Using Botox for More Than Just Wrinkles

Doctors Increasingly Using Botox for More Than Just Wrinkles

If you think Botox is just for wrinkles — think again. The anti-wrinkle drug is now being routinely used to reduce scarring, treat migraines and eliminate excessive sweating.

"A study out of the University of Buffalo demonstrated that using Botox on the outer sides of fresh scars reduces the pull of the muscle tension which makes scars red and thick," said Dr. Steven Pearlman, a dual board certified facial and reconstructive surgeon in Manhattan.

Sitting in Pearlman's office on this particular February day is Nancy Behrman, a busy New York City professional. The mother of two sustained serious injuries to her face last August when she went over the handle bars of her bicycle.

She's had multiple surgeries since then — but she's not going under the knife this time around.

"I had heard through several plastic surgeons and dermatologists that the way to actually relax the bruise on my chin is to have Botox,” she said.

At first, Behrman shied away from the procedure.

"I wanted to get through the rest of my surgeries," she said, "but as the day goes on the bruise gets more and more enlarged. So, I decided that the best thing for me to do to make myself feel better was to entrust myself with a doctor that I knew would take good care of me."

Behrman sat in the chair calm and confident as Pearlman filled the needle with Botox, or Botulinum toxin.

The procedure took barely 20 seconds to complete. A quick solution for an emotionally taxing problem.

"I hope that the actual swelling will diminish," Behrman said. "It's just not so obvious that if you were to look directly at me there wasn't something wrong with my chin.”

Botox takes about three to four days to work and the results last three to four months.

"Scars heal for a full year," Pearlman said. "So you really want to repeat this a few times and keep the muscle relaxed as it heals."

Suffer from migraines?

Pearlman said a little Botox can help with that too.

"The headaches may be a migraine or a tension headache," he said. "Botox works by relaxing muscles and the way it relaxes muscles it prevents the nerve from releasing a chemical that tells the muscle to contract."

When Natalie Ferro heard about the procedure, she jumped at the chance.

"I learned that I could get Botox to help my migraines and it was really exciting for me," she said.

Before you make an appointment, Pearlman said it's extremely important to have your headaches "worked up."

"That means you should see a specialist in headaches," Pearlman said. "Usually a neurologist because you want to make sure there is no other cause for the headaches."

Twenty blocks up from Pearlman's office on Park Avenue, two more patients are getting ready for their first round of Botox. This time for excessive sweating, also know as hyperhidrosis.

"Botox controls the excess perspiration again by inhibiting the glands from functioning for a period of time," said Dr. Neil Sadick, a dermatologist in a private practice. "You can use it any place. It's commonly used for sweating on the hands, soles, under the arms, as well as on the forehead."

Samantha Feder has struggled with excessive sweating for sometime.

"I absolutely have issues," she told FOXNews.com." "Especially as the weather gets warmer."

Feder isn't alone. Abnormal sweating plagues millions of people.

But, Sadick said it doesn't have to be that way.

"For the first time we have a very simple, non-invasive treatment that most importantly gives you almost total control of sweating for several months," he added.

After making a grid inside Feder's armpits, Sadick makes a series of injections.

"I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the results," Feder said. "Especially as summer comes around."

Just down the hallway, Rob Spira is nervously waiting to get Botox injections in his hands.

"Ever since I was a little kid I've always had sweaty hands," Spira said. "There's always anxiety when you're going to shake hands with someone if you're hands are sweaty."

Again, Sadick makes a grid on both of Spira's hands.

"I understand the procedure's a little bit painful but hopefully it will be worth the pain," Spira said.

According to Sadick, the results speak for themselves.

"Most individuals have almost complete eradication of sweating," he said. "Sometimes there's a little bit of focal sweating, but the actual take and cessation of sweating is almost complete. That's what's remarkable about using this procedure."

Getting Botox to treat hyperhidrosis isn't cheap. However, Sadick said the cost is often covered by insurance carriers.

FDA Warning

On a related note, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a warning following the deaths of several children who were treated with Botox and a similar product.

The deaths involved cerebral palsy patients who were given high doses of the anti-wrinkle drug to treat muscle spasms.

The agency warned patients getting a Botox injection for any reason to seek immediate medical attention if they suffer symptoms of botulism, including:

— difficulty swallowing or breathing

— slurred speech

— muscle weakness

— difficulty holding up their head.

Of course, always make sure a licensed physician is administering the Botox injection.

