5 Reasons Women Trail Men in Science

Though women now receive half the doctorates in science and engineering in the United States, they make up only 21 percent of full science professors and a measly 5 percent of full engineering professors.

This gender gap is the subject of hot debate, as illustrated in 2005, when then-Harvard president Larry Summers argued that differences in science aptitude between men and women explained most of the problem.

But research has found the root of the problem may be the clash between career and child-rearing, especially given that the long road through graduate school, postdoctoral research positions at universities and tenure-track professorship meanders through a person's 20s and 30s, a time when a woman is disproportionately more likely than a man to have childbearing and child care responsibilities.

A new series of articles in the journal Nature tackles these issues, examining the causes of the science gender gap and highlighting solutions that work.

"We are not drawing from our entire intellectual capital," Hannah Valantine, the Stanford School of Medicine's dean of leadership and diversity, told Nature. "We've got to put on the accelerator to evoke social change."

Here's what you need to know.

1. Women drop out faster than men

Summers' claims about innate ability aside, women seem to have no trouble meeting the rigorous demands of a Ph.D. The genders are approximately equal in number of doctorates gained in the United States. The problem, Nature's Helen Shen writes, is that women drop out of the science pipeline more than men after getting that Ph.D.

Shen cites one 2006 survey of chemistry doctoral students in the United Kingdom that illustrates the pattern. In the first year of their doctoral programs, 70 percent of the female students said they planned a career in research. By year three, that number dropped to 37 percent. Meanwhile, 59 percent of third-year men still planned to become full-time researchers. [The 10 Most Surprising Sex Statistics]

The issue seems to involve work-life balance. Women in science have fewer kids than their male colleagues, and have fewer children than they'd like to have, according to a 2011 study in the journal PLOS ONE.

Another analysis, published in the March/April issue of the magazine American Scientist, found that before having children, women careers comparable to men in science. But the challenges of child care and the demands of running a research lab are often seen as incompatible. Women who plan to have children in the future drop out of the academic research race at twice the rate of men, the authors found.

Women are hit hard with family responsibilities just when they need to meet research goals to secure tenure, which is the right to not have one's job terminated without cause. Most institutions provide only a limited amount of time a professor can work without tenure, meaning there is a great deal of pressure to achieve. Part-time tenure-track positions could balance out the gender gap, the American Scientist researchers suggest.  

2. It's not just academia

The academic female brain drain might not seem so dire if those women who left academia found cushier jobs in the private sector. But those sorts of moves don't doesn't seem to be common.  

Women do make up more than 25 percent of research scientists in industry, according to Nature's Alison McCook, but they earn only 40 percent of the patents compared with men and start businesses only half as often. Even worse are the numbers of women on scientific advisory boards, which help steer the science of biotech startups and other companies. Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Maryland have found that from the 1970s to today, the proportion of women on scientific advisory boards has topped out at only 10.2 percent.

Scientific advisory board positions are invited by company founders, making it likely that a "boy's club" atmosphere keeps women out, McCook wrote. Women report being invited much less frequently than men. [Busted! 6 Pervasive Gender Myths]

3. Everyone is biased

The tricky thing about discrimination is that it isn't always intentional. Researchers use a task called the Implicit Association Test to determine how unconsciously biased a person is. In the case of women and science, people might be asked to very quickly associate words like "woman" or "wife" with terms like "astronomy" or "physics."

Across 34 countries, 70 percent of people are quicker to associate male terms with science than female terms, according to a study published in 2009 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This unconscious bias may suppress the hiring of women in scientific careers, writes Stanford University neurobiologist Jennifer Raymond in a Nature op-ed.

Indeed, culture plays a major role in girls' interest in science. A 2009 study also published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the lower the gender equality in a nation, the larger the math aptitude gap between boys and girls, suggesting that culture, not biology, is to blame. A 2012 study published in the same journal found biases against female scientists among science faculty members. 

It takes work to first acknowledge and then overcome these biases, Raymond wrote. But conscious strategies such as gender-blind hiring and efforts to mentor women can work, she said.

"By enabling more women to succeed, despite the existence of unconscious bias, this will gradually eliminate the stereotype of the successful scientist as male, which is the root of gender bias," she wrote. [The 10 Most Destructive Human Behaviors]

4. Quotas may not help

The European Commission, the governing body of the European Union, has instituted quotas to try to even out the academic gender gap in Europe, where only 18 percent of full professors are female. For example, the commission is requiring 40 percent of the members of the advisory boards for the EU's 2014-2020 research-funding program to be women.

But such quotas may harm more than they help, writes Isabelle Vernos, a research professor at the Center for Genomic Regulation in Spain. The European Research Council, a major funding agency, has not found any increase in the number of research grants offered to women when there are more women on advisory boards, Vernos writes in Nature. Meanwhile, there are relatively few female scientists, meaning that a small pool of women will face even more demands on their time by serving on the funding boards.

5. Some reforms are successful

The pitfalls of quotas don't mean institutions shouldn't act on science gender gaps, however. Some programs do work, argue Brigitte Mühlenbruch, president of the European Platform of Women Scientists, and Maren Jochimsen of the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. Gender-equality guidelines instituted at the German Research Foundation that require transparency on gender equality and use incentives to get there have worked by supporting flexible working schedules, child care facilities and unbiased hiring procedures, Mühlenbruch and Jochimsen write in Nature.

Meanwhile, the European Science Foundation encourages consideration in the funding process for researchers who have taken time off for family reasons, they write. Germany has also instituted a Program for Women Professors that funds universities for promoting women to tenure-track positions. The program has created 260 new female professorships since 2007. Muhlenbruch and Jochimsen also see some benefit in quotas, they write.

"Motivation and participation are the basis of high-quality results in research — not biased evaluation criteria, job insecurity and glass ceilings," they write. "An academic culture that is transparent, democratic and sensitive to gender and diversity will benefit all scientists."

Follow Stephanie Pappas @sipappas. Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience, Facebook or Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

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Hundreds of Dinosaur Egg Fossils Found

Researchers in northeastern Spain say they've uncovered hundreds of dinosaur egg fossils, including four kinds that had never been found before in the region. The eggs likely were left behind by sauropods millions of years ago.

