Potentially an important step with some of the major killer diseases (from the BBC):

Molecule structure offers clue to HIV and cancer treatments

Scientists have created an image of an important molecule linked to HIV infection and cancer which may help treat the diseases.

Researchers from California used an X-ray technique to find out the structure of the CXCR4 molecule and how it works.

The findings could open up new areas for drug discovery, says the study published in Science.

But experts say we still need to understand more about the activity of CXCR4.

The molecule is part of a large family of proteins called G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs).

These molecules span the cell's membrane and transmit signals from the external environment to its interior.

They help control practically every bodily process, including cell growth, hormone secretion and light perception.

Normally CXCR4 helps activate the immune system and stimulate cell movement.

Mixed signals

But when the signals that activate the receptor are not properly regulated, CXCR4 can spur the growth and spread of cancer.

To get a picture of this important molecule, scientists used a method called X-ray crystallography.

But this method proved difficult because membrane proteins are tricky to coax into the crystal form required for the X-ray technique, the study says.

In the end it took three years to produce the right conditions to get a clear picture of the CXCR4 molecule's structure.

Scientists then managed to generate five distinct structures of CXCR4.

The structures showed that CXCR4 molecules form closely linked pairs, confirming data from other experiments.

'Wine glass' structure

Professor Raymond Stevens, lead researcher from Scripps Research Institute in California, said: "The structures open up entire new areas for understanding fundamental principles in chemokine GPCR signalling," he said.

The images also showed that CXCR4 is shaped like two wine glasses touching in a toast.

Researchers said the pictures suggest how to design compounds that regulate CXCR4 activity or block HIV entry into cells.

If developed into drugs, the study says, such compounds could offer new ways to treat HIV infection or cancer.

Keith Alcorn is senior editor at NAM, a charity that supports people living and working with HIV.

"HIV uses a number of receptors to gain entry to cells. Most people with HIV start out with a virus that uses a receptor called CCR5.

"Over time their virus population may switch to using CXCR4, for reasons we still don't fully understand. Several companies have already developed drugs which block the CCR5 receptor.

"A combination of drugs that block both CCR5 and CXCR4 might prove to be a very successful form of HIV treatment, but we need to understand more about the consequences of blocking the activity of CXCR4, because this receptor is also involved in some of the normal immune system functions," he said.

Josephine Querido, senior science information officer at Cancer Research UK, welcomed the research findings.

"This is exciting research as CXCR4 has been linked to the growth and spread of a variety of different cancers. Unravelling the structure of this molecule is a vital step towards designing new drugs to help treat cancer."

These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise for real (from the BBC):

Virgin Galactic's spaceship makes solo flight

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

Virgin Galactic's suborbital spaceship, Enterprise, has made its first solo test flight, in California.

The spaceship was carried to an altitude of 45,000ft (13,700m) by an aeroplane and then dropped to glide back to the Mojave Air and Space Port.

Enterprise will soon be taking people prepared to pay $200,000 (£126,000) on short hops above the atmosphere.

The British billionaire behind the project, Sir Richard Branson, was on hand to witness the drop test.

"This was one of the most exciting days in the whole history of Virgin," the entrepreneur said.

"For the first time since we seriously began the project in 2004, I watched the world's first manned commercial spaceship landing on the runway at Mojave Air and Space Port and it was a great moment."

Virgin Galactic is aiming to become the world's first commercial space line, and has already taken deposits from 370 customers who want to experience a few minutes of weightlessness on a suborbital flight.

The Enterprise ship is based on the X-Prize-winning SpaceShipOne vehicle, which made history in 2004 by successfully flying to 100km (60 miles) in altitude twice in a two-week period.

The new ship, built by Mojave's Scaled Composites company, is bigger and will be capable of carrying eight people - two crew and six passengers.

When it eventually enters service, Enterprise will be carried to its launch altitude by the "Eve" carrier plane before being released in mid-air. Enterprise will then ignite its single hybrid rocket engine to make the ascent to space.

Although Eve and Enterprise have made several test flights together, Sunday was the first time the spaceplane had been released at altitude.

Two pilots were at the controls, Pete Siebold and Mike Alsbury. They guided the ship back to the Mojave runway.

The entire flight took about 25 minutes. On later test flights, Enterprise will fire its rocket engine.

Only when engineers are satisfied all systems are functioning properly will passengers be allowed to climb aboard.

And also today from the BBC:

Manned flight around Moon considered

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

The possibility of using the space station as a launching point to fly a manned mission around the Moon is to be studied by the station partners.

Letters discussing the concept have been exchanged between the Russian, European and US space agencies.

The Moon flight would be reminiscent of the 1968 Apollo 8 mission which snapped the famous "Earthrise" photograph.

The agencies want the station to become more than just a high-flying platform for doing experiments in microgravity.

They would like also to see it become a testbed for the technologies and techniques that will be needed by humans when they push out beyond low-Earth orbit to explore destinations such as asteroids and Mars.

Using the station as the spaceport, or base-camp, from where the astronauts set off on their journey is part of the new philosophy being considered.

"We need the courage of starting a new era," Europe's director of human spaceflight, Simonetta Di Pippo, told BBC News.

"The idea is to ascend to the space station the various elements of the mission, and then try to assemble the spacecraft at the ISS, and go from the orbit of the space station to the Moon.

"What we are thinking about right now - but again we need more technical work to address this - [is] it should be a small spacecraft that goes around the Moon."

This vehicle would then likely return straight to Earth, rather than returning to the ISS.

Earth departure

Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders made history when they undertook the first lunar mission, testing the Command/Service Module (CSM) and its life-support systems in preparation for the later Apollo 11 landing. Their craft actually made 10 orbits of the Moon before returning home.

Just as with Apollo, any modern venture would need some kind of CSM element for the astronauts, together with a departure stage - a propulsion unit that could accelerate the astronauts' vehicle out of low-Earth orbit, putting it on a path to the Moon.

The new study will assess what precise elements are needed, and how many can be adapted from the spacecraft systems already in existence.

It should be stressed, however, that the idea is just that at the moment - an idea. It is a long way from becoming reality; just because the concept is being examined does not guarantee it will fly.

It should be noted also that the agencies, their industrial partners and a number of "space tourism" advocates have all previously thought about repeating the Apollo 8 Moon mission, if only to do one simple loop around the back.

What may be different this time is the new thinking about how the ISS should be exploited in the coming years.

All five station partners - the US, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada - have indicated their desire to keep flying the platform until at least 2020. And engineers believe many of its modules will be serviceable even in the late 2020s.

Earth-orientated sciences in a zero-g environment will always be its priority, and with six individuals living permanently on the station the amount of astronaut time dedicated to experimentation has now been raised to something like 70 hours a week.

But with many laboratory tasks being automated, there should also be scope to begin new activities, and the partners believe one key role for the ISS going forward will be as a development platform for deep space exploration.

These activities could include demonstrations of new robots, inflatable modules in which to live or grow food ("greenhouses"), new life-support technologies, radiation protection systems, communications and sensor technologies, novel telemedicine approaches - anything that would be needed by astronauts on a self-sufficient mission far from Earth.

Learning how to assemble exploration vehicles at the ISS would also be part of this new vision.

If humans ever do go to asteroids or Mars, the scale of the infrastructure needed to complete a safe round trip could not possibly be launched on a single rocket from Earth. It will have to be sent up on multiple flights and joined together in orbit.

Doing this assembly at the ISS means it can be overseen by astronauts with ready access to tools if needed.

And if the crew assigned to man the deep-space mission travels up separately to the station, it would also mean all the elements for their long-duration flight could be launched without the complications of ultra-safe abort systems that complicate manned rockets.

The crew could instead ride to orbit in a simple, tried and tested rocket, such as a Soyuz, and then transfer across to their deep-space vehicle already waiting for them at the ISS.

And yet another bee story from the BBC

Bumblebees prefer stripes and red flowers, research suggests

Gardeners are being encouraged to grow striped flowers to encourage bumblebee populations, after research suggested the insects are most attracted to them.

Stripes on petal veins direct bumblebees to the flower's "central landing platform" and entrance to gather nectar and pollen.

Researchers also found that red flowers were also attractive to bees.

Bees play a key role in agriculture by pollinating crops.

The scientists say that growing especially inviting plants could be a way for people to help stem what has been called a "catastrophic" decline in UK bumblebee populations.

Stripes and spots

The research was to understand how pollinator decline can been halted, as a reduction in numbers can be "economically damaging and risks our food security", scientists say.

Professor Cathie Martin from John Innes Centre in Norwich said red and striped flowers were visited significantly more frequently than white or pink blooms. More flowers were visited per plant as well, she said.

Researchers from New Zealand also analysed how the stripy patterns were formed along the veins of the common snapdragon.

"Complex colour patterns such as spots and stripes are common in nature but the way they are formed is poorly understood," said Dr Kathy Schwinn of the New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research.

"We found that one signal comes from the veins of the petals and one from the skin of the petals, the epidermis. Where these signals intersect, the production of red anthocyanin pigments is induced."

Anthocyanins are plant pigments which colour red, purple and blue fruits and flowers.

A BBC report on a new carnivore found in Madagascar:

Scientists first caught the live specimen in 2005

A new species of carnivorous mammal has been discovered in Madagascar.

The mongoose-like creature has been called Durrell's vontsira (Salanoia durrelli) in honour of conservationist Gerald Durrell.

Scientists found the creature in the wetlands of Lake Alaotra, the largest lake in Madagascar.

Its marsh habitat is under pressure from invasive species and pollution, and the team thinks it could be one of the world's most threatened mammals.

They describe the cat-sized animal for the first time in the journal Systematics and Biodiversity.

A team from the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust first saw the mammal swimming in the lake during a field trip in 2004. Suspecting it might be a new species, they photographed it so their zoologist colleagues could examine it more closely.

A team then returned to the site in 2005, caught one of the animals and took detailed measurements and blood and tissue samples.

During the same expedition, the scientists sent one dead specimen to the Natural History Museum in London.

There, zoologists were able to compare the creature with its closest relative, the forest-dwelling brown-tailed vontsira, and finally confirm its identity.

Durrell's vontsira and the brown-tailed vontsira are similar but have very different colouring, explained the Natural History Museum's Dr Paula Jenkins, a member of the research team.

"In addition, we found obvious differences in the structure of the skull and teeth... the size and shape of the pads on the paws clearly distinguished this animal from the brown-tailed vontsira, which is a forest-dwelling animal found in eastern Madagascar.

"It was indeed a distinct new species and the specimen we have in the museum is now recognised as the holotype (the specimen from which the species takes its name) so it is available to scientists for research in the future."

'Incredibly rare'

The discovery of mammal species is uncommon and finding a new carnivore species is "particularly unusual", Dr Jenkins added.

"Durrell's vontsira is incredibly rare," she said.

"We know of only two animals in the wild. It has only been found in the wetlands of [Lake] Alaotra in Madagascar, so it lives in a very small area and is consequently vulnerable to the pressures on this threatened habitat."

The creature may be adapted to a semi-aquatic habitat

The researchers still know very little about the animal's behaviour and biology.

They think it may be a mongoose-like creature specifically adapted for an aquatic or semi-aquatic environment.

Professor John Fa, chief conservation officer at Durrell, told BBC News: "If that is the case, it's very interesting indeed; mongooses normally live in arid or forested areas.

"We think it feeds on fish and small mammals in the lake and if it's a mongoose that catches fish - that's very unusual."

The scientists hope to return to the lake to carry out a more detailed, systematic trapping study, and possibly to tag and follow the small mammals to see if their habitat is confined to the lake.

"This just shows how much biodiversity Madagascar is still throwing at us," Professor Fa added.

Since 2006, new mammal species found in this biodiversity hotspot have included three new species of mouse lemur (Microcebus jollyae, M. mittermeieri and M. simmoni) and a bat (Scotophilus marovaza).

But the last carnivore discovered on the island was Grandider's vontsira (Galidictis grandidieri), described in 1986.

It is classified as Endangered on The IUCN Red List.

The team also included researchers from Nature Heritage in Jersey and Conservation International (CI).

