From the BBC:

Doctor trials laser treatment to change eye colour

A US doctor is trying to pioneer a laser treatment that changes patients' eye colour.

Dr Gregg Homer claims 20 seconds of laser light can remove pigment in brown eyes so they gradually turn blue.

He is now seeking up to $750,000 (£468,000) of investment to continue clinical trials.

However, other eye experts urge caution because destroying eye pigment can cause sight problems if too much light is allowed to enter the pupil.

Stroma Medical, the company set up to commercialise the process, estimates it will take at least 18 months to finish the safety tests.

'Irreversible'

The process involves a computerised scanning system that takes a picture of the iris and works out which areas to treat.

The laser is then fired, using a proprietary pattern, hitting one spot of the iris at a time.

When it has hit every spot it then starts again, repeating the process several times.

However the treatment only takes 20 seconds.

"The laser agitates the pigment on the surface of the iris," Dr Homer - the firm's chairman and chief scientific officer - told the BBC.

"We use two frequencies that are absorbed by dark pigment, and it is fully absorbed so there is no danger of damage to the rest of the eye.

"It heats it up and changes the structure of the pigment cells. The body recognises they are damaged tissue and sends out a protein. This recruits another feature that is like little pac-men that digest the tissue at a molecular level."

After the first week of treatment, the eye colour turns darker as the tissue changes its characteristics.

Then the digestion process starts, and after a further one to three weeks the blueness appears.

Since the pigment - called melanin - does not regenerate the treatment is irreversible.

Lasers are already used to remove the substance in skin to help treat brown spots and freckles.

Safety concerns

Other eye experts have expressed reservations.

"The pigment is there for a reason. If the pigment is lost you can get problems such as glare or double vision," said Larry Benjamin, a consultant eye surgeon at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, in the UK.

"Having no eye pigment would be like having a camera aperture with a transparent blade. You wouldn't be able to control the light getting in."

Dr Homer said that he only removes the pigment from the eye's surface.

"This is only around one third to one half as thick as the pigment at the back of the iris and has no medical significance," he said.

He also claimed patients would be less sensitive to light than those born with blue eyes. He reasoned that brown-eyed people have more pigment in the other areas of their eyeballs, and most of it will be left untouched.

"We run tests for 15 different safety examination procedures. We run the tests before and after the treatment, and the following day, and the following weeks, and the following months and the following three months.

"Thus far we have no evidence of any injury."

Testing in Mexico

Dr Homer originally worked as an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, but gave up full-time practice in the mid-1990s to study biology at Stanford University in California.

He said he filed his first patent for the laser treatment in 2001. But it was not until 2004 that he began carrying out experiments on animals at a hospital facility.

To fund his research he used his own savings, attracted investments from venture capital funds and secured a government grant. Dr Homer said he has raised $2.5m to date.

Tests on humans initially involved cadavers, and then moved on to live patients in Mexico in August 2010.

"From a regulatory perspective it is easier," Dr Homer said, "and I can speak Spanish fluently so I can closely monitor how everyone is doing."

Seventeen people have been treated so far. All are very short-sighted. They have been offered lens transplants in return for taking part.

Dr Homer said the work is checked by a board of ophthalmology experts to ensure it is up to standard.

The new funds will be used to complete safety trials with a further three people.

Stroma Medical then intends to raise a further $15m to manufacture hundreds of lasers and launch overseas - ideally within 18 months.

A US launch is planned in three years' time, because it takes longer to get regulatory approval there.

Stroma Medical believes the treatment will be popular; its survey of 2,500 people suggested 17% of Americans would want it if they knew it was completely safe. A further 35% would seriously consider it.

There is also evidence of a growing desire to alter eye colour overseas - a recent study in Singapore reported growing demand for cosmetic contact lenses.

From the BBC:

Click here to see this article with pictures

Ancient horses' spotted history reflected in cave art

By Jennifer Carpenter Science reporter, BBC News

Scientists have found evidence that leopard-spotted horses roamed Europe 25,000 years ago alongside humans.

Until now, studies had only recovered the DNA of black and brown coloured coats from fossil specimens.

New genetic evidence suggests "dappled" horses depicted in European cave art were inspired by real life, and are less symbolic than previously thought.

The findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Horses, which were the most abundant large mammal roaming Eurasia 25,000 years ago, were a key component of early European diets.

So it is not surprising that the cave art of this time had a certain equestrian flair - horses make up 30% of the animals depicted in European cave paintings from this era.

Biologists, interested in the diversity of European animals before the last Ice Age, are interested in how accurately these early artistic impressions portrayed the colouring of the horses that lived alongside the ancient humans.

"It was critical to ensure that the horse depictions from the cave paintings were based on real-life experiences rather than products of the imagination," explained lead author Arne Ludwig from The Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin.

In previous work, Dr Ludwig, and his colleagues, recovered only the DNA of black and brown coat colours from the prehistoric horse bones.

But the dappled coats of the 25,000 year horses depicted at the Pech Merle cave complex in France convinced the team to take a second look.

Fur coats

By revisiting the fossil DNA of 31 horse specimens collected from across Europe, from Siberia to the Iberian Peninsula, the researchers found that six of the animals carried a mutation that causes modern horses to have white and black spots.

Of the remaining 25 specimens, 18 were brown coloured and six were black.

