Image of a horse from the Lascaux caves.

If you thought that those ancient cave paintings at Lascaux and elsewhere were pretty abstract, think again. AP via Fox News reports that DNA studies suggest the cave painters were actually painting what they saw:

Cave painters during the Ice Age were more like da Vinci than Dali, sketching realistic depictions of horses they saw rather than dreaming them up, a study of ancient DNA finds.

It’s not just a matter of aesthetics: Paintings based on real life can give first-hand glimpses into the environment of tens of thousands of years ago. But scientists have wondered how much imagination went into animal drawings etched in caves around Europe.

The latest analysis published online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences focused on horses since they appeared most frequently on rock walls. The famed Lascaux Cave in the Dordogne region of southwest France and the Chauvet Cave in southeast France feature numerous scenes of brown and black horses. Other caves like the Pech Merle in southern France are adorned with paintings of white horses with black spots.

Past studies of ancient DNA have only turned up evidence of brown and black horses during that time. That led scientists to question whether the spotted horses were real or fantasy.

To get at the genetics of equine coat color, an international team led by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany analyzed DNA from fossilized bones and teeth from 31 prehistoric horses. The samples were recovered from more than a dozen archaeological sites in Siberia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe and the Iberian peninsula.

It turned out six of the horses had a genetic mutation that gives rise to a spotted coat, suggesting that ancient artists were drawing what they were seeing. Brown was the most common coat color, found in 18 horses…

[continues at AP via Fox News]

Didn’t we learn anything from Jurassic Park? Scientists have created embryo’s with ‘alligator-like snouts’ and are hoping to be able to further ‘undo’ evolution with future trials. The New Zealand Herald reports:

Harvard scientists are hoping to turn chickens into mini-dinosaurs, according to the Daily Mail.

Scientists at the Ivy League university have ‘rewound’ evolution with chicken DNA to create embryos with alligator-like snouts instead of beaks.

By altering the DNA of chicken embryos in the early stage of their development, the team were able to ‘undo’ evolutionary progress and give the creatures snouts which are thought to have been lost in the cretaceous period millions of years ago.

Evolutionary biologist Arkhat Abzhanov developed the chickens with snouts by cutting a square hole in the shell of a chicken egg and dropping in a small gelatinous protein bead, before watching the embryo develop – stifling the development of certain molecules and preventing the birds from growing certain features.

[Continues at New Zealand Herald]

NASA researchers studying meteorites have found that they contain several of the components needed to make DNA on Earth. The discovery provides support for the idea that the building blocks for DNA were likely created in space, and carried to Earth on objects, like meteorites, that crashed into the planet’s surface. According to the theory, the ready-made DNA parts could have then assembled under Earth’s early conditions to create the first DNA.

The researchers, from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, found adenine and guanine — two of the nucleobases needed to make DNA (the other two are thymine and cytosine, which were not found) — on meteorite samples. Additionally, the samples showed the presence of three molecules that are similar to nucleobases, but do not have a biological role on Earth: Purine, 2.6-diaminopurine, and 6.8-diaminopurine. Hypoxanthine and xanthine, compounds used in biological processes, but not DNA, were also found. What is particularly significant about the new research is that the scientists were able to confirm that the biological parts were created in space and carried to Earth.

Read the rest at Geekosystem

A team of researchers lead by Lulu Qian from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have for the first developed an artificial neural network — that is, the beginnings of a brain — out of DNA molecules. And when quizzed, the brain answered the questions correctly.

They turned to molecules because they knew that before the neural-based brain evolved, single-celled organisms showed limited forms of intelligence. These microorganisms did not have brains, but instead had molecules that interacted with each other and spurred the creatures to search for food and avoid toxins. The bottom line is that molecules can act like circuits, processing and transmitting information and computing data.

The Caltech used DNA molecules specifically for the experiment, because these molecules interact in specific ways determined by the sequence of their four bases: adenine (abbreviated A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). And what’s more, scientists can encode the sequence into strands of DNA molecules, essentially programming them to function in a predetermined way.

[Continues at Discovery News]

The CIA organised a fake vaccination program in the town where it believed Osama bin Laden was hiding in an elaborate attempt to obtain DNA from the fugitive al-Qaida leader’s family. A senior Pakistani doctor was recruited to organize the vaccine drive in Abbottabad, even starting the “project” in a poorer part of town to make it look more authentic.

DNA from any of the Bin Laden children in the compound could be compared with a sample from his sister, who died in Boston in 2010, to provide evidence that the family was present. It is not known exactly how the doctor hoped to get DNA from the vaccinations, although nurses could have been trained to withdraw some blood in the needle after administrating the drug.

The vaccination plan was conceived after American intelligence officers tracked an al-Qaida courier, known as Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, to what turned out to be Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound last summer. The agency monitored the compound by satellite and surveillance from a local CIA safe house in Abbottabad, but wanted confirmation that Bin Laden was there before mounting a risky operation inside another country.

The doctor went to Abbottabad in March, saying he had procured funds to give free vaccinations for hepatitis B. Bypassing the management of the Abbottabad health services, he paid generous sums to low-ranking local government health workers, who took part in the operation without knowing about the connection to Bin Laden. Health visitors in the area were among the few people who had gained access to the Bin Laden compound in the past, administering polio drops to some of the children.

A nurse known as Bakhto, whose full name is Mukhtar Bibi, managed to gain entry to the Bin Laden compound to administer the vaccines. According to several sources, the doctor, who waited outside, told her to take in a handbag that was fitted with an electronic device. It is not clear what the device was, or whether she left it behind. It is also not known whether the CIA managed to obtain any Bin Laden DNA, although one source suggested the operation did not succeed.