Genetic study ties Siberians to people in Americas

Genetic study ties Siberians to people in Americas

A man of Mayan descent sits in his home with one of his 21 grandchildren in Chiquimulilla, Guatemala, February 4, 2007. People indigenous to Siberia have strong genetic links to native peoples in the Americas, including the Maya, according to a study further supporting the theory that humans first entered the Americas over a land bridge across the Bering Strait.


People indigenous to Siberia have strong genetic links to native peoples in the Americas, according to a study further supporting the theory that humans first entered the Americas over a land bridge across the Bering Strait.

Scientists at Stanford University in California combed through the genes of 938 people from 51 places, looking at 650,000 DNA locations in each person.

The study, in the journal Science on Thursday, revealed similarities and differences among various populations.

"This is the highest resolution look at population genetics that has been done to date, both in terms of the number of populations that have been studied and in terms of the number of (genetic) markers used," researcher Devin Absher of the Stanford Human Genome Center said in a telephone interview.

One striking finding was the genetic similarities between the Yakut people, who live in Siberia, and several native populations from Mexico, Central America, Colombia and Brazil, the researchers said. These include the Maya in Central America and the Surui and Karitiana in Brazil.

"That's really an indication of shared ancestry," Absher said.

This fits into the theory that humans migrated into the Americas from Siberia along a now-vanished land bridge across the Bering Strait between perhaps 12,000 and 30,000 years ago.

Previous research suggested a genetic link, finding that a unique genetic mutation is shared by native peoples in Siberia and the Americas, but the new findings offer deeper genetic evidence.

The scientists also were able to detect genetic differences between northern and southern Chinese populations as well as variations within the Bedouin populations of the Middle East.

"With the massive new amounts of data, we are able to tease out the subtle differences between different European populations, or between northern Chinese and southern Chinese, and that has never been possible," said Marcus Feldman, a Stanford professor of biological sciences.

The publication of the research came a day after two other important studies on human genetic variation appeared in the journal Nature. Scientists say these papers together offer strong evidence for the "Out of Africa" theory that humans originated in Africa and migrated to colonize the rest of the world in several waves.

The study showed that human populations have less genetic diversity the farther they are away from Africa.

That would be the case, the researchers said, if the people migrating out of Africa represented only a small fraction of the original African population. These migrating people would go on to establish new, less genetically diverse populations around the world, they added.

Map pinpoints disease 'hotspots'

Map pinpoints disease 'hotspots'

A detailed map highlighting the world's hotspots for emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) has been released. It uses data spanning 65 years and shows the majority of these new diseases come from wildlife.

Map showing risk levels of emerging diseases transmitted from wildlife. The researchers say the majority of hotspots are located in lower-latitude developing nations.

Scientists say conservation efforts that reduce conflicts between humans and animals could play a key role in limiting future outbreaks.

Writing in Nature, they said their map revealed that global anti-EID resources had been poorly allocated in the past.

Researchers from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), and the US-based University of Georgia and Columbia University's Earth Institute analysed 335 emerging diseases from 1940 to 2004.

They then used computer models to see if the outbreaks correlated with human population density or changes, latitude, rainfall or wildlife biodiversity.

Finally, the data was plotted on to maps to reveal the "hotspots" around the globe.

Healthy environment

"Our analysis highlights the critical importance of conservation work," said co-author Dr Kate Jones, a research fellow for ZSL.

"Conserving areas rich in biodiversity from development may be an important means of preventing the emergence of new diseases."

The researchers found that 60% of EID events were caused by "non-human animal" sources.

They add that 71% of these outbreaks were "caused by pathogens with a wildlife source".

If we continue to ignore this important preventative measure, then human populations will continue to be at risk from pandemic diseases.

Among the examples listed by the team was the emergence of Nipah virus in Malaysia and the Sars outbreak in China.
Others included the H5N1 strain of bird flu, Ebola and West Nile virus.

The number of events that originated from wild animals had increased significantly over time, they warned.

"This supports the suggestion that zoonotic EIDs represents an increasing and very significant threat to global health," the paper's authors wrote.

They added that it also highlighted the need to understand the factors that lead to increased contact between wildlife and humans.

"We are crowding wildlife into ever smaller areas, and human population is increasing," explained Dr Marc Levy, a global change expert at Columbia University's Earth Institute.

"Where those two things meet, that is the recipe for something crossing over."

