Hi El, that sounds like it could be very useful in healthcare situations.
I do worry about making our homes "sterile environments". We need to be exposed to some degree of germs, in order to build up our resistence to infection.
I agree yogi - I don't think it's a coincidence that allergy sufferers have increased as our homes have become more sterile.......but I do love my Flash Spray with bleach! 
From the BBC:
Click here to see this article with video clip and pictures
A skull belonging to one of the largest "sea monsters" ever unearthed is being unveiled to the public.
The beast, which is called a pliosaur, has been described as the most fearsome predator the Earth has seen.
The fossil was found in Dorset, but it has taken 18 months to remove the skull from its rocky casing, revealing the monster in remarkable detail.
Scientists suspect the creature, which is on show at the Dorset County Museum, may be a new species or even genus.
Richard Edmonds, Dorset County Council's earth science manager for the Jurassic Coast, said: "This is amazing. We saw this fossil initially as a pile of bones - and slowly, after a lot of hard work, it has come together.
"We are now told this skull is 95% complete, and probably one of the largest and certainly one of the most well-preserved and complete pliosaurs ever found anywhere in the world."
The 155-million-year-old fossil was discovered by local collector Kevan Sheehan between 2003 and 2008 as it gradually tumbled out of the cliffs near Weymouth.
He told BBC News: "It was sheer luck - I was sitting on the beach, and saw three pieces. I had no idea what they were, but I proceeded to drag them back. Then over several years, I'd go back every year and find a new piece. I'm a beach magpie."
At first it more closely resembled huge lumps of rock than a marine monster, but a lengthy preparation process that has been carried out by fossil expert Scott Moore-Faye has revealed the fine details of the fossil.
Looking somewhat like a crocodile on steroids, it is now easy to see the power of this "biting machine": pliosaurs, which lived during the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods were the top predators of the oceans.
On show now are its eye sockets, perched upon the top of its head, revealing how it would have fixed its stare on any passing prey; the openings that held its it immensely powerful jaw muscles, allowing it to crunch down on anything that crossed its path; and the huge holes, running all the way down its snout, that contained its giant, razor-sharp teeth to help finish the meal off.
Palaeontologist Richard Forrest said: "This is an iconic specimen - one of the most exciting we have seen in years.
"It was probably the most fearsome predator that ever lived. Standing in front of the skull you can imagine this enormous beast staring straight back at you, fixing you with its binocular vision, and attacking. Just thinking about it raises the hairs on the back of your neck."
Its bulky body, which would have been powered through the water with four paddle-like limbs, has never been found - and may not even have fossilised.
But new estimates from scientists, based on the 2.4m-long skull, suggest that the predator would have measured between 15-18m from tip to tail.
Currently, the owner of the title of world's biggest sea monster is tricky to ascertain, as it is rare to find a complete fossil.
But pieces of potentially larger specimens have been found in the brick pits of Oxfordshire, and the skull of a species of pliosaur called Kronosaurus, from Australia, could be up to 3m (10ft) long. Recent finds in Svalbard, such as the aptly named "Monster" and "Predator X", as well as the "Monster of Aramberri", found in Mexico are also contenders.
However, scientists say that having a skull that is only missing the tip of its snout and a small piece of its jaw, gives them a rare chance to get a glimpse into the life of this ancient animal.
CT scans carried out by a team at the School of Engineering Sciences University of Southampton, which probe the fossil using X-rays, are now being studied to assess whether this creature is new to science.
Richard Edmonds said: "I've looked at some of the papers of described animals, and it looks different: it is much more massive, much more robust.
"But to determine whether it is anything new is a whole study in its own right. We'll have to go away, carefully compared to the existing species.
"But I wouldn't be surprised if in a year's time, we are standing here and looking at something that is new to science."
The fossil, which was purchased for Β£20,000 by the Dorset County Museum using Heritage Lottery Funds, with half of the money going to the collector and half to the landowner, is now going on public display. Sir David Attenborough is carrying out the opening ceremony.
David Tucker, Dorset County Museums Adviser said: "Our initial expectations have been more than met and the creature looks absolutely fabulous and we doubt whether there is a more complete pliosaur skull anywhere in the world.
"It is amazing to have the largest, most complete skull of the most powerful predator to live on Earth on display on the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site, the home of the science of palaeontology"
From the BBC:
An international team of scientists based in Scotland has decoded the full DNA sequence of the potato for the first time.
The breakthrough holds out the promise of boosting harvests of one of the world's most important staple crops.
Researchers at the James Hutton Institute in Dundee say it should soon be possible to develop improved varieties of potato much more quickly.
The genome of an organism is a map of how all of its genes are put together.
Each gene controls different aspects of how the organism grows and develops.
Slight changes in these instructions give rise to different varieties.
Each individual has a slightly different version of the DNA sequence for the species.
Professor Iain Gordon, chief executive of the James Hutton Institute, said decoding the potato genome should enable breeders to create varieties which are more nutritious, as well as resistant to pests and diseases.
Colour and flavour
He hopes it will help meet the challenge of feeding the world's soaring population.
The research is far from complete. Analysing the genetic sequence of the plant will take several more years.
At the moment it can take more than 10 years to breed an improved variety.
By locating the genes that control traits like yield, colour, starchiness and flavour, the research should make it possible to develop better spuds much more quickly.
Potatoes provide the world's fourth-largest crop, with an annual, global yield of 330m tonnes.
From the BBC:
Click here to see this article with video clip and pictures
The best strikers, defenders and midfield players in the robot football world are gathering in Istanbul.
The teams and their coaches are there for the climax of the 2011 non-human soccer calendar - the RoboCup.
The competition sees teams from all around the world pit their creations, be they made from bolts or bytes, against other robot teams.
The 2011 tournament includes one of the UK's first robot football teams.
Team human
Now in its 14th year, the RoboCup was set up with the aim of creating, by 2050, a team of humanoid robots that can take on and beat the best human players.
The competition aims to encourage innovation in robot building by getting roboteers to tackle the many problems that playing football embodies.
Not only do team coaches have to conquer basic problems such as vision, but they also have to work on how to get their players acting as a team. All robots playing the game have to be autonomous - although the machines can swap information wirelessly. Play must also be fair as no barging, blocking or touching is allowed.
UK team Edinferno from the University of Edinburgh has won a place in the final and is up against 27 other teams in what is known as the "standard platform" league.
Every team in this league uses humanoid Nao robots made by French firm Aldebaran Robotics. The robots are standard but the on-board software controlling their sensors, actuators and limbs is custom-written to try to make the best of the machine's capabilities.
The UK also has an interest in the Noxious Kouretes team that is coached by the Technical University of Crete as well as the University of Wales and Oxford University.
In addition, a number of UK schools have qualified for the junior competition.
Other leagues at the tournament will see competition among simulated players (both 2D and 3D), small robots, medium-sized robots and teams made of humanoid robots.
In 2010, about 500 teams from about 40 nations - including Iran, Taiwan and Chile - took part in the RoboCup's various tournaments.
In recent years, the tournament has grown to include more than just football. Allied competitions cover domestic robots that carry out chores around the house and rescue robots that help emergency services.
And today the BBC announced that Edinfurno were knocked out in the group stages. The BBC article reports:
The team's coach vowed to return next year with a much improved side.
Dr Subramanian Ramamoorthy, assistant professor at the School of Informatics, said the lack of success was largely due to the fact that the UK has no national RoboCup tournament at which Edinferno could fine tune their hardware, software and strategy.
"Almost all the bugs that stopped us were because we were not match ready," he said.
By contrast, said Dr Ramamoorthy, opposing teams had taken part in their respective national tournaments and honed their players and team work before reaching the final in Turkey.
"I suspect we are one of the few that are here for their first year," he said.
Despite getting knocked out in the early stages, Dr Ramamoorthy said Edinferno had accomplished many of its goals.
"Until this year there was no British team," he said. "And we learned that our core technology is not that bad even though we have not been very successful."
From the BBC:
Britain is set to face an increase in harsh winters, with up to one-in-seven gripping the UK with prolonged sub-zero temperatures, a study has suggested.
The projection was based on research that identified how low solar activity affected winter weather patterns.
However, the authors were keen to stress that their findings did not suggest that the region was about to be plunged into a "little ice age".
The findings appear in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
"We could get to the point where one-in-seven winters are very cold, such as we had at the start of last winter and all through the winter before," said co-author Mike Lockwood, professor of space environment physics at the University of Reading.
Using the Central England Temperature (CET) record, the world's longest instrumental data series that stretches back to 1659, the team said that average temperatures during recent winters had been markedly lower than the longer-term average.
"The mean CET for December, January and February for the recent relatively cold winters of 2008/09 and 2009/10 were 3.50C and 2.53C respectively," they wrote.
"Whereas the mean value for the previous 20 winters had been 5.04C.
"The cluster of lower winter temperatures in the UK during the last three years had raised questions about the probability of more similar, or even colder, winters occurring in the future."
Last year, Professor Lockwood and colleagues published a paper that identified a link between fewer sunspots and atmospheric conditions that "blocked" warm westerly winds reaching Europe during winter months, opening the way for cold easterlies from the Arctic and Russia to sweep across the region.
Professor Lockwood, while acknowledging that there were a range of possible meteorological factors that could influence blocking events, said the latest study moved things forward by showing that there was "improvement in the predictive skill" when solar activity was taken into account.
Be prepared
In December 2010, heavy snow and prolonged sub-zero temperatures severely disrupted the UK's transport infrastructure, affecting the Christmas getaway plans of thousands of people.
This prompted Transport Secretary Phillip Hammond to ask his department's chief scientific adviser to assess whether the government should be planning for more severe winters in the future.
Professor Lockwood welcomed Mr Hammond's call for a review, but added a word of caution.
"The key message we are trying to get over here is that past experience is not a good guide here, even recent experience is not a good guide," he told BBC News.
"Taking the averages from over the past 20 or 30 years is not a good way to plan for the future because there may be real systematic shifts.
"We have to do the science to actually understand the combined influence and then draw our conclusions about what level our winter preparedness needs to be over the next 50 years."
'No deep freeze'
Professor Lockwood was keen to point out that his team's paper did not suggest that the UK and mainland Europe was about to be plunged into a "little ice age" as a result of low solar activity, as some media reports had suggested.
The Maunder Minimum, a period of extremely low solar activity that lasted for about half a century from the late 17th Century, has been dubbed by some as the Little Ice Age because Europe experienced an increase in harsh winters, resulting in rivers - such as the Thames - freezing over completely.
Professor Lockwood said it was a "pejorative name" because what happened during the Maunder Minimum "was actually nothing like an ice age at all".
"There were colder winters in Europe. That almost certainly means, from what we understand about the blocking mechanisms that cause them, that there were warmer winters in Greenland," he observed.
"So it was a regional redistribution and not a global phenomenon like an ice age. It was nothing like as cold as a real ice age - either in its global extent or in the temperatures reached.
"The summers were probably warmer if anything, rather than colder as they would be in an ice age."
He added that the Maunder Minimum period was not an uninterrupted series of cold, harsh winters.
Data from the CET showed that the coldest winter since records began was 1683/84 "yet just two year later, right in the middle of the Maunder Minimum, is the fifth warmest winter in the whole record, so this idea that Maunder Minimum winters were unrelentingly cold is wrong".
He explained that a similar pattern could be observed in recent events: "Looking at satellite data, we found that when solar activity was low, there was an increase in the number of blocking events of the jetstream over the Atlantic.
"That led to us getting colder weather in Europe. The same events brought warm air from the tropics to Greenland, so it was getting warmer.
"These blocking events are definitely a regional redistribution, and not like a global ice age."
Happy first birthday to Neptune
From the BBC:
Click here to see this article with pictures
Neptune is about to celebrate its first birthday. On 12 July it will be exactly one Neptunian year - or 164.79 Earth years - since its discovery on 24 September 1846. But why do we still know so little about the distant planet?
About 4.4 billion kilometres away from Earth lies Neptune, the first planet in the solar system to be discovered deliberately.
After the classification of the planet Uranus in the 1780s, astronomers had been perplexed by its strange orbit. Scientists came to the conclusion that either Isaac Newton's laws were fundamentally flawed or that something else - another planet - was pulling Uranus from its expected orbit.
And so the search for the eighth planet began.
"It was such an incredible mathematical business, it makes searching for a needle in a haystack look like a 10-minute job for a child," says Dr Alan Chapman, author of the Victorian Amateur Astronomer.
