Getting robots to play football well involves conquering lots of basic problems
UK researchers are preparing one of the nation's first teams to compete in the 2011 robot football world cup.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh are currently refining the smart systems that control the team of three humanoid robots on the pitch.
They will enter their trio of robots in the main RoboCup competition which pits standardised robots against each other.
Competition to reach the finals will be fierce as the 2010 RoboCup attracted entrants from 40 nations.
"Football is a beautiful game and a difficult game," said Dr Subramanian Ramamoorthy, an assistant professor in the School of Informatics at Edinburgh University who is overseeing the creation of the robotic team.
Research students Aris Valtazanos, Efstathios Vafeias, Thomas McGuire, Jayant Bansal, Chris Towell and Majd Hawasly are coaching the team and getting them to play together.
Dr Ramamoorthy said preparing the small humanoid robots to play a game of football was a good way to create and refine software for robots that will spend time helping humans.
"It's a nice contained experimental testbed for trying out a lot of different things that are hard in robotics," said Dr Ramamoorthy. "The robot has to look, to move, to kick and all of these have to be done in the context of team work."
The Edinburgh researchers are planning to enter a team in the standard platform league of the RoboCup tournament. This sees all entrants use the same robot - a small humanoid called Nao made by French firm Aldebaran Robotics.
This part of the tournament typically attracts the most entrants and national qualifiers are run to find the best teams to go forward to the main RoboCup competition.
The RoboCup attracts teams from more than 40 nations.
When playing together the three robots must act autonomously and get no help from their handlers. The robots can communicate via wi-fi to co-ordinate teamwork.
The challenge of getting them to work together is made more acute, said Dr Ramamoorthy, by the limited vision and processing power of the Nao robot.
Current work is going into improving the visual processing system of the robots so they can spot the bright orange tournament ball.
"Vision for robots is very difficult," said Dr Ramamoorthy, "They lack peripheral vision - something humans use extensively. We also have much better low light vision, if something changes in your environment you get a trigger."
Visual cues have to be tied in to the motion system of the robot so it can note where the ball has gone and move towards it. In doing so they will also have to take into account the actions of team mates or opponents. A touch is an automatic foul in RoboCup rules.
"The rules are strict, you have to play the game fairly," said Dr Ramamoorthy.
As well as a tournament for humanoids, the RoboCup also has competitions for simulated teams, humanoids, mid-sized and small robots. The RoboCup was set up with the aim of, by 2050, creating a team of humanoid robots that can take on and beat the best human players.
Other UK teams that have competed in the RoboCup are the Bold Hearts team, which came fourth in the 2009 humanoid simulation competition, and Prenton High School for girls which competes in the junior league.
UK robots from the University of Plymouth also played in the robo- football tournament run by FIRA - the Federation of International Robot-soccer Association.
Ancient bugs found in 50-million-year-old Indian amber
By Katia MoskvitchScience reporter, BBC News
Most of the found species are completely new to science
More than 700 new species of ancient insect have been discovered in 50-million-year-old amber.
The discoveries come from some 150kg of amber produced by an ancient rainforest in India.
Scientists say in the journal PNAS that many insects are related to species from far-away corners of the world.
This means that, despite millions of years in isolation in the ocean, the region was a lot more biologically diverse that previously believed.
The amber, dubbed Cambay amber, was found in lignite mines in the Cambay Shale of the Indian state of Gujarat.
Jes Rust from the University of Bonn in Germany led an international team of researchers from India, Germany and the US.
According to a predominant theory of continents' formation, at first there were only two so-called supercontinents on Earth. The one in the north was called Laurasia and the other one, located more towards the south, Gondwana.
Drifting away
When Gondwana split up into several smaller pieces in the mid-Jurassic, some 160 million years ago, most of its parts stayed in the southern hemisphere, but one started drifting towards the north.
Having floated in the ocean for at least 100 million years at a remarkable rate of 15-25cm per year, it eventually collided with Asia and became what we know today as the Indian subcontinent. In the process, the Himalayas were formed.
It has long been believed that drifting in complete isolation would have contributed to a potentially unique plant and animal life, found only in the region.
But the mostly tropical climate of India is known to be unfavourable to the preservation of fossils and not much has been found to confirm this hypothesis of what biologists call "endemism". But the present study says the vertebrate fossil record discovered so far reveals little endemism.
Most of the recently discovered bugs also show links to modern insects as well as those that lived millions of years ago in different parts of the world, including Asia, Australia, and even South America.
The lead author Dr Rust told BBC News that this could be explained by land-bridge connections - possibly small islands that formed before the collision with Asia, in the Eocene - between the Indian "ferry" and other landmasses.
"It is possible for plants to drift hundreds of kilometres on open ocean currents, and in the case of insects, some can fly," said Dr Rust.
The researchers found the amber at the Vastan and Tadkeshwar Lignite mines in western India
"There are those that are only able to fly during mating, but they can fly at least a few kilometres.
"Not many are able to cross open seaways, but [they can] drift with plant material. Then there are also very tiny insects and they sometimes simply get blown away, up to the jet stream."
Rainforest's age
The study says the resin that later became Cambay amber originated from an ancient tropical rainforest.
"The Indian amber is from the Lower Eocene and was likely produced by flowering hardwood trees called Dipterocarpaceae, [trees] that predominate in the forests of Southeast Asia today," Paul Nascimbene of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, told BBC News.
To determine where the amber came from, the scientists chemically fingerprinted it.
They also analysed the wood anatomy of fossilised branches and trunks on the site.
"Fossil wood samples were also recovered in association with the amber, [and they] showed that these samples preserved details of the wood's microstructure, pointing to dipterocarps as the probable source," added Dr Nascimbene.
The team also said that it was able to determine the age of the modern rainforest.
Up until now, many experts used to suggest that this type of tropical rainforest, found today all over the South-East Asia, first originated in the Miocene some 20 or 25 million years ago.
But the recent discovery challenged that idea.
David Grimaldi from the American Museum of Natural History and another co-author told BBC News that the rainforest is at least 60 million years old.
"What we have here from India is the earliest fossil evidence of a modern type of tropical rainforest [of the Dipterocarpaceae family] in Asia," he said.
"Before, we just had no idea to how ancient the dipterocarp forests that occur in South-East Asia today really are; there really was no indication."
Dr Grimaldi explained that one problem with determining the modern rainforest's age was the lack of information - fossil deposits are simply very uncommon in tropical regions.
Amber looks like yellow-brownish rocks
"Most of the fossil outcrops are in drier, very eroded areas of the northern hemisphere or southern parts of southern hemisphere, but not so much in the equatorial belt.
"Most of the fossil evidence from tropical South America indicated that rainforests were no later than Miocene, no more than 25 million years old.
"And secondly, people for a century or more had always thought of the tropics as a place where species are evolving very rapidly.
"And perhaps as a result they thought it was a very recent type of ecosystem.
"But in reality, they're like an ancient cauldron - they're very ancient ecosystems, at least ancient on land, at least twice [the age we previously thought]."
3-D specimens
But besides the rainforest's age and India's biogeography, the most astonishing part of the discovery was the huge number of perfectly preserved specimens of insects, most of which have never been seen before.
Unlike other types of amber found in deposits in the north, the Indian amber is much softer. This unique property allowed the scientists to completely dissolve the amber using solvents - toluene and chloroform - and extract the ancient insects, plants and fungi.
"We have complete, three-dimensionally preserved specimens that are 52 million years old and you can handle them almost like living ones," said Dr Rust.
"Of course they are very fragile, but it is still astonishing.
"We have several examples where it is possible to get a complete specimen out. And of course this opens a new dimension in investigations of this material.
Many insects are related to modern and ancient species found in different parts of the world
The researcher said that this amber deposit was the first important one found in India.
Though this natural yellow-brownish substance is quite widespread all over the world, the best-known amber deposits are in the Baltic region, where some 80% of the world's known amber is found, in the Dominican Republic and in Mexico.
"There are tonnes of amber [in this Indian deposit], and what is interesting about it is that it was produced in the tropics, the most highly diverse areas in respect to species diversity," said Dr Rust.
"And the fossil record of the terrestrial tropics is not so good, because usually all the organic material gets rotten very quickly."
With tonnes of amber at their disposal, the researcher said his team hoped to uncover many more secrets of the peculiar world that existed millions of years ago.
The pristine waters of British Columbia's Fraser River, a few hours drive upstream from Vancouver, belies the activity beneath.
Below the tranquil surface, the river has just witnessed one of nature's most spectacular natural phenomena - the return of the sockeye salmon, and this year it is the biggest salmon run in a century.
This year, despite dire predictions from scientists, 34 million sockeye salmon came back to the exact stretch of river where they were born to spawn.
But what makes this even more astonishing is that it comes just one year after only one million fish returned.
Last year's run was so low that the Canadian government set up a federal inquiry to try to understand what happened.
Some experts blame disease from fish farms further up the coast, some think changing ocean temperatures have created fluctuating numbers, while others say shifts in predator patterns in the Pacific Ocean are responsible.
It would be hard to pin the blame on commercial fishing - strict quotas for more than a decade have meant the industry here has virtually ground to a halt and the fleet on the coast has been cut by around two thirds.
As the inquiry opened, the fish farm industry released five years worth of data on disease, which may help get to the bottom of the salmon story.
But the experience has left people asking what the failure of scientists to get it right on salmon means for the fishing industry worldwide - and whether the dire predictions about over-fishing have been over-stated.
It comes at a particularly pertinent time as the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in Japan is discussing what steps are needed to protect global fish stocks.
The sockeye salmon's four-year cycle begins and ends in the mountains of British Columbia
According to Professor Daniel Pauly, one of the world's leading experts on global fish stocks from the University of British Columbia, the threat is very real.
"The global picture is that we have lost 80-90% of the big fish. Biodiversity is being lost on a grand basis in the oceanâĶ and it is due mainly, overwhelmingly, to fishing," he says.
Prof Pauly believes people should not condemn warnings about the big picture just because predictions for individual species, such as salmon, are shown to be wrong.
That would be like dismissing global warming because of one unusually cold winter, he argues.
"I think science is very good at predicting long-term trends over larger areas and it's not good at predicting details over shorter time periods in limited areas."
He is confident of predicting catastrophic collapses, because he says, unlike in Canada, most of the world's fish stocks are not carefully managed.
Government subsidies tend to help sustain vast fishing fleets, rather than fish stocks, he adds.
"West Africa for example... and Asia as a whole, are the places where the stocks are so depleted that you despair.
"And when you want to make a statement about the world, you have to consider those primarily because that is where the bulk of the fish come from," he says.
But Professor Carl Walters, who is also from the University of British Columbia and an expert on the salmon fisheries, believes year-on-year fluctuations reveal relatively little about the overall health of the salmon stock.
"Most fish populations occasionally have these very strong years - cohorts, we call them, or strong-year classes - and fisheries scientists have been trying to understand the causes of these things for over a century and we have been singularly unsuccessful.
The sockeye salmon migrate back up the Fraser River to lay their eggs before they die
"We cook up all manner of models and explanations and the rule in that world of research is publish now because your correlation is going to fail next year," he says.
He welcomes management, but thinks it should be based on economics, not counting numbers of fish.
And he thinks the current approach to conservation demands too much preservation of biodiversity.
He wants to see a return to a policy that he believes led to the rebuilding of the salmon stocks through most of the 20th century.
This, he says, involved a high harvest rate, yet the stocks were able to rebuild.
"Around the world the default option is that the world is open to fishing except for a few little protected areas.
"With Pacific salmon the world is closed to fishing except for a few small open areas. And that severe restriction on the time and place of harvest has been the main reason we've been able to save these stocks.
"It's not because we know how many fish there are, it's because we very severely restrict when and where they're harvested," he says.
But Prof Walters does share some of Prof Pauly's views about the global picture.
He thinks the world's fisheries situation is deeply divided.
