From the BBC:

 

Dwarf galaxies suggest dark matter theory may be wrong

By Leila Battison Science reporter, Bradford

 

Scientists' predictions about the mysterious dark matter purported to make up most of the mass of the Universe may have to be revised.

Research on dwarf galaxies suggests they cannot form in the way they do if dark matter exists in the form that the most common model requires it to.

That may mean that the Large Hadron Collider will not be able to spot it.

Leading cosmologist Carlos Frenk spoke of the "disturbing" developments at the British Science Festival in Bradford.

The current theory holds that around 4% of the Universe is made up of normal matter - the stuff of stars, planets and people - and around 21% of it is dark matter.

The remainder is made up of what is known as dark energy, an even less understood hypothetical component of the Universe that would explain its ever-increasing expansion.

Scientists' best ideas for the formation and structure of the Universe form what is called the "cosmological standard model", or lambda-CDM - which predicts elementary particles in the form of cold dark matter (CDM).

These CDM particles are believed to have formed very early in the Universe's history, around one millionth of a second after the Big Bang, and they are "cold" in the sense that they are not hypothesised to be particularly fast-moving.

The existence of the particles has not yet been proven, as they are extremely difficult to detect - they cannot be "seen" in the traditional sense, and if they exist, they interact only very rarely with the matter we know.

Various experiments are being carried out in deep mines in Yorkshire, on the Fermi Space Telescope, and in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland to try and detect these elusive particles, or indirect evidence of their effects.

So far, none of these experiments has conclusively spotted them.

Scientists working on the problem have recently expressed dismay at the universally negative results coming from the LHC, and this has led some to consider that the standard model may be wrong.

 

'Disturbing possibilities'

Prof Carlos Frenk at Durham University, working with the Virgo Consortium, now has data suggesting that our understanding of the formation and composition of the Universe is incomplete.

These data come from an unlikely source: dwarf galaxies, a "halo" of which surrounds our own Milky Way.

These dwarf galaxies are believed to be mostly made up of dark matter, and contain just a few stars. Their dimness has made them difficult to study in the past.

But the Virgo Consortium has created computer simulations to visualise how the dwarf galaxies formed, using their assumptions about CDM.

The team found that the final results of these simulations did not at all match what we observe. The models showed many more small galaxies in a wide halo around the Milky Way, whereas in reality there are fewer, larger dwarf galaxies.

Prof Frenk explained that there were two "equally disturbing possibilities" for why this is the case.

One idea is that many dwarf galaxies formed as in the simulation, but there were violent supernova explosions during their formation that radically changed the structure of the dwarf galaxy halo.

"If this were the case, it would mean that galaxy formation is a much more exciting process than we thought," said Prof Frenk.

But there are still uncertainties over whether the small fraction of normal matter in the Universe (4%) could have such a fundamental effect on the structure of the dark matter.

An alternative cause for the discrepancies between the modelled data and what we observe is much more fundamental: that CDM does not exist, and the predictions of the standard model relating to it are false.

Prof Frenk said that after working for 35 years with the predictions of the standard model, he is "losing sleep" over the results of the simulations.

 

Warmer Universe

But he believes he has found a solution to the CDM problem. He proposes that instead of "cold" dark matter that formed within the first one millionth of a second after the Big Bang, the Universe may instead be filled with warm dark matter (WDM).

The WDM would have formed later, up to minutes after the Big Bang, and is described as "warm" as the particles would be lighter and more energetic.

When simulations of galaxy formation are run with the later-forming WDM instead of CDM, the halo of dwarf galaxies has the same structure as we observe in reality.

The WDM solution is "remarkably elegant", Prof Frenk said, and it means that "the standard model is by no means dead".

But if all dark matter is WDM and not CDM, this poses major problems for our current attempts to detect it.

The LHC is designed to recreate the conditions one millionth of a second after the Big Bang. If WDM is the dominant dark matter, however, the facility will not see a trace of the particles.

Other possibilities exist for trying to detect WDM. The most likely WDM particle, the "sterile neutrino", could be identified by the X-rays it emits; but much more sensitive X-ray detectors would be needed.

Alternatively, the James Webb Space Telescope, which is designed to peer into space to look for the earliest stars, and is due to be launched in 2018 pending funding agreements, could be used to prove the non-existence of CDM.

If WDM is the dark matter holding galaxies together, then at the very earliest stages of the Universe, the telescope will see nothing, because the WDM and its accompanying galaxies would not have yet formed.

Prof Frenk explained that there is no definitive proof yet that the dark matter theories need a "paradigm shift", but he remains positive that an answer will be found soon.

"Dark matter is poised for big developments in the next few months," he said.

From the BBC:

 

Schizophrenia and epilepsy have 'strong link'

 

People with schizophrenia are six times more likely to develop epilepsy, says a study which finds a strong relationship between the two diseases.

Writing in Epilepsia, researchers in Taiwan say this could be due to genetic, neurobiological or environmental factors.

The study followed around 16,000 patients with epilepsy and schizophrenia between 1999 and 2008.

An epilepsy expert says it is an interesting and convincing study.

The study used data from the Taiwan National Health Insurance database and was led by researchers from the China Medical University Hospital in Taichung.

They identified 5,195 patients with schizophrenia and 11,527 patients with epilepsy who were diagnosed during the nine years period.

These groups of patients were compared to groups of the same sex and age who did not have either epilepsy or schizophrenia.

The findings show that the incidence of epilepsy was 6.99 per 1,000 person-years in the schizophrenia patient group compared to 1.19 in the non-schizophrenia group.

The incidence of schizophrenia was 3.53 per 1,000 person-years for patients with epilepsy compared to 0.46 in the non-epilepsy group.

Previous studies had suggested a prevalence of psychosis among epilepsy patients.

 

Two-way relationship

Researchers in this study also found that schizophrenia levels were slightly higher in men with epilepsy than in women with the disease.

Dr I-Ching Chou, associate professor with the China Medical University in Taichung inTaiwan, said:

"Our research results show a strong bidirectional relation between schizophrenia and epilepsy.

"This relationship may be due to common pathogenesis in these diseases such as genetic susceptibility and environmental factors, but further investigation of the pathological mechanisms are needed."

Dr Manny Bagary, consultant neuropsychiatrist in Birmingham, said it was a "very interesting" study.

"We have been aware that epilepsy sufferers seem to be have an increased risk of psychosis but this is the first convincing study to suggest that people with schizophrenia could also be at risk of developing epilepsy, suggesting a bidirectional relationship has been found between depression and epilepsy".

"The association may be due to a common environmental factors such as traumatic brain injury or brain haemorrhage in utero. Alternatively, a genetic association may be relevant such as LGI1 or CNTNAP2 genes which have been associated with seizures and psychosis."

"However, there may be some questions to ask about the reliability of the schizophrenia and epilepsy diagnoses in the study because it is a retrospective health register study and both conditions can be difficult to diagnose.

"Nevertheless, this study will serve to guide further research into the relationship between epilepsy and psychosis."

For a change, here's a video of a Nano car with a big difference. The basic car is the world's cheapest, but this one is somewaht more expensive.

 

From the BBC:

 

Harvesting 'limitless' hydrogen from self-powered cells

By Mark Kinver Environment reporter, BBC News

 

US researchers say they have demonstrated how cells fuelled by bacteria can be "self-powered" and produce a limitless supply of hydrogen.

Until now, they explained, an external source of electricity was required in order to power the process.

However, the team added, the current cost of operating the new technology is too high to be used commercially.

Details of the findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"There are bacteria that occur naturally in the environment that are able to release electrons outside of the cell, so they can actually produce electricity as they are breaking down organic matter," explained co-author Bruce Logan, from Pennsylvania State University, US.

"We use those microbes, particularly inside something called a microbial fuel cell (MFC), to generate electrical power.

"We can also use them in this device, where they need a little extra power to make hydrogen gas.

"What that means is that they produce this electrical current, which are electrons, they release protons in the water and these combine with electrons."

Prof Logan said that the technology to utilise this process to produce hydrogen was called microbial electrolysis cell (MEC).

"The breakthrough here is that we do not need to use an electrical power source anymore to provide a little energy into the system.

"All we need to do is add some fresh water and some salt water and some membranes, and the electrical potential that is there can provide that power."

The MECs use something called "reverse electrodialysis" (RED), which refers to the energy gathered from the difference in salinity, or salt content, between saltwater and freshwater.

In their paper, Prof Logan and colleague Younggy Kim explained how an envisioned RED system would use alternating stacks of membranes that harvest this energy; the movement of charged atoms move from the saltwater to freshwater creates a small voltage that can be put to work.

"This is the crucial element of the latest research," Prof Logan told BBC News, explaining the process of their system, known as a microbial reverse-electrodialysis electrolysis cell (MREC).

"If you think about desalinating water, it takes energy. If you have a freshwater and saltwater interface, that can add energy. We realised that just a little bit of that energy could make this process go on its own."

 

Early days

He said that the technology was still in its infancy, which was one of the reasons why it was not being exploited commercially.

"Right now, it is such a new technology," he explained.

"In a way it is a little like solar power. We know we can convert solar energy into electricity but it has taken many years to lower the cost.

"This is a similar thing: it is a new technology and it could be used, but right now it is probably a little expensive. So the question is, can we bring down the cost?"

The next step, Prof Logan explained, was to develop larger-scale cells: "Then it will easier to evaluate the costs and investment needed to use the technology.

The authors acknowledged that hydrogen had "significant potential as an efficient energy carrier", but it had been dogged with high production costs and environmental concerns, because it is most often produced using fossil fuels.

Prof Logan observed: "We use hydrogen for many, many things. It is used in making [petrol], it is used in foods etc. Whether we use it in transportation... remains to be seen."

But, the authors wrote that their findings offered hope for the future: "This unique type of integrated system has significant potential to treat wastewater and simultaneously produce [hydrogen] gas without any consumption of electrical grid energy."

Prof Logan added that a working example of a microbial fuel cell was currently on display at London's Science Museum, as part of the Water Wars exhibition.

From the BBC:

 

Car fumes 'raise heart attack risk for six-hour window'

By Michelle Roberts Health reporter, BBC News

 

Breathing in heavy traffic fumes can trigger a heart attack, say UK experts.

Heart attack risk is raised for about six hours post-exposure and goes down again after that, researchers found.

They say in the British Medical Journal that pollution probably hastens rather than directly cause attacks.

But repeated exposure is still bad for health, they say, substantially shortening life expectancy, and so the advice to people remains the same - avoid as far as is possible.

Prof Jeremy Pearson, associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation, which co-funded the study, said: "This large-scale study shows conclusively that your risk of having a heart attack goes up temporarily, for around six hours, after breathing in higher levels of vehicle exhaust.

