Information about News And Events, Politics And Government and More

France’s food watchdog said on Thursday it had concluded that genetically-modified maize from US biotech giant Monsanto is safe, contradicting an earlier report that led to a ban on the maize.

The AFSSA report, which became public after it was revealed in the daily Le Figaro, angered environmentalists and embarrassed President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government which had resorted to a special EU measure to outlaw the crops.

The agency said there was no evidence to support the view that MON810, the only strain of GM maize under cultivation in France before the ban, posed a health risk.

Sarkozy’s government slapped a ban on GM crops in February last year after a panel of experts said in a separate report that they had “serious doubts” about the Monsanto product.

France invoked a European Union safeguard giving member states authority to ban a GM crop provided it has scientific evidence to back this decision.

The new report was seen as an embarrassment for Ecology Minister Jean-Louis Borloo, who is to defend France’s decision to opt for the safeguard in meetings in Brussels next week.

The ecology ministry said in a statement that it would not seek to reverse its decision to opt for the EU safeguard. Environmentalists denounced the report as the product of a plot by powerful interests in agribusiness.

“This is a major coup by the industrialists,” said activist-farmer Jose Bove, who has waged a decade-long crusade against GM foods. “This is an attempt to reverse a trend in Europe.”

Bove said the controversy highlighted the need for an independent authority to put an end once and for all to the debate over GM foods.

Austria, Germany, Hungary and Greece have also restricted GM crops.

In 2007, 22,000 hectares (55,000 acres) were sown with MON810 — less than one percent of the sown acreage for corn in France.

The earlier expert report said evidence had emerged that MON810 had an effect on insects, a species of earthworm and micro-organisms.

There was also concern that windborne pollen from MON810 could travel much further than previously thought, perhaps as much as hundreds of kilometres.

But the report remained controversial: 12 of the 15 scientists who compiled it issued a statement complaining that their findings had been misrepresented.

A Michigan zoo is hosting an exotic, erotic afternoon on Valentine’s Day, when consenting adults will get an unabashed look at how wild animals make babies.

WWMT-TV says the $50-per-couple, adults-only event at Binder Park Zoo — dubbed “Zoorotica” — is sold out and there’s even a waiting list.

Visitors will receive champagne, hors d’oeuvres, a video presentation and a guided tour, including the homes of snow leopards, giraffes, zebras and various primates and reptiles. Some stops will be areas not usually open to the public.

The Battle Creek Enquirer reports that other zoos have offered similar programs — with cute names like “Woo at the Zoo” and “Jungle Love.”

NASA has delayed the planned Feb. 12 launch of the space shuttle Discovery by at least a week to allow extra time to evaluate vital fuel valves on the spacecraft, agency officials said late Tuesday.

Discovery was slated to launch toward the International Space Station on Feb. 12 to deliver the last set of U.S.-built solar arrays to the orbiting laboratory. The mission is now scheduled to blast off no earlier than Feb. 19 at about 4:41 a.m. EST (0941 GMT), but an official launch target will be determined at a later date.

“By looking at it right now, we think it’s about a week delay, but we’re not going to put pressure on the team,” said John Shannon, NASA’s space shuttle program manager, in a briefing at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “We’ll just let the information drive us.”

The delay is necessary to allow engineers time to be sure that pieces of Discovery’s flow control valves won’t chip off and damage vital plumbing between the spacecraft’s main engines and its 15-story external tank. The valves are used to keep the space shuttle’s hydrogen propellant tank pressurized as the orbiter rockets spaceward.

The valves were replaced on Discovery after engineers discovered damage to a similar valve that flew aboard its sister ship Endeavour last November.

During Endeavour’s Nov. 14 launch, a piece of one of three flow control valves chipped off, apparently from high-cycle fatigue, Shannon said. The valve functions much like a pop-up lawn sprinkler to funnel hydrogen gas from a shuttle’s main engine back into its external tank to maintain proper pressure levels, he added.

Shannon said the damaged valve on Endeavour caused no serious harm during that shuttle’s November launch and NASA officials want to be sure the same will be true for Discovery when it flies.

“We don’t expect there to be a problem, but we don’t have the proof in hand,” Shannon said. “We want to have that proof in hand before we commit to go fly.”

Shuttle officials announced Discovery’s flight delay late Tuesday after a day-long meeting to discuss the orbiter’s launch readiness.

NASA engineers plan to perform a series of tests to evaluate what effects valve debris could cause during ascent. Top shuttle officials are expected to discuss the results from those tests next week before setting an official new launch target.

Michael Leinbach, NASA’s launch director, said his team of shuttle workers is currently in a holding pattern until a new launch date is set.

“Once we’re given a launch date, we’ll get back into our processing,” Leinbach said.

