Health Care For The Poor

Crucial training has begun for a project to search for life in a lake hidden beneath the Antarctic ice-sheet.

Scientists and engineers are rehearsing the most challenging stages of the drilling operation planned for Lake Ellsworth.

The goal is to gather samples of water and sediment in a hunt for microbial organisms and clues about past climate.

Training is focused on the handling of a water sampling device and a corer to extract sediment from the lake floor.

To avoid contamination, the drilling has to be undertaken in conditions cleaner than those required in an operating theatre.

The rehearsals are taking place at the National Oceanography Centre at Southampton with the team that will be deployed to Antarctica later this year.

The equipment has to remain sterile to avoid polluting the lake – believed to have been isolated for up to 500,000 years – and to preserve the value of the samples.

This level of hygiene has never been attempted before in the exacting conditions of a polar region.

Blasting a hole

The plan calls for a hot-water drill to blast a hole through the two-mile-thick ice sheet within three days.

The assumption is that the hole will remain open for 24 hours – allowing a brief window for the different probes to be deployed.

At the quay side in Southampton, a deep storm drain serves as a location for the first tests of the system, and the water sampling device has been lowered inside it.

A specially-adapted shipping container, mounted on rails above the drain, provides shelter and holds the winching mechanism for 4,000m of cable – long enough to reach through the ice sheet to the dark waters of the lake below.

Each component is kept sterile within air-tight plastic compartments tested to withstand the temperatures of -30C expected in the field.

The task of connecting and disconnecting the different probes has to be carried out by reaching into the compartments using in-built rubber gloves – an awkward process in the benign weather of a spring day on the English South Coast, but potentially nightmarish in a punishing wind chill.

First run

In the first run, attaching and lowering the water sampling device took 44 minutes; extracting it took 32 minutes, and the team was reasonably satisfied.

In the actual operation, every minute will count before the drill-hole re-freezes; but working in icy conditions is bound to add delay and complication.

In the first day of testing, the team encountered some teething problems including the design of some of the clamps holding components in position. These can, though, be re-engineered.

According to Ed Waugh, who designed the electronics for the water sampling device, the trials are "a useful way of getting a feel for the task".

Detailed planning includes a step-by-step guide to each stage of the operation – with no fewer than 20 steps for the job of getting the water sampling probe into position, and another 13 to deploy it.

At key points, components will go through further careful cleaning with ethanol and a thorough sterilisation with hydrogen peroxide vapour which, to add to the challenges, has to kept above 15C.

Once the hole has been blasted open with hot water, a probe carrying an ultraviolet light will be lowered to sterilise its upper section.

That will then be followed by the water sampling device – its descent captured live by HD cameras – and then the sediment corer. If time allows, each will be deployed a second time.

All this has to be carried out in the notoriously cold and windy environment of West Antarctica.

The tests will continue at Southampton for several months, culminating in a "dress rehearsal". Then the the equipment will be packed up to be shipped south in August.

Five containers of heavy gear including the hot-water drill were delivered to the lake site earlier this year, where they will stay under wraps through the polar winter.

After 10 years of planning and two years of design and engineering, the project is entering a critical phase.

By the end of the year, if all goes according to plan, we should have the first sight – and the first samples – of a lost world beneath the ice.

Stars may be many light-years away but the sounds they produce can give scientists insights into their size, age and whether habitable Earth-like planets are nearby.

When air is blown over the reed of an oboe, the reed vibrates and creates a change of pressure in the air inside it. The resultant note is characteristic of the space in which the pressure waves were generated.

"The same thing happens within a star. Sound is made in the outer layers of stars like the Sun. Because a star is a ball of ionised gas, the trapped sound inside makes it gently breathe in and out, or oscillate," said Prof Chaplin.

By observing the oscillations, it is possible for scientists to "listen" to the sound waves.

"As the star gently breathes in and out, we are able to detect the effect of the sound indirectly. As it breathes in, gas is compressed and it gets hotter. This results in the star becoming brighter. As the star breathes out and relaxes, the gas gets cooler and the star gets a bit fainter," added Prof Chaplin.

Variations in the brightness of the star can then be turned back into sound, although for a star like the Sun, the variations must be sped up around 100,000 times before sound can be heard.

By detecting and analysing the oscillations, Prof Chaplin and his colleagues are able to measure the properties of the stars, for example their size, mass and age. They can even do the equivalent of a CT scan to pick apart the structure within the star.

