And moving from antimatter to ancient seaweed is all in a day's work. From the BBC:

Ancient seaweed is living fossil

By Matt Walker
Editor, Earth News

Ancient seaweed that have been found growing in the deep sea are "living fossils", researchers have reported.

The two types of seaweed, which grow more than 200m underwater, represent previously unrecognised ancient forms of algae, say the scientists.

As such, the algae could belong to the earliest of all known green plants, diverging up to one billion years ago from the ancestor of all such plants.

Details of the discovery are published in the Journal of Phycology.

"The algae occur in relatively deep marine waters - 210m, which is certainly deep for a photosynthetic organism," Professor Frederick Zechman told the BBC.

Verdigellas: older than we thought

"They can be found in shallower water but typically under ledges in low light.

These green algae are among the earliest diverging green plants Frederick Zechman California State University

"They appear to possess special chlorophyll pigments that allow them to utilise the low intensity blue light found at depth."

Professor Zechman of California State University in Fresno, US, sampled the seaweeds with a team of researchers based across the US and in Belgium.

The algae had previously been identified. They belong to the scientific groups, or genera, called Palmophyllum and Verdigellas.

But Professor Zechman's team is the first to study their genetic make-up, and it is this research that has revealed their startling ancestry.

Green origins

Green plants in general belong to one of two groups, or clades.

One clade includes all land plants and the green algae with the most complex structures, known as charophytes or more commonly stoneworts.

The other clade, known as the Cholorophyta, comprises all other green algae.

PLANT DISCOVERIES Fossils of the earliest known land plants were recently discovered in Argentina Harmful blooms of some types of toxic alga have the potential to lay waste to coral reefs Scientists have discovered the source of the gigantic green tide of algae that almost derailed the Beijing Olympics sailing regatta Find out more about plants at BBC Wildlife Finder

Most studies have sought to determine what ancient plants gave rise to the land plants and stoneworts.

But little research has been done into the origin of the other green algae.

So Professor Zechman's team collected and studied Palmophyllum algae from New Zealand waters and Verdigellas from the western Atlantic Ocean.

These algae are unusual as they are multicellular, but their individual cells do not interact with each other in any meaningful way.

Instead, single cells sit in a gelatinous matrix, which can form complex shapes such as stalks.

The scientists analysed the DNA within the nuclei and chloroplasts in the algae's cells.

Palmophyllum umbracola growing in the waters off New Zealand

Instead of belonging to the Cholorophyta, the scientists discovered that both types of algae actually belong to a distinct new group of green plants, one that is incredibly ancient.

The algae are so different that they should be assigned their own Order, a high level taxonomic group, say the scientists.

What is more, "by comparing those gene sequences to the same genes in other green plants, we have discovered that these green algae are among the earliest diverging green plants... if not the earliest diverging lineage of green plants," Professor Zechman told the BBC.

"That would put them in the ball park of over a billion years old."

Plant progenitor

The discovery could "vastly change" our view of which green plant was the ancestor to all those we see today, he says.

That progenitor of green plants is currently thought to be a single-celled plant that had a tail-like structure called a flagellum, which allows the cell to move itself in water.

SOURCES Learn more about the ancient algae at the Journal of Phycology

But no single-celled or flagellated algae of the types studied by Professor Zechman's team have been observed, suggesting the earliest green plants may not have had flagella after all.

Professor Zechman said the previously unrecognised ancient algae could be characterised as "living fossils", even though no actual fossils of such algae are known to exist.

The algae's ability to harness low light intensities allows them to grow in deep water habitats - and that may be the key to their incredible longevity.

At such depths, plants face less stress from the actions of waves, variations in temperature and fewer herbivores that might feed on them.

A new page and a BBC story about some unknown music found:

Vivaldi sonatas found in archive

By Ian Youngs Arts reporter, BBC News

Two previously unknown violin sonatas by Antonio Vivaldi have been uncovered after lying hidden in a collection of manuscripts for 270 years.

The works, thought to have been written for amateur musicians, were found in a 180-page portfolio after it was donated to the Foundling Museum in London.

One of the rediscovered compositions will be performed at Liverpool Hope University on Sunday.

It is likely to be its first airing in the modern era, the university said.

The anthology of manuscripts was compiled between 1715 and 1725, with Vivaldi's sonatas filed alongside works by Handel, Corelli and Purcell.

It was acquired by the late businessman Gerald Coke, whose collection was handed to the Foundling Museum in 2008.

'Simple' pieces

The sonatas were credited to Vivaldi in the anthology, but only became known to experts after being catalogued by the museum.

They have recently been investigated and authenticated by Vivaldi expert Michael Talbot, Liverpool Hope University's visiting professor of music.

"From their relatively simple technical demands, it appears the two sonatas were written by Vivaldi for amateurs," he said.

The Italian composer, best known for The Four Seasons, was a prolific writer who penned almost 50 operas, more than 500 concertos and around 90 sonatas.

Sonata in C will be performed by the La Serenissima ensemble as part of the Cornerstone Festival at Liverpool Hope University's Cornerstone Theatre.

This could be a major development in photography. From the BBC:

Laser camera takes photos around corners

By Jonathan Fildes Technology reporter, BBC News

A camera that can shoot around corners has been developed by US scientists.

The prototype uses an ultra-short high-intensity burst of laser light to illuminate a scene.

The device constructs a basic image of its surroundings - including objects hidden around the corner - by collecting the tiny amounts of light that bounce around the scene.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology team believe it has uses in search and rescue and robot vision.

"It's like having x-ray vision without the x-rays," said Professor Ramesh Raskar, head of the Camera Culture group at the MIT Media Lab and one of the team behind the system.

"But we're going around the problem rather than going through it."

Professor Shree Nayar of Columbia University, an expert in light scattering and computer vision, was very complimentary about the work and said it was a new and "very interesting research direction".

"What is not entirely clear is what complexities of invisible scenes are computable at this point," he told BBC News.

"They have not yet shown recovery of an entire [real-world] scene, for instance."

Flash trick

Professor Raskar said that when he started research on the camera three years ago, senior people told him it was "impossible".

However, working with several students, the idea is becoming a reality.

The heart of the room-sized camera is a femtosecond laser, a high-intensity light source which can fire ultra-short bursts of laser light that last just one quadrillionth of a second (that's 0.000000000000001 seconds).

The light sources are more commonly used by chemists to image reactions at the atomic or molecular scale.

For the femtosecond transient imaging system, as the camera is known, the laser is used to fire a pulse of light onto a scene.

The light particles scatter and reflect off all surfaces including the walls and the floor.

An examination of the causes of that Icelandic volcano eruption. From the BBC:

Scientists picture Icelandic volcano's 'plumbing'

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

Scientists think they can now explain the sequence of events deep inside the Earth that led to the major volcanic eruptions on Iceland earlier this year.

Using data from satellite radar, GPS, and seismometers, the group has sketched a blueprint for the "plumbing" underneath Eyjafjallajokull.

The analysis is published in the journal Nature.

It goes someway to explaining why the volcano caused so much disruption to European air traffic.

"We can say that each volcano has a plumbing system and with our observations we have come up with a model for the plumbing system that was active at Eyjafjallajokull during this whole event," said Professor Freysteinn Sigmundsson from the University of Iceland.

"We were surprised by how complex it was," he told BBC News.

The root cause of the eruptions was a major intrusion of magma below the mountain.

This was picked up in the middle of 2009 as a very subtle change in the shape of the volcano, detected at a GPS station.

It prompted Sigmundsson and colleagues to deploy a full array of instrumentation to track the mountain's behaviour.

This included tasking the German TerraSAR-X satellite to gather repeated radar images of the volcano.

From all of the data, the scientists believe they can describe how the intrusion fed the network of cracks and chambers inside Eyjafjallajokull.

They say the influx created two new sills which saw the molten rock spread laterally and begin to lift the mountain.

There were two eruptive phases - in March and April.

The team says the first phase resulted when the intrusion pushed up through a dyke to break the surface in a relatively calm manner just east of the summit on 20 March.

By that time, the volcano's flanks had expanded by more than 15cm (6in).

The eruption continued into April with a brief pause before a second and much more violent phase was initiated on 22 April.

This time, lava broke out through a new conduit under the ice on the summit of the mountain itself.

Contact between the molten rock and the ice produced an explosive cocktail, as water flashed to steam and gas escaped from bubbles in the magma.

It was this second phase which produced the huge "ash" plume that rose high into the atmosphere, disrupting air traffic over Europe for weeks on end.

The team says the violence could have been a consequence of the new intrusion encountering old and highly evolved magma left under the mountain from the last great series of eruptive events in the 1820s.

"When the second event started, we thought the interaction with the ice was very important - it produces fragmentation of the magma when it comes to the surface," explained Professor Sigmundsson.

"But fragmentation can also occur because gas is escaping from the magma. We think now most of the explosive activity was due to the composition of the [remnant] magma - its technical name is trachyandesite.

