6 | NewScientist | 1 June 2013

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DÉJÀ VU. Once again, controversy is swirling around a paper describing human embryonic stem cells created by cloning.

On 15 May, a team led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon

National Primate Research Center in Beaverton announced success in achieving the feat. It is a goal that has frustrated the field since 2005, when a South Korean claim to have produced cloned human stem cells was shown to be fraudulent.

Now Mitalipov’s work is under scrutiny, after anonymous scientists noted online that the paper contains duplicated and mislabelled images and plots. No one is suggesting that Mitalipov’s group is guilty of fraud. But given that the paper was accepted for publication by Cell within four days of being submitted, the incident is drawing attention to the drawbacks of rushing exciting

Stem cell hash findings into print.Both Cell and the Oregon Health

Sciences University, which runs the primate centre, have issued statements describing the problems as minor errors. “Neither OHSU nor Cell editors believe these errors impact the scientific findings of the paper,” says Jim Newman of OHSU.

Cell also denies that it put time pressure on the scientists who reviewed the paper. “The reviewers moved it to the top of their to-do list and got back to us unusually quickly,” says spokeswoman Mary Beth O’Leary.

IVF patent falloutCAN you patent an aspect of human biology? That is the question some researchers are asking in a row over an IVF patent awarded to Stanford University.

The US patent was granted to Stanford University and Auxogyn, a fertility clinic in Menlo Park, California, and covers the timing of certain stages of early cell division in the embryo that predict future viability. Auxogyn is confident of being awarded a European patent, too.

Jacques Cohen of the ART

Institute in Washington DC, which offers IVF to US military personnel, has called for “responsible reproductive specialists” to protest against the patent. “Researchers focused on embryo kinetics should ignore the time patents claimed by Stanford,” he writes in the journal Reproductive BioMedicine Online (doi.org/mnp).

“Patenting software is one thing, but trying to patent cell-cycle timings is something else altogether,” says Simon Fishel at the CARE Fertility clinic in Nottingham, UK. “That belongs to everybody,” he says.

Stroke promiseIT’S too soon to rejoice, but the first people to receive stem cell therapy after a stroke have shown unexpected but modest improvements in their condition.

For the first time since their stroke, some are able to lift limbs, grip objects and walk unaided a year after treatment. “We’re comfortable with the notion we’re seeing something that’s real, with some hints of improvement and no issues of long-term safety,”

–Going nuclear–

-Helping people walk again-

China’s peak carbon plansTHE dragon is quenching its fire. China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, wants its emissions to reach a peak by 2025.

China has already committed to lowering the carbon intensity of its economy: it has promised to reduce the emissions associated with every generated dollar of GDP by 45 per cent between 2005 and 2020. But that won’t halt its soaring emissions, and its carbon intensity will still be more than double that in the US and Europe.

Now, Chinese media are reporting that the National Development and Reform Commission wants caps on total emissions from 2016, with a peak a decade later. The plan has yet to be formally approved, but follows the introduction of caps and

trial emission-trading schemes in seven provinces.

If the plan is approved, it should boost stalled international talks on fighting climate change. Global emissions need to peak in the early 2020s and then start falling to give us a 50:50 chance of avoiding 2 °C of warming – the accepted threshold for dangerous climate change.

Ajay Gambhir of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change in London has modelled the impact that changing energy technologies will have on China’s emissions.

“Peaking emissions by 2025 would require a concerted shift away from coal and towards nuclear, wind and solar power,” he says, adding that China’s emissions might increase by 15 to 20 per cent before they peak.

“The incident is drawing attention to the drawbacks of rushing exciting findings into print”

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1 June 2013 | NewScientist | 7

says John Sinden of ReNeuron, the UK-based company that developed the treatment.

He says that the recipients were selected because they had long ceased to improve on their own, making it easier to link any improvements to the treatment. Sinden thinks that the fetal neural stem cells injected into the volunteers’ brains may stifle inflammation and catalyse the formation of new blood supplies to stroke-damaged tissue.

The company reported interim results from its first nine patients this week at the European Stroke Conference in London.

