From the BBC:

Rocky exoplanet milestone in hunt for Earth-like worlds

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

Astronomers have discovered the smallest planet outside our solar system, and the first that is undoubtedly rocky like Earth.

Measurements of unprecedented precision have shown that the planet, Kepler 10b, has a diameter 1.4 times that of Earth, and a mass 4.6 times higher.

However, because it orbits its host star so closely, the planet could not harbour life.

The discovery has been hailed as "among the most profound in human history".

The result was announced at the 217th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, US, by Nasa's Kepler team.

The Kepler space telescope, designed to look for the signs of far-flung planets, first spotted the planet 560 light years away, alongside hundreds of other candidate planets.

Kepler relies on the "transiting" technique, which looks for planets that pass between their host star and Earth.

A tiny fraction of the star's light is blocked periodically, giving a hint that the star has a planet orbiting it.

The radius of the planet correlates to exactly how much light is blocked when it passes.

Follow-up measurements by a telescope at the Keck observatory in Hawaii confirmed the find of Kepler 10b by measuring how the planet pulls to and fro on its parent star as it orbits.

Ever-expanding fields

This cosmic dance causes tiny changes in the colour of the starlight that is measured by telescopes.

However, what completed the suite of measurements for the Kepler team was the use of asteroseismology - a study of distant stars that is akin to the study of earthquakes on the Earth.

The oscillations that occur within a star - as within the Earth - affect the frequencies of the light that the star emits in a telltale sign of the star's size.

With the size of the host star, the details of the planet's and star's mutual dance, and the planet's radius, the density of the planet can be calculated.

"All of our very best capabilities have converged on this one result and they all converge to form a picture of this planet," said Natalie Batalha, a San Jose State University professor of astrophysics who helps lead the Kepler science mission for Nasa.

Hot rocks

Professor Batalha told BBC News that the result was unique in an ever-expanding field of exoplanet discoveries, with smaller and smaller exoplanets discovered as experimental methods improve.

"We're always pushing down toward smaller and less massive, so it's natural that we're arriving there," she said.

"But perhaps what's not so natural is that we've pinned down the properties of this planet with such fantastic accuracy that we're able to say without a doubt that this is a rocky world, something that you could actually stand on."

One could, that is, if it were not so close to its host star that its daytime temperature exceeds 1,300C - so Kepler 10b is not a sensible candidate to host life. However, as Professor Batalha explained, it is a significant step in Kepler's mission.

"We want to know if we're alone in the galaxy, simply put - and this is one link in the chain toward getting to that objective.

"First we need to know if planets that could potentially harbour life are common, and we don't know if that's true - that's what Kepler is aiming to do."

A pioneer of the hunt for exoplanets, Geoffrey Marcy, from the University of California Berkeley, said that Kepler 10b represented "a planetary missing link, a bridge between the gas giant planets we've been finding and the Earth itself, a transition... between what we've been finding and what we're hoping to find".

"This report... will be marked as among the most profound scientific discoveries in human history," he said.

This is the official NASA video clip on the discovery of Kepler 10b. It is not included in the BBC news item, but is worth watching as it includes a simulated flyover the planet's surface.

Antimatter is closer to home than you realise. From the BBC:

Antimatter caught streaming from thunderstorms on Earth

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

A space telescope has accidentally spotted thunderstorms on Earth producing beams of antimatter.

Such storms have long been known to give rise to fleeting sparks of light called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes.

But results from the Fermi telescope show they also give out streams of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons.

The surprise result was presented by researchers at the American Astronomical Society meeting in the US.

It deepens a mystery about terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, or TGFs - sparks of light that are estimated to occur 500 times a day in thunderstorms on Earth. They are a complex interplay of light and matter whose origin is poorly understood.

Thunderstorms are known to create tremendously high electric fields - evidenced by lightning strikes.

Electrons in storm regions are accelerated by the fields, reaching speeds near that of light and emitting high-energy light rays - gamma rays - as they are deflected by atoms and molecules they encounter.

These flashes are intense - for a thousandth of a second, they can produce as many charged particles from one flash as are passing through the entire Earth's atmosphere from all other processes.

Scaling down

The Fermi space telescope is designed to capture gamma rays from all corners of the cosmos, and sports specific detectors for short bursts of gamma rays that both distant objects and TGFs can produce.

"One of the great things about the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor is that it detects flashes of gamma rays all across the cosmic scale," explained Julie McEnery, Fermi project scientist at Nasa.

"We see gamma-ray bursts, one of the most distant phenomena we know about in the Universe, we see bursts from soft gamma-ray repeaters in our galaxy, flashes of gamma rays from solar flares, our solar neighbourhood - and now we're also seeing gamma rays from thunderstorms right here on Earth," she told BBC News.

Since Fermi launched in mid-2008, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) has spotted 130 TGFs, picking up on the gamma rays in low Earth orbit as storms came within its scope.

But within that gamma-ray data lies an even more interesting result described at the meeting by Dr McEnery and her collaborators Michael Briggs of the University of Alabama Huntsville and Joseph Dwyer of the Florida Institute of Technology.

"We expected to see TGFs; they had been seen by the GBM's predecessor," Dr McEnery explained.

"But what absolutely intrigues us is the discovery that TGFs produce not just gamma rays but also produce positrons, the antimatter equivalent to electrons."

When gamma rays pass near the nuclei of atoms, they can turn their energy into two particles: an electron-positron pair.

Because electrons and positrons are charged, they align along the Earth's magnetic field lines and can travel vast distances, gathered into tightly focused beams of matter and antimatter heading in opposite directions.

The dance of light and matter continues when positrons encounter electrons again; they recombine and produce a flash of light of a precise and characteristic colour.

It is this colour of light, picked up by the Fermi's GBM, that is a giveaway that antimatter has been produced.

The magnetic field can transport the particles vast distances before this characteristic flash, and one of the Fermi detections was from a storm that was happening completely beyond the horizon.

The results will be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Steven Cummer, an atmospheric electricity researcher from Duke University in North Carolina, called the find "truly amazing".

"I think this is one of the most exciting discoveries in the geosciences in quite a long time - the idea that any planet has thunderstorms that can create antimatter and then launch it into space in narrow beams that can be detected by orbiting spacecraft to me sounds like something straight out of science fiction," he said.

"It has some very important implications for our understanding of lightning itself. We don't really understand a lot of the detail about how lightning works. It's a little bit premature to say what the implications of this are going to be going forward, but I'm very confident this is an important piece of the puzzle."

From the BBC:

Giant pandas 'need old-growth forests'

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

China's endangered giant pandas thrive in old forest that has never been logged, research shows.

The finding comes ahead of a decision on whether to end or renew a 12-year logging ban in the area.

Writing in the journal Biology Letters, the researchers - from China and the US - tell the government that continuing protection would be cost-effective.

They based their finding on data collected during a five-year forest survey in Sichuan Province.

There are thought to be fewer than 2,500 adult giant pandas in the wild, scattered across mountain ranges in small, fragmented populations.

They are classifed as a "conservation-dependent species", meaning that without protection, they would be on their way to extinction.

Roots of the issue

In Sichuan - the animals' main homeland - teams of observers gathered all kinds of data on forests during the State Forestry Administration's Third National Survey, which ran from 1999 to 2003.

This database has now been mined to see which aspects are most closely associated with the presence of pandas.

Having bamboo in the area is a key factor that researchers had previously known and understood - hardly surprising, as the plants constitute 99% of the panda's diet.

However, the researchers - led by Zejun Zhang from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing - discovered that the age of the trees also strongly predicted the existence of pandas.

They suggest this link has not been found before because previous studies looked at small areas only.

Why old-growth forest should be so important is not clear, and data of this type cannot yield the answer.

"One possibility is that the bamboo that grows underneath old growth [trees] is more nutritious," they write.

"Another intriguing possibility is that only old-growth trees grow large enough to form cavities suitable for maternity dens.

"This raises the question: are birth dens a factor-limiting panda population size in reserves with a history of logging?"

Iain Valentine, Director of Animals, Conservation and Education for the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) who has worked on giant pandas with Chinese colleagues for abour five years, commented that understanding the animals' ecological needs was crucial for their long-term survival.

"It could be as simple as that old stands of bamboo produce large new shoots of bamboo at their bases, which are rich in sugars," he told BBC News.

"These large shoots are softer too, and are therefore easier to eat than hard stalks.

"But conversely it could be far more complicated than this and involve complex seasonal nutritional needs of the panda which themselves vary as a result of the bamboo forest structure and age."

RZSS has just concluded an agreement with the Chinese Wildlife Conservation Association to host two giant pandas in its Edinburgh Zoo - the first pandas in the UK for 17 years.

The Chinese authorities have implemented a number of policies aimed at conserving the species - banning trade in skins, setting up reserves, and, in 1998, banning logging throughout the panda's range.

But the logging ban is up for review this year.

The scientists on this study stop short of calling for a continuation; instead, they observe: "It may be more cost-effective to protect the existing old growth than to open it up to logging while protecting an equivalent area of secondary growth forest".

From the BBC:

Swine flu offers 'extraordinary super immunity'

By Michelle Roberts Health reporter, BBC News

People who recover from swine flu may be left with an extraordinary natural ability to fight off flu viruses, findings suggests.

In beating a bout of H1N1 the body makes antibodies that can kill many other flu strains, a study in the Journal of Experimental Medicine shows.

Doctors hope to harness this power to make a universal flu vaccine that would protect against any type of influenza.

Ultimately this could replace the "best guess" flu vaccines currently used.

Such a vaccine is the "holy grail" for flu researchers. Many scientists are already testing different prototypes to put an end to the yearly race to predict coming flu strains and quickly mass produce a new vaccine each flu season.

Dr Patrick Wilson who led the latest research said the H1N1 swine flu virus that reached pandemic levels infecting an estimated 60 million people last year, had provided a unique opportunity for researchers.

"It demonstrates how to make a single vaccine that could potentially provide immunity to all influenza.

"The surprise was that such a very different influenza strain, as opposed to the most common strains, could lead us to something so widely applicable."

Extraordinary immunity

In the nine patients they studied who had caught swine flu during the pandemic, they found the infection had triggered the production of a wide range of antibodies that are only very rarely seen after seasonal flu infections or flu vaccination.

Five antibodies isolated by the team could fight all the seasonal H1N1 flu strains from the last decade, the devastating "Spanish flu" strain from 1918 which killed up to 50m people, plus a potentially deadly bird flu H5N1 strain.

The researchers believe the "extraordinarily" powerful antibodies were created as the body learned how to fight the new infection with swine flu using its old memory of how to fight off other flu viruses.

Next they plan to examine the immune response of people who were vaccinated against last year's swine flu but did not get sick to see if they too have the same super immunity to flu.

Dr Sarah Gilbert is a expert in viruses at Oxford University and has been testing her own prototype universal flu vaccine.

She said: "Many scientists are working to develop a vaccine that would protect against the many strains of flu virus.

"This work gives us more confidence that it will be possible to generate a universal flu vaccine."

But she said it would take many years for a product to go through the necessary tests and trials.

"It will take at least five years before anything like this could be widely available."

The number of deaths this winter from flu verified by the Health Protection Agency currently is 50, with 45 of these due to swine flu.

From the BBC:

'Unethical' flipper tags are damaging to penguins

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

The standard way of tagging penguins for science - putting bands around their flippers - affects their survival and reproduction, a study has found.

French researchers, reporting their work in the journal Nature, found king penguins had 40% fewer chicks if they were banded, and lived shorter lives.

They say continuing to use the tags would in most situations be unethical.

Flipper bands have been used for decades to identify individual penguins so they can be tracked on land and sea.

They allow for easy visual identification of individual birds from a distance.

Some studies down the years had suggested they harmed the birds - for example, by creating extra drag when they swam, or by reflecting sunlight in a way that could attract predators.

But others had suggested there was no problem.