Eggs, eggshell fragments and dozens of clutches were nestled in the stratigraphic layers of the Tremp geological formation at the site of Coll de Nargó in the Spanish province of Lleida, which was a marshy region during the Late Cretaceous Period, the researchers said.

"Eggshells, eggs and nests were found in abundance and they all belong to dinosaurs, sauropods in particular," the study's leader, Albert García Sellés from the Miquel Crusafont Catalan Palaeontology Institute, told Spanish news agency SINC this week.

"Up until now, only one type of dinosaur egg had been documented in the region: Megaloolithus siruguei," Sellés added. His team found evidence of at least four other species: Cairanoolithus roussetensis, Megaloolithus aureliensis, Megaloolithus siruguei and Megaloolithus baghensis. Megaloolithus eggs are thought to be associated with sauropods, long-necked dinosaurs that were among some of the largest to roam the planet.

The Coll de Nargó area is considered one of the most important dinosaur nesting areas in Europe, the researchers said, adding that their study shows it was used by several dinosaurs from the Late Campanian age (around 71 million years ago) to the Late Maastrichtian age (around 67 million years ago).

"We had never found so many nests in the one area before. In addition, the presence of various oospecies (eggs species) at the same level suggests that different types of dinosaurs shared the same nesting area," Sellés said, adding that the dinosaur eggs could help scientists determine the date of future findings at the site.

"It has come to light that the different types of eggs are located at very specific time intervals," Sellés explained to SINC. "This allows us to create biochronological scales with a precise dating capacity. In short, thanks to the collection of oospecies found in Coll de Nargó we have been able to determine the age of the site at between 71 and 67 million years."

The findings are published in the March issue of the journal Cretaceous Research.

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CERN scientists say particle is no "super-Higgs"

By Robert Evans

GENEVA (Reuters) - Physicists who found a new elementary particle last year said on Wednesday it looked like a basic Higgs boson rather than any "super-Higgs" that some cosmologists had hoped might open up more exotic secrets of the universe.

"It does look like the SM (Standard Model) Higgs boson," said physicist Brian Petersen of Atlas, one of two research teams working in parallel on the Higgs project at CERN in Switzerland.

His assertion, on a slide presentation to a conference at CERN and posted on the Internet, was echoed by the other group. "So far, it is looking like an SM Higgs boson," said slides from Colin Bernet of CMS.

The two groups work separately and without comparing findings to ensure their conclusions are reached independently.

It has been assumed since the triumphant announcement last June that a new particle spotted at CERNS's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was the Higgs, named after British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, that, theories say, gave mass to matter after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

But CERN has yet to confirm that. CMS may issue more information on Thursday at an expert gathering in the Italian Alps. A confirmed discovery of the Higgs boson, which could happen this year, would likely win a Nobel prize.

Meeting at CERN, near Geneva, the scientists said on Wednesday that the particle looked very much like it fit into the 30-year-old Standard Model of the makeup of the universe.

If confirmed on Thursday, it would mean LHC scientists will have to wait until late in this decade for any sign of "new worlds of physics".

Until the last few days there had been some faint signs that the discovery might prove to be something more than the particle that would fill the last gap in the Standard Model, a comprehensive explanation of the basic composition of the universe.

Rumours flew of a "super-Higgs" that might - as recently predicted by U.S. physicist Sean Carroll in a book on the particle - "be the link between our world and most of the matter in the universe."

Many scientists and cosmologists will be disappointed that the LHC's preliminary 3-year run from March 2010 to last month has not produced evidence of the two grails of "new physics" - dark matter and supersymmetry.

Dark matter is the mysterious substance that makes up some 25 percent of the stuff of the universe, against the tiny 4 percent - galaxies, stars and planets - which is visible. The remainder is a still unexplained "dark energy."

The theory of supersymmetry predicts that all elementary particles have heavier counterparts, also yet to be seen. It links in with more exotica like string theory, extra dimensions, and even parallel universes.

"I think everyone had hoped for something that would take us beyond the Standard Model, but that was probably not realistic at this stage," said one researcher, who asked not to be named.

The LHC closed down last month for two years of work that will double its power, and, it is hoped, the reach of its detectors. (Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

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Lionheart's heart smelled sweet for heaven, scientists find

VERSAILLES, France (Reuters) - The heart of the Lionheart was embalmed with daisy, myrtle, mint and frankincense, kept sweet-smelling in saintly fashion in hope of speeding King Richard of England's ascent to heaven.

French scientists have analyzed the organ, kept at Rouen Cathedral since the death of Richard I, known as The Lionheart; they found it was wrapped in linen, treated with mercury, herbs and reverence, and that it held pollen confirming records of his death from a war wound in the spring of 1199, in central France.

What Philippe Charlier, who published his paper on Thursday, did not find in the dirty powder that is all that is left of the heart was any trace of toxin - blunting tales that the Crusader king was hit by a poisoned crossbow bolt. Medieval dirt and an infected wound most likely caused his lingering death, aged 41.

For the English, fresh from rediscovering the remains of the Lionheart's 15th-century descendant, namesake and Shakespearian villain Richard III under a municipal car park, the findings of Charlier's team may revive memories of a monarch who lives on in popular culture as the absent but "good King Richard" in the tales of Robin Hood.

For the French, whom Richard was fighting when he died, his reputation as a ruthless warrior, against Muslims in the Holy Land but also in Europe, may explain the care taken to preserve the king's heart in a costly manner bound up in the medieval mind with the embalming of Jesus after the crucifixion.

"He had been rather criticized during the Crusade when he had been particularly cruel," Charlier, a youthful television celebrity in France, told a news conference at Versailles.

"People started to talk when he died, so very special care had to be given to his body and especially to his heart, with herbs and spices which were not chosen by accident.

"We know from historical sources that those herbs and spices were used to make the time Richard the Lionheart would spend in purgatory shorter and give him a kind of odor of sanctity.

"So this study is almost a scientific study of an artificial odor of sanctity, a man-made one," added Charlier, dubbed the "Indiana Jones of the graveyards" by French media for his high-profile analyses of relics and royal remains in recent years.

NO DOUBT

Unlike some such discoveries, notably genetic testing of the bones found to belong to Richard III or Charlier's analysis of a head which he concluded was that of Henri IV, France's great Renaissance king, no research was conducted at Rouen to determine whether the heart was indeed that of Richard I.

