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Difficult decisions ahead on Mars

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

The joint Mars exploration envisioned by the US and Europe is set for an overhaul, following an announcement by the Americans that their part of the budget is critically short of funds.

Nasa and Esa had agreed to send two rovers to the Red Planet in 2018.

In Europe's case, this vehicle is already designed and about to be built.

But a new report from the US National Research Council says the probable $3.5bn (£2.2bn) cost of the American side of the mission is $1bn too high.

The "planetary decadal survey" - which is only an advisory document at this stage - recommends the effort be scaled back or postponed indefinitely.

As an example scenario of how the mission could be modified - or de-scoped - to fit within the new suggested budget, the report considers the situation in which the European rover is simply left behind on Earth.

Such a one-sided outcome from a revision process is not thought to be likely, but it gives a sense of the difficulties Nasa and Esa now face in developing a joint initiative to land and rove on Mars later this decade.

"We're quite confident that a really good mission can be done for $2.5bn," said the survey's chairman Professor Steve Squyres, "but we leave it to those two agencies to work out exactly the details of what that would look like.

"Critically, we feel that the de-scopes have to be shared equitably between Nasa and Esa because it's so important to preserve the partnership with Esa. We can't force all the bad news on to Esa; it's got to be a fair split."

Rocky path

Professor Squyres, from Cornell University, was presenting the findings of his working group's report - formally called Vision and Voyages for Planetary Science in the Decade 2013-2022 - at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in the Woodlands, Texas.

Although just an advisory document, it is deemed to represent the broad views of the US planetary science community and will therefore guide Nasa policy decisions.

The ultimate desire of both Nasa and Esa is to return rock samples from Mars for study in Earth laboratories.

As such, the report believes the 2018 opportunity should be the highest planetary priority for Nasa, the reasoning being that it would begin the sample-return quest.

While the European, or ExoMars, rover would drill below the planet's surface to search for signs of life, the American Max-C rover would seek out and package interesting rocks. Robots despatched to Mars deep in the 2020s would then pick up this cache, blast it off the surface into orbit before next routing it back to Earth.

Budgetary concerns had already prompted Nasa and Esa to merge their Mars exploration priorities.

The idea of putting ExoMars and Max-C on the same rocket and sharing the same landing system was a direct consequence of this joint thinking.

However, changing financial circumstances in the US mean the scope of this plan should now be re-thought, says the decadal report.

The recent budget request for Nasa made to the US Congress envisages declining funds for the agency in the next five to six years, meaning the "science per dollar" delivered by every mission had to be thoroughly scrutinised and justified, said Professor Squyres.

"If that goal of $2.5bn [for Nasa's contribution to 2018] cannot be achieved for whatever reason, our recommendation is that Max-C should be deferred to a subsequent decade or cancelled," he told the Woodlands meeting.

The two agencies are due to hold bi-lateral discussions later this month.

All about cooperation

They already have one near-term joint venture to the Red Planet that is signed off and being prepared: an orbiter that would go Mars in 2016 to seek out sources of methane and other trace gases in the atmosphere.

The results of this mission could conceivably guide the decision of where to land the 2018 effort.

Methane presence is intriguing because it could indicate either present-day life or geological activity, and confirmation of either would be a major discovery.

But precisely what happens now in 2018 will be the subject of a new discussion.

Dr Jim Green, the director of Nasa's planetary science division, told the LPSC meeting: "In terms of our flagship missions - the ones we have planned with Esa - it is clear we must go back to the negotiating table and re-work new agreements if we expect to maintain our partnership with our best foreign partner to date."

But the motivations behind the announcement were made clear as he added: "As everyone knows, we are in completely different economic times and we must take that into account."

The decadal survey's second and third flagship priorities are two orbiters - one to go to the Jovian moon Europa and the other to go to Uranus.

Again, the report says that unless these missions can be substantially reduced in cost, Nasa should defer them and pursue more of the cheaper, smaller-scale missions instead.

Reacting to the release of the report, the director of science at the European Space Agency, Professor David Southwood, said the decadal needed careful consideration before judgement was passed.

"We need to get a clear picture of what the Americans really want to do," he told BBC News. "We also need to be clear to what extent, if we run up a flag and decide to do something, the Americans will want to join us. It's all about cooperation.

"We will meet them at the end of March and will hope to come out of that discussion with some decisions about where we are going. The decadal raises a lot of questions and we have to answer them."

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Kangaroo bounce mechanics illuminated by infrared study

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

The precise details of how kangaroos bounce are now being laid bare, thanks to new technology.

Most animals adopt a more upright posture as their body mass increases, redistributing their weight to allow more efficient movement.

However, kangaroos do not appear to adjust their posture in this way.

Now an outdoor infrared motion-capture approach is showing how the kangaroos' bounds distribute forces along their legs and to the ground.

Motion-capture records movement, registering and analysing reflections from small plastic markers stuck on to the moving entity.

Golf coaches use it to analyse their pupils' swings, and it was used in the Lord of the Rings films to translate the movements of actor Andy Serkis into those of the creature Gollum.

Infrared lights illuminate the subject, and an array of cameras tracks the motion of the markers.

However, such studies are typically not undertaken outdoors, where a great deal of infrared light from the sun is bouncing around.

Now, a team of researchers from the Royal Veterinary College in London, the University of Idaho, the University of Queensland, and the University of Western Australia has been loaned a novel motion capture system from the firm Vicon that is capable of "looking past" the ambient infrared light and focusing on their study subjects: kangaroos.

Boundless energy

"The team is interested in trying to understand how the group of kangaroos change their body posture and hopping mechanics with body size," explained Craig McGowan of the University of Idaho.

"There are a number of species that, as they get larger, adopt more and more upright postures.

"That reduces the mechanical demands on the musculature - so it increases their 'mechanical advantage'."

In addition, the team is measuring the forces that the kangaroos' feet exert on the ground - and thus that are transmitted through their legs - using what are known as force plates.

The team also captured the kangaroos' movement using the traditional method of high-speed video - which in the past was analysed frame-by-frame to obtain the same kind of data that the motion-capture system provides automatically.

Taken together, said Alexis Wiktorowicz-Conroy, a researcher at the Royal Veterinary College, the studies will discover why kangaroos do not simply tear themselves to bits as they get up to speed.

"We want to know how are they able to hop fast - even when they are quite heavy - and not change posture," she told BBC News.

"That's important, because these animals get really big, and we can't really explain without this why their bones don't break at high speeds.

"People have started to look at that in ankle joints; we're looking more at joints in hind limbs."

Dr Wiktorowicz-Conroy thinks that information will shed light on another mystery of roo motion: how they do it in such an evidently efficient way.

"The kangaroos' movement is really neat - at low speeds, they use their tail like a fifth limb, inching along like an inchworm. As they move faster, they start to hop. Humans fatigue very easily when we do this, but the kangaroos don't; they don't expend much energy.

"Certain species of wallaby hop up large hills and don't seem to behave in the same way. There's quite a bit of variation (in the way the marsupials move), but all of them are more economical than you might predict."

The experiments, conducted in Alma Park Zoo in Brisbane, have garnered significant amounts of data that the team is still working to understand.

But Dr Wiktorowicz-Conroy said the outcome was certain to solve some of the biomechanical mysteries of the roo.

"There's a lot we don't know about them, and this is going to help study questions about hopping and animal locomotion in general.

"We hope in the end we can use this in veterinary medicine and for conservation."

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From the BBC:

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The oldest known bird in the US, a Laysan albatross named Wisdom, has been spotted with a chick.

This image of the bird with its newly-hatched chick was taken by US Geological Survey (USGS) scientists at the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in the North Pacific.

The USGS put an identity ring on Wisdom in 1956, as she was incubating an egg.

Laysan albatrosses typically breed at eight or nine years of age, so the bird is likely to be in its early 60s.

Bruce Peterjohn, from the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Maryland, said that the bird "looked great".

"To know that she can still successfully raise young at age 60-plus, that is beyond words," he said.

"While the process of banding (ringing) a bird has not changed greatly during the past century, the information provided by birds marked with a simple numbered metal band has transformed our knowledge of birds."

Scientists estimate that Wisdom has probably raised 30-35 chicks during her breeding life.

These birds lay only one egg per year, and spend most of the year incubating and raising their chicks.

Adult albatrosses also mate for life, with both parents raising the young, but researchers do not know if Wisdom has had the same partner during her 60 years of raising young.

From the BBC:

Broadband companies offer clarity on connection slowing

The UK's biggest broadband providers are to give clearer information about how they slow down users' connections to maintain their network performance.

BT, Virgin Media and Sky are among the companies that will publish details of their "traffic management" policies.

The firms say they want to help customers understand why they need to vary connection speeds.

Critics claim the practice will lead to a two-tier internet where some services pay for faster access to their sites.

The code of practice has been drawn up by the Broadband Stakeholder Group, which represents most of the UK's large internet service providers (ISPs).

Once it comes into effect, users will be able to view a breakdown of how and when their connection is restricted.

"There is a core of consumers who understand this stuff quite well, but it's not something that most people are aware of at this stage," said Anthony Walker, chief executive of the Broadband Stakeholder Group.

Mr Walker said that most companies already make information about their traffic management policies available, but the new guidelines meant that they would all use the same simple format - allowing customers to compare ISPs.

Members signing up to the code will have to give details about how much they reduce speeds, how long the reduction lasts and whether certain services are blocked, slowed down or prioritised.

Managed services

Most internet service providers (ISPs) vary the speed of broadband connections depending on the time of day or volume of traffic on their network.

