From the BBC:

Stereo satellites move either side of Sun

Two US spacecraft have moved either side of the Sun to establish observing positions that should return remarkable new information about our star.

Launched in 2006, the Stereo satellites have gradually been drifting apart - one in front of the Earth in its orbit, the other lagging behind.

On Sunday, Nasa said the spacecraft had arrived at points that put the Sun directly between them.

It will give solar physicists the first 360-degree view of our star.

Stereo is short for Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory.

The mission is studying the Sun's great explosive events that hurl billions of tonnes of charged particles at Earth - events that can disrupt power grids and satellites.

These Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), as they are known, can also be hazardous to astronauts in space.

Professor Richard Harrison of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK, is an investigator on the project.

He told BBC News: "By being away from the Sun-Earth line, you can look back at the space between the Sun and the Earth and see any of these clouds, these coronal mass ejections that are thrown out of the Sun and are coming our way - you can even see these things passing over the Earth. Those are the key to what Stereo's all about."

The two spacecraft will continue to move further apart, heading toward each other on the opposite side of the Sun from the Earth; this means that the full view provided by the two craft will fade, leaving a growing region behind the Sun - on the Earth side - that they do not see.

However, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, launched in Earth orbit a year ago, will remain fixed on the Sun, providing the missing piece of the puzzle.

Achieving an all-round-view view of the Sun will be key to understanding what drives the complex processes in the Sun, believes Professor Harrison.

"You really see it with these widely separated regions of the Sun's atmosphere that are connected magnetically, showing activity at the same time, or causing activity somewhere else," he explained.

"These things stress to us that you can't really study the Sun in great detail just by looking at a bit of it, any more than you could understand the brain by looking at a bit of it or study the Earth's polar regions by looking at the equator. You need this global view to really piece the jigsaw puzzle together."

Scientists suspect that activity on the Sun can on occasions go global, with eruptions on opposite sides of the Sun triggering and feeding off one another. With the Stereo craft in their new positions, this phenomenon can now be studied.

Stereo is already being used to improve "space weather" forecasts for airlines, power companies, satellite operators, and other customers.

Another progress story from the BBC today on the construction of the world's fastest car which I have previously posted:

Construction begins on Bloodhound supercar

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

Construction work formally begins this week on what is expected to be the world's fastest car.

Called Bloodhound, the vehicle has been designed to reach 1,000mph (1,600km/h).

The British car will attempt to set the mark as it breaks the land speed record on a dried out lake bed in South Africa's Northern Cape late next year.

Bloodhound has been in design for the past three years. It will be powered by a Eurofighter-Typhoon jet engine bolted above a hybrid rocket.

The power unit combination should deliver a thrust in the order of 200 kilonewtons (47,000lb). This is not dissimilar to the thrust delivered by one of Concorde's famous Olympus 593 jet engines, except Bloodhound will weigh only about six tonnes.

"It's a fantastic feeling to be handing over the drawings to the people who will now build the car," said chief engineer Mark Chapman. "It's a 'progressive definition release' which means as soon as we finish a design, it goes out the door. The first metal parts should start coming back to our design house in Bristol by Easter," he told BBC News.

The steel-lattice rear chassis will be prepared by aerospace specialists Hampson Industries. They were officially passed the design drawings just a few days ago so that they could start work this week.

Bloodhound's front section will be prepared by Advanced Composites Group, renowned for their work on America's Cup yachts and other hi-tech vehicles that use carbon and glass fibre materials.

ACG will also construct the master models and tooling from which critical elements of the car's bodywork and structural components, such as the monocoque and nose, will be produced.

Bloodhound's Falcon rocket will be the biggest hybrid (solid fuel propellant, liquid oxidiser) booster ever produced in the UK. Such is its scale, it will need a Formula One engine supplied by the legendary Cosworth group just to pump the oxidiser through the motor.

The car's 900mm-diameter wheels will be made from an aluminium alloy. They will have to withstand rotation in excess of 10,000 rpm while at the same time being blasted by grit thrown up by Bloodhound as it sweeps across the lake bed floor. The discs will be made from a grade chosen by Lockheed Martin following simulations that involved firing stone particles at metal plates using a high-powered gas gun.

"If necessary we'll design a fancy mud guard for down the front of the wheels just to protect them," said Mr Chapman. "That's one thing we're still looking at. We're also having one last look at the design of the rear fin before locking out the top of the car."

If it achieves 1,000mph, Bloodhound will surpass the World Land Speed Record set by the Thrust SuperSonic Car in 1997 (763mph; 1,228km/h).

Three people who worked on Thrust are also engaged in the Bloodhound project.

They are driver Wing Cdr Andy Green, project director Richard Noble and chief aerodynamicist Ron Ayres.

The trio envisaged Bloodhound not just as another record bid but as a project that could inspire children to engage in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects. Some 4,000 British schools are now involved in the Bloodhound Education Programme. Many more around the globe have access to online teaching resources via IT partner Intel Corporation's "Skoool" initiative.

Bloodhound is expected to be ready to begin "low speed" trials on a UK runway in the first half of next year before being shipped to Hakskeen Pan in the Northern Cape for high speed runs in late 2012 or 2013.

A private, not-for-profit venture, Bloodhound has received considerable in kind support from the British Ministry of Defence in the form of the loan of two Typhoon engines.

One for the somnabulists, from the BBC:

Sleepwalking 'linked to chromosome fault'

By Michelle Roberts Health reporter, BBC News

Scientists believe they have discovered the genetic code that makes some people sleepwalk.

By studying four generations of a family of sleepwalkers they traced the fault to a section of chromosome 20.

Carrying even one copy of the defective DNA is enough to cause sleepwalking, the experts told the journal Neurology.

They hope to target the genes involved and find new treatments for the condition that affects up to 10% of children and one in 50 adults.

Most often, sleepwalking is a fairly benign problem and something that will be outgrown.

Many children will have episodes where they will arise from their sleep in a trance-like state and wander.

But more extreme cases of sleepwalking can be deeply disruptive and downright dangerous, particularly when the condition persists into adulthood.

Stress trigger

Sleepwalkers may perform complex feats such as locating the car keys, unlocking the doors and then driving.

There have even been high-profile cases where sleepwalkers have killed during an episode.

Despite this relatively little is known about the phenomenon, called somnambulism by medics.

Experts do know that sleepwalking tends to run in families and that some people are particularly susceptible to it.

And factors like being over-tired or stressed can be the trigger.

Typically, episodes happen early in the night, soon after the individual has fallen asleep and is in the deep, dreamless "slow wave" or non-rapid eye movement (NREM) stage of sleep.

By morning, the person will usually have no recollection of the episode.

For the latest study, Dr Christina Gurnett and colleagues at the Washington University School of Medicine sought the help of a large family of sleepwalkers.

The family had been referred to them because one of the youngest members, a 12-year-old girl called Hannah, had been experiencing particularly troublesome sleepwalking, which regularly caused her to leave the house and roam during the night.

Among the four generations of the family, spanning from the great-grandparents downwards, nine members out of the 22 were sleepwalkers.

One family member - an uncle of Hannah's - frequently wakes to find he has put on eight pairs of socks during the night. Some of her other sleepwalking relatives have suffered injuries such as broken toes during their nocturnal wanderings.

Using saliva samples the researchers analysed the family's DNA to unpick the genetics of the condition.

A genome-wide search revealed the problem stemmed from genetic code housed on chromosome 20, and that this code had been passed down from generation to generation. Someone with the gene has a 50% chance of passing it on to their children.

And any individual who inherited a copy of the faulty DNA would be a sleepwalker, they found.

Although they have yet to identify the precise gene or genes involved - there are a potential 28 - their hunch is that it will be the adenosine deaminase gene that is the culprit.

This gene, which sits in the minute segment of chromosome 20 that the researchers identified, is already known to be linked to the slow wave sleep that sleepwalking occurs within.

Dr Gurnett said: "It is likely that several genes will be involved. What we have found is the first genetic locus for sleepwalking.

"We do not know yet which of the genes in this linkage region of chromosome 20 will be responsible. Until we find the gene we won't know whether this accounts for several families or a large number of families who have sleepwalking.

"But discovering these genes could help with identifying and treating the condition."

Dr Malcolm von Schantz, a sleep expert at the University of Surrey, said: "This provides the proof of concept. We are beyond the needle in the haystack stage. It's now become feasible to find out which mutation in which gene is responsible."

From the BBC:

Preparing for climate change 'will boost economy'

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

Early preparation for climate change impacts would bring economic benefits to the UK, say engineers in a report commissioned by the government.

Engineering the Future - an alliance of professional engineering bodies - says companies will be more likely to invest in nations with secure infrastructure.

It urges regulators to improve links between sectors for better planning.

A climate-constrained future will bring more disruption to energy, transport, water and IT, it warns.

This increases the risk of "cascade failures", where a breakdown in one system has knock-on effects on others - such as a flood that takes out the local electricity supply, which in turn affects the mobile phone network.

Potential impacts of climate change covered by the report - Infrastructure, Engineering and Climate Change Adaptation - include:

• damage to roads and railway tracks from prolonged high temperatures
• flooding of drainage networks
• increased damage to buildings from storms

The report concludes that complete protection against climate impacts will not be affordable, and society is going to have to decide what levels of prevention should be funded for various types of threat.

"At the moment, there's no mechanism for having that debate with the public, or even for having it within the regulatory and policy space," said David Nickols, managing director of future energy with engineering consultants WSP Group and a main author on the report.

"We're building infrastructure that's going to last 30 to 40 years, and yet we're not having a debate about whether our children will be happy with what we did."

French connection

Overall, the UK is not doing too badly compared with neighbouring countries, the authors say.

The government has established a national adaptation strategy and major infrastructure providers are having to set out their plans for keeping the country running in a future projected to be several Celsius hotter, with more extreme weather events and higher sea levels around the coast.

The report highlights some ways in which authorities are already adapting.

For example, the Highways Agency recently changed its specification for road surfaces to a French standard, recognising that roads are going to have to cope with higher average temperatures.

However, the engineers cite various ways in which they believe the response is falling short - in particular, through lack of co-ordination between agencies and regulators that ought to be working together.

"There's a bit of a regulatory mess," said Eric Sampson, a visiting professor in transport at Newcastle University.

"Water, rail, electricity - most work has looked at one item in isolation but in fact they're all interlinked and we have to bring them together and look at how one item is affecting another."

In particular, he said, many parts of society depend heavily on energy.

"If the electricity supply goes down, so does the cross-[English] Channel radar system, you can't run Eurostar, you can't run an airport - so there's a total dependence between transport and energy," he said.

Another of the report's authors, information technology specialist Will Stewart from Southampton University, highlighted the total dependence of IT on a reliable electricity supply.

"Total internet business is now about 15% and rising fast, but essentially all business depends on the phone network, mobiles working and credit card payments going through," he said.

Although modern networks offer far more facilities than older technologies, they are typically less resilient, he explained.

Whereas traditional land-line phones would keep working in the event of a power cut, mobile networks and cordless phones are more easily taken offline by outages.

The engineers emphasised that building more resilient infrastructure need not come with a huge price tag - it was mainly a case of understanding the issues and taking sensible, far-sighted decisions.

And taking those decisions early would, they said, bring rewards in a world where many companies were not constrained by national boundaries.

"If your services are more reliable [than your neighbours'], this is where they'll come," said Professor Stewart.

"Effective, reliable infrastructure underpins economic activity - and perception that infrastructure is not resilient does affect investment decisions.

"And there are also consultancy benefits - if we do this sooner and better than other countries, that's saleable."