The organ was first rediscovered during work at the cathedral in the 19th century, in a lead casket dated to the 12th or 13th centuries bearing the inscription in Latin: "hic iacet cor ricardi regis anglorum" - Here lies the heart of Richard, king of the English. Its provenance was not in doubt, Charlier said, noting a prevalent practice at the time of dividing up royal remains for burial in different sites.

Among his previous work, Charlier, 35, has found that relics of Joan of Arc actually came from an Egyptian mummy and verified dried blood on a handkerchief was from the guillotined Louis XVI by DNA testing to link it to other royal remains.

In their paper in "Scientific Reports", Charlier of University Hospital Raymond Poincare and his team wrote that they found traces of linen, myrtle, daisy, mint, frankincense, creosote, mercury and possibly lime.

They had no clearly identifiable human tissue but said the embalmers themselves were not necessarily to blame - the rot may have been due to decay in the lead box and to damp getting in.

Whether they were successful in accelerating the process by which Richard entered paradise is a matter of pure speculation.

Charlier, whose Twitter account describes his "patients" as "you (soon), ... Henri IV, Richard the Lionheart, Louis XVI etc", noted in the paper that a 13th-century bishop had ruled: "Richard the Lionheart spent 33 years in Purgatory as expiation for his sins, and ascended to Heaven only in March 1232."

(Additional reporting by Vicky Buffery in Paris and Reuters Television in Versailles; Writing by Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

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Could global warming change tornado season, too?

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — With the planet heating up, many scientists seem fairly certain some weather elements like hurricanes and droughts will worsen. But tornadoes have them stumped.

These unpredictable, sometimes deadly storms plague the United States more than any other country. Here in tornado alley, Oklahoma City has been hit with at least 147 tornadoes since 1890.

But as the traditional tornado season nears, scientists have been pondering a simple question: Will there be more or fewer twisters as global warming increases?

There is no easy answer. Lately, tornado activity in America has been Jekyll-and-Hyde weird, and scientists are unsure if climate change has played a role in recent erratic patterns.

In 2011, the United States saw its second-deadliest tornado season in history: Nearly 1,700 tornadoes killed 553 people. The Joplin, Mo., twister was the single deadliest in American history, killing 158 people and causing $2.8 billion in damage.

The following year, 2012, started even earlier and even busier. Through April there were twice as many tornadoes as normal. Then the twisters suddenly disappeared. Tornado activity from May to August of that year was the lowest in 60 years of record-keeping, said Harold Brooks, a top researcher at the National Weather Center in Norman, Okla.

Meanwhile, Canada saw an unusual number of tornadoes in 2012; Saskatchewan had three times the normal number.

That year, the jet stream moved north and "essentially shut down" tornadoes in the American Midwest said Greg Carbin, warning meteorologist at the federal storm center. A tremendous drought meant far fewer storms, which not only shut off the spigot on rain but on storm cells that spawned tornadoes.

For much of America, tornadoes are seasonal. Typically, there are more during spring, and the numbers dwindle in the worst heat of the summer. Last year "essentially was an extended period of summertime conditions over the U.S.," Carbin said. "The real question is: What is spring now? Is it February?"

"Summer may be happening earlier and may be muscling out what we consider a transition between summer and winter," he said.

The last two seasons aren't alone in illustrating extremes in tornado activity.

Tornado record-keepers tally things like the most and least tornadoes in a month. Records for that category have been set 24 times over the past 60 years. Ten of those records have been set in the past decade — six for the fewest tornadoes and four for the most, Brooks said. Also, the three earliest starts of tornado season and the four latest have all occurred since 1997, he said.

What does that mean?

"We've had a dramatic increase in the variability of tornado occurrence," Brooks said.

The jet stream, a major player in tornado formation, has been in a state of flux, varying wildly in recent years, said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann.

"It's hard to predict future tornado seasons when we don't understand current tornado seasons," Brooks said between sessions at the National Tornado Summit here earlier this week. "We're not sure what's going to happen with the tornado numbers."

A new study in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society looks at all sorts of extreme weather, how it is changing because of global warming and how things are predicted to change in the future. The study says tornadoes and the severe thunderstorms that spawn them are the hardest to predict.

Public opinion polls show Americans blame global warming for bad tornado outbreaks, but climate scientists say that's not quite right.

One reason scientists can't figure out how global warming might affect tornadoes is that twisters are usually small weather events that aren't easily simulated in large computer models. And records of tornadoes may not have been accurate over the years as twisters twirled unnoticed around unpopulated areas.

So Brooks and others are looking at the ingredients that cause tornadoes. But even that isn't simple. They look at two main factors: moist energy in the atmosphere and wind shear. Wind shear is the difference between wind at high altitudes and wind near the surface. The more moist energy and greater the wind shear, the better the chances for tornadoes.

The atmosphere can hold more moisture as it warms, and it will likely be more unstable so that means more moist energy, several experts said. But wind shear is another matter. Brooks and Stanford University scientist Noah Diffenbaugh think there will be less of that.

That would suggest fewer tornadoes. But if there's more moist energy, that could lead to more tornadoes. One ingredient has to win out, and Brooks says it's hard to tell which one will. Diffenbaugh says recent computer simulations show the moist energy may overcome the reduced shear and produce at least more severe thunderstorms, if not tornadoes.

Given what's happening lately, Brooks believes there will be fewer days of tornadoes but more twisters on the days when they occur.

___

Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears

___

Online:

The National Weather Center: http://nwcnorman.org/

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China's Top 6 Environmental Concerns

China's environmental crises seem to arise on a scale as sweeping and epic as the vast nation itself:

Thousands of dead, bloated pigs floating down the river that supplies Shanghai with its drinking water. Air pollution in Beijing so impenetrable the U.S. Embassy's air quality measuring station can only call it "beyond index." Industrial towns where rates of cancer are so high they're known as "cancer villages."

Compounding these problems is the Chinese government's stony silence about anything that might imperil the country's economic development — including environmental regulation.