Tasks that are not speed critical, like downloading files or sending emails, are delayed slightly to ensure that other services, such as streaming video, run smoothly.

Most analysts agree that some form of traffic management is necessary.

"Go and ask someone on an ISP that doesn't use traffic management," said Andrew Ferguson, editor of the independent website Thinkbroadband.com.

"When congestion kicks in on a Friday night, they are the people who can't go and play on their Xbox Live, they can't play PlayStation online, because latency [network delay] has gone through the roof.

Many ISPs have begun exploring the possibility of offering "managed services" - effectively giving an exemption from traffic management to website and online applications that are willing to pay for it.

The idea has been met with widespread opposition from proponents of net neutrality, who believe that all internet traffic should be treated equally.

"We recognize that there are certain types of traffic shaping that need to occur in order to maintain the integrity of the network," said Jeff Lynn from the Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec).

"But we see that as very different from developing business models in which a particular ISP takes money from 4 on Demand [for example] and makes it easier to download 4oD videos than it does BBC videos," said Mr Lynn.

Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, said that transparency on its own was not enough: "We need meaningful guarantees that ISPs will not act to restrict competition.

"If competition and innovation on the net suffers, that will damage the whole UK economy."

Good or bad

The Broadband Stakeholder Group's code of practice includes provision for ISPs to explore managed services: "offering a guaranteed quality of service for specified content, services or applications."

However, that explicit mention of managed services does not constitute a declaration of intent, according to Mr Walker.

"This document doesn't take a view on whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. That is part of a wider policy debate," he told BBC News.

"If those services do start to emerge, it is really important that both consumers and policy makers are aware of it so that any policy or regulatory framework is based on clear evidence about what is happening in reality rather than just speculation or conjecture about what might happen."

The code will be piloted by BSkyB, BT, O2, TalkTalk, Three, Virgin Media and Vodafone during 2011, with a review of how it is working in the following year.

Campaigners for net neutrality suggest that ISPs are only adopting voluntary measures in the hope that they will stay the hand of legislators and regulators across the UK and Europe.

There is some evidence that may be working.

Market forces

The UK's telecoms watchdog, Ofcom, began looking at the issue of traffic management in 2010. It has yet to publish any proposals, although it welcomed new the code of conduct.

Last November, the culture minister Ed Vaizey said that ISPs should be able to explore the use of managed services as a way of financing the UK's growing internet infrastructure.

And European lawmakers also appear to be moving towards a more hands-off approach, opting to let the market decide.

The EU's Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes recently suggested that mobile users who found themselves disconnected for using Skype should "vote with their feet" and change provider.

From the BBC:

Brain disorder 'messaging clue'

Scientists say they have discovered a "maintenance" protein that helps keep nerve fibres that transmit messages in the brain operating smoothly.

The University of Edinburgh team says the finding could improve understanding of disorders such as epilepsy, dementia, MS and stroke.

In such neurodegenerative disorders, electrical impulses from the brain are disrupted.

This leads to an inability to control movement, and muscles wasting away.

The brain works like an electrical circuit, sending impulses along nerve fibres in the same way that current is sent through wires.

These fibres can measure up to a metre, but the area covered by the segment of nerve that controls transmission of messages is no bigger than the width of a human hair.

Signal failure

The scientists discovered that the protein Nfasc186 is crucial for maintaining the health and function of the segment of nerve fibres - called the axon initial segment (AIS) - that controls transmission of messages within the brain.

They found that the AIS and the protein within it are important in ensuring the nerve impulse has the right properties to convey the message as it should.

Professor Peter Brophy, director of the University of Edinburgh's Centre for Neuroregeneration, said: "Knowing more about how signals in the brain work will help us better understand neurodegenerative disorders and why, when these illnesses strike, the brain can no longer send signals to parts of the body."

Dr Matthew Nolan, of the university's Centre for Integrative Physiology, said: "At any moment tens of thousands of electrical impulses are transmitting messages between nerve cells in our brains.

"Identifying proteins that are critical for the precise initiation of these impulses will help unravel the complexities of how brains work and may lead to new insights into how brains evolved."

The work was funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council.

I thought I should post this . From the BBC:

Google buys Parrot Pictures to improve YouTube quality

Google has bought Irish company Green Parrot Pictures in a bid to improve the quality of video uploaded to YouTube.

The Dublin-based firm specialises in image processing to improve, for example, sharpness and camera shake.

Its technology has already been used by several big Hollywood film studios on movies such as X-Men and Spiderman.

Google said that Green Parrot's technology would enhance the look of videos posted on its site while using bandwidth more efficiently.

A statement, posted on Green Parrot Pictures' website said: "We're excited to join Google, where we will apply our expertise to improve the online video experience for hundreds of millions of users worldwide on may different products, platforms and services."

Green Parrot Pictures was founded six years ago by Dr Anil Kokaram, an associate professor with the school of engineering at Trinity College, Dublin.

Google, which owns YouTube plans to use Green Parrot's technology to perform on-the-fly background processing on user videos.

Writing on the official YouTube blog, Google's director of video technology, Jeremy Doig said: "What if there was a technology that could improve the quality of such videos -- sharpening the image, reducing visual noise and rendering a higher-quality, steadier video -- all while your video is simply being uploaded to the site?

"You can imagine how excited we were when we discovered a small, ambitious company based in Ireland that can do exactly this."

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Messenger probe enters Mercury orbit

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

Nasa's Messenger spacecraft has successfully entered into orbit around the planet Mercury - the first probe to do so.

The robotic explorer initiated a 14-minute burn on its main thruster at 0145 GMT on Friday.

This slowed the spacecraft sufficiently to be captured by the innermost planet's gravity.

Being so close to the Sun, Mercury is a hostile place to do science. Surface temperatures would melt lead.

In this blistering environment, the probe has to carry a shield to protect it from the full glare of our star.

And even its instruments looking down at the planet have to be guarded against the intense heat coming back up off the surface.

"It was right on the money," Messenger's chief engineer, Eric Finnegan, said. "This is as close as you can possibly get to being perfect.

"Everybody was whooping and hollering; we are elated. There's a lot of work left to be done, but we are there."

The spacecraft is now some 46 million km (29 million miles) from the Sun, and about 155 million km (96 million miles) from Earth.

The orbit insertion burn by the probe's 600-newton engine will have parked it into a 12-hour, highly elliptical orbit about the planet.

Principal investigator Sean Solomon, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, is hoping for some remarkable discoveries in coming months.

"We started the Messenger mission as a proposal to Nasa 15 years ago," he told BBC News.

"We have been building for the orbit insertion and the observations that will follow for a decade and a half.

"To say that the science team is excited about what is to come is a huge understatement. We're really pumped."

Just getting to Mercury has proved a challenge.

Messenger has had to use six planetary flybys - one of Earth, two of Venus and three of Mercury itself - to manage its speed as it ran in closer to the Sun and its deep gravity well.

The strategy devised by scientists and engineers is to have Messenger gather data with its seven instruments during the close approaches (some 200km from the surface) and then return that information to Earth when the probe is cooling off at maximum separation from the planet (up to 15,000km from the surface).

Mercury is often dismissed as a boring, featureless world that offers little to excite those who observe it, but planetary scientists who know it well beg to differ. It is a place of extraordinary extremes.

Mercury's proximity to the Sun means exposed equator surfaces can reach more than 600C; and yet there may be water-ice at the poles in craters that are in permanent shadow.

It is so dense for its size that more than two-thirds of the body has to be made of an iron-metal composition.

Mercury also retains a magnetic field, something which is absent on Venus and Mars.

In addition, the planet is deeply scarred, not just by impact craters and volcanic activity but through shrinkage; the whole body has reduced in size through Solar System history.

And Mercury fascinates because it may be our best guide to what some of the new planets might be like that are now being discovered around distant suns.

Many of these worlds also orbit very close in to their host stars.

"We'll be looking at the composition of the planet and how it ended up so dense, and what planetary formation processes gave rise to the high fraction of core," said Dr Solomon

"The answer to that question lies in the composition of the surface that we can sense remotely from orbit, but we need time in orbit to do that.

"We'll also be taking more images, but images at higher resolution and in optimum lighting compared with the conditions we had during the flybys."

Others to follow

Key to the success of the whole endeavour will be maintaining the health of Messenger in the harsh conditions it will experience.

"The sunshade is made of a ceramic material that keeps the heat on the outside of the spacecraft from getting on the inside," explained Eric Finnegan, who is affiliated to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL).

"We also had to develop thermal protection for the solar arrays. We still need to generate power but we had to make sure the solar arrays themselves wouldn't melt. So, we built a solar panel that's only populated with one-third solar cells. The other two-thirds of the panel are basically mirrors to reflect the sunlight off of the panels."

The spacecraft is scheduled to remain in orbit for a year, allowing the probe to fly around Mercury 730 times.

If Messenger stays in good health and the funding allows, a one-year mission extension is likely to be granted.

The European and Japanese space agencies (Esa and Jaxa) are also sending a mission to Mercury this decade.

BepiColombo consists of two spacecraft - an orbiter for planetary investigation, led by Esa, and one for magnetospheric studies, led by Jaxa.

Dr Solomon says there will be plenty left for the duo to do and discover when they get to the innermost planet.

"We'll be collecting global data on the surface, on the interior, on the atmosphere, on the magnetosphere - but we're not going to answer all the questions; we're going to raise new ones," he told BBC News. "There's going to be ample opportunity for follow-on missions."

From the BBC:

DR Congo blocks Soco from oil search in Virunga park

The Democratic Republic of Congo has rejected a bid by the UK's Soco International to search for oil in the famous Virunga National Park, home to rare mountain gorillas.

