The American Chemical Society will be offering a virtual poster session in Second Life from selected posters at the Sci-Mix session taking place April 6, 2008 at the next national meeting in New Orleans. I'm helping out with that effort and I'm pleased to say that we have our first submission from Jodye Selco, Mary Bruno and Sue Chan: "Safe and economical chemistry inquiry for the K-12 classroom".

In December 2006, Dr. Mark Trexler authored a controversial paper called A Consumer’s Guide to Retail Carbon Offset Providers. He studied and ranked the numerous firms selling carbon offsets - also known as carbon credits - and named several firms with credible products. However, some of the most popular companies in the fledgling industry came out smelling, well, rather bad. The report caused quite a flap.

Dr. Trexler is Managing Director of EcoSecurities Global Consulting Services, an international carbon trading and consulting firm. I caught up with him at the noisy EUEC Energy and Environment Conference held at the end of every January in the foothills of Tucson, Arizona. Scientists, policy makers and business leaders from around the world gathered to tackle the fabulously difficult issues of climate change and energy.

Here are Dr. Trexler’s thoughts on topics including whether the Federal Trade Commission will find fraud in the carbon market during its ongoing investigation, when he thinks carbon credits work, and whether to buy them.

Nancy Simmons, do American Museum of Natural History, e restante equipa que publicou a descoberta na revista Nature, avançam que a nova espécie de morcego- Onychonycteris finneyi - ainda não possuiria a capacidade de eco-localização, ou seja, o típico "radar" dos morcegos.

A comprehensive new study documents in detail the dynamics of parts of Greenland’s ice sheet, important data that have long been missing from the ice sheet models on which projections about sea level rise and global warming are based.

The research is published this month in the Journal of Glaciology, also demonstrates how remote sensing and digital imaging techniques can produce rich datasets without field data in some cases.

Traditionally, ice sheet models are very simplified, according to Beata Csatho, Ph.D., assistant professor of geology and lead author of the paper. The implications of these richer datasets may be dramatic, Csatho said, especially as they impact climate projections and sea-level rise estimates, such as those made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The traditional idea of the balance of nature gets quite a beating by a study that appears in the current issue of Nature. Using a long-term laboratory experiment, the authors conclude that, even under constant conditions, all species in a food web continued to fluctuate in a chaotic fashion. Chaos makes long-term prediction of species abundances impossible.

Theoretical ecologists already argued in the 1970s that populations of plants and animals might fluctuate in an unpredictable manner, even without external influences. These predictions, derived from chaos theory, attracted a lot of debate. However, only few scientists believed that species in real ecosystems would truly fluctuate in a chaotic fashion.

Contrary to some reports, the epilepsy drug oxcarbazepine does not appear to prevent migraine, according to research published in the February 12, 2008, issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

The nearly five-month study involved 170 men and women at clinics across the United States with half of the group receiving a daily dose of oxcarbazepine; the other half took placebo. Both groups included people who had three to nine migraine attacks within a month.

Researchers found no difference between the oxcarbazepine and placebo groups in the change in the number of migraine attacks from the beginning to the end of the study.

A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claims to have solved this scientific riddle by analysing the genomics of primitive living fishes such as sharks and lampreys and their spineless relatives, such as the sea squirts.

Vertebrates - animals such as humans that possess a backbone - are the most anatomically and genetically complex of all organisms, but explaining how they achieved this complexity has vexed scientists since the conception of evolutionary theory.

New research from the UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute shows that an interaction between fetal brain cells and maternal antibodies could be linked with the repetitive behavior – also called stereotypies – that is characteristic of autism. While additional studies are needed to confirm the outcome, this result leads investigators to suspect that brain-directed antibodies during the prenatal period could be a causal factor for the disorder. The study appears online now and will be published in a future issue of Brain, Behavior and Immunity.

The study builds on recent research led by UC Davis immunologist Judy Van de Water (to be published in the March 2008 issue of Neurotoxicology) showing that IgG antibodies from the blood of mothers of children with autism react against fetal brain proteins. The outcome was predominant with IgG samples from mothers of children with the regressive form, rather than the early onset form, of the disorder. Her outcome raised the possibility that some cases of autism may be linked to antibody transplacental transfer during pregnancy which, in turn, affects the growing brain.

Ahhhh, Valentine's Day. Bad food, shoddy restaurant service - and you have no choice about it. The Soviet Union had toilet paper lines but they didn't force Valentine's Day on its people. Really, anyone who is unsure what mandates accomplish only needs to look at ethanol for a modern comparison of why things suffer when you force a solution on people.

But all is not lost. There's science in love, you know, and that means there's science in Valentine's Day. Science on Valentine's Day is like cold fusion instead of ethanol. Completely wonderful. And we have it all right here.

Dark Matter and Dark Energy

The Science and Technology Facilities Council has provided information that Science Daily has posted as an abstract of an article by Dr. Hong Sheng Zhao titled "Dark Fluid: Dark Matter And Dark Energy May Be Two Faces Of Same Coin." You can read this abstract at the web site below:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080131094056.htm