6 | NewScientist | 29 August 2009

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WITH the Large Hadron Collider still in the repair shop, the race to find the Higgs boson has become a lot tighter, thanks to the older and less powerful – but working – Tevatron collider near Chicago.

“The Tevatron definitely has a chance,” says Greg Landsberg of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who works on one of the LHC’s detectors.

With the LHC due to restart only in November at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, the Tevatron has been gaining ground in the search for the Higgs, the particle thought to give mass to other elementary particles. At last

week’s Lepton Photon conference in Hamburg, Germany, Tevatron physicists said that by early 2011 they will have recorded enough data to allow them to either find or rule out the Higgs as predicted by the standard model .

Higgs race outsider The LHC will have to sprint to catch up, and it won’t be easy. While the LHC’s higher energies should produce more Higgs particles, it will also boost the production of other particles that can mimic a Higgs, says Gordon Kane of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Telling between the two will require a precise understanding of how the LHC’s detectors are working , which takes time to develop.

The LHC, however, could become the first to find particles of dark matter, a search for which the Tevatron is not well suited.

Stem cell trial delay

PLANS to give human embryonic stem cells (ESCs) their first clinical test have been delayed again. The US Food and Drug Administration has placed a hold on a proposed trial in patients with spinal injury.

Geron of Menlo Park, California, intends to transplant cells called oligodendrocyte progenitors, grown from human ESCs, into the damaged spinal cords of patients whose injuries have left them paralysed. The idea is that they will secrete myelin, which forms sheaths that help protect nerve

cells from damage. In rats, such transplants have helped restore mobility after a spinal injury.

Geron finally won approval to begin the trial in January, years later than it had hoped , after meticulous FDA scrutiny of safety data from its animal studies. No patients have yet been treated.

The FDA’s caution stems from fears that the transplants might contain rare rogue cells that could trigger tumours. The latest concerns arise from new animal experiments, but neither Geron nor the FDA will comment on the precise reasons for the hold.

Fatal disease fix

MEET Mito and Tracker (left), twin rhesus monkeys created using a DNA transplant technique that could prevent rare but devastating human diseases caused when our cells’ energy system is disrupted.

Shoukhrat Mitalipov and colleagues at Oregon Health and Science University in Beaverton used the fact that mitochondria, which provide cells with energy, contain their own DNA, separate from the chromosomes. –Born without mum’s mitochondria–

Bee killer fingerprintedBEEKEEPERS have seen hive after

hive fall prey to colony collapse

disorder (CCD). Now insights from the

honeybee genome could overthrow

guesswork in the effort to diagnose

the cause of the die-offs.

May Berenbaum at the University

of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and

her colleagues looked for genetic

differences between bees from US

colonies that have suffered CCD and

bees that were sampled before colony

collapses shot up in 2006.

Berenbaum’s team found 65 genes

that were distinctly different in CCD

bees. They also discovered unusual

snippets of genetic material that

are typical of infection with the

RNA viruses known as picorna-like

viruses (Proceedings of the National

Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/

pnas.0906970106). They found no

evidence to suggest that pesticides

or bacterial infection are the primary

cause of CCD. Berenbaum thinks

picorna-like viruses may be the

root cause, making the bees

highly vulnerable to other viruses,

pesticides and bacteria.

The team want to use the genetic

fingerprint to investigate reports of

CCD in other countries . This could

provide evidence of how prevalent

the problem is.

Screening bees for the genetic

fragments could form the basis of

an early warning system for

beekeepers, says Berenbaum.

“This could open a new avenue

for colony monitoring,” says Peter

Neumann at the Swiss Bee Research

Centre in Bern.

“Tevatron physicists said that by early 2011 they will have the data to either find the Higgs or rule it out”

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–Sting operation–