From the BBC:

Fears that music volume limits 'could be ignored'

A safety limit on volume levels which comes into force on all new personal music players this month could be ignored by 40% of young people, says a hearing loss charity.

All personal music players and mobile phones sold in the EU must now have a sound limit of 85 decibels (dB), but users can increase it to 100dB.

Action on Hearing Loss says overexposure to loud music can trigger tinnitus.

Experts say the limit is "good news".

Tinnitus is a medical term used to describe a ringing or buzzing noise that people can hear permanently in one ear, both ears or in the head.

It is often caused by exposure to loud music and can be accompanied by hearing loss.

Paul Breckell, chief executive of Action on Hearing Loss, said the new EU standard is important because increasing numbers of young people listen to music through a personal music player.

Survey results

"I urge music lovers to consider the long-term risks of overriding the safe setting as overexposure to loud music can trigger tinnitus, and remember that a good pair of noise cancelling headphones can make all the difference."

A survey of more than 1,500 16 to 34-year-olds by Action on Hearing Loss suggests that 79% of young people are unaware of new standards coming into force this month.

Although 70% of survey respondents said they would take steps to protect themselves against tinnitus, nearly 40% said they would override the new default setting on their music devices.

In October 2008, the European Commission warned that listening to personal music players at a high volume over a sustained period could lead to permanent hearing damage.

As a result, the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardisation (CENELEC) amended its safety standard for personal music players.

Now all personal music players sold in the EU after February 2013 are expected to have a default sound limit of 85dB.

The user can choose to override the limit so that the sound level can be increased up to maximum 100dB. If the user overrides the limit, warnings about the risks must be repeated every 20 hours of listening time.

The European Commission's assessment said: "Listening to music at 80dB or less is considered safe, no matter for how long or how often personal music players are used. This sound level is roughly equivalent to someone shouting or traffic noise from a nearby road."

But turning the volume control to 120dB, which is equivalent to an aeroplane taking off nearby, is exceeding safe limits, it said.

The commission said an estimated 20% of young people are exposed to loud sounds during their leisure time - a figure which has tripled since the 1980s.

An estimated 5-10% of of people in the EU are thought to be at risk of permanent hearing loss if exposed to unsafe noise limits for five years or more.

Dr Michael Akeroyd, from the MRC Institute of Hearing Research in Glasgow, said of the new EU standard: "This is good news for the volumes of personal music players. The volumes they can give has been of concern for many years, going back to at least the advent of portable cassette players."

He added that headphones can vary in quality and design.

"Few designs of headphones remove background sounds, and indeed some designs remove none. But ear-defenders or ear-plugs can remove a substantial amount of noise. Earplug design has advanced greatly in recent years."

From the BBC:

News headlines used to predict future events

Researchers have developed software which could predict future events such as disease outbreak.

The prototype software uses a combination of archive material from the New York Times and data from other websites, including Wikipedia.

The experts focused on predicting riots, deaths and disease outbreaks and say their accuracy was between 70%-90%.

The work is a collaboration between Microsoft Research and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

In their research paper, the two scientists say that using a mixture of archived news reports and real-time data, they were able to see links between droughts and storms in parts of Africa and cholera outbreaks.

For example in 1973 the New York Times published news of a drought in Bangladesh, and in 1974 it reported a cholera epidemic.

Following reports of another drought in the same country in 1983, the newspaper again reported cholera deaths in 1984.

"Alerts about a downstream risk of cholera could have been issued nearly a year in advance," wrote researchers Eric Horvitz, director of Microsoft Research, and Kira Radinsky, PhD student at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

While other research has been done in this area, it has tended to be retrospective - looking back at the event leading up to an outbreak - rather than using that data to try to look ahead to the next one, they said.

Ms Radinsky told MIT Technology Review that other useful websites included knowledge bases DBpedia and OpenCyc, and language database Word.

The software could also be used to verify the likelihood of other predictions, according to the research paper.

"It can be valuable to identify situations where there is a significantly lower likelihood of an event than expected by experts based on the large set of observations and feeds being considered in an automated manner," it said.

""I truly view this as a foreshadowing of what's to come," Mr Horvitz told MIT Technology Review.

"Eventually this kind of work will start to have an influence on how things go for people."

Mentioned on the BBC news today:

Liberty Global to buy Virgin Media for $23.3bn

US billionaire John Malone's cable group, Liberty Global, has agreed to buy the UK's Virgin Media in a cash and stock deal worth $23.3bn (£15bn).

The deal will create the world's largest broadband company, with 25 million customers in 14 countries.

In the UK, it will be the second biggest pay-TV business after BSkyB.

The merger, subject to shareholder and regulatory approval, puts Mr Malone in competition with Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire owns 39% of BSkyB.

Liberty Global already has operations in various European countries including Germany and Belgium.

"Adding Virgin Media to our large and growing European operations is a natural extension of the value creation strategy we've been successfully using for over seven years," said Mike Fries, chief executive of Liberty Global.

Under the terms of the agreement, Virgin Media shareholders will receive $17.50 in cash, 0.2582 Liberty Global Series A shares and 0.1928 Liberty Global Series C shares for each Virgin Media share that they hold.

This implies a price of $47.87 per Virgin Media share - a 24% premium to Virgin Media's closing price on 4 February.

Alongside the announcement of the deal, Virgin Media reported a 30% rise in operating profit to £699.1m last year.

It said it added a record 88,700 new customers to its cable business during the year.

Shares jump

Neil Berkett, chief executive of Virgin Media, said: "The combined company will be able to grow faster and deliver enhanced returns by capitalising on the exciting opportunities that the digital revolution presents, both in the UK and across Europe."

Virgin Media was created from the merger of NTL and Telewest, and Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Mobile in 2006.

As part of that deal Sir Richard retained a 3% stake in the company, which has a 30-year brand licensing agreement with his Virgin Group.

Mr Malone, who is the chairman of Liberty Global, clashed with News Corp's Mr Murdoch in 2007 when the two companies vied for control of DirecTV Group, the largest US satellite TV broadcaster.

BSkyB leads the UK pay-TV market with 10.7 million customers compared with Virgin Media's 4.9 million.

Virgin Media's main listing is in the US on the Nasdaq technology stock exchange, where its shares jumped 17.9% on Tuesday amid speculation that a deal was imminent

From the BBC:

Kaspersky anti-virus cuts web access of thousands of PCs

Thousands of computers running Microsoft's Windows XP operating system were unable to connect to the internet after installing an anti-virus update.

Users said they were also unable to access their internal company networks.

Russian IT security company Kaspersky Labs told users to disable its anti-virus software or roll back the update.

Two hours later it issued a fix - but since their PCs were unable to auto-install new code from the net, users had to perform several tasks first.

Kaspersky told its customers: "Please disable the web AV component of your protection policy for your managed computers."

It then told them to go the repositories section, download an update and re-enable the protection.

Repair jobs

The company issued a statement, apologising "for any inconvenience caused by this database update error".

"Actions have been taken to prevent such incidents from occurring in the future," it said.

Dorset-based IT consultant Graham Lord wrote on the micro-blogging site Twitter: "Bravo on breaking the internet on all your XP clients.

"Your update just set back one of my repair jobs by a day's work."

But Spain-based security blogger David Barroso tweeted: "So Kaspersky QA [quality assurance] team failed with this update but they quickly released a fix, which it is something good."

From the BBC:

UK 'can cope with solar superstorm'

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

If a solar superstorm struck the Earth, the effects on the UK would be "challenging but not cataclysmic", says a major report.

An expert panel for the Royal Academy of Engineering assessed the readiness of Britain to handle a huge outburst of radiation and particles from the Sun.

It found the nation's infrastructure to be reasonably well prepared.

However, the report warns disruption is likely in a number of areas. Some power cuts would probably occur, for example.

Systems reliant on the timing signals from GPS satellites might have to resort to backup oscillators for a period of days, and aviation services could have to be limited for a while because of disruption to communications and possible upsets in aircraft avionics.

But the experts stress that it is the sum of a number of issues all happening at once rather than one or two big calamities that will test society's ability to cope.

"It will be perhaps comparable to the Icelandic volcano eruption [in 2010], or something similar, where there will be severe disruption to our way of life for a while, but it will be something we believe we can deal with," Prof Paul Cannon, the report chairman, told BBC News.

Electricity resilience

Explosive eruptions of energy from the Sun are a common occurrence.

Our star can sometimes despatch big bursts of shortwave and longwave radiation, superfast particles and colossal volumes of charged gas (plasma) in our direction.

This "space weather" can have a number of effects on modern infrastructure, from glitching electronics in orbiting spacecraft to increasing the interference heard on radio broadcasts such as those from the BBC.

But it is the impacts that would stem from a truly big eruption that concerned the RAEng panel.

It used as its yardstick the so-called "Carrington storm" of September 1859. During this eruption, the solar particles hitting the atmosphere produced auroras across the whole world, not just at high-latitude locations as is normally the case.

The experts examined how various aspects of UK life would handle these 1-in-200-year type events.

They found the National Grid to be in good shape. A big solar storm could induce currents and heating in equipment that leads ultimately to blown transformers and blackouts. But the report said many of the contingencies to mitigate such problems were already in place because of the constant threat from terrestrial weather.

"Our grid is organised as a lattice, which means it has resilience built in," commented Chris Train, the director of market operation at the National Grid. "That's very different to the Canadian grid, for example, which is point-to-point with long lines in series. You can see how that kind of system might be vulnerable to a cascade."

Timing back-up

Satellites would undoubtedly be affected, the report said. The assessment was that perhaps one in 10 might be knocked offline by the storm. Most of these would be brought back into operation reasonably quickly, the panel found, although the experience might shorten the lifetimes of some sub-systems and components.

"Fortunately, satellites are already designed to deal with a lot of this space weather," observed one of the report's authors, Keith Ryden, a reader in space engineering at the University of Surrey Space Centre.

"Also, satellite engineers are extremely conservative people and they tend to put in big design margins, and, additionally, we have a big diversity of satellite designers these days.

"For all these reasons, we think that the effects of a superstorm, although it will lead to disruption, will be limited by these mitigating factors."

There is a particular concern about the Global Positioning System (GPS) service. A lot of utilities use the timing signals broadcast by the American sat-nav spacecraft to synchronize the operation of their networks. These broadcasts will likely be degraded, even lost, said the panel for one to three days because of disturbances in the ionosphere.

