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Convention on Human Rights under Article 2 (“right to life”) and Article 8 (“right to respect for private and family life”). Three days later the court rejected their plea for an injunction. The group’s appeal now joins over 100,000 others to be decided by the court.

“We fully understand our need to respond to legitimate scientific concerns,” says CERN’s John Ellis. “But our scientific arguments cannot counter irrational fears, no matter how hard we try.”

As New Scientist went to press, a court in Hawaii was hearing a similar case brought against the US Department of Energy in March for its role in the LHC.

IS OWNING a gun foresight or folly? One potential consequence is that it may make you more likely to kill yourself.

Matthew Miller of the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, looked at suicide rates between 2001 and 2005 in the US. In the states with the most gun owners there were around 14,000 gun suicides by males, over four times as many as in the states with the fewest gun owners . Women in these gun-happy states were eight

A NEW method of forensic DNA analysis has created an unexpected headache for researchers studying the genetic roots of disease. To protect the privacy of research volunteers, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has abruptly pulled data off the web.

David Craig of the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, and his team have devised statistical algorithms which could help police to identify individual DNA profiles from a mixture comprising samples from more than 1000 people. While conventional forensic genetic markers can be difficult to identify in samples containing several people’s DNA, Craig’s algorithms analyse up to 50,000 genetic

variants called single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) (PLoS

Genetics, DOI: 10.137/journal.pgen1000167 ).

Researchers, though, use SNPs to locate genes associated with

disease susceptibility, often posting their results on the web. Someone armed with an individual’s SNP profile, or that of a close relative, could use Craig’s method to analyse pooledresults to determine whether the person had taken part in a genetic study, and whether they were in the group diagnosed with the disease .

The privacy threat is small as it is unlikely that someone would possess a volunteer’s DNA profile. “NIH did the right thing in applying the precautionary principle,” says Kathy Hudson, director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC.

YOU can give them this: the doomsayers convinced that the Large Hadron Collider will kill us all certainly have a flair for drama.

Last week a group in Austria and Germany, some of them scientists, tried to persuade the European Court of Human Rights that the LHC should not power up on 10 September. They fear the experiment will spawn planet-munching black holes, or “killer strangelets”, as well as the new nightmare of bosenovas – tiny explosions in atomic systems at a few billionths of a kelvin.

The group cited the European

Gustav was no Katrina, but the hurricane

put New Orleans’s emergency strategy to

its first real test for three years.

Dubbed “the storm of the century”

before it made landfall by mayor Ray

Nagin, Gustav was actually not the most

demanding of tests. Katrina reached the

maximum intensity of category 5 over

open ocean and made landfall at a

powerful category 3, but Gustav packed

a weaker punch, hitting land at category

2 on Monday. While Katrina passed east

of New Orleans, whipping up the waters

of Lake Pontchartrain, which flooded the

city, Gustav passed to the south-west,

leaving the lake largely undisturbed.

The good news is that post-Katrina

upgrades to flood walls did mitigate

Gustav’s impact. Katrina’s waters

overtopped the walls and scoured

NEW ORLEANS PASSES EASY TESTout their bases, causing breaches.

Although Gustav’s waters slopped over

the western flood wall of the city’s

Industrial Canal, they fell on concrete

pads that prevented scouring.

In terms of evacuation, Gustav was

an apparent victory, with 95 per cent

of affected residents gone before the

storm hit. But although the hurricane

caused very few deaths directly, the

evacuation itself killed 10, including six

“medically fragile” hospital patients.

Joseph Kelley at the University of

Maine in Orono questions whether

evacuation on this scale can be

repeated. With Gustav failing to live

up to fears, “you’re going to get

evacuation fatigue”, he warns, and as

memories of Katrina fade, fewer people

will evacuate next time.

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–Triggering suicide?–

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“Armed with someone’s DNA profile you could determine whether they had a disease”

No gene snooping End not nigh

Loaded question

6 | NewScientist | 6 September 2008 www.newscientist.com

–No panic this time–