Scientists

Old tooth study revived to look at radiation effects Questionnaires will soon be sent to thousands of men who donated their baby teeth half a century ago to scientists seeking to learn whether radioactive fallout in milk the donors drank as children affected their health later in life. It's the latest step in a study that began in the 1950s and 1960s at Washington University, but then stalled for decades. Fifty years ago, concern about atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons spurred a group of local scientists and other area residents to begin the project, then called the St. Louis Baby Tooth Survey.

It's in one of the most isolated and inhospitable places on Earth - and scientists think it contains one of the most pristine ecosystems on the planet, untouched by millenniums of human activity. It's called Lake Vostok, and it's the eighth-largest lake in the world, sealed in darkness beneath miles of Antarctic glacial ice. Scientists who have cautiously begun to sample the lake's microbial life say they're opening what they expect will be a "treasure chest of adaptation." So far, all they've seen are dots in a microscope, probably bacteria, "like little spheres, or little rods, or sometimes like a comma - not a whole lot of shape to them," said Brian Lanoil, the project leader from the University of California, Riverside.

Dogged and determined scientists appear to have given mankind a remarkable gift: a method for creating personalized medical repair kits using skin cells from a patient's own body. The discovery, reached simultaneously by researchers in the United States and Japan, has enormous potential to provide lifesaving cures to people with a wide range of injuries and ailments - cures that avoid the prospect of rejection as well as the ethical concerns about destroying human embryos. Tempting as it would be, though, to declare that there is no longer any need for embryonic stem cell research, that's simply not the case.

Scientists believe they have figured out what caused the most rapid global warming in known geologic history, a cataclysmic temperature spike 55 million years ago driven by concentrations of greenhouse gases hundreds of times higher than today's. The culprit, the researchers reported yesterday in the journal Science, was a series of volcanic eruptions that set off a chain reaction releasing huge quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. The eruptions occurred on the rift between two continental plates as Greenland and Europe separated.

Act now to reverse the warming trend I hope that the new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will bring home to more Marylanders how imminent is the threat from global warming ("Turning up the heat," Feb. 2). Despite Hurricane Katrina and the daffodils that bloomed in Baltimore in January, climate change still seems somehow abstract and far in the future. The truth is, if we don't take urgent action now, we will soon reach a tipping point beyond which the continued warming of the planet will cause unimaginable devastation, including a rise in sea levels that will threaten all coastal areas, including our home state's.

The search for life on other worlds can be boiled down to a simple maxim: Follow the water. Life, at least the carbonaceous form we are familiar with, loves water. For the first time, NASA is about to land a spacecraft in a place on another planet where scientists are confident that water exists. The Phoenix lander is set to blast off from Cape Canaveral early tomorrow for a journey to near the Martian north pole. Once there, it will extend a 7-foot-long robotic arm to dig to a layer of ice thought to lie just beneath the surface.

MILTON WEXLER, 98 Hollywood psychoanalyst Milton Wexler, a prominent Hollywood psychoanalyst whose efforts to find a cure for the disease that killed his wife led scientists to pinpoint the Huntington's gene, died March 16 of respiratory failure at his home in Santa Monica, Calif., his daughters said. Though trained in law and psychology, Dr. Wexler spent much of the past three decades unlocking the mysteries of Huntington's disease, a rare, incurable genetic disorder that slowly killed his wife, her father and three brothers.

Thuvan N. Piehler usually spends her days working with explosives at Aberdeen Proving Ground. Yesterday, she helped young students in southeastern Baltimore County understand chemistry -- using balloons, crackers and glue. Piehler was among five chemists from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground who designed hands-on experiments for Colgate Elementary School's fourth-graders to get them excited about chemistry. Sandra Young, a materials engineer, told the children that chemicals are in everything that they can see, smell and touch.

WASHINGTON -- The federal government proposed new rules yesterday that would make it tougher for scientists with industry ties to offer advice about approving new drugs and medical devices. The Food and Drug Administration said that most scientists with $50,000 or more in stock, consulting fees or other financial links to companies should be barred from making recommendations to the agency about a related product. Scientists with smaller financial interests would be allowed to participate in agency advisory meetings but could not vote.

LOS ANGELES -- Thousands of years before ketchup, mayonnaise or Grey Poupon, there was the red-hot chili pepper. Researchers have found evidence that farmers in Latin American villages from the Bahamas to Panama to Peru domesticated the spicy fruit more than 6,100 years ago, making it perhaps the oldest condiment. The scientists were surprised to find that those early agricultural societies had advanced beyond cultivating staples such as maize, yams, beans and cassava. "This is an indication that there was a complex system of agriculture and sophisticated cuisine very early, even before pottery in some places," said Linda Perry, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and leader of the study, published today in the journal Science.

