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NEWS ... GLOBAL NEWS ... than once every 100 million years. MEDICAL IMPLANTS POWERED vaccines that were either identical or Continental flood basalts, meanwhile, hap- BY BODY HEAT slightly different to a strain of flu infecting than once every 100 million years. Continental flood basalts, meanwhile, hap- pen roughly once every 30 to 50 million years and last for about a million years. Geomar team leader Jason Phipps Morgan said that "the odds of a meteorite impact occurring at the same time as a con- tinental flood basalt within the last 400 mil- lion years is around one in eight". But the probability of four of these coincidences happening within the last 400 million years is one in 3,500. A Verneshot event could trigger a magnitude 11 earthquake and eject as much as 20 gigatonnes of rock into a "super- stratospheric" trajectory before crashing back to earth, in some cases causing impact craters. (Source: New Scientist, 8 May 2004) vaccines that were either identical or slightly different to a strain of flu infecting ponies. The ponies given mismatched vaccine were more likely to become infected and to excrete live flu virus, and also stayed infectious longer than ponies with a well-matched vaccine. "The longer infectious period allows the virus more replication cycles and a greater chance to evolve," says co-author James Wood. And when the researchers put their results into an epidemic model, they found the risk of large outbreaks after using a mismatched vaccine to be up to 1,000 times higher than after a well-matched vac- cination (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2004.2766). This kind of flawed vaccination may have allowed flu mutants to evolve in vaccinated poultry in Mexico (New Scientist, 27 March 2004). The work also raises further concerns about widespread poultry vaccination in China. A virulent new bird flu devastated birds across East Asia this year and also killed 22 people. (Source: New Scientist, 19 June 2004) Acmany in New York state is plan- ning to provide patients with an implantable power source that recharges the battery of their medical implant (i.e., pacemakers, defibrillators) using electricity generated by the patient's own body heat. By continuously recharging the batteries, it saves the patient from frequent surgery. In some low power devices, it could even replace the batteries altogether, making such operations unnecessary. The "biothermal battery", under develop- ment by Biophan Technologies of West Henrietta, will generate electricity using arrays of thousands of thermoelectric gen- erators built into an implantable chip. These generators exploit the well-known thermocouple effect, in which a small volt- age is generated when two of the junctions between two dissimilar materials are kept at different temperatures. Today's pacemaker batteries last more than a decade before they need replacing. Biophan says the device it is aiming for will be able extend this to three decades by continuously trickle-charging pacemaker batteries. It might even be able to power some low-power pacemakers directly. (Source: New Scientist, 12 June 2004) DNA STUDY SHOWS HUMANS AND CHIMPS NOT SO SIMILAR Hom: and their closest relatives, chimpanzees, may be more different than geneticists have realised. A compari- son of the chimpanzee's chromosome 22 with its human counterpart, chromosome 21, shows that just 1.44% of the chromo- some's 33.3 million DNA bases are differ- ent. The study also revealed nearly 68,000 insertions or deletions of DNA, most of which were only a few bases long. But because each gene contains hundreds or thousands of bases, even these differ- ences are enough to alter more than 80% of the proteins produced by those genes, says the International Chimpanzee Chromosome 22 Consortium (Nature 429:382). (Source: New Scientist, 29 May 2004) vase uw wey continuously trickle-charging pacemaker BACTERIAL INTEGRATED batteries. It might even be able to power CIRCUITS CAN SENSE TOXINS some low-power pacemakers directly. sing silicon chips to collect signals (Source: New Scientist, 12 June 2004) from specially altered bacteria, NASA-supported researchers at the CONTAGIOUS FLU VACCINES? University of Tennessee have created a he dangers of vaccinating against flu if device that can detect almost anything. the vaccine is not a perfect match for Microbiologist Gary Sayler and colleagues the disease strain have been highlighted by _ have already used these devices, known as a horse study. BBICs, or Bioluminescent Bioreporter Andrew Park's team at the Animal Integrated Circuits, to track pollution. Health Trust near Newmarket, UK, tested NASA is interested in sensing contami- nants because spaceships are tightly sealed. Unseen fumes from scientific experiments - or toxins produced by moulds and other ~ ae biofilms can accumulate and pose a hazard - — to astronauts. BBICs can be crafted to | - | sense almost anything: ammonia, cadmi- GL? AAC \ ] um, chromate, cobalt, copper, lead, mer- WW AAanlG | | cury, PCBs, proteins, ultrasound, ultravio- ci | | let radiation, zinc—the list goes on and on. wk \ lor \ \ | Microbes thrive in a wide range of envi- TS \ | ronments, so it's possible to design BBICs \ RECORD \ | { that can survive in extreme or highly conta- qyaAt os \ minated surroundings. "They can actually » leans | | do their job sitting in things such as jet > fuel/water mixtures," marvels Sayler. id . =) rr aA \ BBICs are useful on Earth, too. They - can detect formaldehyde emitted by wht pressed wood furniture and moulds often s implicated in sick building syndrome. ——— "If this device works as planned, it could vhat it used to be." turn out to be a very inexpensive kind of )s SS Ate - AciimMAL mlz Le AC j wie y _ ~! jens rere Pv + \Sae s' eacerD ‘e pre Bid ne Fest P Ts w — AS a 8 = NEXUS "The future isn't what it used to be." www.nexusmagazine.com AUGUST - SEPTEMBER 2004