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মঙ্গলবার, ৫ মার্চ, ২০১৩

Grunting Ohio zoo workers act as moms to gorilla

This photo provided by the Cincinnati Zoo on Thursday, February 28, 2013, shows a baby gorilla named Gladys being held by a surrogate human mother at the zoo in Cincinnati. The baby gorilla was born Jan. 29 at a Texas zoo to a first-time mother who wouldn't care for her. Zoo workers and volunteers are acting as surrogate mothers to prepare the baby to be introduced to two female gorillas at the Cincinnati Zoo who might accept her. (AP Photo/The Cincinnati Zoo/David Jenike)

In this Friday, Feb. 15, 2013, photo, Cindy a seventeen day old female baby gorilla reaches into the air at the Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville, Texas. The gorilla born last month at a South Texas zoo has been ignored by her mother so the animal will be sent to an Ohio zoo and introduced to a new troop. (AP Photo/The Brownsville Herald, Christian Rodriguez)

This photo provided by the Cincinnati Zoo on Friday, March 1, 2013, shows a baby gorilla named Gladys holding the finger of a surrogate human mother at the zoo in Cincinnati. The baby gorilla was born Jan. 29 at a Texas zoo to a first-time mother who wouldn't care for her. Zoo workers and volunteers are acting as surrogate mothers to prepare the baby to be introduced to two female gorillas at the Cincinnati Zoo who might accept her. (AP Photo/The Cincinnati Zoo/David Jenike)

This photo provided by the Cincinnati Zoo on Friday, March 1, 2013, shows Ron Evans, Primate Center Team Leader at the zoo, bottle feeding a baby gorilla named Gladys at the zoo in Cincinnati. The baby gorilla was born Jan. 29 at a Texas zoo to a first-time mother who wouldn't care for her. Zoo workers and volunteers are acting as surrogate mothers to prepare the baby to be introduced to two female gorillas at the Cincinnati Zoo who might accept her. (AP Photo/The Cincinnati Zoo/David Jenike)

This photo provided by the Cincinnati Zoo on Friday, March 1, 2013, shows Ron Evans, Primate Center Team Leader at the zoo, stretchiing a baby gorilla named Gladys the way a mother Western Lowland Gorilla would with her young. The baby gorilla was born Jan. 29 at a Texas zoo to a first-time mother who wouldn't care for her. Zoo workers and volunteers are acting as surrogate mothers to prepare the baby to be introduced to two female gorillas at the Cincinnati Zoo who might accept her. (AP Photo/The Cincinnati Zoo/David Jenike)

CINCINNATI (AP) ? Some zoo workers in Cincinnati are going ape over a baby gorilla.

They are wearing all-black outfits, grunting affectionately, and generally imitating mother gorillas to help the month-old baby adjust to a new home and get ready for a surrogate mother. Later, they will don hairy vests and carry baby Gladys on their backs, put on kneepads and gloves to move around like a gorilla, and they might knuckle-walk and climb a tree with baby on board.

Even though some of Gladys' mamas have beards and moustaches, they are trying to give her a mother's love, as much like a gorilla as they are able. They cuddle her, let her hang on them or squirm in their laps, lie down next to her and talk to her with different guttural sounds.

"Whatever a gorilla mom would do with her baby is what we have to do with this baby," said Ron Evans, the zoo's primate team leader and one of Gladys' human surrogates. "Everything that we can do ... obviously, I'm not producing milk."

He's heading a team of seven to 10 people who work in shifts of eight hours or so to provide the baby with 24-hour companionship. She came from the Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville, Texas, where she was born Jan. 29 to a first-time mother who showed little maternal instinct. Zoo employees Jerry and Cindy Stones ? the baby was named Gladys Stones on Friday ? bottle-fed and cared for her there.

The zoos agreed it was best to move her to Cincinnati, where two experienced mother gorillas are available to serve as surrogates. Over the years, 48 gorillas have been successfully born live at Cincinnati.