But China's increasingly restive population of 1.3 billion people is now starting to demand government action to combat the deadly plagues of pollution and disease that are stalking the 21st century's economic powerhouse. [The 10 Most Polluted Places on Earth]

Chinese officials, however, have barely started to acknowledge the problem. In the meantime, the people of China are forced to face the following environmental catastrophes on a daily basis:

Air pollution

According to the Environmental Protection Agency's air quality scale, any pollution rating above 300 means the air is unsafe to breathe. Under these conditions, people should stay indoors with an air purifier running and remain as motionless as possible, according to U.S. Embassy Beijing guidelines.

In January alone, there were 19 days when the index in Beijing surpassed that 300 threshold, according to the Washington Post, and readings above 500 are no longer unusual. On Jan. 12, the reading reached an eye-bleeding 886, comparable to living inside a smoking lounge.

Manufacturing industries and Beijing's 5 million-plus cars all contribute to the city's crippling air pollution, but most experts primarily blame the coal-burning electrical plants that power China's breakneck economic growth.

China now burns 47 percent of the world's coal, roughly equal to the amount used by all other countries of the world combined, the New York Times reports. And Beijing is surrounded by a vast network of coal-burning power plants.

But as foul as it is, Beijing's air isn't even China's worst: That dubious honor goes to Ürümqi in the country's far west, which frequently joins other Chinese cities like Lanzhou and Linfen on lists of the world's most polluted places. [Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth]

Water pollution

Thousands of dead pigs floating past Shanghai, dramatic though they are, may be the least of China's water pollution worries.

In January, a chemical accident leaked benzene, a known cancer-causing agent, into a tributary of the Huangpu River (where the dead pigs were discovered). More than 20 people were hospitalized as a result, according to the Wall Street Journal, and area residents were forced to rely on fire trucks to deliver safe drinking water.

More than half of China's surface water is so polluted it cannot be treated to make it drinkable, the Economist reports, and one-quarter of it is so dangerous it can't even be used for industrial purposes.

Groundwater isn't any safer: About 40 percent of China's farmland relies on underground water for irrigation, and an estimated 90 percent is polluted, Reuters reports. About 60 percent of the groundwater beneath Chinese cities is described as "severely polluted" by the Economist.

Last December — shortly after his sister died of lung cancer at age 35 — businessman Jin Zengmin from Zhejiang province offered a 200,000-yuan ($32,000) reward to any local environmental official who would swim in a nearby river, where Jin once swam as a boy, Time.com reports. The river is now black with sludge from an upstream shoe factory.

His reward remains uncollected.

Desertification

China has a history of intensive agriculture going back millennia, so it's perhaps unsurprising that much of the nation's 3.7 million square-mile (9.6 million square kilometers) territory has been subject to deforestation.

Population pressure, the conversion of forests to farmland, and hydroelectric and other infrastructure projects have placed China's remaining forests at risk. This prompted the United Nations Environment Programme to list the country's forests as threatened and in need of protection.

Following closely on the heels of deforestation and agricultural development is desertification, the destruction of vegetative land cover that results in a landscape defined by bare soil and rock. About 1 million square miles (2.6 million sq km) of China is now under desertification — that's about one-quarter of the country’s total land surface, spread across 18 provinces, according to IPS News Agency.

Blinding dust storms, mud-choked rivers and eroded topsoil are often the result of desertification. Despite recent gains in reforestation and grasslands restoration, the desert continues to expand each year by about 950 square miles (2,460 sq km), according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). [Dry and Drying: Stark Images of Drought]

The resulting loss of arable land has created a generation of "eco-migrants," the Guardian reports, who are forced to leave their homelands, because their traditional agricultural lifestyle is no longer an option.

"We've made progress, but we face a daunting challenge," Liu Tuo, Chinese desertification control officer, told the Guardian. "It may take China 300 years."

Biodiversity

Closely related to deforestation and desertification is the issue of habitat loss and the resulting drop in biodiversity. As vast areas of forest are cleared for farmland, bamboo plantations, timber and fuel wood, endangered animals like pandas struggle to survive.

China's issues with species loss extend far beyond its borders: The slaughter of elephants for ivory, the killing of rhinos for their horns, and the culling of tigers for their bones (as medicine) and penises (as aphrodisiacs) have one primary source: the Chinese market.

Sharks are endangered worldwide, largely because of shark finning — the removal of dorsal fins from still-living sharks — for the Chinese delicacy known as shark fin soup.

Cancer villages

Perhaps no other issue underscores China's reckless disregard for environmental and public health more than the existence of "cancer villages," entire towns that have been written off as so polluted that simply living there is a cancer risk.

For years, individuals and groups have waged a desperate campaign to force the government to address — or even acknowledge — the high rates of stomach, liver, kidney and colon cancer in certain areas, usually adjacent to heavy industrial complexes, the BBC reports.

In Shangba, a city in southern Guangdong province, the river that flows through town changes from white to a startling shade of orange because of varying types of industrial effluent, Reuters reports. Many of the river's contaminants, like cadmium and zinc, are known to cause cancer.

"All the fish died, even chickens and ducks that drank from the river died. If you put your leg in the water, you'll get rashes and a terrible itch," He Shuncai, a 34-year-old farmer from Shangba, told Reuters. "Last year alone, six people in our village died from cancer and they were in their 30s and 40s."

In February of this year, a report from China's environment ministry noted that chemicals and heavy metals banned in other countries are found throughout China. The report went on to state that there are "some serious cases of health and social problems like the emergence of cancer villages in individual regions," marking the first official admission of the problem that has plagued the country for decades.

Population growth

China's "one-child" policy is universally acknowledged as having effectively kept the country's population in check. Nonetheless, China is home to about 1.3 billion people — over one-seventh of the planet's people live in the nation.

What's more of a concern to environmental advocates is the growing affluence of China's middle class, who are now adopting Western-style consumer patterns. While items like red meat, liquor and automobiles were once considered forbidden luxuries, more and more families are driving their car to a market to buy tenderloin beef, 120-proof baijiu liquor and other consumer goods.

The health risks associated with these kinds of purchases have not gone unnoticed: Binge drinking and alcohol-related hospitalizations have now reached "epidemic proportions," the Guardian reports, and the Chinese — who once enjoyed a relatively healthy diet and low rates of cancer — now dine on twice as much meat as Americans, consuming one-quarter of the world's supply, according to the Telegraph.

These consumer trends, multiplied across a large and heavily populated country, have a global reach that affects everything from sugar prices in Europe to climate change in Greenland: Most climate experts agree that China's industrial growth, and its dependence on coal-burning, are significant drivers of climate change, Scientific American reports.

