Crabs Really Do Feel Pain: Study

Scientists have long held that crabs are unable to feel pain because they lack the biology to do so, but behavioral evidence has recently shown otherwise. Now, new research further supports the hypothesis that crabs feel pain by showing that crabs given a mild shock will take steps to avoid getting shocked in the future.

From humans to fruit flies, numerous species come equipped with nociception, a type of reflex that helps avoid immediate tissue damage. On the other hand, pain, which results in a swift change of behavior to avoid future damage, isn't so widespread. (Research has also shown naked mole rats may be immune to pain.)

In the new study, researchers allowed shore crabs (Carcinus maenas) to choose between one of two dark shelters in a brightly lit tank. One shelter came with a mild shock. After just two trials, crabs that initially chose the shocking shelter began opting for the zapless shelter, suggesting they learned to discriminate between the two options and headed for the less painful one.

"It's almost impossible to prove an animal feels pain, but there are criteria you can look at," said lead researcher Robert Elwood, an animal behaviorist at Queen's University, Belfast, in the U.K. "Here we have another criteria satisfied — if the data are consistent, a body of evidence [showing crabs feel pain] can build up."

Building evidence

Elwood initially set out to see if crabs and other crustacean decapods feel pain after a chef posed him the question around eight years ago. If the invertebrates (animals without backbones) feel pain, he reasoned, their reactions to unpleasant stimuli would be more than the simple reflex of nociception — the experience would change their long-term behavior.

Elwood's first experiment showed that prawns whose antennae were doused with caustic soda vigorously groomed their antennae, as if trying to ameliorate pain. Importantly, this behavior didn't occur if Elwood treated the antennae with an anesthetic first.

Another experiment showed that hermit crabs would leave their shells if given a mild shock. "A naked crab is basically a dead crab — they were trading off avoiding the shock with getting out of the shell," Elwood told LiveScience, adding that many of the crabs moved into new shells if any were available. [The 10 Weirdest Animal Discoveries]

For his new study, Elwood tested 90 shore crabs, which naturally seek dark spaces, to see if they exhibited "avoidance learning" and would discriminate between a dangerous and a safe area. Half of the crabs were shocked upon entering the first chamber of their choice, while the other half were not. For each crab, the jolting chamber stayed the same throughout the 10 trials.

In the second trial, most of the crabs returned to their original shelter; whether they were shocked in the first trial had little effect on their second choice. However, crabs were more likely to change shelter in the third trial if they were shocked in the second trial. And as the trials wore on, crabs that chose incorrectly became more likely to exit the unpleasant chamber, brave the bright arena and hide in the alternate shelter. By the final test, the majority of the crabs chose the nonshock shelter at first go.

Time for change?

The research "provides evidence that supports the issue that crabs — and other crustacean decapods as well — feel pain," Francesca Gherardi, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Florence in Italy who wasn't involved in the study, told LiveScience in an email. "It is avoidance learning that makes the difference."

Animals in pain should quickly learn to avoid the unpleasant stimulus and show long-term changes in behavior, Gherardi noted. More research is needed on decapods' avoidance learning and "discrimination abilities between painful and nonpainful situations," he said.

Elwood said he thinks future research should go in a different direction. Stress often comes with pain, he said, so other experiments could look at changes in crustacean hormones or heart rates due to shock.

Whatever the case, Elwood feels it may be time to reconsider the treatment of decapods in the food industry. "If the evidence for pain in decapods continues to stack up with mammals and birds that already get some protection, then perhaps there should be some nod in that direction for these animals," he said.

The study was published today (Jan. 16) in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

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Loneliness Is Bad for Your Health, Study Suggests

NEW ORLEANS — Feeling lonely? New research suggests you might want to reach out. Not only is loneliness an unpleasant condition, it can harm the body's immune system.

The new study, presented Saturday (Jan. 19) here at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, reveals that people who are lonely experience more reactivation of latent viruses in their systems than the well-connected. Lonely people also are more likely than others to produce inflammatory compounds in response to stress, a factor implicated in heart disease and other chronic disorders.

"Both, in different ways, indicate that the immune system is a little out of whack," said study researcher Lisa Jaremka, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research at Ohio State University College of Medicine.

The lonely body

Jaremka and her colleagues were interested in immune links to loneliness because feeling socially disconnected is associated with poor health and chronic disease. They recruited 200 female breast cancer survivors, average age 51, and 134 overweight, middle-age adults with no major health problems.

In the first study, the researchers analyzed the blood of the breast cancer survivors for antibodies against cytomegalovirus, a herpes virus. These common viruses can remain dormant and symptomless inside the body. Even when active, they may not cause symptoms, but they do trigger the immune system to produce antibodies, or protective proteins that help the immune system hunt down the rogue viruses. Higher antibody levels indicate higher levels of activated virus. The participants also filled out questionnaires about their loneliness and social connectedness. [7 Personality Traits That Are Bad For You]

The results revealed that the lonelier the participant, the higher the levels of cytomegalovirus antibodies in the blood.

"It's definitely indicating that the immune system is compromised in some way," Jaremka told LiveScience. "It's unable at that time, for whatever reason, in this case loneliness perhaps, to keep that virus under control."

In a second study, the researchers measured inflammatory proteins called cytokines in 144 of the breast cancer survivors as well as the healthy though overweight middle-age adults. The participants gave a blood sample and then were subjected to the stress of having to give an impromptu speech and do mental math in front of a panel of people in white lab coats. To up the anxiety, the panel gave the participants no encouragement.

"No matter what they say and no matter what jokes they crack, no matter how much they smile, the panel just stares at them, basically," Jaremka said.

The researchers also triggered the participants' immune systems with a harmless compound from bacterial cells before taking a second blood sample.

The lonelier the person, the higher the levels of cytokine interleukin-6 after the stressful speech. This cytokine is important for healing in the short term, because it promotes inflammation — think of the redness and swelling that accompanies a healing cut. However, when cytokines react too readily, inflammation can be harmful. Chronic inflammation has been linked to coronary heart disease, arthritis, Type 2 diabetes and even suicide attempts.

Loneliness and stress

Researchers have long known that chronic stress has a similar inflammation-producing, immune-disrupting effect on the body. Loneliness, in fact, may act as its own source of chronic stress, Jaremka said. Earlier research shows that close and connected relationships are necessary to help people thrive; without them, people are under a constant stressful cloud of missing this crucial social connection.

People who are lonely also tend to react more strongly to negative events in their lives, Jaremka said. If lonely people experience daily life as more stressful, it may cause chronic stress, which in turn disrupts the immune system.

Solving the problem is harder than telling lonely hearts to go out and seek more close friends, Jaremka said — it's easier said than done. But if researchers can figure out how loneliness results in poor health, they may be able to come up with treatments that disrupt the links, in essence making loneliness less of a burden, at least physically. 

The study shouldn't be seen as all doom and gloom, Jaremka said. The flip side is that those who feel close to friends and family can know that their health is likely getting a boost from those relationships.

"People who feel socially connected are experiencing positive outcomes," she said.

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5 Famous Scientists That Started Their Work as Young Teens

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Monster Black Hole Burp Surprises Scientists

LONG BEACH, Calif. – Astronomers have discovered what appears to be colossal belch from a massive black hole at the heart of a distant galaxy. The outburst was 10 times as bright as the biggest star explosion, scientists say.

The potential super-sized black hole burp find came as astronomers studied the galaxy NGC 660, which is located 44 million light-years away in the constellation Pisces.

"The discovery was entirely serendipitous. Our observations were spread over a few years, and when we looked at them, we found that one galaxy had changed over that time from being placid and quiescent to undergone a hugely energetic outburst at the end," study researcher Robert Minchin of Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico said in a statement.

To determine whether the outburst was from a supernova — the explosive end of a star —  or the galaxy's core, the researchers used the High Sensitivity Array, a global network of telescopes that includes the Very Long Baseline Array, the Arecibo Telescope, the NSF's 100-meter Green Bank Telescope, and the 100-meter Effelsberg Radio Telescope in Germany.

Instead of an expanding ring of material suggesting a supernova event, the researchers found five locations with bright radio emissions clustered around the galaxy's core.

"The most likely explanation is that there are jets coming from the core, but they are precessing, or wobbling, and the hot spots we see are where the jets slammed into the material near the galaxy's nucleus," said Chris Salter, also of the Arecibo Observatory.

 Those jets, the researchers said, would mean the outburst likely came from a supermassive black hole at the heart of galaxy NGC 660. As the black hole devours dust and mass, it pulls a whirling disk of matter into its heart that spews jets of particles as it is consumed.

Supermassive black holes are colossal structures at the cores of galaxies that are between millions and billions of times as massive as the sun. They are much larger than stellar-mass black holes, which are created from the deaths of giant stars and can contain the mass of about 10 suns.

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Will Climate Change Get Cold Shoulder in Obama's 2nd Term?

As President Barack Obama prepares to take the oath of office for the second time, he has promised that climate change will be a priority in his second term. The chances that significant climate action will actually happen, however, remain slim, policy experts say.

"I always have hope, but it is sometimes hard to see how real progress, substantial progress, is going to be made with the fact that the Congress is so polarized," said Travis Franck, a policy analyst for nongovernmental organization Climate Interactive.