"We've got North America, the Antipodes and on the way the North Sea and North Atlantic, where we're starting to put in effective management regimes, where there's a lot of stock recoveries going on, where the odds of a real catastrophic collapse have dropped. We are learning lessons.
"And in sharp contrast to that you have south east Asia, China, much of the Third World where exactly the opposite is happening."
One thing is for certain, there is a deep cultural connection to the sockeye salmon in British Columbia, with thousands of people coming to gaze at its return every year.
And the arguments over how to manage this one fish stock echo the wider picture of governments struggling to juggle the demands of those with vested interests in this crucial global resource.
All the more vital then that scientists strive for as complete a picture as possible to explain why so many salmon returned this year, and so few last year, or they risk a loss in confidence until no-one is listening to apocalyptic warnings of threats to the wealth of our oceans.
Scientists say the chin is distinctly modern in form
Modern humans could have reached East Asia much earlier than believed, according to new evidence.
An international team analysed fossil teeth and part of a jaw unearthed in southern China in 2007.
In the journal PNAS, the scientists say the fragments belonged to a "modern" human who lived 100,000 years ago.
The study is likely to be controversial: the earliest humans previously known from East Asia were half this age.
Wu Liu from the Chinese Academy of Sciences led the predominantly Chinese team that worked at Zhirendong (Zhiren Cave) fossil site.
US scientist Erik Trinkaus from Washington University in St Louis and R Lawrence Edwards from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis also took part in the study.
Living together
Dr Trinkaus explained to BBC News that the ancient remains mean modern humans co-existed with our closest relatives - Neanderthals and Neanderthal-like people - across Asia.
"There are some archaic features in the specimen and that suggests to us that these are not just simply modern humans coming out of Eastern Africa, but somewhere along the way they probably intermixed with regional groups of archaic humans," Professor Trinkaus told BBC News.
"Previous evidence for co-existence was basically between Europe and Western Asia and adjacent part of Africa, but what this suggests is that the geographical range of co-existence spread all the way across Asia, which is an enormous difference.
"This is the first evidence for that."
The remains were spotted by scientist Chang-Zhu Jin during excavations at a site in Southern China.
The researcher was able to distinguish the valuable fossils among "the bones of a whole bunch of other mammals from a little over a 100,000 years ago".
Professor Trinkaus said that in terms of human evolution, the remains showed distinctive modern human features - a lower jaw with a distinctive chin.
"That means that modern humans spread across at least southern Asia some 100,000 years ago," added the scientist.
The fossils were discovered at Zhirendong in southern China
"It is interesting because we get the persistence of archaic humans, pre-modern humans, further north across all of Eurasia for another 60,000 years.
"It means that there was something that allowed these modern humans to spread across southern Asia, but at the same time they weren't able to spread further north across Asia or into Europe - they did not [have] this overwhelming superiority that is sometimes attributed to modern humans since they clearly didn't spread across all of the old world at this time period."
Possible controversy
Professor Fred Smith of Illinois State University reviewed the paper for PNAS journal. He said that it was possible such a significant discovery could generate controversy.
"It will remain somewhat controversial because it's only one specimen at one site, but the fact is that it is a very important piece of the puzzle," he told BBC News.
"There's always a possibility that a date is wrong or that something has gone wrong. I don't see any [such] indication, but there's always a possibility of complications that weren't noticed or weren't completely understood.
"I'm sure that there will be some controversy, some people that are going to say: 'Well, this is all well and good, but we need more information to be certain'."
To make sure the study is correct, Professor Smith said scientists will continue their efforts to find more specimens of modern human fossils from southern China.
By Richard BlackEnvironment correspondent, BBC News
Some 13% of birds qualify for inclusion on the Red List
One fifth of animal and plant species are under the threat of extinction, a global conservation study has warned.
Scientists who compiled the Red List of Threatened Species say the proportion of species facing wipeout is rising.
But they say intensive conservation work has already pulled some species back from the brink of oblivion.
The report is being launched at the UN Biodiversity Summit in Japan, where governments are discussing how to better protect the natural world.
Launched at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meeting, the report says that amphibians remain the most threatened category of animals, with 41% of species at risk, while only 13% of birds qualify for Red-Listing.
The highest losses were seen in Southeast Asia, where loss of habitat as forests are cleared for agriculture, including biofuel crops, is fastest.
"The 'backbone' of biodiversity is being eroded," said the eminent ecologist, Professor Edward O Wilson of Harvard University.
"One small step up the Red List is one giant leap forward towards extinction. This is just a small window on the global losses currently taking place."
However, the scientists behind the assessment - who publish their findings formally in the journal Science - say there is new evidence this time that conservation projects are having a noticeable global impact.
"Really focused conservation efforts work when we do them - many island birds are recovering, lots of examples like this," said Simon Stuart, chair of the Species Survival Commission with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Fundamental changes are needed to prevent widespread decline, the study says
"We can show for sure that when we focus conservation efforts and really address the threats and put enough money into it, then you see positive results."
Species that have benefited from such action include three bred in captivity and returned to the wild - the California condor and black-footed ferret of the US, and Przewalski's horse in Mongolia.
The ban on commercial whaling has led to such a swiftly increasing population of humpback whales that they have come off the Red List entirely.
Meanwhile, a parallel study, also published in Science, asks where trends of increased risk, but also increased conservation effort, will lead the natural world in future.
Researchers analysed a range of scientific studies and global assessments. Although projections varied, all found that fundamental changes are needed in order to avoid declining populations across many types of plant and animal species.
United front
"There is no question that business-as-usual development pathways will lead to catastrophic biodiversity loss," said research leader Paul Leadley from the Universite Paris-Sud.
"Even optimistic scenarios for this century consistently predict extinctions and shrinking populations of many species."
This picture is, in large part, what the CBD meeting is supposed to prevent.
One of the many debates currently ongoing at the meeting here is what the global target for 2020 should be - to completely halt the loss of biodiversity, or something less ambitious.
Dr Leadley's analysis backs up the view of many that a complete halt is not feasible.
But governments do at least appear united in their desire to do something, according to Dr Stuart, one of a large IUCN team monitoring developments here.
"They've said that they want to see improvements in status, especially in those species that are most at risk," he told BBC News.
"That to us is a very good target - we think it's achievable with a lot of effort.
"There doesn't seem to be much disagreement between countries on that issue - on other issues, yes, but on the species issue they're pretty solid."
However, on financing for species protection there is a lot of disagreement.
Some developing countries want a 100-fold increase in current rates of spending by the West. Other nations are arguing for a 10-fold rise.
But given the economic problems facing the world, that climate change is also supposed to see a huge and rapid increase in spending, and that no-one knows what the current spend on biodiversity actually is, all bets are currently off on what wording delegates will eventually arrive at
The authorities are involved in a big crack down on illegal file-sharing
An injunction issued by the US district court in New York has effectively shut down LimeWire, one of the internet's biggest file-sharing sites.
It ends four years of wrangling between the privately-owned Lime Group and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
The injunction compels Lime Group to disable its searching, downloading, uploading and file trading features.
The firm plans to launch new services that adhere to copyright laws soon.
Visitors to the LimeWire website are confronted with a legal notice that reads: "This is an offical notice that LimeWire is under a court ordered injunction to stop distributing and supporting its file-sharing software."
It adds that "downloading or sharing copyrighted content without authorisation is illegal".
The RIAA told the AP news agency that it was pleased by the judge's decision.
"It will start to unwind the massive piracy machine that LimeWire... used to enrich themselves immensely," said RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy.
LimeGroup appeared to acknowledge defeat.
"We are out of the file-sharing business, but you can make it known that other aspects of our business remain ongoing," Lime Group spokeswoman Tiffany Guarnaccia told AP.
The firm is working on developing new software that will adhere to copyright laws.
New species of snub-nosed monkey discovered in Myanmar
By Ella Davies Earth News reporter
A digital reconstruction of the Burmese snub-nosed monkey by Dr Thomas Geissmann
A new species of monkey with unusual upturned nostrils has been discovered in north eastern Myanmar.
Scientists surveying in the area initially identified the so-called snub-nosed monkey from skin and skulls obtained from local hunters.
A small population was found separated from the habitat of other species of snub-nosed monkeys by the Mekong and Salween rivers.
The total population has been estimated at just 260-330 individuals.
A team of Burmese and international primatologists identified the new species of snub-nosed monkey during this year's Myanmar Primate Conservation Program.
It is absolutely exceptional to discover a new species of primate
FFI Asia-Pacific Development Director Frank Momberg
Local hunters reported the presence of a monkey which did not match any description of species previously identified in the area.
After further investigation in the north eastern state of Kachin, experts found a small population of previously undiscovered black monkeys with white ear tufts and chin beards, prominent lips and wide upturned nostrils.
Asia-Pacific Development Director for Fauna & Flora International (FFI) Frank Momberg attended the expedition that discovered the species.
"It is absolutely exceptional to discover a new species of primate, and especially discovering a new species of snub-nosed monkey is very rare indeed," he told the BBC.
"With the new snub-nosed monkey Myanmar has now 15 species of primates, which underlines the importance of Myanmar for biodiversity conservation," said Mr Momberg.
An artists' illustration of the Burmese snub-nosed monkey
The new species has been named the Burmese snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus strykeri).
In research published in the American Journal of Primatology, scientists also describe the monkey as having a relatively long tail at 140% of its body size.
Until now snub-nosed monkeys were thought to live only in China and Vietnam, not Myanmar.
The species discovered this year was separated from the habitats of its nearest neighbours, the Yunnan snub-nosed monkey (R. bieti), by the Mekong and Salween rivers.
Researchers pointed to this isolation as evidence that the monkeys are a separate species rather than simply an existing species with a different colouration.
Although new to science, interviews with local people in the area revealed that they knew the Burmese species as mey nwoah, "monkey with an upturned face."
Evidence from hunters also suggested that the monkeys were particularly easy to find in the rain. The monkeys allegedly sneeze audibly when rainwater gets in their noses and local people said they could be found with their heads tucked between their knees on rainy days.
Based on direct observations and evidence from local people, researchers estimated the total population of R. strykeri to be 260-330 individuals.
All species of snub-nosed monkey are considered critically endangered, including the striking blue-faced R. roxellana or golden snub-nosed monkey.
Hunting and habitat destruction are the key threats facing global populations.
The global charity Fauna & Flora International has committed to taking immediate conservation action to protect the newly discovered species.
Community action and appeals to the logging industry to protect the monkey's habitat have been intitiated.
"If we can convince local people to stop hunting the snub-nosed monkey through creating local pride, develop community-based patrolling and monitoring, and provide alternative sources of livelihoods for forest dependent communities we can save [it] from extinction," said Mr Momberg.
Bond's gadget-packed DB5 is the only surviving example used in the spy films
An American car enthusiast has paid ÂĢ2.6m to buy James Bond's most famous car - and then vowed to take it for a spin around the streets of London.
The 1964 Aston Martin DB5, which boasts revolving license plates, ejector seat and bullet-proof shield, featured in the films Goldfinger and Thunderball.
The silver model is still capable of 145mph and 0-60mph in 7.1 seconds.
It was bought at a London auction by collector Harry Yeaggy, who will display it at a car museum in Ohio.
It was previously owned by a US broadcasting boss who paid $12,000 in 1969.
Enthralling
After his winning bid was accepted, Mr Yeaggy revealed that it has been "a last-minute decision" to fly into London for the auction and that he had spent a little more than he had planned.
He explained: "I thought a European would buy it. But I guess they didn't appreciate Bond as much as we do."
And having paid out such a sum, he said he was determined to get his money's worth: "We're going to fire the car up and drive it round the streets of London tonight. We're going to have a bit of fun with it."
The car is said to be in excellent condition and, as well as its other spy accessories, contains an early version of the modern-day satellite navigation system.
