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A report from the BBC on the UK space industry:

UK space sector earnings now at £7.5bn

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

UK space companies have defied the recession, growing by an average of 10% a year from 2007.

So says a report from the Oxford Economics consultancy, which predicts the growth will continue in 2010.

The space business is now said to have a turnover worth some £7.5bn, with employment rising at about 15% a year.

The best performing areas are in so-called downstream activities - services such as satellite broadcasting and telecommunications.

But even the upstream sector - such as satellite manufacturing - recorded a very healthy performance, averaging annual growth of 3% over the period 2006/07 to 2008/09.

The latest "Size and Health" report was commissioned by the UK Space Agency and is based on a survey of the activities of 260 leading companies.

"We had good anecdotal evidence through the recession that we were doing well but now we have the hard numbers; and it's very positive," said Richard Peckham from EADS Astrium and chair of UK Space, an umbrella group representing the industry.

The sector recently set out a 20-year vision for itself called the Space Innovation and Growth Strategy (S-IGS).

It identified what it thought were the emerging market trends and the approaches that needed to be adopted to exploit them.

It covered areas as diverse as space tourism and the delivery of broadband internet by satellite.

The vision called on industry to intensify its R&D spending, but also for government to increase its investment.

If that happened, the S-IGS said, the UK space sector could create up to 100,000 new UK jobs in space-related activity and grow revenues to £40bn a year.

Mr Peckham said the government could help underpin the success story.

The space sector is currently championing the potential of a privately financed, national Earth-observation (EO) service to acquire imagery for the MoD and other government departments, while selling other data on the open market.

The satellites would be built and operated by the private sector, but to stand a chance of success the project would need a long-term commitment from the government to purchase its products.

"Government has a huge influence through procurement; it's what they buy," Mr Peckham told BBC News.

"We think one of the biggest markets going forward is Earth observation. We're not asking for hundreds of millions of pounds from government, but if they will just aggregate all their requirements then we can build something and go and export it."

Other examples of smart government investments include the Hylas-1 spacecraft. Due to launch on 25 November, it will become Europe's first broadband dedicated satellite, providing internet connections to rural areas poorly served by terrestrial technology.

Hylas will be operated by start-up Avanti Communications, but the spacecraft's core technology came out of a European Space Agency R&D programme funded by the British government.

UK SPACE SECTOR - 'SIZE AND HEALTH' SURVEY 2010

• Over 70% of employees in the sector are degree-qualified or better
• Some 80,000 UK jobs may now be dependent on space in some form

News just out from the BBC:

Royal Navy website attacked by Romanian hacker

The Royal Navy's website has been hacked by a suspected Romanian hacker known as TinKode.

The hacker gained access to the website on 5 November using a common attack method known as SQL injection.

TinKode published details of the information he recovered, which included user names and passwords of the site's administrators.

A Royal Navy spokesperson confirmed the site had been compromised and said: "There has been no malicious damage."

They added that as a precaution the site has been "temporarily suspended" and that security teams were investigating how the hacker got access. They said no confidential information had been disclosed.

The Royal Navy website currently shows a static image on which is a black box bearing the text: "Unfortunately the Royal Navy website is undergoing essential maintenance. Please visit again soon."

TinKode first mentioned the attack on his Twitter stream and added a web link to a page that contained more details about what he had found.

This text file contained the names of the site's administrators and many regular users.

The attack used to get the information compromises the database used to run a site by sending malformed queries and analysing the responses this generates.

Graham Cluley, senior security analyst at Sophos, said the incident was "immensely embarrassing, particularly in the wake of the recent security review where hacking and cybercrime attacks were given the top priority.

"Now we have the Royal Navy with egg on its face."

Mr Cluley said the hacker had apparently gained access to the Navy's blog, Jackspeak, and to an area called Global Ops.

"He's obviously more of a show-off type of hacker rather than malicious," said Mr Cluley.

"But if he'd wanted to he could have inserted links which would have taken the website's readers to malicious sites."

Tinkode has apparently carried out 52 separate defacements of websites in the last 12 months, according to website ZoneH.

Targets included everything from small businesses to adult websites. He has also uncover vulnerabilities in high-profile sites such as Youtube.

The Hadron Collider is live and kicking. From the BBC:

Large Hadron Collider (LHC) generates a 'mini-Big Bang'

By Katia Moskvitch Science reporter, BBC News

The Large Hadron Collider has successfully created a "mini-Big Bang" by smashing together lead ions instead of protons.

The scientists working at the enormous machine on Franco-Swiss border achieved the unique conditions on 7 November.

The experiment created temperatures a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun.

The LHC is housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border near Geneva.

Up until now, the world's highest-energy particle accelerator - which is run by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) - has been colliding protons, in a bid to uncover mysteries of the Universe's formation.

Proton collisions could help spot the elusive Higgs boson particle and signs of new physical laws, such as a framework called supersymmetry.

But for the next four weeks, scientists at the LHC will concentrate on analysing the data obtained from the lead ion collisions.

This way, they hope to learn more about the plasma the Universe was made of a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.

One of the accelerator's experiments, ALICE, has been specifically designed to smash together lead ions, but the ATLAS and Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiments have also switched to the new mode.

'Strong force'

David Evans from the University of Birmingham, UK, is one of the researchers working at ALICE.

He said that the collisions obtained were able to generate the highest temperatures and densities ever produced in an experiment.

"We are thrilled with the achievement," said Dr Evans.

"This process took place in a safe, controlled environment, generating incredibly hot and dense sub-atomic fireballs with temperatures of over ten trillion degrees, a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun.

"At these temperatures even protons and neutrons, which make up the nuclei of atoms, melt resulting in a hot dense soup of quarks and gluons known as a quark-gluon plasma."

Quarks and gluons are sub-atomic particles - some of the building blocks of matter. In the state known as quark-gluon plasma, they are freed of their attraction to one another. This plasma is believed to have existed just after the Big Bang.

He explained that by studying the plasma, physicists hoped to learn more about the so-called strong force - the force that binds the nuclei of atoms together and that is responsible for 98% of their mass.

After the LHC finishes colliding lead ions, it will go back to smashing together protons once again.

We've had zebra crossings and pelican crossings. We need some jaguar crossings. From the BBC:

Big cats to benefit from habitat fragmentation model

By Mark Kinver Science and environment reporter, BBC News

Experts have developed a statistical model that identifies where big cats are most likely to cross busy roads that cut through their natural range.

A team from Germany and Mexico describe habitat fragmentation as one of the greatest threats to large carnivores.

The model is based on a decade's worth of data collected from GPS and radio-telemetry collars fitted to jaguars in Central America.

The findings have been published in the journal Animal Conservation.

"Currently, most of the models that people are using are based on either expert opinion or on habitat availability," said co-author Fernando Colchero, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Germany.

"The problem with that is it is just like a snapshot of how the animal is choosing the habitat but it is not taking into account how the animal decides to move.

"What we wanted to do with our exercise is to incorporate the movement behaviour of animals. From the fieldwork that we have done, our results seem to be pretty accurate."

Power of prediction

Dr Colchero explained that the team's study was carried out in an area of the Mayan Forest, which stretches from south-eastern Mexico into Guatemala.

The main focus was on a main road between the Mexican cities of Escarcega and Xpujil, which bisected the big cats' natural range.

Between 1998 and 2007, 11 jaguars (seven females and four males) were captured. The five big cats captured before 2001 were fitted with radio-telemetry collars, while the six captured from 2001 were fitted with GPS devices.

The cats' locations were recorded four times a day, allowing the team to develop a data series plotting the jaguars' (Panthera onca) movements in the study area. This data allowed the researchers to develop an understanding of movement behaviour.

"We actually found that males were much less shy towards roads than females," Dr Colchero told BBC News.

"When we used the model to simulate how the jaguars moved in the landscape, we found that males could be found close to areas that are somewhat populated (by humans). However, females would definitely avoid those areas.

"When we simulated jaguars moving around the area of road that we were interested in, we found that males could cross the road in many different locations. Yet females were restricted to areas that had very low human densities."

He added that although males were more disposed to crossing the roads, it did increase the likelihood of road kills.

Using the model, the team identified a 1km stretch of road where the likelihood of both sexes crossing it were the highest. This was the location, they predicted, that would be the most suitable for the establishment of a wildlife pass under the road.

They added that using a predictive model could "greatly advance region-wide conservation plans for the location of corridors and conservation areas".

Dr Colchero added: "We applied this model to roads that already existed, but if the road does not exist then you cannot have direct information on where the animals are crossing a road.

"Our modelling can help a lot because you can simulate the road and see where animals would most likely cross.

"That is one of the main advantages of using such a method because you need to be able to do predictions and that is one of the things that current methods lack: to be able to predict where animals were most likely to cross the road."

You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.From the BBC:

Slavemaker ants prefer to target the strong over the weak when seeking new servants, researchers have found.

Ants were observed actively choosing to attack larger, better defended colonies over smaller, weaker ones.

Scientists suggest that the intelligent ants identify strong defences as a sign of a strong population.

By conducting fewer raids on strongly defended targets, the slave-making ants actually limit the risks and come away with the most pupae to enslave.

SMARTY ANTS Fire ants build a life raft. Mangrove ants walk on water. Leaf cutter ants perform night-time chores.