While mathematical predictions had been made over the previous decades, it was not until French mathematician Urbain le Verrier's theories were tested at the Berlin observatory by Johann Gottfried Galle that the planet was first seen.
After only an hour or so of searching, Neptune was observed for the first time on the night of 23 September 1846. It was found almost exactly where le Verrier had predicted it to be.
Independently, British scientist John Couch Adams also produced similar results, and now he and Verrier are given joint credit for the discovery.
But many claim it was not Galle who documented the planet first, but the famous astronomer and mathematician Galileo. In his famous work The Starry Messenger, some evidence points to his discovery.
"If you look at the drawings for January 1613, you can see a fantastic drawing of Jupiter and its moons," says Dr Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society.
"It even includes an object labelled as 'fixed star' which is the first telescopic drawing of the planet Neptune."
Controversy aside, comparatively little is still known about the planet.
Part of the problem is that there is no way for the planet to be viewed with the naked eye and until the Hubble telescope, scientific observation was very difficult.
So what is Neptune like?
"It's a frozen lump of frozen gases and I suppose not a terribly friendly place," says Dr Chapman.
"Let's wish it a happy birthday but perhaps let's keep as far away from it as we can as it won't give you a welcome."
One of the things most interesting to scientists about Neptune is the weather.
"Cloudy with a chance of methane" is how planetary scientist Heidi Hammel, of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (Aura), describes it.
Winds can reach 1,930km/h (1,200mph), creating storms unimaginable on Earth. These huge storms are seen as dark spots in a similar way to the Great Red Spot on Jupiter.
The reason astronomers know so little is because the planet has only been photographed once from close range - on the Voyager 2 mission in 1989. And because its seasons last 40 Earth years, only Neptune's spring and early summer have been closely documented.
"Every time we go to a telescope and look at this planet, it's doing something new, it's doing something we hadn't thought of before," says Dr Hammel.
What Dr Hammel found was that storms were appearing and forming and changing much more quickly than had previously been thought. She was looking at a planet very different from the photos taken by Voyager 2.
"We really have only been observing Neptune with big telescopes since shortly before 1989," she says.
"We haven't been looking long enough. This planet is not for the impatient."
The chance to find out more about the planet close-up still seems a long way away - more than just the billions of kilometres in distance.
Nasa missions to discover more about the planet have been sidelined for the moment due to budget constraints. The Neptune Orbiter mission, once planned to launch sometime in 2016, no longer features on Nasa's proposed mission list.
"We've never had a mission that's been dedicated to Neptune," says Dr Robin Catchpole, of Cambridge University's Institute of Astronomy.
"We know how it fits into the sequence of planets as far as composition goes but we don't know a lot."
Even the New Horizons mission to discover more about Pluto and the outer reaches of the solar system - due to pass through the orbit path of Neptune on 24 August 2014 - has not been organised to closely monitor Neptune.
Instead, photos are being taken of it and its moon to test the imaging equipment rather than for any major scientific purposes.
And this mission is allowing some to question whether Pluto could be reclassified as the ninth planet in the solar system after its primary planet title was taken away in 2006.
If it was reinstated, Neptune would lose the honour of being the furthest planet from the Sun.
"Whether Pluto is called a planet or not is a matter of semantics," says Dr Catchpole.
"The situation with the classifications is that Pluto doesn't fit into the [current] system very well. I don't think it's ever going to change again."
So happy birthday Neptune. Though lighting any candles on a birthday cake might be tricky in those high winds.
From the BBC:
A rediscovered oil painting by Leonardo Da Vinci is to go on show at the National Gallery in November.
Salvator Mundi, meaning Saviour of the World, dates to around 1500 and depicts a figure of Christ holding an orb.
The work was long known to have existed, but had been presumed to have been lost or destroyed.
The painting will be displayed as part of the gallery's Leonardo da Vinci: Painter of the Court of Milan exhibition from 9 November.
The recently authenticated work was once owned by King Charles I and recorded in his art collection in 1649 before being auctioned by the son of the Duke of Buckingham in 1763.
It next appeared in 1900, damaged from previous restoration attempts and its authorship unclear, when it was purchased by a British collector, Sir Frederick Cook.
Cook's descendants sold it at auction in 1958 for Β£45 and it was acquired by a US consortium of art dealers in 2005.
After undergoing extensive conservation treatment last year, it was determined to be an original Da Vinci work.
It is now estimated to be worth around Β£120m.
The last time a Da Vinci painting was discovered was in 1909, when the Benois Madonna came to light.
The piece is currently on display at the Hermitage in St Petersburg.
And this is a photo of the painting I found elsewhere
And coincidentally I saw this article today, also from the BBC:
A lost painting by Renaissance artist Michelangelo has been hanging in a University of Oxford residence, an Italian scholar claims.
The Campion Hall painting, which depicts the crucifixion, had been thought to be by Marcello Venusti.
But Antonio Forcellino said infra-red technology had revealed the true creator of the masterpiece.
It has been removed from a wall of the Jesuit academic community and sent to the Ashmolean Museum for safekeeping.
'Excitement and concern'
The master of Campion Hall, Father Brendan Callaghan, said: "It's a very beautiful piece, but far too valuable to have on our wall any more."
He said he greeted the development that the work - called Crucifixion With The Madonna, St John And Two Mourning Angels - could be a Michelangelo with "a mixture of excitement and slight concern".
"Simply having it hanging on our wall wasn't a good idea," he explained.
"Its value in the three years I've been master has gone up tenfold, even if it's not by Michelangelo.
"No doubt the art historians will argue the points to and fro."
In his book The Lost Michelangelos, Mr Forcellino wrote: "No-one but Michelangelo could have painted such a masterpiece."
The painting was bought by Campion Hall at a Sotheby's auction in the 1930s.
I found this image of the painting elsewhere
From the BBC:
Click here to see this aricle with pictures
Will it rain on your picnic/camping trip/festival? Old weather sayings may sound like fanciful folklore, but some can help amateur forecasters. Here are six that are backed up by science.
Is there any truth to weather sayings, or are they merely a whimsical interpretation of reality?
Some of the earliest examples of weather lore date back to the Bible. With farmers and mariners so dependent on the weather, we have undoubtedly been looking for signs from the heavens since the dawn of man.
Forecasting the weather accurately can be a challenge, even with today's supercomputers.
But an experienced weather observer can get a fairly good idea of an impending storm well in advance, just by looking at the sky. The signs can be clearer than you think.
Over the millennia we have learnt to recognise these patterns, and a rhyme handed down from generation to generation is a good way to share and remember knowledge - especially in the days before literacy was widespread.
While many old sayings are unreliable and of little practical use, here is the meteorological logic behind six traditional weather rhymes.
1. "Red sky at night, shepherd's delight; red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning"
Deep red sunsets are often associated with dry, settled weather and high pressure. A deep red sunset may indicate a prolonged spell of good weather. But the key sign is in the red sky around the sun - and not the colour of the cloud itself.
Red sky in the morning can be interpreted in a slightly different way. As the sun rises at a low angle in the east, it may light up the impending clouds associated with a weather front coming in from the west.
It may also indicate that rain is on its way and due to arrive later in the day, hence the "shepherd's warning".
2. "Three days rain will empty any sky"
This saying is very much open to anyone's interpretation, but the simplest logic behind it is that, in our climate, heavy rain doesn't really last for very long. Cloudy and gloomy weather may persist for many days at a time, but torrential rain usually clears in a day or two, and almost certainly in three.
3. "When the wind is out of the east, tis neither good for man nor beast"
This is a classic weather rhyme and an easy one to interpret for meteorologists in the UK and in any other part of Europe.
It simply implies that our harsh winter weather usually comes in from eastern Europe and Russia. A strengthening icy wind blowing from the east would indicate to a farmer hundreds of years ago that snow and frigid conditions were on the way.
Cold "easterlies" often bring spells of heavy snow to eastern Britain, but the wind chill from a cutting Siberian wind is felt right across the country. In the summer months, on the other hand, an easterly wind may carry pollutants and poor quality air from the near continent, giving us hazy skies. However, the latter link is more open to debate.
4. "In the morning mountains, in the afternoon fountains"
Thunder clouds and heavy showers often develop in a set pattern, especially in the summer months. As the sun heats the ground and air during the morning, small cumulus clouds appear in the sky.
If atmospheric conditions are just right, these will rapidly grow into towering cauliflower-like mountains. By the afternoon, the clouds will have reached the dizzy heights of the top of the atmosphere, resulting in rain and lightning below.
5. "If a circle forms 'round the moon, 'twill rain or snow soon"
Rain in the UK is usually associated with a weather front or big shower clouds - it's typically one or the other.
Weather fronts come in all shapes and sizes and travel at different speeds, but they have one thing in common - their structure. Just like a house needs foundations and a roof, a weather front has a base and a top. The top, or leading edge, of a weather front can be sometimes be seen in the distant horizon or high in the sky, well before the rain arrives.
The cloud layer that makes the top of the weather front is easily recognisable if you know what to look for. It's a thin, wispy or hazy layer made of ice crystals and known to weather forecasters as cirrostratus.
This layer of ice crystals in the night sky can create an optical phenomena called a lunar corona - a circle of colours surrounding the moon. Hence, the idea that a weather front is approaching and rain is on the way.
6. "Cold night stars bright"
This is one of the easiest rhymes for anyone to interpret.
Clear night skies usually bring a chill to the air. As clouds act as blankets, without them heat stored in the earth's surface during the day escapes into the atmosphere.
When stars are particularly bright, it may indicate very dry, unpolluted air which often arrives from the Arctic. Therefore, one would expect that a particularly cold and clear night is due to air originating from the far north.
BBC One's The Great British Weather starts on Wednesday 13 July at 1930 BST.
From the BBC:
Click here to see this article with video clip and pictures
In the future, we will have robots in our homes. They will do all the dirty and boring jobs that we don't want to do because we've got better things to do such as sip cocktails or play with our children.
Or at least that's what many films, novels and media articles have promised. Reality is taking some time to catch up. So far, the only domestic robots enjoying significant success are toys or, in a distant second place, those that vacuum the floor.
Intelligent machines that can greet our guests, serve drinks and do the laundry are still the stuff of science fiction.
But progress is being made.
Some of that progress was on display at the 2011 RoboCup. Although most of the tournament is about getting intelligent machines to play football, one of its constituent contests is for robots designed to interact with people in their homes.
RoboCup@Home pits machines created in labs around the world against each other to see which can do the best job of serving their human masters.
The competition sets tough goals because of what robots will have to do when they start to live alongside us, said Dr Sven Wachsmuth from the University of Bielefeld, who oversees the RoboCup@Home competition.
"It's about human-robot interaction and skills," he said. "They need to communicate with humans and navigate their environment."
The competition is not about producing a better robotic floor mopper or carpet sweeper. For AI researchers, those problems are not interesting or difficult enough.
"Those tasks do not need human-robot communication," he said. "But there are other tasks that rely on that."
It's those tasks that demand some interaction between robots and people that the RoboCup@Home tests.
"We test if the robot is friendly and helpful and if it is it polite to me," said Dr Wachsmuth. "Does it show the natural interaction that we are used to?"
The contest takes place in a denuded apartment made up of several rooms including bedroom, kitchen, hall, utility room and living room.
Robots are allowed to explore this mock home to create their own mental map and get to know the fixtures distributed around it - washing machine, table, shelves, cupboard, microwave - and the objects that adorn it - crackers, flowers, shoes, a tea box, crisps and soda.
To do the mapping and object spotting, many of the robots taking part in the RoboCup@Home had adopted and adapted the Kinect sensor produced for the Xbox 360 console.
The sensor array used in the gadget proved very useful when robots were finding their way around or looking for a specific object.
Dr Xiaoping Chen, who heads the Wright Eagle robot project at the University of Science and Technology in China, said there was another reason the Kinect is proving attractive.
It is cheap.
Sensors that can map the world with the fidelity of the Kinect used to be very expensive, he said. But cheaper parts will mean more robots.
"Price is a very important factor if robots are to get into everyone's homes," said Dr Chen.
The tests the robots are asked to perform are contrived to catch them out and see if they can work out what to do. For instance, in one test a human asks the robot to retrieve a drink from the kitchen.
Unbeknownst to the robot there are no cans of that brand of drink in the fridge. When it finds this out, the robot must decide what to do. Should it take what it finds even though it knows it is wrong or ask what else that person would like instead?