"We know that pollution can have a major effect on your heart health, possibly because it can 'thicken' the blood to make it more likely to clot, putting you at higher risk of a heart attack.

"Our advice to patients remains the same - if you've been diagnosed with heart disease, try to avoid spending long periods outside in areas where there are likely to be high traffic pollution levels, such as on or near busy roads."

 

Early peak

The research looked at the medical records of almost 80,000 heart attack patients in England and Wales, cross-referencing these details with air pollution data.

This enabled the investigators to plot hourly levels of air pollution (PM10, ozone, CO, NO2, and SO2) against onset of heart attack symptoms and see if there was any link.

Higher levels of air pollution did appear to be linked with onset of a heart attack lasting for six hours after exposure.

After this time frame, risk went back down again.

Krishnan Bhaskaran from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who led the research, said the findings suggested that pollution was not a major contributing factor to heart attacks.

For example, being exposed to a spell of medium-level rather than low-level pollution would raise heart attack risk by 5%, by his calculations.

"If anything, it looks like it brings heart attack forward by a few hours. These are cardiac events that probably would have happened anyway."

But he said the findings should not detract from the fact that chronic exposure to air pollution was hazardous to health.

Prof Pearson from the BHF agrees: "Unhealthy diets and smoking etc are much bigger heart attack risk factors, but car fumes are the cream on the cake that can tip you over."

On the BBC news today:

 

Speed-of-light experiments give baffling result at Cern

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

 

Puzzling results from Cern, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists - because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light.

Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early.

The result - which threatens to upend a century of physics - will be put online for scrutiny by other scientists.

In the meantime, the group says it is being very cautious about its claims.

"We tried to find all possible explanations for this," said report author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration.

"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't," he told BBC News.

"When you don't find anything, then you say 'Well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this.'"

 

Caught speeding?

The speed of light is the Universe's ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics - as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his special theory of relativity - depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it.

Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit.

But Dr Ereditato and his colleagues have been carrying out an experiment for the last three years that seems to suggest neutrinos have done just that.

Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another.

The team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, sending them from Cern to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos.

In the course of doing the experiments, the researchers noticed that the particles showed up a few billionths of a second sooner than light would over the same distance.

The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 15,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance that in scientific circles would count as a formal discovery.

But the group understands that what are known as "systematic errors" could easily make an erroneous result look like a breaking of the ultimate speed limit, and that has motivated them to publish their measurements.

"My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing - then I would be relieved," Dr Ereditato said.

But for now, he explained, "we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy".

"And of course the consequences can be very serious."

From the BBC:

 

Arthur Conan Doyle's first novel hits shops

 

The previously unpublished first novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle will finally be available to buy from Monday.

Entitled The Narrative of John Smith, the novel - written between 1883 and 1884 - comprises the reflections of a man confined to his room by gout.

Conan Doyle sent it to a publisher but it was lost in the post. The book was then reconstructed from memory.

The British Library is now releasing the novel, alongside an audiobook read by actor Robert Lindsay.

The four notebooks that comprise the manuscript form part of an exhibition that runs at the Library until 5 January.

"This publication and exhibition show that there are still new things to discover about this iconic literary figure," said Rachel Foss, who co-edited the novel.

"It's a testament to the richness of Conan Doyle's life and the archive he left behind him... that we can still unearth such little-known gems."

The novel has been part of the Library's collection since 2007 and is being published with the consent of the Conan Doyle literary estate.

The author continued to revise the text and drew on passages from it in his later writings but he never re-submitted the novel for publication.

"My shock at its disappearance would be as nothing to my horror if it were suddenly to appear again - in print," he once joked.

According to Jon Lellenberg of the Conan Doyle Estate, the author was "fortunate" that his first stab at penning a novel went unpublished in the 1880s.

Even so, he continued, the text offered "a unique window into the mind, thinking and often emphatic opinions" of the Sherlock Holmes creator.

From the BBC:

 

Virtual monkeys write Shakespeare

 

A few million virtual monkeys are close to re-creating the complete works of Shakespeare by randomly mashing keys on virtual typewriters.

A running total of how well they are doing shows that the re-creation is 99.990% complete.

The first single work to be completed was the poem A Lover's Complaint.

Set up by US programmer Jesse Anderson the project co-ordinates the virtual monkeys sitting on Amazon's EC2 cloud computing system via a home PC.

Mr Anderson said he started the project as a way to get to know the Hadoop programming tool better and to put Amazon's web services to the test.

It is also a practical test of the thought experiment that wonders whether an infinite number of monkeys pounding on an infinite number of typewriters would be able to produce Shakespeare's works by accident.

Mr Anderson's virtual monkeys are small computer programs uploaded to Amazon servers. These coded apes regularly pump out random sequences of text.

Each sequence is nine characters long and each is checked to see if that string of characters appears anywhere in the works of Shakespeare. If not, it is discarded. If it does match then progress has been made towards re-creating the works of the Bard.

To get a sense of the scale of the project, there are about 5.5 trillion different combinations of any nine characters from the English alphabet.

Mr Anderson's monkeys are generating random nine-character strings to try to produce all these strings and thereby find those that appear in Shakespeare's works.

Mr Anderson kicked off the project on 21 August using Amazon's cloud computers. Each day of virtual monkey keyboard mashing processing cost $19.20 (£12.40).

The project has been moved to a home PC to speed up text string generation and to cut the cost. To make the task even easier the text being sampled has had all the spaces and punctuation removed.

Mathematicians said the constraints Mr Anderson introduced to the project mean he will complete it in a reasonable amount of time.

"If he's running an evolutionary approach, holding on to successful guesses, then he'll get there," said Tim Harford, popular science writer and presenter of the BBC's radio show about numbers More or Less.

And without those constraints?

"Not a chance," said Dr Ian Stewart, emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Warwick.

His calculations suggest it would take far, far longer than the age of the Universe for monkeys to completely randomly produce a flawless copy of the 3,695,990 or so characters in the works.

"Along the way there would be untold numbers of attempts with one character wrong; even more with two wrong, and so on." he said. "Almost all other books, being shorter, would appear (countless times) before Shakespeare did."

Earlier experiments have shown how difficult the task is. Wikipedia mentions a 2003 project that used computer programs to simulate a lot of monkeys randomly typing.

After the equivalent of billions and billions and billions of monkey years the simulated apes had only produced part of a line from Henry IV, Part 2.

Also in 2003, Paignton Zoo carried out a practical test by putting a keyboard connected to a PC into the cage of six crested macaques. After a month the monkeys had produced five pages of the letter "S" and had broken the keyboard.

Originally Posted by El Loro:

From the BBC:

 

Coffee may prevent depression, scientists say

By Michelle Roberts Health reporter, BBC News

 

Women who drink two or more cups of coffee a day are less likely to get depressed, research suggests.

It is not clear why it might have this effect, but the authors believe caffeine in coffee may alter the brain's chemistry. Decaffeinated coffee did not have the same effect.

The findings, published in Archives of Internal Medicine, come from a study of more than 50,000 US female nurses.

The experts are now recommending more work to better understand the link.

And they say it is certainly too soon to start recommending that women should drink more coffee to boost mood.

 

Caffeine lift

The Harvard Medical School team tracked the health of the women over a decade from 1996 to 2006 and relied on questionnaires to record their coffee consumption.

Just over 2,600 of the women developed depression over this time period.

More of these women tended to be non- or low-coffee drinkers rather than frequent coffee consumers.

Compared with women who drank one cup of caffeinated coffee or less per week, those who consumed two to three cups per day had a 15% decreased risk of developing depression.

Those who drank four or more cups a day cut their risk by 20%.

Regular coffee drinkers were more likely to smoke and drink alcohol and were less likely to be involved in church, volunteer or community groups. They were also less likely to be overweight and have high blood pressure or diabetes.

Even after controlling for all of these variables, the trend of increasing coffee consumption and lower depression remained.

 

Mounting evidence

The researchers say their findings add weight to the work of others which found lower suicide rates among coffee drinkers.

They suspect caffeine is the key player - it is known to enhance feelings of wellbeing and energy.

And it has a physical effect on brain function and transmission by blocking certain chemical receptors, like adenosine. But more research is needed to show if this might mean it is useful for warding off depression.

Alternatively, it might be that people with low moods chose not to drink coffee because it contained caffeine, point out the researchers. One of the common symptoms of depression is disturbed sleep, and caffeine can exacerbate this because it is a stimulant.

Too much caffeine can also increase feelings of anxiety.

Prof Bertil Fredholm, an expert in pharmacology and physiology at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, said the findings were reassuring for coffee-lovers.

"This fits nicely with a lot of the previous work and what we know about caffeine and the brain. It blocks adenosine, which produces a similar effect to increasing dopamine production. And it's becoming increasingly clear that the dopamine-rich areas of the brain are much more important in depression that previously thought.

"Despite valiant efforts to show how dangerous coffee is for us, it is not proving so.

"This removes yet another anxiety regarding caffeine use. Drunk in moderation, the evidence is strong that it is not one of the things we do that is going to damage your health."

From the BBC:

 

Tom Feilden Science correspondent, Today programme

A fried egg by any other name...

What's in a name? Astronomers it seems have an eye for the prosaic when it comes to dreaming up suitable titles to describe both the kit they use and the phenomena they study.

To that end the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (soon to be superseded by the even bigger and more powerful Extremely Large Telescope), has been used to take the first pictures of one of the rarest types of star in the Universe - a colossal yellow hypergiant surrounded by a dusty double shell.

And what name have they come up with to describe this singular and beautiful stellar formation? Why it's the Fried Egg Nebula of course.

Looking at this image - taken using the VISIR infrared camera on the VLT - it's easy to see how IRAS 17163-3907, with its milky-white halo of dusty matter surrounding a yolky central star, acquired the name.

And the Fried Egg nebula is a monster. Shining some 500,000 times more brightly than the sun if it were placed at the centre of the solar system the Earth would lie deep within the star itself while Jupiter would be tracing a path just above its surface. The surrounding nebula would engulf the rest of the planets extending as far as some of the comets orbiting well beyond Neptune.

Thankfully for us the Fried Egg Nebula lies some 13 000 light years from Earth near the centre of the Milky Way. Although it was first discovered by the IRAS satellite in 1983 it has been overlooked by astronomers because it glows so faintly in visible light.

"It is amazing that one of the brightest stars in the infrared sky has previously gone unnoticed" says professor Albert Zijlstra from the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics "We are seeing a very rare event, when a star is beginning to blow off its outer layers, as a prelude to its final explosion as a supernova."

That activity also shows the Fried Egg Nebula is doomed to a spectacular and explosive death - fated to briefly light up our galaxy as it blows itself apart.

Any bets on what we'll call it then? My money's on the Scrambled Egg Supernova.