The report was commissioned by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), which is responsible for climate adaptation.

Ministers will consider its findings as they work on a cross-government strategy on adaptation and infrastructure

From the BBC. Cheers:

Shipwreck's 'oldest beer' to be analysed, brewed again

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Samples of the world's oldest beer have been taken in a bid to determine its recipe - and brew it again.

In July 2010, a Baltic Sea shipwreck dated between 1800 to 1830 yielded many bottles of what is thought to be the world's oldest champagne.

Five of the bottles later proved to be the oldest drinkable beer yet found.

The local government of the Aland island chain where the wreck was found has now commissioned a scientific study to unpick the beer's original recipe.

Divers found the two-mast ship at a depth of about 50 metres in the Aland archipelago, which stretches between the coasts of Sweden and Finland in the Baltic Sea.

The ship was believed to be making a journey between Copenhagen in Denmark and St Petersburg, then the capital of Russia.

The salvaging operation to bring up 145 champagne bottles - since determined to include vintages from Heidseck, Veuve Clicquot, and Juglar - had one casualty: a bottle that burst open at the surface, revealing itself to be beer.

The brew has already been sampled by four professional beer tasters.

"They said that it did taste very old, which is no surprise, with some burnt notes. But it was quite acidic - which could mean theere's been some fermenting going on in the bottle and with time it's become acid," said Annika Wilhelmson of the Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT).

VTT has now been commissioned to get to the bottom of the sunken beer's recipe.

"We're going to try to see if we can find any living yeast or other microbial cells, because that would be very interesting with respect to reproducing the beer," Dr Wilhelmson explained.

"So far we have seen under microscopes that there are yeast and bacterial cells, but we don't know if they're dead or alive yet. If we can't find living microbes, we will look at the DNA and try to compare it to brewing yeasts that we know today, to see how similar or different the yeasts are."

Pinning down which hops have been used on the basis of further chemical analysis may be difficult, Dr Wilhelmson added, meaning that reviving the 200-year-old brew for modern drinkers may prove difficult.

"Whatever we analyse, we're going to have to do a lot of interpreting," she said. "We need to analyse what it is today and start thinking about what it was like when it was made - when it was fresh, becasue it clearly isn't fresh now."

Quoth the raven "Nevermore!" (Poe). From the BBC:

Click here to see this article with pictures

Ravens stressed by 'gang life'
By Ella Davies
Earth News reporter

Life is tough in gangs

Ravens living in juvenile gangs are more stressed than those in adult pairs, a new study reveals.

Scientists analysing droppings found higher levels of stress hormones among birds living in groups.

The findings contradict theories that living in territorial pairs is more energetically demanding than co-operative group life.

Researchers now suggest that stress could be a driving factor in ravens' maturation from groups to pairs.

Ravens are members of the intelligent corvid family that includes crows and magpies.

Young birds live together in social groups and co-operatively share food.

Adult birds meanwhile form pairs, often for life, and aggressively defend their breeding territory.

Our study shows that life in groups is not so heavenly as traditionally thought Dr Nuria Selva

Scientists studying the birds in Bialowieza Forest, Poland, investigated how stressful these different social systems were.

Their findings, published in the journal Biology Letters, caused researcher Dr Nuria Selva some surprise.

"In the case of ravens, it is clear that food finding and sharing is easier when a group of thirty ravens is searching for a carcass, than when only two ravens do it," she said

"But our study shows that life in groups is not so heavenly as traditionally thought."

Previous theories have identified the benefits of group living because young ravens do not have to defend territory or forage alone.

However, the new study's analysis of raven droppings on the forest floor told a different story.

The juvenile gangs' droppings contained much higher levels of the stress hormone corticosterone than the adult pairs'.

The new evidence suggests it may be more energetically demanding to live in groups than to maintain a territory.

Competition for dominance could cause the increased stress, the researchers say.

RAVEN FACTS A group of ravens is sometimes called a congress Common ravens mostly feed on carrion and will store surplus food They are also known to store shiny and unusual objects Watch a devoted raven couple raising a family

Dr Selva also says stress could be a significant factor in ravens' maturation.

"We think that having high stress levels can be an important reason to leave the group," she said.

The pressures of gang life could drive young ravens to set up home in a more stable adult "relationship".

"Somehow, we feel it has many similarities with human life - stressful life in teenage gangs versus a more peaceful live in a pair," said Dr Selva.

A more positive environmental article from the BBC:

Click here to see this article with pictures

Palm oil deal aims to save forests and carbon

  By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

A major palm oil producer is joining forces with environmental campaigners in a bid to ramp up forest protection.

The giant Indonesian company Golden Agri-Resources (GAR) has agreed to work within new standards aimed at saving forests that store a lot of carbon.

International environment group The Forest Trust (TFT) is partnering the company and will monitor compliance.

The palm oil industry has regularly been accused of destroying old-growth forest as demand rockets.

The new deal expands on existing standards agreed under the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), an international alliance of producers, processors, retailers and environment groups.

Already, RSPO rules forbid clearing old-growth forest or land with high conservation value, and developers are also supposed to obtain informed consent from local people before initiating new plantations.

Under the new deal, GAR will go further, vowing not to plant on peat, and not to clear forest where significant carbon is locked up in trees.

This should mean that large tracts of forest that have been partially logged will now be off-limits to the company.

Initially, the figure of 35 tonnes of carbon stored per hectare will be used as a ceiling; but that could change as research progresses.

"We're not trying to undermine the RSPO - we're saying 'this is something you guys need to look at and maybe move towards,'" said Scott Poynton, TFT's executive director.

"Everyone's talking about taking the lead, but no-one's doing it - this is an example of taking the lead," he told BBC News from Indonesia.

Reputational hit

GAR is the world's second-largest producer of palm oil, a product mainly used in food, fuels and cosmetics.

Like other companies in the field, it has been heavily criticised by environmental groups - a state of affairs that it wants to change.

"As a leading player in the palm oil industry, we are committed to playing our role in conserving Indonesia's forests," said Franky Wijaya, GAR's chairman and CEO.

"Our partnership with TFT allows us to grow palm oil in ways that conserve forests and that also respond to Indonesia's development needs; creating much needed employment while building shareholder value."

Earlier in the year, TFT finalised a deal with Swiss-based food giant Nestle designed to "ensure that its palm oil procurement had no deforestation footprint".

This led to discussions with suppliers such as GAR - and the conclusion that in order to preserve their markets, growers would have to purify their operations.

Greenpeace, which has taken the lead on the issue among international NGOs, sees the deal as a potential step forwards.

"This is really throwing a gauntlet down to the rest of the palm oil sector, and to other players," said campaigner Phil Aikman.

"It's setting a threshold for carbon, and that's pretty good - it'll protect a lot of orangutan habitat and other important areas that have been threatened by palm oil plantations.

"It challenges the rest of the sector to increase its productivity rather than target new areas over and over again, and that's been the main issue."

With RSPO, another issue has been compliance, with a number of companies accused of failing to live up to their promises.

But TFT says it will be working closely with GAR to make sure pledges are delivered.

I have seen on their website today that the BBC has just changed its terms and conditions. As their images may or may not be in their copyright, this means that in future I cannot display photographs. So in future I will include a link to their article which would include the photographs. This would also apply to their video and audio clips, but as I have never been able to include these but provided links, this doesn't matter.

I have always acknowledged the BBC as the source.

From the BBC:

Click here to see this article with pictures.

Robots to get their own internet

By Mark Ward Technology correspondent, BBC News

Robots could soon have an equivalent of the internet and Wikipedia.

European scientists have embarked on a project to let robots share and store what they discover about the world.

Called RoboEarth it will be a place that robots can upload data to when they master a task, and ask for help in carrying out new ones.

Researchers behind it hope it will allow robots to come into service more quickly, armed with a growing library of knowledge about their human masters.

Share plan

The idea behind RoboEarth is to develop methods that help robots encode, exchange and re-use knowledge, said RoboEarth researcher Dr Markus Waibel from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

"Most current robots see the world their own way and there's very little standardisation going on," he said. Most researchers using robots typically develop their own way for that machine to build up a corpus of data about the world.

This, said Dr Waibel, made it very difficult for roboticists to share knowledge or for the field to advance rapidly because everyone started off solving the same problems.

By contrast, RoboEarth hopes to start showing how the information that robots discover about the world can be defined so any other robot can find it and use it.

RoboEarth will be a communication system and a database, he said.

In the database will be maps of places that robots work, descriptions of objects they encounter and instructions for how to complete distinct actions.

The human equivalent would be Wikipedia, said Dr Waibel.

"Wikipedia is something that humans use to share knowledge, that everyone can edit, contribute knowledge to and access," he said. "Something like that does not exist for robots."

It would be great, he said, if a robot could enter a location that it had never visited before, consult RoboEarth to learn about that place and the objects and tasks in it and then quickly get to work.

While other projects are working on standardising the way robots sense the world and encode the information they find, RoboEarth tries to go further.

"The key is allowing robots to share knowledge," said Dr Waibel. "That's really new."

RoboEarth is likely to become a tool for the growing number of service and domestic robots that many expect to become a feature in homes in coming decades.

Dr Waibel said it would be a place that would teach robots about the objects that fill the human world and their relationships to each other.

For instance, he said, RoboEarth could help a robot understand what is meant when it is asked to set the table and what objects are required for that task to be completed.

The EU-funded project has about 35 researchers working on it and hopes to demonstrate how the system might work by the end of its four-year duration.

Early work has resulted in a way to download descriptions of tasks that are then executed by a robot. Improved maps of locations can also be uploaded.

A system such as RoboEarth was going to be essential, said Dr Waibel, if robots were going to become truly useful to humans.

From the BBC:

Spice drug fights stroke damage'

A drug derived from the curry spice turmeric may be able to help the body repair some of the damage caused in the immediate aftermath of a stroke.

Researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles are preparing to embark on human trials after promising results in rabbits.

Their drug reached brain cells and reduced muscle and movement problems.

The Stroke Association said it was the "first significant research" suggesting that the compound could aid stroke patients.

Turmeric has been used for centuries as part of traditional Indian Ayurvedic medicine, and many laboratory studies suggest one of its components, curcumin, might have various beneficial properties.

However, curcumin cannot pass the "blood brain barrier" which protects the brain from potentially toxic molecules.

The US researchers, who reported their results to a stroke conference, modified curcumin to come up with a new version, CNB-001, which could pass the blood brain barrier.

The laboratory tests on rabbits suggested it might be effective up to three hours after a stroke in humans - about the same time window available for current "clot-busting" drugs.

Chain reaction

Dr Paul Lapchak, who led the study, said that the drug appeared to have an effect on "several critical mechanisms" which might keep brain cells alive after a stroke.

Although strokes kill brain cells by depriving them of oxygenated blood, this triggers a chain reaction which can widen the damaged area - and increase the level of disability suffered by the patient.

Dr Lapchak said that CNB-001 appeared to repair four "signalling pathways" which are known to help fuel the runaway destruction of brain cells.

However, even though human trials are being planned, any new treatment could still be some time away.

Dr Sharlin Ahmed, from The Stroke Association, said that turmeric was known to have health benefits.

She said: "There is a great need for new treatments which can protect brain cells after a stroke and improve recovery."

"This is the first significant research to show that turmeric could be beneficial to stroke patients by encouraging new cells to grow and preventing cell death after a stroke.

"The results look promising, however it is still very early days and human trials need to be undertaken."

From the BBC:

Click here to see this article with pictures

Fossil find puts 'Lucy' story on firm footing

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

New fossil evidence seems to confirm that a key ancestor of ours could walk upright consistently - one of the major advances in human evolution.