Commanded by veteran spaceflyer Lee Archambault, Discovery’s STS-119 mission will launch seven astronauts toward the space station to deliver the outpost’s last set of U.S. solar arrays. Four spacewalks are scheduled during the two-week spaceflight. The mission will also ferry Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata to the space station, where he will replace NASA spaceflyer Sandra Magnus as a member of the outpost’s three-person crew.

Space station mission managers, meanwhile, are tackling several issues to prepare the outpost for Discovery’s arrival this month and the planned shift to a larger, six-person crew later this year. They range from a recent vibration event associated with a Jan. 14 thruster firing to ongoing, but not insurmountable, glitches with new life support equipment.

NASA space station program manager Mike Suffredini said he is confident the glitches will be resolved and the station ready to support the first six-person crew in late May as planned.

Suffridini said that while the vibrations on Jan. 14, which occurred during a routine Russian thruster firing to boost the space station’s orbit, were stronger than the acceptable limits, they did not cause any structural damage to the outpost. During the two-minute, 22-second engine burn, the space station’s current skipper Michael Fincke of NASA reported that the outpost shook more than he’d ever seen in his two increments aboard, but he did not hear creaks or groans from the structure, he added.

A video from a camera inside the station showed items shaking back and forth.

“You can see things were moving around pretty good,” Suffredini said.

But despite the shaking, the event did not impact the space station’s 15-year design lifetime, he added.

Earlier today, space station managers in Russia and at NASA’s Mission Control in Houston canceled another planned thruster firing planned Wednesday. The next maneuver may take place sometime in March, Suffredini said.

Discovery’s STS-119 mission is NASA’s first of up to six planned shuttle flights for 2009. They include one final flight to overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope and a series of space station construction missions.

Scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University say that remarkable new tools, which spotlight individual cellular molecules, are helping advance biomedical research.

They have revealed that these new tools are photoactivatable fluorescent proteins (PAFPs) and other advanced fluorescent proteins (FPs).

Dr. Vladislav Verkhusha, associate professor of anatomy and structural biology at Einstein, says that PAFPs and FPs help noninvasively visualize the structures and processes in living cells at the molecular level.

The researcher says that it is now possible to follow cancer cells as they seek out blood vessels and spread throughout the body or to watch how cells manage intracellular debris, preventing premature aging.

The significance of this study lies in the fact that the new fluorescent proteins add considerably to the biomedical imaging revolution started by the 1992 discovery that the gene for a green fluorescent protein (GFP) found in a jellyfish could be fused to any gene in a living cell.

When the target gene is expressed, GFP lights up (fluoresces), creating a visual marker of gene expression and protein localization, via light (optical) microscopy.

While earlier technique could capture images only in non-living cells, the addition of PAFPs, more versatile versions of FPs, made it possible to do real-time SR fluorescence microscopy in living cells.

Dr. Verkhusha is said to have developed a variety of PAFPs and FPs for use in imaging mammalian cells, expanding the applications of fluorescence microscopy.

The collection includes PAFPs that can be turned on and off with a pulse of light, FPs that can fluoresce in different colors, and FPs that have better resolution for deep-tissue imaging.

The researcher most recently developed a red PAFP called PAmCherry1, which has faster photoactivation, improved contrast, and better stability compared to other PAFPs of its type.

“PAmCherry1 will allow improvements in several imaging techniques, notably two-color SR fluorescence microscopy, in which two different molecules or two biological processes can be viewed simultaneously in a single cell,” Nature Methods quoted the researcher as saying in its online version.

Dr. Verkhusha’s PAFPs have been used in several studies, providing new insights into a variety of biological processes.

In one of the studies, his PAFPs were used to capture the first nanoscale images of the orientation of molecules within biological structures.

“Such images could be useful in studying protein-protein interactions, the growth and collapse of intracellular structures, and many other biological questions,” says Dr. Verkhusha.

In another study, Dr. Verkhusha contributed a novel PAFP to a new method of viewing individual breast cancer cells for several days at a time, providing new details on how cancer cells invade surrounding tissue and reach blood vessels, a process called metastasis.

“Mapping the fate of tumor cells in different regions of a tumor was not possible before the development of the photoswitching technology,” explains John Condeelis, Ph.D., co-chair and professor of anatomy and structural biology and co-director of the Gruss Lipper Biophotonics Center.

Dr. Verkhusha has also developed new types of fluorescent proteins for use in conventional fluorescent microscopy, called fluorescent timers (FTs), which can change their colour from blue to red over a matter of hours.

“These FTs will enable scientists to study the trafficking of cellular proteins and to provide accurate insight into the timing of intracellular processes, such as activation or inhibition of gene expression or protein synthesis,” he says.

