Biologists at the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) prepared a report arguing that Gunnison sage grouse be listed under the Endangered Species Act, but Deputy Assistant Secretary Julie MacDonald - an engineer by training - edited out much of the scientific evidence supporting the recommendation. The FWS then decided not to list the grouse, in part because of a lack of evidence.

Email records also show that MacDonald instructed FWS biologists to recommend against listing the Gunnison prairie dog. A draft report stating that it faced serious threat from sylvatic plague was then altered to read that there was not sufficient evidence of that threat - though no information was offered to justify this change. The documents were obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests by conservation groups.

The Interior Department says MacDonald was simply pointing out where biologists' evidence was weak. However, Francesca Grifo, director of the scientific integrity programme at the advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists says her actions are part of a culture of suppressing inconvenient scientific results.

From issue 2576 of New Scientist magazine, 04 November 2006, page 6

Hannah Kinney and David Paterson at the Children's Hospital Boston examined the brains of 31 infants who had died of SIDS and compared them with the brains of 10 infants who had died of other causes. They found abnormalities in the medulla, the part of the brainstem that regulates breathing, blood pressure, body heat and arousal. SIDS babies had more of the neurons that release serotonin, but fewer receptors for the neurotransmitter.

Kinney has previously recorded low numbers of serotonin receptors in around 50 per cent of SIDS babies, while studies in mice have shown that "pacemaker" cells in the medulla, which prompt gasping and recovery, don't fire when serotonin is taken away (New Scientist, 18 March, p 21).

"It might be that a defect in the medulla's serotonin system is inhibiting a baby's ability to gasp," says Paterson. Only further tests will establish whether pacemaker cells are simply not responding to serotonin, or whether the ability of neurons to release it is turned off, he says.

No one yet knows what causes these abnormalities in infants' brains, although Paterson suspects they begin early in fetal development and are down to a combination of genetic and environmental factors, such as the mother smoking or drinking.

SIDS is the leading cause of death in infants under one year in the US, affecting around 0.67 in every 1000 live births. According to the "triple risk hypothesis", proposed by Kinney in 1994, a baby who is at risk of SIDS has some genetic or inborn susceptibility, is at a vulnerable stage of development at around six months and is exposed to one or more external stress factors such as infection, a lack of oxygen or overheating.

A serotonin defect would fall into the first category, says Kinney, adding that the first six months are risky time for babies because they have to adjust to breathing on their own and maintaining their blood pressure.

"If the baby is then put through additional stresses such as overheating and overbundling and it is unable to meet those challenges then it may die," she says. Around 65 per cent of the SIDS infants in the study had been sleeping on their stomach or side - a known risk factor for SIDS.

George Haycock, scientific director of UK-based research organisation the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths, says the new findings are important and unlikely to be due to chance. "However, I doubt that this is the only inherited or non-modifiable risk factor," he says. Other studies have shown differences in genes for immune system signalling molecules and a growth factor critical for lung development in SIDS babies, for example.

Paterson agrees that brainstem abnormalities may be involved in around 50 per cent of SIDS cases, but adds, "There are definitely other factors causing it as well."

From issue 2576 of New Scientist magazine, 04 November 2006, page 12

Until recently, this ability was thought to be the exclusive preserve of humans and great apes. Then in 2001, Diana Reiss of Columbia University in New York showed that dolphins tended to position themselves to view a mark on their bodies that would not otherwise be visible, showing that they too could recognise their own reflections.

Like humans and apes, dolphins are highly social animals with large brains, and seem to show empathy towards one another. So Reiss turned her attention to another large-brained and apparently empathetic species - the Asian elephant. Teaming up with Frans de Waal and Joshua Plotnik of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, Reiss presented three elephants at the Bronx Zoo in New York City with a mirror. They began inspecting themselves with their trunks while staring at their reflections, and one repeatedly touched a mark painted onto its head (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0608062103).

A previous attempt to investigate self-recognition failed, apparently because the mirrors used were too small. "Elephants don't have the best eyesight," de Waal says. "It's important that the mirror is the size of an elephant and is accessible."

From issue 2576 of New Scientist magazine, 04 November 2006, page 17

Back on Earth it can take weeks for an astronaut to re-adapt to terrestrial gravity, and they risk broken bones and torn muscles for much longer. "The body tries to adapt itself to a free-fall environment, and this creates enormous problems on return to gravity," says Kevin Fong of the Centre for Aviation, Space and Extreme Environment Medicine at University College London.