Dr Ludwig explained that all three of the horse colours - black, brown and spotted - depicted in the cave paintings have now been found to exist as real coat-colours in the ancient horse populations.

The researchers say that these three colours probably provided enough variation for humans to create the diversity of coat colours and patterns seen in modern horses.

The domestication of horses, which produced modern breeds, is thought to have begun about 4,600 years ago in the steppe between modern Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

From the BBC:

Treasury to close loophole that allows VAT-free DVDs

The government is to change the tax rules that have allowed retailers to avoid paying VAT by sending goods from the Channel Islands.

Low Value Consignment Relief (LVCR) will not apply to goods sent from the Channel Islands to the UK from 1 April.

The loophole has been used increasingly in recent years by companies selling CDs and DVDs online, such as Play.com, Tesco and Amazon.

The government said the loophole was now costing £140m a year.

The chief minister of Guernsey, Deputy Lyndon Trott, said the change would have a "significant impact" on the islands.

The maximum price of the goods allowed under LVCR was cut from £18 to £15 on 1 November following an announcement in the Budget in March.

"These reforms will ensure that UK companies, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, can compete on a level playing field with those larger companies with the resources to set up operations in the Channel Islands," said David Gauke, Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury.

LVCR was originally established as a VAT exemption for goods coming from outside the EU. The idea was to prevent EU members having to collect small amounts of VAT, when collecting it would cost more than it was worth.

The problem has been that the Channel Islands are treated as being outside the EU for VAT purposes.

'Moral market'

Big retailers have been sending low-price goods to the Channel Islands and then having them sent back individually to customers in the UK.

The government said that LVCR will continue to apply to goods coming from other countries outside the EU.

"The removal of this major market distortion should be welcomed by all UK businesses that wish to trade online," said Richard Allen, spokesperson for Retailers Against VAT Avoidance, a group that has campaigned against LVCR.

"The VAT Loophole is not only contra to the basic principles of EU VAT law but is also contrary to any sense of fair play and a 'moral market'."

Jersey's Economic Development Minister, Senator Alan Maclean, said more than 1,700 people were employed in the fulfilment industry across the Channel Islands.

Channel Island legislators are worried about the amount of notice they have been given of the closing of the loophole.

From the BBC:

Click here to see this article with pictures

Single-molecule 'electric car' taken for test drive

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Scientists have shown off what can be described as the world's smallest electric car - made of a single, carefully designed molecule.

The molecule has four branches that act as wheels, rotating when a tiny metal tip applied a small current to them.

With 10 electric bursts, the car was made to move six billionths of a metre.

The approach, published in Nature, joins recent single-molecule efforts, and seems to overcome the forces that often dominate at such tiny scales.

The "batteries" of the electric car come by way of the tip of what is called a scanning tunnelling microscope - an extraordinarily fine point of metal that ends in just an atom or two. As the tip draws near the molecule, electrons jump into it.

The motor of the approach lies with the four "molecular rotors" that act as the car's wheels; they undergo a change in shape when they absorb the electrons.

The demonstration is a tour de force in what is called "bottom-up" nanotechnology. A wide array of machines has been demonstrated in recent years, incorporating parts etched to minuscule sizes from chunks of metals or semiconductors - a small version of traditional, "top-down" manufacturing.

Building up from single, designed molecules is another matter, said Tibor Kudernac, a chemist now at the University of Twente, the Netherlands, and lead author of the paper.

"If you look around, in all biological systems are a vast number of molecular machines or rotors based on proteins that do important things very well; muscle contraction is based on protein motors," he explained.

"This is a simple demonstration that we can achieve anything like that. It's an important observation and I think it will motivate people to think about it perhaps a bit more from an application point of view."

Dr Kudernac concedes that applications for molecular machines like the car are probably far in the future. The first task, he said, was to make it work under normal conditions; the current work has been done at a blisteringly cold -266C and in a high vacuum.

And although each potential application will require a newly designed molecular machine, Dr Kudernac remains confident.

"There are ways to play around," he said. "That's what we chemists do - we try to design molecules for particular purposes, and I don't see any fundamental limitations."

From the BBC:

Malaria vaccine hope after blood entry route discovered

By James Gallagher Health reporter, BBC News

The route all strains of the most deadly malaria parasite use to enter red blood cells has been identified by researchers at the Sanger Institute in Cambridge.

The scientists involved said the finding offered "great hope" for the development of a vaccine, which had the potential to be hugely effective.

Other experts said they were surprised and impressed.

Malaria affects 300 million people each year.

One million die, mostly children in sub-Saharan Africa.

There are many malaria parasites. Plasmodium falciparum is the most deadly and researchers at the Sanger Institute acknowledge it as a "very complex and cunning foe".

It is exceptionally good at evading and bamboozling the immune system. Within five minutes of being bitten by a malaria-carrying mosquito, the parasite is already hiding inside the liver.

It then emerges from the liver at a different stage in its life cycle and infects red blood cells, where it starts reproducing.

Difficulty

The human immune system struggles to build up resistance to malaria and researchers have struggled in the laboratory.

There is still no approved vaccine against malaria. Large scale trials of the most advanced prototype - RTS,S - showed it halved the risk of getting malaria.

This study, published in Nature, looked at the moment the parasite infected a red blood cell.

They were looking for proteins on the surface of Plasmodium and red blood cells which were necessary for the parasite to identify its target and invade.