And another fossil story from the BBC, this time on plants:

The earliest plants to have colonised land have been found in Argentina.

The discovery puts back by 10 million years the colonisation of land by plants, and suggests that a diversity of land plants had evolved by 472 million years ago.

The newly found plants are liverworts, very simple plants that lack stems or roots, scientists report in the journal the New Phytologist.

That confirms liverworts are likely to be the ancestors of all land plants.

The appearance of plants that live on land is among the most important evolutionary breakthroughs in Earth's history.

Land plants changed climates around the globe, altered soils and allowed all other multi-cellular life to evolve and invade almost all of the continental land masses.

The discovery of the oldest known land plants was made by a team of researchers led by Claudia Rubinstein of the Department of Palaeontology at the Argentine Institute of Snow, Ice and Environmental Research in Mendoza, Argentina.

She and her collected samples of sediment from the Rio Capillas, in the Sierras Subandinas in the Central Andean Basin of northwest Argentina.

They then processed the sediment samples by dissolving them in strong acids, taking great care to avoid contamination.

Five varieties

In the sediment the team found hardy fossilised spores from five different types of liverwort, a primitive type of plant thought to have evolved from freshwater multi-cellular green algae.

"Spores of liverworts are very simple and are called cryptospores," Dr Rubinstein told the BBC.

"The cryptospores that we describe are the earliest to date."

The fossils were found in rocks of the Sierras Subandinas, Argentina

These spores, dating from between 473 and 471 million years ago, come from plants belonging to five different genera - groups of species.

"That shows plants had already begun to diversify, meaning they must have colonised land earlier than our dated samples," said Dr Rubinstein, who made the discovery with scientists at the National University of Cordoba, Argentina and the University of Liege, Belgium.

The researchers' best estimate is that the colonisation of land could have occurred during the early Ordovician period (488 to 472 million years ago) or even during the late Cambrian period (499 to 488 million years ago).

Highly resistant

The previous record holder of the earliest known land plants were small liverwort cryptospores found in Saudi Arabia and the Czech Republic.

These were dated at 463 to 461 million years old.

TALENTED PLANTS Read how plants are able to 'defy the effects of ageing' Last year, a new species of giant carnivorous plant was discovered Learn more about the Plant Kingdom at the BBC Wildlife Finder

All land plants produce spores or pollen in vast numbers.

These spores are enclosed in a thick protective wall that is incredibly resistant, meaning they fossilise well.

Whole plants fossilise less easily, explaining why the earliest "megafossils" of whole plants are much younger.

Cryptospores are just like modern plant spores, except for an unusual structural arrangement.

Shocking find

The discovery of spores from the oldest liverworts came as shock to the researchers.

"The surprise was so great that I asked my colleague Philippe Steemans to process the same sediment samples.

"He found exactly the same cryptospore assemblages, which demonstrated that the presence of the cryptospores in my samples was not due to a contamination," said Dr Rubinstein.

SOURCES Visit the New Phytologist to read more about the discovery of the earliest land plants Visit the New Phytologist to read an expert commentary on the significance of the discovery

The cryptospores from Argentina hint at where land plants originated.

"It most probably happened on Gondwana, as already demonstrated by previous discoveries, but very far, at least 5000km, from the Saudi Arabian and the Czech Republic, where previous earliest traces of land plants were found," said Dr Rubinstein.

As land plants matured, they evolved from liverworts into mosses, and then into plants known as hornworts and lycopods.

Then ferns appeared before seed plants, of which there are many species today, finally evolved.

A whale of a jourmey (from the BBC):

In a record-breaking journey, a female humpback whale has travelled across a quarter of the globe, a distance of at least 10,000km.

The event, reported in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, is the longest documented movement by a mammal.

Its voyage was also twice the distance that the whales typically migrate each season to new breeding grounds.

Scientists say the extreme behaviour shows how "flexible" these animals are.

Explore and adapt

The female whale was spotted and photographed twice - once at its regular breeding ground in Brazil, then later off the coast of Madagascar.

The shortest distance between these two locations is 9,800km.

The whales are identified by markings on their tails or flukes

The research team, led by Dr Peter Stevick from the College of the Atlantic in Maine, US, thinks the whale may have travelled this far in two distinct journeys.

"If I had to guess, I'd say this animal did a normal migration to the Antarctic [to feed] and went to Madagascar from there," Dr Stevick told BBC News.

"If I were to draw a track for it, it would be from Brazil to the Southern Ocean and from there into the Indian Ocean."

The scientists were able to identify the animal from photographs that were taken of its tail, or fluke.

Each humpback whale has unique markings on the pale underside of its fluke.

The team is involved in a long-term study, collecting and examining the pictures of the whale flukes in an effort to develop a "big picture" of humpback behaviour and their migration patterns.

WHALE BEHAVIOUR See the battle between male humpback whales as they fight for a potential mate The gray whale that 'came back from the dead' Humpback whales pay a seasonal visit to a reef to mate

Such a long-distance movement between different breeding grounds is very rare.

And the fact that this was a female whale made the event even more unusual, as males are more commonly known to explore in order to find mates.

"Some exploration helps them to remain adaptable," explained Dr Stevick.

"If animals always returned to exactly the same place to breed, if anything happened to change that environment, they might not be able to adapt, so very occasional exploration could be beneficial for them."

The journey would have taken the animal at least several weeks and so far the scientists only have records of these two sightings.

"But we gather these research photographs from all over the globe," said Dr Stevick.

"So we're hopeful we will see this animal again, or see other animals doing related things."

A BBC story from very very long ago:

Tiny tubes point to ancient life

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

Tiny tubes thought to have been etched into South African rocks by microbes are at least 3.3 billion years old, scientists can confirm.

A new analysis of the material filling the structures shows they were created not long after the volcanic rock itself was spewed on to the seafloor.

The tubules could therefore represent the earliest "trace" evidence of activity by life on Earth.

The dating work is reported in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

It is a follow-up study to the University of Bergen team's discovery of the microscopic tunnels and pits first published in 2004.

The structures are seen in rocks from the famous Barberton Greenstone Belt in the Mpumalanga Province of South Africa.

These rocks were originally erupted underwater but over the course of Earth history have been lifted on to dry land.

The basalt that forms the rock had previously been dated to 3.47-3.45 billion years old, but there was some doubt about when the tubules themselves were created.

By comparing the ratio of different types, or isotopes, of uranium and lead atoms in the material that now fills these tunnels, the team can show they must have been etched by about 3.34 billion years ago - in other words, very soon after the host rock itself was formed.

The issue of when life first appeared on our planet is a hotly debated topic.

The constant recycling of rock means there are very few locations like Barberton where a physical record of the ancient Earth can still be examined.

Some researchers argue that the peculiar chemistry of rocks at Isua in Greenland betrays the presence of bacteria some 3.8 billion years ago.

What is different about Barberton is that this geochemical signal is also supported by shapes and textures - so-called trace fossils - in the rock which could have been cut by the ancient microbes.

It is not the same as having the "body" fossils of the organism, but researchers can make a strong case that the shapes have a biological origin if they can point to similar tubules made by modern microbes. The Bergen team believes it can do this.

"We're kind of looking at their 'footprints' - we're looking at the holes, the microborings, left by the bugs as they dissolved into, or 'chewed', into the rocks," explained Dr Nicola McLoughlin from Bergen's Centre for Geobiology.

"So instead of looking at the microbe itself, you're looking at the cavity or hole that it makes. We're still working to convince people of the biogenicity of these things and we think we have really good constraints on the modern seafloor," she told BBC News.

"But things get more difficult in the ancient [setting] because the shapes are simpler and the chemistry has been modified. What this paper does show, however, is the progress we have made in dating these structures."

The Barberton rocks in which the tubules were first identified were found at the surface. The University of Bergen is now analysing rocks that have been drilled from deep underground.

At the very least, this type of investigation will researchers more about what conditions were like on Earth almost 3.5 billion years ago.

In space no-one can hear you crash. From the BBC:

Asteroid collision makes quite a picture

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

The dusty wreckage thrown out in the explosive collision of two asteroids has been pictured by spacecraft.

The debris stretches for hundreds of thousands of kilometres.

US and European scientists tell the journal Nature that a remnant rock about 120m in size sits at the head of this shattered stream of material.

Their investigations using the powerful imaging equipment on the Hubble telescope and the Rosetta probe suggest the pile-up occurred in early 2009.

Colin Snodgrass from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, worked on the Rosetta data.

He said the event offered a unique observing opportunity for researchers studying the Solar System.

"If you look at the literature on 'recent' asteroid collisions, they tend to talk about things occurring in the past million years or so - that's recent on geological timescales. But on the timescales involved in this event, we're really catching it in the moment of happening," he told BBC News.

The collision occurred beyond the orbit of Mars, hundreds of millions of km from Earth.

Unified conclusions

Two groups working independently studied the impact, and their findings are in strong agreement.

Initially, they thought they were looking at a comet which produces a characteristic trail of material as the ices that make up most of its body boil off in sunlight.

But when the researchers looked closer at their subject, they discovered some very un-comet-like features. The object, dubbed P/2010 A2, did not have the shroud, or coma, of gases enveloping its main body; nor was it moving in a direction expected of a comet in that part of the Solar System.

It was down to Hubble and Rosetta to reveal the object's true nature - a large rock followed by a wide band of debris blasted off its surface by the impact of a much smaller object that was itself most probably vaporised in the impact.

The two spacecraft brought different perspectives to the research given their widely separated viewing positions.

Hubble is sited in orbit around the Earth and can see some exceptionally fine detail; Rosetta, on the other hand, is positioned between Mars and Jupiter and can see aspects of the object's geometry that are beyond home-based observatories, revealing the debris stream's overall shape and angle.

Modelling the patterns in the dusty wreckage leads the scientists to the conclusion that the collision probably occurred sometime in February or March 2009.

David Jewitt, of the University of California, Los Angeles, led the Hubble group.

He said the research provided new insights into how asteroids behaved when they smashed into each other, and how the fall-out from these impacts contributed to the dust that pervades the Solar System.

"These observations are important because we need to know where the dust in the Solar System comes from, and how much of it comes from colliding asteroids as opposed to 'outgassing' comets," he explained.

"We can also apply this knowledge to the dusty debris discs around other stars, because these are thought to be produced by collisions between unseen bodies in the discs. Knowing how the dust was produced will yield clues about those invisible bodies."

Dr Jewitt said the smaller impactor was probably about three to five metres wide, and he calculated the pair likely collided at high speed, at about 18,000km/h.

This encounter was as powerful as the detonation of a small atomic bomb, the UCLA scientist noted.

The pressure of sunlight is now pushing the debris away from the remnant rock. If the material in this tail were brought together, it would make a ball 20m wide, Dr Jewitt suggested.

Remember this next time you are fed up with the food on a plane. From the BBC:

Background noise affects taste of foods, research shows

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

The level of background noise affects both the intensity of flavour and the perceived crunchiness of foods, researchers have found.

Blindfolded diners assessed the sweetness, saltiness, and crunchiness, as well as overall flavour, of foods as they were played white noise.

While louder noise reduced the reported sweetness or saltiness, it increased the measure of crunch.

The research is reported in the journal Food Quality and Preference.

It may go some way to explaining why airline food is notoriously bland - a phenomenon that drives airline catering companies to heavily season their foods.

"There's a general opinion that aeroplane foods aren't fantastic," said Andy Woods, a researcher from Unilever's laboratories and the University of Manchester.

"I'm sure airlines do their best - and given that, we wondered if there are other reasons why the food would not be so good. One thought was perhaps the background noise has some impact," he told BBC News.

"Nasa gives their space explorers very strong-tasting foods, because for some reason thay can't taste food that strongly - again, perhaps it's the background noise.

"There was no previous research on this, so we went about seeing if the hunch was correct."

Tasteful

In a comparatively small study, 48 participants were fed sweet foods such as biscuits or salty ones such as crisps, while listening to silence or noise through headphones.

Meanwhile they rated the intensity of the flavours and of their liking.

In noisier settings, foods were rated less salty or sweet than they were in the absence of background noise, but were rated to be more crunchy.