This could be a huge problem if NASA decides to go ahead with its planned trip to Mars. Existing proposals for a "bank robbery" mission, in which a spacecraft would fly there and back as quickly as possible, would take six months each way. After such a spell in microgravity, astronauts could find themselves landing on the Martian surface in dire physical shape. The techniques so far developed to try to limit this deterioration, including subjecting astronauts to rigorous exercise in orbit strapped to a treadmill or cycling machine with elastic bungees, have all proved ineffective.

The answer, space scientists increasingly believe, is to create artificial gravity in orbit. "We'll be taking our own air, food, heat and light to Mars. Why not just take gravity along with us as well?" says Fong.

Gravity can be simulated using a rotating body, which produces a centripetal force. The idea was first proposed in 1911, when space-travel pioneers envisioned a large spinning doughnut-shaped section of a spacecraft that would provide a gravity-equipped habitat for astronauts. Among alternative designs was a large centrifuge created by two rotating crew habitats on each end of a long boom - rather like a spinning baton - jutting out horizontally from the centre of the spacecraft. Work, exercise or recreational time spent in such centrifuges would greatly reduce the physical deterioration of astronauts on a trip to Mars.

The problem is that spinning spacecraft modules are not practical at present. Since the force generated by such a module depends on its radius and how fast it rotates, it would have to be well over 100 metres across, or roughly the size of the London Eye, to create the same gravity as Earth while spinning at a reasonably gentle few rotations per minute. Artificial gravity systems would also generate a number of other disorientating sensations and illusions (see "Light head, heavy feet").

Far more feasible in engineering terms would be to create a small centrifuge that spins at high speed within the main body of the spacecraft. That's what Bill Paloski, a neuroscientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, is investigating. He is carrying out a study in which volunteers spend three weeks lying in a bed with their head lower than their feet, to recreate some of the damaging effects of weightlessness. Half of the people are taken to a centrifuge and spun for an hour a day to create an artificial gravity of 2.5 g at their feet, decreasing to about 0.7 g at their head.

"We're seeing what benefits artificial gravity brings to the body as a whole, looking at everything from muscle and bone strength to heart function, levels of stress hormones and aerobic fitness," says Paloski. The early results are encouraging, he says, and he hopes to be able to publish them next year.

Small centrifuges have a major drawback, however. A centrifuge around 6 metres across - small enough to be reasonably accommodated inside a space station or spacecraft - would have to spin at up to 30 rotations per minute to generate Earth gravity at an astronaut's feet. This is enough to cause severe motion sickness. To prevent astronauts being crippled by these effects, teams are concentrating on developing spinning gyms rather than living or working quarters where astronauts would be free to walk around.

Vincent Caiozzo, an orthopaedics specialist at the University of California, Irvine and his team have built a short-arm centrifuge called the Space Cycle. One astronaut sits on a suspended bicycle-like device, opposite which hangs a cage containing another astronaut, and both are attached to a central pole to form a centrifuge. By pedalling the cycle, the astronaut makes the centrifuge spin, swinging the bike and platform outwards. The device not only provides a strenuous cardiovascular workout for the pedal-pusher, but also generates artificial gravity for both. The astronaut in the cage can then exercise and keep their muscles toned. "Squats are particularly good, as they target the large muscles worst hit by weightlessness, in the legs and lower back," says Caiozzo.

The team has also been experimenting with the possibility of boosting the dosage of artificial gravity, spinning faster in order to provide the same physical protection from shorter gym sessions. "We've had some subjects doing squats straining against three times terrestrial gravity," says Caiozzo. Paloski is also interested in the prospect of using hypergravity, but warns that there is a lot of work still to be done on how this might work best.

For a start, hypergravity means spinning the centrifuge at a nausea-inducing 40 rotations per minute. However, Paloski has shown that by keeping their heads still, people can largely avoid motion sickness, even while performing gentle squats.

Also designing an artificial gravity gym is Larry Young at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His gym will have a cycle on one arm and a cage containing a treadmill on the other. He believes astronauts can adapt to artificial gravity. "Virtually anyone can adapt to head movements at very high centrifuge rotations within just a few sessions," he says.

The trick, Young says, is to train the brain by making repeated movements in artificial gravity and progressively increasing the rotation rate. "The brain learns sensory-motor programmes appropriate for each gravity environment and simply loads up the one required at the time," he says. "It is much like the experience with new spectacles as your brain learns how to make head movements without causing motion sickness."

