6 | NewScientist | 12 February 2011

UPFRONT

SPACEFARERS take note: an attack on the spacecraft of one nation is an attack on all spacecraft.

That’s the message the US National Security Space Strategy is using to promote peace in space. Published last week, the NSSS report is the first time that the US military and intelligence community have agreed on an approach to the threat posed by space weapons.

Many nations rely on GPS and communications satellites, but these are vulnerable to damage if another spacecraft is attacked. For example, satellites are still at risk from the thousands of shards that were produced when a Chinese missile destroyed a

weather satellite in 2007.So the US intelligence agencies

and the Pentagon will “encourage other countries to act responsibly in space”, says Gregory Schulte, US deputy secretary of defence for space policy. That means forming international alliances that promote safe behaviour in orbit.

Laura Grego at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts welcomes the new strategy.

Bring order to orbit

Perchlorate stateTHE US will clean up its act by setting tougher limits on levels of perchlorate in drinking water.

In a decision that reverses a 2008 policy of the Bush administration, the Environmental Protection Agency announced last week that it will regulate more strictly the permissible levels of perchlorate – a natural chemical which is also synthesised for use in rocket fuel, bleach and fertilisers. If ingested at high levels the chemical may disrupt

Food flashpoint rocked Egypt TUNISIA’S government has fallen and Egypt’s is facing insurrection – and this could be just the start. Food and economic analysts are warning that these governments could be the first victims of the global food crisis, and others are similarly vulnerable.

What seems clear is that surging food prices helped trigger both uprisings and protests elsewhere in north Africa. The region depends on bread, and imports half of its wheat. So when world wheat prices soared by 50 per cent in 2010, Egypt massively increased spending on the cereal to sell to its poorest citizens as subsidised bread.

Yet on private markets in Cairo, bread prices rose by 25 per cent. This especially affected the lower middle class, which Claire Spencer of the London-based think tank Chatham

House says is key to the uprisings. While the poorest must keep working to eat, she says, the slightly better-off have more freedom to stage sit-ins.

If food is far from the only reason for discontent in Egypt, it can nonetheless be a trigger, Spencer says. “People are underemployed, can’t start a business or improve their circumstances, are barely feeding their families, and then food prices go up and literally put them on the breadline. It can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”

What lessons can be learned? Countries that depend upon food imports and whose people spend one-third or more of their income on food are most vulnerable to increased global food prices, according to an analysis by Japanese investment firm Nomura. In its top 10 are Egypt,

“Thousands of shards from 2007, when a missile destroyed a satellite, still threaten other spacecraft”

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Algeria and Morocco, but also Hong Kong, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Tunisia, Romania and Ukraine are in the top 20. “High food prices… [are] a potential source of protests, riots and political tension,” Nomura warns.

And these are pricey times: the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced last week that food prices have reached an all-time high, exceeding even the big spike of 2008. This new spike is due to weather-related crop losses in Russia, Australia and Pakistan, high oil prices and speculation. Prices will stay high at least until major harvests in six months, says Abdolreza Abbassian of the FAO. Then the weather will have to be very good, or harvests may not be enough to rebuild stocks and reduce prices. If it’s bad, “we’re one major crop failure short of a real crisis”.

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Valley high and dryIT MAY be a land of milk and honey, but California’s Central valley – the most productive farmland in the US – is being sucked dry. The culprits? Lettuce and other green vegetables.

James Famiglietti at the University of California, Irvine, used the twin GRACE satellites to find that 20 cubic kilometres of groundwater had disappeared from beneath the valley between October 2003 and March 2010. Between 1998 and 2003, 28.5 km3

were lost, according to the US Geological Survey, meaning that about 50 km3 of groundwater had disappeared in 12 years (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2010GL046442).

That’s unsustainable, says Famiglietti, and bad news for local farmers. “There is a foreseeable end to groundwater availability in California,” he says. Estimates of the total reserves are rough, so the end is difficult to predict, but Famiglietti says the valley could run dry by 2100.