A Single Nucleotide Polymorphism is a change of a nucleotide at a single base-pair location on DNA. Author: David Hall (CC)

Call me old-fashioned, but voluntarily submitting your children’s DNA for inclusion in a database seems foolhardy to me. Just how secure is that database? Is Gattica really so far in the future once this becomes the norm? From BBC News:

Parents believe the benefits of testing their children for the genetic risk of some diseases outweigh the negative consequences, according to US scientists.

In the study, published in the journal Pediatrics, parents who were offered a genetic test supported their children also being tested.

The authors say doctors and politicians need to be more aware of the issue. Genewatch UK said children should never be tested for adult conditions.

Genetic testing used to be confined to specialist clinics, but direct-to-consumer testing is now possible. People send a sample to a company in the post and are told if they have any genes which carry an increased risk of illness.

In this study, 219 parents were tested for 15 genetic variants linked to heart disease, osteoporosis, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes and colon, skin and lung cancer.

They were then asked a series of questions to compare benefits such as reassurance, knowledge and prevention, with risks such as invasion of privacy and psychological discomfort.

The report found that “parents offered the genetic susceptibility test for common preventable conditions tended to consider that the potential benefits of this test for their own child could outweigh its risks”…

[continues at BBC News]

Researchers have fabricated a lattice out of gold and virus fragments. It could make your computer much faster. And turn it into a biological machine.

Optical computing technology, a growing field in the tech sector, involves computers that send data using beams of light. In order to expand the capabilities of optical computing, engineers are required to find materials that manipulate light very precisely. Photonic crystals are one such helpful material. A photonic crystal can block very precise wavelengths of light, making it a great optical tool. But creating such a crystal is a challenge. Now scientists have tested a new method for making them, and they have done using the coolest materials possible: Gold and virus parts.

Tiny gold nanospheres and pieces of virus were hooked together using strands of DNA. The DNA pieces were created specifically for the experiment. Small spheres of gold attach to certain base pairs and form part of the lattice. Gold, while malleable for a metal, is relatively heavy and rigid for such a small structure. The lattice is made more bendable by its organic component, capsids, which are what make up the protein shells of viruses. These bits of virus ’skin’ string together the tough gold spheres.

A mix of all of these components – DNA, capsids, and gold spheres – self-assembles into a lattice. The structure of that lattice can, with certain materials, be made into a photonic crystal. No one would have to build a crystal to use in optical computing, mixing together the right ingredients could make it build itself…

Article continues at io9. For the original, more in-depth article, see Nature Materials.

Woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) - Mauricio Antón/PLoS (CC)

Are we one step closer to Jurassic Park? Perhaps wishful thinking on my part, but we’re making progress, as reported by the Daily Mail:

It died out around 8,000 years ago…but in just five years the woolly mammoth could soon be walking the Earth again.

Japanese scientists are behind an ambitious project to bring the long-extinct mammal back from the dead.

The revival requires a sample of intact DNA for cloning purposes and an elephant to act as surrogate mother, donating an egg and her womb.

Taking into account the 600 or so days needed for the pregnancy, the first baby mammoths of the modern age could be born in four to five years.

In recent years, scientists have used samples of hair frozen in the Siberian ice for thousands of years to piece together the mammoth’s genetic code. And DNA preserved in bone has been used to recreate the prehistoric giant’s blood.

But the latest project is far more ambitious.

The Kyoto University researchers are planning an expedition to the Siberian permafrost this summer in search of a flash-frozen specimen still rich in DNA…

[continues in the Daily Mail)]

Denisovan tooth. Photo: David Reich, et al./Nature

Unraveling ancient human DNA must be like crack for anthropologists — they just can’t stop! Joe Palca reports for NPR:

DNA taken from a pinkie bone at least 30,000 years old is hinting at the existence of a previously unknown population of ancient humans. It’s just the latest example of how modern genetic techniques are transforming the world of anthropology.

The pinkie bone in question was unearthed in 2008 from what’s called the Denisova Cave.

“The Denisova Cave is in southern Siberia in the Altai Mountains in central Asia,” says David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “This bone is the bone of a 6- to 7-year-old girl.”

Reich and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig were able to extract DNA from the pinkie bone and sequence all 3 billion letters of DNA that made up this girl’s genome. This is the second ancient genome this team has unraveled. The first was the Neanderthal genome announced earlier this year.

Closer To Neanderthals

Reich says there were several remarkable things about the group of people this girl is from, a group he and his colleagues call Denisovans.

“On the one hand it’s a sister group to Neanderthals, which means that it’s more closely related to Neanderthals on average than it is to modern humans,” he says.

As he reports in the journal Nature, the other remarkable finding was that Denisovans’ genome was more closely related to humans currently living in New Guinea than it was to genomes of people in Europe or Asia…

[continues at NPR]

Boian Alexandrov at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico recently published an abstract with colleagues, “DNA Breathing Dynamics in the Presence of a Terahertz Field ” that reveals very disturbing—even shocking—evidence that the THz waves generated by TSA scanners is significantly damaging the DNA of the people being directed through the machines, and the TSA workers that are in close proximity to the scanners throughout their workday.

In layman’s terms what Alexandrov and his team discovered is that the resonant effects of the THz waves bombarding humans unzips the double-stranded DNA molecule. This ripping apart of the twisted chain of DNA creates bubbles between the genes that can interfere with the processes of life itself: normal DNA replication and critical gene expression.

Other studies have not discovered this deadly effect on the DNA because the research only investigated ordinary resonant effects.

Nonlinear resonance, however, is capable of such damage and this sheds light on the genotoxic effects inherent in the utilization of THz waves upon living tissue. The team emphasizes in their abstract that the effects are probabilistic rather than deterministic.