After his re-election, Obama told Time magazine that his daughters inspired him to think long term, particularly about issues of climate change. And in his first news conference after the election, the president told reporters that he planned to shape a climate change agenda, but gave no details on what that agenda might look like — though he did say that a tax on carbon emissions was likely a non-starter.

These statements took place before the massacre at Newtown, Conn., which pushed gun control to the forefront. And climate change will surely have to vie for attention with other divisive issues, such as an upcoming congressional battle over the nation's debt ceiling. While Obama may be able to take some executive action to tighten environmental regulations in certain sectors, such as fuel-efficient vehicles or clean energy, experts say, a gridlocked Congress is unlikely to cooperate with the administration's global warming agenda. 

"From my point of view, being an observer from Europe, I think it's more likely this sector-by-sector approach is implemented than a national climate policy," said Niklas Höhne, the director of energy and climate policy at Ecofys, a renewable energy and climate policy consulting firm. [8 Ways Global Warming Is Already Changing the World]

An urgent call for action

Obama's second term comes at a time when climate scientists are making increasingly urgent calls for action to mitigate the effects of a warming world. In November, University of Bern, Switzerland, climate researcher Thomas Stocker warned in the journal Science that every year of delay makes it harder to keep warming below levels that would severely disrupt the planet.

A cap of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) of warming, the most conservative goal discussed by the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, is already out of reach, Stocker wrote. After 2027, the world can no longer hope to keep warming below 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C), which is the number currently at the center of international climate negotiations.

The World Bank also issued a report in November, calling for global action on climate change. And in January, a study published in the journal Nature found that the biggest determiner of whether the world would successfully tackle climate change is not tech savvy or hoped-for green development, but the timing of political action.

Public opinion appears receptive to climate change as well. About 73 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of independents and 33 percent of Republicans say they are somewhat or very worried about climate change, according to a September 2012 survey of Americans by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.

Support for action was higher. Three-quarters of independents, 93 percent of Democrats and 52 percent of Republicans said global warming should be at least a medium priority for the president and Congress. Severe weather such as the summer's wildfires out west may have shifted these opinions, as the same numbers in March 2012 (before the fires) were 9 points lower for Democrats and 7 points lower for independents. Republicans held steady between March and September.

Challenges in Congress

The party schisms seen in the polling data are more pronounced in Congress, where representatives routinely deny the scientific consensus that climate is changing and that greenhouse gas emissions by humans are the main driver.

"I'm not going to bet the U.S. economy or the Texas economy on a theory that is not proven," Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) told the Dallas Morning News this month. "Climate has always been changing." [Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted]

Attitudes like Barton's are why climate policy specialists expect little in the way of climate legislation in the upcoming four years.

The administration can make some progress on its own, said Elizabeth Sawin, co-director of Climate Interactive. In Obama's first term, for example, the administration ordered new fuel standards for lightweight vehicles and coal-fired power plants, and there was money included in the economic stimulus for public transportation and clean energy. Similar efforts in the second term could move the country toward lower carbon emissions, Sawin told LiveScience.

"Anything is better than nothing," she said.

But a piecemeal approach is less likely than an overarching plan to succeed in slowing warming significantly, Franck, the policy analyst for Climate Interactive, said. Moreover, a failure to act nationally puts the administration in an awkward spot in international negotiations. The 2011 climate talks in Durbin, South Africa, set a plan for a new international climate treaty to be prepared by 2015.

"We've lost a lot of credibility in climate change negotiations, because we've been kind of paralyzed," Franck told LiveScience. "If [international negotiators] bring home a treaty or agree to something, when does it get ratified by the Senate? Will we have domestic legislation already? Will the Senate pass it and then we'll have to pass domestic legislation?"

If the Obama administration is stuck with instituting piecemeal regulations, it will be a "major challenge" to communicate this progress to the international community, Höhne told LiveScience.

"The international climate negotiations really depend on the U.S. bringing something forward," he said. "If the U.S. doesn't bring something forward that is considered by most players as something new and something ambitious, then the new international agreement in 2015 will not be ambitious."

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What Does the Fiscal Deal Mean for Science?

The deal that lawmakers and the White House finalized late Tuesday (Jan. 1) to avert going over the fiscal cliff leaves science agencies in limbo, delaying a decision on budget cuts for two more months.

The agreement does, however, reduce the potential impact of these cuts.

"I am hopeful they will find a deal that spares the worst of these cuts, that takes a much more balanced approach," said Matt Hourihan of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Tuesday's tax deal, he said, "is a step in that direction."

The mandatory cuts would affect the current year's budget as well as future ones, leaving agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, NASA and the National Science Foundation in limbo.

"This deal doesn't change that at all, it just extends that condition of uncertainty into the next couple of months," said Hourihan, director of the AAAS research and development budget and policy program.

Had no deal been reached as the New Year began, Hourihan estimates that mandatory across-the-board cuts to research and development, both in defense and elsewhere, would have come to about 9 percent.

Negotiators managed to knock off about one-fifth of that cut for this year, then kicked the can down the road by delaying the deadline until March 1. [7 Great Dramas in Congressional History]

These budget cuts, mandated by the Budget Control Act of 2011 and known as sequestration, were an important element of what is known as the fiscal cliff. Politicians struggled to address the fiscal cliff, which also involved the expiration of tax cuts.

The highest-profile element of Tuesday's deal —income tax increases on those making $400,000 per year or couples making $450,000 or more — was separate from sequestration. It does not affect the prospect of mandatory spending cuts.

For this fiscal year, the mandatory cuts would have reduced federal spending by $109 billion. But the deal made changes to rules regarding retirement accounts, with the intent of raising $12 billion. It also trades one type of cut for another. Congress has agreed to make $12 billion in cuts, divided between this year and next.

Under sequestration, the Office of Management and Budget must allocate the cuts as mandated by the law. However, the $12 billion in cuts made as part of the deal are different. This time, Congress will have the power to pick and choose the areas that lose funding, Hourihan said.

This means science agencies may or may not be affected by the $12 billion in cuts.

The deal reduces the potential cuts to this year's budget to $85 billion, but potential cuts for future years remain unaffected, according to an analysis by the AAAS.

Budget cuts for science agencies mean less money to spend on equipment, facilities or research. For NASA, for example, this could mean cutbacks in missions, Hourihan said.

For the NIH or the NSF, both of which provide funding to the academic community, cuts could mean fewer and smaller grants, and, as a result, less support for graduate students and others becoming established as scientists, he said.

Prior to the deal, NIH director Francis Collins told a congressional subcommittee that sequestration would require the NIH to award 2,300 fewer grants.

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2 Americans, 1 Swede share Crafoord science prize

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Two Americans and a Swede have won this year's Crafoord Prize, a 4 million kronor ($600,000) scientific award given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to honor achievements not always covered by its more famous Nobel Prizes.

Peter Gregersen of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research near New York, Robert Winchester of Columbia University and Lars Klareskog of Stockholm's Karolinska institute were cited for discoveries related to rheumatoid arthritis.

The academy said Thursday that the three scientists, who will share the award, "contributed to a basic understanding of how the most common and serious form of rheumatoid arthritis develops."

Named after Holger Crafoord, the Swede who designed the first artificial kidney, the award has been given annually since 1982.

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'Universal' Personality Traits Are Not, Study Finds

Psychologists can get a pretty clear picture of someone's personality by evaluating to what degree they express traits known as the "Big Five" — openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. These factors are thought to be rooted in biology and to transcend cultural differences, but a new study of an indigenous Bolivian society shows the traits might not be universal after all.

Researchers spent two years studying more than 1,000 Tsimane forager-farmers, who live in isolated communities, each ranging from 30 to 500 people. Most are not formally educated, and they live in extended family clusters, sharing food and labor and limiting contact with outsiders.

The team first surveyed adults in the villages with a standard questionnaire (translated into the Tsimane language) that assesses the Big Five personality traits. Next the researchers asked Tsimane participants to evaluate their spouse's personality. This second part revealed that the subject's personality as reported by his or her spouse also did not fit with the Big Five traits. The researchers found that their results held true even when they controlled for education level, Spanish fluency, gender and age.

The team instead discovered evidence of a pair of broad traits that could be considered the Tsimane "Big Two." The researchers labeled one prosociality — socially beneficial behavior, which among the Tsimane, looks like a mix of items under the extroversion and agreeableness portions of the Big Five. The other trait is industriousness, which blends the efficiency, perseverance and thoroughness found in the conscientiousness portion of the Big Five, the researchers said.

The team says their results don't support the universality of the Big Five, and they speculated that the social structure of the Tsimane could have resulted in a trait structure different from the Big Five.

"Individuals in all human societies face similar goals of learning important productive skills, avoiding environmental dangers, cooperating and competing effectively in social encounters, and finding suitable mates. In small-scale societies, individuals have fewer choices for social or sexual partners and limited domains of opportunities for cultural success and proficiency. This may require abilities that link aspects of different traits, resulting in a trait structure other than the Big Five," the team wrote.

The research was detailed online in December in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

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Russia plans to send probe to moon in 2015

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia will resume a long-dormant quest to explore the moon by sending an unmanned probe there in 2015, the head of the space agency was quoted as saying on Tuesday.

The craft, called Luna-Glob, or Moon-Globe, will be carried by the first rocket to blast off from a new facility that Russia is building in its far eastern Amur region, Roskosmos director Vladimir Popovkin said, according to the Interfax news agency.