Environment Minister Jose Endundo said he had rejected an environmental assessment submitted by the firm.

Environmental groups had warned that drilling for oil in the park would damage the park's eco-system and increase tension in the volatile area.

This was denied by Soco.

Virunga is home to some 200 of the world's remaining 700 mountain gorillas, the AP news agency reports.

It is also seen as one of the most bio-diverse places on Earth and is on the UN's list of World Heritage sites in danger.

UN cultural organisation Unesco has repeatedly warned against oil exploration in the area.

Virunga is in eastern DR Congo, where numerous armed groups continue to operate - attracted by the area's rich mineral resources.

Mr Endundo said the government would now conduct its own environmental assessment into oil exploration in Virunga, as well as the entire border region.

Soco's chief executive Roger Cagle told the BBC that oil exploration would continue on the Ugandan side of the border regardless of the Congolese decision.

He told Reuters news agency he was surprised how quickly the decision had been taken.

Environmental activists had also feared that the search for oil could damage fish stocks in nearby Lake Edward - a vital food supply for some 500,000 families.

However, some Congolese politicians had said that oil would bring much needed jobs and income to the region.

The film Gorillas in the Mist was set in Rwanda, but was filmed on location in Virunga National Park.

A Youtube clip (not from the film) of some mountain gorillas filmed in Virunga:

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From the BBC:

Protein found in brain cells may be key to autism

Scientists have shown how a single protein may trigger autistic spectrum disorders by stopping effective communication between brain cells.

The team from Duke University in North Carolina created autistic mice by mutating the gene which controls production of the protein, Shank3.

The animals exhibited social problems, and repetitive behaviour - both classic signs of autism and related conditions.

The Nature study raises hopes of the first effective drug treatments.

Autism is a disorder which, to varying degrees, affects the ability of children and adults to communicate and interact socially.

While hundreds of genes linked to the condition have been found, the precise combination of genetics, biochemistry and other environmental factors which produce autism is still unclear.

Each patient has only one or a handful of those mutations, making it difficult to develop drugs to treat the disorder.

Shank3 is found in the synapses - the junctions between brain cells (neurons) that allow them to communicate with each other.

The researchers created mice which had a mutated form of Shank3, and found that these animals avoided social interactions with other mice.

They also engaged in repetitious and self-injurious grooming behaviour.

Brain circuits

When the MIT team analysed the animals' brains they found defects in the circuits that connect two different areas of the brain, the cortex and the striatum.

Healthy connections between these areas are thought to be key to effective regulation of social behaviours and social interaction.

The researchers say their work underscores just what an important role Shank3 plays in the establishment of circuits in the brain which underlie all our behaviours.

Lead researcher Dr Guoping Feng said: "Our study demonstrated that Shank3 mutation in mice lead to defects in neuron-neuron communications.

"These findings and the mouse model now allow us to figure out the precise neural circuit defects responsible for these abnormal behaviours, which could lead to novel strategies and targets for developing treatment."

It is thought that only a small percentage of people with autism have mutations in Shank3, but Dr Feng believes many other cases may be linked to disruptions to other proteins that control synaptic function.

If true he believes it should be possible to develop treatments that restore synaptic function, regardless of which protein is defective in a specific individual.

Carol Povey, director of the National Autistic Society's Centre for Autism, said: "Animal research can help advance our understanding or the role of genetics and their influence on behaviour, however it is only a small part of the picture when it comes to understanding autism.

"Human brains are far more complex than those of other mammals, and it is believed that a variety of factors are responsible for the development of the condition."

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North Wales hillfort test of Iron Age communication

An experiment has shed light on how Iron Age people communicated from their hilltop homes 2,500 years ago.

About 200 volunteers stood on the summit of 10 hillforts in north Wales, the Wirral and Cheshire, and signalled to each other with torches.

Their aim was to learn if communities used the summits to warn each other.

"It was a success," said archaeologist Erin Robinson. "It captured the public's imagination and we made extra links we did not think were possible."

Saturday night's Hilltop Glow event was rescheduled after December's severe weather.

The ancient sites used were on the Clwydian Range; Halkyn Mountain, near Holywell, Flintshire; a lowland site at Wirral; and the Sandstone Ridge, Cheshire.

Beacon fires have previously used on hilltops around the UK to mark the Queen's golden and silver jubilees.

"Most of the hill forts across the surrounding landscape can be seen from each other," explained Ms Robinson from Denbighshire's Heather and Hillforts project.

"The experiment was aiming to see if the glowing fires could have been seen across the hills and acted as a communication or warning system."

Ms Robinson, who climbed to the Moel y Gaer hillfort, near Mold, Flintshire, said she was able to see signals from high-powered torches from all but one hill top.

"It was fantastic," she said. "We saw all the way to a hilltop in Cheshire, which we weren't sure we'd be able to do."

Ms Robinson said the furthest link was made between hills at Burton Point on the Wirral and Maiden Castle, at Bickerton Hill in Cheshire, a distance of approximately 25km (15.5 miles).

"It was a hard thing to organise but it seems to have captured the imagination of the communities involved. We brought the hills alive."

Both the Heather and Hillforts and Habitats and Hillforts projects are Landscape Partnership Schemes funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

From the BBC:

Stock trades to exploit speed of light, says researcher

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

Financial institutions may soon change what they trade or where they do their trading because of the speed of light.

"High-frequency trading" carried out by computers often depends on differing prices of a financial instrument in two geographically-separated markets.

Exactly how far the signals have to go can make a difference in such trades.

Alexander Wissner-Gross told the American Physical Society meeting that financial institutions are looking at ways to exploit the light-speed trick.

Dr Wissner-Gross, of Harvard University, said that the latencies - essentially, the time delay for a signal to wing its way from one global financial centre to another - advantaged some locations for some trades and different locations for others.

There is a vast market for ever-faster fibre-optic cables to try to physically "get there faster" but Dr Wissner-Gross said that the purely technological approach to gaining an advantage was reaching a limit.

Trades now travel at nearly 90% of the ultimate speed limit set by physics, the speed of light in the cables.

Competitive advantage

His first solution, published in 2010, considered the various latencies in global fibre-optic links and mapped out where the optimal points for financial transactions to originate - midway between two major financial hubs to maximise the chance of "buying low" in one place and "selling high" in another.

That of course resulted in a number of ideal locations in all corners of the globe, including the oceans. But wholesale relocation of operations does not immediately appeal to many firms.

"I'm now working... with real companies on real deployments that don't require you deploy a floating data centre in the middle of the ocean; we say, 'OK, you have your existing infrastructure, that's not moving - now, given your location, which stocks in various locations are you best positioned to trade?'"

"If you don't have the budget to put new data centres in the middle of the ocean you can, for example, use existing data centres that are an approximation to the optimal location in the ocean - say, Nova Scotia for New York to London," Dr Wissner-Gross told BBC News.

Because there is a clear, physical advantage to the approach, Dr Wissner-Gross said that the first firm to try to exploit the effect will be at significant competitive advantage - until more firms follow suit.

That means that out-of-the-way places - at high latitudes or mid-ocean island chains - could in time turn into global financial centres.

"It's instructive to start to think about latency correlations as a new sort of resource," he explained.

"If you're positioned between two major financial hubs, you may be far out of the way, rather far from population centres, maybe economically poor, but because of your unique position, that could be a natural resource.

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From the BBC:

Iran accused in 'dire' net security attack

Analysis in the wake of the thwarted attack suggests it originated and was co-ordinated via servers in Iran.

If it had succeeded, the attackers would have been able to pass themselves off as web giants Google, Yahoo, Skype, Mozilla and Microsoft.

The impersonation would have let attackers trick web users into thinking they were accessing the real service.

Fake identity

The attack was mounted on the widely used online security system known as the Secure Sockets Layer or SSL.

This acts as a guarantee of identity so users can be confident that the site they are visiting is who it claims to be. The guarantee of identity is in the form of a digital passport known as a certificate.

Analysis of the attack reveals that someone got access to the computer systems of one firm that issue certificates. This allowed them to issue bogus certificated that, if they had been used, would have let them impersonate any one of several big net firms.

It appears that the attackers targeted the SSL certificates of several specific net communication services such as Gmail and Skype as well as other popular sites such as Microsoft Live, Yahoo and the Firefox browser.

SSL certificate issuer Comodo published an analysis of the attack which was carried out via the computer systems of one of its regional affiliates.

It said the attack exhibited "clinical accuracy" and that, along with other facets of the attack led it to one conclusion: "this was likely to be a state-driven attack."

It is thought it was carried out by the Iranian authorities to step up scrutiny of opposition groups in the country that use the web to co-ordinate their activity.

The bogus certificates have now been revoked and Comodo said it was looking into ways of improving security at its affiliates.

Browsers have also been updated so anyone visiting a site whose credentials are guaranteed by the bogus certificates will be warned.

Writing on the blog of digital rights lobby group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Peter Eckersley, said the attack posed a "dire risk to internet security".

"The incident got close to — but was not quite — an internet-wide security meltdown," he said.

"We urgently need to start reinforcing the system that is currently used to authenticate and identify secure websites and e-mail systems," said Mr Eckersley.

 

I see that the very recent Firefox update to v 3.6.16 (and I would assume v4) was released with this in mind - the release notes say "Firefox 3.6.16 blacklists a few invalid HTTPS certificates."

 

From the BBC:

Curry powder molecule 'is cheap sensor for explosives'

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

A cheap and widely available spice seems to be a solution to diverse problems

The main chemical in the curry spice turmeric could be the basis for cheap explosives detectors, say researchers.

