Iranian researchers have announced the birth of Iran and the Middle East’s first transgenic animals in the Rouyan Research Institute in Isfahan.

A transgenic animal is one that carries a foreign gene, constructed using recombinant DNA methodology, in its genome. Sheep and goats produced through this method express foreign proteins in their milk and are, therefore, considered valuable sources of protein for human therapy.

Such animals are commonly produced in countries such as the US, France, the UK, Japan, Denmark, Canada, Scotland, the Netherlands, and China to extract alpha-antitrypsin, plasminogen activating factor, factor VIII, fibrinogen, lactoalbumin, lactoferrin, human albumin, collagen I and II, and monoclonal antibodies from their milk.

The two Iranian transgenic kids named ‘Shangoul’ and ‘Mangoul’, the leading characters of a famous traditional children’s story in Iran, were born in Rouyan Institute on Saturday morning.

“The two kids are in a good health condition,” said Hamid Gourabi, the head of Rouyan Research Institute.

Tests revealed high concentrations of human factor IX, an anticoagulant agent used to treat patients with hemophilia B, in their blood. More time, however, is needed to study the availability of the factor in their milk.

A lamb named ‘Royana’, a kid named ‘Hanna’ and two calves named ‘Bonyana’ and ‘Tamina’ were the first animals successfully cloned in the country.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=117456&sectionid=3510208

An exhibition that has just opened at the Science Museum is celebrating 1,000 years of science from the Muslim world.

From about 700 to 1700, many of history’s finest scientists and technologists were to be found in the Muslim world.

In Christian Europe the light of scientific inquiry had largely been extinguished with the collapse of the Roman empire. But it survived, and indeed blazed brightly, elsewhere.

From Moorish Spain across North Africa to Damascus, Baghdad, Persia and all the way to India, scientists in the Muslim world were at the forefront of developments in medicine, astronomy, engineering, hydraulics, mathematics, chemistry, map-making and exploration.

A new touring exhibition, hosted by the Science Museum in London, celebrates their achievements.

There is a whole area of science that is literally just lost in translation Dr Susan Mossman, Science Museum

Salim Al-Hassani, a former professor of engineering at Umist (University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology) is a moving force behind the exhibition, 1001 Inventions.

He calls it “edutainment”: a series of displays devoted to different aspects of science meant to be both educational and entertaining.

“We hope to inspire the younger generation to take up a career in science and technology and to be interested in improving the quality of societies,” he says.

Mix of cultures

Visitors to the exhibition will be greeted by a 20 ft high replica of a spectacular clock designed in 1206 by the inventor Al-Jazari.

It incorporates elements from many cultures, representing the different cultural and scientific traditions which combined and flowed through the Muslim world.

Young people took the chance to explore the interactive exhibits

The clock’s base is an elephant, representing India; inside the elephant the water-driven works of the clock derive from ancient Greece.

A Chinese dragon swings down from the top of the clock to mark the hours. At the top is a phoenix, representing ancient Egypt.

Sitting astride the elephant and inside the framework of the clock are automata, or puppets, wearing Arab turbans.

Elsewhere in the exhibition are displays devoted to water power, the spread of education (one of the world’s first universities was founded by a Muslim woman, Fatima al-Fihri), Muslim architecture and its influence on the modern world and Muslim explorers and geographers.

There is a display of 10th Century surgeons’ instruments, a lifesize model of a man called Abbas ibn Firnas, allegedly the first person to have flown with wings, and a model of the vast 100 yard-long junk commanded by the Muslim Chinese navigator, Zheng He.

Outside the main exhibition is a small display of exhibits drawn from the Science Museum’s own collection.

They include a 10th Century alembic for distilling liquids, an astrolable for determining geographical position (and the direction of Mecca - important for Muslims uncertain which way to face when praying).

Also on display is an algebra textbook published in England in 1702, whose preface traces the development of algebra from its beginnings in India, through Persia, the Arab world and to Europe.

Dr Susan Mossman, project director at the museum, says: “There is a whole area of science that is literally just lost in translation.

“Arabic and Muslim culture particularly is a little-known story in Britain. This is a real opportunity to show that hidden story.”