"We will begin our exploration of the moon from there," he said of the new space centre that will decrease Russia's reliance of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the ex-Soviet nation Kazakhstan, which it leases.

Russian space officials have said Luna-Glob would consist of an orbital module and a probe that would land on the moon and beam back information about samples it takes from the surface.

The Soviet Union got a jump on the United States in the Cold War space race, sending a probe to the moon in 1959 and putting the first person into space in 1961. But the United States first put a man on the moon in 1969 and Russia has not done so.

The last successful Soviet launch of a unmanned probe to the moon was in the 1970s, and Russia has suffered setbacks in its space program in recent years, including bungled satellite launches and the failure of a Mars probe in 2011.

A successful rocket launch on Tuesday put three military satellites in orbit, the Defense Ministry said.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev approved a plan last month to spend 2.1 trillion roubles ($70 billion) on space industry development in 2013-2020, to pursue projects to explore the moon and Mars, among other things.

(Writing by Steve Gutterman; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

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Race is on for EU's $1.3 billion science projects

BERLIN (AP) — Call it Europe's Got Talent for geeks.

Teams of scientists from across the continent are vying for a funding bonanza that could see two of them receive up to €1 billion ($1.33 billion) over 10 years to keep Europe at the cutting edge of technology.

The contest began with 26 proposals that were whittled down to six last year. Just four have made it to the final round.

They include a plan to develop digital guardian angels that would keep people safe from harm; a massive data-crunching machine to simulate social, economic and technological change on our planet; an effort to craft the most accurate computer model of the human brain to date; and a team working to find better ways to produce and employ graphene — an ultra-thin material that could revolutionize manufacturing of everything from airplanes to computer chips.

The two winners will be announced by the European Union's executive branch in Brussels on Jan. 28.

Initially, each project will receive €54 million from the European Union's research budget, an amount that will be matched by national governments and other sources. Further funding will depend on whether they reach certain milestones within the first 30 months, but over a decade it could total €1 billion each.

Securing such vast sums will be made harder by the austerity measures imposed by many financially drained European governments.

Still, the senior EU official overseeing the so-called Future and Emerging Technologies Flagships program is confident the money will be made available and insists the investment is necessary if Europe wants to match the success the CERN labs on the Swiss-French border that have become the world's premier center for particle research thanks to their $10 billion atom smasher.

"Supporting research and development is not a nice-to-have, it is essential because no investment means no chance for a better future," Neelie Kroes told The Associated Press in an email. "And especially during a crisis we all need something positive to look ahead to. Just cutting public expenditure and austerity don't bring new growth and jobs."

Kroes, whose title is European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, believes it will pay off. "By pooling resources across the EU and focusing on the two best projects we get a good shot at a manifold return on the investment," she said. Switzerland, Norway, Israel and Turkey, which are not part of the 27-nation EU, are also partnering in the program.

One explicit aim of the program is to encourage scientists to address not just contemporary problems but also those that could arise in future.

Climate change, ageing societies and a shortage of natural resources all loom large in predictions for Europe's future. So far, solutions to these problems have been limited, partly because of their sheer scope.

"The world of today has become so complex that it's beyond our control," said Dirk Helbing, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH in Zurich. Helbing is the coordinator of the FuturICT team that aims to monitor the state of the planet in real time using growing mountains of data now at our fingertips. Anybody will be able to tap into the system to explore possible future scenarios in much the same way as the meteorologists can now forecast the weather with a certain degree of accuracy.

"Think of it as the telescope of the 21st century to help get better insight into problems," Helbing said.

A rival project led by scientists at ETH's sister school EPFL in Lausanne, focuses less on the planetary and more on the personal.

Adrian Ionescu, a professor of nanoneletronics at EPFL, says the booming in mobile devices has concentrated mainly on communication and gaming. His team's Guardian Angels project aims to develop wearable, self-powered gadgets than can warn their users of danger, encourage them to exercise, and collect environmental and health information that could be of use to doctors.

Ionescu claims such devices could save large sums in health care costs by preventing diseases and helping manage them.

The components to make them are already available, he said. The key is integrating them all into one system — a process he likened to the effort made by the United States in the 1960s to put a man on the moon.

One of the most promising materials for electronic devices of the future is graphene — the sole focus of a third finalist. It has been touted as a solution to problems as wide-ranging as mopping up nuclear spills, making airplanes more fuel efficient and speeding up computer chips. Russian-born scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov received the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics for their experiments with this two-dimensional "wonder material" that's up to 300 times stronger than steel — but much lighter.

The problem is how to manufacture it efficiently.

"There is still quite a bit of research to be done," said Jari Kinaret, professor of applied physics at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Kinaret said the long-term funding offered by the EU program would be key to developing what he called a "disruptive technology."

"If you want to create a new technology it does not happen in one or two years," he said. Although Europe, the United States and Asia each produce a third of the scientific papers published on graphene, the number of patents coming out of Europe lags behind.

"We risk that the fruits of research that started in Europe will be harvested elsewhere," he told the AP.

The prospect of Europe losing ground to nimbler rivals plays a prominent role in the arguments put forward by all four projects still in the race.

"If we don't get the funding...we may see some of the European talent move to parts of the world where there is better funding situation, like Singapore," said Kinaret.

Henry Markram said CERN's success was the best example of how polling European resources can put the continent at the forefront of science. CERN announced last year that they have finally found solid evidence of the elusive Higgs boson particle that scientists have been hunting for 50 years.

Markram, a professor of neuroscience at EPFL, says his team wants to do the same for the human brain.

"The pharmaceutical industry won't do this, computing companies won't do this, there's too much fundamental science," he said. "This is one project which absolutely needs public funding."

His Human Brain Project plans to use supercomputers to model the brain and then simulate drugs and treatments for diseases that Markram says cost €800 billion each year in Europe alone.

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Fossil of Long-Extinct Whale Found on Seafloor

Researchers diving off the coast of Georgia may have found the remains of an Atlantic gray whale, a relic of a population that was hunted to extinction by the 18th century.

But this particular specimen died long before whalers became a threat. Carbon dating showed that the fossil, a left jawbone, is about 36,000 years old.

The big bone was first discovered along with two badly eroded vertebrae near Gray's Reef National Marine Sanctuary about 20 miles (32 kilometers) off southeast Georgia in 2008. It took the researchers two years to pull out all of the pieces of the fossil, which was embedded in layers of shell and sand 70 feet (21 meters) below the surface. The jawbone was recovered in sections and measures 5 feet (1.5 m) in length.

The researchers say the bone is clearly from a baleen whale — or whales that use baleen plates in their mouths to filter meals of tiny organisms out of seawater — and looks very similar to that of the gray whale, Eschrichtius robustus. This species is only locally extinct. Gray whales can be found today in quite strong numbers, but only in the Pacific Ocean, and even these had once teetered on the brink of extinction during eras when the whaling industry reigned.

Scientists previously believed that the Atlantic gray whale had been a distinct species. But recent research has shown these vanished whales and the living ones in the Pacific are actually one in the same.

"The California grays looked exactly like the bones that were dug up in Scandinavia back in the 19th century," Ervan Garrison, a geoarchaeology professor at the University of Georgia, said in a statement, describing it as "one of the first instances where a living species was named based on the fossil evidence."

The new specimen's age of approximately 36,570 years old makes it one of the oldest fossil finds in the western Atlantic basin, the researchers say. And if the find indeed represents a Pleistocene-age gray whale, its oldest counterpart is a specimen found on the southern North Sea dating to 42,800 years ago.

The research was detailed online last month in the journal Paleontologica Electronica.

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Once-conjoined NY twins make debut at Pa. hospital

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — More than nine months after they were born joined at the lower chest and abdomen, twin girls made their public debut Thursday at the hospital where they were separated.

Allison June and Amelia Lee Tucker, clad in animal-striped shirts and flowered headbands, were introduced during a news conference at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Both girls still have nasal tubes but appeared rosy-cheeked and alert as they were held by their parents, Shellie and Greg Tucker, of Adams, N.Y., about 300 miles north of Philadelphia near Lake Ontario.

Allison, described by doctors and her parents as the smaller but feistier twin, was discharged from the hospital Monday. Her sister Amelia, who's larger and more reserved, needs a little more recovery time and will remain in the hospital into the new year.

"We totally expect them to have full, independent lives," said pediatric surgeon Dr. Holly Hedrick, who led a 40-person medical team in the complex seven-hour operation on Nov. 7.

The twins shared a chest wall, diaphragm, liver and pericardium, the membrane around the heart.

Shellie Tucker was about 20 weeks into her pregnancy when she learned she was carrying conjoined twins. Prenatal screening tests at Children's Hospital, including ultrasound imaging and MRI, determined that they would be good candidates for separation.

Planning for the separation surgery began months before the twins were delivered by cesarean section on March 1. Shortly after they were born, plastic surgeons inserted expanders under the girls' skin to increase the skin surface available to cover exposed organs after their separation.

Shellie Tucker described the past year as a "roller coaster ride" but said she was relieved now that her daughters are doing so well.

"The burden is completely gone, and I am very, very happy," she said.

The surgery was the 21st successful separation of conjoined twins performed at the hospital. The first was in 1957.

According to statistics provided by the hospital, conjoined twins occur once in every 50,000 to 60,000 births and about 70 percent are female. Most conjoined twins are stillborn.

