OBAMA STEM CELL RESEARCH ANNOUNCEMENT

The official could not confirm the details of what Obama would sign, but advisers had previously said he favored lifting the eight-year limitation on funding of human embryonic stem cell research imposed by his predecessor, President George W. Bush.

The issue is controversial because some people believe the destruction of any human embryo is wrong.

The official also said Obama would make an announcement about a broader initiative to restore scientific integrity to government processes.

Other government officials, who asked not to be named, have said Obama could take several different routes to lifting the Bush limits on stem cell research. These include an executive order, a simple statement of policy, or some kind of joint action with Congress.

Obama has made clear since before he ran for president that he supports federal spending on human embryonic stem cell research.

Stem cells are the body's master cells, the source of all cells and tissue, like brain, blood, heart, bones and muscles. Embryonic stem cells come from days-old embryos and many scientists consider them the most powerful because they can transform into any type of cell in the body.

Doctors hope to harness the transformational qualities of stem cells to treat a variety of diseases, including brain cells for Parkinson's disease, pancreatic cells for diabetes and nerve cells for spinal-cord injuries.

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Scientists have complained that the eight years of limitations placed by Bush have held up research, while opponents of human embryonic stem cell research say scientists can be working with other types of stem cells that do not come from embryos.

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DICKEY AMENDMENT

U.S. legislation called the Dickey Amendment forbids the use of federal funds for the creation or destruction of human embryos for research.

In 1998, soon after human embryonic stem cells were discovered, the Health and Human Services Department determined that the Dickey Amendment did not apply to researchers working with human stem cells, so long as they did not get the cells themselves from embryos.

But in August 2001, Bush declared otherwise and limited the use of federal funds to human embryonic stem cell lines, or batches, that existed as of that moment. He vetoed congressional attempts to override this decision.

Several members of Congress who oppose abortion rights have supported broader federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research, and the issue crosses the political divide.

Even many abortion opponents say they support the use of stem cells from embryos created in fertility clinics -- embryos that would otherwise be discarded.

Critics of the Bush administration accused it of inserting ideology into the scientific process -- from the stem cell issue to climate change and even contraception. The Obama administration has been working to overturn these policies.

On Friday, the Health and Human Services Department moved to rescind a controversial rule, made final just before Obama took office, that would allow healthcare workers to invoke their consciences in refusing to provide health services or information to patients.

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Three minutes later an explanation came through on the satellite's launch blog: "According to Nasa commentator George Diller, the payload fairing [a clamshell cover protecting the satellite as it is blasted through the atmosphere] failed to separate from the vehicle during ascent."

The rocket and satellite failed to reach orbit and subsequently plummeted into the ocean.

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"Certainly for the science community it's a huge disappointment," said John Brunschwyler, Taurus project manager for Orbital Sciences Corp, which built the rocket and satellite. "It's taken so long to get here."

The project took nine years to reach the launch pad.

"The loss of this instrument is a serious setback," added Professor John Burrows, a co-investigator for the satellite. "OCO planned to build on the first measurements by the European Sciamachy instrument on Envisat and is complementary to the recently launched Japanese mission, Gosat."

Nasa's director of Earth sciences, Michael Freilich, said: "Over the next several days, weeks and months, we're going to carefully evaluate how to move forward and advance the science, given our evaluation of the assets that are in orbit now, the assets of our international partners and the existence of flight spares in order to put together a program, as rapidly as possible, to pick up where OCO left off."

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Though Dolly the sheep was the first clone to be shoved into the limelight, in 1996, the process of human-directed cloning has existed since 1952. In that year, American researchers Robert Briggs and Thomas King successfully removed the nucleus of a tadpole's embryonic cell and transferred it to a donor cell, cloning 27 tadpoles in the experiment. This groundbreaking achievement landed the scientists the internationally lauded Charles Leopold Mayer Prize of the Académie des Sciences, making them the first Americans in history to receive the award.

Since Briggs and King's discovery, a veritable Noah's Ark of clones has been created, ranging from fish in 1963 to horses in 2003. Dolly's birth, at the Roslin Institute in Scotland, marked the first successful cloning of a mammal from an adult cell, proving that a complete animal could be grown from the DNA contained in cells from just about any part of another.