"That magma had more gas and it was more viscous, and this combination probably led to most of the explosive activity when it came into contact with the new magma.

"We say the ice-magma interaction augmented this explosivity."

Many have asked whether the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull could kick the nearby - and much larger - Katla volcano into life. However, the team says the plumbing systems under each mountain are separate and quite different in their structure.

It is likely, though, that Eyjafjallajokull will have lessons for volcanologists studying very similar mountains elsewhere in the world.

"There are many volcanoes on Earth that we can say are moderately active - they sleep for hundreds of years, or even longer times," Professor Sigmundsson told BBC News.

"Their reawakening may be similar to what we observed at Eyjafjallajokull. We have such detailed records - we have may be one of the best cases of observations of how a moderately active volcano wakes up and of the events preceding an eruption."

On the BBC radio news this morning:

'Alien' planet detected circling dying star

By Neil Bowdler Science reporter, BBC News

Astronomers claim to have discovered the first planet originating from outside our galaxy.

The Jupiter-like planet, they say, is part of a solar system which once belonged to a dwarf galaxy.

This dwarf galaxy was in turn devoured by our own galaxy, the Milky Way, according to a team writing in the academic journal Science.

The star, called HIP 13044, is nearing the end of its life and is 2000 light years from Earth.

The discovery was made using a telescope in Chile.

Cosmic cannibalism

Planet hunters have so far netted nearly 500 so-called "exoplanets" outside our Solar System using various astronomical techniques.

But all of those so far discovered, say the researchers, are indigenous to our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

This find is different, they say, because the planet circles a sun which belongs to a group of stars called the "Helmi stream" which are known to have once belonged to a separate dwarf galaxy.

This galaxy was gobbled up by the Milky Way between six and nine billion years ago in an act of intergalactic cannibalism.

The new planet is thought to have a minimum mass 1.25 times that of Jupiter and circles in close proximity to its parent star, with an orbit lasting just 16.2 days.

It sits in the southern constellation of Fornax.

The planet would have been formed in the early era of its solar system, before the world was incorporated into our own galaxy, say the researchers.

"This discovery is very exciting," said Rainer Klement of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, who targetted the stars in the study.

"For the first time, astronomers have detected a planetary system in a stellar stream of extragalactic origin. This cosmic merger has brought an extragalactic planet within our reach."

Dr Robert Massey of the UK's Royal Astronomical Society said the paper provided the first "hard evidence" of a planet of extragalactic origin.

"There's every reason to believe that planets are really quite widespread throughout the Universe, not just in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, but also in the thousands of millions of others there are," he said, "but this is the first time we've got hard evidence of that."

End Days

The new find might also offer us a glimpse of what the final days of our own Solar System may look like.

HIP 13044 is nearing its end. Having consumed all the hydrogen fuel in its core, it expanded massively into a "red giant" and might have eaten up smaller rocky planets like our own Earth in the process, before contracting.

The new Jupiter-like planet discovered appears to have survived the fireball, for the moment.

"This discovery is particularly intriguing when we consider the distant future of our own planetary system, as the Sun is also expected to become a red giant in about five billion years," said Dr Johny Setiawan, who also works at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, and who led the study.

"The star is rotating relatively quickly," he said. "One explanation is that HIP 13044 swallowed its inner planets during the red giant phase, which would make the star spin more quickly."

The new planet was discovered using what is called the "radial velocity method" which involves detecting small wobbles in a star caused by a planet as it tugs on its sun.

These wobbles were picked up using a ground-based telescope at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla facility in Chile.

The noose slowly tightens. From the BBC:

Code clues point to Stuxnet maker

By Mark Ward Technology correspondent, BBC News

Detailed analysis of the code in the Stuxnet worm has narrowed the list of suspects who could have created it.

The sophisticated malware is among the first to target the industrial equipment used in power plants and other large scale installations.

New research suggests it was designed to disrupt centrifuges often used to enrich uranium.

Forensic analysis of the worm has revealed more about the team behind it and what it was supposed to do.

Code secrets

The close look at the code inside Stuxnet was carried out by Tom Parker from security firm Securicon who specialises in picking out the digital fingerprints hackers leave behind in malware.

His analysis of Stuxnet shows it is made of several distinct blocks. One part targets industrial control systems, another handles the worm's methods of spreading itself and another concerns the way its creators planned to communicate with and control it.

The most sophisticated part of Stuxnet targeted the Programmable Logic Controllers used in industrial plants to automate the operation of components such as motors or pumps.

Subverting PLCs required detailed knowledge of one manufacturer's product line, the programming language written for it and insight into how it could be subverted. That meant, said Mr Parker, the list of suspects was pretty short.

"I do believe the PLC components were written in the West," he said. "It's western companies that are investing most heavily in automation of industrial processes whether its putting coke in cans or nuclear enrichment."

"However, the bits that drop it into a system and the command and control parts are not that advanced at all," said Mr Parker.

"I've compared this less advanced code to other malware and it does not score very highly," he said.

Dedicated hi-tech criminals would not have used such crude methods of distribution and control, he said, suggesting that it was put together by a nation rather than organised crime.

What this implies, he said, is that whichever country put Stuxnet together commissioned the creation of the PLC part from a Western nation then added their own distribution and control code to it.

The analysis suggests that a team of 6-10 people were behind Stuxnet and were involved with it for some time. Whoever wrote it would also need information about and access to industrial plants in Iran if that was the actual target, said Mr Parker.

Motor control

More information has also emerged about how Stuxnet disrupts the industrial control systems it managed to compromise.

Research by security firm Symantec has shown that the likely target were frequency controllers that many PLCs are hooked up to in order to regulate a motor.

In particular, said Symantec, Stuxnet targeted those operating at frequencies between 807 and 1210Hz.

"There's a limited amount of equipment operating at that speed," said Orla Cox, security operations manager at Symantec. "It knew exactly what it was going after."

"Those operating at 600hz or above are regulated for export by the US because they can be used to control centrifuges for uranium enrichment," she said.

If Stuxnet did manage to infect a PLC connected to a centrifuge it would seriously disrupt its working, said Ms Cox.

What is not clear, said Ms Cox, is whether Stuxnet hit its target. If it did not, she said, then the fact that the command and control system has been taken over by security firms has ended any chance of it being used again.

"Our expectation is that the attack is done at this point," she said. "We've not seen any more variants out there and I don't suspect we will."

Mr Parker said that whoever did write it failed in one respect because Stuxnet has not stayed live for as long as its creators hoped.

The control system set up needed to have been in place for years to have a seriously disruptive effect on its intended targets, he said.

"Someone has serious egg on their face because they are never going to be able to use this investment ever again," he said.

Judge for yourself. From the BBC:

Top judge says internet 'could kill jury system'

The jury system may not survive if it is undermined by social networking sites, England's top judge has said.

In a lecture published on Friday the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, raised major concerns about the use of the internet by jurors.

He said: "If the jury system is to survive as the system for a fair trial... the misuse of the internet by jurors must stop."

Lord Judge said some jurors had used the internet to research a rape case.

Earlier this year a judge in Manchester had to dismiss a jury and restart a trial, The Sun reported, after a juror went onto her Facebook page, gave details of a trial and asked friends: "Did he do it?"

Lord Judge, who is the most senior judge in England and Wales, said it was too easy for campaigners to bombard Twitter with messages in a bid to put pressure on jurors who might be looking at it.

He said: "We cannot stop people tweeting, but if jurors look at such material, the risks to the fairness of the trial will be very serious, and ultimately the openness of the trial process on which we all rely, would be damaged."

Lord Judge added: "We cannot accept that the use of the internet, or rather its misuse, should be acknowledged and treated as an ineradicable fact of life, or that a Nelsonian blind eye should be turned to it or the possibility that it is happening.

"If it is not addressed, the misuse of the internet represents a threat to the jury system which depends, and rightly depends, on evidence provided in court which the defendant can hear and if necessary challenge."

He said judges need to warn jurors in the strongest terms not to use the internet to research cases or to give details of cases they are deliberating on.

He wants the notice in jury rooms to be amended to include a warning that such research could amount to a contempt of court. He raised the prospect of sentencing jurors who use the internet for research.

Lord Judge even suggested sending text messages from court buildings should be banned.

The BBC's Legal Affairs Analyst, Clive Coleman, said: "This is the strongest and most detailed judicial consideration of the threat to the criminal justice system posed by jurors using modern technology. It raises major questions of how to police and stop internet use."

Far too serious an article for me to make any comments, but this needs to be told. From the BBC:

Farms to harvest rare animal parts 'are not the answer'

By Mark Kinver Science and environment reporter, BBC News

Farming rare animal species will not halt the illegal trade in animal parts, a conservation group has warned.

Care for the Wild says the fact that the animals are worth more dead than alive is hampering efforts to save species such as tigers and rhinos.

They add that selling parts from captive-bred creatures would not result in a halt of illegally traded animal parts and would instead fuel demand.