 

Picture from the European Southern Observatory's website:

From the BBC:

 

Click here to see this article with a video clip

 

'Flying carpet' of conductive plastic takes flight

A miniature magic carpet made of plastic has taken flight in a laboratory at Princeton University.

The 10-cm sheet of smart transparency is driven by "ripple power"; waves of electrical current flex a thin, 10cm sheet, driving thin pockets of air from front to rear underneath.

The prototype, described in Applied Physics Letters, moves at speeds of around a centimetre per second.

Improvements to the design could raise that to as much as a metre per second.

The device's creator, graduate student Noah Jafferis, says he was inspired by a mathematical paper he read shortly after starting his PhD studies at Princeton.

He abandoned what would have been a fashionable project printing electronic circuits with nano-inks for one that seemed to have more in common with 1001 Nights than 21st-Century engineering.

Prof James Sturm, who leads Mr Jafferis' research group, conceded that at times the project seemed foolhardy.

"What was difficult was controlling the precise behaviour of the sheet as it deformed at high frequencies," he told the BBC.

"Without the ability to predict the exact way it would flex, we couldn't feed in the right electrical currents to get the propulsion to work properly."

What followed was a two year digression attaching sensors to every part of the material so as to fine-tune its performance through a series of complex feedbacks.

But once that was mastered, the waveform of the undulating matched that prescribed by the theory, and the wafting motions gave life to the tiny carpet.

In the paper describing the design, Mr Jafferis and his co-authors are careful to keep the word "flying" in inverted commas, because the resulting machine has more in common with a hovercraft than an aeroplane.

"It has to keep close to the ground," Mr Jafferis explained to the BBC's Science in Action, "because the air is then trapped between the sheet and the ground. As the waves move along the sheet it basically pumps the air out the back." That is the source of the thrust.

 

Ray hope

Harvard University's Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, who wrote the 2007 paper in Physical Review Letters that inspired the whole project, expressed a mixture of surprise and delight at the Princeton team's success.

"Noah has gone beyond our simple theory and actually built a device that works," he told the BBC "And what's more, it behaves, at least qualitatively, as we had predicted."

Mr Jafferis points out that the prototype is limited because tiny conducting threads anchor it to heavy batteries, so it's free to move only a few centimetres. But he is already working on a solar-powered upgrade that could freely fly over large distances.

The advantage of this kind of propulsion, he argues, is that unlike jets, propellers and hovercraft, there are no moving components like cogs and gears that rub against each other.

"The ideal use would be some kind of dusty, grimy environment where moving parts would get gummed up and stop," he explained.

That said, he laughingly admits that with the existing materials, a flying carpet powerful enough to carry a person would need a wingspan of 50 metres - not the best vehicle to take on the streets just yet.

On the other hand, preliminary calculations suggest that there is enough atmosphere on the planet Mars to send floating rovers scudding over its dusty surface.

Meanwhile, Prof Mahadevan looks forward to sophisticated improvements in the near future, suggesting the approach could progress to "mimicking the beautiful two-dimensional undulations of the skate or manta ray".

From the BBC:

 

Vast shark sanctuary created in Pacific

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

 

The Marshall Islands government has created the world's largest shark sanctuary, covering nearly two million sq km (750,000 sq miles) of ocean.

The Pacific republic will ban trade in shark products and commercial shark fishing throughout its waters.

Tourism, including diving, is a staple of the Marshall Islands archipelago, which is home to just 68,000 people.

Sharks and their near relatives such as rays are seriously threatened by issues such as habitat loss and fishing.

About a third of ocean-going sharks are on the internationally-recognised Red List of Threatened Species.

"In passing this [shark protection] bill, there is no greater statement we can make about the importance of sharks to our culture, environment and economy," said Senator Tony deBrum, who co-sponsored the bill through the Marshallese parliament.

"Ours may be a small island nation, but our waters are now the biggest place sharks are protected."

To put the sanctuary in context, it covers roughly the same area as Indonesia, Mexico or Saudi Arabia, and is about eight times bigger than the UK.

The move will extend the area of ocean in which sharks are protected from about 2.7 million sq km to 4.6 million sq km (1.0 to 1.8 million sq miles).

 

Global network

Under the bill, commercial shark fishing and any trade in shark products will be banned, and any of the fish accidentally caught must be released alive.

Certain designs of fishing gear will be banned from Marshallese waters; and violators of all these measures face fines of up to £200,000.

The Marshallese government has worked on the plan with advisors from the Pew Environment Group, the US-based organisation that identified archipelago nations as providing big marine conservation "wins" because of the vast scale of their territorial waters.

"We salute the Republic of the Marshall Islands for enacting the strongest legislation to protect sharks that we have seen," said Matt Rand, Pew's director of global shark conservation.

"As leaders recognise the importance of healthy shark populations to our oceans, the momentum for protecting these animals continues to spread across the globe."

The Marshall Islands follows the lead taken by Palau two years ago, whose sanctuary was then the world's biggest. Other nations including the Bahamas have since followed suit.

Last week, a group of eight countries including Mexico, Honduras, the Maldives and Northern Mariana Islands signed a declaration announcing they would push for more shark protection across the world.

Because they grow and reproduce relatively slowly, sharks are especially vulnerable to factors such as accidental or targeted fishing.

Shark protection measures are also likely to help marine biodiversity overall, as they restrict the rights of fishing vessels and require greater scrutiny of landings.

However, with the Marshall Islands as with Palau and some other countries, there are questions over the capacity of authorities to monitor fully such huge expanses of ocean.

From the BBC:

 

Men 'more prone to type 2 diabetes'

 

Researchers say they have discovered why men may be more likely than women to develop type 2 diabetes - they are biologically more susceptible.

Men need to gain far less weight than women to develop the condition, study findings suggest.

The Glasgow University team found men developed the disease at a lower Body Mass Index (BMI) than women.

They believe distribution of the body fat is important - men tend to store it in their liver and around the waist.

Women, meanwhile, have greater amounts of 'safe' subcutaneous fat stored on the thighs and hips, for example.

This means women need to accumulate more fat overall than men to develop the harmful fat deposits linked with diabetes, the researchers explain in the journal Diabetologia.

 

Body fat

Type 2 diabetes is caused by too much sugar in the blood which occurs when the body's ability to regulate sugar levels in several different organs becomes disturbed. The condition is linked to excess fat in some of these organs such as the liver and muscles.

Professor Naveed Sattar, of the Institute of Cardiovascular & Medical Sciences, who led the research, said: "Previous research has indicated that middle-aged men are at a higher risk of developing diabetes than women and one possible explanation is that men have to gain less weight than women to develop the condition.

"In other words, men appear to be at higher risk for diabetes."

For the study, the researchers analysed data from 51,920 men and 43,137 women in Scotland with diabetes, taking into consideration body weight and obesity using the BMI measurement based on height and weight.

The results showed women developed diabetes at a heavier BMI than men - the mean BMI at diabetes diagnosis in men was 31.83 but 33.69 in women.

The researchers say this helps explain why men have higher rates of diabetes in many parts of the world.

Dr Victoria King, Head of Research at Diabetes UK, said: "It is worrying that men develop type 2 diabetes at a higher rate than their female counterparts. Research like this will help us understand reasons why and provide greater insight into what we can do to improve prevention of type 2 diabetes.

"Diabetes UK is calling on both men and women to reduce their chances of developing type 2 diabetes by losing any excess weight, eating a healthy, balanced diet and by taking regular physical activity."

From the BBC:

 

When The Beatles met Elvis Presley

 

On the evening of 27 August 1965, Elvis Presley and The Beatles, the music world's biggest stars, met for the first and only time.

When the Fab Four went to see the King of Rock 'n' Roll at his Beverly Hills mansion on a night off from their US tour, the initially awkward small talk gave way to an impromptu jam session.

But there are no recordings or photographs of the event.

Tony Barrow, who was The Beatles' press officer between 1962 and 1968, was also in the room. As a new exhibition about The Beatles and Elvis opens at The Beatles Story in Liverpool, he recalls that memorable night.

"When I put the idea of meeting Elvis to John, Paul, George and Ringo, they were initially put off by the fact that the press might be involved," he said.

"I remember George saying 'if this is going to be another dirty big publicity circus, let's forget it'. They did want to meet their rock 'n' roll idol, but not with a gang of reporters and photographers around to hassle them.

"The first fundamental ground rules to be set were: no press to be invited, no pictures to be taken, no recordings to be made and no leaking of our plans in advance.

"It was shortly before 10pm when we drove over. We were in a convoy of three big black limousines, led by [Elvis' manager] Colonel Parker and his people.

"The property consisted of two storeys nestled into a hillside. It was a vast, round building with a lot of windows and a spacious front garden. There was a Rolls Royce and a couple of Cadillacs lining the drive.

"Members of the famous 'Memphis Mafia' guarded the tall gates but they waved our line of limousines straight through.

"Once inside the front door, our feet seemed to sink inches into deep white shag pile carpeting.

"We arrived in the centre of the building, into this massive circular room bathed in red and blue light, and this was where the King entertained.

"This was Elvis Presley's giant playpen, complete with a colour television, a jukebox, a deep crescent-shaped couch, a couple of pool and games tables and a well-stocked bar.

"I would say, at a guess, that Presley's army of henchmen and their womenfolk must have totalled about 20 people, well outnumbering our little group.

"As the two teams faced one another, there was a weird silence and it was John who spoke first, rather awkwardly blurting out a stream of questions at Elvis, saying: 'Why do you do all these soft-centred ballads for the cinema these days? What happened to good old rock 'n' roll?'

"Elvis was fairly quiet - that was my first reaction. He smiled a lot and shook hands with everybody.

"The ice didn't really break in the early stages at all. The boys and Elvis swapped tour stories, but it hadn't got going.

"They quickly exhausted their initial bout of small talk and there was this embarrassing silence between the mega-famous five, stood there facing each other, with very little of import being said.

"Apart from anything else, I think it was just that each was in awe of the other. Elvis didn't have that much confidence, as far as I could see. He was a fairly easily embarrassed person by the look of him.

"But Elvis suddenly plugged the gap by calling for some guitars to be handed out to John, Paul and George, and a piano was hauled into view.

"Up to that point, the party really had been a bit lifeless and unexciting. But as soon as Presley and The Beatles began to play together, the atmosphere livened up.

"The boys found that they could make much better conversation with their guitars than they could with their spoken word. Music was their natural meeting point, their most intelligent means of communication.

"I can't remember all the things that they played but I do remember one of the songs was I Feel Fine. And I remember Ringo, who of course didn't have an instrument, tapping out the backbeat with his fingers on the nearest bits of wooden furniture.

"Everybody was singing. Elvis strummed a few bass guitar chords for Paul and said: 'See, I'm practising.' And Paul came back with some quip about: 'Don't worry, between us, me and Brian Epstein will make a star of you soon.'