Those who were reliant on GPS timing should ensure they had back-up oscillators available, the panel said. It commended the traditional fixed and mobile phone networks in the UK in this respect, but raised a flag about the introduction of the newer 4G cellular systems. The standards underpinning the next generation of mobile phones were not as robust as they could be, the experts warned.

Future leadership

A GPS outage would also impact navigation in the shipping and aviation sectors. Disturbance to satellite and high-frequency radio communications would cause them problems, also. The panel noted that ships and planes had alternatives available. However, they recommended these sectors, especially planes, consider putting sensors on board to understand better the glitches that can occur in electronics.

Aeroplane avionics, for example, are vulnerable to the perturbations caused by neutron particles cascading down through the high atmosphere during a storm.

The other aspect relevant to aviation is the increase in radiation that aircrew and passengers caught in a major solar storm would experience.

Dr Jill Meara is affiliated to the Centre for Radiation, Chemical and Environmental Hazards at the Health Protection Agency. She cited the example of a London to Tokyo flight. In normal circumstances, a passenger might receive a radiation dose of 0.1 millisieverts on such a journey, she explained. If the flight was made during a Carrington storm, this dose could be as much as 20mSv.

"To put that into context, 20mSv is the same dose you get from three computed tomography (X-ray) scans of your chest, roughly," she told reporters.

"It's also the dose you might get from 2.5 years living in Cornwall where the natural radiation dose is higher because of radon coming up from the ground. Clearly, 20mSv is an unusual dose and not to be recommended, but it's not a significant dose for an individual or in public health terms."

The RAEng recommends that a UK Space Weather Board be set up by the government to lead the response to the space weather issue. It also calls for more research and more coordination with the UK's international partners.

In the last week it was announced that the largest prime number to date had been found. It has some 17 million digits in it and it starts with 581 and ends with 951.

If you really really want to see the complete number you can find it here:

http://www.isthe.com/chongo/te...61/huge-prime-c.html but it will take a long time to load unless you have fast broadband.

Prime numbers are numbers which can only be divided by 1 and themselves so 31 is a prime number but 33 isn't as that's 3 x 11. Apart from 2, all prime numbers have to be odd numbers as all other even numbers are divisible by 2.

Large prime numbers found in the past have been what are called Mersenne primes. These are numbers which take the form of 2 to the power of a number and then 1 is deducted from the result. 31 is an example of a Mersenne prime and is equal to 2 to the power of 5 =32 less 1 - 31.

This largest prime recently found is another Mersenne prime and is equal to 2 to the power of 57885161 less 1.

Most prime numbers are not Mersenne primes, it's just that it is easier for computers to work on large Mersenne numbers rather than on other numbers.

Not all powers of 2 less 1 are prime, and most are not. It has been proved that the power used has itself to be prime so 5 and 57885161 are prime numbers but that doesn't mean that all powers of 2 to a prime number less 1 are prime numbers. For instance although 11 is a prime number, 2 to the power of 11 less 1 is not a prime number. 2047 (the result) is equal to 23 x 89.

To date 48 Mersenne prime numbers have been found, summarised here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_prime

Perfect numbers have a strong link with Mersenne primes. Perfect numbers are those where if you add all the numbers which divide into a perfect number (other than itself) the total equals that number. 28 is a perfect number. The numbers which divide into 28 are 1, 2, 4, 7 and 14 and the total of those come back to 28. If a Mersenne prime with the form of 2^p - 1 is multiplied by 2^(p-1) you get a prime number. For instance where p is 3 2^3 - 1 = 7, multiple that by 2^(3-1=2) = 4 and you get 28. The link with Mersenne primes has been know for a very long time and it was Euclid who proved that Mersenne primes always resulted in perfect numbers. 

It has never been proved if there are any perfect numbers which are not derived from Mersenne primes. That is one of the unsolved problems in mathematics. One of the best known other unsolved problems is Goldbach's conjecture. That is that every even number above 2 can be expressed as the sum of 2 prime numbers. For instance 100 = 11 + 89.

It is quite easy to prove that there are an infinite number of primes. If you took every prime number (other then 2) and multiplied them together and then deduct (or add) 2 to the result, the resulting number has to either be a prime number itself or consist of a mupliple of prime numbers none of which were included in the list of know prime numbers. The reason being that 2 cannot be divided by any prime number (other than 1 or 2). Doing such a calculation would probably take longer to do than before the universe ends so is a bit impractical to put to the test.

From the BBC:

4G to affect TV reception in two million homes

Filters will be provided for Freeview televisions which experience reception problems following the roll out of 4G later this year.

Ofcom estimates that the TV viewing in up to 2.3 million British households could be affected by 4G but only 40% of them have Freeview.

Satellite receivers will not be affected, the watchdog claims.

A fund provided by the 4G auction winners will be used to pay for filters for those who need them.

At the moment only mobile operator EE is able to offer customers the 4G service, which provides faster mobile internet connections.

The other operators are currently bidding for licences in an auction run by telecoms watchdog Ofcom.

Up to £180m from the auction will be used to fund the filters, a spokesperson from Ofcom said.

However, around 1% of affected Freeview households will be unable to use them and will be offered an alternative instead.

Ofcom estimates there may be fewer than 1000 homes in the UK who will not be able to access those alternatives either and will be left without television services.

A not-for-profit organisation called Digital Mobile Spectrum Limited (DMSL) has been created to tackle the problem.

"I look forward to working closely with broadcasters and mobile network operators to ensure everyone continues to be able to receive their current TV service," said newly appointed chief executive Simon Beresford-Wiley.

"DMSL plans to pre-empt the majority of potential interference issues caused by 4G at 800 MHz and existing TV services. We're focused on being able to provide anyone who may be affected with the information and equipment they'll need to ensure they continue to receive free-to-air TV."

Last month Freeview homes in South Wales had to retune their TVs and boxes following technical changes to a transmitter in order to make way for 4G.

For those who have too much money. From the BBC:

Luxury smartphone maker Vertu has launched its first Android-operated handset.

The Vertu Ti costs 7,900 euros (£6,994) and is made at the firm's headquarters in Church Crookham, Hampshire.

The device had a titanium frame and sapphire screen but was not 4G-enabled, said its designer Hutch Hutchison.

Until last year the company was owned by Nokia and specialised in highly priced handsets designed for the Symbian operating system.

Vertu had chosen Android over Windows as an operating system because it was more established, chief executive Perry Oosting told the BBC.

"You need to be part of an ecosystem," he said.

"Your device will have to integrate with other devices. I think the Windows phone will have success but it is still a relatively small market share. At the moment it doesn't have the global reach of Android - which is about 60% of the market."

Head of design Mr Hutchison said that Vertu was not interested in being a tech pioneer.

"Vertu will never be at the bleeding edge of technology," he said.

"It has to be about relevant technology and craftsmanship - it's not a disposable product."

Niche appeal

The firm is also not focused on the mass market, with just 326,000 Vertu smartphone owners worldwide after 10 years in the industry.

"We don't make massive numbers of phones and the price point is reflective of that," said Mr Oosting.

Each device is assembled by hand. The name and signature of the person who assembled the phone is laser inscribed onto the inside lid of the SIM card holder.

Vertu handsets can only be purchased in 500 retail outlets, 70 of which are the company's own boutiques, around the world.

Each device has a "concierge" button that connects the caller with a global team who can provide localised advice and help with events and restaurant bookings.

Weighing 180g (6oz), the Vertu Ti is heavier than most current generation smartphones - the Samsung Galaxy S3 weighs 118g and the iPhone 5 is 112g.

One reason for this is that it has been designed for intense durability. One handset - and its screen - remained intact and working after being accidentally run over by a delivery truck.

"People think sapphire is just posh glass," said Mr Hutchison.

"But sapphire is to glass what steel is to blancmange. The only thing that scratches it is a diamond."

Vertu does not release figures but says sales have increased every year for the past 10 - with the exception of 2008, when the bank Lehman Brothers collapsed.

It also says China is its biggest market.

Other luxury brands such as Tag Heuer and Goldvish are also now competing in the niche yet lucrative space for handsets costing thousands of pounds.

However some experts believe the wider market is moving towards lower-end smartphones.

Huawei has just launched a budget Windows device in Africa and there are rumours of a cheap version of the iPhone 5.

"We forecast that by 2016, 31% of the global overall handset market will be low-end smartphone," Ian Fogg, principal analyst at IHS, told the BBC last month.

From the BBC:

Ancient languages reconstructed by computer program

By Rebecca Morelle Science reporter, BBC World Service

A new tool has been developed that can reconstruct long-dead languages.

Researchers have created software that can rebuild protolanguages - the ancient tongues from which our modern languages evolved.

To test the system, the team took 637 languages currently spoken in Asia and the Pacific and recreated the early language from which they descended.

The work is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Currently language reconstructions are carried out by linguists - but the process is slow and labour-intensive.

Dan Klein, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said: "It's very time consuming for humans to look at all the data. There are thousands of languages in the world, with thousands of words each, not to mention all of those languages' ancestors.

"It would take hundreds of lifetimes to pore over all those languages, cross-referencing all the different changes that happened across such an expanse of space - and of time. But this is where computers shine."

Rosetta stone

Languages change gradually over time.

Over thousands of years, tiny variations in the way that we produce sounds have meant that early languages have morphed into many different descendents.

Dr Klein explains: "These sound changes are almost always regular, with similar words changing in similar ways, so patterns are left that a human or a computer can find.

"The trick is to identify these patterns of change and then to 'reverse' them, basically evolving words backwards in time."

The scientists demonstrated their system by looking at a group of Austronesian languages that are currently spoken in southeast Asia, parts of continental Asia and the Pacific.

From a database of 142,000 words, the system was able to recreate the early language from which these modern tongues derived. The scientists believe it would have been spoken about 7,000 years ago.

They then compared the computer's findings to those of linguists, finding that 85% of the early words that the software presented were within one "character" - or sound - of the words that the language experts had identified.

The software can churn through large amounts of data quickly, but it does not bring the same degree of accuracy as a linguist's expertise.

Dr Klein said: "Our system still has shortcomings. For example, it can't handle morphological changes or re-duplications - how a word like 'cat' becomes 'kitty-cat'.

"At a much deeper level, our system doesn't explain why or how certain changes happened, only that they probably did happen."