The evidence comes in the form of a 3.2 million-year-old bone that was found at Hadar, Ethiopia.

Its shape indicates the diminutive, human-like species Australopithecus afarensis had arches in its feet.

Arched feet, the discovery team tells the journal Science, are critical for walking the way modern humans do.

"[The bone] gives a glimpse of foot anatomy and function," explained William Kimbel, director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, US.

"It is the fourth metatarsal bone, which resides on the outside of the middle part of your foot, and which helps support the well-developed arches of the foot that we see in the soles of modern human feet.

"The bone that was recovered from the Hadar site has all the hallmarks of the form and function of the modern human foot," he told the BBC.

Arch types

Palaeo-scientists knew A. afarensis spent some of its time standing tall; that much has been clear since 1974 when they first examined a skeleton of the species, famously dubbed "Lucy", also found near the village of Hadar in the Ethiopian rift valley.

But the absence of important foot bones in all of the specimens uncovered to date has made it difficult for researchers to understand precisely how much time Lucy and her kin spent on their feet, as opposed to moving through the branches of trees.

Human feet are very different from those of other primates. They have two arches, longitudinal and transverse.

These arches comprise the mid-foot bones, and are supported by muscles in the soles of the feet.

This construction enables the feet to perform two critical functions in walking. One is to act as a rigid lever that can propel the body forwards; the other is to act as a shock absorber as the feet touch the ground at the end of a stride.

In our modern ape cousins, the feet are more flexible, and sport highly mobile large toes that are important for gripping branches as the animals traverse the tree tops.

Professor Kimbel and colleagues tell Science journal that the feet of A. afarensis' say a lot about the way it lived.

It would have been able to move across the landscape much more easily and much more quickly, potentially opening up broader and more abundant supplies of food, they say.

"Lucy's spine has the double curve that our own spine does," Professor Kimbel said.

"Her hips functioned much as human hips do in providing balance to the body with each step, which in a biped of course means that you're actually standing on only one leg at a time during striding.

"The knees likewise in Lucy's species are drawn underneath the body such that the thighbone, or femur, angles inwards to the knees from the hip-joints - as in humans.

"And now we can say that the foot, too, joins these other anatomical regions in pointing towards a fundamentally human-like form of locomotion in this ancient human ancestor."

A. afarensis is thought to have existed between about 2.9 million and 3.7 million years ago, and the Hadar area has yielded hundreds of fossil specimens from the species.

Long road

Commenting on the latest research, Professor Chris Stringer, a palaeoanthropologist at London's Natural History Museum, said scientists were gradually filling in the detail of this creature's position in the human origins story.

"Bipedalism in Lucy is established, but there has been an issue about how much like our own that bipedalism was," he told BBC News.

"Was it a more waddling gait or something more developed?

"And certainly there's evidence in the upper body that the Australopithecines still seemed to have climbing adaptations - so, the hand bones are still quite strongly curved and their arms suggest they're still spending time in the trees.

"If you are on the ground all the time, you need to find shelter at night and you are in a position to move out into open countryside, which has implications for new resources - scavenging and meat-eating, for example.

"If the Australopithecines were on that road, they were only at the very, very beginning of it."

From the BBC:

Click here to see this article with pictures

Global data storage calculated at 295 exabytes

By Jon Stewart Presenter, BBC World Service

Mankind's capacity to store the colossal amount of information in the world has been measured by scientists.

The study, published in the journal Science, calculates the amount of data stored in the world by 2007 as 295 exabytes.

That is the equivalent of 1.2 billion average hard drives.

The researchers calculated the figure by estimating the amount of data held on 60 technologies from PCs and and DVDs to paper adverts and books.

"If we were to take all that information and store it in books, we could cover the entire area of the US or China in 13 layers of books," Dr Martin Hilbert of the University of Southern California told the BBC's Science in Action.

Information revolution

Computer storage has traditionally been measured in kilobytes, then megabytes, and now usually gigabytes. After that comes terabytes, petabytes, then exabytes. One exabyte is a billion gigabytes.

The same information stored digitally on CDs would create a stack of discs that would reach beyond the moon, according to the researchers.

Scientists calculated the figure by estimating the amount of data held on 60 analogue and digital technologies during the period from 1986 to 2007. They considered everything from computer hard drives to obsolete floppy discs, and x-ray films to microchips on credit cards.

The survey covers a period known as the "information revolution" as human societies transition to a digital age. It shows that in 2000 75% of stored information was in an analogue format such as video cassettes, but that by 2007, 94% of it was digital.

"There have been other revolutions before." Dr Hilbert told the BBC's Science in Action programme.

"The car changed society completely, or electricity. Every 40, 50 or 60 years something grows faster than anything else, and right now it's information.

"Basically what you can do with information is transmit it through space, and we call that communication. You can transmit it through time; we call that storage. Or you can transform it, manipulate it, change the meaning of it, and we call that computation."

Other results from the global survey show that we broadcast around two zettabytes of data (a zettabyte is 1000 exabytes). That's the equivalent of 175 newspapers per person, per day.

The fastest growing area of information manipulation has been computation. During the two decades the survey covers, global computing capacity increased by 58% per year.

These numbers may sound large, but they are still dwarfed by the information processing and storage capacity of nature.

"The Human DNA in one single body can store around 300 times more information than we store in all our technological devices" according to Dr Hilbert.

This study looked at the world as a whole, but the scientists say that it does show that the "digital divide" between rich and poor countries is growing. Despite the spread of computers and mobile phones, the capacity to process information is becoming more unequal.

In 2002 people in the developed world could communicate eight times more information than people in the developing world. Just five years later, in 2007, that gap has nearly doubled, and people in richer countries have 15 times more information carrying capacity.

The study also pinpoints the arrival of the digital age as 2002, the first year worldwide digital storage capacity overtook analogue capacity.

From the BBC - the story behind the ship in Moby Dick - The Pequod:

'Moby Dick' captain's ship found

US marine archaeologists have found the sunken whaling ship belonging to the captain who inspired Herman Melville's classic 19th Century novel, Moby Dick.

The remains of the vessel, the Two Brothers, was found in shallow waters off Hawaii.

Captain George Pollard was the skipper when the ship hit a coral reef and sank in 1823.

His previous ship, the Essex, had been rammed by a whale and also sank, providing the narrative for the book.

'Pretty amazing'

The remains of the Two Brothers were found by researchers from America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), about 600 miles (965 km) north-west of Honolulu in the remote chain of islands and atolls.

The wooden vessel has disintegrated in the warm waters, but the researchers found harpoons, a hook for stripping whales of their blubber and cauldrons used to turn whale blubber into oil.

"To find the physical remains of something that seems to have been lost to time is pretty amazing," said Nathaniel Philbrick, an author and historian, who has been researching the Two Brothers, the Essex and their captain.

"It just makes you realise these stories are more than stories. They're about real lives."

The sinking of the Two Brothers was relatively uneventful compared with the Essex's run-in with the sperm whale in 1821.

After the Essex sank, Capt Pollard and his crew drifted at sea without food and water for three months and even resorted to cannibalism before they were rescued.

Pollard gave up whaling and became a night watchman in Nantucket, Massachusetts.

While Meville was inspired by Pollard's adventures, the unlucky seafarer's character is not thought to have been the basis for the novel's obsessive Capt Ahab.

From the BBC:

Click here to see this article with pictures

Spinning black holes 'twist light'

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Researchers have proposed a means to spot rotating black holes.

The idea may provide the first unique signature of black holes, which - true to their name - have never been seen.

The approach, reported in Nature Physics, relies on a property of light called its orbital angular momentum.

The roiling nature of the fabric of space-time around spinning black holes should impart a "twist" in this momentum which could be detected here on Earth, the researchers say.

Light particles known as photons carry two kinds of momentum - a kind of energy carried in motion - but only one of them is familiar.

"If we take the Earth as an example, it spins around its own axis in about 24 hours - that's its spin angular momentum, and it also moves in orbit around the Sun - that's its orbital angular momentum," explained Bo Thide, a co-author of the paper.

"Photons can carry both," he told BBC News.

The spin angular momentum of photons manifests itself in the familiar phenomenon of polarisation - an effect that some sunglasses and even 3D glasses exploit.

But orbital angular momentum is trickier, and though it was predicted by the father of electromagnetic theory James Clerk Maxwell, it took until 1992 for experimentalists to find a way to manipulate it.

'That's relativity'

Now Professor Thide, of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, and his colleagues have shown how the unique conditions around a spinning black hole could also impart orbital angular momentum to passing light.

"Around a spining black hole, space and time behave in such an odd way; space becomes time, time becomes space, and the whole space-time is acutally dragged around the black hole, becomes twisted around the black hole," Professor Thide explained.

"If you have radiation source... it will then sense this twisting of spacetime itself. The light ray may think that 'Wahey, I'm propagating in a straight line', but if you look at it from the outside, you see it's propagating along a spiral line. That's relativity for you."

The idea that spinning black holes could leave their imprint on passing light was first put forward by Martin Harwit of Cornell University in 2003 in an article in the Astrophysical Journal.

Professor Harwit presumed the light would be coming from some point beyond the black hole and simply passing nearby, and his calculations showed the effect would be minimal.

Professor Thide's team have now shown that the light emission from the swirling disc of material hypothesised to be around black holes, which emits intense light, would show the imprint more profoundly - enough to be spotted by the biggest telescopes on Earth, if their operators knew what they were looking for.

Champagne, no supernova

The great masses that sit at the centres of galaxies including our own Milky Way are by consensus presumed to be black holes, and if they are, are likely to be spinning. So a signature of light that can reveal spinning black holes is a potentially powerful tool in discovering how our galaxy is put together.

"While this effect has been known to theorists for some time, it has been regarded as obscure and of no practical importance," said Saul Teukolsky, an astrophysicist and black hole expert at Cornell University in Ithaca, US.

"What is exciting here is the prospect it might be used to measure the spin of the black hole at the center of our galaxy - the measurement will be difficult, though," he told BBC News.

In fact, to put the method into practice, only the very largest telescope arrays can be used. Professor Thide said that the Very Large Array in New Mexico, and the coming Square Kilometer Array and Atacama Large Millimetre Array telescopes could be the proving grounds for the idea.

"You would have to modify (the telescope arrays) slightly - probably only through software, and then you combine the signals in a way that's never been done before," he explained.

"If we are lucky, we should see the twisted light stand out, and then we open a bottle of champagne or two."

On the BBC radio news this morning:

Zinc can be an 'effective treatment' for common colds

By Michelle Roberts Health reporter, BBC News

Taking zinc syrup, tablets or lozenges can lessen the severity and duration of the common cold, experts believe.

A review of the available scientific evidence suggests taking zinc within a day of the onset of cold symptoms speeds recovery.

It may also help ward off colds, say the authors of the Cochrane Systematic Review that included data from 15 trials involving 1,360 people.

But they say zinc cannot be used long-term because of toxicity concerns.

Excessive amounts can cause nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain and diarrhoea.

Now more work is needed to determine the exact dosing required, say the experts.

Cold viruses

Adults catch between two to four colds a year and children up to 10 a year.

There is little a person can do to avoid these infections because the viruses responsible are so commonplace.

Cold viruses can be passed from person to person not only by coughs and sneezes but also by touching contaminated surfaces such as door handles.

There is no proven treatment for the common cold, but experts believe zinc medications may help prevent and lessen infections by coating the common cold viruses and stopping them from entering the body through the thin lining of the nose.

