European Commission: Tar sands no dirtier than other fuels

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier | Categories: ,

The European Commission has backed down from plans to label fuels derived from tar sands as more polluting than other fuels.

oil-sands-1aThe move, which EU member states must yet approve, could ease the importation of oil extracted from Canadian tar soils. But environmental groups say it is a blow to Europe’s climate protection targets.

Thanks to Alberta’s extensive tar sands, Canada holds the world’s second largest oil reserves, after Saudi Arabia. But the extraction of oil from tar sands uses considerably more energy and water than conventional oil mining.

The EU’s Fuel Quality Directive requires fuel suppliers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from vehicle fuels by 6% by 2020.

In 2011, Brussels had proposed to restrict the use of fuel derived from tar sands by revising the directive to classify tar sands as 20% more carbon intensive – in terms of carbon dioxide emissions per unit energy – than other fuel sources. But the following year the European Commission’s proposal was voted down by member states concerned over Canada’s threat to take the issue to the World Trade Organization.

The Commission’s new proposal, released on October 7, requires fuel suppliers to report an average carbon intensity of different fuel types over their lifecycle.

“At this time, the proposed methodology should not require the differentiation of the greenhouse gas intensity of fuel on the basis of the source of the raw material as this would affect current investments in certain refineries in the Union,” the proposed text reads.

“It is no secret that our initial proposal could not go through due to resistance faced in some Member States,” Connie Hedegaard, the EU’s Climate Commissioner, said in a statement.

“However, the Commission is today giving this another push, to try and ensure that in the future, there will be a methodology and thus an incentive to choose less polluting fuels over more polluting ones like for example oil sands.”

Canada has only just begun to ship tar oil to European refineries, but Canadian oil producers hope to increase their market share in the region as EU countries seek to become less dependent on supplies from Russia and the Middle East.

Nanoscopy pioneers win Chemistry Nobel

Posted by Elizabeth Gibney | Categories: ,

Nobel

Akademie/Alamy

The 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Eric Betzig, Stefan Hell and William Moerner.

The researchers won for the development of microscopes that make it possible to study molecular processes in real time (see press release).

Scientists long believed that optical microscopy would never be able to resolve distances smaller  than half the wavelength of light, 0.2 micrometres. The three laureates have won the prize for their “groundbreaking work” that broke this limit and brought optical microscopy down to the nanoscale.

The researchers used two separate techniques, both of which make use of the fluorescence or glow of molecules in response to light. In 2000, Hell, working at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany, developed a technique called stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy using laser beams.

Betzig, now at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Virginia, and Moerner, at Stanford University in California, separately paved the way for the development of a second method known as single-molecule microscopy, which Betzig achieved for the first time in 2006.

Using these techniques, scientists can now “see how molecules create synapses between nerve cells in the brain; they can track proteins involved in Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases as they aggregate; they follow individual proteins in fertilized eggs as these divide into embryos”, according to a statement released by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

This page will be updated throughout the morning.

Update 11:35 a.m.

In 2009 Nature interviewed Hell for a feature on this revolution in microscopy. Read it here.

Hell also features in this Nature Methods‘ Method of the Year 2008 video on various forms of Super-Resolution Microscopy.

Spanish Ebola case highlights risks to health-care workers

Posted by Declan Butler | Categories: , , ,

A nurse who cared for an Ebola patient repatriated to a Madrid hospital has contracted the disease, the Spanish health ministry announced on 6 October. But the news is, unfortunately, not surprising.

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US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease

Although Ebola is relatively difficult to catch in the community because infection requires contact with the bodily fluids — such as blood or vomit — of an infected person, close contacts and health-care workers treating patients with Ebola have long been recognized as being most at risk of contracting the virus.

Health-care workers have already paid a heavy price in the current epidemic in west Africa: as of 1 October, the World Health Organization estimates that 382 have contracted Ebola, and 216 of them have died.