The pitch produced by a star informs scientists of its size – in the same way a large instrument like a tuba produces a low pitch, whereas the smaller piccolo trumpet produces a higher pitch.

These measurements are important for Kepler's goal of detecting Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of other stars.

This so-called "goldilocks" zone must be the right temperature for liquid water to be present on the surface of the planet.

Kepler has received extra funding from Nasa to continue until 2016, even in the face of severe budget cuts in some other areas of the agency's activities. The mission was otherwise due to finish towards the end of 2012.

By studying the sounds of the stars, Prof Chaplin and his colleagues were able to confirm that the recently discovered planet Kepler 22-b is close enough to its host star to be classified as habitable. It orbits a star about 600 light-years from Earth and has a temperature of about 22C.

The Kepler telescope measures the change in the brightness of a star, caused by a planet passing in front of it. By observing the amount of light that has been blocked, it gives an indication of the size of the planet relative to the star.

Once an Earth-sized planet is detected, questions about its age and size become important. Prof Ronald Gilliland, a science co-investigator with Kepler, said scientists would then be able to ask whether other planets like Earth exist.

"There is great public interest in learning whether other planets like our own are common in the galaxy, and most importantly being able to speculate with good founding whether or not conditions are conducive to life on other planets.

"What we hope to achieve with Kepler in the next few years are important steps towards the ultimate goal to see if there is evidence for intelligent life."

But he said that it would be impossible to travel between stellar systems, due to the limitations of the current rocket and spacecraft technology.

Even if another civilisation was as little as four light-years away, it would take eight years to hear an answer to a question over the radio.

In order to discover whether new life does exist, the next step would be to analyse a new planet's atmosphere, said Douglas Gough, emeritus professor of astrophysics at Cambridge.

"If you look at the spectrum of a star, you can see all the colours of a rainbow. Thin dark lines between the colours are produced by the interaction of light with chemical elements of the atmosphere of the star, or the planet around the star."

It is these patterns of elements that will allow scientists to establish the atmosphere of new planets, in a similar way that helium was discovered in the Sun. Only then will scientists further their understanding of whether life exists on other planets.

A hearing on Thursday will decide the fate of a ship once captained by Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian explorer first to reach the south pole.

The Maud is partially sunk in Cambridge Bay in Nunavut, northern Canada.

A permit to return the ship to Norway was denied in December and Canadian officials have argued the ship is crucial to the nation's heritage.

Campaigner Jan Wanggaard is spearheading a project to overturn the decision.

Called Maud Returns Home, the project would see the wreck towed back to Norway to become a museum near Oslo.

Amundsen was using the ship to sail through the Northeast Passage between 1918 and 1920 but was unable to launch an expedition to the north pole from there.

The ship was sold to the Hudson's Bay Company and became a warehouse and radio station before sinking in 1930.

Asker Council in Norway bought the ship back for $1 in 1990, securing a permit to repatriate it – but the permit has since expired.

In December, the Canadian Border Services Agency rejected a renewed request to export the wreck.

Mr Wanggaard will appear before the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board in Ottawa on Thursday to overturn that decision.

The board may roundly reject the proposal or impose a delay of up to six months on the decision, during which time it is believed a Canadian buyer may be sought.

As hopes grow in Sri Lanka that viable reserves of oil are about to be discovered in its seawaters, commentators are speculating about the intentions of India, China and Russia in prospecting for it.

The wells were sunk by Cairn Lanka, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the private company Cairn India in which Cairn UK has a minority holding.

Cairn has prospecting rights in one out of the 15 blocks being seriously considered for petroleum. Ten of these lie in the Mannar Basin and five in the Cauvery Basin further north.

It won the rights through an open bidding in 2007 and is now conducting further exploration while assessments are made of the viability of the gas deposits which also contain light oil reserves.

"We're quite confident that the Mannar Basin holds commercial reserves of petroleum," the director-general of Sri Lanka's Petroleum Resources Development Secretariat, Saliya Wickramasuriya, told the BBC.

"We now want to accelerate investment and development here based on the Cairn finds."

There is optimism because the Indian portion of the Cauvery Basin has yielded oil deposits for several decades. More than 30 wells operate there and a Canadian company has rights over 1,360 sq km.

A few years ago Colombo offered a block each to the Indian and Chinese governments free of charge, but they failed to take up the offer.

Things now seem to be different.