The curcumin molecule is already well-known in medicine for its anti-cancer and anti-oxidant properties.

Now, research presented at the American Physical Society meeting suggests it could replace more complex solutions to spot explosives like TNT.

As it gathers molecules of explosive material in air, changes in its light-emitting properties can be measured.

This "fluorescence spectroscopy" is already employed in a wide array of sensing and analysis techniques.

Illuminating some chemicals causes them to re-emit light of a different colour, sometimes for extended periods - an effect exploited in, for example, glow-in-the-dark materials.

The intensity of this re-emitted light can change if different molecules bind to the fluorescent ones, and that is how sensing techniques exploit the effect.

Light idea

Now, Abhishek Kumar, of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and his colleagues have happened across a means of co-opting the curry ingredient's fluorescence properties for explosive detection.

"If you have a gram of TNT... and you sample a billion air molecules from anywhere in the room, you'll find four or five molecules of TNT - that's the reason they're so hard to detect," he told the conference.

"And, the US State Department estimates there are about 60 to 70 million land mines throughout the world; we need a very portable, field-deployable sensing device which is cheap, very sensitive, and easy to handle."

Mr Kumar's team was investigating the use of curcumin for biological applications, trying to make it easily dissolve in water, when they hit on the idea of making use of its optical properties.

"People have mainly looked at its biological applications, treating cancer and Alzheimer's and so on, but nobody has looked at making optical devices out of them," he told BBC News.

The team's first trick was to use a chemical reaction to attach "side groups" to the curcumin that preferentially bind to explosive molecules.

But curcumin's helpful optical properties only worked when it was dissolved in a liquid; when evaporated to a solid, it clumped together and the fluorescence stopped.

They then hit on the idea of using a polymer called polydimethylsiloxane, which is thick and viscous at room temperature, spinning the mixture on glass plates to make extremely thin films.

The idea would be to use an inexpensive light source - the team uses LEDs - shone on to the thin films, detecting the light they then put off. In the presence of explosives, the light would dim.

By using an array of sensors, each sensitive to slightly different colours of light, a range of different materials could be detected, and, crucially, reduce the risk of false alarms.

In tests, the films can currently detect explosive levels down to 80 parts per billion, but Mr Kumar said that for hgh-sensitivity applications like mine detection, they needed to increase the sensitivity further, by adjusting the chemical groups attached to curcumin.

The team, which is funded in part by the US government, is already in discussions with a company to develop the technique into a portable detector device.

From the BBC:

 

Click here to see this article with pictures

 

Stone tools 'demand new American story'

By Paul Rincon and Jonathan Amos Science reporters, BBC News

 

The long-held theory of how humans first populated the Americas may have been well and truly broken.

Archaeologists have unearthed thousands of stone tools that predate the technology widely assumed to have been carried by the first settlers.

The discoveries in Texas are seen as compelling evidence that the so-called Clovis culture does not represent America's original immigrants.

Details of the 15,500-year-old finds are reported in Science magazine.

A number of digs across the Americas in recent decades had already hinted that the "Clovis first" model was in serious trouble.

But the huge collection of well-dated tools excavated from a creek bed 60km (40 miles) northwest of Austin mean the theory is now dead, argue the Science authors.

"This is almost like a baseball bat to the side of the head of the archaeological community to wake up and say, 'hey, there are pre-Clovis people here, that we have to stop quibbling and we need to develop a new model for peopling of the Americas'," Michael Waters, a Texas A&M University anthropologist, told reporters.

For 80 years, it has been argued that the Clovis culture was the first to sweep into the New World.

These people were defined by their highly efficient stone-tool technology. Their arrow heads and spear points were formidable hunting weapons and were used to bring down the massive beasts of the Ice Age, such as mammoth, mastodon and bison.

 

Clovis first?

 

The hunter gatherers associated with this technology were thought to have crossed from Siberia into Alaska via a land bridge that became exposed when sea levels dropped. Evidence indicates this occurred as far back as about 13,500 years.

But an increasing number of archaeologists have argued there was likely to have been an earlier occupation based on the stone tools that began turning up at dig sites with claimed dates of more than 15,000 years.

Dr Waters and colleagues say this position is now undeniable in the light of the new artefacts to emerge from the Debra L Friedkin excavation.

These objects comprise 15,528 items in total - a variety of chert blades, bladelets, chisels, and abundant flakes produced when making or repairing stone tools.

The collection was found directly below sediment containing classic Clovis implements. The dating - which relied on a technique known as optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) that can tell how long minerals have been buried - is robust, says the team. And, they add, the observed sequence is also reliable; the sediments have not been mixed up after the tools were dropped.

"The sediments were very rigid in the fact that they were clay, which worked to our advantage," explained Lee Nordt from Baylor University. "If you go to many other sites, they are loamy or sandy in texture, and they are mixed very rapidly by burrowing from animals or maybe from plant roots, etc."

 

Getting around

 

The newly discovered tools are small, and the researchers propose that they were designed for a mobile toolkit - something that could be easily packed up and moved to a new location. Although clearly different from Clovis tools, they share some similarities and the researchers suggest Clovis technology may even have been derived from the capabilities displayed in the earlier objects.

"The Debra L Friedkin site demonstrates that people were in the Americas at least 2,500 years before Clovis," said Dr Waters.

"The discovery provides ample time for Clovis to develop. People could experiment with stone and invent the weapons and tools that would potentially become recognizable as Clovis. In other words, [these tools represent] the type of assemblage from which Clovis could emerge."

But anthropologist Tom Dillehay, who was not involved with the latest study, commented: "The 'Clovis first' paradigm died years ago. There are many other accepted pre-Clovis candidates throughout the Americas now."

Professor Dillehay, from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, told BBC News: "If you look at the prose of this paper, it bothers me a little bit because it's as if they are reconstituting the Clovis-Pre-Clovis debate and saying, 'Here's the site that kills it'."

He commended the researchers on their well-presented data and "tight discussion". But he said that the OSL technique was less reliable than radiocarbon dating, which has been applied to other early American sites.

And assigning the artefacts to Clovis and pre-Clovis technologies was not straightforward because the site lacked the projectile points required to reliably distinguish between the two. Clovis projectile points are unmistakeable.

In addition, said the Vanderbilt anthropology professor, the tools come from a floodplain deposit that is just 6-7cm thick. This, he said, was "potentially problematic" because of the possibility that artefacts were transported around by water.

Professor Gary Haynes, from the University of Nevada in Reno, US, praised the "good work" by the research team.

But he said it was plausible that natural processes could have caused some stone tools to migrate downwards in the clay - giving the impression of a pre-Clovis layer.

From the BBC:

 

Pacific salmon run helps shape Canada's ecosystems

By Mark Kinver Science and environment reporter, BBC News

Pacific salmon plays an important role in providing nutrients to part of the world's largest old-growth temperate rainforest, a study has shown.

The annual migration sees salmon return to western Canada to spawn, but many are caught by bears and wolves, which carry carcasses away from the streams.

This allows nutrient-rich plants to thrive in these areas.

Writing in Science, the team said a shift in salmon numbers would have "far-reaching impacts" on biodiversity.

"Along the Pacific coast, all salmon die after spawning so carcasses can line rivers, but many of them are killed before by bears and wolves," explained co-author John Reynolds, professor of ecology at Simon Fraser University (SFU), Canada.

"This adds up to a huge amount of nutrients being dumped into the stream or on to the banks," he added.

"The question is where do all these nutrients, which the fish consumed while they were growing at sea, actually end up?"

 

Bear necessities

Professor Reynolds and lead author Dr Morgan Hocking, also from SFU, examined 50 river systems in the Great Bear Rainforest, British Columbia.

They found a distinct pattern in where the nutrients were found, and how it affected the plant diversity.

"Most of the carcasses that are left behind by the bears and wolves, who only normally only eat a small part of the salmon, are dropped within the first five to 15 metres of the stream," Professor Reynolds told BBC News.

"Bears, for example, have feeding platforms; once they have fished out a salmon, they will take it up on to a bank, eat it and then go and get another one.

"So we predicted before we started that we would see the biggest impact, if any, closer to the stream. That's exactly what we found by doing these different surveys."

The team found that nearer the stream, the plant community was dominated by species that thrived on large amounts of nitrogen.

However, this was at the expense of diversity - which suggested that nutrient-rich plants such as salmonberry and elderberry were able to out-compete other species.

"As you move away from the stream, you tend to switch to a community of species which are less dependent on this extra nitrogen," Professor Reynolds observed.

The researchers found that in areas that had streams containing fewer salmon, the bordering plant life consisted of species with lower nutrient contents, such as blueberry and huckleberry.

In their paper, the two researchers said that predicting how salmon affected terrestrial ecosystems would play a key role in shaping effective conservation and habitat management techniques.

From the BBC:

 

China 'to overtake US on science' in two years

David Shukman Science and environment correspondent, BBC News

China is on course to overtake the US in scientific output possibly as soon as 2013 - far earlier than expected.

That is the conclusion of a major new study by the Royal Society, the UK's national science academy.

The country that invented the compass, gunpowder, paper and printing is set for a globally important comeback.

An analysis of published research - one of the key measures of scientific effort - reveals an "especially striking" rise by Chinese science.

The study, Knowledge, Networks and Nations, charts the challenge to the traditional dominance of the United States, Europe and Japan.

The figures are based on the papers published in recognised international journals listed by the Scopus service of the publishers Elsevier.

 

'No surprise'

In 1996, the first year of the analysis, the US published 292,513 papers - more than 10 times China's 25,474.

By 2008, the US total had increased very slightly to 316,317 while China's had surged more than seven-fold to 184,080.

