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Science class for a group of 12-year-old New Yorkers frequently means a day at the zoo, petting a monitor lizard, laughing at infant gorillas as they wrestle or seeing how a giant rock python hunts in the dark.

“I love animals and it’s fun,” said Marquis Palmer, 12.

“If nobody cared about animals they would all be dead. Plus, we wouldn’t really have anything to eat,” he said, with a mischievous grin, explaining why he loves science during a recent scavenger hunt at the Bronx Zoo’s Congo exhibit.

A new report by the National Academy of Sciences said informal learning — such as at zoos or just while fishing or gardening — is a powerful tool in science education.

Newly inaugurated President Barack Obama has pledged to “restore science to its rightful place” and educate a new generation of scientists able to transform America into an environmentally sustainable “green economy.”

But with endowments and private donations falling and public funds under pressure, the recession is making it harder for zoos and aquariums to keep inspiring kids in science.

Palmer was among a dozen children from the Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservation, located in a struggling area of the New York borough of the Bronx, who crowded up against a glass partition to watch a pair of young gorillas during a visit last month to the Bronx Zoo.

One girl imitated a gorilla, others tapped on the glass, others called: “Can I take one home?” or “Fight, fight.”

Later they returned to a classroom at the zoo to discuss their science project to design an exhibit for a zoo animal.

The wildlife school is one of 20 themed academies created to replace underperforming schools in New York. It has close links to the nearby Bronx Zoo and offers children twice the normal amount of science classes, focusing on conservation.

WALL STREET FALLOUT

But New York State, facing a $15.4 billion budget gap, is proposing to eliminate the $9 million it gives 76 zoos, aquariums and botanical gardens next year.

The governor had also proposed cutting the funding by 55 percent this year, but that is expected to be rejected by state legislators this week after intense lobbying by zoos.

Jeffrey Gordon, budget spokesman for the governor’s office, said the cut was one of many difficult choices, including cuts in spending on healthcare, education and economic development.

“New York depends very heavily on Wall Street for its revenues,” he said, pointing to the sharp fall in tax revenues as the financial sector has been rocked by crisis.

Steven Sanderson, president of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) that runs four New York zoos and an aquarium, said state funding of around $3 million for WCS facilities was “modest but really important,” particularly for educational activities such as the partnership with the Urban Assembly wildlife school.

“People don’t take seriously enough the out-of-classroom science education opportunity,” Sanderson said.

Around 2 million children and students visit the five WCS facilities each year and 70,000 conduct formal educational programs. The WCS also trains 2,000 public school teachers a year.

Sanderson said he has to cut $15 million from the $100 million budget that covers the century-old Bronx Zoo and New York Aquarium in Brooklyn, as well as WCS administration.

Unguided school visits are free and more formal programs have fees that start around $200, which covers only part of the cost. Sara Hobel, head of WCS education, said as school budgets are cut, they will struggle to pay even those fees.

KEY MOMENTS

Philip Bell, associate professor of learning sciences at the University of Washington and co-chair of the National Academy report on informal learning, said an early interest in science often translates into further study.

Naya Motta, 11, recalls a visit to an anatomical exhibition of human bodies when she was around three, which she says she remembers because she has a photographic memory.

“It showed really interesting parts of the body, I remember that,” Motta said on a visit to the American Museum of Natural History’s (AMNH) Climate Change exhibition with her class from the Salk School of Science, a public school in Manhattan.

Salk is one of the 30 percent of New York City middle schools enrolled in Urban Advantage, another partnership between schools and scientific institutions. The program trains teachers and gives kids access to zoos, museums and gardens to help them complete a mandatory science project in 8th grade.

Lisa Guggenheim, head of education at the AMNH, said Urban Advantage faced a 20 percent cut in city funding this year, so it can not expand beyond the 25,000 kids it reaches now.

The AMNH’s endowment lost around a quarter of its value between June and November, and city funding for its educational activities was cut 39 percent to $2 million this year.

Already eliminated is a program that last year gave training and summer employment to 45 New Yorkers aged 18-21, providing an introduction to a science-related career.

“We have graduates of the program that have gone on to brilliant careers. The majority of the people in the program were young people of color,” Guggenheim said.

New York institutions are among the hardest hit but they are not alone. Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo is cutting $1 million from its $21 million budget, the Chicago Tribune reported.

And Paul Boyle, senior vice president of the U.S. Association of Zoos and Aquariums, said many of his 216 members were cutting nonessential costs such as travel and scientific research.