Attempts at cloning haven't stopped at the nonhuman animal kingdom: scientists have long speculated about cloning humans as well, but for the most part, ethical considerations have prevented any such notions from being put into practice. President George W. Bush urged Congress to enact legislation banning human cloning in 2002 after being "deeply troubled" by rumors that a Canada-based UFO cult had announced the birth of a successfully cloned baby girl. Though the claims were never substantiated, Congress passed the Human Cloning Prohibition Act in 2003. Congresswoman Sue Myrick, who supported the act, claimed that "anything other than a ban would license the most ghoulish and dangerous enterprise in human history." Religious groups also came out in force against human cloning; science was threatening to disrupt the natural order of life, they said, and researchers "playing God" were treading on dangerous existential territory. A representative of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops hailed the passing of the bill, stating, "This vote reflects America's rejection of the notion that human life is a commodity to be created for experimentation."


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Cloning has generated controversy outside of ethics questions as well — or at least, outside of these particular ethics questions. In 2004, South Korean researcher Hwang Woo Suk shot to fame after claims that his team had successfully extracted potentially disease-curing stem cells from a cloned human embryo. However, mere months later, Hwang's reputation dissolved after a Seoul National University panel concluded that much of his research was "intentionally fabricated." Hwang was accused of doctoring pictures of his supposed patient-specific stem-cell lines and was forced to resign. Though the controversy stunned South Korea, the nation resumed its cloning research, and in 2008 it unveiled seven Labrador retrievers, cloned from a drug-sniffing canine, that shared her superior narcotic-detecting abilities.



The genetic sequencing of the woolly mammoth, meanwhile, raises the similarly fraught but increasingly realistic possibility of cloning extinct animals, a process that Jurassic Park director Steven Spielberg has called "the science of eventuality." Still, scientist Stephan Schuster, who led the team at Penn State, isn't holding his breath. "What I'm trying to say is that there is a workable route to do that, but it is at this time technically, and cost-wise and time-wise, not feasible."

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Scientists on Wednesday revealed they had unravelled much of the genetic code of a woolly mammoth, in what could be the first baby step in bringing the extinct creature, or at least characteristics of it, back to life.

Researchers from the U.S. and Russia, in a million-dollar project, said Wednesday they have sequenced more than three billion DNA bases of the mammoth nuclear genome, obtained from ancient hair shafts extracted from two specimens dating back roughly 20,000 years. That represents roughly 80 per cent of the 4.17 billion DNA pairs they expect to find in the mammoth genome, assuming the mammoth genome is similar in size to that of modern African savanna elephants.

Stephan Schuster, a Penn State University biochemistry professor and co-author of the new research, said the early findings suggest it's only a matter of time before the complete sequence is obtained, raising the possibility that an extinct species could be brought back based on its genetic material. "It could be done. The question is, just because we might be able to do it one day, should we do it?" said Schuster. "I would be surprised to see if it would take more than 10 or 20 years to do it."

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The research, which also found that woolly mammoths split into two genetic groups about two million years ago, will be published in the Thursday edition of the journal Nature. Hamilton, Ont.-based University of McMaster anthropology Prof. Hendrik Poinar wasn't part of the Nature study but has done pioneering work extracting nuclear DNA from bone in woolly mammoths. He said the research marks the beginning efforts in the quest to complete the mammoth genome, but cautions that it is only a beginning step.

"With sequencing of this sort, you want to get about eight to 12-fold coverage of the genome, so you can be reasonably sure of its accuracy," he told CBC News. "Here we are talking about a 10th of that coverage, so there's a large amount of room for error, but it's great as a proof of principle." Fossil samples of bone and hair have already provided researchers with access to DNA from extinct animals. While bone and hair samples are more known as a resource for the more abundant mitochondrial DNA, the more revealing nuclear DNA can be found in the samples as well.

The issue with ancient samples is contamination: DNA from bacteria and other foreign life forms can mix with samples and degrade them. Schuster's group found a way around this by focusing on hair, which they found was easier to decontaminate. The method used by the researchers isn't likely to be applicable to older creatures like dinosaurs, however, because whether the DNA can survive the rigours of thousands of years depends in large part on how undisturbed the specimen is by the ravages of its environment, Poinar said.