Previous estimates for the rate of expansion of Chinese science had suggested that China might overtake the US sometime after 2020.

But this study shows that China, after displacing the UK as the world's second leading producer of research, could go on to overtake America in as little as two years' time.

"Projections vary, but a simple linear interpretation of Elsevier's publishing data suggests that this could take place as early as 2013," it says.

Professor Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, chair of the report, said he was "not surprised" by this increase because of China's massive boost to investment in R&D.

Chinese spending has grown by 20% per year since 1999, now reaching over $100bn, and as many as 1.5 million science and engineering students graduated from Chinese universities in 2006.

"I think this is positive, of great benefit, though some might see it as a threat and it does serve as a wake-up call for us not to become complacent."

The report stresses that American research output will not decline in absolute terms and raises the possibility of countries like Japan and France rising to meet the Chinese challenge.

"But the potential for China to match American output in terms of sheer numbers in the near to medium term is clear."

 

Quality questions

The authors describe "dramatic" changes in the global scientific landscape and warn that this has implications for a nation's competitiveness.

According to the report, "The scientific league tables are not just about prestige - they are a barometer of a country's ability to compete on the world stage".

Along with the growth of the Chinese economy, this is yet another indicator of China's extraordinarily rapid rise as a global force.

However the report points out that a growing volume of research publications does not necessarily mean in increase in quality.

One key indicator of the value of any research is the number of times it is quoted by other scientists in their work.

Although China has risen in the "citation" rankings, its performance on this measure lags behind its investment and publication rate.

"It will take some time for the absolute output of emerging nations to challenge the rate at which this research is referenced by the international scientific community."

The UK's scientific papers are still the second most-cited in the world, after the US.

Dr Cong Cao, associate professor at Nottingham University's School of Contemporary Chinese Studies, agrees with the assessment that the quantity of China's science is yet not matched by its quality.

A sociologist originally from Shanghai, Dr Cao told the BBC: "There are many millions of graduates but they are mandated to publish so the numbers are high.

"It will take many years for some of the research to catch up to Western standards."

As to China's motivation, Dr Cao believes that there is a determination not to be dependent on foreign know-how - and to reclaim the country's historic role as a global leader in technology.

From the BBC:

 

Click here to see this article with video clip

 

UK study looks to serve cows and sheep burp-free fodder

 

UK scientists have been looking at how changes to the diet of cows and sheep could help reduce the animals' greenhouse gas emissions.

The study suggested that certain feedstocks, in proportion to milk or meat yields, could reduce the release of methane by up to 33%.

According to latest figures, the agricultural sector accounts for about 43% of the nation's methane emissions.

Ministers hope the study will improve the environmental performance of farms.

"It is very exciting that this new research has discovered that by simply changing the way we feed farm animals we have the potential to make a big difference to the environment," said Agriculture Minister Jim Paice.

According to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) - which funded the study - the farming industry accounts for 9% of the UK total greenhouse gases, half of which comes from sheep, cows and goats.

The research was carried out by a team from the University of Reading and Aberystwyth University's Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences (Ibers), showed how it was possible cut environmental impacts from livestock. For example:

• increasing the proportion of maize silage from 25% to 75% in a short-term trial was found to reduce methane (per kg milk) by 6%

• high-sugar grasses could reduce an animal's methane emissions by 20% for every kilo of weight gain

• naked oats could reduce methane emissions from sheep by 33%

But Defra added that the long-term benefits of the savings would have to be "considered against other environmental impacts as well as how practical or costly they are for the farming industry to implement".

It is also not clear whether these measures actually reduce emissions from the animals, or whether the dietary changes increases the overall yield therefore reducing the proportion of methane produced per kilo of meat or litre of milk.

 

Chewing the cud

 

The quest to reduce the impact of livestock on the environment and atmosphere is not new.

Since the turn of the century, researchers in New Zealand and Australia have been considering ways to tackle the problem of potent burps from ruminants.

In New Zealand, livestock account for 90% of the nation's methane emissions, and about 43% of its greenhouse gases from human activities. In short, without coming up with a solution, it would struggle to meet its Kyoto Protocol targets.

Last year, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) suggested taxing animal emissions as part of a range of measures to reduce the impact from the global agriculture sector.

When the entire food chain was taken into account (rearing, feedstock, transportation, slaughter etc), the FAO estimated that the world's livestock accounted for about 9% of human-induced CO2 and 37% of methane emissions.

UK farming representatives are against the tax idea, saying that they have already taken measures to reduce overall emissions.

An alternative measure, outlined by researchers from the University of Bangor, could be to house dairy cattle in sheds, which would allow farmers to harvest the methane as a fuel source and prevent it escaping into the atmosphere.

From the BBC:

 

Click here to see this article with picture

 

India wild tiger census shows population rise

The number of tigers in India's wild has gone up by 20%, according to the latest tiger census, which has surveyed the whole of India for the first time.

The census puts the population of the big cat at 1,706. There were 1,411 tigers at the last count in 2007.

But officials have raised concerns about the amount of territory that tigers have to roam in.

India has more than 45,000 sq km (27,961 miles) of forest area in 39 designated tiger reserves.

But India's Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh described the shrinking of tiger corridors as "alarming".

 

Unique footprints

Wildlife experts say the preservation of these corridors should be a priority for the government.

Tiger corridors connect natural habitats, which have been separated over time by human development and activity.

Conservationists used hidden cameras installed at strategic points and DNA tests to count the cats.

Earlier estimates were drawn up using the older method of counting the pugmarks - or the unique footprint - of individual tigers.

India had 100,000 tigers at the turn of the last century but there has been a serious decline in numbers since then.

Experts say that 97% of tigers have been lost to poaching and shrinking habitats.

Today, fewer than 3,500 tigers remain in the wild around the world with India accounting for more than half of them.

But the latest census figures were described as "good news" by Mr Ramesh.

The key difference in the latest census was that it covered the whole of India.

"The count is more scientific this time and therefore more accurate," Rajesh Gopal of Project Tiger, the government's tiger conservation body, was quoted by the Associated Press news agency as saying.

The survey could include difficult swampy terrain such as that found in the Sundarbans mangrove forest in West Bengal state bordering Bangladesh.

This count yielded 70 tigers from the Sundarbans tiger reserve, which had not been covered in the last census.

Tiger numbers have been rapidly falling in recent years due to a rise in poaching, which experts say is now organised in a similar way to drug trafficking.

The Indian authorities have not been able to put a stop to poaching, partly because of the ever-changing techniques used by the cartels behind it.

Correspondents say tiger products are a lucrative business.

There is huge demand for tiger bones, claws and skin in countries like China, Taiwan and Korea, where they are used in traditional Chinese medicine.



Testing only

 

Audrey Hepburn

From the BBC today:

 

Chicken feathers suggested as basis for plastics

The millions of tonnes of chicken feathers discarded each year could be used in plastics, researchers say.

A study reported at the American Chemical Society meeting in the US suggests feathers could lead to more environment-friendly, lighter plastics.

The chemical recipe requires significantly less petroleum-derived material.

However, tests on a grander scale will be necessary to establish the idea's industrial feasibility.

Such "biowaste" materials have been proposed as components of plastic formulations before.

Feathers, like hair and fingernails, are made up principally of the tough and chemically stable protein keratin, and can lend strength while reducing weight in the mixtures of plastics chemicals known as composites.

Researchers at the US agricultural authority have even published research into the possibility of incorporating chicken feathers into plastics, as an additive in composites that are made largely of a chemical polymer.

But the work presented by Yiqi Yang, from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, takes this idea further and uses the chicken feather fibres themselves as a principal ingredient - making up 50% of the mass of the composite.

As a result, the plastics require less of the materials such as polyethylene and polypropylene that are derived from petroleum products.

"[Prior] technology uses keratin as an 'additive' to polyethylene and polypropylene. Our work turns feathers into something like polyethylene and polypropylene," Professor Yang told BBC News.

"If used as composite materials, no polyethylene or polypropylene are needed. Therefore [the plastics] will be more degradable and more sustainable."

Professor Yang's team processed chicken feathers and added a chemical known as methyl acrylate to turn them into a plastic, from which they made thin films.

These films were tougher than comparable formulations using other biowaste materials, and Professor Yang said that a crucial advantage of the team's approach was that their plastics are much more resistant to water.

Renko Akkerman, technical director of the Thermoplastic Composite Research Centre in the Netherlands, said that, depending on the application, feather-derived composites could be a strong addition to the palette of plastics.

"Whenever you can use waste for a functional product, I'd say that's a good idea. So using biomaterials, whether it's for commodity products or even structural applications, that's worth pursuing," he told BBC News.

However, he said that only by making larger amounts of the composite - and assessing the energy costs of production - could a full assessment of the idea be made.

"For each material you can do things at a very minor scale, but making the transition to mass production is a large one and only then can you truly grade the performance in terms of economics, carbon footprint, and so on.

"Despite all that we should pursue things like these, try and use biomaterials - certainly if it's waste otherwise - and make something useful."



From the BBC:

 

Click here to see this article with video clip and picture

 

Sites hit in massive web attack



Patrik Runald, senior manager for security research at Websense told the BBC's Katty Kay that the scale of the attack was "worrying"

 

Hundreds of thousands of websites appear to have been compromised by a massive cyber attack.

The hi-tech criminals used a well-known attack vector that exploits security loopholes on other sites to insert a link to their website.

Those visiting the criminals' webpage were told that their machines were infected with many different viruses.

Swift action by security researchers has managed to get the sites offering the sham software shut down.