Mr Wickramasuriya says India's state-owned oil company, ONGC-Videsh, has visited Sri Lanka in recent weeks and wants to prospect in both the Mannar and Cauvery basins. It has made investment proposals which Colombo is still considering.

He denies the Indians have stipulated who else should be allowed to apply and says Sri Lanka is strongly interested in working with ONGC whose bid he describes as "logical" and, coming from a neighbouring country, attractive.

"They've a lot of experience. Their knowledge is more than ours – they have a lot of seismic knowledge. And they have the funding – if we're picking partners, they tick the boxes.

"But we'd like to see a diversity of investors."

He says several are interested – ranging from Russia's state-owned Gazprom and Vietnam's state-owned PVEP to the private French giant Total and smaller independents from Australia, the US and European countries.

He did not confirm any special interest from China but said Sri Lanka will "write to the whole world", including China, to attract bids.

Successful bidders will have to pay oil royalties and steep taxes to Sri Lanka in return for their licences.

Asantha Sirimanne, editor of Lanka Business Online, believes China is in general "very keen to get mineral rights" and may prefer to be assigned a block than to bid for one.

He says Gazprom officials have met the Sri Lankan authorities both here and in Russia within the past nine months and believes that as close international allies of Sri Lanka both China and Russia will have "lots of leverage" if they are seriously seeking exploration rights.

China is extending huge loans to Sri Lanka for post-war infrastructure development, with Chinese workers doing much of the construction on seaports, a new airport, highway and railway extension projects and power stations.

Colombo is fulsome in its praise for Beijing, which it now says is its largest development partner. Last week as its defence secretary visited Beijing, Sri Lanka said bilateral relations were at an "unprecedented" high.

Indian-financed projects in Sri Lanka have been slower to get off the ground and Mr Sirimanne believes India may be concerned at any Chinese interest in the oil rush, China being its great regional rival and Sri Lanka being right on India's doorstep.

One extra factor is that another block seen as having hydrocarbon potential has been earmarked off southern Sri Lanka, close to the massive Chinese-funded Hambantota port.

Mr Wickramasuriya admitted that in Indian eyes the Mannar Basin is essentially shared between India and Sri Lanka and said any prospecting in the area by other countries would be closely monitored to ensure that it did not extend beyond oil exploration.

The authorities say they hope the Mannar and Cauvery blocks will all be allocated by nomination or by open bidding in two phases this year and next.

As a reassurance to the Indian oil giant, he said it was quite possible that exploration rights in some blocks might be awarded to ONGC-Videsh on a nomination basis.

The spectacular snouts of sawfish are revealed as complete hunting weapons, sensing prey and killing them.

All seven species are listed as Critically Endangered on the internationally-recognised Red List.

The researchers, mainly based in Australia, suggest sawfish may be unique among their peers in possessing a snout, or rostrum, that works both as a sensory organ and a hunting weapon.

"I like to call it an antenna and a weapon, because that's what it is – it helps them to find the prey, but then also to kill it," said Barbara Wueringer from the University of Queensland, who led the research team.

The research was done using captive sawfish.

Australian regulations on the ethics of animal research meant the team was not allowed to film the sawfish hunting live prey.

Instead, pieces of mullet and tuna flesh were dangled in their tanks, and underwater video cameras deployed to record them.

Weak electric fields were deployed in the water and on the bottom, to mimic the fields produced by live fish, which sawfish sense using the dense arrays of electroreceptors along the rostrum.

The films show the sawfish approaching the "prey" and swiping vigorously, impaling the flesh on the saw's teeth, with blows so powerful that the blocks of dead fish were sometimes split in two.

They would also use the teeth to pin chunks of meat to the bottom.

The films also revealed that sawfish do not use their rostra to rifle through sediment, as some related species do. They do however rub the teeth on the bottom, possibly to sharpen them.

The rostra of sawfish are prized as trophies, with specimens trading hands for thousands of dollars.

The fish were also heavily caught for the aquarium trade, until the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) banned most international trade in 2007.

The toothed rostrum also makes sawfish especially prone to entanglement in fishing nets; and with many living in estuaries, coastal development and loss of habitat is another factor that has wiped out populations across the tropics and sub-tropics.

Like the sharks and rays to which they are related, their slow growth and reproduction also makes populations vulnerable.

"Sawfish are among the most endangered fish in the world," commented Sonja Fordham, president of the conservation group Shark Advocates International.

"Conservation actions – from education to strict national protection – are urgently needed in tropical and sub-tropical areas around the globe to prevent extinction and promote recovery of these remarkable animals."