Other tasks test the robot's ability to deal with the messy realities of human life such as sorting washing.
Humans find these tasks easy if dull, but for robots, unschooled in social niceties and without any evolutionary history to draw on, working out what to do is tricky.
"There are so many things we take for granted as humans," said Dr Nathan Kirchner, who heads the University of Sydney's RobotAssist team. "But when you get a machine to do it there's nothing for free. It has to learn every action."
The computation involved in working out what is happening and what to do about it is formidable. The RoboCup@Home contest showed off some of those different approaches. For instance, the Nimbro team from the University of Bonn based the decision making system of their Cosero robot around probabilities.
In all situations it weighs up its options given where it is, the actions possible in that place, and measures it against what it has been asked to do.
The competition showed that progress is being made. Some robots navigated the mock apartment well, did a good job of recognising people and guests and were not fooled by the tricky questions.
Technology is developing rapidly, said Dr Wachsmuth. So much so that every two years the rules for RoboCup@Home have to be revised because the robots have caught up and mastered the tasks they were presented with in earlier years.
"We're making it more complicated every time," he said.
Despite this and the success of many of the robots taking part, Dr Wachsmuth believes that other types of robots will appear in homes before robot valets. Robots that help with communication and telepresence are more likely to turn up first.
"You might have a robot dog rather than a real dog so you can turn it off when you go on vacation," he said.
What is clear is that robots in our homes that know what we want and can help us get it are going to be more important. Demographics tells us that, said Dr Chen.
"China, like many other places, is changing from an aging society to an aged society," he said. "It's changing dramatically and we need to adapt to that."
"We want to make a robot think like people and live alongside people so it can aid people," he said.
"We do not think of a robot as a tool, we think of it as a friend."
From the BBC:
An online entrepreneur says that poor spelling is costing the UK millions of pounds in lost revenue for internet businesses.
Charles Duncombe says an analysis of website figures shows a single spelling mistake can cut online sales in half.
Mr Duncombe says when recruiting staff he has been "shocked at the poor quality of written English".
He says the big problem for online firms isn't technology but finding staff who can spell.
The concerns were echoed by the CBI whose head of education and skills warned that too many employers were having to invest in remedial literacy lessons for their staff.
Written word
Mr Duncombe, who runs travel, mobile phones and clothing websites, says that poor spelling is a serious problem for the online economy.
"Often these cutting-edge companies depend upon old-fashioned skills," says Mr Duncombe.
And he says that the struggle to recruit enough staff who can spell means that this sector of the economy is not as efficient as it might be.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics published last month showed internet sales in the UK running at Β£527m per week.
"I know that industry bemoaning the education system is nothing new but it is becoming more and more of a problem with more companies going online.
"This is because when you sell or communicate on the internet 99% of the time it is done by the written word."
Mr Duncombe says that it is possible to identify the specific impact of a spelling mistake on sales.
He says he measured the revenue per visitor to the tightsplease.co.uk website and found that the revenue was twice as high after an error was corrected.
"If you project this across the whole of internet retail then millions of pounds worth of business is probably being lost each week due to simple spelling mistakes," says Mr Duncombe, director of the Just Say Please group.
Spelling is important to the credibility of a website, he says. When there are underlying concerns about fraud and safety, then getting the basics right is essential.
"You get about six seconds to capture the attention on a website."
When recruiting school and university leavers, Mr Duncombe says too many applications have contained spelling mistakes or poor grammar.
"Some people even used text speak in their cover letter," he says.
Even among those who appeared to be able to spell, he says that a written test, without access to a computer spellchecker, revealed further problems with spelling.
William Dutton, director of the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, says that in some informal parts of the internet, such as Facebook, there is greater tolerance towards spelling and grammar.
"However, there are other aspects, such as a home page or commercial offering that are not among friends and which raise concerns over trust and credibility," said Professor Dutton.
"In these instances, when a consumer might be wary of spam or phishing efforts, a misspelt word could be a killer issue."
James Fothergill, the CBI's head of education and skills, said: "Our recent research shows that 42% of employers are not satisfied with the basic reading and writing skills of school and college leavers and almost half have had to invest in remedial training to get their staff's skills up-to-scratch.
"This situation is a real concern and the government must make the improvement of basic literacy and numeracy skills of all school and college leavers a top priority."
From the BBC:
Click here to see this article with a video clip of the auction
A rare Jane Austen manuscript has sold for Β£993,250 ($1.6m) in London, three times more than its estimated price.
Auction house Sotheby's had originally valued the unfinished novel - entitled The Watsons - at Β£200,000-300,000.
The manuscript, originally owned privately, was purchased by an institution.
It is thought Austen wrote the tale, about a young woman who returns home to her father's household after being brought up by a wealthy aunt, in 1804.
The work is particularly important because few of Austen's draft works have survived, with the exception of two draft chapters of Persuasion, Lady Susan, and Sanditon.
Sotheby's specialist Gabriel Heaton said this piece of Austen's work is "particularly informative" because it is "very much a working draft".
Every page is littered with crossings out, revisions and additional text between some of the lines.
The auction house said the anonymous buyer was successful after an extended four-way bidding war in the salesroom.
"We are thrilled by the sale of the earliest surviving manuscript for a novel by Jane Austen today," Mr Heaton said.
Austen published six complete novels, including Pride and Prejudice and died in 1817 at age 41.
Per Wiki:
Several attempts have been made to finish the novel.
Austen's niece, Catherine Hubback, completed The Watsons and published it under the title The Younger Sister in the mid-nineteenth century.
John Coates also published a completion in 1957.
Laura Wade is adapting the text for the stage.
The Watsons, by Jane Austen and Another Lady (ASIN B002ACZTWA) by Helen Baker is a completion published in 2008.
If you are interested in the unfinished manuscript, it's on Wikisource
From the BBC:
Click here to see this article with pictures
TEDGlobal is a conference which puts the sharing of good ideas at the heart of its ethos.
Many of those ideas are about making improvements to everyday lives.
Each year the TED organisation chooses a group of new fellows - individuals whose ideas it regards as particularly inspiring.
The BBC has talked to three of them, all of whom share a desire to transform lives in the developing world.
Jose Gomez-Marquez has taken an unusual approach to making medical devices for the developing world
Rather than stripping down complex medical equipment, he uses toy guns and Lego.
"Toys have amazing mechanical parts. To get a part made from scratch could cost hundreds of dollars but I can go to a market and find toys very cheaply," he said.
So the trigger of a toy gun can be taken apart and attached to an IV drip to provide a sound alert when the drip is running low.
Lego bricks can be moulded to create tiny conduits for medicines in simplified labs-on-chips.
And nebulizers can be made out of bicycle pumps.
Mashing up technology is the key to his Innovations in International Health team which is based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Collaboration with the wider medical community is also important, but the key to the success of his designs is talking to those on the ground who will use the equipment.
By cooperation with health care workers in Nicaragua, Mr Gomez-Marquez came up with a system to persuade TB patients to take the medicines they needed to help cure them.
Health workers suggested that a good incentive would be offering patients mobile phone top-ups, so he designed test strips which, once used, revealed a code which people could text to receive phone credits.
Mr Gomez-Marquez is also creating kits for field workers, with a range of parts that they can use to build their own makeshift medical equipment.
"I couldn't build them a clinic but I can provide them with a Lego kit for them to make their own devices," he said.
Femi Akinde decided to create SlimTrader when he realised that he couldn't buy a plane ticket online when he was in Africa.
"Consumers aren't able to access data, and goods and services don't tend to be online anyway," he said.
To combat this dual problem, Mr Akinde decided to link retailers with customers via a platform that everyone could access - text messaging.
SlimTrade is in the early stages of development but hopes to launch in Uganda, Kenya and Nigeria over the coming months.
The service will allow, for instance, a farmer trying to source fertilizer to send a text message and get a response from SlimTrader outlining all the distributors near to where he lives.
"He can find someone who is a credited distributor so he knows he won't be sold fake fertilizer, which is a very big problem. And he doesn't have to leave his house," explained Mr Akinde.
Mobile phone usage is exploding in Africa and it has allowed mobile banking to take off, bringing previously undreamt of financial services to people.
By tying businesses to customers in a similar way, one of the biggest gaps between the developing and developed world can be closed, explains Mr Akinde.
"Buying online is something the Western world takes for granted. I don't buy anything unless I can find it online," he said.
And in Africa, instant access to a range of services can be really transformational.
"It means people can plan a trip ahead of time and they won't have to travel great distances and not know whether they are going to find what they want at the end," he said.
It was not a problem that affected Manuel Aguilar who had moved to the US to study and then went on to work in the financial markets.
But one day he had a lightbulb moment.
"I was helping rich people get richer and I thought my skills could be better used," he said.
Back home in Guatemala, he founded Quetsol, an energy company offering a simple solution to the lack of electricity.
The firm makes kits, which consists of a battery, an LED lightbulb and a small solar panel. So far it has sold 1,000.
The battery also offers a socket which allows people to charge their mobile phones, something that was far from easy before.
"People used to have to walk two hours to charge their phones and pay for it," said Mr Aguilar.
In the next few months Quetsol plans to launch a 30 watt battery which will allow people to power a computer.
"It will give families internet access and education for their kids," said Mr Aguilar.
At Β£240, the kit isn't cheap but the company had done a deal with the biggest bank in Guatemala which allows people to pay $13 a month.
"That is what they would have spent on candles," said Mr Aguilar.
Despite the surprising simplicity of the kit, there is little to rival it in the country and Mr Aguilar hopes his personal approach will pay dividends.
His mobile phone number is printed on the back of the battery pack and he prides himself on customer service.
"If something is wrong with the kit we tell them to take it back to where they bought it and they will get a new one. They have never had service like this before. It is about treating the customer with respect," he said.
From the BBC:
A colourful, spindly-legged toad that was believed to be extinct has been rediscovered in
Scientists from Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) found three of the missing long-legged Borneo rainbow toads up a tree during a night time search.
The team had spent months scouring remote mountain forests for the species.
Prior to these images, only illustrations of the toad had existed.
These were drawn from specimens that were collected by European explorers in the 1920s.
Conservation International, which launched its Global Search for Lost Amphibians in 2010, had listed the toad as one of the "world's top 10 most wanted frogs".
Dr Indraneil Das led a team that searched the ridges of the Gunung Penrissen range of Western Sarawak, a boundary between Malaysia's Sarawak State and Indonesia's Kalimantan Barat Province.
After several months of night-long expeditions, one of Dr Das's graduate students eventually spotted a small toad in the high branches of a tree.
Lost hope
"Thrilling discoveries like this beautiful toad, and the critical importance of amphibians to healthy ecosystems, are what fuel us to keep searching for lost species," said Dr Das.
"They remind us that nature still holds precious secrets that we are still uncovering."
Dr Robin Moore of Conservation International, who launched the Global Search for Lost Amphibians, was delighted by the discovery.
He said: "To see the first pictures of a species that has been lost for almost 90 years defies belief.
"It is good to know that nature can surprise us when we are close to giving up hope, especially amidst our planet's escalating extinction crisis.
"Amphibians are at the forefront of this tragedy, so I hope that these unique species serve as flagships for conservation, inspiring pride and hope by Malaysians and people everywhere."
And a Youtube clip about this (you may need to turn up the sound to hear this)
A thought provoking article from the BBC:
Computers and the internet are changing the nature of our memory, research in the journal Science suggests.
Psychology experiments showed that people presented with difficult questions began to think of computers.
When participants knew that facts would be available on a computer later, they had poor recall of answers but enhanced recall of where they were stored.
The researchers say the internet acts as a "transactive memory" that we depend upon to remember for us.
Lead author Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University said that transactive memory "is an idea that there are external memory sources - really storage places that exist in other people".
"There are people who are experts in certain things and we allow them to be, [to] make them responsible for certain kinds of information," she explained to BBC News.
Co-author of the paper Daniel Wegner, now at Harvard University, first proposed the transactive memory concept in a book chapter titled Cognitive Interdependence in Close Relationships, finding that long-term couples relied on each other to act as one another's memory banks.
"I really think the internet has become a form of this transactive memory, and I wanted to test it," said Dr Sparrow.
Where, not what
The first part of the team's research was to test whether subjects were "primed" to think about computers and the internet when presented with difficult questions. To do that, the team used what is known as a modified Stroop test.