While researchers are able to reconstruct languages that date back thousands of years, there is still a question mark over whether it would ever be possible to go even further back to recreate the very first protolanguage from which all others evolved.

From the BBC:

Antibiotics search to focus on sea bed

Researchers are embarking on an £8m project to discover new antibiotics at the bottom of the ocean.

A team, led by scientists at Aberdeen University, is hunting for undiscovered chemicals among life which has evolved in deep sea trenches.

Prof Marcel Jaspars said the team hoped to find "the next generation" of infection-fighting drugs.

England's chief medical officer has warned of an "antibiotic apocalypse" with too few new drugs in the pipeline.

Few samples have ever been collected from ocean trenches - deep, narrow valleys in the sea floor that can plunge down to almost 6.8 miles (11km).

Yet researchers believe there is great potential for discovering antibiotics in these extreme conditions.

Life in these incredibly hostile environments is effectively cut off and has evolved differently in each trench.

The international team will use fishing vessels to drop sampling equipment on a reel of cables to the trench bed to collect sediment.

Scientists will then attempt to grow unique bacteria and fungi from the sediment which can be extracted and refined to discover new antibiotics.

Starting in the autumn with the Atacama Trench in the eastern Pacific Ocean - about 100 miles (161km) off the coast of Chile and Peru - the EU-funded research will also search deep trenches off New Zealand as well waters off the Antarctic.

Arctic waters off Norway will also be explored.

'Pre-antibiotic era'

The inappropriate prescribing of antibiotics - and an over-reliance on the drugs - has led to a rapid increase in resistant bugs and medical experts fear effective antibiotics might soon run out completely.

In January, Chief Medical Officer for England, Dame Sally Davies, compared the threat to global warming and said going for a routine operation could become deadly due to the risk of untreatable infection.

Project leader Marcel Jaspars, professor of chemistry at the University of Aberdeen, said: "If nothing's done to combat this problem we're going to be back to a 'pre-antibiotic era' in around 10 or 20 years, where bugs and infections that are currently quite simple to treat could be fatal."

He said there had not been a "completely new" antibiotic registered since 2003 - "partially because of a lack of interest by drugs companies as antibiotics are not particularly profitable".

"The average person uses an antibiotic for only a few weeks and the drug itself only has around a five to 10-year year lifespan so the firms don't see much return on their investment."

He said he expected scientists to be working on samples in the laboratory within 18 months and added that, if new treatments were discovered, they could be available within a decade.

Project co-ordinator Dr Camila Esguerra, from the University of Leuven in Belgium, said: "We'll be testing many unique chemical compounds from these marine samples that have literally never seen the light of day.

"We're quite hopeful that we'll find a number of exciting new drug leads."

Interesting article on the BBC website about how the human brain is wired up. The article includes a video clip and photographs which can't be included here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/scie...environment-21487016

Brecon Beacons national park has been awarded dark sky reserve status and is the first place in Wales to get this and the fifth in the world. Exmoor is the only other place in Great Britain, the others are in Canada, New Zealand and Namibia.

A dark sky reserve is a public or private land possessing an exceptional or distinguished quality of starry nights and nocturnal environment that is specifically protected for its scientific, natural, educational, cultural, heritage and/or public enjoyment mission of a large peripheral area. The International Dark Sky Reserve consists of a core area meeting the minimum criteria for sky quality and natural darkness, and a peripheral area that supports dark sky values in the core and receives benefits from them as well. The International Dark Sky Reserve is formed through a partnership of multiple land owners and/or administrators that have recognized the value of the starry night through regulation and/or formal agreement and/or long term planning.

Article with video and audio clips on the BBC website:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-21496562

A BBC article with video clip about the discovery of the deepest undersea vents yet found and the strange lifeforms found there.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/scie...environment-21520404

No sign yet though of any Silurians.

From the BBC:

Flu drug 'shows promise' in overcoming resistance

A new type of flu drug that can stop resistant strains in their tracks shows promise, say US researchers.

It permanently blocks a key enzyme on the surface of the flu virus, stopping it from spreading to other cells.

In mice it was found to effective against strains which were resistant to the two flu antivirals currently on the market, the journal Science reported.

The World Health Organization estimates that influenza affects three to five million people every year.

Resistance to the existing flu drugs Relenza and Tamiflu is becoming an increasing problem, largely due to their overuse.

The more exposure the flu virus has to the drugs - and in some countries it is available as a preventive treatment before people even catch the infection - the more chance it has of working out how to evade their effects.

Yet in the event of a flu pandemic they are the only weapon available for treating patients in the months before a vaccine can be developed.

'Broken key'

A team of researchers from Canada, the UK and Australia developed a compound that binds to an enzyme on the surface of the flu virus called neuraminidase.

This enzyme is responsible for severing the connection between the flu virus and human cell so it can move on and infect other cells.

The new class of drugs - DFSAs - permanently bind to the enzyme, blocking its action and stopping it from spreading further, the journal Science reported.

Currently available antivirals also work by attaching to this enzyme.

But DFSAs do so in such a way that the flu virus cannot evolve to be resistant to the drug without rendering itself useless.

Tests in mice showed it works against both A and B influenza types and known resistant flu strains and researchers are now doing tests in other animals.

Study leader Prof Steve Withers from the University of British Columbia said: "Our drug agent uses the same approach as current flu treatments - by preventing neuraminidase from cutting its ties with the infected cell.

"But our agent latches onto this enzyme like a broken key, stuck in a lock, rendering it useless."

Co-author Dr Andrew Watts from the University of Bath said: "Our drug can work even better in drug resistant strains than in natural viruses emphasising that it is working through a totally different mechanism."

He added that realistically it would be six to seven years before the drug came to market.

Prof John Oxford, a virology expert at Queen Mary, University of London, said the work seemed to be a significant step forward.

"It is always nice to have an extra drug in the medicine cupboard and it would be reassuring if in the near future we had a second line drug."

From the BBC:

Click here to see article with a "map" of the ancent continent.

Fragments of ancient continent buried under Indian Ocean

By Rebecca Morelle Science reporter, BBC World Service

Fragments of an ancient continent are buried beneath the floor of the Indian Ocean, a study suggests.

Researchers have found evidence for a landmass that would have existed between 2,000 and 85 million years ago.

The strip of land, which scientists have called Mauritia, eventually fragmented and vanished beneath the waves as the modern world started to take shape.

The study is published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Supercontinent

Until about 750 million years ago, the Earth's landmass was gathered into a vast single continent called Rodinia.

And although they are now separated by thousands of kilometres of ocean, India was once located next to Madagascar.

Now researchers believe they have found evidence of a sliver of continent - known as a microcontinent - that was once tucked between the two.

The team came to this conclusion after studying grains of sand from the beaches of Mauritius.

While the grains dated back to a volcanic eruption that happened about nine million years ago, they contained minerals that were much older.

Professor Trond Torsvik, from the University of Oslo, Norway, said: "We found zircons that we extracted from the beach sands, and these are something you typically find in a continental crust. They are very old in age."

The zircon dated to between 1,970 and 600 million years ago, and the team concluded that they were remnants of ancient land that had been dragged up to the surface of the island during a volcanic eruption.

Prof Torsvik said that he believed pieces of Mauritia could be found about 10km down beneath Mauritius and under a swathe of the Indian Ocean.

It would have spanned millions years of history, from the Precambrian Era when land was barren and devoid of life to the age when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

But about 85m years ago, as India started to drift away from Madagascar towards its current location, the microcontinent would have broken up, eventually disappearing beneath the waves.

However, a small part could have survived.

"At the moment the Seychelles is a piece of granite, or continental crust, which is sitting practically in the middle of the Indian Ocean," explained Prof Torsvik.

"But once upon a time, it was sitting north of Madagascar. And what we are saying is that maybe this was much bigger, and there are many of these continental fragments that are spread around in the ocean."

Further research is needed to fully investigate what remains of this lost region.

Prof Torsvik explained: "We need seismic data which can image the structure... this would be the ultimate proof. Or you can drill deep, but that would cost a lot of money."

From the BBC:

Bank of England deputy governor Paul Tucker has said negative interest rates should be considered.

A negative interest rate would mean the central bank charges banks to hold their money and could encourage them to lend out more of their funds.

Speaking to MPs on the Treasury Committee, Mr Tucker said: "This would be an extraordinary thing to do and it needs to be thought through carefully."

He said it was one of a number of ideas that he had put up for consideration.

"I hope we will think about whether there are constraints to setting negative interest rates," Mr Tucker told MPs.

With interest rates at a record low, there is little scope for central banks to use conventional means to stimulate the UK's weak economy, which has dipped in and out of recession since the 2008 financial crisis.

The Bank has resorted to so-called quantitative easing (QE), pumping billions into the economy.

Minutes of the last meeting of the Bank's policy setting committee showed that the governor, Sir Mervyn King, was outvoted in calling to expand QE from its current level of £375bn.

During that meeting other policy measures discussed included buying assets other than government bonds. It also considered reducing the Bank rate, which is currently 0.5%, and is the rate which directly influences mortgage and loan rates.

In addition, the committee looked at reducing the marginal rate of interest on bank reserves held at the Bank to encourage them to lend more. When negative interest rates were introduced in Denmark, it was this rate which was cut below zero.

The Bank of England minutes showed that the committee, "had noted drawbacks with each of these options in the past ; those drawbacks remained".

"The committee would nevertheless continue to examine all of the policies potentially available to it."

In his evidence to MPs, Mr Tucker also suggested "possible extensions" to the Funding for Lending scheme that he termed "quite significant, in terms of lending to non-banks and via non-banks".

In its first phase, the Bank's Funding for Lending scheme offers up to £60bn of cheap funds to banks and building societies if they then lend the money to individuals and businesses.

Untested ideas

Negative interest rates have been discussed by other countries. Negative rates would have a detrimental impact on savers, who have already seen the income from their savings fall since the financial crisis.

In 2009, the Swedish central bank, the Riksbank, surprised many when it set a rate of -0.25%. The move below zero for the first time was seen as largely symbolic.

That was on the deposit rate, the rate put on money left by commercial banks at the central bank, which it normally earns interest on.

Banks were, in effect, being charged for keeping money at the central bank rather than lending it out to consumers and businesses to boost consumer spending and growth.

In December, the Swiss bank Credit Suisse imposed negative rates on bank deposits to tame demand for the Swiss franc.