While the relatively unchanging permafrost of Siberia is capable of preserving specimens as old as 100,000 years, the time of dinosaurs was much warmer and the land mass they lived on was closer to the equator, unsuitable conditions for permafrost. That means we won't be seeing Jurassic Park any time soon, said Poinar. As for resurrecting a woolly mammoth, he said that while it's admittedly a fascinating idea, it's years away from reality because of all of the intermediary steps that would need to be taken. "You would need to find a way to synthesize a full set of chromosomes from the genome data and right now we don't even know how many chromosomes it had," he said. "If you could do that, you could, in theory, take the chromosomes of an Indian elephant and alter them to those of a mammoth and then plant those chromosomes in an egg; you could then bring it to term," he said. "But we need that chromosome information — right now we have no scaffold to build on," said Poinar. It might be possible, however, to isolate ways in which the mammoth genome differs from modern-day elephants and possibly isolate a particular feature, according to an accompanying article in Nature. Svante Paabo, 53, of the Max Planke Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told the scientific journal such a creation represents the closest the public might come to seeing a mammoth in his lifetime.

New Genetic Research Uncovers Possible Cure for Male Pattern Baldness

A new genetic discovery suggests that some men's hair loss may not be all mom's fault after all.

Two groups of international researchers, including one team with members from Canada, have independently found a region of DNA that appears to increase some men's susceptibility to male pattern baldness.

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Scientists have long known there is a genetic variant passed from mothers to sons via the X chromosome that causes men to start losing their hair by the time they reach middle-age.

"That's where the idea that baldness is inherited from the mother's side of the family comes from," said Dr. Brent Richards, an endocrinologist at McGill University and lead author of one of the studies. "However, it's been long recognized that there must be several genes causing male pattern baldness."

The newly identified genetic region "is in an entirely novel area on chromosome 20," Richards said from Montreal, noting that men who have both genetic variations on the two chromosomes have a sevenfold higher risk of seeing their hairline recede over time.

He said one in seven men - or 14 per cent of the population - have both genetic anomalies.

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"How this novel gene or area of the genome influences male pattern baldness will require a lot more research."

About one-third of men are affected by male pattern baldness - the most common type of hair loss - by age 45. The loss begins above both temples and results in a distinctive M-shaped hairline. More than 80 per cent of cases are believed to be hereditary.

Hair loss affects about 40 per cent of women, mostly after menopause, but Richards said more research is needed to determine what role - if any - the area on chromosome 20 plays in females.

To conduct the study, Richards collaborated with researchers in the United Kingdom, Iceland, Switzerland and the Netherlands. They analyzed the genomes of 1,125 Caucasian men who had been assessed for male pattern baldness, then confirmed the finding on chromosome 20 in another 1,650 men.

"Our study only involved Caucasian men, and although we would assume the risk factors are similar in different races, we have no idea," Richards said.

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The research is published in the latest issue of the journal Nature Genetics, along with a study showing similar findings by a separate group of German scientists.

Dr. Kevin McElwee of the University of British Columbia called the finding "quite exciting."

"It's a big step forward in terms of understanding the disease mechanism involved and we certainly need to know what the disease mechanism is if we want to develop new and effective treatments for it," said McElwee, a researcher in hair loss at the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute.

"So in that sense it's a big discovery."

While not a disease, the condition creates considerable social and economic fallout: in the United States alone, men spent more than $115 million for hair transplantation in 2007.

Worldwide, about $2 billion is spent each year on transplants, pharmaceutical lotions like Propecia and Rogaine, thickening agents, scalp prosthetics and wigs to fight or hide baldness, said McElwee, noting that the amount is a conservative estimate and could be as high as $10 billion annually.

Still, he pointed out that it could be 15 to 20 years before scientists investigating the new genetic target figure out how it affects male pattern baldness and how that could be overcome.

"To actually make that into treatment, we're talking about a lot more research and effort and time before we actually see something that we can put on our heads and grow hair with."

The World Community Grid - What is it and What does it do?

Grid Computing: The Basics
Grid computing joins together many individual computers, creating a large system with massive computational power that far surpasses the power of a handful of supercomputers. Because the work is split into small pieces that can be processed simultaneously, research time is reduced from years to months. The technology is also more cost-effective, enabling better use of critical funds.

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Changing Our World Now
Grid computing is not a futuristic technology. World Community Grid is at work right now applying this technology to exciting research projects that can benefit us all.