The standard Stroop test measures how long it takes a participant to read a colour word when the word itself is a different colour - for example, the word "green" written in blue.
Reaction times increase when, instead of colour words, participants are asked to read words about topics they may already be thinking about.
In this way the team showed that, after presenting subjects with tough true/false questions, reaction times to internet-related terms were markedly longer, suggesting that when participants did not know the answer, they were already considering the idea of obtaining it using a computer.
A more telling experiment provided a stream of facts to participants, with half told to file them away in a number of "folders" on a computer, and half told that the facts would be erased.
When asked to remember the facts, those who knew the information would not be available later performed significantly better than those who filed the information away.
But those who expected the information would be available were remarkably good at remembering in which folder they had stored the information.
"This suggests that for the things we can find online, we tend keep it online as far as memory is concerned - we keep it externally stored," Dr Sparrow said.
She explained that the propensity of participants to remember the location of the information, rather than the information itself, is a sign that people are not becoming less able to remember things, but simply organising vast amounts of available information in a more accessible way.
"I don't think Google is making us stupid - we're just changing the way that we're remembering things... If you can find stuff online even while you're walking down the street these days, then the skill to have, the thing to remember, is where to go to find the information. It's just like it would be with people - the skill to have is to remember who to go see about [particular topics]."
From the BBC:
Click here to see this article with pictures
New Yorkers have witnessed an urban solar phenomenon, with the Sun setting in alignment with the city's skyscrapers and giving an effect fans say is reminiscent of Wiltshire's Stonehenge. Welcome to Manhattanhenge.
Twice every year amateur photographers gather in carefully-selected spots to set up tripods and wait to capture the ultimate sunset.
On Wednesday night at 2025 local time (0125 BST), the east-west lying streets of the city's famous grid system neatly framed the setting sun, creating golden glows New Yorkers rarely see.
During the phenomenon, the Sun appears to be nestled perfectly between the skyscraper corridors, illuminating the north and south sides of the streets.
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson coined the term Manhattanhenge in 1996, inspired by its likeness to Stonehenge, where the sun aligns with concentric circles of vertical stones on each of the solstices.
"As a kid, I visited Stonehenge in the Salisbury Plain of England and did research on other stone monuments across the British Isles. It was deep within me," says deGrasse Tyson.
"So I was, in a way, imprinted by the emotional power that terrestrial alignments with the Sun can have on a culture or civilization."
After coining the term, deGrasse Tyson later published dates and times in Natural History magazine.
Similar "henge" phenomena also occur in other cities with large numbers of skyscrapers and long straight streets - such as Chicago, Montreal and Toronto.
As far as sunset goes - which is the fans' true Manhattanhenge - the event happens in May and July, and for two nights each. There's also the winter version, but that's sunrise.
New York-based photographer Emon Hassan has celebrated Manhattanhenge in his work.
"You'll see photographers on both sides, lined up, just waiting. In one area, I could go in the middle of the street and get the shot. Photographers risk their lives to get the perfect shot.
"It's cut-throat. You only have a 15 to 20 minute window. It happens pretty quick after you consider dodging traffic.
"I don't even know how to articulate that feeling. It's almost like seeing an eclipse."
Getty photographer Mario Tama shot the event earlier this year. He says the event provides residents with a moment of clarity and beauty in a chaotic world.
"Basically, people in Manhattan are trapped in an island of tall buildings and sometimes can't even see the sky really.
"It's a brilliant moment when Manhattanites can connect with the rest of the world and with the Earth. If you get out of the subway at 34th Street, you'll see two or three hundred people with tripods jumping in the street. Usually when this happens, there has been a shooting or something, so this is really a beautiful thing," says Tama.
The event has become a social phenomenon in New York City.
"Amateur and professional photographers can meet up, they tag each other's work on Twitter and meet other people - people with other interests," says Hassan.
"Manhattan is one of the most fascinating places and this is such a unique event."
Its distinctiveness lies in the positioning of the city's layout.
Manhattan's Commissioner's Plan of 1811 established its grid system, which is rotated 29 degrees from true east-west. If Manhattan's streets were perfectly laid out on an east-west grid, Manhattanhenge would occur facing both east and west on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.
It also has the advantage over other skyscraper cities because of a relatively clear view to the horizon down some of its streets.
For photographers and people taking an early evening stroll, it is just a beautiful effect of light.
But for astronomers, it's something more - a chance to engage laymen and enthusiasts with the studies of the cosmos.
DeGrasse Tyson uses the event to make people more interested in astronomy.
"I'll take any excuse I can get to get people to look up and notice our cosmic environment," deGrasse Tyson recently told PBS television.
The best vantage point to view the event, which he describes as "the greatest of the cosmos together with the greatest of our urban icons", is on Park Avenue and 34th Street, looking west, he says.
And a brief clip to go with this:
From the BBC:
When a carpet gets old, users usually throw it away.
And in our increasingly recycling-aware society, a carpet is one of those things that usually does not get re-used - it is simply burned.
That could soon change, say researchers.
An international team of scientists has come up with a method to make wool carpets from all-natural materials that can be re-processed after a life cycle.
Although wool and cellulose fabrics are biodegradable, most modern carpets have another ingredient holding fibres together.
It is a bonding agent called latex - and because of it, carpets usually end up in an oven.
The new project, funded by the Dutch government, is called Erutan - or "nature" read backwards.
It is a joint venture of three Dutch companies - James, Best Wool Carpets, and Bond Textile Research, working in cooperation with three technology developers - Research Institute TNO in the Netherlands, Technical University of Graz in Austria (TUG) and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Spain (UPC).
The researchers decided to replace all synthetic substances and chemicals with organic materials, enzymes and polymers.
In the end, they managed to get an all-natural carpet that looks and feels exactly like any other wool carpet, and has the same characteristics in terms of its flexibility, durability and life span.
"It's a natural solution - sheep eat grass, from the sheep we get wool, and from the wool we make a carpet with natural ingredients," Dr Yvar Monasch of Best Wool Carpets told BBC News.
"After use - and it depends where the carpet is used, as in hospitality it is only used for about three years, but at homes it can be used for 15-20 years - we'll take it back and re-process the raw materials."
This way, a second-life carpet could be produced, he explained. Alternatively organic waste could be used as a sort of a fertiliser in agriculture.
No latex
Different partners are responsible for different stages of the manufacturing process.
The major innovation, according to the team, is swapping synthetic ingredients for organic ones - and getting rid of latex.
This is done by UPC in Barcelona, with Dr Tzanko Tzanov heading a team of researchers.
He explained to BBC News that in an ordinary carpet, there is usually a layer of latex on the back side, necessary for "gluing" the fibres to the backing fabric and keeping the dimensional stability of the carpet.
Some 1.2 kg of latex is normally required per square metre.
After a carpet's life cycle, it is usually impossible to take the latex off in order to recycle the product.
But the Erutan group decided to eliminate this substance altogether - and replace it with an organic adhesive.
"Our adhesive is based on natural compounds such as lignin or tannic acid," said Dr Tzanov.
Lignin is a basic biopolymer that is a natural waste product from paper industry and a compound of many materials, including wood.
It is normally burned for energy - but Dr Tzanov's team used biotechnology - oxidative enzymes - to convert it into an organic "glue".
"All this happens at about 50ΒΊC, instead of 150ΒΊC as for latex," he added.
Enzymes are proteins that catalyse, or increase the rates, of chemical reactions, and they are used to speed up a natural process.
With this enzymatically-generated adhesive, the scientists were able to bond linen - the main component of the backing fabric and a natural cellulose material - with wool fibre in a matter of minutes.
"It's the same as when you did your laundry in the washing machine 20 years ago - to get it as clean as a modern machine gets it now, it would take you a really long time," said Dr Monasch.
"But with enzymes in washing powders everything has gotten faster, you use less water, it's much better for the environment and those enzymes come from nature."
Natural manufacturing
But the scientists did not want to stop at changing basic ingredients - they decided to make all other processes associated with manufacturing eco-friendly as well.
For instance, the researchers from Technical University of Graz in Austria came up with a way to wash dirty, greasy raw wool from New Zealand sheep without any detergents, salt or any other chemicals.
Again, they clean it with enzymes.
The wool dying method is also innovative, using natural dyes.
"We're not sticking to synthetic dyes anymore - and though natural dyes are often not quite stable, by binding them to clay platelets - a kind of carrier for the dye - the stability of those dyes improves dramatically," said Dr Herman Lenting from the research institute TNO.
Recycling carpets
Besides natural manufacturing process and ingredients, another important idea is recycling used carpets.
Instead of ending up in incinerators, the products would be shredded and re-used - and to make sure people actually bring their old carpets back, the company is prepared to pay them.
"Today, most carpets are very much welcomed by the garbage industry because they burn really well," said Dr Chris Reutelingsperger from Bond Textile Research.
"So either they burn it in their own ovens or they sell it to concrete industry to burn it as well, so it's only being used as energy - whereas we can re-use the raw materials in actual products again.
"And if you look at the future of our world, the shortage will be in raw materials if we continue to burn everything that we use."
From the BBC:
The Dawn probe has successfully entered orbit around the asteroid Vesta.
Nasa's robotic satellite sent data early on Sunday confirming it was circling the 530km-wide body.
The probe has taken almost four years to get to Vesta and will spend the next year studying the huge rock before moving on to the "dwarf planet" Ceres.
Asteroid Vesta looks like a punctured football, the result of a colossal collision sometime in its past that knocked off its south polar region.
"Today, we celebrate an incredible exploration milestone as a spacecraft enters orbit around an object in the main asteroid belt for the first time," Nasa Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement.
"Dawn's study of the asteroid Vesta marks a major scientific accomplishment and also points the way to the future destinations where people will travel in the coming years. President Obama has directed Nasa to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025, and Dawn is gathering crucial data that will inform that mission."
Vesta was discovered in 1807, the fourth asteroid to be identified in the great belt of rocky debris orbiting between Mars and Jupiter.
At the time, its great scale meant it was designated as another planet but it later lost this status as researchers learnt more about the diversity of objects in the Solar System.
Close but careful
Dawn's encounter is occurring about 188 million km (117 million miles) from Earth.
The probe is propelled by an ion engine and engineers put the spacecraft on a course to be captured in the gravitational field of Vesta.
They cannot say precisely when that happened; it will have depended on the asteroid's mass - and that property is something Dawn will determine during its stay.
Initially, Dawn will be orbiting at a distance of several thousand km from the asteroid, but this distance will be reduced over time.
Mission scientists hope to get within 200km of the surface but the team do not intend to take any unnecessary risks.
"We would like to get as low as possible but if we crash Dawn, Nasa would understandably be very angry at us," Principal Investigator Chris Russell told BBC News.
Asteroids can tell us about the earliest days of the Solar System. These wandering rocks are often described as the rubble that was left over after the planets proper had formed.
Vesta and Ceres should make for interesting subjects. They are both evolved bodies - objects that have heated up and started to separate into distinct layers.
Surface detail
"We think that Vesta has a metal core in the centre - an iron core - and then silicate rock around it," explained Dr Russell.
"And then, sometime in its history, it got banged on the bottom and a lot of material was liberated. Some of this material gets pulled into the Earth's atmosphere. One in 20 meteorites seen to fall to Earth has been identified with Vesta," he added.
Ceres, which, at 950km in diameter, is by far the largest and most massive body in the asteroid belt, probably did not evolve as much as Vesta.
Scientists think it likely that it retains a lot of water, perhaps in a band of ice deep below the surface.
Dawn's quest at Vesta over the coming months will be to map the asteroid's surface.
The probe carries instruments to detect the mineral and elemental abundances in its rocks. It will be looking for evidence of geological processes such as mountain building and rifting. The team is keen to understand how Vesta's surface has been remodelled over time by impacts and even lava flows.
I found this photo on the NASA website showing the first closeup image of Vesta
This article from the BBC. The problem with this software is that presumably it would also be of use to the likes of child abusers and terrorists in evading detection.
Data smuggling software could help citizens in countries operating strict net filters visit any site they want.
Developed by US computer scientists the software, called Telex, hides data from banned websites inside traffic from sites deemed safe.
The software draws on well-known encryption techniques to conceal data making it hard to decipher.
So far, Telex is only a prototype but in tests it has been able to defeat Chinese web filters.
Outside in
Telex was developed to get around the problem that stops other anti-censorship technologies being more effective, said Dr Alex Halderman, one of the four-strong team that has worked on Telex since early 2010.