It is the only surviving example of two Aston Martins used in the early Bond films, after the other was reported stolen in 1997.
Bond's creator Ian Fleming had originally envisaged his British spy in a Bentley, but the Aston Martin was preferred by film-makers for its enthralling combination of Italian design and British engineering, analysts say.
A less sophisticated version of the car was released in the UK in 1963. It had a top speed of 145 mph (233 km/h).
The proceeds of the sale will go to previous owner Jerry Lee's charitable foundation supporting education and anti-crime projects internationally.
The researchers have developed a way to record higher brain activity
A US researcher says he plans to electronically record and interpret dreams.
Writing in the journal Nature, scientists say they have developed a system capable of recording higher level brain activity.
"We would like to read people's dreams," says the lead scientist Dr Moran Cerf.
The aim is not to interlope, but to extend our understanding of how and why people dream.
For centuries, people have been fascinated by dreams and what they might mean. In Ancient Egypt they were thought to be messages from God.
More recently, dream analysis has been used by psychologists as a tool to understand the unconscious mind. But the only way to interpret dreams is to ask people about the subject of their dreams after they had woken up.
The eventual aim of Dr Cerf's project is to develop a system which would enable psychologists to corroborate people's recollections of their dream with an electronic visualisation of their brain activity.
"There's no clear answer as to why humans dream," according to Dr Cerf. "And one of the questions we would like to answer is when do we actually create this dream?"
Dr Cerf makes his bold claim based on an initial study which he says suggests that the activity of individual brain cells, or neurons, are associated with specific objects or concepts.
He found, for example, that when a volunteer was thinking of Marilyn Monroe, a particular neuron lit up.
By showing volunteers a series of images, Dr Cerf and his colleagues were able to identify neurons for a wide range of objects and concepts - which they used to build up a database for each patient. These included Bill and Hilary Clinton, the Eiffel Tower and celebrities.
So by observing which brain cell lit up and when, Dr Cerf says he was effectively able to "read the subjects' minds".
Dream catcher
He admits that there is a very long way to go before this simple observation can be translated into a device to record dreams, or dream catcher. But he thinks it is a possibility - and he said he would like to try.
The next stage is to monitor the brain activity of the volunteers when they are sleeping.
The researchers will only be able to identify images or concepts that correlate with those stored on their database. But this data base could in theory be built up - by for example monitoring neuronal activity while the volunteer is watching a film.
But Dr Roderick Oner, a clinical psychologist and dream expert, believes that while this kind of limited visualisation might be of academic interest - it will not really help in the interpretation of dreams or be of use in therapy.
"For that you need the entire complex dream narrative," he said.
Another difficulty with the technique is that to get the kind of resolution needed to monitor individual neurons, subjects had to have electrodes surgically implanted deep inside their brain.
In the Nature study, the researchers obtained their results by studying patients who had electrodes implanted to monitor and treat them for brain seizures.
Translating thoughts
But Dr Cerf believes that sensor technology is developing at such a pace that eventually it might be possible to monitor brain activity in this way without invasive surgery. If this were to happen it would open up a range of possibilities.
"It would be wonderful to read people's minds where they cannot communicate, such as people in comas," said Dr Cerf.
There have been attempts to create machine interfaces before that aim to translate thoughts into instructions to control computers or machines.
But in the main these have tried to tap into areas of the brain involved in controlling movement. Dr Cerf's system monitors higher level areas of the brain and can potentially identify abstract concepts.
"We can sail with our imaginations and think about all the things we could do if we had access to a person's brain and basically visualise their thoughts.
"For example, instead of just having to write an email you could just think it. Or another futuristic application would be to think a flow of information and have it written in front of your eyes."
Professor Colin Blakemore, a neuroscientist at Oxford University, believes that it is quite a jump from the limited results obtained in the study to talking about recording dreams.
Neutron star packs two Suns' mass in London-sized space
By Jonathan AmosScience correspondent, BBC News
Artist's concept: Pulsars are so-called because of the way their radio emission is detected at Earth
Astronomers have discovered what they say is the heaviest neutron star yet.
The super-dense object, which lies some 3,000 light-years from Earth, is about twice as massive as our Sun.
That is 20% greater than the previous record holder, the US-Dutch team behind the observation tells the journal Nature.
Like all neutron stars, the object's matter is packed into an incredibly small space probably no bigger than the centre of a big city like London.
"The typical size of a neutron star is something like 10km in radius," said Dr Paul Demorest from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), Charlottesville, US.
"It's approximately the size of a city, which for an astronomical object is interesting because people can conceive of it pretty easily; and yet in that space it has the mass in this case about two times our Sun. So the size is easy to understand but the densitiy is much more extreme than anything we know here on Earth," the study's lead author told BBC News.
The finding is important, says Dr Demorest's team, because it puts constraints on the type of exotic material that can form a neutron star.
Such objects are thought to be the remnant cores of once giant stars that blew themselves apart at the ends of their lives.
Theory holds that all atomic material not dispersed in this supernova blast collapses to form a body made up almost entirely of neutrons - the tiny particles that appear in the nuclei of many atoms.
As well being fantastically compact, the cores also spin incredibly fast.
This particular object, classified as PSR J1614-2230, revolves 317 times a second.
It is what is termed a pulsar - so-called because it sends out lighthouse-like beams of radio waves that are seen as radio "pulses" every time they sweep over the Earth.
The observations were made using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia
The pulses are akin to the ticks of a clock, and the properties of stable neutron stars make for ultra-precise time-pieces.
This was how the team, observing with the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, was able to measure the object's mass.
Because PSR J1614-2230 also circles a companion star, its pulses - as received at Earth - are disturbed by the neighbour's gravity.
"The way it works is that as the pulses travel from the neutron star past the companion, they slow down a little bit.
"And how we see that on Earth is that the pulses arrive a little later than we would otherwise expect when the neutron star is lined up behind the companion," Dr Demorest said.
The team could use this effect to calculate the masses of both bodies.
The group reports a pulsar mass 1.97 times that of our Sun - significantly greater than the previous precise record of 1.67 solar masses.
The result is said to put limits on the type of dense matter that can make up the cores of these bizarre objects.
Some scientists had suggested exotic particles such as hyperons, kaon condensates or free quarks could exist deep inside neutron stars. But Dr Demorest and colleagues believe their observations preclude this possibility.
"It's simply that if those particles were formed, the star would get too dense and collapse into a black hole prior to this point," the NRAO researcher said.
Flamingos use colourful cosmetics to enhance feathers
By Victoria Gill Science and nature reporter, BBC News
Flamingos in the wild use pigments as "cosmetics" to enhance the colour of their plumage, according to scientists.
Researchers studying greater flamingos in the wetlands of southern Spain found that the birds rubbed pigmented secretions onto their feathers.
They produce the pigments in glands near the base of their tails.
The scientists describe in the journal Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology how the birds use the pigments to signal to potential mates.
We have data indicating that females make-up much more often than males
Juan Amat, biologist
The researchers identified pigments called carotenoids in the mixture of wax oil that the birds secrete in their preen glands.
They noticed that, as well as smoothing and tidying their feathers, many birds deliberately rubbed their cheeks against the preen gland and then immediately onto their neck, breast and back feathers.
Reddish-orange carotenoid pigments in the oils then brightened the signature pink hue of the birds' feathers.
High maintenance
Juan Amat from the Donana Biological Station in Spain led the study.
He said that the birds appeared to "manipulate the colour of their plumage" as a signal of their quality.
Since it takes time and energy to apply the pigments, being more colourful could be a powerful visual signal of a healthy, well-nourished flamingo with time to take care of its appearance.
"The rubbing is time-consuming," Dr Amat told BBC News. "And the more frequently the birds practise it, the more coloured they appear.
"If the birds stop the rubbing, [their] plumage colour fades in a few days because carotenoids bleach quickly in the sunlight."
This means that, like with make-up, frequent reapplication is necessary to stay colourful.
The scientists have not directly investigated how this cosmetic use benefits the birds, but they think that the more colourful flamingos might have more success in finding a mate.
"We found that the more coloured birds started breeding earlier than paler ones," explained Dr Amat.
"So by mating to a colourful bird an individual may increase its reproductive success, as from previous studies we know that the first pairs to start breeding gain access to the best breeding sites."
And there is more to the story of cosmetic-using flamingos than this one study, according to Dr Amat.
"We have data indicating that females make-up much more often than males - just like in humans," he told BBC News.
"Also, we know that flamingos apply make-up more often in better habitats, and that the more coloured birds obtain food of better quality."
Earth-sized worlds much more common than giant planets
By Pallab GhoshScience correspondent, BBC News
The Kepler mission should find tens or even hundreds of Earth-sized planets
Nearly one in four stars like the Sun could have Earth-sized planets, according to a new estimate published in the journal Science.
A US team has found that on average small, so-called rocky planets are much more common in orbit close to their star than giant planets planets similar in size to Jupiter.
This estimate is based on observations from nearby stars taken by the the twin 10-metre Keck telescopes in Hawaii. These show that 22 of the stars had detectable planets.
The researchers estimated that about 1.6% of the Sun-like stars in their sample had Jupiter-size planets and 12% had so-called "super-Earths", which are between three and 10 times the mass of the Earth.
Best guess
The Keck telescopes are not powerful enough to detect planets that are any smaller, so the scientists have assumed that this trend toward more smaller planets continues and estimated that 23 of the stars had Earth-sized planets.
Dr Andrew Howard, from the University of California at Berkeley, admits that the estimate is currently impossible to back up using existing data.
However, he says it is the first estimate that has been obtained using observations of relatively small planets.
"This extrapolation is the least certain part of our analysis. The true answer might be one in eight or one in two - but we know that it isn't one in 100," he told BBC News.
Based on these statistics, Dr Howard says that Nasa's Kepler space telescope - which is to to survey 156,000 stars - will detect between 120 and 260 "plausibly terrestrial worlds".
"If there's life out there, it's most likely that it exists on rocky planets like our own Earth. So if there are more rocky small planets out there, then it seems more likely that there's life out there too," he said.
But according to Dr Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society, most of the worlds they predict exist would be too close to be habitable.
"We probably need to wait a bit longer before we find a significant number of 'Earths' in habitable zones of their parent stars."
The Twilight Zone: where animals battle for dominion
By Ella Davies Earth News reporter
As night falls, battle commences
As nature draws the velvet curtain of night across the animal kingdom, a battle for survival begins.
In the murky half light, bats and owls go head to head with the scuttling, slithering, squeaking creatures of the undergrowth.
Each uses a different strategy to come out on top, relying on either sight, smell or sound to seek dominion of the Twilight Zone, the period of time between daylight and absolute night at both dawn and dusk.
Many species use these murky hours as a frantic, fleeting window of time for feeding, mating and communicating.
Yet despite his bustle of activity, scientists do not yet fully understand how creatures behave in the twilight zone, or even why they choose to emerge within it.
The eyes have it
Animals are known as "crepuscular" if they are active at this peculiar time of day.
The most quoted theory for crepuscular activity is that it offers an optimal balance: there is just enough light to see, but it is dark enough to lower of the odds of being caught and eaten.
Many predators active in the day are let down by their eyesight as the light fades.
For example, even the incredible eyes of the kestrel diminish with the departing sunlight.
Owls trade high resolution for high sensitivity with their night vision
The reason is that diurnal birds of prey rely on their sophisticated vision during the day to identify small prey from long distances.
Analyses of the eye structure of these birds show their retinas are densely packed with cones: light processing cells that allow high resolution, detailed sight in bright light.
But crucially, birds with a greater number of cones have fewer rods: the cells needed to process low light intensities or "see in the dark".
Barn owls' flat faces channel sound to their ears
The eyesight of American kestrels diminishes rapidly once the sun sets
Avian vision expert Professor Graham Martin from the University of Birmingham explains that diurnal birds of prey sacrifice twilight sight for their exceptional daytime vision.
