New Horizons in Science

Some patients with depression are helped by therapy, or drugs, or, more often, a combination of the two. But for others, nothing medicine has been able to offer could soften the blackness and bleakness of the illness. Helen Mayberg is working hard to change that, using a technique called deep-brain stimulation, in which electrodes are inserted deep into the cortex of patients with unremitting depression. And although she’s treated only a small number of patients so far, she’s had some spectacular successes.   more…

Matthew State, a psychiatrist who went back to school to study genomics, has become one of a group of elite researchers using the newest and fastest genomics analysis—so-called high-throughput technology—to pursue the genes behind Tourette syndrome, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder and other neuropsychiatric ailments in children, which have clear   more…

In November, 2009, hackers released emails from climate researchers at the University of East Anglia in England, prompting wide-ranging attacks on climate research and climate researchers—Michael Mann among them. The author of the famous “hockey-stick” graph of temperatures over the past millennium, Mann was not amused; indeed, for a time his career as one of the world’s leading climate scientists seemed in jeopardy. In July, a university investigation completely vindicated him of charges of data fabrication.   more…

In 2001, Jo Handelsman spoke at New Horizons in Tempe, Arizona, where she told us about her pioneering work in extracting DNA of previously unknown organisms from soil—an area of study known as metagenomics. These were organisms that could not be cultured in the laboratory, and so the DNA revealed bits of countless organisms unkown to science. Because many antibiotics come from the soil, Handelsman has since been investigating sources of antibiotic resistance in the soil—that is, genes and proteins that allow bacteria to survive a hit with an antibiotic.   more…

Why do people often sharply disagree about things that scientists mostly agree on? As Dan Kahan has written, “The same groups who disagree on 'cultural issues' — abortion, same-sex marriage and school prayer — also disagree on whether climate change is real and on whether underground disposal of nuclear waste is safe.” How could views on such divergent issues go together? Kahan and his colleagues are looking at something they call the “cultural cognition of risk” to explain why individuals form opinions at odds with the facts.   more…

For 50 years, researchers have pursued the idea that cancer cells divide quickly. All the drugs developed so far are aimed at those cells. Such drugs now cure 80 percent of cases of ovarian cancer. But much of that cancer recurs within 2 to 5 years, and when it comes back, it kills many of the patients. The five-year survival rate can be as low as 20 to 30 percent, says Gil Mor.   more…

Surely the conditions that lead to insurgency and war depend upon such things as ideology, anger, the desire for revenge and other factors unique to each location, to each insurgent group, to each mortal conflict. Neil Johnson and his colleagues, experts in the modeling and understanding of complex systems, weren’t buying that assumption. They reviewed 11 very different conflicts and concluded that the size and timing of violent events across these conflicts showed “remarkable” similarities.   more…

Most colors on animals are produced by molecular pigments that absorb some wavelengths of visible light and reflect the others. But many of the most brilliant and vivid colors in nature are what are called “structural” colors. Like a rainbow, an opal, or an oil slick, structural colors are produced by optical interactions of light with biological nanostructures. Richard Prum, an evolutionary ornithologist, and his collaborators are exploring the optical properties of these biological nanostructures; the self-assembly mechanisms that organisms use to grow them reliably; and the evolution of these structures for their functions in communication.   more…

How do we make decisions and exercise judgment? We might expect that these are uniquely human activities, among the things that distinguish us from our non-human primate relatives. But Laurie Santos is pursuing a different notion—namely, that some aspects of the irrational decision-making that human adults are famous for might be shared with children and monkeys. Santos thinks this can teach us something about the origin of basic human irrationalities, such things as loss aversion, cognitive dissonance, or the anchoring bias—favoring some information over other considerations when making a decision. Why would evolution have allowed such things to appear so early in human development, when they seem to be a source of trouble and bad decisions?   more…