Growing green vegetables is profitable, but they need copious water. The problem is that water use is not regulated. “Anyone who wants to can drill a well and pump it up,” says Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, a think tank based in Oakland, California.

Shaken evidenceNEW evidence has emerged that suggests a leading British police officer has approved a policy of discrediting expert witnesses for the defence in “shaken baby” cases. This may have led to the temporary gagging of at least one prominent expert witness, as reported in New Scientist last year.

Heather Kirkwood, a lawyer from Seattle, Washington, has released notes she took at a lecture last year by Colin Welsh, the Metropolitan Police’s lead investigator for child abuse homicides. These record Welsh as

blaming defence expert testimony for the majority of failures to obtain a conviction in such cases in 2008 and 2009. The solution, he went on to say, is for the prosecution to seek to undermine such witnesses’ credibility.

The Metropolitan Police says in response that it is “completely committed to the judicial process and would never seek to improperly influence it.”

“Defence expert testimony was the main reason why ‘shaken baby’ prosecutions failed in 2008 and 2009”

THE 11th-century Preah Vihear temple lies at the centre of an international dispute for ownership between Cambodia and Thailand. It is also close to a region that last year saw the emergence of a form of malaria resistant to artemisinins, the most potent antimalarial treatment we have. As troops from Cambodia and Thailand exchange fire, this drug-resistant strain of the disease now threatens to spread.

The fear is that the conflict will undermine a $175 million effort launched by the WHO last month to block the spread of artemisinin-resistant malaria. Under this programme, health workers in the region have been tasked with detecting new cases of the disease,

monitoring resistance and keeping infection in check. Now troop manoeuvres are making the area a potential no-go zone. What’s more, health workers are not being allowed to check the soldiers for infection and resistance.

“I hope the critical importance of a global health emergency takes precedence over a political conflict,” says Robert Newman, director of the WHO’s Global Malaria Programme. His principal concern is that if the resistant form of the malaria parasite is left unchecked, it will spread to Africa, where 90 per cent of malaria deaths occur. “I hope the dispute can be settled, not just for our project but for the people on this border and for the wider world,” says Newman.

Temple of malarial doom

–Preah Vihear is now in a war zone–

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Happy to flyThe shooting of US congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords last month led her husband, NASA astronaut Mark Kelly, to consider resigning his command of a shuttle mission set for April. But with Giffords now recovering, Kelly resumed training on Monday. The mission will deliver a long-awaited cosmic ray telescope to the International Space Station.

Tiny flea, big genomeIt may be just 5 millimetres long, but the water flea packs in more genes than any species yet sequenced. With 30,907 genes, Daphnia pulex has at least 5000 more than humans, many newly evolved to help the fleas combat climatic changes and pollutants (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1197761).

Sun in stereoIt is the most familiar object in the sky, but until 6 February we had never seen all of the sun at once. That’s when NASA’s twin STEREO probes moved into position on opposite sides of the star and beamed back images of its entire surface. The images could improve forecasts of solar eruptions, which affect satellites and power lines.

Astrology’s a scienceThe Bombay High Court has dismissed a case that questioned the validity of astrology and related practices such as reiki, feng shui and tarot cards. It said that the Supreme Court of India had already ruled that astrology is a science and had directed universities to consider adding astrology to their syllabuses.

Heart of sandstoneWhat was thought to be the fossilised heart of a dinosaur turns out to be nothing more than sand that was washed into its decomposing body. But all is not lost: the sand has preserved tiny structures that may be fragments of tissue (Naturwissenschaften, DOI: 10.1007/s00114-010-0760-1).

For daily news stories, visit www.newScientist.com/news

the thyroid’s ability to produce hormones that are critical to development.

The EPA says the chemical contaminates the drinking water of between 5 and 17 million Americans in 26 states. A 2009 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that it was also present in 15 brands of powdered infant-formula. Taken together, all of this suggests infants could be at risk of ingesting perchlorate at levels that may be unsafe.

The EPA says it will take at least two years to establish maximum permissible levels.