"It would be wonderful to have either photographs or recordings. That recording would be invaluable, surely. It would be a multi-million dollar piece of tape. But it wasn't to be. It was an amazing session to listen to.

"Parker and Epstein lost interest - they were leaving the children to play. Parker put his plump arm around Brian Epstein's shoulder and led him away to a quiet corner of this playroom.

"Epstein at this point grabbed his chance to bring up the subject he'd been waiting to raise, which was his secret agenda. He hoped to persuade Parker to let him present Elvis in a series of UK concerts.

 

'Elvis was stoned'

"It was a hopeless project from the outset, although at the time, Parker pretended to leave the door open by saying he'd think about it.

"The party ended when Colonel Parker decided that it was time for it to end. He started dishing out presents, which mostly consisted of piles of Elvis Presley albums.

"I remember, as we went out to our limousines, John put on his Adolf Hitler accent and shouted: 'Long live ze king.' Also, John said, as we got into our limousines: 'Elvis was stoned.' George Harrison responded very quietly: 'Aren't we all?'

"They tried to make light of it and not show too much adoration for their idol, but Elvis Presley was their idol and one of the prime influences of The Beatles' music."

From the BBC:

 

Click here to see this article with the all important photographs

 

'Quadruple rainbow' caught on film for the first time

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

 

Scientists have captured the first image of a "quaternary" rainbow - the fourth rainbow caused by the bending of light through water in the air.

This refraction frequently creates a visible second rainbow, but until now, no one had caught sight of the fainter third and fourth arcs that the process creates in a different part of the sky.

The first tertiary, or third, rainbow has only just been caught on film.

Digitally enhanced pictures of the two effects appear in Applied Optics.

Unfortunately, the pictures are not as striking as more familiar images of double rainbows - and some image processing was the only way to make the arcs visible at all.

That is principally due to the fact that the tertiary and quaternary rainbows are by definition far fainter than their more familiar cousins.

What forms a normal rainbow is the collective action of rays of sunlight bending through raindrops; the constituent colours of the white light are slightly separated in the process because they travel at slightly different speeds in water.

Much of that bent and separated light then exits the drops, appearing for a given observation point to focus in an arc opposite the Sun.

However, some of the light takes another bounce within the drop, being bent at a different angle as it passes, creating the second rainbow.

Even smaller proportions make a third and a fourth bounce, and exit in a direction close to the source of the incoming light.

The rainbows that these bounces produce are the faint tertiary and quaternary arcs that, until now, have never been captured on film.

 

Bow hunt

A renewed hunt for the elusive rainbows started with Raymond Lee, a meteorologist at the US Naval Academy, who combed 250 years of scientific literature for the only recorded evidence of tertiary rainbows: he found just five examples.

He studied the conditions in which those five occurred and came up with a recipe for spotting them, also published in Applied Optics.

He recommended trying to find them against dark clouds after a storm with evenly sized drops - and he challenged rainbow-hunters to seek out those conditions.

Michael Grossmann of Arbeitskreis Meteore, the German association for the observation of atmospheric phenomena, went hunting for the tertiary effect in May this year, and found it after a storm in Kaempfelbach in south-western Germany.

Because the effect is so faint, a number of shots had to be taken and averaged after the fact, along with a digital enhancement known as unsharp masking, to show evidence of the tertiary rainbow.

Then in June, another rainbow-hunter, Michael Theusner, caught another tertiary rainbow and its adjacent quaternary counterpart near Bremerhaven in northern Germany - after processing the images in the same way.

Unfortunately, the rare conditions that lend themselves to a nearly visible tertiary or quaternary rainbow, along with the post-production needed to make them apparent, mean that amateur skygazers are unlikely as ever to catch sight of one.

But after 250 years of scattered reports, the record finally holds a picture of them.

From the BBC:

 

Venus springs ozone layer surprise

By Jennifer Carpenter Science reporter, BBC News

 

Scientists have discovered that Venus has an ozone layer.

The thin layer, which is hundred of times less dense than the Earth's, was discovered by the European Space Agency's Venus Express craft, researchers report in the journal Icarus.

Until now, ozone layers have only been detected in the atmospheres of Earth and Mars.

The find could help astronomers refine their hunt for life on other planets.

The European spacecraft spied the ozone layer when focusing on stars through Venus' atmosphere.

The distant stars appeared fainter than expected, because the ozone layer absorbed some of their ultraviolet light.

The paper's lead author Franck Montmessin, of the LATMOS atmospheric research centre in France, explained that Venus' ozone layer sits 100km up; about three times the height of our own.

The ozone - a molecule containing three oxygen atoms - formed when sunlight broke down carbon dioxide in the Venusian atmosphere to form oxygen molecules.

On Earth, ozone, which absorbs much of the Sun's harmful UV-rays preventing them reaching the surface, is formed in a similar way.

However, this process is supplemented by oxygen released by carbon dioxide-munching microbes.

 

Ozoning in

Speaking of the international team's find, Hakan Svedhem, ESA project scientist for the Venus Express mission, said: "This ozone detection tells us a lot about the circulation and the chemistry of Venus's atmosphere.

"Beyond that, it is yet more evidence of the fundamental similarity between the rocky planets, and shows the importance of studying Venus to understand them all."

Some astrobiologists assume that the presence of oxygen, carbon, and ozone in an atmosphere indicates that life exists on a planet's surface.

The new results negate that assumption - the mere presence of oxygen in an atmosphere is now not enough evidence to start looking for life.

However, the presence of large quantities of these gases, as in the Earth's atmosphere, is probably still a good lead, the scientists said.

"We can use these new observations to test and refine the scenarios for the detection of life on other worlds," said Dr Montmessin.

From the BBC:

 

Brain 'rejects negative thoughts'

By James Gallagher Health reporter, BBC News

 

One reason optimists retain a positive outlook even in the face of evidence to the contrary has been discovered, say researchers.

A study, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggests the brain is very good at processing good news about the future.

However, in some people, anything negative is practically ignored - with them retaining a positive world view.

The authors said optimism did have important health benefits.

Scientists at University College London said about 80% of people were optimists, even if they would not label themselves as such.

They rated 14 people for their level of optimism and tested them in a brain scanner.

Each was asked how likely 80 different "bad events" - including a divorce or having cancer - were to happen.

They were then told how likely this was in reality. At the end of the session, the participants were asked to rate the probabilities again.

There was a marked difference in the updated scores of optimists depending on whether the reality was good or bad news.

Dr Tali Sharot, lead researcher, gave the example of the risk of cancer being set at 30%.

If the patient thought their risk was 40%, then at the end of the experiment they downgraded their own risk to about 31%, she said.

However, if the patient originally thought their risk was 10%, they only marginally increased their risk - they "leaned a little bit, but not a lot".

 

Pick and choose

When the news was positive, all people had more activity in the brain's frontal lobes, which are associated with processing errors. With negative information, the most optimistic people had the least activity in the frontal lobes, while the least optimistic had the most.

It suggests the brain is picking and choosing which evidence to listen to.

Dr Sharot said: "Smoking kills messages don't work as people think their chances of cancer are low. The divorce rate is 50%, but people don't think it's the same for them. There is a very fundamental bias in the brain."

Dr Chris Chambers, neuroscientist from the University of Cardiff, said: "It's very cool, a very elegant piece of work and fascinating.

"For me, this work highlights something that is becoming increasingly apparent in neuroscience, that a major part of brain function in decision-making is the testing of predictions against reality - in essence all people are 'scientists'.

"And despite how sophisticated these neural networks are, it is illuminating to see how the brain sometimes comes up with wrong and overly optimistic answers despite the evidence."

Optimism seem to be good for your health. A study on nearly 100,000 women showed a lower risk of heart disease and death in optimists.

But as Dr Sharot points out: "The negative aspect is that we underestimate risks."

From the BBC:

 

Vitamins linked with higher death risk in older women

By Michelle Roberts Health reporter, BBC News

 

When it comes to vitamins, it appears you could have too much of a good thing, say researchers who report a link between their use and higher death rates among older women.

Experts have suspected for some time that supplements may only be beneficial if a person is deficient in a nutrient.

And excess may even harm, as the study in Archives of Internal Medicine finds.

All of the women, in their 50s and 60s, were generally well nourished yet many had decided to take supplements.

Multivitamins, folic acid, vitamin B6, magnesium, zinc, copper and iron in particular appeared to increase mortality risk.

The researchers believe consumers are buying supplements with no evidence that they will provide any benefit.

Harms vs gains

They are quick to stress that their study relied on the 38,000 US women who took part in it recalling what vitamins and minerals they had taken over the previous two decades.

And it is difficult to control for all other factors, like general physical health, that might have influenced the findings.

But they say their findings suggest that supplements should only be used if there is a strong medically based cause for doing so because of the potential to cause harm.

"Based on existing evidence, we see little justification for the general and widespread use of dietary supplements," Dr Jaakko Mursu of the University of Eastern Finland and his research colleagues said.

 

Less is more

In the study, iron tablets were strongly linked with a small (2.4%) increased death risk, as were many other supplements. The link with iron was dose-dependent, meaning the more of it the individual took, the higher their risk was.

Conversely, calcium supplements appeared to reduce death risk. However, the researchers say this finding needs more investigation and they do not recommend that people take calcium unless advised to by a doctor in order to treat a deficiency.

Drs Christian Gluud and Goran Bjelakovic, who review research for the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews to evaluate best evidence, said: "We think the paradigm 'the more the better' is wrong."

They say dietary supplementation has shifted from preventing deficiency to trying to promote wellness and prevent diseases, and caution: "We believe that for all micronutrients, risks are associated with insufficient and too-large intake."

Helen Bond of the British Dietetic Association said some people, like the elderly, might need to take certain supplements. For example, vitamin D is recommended for people over the age of 65.

But she said that generally, people should be able to get all the vitamins and minerals they needed from a healthy, balanced diet.

She said some took supplements as an insurance policy, wrongly assuming that they could do no harm. "But too much can be toxic and it is easy to inadvertently take more than the recommended daily amount."

From the BBC:

 

Click here to see the article with photos

 

Meerkats recognise each others' voices

Meerkats recognise another member of their social group by the sound of their voice, according to scientists.

Researchers studying the animals in the Kalahari Desert, South Africa, played recordings of meerkat calls and observed the animals' reactions.

Their discovery, reported in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters is the first evidence of a non-primate showing vocal recognition in the wild.

The phenomenon could be more widespread in the animal kingdom than thought.

"There's lots of evidence of vocal recognition in primates," explained lead researcher Dr Simon Townsend from the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

"[In primates] you can really test whether they respond to individual vocal recognition."

But this harder to test in other non-primates, he explained, because relationships between individual animals are not as clear.