Many existing anti-censorship systems involve connecting to a server or network outside the country in which a user lives.
This approach relies on spreading information about these servers and networks widely enough that citizens hear about them but not so much that censors can find out and block them.
Telex turns this approach on its head, said Dr Halderman.
"Instead of having some server outside the network that's participating we are doing it in the core of the network," he said.
Telex exploits the fact that few net-censoring nations block all access and most are happy to let citizens visit a select number of sites regarded as safe.
When a user wants to visit a banned site they initially point their web browser at a safe site. As they connect, Telex software installed on their PC puts a tag or marker on the datastream being sent to that safe destination.
Net routers outside the country recognise that the datastream has been marked and re-direct a request to a banned site. Data from censored webpages is piped back to the user in a datastream disguised to resemble that from safe sites.
Rights fight
The datastream is subtly altered using a well-known encryption technique called public key cryptography. This allows anyone with a public key to lock content but only allows the owner of the corresponding private key to unlock it.
This cryptographic technique helps secure Telex against interference, said Dr Halderman.
"You cannot see this marker unless you have a corresponding private key," he said.
The Telex-spotting routers know the key so they can unlock the content and discover the website a user is really interested in seeing. If Telex is deployed, ISPs would be encouraged to add marker-spotting software to the routers in their networks.
Although Telex was "not ready" for real users, Dr Halderman said the development team had been using it for their own web browsing for months. In addition, he said, the team had carried out some small scale tests against sophisticated filtering systems.
"We've also tried it from within China bouncing it off computers there," he said. "So far, we've had no problems with the censorship there."
Telex allowed the team to view banned content such as high definition YouTube videos and sites deemed "subversive" by the Chinese authorities.
One stumbling block for Telex was getting the basic software to users without it being compromised by net censors who could add spyware or key loggers to it, said Dr Halderman.
There were other issues to be resolved as development continues.
"The most difficult part is making sure the connections the user is making to an uncensored website that we use to disguise the censored content are convincing enough," he said.
"But," he said "that's the parameter we would adjust as the censor becomes more sophisticated."
The developers are planning to give a more formal launch to Telex at the upcoming Usenix security conference. That conference will host an annual workshop for the growing numbers of people developing anti-censorship code, he said.
"We are all seeing how powerful information can be at helping citizens assert themselves and their human rights," he said. "It's a deeply interesting technical problem and a goal that's worthy of any technologist's attention."
From the BBC:
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have identified another moon around the dwarf planet Pluto.
It becomes the fourth object known to be circling the distant world after the long-recognised Charon and recently observed Nix and Hydra satellites.
Scientists are temporarily calling the new moon P4 and estimate its diameter to be 13 to 34 km (of 8 to 21 miles).
Pluto, controversially demoted from full planet status in 2006, will be the target of a big space mission in 2015.
Nasa's New Horizons probe is due to fly past the icy world and should get a good look at the moons, also.
"This is a fantastic discovery," said New Horizons' principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "Now that we know there's another moon in the Pluto system, we can plan close-up observations of it during our flyby."
P4 sits between the orbits of Nix and Hydra, which Hubble identified in 2005. The space telescope did not discover Charon - that was done by the US Naval Observatory in 1978 - but it was the first astronomical instrument to resolve it as a separate body from Pluto.
For comparison, Pluto itself is a little over 2,300km across, Charon about 1,200km in diamter, and Nix and Hydra in the range of 30 to 115km across.
Hubble first saw P4 with its new Wide Field Camera 3 on 28 June. Follow-up observations this month confirmed its existence.
New Horizons will fly by Pluto in the July of 2015. The spacecraft's seven instruments will carry out detailed mapping of the object's surface features, composition and atmosphere.
The probe will go to about 10,000km from Pluto and about 27,000km from Charon, before pressing onwards.
With extra Nasa approval and funding, the probe will then be maintained to travel on to other objects in the Kuiper Belt, a region of space that contains many frozen leftovers from the construction of our Solar System.
The $700m probe was launched in 2006, the same year the International Astronomical Union - astronomy's offical nomenclature body - decided Pluto no longer merited full planet status, giving it the new classifcation of dwarf planet.
These two photos on the Hubble website show the photos taken on 28 June and the follow up on 3 July.
From the BBC:
Nepal has ordered a new survey of Mount Everest to end the "confusion" over the exact height of the world's highest mountain, a government spokesman has said.
The official overall height of Everest is designated as 8,848m (29,029ft).
But China and Nepal have had a long-running disagreement over the height.
The Chinese have argued it should be measured by its rock height. Nepal said it should be measured by its snow height - which is four metres higher.
The world's highest mountain traverses the border of the two countries.
Last year the two sides agreed that Mount Everest should be recognised as being 8,848m high.
But Nepal government spokesman Gopal Giri told AFP news agency that, during border talks between the two countries, Chinese officials often use the rock height.
"We have begun the measurement to clear this confusion. Now we have the technology and the resources, we can measure ourselves," Mr Giri said.
"This will be the first time the Nepal government has taken the mountain's height."
He said stations will be set up at three different locations using the global positioning system, and the task of measuring the peak would take two years.
Correspondents say that while thousands of people have climbed the mountain since the first ascent in 1953 by Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary, its exact height has been disputed ever since the first measurement was made in 1856.
The broadly-accepted height of 8,848m was first recorded by an Indian survey in 1955.
But geologists say that the estimates of both countries over the height of Mount Everest could be wrong.
They say that the mountain is becoming higher as India is gradually pushed beneath China and Nepal because of shifting continental plates.
In May 1999 an American team used GPS technology to record a height of 8,850m - a figure that is now used by the US National Geographic Society, although it has not been officially accepted by Nepal.
From the BBC:
Click here to see this article with video clip and pictures
The Citroen C1 springs to life and leaps forward with the enthusiasm only a French city runaround can muster.
This one is a little smoother and quieter than most. It's electric, and like all battery-operated automobiles needs regular charging.
But the top-up process is different from the usual hassle of plugging a bulky cable into a specially designed socket.
Here, the driver doesn't even need to get out.
"The charging is done wirelessly, you park up, turn off the key and voila... charging starts automatically," says Anthony Thomson, CEO of HaloIPT, a UK company that has installed the technology.
The process uses electromagnetic induction to transfer power from a pad built into the ground to another installed in the bottom of the car.
The system could be installed in a supermarket parking place, garage floor or the ground at a special charging station.
When a driver parks the vehicle, the two pads line up and with a flick of a switch, the charging starts.
Induction
The phenomenon of electromagnetic induction was discovered by British physicist Michael Faraday in 1831.
He found that when two coils were placed close to each other and power applied to one of them, it produced a magnetic field, which then induced a voltage across the second coil.
In the case of charging a car, the coils are embedded inside the two pads.
The system was originally developed at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and commercialised by HaloIPT.
And although some of the electricity inevitably gets wasted during the charging process, people who have tried it have praised its simplicity.
Two of the induction-equipped C1s have been taking part in the Coventry and Birmingham Low Emission Demonstrators (CABLED) consortium - the world's biggest trial of electric vehicles.
"City planners don't like the prospect of a line of charge posts down streets, adding to the existing street clutter," said Neil Butcher, the CABLED project leader, who has been driving one of the two cars since May 2011.
"The lack of any visible connection minimises any risk of vandalism - unplugging or theft of cables.
"There are also obvious health and safety issues associated with many live electric cables hanging between the post and the car, especially in bad weather, including electric shock and trip hazards," added Mr Butcher.
But with wireless power transfer, bad weather is not a problem, claims HaloIPT.
Pads remain perfectly operational and safe in any conditions, "sending" the energy up, even through a layer of snow.
As simple as the process might sound, there is a catch - there are currently no charging stations in the UK.
So Mr Butcher can only feed his hungry Citroen at his garage where the system has been installed as part of a pilot project. As a back-up he can switch to a conventional plug-in cable charging point.
But HaloIPT is certain that things will improve in the future, and induction stations will become commonplace.
One of their first visitors may be a Rolls Royce.
The luxury carmaker has equipped its latest electric model, the 102EX Phantom Experimental Electric with a magnetic induction plate.
And the technology is being deployed in more down-to-earth modes of transport.
Italian buses
A fleet of city buses equipped with special pads has been navigating the streets of two Italian cities, Genoa and Turin, since 2002.
Corresponding pads have been embedded into the pavement at certain bus stops - to charge the vehicles on the go.
"The buses have signs that they are electric, and people say that they like the experience - the buses are a lot smoother than diesel ones," said Mathias Wechlin from Conductix-Wampfler, a German company that, just like HaloIPT, originally sprung from the University of Auckland and now licenses the technology.
Mr Wechlin adds that, during charging time, people stay inside the buses - something he says is absolutely safe, as the strength of the magnetic field produced is within the limits recommended by the International Commission on non-ionizing radiation protection (ICNIRP).
Although the safety issue may indeed seem worrisome, Professor Paul Mitcheson from Imperial College London, who has studied the effects of electromagnetism on people, says there should not be a problem.
"The whole concept of efficient wireless charging of vehicles relies on near-field, non-radiative coupling between the charging point and the receiver on the vehicle.
"It is not possible to design a system with no radiation, but a well-designed system can have negligible levels of radiation well below safety limits provided by the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) standard."
Despite the electric buses project in Italy being a success on a small scale, the company has found it tricky to expand the operation.
The main reason has been the difficulty in convincing municipalities to get on board, said Mr Wechlin, as electric buses are usually a lot more expensive than petrol or diesel powered ones.
In Turin and Genoa, the situation was different.
Officials decided to invest some money in trialling alternative transport systems, and electric buses seemed a perfect option.
But when they raised the idea of plug-in technology, the union of bus drivers voted against their members plugging in cables on health and safety grounds.
That was when Conductix-Wampfler offered to go wireless.
The initiative resulted in eight buses in Genoa and another 23 in Turin.
Mr Wechlin said that besides pure convenience, the system also significantly increases the time the bus can remain in operation as it does not need to go to the depot every few hours for recharging and there is a need to swap batteries.
"With wireless charging, the buses are charged at the end of the route, where they change direction and stand for about five to ten minutes - and those little rechargings allow you to keep the bus in operation from 7am till 8pm," he told the BBC.
WiTricity
But electromagnetic induction is not the only method used for wireless charging.
A US start-up business WiTricity, founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Professor Marin SoljaΔiΔ, has patented a new way to wirelessly transfer energy in much larger amounts and over greater distances than induction.
The technique, called highly coupled magnetic resonance, involves pairing the magnetic fields of two pads with closely matching resonant frequencies.
"When you plug one pad into the wall, that electricity is converted into a magnetic field, which oscillates at a frequency," explained WiTricity CEO Eric Giler.
"It creates a second magnetic field that oscillates around the second coil that sits underneath the car, and it is then converted into electricity that goes to a charger inside the car and charges the battery."
The company has received a lot of attention since WiTricity demonstrated the technology at the 2009 TED conference.
Electronics giant Intel started experimenting with it in their labs, and some recent reports suggest that Apple is investigating wireless charging for the iPhone 6.
In March 2011, carmaker Toyota invested in the start-up and signed a deal to develop wireless charging for its future electric cars.
Mr Giler said that besides Toyota, WiTricity has been in contact with virtually all the biggest car companies around the world.
And just like Mr Thomson of HaloIPT and Mr Wechlin of Conductix-Wampfler, he believes that sooner or later, automakers will have to go wireless.
"Car manufacturers have already realised that if you don't have to plug a car in to charge it, it will significantly increase the adoption of the electric vehicles," he said.
With global oils supplies depleting, the hope is that wireless charging might be the killer feature that attracts drivers to electric vehicles.
And maybe one day, if the technology gets embedded into streets and motorways, drivers won't even have to worry about charging at all.
From the BBC:
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has picked up tantalising fluctuations which might - or might not - be hints of the sought-after Higgs boson particle.
But scientists stress caution over these "excess events", because similar wrinkles have been detected before only to disappear after further analysis.
Either way, if the sub-atomic particle exists it is running out of places to hide, says the head of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), which runs the LHC.
He told BBC News the collider had now ruled out more of the "mass range" where the Higgs might be.
The new results are based on analyses of one inverse femtobarn of data, gathered as the vast machine smashes beams of protons together at close to light-speed.
Scientists from two different experiments (Atlas and CMS) based at the LHC are scouring the wreckage of these collisions.