"The evidence points to this effect being down to where your attention lies - if the background noise is loud it might draw your attention to that, away from the food," Dr Woods said.

Also in the group's findings there is the suggestion that the overall satisfaction with the food aligned with the degree to which diners liked what they were hearing - a finding the researchers are pursuing in further experiments.

A disturbing fish story from the BBC:

Salmon 'losing distinct genetic characteristics'

By Mark Kinver Science and environment reporter, BBC News

The distinct genetic characteristics of salmon populations in Spain are being lost as a result of climate change and human interference, a study has warned.

A team of UK and Spanish researchers say disrupting the species' migratory behaviour and strong homing instinct could have long-term consequences.

They added that they were working on ways to "disentangle" the individual threats affecting salmon populations.

The findings appear in the journal Global Change Biology.

The team's study focused on the changes recorded over a 20-year period to Atlantic salmon populations in Asturias, Spain - considered to be the "vulnerable" southern limit of the species' natural range.

"Salmon develop quite distinct population structures because of their ability to home to their natal rivers," explained co-author Jamie Stevens, from the University of Exeter's School of Biosciences.

"If you have such a defined system, they will quite quickly develop genetic profiles that become definitive to a particular river system."

He said the unique characteristics meant that the fish adapted to the conditions found within a particular river.

"There is a whole bunch of things: river chemistry, ability of the fish to withstand things like temperature, behavioural factors like run time to the sea and return time to spawning grounds," Dr Stevens told BBC News.

"The reason why we do not want those structures broken down is because we know that those local populations have a range of adaptations that can give the fish an advantage within that river."

'Straying fish'

The team analysed 924 tissue samples taken from adult fish returning to five rivers in Asturias between 1988 and 2007. They found that the results were consistent with high levels of mixing between local populations of salmon.

Dr Stevens said the study identified two distinct periods. Until 1992, there were a lot of "foreign" fish being introduced to the river systems. After 1992, this practice was halted but there was still a high number of "straying fish".

"Historically, people who like fishing like to have big fish coming up their rivers, so there has been human movement of fish, such as from highly productive rivers in Scotland to other areas," he said.

"Introduced fish would, typically, be chosen for larger sizes and faster growth rates but they may have had very poor survival rates at sea or poor at returning to the river or spawning.

"That stopped in 1992, but we still had problems. As our paper shows, there is still not a big recovery towards the genetic differences that is a signal of healthy populations.

"So as the impact from the movement of fish by humans is subsiding, we have got other things coming into play that are also causing disruptions."

Previous studies had suggested that increased water temperature was linked to an increase in fish straying between rivers and a breakdown of population structures.

"Increased water temperature appears to disrupt the fidelity of salmon returning to their natal rivers," Dr Stevens added.

In their paper, the researchers from the universities of Exeter, UK, and Oviedo, Spain attempted to untangle how the different factors were undermining the salmon population structures of the five rivers.

They suggested that while the impact of the introduction of foreign fish was decreasing over time, the influence of changes to water temperature was becoming increasingly important.

However, they said that more data was required to get a clearer picture.

"Without many additional studies, it is not possible to determine the exact moment or life stage when the population structuring was eroded," they wrote.

"Long datasets of well-monitored populations could serve for this purpose."

They added: "The ability to disentangle the effects of climatic changes and anthropogenic factors (fisheries management practices) is essential for effective long-term conservation of this iconic species."

Dr Stevens also explained that salmon was often used as an indicator for the state of rivers: "Monitoring a fish that is a top predator gives you a really good feel for the overall health of river systems that you might want to manage."

So is it is a horse or a dog? from the BBC:

Vet's dog theory over ancient Uffington White Horse

The Uffington White Horse has been caught up in an identity battle after it was suggested it could be a dog.

Retired vet Olaf Swarbrick has said the ancient carving in the Oxfordshire hillside is not anatomically correct and has more canine-like features.

But the National Trust, which said soil samples indicated that the figure dated back 3,000 years to the Bronze Age, has rejected Mr Swarbrick's ideas.

However it admitted there were many theories about the carving.

Written records date back to the 12th Century but do not give proof of its exact age or why it was created.

It used to be thought that the figure was constructed by the Saxons to celebrate a victorious battle of King Alfred's. This view is now mainly discredited.

'Perpetual canter'

Mr Swarbrick wrote a letter to scientific journal the Veterinary Record appealing for his fellow professionals to cast their opinion on his claim.

He said he believed the figure looked like a hunting hound at full stretch.

"Anatomically it's not a horse at all," Mr Swarbrick said.

"It's too long and too lean and it has a long tail - horses don't have a tail the length of that stylised creature at Uffington."

Mr Swarbrick joked that its name might have to be changed.

"If I'm correct, it needs to have its horse removed - maybe the wolf hound of Uffington.

"The other thing about short-carved figures is that over the years they have had to be cleaned and refurbished and they do change in their shape over periods."

Keith Blaxhall, from the National Trust, said he thought its shape suggested the figure was supposed to be a horse.

"What you have to remember it's a stylised horse, almost like a stencil on the hillside, so it's not a complete figure of a horse, it's a suggestion.

"I would like to think it's frozen in perpetual canter across the downs.

"Visibility wise you can't see the entire figure, my theory is it's meant to be revered by the living and by the gods and the ancestors - a view from above and below."

From the BBC:

Fibre optic cables' data capacity may soon be reached

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Technology may stretch the capacity of the fibre optic cables used to carry data sooner than has long been thought, according to a report in Science.

The capacity limit has until recently been in the preparation of the light signals that pass through the cables.

But the report reviews recent laboratory results showing data rates that are more than half the ultimate limit of fibre optic cables.

It calls for urgent research to develop higher-bandwidth cables.

A number of innovations have in the past massively increased the data capacity of optical fibres.

The first change improved the transmission of the fibres, so that optical signals did not simply get absorbed as they passed through.

This resulted in fibres with data rates hundreds of times higher and theoretical capacities thousands of times higher than that.

Those improved fibres have become standard and now lie underground and undersea all over the globe; the limitation since then has been in the lasers and electronics that prepare and then translate the optical signals on either side of these "light pipes".

Now, David Richardson of the University of Southampton's Optoelectronics Research Centre says in the Science report that the best data rates measured in laboratory settings challenge the perceived notion that fibres are limitless conduits for data.

"The thought that the current fibre technology has infinite capacity is not true - we are beginning to hit the fundamental limits of the current technology," he told BBC News.

"We need to be looking at the next big breakthrough to allow us to continue to scale as we have traditionally done."

He said there are more increases to be had, for instance, in the way the light signals are encoded, but that "radical" gains will likely come from changes in the fibres themselves.

"If you gain a factor of two in bandwidth by developing a whole new amplifier technology, that's perhaps two or three years of capacity growth. To get radical changes - to get factors of 100 or 1000 - it's going to be extremely demanding.

"It's likely we're going to have to go right back to the fundamentals of the optics, the actual light pipes. And if you want to develop the next generation of cable, you want to be doing that 10 years in advance, not for tomorrow."

Market forces

Of course, the point at which the data rates required by internet users outstrip capacity depends only on how fast demand rises - a notoriously difficult figure to predict, as Geoff Bennett of telecoms firm Infinera points out.

"A small change in growth rate makes a big difference to the final numbers," he told BBC News.

"But whichever way it goes, it will be driven by market forces. Today, video is the only application we know that is stressing internet capacity. If people want YouTube or iPlayer video in 3D, '4k' high-definition, then maybe they'll have to pay more for it. And that will limit demand; that's how every other market works."

For his part, Dr Richardson feels that behavioural changes, as much as market forces, could easily push the limitations out later.

"Changes in the way we use the internet may well deal with it very straightforwardly," he said.

Or, as he wrote in the Science paper: "We may all increasingly need to get used to the idea that bandwidth - just like water and energy - is a valuable commodity to be used wisely."

This was mentioned on the BBC radio news this morning:

A study has revealed that a wind turbine's colour affects how many insects it attracts, shedding more light on why the turbines occasionally kill bats and birds.

Scientists say that turbines, most commonly painted white or grey, draw in insects. These then lure bats and birds - as they pursue their prey - into the path of the turbine blades.

Support for the idea comes from another study showing that bats are most often killed by turbines at night and in summer, when insects are most abundant.

Paint them purple?

"It had been speculated that insects may be attracted to turbine structures for some reason and this then could attract insectivorous species, such as birds and bats, to forage in the vicinity," said PhD student Chloe Long of Loughborough University, UK.

However, she added, "no other study has looked in detail at what specific insect species might be attracted to turbine installations or why".

So Miss Long and her Loughborough colleagues, Dr James Flint and Dr Paul Lepper, conducted the first empirical study of insect attraction to wind turbines, the results of which are published in the European Journal of Wildlife Research.

BAT STRIKES Bats are more likely to be killed by wind turbines at night and during the summer, researchers have discovered. The reason is thought to be because the turbines attract migrating insects. At some sites, 20 to 40 bats are killed each year per turbine, although rates of one to three bats are more typical. Now scientists have ascertained that 90% of bat mortality occurs in northern Europe between late July and early October. A similar pattern occurs in North America. Observations from both continents also show that most bats are killed on relatively warm nights with low wind speed. While the review by scientists does not provide all the answers, it suggests wind turbines are tall enough to attract insects migrating at night, which typically fly at heights of over 60m. Bats and birds are then killed by turbine blades as they feed on this insect bonanza.

In particular, they measured how a turbine's colour alters how many insects gather around it.

Most turbines are painted pure white or light grey, in a bid to make them as visually unobtrusive as possible.

But insects, it seems, are unlikely to ignore these muted tones.

The researchers measured how many insects were attracted to a range of paint colours, including pure white, light and dark grey, sky blue, red and purple.

They did so by laying out coloured cards in a random sequence next to a 13m-high three-blade wind turbine situated in a meadow near Leicestershire, UK.

The scientists were surprised by what they discovered.

"Our major conclusion from this work is that turbine paint colour could be having a significant impact on the attraction of insect species to the structure, both during the day and at night," Miss Long told the BBC.

What is more, turbines painted pure white and light grey drew the most insects bar just one other colour; yellow.

The insects attracted included small flies (body size less than 5mm); large flies (body size equal to or greater than 5mm); greenfly; moths and butterflies; thrips; beetles and crane flies.

"We found it extremely interesting that the common turbine paint colours were so attractive to insects," said Miss Long.

"Our findings support the hypothesis that turbines may be attractive to insects."

The least attractive paint colour to insects was purple.

That does not necessarily mean that all wind turbines should be painted that colour, say the researchers.

But it does imply that changing a turbine's colour could have a profound impact on the number of insects it lures in and therefore the number of birds and bats that follow.

The researchers also found that the ultraviolet and infrared components of paint colour, which humans cannot see but insects can, also had a significant impact, with higher levels of both attracting more insects.

SOURCES Visit the European Journal of Wildlife Research to learn more about how wind turbine colour attracts insects Visit the same journal to also learn about the link between bat mortality at wind turbines and nocturnal insects

"If the solution were as simple as painting turbine structures in a different colour this could provide a cost-effective mitigation strategy," says Miss Long.

But she and her colleagues suspect that other factors play a role in attracting birds and bats to wind turbines.

As well as the turbines' colour, the heat they generate may attract insects and their predators.

Bats may also find turbines difficult to detect using echolocation

I wouldn't mind having one of these stamps (from the BBC):

Rare Audrey Hepburn stamps up for sale

A rare sheet of 10 stamps showing film star Audrey Hepburn smoking is expected to fetch at least 400,000 euros (£350,000) at an auction next week.

The German Postal Service printed 14 million of the stamps in 2001 depicting the actress as Holly Golightly in the film Breakfast at Tiffany's.

But after Hepburn's son refused to grant copyright, all but a few sheets were destroyed.

Proceeds from the sale in Berlin next week will go to charity.

The stamps were printed as part of a series featuring classic film stars, but it was only after production that Sean Ferrer, the actress's son, was contacted for copyright permission.

"In the original photo, she's got sunglasses hanging from her mouth, but they had flipped the negative and replaced the glasses with the cigarette holder," Ferrer told AP.