She says the hands-on exhibition suits the museum’s style, which she describes as “heavy-duty scholarship produced in a user-friendly way and underpinned by academic research”.

She adds: “We are opening people’s eyes to a new area of knowledge - a cultural richness of science and technology that has perhaps been neglected in this country.”

Intellectual climate

There is one big question the exhibition does not address: why, after so many centuries, did the Muslim world’s scientific leadership falter? From the 16th Century onwards it was in Europe that modern science developed, and where scientific breakthroughs increasingly occurred.

Visitors are able to get close up to the replica of the 13th century clock

Prof Al-Hassani has his own theory, though there are others. Science flourished in the Muslim world for so long, he believes, because it was seen as expanding knowledge in the interests of society as a whole.

But in the later Middle Ages, the Muslim world came under attack from Europeans (in the Crusades) and the Mongols (who sacked Baghdad in 1258) and the Ottoman Turks overran the remnants of the Byzantine empire, setting up a formidably centralised state.

The need for defence against external enemies combined with a strong centralised government which put less value on individuals’ scientific endeavour resulted in an intellectual climate in which science simply failed to flourish, he says.

The free exhibition runs from 21 January to 25 April with a break between 25 February and 12 March.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8472111.stm

Quantum physicist Jim Al-Khalili grew up in Iraq and has become an expert on the golden age of Islamic science. He explains to Sanjida O’Connell how science in the Muslim world will flourish once more

Few westerners know about the golden age of Arabic science. How did it come about?

The Arab empire was hugely powerful by late 8th and early 9th century; its rulers were getting taxes from across the empire and had money to spend on translations and patronage of scholarship. About this time the House of Wisdom was set up in Baghdad by one of the Abbasid caliphs, al-Ma’mun. It began as a translation house, translating Greek texts into Arabic and rapidly started to attract the greatest minds in the Islamic world, while Arabic became the international language of science. There was also a strong influence from Persia; an Arab scholar once said, “We Arabs have all the words but you Persians have all the ideas.”

In the west there is a widely held misconception that the Islamic world did no more than act as steward of Greek science

In fact, an incredible number of important and original advances were made by Arab scientists, who were the first to undertake real science - theory and experimentation - several hundred years before the scientific revolution in Europe.

Can you give an example of this legendary Arabic science?

An Islamic mathematician, al-Khwarizmi, wrote a book, the title of which gives us the word algebra from the Arabic al-jabr, which means “restoration”. He is regarded as the father of algebra but I wasn’t sure whether this was true. It turns out that no one was really doing proper algebra until he came along. The concept of an equation that you solve to find the unknown quantity, x, goes back to this one scholar. There’s also a scholar whom I regard as the greatest physicist of the medieval world, Ibn al-Haytham, who used geometry to prove how vision works. It’s obvious to us now but at the time no one understood that light travels in straight lines.

Why did Arabic science go into decline?

Some say it went into decline in the 11th century because Islam suddenly took a turn for orthodoxy and conservatism and became anti-scientific. There’s also an argument that it went into decline with the Mongol invasion in the 13th century, which destroyed Baghdad, including the House of Wisdom.

The truth is that the decline in Arabic science happened much more slowly than people think: there were great scholars in the Islamic world all the way up to and including the 15th century.

Why is this era of science so little known in the western world?

Europe was flush with money around the time the Islamic empire was fragmenting. When the Renaissance began, Europeans went through the same process that the early Muslims did: they learned Arabic and rediscovered Greek texts that had been translated into Arabic. So we really only know about those scholars whose work was translated from Arabic into Latin. One of the greatest philosophers of Islam, Ibn Sina, is known in Europe as Avicenna. His work was very easy to get hold of and it hugely influenced European philosophers like Thomas Aquinas and Francis Bacon.

Some argue that colonialism played a role. When the British and the French were invading Asia, the Middle East and Africa they didn’t want to hear that these places were once wonderful, flourishing civilisations; in order to justify what they were doing, they had to show that these people were ignorant savages.

So do you think there’s an element of racism to the suppression of Arabic science?