Slavemaker ants such as Protomognathus americanus are known to demonstrate unusual colony behaviour.

The queen produces offspring but crucially, they do not perform the everyday worker tasks of foraging or caring for broods.

Instead, nominated scout workers identify nearby "host" ant colonies suitable for attack.

During the attack the slavemaker ants steal host pupae and take them back to their own colony.

The pupae are imprinted on the odour of the slavemaker colony and grow up to perform all of the ordinary worker tasks.

This exploitation of another species' workforce is called social parasitism.

In their study published in Animal Behaviour, researchers from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany theorised that slavemaker ants chose "easy targets" over more strongly defended colonies as they offered the lowest risk.

The ants in Sebastian Pohl's study acted in the opposite manner: raiding parties were more likely to attack stronger colonies.

"At first, we were quite surprised, as we expected that attacking slavemaker colonies prefer host colonies that provide a better benefit to risk ratio," Mr Pohl explained.

Losing a single worker might very likely be synonymous with losing half of the colony members Sebastian Pohl

"We hence had to look at the slavemakers' decision in more detail and had to consider more aspects of the complete raiding behaviour."

Mr Pohl and his colleagues identified that the "slave raids" presented considerable risk to P. americanus.

In small slavemaker colonies consisting of one queen, two to five workers and 30 to 60 slaves, scout ants were very valuable.

It was essential that scouts made the right decision about suitable raid targets or "host colonies" without being discovered and attacked.

"Losing a single worker might very likely be synonymous with losing half of the colony members," Mr Pohl told the BBC.

Therefore, a smaller number of scouting events and subsequent raids presented the lowest risk to the slavemaker colony.

However, the colony still needed new slaves to be able to survive to the next season.

From their behaviour, researchers suggested that the scout ants associated strong colonies with high numbers of pupae and a high benefit.

The tactic of fewer raids on stronger targets consequently offered the best risk to benefit ratio.

SOURCES Visit the journal Animal Behaviour to learn more about ant colonies

P. americanus are 2-3mm in size and live in the deciduous forests of the northeastern USA and adjacent Canadian regions.

Due to their small size a whole colony can inhabit one hollow acorn.

A story about some little nippers from the BBC:

Baby fiddler crabs take up refuge in seashells

Baby fiddler crabs "move in" to empty snail shells for shelter, scientists have found.

Researchers made this discovery whilst studying salt marsh ecosystems on Tybee Island in Georgia, US.

The finding shows how "resourceful" these primitive crustaceans are, they say, as unlike hermit crabs, fiddlers do not carry seashells on their backs as a permanent home.

It also reveals how crabs can benefit when snails are eaten by predators.

Professor Sophie George from Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, who led the study, explained that fiddler crabs are important in the establishment and maintenance of the salt marsh ecosystem.

In the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, her team explained that the crabs were a source of food for many animals.

Adult fiddler

"They are eaten by resident and migratory birds, by [other] crabs and by shrimp and fishes," wrote the researchers.

"Small mammals and reptiles feed on fiddler crabs as they move across the salt."

The tiny baby crabs - with a soft shell less than 3mm wide - are particularly vulnerable.

"Settlement of the first fiddler crab stage during high tide exposes them to a variety of habitats but also to predators," said Professor George.

On top of this, the juvenile crabs are too small to dig their own burrows.

Previous studies had found that some animals used shells for shelter.

So to find out if the baby fiddler crabs might also hide in the empty snail shells, the researchers visited the island 20 times to collect the shells.

SOURCES Visit the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology to learn about baby fiddler crabs

Out of every 100 empty shells, they found that 79 were occupied by the tiny crabs.

Professor George said: "An abundance of Littoraria irrorata [snail] shells [provide] a welcome refuge for juvenile fiddler crabs."

co v com v co.uk - from the BBC:

Colombian domain challenges .com

A domain name owned by the Colombian government is proving popular in the increasingly crowded space of web addresses.

The .co web address was assigned to Colombia by net regulator Icann but is now being run by a private firm.

Since being launched in July, the .co domain name has attracted nearly 600,000 registrations and is being seen as a challenger to .com.

It comes ahead of a big shake-up in the way web addresses are assigned.

It has taken the Colombian government 10 years to get its domain name up and running on a commercial basis.

Originally the .co address was administered by the University of the Andes in Bogota.

The university recognised the potential of the name but the commercial roll-out never got off the ground.

"It has been a long process of creating the laws and procurement process," said Juan Diego Calle, chief executive of the .co registry.

A quarter of the revenue the registry makes from .co will go to the Colombian government.

Mr Calle is hoping the name can compete with the dominance of .com.

"We are going for a global audience and in three to five years we hope to have three to five million registrations.

"The average person can try up to 20 times to register a domain and companies are starting to come up with long and silly urls," he said.

So far, 38% of firms registering for a .co domain are in the US, with 20% in Europe, the majority of these from the UK.

For countries lucky enough to have a domain name with a meaning beyond their own borders - such as the tiny South Pacific island of Tuvalu (.tv), domain names can be a rich income source.

The .tv web address has proved a hit with the broadcast industry, while Montenegro's me has appeal to the social networking generation.

The .co landgrab could be one of the last before Icann overhauls the way net addresses are assigned.

Next year the body is due to open up the system so that companies and individuals can register any name they want.

Mr Calle does not think it will impact the success of .co.

"You need technology resources to manage a domain name. Running a domain registry costs millions," he said.

The deregulation of web addresses will show that net names can go beyond the established names, he thinks.

"It will help educate consumers that you can type .co into a browser and get a valid website," he said.

Here's a new market for the suncream manufacturers. From the BBC:

The Sun's rays can "burn" whales' skin, just like they can damage human skin, according to a team of researchers.

The scientists studied more than 150 whales in the Gulf of California.

By taking photographs and skin samples, the US and Mexico-based team found the whales had blisters that were caused by sun damage.

The report in the Royal Society journal, Proceedings B, concluded that darker skinned whales showed fewer signs of sun damage.

The team was interested in the effects of increasing levels of ultraviolet (UV) radiation on wildlife.

Laura Martinez-Levasseur, from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and Queen Mary, University of London, led the study.

I hope this will also open the door for other researchers to look into the effects of sun damage on wildlife Laura Martinez-Levasseur, ZSL More about whales, dolphins and porpoises on BBC Wildlife Finder

She explained that whales were a good model for this because "they need to come to the surface to breathe air, to socialise and to feed their young, meaning that they are frequently exposed to the full force of the sun".

Ms Martinez-Levasseur and her colleagues from the marine research centre CICMAR, in Mexico, studied blue whales, sperm whales and fin whales over a period of three years.

They examined high resolution photographs of the whales' skin and took skin samples from areas that appeared to be blistered.

Examining the samples under the microscope revealed that the blisters were caused by sunburn.

The researchers examined blisters on the whales' skin

The scientists also found that signs of sun damage were more severe in the paler-skinned blue whales, compared with the darker-skinned fin whales.

Like in humans, darker skinned whales have more cells that produce of a dark brown pigment called melanin.

In humans, this is produced when DNA is damaged by UV radiation; a similar response appeared to be occurring in the whales.

'First evidence'

In blue whales the symptoms of sunburn seemed to be worsening during the period the study took place.

"This is the first evidence that the Sun's rays can cause skin lesions in whales," said Ms Martinez-Levasseur.

"The increase in skin damage seen in blue whales is a matter of concern, but at this stage it is not clear what is causing this increase. A likely candidate is rising ultraviolet radiation as a result of either ozone depletion, or a change in the level of cloud cover."

Professor Edel O'Toole, from Queen Mary, University of London, a skin specialist who took part in the study, said: "As we would expect to see in humans, the whale species that spent more time in the sun suffered greater sun damage.

"We predict that whales will experience more severe sun damage if ultraviolet radiation continues to increase."

This study showed no signs of skin cancer in the whales, but the team are going on to find out how the whales respond to sun damage at a genetic level.

This could provide clues about the longer term effects.

Ms Martinez-Levasseur said that other species were likely to be affected by UV damage, especially hairless creatures, including amphibians or sea mammals that live at the poles - where ozone decline is most pronounced.

She said: "I hope this will also open the door for other researchers to look into the effects of sun damage on wildlife."

An article from the BBC on how to get off a crowded train:

Who, what, why: How to get off a busy train

Train overcrowding is unacceptable, and going to get worse, according to a report by MPs. But passengers often do themselves no favours by the way they crowd around doors when getting on and off.

Elbows at the ready and breathe in. You'll need to as a new report from MPs says overcrowding on trains in England and Wales will get substantially worse over the next four years, despite rises in ticket prices.

Plans to improve the situation will be unveiled soon, says the government. But could beleaguered passengers make the best of a bad lot by learning to get on and off trains more efficiently?

The following is an all too typical scene - a train stops, the doors slide open and anyone trying to get off is greeted by a wall of people. Alighting passengers must slowly funnel themselves through a small opening in the crowd.

For passengers trying to get on as quickly and easily as possible, this is exactly the wrong thing to do, says productivity consultant Eugene Chinal. Pushing gets you nowhere fast. It's all about creating - and maintaining - a steady flow, he says.

"The thing about efficiency is getting a consistent flow - if flow is impeded you get a build up. It's the same when driving on the motorway or trying to get into a football stadium."