So not only should astronauts be able to move around on the centrifuge without crippling nausea, just as importantly they can also hop off again with no after-effects. This should mean that ultimately living and working quarters might not be out of the question.

So will astronauts be able to cope with a trip to Mars? More work needs to be done on the effects of long-term exposure to centrifuging, Paloski says. To start to address this, Young's team is set to launch the Mars Gravity Biosatellite into near-Earth orbit in 2010. In it, mice will be spun for over a month inside a small centrifuge to recreate the partial gravity of Mars, which is around a third that of Earth.

If the research proves successful, astronauts could take a spin in the gym once a day, and return from Mars as fresh as they went out. "Ultimately, we might prescribe gravity like a drug, with astronauts taking a couple of doses a day," says Paloski.

From issue 2576 of New Scientist magazine, 03 November 2006, page 30-31

The past couple of years have seen growing interest in the science of human head hair. It began with the publication of a short article in Evolutionary Anthropology by Arthur Neufeld, a physiologist at Northwestern University in Chicago and anthropologist Glenn Conroy from Washington University in St Louis, Missouri (vol 13, p 89). They pointed out that while the fur of other mammals just grows to the required length and then stops, the hairs on our heads stick around for years getting longer and longer. "Have you ever seen a chimpanzee getting a haircut?" they asked. "For that matter, have you ever seen any furry mammal (aside from certain competitive canine contestants) in need of tonsorial grooming?" Of course not. So why then have humans evolved this unique adaptation of almost continuously growing head hair, was the question they posed in their article. "The response was enormous," recalls Neufeld.

This much we know. Our hair comes in two types: terminal hair, which occurs on the scalp, eyebrows and eyelashes, and the usually softer vellus hair, which is found everywhere else. Via complex mechanisms of hormonal control, these two give rise to the nine or ten varieties of hair adults have, from pubic and underarm hair to beards. Whether it's glossy shoulder-swishing locks or the tiniest toe-hair, it all grows at the same rate - about 1 to 1.5 centimetres a month - with only a very short dormant spell before it drops out. What differs is the lifetime of the hair on different parts of the body, and this is what determines its maximum length. Leg hairs, for example, last around two months, armpit hairs left to their own devices make it to six months, but head hairs grow nonstop for six years or more.

Things get more uncertain when it comes to exactly how hair growth is regulated. We have yet to untangle the details, but there are probably hundreds of genes involved and we do know that even a single mutation can have a big effect. Angora mice, for example, owe their long hair to a single mutation in FGF5, a gene that codes for a protein involved in halting growth of the hair shaft. Neufeld and Conroy wondered whether human head hair might also keep growing because it has become insensitive to growth inhibitory factors produced by FGF5 or similar genes.

Another possibly lies with the 10 main genes for the keratin from which our hair is constructed. The duo point out that nine of these are almost identical in humans, chimps and gorillas, but the tenth, phi-hHaA, is notably different. In the other primates it codes for a protein, whereas in humans it is a pseudogene - it is transcribed into RNA but no protein is ever synthesised (Human Genetics, vol 108, p 37). Helmelita Winter of the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg, who reported this finding in 2001, has also calculated that the mutation responsible for this change occurred some 240,000 years ago. "Is that when humans acquired head hair that continues to grow?" ask Conroy and Neufeld.

Bernard Thierry from the French national research agency CNRS in Paris thinks it could be. He points out that 240,000 years ago is also when our ancestors started burning fires in hearths (Evolutionary Anthropology, vol 14, p 5). "Cultural evolution first provided an environment with new selective pressures, then genetic mutations were sorted out," he says. In other words, he believes the driving force of change was culture. It was only after our ancestors invented ways to keep warm without being covered in fur that their hair could become adapted to serve new functions.

There are several good reasons to become less furry. One is that it would have helped fight disease, since fur is a prime habitat for parasites. Another is that it was important for thermoregulation, allowing our ancestors to sweat more efficiently following their move from a forest habitat onto the hot savannah. Some even believe it was an adaptation to a more aquatic phase in our history. Darwin, of course, had an explanation, suggesting that sexual selection was the key: the least hairy of our ancestors were considered the most attractive and so produced more offspring, making the species progressively less hirsute.

But none of this explains why the hair on our heads should have evolved in the opposite direction - something that would have been very costly in terms of the energy needed to make it and to keep it free of parasites. Surely there must have been a payoff?