It also appears to stop the virus from replicating, at least in laboratory tests.

There is also the suggestion that zinc aids the immune system and may dampen down some of the unpleasant reactions the body has to an invading virus.

Speedy recovery

Lead researcher Meenu Singh, of the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh, India, said: "This review strengthens the evidence for zinc as a treatment for the common cold.

"However, at the moment, it is still difficult to make a general recommendation, because we do not know very much about the optimum dose, formulation or length of treatment."

According to trial results, zinc syrup, lozenges or tablets taken within a day of the onset of cold symptoms reduce the severity and length of illness.

At seven days, more of the patients who took zinc remedies every couple of hours during the daytime had cleared their symptoms compared to those who took placebos.

And children who took 15mg of zinc syrup or zinc lozenges daily for five months or longer caught fewer colds and took less time off school.

But the 15 trials in the review all used different treatment timescales and doses, making it impossible to reach a consensus.

And the people who used zinc also reported more side effects, such as an unpleasant aftertaste or nausea, than the placebo group.

Editor in Chief of the Cochrane Library, David Tovey, said: "This is a treatment that is showing some promise which, where treating the common cold is concerned, is unusual.

"Although there are many over-the-counter cold remedies already available, we are not awash with things that can stop cold symptoms or greatly reduce their severity.

"But there is still uncertainty about the best doses, timings and formulations and more studies will be needed to look at this."

Professor Ronald Eccles, Director of the Common Cold Centre at Cardiff University, remained doubtful about zinc's benefits as a cold treatment in current formulations.

He said zinc's toxicity would also be a potential concern if taken over longer periods.

From the BBC:

Sun unleashes huge solar flare towards Earth

By Paul Rincon Science reporter, BBC News

The Sun has unleashed its strongest flare in four years, observers say.

The eruption is a so-called X-flare, the strongest type; such flares can affect communications on Earth.

Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spacecraft recorded an intense flash of extreme ultraviolet radiation emanating from a sunspot.

The British Geological Survey (BGS) has issued a geomagnetic storm warning, and says observers might be able to see aurorae from the northern UK.

The eruptions are expected to hit the Earth's magnetic field field over the next couple of days, causing an increase in geomagnetic activity.

The monster flare was recorded at 0156 GMT on 15 February and directed at the Earth. According to the US space agency, the source of this activity - sunspot 1158 - is growing rapidly.

Solar flares are caused by the sudden release of magnetic energy stored in the Sun's atmosphere.

Preliminary data from the Stereo-B and Soho spacecraft suggest that the explosion produced a fast but not particularly bright coronal mass ejection (CME) - a burst of charged particles released into space.

The unpredictable activity on the Sun can interfere with modern technology on Earth, such as electrical power grids, communications systems and satellites - including the satellite navigation (or sat-nav) signals used on Earth.

On Wednesday, the BGS released a rarely seen archive of geomagnetic records that provide an insight into "space weather" stretching back to the Victorian era.

BGS scientists says that studying past solar activity could inform the prediction of future space weather and help mitigate threats to national infrastructure.

In 1972, geomagnetic storm provoked by a solar flare knocked out long-distance telephone communication across the US state of Illinois.

And in 1989, another storm plunged six million people into darkness across the Canadian province of Quebec.

Displays of the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis) have already been seen further south than usual in Northern Ireland and elsewhere in the UK. And further activity is expected over the next few days.

Researchers say the Sun has been awakening after a period of several years of low activity.

This is an time lapse image of this solar flare I found on the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory website.

From the BBC:

Click here to see this article with pictures

Scientists build the world's first anti-laser

Physicists have built the world's first device that can cancel out a laser beam - a so-called anti-laser.

The device, created by a team from Yale University, is capable of absorbing an incoming laser beam entirely.

But this is not intended as a defence against high-power laser weapons, the researchers said.

Instead they think it could be used in next-generation supercomputers which will be built with components that use light rather than electrons.

Professor Douglas Stone and colleagues at Yale University had initially been developing a theory to explain which materials could be used as the basis of lasers.

Strange lasers

Recent advances in laser design have resulted in a number of unusual devices that do not fit the traditional concept of a laser, Professor Stone explained.

"So we were working on a theory that could predict what could be used to form a laser," he said.

That theory also predicted that instead of amplifying light into coherent pulses, as a laser does, it should be possible to create a device that absorbs laser light hitting it, said Professor Stone - an anti-laser.

They have now succeeded in building one.

Their device focuses two lasers beams of a specific frequency into a specially designed optical cavity made from silicon, which traps the incoming beams of light and forces them to bounce around until all their energy is dissipated.

In a paper published in the journal Science they demonstrated that the anti-laser could adsorb 99.4 per cent of incoming light, for a specific wavelength.

Light speed

Altering the wavelength of the incoming light means that the anti-laser can effectively be turned on and off - and that could be used in optical switches, Professor Stone told BBC News.

Building something which can absorb light over a wide range of wavelengths is pretty simple, said Professor Stone, but only doing so for a particular wavelength makes the anti-laser potentially useful in optical computing.

The anti-laser's big advantage is that it is built using silicon, which is already widely used in computing.

It would not, however, be much use as a laser shield, according to Professor Stone.

"The energy gets dissipated as heat. So if someone sets a laser on you with enough power to fry you, the anti-laser won't stop you from frying," he said.

From the BBC:

Brain and body training treats ME, UK study says

Writing in The Lancet, they argue that the approach preferred by some charities, managing energy levels, is less successful.

Action for ME disputed the claims, which it said were exaggerated.

A quarter of a million people in the UK have the condition, yet its cause remains unknown.

Symptoms include severe tiredness, poor concentration and memory, muscle and joint pain and disturbed sleep.

This study looked at which treatments were the most successful. It compared CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy - changing how people think and act), graded exercise therapy - gradually increasing the amount of exercise, and adaptive pacing therapy - planning activity to avoid fatigue.

All of the 641 people who took part in the study had chronic fatigue syndrome, but were not bed-bound.

The authors say cognitive behavioural and graded exercise therapies were the most successful, both at reducing fatigue and increasing physical function.

With cognitive behavioural therapy, 30% of patients returned to normal levels of fatigue and physical function.

They say that adaptive pacing therapy is little better than basic medical advice.

Professor Michael Sharpe, co-author of the study from the University of Edinburgh, said: "One of the difficulties in the field is ambiguity, what is the cause and most importantly, what is the treatment?

"The evidence up to now has remained controversial. The helpful thing about this trial is that it actually gives pretty clear cut evidence about effectiveness and safety."

Exaggerated

But the charity Action for ME said the conclusions were exaggerated and questioned the safety of graded exercise therapy.

Its CEO, Sir Peter Spencer, said: "The findings contradict the considerable evidence of our own surveys.

"Of the 2,763 people with ME who took part in our 2008 survey, 82% found pacing helpful, compared with 50% for cognitive behavioural therapy and 45% for graded exercise therapy.

"Worryingly, 34% reported that graded exercise therapy made them worse."

The authors suggest that poor advice, such as suggestions to just go to the gym, could be responsible for bad experiences with the exercise therapy.

They said that the amount of exercise needed to be tailored to each person.

The Association of Young People with ME welcomed the findings.

It said it hoped that fears about graded exercise and CBT were laid to rest, and that the study needed to be repeated in children.

Professor Willie Hamilton, GP and professor of primary care diagnostics at Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry, said: "This study matters, it matters a lot.

"Up until now we have known only that CBT and graded exercise therapy work for some people. We didn't know if pacing worked. This caused a real dilemma, especially for those in primary care. We didn't know whether to recommend pacing, or to refer for CBT or GET.

"Worse still, not all GPs have access to CBT or GET, so ended up suggesting pacing almost by default. This study should solve that dilemma."

NICE (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) said the findings were in line with current recommendations.

Dr Fergus Macbeth, director of the centre for clinical practice at NICE, said: "We will now analyse the results of this important trial in more detail before making a final decision on whether there is a clinical need to update our guideline."

From the BBC:

'Music of the stars' now louder

The Kepler space telescope measures the sizes and ages of stars five times better than any other means - when it "listens" to the sounds they make.

Bill Chaplin, speaking at the AAAS conference in Washington, said that Kepler was an exquisite tool for what is called "astroseismology".

The technique measures minuscule variations in a star's brightness that occur as soundwaves bounce within it.

The Kepler team has now measured some 500 far-flung stars using the method.

Bill Chaplin of the University of Birmingham told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that astroseismology was, in essence, listening to the "music of the stars".

But it is not sound that Kepler measures. Its primary job is spotting exoplanets, by measuring the tiny dip in the amount of light that it sees whan a planet passes in front of a distant star.

Such precision light-level measurements also work for astroseismology, because as sound waves resonate within a star, they slightly change both the brightness and the colour of light that is emitted.

Researchers can deduce the acoustic oscillations that gave rise to the ripples on the light that Kepler sees.

Like a musical instrument, the lower the pitch, the bigger the star. That means that the sounds are thousands of times lower than we can hear.

But there are also overtones - multiples of those low frequencies - just like instruments, and these give an indication of the depth at which the sound waves originate, and the amount of hydrogen or helium they are passing through.

Since stars fuse more and more hydrogen into helium as they grow older, these amounts give astroseismologists a five-fold increase in the precision of their age estimates for stars.

"With conventional astronomy, when we look at stars we're seeing the radiation emitted at their surfaces; we can't actually see what's happening inside."

"Using the resonances, we can literally build up a picture of what the inside of a star looks like - there's no other way of doing that. It's not easy to do, but we're now getting there, thanks to Kepler."

Kepler is not the first mission to lend itself to astroseimology; Canada's Most and Esa's Corot satellites, for example, are designed specifically to collect similar data.

But just the first few months of observations by Kepler has provided scientists with data on hundreds of stars, whereas Dr Chaplin said that only about 20 have been studied in detail before.

"Suddenly we have this huge database to mine," he said.

"I could literally spend the rest of my research career working on these data - we're just starting to mine them."

From the BBC:

Click here to see this article with pictures

Device 'could revolutionise blood pressure monitoring'

A device which can be worn like a watch could revolutionise the way blood pressure is monitored in the next few years, scientists say.

Researchers at the University of Leicester and in Singapore have developed a device to measure pressure in the largest artery in the body.

Evidence shows it gives a much more accurate reading than the arm cuff.

The technology is funded by the Department of Health and backed by Health Secretary Andrew Lansley.

It works by a sensor in the watch recording the pulse wave of the artery, which is then fed into a computer together with a traditional blood pressure reading from a cuff.

Scientists are then able to read the pressure close to the heart, from the aorta.

Professor Bryan Williams, from the University of Leicester's department of cardiovascular sciences at Glenfield Hospital, said: "The aorta is millimetres away from the heart and close to the brain and we have always known that pressure here is a bit lower than in the arm.

"Unless we measure the pressure in the aorta we are not getting an appreciation of the risks or benefits of treatment."

He said the device would "change the way blood pressure has been monitored for more than a century" and he expected the technology to be used in specialist centres soon, before being "used much more widely" within five years.

"The beauty of all of this is that it is difficult to argue against the proposition that the pressure near to your heart and brain is likely to be more relevant to your risk of stroke and heart disease than the pressure in your arm," he said.

But it was important to ensure the new device was as small as possible to encourage clinicians and patients to use it, he added.

The research work was funded by the Department of Health's National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).

The NIHR invested £3.4m, with a further £2.2m of funding coming from the Department of Health, to establish a Biomedical Research Unit at Glenfield Hospital in Leicester.

The university collaborated with the Singapore-based medical device company HealthSTATS International.

