WWW.NATURE.COM/NEWS
VOL.437 NO.7058 DATED 22 SEPTEMBER 2005
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News: Astronomers propose to dump the term 'planet'
An expert panel responsible for ending the debate about whether or not Pluto
is a planet have come up with a radical solution. They want to end use of
the term 'planet' altogether, unless it is accompanied by a qualifier.
The new proposal, an exclusive copy of which has been seen by
Nature, contends that the collection of objects currently dubbed planets,
from rocky worlds on the outer shores of our Solar System to free-roaming
objects in deep space, is too diverse to justify a single moniker. Instead,
the researchers want to define different types of 'planetary objects', such
as terrestrial planets, including Earth and its immediate neighbours, and
extrasolar planets, which orbit stars other than the Sun.
Debates about nomenclature are common in science, but the planet
question is one of the few that have spilled into the public arena. If
passed, the proposal would end recent arguments over UB313 and Pluto, which
would be known as Trans-Neptunian planets, a class roughly defined as large
objects that orbit the Sun beyond Neptune.
Contact for background information
Jim Giles, Journalist, Nature
Tel: +44 20 7843 4645; E-mail: [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
News: Liar liar
Brain-imaging techniques that reveal when a person is lying are now reliable
enough to be used to detect terrorists and other criminals, say researchers.
In an exclusive news article in this week's Nature, Jennifer Wild reveals
how scientists are using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to
track patterns of brain activity when people lie and tell the truth.
Analysing brain activity during both scenarios, they've produced a formula
that can detect lies from truth for each person with 99% accuracy.
Critics maintain that the technique will never be useful for criminal
investigations, arguing that as with traditional polygraph detectors, liars
could learn to fool the tests. And researchers in the field have previously
admitted that the approach needs more work. But neuroscientists from the
have told Nature they believe their test is ready for real-life scenarios.
"We can't say if this person will one day use a bomb," says Daniel
Langleben, one of the study's co-investigators. "But we can use fMRI to find
concealed information. We can ask is X involved in terrorist organisation
Y?"
The main technical advance is that researchers can now distinguish lies from
truthful statements for a given person; previously, scientists could see how
the brain lit up when people lied, but their results were based on the
averaged brain activity of a group of people.
Contact for background information
Jennifer Wild via Nature Press Office:
Tel: +44 20 7843 4562; E-mail: [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
News: Race claims spark fury over Croatia's school curriculum
Croatian scientists are protesting at what they believe are attempts by
their science minister to promote in schools the view that Croats are only
distantly related to other Slavic populations such as the Serbs.
The claim that there are racial differences between Croats and Slavs is not
accepted by geneticists and is potentially incendiary in the Balkan region,
recently torn apart by civil war.
Dragan Primorac, minister of science and education in Croatia, who trained
as a medical scientist, denied the charge to Nature. But he has regularly
upset scientists in the country by claiming publicly that Croats are more
similar to Germans and Finns than Slavs. His arguments come from data he
provided for a paper that looked at a series of genetic markers on the Y
chromosome of human populations across Europe (O. Semino et al., Science
290, 1155-1159; 2000). But his conclusions were not drawn in the Science
paper itself and geneticists argue that only one of the dozen or so markers
analysed reveals such a pattern.
Discontent boiled over last week when Primorac's advisor, physicist Vladimir
Paar, said that history classes on the use of genetics to analyse the
distant past of human populations are to be incorporated into the new school
curriculum.
Contact for background information
Alison Abbott, Journalist, Nature
E-mail: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
Media contact
Ruth Francis, Nature London
Tel: +44 20 7843 4562; E-mail [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
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