F  r  o  m     t  h  e     B  B  C  :

Stretchy battery drawn to three times its size

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Researchers have demonstrated a flat, "stretchy" battery that can be pulled to three times its size without a loss in performance.

While flexible and stretchable electronics have been on the rise, powering them with equally stretchy energy sources has been problematic.

The new idea in Nature Communications uses small "islands" of energy-storing materials dotted on a stretchy polymer.

The study also suggests the batteries can be recharged wirelessly.

In a sense, the battery is a latecomer to the push toward flexible, stretchable electronics. A number of applications have been envisioned for flexible devices, from implantable health monitors to roll-up displays.

But consumer products that fit the bendy, stretchy description are still very few - in part, because there have been no equally stretchy, rechargeable power sources for them.

"Batteries are particularly challenging because, unlike electronics, it's difficult to scale down their dimensions without significantly reducing performance," said senior author of the study John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

S for stretch

"We have explored various methods, ranging from radio frequency energy harvesting to solar power," he told BBC News.

In recent years, Prof Rogers worked with colleagues at Northwestern University, focusing on stretchy electronics of various sorts made using what they termed a "pop-up" architecture. The idea uses tiny, widely spaced tiny circuit elements embedded within a stretchy polymer and connected with wires that "popped up" as the polymer was stretched.

But batteries do not lend themselves to this idea; traditionally they are much larger than other circuit elements. They could be made from smaller elements wired together, but to create a small battery with sufficient power, the elements must be spaced more closely than those of the pop-up circuits.

The team's new idea was to use "serpentine" connections - wires that loop back on themselves in a repeating S shape, with that string of loops itself looped into an S shape.

Stretching out the polymer in which the tiny solar cells were embedded first stretches out the larger S; as it is stretched further, the smaller turns straighten - but do not become taut, even as the polymer was stretched to three times its normal size.

The team says the stretchy battery can be charged "inductively" - that is, wirelessly over a short distance. Prof Rogers said that the uses for such batteries and the stretchy circuits they power were myriad.

"The most important applications will be those that involve devices integrated with the outside of the body, on the skin, for health, wellness and performance monitoring," he explained.

However, the prototype batteries described in the paper were only run through 20 charge/discharge cycles, and Prof Rogers said that "additional development efforts to improve the lifetime will be required for commercialisation".

BBC article with video clip about a 3D see-through computer which enable users to reach inside the computer and touch digital content:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21603323

From the BBC:

(Next, we'll be hearing of scientists developing cyborgs capable of repairing themselves)

Click here to see article with video clip

TED 2013: 4D printed objects 'make themselves'

By Jane Wakefield Technology reporter

Many are only just getting their heads around the idea of 3D printing but scientists at MIT are already working on an upgrade: 4D printing.

At the TED conference in Los Angeles, architect and computer scientist Skylar Tibbits showed how the process allows objects to self-assemble.

It could be used to install objects in hard-to-reach places such as underground water pipes, he suggested.

It might also herald an age of self-assembling furniture, said experts.

Smart materials

TED fellow Mr Tibbits, from the MIT's (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) self-assembly lab, explained what the extra dimension involved.

"We're proposing that the fourth dimension is time and that over time static objects will transform and adapt," he told the BBC.

The process uses a specialised 3D printer made by Stratasys that can create multi-layered materials.

It combines a strand of standard plastic with a layer made from a "smart" material that can absorb water.

The water acts as an energy source for the material to expand once it is printed.

"The rigid material becomes a structure and the other layer is the force that can start bending and twisting it," said Mr Tibbits.

"Essentially the printing is nothing new, it is about what happens after," he added.

Such a process could in future be used to build furniture, bikes, cars and even buildings, he thinks.

For the time being he is seeking a manufacturing partner to explore the innovation.

"We are looking for applications and products that wouldn't be possible without these materials," he added.

"Imagine water pipes that can expand to cope with different capacities or flows and save digging up the street."

Nature's inspiration

Engineering software developer Autodesk, which collaborated on the project, is looking even further into the future.

"Imagine a scenario where you go to Ikea and buy a chair, put it in your room and it self-assembles," said Carlo Olguin, principal research scientist at the software firm.

The 4D printing concept draws inspiration from nature which already has the ability to self-replicate.

"We already have 3D printers that can be injected with stem cells, printing micro slices of liver," Mr Olguin added.

"The idea behind 4D printing is to use the sheer power of biology and modify it. But it is still an elusive goal."

The next stage for the research is to move from printing single strands to sheets and eventually whole structures. And water need not be the process's only energy source.

"We could also have heat, vibration and sound," said Mr Tibbits.

From the BBC today (just a strange coincidence following the previous post):

Robot warriors: Lethal machines coming of age

By Jonathan Marcus BBC Diplomatic Correspondent

The era of drone wars is already upon us. The era of robot wars could be fast approaching.

Already there are unmanned aircraft demonstrators like the arrow-head shaped X-47B that can pretty-well fly a mission by itself with no involvement of a ground-based "pilot".

There are missile systems like the Patriot that can identify and engage targets automatically.

And from here it is not such a jump to a fully-fledged armed robot warrior, a development with huge implications for the way we conduct and even conceive of war-fighting.

On a carpet in a laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Professor Henrik Christensen's robots are hunting for insurgents. They look like cake-stands on wheels as they scuttle about.

Christensen and his team at Georgia Tech are working on a project funded by the defence company BAE systems.

Their aim is to create unmanned vehicles programmed to map an enemy hideout, allowing human soldiers to get vital information about a building from a safe distance.

"These robots will basically spread out," says Christensen, "they'll go through the environment and map out what it looks like, so that by the time you have humans entering the building you have a lot of intelligence about what's happening there."

The emphasis in this project is reconnaissance and intelligence gathering. But the scientific literature has raised the possibility of armed robots, programmed to behave like locusts or other insects that will swarm together in clouds as enemy targets appear on the battlefield. Each member of the robotic swarm could carry a small warhead or use its kinetic energy to attack a target.

Peter W Singer, an expert in the future of warfare at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, says that the arrival on the battlefield of the robot warrior raises profound questions.

"Every so often in history, you get a technology that comes along that's a game changer," he says. "They're things like gunpowder, they're things like the machine gun, the atomic bomb, the computer… and robotics is one of those."

"When we say it can be a game changer", he says, "it means that it affects everything from the tactics that people use on the ground, to the doctrine, how we organise our forces, to bigger questions of politics, law, ethics, when and where we go to war."

Jody Williams, the American who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her work leading the campaign to ban anti-personnel landmines, insists that the autonomous systems currently under development will, in due course, be able to unleash lethal force.

Williams stresses that value-free terms such as "autonomous weapons systems" should be abandoned.

"We prefer to call them killer robots," she says, defining them as "weapons that are lethal, weapons that on their own can kill, and there would be no human being involved in the decision-making process. When I first learnt about this," she says, "I was honestly horrified — the mere thought that human beings would set about creating machines that they can set loose to kill other human beings, I find repulsive."

It is an emotive topic.

But Professor Ronald Arkin from the Georgia Institute of Technology takes a different view.

He has put forward the concept of a weapons system controlled by a so-called "ethical governor".

It would have no human being physically pulling the trigger but would be programmed to comply with the international laws of war and rules of engagement.

"Everyone raises their arms and says, 'Oh, evil robots, oh, killer robots'," but he notes, "we have killer soldiers out there. Atrocities continue and they have continued since the beginning of warfare."

His answer is simple: "We need to put technology to use to address the issues of reducing non-combatant casualties in the battle-space".

He believes that "the judicious application of ethical robotic systems can indeed accomplish that, if we are foolish enough as a nation, as a world, to persist in warfare."

Arkin is no arms lobbyist and he has clearly thought about the issues.

There is also another aspect to this debate that perhaps would be a powerful encouragement to caution. A present, the US is one of the technological leaders in this field, but as Singer says this situation will not last forever.

"The reality is that besides the United States there are 76 countries with military robotics programmes right now," he says.

"This is a rapidly proliferating technology with relatively low barriers to entry.

"You can, for a couple of hundred dollars, purchase a small drone that a couple of years ago was limited to militaries. This can't be a situation that you interpret through an American lens. It's of global concern."

Just as drone technology is spreading fast, making the debates about targeted killings of much wider relevance — so too robotics technology will spread, raising questions about how these weapons may be used or should be controlled.

The prospect of totally autonomous weapons technology - so called "human-out-of-the-loop" systems - is still some way off. But Nobel Prize winner Jody Williams is not waiting for them to arrive.

She plans to launch an international campaign to outlaw further research on robotic weapons, aiming for "a complete prohibition of robots that have the ability to kill".

"If they are allowed to continue to research, develop and ultimately use them, the entire face of warfare will be changed forever in an absolutely terrifying fashion."

Arkin takes a different view of the ethical arguments.

He says that to ban such robots outright, without doing the research to understand whether they can lower non-combatant casualties, is to do "a disservice to those who are, unfortunately, slaughtered in warfare by human soldiers".

On the BBC news yesterday:

US HIV baby 'cured' by early drug treatment

A baby girl in the US born with HIV appears to have been cured after very early treatment with standard drug therapy, doctors say.

The Mississippi child is now two-and-a-half years old and has been off medication for about a year with no signs of infection.

More testing needs to be done to see if the treatment - given within hours of birth - would work for others.

If the girl stays healthy, it would be the world's second reported 'cure'.

Dr Deborah Persaud, a virologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, presented the findings at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta.

"This is a proof of concept that HIV can be potentially curable in infants," she said.

Cocktail of drugs

In 2007, Timothy Ray Brown became the first person in the world believed to have recovered from HIV.

His infection was eradicated through an elaborate treatment for leukaemia that involved the destruction of his immune system and a stem cell transplant from a donor with a rare genetic mutation that resists HIV infection.

In contrast, the case of the Mississippi baby involved a cocktail of widely available drugs, known as antiretroviral therapy, already used to treat HIV infection in infants.

It suggests the swift treatment wiped out HIV before it could form hideouts in the body.

These so-called reservoirs of dormant cells usually rapidly reinfect anyone who stops medication, said Dr Persaud.

The baby was born in a rural hospital where the mother had only just tested positive for HIV infection.

Because the mother had not been given any prenatal HIV treatment, doctors knew the baby was at high risk of being infected.

Researchers said the baby was then transferred to the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson.

