In 2011, the world will emit more than 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Every day of the year, almost a hundred million tons will be released into the atmosphere. Every second more than a thousand tons – two million pounds – of carbon dioxide is emitted from power plants, cars, trucks, ships, planes, factories, and farms around the world. The average citizen of the world will account for the release of four and a half tons – 9,000 pounds – of CO 2 this year. The average American will be responsible for four times as much, almost 18 tons, or 36,000 pounds of carbon dioxide this year, roughly a hundred pounds of carbon dioxide emissions for every day of the year.

While humans emit far less carbon dioxide than nature, the amount we emit exceeds the capacity of plants and oceans to absorb on top of the amount they’re already absorbing from natural sources. As a result, most of the carbon dioxide we emit remains in the atmosphere. Year over year, the atmospheric concentration of CO 2 creeps up. It will rise only half a percent in 2011, a seemingly tiny change. Yet tiny changes add up. Over the 50 years since 1960, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen nearly 25%. Since the start of the industrial revolution it has risen by 45%, putting it at a level not seen in millions of years.

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Aids researchers and advocates were devastated in 2007, when a much anticipated vaccine against HIV unexpectedly failed to protect anyone in a clinical trial of 3,000 people. Even worse, the experimental inoculation, developed with money from the Merck pharmaceutical company and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, actually increased the chances that some people would later acquire HIV. Millions of dollars and more than a decade of research had gone into creating the vaccine. Meanwhile, in that same 10-year period, 18 million people died of AIDS, and millions more were infected.

The Merck vaccine failed in large part because investigators do not yet know how to create the perfect vaccine. Yes, a number of vaccines have been spectacularly successful. Think of polio and smallpox. In truth, though, luck played a big role in those successes. Based on limited knowledge of the immune system and of the biology of a pathogen, investigators made educated guesses at vaccine formulations that might work and then, perhaps after some tinkering, had the good fortune to be proved right when the vaccine protected people. But all too often lack of insight into the needed immune response leads to disappointment, with a vaccine candidate recognized as ineffective only after a large human trial has been performed.

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No organ in the human body is as resistant to study as the brain. Whereas researchers can examine living cells from the liver, lung and heart, taking a biopsy of the brain is, for many reasons, more problematic.

The inability to watch living human brain cells in action has hampered scientists in their efforts to understand psychiatric disorders. But researchers have identified a promising new approach that may revolutionize the study and treatment of conditions such as schizophrenia, autism and bipolar dis­order. A team led by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., took skin cells from a patient with schizophrenia, turned them into adult stem cells and then grew those stem cells into neurons. The resulting tangle of brain cells gave neuroscientists their first real-time glimpse of human schizophrenia at the cellular level. Another team, from Stanford University, converted human skin cells directly into neurons without first stopping at the stem cell stage, potentially making the process more efficient. The groups published their results recently in Nature ( Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group).

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Most people do their best to avoid contact with Salmonella . This bacteria genus, which often lives on poultry and can find its way into other food products , causes hundreds of thousands of illnesses--and hundreds of deaths--in the U.S. each year. But new research demonstrates that this common food pathogen could be disarmed and reconfigured as a vehicle for gene-based antiviral treatments. [More]

BOSTON--A novel treatment for HIV could involve changing the genes in a person's immune cells and, ultimately, in his or her stem cells, as well. It might even lead to a cure for that deadly disease. Promising advances in that direction were presented here Monday at the 18th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections.

The pieces have been coming together for some time. First came the understanding that HIV enters a cell by grabbing on to a CD4 receptor molecule on the surface, and then on to a co-receptor molecule--the one most commonly used is called CCR5.

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Obesity is a national health crisis--that  much we know. If current trends continue, it will soon surpass smoking in the U.S. as the biggest single factor in early death, reduced quality of life and added health care costs. A third of adults in the U.S. are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and another third are overweight, with Americans getting fatter every year. Obesity is responsible for more than 160,000 “excess” deaths a year, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association . The average obese person costs society more than $7,000 a year in lost productiv­ity and added medical treatment, say researchers at George Washington University. Lifetime added medical costs alone for a person 70 pounds or more overweight amount to as much as $30,000, depending on race and gender.

All this lends urgency to the question: Why are extra pounds so difficult to shed and keep off? It doesn’t seem as though it should be so hard. The basic formula for weight loss is simple and widely known: consume fewer calories than you expend. And yet if it really were easy, obesity would not be the nation’s number-one lifestyle-related health concern. For a species that evolved to consume energy-dense foods in an environment where famine was a constant threat, losing weight and staying trimmer in a modern world of plenty fueled by marketing messages and cheap empty calories is, in fact, terrifically difficult. Almost everybody who tries to diet seems to fail in the long run--a review in 2007 by the American Psychological Association of 31 diet studies found that as many as two thirds of dieters end up two years later weighing more than they did before their diet.

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Over 1.5 million new cancer cases were identified in the United States in 2010, and despite continued advances in cancer treatment, approximately 500,000 cancer-related deaths occurred in the same year (1). For a long time, cancer therapies were a one-size-fits-all, depending on the cancer type. In recent years however, the need has emerged to develop a more enlightened paradigm in which treatments are better tailored towards the individual uniqueness of the cancer (2).

Personalized Medicine is a catch phrase that reflects the current understanding that no two patients are alike. The primary goal of personalized medicine is to develop patient-specific treatments that can hopefully reduce unnecessary side effects as well as the overall cost of cancer care by using therapies that are most likely to be effective in the population that is most likely to benefit (3).