Train companies realised this a long time ago, says Mr Chinal, who has worked with many transport companies on time and motion studies. Newer trains incorporate features to increase passenger flow.

Heavy doors that opened manually by turning a clunky handle have been replaced by electronic doors that open automatically, as soon as the train stops.

And speed is not always a solution, he adds. Too fast and people may stumble. Take it steady to keep things flowing.

"When it comes to flow, even the smallest action or impediment can have a snowballing affect, behind the person and in front of them," says Mr Chinal.

There is also a correct sequence to making embarking and disembarking as painless as possible. Firstly, all passengers who want to get off should be allowed to do so quickly - which means those eager to board the carriage ought to stand well back. Getting on as someone is getting off is a big no-no.

Once everyone is off new passengers should step on. It is very important that they continue moving down the carriage, this allows the flow to remain consistent. Stopping in the first clearing of free space slows everyone down, says Mr Chinal.

But getting on and off public transport efficiently is also very much about state of mind, not just the physical.

Queuing is like any other of society's rules. People observe a queue because they know what behaviour is expected of them to maintain order. Having the right attitude is as important to keeping things flowing as moving one's feet.

It's when people become more selfish that these systems start falling apart, says psychologist Dr Colin Gill. Yet if conditions are anything to go by, this is only going to get worse. The "already unacceptable levels of overcrowding will simply get worse and ever more intolerable", says the report from The Public Accounts Committee (PAC).

Such social rules are starting to breakdown throughout British society, adds Dr Gill.

"We are becoming a society of individualists, rather than a society. In modern culture people don't get rewarded for doing the right thing and there aren't so many sanctions for doing something wrong. There are fewer moral absolutes."

We are also driven by a "herd instinct". People don't want to be on the outside because they feel vulnerable, says Dr Gill. It's why we push to be in the centre.

From the BBC:

How ID card database will be destroyed

By Brian Wheeler Political reporter, BBC News

Identity cards may be history for British citizens - but what about all the personal details collected by the government and stored on its national identity database?

Anyone who imagined it would simply be a case of an official somewhere hitting delete is in for a rude awakening.

The Home Office is seemingly planning an orgy of destruction, as expensive and barely-used equipment is removed from offices and destroyed - all in accordance with government guidelines on recycling, of course.

A document from the Identity and Passport Service details the meticulous steps that will be taken to wipe the ID register from the face of the earth, once the Identity Documents Bill has received Royal Assent, expected before the end of the year.

It reads like a toxic waste disposal log, as any machine that has ever come into contact with the personal details contained on the database is either cleansed of its contents or fed into the shredder.

It would, of course, be a public relations disaster for the government if any of the data fell into the wrong hands - as well as a potential security threat for those on the register.

Nobody wants a repeat of the HM Revenue and Customs lost discs fiasco.

'Early interest'

Which is why Home Secretary Theresa May has ordered the equipment that held the data to be physically destroyed, rather than simply wiped clean.

The document reveals that recently purchased systems for collecting fingerprints and biographical information from ID card applicants is to be removed from four passport offices in the areas where the ill-fated ID scheme was being trialled - in London, Manchester, Liverpool and Blackburn - and "disassembled".

Similar equipment at London City Airport and Manchester Airport, where trials of the scheme took place with airside workers, has already been removed.

Destruction of this equipment might have been avoided if the data it collected had been stored centrally as it was meant to be. But there is evidence that some was accidentally stored locally, the document reveals, so off to the dump it must go.

Any data collected by the Home Office's "early interest" website, where people could put down their name for an ID card, will also be physically destroyed, the document reveals.

But 200 computer terminals in five "back offices", where officials processed applications and ran background checks, will be spared the crusher.

Instead, workers will have to "provide file locations of extracted data" so that the Home Office team can put together an "audit record of data deletion".

Hacking

But any paper records at the five offices will be shredded on site and the company that booked appointments for people applying for a card, Teleperformance, will have to destroy their spreadsheets.

Anti-ID card campaigners often warned about the dangers of storing all of the ID data in one place - making it potentially vulnerable to hacking, only to be assured by ministers from the previous government that this would not happen.

So it is fascinating to read that there are two separate locations in the UK where all of the biometric and biographical information gathered by the ID card scheme is, or has been, stored.

The "core" of the database is held by French defence contractor Thales, at its secure data centre in Doncaster, South Yorkshire.

If you are one of the 15,000 people who applied for an ID card before the scheme was cancelled, your personal details - name, date and place of birth, address, signature, fingerprints if you gave them, photograph, national insurance number, nationality and immigration status, will be stored here.

But the full database has also been stored by 3M Security Printing and Systems, in Chadderton, Greater Manchester, which had the job of manufacturing the ID cards.

'Disaster recovery'

All identity database storage media from the Thales and 3M sites, such as hard disks, back-up tapes and seven different types of server, will be removed and "physically destroyed by shredding". Switchers, routers, firewall servers and other assorted paraphernalia will be spared.

The Home Office will have to buy some equipment from 3M specifically in order to destroy it.

The document also reveals details of the back-up systems in place to prevent data loss. Live data from Doncaster is replicated to a "disaster recovery" facility at Crawley and back-up tapes from both sites are "taken off site to Wakefield" by American data storage specialists Iron Mountain.

But, in another twist, the document also reveals that not all identity data will be destroyed - some will be kept for the purposes of investigating fraud.

"This data will then be deleted or stored as necessary to ensure watch lists are up to date and that the integrity remains in place for further applications to IPS for travel documents," says the document.

"Each case will be considered individually before a decision is made whether to retain or delete data," it adds.

And the identity register will, of course, live on for foreign nationals working in the UK.

I'm sure you've often wondered how fish see colour - here's the answer (from the BBC):

Model offers fish eyes' view of colour

By Mark Kinver Science and environment reporter, BBC News

A maths model that mimics how a fish sees colour offers an insight into how markings help females choose mates.

A team of scientists say sticklebacks' eyes are sensitive to ultraviolet light, invisible to humans, that is reflected by marking on males.

The model provides clues how more colourful markings, produced by pigments known as carotenoids, help females select the most suitable mate.

The findings have been published in the journal Functional Ecology.

"Females typically use carotenoid colours to assess the quality of a potential mate, with more colourful males generally being regarded as the most attractive," explained lead author Tom Pike from the University of Exeter.

Carotenoids are naturally occuring yellow, red and orange pigments that colour plants and animals. For example, flamingos' pink features, blue tits' yellow breast feathers and carrots' orange flesh.

However, the vast majority of animals are unable to produce their own carotenoids, so they consume them in their diet.

Eye of the beholder

Writing in the British Ecological Society journal, the team observed: "During the breeding season, male three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus) develop a region of intense, carotenoid-based colouration that is used by females when deciding a mate and during male-male competition."

However, they added: "The [colours] appear red and yellow to human observers, but also have an ultraviolet component to which humans are not sensitive."

The researchers said that previous studies had used photographic techniques and limited analyses to the human-visible spectrum, so did not take into account the difference between human and stickleback eyes.

"The major difference between stickleback vision and our own is that they can see ultraviolet light, which is invisible to humans," Dr Pike said.

"This may be important because carotenoids reflect ultraviolet light as well as the reds, oranges and yellows that we can see."

However, the reason why females were attracted to more colourful males was based on more practical reasons than just good looks.

"Variation in carotenoid concentration may indicate individual variation in the ability to assimilate (or in the wild, locate) dietary carotenoids, and so may provide honest information on foraging ability," the team suggested.

They concluded: "We demonstrate that the visual system of sticklebacks is acutely sensitive to variations in both the total concentration of carotenoids in the male's nuptial signal and the relative proportion of its constituents.

"This may allow sticklebacks to accurately assess male quality and thereby inform mate choice and intrasexual competition decisions."

Astronomical costs from the BBC:

Costs of Nasa JWST to replace Hubble telescope balloon

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

The scale of the delay and cost overrun blighting Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope has been laid bare by a panel called in to review the project.

The successor to Hubble will probably cost at least $6.5bn to launch and operate, and may get into orbit by September 2015.

But even that assessment is optimistic, say the panel members.

The head of the US space agency has accepted that "cost performance and coordination have been lacking".

Charles Bolden has ordered a reorganising of the project and has changed the management at its top.

Estimates for JWST's total cost to build, launch and operate have steadily increased over the years from $3.5bn to $5bn.

Along with the cost growth, the schedule has also eroded.

The most recent projected launch of 2014 has looked under pressure for some time.

The independent panel chaired by John Casani of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, believes it to be unrealistic.

Huge shield

The group was convened to examine the root causes of JWST's problems.

It found the original budget for the project to be insufficient and poorly phased, and blamed the management for failing to pick up and deal with the issue.

"This is a very large complex project and to estimate something with any real degree of precision that's never been done before is a tough job," John Casani told reporters.

"But the bottom line is that there was never enough money in the budget to execute the work that was required."

The panel did however commend the technical success of the project. Mr Casani said the technology on JWST was in "very good shape".

The telescope was always regarded as major undertaking. Its primary mirror is 6.5m (21ft) across - close to three times wider than Hubble's.

The huge reflector will sit behind an even more expansive sun shield, the area of a tennis court.

This structure will protect the observatory from radiation from the Sun and the Earth.

Whereas Hubble sees the Universe mostly in visible light, JWST will observe the cosmos at longer wavelengths, in the infrared. It will see deeper into space and further back in time, to the very first population of stars.