Others had been found before, but none were universally used.

The team at the Sanger Institute discovered that "basigin", a receptor on the surface on red blood cells, and "PfRh5", a protein on the parasite, were crucial.

In all strains of Plasmodium falciparum tested so far, interrupting the link protected the blood cells from attack.

One of the researchers, Dr Julian Rayner, said: "We were able to completely block invasion using multiple different methods, using antibodies targeting this interaction we could stop all invasion of red blood cells.

"It seems to be essential for invasion."

The plan is to develop a vaccine which will prime the immune system to attack PfRh5 on the parasite

Fellow researcher Dr Gavin Wright said a vaccine would have great potential as the target was so essential.

"As a starting point for developing a vaccine you couldn't hope for better," he said.

Prof Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute at Oxford University, said that after 25 years studying malaria he was "surprised" and "intrigued" by the findings.

He said textbooks and academic research suggested that if you blocked one pathway into the red blood cells, the parasite would choose another.

He added: "It remains to be seen how easy it will be to translate into a vaccine, but [for blood stage vaccines] PfRh5 is now at the top of the list.

"Vaccine candidates will come. If I had to bet, I'd say you'd get some partial efficacy from it."

Many of us have had this sort of call and I have. Last time I did the same as the following account from Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC and I managed to waste about 16 minutes of the scammer's time before I told him that I knew what he was trying to do.

From the BBC:

The phone rang at home the other day, and when I picked it up a voice down a crackly line asked if a "Mr Sellan" was there. He then proceeded to tell me that a problem had been detected with my Windows computer. Having had similar calls before, I thought I knew what was coming.

So instead of putting the phone down, I decided to play along and record the call. The man at the other end told me to go to my computer and type in a complex series of instructions.

Then he asked me if I was seeing a certain string of letters and numbers. "Ooh yes," I said. That was proof, he told me, that my computer was sending out the error message that his company had received - and which had led him to call in the first place.

So I then sought to find out what he was suggesting I do about my badly infected computer.

"We will first have to check out the problems and what it will take to fix them," he told me.

That might cost nothing or just a minimum charge but if I wanted complete protection over a longer period that would be £159.

At that point, I decided to reveal that I had been stringing him along. I do not have a Windows computer at home, so I had not been typing in the instructions - though when a colleague tried it later on a PC at work following the same commands, he came up with same string of numbers and letters.

The man at the other end was first bemused, then rather cross. He accused me of wasting his time and energy, then when I asked for a telephone number to contact his firm's PR department, he terminated the call.

Now this is a well-known scam, which can involve selling you software you don't need or even having your computer taken over for malicious purposes. There are plenty of warnings from Microsoft and from security experts that any call you get from someone claiming they know what is happening to your PC should be terminated rapidly.

But some people are getting repeated calls, and there must be quite a few who are worried enough to fall for the scam. My caller - who appeared by the way to be completely convinced that he was offering a legitimate product - told me that his firm had lots of satisfied customers.

The other question which I wanted answered was how the firm had got hold of my number - which I've listed with the Telephone Preference Service in order to avoid getting these calls.

The caller said it was on "an international database". If that is so, then someone is involved in a potentially illegal trade in personal data.

But as this company - like most of them - was based overseas they may not care too much about that. So it looks as though we can all expect to carry on getting these calls - and will have to choose to ignore them, or perhaps string them along for a while to waste their time.

From the BBC:

Study links Parkinson's disease to industrial solvent

By Neil Bowdler Health reporter, BBC News

An international study has linked an industrial solvent to Parkinson's disease.

Researchers found a six-fold increase in the risk of developing Parkinson's in individuals exposed in the workplace to trichloroethylene (TCE).

Although many uses for TCE have been banned around the world, the chemical is still used as a degreasing agent.

The research was based on analysis of 99 pairs of twins selected from US data records.

Parkinson's can result in limb tremors, slowed movement and speech impairment, but the exact cause of the disease is still unknown, and there is no cure.

Research to date suggests a mix of genetic and environmental factors may be responsible. A link has previously been made with pesticide use.

'Significant association'

The researchers from institutes in the US, Canada, Germany and Argentina, wanted to examine the impact of solvent exposure - specifically six solvents including TCE.

They looked at 99 sets of twins, one twin with Parkinson's, the other without.

Because twins are genetically very similar or identical and often share certain lifestyle characteristics, twins were thought to provide a better control group, reducing the likelihood of spurious results.

The twins were interviewed to build up a work history and calculate likely exposure to solvents. They were also asked about hobbies.

The findings are presented as the first study to report a "significant association" between TCE exposure and Parkinson's and suggest exposure to the solvent was likely to result in a six-fold increase in the chances of developing the disease.

The study also adjudged exposure to two other solvents, perchloroethylene (PERC) and carbon tetrachloride (CCl4), "tended towards significant risk of developing the disease".

No statistical link was found with the other three solvents examined in the study - toluene, xylene and n-hexane.

"Our study confirms that common environmental contaminants may increase the risk of developing Parkinson's, which has considerable public health implications," said Dr Samuel Goldman of The Parkinson's Institute in Sunnyvale, California, who co-led the study published in the journal Annals of Neurology.

He added: "Our findings, as well as prior case reports, suggest a lag time of up to 40 years between TCE exposure and onset of Parkinson's, providing a critical window of opportunity to potentially slow the disease before clinical symptoms appear."