"There was a debate about whether bands have an effect or not - and you could find studies and some would say 'yes' and some would say 'no'," said Claire Saraux from the University of Strasbourg and the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).

"So our idea was to try to make sure - instead of doing one-year studies, to try to find out what's going on over 10 years," she told BBC News.

The French researchers followed a group of 100 king penguins in a colony on Possession Island off the Antarctic coast.

Half were tagged with flipper bands, while the other half had tiny transponders implanted under their skin.

After a decade of observation, 18 of the transponder group were alive - but only 10 of the banded birds.

They arrived at the island for breeding significantly later in the Antarctic spring, needed to make longer foraging trips for food, and overall reared far fewer chicks.

"This study is far and away the longest and most systematic that's been done - it eclipses everything else," said Rory Wilson from the UK's Swansea University.

"It's conclusive - it's going to be very hard for anyone to argue against it."

Professor Wilson, who was not involved in the current research project, tagged his first penguin more than 30 years ago.

Changing climate for research

In recent years, studying penguins around the Antarctic shores has been given a new impetus by concerns over impacts of climate change on the marine ecosytem.

In some parts of the region, krill - the tiny animals near the base of the food chain - are in decline, with potential effects on everything from birds to fish to marine mammals.

But in the light of this study, use of the principal penguin research tool may become unethical.

"I would say no [it is not ethical]," said Ms Saraux.

"The exception would be using them only on land, and that probably won't be a problem so long as you take them off the birds before they go to sea - and that could still be useful, because I can tell you that when you go into a colony of 50,000 penguins to find yours, it's not easy.

"But there are a lot of groups that are still banding [in sea-based research], and I'm pretty sure it's going to be controversial - some may want to continue with other species of penguin, but I'm pretty sure the effect is going to be the same for other species too."

The logic behind this conclusion is that if the bands increase drag in the water - which has been seen in captive Adelie penguins - that is something that should affect all species.

The Strasbourg group is one that has adopted implantable transponders as an alternative tool.

But unlike flipper bands, they cannot be read from a distance - the birds must come into close proximity with the antenna that "reads" the bird's identity.

In the meantime, scientists may have to go back to research performed using flipper bands and ask whether the results still stand, or whether they were distorted by the very tools used in the research.

"If you compared population trends in chinstrap penguins in different areas, say, and both groups were banded, and one does better under certain ice conditions, that wouldn't necessarily be invalidated," said Rory Wilson.

"But if you've tried to measure the mortality rate and say 'it's down to over-fishing' or something, and you haven't considered bands as contibuting to mortality, then you'd need to re-assess your data."

On the BBC radio news this morning:

World's first flu-resistant GM chickens 'created'

By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News

UK scientists have created the world's first genetically modified chickens that do not spread bird flu.

Writing in Science journal, the team says their work demonstrates it is possible to create a variety of GM farm animals resistant to viral diseases.

The research team inserted an artificial gene into chickens; this introduces a tiny part of the bird flu virus into chicken cells.

These birds become infected but render the virus harmless to other poultry.

The team believes that the genetic modification they have introduced is harmless to the chickens and to people who might eat the birds.

Professor Helen Sang of Edinburgh University told BBC News that genetic modification is potentially a much better way of protecting against diseases than vaccination because the GM technique works even if the virus mutates.

"It will protect a whole flock from avian influenza infection. This is really exciting because bird flu is a real challenge to poultry production and if it were introduced to poultry breeding it would protect our large scale production flocks from avian inlfuenza," said Professor Sang.

Broad protection

The researchers say that, in principle, the technique could be used to protect any farm animal from any disease. The eventual aim is to develop animals that are completely resistant to viral diseases.

According to co-author Dr Laurence Tiley, from the University of Cambridge, UK: "Agricultural selective breeding has made huge improvements on productivity of many livestock - but it's reaching the point where it's now limited.

"And the GM technologies allow you to introduce novel genes that don't exist in nature but are based on our detailed knowledge of the molecular biology of viruses. We can specifically target these viruses to prevent them from replicating."

The researchers say they think the technology has the potential to boost food production and reduce costs.

"There's going to be a real problem in feeding the world as the population increases," says Professor Sang.

"As the demand for animal products increases and it's going to get increasingly expensive and we are looking at different ways to tackle that problem."

GM techniques could also have benefits for human health, according to Professor Sang. If fewer animals are carrying viruses there is a lower chance of them mutating into a form that would be deadly to humans and so create a pandemic.

Cautious welcome

But the news received a cautious welcome from the poultry industry. Peter Bradnock of The British Poultry Council said more research was needed to assess the long term impact on farm animals before food producers would even consider using the technology.

Even then, companies would have to assess the likely reaction from consumers: "We have to have a big debate as to whether society wants to have GM animals even for this very good potential benefit," he told BBC News.

And Tim Elsdale, who is an organic farmer in East Sussex, said it was better to adopt good farming practices to avoid animals getting diseases in the first place than to create GM farm animals.

"We don't suffer much from animal diseases on this farm," he said.

"Organic methods of husbandry doesn't encourage disease if the animals are well spaced enough. They live in a natural environment and they eat normal food then a lot of diseases that are prevalent on conventional farming would not be apparent to us".

If the food and farming industry did want to use GM technology in this way in the UK, they would need to seek prior approval from the Food Standards Agency (FSA). The FSA would conduct a full detailed safety evaluation before any of this GM produce could enter the market.

In addition to that, produce would need to be labelled so that consumers would be able to make a choice about the food they eat. If there were an application, the authorisation process could be carried out in a matter of months.

The FSA's Chief Scientist, Dr Andrew Wadge said it would be interesting to see if the debate over GM animals would go the same way as the debate over GM crops:

"I do think it's interesting that so far with GM technology it's not really a benefit for consumers and wouldn't it be interesting if we had produce that did offer a benefit?

"For example, food safety for us is about a bacteria found in chickens called Campylobacter which makes 500,000 people ill each year.

"If we could develop a GM chicken that is resistant to Campylobacter it would be very interesting indeed to see how consumers saw that technology and whether it was a technology they would be willing to embrace".

From the BBC:

Roman rise and fall 'recorded in trees'

By Mark Kinver Science and environment reporter, BBC News

An extensive study of tree growth rings says there could be a link between the rise and fall of past civilisations and sudden shifts in Europe's climate.

A team of researchers based their findings on data from 9,000 wooden artifacts from the past 2,500 years.

They found that periods of warm, wet summers coincided with prosperity, while political turmoil occurred during times of climate instability.

The findings have been published online by the journal Science.

"Looking back on 2,500 years, there are examples where climate change impacted human history," co-author Ulf Buntgen, a paleoclimatologist at the Swiss Federal Research Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape, told the Science website.

Ring record

The team capitalised on a system used to date material unearthed during excavations.

"Archaeologists have developed oak ring width chronologies from Central Europe that cover nearly the entire Holocene and have used them for the purpose of dating artefacts, historical buildings, antique artwork and furniture," they wrote.

"Chronologies of living and relict oaks may reflect distinct patterns of summer precipitation and drought."

The team looked at how weather over the past couple of centuries affected living trees' growth rings.

During good growing seasons, when water and nutrients are in plentiful supply, trees form broad rings, with their boundaries relatively far apart.

But in unfavourable conditions, such as drought, the rings grow in much tighter formation.

The researchers then used this data to reconstruct annual weather patterns from the growth rings preserved in the artefacts.

Once they had developed a chronology stretching back over the past 2,500 years, they identified a link with prosperity levels in past societies, such as the Roman Empire.

"Wet and warm summers occurred during periods of Roman and medieval prosperity. Increased climate variability from 250-600 AD coincided with the demise of the western Roman empire and the turmoil of the migration period," the team reported.

"Distinct drying in the 3rd Century paralleled a period of serious crisis in the western Roman empire marked by barbarian invasion, political turmoil and economic dislocation in several provinces of Gaul."

Dr Buntgen explained: "We were aware of these super-big data sets, and we brought them together and analyzed them in a new way to get the climate signal.

"If you have enough wood, the dating is secure. You just need a lot of material and a lot of rings."

From the BBC:

Milky Way's dark-matter satellite in stargazers' sights

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

Scientists have proposed a means to track down the dark dwarf galaxies that should be orbiting the Milky Way, saying they have found evidence of one.

Spiral galaxies like ours have these satellites, but some are made of "dark matter" that is impossible to see.

The idea is to look for tracks they leave in hydrogen gas at the galaxy's edge, like the wake behind a boat.

Observations based on the idea suggest the existence of a far-flung satellite galaxy weighing up to 10 billion Suns.

Presenting her work at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, Sukanya Chakrabarti, from the University of California, Berkeley, said her method could solve a long-standing problem in cosmology.

Around our Milky Way are a number of satellite galaxies - these and other galaxies form the Local Group that is our conurbation in the cosmos.

However, theory predicts that there should be far more satellites orbiting the Milky Way.

What may account for these missing galaxies is that they are composed overwhelmingly of dark matter - a mysterious counterpart to matter that is believed to make up 85% of matter in the Universe.

But dark matter does not interact with light and cannot be seen down a telescope like normal matter - it is known only because it exerts gravitational forces on matter we can see.

But Dr Chakrabarti explained one aspect of the dark matter theory that is lacking.

"One of the current outstanding problems in cosmology is there's this missing satellites problem," she told the BBC.

The current dark matter theory, she said, "is very successful at recovering the large-scale distribution of galaxies, but when you look on sub-galactic scales, it far overpredicts the number of dwarf galaxies relative to what we actually observe".

"So we wanted to develop a method that allows you to find very dim dwarf galaxies without having to see them directly."

'Galaxy X'

Dr Chakrabarti and her colleagues hope to exploit dark matter's indirect effects to solve the conundrum, by using radio telescopes to carefully analyse disturbances in the vast clouds of hydrogen gas at the farthest reaches of the Milky Way.

A dark matter-dominated galaxy passing through the gas, she said, should leave ripples in the dust that are an indication of not only where the galaxy is, but how big it is.

The method has already been successfully tested out on galaxies that have visible satellites, including the famous Whirlpool Galaxy, as Dr Chakrabarti explains in a paper that will be published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Using the method, Dr Chakrabarti found a set of ripples that indicate a comparatively huge satellite galaxy, 260,000 light-years from the centre of the galaxy.

The satellite - dubbed Galaxy X in deference to the 19th-Century discovery of Neptune that named it Planet X - should weigh between three and 10 billion times as much as the Sun, about a hundredth as much as the Milky Way itself.

Now all that remains is to confirm it. That will have to wait until Dr Chakrabarti's collaborators are granted time to use the Spitzer Space Telescope.

"This is the first time in my work that I've really gone out on a limb and made a very specific prediction - I didn't give myself any elbow room," Dr Chakrabarti told the meeting.

"If we're right, then it's a huge success and you can find very dim or effectively dark galaxies simply by analysing disturbances in the gas disk."

Dr Chakrabarti said that the method should work for far smaller dwarf galaxies - down to a thousandth the mass of the Milky Way.

Pending the granting of time on Spitzer, the many proposed dark and mysterious galaxies surrounding our Milky Way could be spotted later this year, and a big problem in cosmology could be neatly solved.

Mentioned on the BBC radio news this morning:

Climate secrets of Marianas Trench probed

By Rebecca Morelle Science reporter, BBC News

The climate secrets of the deepest part of the ocean, the Marianas Trench in the western Pacific Ocean, have been probed by scientists.

The international team used a submersible, designed to withstand immense pressures, to study the bottom of the 10.9km-deep underwater canyon.

Their early results reveal that ocean trenches are acting as carbon sinks.

This suggests that they play a larger role in regulating the Earth's chemistry and climate than was thought.

Although two explorers, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh, reached the deepest part of the Marianas Trench - a point called the Challenger Deep - in 1960, no humans have been back since.

And the handful of scientific missions, including this recent visit to this deepest spot, have been carried out using unmanned underwater vehicles.