Unfortunately, DNA damage is not limited only to THz wave exposure. Other research has been done that reveals lower frequency microwaves used by cell phones and Wi-Fi cause some harm to DNA over time as well.

Schizophrenia has long been blamed on bad genes or even bad parents. Wrong, says a growing group of psychiatrists. The real culprit, they claim, is a virus that lives entwined in every person’s DNA.

Schizophrenia is usually diagnosed between the ages of 15 and 25, but the person who becomes schizophrenic is sometimes recalled to have been different as a child or a toddler—more forgetful or shy or clumsy. Even more puzzling is the so-called birth-month effect: People born in winter or early spring are more likely than others to become schizophrenic later in life. It is a small increase, just 5 to 8 percent, but it is remarkably consistent, showing up in 250 studies. That same pattern is seen in people with bipolar disorder or multiple sclerosis.

“The birth-month effect is one of the most clearly established facts about schizophrenia,” says Fuller Torrey, director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland. “It’s difficult to explain by genes, and it’s certainly difficult to explain by bad mothers.”

The facts of schizophrenia are so peculiar, in fact, that they have led [a growing number of] scientists to abandon the traditional explanations of the disease and embrace a startling alternative. Schizophrenia, they say, does not begin as a psychological disease. Schizophrenia begins with an infection.

The idea has sparked skepticism, but after decades of hunting, Torrey and his colleagues think they have finally found the infectious agent. You might call it an insanity virus. If Torrey is right, the culprit that triggers a lifetime of hallucinations—that tore apart the lives of writer Jack Kerouac, mathematician John Nash, and millions of others—is a virus that all of us carry in our bodies. “Some people laugh about the infection hypothesis,” says Urs Meyer, a neuroimmunologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. “But the impact that it has on researchers is much, much, much more than it was five years ago. And my prediction would be that it will gain even more impact in the future.”

The implications are enormous. Torrey, Meyer, and others hold out hope that they can address the root cause of schizophrenia, perhaps even decades before the delusions begin. The first clinical trials of drug treatments are already under way. The results could lead to meaningful new treatments not only for schizophrenia but also for bipolar disorder and multiple sclerosis. Beyond that, the insanity virus (if such it proves) may challenge our basic views of human evolution, blurring the line between “us” and “them,” between pathogen and host.

But fluoroquinolones are now known to researchers to sometimes cause tendinopathy, neuropathy, and other serious adverse effects.  They work by preventing bacterial DNA from duplicating, and it seems they might sometimes harm human DNA as well.

So why haven’t the manufacturers told doctors about these risks?  And why hasn’t the FDA ordered them to?

Hours before their special news conference today, the cat is out of the bag: NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn’t share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth. This changes everything.

At their conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic. All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.

But not this one. This one is completely different. Discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California, this bacteria is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible. While she and other scientists theorized that this could be possible, this is the first discovery. The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don’t have to be like planet Earth.

No details have been disclosed about the origin or nature of this new life form. We will know more today at 2pm EST but, while this life hasn’t been found in another planet, this discovery does indeed change everything we know about biology. I don’t know about you but I’ve not been so excited about a bacteria since my STD tests came back clean. And that’s without counting yesterday’s announcement on the discovery of a massive number of red dwarf stars, which may harbor trillion of Earths.

Read More on WIRED Science

Rotterdam, the Netherlands — When the McDonald’s down from City Hall here was burglarized a few years ago, its managers decided they needed a new security system.

It was just about that time that local police officers were offering something totally different that they hoped would stem a rising tide of robberies that occur mainly in the immigrant neighborhoods of this rough-and-tumble port city. The new system involved an employee-activated device that sprays a fine, barely visible mist laced with synthetic DNA to cover anyone in its path, including criminals, and simultaneously alerts the police to a crime in progress.

The mist — visible only under ultraviolet light — carries DNA markers particular to the location, enabling the police to match the burglar with the place burgled. Now, a sign on the front door of the McDonald’s prominently warns potential thieves of the spray’s presence: “You Steal, You’re Marked.”

Saliva samples taken from 39 relatives of the Nazi leader show he may have had biological links to the “subhuman” races that he tried to exterminate during the Holocaust. Jean-Paul Mulders, a Belgian journalist, and Marc Vermeeren, a historian, tracked down the Fuhrer’s relatives, including an Austrian farmer who was his cousin, earlier this year.

A chromosome called Haplogroup E1b1b1 which showed up in their samples is rare in Western Europe and is most commonly found in the Berbers of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, as well as among Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.

“One can from this postulate that Hitler was related to people whom he despised,” Mr Mulders wrote in the Belgian magazine, Knack. Haplogroup E1b1b1, which accounts for approximately 18 to 20 per cent of Ashkenazi and 8.6 per cent to 30 per cent of Sephardic Y-chromosomes, appears to be one of the major founding lineages of the Jewish population.

Read More: Telegraph

A science writer argues we’re rapidly approaching a day when “we can customize the human body as easily as we can customize our car… an era where the genetic lottery of our inherited DNA will no longer dictate who we chose to be.” There’s already stem cell breast augmentation, making ovaries into testes, 3-D tissue printers and “tissue Legos”, and “then add in who knows how many other recent stem cell breakthroughs have happened in the last year and a half…”

He sees a big picture where “advancing computer science mixed with advancing biotech combine to create a potential future in which trolls and elves could walk down the street side by side with humans.”

“Here’s to hoping I’ll see you on the other side.”

Scientists on Wednesday announced they had created a molecular robot made out of DNA that walks like a spider along a track made out of the chemical code for life.