When it is finally built, it will be launched on Europe's Ariane 5 rocket and sent to an observing position 1.5 million km from Earth. It is expected to have a 10-year lifespan.

Its distance from Earth means the telescope cannot be serviced by astronauts, as was the case with Hubble.

Casani's panel has several concerns going forward and says the project is vulnerable to further delay .

It says a total life-cycle cost of $6.5bn and a launch in September 2015 may still be possible, but only if the budget for the project is increased by about $200m in each of the financial years 2011 and 2012.

"If those amounts are not available then of course the $6.5bn number is going to move out and the launch date might move out too," Mr Casani said.

Chris Scolese, an associate administrator at Nasa headquarters, said the agency was looking at how it could find the necessary money. Efficiencies were being sought, he explained, and he also warned that funding for other science activities across Nasa could be affected as senior managers tried to close the budget gap.

"We'll look at what we can do," he explained. "FY11 is upon us and we have to work with the administration and Congress to understand what flexibilities we have.

"I think it's fair say I doubt that we're going to find $200m. But you have to give us some time to go off and work that before we can really answer that question."

The places Nasa will not go looking for the needed funds are its international partners on the project, Europe and Canada.

Their contributions are fixed through in-kind provision, such as instrumentation and the launch rocket.

"The problems we are dealing with are wholly US; they have to do with how much we pay our suppliers for the components here [in America]," Mr Scolese told BBC News.

"We can't go off and look to the European Space Agency to solve those problems. We appreciate their understanding as we work through this and we will make the mission as successful as we all believe it can be."

The James Webb Space Telescope is named after the former administrator of Nasa who led the agency in the run up to the Apollo landings.

From the BBC:

Google scotches Australian 'Groggle' search

An Australian hoping to quench his nation's thirst via the web has agreed to change the name of his alcohol search site after protests from Google.

Cameron Collie set up Groggle to allow users to find the best-priced "grog" in nearby stores.

Search giant Google complained at his effort to trademark the name, prompting a six-month legal wrangle.

Now the name Groggle has been changed to a more conventional title, Drinkle, ahead of its launch in 2011.

Announcing the settlement, Mr Collie, 37, said he could not disclose terms of the deal but confirmed that the name change was part of the agreement.

There was no word on whether money had changed hands, but the firm announced on Twitter that it would be celebrating with a bottle of "Australia's most expensive beer".

Asked about the settlement, Mr Collie told the Sydney Morning Herald that he was "just happy that it's over".

"It [the legal argument] basically put a lot of restrictions on us, prevented us from launching and entering the market and getting things underway, something that we've worked on now for a couple of years.

"I still maintain that I don't think that there would have been any confusion in the marketplace," he added.

Google said it had "reached agreement" and was "glad to move forward" on the matter, the Herald reported.

Followed by some Scotch on the rocks (from the BBC):

Scottish rocks record ancient oxygen clues

Oxygen levels on Earth reached a critical threshold to enable the evolution of complex life much earlier than thought, say scientists.

The evidence is found in 1.2-billion-year-old rocks from Scotland.

These rocks retain signatures of bacterial activity known to occur when there is copious atmospheric oxygen.

The microbes' behaviour is seen 400 million years further back in time than any previous discovery, the researchers tell the journal Nature.

The team is not saying complex life existed 1.2 billion years ago, merely that the conditions would have been right for it to start to take hold.

"We're recording a key stage in the evolution of life on Earth," said Professor John Parnell from the University of Aberdeen.

"The evidence relates to a particular group of microbes that have been very successful through Earth's history and are now found everywhere from glaciers to the deep ocean floor.

"These microbes made an important advance by becoming more efficient, which they did through using oxygen in their environment. So the occurrence of these microbes is a marker for increasing oxygen in the atmosphere," he told BBC News.

Atom analysis

The rocks that record their activity are sited today on the coast near Lochinver in the Northwest Highlands, but they comprise sediments that were once at the bottom of an ancient lake bed.

The researchers do not see the fossil evidence of the microbes themselves - only the chemical traces that they were present and using sulphur in the lake floor as a form of energy.

These traces take the form of specks of the mineral iron pyrite, better known as "fool's gold" for its yellow appearance.

Analysis of the sulphur atoms in the pyrite shows them to be of different types, and in particular fractions, which could only have been produced through biological behaviour, say the scientists.

"There's a certain stage which is achieved by bacteria when they start to work in a more complex way, and they do this by forming a community where some bacteria are turning sulphate into sulphide and there's another lot of bacteria turning the sulphide back to sulphate," explained Professor Parnell.

"And so you start getting cycles of chemical reduction and chemical oxidation, and they drive up the level of fractionation."

Trigger events

Prior to the Lochinver discovery, the oldest rocks known to display this sulphur signature were 800 million years old. The new study now indicates oxygen levels in Earth's atmosphere were raised to such a level that the gas was permeating into lake waters and their sediment beds 1.2 billion years ago.

The type of biochemistry pursued by complex life requires a lot of oxygen but the fact that levels were elevated at this time does not in itself prove such organisms were also present.

The precise timing of the emergence of complex life on Earth is a topic of intense debate, and marked by claim and counter claim.

Certainly, the earliest indisputable evidence for complex animal life - slug-like organisms called Kimberalla - are not seen until the Ediacaran Period, which came at the end of the last great global glaciation These fossil remains are found today in 555-million-year-old rocks in Australia and Russia.

"What we are now showing is that the conditions in the atmosphere were in place [1.2 billion years ago], so it probably needed some other factor to trigger the early evolution of complex life and the fact that the Ediacaran fauna occurs after the 'snowball Earth' episode suggests those two are linked somehow," said Professor Parnell.

From the BBC:

Internet pioneer Vint Cerf warns over address changes

The internet could face years of instability as it moves to a new addressing system, one of the network's original architects has warned.

Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet, spoke as the UK was urged to begin using the new addressing system.

With current addresses due to run out in 2012, nations and businesses must get on with switching, said Mr Cerf.

During the switch internet links could become unreliable, making sites and services hard to reach, Mr Cerf said.

"This has to happen or the internet will stop growing or will not be growable," he said of the move to the addressing system.

The net has grown to its current size using version 4 of its addressing scheme (IPv4), which allows for about 4.3 billion addresses.

Estimates suggest that this pool of addresses will be exhausted by the end of January 2012.

Priority issue

A system with a far larger pool of addresses has been created, called IPv6, but progress towards using it has been sluggish.

"The business community needs to understand that this is an infrastructure they are relying on and it needs to change for them to continue to grow and to rely on it," Mr Cerf said.

He criticised global businesses, saying they were "short-sighted" for not making the shift sooner.

"They cannot grow their business if they do not have an address space to grow it into," he added.

The problem of the switchover will be exacerbated, said Mr Cerf, because the two addressing systems are not compatible.

As parts of the internet do eventually convert to IPv6 those trying to get at the parts still on IPv4 may not reach the site, resource or service they were after.

The net would not stop during the switch, said Mr Cerf, but access could get "spotty".

That instability could last years, he suggested, as even search giant Google - his current employer - took three years to get its IPv6 network up and running.

"There's work to be done," he said.

"It's not massive work but it is meticulous work."

Mr Cerf was the keynote speaker at a launch event for 6UK, a non-profit group set up to get UK businesses converting to the new addressing scheme.

Currently only about 1% of data sent over the internet is wrapped in IPv6 packets, said Mr Cerf, adding that moving to using the bigger address space should now be a global priority.

Some nations, such as China and the Czech Republic, had made great strides in using IPv6 but others had not even started.

"There is turbulence coming," said Nigel Titley, chairman of RIPE, the body that hands out Europe's allocation of IPv4 addresses.

He said it was only a matter of time before the shortfall of addresses started to hit business.

Attempts to get more people online, close digital divisions or to boost e-commerce could all be hampered by a lack of addresses, Mr Titley said.

The key to accelerating the shift to IPv6 would be making internet service providers (ISPs) offer the service to their customers, he said, something too few were doing at the moment.

"Sooner or later BT is not going to be able to provision a new broadband customer," said Mr Titley. "That's when the accountants might wake up."

This is a link to a BBC story revealing how cats lap up milk

I've provided a link as the story includes a video showing this. We cannot copy BBC clips on this site as we can for Youtube clips, and the video is an essential part of the story.

Some very old eggs from the BBC:

Eggs with the oldest known embryos of a dinosaur found

By Katia Moskvitch Science reporter, BBC News

Palaeontologists have identified the oldest known dinosaur embryos, belonging to a species that lived some 190 million years ago.

The eggs of Massospondylus, containing well-perserved embryos, were unearthed in South Africa back in 1976.

The team writes in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology that the dino was an ancestor of the giant, plant-eating sauropods, such as Brontosaurus.

The study also sheds light on the dinosaurs' early development.

The researchers used the embryos to reconstruct what the dinosaurs' babies might have looked like when they roamed the Earth.

Having studied the fossilised eggs, the team, led by Professor Robert Reisz of the University of Toronto Mississauga in Canada, discovered that the embryos were the oldest ones ever found of any land-dwelling vertebrate.

"This project opens an exciting window into the early history and evolution of dinosaurs," said Professor Reisz.