Dr Choon Meng Ting, chairman of HealthSTATS, said: "This study has resulted in a very significant translational impact worldwide as it will empower doctors and their patients to monitor their central aortic systolic pressure easily, even in their homes and modify the course of treatment for blood pressure-related ailments."

Mr Lansley said the device was "a great example of how research breakthroughs and innovation can make a real difference to patients' lives".

Judy O'Sullivan, senior cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, said previous research had shown that measuring pressure close to the heart was a better indicator of the effectiveness of treatment for high blood pressure than the standard method.

"However, further research is needed before we can be certain of its superiority in the doctor's surgery," she said.

Is science fiction becoming fact? From the BBC:

Click here to see this article with video clip and picture

'Printing out' new ears and skin

By Jason Palmer and Matt Danzico BBC News, Washington DC

Hod Lipson: 'People have been trying to expand the range of materials that can be fabricated using a 3D printer'

The next step in the 3D printing revolution may be body parts including cartilage, bone and even skin.

Three-dimensional printing is a technique for making solid objects with devices not unlike a computer printer, building up line by line, and then vertically layer by layer.

While the approach works with polymers and plastics, the raw ingredients of 3D printing have been recently branching out significantly.

The printers have been co-opted even to make foods, and do-it-yourself biology experiments dubbed "garage biotech" - and has most recently been employed to repair a casting of Rodin's sculpture The Thinker that was damaged in a botched robbery.

But at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC, the buzzword is bioprinting: using the same technique to artfully knock out new body parts.

Print preview

James Yoo, of the Institute of Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University, told the meeting of his group's aim to print skin directly onto burn victims.

"What motivated us to start this programme and development is the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq," he said.

"Up to 30% of all injuries and casualties that occur from the war involve the skin, and using bioprinting we thought that we could address some of the challenges they're facing with burn care."

Professor Yoo's group is developing a portable system that can be brought directly to burn victims.

"What's unique about this device is that it has a scanner system that can identify the extent and depth of the wound, because every wound is different," he said.

He added: "That scan gets converted into 3D digital images; that determines how many layers of cells then need to be deposited to restore the normal configuartion of the injured tisue."

Hod Lipson, director of the Computational Synthesis Laboratory at Cornell University, brought a 3D printer to the conference, to demonstrate how his well-established project, named Lab@Home, is branching out into bioprinting - by creating an ear.

Ear today

The machine starts with a computer file with the 3D coordinates from a scan of a real ear.

For the demonstration, the real cells that the group would normally use have been replaced with silicone gel in order to bioprint the shape.

The team has also published its results from bioprinting repairs in damaged animal bone.

But the method is still in its infancy, and several technical hurdles lie between the groups' current efforts and a future in which injured body parts are repaired digitally on-site or simply printed out fresh.

"Some tissues can be handled more easily than others," Professor Lipson said.

"We and our colleagues have started with cartilage; it's amorphous, it doesn't have a lot of internal structure and vascularisation - that's the entry level point to start with.

"That has been fairly successful in animal models, and that would be the first thing you'll see used in practice. From there we'll climb the complexity of tissue, going to bone, or perhaps liver."

Another concern is that bioprinted tissues aren't easy to connect to the real thing.

"One of the advantages of using the computerised printing is that you can create a tissue construct in a more accurate manner than when you're trying to build someting manually," Professor Yoo said.

"But how can we create and connect those tissues produced outside the body?Whatever you put in the body has to be connected with the body's blood vessels, blood supply and oxygen. That's one of the challenges we'll face with larger tissues."

Whatever the challenges ahead, Professor Lipson told BBC News that he believed bioprinting will overcome them to become a standard technique.

"If I have to guess, I'd say that in 20 years this technology will be mainstream, absolutely," he said.

From the BBC:

Click here to see this article with video clip and picture

Messenger Nasa probe will soon enter Mercury orbit

By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News, Washington DC

The arrival of a Nasa probe in orbit around Mercury will transform our understanding of the innermost planet.

Messenger will be the first probe to orbit Mercury; it was previously visited by the Mariner 10 spacecraft, which made several passes in the 1970s.

The team behind the mission were outlining details to scientists at a conference in Washington DC.

Messenger has already made three flybys of Mercury and is set to enter orbit around the rocky world on 17 March.

When Mariner 10 visited the planet in 1974, it sent back pictures of what seemed to some at the time an uninteresting planet compared with Venus, Mars and the Solar System's gas giants.

But Dr Nancy Chabot who is Messenger's instrument scientist Mercury was "under-appreciated".

But observations from Earth began to show that for from being boring, Mercury may well be unique.

It is a planet of extremes. The world is the closest to the Sun, yet it could have ice at its poles.

And it has a giant metal core unlike any of the other inner Solar System planets. Planetary scientists began to think that understanding Mercury might be the key to understanding how all the inner rocky planets formed. And so the Messenger mission was born.

According to Dr Chabot "What you can learn when you are in orbit is so different from when you are just flying past by gathering data as you go. This is really going to revolutionise what we know about this planet".

Messenger will be the first spacecraft to study Mercury's geology in detail. In particular, scientists will be interested in data from the planet's giant core.

There are three theories as to how the planet came to have such an inner structure: It was created that way; it used to be much larger and a giant impact ripped off much of the rocky crust; or, most intriguingly, that Mercury was once much larger - but an early solar event partially vapourised its surface.

The Messenger mission should help determine which of these theories is correct.

From the BBC:

Click here to see this article with pictures

Tawny owls turn brown to survive in warmer climates, according to scientists in Finland.

Feather colour is hereditary, with grey plumage dominant over brown. But the study, published in the journal Nature Communications, found that the number of brown owls was increasing.

As winters become milder, the scientists say, grey feathered tawny owls are likely to disappear.

This study indicates that the birds are evolving in response to climate change.

Climate-driven selection has led to an evolutionary change in the population Dr Patrik Karell University of Helsinki, Finland Tawny owl, pictures & stunning videos: BBC Wildlife Finder

Dr Patrik Karell from the University of Helsinki, who led the study, gathered together data from long-term tawny owl studies carried out across Finland over the last 30 years.

The owls can be split into two plumage-based categories - brown or grey.

The colour of a tawny owl's plumage does not change throughout its lifetime, so Dr Karell and his colleagues were able to use the data to create "colour maps" of breeding pairs and their offspring.

The maps showed that plumage colour was hereditary; pairs with grey plumage had the grey "version" of the gene that coded for plumage colour, so they produced grey offspring.

In the case of mixed colour breeding pairs, the grey colour trait was "dominant", which meant that an owlet that inherited both grey genes and brown genes would be likely to have grey plumage.

Lighter shade

Tawny owls have two plumage colours, grey (left) and brown (right)

The team examined tawny owl data, which was compiled by amateur bird ringers from the Finnish Museum of Natural History.

This revealed that, in years when winter weather was particularly severe, there was a higher mortality rate in the brown owl population.

This could be because brown owls were more visible to predators when there was thick snow cover.

Previous genetic studies have also suggested that brown owls' may have other disadvantages compared to their grey counterparts, including weaker immune systems and higher metabolic rates - meaning they need to forage more in order to survive.

But as the winters have become warmer, and snow cover has been reduced, the brown tawny owl populations have greatly increased.

Dr Karell told BBC News that the brown owls, which used to form 30% of the tawny owl population in Finland, now make up 50%.

"Its survival has improved as winters have become warmer," he said. "In other words, climate-driven selection has led to an evolutionary change in the population."

The results also suggest that a changing climate could, in some species, reduce the number and variety of characteristics that can be inherited.

If the grey owls disappeared from the "gene pool", for example, there would be only one version of the colour gene to be found.

From the BBC:

Click here to see this article with video clip and pictures.

Dinosaur named 'thunder-thighs'

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

Scientists have named a new dinosaur species "thunder-thighs" because of the huge thigh muscles it would have had.

Fossil remains recovered from a quarry in Utah, US, are fragmentary but enough to tell researchers the creature must have possessed extremely powerful legs.

The new species, described in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, is a sauropod - the family of dinosaurs famous for their long necks and tails.

It could have given other animals a hefty kick, say its discoverers.

"If predators came after it, it would have been able to boot them out of the way," said Dr Mike Taylor, from University College London, UK.

The team has named its dinosaur Brontomerus mcintoshi - from Greek "bronto", meaning "thunder"; and "merós", meaning "thigh".

The fossilised bones of two specimens - an adult and a juvenile - have been dated to be about 110 million years old.

They were rescued from the Hotel Mesa Quarry in Grand County, Utah.

The site has been looted by commercial fossil-hunters and so scientists have probably been denied the full range of material from which to make their classification.

Nonetheless, those bones they do have sport tell-tale features that mark out an extraordinary species.

Chief among them is a hip-bone, called the ilium, which is unusually large in comparison to that of similar dinosaurs.

The wide, blade-shaped bone projects forward ahead of the hip socket, providing a proportionally massive area for the attachment of muscles.

"As you put the skeleton together, you can run muscles down from the hip-bone to join at the knee and that gives you a whopping thigh," Dr Taylor told BBC News.

"What's interesting is that if it were a sauropod that could move particularly fast, you would expect to see very strong muscles on the back of the leg to pull it along. But we don't; this is the opposite. It seems most likely to us that what this is about is being able to deliver a strong kick," he told BBC News.

The paleo-scientists speculate that the larger specimen in their possession is the mother of the juvenile.

The adult would have weighed about six tonnes - something like the size of a large modern elephant - and probably measured 14m in length.

At a third of the size, the juvenile would have weighed in at about 200kg - the size of a pony - and been 4.5m long.

Brontomerus was living in what geologists term the Early Cretaceous Period.

Some other marks on the fossils give additional clues to what sort of lifestyle the creature had and the environment it faced.

"The shoulder blade of Brontomerus has unusual bumps that probably mark the boundaries of muscle attachments, suggesting that Brontomerus had powerful forelimb muscles as well," explained team-member Dr Matt Wedel, from the Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, California.

"It's possible that Brontomerus mcintoshi was more athletic than most other sauropods. It is well established that far from being swamp-bound hippo-like animals, sauropods preferred drier, upland areas; so perhaps Brontomerus lived in rough, hilly terrain and the powerful leg muscles were a sort of 'dinosaur four-wheel drive'."

The team also believes the find is significant for its position in Earth history, in that it challenges the notion that sauropods began to disappear in the Early Cretaceous.

"Because sauropods were the most abundant dinosaurs found during the Jurassic Period and the rarest during the Early Cretaceous, there's long been the perception that sauropods were successful in the Jurassic and were replaced by duckbills and horned dinosaurs in the Cretaceous," said Dr Wedel.

"In the past 20 years, however, we are finding more sauropods from the Early Cretaceous period, and the picture is changing. It now seems that sauropods may have been every bit as diverse as they were during the Jurassic, but much less abundant and so much less likely to be found."

Dr Taylor is disappointed that more of Brontomerus could not be recovered, and wonders whether larger fossil pieces are being held in some unknown private collection.

"The fossil-hunters basically pillaged this site," he told BBC News.

"They left behind broken remnants and smashed bits of bone; and in some cases they were using broken bones to hold down tarpaulins - that's really the most disgraceful aspect of it."

Lol
If you want funding, link your subject to climate change.
Then again, they could have just checked the temperature records

From the BBC:

Alcohol in moderation 'can help prevent heart disease'

An alcoholic drink a day can help keep heart disease at bay, according to a review of 30 years of research.

The work, published in the British Medical Journal, showed a 14% to 25% reduction in heart disease in moderate drinkers compared with people who had never drunk alcohol.

