hates working nights. As an oncologist, she often took on sleep-disrupting shifts, but had no idea they could be causing health problems. When several nurses in her department developed cancer, Schernhammer proposed investigating a possible link between shift work and the disease for a class project. Today the Austrian native’s assignment has evolved into a job studying the health impacts of circadian rhythms at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts.

There is a huge amount of work going on in cancer research and the field is growing for those interested in cancer prevention. Schernhammer’s research adds to mounting evidence that a person’s lifestyle choices can influence their risk of developing cancer. The estimates that . Preventive measures such as anti-smoking campaigns have helped drive down the rates of some cancers, however the prevalence of obesity-related cancers, particularly of the breast and prostate, remains high. The World Health Organization (WHO) has claimed that given what we already know about the disease.

Better than a cure

Broadly speaking, the field of cancer prevention has two primary goals: identifying individuals at highest risk of developing cancer and working out what is needed to stop it occurring, whether that is a simple vitamin D supplement or a battery of aggressive drugs.

Careers in cancer prevention cut across a swath of specialties. At one end of the scale are the behavioral scientists looking at ways to get people to change their lifestyles, while at the other are physicians doubling up as researchers, who are helping move therapies from the lab-bench to the market.

broadened out from treating urological cancers to predicting them, saying he wanted to get to the source of cancer, rather than the symptoms, and help develop “a global understanding of the disease”. Karakiewicz retrained for a degree in biostatistics and epidemiology and now, as director of the cancer prognostics unit at the University of Montreal Health Center in Canada, creates . These are algorithmic tools that look at age, ethnicity, lifestyle, and the biomarkers and physical indicators that quantify an individual’s risk of developing prostate or bladder cancer. They are already in use and improving their accuracy is a promising area of study towards better prediction and prevention of cancers.

Melissa Loomis, a scientific recruiter for in Seattle, Washington, is currently looking to hire scientists who are able to develop computer programs or algorithms to analyze an individual’s cancer risk.

Of course, even once you’ve found the people at risk of developing cancer, finding the right preventive intervention can be tricky. In the cases where cancer is caused by an infection, vaccines could play an important role. Infections cause 18 per cent of cancers worldwide, including almost all cervical cancers. Vaccine research is a growing area of study, although currently it receives less funding than other areas of cancer prevention, such as research into smoking cessation and behavioral change.

“The search for vaccines to prevent cancer is on,” says , director of the Center for Infection Research in Cancer at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. Giuliano has been studying cancer vaccines since the early 1990s, when she was a fellow at the University of Arizona in cancer epidemiology. While there, she was part of a team that conducted clinical trials of a vaccine against the human papillomavirus (HPV) – a virus that can trigger abnormal cell growth and lead to cervical cancer. While the vaccine could theoretically prevent almost all cervical cancers – which 12,000 American women develop every year – , the vaccine’s key demographic target, thus muting the vaccine’s success rate.

Even so, Giuliano says: “The HPV story demonstrates clearly that once you know the organism that causes cancer, you can direct a vaccine against it.”

Other researchers are investigating how to prevent cancer through dietary changes. , a gastroenterologist and professor at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, is identifying the particular cellular activity that goes awry when overweight individuals develop colon cancer. Once identified, he hopes to determine how to block that activity and to shut off the cancer. “It looks like we are going to be stuck with a high prevalence of obesity in our society for the foreseeable future,” he says, “so we need to find means of disconnecting this link between obesity and colon cancer risk.”

Funding the fight

The opportunities to get involved in cancer prevention are opening up as funding increases. The piece of the funding pie devoted to preventing cancer, versus treating it, has been getting bigger for over a decade says , a veteran cancer and pharmacology researcher at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. Conney says that in 2004, National Cancer Institute grants allocated to treatment clinical trials outstripped prevention clinical trials fivefold. By 2011, that difference had shrunk to only threefold.

Still, getting research money sometimes requires a long-term view. After writing her mock proposal, Schernhammer was surprised to find many others studying the link between cancer and nighttime work. While working back in Austria, she polished her initial proposal and applied to the Austrian government for postgraduate funding to study cancer rates among nurses.

She got it, and today, thanks to her research and that of others, the WHO lists shift work as a probable carcinogen. Now, once a year, Schernhammer guest lectures back at the class that launched her career, hoping her story will inspire similarly persistent professionals.

When the heat is on, lizards become smarter – potentially giving them a competitive edge as the world warms.

Previous research has shown that scincid lizards () grow larger if their eggs are incubated at higher temperatures.

and colleagues at the University of Sydney, Australia, wanted to see if bigger lizards also make better learners, so they incubated nine eggs in cold conditions – 8.5 to 23.5  °C – and 12 in warm conditions – 14.5 to 29.5 °C.

