BBC Medical Science — A US clinic has sparked controversy by offering would-be parents the chance to select traits like the eye and hair colour of their offspring. The LA Fertility Institutes run by Dr Jeff Steinberg, a pioneer of IVF in the 1970s, expects a trait-selected baby to be born next year. His clinic also offers sex selection.

UK fertility experts are angered that the service will distract attention from how the same technology can protect against inherited disease. The science is based on a lab technique called preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD. This involves testing a cell taken from a very early embryo before it is put into the mother’s womb.

Doctors then select an embryo free from rogue genes - or in this case an embryo with the desired physical traits such as blonde hair and blue eyes - to continue the pregnancy, and discard any others. Dr Steinberg said couples might seek to use the clinic’s services for both medical and cosmetic reasons.

For example, a couple might want to have a baby with a darker complexion to help guard against a skin cancer if they already had a child who had developed a melanoma. But others might just want a boy with blonde hair. His clinic is offering this cosmetic selection to patients already having genetic screening for abnormal chromosome conditions in their embryos. …

Dr Steinberg said: “I would not say this is a dangerous road. It’s an uncharted road.” He said the capability to offer such services had been around for years, but had been ignored by the medical community. “It’s time for everyone to pull their heads out of the sand.” (03/02/09)
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BBC Business – The PC industry will see a decline of nearly 12% in 2009, analysts predict. It would be only the second period of negative growth in the industry, after a slump of 3.2% in 2002. The news follows an announcement that the semiconductor industry saw a 35% drop in sales of computer chips between 2008 and 2009.

However, analysts say the chip industry will weather the global economic storm better and rebound faster the rest of the technology sector. “The outside economic situation that we’ve seen deteriorating over the last few quarters is now directly affecting the PC market and we’re going to see growth slump over the next year,” said Ranjit Atwal, principal research analyst at Gartner.

The shift in the health of the market was a sharp one. European PC sales were at 20% in the third quarter of 2008; the fourth quarter saw a dive to just 4%. In 2009, Gartner predicts, those numbers will plummet into the negative. They say that the global market will see 257 million PCs sold in 2009, a downward slide of 11.9% on 2008.

The market dive that occurred in 2001-2002, Mr Atwal said, was primarily from the corporate side of the market. This time, both individuals and businesses are predicted to buy less PCs, hanging on to ageing computers for longer as part of general belt-tightening.

“The PC market is much more mature [as compared to 2002], and the PC is relatively more important to consumers,” Mr Atwal said. “But nevertheless, it’s still a luxury item, it hasn’t gone all the way that it’s a necessity. That means if your PC slows down, doesn’t work well, doesn’t do what you think it should do, you’ll live with it.” (03/02/09)
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BBC Environmental Science — A British team has begun a gruelling trek to the North Pole to discover how quickly the Arctic sea-ice is melting. Renowned Arctic explorer Pen Hadow and two companions were dropped onto the ice by plane 800km (500 miles) off the northern coast of Canada on Saturday. During their 1,000km journey they plan to take measurements of the thickness of the ice. It will be the most detailed survey of its kind this season, and should be completed in late May.

BBC environment correspondent David Shukman said that where there were gaps in the ice, the team would put on survival suits and swim. At the rear of one sledge is a mobile radar unit which will constantly measure the thickness of the ice.

Satellites have shown how the area of Arctic sea-ice has been shrinking in recent years, but this expedition should give scientists a better idea of how thin the ice is becoming. The sea-ice is widely believed to be melting at an increased rate because of warmer air temperatures above the ice and because of warmer waters below it. The major scientific institutions and agencies that study the Arctic attribute the changes to global warming.

Only a few years ago, researchers predicted that by the end of this century the Arctic could be free of ice in summer. Some now say that could come far sooner.

Mr Hadow, 46, and the other members of the British Catlin Arctic Survey group, Ann Daniels, 44, and Martin Hartley, 40, will attempt to gather important new data about the state of the ice in winter and early spring - when the ice reaches its greatest extent. It is intended to give scientists the very latest “ground truth”, to better constrain their models and their interpretation of the observations coming from satellites.

Arctic ice modeller Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, a science adviser to the survey, hopes the data will enable him to refine his forecast of when the first ice-free summer might arrive. Currently, he has it down for 2013 - but with an uncertainty range between 2010 and 2016. (03/02/09)
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BBC Animal Science – Australian authorities are racing to save dozens of pilot whales and a small pod of dolphins beached on an island. The mammals have stranded themselves on King Island, in the Bass Strait between the mainland and the southern state of Tasmania. Reports say about 140 out of nearly 200 whales have already died.

More than 400 whales have died in Tasmanian waters in recent months, in a phenomenon for which scientists still have no definitive explanation. The 194 pilot whales and half a dozen bottlenose dolphins became stranded on Naracoopa Beach on King Island on Sunday evening.

Chris Arthur, of Tasmania’s Parks and Wildlife Service, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that 54 whales and seven dolphins were still alive. “It’s amazing, some will some die straight away, some will survive for days. These are fairly robust animals, pilot whales, we experienced that in the past. While they’re alive there is a chance.”

Local residents joined rescuers in trying to keep the animals wet and finding ways to move them out to open water. More than 100 King Island residents have volunteered to help the efforts.

More than 150 pilot whales died after beaching themselves on Tasmania’s remote west coast in November and 48 sperm whales died in January on a sandbar off Perkins Island. Mass strandings of whales occur periodically in Australia and New Zealand, as the whales migrate to and from Antarctic waters, for reasons that are not entirely understood. Theories include disturbance of echo-location, possibly by interference from sound produced by human activities at sea. (03/02/09)
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