News in perspective

Upfront–

IS A light tipple when you’re pregnant OK? Lots of expecting mums now say they avoid even light drinking, but the latest study indicates that this may be an unnecessary precaution.

Yvonne Kelly and colleagues from University College London analysed data collected from over 12,000 mothers and children in the UK since 2001. Children whose mothers had one or two alcoholic drinks per week during pregnancy had fewer behavioural and cognitive problems by age 3

than the children of women who abstained completely (International Journal of Epidemiology, DOI: 10.1093/ije/dyn230).

Kelly says that light drinking is unlikely to be physiologically beneficial. Rather, the light drinkers in her study tended to be better educated and have higher incomes than heavy drinkers and abstainers. These people might be

more likely interact with their child in a way that helps them do well in cognitive tests, which would affect the results, even though Kelly says she went to “enormous lengths” to remove the influence of social factors. Light drinking could also help women to relax, making the pregnancy less stressful.

While heavy drinking is known to cause fetal alcohol syndrome, the effects of a few drinks are harder to pin down (New Scientist, 29 June 2006, p 46). To be on the safe side, many countries now recommend abstaining.

Fred Bookstein , professor of statistics at the Universisty of Washington in Seattle says the research on light drinking has not arrived at a “stable conclusion”. “We have no evidence that it does anything and it probably makes women feel better,” he says.

However, John Olney , a neuroscientist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, who has shown that in mice even a small amount of ethanol causes fetal neurons to die off, says it is difficult to detect “anything but massive damage” in people, so low-level harm might go unnoticed.

RACIAL barriers have toppled at a very elite club. Two anonymous men, one Han Chinese, the other Yoruban from Nigeria, have become the first non-white, non-celebrities to have their full genomes sequenced.

Until now, geneticists Craig Venter and James Watson were the only individuals whose full genomes were known. This week, research teams led by Jun Wang of the Beijing Genomics Institute in Shenzhen, China, and David Bentley of Illumina Cambridge in

Essex, UK, published the genomes of the Chinese man and Nigerian man respectively, in the journal Nature (DOI: 10.1038/nature07484 and DOI: 10.1038/nature07517). Both used the latest technology to break up the DNA and sequence tens of millions of fragments in just a few weeks.

Although we now have entire sequences from three major racial groups, it is too early to work out whether disparities between the genomes reflect individual variation or group differences. That will require more genome sequences from these groups.

HUBBLE ON BORROWED TIMEThe Hubble Space Telescope is back up

and running – but perhaps not for long.

The HST has been inactive since a

unit that controls instruments and

formats their output failed a month

ago. Engineers got the telescope back

online at the end of October by

switching to a back-up unit, allowing

it to start taking pictures again.

But no one knows how long the

previously unused back-up will keep

working – and a replacement control

system due to be fitted by astronauts

during a fourth and final servicing

mission next February has itself been

found to have “glitches”, delaying the

mission until May at the earliest.

If Hubble’s ageing batteries fail

before they can be replaced, it could

spin out of control and beyond recovery,

says Hubble’s manager Preston Burch

of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

in Greenbelt, Maryland, though he says

their performance is stable for now.

DID DRILLING CAUSE ERUPTION?

“Light drinking could help women to relax, making the pregnancy less stressful”

As the Lusi mud volcano in Indonesia

continues to spew millions of litres of

mud every day, debate over the trigger

for the eruption is heating up again.

On the day before Lusi was first

observed to be erupting in 2006, the oil

company Lapindo Brantas was drilling

for gas nearby. The well was sealed

because the drilling had breached

a pocket of saline water. Geologist

Richard Davies of Durham University,

UK, argues that this prompted the

eruption – a view supported by many

petroleum geologists at a meeting in

Cape Town, South Africa, last week.

The geologists had been shown

figures purportedly showing pressure

changes within the borehole in the

hours before the eruption, presented by

Susila Lusiaga, a drilling engineer who

has been working with the Indonesian

investigation. According to Davies, who

was at the meeting, the figures showed

that “a huge pressure drop” occurred

about an hour and a half after the well

was sealed. He says this represents a

catastrophic release of saline water

through fractures in the surrounding

rock, bringing the mud to the surface.

But Lapindo Brantas contests this

interpretation, saying the data presented

at the conference was unsourced and

unrepresentative. It contends that Lusi’s

eruption was triggered by an earthquake

two days earlier – a view supported by

independent geologist Adriano Mazzini

of the University of Oslo in Norway.

The company’s argument lost

out in a show of hands after Lusiaga’s

presentation: 42 of the 74 attendees

thought the drilling was at fault, three

reckoned it was the earthquake, 13

thought both factors contributed and

16 felt the evidence was inconclusive.

JOH

N S

TAN

MEY

ER/V

II

–Two years on, and the mud keeps coming–

Here’s to the baby Genome bonanza

6 | NewScientist | 8 November 2008 www.newscientist.com