Can China change course?

While China's traditionally obdurate government hierarchy has seemed to value economic development at any cost, including the health of its citizens and wholesale eco-destruction, there are signs of a thaw in the icy silence that shrouds much environmental action in the country.

The government's recent admission that cancer villages exist "shows that the environment ministry has acknowledged that pollution has led to people getting cancer," environmental lawyer Wang Canfa told Agence Frence-Presse. "It shows that this issue, of environmental pollution leading to health damages, has drawn attention."

Coupled with the public outcry over the thick blanket of toxic smog that covered Beijing earlier this year, there are glimmers of hope that the Chinese people may succeed in wresting some measure of control over their environment — and their lives — back from government and industry leaders.

Whether they will succeed remains to be seen.

Email Marc Lallanilla or follow him @MarcLallanilla. Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience. We're also on Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

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Europe, Russia to launch Mars mission to sample soil for signs of life

By Alissa de Carbonnel

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Europe and Russia signed a deal on Thursday for a joint Mars mission which will bore beneath the Red Planet's surface for soil samples they hope will solve the mystery of whether there is life beyond Earth.

Europe's space agency had hoped to work with NASA on the two-spacecraft ExoMars mission but turned to the Russians after the U.S. agency pulled out due to budget shortfalls.

The announcement comes amid heightened excitement over the search for life on the planet in our solar system most like Earth after scientists said analysis from NASA's own mission rover, Curiosity, showed Mars had the right ingredients for life.

European scientists say the two-stage mission, with the two craft to be launched in 2016 and 2018, will pave the way for what NASA has described as the "Holy Grail" of Mars exploration: a separate mission to return dirt samples from the Red Planet.

"Curiosity learnt us a little bit, ExoMars will bring us a step further, but bringing back those samples to Earth you can do 10 to 100 times more analysis," Rolf de Groot, head of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Robotic Exploration Coordination Office, told Reuters.

"That is a goal of everybody who works on Mars exploration."

The Europe-Russia mission hopes to take scientists beyond NASA's finding that the surface of Earth's neighboring planet had the right mix of elements to sustain life, by drilling 2 meters (6 feet) below its radiation-hit surface for samples.

"NASA is also drilling, but two centimeters deep," de Groot said, referring to the ongoing Curiosity mission. "It's a completely different story."

"ExoMars, by drilling 2 meters into the ground, might hope to identify really the big molecules because that would be a direct indication of the presence of life or that life once existed on Mars."

He said the ESA's Mars rover would also be equipped with a much more advanced laboratory than Curiosity has, so would be able to carry out more detailed analysis.

RUSSIAN ROCKETS

Russian Space Agency Roskosmos will provide the rockets to launch the ExoMars - short for Exobiology on Mars - mission and will also design the descent module and surface platform.

Europe turned to Russia after NASA left the $1.3 billion project in February 2012, citing a budget crunch. The ESA and Roskosmos agreed to cooperate last April, but talks to work out the details dragged on for nearly a year.

"This event was a long time in the making and took a great deal of collaboration," Roskosmos head Vladimir Popovkin said after signing the deal with ESA Director Jean-Jacques Dordain in Paris.

Russia's involvement in the ambitious mission could boost the status of its once-pioneering space agency after a litany of costly and embarrassing failures.

The delays in agreeing the mission hinged on the extent of Russia's participation, according to Russian space experts who said Moscow had seemed to reach its goal of full partnership.

"The agreement implies that Russian scientists and engineers will become full-fledged participants in all the international scientific and technical groups," Roskosmos said in a statement.

What was to be Russia's first deep space mission in more than two decades - the Phobos-Grunt mission to scoop up soil samples from Mars - was among five botched launches that damaged Moscow's reputation as a reliable launch partner.

European governments have so far committed 850 million euros to the mission. The funding cap has been set at 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) but delays and changes to the scientific aspects of the project are expected to drive up the price tag.

Even though NASA pulled out, it will still provide radio communications equipment, an important organics experiment and engineering and mission support.

The United States also plans to follow up its Curiosity rover with an identical probe, to launch in 2020. It has not yet decided if it will cache samples for a future return to Earth.

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2011 ranked a Mars sample return mission as its top priority in planetary science for the next decade. The long-term goal of the U.S. human space program is to land astronauts on Mars in the 2030s.

(Additional reporting by Irene Klotz; Editing by Pravin Char)

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Russian scientists may have found new life under Antarctic ice

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian scientists believe they have discovered new life forms sealed off for millions of years in a subglacial lake deep under the Antarctic ice, the RIA news agency reported on Thursday.

After more than a decade of stop-and-go drilling, Russia pierced through Antarctica's frozen crust last year and took back samples of water from a vast lake that has lain untouched for at least 14 million years.

Scientists say the icy darkness of Lake Vostok, under some 3,700 metres of ice, may provide a glimpse of the planet before the Ice Age and clues to life on other planets.

"After excluding all known contaminants, bacterial DNA was found that does not match any known species in world databases," Sergei Bulat of the St Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute told RIA.

"If it (the bacteria) had been found on Mars, then without a doubt we would have said there is life on Mars - but this is DNA from Earth," he said. "We are calling this life form unidentified or unclassified."

Scientists from the United States and Britain are close on Moscow's heels to probe what life may exist in one of the most extreme environments on Earth.

This year, a U.S. expedition said they had seen living cells under a microscope in field samples taken from the shallower subglacial Lake Whillans, but more study is needed to determine what kinds of bacteria they are and how they live.

A British effort to reach a third body, Lake Ellsworth, was called off in December because of problems drilling.

What life is found in the icy depths may provide the best answer yet to whether life can exist in the extreme conditions on Mars or Jupiter's moon Europa.

The Russian discovery came from analysing water that froze onto the end of the drill bit used to bore through to Vostok - the largest of a network of hundreds of lakes under the ice cap that acts like a blanket trapping the Earth's geothermal heat.

Bulat and other members of Russia's Antarctic mission could not be reached for comment to Reuters on Thursday.

But Bulat told RIA that scientists are waiting for more samples from the lake to confirm their discovery.