Evans said the Columbus Zoo in Ohio has been a global pioneer in taking gorilla babies in need of surrogates from other zoos, but this is a first for Cincinnati. Zoo employees want to be careful, and have a four- to five-month transition period to make sure first that the baby is healthy, then will be able to socialize and be accepted within its population of eight other gorillas.

"We don't want to move too fast with her, where we stress out the baby," Evans said. "It's going to be a gradual process."

A suite has been set up for Gladys and the human surrogates, within view, hearing and smell of the other gorillas. Evans said that so far, they have responded hospitably.

"Babies have a calming effect on a gorilla community," he said. "The two females were just fixated on that baby."

Gladys is gaining weight, big for her age at nearly 7 pounds, and alert and apparently curious, looking around a lot at her surroundings.

When working on her transition plan, Evans considered bringing in veteran neonatal nurses, but decided that familiarity with gorilla behavior was more important. As the baby progresses, volunteers who have worked with gorillas may be added to help.

Zoo spokeswoman Tiffany Barnes said the surrogate effort has drawn wide interest, with thousands of emails and social media responses already. There have been plenty of volunteers from the public to cuddle and bottle-feed the baby gorilla or otherwise help out.

"At this point, we aren't in need of volunteers, as we are using zoo staff members who have ape behavior knowledge and experience," she said. "That being said, if we ever needed volunteers, we know we don't have to look far."

___

Online:

www.cincinnatizoo.org

___

Contact the reporter at http://www.twitter.com/dansewell

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-03-04-Surrogate%20Gorillas/id-61bac366ef2e4b2096206ca8bb6388ed

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রবিবার, ৩ মার্চ, ২০১৩

The Real Reason Journal Articles Should Be Free

Around the time of the tragic suicide of Aaron Swartz, who lobbied tirelessly for free access to academic articles (in his sometimes grey-hat manner, which ultimately got him in trouble), I admitted to some friends that I didn't understand how this became a problem. Why aren't all journal articles free, all the time?

I don't mean that I didn't know why the journal publishers charged exorbitant fees for their subscriptions. If academic researchers have to have access to journal articles in order to do their jobs, then you can expect the journals to gouge academic libraries on the prices. What I didn't understand was: Why do academics even publish in journals that demand exclusive publishing rights for their work, and then charge readers huge fees to read it?

Well actually, we know the answer to that too: academics want the prestige of publishing in big-name journals that have established reputations, and as a result, those well-known journals are in a position to dictate the terms of the contract. A professor might genuinely want to publish their paper in a journal where it can be read for free by all, but they can hardly be blamed for thinking of their own career path first.

Here's the question I really wanted answered: If "prestige" only exists in the minds of other academics within a field, then why don't the academics within a given field just agree to confer "prestige" on papers published in open-access journals, if they can see for themselves that the quality is equivalent to what would be published in the old-guard journals that charge an arm and a leg? And then make hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions accordingly?

I don't mean that the papers published in an open-access journal would bypass the peer-review process, and that everyone in the field would have to judge the papers for themselves without any prior certification of their quality. One of the points that Peter Suber makes repeatedly in his book Open Access is that open access is not about skipping peer review and dumping papers directly onto the web. Rather, the process would work similarly to peer review for a traditional journal:

Author submits a paper to journal XYZ.
Journal XYZ selects one or more peer reviewers from among their list of people they consider qualified to review the paper. The peer reviewers send back their usual suggestions and some consensus is reached as to whether or not to publish.
If Journal XYZ publishes the paper, then they have certified that the paper passed the quality controls in step #2, and the author can now legitimately claim that they had a paper published in Journal XYZ.
If people in the field know that Journal XYZ is not skimping on the quality controls in step #2 ? that Journal XYZ is sending the papers to the same academics who would do peer review for one of the old-guard journals, and who are holding the papers to the same standard ? then they should respect the paper just as much as if it were published in a traditional journal. If a person has never heard of Journal XYZ, then it should only take a minute to explain to them how it works (and crucially, that Journal XYZ is just as strict about quality as the old-guard journals that everybody has heard of).