"Prosauropods are the first dinosaurs to diversify extensively, and they quickly became the most widely spread group, so their biology is particularly interesting as they represent in many ways the dawn of the age of dinosaurs."

'Awkward' bodies

Massospondylus belonged to a group of dinosaurs known as prosauropods, the ancestors of sauropods - huge, four-legged dinosaurs with long necks.

Having studied the tiny (20cm-long) skeletons, the researchers noted that the embryos were almost about to hatch - but never had the chance.

Interestingly, the report says, the embryos looked quite different compared to the adult animals.

Once hatched, the babies would have had rather long front legs, meaning that they would have been walking on all fours rather than on two legs like the adults.

The embryos' heads were also disproportionally big, but it is believed the adult Massospondylus, which were about five metres in length, had relatively tiny heads and long necks.

The little ones' anatomy would have changed with age.

The paper stated that the rather awkward body of the embryos suggested that just like humans, the hatchlings would have required parental care - and if in this case, it would be the earliest known example of parental care.

One lump or two. From the BBC:

Supercomputers 'will fit in a sugar cube', IBM says

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News, Zurich

A pioneering research effort could shrink the world's most powerful supercomputer processors to the size of a sugar cube, IBM scientists say.

The approach will see many computer processors stacked on top of one another, cooling them with water flowing between each one.

The aim is to reduce computers' energy use, rather than just to shrink them.

Some 2% of the world's total energy is consumed by building and running computer equipment.

Speaking at IBM's Zurich labs, Dr Bruno Michel said future computer costs would hinge on green credentials rather than speed.

Dr Michel and his team have already built a prototype to demonstrate the water-cooling principle. Called Aquasar, it occupies a rack larger than a refrigerator.

IBM estimates that Aquasar is almost 50% more energy-efficient than the world's leading supercomputers.

"In the past, computers were dominated by hardware costs - 50 years ago you could hold one transistor and it cost a dollar, or a franc," Dr Michel told BBC News.

Now when the sums are done, he said, the cost of a transistor works out to 1/100th of the price of printing a single letter on a page.

Now the cost of the building the next generation of supercomputers is not the problem, IBM says. The cost of running the machines is what concerns engineers.

"In the future, computers will be dominated by energy costs - to run a data centre will cost more than to build it," said Dr Michel.

The overwhelming cause of those energy costs is in cooling, because computing power generates heat as a side product.

Cube route

"In the past, the Top 500 list (of fastest supercomputers worldwide) was the important one; computers were listed according to their performance.

"In the future, the 'Green 500' will be the important list, where computers are listed according to their efficiency."

Until recently, the supercomputer at the top of that list could do about 770 million computational operations at a cost of one watt of power.

The Aquasar prototype clocked up nearly half again as much, at 1.1 billion operations. Now the task is to shrink it.

"We currently have built this Aquasar system that's one rack full of processors. We plan that 10 to 15 years from now, we can collapse such a system in to one sugar cube - we're going to have a supercomputer in a sugar cube."

Mark Stromberg, principal research analyst at Gartner, said that the approach was a promising one.

But he said that tackling the finer details of cooling - to remove heat from just the right parts of the chip stacks - would take significant effort.

Third dimension

It takes about 1,000 times more energy to move a data byte around than it does to do a computation with it once it arrives. What is more, the time taken to complete a computation is currently limited by how long it takes to do the moving.

Air cooling can go some way to removing this heat, which is why many desktop computers have fans inside. But a given volume of water can hold 4,000 times more waste heat than air.

However, it adds a great deal of bulk. With current technology, a standard chip - comprising a milligram of transistors - needs 1kg of equipment to cool it, according to Dr Michel.

Part of the solution he and his colleagues propose - and that the large Aquasar rack demonstrates - is water cooling based on a slimmed-down, more efficient circulation of water that borrows ideas from the human body's branched circulatory system.

However, the engineers are exploring the third dimension first.

They want to stack processors one on top of another, envisioning vast stacks, each separated by water cooling channels not much more than a hair's breadth in thickness.

Because distance between processors both slows down and heats up the computing process, moving chips closer together in this way tackles issues of speed, size, and running costs, all at once.

In an effort to prove the principle the team has built stacks four processors high. But Dr Michel concedes that much work is still to be done.

The major technical challenge will be to engineer the connections between the different chips, which must work as conductors and be waterproof.

"Clearly the use of 3D processes will be a major advancement in semiconductor technology and will allow the industry to maintain its course," Gartner's Mark Stromberg told the BBC.

"But several challenges remain before this technology can be implemented - issues concerning thermal dissipation are among the most critical engineering challenges facing 3D semiconductor technology."

Considering that the moon has an effect on the tides on Earth, this from the BBC doesn't seem surprising:

Earth's pull 'shaped Moon's surface'

By Neil Bowdler Science reporter, BBC News

The Earth may have played a major role in shaping the lunar surface, according to a new research study by US researchers.

The team members say our planet's gravitational pull distorted the shape of the Moon in ancient times.

This led to "bulging" at the equator and could explain why the far side is more elevated than the near side of the Moon even today.

Details of the study are published in the journal Science.

The far side of the Moon remains a mystery in many ways. Densely cratered, it has few of the volcanic plains that characterise the near side with which we are all familiar, and it is much higher - several kilometres higher in places.

Now the authors of a new study think they know why it might have become so high and are blaming the Earth.

Over four billion years ago, soon after the Moon's formation and before it had solidified to its core, its crust floated on a sea of magma.

It was during this time that the Earth was able to tug on that floating crust, distorting it, much like the Moon tugs on the Earth's oceans today creating the tides.

This "tidal bulge" in the Moon's shape led to the crust melting and thinning at the poles where the strain was greatest, while the crust around the equator remained thicker and fatter, say the scientists.

Tidal bulge

Professor Ian Garrick-Bethell of the University of California in Santa Cruz, who led the study, believes tidal processes can explain between 25% and 40% of the Moon's topography.

But while the evidence for this remains in the elevated surfaces of the far side, the evidence on the near side has been obliterated by subsequent volcanic activity.

"Since the Apollo missions... people have known that the topography on the far side of the Moon is much more elevated than anywhere else on the moon," said Professor Garrick-Bethell.

"Our study is the first to quantify the structure and shape on the far side and in doing that, we were able to demonstrate that this topography bears the signature of a tidal process."

The process by which the stretching and pulling of the Moon by the Earth leads to variations in crust thickness is called "tidal heating".

"You can imagine that the part of the Moon that's pointing towards the Earth will start to flex and begin to be drawn towards the Earth and away from the Earth on the far side, and during this, the poles will be stretched and heated."

"The amount of strain in the rock is going to be greater at the poles so there will be more heating at the poles and there'll be thinner crust at the poles."

Tidal bulging probably occurs across the solar system today. The oceans on Earth bulge as a result of the Moon's gravitational pull and the same process is thought to occur on Jupiter's moon Europa.

Europa consists of an ice crust on an ocean of water, and Jupiter's massive gravitational pull is thought to distort the moon's shape much like the process described in this new paper.

A similar process could be occurring on the moon Titan, Saturn's largest moon.

Now what was I thinking of, I can't remember. Oh yes, that was it - from the BBC:

People spend 'half their waking hours daydreaming'

People spend nearly half of their waking hours not thinking about what they are actually doing, according to a US study conducted via the iPhone.

More than 2,200 volunteers downloaded an app which then surveyed them about their thoughts and mood at random times of day and night.

The Science study suggested minds wander, even from demanding tasks, at least 30% of the time.

A UK expert said other studies confirmed people are easily distracted.

The iPhone was a novel research tool for researchers at Harvard University.

Participants agreed to be contacted, at which point they selected what they were doing from a menu, whether they were actually thinking about it, and how happy or sad they felt.

Remarkably, some participants were prepared to answer the survey even when making love.

While their study sample was composed entirely of people who owned the device, and were prepared to download and be disturbed by an app of this kind, the researchers said it provides an insight into how our minds can wander during the day.

After gathering 250,000 survey results, the Harvard team concluded that this group of people spent 46.9% of their time awake with their minds wandering.

Dr Matthew Killingsworth, one of the researchers, said: "Mind-wandering appears ubiquitous across all activities.

"This study shows that our mental lives are pervaded, to a remarkable degree, by the non-present."

Happiness

In addition, the survey data on happiness appeared to show a modest connection between the degree of mind-wandering and the level of happiness.

People who were most distracted away from the task in hand were more likely to report feelings of unhappiness.

Reports of happiness were most likely among those exercising, having a conversation or making love, whereas unhappiness was reported most while people were resting, working, or using computers.

Dr Killingsworth said: "Mind-wandering is an excellent predictor of people's happiness."

However, whether mind-wandering is the cause, or the result of unhappiness is still not proven by the research.

Professor Nilli Lavie, from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, said that while any attempt to try to measure the wandering mind was "heroic", the results of the study might be rendered less reliable by the type of participant it attracted.

She said: "Mind-wandering may simply be ubiquitous in the type of person who is engaging in this type of iPhone application, and who is prepared to be distracted from whatever they are doing in this way."

However, she said that her own laboratory research had found similar or even higher levels of mind-wandering among subjects given less demanding tasks to complete.

Lol
Most iphone owners don't actually think about what they are doing most of the time, and the same is also true of people who take part in surveys

Hi muf, my standard response when I get a telephone survey is to say "I'm sorry, I'm too busy to take part. Goodbye" and put the phone down. Polite, but firm and gives them no chance to get going.

