People in southeastern Turkey know the meaning of conflict all too well. Government forces have been fighting Kurdish rebels for the past 27 years, with hundreds of thousands of people displaced as a result. Poverty and unemployment are high, and there are few opportunities, particularly for young people. But a Kurdish Basketball club offers an alternative for local youths.

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The crizotinib trial was unusual because it did not contain a control arm for placebo treatment. In 2008, Mano and his colleagues at Jichi Medical University identified a fusion protein of anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) with another protein EML4, resulting from a chromosomal rearrangement seen in about 4% of lung cancer patients. The ALK-EML4 fusion is a powerful driver of cancer but is potently inhibited by crizotinib.

In this trial, doctors only enrolled patients testing positive for the ALK biomarker. Crizotinib treatment resulted in dramatic shrinkage of the tumors, visibly and almost immediately, in some cases within 48 hr. There could be no doubt that the drug was working. Even though only 82 patients were enrolled, the results were clearly statistically significant. Dr Mano’s patient was on his feet in days.

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There’s an element of tension pervading Diyarbakir, the largest city in Turkey’s Kurdish region. The police and military keep a tight watch on the city, and political demonstrations are common.

The American withdrawal from Iraq has stoked fears of a Kurdish uprising, and the government has stepped up its military presence in the regions bordering Iraq. Most recently, protests broke out in late December after 35 civilians were killed in a botched air strike near the Iraqi border.

Given the conflict, many Kurdish youth feel alienated from the rest of Turkey and they cannot easily escape the poverty of their surroundings, according to experts. But a basketball training program in the neighborhood of Baglar is offering just that.

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The report finds that there are relatively few baseline measurements of water quality in an aquifer before drilling begins to draw on for scientific analysis.

“Some states have revised regulations specifically for shale gas development; regulatory gaps remain in many states, including the areas of well casing and cementing, water withdrawal and usage, and waste storage and disposal,” states the report.

It also finds that hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” a technique used to extract natural gas, is not directly responsible for contaminating groundwater with chemicals or methane.

Instead, the scientists laid the blame on accidents connected to gas development that are on the surface or just below, closer to water aquifers. These could include other aspects of drilling such as improper casing and cementings of well bores, spills of produced water, improper disposal and subsurface blowouts.

Their report echoes previous findings regarding groundwater contamination and natural gas extraction.

“The immediate concern with shale gas development and hydraulic fracturing was that fracking was several thousand feet below the surface,” Charles Groat at the university’s Energy Institute said in a video report. “We put chemicals in the groundwater that people drank that would be bad for your health. So people are very much opposed to hydraulic fracturing from that point of view.”

But fracturing itself — a process in which water, sand and chemicals are shot at shale at high pressures underground to cause fractures and release natural gas — does not lead to contamination of aquifers, said Groat. It takes place at about 8,000 feet below ground level, which is thousands of feet below typical municipal water aquifers.

“That doesn’t mean there aren’t ways for fracturing fluids or flowback waters to get into groundwater supplies, and that brings us closer to the surface than where hydraulic fracturing takes place,” said Groat.

He acknowledged that for the layperson, fracturing can encompass all the activities related to natural gas development, not just the drilling process below ground. But it is important to make the distinction so regulators can focus on which part of the extraction process actually leads to contamination, he said.

The problem is the industry is moving at such a fast pace that it is difficult for science to keep up, he said. He then added that, on the positive side, the techniques of drilling also improve each day.

The study was funded entirely by the University of Texas. The researchers had initially sought industry funding but were unable to secure support due to demands industry made over the timeline and method of completion.

The report includes 450 pages of white papers from various experts and examines instances of contamination recorded in the Barnett, Marcellus and Haynesville shales. Its research agenda was designed in cooperation with the Environmental Defense Fund and Syracuse University. It is meant as a systematic review of existing scientific literature, though it is not peer reviewed.
Regulations

The study finds that in most places in America, no one keeps track of chemicals in groundwater before oil and gas drilling begins, making it difficult to get a read on how gas production changes the water.