"There is a trade-off between high resolution and high sensitivity," Prof Martin explains.
"From this we would predict that as light levels [fall] during twilight the ability of birds to detect details will decrease rapidly."
That gives small mammals, lizards and amphibians a short window of "safety" from most birds.
But not all.
Owls are well known for their large eyes. Less known is that their eyes' retinas contain abundant rods but few cones.
That means their vision becomes blurry at higher light intensities, but it makes them experts at hunting out prey in extremely low light.
Colour is key
As well as detailed sight in bright light, cone cells or "photo receptors" allow for colour vision.
So as daylight fades, so does the colour perception of daytime predators. Equally, with their higher proportion of rods, many nocturnal specialists are rendered colour blind, offering crepuscular species another chance to capitalise.
For some creatures, twilight is a time for colourful mating and feeding frenzies.
Jamaican turquoise anole lizards perform colourful displays at dusk
Last year, researchers found that Jamaican turquoise anole lizards (Anolis grahami) performed unique visual displays during dusk.
Their complex routine of "push ups" and brightly coloured throat flap extensions suggested that the lizards must have excellent sight and colour vision during this murky time if the displays were to attract any attention from fellow lizards.
Reptiles aren't the only twilight-active animals found to recognise colours at low light levels.
Horned scarab beetles (Coprophanaeus lancifer) in the Amazon basin are only active during dusk.
By analysing the beetles' appearance "through beetle eyes", researchers from France found that their deep violet-blue bodies were far more visible to potential mates during dusk than daytime.
Also, fellow invertebrates, elephant hawkmoths (Deilephila elpenor), are able to discern colours at all light intensities, according to research published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
Scientists found that the moths could recognise the colour of their favourite flowers regardless of the light conditions. This effectively means moths can pick their mealtimes to avoid diurnal birds and nocturnal bats with a taste for insects.
Noctule bats feast during twilight
Smell 'o' vision
Further tactics employed by twilight specialists focus on senses that do not rely on light levels at all.
Moths are known to use olfactory or "smell" clues to find their preferred food sources.
A study into flying insects found those with a taste for decaying food also let their noses lead the way in dim light. The researchers attributed this to dusk temperatures and air conditions that make smells easier to trace as the air is still and moist.
Long-eared bats can "smell out" their prey
With their diminished sense of smell, many avian predators again lose out in the twilight war of the senses, but mammals such as bats are at no such disadvantage.
Bats are known to identify their young in large colonies by scent alone and the lesser short-tailed bat (Mystacina tuberculata) and long-eared bat (Plecotus auritus) are two species known to use their sense of smell to hunt.
Bats' mammalian eyes are better suited to twilight too, as their retinas are composed of both rods and cones, according to research by scientists in Germany.
This balance suggests they can see in colour, even UV, and at a variety of light intensities including the changing light of dusk.
The only thing keeping bats in their roost until dark is the risk of predation.
Although perfect for night hunting, their dark camouflage casts a conspicuous silhouette in lighter skies.
The bats which are often seen flying in twilight are usually fast flying species such as the noctule - these are best able to avoid predatory birds
Professor Gareth Jones
"Daylight flying is largely avoided, and the most favoured hypothesis is that bats don't fly then because they would be captured and eaten by diurnal birds of prey," says Professor Gareth Jones, who runs the Bat Ecology and Bioacoustics lab at the University of the Bristol, UK.
"Others argue that avoidance of competition with aerial insectivorous birds, and threats of overheating may stop bats flying by day," he adds.
Studies into bats' foraging behaviour suggest that twilight emergence is more likely amongst bats with stronger defences in the shape of more protective tree cover or physical strengths.
"The bats that emerge earliest in the evening and hence which are often seen flying in twilight are usually fast flying species such as the noctule - these are best able to avoid predatory birds," says Prof Jones.
Savour the sounds
A pipistrelle bat hunts by twilight
Bats are well-known for their ability to echolocate: pinpointing prey by bouncing sound signals off them and listening for the echo.
This unique skill effectively means they can hunt regardless of light levels.
Owls too employ excellent hearing to catch their prey. The barn owl in particular has a large flat face that channels sound to its asymmetrically positioned ears.
Recent research has found that the birds can pick up not just high but also low frequencies as they search for a meal.
However, it is not only the hunter that is listening carefully in post-sunset struggles, as researchers studying moths have found.
Certain species are now known to hear and understand bat calls so that they can take defensive measures. A study of Choerocampine hawkmoths found that they can hear with their mouthparts and respond to bat calls with evasive manoeuvres.
Large yellow underwings (Noctua pronuba) meanwhile can tell whether they have been "spotted" by bats and American researchers last year found that tiger moths (Eptesicus fuscus) use their own ultrasound clicks to jam predators' echolocation signals.
Scientists point to this evidence as proof of a "co-evolutionary arms race" between bats and moths with each species developing counter-measures to maintain their survival.
The thing about arms races, however, is that they are rarely won.
So it seems likely that the battle for dominion of the twilight zone will continue. Just as night follows day, and day follows night.
Jellyfish 'may benefit from ecosystem instability'
By Mark KinverScience and environment reporter, BBC News
The causes behind jellyfish blooms are difficult to disentangle, say the authors
A team of researchers have been trying to identify how jellyfish may benefit from marine ecosystems destabilised by climate change and overfishing.
There is concern that a rise in jellyfish numbers could prevent depleted commercially important fish stocks recovering to historical levels.
However, a study by European scientists says more data is needed to understand what is happening beneath the waves.
The findings are set to be published in the journal Global Change Biology.
Researchers from the UK and Ireland said samples collected from the Irish Sea since 1970 have recorded an increase in material from cnidarians (the division of the animal kingdom that includes jellyfish and coral), "with a period of frequent outbreaks between 1982 and 1991".
"There does appear to have been an increase in abundance since 1994 for the Irish Sea," said co-author Christopher Lynam, a researcher at the Centre for Environment Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas).
The team added that previous studies had recorded changes to marine ecosystems as a result of various factors, such as the removal of top predators, and changes to the distribution and characteristics of plankton.
'Jellyfish joyride'
These changes have led to a growing concern that the oceans may become increasingly dominated by jellyfish because "many gelatinous zooplankton species are able to increase in abundance rapidly and adapt to new conditions".
Vast blooms of certain jellyfish can cause havoc in affected areas
In recent years, there have been a number of examples of sudden blooms of jellyfish in European waters - including the Irish, Mediterranean and Black seas - which have killed fish and closed beaches.
In 2007, an invasion of mauve stingers (Pelagia noctiluca) wiped out Northern Ireland's only salmon farm, killing more than 100,000 fish.
However, Dr Lynam was keen to point out that the team's study was dominated by the common moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita), which was not responsible for wiping out the salmon.
The main concern, the team wrote, was the establishment of a "never-ending jellyfish joyride" in which the creatures become so established that it makes it almost impossible for commercial fish stocks to return to historical levels.
But Dr Lynam told BBC News: "I don't think that the hypothesis that jellyfish will come into an area and dominate, not allowing anything to come back again, is really supported.
"Such a nightmare scenario does not seem to be the case, when you consider the data and studies that have been carried out."
Complicated picture
He explained that the team looked at whether factors such as changes to the climate and overfishing were responsible for the increase in jellyfish abundance.
"It is quite a complicated set of possible linkages that need to be drawn, which we really only have a vague insight at the moment.
"For the recent period where we have good data, it appears as if sea surface temperature is the most important variable.
"This does not necessarily prove it of course, but it does appear to be benefiting jellyfish."
The team, using data provided by the UK Met Office, commented: "The regional seas of the northeast Atlantic have been warming for the past 15 years at a rate not experienced in recent centuries."
Overfishing has also been linked to the rise of jellyfish populations. Research suggests that commercial fishing during the 20th Century had resulted in a change in the Irish Sea's ecosystem.
The researchers wrote: "The overexploitation of herring during the late 1970s was followed by a period of ecosystem instability in the 1980s in which the frequency of occurrence of cnidarian material... rose to high levels, indicating outbreaks of jellyfish."
Dr Lynam added: "If you take out a lot of the plankton feeders, there could be more food for jellyfish so they might become more abundant. There may be feedback mechanisms that we are not aware of, so there does need to be further study."
But he cited examples in the North Sea and Black Sea where fish species had declined, leading to an increase in jellyfish abundance, but the introduction of measures such as limits on catches had resulted in a recovery of fish stocks.
The team urged for the monitoring of jellyfish to continue, and concluded: "The move to ecosystem-based fisheries management requires extensive ecological knowledge and an understanding of the risks posed by any indirect effects... of our utilisation of the sea's resources."
The first marine plan area extends up to 200km into the North Sea off the east coast of England
A swathe of the North Sea has been chosen as the first area off England's coast to get a marine planning system.
The marine plan aims to bring to the sea the same level of planning as councils have on land.
The area extends from Flamborough Head, East Yorkshire, to Felixstowe, Suffolk, and 200km (124 miles) out to sea.
Plans will be drawn up by the Marine Management Organisation (MMO) over the next two years to co-ordinate the development of all marine activities.
They will serve as a blueprint for what activities can be licensed in the new marine plan area.
The Flamborough-to-Felixstowe zone will be the first of 10 that will eventually form a comprehensive marine planning system around England.
They will aim to bring "joined-up" planning to marine activities including wind farms, oil and gas exploration, cable laying, commercial shipping, fishing and recreational use.
'World first'
Steve Brooker, head of the MMO's marine planning, said: "England's marine area is extremely crowded in terms of existing activities and the pressure and competition for space are going to increase.
"Marine planning will enable the MMO and others to balance and integrate the vast range of competing activities and aspirations.
"As a country, we can then take informed decisions about the development of our sea area and our priorities, based on shared understanding, a common baseline and sound evidence."
The MMO said it was the first organisation in the world to develop an integrated planning system for the sea "mirroring the terrestrial planning regime, which has, over 60 years, become an established and trusted mechanism for integrating and balancing land use".
Jonathan Amos| <abbr class="published" title="2010-10-29T23:09:42+00:00">23:09 UK time, Friday, 29 October 2010</abbr>
Somewhere out in space thereâs a big rock that has our address on it.
If an object was sent to strike the asteroid, the rock's course could be subtly changed
Throughout geological history, our planet has been hit by a succession of major asteroids and the probabilities suggest further impacts will occur in the future.
No-one can say today when these might happen; we havenât yet identified an asteroid of sufficient size and on a path that gives us immediate cause for concern.
But the evidence hints strongly that something could find us sooner or later, and we need to be ready.
On average, an object about the size of car will enter the Earth's atmosphere once a year, producing a spectacular fireball in the sky.
About every 2,000 years or so, an object the size of a football field will impact the Earth, causing significant local damage.
And then, every few million years, a rock turns up that has a girth measured in kilometres. An impact from one of these will produce global effects.
We know of some Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) today that are several km wide but fortunately none of them comes close enough to make us sweat.
The important thing is we keep looking. The US space agencyâs NEO programme has been running since the late 1990s.
It was tasked with finding 90% of the potentially hazardous objects out there larger than 1km and itâs about 80% through this search. A few years back, the US Congress asked Nasa to extend the survey to include rocks down to about 140m in size.
That requires more and better telescopes and these are coming online. You will hear much more information on NEOs in the coming years because of this finer-scale sweep of the skies.
When a potentially hazardous rock is discovered, one of the best ways to determine its true status is to complete a study using radar, an extremely powerful tool.
Facilities such as the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico or the Goldstone complex in California can pin down a rockâs key properties, determining its velocity to a precision less than 1mm per second, and enabling scientists to compute its orbit hundreds of years into the future.
One of the more interesting factoids that I became aware of recently is just how many of these objects are actually binaries â thatâs to say, when the radar observations are done it becomes apparent that the asteroid is really two asteroids, or even a trio.