In meerkats, for example - although they are social animals that live in groups and forage and even raise young together - it is not entirely clear how one animal will respond to another when it hears its call.

To solve this problem, the researchers used a simple audio playback experiment.

They used recordings of the staccato "close calls" that meerkats make continually while they are foraging. "We think the calls mainly function to keep the group together," said Dr Townsend. "But they also tell other individuals, 'I'm here, this is my patch'."

 

Comparing meerkat reaction

The scientists placed speakers on either side of a foraging meerkat, and played a call from a member of their social group. A few seconds later they played the call of a different member of the same group through a speaker on the opposite side.

The next part of this experiment presented the animals with a puzzle; after playing the call of a meerkat from one side, the researchers immediately played a call from the same animal, through the opposite speaker.

Dr Townsend explained that this was a "violation of the animal's expectation"; it would be "physically impossible" for the same meerkat to be in both places.

"The meerkats showed more vigilance when their expectations were violated," explained Dr Townsend. "They would stop foraging, orientate their ears towards the violation, or look in that direction."

The researcher explained that recent research had shown that vocal recognition seemed to be "present in lots of different branches of the evolutionary tree".

"It's possible that animals living in complex [social] systems need to be able to keep track of each other. But given how widespread it appears to be... it could have a much deeper evolutionary origin.

The team hopes that this simple playback experiment will help other scientists to study the phenomenon across a wide range of species.

Prof Richard Byrne, an animal communication expert from the University of St Andrews, said the experiment gave "simple and irrefutable evidence of vocal individual recognition".

"It could certainly be used with a range of other species," he told BBC Nature.

From the BBC:

 

Click here to see this article with an audio clip

 

Piranhas communicate with sound, say researchers

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC Nature

 

Despite a nasty reputation, piranhas seem to bark more often than bite.

Scientists have discovered that the fearsome fish use sounds to communicate - often intimidating their rivals rather than attacking.

With underwater microphones, scientists recorded the sounds the fish made when they confronted one another.

They reported in the Journal of Experimental Biology that each of these three sounds appeared to contain a different "message".

Lead researcher Eric Parmentier, from the University of Liege, Belgium, has studied sound production and communication in a wide variety of fish species, including the charismatic clownfish and the spectacularly ugly toad fish.

He already knew that piranhas made sounds, but wanted to understand why.

Many fish use noises to attract a mate, so the sounds are an important indicator that the fish are reproducing.

"Eventually, if we understand the behaviour that's associated with the sounds, we might be able to listen to the sea and explain to fishermen: 'Now's not the best time to start fishing'."

Dr Parmentier and his colleagues put a hydrophone - an underwater microphone - into a tank of piranhas in their lab and filmed the fish as they interacted.

They recorded three distinct sounds. The first was a bark that the fish produced when they "displayed" to each other - confronting one another face to face but not fighting.

Most of the time, though, the fish swam around peacefully, making no noise and engaging in none of these underwater conflicts. It was only through hours of painstaking observation that the researchers managed to capture the behaviour.

"For animals, it's less expensive [in terms of energy] to make a lot of noise and impress the other guys, rather than fight," explained Dr Parmentier.

 

Good vibrations

Piranhas, like many other "noisy" fish, produce sounds by vibrating their swim bladders - gas-filled organs in their bodies that help regulate their buoyancy.

The team also studied the very high-speed muscles that drove this vibration.

"This muscle contracts and relaxes 150 times every second to vibrate the swim bladder," Dr Parmentier explained to BBC Nature.

He and his team hope to go on to study the fish in their Amazon river home to find out more about their acoustic repertoire.

From the BBC:

 

Pylon design competition winner revealed

 

A T-shaped design has scooped a £5,000 prize in a competition to find the next generation of electricity pylons.

Danish engineering firm Bystrup beat 250 rivals to win the Royal Institute of British Architects contest.

It set the challenge to replace the familiar "triangle" design - in use since the 1920s - in May, although there is no commitment to build them.

An increasing number of pylons are expected to be needed to connect new wind, nuclear and hydroelectric plants.

Bystrup's architect Rasmus Jessing said he aimed for a more positive shape than the traditional "grumpy old men" design, as they are known in Denmark, to carry new forms of renewable energy.

"Hopefully in the next couple of years it will be time for T - the T-pylon," he said.

Entries shortlisted in the competition, organised with the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the National Grid, have been on show in London's Victoria and Albert Museum.

The jury, which included Energy Secretary Chris Huhne, leading architects and energy officials, rated entries on criteria including design quality, functionality, and technical viability.

 

'Transform landscapes'

After calling for entries "both grounded in reality and beautiful", the judges took into account the public response to the designs and the teams' abilities to create them.

Organisers say the target of reducing carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 will lead to electricity playing an increasingly important role in the UK's energy mix.

A subsequent proliferation of pylons and underground cables "have the potential to transform our landscapes for good or bad, and for generations to come", they said.

Campaigners frequently complain that pylons blight the countryside, while Lib Dem MP Tessa Munt described damage they cause as "beyond belief" in a Parliamentary debate in July.

However, it is 10 times as expensive to lay underground cables which are also more difficult and costly to repair.

 

I found this photo of the winning design elsewhere:

From the BBC:

 

Click here to see this article with video clip

 

'Criminal' penguin caught on film

 

A "criminal" stone-stealing Adelie penguin has been captured on camera by a BBC film crew.

 

The team, filming for the documentary Frozen Planet, spent four months with the penguin colony on Ross Island, Antarctica.

 

The footage they captured shows a male penguin stealing stones from its neighbour's nest.

 

The birds build their stone nests to elevate and protect their eggs from run-off when the Antarctic ice melts.

 

Males with the best nests are more likely to attract a mate, so, in a colony of half a million penguins, the best stones are highly prized.

 

 

Jeff Wilson, director of the shoot, explained that he and the cameraman, Mark Smith, knew that the birds occasionally stole stones from one another. But he said it was a challenge to capture the moment in the chaos of a busy penguin colony.

 

"The're only a foot and a half tall, so you have to get down to penguin level," he told BBC Nature.

 

"So poor old Mark, was crawling around and there were adelies constantly looking right down the barrel of his lens.

 

"It's appealing at first, but when it happens for the hundredth time as you're trying to get the shots you need, you start to lose patience."

 

He added that the colony was "the most aurally exhausting place".

 

"You're bombarded with sound," he recalled.

 

"There are 250,000 males building nests and on top of all the breeding penguins, you have groups of adolescent non-breeding penguins. They're just in the way causing trouble."

 

Each male adelie penguin build its nest just out of "pecking distance" of its neighbours. Mr Wilson likened the density of nests and the constant activity of the animals to a field of tents at a festival.

 

"Adelies are like festival-goers that have had too much caffeine," he said. "They're aggressive and hyperactive."

 

Despite this, Mr Smith managed to capture a remarkable sequence, with one penguin repeatedly returning to its nest to add stones, apparently unaware of the fact that his neighbour would steal a stone every time his nest was unattended.

 

"It's a testament to Mark's patience and presence of mind, that he managed to leave the camera running and capture that moment."

 

Frozen Planet starts on 26 October at 21:00 BST on BBC One

From the BBC:

 

Click here to see this article with video clip and pictures

 

Ardnamurchan Viking boat burial discovery 'a first'

 

The UK mainland's first fully intact Viking boat burial site has been uncovered in the north-west Highlands, archaeologists have said.

The site, at Ardnamurchan, is thought to be more than 1,000 years old.

Artefacts buried alongside the Viking in his boat suggest he was a high-ranking warrior.

Archaeologist Dr Hannah Cobb said the "artefacts and preservation make this one of the most important Norse graves ever excavated in Britain".

Dr Cobb, from the University of Manchester, a co-director of the project, said: "This is a very exciting find."

She has been excavating artefacts in Ardnamurchan for six years.

The universities of Manchester, Leicester, Newcastle and Glasgow worked on, identified, or funded the excavation.

Archaeology Scotland and East Lothian-based CFA Archaeology have also been involved in the project which led to the find.

The term "fully-intact", used to describe the find, means the remains of the body along with objects buried with it and evidence of the boat used were found and recovered.

The Ardnamurchan Viking was found buried with an axe, a sword with a decorated hilt, a spear, a shield boss and a bronze ring pin.

About 200 rivets - the remains of the boat he was laid in - were also found.

Previously, boat burials in such a condition have been excavated at sites on Orkney.

Until now mainland excavations were only partially successful and had been carried out before more careful and accurate methods were introduced.

Other finds in the 5m-long (16ft) grave in Ardnamurchan included a knife, what could be the tip of a bronze drinking horn, a whetstone from Norway, a ring pin from Ireland and Viking pottery.

 

'The icing'

Dozens of pieces of iron yet to be identified were also found at the site.

The finds were made as part of the Ardnamurchan Transition Project (ATP) which has been examining social change in the area from the first farmers 6,000 years ago to the Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Viking specialist Dr Colleen Batey, from the University of Glasgow, has said the boat was likely to be from the 10th Century AD.

Dr Oliver Harris, project co-director from the University of Leicester's School of Archaeology and Ancient History, reinforced the importance of the burial site.

He said: "In previous seasons our work has examined evidence of changing beliefs and life styles in the area through a study of burial practices in the Neolithic and Bronze age periods 6,000-4,500 years ago and 4,500 to 2,800 years ago respectively.

"It has also yielded evidence for what will be one of the best-dated Neolithic chambered cairns in Scotland when all of our post-excavation work is complete.

"But the find we reveal today has got to be the icing on the cake."

From the BBC:

 

Future computers could rewire themselves

By Katia Moskvitch Technology reporter, BBC News

 

Future microchips may have only one type of component, capable of rewiring itself to do different jobs.

Researchers from Northwestern University in the US have developed a material that can radically change its electronic properties.

A resistor made from it could become a transistor or a diode, according to the report in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

The discovery could lead to cheaper, smaller and more powerful computers.

As electronics advance and demands for portability increase, one of the main challenges has been decreasing the size of elementary components.

Technology firms have attempted to address this with a number of innovations, including new ways of building circuit tracks so signals do not suffer damaging interference at ultra small sizes.

The Northwestern University team took a different approach.

"It's becoming more and more challenging to make devices smaller and you need to think of new ways rather than just shrinking things down because you're reaching a fundamental scientific limit here of how small you can make a device," said David Walker, one of the researchers.

"Our solution to this is instead of making things smaller, why don't we try to make them more versatile - by taking all these hardware components and building them into one.

"Think of this as a Swiss army knife of computer hardware, so to speak, where you package a lot of different things all into one device."

Rewiring itself 

By controlling how the ions (blue) are distributed, it is possible to "steer" current flows - and change the properties of a particular component

To achieve this, the scientists have created a new material that consists of a "sea" of small negatively charged particles and larger, positively charged particles, which are "jammed" in place.