In a sense, yes. It’s tied in with modern-day Islamophobia and the idea that all Muslims have backward attitudes to life, from women to politics; and there’s the additional tension because of fundamentalism and terrorism. So there is a natural tendency to think that surely these people couldn’t really have been far more civilised and advanced than us.

Is it true that what really concerns you is that the Islamic world itself isn’t proud enough of its own heritage?

Yes, it is a shame that there are anti-scientific attitudes in Islam today, almost to the level of - why do you want to go and do science, it’s all written in the Qur’an? The Muslim world needs to be reminded where it was 1000 years ago: it was tolerant of other religions, it was enlightened, it was doing curiosity-driven science.

Many developing countries have poured money into science but only to drive their economy. You won’t get real advances in science - real blue-sky thinking - unless you forget about what might come out of it and you do science for the sake of it. That’s what the Islamic world was like 1000 years ago and until it gets back to that sort of mindset it will always be trying to catch up with the rest of the world.

The King of Saudi Arabia has created a new university, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Could that lead to a renaissance in Islamic science?

The king has specifically said that he wants KAUST to be the new House of Wisdom, so I hope so. A lot of leading western universities are falling over each other to join in collaborations with KAUST hopefully not just because of money, but because they think there’s going to be some real, fundamental research carried out there. Billions of dollars of Saudi oil money have gone into building the university in less than three years. KAUST does seem to be genuinely interested in doing pure, curiosity-driven research - not research to support the oil industry or any political or religious agenda. There are other pockets of excellence and we will see it tentatively growing: the Qatar Foundation is trying to transform their universities into something much more modern and blue-sky research driven. The Royan Institute, a genetics lab in Tehran, Iran, is also doing remarkable work.

Are any of these institutions operating under any constraints?

At the Royan Institute a religious body oversees what research fits into the remit of Islamic teaching. Even KAUST has to be very politically sensitive about what it’s doing. After all, Saudi Arabia is an Islamic country and many people are anti-science.

Your own research is into quantum physics. What was your biggest breakthrough?

The “quantum” world of atoms behaves very differently to the everyday world of Newtonian physics. I apply quantum physics to the atomic nucleus: understanding what it looks like, how its constituents - the protons and neutrons - all fit together. For years we’ve thought of the protons and neutrons as being tightly packed together inside the nucleus. But what we’ve discovered is that some neutrons can orbit the rest of the nucleus much further away than we’d thought. My most cited paper was one in which I’d calculated the size of this “halo cloud”.

Iranian researchers have successfully managed to develop a safe and natural substitute for artificial sweeteners from an herb known as Stevia.

Stevia rebaudiana Bertoni, an herb which grows wild in parts of Paraguay and Brazil has been used to sweeten a native beverage called ‘mate’ since pre-Columbian times.

“Stevia is a safe natural substitute for sugar and artificial sweeteners such as aspartame, sodium saccharine and cyclamate,” Mohammad-Reza Mofid Mohaqheq, a scientist involved in the project held at Isfahan’s Agricultural Jihad Organization, told IRIB News Agency.

Extracted from the Stevia rebaudiana Bertoni plant, the new lower calorie product is not only non-absorbable and non-digestible but also does not contribute to side effects commonly reported following the use of artificial sweeteners, said Mohaqheq.

He added that the product can lower blood sugar levels and blood pressure in the consumers.

Compared to refined sugar, crude stevia leaves and herbal powders are 10-15 times sweeter, said Mohaqheq, adding that the refined Stevia extracts, known as ’steviosides’, are 250-300 times sweeter than table sugar.

Mohaqheq said Iran would be able to mass produce the sweetener from this plant in the coming year whereafter the product would be available on the market.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=111268&sectionid=3510212

Smoking a shisha pipe is as bad for people as smoking tobacco, the Department of Health and the Centre for Tobacco Control Research has found.

People who smoke shisha, or herbal tobacco, can suffer from high carbon monoxide levels, its research revealed.

It found one session of smoking shisha resulted in carbon monoxide levels at least four to five times higher than the amount produced by a cigarette.

High levels of carbon monoxide can lead to brain damage and unconsciousness.

Shisha is an Arabic water-pipe in which fruit-scented tobacco is burnt using coal, passed through an ornate water vessel and inhaled through a hose.