A kilo of powdered rhino horn can fetch £22,000 on the black market.

Mark Jones, programmes director of Care for the Wild International, said recent media reports suggested that the South African government was considering "a feasibility study on some kind of farming or ranching of rhinos for their horns".

"This flagged up that these sort of farming initiatives are still being considered at quite high levels," he explained.

"Rhinos are in quite a lot of trouble at the moment, with the value of their horns going through the roof, especially in Vietnam."

Media coverage in 2009 reported that a member of the Vietnamese government said he took rhino horn and his cancer went into remission, prompting a growth in the demand for the illegal product.

"The sums that are being paid for powdered rhino horn are just astronomical."

There are two species of rhino found in Africa. While the white rhino (Ceratotherium simum) has enjoyed a surge in numbers in recent years, taking the population to about 17,500, it is a very different story for the northern sub-species Ceratotherium simum cottoni.

It is listed as Critically Endangered, and conservationists have warned that it is on the "brink of extinction" with four or fewer individuals remaining.

More than 200 rhinos have been killed in South Africa for their horns since the beginning of this year. This week, the nation's defence minister told BBC News that troops would be deployed to help rangers fight poachers.

Horn of hope

Mr Jones added: "One of the issues we have is that the white rhino population (not sub-species) in South Africa/Swaziland is on Appendix II of Cites, which means some export is allowable.

"Also, China has been buying quite large numbers of live rhinos from South Africa in recent times, and there is concern that some people within China may be setting up rhino horn harvesting.

"An awful lot of people from Vietnam, in particular, seem to be coming over to shoot rhinos and take the horns home as trophies.

"Yet, they don't seem to have much interest or history in hunting but appear to have an awful lot of history in getting the horn out of the country."

The Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites) is a global framework designed to regulate the global commercial sale of wild species.

If a species is listed as Appendix I, such as tigers, this means that no commercial exports are permitted. However, Cites has no jurisdiction within national borders.

The idea of farming threatened species, through captive breeding programmes, is not new. Bear bile farms have been in operation in East Asia for three decades.

The practice involves caged bears being fitted with tubes that allows the bile from the animals' stomachs to be extracted and legally sold.

"Putting the welfare issues of the practice to one side, there is absolutely no evidence coming out of China that Asiatic black bear (Ursus thibetanus) populations are stabilising or increasing," Mr Jones told BBC News.

"Another example is turtle farming, which is arguably a multi-billion dollar industry. Populations of freshwater turtles in China and beyond continue to decline.

"Even the supply of very, very large numbers of turtles from the farms does not seem to be having any positive impact on the conservation of wild populations."

Probably the most controversial topic involves farming tigers. Campaigners suggest that for every one of the estimated 3,500 wild tiger alive in the world today, there may be three farmed tigers in China.

China banned the trade in tiger bones and products in 1993, but wildlife monitoring groups say that has not stopped the practice.

A recent report by Traffic estimated that 1,000 of the big cats were illegally killed in the past decade to meet the demand for tiger parts.

In an effort to protect the world's remaining wild population, a tiger summit begins on Sunday in St Petersburg, Russia, with the aim of drawing up a road map to ensure the species is not wiped off the face of the Earth.

Campaigners are not hopeful that Chinese representatives will engage with other delegates on the topic of tiger farms.

Farming fears

Farming rare species, it is argued, could help protect dwindling populations because it would meet the demand for parts of threatened species without the need to kill wild individuals.

"On the face of it, it does seem like a logical argument," said Mr Jones.

"But for many people, there is a perception that products from wild animals is better than that from farmed or ranched animals, or animals that are kept in captivity."

As a result, increasingly affluent people are willing to pay a premium for products from wild-caught specimens.

He explained that there was no simple answer to ending the illegal hunting of threatened wild animals, especially when the species commanded a high value.

"It is complex, but we are talking about the establishment of good legal provisions to protect species in their home range countries, and the adequate enforcement of those laws," Mr Jones observed.

"You also have to consider education programmes to inform the public of the illegality of poaching these animals, but also the value of the live animals to the ecosystem in which they live.

"If you remove a species from a particular ecosystem, then the system changes and usually diminishes."

From the BBC:

Attack of the rats

A more positive animal news story than the previous two. From the BBC:

Tiger summit aims to double numbers

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

Governments of the 13 countries where tigers still live aim to agree moves that could double numbers of the endangered big cats within 12 years.

The International Tiger Conservation Forum in St Petersburg will discuss proposals on protecting habitat, tackling poaching, and finance.

About 3,000 tigers live in the wild - a 40% decline in a decade.

There are warnings that without major advances, some populations will disappear within the next 20 years.

Five prime ministers are due to attend the summit, including China's Wen Jiabao and Vladimir Putin of Russia.

"Here's a species that's literally on the brink of extinction," said Jim Leape, director general of conservation group WWF.

"This is the first time that world leaders have come together to focus on saving a single species, and this is a unique opportunity to mobilise the political will that's required in saving the tiger."

Double trouble

The draft declaration that leaders will consider acknowledges that "Asia's most iconic animal faces imminent extinction in the wild".

Measures aimed at doubling numbers include making core tiger areas "inviolate", cracking down on poaching and smuggling, making people aware of the importance of tigers, and setting up cross-boundary protected areas where necessary.

A recent report by Traffic, the global wildlife trade monitoring organisation, said that body parts from more than 1,000 tigers had been seized in the last decade.

But there is acknowledgement that some of the smaller nations will need help, in the form of money and expertise.

Earlier this year, scientists calculated the price of effective global tiger conservation at $80m (£50m) per year, but said only $50m was currently on the table.

However, campaigners say financial concerns should not be an excuse for inaction.

The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) points out that by comparison, it is estimated that "China spent $31bn on the Olympic Games in 2008, while India spent a total of $2.6bn on the 2010 Commonwealth Games".

"This is the big question," said EIA's campaigner Alasdair Cameron.

"The draft deal has a lot of positive stuff in it, but a lot of the stuff has been around for years - what we need is the political will to make it happen."

He identified two elements missing in the draft deal: measures to reduce the demand for tiger skins and bones and body parts for traditional medicine, and any discussion of tiger farms.

Both are sensitive topics in China, where it is estimated there are more tigers in captivity than exist globally in the wild.

The World Bank has given substantial backing to moves aimed at saving the tiger, and its president Robert Zoellick also referred to the need to reduce demand, especially in China and Vietnam.

"There's no question everyone recognises this as a core issue - the challenge is how we get at it," he said.

Film star Jackie Chan recently voiced some public service announcements in China asking people not to use tiger parts, which Mr Zoellick said was playing a part in "chaning public attitudes".

Small is ugly

From a scientific perspective, one of the most worrying aspects of the tiger's plight is that many populations are very small - fewer than 100 animals.

This means that incidents such as disease can prove particularly severe.

Of the nine sub-species recognised to have been in existence 100 years ago, at least three have since disappeared.

The Bali tiger was last seen in the 1930s, while the Javan and Caspian sub-species were wiped out in the 1970s. All are officially listed as extinct.

The South China tiger may also have disappeared from the wild, with no sightings for nearly 40 years.

Jean-Christoph Vie, deputy head of the species programme with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), suggested the tiger could be seen as a test-case for whether countries are really serious about saving biological diversity.

"Some people are saying 'well, doubling the tiger population is good, but we have no room' - I've heard that said [in preliminary meetings]," he told the BBC.

"It needs to be done everywhere - especially we need to see a doubling where you have significant populations.

""If you leave tigers alone and don't kill them and don't poach them, then naturally they will double in 10 years."

Watch out for this in Cambridgeshire. From the BBC:

First pictures of rare wetland spider in Cambridgeshire

A spider that was feared extinct in the UK has been photographed for the first time after a new colony of the species was found.

The Rosser's sac spider, which had not been seen for 10 years, has been discovered at Chippenham Fen in Cambridgeshire.

It makes its home in wetland areas and had been found only once before, at Lakenheath Fen in Suffolk.

Fears were growing that the spider had died out due to loss of habitat.

The light brown spider was first discovered in the 1950s, but the draining of the fens and changing farming practices since the World War II had put it under threat.

Spider enthusiast Ian Dawson spotted a Rosser's sac spider in September at the Cambridgeshire site, and a further search in October revealed 10 spiders.

He said: "I was extremely surprised to find the first one and then when we went back a month later it was great to find more of them.

"If we've managed to find 10 of them, I think there must be quite a sizeable population of Rosser's at that particular site."

The first photographs of live Rosser's sac spiders were taken by Peter Harvey, who took part in the second survey.

'Still creeping around'

Matt Shardlow, chief executive of insect conservation charity Buglife said: "This spider is globally endangered.

"It's fantastic that it's still creeping around in the British countryside and we're ecstatic that people can now see what it looks like for the first time in history.