The idea now emerging is that, precisely because our head hair needs so much care, it makes a perfect billboard upon which individuals can advertise their social standing. Good grooming is a social enterprise, and so shows you are part of the in-crowd, that you have friends and the social skills to keep them. If this is correct, then the corollary is clear:head hair grows simply to be cut and coiffed.
You scratch my head

"It makes so much sense," says Alison Jolly, a primatologist from the University of Sussex, UK, who was one of the first to respond to the original paper (Evolutionary Anthropology, vol 14, p 5). "Neat hair shows someone likes you enough to do the bits around the back." She takes the idea a step further. "You must not only be good enough and skilled enough literally to have time on your hands, but also dexterous enough not to make a hash of this delicate operation." So good grooming also requires reciprocity - to trust and to be trusted. This might explain why long, lank, unkempt locks are traditionally the mark of the outcast, the lunatic and the social pariah.

That seems like an awful lot to deduce from a few strands of coiled keratin. "Yes, but primates have done this for a long time," says Jolly, pointing out that grooming is the glue of primate societies. "Many primates have quite complex natural hairstyles that show the individual's health and social status, as well as telling everyone what species they are," says Jolly. She reels off a list of the well-groomed that includes African baboons (magnificent manes), Amazonian cotton-top tamarins (near-punk head-tufts), the emperor tamarin (imperial moustaches) and India's lion-tailed macaque (general chic elegance).

Of course, humans do not need hairstyles to distinguish them from closely related species; since the Neanderthals died out around 24,000 years ago, there haven't been any. Nevertheless, throughout the ages and across cultures, we have used hairstyles to signify membership of particular groups:think Roundheads, punks and Rastafarians. Thierry believes that for our prehistoric ancestors, hair care was not simply a matter of individual belonging but was also about group identity. This notion is clearly very important in tribal societies, he says, pointing to the example of 5300-year-old Ötzi the Iceman, found in the Italian Alps in 1991, whose tribal marks included 57 tattoos - although his hairstyle is unknown. Another example reported earlier this year is the 2300-year-old Cloneycavan Man discovered in a bog in County Meath, Ireland, who was apparently wearing gel to make his hair stand on end.

Thierry believes hairdos have acted as gang membership badges since the evolution of modern humans, around 200,000 years ago. That fits broadly with the timing of the phi-hHaA mutation. Unfortunately there are no fossilised topknots to clinch the argument, and the earliest known combs date back barely 8000 years, but some of the most ancient human figurines do have dressed hair. The 23,000-year-old Willendorf Venus is one. Her creator may have given her no facial features, but she did get a complex hairdo. Similarly the oldest known three-dimensional representation of a person, the 25,000-year-old Brassempouy Lady, an ivory statuette from Aquitane in France, has elegant shoulder-length hair.

Undoubtedly it is a big leap back in time from these cultural artefacts to the dawn of our species. Yet despite the lack of older archaeological evidence, many experts believe our ancestors were braiding hair far further back even than this. By looking at genetic variation in the MC1R gene, which is associated with skin coloration, Alan Rogers from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City concludes that we became furless around 1.7 million years ago (Current Anthropology, vol 45, p 105). Around this time Homo erectus was living on the hot savannah, so this fits with the idea that furlessness is an adaptation to allow better thermoregulation. The heads of these bipeds would have been disproportionately exposed to the sun, and long head hair would have been an effective sunshade. While there is no way of knowing whether the crowning glory of Homo erectus was primped and plaited, the fossil evidence does at least suggest that, even this far back, our ancestors had the dexterity for the job.
Coiffured cavemen

So where does that leave the grubby, hirsute caveman of popular imagination? The very fact that we have this image is evidence of hair's cultural importance, says New York-based anthropologist Judith Berman-Kohn. It dates from the late 19th century, she says, when the notion of what it was to be human and civilised was threatened on many fronts - by the discovery of the first Neanderthal remains, the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, the American civil war and the spread of European imperialism. The hairy, unkempt cavemen depicted by artists such as Charles R. Knight and Fernand Cormon were not based on fact but reflected the influences of their time. "Hair was both a medium and a metaphor," Berman-Kohn says.

Today we know a lot more about how our cave-dwelling ancestors would have lived. They would certainly have had the time to beautify their hair. "Tribal societies are efficient. Hunting and gathering take up only so much time. There are many hours left over for socialisation," says Thierry. They clearly also had a developed aesthetic. "Even the earliest and most mundane artefacts we have seem to have been made with a feeling for style. I see no reason why, even in cultures with few material goods, hair ornamentation should not have been important," he adds.

