Published online: 26 April 2007; | doi:10.1038/news070423-9 / http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070423/full/070423-9.html

Chimp denied a legal guardian

Court turns down request in case aiming for 'ape rights'.

Ned Stafford

An Austrian judge turned down a request this week to appoint a woman as legal guardian of a chimpanzee.

The decision is a blow to a growing movement in Europe attempting to give apes some of the legal rights of humans, such as protection from being owned. But proponents of ape rights say they will appeal the decision and continue fighting for the cause elsewhere in Europe. In Spain, for example, they are pushing for a national law that would extend some human rights to apes.

Paula Casal, a vice-president of the Great Ape Project branch in Spain, says the Spanish law, first proposed a year ago, might finally be put to a vote soon in parliament. "After that battle is won, then we will have momentum to start organizing groups in other countries to do the same," said Casal, a philosopher at the University of Reading, UK.

The goal of the Great Ape Project is to extend basic human rights to apes, such as the right to life, protection of individual liberty and prohibition of torture.

Apes are no longer used in most western nations for research, with the United States being a major exception. New Zealand passed an ape rights law in 1999, backed by the Great Ape Project, which prohibits using apes in any experiments that would benefit humans.

The proposed Spanish law goes beyond this, additionally banning private ownership of apes, or their use for employment or entertainment. The state would be responsible for putting the more then 200 apes registered in Spain in sanctuaries. Furthermore, as written it would require the Spanish government to work towards convening an international forum of developed and developing nations on the issue of protecting the rights of great apes.

Wrong papers

Hiasl and Rosi are at the Vienna Animal Protection Shelter for now. Balluch

In the Austrian case, the Association Against Animal Factories (VGT) earlier this year went to court in an attempt to name a legal guardian for Hiasl (pronounced Hee-sel), who was taken in 1982 from western Africa with several other young chimps. The chimps were to be shipped to a research laboratory, but did not have proper documentation and were intercepted by customs officials, according to Martin Balluch, president of the VGT. Two of them, Hiasl and Rosi, ended up at the Vienna Animal Protection Shelter.

Balluch says they are worried that the shelter may no longer be able to afford to keep Hiasl and Rosi, and his group wants to ensure the chimps do not end up in a zoo or a laboratory. "If they are sent outside of Austria, then anything could happen to them," he says.

The VGT decided the best strategy was to seek a legal guardian for Hiasl, and then, if they won, use that as legal precedent to appoint a legal guardian for Rosi and other chimps in Austria, Balluch says.

In the lawsuit, Paula Stibbe, a UK citizen living in Austria and in regular contact with Hiasl since 1999, was put forward to be Hiasl's guardian. Stibbe, who still visits Hiasl regularly, says: "I consider him a friend. He greets me with kisses, hugs."

Support payments

Before filing the lawsuit, Balluch consulted with international experts and ape supporters such as Jane Goodall and US animal rights lawyer/author Stephen Wise. They chose the legal-guardian strategy because it would mean Hiasl could not be sold, Balluch says. And a lawsuit could then be filed on Hiasl's behalf against the laboratory that tried to import him, in order to obtain support payments. "Hiasl is now dependent on the goodwill of others," Balluch says. "If he were still in the west African jungle, he would not need money. It was the company that brought him here and started this mess."

In a trustee court hearing on 24 April, the judge denied the request. She said that if she appointed a legal guardian for a chimp, then this might create the public perception that humans with court-appointed legal guardians are at the same level as animals.

Balluch says his group will appeal the decision to a higher district court. He notes that many other chimps from the same research laboratory are in a sanctuary north of Vienna. Donations for that sanctuary are drying up, Balluch says. If Hiasl eventually wins the right to guardianship, then Balluch says he "would not hesitate to expand that to the 44 chimps north of Vienna."

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070423/full/446956b.html / Published online: 25 April 2007; | doi:10.1038/446956b

Brain's speech site is revisited and revised

Scans of pickled organs shed fresh light on Broca's area.

Kerri Smith

Analysis of two damaged brains, preserved in a museum since the nineteenth century, could force neuroscientists to rethink the area where language resides in the brain.

In 1861, the French surgeon and anatomist Paul Broca described two patients who had lost the ability to speak. One patient, Lelong, could produce only five words, and the second, Leborgne, could utter only one sound - "tan". After their deaths, Broca examined their brains and noticed that both had damage to a region in the frontal area on the left side. Broca's area, as it became known, is now thought to be the brain's speech-processing centre.