He suggested either the original photo or an alternative, but the postal service hastily replaced the actress with a generic film roll and ordered the stamps to be destroyed.

Two sheets were spared, one for the Postal Service Archives and one for the German Post Museum, however two additional sheets of stamps disappeared.

'Supply and demand'

During the last six years, five of the missing stamps were sold at auction for between 62,500 euro (£54,700) - 173,000 euro (£151,000) by stamp appraiser Andreas Schlegel.

Schlegel then contacted Ferrer to suggest asking the German government if they could sell one of the archived stamp sheets for charity.

However, Ferrer already had a sheet the government had sent him for approval in 2001, which will now be sold.

Mercer Bristow, from the American Philatelic Society, said a contract Ferrer signed with the German finance ministry earlier this year, securing rights to the stamp sheet and ensuring the government would not sell either of its sheets until 2040, helped drive up the reserve price of the set.

"It goes back to supply and demand. It's the only sheet out there people can bid on and she's still such a popular actress," he said.

Money raised will be split between Unicef and the Audrey Hepburn Children's foundation.

Makes the rest of us seem like snails. From the BBC:

South Korean broadband speeds let content almost fly onto the screen

South Korea is already ahead of the global technological curve but it is looking to forge even further ahead by boosting broadband speeds across the nation.

It is not aiming at 100, 200 or even 500 megabits per second (Mbps). Instead it has devised a national plan for 1,000Mbps connections to be commonplace by 2012.

The government is encouraging enterprise to spend the 34 trillion Won (£19bn), required to complete the scheme. By way of a comparison, that figure is roughly the same as the nation's annual education budget.

In theory, this idea will give many homes in South Korea a connection speed 500 times faster than is guaranteed in the UK.

In practice, South Korea is already considered the country quickest for broadband. The current average connection, according to a report by web firm Akamai, is 12Mbps - the highest in the world.

How quick is a 1GB connection? Download Tolstoy's War and Peace: 0.002 secs (2mbps: 1 sec) Download a 45-minute album: 0.05 secs (2mbps: 26 secs) Download a 90-minute HD film: 3 mins 36 secs (2mbps: 30hrs) Watch 1-minute of Super HD: 6 mins 40 secs (2mbps: 200hrs)

The Kung family are just one of the families reaping the benefits of blisteringly fast broadband.

Click visited the family to find out how it used the high-speed link. On a typical day twenty-something Kevin would be in his bedroom immersed in multiplayer online gaming, an activity which South Koreans have adopted as something of a national sport

In the living room, Eunice and her toddler might be enjoying the television. Thanks to the fast connection they can watch and interact.

With a £12-a-month ($19) subscription to an internet TV service, the family has access to dozens of regular channels, tens of thousands of movies on demand, interactive services like Twitter, and English learning through subtitles and karaoke.

"At home I'm using 100 megabits right now and that satisfies me a lot because it's fast," says Eunice Kung.

"But 1,000 megabits in three years? That'll surprise people but I think it's a very natural conclusion because South Korean people are very impatient, they need everything quickly, quickly, quickly. They need more, all the time."

Wireless networks are seen as key to the future of mobile data

In the UK, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has said that Britain will lead Europe into the era of super-fast broadband by 2015.

Some companies are already promising speeds of around 50Mbps and the government has guaranteed a 2Mbps connection for everyone by the end of the current parliament.

But what can a 1,000Mbps super-fast connection be used for?

Firstly, it is about speed - Hollywood blockbusters can be downloaded in 12 seconds or the entire James Bond back catalogue can be delivered whilst the kettle boils.

Super HD

And one thing that is becoming increasingly common is streaming television. While a Department for Media, Culture and Sport spokesperson in the UK says that "two megabits is sufficient" for streaming services, the next generation of hi-definition content will stretch the bandwidth limits worldwide.

According to the Blu-ray Disc Association, it takes a 40Mbps connection to stream full HD content but that is only the tip of the iceberg.

3D images, by their very nature, require a quicker transfer rate and Super HD, to be introduced over the next decade, goes even further.

It has 16 times as many pixels as today's high-end HD and the compressed version needs a minimum bandwidth of 320Mbps. The uncompressed stream requires 24 gigabits a second.

South Koreans are often seen as an entire nation of "early adopters"

The quickening pace of fixed line and wi-fi services seems not to cater for the growing trend of mobile users. In South Korea, a network of LTE - advanced cellular data networks - is being introduced.

But Lee Suk-Chae, chairman of Korea Telecom, says that these networks alone will not be sufficient to meet our needs.

"I think in the future we will really see a data deluge - data will explode over the network," he says.

"And you cannot handle that data traffic only through the mobile internet. Although there will be LTE, still you won't be able to handle all that traffic.

"Fixed line is essential to support that traffic and in that sense, I think people want to watch the content they want anywhere, anytime, and to satisfy their demands you need to have a strong network, maybe a gigabit internet."

He says that only 10% of data transfer is through 3G networks, 70% coming through wi-fi - which is not that surprising when you consider the number of hotspots in South Korea's urban areas.

And with a nation full of early-adopters, it seems only a matter of time before Koreans are surfing the net at speeds the rest of us can only dream about.

A romantic story with a difference.
Some 4 years ago, Gerald the giraffe arrived as a youngster at Noah.s Ark Zoo in the Bristol area.


He lived there as he grew to adulthood

But he was lonely and the zookeepers tried to find him a companion. And then yesterday the BBC reported:

Bachelor giraffe in Bristol finally gets a girlfriend

A lonely giraffe in Bristol has finally found love after a worldwide search for a girlfriend which lasted four years.

Genevieve has been introduced to lanky bachelor Gerald following a 1,000 mile (1,609km) journey from Eastern Europe to Noah's Ark Zoo Farm in Wraxall.

Keepers at the zoo have been searching for a suitable girlfriend for the 15ft (4.6m) male since he arrived in 2006.

Head keeper Chris Wilkinson said that Genevieve was "well worth the wait" and Gerald was "a very lucky giraffe".

'Suitable friend'

The unlucky-in-love giraffe had struck up some unlikely relationships over the years including a "little and large" bond with Eddie the goat.

Now seven-year-old Gerald will not have to bend down quite so far as Genevieve stands only a few feet shorter than him at 12ft (3.7m).

"I've been here since the start, remembering quite clearly our hopes in the early days of keeping giraffes," added Mr Wilkinson.

"We've been looking for a suitable female friend for him ever since that day, with lots of setbacks to contend with and some false starts."

Previous potential partners were ruled out because of Blue Tongue regulations and a foot-and-mouth outbreak in South Africa.

Staff will now monitor the two giraffes closely and help them adjust to each other slowly as Genevieve gets used to her new surroundings.

An update on the story about the Audrey Hepburn stamps - they were sold at auction for 430,000 euros (£380,000). Two-thirds of the proceeds from Saturday's auction will go towards the Audrey Hepburn Children's Fund to help educate children in sub-Saharan Africa, while a third will go to Unicef. Audrey Hepburn was the goodwill ambassador for Unicef for the last 13 years of her life. She took this role far beyond what would have been expected of her and went on many journeys to places of horrific poverty. Her last trip only 4 months before she died was to Somalia.

Hepburn called it "apocalyptic" and said, "I walked into a nightmare. I have seen famine in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, but I have seen nothing like this – so much worse than I could possibly have imagined. I wasn't prepared for this". "The earth is red – an extraordinary sight – that deep terracotta red. And you see the villages, displacement camps and compounds, and the earth is all rippled around them like an ocean bed. And those were the graves. There are graves everywhere. Along the road, around the paths that you take, along the riverbeds, near every camp – there are graves everywhere"

The BBC article on the new IPCC report:

IPCC aims for clarity and relevance in new report

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

Providing information that policymakers can use is key to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as work begins on its next global assessment.

The report, known as AR5, will focus on factors that materially affect people's lives, such as the Asian monsoon.

It will also look at what aspects of climate change might be irreversible.

Leaders of the IPCC's scientific assessment were speaking to BBC News during a conference in South Korea aimed at modernising the organisation.

They indicated that procedures used in compiling AR5 will reflect some criticisms made in the wake of errors uncovered in its previous assessment, in 2007.

The recent review of the IPCC's procedures, conducted by the InterAcademy Council (IAC), an umbrella body for the world's science academies, said that some assertions about the likelihood of severe impacts were based on little research.

"Authors reported high confidence in statements for which there is little evidence, such as the widely-quoted statement that agricultural yields in Africa might decline by up to 50 percent by 2020," it noted.

The IAC recommended that the next assessment must deal much more carefully and consistently with uncertainties - and Chris Field, co-chair of the IPCC working group on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, indicated the message had been taken on board.

"The fact of the matter is that climate change impacts are very poorly known," he told BBC News.

"We only have mature scientific studies for a small number of topics and a small number of places, so we need to recognise that and figure out how, in an environment where the information is limited, we can still provide valuable information.

"What I expect us to do is to use the uncertainty guidance very carefully so we can avoid problems where we seem to be asserting more confidence than the data will allow; but also provide value to a discussion where the confidence isn't necessarily very high.

"After all, most people spend their lives making decisions under uncertainty, and that's what dealing effectively with climate change demands - the same kind of decisions you make when you decide to buckle your seatbelt, or buy insurance for your house or invest in the financial markets."

Natural changes

Increasingly, computer models of climate change are projecting impacts on a region-by-region basis, rather than globally.

This is widely acknowledged as vital for policymaking. But previous IPCC reports have not necessarily produced regional assessments in the most user-friendly or relevant way, suggested Thomas Stocker from the University of Bern in Switzerland, co-chair of the climate science working group for AR5.

"We will start from the processes that are necessary to characterise regional climate change, such as the El Nino Southern Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, monsoon systems around the world," he said.

"The new approach is that we first assess our physical understanding of these fundamental processes: what are the elements that change them, how do they respond to a background change in albedo or temperature or shift in rain bands ?

"Once we've assessed that, we then ask how does this knowledge inform us for projecting the monsoon in India, for example, or Southeast Asia? What does it tell about El Nino projections? And so forth."

The belief is that this process will make it easier for governments - and people - to assess how their lives may be affected by climate change, and so make better-informed policy choices.

Another issue that AR5 will grapple with in much more detail than previously is the influence of natural cycles on climate, particularly in the near-term.

Within the last few years, the world has seen the cooling influence of La Nina restrain the rise in global temperatures, before a switch to El Nino conditions put 2010 on course to be one of the warmest few years - perhaps the warmest of all - in recent times.

Researchers attempting to project temperatures for the next decade or so have to factor in numerous natural cycles as well as greenhouse warming, and Dr Stocker admitted that it is a confusing picture.

"It is an emerging field, the uncertainties are large. You can find studies with a cooling over the next 10 years, and others showing an enhanced warming - so the variety of simulation studies seems confusing," he said.

"So what we want to present is a good assessment of the issue of predictability; we probably won't provide a solution [to why the near term is hard to predict], but we will provide the scientific basis to explain it."

Active areas of research that are vital for understanding climate change - including the interactions of clouds and dust particles in the atmosphere, and sea-level rise - will receive their own detailed chapters.

Also for the first time, AR5 will take a detailed look at whether some aspects of climate change will lead to transformations of the Earth's land, air and oceans that are irreversible on human timescales.

Impactful agenda

With greenhouse gas emissions set to continue their rise as the global recession eases, there is growing acknowledgement that research on living with climate impacts - adaptation - is equally as important as studying ways of curbing emissions.

Developing countries - particularly those experiencing what they believe to be climate impacts now - are especially adamant that adaptation must secure equal status to mitigation.

Chris Field, who is based at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University in California, said that AR5 will take this concept on board.

In order to improve its analyses, the IPCC is adopting a new set of "scenarios" - projections of how the future may unfold, in terms of economic growth, the size of the world's population, policy choices on energy, and so on, all of which affect emissions.

Known as Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), the aim is to better integrate data and forecasts on different aspects of the future.

They are also designed to allow for more wide-ranging analyses of policy choices.

"The RCPs... allow us to explore many issues - not only in understanding policy implications, but also how those ramify into things that are as diverse as impacts on distributional equity, questions of justice, or migration," said Dr Field.