And if some people were better at it than others, they would surely have been in demand. The unmistakable conclusion is that, along with warrior and prostitute, one of the oldest professions was probably hairdresser.

Adrian Barnett is a primatologist at Roehampton University in London. The name is his own, not a pseudonym adopted for this article

From issue 2576 of New Scientist magazine, 04 November 2006, page 39-41

In at least one European country, the Netherlands, euthanasia is permitted as treatment for gravely ill premature infants. Although this practice is illegal in Britain, the RCOG has recommended a discussion of this option as the Nuffield Council conducts an inquiry into "the ethics of prolonging life in foetuses and the newborn".

The British Council of Disabled People has slammed the RCOG's recommendations. I also wonder: since when was it OK to end the life of a child because of the financial burden that he or she will impose on the family - or the state? And I also am curious why clinicians would end the life of an infant instead of managing its pain as much as humanly possible. I can understand where some parents may not want doctors to resuscitate their dying child. But "active" euthanasia strikes me as going a bit too far.

All this said, though, I am struck most by the nature of this discussion itself. While the British public debates active euthanasia for premature infants, people here in the US argue over the morality of abortion. These discussions on terminating a pregnancy or euthanising the just-born clearly highlight the cultural differences between the two countries. I've yet to see "active euthanasia" for infants listed as a decisive issue in any mid-term election here in the states.