Once there, paediatric HIV specialist Dr Hannah Gay put the infant on a cocktail of three standard HIV-fighting drugs at just 30 hours old, even before laboratory tests came back confirming the infection.

"I just felt like this baby was at higher-than-normal risk and deserved our best shot," Dr Gay said.

The treatment was continued for 18 months, at which point the child disappeared from the medical system. Five months later the mother and child turned up again but had stopped the treatment in this interim.

The doctors carried out tests to see if the virus had returned and were astonished to find that it had not.

Dr Rowena Johnston, of the Foundation for Aids Research, said it appeared that the early intervention that started immediately after birth worked.

"I actually do believe this is very exciting.

"This certainly is the first documented case that we can truly believe from all the testing that has been done.

"Many doctors in six different laboratories all applied different, very sophisticated tests trying to find HIV in this infant and nobody was able to find any.

"And so we really can quite confidently conclude at this point that the child does very much appear to be cured."

A spokeswoman for the HIV/Aids charity the Terrence Higgins Trust said: "This is interesting, but the patient will need careful ongoing follow-up for us to understand the long-term implications for her and any potential for other babies born with HIV."

From the BBC:

Stomach cancer 'spotted by breath test'

A quick and simple breath test can diagnose stomach cancer, study findings reveal.

Scientists from Israel and China found the test was 90% accurate at detecting and distinguishing cancers from other stomach complaints in 130 patients.

The British Journal of Cancer says the test could revolutionise and speed up the way this cancer is diagnosed.

About 7,000 UK people develop stomach cancer each year and most have an advanced stage of the disease.

Two-fifths of patients survive for at least a year, but only a fifth are still alive after five years, despite treatment.

Currently doctors diagnose stomach cancer by taking a biopsy of the stomach lining using a probe and a flexible camera passed via mouth and down the gullet.

The new test looks for chemical profiles in exhaled breath that are unique to patients with stomach cancer.

Volatile organic compounds

Cancer appears to give off a signature smell of volatile organic compounds that can be detected using the right technical medical kit - and perhaps even dogs.

The science behind the test itself is not new - many researchers have been working on the possibility of breath tests for a number of cancers, including lung.

But the work by Prof Hossam Haick, of the Israel Institute of Technology, suggests it is a good way to spot stomach cancer.

In the study, 37 of the patients had stomach cancer, 32 had stomach ulcers and 61 had other stomach complaints.

As well as accurately distinguishing between these conditions 90% of the time, the breath test could tell the difference between early and late-stage stomach cancers.

The team are now running a bigger study in more patients to validate their test.

Kate Law, director of clinical research at Cancer Research UK, said: "The results of this latest study are promising - although large scale trials will now be needed to confirm these findings.

"Only one in five people are able to have surgery as part of their treatment as most stomach cancers are diagnosed at stages that are too advanced for surgery. Any test that could help diagnose stomach cancers earlier would make a difference to patients' long-term survival."

From the BBC:

Some DNA ancestry services akin to 'genetic astrology'

 By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News

Scientists have described some services provided by companies tracing ancestry using DNA as akin to astrology.

Some test findings tell people that they have links to groups such as Vikings, to particular migrations of people and sometimes to famous figures such as Napoleon or Cleopatra

But researchers working with a campaign group say DNA tests cannot provide accurate information about ancestry.

Ancestry companies insist they are able to provide a valuable service.

An increasing number of companies are offering to profile the genetic history of individuals based on a DNA sample for around £200.

But in a public guide, published by Sense About Science, Prof David Balding and Prof Mark Thomas of University College London warn that such histories are either so general as to be "personally meaningless or they are just speculation from thin evidence".

The scientists say that genetic profiles cannot provide accurate information about an individual's ancestry.

They say "the genetic ancestry business uses a phenomenon well-known in other areas such as horoscopes, where general information is interpreted as being more personal than it really is".

'Uncritical' coverage

They also highlight uncritical media coverage of the issue. Prof Balding, says that news items about famous people being related to historical figures often come from PR material provided by genetic testing companies.

Prof Thomas says that the idea that we can read our ancestry directly from our genes is "absurd".

"This is business, and the business is genetic astrology," he said.

BBC News contacted five companies offering DNA ancestry services. We received a response from the DNA Worldwide group.

Their director David Nicholson told BBC News that all firms should not be tarred with the same brush. Some such as his, he argues, provide credible and legitimate services.

"With advanced testing you can provide a general ancestry indication i.e. Northern European, Western Africa or Middle Eastern and in some cases even more specific," said Mr Nicholson.

"DNA cannot tell you that your ancestors were Viking, simply that your ancestry came from a part of the world common to the Vikings based on historic facts. It's important to talk to the company who provide the testing to make sure your expectations are realistic".

Prof Steve Jones, from University College London and author of some of the seminal books on genetics and evolution, said: "On a long trudge through history - two parents, four great-grandparents, and so on - very soon everyone runs out of ancestors and has to share them.

"As a result, almost every Briton is a descendant of Viking hordes, Roman legions, African migrants, Indian Brahmins, or anyone else they fancy."

From the BBC:

Antarctic Lake Vostok yields 'new bacterial life'

By Paul Rincon Science editor, BBC News website

Russian scientists have claimed the discovery of a new type of bacterial life in water from a buried Antarctic lake.

The researchers have been studying samples brought up from Vostok - the largest subglacial lake in Antarctica.

Last year, the team drilled through almost 4km (2.34 miles) of ice to reach the lake and retrieve samples.

Vostok is thought to have been cut off from the surface for millions of years.

This has raised the possibility that such isolated bodies of water might host microbial life forms new to science.

"After putting aside all possible elements of contamination, DNA was found that did not coincide with any of the well-known types in the global database," said Sergei Bulat, of the genetics laboratory at the St Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics.

"We are calling this life form unclassified and unidentified," he explained.

Dr Bulat added that close attention was focused on one particular form of bacteria whose DNA was less than 86% similar to previously existing forms.

"A level of 90% usually means that the organism is unknown."

The drilling project took years to plan and implement. The lake's location in the heart of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet makes it one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet.

It is the place where thermometers recorded the lowest ever temperature on Earth - minus 89C on 21 July 1983.

Vostok Station was set up by the Russians in 1956, and their seismic soundings soon suggested there was an area of liquid underneath all the ice. However, it was only in the 1990s that British scientists, with the help of radar, were able to determine the full extent of the sub-glacial feature.

With an area of 15,000 square km and with depths reaching more than 800m, Lake Vostok is similar in size to Lake Baikal in Siberia or Lake Ontario in North America.

The US recently broke through into another Antarctic lake - Whillans. They have also reported the discovery of microbial life in the lake waters. But Lake Whillans is thought by some to have been less isolated than Vostok.

A British expedition to drill through 3km (1.8 miles) of Antarctic ice into Lake Ellsworth was called off late last year after engineers were unable to join the main borehole with a parallel hole that was to be used to recover drilling water.

From the BBC:

Hidden salt 'present in popular restaurant meals'

A survey of nearly 700 popular meals served in celebrity chef and High Street restaurants found half were high in salt - equivalent to a red traffic light label on a supermarket product.

From their research, Consensus Action on Salt and Health (Cash) discovered that the 13 saltiest main meals contained more than the maximum recommended daily intake of 6g of salt.

Fast food outlets were also analysed.

Charities are urging chefs to use less salt in their food.

The survey measured the salt content of 664 main meals from 29 popular High Street and celebrity restaurants, fast food and cafes chains.

Analysis showed that 347 meals had more than 2.4g of salt per portion, which would earn them a red traffic light label for salt content.

A selection of main meals from six celebrity chef restaurants were analysed for their salt content including Brasserie Blanc (Raymond Blanc), Dinner (Heston Blumenthal), Frankies (Marco Pierre White), Jamie's Italian (Jamie Oliver), Fifteen (Jamie Oliver) and Savoy Grill (Gordon Ramsay).

From the celebrity chef restaurants tested, on average Jamie's Italian had the highest level of salt in their three dishes while Heston's Dinner was shown to have the lowest values of salt, all below 1.5g of salt per dish.

Celebrity chef restaurants and High Street chain restaurants both came out higher for salt content than cafes and fast food chains, partly due to the larger portion sizes.

Daily dose

In the fast food category, meals from McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, Subway, Pizza Hut and Dominos were all analysed as part of the survey.

Pizza Hut fared worst with 100% of their dishes analysed containing more than 2.4g of salt. Subway fared best with less than one in five meals getting a red traffic light label for salt, although their portions were smaller.

In the 20 saltiest meals from fast food outlets, a regular BBQ meat feast pizza from Pizza Hut was found to contain 6.36g of salt while Domino's pepperoni passion pizza contained 4.8g.

The survey found an average of 3.1g salt per meal - half a person's daily recommended amount of salt.

Alongside the analysis of dishes, Cash undertook a survey of public opinion on salt which found that 54% of 1,100 people surveyed found restaurant meals too salty, and nine out of 10 people believed that restaurants and cafes should let them choose if they want to add salt to their meal or not.

Health impact

The Department of Health has previously said that reducing salt intake by just 1g per day - a pinch of salt - would save 4,147 preventable deaths and £288m to the NHS every year.

A high salt diet has been linked to a number of other serious health conditions such as stomach cancer, osteoporosis and kidney disease.

Tracy Parker, dietitian at the British Heart Foundation, said: "We're all eating too much salt and with one in six meals being eaten out of the home, it's important to keep an eye on our salt intake all the time.

"It's vital restaurants provide clear menu labelling showing us how much salt is our dinner, but chefs should ideally be cutting back on the salt they use and giving the diner the choice.

"Until then, using information on restaurants' websites before you go out can help you eat more healthily when eating out."

Graham MacGregor, professor of cardiovascular medicine at The Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Queen Mary University and chairman of Cash, said that too much salt is harmful.

"Salt puts up our blood pressure, and as a result, thousands of people die unnecessarily each year from strokes, heart attacks and heart failure.

"Whilst efforts have been made by foods in supermarkets to use less salt, chefs' preference for saltier foods is preventing further progress. It's clear from our survey that some chefs are not listening to their customers."

Salt reductions

Eddie Gershon, spokesman for restaurant JD Wetherspoon, said they were open and honest with their customers about the salt content of their meals.

"Most of our dishes on Cash's list contain bacon, gammon or pork which are all meats which are high in salt.