Contact binary: Toutatis (4.5km long) frequently gets to within a couple of Earth-Moon distances
Some of these are what are termed contact binaries â they touch each other. These are the objects that look like giant peanuts. (My favourite contact binary is the âdog boneâ asteroid, 216 Kleopatra, although this is a long way from Earth and no threat to us).
About a quarter of all the objects investigated by radar turn out to be binaries of some kind.
So the inevitable question arises, what do we do if we find that huge rock with our address on it?
The powers that be are on the case. A lot of this work goes under the aegis of the United Nations, and in this context a body called the NEO Mission Planning and Operations Group (MPOG) has been meeting in Germany this week.
This panel of experts â these are astronauts, various space scientists and engineers - is urging the worldâs space agencies to improve their search and tracking capabilities, and to start developing concepts to deflect asteroids.
One of the leading figures in this initiative is the Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart. Heâs the chairman of the B612 Foundation, which campaigns on the NEO topic [PDF], and was one of the attendees at the MPOG meeting. He characterises the threat thus:
âAt the upper end, youâre talking about wiping out the dinosaurs and most of life on Earth 65 million years ago; at the smaller end youâre talking about a million objects that hit the Earth last night â we call them shooting stars. Itâs the objects in between that occur every few hundred years that weâre concerned with.â
Schweickart is convinced the solutions are within reach to deal with most hazardous asteroids on a collision path with Earth. In the majority of cases, the preferred concept would look much like Nasaâs Deep Impact mission of 2005 which saw a shepherding spacecraft release an impactor to strike a comet.
This gentle nudge, depending when and how it's done, could change the velocity of the rock ever so slightly to make it arrive âat the intersectionâ sufficiently early or late to miss Earth.
According to Schweickart, rear-ending an asteroid may be the easy part, however. Getting the worldâs bureaucracy to act on the threat in a timely fashion may be the bigger challenge, he believes. And hereâs why.
Consider the 300m-wide asteroid Apophis. For a while, before the calculations were detailed enough, there was some concern this object might hit Earth in 2036. The odds now are thought to be pretty slim.
But just imagine for a moment that it was headed right for us and we needed to do something about it.
Take a look at the map below. We know enough about the plane of Apophisâs orbit to understand where this rock would intersect the Earth, and it would be somewhere along the red line.
Now imagine the UN meeting convened to discuss whether the mission sent up to deflect the asteroid should try to slow or accelerate the rock. The choice is important because it would determine where on the line the rock would hit if the mission is not entirely successful in getting the asteroid to pass by the Earth.
In other words, one strategy chosen over the other would lessen the risks for some while increasing them for others.
So, you can bet Russia, Venezuela and Senegal would have very different views on which mission profile should be chosen.
Thatâs why Schweickart believes the geopolitical obstacles need to be tackled now and the mechanisms put in place to deal with thorny issues like the one Iâve just described:
âIf we can get past that bureaucratic challenge, we can in fact prevent [large] asteroid impacts from hitting again in our future. This is an amazing and rather audacious statement to make, but if we really do our job right, we should never be hit again by an asteroid that can do serious damage to life on Earth.â
(BBC news):Your chance to have a look at an ongoing dig:
Digger finds Neolithic tomb complex
Excavations have exposed a complex rock cut chamber with skulls in it
Archaeologists on Orkney are investigating what is thought to be a 5,000-year-old tomb complex.
A local man stumbled on the site while using a mechanical digger for landscaping.
It appears to contain a central passageway and multiple chambers excavated from rock.
There is a large neolithic burial complex nearby called The Tomb of the Eagles where over 300 bodies were found.
"Potentially these skeletons could tell us so much about Neolithic people," said Orkney Islands Council archaeologist Julie Gibson.
"Not only in relation to their deaths, but their lives."
One end of the tomb was accidentally removed as it was discovered and as a result, the burial site has now been flooded.
Archaeologists are in a race against time to recover its contents before they are damaged or destroyed.
"There might also be other material, pottery or organics such as woven grass, buried in there - which cannot last under the circumstances," said Ms Gibson.
The rescue excavation is being undertaken by archaeologists from Orkney College and is sponsored by by Orkney Islands Council and Historic Scotland.
Archaeologists have described the hoard as an exciting find
Archaeologists have unearthed a collection of Bronze Age axe heads, spear tips and other 3,000-year-old metal objects buried in an Essex field.
The items include an intact pottery container with heavy contents which has been removed undisturbed.
The materials are now at a local museum where archaeologists hope to uncover new insights into Bronze Age Britain.
"This is a really exciting find," said local archaeologist Laura McLean.
"To find a hoard still located in its Bronze Age context, below the level of ploughed soil, is very rare. The fact that there is pottery involved makes the find even more unusual."
The location was reported to archaeologists at Colchester and Ipswich Museums by a landowner from the Burnham-on-Crouch area and Mr J Humphreys, a metal detectorist.
Finding a hoard in its Bronze Age context is very rare
Three other hobbyists then came forward to report more finds in the same area including the top of a pottery vessel.
"This is a really exciting find and a good example of metal detectorists and archaeologists working together to uncover and record our history, making sure it is not lost forever," says McLean who acts as local Finds Liaison Officer for the Portable Antiquities Scheme.
The excavation at the Bronze Age site was filmed and the objects have been removed to allow archaeologists to carry out their studies.
As the intact pot was so fragile and the contents were heavy, the decision was taken to "block lift" the vessel and transport it to the museums laboratory for further study.
In block lifting, the soil around the object is excavated and the object itself is sealed - on this occasion in cling film - to preserve it intact and to prevent damage when transporting it.
The scientists studied the brain activity of 76 people
Our ability to project a picture of ourselves in other people's minds may be down to a distinct form of brain activity, according to a report.
A US team used functional magnetic resonance imaging to observe the brains of people playing a strategic game.
They write in the journal PNAS that those who tried to trick their rivals showed a unique brain activity.
The report says this could help shed light into what goes on in the minds of people with mental disorders.
"The study is a way to probe the way that we think how other people think about us," Read Montague of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, US, a co-author of the paper, told BBC News.
Mental models
To explain the idea of this so-called second-order belief, or "the ability and willingness to manipulate other people's beliefs about ourselves for gain, Dr Montague used an example of a typical job interview.
"People send signals to one another to manage our image in the minds of others.
"You send a resume in that creates a prior set of dispositions about you, then you walk into an interview and you say things in order to manipulate in the mind of the interviewer a model of you in their mind.
"That's second-order belief."
To get the results, the team, led by Meghana Bhatt, also of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, asked 76 participants to play a strategic computer game.
'Strategic deceivers'
It seemed simple, but the players executed it differently, with some of them showing signs of a "strategic deceiver" - a person who bluffs.
During the game, "buyers" had to pass on information about an object's value to the "sellers", in order to buy the object as cheaply as they could.
"Somebody sends a suggestion to you, saying 'You should sell me this thing for such and such amount of money', and the other person has to decide what that person means by those signals, what does that person think I think about them," explained Dr Montague.
The team found that about 11% of the players consciously tried to deceive their opponents by making them believe they were being honest - thus aiming to reap higher profits.
The researcher said that this study was an important step towards understanding mental disorders, including autism.
He explained that people with personality or mental disorders did not process social information appropriately.
But asking a person with a mental illness to play a strategic computer game could help provide insights into a specific disorder.
"Right now we have no understanding of mental illness at all," said Dr Montague.
"We have opinions of physicians in clinical settings; we have the obvious incapacities of people where they can't have normal lives.
"But we haven't had objective procedures where we can access therapies or drugs.
"So this is a step in that direction and this is going to allow us to identify genes associated with these disorders too."
This was on the BBC radio news this morning, but I would have thought that it was common sense that fit people tend to be healthier than unfit people, so less likely to catch bugs, or if they catch a bug that their bodies are more able to lessen the effects.
Exercise 'can prevent a cold', a study shows
By Michelle RobertsHealth reporter, BBC News
Common cold viruses are spread via large particles expelled at close range by coughs and sneezes
People who exercise regularly are less likely to get a cold, researchers say.
A study of 1,000 people found that staying active nearly halved the odds of catching cold viruses and, failing that, made the infection less severe.
Experts told the British Journal of Sports Medicine that this could be because exercise helps bolster the immune system to fight off bugs.
But you may not have to actually do much exercise - those who merely think they are fit enjoy the same lower risk.
Adults can expect to suffer two to five colds per year. This latest research suggests there are lifestyle choices you can make to improve your odds of either avoiding them, or suffering too badly from them.
For their study, US researchers asked the healthy volunteers to keep a record of any coughs and sniffles they experienced over a three-month period during the autumn and winter.
The volunteers were also asked to say how frequently in any given week they would do exercise lasting at least 20 minutes and intensive enough to break a sweat.
And they were questioned about lifestyle, diet and recent stressful events, as these can all affect a person's immune system.
Being older, male and married seemed to reduce the frequency of colds, as did eating plenty of fruit.
But the most significant factors that cut colds was how much exercise a person did and how fit they perceived themselves to be.
Feeling fit and being active cut the risk of having a cold by nearly 50%.
People who were physically active on five or more days of the week were unwell with a cold for about five days of the three-month period, compared to nine days for those who did little or no exercise.
And even when they were ill, they suffered less with their symptoms.
The common cold
Common cold infections are so widespread that there can be very few humans who escape infection each year
Adults with regular contact with children are most exposed to infection
Cold viruses can be passed from person to person by hand contact or by touching contaminated surfaces such as door handles
The severity of symptoms fell by 41% among those who felt the fittest and by 31% among those who were the most active.
Lead researcher Dr David Nieman and his team, from Appalachian State University in North Carolina, say bouts of exercise spark a temporary rise in immune system cells circulating around the body that can attack foreign invaders.
Although these levels fall back within a few hours, each session is likely to provide an immune boost to fight off infections like the common cold.
Professor Steve Field, chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners, said: "This is yet more evidence for doing exercise. It reflects what we have believed for some time.
"Exercise makes us feel better and now here's more evidence that it is good for us."
Virus breakthrough raises hope over ending common cold
Scientists say they have made a landmark discovery which could pave the way for new drugs to beat illnesses like the common cold.
Until now experts had thought that antibodies could only tackle viral infections by blocking or attacking viruses outside cells.
But work done by the Medical Research Council shows antibodies can pass into cells and fight viruses from within.
PNAS journal said the finding held promise for a new antiviral drugs.
The Cambridge scientists stressed that it would take years of work and testing to find new therapies, and said that the pathway they had discovered would not work on all viruses.
Fighting viruses
Some antiviral drugs are already available to help treat certain conditions, like HIV.
But viruses remain mankind's biggest killer, responsible for twice as many deaths each year as cancer, and are among the hardest of all diseases to treat.
The new discovery by Dr Leo James and colleagues transforms the previous scientific understanding of our immunity to viral diseases like the common cold, 'winter vomiting' and gastroenteritis.
It shows that antibodies can enter cells and that once inside, they then trigger a response, led by a protein called TRIM21.
This protein pulls the virus into a disposal system used by the cell to get rid of unwanted material.
The researchers found this process happens quickly, usually before most viruses have chance to harm the cell.
And they discovered that increasing the amount of TRIM21 protein in cells makes this process even more effective, suggesting new ways of making better antiviral drugs.
Dr James said: "Doctors have plenty of antibiotics to fight bacterial infections but few antiviral drugs.
"Although these are early days, and we don't yet know whether all viruses are cleared by this mechanism, we are excited that our discoveries may open multiple avenues for developing new antiviral drugs."
Sir Greg Winter, deputy director of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, said: "This research is not only a leap in our understanding of how and where antibodies work, but more generally in our understanding of immunity and infection."
Jellyfish cells 'diagnose' cancer, York scientists say
Cells from jellyfish can be used to help diagnose cancers, the scientists say
Luminous cells from jellyfish can be used to diagnose cancers deep inside the body, scientists have said.