He added that the main sources were mammals that were most closely related to humans.

'Missing the point'

While some pathogens may be picked up while hunting or by accident, others - such as Nipah virus - are transmitted to humans from wild animals via livestock.

Because humans had not evolved resistance to these EIDS, the scientists said that the results could be "extraordinarily lethal".

The main hotspots were located in low latitude regions, like South Asia and South-East Asia, which were not the financial focus of global funds to prevent the spread of EIDs.

"The world's public health resources are misallocated," opined co-author Peter Daszak, executive director of the Consortium for Conservation Medicine at the US-based Wildlife Trust.

"Most are focused on richer countries that can afford surveillance, but most of the hotspots are in developing countries.

"If you look at the high-impact diseases of the future, we're missing the point."

However, Dr Dazak said that the maps were the first to offer a prediction of where the next new disease could emerge.

His colleague, Dr John Gittleman from the University of Georgia's Odum School of Ecology, described the data-set as a "seminal moment in how we study emerging diseases".

"Our study has shown that bringing ecological sciences and public health together can advance the field in a dramatic ways," he observed.

The researchers said that the priority should be to set up "smart surveillance" measures in the hotspots identified on the map.

Dr Daszak explained that logistically straightforward bio-security measures, such as screening people who come into contact with wild birds and mammals in the hotspot areas, could halt the "next Aids or Sars before it happened".

"It simply follows the old adage that prevention is better, and cheaper, than finding a cure.

"If we continue to ignore this important preventative measure, then human populations will continue to be at risk from pandemic diseases," Dr Daszak warned.

Solar Storms Get More Predictable

One Hour Warning: Solar Storms Get More Predictable

View image details A solar eruption

If humans live on the moon some day, they might turn on the weather forecast just as they do on Earth. But in space, they won't fear rain storms, but sun storms.

During a solar radiation storm, the sun emits huge sprays of charged particles that can disable satellites and would harm humans in space if they're not properly protected. Although these storms are notoriously difficult to predict, a new method of forecasting storms can give up to an hour's warning.

The technique relies on measurements taken by the NASA/ESA SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) spacecraft in orbit around the sun. SOHO, launched in 1995, has been near death more than once, but clever engineers, working with the equivalent of electronic duct tape and more than a dash of luck, have kept it running well beyond its expected lifetime. And now the probe is making fresh contributions to solar weather forecasting.

The new technique relies on SOHO's Comprehensive Suprathermal and Energetic Particle Analyzer (COSTEP), which monitors the radiation coming from the sun.

Scientists analyzed the data COSTEP recorded from sun storms during the first six years of the spacecraft's launch, and compiled a matrix that can predict a full-blown storm is coming after the less-dangerous first wave arrives. Because there is about an hour's lag time between the early arrival of electrons, and the eventual onslaught of more-damaging protons, this new forecast system gives people and spacecraft enough time to take cover.

The method was described in the journal Space Weather, and went online just in time for the recent launch of the STS-122 shuttle mission.

Radiation risk

On Earth, people are protected from the brunt of solar radiation by our planet's atmosphere and magnetic field. Even astronauts orbiting the Earth on the International Space Station are shielded from much of it since Earth's magnetic field extends far enough to cover them. The astronauts do retreat to a radiation-shielded part of the station during severe storms, however.

But when people venture beyond our planet's protective bubble, they will really be at risk of severe health effects from solar storm radiation. It was a concern even during brief lunar missions in the Apollo era.

"We know what happens when humans are exposed to a lot of radiation — Hiroshima and Nagasaki have given us an example," said Arik Posner, a senior research scientist at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, who developed the new forecast technique. "Humans are constantly hit by some sort of radiation, even on Earth, at very low levels. But what happens when you increase the radiation level slightly? We don't know. But the best thing to do is limit exposure."

DNA damage

The most damaging solar-storm radiation particles are fast-moving protons. These energetic particles can destroy human tissue and break strands of DNA.

The radiation is also dangerous for spacecraft. When a speeding particle hits electronics, it can cause bits to change from zeroes to ones or vice versa, prompting program malfunctions. If power is knocked out, a satellite can fail completely.

Scientists don't fully understand the physics behind solar storms. They know they are closely related to the cycles of the sun's magnetic field, and that they emerge from relatively cool, intensely magnetic regions of the solar surface called sunspots. The magnetic field is always changing — about every 11 years its magnetic north pole becomes the south pole, and vice versa. As the polarity cycles and regional instabilities develop, the sun's magnetic field lines get twisted and tangled, resulting in big knots of extremely strong magnetism.