Because of the technology used to keep from polluting the pristine lake, Russia will only obtain clean water samples - uncontaminated by drilling fluid - for analysis later this year.

To answer concerns kerosene and anti-freeze from the borehole would seep into the lake, Russian engineers withdrew the drill to allow the water to percolate up into the borehole and freeze there, only returning this year to collect it.

But Bulat said the unknown microbes were found after separating out species of bacteria that are known to exist in the drilling fluid.

"When we tried to identify the DNA, it did not coincide with any of known species. It's degree of similarity was less than 86 percent," Bulat told RIA.

"That is practically zero when working with DNA. A level of 90 percent tells us the organism is unknown."

Frozen samples from deeper in the borehole collected during this year's Antarctic summer season in February are now being carried back by boat and are due in St Petersburg in May.

"If we again identify the same group of organism in that pure sample of water, then we can confidently say we have found new life on Earth," Bulat said.

(Reporting by Alissa de Carbonnel; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)

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Space trio lands in Kazakhstan after bad weather delay

ALMATY (Reuters) - A Russian Soyuz capsule made a "bull's eye" landing in the steppes of Kazakhstan on Saturday, delivering a Russian-American trio from the International Space Station, a day after its originally scheduled touchdown was delayed by foul weather.

NASA's Kevin Ford and Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin, who had manned the $100 billion orbital outpost since October as Expedition 34, landed in cloudy weather at 7:06 a.m. Moscow time (0306 GMT) northeast of the town of Arkalyk.

They had spent 144 days aboard the multinational ISS on their space journey of almost 61 million miles (98 million km).

"The landing was energetic and exciting," Russian TV showed Novitskiy as saying.

NASA television said the deorbit burn and other events during the descent had gone flawlessly. It said the capsule had landed upright, almost hitting its bull's eye target in thick fog.

"Oleg Novitskiy reported to search and recovery teams that the crew is feeling good," NASA television said. "Everything seems to be in order."

Due to hampered visibility, it took a few minutes before helicopters with Russian search and recovery teams could locate the Soyuz capsule after its landing.

The first images shown by Russia's Vesti-24 television featured rescue workers standing in a snow-covered steppe opening the hatch of the capsule.

The three smiling astronauts were seated on semi-reclined chairs and covered with blue thermal blankets. They were then carried to a nearby inflatable medical tent.

On Friday, fog and freezing rain at the landing site in Kazakhstan prevented helicopters from setting up for the crew's return to Earth.

In preparation for their departure, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield took the helm of the space station on Wednesday, becoming the first Canadian to take command of the outpost.

It is only the second time in the 12-year history of the station, a project of 15 nations that has been permanently staffed since November 2000, that command has been turned over to someone who is not American or Russian.

Hadfield will be part of a three-man skeleton crew until NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin arrive later this month.

(Reporting by Dmitry Solovyov; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

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Bat-Eating Spiders Are Everywhere, Study Finds

There's only one place in the world to escape bat-catching spiders: Antarctica. These arachnids ensnare and pounce on bats everywhere else in the world, researchers say.

Bats rank among the most successful groups of mammals, with the more than 1,200 species of bats comprising about one-fifth of all mammal species. Other than owls, hawks and snakes, bats have few natural enemies.

Still, invertebrates — creatures without backbones — have been known to dine on bats. For instance, giant centipedes in a cave in Venezuela were seen killing and eating bats, and the arachnids known as whip spiders were spotted feeding on dead bats in caves of the Caribbean. Cockroaches have been observed feeding on bat pups that have fallen to the floor of caves.

Spider-eat-bat world

Accidental deaths of bats in spiderwebs were known as well, but were thought to happen very rarely. Still, spiders are known to occasionally dine on a variety of vertebrates — creatures with backbones. For instance, fishing spiders capture and devour fish and frogs; some species of wolf spiders, huntsman spiders, tarantulas and related spiders have been seen killing and eating frogs and lizards; and tarantulas and comb-footed spiders have apparently fed on snakes and mice. There are also numerous reports of spiders killing other flying vertebrates, snagging birds with large orb webs. 

Recent studies of a web-building spider species (Argiope savignyi) and a tarantula species (Poecilotheria rufilata) both killing small bats led researchers to suggest that bat captures and kills due to spiders might be more frequent than previously thought. So they analyzed 100 years' worth of scientific reports, interviews of bat and spider researchers and the staff of bat hospitals, and scans of image and video sites. The search revealed 52 cases of bat-catching spiders worldwide. [See Photos of Bat-Eating Spiders in Action]

Giant webs

Approximately 90 percent of known bat-catching spiders live in the warmer areas of the globe, in the third of the Earth surrounding the equator. About 40 percent live in the neotropics — the whole of South America, and the tropical regions of North America — while nearly a third live in Asia and more than a sixth live in Australia and Papua New Guinea.

Eighty-eight percent of the reported cases of bat catches were due to web-building spiders, with giant tropical orb-weaving spiders with a leg-span of 4 to 6 inches (10 to 15 centimeters) seen catching bats in huge, strong orb-webs up to 5 feet (1.5 meters) wide. 

In instances seen in Costa Rica and Panama, the spiders had built their webs near buildings inhabited by bat colonies. Bat-catching via spiderwebs was also witnessed particularly often in the parks and forests of the greater Hong Kong area. Future research may investigate whether the huge webs that sometimes block the entrances of tropical bat caves in east and southeast Asia and the neotropics may occasionally snag any members of the giant swarms of bats that emerge from the caves at night. [Photos: Creepy, Crawly & Incredible Spiders]

The other 12 percent of cases of spider kills of bats were from spiders that hunt without webs. For instance, tarantulas were seen eating small bats in tropical rainforests in Peru and eastern Ecuador and on the forest floor in northeastern Brazil. A reddish parachute tarantula (Poecilotheria rufilata) was also seen predating on a small bat in Kerala, India, while a huntsman spider (Heteropoda venatoria) was observed capturing and killing a small bat in a shed near Kolkata, India. An attempt by a large fishing spider (Dolomedes triton) to kill a bat pup was also witnessed below a bridge in Indiana.

The victims

Most bat prey of spiders are small or juvenile insect-eating bats, and usually are among the most common bat species of their areas. Bats entangled in webs were usually 4 to 9.5 inches (10 to 24 cm) in wingspan, including some of the smallest species of bats in the world, and they sometimes died of exhaustion, starvation, dehydration or overheating — but there were many cases where spiders were seen actively attacking, killing and eating these victims.