Water contaminant

TCE has been used in paints, glue, carpet cleaners, dry-cleaning solutions and as a degreaser. It has been banned in the food and pharmaceutical industries in most regions of the world since the 1970s, due to concerns over its toxicity.

In 1997, the US authorities banned its use as an anaesthetic, skin disinfectant, grain fumigant and coffee decaffeinating agent, but it is still used as a degreasing agent for metal parts.

Groundwater contamination by TCE is widespread, with studies estimating up to 30% of US drinking water supplies are contaminated with TCE. In Europe, it was reclassified in 2001 as a "category 2" carcinogen, although it is still used in industrial applications.

PERC, like TCE, is used as a dry-cleaning agent and degreasing agent, and is found in many household products. CCl4's major historical use was in the manufacture of chlorofluorocarbons for use as refrigerants, but it has also been used a fumigant to kill insects in grain.

Commenting on the paper, Dr Michelle Gardner, Research Development Manager at Parkinson's UK, said: "This is the first study to show that the solvent TCE may be associated with an increased risk of developing Parkinson's.

"It is important to highlight that many of the previous uses of this solvent have been discontinued for safety reasons over 30 years ago and that safety and protection in work places where strong chemicals such as this solvent are used has greatly improved in recent years."

She also called for more research to confirm the link between TCE and other solvents with Parkinson's.

"Further larger-scale studies on populations with more defined exposures are needed to confirm the link," she said.

From the BBC:

Report reveals drop between peak and off-peak surfing

UK broadband speeds drop by an average of 35% from their off-peak highs when most people are online in the evening, according to a report.

The research, conducted by the comparison site Uswitch, was based on two million broadband speed tests.

The peak surfing times between 7pm and 9pm were the slowest to be online, the report said.

There were also huge regional variations between evening and early morning surfing times.

The report suggested the best time to be online was between 2am and 3am.

Users in Evesham, Worcestershire, fared worst, according to the survey, with a massive 69% drop-off between off-peak morning and evening surfing.

Those living in Weston-super-Mare did little better with speeds falling from an off-peak average of 9.5Mbps (megabits per second) to 3.4Mbps in the evening - a 64% drop.

The difference was often most noticeable in rural areas where even peak speeds were relatively slow. In Wadebridge, in Cornwall, speeds nearly halved from 4.1Mbps at off-peak times to 2.1Mbps at peak times.

"It really is surprising just how much broadband speeds fluctuate at different times of the day, with drop-offs of almost 70% in some areas of the UK," said Uswitch's technology expert Ernest Doku.

"Not many internet users enjoy the maximum headline broadband speeds offered by providers, and certainly not during the working week," he added.

New rules

Broadband speed is becoming more important as bandwidth-hungry services such as on-demand TV become more popular.

Telecoms regulator Ofcom recently revealed that British households download an average of 17 gigabytes of data on average every month over their home broadband connections.

That monthly data diet is equivalent to streaming 11 movies or 12 hours of BBC programmes via iPlayer.

Critics say consumers are being misled by internet service providers who continue to advertise their maximum broadband speeds, even though many users do not get them.

New rules from the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) say that from April next year providers will no longer be able to advertise maximum speeds for net packages unless 10% of customers receive them.

Almost half of broadband users are now on packages with advertised speeds above 10Mbps but the average broadband speed is 6.8Mbps according to Ofcom.

From the BBC:

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Liquid lakes close to moon's skin

By Jennifer Carpenter Science reporter, BBC News

Scientists have found the best evidence yet for water just beneath the surface of Jupiter's icy moon, Europa.

Analysis of the moon's surface suggests plumes of warmer water well up beneath its icy shell, melting and fracturing the outer layers.

The results, published in the journal Nature, predict that small lakes exist only 3km below the crust.

Any liquid water could represent a potential habitat for life.

From models of magnetic forces, and images of its surface, scientists have long suspected that a giant ocean, roughly 160km (100 miles) deep, lies somewhere between 10-30km beneath the ice crust.

Many astrobiologists have dreamed of following in the footsteps of Arthur C Clarke's fictional character David Bowman, who, in the novel Odyssey Two, discovers aquatic life-forms in the deep Europan sea. (This book is better known as 2010)

But punching holes through the moon's thick, icy outer layers has always seemed untenable.

The discovery of shallow liquid water by an American team makes a space mission to recover water from the moon much more plausible.

Shallow seas

The shallow lakes also means that surface waters are probaby vigorously mixing with deeper water.

The icy eddies could transfer nutrients between the surface water and the ocean's depths.

"That could make Europa and its ocean more habitable," said lead author Britney Schmidt from the University of Texas at Austin, US, who analysed images collect by the Galileo spacecraft launched in 1989.

Glaciologists have been studying the surface of Europa for many years, trying to work out what formed its scarred, fractured surface.

By looking at Antarctica, where we see similar [features] - glaciers, ice shelves - we can infer something about the processes that are happening on Europa, said glaciologist Martin Siegert from the University of Edinburgh.

He explained that the new study tells us how upwelling of warmer water causes melting of surface ice, forming cracks.

"You get freezing [water] between the cracks... so you end up with the existing ice cemented in with new ice."

"The underside then freezes again, which causes the uplifting; its pretty neat," Dr Siegert told BBC News.

