In brief–

Research news and discovery

“SO, WHERE is everybody?”

Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi

reportedly quipped to fellow

physicists in 1950, when discussing

why we haven’t seen any signs of

alien civilisations if, as many

believe, our galaxy is teeming with

life. Now, a maths model may have

an answer to Fermi’s paradox.

Rasmus Bjørk of the Niels

Bohr Institute in Copenhagen,

Denmark, has calculated that

0.4 per cent of the stars (www.

arxiv.org/astro-ph/0701238v1).

So, Bjørk’s answer to the Fermi

paradox: aliens haven’t contacted

us because they haven’t had the

time to find us yet.

He adds that the search could

be optimised by visiting only

those stars that harbour habitable

planets, which could be identified

by planet-finding missions such

as NASA’s Terrestrial Planet

Finder. Bjørk is also “cautiously

optimistic” about listening out

for aliens with radio telescopes.

eight probes – travelling at a tenth

of the speed of light and each

capable of launching up to eight

sub-probes – would take about

100,000 years to explore a region

of space containing 40,000 stars.

When Bjørk scaled up the search

to include 260,000 such systems

in our galaxy’s habitable zone,

the probes took almost 10 billion

years – three-quarters the age

of the universe – to explore just

Aliens need a lot more time to find us

THE gradual erosion of telomeres,

the DNA caps at the ends of

chromosomes, may signal an

increased risk of heart disease.

In a study of about 1500 men,

those with shorter telomeres in

their white blood cells turned out

to be more susceptible to heart

attacks than those with longer

telomeres.

The cholesterol-busting drugs

called statins seemed to weaken

the link, but only in people with

comparatively short telomeres.

“Without statins they might have

been even shorter,” says Nilesh

Samani of the University of

Leicester, UK, who led the research

(The Lancet, vol 369, p 107).

The link could arise because

degraded telomeres in blood

cells that normally help repair

damaged arterial walls might

be making these cells less

effective. It might one day give

doctors a test to identify people at

greatest risk, enabling them to get

treatment early.

Age takes its toll…

ANOTHER risk factor for

heart disease (see story above)

is obesity, but if your heart is

already failing, being fat could

save your life.

Gregg Fonarow of the

University of California, Los

Angeles, and his colleagues looked

at the records of more than

100,000 patients hospitalised

because their heart failure was

worsening. They found that the

fatter the person, the less likely

they were to die during a

week-long hospital stay (American

Heart Journal, vol 153, p 74).

Fonarow suggests that fat

people may cope better with heart

failure because they have more

metabolic reserves to draw on

when the heart isn’t pumping

blood fast enough to meet the

body’s needs.

…but it’s not so

bad to be fat

Test for infection could spare babies from hidden danger

A SIMPLE test could identify inflammation caused by

infection in the wombs of mothers showing signs of

premature labour, potentially allowing doctors to

intervene and prolong their pregnancy.

Routine tests can easily miss infections in the womb,

which are one cause of premature births. Such babies often

have learning difficulties or, in rare cases, severe brain

damage. Catalin Buhimschi of Yale University School of

Medicine and his team looked for proteins characteristic

of inflammation in samples of amniotic fluid taken from

169 women admitted to hospital because they had gone

into early labour or because their waters had broken

prematurely. The samples were taken by amniocentesis,

in which a long hollow needle is inserted through the

abdominal wall and into the womb.

The presence of infection could be confirmed within

15 minutes of testing, and the test picked up even low

levels of infection (PLoS Medicine, DOI: 10.137/journal.

pmed.0040018).

The technique would primarily be used on women

going into labour at between 20 and 34 weeks of

pregnancy, where the risk to the child of an undiagnosed

infection is much greater than the risk of miscarriage due

to amniocentesis. Doctors might then be able to treat the

infection using antibiotics, steroids or anti-inflammatory

drugs in the hope of maintaining the pregnancy.

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