Our first project, Human Proteome Folding, is identifying the proteins produced by human genes. With this information, scientists can understand how defects in proteins can cause disease, making it easier to find cures.

In 2003, with grid computing, in less than three months scientists identified 44 potential treatments to fight the deadly smallpox disease. Without the grid, the work would have taken more than one year to complete.

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If you have kids and they want to learn about "The Grid" and how it effects the world as a whole, Visit this site at try science. It has a simpified activity approach to Explaining Grid Computing

If, on the other hand, you have some extra time and would like to take part in the World Grid Community Visit the World Community Grid Home page

Big Bang Theory Experiment in Switzerland Excites scientists and scares sceptics

Scientists are about to get a chance to answer some of the deepest mysteries of the universe - in the most expensive experiment in history.

The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland could turn the world of physics on its head.

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But what exactly is it and what will the biggest particle accelerator ever built do? Here are the answers to some of your questions:

What's the point of this experiment?
Scientists are trying to unlock the secrets and answer unresolved questions about the universe. There are fundamental gaps in our basic understanding of physics and how the universe works. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will recreate conditions just after the Big Bang (the theory that a massive explosion created the universe) and may help to fill in missing knowledge. Physicists hope the experiment will help them understand what the universe is made of, what propels its expansion and predict its future.

How does it work?
Inside the accelerator, two beams of particles will travel in opposite directions at close to the speed of light. Thousands of magnets of different varieties and sizes will direct the beams around the accelerator. Because the particles are so small, another type of magnet is used to squeeze them closer together to encourage them to collide.

Scientists hope previously unseen particles will be discovered in the debris when beams smash together. The new particles are expected to provide new leads for physicists and may confirm existing theories.

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What is the Higgs particle?
The Higgs particle is a theoretical idea to explain mass in the universe but it has never been proved. The theory suggests particles had no mass just after the Big Bang. When the temperature fell, an invisible force field was formed. When particles interact with the field they become heavier. If scientists could identify the Higgs particle or field using the LHC, it would explain why some particles have a greater mass than others and would support the current understanding of how particles work.

What if they don't find anything?
They may find no new particles which would be a setback for scientists trying to secure funding for the next generation collider machine. If they cannot prove the existence of the Higgs particle, it would mean theories about matter and mass have been developing along the wrong track for decades. Many scientists might consider that an exciting prospect because they would have to start theorising from scratch.

Who is involved in this?
The new particle accelerator might be buried along the Swiss-French border but it has attracted researchers from 80 countries. The £2.4bn project has mostly been financed by 20 European member states but the US and Japan are major contributors with observer status. Ten thousand scientists from 500 different institutions have been involved in developing the LHC.

When can we expect the results?

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It has already taken two decades to get this far and it will take another two months just to get the proton beams colliding. The data recorded will fill around 100,000 DVDs every year but physicists may have to wait between five and 10 years before they get any significant results.

What are the risks?
Sceptics have filed suits in the US District Court in Hawaii and the European Court of Human Rights to stop the project. They claim the experiment will create a big black hole which could suck up all life on Earth. Several safety reviews of the LHC have been carried out which show there is no measurable risk.

Will it create black holes?
Nature forms black holes when stars collapse on themselves at the end of their lives. There is some speculation that the LHC could produce microscopic black holes. If they were created, they would evaporate away very quickly and would be too small to suck in any matter. The accelerator may help scientists understand more about black holes.
Hold on to your hats, folks. Smoke if you have them. Those inclined to do so, pray.

Because some time today -- I can't figure out the time zone difference -- the Large Hadron Collider is going to switch on deep under the mountains on the Swiss-French border.

Some nervous Nellies in the scientific community are afraid that this mammoth device is going to change, forever, more than science, which is supposed to be its purpose. They say the black holes it will create could create a super black hole that would swallow the planet.

If so, our happy little world is going to end with a Big Bang in reverse, not the prolonged whimper of our discontent that global warming is supposed to be causing.

But Al Gore might still have a little time to change gears and redraw his fanciful charts. It will take weeks before the particles zooming about in the underground collider in fact collide, precipitating, perhaps, Armageddon.

Interestingly enough, that's the same time that the chain reaction our own Large Canadian Collider has started this week is due to go off. We electrons are enjoined to contribute what energy we can muster to our own Big Bang next month.