The US and Europe are working on missions to Europa, and Jupiter's other moons, which they hope to launch either late this decade or early in the 2020s.

From the BBC:

Scientists at MIT replicate brain activity with chip

Scientists are getting closer to the dream of creating computer systems that can replicate the brain.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have designed a computer chip that mimics how the brain's neurons adapt in response to new information.

Such chips could eventually enable communication between artificially created body parts and the brain.

It could also pave the way for artificial intelligence devices.

There are about 100 billion neurons in the brain, each of which forms synapses - the connections between neurons that allow information to flow - with many other neurons.

This process is known as plasticity and is believed to underpin many brain functions, such as learning and memory.

Neural functions

The MIT team, led by research scientist Chi-Sang Poon, has been able to design a computer chip that can simulate the activity of a single brain synapse.

Activity in the synapses relies on so-called ion channels which control the flow of charged atoms such as sodium, potassium and calcium.

The 'brain chip' has about 400 transistors and is wired up to replicate the circuitry of the brain.

Current flows through the transistors in the same way as ions flow through ion channels in a brain cell.

"We can tweak the parameters of the circuit to match specific ions channels... We now have a way to capture each and every ionic process that's going on in a neuron," said Mr Poon.

Neurobiologists seem to be impressed.

It represents "a significant advance in the efforts to incorporate what we know about the biology of neurons and synaptic plasticity onto ...chips," said Dean Buonomano, a professor of neurobiology at the University of California.

"The level of biological realism is impressive," he added.

The team plans to use their chip to build systems to model specific neural functions, such as visual processing.

Such systems could be much faster than computers which take hours or even days to simulate a brain circuit. The chip could ultimately prove to be even faster than the biological process.

From the BBC:

Click here to see this article with a picture

World's 'lightest material' unveiled by US engineers

A team of engineers claims to have created the world's lightest material.

The substance is made out of tiny hollow metallic tubes arranged into a micro-lattice - a criss-crossing diagonal pattern with small open spaces between the tubes.

The researchers say the material is 100 times lighter than Styrofoam and has "extraordinarily high energy absorption" properties.

Potential uses include next-generation batteries and shock absorbers.

The research was carried out at the University of California, Irvine, HRL Laboratories and the California Institute of Technology and is published in the latest edition of Science.

"The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness 1,000 times thinner than a human hair," said lead author Dr Tobias Schaedler.

Low-density

The resulting material has a density of 0.9 milligrams per cubic centimetre.

By comparison the density of silica aerogels - the world's lightest solid materials - is only as low as 1.0mg per cubic cm.

The metallic micro-lattices have the edge because they consist of 99.99% air and of 0.01% solids.

The engineers say the material's strength derives from the ordered nature of its lattice design.

By contrast, other ultralight substances, including aerogels and metallic foams, have random cellular structures. This means they are less stiff, strong, energy absorptive or conductive than the bulk of the raw materials that they are made out of.

William Carter, manager of architected materials at HRL, compared the new material to larger low-density structures.

"Modern buildings, exemplified by the Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge are incredibly light and weight-efficient by virtue of their architecture," he said.

"We are revolutionising lightweight materials by bringing this concept to the nano and micro scales."

Robust

To study the strength of the metallic micro-lattices the team compressed them until they were half as thick.

After removing the load the substance recovered 98% of its original height and resumed its original shape.

The first time the stress test was carried out and repeated the material became less stiff and strong, but the team says that further compressions made very little difference.

"Materials actually get stronger as the dimensions are reduced to the nanoscale," said team member Lorenzo Valdevit.

"Combine this with the possibility of tailoring the architecture of the micro-lattice and you have a unique cellular material."

The engineers suggest practical uses for the substance include thermal insulation, battery electrodes and products that need to dampen sound, vibration and shock energy.

From the BBC:

Bionic contact lens 'to project emails before eyes'

By Michelle Roberts Health reporter, BBC News

A new generation of contact lenses that project images in front of the eyes is a step closer after successful animal trials, say scientists.

The technology could allow wearers to read floating texts and emails or augment their sight with computer-generated images, Terminator-syle.

Researchers at Washington University who are working on the device say early tests show it is safe and feasible.

But there are still wrinkles to iron out, like finding a good power source.

Currently, their crude prototype device can only work if it is within centimetres of the wireless battery.

And its microcircuitry is only enough for one light-emitting diode, reports the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering.

But now that initial safety tests in rabbits have gone well, with no obvious adverse effects, the researchers have renewed faith about the device's possibilities.

They envisage hundreds more pixels could be embedded in the flexible lens to produce complex holographic images.

For example, drivers could wear them to see journey directions or their vehicle's speed projected onto the windscreen.

Similarly, the lenses could take the virtual world of video gaming to a new level.

They could also provide up-to-date medical information like blood sugar levels by linking to biosensors in the wearer's body.

Delicate materials

Lead researcher Professor Babak Praviz said: "Our next goal is to incorporate some predetermined text in the contact lens."

He said his team had already overcome a major hurdle to this, which is getting the human eye to focus on an image generated on its surface.

Normally, we can only see objects clearly if they are held several centimetres away from the eye.

The scientists, working with colleagues at Aalto University in Finland, have now adapted the lenses to shorten the focal distance.

Building the end product was a challenge because materials used to make conventional contact lenses are delicate.