The achievement, reported in the British journal Nature, is a further step in nanoscale experiments that, one day, may lead to robot armies to clean arteries and fix damaged tissues.

The robot is just four nanometres — four billionths of a metre — in diameter.

Milan Stojanovic of New York’s Columbia University, who led the venture, likens the nanobot to “a four-legged spider.”

The beast moves along a track comprising stitched-together strands of DNA that is essentially a pre-programmed course, in the same way that industrial robots move along an assembly line.

The track exploits one of the basic characteristics of DNA. A double-helix molecule, DNA comprises four chemicals which pair in rungs.

By “unzipping” the DNA, one is left with one side of the strand whose rungs can then be paired up with matching rungs.

In other words, the track can be used rather like the teeth in a clockwork mechanism. A cog can move around the teeth, provided it meshes with them…

[more from AFP]

Dan Eden for viewzone.com (at mondovista.com):

I get lots of suggestions for stories, and I really appreciate them. But some of them are too good to be true. An example of this was a story of a giant human skeleton — maybe 40 feet tall — that was discovered by a Russian archaeological team. The story had photos and links accompanying it and looked promising. But when the links were researched they went in a circle. Each link used the other link as the source. Finally the elements of the photos turned up and we recognized a good Photoshop job had fooled everyone.

I had this same experience this week when I was sent an article where a Russian (again) scientist, Pjotr Garjajev, had managed to intercept communication from a DNA molecule in the form of ultraviolet photons — light! What’s more, he claimed to have captured this communication from one organism (a frog embryo) with a laser beam and then transmitted it to another organisms DNA (a salamander embryo), causing the latter embryo to develop into a frog!

But this was just the beginning.

Dr. Garjajev claims that this communication is not something that happens only inside the individual cells or between one cell and another. He claims organisms use this “light” to “talk” to other organisms and suggested that this could explain telepathy and ESP. It was like human beings already had their own wireless internet based on our DNA. Wow!

I tried to find a scientific journal that had this experiment. All I could find were blogs and other websites that carried the same story, word for word, without any references. That is until I stumbled on the work of Fritz-Albert Popp [right]. Then everything I had just read seemed very plausible.

Fritz-Albert Popp thought he had discovered a cure for cancer. I’m not convinced that he didn’t.

It was 1970, and Popp, a theoretical biophysicist at the University of Marburg in Germany, had been teaching radiology — the interaction of electromagnetic (EM) radiation on biological systems. Popp was too early to worry about things like cellphones and microwave towers which are now commonly linked with cancers and leukemia. His world was much smaller.

He’d been examining two almost identical molecules: benzo[a]pyrene, a polycyclic hydrocarbon known to be one of the most lethal carcinogens to humans, and its twin (save for a tiny alteration in its molecular makeup), benzo[e]pyrene. He had illuminated both molecules with ultraviolet (UV) light in an attempt to find exactly what made these two almost identical molecules so different…

[continues at mondovista.com]

Here’s a study to file under “unworkable but very cool.” A group of Japanese researchers has developed a mosquito that spreads vaccine instead of disease. Even the researchers admit, however, that regulatory and ethical problems will prevent the critters from ever taking wing — at least for the delivery of human vaccines.

Scientists have dreamed up various ways to tinker with insects’ DNA to fight disease. One option is to create strains of mosquitoes that are resistant to infections with parasites or viruses, or that are unable to pass the pathogens on to humans. These would somehow have to replace the natural, disease-bearing mosquitoes, which is a tall order. Another strategy closer to becoming reality is to release transgenic mosquitoes that, when they mate with wild-type counterparts, don’t produce viable offspring. That would shrink the population over time.

The new study relies on a very different mechanism: Use mosquitoes to become what the scientists call “flying vaccinators.” Normally, when mosquitoes bite, they inject a tiny drop of saliva that prevents the host’s blood from clotting. The Japanese group decided to add an antigen-a compound that triggers an immune response-to the mix of proteins in the insect’s saliva.

Read More on ScienceNOW

CCTV and DNA are crucial.

There are of course some who think CCTV is “excessive”, but they probably don’t have to walk home or take the night bus on their own at the end of a night out. For the rest of us, for ordinary hard working, decent people, the evidence is clear: CCTV reduces the fear of crime and anti-social behaviour.

That is why this government has funded CCTV in nearly 700 town centre schemes over the last decade — and why in the coming months we are bringing in a new power for people to petition their local authority for more CCTV, with the authority having a duty to respond.

Now the opposition parties have campaigned against CCTV — our support for CCTV will be on the ballet paper at any coming election.

This section of his speech is so filled with inaccuracies and lies that it is worth breaking down line by line, but first it is worth mentioning that Brown was restating proposals laid out last June as part of the government’s ‘Building Britain’s Future’ (BBF) action plan [3] (see the No CCTV article on BBF — ‘Proposed bill contains CCTV expansion in disguise’ [4]). In fact his speech was an even more authoritarian reworking of the text on page 79 of the Building Britain’s Future report [5] which stated:

CCTV will continue to play an important role, deterring and detecting crime and helping secure convictions. Having spent almost £170 million funding nearly 700 CCTV schemes earlier this decade, we are now focused on improving their effectiveness through operator training, and giving local people more of a say on where they want to see additional CCTV coverage, but also giving them clearer ways to complain on the rare occasions where they feel it is excessive.

Let us now look a little closer at Brown’s Reading speech.