One of their primary goals is to search for hints of the Higgs, which is the last missing piece in the Standard Model - the most widely accepted theory of particle physics.
Without the Higgs, physicists cannot explain why particles have mass. But despite the best efforts of scientists working on both sides of the Atlantic to detect it experimentally, the boson remains a theoretical sub-atomic particle.
Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director-general of Cern, said the amount of data gathered was a factor of 20 greater than had been amassed at the same time last year.
"With one inverse femtobarn, you cannot cover the entire mass region which is allowed for the Higgs boson," Professor Heuer told me.
"However, the experiments can now - unfortunately - exclude quite a large part of this allowed mass region."
Physicists think the Higgs will most probably be found in the low-mass region - between 114 GeV (gigaelectronvolts) and 140 GeV. While the gigaelectronvolt is a unit of energy, in particle physics, mass and energy can be interchanged because of Einstein's equivalence idea (E=MC2).
Professor Heuer said that searches at low masses had picked up small fluctuations "here and there", but that this was expected because physicists were analysing small numbers across a number of different "channels".
"The whole thing becomes more interesting the more data we collect," he explained.
News of the surplus of interesting events - seen by both the Atlas and CMS teams - were outlined at the European Physical Society's HEP 2011 conference here in Grenoble, France.
One candidate noted by the Atlas team occurs at the higher mass of 250 GeV and has reached the 2.8 sigma level of certainty. A three-sigma result means there is roughly a 1 in 1,000 chance that the result is attributable to some statistical quirk in the data.
Five sigma means there is about a one-in-one-million chance that the "bump" is just a fluke and is the level generally required for a formal discovery.
Another Atlas fluctuation occurs between 130 GeV and 150 GeV and is at the 2.5-sigma level.
Professor Dave Charlton, who works on the Atlas experiment at the LHC, called the excess of events "intriguing".
But the particle physicist from the University of Birmingham, UK, told BBC News these "could go up to three sigma, or they could disappear".
HEP 2011 runs until 29 July in Grenoble.
From the BBC:
Click here to see this article with video clip and pictures
With its crystal clear skies and bone dry air, the Atacama Desert in northern Chile has long drawn astronomers. Some of the most powerful telescopes in the world are housed here.
But now, work is about to begin on a telescope that will dwarf them all - not a VLT (Very Large Telescope) but an ELT (Extremely Large Telescope).
It will be built 2,600m (8.530ft) up in the Andes on a site overlooking the Paranal observatory, and when it is finished in 10 years' time it will be the most powerful optical instrument in the world.
The telescope will be the size of a football stadium, cost around $1.5bn (Β£930m) and weigh over 5,000 tonnes.
It will be built to withstand major earthquakes, a serious consideration in Chile.
Jigsaw puzzle
Astronomers say the images it produces will be 15 times sharper than those sent to earth by the Hubble space telescope, and might eventually help us find signs of life on other planets.
The European Southern Observatory (ESO), which operates Paranal, says the telescope, and others like it, "may eventually revolutionise our perception of the universe as much as Galileo's telescope did".
The telescope's main mirror will be 42m wide. That is five times bigger than the mirrors on the existing telescopes at Paranal, which are already among the biggest in the world.
Because it is impossible to make such a large, curved, high-precision mirror, engineers in Europe will make nearly 1,000 small hexagonal mirrors which will be shipped to Chile and fitted together like pieces in a giant jigsaw puzzle.
Henri Boffin, a senior astronomer at Paranal, says the new telescope should help scientists address questions raised by the existing instruments at the observatory.
"What we have been able to do so far is raise a set of questions," Mr Boffin said. "Like, for example, we have discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, but we have no clue why.
"There's a kind of dark energy we think is there, but we have no clue at all what it is. Similarly, we know that the universe is made in part of dark matter, but we have absolutely no clue what it is, and it makes up more than 25% of the universe.
"The new telescope will hopefully help us answer these questions."
The construction of the telescope is not the only major astronomical project in Chile.
Just up the road from Paranal, engineers are completing the construction of ALMA, the world's biggest network of radio telescopes.
It will consist of more than 60 giant radio dishes, assembled on the Chajnantor plateau at a dizzying altitude of 5,000m.
Tim de Zeeuw, the head of ESO, says ALMA, which is scheduled to begin operations later this year, promises to be "as transformational for science as the Hubble space telescope".
Desert dry
These two projects are cementing Chile's reputation as an astronomer's paradise. By some calculations, by 2025 the country will be home to more than half the image-capturing capacity in the world.
Much of the reason for that lies in the desert skies, which are among the clearest on earth. In some parts of the Atacama Desert, rainfall has never been recorded.
Altitude is also important, particularly for ALMA. Radio telescopes pick up wavelengths from outer space, but the signals are often distorted by water vapor in the earth's atmosphere.
By building at altitude, in dry air, engineers can get above some of that moisture.
But there are other reasons why astronomers are flocking to Chile.
Being in the southern hemisphere, its observatories are not in direct competition with those in the United States and Europe, which gaze out at different skies.
"If you want to do modern astronomy and you want to do it in the southern hemisphere, you have to do it in Chile," Mr Boffin says.
Politics and infrastructure are also factors. Chile has emerged as one of the most stable, prosperous countries in the region since its return to democracy in 1990. That stability is essential for long-term investment projects like these.
The existing telescopes at Paranal have already helped scientists make some remarkable discoveries.
For example, they captured the first ever images of a planet outside our own solar system, and helped astronomers work out the age of the oldest known star in the Milky Way - it is 13.2bn years old.
One of the observatory's greatest feats was proving that a huge black hole lies at the centre of the Milky Way.
Scientists calculate that this mysterious void has a mass three million times larger than the Sun.
The astronomers at Paranal are proud of these achievements but say they now want more.
And they say their giant new telescope will help them achieve it, taking our understanding of the universe to the next level.
From the BBC:
Click here to see this article with pictures
In 1903, 3,000 teddy bears were sent by ship from Germany to America only for them to disappear. Some claim the bears were the first ever made and would now be the most valuable in the world. So what happened to them?
In the Steiff museum, in the German town of Giengin, the mystery of the missing bears is explained to the visiting children with a tale that they were lost at sea.
The idea of shipwrecked teddy bears captures the imagination, but is it true?
The company was established by seamstress Margarete Steiff in the 19th Century. In 1880, needing a present for a nephew, she found a pattern for a toy elephant and made it from soft felt. Drawn to how soft and cuddly they were, children in the neighbourhood were soon asking for elephants too.
She started to make the elephants alongside her dressmaking business but it was her nephew Richard Steiff who came up with the idea of a toy bear.
As a student at art college in Stuttgart he used to visit the zoo and sketch the bears. At the zoo they had cross-bred brown bears with polar bears and these became the inspiration for his first life-like toy bear.
"Before the bear, children were playing with porcelain dolls, soldiers, tin toys. They were hard and cold and Richard wanted to give children a companion that they could hold," explains Leyla Maniera, a former bear expert at Christie's and consultant for Steiff.
Steiff's first bear was called 55 PB. The 55 stood for its height, P stood for plush and B for beweglich, German for moveable.
55 PB was introduced to the German public at the Leipzig Toy Fair in spring 1903. But there was not much interest, says Maniera.
"There's a wonderful story how he's [Richard Steiff] just so fed up he's putting all the bears back in the boxes and he's sealing everything up when Hermann Berg comes, a buyer for Borgfeldt in New York.
"Berg is desperately miserable as he's been trudging around the trade fair all week and he hasn't found anything to take back to New York and he's under instruction to bring something new back.
"He spies on Richard Steiff's stand as he's nailing down almost the last box and he asks Richard what's in there? He pulls out 55 PB and Hermann Berg is captivated by him. Apparently on the spot he orders 3,000 bears - a massive order at that time."
The premises of the Steiff business could not cope and they had to build a new factory in which to make the bears. Templates and patterns of the bears exist but none have ever turned up.
"The order was definitely made," says Maniera, "We have samples of the boxes so we know they were boxed up and shipped.
"The archives have copies of orders right from the beginning. We do know the orders were made, they were packed and shipped, but sadly to this day we don't know what happened to the 3,000 bears."
So how about that theory about the bears being lost at sea? Gunther Pfieffer, author of four books about Steiff bears, does not believe it.
"The mystery first appeared in 1953 with the 50th anniversary of the teddy bear. A clever employee of the marketing department was writing a little festival book and that's the first time this story came up.
"So I guess it was just a good marketing idea, nothing else."
But if they were shipped, why have none ever appeared in attics or auction houses?
Manuela Fustig, from the Steiff museum, has a theory. "I think this is due to the construction of the bear. His arms and head and legs were jointed to his body with strings so this was very breakable and I think the bears have not survived."
But she is hopeful that one could still re-appear.
"When I have guests I say to them 'look at your home to see if there is a strange looking bear in a dark colour and send me a photo' and I'm waiting everyday, hoping, that somebody has found a 55 PB," says Fustig.
"He is very dark in colour - he hasn't the cute charming look of a typical Steiff teddy bear, he has no button in his ear - he was made in 1903 and the buttons were added in 1904.
Teddy bear enthusiasts are able to buy a replica of the bear online for Β£399, but if you found one in your attic it would be a collector's dream.
"If a PB 55 is discovered, he would completely crash and break all existing world records without question," says Maniera.
"There isn't anything more important than PB 55. The current world record is over Β£180,000 but he would easily break that."
From the BBC:
Physicists have confirmed the ultimate speed limit for the packets of light called photons - making time travel even less likely than thought.
The speed of light in vacuum is the Universe's ultimate speed limit, but experiments in recent years suggested that single photons might beat it.
If they could, theory allows for the prospect of time travel.
Now, a paper in Physical Review Letters shows that individual photons too are limited to the vacuum speed limit.
That means that photons maintain the principle of causality laid out in Einstein's theory of special relativity - that is, an event's effect cannot precede its cause by traveling faster than light. It is violation of this causality that would, in principle, permit time travel.
While the limit in vacuum is a fixed number - some 300,000km per second - the speed of light can vary widely in different materials.
These differences explain everything from why a straw looks bent in a glass of water to experiments in cold gases of atoms in which light's speed is actively manipulated.
Some of those experiments showed "superluminal" behaviour, in which photons travelled faster than the speed of light in a given medium.
It remained, however, to determine whether or not individual photons could exceed the vacuum limit.
All relative
Now, Shengwang Du and colleagues at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have measured what is known as an optical precursor.
Like the wind that moves ahead of a speeding train, optical precursors are the waves that precede photons in a material; before now, such optical precursors have never been directly observed for single photons.
By passing pairs of photons through a vapour of atoms held at just 100 millionths of a degree above absolute zero - the Universe's ultimate low-temperature limit - the team showed that the optical precursor and the photon that caused it are indeed limited to the vacuum speed of light.
"By showing that single photons cannot travel faster than the speed of light, our results bring a closure to the debate on the true speed of information carried by a single photon," said Professor Du.
Thus, photons cannot time travel, and moving information around at faster-than-light speeds is impossible.
But the work has more prosaic implications.
"Our findings will also likely have potential applications by giving scientists a better picture on the transmission of quantum information," said Professor Du.
Time travel by other means, however, is not entirely ruled out.
Einstein's theory of general relativity, in which space and time are two intertwined aspects of the same medium, would permit the bending of the medium to join two different times - a situation popularised as creating a "wormhole"
From the BBC:
Broadband speeds in the UK now average 6.8Mbps (megabits per second) but there is still a huge gap between advertised and actual speeds, according to Ofcom.
Almost half of broadband users are now on packages with advertised speeds above 10Mbps but few achieve this.
Ofcom's biannual report into the state of the broadband market urged changes to advertising.
Virgin Media accused rivals of misleading the public.
The report found that the average broadband speed has increased 10% in the last six months as more people try out fast services.
But the gap between advertised and actual speed has widened in the same period. The average advertised speed was 15Mbps, 8.2Mbps faster than the average actual speed.
It also found that more than a third of customers on services advertised as "up to" 24Mbps actually received speeds of 4Mbps or less.
"The research is still telling us that some consumers are not receiving anywhere near the speeds that are being advertised by some ISPs," said Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards.
The watchdog is urging changes in advertising guidance "so that consumers are able to make more informed decisions based on the adverts they see".
Superfast broadband is now available to 57% of UK homes, the report finds.