From the BBC:

Leatherback turtles, the ocean's deepest-diving reptiles, control their buoyancy simply by breathing in, scientists have found.

Researchers describe in the Journal of Experimental Biology how the turtles regulate their dives through the volume of air in their lungs.

This allows them to glide and forage for food at a variety of depths.

Scientists believed that the animals would exhale before diving, to avoid gas bubbles forming in their bodies.

US and UK scientists monitored the turtles' diving by attaching small data loggers to the animals' backs.

They're able to regulate the amount of air they take in when they're diving Sabrina Fossette More on turtles, terrapins and tortoises from BBC Wildlife Finder

Sabrina Fossette from the University of Swansea in Wales led the study.

She and her colleagues attached the data loggers to five female leatherbacks in a wildlife refuge in the Caribbean.

"In addition to the depth, we could measure their acceleration," Dr Fossette told BBC News. "So we were able to model each dive in 3-D.

The researchers saw that the leatherbacks started their dives by actively swimming as they descended.

"Then, at some point during the dive they started gliding," said Dr Fossette.

"The turtles started gliding at deeper depths during deeper dives, suggesting they regulate the amount of air they inhale before diving."

This enables them to use their lungs as buoyancy aids to precisely counteract their weight.

The ability to glide at a variety of depths allows leatherbacks to conserve energy; it also means they are more flexible in terms of where in the ocean they can feed.

"Leatherbacks forage on gelatinous plankton," said Dr Fossette, "which can be found either at the surface or really deep in the ocean."

'The bends'

Many other diving animals, including hard-shelled turtles and penguins also inhale before they dive, but the researchers we were surprised to see the same behaviour in leatherbacks because the creatures are such deep divers.

Scientists have recorded the animals reaching depths of up to 1,000m - the deepest leatherback dive ever recorded was more than 1,200m.

"Stick-on" data loggers allowed the scientists to monitor the turtles' dives

So the researchers expected that the animals would exhale before a dive, in order to avoid decompression sickness.

Otherwise known as the bends, this can occur when dissolved gases in an animal's (or human's) blood form bubbles inside their bodies.

"Many deep divers - notably deep-diving mammals - exhale before diving to minimise the effects of decompression," said Dr Fossette.

"Leatherback turtles share many physiological and physical features with deep-diving mammals and therefore we would expect them to exhale."

It seems that the turtles' body temperature increases the solubility of the gases and therefore decreases the risks of bubbles forming.

This tagging experiment was designed by Rory Wilson, also from the University of Swansea, and Molly Lutcavage from the University of New Hampshire, US.

This is probably the most important scientific breakthrough of our lifteime and will be of good news to billions of people.
From the BBC:

Cocoa genome 'will save chocolate industry'

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News, Zurich

The public release of the genome of the cacao tree - from which chocolate is made - will save the chocolate industry from collapse, a scientist has said.

Howard Yana-Shapiro, a researcher for Mars, said that without engineering higher-yielding cacao trees, demand would outstrip supply within 50 years.

Dr Yana-Shapiro said such strains will also help biodiversity and farmers' welfare in cacao-growing regions.

The genome's availability will likely lead to healthier, tastier chocolate.

The sequencing of the genome was an international, multidisciplinary effort between firms including Mars and IBM, the US department of agriculture and a number of universities, and was announced in September.

Dr Shapiro, once described as a "biodiversifarian", was speaking at an event at IBM's research labs in Zurich when he called the date the genome was released "the greatest day of my life".

"In late 2007, it became very apparent to me that we would not have a continuous supply of cocoa going into the future if we did not intervene on a massive scale to secure our supply chain."

"Cote d'Ivoire is the largest producer of cocoa in the world," Dr Shapiro continued. "Mars has bought cocoa from there for sixty years - but when we started to understand the environmental and ecological conditions, the productivity, sociocultural and economic conditions, I realised this was a moment of crisis for this region."

What is at issue is both the inherent yield of varying strains of the Theobroma cacao tree, which on average currently produce 400 kilograms per hectare of land. What is needed is to make more cocoa from fewer trees and less land.

"In 10 years, under a 2% increase in consumption we will need (an area corresponding to) another Cote d'Ivoire. There is no more place to grow it, productivity with less land must be our driver."

The genetic codes of major global staple crops such as rice and wheat have been decoded, with a view to improving yields or nutritive properties. However, those crops are grown principally on large, industrial farms.

Cocoa, by comparison, is grown for the most part on small farms by individual farmers and sold on in a less centralised market.

Disease and drought

For that reason, Dr Shapiro said, increases to yields or the cocoa butter and fat content - for which cocoa farmers are actually paid - could directly affect the lives of some 6.5 million small farmers around the globe.

Under his direction, the consortium sequenced the Theobroma cacao genome in a remarkably short time, finishing three years ahead of schedule.

The whole of the genome was first published, as Dr Shapiro puts it, "in the public domain and protected from patenting for perpetuity - so everyone would have free and continued access to it".

Now correlations between certain characteristics - such as disease and drought resistance or higher proportions of healthier fats - can be made in the field with the benefit of relatively inexpensive laboratory equipment. In this way, each region ensures it has strains that will produce the most, and the best, cocoa.

There are a number of other characteristics that, in time, may be maximised on a genetic basis - such as the level of chemicals known as flavinols, which have been implicated in laboratory tests of heart health.

'Ecological stability'

"Soon it will be the norm as opposed to the exception: healthy fats, high levels of flavinols, so that chocolate will actually become something quite different. Whether that's 10, 15 20 years away, it's on that track now."

Higher yields will free up land for other under-utilised crops in the region such as yams, sorghum and plantains. Dr Shapiro sees such small changes - that a chocolate consumer never sees - as a tangible human benefit of science-driven agriculture.

"It gives you social stability in the rural sector, it gives you cultural stability that doesn't break up the rural sector, it gives you environmental stabilty because we're reducing the risk to the environment from agricultural chemistry, it gives you ecological stability because we're protecting the remnant forest, it also sequesters carbon," he said.

"This is the really 'Green Revolution' of understanding the entire ecosystem from which you are working."

From the BBC:

Unseen Rossetti to go on display in Birmingham

A previously unseen work by Dante Gabriel Rossetti is to go on show at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery next year.

Mnemosyne, from 1876, depicts Jane Morris, wife of designer William Morris and Rossetti's main muse during the last decade of his life.

The drawing remained in the artist's studio until his death in 1882 and has been in a private collection since.

It will go on show at the Poetry of Drawing exhibition opening in January.

The large-scale pastel drawing is a study for a painting of Mnemosyne, the personification of Memory in Greek mythology.

Rossetti began work on the painting - which is currently on show at the Delaware Art Museum - in 1876 and completed it in 1881.

The artist fell in love with Jane Morris, drawing and painting her repeatedly, often as characters from mythology and literature.

Her distinctive appearance has come to typify the later Pre-Raphaelite ideal of female beauty.

The exhibition will bring together works from Birmingham's important collections of Pre-Raphaelite and later 19th century art, some of them rarely seen, alongside key loans from public and private lenders.

It includes the earliest appearances in Pre-Raphaelite art of red-haired Elizabeth Siddal who, along with Jane Morris, was the most famous Pre-Raphaelite model.

Now they've come up with pole-vaulting dinosaurs. From the BBC:

Pterosaur reptile used "pole vault" trick for take-off

A new study claims that the ancient winged reptiles known as pterosaurs used a "pole-vaulting" action to take to the air.

They say the creatures took off using all four of their limbs.

The reptiles vaulted over their wings, pushing off first with their hind limbs and then thrusting themselves upwards with their powerful arm muscles - not dissimilar to some modern bats.

The research is published in the open-access journal Plos One.

Pterosaurs lived at the same time as the dinosaurs, but belonged to a different group of reptiles. They existed from the Triassic Period until the end of the Cretaceous - about 220 million years ago to 65 million years ago.

In their study, Dr Mark Witton at Portsmouth University, UK, and Dr Michael Habib of Chatham University, Pennsylvania, US, reappraised giant pterosaur fossils.

Their findings challenge other claims that the giant pterosaurs - such as Pteranodon and the largest azhdarchids - were not capable of flying.

'Too heavy'

Researchers have previously suggested that these creatures were too heavy to have taken to the skies.

There have also been doubts that the ancient reptiles could have taken off using the same action as birds.

"Most birds take off either by running to pick up speed and jumping into the air before flapping wildly, or if they're small enough, they may simply launch themselves into the air from a standstill," said Dr Witton.

"Previous theories suggested that giant pterosaurs were too big and heavy to perform either of these manoeuvres."

He added: "These creatures were not birds; they were flying reptiles with a distinctly different skeletal structure, wing proportions and muscle mass.

"They would have achieved flight in a completely different way to birds and would have had a lower angle of take off and initial flight trajectory."

Muscle bulk

The authors of the latest study suggest that, with up to 50kg of forelimb muscle, the creatures could easily have launched themselves into the air despite their massive size and weight.

Dr Habib explained: "Instead of taking off with their legs alone, like birds, pterosaurs probably took off using all four of their limbs.

"By using their arms as the main engines for launching instead of their legs, they use the flight muscles - the strongest in their bodies - to take off and that gives them potential to launch much greater weight into the air," he explained.