“CCTV and DNA are crucial” …

In one simple phrase Brown casts aside research commissioned into the effectiveness of surveillance cameras and DNA, ignores the costs, ignores the civil liberties concerns and claims that these technologies are “crucial”. What he also does rather sneakily is link CCTV to DNA – part of the move towards presenting CCTV as a “forensic science”. In December the government appointed Andrew Rennison (the Forensic Science Regulator) to the post of ‘Interim CCTV Regulator’ [6] – tasked with pushing ahead with the National CCTV Strategy [7] which lays out the path to the creation of this new “forensic discipline”. CCTV is not a science, it is nothing more than an eye-witness and open to interpretation. Shoehorning CCTV into the field of forensics is likely to lead to longer retention periods for CCTV images and an even greater misplaced faith in the value of surveillance cameras.

Brown is of course, like all politicians, well aware of the misplaced faith in cameras and is quite happy to exploit it to win votes.

“There are of course some who think CCTV is ‘excessive’” …

Brown next turns his attention to those of us opposed to the massive surveillance network that has been created and is ever expanding in the UK. He fends us off not with facts, not with studies that show the value or cameras, not even with reassurances that our privacy will be safeguarded. No, Brown uses an emotive fear based argument to brush aside our concerns, after all those against surveillance cameras “probably don’t have to walk home or take the night bus on their own at the end of a night out”. It is unclear how Brown imagines we do get home, perhaps he presumes we don’t go out. He certainly seems to think that walking home or taking a night bus are dangerous acts that only the watchful eye of Big Brother can protect us from.

Back in the Building Britain’s Future document released last June the government talked of giving people “clearer ways to complain on the rare occasions where they feel it [CCTV] is excessive”. This is now replaced with a suggestion that only those who don’t go out at night or don’t use night buses are against surveillance cameras. A thought that when deconstructed does not make any sense at all but which is designed to press the fear button and encourage dependence on the state.

“the evidence is clear” …

Having masterfully cast aside the loonie, stay at home, night bus averse, anti-cctv mentalists, Brown now turns his attention to “the rest of us, for ordinary hard working, decent people”. So now he is adding to the growing list of attributes that describe people against surveillance cameras – they are also lazy, work shy and immoral. Everyone else is like our glorious leader a decent person and that is why they can see that “the evidence is clear: CCTV reduces the fear of crime and anti-social behaviour”.

Note that Brown has backed away from earlier claims in the Building Britain’s Future report that CCTV can deter, detect and solve crimes and now focuses on the suggestion that CCTV reduces the fear of crime. Presumably Brown makes this switch because it is once again an emotive claim and one that has not been addressed directly in mainstrean coverage of the surveillance state. In fact research into CCTV suggests that it increases the fear of crime. In 2008 the Joseph Rowntree Foundation produced a report entitled ‘Why are fear and distrust spiralling in twenty-first century Britain?’ [8]. The report states:

mounting evidence shows that private security and CCTV does not reduce fear of crime or actual crime and might in fact increase crime. According to a study funded by the Scottish Office in Glasgow, there was no improvement in feelings of safety after CCTV was introduced, while the area studied actually showed an increase in crime. The author concluded that the “electronic eye on the street” threatens to erode the “natural surveillance” of “mutual policing” by individuals and represents a retreat from “collective and individual responsibility to self interest and a culture of fear”.

The author of the Joseph Rowntree report, Anna Minton went on to produce a book ‘Ground Countrol – Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First Century City’ [9] which expands on the issue of fear in the UK today. In a recent Guardian article [10] (’Expect the drones to swarm on Britain in time for 2012′, The Guardian 22nd Febuary 2010) Minton wrote:

There is no evidence that CCTV reduces crime, but there is research, including a study commissioned by the government, which reveals that it increases distrust between people and promotes fear of crime.

An article in the Local Government Studies journal [11] (’Towns on Television: Closed Circuit TV Systems in British Towns and Cities’, Vol.22, No.3, pp.1-77, 1996) also points out that CCTV does not in fact reduce the fear of crime.

CCTV may actually undermine the natural surveillance in towns and communities [...] the result may be a further spiral of social fragmentation and atomization, which leads to more alienation and even more crime.

A 2005 Home Office study, ‘Assessing the impact of CCTV’ [12] (Home Office Research Study 292), which like many many other studies found that CCTV is not an effective crime fighting measure stated:

the majority of the schemes evaluated did not reduce crime and even where there was a reduction this was mostly not due to CCTV; nor did CCTV schemes make people feel safer, much less change their behaviour.

But Brown skillfully ignores all of this, after all only work shy, immoral, stay at home, night bus averse, anti-cctv mentalists believe any of these reports. Honest decent people don’t let facts get in the way of emotions.

“this government has funded CCTV in nearly 700 town centre schemes” …

Having shown that CCTV is the best thing since night buses, Brown is now ready to show just how much money his government has wasted – oops, sorry invested into surveillance cameras. Last June in the Building Britain’s Future report it was claimed that the 700 schemes the government has funded over the last 10 years cost “almost £170 million”, but this only tells half the story. Data Protection experts at Amberhawk Training have done some back of the envelope calculations on the costs of CCTV in the UK [13]. Starting from the December 2009 Scottish Parliament report ‘Public Space CCTV In Scotland’ [14] which states that: “Over the period 2008 to 2010, the total cost of operating public space CCTV systems in Scotland can be expected to exceed £40 million”. Amberhawk go on:

If we assume that CCTV surveillance in the UK is the same as in Scotland (and scale the Scottish survey results in proportion to the whole UK population using the approximately 12:1 ratio of populations – we are in effect assuming there is an average “CCTV surveillance per unit of population”), then we can gain an estimate of the public space spending on CCTV and the number of public space cameras run by local authorities.

Multiplying by twelve, we find that, in total, there is an estimated £480 million spent by mainly local authorities (every three years), employing 4,200 largely untrained staff who monitor 26,400 CCTV cameras that are not assessed for effectiveness and where any data sharing is haphazard at best.