With the use of the FTs, he and his colleagues have shown for the first time how a protein called LAMP-2A, which scavenges cellular debris, is transported to intracellular organelles called lysosomes, where the debris is digested.

The researchers are of the opinion that understanding this process, which maintains the health of cells and organs, may lead to treatments to keep elderly people’s organs in prime condition.

A gene called DREAM, earlier known to regulate the perception of pain, has now been found to control learning and memory as well.

In a 2002 study on mice, scientists found that DREAM controlled all kinds of pain, whether chronic or acute and thus it was dubbed as the “Master-Gene of pain perception”.

However, Josef Penninger, meanwhile scientific director of IMBA, the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, wanted to find out other functions of DREAM.

Thus, Penninger, in collaboration with neurobiologists from the University Pablo de Olivade, devised experiments to follow up on the previous findings.

For the study, the researchers subjected DREAM-less mice to numerous neurological tests and analysed their memory skills.

And the findings were quite were striking-without DREAM, the mice were able to learn faster and remember better.

In fact, the brains of aged mice (18 months) showed learning capabilities similar to those of very young mice, thus making DREAM a potential genetic candidate for explaining old age dementia.

In fact, DREAM could also have its roots in regulating Alzheimer’s disease as the characteristic accumulation of amyloid plaques in brain cells during Alzheimer’s is believed to be caused by Calcium-imbalance, which is also responsible for tuning the activity of the DREAM-gene.

Calcium homeostasis may thus be the link between pain perception, learning and memory.

The conclusion is supported by observations of patients suffering from chronic pain- very often their ability to memorize is strikingly reduced and they need a lot more time to learn than individuals without pain.

“It is absolutely fascinating that we found a gene which at the same time regulates pain, learning and old age memory function, and it is of great interest to the millions of people suffering from chronic pain that we follow up on these results,” said Josef Penninger.

In a finding that could help doctors fine-tune breast cancer treatments even further, a new study confirms that there are genes that increase the likelihood that the disease will spread throughout a woman’s body.

Scientists from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), building upon earlier research, found in both mice and human breast tumor samples that a certain gene signature predicted the chance of metastasis. Many experts have believed that metastasis is primarily the result of non-inherited mutations in cancerous tissue.

“Our earlier studies clearly established that inherited factors also play an important role in metastatic progression and can help distinguish which tumors have a propensity to metastasize,” study author Kent W. Hunter, head of the NCI’s Metastasis Susceptibility Section in the Laboratory of Cancer Biology and Genetics, said in an NCI release. “Hopefully, in the future, we will be able to determine which women are more likely to have a tumor that would metastasize, and we could then tailor therapy specifically for them, avoiding the use of harsh treatments for those with a low probability of metastasis.”

The researchers first discovered a gene signature in mice that raised the risk of breast cancer metastasis in mice by 20-fold. They then found the corresponding human gene signature, and it predicted relapse or recurrence in four of five breast cancer patients.

“Our study provides additional evidence of the role of inherited genes in human breast cancer progression,” Hunter said.

Scientists have analyzed odd-looking Martian craters, which they think indicates hidden ice.

Surface features common in the northern and southern mid latitudes of Mars and known as lobate debris aprons and lineated valley fill are believed to have formed either as debris flows mobilized by pore ice or as debris-covered glaciers.

To learn more, Ailish M. Kress and James W. Head, both from the Department of Geological Sciences, Brown University Providence Rhode Island, US, have defined and analyzed ring mold craters, which are abundant on debris aprons and lineated valley fill but not seen in surrounding terrain.

Ring mold craters are concentric crater forms named for their similarity to the cooking implement, in contrast to the bowl-shaped craters that are common at such small sizes.

On the basis of similarities in shape of ring mold, craters to laboratory impact craters in ice and of the physics of impact cratering into pure ice, the authors interpreted that ring mold craters result from projectiles hitting relatively pure ice below a thin debris layer.

These results support the hypothesis that lobate debris aprons and lineated valley fill are debris-covered glaciers and that many hundreds of meters of ice remain in these deposits today on Mars.

If you think that our facial expressions of emotion are a product of cultural learning, you better think again, for a new study suggests that they are hardwired into our genes.

Published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, this is the first study to suggest that facial expressions of emotion are innate rather than a product of cultural learning.

During the study, sighted as well as blind individuals were found to use the same facial expressions, producing the same facial muscle movements in response to specific emotional stimuli.

Lead researcher David Matsumoto, a professor of Psychology at San Francisco State University, said that the study also provided new insight into how humans manage emotional displays according to social context, suggesting that the ability to regulate emotional expressions is not learnt through observation.