"[This is] a wide range of issues where it's been really difficult to figure out what's the climate part vs the societal part."

Interactions between the physical manifestations of climate change and societal issues will be expanded in the third part of AR5, on options for mitigation - a segment that will also include evaluation of what various policy choices mean economically.

"Since the release of AR4, there's been a vast amount of literature on socio-economic aspects of climate change," said IPCC vice-chairman Hoesung Lee.

"And the fifth assessment report will particularly look into this growing literature."

AR5 is due for publication in 2013-4, in four consecutive parts - science, impacts, mitigation and a synthesis - as in previous assessments.

But the procedures and timings have been adjusted with the aim of facilitating co-ordination between groups working on the various aspects - in particular, so that the most recent scientific projections can underpin the analysis of impacts.

The coming months will see the first meetings of lead authors for the first three segments, where they will plot out in more detail how to analyse the vastly increased amount of material on all aspects of climate change.

The Korea conference - the IPCC's annual plenary - ended with the partial adoption of reform measures recommended in the IAC review.

Most of the recommendations, however, are to be discussed by committees over the coming months, with the aim of tying up all the oustanding issues in May.

From the BBC:

'Ten years' to solve nature crisis, UN meeting hears

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News, Nagoya, Japan

The UN biodiversity convention meeting has opened with warnings that the ongoing loss of nature is hurting human societies as well as the natural world.

The two-week gathering aims to set new targets for conserving life on Earth.

Japan's Environment Minister Ryo Matsumoto said biodiversity loss would become irreversible unless curbed soon.

Much hope is being pinned on economic analyses showing the loss of species and ecosystems is costing the global economy trillions of dollars each year.

Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), described the meeting in Nagoya, Japan, as a "defining moment" in the history of mankind.

"[Buddhist scholar] Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki said 'the problem of nature is the problem of human life'. Today, unfortunately, human life is a problem for nature," he told delegates in his opening speech.

Referring to the target set at the UN World Summit in 2002, he said:

"Let's have the courage to look in the eyes of our children and admit that we have failed, individually and collectively, to fulfil the Johannesburg promise made by 110 heads of state to substantially reduce the rate of loss of biodiversity by 2010.

"Let us look in the eyes of our children and admit that we continue to lose biodiversity at an unprecedented rate, thus mortgaging their future."

Earlier this year, the UN published a major assessment - the Global Biodiversity Outlook - indicating that virtually all trends spanning the state of the natural world were heading downwards, despite conservation successes in some regions.

It showed that loss and degradation of forests, coral reefs, rivers and other elements of the natural world was having an impact on living standards in some parts of the world - an obvious example being the extent to which loss of coral affects fish stocks.

In his opening speech, Mr Matsumoto suggested impacts could be much broader in future.

"All life on Earth exists thanks to the benefits from biodiversity in the forms of fertile soil, clear water and clean air," he said.

"We are now close to a 'tipping point' - that is, we are about to reach a threshold beyond which biodiversity loss will become irreversible, and may cross that threshold in the next 10 years if we do not make proactive efforts for conserving biodiversity."

Climate clouds

In recent years, climate change has dominated the agenda of environmental politics.

And Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, suggested there is a lack of understanding at political levels of why tackling biodiversity is just important.

"This is the only planet in this Universe that is known to have this kind of life," he said.

"This fact alone should give us food for thought, But more importantly, we are destroying the very foundations that sustain life on this planet; and yet when we meet in these intergovernmental fora, society somehow struggles to understand and appreciate what it is what we're trying to do here, and why it matters."

On the table in Nagoya is a comprehensive draft agreement that would tackle the underlying causes of biodiversity loss, as well as setting new targets for conservation.

At the heart of the idea is the belief that if governments understand the financial costs of losing nature, they can adopt new economic models that reward conservation and penalise degradation.

A UN-sponsored project called The Economics of Ecosytems and Biodiversity (TEEB) calculates the cost at $2-5 trillion per year, predominantly in poorer parts of the world.

Jane Smart, head of the species programme at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), said that although the problem was huge and complex, there were some encouraging signs.

"The good news is that when we carry out conservation, it does work; we increasingly know what to do, and when we do it, it works really really well," she told BBC News.

"So we need to do a lot more conservation work, such as protected areas - particularly in the sea, in the marine realm - we need to save vast areas of ocean to protect fish stocks - not to stop eating fish, but to eat fish in a sustainable way."

Triple win

Governments first agreed back in 1992, at the Rio Earth Summit that the ongoing loss of biodiversity needed attention. The CBD was born there, alongside the UN climate convention.

It aims to preserve the diversity of life on Earth, facilitate the sustainable use of plants and animals, and allow fair and equitable exploitation of natural genetic resources.

The UN hopes that a protocol on the final element - known as access and benefit sharing (ABS) - can be secured here, 18 years after it was agreed in principle.

However, the bitter politicking that has soured the atmosphere in a number of UN environment processes - most notably at the Copenhagen climate summit - looms over the Nagoya meeting.

Some developing nations are insisting that the ABS protocol be signed off before they will agree to the establishment of an international scientific panel to assess biodiversity issues.

The Intergovernental science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is due to be signed off during the current UN General Assembly session in New York.

Many experts - and Western governments - believe it is necessary if scientific evidence on the importance of biodiversity loss is to be transmitted effectively to policymakers.

I don't think this report from the BBC will come as much of a surprise:

UK net is "not ready" for future

The UK is slowly climbing up the broadband world rankings, but is still not "ready for tomorrow," according to a global study of net services.

The annual report, commissioned by network giant Cisco, looks at how well countries are doing in terms of both quality and penetration of net services.

The UK is now ranked 18th out of 72 countries, up from 25th place last year.

South Korea is once again ranked first.

The annual study, conducted by the University of Oxford's Said Business School and the University of Oviedo in Spain looks at a range of factors, including both the number of homes to have broadband and the quality of the services.

Quality, for the purposes of the study, encompasses the speed of the connection and the latency - the amount of time it takes data to arrive at a machine.

It put 14countries in the elite category of being ready for the "applications of tomorrow", including the obvious; Korea, Japan and Sweden and the less obvious; Latvia, Bulgaria and Portugal.

In 2008, when the first study was commissioned, only one country - Japan - was judged ready for tomorrow.

The applications ascribed to tomorrow's internet include high definition internet TV and high-quality video communications.

The report found that such applications would require an average download speed of 11Mbps and an upload speed of 5Mbps.

The average global upload speed currently is just 1.7Mbps.

In this year's report the UK is categorised as "comfortably enjoying today's applications", alongside 19 others including the USA, France, Canada, Greece and Poland.

A further 19 countries - including Vietnam, Egypt, China and India, are characterised as being "below today's application threshold" while five countries - Algeria, Peru, Nigeria, Kenya and Angola - are viewed as having only the most basic of services.

The report finds that average broadband speeds in the UK now stand at 6.4Mbps (megabits per second), which is more than double that in 2008, when the first report was compiled.

It is also above the global average of 5.9Mbps.

"The UK is not on average ready for tomorrow but there has been significant improvements in the last two years," said Fernando Gil de Bernabe, a senior director at Cisco.

Mr de Bernabe said the UK was likely to experience a "step-change" in its broadband footprint over the next 12 months, because of increased fibre optic roll-outs from BT and extensions of Virgin Media's cable network.

"Where similar fibre roll-outs have happened the download speeds improved by 50 or 60% in just one year," he said.

Those countries which are categorised as ready for tomorrow in the report have one thing in common, according to Mr de Bernabe.

"There is a clear digital strategy. These countries have placed a bet on broadband and think it will have the same impact on their economies as the infrastructures of the past. They want a society that is based on knowledge," he said.

The UK government has ambitions to be the best broadband economy in Europe by 2015, although it has so far only committed to the rollout of basic 2Mbps broadband by that date.

That decision could mean the UK falls foul of European legislation. The European Union wants member states to provide citizens with a minimum of 30Mbps broadband by 2020, with all nations offering basic broadband - generally regarded as 2Mbps - for all by 2013.

Mr de Bernabe said the UK needed to put its pledge into practise.

"What I hear repeatedly is the question about who is going to pay for it. The leadership countries aren't asking those questions," he said.

A UK satellite story from the BBC:

Satellite to demonstrate UK tech

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

The UK is going to develop a satellite to trial innovative space technologies.

It is hoped the components and instruments flying on TechDemoSat (TDS) can prove their worth and go on to win substantial international business.

Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) will lead the project.

Payload participants are likely to include a novel instrument to measure the state of the sea, another to track ships from orbit, and even one to destroy TDS at the end of its life.

The latter is a "sail" that would be deployed from the satellite to force it out of the sky to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere. Efficient technologies to retire defunct spacecraft are expected to have big markets in the future.

The core mission design of TDM is being funded with a grant of £770,000 from the UK government's Technology Strategy Board (TSB) and the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA).

Assuming that all goes well, a further £2,730,000 will be released to move the project into the build and test phase.

"One of our key philosophies is to help companies overcome barriers to market," said the TSB's Michael Lawrence.

"There are a number of British-based space companies out there that have great technology but they need to demonstrate it in orbit. Hopefully, this initiative will help them prove the technology works and that will open up commercial markets for them," he told BBC News.

Reflected GPS signals

TechDemoSat will have a challenging timetable. SSTL wants to be able to ship the satellite to the launch pad in 18 months' time.

All the companies and academic institutions hoping to fly payloads must pay their own costs.

The participants, while still under final selection, are expected to include Com Dev Europe, SSTL, Selex Galileo, Qinetiq, Aero Sekur, RAL Space, Oxford University, University of Surrey, Leicester University, MSSL and the Langton Star Centre (which will be providing a UK schools experiment).

One of the biggest proposed payloads at 7.5kg is SSTL's own - an Earth observation instrument designed to measure the state of the ocean.

"It makes use of the fact that there are a lot of GPS signals coming down from space and these get reflected off the ocean's surface. The instrument can intercept them to infer things about the sea state. So depending on whether the water is choppy or smooth, you get a different type of return signal," explained Doug Liddle, SSTL's head of science.

One of the smallest payloads, weighing just 750g, is being provided by Selex Galileo. This is a sugar-cube-sized gyroscope that can sense the orientation of the spacecraft.

Aero Sekur is behind the space sail. It takes the form of a deployable membrane. Residual air molecules still present in the spacecraft's low-Earth orbit will catch the sheet and pull TDS out of the sky much faster than would normally be the case - certainly, within the international 25-year-guideline recommended for redundant space hardware.

It is hoped the TechDemoSat project can emulate the Mosaic (Micro Satellite Applications in Collaboration) programme of a decade ago.

Then, £11m of public investment in spacecraft projects led by SSTL ultimately resulted in the company winning almost £300m in export business.

Launch funds

It is just the sort of initiative recommended by the recent Space Innovation and Growth Strategy (Space-IGS) which set out a 20-year plan to maximise the potential of the UK's highly successful space sector.

There are more payload ideas in British industry and academia than can be accommodated on the demonstrator, and Michael Lawrence said it was possible the opportunity could be repeated in the future.

"We'll need to see how this one works - if it delivers to time, to budget," he said. "There will be many factors to consider, but if this goes the way we want it to then I would hope there will be a TechDemoSat-2."

One matter which still needs to be resolved is how TDS-1 gets into orbit.

With the TSB/SEEDA funding and the payload participants carrying their own costs, there is sufficient cash to get the satellite built - but not launched.

The cost of a ride to space for a 150kg spacecraft like TDS can be about £2.5m if the spacecraft shares the rocket with a group of other satellites. This is an issue the UK Space Agency will have to address in due course.

All you ever wanted to know about cane toads from the BBC:

Scientists have demonstrated a "runaway evolutionary effect" that is speeding up Australia's cane toad invasion.

This explains why the invasive toads have increased their rate of spread so dramatically, the researchers say.

They found that toads living at the very edge of their range were "super-invaders" - able to move beyond the boundaries of this existing habitat.

And when toads at the frontiers bred, their offspring inherited this ability to move quickly into new territory.

This phenomenon, which scientists have termed the Olympic Village Effect, has been proposed before, since these same scientists observed that the toads at the edge of the range had bigger front legs and stronger back legs - all the better to jump and to invade new areas.