Spanish authorities will investigate how the nurse at the Carlos III hospital came to be infected, and whether there were any shortcomings in infection control — such as in the personal protective equipment supplied, training in its use or hospital hygiene. As someone who recently treated an Ebola patient, the nurse would have been considered a contact at risk of exposure to the virus, and have been monitored for any symptoms such as fever, that could signal the onset of Ebola. Such surveillance of contacts is crucial to preventing any onward spread of virus.

It’s important to remember that people with Ebola don’t become infectious until they start showing symptoms, so monitoring of contacts of an Ebola-infected patient for fever is usually considered sufficient, with them being isolated only at the first hint of illness — although some authorities may choose to quarantine high-risk contacts. Such early isolation is crucial to limit the number of people they could come into contact with.

A key question for Spanish authorities will be whether there was any delay between when the nurse first showed symptoms and when she was isolated. They will then try to trace every single person she was in contact during that period and monitor them for symptoms for 21 days, the maximum incubation period of the disease (see ‘How disease detectives are fighting Ebola’s spread‘ for an explainer of this process of ‘contact tracing’).

That contacts of the nurse might in turn become infected cannot be ruled out, but the case does not raise any major threat of an outbreak of Ebola in Europe. Risk assessments of the current outbreak have long factored in the prospect that infected people would occasionally travel from the epicentre of the epidemic in west Africa to distant unaffected areas, and that healthcare workers are among those most at risk of secondary infections.

The Spanish case raises legitimate concerns as to the preparedness of hospitals to safely treat Ebola patients, and spotlights the need for health facilities everywhere to review their own precautions and practice. But even with the best training and equipment, the infectious nature of bodily fluids that carry Ebola means that accidental infections of health-care workers treating patients with the virus will unfortunately continue.

In its latest risk assessment, the the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control reiterated that “if a symptomatic case of [Ebola] presents in an EU Member State, secondary transmission to caregivers in the family and in healthcare facilities cannot be ruled out.” Europe’s well developed public-health services are, however, well placed to quickly stamp out any further chains of transmission using contact tracing.

The big lessons of the new Spanish case, as in the recent case of a traveller from Liberia diagnosed with Ebola in Dallas, Texas, are the same: that unless the international community acts far faster, and on a far larger scale, to tackle Ebola at its source in west Africa, exported cases and the repatriation of sick health-care workers will continue — and family, and health-care workers caring for them, will continue to become infected with Ebola.

Work still needed to reduce animals in research

Posted by Daniel Cressey | Categories: ,

Replace, refine, reduce. Those are the goals of a centre founded 10 years ago to improve the welfare of animals used in research. But more still needs to be done to embed these ideas, according to the head of the centre.

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Wikimedia Commons

Vicky Robinson, chief executive at the London-based National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs), says that when the centre was launched 10 years ago there was “some uncertainty” in the scientific community about it. The organization has since funded research that ranges from using facial expressions of animals to assess pain and improve welfare to growing ‘micro-cancers’ in a dish in order to reduce the use of animals used in drug development.

Last week, launching the NC3R’s strategy for the next decade, she said: “Ten years on I think the transformation has been huge. Getting a grant from the NC3Rs really does count these days.”

But she added that there were still “too many scientists who think that the 3Rs belong in the animal house” and do not apply to their research. And she admitted that there were still concerns in the scientific community to be overcome around whether changing laboratory conditions to improve animal welfare could also negatively impact research outcomes. The new NC3Rs strategy includes working to ensure that standardised measures of animal welfare can be used to improve both the welfare of animals and scientific results, that all scientists are committed to the ‘3Rs’ and that this is expanded to other countries.

Jim Smith, chief of strategy at the UK’s Medical Research Council, told the meeting that the work of the NC3Rs had been “enormously influential”. He cited the widely-backed  ARRIVE guidelines, which lay down how researchers using animals should report their work in journal papers, as an example (although there is some debate over how effective the guidelines have been).

Despite the work of the NC3Rs, Smith admitted, the statistics show an increase in animal use in UK research every year. However, much of this is down to the UK measuring procedures, rather than animals used; breeding counts as a procedure, meaning that simply producing genetically modified animals needed for scientific research is a huge contributor to the overall rise.