Manufacturing electrical circuits, however, involves inorganic materials, scorching temperatures and toxic chemicals. Researchers built the circuits from layers of metal only a few nanometres thick, about one thousandth the width of a human hair, and constructed light-emitting diodes measuring one third of a millimetre across.

Dr Praviz and his team are not the only scientists working on this type of technology.

A Swiss company called Sensimed has already brought to market a smart contact lens that uses inbuilt computer technology to monitor pressure inside the eye to keep tabs on the eye condition glaucoma

From the BBC:

Most liveable alien worlds ranked

Scientists have outlined which moons and planets are most likely to harbour extra-terrestrial life.

Among the most habitable alien worlds were Saturn's moon Titan and the exoplanet Gliese 581g - thought to reside some 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra.

The international team devised two rating systems to assess the probability of hosting alien life.

They have published their results in the journal Astrobiology.

In their paper, the authors propose two different indices: an Earth Similarity Index (ESI) and a Planetary Habitability Index (PHI).

"The first question is whether Earth-like conditions can be found on other worlds, since we know empirically that those conditions could harbour life," said co-author Dr Dirk Schulze-Makuch from Washington State University, US.

"The second question is whether conditions exist on exoplanets that suggest the possibility of other forms of life, whether known to us or not."

As the name suggests, the ESI rates planets and moons on how Earth-like they are, taking into account such factors as size, density and distance from the parent star.

The PHI looks at a different set of factors, such as whether the world has a rocky or frozen surface, whether it has an atmosphere or a magnetic field.

It also considers the energy available to any organisms, either through light from a parent star or via a process called tidal flexing, in which gravitational interactions with another object can heat a planet or moon internally.

And finally, the PHI takes into account chemistry - such as whether organic compounds are present - and whether liquid solvents might be available for vital chemical reactions.

The maximum value for the Earth Similarity Index was 1.00 - for Earth, unsurprisingly. The highest scores beyond our solar system were for Gliese 581g (whose existence is doubted by some astronomers), with 0.89, and another exoplanet orbiting the same star - Gliese 581d, with an ESI value of 0.74.

The Gliese 581 system has been well studied by astronomers and comprises four - possibly five - planets orbiting a red dwarf star.

HD 69830 d, a Neptune-sized exoplanet orbiting a different star in the constellation Puppis, also scored highly (0.60). It is thought to lie in the so-called Goldilocks Zone - the region around its parent star where surface temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for life.

The highly rated worlds from our own solar system were Mars, with a value of 0.70, and Mercury, with 0.60.

The Planet Habitability Index produced different results. The top finisher here was Saturn's moon Titan, which scored 0.64, followed by Mars (0.59) and Jupiter's moon Europa (0.47), which is thought to host a susbsurface water ocean heated by tidal flexing.

The highest scoring exoplanets were, again Gliese 581g (0.49) and Gliese 581d (0.43).

In recent years, the search for potentially habitable planets outside our solar system has stepped up several gears. Nasa's Kepler space telescope, launched into orbit in 2009, has found more than 1,000 candidate planets so far.

Future telescopes may even be able to detect so-called biomarkers in the light emitted by distant planets, such as the presence of chlorophyll, a key pigment in plants.

From the BBC:

New state of matter seen on cheap

By Roland Pease BBC Radio Science Unit

Students and enthusiasts attending a recording for BBC Radio 4 have probably seen a new state of matter only recently discovered, an expert says.

The state of matter is a plasma (ionised gas) like those in nuclear fusion tests, but at higher densities.

And far from needing hundred-million-pound apparatus, the conditions can be achieved in a simple glass tube containing a routine liquid.

The professor behind the demonstration says it can be achieved for a mere £10.

The audience were attending a demonstration lecture by chemist Professor Andrea Sella being recorded at University College London for Spooklights on Radio 4.

During the lecture, Professor Sella demonstrated a phenomenon called sonoluminescence - flashes of light created by collapsing bubbles in a fluid. The flashes are extraordinarily faint, but in the darkened auditorium, those attending could see the evanescent sparks quite clearly.

As the name suggests, sonoluminescence is traditionally created by intense sound waves - rapid pressure oscillations - focused into a liquid. In the low-pressure regions of the sound waves, fluid is ripped apart to create tiny bubbles, the source of the light.

Professor Sella's demonstration is far simpler, involving a simple sealed glass tube part filled with phosphoric acid and traces of the inert gas xenon. Then all that's needed is a gentle shaking of the tube. As the acid hits the tube's bottom, there's a distinct metallic clink, as if a heavy ball bearing is striking the glass wall.

Hotter than the Sun

In fact, it's just a water-hammer effect, an impact that shatters the liquid column, creating a trail of bubbles that are clearly visible in daylight.

With the lights off, what's seen is a trail of blue sparks - the sonoluminescence.

"When the bubbles collapse," Professor Sella explains, "they generate incredibly high temperatures - 10 thousand degrees. That's twice the temperature of the surface of the Sun."

Seeking more information on what goes on inside that bubble, Professor Sella contacted a world authority on the effect, physicist Seth Putterman of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). And he learned far more than he bargained for.

Professor Putterman has also long been trying to understand the precise source of the light. Judging from its intensity and characteristics, the light demands a source containing billions upon billions of free electrons.