"When they were far enough off the ground, they could start flapping their wings before finding a thermal or another area of uplift to gain some altitude and glide off to wherever they wanted to go," he told BBC News.

The largest pterosaurs may have had wingspans up to 13m and weighed up to 544kg.

But the authors' reappraisal of pterosaur fossils suggests these numbers may have been overestimated. They argue that the biggest creatures may have had 10-11m wingspans and weighed between 200 and 250 kg

Next time you have some chocolate there's a good chance that slaves were used in its production, unless it's fair trade

That's sickening

Good news from the BBC about spammers:

Global spam e-mail drops after hacker arrests

Levels of spam have fallen by almost 50% since August 2010, suggest figures.

Figures compiled by security firm Symantec show that the amount of junk e-mail messages flowing around the net has dropped 47% in three months.

Kaspersky Labs noted a similar fall from July to September, when spam levels fell to 81.1% of all e-mails

The decline was put down to the arrests of those behind spam-sending botnets, and intelligence work that saw other spamming systems shut down.

Server shutdown

In the last few months security firms have scored several notable successes against gangs that own and operate botnets - collections of hijacked home computers.

The vast majority of spam or junk mail is routed through these hijacked machines.

One of the biggest successes was against the Pushdo or Cutwail botnet, which had been in operation since 2007 and was thought to be sending about 10% of global spam.

An international operation co-ordinated by the security firm LastLine managed to get 20 of the 30 servers controlled by the group shut down. The servers were turned off with the help of the internet service providers unwittingly found to be hosting them.

As a result, many of the "drone" PCs in the huge botnet used to send e-mail were cut off and no longer relayed the junk messages.

Bredolab was another big botnet hit in October thanks to work by the hi-tech division of the national crime squad in the Netherlands. The arrest of an Armenian man thought to be the botnet's controller led to the closure of the 143 servers linked to Bredolab.

At its height Bredolab was thought to involve up to 30 million computers around the world and be capable of sending 3.6 billion e-mails every day.

Police forces also took action against many of the people involved in the Zeus botnet.

Around the world about 100 people were arrested and many of the command and control machines overseeing the network were turned off.

Spammers were also hit by the September closure of the Spamit partner program. It paid spam senders to promote its Canadian Pharmacy network of sites peddling fake pills.

Action against botnets and the closure of Spamit led spam volumes to drop to 86.8% of all e-mail, the lowest percentage since September 2009, said Symantec.

However, Kaspersky analyst Darya Gudkova warned that there was bad news mixed in with the good.

"Spam is becoming a greater threat as it now frequently contains a variety of malicious attachments and links to infected websites," she said.

From the BBC:

Japan probe collected particles from Itokawa asteroid

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

Japanese scientists have confirmed that particles found inside the Hayabusa probe after its seven-year space trip are from the asteroid Itokawa.

A statement from the country's space agency said microscopic analysis of 1,500 grains retrieved from the craft's sample canister proved they were of extraterrestrial origin.

The announcement represents a huge triumph for Japan.

It is the first time samples from an asteroid have been returned to Earth.

"It's a world first and a remarkable accomplishment that [Hayabusa] brought home material from a celestial body other than the Moon," Japan's science and technology minister, Yoshiaki Takagi, told a news conference in Tokyo.

Junichiro Kawaguchi, the project manager on the mission, told reporters: "I don't know how to describe what has been beyond our dreams, but I'm overwhelmed by emotion."

The Hayabusa mission spent three weeks orbiting asteroid Itokawa in 2005 and attempted to pluck dust from its surface.

The $200m (£125m) mission encountered many technical problems, from being hit by a solar flare to experiencing propulsion glitches.

But each time an issue came up, the Japanese project team found an elegant solution to keep Hayabusa alive and bring it back to Earth - albeit three years late.

The sample capsule fell safely to Earth in Australia.

The main Hayabusa spacecraft, however, was destroyed on re-entry to the atmosphere.

Yesterday during the Radio 4 news programme at 5.00, the presenter announced that NASA was going to make a major announcement during the course of the programme and that they would bring the news when it was announced.

I think it is fair to say that the announcers were quite excited as to what was going to be announced. When it came it was more than a bit of an anti-climax as the announcer admitted that they thought that it was going to be that intelligent life elsewhere had been discovered. The announcment was that a young black hole which could only be 30 years old had been detected. This means that the scientists will be able to get a much better idea as to how a black hole operates than before.

At present, there is nothing on the BBC website about this story.

And the BBC has now got their article on the black hole discovery:

Telescopes spy 'baby black hole'

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

US astronomers are confident an object studied for 30 years in the M100 galaxy is a black hole.

If so, it would be the "youngest, nearby" such object to Earth.

It is still a long way off in human terms - more than 470 million, million, million km. But given the size of the cosmos, that is effectively just like our back yard, says the Nasa team.

The object, bright in X-rays, is in the same place on the sky that a giant stellar explosion was observed in 1979.

Although the blast was observed to occur just 30 years ago, its light actually took 50 million years to arrive at Earth.

The supernova remnant, called SN 1979C, has been investigated by a series of telescopes including the US space agency's Swift satellite, the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton observatory, and the German Rosat spacecraft. The most recent study has been conducted using Nasa's Chandra facility.

All show the the source of X-rays has remained steady since 1995. This suggests strongly the object is a black hole.

"While it's been steady, it's also been extremely bright; and we explain this high luminosity as evidence of accretion of supernova material back on to the black hole," said Daniel Patnaude of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass, who led the latest research.

"As it's accreted on to the black hole, it has heated up to extremely high temperatures and become very bright in X-rays. We can use the brightness of the accretion to find out that this black hole probably has a mass of around five times the mass of our Sun."

The scientists think SN 1979C, which was first identified by amateur astronomer and schoolteacher Gus Johnson in 1979, formed when a star about 20 times more massive than the Sun collapsed in on itself.

This end-of-life event, which occurs when the nuclear fusion processes at a giant star's core can no longer support its great size, is thought to be the most common way of making a black holes.

Being able to view an example at such an early stage in its evolution, and reasonably close to Earth, should therefore prove a boon to researchers as they try to understand such objects better.

Nasa astrophysicist Kimberly Weaver commented: "It's not just that possibly we've found the youngest, nearby black hole. What's really exciting about it is that we know the exact birthday of the black hole. We've found for the first time, possibly, the true birthday of a black hole."

But more interesting is this story on frogs from the BBC (my brother is a frog fanatic):

New frog species found in hunt for old ones

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

A search for frogs believed to be extinct has instead led scientists to discover some new ones.

Three species hitherto unknown to science have been found in Colombia.

They include a poison-secreting rocket frog and two toads. All three are tiny and tend to be most active in daytime, which is unusual for amphibians.

However, the same expedition to Colombia failed to find the species it was hoping to rediscover, the Mesopotamia beaked toad.

The disappointment provoked by that non-discovery turned to glee when the conservation scientists came across the three new species.

The 3-4cm red-eyed toad, discovered at an altitude of 2,000m, evoked particular fascination.

"I have never seen a toad with such vibrant red eyes," said Robin Moore from Conservation International, the scientist who set up the rediscovery project.

"This trait is highly unusual for amphibians, and its discovery offers us a terrific opportunity to learn more about how and why it adapted this way."

The other new toad is also tiny - less than 2cm long - with a beak-shaped head that Dr Moore compared to the snout of Montgomery Burns, the villain of The Simpsons TV series.

George Meyer, a long-time Simpsons writer and amphibian enthusiast, commented: "The toad's imperious profile and squinty eyes indeed look like Monty Burns."

The reason why it has not been identified previously is probably because the species skips the tadpole stage, instead producing toadlets that resemble the fallen leaves of the forest floor in which they live.

The third newcomer is a rocket frog, a member of the poison dart family - though not as poisonous as many of its cousins.

The amphibian search, co-ordinated by Conservation International along with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, began in August and is the first co-ordinated attempt to look for species believed to be extinct.

Expeditions have been mounted in 19 countries in search of 100 lost species.

So far, three have been found: a Mexican salamander not seen since its discovery in 1941, a frog from the Ivory Coast last observed in 1967, and another frog from Democratic Republic of Congo not seen since 1979.

Despite the discoveries and rediscoveries, the team emphasises that overall, the global outlook for amphibians is still bleak.

The remainder of species targeted by the current search have remained undetected, suggesting that they are indeed extinct.

And the latest Red List of Threatened Species, released during the UN biodiversity summit last month, put 41% of amphibians on the danger list, with most of the threats continuing to intensify.

A whale of a story from the BBC:

Great white sharks in Mediterranean made 'wrong turn'

Great white sharks in the Mediterranean may have first arrived from the seas about Australia 450,000 years ago, genetic studies have suggested.

Researchers writing in Proceedings of the Royal Society B believe the arrival may have been simply a migratory "wrong turn" by a few pregnant females.

A tumultuous climate between ice ages may have been the cause.

The species - Carcharodon carcharias - would have remained in the Med because it returns to spawn where it was born.

It was previously assumed that the great whites in the Mediterranean were most closely related to their nearby cousins in the Atlantic Ocean.

But now, a team led by Les Noble of the University of Aberdeen has examined the several groups of sharks' mitochondrial DNA - genetic material passed through the maternal line that is particularly suited to tracing lineages.