Dr Hilary Wareing, director of the Centre for Tobacco Control Research, told the BBC’s Asian Network she was shocked by the results of the research.

“Our mouths opened at the level of harm - none of the tests we did showed anything other than shisha is hazardous to health.”

Paul Hooper, regional manager at the Department of Health, said the findings made the dangers of shisha a “major issue”.

He said many people regard shisha “as not even smoking”.

Misconception

Shisha bars, which are typically decked out with low stools and soft cushions to create an inviting atmosphere, have become popular in cities across the UK, particularly London, Manchester and Birmingham.

An activity largely associated Middle Eastern customers and a young crowd, there is a growing trend of themed shisha parties.

Many people who go to “shisha evenings” think it is a safer alternative to smoking cigarettes.

“You never see it in the news - ‘that is terrible, don’t do it’ - there’s no shock tactics like (there is with) cigarettes,” said one young woman.

“If my mum sees me smoking shisha, she isn’t going to take it as seriously as if I was smoking cigarettes,” said a British Pakistani man.

It was this misconception - and finding dangerous levels of carbon monoxide in a pregnant woman who had stopped smoking tobacco, but continued to smoke shisha - which prompted the research.

“We found one session of smoking shisha - that’s 10 milligrams for 30 minutes - gave carbon monoxide levels that were at the lowest four and five times as high as having a cigarette,” said Dr Wareing.

“But at the worst, shisha was 400 to 450 times more dangerous than having a cigarette,” she added.

Informed choice

Shisha smokers in a cafe in Edgware Road, London, said the findings would make them think twice about smoking.

“You know you can die from cigarettes, but you don’t know you can die from shisha,” said one.

“I’m now going home to research it,” said another.

But not everyone is convinced.

Akram, a 27-year-old who runs a restaurant and shisha bar in Birmingham, has his own views.

“There is a health risk but it’s all down to consumption and all the evidence I’ve seen is that smoking shisha is nothing like smoking even one cigarette,” he said.

He said he did not actually inhale shisha smoke.

It is not just the level of carbon monoxide that is causing concern.

Qasim Choudhory, a youth worker at the NHS Stop Smoking Service in Leicester, said sharing a shisha pipe could pass around infections.

“There’s a heightened risk of getting TB, herpes and infections like that,” she said.

“Now you know swine flu is on the top of the agenda right now - there’s no kind of direct correlation, but at time when we’re up on our hygiene, it’s not the best type of activity to be taking part in.”

Dr Wareing said more research on exactly how dangerous shisha was needed to be conducted to enable people to make an informed choice.

Paul Hooper said the department was working hard at “how best to get the message - that it is dangerous - across to the consumer”.

“But how do you label the tobacco and the shisha pipe? It’s not as simple as labelling a packet of cigarettes,” he added.

The Trouble with Hubble-Bubble will be broadcast on the BBC’s Asian Network at 1800 BST on Monday 24 August 2009.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8214097.stm

A 16-year-old Iraqi immigrant living in central Sweden has figured out a formula that has challenged great mathematicial minds for 300 hundred years, earning him praise from professors at prestigious Uppsala University.

Mohamed Altoumaimi, who moved with his family to Sweden six years ago, is a first year student at the Falu Frigymnasium high school in Falun in central Sweden.

Long interested in mathematics, Altoumaimi has spent the last four months toiling over his notebook in an attempt to write a formula to explain the calculation of Bernoulli numbers.

The numbers are named for the 17th century Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli and consist of a sequence of rational numbers which are important for number theory.

Needless to say, Altoumaimi’s teachers were more than sceptical when he showed up to school recently claiming he had come up with a formula.

“When I first presented it to my teachers, none of them believed that the formula I had written down really worked,” he told the Falu Kuriren newspaper.

Undeterred by the doubts of his teachers, Altoumaimi decided to contact professors at Uppsala University in hopes they would validate his work.

“Right away they wanted to take a look at all my calculations and the documents where I show that the formula really works,” said Altoumaimi.

While it’s not the first time that someone has come up with a formula for Bernoulli numbers, it’s highly unusual for a first year high school student to make his way through the complicated calculations.