Lead researcher Professor Ronnie Glud, from the University of Southern Denmark and the Scottish Association for Marine Science (Sams), said that working at more than 1,000 atmospheres of pressure was challenging, but advances in technology had made it possible.

He told BBC News: "This is the first time we have been able to set down sophisticated instruments at these depths to measure how much carbon is buried there."

Under pressure

Professor Glud, working with scientists from the Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology (Jamstec) and from the UK and Germany, used a lander equipped with special sensors packed in a titanium cylinder that was able to resist the remarkable pressures.

The lander was launched from a ship and took three hours to free-fall to the sea bottom, where it carried out pre-programmed experiments before releasing its ballast and returning to the surface.

The tests helped the scientists to assess the abundance of carbon at those murky depths.

Professor Glud said: "Basically, we are interested in understanding how much organic material - that is all the material produced by algae or fish in the water above - settles at the sea bed, and is either eaten by bacteria and degraded or is buried.

"The ratio that is either degraded or buried is the ultimate process determining what are the oxygen and carbon dioxide concentrations of the oceans and the atmosphere, and this gives us an overall picture of how efficiently the sea can capture and sequester carbon in the global carbon cycle."

While this has been studied in other parts of the ocean, such as the abyssal plain - the large flat area of the ocean that lies between 4.6km and 5.5km of depth - the role deep sea trenches play in the carbon cycle has until now remained largely unknown.

Professor Glud said: "Although these trenches cover just 2% of the ocean, we thought they might be disproportionately important, because it was likely that they would accumulate much more carbon because they would act as a trap, with more organic matter drifting to the bottom of them than in other parts of the ocean."

He explained that preliminary data from his experiments suggested that this was the case.

He said: "Our results very strongly suggest that the trenches do act as sediment traps. And they also had high activity, meaning that more carbon is turned over by bacteria in the trenches than is turned over at 6,000m of depth in the abyssal plain.

"What it means is that we have carbon storage going on in these trenches that is higher than we thought before, and this really means that we have a carbon dioxide sink in the deep ocean that wasn't recognised before."

The next stage for the team is to quantify their results and work out exactly how much more carbon is stored in deep sea trenches compared with other parts of the sea, and how much carbon turnover by bacteria is being carried out.

This, the researchers said, should help them to better establish the role of the ocean trenches in regulating climate.

Surprising finds

This is not the first time deep sea trenches have surprised scientists.

Recent studies by University of Aberdeen's Oceanlab team have revealed that marine life is much more abundant in this hostile habitat than was previously thought.

In 2008, they filmed the deepest living fish ever to be caught on camera - a 17-strong shoal found at depths of 7.7km in the Japan Trench, and the revealed other animals such as amphipods were present in large numbers even deeper.

Dr Alan Jamieson, from Oceanlab, said the new study was helping researchers to build up a better idea of what happens in the deepest of the deep.

He said: "The trenches continue to amaze us.

"And to see an experiment such as this carried out at these extreme depths is a great leap forward in deep-sea science.

"These studies will greatly enhance our understanding of how the deep trenches contribute to carbon cycling in the world's oceans."

From the BBC:

European beavers construct ideal habitats for bats
By Ella Davies
Earth News reporter

Reintroduced beavers construct ideal habitats for bats, new research reveals.

By felling trees, beavers thin out the canopy, scientists have found, leaving fewer obstacles in the way of aerial-hunting bats as they pursue insects.

Also, river-damming by beavers boosts the numbers of these insect prey by creating large waterlogged areas.

Scientists say this study provides further evidence of beavers' essential role in maintaining woodlands.

Forest that was both flooded and subjected to beaver 'logging' supported the highest bat activity Mateusz Ciechanowski

The European beaver was reintroduced to forest areas of northern Poland between 1943 and 1986, having previously become extinct in the area a century before.

Beavers are known to extensively transform the environments in which they live by felling trees for food and building dams.

But previous studies have largely been limited to how beaver activity can effect species living on or in the water, including waterfowl, amphibians and crustaceans.

So researchers from the University of Gdansk, Poland aimed to study the effects of beaver activity on species less obviously connected to wetland habitats.

In findings published in the European Journal of Wildlife Research, Mateusz Ciechanowski reports benefits for insectivorous bats sharing habitat with beavers.

In particular, aerial-hawking bats including common pipistrelles (Pipistrellus pipistrellus), Nathusius' pipistrelles (Pipistrellus nathusii), soprano pipistrelles (Pipistrellus pygmaeus) and common noctules (Nyctalus noctula).

"Bats are very skilled fliers, but those species who hawk prey in the air, cannot effectively hunt in a very dense forest," says Mr Ciechanowski.

Aerial-hawking bats hunt by echo-location, bouncing sound off their prey and listening for the echo, which identifies its location.

Mr Ciechanowski explains that in dense forest the echoes of insect prey are "cluttered" by echoes from branches, making hunting less effective.

In areas where beavers have felled trees whilst foraging or to build dams, aerial-hawking bats are thought to capitalise on the canopy gaps to catch more prey.

Likewise, beavers flood stream valleys when making dams which create waterlogged areas favoured by bat prey such as midges (Chironomidae).

"Forest that was both flooded and subjected to beaver 'logging' supported the highest bat activity," says Mr Ciechanowski.

BEAVER BUILDERS Beavers fell large trees using their strong front teeth They actively manage their habitat, building dams to create ponds where they live Their lodge homes have underwater entrances to protect from predators Watch American beavers constructing a dam

The research team found that bat species that hunt near water surfaces did not benefit as much as was expected.

"We were astonished, that beavers... 'could not help' Daubenton's bat, i.e. the species most strongly associated with water bodies," says Mr Ciechanowski.

Daubenton's bats (Myotis daubentoni) forage over flat water that acts as an "acoustic mirror", reflecting that bats' calls to reveal the location of insects on or above the water's surface.

Narrow streams in woodlands are too small and changeable for this method of hunting but researchers theorised that beaver ponds created by dams would provide excellent conditions.

"Unfortunately, young beaver ponds are known to cover fast by duckweed and the duckweed is known to produce complicated echoes, masking echoes reflected from the body of flying insects."

Early beaver ponds often have duckweed on the surface.

"This was the case of one our study valleys - pipistrelles and noctules did not care about duckweed, because they hawk prey in the air, far from any background, but almost no Daubenton's bats were recorded there."

Mr Ciechanowski believes this study complements conservationist's arguments that beavers are an essential or "keystone" species in woodland habitats.

"It simply supports the idea of beaver reintroduction... not only for that magnificent animal itself, but also as a tool to restore habitats biologically depauperated by ourselves."

From the BBC:

New grapes needed to keep wine flowing

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

The future of wine-making depends on developing new varieties of grape, scientists say - and maps of the grape genome can help provide them.

Disease is a constant issue for growers; but new regulations are likely to curb the use of chemical treatments.

US researchers have made genome maps of more than 1,000 vine samples.

Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they say this type of data plots the way to disease-resistant grape varieties.

The grape varieties whose wine we like to drink - merlot, chardonnay, semillon, riesling and the rest - have mainly been developed from one species, Vitis vinifera vinifera.

It was probably "domesticated" about 5,000 years ago, in or close to what is now Turkey.

Since then, it has become the staple for wine-making as far from its homeland as Australia, Chile, the US and South Africa.

Vinifera has been honed into hundreds of varieties, red and white; but the grapes are all still members of the same species, with limited cross-breeding between different varieties.

"The degree to which that was done seems to have been extremely limited," said Sean Myles, lead author on the new study.

"Once we found good cultivars that were working for us, we adopted them and as a result they're sitting ducks for pathogens," he told BBC News.

Dr Myles is affiliated to Stanford University School of Medicine, but was based at Cornell University while this project was running.

Chemical curbs

Just as the grapes travelled from the shores of Europe across the world, diseases have travelled in the other direction.

Powdery mildew, for example, evolved in North America.

Vinifera grapes have no natural resistance; and in Australia alone, dealing with this disease costs an estimated $100m per year, largely through the fungicidal chemicals that are used to protect vines.

Seventy percent of fungicides used in US agriculture are sprayed in vineyards.

But as the EU - which still produces nearly 70% of the world's wine - seeks to improve the environmental footprint of its farm sector, the bloc is trying to reduce the use of such chemicals.

One proposal from the European Commission would heavily restrict spraying on "non-essential" crops from 2013.

Scientists from several institutions have been trying to develop new grape varieties that are immune to infection, either through cross-breeding with resistant species or through manipulating the genes that make plants susceptible to infection and damage.

But conventional cross-breeding is costly and laborious for grapes.

Plants have to be grown for three or four years until they fruit.

Then wine has to be made, tasted and assessed before growers know whether they have something viable; and even if they do, there is no guarantee that people will take to the taste over their preferred varieties.

What the Cornell/Stanford team has done is to produce genomic maps of more than 1,000 samples, which link the presence of genetic "markers" (sequences of DNA) to traits such as acidity, sugar content, or disease resistance.

"If you know the genetic markers associated with these traits, you can plant them out as seedlings, look at its DNA as soon as you get the first leaf tissue, and say for example 'we'll keep these five because we know their genetic profiles are associated with the traits we're interested in'," said Dr Myles.

"That'll save an enormous amount of time and money.

"But you do need to have genome-wide data from lots of individual plants - on the other hand that's getting increasingly cheap, so that compared with the method we used you can now do it 100 times cheaper."

Although commercial factors tended to make wine-making a conservative profession, he said change must come.

"We can't just go on using the same cultivars for the next thousand years."

The good news is that more experimentation should in principle produce a wider variety of wines.

On the BBC radio news this morning:

Salisbury Plain great bustard project EU funding boost

A project to reintroduce the great bustard to the UK has been given a £1.8m boost from the European Union.

The world's heaviest flying bird was hunted to extinction in the UK in 1832. It was reintroduced to Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire in 2004.

A population of around 18 has been established from chicks brought from Russia.

The cash will cover 75% of the scheme's costs, including monitoring the birds with GPS satellite transmitters.

The Great Bustard Consortium was founded in 2004 to reintroduce the birds.

It is made up of the Great Bustard Group, the University of Bath, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Natural England.

Reared to fledging

The group is embarking on a five-year project, funded by an EU Life+ grant.

In 2009, the first great bustard chicks in 177 years hatched in the wild in the UK. Last year, at least four chicks hatched and two native chicks were successfully reared to fledging.

Male great bustards can reach more than 1m tall (40in) with a wingspan of up to 2.4m (7ft 10in).

A University of Bath spokesman said 16 bustards had been fitted with satellite transmitters to track where they feed and roost.

The areas will be monitored for the availability of food, and for predators.

Feeding patches with the right plants and seeds to provide food and attract the type of insects the birds eat will also be cultivated.

'Real wings'

David Waters, founder and director of the Great Bustard Group, said: "Despite our successes over the last six years, we would sometimes struggle to find £10 or £20 to put diesel in the Land Rover; now we have a chance to give this project real wings.

"The funding will provide a properly resourced project, with four new posts, new monitoring equipment and even the possibility of a second release site."

The project's partners will still have to find 25% of the costs.

Bath PhD student John Burnside said: "We're particularly interested in how the birds will behave in their new habitat.

"Great bustards learn a lot of their behaviour from each other and so the newly introduced chicks have to learn quickly how to feed, survive and avoid predators without the help of their mother.

"As the population becomes established, their survival chances should hopefully get better - this project will be looking into ways of improving release methods and the survival of the birds in the long term."

From the BBC:

Amoebas show primitive farming behaviour as they travel

A species of amoeba - among the simplest life forms on Earth - has been seen "farming" the bacteria it eats.

When the bacteria become scarce, the Dictyostelium discoideum slime mould gathers up into a "fruiting body" that disperses spores to a new area.

Research described in Nature shows that a third of these spores contain some of the bacteria to grow at the new site.

Food management has been seen in animals including ants and snails, but never in creatures as simple as these.