I found out about the LHC way back in the newspaper the other day next to the obituaries, a section I find myself turning to more frequently at this stage in my life. I'm glad I did. I'd hate to think that I'd missed it if The end is so nigh.

Until then I'd never considered the current prime minister a major scientific achievement. I had assumed that, despite his rather cool manner, he was a person of soft flesh and warm blood -- a being of quirks, perhaps, but not quarks.

I understand that groupings of quarks make hadrons, of which we treat. The mind boggles -- well, mine does anyway -- at what makes up our Large Canadian Collider.

There's no doubt, though, that collisions are in his nature. In his parliamentary state of minus properties, he's been trying to provoke them. But the particulate matter in the Commons that is supposed to be negatively charged has seemed to veer away on other trajectories at the last millisecond.

Clearly, our Collider has concluded he must end this experiment on his own and exercise his properties outside the crucible that is Parliament -- a process that's akin to asexual reproduction.

We've all seen how he has managed to govern without being restricted by constitutional parameters and how he has altered the properties of politics. So he is ordering this campaign.

Chain reactions are seldom benign. The world of clashing protons, neutrons and hadrons has no conscience. The machine, once switched on, decides what will be.

So what does our Collider expect to gain from this exercise in which all our futures are at stake? The holy grail that scientists are hoping the LHC will reveal is something called the Higgs boson, an elusive particle that's supposed to give everything in the universe its mass and weight.

Does our Collider believe that his experiment can reveal the Harper boson, by which the mass of Canada and the weight of all its constituent parts will be determined for the foreseeable future?

How that would simplify things. With this boson in his locker, sailing the ship of state would be so much easier.

He wouldn't have to wear sweaters anymore, or cuddle babies gingerly, or pretend to like people, because he'd be an undetectable force with the power to cloud men's minds, the master of Canada's mass and its masses.

I wonder if Stéphane Dion knows what he's up against. The Collider has assigned to him the physical properties of a buffoon. We're led to believe that he's an example of antimatter over mind.

When particles collide at 99.9999991 per cent of the speed of light at temperatures just 1.9 degrees above absolute zero, as they will beneath the Jura Mountains, the weak ones could leave only a trace, like a watermark, while the stronger could travel to another dimension with unknown consequences for our world.

Scientists say this should happen some time in October.

What impact will this experiment have on everyday life?
The work carried out by scientists at the European Nuclear Research Centre might seem far removed from everyday life, but it does push the boundaries of existing technologies and engineering in a way that can be adapted to benefit us all. For example, earlier work led to the creation of the internet.

Scientists working on the LHC have also created the "grid" which is described as the next generation internet and is 10,000 times faster than most broadband connections. For More information on "The Grid"

Scientists look into CHEATING GENE

A friend once suggested to me that you could find clinical trial results "to support anything you want," the idea being that if you believe strongly in something, there is probably a study out there somewhere that supports your beliefs. I wasn't really convinced of my friend's assertion until I was driving to work this morning and heard this on the radio: a new study in Sweden has found that there is a "cheating gene" that "makes" men cheat in their relationships. A slew of men and women called in to the radio show to comment on this "breaking news." Many men said, "That explains everything! We have to cheat because it's in our nature." While the women's comments, to no surprise, ran along the lines of, "That's just another excuse to make them feel better about cheating."

The study, conducted by geneticists at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, found that this gene variant is present in two out of every five men. More than 2100 subjects participated in the study, which was based on previous research in prairie voles regarding a gene's impact on the hormone vasopressin. Apparently, men with two copies of the gene have twice the risk of experiencing martial dysfunction, according to a Washington Post article on the study. The gene can also predict whether a man will live with a woman or get married, or seem emotionally distant and disagreeable. The media is going as far as to say that women may want to have their male partners undergo a genetic test before marriage to see whether the potential mate may be a bad prospect for long-term commitment.

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Women subjects were not part of the study. But granted the amount of press this study is getting, I expect a follow-up with women is on the horizon.

If you want to check it out, the study is published in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. I'm glad research dollars are being spent on clinical studies that can benefit greater mankind. And as my friend pointed out, I'm also glad that research can, indeed, support almost anything we humans want to hear.

Sometimes love goes astray, but a new study says guys might not have much control over their cheating hearts.