After verifying the calculations, Uppsala University senior maths lecturer Lars-Åke Lindahl then contacted Altoumaimi’s teachers to tell them what a gifted student he was.

http://www.thelocal.se/19710/20090528/

To operate in remote areas, some equipment had to run on a car batter

A genetic map of Africa - the continent from which all modern humans originate - has provided information about its huge diversity of language and culture.

It is the result of the largest African genetic study ever undertaken.

The work revealed the continent to be the most genetically diverse place on Earth, and identified descendents of our earliest human ancestors.

The international team of scientists describe their 10-year study in the journal Science.

The team, led by Sarah Tishkoff from the University of Pennsylvania, studied genetic material from 121 African populations.

They collected over 3,000 samples, and identified 14 “ancestral population clusters”. These are groups of populations with common genetic ancestry, who share ethnicity and similarities in both their culture and the properties of their languages.

“This is a spectacular insight into the history of African populations and therefore the history of mankind,” said Muntaser Ibrahim, a researcher from the University of Khartoum, who was also involved in the study.

The team looked at individual ancestry, or genetic similarities in their samples, by comparing the frequencies of more than 1,000 DNA markers - sections of the DNA code that are known to reveal common genetic heritage.

“In the past, [geneticists] studied just a few Africans, and suggested they were representative of the continent, but we’ve found that no population is representative of all of this diversity,” said Dr Tishkoff.

“Our goal has been to do research that will benefit Africans,” she said. “I hope this will set the stage for future genomics research there, and future biomedical research.”

The completion of the study could enable such research, allowing the link between genes and disease to be properly studied.

“The genetic variants we’ve identified may play a role in disease susceptibility and the different ways in which people respond to drugs,” Dr Tishkoff explained.

Remote research

Her team had to gather genetic samples from some of the continent’s most remote communities.

To extract the important information from blood samples, they have to be “spun down”, using a centrifuge to produce a pellet containing the DNA.

“In the most remote areas, we used a centrifuge that plugged into a car battery,” Dr Tishkoff recalled.

Largely as a result of these difficulties, a large amount of the group’s data comes from populations that have never previously been studied genetically.

This is the first time we have had the genetic data to reconstruct migration events Sarah Tishkoff University of Pennsylvania

This allows the map to provide an entirely new link between biology, and existing anthropology and linguistic information.

The research also located the origin of modern human migration in south-western Africa, near the coastal border of Namibia and Angola.

This is based on the widely-accepted theory that the highest level of genetic diversity is in the oldest population - the one that has had the longest to evolve.

The site is the homeland of the indigenous San communities, Dr Tishkoff explained.

“It’s not surprising but it’s a very neat finding because the San have already been shown to have the oldest genetic lineages, suggesting they may be descendents of a population ancestral to all modern humans.”

Genetic reconstruction

The data has revealed a great deal about the history of the continent. “This is the first time we have had the genetic data to reconstruct migration events,” Dr Tishkoff commented.

Her team, which represented an variety of academic disciplines, showed how genetic and linguistic diversity have co-evolved. This analysis revealed some surprises.

“The Masai people [in Kenya], for example, have maintained their traditional language and pastoral lifestyle, but genetically they’ve mixed a lot with populations from Ethiopia [who speak a different language],” said Dr Tishkoff.

The researchers also took samples from four African American populations, and traced their African ancestry. This was, as expected, mostly pinned down to West Africa.

Mark Thomas from the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at UCL praised the study, and said that the level of diversity discovered was “broadly what we would expect”.

He added that because the origins of African American ancestry can be seen “all the way from Senegal down to Angola, it will be a long time before a DNA test will be able to identify someone’s ancestral origin.

“That’s despite the ridiculous claims of some of these DNA testing companies.”

Read more about this here.