Once hatched, the lizards were put in plastic containers equipped with two hideouts, one blocked off with Plexiglass and the other fully accessible. The researchers, playing predators, scared the lizards by touching their tails with a paintbrush and recorded where the lizards went. After 16 trials, five of the nine cold-incubated lizards still headed for the inaccessible hideout. Just one of the 12 warm-incubated lizards made the same mistake.

“Climate change might not be so bad for these guys,” says Amiel.

Elsewhere in the world, though, a warmer world is bad news for reptiles. It is thought to be responsible for a 12 per cent drop in the population of one group of Mexican lizards since 1975, and a 75 per cent decline in reptiles and amphibians in Costa Rica’s native forests since 1970.

Journal reference: , DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.1161

Meat is bad: bad for you, bad for the environment. At least, that’s the usual argument. Each year, the doors to the UN climate negotiations, which kick off again in Durban, South Africa, on 28 November, are assailed by demonstrators brandishing pro-vegetarian placards. The fact is that livestock farming accounts for a whopping 15 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions. We can’t all go veggie, so just how much meat is it OK for an eco-citizen to eat?

It’s not just the demonstrators who are concerned about food’s impact on the climate. This week, a major report concludes that food production is too close to the limits of a “safe operating space” defined by how much we need, how much we can produce, and its impact on the climate.

Meat is a major contributor to that: , and the problem is getting worse. As people get richer, the demand for protein gets stronger, says Molly Jahn, a former undersecretary at the US Department of Agriculture, and one of the authors of Achieving Food Security in the Face of Climate Change, commissioned by the (CGIAR).

It’s unrealistic to expect everyone to give up meat entirely, and many of the world’s poor need to increase their meat consumption to overcome malnutrition and food insecurity.

The solution is to eat less meat rather than no meat.

In 2007, of the Australian National University in Canberra estimated that the average person consumed 100 grams of meat a day, or about one burger (a quarter-pounder is 113 g). The rich eat 10 times more than the poor – in other words, some people get 10 burgers a day while others get none.

Butler showed that if every person in the world ate 50 g of red meat and 40 g of white meat per day by 2050, greenhouse gas emissions from meat production would stabilise at 2005 levels – a target cited in national plans for agricultural emissions. That’s about one burger and one small chicken breast per person every two days (The Lancet, DOI: 10.1016/S0140- 6736(07)61256-2).

Butler’s 2007 figures didn’t take into account the fact that we throw out a lot of the animal mass produced because we consider it inedible. Western countries are the biggest offenders: while many cultures are not fazed by a meal of brains or testicles, Butler estimates that Americans and Australians throw out up to half the cow mass they produce.

At ��è����Ƶ‘s request, he updated his calculations. He estimates that globally we discard between 5 and 10 per cent of the animal. This means we can only allow ourselves 80 to 85 g of red and white meat, or one burger and one chicken fillet every three days.

That’s an upper limit. Emissions may need to be cut further.

Our allowance would drop further if more people were as wasteful as the Americans and Australians. And, according to CGIAR, in addition to the waste between the abattoir and the plate, one-third of all produced food is spoiled because of poor refrigeration, pests and bulk packaging that encourages consumers to buy more than they can eat. All of which eat into our meat allowance.

Imagine walking away from a doctor’s office with a prescription to play a video game. Brain Plasticity, the developer of a cognitive training game, has begun talks with the to market the game as a therapeutic drug.

Brain Plasticity has been fine-tuning a game to help people with schizophrenia improve the deficits in attention and memory that are often associated with the disorder.

Early next year, they will conduct a study with 150 participants at 15 sites across the country. Participants will play the game for one hour, five times a week over a period of six months. If participants’ quality of life improves at that “dosage,” Brain Plasticity will push ahead with the FDA approval process.

FDA approval for computer games in general – whether for schizophrenia or more common disorders such as depression or anxiety – could change the medical landscape, says Daniel Dardani, a technology licensing officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

But FDA involvement in the brain game industry will come with pros and cons. Panellists drawn from research and industry debated the issue at a meeting of the in San Francisco earlier this week.

Controversial industry

Some hope that an FDA stamp of approval will add integrity to a controversial industry. “The world of brain games is just full of bullshit,” , co-founder of Posit Science, a developer of cognitive games told ��è����Ƶ at the meeting.

He points to a study last year showing that cognitive training games do nothing for brain fitness (. FDA involvement might help to single out those games with a demonstrable benefit.

But identifying beneficial games might be a complicated process. Since the Nature study was published, critics of the study have pointed out that the 11,430 participants were self-selected, healthy and did not follow a strict “dosing” regimen. They believe the games need to be tested more rigorously.

Unlike the cognitive tasks that featured in the Nature study, the Brain Plasticity game targets a specific section of the population and comes with stringent “dosage” requirements for how often and how long participants need to play to see results.

Game scrutiny

Even if the FDA gives approval for games like Brain Plasticity’s, it might not scrutinise the many games that claim to firm up healthy people’s brains, says Henry Mahncke, a senior scientist at Brain Plasticity.