___

Online:

Children's Hospital of Philadelphia: http://www.chop.edu

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World Not Prepared for Extreme Events Like Sandy, Scientist Says

The storm surge Hurricane Irene brought to New York’s coastal community of Breezy Point in 2011 left Gretchen Ferenz Fox's home untouched. But a little over a year later, Sandy was different.

This storm flooded the basement of her family home, destroying its contents, and rising up to the first floor. The wall and sand berm, a raised barrier, around the house, the sandbagged windows, and basement renovations meant to keep water from seeping in — nothing stopped it.

"The house was flooded, the entire basement was submerged in floodwaters and sewage, because we have septic systems in the neighborhood," Fox said. "We had a false sense of security, when we didn't suffer any water into the home from Irene, that the storm [Sandy] would not be any worse."

Others fared even worse. Fire destroyed more than 100 homes; floodwater and winds amplified the destruction on the western end of the Rockaway Peninsula of Queens, N.Y., where Fox, her husband and their son live year round. [On the Ground: Hurricane Sandy in Images]

A rare storm

On Oct. 29, Sandy, a hybrid hurricane-winter storm, made landfall, bringing an unprecedented storm surge to The Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan. The 11.9-foot (3.6 meters) surge received a boost from the high tide, creating a storm tide as high as 13.88 feet (4.2 m).

When measured against projected storm tides caused by hurricanes, Hurricane Sandy's surge was nearly off the charts. By comparison, a 500-year hurricane would bring about a 10.2-foot (3.1 m) storm tide, according to research that looked at the future of hurricane-caused flooding for New York City.

The devastation it wrought revealed New York City's, and the region's, vulnerability to an extreme event. But Sandy was only one of a series of events that have highlighted a global need to better understand and prepare for rare, extreme natural disasters, said Tom O'Rourke, an infrastructure and natural hazards expert.

Lessons learned from disasters

Hurricane Katrina, the Tohoku earthquake and the nuclear disaster it triggered, as well as the Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand also provided vivid illustrations of the need. Their lessons are myriad.

For instance, when assessing risk, officials may fail to properly take evidence of past events into account, or they may bungle the response to a disaster — two factors that contributed to the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant after the tsunami hit. Or existing protection systems, like those intended to keep New Orleans dry when Katrina hit in 2005, may fail on a massive scale. Or unanticipated dynamics can make what should have been a moderate event into a devastating one, as happened in Christchurch, New Zealand, O'Rourke related during a presentation in Manhattan on Dec. 12.

False confidence contributes to the lack of preparation. Engineers have had success dealing with more common, less dramatic natural events, he said.

The cost? Lives, expensive damage and lost options for the future.

The Fukushima nuclear disaster, for example, has affected attitudes toward nuclear power, not only in Japan but also in other countries, such Germany and Switzerland, he told an audience. This has ramifications for efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, as nuclear energy is considered a low-carbon energy source. And there are geopolitical consequences as well. If Japan turns away from nuclear power and begins to import natural gas, this will put them in competition with other nations, such as China.

"This event really did change the future, and it changed the future significantly enough that it took away some of our options," O'Rourke told LiveScience.

Climate change is expected to aggravate the dangers from certain types of events by, for example, raising sea levels. 

Rethinking the future

Fox and her husband purchased their home five years ago, after moving from Brooklyn. Only half a block from Jamaica Bay and two-and-a-half blocks from the Atlantic Ocean, the house also gave them the chance to live in close proximity to nature, in a community within the National Park Service's Gateway National Recreation Area.

"We thought about the risks and never in my wildest dreams would I have considered a storm of this magnitude and the impacts that it had on us," she said.

But afterward, moving was never an option. The family is now focused on rebuilding and helping their neighbors do the same. Her husband, Tom Fox, has received funding on behalf of residents on their block for an environmentally friendly demonstration project called Rebuilding Breezy Green. [Save the Planet? 10 Bizarre Solutions]

The Foxes bought their home intending to retire there; she is 53 and he is 65. But after Hurricane Sandy, they saw how the older residents of the community had to rely on family members or volunteers to rebuild for them, the Foxes realized they may not be able to stay in the home they love as they age.

"We just imagined if one of us were living alone and had the burden of cleaning up and rebuilding. That might be too much to bear in our elderly years," she said. "It's emotionally difficult to think about that."

Fox, who works for Cornell University's Cooperative Extension program, attended O'Rourke's talk last week, which was hosted by the Structural Engineers Association of New York and by the New York-Northeast Chapter of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute.

Preparing better

After detailing the dynamics that turned extreme natural events into disasters, O'Rourke offered some solutions.

It is impossible to upgrade everything at once, so local communities must prioritize, and assess which infrastructure is critical, or as O'Rourke put it, "too big to fail." Then, designs must be made to address possible, not just probable scenarios, by asking questions, such as, "If the water comes over the sea wall, what do we do?" he said. 

Important upgrades, such as replacing old pipes with more resilient high-density polyethylene, become much more realistic when done piecemeal over time.

To make all of this possible, leaders must be engaged, engineers and planners must talk with one another, and communities must tap into private money to make these very expensive changes happen, he said.

Fox said O'Rourke's presentation gave her the opportunity to step outside her personal experience and to think about the disaster in a bigger context.

"I would hope we would all learn and not Band-Aid our problems and our weak links," Fox said, adding that instead, communities should use an event like Sandy as an opportunity to better prepare for the future.

Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

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Scientists in Hong Kong map initial anti-aging formula

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Scientists in Hong Kong appear to have mapped out a formula that can delay the aging process in mice, a discovery they hope to replicate in people.

Their finding, published in the December issue of Cell Metabolism, builds on their work in 2005 which shed light on premature aging, or progeria, a rare genetic disease that affects one in four million babies.

Progeria is obvious in the appearance of a child before it is a year old. Although their mental faculties are normal, they stop growing, lose body fat and suffer from wrinkled skin and hair loss. Like old people, they suffer stiff joints and a buildup of plaque in arteries which can lead to heart disease and stroke. Most die before they are 20 years old.

In that research, the team at the University of Hong Kong found that a mutation in the Lamin A protein, which lines the nucleus in human cells, disrupted the repair process in cells, thus resulting in accelerated aging.

Conversely, in their latest work using both mice and experiments in petri dishes, they found that normal and healthy Lamin A binds to and activates the gene SIRT1, which experts have long associated with longevity.

"We can develop drugs that mimic Lamin A or increase the binding between Lamin A and SIRT1," Liu Baohua, research assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Hong Kong, told a news conference on Thursday.

The team went further to see if the binding efficiency between Lamin A and SIRTI would be boosted with resveratrol, a compound found in the skin of red grapes and other fruits which has been touted by some scientists and companies as a way to slow aging or remain healthy as people get older.

Associate professor Zhou Zhongjun, who led the study, said healthy mice fed with concentrated resveratrol fared significantly better than healthy mice not given the compound.

"We actually delayed the onset of aging and extended the healthy lifespan," Zhou said of the mice.

Mice with progeria lived 30 percent longer when fed with resveratrol compared with progerial mice not given the compound.

Asked if their study supported the notion that drinking red wine delays aging and reduces the risk of heart disease, Zhou said the alcohol content in wine would cause harm before any benefit could be derived.

"The amount of resveratrol in red wine is very low and it may not be beneficial. But the alcohol will cause damage to the body," Zhou said.

(Reporting by Tan Ee Lyn; Editing by Robert Birsel)

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Annual bird counts give scientists climate clues

MAD ISLAND, Texas (AP) — Armed with flashlights, recordings of bird calls, a small notebook and a stash of candy bars, scientist Rich Kostecke embarked on an annual 24-hour Christmastime count of birds along the Texas Gulf Coast. Yellow rail. Barn owl. Bittern. Crested Cara-Cara. Kostecke rattled off the names and scribbled them in his notebook.

His data, along with that from more than 50 other volunteers spread out into six groups across the 7,000-acre Mad Island preserve, will be analyzed regionally and then added to a database with the results of more than 2,200 other bird counts going on from mid-December to Jan. 5 across the Western Hemisphere.

The count began in 1900 as a National Audubon Society protest of holiday hunts that left piles of bird and animal carcasses littered across the country. It now helps scientists understand how birds react to short-term weather events and may provide clues as to how they will adapt as temperatures rise and climate changes.

"Learning the changes of habit in drought could help us know what will happen as it gets warmer and drier," said Kostecke, a bird expert and associate director of conservation, research and planning at the Nature Conservancy in Texas.

Scientists saw birds change their habits during last year's historic drought that parched most of Texas. Some birds that normally winter on the coast — such as endangered whooping cranes — arrived and immediately turned back when they couldn't find enough food. Other birds didn't even bother flying to the coast. Snowy owls, who sometimes migrate from the Arctic to Montana, suddenly showed up as far south as Texas.

There has been some rain this year, but Texas still hasn't fully recovered from the drought and many areas remain unusually dry. Wetlands, a crucial bird habitat, have been damaged. Trees and brush are dead or brown. There are fewer flooded rice fields, prime foraging grounds for birds. And sandhill cranes, for the second winter in a row, are staying in Nebraska.

An initial report on the 24-hour count that began midnight Monday and ended midnight Tuesday included 233 different species — a drop of 11 from last year when 244 were counted on Mad Island. While the area likely still has one of the United States' most diverse bird populations, the species that were missing raise questions.