Although the exact mechanism isn't known, somehow these magnetic field events are tied to eruptions of matter and energy.

"We don't have a really good idea of exactly how these processes happen," Posner said. "It's a very active area of research."

Huge explosions on the sun accelerate charged particles to near light-speed. The lighter particles, electrons, can speed up more easily, so they reach SOHO's radiation detector first. This allows the spacecraft to give humans about an hour's advance notice before the heavier protons and ions arrive and wreak havoc.

"The detector can only say that there is already an event in progress," Posner told SPACE.com. "It cannot predict one before it starts. But it does give you a tool to forecast these events."

After Posner and his collaborators designed the matrix to predict a coming storm, they tested it on the sun storm record from 2003, a year that did not comprise the initial data set on which the matrix was based. When it measured an increase in high-speed electrons, the program was able to successfully predict that a solar storm was coming. It forecasted all four major storms of 2003 with advance warnings ranging from 7 to 74 minutes.

Enduring craft

SOHO is a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). Three times it has seemed to be a doomed mission. During the most recent scare, in 2003, a stuck motor drive would not permit the craft's primary antenna to move. The antenna is used for transmitting pictures and data back to Earth, and it must be pointed toward the planet. Scientists feared lengthy blackout periods.

Engineers employed some tricks, including flipping the craft upside down during portions of its orbit, to get the data flowing again.

In 1998, changes in the spacecraft's software inadvertently sent it into a flat spin. The electricity-providing solar panels turned edge-on to the Sun, and SOHO lost power. It could not orient itself or maintain its temperature — critical in the frigid environment of space.

The mission appeared doomed.

After nearly three months, with much perseverance by the ground team, contact was re-established and the craft's orientation was fixed. Sunlight hit the panels, and SOHO was back.

Later in 1998, another problem nearly ended the mission again. The craft's last navigational gyro failed.

"In a race against time and a depleting maneuvering-fuel supply," explained SOHO Project Scientist Bernhard Fleck of ESA, engineers had to develop a software patch to get the craft back in operation without the gyro. New software was developed in early 1999 to allow a spacecraft to maintain attitude without gyros. Engineers sent it up, "making SOHO the first 3-axis stabilized spacecraft to be operated without any gyros," Fleck said.

Today, SOHO receives minimal funding for a small crew to monitor its health and process the data.

Water Gushes Created "Staircases" on Mars: Study

Water Gushes Created "Staircases" on Mars: Study


A handout of the European Space Agency ESA shows a visualisation of Mars, created from spacecraft imagery. Sudden, tremendous gushes of water from underground most likely carved out unusual fan-shaped geological formations with steps like a staircase long ago on the surface of Mars, scientists said on Wednesday.


Sudden, tremendous gushes of water from underground most likely carved out unusual fan-shaped geological formations with steps like a staircase long ago on the surface of Mars, scientists said on Wednesday.

The Martian surface boasts perhaps 200 large basins that have formations resembling fans. About 10 of them are terraced, with what looks like steps into the basin. Since they were first seen three years ago, scientists have debated how these formations, some of them 9 miles wide, were created.

Dutch and U.S. researchers simulated on Earth on a vastly smaller scale the conditions that might have led to these formations on Mars that resemble dry river deltas with steps.

At a facility at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, they dug a crater in sand in a room-sized tub, then started water flowing into the crater. As the water flowed in through a channel, it eroded the sediment, then fanned out and deposited sediment as deltas, building steps down into the basin, very much like the Martian formations.

Erin Kraal, a researcher at Virginia Tech University who led the study published in the journal Nature, said these Martian formations probably formed quickly -- in a period of decades not hundreds, thousands or millions of years.

And they involved a lot of water.

"What you could imagine is something like the Mississippi River flowing for 10 years and then turning off, or the Rhine River flowing for 100 years and then turning off," Kraal said in a telephone interview.

"It's hard to image being able to get that much water to start so suddenly and stop so suddenly," Kraal added.

Kraal said the large volume of water needed to carve out these formations billions of years ago most likely burst from beneath the surface of the planet. "It doesn't look like it came from precipitation, or from rain. It looks like it came from a hydrothermal source or from melting ice," Kraal said.