"It's no excuse to be unfaithful," said one researcher. "I think the bottom line of this study [is that] there are genetic vulnerabilities that we all inherit. We can be ruled by them or we can be in charge of them."


Researchers say that some men might be born to cheat.


A new study published in the Journal for the National Academy of Science says it is because of a certain genetic make-up in guys that affects an important attachment hormone. It prevents men from establishing long, committed relationships.


Doctor's say guys are not off the hook though. While the gene might make us more vulnerable to temptation, it doesn't necessarily mean we can't be monogamous.

Who knows, this may result in a pre wedding blood test to determine if a person is a cheater

MegaTooth Shark tooth found in St. Clair River

David Wentz was snorkeling off Marysville Beach in the St. Clair River last August when what he thought was an odd-looking rock caught his eye. "I didn't know what to think," the 16-year-old Port Huron resident said.

His father, Craig, said he knew right away what it was due to hours of watching the Discovery Channel.

"It's a shark tooth," Craig Wentz said. "It's petrified. It's rock."

Michigan State University paleontologist Michael Gottfried told the Times Herald of Port Huron that the 3-inch long tooth comes from an extinct species called Carcharodon megalodon, or the "megatooth" shark.

The megalodon, which went extinct 2 million years ago, was larger than any building in Port Huron, reaching lengths of more than 60 feet. By comparison, Great White sharks generally are about 20 feet long.

The megatooth shark ate about 1,500 pounds of food a day, mostly feeding on whales and other large marine creatures.

Gottfried doesn't think the tooth is from a shark that may have been in the Great Lakes region during two different prehistoric eras, dating back from a half-million years to 300 to 400 million years ago, when it was a "shallow marine environment" filled with sharks, whales and other aquatic life.

"I suspect that it was probably carried and dropped by a human inhabitant of the region, either in recent historical times, or perhaps by earlier native people in this area," he said.

"I can't say just how it came to be in the St. Clair River, but I can assure you that there aren't any sharks with 3-inch teeth living there now."

Grande Extra shot Latte with a dose of Malaria Please

SEATTLE — Within the next 18 months, medical researchers will be asking people in Seattle to volunteer to be exposed to the deadliest form of malaria to help them test the effectiveness of vaccine candidates.

The Seattle Biomedical Research Institute is collaborating with the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative to accelerate malaria vaccine research by opening a new vaccine testing center in Seattle's south Lake Union neighborhood.

Scientists at the center will use early testing of vaccines to weed out those that don't work so they can speed up research on the ones that are effective. Malaria vaccine testing has already begun at a second site in the United States, the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Maryland, and is also being conducted at labs in England and the Netherlands.

"We're particularly excited by the center's location in Seattle, a community where many people have an interest in global health issues and, as a result, are willing to volunteer for such an important cause -- to help save the lives of young children in some of the world's poorest countries," said Dr. Christian Loucq, Malaria Vaccine Initiative director.

Malaria, which is spread by mosquitoes, kills more than a million people each year, most of them children. Deaths doubled in Africa over the past 20 years due to resistance to existing drugs and insecticides.

Seattle volunteers will be paid an estimated $2,000 or more to hold a paper cup containing infected mosquitoes against their arm, waiting for the insects to bite. Symptoms usually develop within nine to 11 days, and volunteers will be treated for malaria when the first parasites show up in their blood. The treatments last three days.

In the related project at Walter Reed, where hundreds of people have been exposed to the malaria virus, not one person has gotten seriously ill, said Dr. Patrick Duffy, head of the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute's malaria research programs.

The compensation is for time and inconvenience and the amount must be approved by an independent panel before the study begins.

"It's a sensitive issue. They want to make sure it's fair ... but not so much that somebody would say, 'I can't turn down this opportunity'," Duffy said.

Testing subjects will get no sicker than someone with the flu and most won't even miss a day of work after being exposed to malaria and then treated, he said. They will need to stay in a downtown hotel for a few days and get daily medical tests, but can leave their room during the day because treatment for the virus would begin before it becomes contagious.

"The parasite has an incredibly complex lifecycle. It takes on many different forms during its different lifecycle stages. One form infects the mosquito. That form develops late. The form that makes people sick develops early. We'll be treating this early before the form that can be transmitted is developed," Duffy said.