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The first discovery of a cancer gene marker--the BRAF oncogene for melanoma and colorectal malignancies--back in 2002 changed the way many researchers thought about cancer treatment. Rather than approach the disease based on what region of the body it stemmed from, scientists began to identify cancers in terms of their genetic signatures. Researchers now recognize more than 200 kinds of cancer--all genetically unique. [More]

Cancer - Health - Conditions and Diseases - Colorectal cancer - Management of cancer

Every day as a practicing psychiatrist, I confront my field’s limitations. Despite the noble efforts of clinicians and researchers, our limited insight into the roots of psychiatric disease hinders the search for cures and contributes to the stigmatization of this enormous problem, the leading cause worldwide of years lost to death or disability. Clearly, we need new answers in psychiatry. But as philosopher of science Karl Popper might have said, before we can find the answers, we need the power to ask new questions. In other words, we need new technology.

Developing appropriate techniques is difficult, however, because the mammalian brain is beyond compare in its complexity. It is an intricate system in which tens of billions of intertwined neurons--with multitudinous distinct characteristics and wiring patterns--exchange precisely timed, millisecond-scale electrical signals and a rich diversity of biochemical messengers. Because of that complexity, neuroscientists lack a deep grasp of what the brain is really doing--of how specific activity patterns within specific brain cells ultimately give rise to thoughts, memories, sensations and feelings. By extension, we also do not know how the brain’s physical failures produce distinct psychiatric disorders such as depression or schizophrenia. The ruling paradigm of psychiatric disorders--casting them in terms of chemical imbalances and altered levels of neurotransmitters--does not do justice to the brain’s high-speed electrical neural circuitry. Psychiatric treatments are thus essentially serendipitous: helpful for many but rarely illuminating.

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Editor's Note: Carl Zimmer, author of this month's article, "100 Trillion Connections," has just brought out a much-acclaimed e-book, Brain Cuttings: 15 Journeys Through the Mind (Scott & Nix), that compiles a series of his writings on neuroscience. In this chapter, adapted from an article that was first published in Playboy , Zimmer takes the reader on a tour of the 2009 Singularity Summit in New York City. His ability to contrast the fantastical predictions of speakers at the conference with the sometimes more skeptical assessments from other scientists makes his account a fascinating read.  

Let's say you transfer your mind into a computer--not all at once but gradually, having electrodes inserted into your brain and then wirelessly outsourcing your faculties. Someone reroutes your vision through cameras. Someone stores your memories on a net of microprocessors. Step by step your metamorphosis continues until at last the transfer is complete. As engineers get to work boosting the performance of your electronic mind so you can now think as a god, a nurse heaves your fleshy brain into a bag of medical waste. As you--for now let's just call it "you"--start a new chapter of existence exclusively within a machine, an existence that will last as long as there are server farms and hard-disk space and the solar power to run them, are "you" still actually you?

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The Advances news section in April's issue of Scientific American included stories on digital textbooks, the promise of using gene therapy to fight blindness and how fragile orchids survive. To learn more about any of the stories, follow these links.

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The vast array of behaviors that are seen in autism spectrum disorder seems to cover an even deeper range of genetic complexity just below the surface. And the largest genetic study of autistic children and their parents to date has located a host of new variations in autistic individuals. [More]

Autism spectrum - Autism - Health - Mental health - Disorders

Gene therapy has markedly improved vision in both eyes in three women who were born virtually blind. The patients can now avoid obstacles even in dim light, read large print and recognize people's faces. The operation, researchers predict, should work even better in children and adolescents blinded by the same condition.

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A nearly 13-year-old skin cancer drug rapidly alleviates molecular signs of Alzheimer's diseas e and improves brain function, according to the results of a new mouse study being hailed as extremely promising. Early-stage human clinical trials could begin within months.

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Editor's note: Climate Query is a semi-weekly feature offered by Daily Climate, presenting short Q&A's with players large and small in the climate arena. Read others in the series at http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/query/climate-queries .

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This has been a big week in Alzheimer's news as scientists put together a clearer picture than ever before of how the disease affects the brain. Three recently published studies have detected the disease with new technologies, hinted at its prevalence, and described at last how it makes its lethal progress through the brain.

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Stephen Hawking turns 70 on Sunday, beating the odds of a daunting diagnosis by nearly half a century. [More]

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Inevitably, year-end lists invite plenty of debate and criticism, and Scientific American 's is no exception. Certainly, we could have included the discovery of new worlds beyond our solar system, including Kepler 22 b, an exoplanet in the "Goldilocks" zone of habitability, as well as the first known Earth-size exoplanets . Or noted the accumulating evidence suggesting that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to retrieve natural gas is likely to contaminate water supplies. (Final New York State regulations, expected in mid-2012, could determine the future of fracking in the U.S.)

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They look like ordinary baby rhesus macaques , but Hex, Roku and Chimero are the world's first chimeric monkeys, each with cells from the genomes of as many as six rhesus monkeys.

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Everyone knows about cancer. According to the World Health Organization eight million people died of one of the many forms of cancer 2007 and this number is expected to grow to more than 12 million by 2030. However, unlike many other significant diseases, cancer is not confined to a continent or socioeconomic cohort. Also unlike other entrants on the WHO’s top 10 there is no vaccine or wonder drug. This insidious disease requires surgery, chemotherapy or radiotherapy all of which wreak havoc on the patient during and often long after treatment. But recently novel research looking at using certain bacteria as a therapy is gaining traction that may result in new treatment options that are cheap, easy to produce, noninvasive and if the current research is any indication capable of complete remission in some cases.

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