Scientists want to understand the history of water on Mars because water is fundamental to the question of whether the planet has ever harbored microbial or some other life. Liquid water is a necessity for life as we know it. While Mars is now arid and dusty, there is evidence it once was much wetter.

For example, scientists think that long, undulating features seen on the northern plains of Mars may be remnants of shorelines of an ocean that covered a third of the planet's surface at least 2 billion years ago.

Currently, there are huge deposits of frozen water at the poles. And images taken by a NASA spacecraft suggest the presence of a small amount of liquid water on the surface. The images showed changes in the walls of two craters apparently caused by the downhill flow of water in the past few years.

First Stars 'May Have Been Dark'

First Stars 'May Have Been Dark'

The "dark" stars may have been large and diffuse

The first stars to appear in the Universe may have been powered by dark matter, according to US scientists.
Normal stars are powered by nuclear fusion reactions, where hydrogen atoms meld to form heavier helium.

But when the Universe was still young, there would have been abundant dark matter, made of particles called Wimps: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles.

These would have fused together and obliterated each other long before nuclear fusion had the chance to start.

As a result, the first stars would have looked quite different from the ones we see today, and they may have changed the course of the Universe's evolution - or at least held it up.

The theory, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, depends on particles that astronomers can't see, but are certain exist, and physicists have never detected. But the indirect evidence for their existence is overwhelming.

"Dark matter particles make up more than three-quarters of the mass of the Universe," says theoretical physicist Katherine Freese from the University of Michigan.

"In fact, billions of them are passing through each of us every second."

In the early Universe, there would have been even more.

Changing course

The nature of the first stars has long puzzled astronomers. Immediately after the Big Bang, the Universe expanded and cooled, so that for millions of years it was filled with dark, featureless hydrogen and helium - and perhaps Wimps.

Astronomers can see that there were normal stars 700 million years after the Big Bang - the Hubble Telescope looking to the edges of the Universe, which is like looking back billions of years in time, can see whole galaxies of them.


But how did the Universe change course?

The leading theory is that gravity pulled balls of dark matter and hydrogen together.

"These 'haloes', as we call them, are about a million times as massive as the Sun, and the first stars formed inside their centres," Professor Freese told the BBC.

It had been thought the hydrogen brought together by these dark matter haloes would collapse to make the first small stars, and would start to make inside themselves the first new elements - carbon, oxygen, silicon and other materials needed by planets and life.

But the new paper says reactions between the Wimps, colliding and annihilating each other, would have generated enough heat to keep the protostars inflated - like hot air balloons. And as more Wimps rained down on them the heating would have kept going.

These giant, diffuse stars could have filled the orbit of the Earth.

The details of what the stars would have looked like have yet to be worked out. But in five years' time, Nasa will be launching its James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, and that might be able see right back to these "dark" stars.

There is also the intriguing possibility, says Professor Freese, that in some corner of our local Universe, there may be a few survivors lurking unnoticed.

New Gravitationally Lensed Galaxies Discovered

Hubble Discovers 67 New Gravitationally Lensed Galaxies in the Distant Universe

View image details

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have compiled a large catalog of gravitational lenses in the distant universe. The catalog contains 67 new gravitationally lensed galaxy images found around massive elliptical and lenticular-shaped galaxies. This sample demonstrates the rich diversity of strong gravitational lenses. If this sample is representative, there would be nearly half a million similar gravitational lenses over the whole sky.

The lenses come from a recently completed, large set of observations as part of a huge project to survey a single 1.6-square-degree field of sky (nine times the area of the full Moon) with several space-based and Earth-based observatories. The COSMOS project, led by Nick Scoville at the California Institute of Technology, used observations from several observatories including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, the XMM-Newton spacecraft, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Very Large Telescope (VLT), the Subaru Telescope, and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.

A team of European astronomers led by Jean-Paul Kneib (Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille) and Cecile Faure (Zentrum für Astronomie, University of Heidelberg) analyzed the results from Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). From ACS high-resolution images, complemented by the extensive ground-based follow-up observations, astronomers have identified 67 strong gravitationally lensed galaxies. These lenses were found around very massive galaxies that are usually elliptical or lenticular in shape and have a deficiency of gas and dust.

The strong lensing produced by massive galaxies are much more common than the usual giant "arc" gravitationally lensed galaxies that Hubble has previously observed; but they are generally more difficult to find as they extend over a smaller area and have a wide variety of shapes.