"If we want future generations to be able to see the live animal, we will need to take great care of the tiny remaining fragments of wild wetlands in this country and reinstate large areas of lost fen."

Mike Taylor, of Natural England, which manages the Chippenham Fen reserve, said: "Rosser's sac spiders spend their days hidden in tubular silken retreats, often in a folded leaf, a bit like a sleeping bag.

"It's a member of the clubionid family of spiders who like to hunt their prey rather than catch them in a web.

"We were delighted that they have been spotted recently."

Latest story on the 1000mph car project. From the BBC:

1,000mph car project 'on track'

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

The British project to develop a 1,000mph car is on target to meet its goals, says director Richard Noble.

Construction will start on the rear of the Bloodhound vehicle in January, with an attempt on the World Land Speed record expected in 2012.

"We've got companies all over the world wanting to sponsor the car," Mr Noble told BBC News.

"We've actually got more people who want to financially back this thing than we've got space for them."

Mr Noble has made an appeal for people to help prepare the vehicle's race track.

This is a dried-up lake bed in Northern Cape Province, South Africa, known as Hakskeen Pan.

Before the Bloodhound car can hurtle across this flat expanse of land, it must be cleared of all loose stones.

A rock thrown up at 1,000mph has the potential to do serious damage to the car's thin alloy bodywork and even cripple its four solid aluminium wheels.

With the assistance of the Northern Cape government, work has just started to prepare the track. A team of 300 local people has begun sweeping an area 20km x 1.5km, picking up any stones in their path.

Mr Noble has placed a light-hearted advert in Monday's London Times newspaper calling on UK volunteers to go out to the Northern Cape to join in the back-breaking effort.

It promises: "No wages, constant heat, tough work in beautiful but remote Hakskeen Pan… Scorpions may be present. Inspiring next generation of engineers the reward."

It echoes a famous advertisement reputed to have been placed in papers 100 years ago by the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton as he sought volunteers for one of his expeditions. Shackleton's ad was said to have warned applicants that their safe return could not be guaranteed.

Bloodhound track preparation should not be quite so dramatic or dangerous as a Shackleton expedition.

"The volunteers have got to support themselves, but the cost of living out there is not great. It's an opportunity to be a part of an extraordinary experience," he told BBC News.

The Bloodhound project was conceived as way of promoting science and engineering to young people. The development of the car has been accompanied by a huge educational programme in British schools.

To claim the World Land Speed record, Bloodhound will have to better the mark of 763mph (1,228km/h) set by the Thrust SuperSonic Car in 1997.

It will be powered by a combination of a hybrid rocket and a jet engine from a Eurofighter-Typhoon.

Three who worked on Thrust are also engaged in the Bloodhound project, including driver Wing Cmdr Andy Green, the chief aerodynamicist Ron Ayres, and director Richard Noble, who as a driver held the record himself in the 1980s.

Although a private, not-for-profit venture, Bloodhound has been given not-inconsiderable in-kind support by the UK government, which has loaned the project two Typhoon engines.

Major aerospace companies are involved. Hampson Industries will build the rear of the car, while Lockheed Martin is working on its 90cm-wide, 97kg wheels. F1 engine manufacturer Cosworth has recently joined the project. One of its power units will be used to drive the liquid oxidiser into Bloodhound's rocket.

The project still has some way to go to meet its funding objectives but Mr Noble said he was now confident it would all come together: "It's quite clear it's going to happen now."

The official government digital champion speaks out, Martha Lane Fox was appointed by the previous government and was reappointed by this coalition. From the BBC:

Martha Lane Fox urging online government 'revolution'

The government's "digital champion" has called for a revolution in the way it deals with the public online.

Martha Lane Fox, who reviewed the Directgov website, said it must become easier to access government services and make payments over the internet.

Shifting half of its contacts with the public online could save the government more than £2bn a year, she said.

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said there was no excuse for not making quality online services.

'Dramatic measures'

BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones said the words "fragmentation, duplication and bureaucracy" leapt out of Ms Lane Fox's review of the Directgov website.

She contrasts the process of applying for a student loan, which ends with the printing out and signing a 30-page document, with the simplicity of booking a flight.

Her report recommends that Directgov becomes the place for all government transactions - from paying out benefits to collecting car tax - but with a brief to take a service culture to the public sector.

But Ms Lane Fox says that as this revolution proceeds, some services will need to be turned off.

She said: "Government should take advantage of the more open, agile and cheaper digital technologies to deliver simpler and more effective digital services to users, particularly to disadvantaged groups who are some of the heaviest users of government services.

"But this is just the beginning. The government must look at more dramatic measures - such as syndicating and opening up information and services to other organisations - to be able to offer genuine improvements to consumers, taxpayers, business and citizens in the UK."

'Digital divide'

The internet entrepreneur was appointed to advise Labour on digital inclusion in 2009 and is now acting in a similar role for the coalition government.

As well as encouraging maximum internet availability and usage, the lastminute.com founder sits on the government's efficiency board chaired by Mr Maude.

Her focus is to help reduce government costs by making services more accessible and usable.

Ms Lane Fox says "bridging the digital divide" is a key economic priority.

Commenting on the report, Mr Maude said: "There is no excuse for not making quality online services the default solution for people needing government services.

"This does not mean we will abandon groups that are less likely to access the internet. We recognise that we cannot leave anyone behind.

"Every single government service must be available to everyone - no matter if they are online or not."

An important step in protecting those on the front line. From the BBC:

Visor could reduce head injuries caused by explosions

A simple face shield added to soldiers' helmets could save lives, says a study.

A detailed simulation of how explosive blasts pass through the skull shows existing helmets used by the US delay but do not dissipate blast waves.

Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers say that blasts' pressure waves enter the skull primarily through the face.

A clear plastic shield could spread that pressure throughout the helmet, avoiding brain injury, they say.

Previous studies have suggested that the Advanced Combat Helmet, currently employed by the majority of US ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, actually focuses blast wave energy, causing more harm than good.

To find out, Raul Radovitzky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies and his colleagues simulated a human skull in detail on a computer.

They then applied a simulated blast wave to it, observing how the pressure wave - an advancing, expanding sphere representing 10 times normal atmospheric pressure - propagated through a simulated head with and without a helmet on.

The team found that the current helmet does not make matters worse.

"The existing Advanced Combat Helmet... does not worsen the negative effects of a blast wave - does not enhance the energy of the blast - as has been previously suggested," Dr Radovitzky told BBC News.

"But we also find that it doesn't really help much; it doesn't mitigate the blast wave significantly."

Face value

The reason for that appears to be that the helmet does not cover the part of the skull most vulnerable to a pressure wave.

"Our simulations without the helmet and with it both show that the primary pathway for transmission of the energy of the blast into the brain tisssue is through the soft tissues of the face," Dr Radovitzky explained.

The team added a face shield to their simulation - similar to the plain plastic visors used in motorcycle helmets - and found they radically changed the degree to which explosive energy was transmitted to the brain.

However, Dr Radovitzky, whose team is in consultations with the US Army on soldier technology, said that there are many factors to take into consideration when suggesting changes to standard-issue kit for soldiers.

"There are of course many other aspects of putting a face shield on a soldier's helmet that need to be taken into acount, like how you would affect the situational awareness of the soldier, how they can operate without being hindered by the device."

I can't believe i have never looked in the Bird Sanctuary.

I will have a quick look through and see what appeals for the reading matter  

Panama Canal fossils reveal ancient collision of worlds

Enjoyed reading this ^^  thanks El Loro 

Welcome Evelyn I set this thread going when the last series of BB started as I'm not really into reality TV and set this thread up as a sort of refuge. It's developed into what I think of as the equivalent of a broadsheet magazine supplement with articles I have found which may have some interest. The articles typically come from the BBC website where we are permitted to copy material from, and sometimes I add little opening comments and/or Youtube clips which have some connection. It is impossible as far as I can see to get a copy of a BBC clip working on this site.

The articles I post are fairly wide ranging - scientific, wild-life, environmental, health, arts, but less on popular culture, sport and celebrity as other threads fully cater for those interests.

Your not really into Reality or BB?

wow, here was me thinking everyone was on these here boards.

So how did you come about gaga? Im guessing not from the Big Brother forum?

I think i will come back every so often, *with my cuppa breaks* and have a good read of them all. Its great as some will be more interesting than others depending on the individual, something for everyone . Great. xx

I came over to Gaga from when it was the Channel 4 forum which covered lots of things besides reality TV.

From the BBC:

Digital vaccine needed to fight botnets

By Mark Ward Technology correspondent, BBC News

The equivalent of a government-backed vaccination scheme is needed to clean up the huge numbers of PCs hijacked by cyber criminals, suggests research.

In Europe, about 5-10% of PCs on broadband net links were hijacked and part of a botnet in 2009, it suggests.

ISPs are key to wresting control of these machines away from criminals, says the Dutch report.

Initiatives in Germany and Australia show how official help can boost efforts to clean up infected machines.