The scrolls were first discovered in a cave in Jordan's Qumran region near the Dead Sea in 1947. By 1956, archaeologists and Arab treasure hunters found 10 more caves at Qumran that held mostly fragments of some 800 manuscripts, commonly thought to have been written between 200 BC and AD 25.
Soon after the scrolls' discovery, a scholarly debate broke out over whether the writings were indeed pre-Christian, with many respected scholars arguing that the texts were much more recent.
Today, a growing number of scholars doubt the Dead Sea Scrolls were produced by a Jewish sect at Qumran but think they actually originated elsewhere. No one, however, has pointed to Asia, where new information has turned up, including a possibly new scroll called the Moshe Leah Scroll from China.
In 1991, I wrote articles for the Washington Post and Boston Herald about the idea that a number of previously undeciphered markings in the margins of two Dead Sea Scrolls were Chinese. Victor Mair, graduate chairman of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote that the Chinese character ti, which was found on the Dead Sea Scrolls, meant "god, divine king, deceased king, emperor."
Word of Chinese characters in the scrolls triggered an interesting chain of events.
Early in 1992, Leo Gabow, then president of the Sino-Judaic Institute in California, sent me an August 1987 copy of his institute's journal, Points East, by which I came to know of Moshe Leah.
In the journal, Gabow wrote: "In July of 1983, a curious article appeared in the Israeli newspaper Maariv ... 'A Jew Looking for Correspondents.' His name is Moshe Leah. He is 35 years old. ... His occupation: clerk in a printing company. He lives in Taiwan. ..."
Leah told Gabow his mother had told him that their ancestors "came to China from a land where they were deported to by their enemy. And a King of Babylon defeated our enemy ... and allowed Jews to return to Israel (516 BC), but our ancestor ... came to the Orient for the deal of tea and ivory with the tribes of Hsiung-nu (who dominated Central Asia at the time)."
Gabow also said that Leah "mentioned that his mother previously owned two ancient Hebrew scrolls that had been destroyed by a leaky roof. One scroll dealt with 'Moshe's Law of the Book of Geshayeher,' possibly Isaiah, and the other scroll exalted human 'virtues' in Chinese style (in Hebrew script)."
During the course of their correspondence, Gabow received two photos of Leah looking at the scrolls. The first photo was "of poor quality and the letters ... difficult to identify even with a magnifying glass. Photo number two (shown left) however, had considerably more clarity," Gabow wrote in the Points East article. Speculation immediately arose as to whether the language of the scroll in the photo could be Judeo-Persian or Judeo-Chinese or even Aramaic, Gabow wrote.
Through the years, Gabow contacted other scholars connected with the Sino-Judaic Institute to help unravel the mystery of the Moshe Leah Scroll. According to Gabow's article in Points East, Michael Pollak, vice-president of the Sino-Judaic Institute and a leading expert on Chinese Jewry, was the first to make a breakthrough.
"This I am sure of," Pollak wrote in a report cited by Gabow: "The lettering is Hebrew and is in Chinese calligraphic style. Especially the long, giraffe-like lamed."
Besides finding Aramaic words mixed with the Hebrew on the Moshe Leah Scroll, Rabbi Nathan Bernstein of La Habra, Calif., was also the first to think that the section of the scroll shown in the second Leah photo was from the Book of Isaiah, and other paleographers identified the text as Isaiah 38:8-40.
But interestingly, the Qumran Isaiah Scroll has no Aramaic in those chapters, indicating that the Moshe Leah Scroll was not a copy of a Qumran scroll.
Rabbi Emanual Silver, curator of the Hebrew section of the British Library, department of Oriental Manuscripts, saw the similarities, and Gabow says Silver wrote, "Anybody slightly acquainted with the Dead Sea Scrolls will notice at a glance the overall similarity of the hand that wrote the Moshe Leah Scrolls to that of certain documents of the Dead Sea caves, and anyone a little familiar with the Dead Sea texts will be struck by the resemblances in orthography."
Gabow wrote, "For the first time the Moshe Leah 'Isaiah Scroll' is associated with Dead Sea texts" because of the similar style of writing.
Gabow later sent me the photos of Leah holding the scrolls.
Gabow also sent me texts in Hebrew from China. In one, known as the Genesis Manuscript (1489-1679) from the Kaifeng Synagogue, the mems (Hebrew "m") were also like those in the Dead Sea's Isaiah Scroll and the Moshe Leah Scroll.
More important, Gabow enclosed a copy of the Khotan text, a business letter written on paper that came from Chinese Central Asia and had been dated from the 8th century. It had numerous Hebrew letters matching those in Dead Sea texts: the unique wishbone-shape gimels, diamond-shaped kophs, S-shaped nuns, giraffe-neck lameds and mems.
If the Dead Sea Scrolls were written before Christ's time and then buried in caves until the 20th century, how could the same script show up in China in the 8th century - or even later?
These paleographic details provide some solid evidence about the age of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Dating them not in antiquity but in the Middle Ages, at the earliest, explains the connection to medieval texts, as well as unusual things like the Chinese symbol for God in the Isaiah Scroll. University of Pennsylvania's Mair dated this character, which also appears in The Order of the Community, another Dead Sea Scroll, no earlier than AD 100 and perhaps 700 years or more later.
Donald Daniel Leslie, an Australian sinologist and leading expert in Kaifeng Jewry, agreed with Mair's dating and wrote in Points East that it's unlikely the Jews and the Chinese knew much, if anything, about each other before the time of Jesus. Leslie wrote that "there is no hint in Western sources of any knowledge of the Chinese language or writing until perhaps a thousand years later."
In later scholarly reports, Bruce Brooks, research professor of Chinese and director of an international group of sinologists at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, confirmed Mair's findings and other possible Chinese characters on some of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
These Chinese connections, especially the symbol for God dating after Christ, and the fact that the characters are native to the Chinese Central Asian area, begin to explain the time frame of the Dead Sea Scrolls and their possible place of origin. Mair identified Chinese Central Asia as the area from which the Chinese symbol for God in the scrolls came.
When a text such as the Moshe Leah scroll shows up in China, the Asian connection with the Dead Sea Scrolls is no longer strange.
This new scroll would have perhaps come to light sooner had Gabow accepted Pollak's assessment that "it would be wiser to conclude that the Moshe Leah scrolls were very old family heirlooms."
Pollak's article on the Moshe Leah Scroll, in a January 1987 addendum in Points East, called for a reassessment of the writing and spelling styles of surviving medieval Hebrew manuscripts from Kaifeng. His conclusion is that "the possibility of a Dead Sea tie-in to these texts seems never to have been suspected in the past. That possibility ... now demands investigation."
Scholars still disagree about the age of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and research remains to be done, but all the scholars I have contacted have come to the same conclusion, that the Moshe Leah Scroll is not a forgery, nor is it based on Polish scholar Josef Milik's copies of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
It would be in the best interest of the scholars who believe in the antiquity of the Dead Sea Scrolls to discredit the Moshe Leah Scroll because of its striking paleographic similarities to the Dead Sea Scrolls.
If those scholars acknowledge it as authentic, however, the obvious conclusion would be that the Dead Sea Scrolls would have to be dated in the medieval era - after A.D. 500 - at the earliest, and the myth of the Dead Sea Scrolls' antiquity will have run its course.