"We give customers what they want and tell them which meals are high in salt on our website and the company's nutritional leaflet.

"We do reduce salt where possible in line with government guidelines."

A Pizza Hut spokesperson said they had reduced salt in their meals.

"We have invested heavily in salt reduction, cutting salt by 15% across our menu since 2006 and we'll continue to make reductions in line with consumers' attitudes and palates.

"However, salt reduction is a journey, and we know from previous trials that customers will reject the changes in taste caused by sudden salt reductions.

"We removed salt shakers from our restaurant tables last year and are also looking at new technology which will aid the reduction in salt in our food."

From the BBC:

Chester Zoo team on the hunt for new species in Nigeria

A team from Chester Zoo is heading to a remote, mountainous region in Nigeria to assess what species live in an area where few surveys have been conducted.

They are set to carry out the first biodiversity assessment in the Gashaka Gumti National Park.

The area is said to be home to the last viable population of the endangered Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes ellioti).

The 12-strong team will travel out to Nigeria in late March for two weeks.

"Obviously it would be great to find a big, sexy bug or frog but it is hard to tell you how likely that will be because we do not know what is there," explained Chester Zoo director general Mark Pilgrim.

"But there is a good chance that there are a lot of things there that we currently do not know about.

"Whether it is a brightly coloured big thing or not, we will have to wait and see."

Biodiversity hotspot

The park, located in eastern Nigerian on the border with Cameroon, is the country's largest national park and is considered to be one of the continent's most important biodiversity hotspots.

Dr Pilgrim said that the zoo had been funding the core support facilities a research field camp in the park for more than a decade, but was now becoming directly involved.

"The field camp was mainly set up to look at and protect the Nigerian chimpanzee, which is a sub-population of chimpanzee," Dr Pilgrim added.

The Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee is under threat.

Conservationists say that high levels of exploitation, loss of habitat and habitat degradation has led to the species experiencing a "significant population reduction" over the past 20-30 years.

The total population is estimated to be in the region of 6,500, with up to 1,500 found in the Gashaka Gumti National Park.

It is one of four subspecies of the primate, although some recent research suggest that the differences between the subspecies are too small to warrant such classifications.

The camp allows about 20 students each year to work on projects researching the area's population of primates, led by Prof Volker Sommer from University College London.

Dr Pilgrim told BBC News that the presence of the research projects was "what helps protect the forests".

"By having these strange foreigners wandering around, looking for primates is what keeps the forest safe," he observed.

As the zoo would become more involved in the field project, Dr Pilgrim said that it was also an opportunity to widen the focus of the research carried out from the camp.

"Of course, the flagship research remains the Nigerian chimpanzee, which is what makes the area so special and important.

"But because the zoo has wider expertise than that, we are taking out a range of experts to also look at the frogs, birds, small mammals etc because those areas have had very little in the way of surveys in the past."

"This is really the first biodiversity assessment of this forest."

Dr Pilgrim said that he hoped the data gathered during the the field trips will allow partnerships to be forged with scientists working in Nigerian universities.

"For example, it may be that we turn up a number of strange beetles that we do not have the expertise to identify," he suggested.

"This will be an intense, short trip but there will be more follow-up trips to get some really strong scientific papers out of the project."

From the BBC:

Neanderthal large eyes 'caused their demise'

By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News

A study of Neanderthal skulls suggests that they became extinct because they had larger eyes than our species.

As a result, more of their brain was devoted to seeing in the long, dark nights in Europe, at the expense of high-level processing.

This ability enabled our species, Homo Sapiens, to fashion warmer clothes and develop larger social networks, helping us to survive the ice age in Europe.

The study is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B Journal.

Neanderthals are a closely related species of human that lived in Europe from around 250,000 years ago. They coexisted and interacted briefly with our species until they went extinct about 28,000 years ago, in part due to an ice age.

The research team explored the idea that the ancestor of Neanderthals left Africa and had to adapt to the longer, darker nights and murkier days of Europe. The result was that Neanderthals evolved larger eyes and a much larger visual processing area at the back of their brains.

The humans that stayed in Africa, on the other hand, continued to enjoy bright and beautiful days and so had no need for such an adaption. Instead, these people, our ancestors, evolved their frontal lobes, associated with higher level thinking, before they spread across the globe.

Eiluned Pearce of Oxford University decided to check this theory. She compared the skulls of 32 Homo sapiens and 13 Neanderthal skulls.

Social networks

Ms Pearce found that Neanderthals had significantly larger eye sockets - on average 6mm longer from top to bottom.

Although this seems like a small amount, she said that it was enough for Neanderthals to use significantly more of their brain to process visual information.

"Since Neanderthals evolved at higher latitudes, more of the Neanderthal brain would have been dedicated to vision and body control, leaving less brain to deal with other functions like social networking," she told BBC News.

This is a view backed by Prof Chris Stringer, who was also involved in the research and is an expert in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London.

"We infer that Neanderthals had a smaller cognitive part of the brain and this would have limited them, including their ability to form larger groups. If you live in a larger group, you need a larger brain in order to process all those extra relationships," he explained.

The Neanderthals' more visually-focused brain structure might also have affected their ability to innovate and to adapt to the ice age that was thought to have contributed to their demise.

Neanderthal wraps

There is archaeological evidence, for example, that the Homo sapiens that coexisted with Neanderthals had needles which they used to make tailored clothing. This would have kept them much warmer than the wraps thought to have been worn by Neanderthals.

Prof Stringer said that all these factors together might have given our species a crucial advantage that enabled us to survive.

"Even if you had a small percent better ability to react quickly, to rely on your neighbours to help you survive and to pass on information - all these things together gave the edge to Homo sapiens over Neanderthals, and that may have made a difference to survival."

The finding runs counter to emerging research that Neanderthals were not the stupid brutish creatures portrayed in Hollywood films, but may well have been as intelligent as our species.

Oxford University's Prof Robin Dunbar, who supervised the study, said that the team wanted to avoid restoring the stereotypical image of Neanderthals.

"They were very, very smart, but not quite in the same league as Homo sapiens," he told BBC News.

"That difference might have been enough to tip the balance when things were beginning to get tough at the end of the last ice age," he said.

Up until now, researchers' knowledge of Neanderthals' brains has been based on casts of skulls. This has given an indication of brain size and structure, but has not given any real indication of how the Neanderthal brain functioned differently from ours. The latest study is an imaginative approach in trying to address this issue.

Previous research by Ms Pearce has shown that modern humans living at higher latitudes evolved bigger vision areas in the brain to cope with lower light levels. There is no suggestion though that their higher cognitive abilities suffered as a consequence.

Studies on primates have shown that eye size is proportional to the amount of brain space devoted to visual processing. So the researchers made the assumption that this would be true of Neanderthals.

From the BBC:

Doctor 'used silicone fingers' to sign in for colleagues

A Brazilian doctor faces charges of fraud after being caught on camera using silicone fingers to sign in for work for absent colleagues, police say.

Thaune Nunes Ferreira, 29, was arrested on Sunday for using prosthetic fingers to fool the biometric employee attendance device used at the hospital where she works near Sao Paulo.

She is accused of covering up the absence of six colleagues.

Her lawyer says she was forced into the fraud as she faced losing her job.

The local public prosecutor's office opened an investigation on Monday.

The doctor was arrested by the local police following a two-week investigation in the town of Ferraz de Vasconcelos, and was released on Sunday.

Police said she had six silicone fingers with her at the time of her arrest, three of which have already been identified as bearing the fingerprints of co-workers.

The town's mayor, Acir Fillo, has also asked five employees of the medical service said to have been involved to step aside, while the local council has launched a public inquiry into the matter.

Brazil's ministry of health has said it will launch an inquiry of its own into the local hospital.

Mr Fillo says that the police investigation showed that some 300 public employees in the town, whom he described as ''an army of ghosts'', had been receiving pay without going to work.

A council spokesman has told BBC Brasil that among those believed to be those "ghost employees" - as Brazilians call informally those who receive regular wages without actually showing up for work - are public workers in the areas of health, education and security.

On the BBC news today:

'Black Death pit' unearthed by Crossrail project

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Excavations for London's Crossrail project have unearthed bodies believed to date from the time of the Black Death.

A burial ground was known to be in an area outside the City of London, but its exact location remained a mystery.

Thirteen bodies have been found so far in the 5.5m-wide shaft at the edge of Charterhouse Square, alongside pottery dated to the mid-14th Century.

Analysis will shed light on the plague and the Londoners of the day.

DNA taken from the skeletons may also help chart the development and spread of the bacterium that caused the plague that became known as the Black Death.

The skeletons' arrangement in two neat rows suggests they date from the earliest era of the Black Death, before it fully developed into the pandemic that in later years saw bodies dumped haphazardly into mass graves.

Archaeologists working for Crossrail and the Museum of London will continue to dig in a bid to discover further remains, or any finds from earlier eras.

The £14.8bn Crossrail project aims to establish a 118km-long (73-mile) high-speed rail link with 37 stations across London, and is due to open in 2018.

Because of the project's underground scope, significant research was undertaken into the archaeology likely to be found during the course of the construction.

Taken together, the project's 40 sites comprise one of the UK's largest archaeological ventures.

Teams have already discovered skeletons near Liverpool Street, a Bronze-Age transport route, and a litany of other finds, including the largest piece of amber ever found in the UK.

"We've found archaeology from pretty much all periods - from the very ancient prehistoric right up to a 20th-Century industrial site, but this site is probably the most important medieval site we've got," said Jay Carver, project archaeologist for Crossrail.

"This is one of the most significant discoveries - quite small in extent but highly significant because of its data and what is represented in the shaft," he told BBC News.

The find is providing more than just a precise location for the long-lost burial ground, said Nick Elsden, project manager from the Museum of London Archaeology, which is working with Crossrail on its sites.

"We've got a snapshot of the population from the 14th Century - we'll look for signs that they'd done a lot of heavy, hard work, which will show on the bones, and general things about their health and their physique," he added.

"That tells us something about the population at the time - about them as individual people, as well as being victims of the Black Death."

In addition, the bodies may contain DNA from the bacteria responsible for the plague - from an early stage in the pandemic - helping modern epidemiologists track the development and spread of differing strains of a pathogen that still exists today.

"It's fantastic. Personally, as an archaeologist, finding good-quality archaeological data which is intact that hasn't been messed around by previous construction is always a great opportunity for new research information - that's why we do the job," said Mr Carver.

