O's digest parziale

Oggi alla radio, non in onda, si parlava del virus Zika, d’altronde se aspettassi un figlio e dovessi viaggiare parecchio, sarei un po’ in ansia anch’io.

Su Nature, un editoriale ricorda che è urgente chiarire il nesso tra le microcefalie e l’infezione, e conclude con la solita raccomandazione:

The most important immediate step is to attack the Aedes mosquito vector. Effective vector control is not easy, but an all-out campaign is in any case long overdue. Even if the threat of Zika turns out to have been overrated, concerted action now would have valuable pay-offs in reducing the burden of the established disease threats of dengue and chikungunya in the Americas.

Chissà se il panico attuale servirà… C’è poi il problema dei criteri diversi usati per la diagnosi di microcefalia, che sarebbero quindi sovrastimate, secondo un rapporto del Latin American Collaborative Study of Congenital Malformations (ECLAMC), che a sua volta pare sottostimarle, scrive Declan Butler.

Olive Heffernan riassume le ricerche sull’espansione dei Tropici le cui fasce esterne più aride avanzano verso i poli

there is little agreement on how quickly the border of the tropics is shifting: estimates run from less than half a degree of latitude per decade to several. At the more extreme end, the change in climate would be like moving London to the position of Rome over the course of a century. The problem is compounded by lack of consensus on how to define the tropics, which makes it hard for scientists to agree on the extent of the changes. Nevertheless, researchers investigating this phenomenon agree that it is real.

In una lettera firmata da altri 69 ricercatori, non solo in “scienze dure” o sbaglio? (sbaglio, h/t Stefano), Giorgio Parisi s’incavola perché “alcuni paesi” contribuiscono ai programmi di ricerca UE sottraendo fondi ai propri:

Italy, for example, seriously neglects its research base. The Italian National Research Council has not overseen basic research for decades, being itself starved of resources. University funding has dwindled to a bare minimum. (…) This year’s PRIN  – i Progetti d’interesse nazionale, defunti dal 2012 ndr – allocation of a 92-million (US$100-million) funding call to cover all research areas is too little, too late. Compare this with the annual French National Research Agency’s allocation of up to 1 billion, or with Italy’s 900-million annual contribution to the EU Seventh Framework Programme that ran in 2007–13. That resulted in a net annual loss of 300 million for Italian science.

Anche Elizabeth Gibney (c’è scritto 4 gennaio, ma è un errore) si occupa delle riviste “sovrapposte” ad arXiv, un modello di editoria scientifica detto “open access Diamond”, proposto dagli astrofici e da Tim Gowers che metterà in difficoltà sia l’oligopolio strozzino che l’editoria open access predona e spennapolli.

Se si diffonde:
Whatever their costs, the main problems facing all new journals hoping to achieve traction among researchers are ensuring speed and editorial fairness, adds Andrew King, a cosmologist at the University of Leicester, UK. “Reliability — and particularly fairness — are very hard to guarantee,” he says, pointing out that the backing of long-lived organizations with a stake in the future of a field, such as learned societies, is often crucial to a journal’s success.

Ho letto solo un paio di paper. Ramon Lorenzo-Redondo et al. trovano che l’HIV non è “latente”, ma continua a replicarsi nei “santuari” linfatici, dove i farmaci anti-retrovirali non arrivano in concentrazione sufficiente a eliminarli. Con un modello di evoluzione filogenetica confermano che nei santuari, “non è inevitabile” che l’HIV diventi resistente ai farmaci. Dati i loro effetti collaterali, non pare una buona notizia.

Trifoglio bianco delle Hawaii, fonte

Matilde Baude et al. hanno fatto una cosa straordinaria. Sono riusciti a ricostruire la quantità di nettare messa a disposizione delle api (“bees” intese come Apoideae, bombi principalmente) dalle “risorse floreali” (260 specie) nel Galles e in Inghilterra tra il 1930 e 2007 e in Gran Bretagna tra il 1978 e i 2007. Poi l’hanno correlata alla quantità di api presenti nei vari – e nel frattempo pure variati – ecosistemi. Conclusione:

our results indicate that improved grassland has the potential to contribute massively to the nectar available nationally. Small adjustments to the management cycle in improved grasslands, allowing white clover, the dominant resource species, to flower, would help realize this potential, although its utility might be restricted to a limited number of pollinator species.

Combinazione, oggi su Science un altro gruppo inglese pubblica una ricerca di genetica sulle api intese come mellifere. Il virus delle ali deformi (DWV) che un tempo infettava le mellifere europee è stato trasmesso nel sud-est asiatico dalla Varroa jacobsoni europea alla Varroa destructor asiatica, con le esportazioni di api mellifere.

Dall’Asia il virus è tornato mutato insieme al più feroce acaro asiatico, contribuendo così al declino delle colonie e di altri impollinatori nei 17 paesi per i quali hanno raccolto dati attendibili. Concludono:

DWV not only causes colony mortality in managed A. mellifera populations but also affects feral populations and has been identified as an emerging disease in wild pollinators, with dramatic impacts on survival in bumblebees. As such, DWV may pose a threat not only to managed honeybees but also to pollinators more generally. Wild pollinators, such as bumblebees and solitary bees, have experienced a loss of species richness and diversity during recent decades, which can be attributed partly to infectious diseases. Our results show that there is a global pandemic of DWV, with transmission mediated by European populations of A. mellifera. Transmission has been amplified by human-mediated movement of honeybees or other infected material and fueled by the concurrent emergence of V. destructor mites. Pollinator populations are interconnected via trade and movement of managed pollinators, which offers the potential for rapid spread of pathogens and parasites around the globe and between species. To reduce the negative effects of DWV on beekeeping and wild pollinators, tighter controls, such as mandatory health screenings and regulated movement of honeybees across borders, should be imposed, with every effort made to maintain the currentVarroa-free refugia for the conservation of wild and managed pollinators.

“Prospettiva” di Ethel Villalobos.
Tengo per domani tre papers sul clima, quello sulle cause dell’alopecia e le news di Science…

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Le ultime parole famose

Bob Greenyer del Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project, in mezzo a cori esultanti per un nano-eccesso di calore prodotto dalla cella Celani, ieri

At around hour 52:40 in the experiment, the power was raised by 10W on the suggestion of Francesco Celani. The event and subsequent response by the MFC can be seen in this GIF animation:  https://goo.gl/JyLya0
Francesco Celani’s comment about the result is also attached. (…) What this shows more than anything is the value of Live Open Science – an onlooker, in this case a knowledge expert, can propose a test whilst an experiment is running and see the results. If this was run behind closed doors – this test might never have happened. This experiment took 2 years to put together and a LOT of donations – there is a lot of value being squeezed into a short time period.
The experiments in France and US are expected to last for another 2-4 days, please, if you have some inspiration, engage your thinking caps with reasoned experiments that you feel we need to do to add credibility to any potential dataset.

Ma la sfi(…)a passerina non dorme mai. 

Bob Greenyer oggi:

Guys – I have to got to hospital as I fell off my bicycle (fortunately not at speed) and my entire fall has been taken by my left thumb… Before I go to hospital – I want to say that I have been working with Mathieu this afternoon to address the legitimate points raised by “Fact Police“. The net result is that at this stage, I must report that due to an instrumentation artefact, it is likely we have NOT seen apparent excess heat in this experiment to date.
Mathieu is stuck at home ill – but he is getting to the bottom of it and reporting on our main site…  See here.