Where are the wild turkeys? Why were no black rails found? What about fox sparrows and the 13 other species that are commonly counted on the preserve? Where have they gone?

"There are several possibilities," Kostecke surmised. "Conditions may be better in the east, like Louisiana. Some may still be north, because it's been mild, and they tend to follow the freeze line."

With weather in the north still relatively warm, some birds might choose to stay put and conserve energy for the nesting season, Kostecke added.

Similar changes in bird behavior could be seen this year in the Midwest and parts of the South, areas that have been gripped by a massive drought that covered two-thirds of the nation at its height. The drought's severity is unusual, but scientists warn that such weather could become more common with global warming. Birds — as well as other animals — will have to adapt, and the data collected in the Christmas count gives crucial insight on how they might do that.

The dataset is notable for its size and the decades that it covers. Along with showing how birds adapt to climate change, it reveals the impact of environmental changes, such as habitat loss, which has contributed to a 40 percent decline in bird numbers during the past 40 years, said Gary Langham, vice president and chief scientist for the National Audubon Society.

"We've converted the landscape dramatically, and then you add climate change to the mix ... and the results are more alarming," Langham said.

Scientists have used the data to predict bird populations and behavior in 2020, 2050 and 2080. They also could use it to advance conservation work or calls for emergency action, he said.

Birds, though, are only one part of an ecosystem. As they move from place to place, they encounter new predators and species that may be competing for the same food. Vegetation also is changing as the Earth warms and some areas become more drought-prone. What happens as all these changes take place?

"It's the million dollar question. When you have that kind of ecological disruption, no one knows what happens," Langham said. "There are going to be winners and losers. There will be some that become more common, and some that will go extinct."

The survivors are the big unknown.

___

Plushnick-Masti can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RamitMastiAP

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Scientists may make definitive Higgs boson announcement in March

GENEVA (Reuters) - Scientists at Europe's CERN research centre said on Wednesday they may be able to definitively announce at a conference next March that they had discovered the elusive Higgs boson.

But they dismissed suggestions circulating widely on blogs and even in some science journals that instead of just one type of the elementary particle they might have found a pair.

CERN researchers said in July they had found what appeared to be the particle that gives mass to matter, as imagined and named half a century ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs. But they stopped short of saying for sure it was the Higgs boson, pending further research.

"The latest data we have on this thing we have been watching for the past few months show that it is not simply 'like a Higgs' but is very like a Higgs," said Oliver Buechmuller of the CMS team at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

"The way things are going, by the Moriond meeting we may be able to stop calling it Higgs-like and finally say it is the Higgs," he told Reuters, referring to the annual gathering which will take place at the Italian Alpine resort of La Thuile, 120 kms (75 miles) from CERN, on March 2-9.

Suggestions that there may be two Higgs, a particle that made formation of the universe possible after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, emerged after a progress report by CERN scientists last week. Its definitive discovery that would almost certainly win a Nobel Prize.

Commentators, including one in the journal Scientific American, said differing measurements - so far unexplained - of the new boson's mass that were recorded by ATLAS - a parallel but separate research team to CMS at CERN, indicated there might be twin particles.

"That is quite an exaggeration," said Pauline Gagnon, a scientist with ATLAS. "The facts are so much simpler: we measure one quantity in two different ways and obtain two slightly different answers.

"However, when we combine all the information, we clearly get only one value. Since we have checked all other possibilities, it really looks like a statistical fluctuation. Such things happen."

Buechmueller, whose CMS team found no such variation in their measurements, said he agreed there was no special relevance in the ATLAS discrepancy. "It will probably disappear when more data is in and analysed," he added.

The $10-billion Large Hadron Collider, a 27-km (17-mile) circular construct deep under the Franco-Swiss border, will shut down for some two years in February to allow a doubling of its power and its capacity to probe cosmic mysteries

(Reported by Robert Evans; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

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Oops! 5 Retracted Science Studies of 2012

When you read about medical breakthroughs in the newspapers, you shouldn't get your hopes up. This is not because of journalistic hyperbole or even the fact that cures often are years away from the initial publication of result.

It seems that an increasing number of scientific studies are just plain wrong and are ultimately retracted. Worse, a study published in October 2012 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (uh, if it's true) claims that the majority of retractions are due to some type of misconduct, and not honest mistakes, as long assumed.

The blog Retraction Watch tracks such retractions and has notified its readers of hundreds of journal-article withdrawals in 2012 alone. The king of retractions, according to Retraction Watch, is Japanese anesthesiologist Yoshitaka Fujii, who falsified data in 172 of 212 of his papers published between 1993 and 2011. All of this came to light in 2012. [See Last Year's Biggest Science Retractions]

Sadly, fudged studies create false hopes, and they also sully the reputation and publication record of the co-authors, often students, who weren't aware of the fraudulent behavior.

Here is a list of some of the more interesting retracted papers in 2012.

1. Hyung-In Moon is a genius, says Hyung-In Moon

Korean scientist Hyung-In Moon took the concept of scientific peer review to a whole new level by reviewing his own papers under various fake names. Not surprising, his imaginary peers were quite impressed with his work.

But perhaps also not surprising from someone who attempts such a scheme, Moon's research — which included a study on alcoholic liver disease and another on an anticancer plant substance — can't be trusted. Moon admitted to falsifying data in some of his papers, according to Chronicle of Higher Education. So far, 35 of his papers have been retracted in 2012.

Peer review is a process in which scientific peers in the same field judge the merit of a submitted journal paper. Moon, a plant researcher now at Dong-A University in Busan, Korea, sought out those journals that allowed submitters to suggest reviewers. He then suggested fake "experts" to review his work, with e-mail addresses that he controlled. [The 10 Most Destructive Human Behaviors]

Sometimes Moon used real names but with fake e-mail addresses that would come to him. This scheme of suggesting real university-based researchers with Gmail or Yahoo e-mail accounts went unchallenged for years, however dubious this must sound to anyone with an inquisitive mind.

Moon got a little sloppy, though. According to Retraction Watch, editors at the Journal of Enzyme Inhibition and Medicinal Chemistry grew suspicious when four of his glowing reviews came back within 24 hours. Anyone who has ever submitted a paper for peer review knows that reviewers take weeks or months to reply.

2. Math paper a big, fat zero

Neither the one-sentence abstract — "In this study, a computer application was used to solve a mathematical problem" — nor the co-author's e-mail address, ohm@budweiser.com, seemed to dissuade the editors at Computers and Mathematics with Applications from publishing this one-page gem entitled "A computer application in mathematics" by the perhaps fictitious M. Sivasubramanian and S. Kalimuthu, the one working for Budweiser. It was published in January 2010 but not retracted until April 2012, despite silly sentences such as "Computer magnification is a Universal computer phenomenon" and "This is a problematic problem."

Two of the paper's references are to earlier, similar papers from M. Sivasubramanian, which also somehow got published. One is to a store that sells math games. And the other three are to non-existent websites. [5 Seriously Mind-Boggling Math Problems]

The journal, part of the respected Elsevier family of scientific publications, finally retracted the paper because it "contains no scientific content." The editors chalked it up to "an administrative error."

Too bad. This could have been big. As the authors concluded, "Further studies will give birth to a new branch of mathematical science." But maybe the real "problematic problem" is the ease in which nonsensical math papers are published — something that maybe the "authors" were out to prove.

3. Maybe his failure doesn't feel better than success

Have you ever wondered whether there is any truth in the saying "no pain, no gain" or whether failure can be better for you than success?

The Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel has pondered such deep questions. His research has found that, paradoxically: failure sometimes feels better than success; beauty ads make women feel ugly; power increases infidelity among men and women; and comparing yourself to others might help you persevere with studying or dieting but ultimately won't make you happier.

Yes, Stapel has found lots and lots of stuff. His work has appeared in top journals. And his good looks and clever research topics made him a media darling, featured in The New York Times and on liberal-leaning television news programs.

The only problem is that his research appears to be either mostly or completely fabricated.

Stapel's scientific misconduct came to light in September 2011. His employer, Tilburg University in the Netherlands, promptly placed Stapel on suspension as it investigated the allegations. The University published its final report in November 2012, citing 55 publications with evidence of fraud.

So far, 31 papers have been retracted, according to Retraction Watch. More will surely follow. This could mean that meat eaters are absolved: One of Stapel's studies, now suspected to be fabricated, found that meat eaters are more selfish and less social than vegetarians. Note that Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian.

4. Rabbit testicles safe … for now

Studies proposing a link between cellphone use and cancer often rely on weak statistics. This one just used fudged data.

Back in 2008, scientists published a paper in the International Journal of Andrology stating that cellphones in standby mode lowered the sperm count and caused other adverse changes in the testicles of rabbits. [7 Surprising Facts About Sperm]

The study, although small and published in a rather obscure journal, made the news rounds. And the cautious human male, upon reading of the risks, might have moved his cellphone from his front pocket to the back.

In March 2012, the authors retracted the paper. It seems the lead author didn't get permission from his two co-authors and, according to the retraction notice, there was a "lack of evidence to justify the accuracy of the data presented in the article."

You'd think the data would have been accurate, seeing how the lead author lifted data and figures from his two previously published papers that doom rabbits and their sperm. But alas, one of those papers also was retracted this year and the other, according to Retraction Watch, soon will be.