He revealed that the research team compared the facial expressions of sighted and blind judo athletes at the 2004 Summer Olympics and Paralympic Games.

The researcher said that over 4,800 photographs were captured and analysed, including images of athletes from 23 countries.

“The statistical correlation between the facial expressions of sighted and blind individuals was almost perfect. This suggests something genetically resident within us is the source of facial expressions of emotion,” Matsumoto said.

He and his colleagues observed that both sighted and blind individuals managed their expressions of emotion in the same way according to social context.

Given the social nature of the Olympic medal ceremonies, according to the researcher, they could form parts of their analyses.

They said that 85 per cent of silver medallists, who lost their medal matches, produced during the ceremony “social smiles” that use only the mouth muscles, compared to true smiles that cause the eyes to twinkle and narrow and the cheeks to rise.

“Losers pushed their lower lip up as if to control the emotion on their face and many produced social smiles. Individuals blind from birth could not have learned to control their emotions in this way through visual learning so there must be another mechanism. It could be that our emotions, and the systems to regulate them, are vestiges of our evolutionary ancestry. It’s possible that in response to negative emotions, humans have developed a system that closes the mouth so that they are prevented from yelling, biting or throwing insults,” Matsumoto said.

A radar instrument aboard a NASA spacecraft has detected large glaciers hidden under rocky debris that may be the vestiges of ice sheets that blanketed parts of Mars in a past ice age, scientists said on Thursday.

The glaciers, the biggest known deposits of water on Mars outside of its poles, could prove useful for future manned missions to the red planet as drinking water or rocket fuel, University of Texas planetary geologist John Holt said.

“If we were to, down the road, establish a base there, you’d want to park near a big source of water because you can do anything with it,” Holt said.

The glaciers, perhaps 200 million years old, also may entomb genetic fragments of past microbial life on Mars as well as air bubbles that might reveal the composition of the atmosphere as it was long ago, according to geologist James Head of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

A ground-penetrating radar instrument aboard the U.S. space agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter collected the data that confirmed the presence of the buried glaciers that extend for dozens of miles (km) from the edges of mountains or cliffs.

These closely resemble glaciers in Antarctica that similarly are covered by rocky debris, Head said.

Scientists previously determined that large deposits of ice exist at the Martian north and south polar regions, but hundreds of these buried glaciers are located at mid-latitudes on the planet.

Head said they can be about half a mile thick. One of them was three times larger than the city of Los Angeles.

The ones described by the researchers in the journal Science were in the Hellas Basin region of the Martian southern hemisphere, but many more are in the northern hemisphere.

Holt said the glaciers may be the vestiges of large ice sheets that once covered parts of Mars in a past ice age. Earth’s most recent ice age ended about 12,000 years ago.

“It’s dramatic evidence of major climate change on Mars, presumably linked to orbital variations. That’s what causes the major glaciations on Earth,” Holt said.

The existence of these features — rounded surfaces sloping gently away from steeper ridges — has been known for decades but their nature was a matter of dispute. Some scientists had argued they were ice-filled rock piles and not glaciers.

But the radar echoes received by the spacecraft indicated that a thin coating of rocky material at the surface covered thick ice and not rock.

Scientists want to understand the history of water on Mars because water is fundamental to the question of whether the planet has ever harbored microbial or some other life. Liquid water is a necessity for life as we know it. While Mars is now arid and dusty, there is evidence it once was much wetter.

For example, scientists think that long, undulating features seen on the northern plains of Mars may be remnants of shorelines of an ocean that covered a third of the planet’s surface at least 2 billion years ago.  The Phoenix Mars Lander, which touched down at the north pole of Mars in May, found definitive proof of water before ending its mission earlier this month.

A storm was expected to dump snow, sleet and rain on the Rockies and parts of the Plains and the Midwest on Friday, while cloudy conditions were forecast for much of the East Coast and the West Coast was likely to be mostly dry and clear.

Snow was forecast for the Rockies and most of the northern Plains, while the central Plains were expected to see snow, rain or a mix. Minnesota was predicted to get snow, while the rest of the upper Midwest was likely to see rain or sleet.

High wind warnings and wind advisories were issued across the Dakotas, Nebraska and western Kansas. Pleasant conditions were likely in the southern Plains.

Showers were forecast for the Northeast, while thunderstorms could occur in the Southeast. Severe storms were possible from Alabama through the Carolinas.

The West was expected to be mostly dry, though Washington was likely to be cloudy. Temperatures across the Southwest were expected to reach the 80s and 90s, which, combined with dry air, was creating fire danger in Southern California.

Temperatures in the Lower 48 states on Thursday ranged from a low of 17 degrees at Clayton Lake, Maine, to a high of 91 degrees at Van Nuys, Calif.