Revenue from ticket sales, however, was generally holding up well because zoos and aquariums offer affordable local entertainment at a time when thrifty families are shunning expensive vacations far from home, he said.

“One of the things that tells us there is important stuff going on, and learning, is that year after year after year, 160 million people come to these institutions,” Boyle said.

A team of Danish researchers has shown that unchecked global warming would lead to a dramatic expansion of low-oxygen areas zones, or ‘dead zones’, in the global ocean by a factor of 10 or more.

Dead zones are low-oxygen areas in the ocean where higher life forms such as fish, crabs and clams are not able to live.

In shallow coastal regions, these zones can be caused by runoff of excess fertilizers from farming.

Whereas some coastal dead zones could be recovered by control of fertilizer usage, expanded low-oxygen areas caused by global warming will remain for thousands of years to come, adversely affecting fisheries and ocean ecosystems far into the future.

According to Professor Gary Shaffer of the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, who is the leader of the research team at the Danish Center for Earth System Science (DCESS), “Such expansion would lead to increased frequency and severity of fish and shellfish mortality events, for example off the west coasts of the continents like off Oregon and Chile.”

Together with senior scientists Steffen Olsen oceanographer at Danish Meteorological Institute and Jens Olaf Pepke Pedersen, physicist at National Space Institute, Technical University of Denmark, Professor Shaffer has performed projections with the newly-developed DCESS Earth System Model, projections that extend 100,000 years into the future.

“If, as in many climate model simulations, the overturning circulation of the ocean would greatly weaken in response to global warming, these oxygen minimum zones would expand much more still and invade the deep ocean,” he added.

Extreme events of ocean oxygen depletion leading to anoxia are thought to be prime candidates for explaining some of the large extinction events in Earth history including the largest such event at the end of the Permian 250 million years ago.

Furthermore, as sub-toxic zones expand, essential nutrients are stripped from the ocean by the process of denitrification.

This in turn would shift biological production in the lighted surface layers of the ocean toward plankton species that are able to fix free dissolved nitrogen.

This would then lead to large, unpredictable changes in ocean ecosystem structure and productivity, on top of other large unpredictable changes to be expected from ocean acidification.

According to Professor Shaffer, “The future of the ocean as a large food reserve would be more uncertain. Reduced fossil fuel emissions are needed over the next few generations to limit ongoing ocean oxygen depletion and acidification and their long-term adverse effects.”

Beekeepers who are battling a mysterious ailment that led to the disappearance of millions of honeybees now fear the sting of imported Australian bees that they worry could outcompete their hives and might carry a deadly parasite unseen in the United States.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has allowed shipments of Australian bees to resume despite concerns by some of its own scientists.

Australia had been airfreighting the insects across the Pacific for four years to replace hives devastated by the perplexing colony collapse disorder. But six weeks ago the Australian government abruptly stopped the shipments, saying it could no longer be certain the country was free of a smaller, aggressive bee that has infested areas near the Great Barrier Reef, U.S. officials said.

Early this month, the USDA decided to permit the bee shipments to resume with some precautions, and the first planeloads arrived in San Francisco last Monday.

Beekeeper Ken Haff of Mandan, N.D., says he fears the foreign hives could kill off his apiary.

“We’ve got enough problems with our own bee diseases that we don’t know how to treat, and they open the border to a whole new species that could carry God knows what,” said Haff, a vice president of the American Honey Producers Association. “That’s a total slap in the face for us.”

Shad Sullivan, a bee wholesaler in California’s Central Valley, said that in the four years he has imported bees from Australia, he has found that the hearty imports outlive domestic bees that have been weakened by pesticides, pests and diseases.

“If the bees were truly carrying something that bad, I would have been the first to get it,” Sullivan said as a thick cloud of the buzzing insects flew overhead. “I just haven’t seen those kinds of devastation.”

Domestic honeybees feed on most flowering plants, and are vital pollinators for many food crops.

However, domestic bee stocks have been waning since 2004, when scientists first got reports of the puzzling illness that has claimed up to 90 percent of commercial hives and has been labeled colony collapse disorder.

That’s also the year the USDA allowed imports of Australian hives, and scientists have been investigating whether Australia was a source of a virus tied to the bee die-off.

Entomologists also fear that the aggressive bee species found near Australia’s Great Barrier Reef could carry a deadly mite, said Jeff Pettis, the USDA’s top bee scientist.

“This could be a threat worldwide, because if those bees are moving around the chances are this mite would move with it,” Pettis said. “We just don’t need another species causing problems.”

The Australian government has adopted emergency controls to quarantine and destroy the aggressive bees and has never detected that mite, according to materials provided by Chelsey Martin, counselor for public affairs at the Australian Embassy in Washington.