Gravitational lensing occurs when light traveling toward us from a distant galaxy is magnified and distorted as it encounters a massive object between the galaxy and us. These gravitational lenses often allow astronomers to peer much farther back into the early universe than they would normally be able to do.

The massive objects that create the lenses are usually huge clusters of massive galaxies. "We typically see the gravitational lens create a series of bright arcs or spots around a galaxy cluster. What we are observing here is a similar effect but on a much smaller scale — happening only around a single but very massive galaxy," said Kneib.

Of the 67 gravitational lenses identified in the COSMOS survey, the most impressive lenses show the distorted and warped light of one or two background galaxies. At least four of the lenses produce Einstein rings, a complete circular image of a background galaxy, which is formed when the background galaxy, a massive, foreground galaxy, and the Hubble Space Telescope are all aligned perfectly.

Hubble astronomers went through a unique process to identify these incredible natural lenses. First, possible galaxies were identified from a galaxy catalog, comprising more than 2 million galaxies. "We then had to look through each individual COSMOS image by eye and identify any potential strong gravitational lenses," said Faure. Finally, checks were made to see if the foreground galaxy and the lensed galaxy were really different or just one galaxy with an odd shape. "With this sample of gravitational systems identified by the human eye, we now plan to use the sample of lenses to train robot software to find more of these lenses across the entire Hubble image archive, and we may find even more strong lensing systems in the COSMOS field," added Kneib.

The new results confirm that the universe is filled with gravitational lensing systems. Extrapolating these new findings to the whole sky predicts no less than half a million similar lenses in total.

The study of these gravitational lenses will give astronomers a first-rate opportunity to probe the dark matter distribution around galactic lenses. Once astronomers find even larger numbers of these smaller, stronger lenses, they can be used to create a census of galaxy masses in the universe to test the predictions of cosmological models.

Quicksilver Clock Could 'Revolutionize' Physics

Quicksilver Clock Could 'Revolutionize' Physics


The Strontium Clock
This strontium-based clock emits a blue light. The newly developed mercury-based clock, which could be the world's most accurate, emits invisible UV light, but the design is the same.


Researchers are set to test a new mercury-based clock expected to be the world's most accurate timepiece.

The Tokyo-based research should improve measurements of everything from the speed of light to the strength of electromagnetic forces. It could also improve the accuracy of GPS signals.

"We hope that the proposed clock...will be the most accurate one, although it is not experimentally demonstrated yet," said team leader Hidetoshi Katori, a physicist at the University of Tokyo. The clock will have to run for several weeks before researchers can determine its accuracy.

The study was published recently in Physical Review Letters.

The researchers propose what is called an optical lattice clock, where a set of lasers creates a wave that holds atoms of mercury at rest. Another set of lasers reads the atoms' energy levels to determine the time.

Current clocks are based on the oscillation of the metal cesium, a technology which is more than 50 years old, notes Andrei Derevianko, a professor of physics at the University of Reno and one of the new study's authors. The problem with the cesium clock is that after 30 million years or so, the clock will be off by about one second.

While this might not seem like a big deal, the Global Positioning System (GPS) finds a location based on the very tiny, fractions of a second differences between the signals of orbiting satellites.

Researchers expect the new clock will lose only a fraction of a second over 14 billion years -- that's as long as the universe has existed.

While it will take several weeks to test the new mercury-based clock, the researchers expect it to be more accurate by several magnitudes than other kinds of clocks because it measures millions of atoms simultaneously, instead of a single ion.

In 2005 the researchers reported they had developed a similar clock, made out of strontium. Subsequent tests showed the clock was affected by a certain kind of radiation, known as blackbody radiation. Mercury is not affected by this radiation, so it makes for a more accurate clock.

Mercury is, however, affected by electromagnetism.

In physicists' equations, alpha refers to the strength of the electromagnetic force. For decades it was assumed that the value of alpha was unchangeable. But over the last decade a host of experiments in fields from astronomy to nuclear physics has shown that alpha may have changed.

If scientists find a difference between the alpha-sensitive mercury clock and the alpha-neutral strontium clock, it could usher in a new age of physics.

"Discovery of such variation would lead to a revolution in physics and cosmology," said Victor Flambaum, a physicist at the University of New South Wales in Australia and an expert in alpha measurements. "A new theory will be needed to extend present 'standard model,' including Einstein's general relativity."

