A nonprofit group that promotes animal rights in medical research has taken issue with a NASA grant funding an assessment of the long-term effects of radiation on monkeys. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), based in Washington, D.C., sent an appeal Thursday to NASA administrator Charles Bolden, urging that the radiobiology study, intended to test the effects of radiation encountered in long-range spaceflight, be suspended.

The research project, led by Jack Bergman of McLean Hospital, a Harvard Medical School affiliate in Belmont, Mass., was one of 12 awarded radiobiology research grants through NASA's Human Research Program, the space agency announced October 27. In Bergman's study, according to Discovery News, 18 to 28 squirrel monkeys would be subjected to radiation and periodically tested to gauge how exposure affects performance in a variety of learned tasks. Stellar and galactic radiation would bombard astronauts on missions to Mars, but the health effects of such a trip are not well known.

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As utilities fire up their "clean coal" machines and international negotiators haggle over the precise definition of a tree, only one entity has the courage to stand and deliver the hot air the world so desperately craves on climate change: the U.S. Senate. After a hectic couple of weeks, filled with Republican walkouts and Democratic intransigence, the Senate's Environment and Public Works committee has pushed a bill to the Senate floor that would cut carbon dioxide.

Unfortunately, Republicans (other than Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina) are dead set against it. "My colleagues have advanced a bill with potentially serious economic harm without a comprehensive analysis of its costs," wrote Ohio Senator George Voinovich to Senate Majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada. "My request [for an economic analysis of the proposal] could have shown whether the bill would have any appreciable impact on global climate change."

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The flood of Google Droid mobile phone reviews in the past week suggests that if the two devices stepped into the ring together, it would end like the first Rocky movie. Like Apollo Creed, the iPhone would still be the champ by a split decision by virtue of its status as the smooth-stepping veteran in the marketplace (not to mention its friendship with iTunes), but the Droids that debuted Friday on Motorola and HTC devices have come out swinging and win a few key rounds.

In the iPhone, "Apple has created a tight product that is extremely elegant, fun to use and boasts not only a powerful piece of hardware but an almost infinite amount of third-party software," Ryan Kim blogged on Seattlepi.com. "While it doesn't match the iPhone's simplicity and produce the same end result, Droid creates a hugely compelling package that is the best challenger yet to the iPhone." Kim's bottom line: "The Droid doesn't kill the iPhone so much as offer a credible alternative."

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In the chilly depths of one of Antarctica's freshwater lakes, a surprising number of novel viruses thrive.

Researchers braved frigid temperatures to collect water samples from Lake Limnopolar, located on Livingston Island near the Antarctic Peninsula, and sequenced the genomes of the collected species. The new genetic study reveals some 10,000 species of viruses from a dozen families.

The viral diversity in the surface lake was "unexpectedly high," the authors wrote in a report on their findings, published online Thursday in Science. Most aquatic environments typically are home to viral species from only three to six families. The authors attribute the "unprecedented taxonomic diversity and high genetic richness" to the low diversity of other organisms at the site.

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The best bypass surgery choice may be to use a heart–lung machine, after all, according to a new study published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Surprising many in the field, off-pump surgery did not win out in a large comparison study—and actually resulted in patients who were slightly more likely to need additional operations or to have heart attacks.

Some patients who have had open-heart surgery while hooked up to a heart–lung machine have complained of a cognitive cloudiness that set in after their procedure. The machine, also called a cardiopulmonary-bypass pump, keeps the blood circulating and oxygenated while the heart is stopped for the operation, but some have worried that it can have long-term effects on the brain.

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The cry of newborn babies may seem like nothing more than inescapable shrills, but they could be infants' first attempts to imitate the language they hear while in the womb.

In a study published today in Current Biology, scientists found differences in the crying patterns of babies as early as two days after birth, depending on whether their mothers spoke French or German. Previous studies have reported that fetuses in their third trimester can learn aspects of their eventual native tongue, such as language rhythm and intonation. But, as of yet, there was only evidence that newborns incorporated these early language lessons into their own sounds starting at 12 weeks of age, when they typically start to babble and produce syllables.

"According to our research, language development starts with melody, and indeed with crying melody, and not with articulation [of vowels or syllables]," says Kathleen Wermke, a medical anthropologist at the University of Wurzburg in Germany, and senior author of the study.

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Slowing climate change is neither inevitable nor impossible, former Vice President Al Gore said in a speech Tuesday night in New York City. Gore, who was launching his new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, said that he has "absolute conviction that we have all the tools to solve [several] climate crises."

In that light, one climate in peril may not sound like such a tall order, the Nobel Peace Prize (and Oscar and Grammy) winner may hope. But with a myriad of gonzo geoengineering schemes in the air—and on the airwaves—and recent right-wing flack for touting solutions that he has financial interest in, Gore and his book may face a stiff challenge. The sold-out crowd at the American Museum of Natural History, however, applauded his work—tough topics and all—at length.

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Less than one month after NASA crashed its Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) into the moon's surface in order to analyze the resulting plume of debris for signs of water, the U.S. space agency is handing out nearly $2 million on Thursday to engineers developing technology for a much softer landing on the lunar surface as part of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander X PRIZE Challenge.

The competition consisted of two levels, the second of which was held last week in California's Mojave Desert. Level two required each team's rocket to simulate a full lunar lander mission, including a descent from lunar orbit to the lunar surface, refueling and returning to lunar orbit. Each lander needed to ascend to a height of 50 meters and land safely on a rocky lunar-replica surface after at least 180 seconds of flight time (the first level required only 90 seconds of flight time). This flight then needed to be repeated, with the rocket demonstrating repeat-use capability by returning to the original launch site.

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Nearly lost amidst the breathless anticipation of all things wireless—whether it's the latest smart phone, free Internet hot spot or GPS navigation system—is the potential impact these gadgets may have on scientific instruments that likewise need access to the electromagnetic spectrum. Yet the proliferation of wireless technologies, licensed and otherwise, grabbing increasingly more spectrum bandwidth is interfering significantly with scientists' ability to monitor radio emissions from the Earth and space that "yield vital information" about our planet and its place in the universe, according to a report released Monday by the National Research Council's Scientific Use of the Radio Spectrum committee.

Interference from wireless devices makes it difficult for scientists to gather signals used for radio astronomy and Earth environmental sensing, in some cases rendering these signals unusable, says the 175-page report, written in response to concerns that NASA, the Department of Commerce, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have raised about the increasing potential for new wireless technologies to interfere with radio observations that have become important to the missions of these agencies.

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Systemic lupus is the most common form of the autoimmune disease, lupus, which afflicts about five million people worldwide and causes a slew of symptoms including fever, pain and swelling. Now, sufferers of systemic lupus may be closer to a new drug to treat their symptoms, according to the results of a study announced yesterday. If approved for the market, the drug, which was developed by Human Genome Sciences (HGS) and GlaxoSmithKline, would be the first new treatment for lupus in nearly half a century.

HGS and GlaxoSmithKline had already seen encouraging results with their drug, called Benlysta, in the first clinical trial of 860 patients that was completed in July of this year. The companies were waiting for the results of a second trial to file for approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. HGS states on its Web site that it will file for approval in the first half of 2010.

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