U.S. agriculture officials say they also are taking precautions.

Agricultural officials started sampling Australian bees last week after they were released in the Central Valley.

“Bees from Australia make great sense,” said Wayne Wehling, a senior entomologist in the USDA’s permit unit. “But we certainly don’t want to bring any economic impacts onto our honeybees that we don’t already have or introduce any new pests or disease.”

Government officials said they do not know how many Australian bees have been imported, but hive importer Sullivan estimates that he has sold 110,000 hives since 2005.

On Wednesday, a USDA inspector in a protective suit collected samples of bees at Sullivan’s operation.

“Hopefully this will ease the minds of people who have their own hives here,” said inspector John Iniguez. “We’re trusting Australia that they’re clean. Now we just want to confirm that.”

Students from the college of engineering at Virginia Tech in the US have made highly durable bricks composed of a lunar rock-like material, which one day might be used to build dwellings in colonies on the moon.

The invention won the In-Situ Lunar Resource Utilization materials and construction category award from the Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems (PISCES).

The team of students, under the advisement of Kathryn Logan, a professor in the materials science and engineering department, designed the brick as a potential building tool for future colonies on the moon.

Initially designed to construct a dome, the building material is composed of a lunar rock-like material mixed with powdered aluminum that can be molded into any shape.

Design work on the early-development lunar bricks was based on previous work by the college of engineering student team’s adviser Kathryn Logan, a professor of materials science and engineering and the Virginia Tech Langley Professor at the National Institute of aerospace in Hampton, Virginia.

Logan’s prior research entailed mixing powdered aluminum and ceramic materials to form armor plating for tanks funded through a department of defense contract.

“I theorized that if I could do this kind of reaction to make armor, then I could use a similar type of reaction to make construction materials for the moon,” Logan said.

Since actual lunar rock, known as regolith, is scarce, the students used volcanic ash from a deposit on Earth along with various minerals and basaltic glass, similar to rock on the lunar surface, according to Eric Faierson, a doctoral student who led the Virginia Tech team.

During initial experiments, the simulated regolith and aluminum powder were mixed and placed inside a shallow aluminum foil crucible.

A wire was inserted into the mixture, which was then heated to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit triggering a reaction called self-propagating high-temperature synthesis (SHS), according to Logan.

The reaction caused the material to form a solid brick. A ceramic crucible was used in later experiments to form complex curved surfaces.

Once the student team had created a brick, they found that it was almost as strong as concrete under various pressure tests.

According to Faierson, one-square inch of the brick could withstand the gradual application of 2,450 pounds.

This strength would enable it to withstand an environment where gravity is a fraction of the pull on Earth.

In a new research, scientists have studied stone-handling behavior in several troops of Japanese macaques, which may shed light on the evolution of stone-tool use in early hominids.

By watching these monkeys acquire and maintain behavioral traditions from generation to generation, the scientists have gained insight into the cultural evolution of humans.

Primatologists Michael A. Huffman, Charmalie A.D. Nahallage, and Jean-Baptiste Leca from the Primate Research Institute in Kyoto, Japan, assessed social learning exhibited by these macaques during stone-handling, a behavior that has been passed down from elder to younger since it was observed in some of the troops in 1979.

Stone-handling, in this study, included rubbing and clacking stones together, pounding them onto hard surfaces, picking them up, and cuddling, carrying, pushing, rolling and throwing them.

The scientists found, for example, that an infant’s proximity to their mother had a significant impact on the development of the infant’s stone-handling abilities.

In other words, infants with mothers who frequently exhibited stone-handling behaviors spent more time with their mother, about 75 percent of their time, during the first three months of life, and they also participated in stone-handling earlier in life than the other infants.

These findings suggest that the mothers’ frequent stone-handling caught the infants’ attention, and as a result, the infants acquired the behavior more quickly than other infants.

Furthermore, the primatologists reported that the stone-handling behavior changed with each generation as individual macaques contributed their own patterns of stone-handling, such as stone-throwing.

According to the authors, “The recent emergence of a unique behavior, stone-throwing, may serve to augment the effect of intimidation displays.”

“Research on such transformation may shed light on the evolution of stone-tool use in early hominids,” they concluded.

A single gene appears to play a crucial role in deadly breast cancers, increasing the chances the cancer will spread and making it resistant to chemotherapy, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

They found people with aggressive breast cancers have abnormal genetic alterations in a gene called MTDH, and drugs that block the gene could keep local tumors from metastasizing or spreading, increasing a woman’s chances for survival.