The behaviour falls short of the kind of "farming" that more advanced animals do; ants, for example, nurture a single fungus species that no longer exists in the wild.

But the idea that an amoeba that spends much of its life as a single-celled organism could hold short of consuming a food supply before decamping is an astonishing one.

More than just a snack for the journey of dispersal, the idea is that the bacteria that travel with the spores can "seed" a new bacterial colony, and thus a food source in case the new locale should be lacking in bacteria.

D. discoideum is already something of a famous creature, having proven its "social" nature as it gathers together into a mobile, multicellular structure in which a fifth of the individuals die, to the benefit of the ones that make it into the fruiting body.

Researchers from Rice University in Texas, looking to study the amoebas further, happened across another, truly unique behaviour - discovered perhaps because the samples came from the wild, rather than grown in the laboratory.

"It was a bit of serendipty, really," Debra Brock, lead author of the Nature story, told BBC News.

"I had previously worked with them, looking at developmental genes. Not many people work with wild clones but I had started in a new lab and my advisers had a large collection of them, and I came with a bit of a different perspective."

Costly choice

Once Ms Brock spotted the amoebas' fruiting bodies carrying bacteria, she measured how many of the spores were responsible, finding that about a third of them traveled with their bacterial seeds.

The behaviour seems to be genetically built-in; clones of the "farmer" amoebas in turn developed into farmers, while clones of the "non-farmers" did not.

"To think of a single-celled amoeba performing something that you could consider farming, I think, is surprising," Ms Brock said.

"Choices like that are generally costly, so there has to be a pretty large benefit for it to persist in nature."

That is to say, the amoebas, in choosing not to consume all of the bacteria around them, are forced to make smaller fruiting bodies that cannot travel as far when they disperse.

There is thus an evolutionary balance to be struck between the advantage gained by showing up with the beginnings of a crop and the cost of bringing it.

Jacobus Boomsma of the University of Copenhagen said that the find was a surprising one, and gives insight that has been absent in farming creatures known already to science.

For example, all the individuals of a given ant or termite species farm particular species of fungus exclusively, and the "free" versions of the advanced farmed fungi no longer exist.

"Here, farming and non-farming [members of the species] coexist, so they look perfectly normal until you put them under the microscope and know what you're looking at; [the bacteria] don't assume specialisesd roles as crops like fungi that ants and termites rear," Professor Boomsma told BBC News.

"In other farming systems that we see, they always lack this intermediate stage."

Ms Brock said that further study has already found other species of amoeba that "pack a lunch", and that D. discoideum carries more than just a snack.

"Bacteria generally provide huge resources that are really untapped," Ms Brock said.

"These amoebas carry bacteria that aren't just used for food, so that's what I'm looking into now."

A rubbish story from the BBC:

Plastic adorns the nests of birds fit for a fight

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

It might not seem de rigueur but for a black kite furnishing one's nest with white plastic is a major statement.

Spanish scientists have documented how this bird of prey will decorate its nest with large amounts of rubbish.

It is a symbol of success, apparently - the biggest collections of plastic are displayed by the black kites with the most chicks and the best territory.

The research, conducted in Donana National Park, is reported in this week's edition of Science magazine.

The Spanish team behind the study says the strips, mostly from old bags, are a signal to other birds that the incumbent will put up a fierce fight if any rival tries to move in on the local patch.

"People who've worked with black kites and even red kites, their cousins, had noted these birds' nests were often littered with rubbish, but this is the first time the function of this decoration has been studied," said Dr Fabrizio Sergio.

"It is not only white plastic - they surely prefer that - but they can actually use a wide range of materials, including cloth and paper," he told BBC News.

The 500-sq-km Donana National Park, a Unesco World Heritage Site, is famed for its wildlife, which numbers the Iberian lynx and imperial eagle among its inhabitants.

It is also home to hundreds of pairs of black kites (Milvus migrans), which are medium-sized migratory raptors.

These birds are known to fill their nests with man-made rubbish, and a breeding pair will start scavenging for the litter about 20 days before laying eggs.

Dr Sergio and colleagues from the Donana Biological Station wanted to establish if this activity represented a form of communication and, if so, what it was saying.

Over a period of five years, they observed the behaviour of the kites and the nature of their nest decoration.

They even intervened on occasions to change the adornment to see how the birds would react.

The team found that the strongest birds in a middle age bracket were the ones with the most plastic. The very young and the very old had hardly any at all.

The birds with the most white plastic were also the best at defending their territory and monopolised the food bait laid by the researchers.

"These aggressive birds are probably the ones in best body condition and this probably coincides with the age class which we defined as the prime age, which is between seven and 12 years old," explained Dr Sergio.

"This is the age class that shows the best reproductive success and the best survival. They are the most viable individuals.

"The white plastic clearly functions as a threat to other individuals of the same species - to other kites. It's basically a 'keep away, no trespassing' signal. A comparison with humans would be the notices placed on the gates of certain nice houses which say 'beware, guard dog'.

To test its ideas, the team made additions to the nests of kites that had hardly any plastic.

Almost immediately the owners of those nests started stripping out the plastic.

The birds knew that to make an extravagant display would invite challenges, said Dr Sergio, and very young or elderly birds would not risk picking fights they could not win. "Cheating is punished," he added.

Other species in nature will add objects into their nests. Examples include not just man-made items, but stones, green plants, snake skins, and even dung.

The signalling function of such activity may not have been fully appreciated, the Spanish team believes.

The Donana Biological Station is funded by Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).

From the BBC:

Ukraine crocodile sick after eating mobile phone

Staff at an aquarium in Ukraine are concerned for one of their crocodiles after it ate a mobile phone dropped into its enclosure by a visitor.

The 14-year-old crocodile - known as Gena - has been refusing food since the accident in Dnipropetrovsk last month.

Workers at first did not believe the woman's complaints that her phone had been eaten until it began ringing.

The incident has been compared to the crocodile in Peter Pan, which emitted a "tick-tock" after swallowing a clock.

Visitor Rimma Golovko said she had stretched out her arm trying to snap a photograph of Gena opening his mouth, but the phone slipped.

"This should have been a very dramatic shot, but things didn't work out," she said.

Surgery?

Since the incident, the African crocodile has been refusing food and appears listless.

"He moves very little and swims much less than he used to," a staff member told the Associated Press news agency.

Experts tried to tempt Gena with live quail injected with a laxative, but he still would not eat.

Oleksandr Shushlenko, Dnipropetrovsk's chief veterinarian, said that if Gena continues to refuse food, he will be given an X-ray next week and could face surgery.

However, he said an operation would be a last resort as the procedure is dangerous for the animal and the vets.

"We don't have much experience working with such large animals," he added.

Ms Golovko says she wants her Sim card back as it contains photographs and contacts.

 

As this forum does not provide for BBC video clips, I have posted this Youtube clip.

From the BBC:

Two forms of world's 'newest' cat, the Sunda leopard
By Matt Walker
Editor, Earth News


Did Bornean clouded leopards evolve new spots?

The "newest" cat species described to science, the Sunda clouded leopard, actually exists in two distinct forms, scientists have confirmed.

This big cat is so enigmatic that researchers only realised it was a new species - distinct from clouded leopards living elsewhere in Asia - in 2007. The first footage of the cat in the wild to made public was only released last year.

Now a genetic analysis has confirmed that the cat comes in two forms, one living in Sumatra, the other on Borneo.

Clouded leopards are the most elusive of all the big cats, which include lions, tigers, jaguars, snow leopards and normal spotted leopards.

So far we can only speculate about the specific course of events in the evolution of the clouded leopard Joerns Fickel Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research

Living across south-east Asia, into China and India, the leopards have larger cloud-like spots than ordinary leopards.

Until 2006, all clouded leopards were thought to belong to a single species.

However, genetic studies revealed that there are actually two quite distinct clouded leopard species.

As well as the better known clouded leopard living on the Asian mainland (Neofelis nebulosa), scientists determined that a separate clouded leopard species lives on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra.

The two species are thought to have diverged over one million years ago.

This leopard is now known as the Sunda clouded leopard (Neofelis diardi), though it was previously and erroneously called the Bornean clouded leopard.

Since 2008, it has been listed as vulnerable by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

In 2010, a team of scientists working in the Dermakot Forest Reserve in Malaysia released the first footage of the cat in the wild to be made public.

Led by Mr Andreas Wilting of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, Germany, the researchers captured images of a Sunda clouded leopard walking along a road.

Now Mr Wilting and colleagues have published new research which reveals even more about this mysterious cat.

They sampled 15 Sunda clouded leopards living on Borneo and 16 living in Sumatra, conducting molecular and genetic studies to reveal their origin.

The researchers also examined the skulls of 28 further Sunda clouded leopards and the fur coats of 20 specimens held in museums, as well as the coats of cats photographed on both islands.

"Although we suspected that Sunda clouded leopards on Borneo and Sumatra have likely been geographically separated since the last Ice Age, it was not known whether this long isolation had caused them to split up into separate sub-species," explains Wilting.

RARE CATS: FIND OUT MORE Ghostly photographs of the rare Saharan cheetah were revealed last month A "lost" population of tigers has been filmed living in the Himalayas by the BBC Only the second known photos of the elusive African golden cat were taken in the wild in 2009 Watch more videos of wild cats here

But his team's analysis confirms that the latest "new" species of cat to be discovered actually comes in two forms, a Bornean subspecies N. d. borneensis and the Sumatran subspecies N. d. diardi.

Their results are published in the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution.

The differences aren't obvious: the Sunda clouded leopards on Borneo and Sumatra look alike.

Both cats have similar patterned coats as they live in similar jungle habitats, the researchers suspect.

But as well as being genetically distinct, the clouded leopards on both islands are also morphologically different, having unique features in their skulls and teeth.

It is unclear what caused the Sunda clouded leopard to evolve into two forms.

"So far we can only speculate about the specific course of events in the evolution of the clouded leopard," says team member Joerns Fickel, also at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research.

But the researchers think that a volcanic eruption on Sumatra 75,000 years ago may have wiped out most clouded leopards.

One group survived in China and colonised the rest of mainland Asia.

Another hung on in Borneo, becoming the Sunda clouded leopard. This evolved into two types after a group colonised Sumatra via glacial land bridges, and then became cut off as sea levels rose.

From the BBC:

Mobile phone to blast into orbit

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

British engineers are planning to put a mobile phone in space.

The team at Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) in Guildford want to see if the sophisticated capabilities in today's phones will function in the most challenging environment known.

The phone will run on Google's Android operating system but the exact model has not yet been disclosed.

It will be used to control a 30cm-long satellite and take pictures of the Earth in the mission later this year.

Although mobile phones have been flown on high altitude balloons before, this would likely be the first time such a device has gone into orbit several hundred kilometres above the planet.

"Modern smartphones are pretty amazing," said SSTL project manager Shaun Kenyon.

"They come now with processors that can go up to 1GHz, and they have loads of flash memory. First of all, we want to see if the phone works up there, and if it does, we want to see if the phone can control a satellite."

High Street product

The venture is part of the company's quest to find more inexpensive, off-the-shelf electronics that can be used to lower the cost of its spacecraft designs.

The mission is known as STRaND-1 (Surrey Training Research and Nanosatellite Demonstration).

It involves both the company and researchers from the local university's Surrey Space Centre (SSC).

Much of the development work has been done in team-members' spare time.

The mobile model being used will be a standard, sub-£300 ($450), smartphone available in High Street stores.

"We're not taking it apart; we're not gutting it; we're not taking out the printed circuit boards and re-soldering them into our satellite - we're flying it as is," Mr Kenyon explained.

"And, in fact, we're going to have another camera on the satellite so we can take a picture of the phone because we want to operate the screen and have some good images of that as well."

Eye on Earth

Critical to the whole endeavour is the phone's operating system.

Android is open source software which means SSTL's engineers can modify it to adapt the phone's functions.

The great swings in temperature and the harsh radiation found in space require the phone be placed inside the satellite casing to give it some protection.