You’ve got to check out the video to see the installation for this experiment. It’s amazing. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7972865.stm

Take a ride on a beamline in this National Ignition Facility promotional video The US has finished constructing a huge physics experiment aimed at recreating conditions at the heart of our Sun. The US National Ignition Facility is designed to demonstrate the feasibility of nuclear fusion, a process that could offer abundant clean energy. The lab will kick-start the reaction by focusing 192 giant laser beams on a tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel. To work, it must show that more energy can be extracted from the process than is required to initiate it. Professor Mike Dunne, who leads a European venture that is also pursuing nuclear fusion with lasers, told BBC News that if NIF was successful, it would be a “seismic event”. It would mark the transition for laser fusion from ‘physics’ to ‘engineering reality’,” he said. The California-based NIF is the largest experimental science facility in the US and contains the world’s most powerful laser. It has taken 12 years to build. “This is a major milestone,” said Dr Ed Moses, director of the facility. “We are well on our way to achieving what we set out to do - controlled, sustained nuclear fusion and energy gain for the first time ever in a laboratory setting.” ‘Building blocks’ Experiments will begin in June 2009, with the first significant results expected between 2010 and 2012. HOW TO MAKE A STAR ON EARTH A pea-sized spherical capsule is filled with fusion fuel This comprises a 150-microgram mix of deuterium and tritium The NIF laser set-up pulses for 20 billionths of a second For that time, it generates about 500 trillion watts That’s equivalent to five million million 100-watt light bulbs All the laser power is focused on to the capsule’s surface The fuel is compressed to a density 100 times that of lead It is heated to more than 100 million degrees Celsius Under these extreme conditions, fusion is initiated “We have an incredible amount to do and an incredible amount to learn,” added Dr Moses. Fusion is looked on as the “holy grail” of energy sources because of its potential to supply almost limitless clean energy. But the challenge of creating a practical fusion reactor has eluded scientists for decades. Now, however, they believe they are nearing their goal. “We are now very close to the culmination of 50 years’ effort,” explained Professor Dunne. There are currently several experimental facilities around the world aimed at demonstrating the building blocks of nuclear fusion. In this process, two heavier forms of hydrogen, known as deuterium and tritium, are fused together to form helium. Deuterium is commonly found in seawater, whilst tritium can be prepared from lithium, a relatively common element found in soil. When these isotopes are combined at high temperatures, a small amount of mass is lost and a colossal amount of energy is released. Energy gain Fusion naturally occurs at the centre of stars where huge gravitational pressure allows the process to happen at temperatures of about 10 million Celsius. At the much lower pressures on Earth, temperatures to produce fusion need to be much higher - above 100 million Celsius. NIF will focus on a process known as inertially confined fusion, in which these extreme temperatures are achieved using ultra powerful lasers. “When all NIF lasers are fired at full energy, they will deliver 1.8 megajoules of ultraviolet energy to the target,” explained Dr Moses. The laser power will be focused on to a tiny pellet inside a small cylinder NIF’s beams are intended to deliver more than 60 times the energy of any previous laser system. When fired, the pulse will last just a few nanoseconds (billionths of a second) but it will impart 500 trillion watts of power - more than the peak electrical generating power of the entire United States. This intense energy will be focused on a ball-bearing-sized pellet of fuel, ablating the surface and compressing the remaining material inwards. “This process will create temperatures of 100 million degrees and pressures billions of times greater than Earth’s atmospheric pressure, forcing the hydrogen nuclei to fuse and release many times more energy than the laser energy required to spark the reaction,” said Dr Moses. This “energy gain”, as it is known, is key. If it works, NIF will release 10 to 100 times more energy than the amount pumped into the lasers to kick-start the reaction. Other experiments have shown that ignition is possible, but so far none has been able to demonstrate a net energy gain. “The world is looking to NIF to provide a clear, unequivocal demonstration that lasers can initiate fusion energy gain,” said Professor Dunne. “This would lay the fundamental physics question to rest, allowing the community to focus on harnessing this energy.” Twin track Although NIF is only at the beginning of its experimental life, scientists are already planning its successor, a European project known as Hiper (High Power Laser Energy Research). “The technology of NIF allows the laser to fire every few hours,” explained Professor Dunne, director of Hiper. “This is right for the demonstration of the physics ‘proof of principle’, but does not meet the requirement of a laser fusion power plant, which needs to operate a few times per second.” Hiper aims to lay the foundations of this continuous fusion cycle by showing it can ignite a steady stream of fuel pellets. Inside one of NIF’s two laser bays “This means a fundamentally different laser technology, a new approach to fuel pellet production, and a suite for robotic handling capability,” said Professor Dunne. In October 2008, Hiper received approximately 13m euros of funding to carry out a feasibility study. It also has access to European hardware and capability worth a further 50m euros. If all goes well, engineers will begin to build the Hiper facility towards the end of the next decade, bringing the vision of a commercial fusion reactor one step closer to reality. At approximately the same time, scientists will also get their hands on another mammoth fusion experiment, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter), currently being built in Cadarache, France. Iter will attempt to initiate fusion using a different method, known as magnetic confinement, in which a super-heated volume of gas is constrained by magnetic fields in a doughnut-shaped vessel known as a tokamak. “We are entering a period when much of the technology development is common to both approaches,” said Professor Dunne. “We believe that the two-track approach is essential given the scale of the problem, and the predicted impact on society.”