Some worry that FDA approval would actually stymie development of cognitive training games, because the agency will be too slow to approve the minor tweaks that let games evolve. “I think it’s premature to have the FDA get involved,” says , a cognitive remediation specialist at Columbia University in New York City.

Compromise may be possible. The FDA could issue guidelines for what consumers should look for in a therapeutic gaming product – similar to its handling of , says Alvaro Fernandez, CEO of , a Washington DC-based market research firm that tracks non-invasive neuroscience tools.

Previously, similar rises in cases of narcolepsy – a disorder that causes sleepiness at inappropriate times – have been linked to use of a swine flu vaccine. The cause was presumed to lie in the vaccine’s adjuvants, additives that boost a person’s immune response to the shot.

The claim puzzled researchers who saw a rise in narcolepsy cases in China, where few people had opted to get vaccinated and those who did received a vaccine without adjuvants. Some began to suspect that the flu itself was to blame.

To find out, Fang Han and his colleagues at Beijing University People’s Hospital looked at the medical profiles of 906 people who had come to the hospital with narcolepsy since 1998.

The team found that, even before the vaccine was introduced in October 2009, the number of narcolepsy cases followed a seasonal pattern, dropping significantly around November and spiking in April. The peak was higher than normal in the spring after the swine flu pandemic (Annals of Neurology, ).

The idea that flu causes narcolepsy fits in with the theory that the sleep disorder is triggered by the immune system’s response to airway infections, says Masashi Yanagisawa at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who was not part of the study. However, he adds that there is “no direct cellular evidence” to support the idea yet.

Study co-author Juliette Faraco at Stanford University’s Center for Narcolepsy in California agrees that a direct link between swine flu virus and narcolepsy has yet to be established, “but we think this [study] raises a big red flag”.

, a cognitive neuroscientist at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri, carried out fMRI brain scans on volunteers watching film clips of everyday scenes, such as a person washing dishes. The participants showed increased activity in the midbrain dopamine system (MDS) just before and after a scene changed, indicating this brain area is involved in both anticipating and responding to events.

Dopamine-producing cells in part of the MDS are impaired in Parkinson’s disease, suggesting the disease impairs people’s ability to recognise transitions in everyday situations. The study could one day lead to an early diagnostic tool for Parkinson’s and other cognitive diseases, says Zacks.

Journal reference:

Previously, similar rises in cases of narcolepsy – a disorder that causes sleepiness at inappropriate times – have been linked to use of a swine flu vaccine. The cause was presumed to lie in the drug’s adjuvants – additives that boost the immune response to the vaccine.

The claim puzzled researchers who saw a concurrent rise in narcolepsy cases in China, where few people had opted to get vaccinated and those who did received a vaccine without adjuvants. Could the flu itself be to blame?

To find out, Fang Han and his colleagues at Beijing University People’s Hospital studied the medical profiles of 906 people who had come to the hospital with narcolepsy since 1998.

The group found that, even in the years before the vaccine was introduced in October 2009, the number of narcolepsy cases followed a seasonal pattern – cases dropped significantly around November and spiked in April. The peak was higher than normal in the spring after the swine flu pandemic ().

Big red flag

The idea that flu causes narcolepsy fits in with the theory that narcolepsy is triggered by the immune system’s response to airway infections.

“There is no way to definitively say that the [swine flu virus] caused narcolepsy, but we think this raises a big red flag,” says Juliette Faraco at in California, a co-author of the study.

The flu vaccine will protect against the flu – if it also protects against narcolepsy, all the better, she says.

The puzzle over what happened to the oil and gas released during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year has been partially solved.

Oil is composed of many thousands of different chemicals but the plume that stretched through the Gulf contained relatively few. Now chemists have worked out what happened to the rest.

, an environmental chemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, and colleagues, used a remotely operated submarine to collect samples directly from the leaking well in June 2010 and compared these with samples taken from elsewhere in the oil plume.

Reddy likens the oil and gas molecules gushing out of the wellhead to passengers on an elevator. “We wanted to know which compounds got off the elevator instead of going up,” he says.

The team found that water-soluble compounds dissolved in neutrally buoyant seawater about 400 metres above the wellhead. These included benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene – a toxic suite collectively referred to as BTEX. And in this layer they stayed. By contrast, the compounds that reached the surface were mainly insoluble.

Deep difference

Reddy’s work helps to answer one of the major questions from the oil spill – what happened to all that oil and gas, says , a microbial geochemist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The results show how deep oil spills differ from surface spills, where many toxic compounds quickly evaporate rather than contaminating the water.

The team’s measurements also show that BTEX concentrations reached up to 78 micrograms per litre. That level is several orders of magnitude higher than known toxicity levels for marine organisms, according to , a zoologist also at Woods Hole.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1101242108