Each step in this process should cost the journal virtually nothing. The "hard cost," the part that consumes the time of people with unique skills, is the peer review step, but peer reviewers are usually paid by universities and consider peer review for academic journals to be part of their job description. At a minimum, all the editors really have to do is maintain the list of people they consider qualified to do the peer review, and send the submitted papers off to them.

Moreover, the entire process should be fast. Again, the "hard cost" in time is the peer review, but there's no reason that the delays between submission and publication should be in the range of months or years.

(I'm assuming that the article authors would want their writings to be widely read, or at least would not be opposed to it. That may not be the case if, for example, the authors were commissioned by a pharmaceutical company for a study that cast their drug in a favorable light, but the authors realize that their research methods contained errors and want to minimize the number of eyes on their paper, to reduce the chances of their chicanery being caught. Ben Goldacre's Bad Pharma documents these types of problems very thoroughly, but I'm sidestepping that issue for now.)

So, with that in mind as the ideal, I asked my friends, including many current and former academics, why this essentially wasn't the model that was used. Several mentioned the Public Library of Science, which publishes all articles in its journals under a Creative Commons Attribution License (free for anyone to read and reproduce in full, as long as the original author is cited), and finances its operations through publication fees. These fees are in the $2,000-$3,000 range, heavily discounted for low-income countries and authors, and in any case most academic authors pay the fees out of their research grants and not out of their own pockets. That sounded much better than the traditional model, I thought, but I still didn't understand why the costs weren't even closer to zero. Another friend pointed out that PLOS costs cover the expenses for many of their other activities ? which are all noble goals, to be sure, but at the same time, why isn't anybody operating a more bare-bones model which minimizes all expenses, and charges almost nothing for publication or subscription?

This, it turns out, appears to be the approach of the PeerJ project, which aims to let authors pay a one-time fee of $99 at article submission time for the right to publish one article per year ? or, if you prefer to pay only if your article is accepted for publication, you can pay $129 "on acceptance" (explained here). And the author of the Techdirt piece mentions that he submitted a paper which was published in the inaugural edition of one of PeerJ's journals, 10 weeks after the submission date. This is cheap and fast enough that I'd call it a validation of the theoretical model which predicts the whole process should be able to be done for almost no cost in almost no time. In other words, I think PeerJ will succeed, but even if it does fail, it will only be because of some anomalous business snafu, not because the hard costs of the service they're providing are greater than the dirt-cheap price they're charging for it. If for any reason PeerJ doesn't happen to get it right the first time, they or some other company should keep trying until someone makes it work.

The basic algorithm at work here ? taking a piece of content, submitting it to one or more suitably qualified reviewers, and then certifying the content based on the feedback of the reviewers ? is something I've advocated in many contexts over the years, for many different types of problems. In one article I argued that we could make success in the music industry into much more of a meritocracy, with far less arbitrariness in determining who succeeds and fails, if a suitably popular site like Pandora simply took new submissions from artists, had the content "rated" by a random sample of listeners interested in that type of music, and if enough of them liked it, push the content out to all of the fans of that genre. In "Crowdsourcing the Censors" I suggested that Facebook's complaint review process should use the same principle: If a given page received enough complaints, have the page contents reviewed by a random subset of Facebook users who had signed up to be "abusive content" reviewers, and then only flag the page for removal if a high enough percentage of those users voted that the page had indeed violated Facebook's guidelines. This year I argued that "We The People", the White House's online petition-drive-organizing website, should rate ideas based on what a random subset of users think of each idea, rather than allowing users to organize mobs of their friends and followers to vote their own ideas to the top of the pile (which, in case you missed it, is how 4chan gave us this). Or, if you think the general public is not qualified to rate ideas according to how they should be prioritized by the White House (and I'd be inclined to agree), you could have the ideas rated by a random subset of, say, the nation's economics professors.