At the 1988 briefing in Boulder, “Future Climate/Future Life” served as the rubric for tandem presentations by Ralph Cicerone and the late Stephen Schneider, both at the time senior atmospheric scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.   more…

In the course of his exceptional career, Lee Hood has lived through, and helped in significant ways to catalyze, four major paradigm shifts in biology (i.e., the joining of engineering to biology, the human genome project, cross-disciplinary biology and, of late, systems biology).   more…

Supported by a large body of data, the current cosmological model describes the evolution of the Universe from a very early burst of accelerated expansion, known as inflation, a tiny fraction of a second after the beginning, through the assembly of galaxies and large-scale structure shaped by dark matter, to the present epoch and the rule of dark energy.  Problem is, as succes   more…

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Antibodies make excellent drugs for such things as rheumatoid arthritis and cancer, but they can’t be taken as a pill, and they can cause life-threatening allergic or immune responses, only making matters worse. David Spiegel has a work-around. He is developing antibody recruiters that can induce a patient’s own antibodies to attack illnesses such as prostate cancer, /Staph aureus/ infections, and HIV. The idea is to exploit the advantages of antibody treatments while using these recruiters to overcome the disadvantages. Spiegel’s molecules are cheaper than antibodies, could be taken by mouth, and easy to synthesize. The research could, Spiegel hopes, “serve as a starting point toward entirely novel therapeutic approaches to a wide range of diseases.”   more…

When we report on clinical trials, we need to ask ourselves the following questions, Krumholz says: Where is the kernel of truth that really matters? When does a study convey more spin than substance? Why is it sometimes so hard to determine exactly what a study says?   more…

If you’re a gene and you don’t make a messenger RNA that makes a protein, you’re useless. Or so researchers thought until they discovered genes that were once as invisible to us as the dark side of the moon. According to this central dogma in biology, there are about 26,000 genes in our cells that make up about 1 percent of our DNA. Lin and others have recently discovered that the other 99 percent—the mis-named “junk DNA”—contains different genes that produce at least 60,000 RNA molecules. These so-called piRNAs are typically 20-30 units long, compared to the 1,000 to 10,000 units in typical messenger RNA. Lin’s work is making it clear that these RNAs have a large role in regulating the genome—and some help stem cells renew themselves.    more…

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill has been referred to as the worst environmental disaster in our nation’s history. As Lohrenz points out, scientific observations played a critical role in the response to the crisis and in understanding the impacts on the marine life and ecosystems in the northern Gulf of Mexico.   more…

The “holy grail” of autism research is to be able to diagnose it many months before its symptoms are clear, giving doctors time to change its course before it has seeped into and resculpted the brain of an affected child. Researchers disagree over whether this will ever be possible, but Ami Klin has little doubt. “There is no question we will be able to attenuate autism,” he says. He is interested in the social mind—social cognition—and how it is disrupted in children with autism. One path toward possible early diagnosis of autism is to use eye-tracking studies to see and measure social engagement. How often, for example, does an infant look at the face of an interviewer? Some children have abnormalities in visual scanning in normal, social settings. Such studies could reveal vulnerabilities for autism in the first months of life, a year or two before the disease begins to become apparent. They might also help predict the degree of impairment and social disengagement that at-risk children can expect.   more…

About 700 new chemicals are introduced each year, on top of 80,000 already in use. Since 1976, the EPA has restricted the use of five existing chemicals, according to Zimmerman. “If you live and breathe in the United States,” she says, “you are exposed to chemicals with little or no knowledge of their impacts on health or the environment.” Zimmerman is working toward a world in which the properties of chemicals that make them toxic are understood, so she and others can design alternatives that are equally effective, but more benign. She’s working through a database of 12 million chemicals, modeling their properties, and trying to correlate them with different toxicities to fish, birds, and mammals. She’s already identified molecular characteristics that affect fish or aquatic environments and is telling companies who develop such chemicals which chemicals are worth a second look in terms of potential toxicity.    more…