These three studies live on, however, on the websites of proponents of the cellphone-cancer link, likely never to be retracted because it is so easy to cut and paste references without reading the papers.

5. Stem-cell cure for heart disease likely faked

The timing was perfect. Kyoto University biologist Shinya Yamanaka had just won the 2012 Nobel Prize for his discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells), which are adult cells that can be reprogrammed to their "embryonic" stage.

That's when Hisashi Moriguchi, a visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo, claimed at a New York Stem Cell Foundation meeting in early October to have advanced this technology to cure a person with terminal heart failure. It made sense, and the announcement rang around the world.

Just as quickly, however, the claim began to unravel. Two institutions listed as collaborating on Moriguchi's related papers — Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital — denied that any of Moriguchi's procedures took place there. By Oct. 19, the University of Tokyo fired Moriguchi for scientific dishonesty even as the investigation was just getting underway.

The smoke hasn't cleared. Moriguchi has admitted only to making some "procedural" mistakes. He has backed away from an original verbal claim that his injection of iPS cells in five patients has yielded positive results. He is sticking to his story, however, that one patient was cured … at a Boston hospital not yet named.

Moriguchi's co-authors are taking no chances. In November they retracted two related papers in the journal Scientific Reports, stating in that retraction that they "cannot guarantee the accuracy of the results and conclusions described."

If there is any truth to Moriguchi's claims, his work would catapult the field of iPS cells from test tube to cure, years before any expert would have predicted so. But Moriguchi's evolving story line and reluctance to share the full details of his work have left many scientists skeptical.

Christopher Wanjek is the author of a new novel, "Hey, Einstein!", a comical nature-versus-nurture tale about raising clones of Albert Einstein in less-than-ideal settings. His column, Bad Medicine, appears regularly on LiveScience.

Copyright 2012 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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2012 Year in Review: 10 Scientists Who Mattered in 2012

Scientists were plenty busy this year, with landing the 1-ton rover Curiosity on Mars, announcing the discovery of what is likely the Higgs boson and even revealing a little-dirty secret in research.

For the second year, the editors of the scientific journal Nature have announced their "Nature's 10," the top 10 scientists who mattered in 2012, with profiles that dig deeper into the personal stories behind the achievements. Here's a look at their picks.

A heavenly discovery?

A particle sought after for decades came to light in spectacular fashion on July Fourth this year, with physicists from two experiments being conducted in the Large Hadron (LHC) Collider near Geneva announcing they had found a particle that looked eerily similar to the Higgs boson, predicted to give all other matter its mass.

While several billion neurons (not to mention the Wattage used in the LHC) were behind the discovery, director general of LHC's host lab CERN, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, made sure the world heard about it, according to Nature editors. Apparently neither group was willing to claim an actual "discovery" until their evidence was proven to a certain level of certainty. With a gentle hand, Heuer nudged for the announcement, but let the scientists be scientists and stick to the facts (for instance saying they had a 5 and 4.9 sigma level of certainty, respectively), while he used, only once, the word "discovery." (A 5 sigma means there is only a one in 3.5 million chance the signal seen in the LHC data isn't real.) [Top 5 Implications of Finding the Higgs Boson]

Mars madness

Another whopper for science in 2012 was arguably the landing of the Mars rover Curiosity on the Red Planet's surface. Leading the 50-person team behind the smooth landing was engineer Adam Steltzner, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The touchdown technique was a first: Curiosity was lowered to the Martian surface on cables by a rocket-powered sky crane, one that had an alien look on its own. "Because it looked so outlandish, we all felt very exposed," Steltzner told Nature. "If it failed, people would have been like, 'You idiots.'" It didn't.

Since its spectacular touchdown, Curiosity has discovered an ancient streambed where water likely flowed for thousands of years long ago and hints of possibly life-giving organic compounds.

Hurricane Sandy Cassandra

Not all happenings were so uplifting. After Hurricane Sandy battered the East Coast and left transportation tunnels flooded and millions without power, climatologist Cynthia Rosenzweig wasn't surprised. That's because the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies researcher and a team of other scientists had forecasted such cataclysmic events in 2000 as part of a report for the U.S. Global Change Research Program. The dozen years of warning helped city officials incorporate climate change into city planning. Rosenzweig, who started off as a farmer in Tuscany but eventually moved from agricultural science to climate science, is now trying to assess whether those efforts reduced Sandy's damage. [On the Ground: Hurricane Sandy in Images]

Can you repeat that?

It's a dirty-little secret that many scientific results can't be reproduced. In 2006, Elizabeth Iorns, a geneticist at the University of Miami, tried to replicate a study about a cancer gene and couldn't. She found that few scientific journals wanted to publish her findings and that she got blowback from colleagues. That lit a fire in her belly to ensure that more scientific results are rigorously tested. To that end, she created a startup based in Palo Alto, Calif., called the Reproducibility Initiative. The goal of the fledgling nonprofit is to have third-party researchers replicate important scientific experiments. If the startup can make headway, it may help scientists know which results are real.

Sex bias

While it's no surprise that women are underrepresented in science, pinning that to discrimination, rather than gender differences in aptitude or interest, has been tricky. But when Yale University microbiologist Jo Handelsman showed that researchers offer fictitious female job applicants about $4,000 less in salary and rate them as less competent and worthy of mentorship than male counterparts, she produced strong evidence for sexual bias. Handelsman says she hasn't personally experienced strong bias, but became motivated to speak out about it when other women scientists described their experiences with sex discrimination.

Mad man

Timothy Gowers isn't a likelier crusader in the world of scientific journal publishing. The Cambridge University mathematician has won the Fields Medal (mathematics highest honor) and has been knighted for his influential work. But he made waves this year when he spearheaded a global boycott of the giant publishing group Elsevier, discontented with the publishing group's sky-high prices and their fight against open-access scientific publishing, which can be viewed by everyone without a subscription. The boycott has fueled growing interest in open-access publishing and may even have influenced Elsevier to withdraw its support for a controversial, anti-open access political bill. The bill, the Research Works Act, would have allowed scientists to publish research funded with U.S. taxpayer money in journals that would be closed off to the general public.

Deadly research

When Ron Fouchier, a virologist at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, used just four genetic tweaks to create a highly lethal strain of the H5N1 bird flu that could spread through the air, it sparked a global discussion about whether such deadly pathogens should be created. Critics argued that the mutant bird flu could be accidentally released and that publishing the findings could give would-be terrorists a road-map for creating a biological weapon. Fouchier's results were eventually published in Nature with key methodological details removed, but not without a flurry of discussion over the ethics of the research. Throughout it all, Fouchier has been arguing that the research is necessary and safe. In January 2012, Fouchier and other flu researchers agreed to a moratorium on researching this particular type of flu. Now he has set his sights on a mysterious, deadly form of pneumonia that has emerged from a bat virus in Saudi Arabia.

Watching cells grow

Cedric Blanpain doesn't trust Petri dishes, sort of. This skepticism in the ability of lab-dish cell growth to replicate what happens in real life led Blanpain to uncover, in 2011, distinct stem cells in the adult mammary gland. This year, he applied a carcinogen to mouse skin and then followed tumor growth using a cell-tracking method; his results showed not all cells contribute equally to tumor growth, with some dwindling after a few cell divisions and others, the stem cells, generating thousands of clones — the tumor-generating cells. "I saw the first slide, and I said 'show me the second one.' After the fifth, I was sure what I was seeing," Blanpain told Nature.

Manslaughter verdict

A reminder that science doesn't always, and sometimes cannot, stay in the ivory towers, this year brought a devastating manslaughter verdict for six Italian scientists and one government official Bernardo De Bernardinis (an engineer by training) accused of being too reassuring about the risk of an earthquake prior to a temblor in 2009 that killed 309 individuals in the town of L'Aquila. [See Photos of L'Aquila Earthquake Destruction]

Seismologists across the globe expressed appall at a verdict that didn't account for the fact that earthquakes cannot be predicted with any level of accuracy. Even so, De Bernardinis not only showed compassion for those who lost loved ones in the earthquake, but he also showed up at every hearing, Nature reported. Insisting that he only listened to what the seismologists told him before the infamous press conference at the center of this trial, De Bernardinis also admits he should've waited for a concise statement from the scientists before addressing the public. Now, he hopes the trial will lead to better risk-prevention systems in Italy that have clear-cut expectations for scientists, government officials and the media.

Sequencing genomes

The head of the Chinese genome-sequencing institute, BGI, Jun Wang has shown modesty and confidence in the significance of what he and colleagues are doing. And the numbers speak worlds: BGI is leading the sequencing of 10,000 vertebrates (animals with backbones), 5,000 insects and other arthropods, and more than 1,000 birds, including some extinct ones. In this year alone, BGI was listed in 100 scientific publications, Nature reports, adding the organization is a "main player" in the 1,000 Genomes Project Consortium, whose aim is to find genetic factors behind disease.

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2012: A Memorable Year for Weather

Drought, wildfire, hurricanes, a deadly typhoon and cold snap — this year had a lot to offer in terms of weather news.

Weather historian Christopher C. Burt, who blogs for the meteorological website Weather Underground, has been keeping tabs on events this year, and the headliner is clear, he said: Unusually warm temperatures, most notably across the continental United States.  