Of course, I haven't heard of any plans to implement this algorithm in any of those contexts. Not that I expected the key power players to be reading my articles, but it's a little surprising that none of them ever came up with this idea independently, either. (To this day, the only website I'm aware of that ever implemented random-sample voting correctly, was HotOrNot.com, where users could rate members' pictures by attractiveness ? but each picture's rating was determined by showing it to a random subset of the site's visitors. That system is gone, since the site has made itself over into a date-finding service.)

But academia in general, and science specifically, is different from other arenas in a number of key ways which could help this algorithm succeed:

Academia, uniquely, is comprised of many professionals whose love of knowledge and intellectual inquiry, is greater than their desire for money. That's not to say that I don't think the same algorithm could work just as well in a business like the music industry, where most of the stakeholders are in it for the money. But even if Pandora did successfully implement the algorithm, it would meet a lot of resistance from entrenched interests in the music industry, who make their money by finding and promoting and managing talent and would not be happy about a new system that threatened to make them irrelevant. In academia, by contrast, it's quite plausible that even the "entrenched interests" ? the people who had become superstars under the old system ? would see the new system's great potential for disseminating free knowledge, and would welcome it even if it gave scrappy new upstart academics a chance to dethrone them. Not everybody in academia loves knowledge more than they love their own prestige, but I know more people like that in academia than anywhere else.
In academia, even among people who do care primarily about their own prestige, many of them have tenure and guaranteed job security, a situation that does not exist in most other industries. This gives them the freedom to experiment with new models, such as submitting papers to upstart PeerJ journals. But more importantly for our purposes, it means they can announce that in their department's hiring and promotion decisions, they will count PeerJ-published papers as legitimate professional accomplishments, for the benefit of non-tenured faculty members who do have to worry about their resume.
Academics, particularly in maths and sciences, are more prone to the kind of thinking that would lead a person naturally in the direction of the kind of system that PeerJ embodies. First, think of a theoretical model (like the kind I described near the beginning of the article). This model predicts that, ideally, it should be possible to publish papers at very low cost with quick turnaround times, without sacrificing peer-review quality assurance. Now, try to approximate that model as closely as possible in the real world. (In most other industries that I've worked in, there's much more inertia around the existing way of doing things, and far less willingness to entertain any discussion about whether a theoretical model can show how we could accomplish the same thing with vastly less overhead.)

And that, in the end, is the real reason journal articles should be free. Not because the U.S. government is making it a condition for taxpayer-funded research, although that is a welcome development. But because there's no part of the process that should cost very much to begin with, if article authors and peer reviewers are already being paid by their employers. The last piece of the puzzle is that enough academics and faculty departments have to agree to confer "prestige" on articles published in open-access journals, equivalent to the level of prestige that they would accord for an article published in a traditional journal of the same quality. If they won't do that, then the old-guard journals will maintain their monopoly on conferring "prestige", and don't be surprised if journal prices keep growing to the point where even Harvard can't pay for them.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/kwEgnwNn-e4/story01.htm

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Important control mechanism behind autoimmune diseases discovered

May 4, 2010 ? Researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have discovered a new control mechanism in our immune system. The discovery is of potential significance to the treatment of serious diseases such as MS (multiple sclerosis), rheumatoid arthritis, and SLE (Systemic lupus erythematosus).

"Now that we've started to understand the regulatory mechanisms involved in these autoimmune diseases, we are hopeful that new treatments can be found," says Mikael Karlsson, associate professor at the Department of Medicine at Karolinska Institutet in Solna, and one of the team behind the study now published in the highly reputed periodical, The Journal of Experimental Medicine.