Planetary scientists are preparing for another quick and close-up look at the planet Mercury on Tuesday evening as the Maryland-built Messenger spacecraft skims to within 142 miles of the sun's closest neighbor. The flyby, around 6 p.m., will be the scientists' last look at Mercury until their spacecraft returns in March 2011 and, if all goes well, become the first ever to orbit the tiny planet. "Every time we encounter this planet we are surprised," said Sean C. Solomon, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the $446 million mission's principal investigator.

Confounding forecasts that the Chesapeake Bay would fare relatively well this summer, scientists report now that the bay's fish-stressing "dead zone" has grown to its usual size. Sampling conducted by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science found that the volume of water in the bay where oxygen levels are too low to sustain fish and shellfish is typical for this time of year, its scientists said. Last month, Maryland and other scientists had predicted that the Chesapeake's 'dead zone' this summer would be one of the smallest in years because of relatively low rainfall this spring in those portions of Pennsylvania and New York that drain into the Susquehanna River.

It isn't just Baltimore's Inner Harbor that's been plagued lately with fish-killing algae blooms. Scientists with the Department of Natural Resources say they've been seeing "extensive algal blooms" this month across Maryland's portion of the Chesapeake Bay. The scientists say they've detected high concentrations of Prorocentrum minimum, a type of algae with little whiplike arms that enable it to move in the water. http://mddnr.chesapeakebay.net/hab/HAB_maps.cfm.

The last time NASA sent people to the moon, they landed somewhere near the moon's equator. It was simpler to get home from there and safer for those early missions. But as NASA plans to return astronauts to the moon in the coming decades, it is the moon's north and south poles that scientists and engineers are aiming for - drawn by the prospect of perpetual sunlight, water ice, intriguing geology and a gentler environment. Scientists at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab will help the agency prepare for those missions.

No proof man is causing Earth's warming trend According to the editorial "A New Year's resolution" (Jan. 2), tens of thousands of scientists like me are "flat-earth types." I guess my doctorate in chemical physics from Johns Hopkins doesn't give me nearly the qualifications to analyze the science associated with the global climate as an editor with an agenda. If we are going to stoop to name-calling, an appropriate name for people with the view The Baltimore Sun endorses could be "Chicken Littles."

Old tooth study revived to look at radiation effects Questionnaires will soon be sent to thousands of men who donated their baby teeth half a century ago to scientists seeking to learn whether radioactive fallout in milk the donors drank as children affected their health later in life. It's the latest step in a study that began in the 1950s and 1960s at Washington University, but then stalled for decades. Fifty years ago, concern about atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons spurred a group of local scientists and other area residents to begin the project, then called the St. Louis Baby Tooth Survey.

LAUREL - Like Columbus' crew reconnoitering the coast of the New World with spyglasses, scientists with NASA's Messenger mission gathered in an unremarkable office park yesterday to take in mankind's first glimpse of broad swaths of the planet Mercury. Hunched over computer monitors, they pointed out bright young craters and marveled at the energy of a meteor impact that threw debris halfway around the planet. With fingers, they traced fault lines for hundreds of miles and speculated about the forces that cracked and wrinkled the planet's crust.

Twenty-five years after the discovery of the virus that causes AIDS, two French researchers were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine yesterday for their role in that scientific breakthrough. Perhaps more notable than who won the award is who did not: Dr. Robert C. Gallo, the University of Maryland virologist who has long been credited as a co-discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus and whose early work led to a blood test for HIV that is believed to have saved millions of lives.

Planetary scientists in Maryland should have a trove of never-before-seen views of the planet Mercury on their computer screens today. NASA's Messenger spacecraft flew within 124 miles of the sun's nearest neighbor early yesterday, and scientists at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory near Laurel were expecting the first high-resolution photographs to arrive from the spacecraft today, beginning shortly before 2 a.m. Already yesterday,...

GREENBELT - Astrophysicists like to dance. Who knew? Another thing you might have learned yesterday at the Goddard Space Flight Center was that if you zip yourself into a striped suit of a certain adhesive material you will stick to a wall made of Velcro. And if you do it once, you'll have to do it twice. "I just want to go on the Velcro again," said Maria Cummings, one of seven children in a Gaithersburg family, who was so excited by the prospect of reconnecting with the wall that she became momentarily confused as to whether she was 8 or 9. Her 6-year-old brother John - no question about his age - was more concerned with the cookies being doled out by members of the Goddard Dance Club, run by scientists and other brainy types who apparently like to shake a leg when they're not busy figuring out the trajectory of some billion-dollar spaceship hurtling toward the stars.