But Flambaum cautions that any difference in alpha found by the clock will have to be verified by other experiments. Only time will tell.

Scientists Would Turn Greenhouse Gas Into Gasoline

Scientists Would Turn Greenhouse Gas Into Gasoline

ENLARGE SEEING GREEN Air pollution in downtown Los Angeles.

If two scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory are correct, people will still be driving gasoline-powered cars 50 years from now, churning out heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — and yet that carbon dioxide will not contribute to global warming.

The scientists, F. Jeffrey Martin and William L. Kubic Jr., are proposing a concept, which they have patriotically named Green Freedom, for removing carbon dioxide from the air and turning it back into gasoline.

The idea is simple. Air would be blown over a liquid solution of potassium carbonate, which would absorb the carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide would then be extracted and subjected to chemical reactions that would turn it into fuel: methanol, gasoline or jet fuel.

This process could transform carbon dioxide from an unwanted, climate-changing pollutant into a vast resource for renewable fuels. The closed cycle — equal amounts of carbon dioxide emitted and removed — would mean that cars, trucks and airplanes using the synthetic fuels would no longer be contributing to global warming.

Although they have not yet built a synthetic fuel factory, or even a small prototype, the scientists say it is all based on existing technology.

"Everything in the concept has been built, is operating or has a close cousin that is operating," Dr. Martin said.

The Los Alamos proposal does not violate any laws of physics, and other scientists, like George A. Olah, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist at the University of Southern California, and Klaus Lackner, a professor of geophysics at Columbia University, have independently suggested similar ideas. Dr. Martin said he and Dr. Kubic had worked out their concept in more detail than previous proposals.

There is, however, a major caveat that explains why no one has built a carbon-dioxide-to-gasoline factory: it requires a great deal of energy.

To deal with that problem, the Los Alamos scientists say they have developed a number of innovations, including a new electrochemical process for detaching the carbon dioxide after it has been absorbed into the potassium carbonate solution. The process has been tested in Dr. Kubic's garage, in a simple apparatus that looks like mutant Tupperware.

Even with those improvements, providing the energy to produce gasoline on a commercial scale — say, 750,000 gallons a day — would require a dedicated power plant, preferably a nuclear one, the scientists say.

According to their analysis, their concept, which would cost about $5 billion to build, could produce gasoline at an operating cost of $1.40 a gallon and would turn economically viable when the price at the pump hits $4.60 a gallon, taking into account construction costs and other expenses in getting the gas to the consumer. With some additional technological advances, the break-even price would drop to $3.40 a gallon, they said.

A nuclear reactor is not required technologically. The same chemical processes could also be powered by solar panels, for instance, but the economics become far less favorable.

Dr. Martin and Dr. Kubic will present their Green Freedom concept on Wednesday at the Alternative Energy Now conference in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. They plan a simple demonstration within a year and a larger prototype within a couple of years after that.

A commercial nuclear-powered gasoline factory would have to jump some high hurdles before it could be built, and thousands of them would be needed to fully replace petroleum, but this part of the global warming problem has no easy solutions.

In the efforts to reduce humanity's emissions of carbon dioxide, now nearing 30 billion metric tons a year, most of the attention so far has focused on large stationary sources, like power plants where, conceptually at least, one could imagine a shift from fuels that emit carbon dioxide — coal and natural gas — to those that do not — nuclear, solar and wind. Another strategy, known as carbon capture and storage, would continue the use of fossil fuels but trap the carbon dioxide and then pipe it underground where it would not affect the climate.

But to stabilize carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would require drastic cuts in emissions, and similar solutions do not exist for small, mobile sources of carbon dioxide. Nuclear and solar-powered cars do not seem plausible anytime soon.

Three solutions have been offered: hydrogen-powered fuel cells, electric cars and biofuels. Biofuels like ethanol are gasoline substitutes produced from plants like corn, sugar cane or switch grass, and the underlying idea is the same as Green Freedom. Plants absorb carbon dioxide as they grow, balancing out the carbon dioxide emitted when they are burned. But growing crops for fuel takes up wide swaths of land.

Hydrogen-powered cars emit no carbon dioxide, but producing hydrogen, by splitting water or some other chemical reaction, requires copious energy, and if that energy comes from coal-fired power plants, then the problem has not been solved. Hydrogen is also harder to store and move than gasoline and would require an overhaul of the world's energy infrastructure.