Barbara Wueringer is hopeful that her line of research could lead to practical ideas that would keep the animals alive.

"There is an upcoming field of research where people are trying to work with different electric field strengths or magnetic fields to deter animals like sharks and rays from fishing gear," she told BBC News.

"And to do that you have to know what field strength the animals are attracted to.

"Also, they had that reputation of being a sluggish bottom-dweller; we now that they actively move into the water column to take their prey from there, so that restricts the fishing methods that can be allowed in their areas."

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BERLIN (Reuters) – Scientists say they have discovered a species of chameleon so small it can balance on the tip of a match.

The miniature lizard – “Brookesia micra” – reaches a maximum length of 29mm, and was discovered by a team of German and American researchers on the island of Nosy Hara, just off the northern coast of Madagascar.

“During the day it is very hard to find the chameleons, because they are very tiny and don’t move very much,” Frank Glaw, scientist at the Zoological State Collection in Munich, Germany, told Reuters TV on Thursday.

“The only way, or the best way, to find them is if you go out at night with headlamps and torches, because in the dusk the chameleons climb up the small plants to sleep,” he said.

The species was one of four types of tiny chameleons found in Madagascar, believed to be among the smallest reptiles in the world.

(Reporting by Alice Baghdjian)

Delegates from 26 countries opposed to a new EU carbon tax on airlines are meeting in Moscow to consider possible retaliation, amid fears of a trade war.

The number of permits is reduced over time, so that the total CO2 output from airlines in European airspace falls.

The payment for 2012 will be calculated after each airline's annual carbon output has been added up, to be paid in early 2013.

China claims the plan could cost Chinese airlines 95m euros (£79m; $124m) in additional annual costs. Analysts say it could jump to three or four times that much by 2020.

China has barred its airlines from participating in the ETS and the US Congress has voted to exclude US airlines from it.

Trevor Sikorski, a carbon markets analyst at Barclays Capital, said broad non-compliance among non-EU airlines could lead to jets being impounded in the EU and tit-for-tat measures, "which would be very damaging for airlines".

Airbus chief executive Tom Enders, quoted by the Associated Press, said he was worried that "what started out as a solution for the environment has become a source of potential trade conflict".

LONDON (Reuters) – Scientists studying the human genome have found that each of us is carrying around 20 genes that have been completely inactivated, suggesting that not all switched-off genes are harmful to health.

A team at Britain’s Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is developing a new catalogue of so-called “loss-of-function” (LoF) gene variants to help identify new disease-causing mutations, and say their work will help scientists better understand the normal function of human genes.

Working as part of larger study called the 1000 Genomes Project, the team developed a series of filters to identify common errors in the human genome, which maps the entire genetic code.

“The key questions we focused on for this study were how many of these LoF variants were real and how large a role might they play in human disease,” said Daniel MacArthur of the Sanger Institute, who worked on the team.

The researchers looked at nearly 3,000 possible LoF variants in the genomes of 185 people from Europe, East Asia and West Africa. Their findings were published in the journal Science on Thursday.

Loss of function variants are genetic changes that are predicted to severely disrupt the function of genes. Some are known to cause severe human diseases such as muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis.

Previous genome sequencing projects have suggested there are hundreds of these variants in the DNA of even perfectly healthy individuals, but researchers were not able to tell exactly how many.

In this study, the filters revealed that 56 percent of the 3,000 possible LoFs analyzed were unlikely to seriously affect gene function.

But of the true LoF variants, 100 are typically found in the genome of each European, the researchers said, and 20 affect both copies of the gene – meaning they are likely to result in complete loss of gene function.

“This shows that at least 1 percent of human genes can be shut down without causing serious disease,” said Mark Gerstein, a professor of biomedical informatics from Yale University in the United States, who also worked on the study.

“We were able to use the differences between such ‘LoF-tolerant’ genes and known human disease genes to develop a way of predicting whether or not a newly discovered change in a gene is likely to be severely disease-causing.”

Chris Tyler-Smith, who led the team at the Sanger Institute, said the findings would prove immediately useful for current DNA sequencing studies in patients with particular diseases.

The results produced a list of more than 1,000 LoF variants, he said, “and in most cases little or nothing is known about how these genes work or what they do.

“By studying the people carrying them in detail, we should get new insights into the function of many poorly known human genes.”

(Reporting by Kate Kelland)