 

Code control

Security firm Websense has been tracking the attack since it started on 29 March. The initial count of compromised sites was 28,000 sites but this has grown to encompass many times this number as the attack has rolled on.

Websense dubbed it the Lizamoon attack because that was the name of the first domain to which victims were re-directed. The fake software is called the Windows Stability Center.

The re-directions were carried out by what is known as an SQL injection attack. This succeeded because many servers keeping websites running do not filter the text being sent to them by web applications.

By formatting the text correctly it is possible to conceal instructions in it that are then injected into the databases these servers are running. In this case the injection meant a particular domain appeared as a re-direction link on webpages served up to visitors.

Early reports suggested that the attackers were hitting sites using Microsoft SQL Server 2003 and 2005 and it is thought that weaknesses in associated web application software are proving vulnerable.

Ongoing analysis of the attack reveals that the attackers managed to inject code to display links to 21 separate domains. The exact numbers of sites hit by the attack is hard to judge but a Google search for the attackers' domains shows more than three million weblinks are displaying them.

Security experts say it is the most successful SQL injection attack ever seen.

Generally, the sites being hit are small businesses, community groups, sports teams and many other mid-tier organisations.

Currently the re-directs are not working because the sites peddling the bogus software have been shut down.

Also hit were some web links connected with Apple's iTunes service. However, wrote Websense security researcher Patrick Runald on the firm's blog, this did not mean people were being redirected to the bogus software sites.

"The good thing is that iTunes encodes the script tags, which means that the script doesn't execute on the user's computer," he wrote.



From the BBC:

 

Click here to see this article with pictures

 

I found on the BBC website an article on paintings of plant pictures by a victorian artist Marianne North which is presented by Kate Adie (in a very different role from that we are accustomed to).

 

The article is in the form of an audio slideshow, so I have provided this link

.

From the BBC:

 

Chemical found which 'makes bone marrow repair skin'

The chemical which summons stem cells from bone marrow to the site of a wound has been discovered by scientists in the UK and Japan.

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, identified the distress signal - HMGB1.

The authors believe it can be used to put "a megaphone in the system" to improve the treatment of injuries such as burns and leg ulcers.

Another UK expert said the research had potential.

Bone marrow was thought to play a role in repairing damaged skin, but the exact process was unknown.

Scientists at Osaka University and King's College London gave mice bone marrow cells that glow green - which can be tracked while moving round the body.

They then wounded the mice and some were given skin grafts.

 

Megaphone medicine

 

In mice without grafts, very few stem cells travelled to the wound. Those with grafts had many stem cells travelling to the wound.

Professor John McGrath, from King's College London, says grafted skin tissue has no blood vessels and therefore no oxygen. He says this environment leads to the release of HMGB1 - or what he called a 'Save Our Skin signal' - which results in stem cells moving to the wound.

He said: "It could have a very big impact on regenerative medicine for treating people with rare genetic illnesses and more common problems such as burns and ulcers.

"It could potentially revolutionise the management of wound healing."

He envisaged treatments in which a drug similar to HMGB1 would be injected near to a wound.

He said: "It would be like putting a megaphone in the system" bringing stem cells to the injury.

Researchers in Osaka are developing a drug to mimic HMGB1. They hope to begin animal testing by the end of the year and human clinical trials shortly afterwards.

Phil Stephens, professor of Cell Biology at Cardiff University, said: "I think it has potentially big clinical implications, but the key is potential if you can control it. You can't just chuck it on, you need the right amounts at the right time."

"Identifying the mechanism is a really important first step."

From the BBC:



Click here to see this article with pictures

Partnership to tackle Mediterranean forest threats

By Mark Kinver Science and environment reporter, BBC News

A partnership has been established to tackle the range of threats facing forests in the Mediterranean region, such as water scarcity and fires.

Each year, wildfires in the region claim up to 1m hectares of forests, at an estimated cost of 1bn euros (£870m).

The new partnership was launched at the 2nd Mediterranean Forest Week, which is being held in Avignon, France.

It will bring together scientists, policymakers, landowners and farmers.

"The region's forests have faced a number of socio-economic challenges over the past 100 years," explained Eduardo Rojas, assistant director general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) Forestry Department.

"On top of this we have the challenge of climate change, which is predicted to be very critical for the Mediterranean region by increasing temperatures and reducing rainfall," he told BBC News.

The FAO warns that the area is set to face a "considerable increase in longer and more frequent droughts and heat waves".

This is likely to increase the risk of large-scale wildfires and greater water scarcity, affecting both rural and urban populations.



Raising awareness

As well as climatic shifts, there are a number of socio-economic threats facing the habitat that covers about 8.5% of the Mediterranean basin. These include increasing demand for agricultural land, tourism and the expansion of urban areas.

For example, the FAO observes, forest areas in southern parts of the region are coming under increasing pressure as a result of activities such as overgrazing and the felling of trees for firewood.

Forests in the northern Mediterranean appear to be at a greater risk of wildfires because many forests are privately owned and, as a consequence of a lack of hands-on management, vegetation has spread, increasing the risk of wildfires.

"The Collaborative Partnership on Mediterranean Forests will help raise awareness on the wealth of vital fuctions Mediterranean forests provide to its citizens," explained Mr Rojas.

"These include soil and water protection, landscape values, carbon sequestration and biodiversity conservation. It is urgent that we join efforts to restore and preserve their function for future generations.

"The partnership tries to build on existing partnerships, but we now understand that just intergovernmental co-operation within the region is not sufficient, so that is why we have set up this partnership," he added.

"We hope to integrate research institutions, forest owners, farmers and other stakeholders who would otherwise not be active within an intergovernmental framework."

The group will initially focus its attention on six nations in the southern and eastern reaches of the Mediterranean: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey.

From the BBC:

 

Thunderstorm numbers calculated

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

The Earth sees about 760 thunderstorms every hour, scientists have calculated.

The figure, unveiled at the European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna, is substantially lower than numbers that have been used for nearly a century.

The new research uses a global network of monitoring stations that detect the electromagnetic pulses produced by major bolts of lightning.

It confirms that thunderstorms are mainly a tropical phenomenon - and the Congo basin is the global hotspot.

Thunderstorms also track the passage of sunlight across the world, with sunny conditions producing greater convection in the air.

"The monitoring stations might miss some bolts of lightning, but we think we're getting the big ones - and that's enough to tell you where the thunderstorms are," said Colin Price, head of the Geophysics and Planetary Sciences department at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

"And so with this global network we're able to improve on numbers that have been in standard use since the 1920s."

 

Global network

The first attempt to estimate thunderstorm numbers is thought to have been made by CEP Brooks in 1925.

At that time, it was customary for weather stations to note days when thunderstorms occurred nearby.

Collecting records where he could, the British climatologist calculated there were around 1,800 per hour on average across the world.

But his research suffered from incomplete data and mistaken assumptions - including that storms were equally distributed over land and sea, whereas the vast majority occur over land.

In the 1950s, OH Gish and GR Wait flew over the top of 21 thunderstorms in the US in aeroplanes carrying equipment capable of measuring voltages and currents in the air.

Extending their readings to the rest of the world, they came up with a global figure of 2,000-3,600 per year.

More recently, satellites have been deployed - but they do not see the whole world.

The new research uses a completely different technique, with more than 40 stations around the world geared up to detect electromagnetic pulses produced by strong lightning bolts.

 

Daytime peaks

Triangulating from groups of stations enables the World Wide Lightning Location Network (wwlln.net) to pinpoint flashes.

When they are clustered, a computer algorithm is deployed to assign flashes to their separate parent storms.

Analysing this data for September 2010 produced the average hourly figure of 760.

Each continent shows peaks during its daytime - and globally, the peak time is around noon GMT.

Thunderstorms cluster in the centre of continents in the tropics, with the Congo basin standing out.

"That's perhaps because it's drier there than in the Amazon, for example - thunderstorms seem to form more easily in drier conditions," Dr Price told BBC News.

The network is looking to add new observation points to improve results, and recently initiated a programme to detect explosive volcanic eruptions via the lighning flashes that occur in the ascending plumes of hot ash.

From the BBC:

 

Click here to see this article with pictures

 

Brain waves from thoughts of sounds used to move cursor

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

A cursor on a computer screen can be controlled using thoughts about a range of vowel sounds, research has found.

Brain signals have been translated into motion or even pictures before, but the current research showcases a nascent technique called electrocorticography.

The approach uses sensors placed directly on the surface of the brain.

The authors of the Journal of Neuroengineering paper say the technique will lead to better "brain-computer interfaces" for the disabled.

A great many studies and demonstrations have in recent years made use of the electroencephalograph, or EEG, typically worn as a "cap" studded with electrodes that pick up the electric fields produced by firing neurons.

The technique has been shown to guide electric wheelchairs or even toys, based only on the wearer's intention.

 

Sound idea

 

However, EEGs lose a great deal of the precious information that is available closer to the brain itself, what lead author of the study Eric Leuthardt, of Washington University in St Louis, in the US, calls the "gold standard" brain signal.

"You cannot get the spatial or the signal resolution," he told BBC News.

"One of the key features in signal resolution is seeing the higher frequencies of brain activity - those higher frequencies have a substantial capability of giving us better insights into cognitive intentions, and part of the reason EEG suffers for this is it acts as a filter of all of these high frequency signals."

That is, the EEG picks up signals outside the skull, which acts to absorb and muddle the signals.

Electrocorticography, by contrast, is so named because it taps directly into the brain's cortex - the outermost layer of the brain.

In a surgical procedure, a plastic pad containing a number of electrodes is implanted under the skull.

Its power has already been shown off in allowing video game play by thought alone - but in the new study, the researchers have tapped into the speech network of the brain.