After a story about the vaccine center ran in The Seattle Times on Wednesday, the project's e-mail box was filled with hundreds of inquiries from people who wanted to participate in the vaccine trials, Duffy said.

He said people in Seattle have a strong sense of altruism.

"I don't think most people would volunteer for this unless they felt like they were doing it for a larger purpose," Duffy said.

The Seattle vaccine testing center will be built this year and the first trial with just six volunteers is expected to be conducted in the summer of 2009, paid for with between $4 million and $5 million from the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, which was created with a grant of $50 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Additional trials are expected to cost between $1 million and $2 million and each one would require about 26 volunteers.

The Seattle Biomedical Research Institute has been working on tropical diseases for about 30 years and is home to one of the largest malaria research programs in the United States.

Although the institute has been developing malaria vaccines of its own, the testing program will be open to vaccine candidates from around the world.

Duffy said the project at Walter Reed, where he worked before coming to the institute in Seattle, has helped one promising vaccine candidate get to the point where it is about 50 percent effective at preventing malaria.

He said that vaccine is an inspiration to everyone who is working to find a way to save people from malaria.

"We have a partially effective vaccine now and there's no reason why we can't get a fully effective vaccine," Duffy said.

Bill and Melinda Gates announced in October they would seek worldwide eradication of the disease rather than just control. Their foundation has committed $860 million to malaria programs and another $650 million to support the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Self Healing Rubber band - Offers hope for flat tires

Anyone who has heard the snap of a rubber band breaking knows it's time to reach for a replacement.

But a group of French scientists have made a self-healing rubber band material that can reclaim its stretchy usefulness by simply pressing the broken edges back together for a few minutes.

The material, described on Wednesday in the journal Nature, can be broken and repaired over and over again.

It is made from simple ingredients -- fatty acids like those found in vegetable oils, and urea, a waste compound in urine that can be made synthetically.

The material would be an asset to industry and might even help shed light on the physics of elasticity, wrote Philippe Cordier and colleagues at the Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution in Paris.

Standard rubber bands, which can stretch up to several hundred percent then snap back into shape, are made from long chains of cross-linked polymers.

The new material is linked by short chains of a type of molecule called ditopic, which can associate with two other molecules, and multitopic molecules, which can associate with more than two molecules.

This network of molecules is strengthened by hydrogen bonds that allow the material to stretch up to several hundred percent, then snap back into shape.

If severed, the material mends itself when the ends are pressed together at room temperature, allowing these bonds to re-form.

"The mended samples are able to sustain large deformations and recover their shape and size when stress is released," Cordier and his colleagues wrote.

The material can "withstand multiple fractures, needs no catalysts and is otherwise straightforward to produce," Justin Mynar and Takuzo Aida of the University of Tokyo wrote in an accompanying article.

"A final blessing is that it can be broken down with heat and easily recycled -- so it is environmentally friendly, too."

USS Lake Erie moves into position for Wednesday Missile Mission

A US warship is moving into position to try to shoot down an out-of-control US spy satellite as early as Wednesday before it tumbles into the Earth's atmosphere, Pentagon officials said Tuesday.

Armed with two specially modified interceptor missiles, the USS Lake Erie has been tasked to intercept the satellite over the Pacific and shoot it down into the ocean, the officials said, adding that a cruiser, the Aegis, is already in waters off Hawaii.

The USS Decatur, a guided missile destroyer, is carrying a third interceptor missile in case the first two attempts fail, defense officials said. Another destroyer, the USS Russell, was still in port on Tuesday.

"I'm confident they'll be able to do something," said a senior Navy official. "Once the weapon goes into track, then I think it's a done deal."

The Pentagon has waited for the space shuttle Atlantis to land first at the end of its mission to the International Space Station. That is scheduled for 9:07 am Wednesday.

"Touchdown of the Atlantis opens the window of opportunity for the US military to shoot down that rapidly decaying US intelligence satellite," said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary.

"There is a very low risk because our orbits are quite different," Atlantis Commander Steve Frick said. "The satellite is well below us (where) we are now, but of course we are going to land before they break up that satellite."

The Pentagon is essentially employing the US missile defense system for the shoot-down attempt at an estimated cost of 40 to 60 million dollars.

It is training a panoply of Aegis warships, radars and computerized command networks on the school bus-sized satellite.