A hole will have to be cut in the side of the casing therefore to allow the phone's camera lens to see out.

The phone itself will not "call home"; messages and pictures will come back via the satellite's radio link.

For the first part of the mission, the mobile will act as the back-up to the main computer on the spacecraft.

After a period of time, however, the phone will be put in charge.

"We're trying to use as much of the capability of the phone as possible," said Doug Liddle, head of science at SSTL.

"Ideally, the phone can take control and do the thinking."

Busy months

To precisely point and manoeuvre, the satellite will be incorporating advanced guidance, navigation and control systems including miniature reaction wheels, and a GPS receiver, as well as innovative pulse plasma thrusters to propel it through space.

The intention is that the phone be given the chance to oversee all these subsystems.

"The open source nature of the software is very exciting because you can see how further down the line, once we've got the phone working in orbit, we could get people to develop apps for it," Mr Liddle added.

Chris Bridges from the Surrey Space Centre commented: "If a smartphone can be proved to work in space, it opens up lots of new technologies to a multitude of people and companies for space who usually can't afford it. It's a real game-changer for the industry."

SSTL has earned a worldwide reputation for its small satellites. The company has managed to reduce the cost of its systems by incorporating components that were originally developed for consumer products such as laptops.

The coming months will see the company launch Earth observation spacecraft for Nigerian, Russian and Canadian customers.

It is also about to start building the spacecraft that will form the initial constellation of Galileo, Europe's multi-billion-euro answer to America's GPS network.

I'm sorry I haven't been in The Lounge for ages, El.
I had to laugh at the story of the crocodile eating the mobile phone.

On the BBC radio news this morning:

Two-clawed and parrot-sized: new T.rex cousin unveiled

By Neil Bowdler Science reporter, BBC News

A tiny distant cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex has been discovered in China with only a single claw on each upper limb.

Linhenykus monodactylus weighed no more than a large parrot and was found in sediments between 84 and 75 million years old.

The dinosaur belongs to a sub-branch of the theropods, the dinosaur group which includes T.rex and Velociraptor, and which gave rise to modern birds.

Details are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The new species was named after the Chinese city of Linhe, Inner Mongolia, near where its fossilised remains was uncovered in what is called the Upper Cretaceous Wulansuhai Formation.

The international team found a partial skeleton, including bones of the vertebrae, forelimb, hind limbs, and a partial pelvis.

It is part of the Alvarezsauroidia family of theropods, a strange group of small, long-legged running dinosaurs.

Michael Pittman of University College London, who was part of the team, says the animal would have been hardly be intimidating.

"You'd see a very small animal, probably below your hip height, with a very small skull. It's not very threatening because its teeth are very small compared to other carnivorous dinosaurs and there's some evidence it may have been an insectivore," he told the BBC.

What is striking is the animal's unusual claws.

"Non-avian theropods start with five fingers but evolved to have only three fingers in later forms," he says. "Tyrannosaurs were unusual in having just two fingers but the one-fingered Linhenykus shows how extensive and complex theropod hand modifications really were."

Disappearing fingers

The suggestion is that this mono-digit theropod may represent the end of one evolutionary pathway, in which unused digits disappear as part of a process of natural selection.

"Vestigial structures, like legs in whales and snakes, may appear and disappear seemingly randomly in the course of evolution," says Jonah Choiniere of the American Museum of Natural History, who also worked on the find.

"Linhenykus highlights complexity in evolution of these vestigial fingers."

Dr Paul Barrett of London's Natural History Museum said the discovery was a "nice specimen" to add to a sub-group already known for its weirdness.

"Alvarezsauroids are already know to be an unusual group of theropods with very bizarre hands used primarily for digging, and this new find confirms there was some variation in how weird these hands were."

From the BBC:

Polar bear's epic nine day swim in search of sea ice
By Ella Davies
Earth News reporter

A polar bear swam continuously for over nine days, covering 687km (426 miles), a new study has revealed.

Scientists studying bears around the Beaufort sea, north of Alaska, claim this endurance feat could be a result of climate change.

Polar bears are known to swim between land and sea ice floes to hunt seals.

But the researchers say that increased sea ice melts push polar bears to swim greater distances, risking their own health and future generations.

We are in awe that an animal that spends most of its time on the surface of sea ice could swim constantly for so long in water so cold. George M. Durner

In their findings, published in Polar Biology, researchers from the US Geological Survey reveal the first evidence of long distance swimming by polar bears (Ursus maritimus).

"This bear swam continuously for 232 hours and 687 km and through waters that were 2-6 degrees C," says research zoologist George M. Durner.

"We are in awe that an animal that spends most of its time on the surface of sea ice could swim constantly for so long in water so cold. It is truly an amazing feat."

Although bears have been observed in open water in the past, this is the first time one's entire journey has been followed.

SOURCES Visit the journal Polar biology to learn more about polar bear behaviour

By fitting a GPS collar to a female bear, researchers were able to accurately plot its movements for two months as it sought out hunting grounds.

The scientists were able to determine when the bear was in the water by the collar data and a temperature logger implanted beneath the bear's skin.

The study shows that this epic journey came at a very high cost to the bear.

"This individual lost 22% of her body fat in two months and her yearling cub," says Mr Durner.

"It was simply more energetically costly for the yearling than the adult to make this long distance swim," he explains.

Mr Durner tells the BBC that conditions in the Beaufort sea have become increasingly difficult for polar bears.

"In prior decades, before 1995, low-concentration sea ice persisted during summers over the continental shelf in the Beaufort Sea."

POLAR BEAR FACTS Polar bears are the world's largest land carnivores They have black skin and transparent hairs but appear white, turning yellow with age On land, they can reach up to 40 kph (25 mph) when sprinting short distances to catch prey Watch a polar bear swimming to find prey

"This means that the distances, and costs to bears, to swim between isolated ice floes or between sea ice and land was relatively small."

"The extensive summer melt that appears to be typical now in the Beaufort Sea has likely increased the cost of swimming by polar bears."

Polar bears live within the Arctic circle and eat a calorie-rich diet of ringed seals (Pusa hispida) to survive the frozen conditions.

The bears hunt their prey on frozen sea ice: a habitat that changes according to temperature.

"This dependency on sea ice potentially makes polar bears one of the most at-risk large mammals to climate change," says Mr Durner.

The IUCN red list identifies polar bears as a vulnerable species, citing global climate change as a "substantial threat" to their habitat.

From the BBC:

Bats in Borneo roost in carnivorous pitcher plants
By Ella Davies
Earth News reporter

Bats in Borneo have been found roosting in carnivorous pitcher plants.

A new study reveals that the plants benefit from nutrients in the bats' droppings.

This unusual living arrangement is apparently beneficial for the bats too as they can shelter unseen inside the plants' pitchers.

Although tree shrews have also been observed using pitcher plants as toilets, this is the first time mammals have been found living inside them.

Nepenthes carnivorous pitcher plants grow in nutrient-poor soil and rely on trapping insects to acquire enough nitrogen for growth.

Found in the peat swamps and heath forest of Borneo, N. rafflesiana elongata are remarkable for their long aerial pitchers.

However, research has previously suggested that N. r. elongata catch up to seven times less insects than other pitcher plants in Borneo.

The pitcher plant benefits from attracting the bat because the bats defecate into the pitcher, using it as a toilet Dr Ulmar Grafe

In a new study, published in the journal Biology Letters, scientists found that the unique subspecies had a extraordinary relationship with mammals.

Dr Ulmar Grafe and his team investigated how the plants supplemented their nitrogen intake and were surprised to find woolly bats inside the pitchers.

"It was totally unexpected to find bats roosting in the pitchers consistently," says Dr Grafe.

The small Hardwicke's woolly bats (Kerivoula hardwickii) were found roosting above the digestive fluids in the plants' pitchers.

Rather than consuming the whole bat for extra nitrogen, Dr Grafe found that the plants gained from the bats' waste.

The darker shadow in this pitcher is a roosting bat

"The pitcher plant benefits from attracting the bat because the bats defecate into the pitcher, using it as a toilet if you will," he explains.

This unusual arrangement also has advantages for the bat according to Dr Grafe.

"The bat benefits from having a secure roosting place that is also free of blood-sucking ectoparasites that often accumulate in bat roosts," he tells the BBC.

Last year, researchers observed tree shrews using another type of pitcher plant (Nepenthes rajah) as a toilet and likewise found that the plant benefited from nitrogen in the deposits.

However, this is the first time mammals have been found living inside carnivorous plants.

Dr Grafe points to these findings as evidence that biodiversity is key to protecting the planet's wildlife.

"This is one of many animal-plant mutualisms... that highlights the fact that extinction or removal of a single species within an ecosystem will impact many other species," he says.

From the BBC:

Hubble telescope detects the oldest known galaxy

By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News

The Hubble Space Telescope has detected what scientists believe may be the oldest galaxy ever observed.

It is thought the galaxy is more than 13 billion years old and existed 480 million years after the Big Bang.

A Nasa team says this was a period when galaxy formation in the early Universe was going into "overdrive".

The image, which has been published in Nature journal, was detected using Hubble's recently installed wide field camera.

According to Professor Richard Bouwens of Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands: "We're seeing these galaxies - 'star cities' - that are building themselves up over cosmic time."

The research team observed rapid growth over a relatively short period of time: Their sample data showed there was just one galaxy in existence about 500 million years after the Big Bang. But this rises to 10 galaxies some 150 million years later. The tally has doubled about 100 million years later.

"You start out with these little seeds in the very early Universe which would eventually have formed stars, then star clusters, baby galaxies then eventually these large majestic galaxies that we know today," according to Professor Bouwens.

"It's very exciting to see this complicated physical process actually take place somewhere that no man has seen before," Professor Bouwens told BBC News.

He compares the early galaxy to a toddler: It is much smaller than older galaxies like our own Milky Way and it is growing more quickly.

"We can use these measurements to learn how fast galaxies grow and build up with cosmic time," according to Professor Bouwens.

Dr Olivia Johnson of the Royal Greenwich Observatory at the National Maritime Museum says that quantifying the rapid evolution of the Universe will reveal a greater detail about what was happening in the early cosmos - such as when the first stars and galaxies formed.

Test theories

"These are big, open questions in astronomy and the fact that we are finally able to look into the primordial universe for the first time is quite exciting," she said.

Dr Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) says the new image from Hubble will enable astronomers to test their current theories of the evolution of the Universe.

Professor Bouwens stressed that the observation had yet to be confirmed but that he and his colleagues were "pretty confident" that they had discovered the oldest galaxy caught on camera to date.

"There are many different sorts of objects that can masquerade or look very much like these distant objects. We've done lots of checks and lots of tests and we think that this candidate is OK," he said.

"It's filling in the gaps. Although we have ideas about the formation of the Universe, it is quite difficult to go from the primeval soup in the early stages of the Universe to the Universe we are in. Images like the one we have today helps plot that journey."

Astronomers are eagerly awaiting the launch of Nasa's James Webb telescope in 2014 which will be able to delve perhaps 200 million years further back in cosmic time when galaxies were just beginning.

From the BBC:

Greenland glaciers spring surprise

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

Some Greenland glaciers run slower in warm summers than cooler ones, meaning the icecap may be more resistant to warming than previously thought.

A UK-led scientific team reports the finding in the journal Nature, following analysis of five years of satellite data on six glaciers.

The scientists emphasise the icecap is not "safe from climate change", as it is still losing ice to the sea.

Melting of the icecap would add several metres to sea level around the world.

But it suggests that one reason behind the acceleration in glacier flow, which so concerned scientists when it was first documented in 2002, will prove not to be such a serious concern.

"In their last report in 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded they weren't able to make an accurate projection of future sea level because there were a couple of processes by which climate change could cause additional melt from the ice sheet," said Andy Shepherd from the University of Leeds.

"We're addressing one of those processes and saying that according to the observations, nothing will change, so that process can probably be ruled out."