Home invasion

The survey of botnet numbers was carried out in an attempt to understand the scale of the problem and reveal the forces influencing how many PCs on a particular network are hijacked.

Botnets are typically networks of home computers that malicious hackers have managed to hijack by tricking their owners into opening a virus-laden e-mail or visiting a booby-trapped website.

They are then commonly used to pump out spam and attack websites.

The team drew up its results by analysing a pool of 170 million unique IP addresses culled from a spam trap that amassed more than 109 billion junk mail messages between 2005 and 2009.

With 80-90% of all spam being routed through hijacked PCs these IP addresses were a good guide to where infected machines were located, said Professor Michel Van Eeten from the Delft University of Technology who lead the OECD-backed research.

Analysis of this huge corpus of data showed that about 50 ISPs were harbouring around half of all infected machines worldwide. Confirmation of this finding came from other non-spam sources - the 169 million IP addresses that were part of the Conficker botnet and 130 million IP addresses collected by net security watchdog SANS.

The numbers of machines on these networks varied widely, said Professor Van Eeten, but infected rates on individual networks were quite stable over time relative to each other.

What was also clear from the research, he said, was that ISPs were not going to be able to clean up the large numbers of infected machines without some kind of central aid. In Holland, ISPs have dramatically increased their efforts but are still only cleaning up about 10% of infected machines.

At the moment, he said, two bottlenecks were preventing ISPs doing more to clean up machines.

The first, he said, was the lack of comprehensive data about the numbers and location of infected machines.

An initiative by the Australian government to pool data on infections and provide it to the nation's ISPs showed how this could be overcome, said Prof Van Eeten.

"The second bottleneck is that it costs money to notify customers and get them to clean up their machine," he said.

"An incoming call is very costly especially as those kinds of calls need experts," he said. "ISPs can completely lose their profit margin on a customer like that."

South Korean and Germany had tackled this problem, he said, by setting up national call centres to which ISPs can refer infected customers where they can get advice about disinfecting their machine. The call centres are publicly funded - though Germany will only pay for its centres temporarily.

"Governments can be very helpful," he said.

Prof Van Eeten said the numbers and prevalence of botnets suggests we should perhaps see them as the modern-day equivalent of the epidemics that struck in Victorian times and prompted the creation of government-backed vaccination schemes.

A similar system delivering a digital vaccine might again be part of the solution, he said.

Ancient Big Bird. From the BBC:

Pterosaurs' wings 'key to their size'

By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News

Ancient flying reptiles called pterosaurs were adapted to fly in a slow, controlled manner in gentle tropical breezes, researchers say.

Their conclusions are drawn from the first detailed aerodynamic study of the wings, which suggests they did not evolve to fly fast and powerfully in stormy winds.

The research, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, may also explain how the creatures were able to become the largest flying animals ever known.

By landing slowly, the pterosaurs could avoid injury and grow to much larger sizes than modern day birds. However, the trade-off for their large size was a vulnerability to strong winds.

Also known as pterodactyls, these creatures lived at the time of the dinosaurs. Some species are thought to have had wingspans of up to 10m.

Although there is a wealth of information about the bones of these creatures - no one really knows how they flew.

But a fresh look at the problem by a 62 year-old former engineer in Bristol working on a PhD thesis suggests that they glided gently on tropical breezes, soared by hillsides and coastlines and floated on thermal air currents.

Colin Palmer had a simple idea that hadn't occurred to more eminent palaeontologists: To build models of pterosaur wings and put them into a wind tunnel.

"I come at this as an engineer rather than a palaeontologist," Mr Palmer told BBC News.

"Palaeontologists have done amazing work in understanding the anatomy of these animals and that gave me a huge amount of data to build on. But as an engineer and experimentalist my first reaction was I want to do some (modelling) and find out what's going on."

The results from the PhD study have been so impressive that they been published in one of the Royal Society's prestigious scientific journals.

The front edge of the Pterosaur wing is bone. Mr Palmer found in his wind tunnel experiments that that this caused drag making it aerodynamically less efficient than the wings of birds - which use feathers to create a smoother leading edge.

Happy landings

Mr Palmer reasoned that pterosaurs flew in a slow, controlled way, in particular when they came in to land. That would be important to pterosaurs because they had very thin bones which, according to Mr Palmer, could break on landing.

"If you are a pterosaur coming into land the last thing you want to do is bump into a rock so you want to land slowly and under control".

It's thought that these creatures controlled their flight by adjusting the curvature of their wings,. This enabled them to generate lift and so fly under control at lower speeds.

The wind tunnel results show that pterosaur wings were able to provide them with the soft landing that their large, fragile bodies needed.

"This is the first time this has been done," says Mr Palmer. "Previously data has been taken from the aerodynamic literature and adapted it as best they could to make predictions of pterosaur flight performance. Now for the first time we've got data from (models of pterosaur wings).

Some palaeontologists had suggested that pterosaurs might have flown like modern day albatrosses which fly very fast and efficiently in strong winds.

Albatrosses make use of a technique called dynamic soaring where they make use of the strong winds and wind gradients in the southern ocean. In order to do that you have to fly very fast and very efficiently - neither of which pterosaurs were capable, according to the wind tunnel data.

Instead it shows they were much better adapted to flying in at gentle breezes of the tropics and using the lift you get from rising air currents as they come from the sea on to the land and also the thermal lift you get in tropical areas.

The nearest present day analogy in birds is frigate birds in the tropics make use of thermal lift over the sea.

Mr Palmer commented: "Since the bones of pterosaurs were thin-walled and thus highly susceptible to impact damage, the low-speed landing capability would have made an important contribution to avoiding injury and so helped to enable pterosaurs to attain much larger sizes than extant birds.

"The trade-off would have been an extreme vulnerability to strong winds and turbulence, both in flight and on the ground, like that experienced by modern-day paragliders."

Mr Palmer says he's surprised and pleased that his first time effort at academic research has been a hit.

"I work with a really good bunch of people who have given me the confidence to come to this late in life. It's very exciting for me.

"It's just a different approach. And I think this cross disciplinary work is very important because it brings in new insights based on new perspectives."

I was in the Big Brother one mainly, but did venture into.." how clean is your house..Lost...Deal or no Deal".. lol...The cricket and the Christmas forum were aware of my presence as well 
OOh and the news forum on channel four.

I tended to frequent the Films section. One of the other users, who did not come to Gagajoyjoy luckily for everyone here, had some very unusual views on life and was not able to accept any view which didn't agree with that user. I won't go into details other than to say that if that person had come here, Gagajoyjoy would be a much less pleasant place.

Following on from this morning's Ancient Big Bird story, now from the BBC a story on big cats:

Summit agrees tiger recovery plan

Governments of 13 countries where tigers still live have endorsed a plan to save the big cats from extinction.

Delegates at a summit in St Petersburg, Russia, agreed to double tiger numbers by 2022.

The countries will focus on protecting tiger habitats, addressing poaching, illegal trade and providing the financial resources for the plan.

In the last 100 years, tiger numbers have dropped from about 100,000 to less than 3,500 tigers in the wild today.

There has been a 40% decline in numbers in a decade, and some populations are expected to disappear within the next 20 years.

The United Nations Environment Program (Unep) says that the St Petersburg Declaration will strengthen international collaboration to protect the majestic Asian wild cat.

Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, executive-secretary of Unep's Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) Secretariat, commented: "Safeguarding international migration corridors and trans-border habitats will be crucial for global efforts to save the tiger."

The declaration sets in motion a strategic plan for tiger recovery; the countries are putting together a roadmap for post-summit action.

They are also discussing the institutional structure which will be set up to implement the aims and objectives of the declaration and its recovery programme.

The tiger summit was hosted by the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and the President of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, from 21-24 November.

Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio donated $1m to the effort.

Mr DiCaprio arrived in St Petersburg on Tuesday after two problems with his flights.

One plane was forced into an emergency landing after losing an engine, the other had to make an unscheduled stop after encountering strong headwinds.

Mr Putin described the actor as a "real man" - or "muzhik" - for his persistence in getting to the summit.

And a new forensic test from the BBC:

Test tells age from blood drops

Scientists have developed a technique to estimate the age of a suspect from blood left at a crime scene.

Experts say the profiling method could be put to immediate use by forensic scientists where age information can provide investigative leads.

The technique exploits a characteristic of immune cells carried in the blood known as T cells.

The work by a team in the Netherlands has been published in the journal Current Biology.

T cells play a key role in recognising foreign "invaders" such as bacteria, viruses, parasites, or tumour cells.

As part of the process these cells use to recognise these invaders, small circular DNA molecules are produced.

The number of these circular DNA molecules - known as signal joint TCR excision circles (sjTRECs) - declines at a constant rate with age.

Writing in Current Biology, the researchers said they had shown that this biological phenomenon could be used for estimating the age of a human individual "accurately and reliably".

Unknown persons

The approach enables scientists to estimate a person's age, give or take nine years, the researchers report.