Software changes have been made to the SM-3 interceptor missiles so that they will recognize a satellite in space instead of a ballistic missile -- their normal programmed target -- officials said.

The three-stage missile will carry a maneuverable non-explosive warhead guided from the ground until it can use its infrared sensor to steer itself into a shattering collision with the satellite at an altitude of 150 nautical miles.

US Navy ships have intercepted ballistic missile warheads in this way in tests, but the Navy official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, said the satellite poses a somewhat different problem.

It is colder and moving through space at a much higher speed, making it more difficult to track than the ballistic missiles.

If the USS Lake Erie misses with its first shot, it will probably have to wait a day to try again. The longer the wait, the harder the satellite will be to shoot down as it gathers speed, falling towards the Earth's atmosphere.

The plan is to hit a tank on the satellite carrying the toxic propellant hydrazine, which officials say could pose a threat to humans if it survives re-entry.

"The system itself is very accurate so hopefully that will translate into being able to hit the tank," said a defense official.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who leaves Wednesday on a trip to Australia and Southeast Asia, has been empowered President George W. Bush to authorize the shoot-down, Morrell said.

"Based on the advice he gets he's prepared to do so from the road if necessary," he said.

France urged the United States to take all necessary safety measures.

"We hope all measures will be taken to reduce as much as possible the consequences of destroying this satellite for the safety and integrity of other space objects," foreign ministry spokeswoman Pascale Andreani told reporters.

The plan drew criticism on Sunday from Russia, whose defense ministry said it looked like a veiled weapons test and an "attempt to move the arms race into space." China has also voiced concern.

Washington has denied seeking to cover up the satellite's technological secrets or to make a show of strength after China used a missile to shoot down an old weather satellite in January 2007.

"nanovalve" discovery could be used to cut greenhouse gas emissions

CALGARY - Researchers at the University of Calgary say they have found a new way to trap and store gasses in molecule-sized tanks - a discovery that businesses could use to deal with their greenhouse gas emissions.

"This is fundamentally a different way of storing any gas," chemistry professor George Shimizu said in an interview.

Right now, gas storage can be tricky and pose safety risks because it needs to be kept at very high pressures, said Shimizu, who along with fellow researchers David Crab and Brett Chandler announced the discovery Friday.

But the scientists have invented a crystal structure that can store gas molecules indefinitely without the need for pressure using "molecular nanovalves." On top of that the gas can be released easily.

"If it was a static structure with pores, the gas could really just flow in and out. But it's the fact that the structure shifts and traps the gas that's really intriguing," Shimizu said.

Right now gas can be stored by chemically bonding the molecules to a surface, which makes it hard to access. Alternatively, gas can be absorbed onto a surface, but it doesn't usually stick very well.

"In this case it's neither of those. It's a mechanical trapping where we're forming a molecular cage around the gas. So the gas is stuck in there for a few hundred degrees, but you can access the gas at room temperature just by adding a little bit of water," Shimizu explained.

The research, published Friday in the journal "Nature Materials," could have a number of applications.

"From a commercial standpoint, anything that you'd want to store in a cylinder can be stored at lower pressure in this material," Shimizu said.

"One of the gasses that is stored efficiently in this material is carbon dioxide."

That could include carbon capture and storage, a technology touted by the Alberta government as a good way to cut the massive greenhouse gas emissions belched out by the energy sector.

A provincial-federal task force, chaired by TransAlta Corp. (TSX:TA) CEO Steve Snyder, said Thursday the government should shell out $2 billion to develop carbon capture technology. The process involves capturing the carbon dioxide emissions, compressing them and pumping them underground.

Critics have slammed that plan as too expensive and risky. Some environmentalists say it does nothing to address the crux of the climate change issue: the world's dependence on fossil fuels.

But TransAlta and a number of other energy companies have been trying hard to advance it.

"I believe it's something that needs to be done. The technology is available. It needs to be put into full-scale use," Snyder said Friday in a conference call to discuss his company's fourth-quarter earnings.

The University of Calgary discovery could serve another environmentally friendly purpose: the development of hydrogen fuel cells.

"The gas that globally would be of most interest would be hydrogen. If you ever plan on using hydrogen to power mobile vehicles, you need a way to store hydrogen on board," Shimizu said.