"Every hole we're digging is contributing info to London archaeologists, who are constantly piecing together and synthesising the information we've got for London as a whole - it's providing information to slot into that study of London and its history."

From the BBC:

Car drivers 'will save cash thanks to CO2 rules'

By Roger Harrabin Environment analyst

Drivers will save £3,300 (€3,800) over the lifetime of their cars if the EU imposes strict new standards on manufacturers, a report claims.

It says if CO2 emissions from the average car were limited to 95g per km, fuel use would be cut by a quarter.

The innovations to the vehicle would add about £860 (€1,000) to the price of the average car in 2020.

But that extra cost would be offset in less than three years through fuel savings of around £350 (€400) per year.

The joint report from consultancies Cambridge Econometrics and Ricardo-AEA says that once all EU cars and vans meet the standard, Europe’s vehicle fleet will be €35bn cheaper to run each year.

The report is timed to coincide with the first of a series of votes in the European Parliament on car standards.

The 95g limit is proposed by the Commission. It argues that strict standards are essential to sustain the competitiveness of Europe’s car makers and help the EU meet its targets of reducing transport CO2 emissions 60% by 2050.

Price point

The technology is available: cars like the Ford Focus ECOnetic are already achieving the proposed 2020 standard.

The plans may be contentious in Parliament, though, with some German MEPs fearing their impact on manufacturers building bigger, heavier cars.

Monday’s report was commissioned by a group of organisations which believe that Europe’s car makers need to ratchet up efficiency to compete with US manufacturers facing President Obama’s demand of 93g/km in 2025 – a demanding target for US car makers starting from a low base.

The new report estimates that increased spending on vehicle technology will create 350,000-450,000 net additional jobs if the 95g limit is imposed in Europe. This figure will doubtless be contested.

The study was funded by a group including Nissan, the European Association of Automotive Suppliers, GE, the union body IndustriAll and the European Climate Foundation. It focuses only on traditional-engine cars.

Improvements are likely to come from many innovations, including building cars from aluminium – much lighter than steel – and installing universal stop-start technology which turns off the engine at traffic lights.

Volkswagen has already committed itself to the 95g target.

In the run-up to the Geneva Motor Show, Volkswagen’s Martin Winterkorn said the firm intended to become the world’s most environmentally sustainable car maker: “This is a Herculean task calling for the best efforts of all our 40,000 developers. We can do it.”

The European car makers' association ACEA told me the rules would harm some manufacturers.

A spokesman warned: “Price is the number-one factor motivating a customer's purchasing decision. In a sector where margins are narrow and consumers have a wide range of choice, even a slight relative price rise can make a manufacturer’s range uncompetitive.”

The authors of Monday’s study point out that this argument underlines the need for new standards to ensure a level playing field for all car makers.

But ACEA continued: “The fact that a car may be cheaper to run once on the road is not relevant if the consumer cannot afford the new technology and instead opts for a used car, with higher emissions – or for keeping his old vehicle, again with higher emissions."

The campaign group Transport and Environment says this is an old argument from an industry which has been forced by previous standards to improve efficiency and reduce fuel bills. The group argued that the EU needed long-range standards to 2025 to drive further innovation.

It also warns that manufacturers are becoming adept at manipulating tests to make cars appear more efficient than they really are.

The Commission will need to ensure that the move towards diesel vehicles to improve efficiency does not lead to increased local air pollution from particulates.

From the BBC:

Phages may be key in bacteria battle

By Damien McGuinness and Deborah Cohen Health Check, BBC World Service

They might look like sinister aliens, but these bacteria-munching viruses could be the next weapon in the fight against infectious diseases.

At the Eliava Institute in Tbilisi, Georgia, patients are treated for all kinds of bacterial infections with viruses called phages. In most places in the world antibiotics are given for these infections.

One patient says he regularly uses phages to treat a recurring eye infection.

"I've tried everything. I've even had operations on my eye but nothing helped. But this does help," he says.

Phages are naturally occurring viruses that kill bacteria. Once they get into bacterial cells the phages' DNA replicates until it kills the host.

Doctors in Georgia, and in other countries that were in the former USSR, have been using this therapy for 90 years. But medics and drug regulatory bodies in most places in the developed world have been reluctant to accept that it works.

Now that more and more bacteria have become resistant to antibiotics, the pharmaceutical industry is showing an interest in phage therapy.

The director of the Eliava Institute, Dr Revaz Adamia, explains: "In 2008 I had six letters from people in the West asking for help, but now in the last two months I've probably had about 150.

"People want to be cured because they are desperate that they cannot be cured with antibiotics. Now they are looking at what they can do and they are coming to us."

Viral broth

Dr Martha Clokie, a microbiologist at the University of Leicester, carries out research into phages that could treat Clostridium difficile infections. She has tried therapy at the Eliava Institute.

"When I was in Tbilisi one winter I had tonsillitis, and every six hours I was given broth containing phages, which I gargled. Back in the UK my husband and child had the infection too and they were prescribed antibiotics. We all got better at the same time."

The institute also has some prepared phage solutions that it has worked out will kill the bacteria that cause common diseases, such as E.coli, which causes stomach upsets.

The therapy can be injected, sprayed on to the site of infection or swallowed. Each solution contains many types of phages, although usually just one attacks the bacteria.

Refrigerators

Dr Naomi Hoyle is an American who has trained to be a doctor in Georgia and now works at the institute.

She is married to the grandson of Dr Liane Gachechiladze, one of the scientists who kept the place going during the civil wars and economic chaos of the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Dr Gachechiladze remembers: "We used to get a lot of power cuts in this neighbourhood which was a problem because phages have to be stored cold in refrigerators.

"But in the part of town where I lived, we would still often have electricity. So I bought an old fridge, and I used to take all the phages home and keep them safe in my kitchen."

Dr Hoyle says that one of the advantages of the viruses over antibiotics is that they target only the harmful bacteria.

"It doesn't have the side-effects or the negative aspects of antibiotics, like diarrhoea, because of its high specificity. It's not the silver bullet that antibiotics are, but it has its advantages as it works well on chronic infections. It enters the site and continues to do its work even after application."

Dr Martha Clokie says we may see the use of phage therapy outside the former Soviet Union in the next decade. "Large companies have done phase one and two clinical trials and are now finding ways to do phase three clinical trials, in which they will be seeing if the treatment works in patients.

"In the future we may see phages used to treat minor bacterial infections, and antibiotics kept for the serious life-threatening conditions."

From the BBC:

Isle of Wight girl Daisy Morris has dinosaur named after her

A nine-year-old girl from the Isle of Wight has had a dinosaur named in her honour after a fossil she found turned out to be an undiscovered species.

Dinosaur fan Daisy Morris from Whitwell stumbled upon the fossilised remains on Atherfield beach four years ago.

A scientific paper stated the newly discovered species of pterosaur would be called Vectidraco daisymorrisae.

Fossil expert Martin Simpson said this was an example of how "major discoveries can be made by amateurs".

'Washed away'

The Morris family approached Southampton University's 'Fossil Man' Mr Simpson with Daisy's finds in 2009.

"I knew I was looking at something very special. And I was right," said Mr Simpson.

The fossil turned out to be a new genus and species of small pterosaur; a flying reptile from 115 million years ago in the Lower Cretaceous period.

The new species and name was confirmed in a scientific paper published on Monday.

Mr Simpson said the island's eroding coastline meant the fossil would have been "washed away and destroyed if it had not been found by Daisy".

The pterosaur has since been donated to the Natural History Museum which recently named the Isle of Wight as the "dinosaur capital of Great Britain".

The confirmation of Vectidraco daisymorrisae comes a week after the discovery on the island of an almost complete skeleton of a 12-feet long dinosaur.

From the BBC:

Lorry drivers who drink coffee 'cut their crash risk'

By Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC News online

Long-distance lorry drivers who drink coffee have fewer road traffic accidents, research suggests.

Australian investigators say they found the link while comparing 530 heavy goods vehicle drivers who had recently been in a crash with 517 who had not.

Coffee and other beverages containing the stimulant caffeine cut crash risk, probably because they boost alertness, the British Medical Journal reported.

Road safety experts stressed caffeine was no substitute for sleep.

In the study, more than a third said they drank caffeinated beverages and half of these said they did so in order to stay awake.

The drivers who consumed caffeine to keep them from nodding off behind the wheel were 63% less likely to crash than drivers who had no caffeine.

This was after adjusting for factors such as age, sleep patterns, kilometres driven, breaks taken and night-driving schedules.

Nap advice

If the driver had a poor track record of crashes in the past five years this had an impact on their likelihood of having another crash, raising their risk by 81%.

About 70% of the drivers in the study said they stopped for a nap when they were tired - something that road safety experts strongly recommend.

Lead researcher Lisa Sharwood and colleagues from the University of Sydney say while it is clear that tired drivers should be taking breaks, it still not clear what activities benefit them most during these breaks - napping or drinking coffee.

"The varying extent to which activities such as taking a nap, drinking a cup of coffee, or going for a short walk contribute to subsequent vigilance behind the wheel are not well understood and are therefore recommended for further study," they say.

UK road safety experts say the only real cure for fatigue is sleep.

A spokesman for the Department for Transport said: "Driving tired significantly increases the risk of an accident so we encourage drivers to ensure they are properly rested before climbing behind the wheel.

"Drivers should get a good night's sleep, plan sufficient breaks and pull over if they feel tired.

"The Highway Code is clear that the most effective way to counter sleepiness while driving is to have, for example, two caffeinated drinks and take a short nap."

From the BBC:

Whole internet probed for insecure devices

A surreptitious scan of the entire internet has revealed millions of printers, webcams and set-top boxes protected only by default passwords.

An anonymous researcher used more than 420,000 of these insecure devices to test the security and responsiveness of other gadgets, in a nine-month survey.

Using custom-written code, they sent out more than four trillion messages.

The net's current addressing scheme accommodates about 4.2 billion devices. Only 1.3 billion addresses responded.

The number of addresses responding was a surprise as the pool of addresses for that scheme has run dry. As a result, the net is currently going through a transition to a new scheme that has a vastly larger pool of addresses available.

The scan found half a million printers, more than one million webcams and lots of other devices, including set-top boxes and modems, that still used the password installed in the factory, letting almost anyone take over that piece of hardware. Often the password was an easy to guess word such as "root" or "admin".

