4 | NewScientist | 4 February 2012

IT IS a bad time to be a parasitic worm or tsetse fly. An unprecedented $785 million is to be invested by governments of rich countries, pharmaceutical companies and global charities to try to combat tropical diseases affecting a billion of the world’s poorest people.

The collaboration has pledged this week to provide 14 billion treatments over the next decade for 10 neglected tropical diseases, including sleeping sickness, spread by the tsetse fly, leprosy and a host of debilitating diseases caused by parasitic worms.

“This is the largest collaborative effort ever to attack an unacceptable infectious disease

burden affecting the world’s poor,” says James Kazura, president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. “The timing could not be better

Wealth on warpath since the tools to control neglected tropical diseases are in hand, or soon will be if critical research can be continued.”

Backers of the collaboration, united by a new World Health Organization strategy, include 13 pharmaceutical companies, the governments of the US, UK and United Arab Emirates, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a host of global health organisations.

Michael Ferguson, who develops treatments for tropical diseases at the University of Dundee, UK, welcomed the announcement: “The world is now going in the right direction on this, whereas 10 years ago you felt no one was listening.”

According to Ferguson, the past few years have seen a “sea change” in attitudes, with the growth of corporate responsibility, pressure from shareholders to help the poor and pledges by governments of long-term support for drug-development projects.

He adds that research is particularly needed to find better treatments for Chagas disease, which is presently incurable.

No leptoquark hereLAZY photons, leptoquarks, string balls and colorons were just some of the exotic no-shows at the world’s largest particle smasher. It was the most comprehensive particle roll call to date.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, has become synonymous with the search for the Higgs boson, predicted by the standard model of physics. But physicists are also hoping that the LHC will throw up rare particles from theories that

go way beyond the standard model, such as string theory.

To that end, Eva Halkiadakis and colleagues from the CMS experiment, an LHC detector, sifted through the debris from 400 trillion proton smashes. They didn’t find any particle exotica, Halkiadakis told a seminar at CERN on 31 January.

Thankfully for lovers of this subatomic stuff, it’s still early days. More complete searches will be presented at a conference in March. The LHC is due to restart in early March after a winter break.

–Looking for a space-time warp –

Golfball will test Einstein YOU don’t have to be big to challenge Einstein. A pocked ball just 36 centimetres wide is the latest space probe tasked with measuring general relativity, one of the cornerstones of modern physics.

The Laser Relativity Satellite, or LARES, is a tungsten sphere (right) with reflectors mounted in 92 holes punched into its surface. It is due to launch from Kourou, French Guiana, on a new European Space Agency rocket called Vega, designed to cheaply launch payloads of less than 2500 kilograms. The launch window opens on 9 February.

LARES’s orbit will be tracked by bouncing ground-based lasers off the reflectors. General relativity states that gravity arises from the curvature of space and time. If this

is true, Earth should drag space-time around with it as it spins, slightly perturbing the orbits of satellites.

Though general relativity is the accepted theory of gravity, it might break down if measured with greater accuracy. The beleaguered Gravity Probe B satellite achieved an accuracy within 19 per cent of the expected orbit change; earlier satellites got within 10 per cent. Researchers hope to achieve 1 per cent with LARES, built by the Italian Space Agency.

Expect to see more launches from the ESA-owned spaceport in future. As well as climate and astronomy satellites, Vega is due to launch an experimental ESA craft in 2014 to test technologies for a possible crewed mission. The Ariane 5 and Soyuz can also launch from Kourou.

“The timing could not be better since the tools to control neglected tropical disease are in hand”

THE Arab Spring in Egypt may be a triumph for people and democracy, but it’s been bad news for elephants. Illegal trade in ivory is booming because of a lack of law enforcement. The Arab Spring is not the only factor, though – much of the trade has been driven by unprecedented demand from Chinese tourists.

A new report by TRAFFIC, the UK-based network that monitors the trade in wildlife, shows that Egyptian authorities have made only two

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seizures of ivory since 2009. The sale and display of ivory has been illegal in Egypt since 1989, but TRAFFIC found 8343 ivory items openly on sale in Cairo in April last year, and 918 for sale in Luxor.

Tom Milliken, TRAFFIC’s elephant-trade expert, says that demand for ivory has fallen in the west, but there has been a rise in interest from Chinese tourists. The solution is for authorities to crack down on the vendors, says Milliken.

UPFroNT

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