We take a look back at the most significant weather of 2012:

Record-breaking warmth: The data for the last of the year isn't in yet, but this year looks "virtually certain" take the title of warmest year on record for the lower 48 states, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Burt follows temperature observations for 300 evenly disbursed U.S. cities or sites with records going back into the 19th century. Of these, 22 reached their all-time highs this year, most during the heat wave that hit much of the country in late June and early July. Only the Pacific Northwest did not share in this year's exceptional warmth, Burt said. 

It was also a warm year for the planet, though not to quite the same degree. As of November, 2012 ranked as the eighth warmest for global average temperature, NOAA reported on Thursday (Dec. 20).

Burt also tracks temperatures for countries, and he noted all-time high records in July and August for five countries, three in Europe, one in Asia and one in Africa.

Summer in March: One notable heat wave this year hit the Great Lakes, Midwest, northern New England, New Brunswick and Novia Scotia in March, bringing scores of record-breaking temperatures for this time of year. In "The Nation's Icebox," International Falls, Mich., the low temperature during this heat wave — which bottomed out at 60 degrees Fahrenheit (15.6 degrees Celsius) on March 20 — tied the previous high for that date, according to the Weather Underground. 

Hottest month on record in the U.S.: Until this year, July 1936, during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, held the record for hottest month on record in the lower 48 states going back to 1895, but this July's heat surpassed even that record, surprising Burt, who told LiveScience in July, "1936 is probably unassailable frankly."

Drought: The unusually warm weather contributed to drought across much of the country this year, in some places, such as Texas, for the second consecutive year. While devastating, particularly to agriculture, this year's drought has not been unprecedented. It is the most extensive since the 1930s, affecting over half of the country for a majority of the year, NOAA reported on Dec. 20. [Dried Up: Photos Reveal Devastating Texas Drought]

A fiery year: In turn, drought and heat this year contributed to the third worst wildfire season for the western United States, where more than 9 million acres (3.6 million hectares) burned. Colorado and Oregon saw some of the worst fires.

Big storms: Hurricane Isaac made landfall at the end of August in southeastern Louisiana, seven years after Hurricane Katrina's arrival, which flooded New Orleans. This time, however, the city, with its fortified protection system, was spared the devastation. Later in the year, Superstorm Sandy, a hybrid hurricane and winter storm, pummeled the East Coast, bringing an unprecedented storm tide to The Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan. A sustained cluster of violent thunderstorms, called a derecho event, over central, eastern and northeastern states also made NOAA's list of billion-dollar-plus disasters; 28 people died as a result of these storms in late June and early July.

Biggest killers: The deadliest weather event of the year goes to Typhoon Bopha, which struck the Philippines in early December. The death toll has surpassed 1,000, with hundreds more missing, including fishermen who were out to sea when the typhoon — a tropical cyclone in the western Pacific or Indian Oceans — struck, according to media reports. But by comparison, the deadliest recorded tropical cyclone hit Bangladesh in November 1970, killing half-a-million people, Burt said. The cold wave that hit central and eastern Europe early in the year ranked as the second deadliest event of 2012, killing 824 people, Burt said.

Cold, but not unprecedented: In spite of its severity, this cold wave failed to set records. In fact, Burt said he is not aware of any significant cold records that were set during 2012. However, the coldest temperature for the year worldwide was recorded on Sept. 16 at Vostok, Antarctica, at minus 119.6 degrees F (minus 84.2 degrees C), according to Burt.

A slow year for tornados: After the devastation caused by tornados in 2011, this year has been relatively quiet. In fact, 2012 is on track to have the lowest tornado death count in a couple of decades, Burt said.

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Pygmy Elephants Get Protection Boost from Genetics

To help protect a diminutive elephant researchers are taking an innovative look at the pachyderm's genome.

The goal is to understand the genetic diversity of pygmy elephants on the island of Borneo. Numbering about 2,000, these babyish-looking elephants are the most endangered subspecies of Asian elephant. They live primarily in the Malaysian state of Sabah on Borneo, where they are threatened by the loss and fragmentation of their forest, often by development associated with palm oil, widely used, edible plant oil.

"We are interested in looking at the diversity of elephants around the whole distribution range in Sabah," said study researcher Reeta Sharma, a postdoctoral fellow at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC) in Portugal.

Sharma and colleagues want to see how genetic diversity is distributed within the Borneo elephant population and how the fragmentation — or breaking up — of their forest habitat is affecting it by, for example, isolating groups of elephants. Increased isolation can be problematic because it means inbreeding, which can lead to more sickly and vulnerable animals. Their results suggest low genetic diversity in the pygmy elephants. [Amazing Photos of Pygmy Elephants]

Not easy to find

From the outset, the researchers knew they would need a close look to find markers within the elephant's genetic code that they could use to assess diversity. Markers are spots in the sequence that should vary between individual animals.

Only one previous study, published in 2003, conducted a genetic analysis of Borneo elephants. Using information developed from other Asian elephants, this study found low levels of diversity among Borneo elephants, meaning researchers were on the hunt for needles in a haystack.

"There is diversity there but you need genomes to look at it," said study researcher Lounès Chikhi, a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifiquein France and a principal investigator at the IGC.

A genome is an organism's DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) sequence. Sharma and Chikhi hoped to harness rapidly evolving technology for reading large amounts of this sequence to identify markers they could use to assess diversity.

Before the arrival of genome-sequencing technology, identifying markers was a cumbersome and tedious process. Often, researchers had to rely on markers developed for relatives of the animal in question, the researchers said.

The Borneo elephant presented a particular challenge, because until this current study no sequencing work had been done on it.

The techniques

Sharma and Chikhi tried two genomic techniques to find genetic markers that differed from elephant to elephant. The first technique is known as shotgun sequencing; it breaks the genome into small pieces before sequencing them. Researchers at the University of Connecticut, led by Rachel O'Neill, performed this sequencing and identified the markers.

The second technique, known as RAD-seq, examined small subsets of the genome defined by sites at which an enzyme had cut the DNA sequence. A biotech company in Oregon, Floragenex, performed this work on blood samples from eight elephants.

Blood from Borneo elephants is hard to come by, but company vice president, Jason Boone, located one of the study elephants, a female named Chendra, at the Oregon Zoo, and arranged to have a sample taken from her. The other samples were collected from elephants in Sabah.

Each technique generated a unique set of thousands of markers.

"What we show is the two methods are good, but they have differences," Chikhi said.

He and Sharma are currently applying both sets of markers to DNA found in elephant fecal samples in Sabah.

Helping others

The genomic approach may make it possible to relatively quickly identify markers and assess them in samples from other rare and endangered species in which little to no prior genomic work has been done, according to Chikhi and Sharma, whose research was published in November in the journal PLoS ONE.

Others are beginning to apply genomics to endangered species.

For instance, in June 2011, researchers reported sequencing the whole genomes of two Tasmanian devils in the hopes of providing information that might help conservationists protect the animals from a devastating facial cancer.

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FDA closer to approving biotech salmon, critics furious

(Reuters) - A controversial genetically engineered salmon has moved a step closer to the consumer's dining table after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Friday the fish didn't appear likely to pose a threat to the environment or to humans who eat it.

AquAdvantage salmon eggs would produce fish with the potential to grow to market size in half the time of conventional salmon. If it gets a final go-ahead, it would be the first food from a transgenic animal - one whose genome has been altered - to be approved by the FDA.

The AquAdvantage Atlantic salmon egg was developed by AquaBounty Technology to speed up production to meet global seafood demand.

In a draft environmental assessment, the FDA affirmed earlier findings that the biotech salmon was not likely to be harmful. It said it would take comments from the public on its report for 60 days before making a final decision on approval.

"With respect to food safety, FDA has concluded that food from AquAdvantage salmon is as safe as food from conventional Atlantic salmon, and that there is a reasonable certainty of no harm from consumption," the FDA assessment states.

AquaBounty officials said they were caught by surprise by the news that its product was a step closer to approval as years of controversy had followed the company's application for a go-ahead from the regulator. They said they did not know the timing or details of the process the FDA will follow following the 60-day comment period.

"We are encouraged that the environmental assessment is being released and hope the government continues the science-based regulatory process," said AquaBounty Chief Executive Ronald Stotish.

Critics say the new salmon is a "dangerous experiment" and have pressured the FDA to reject it. They say the FDA has relied on outdated science and substandard methods for assessing the new fish.

"We are deeply concerned that the potential of these fish to cause allergic reactions has not been adequately researched," said Michael Hansen, a scientist at the Consumers Union. "FDA has allowed this fish to move forward based on tests of allergenicity of only six engineered fish, tests that actually did show an increase in allergy-causing potential."

There were also concerns the FDA would not require the genetically modified salmon to be labeled as such, and some critics said they may file a lawsuit to prevent what they fear could be the imminent approval of the engineered fish.

"Congress can still keep FDA from unleashing this dangerous experiment," said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, a consumer advocacy group. "Although this latest FDA decision is a blow to consumer confidence, we encourage everyone to contact their members of Congress and demand this reckless decision be overturned."

The Center for Food Safety, another non-profit consumer protection group, was highly critical of the FDA report, and officials said they might sue the regulator over the issue.

"It is extremely disappointing that the Obama Administration continues to push approval of this dangerous and unnecessary product," said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Food Safety. "The GE salmon has no socially redeeming value. It's bad for the consumer, bad for the salmon industry and bad for the environment."