This would allow individuals to be placed into generational categories spanning about 20 years.

Predicting human "phenotypes" - a person's outward traits such as hair colour or eye colour - from DNA information is a newly emerging field in forensics.

But only a few phenotypic traits can currently be identified from DNA information with enough accuracy to have practical applications.

Lead author Manfred Kayser of the Erasmus MC University Medical Center Rotterdam said his test currently had the highest accuracy of any designed to estimate a "phenotypic" human trait from DNA information.

"Conventional DNA profiling applied in forensics can only identify persons already known to the investigating bodies," Dr Kayser said.

"Hence, every forensic lab is confronted with cases where the DNA profile obtained from the evidence material does not match that of any known suspect tested, nor anybody in the criminal DNA database.

"In such cases, it is expected that appearance information estimated from evidence material will help in finding unknown persons."

A note to newcomers . You will see from my articles postings that I mention that I have taken them typically from the BBC. I have already said that we are pemitted to copy material from the BBC so there is no breach of copyright, but I generally mention the BBC in the post to show that the article is from the BBC rather than my own work. I think that is only right to do that.

I posted in NEWS too towards the end, originally I stayed in science

I do miss the Channel four forums.

I did post a few of my favourite films once in the film section, but didnt come across too many unsavouries thankfully.

You are bound to get the odd few anywhere you go, but i find gaga to be friendlier than most.

There was a few characters in the News Forum as well Muff 

Aye
A lot of them are on Random Banter now

A Facebook warning article from the BBC:

Facebook news feeds beset with malware

One fifth of Facebook users are exposed to malware contained in their news feeds, claim security researchers.

Security firm BitDefender said it had detected infections contained in the news feeds of around 20% of Facebook users.

By clicking on infected links in a news feed, users risk having viruses installed on their computer.

Facebook said it already had steps in place to identify and remove malware-containing links.

BitDefender arrived at its figures by analysing data from 14,000 Facebook users that had installed a security app, called safego, it makes for the social network site.

In the month since safego launched, it has analysed 17 million Facebook posts, said BitDefender.

The majority of infections were associated with apps written by independent developers, which promised enticements and rewards to trick users into installing the malware, BitDefender said.

Trusted community

These apps would then either install malware used for spying on users or to send messages containing adverts to the users' contacts.

Facebook has a thriving community of independent developers who have built apps for the social network.

The vast majority enable users to tweak their Facebook pages, adding widgets, games or extra functions, such as delivering daily horoscope predictions.

Facebook said it had processes and checks in place to guard against the risk of malware.

"Once we detect a phony message, we delete all instances of that message across the site," the site said in a statement.

Crooks have targeted social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter because of their vast number of users, said Rik Ferguson, a security researcher for anti-virus maker Trend Micro.

"Because social networks are based on a community of people you trust, they're an attractive target for malware writers," said Ferguson. "You're more likely to click on a link from someone you trust."

On a similar theme to yesterday's big cat story, this on polar bears, from the BBC:

Alaska polar bears given 'critical habitat'

The US has designated a "critical habitat" for polar bears living on Alaska's disappearing sea ice.

The area - twice the size of the United Kingdom - has been set aside to help stave off the danger of extinction, the US Fish and Wildlife Service said.

The territory includes locations where oil and gas companies want to drill.

Environmentalists hope the designation will make it more difficult for companies to get permits to operate in the region.

"This critical habitat designation enables us to work with federal partners to ensure their actions within its boundaries do not harm polar bear populations," said Tom Strickland, assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks.

Any proposed economic activity in the area, which covers 187,000 sq miles (almost 500,000 sq km) must now be weighed against its impact on the polar bear population, Mr Strickland said in a statement.

Most of the designated habitat is sea ice and includes some of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, where the oil company Shell wants to drill.

Shell was due to start drilling in the Arctic earlier this year, until the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico brought the plans to a temporary halt. It is now aiming to start drilling in 2011.

Environmentalists welcomed the move.

"Now we need the Obama administration to actually make it mean something so we can write the bear's recovery plan - not its obituary," said Kassie Siegel from the Center for Biological Diversity.

Ms Siegel urged the US government to impose a moratorium on oil and gas drilling in bear habitat areas.

Environmentalists also want the polar bear to be listed as an endangered species. Currently the US interior department describes them as "threatened" or likely to become endangered because the sea ice on which they live and hunt is melting.

Good to Know. Cool 

Another bee story from the Bee Bee Cee:

Bumbles make beeline for gardens, study suggests

By Mark Kinver Science and environment reporter, BBC News

Gardens are able to sustain a greater number of bumblebee nests than farmed land, a study involving genetic analysis and modelling has suggested.

DNA samples were taken from two species by UK researchers in order to build up a picture of nest density and how land use affects the creatures.

Previous studies have shown that bumblebee numbers are declining in western Europe, Asia and North America.

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

The team said that the importance of gardens tied in with the findings of earlier studies, which suggested the habitats provided a stronghold for the creatures "in an otherwise impoverished agricultural environment".

They added: "Our data suggests that the positive influence of gardens on bumblebee populations can spill over at least 1km into surrounding farmland."

Lead author Dave Goulson, head of the University of Stirling's School of Biological and Environmental Science, explained the reason for the study: "If you are a conservation biologist, you want to know how many animals you have got left and whether they are increasing or decreasing."

"Yet bumblebees are a bit odd because they are social insects, so you could go out into a meadow and count the number of bees you saw.

"But that would not really give you an idea on the population size because it could be that the bees you saw were worker bees, which where sterile, and would never have any offspring of their own.

"So what you need to do is to count nests, because within each nest is basically one single, female breeding bee - the queen. From a population biologist's perspective, the population size is the number of nests."

Professor Goulson explained that the nests were very hard to find: "You can walk through a meadow and not see any but you know they must be there.

"As a result, we have ended up with this rather elaborate way of counting the nest by catching the workers and DNA fingerprinting them, allowing you to work out which ones are sisters (all the workers from one nest are deemed sisters, as they are all offspring from the queen).

"Counting the sisterhoods gives you an idea of how many nests you have within the bee-flying range of where you are standing."

Tongues and toes

The team gathered DNA information on two of the UK's six most widespread species: the common carder bumblebee (Bombus pascuorum) and the red-tailed bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius).

"One of the things that distinguish bumblebees are the length of their tongues and this determines what plants and crops they visit," Professor Goulson told BBC News.

"What we wanted to do was include two contrasting species because it was important from a conservation point of view that we try and preserve examples of each."

Professor Goulson said that the common carder bumblebee was one of the longer tongued species, while the red-tailed bumblebee is relatively short-tongued.

In order to gather to collect a "DNA fingerprint" from each of the bees, the team effectively snipped off a toe.

"Basically, you take the last tarsal segment from a leg - the middle one ideally," Professor Goulson said.

"Essentially you take this tiny bit, barely visible to the naked eye, and with modern technology it is remarkably easy to amplify the DNA."

He added that the data gathered from more than 2,700 specimens allowed them to attempt to answer the question of what factors affected bumblebee nest survival, which - until now - was unknown.

"If you go out in the spring, you will see a lot of big, fat bumblebee queens flying around and each one of those will try to start a nest," Professor Goulson observed.

"It is clear that the vast majority of them will not succeed. Our estimate of how many nests there are at the end of the season are much, much lower than how many queens start off.

"What we were trying to do was quantify how the number of nests changed at various points in the landscape from May to the end of July, and seeing if we could explain why nests did better in some places compared with others - we looked at what the landscape contained and what could make bumblebee nests more or less likely to survive."

The team found that even quite a small amount of gardens seemed to be having a big, positive impact on the density of bumblebee nests.

"Most of the sites were farmlands, but even just a few percent of gardens in the surrounding landscape seemed to have a positive effect up to a kilometre away," said Professor Goulson.

"We've always suspected that gardens were good for bumblebees, but in some ways it is quite disturbing because while it is good news for gardeners, the flip side is that farmland is pretty rubbish for bumblebees these days.

"It has become rather odd that some bumblebee species now seem to be much more abundant in suburban areas than in 'green' countryside."

Lack of flowers

One of the overarching goals of food policy in post-war Britain was to grow as much food as possible on British soil, at an affordable price for consumers.

Yet decades of intensive farming took their toll on the countryside and the habitat needed to support a diverse range of flora and fauna.

Professor Goulson said the study's findings offer a "glimmer of an answer", but it was not practical to suggest that people should put gardens in the arable land across the world.

"But there the one area of farmland that was very good (for bumblebee nest density) was an area that had a clover ley on it," he added.

Clover leys were used in rotation systems to improve soil nutrition levels, but the system fell out of favour in the mid-20th Century as cheaper synthetic substitutes became available.

Professor Goulson, who is also a director of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, explained: "Clover is a favourite food for bees, so one way forward - from my perspective - would be if farmers did start using crop rotation systems on a landscape scale."