The process uses the green fluorescent protein (GFP) enabling jellyfish to glow in the dark.
Researchers in North Yorkshire found it can be targeted at cancer cells allowing them to be spotted using a special camera.
A team from the Yorkshire Cancer Research Laboratory at York University has developed the procedure.
The team's leader, Professor Norman Maitland, believes it will revolutionise the way some cancers are diagnosed.
He said: "Cancers deep within the body are difficult to spot at an early stage, and early diagnosis is critical for the successful treatment of any form of cancer.
"What we have developed is a process which involves inserting proteins derived from luminous jellyfish cells into human cancer cells.
"Then, when we illuminate the tissue, a special camera detects these proteins as they light up, indicating where the tumours are."
The process is an extension of the work done by American chemist Dr Roger Y Tsien, who won a Nobel Prize in 2008 for taking luminous cells from the crystal jelly species of jellyfish and isolating the GFP.
Prof Maitland said: "When we heard about Dr Tsien's work, we realised how that advance might be useful in the diagnosis of cancer.
'Flare up'
"X-rays, for example, struggle to penetrate well deeply into tissues and bone, so diagnosing dangerous microscopic bone cancer is difficult.
"Our process should allow earlier diagnosis to take place."
The York team's process uses an altered form of the protein so that it shows up as red or blue, rather than its original green.
Viruses containing the proteins are targeted to home in on tiny bundles of cancer cells scattered throughout the body which are too small to be seen by conventional scanning techniques.
But the viruses grow and, while doing so, make more and more of the fluorescent proteins.
"When a specially-developed camera is switched on, the proteins just flare up and you can see where the cancer cells are." said Prof Maitland.
"We call the process 'Virimaging'."
Deep in body
The team expects the procedure to be ready for clinical trials within five years, if the research continues to go to plan.
Prof Maitland said one problem, however, may be the availability of the specialised cameras needed for the process.
A United States company is the only one which has so far designed and built a camera system which allows the jellyfish proteins to be seen with the desired resolution so deep in the body.
This kit costs about ÂĢ500,000 and Prof Maitland said he was currently raising the funds to buy one.
A few days ago I posted a story about wind turbines affecting birds. A similar story from the BBC, but this time about power lines:
Power lines 'invisible' to birds
By Ella Davies Earth News reporter
Birds fly into power lines because they have "blind spots" in their field of vision, according to new research.
Vision experts found that cranes, bustards and storks were unable to see obstacles straight ahead when they tilted their heads downwards in flight.
Birds often look down during flight to find fellow birds as well as nesting and feeding areas, say the researchers.
The new evidence suggests that the problem cannot be prevented by altering the appearance of power lines.
Millions of birds are thought to be killed by hitting power lines globally each year.
Clear statistics are difficult to obtain because birds' remains are often scavenged before the cause of death can be recorded.
Despite efforts to make power lines more visible through the use of reflective markers and high-visibility tags, certain species still have high mortality rates from power line crashes.
Scientists from the Centre for Ornithology at the University of Birmingham, UK, studied three particularly affected species: kori bustards (Aerdeotis kori) blue cranes (Anthropoides paradisea) and white storks (Ciconia ciconia).
Their findings, published in the journal Biological Conservation, identify that these species share significant blind areas to the front of their heads.
The blue crane's eyesight is better suited to eating than flying.
Although the heavy bustard differs greatly in general body shape from the delicate crane and stork, the birds share a foraging technique - visually guiding their bill to take food items.
This technique requires excellent vision at the end of the bill, resulting in a narrow field of vision and wide "blind spots".
"Once we saw the wisdom of looking at the problem through birds' eyes rather than human eyes, it all made sense," says Professor Graham Martin.
"These birds can see straight ahead in flight but they only need to pitch their heads forward by a small amount and they will be blind in the direction of travel."
Many species of bird have been observed looking down during flight, possibly to locate fellow birds and suitable foraging and nesting sites.
Narrow binocular fields combined with birds' tendencies to look down effectively means certain species cannot see power lines until it is too late.
White storks fly great distances to overwinter in Africa
"Not all birds will be blind ahead when they look down but we can certainly suggest that this will apply in all crane and bustard species and probably in larger raptors including eagles and vultures," Professor Martin tells the BBC.
This new evidence could help to inform both ornithologists and power distribution companies seeking to avoid crashes.
"Simply putting devices on power lines to make them more conspicuous will not work in many situations... ways need to be found of decoying birds away from power wires at sites where collision rates are high," says Professor Martin.
Of the African birds studied, the blue crane is the most vulnerable according to the IUCN red list.
Conservationists point to power line incidents as a key factor in the blue cranes' population decline
From the BBC: an ongoing major court case in the States concerning the availability of violent computer games and children:
Supreme Court considers violent games rules case
There is conflicting evidence over the effect of violent games
The highest court in the US has heard arguments over whether children can be stopped from buying violent video games involving murder and sexual assault.
The Supreme Court case centres on a ban in California on selling or renting games to those under the age of 18.
Opponents of the measure says it breaches the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech.
But supporters say the law is necessary as violent games can cause harm to children.
Supreme Court justices appeared split on Tuesday over whether the restrictions are constitutional.
"We do not have a tradition in this country of telling children they should watch people actively hitting schoolgirls over the head with a shovel so they'll beg with mercy - being merciless and decapitating them - shooting people in the leg so they fall down," Chief Justice John Roberts said.
But other justices appeared to be worried the law, which was never put into effect, could have larger, damaging implications for the US constitution.
"I am concerned with the First Amendment, which says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech," said Justice Antonin Scalia.
He added: "It has never been understood that the freedom of speech did not include portrayals of violence. You are asking us to create a whole new prohibition which the American people never ratified when they ratified the First Amendment."
Paul Smith, a lawyer for the Entertainment Merchants Association, added there was no proof violent video games were any more damaging than television, books or movies.
"We have a history in this country of new mediums coming along and people vastly overreacting to them, thinking the sky is falling, our children are all going to be turned into criminals," he said.
'Morbid interests'
The 2005 California law prohibits the sale of violent video games to children "where a reasonable person would find that the violent content appeals to a deviant or morbid interest of minors, is patently offensive to prevailing community standards as to what is suitable for minors, and causes the game as a whole to lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors".
Under the law, parents can still purchase violent video games for their children, but retailers caught selling the titles to minors can face a fine of up to $1,000 (ÂĢ625) for each game.
After a legal challenge by industry groups, a district court and then the court of appeals stopped the law coming into effect.
Courts in six other states have also reached similar conclusions, striking down bans.
The Supreme Court, which will make a decision next year on the case, may have to decide if California is required to demonstrate "a direct causal link between violent video games and physical and psychological harm to minors" before stopping games being sold to them.
Outgoing California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is supporting the legal case against the Entertainment Merchants Association, with a number of other trade groups and rights activist bodies involved.
There is already a nationwide voluntary system of game classification.
The fossil's concave shape suggests it fit below a dome-like forehead
A new type of dolphin with a short, spoon-shaped nose and high, bulbous forehead has been identified from a fossil found in the North Sea.
The Platalearostrum hoekmani was named after Albert Hoekman, the Dutch fisherman who in 2008 trawled up a bone from the creature's skull.
Up to six metres in length, the dolphin lived two to three million years ago.
The so-called rostrum bone and a model of the dolphin are on display at the Natural History Museum Rotterdam.
As museum researchers Klaas Post and Erwin Kompanje write in the museum's journal Deinsea, the North Sea has been a rich source of fossils in recent decades as bottom-trawling has become more prevalent.
The practice has yielded tens of thousands of pieces of the fossil record - many of which defy classification.
The fossil is one of thousands that must be fitted into a fuller catalogue of marine mammals
What is clear from the singular bone found by Mr Hoekman is that the animal from which it came fits neatly in the family of marine mammals known as Delphinids - the ocean-going dolphins that actually includes both killer and pilot whales.
More specific classification within this family is somewhat speculative.
The bone shows an unusually large tip region containing six teeth known as the premaxilla. This feature suggests the broad, blunt nature of the creature's snout.
Based on analyses of similar fossils and modern relatives within the family, the researchers are convinced they have found a new species whose closest living relative is the pilot whale.
By Victoria Gill Science and nature reporter, BBC News
Drongos often follow groups of meerkats as they forage
Drongos in the Kalahari mimic the alarm calls of other species in order to steal food, scientists have found.
The birds "play tricks" on meerkats in particular, following the little mammals around until they catch a meal.
The drongos then make fake alarm calls that mimic other species and cause the meerkats to run for cover, allowing the drongos to swoop in.
The findings are reported in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The scientists suggest that by mimicking other species, drongos keeps their deception "believable".
"It's a nifty trick," said Tom Flower, the Cambridge University PhD student who carried out the research.
He began his work studying meerkats in the Kalahari Desert and quickly noticed their reaction to the drongos' alarm calls.
When a predator was in the area, the birds could make an alarm call and the meerkats would immediately dash for cover in boltholes.
"But when the drongos saw a meerkat with a large food item such as a gecko, larvae or even a scorpion, it would make a false alarm call that sounded the same as the calls they made at predators, even though there were no predators around," he told BBC News.
Crying wolf
The researcher then turned his attention to the drongos. He followed and studied 100 birds, and discovered that they mimicked the alarm calls of several other species.
This appeared to persuade the meerkats that there was a dangerous predator in the area and they should abandon their food and hide.
Mr Flower likened the discovery to one of Aesop's fables. "Using your own alarm call won't get you too far - just like the boy who cried wolf - the responder will stop listening to you," he explained.
To avoid being ignored, the birds appear to deliberately change the type of call they make - to alter the species they mimic - when meerkats stop responding to their alarm calls.
"This might keep their deception racket going, increasing their food stealing profit," said Mr Flower.
"It would be like the boy in Aesop's fable mimicking the voice of another villager when he cried wolf in order to continue fooling the villagers."
Although most of the species they impersonated were other birds, drongos even managed a meerkat alarm call. Mr Flower thinks the birds may have learned by trial and error that meerkats are likely to find their own alarm call "particularly convincing".
This is one of the first studies to show a function for vocal mimickry.
"It's very common in birds, but [previously] we had no idea why they did it," said Mr Flower.
My monitor packed up yesterday, so I've only just been able to get back on here.
From the BBC:
Invisibility cloak closer with flexible 'metamaterial'
By Jason PalmerScience and technology reporter, BBC News
Metamaterials work by interrupting and channelling the flow of light
Scientists in the UK have demonstrated a flexible film that represents a big step toward the "invisibility cloak" made famous by Harry Potter.
The film contains tiny structures that together form a "metamaterial", which can, among other tricks, manipulate light to render objects invisible.
Flexible metamaterials have been made before, but only work for light of a colour far beyond that which we see.
Physicists have hailed the approach a "huge step forward".
The bendy approach for visible light is reported in the New Journal of Physics.
Metamaterials work by interrupting and channelling the flow of light at a fundamental level; in a sense they can be seen as bouncing light waves around in a prescribed fashion to achieve a particular result.
However, the laws of optics have it that light waves can only be manipulated in this way by structures that are about as large as the waves' length.
Until now, the most striking demonstrations of invisibility have occurred for light waves with a much longer wavelength - a far redder colour - than we can see. This is because it is simply easier to construct metamaterials with relatively large structures.
Even flexible metamaterial films have been shown off for this high-wavelength range.
For the far shorter waves that we can see, a metamaterial requires structures so tiny - nanostructures - that they push the boundaries of manufacturing.
"The first step is imagining first of all that this could be done," said Andrea Di Falco of St Andrews University, the author of the paper.
"All the typical results have been reached in flat and rigid surfaces because this is the legacy of the procedures used to create nanostructures."
So instead of building the typical stacks of the "fishnet" structures on hard, brittle silicon, Dr Di Falco used a thin polymer film.