Stephen Holgate, the chair of the NC3Rs board, told the meeting that the centre had created a community of like-minded animal-welfare scientists that did not exist before.

“The success of the NC3Rs is without doubt,” he said. “Our challenge now is to get adoption and uptake.”

Blue LED discovery wins Physics Nobel

Posted by Richard Van Noorden | Categories: ,

Nobel

Akademie/Alamy

The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura.

The three researchers won the award for their invention of diodes that emit blue light, “which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources,” the prize-awarding committee announced in Stockholm today (see press release).

Combining blue, green and red diodes creates a long-lasting, efficient white light. But despite earnest industry efforts to work out how to get gallium nitride-based semiconductors to shoot out blue beams, it took until the 1990s before Akasaki and Amano – working together at Nagoya University in Japan – and Nakamura, working at a company in Tokushima called Nichia Chemicals, made the breakthrough.

Nakamura, like the other winners, was born in Japan. But in 2000, he left the country to take up an academic position at the University of Santa Barbara in California, and is now a US citizen. At the time, he said that the United States offered better working conditions: “Japanese industrial research and development may be on its way to becoming obsolete.” He later sued Nichia Chemicals over the compensation he received for inventing the blue LED technology, in January 2005 eventually settling for ¥840 million ($7.6 million at the time).

Update 2.25pm

Scientific American have a profile of Nakamura, written in 2000, which reveals how hard he had to push to develop the technology at Nichia Chemicals:

In January 1988 [Nakamura] bypassed his boss and marched into the office of Nichia’s CEO, Nobuo Ogawa, with a list of demands. He wanted about $3.3 million in research funding to work on blue-light devices and also a year off to study metallorganic chemical vapor deposition, or MOCVD, at the University of Florida. MOCVD was then emerging as the technology of choice for producing exotic semiconductors, such as the ones capable of emitting blue light.

Nakamura’s move would probably raise a few eyebrows at most in a small American start-up company, but it was absolutely outrageous in the feudal, seniority-based Japanese system. “I was very mad,” he explains, when asked what prompted his ultimatum. “I wanted to quit Nichia. I didn’t care about anything. It was OK for them to fire me. I was not afraid of anything.”

Much to his amazement, Ogawa simply agreed to all his demands.

Nature full news story on the prize is here.

Brain positioning system wins medicine Nobel

Posted by Ewen Callaway | Categories: ,

Nobel

Akademie/Alamy

The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to John O’Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser.

The researchers discovered how the brain helps us navigate the world around us. O’Keefe, a neuroscientist at University College London, discovered specialized “place cells” that were activated when a rat explored a room.

In 2005, the Mosers (a married couple who share a laboratory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway) together discovered another component of the brain’s positioning system. The “grid cells” they found create a coordinate system by firing at regular spatial intervals as an animal explores a space. They went on to show how grid cells and place cells work together.

Keep watching this blog for reaction.

Update 11:05 a.m.

As coincidence would have it, Nature was planning to publish a feature story on the Mosers in this week’s issue. Here it is.

Update 11:11 a.m.

The Mosers explain how grid cells work in this 2011 video. For more videos from the duo, follow this link.

Update 11:32 a.m.

In their press release (download the PDF here) announcing today’s award, the Nobel Committee recognizes work that O’Keefe did in the 1970s and research in the Mosers’ lab three decades later. But the three all worked together in 1995. The Mosers were fresh out of graduate school, and they did a short stint in O’Keefe’s lab, learning how to take electrical recordings of place cells. “This was probably the most intense learning experience in our lives,” they write, in a nice summary of their work on their lab website.

Update 11:52 a.m.

The Nobel website has a recording of May-Britt Moser’s response to the news. She says her husband is still on a plane and hasn’t yet heard the news. He’s due to land in Munich soon. “That would be fantastic if people were waiting at the airport. He would be in shock,” she says.

Update 12:07 p.m.