So in fact many more hundreds of millions of pounds of public money have been sunk into cameras that don’t fight crime or even reduce the fear of crime – sorry that smacks of night bus hating again – the government has invested hundreds of millions that would only have been wasted on frivolities were it not for their wisdom to invest in CCTV.

“a new power for people to petition their local authority for more CCTV” …

So now Brown wants the “ordinary hard working, decent people” (who aren’t troubled by the facts about CCTV) to have a mechanism for getting more CCTV. As we pointed out last time Brown announced this “power”, people already have it – it’s called local democracy. People can attend local council meetings or lobby local councillors (as No CCTV and other groups around the UK have done). Council meetings are open to the public and the minutes are publicly available. Brown says that along with the power to request more cameras the local authority will have “a duty to respond”. Surely they already do have a duty to respond to the local tax payers, so why is Brown codifying something that already exists?

Maybe Brown is worried that as budgets get tight local authorities will start to realise that CCTV is a waste of money and may use what money they have to do something that might actually help their local communities. With this “new power”, if Brown can get the ill informed “ordinary hard working, decent people” to cry out for more cameras then local authorities will have to obey regardless of whether it’s a good idea or not.

This very issue was raised in a House of Lords debate last year [15]. Lord Peston, who as a member of the Constitution Committee considered the evidence presented to the ‘Surveillance: Citizens and the State’ inquiry [16], pointed out that:

if the public want these CCTV cameras—and my ad hoc experience is that that is true—what is the correct response that those of us in public life, not least the Government, should give? Should we say, “If it is what they want, then it is what they ought to have even though it is not backed by any evidence at all”? Or is it our duty to educate them and tell them that they are wrong? [...] I certainly believe that if all CCTV cameras do is reassure you when you should not regard them as doing so, then someone ought to say to you, “Why don’t you think about it a little bit and realise that you are mistaken?”.

Brown clearly wants to ensure that decision makers cannot educate the public and tell them they are wrong when it comes to CCTV. If the public has bought the lie then the lie must be followed and no-one must be able to stop the lie.

“opposition parties have campaigned against CCTV” … !

Next Brown raises the evil spectre that he suggests could stop the lie – the opposition parties! This is quite the most ridiculous statement in Brown’s pro CCTV outburst. The suggestion that opposition parties are bent on stopping the CCTV lie is itself a lie.

At a local level where most decisions are made about the installation of CCTV politicians of all parties seem to think that surveillance cameras are a vote winner. By installing cameras they can be seen to appear to be doing something.

At the national level: in September 2009 the Conservative party published a report entitled ‘Reversing the rise of the Surveillance State’ [17] which made no mention of surveillance cameras despite the fact that they are the cornerstone of the surveillance state; whilst the Liberal Democratic party last year published a ‘Freedom Bill’ [18] which they say would restore civil liberties lost over the last two decades – one of the proposals in the Bill was for a Royal Commission on the use and regulation of CCTV. But calling for regulation of CCTV is simply the consesus view. Regulation does not address the core issues of removal of personal freedom, anonymity and other rights. All regulation does is to endorse acceptance of CCTV by formalising its “proper use” and leaving no room for the rejection of such technology.

There is effectively no political opposition to surveillance cameras in the UK. But that does not mean that the surveillance state cannot be reversed – as things stand decisions are still made at a local level and so it is up to the people of the UK to get educated and start demanding action from their local councillors. It’s all about numbers – if enough people demand the removal of CCTV they will have to get removing it.

Brown is so convinced that CCTV is a vote winner that he is willing to paint the opposition parties as some sort of evil defenders of civil liberties – when in fact they are nothing of the sort. The rabbit hole is deep in Brown’s warped world.

Stoking the fear of crime?

Much of the rest of Brown’s speech focussed on the fear of crime which he said was out of step with reality: “So these are the facts: crime down; anti-social behaviour down; but fear of crime and anti-social behaviour not down as much”. He even warned of: “those who spread fear with fiction”. He went on to say:

Because sometimes as damaging as the fear of crime is the crime of fear.

And I will play no part in that.

Yet wasn’t it Brown himself that suggested walking home or taking a night bus were dangerous acts? Brown also said:

So even as we halve the deficit I’m protecting frontline policing.

Because I know that the hard working majority will never be able to afford to live in a gated community or hire a private security firm, I am committed to a strong, modern police service for all – more visible in your community and more responsive to your needs and concerns.

Why would the hard working majority need to live in a gated community? Isn’t Brown pressing the fear buttons again?

Lost in translation?

So to summarise, Gordon Brown has launched the New Labour party’s general election CCTV agenda with the following speech (roughly translated):

We in the Labour party really love CCTV, only lazy night bus haters have a problem with the surveillance state but all obedient citizens know that the non-existant evidence clearly shows that covering the entire country with the paraphernalia of a dystopian lawless state reduces the fear of descending into dystopian lawlessness. That is why this government, like all others, has and will continue to use public money to remove freedoms from the public and we’re even going to give you all a new power – the power to demand that the state does what the state wants. Long live democracy! Vote for CCTV!

Rest assured, the battle against the surveillance state will not be fought at this coming election.