It also finds that regulators ought to use more careful methods for analyzing and sampling water. A lack of scientific rigor can affect regulators’ ability to attribute pollution to specific causes.

Gas drilling is mostly regulated at the state level, and while some states are on track to developing regulations tailored to the industry, some are lax, according to the report.

Among some of its specific recommendations:

“States not having regulations for blasting in environmentally sensitive areas or for shot hole plugging during the shale gas exploration phase may want to consider adding these requirements.”

“States may also need to more uniformly require a plan for disposal of wastes (including drilling fluids, drill cuttings, and flowback and produced water) and to ensure that the methods of disposal (e.g., centralized facility, surface discharge with permit, discharge to POTW or injection well, land application) conforms with regulations and best practices.”

“States may need to update or put in place adequate regulations for disposal of wastes containing naturally-occurring radioactive material (NORM) — as for oil and gas operations in general.”

The report also calls for greater enforcement of the regulations: “Evaluation of state enforcement is hindered by several factors, including differing methods of collecting, organizing, and recording violations and enforcement actions; variances in the completeness of records; and responsiveness of agencies to information requests.”
Methane

The report also finds that methane in water wells in some shale gas areas such as the Marcellus can “most likely be linked to natural sources and likely was present before the onset of shale gas operations.”

Fears surrounding methane contamination were first highlighted to a national audience by the documentary “Gasland,” which showed a homeowner’s tap water catching on fire because of the presence of methane.

Subsequently, a study by Duke University researchers in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that drinking water near Marcellus Shale gas wells was more likely to be contaminated with methane. People interpreted the study as evidence that the technique of hydraulic fracturing caused the contamination.

But scientists disputed this interpretation, saying the contamination was more likely the result of leaky gas well casings from three nearby wells rather than fracturing. They also pointed out that the study did not have data on the composition of groundwater in these wells before drilling began to get a comparison.

No one has so far studied the health effects of sustained exposure to low levels of methane.

Reporter Mike Soraghan contributed.

Read more at the Huffington Post

He was 42, a ranger in the nearby forest, and a tree branch fell on his head. Like funerals elsewhere in West Africa, the entire town is in exuberant mourning. There is plenty of cane juice (alcohol made of sugar cane) and beer to go around, courtesy of the Forestry Development Authority. Supplies were fetched from Greenville, the closest ‘city’, and everyone has been drinking heavily for the past few days.

Once the cans are empty, children pick them and pretend to be adults as they dance to high life music while swigging down invisible spirits.

Heavily armed officials from the immigration authority march through the town, keeping on their vests and boots and hats despite the heavy heat.

Goats for slaughter are paraded in front of officials who’ve turned up at the funeral. Men use the chance to ask for jobs, and the village football team dances in at a critical juncture to demand a football to play with.

Tears finally flow as the coffin is hoisted up on the shoulders of his friends and colleagues and left on the outskirts of the village. The next day, the man’s family shave their heads in a cleansing ritual.

In a sunlit opening in the forest, Skinnah spots a large adult chimpanzee hammering something with a big stone. The chimpanzee puts a broken nut into its mouth then continues pounding. When Skinnah tries to move closer, the chimp disappears into the trees. By the time Leinert and her crew get to the clearing, the animal is long gone.

For the past year, Leinert has been trekking through Sapo National Park, Liberia’s first and only protected reserve, to study its chimpanzee population. A student volunteer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (EVA) in Leipzig, Germany, Leinert has never seen her elusive subjects in the flesh but she knows some of them well. There’s an energetic young male with a big belly who hammers nuts so vigorously he has to grab a sapling for support. There are the stronger adults who can split a nut with three blows. And there are the mothers who parade through the site with their babies. They’ve all been caught by video cameras placed strategically throughout Sapo.

Chimpanzees in the wild are notoriously difficult to study because they flee from humans — with good reason. Bushmeat hunting and human respiratory diseases have decimated chimpanzee populations¹, while logging and mining have wiped out their habitat. Population numbers have plunged — although no one knows by exactly how much because in most countries with great apes, the animals have never been properly surveyed.