But three-quarters of broadband services are still delivered via copper-based ADSL technologies, which will always have speed limitations based on the distance between the home and the telephone exchange.
Other factors that slow down a connection include the quality of the wiring in a house and the time of day that the service is used.
Virgin Media is the only ISP able to come close to advertised speeds because cable services are not influenced by distance.
It has spearheaded the campaign to change the way broadband is advertised.
Jon James, executive director of broadband for Virgin Media, said: "The gulf between what's advertised and what speeds customers get continues to grow."
"We remain concerned that people paying for fast broadband are still being misled and believe it is absolutely essential that consumers have all the information they need to make an informed choice," he added.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is currently reviewing broadband advertising. Its report is expected in the next few months.
In a bizarre twist, last month it ruled that Virgin Media's campaign against false advertising itself broke advertising rules.
Andrew Ferguson, co-founder of broadband news site ThinkBroadband thinks more needs to be done to explain the differences between cable and ADSL but is not sure changes to advertising is the correct way.
"Adverts will shift to lifestyle advertising rather than actual facts, and some people may be denied access to products because they would drag the average speed down," he said.
Ofcom has introduced a code of practice to help inform the public about their likely speed before signing up to a service.
It recommends that broadband customers should be given a speed range rather than a single estimate of the maximum speed on their line.
It also suggests that users be allowed to leave their provider without penalty if they receive a maximum speed which is significantly below estimates.
So far, Virgin Media, BT, O2 and Sky have signed up to the code.
Michael Phillips, of comparison website broadbandchoices, is not sure the code goes far enough.
"Ofcom's code of practice has made some steps in the right direction, but without some more careful thought, there's still room for a lot of confusion.
How will my mum know if a service offering 1Mb - 6Mb is better or worse than one providing 2Mb - 5Mb? She needs to know what speed she's most likely to receive most of the time," he said.
He thinks that 'typical speeds' should be made "the gold standard for speed advertising in the same way that banks use 'typical APR' percentages".
From the BBC:
Click here to see this article with pictures - the first one is spectacular
A chicken-sized dinosaur fossil found in China may have overturned a long-held theory about the origin of birds.
For 150 years, a species called Archaeopteryx has been regarded as the first true bird, representing a major evolutionary step away from dinosaurs.
But the new fossil suggests this creature was just another feathery dinosaur and not the significant link that palaeontologists had believed.
The discovery of Xiaotingia, as it is known, is reported in Nature magazine.
The authors of the report argue that three other species named in the past decade might now be serious contenders for the title of "the oldest bird".
Archaeopteryx has a hallowed place in science, long hailed as not just the first bird but as one of the clearest examples of evolution in action.
Discovered in Bavaria in 1861 just two years after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, the fossil seemed to blend attributes of both reptiles and birds and was quickly accepted as the "original bird".
But in recent years, doubts have arisen as older fossils with similar bird-like features such as feathers and wishbones and three fingered hands were discovered.
Now, renowned Chinese palaeontologist Professor Xu Xing believes his new discovery has finally knocked Archaeopteryx off its perch.
His team has detailed the discovery of a similar species, Xiaotingia, which dates back 155 million years to the Jurassic Period.
By carefully analysing and comparing the bony bumps and grooves of this new chicken-sized fossil, Prof Xu now believe that both Archaeopteryx and Xiaotingia are in fact feathery dinosaurs and not birds at all.
"There are many, many features that suggest that Xiaotingia and Archaeopteryx are a type of dinosaur called Deinonychosaurs rather than birds. For example, both have a large hole in front of the eye; this big hole is only seen in these species and is not present in any other birds.
Several species discovered in the past decade could now become contenders for the title of most basal fossil bird.
Epidexipteryx - a very small feathered dinosaur discovered in China and first reported in 2008 (above). It had four long tail feathers but there is little evidence that it could fly.
Jeholornis - this creature lived 120 million years ago in the Cretaceous. It was a relatively large bird, about the size of a turkey. First discovered in China, and reported in 2002.
Sapeornis - lived 110 to 120 million years ago. Another small primitive bird about 33 centimetres in length. It was discovered in China and was first reported in 2002.
"Archaeopteryx and Xiaotingia are very, very similar to other Deinonychosaurs in having a quite interesting feature - the whole group is categorised by a highly specialised second pedo-digit which is highly extensible, and both Archaeopteryx and Xiaotingia show initial development of this feature."
The origins of the new fossil are a little murky having originally been purchased from a dealer. Prof Xu first saw the specimen at the Shandong Tianyu Museum. He knew right away it was special
"When I visited the museum which houses more than 1,000 feathery dinosaur skeletons, I saw this specimen and immediately recognised that it was something new, very interesting; but I did not expect it would have such a big impact on the origin of birds."
Other scientists agree that the discovery could fundamentally change our understanding of birds. Prof Lawrence Witmer from Ohio University has written a commentary on the finding.
"Since Archaeopteryx was found 150 years ago, it has been the most primitive bird and consequently every theory about the beginnings of birds - how they evolved flight, what their diet was like - were viewed through the lens of Archaeopteryx.
"So, if we don't view birds through this we might have a different set of hypotheses."
There is a great deal of confusion in the field says Prof Witmer as scientists try to understand where dinosaurs end and where birds begin.
"It's kind of a nightmare for those of us trying to understand it. When we go back into the late Jurassic, 150-160 million years ago, all the primitive members of these different species are all very similar.
"So, on the one hand, it's really frustrating trying to tease apart the threads of this evolutionary knot, but it's really a very exciting thing to be working on and taking apart this evolutionary origin."
Such are the similarities between these transition species of reptiles and birds that other scientists believe that the new finding certainly will not mean the end of the argument.
Prof Mike Benton from the University of Bristol, UK, agrees that the new fossil is about the closest relative to Archaeopteryx that has yet been found. But he argues that it is far from certain that the new finding dethrones its claim to be the first bird.
"Professor Xu and his colleagues show that the evolutionary pattern varies according to their different analyses.
"Some show Archaeopteryx as the basal bird; others show it hopped sideways into the Deinonychosaurs.
"New fossils like Xiaotingia can make it harder to be 100% sure of the exact pattern of relationships."
According to Prof Witmer, little is certain in trying to determine the earliest bird and new findings can rapidly change perspectives.
"The reality is, that next fossil find could kick Archaeopteryx right back into birds. That's the thing that's really exciting about all of this."
From the BBC:
Click here to see this article with pictures
Astronomers have detected an asteroid not far from Earth, moving in the same orbit around the Sun.
The 200-300m-wide rock sits in front of our planet at a gravitational "sweet spot", and poses no danger.
Its position in the sky makes it a so-called Trojan asteroid - a type previously detected only at Jupiter, Neptune and Mars.
2010 TK7, as it is known, was found by Nasa's Wise telescope. The discovery is reported in this week's Nature journal.
It is a fascinating observation because the relative stability and proximity of Trojans would make possible targets for astronaut missions when we eventually go beyond the space station.
2010 TK7 is probably not the rock of choice, simply because it travels too far above and below the plane of Earth's orbit, which would require a lot of fuel to reach it.
Nonetheless, its detection means it is highly likely there are other, more suitable Trojans out there waiting to be found.
The difficulty is the viewing geometry that puts any Trojan, from the perspective of an Earth-based telescope, in bright skies.
It took an orbiting telescope sensitive to infrared light to pick up 2010 TK7.
Wise, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer launched in 2009, examined more than 500 Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), 123 of which were new to science.
The authors of the Nature paper sifted through data on these rocks, looking for the candidates that might be Trojans.
Follow-up work on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope confirmed the status of 2010 TK7.
It traces quite a complex path at its orbital point. Currently, it is about 80 million km from Earth, and should come no closer than about 25 million km.
The team says its orbit appears stable at least for the next 10,000 years.
2010 TK7's existence should not really be a surprise. Jupiter, Neptune and Mars all have collections of rocks sitting in the so-called Lagrange points 60 degrees ahead of or behind the planets in their orbits.
In the case of Jupiter, the number of Trojans now tops 1,000 rocks.
"These objects are difficult to find from Earth, simply because they're not very big and they're pretty faint, and they're close to the Sun as seen from Earth," explained Christian Veillet from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope and a co-author on the Nature study.
"But we can find them from space, and future satellites will likely find some more. We think that there are others which will be very close to the Earth and have motions that make them relatively easy to reach. So, they could be potential targets to go to with spacecraft," he told BBC News.
From the BBC:
Click here to see this article with picture
A rainforest vine has evolved dish-shaped leaves to attract the bats that pollinate it, scientists have found.
Tests revealed that the leaves were supremely efficient at bouncing back the sound pulses the flying mammals used to navigate.
When the leaves were present the bats located the plant twice as quickly as when these echoing leaves were removed.
A team of scientists in the UK and Germany reported its findings in the journal Science.
The study is the first to find a plant with "specialised acoustic features" to help bat pollinators find them using sound.
Most bats send out pulses of sound to find their way around; the way they sense objects in their environment by sensing how these pulses bounce off them is known as echolocation.
"We already knew that plants used their brightly coloured petals to attract pollinators," explained Marc Holderied from the University of Bristol, one of the researchers involved in the study.
"What we've found is the echolocating equivalent to colourful flowers.
"We have a shape that produces an echo - an 'echoacoustic beacon'."
The scientists first notice the Caribbean plant, Marcgravia evenia, in a photograph in a Natural History magazine.
"We immediately recognised that this dish-shaped leaf could be a perfect bat attractor," he recalled.
He and his colleagues brought the plant into their laboratory and bounced to measure its acoustics - essentially firing sound pulses at it to see how they echoed.
The next step was to test how the bats responded to it.
The researchers set a test for a group of nectar-feeding bats (Glossophaga soricina) to measure how long it took them to locate a small feeder in a dark room.
They adorned the feeder either with the plants' dish-shaped leaf or with a normal (much flatter) foliage leaf from the same plant.
"Once we added the leaf, that really did the trick," said Dr Holderied. "The bats found the feeder in half the time."
"Now we know that the acoustic clues are important for pollination."
From the BBC:
Tapping into drivers' brain signals can cut braking distances and avoid car crashes, according to scientists.
Researchers at the Berlin Institute for Technology attached electrodes to the scalps of volunteers inside a driving simulator.
The system detected the intention to brake, and cut more than 3m (10ft) off stopping distances, the team report in the Journal of Neural Engineering.
The team's next aim is to check the system in a series of road tests.
The 18 volunteers were asked to keep 20m (66ft) behind the simulated car in front, which braked sharply at random intervals.
Scientists used a technique called electroencephalograhy (EEG) to analyse the drivers' brain signals.
The system was able to pinpoint the intention to brake 13 hundredths of a second before the driver applied pressure to the brakes.
The team reported that at a speed of 100km/h (65m/h) the braking distance was reduced by 3.66 meters (12 feet).
Computer scientist Stefan Haufe told BBC News: "We know that any intention is generated in the brain. So it's no wonder that such things are visible in the brain.
"We were surprised it is so predictive. That is the thing!"
Lead investigator Benjamin Blankertz added: "It's quite easily explained by the fact that we can tap the driver's intention at the source of the build up of intention in the brain.
"It's a longer process, from the very first upcoming cognitive processes and intention building, until finally the muscles start the movement."
The volunteers also had the muscle tension in their lower legs analysed to detect the first signs of leg motion before they released the accelerator and pushed the brake pedal.
This data enabled the scientists to analyse the EEG information to determine which parts of the brain are key to braking. They improved the detection system accordingly.
'Point of no return'
The Institute of Physics says this is the first time that EEG has been used to assist in braking.
The technique is, however, already used to help paralysed people control computers, prosthetic limbs and wheelchairs.
The researchers are planning to conduct road trials of their system to test its viability out of the lab.
But Benjamin Blankertz stressed that he suspects there may be some way to go before EEG can be used as a safety aid in real driving situations, not least because it requires the driver to wear a plastic cap with 64 electrodes covered in conductive gel.
This is uncomfortable, takes up to half an hour to fit, and the wearers have to wash the gel out of their hair afterwards. Smaller, more lightweight versions are in development.
The paper also mentions that wearers of EEG caps have to keep fairly still which is not always possible while driving, particularly when executing an emergency stop.
Dr Blankertz also said more work needs to be done on avoiding false alarms - to avoid the possibility that the machine could misread a drivers' brain signals and brake unnecessarily.
He said: "We need to investigate intention-building and decision-taking and self-initiated movement.