In this study, the researchers tested the effect, essentially setting up a cane toad race.

Radio tags allowed the scientists to track the toads

Dr Ben Phillips from James Cook University in Queensland, Australia collected cane toads from four different populations.

He captured ten toads from the core population in northern Queensland, and ten from each of three populations that were increasingly distant from this point.

He took the toads to a facility in the appropriately named Middle Point near Darwin, where he fitted them with radio tags and then released them. The tags enabled the scientists to follow the toads' progress.

As Dr Phillips expected, toads that were collected from the edge of the range were much faster movers.

All in the genes

To confirm that this increased strength and speed had a genetic basis and could be inherited, Dr Phillips studied a generation further.

He allowed toads from the same population to breed. Then he set up another radio-tagged toad race, this time between these captive-bred offspring.

Toads that had parents from the edge of the range won the dispersal race, revealing that they inherited their speed and strength from their parents.

"It's bad news," Dr Phillips told BBC News. "It means they're getting faster and better at invading new areas."

Even worse, the researchers say, all animal invasions are likely to follow this pattern.

He explained that the faster moving toads even reproduced more quickly. But this could point to a chink in their biological armour.

"They have to be trading something off to do that," he said. "And one of the things we suspect is that they're trading off their immune systems."

SOURCES Visit the Journal of Evolutionary Biology to learn more about this runaway evolutionary effect Visit the IUCN Red List to find out more about the spread of invasive cane toads

Since the bigger, faster toads spread and breed so quickly, they are likely to leave any endemic diseases and parasites behind them because toads that move so quickly are likely to be disease-free.

This could mean that they and their offspring have less natural immunity. If this is the case, it could help scientists develop some sort of biological defence against the toads.

"If you re-introduce [these] parasites at the edge of the range, perhaps you could slow down the invasion," said Dr Phillips.

He and his colleagues plan to study the creatures in more detail in the hope of pinpointing some of these biological weak spots.

Cane toads were introduced to Australia in 1935, to north tropical Queensland to control sugar cane pests. They failed to do this, but succeeded in becoming one of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) top 100 invasive species.

Their range now extends through most of Queensland and into Australia's Northern Territory.

"They're certainly up there with the worst invasive species," said Dr Phillips. "They're doing well for themselves, you have to give them that."

The work was published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.

An erupting story from the BBC:

Mount Etna mapped by radar satellites

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

Two German radar satellites flying in tight formation above the Earth have returned their first combined images.

TanDEM-X and TerraSAR-X are circling the globe just 350m apart as they get set to make the most detailed 3D map of the Earth's surface ever acquired.

Their close proximity allows them to view the same patch of ground simultaneously but from slightly different angles.

This remarkable stereo vision has been demonstrated in an image of Mount Etna.

The German space agency (DLR) said on Tuesday that the picture was the first of its kind to be made by satellites flying in such a close formation.

It shows the Italian volcano on the east coast of Sicily. On the left of the image, in the foothills of the volcano, the city of Catania is visible as a collection of white points.

This 3D view of the mountain was generated from data recorded by TanDEM-X and TerraSAR-X in their new interferometric mode in which one spacecraft acts as a transmitter/receiver and the other as a second receiver - a so-called bistatic radar arrangement.

The pair will soon begin an intense observation campaign that will pin down the variation in height across the globe to a relative accuracy of better than two metres.

This seamless digital elevation model (DEM) will be put to myriad uses - everything from improving the safety of aircraft navigation to understanding better which areas of ground are most at risk during a flood.

TerraSAR-X was launched in 2007. TanDEM-X was put in space in June, since when it has been brought closer and closer to its more established sibling.

The very close proximity manoeuvres were conducted step-by-step last week.

The orbits of the two spacecraft have been given a very small offset which means they trace paths across the sky that look like the strands of a double helix. This should ensure they never bump into each other.

They will be brought even closer together in the next few months - down to separation of 200m - whereupon they will begin building their global DEM.

The pair's radars work by constantly bouncing microwave pulses off the ground and sea surface. By timing how long the signal takes to make the return trip, the instruments can determine differences in height.

The TanDEM-X/TerraSAR-X venture is operated on the basis of a public-private partnership. The German space agency owns the hardware; EADS Astrium builds it; and Infoterra GmbH has exclusive rights to commercialise the data.

Responsibility for controlling the spacecraft falls to the German Space Operations Centre (GSOC) in Oberpfaffenhofen.

More from the BBC:

Globalstar rolls out new network

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

A Soyuz rocket carrying six spacecraft for Globalstar Inc has lifted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome.

The US-based company is the first of the major mobile satellite phone and data services organisations to start upgrading their constellations.

The six new spacecraft were deployed by the Soyuz 100 minutes after leaving the ground at 2310 local time (1710 GMT).

A further 18 satellites will be launched over the next year to replace those that are failing.

"The way these systems work is that every time you put a satellite in space, the service improves significantly," said Tony Navarra, president of the company's global operations.

"It will take up to three months for the first six satellites to be fully put into their positions in their orbital rings or planes. We will probably have the entire constellation reconstituted, ready to be under full service by the summer of 2011," he told BBC News.

Customers using sat phones on the network have experienced an increasingly patchy service as the performance of the first generation spacecraft has degraded.

Rolled out in the late 1990s, many of these original satellites have suffered suspected radiation damage to their S-band transmitter equipment, which has limited their ability to handle two-way communications.

To compensate, the company has grown markets that rely on one-way messaging for security and safety. Its Spot services, for example, run off small devices that can be carried by a child, a backpacker or a boat, and which relay simple information back to a receiver about location and movement.

Globalstar says its $1bn replacement programme will not only restore the network to full capability but significantly enhance the services like Spot that it is able to offer in the future.

The new spacecraft have been built by the French-Italian manufacturer Thales Alenia Space (TAS). Weighing some 700kg, the satellites have a trapezoidal shape that conserves volume and allows them to be clustered on the cone-shaped dispenser Soyuz uses to deploy them in orbit.

The 24 new spacecraft will be incorporated along with eight late-stage first-generation satellites into a 32-platform constellation operating 1,414km above the Earth. This will give coverage to about 70 degrees North and South.

TAS has also been contracted by Globalstar's key competitor Iridium to build its second-generation network as well.

The Iridium system comprises 66 operational satellites. These spacecraft are not expected to begin launching until 2015.

"We have dedicated infrastructure just for building constellations," said Luigi Pasquali, CEO for Thales Alenia Space Italy.

"Our facility in Rome was established for the original, first-generation Globalstar system. In that facility we have put in place the means to build up and test satellites in series. We have stations where we park the satellite, we make something and then we move it into another bay, and so on - just like Ferrari," he told BBC News.

I've just spotted this on the BBC site:

On how the leopard got its spots

By Katia Moskvitch Science reporter, BBC News

Leopards' spots and tigers' stripes are a camouflage closely tied to their habitats, researchers say.

A UK team examined the flank markings of 37 species of wild cats in a bid to understand the spectacular variety of their colour patterns.

The scientists say that cats living in the trees and active at low light levels are the most likely to have complex and irregular patterns.

They published the findings in a Royal Society journal.

It is not the first study to suggest that wild cats need spots to "vanish" in dense forests, sandy deserts or snowy mountains.

But this time, the researchers analysed the colour patterns' detailed shapes and complexities, stating that these two factors are vital for camouflage.

To examine different patterns, the team used images obtained from the internet and classified them with the help of mathematical formulas.

"[Some species] are particularly irregularly and complexly spotted," William Allen from the University of Bristol, the lead author of the study, told BBC News.

"The pattern depends on the habitat and also on how the species uses its habitat - if it uses it at night time or if it lives in the trees rather than on the ground, the pattern is especially irregularly spotted or complexly spotted."

Kipling's inspiration

The first part of the study's title, as it appears in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B is "Why the leopard got its spots".

Dr Allen said that the title has been inspired by a short story of Rudyard Kipling with a similar name, "How the leopard got his spots".

In the story, an Ethiopian first changed his skin colour to black and then "put his five fingers close together (there was plenty of black left on his new skin still) and pressed them all over the Leopard, and wherever the five fingers touched they left five little black marks, all close together. Sometimes the fingers slipped and the marks got a little blurred; but if you look closely at any Leopard now you will see that there are always five spots - off five black finger-tips".

Dr Allen explained that though the fingertips idea was understandably fictitious, Mr Kipling's deduction about leopards needing spotty coats to "disappear" among trees was spot on.

"The mechanism - the fingerprint - isn't the right idea, but it is actually the case that leopard's spots and similar patterns evolve in forest habitats," said the scientist.

Dr Allen's study still fails to explain the mechanism of wild cats' pattern development - but the scientists managed to find a set of numbers to measure the irregularity or complexity of a pattern and correlate this with where the species lives to explain its behaviour.

"We've shown that the usefulness of patterns for species' survival can be related to a mathematical model of how the pattern arises and what that does is it gives more complex information on why the leopard has its spots," said Dr Allen.

And it is all about genetics, he added.

"When you place cat patterning over the evolutionary tree of cats, you can see that patterning emerges and disappears very frequently within the cat family, which is kind of interesting - it suggests that perhaps particular genetic mechanisms can solve very different appearances of cats."

Other theories

Previously, researchers believed that wild cats used their colour patterns to attract members of the opposite sex, but Dr Allen's team discounted this theory, saying that if there were a sexual motive, "you'd expect to see different patterns in males and females, which you don't".

"Another idea is that the patterns might have some sort of social signalling function, but again we didn't support this because the type of pattern cats have isn't related to their social system.

"For example, lions don't have particular flank markings that help them get along with living in prides."

What's so wrong with Comic Sans?

Comic Sans, that unassuming jaunty typeface lurking inside millions of computers, has become the target of an online hate campaign. Simon Garfield explains why normally mild-mannered people are so enraged by its use.

How did schools ever advertise their Christmas fairs without it? Has a homemade birthday card ever looked so friendly written in anything else? Have type lovers ever found anything they loathe as much?

If you wrote these questions in Comic Sans you'd have something that was warm, inoffensive and rather unsuitable, a typeface that's gone wrong. And you'd also have something guaranteed to provoke a howl of protest.

Comic Sans is unique: used the world over, it's a typeface that doesn't really want to be type. It looks homely and handwritten, something perfect for things we deem to be fun and liberating. Great for the awnings of toyshops, less good on news websites or on gravestones and the sides of ambulances.

Last year it stuck out like an unfunny joke in Time magazine and Adidas adverts, and even the BBC wasn't immune, choosing the font to promote its Composers of the Year during the Proms.

What can be done? One can buy the "Ban Comic Sans" mugs, caps and T-shirts, and help finance a documentary called Comic Sans, Or the Most Hated Font In The World.

Black-tie do (not)

Holly and David Combs, the husband and wife cottage industry behind bancomicsans.com, argue that the misuse of the font is "analogous to showing up for a black tie event in a clown costume". Some of what the Combses have to say is tongue-in-cheek, but it is hard to disagree with their claims that type - used well or badly - has the ability to express meaning far beyond the basic words it clothes.

But why, more than any other font, has Comic Sans inspired so much revulsion?

Partly because its ubiquity has led to such misuse (or at least to uses far beyond its original intentions). And partly because it is so irritably simple, so apparently written by a small child. Helvetica is everywhere and simple too, but it usually has the air of modern Swiss sophistication about it, or at least corporate authority. Comic Sans just smirks at you, and begs to be printed in multiple colours.

Perhaps the most comic thing about Comic Sans is that it was never designed as a font for common use. It was intended merely as a perfect solution to a small corporate problem.

It was created in 1994 by Vincent Connare, who worked at Microsoft with the title of "typographic engineer".

Mrs Gates' role

In 1994, Connare looked at his computer screen and saw something strange. He was clicking his way through an unreleased trial copy of Microsoft Bob, a software package designed to be particularly user-friendly. It included a finance manager and a word processor, and for a time was the responsibility of Melinda French, who later became Mrs Bill Gates.

But the typeface it used was Times New Roman, which Connare judged to be a strange choice. It was a little harsh and schoolmasterly, not to say boring. It was not something that would hold your hand in a welcoming way.