Drinking steaming hot tea has been linked with an increased risk of oesophageal (food tube) cancer, Iranian scientists have found.

The British Medical Journal study found that drinking black tea at temperatures of 70C or higher increased the risk.

Experts said the finding could explain the increased oesophageal cancer risk in some non-Western populations.

Adding milk, as most tea drinkers in Western countries do, cools the drink enough to eliminate the risk.

The oesophagus is the muscular tube that carries food from the throat to the stomach.

Oesophagus cancers kill more than 500,000 people worldwide each year and oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is the most common type.

Tobacco and alcohol are the main factors linked to the development of oesophageal cancers in Europe and America.

But it has not been clear why other populations around the world have high rates of the disease although there has been a theory that regularly drinking very hot drinks damages the lining of the gullet.

A litre a day

Golestan Province in northern Iran has one of the highest rates of OSCC in the world, but rates of smoking and alcohol consumption are low and women are as likely to have a diagnosis as men. Tea drinking, however, is widespread.

The University of Tehran researchers studied tea drinking habits among 300 people diagnosed with OSCC and compared them with a group of 570 people from the same area.

Nearly all participants drank black tea regularly, on average drinking over a litre a day.

A regular habit of eating and drinking very hot foods and drinks could increase your risk of developing cancer of the oesophagus Oliver Childs, Cancer Research UK

Compared with drinking warm or lukewarm tea (65C or less), drinking hot tea (65-69C) was associated with twice the risk of oesophageal cancer, and drinking very hot tea (70C or more) was associated with an eight-fold increased risk.

The speed with which people drank their tea was also important.

Drinking a cup of tea in under two minutes straight after it was poured was associated with a five-fold higher risk of cancer compared with drinking tea four or more minutes after being poured.

There was no association between the amount of tea consumed and risk of cancer.

Because the researchers had relied on study participants to say how hot their tea was, they then went on to measure the temperature of tea drunk by nearly 50,000 residents of the same area.

This ranged from under 60C to more than 70C, and reported tea drinking temperature and actual temperature was found to be similar.

Tea lovers

Writing in the BMJ, the researchers led by Professor Reza Malekzadeh, said: “Our results showed a noticeable increase in risk of oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma associated with drinking hot tea.

“A large proportion of Golestan inhabitants drink hot tea, so this habit may account for a substantial proportion of the cases of oesophageal cancer in this population.”

Previous studies from the UK have reported people prefer their tea to be about 56-60C - cool enough not to be risky.

In a BMJ editorial, David Whiteman from the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Australia said: “The mechanism through which heat promotes the development of tumours warrants further exploration and might be given renewed impetus on the basis of these findings.”

Dr Whiteman advised tea-drinkers to simply wait a few minutes for their brew to cool from “scalding” to “tolerable”.

Oliver Childs, a spokesman for Cancer Research UK, said: “Tea drinking is part of many cultures, and these results certainly don’t point to tea itself being the problem.

“But they do provide more evidence that a regular habit of eating and drinking very hot foods and drinks could increase your risk of developing cancer of the oesophagus.”

He added: “People in this region of northern Iran often drink very hot tea as part of their daily routine. We’re a nation of tea lovers in the UK, but we don’t tend to drink tea at such high temperatures and we usually add milk, which cools it down.”

Visit this link for video and audio clip: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7965380.stm