FDA spokeswoman Morgan Liscinsky said no final decisions have been made on labeling or on the application for approval.

"The release of these materials is not a decision on whether food from AquAdvantage Salmon requires additional labeling; nor is it a decision on the new animal drug application currently under review. It also does not provide a final food safety determination," Liscinsky said.

The AquAdvantage salmon would be an all-female population with eggs produced in a facility on Prince Edward Island in Canada and shipped to a "grow-out facility" in Panama, where they would be reared to market size and harvested for processing.

(Editing by Bernadette Baum; and Peter Galloway)

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CERN students make "scientist fiction" zombie film

GENEVA (Reuters) - Murderous zombies are stalking the dark underground passageways of the renowned CERN physics centre near Geneva, hunting young scientists who have survived a devastating failure in its world-famous particle collider.

Gaunt men with peeling faces and stony-eyed women dripping blood from their mouths leer around corners and loom from behind wrecked equipment, impervious to the bullets from a gun wielded by one of their would-be victims.

And it is all happening right at the heart of the multi-billion dollar complex where, last July, physicists announced the discovery of what they think is the particle -- the Higgs boson -- which made life and the universe possible.

Well, happening at least on the Internet (http://www.decayfilm.com/). Scientists at the centre on Wednesday said they were pursuing their efforts to reveal the great mysteries of the cosmos and had not noticed anything unusual.

"But that does explain why my neighbour shouted: 'Watch for the Zombies,' when I left for work this morning," said one puzzled physicist who is part of one of the two large teams which jointly tracked down the Higgs.

The gory action comes in an 80-minute horror film, "Decay", shot in 2010 around open areas of the sprawling CERN complex at weekends by budding young scientists from Britain and the United States, without formal management approval.

"They asked for CERN's endorsement once the whole thing was in the can," said spokesman James Gillies. "Clearly we can't endorse such a thing, but nor were we going to stop it. After all, it's just students doing the kind of thing students do."

The movie burst onto the World Wide Web, itself invented at CERN 20 years ago. A notice on its site and a press release from the makers, H2ZZ Productions, declares: "This film has not been authorised or endorsed by CERN."

FLESH-EATERS

The cinematic mayhem follows a disaster in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), releasing the Higgs and its associated particle field which turn dozens of the technicians working around the subterranean complex into "living dead" flesh-eaters.

A group of scientists is isolated in the control room -- which the filmmakers move underground from its actual location on the surface -- and as they try to break out to safety they are picked off one by one by their zombie colleagues.

"It's a bit of fun in the best tradition of B-series Zombie movies," said a CERN researcher who followed the project. "It's well done, but I can't say the acting is Oscar quality."

"They wanted to make the film as unbelievable as possible, and the scientific 'facts' cited in it are laughable, so no-one could take it seriously."

The producers are at pains to underline that in making their technicolour epic they had no access to the actual 27-km (17-mile) circular tunnel where the LHC and the giant particle detectors and magnets are housed.

The writer and director of the film was Luke Thompson, who apart from his studies at CERN is a physicist and doctoral student at Britain's Manchester University, where the film had an early showing at the end of last month.

Co-producer and director of photography was Burton de Wilde, who holds a physics doctorate from Stony Brook University in the United States. The actors came from among CERN's several hundred doctoral or summer students.

The company set up to market the film says it has showings scheduled for several places in Britain, the United States and Europe.

"It might just turn out to be one of those off-the-wall successes," the CERN researcher said.

(Reported by Robert Evans, editing by Paul Casciato)

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Pagan Roots? 5 Surprising Facts About Christmas

When you gather around the Christmas tree or stuff goodies into a stocking, you're taking part in traditions that stretch back thousands of years — long before Christianity entered the mix.

Pagan, or non-Christian, traditions show up in this beloved winter holiday, a consequence of early church leaders melding Jesus' nativity celebration with pre-existing midwinter festivals. Since then, Christmas traditions have warped over time, arriving at their current state a little more than a century ago.

Read on for some of the surprising origins of Christmas cheer, and find out why Christmas was once banned in New England.

1. Early Christians had a soft spot for pagans

It's a mistake to say that our modern Christmas traditions come directly from pre-Christian paganism, said Ronald Hutton, a historian at Bristol University in the United Kingdom. However, he said, you'd be equally wrong to believe that Christmas is a modern phenomenon. As Christians spread their religion into Europe in the first centuries A.D., they ran into people living by a variety of local and regional religious creeds.

Christian missionaries lumped all of these people together under the umbrella term "pagan," said Philip Shaw, who researches early Germanic languages and Old English at Leicester University in the U.K. The term is related to the Latin word meaning "field," Shaw told LiveScience. The lingual link makes sense, he said, because early European Christianity was an urban phenomenon, while paganism persisted longer in rustic areas.

Early Christians wanted to convert pagans, Shaw said, but they were also fascinated by their traditions.

"Christians of that period are quite interested in paganism," he said. "It's obviously something they think is a bad thing, but it's also something they think is worth remembering. It's what their ancestors did." [In Photos: Early Christian Rome]

Perhaps that's why pagan traditions remained even as Christianity took hold. The Christmas tree is a 17th-century German invention, University of Bristol's Hutton told LiveScience, but it clearly derives from the pagan practice of bringing greenery indoors to decorate in midwinter. The modern Santa Claus is a direct descendent of England's Father Christmas, who was not originally a gift-giver. However, Father Christmas and his other European variations are modern incarnations of old pagan ideas about spirits who traveled the sky in midwinter, Hutton said.

2. We all want that warm Christmas glow

But why this fixation on partying in midwinter, anyway? According to historians, it's a natural time for a feast. In an agricultural society, the harvest work is done for the year, and there's nothing left to be done in the fields.

"It's a time when you have some time to devote to your religious life," said Shaw. "But also it's a period when, frankly, everyone needs cheering up."

The dark days that culminate with the shortest day of the year ­— the winter solstice — could be lightened with feasts and decorations, Hutton said.

"If you happen to live in a region in which midwinter brings striking darkness and cold and hunger, then the urge to have a celebration at the very heart of it to avoid going mad or falling into deep depression is very, very strong," he said.

Stephen Nissenbaum, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist "The Battle for Christmas" (Vintage, 1997), agreed.

"Even now when solstice means not all that much because you can get rid of the darkness with the flick of an electric light switch, even now, it's a very powerful season," he told LIveScience.

3. The Church was slow to embrace Christmas

Despite the spread of Christianity, midwinter festivals did not become Christmas for hundreds of years. The Bible gives no reference to when Jesus was born, which wasn't a problem for early Christians, Nissenbaum said.

"It never occurred to them that they needed to celebrate his birthday," he said.

With no Biblical directive to do so and no mention in the Gospels of the correct date, it wasn't until the fourth century that church leaders in Rome embraced the holiday. At this time, Nissenbaum said, many people had turned to a belief the Church found heretical: That Jesus had never existed as a man, but as a sort of spiritual entity.

"If you want to show that Jesus was a real human being just like every other human being, not just somebody who appeared like a hologram, then what better way to think of him being born in a normal, humble human way than to celebrate his birth?" Nissenbaum said. [Religious Mysteries: 8 Alleged Relics of Jesus]

Midwinter festivals, with their pagan roots, were already widely celebrated, Nissenbaum said. And the date had a pleasing philosophical fit with festivals celebrating the lengthening days after the winter solstice (which fell on Dec. 21 this year). "O, how wonderfully acted Providence that on that day on which that Sun was born … Christ should be born," one Cyprian text read.

4. The Puritans hated the holiday

But if the Catholic Church gradually came to embrace Christmas, the Protestant Reformation gave the holiday a good knock on the chin. In the 16th century, Christmas became a casualty of this church schism, with reformist-minded Protestants considering it little better than paganism, Nissenbaum said. This likely had something to do with the "raucous, rowdy and sometimes bawdy fashion" in which Christmas was celebrated, he added.

In England under Oliver Cromwell, Christmas and other saints' days were banned, and in New England it was illegal to celebrate Christmas for about 25 years in the 1600s, Nissenbaum said. Forget people saying, "Happy holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," he said.

"If you want to look at a real 'War on Christmas,' you've got to look at the Puritans," he said. "They banned it!"

5. Gifts are a new (and surprisingly controversial) tradition

While gift-giving may seem inextricably tied to Christmas, it used to be that people looked forward to opening presents on New Year's Day.

"They were a blessing for people to make them feel good as the year ends," Hutton said. It wasn't until the Victorian era of the 1800s that gift-giving shifted to Christmas. According to the Royal Collection, Queen Victoria's children got Christmas Eve gifts in 1850, including a sword and armor. In 1841, Victoria gave her husband, Prince Albert, a miniature portrait of her as a 7-year-old; in 1859, she gave him a book of poetry by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

All of this gift-giving, along with the secular embrace of Christmas, now has some religious groups steamed, Nissenbaum said. The consumerism of Christmas shopping seems, to some, to contradict the religious goal of celebrating Jesus Christ's birth. In some ways, Nissenbaum said, excessive spending is the modern equivalent of the revelry and drunkenness that made the Puritans frown.

"There's always been a push and pull, and it's taken different forms," he said. "It might have been alcohol then, and now it's these glittering toys."

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