The team found that the Mediterranean sharks were very different to the Atlantic group and more like sharks from Australia and New Zealand.

Although changes to the DNA in the different populations happen randomly, they do happen with a regular average rate.

As a result, the few differences between the Australian and Mediterranean sharks are an indication of how long ago they parted ways: 450,000 years ago - a time between ice ages that would have seen many effects of a changing climate.

"That was a time of interglacials, when you would've had all kinds of changes in the currents going down the east and up the western coast of Africa," Dr Noble told BBC News.

The team hypothesises that strong, warm currents pushing the sharks northward would have put them far off course.

"They might have gone a considerable way up there before the warmth ran out. Then they start trying to turn east and north and the first place you can go east, of course, is the Straits of Gibraltar.

"It's not too much of a stretch to imagine the odd one might indeed do a 'wrong turn' and make this kind of migration."

It may have been rare for sharks to fall prey to the currents, but Dr Noble explained that perhaps only a few pregnant great whites would have needed to make the journey.

"The reason we still have a genetic signature of that with the great whites is because they're like salmon - where the pups are dropped, they recognise as their home - that's where they always return to."

It may be then that just a few shark pups - or perhaps just one - born in the Mediterranean due to a migratory wrong turn, returned to establish the species there.

Another use for garlic. From the BBC:

Garlic 'remedy for hypertension'

By Helen Briggs Health reporter, BBC News

Garlic may be useful in addition to medication to treat high blood pressure, a study suggests.

Australian doctors enrolled 50 patients in a trial to see if garlic supplements could help those whose blood pressure was high, despite medication.

Those given four capsules of garlic extract a day had lower blood pressure than those on placebo, they report in a scientific journal.

A UK heart charity said more research was needed.

Garlic has long been though to be good for the heart.

Garlic supplements have previously been shown to lower cholesterol and reduce high blood pressure in those with untreated hypertension.

In the latest study, researchers from the University of Adelaide, Australia, looked at the effects of four capsules a day of a supplement known as aged garlic for 12 weeks.

They found systolic blood pressure was around 10mmHg lower in the group given garlic compared with those given a placebo.

Researcher Karin Ried said: "Garlic supplements have been associated with a blood pressure lowering effect of clinical significance in patients with untreated hypertension.

"Our trial, however, is the first to assess the effect, tolerability and acceptability of aged garlic extract as an additional treatment to existing antihypertensive medication in patients with treated, but uncontrolled, hypertension."

Experts say garlic supplements should only be used after seeking medical advice, as garlic can thin the blood or interact with some medicines.

Ellen Mason, senior cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, said using garlic for medicinal purposes dates back thousands of years, but it is essential that scientific research proves that garlic can help conditions such as raised blood pressure.

She said: "This study demonstrated a slight blood pressure reduction after using aged garlic supplements but it's not significant enough or in a large enough group of people to currently recommend it instead of medication.

"It's a concern that so many people in the UK have poorly controlled blood pressure, with an increased risk of stroke and heart disease as a consequence. So enjoy garlic as part of your diet but don't stop taking your blood pressure medication."

The study is reported in the journal Maturitas.

Italy as you don't normally see it. From the BBC:

Italy lights up for space station

Astronauts have taken a spectacular nighttime picture of Italy from the Cupola observation deck of the International Space Station (ISS).

The image looks north over Sicily and the "boot" of Italy. The Mediterranean Sea dominates the foreground.

The domed Cupola is attached to the underside of the station and is used to control robots working on its exterior.

Its amazing views also mean it has become a popular place for astronauts to relax and gaze over Earth.

The Cupola was fitted to the station in February by a crew of the Endeavour shuttle.

It takes the shape of a dome, with six trapezoidal side windows and a circular top window of a little under 80cm - the largest window ever built for space.

The structure is a key European Space Agency contribution to the ISS project.

It was constructed by Thales Alenia Space (TAS) in Turin in northern Italy. TAS has provided more than half of the pressurised volume on the US side of the station.

And click on the attachment below to get a large photo showing the border between France and Italy. It's worth look at.

From the BBC:

Mars 'hopper' may run on nuclear decay and Martian CO2

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Nuclear decay-driven machines could gather gases from the atmosphere of Mars, giving future robotic missions leaps of a kilometre, researchers say.

A design concept in Proceedings of the Royal Society A outlines an approach to compress CO2 and liquefy it.

The liquid would then be heated much as in a standard rocket, expanding violently into a gas to propel exploratory craft great distances.

The authors suggest this is a better strategy to see more of the Red Planet.

While the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity provided far more data than was initially planned, as vehicles that are powered by the sun and get around on wheels, they are limited in their overall range of exploration.

For example, the Opportunity rover, which has been on the Martian surface for nearly seven years, passed the 25-kilometre mark this week.

As a result, researchers have been looking into means of getting farther with future robotic missions to Mars. Ideas including landers with wings or lighter-than-atmosphere balloons have been proposed, or even "inflatable tumbleweeds" that are blown across the landscape.

However, Hugo Williams and his colleagues at the University of Leicester - working on the propulsion ideas for a lander project including the aerospace giant Astrium - argue that a lander that can gather up its own fuel is best.

At the heart of the idea is a radioisotope-based generator - a few-kilogram piece of radioactive material that heats up as it regularly spits out tiny subatomic particles.

"Nuclear batteries" employing the same principle have been in use in long-term space missions since the Pioneer craft of the early 1970s.

In the proposed hopper design, heat from the decay is gathered and used to run a compressor, collected the CO2-rich Martian atmosphere into a tank and compressing it until it turns into a liquid.

Some of the heat is channeled to another block of material that is used as a storage heater. When a boost is needed the liquid is allowed to contact the block, quickly turning back into a gas and heating up.

When passed through a standard rocket nozzle, the expanding CO2 gas provides thrust that can launch a lander and provide a soft landing when it "hops" to its new locale.

"The advantage is that the radioisotope source is long-lived and not dependent on solar energy," Dr Williams explained to BBC News.

"You can operate for a long time, and in areas of Mars where the amount of sunlight is relatively small. Because you're collecting your propellant from the Martian atmosphere you're not limited by having to take propellant out from Earth."

The concept design would require a week to gather sufficient propellant for a hop of about a kilometre, but eventual designs will accommodate the needs of exploratory missions, pausing less or more time at each landing site.

And on the BBC radio news this morning:

Antimatter atom trapped for first time, say scientists

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Antimatter atoms have been trapped for the first time, scientists say.

Researchers at Cern, home of the Large Hadron Collider, have held 38 antihydrogen atoms in place, each for a fraction of a second.

Antihydrogen has been produced before but it was instantly destroyed when it encountered normal matter.

The team, reporting in Nature, says the ability to study such antimatter atoms will allow previously impossible tests of fundamental tenets of physics.

The current "standard model" of physics holds that each particle - protons, electrons, neutrons and a zoo of more exotic particles - has its mirror image antiparticle.

The antiparticle of the electron, for example, is the positron, and is used in an imaging technique of growing popularity known as positron emission tomography.

However, one of the great mysteries in physics is why our world is made up overwhelmingly of matter, rather than antimatter; the laws of physics make no distinction between the two and equal amounts should have been created at the Universe's birth.

Slowing anti-atoms

Producing antimatter particles like positrons and antiprotons has become commonplace in the laboratory, but assembling the particles into antimatter atoms is far more tricky.

That was first accomplished by two groups in 2002. But handling the "antihydrogen" - bound atoms made up of an antiproton and a positron - is trickier still because it must not come into contact with anything else.

While trapping of charged normal atoms can be done with electric or magnetic fields, trapping antihydrogen atoms in this "hands-off" way requires a very particular type of field.

"Atoms are neutral - they have no net charge - but they have a little magnetic character," explained Jeff Hangst of Aarhus University in Denmark, one of the collaborators on the Alpha antihydrogen trapping project.

"You can think of them as small compass needles, so they can be deflected using magnetic fields. We build a strong 'magnetic bottle' around where we produce the antihydrogen and, if they're not moving too quickly, they are trapped," he told BBC News.

Such sculpted magnetic fields that make up the magnetic bottle are not particularly strong, so the trick was to make antihydrogen atoms that didn't have much energy - that is, they were slow-moving.

The team proved that among their 10 million antiprotons and 700 million positrons, 38 stable atoms of antihydrogen were formed, lasting about two tenths of a second each.

Early days

Next, the task is to produce more of the atoms, lasting longer in the trap, in order to study them more closely.

"What we'd like to do is see if there's some difference that we don't understand yet between matter and antimatter," Professor Hangst said.

"That difference may be more fundamental; that may have to do with very high-energy things that happened at the beginning of the universe.

"That's why holding on to them is so important - we need time to study them."

Gerald Gabrielse of Harvard University led one of the groups that in 2002 first produced antihydrogen, and first proposed that the "magnetic bottle" approach was the way to trap the atoms.

"I'm delighted that it worked as we said it should," Professor Gabrielse told BBC News.

"We have a long way to go yet; these are atoms that don't live long enough to do anything with them. So we need a lot more atoms and a lot longer times before it's really useful - but one has to crawl before you sprint.

Professor Gabrielse's group is taking a different tack to prepare more of the antihydrogen atoms, but said that progress in the field is "exciting".

"It shows that the dream from many years ago is not completely crazy."