Connare was a fan of the graphic novel, and was inspired by the speech bubbles to create something simple and rounded, letters that might have been created by cutting with blunt scissors (the truth is he used a popular font-making software package).

His font, not yet called Comic Sans, was rejected for technical reasons (it didn't fit the existing grids), but not long afterwards was adopted for the successful Microsoft Movie Maker. It was then included as a supplementary typeface in the Windows 95 operating system, where everyone with a PC could not only see it, but use it.

Better than Times New Roman

And thus it became a global phenomenon, something that would inspire attention from Design Week magazine to the Wall St Journal. Connare later explained why it worked so well: "'Because it's sometimes better than Times New Roman, that's why."

One thing the Comic Sans debate has demonstrated beyond doubt is that one's choice of font is now a serious affair.

Twenty years ago fonts were not something most of us gave much of a second thought. Unless we were in the print or design industries, fonts were something we accepted rather than chose.

The pull-down menu on our computers changed everything. Here was a way of expressing our intentions and emotions in a new way, a choice that stretched from digital updates of Garamond from the 16th Century up to modern screen fonts such as Georgia and Calibri.

We could employ the efficient Gill Sans for job applications or the more elegant Didot for wedding invitations. We could become familiar with the differences between serif faces and sans serifs, the former with feet and tips on their letters, the latter usually with a less formal air. And we could unleash a seemingly harmless childlike new font on a defenceless world.

Almost inevitably, the Comic Sans backlash has produced a backlash of its own. There are already signs that the font may be becoming retro-chic, in the same way that we now embrace 80s fashion and pop. Most significant of all, it has become highly regarded by those who work with dyslexic children - one of the better uses for which it was never intended.

And yes, I have used the Comic Sans font in my introduction to the above posting. But there's no font option on the post reply row of icons you say. And if you create say a word document in anything other than the font used on this forum, then copy and paste over here, you find that it just goes back to the forum font. So I have used a different method but it's too impractical for regular use

On the BBC news this morning, the announcement of the most distant object yet seen:

Galaxy is most distant object yet

A tiny faint dot in a Hubble picture has been confirmed as the most distant galaxy ever detected in the Universe.

This collection of stars is so far away its light has taken more than 13 billion years to arrive at Earth.

Astronomers used the Very Large Telescope in Chile to follow up the Hubble observation and make the necessary detailed measurements.

They tell the journal Nature that we are seeing the galaxy as it was just 600 million years after the Big Bang.

"If you look at the object in the Hubble image, it really isn't much," said Dr Matt Lehnert of the Observatoire de Paris, France, and lead author on the Nature paper

"We really don't know much about it, but it looks like it is quite small - much, much smaller than our own Milky Way Galaxy. It's probably got only a tenth to a hundredth of the stars in the Milky Way. And that's part of the difficulty in observing it - if it's not big, it's not bright," he told BBC News.

Scientists are very keen to probe these great distances because they will learn how the early Universe evolved, and that will help them explain why the cosmos looks the way it does now.

In particular, they want to see more evidence for the very first populations of stars. These hot, blue giants would have grown out of the cold neutral gas that pervaded the young cosmos.

These behemoths would have burnt brilliant but brief lives, producing the very first heavy elements.

They would also have "fried" the neutral gas around them - ripping electrons off atoms - to produce the diffuse intergalactic plasma we still detect between nearby stars today.

So, apart from its status as a record-breaker, the newly discovered Hubble galaxy, classified as UDFy-38135539, is of keen interest because it is embedded directly in this time period - the "epoch of re-ionisation", as astronomers call it.

The galaxy was one of several interesting candidates identified in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UDF) image of the Fornax Constellation acquired with the telescope's new Wide Field Camera 3 last year.

As a source of light, it barely registers on the Hubble picture which was made from an exposure lasting 48 hours.

Astronomers knew from the UDF data that the galaxy must be very far away, but it took some exquisite measurements using the Yepun Very Large Telescope unit on Mount Paranal in the Atacama Desert to determine the precise distance.

This was done using the Sinfoni instrument attached to Yepun. The spectrograph was able to pick apart the weak infrared light and establish the degree to which it had been stretched on its long journey through space and time by the expansion of the Universe.

Using this measure, known as redshift, the astronomers could confirm that UDFy-38135539 was more than 13 billion light-years distant (a redshift of 8.55).

Dr Andy Bunker from Oxford University, UK, worked with one of the Hubble teams that first spotted the galaxy. He said Lehnert and colleagues had made a compelling case for the object's great distance.

"These things are incredibly faint and far away," he commented. "You're talking about an emission line that's a small fraction of the brightness of the night sky and you have to be very careful in your measurement; but this group is careful. The result looks convincing," he said.

A redshift of 8.55 puts the galaxy firmly within the epoch of re-ionisation.

At this early time, theory indicates, the Universe would not have been fully transparent. Much of it would have been filled with a hydrogen "fog" that absorbed the fierce ultraviolet light coming off the young galaxies.

Only as these galaxies ionised this neutral gas filling the space between them did their light sweep out across the cosmos.

One of the more puzzling aspects of the discovery is that the glow from UDFy-38135539 would not have been strong enough on its own to burrow a path through the opaque hydrogen fog.

This means there must be fainter, less massive galaxies - unseen in the Hubble UDF - helping to clear out the neighbourhood.

Professor Malcolm Bremer of Bristol University, UK, is a co-author on the Nature paper. He explained the importance of these distant objects to astronomy:

"They're beautiful probes of our understanding of galaxy formation because we're seeing them at their earliest stages and therefore, hopefully, at their simplest," he said.

"If we want to believe we understand galaxy formation and evolution, then we would want to be able to say that the observed properties in these early galaxies are what we've been predicting. We want to see the start of the process," he told BBC News.

These observations on both Hubble and the VLT push current technology to the limit.

Astronomers have other candidates of similar distance in the UDF they hope to confirm soon. However, the real breakthrough in observing the epoch of re-ionisation is probably going to have to wait until more powerful telescopes and techniques are established.

This next-generation astronomy will include Hubble's successor (the James Webb Space Telescope) and the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) to be built near the VLT in Chile.

The ELT will catch the faintest starlight with a mirror some 42m across. That is five times the diameter of Yepun's primary mirror.

Soon you'll be able to see the Dead Sea Scrolls for yourself. However it would help if you are able to read Aramaic, Ancient Greek and Hebrew. From the BBC:

Google helps Dead Sea Scrolls enter internet age

Sixty years after a shepherd happened upon the Dead Sea Scrolls, a plan aims to bring them into the internet age.

Researchers at the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), aided by scientists at Google, plan to image the 2,000-year old documents and publish them online.

The collection of biblical texts are made up of 30,000 fragments which together comprise 900 manuscripts.

The high-resolution images will be made available for free in original form and with translations.

"This project will enrich and preserve an important and meaningful part of world heritage by making it accessible to all on the internet," said professor Yossi Matias, of Google-Israel.

"We shall continue with this historical effort to make all existing knowledge in archives and storages available to all."

The scrolls, which include texts form the Hebrew Bible, are currently housed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

Only a small portion of the larger fragments are ever displayed to minimise damage.

When not on show, they are kept in a dark, climate-controlled storeroom.

The new project will digitally image every Scroll fragment in various wavelengths. It is hoped that infra-red images may expose letters currently invisible to the naked eye

The images will then be uploaded to a searchable online database, allowing scholars around the world to pore over their details.

"We are establishing a milestone connection between progress and the past to preserve this unique heritage for future generations," said Shuka Dorfman, the current head of the IAA.

"The public with a click of the mouse will be able to freely access history in its fullest glamour."

The scrolls were discovered by a Bedouin shepherd in the Qumran caves above the Dead Sea in the mid-1940s.

They have been described as "one of the most important archaeological finds of the 20th Century".

The parchment and papyrus scrolls contain Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic writing, and include several of the earliest-known texts from the Bible, including the oldest surviving copy of the Ten Commandments.

The first images will go online in the coming months.

From the BBC - GPS with a difference:

Five rhinos in South Africa's North West province have been fitted with a Global Positioning System (GPS) device to help protect them from poachers.

The GPS chip is fitted into the rhino's horn by drilling a small hole in the inert or dead part of the horn.

As well as GPS tracking, the device is equipped with alarm systems to alert game wardens of unusual movement or if a rhino is outside of the park.

The North West Park Board is testing the devices in Mafikeng Game Reserve.

We can monitor the animals on whatever time delay we want Rusty Hustler, North West Parks Board More rhino facts from BBC Wildlife Finder

The board began this novel project in April of this year, when they tested the chips.

Park vets carried out the first implants the system is now "up and running" - constantly monitoring the five animals.

"It's basically a satellite system which connects with the cell phone system and we can monitor the animals on whatever time delay we want," Rusty Hustler, head of security for North West Parks Board, told BBC News.

"There are a number of alarms that can be programmed: one for excessive movement, so if the rhino starts running, and another that goes off if the rhino sleeps for longer than six hours, which is abnormal."

An alarm also sounds if the chip goes outside of the area of the game reserve.

A reaction team in the park would be able to track and quickly reach the animal if an alarm went off.

More than 200 rhinos had been slaughtered in South Africa since the start of the year and there is a high demand for rhino horn, a prized ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine.

Mr Hustler said that the board was looking to use the devices in animals in other North West province parks and were planning to tag more animals in the coming weeks.

He added that in the future, the devices could even help to track rhino horns that were taken by poachers to help combat the illegal trade.

A story from the BBC to quench your thirst:

Moon's water is useful resource, says Nasa

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

There are oases of water-rich soil that could sustain astronauts on the Moon, according to Nasa.

Scientists studied the full results of an experiment that smashed a rocket and a probe into a lunar crater last year.

The impacts kicked up large amounts of rock and dust, revealing a suite of fascinating chemical compounds and far more water than anyone had imagined.

A Nasa-led team tells Science magazine that about 155kg of water vapour and water-ice were blown out of the crater.

The researchers' analysis suggests the lunar regolith, or soil, at the impact site contains 5.6% by weight of water-ice.

"That's a significant amount of water," said Anthony Colaprete, from the US space agency's Ames research centre.

"And it's in the form of water-ice grains. That's good news because water-ice is very much a friendly resource to work with. You don't have to warm it very much; you just have to bring it up to room temperature to pull it out of the dirt real easy."

And he added: "If you took just the 10km region around the impact site and say it had 5% water - that would be equivalent to about a billion gallons of water. I'm not saying that's what's there, but it just shows you that even at these small concentrations there's potential for lots of water."

The Nasa-led team has published six papers in the American journal describing the findings of the 9 October, 2009, impacts of the LCROSS spacecraft and its companion rocket stage.

The pair was targeted at the Moon's southern pole - at Cabeus Crater, a depression so deep and dark that the odds of disturbing ice were thought to be very good.

The rocket stage went in first, followed a few minutes later by the LCROSS probe which gathered imagery and other data just before it too slammed into the surface.

Another spacecraft, Nasa's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), was passing close by. It also was able to study the plume of material ejected into sunlight more than 15km above the rim of Cabeus.

Moon's 'archive'

The suite of instruments deployed on that day has determined as much as 20% of this dust plume was made up of volatile compounds, including methane, ammonia, hydrogen gas, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.

In addition, the instruments saw relatively large amounts of some metals, such as sodium, and mercury. There was even a signature of silver, but this was tiny.

Scientists say the water and mix of volatiles could be remnants of comet or asteroid impacts through the eons, but they reckon a number of quite complex chemical and physical processes are also working to cycle and migrate these substances around the Moon.

"The LCORSS mission provided some surprises with significant implications for the creation, transport, collection and archiving of volatiles below the shadows of the south pole," said team-member Peter Schultz from Brown University.

"We've opened this lunar closet and discovered things we just didn't expect. And just as the Earth holds its clues to the past climates in the ices at its poles, the Moon also holds clues to past impacts and perhaps even the last stages of lunar volcanism."

The water-ice is not uniformly distributed across the southern pole. Rather, it is held in pockets.

Some of these oases are, like in Cabeus, to be found in shadows where LRO's Diviner instrument has sensed temperatures down to minus 244C. Under such conditions, ices will stay fixed for billions of years.