Because the negative particles form conductive regions, they act like conventional copper tracks in a circuit.

Once an electrical charge is applied to the material, those particles can be shifted around and reconfigured.

"Like redirecting a river, streams of electrons can be steered in multiple directions through a block of the material - even multiple streams flowing in opposing directions at the same time," explained the lead researcher, Professor Bartosz Grzybowski, of Northwestern University.

This unusual property could allow a component made from this material to change its functions - allowing, in turn, a future computer to redirect and adapt its own circuitry as required.

"So the computer could send some set of electrical impulses or some type of electrical potential, and that would actually reconfigure the device to operate in a different way," said Mr Walker.

He explained that there was not yet a name for the new material, but it was unlike any other material that exists today.

 

Smaller and more powerful

As computers would have fewer components, the scientists believe, it would inevitable be less costly to produce them - and for consumers to buy them.

If such a component were manufactured today, said Mr Walker, it would be four times larger than "IBM's best sized technology out there", but at the same time it would be able to simultaneously fulfil the functions of five different devices - so the overall efficiency would soar by 20%.

And eventually, these components would decrease in size, he added.

"The technology has got the propensity to be smaller, cheaper and more powerful.

"Eventually down the road it has the possibility to replace silicon-based devices that we use and to make electronics in a completely new way that may turn out to be much more promising than the current technology used in all of today's devices."

From the BBC:

 

Click here to see this article with pictures

 

Old American theory is 'speared'

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

 

An ancient bone with a projectile point lodged within it appears to up-end - once and for all - a long-held idea of how the Americas were first populated.

The rib, from a tusked beast known as a mastodon, has been dated precisely to 13,800 years ago.

This places it before the so-called Clovis hunters, who many academics had argued were the North American continent's original inhabitants.

News of the dating results is reported in Science magazine.

In truth, the "Clovis first" model, which holds to the idea that America's original human population swept across a land-bridge from Siberia some 13,000 years ago, has looked untenable for some time.

A succession of archaeological finds right across the United States and northern Mexico have indicated there was human activity much earlier than this - perhaps as early as 15-16,000 years ago.

The mastodon rib, however, really leaves the once cherished model with nowhere to go.

The specimen has actually been known about for more than 30 years. It is plainly from an old male animal that had been attacked with some kind of weaponry.

It was found in the late 1970s near Manis, just north of Seattle, in Washington State.

Although scientists at the time correctly identified the specimen's antiquity, adherents to the Clovis-first model questioned the dating and interpretation of the site.

To try to settle any lingering uncertainty, Prof Michael Waters of Texas A&M University and colleagues called upon a range of up-to-date analytical tools and revisited the specimen.

These investigations included new radio carbon tests using atomic accelerators.

"The beauty of atomic accelerators is that you can date very small samples and also very chemically pure samples," Prof Waters told BBC News.

"We extracted specific amino acids from the collagen in the bone and dated those, and yielded dates 13,800 years ago, plus or minus 20 years. That's very precise."

Computed tomography, which creates exquisite 3D X-ray images of objects, was also used to study the embedded point. The visualisation reveals how the projectile end had been deliberately sharpened to give a needle-like quality. And it also enabled the scientists to estimate the projectile end's likely original size - at least 27cm long, they believe.

"The other thing that's really interesting is that as it went in, the very tip broke and rotated off to the side," said the Texas A&M researcher.

"That's a very common breakage pattern when any kind of projectile hits bone. You see it even in stone projectiles that are embedded in, say, bison bones."

DNA investigation also threw up a remarkable irony - the point itself was made from mastodon bone, proving that the people who fashioned it were systematically hunting or scavenging animal bones to make their tools.

The timing of humanity's presence in North America is important because it plays into the debate over why so many great beasts from the end of the last Ice Age in that quarter of the globe went extinct.

Not just mastodons, but woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, giant sloths, camels, and teratorns (predatory birds with a nearly four-metre wingspan) - all disappeared in short order a little over 12,700 years ago.

A rapidly changing climate in North America is assumed to have played a key role - as is the sophisticated stone-tool weaponry used by the Clovis hunters. But the fact that there are also humans with effective bone and antler killing technologies present in North America deeper in time suggests the hunting pressure on these animals may have been even greater than previously thought.

"Humans clearly had a role in these extinctions and by the time the Clovis technology turns up at 13,000 years ago - that's the end. They finished them off," said Prof Waters.

"You know, the Clovis-first model has been dying for some time," he finished. "But there's nothing harder to change than a paradigm, than long-standing thinking. When Clovis-First was first proposed, it was a very elegant model but it's time to move on, and most of the archaeological community is doing just that."

From the BBC:

 

Indians oppose 'recycled' sewage for Arizona skiing

By Daniel Nasaw BBC News Magazine, Washington

 

A ski area in the US state of Arizona hopes to become the latest in a small number of resorts using "recycled" sewer water to make snow. But the Hopi Indian tribe aims to stop what they describe as the desecration of their sacred mountain.

The San Francisco Peaks tower over the baking Arizona desert. Stands of white barked aspens, spruce and ponderosa pines dot the high tundra landscape, and the mountain is the highest in the state.

The US Forest Service, which manages the land, recommends it for hikers seeking solitude in the wilderness. The mountain is a holy entity for the Hopi and other Indian tribes who lived in the area centuries before Europeans arrived.

On the mountain's western face lies the Arizona Snowbowl ski resort, a narrow 777-acre block of land poking 10,000ft (3,048m) into the wilderness area, which surrounds it on three sides.

People have been skiing there since 1938. But Arizona is one of the driest states in the US, and a recent run of dry winters has left the operators scrambling to find water to make artificial snow to keep skiers - and their dollars - on the slopes.

The resort's owners, who manage the resort under an agreement with the US government, are embroiled in a row with the Hopi Indian tribe, which has filed a lawsuit to stop Snowbowl's plan to pump highly treated wastewater from the nearby city of Flagstaff up the ski runs to make artificial snow.

The Hopi say spraying treated wastewater on the mountain - even just within the boundaries of the ski resort - would irreparably sully it and threaten their ability to carry out their religious rites among the peaks. And they say it would defile the pristine wilderness for all those who want to enjoy it without skies on.

"The Hopi people believe it is up to moisture from the sky to bring in water," says LeRoy Shingoitewa, Hopi tribal chairman and a former school principal.

"We believe that whatever comes off the mountain is pure. When you take something that is not pure and defile it, it becomes a dirty object. Would you use something in your ceremony that is not clean?"

 

'Less financial uncertainty'

The Hopi and other Indian groups in the area have been battling the ski resort for decades, but the recent row began in 2002, when the ski area asked the Forest Service for permission to add a new ski lift and carve new ski trails and to buy up to 1.5m US gallons (5.7m litres) of treated sewage a day from Flagstaff during ski season for snow making.

"Snow making is the only viable method to ensure consistent and reliable operating season each year with more stable visitor use and less financial uncertainty," Ed Borowsky, one of the owners of the Snowbowl, wrote in a sworn affidavit in federal court.

The operators also found that recycled sewage was the only available water source in the dry desert region.

"No matter how deep you dig, it is impossible to predict whether you will get a dry hole, a slow trickle, or whether you will truly strike water," Mr Borowsky wrote.

Snowbowl officials did not respond to interview requests, and Flagstaff declined to make officials available.

The Forest Service and later the federal courts dismissed the Indian tribes' opposition and allowed the Snowbowl expansion to begin. But this summer, the Hopi tried a new legal tactic. In a state court, they claim Snowbowl's contract to buy Flagstaff's treated wastewater violates state environmental law and ask it be voided.

In the US and across the world, recycled sewage has for decades been used in a variety of applications in which it does not come into sustained contact with humans.

 

Conserving water

The stringency of treatment the wastewater undergoes depends on its ultimate use.

It can be filtered several times, zapped with ultraviolet lights, injected with chlorine and allowed to settle for long periods. It is used in golf course and park irrigation, car washes, firefighting, industrial applications, irrigation of some crops, and in toilets in commercial buildings. Except in the city of Windhoek, Namibia in Africa, it is not drunk, people familiar with the industry say. Nor is it used in swimming pools.

Recycled water advocates describe it as a process that is ultimately beneficial to the environment, because it conserves a precious natural resource like recycling newspapers saves trees.

"If one uses recycled water, you're taking pressure off of the [drinkable] water supply," says Wade Miller, executive director of the WateReuse Association, a US non-profit advocacy and lobbying organisation.

"If you're using water more than once, you're reducing your water footprint and you're reducing your energy footprint."

It is unclear how many of the more than 480 ski areas in the US use recycled wastewater in snow making operations, though the number is miniscule.

Seven Springs Mountain Resort in Pennsylvania uses diluted recycled wastewater to augment the collected surface water it uses to make snow, says Chris Marso, the executive director of operations.

"It's been treated, it's filtered," he says. "It's probably better than the pond water."

Bear Creek Mountain Resort, also in Pennsylvania, hopes to begin using recycled wastewater to make ski snow this season, in a nine to one ratio with untreated fresh water, says Mark Schroetel, the resort's general manager.

"It's a resource that we have at our disposal to use," Mr Schroetel says. "Water is at a premium. Any water we can get a hold of is added security for us."

And at least two ski resorts in Australia - a continent devastated by prolonged drought - make snow from recycled wastewater.

The recycled water taken from Flagstaff won't smell and it won't be cloudy, supporters say, but a previous US Geological Survey study has found trace amounts of some common pharmaceutical chemicals, caffeine, cleaning products, sunscreen agents and other household and industrial chemicals.

Water reuse advocates say the amounts are so miniscule as to be harmless in casual exposure.

But the Hopi fear spraying the water on the San Francisco Peaks will do lasting damage to the ecosystem there, and they are unconvinced by the science.

The tribe, in its capacity as a taxpayer and property owner in the city of Flagstaff, has sued the city to stop it from selling the water to the Snowbowl. It says that use of the water would violate state environmental laws, though the regulations expressly allow use in snow making.

"What does clean mean?" asks Mr Shingoitewa. "The more we looked at it, the more we were told by our people, you've got to protect that sacred mountain."

From the BBC:

 

Switched at birth, then meeting aged 12

By Steve Rosenberg BBC News, Kopeysk, Russia

 

Two Russian families are united by a terrible event more than a decade ago. Their newborn daughters were accidentally mixed up in the maternity hospital and grew up with the "wrong" parents.

In a tiny flat in the Ural Mountains, Yulia Belyaeva and her 12-year-old daughter Irina are looking through family photos.

One of the pictures shows Irina as a newborn baby swaddled in a blanket. It was taken the day mother and daughter left hospital. But 12 years on, Yulia Belyaeva has discovered that the baby she'd taken home - the daughter she'd thought she'd given birth to - is not her child.