In all five years studied (1993 and 1995-8), the speed of the glaciers increased with the onset of summer, as meltwater collected between the bottom of the glacier and the rock beneath, lubricating the flow.

But in the warmest years, the acceleration stalled early in the season; in relatively cool summers, it did not.

Even though the melting accelerated earlier in warmer years, by late summer the glaciers were 60% slower.

The explanation is that hotter summers cause so much meltwater to collect that it runs off in channels below the ice - meaning it does not lubricate the glaciers so efficiently.

Elevated concern

The results reinforce work by other scientific groups, on glaciers in Greenland and in mountains in temperate regions of the world.

And the somewhat counter-intuitive finding may change the view of what lies ahead.

"Those higher-temperature years are more like Greenland would be in 50-100 years," Professor Shepherd told BBC News.

"It's a snapshot of Greenland in the future; so one might expect the ice to be flowing slower than it is today."

However, this mechanism is not the only way that higher temperatures result in faster loss of ice.

Glaciers that end in the ocean can be accelerated by warmer seawater melting the ice tongue from underneath.

And warming can also lead to melting at progressively higher altitudes, increasing the total amount of water flowing down into the sea.

"I would be very careful about doing an extrapolation both in time and space," said Michiel van den Broeke, a polar icecap specialist from the University of Utrecht in The Netherlands and co-editor-in-chief of The Cryosphere journal.

"This ensemble of glaciers is quite small, and [the researchers] only take a limited elevation interval.

"So it's an important study, but it doesn't say what happens to glaciers higher up, and they could start acting like the accelerating glaciers now; so I'd be very cautious."

Satellite observations show an overall loss of ice across Greenland.

But thinning is greater along the coast and in the south, while some central areas have thickened, perhaps due to increased snowfall.

What happens to the crucial icecap when is still unclear; and may still not be resolved by the time of the next major IPCC assessment, in 2013/4.

From the BBC:

Humans 'left Africa much earlier'

By Paul Rincon Science reporter, BBC News

Modern humans may have emerged from Africa up to 50,000 years earlier than previously thought, a study suggests.

Researchers have uncovered stone tools in the Arabian peninsula that they say were made by modern humans about 125,000 years ago.

The tools were unearthed at the site of Jebel Faya in the United Arab Emirates, a team reports in the journal Science.

The results are controversial: genetic data strongly points to an exodus from Africa 60,000-70,000 years ago.

Simon Armitage, from Royal Holloway, University of London, Hans-Peter Uerpmann, from the University of Tuebingen, Germany, and colleagues, uncovered 125,000-year-old stone tools at Jebel Faya which resemble those found in East Africa at roughly the same time period.

The authors of the study say the people who made the tools were newcomers in the area with origins on the other side of the Red Sea.

The researchers were able to date the tools using a light-based technique, which tells scientists when the stone artefacts were buried.

Genetics questioned

So-called anatomically modern humans are thought to have emerged somewhere in Africa some 200,000 years ago.

They later spread out, migrating to other continents where they displaced the indigenous human groups such as the Neanderthals in Europe and the Denisovans in Asia.

DNA from the cell's powerhouses - or mitochondria - can be used as a "clock" for reconstructing the timing of human migrations. This is because mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) accumulates mutations, or changes, at a known rate.

Studies of mtDNA had suggested a timing for the "Out of Africa" exodus of 60-70,000 years ago.

But scientists behind the latest study argue that the people who made tools at Jebel Faya 125,000 years ago are ancestral to humans living outside Africa today.

Professor Uerpmann said the estimates of time using genetic data were "very rough".

"The domestic dog was said to be 120,000 years old, and now it is 20,000. You can imagine how variable the genetic dating is," he explained.

Commenting on the findings, Professor Chris Stringer, a palaeoanthropologist at London's Natural History Museum, said: "This archaeological work by Armitage and colleagues provides important clues that early modern humans might have dispersed from Africa across Arabia, as far as the Straits of Hormuz, by 120,000 years ago.

"This research augments the controversial idea that such populations could have migrated even further across southern Asia, despite conflicting genetic data that such movements only occurred after 60,000 years."

Multiple migrations?

The researchers say the toolmakers at Jebel Faya may have reached the Arabian Peninsula at a time when changes in the climate were transforming it from arid desert into a grassland habitat with lakes and rivers.

These human groups could later have moved on towards the Persian Gulf, trekking around the Iranian coast and on to South Asia.

Indeed, Dr Mike Petraglia at the University of Oxford has uncovered tools in India that he says could have been made by modern humans before 60,000 years ago. Some tools were sandwiched in ash from the eruption of the Toba super-volcano in Indonesia that geologists can date very accurately to 74,000 years ago.

However, other researchers suggest that the people living in India at this time could have died out and been replaced by a later wave of humans.

Anthropologists already knew of an early foray out of Africa by modern humans. Remains found at Skhul and Qafzeh in Israel date to between 119,000 and 81,000 years ago.

But the Skhul and Qafzeh people are generally thought to have died out or retreated south, perhaps because of climatic fluctuations. They subsequently disappear, and their sites are re-occupied by Neanderthals.

Professor Stringer said the fact that the tools found at Jebel Faya did not resemble those associated with modern humans at Qafzeh and Skhul hinted at "yet more complexity in the exodus of modern humans from Africa".

He posed the question: "Could there have been separate dispersals, one from East Africa into Arabia, and another from North Africa into the Levant?"

From the BBC:

Pigeons sniff their way home with right nostril
By Victoria Gill
Science and nature reporter, BBC News

The researchers used GPS tags to track the birds' journeys

Pigeons can find their way home from hundreds of miles - an ability that fascinates scientists and has led to their use in carrying messages and even smuggling drugs.

Now, researchers in Italy, say they have shown how much the birds rely on one of their nostrils to "sniff" their way around.

The team report in the Journal of Experimental Biology, that pigeons with a blocked right nostril were unable to create the "map of smells" that guides them on their journey.

Homing pigeons are the domesticated relatives of wild rock doves , which have an innate ability to find their way back to their own nest over long distances.

More on "pesky pigeons" from BBC Wildlife Finder Read the paper in Journal of Experimental Biology

The domestic birds are bred to fine-tune this capability, to help them find the loft they are raised in.

Previous attempts to unpick this remarkable navigational skill, by this team as well as other researchers, revealed that as the birds sit in their lofts they learn the directions from which odours originate.

The birds appear to construct a mental map of these odours; a map that is sufficiently accurate to guide them in the direction of home until they spot local landmarks.

Blocked nose

To investigate this further, the scientists plugged either the left or the right nostril of homing pigeons raised just outside Pisa.

They released the birds from Cigoli, 40km away, and followed the birds' return routes using GPS trackers.

Analysing the flight paths of the birds, Dr Gagliardo and her colleagues could see that pigeons that could not breathe through the right nostril took a more tortuous routes.

The birds also stopped more often than birds that had only their left nostrils blocked and took far longer to find their way home.

Other research has shown that pigeons are able to "sense" the Earth's magnetic field; giving them an internal compass that helps guide them.

But Dr Gagliardo says that odours are vital cues that allow them to "understand where they are with respect to home".

She told BBC News that odours sniffed through the pigeons' right nostrils seem to help the birds construct their "navigational map".

From the BBC:

Defra's UK climate-proofing plans unveiled

By David Shukman Environment correspondent, BBC News

Roads built to the same standards as the scorching south of France; fish moved from the overheated Lake District to cooler waters in Scotland; lighthouses threatened by rising seas.

From measures in use already to seemingly far-fetched scenarios for the future, these are some of the findings in the first batch of climate adaptation plans submitted to the environment ministry Defra.

Under the Climate Change Act, 91 major organisations responsible for key aspects of national infrastructure have to explain how they will cope if the climate alters as forecast.

The latest projections suggest the potential for major change - for example that it is "very likely" that southern England will on average be 2.2-6.8C warmer by the 2080s.

That range of possible warming reveals the huge uncertainties inherent in climate forecasting. Nevertheless the aim of the studies is to ensure that long-term planning takes account of the possible risks.

Rocky road

Many of the ideas for adaptation have been aired before but this is the first time they have been brought together in a formal set of strategies.

In its plan, the Highways Agency recognises the risk of roads deteriorating more rapidly in higher temperatures and more frequent extreme weather.

One solution, adopted in 2008, is to copy the specifications for road foundations used in southern France.

The Environment Agency warns that rising temperatures will be stressful for wildlife - with fish at the greatest risk.

It raises the radical option of relocating some fish species from the Lake District to habitats further north where the waters will be cooler.

The Trinity House Lighthouse Authority - which runs 68 lighthouses on the English and Welsh coasts - reckons the majority of its installations will face no impact.

But it details four lighthouses that would be threatened by sea-level rise unless action is taken, with a further nine whose landing docks may be at risk in future.

Trinity House estimates that five lighthouses may suffer from the erosion of the cliffs they stand on - but points out that this process may have nothing to do with climate change.

Waves on the track

Network Rail raises concerns about keeping passengers cool in heatwaves, ensuring that rail lines do not buckle in high temperatures and preventing embankments collapsing as a result of flooding.

One of its most vulnerable stretches of track is on the south Devon coast between Dawlish and Teignmouth where storms have often seen waves break over the line.

Network Rail says the sea level at this point has risen 30cm since 1840 and is projected to rise by a further 70cm by 2050 and 1.45m by 2100. The risk of the track being 'overtopped' is predicted to increase by 50% by 2020 and to treble by 2080.

It has already invested £8.5m in the past 10 years in fortifying the sea defences and establishing an early warning system to watch for rockfalls from the cliffs.

Network Rail believes it is "ahead of the game" by planning for future changes but warns that any adaptation will need to be dove-tailed with flood protection schemes for neighbouring Teignmouth and Dawlish.

National Grid has submitted two reports - for gas and electricity. On gas, it warns that pipes could become exposed through subsidence or erosion and it is working to replace old metal pipes with ones made of polyethylene.

On electricity, it identifies 13 substations - unnamed - that are vulnerable to a one-in-a-century flood - a relatively high risk for such important assets.

The 2007 floods had provided a wake-up for the industry when a vital substation at Walham in Gloucester - serving tens of thousands of households - was almost overwhelmed.

Later this year, power companies, water utilities, harbour authorities and others will submit their plans, leading ultimately to a national adaptation strategy.

Being local I happen to know just how close to the substation came to being flooded out - half an inch away (in height of water). If it had been flooded, it would have resulted in the biggest mass evacuation of people since WW2.
The Walham substation under water

From the BBC:

Frogs re-evolved lost lower teeth
By Ella Davies
Earth News reporter

Frogs re-evolved "lost" bottom teeth after more than 200 million years, according to new research.

Tree-dwelling Gastrotheca guentheri are the only frogs with teeth on both their upper and lower jaw.

The reappearance of these lower teeth after such a long time fuels debate about whether complex traits are lost in evolution or if they can resurface.

Scientists suggest this new evidence identifies a "loophole" in previous theories.

The Gastrotheca genus of frogs carry eggs on their backs

Commonly known as "marsupial frogs", the Gastrotheca genus carry their eggs in pouches.

Unlike marsupial mammals such as kangaroos however, the frogs' pouches are on their backs.

The species Gastrotheca guentheri is even more unusual, being the only known frog to have teeth on its lower jaw.

Dr John Wiens led a team of scientists from Stony Brook University, New York to investigate this exceptional feature.

Their findings are reported in the journal Evolution.

"I combined data from fossils and DNA sequences with new statistical methods and showed that frogs lost their teeth on the lower jaw more than 230 million years ago, but that they re-appeared in G. guentheri within the past 20 million years," explains Dr Wiens.

Complex anatomical traits that are evolutionarily lost can re-evolve, even after being absent for hundreds of millions of years Dr John Wiens

In the past, scientists have argued that traits "lost" in evolution cannot return, an assertion known as Dollo's law.