Another article, by the same Canadian research group, showed alcohol increased "good" cholesterol levels.

But experts said this was not a reason to start drinking.

For many years, studies have suggested that drinking alcohol in moderation has some health benefits.

Scientists at the University of Calgary reviewed 84 pieces of research between 1980 and 2009.

Reduced risk

One unit of alcohol in the UK, equivalent to half a pint of normal beer, contains 8g of pure alcohol.

This review showed that the overall risk of death was lower for those consuming small quantities of alcohol, 2.5g to 14.9g, compared with non-drinkers.

The researchers also say regular moderate drinking reduced all forms of cardiovascular disease by up to 25%.

However, while consuming small quantities of alcohol had a beneficial effect on the number of strokes and stroke deaths, the risk increased substantially with heavier drinking.

Professor William Ghali, from the Institute for Population and Public Health at the University of Calgary, told the BBC: "Our extensive review shows that drinking one or one to two drinks would be favourable.

"There is this potentially slippery slope, most notably with social problems and alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver, but the overall mortality including cancer and accidents shows you would be better with alcohol."

Moderation

Cathy Ross, senior cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, said: "This analysis of previous studies supports what we already know about moderate drinking reducing our risk of cardiovascular disease.

"However, drinking more than sensible amounts of alcohol does not offer any protection and can cause high blood pressure, stroke, some cancers and damage to our heart.

"If you don't drink, this is not a reason to start. Similar results can be achieved by being physically active and eating a balanced and healthy diet."

The researchers believe any beneficial effects are down to the alcohol itself, rather than anything else in a drink.

Their second study suggests that drinking up to 15g a day for women or 30g for men increased levels of good cholesterol, adiponectin and apolipoprotein, which have been linked to a healthy heart.

They said this pattern was true for all types of beverage.

The research group believes that governments may have to change their messages on public health to argue for drinking alcohol in moderation.

Prof Ghali said: "There's no doubt a public health campaign would be controversial. We need to ponder the message of how a doctor talks to a patient and how the government talks to the people."

Professor Lindsey Davies, president of the Faculty of Public Health, added: "It just strengthens the argument that a little bit does you good, but a lot does you harm, but that always makes a public health message hard."

From the BBC:

Click here to see this article with video clip and picture

Record yellow diamond on show in Natural History Museum

By Samantha Smith Science reporter, BBC News

A bright yellow diamond weighing more than 110 carats has gone on display in London's Natural History Museum.

The Sun Drop, roughly the size of a woman's thumb, is one of the biggest of its type in the world.

It is on loan to the museum from diamond manufacturers Cora International.

Most diamonds are small and colourless - those in jewellery are typically less than five carats.

Colour in diamonds is caused by the presence of other substances or structural defects.

Tiny amounts of boron create a blue stone, while exposure to radiation at some point during formation will result in a green tint.

Pink diamonds are created by structural defects, while yellow diamonds are the result of traces of nitrogen in the carbon.

But strong colours are unusual, and larger stones with high levels of colour are especially rare.

Alan Hart, the Natural History Museum's minerals curator, told BBC News: "I've never seen a stone such as this."

"A one carat diamond is what most people are familiar with, and are really pleased to own. You can see how exceptional this diamond is."

Cora International chief executive Suzette Gomes told BBC News the cut was vital in bringing out a diamond's beauty.

"If the colour is weaker you would cut a square… to keep the colour and make it stronger. If your colour's very strong, you would cut a pear shape."

From finding a diamond in the rough to presenting a finished, polished, precious stone can take up to six months.

The stone is carefully analysed, as imperfections and inclusions can cause it to shatter when cutting begins.

Ms Gomes says the process is "like art… it takes a lot of courage and experience".

Neither Mr Hart nor Ms Gomes would be drawn on the possible price of the diamond.

Ms Gomes said pricing stones was "not something we normally talk about," adding that "the value at the moment is undetermined".

Mr Hart added that, to the Museum, "the real value with these gems is that they're exceptional, they're one-offs".

From the BBC:

Sea turtles' migration mystery is 'solved'

By Camille Ebden BBC News

Until now, how species such as loggerhead sea turtles manage to migrate thousands of miles across oceans with no visual landmarks has been a mystery.

Now researchers from the University of North Carolina believe they have found the answer.

Loggerhead sea turtles appear to be able to determine their longitude using two sets of magnetic cues.

It is the first time this ability has been shown in any migratory animal.

This research is published in the journal Current Biology.

Although several species of turtles are known to use magnetic cues to determine latitude, it was believed that this wasn't possible for longitude.

However, the loggerhead turtles have managed to surprise researchers by developing a method that involves using the strength and angle of the Earth's magnetic field.

Nathan Putman, the lead author of the research, emphasised that "the most difficult part of open-sea navigation is determining longitude or east-west position".

"It took human navigators centuries to figure out how to determine longitude on their long-distance voyages."

Loggerhead hatchlings, however, are able to manage this feat as soon as they reach the sea from their nests.

On reaching the sea, the hatchlings are able to establish the correct course to the open ocean.

The young loggerheads then spend several years successfully navigating complex migratory routes over thousands of miles of ocean.

To carry out the research loggerhead hatchlings from Florida were placed in circular water containers and tethered to electronic tracking systems to monitor their swimming direction.

The hatchlings were then exposed to magnetic fields which replicated the fields they would come across in two locations on the same latitude but different longitude along their migratory route.

The turtles reacted to each magnetic field by swimming in the directions that would, in the real location, take them along their circular migratory route.

The researchers say this shows that the hatchlings are able to determine longitude using information from the magnetic field.

Nathan Putman explains that "along the migratory route of loggerheads, nearly all regions are marked by unique combinations of intensity (field strength) and inclination angle (the angle that field lines intersect the surface of the Earth)".

"Thus, turtles can determine longitudinal position by using pairings of intensity and inclination angle as an X, Y coordinate system".

Dr Kenneth Lohmann, director of the laboratory where this research was carried out, said the research "not only solves a long-standing mystery of animal behaviour but may also be useful in sea turtle conservation".

The research might even have a role to play in the development of human navigational technologies, according to Nathan Putman.

"There may be situations where satellite might not be available, where this system of using two aspects of a magnetic field could be very useful"

From the BBC:

Intel launches high speed Thunderbolt connector

Chip manufacturer Intel has announced it is to roll out a new technology for connecting computers and peripherals.

The system, know as Thunderbolt, promises transfer speeds twice as fast as USB 3.0.

However it won't reach its theoretical maximum because Intel has opted to use copper wires rather than fibre optic cables.

The company said it would gradually move to higher speeds over time.

Apple will become the first manufacturer to use Thunderbolt, on its Macbook Pro computers.

The Cupertino firm is said to have been a major driver of its development, although it remains to be seen how may other manufacturers will adopt the new standard.

Light Peak

Intel has been working on the technology for several years.

It was first announced, under the codename Light Peak in 2009.

At launch, its top speed will be limited to 10 Gigabits per second - twice as fast as USB 3.0, but still well below the theoretical maximum using optical cables.

Intel claims that future versions will be able to reach 100 Gb/sec.

The faster data transfer rates are likely to be welcomed by those consumers who use high-definition video, said Sarah Rottman Epps, an analyst with Forrester Research.

"This isn't an innovation that consumers have been asking for, but it's one they'll appreciate," she said.

"Especially when transferring video, as that's when [USB] starts to feel slow."

The system also promises to reduce the number of cables a user has connecting their computer setup.

It is able to carry multiple signal types at the same time, enabling power, display and peripherals to use a single cable.

However, in the short term, users may need to invest in special adaptors to connect their older devices onto Thunderbolt sockets.

Its arrival on the consumer market also raises questions about the future of other connector standards, such as USB and Firewire.

Thunderbolt's most high profile supporter, Apple, is expected to gradually transition to a single connector, according to Karen Haslam, editor of Macworld UK.

"In the long run there will be no need for Apple to support these multiple formats with individual ports - existing products can run through an adaptor," she said.

Not everyone is convinced that Thunderbolt will become the lone standard.

Ian Chiu, editor of the website Everythingusb.com told BBC News that the cost of components could put off some manufacturers.

"I don't really know how Intel will make Thunderbolt appealing to all the other first-tier PC manufacturers," he said.

"HP, Sony, Dell, Acer, Asus make most of their money from the low-end and medium-end notebooks.

"On the other hand, Apple's Macbook Pro line-up is targeted at the prosumers, professionals and other people who aren't so price conscious," said Mr Chiu.

From the BBC:

Dark matter theory challenged by gassy galaxies result

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

A controversial theory that challenges the existence of dark matter has been buoyed by studies of gas-rich galaxies.

Instead of invoking dark matter, the Modified Newtonian Dynamics theory says that the effects of gravity change in places where its pull is very low.

The new paper suggests that Mond better predicts the relationship between gassy galaxies' rotation speeds and masses.

However, critics maintain that dark matter theory is a better general description of the Universe we see.

The study, available online, will be published in Physical Review Letters.

The theory that first proposed dark matter was developed in large part to account for mass that, if everything else we think about gravity is correct, seemed to be missing in rotating galaxies.

Standard formulations of gravity have it that matter circling, for instance, spiral galaxies, should rotate more slowly with increasing distance from the centre of the galaxy - much as the outer planets in our Solar System orbit more slowly than their innermost counterparts.

But the matter in rotating galaxies seems consistently to rotate with roughly equal speed near their cores and at their edges.

In the standard dark matter theory, cosmologists proposed a massive yet invisible quantity of material in order to solve this "flat rotation curve" problem.

This dark matter is imagined to exist in a "halo" around galaxies, providing the extra gravitational pull necessary to speed up those outlying bodies.

By contrast, Modified Newtonian Dynamics (Mond) first appeared in 1983, when Mordehai Milgrom of the Weizmann Institute in Israel proposed it in an Astrophysical Journal paper.

As a modification to the dearly-held formulation of gravity laid out by Isaac Newton, the theory came immediately under fire. It has always maintained a minority position among theories proposed to solve the missing mass problem.

Trompe le Mond

Now, Stacy McGaugh of the University of Maryland in the US says that a study of galaxies that have few stars and are dominated by gas adds weight to the Mond theory.

The current work hinges on what is known as the Tully-Fisher relation, which maps out the interplay between galaxies' mass and their speed of rotation.

However, mass estimation is a tricky business because it depends on the amount of light a galaxy emits, which varies considerably with the types and quantities of stars it contains.

To get around this error, Professor McGaugh studied 47 gas-rich galaxies with few stars, known as low surface-brightness galaxies.

He found that the Mond theory neatly predicts the relation between the galaxies' masses with their rotation speed - and contends that dark matter theory would do so far less accurately.

"My attitude toward low surface brightness galaxies at first was 'great, this will finally be able to falsify the Mond theory'," Professor McGaugh told BBC News, "but it was the only thing that explains this shift in the relation."

"Whenever I look at smallish things like individual galaxies it works really well."

However, he conceded that "when you get up to the big scale of clusters of galaxies and you try to apply Mond to the whole thing, you fall short of fixing the missing mass problem".

Dan Hooper, a theoretical astrophysicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the US, said that Professor McGaugh's formulation "overstates the case" in that it assumes all galaxies will have the same ratio of normal matter to dark matter.

"That's not what we'd expect," he told BBC News.

"Some galaxies have very little stars and gas material compared to dark matter, and we don't expect the biggest galaxies to have the same fraction - which would change the shape of that line (relating galactic mass to spin speed)."