"I found this out when my ex-husband refused to pay maintenance," says Yulia. "I took him to court to prove that he was Irina's father. We did all the DNA tests. But the results were a total surprise. Not only does my ex-husband have no biological link to Irina - neither do I."

Police believe that on 17 December 1998, there had been a terrible mix-up at the local maternity hospital. Two babies had been given the wrong name tags - and the wrong parents.

"At first I thought it was a joke," recalls Yulia. "Then I couldn't stop crying. My whole world had turned upside down. I kept worrying what Irina would say. And I kept thinking about my real daughter. Maybe she'd been abandoned. Put in an orphanage. Or perhaps she was begging on the streets."

Desperate to find her, Yulia went to the police and they launched a search for her biological daughter. Within weeks they had found her.

In a village half an hour's drive from Yulia Belyaeva's flat, lives 12-year-old Anya Iskanderova. In a meadow opposite her house, she shows me her favourite cow April. Anya is the girl Yulia had given birth to. She is the spitting image of her biological mother.

In the house is Naimat Iskanderov - the man Anya thought was her father. Naimat is from Tajikistan. He had married a Russian woman, but they had divorced. It was Naimat who brought up Anya and his other children as devout Muslims. When police told him about the mistake at the maternity hospital and that Anya was not his daughter, to begin with he refused to believe it.

"Then the detective showed me a photo of the other girl, Irina, the one they said was my real daughter," Naimat tells me. "When I saw her face, it was like seeing myself. My arms and legs began shaking. It was awful to think that my child had grown up with another family. And that I had brought up someone else's daughter."

The two families meet regularly now. But the parents admit there is tension between them.

"It is difficult," concedes Naimat. "One family is Christian, the other is Muslim. We have different traditions. What I fear most is that the daughter I've raised will start going drinking in bars, that she will stop praying and working. I'm worried she will lose her religion."

"There is tension between the adults," says Yulia, "Naimat doesn't like some things that go on in our family, I don't like some things in their home. Both of us are used to life as it has been. Not as it is now. Now it is a nightmare."

More than anything Yulia fears that both children will desert her. She can see that the daughter she brought up is keen to spend time now with her biological father. And the child she actually gave birth to is like a stranger.

'I try to show Anya motherly love," Yulia says, "But she doesn't accept it. She's been brought up differently. She's not used to tenderness. We don't really understand each other. When your own daughter looks at you like a stranger, that's so painful."

Both families are suing the Kopeysk Maternity Hospital for more than $300,000 in damages. Its chief doctor went on Russian TV to apologise for the mistake, but argued the hospital could not afford to settle such a claim. Prosecutors are considering bringing criminal charges against the hospital staff responsible for the mix-up. Although that seems unlikely, considering so many years have passed.

For now the two girls say they do not want to swap parents. They are just glad to have found each other.

"To begin with we were a bit shy," Irina tells me, "but now we've become the best of friends."

"What I'd like," says Anya, "is for all of us to live in one big house."

Irina and Anya were born 15 minutes apart. Now the truth about what happened in hospital has brought them together.

From the BBC:

 

Linn Duchaill: Ireland's unlikely Viking capital

By Conor Macauley BBC Newsline reporter

A windswept barley field just south of Dundalk seems an unlikely spot for Ireland's capital.

But if things had been different, Annagassan near Castlebellingham might have been the principal city on the island of Ireland.

Twelve hundred years ago it was the site of Linn Duchaill, one of the first Viking settlements, which rivalled Dublin in size and importance.

Folklore said it was there, but all traces of it had disappeared, until a group of archaeologists and local historians set out to prove its existence.

Extensive field research and test digs have now done that.

What they found was a huge fortified settlement up to 150 acres in size, established by 841AD where the Vikings built and repaired their ships, traded and raided into the surrounding countryside.

Artist and historian Micheál McKeown was one of those who carried out extensive field research.

 

Raids

He said the Vikings sailed their ships about a mile upstream in the River Glyde, then built a heavily defended position by digging a long trench between the river and the Irish Sea, to completely cut themselves off.

"Dublin developed more as a trading town, this appeared to be more of a raiding town," he said.

"From here they attacked inland, they flattened all the monasteries in County Louth, they went to Armagh three times in one year, they went as far as the Shannon, deep into Longford.

"So there had to be a great amount of Vikings here. I would estimate four or five thousand Vikings here with up to 200 ships."

Test trenches were dug at the site in August last year and a host of items were found.

They included ships rivets, off-cuts of silver, which the Vikings used as currency, and a tiny weighing scale.

Those are now on show at an exhibition in Dundalk's Louth County Museum, along with other items recovered years ago in the same area, including a slave chain, and an axe head - all of Viking vintage.

Around 70 people gathered there over the weekend for a two day conference to discuss the significance of the finds at the Annagassan site.

Among them was Ned Kelly, the keeper of Irish antiquities at the National Museum of Ireland, one of those who helped uncover the settlement.

"There's been a bit of a mystery about where exactly the site was located or what exactly the site consisted of, and antiquarians and historians and archaeologists have been trying to sort that mystery since about 1750.

"We've now absolutely confirmed the location and nature of the site. It's a very large site. It's one of the earliest sites, there's only one earlier site in Lough Neagh.

 

History

"Sites of this nature by virtue of the fact that the Vikings were an international phenomenon, are of international importance.

"This is a site that has the potential to tell us an awful lot about the early activities of the Vikings in Ireland. This is the phase prior to the establishment of towns like Dublin and Wexford.

"The site is well preserved, it's very big and the trial cuttings we put in last September show us that there's a great depth of archaeological deposits, so there's an enormous amount we can learn about early Viking settlement in Ireland."

Linn Duachaill was eventually abandoned in favour of Dublin.

Experts believe that was because Dundalk Bay is shallow and access to the Glyde River was dependant on the tides, which effectively meant the Vikings were stranded upstream twice a day.

That left them and their ships vulnerable to attack and it became too big of a risk.

I thought you might be interested to know, last week, mr summer came within 10ft of a Pallid Harrier. he said it was stunning! Rarely seen in this country, it was spotted at seal sands, near Middlesbrough. Bird watchers from all over the country raced there to get a sighting, one from Devon! I'll pop in pic in later

I've seen your pic, Summer - thank you

From the BBC:

 

Click here to see this article with video clip

 

How woodpeckers avoid head injury

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

 

Slow-motion footage, X-ray images and computer simulations have shed light on how woodpeckers avoid injuries to their brains as they peck.

Their heads move some 6m per second, at each peck enduring a deceleration more than 1,000 times the force of gravity.

But researchers reporting in Plos One say that unequal upper and lower beak lengths and spongy, plate-like bone structure protect the birds' brains.

The findings could help design more effective head protection for humans.

For years, scientists have examined the anatomy of woodpeckers' skulls to find out how they pull off their powerful pecking without causing themselves harm.

The birds have little "sub-dural space" between their brains and their skulls, so the brain does not have room to bump around as it does in humans. Also, their brains are longer top-to-bottom than front-to-back, meaning the force against the skull is spread over a larger brain area.

A highly-developed bone called the hyoid - which in humans is just above the "Adam's apple" - has also been studied: starting at the underside of the birds' beaks, it makes a full loop through their nostrils, under and around the back of their skulls, over the top and meeting again before the forehead.

 

Head-banging study

However, Ming Zhang of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, a co-author of the new work, said that he and his colleagues wanted to get to the bottom of the problem numerically.

"We thought that most of the previous studies were limited to the qualitative answer to this question," he told BBC News.

"More quantitative studies are necessary to answer this interesting problem, which would aid in applying the bio-mechanism to human protective device design and even to some industry design."

First, the team had a look at woodpeckers in a controlled environment: two slow-motion cameras captured images of the birds striking a force sensor that measured their pecking power.

They found that the birds slightly turn their heads as they peck, which influences how forces are transmitted.

The team also gathered computed tomography and scanning electron microscope analyses of woodpecker skulls, laying out in detail how the parts fit together and where bone density varied.

With those data in hand, they were able to use a computer simulation to calculate the forces throughout the birds' skulls in the process of pecking.

The team's simulations showed that three factors were at work in sparing the birds injury.

Firstly, the hyoid bone's looping structure around the whole skull was found to act as a "safety belt", especially after the initial impact.

The team also found that the upper and lower halves of the birds' beaks were uneven, and as force was transmitted from the tip of the beak into the bone, this asymmetry lowered the load that made it as far as the brain.

Lastly, plate-like bones with a "spongy" structure at different points in the skull helped distribute the incoming force, thereby protecting the brain.

The team stresses that it is the combination of the three, rather than any one feature, that keeps woodpeckers pecking without injury.

To celebrate the above, here is the very first time Woody Woodpecker appeared in cartoons.

 

That's fascinating! I love woodpeckers Thanks for sharing El

From the BBC:

 

Click here to see this article with a rather amusing picture

 

Reindeer pant to stay cool in fur coats

By Ella Davies Reporter, BBC Nature

 

Reindeer pant to lower their brain temperatures when running in fur coats, according to research.

Scientists in Norway trained reindeer to run on treadmills to study how they stayed cool under physical exertion.

The animals are heavily insulated against the cold of Arctic winters, leaving few methods of losing heat.

Results showed the reindeer inhaling large quantities of cold air and transferring heat by panting.

Professors Arnoldus Blix and Lars Folkow from the University of Tromso worked with Lars Walloe from the University of Oslo on the study.

Their findings are published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

"Reindeer are the best animals to work with; once they trust the trainer they will do anything for you," Prof Blix told the journal.

After training the reindeer to run on the treadmill, the scientists measured their physiological responses to exercise in a cold environments.

In the early stages of running, the reindeer's breathing changed from seven breaths per minute to 250.

Blood flow to the face also increased and as the inhaled air passed over blood vessels inside the reindeer's noses, the temperature of this blood dropped.

This cooler blood then circulated around the body to cool the hard-working, heat-stressed muscles.

Subsequent panting then exposed the reindeer's large wet tongues to the cool air.

"They do not have sweat glands like us humans which would ruin the insulative properties of their fur, but make use of the same principle - heat dissipation through evaporation of water - when they pant," Prof Folklow told BBC Nature.

Finally, when their brain temperature reached a critically hot 39C, the reindeer switched to another strategy.

The team found that through "selective brain cooling", the reindeer diverted the cooled blood from their noses into their heads, where it reduced the temperature of blood circulating to the brain, protecting it from overheating.

"This high-arctic [animal] which tolerates cold very well, also has an immense capacity to tolerate heat stress due to the high efficiency of the panting mechanism and the habit of resorting to brain cooling when the heat load gets really high," said Prof Folklow.

Previous studies have highlighted this ability in sheep, leading scientists to question whether all species of hoofed mammal can selectively cool their brains.