“Not only has a new metastasis gene been identified, but this also is one of a few such genes for which the exact mode of action has been elucidated,” said Dr. Michael Reiss of The Cancer Institute of New Jersey in New Brunswick, whose study appears in the journal Cancer Cell.

“That gives us a real shot at developing a drug that will inhibit metastasis,” he said in a statement.

Stopping cancer’s spread is important — while more than 98 percent of patients with breast cancer that has not spread live five years or more, only 27 percent of patients whose cancer has spread to other organs survive.

Reiss and Yibin Kang of Princeton University used several different research approaches to find the gene, which helps tumor cells stick to blood vessels in distant organs.

To get them in the right general area, they used big computer databases of breast tumors and found that a small segment of human chromosome 8 was repeated many times in people with aggressive breast tumors.

While most normal DNA sequences contain only two copies of a gene, they found some breast tumors had as many as eight copies of this gene segment.

The team then turned to human breast tumor samples taken from 250 patients to look for these genetic abnormalities and found the gene MTDH was overly active or expressed in aggressive tumors.

EXISTS IN EVERY CELL

“This gene exists in every one of our cells,” Kang said in a telephone interview. “Somehow the tumor gains extra copies and overexpresses them.

“We saw 30 to 40 percent of them overexpressed this gene.”

The researchers then injected lab mice with tumor cells from patients who had this genetic alteration and found the mice formed tumors that were more likely to spread.

They also were more likely to resist treatment with traditional chemotherapy drugs, such as paclitaxel.

But when they genetically altered these tumors, inhibiting the MTDH gene, the tumor cells were less able to spread and were more vulnerable to chemotherapy.

Kang said he is hopeful the finding will lead to drugs that not only keep breast cancer from spreading, but also make it more responsive to treatment.

“If we have a drug to inhibit this type of gene, one stone hits two birds,” Kang said.

He said MTDH may also play a role in other types of cancers, including prostate cancer. “It’s likely to be a broad influence gene,” he said.

Kang said he thinks it would be possible to develop an antibody to neutralize the activity of the gene.

Already, it has gained the attention of drugmakers. Kang said he plans to meet with Johnson & Johnson next week.

“I’m quite optimistic we will try to dev

Many genes linked to various cancers do not appear to raise the risk of getting cancer after all, according to an analysis of hundreds of studies published on Tuesday.

The findings highlight the need to exercise caution over the increasing number of studies associating common genetic variations with a range of diseases, said John Ioannidis of the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece.

“The whole thing about genetic variations and links to diseases like cancer are very exciting, but the general public should be quite cautious about jumping to the conclusion that if they have a change in one gene or another they are doomed,” Ioannidis, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

“Genetic effects are very complex and very subtle and we need to know a lot more before we can make strong recommendations based on genetic profiles.”

Ioannidis said his team had looked only at common genetic changes or polymorphisms, not at rare mutations, which in genes such as BRCA1 and BRCA2 significantly raise breast cancer risk. The rare form of these variants, for example, accounts for an estimated 5 to 10 percent of breast cancers.

Since early 2007, variations at more than 100 places on the genome have been linked to diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers.

The problem, researchers say, is that many of these genes typically interact in a complicated manner and their ultimate effects are influenced by the environment — diet, exercise, smoking and other behavior — in often poorly understood ways.

Ioannidis and his colleague Paolo Vineis of Imperial College London analyzed hundreds of published studies linking genetic changes to different cancers. They found that, out of 240 associations between a specific mutation and a cancer, only two genes involved in DNA repair and tied to lung cancer — XRCC1 and ERCC2 — turned out to be strong candidates for such a link.

“Most of the associations had weak or modest credibility,” he said. That included PARP1 for breast cancer and CCND1 for head and neck tumors.

The problem is that on their own, the earlier studies fail to provide a complete picture and run the risk of drawing conclusions from too limited an amount of data, Ioannidis said.

This does not mean studies linking genes to cancer and the risk of other diseases have completely missed the mark, but rather that it takes a mountain of evidence to reach strong conclusions when it comes to the human genome, he added.

“Our study shows that it really takes a lot of research effort and many, many studies to be able to pinpoint a couple of associations,” Ioannidis said.

In 2009, a group of astronomers is planning to get the ruling that Pluto is not the ninth planet of our solar system, overturned.

The International Astronomical Union (IAU), ruled in 2006 that there are no longer nine planets in the Solar System, and downgraded Pluto to the lowly status of a “dwarf planet”.