The Pan Africa Great Ape Program, the first Africa-wide great-ape census to be mounted, could change that. In addition to surveying chimpanzee numbers (see ‘How many chimpanzees are left?’), project scientists plan to set up automated video and audio recording devices at 40 research sites in 15 countries with chimp populations. Led by Christophe Boesch, director of the primatology department at the EVA, and Hjalmar Kühl, also at the EVA, the programme aims to get a picture of how chimpanzee behaviour — from nut cracking to vocal calls — varies across Africa. Ultimately, the hope is to learn about the origins and extent of what, in humans, would be called culture.

Until recently, scientists regarded culture — defined as socially transmitted behaviours — as exclusive to humans, but there is growing recognition that many animals exhibit some sort of culture. Chimpanzees, which share 98% of their genes with humans, have the most varied set of behaviours documented in the animal world. The difference between humans and animals is growing less distinct, say some researchers. “It is not black and white,” says Kühl, who is Leinert’s supervisor at the EVA.

In the old scenario, “only humans have culture”, says Jason Kamilar, a biogeographer in the department of anthropology at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “Then, culture would be the defining feature of humanity, which evolved some time after the split between the human and chimp lineages,” he says. But “if chimps have culture, then presumably the last common ancestor of chimps and humans had culture”.

Continue reading at NatureNews

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Kenyan science is a study in contrasts. Among sub-Saharan nations, it ranks third — behind South Africa and Nigeria — in its output of scientific papers published in international journals, and its publishing outranks that of economic heavyweight Nigeria in fields such as environment, ecology and immunology. It is also a hub of collaborations on the continent (see ‘Country connections’). But Kenya’s research output has grown more slowly than most other sub-Saharan nations. In the recent African Union survey, Kenya scored last in terms of the increase in the numbers of published research papers, normalized for population size.

Most of the scientific work in Kenya is centred in government-owned research institutes that have extensive international collaborations. Among the most renowned is the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI), which has centres around the country and does basic research as well as developing drugs, vaccines and products such as diagnostic kits for HIV — an important service because Kenya lacks a thriving private sector for commercialization of research. KEMRI has a budget of $37.5 million, with 45% coming from its international collaborators, including the Wellcome Trust, a London-based medical research charity.

Other centres also stand out, such as the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute, headquartered in Nairobi, which has an international reputation for its work on crops and agricultural diseases. And the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute, headquartered in Mombasa, has a programme focused on mangrove research that is considered the best in sub-Saharan Africa.

By contrast, the universities suffer from lack of infrastructure and money. The government and donors have focused on boosting primary and secondary education, but have neglected universities, say observers.

The government invested only $3.6 million in 2010 on university-based research, according to Shaukat Abdulrazak, secretary of the National Council for Science and Technology. And there is a shortage of professors to serve a student population that grew from 90,000 in 2004 to more than 120,000 in 2008.

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Njoro, Kenya (Jun 30, 2011) — David Cheruiyot noticed that his wheat fields were turning the wrong colour. The stems of the plants took on a sickly brown hue, and when he peeled open the heads there was no grain inside. “If you go to inspect it, there is nothing but dust,” he recalls.

Ug99, a virulent fungus that causes a disease called stem rust, arrived on Cheruiyot’s farm in Kenya in 2007. It devastated wheat fields in the country that season, slashing yields by as much as 80% in some regions. Since that epidemic, Cheruiyot has sprayed his wheat three times a season with fungicide, something that few farmers in Africa can afford.
Online collection.

Stem rust has plagued farmers for millennia, but Ug99 is a new superstrain that overcomes defensive genes in 90% of the wheat crops planted around the globe. Since it was first detected in 1998, spores of the fungus have spread from East Africa into Yemen and Iran. If the disease continues its march eastwards, hitting the breadbaskets of south Asia and China, it will threaten the food supply of hundreds of millions of people.

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