"Typically what you do is stack several layers of fishnet structures and this all together will give you a metamaterial," Dr Di Falco explained.
"What I've done here is fabricate a single layer - I lift it off so that at the end I am left with a self-standing membrane - and show that it has the properties required to create a 3D flexible metamaterial."
Tents moment
Ortwin Hess, a physicist who recently took up the Leverhulme Chair in Metamaterials at Imperial College London, called the work "a huge step forward in very many ways".
"It clearly isn't an invisibility cloak yet - but it's the right step toward that," he told BBC News.
He added that the next step would be to characterise the way that the material's optical properties change as it is bent and folded.
If the properties were sensitive to the movement, delicate manipulations of the films may make them useful for next-generation lenses in, for example, handheld cameras.
If instead they were impervious to bending and motion, the films might be useful for instance in contact lenses. What is more, the invisibility cloak could be that much closer - but Professor Hess added that is still some way off.
"Harry Potter has to wait still - that's the huge goal," he said.
"So far he's had to live in a house and now he can live in something like a tent; it's not the cloak that adjusts to his shape, but it's a bit more flexible. Now we have to take the next step forward."
The first pictures to show good detail of the nucleus were taken by the medium resolution camera
Nasa's Deep Impact probe has flown by Comet Hartley 2.
The first pictures revealed a roughly 1.5km-long, peanut-shaped object with jets of gas streaming from its surface.
The pass, which occurred about 23 million km from Earth, was only the fifth time a spacecraft had made a close approach to a comet.
Nasa said it would take many hours to retrieve all of the data recorded by Deep Impact's two visible-light imagers and one infrared sensor.
But the initial pictures to get to ground gave a fascinating view of the comet's icy body, or nucleus.
"Scientists often think of celestial bodies as roundish, and this obviously is not - it's peanut-like," commented Dr Don Yoemans, who manages Nasa's Near-Earth Object programme. "Mother Nature has once again pulled the rug out from under scientific ideas."
The information from the flyby should give scientists further insight into the diverse properties and behaviours of what are some of the Solar System's most remarkable objects.
"Every time we go to comets, they're full of surprises," said principal investigator Mike A'Hearn from the University of Maryland, College Park.
"None of them look the same, which means there must be some fundamental differences in how they all work; and that's what we're trying to figure out with the Expoxi mission."
The closest approach to Hartley 2 - a highly elongated, 2km-long object - occurred just before 1400 GMT. The probe whizzed by at a relative speed of 12.5km/s.
Deep Impact is on an extended mission, having been re-tasked to visit Hartley following its successful flyby of Comet Tempel 1 in 2005.
On that primary mission, the spacecraft released an impactor that crashed into Tempel's nucleus kicking up thousands of tonnes of icy debris.
The new venture is known by the name Epoxi. It required a series of deep-space manoeuvres, including three gravitational slingshots around Earth, to put the spacecraft in the right part of the sky to meet up with Hartley.
Comet Hartley is named after the Australian astronomer Malcolm Hartley who first identified the body in a photographic plate from a sky survey undertaken in 1986.
He was at Nasa's mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California to see the images of his comet come back from Deep Impact.
"It's awesome," he said. "I've been overwhelmed by everything that's happened in the last two weeks.
"There'll be enough data downloaded to keep researchers busy for the next five, 10, 15 years probably. It's proving to be very interesting."
Tim Larson, the Epoxi project manager at JPL, said: "The mission team and scientists have worked hard for this day. It's good to see Hartley 2 up close."
THE FOUR PREVIOUS COMETS PASSED BY PROBES
Halley's nucleus was by far the biggest seen - 15km in length
Comet Borrelly was about 8km in its longest dimension
Wild 2's dusty shroud (coma) was sampled by the Stardust probe
Tempel 1 was Deep Impact's primary mission "target"
Comets are thought to contain materials that have remained largely unchanged since the formation of the Solar System. They incorporate compounds that are rich in carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen.
Intriguingly these are the elements that make up nucleic and amino acids, the essential ingredients for life as we know it; and there are some who believe comet impacts in the early years of the Solar System could have seeded the Earth with the right chemical precursors for biology.
As well as Tempel 1, spacecraft have previously visited comets Borrelly, Wild 2, and Halley. All are considerably bigger than Hartley. But Hartley - it was discovered in 1986 by the Australian astronomer Malcolm Hartley - has already proved itself to be a fascinating target.
Even from a distance, scientists have seen a lot of short-term changes on the object, and it ejects twice as much gas every minute as Tempel 1.
"We're trying to find out if all the new phenomena we saw at Tempel 1 are universal across all comets or are they special to Tempel 1," said Dr A'Hearn.
"The other key goal is to separate out the primordial features which we think we saw on Tempel 1 in the layering of the cometary nucleus and see what that can tell us about the formation of the Solar System 4.5 billion years ago."
Deep Impact will keep imaging Hartley for a further 20 days.
The Adriatic is an important habitat for loggerhead turtles
One in three loggerhead turtles in the Adriatic Sea has plastic in its intestine, according to researchers studying the impact of debris on marine life.
The shallow waters of the Adriatic are important feeding grounds for the turtles as they develop into adults.
But the sea-floor is one of the most polluted in Europe.
The team studied the bodies of dead sea turtles that had been stranded or accidentally caught by fishing vessels.
The impacts of debris on marine creatures are not entirely clear. But scientists have found that animals ranging from invertebrates to large mammals consume plastic waste and are concerned that it could damage their health.
For a turtle, just a few grams of debris can be fatal if it obstructs the gut.
The researchers from the University of Zagreb found that more than a third of the 54 turtles they examined had ingested marine debris of some kind including plastic bags, wrapping foils, ropes, polystyrene foam and fishing line.
One turtle had consumed 15 pieces of plastic, which almost filled its stomach.
Although the plastic weighted just 0.71g in total, they said it was enough to "probably cause the death of this individual".
Plastic can weaken the turtles by taking up space in the gut which would otherwise digest food.
Population pressure
The shallow coastal waters of the northern Adriatic are one of the most important feeding grounds for loggerhead turtles in the Mediterranean. Here they are able to progress to feeding on the sea floor at a young age.
The southern Adriatic is also important in their development into ocean-going animals.
"It is important to know more about the Adriatic Sea in order to help loggerhead turtles across the whole Mediterranean." says Romana Gracan, one of the researchers involved in the study.
"The water temperature here suits them and because it is shallow they have the opportunity to feed on benthic [sea-floor] animals."
The concentration of litter on the sea floor is among the highest along European coasts, after the northwestern Mediterranean and the Celtic Sea.
The waste comes from the dense population of four million people who live along the coast and are joined each summer by 18 million tourists.
The sea is small and largely cut off from the rest of the Mediterranean, only joined to the Ionian Sea by the 70km wide Strait of Otranto.
Conservation hope
Loggerhead turtles (Caretta caretta) are omnivorous feeders that feed at a variety of different depths.
Where the Mediterranean is too deep for the turtles to reach the sea floor, they feed on floating animals.
But in shallower coastal waters of the Adriatic they take the opportunity to feast on larger sea-floor animals. This brings them into contact with large amounts of debris.
The researchers say their study, published in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin, is the first to address the problems caused by solid debris in the Adriatic Sea.
In the future we must think more carefully what we put in the sea
Romana Gracan, University of Zagreb
Chemical pollution in the Adriatic has been studied for more than 30 years and is already central to marine conservation in the Mediterranean.
The researchers hope that, now they have shown that the turtles are particularly vulnerable to plastic debris, more will be done to reduce it.
"Loggerheads are opportunistic feeders which will eat almost anything that is in front of them and plastic stays around for a very long time in the sea," says Dr Gracan.
"In the future we must think more carefully what we put in the sea."
P.S. If you haven't already heard of it, check out geocaching, it might interest you ;-) (I've learned lots of geography & history through it that I probs never would have otherwise)
As you probably know the NUJ members at the BBC are currently on a 48 hour strike in a dispute over the BBC pension scheme. As a result, it is unlikely that my normal source of info for this thread will have the normal level of activity.
Impacts from space are a topic of fascination in the general public, not just a scientific research field
Want to know what would happen if a 10km-wide asteroid came out of the sky and slammed down on your city?
Scientists at Purdue University and Imperial College London have updated their popular impact effects calculator first produced in 2004.
Users dial in details about the hypothetical impactor, like its diameter and density.
The web program then estimates the scale of the ensuing disaster, such as the size of the crater left behind.
It will also tell you how far away you need to be to avoid being buried by all the material thrown out by the blast, or set on fire.
The original calculator was a "big hit" when it was released, not just within the research community but with a curious public, also. Devised by Purdue's Professor Jay Melosh and colleagues, it is underpinned by scientifically accurate equations.
Many government organisations and scientific institutions regularly link to the calculator as an education tool.
The updated program, known as Impact: Earth! incorporates some additional impact effects, such as the tsunami wave height from an ocean collision. But the key difference those familiar with the old tool will notice is the much more visual and user-friendly interface.
"We've had to update things as knowledge has improved," said Imperial's Dr Gareth Collins.
"One of the major new additions is the estimates for tsunami wave height at a given distance away from an ocean impact. This had been a popular request, but we didn't put it in the original calculator because there simply wasn't consensus back then on what the hazard was. There's since been some good research and we now have a better understanding of the issue," he told BBC News.
The famous Barringer (Meteor) Crater in Arizona was dug out by a 40m-wide impactor
On average, an object about the size of car will enter the Earth's atmosphere once a year, producing a spectacular fireball in the sky.
About every 2,000 years or so, an object the size of a football field will impact the Earth, causing significant local damage.
And then, every few million years, a rock turns up that has a girth measured in kilometres. An impact from one of these can produce global effects.
"The site is intended for a broad global audience because an impact is an inevitable aspect of life on this planet and literally everyone on Earth should be interested," said Dr Melosh.
"There have been big impacts in the past, and we expect big impacts in the future. This site gives the lowdown on what happens when such an impact occurs."
Purdue servers host the new calculator; Imperial will continue to host the old web program. This is being retained for those internet users who do not have fast connections.
The Imperial site is also trialling a tool that will enable users to map the impact effects on to the virtual globe software Google Earth.
"When we first launched the calculator, we hoped it would be a useful tool for scientists working in the field and for those people who were simply keen to find out more when a new crater was discovered and they wanted to understand the consequences if that event had happened yesterday," recalled Dr Collins.
"So we thought there would be some curiosity, but we were simply blown away by the interest."
The new tool has a much more visual and user-friendly interface
Huge amounts of traffic easily overwhelmed Burma's links to the net
An ongoing computer attack has knocked Burma off the internet, just days ahead of its first election in 20 years.
The attack started in late October but has grown in the last few days to overwhelm the nation's link to the net, said security firm Arbor Networks.
Reports from Burma say the disruption is ongoing.
The attack, which is believed to have started on 25 October, comes ahead of closely-watched national elections on 7 November.
International observers and foreign journalists are not being allowed into the country to cover the polls.
It will raise suspicions that Burma's military authorities could be trying to restrict the flow of information over the election period.
The ruling generals say the polls will mark a transition to democratic civilian rule.
But as the BBC's Sue Lloyd-Roberts reports from Burma, many believe the election is a sham designed to cement the military's grip on power.
In the last elections in 1990, Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) won a landslide victory but the junta ignored the result and have remained in power ever since.
Cyber attack
The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, as it is known, works by flooding a target with too much data for it to handle.
BURMA ELECTION: NUMBERS
First election in 20 years
Total of 37 parties contesting the polls
29 million voters eligible to cast ballots
About 3,000 candidates of whom two-thirds are running for junta-linked parties
1.5 million ethnic voters disenfranchised because areas deemed too dangerous for voting to take place
No election observers, no foreign journalists
The "distributed" element of it means that it involves PCs spread all over the world. These networks of enslaved computers - known as "botnets" - are typically hijacked home computers that have been compromised by a virus.