An important component of our immune defence is a type of cell called a B cell. Normally, the job of these cells is to produce antibodies, which in turn bind to and neutralise invasive microorganisms, such as bacteria and viruses. In people with an autoimmune disease, explains Dr Karlsson, these B cells actually have an injurious effect and instead of serving the body, are activated against its own tissues, which they start to break down.

Patients with SLE and other autoimmune diseases have lower levels of so-called NKT cells. Previously, it was not known what part these cells play in the origin and development of the disease; now, however, the research group at KI has shown that this deficiency is a contributory pathogenic factor.

"We've demonstrated that NKT cells can regulate how B cells become activated against healthy tissue, and that a lack of NKT cells results in greater misguided B cell activation," says Dr Karlsson. "So now we can mechanically link the NKT cell defect in patients to the disease."

The study also shows that the NKT cells directly impede faulty B cell activation, and that they do so early in the misdirected process. The team managed to inhibit the activity of pathogenic B cells by adding NKT cells -- a result that may one day lead to new types of treatment.

"This means that new treatments specifically targeting the protective NKT cells can help this patient group," concludes Dr Karlsson.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Karolinska Institutet.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Journal Reference:

F. Wermeling, S. M. Lind, E. D. Jordo, S. L. Cardell, M. C. I. Karlsson. Invariant NKT cells limit activation of autoreactive CD1d-positive B cells. Journal of Experimental Medicine, 2010; 207 (5): 943 DOI: 10.1084/jem.20091314

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/UR3WaKi9EQc/130301085633.htm

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শনিবার, ২ মার্চ, ২০১৩

Sequester deadline day is here, so what now?

By Tom Curry, National Affairs Writer, NBC News

It?s Friday, March 1, and that means the federal government has crossed the much-hyped and dreaded deadline for the fiscal reductions known as the ?sequester.?

The members of Congress who for voted for the Budget Control Act ? and the budget cuts contained within ??and President Barack Obama who signed it into law on Aug. 2, 2011, may not have believed the day would arrive, but now it has.

But today is only the beginning of the beginning.

For one thing, Obama must sign an order formally starting the ?sequester? or spending reductions ? which according to a new estimate from the Congressional Budget Office ??would amount to $42 billion in the current fiscal year.

And White House aides have indicated that the president is not likely to put pen to paper on that order until after he meets with congressional leaders, a meeting slated for Friday morning.

Once Obama signs the order to start the spending cuts, any furloughs of federal workers could not begin at least for another 30 days due to federal regulations and to collective bargaining agreements which the government has with the unions that represent roughly half of the federal workforce.

Alex Wong / Getty Images

House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi speaks during a news conference Feb. 28, 2013 on Capitol Hill in Washington.

So the Border Patrol Agents in Arizona won?t suddenly vanish on Friday and the civilians who repair Navy ships won?t be ordered to immediately put down their tools.

As with many things the federal government does, there are multiple rules, regulatory hurdles, avenues for appeal and opportunities for litigation.

As Under Secretary of Defense Robert Hale, the Pentagon?s Chief Financial Officer, explained last week, ?The bottom line is, furloughs would not actually start for DOD employees until late April.?

He explained, ?There's a whole series of notifications. We started the first one today (Feb. 20), with the notification to Congress, along with a message by the secretary of defense to our civilian employees. That starts a 45-day clock ticking. Until that clock has run out, we cannot proceed with furloughs.?

He added, ?At some point in mid-March, we will send a notification to each employee who may be furloughed. That starts a 30-day clock, waiting period, before we can take any action. And then later on in April, we will send a decision to employees, and they have a one-week period, once we've made that decision, to appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board.???

The Merit Systems Protection Board is the independent agency which hears and decides complaints when a federal employee claims that he or she has been the victim of an unfair, punitive, or discriminatory personnel action. The board issued 7,585 decisions last year.