Bats are likely capable of detecting spiderwebs via echolocation, their biological sonar. Even if bats do collide with spiderwebs, only the strongest traps are likely capable of withstanding the energy of such an impact without breaking. As such, bat captures are likely rare.

Still, as scarce as spider captures of bats likely are, they would prove well worth the effort. The catch of a 2-gram bat by the giant orb-weaving spider Nephila pilipes, a common killer of bats, would be a bonanza about 10 times the mass of the average daily catch of insect prey, researchers noted.

Martin Nyffeler and Mirjam Knörnschild detailed their findings online March 13 in the journal PLOS ONE.

Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience, Facebook or Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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E.T. Is Coming! Science Channel Series Explores Possible Alien Invasion

A new cable television series premiering tonight (March 5) reveals a fresh take on how aliens could invade Earth.

The Science Channel's "Are We Alone?" is a two-part miniseries that uses expert testimony and some creative science fiction to explore how a technologically advanced species could travel to Earth and invade the planet.

"It's like nothing you've seen before," Hakeem Oluseyi, a Florida Institute of Technology astrophyscist interviewed in the series, told SPACE.com.

"Are We Alone?" chronicles an alien invasion from start to finish. Interstellar travelers arrive on Earth, dropping capsules that begin multiplying when they reach the surface of the planet. "Are We Alone?" attempts to explore every aspect of the invasion, from how the biological components could take over the Earth to how humans would react to the aliens.

Oluseyi thinks that an invasion is probably not the most likely way humanity will encounter aliens, however. For the most part, Earth was inhabited solely by single-celled organisms, until more complex life started taking over, Oluseyi said.

"Chances are that single-celled life is the type that's ubiquitous throughout the universe," Oluseyi said.

"Are We Alone?" kicks off a month of Science Channel programming devoted to the search for alien life. Another two-part series, called "Aliens: The Definitive Guide," details the work that scientists are doing to hunt for alien life.

Planet-hunting telescopes — like NASA's Kepler Space Telescope — are helping scientists understand that there are plenty of planets that could harbor life, Oluseyi added.

"We're at this point that we're finding things we always knew were there," Oluseyi said, citing Kepler's newest discoveries. "Life is the same way. We're pretty certain that it's there, but we haven't seen it yet."

There is even a possibility of some form of primitive extraterrestrial life in the solar system, Oluseyi said. Some moons of Jupiter, like Europa, are similar enough to Earth that they could harbor life. It's even possible that alien life has entered Earth's atmosphere through a process called "panspermia."

Some studies have shown that micro-organisms can survive the intense heat and pressure created by entry into an atmosphere, Oluseyi said.

Tonight's first episode of "Are We Alone?" called "The Invasion," premieres on the Science Channel at 10 p.m. ET (check local listings). The second episode, titled "The Offspring," premieres March 12.

Follow Miriam Kramer on Twitter @mirikramer and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebookor Google+. This article was first published on SPACE.com.

Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Physicists Undo Century-Old Gordian Knot

A century-old physics question had scientists and mathematicians in knots, until two researchers at the University of Chicago annihilated them.

Dustin Kleckner, a postdoctoral scientist, and William Irvine, an assistant professor of physics, used a tank of fluid to generate a vortex loop, a structure similar to a smoke ring. Vortex loops are common phenomena, showing up in not only smoke rings but mushroom clouds, fire-eater tricks, and even the sun's outer atmosphere, the corona.

A big question was what happens to these loops over time. The mathematical theories worked out over a century ago by William Thomson, more commonly known as Lord Kelvin, suggested the vortex rings could form knots, and that those knots would be conserved, meaning they'd persist indefinitely.

But Kleckner and Irvine found that they are not conserved. The vortex rings, which spin about their axis or vortex line, can connect, tangle up, and annihilate each other, the researchers found. [See Images of the Vortex Knots]

A knot

Mathematically speaking, a knot is a shape that doesn't cross itself unless projected onto another surface. So for example, a trefoil knot (popular on Celtic-themed jewelry) crosses itself when looked at as a two-dimensional picture, but if one follows the rope that makes the knot, it doesn't. That is, while the knots might form all kinds of shapes, if you were following the "rope" formed by the vortex ring, it would never touch itself.

"The basic idea was that if you have a vortex like this, and a principle vortex line, it should not be able to cross itself," Kleckner told LiveScience. When they don't cross, the knot stays intact.

The mathematics may sound abstruse, but they can be tested experimentally. Kleckner and Irvine's setup represented the first time anyone has been able to form knots in a fluid, rather than simple rings, to test Kelvin's theory.

The researchers knew the knots they formed wouldn't be conserved indefinitely, because real fluids have viscosity, or become turbulent, or have friction with the sides of the container — just as trajectories don't behave perfectly according to Newton's laws because of factors such as air resistance. But Kleckner and Irvine thought it would still be useful to check the theory against an experiment.

Making vortices

So the two tried to find a way to generate the vortices. It was harder than it sounded. The problem was getting the fluid (water, in this case) to flow over a structure in just the right way to make the vortex. The two turned to hydrofoils, which are the wings used in watercraft.

To make the vortex, the scientists took the wing-shaped hydrofoil and made it into a ring. They then pushed it through the water. It's not unlike blowing a smoke ring, but in that case it's about getting the puff of air right, Kleckner said. In this experiment, the challenge was getting water to make just the right shape as it is blasted out at high speed.

That took a lot of work with a 3-D printer and some heavy-duty mathematical modeling. After trying some 30 different shapes, the researchers found one that worked. When the water is pushed out with a force equivalent to 100 times the acceleration of gravity, it forms the vortex rings, which connect up to each other and annihilate themselves. The same would likely happen in other media, Kleckner said, as long as one remains well below the speed of sound in the fluid.

The researchers plan to scale up their experiment, to see if making bigger vortices makes them more stable.

Kleckner said that the experiment raises as many questions as it answers. "If these things do exist [in nature], are they important in turbulence? How is this connected to the corona of the sun — that goes through a similar reconnection process," he said. "No one has been able to do experiments like this before."

The research is detailed in the March 3 issue of the journal Nature Physics.

Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience, Facebook or Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Hopes fade of Higgs particle opening door to new realms soon

GENEVA (Reuters) - Scientists' hopes that last summer's triumphant trapping of the particle that shaped the post-Big Bang universe would quickly open the way into exotic new realms of physics like string theory and new dimensions have faded this past week.

Five days of presentations on the particle, the Higgs boson, at a scientific conference high in the Italian Alps point to it being the last missing piece in a 30-year-old cosmic blueprint and nothing more, physicists following the event say.

"The chances are getting slimmer and slimmer that we are going to see something else exciting anytime soon," said physicist Pauline Gagnon from CERN near Geneva in whose Large Hadron Collider (LHC) the long-sought particle was found.

And U.S. scientist Peter Woit said in his blog that the particle was looking "very much like a garden variety SM (Standard Model) Higgs", discouraging for researchers who were hoping for glimpses of breathtaking vistas beyond.

That conclusion, shared among analysts of vast volumes of data gathered in the LHC over the past three years, would push to well beyond 2015 any chance of sighting exotica like dark matter or super symmetric particles in the giant machine.

That is when the LHC, where particles are smashed together at light speed to create billions of mini-Big Bangs that are traced in vast detectors, resumes operation with its power doubled after a two-year shutdown from last month.

The Higgs - still not claimed as a scientific discovery because its exact nature has yet to be established - was postulated in the early 1960s as the element that gave mass to flying matter after the Big Bang 13,7 billion years ago.

UNEXPLAINED MYSTERIES

It was incorporated tentatively into the Standard Model when that was compiled in the 1980s, and its discovery in the LHC effectively completed that blueprint. But there are mysteries of the universe, like gravity, that remain outside it.

Some physicists have been hoping that the particle as finally found would be something beyond a "Standard Model Higgs" - offering a passage onwards into a science fiction world of "New Physics" and a zoo of new particles.

They had been looking to the Italian gathering, called the Moriond Conference although it is held in the ski village of La Thuile, for reports bringing evidence of this.

Dark matter, the invisible stuff that makes up some 25 percent of the universe, and super symmetry, a theory that says all particles have unseen extra-heavy counterparts, were top of the target list after the finding of the Higgs.

Both are integral parts of the concept of "New Physics" that should take knowledge of how the universe works beyond that of the Standard Model blueprint.

There is little or no controversy about dark matter, whose existence is deduced from its gravitational influence on the visible galaxies, stars and planets which make up little more than four percent of the cosmos.

But super symmetry, dubbed SUSY by physicists, is controversial, championed by some physicists and dismissed as fantasy by others - like the string theory on how the universe is built, with which it is linked.

One of its proponents, Oliver Buchmueller of CERN's CMS research team, on Friday accepted that finding it would now take longer. "It seems we have to wait for 2015 and higher energy. That will be the showdown for Susy," he told Reuters.

(Reported by Robert Evans; editing by Andrew Roche)

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Illinois scientists find rare coin in Kenya

CHICAGO (AP) — Scientists from Illinois have found a rare, 600-year-old Chinese coin on the Kenyan island of Manda.

The Field Museum in Chicago announced the find Wednesday. The joint expedition was led by Chapurukha Kusimba of the museum and Sloan Williams of the University of Illinois-Chicago. Researchers say the coin proves trade existed between China and eastern Africa decades before European explorers set sail.

The coin is made of copper and silver. It has a square hole in the center so it could be worn on a belt. Scientists say it was issued by Emperor Yongle of China and his name is written on the coin.

Scientists from Kenya, Pennsylvania and Ohio also participated in the expedition. They also found human remains and other artifacts predating the coin.

___

Online: http://www.fieldmuseum.org

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Scientists find how deadly new virus infects human cells

By Kate Kelland

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have worked out how a deadly new virus which was unknown in humans until last year is able to infect human cells and cause severe, potentially fatal damage to the lungs.

In one of the first detailed studies of the virus - which emerged in the Middle East and has so far infected 15 people worldwide, killing nine of them - Dutch researchers identified a cell surface protein it uses to enter and infect human cells.

The finding, published in the journal Nature, came as the World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed the 15th case of the virus, known as novel coronavirus or NCoV, in a male patient in Saudi Arabia who died on March 2.

Other cases have been in Jordan and Qatar, and in patients in Germany and Britain linked to travel in the Middle East.

NCoV is from the same family of viruses as those that cause common colds and the one that caused the deadly outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) that first emerged in Asia in 2003.

The WHO first issued an international alert about it in September after it was identified in a Qatari man in Britain who had recently been in Saudi Arabia.

A study published last month found that NCoV was well adapted to infecting human cells and may be treatable with medicines similar to the ones used for SARS, which killed a tenth of the 8,000 people it infected.

In this latest study, led by Bart Haagmans at the Erasmus Medical Center in The Netherlands, researchers set out to find how the virus got into cells - which receptors it used - and then to find out where in the body those receptors were common.

POTENTIAL VACCINES

"Once you can identify the receptor and you know the distribution of the receptor in the body, then you can get more information on the pathogenesis (the way it infects people) of the virus and the possibility for transmission," Haagmans said in a telephone interview.

Researchers identified the key receptor for the disease as a cell surface protein called dipeptidyl peptidase 4 (DPP4).

They also found cells containing DPP4 receptors were common in the lower respiratory tract but not in the upper respiratory tract - giving clues to why the virus causes illness in the lungs rather than in the nose and throat as a cold virus would.

The findings should help researchers find ways of developing potential drugs or vaccines to block the DPP4 receptors and prevent infection, Haagmans said.

A few drugs that block DPP4 receptors are already on the market, licensed for use in diabetes, but Haagmans said his team already tried using those to stop the virus in laboratory tests and found they did not work.

He said, however, that the team was working with other molecules that might block the receptors and could form the basis for developing a potential vaccine.

Initial analysis by scientists at Britain's Health Protection Agency last year found that NCoV's closest relatives were most probably bat viruses.

Yet further work by a research team in Germany suggests NCoV may have come through an intermediary - possibly goats.

Haagmans said since DPP4 receptors were also present in other species, including bats, his findings showed it was feasible the virus came from bats. He said the idea that goats may have been an intermediary also looked feasible.

(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Pravin Char)

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