"I don't think the Mond/dark matter debate hinges on the Tully-Fisher anymore," he added. "Mond only explains galaxies - everything else it fails to do or simply can't address."

Nevertheless, Mond still counts several prominent cosmologists among its adherents, and Professor McGaugh said his work continues to show that Mond is a serious contender that dark matter theory will have to work to disprove.

"Sometimes I wish I didn't work on this," Professor McGaugh said. "If your own data don't get in your face about this, it's easy to say 'so-and-so screwed up'."

He maintains that Mond represents a missing piece of the dark matter model that a majority of his peers hold to be a complete picture of the makeup of our Universe.

"At the very least, it's telling us something about dark matter that's not native to our current model."

From the BBC:

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From the BBC:

Click here to see this article with pictures

Meteorites 'could have carried nitrogen to Earth'

By Neil Bowdler Science reporter, BBC News

A meteorite found in Antarctica could lend weight to the argument that life on Earth might have been kick-started from space, scientists are claiming.

Chemical analysis of the meteorite shows it to be rich in the gas ammonia.

It contains the element nitrogen, found in the proteins and DNA that form the basis of life as we know it.

The researchers say meteorites like this could have showered the early Earth, providing the missing ingredients for life.

Details of the study by researchers at Arizona State University and the University of California, Santa Cruz, are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Life story

The new study is based on analysis of just under 4g of powder extracted from a meteorite called Grave Nunataks 95229 (named after its place of discovery in Antarctica), discovered in 1995.

On treatment, the powder sample was shown to contain abundant amounts of ammonia as well as hydrocarbons.

Professor Sandra Pizzarello, who led the research, says the study "shows that there are asteroids out there that when fragmented and become meteorites, could have showered the Earth with an attractive mix of components, including a large amount of ammonia".

Meteorites like this could have supplied the early Earth with enough nitrogen in the right form for primitive life forms to emerge, she says.

Previous studies have focused on the "Murchison" meteorite, which hit Australia in 1969, which was found to be rich in organic compounds.

The professor says Murchison is "too much of a good thing" and contains hydrocarbon molecules which you would expect to find at the end rather than the start of the life story.

She believes the composition of these compounds are too complex and too random in their molecular shape to have played a role in life on Earth.

Asteroid belt

The theory that our planet may have been seeded by a comet or asteroid arises partly from the belief the formative Earth might not have been able to provide the full inventory of simple molecules needed for the processes which led to primitive life.

The suggestions is that the Asteroid Belt, between Mars and Jupiter, away from the heat and pressure of the forming planets, could have been a better place for such processes.

Collisions between asteroids within the belt produce meteoroids which shoot off around the Solar System and which can carry materials to the Earth.

Dr Caroline Smith, a meteorite expert at London's Natural History Museum agrees the important element in the new study is the nitrogen, even though she would like to see similar results repeated in other meteorites.

"One of the problems with early biology on the early Earth is you need abundant nitrogen for all these prebiological processes to happen - and of course nitrogen is in ammonia.

"A lot of the evidence shows that ammonia was not present in much abundance in the early Earth, so where did it come from?"

What specifically caused life to begin on Earth remains a mystery. Professor Pizzarello hypothesises material from a meteorite may have interacted with environments on Earth such as volcanoes or tidal pools, but says all remains a matter of guess work.

"You find these extraterrestrial materials (in meteorites) which have what you need," she says, "but on the how and when, in which environments and by what means - really, we don't know."

"You can only say that yes, it seems that the extraterrestrial environments could have had the good stuff."

From the BBC:

Click here to see this article with pictures

Microscope with 50-nanometre resolution demonstrated

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News
UK researchers have demonstrated the highest-resolution optical microscope ever - aided by tiny glass beads.

The microscope imaged objects down to just 50 billionths of a metre to yield a never-before-seen, direct glimpse into the "nanoscopic" world.

The team says the method could even be used to view individual viruses.

Their technique, reported in Nature Communications, makes use of "evanescent waves", emitted very near an object and usually lost altogether.

Instead, the beads gather the light and re-focus it, channeling it into a standard microscope, allowing researchers to see with their own eyes a level of detail that is normally restricted to indirect methods such as atomic force microscopy or scanning electron microscopy.

Using visible light - the kind that we can see - to look at objects of this size is, in a sense, breaking light's rules.

Normally, the smallest object that can be seen is set by a physical property known as the diffraction limit.

Light waves naturally and inevitably "spread out" in such a way as to limit the degree to which they can be focused - or, equivalently, the size of the object that can be imaged.

At the surfaces of objects, these evanescent waves are also produced.

As the name implies, evanescent waves fade quickly with distance. But crucially, they are not subject to the diffraction limit - so if they can be captured, they hold promise for far higher resolution than standard imaging methods can provide.

Going viral

"Previously, people including ourselves have been using microspheres for focusing light for fabrication purposes, so we can machine features smaller than the diffraction limit," explained Lin Li, of the University of Manchester's Laser Processing Research Centre.

"It just came to my mind that if we reverse it, we might be able to see small features as well, so that is the reason we carried out this piece of research," he told BBC News.

Professor Li and his colleagues used glass beads measuring between two and nine millionths of a metre across, placed on the surfaces of their samples.

The beads collect the light transmitted through the samples, gathering up the evanescent waves and focusing them in such a way that a standard microscope lens could pick them up.

The team imaged minuscule features in various solid samples and even the nanometre-scale grooves in Blu-Ray discs to show that the approach's resolution beat all previous records for optical microscopy.

But Professor Li thinks the technique holds great promise for biological studies, for which the action at the nanoscale is difficult to see directly.

"The area we think will be of interest will be looking at cells, bacteria, and even viruses," he said.

"Using the current technology, it is very time consuming; for example, using fluorescence optical micoscopy, it takes two days to prepare one sample and the success rate of that preparation is 10 to 20%. That illustrates the potential gain by introducing a direct method of observing cells."

Ortwin Hess of Imperial College London said that "it's really quite fascinating and exciting to see these effects coming together".

"If you use the fact that you do generate those (evanescent waves) and focus them again, then you have a tight focal point that you wouldn't normally expect to have," he told BBC News.

"It's quite a nice phenomenon that they've absolutely exploited."

From the BBC:

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Sharks navigate using 'mental maps'

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News
Some shark species make "mental maps" of their home ranges, allowing them to pin-point destinations up to 50km (30 miles) away, research suggests.

US-based scientists analysed data from tiger sharks tagged with acoustic transmitters, and found that they took directed paths from place to place.

Other species such as blacktip reef sharks did not show this behaviour.

Writing in the Journal of Animal Ecology, researchers suggest this shows a capacity to store maps of key sites.

In addition, it is further evidence that the great fish can navigate, possibly using the Earth's magnetic field.

Earlier research in Hawaii had shown tiger sharks swimming across deep channels and finding shallow banks rich in food 50km away.

In this project, researchers used statistical techniques to show the journeys were not made by accident; the sharks were following some kind of path.

Blacktips, however, did not. A third species, thresher sharks, also showed "directed walking" like the tigers, but on much smaller scales.

"Our research shows that, at times, tiger sharks and thresher sharks don't swim randomly but swim to specific locations," said research leader Yannis Papastamatiou from the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.

"Simply put, they know where they are going."

Maps and magnets

A key question is how they know where they are going.

Sharks are among the wide array of animals that can sense magnetic fields.

But whereas others, such as yellowfin tuna, apparently do this using small amounts of the mineral magnetite in their heads, sharks do not appear to maintain deposits of this magnetic sensor.

Alternative possibilities are that they use signals from ocean currents, water temperature or smell.

"They have to have a pretty good navigation system because the distances are great," Dr Papastamatiou told BBC News.

"Which one it is is open to debate, but the fact that many of these journeys took place at night - you and I would think there's nothing to orientate to, so orientating to magnetic fields is one possibility."

Among thresher sharks, adults made much longer directed journeys than juveniles.

The researchers say this suggests the fish build up mental maps as they mature.

The differences between species are probably explained by the varying ways in which they live.

Blacktip reef sharks (Carcharhinus melanopterus), although widespread around the Pacific, appear to have small ranges within their home reef system.

On the other hand, tiger sharks (Galeocerdo cuvier) can cover huge distances. Tags have been recovered from individuals more than 3,000km away from where they were attached.

From the BBC:

'Tractor beam' is possible with lasers, say scientists

A laser can act as a "tractor beam", drawing small objects back toward the laser's source, scientists have said.

It is known that light can provide a "push", for example in solar sails that propel spacecraft on a "wind of light".

Now, in a paper on the Arxiv server, researchers from Hong Kong and China have calculated the conditions required to create a laser-based "pull".

Rather than a science fiction-style weapon, however, the approach would only work over small distances.

The effect is different from that employed in "optical tweezers" approaches, in which tiny objects can be trapped in the focus of a laser beam and moved around; this new force, the authors propose, would be one continuous pull toward the source.

And it relies on directly impinging on an object, making it distinct from an approach demonstrated in 2010 by Australian researchers whose trapping worked by heating air around a trapped particle.

The trick is not to use a standard laser beam, but rather one known as a Bessel beam, that has a precise pattern of peaks and troughs in its intensity.

Seen straight-on, a Bessel beam would look like the ripples surrounding a pebble dropped in a pond.

If such a Bessel beam were to encounter an object not head-on but at a glancing angle, the backward force can be stimulated.

As the atoms or molecules of the target absorb and re-radiate the incoming light, the fraction re-radiated forward along the beam direction can interfere and give the object a "push" back toward the source.

'Radical idea'

"Light can indeed pull a particle," the authors wrote, "...and this may open up new avenues for optical micromanipulation, of which typical examples include transporting a particle backward over a long distance and particle sorting."

Ortwin Hess at Imperial College London called the work - which has not yet been peer-reviewed - as "fascinating", saying that it "takes a radical idea forward".

"It's a bit like a boat moving through water," Professor Hess told BBC News. "In the eddies you generate as part of that forward movement, there are areas that literally seem to be pulling back.

"The ship has a shape, and you get these backward eddies at the side; in a similar way if you have a Bessel beam you have certain areas that do the same thing."

However, he remarked that the effect is only predicted to occur over a short distance - and that the effect first of all needs to be demonstrated in practice.

"It's a very good start," he said. "As always with theory, if one doesn't obtain a theoretical argument that things are impossible for some reason, then it can happen."

From the BBC:

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Antarctic ice sheet built 'bottom-up'

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

Scientists have seen once again just how dynamic a place the underside of the Antarctic ice sheet can be.

Survey data collected from the middle of the White Continent shows liquid water is being frozen on to the bottom of the sheet in huge quantities.

In places, this deeply buried add-on layer is hundreds of metres thick and represents about half of the entire ice column, researchers say.

The discovery is reported online in the journal Science.

Project leaders confess to being astonished by the findings.

"It's jaw-dropping, I have to say," said Professor Robin Bell from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

"The first time I showed the data to colleagues, there was an audible gasp," she told BBC News.

The new data will add to the understanding of how the ice sheet expands and moves, which in turn will inform researchers as they try to grasp how Antarctica might change in a warmer world.

The observations come from a major expedition to survey the Gamburtsev mountain range in the polar summer of 2008-2009.

Although similar to the European Alps in scale, the Gamburtsevs are hidden under kilometres of ice deep in the Antarctic interior.

An expeditionary team used instrumented planes to gather a wealth of new information about the peaks and their ice shroud.

Equipment included radar to see through the ice, showing its many layers, right down to the rock bed.

The survey data also gives new insights into how liquid water funnels through the mountains' valleys.