 

Prior studies have made use of the motor control signals in the brain: the thought or will to move in a particular direction.

But Dr Leuthardt said that the units of speech known as phonemes allow signals of a particular "discrete" nature, rather than signals that range in intensity, as with thoughts of motion.

"(It's) for the same reason that you don't type a paper with a mouse - you have a keyboard with a number of discrete commands," he explained.

"We would want to facilitate somebody's abilty to communicate by having different phonemes - or essentially key presses - that could allow them to have discrete type of control."

Four patients who were already undergoing the electrocorticograph implantation - to establish the source of incurable epileptic seizures - participated in the latest study.

They were asked to think of four different phonemes - "oo", "ah", "ee" and "eh" - and their brain signals were recorded. Those higher-frequency signals were shown to reliably move a cursor on a computer screen.

"Do we need that gold standard to get this simple level of control? I think the likely answer is yes," Dr Leuthardt explained.

"For a brain-computer interface, especially for someone who is severly impaired, they need something that is absolutely, completely reliable. If you think of EEG (systems), they move, they're susceptible to noise, and the likelihood for reliablity is much lower."

Just a few discrete but reliable signals - tantamount to being able to move a cursor in two dimensions and effect a "click" - could lead to a vast number of applications, he continued.

"What is one of the most prolific '2D-plus-click' devices we have today? It's an Iphone. Once you have 2D plus click... there's innumerable different types of functionality you can create on an application base - but what you first need is the control."

The study also showed that the large-area arrays utilised for the epilepsy research would not be necessary for future electrocorticography implants; an area just 4mm by 4mm can provide the same level of information.

From the BBC:

 

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Classic Commodore 64 lives again

Fans of retro computing will soon be able to buy a modern PC clad in a classic case.

Commodore is making a Windows PC that fits inside a boxy beige shell that looks exactly like its original C64.

The 8-bit machine was released in 1982, had 64 kilobytes of memory and became one of the best-selling computers ever.

Commodore's updated version will run Windows 7 but also has an emulator capable of playing games written for its ancestor.

Commodore has started taking orders for the C64x, priced at $595 (£364), and said the machines would ship between May and June. It is expected to appear in shops later in the year.

The machine's internal hardware will be based around a dual-core Intel Atom D525, a chip typically found in notebook computers.

Its 1.8Ghz chip is far faster than the 8-bit 1MHz MOS 6502 processor used in the 80's original.

 

The C64x will also use an integrated Nvidia graphics chip and buyers have the option of equipping a model with a Bluray DVD player.

All the hardware for the machine fits inside the keyboard case.

The first models will sport the same taupe colour scheme as the original along with a "clicky" keyboard familiar to anyone who used the older C64 or its predecessor, the Vic 20.

From the BBC:

 

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Tevatron accelerator yields hints of new particle

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

A particle accelerator in the US has shown compelling hints of a never-before-seen particle, researchers say.

The find must be more fully confirmed, but researchers at the Tevatron are racing to work through existing data.

If proved, it will be a completely new, unanticipated particle; researchers say it cannot be the much sought-after Higgs boson.

It could also signal a new fundamental force of nature, and the most radical change in physics for decades.

Researchers at the Tevatron formally announced the find on the collaboration's website, after posting an as-yet unreviewed account of the research on the Arxiv repository.

The team was analysing data from collisions between protons and their anti-matter counterparts antiprotons. In these collisions, particles known as W bosons are produced, along with a pair of "jets" of other particles.

It was in these jets that the unexpected "bump" in the team's data came to light, potentially representing a particle that the current understanding of the zoo of subatomic particles - the Standard Model - does not include.

 

'Time will tell'

 

"When you look at the data it's not some disagreement with the Standard Model, it's a nicely formed bump in the distribution that looks really like the kind of bump you'd get if a new particle was being exchanged in this process," said Dan Hooper, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab who was not involved in the research.

 

However, the result is at what is known as the "three-sigma" level of certainty; that means there is still about a tenth of a percent chance that the result is attributable to some statistical fluctuation in the data.

For a formal discovery, the level is traditionally taken to be five-sigma - or about a one-in-a-million chance that the "bump" is just a fluke. However, Dr Hooper said, the result comes from data taken at one of the Tevatron's two detectors, called CDF and DZero.

"Even without running the machine one more day, they have roughly twice as much data at one of the two experiments, and if you include... DZero, then you have four times as much," he told BBC News.

That means that confirming the result more fully is simply a matter of working through the numbers the team already have to hand. Further, the coming experimental run at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) should provide even more data to confirm or refute the new particle - whatever it is.

All that is clear is that the bump definitely does not represent the unwitting star of high-energy physics, the Higgs boson - the hunt for which has popularly been pitched as a race between the Tevatron and the LHC.

"If it's a real effect, rather than a fluctuation or a mismodelling of the background, it would be much more exciting than a standard model Higgs - or any type of Higgs," said Tony Weidberg, a physicist from Oxford University who works on the LHC's Atlas instrument.

However, he told BBC News that he did not "find this evidence very convincing", though he reiterated that a more definitive answer would be soon in coming.

"I've been doing this for 30 years now, and every few years we get these three-sigma effects - they come and then they go. Time will tell."

Dr Hooper is more optimistic on the basis of the current result alone.

"There's a 0.1% chance that this is a statistical fluke," he said. "Other than that possibility that lingers, this is the most exciting new phyiscs we've learned about in my lifetime."

If it is in fact true, Dr Hooper believes that the mystery particle represents an undiscovered "fundamental force".

"We'd essentially be saying there's a new force of nature being communicated by the particle. We know that there's four forces: electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. This would be the fifth; every freshman physics class would have to change their textbooks."

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Kepler star trio find is mystery to astroseismologists

The graceful dance between three stars seen by the Kepler telescope has drawn the attention of astronomers because it is not accompanied by a song.

Most stars are known to generate great booming sounds in their interiors, and Kepler can spot the resulting change in the light that they emit.

However, astronomers reporting in Science say a red giant they have spotted is unexpectedly quiet.

HD181068A is orbited by two smaller, red dwarf stars that orbit each other.

The study of the sounds within stars is known as astroseismology, and a separate report in Science details the findings of more than 500 stars whose deep rumblings Kepler has measured.

As convection processes within stars move masses of material up from the core, great pressure waves - in essence, sound waves of very low frequency - are created.

As the gases are compressed and rarefied, temperature changes lead to changes in the light that escapes the stars.

The sounds within the stars, and the clues they give into the stars' makeup, can be inferred from these small changes in the "light curves" that telescopes such as Kepler measure.

 

Triple play

 

But HD181068 is an unusual case - firstly because it is a "triply eclipsing" system. From Kepler's viewpoint, the two smaller binary stars pass in front of one another as they orbit each other, and they in turn pass in front of the red giant.

Just what is going on in the system can be worked out from measuring the tiny amounts of light that are blocked by each star at each stage of the trio's waltz.

It is not the first triply eclipsing system that Kepler has spotted; that honour goes to KOI 126, also reported in Science, in February.

But the red giant's silence has confounded the new study's lead author Aliz Derekas, of Eotvos University in Hungary.

"This red giant star should pulsate," she told BBC News.

"We now know all red giants show some oscillations - the surface of the star should show some waves that should be in the light curve. We can estimate the period of these oscillations, and this red giant doesn't show that period."

The best guess for the moment is that the gravitational forces at work between the three stars could serve to dampen the oscillations at HD181068's surface.

That is because the two smaller stars orbit each other in 0.9 days, whereas the expected period of oscillations from the red giant's rumblings is almost exactly half that.

It may be that the binary pair stops the oscillations on the red giant by tugging on the star's surface at just the right times.

Mike Montgomery, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, said another force may be at work.

"When you have stars in a binary or triple system, and one of them burns all its hydrogen and becomes a red giant, if it's close enough it can start to dump some of its material onto that other star," he explained to BBC News.

"This is just circumstantial evidence, but maybe its internal structure isn't what it would have been if it were a single star, and that's somehow affecting its ability to pulsate."

Either way, Kepler's prolific rate of discovery means that further examples of systems of this sort may be just around the corner.

Dr Montgomery said: "These things are not as uncommon as you might think. We'll probably discover more of these systems and we'll be able in a couple of years to be sure about this sort of diagnosis."

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Laser gun fired from US navy ship

 

The US Navy has fired a laser gun from one of its ships for the first time.

Researchers used the high-energy laser (HEL) to disable a boat by setting fire to its engines off the coast of California.

Similar systems had previously been tested on land, however moist sea air presented an extra challenge as it reduces a beam's power.

The navy said that ship-borne lasers could eventually be used to protect vessels from small attack boats.

The US military has been experimenting with laser weapons since the 1970s.

Early systems used large, chemical-based lasers which tended to produce dangerous waste gasses.

More recently, scientists have developed solid state lasers that combine large numbers of compact beam generators, similar to LEDs.

 

HELs fire

Until now, much of the development of HELs has focused on shooting down missiles or hitting land-based targets.

The latest round of tests showed its wider possibilities, according to Peter Morrison from the Office of Naval Research.

"This test provides an important data point as we move toward putting directed energy on warships.

"There is still much work to do to make sure it's done safely and efficiently," he said.

While a weaponised system would likely be restricted to military vessels, merchant shipping has also expressed an interest in laser technogy,

A gun which uses visible laser light to temporarily blind pirates was announced by BAE Systems in 2010.

The technology is still being tested, ahead of a commercial launch.

From the BBC:

 

Pensioner in Georgia cuts Armenia off from internet

An elderly woman in Georgia is facing a prison sentence after reportedly causing internet services in neighbouring Armenia to crash.