Broca kept the patients' brains for posterity, preserving them in alcohol and placing them in a Paris museum. And that's where Nina Dronkers, of the VA Northern California Health Care System in Martinez, and her colleagues picked them up, in order to reinspect the damage using magnetic resonance imaging.

Leborgne's brain had been scanned twice before, but not Lelong's. And neither had been compared with modern interpretations of Broca's area. After the team put the two brains through a scanner, they came up with a surprising finding: in both patients, the damaged area was much larger than the region that is now considered to be Broca's area.

The brain of Lelong, one of Broca's patients, about to be scanned. N. DRONKERS

"We were noticing that what people were calling Broca's area encompassed large areas of the frontal lobe," says Dronkers. The scans show that neither of the old brains had damage that affected the whole region now known as Broca's area. But damage also stretched far into other regions beyond this spot.

Broca realized this at the time, says Dronkers, and noted that the areas of damage were different in the two patients. But his conception of the area involved in speech processing has become simplified by others over time, the authors argue. They published their findings online earlier this month in the journal Brain (N. F. Dronkers, O. Plaisant, M. T. Iba-Zizen and E. A. Cabanis Brain doi:10.1093/brain/awm042; 2007).

This misplaced focus could lead to problems when diagnosing people with language impairments, says Dronkers. By assuming that only one small area of the brain is responsible for language, clinicians might overlook other regions involved in speech production. In other words, focusing too heavily on Broca's area could be missing the point, Dronkers argues.

Others agree. "There's a tendency for researchers to see activation in somewhere like Broca's area and to say 'oh well, we're tapping into a language area'," says Joseph Devlin, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK, who images language networks in the brain.

Newer imaging techniques may also help researchers to discover what Broca was unable to see. Dronkers and Devlin are both working on the use of alternative imaging techniques to investigate other regions of the brain that may be important in language processing but which are not detected by magnetic resonance imaging, such as the tracts of white matter that connect areas of grey matter.

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070423/full/070423-5.html / Published online: 25 April 2007; | doi:10.1038/news070423-5

The most Earth-like planet yet

Extrasolar planet grabs attention of astronomers and alien-hunters.

Katharine Sanderson

As this artist's impression shows, we now know of three planets orbiting the red star Gliese 581. ESO

Astronomers have found an Earth-like planet circling a dim red star not far, in galactic terms, from our Solar System. The planet, just five times the mass of our own, might be the best hope yet of a world that can support life.

The extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, is orbiting one of our closest stellar neighbours, the red dwarf star Gliese 581, just 20.5 light years away. Stéphane Udry of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland and his colleagues spotted the planet by detecting wobbles in the parent star, caused by the orbiting planet's gravity.

The planet is much closer to its star than we are to the Sun - orbiting at one-fourteenth of the Earth-Sun distance. But because Gliese 581 is a red dwarf, which emits less light and heat than the Sun, the planet is in the so-called 'habitable zone' for its star. The researchers' calculations suggest that the planet's average temperature is between 0 and 40 °C - perfect for liquid water, and perhaps even life, to exist.

But this is a very crude temperature estimate, says Udry's colleague Michel Mayor, principal investigator for HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planetary Searcher), the instrument that made the observations in La Silla, Chile. To get a better idea, more information about the nature of the planet would be needed - for example, whether it has an atmosphere. "For the time being, it is difficult to know more," he says.

In with a chance

The new planet is the closest in mass to Earth ever discovered outside our Solar System -the previous nearest match was roughly 5.5 times the mass of Earth and in a much more distant orbit from its star. The technique used by Udry's team can only put a lower limit on the planet's likely mass, and its size can therefore only be guessed at: if the planet is rocky and Earth-like, its radius should be around 1.5 that of Earth. If the planet is ocean-like, it will be slightly bigger. The researchers have submitted their results to the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Information about the planet's composition can only be gleaned if the planet is passing in front of, or transiting, its star, and the chances of seeing that happen with any one planet is about 2%, says Mayor. But this doesn't mean that they will stop looking. "We have good reason to believe that this kind of planet exists around other stars," he says. And if there are a lot of planets whizzing around their stars, at some point a transiting planet will be seen.

The latest discovery follows news two years ago of two other planets orbiting Gliese 581, one roughly eight times the Earth's mass, and the other around 15 times Earth mass.