John Stein, a physiologist at the University of Oxford, says that O’Keefe’s discovery of place cells initially raised more than a few eyebrows. In a statement sent to reporters by the UK Science Media Centre he says: “I remember how great was the scoffing in the early 1970s when John first described ‘place cells’.  “Bound to be an artifact”, “He clearly underestimates rats’ sense of smell” were typical reactions.  Now, like so many ideas that were at first highly controversial, people say “Well that’s obvious”!”

Updated 1:39 p.m. Corrected affiliation of May-Britt and Edvard Moser

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European regulator confirms milestone medical-data transparency rules

Posted by Daniel Cressey | Categories:

Clinical trial data previously kept behind closed doors is to be released to the public by Europe’s medical regulator, after a new transparency policy was finally agreed at the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

The EMA, which is responsible for licencing drugs to be sold in European Union states, has been embroiled in a long-running debate about how it could or should release information submitted by drugs companies seeking permission to market their medicines. On 2 October, the EMA management board approved a new policy that will see it pro-actively publish clinical reports submitted to the agency in support of marketing authorisation from 1 January.

Guido Rasi, the executive director of the EMA, said the policy “sets a new standard for transparency in public health and pharmaceutical research and development” and would provide an “unprecedented level of access to clinical reports”.

This policy has been subject of fierce debate since it was first proposed, with transparency campaigners claiming the EMA was not being bold enough, and that pharmaceutical companies had previously been able to manipulate perceptions about the effectiveness of their drugs by choosing to conceal data that might paint them in a bad light. And industry has feared that commercially sensitive information would be released, and this could compromise their long-term ability to invest in research.

A key change from earlier versions of the policy is that researchers, and other members of the public, will now be able to download data. It had previously been suggested they might only be allowed to view clinical reports on screen, limiting their ability to reanalyse the huge datasets collected by pharmaceutical companies in clinical trials.

Concerns have also been raised about confidentiality, and the possibility that it might be possible to identify some individuals from the patient data in these clinical reports, particularly in the cases of rare diseases. In future the EMA will make data down to the level of individual patients available, but it wishes to consult further about how it can do this while protecting privacy.

Companies will also be able to request that parts of their data do not go into the public domain if they consider them to be ‘commercially confidential’. This has already been criticised by some transparency campaigners, but the EMA insists it will have the final say on what is redacted, and the assumption will be that information is not commercially confidential.

Information held by the agency from pre-2015 company submissions will be available under an existing policy where researchers can request access, but it will not be placed in the open.

End of the road for rogue stem-cell therapy in Italy

Posted by Lauren Morello | Categories:

Posted on behalf of Alison Abbott.

The Italian health minister Beatrice Lorenzin declared on 2 October that her government will not support a clinical trial of a controversial stem cell therapy that it promised last year.

Her statement, based on conclusions of an expert committee,  draws a line under a bitter two-year  row between the therapy’s inventor Davide Vannoni — who proclaimed it a cure-all and achieved an unlikely political influence — and Italian scientists and health-agency officials who declared it ineffective and possibly dangerous.

At the height of the row, hundreds of patients and their relative  took to the streets in Rome and other cities in support of Vannoni and his Stamina Foundation. The affair dominated headlines.

A committee of experts concluded in October last year that the treatment was phoney, but in December a court ruled that committee illegally biased. Lorenzin established a new committee earlier this year which has now drawn the same conclusion as its predecessor.

The Stamina Foundation is estimated to have treated well over eighty seriously ill people since 2007, mostly children.

Imperial College cleared of animal-cruelty allegations

Posted by Daniel Cressey | Categories: ,

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Courtesy of Imperial College London

One of the United Kingdom’s leading universities has been cleared of charges of animal cruelty at the end of a long-running and contentious series of investigations, an official report has concluded. However, the report found that Imperial College London had a “widespread poor culture of care” in its animal-research labs.

The controversy began in April 2013, when the London-based British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) revealed that it had conducted an undercover investigation in 2012 at Imperial, and alleged that this had uncovered large-scale suffering and breaches of the law.