"In terms of long-term sustainability, it is a very attractive option environmentally if it can be made to work economically for farmers.

"Bumblebees and other bees are the main pollinators of lots of wild flowers and quite a lot of our crops - the fruit and veg you might buy from a supermarket would not be there is it were not for bumblebees.

"There is pretty good evidence that bees are declining, so we need to understand why and where they are declining, so we need to find out more about them so then we can stop them declining even more, and even boost their numbers."

This has to be one of the most mis-timed news stories I've seen. From today's BBC:

Met Office says 2010 'among hottest on record'

By Roger Harrabin Environment analyst

This year is heading to be the hottest or second hottest on record, according to the Met Office.

It says the past 12 months are the warmest recorded by Nasa, and are second in the UK data set, HadCRUT3.

The Met Office says it is very confident that man-made global warming is forcing up temperatures.

Until now, the hottest year on record has been 1998, when temperatures were pushed up by a strong El Nino - a warming event in the Pacific.

This year saw a weaker El Nino, and that fizzled out to be replaced by a La Nina cooling event.

So scientists might have expected this year's temperatures to be substantially lower than 1998 - but they are not. Within the bounds of statistical error, the two years are likely to be the same.

"It's a sign that we've got man-made global warming," said Dr Vicky Pope, head of climate science advice at the Met Office.

Increase expected

The last decade was the hottest on record, and Dr Pope warns it will turn out to have been even hotter by about 0.03C when corrections are made to data taken from buoys at sea.

The buoys take temperature measurements a metre below the surface, where it is slightly cooler than on the surface itself. Measurements were previously taken mainly by ships.

Climate sceptics say that until now, warming has plateaued over the last decade. The Met Office agrees that the rate of warming has slowed - but it maintains that is due to natural variability, not because man-made warming has stopped.

They think factors in the slower warming may have been - a natural downturn in solar radiation; a small reduction in water vapour in the stratosphere; a possible increase in aerosol emissions from Asia; and the fact that strong warming in the Arctic is poorly represented in the way data is collected.

Dr Pope says the slowdown in temperature rise is consistent with projections from climate models. She also says she expects warming to increase in the next few years.

"The long-term warming trend is 0.16C," she says. "In the last 10 years the rate decreased to between 0.05 and 0.13.

"There are a number of things that are affecting short-term temperatures. A lot of the heat could be distributed to the deep oceans and we don't know what's going on there."

Many years ago my father found an ammonite fossil looking like a smaller version (6 inches across) of the one shown in the second photo here. He found it at a quarry at a local hill. I've still got it. From the BBC:

Ammonites were eaten by squid, say experts

By Zoe Kleinman
BBC Reporter, Dorset

A new research paper published by the Geological Society suggests why many ammonites on the Jurassic Coast have "bite marks" in the same place.

Zoologist Chris Andrew and geologist Paddy Howe in Lyme Regis say that one in four of the fossils bears the mark, which is visible to the naked eye.

Their research supports similar findings from experts in Belgium.

The pair say the ammonites were eaten by a fellow cephalopod such as a soft-bodied squid.

These creatures had beaks which they could have used to break the ammonite shells, said Paddy Howe, a geologist at Lyme Regis Museum and one of the four authors of the report.

"It's got to be something that can grab the ammonite and manipulate it into the right position - certainly modern cephalopods are capable of this sort of behaviour," he said.

"The modern Humboldt squid can be five or six feet (1.5 - 1.8m) in length, it can take chunks out of a wetsuit or a diver, so yes, it would be perfectly capable of biting through the relatively thin shell of an ammonite."

Sea life

The cephalopod family of sea creatures includes octopus, squid, cuttlefish and nautiluses.

Shell-dwelling ammonites, believed to be ancestors of modern cephalopods, became extinct towards the end of the Cretaceous period.

"Whatever killed the dinosaurs, it was probably the same factors," said Mr Howe, who also runs the Fossil Workshop in Lyme Regis along with Mr Andrew.

As for why the bite marks are so prevalent on the Jurassic Coast - it is simply a matter of numbers, said Paddy Howe.

Fossil food

Chris Andrew and Paddy Howe studied Jurassic Coast fossils

"In any area where you have an abundant food source there are going to be predators there taking advantage of it."

Richard Edmonds, earth science manager at the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site, said he agreed with Mr Howe and Mr Andrew's conclusions.

Another possible interpretation, that gas was responsible for the mark, was less likely, he said.

"The alternative is that there was a gas bubble," he said.

"The strong sinuous bits that held the muscles to the shell could have been left in that canopy - but if that was the case you would expect to see crushed shell in the hole, and I've never seen that."

The next challenge for fossil hunters is to actually find an ancient sea creature mid-meal, said Mr Edmonds.

"What would be fantastic with the bite marks would be to find a fossilised lobster or fish in the process of biting them," he said.

"As long as people are allowed to continue to collect fossils, one day somebody will find that hopefully."

I knew of Jupiter's red spot, but not this brown stripe. From the BBC:

Jupiter's brown stripe is returning, say astronomers

One of the "stripes" on Jupiter that faded away earlier this year is making a comeback, astronomers have said.

The South Equatorial Belt had blended into surrounding white clouds but an "outbreak" spotted by an amateur astronomer heralds the stripe's return.

The stripe's disappearing act is due to clouds shifting altitudes, with white ammonia clouds obscuring clouds below.

This performance will give astronomers their first chance to study the weather and chemistry behind the phenomenon.

As part of the show, the Great Red Spot has darkened, but astronomers say it will lighten again as the South Equatorial Belt comes back.

The stripe has come and gone several times in recent decades but the mechanism by which it returns remains mysterious.

The first signs of the return were spotted by Christopher Go of the Philippines and was confirmed by the Infrared Telescope Facility and Gemini and Keck telescopes in Hawaii.

"At infrared wavelengths, images in reflected sunlight show that the spot is a tremendously energetic 'outburst,' a vigorous storm that reaches extreme high altitudes," said Imke de Pater, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley.

"The storms are surrounded by darker areas, bluish-grey in the visible, indicative of 'clearings' in the cloud deck."

And a connected story, also from the BBC:

Saturn's moon Rhea has thin atmosphere

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

Rhea, the second biggest moon of Saturn, has an atmosphere of oxygen and carbon dioxide, scientists say.

It is incredibly thin, however. The density of O2, for example, is probably about five trillion times less dense than the oxygen that blankets Earth.

The presence of an exosphere, as it is more properly called, was confirmed by instruments on the Cassini probe which orbits the ringed planet and its moons.

The discovery is reported in the online version of Science magazine.

Oxygen exospheres have been seen at Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede, but this is the first time such a detection has been made in the Saturnian system.

Ben Teolis and colleagues say the tenuous envelope around Rhea is maintained by high-energy particles that constantly bombard the moon's icy surface.

"As the magnetic field rotates around Saturn, particles carried in the field slam into the hemisphere of Rhea that's facing their flow," Dr Teolis from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, US, told BBC News.

"They hit that hemisphere and break water molecules on the surface. The atoms are then rearranging themselves to make O2 molecules, which are sputtered from the surface by additional impacting particles."

It is an ongoing process. As fast as the oxygen is created, energetic processes around Rhea are whipping the O2 molecules out into space.

The mechanism driving the production of carbon dioxide is less obvious, say the researchers.

Some of it, like the O2, could be being produced as a result of high-energy particle impacts. Such CO2 could certainly result if organic compounds are present in the surface ice.

It is possible also that the carbon dioxide was made in deep sub-surface processes and the CO2 is slowly escaping the moon's body.

Previous efforts to try to identify an exosphere at Rhea using Earth telescopes and even the remote-sensing instruments on Cassini had failed.

Only by getting up close to Rhea could Cassini make a positive detection.

"What we've been able to do now with Cassini is actually fly through this atmosphere and measure it in situ - to 'sniff' and 'taste' it, and find out what it's made of," said co-author Professor Andrew Coates from the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, University College London, UK.

The probe's ion and neutral mass spectrometer (INMS) measured peak densities of oxygen of about 50 billion molecules per cubic metre . It detected peak densities of carbon dioxide of about 20 billion molecules per cubic metre (about 600 million molecules per cubic foot).

"All this suggests these kinds of exospheres may be very common," said Dr Teolis. "There are different moons at Saturn and at Uranus, for example, which should be massive enough to hold an atmosphere. And, presumably, this kind of thing is duplicated billions of times throughout the galaxy. This could be something happening all over the place."

Other good candidates at Saturn might include the moons Dione and Tethys. No close flybys of Tethys are planned in the remaining years of the Cassini mission, but the probe will get near enough to Dione in December 2011 to try to make a direct detection of an exosphere.

Cassini is a joint venture between the US space agency (Nasa), the European Space Agency (Esa) and the Italian Space Agency (ASI).

Its mission has been extended up until 2017 when it will be commanded to destroy itself by plunging into Saturn's atmosphere.