They are typically rented out by cyber criminals for various means, including web attacks. They can be called into action and controlled from across the internet.
Burma links to the wider net via cables and satellites that, at most, can support data transfers of 45 megabits of data per second.
At its height, the attack was pummelling Burma's connections to the wider net with about 10-15 gigabits of data every second.
Writing about the attack, Dr Craig Labovitz from Arbor Networks said the volume of traffic traffic was "several hundred times more than enough" to swamp these links.
The result, said Dr Labovitz, had disrupted network traffic in and out of the nation.
He said the attack was sophisticated in that it rolled together several different types of DDoS attacks and traffic was coming from many different sources.
At time of writing, attempts to contact IP addresses in the block owned by Burma and its telecoms firms timed out, suggesting the attack is still under way.
"Our technicians have been trying to prevent cyber attacks from other countries," a spokesperson from Yatanarpon Teleport told the AFP news agency.
"We still do not know whether access will be good on the election day."
Mr Labovitz said that he did not know the motivation for the attack but said that analysis of similar events in the past had found motives that ran the gamut "from politically motivated DDoS, government censorship, extortion and stock manipulation."
He also noted that the current wave of traffic was "significantly larger" than high-profile attacks against Georgia and Estonia in 2007.
Vitamin E linked to increased risk of some strokes
Maintaining a healthy lifestyle has a bigger effect on stroke risk than taking vitamin E
Taking vitamin E could slightly increase the risk of a particular type of stroke, a study says.
The British Medical Journal study found that for every 1,250 people there is the chance of one extra haemorrhagic stroke - bleeding in the brain.
Researchers from France, Germany and the US studied nine previous trials and nearly 119,000 people.
But the level at which vitamin E becomes harmful is still unknown, experts say.
The study was carried out at Harvard Medical School, Boston, and INSERM in Paris.
Haemorrhagic strokes are the least common type and occur when a weakened blood vessel supplying the brain ruptures and causes brain damage.
Researchers found that vitamin E increased the risk of this kind of stroke by 22%.
The study also found that vitamin E could actually cut the risk of ischaemic strokes - the most common type of stroke - by 10%.
Ischaemic strokes account for 70% of all cases and happen when a blood clot prevents blood reaching the brain.
Experts found vitamin E could cut the risk, equivalent to one ischaemic stroke prevented per 476 people taking the vitamin.
Lifestyle check
However, they warned that keeping to a healthy lifestyle and maintaining low blood pressure and low cholesterol have a far bigger effect on cutting the risk of ischaemic stroke than taking vitamin E.
More than 111,000 people have a stroke every year and they are the third biggest cause of death in the UK.
Those who survive are frequently left with disability.
While none of the trials suggested that taking vitamin E increased the risk for total stroke, the differences were notable for the two individual types of strokes.
The authors concluded: "Given the relatively small risk reduction of ischaemic stroke and the generally more severe outcome of haemorrhagic stroke, indiscriminate widespread use of vitamin E should be cautioned against."
Previous studies have suggested that taking vitamin E can protect the heart from coronary heart disease, but some have also found that the vitamin could increase the risk of death if taken in high doses.
Dr Peter Coleman, deputy director of research at The Stroke Association, said: "This is a very interesting study that shows that the risk of haemorrhagic stroke can be slightly increased by high levels of orally taken Vitamin E, although what is a high level has not clearly been ascertained.
"More research is required to discover the mechanism of action and the level at which Vitamin E can become harmful.
"We urge people to maintain a lifestyle of a balanced diet, regular exercise and monitoring their blood pressure to reduce their risk of a stroke but would be very interested in seeing further research into this study," he said.
With the BBC journalists strike, there is not a lot of new material on the BBC site. This story was posted before the strike:
UK copyright laws to be reviewed, announces Cameron
Spoof videos can fall foul of current copyright laws, campaigners say
Britain's intellectual property laws are to be reviewed to "make them fit for the internet age," prime minister David Cameron has announced.
He said the law could be relaxed to allow greater use of copyright material without the owner's permission.
The announcement was welcomed by internet campaigners who say it will boost small business.
But any changes could be resisted by the music and film industries who have campaigned against copyright reform.
Speaking at an event in the East End of London, at which he announced a series of investments by IT giants including Facebook and Google, Mr Cameron said the founders of Google had told the government they could not have started their company in Britain.
'Fair use'
He said: "The service they provide depends on taking a snapshot of all the content on the internet at any one time and they feel our copyright system is not as friendly to this sort of innovation as it is in the United States.
"Over there, they have what are called 'fair-use' provisions, which some people believe gives companies more breathing space to create new products and services.
"So I can announce today that we are reviewing our IP laws, to see if we can make them fit for the internet age. I want to encourage the sort of creative innovation that exists in America."
The six month review will look at what the UK can learn from US rules on the use of copyright material without the rights holder's permission.
It will also look at removing some of the potential barriers that stand in the way of new internet-based business models, such as the cost of obtaining permission from rights holders and the cost and complexity of enforcing intellectual property rights in the UK and internationally.
It will also look at the interaction between intellectual property and competition law - and how to make it easier for small businesses to protect and exploit their intellectual property.
The review, which will report next April, will recommend changes to UK law, as well as long-term goals to be pursued by the British government on the international stage
In a separate development, the Intellectual Property Office will trial a "peer to patent" project, which will allow people to comment on patent applications and rate contributions to help improve the quality of granted patents.
'Basic user rights'
The announcement was welcomed by internet freedom campaigners, who said the government had to redress the balance after the controversial Digital Economy Bill, which gives copyright holders the power to block access to websites hosting illegal content.
"It is long overdue. Some of our copyright laws are frankly preposterous," Jim Killock, of the Open Rights Group, told BBC News.
"The Digital Economy Act left a massive hole of missing user rights like personal copying and parody.
"It's great to have the opportunity to make the case for modern copyright that works for citizens and artists rather than yesterday's global publishing monopolies."
The Digital Economy Bill was rushed into law in the dying days of the Labour government but has yet to be enacted.
Mr Killock said he hoped the government would introduce "basic user rights" so that people could make personal copies of music and videos, or transfer them from one format to another, without fear of prosecution.
He also called on ministers to relax the laws on parody - citing the case of a recent You Tube clip parodying rapper Jay-Z's Empire State of Mind.
Newport State Of Mind has been taken down by YouTube due to a copyright claim by EMI Music Publishing Ltd.
Mr Killock said relaxing copyright laws would also give companies more freedom to innovate.
But the Publishers Association, which represents some of the big names in book, audio and digital publishing in the UK, sounded a note of caution.
Chief executive Richard Mollet said intellectual property laws had to keep pace with rapidly changing technology but he added: "The immutable fact remains that the people who generate and invest in creativity deserve and need to be rewarded."
He added: "The Publishers Association will work very closely with the Intellectual Property Office during this six month review to ensure that rights holders' interests are not regarded as an obstacle to creating internet based business models, as some believe, but rather as the foundation of the UK's world-beating creative, cultural and educational publishing industries."
Canadian officials see through 'unbelievable' disguise
Canadian officials released "before and after" images
Canadian officials have detained a young Asian man who apparently boarded a flight from Hong Kong to Vancouver disguised as an elderly white male.
Canadian Border Services said the man wore a silicone mask covering his head and neck in what they called an "unbelievable case of concealment".
Suspicions were raised when an apparently elderly passenger was noticed with young-looking hands.
Later he emerged from a washroom looking like a man in his twenties.
An internal intelligence alert from the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA), obtained by AP news agency, shows before-and-after photos.
The passenger was seen at the start of the flight as an "elderly Caucasian male who appeared to have young-looking hands," the CBSA bulletin said.
Disguise kit
"The subject attended the washroom and emerged an Asian looking male that appeared to be in his early twenties."
The document said the man had a bag with a "disguise kit which consisted of a silicone type head and neck mask of an elderly Caucasian male, a brown leather cap, glasses and a thin brown cardigan."
"We can confirm that officials from the CBSA met a passenger arriving off AC018 Hong Kong to Vancouver on October 29 and the matter is still under investigation," Air Canada spokesperson Angela Mah told AFP news agency.
The man is reported to be seeking refugee status in Canada.
A second opinion was sought from an expert in Germany before the sawfly's identity was confirmed, and announced at the Highlands International Biodiversity and Climate Change conference, part of the United Nations' International Year of Biodiversity, being held at the Highland Council Chambers in Inverness.
The fly species is considered to be a specialist depending on northern European birchwood.
Previously at the same site, scientists have discovered a mining bee thought to have been extinct in Scotland since 1949 and the golden horsefly, which had only been sighted twice in Scotland since 1923 until it was spotted on Dundreggan in 2008.
Forget the calories, just eat sensibly. From the BBC:
Has the calorie had its day?
By Philippa RoxbyHealth reporter, BBC News
Naan bread or garlic bread? Let's count the calories...
Counting calories is an addictive pastime for many a dedicated slimmer. Croissant or toast? Curry or pizza? Sandwich or salad?
Food labels help millions of people decide what to buy and what to eat. So it's important that they are accurate but, according to some experts, the system on which they are based is flawed and misleading.
A calorie is the energy we get from food. Too much energy and we end up getting fat. But how is the calorie content of food calculated?
Back in the 1800s an American chemist, Wilbur Atwater, devised the system on which calorific values on our food labels are still based.
Basically, he burned food and then measured how much energy it gave off.
He then estimated the amount of energy the body used up by calculating the amount of energy in undigested food in waste products.
That thankless task prompted Atwater to conclude that every gram of carbohydrate produced four calories, every gram of fat produced nine, and every gram of protein produced four calories.
These figures have been used as the basis for calculating the calorie content of food ever since.
Energy usage
Nutritionists have always known that these calorific values are approximate.
But recently some nutritionists, including Dr Geoffrey Livesey, are saying that the calorie content of items in our shopping baskets could be up to 25% out.
This is because the texture of the food, its fibre content, and how it is cooked can all affect the amount of energy the body is able to get from food, he says.
Even the process of chewing food uses up energy and, therefore, calories.
The more protein or fibre in a food, for example, the harder the body has to work to process it.
So when we are weighing up which ready meal to buy in the supermarket, we need to think about more than just the calories contained in food before we eat it - we need to consider how our body digests and processes it too.
Dr Livesey says: "People need to be given the right information to make the right choices, following the latest scientific understanding, because if you are not following the science, you're following something else.
"When you consider calories have been used as the only measurement for understanding foods' impact on weight loss for nearly 200 years, despite our huge advancement in nutritional science, you realise how outdated calorie counting is."
'Calorie conscious'
So is it time to overhaul the current system of food labelling?
Dr Susan Jebb, head of nutrition at the Medical Research Council, says it's right to say that some calories are more filling than others but, "in the grand scheme of things, we're talking about really small differences here."
She added: "When it comes to advising the public and getting people to eat fewer calories, I'm not sure this is going to be helpful."
"If you're trying to lose weight you have to be calorie conscious, not calorie counting all the time.
"In any case, we need to test if this is better way of advising people than the current way."
Gaynor Bussell, a dietician and spokesperson for the British Dietetic Association, agrees that overhauling the whole system on which calories are calculated doesn't make sense without backing from scientists and governments.
What matters is eating healthily and that is "not a precise art anyway", she says.
"What's important is to eat fewer calories so that the body is in negative energy balance. How you calculate it doesn't matter."
Weight Watchers is proposing a new system called ProPoints, which it says is a more accurate alternative to calorie counting.
It's based on a daily allowance which takes into account gender, age, weight and height. All fruits and most vegetables contain zero ProPoints.
The system tells you "the amount of energy that is available in a food after you've eaten it," the weight loss organisation maintains.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization looked at the issue a few years ago and decided that changing the way calories are calculated would need huge upheaval and lots of money - all for marginal gain.
So don't fret too much over the labels at the supermarket - eating sensibly is far more important.
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