"Some recent research suggests that the outcome of free choices can be predicted from brain activity before the experimental subject is consciously aware of their intention.
"A technology that would make possible real time prediction of future decisions could be used to investigate how this relates to the so-called point of no return.
The team ultimately hopes to work with the automotive industry to combine their EEG technique with radar and laser systems that are used in some commercially available crash-avoidance systems, which detect obstacles such as walls, traffic signals and other vehicles.
From the BBC:
Click here to see this article with pictures
The most massive fruiting body of any fungus yet documented has been discovered growing on the underside of a tree in China.
The fruiting body, which is equivalent to the mushrooms produced by other fungi species, is up to 10m long, 80cm wide and weighs half a tonne.
That shatters the record held previously by a fungus growing in Kew Gardens in the UK.
The new giant fungus is thought to be at least 20 years old.
The first example of the new giant fungus was recorded by scientists in 2008 in Fujian Province, China, by Professor Yu-Cheng Dai of the Herbarium of biology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shenyang and his assistant Dr Cui.
"But the type collection was not huge," Prof Dai told BBC Nature.
However, "we found [the] giant one in Hainan Province in 2010."
The researchers were in the field studying wood-decaying fungi when they happened upon the specimen, which they describe in the journal Fungal Biology.
"We were not specifically looking for this fungus; we did not know the fungus can grow so huge," he said.
"We were surprised when we found it, and we did not recognise it in the forest because it is too large."
The fungus, F. ellipsoidea, is what mycologists call a perennial polypore - otherise known as a bracket fungus.
Being a perennial, it can live for a number of years, which may have enabled it to grow to such large size.
By colonising the underside of the large fallen tree, the fungus also had a huge amount of dead and decaying wood to feed on, helping to fuel its growth.
Fruiting bodies, such as mushrooms and toadstools, are the sexual stages of a many higher types of fungi, producing seeds or spores that produce further generations.
The giant fruiting body of F. ellipsoidea forms a long, brown shape up to 10.85m long, 82-88cm wide, and 4.6-5.5cm thick.
Tests on the density of the fruiting body suggest the whole thing weighs 400-500kg; it is also estimated to hold some 450 million spores.
"A small piece of the fruiting body is almost like my size," said Prof Dai.
The previous record holder was a specimen of Rigidoporus ulmarius, a polypore with a pileate fruiting body found in Kew Gardens in the UK in 2003.
It measured approximately 150cm in diameter with a circumference of 425cm.
After their initial encounter with the new record-breaking fungus, the scientists took samples of it back to the lab where to be analysed.
These tests revealed that the fungus was the species Fomitiporia ellipsoidea, and the researchers made two subsequent trips to study the specimen further.
From the BBC:
A government agency is warning people not to use a new tanning spray that is being sold in the UK.
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) say that Ubertan Sunless Tanning System is an unlicensed medicine, meaning it is illegal to sell, advertise or supply.
The MHRA has launched an investigation into the product.
Ubertan has not responded to the warning, despite repeated attempts by Newsbeat to contact them.
'Head rush'
Nicole Froggett, from Coventry, tried using sunbeds and spray tans but they didn't work for her.
"I'm very, very pale," she said. "It takes me a long time to tan if I'm on holiday.
"I'll have to probably use sunbeds before going away.
"I do prefer to be tanned it just makes you look healthier I think."
Her friend recommended Ubertan and the first time Nicole tried it she had some side effects.
"You feel a bit dizzy and you get a head rush like you've had your first cigarette of the day," she said.
"I started to feel sick, but it wore off after two hours."
The box has instructions on how to use Ubertan, which involve spraying the product up your nostrils twice a day for 10 to 14 days.
However, both the box and bottle do not have an ingredients list.
The website states: "Ubertan is not a fake spray tan and is made from the all natural extract of an Indian tropical plant called the Indian Coleus."
Unlicensed medicine
The MHRA says Ubertan could contain Forskolin, which is derived from Coleus forskohlii, which is not licensed for sale in the UK.
The MHRA is also investigating another form of Ubertan which was found to contain Melanotan II, a type of hormone that increases the levels of the pigment melanin in the body.
Melanotan II is also unlicensed and illegal to sell.
Claire Tilstone, from the MHRA, is worried that users will suffer serious side effects.
She said: "Ubertan or any other nasal tanning spray hasn't undergone testing to show it's safe or that it even works.
"At best it's a waste of money, at worse it can seriously damage your health.
"Don't use this product, throw it away if you have already bought it and don't buy any more."
Nicole bought Ubertan from her local tanning salon.
She is worried about the contents but will continue to use it until there's proof that it is unsafe.
"I didn't know anything about it when I first took it, so I wasn't worried at all. I didn't even think about it really," she admitted.
"This is the best tan I have had.
"This is my last bottle now and maybe in a couple of months, I may get another one."
From the BBC:
Rules outlawing the transfer of content from CDs or DVDs on to MP3 files and computers are set to be scrapped by the government.
Business secretary Vince Cable will announce the official response to the Hargreaves Review of UK copyright law.
The review was intended to identify legislation that has been outdated by technological change.
As well as legalising "format shifting", it also suggested relaxing rules on parody of copyright material.
The government is widely expected to accept and pledge to implement many parts of the review.
Mr Cable told the BBC that he hoped to add "more clarity" to the current copyright laws and confirmed that most private ripping of music and video would no longer be technically illegal.
"We are talking about big changes," he said. "Bringing the laws more up-to- date to have a proper balance which allows consumers and businesses to operate more freely, but at the same time protect genuinely creative artists and penalise pirates."
The business secretary said the economy would benefit by Β£8bn over the next few years by updating the legislation.
'Not very good law'
Millions of people regularly convert movies on DVDs and music on CDs into a format that they can move around more easily, although most do not realise that it technically illegal.
"The review pointed out that if you have a situation where 90% of your population is doing something, then it's not really a very good law," said Simon Levine, head of the intellectual property and technology group at DLA Piper.
Legalising non-commercial copying for private use would bring the UK into line with many other nations and also meet the "reasonable expectations" of consumers, said the government.
The change would not make it legal to make copies and then share them online.
The legal anomaly preventing personal "ripping" was one of many identified by Professor Ian Hargreaves in the review as stifling innovation.
One technology caught out by the law was the Brennan JB7 music player that lets owners copy their CDs onto a hard drive that can be accessed from around a home.
The Advertising Standards Authority demanded that Brennan advise customers that using the JB7 breaks the law.
Copycat
Some legal experts believe that the acceptance of format shifting, combined with relaxations on manipulating works for the purpose of parody, paved the way for creative people to use content in different ways.
Susan Hall, a media specialist at law firm Cobbetts LLP, said the changes would give many artists "room to breathe" and remove the nervousness they might feel when using another work as inspiration.
One example that would be tolerated under the new regime is the Welsh rap song Newport State of Mind which was based on Jay Z and Alicia Keys's song Empire State of Mind.
Despite winning many fans on YouTube, the track was removed following a copyright claim by EMI. It is still available on other websites.
"There are all sorts of things that are genuine artistic works which are nevertheless based on parody, caricature and pastiche," said Ms Hall.
Updated laws on copyright could have a profound effect on the popular culture that can be created, albeit one that was hard to measure, she added.
One example is that of Doctor Who writers Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat who began their careers writing fan fiction about the time lord.
Such creative synergies could become more common in a more tolerant copyright climate, suggested Ms Hall.
"Rights holders are often very nervous about things like this but when you come down to it, it's the people that buy everything who also go to the trouble of writing and creating more," she said.
"It's about riffing off, not passing off."
On the BBC radio news this morning:
Click here to see this article with pictures
A new theory suggests the Earth once had a small second moon that perished in a slow motion collision with its "big sister".
Researchers suggest the collision may explain the mysterious mountains on the far side of our Moon.
The scientists say the relatively slow speed of the crash was crucial in adding material to the rarely-seen lunar hemisphere.
Details have been published in the journal Nature.
The researchers involved hope that data from two US space agency (Nasa) lunar missions will substantiate or challenge their theory within the next year.
For decades, scientists have been trying to understand why the near side of the Moon - the one visible from Earth - is flat and cratered while the rarely-seen far side is heavily cratered and has mountain ranges higher than 3,000m.
Various theories have been proposed to explain what's termed the lunar dichotomy. One suggests that tidal heating, caused by the pull of the Earth on the ocean of liquid rock that once flowed under the lunar crust, may have been the cause.
But this latest paper proposes a different solution: a long-term series of cosmic collisions.
The researchers argue that the Earth was struck about four billion years ago by another planet about the size of Mars. This is known as the global-impact hypothesis. The resulting debris eventually coalesced to form our Moon.
Slow-motion impact
But the scientists say that another, smaller lunar body may have formed from the same material and become stuck in a gravitational tug of war between the Earth and the Moon.
Dr Martin Jutzi from the University of Bern, Switzerland, is one of the authors of the paper. He explained: "When we look at the current theory there is no real reason why there was only one moon.
"And one outcome of our research is that the new theory goes very well with the global impact idea."
After spending millions of years "stuck", the smaller moon embarked on a collision course with its big sister, slowly crashing into it at a velocity of less than three kilometres per second - slower than the speed of sound in rocks.
Dr Jutzi says it was a low velocity crash: "It was a rather gentle collision at around 2.4km per second; lower than the speed of sound - that's important because it means no huge shocks or melting was produced.
At the time of the smash, the bigger moon would have had a "magma ocean" with a thin crust on top.
The scientists argue that the impact would have led to the build-up of material on the lunar crust and would also have redistributed the underlying magma to the near side of the moon, an idea backed up by observations from Nasa's Lunar Prospector spacecraft.
In a commentary, Dr Maria Zuber from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, US, suggests that while the new study "demonstrates plausibility rather than proof", the authors "raise the legitimate possibility that after the giant impact our Earth perhaps fleetingly possessed more than one moon".
The researchers believe one way of proving their theory is to compare their models with the detailed internal structure of the moon that will be obtained by Nasa's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
They will also be looking to high resolution gravity mapping set to be carried out next year by the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission.
But according to Dr Jutzi the scientists would prefer to get their hands on samples from the far side of the Moon to prove their theory.
"Hopefully in future, a sample return or a manned mission would certainly help to say more about which theory is more probable."
From the BBC:
Click here to see this article with video clip
Striking new images from the mountains of Mars may be the best evidence yet of flowing, liquid water, an essential ingredient for life.
The findings, reported today in the journal Science, come from a joint US-Swiss study.
A sequence of images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show many long, dark "tendrils" a few metres wide.
They emerge between rocky outcrops and flow hundreds of metres down steep slopes towards the plains below.
They appear on hillsides warmed by the summer sun, flow around obstacles and sometimes split or merge, but when winter returns, the tendrils fade away.
This suggests that they are made of thawing mud, say the researchers.
"It's hard to imagine they are formed by anything other than fluid seeping down slopes," said Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project Scientist Richard Zurek of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but they appear when it's still too cold for fresh water.
Salty water
"The best explanation we have for these observations so far is flow of briny water, although this study does not prove that," said planetary geologist and lead author Professor Alfred McEwen of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona.
Saltiness lowers the temperature at which water freezes, and water about as salty as Earth's oceans could exist at these sites in summer.
"This could be the first flowing water," said Professor McEwen. This has profound implications in the search for extraterrestrial life.
"Liquid water is absolutely essential for life, and we've found life on Earth in pretty much every moist niche," said Dr Lewis Dartnell, astrobiologist at University College London, who was not involved in the study.
"So perhaps there could be hardy microbes surviving in these short periods of summer meltwater on the desert surface of Mars."
This was echoed by an expert on life in extreme environments, Professor Shiladitya DasSarma of the University of Maryland, also not involved in this study: "Their results are consistent with the presence of large and extensive underground salty lakes on Mars."
"This is an exciting possibility for those of us studying salt-loving (halophilic) micro-organisms here on Earth, since it opens the possibility that these kinds of hearty bugs may also inhabit our neighbouring planet," he said.
"Halophilic microbes are champions at withstanding the most punishing conditions, complete desiccation and ionising (space) radiation."
For geologist Joe Levy of Portland State University, a specialist in Antarctic desert ecosystems, who did not contribute to this work, they represent "a truly tantalising astrobiological target".
These small and mysterious tendrils could then be the best place to look for Martian life. Professor McEwen says that "for present-day life, these are the most accessible sites"