The return of lower jaw (mandible) teeth in G. guentheri after more than 200 million years could make evolutionary biologists reconsider this law.

"The loss of mandibular teeth in the ancestor of modern frogs and their re-appearance in G. guentheri provides very strong evidence for the controversial idea that complex anatomical traits that are evolutionarily lost can re-evolve, even after being absent for hundreds of millions of years," Dr Wiens says.

Dr Wiens believes that this re-evolution can be considered a "'loophole' in Dollo's law".

He suggests that because the frogs have always had teeth on their upper jaw, the "mechanisms for developing teeth" have always been present.

"What G. guentheri did was to put teeth back on the lower jaw, rather than having to re-evolve all the mechanisms for making teeth 'from scratch'," says Dr Wiens.

SOURCES Visit the journal Evolution to learn more about frogs' teeth

"This "loophole" may apply to many other cases when traits appear to re-evolve, such as in the re-evolution of lost fingers and toes in lizards," Dr Wiens tells the BBC.

According to Dr Wiens, this theory could be applied to other recent studies that have suggested the re-evolution of lost traits.

In the last decade, scientists have identified and debated several attributes that have apparently "re-evolved" over time including stick insect's wings, coiling in limpet shells, larval stages of salamanders and lost digits in lizards.

G. guentheri live on the forested slopes of the Andes in Columbia and Ecuador.

The IUCN lists the species as vulnerable due to their "extremely fragmented" habitat.

From the BBC:

UK set for high end climate costs, as floods spread

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

The UK is likely to feel bigger costs from climate change than most other EU countries, a report concludes.

Rising sea levels are likely to impact the nation harder than most, negating economic benefits from increased tourism and possibly farm yields.

The findings come from a study funded by the European Commission, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

It projects a net cost for most EU nations, but a net benefit for a few.

Scandinavian countries and the Baltic states should be better off, it finds, largely through increased opportunities for agriculture.

Researchers looked at climatic conditions likely to apply in 2080, and asked how present-day economies would fare if those climatic conditions were here now.

It addresses five issues - agriculture, river floods, coastal areas, tourism and human health - which the team acknowledges is a limitation.

"We know little at EU level or at member state level about implications of climate change in the economy," said Juan-Carlos Ciscar from the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies in Seville, Spain.

"Climate change is happening, we need to adapt to it, so we need to know which sectors will be affected and why so we can establish adaptation policies - which means minimising impacts, but also taking advantage of opportunities," he told BBC News.

Southern accent

In 2004, the European Council asked the European Commission's Joint Research Center (JRC) to analyse these costs and benefits as far as possible.

Dr Ciscar's institute is part of the JRC and led the project, which involved commissioning new models of some types of climate impact.

Overall, they calculate, EU citizens would be on average 0.2-1.0% worse off were climatic conditions projected for 2080 to apply now.

But that headline figure conceals big regional differences.

To simplify matters a little, they divided EU nations into five geographical blocs: southern Europe, central Europe south, central Europe north, northern Europe, and the British Isles.

The most heavily affected region is southern Europe (Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria), for which the models project drops in agricultural yield of up to a quarter, major increases in coastal flooding, and a small drop in tourism revenue.

The northern bloc, by contrast, would see farm yields rise by about one-third and an increase in tourism.

The UK and Ireland, meanwhile, would see an overall economic impact almost as large as southern Europe's - but produced mainly through an increase in flooding.

The researchers took four different scenarios of warming into account, and saw the biggest impact on the British Isles at the high-temperature end - a rise of about 5C from now.

"The highest scenario, with a sea level rise of 88cm, brings dramatic changes in coastal impacts - the increase is more than proportional," Dr Ciscar told BBC News.

Expansion agenda

In a counterintuitive twist, lower temperature rises are projected to cost the British Isles in terms of agricultural yields - but the warmest scenarios should bring a net benefit.

"With the lower temperature increase, we assume the current crop pattern would still apply, with conditions a little more hot and dry," explained Ana Iglesias, professor of agricultural economics at the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid.

"But if things changed more we could introduce crops and systems more fitting now to a Mediterranean climate - grapes for example - plus vegetables such as tomatoes you could grow outside glasshouses for longer periods."

The next step in the process will be to expand the issues covered, although including all sectors of the economy and all societal impacts promises to be a daunting task.

But the work so far is likely to be useful, according to Simon Dietz, deputy director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics.

"The paper is likely to be useful in identifying adaptation needs - how much money is used, and where governments should be sending it to," he said.

"However, it isn't really able to look at extremes of weather; and we know from the Australian floods this year that you'll miss quite a lot [of impacts] if you're not able to include extremes in terms of droughts and floods."

Dr Dietz was not involved in the JRC project but was one of the team behind the 2006 Stern Review of Climate Change Economics.

Overall, Europe is one of the global regions considered to be most capable of adapting to climate change - partly because impacts in the region are projected to be relatively modest, and partly because it is reatively prosperous.

Bye bye Moon From the BBC:

Why the Moon is getting further away from Earth

The speed at which the Moon is moving away from Earth could affect life on the planet, but this could take billions of years to happen, writes space scientist Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock.

It's easy to take the Moon for granted, even on a clear night when it can light up the sky. It really feels as if it has always been there just as it is now, throughout history. But that's not strictly true.

It is thought that the Moon was formed when a proto-planet about the size of Mars collided with the early Earth around 4.5bn years ago. The debris left over from impact coalesced to form the Moon. Computer simulations of such an impact are consistent with the Earth Moon system we see in the 21st Century.

The simulations also imply that at the time of its formation, the Moon sat much closer to the Earth - a mere 14,000 miles (22,530.8 kilometres) away, compared to the quarter of a million miles (402,336 kilometres) between the Earth and the Moon today.

The Moon continues to spin away from the Earth, at the rate of 3.78cm (1.48in) per year, at about the same speed at which our fingernails grow.

Without the Moon, the Earth could slow down enough to become unstable, but this would take billions of years and it may never happen at all.

The migration of the Moon away from the Earth is mainly due to the action of the Earth's tides.

The Moon is kept in orbit by the gravitational force that the Earth exerts on it, but the Moon also exerts a gravitational force on our planet and this causes the movement of the Earth's oceans to form a tidal bulge.

Due to the rotation of the Earth, this tidal bulge actually sits slightly ahead of the Moon. Some of the energy of the spinning Earth gets transferred to the tidal bulge via friction.

This drives the bulge forward, keeping it ahead of the Moon. This large mass of water then exerts its own gravitational pull on the Moon which causes the moon to speed up.

The Moon's increased speed causes it to drift away from the Earth with an ever-increasing orbital diameter. This phenomenon is similar to the experience one feels on a children's roundabout.

The faster the roundabout spins the stronger the feeling of being slung outwards.

While 3.78cm may not seem like much, this small difference over a long enough period of time could affect life on Earth.

As the Moon is speeding up due to the tidal bulge and the Earth's rotation, the opposite effect is happening to the Earth and it is slowing down.

On early Earth, when the Moon was newly formed, days were five hours long, but with the Moon's braking effect operating on the Earth for the last 4.5bn years, days have slowed down to the 24 hours that we are familiar with now, and they will continue to slow down in the future.

We can see some evidence of the slowdown in the fossil records of some creatures.

By looking at the daily growth bands of corals we can calculate the numbers of days that occurred per year in past periods, and from this we can see that days are getting longer, at a rate of 19 hours every 4.5bn years.

The length of a day, or in other words the rotation speed of the planet, plays a big part in its stability.

Just like keeping a plate spinning on a stick, the key is to have the plate spinning fast, as if it slows down it crashes to the floor. In a similar way, as the Earth's rotation slows down, our whole planet may start to slowly wobble and this will have a devastating effect on our seasons.

We have the seasons we currently do, due to the Earth's tilt at an angle of 23 degrees on its axis.

During summer the Northern Hemisphere is tilted towards the Sun so we get longer days and warmer weather. However in winter the Northern Hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun giving us shorter days and cooler weather.

If this were to change, and the Earth became unstable, then parts of the world could experience much greater temperature swings than we are used to through any given year, with freezing Arctic temperatures in winter followed by blazing hot temperatures in summer.

As humans we have the ability to adapt to our local surroundings to meet our needs. If humans are still around when and if it happens it is quite likely we would survive these massive changes with air conditioning in the summer and a lot of heating in winter.

Unfortunately most animals are not so adaptable and if these changes happened rapidly due to an unstable planetary wobble, then most animals would not be able to evolve quickly enough to hibernate or migrate out of harm's way.

The human race has little to fear at present. By the time any change occurred, humans might even have generated technology that could speed up the Earth's rotation or transport us to other liveable planets within our galaxy.

From the BBC:

Conkers on horse chestnut trees threatened by moth pest

The Mars5000 crew have reached Mars and are preparing to land. Well in the simulation they have. From the BBC:

Mars500 crew 'arrives at Red Planet' on simulated mission

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

The crew of the Mars500 simulated mission to the Red Planet have reached a key milestone.

The six men, sealed since June inside steel containers representing a spacecraft, have "gone into orbit" at their destination.

Three of the group will now "descend" to the planet, don real spacesuits and walk on the "surface" of Mars.

In reality, this surface will just be the sandy floor of another module at the Moscow-based experiment.

The Mars500 project is run by Russia's Institute of Biomedical Problems with the participation of the European Space Agency (Esa).

It aims to investigate some of the psychological and physiological effects that humans might encounter on a long-duration spaceflight.

"So far, I must say we've had no major problems," said Martin Zell, who heads up the Esa scientific programme on the International Space Station (ISS).

"There is permanent monitoring, so we understand their health very well. We have a lot of data now on their mental state and on how their bodies are reacting. That's important because there is a link between the two," he told BBC News.

The crew comprise three Russians, two EU citizens and a Chinese national.

Alexander Smoleevskiy, Sukhrob Kamolov, Alexey Sitev, Diego Urbina, Romain Charles and Wang Yue all had to pass through a rigorous selection procedure to get on the programme, and their "departure" on the grounded spaceship last year drew wide international attention and curiosity.

 

 

For eight months, the group has worked together inside the closed facility which has no windows and a total interior volume of about 550 cubic metres (19,423 cubic feet).

The coming days will see Smoleevskiy, Urbina, and Wang enter a "descent module", from where they will have access to a further container that has been set up to look like the dusty terrain of Mars.

The trio will put on the type of spacesuit worn by real cosmonauts and simulate the sort of geological investigations future astronauts might pursue on the Red Planet one day. Three sorties are planned, with the first outing due to take place on 14 February.

A robot rover will assist the Mars walkers, and their activity will be overseen by Mission Control Moscow which normally deals with events on the ISS.

"They will go on to the surface two at a time, with one man staying behind in the landing module," explained Dr Zell.

"Working in their suits, they will have a drill to get below the surface; and they will do a virtual analysis of the samples the drill delivers to them. They will also take samples back to the module for further analysis."

Although the Mars500 experiment has not been able to simulate the constant weightlessness of a genuine eight-month journey through space, it has been able to introduce one important realism - that of a time delay in the communications between the crew and their ground controllers outside the modules.

Messages take 20 minutes to pass between the two ends of the link, similar to the lag radio messages travelling the great distance between Mars and Earth would come up against.

This proved particularly testing last month when controllers deliberately - and without warning to the crew - cut the power to the modules. They even blew a small amount of smoke into the containers to give the men inside the sensation that they were dealing with a serious electrical failure.

"They spent almost a day without energy," Dr Zell said. "They had to work through their emergency procedures and analyse the situation. They didn't panic and they remembered their training."

Mars500 is so called because it simulates the duration of a possible human Mars mission in the future using conventional propulsion: 250 days for the trip to the Red Planet, 30 days on the Martian surface and 240 days for the return journey, totalling 520 days. (In reality, it would probably take a lot longer than this.)

The six men are due "back on Earth" in November.

