Dinosaur speed demon not for turning

SMALL PRINT:A SPEEDY, seven-metre-long, meat-eating dinosaur that stalked South America in its heydey appears to have had an enormously strong tail that boosted its speed, according to a new study.

Carnotaurus had a huge tail muscle that made it one of the fastest hunters of its time, according to researcher Scott Persons, a graduate student in palaeontology at the University of Alberta in Canada.

The paper, published in PLoS One, dubs Carnotaurus sastreia "dinosaur speed demon" and details findings from computer modelling which suggest that long rib-like bones, along the length of the dinosaur's tail, could have supported a huge muscle.

While the muscular tail may have meant Carnotauruscouldn't turn too deftly, it may have boosted the twin-horned dinosaur's ability to cover ground.

"The results of the digital muscle reconstruction suggest that what C. sastreilacked in turning ability, it may have made up for in overall speed and acceleration," write the study authors.

But perhaps that straight trajectory gave the dinosaur’s would-be prey a get-out-of-jail card, surmised Persons in a statement. “The tail was rigid, making it difficult for the hunter to make quick, fluid turns,” he says.

"Imagine yourself as a small plant-eating dinosaur on the floodplains of prehistoric Argentina, and you are unlucky enough to find yourself being charged by a hungry Carnotaurus. Your best bet is to make a lot of quick turns, because you couldn't beat Carnotaurus in a straight sprint."

Promising malaria vaccine results

A CANDIDATE malaria vaccine that is undergoing a major trial in Africa reduces the risk of clinical malaria by half in older babies and toddlers in the year or so following vaccination, according to early findings published this week.

Malaria is caused by a Plasmodiumparasite that is transmitted though bites from mosquitoes. In 2009 there were 225 million cases of malaria and an estimated 781,000 deaths, according to the World Health Organisation.

The new study results, which appear online in the New England Journal of Medicine, come from an ongoing trial of the experimental vaccine RTS,S/AS01 across seven sub-Saharan African countries. The trial looks at the effects of vaccination with either RTS,S/AS01 or a non-malaria comparator in children aged six to 12 weeks and five to 17 months. Analysis of data from 6,000 children in the older group showed that three doses of RTS,S/AS01 reduced the risk of them experiencing clinical malaria by over 50 per cent.

The vaccine is being developed in partnership by GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals and the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative, which receives funding from the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation, together with African research centres.

Andrew Witty, chief executive of GSK, says the data bring us “to the cusp” of the world’s first malaria vaccine. “The addition of a malaria vaccine to existing control interventions such as bed nets and insecticide spraying could potentially help prevent millions of cases of this debilitating disease,” he says.

But Nature this week reported comments from experts who expressed disappointment at the candidate vaccine’s overall efficacy against the severe form of malaria, reported in the NEJM paper as being just shy of 35 per cent for combined age groups in the per-protocol population.

The phase III trial is ongoing. “Additional information on vaccine efficacy among young infants and the duration of protection will be critical to determining how this vaccine could be used most effectively to control malaria,” the authors write.