New comparisons between the ongoing maximum and historical data suggest the sun’s activity is more akin to a short series of weak cycles at the beginning of the 20th century, says Giuliana DeToma of the High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colorado, who presented the work at the American Astronomical Society’s solar physics meeting on 11 July.

The findings fit with a prediction made in 1933 that these minor dips occur every century. That suggests the sun will soon become more energetic, and any cooling from the brief downturn will stop.

Pollution deathsHOLD your breath. Air pollution kills more than 2 million people worldwide every year.

By using climate models to simulate what air pollution was like in 1850 and 2000, Jason West at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his colleagues have estimated its effect on death rates today. The team links ozone to about 470,000 deaths per year from respiratory disease; increases in particulates – fine particles that penetrate the lungs – are behind 2.1 million deaths from heart and

lung disease. Climate change is linked to just 3700 of these air pollution deaths (Environmental Research Letters, doi.org/m8j).

“Many of these deaths occur in Asia, where air pollution has increased markedly in recent

years,” says Frank Kelly of King’s College London. “Mortality associated with poor air quality is likely to become the world’s top environmental challenge.”

CHINA and the US collaborating in the fight against climate change? Impossible, we hear you say. And yet, after years of public stand-offs, the world’s two largest planet warmers – with 40 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions between them – last week reached a ground-breaking deal in Washington DC.

Both countries are keen on quick fixes for greenhouse gases other than CO2. They will phase out hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), used as refrigerants, and harmonise vehicle emissions standards. That will include smoke emissions from large trucks, which also damage human lungs (see “Pollution deaths”, above).

Observers said the biggest advance by the US-China Working

Group on Climate Change was an agreement to work together to find commercial uses for CO2 captured from power plants – rather than letting it loose or storing it.

“The focus on carbon capture and utilisation is important,” says Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development in Washington DC. He thinks it could push forward schemes to use CO2 in cement. “Storing CO2 in our highways and buildings is smart technology and smart business.”

The two countries also pledged to collaborate on smart power grids that can make greater use of intermittent renewable energy sources like wind and solar power.

An unexpected agreement

–A deal to smile about–

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Park on the moonAs space mining edges closer to reality, two US senators say now is the time to protect historical sites on the moon. On 8 July they introduced a bill that would turn part of the moon into a national park, safeguarding artefacts associated with the Apollo missions. Government transparency website GovTrack.us gives a 7 per cent chance the bill will be enacted.

Scottish datingArchaeologists have discovered the world’s oldest calendar in a field in Aberdeenshire, UK. Dating from 8000 BC, the calendar is actually an arc of 12 pits from which the sun appears to rise over the year. The shape of each pit seems to mimic the phases of the moon (Internet Archaeology, doi.org/m7x).

Surviving a T. rex biteA duckbilled dinosaur’s tail bone has been found in South Dakota, and embedded in it is a Tyrannosaurus rex tooth. The injury has healed, suggesting that the duckbill survived the attack, and that the T. rex was an active hunter (PNAS, doi.org/m8h).

Scan for ADHDThe first brain scanning test for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. The test uses electrodes to track specific patterns of brainwaves thought to be more prevalent in children with ADHD. According to the FDA, the method aids accurate diagnosis, although study data has not been made available.

Nightmare-liner?An empty 787 Dreamliner jet parked at London’s Heathrow airport suffered a fire that burned through part of its carbon-fibre hull on 12 July. The cause is unclear, but the UK Air Accidents Investigation Board says the plane’s lithium-ion batteries, which smouldered in two previous incidents, do not appear to be at fault this time.

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“Mortality associated with air quality is likely to become the world’s top environmental challenge”

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