[ Note: This is not the first time Gordon Brown has been caught sexing up surveillance cameras, see 'Brown sexes up CCTV evaluations' at http://www.no-cctv.org.uk/blog/brown_sexes_up_cctv_evaluations.htm. ]

• [ 1] http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page22631
• [ 2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXUYU0ocKHo
• [ 3] http://www.hmg.gov.uk/buildingbritainsfuture/about/commitments/crime-policing.aspx
• [ 4] http://www.no-cctv.org.uk/blog/proposed_bill_contains_cctv_expansion_in_disguise.htm
• [ 5] http://www.hmg.gov.uk/media/27749/full_document.pdf
• [ 6] http://www.no-cctv.org.uk/blog/government_appoints_cctv_yes_man_-_as_surveillance_industrial_complex_begins_its_takeover.htm
• [ 7] http://www.crimereduction.homeoffice.gov.uk/cctv/
• [ 8] http://www.jrf.org.uk/publications/why-are-fear-and-distrust-spiralling-twenty-first-century-britain
• [ 9] http://www.annaminton.com/Ground_Control.htm
• [10] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/22/doesnt-work-didnt-ask-why-cameras
• [11] Quoted in ‘Crime and the City’, Jason Ditton, British Journal of Criminology – http://bjc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/40/4/692.pdf
• [12] http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs05/hors292.pdf
• [13] http://www.sccjr.ac.uk/documents/CCTVtog.pdf
• [14] http://amberhawk.typepad.com/amberhawk/2010/03/do-local-authorities-spend-nearly-half-a-billion-pounds-on-ineffective-cctv.html
• [15] http://www.theyworkforyou.com/lords/?gid=2009-06-19a.1295.0
• [16] http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200809/ldselect/ldconst/18/1802.htm
• [17] http://www.conservatives.com/News/News_stories/2009/09/Reversing_the_rise_of_the_surveillance_state.aspx
• [18] http://freedom.libdems.org.uk/the-freedom-bill/full-text-of-the-freedom-bill/

But NPR’s Moira Gunn (from Biotech Nation) now asks a provocative question. Is it wrong to cure colorblindness?

She reports on an experiment that used a virus to introduce corrective DNA into colorblind monkeys. (”It took 20 weeks, but eventually the monkeys started distinguishing between red and green.”) Then she asks, could it be viewed differently? “Are we trying to ‘normalize’ humans to a threshold of experience?

“Slippery Slope. Enter here. Watch your step…”

A man who has allegedly come back from the dead after being murdered is being fought over by two families, each claiming him as their own son in Transkei. The man is being called Siviwe Ntwalana, a man who was murdered five years ago and also Lakitha Zokufa after another deceased son who allegedly came back from the dead. The story is too strange for fiction.

The man in dispute is currently residing at Mthatha General Hospital Mental Clinic under the name Lakitha Zokufa.

Apparently the man with two names’ testimony, when present, is not applicable in this situation, but it seems he isn’t particularly sure himself which of the families is correct. Interestingly, there is no real gain for either family financially for getting their son back, and both are convinced enough by their son’s presence that they are willing to pay for the otherwise strange man’s medical fees.

Both parties are also so convinced that they are willing to pay for DNA tests to find out who the man is truly related to, and they’re willing to match his fingerprints as well. This case is truly strange as both seem to have a convincing story leading their son back home to them. It seems this is one of the strangest cases of mistaken identity ever put forward, as both believe the man is their son and neither can explain how he is here.

Read More: Unexplainable.net

Scientists who decoded the DNA of some southern Africans have found striking new evidence of the genetic diversity on that continent, and uncovered a surprise about the ancestry of Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

They found, for example, that any two Bushmen in their study who spoke different languages were more different genetically than a European compared to an Asian. That was true even if the Bushmen lived within walking distance of each other.

“If we really want to understand human diversity, we need to go to (southern) Africa and we need to study those people,” said Stephan Schuster of Pennsylvania State University. He’s an author of the study, which appears in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

The study also found 1.3 million tiny variations that hadn’t been observed before in any human DNA. That should help scientists sort out whether particular genes promote certain diseases or influence a person’s response to medications. Findings like that could have payoffs both within Africa and elsewhere, experts said.

The genetic diversity of Africa’s population is no surprise to scientists. Modern humans evolved on that continent about 200,000 years ago and have lived there longer than anyplace else. So that’s where they’ve had the most time to develop genetic differences. The varied environments of Africa have also encouraged genetic differences…

[continues at AP via comcast.net News]

If Neanderthals ever walk the earth again, the primordial ooze from which they will rise is an emulsion of oil, water, and DNA capture beads engineered in the laboratory of 454 Life Sciences in Branford, Connecticut. Over the past 4 years those beads have been gathering tiny fragments of DNA from samples of dissolved organic materials, including pieces of Neanderthal bone. Genetic sequences have given paleoanthropologists a new line of evidence for testing ideas about the biology of our closest extinct relative.

The first studies of Neanderthal DNA focused on the genetic sequences of mitochondria, the microscopic organelles that convert food to energy within cells. In 2005, however, 454 began a collaborative project with the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, to sequence the full genetic code of a Neanderthal woman who died in Croatia’s Vindija cave 30,000 years ago. As the Neanderthal genome is painstakingly sequenced, the archaeologists and biologists who study it will be faced with an opportunity that seemed like science fiction just 10 years ago. They will be able to look at the genetic blueprint of humankind’s nearest relative and understand its biology as intimately as our own.

In addition to giving scientists the ability to answer questions about Neanderthals’ relationship to our own species–did we interbreed, are we separate species, who was smarter–the Neanderthal genome may be useful in researching medical treatments. Newly developed techniques could make cloning Neanderthal cells or body parts a reality within a few years. The ability to use the genes of extinct hominins is going to force the field of paleoanthropology into some unfamiliar ethical territory. There are still technical obstacles, but soon it could be possible to use that long-extinct genome to safely create a healthy, living Neanderthal clone. Should it be done?