Related: Budget cuts likely to be felt on Main Street

In a memo sent Wednesday to Cabinet officers and the heads of federal agencies, Danny Werfel, the controller of the Office of Management and Budget, emphasized that agency heads ?must allow employees? exclusive representatives? ? their unions ? ?to have pre-decisional involvement? in planned furloughs or other personnel actions ?to the fullest extent practicable? and must bargain with the unions over the impact of furloughs. The head of each department or agency must comply with ?any and all collective bargaining requirements.?

In his memo, Werfel did not flatly warn federal agency heads to not hire any new personnel, but he did say they should give ?increased scrutiny? to hiring any new workers, as well to the money they spend on training programs, conferences, and travel.

Like Hale at the Pentagon, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano emphasized in her briefing for reporters this week that the effects of the spending cuts ? while they will be substantial ? won?t be instantaneous.

?The impacts people are going to see ??and they will build over the next several weeks; you won?t see them immediately like a shutdown, but it will accrue over the next few weeks,? she said. ?Lines, procedures, wait times (at U.S. ports of entry and airports) are all going to get longer.?

She added, ?It won?t be like a (government) shutdown, where it?s like turning off the light switch. But all I can say for folks is these are the effects that will accrue. Please don?t yell at the customs officer or the TSO (transportation security officer) officer because the lines are long. The lines over the next few weeks are going to start to lengthen in some dramatic ways in parts of the country.?

Just as the personnel decisions will take weeks to ripple their way through the federal workforce, so too will decisions on contracts for new ships, drones, and electronic gadgets.

?I don't anticipate that we will cancel many, if any contracts, because we'd incur substantial costs,? Hale told reporters last week.

He said that due to the spending cuts, the Pentagon might delay entering into new contracts, ?but I wouldn't expect that we will terminate existing contracts.?

Federal agencies are warning about potentially devastating impacts from the automatic budget cuts that will go into effect on Friday. Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Development, discusses.

Seeking to reassure contractors, Hale said, ?If you've got a contract with us, we're going to pay you ... . Even under sequestration and furloughs, we will find a time to keep our payments to our employers and the vendors on time.?

The slow grinding of the bureaucratic wheels does not mean that furloughs won?t hurt, if they occur.

A fact sheet issued by the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal union which representing 650,000 federal and D.C. government workers, spells out some of the possible pain:

?Up to 22 days out of work with no pay, equivalent to a 20 percent pay cut;

?Reduced contribution to workers? retirement savings accounts;

?Reduced take-home pay due to the deduction of health insurance benefits at the full salary rate.

But as a recent report from the Congressional Research Service pointed out, the sequestration procedures provide for exemptions for many groups.

Among the categories which the law spares from the spending cuts are:

?Social Security benefits

?The Medicaid health insurance program for low-income people

?Payments to individuals in the form of refundable tax credits, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-wage workers and the tax credits under the 2010 health care law to help people buy health insurance.

?Retirement benefits paid to retired federal workers

?Child Nutrition Programs, including the School Lunch and School Breakfast programs,

?The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly called ?food stamps?

?Pell Grants for college students

?Unobligated cash balances, carried over from prior years, for nondefense programs

?Pay for military personnel.

This story was originally published on Fri Mar 1, 2013 12:00 AM EST

Source: http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/01/17136205-sequester-deadline-day-is-here-but-the-effects-wont-be-instantaneous?lite

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শুক্রবার, ১ মার্চ, ২০১৩

Annual shark kills 'hit 100 million'

1 March 2013 Last updated at 14:47 ET

By Matt McGrath Environment correspondent, BBC News

The most accurate assessment to date of the impact of commercial fishing on sharks suggests around 100 million are being killed each year.

The researchers say that this rate of exploitation is far too high, especially for a species which reproduces later in life.

The major factor driving the trade is the ongoing demand for shark fins for soup in Chinese communities.

The report has been published in the Journal Marine Policy.

Researchers admit that establishing the true level of global shark fishing is extremely difficult, as the quality of the data is poor. Many sharks that are caught have their fins removed at sea with the body dumped overboard. These fish are often not included in official reports.