But although ten thousand degrees sounds extreme by human experience, it's nowhere near enough to strip the electrons from the molecules and atoms in the sonoluminescence.

Dense plasma

What Professor Putterman realised earlier this year is that under these peculiar circumstances a kind of electrical cascade can take place. If a few electrons escape the embrace of their home atoms, their field makes it easier for further electrons to escape, and so on until the entire bubble interior has become ionised.

"Not only is it creating a plasma," Professor Putterman explains, "we believe it's an new state of matter because it's an extremely dense plasma - the density is hundreds to ten thousand times the density they achieve inside nuclear fusion experiments."

According to Professor Putterman's experiments, the plasma goes through a phase transition - analogous the melting of ice to water. Which is why he feels justified in describing the plasma as an entirely new state.

He also confirmed that the conditions in Andrea Sella's "plink tube" demonstration are precisely those needed to create this new state.

Not that that means nuclear fusion is occurring inside the tubes. Claims of nuclear fusion inside fluid bubbles have been extremely controversial.

Professor Putterman is emphatic: "We have not yet succeeded - no-one has yet succeeded - in generating nuclear fusion inside these bubbles. However, we're looking around for that trick that could boost our parameters by a factor of 10, to get it to the region of fusion."

Professor Sella, meanwhile, is delighted that his simple demonstration should reveal to onlookers a state of matter that has only just been discovered.

"I can't wait to tell my nuclear physicist friends, that for a cost of around £10, I'm up in the region that they do for the cost of hundreds of millions of pounds. It's very exciting."

From the BBC:

Robotic prison wardens to patrol South Korean prison

Robot wardens are about to join the ranks of South Korea's prison service.

A jail in the eastern city of Pohang plans to run a month-long trial with three of the automatons in March.

The machines will monitor inmates for abnormal behaviour. Researchers say they will help reduce the workload for other guards.

South Korea aims to be a world leaders in robotics. Business leaders believe the field has the potential to become a major export industry.

The three 5ft-high (1.5m) robots involved in the prison trial have been developed by the Asian Forum for Corrections, a South Korean group of researchers who specialise in criminality and prison policies.

It said the robots move on four wheels and are equipped with cameras and other sensors that allow them to detect risky behaviour such as violence and suicide.

Prof Lee Baik-Chu, of Kyonggi University, who led the design process, said the robots would alert human guards if they discovered a problem.

"As we're almost done with creating its key operating system, we are now working on refining its details to make it look more friendly to inmates," the professor told the Yonhap news agency.

The one-month trial will cost 1bn won (£554,000) and is being sponsored by the South Korean government.

It is the latest in a series of investments made by the state to develop its robotics industry.

The country's Ministry of Knowledge Economy said in January that it had spent the equivalent of £415m on research in the sector between 2002 and 2010.

It said the aim was to compete with other countries, such as Japan, which are also exploring the industry's potential.

In October the ministry said the Korean robot market had recorded 75% growth over the past two years and was now worth about £1bn.

Robots everywhere

Success stories reported by the Korean media include Samsung Techwin's sale of a robotic surveillance system to Algeria and shipments of the humanoid Hubo robot to six universities in the US.

The South Korean defence company DoDAAM is also developing robotic gun turrets for export which can be programmed to open fire automatically.

Within the country English-speaking robotic teaching assistants are already being deployed in some schools to help children to practise their pronunciation.

The Joongang Daily newspaper reported in August that a company called Showbo had begun mass producing a robot that bowed to shop customers and told them about promotions on offer.

Other firms say they hope to start selling robots to help care for the elderly before the end of the decade, and personal assistant robots further down the line.

The government is also building a Robot Land theme park in the north-west city of Incheon to help highlight the country's success. Planners say they hope 2.8 million people will visit each year.

From the BBC:

Archaeologists make new Stonehenge 'sun worship' find

Two previously undiscovered pits have been found at Stonehenge which point to it once being used as a place of sun worship before the stones were erected.

The pits are positioned on celestial alignment at the site and may have contained stones, posts or fires to mark the rising and setting of the sun.

An international archaeological survey team found the pits as part of the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project.

The team is using geophysical imaging techniques to investigate the site.

The archaeologists from the University of Birmingham and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection in Vienna have been surveying the subsurface at the landmark since summer 2010.

Procession route

It is thought the pits, positioned within the Neolithic Cursus pathway, could have formed a procession route for ancient rituals celebrating the sun moving across the sky at the midsummer solstice.

A Cursus comprises two parallel linear ditches with banks either side closed off at the end.

Also discovered was a gap in the northern side of the Cursus, which may have been an entrance and exit point for processions taking place within the pathway.

These discoveries hint that the site was already being used as an ancient centre of ritual prior to the stones being erected more than 5,000 years ago, the team said.

Archaeologist and project leader at Birmingham University, Professor Vince Gaffney, said: "This is the first time we have seen anything quite like this at Stonehenge and it provides a more sophisticated insight into how rituals may have taken place within the Cursus and the wider landscape."

From the BBC:

Click here to see this article with a couple of video clips

The greatest light show on earth

By Ella Davies Reporter, BBC Nature

Could our planet be under attack from the unearthly forces that cast a mysterious glow across the poles, disrupting life as we know it?

The strange, beautiful coloured lights that circle the Earth's polar regions are a source of fascination for many.