Ephemeral planetTHERE goes the neighbourhood. Last year astronomers announced the discovery of an Earth-mass planet just 4.3 light years away in the nearby Alpha Centauri system. Now a second look suggests the planet may not be there after all.

Xavier Dumusque of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland and colleagues identified the planet, known as Alpha Centauri Bb, from a slight wobble in the position of Alpha Centauri B, the smaller of the two stars in the system. But Artie Hatzes of the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany, begs to differ. “This just doesn’t smell like a solid discovery,” he says, though he is happy to be proved wrong. His alternative analysis of the data suggests Bb might not exist (arxiv.org/abs/1305.4960).

Dumusque, now at Harvard University, says it is always worth reanalysing planetary detections. His team is gathering more data and is also trying to detect Bb by looking for a dip in light as it moves in front of its star.

Space outreach company Uwingu has already staged a contest to name Alpha Centauri Bb, to the ire of the International Astronomical Union, which says it was run without its permission.

Arctic meltdownIT TAKES the phrase “on thin ice” to a whole new level. Russia is evacuating a research station on an ice floe in the Arctic because the ice is breaking up beneath it. It’s another indicator of the rapidity with which the Arctic sea ice is shrinking.

On 24 May, Russia’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment announced that it was evacuating the drifting station North Pole-40 because the ice floe it was resting on had split. The station was set up in October 2012 and was supposed to stay in

place until September this year. Up until the 1980s, ice-floe

stations lasted two to three years, but since 2003 most new stations have only lasted a year. “Russian high-latitude ocean measurements are fundamental

to our knowledge of the Arctic Ocean,” says Sheldon Bacon of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK. Last year saw a record minimum for Arctic sea ice.

“Russia is evacuating a research station in the Arctic because the ice floe it stands on has split”

WHAT a spring clean. Vials of moon dust collected by the first men to walk on the moon have been discovered in a storage closet in California after being missing for more than 40 years.

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin returned from the moon aboard Apollo 11 in 1969, NASA sent 68 grams of lunar dust to Melvin Calvin at the University of California, Berkeley, who won the 1961 Nobel prize for chemistry.

Calvin split the sample between his colleagues to study its carbon compounds, then gathered it up to send back to NASA. But only 50 grams were returned. The remainder was assumed destroyed in the process of research.

But somehow 3 grams of the dust ended up in 20 vials, packed in a vacuum-sealed jar.

The vials lay untouched until they were discovered in a warehouse at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory by archivist Karen Nelson in April.

Nelson returned the samples to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where curator Ryan Zeigler says they may still be scientifically useful since they come from a relatively rare type of lunar soil called breccia.

Zeigler stresses that he doesn’t think there was any foul play in the samples’ misplacement. “I have a feeling [Calvin] just forgot about them,” he says.

Lunar lost and found

–You won’t see me for dust–

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Superstar face blindActor Brad Pitt has told Esquire magazine that he thinks he has face blindness. He wants to get tested for the condition after realising that he “can’t grasp a face”. Marlene Behrmann at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, invited Pitt to get his brain scanned to find out.

World running dry“In just one or two generations, the majority of the Earth’s population will experience fresh water shortages.” So declared the 350 scientists attending the “Water in the Anthropocene” meeting in Bonn, Germany, last week, as they called for a global standardised monitoring system.

Volcano fit to burstChile and Argentina are bracing themselves for a volcanic eruption. On Monday, Chile’s National Emergency Office warned that Copahue, on the border of the two countries, looks set to explode and could produce a scalding pyroclastic flow. People within 25 kilometres of the volcano were being evacuated as New Scientist went to press.

Tamiflu: use it sparinglyDoctors in Hong Kong have urged caution when using the antiviral drug Tamiflu to treat severe H7N9 flu. It can work well – but in three cases the virus has mutated to resist the drug during treatment. The speed of mutation in three people – who worsened or died – suggests Tamiflu should be used sparingly to treat H7N9, to stop widespread resistance evolving (The Lancet, 10.1016/S0140-6736(13)61125-3).

Elemental shiftThe periodic table is changing. Bromine and magnesium are the latest elements to have their atomic weights expressed as a range, not a single number. The aim is to dispel the myth that atomic weight is a constant of nature for all elements.

For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news

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