Electric cars also push the carbon dioxide problem to the power plant. And electric cars have typically been limited to a range of tens of miles as opposed to the hundreds of miles that can be driven on a tank of gas.

Gasoline, it turns out, is an almost ideal fuel (except that it produces 19.4 pounds of carbon dioxide per gallon). It is easily transported, and it generates more energy per volume than most alternatives. If it can be made out of carbon dioxide in the air, the Los Alamos concept may mean there is little reason to switch, after all. The concept can also be adapted for jet fuel; for jetliners, neither hydrogen nor batteries seem plausible alternatives.

"This is the only one that I have seen that addresses all of the concerns that are out there right now," Dr. Martin said.

Other scientists said the Los Alamos proposal perhaps looked promising but could not evaluate it fully because the details had not been published.

"It's definitely worth pursuing," said Martin I. Hoffert, a professor of physics at New York University. "It's not that new an idea. It has a couple of pieces to it that are interesting."

Potentially Habitable Planets Are Common

Potentially Habitable Planets Are Common, Study Says

An artist's rendering depicts a montage of terrestrial worlds that may form around neighboring sunlike stars. A new study suggests that more than half of the sunlike stars in the galaxy could have terrestrial planets with the potential to harbor life.

More than half of the sunlike stars in the galaxy could have terrestrial planets with the potential to harbor life, a new study suggests.

The research, announced yesterday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, Massachusetts, is just one of a set of recent findings that suggest the roster of potential life-harboring worlds is huge—even in our own solar system.

"Our observations suggest that between 20 percent and 60 percent of sunlike stars form rocky planets like our solar system's," said Michael Meyer, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, at a press briefing Sunday.

Meyer and his team used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to study heat from the dust around sunlike stars of various ages, much like looking at "the smoke you see rising from chimneys in Boston on a cold day."

Such hot dust implies that larger rocky bodies are forming and colliding in the "messy" business of planet formation, Meyer explained.

Planet-forming dust was found at one to five times the distance from the sun to Earth, Meyer said (see an interactive map of the solar system.)

The dust was also seen in young stars but was absent from most stars older than 300 million years—a perfect fit with current models of planetary formation, he added.

The study will appear in an upcoming edition of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Earth-Size Refugees?

At the briefing, scientists also advanced the possibility that our solar system contains hundreds or even thousands more dwarf planets like Pluto, hidden from view in the distant region known as the Kuiper belt.

There is a growing body of evidence that the poorly understood region contains several Earth- or Mars-size planets and many tinier bodies, said NASA planetary scientist Alan Stern, adding that this could very well be a "new Copernican revolution" in our understanding of planets.

"What we thought is, our outer solar system is actually our middle solar system," Stern said.

It would be a vindication for Pluto, which was recently "demoted" from full planet status by astronomers after a lively and controversial debate.

Pluto might be the best known representative of a third major class of planets, the dwarfs, "which could be far more common than either the terrestrial or gas giant planets," Stern said.

The initial solar system was quite cluttered with small bodies, he explained, but these were swept out as the four gas giant planets—Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune—finished forming.

Evidence for that can be seen in Uranus, which is lying almost on its side compared to the other planets, Stern said.

It must have been struck by a massive object several times the mass of Earth—an extraordinary coincidence if there were only a few such bodies around.

Exploring the Kuiper belt will be a slow process, Stern pointed out, as the objects in it are extremely difficult to find because of their distance from Earth.

These worlds would mostly be rocky bodies with icy surfaces, though larger ones might be able to harbor gassy envelopes.

But there is also the possibility that some could have "warm, wet interiors," Stern said.

Some scientists think it is "likely Pluto has an ocean in its interior, as does [Jupiter's moon] Europa and many of the other satellites of other planets," Stern said.

In the future, we might focus the search for life on such worlds, which could be far more common than planets like Earth with liquid water on their surface, he added.

Slow Search for Life

But directly detecting the kinds of planets that could harbor life remains a huge challenge, said Debra Fischer of San Francisco State University.

Such planets fall into an "anti-sweet spot," she said—far too small to detect using any of the common planet detection methods, which have so far found about 250 or more extrasolar planets.

But scientists have reasons to remain optimistic, she said.

If a planet with the right mass is found at the right distance from a star—in the so-called Goldilocks zone, where it is neither too hot nor too cold—most of the work is done.

"The raw materials for life are common," she said. "Water is probably the most common molecule in the universe."