But, according to a report in The Independent, in 2009, Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and his like-minded colleagues, hope to get the ruling overturned at the next general assembly of the IAU, to be held in Rio de Janeiro in August.

“The IAU is not the Holy Mother Church, so its pronouncements are not followed by everybody,” said Dr Sykes. “To me and many like me, Pluto remains a planet and there are still nine planets in the Solar System,” he added.

“The one thing that was particularly bad about the IAU’s decision is that normally it makes pronouncements that are a mark of a general consensus, but here it has tried to impose its view on the rest of us,” he further added.

The row over Pluto’s downgrading has been simmering since the astronomy organisation voted to relegate it in August 2006 in Prague.

It was agreed at the last vote of that conference – after many scientists had left.

“The IAU definition is so flawed on so many levels,” said Alan Stern, principal investigator on a NASA mission, New Horizons. “It’s an awful definition; it’s sloppy science and it would never pass peer review,” he added.

The IAU has coined the term “plutoid” for objects like pluto, which, while massive enough to form a near-spherical shape, do not have gravitational influence to clear the neighbourhood around their orbit of other objects.

If you took Earth out of the Solar System, the other planets would care. If you took Pluto out, it would make no difference to the orbits of the other planets,” said Hal Levison of the South Western Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado who has studied the dynamics of planet definition.

But, Dr Sykes disagrees.

“Pluto is far more like Earth than Earth is like Jupiter. Jupiter is a gas planet. It doesn’t even have a surface or topography, unlike Pluto,” he said.

“The argument over Pluto is a demonstration that scientists can disagree and that science is not some dictatorial project – it’s dynamic,” he added.

The faculty at the University of Alabama (UA) in the US has made predictions for the year 2009.

In the 28th edition of “Educated Guesses,” the predictions for 2009 include: -

Americans to cope with recession in both health and unhealthy ways: Anxiety and depression will threaten Americans’ mental health in 2009 as the recession progresses. While some people might take to drugs or alcohol, other may actually step back and readjust their lives.

American retailing picture to be dim in 2009: The retailing picture of the US will not improve through most of 2009.

First 100 days will be key to Obama presidency: Look for President Obama to pursue his electoral mandate to fix the economy and health care in 2009 in a historic moment nearly comparable to the beginning of the Roosevelt administration in 1933.

Bailout or not, U.S. auto industry will change in 2009: Whether or not the federal government bails out the ailing auto industry, substantial changes in the American auto industry can be expected next year.

Oil prices will stay low for 2009: After a year in which oil prices fluctuated from record highs to the lowest prices in the last five years, a UA engineering professor predicts that oil prices will remain low during 2009, thanks to the struggling economy.

U.S. to pull out of Iraq, increase troops in Afghanistan: The incoming Obama administration will make good on pledges regarding the ongoing conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009 even as those nations pose huge challenges.

Obama’s first year to bring open, frank dialogue about racial and ethnic diversity: An increase in open and frank dialogue about racial and ethnic diversity will begin as Barack Obama’s presidential administration gets underway in the coming year.

Weather to offer few surprises: 2009 will follow the weather pattern set by the current year - a pattern of normalcy.

Multi-platform books, fantasy to hold kids’ attention: Interactive books that use Web pages and CDs to help tell their stories and keep kids guessing will continue to hold children’s and young adults’ attention in 2009.

Style shifts direction in 2009: More figure-flattering cuts, belts and dresses that emphasize the waist will replace bulky tops as the hottest styles in 2009 as fashion trends move away from the focus on volume of the last few seasons.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled in a landmark verdict that the retention of innocent people’s DNA and fingerprint records by police is illegal.

According to a report in The Independent, the unanimous judgment by the Strasbourg court in France condemned the “blanket and indiscriminate nature” of powers given to police in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in collecting and storing DNA and fingerprint evidence of suspects.

But, the British Government has not immediately said it will comply with the ruling by bringing in laws that would destroy nearly a million DNA samples taken from suspects who have been exonerated by the police and courts.

Instead, the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, said she was “disappointed” by the judgment and confirmed the law would remain unchanged while ministers consider what, if any, action, to take.

It is a well established convention that United Kingdom governments comply with ECHR rulings.

If the Government does not accept the new judgment, it could provoke a constitutional crisis between ministers and judges in Strasbourg, who act as the final court of appeal for human rights laws across Europe.

Human rights groups have welcomed the judgment and called for the British Government to follow Scotland where police routinely destroy profiles of those either acquitted or not charged.

The ruling could have important implications for fingerprint databases. According to the judges, holding innocent people’s details could infringe their rights.