Fin margin

However, the scientists estimate a mortality range of between 63 and 273 million sharks in 2010.

Continue reading the main story

?Start Quote

They are not reproducing fast enough to keep up with the rate we are pulling them out of the ocean?

End Quote Dr Demian Chapman Stony Brook University

"There is a very large range and that speaks to the quality of data, which is not great," said Dr Demian Chapman from Stony Brook University in New York, US.

"Certainly 100 million is the median estimate and that's the best estimate there is," he added.

While the number of sharks being caught has not changed substantially between 2000 and 2010, the authors of the research argue that the commercial fishing fleets are simply changing location and the shark species they target in order to keep up with demand. The fear is that eventually these shark species will crash.

Fuelling the concern is the fact that many of the species that are most threatened are very slow to reproduce.

"A lot of the sharks that are prized in the trade take more than a decade to reach maturity," said Dr Chapman.

"There is a really razor-thin level of mortality that sharks can experience before their population trajectory becomes negative - that is really what's been happening.

"They are not reproducing fast enough to keep up with the rate we are pulling them out of the ocean," he added.

The biggest driver for shark fishing has been the demand for shark fin soup, a product that is seen as a luxury item among Chinese communities.

While fins are still being cut off sharks at sea, several countries including Canada, the US and the European Union have tried to restrict this by law.

But this has not had the desired effect, Dr Chapman explained.

"The problem is that the fins are so valuable that now people are not 'finning' the sharks at sea - they're keeping the whole thing. But it is still dead; the finning bans have not stopped the root problem."

On Sunday, negotiators from 178 countries will gather in Bangkok for the meeting of the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites). There are proposals to regulate the trade in five of the most threatened species of shark.

At a previous meeting in 2010, similar restrictions fell just short of the required-two thirds majority. This time, campaigners say they have broad support among developed and developing countries and are optimistic they will be able to muster the required votes.

Follow Matt on Twitter.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21629173#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

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Problems with identifying meat? The answer is to check the barcode

Mar. 1, 2013 ? Want to know what you are eating? DNA barcodes can be used to identify even very closely related species, finds an article published in BioMed Central's open access journal Investigative Genetics. Results from the study show that the labelling of game meat in South Africa is very poor with different species being substituted almost 80% of the time.

In South Africa game meat biltong (air dried strips) is big business with over 10,000 wildlife farms and is supplemented by private hunting. This meat is considered to be 'healthier' than beef because it is lower in fat and cholesterol and perceived to be lower in additives.

Using mitochondrial COI DNA barcoding and cytb sequencing, researchers analysed samples of game meat from supermarkets, wholesalers and other outlets and compared them to known samples and library sequences. From 146 samples over 100 were mislabelled.

All the beef samples were correct, but for the most badly labelled case 92% of kudu was a different species. Only 24% of springbok and ostrich biltong was actually springbok or ostrich. The rest was horse, impala, hartebeest, wildebeest, waterbok, eland, gemsbok, duiker, giraffe, kangaroo, lamb, pork or beef. Worryingly one sample labelled zebra was actually mountain zebra, a 'red listed' species threatened with extinction.

Maria Eugenia D'Amato from the University of the Western Cape commented, "The delivery of unidentifiable animal carcasses to market and the general lack of regulations increases the chances of species mislabelling and fraud. This has implications for species safety but also has cultural and religious implications. This technique is also able to provide new information about the identity of animals and meant that we found several animals whose DNA had been misidentified in the scientific libraries."

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by BioMed Central Limited, via AlphaGalileo.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Journal Reference:

Maria E D'Amato, Evguenia Alechine, Kevin W Cloete, Sean Davison and Daniel Corach. Where is the game? Wild meat products authentication in South Africa: a case study. Investigative Genetics, 2013; (in press) [link]

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/CPtUy4dhlXw/130228194659.htm

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