At the 454 Life Sciences offices, Gerald Irzyk, Jason Affourtit, and Thomas Jarvie explain the process they use to read the chemicals that made up Neanderthal DNA and the genes that determined a large part of their biology. DNA has a shape, called a double helix, that makes it look like a twisted ladder. Each rung on the ladder is called a base-pair. The rungs are made up of a pair of chemicals called nucleotides–adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine, which are usually referred to by their first initials. The sequence of the nucleotides in the DNA determines what genes an organism has and how they function…

[continues in Archaelogy]

A new way of using the genetic code has been created, allowing proteins to be made with properties that have never been seen in the natural world. The breakthrough could eventually lead to the creation of new or “improved” life forms incorporating these new materials into their tissue.

In all existing life forms, the four “letters” of the genetic code, called nucleotides, are read in triplets, so that every three nucleotides encode a single amino acid.

Not any more. Jason Chin at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues have now redesigned the cell’s machinery so that it reads the genetic code in quadruplets.

In the genetic code that life has used up to now, there are 64 possible triplet combinations of the four nucleotide letters; these genetic “words” are called codons. Each codon either codes for an amino acid or tells the cell to stop making a protein chain. Now Chin’s team have created 256 blank four-letter codons that can be assigned to amino acids that don’t even exist yet.

Read More: New Scientist

When, in 2001, the human genome was sequenced for the first time, we were confronted by several surprises. One was the sheer lack of genes: where we had anticipated perhaps 100,000 there were actually as few as 20,000. A bigger surprise came from analysis of the genetic sequences, which revealed that these genes made up a mere 1.5 per cent of the genome.

This is dwarfed by DNA deriving from viruses, which amounts to roughly 9 per cent.On top of that, huge chunks of the genome are made up of mysterious virus-like entities called retrotransposons, pieces of selfish DNA that appear to serve no function other than to make copies of themselves. These account for no less than 34 per cent of our genome.

All in all, the virus-like components of the human genome amount to almost half of our DNA. This would once have been dismissed as mere “junk DNA”, but we now know that some of it plays a critical role in our biology. As to the origins and function of the rest, we simply do not know.

The human genome therefore presents us with a paradox. How does this viral DNA come to be there? What role has it played in our evolution, and what is it doing to our physiology? To answer these questions we need to deconstruct the origins of the human genome — a story more fantastic than anything we previously imagined, with viruses playing a bigger part than you might care to believe.

Read More: New Scientist

The latest airport security trend is the backscatter x-ray machine, touted as a powerful way to virtually frisk a traveler for contraband without the embarassment of a strip search.

Though touted as completely safe because the level of radiation is so low, travelers have been nervous about the devices — and not just because it shows off a nice outline of their privates to the people manning the machines — but because they remain scared of the health problems they might propose.

Looks like a little healthy paranoia might have been a good thing. While the conventional wisdom has held that so-called “terahertz radiation,” upon which backscatter x-ray machines are based, is harmless because it doesn’t carry enough energy to do cellular or genetic damage, new research suggests that may be completely wrong.

Specifically, researchers have found that terahertz radiation may interfere directly with DNA. Although the force generated is small, the waves have been found to “unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication.”

I’m not a doctor, but that just doesn’t sound good…

[continues at Yahoo Tech]

Humans carry in their genome the relics of an animal virus that infected their forerunners at least 40 million years ago, according to research published by the British science journal Nature.The invader is called bornavirus, a brain-infecting pathogen that was first identified in 1970s. Scientists led by Keizo Tomonaga of Japan’s Osaka University compared the DNA of a range of mammals, including humans, apes, elephants, marsupials and rodents, to look for tell-tale signatures of bornavirus code.

In the human genome, the team found several bornavirus fragments but also in the form of two genes that may be functional, although what they do is unclear. Until now, the only viruses known to have been handed on in vertebrates were retroviruses, which work by hijacking cellular machinery in order to reproduce.

Retroviruses are effective in infiltrating the germline — the DNA of reproductive cells, which means their sequence, or part of it, is handed on to ensuing generations.

Read More: AFP via Yahoo News

IRVINE, Calif. — Jim Fallon recently made a disquieting discovery: A member of his family has some of the biological traits of a psychopathic killer.

“These results will cause some problems at the next family party,” he said, reviewing the data on his laptop in his backyard. Meanwhile, his wife, Diane, stood in the kitchen, using a knife to slice through a blood-red pepper.

Dr. Fallon, 62 years old, is a neuroscientist who studies the biological basis of human behavior at the University of California’s campus here. He has analyzed the brains of more than 70 murderers on behalf of psychiatric clinics or criminal defense lawyers. It’s a young science. Because jailed killers rarely are permitted to take part in research trials, data linking genes and brain damage to violent crime are tentative and often disputed.

“In terms of early factors, we know nothing about who becomes an adult psychopath,” says Adrian Raine of the University of Pennsylvania, who applies neuroscience techniques to study the causes and cures of crime.

Three years ago, as part of a personal project to assess his family’s risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, Dr. Fallon collected brain scans and DNA samples from himself and seven relatives. At a barbecue soon thereafter, Dr. Fallon’s mother casually mentioned something he had been unaware of: His late father’s lineage was drenched in blood… [continues in the Wall Street Journal]

More than three-quarters of young black men are on system, watchdog says

Britain has built the world’s biggest DNA database without proper political debate and police routinely arrest people just to get their DNA profiles onto the system, the genetics watchdog said in a report on Tuesday.

The Human Genetics Commission, which advises the government on the social, legal and ethical aspects of genetics, called for a review of the database and said new laws must be passed to govern its use.

In a damning report, the commission said “function creep” had transformed the system from a DNA store for offenders into a database of suspects.

Was on MSNBC via Reuters, also on USA Today