An official Home Office investigation into the BUAV allegations, the report of which is released today and refers to Imperial only as ‘the Establishment’, concludes: “Overall, the animal rights organisation’s allegations of cruelty at the Establishment have not been substantiated.”

The Home Office report says that more than 180 individual allegations were made, and only five were substantiated. These five led to formal non-compliance cases, resulting in sanctions to eight individuals, including letters of reprimand and further training. However it also says these non-compliances with regulations were “of a persistent nature” and “could broadly be traced back to failing in management structures”.

“It is concluded that there was a widespread poor culture of care,” says the report.

In December 2013, an independent academic review of Imperial’s animal-research culture found serious problems with Imperial’s animal research (see ‘Report slams university’s animal research’).

Earlier this year it emerged that government inspectors had expressed concerns about animal research at Imperial before the BUAV allegations, and the university official responsible for animal research stepped down from that role.

In a statement released today, James Stirling, the university’s provost, said: “We welcome the publication of the report about this extensive Home Office investigation, which shows that the vast majority of the allegations made against Imperial by BUAV have not been substantiated. … We recognise that there have been problems with the culture and management around our animal research. We are sorry for these shortcomings and we have addressed them through considerable efforts and investment in our animal research infrastructure, to improve our culture of care and to ensure that we meet the very highest standards in our animal research.”

In response, BUAV head Michelle Thew said that there was “continuing complacency” at Imperial and that today’s report highlighted the need to reform the government inspection regime.

“Problems identified [by the Home Office] in 2012 were still documented by the subsequent BUAV investigation, with a leisurely inspection regime and mild sanctions such as a requirement for further training failing to breach the wall of indifference,” Thew’s statement said. “The conclusion is that the system is simply inadequate to enforce the standards that it purports to uphold.”

World’s first ‘clean coal’ commercial power plant opens in Canada

Posted by Richard Van Noorden | Categories: , ,

Boundary Dam for web

The Boundary Dam Power Station.

SaskPower

The world’s first commercial coal-fired power plant that can capture its carbon dioxide emissions officially launched today in Canada — marking a milestone for ‘clean coal’ technology.

The Boundary Dam project, in Saskatchewan, aims to capture and sell around 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year — up to 90% of the emissions of one of its refitted power units — to oil company Cenovus Energy, which will pipe the compressed gas deep underground to flush out stubborn oil reserves. Unsold gas will be hived off to the Aquistore research project.  (If you’re curious to know what a carbon capture facility looks like, SaskPower provides a virtual tour of the power station.)

As noted in a Nature article about the scheme in April, carbon-dioxide capture and storage (CCS) technology doesn’t come cheap. The Boundary Dam refit will cost Can$1.3 billion (US$1.2 billion), has depended on $240 million in government subsidies, and SaskPower — the sole electricity supplier in the province — hopes that regulators will grant it a 15.5% increase on electricity prices over the next three years. But the hope is that engineers can learn from the experience how to install the technology at lower cost.

The Canadian project is just the first of what will need to be thousands of clean coal plants by 2050 to put a significant dent in emissions. (Coal-burning alone produced 15 billion tonnes of CO2 worldwide in 2012, 43% of the world’s total). On current timetables, the world is nowhere close to achieving this: the technology is just too expensive, and so far there’s been no political will to tax fossil fuels on the basis of their emissions, which would be an incentive for clean coal.

In 2009, the IEA published a road map calling for 100 large CCS projects by 2020, but in July 2013, with projects failing to materialize, it downgraded that to just 30. And even that is ambitious.

Still, one has to start somewhere. Around a dozen projects are already storing carbon dioxide at the million-tonne scale, mostly extracted from natural-gas processing plants, and the Saskatchewan ribbon-cutting today marks the first time that a commercial, grid-connected coal plant has adopted the technology. A newly built advanced coal plant in Kemper County, Mississippi, designed to store 3.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, was to open this year but has been delayed to 2015.