THE LAYOUT OF THE MARS500 'SPACESHIP'

• MEDICAL MODULE: A 12m-long cylinder that acts as the laboratory. Should a crewmember become ill, he can be isolated and treated here
• HABITABLE MODULE: The main living quarters. The 20m-long module has beds, a galley, a social area. It also acts as the main control room
• LANDING MODULE: This will only be used during the 30-day landing operation. Three crewmembers will visit the "surface"
• UTILITY MODULE: It is divided into four compartments, to store food and other supplies, to house a greenhouse, a gym a refrigeration unit
• SURFACE MODULE: To walk across the soil and rocks of Mars, crewmembers must put on Orlan spacesuits and pass through an airlock

From the BBC:

Parrots prefer 'left handedness'

From the BBC:

Exoplanet hunt turns up 54 potentially habitable worlds

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Astronomers have identified some 54 new planets where conditions may be suitable for life.

Five of the candidates are Earth-sized.

The announcement from the Kepler space telescope team brings the total number of exoplanet candidates they have identified to more than 1,200.

The data release also confirmed a unique sextet of planets around a single star and 170 further solar systems that include more than one planet circling far-flung stars.

The Kepler telescope was conceived to hunt for exoplanets, staring into a small, fixed patch of the sky in the direction of the constellations Cygnus and Lyra.

It looks for the minuscule dimming of light that occurs when an exoplanet passes in front of its host star. Kepler spots "candidate" planets, which typically are confirmed by ground-based observations to confirm their existence.

In just its first few months of operation, as a paper posted to the Arxiv server reports, Kepler has spotted 68 Earth-sized candidates, 288 so-called "super-Earths" that are up to twice Earth's size, 662 that are Neptune-sized, and 184 that are even larger.

On Wednesday, members of the team announced it had confirmed the Kepler-11 solar system, comprising six large exoplanets tightly circling an eight billion-year-old star that lies about 2,000 light-years away.

"The fact that we've found so many planet candidates in such a tiny fraction of the sky suggests there are countless planets orbiting sun-like stars in our galaxy," said William Borucki, who heads Kepler's science programme at Nasa's Ames Research Center.

"We went from zero to 68 Earth-sized planet candidates and zero to 54 candidates in the habitable zone, some of which could have moons with liquid water."

The bountiful nature of the data from just a few months of observing time from Kepler makes profound suggestions about the preponderance of exoplanets in general, and about the existence of multiple planets around single stars in particular.

In a separate paper, team members outlined how the Kepler candidates include 115 stars that host a pair of planets, 45 with three, eight stars with four, one with five planets, and Kepler-11, which hosts six.

"Even in first four months of Kepler data, a rich population of multiples appeared, and we recognised this was going to be a very important discovery," David Latham, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told BBC News.

A grim story from the BBC:

Amazon drought 'severe' in 2010, raising warming fears

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

Last year's drought in the Amazon raises concerns about the region's capacity to continue absorbing carbon dioxide, scientists say.

Researchers report in the journal Science that the 2010 drought was more widespead than in 2005 - the last big one - with more trees probably lost.

The 2005 drought had been termed a "one in a century" event.

In drought years, the Amazon region changes from being a net absorber of carbon dioxide into a net emitter.

The scientists, from the UK and Brazil, suggest this is further evidence of the Amazon's vulnerability to rising global temperatures.

They also suggest the days of the Amazon forest curbing the impact of rising greenhouse gas emissions may be coming to an end.

The 2010 drought saw the Amazon River at its lowest levels for half a century, with several tributaries completely dry and more than 20 municipalities declaring a state of emergency.

Research leader Simon Lewis, from the University of Leeds, is the scientist who gained an apology from the Sunday Times newspaper last year over the so-called "AmazonGate" affair.

"It's difficult to detect patterns from just two observed droughts, but to have them close together is concerning," he told BBC News.

Both droughts were associated with unusually warm seas in the Atlantic Ocean off the Brazilian coast.

"If that turns out to be driven by escalating greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, it could imply that we'll see more drought years in the near future," said Dr Lewis.

"If events like this do happen more often, the Amazon rainforest would reach a point where it shifts from being a valuable carbon sink slowing climate change to a major source of greenhouse gases."

Some computer models of climate change - in particular, the one developed at the UK's Hadley Centre - project more droughts across the region as the planet warms, and a diminishing capacity to absorb CO2.

There are several ways in which warming can turn greenhouse gas-absorbing forests into emitters.

In the Amazon, the principal mechanism is simply that trees die and then rot; in addition, those trees are then not available to absorb CO2 from the air.

Eye in the sky

For this research, scientists used data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), a US/Japanese satellite that monitors rainfall in a belt extending either side of the Equator.

Its observation showed that whereas the 2005 drought covered an area of nearly two million sq km, in 2010 it stretched for three million sq km.

Following the 2005 drought, scientists were able to study the impact on trees and work out the relationship between the rainfall loss and the release of carbon.

In an average year, the basin absorbs about 1.5 billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere.

By contrast, the impact of the 2005 drought, spread over a number of years, was calculated as a release of five billion tonnes.

The new paper calculates the figure for 2010 as about eight billion tonnes, as much as the annual emissions of China and Russia combined; but this, the researchers acknowledge, is a first estimate.

"It could be that many of the susceptible trees were killed off in 2005, which would reduce the number killed last year," said Paulo Brando from the Amazon Institute of Environmental Research (IPAM) in Belem, Brazil.

"On the other hand, the first drought may have weakened a large number of trees, so increasing the number dying in the 2010 dry season."

Leeds University is part of a research group that maintains about 130 land stations across the Amazon region.

If funds are forthcoming, the team will visit them all in the coming months to gather first-hand data on tree deaths.

This should provide for a more accurate estimate of the 2010 drought's contribution to global emissions.

Closing the gate

The likely fate of the Amazon under climate change came under focus early last year when, as one of a series of attacks on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Sunday Times newspaper accused the panel of having included an unsubstantiated claim that up to 40% of the forest could be affected by climate change in future.

It used quotes from Dr Lewis in support of its claim.

In fact, Dr Lewis was concerned about the region's vulnerability and had sent the newspaper a sheaf of scientific papers to back the case.

He told the newspaper that the IPCC had sourced its statement to a report from environmental group WWF, when it should have referenced the scientific papers WWF had used in its report.

"In fact, the IPCC's Amazon statement is supported by peer-reviewed scientific evidence," the Sunday Times acknowledged in its apology.

Commenting on that so-called "AmazonGate" episode from the perspective of the new research, Dr Lewis noted:

"The notion that the Amazon is potentially very vulnerable to droughts linked to climate change was reasonable and defensible at the time, and is consistent with the new findings.

"If greenhouse gas emissions contribute to Amazon droughts that in turn cause forests to release carbon, this feedback loop would be extremely concerning.

"Put more starkly, current emissions pathways risk playing Russian roulette with the world's largest rainforest."

From the BBC:

Chernobyl birds are small brained
By Matt Walker
Editor, Earth News

Marsh warblers are one of the species affected

Birds living around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear accident have 5% smaller brains, an effect directly linked to lingering background radiation.

The finding comes from a study of 550 birds belonging to 48 different species living in the region, published in the journal PLoS One.

Brain size was significantly smaller in yearlings compared to older birds.

Smaller brain sizes are thought to be linked to reduced cognitive ability.

The discovery was made by a team of researchers from Norway, France and the US led by Professor Timothy Mousseau from the University of South Carolina, US, and Dr Anders Moller from the University of Paris-Sud, France.

Harmful legacy

In April 1986, reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded.

After the accident, traces of radioactive deposits were found in nearly every country in the northern hemisphere.

An exclusion has since been set up around the site of the accident.

However, scientists have been allowed inside to gauge the impact the radiation has had on the ecology of the region.

Last year Prof Moller and Prof published the results of the largest wildlife census of its kind conducted in Chernobyl - which revealed that mammals are declining in the exclusion zone surrounding the nuclear power plant.

Insect diversity has also fallen, and previously, the same researchers found a way to predict which species there are likely to be most severely damaged by radioactive contamination, by evaluating how often they renew parts of their DNA.

In their latest study, the scientists used mist nets to collect birds from eight woodland sites around Chernobyl, which have seen a decline in the numbers of larger animals and small invertebrates living within.

After controlling for the differences between species, they found that the birds had brains 5% smaller on average compared to birds not exposed to background radiation.

The effect was most pronounced in younger birds, particulary those less than a year old.

That suggests that many bird embryos did not survive at all, due the negative effects of their developing brain.

Mechanism unclear

Stressed birds are able to change the size of some of their organs in order to tough out difficult environmental conditions.

For example, migrating birds that have travelled long distances often shrink certain organs as they use up energy.

But the brain is last organ to be sacrificed in this way, say the researchers.

Chernobyl is largely human-free but still contaminated with radiation

That suggests the background radiation could be having even a more pronounced effect on other organs within the birds.

It is unclear exactly what mechanism is shrinking the birds' brains.

High levels of background radiation causes animals oxidative stress, where they had to use antioxidants in their bodies to fight its ill effects.

That leaves animals exposed to radiation severely depleted of antioxidants, and the reduced brain size may be a result of this depletion.

Alternatively, radiation could cause developmental errors in the way the brain grows.

However, if that was the case, the scientists say they would expect to see pronounced changes to the size and shape of other parts of the birds' bodies.

Another possibility is that the bird's are developing less well as their is less invertebrate prey to eat.

But the scientists know of no example of the brains of a wild animal shrinking due to a lack of food.

From the BBC:

New mosquito type raises concern

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

Scientists have identified a new type of mosquito.

It is a subgroup of Anopheles gambiae, the insect species responsible for most of the malaria transmission in Africa.

Researchers tell Science magazine that this new mosquito appears to be very susceptible to the parasite that causes the disease - which raises concern.

The type may have evaded classification until now because it rests away from human dwellings where most scientific collections tend to be made.

Dr Michelle Riehle, from the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, and colleagues made their discovery in Burkina Faso, where they gathered mosquitoes from ponds and puddles near villages over a period of four years.

When they examined these insects in the lab, they found many to be genetically distinct from any A. gambiae insects previously recorded.

The team grew generations of the unique subtype in the lab to assess their susceptibility to the malaria parasite and this revealed them to be especially vulnerable, more so than indoor-resting insect types.

But Pasteur team-member Dr Ken Vernick cautioned that these mosquitoes' significance for malaria transmission had yet to be established.

"We are in a zone where we need to do some footwork in the field to identify a means to capture the wild adults of the outdoor-resting sub-group," he told BBC News.

"Then we can test them and measure their level of infection with malaria, and then we can put a number on how much - if any - of the actual malaria transmission this outdoor-resting subgroup is responsible for."

The researchers report that the new subgroup could be quite a recent development in mosquito evolution and urge further investigation to understand better the consequences for malaria control.

They also emphasise the need for more diverse collection strategies. The subtype is likely to have been missed, they say, because of the widespread practice of collecting mosquitoes for study inside houses. In one sense this has made sense - after biting, mosquitoes need to rest up and if they do this inside dwellings, the confined area will make them an easier target for trapping. However, the method is also likely to introduce a bias into the populations under study.

Commenting on the study, Dr Gareth Lycett, a malaria researcher from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the UK, said it was an interesting advance that might have important implications for tackling malaria.

"To control malaria in an area you need to know what mosquitoes are passing on the disease in that district, and to do that you need sampling methods that record all significant disease vectors," he told BBC News.

"You need to determine what they feed on, when and where, and whether they are infectious. And where non-house-resting mosquitoes are contributing to disease transmission, devise effective control methods that will complement bed-net usage and house spraying.

"A recent 12m-euro multinational project (AvecNET), funded by the European Union, and led by the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine has the specific aims of doing just this."

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are more than 200 million cases of malaria worldwide each year, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths, most of them in Africa.

Malaria is caused by Plasmodium parasites. The parasites are spread to people through the bites of infected female Anopheles mosquitoes.