The country found itself offline for hours on 28 March after cables linking Georgia to Armenia were damaged.

A Georgian interior ministry spokesman said a 75-year-old woman had admitted damaging fibre-optic cables while scavenging for copper.

She has been charged and reportedly faces up to three years in prison.

"Taking into account her advancing years, she has been released pending the end of the investigation and subsequent trial," spokesman Zura Gvenetadze told AFP news agency.

She had been searching for copper in the Georgian village of Ksani.

The cables, owned by the Georgian Railway Telecom company, serve eastern Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

All three wholesale internet providers in Armenia - ArmenTel, FiberNet Communication and GNC-Alfa - were unable to provide their usual service on the evening of 28 March, Armenia's Arka news agency reported.

Services were eventually restored after midnight.

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Shale gas 'worse than coal' for climate

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

The new kid on the energy block, shale gas, may be worse in climate change terms than coal, a study concludes.

Drawn from rock through a controversial "fracking" process, some hail the gas as a "stepping stone" to a low-carbon future and a route to energy security.

But US researchers found that shale gas wells leak substantial amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

This makes its climate impact worse than conventional gas, they say - and probably worse than coal as well.

"Compared to coal, the footprint of shale gas is at least 20% greater and perhaps more than twice as great on the 20-year horizon, and is comparable over 100 years," they write in a paper to be published shortly in the journal Climatic Change.

"We have produced the first comprehensive analysis of the greenhouse gas footprint of shale gas," said lead author Robert Howarth from Cornell University in Ithaca, US.

"We have used the best available data [and] the conclusion is that shale gas may indeed be quite damaging to global warming, quite likely as bad or worse than coal," he told BBC News.

 

Short-term fix?

Greenhouse gas emissions from shale gas are predominantly down to two things: carbon dioxide produced when the gas is burned, and methane that leaks out while the well is being exploited.

Figures from the US government and industry indicate that at least a third more methane leaks from shale gas extraction than from conventional wells - and perhaps more than twice as much.

Extracting the gas involves a complex sequence of processes including drilling down and then sideways along a shale bed, cracking the rock with hydraulic pressure or explosions (fracking), placing plugs in the shaft and then "drilling out" these plugs.

Coal, by contrast, is associated with a much smaller methane release during mining; but burning it produces about twice as much CO2 as burning natural gas.

Molecule for molecule, methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2; but it lasts for a much shorter time in the atmosphere.

Figures from this research team indicate that over a 20-year period, the net warming impact of using shale gas is worse than coal - and, perhaps more surprisingly, that conventional gas may be worse than coal as well.

Over a 100-year timeframe, conventional gas is almost certainly better than coal - but shale gas could be worse.

The precise numbers depend most on leakage rates. Dr Howarth's group used "best practice" estimates; in the real world, therefore, the leakage and the climate impact could be even worse.

"No-one knows for sure to what extent industry uses best practices; and unfortunately, at least in the US, industry does not want government or the public to know," he said.

 

"The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed rules that would require industry to report methane emissions, but several companies have sued the EPA to try to prevent such reporting."

With greenhouse gas emissions resuming their rise as societies emerge from recession, and with growth in fossil fuel use expanding at a faster absolute rate than renewables, some analysts and even climate campaigners have seized on the option of expanding gas use as a "transitional fuel" on the way from high-carbon coal-burning to low-carbon alternatives.

The new US analysis suggests this may not be a sensible strategy, given that the total carbon footprint appears bigger - especially if the gas comes from shale formations.

Current projections suggest that within 25 years, half of the US natural gas output will come from shale, while many other countries are also pursuing the technology.

The first trial fracking in the UK took place last month, in Lancashire.

Euan Nisbet, a geologist who runs several methane monitoring and research programmes from Royal Holloway, University of London, suggested the detailed balance might vary between geological formations.

"By trying to evaluate the greenhouse gas footprint of shale gas extraction, Howarth and his team are asking important questions about this new bonanza," he said.

"I suspect the debate on this will be long, and the answers will be different for each shale gas formation; but it is important that we tackle this debate."

"We also need to be very careful to account fully for the greenhouse footprint of conventional gas piped over long distances, for instance in the import of Asian gas to Europe, or Norwegian gas to the UK. The energy choices are not easy."

The UK Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) is preparing to issue more fracking licences around the country, and a spokesman said it would "closely monitor developments and consider the need for additional research to improve our understanding of the implications for policy".

Robert Howarth, however, was less equivocal.

"We should not proceed to view shale gas as a 'transitional fuel' to be used over the next few decades to replace other fossil fuels, but rather work harder to move towards truly green renewable fuels as quickly as possible, such as wind and solar."

From the BBC:

 

Fujitsu offers UK fast rural broadband network

 

Fujitsu is to create a superfast broadband network for rural parts of the UK, rivalling BT's service.

Virgin Media and TalkTalk have already said they will use it to provide internet services. It will also be open to local authorities.

Much of the system will be built on BT infrastructure, such as underground ducting and phone poles, which it has been forced to open up to competitors.

Fujitsu wants £500m of government money to help fund the project.

That would account for the lion's share of the £530m the government has set aside to stimulate rural broadband projects.

This cash comes from a fund originally intended to help the digital switchover. A further £300m, from the BBC licence fee, will be available after 2015.

The money will be given to local authorities with Fujitsu able to bid to provide the network in that area.

Without it, the network will not be built, Andy Stevenson, managing director of network solutions at Fujitsu told the BBC.

"Assuming we are successful we would hope to add our first retail customer in 2012 and reach 5 million in three to five years," he said.

He is hopeful that local authorities will band together to provide funds for the project.

"We don't want to end up with 40 fragmented networks so it makes sense for regions to come together. That is not mandated but it is what we expect to happen," he said.

The announcement comes as research suggests just 1% of UK households currently have access to superfast broadband, defined as speeds of over 25Mbps.

The Fujitsu network will offer fibre optic cabling directly to homes - so-called Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH). That could bring speeds in excess of 1Gbps with the potential to go even faster.

The system would be more sophisticated than BT's superfast network, which relies mainly on slower Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) technology. FTTC offers speeds of up to 40Mbps.

 

Genuine choice

 

Other ISPs, community groups and local authorities will be able to take advantage of the network.

Duncan Tait, chief executive of Fujitsu thinks it could breathe new life into rural communities.

"If done correctly this can be a key vehicle to accelerate recovery in the UK and bring genuine choice to generations of communities staved of participating fully in the UK economy," he said.

Virgin Media's chief executive Neil Berkett described it as: "a once in a lifetime opportunity to make the ambition of a digitally enabled society a reality beyond the country's cities and towns".

It is estimated that a third of the UK will not be served by existing commercial broadband solutions because it is not economically viable to offer them in remote areas.

Communication minister Ed Vaizey said the planned network was "exactly the sort of ambition and innovation" that the government wanted to stimulate.

Sebastien Lahtinen, co-founder of broadband news site ThinkBroadband said the collaboration between Fujitsu, Virgin Media and TalkTalk would provide "a real alternative to BT wholesale which could help jump ahead of urban areas".

"It is exactly what campaigners for the final third have been seeking. The UK could be about to take the biggest leap forward in next-generation broadband access," he said.

 

Modest pace

 

However, one sticking point could be the price BT is proposing to charge for access to its ducts and poles. It was forced to open them up to rivals but ISPs, including Virgin Media and Sky, have written to the government asking it to reassess the price.

In the letter, sent earlier this month, Virgin Media said it would be more cost-effective to build an entirely separate duct and pole network than pay the prices being asked by BT.

The government has said it wants to make the UK the best place in Europe for superfast broadband by 2015, but new research suggests that it is being adopted at a relatively modest pace.

Broadband analysis firm Point Topic found that just 1% of homes currently have broadband speeds of 25Mbps or above.

By the end of 2010, there were 175,000 superfast broadband lines, the majority made up from the 118,000 Virgin Media customers signed up for its 50Mbps broadband service. The rest came from BT or alternative operators.

"At that rate we should pass the quarter of a million milestone sometime between now and the end of April," said Point Topic chief analyst Tim Johnson.

From the BBC:

 

FBI closes in on zombie PC gang

 

US crime-fighters are closing in on a gang behind a huge botnet after taking control of the criminals' servers.

It is the first time FBI investigators have used such a method.

The US Justice Department had to seek court permission from a judge to carry out the sting.

It enabled the authorities to issue its own commands, effectively ordering the malware to shut down. It also logged the IP addresses of compromised machines.

It means the authorities will be able to notify ISPs about which machines have been infected and ISPs in turn can let victims know that their machines had been taken over.

A similar approach was used last year by Dutch police as part of its shutdown of the Bredolab botnet.

At the time, privacy experts questioned the legality of such a move.

 

Millions recruited

 

A botnet is a network of infected computers, also known as zombie PCs.

Coreflood, the malware program prompting the FBI investigation, has been around for at least a decade and can record key strokes, allowing criminals to take over unsuspecting computers and steal passwords, banking and credit card information.

It is believed to have recruited around 2.3 million machines and raked in millions for those behind it.

Officials have not said where the attacks came although it appears consistent with cybercrime activity in Eastern Europe.

Investigators seized five of the botnet's servers that were controlling hundreds of thousands of infected machines.

They also seized 29 domain names used by the botnet.

"As a result the zombie machines in the Coreflood network are being re-routed to communicate with the server controlled by law enforcement agencies," explained Noa Bar Yosef, a senior strategist at security firm Imperva.

"The 'good' server can then issue commands to stop the malware execution on the compromised machines."