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In the November 21 Issue:

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Science & the Public: H1N1: Call to revise flu-mask policy
Three groups of healthcare professionals sent a letter to President Obama yesterday asking that he instruct his administration to revise federal flu-mask guidance. What these groups want: formal recognition that two studies last month showed conventional surgical masks are about as protective as the fancy — but much more expensive — N95 respirators in limiting H1N1 infection.

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Found in: Biomedicine and Science & Society
Science & the Public: House passes medical isotopes bill
A spot of encouraging news emerged yesterday on the medical-isotope front. The House of Representatives voted 440 to 17 in favor of a bill to reestablish domestic production of molybdenum-99. It’s the feedstock for the most heavily used nuclear agent in diagnostic medicine.

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Found in: Biomedicine, Science & Society and Technology
Science & the Public: Large Hadron Collider suffers carb attack
Efforts to get the Large Hadron Collider up and running just encountered a temporary snag, according to yesterday's online edition of The Times of London. A crusty chunk of bread “paralysed a high voltage installation that should have been powering the cooling unit.”

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Found in: Physics, Science & Society and Technology
On the Scene: A little bit of gamma-ray music
Art and science meld during musical performance for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope

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Found in: Atom & Cosmos and Science & Society
Science & the Public: Nanoparticles' indirect threat to DNA
Tiny metal nanoparticles can damage DNA, essentially by triggering toxic gossip.
firstthingsfirst/iStockphoto
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Found in: Biomedicine, Chemistry, Environment, Science & Society and Technology
Science & the Public: Genome 10K: A new ark
Biologists can tell a lot about how living things evolved by rooting around in their genes, comparing snippets of DNA from supposedly related — or unrelated — species. This only works, of course, if catalogs of those DNA snippets exist. Which they largely don’t yet — but could in the not-too-distant future. At least, that is, if a consortium of researchers gets its way — and a boatload of money.

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Found in: Biology, Biomedicine, Science & Society and Zoology
Science & the Public: Kyoto climate treaty's greenhouse 'success'
There are 33 days until the opening of formal negotiations in Copenhagen on the next global climate-protection treaty. The hoped-for accord would take up where the current treaty leaves off. But to get some perspective on just where that is, a new United Nations report describes for negotiators and the public just how much the Kyoto Protocol has achieved. And real strides have been made in slowing the growth of greenhouse-gas emissions, thanks to many European nations (albeit with little help from North American ones or Japan).
Adapted from: UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
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Found in: Climate Change and Science & Society
Science & the Public: H1N1 vaccine: Counting side effects
Pregnant women are considered at high risk for suffering complications or death from the new H1N1 pandemic swine flu. So they’re near the top of the list for getting vaccinated. A new international study calculates that up to 400 out of every million pregnant women who receive such swine-flu shots will experience a miscarriage within 24 hours. But not BECAUSE of their flu shots.

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Found in: Biomedicine and Science & Society
On the Scene: From the infectious diseases meeting: What's with the vaccine-o-phobia?
Science News writer Nathan Seppa talks with physicians about people opting out of vaccinations

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Found in: Biology
Science & the Public: Mice: seasonal flu vaccine and vulnerability to pandemic strain
Earlier this year, Dutch scientists showed that vaccinating mice against seasonal strains of flu rendered the animals unnecessarily vulnerable to dying if they later encountered a pandemic flu strain. Authors of this study now ask whether there are lessons in their data for parents. Such as whether to ignore recommendations that youngsters get seasonal-flu shots during years when pandemic flu is raging. Others suggest this idea, at least as regards people, is bunk.

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Found in: Biomedicine and Science & Society
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The First Sound Bites	New species in Papua New Guinea	Interactive Darwin Timeline
Hear Sound Recordings from the 1908 presidential campaign	See photos of frogs and spiders recently discovered	View key events and discoveries related to evolution