From the BBC:

 

GM mosquitoes show fever promise

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

 

Genetically modified mosquitoes could prove effective in tackling dengue fever and other insect-borne diseases, a UK-based scientific team has shown.

The male mosquitoes are modified so their offspring die before reproducing.

In a dengue-affected part of the Cayman Islands, researchers found the GM males mated successfully with wild females.

In Nature Biotechnology journal, they say such mating has not before been proven in the wild, and could cut the number of disease-carrying mosquitoes.

Dengue is caused by a virus transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito as it bites.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that there may be 50 million cases each year, and the incidence is rising, with some countries reporting what the WHO terms "explosive" outbreaks.

As yet, there is no vaccine.

 

Radiation damage

As far back as the 1940s, it was realised that releasing sterile males into the wild could control insects that carried disease or were agricultural pests.

When females breed with the sterile males rather than wild fertile ones, there will be no viable offspring, meaning there are fewer mosquitoes around to transmit the disease.

In the 1950s, the screwworm fly was eradicated from the Caribbean island of Curacao using males sterilised by radiation.

But the technology has not worked so well with disease-carrying insects.

Generally, the sterilising process weakens the males so much that they struggle to mate; the wild males are dominant.

Oxitec, a company spun off from Oxford University, uses a genetic engineering approach.

Offspring of their GM males live through the larval stage but die as pupae, before reaching adulthood.

In the latest study, the research group - which includes scientists from Imperial College London and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine - released batches of GM mosquitoes in 2009 in an area of the Cayman Islands where Aedes aegypti are common, and dengue sometimes present.

A proportion of the eggs collected from the study area in subsequent weeks carried the introduced gene, meaning the biotech mosquitoes had mated successfully.

The GM males made up 16% of males in the study area, and fathered 10% of the larvae; so they were not quite as successful as the wild males, but not significantly worse.

"We were really surprised how well they did," said Luke Alphey, Oxitec's chief scientific officer and a visiting professor at Oxford University.

"For this method, you just need to get a reasonable proportion of the females to mate with GM males - you'll never get the males as competitive as the wild ones, but they don't have to be, they just have to be reasonably good."

"This study is the first to show that the mosquito population could be suppressed this way," said Dr Raman Velayudhan, a WHO dengue expert.

"The fitness level is much better [compared with previous attempts] - it is almost the same as in wild mosquitoes," he told BBC News.

Cognizant that genetic engineering is a technology that carries the potential for risks as well as benefits, the WHO is finalising guidance on how GM insects should be deployed in developing countries, which it expects to release by the end of the year.

The field seems to be hotting up, with other research groups recently creating Anopheles mosquitoes that are immune to the malaria parasite they normally carry, and making male Anopheles that lack sperm.

Malaria is a prime target for these approaches simply because it is such an important disease; but arguably it is more needed in diseases such as dengue where there are few alternatives.

"For malaria, there are effective alternatives like bednets, but they won't work for dengue because the mosquitoes bite during daytime," said Dr Alphey.

"We don't advocate [GM mosquitoes] as a 'magic bullet' that will solve all dengue in one go, so the question is how it fits in as part of an integrated programme - and for dengue, it would be a huge component of an integrated programme."

Funding for the Oxitec approach has come from a number of sources including private investors, charities, Oxford University and governments, and the Cayman Islands authorities were willing to take part in the field trial.

 

Death by feedback

The genetic approach used to create the mosquitoes is a system known as tetracycline-controlled transcriptional activation (tTA).

The tTA gene is spliced into the insect's genome in such a way that the protein it makes increases the gene's activity - a positive feedback loop.

The cells make more and more tTA protein - and in doing so, have little capacity for making any other proteins. Eventually, this kills the insects.

When the male larvae are reared at Oxitec, this process is turned off by keeping them in water containing the antibiotic tetracycline, which inhibits the feedback process.

When the males breed in the wild, however, tTA genes in their offspring are fully active.

In principle, a process that allows larvae to hatch and stay alive for many days should be more advantageous than the traditional approach of producing infertile eggs, as the larvae will consume food that could otherwise be used by viable larvae from the union of wild males and females.

The next step in the work is to demonstrate that deploying GM males does suppress the insect population enough that it is likely to have an impact on dengue incidence.

Dr Alphey said results from a project last year in the Cayman Islands suggested this had been achieved.

From the BBC:

 

DNA gene find 'transforms' theories on how brain works

 

The genetic make-up of our brain cells changes thousands of times over the course of our lifetimes, according to new research.

Scientists at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh have identified genes, called retrotransposons, responsible for tiny changes in the DNA of brain tissue.

They say their discovery completely overturns previous theories about how the brain works.

It could also increase understanding of conditions such as Parkinson's disease.

The study shows for the first time that brain cells are genetically different to other cells in the body, and are also genetically distinct from each other.

The research was carried out in collaboration with scientists from the Netherlands, Italy, Australia, Japan and the US.

They found that the retrotransposons were particularly active in areas of the brain linked to cell renewal.

 

Genetic changes

It is hoped that by mapping the location of these genes, scientists could identify mutations that impact on brain function and may cause diseases such as Parkinson's to develop.

The researchers are now investigating whether brain tumour formation and conditions which affect the memory, such as Alzheimer's, are associated with a change in retrotransposon activity.

Dr Geoff Faulkner, from the Roslin Institute, based at the University of Edinburgh, said: "This research completely overturns the belief that the genetic make-up of brain cells remains static throughout life and provides us with new information about how the brain works.

"If we can understand better how these subtle genetic changes occur we could shed light on how brain cells regenerate, how processes like memory formation may have a genetic basis and possibly link the activity of these genes to brain diseases."

The scientists' findings are published in the journal Nature.

From the BBC:

 

Nasa examines 'tractor beams' for sample gathering

 

US space agency Nasa has funded a study of "tractor beams" to gather samples for analysis in future missions.

The $100,000 (£63,000) award will be used to examine three laser-based approaches to do what has until now been the stuff of science fiction.

Several tractor-beam ideas have been published in the scientific literature but none has yet been put to use.

Nasa scientist Paul Stysley says the approach could "enhance science goals and reduce mission risk".

"Though a mainstay in science fiction, and Star Trek in particular, laser-based trapping isn't fanciful or beyond current technological know-how," said Dr Stysley of Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center, whose group was awarded the research funding.

 

High-beam profile

The team has identified three possible options to capture and gather up sample material either in future orbiting spacecraft or on planetary rovers.

One is an adaptation of a well-known effect called "optical tweezers" in which objects can be trapped in the focus of one or two laser beams. However, this version of the approach would require an atmosphere in which to operate.

The other two methods rely on specially shaped laser beams - instead of a beam whose intensity peaks at its centre and tails off gradually, the team is investigating two alternatives: solenoid beams and Bessel beams.

The intensity peaks within a solenoid beam are found in a spiral around the line of the beam itself, while a Bessel beam's intensity rises and falls in peaks and troughs at higher distances from the beam's line.

Solenoid beams have already proven their "tractor beam" abilities in laboratory tests published in the journal Optics Express, but the pulling power of Bessel beams, presented on the preprint server Arxiv in February, remains to be proved experimentally.

In all three cases, explained Dr Stysley, the effect is a small one - but it could in some instances outperform existing methods of sample gathering.

"[Current] techniques have proven to be largely successful, but they are limited by high costs and limited range and sample rate," he said.

"An optical-trapping system, on the other hand, could grab desired molecules from the upper atmosphere on an orbiting spacecraft or trap them from the ground or lower atmosphere from a lander.

"In other words, they could continuously and remotely capture particles over a longer period of time, which would enhance science goals and reduce mission risk."

From the BBC:

 

Click here to see this article with pictures

 

Clever Eurasian jays plan for the future

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC Nature

 

Experiments with Eurasian jays have shown that the birds store food that they will want in the future - "planning" for their impending needs.

The study revealed that birds would stash more of the foods that they knew would be unavailable to them on forthcoming foraging trips.

Jays are not the first birds to show that they might have the capacity for what is known as "mental time travel".

But previous claims that birds "plan" in this way have been controversial.

The findings are published in the journal Biology Letters.

To find out if the jays thought about the future, the scientists exploited the birds' habit of hiding or "caching" food for later.

In previous studies on Eurasian jays' distant relatives, scrub jays, Prof Nicola Clayton from the University of Cambridge showed that when the birds were offered so much of one food that they became sick of it, they would still store it away in their cache.

She and her team interpreted this to mean that the birds knew they would want that food in the future.

"The difficulty though, is that we don't know what they know, we only know what they're doing," explained Lucy Cheke, a researcher who works with Prof Clayton and who carried out this latest experiment.

The scrub jays, Ms Cheke explained, might just have worked out which foods stored well and which did not. With their new experiment, the scientists wanted to eliminate the possibility that the birds were using this simple rule.

To do this, the researchers put four adult jays through their intellectual paces in a complicated four-day test.

'Sick of peanuts'

On day one, the jays were presented with two differently coloured boxes in which to hide food. They could gather this from from a mixed pile of peanuts and raisins.

The following day, the scientists fed the birds only with raisins, then offered them just one of their boxes. On day three, the birds were given a pile of peanuts before being presented with the other box.

"The day after that, they came to cache again," explained Ms Cheke, "and just before they cache, they're fed a big pile of peanuts.

"So when they come to cache, they're sick of peanuts.

But instead of ignoring the peanuts and only stashing the raisins, the birds appeared to plan ahead. They stored raisins in the tray they were offered after their "peanut binge" and peanuts in the one they were offered after being fed raisins.

"Imagine a child is packing two lunch boxes - one for this afternoon and one for tomorrow," Ms Cheke explained.

"If this afternoon they know they'll get to eat loads of cake before their lunch, they'll know only to pack sandwiches in that lunch box."

The Cambridge team and their colleagues who work with corvids are continuing to reveal remarkable insights into their intelligence.

Ms Cheke is currently investigating Eurasian jays' social abilities - finding out if the birds are able to understand how other birds are feeling.

 

Follow the ants

Other researchers based in the same Cambridge laboratory have found examples of what they think is mental time travel in wild birds.

Some bird species in Costa Rica follow army ant swarms through the forest, indulging in an insect feeding frenzy as flying insects flee the ant raid.

Researcher Corina Logan has observed birds checking ant bivouacs - the temporary nest structures that the ants construct at the end of their raid.

She and her colleagues proposed, in a paper in the journal Behavioural Ecology, that the birds might return to the nest sites the following day, in order to follow the next ant raid.

Ms Logan told BBC Nature: "I think [this behaviour] could possibly involve future planning.

"The birds were checking bivouacs when they were not hungry, a behaviour that does not make sense until the next morning."

Ms Logan says that studying animals in the wild like this helps researchers make sense of their cognitive abilities "in the context of their social and ecological environment".