"Whenever you think, 'That shouldn't be on the internet, but will probably be found a few times,' it's there a few hundred thousand times," wrote the un-named researcher in a paper documenting their work.

HD Moore, who carried out a similar survey in 2012, told the Ars Technica news website the results looked "pretty accurate".

He added he had seen malicious hackers exploiting the security failings of these devices to run criminal networks known as botnets that are used to send out spam, mount phishing attacks and bombard websites with deluges of data.

From the BBC:

Advert turns air into drinking water

By Aida Parados BBC Mundo

Just outside Lima, Peru, a billboard provides drinking water to whomever needs it - mainly, its neighbours.

The panel produces clean water from the humidity in the air, through filters.

Researchers at the University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) in Lima and advertising agency Mayo Peru DraftFCB joined forces to launch it.

UTEC says it wanted to put "imagination into action" and show that it is possible to solve people's problems through engineering and technology.

"A billboard that produces drinking water from air," says the billboard up high. And it does what it says on the tin: so far, the billboard has produced over 9,000 litres of drinking water - 96 litres a day.

The panel is strategically located in the village of Bujama, an area south of the capital city that is almost a desert, where some people have no access to clean water.

Access to all

Despite tough conditions with little rain, air humidity reaches 98%, says UTEC.

"The panel traps humidity in the air and transforms it into water. It's that simple," said Jessica Ruas, a spokesperson from the university.

"There is a lot of water. It is right there in the sea, but it is not suitable for drinking purposes, and costs a lot of money to process it."

Ruas says the system might become a wider solution for the problem.

"It doesn't have to come in the shape of a billboard, but ingenuity is key to development".

Internally, the panel consists of five devices that extract water vapour from the air using a condenser and filters.

Water is stored in tanks at the top of the structure. Once filtered, it flows down a pipe connected to a tap, accessible to everybody.

The internal system costs some US$1,200 (£790) to set up.

On the publicity side, the panel itself seeks to attract the "creative minds that Peru needs" to the young UTEC, which was founded only a year ago.

"We want to change the minds of future engineers and inspire them," said Ms Ruas.

The neighbours have given the billboard a warm welcome. It has become a local attraction for and motorists and an indispensable part of life in the local village.

"We hadn't realised how big the impact would be," said Ms Ruas.

I found this clip which shows the billboard being used. The clip is in Spanish but the above explains it.

From the BBC:

Bacteria power 'bio-battery' breakthrough

Bacteria could soon be acting as microscopic "bio-batteries" thanks to a joint UK-US research effort.

The team of scientists has laid bare the power-generating mechanism used by well-known marine bacteria.

Before now it was not clear whether the bacteria directly conducted an electrical charge themselves or used something else to do it.

Unpicking the process opens the door to using the bacteria as an in-situ, robust power source.

Power play

"This was the final part of the puzzle," said Dr Tom Clarke, a lecturer at the school of biological sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA), who led the research. UEA collaborated with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington on the research project.

Before now, Dr Clarke told the BBC, the bacterium being studied had been seen influencing levels of minerals in lakes and seas but no-one really knew how it did it.

The bacterium, Shewanella oneidensis, occurred globally in rivers and seas, he said. "They are in everything from the Amazon to the Baltic seas," said Dr Clarke.

The strain used by the researchers was taken from a lake in New York.

"Scientists noticed that the levels of iron and manganese in the lake changed with the seasons and were co-ordinated with the growth patterns of the bacteria," Dr Clarke said.

However, he added, what was not known was the method by which the bacteria was bringing about these changes in mineral concentrations.

To understand the mechanism, Dr Clarke and his collaborators made a synthetic version of the bacterium and discovered that the organism generated a charge, and effected a chemical change, when in direct contact with the mineral surface.

"People have never really understood it before," he said. "It's about understanding how they interact with the environment and harnessing the energy they produce."

Understanding that mechanism gave scientists a chance to harness it, said Dr Clarke, and use it as a power source in places and for devices and processes in inaccessible or hostile environments.

"It's very useful as a model system," he said. "They are very robust, we can be quite rough with then in the lab and they will put up with it.

A paper about the research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

From the BBC:

A Canadian accountant has managed to create a basic video game using only Excel spreadsheets.

The game, called Arena.Xlsm, is a turn-based fantasy game in which players fight monsters and gather loot to make their character more powerful.

Much of Arena is regenerated every time the game is played to lend variety to the way it is completed.

It was created using macros - simple programs and shortcuts that users create to speed up use of the program.

Chartered accountant Cary Walkin built the game during the spare time he had while studying for an MBA in Toronto.

In the game, players take on a series of increasingly tough enemies in an arena drawn using only the basic characters and punctuation marks available in Excel. Defeating enemies such as anacondas, black widow spiders and hyenas bestows fame points.

As a player builds up fame points they go up levels and get points to spend to boost the fighting abilities of their character.

The story framing the game is presented to the player in a series of letters. The ending for each game is chosen randomly from four potential conclusions.

Mr Walkin said it took about four months to create the game which has about 2,000 possible enemies, eight tough encounters with bosses and lots of different items players can gather to boost their fighting or defensive abilities.

The game is designed to work with Excel 2007, 2010 and 2013. It does not work on Mac versions of the spreadsheet program.

Downloadable from here:

http://carywalkin.wordpress.co...arena-xlsm-released/

From the BBC:

Government warned over 'them and us' online services

The government is in danger of creating a "them and us" situation by digitising public services, a report warns.

Ministers say 82% of "transactions" can be carried out online, as that is roughly the proportion of the population which uses the internet.

But the National Audit Office argued that the percentage of people able to access some services, such as those used by elderly people, was lower.

It called for "continued access" to face-to-face and telephone services.

The government said it was continuing to offer help to users and promised to create websites "so good (that) people will prefer to use them".

The coalition has moved most government services to the single gov.uk address, after Whitehall departments set up their own sites in a more piecemeal fashion. Other bodies are expected to follow by March next year.

It estimates that making services "digital by default" will save up to £1.8bn a year by 2015.

'Greater scope'

A study has put the average cost of face-to-face transactions at £8.62 each, those via telephone at £2.83 and those via a website at 15 pence.

In its report, the National Audit Office (NAO) agreed there was "greater scope" for online public services.

It said: "The government, in calculating potential savings, has assumed that 82% of transactions with public services will be carried out online, the proportion of the population currently online."

But it warned that "online use of some services falls short of that level", and that "age, socio-economic group and disability do make a difference".

The NAO looked at 20 public services and found the main reasons for lower take-up were: a preference for face-to-face dealings; an unwillingness to provide information online; and low awareness of some online services.

The report said: "The government has set out plans to help people not on the internet to use digital services. Given the scale of 'digital exclusion', the government now needs to put these plans into action to avoid a 'them and us' problem."

Amyas Morse, head of the NAO, said: "Online working is increasingly central to the delivery of government services and rightly so. But it is important to remember that there are significant numbers for whom this does not work - who cannot or do not want to go online."

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said: "This report firmly endorses the digital transformation of public services designed around user needs that the government has undertaken.

"Putting these services online, rather than using face-to-face, postal or phone options, will deliver substantial savings to the public purse, and save users time and money.

"We are developing digital services that are so good people will prefer to use them, while ensuring that those who are not able to go online are given the support they need to do so."

Electrode vest gives hope to heart rhythm patients

By Jane Dreaper Health correspondent, BBC News

Doctors are using special vests to precisely diagnose abnormal heart rhythms, in the first UK tests of their kind.

Cardiologists from Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust in west London say the vests have enabled them to successfully treat more patients.

They hope the technology could eventually help more people suffering from heart palpitations.

The Arrythmia Alliance described the tests as a "fantastic development".

The work is in its early stages - doctors have used the vests on 40 patients so far.

However, they are impressed with the precision that each vest can give them. The results have been sent to a medical journal.

The panels contain about 250 electrodes, to determine exactly where abnormal electrical activity in the heart is causing problems.

Computer images are then generated to produce an "electrical map" of the patient's heart.

Using this technology - known as the ECVUE system - means that a subsequent procedure called ablation - in which a catheter is placed in the heart through veins in the leg and then used to burn away the problematic area - stands a better chance of success.

Dr Prapa Kanagaratnam, the consultant cardiologist leading the work, said: "It was very appealing right from the start to be able to get measurements of the heart's electrical activity with that degree of precision, without having to initially put wires into the heart.

"It was obvious to us straight away there was a group of patients we could apply the technology to effectively.

"Many patients suffer palpitations at night or when they are resting and this can be impossible to treat by current techniques, as it is difficult to recreate a relaxing environment in the operating theatre.

"It's been very satisfying to use the ECVUE system and see the results over the last couple of years."

Each vest costs about £1,000 - the doctors say this compares well with conventional diagnosis techniques, especially given the benefit of treating patients they were sometimes not able to previously help.

It is thought there are about two million people with heart rhythm problems in the UK, although many of these will be undiagnosed. Arrhythmia is an umbrella term which covers various conditions.

'Huge shock'

Lana Morgan, 29, from Watford, is among the patients who have benefited from trying the vest at Imperial.

Lana, a former air stewardess, was retraining as an interior designer last year when episodes of breathlessness and a pounding heart began to feel serious.

She said: "I was working late on a project one day and I was quite stressed. I had to run for my train home and I felt quite unwell. I went home and phoned my doctor.

"I'd been brushing it off, but it got to the point when I couldn't ignore it any longer.

"My heart would beat quickly and then slow down, or beat strongly and then go faint. At the time I would feel as though I was going to pass out.

"It was only when I had a 24-hour monitor that it showed up that my heart wasn't beating correctly. They kept me in hospital for a week and that was a huge shock."

Unlike some patients, Lana's extra heartbeats tended to occur during exertion - but doctors struggled to trigger the palpitations and therefore pinpoint the exact area of the problem until they used the electrode vest.

She said: "They've told me that without this they couldn't have corrected my heart. But now I'm fixed and can get on with my life."

Trudie Lobban, the founder and chief executive of the Arrhythmia Alliance, a heart rhythm charity, said: "Anything that can help diagnose these patients will ultimately help save lives.

"These arrythmias are like electrical faults in your car - it can take ages to identify which wire is faulty.

"So being able to then successfully do the soldering work with the ablation is fantastic.

"It means people can return to work and live normal lives."