What a heading for an article . From the BBC:

Dinosaur demise allowed mammals to 'go nuts'

By Neil Bowdler Science reporter, BBC News

Land mammals went from small "vermin" to giant beasts in just 25 million years, according to a new study.

Writing in the journal Science, researchers say mammals rapidly filled the "large animal" void left by the dinosaurs' demise 65 million years ago.

They then went from creatures weighing between 3g and 15kg to a hugely diverse group including 17-tonne beasts.

Further growth was capped by temperature and land availability, the scientists believe.

Felisa Smith of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, US, and colleagues looked at the fossil record of mammals to plot their course through the ages.

They concluded that the rise of the mammals was by no means inevitable, and owes most to the chance obliteration of the dinosaurs, be it by comet, asteroid or another event.

"Mammals actually evolved almost around the same time as dinosaurs, about 210 million years ago," she told BBC News.

"And for the first 140 million years, we were basically vermin scurrying around the feet of the dinosaurs and not really doing much of anything.

"A comet came and hit the Earth and killed off all dinosaurs... and mammals as a class probably had characteristics that helped them survive that impact."

She believes most were burrowers that lived through the ensuing environmental mayhem largely underground, feeding on whatever food they could find, be it plant or meat.

"What came out of that impact at the end of the Cretaceous period was a bunch of really small mammals that were not particularly diverse, probably not much more than a kilo," said Professor Smith.

"But we had a giant Earth with nothing big on it anymore; and so I think that ecological opportunity allowed mammals to just go nuts."

"Going nuts" meant land mammals diverging in shape and size. Some mammals attained weights of 15-17 tonnes, including Indricotherium, a mammal related to horses, and Deinotherium, a member of the elephant family.

They reached these weights within about 25 million years of the demise of the dinosaurs, but weights then plateaued through to recent times, say the researchers.

This pattern was repeated across the continents, they say, suggesting there existed an intrinsic upper ceiling for mammal body mass, probably determined by temperatures and the availability of land.

Larger animals have a reduced surface-to-volume ratio, which makes it harder to dissipate heat - something that warm-blooded creatures must do to regulate their body temperature.

"If you get too big and you're not able to dissipate heat, you can actually suffer; and probably that heat loading was an issue for the very largest mammals," said Professor Smith.

As mammals populated the Earth, reductions in the amount of available land and as a consequence, food, may also have played a key role.

Even so, "mega-sized" land mammals lived on through to just thousands of years ago in the form of the woolly mammoth, which Professor Smith - if not everyone - believes was hunted to extinction by a much smaller mammal, the human.

Professor Adrian Lister of London's Natural History Museum (who believes climate, not humans, killed off the woolly mammoth) said the new research did suggest the existence of an upper ceiling to mammal body mass.

"To demonstrate this parallel feature on all the continents, and that it reached a natural plateau, very strongly suggests some inherent reason," he told the BBC.

"One simple way of reading Darwin is almost anything is possible and animals can be adapted in any way. There's a counter school of thought which says evolution is moulded by physical restrictions too, and that's the most interesting point here."

Dr Kate Jones of the Zoological Society of London, said: "It's a really interesting study, showing some great patterns which we would want to take further using an evolutionary framework."

The new study did not look at aquatic mammals, although the same team is currently preparing a further paper looking at their development through the ages.

Before the Big Bang? - from the BBC. Seriously heavy stuff:

Cosmos may show echoes of events before Big Bang

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Evidence of events that happened before the Big Bang can be seen in the glow of microwave radiation that fills the Universe, scientists have asserted.

Renowned cosmologist Roger Penrose said that analysis of this cosmic microwave background showed echoes of previous Big Bang-like events.

The events appear as "rings" around galaxy clusters in which the variation in the background is unusually low.

The unpublished research has been posted on the Arxiv website.

The ideas within it support a theory developed by Professor Penrose - knighted in 1994 for his services to science - that upends the widely-held "inflationary theory".

That theory holds that the Universe was shaped by an unthinkably large and fast expansion from a single point.

Much of high-energy physics research aims to elucidate how the laws of nature evolved during the fleeting first instants of the Universe's being.

"I was never in favour of it, even from the start," said Professor Penrose.

"But if you're not accepting inflation, you've got to have something else which does what inflation does," he explained to BBC News.

"In the scheme that I'm proposing, you have an exponential expansion but it's not in our aeon - I use the term to describe [the period] from our Big Bang until the remote future.

"I claim that this aeon is one of a succession of such things, where the remote future of the previous aeons somehow becomes the Big Bang of our aeon."

This "conformal cyclic cosmology" (CCC) that Professor Penrose advocates allows that the laws of nature may evolve with time, but precludes the need to institute a theoretical beginning to the Universe.

Supermassive find

Professor Penrose, of Oxford University, and his collegue Vahe Gurzadyan of Yerevan State University in Armenia, have now found what they believe is evidence of events that predate the Big Bang, and that support CCC.

They looked at data from vast surveys of the cosmic microwave background - the constant, nearly uniform low-temperature glow that fills the Universe we see.

They surveyed nearly 11,000 locations, looking for directions in the sky where, at some point in the past, vast galaxies circling one another may have collided.

The supermassive black holes at their centres would have merged, turning some of their mass into tremendous bursts of energy.

The CCC theory holds that the same object may have undergone the same processes more than once in history, and each would have sent a "shockwave" of energy propagating outward.

The search turned up 12 candidates that showed concentric circles consistent with the idea - some with as many as five rings, representing five massive events coming from the same object through the course of history.

The suggestion is that the rings - representing unexpected order in a vast sky of disorder - represent pre-Big Bang events, toward the end of the last "aeon".

"Inflation [theory] is supposed to have ironed all of these irregularities out," said Professor Penrose.

"How do you suddenly get something that is making these whacking big explosions just before inflation turns off? To my way of thinking that's pretty hard to make sense of."

Shaun Cole of the University of Durham's computational cosmology group, called the research "impressive".

"It's a revolutionary theory and here there appears to be some data that supports it," he told BBC News.

"In the standard Big Bang model, there's nothing cyclic; it has a beginning and it has no end.

"The philosophical question that's sensible to ask is 'what came before the Big Bang?'; and what they're striving for here is to do away with that 'there's nothing before' answer by making it cyclical."

Professor Cole said he was surprised that the statistical variation in the microwave background data was the most obvious signature of what could be such a revolutionary idea, however.

"It's not clear from their theory that they have a complete model of the fluctuations, but is that the only thing that should be going on?

"There are other things that could be going on in the last part of the previous aeon; why don't they show even greater imprints?"

Professors Penrose and Cole both say that the idea should be shored up by further analyses of this type, in particular with data that will soon be available from the Planck telescope, designed to study the microwave background with unprecedented precision.

Will our hospitals have their own weather forecasters? From the BBC:

Weather check 'could predict' A&E injury rates

Taking the temperature outside A&E could give staff an accurate way to predict number of injuries and who will suffer them.

Experts know that extreme weather can affect A&E patient numbers.

Warwick University researchers found that even 5C falls or rises could make a difference to injury rates.

Rates for children were up to 70% higher in summer compared with winter, the Emergency Medicine Journal reported.

Many trusts plan ahead for winter, when the arrival of frost, snow and ice, as well as flu and pneumonia, is traditionally linked to busier shifts.

The study of 60,000 patients found that each 5C drop in minimum temperature during the day meant a three per cent rise in serious accidents to adults.

Heat of summer

The arrival of snow and ice led to an eight per cent rise, as the number of slips, trips and car accidents rose.

However, the study found other increases linked to the heat of the summer, often viewed as a slightly calmer period in emergency departments.

Even among adults, every five degree centigrade rise in maximum temperature during the day, and additional two hours of sunshine, meant a 2% rise in the rate of serious injury.

This effect was particularly noticeable in children, who are more likely to get injured while playing outside during the warmer months.

For them, a 5C rise meant a 10% increase in injury cases, and two hours of extra sunshine boosted cases by six per cent.

While these connections were made by comparing records of hospital admissions with historical weather data, the researchers are convinced that the principle could be used to help emergency teams plan ahead for days when their workload is likely to be higher.

They wrote: "This model could clearly be used to provide predictions of daily admissions, with clear implications for the scheduling of staff and other resources at UK trauma-receiving hospitals.

"The challenge for the future is to improve forecast accuracy further in order to provide sufficient time for the detailed planning and allocation of resources that would be necessary to implement these models."

Professor John Heyworth, president of the College of Emergency Medicine, agreed that the detailed study could help clinical teams know what to expect on any particular day, although he questioned whether the current accuracy of medium-term weather forecasts was good enough to justify staffing changes.

He said: "We've always known that there is increased activity in emergency departments during winter, but in recent years, we've noticed that this doesn't really diminish during the summer months - we remain busy all year round.

"If you have your emergency department set up to deal with this expected load, then you can deal with extra cases due to weather conditions.

"However, this is a very helpful study."