But the research indicates there is probably water-ice even in areas which receive some sunlight through the year, provided it is buried in the soil.

"We've dubbed these newly discovered regions 'lunar permafrost areas'; and they're very extensive," said David Paige, Diviner's principal investigator.

"This could facilitate future human and robotic explorers in their quest for understanding of the lunar ice, as well as its potential use as resource; because rather than having to brave the cold and dark conditions inside permanent shadow, they could land much more conventionally in areas where the sunlight is shining - at least for part of the year - and then dig a small distance below the surface and access the ice."

Another tail from the BBC:

The study was the first to measure how much dogs "prefer" their owners

Scientists have shown just how much dogs rely on seeing their owners faces in order to recognise them.

The researchers also measured how much dogs prefer to gaze at and follow their owners, rather than a stranger.

In the journal Animal Behaviour, the team described how dogs had difficultly recognising their human "best friend" when the person had their face covered.

The study sheds more light on how thousands of years of domestication has affected the behaviour of canines.

This is very likely to be a by-product of thousands of years of domestication Paolo Mongillo, University of Padua

Paolo Mongillo from the University of Padua in Italy led the study. He explained that, although many researchers have studied how dogs interact with humans, no one had yet investigated how the animals focused on one person in preference to another - or just how much companion dogs "prefer" their owners.

Dr Mongillo's team invented an experiment to measure this.

"We had the dog in an empty room and we instructed the owner and another person - someone unfamiliar to the dog - to walk across the room several times," the scientist explained.

"The people walked in opposite directions, so they crossed many times in front of the dog and we measured how long the dog looked at one person versus another."

The research team then instructed the two people to leave the room via two different doors and allowed the dog to approach one of the doors.

"Most of the dogs gazed at their owners for most of the time and then chose to wait by the owner's door," said Dr Mongillo.

ANCIENT CANINES More about wild dogs and wolves from BBC Wildlife Finder

He described this as an "expected" result but something that no one has measured before.

"If you imagine a dog in a real setting in a city or anywhere in the middle of a crowd or a crowded space, you can see how the animal must have adapted to give preferential attention to its owner," said Dr Mongillo.

In the second part of the study, the scientists asked the people to cover their faces; the human volunteers then walked across the room with bags over their heads.

During this phase of the experiment, the dogs were much less attentive to their owners. This revealed just how much the animals relied on human faces for recognition.

Wild dogs rely on body signals and on cues from other animals in their social groups, but studies including this one suggest that domestic dogs are so attuned to human social groups that they are even able to recognise some human facial expressions.

"This is very likely to be a by-product of thousands of years of domestication," said Dr Mongillo.

Studies of the genetic differences between dogs and their wolf ancestors suggests that canines were first domesticated between 15,000 and 40,000 years ago.

Dogs and dementia

In the same study, the team investigated the effects of ageing on the dogs' attention.

They found that "aged" dogs - seven years and older - were less able to focus on their owner and also were less likely to choose the owner's door.

SOURCES Visit Animal Behaviour to learn more about dogs and their owners

"There have been studies to show that dog ageing is similar to human ageing in terms of cognitive impairment," said Dr Mongillo.

So studying ageing in dogs could help our knowledge of human as well as animal age-related diseases.

And also from the BBC:

Wave the dolphin, tail-walking

Wild dolphins in Australia are naturally learning to "walk" on water.

Six dolphins have now been seen mastering the technique - furiously paddling their tail fluke, forcing their body out and across the water.

The dolphins seem to walk on water for fun, as it has no other obvious benefit, say scientists working for the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.

That makes the behaviour a rare example of animals "culturally transmitting" a playful rather than foraging behaviour.

Only a few species are known to create their own culture - defined as the sharing or transmitting of specific novel behaviours or traditions between a community of animals.

Rare trick

The discovery was made by Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) scientist Dr Mike Bossley, who has spent 24 years studying dolphins living in the Port River in Adelaide, Australia.

In past years, Dr Bossley has witnessed two wild adult female dolphins, named Billie and Wave for research purposes, attempting to walk on water.

Now four other dolphins, including young infants, have been recorded trying to learn the trick from the two adults, and have been seen practising, less successfully, in the river.

The behaviour, when a dolphin beats its tail fluke repeatedly, so it lifts its body vertically out of the water and then along the surface, is more commonly seen among captive dolphins trained to perform tricks.

In the wild it is extremely rare.

According to the WDCS, apart from Billie and Wave, only one other adult dolphin had previously been seen tail-walking in the Port River during thousands of hours of scientific observations, and then only once.

Billie is thought to have learned the trick during a brief period when she was held captive in a dolphinarium, before being released back into the wild.

TALENTED DOLPHINS When two dolphin species come together, they attempt to find a common language, preliminary research suggests Watch how innovative dolphins have learnt to collect conch shells Watch the dolphins of Shark Bay go 'hydroplaning' for fish Find out more about bottlenose dolphins

She passed the behaviour onto Wave, and now Billie and Wave appear to be passing on their knowledge of how to tail-walk to their wider community.

WDCS dolphin photographers Marianna Boorman and Barbara Saberton have recently documented Wave's calf, named Tallula, also attempting to tail-walk.

Other dolphin called Bianca, and her calf Hope, and another calf called Bubbles are also attempting the trick.

These dolphins are now being seen trying to tail-walk many times each day.

A number of animals are known to culturally transmit novel behaviours to others of their species.

Bianca the dolphin photographed tail-walking on 18 October, 2010

Chimps learn to fish for termites with sticks, and orcas learn various techniques to hunt seals, for instance.

But few examples have been documented of animals culturally passing on behaviours that are unrelated to obtaining food.

Tail-walking appears to have no function other than play, says Dr Bossley.

"As far as we are aware, tail-walking has no practical function and is performed just for fun, akin to human dancing or gymnastics," he says.

"Culture in the wider sense of the term, defined as 'learned behaviour characteristic of a community' is now frequently on show in the Port River."

And accompanying the first post on this page is this from the BBC:

Runway opens at world's first spaceport

Commercial space travel took a step closer with the opening of the runway at the world's first spaceport in the US state of New Mexico.

The event was marked with a flypast of an aircraft carrying SpaceShip Two.

The vehicle has been designed to take fee-paying tourists on trips to the edge of space and back.

British billionaire Sir Richard Branson - whose Virgin group has backed the venture - said the first passenger trip should take place within 18 months.

The opening of the nearly two-mile (three-kilometre) runway comes less than two weeks after another major step for Sir Richard's Virgin Galactic company: the first solo glide flight of SpaceShip Two.

"Today is very personal as our dream becomes more real," Sir Richard said.

"People are beginning to believe now. I think the drop flight two weeks ago, which went beautifully, I think it made people sit up and realize this is really reality."

More than 300 people have already paid at least $200,000 (£128,000) each for a three-hour flight.

Virgin Galactic's White Knight Two - the jet-powered mothership that will carry SpaceShip Two to launch altitude - appeared at Friday's ceremony at Spaceport America near the Mexican border.

The craft, carrying SpaceShip Two, passed over the spaceport several times before landing on the new runway.

A Youtube clip showing the above:



and a clip showing a test flight from a few days ago (was not on Youtube when I posted the first posting on this page)


You may notice that the sound track is slightly out of sync with the video

How elephants are helping frogs. From the BBC:

Elephant ecological engineering 'benefits amphibians'

By Mark Kinver Science and environment reporter, BBC News

Areas heavily damaged by elephants are home to more species of amphibians and reptiles than areas where the beasts are excluded, a study has suggested.

US scientists recorded 18 species in high damage areas but just eight species in unaffected habitats.

Elephants are described as "ecological engineers" because they create and maintain ecosystems by physically changing habitats.

The findings have been published in the African Journal of Ecology.

"Elephants, along with a number of other species, are considered to be ecological engineers because their activities modify the habitat in a way that affects many other species," explained Bruce Schulte, now based at Western Kentucky University, US.

"They will do everything from digging with their front legs, pulling up grass to knocking down big trees. So they actually change the shape of the landscape."

He added that elephants' digestive system was not very good at processing many of the seeds that they eat.

"As the faeces are also a great fertiliser, the elephants are also able to rejuvenate the landscape by transporting seeds elsewhere," Dr Schulte told BBC News.

The team from Georgia Southern University, US, carried out its study in Ndarakwai Ranch, a 4,300-hectare site of mixed savannah woodlands (dominated by two Acacia species) and open savannah in North-East Tanzania, between August 2007 and February 2008.

They identified areas that experienced high, medium and low damage from free-ranging elephants, which were compared with a 250-hectare undisturbed area that was fenced off to protect it from large herbivores, such as elephants, giraffes, zebra and elands.

When sampling for species richness and abundance, the researchers found "a trend towards greater richness in areas with more elephant damage to the woody vegetation".

Frogs' best friend

They wrote: "Eighteen herpetofaunal (amphibians and reptiles) species... were sampled in areas of high elephant damage. Medium damage areas were comprised of 12 species, while areas of low damage had 11 species.

"The control site (fenced area) had the lowest species richness with only eight species."

In the paper, the scientists concluded that difference in abundance and species richness in the damaged areas was probably a result of engineering by elephants, generating new habitats for a diverse array of frog species.

"Craters and coarse woody debris formed by uprooted and broken trees [increased] the number of refuges against predators," they observed

They added that the locations were also favoured by insects, which were an important food source for amphibians and reptiles.

"Therefore, the abundance and diversity of prey may be important factor that attracted these species of herpetofauna to elephant modified areas."

Dr Shulte explained the team decided to carry out the study in order to identify effective indicator species that offered an insight into the health of the region's environment.

"In a landscape, such as the African savannah, birds can just leave if things are not so good," he told BBC News.

"Amphibians and reptiles tend to be sensitive to habitat change, and many of them are limited in terms of how far they can go in a relatively short space of time to escape problems."

He added that the findings had implications for habitat and wildlife management strategies.

"if we are managing habitat, then we clearly have to know what we are managing it for.

"What this study point towards is that although things may not look particularly pretty to a human eye does not necessarily mean that it is detrimental to all the life that is there."

Google could be in a bit of trouble. From the BBC:

Privacy body to re-examine Google

Britain's privacy watchdog is to look again at what personal information internet giant Google gathered from private wi-fi networks.

The Information Commissioner's Office had investigated a sample earlier this year after it was revealed that Google had collected personal data during its Street View project.

At the time, it said no "significant" personal details were collected.

But Google has since admitted that e-mails and passwords were copied.

On its official Google blog, senior vice president Alan Eustace wrote that the company was "mortified" to discover, after the initial investigation in May, that personal information had been collected.

Privacy watchdogs in numerous countries, including France, Germany and Canada, had also investigated the information.

"It's clear from those [external] inspections that while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire e-mails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords," Mr Eustace wrote.

"We want to delete this data as soon as possible and I would like to apologise again for the fact that we collected it in the first place.

"We are mortified by what happened, but confident that... changes to our processes and structure will significantly improve our internal privacy and security practices for the benefit of all our users."

A spokesman for the Information Commissioner's Office said it had kept an eye on international investigations since its own one concluded in July.

That investigation said that the information "did not include meaningful personal details that could be linked to an identifiable person".

Enforcement powers

However, Google's admission of more detailed data has prompted further action by the ICO.

"We will be making enquires to see whether this information relates to the data inadvertently captured in the UK, before deciding on the necessary course of action, including a consideration of the need to use our enforcement powers," a spokesman said.‬

Google's director of privacy Alma Whitten said the company would work with the ICO to answer its "further questions and concerns".

She added that the data "has never been used in any Google product and was never intended to be used by Google in any way".

Information about the gathering of personal data came to light following a request by data protection authorities in Hamburg, Germany, for more information about the operation of Google's Street View technology which adds images of locations to maps.

This revealed that Google had "accidentally" grabbed data from unsecured hotspots for years as its Street View cars captured images of street scenes.

It led to many data protection authorities pressing Google for access to the mass of data it grabbed to see whether laws on the protecting of personal information had been broken.

Google said it had since "strengthened" its internal privacy and security practices.