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7 July 2012 | NewScientist | 7 TORU HANAI/REUTERS A NEW strain of foot-and-mouth disease in Egypt could aggravate discontent among the rural poor and prolong the country’s political turmoil. Egypt previously harboured two strains of the foot-and-mouth virus. In March a new strain, SAT2, broke out. It has since killed 20,000 of the livestock that are of vital economic importance to rural people, who make up the majority of the population. Political instability has meant that “the ability to do the right surveillance and control has been quite diminished”, says Juan Lubroth, head of animal health at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The virus now threatens the rest of the Middle East, including Syria and Iraq, where veterinary services have also been hit by unrest. Egypt is struggling to make 2 million emergency doses of vaccine – at the cost of dispensing with the usual quality controls. Regional vaccine banks hold enough concentrated SAT2 protein to produce at least 4 million doses, but the FAO has been unable to find the funds to do so. Virus plagues Egypt TIMBUKTU’S priceless collection of ancient scientific texts is at risk of destruction by hard-line Islamists. Ansar Dine, a Tuareg militia, occupies territory around Timbuktu, a town in northern Mali listed as a world heritage site. In recent weeks, the group has destroyed historic tombs in the town (see picture), which house the remains of Islamic Sufi saints and which Ansar Dine says are idolatrous. “We know six or seven shrines have been attacked,” Lazare Eloundou Assomo, chief of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre’s Africa Unit, told New Scientist. “But there are many scientific documents at risk too, and no one can tell if they’ll be safe.” UNESCO has accepted a request by the government of Mali to add Timbuktu to the list of heritage sites at risk of destruction. Various sites in Timbuktu house a matchless collection of 300,000 ancient Islamic texts, some dating from the 13th century, which include treatises on science and mathematics. Among them are texts on the harmful effects of tobacco, on medicine as practised 300 years ago, and on astronomy. One of UNESCO’s projects is to translate and digitise the Timbuktu manuscripts, many of which are currently kept in the town’s Ahmed Baba Institute. They are among the most important historical texts in Africa. AFP/GETTY Fertility restored Ovarian tissue transplants may restore fertility. Samuel Kim from the University of Kansas Medical Center tracked five women who had the transplant after surviving cancer. Hormonal activity was restored in all five (Journal of Assisted Reproduction and Genetics, DOI: 10.1007/s10815-012-9757-3). Asteroid impact You would have to go to the moon or Mars to find a bigger impact crater than the one discovered in Greenland. Caused by a gigantic asteroid collision 3 billion years ago, the crater is the oldest on Earth – but the finding is controversial (Earth and Planetary Science Letters, DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2012.04.026). Magnetic reversal? Could we be witnessing the start of a reversal of Earth’s geomagnetic field? That’s the tentative suggestion from computer models created by Peter Olson and Renaud Deguen of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland (Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/ ngeo1506). A reversal could expose us to solar winds capable of knocking out power grids. China’s place in space Liu Yang, the first Chinese woman in space, returned to Earth on 29 June. Liu and her colleagues, Jing Haipeng and Liu Wang, had completed the first crewed mission to the Chinese space station, Tiangong-1 (“Heavenly Place”) where they performed experiments required for the creation of a larger module. Can’t stop the sea Some sea level rise is inevitable and will continue for centuries, even if we stabilise global temperatures by cutting greenhouse gas emissions, according to a paper in Nature Climate Change (DOI: 10.1038/ nclimate1529). Acting quickly, however, will buy time for low-lying communities to adapt. –Shrine smashed up, 1 July– Timbuktu in peril Artificial symphony “Unrest has meant that the ability to do surveillance and control of the virus has been diminished” “Timbuktu’s priceless collection of ancient scientific texts is at risk of destruction” COMPUTERS may struggle to converse with us convincingly, but composing music seems to come naturally. A century on from Alan Turing’s birth, a program called Iamus has penned a suite of musical and orchestral pieces in his honour. Iamus was created by Francisco Vico of the University of Malaga, Spain, and developed with pianist and composer Gustavo Díaz-Jerez, also at Malaga. It “evolves” its own music, and produces scores that real musicians can play. This week, Díaz-Jerez played Colossus, an Iamus composition premiered in a live-streamed concert to honour Turing. In a month’s time, a recording of Iamus’s Transits into an Abyss, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, will go on sale – the first major work composed by a computer and performed by a full orchestra. 60 SECONDS –Oi, don’t turn that nuke on!– For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