It is well known that ice sheets grow from the top down, as snow settles on the surface and is compacted over thousands of years.

But the new findings illustrate clearly how the sheet can also grow from the bottom up by accumulating layers of liquid water.

Sub-glacial water can be maintained in a liquid state at the bottom of the sheet, either by the intense pressure of the overlying ice or by being in contact with the warmth of the bedrock.

But if the water is forced up valley sides to locations of lower pressure, or into ponds in places away from retained heat in rocks, then it will rapidly turn to ice - and can stick to the bottom of the sheet above.

The survey data reveals that this add-on ice makes up 24% of the ice sheet base around Dome A, a 4.2km-high plateau of ice that represents the greatest elevation on the continent.

And in some other places, this refreeze phenomenon accounts for slightly more than half of the total ice thickness.

That means in these locations, ice is being created faster on the bottom of the sheet than it is being accumulated through snow deposition on the top.

New dimensions

Liquid water at the base of the sheet has long been recognised to be a "lubricant" for movement, but the latest data adds a whole new dimension to our understanding, said Professor Bell.

"We've known there's been melting under ice sheets from a long time - since the 1960s," she explained.

"Then it was demonstrated this water could move, it could slosh around; but I think we still had this idea that it just spilled into the ocean.

"Well, now we can show these hydrologic systems are modifying the fundamental stratigraphy of the ice sheet."

The discovery also has implications for the search for ancient ice.

Scientists are looking for a location to drill accumulated snow layers, because bubbles trapped in the layers retain information about the climate at the time of precipitation.

Currently, the oldest ice core climate record in the Antarctic extends back about 800,000 years.

Potentially, a core drilled from around Dome A could find ice that was laid down more than a million years ago.

The latest data could have a positive or a negative bearing on that search, said Dr Tom Jordan from the British Antarctic Survey.

"The new process we're observing suggests old ice could be pushed up towards the surface, which could make this very old ice that would give you a very long climate record much more accessible," he told BBC News.

"So instead of having to drill a three-kilometre core, the record might have been pushed to within a kilometre of the surface.

"That's the good news; but it's balanced against the recognition that in these places where we've found these structures, we may also be getting significant melting, deformation and destruction of ice sheet records.

"We'll have to choose a drill site very carefully; we can't just throw a dart in a board."

The Gamburtsev survey was a flagship expedition for International Polar Year (IPY), comprising scientists, engineers, pilots and support staff from the US, the UK, Germany, Australia, China and Japan.

The team established two field camps from which to mount the airborne campaign.

As well as the ice-penetrating radar, other instruments measured the local gravitational and magnetic fields.

Some 120,000km were flown in total, the equivalent of three trips around the globe.

More than 20% of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet was explored.

An update from the BBC on the 1000 mph car project I have mentioned before.

Click here to see this article with video clip and pictures

UK rocket test for 1,000mph car

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News
The first full test firing of the rocket that will power a British car to over 1,000mph (1,600km/h) will take place in the coming months.

Producing 122kN (27,000lb) of thrust, the hybrid Falcon motor will be the largest rocket to be ignited in the UK for 20 years.

It will not be the only power unit in the Bloodhound vehicle when it tries to break the land speed record next year.

There will also be a jet from a fighter plane and the engine from an F1 car.

The team behind the project believes this trio of power units could secure the absolute land speed record for Britain for many years to come.

"We are creating the ultimate car; we're going where no-one has gone before," said Richard Noble, the Bloodhound project director.

Several locations are being considered for the rocket test.

They include places with historic connections to the land speed record - places such as Pendine in West Wales where several records were set in the 1920s, and at Shoeburyness in eastern England where the engines for the current record holder, the Thrust SSC vehicle, were tested. Both these locations have military evaluation centres.

Bloodhound's 45cm-wide, 3.6m-long (18in by 12ft) rocket will be British designed and built.

It will burn a mixture of solid propellant (HTPB, or hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene) and liquid oxidiser (high-test peroxide, HTP) for 20 seconds.

To put its peak thrust of 122kN in context, it is equivalent to the combined power of about 645 family saloon cars.

Added to the 90kN of thrust coming from the EJ200 Eurofighter-Typhoon jet, Bloodhound should have sufficient energy to put itself 8km away from a standing start in just 100 seconds.

The rocket is being developed by the Falcon Project Ltd, a specialist rocketry company based in Manchester and led by 27-year-old self-trained rocketeer Daniel Jubb.

"We've done 10 firings to date of our six-inch model - that was in the Mojave Desert in California," explained Mr Jubb.

"We've also done one on the 18-inch Bloodhound model, but it was pressure-fed; it wasn't done using our new pump and that's the point about this upcoming test."

The Falcon will need almost a tonne of HTP pushed through it, which is the job of the F1 engine.

Cosworth, which manufactures power units for several cars on the F1 grid, are making one of their CA2010 engines available just to drive the Falcon's oxidiser pump.

Engineers at Cosworth will have to meet several new challenges to make the CA2010 work in Bloodhound. For one thing, it is sitting back-to-front compared with its usual mounting in an F1 vehicle, and this means its oil lubricant will move about the engine in a different way.

This will need to be managed carefully if the engine is to run efficiently. The design team also has to figure out how to let the engine "breathe" when it is sitting in a car moving at 1,000mph.

"To the best of my knowledge there isn't a piston engine operating anywhere that's in a vehicle that's running at supersonic speed," said Cosworth chief executive Tim Routsis.

"It means the way you actually connect the engine to the outside world needs an awful lot of thought because if we were to feed it a supersonic airflow we would give it a fairly epic amount of boost and it would be very powerful for an extremely short period of time.

"In areas like this, we are moving into the unknown."

The production of the Bloodhound car's body formally began last month. The vehicle should be finished and ready to begin "low speed" trials on a UK runway in the first half of next year before being shipped to Hakskeen Pan in the Northern Cape for high-speed runs in late 2012 or 2013.

The Bloodhound venture was conceived not just as another record bid but as a project that could inspire children to engage in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects.

Some one and a half million children in more than 4,000 British schools are now involved in the Bloodhound Education Programme.

Many more around the globe have access to online teaching resources via IT partner Intel Corporation's "Skoool" initiative.

"When Richard first talked to me about Bloodhound I got very engaged, very quickly, because I saw it as a wonderful platform through which we can introduce the young boys and girls to the sort of world that we work in," said Mr Routsis.

"We can show them that STEM subjects are not just boring things you do in a classroom, but they can actually lead to an extremely interesting set of challenges that you can address in a very fulfilling life."

From the BBC:

Click here to see this article with video clip and picture

'Light sheets' image life in 3D

Painting a better picture of life going about its business at the microscopic scale requires a trick of the light.

A report in Nature Methods describes how "light sheets" allow researchers to take images of cellular processes in action, in unprecedented detail.

These slivers of light illuminate just the part of a living cell that is in focus, and 3D images are made from many of these thin planes stacked up.

The approach could provide a previously unachievable view of living things.

That is because the very best imaging methods known so far do their work on cells that are fixed in place and whose cellular machinery has ground to a halt.

"Most of the techniques I've developed look at dead cells," said Eric Betzig, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) physicist who led the research.

"You can get a lot of information looking at fixed, dead cells - high-resolution information - but you'd still like to be able to see dynamics," he told BBC News.

"There's a lot you can learn from actually watching things wiggle around."

Light relief

The principal techniques in cell biologists' toolboxes are known as confocal and wide-field microscopy. But they suffer from two shortcomings, both caused by the nature of the light that is used to illuminate the sample.

One is that spatial resolution - the size down to which objects like cell components can be distinctly resolved - is not the same in all directions, leading to "elongated blobs" in images.

But another is the fact that cells do not appreciate being in the limelight for long.

"When you try to study live cells for any length of time, the light itself starts to harm the cells, and eventually they literally curl up and die," Dr Betzig explained.

"So there needs to be some way of getting around that."

The solution is known as plane illumination.

Instead of shining light through a sample from the bottom and looking at what passes through it, plane illumination aims to shoot light in from the side in a thin sheet, only in the plane on which a microscope is focused.

The image is formed from what bounces off the sample and up toward the microscope's lens.

This plane illumination has been used to great effect before, but the new publication takes the approach to a level of resolution both in space and in time that is unprecedented.

The secret is the use of what are known as Bessel beams (recently highlighted in a report detailing how lasers can be used as "tractor beams").

Rather than being uniform across their width, Bessel beams have a strong, narrow central point and are much weaker at the side.

The team also used what is known as a two-photon approach to ensure that the central portion of the beam - what Dr Betzig calls the "long pencil of light" - is the only part that contributes to an image.

By scanning their Bessel beams rapidly across living samples and flashing them on and off, the team could build up two-dimensional pictures as tiny strips of their sample were illuminated.

By then slightly shifting upward and downward the plane at which the microscope was focused, a number of these 2D slices could be acquired, and "stacked together" to create a 3D image.

The team can create 200 of these slices in a second, forming an image of whole, living cells - and single cell parts - caught in the act of, for instance, cell division and signalling.

While a wealth of other imaging techniques can offer higher resolution, the team's effort is superlative for the study of living cells.

They have improved the resolution through the sample - the fineness of detail they can see - by more than a factor of three over prior cell-imaging techniques, and they can acquire images far faster.

"We have for the first time a technology that allows you to look at the three-dimensional complexity of what's going on, at the sort of rates at which things happen within cells," Dr Betzig said.

Announced on Reuters today:

A NASA scientist reports detecting tiny fossilized bacteria on three meteorites, and maintains these microscopic life forms are not native to Earth.

If confirmed, this research would suggest life in the universe is widespread and life on Earth may have come from elsewhere in the solar system, riding to our planet on space rocks like comets, moons and other astral bodies.

The study, published online late Friday in The Journal of Cosmology (journalofcosmology.com), is considered so controversial it is accompanied by a statement from the journal's editor seeking other scientific comment, which is to be published starting on Monday.

The central claim of the study by astrobiologist Richard Hoover is that there is evidence of microfossils similar to cyanobacteria -- blue-green algae, also known as pond scum -- on the freshly fractured inner surfaces of three meteorites.

These microscopic structures had lots of carbon, a marker for Earth-type life, and almost no nitrogen, Hoover said in a telephone interview on Sunday.

Nitrogen can also be a sign of Earthly life, but the lack of it only means that whatever nitrogen was in these structures has decomposed out into a gaseous form long ago, Hoover said.

"We have known for a long time that there were very interesting biomarkers in carbonaceous meteorites and the detection of structures that are very similar ... to known terrestrial cyanobacteria is interesting in that it indicates that life is not restricted to the planet Earth," Hoover said.

Hoover, based at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, has specialized in the study of microscopic lifeforms that survive extreme environments such as glaciers, permafrost and geysers.

He is not the first to claim discovery of microscopic life from other worlds.

In 1996, NASA scientists presented research indicating a 4-billion-year-old meteorite found in Antarctica carried evidence of fossilized microbial life from Mars.

The initial discovery of the so-called Mars meteorite was greeted with acclaim and the rock unveiled at a standing room-only briefing at NASA headquarters in Washington.

Since then, however, criticism has surrounded that discovery and conclusive proof has been elusive.

Hoover's research may well meet the same fate. In a statement published with the online paper, the Journal of Cosmology's editor in chief, Rudy Schild, said in a statement:

"Dr. Richard Hoover is a highly respected scientist and astrobiologist with a prestigious record of accomplishment at NASA. Given the controversial nature of his discovery, we have invited 100 experts and have issued a general invitation to over 5,000 scientists from the scientific community to review the paper and to offer their critical analysis."