If Udry's models are correct, the new planet would be a so-called 'super-Earth' - a very exciting prospect, says exoplanet expert David Charbonneau at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "If the planet is a rocky super-Earth, then perhaps it has a surface with liquid water and life," he suggests.

There is another, less exciting option, however, which would make the planet slightly less homely, Charbonneau adds: "If instead the planet is a 'sub-Neptune', then it would have a large gas envelope that buries the surface below, making it inhospitable for life."

References : Udry U., et al. Astron. Astrophys. (submitted) .

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http://www.futura-sciences.com/news-gliese-581c-premiere-planete-extraterrestre-compatible-avec-vie_10726.php
La découverte autour de l'étoile Gliese 581 (Gl 581) d'une planète extraterrestre marque une étape importante car, pour la première fois, celle-ci réunit toutes les caractéristiques considérées comme indispensables à l'apparition éventuelle d'une forme de vie.

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http://www.la-croix.com/photo2/index.jsp?docId=2301300&rubId=4085

La première planète potentiellement habitable

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http://www.techno-science.net/?onglet=news&news=3999

Une planète "habitable" à vingt années-lumière de la Terre

Vue d'artiste du système planétaire autour de la naine rouge Gliese 581. 

http://www.futura-sciences.com/news-champignons-9-metres-haut_10731.php Par Jean Etienne, Futura-Sciences, le 26/04/2007 à 17h03
Depuis leur première description en 1959, ces curieux troncs fossiles qui peuvent atteindre 6 à 9 mètres de haut, intriguent et divisent les spécialistes. On en sait aujourd'hui un peu plus. Ce seraient des champignons. [...] Ces fossiles, qui remontent au Dévonien (350 - 400 millions d'années), ont été découverts un peu partout sur la planète, et constituaient donc une espèce particulièrement répandue. Ils se présentent sous la forme de grands troncs cylindriques de dimensions impressionnantes, au point que les scientifiques les ont longtemps pris pour des conifères.

Mais Francis Hueber, un chercheur au Muséum national d'histoire naturelle de Washington, a émis dès 2001 une thèse selon laquelle il s'agirait bien de champignons. Lui-même et son équipe se sont appuyés sur une étude isotopique de Prototaxites de diverses provenances, notamment le Canada, l'Australie et l'Arabie Saoudite. Ils ont pour cela examiné et mis en rapport les ratios des isotopes 12 et 13 du carbone. Ceux-ci sont répartis régulièrement dans les plantes, qui produisent cet élément à partir du CO2 présent dans l'air, et varient peu d'une espèce à l'autre. Par contre, chez les champignons, qui ne réalisent pas la photosynthèse, le carbone provient de la nourriture, comme pour les animaux et présentent des ratios variables.

Selon Francis Hueber, les variations des ratios observés entre les valeurs isotopiques du carbone sont trop différentes pour qu'il puisse s'agir de plantes. Une dernière observation manque encore cependant pour valider définitivement la thèse des chercheurs: la découverte de spores fossiles, dont l'existence est liée à toutes les espèces de champignons et qui en constituent le seul moyen de reproduction.

Sections fossiles de Prototaxites (Crédits : Muséum national d'histoire naturelle de Washington)

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070423/full/070423-6.html Published online: 24 April 2007; | doi:10.1038/news070423-6

Every cloud has an invisible halo

Unseen particles may confuse climate models.

Philip Ball

Clouds are bigger than they look, according to new measurements by atmospheric scientists in Israel and the United States. They say that clouds are surrounded by a 'twilight zone' of diffuse particles, invisible to the naked eye, extending for tens of kilometres around the cloud's visible portion.

These vast, sparse haloes of droplets may have been overlooked in atmospheric studies, the researchers say. And they think that this could have skewed attempts to understand how clouds influence climate.

Clouds are one of the biggest sources of uncertainty in efforts to measure and predict global warming. They have two opposite effects: increasing warming by absorbing heat radiated from the planet's surface (which is why cloudy nights are warmer), while offsetting this by reflecting sunlight back into space from cloud tops.

Most atmospheric scientists now think that clouds have an overall global cooling effect. Measurements of warming trends therefore have to take into account whether the skies are cloudy or not, and model forecasts of future warming may hinge on whether they predict more or less cloudiness...

 References : Koren I., et al. Geophys. Res. Lett., 34. L08805 (2007).