But as the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, dance in the frozen skies over Alaska, scientists' trigger fingers are poised to launch rockets.

The researchers at the world's largest land-based rocket range hope to learn more about these storms and their impact on lives in the northern hemisphere.

The luminous sheets of light might look spectacular, but they are also visual indicators of geomagnetic storms in space that can interfere with satellites, power grids, navigation and communication systems. They can even corrode oil pipelines.

It is this disruption that the researchers are trying to help mitigate.

Rocket men

The Poker Flat Research Range's location in central Alaska makes it the perfect place to study, and film, the Aurora Borealis.

So filmmakers headed there to capture footage both of the natural phenomenon and the scientists' explosive experiments for the BBC series Frozen Planet.

They worked with a team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) Geophysical Institute - the only academic institution in the world with its own scientific rocket-launching facility.

Since 1969, hundreds of rockets have been launched from the base in an attempt to gain new perspectives on the interaction between the Earth's atmosphere and the space environment.

For almost 10 years, aurora expert Professor Dirk Lummerzheim's project has studied the Northern Lights.

His project combines sophisticated technology with what are in essence simple smoke signals.

"We wanted to study how the upper atmosphere gets set in motion by the aurora," he explains. "This is important because the wind at auroral altitude might affect satellite velocity.

"Moving the atmosphere around also changes its electrical properties, which would affect GPS and satellite communication, as well as short-wave long-distance radio communication."

On winter nights illuminated by green waves, the team fire "sounding rockets" 60 miles straight up into the light displays.

Taking their name from the nautical term "to sound", meaning to take measurements, these rockets do not blast into orbit but simply roar upwards before falling back down to Earth.

As the rockets arc through the atmosphere, they release a plume of smoke which scientists on the ground can track using sophisticated filming equipment.

Space weather

Studying the footage and using the stars as known points of reference, researchers can track how the smoke plumes descend, and use these patterns to calculate wind speeds in the upper atmosphere.

But what does this mean for people on the ground?

By taking measurements of atmospheric winds during light displays, scientists hope to get to grips with the geomagnetic activity responsible for them.

"By understanding how these geomagnetic storms are caused, we may eventually be able to predict them more reliably," says Prof Lummerzheim.

"If we can predict space weather, we can prepare for it and mitigate the dangers."

Frozen Planet is on Wednesdays on BBC One at 2100 GMT.

On the BBC news today:

Click here to see this article with audio clip and photos

How animals predict earthquakes

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC Nature

This, scientists say, could be the cause of bizarre earthquake-associated animal behaviour.

Researchers began to investigate these chemical effects after seeing a colony of toads abandon its pond in L'Aquila, Italy in 2009 - days before a quake.

They suggest that animal behaviour could be incorporated into earthquake forecasting.

The team's findings are published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. In this paper, they describe a mechanism whereby stressed rocks in the Earth's crust release charged particles that react with the groundwater.

Animals that live in or near groundwater are highly sensitive to any changes in its chemistry, so they might sense this days before the rocks finally "slip" and cause a quake.

The team, led by Friedemann Freund from NASA and Rachel Grant from the UK's Open University hope their hypothesis will inspire biologists and geologists to work together, to find out exactly how animals might help us recognise some of the elusive signs of an imminent earthquake.

Strange behaviour

The L'Aquila toads are not the first example of strange animal behaviour before a major seismic event. There have been reports throughout history of reptiles, amphibians and fish behaving in unusual ways just before an earthquake struck.

In 1975, in Haicheng, China, for example, many people spotted snakes emerging from their burrows a month before the city was hit by a large earthquake.

This was particularly odd, because it occurred during the winter. The snakes were in the middle of their annual hibernation, and with temperatures well below freezing, venturing outside was suicide for the cold-blooded reptiles.

But each of these cases - of waking reptiles, fleeing amphibians or deep-sea fish rising to the surface - has been an individual anecdote. And major earthquakes are so rare that the events surrounding them are almost impossible to study in detail.

This is where the case of the L'Aquila toads was different.

Toad exodus

Ms Grant, a biologist from the Open University, was monitoring the toad colony as part of her PhD project.

"It was very dramatic," she recalled. "It went from 96 toads to almost zero over three days."

"After that, I was contacted by NASA," she told BBC Nature.

Scientists at the US space agency had been studying the chemical changes that occur when rocks are under extreme stress. They wondered if these changes were linked to the mass exodus of the toads.

Their laboratory-based tests have now revealed, not only that these changes could be connected, but that the Earth's crust could directly affect the chemistry of the pond that the toads were living and breeding in at the time.

NASA geophysicist Friedemann Freund showed that, when rocks were under very high levels of stress - for example by the "gargantuan tectonic forces" just before an earthquake, they release charged particles.

These charged particles can flow out into the surrounding rocks, explained Dr Freund. And when they arrive at the Earth's surface they react with the air - converting air molecules into charged particles known as ions.

"Positive airborne ions are known in the medical community to cause headaches and nausea in humans and to increase the level of serotonin, a stress hormone, in the blood of animals," said Dr Freund. They can also react with water, turning it into hydrogen peroxide.

This chemical chain of events could affect the organic material dissolved in the pond water - turning harmless organic material into substances that are toxic to aquatic animals.

It's a complicated mechanism and the scientists stress that it needs to be tested thoroughly.

But, Dr Grant says this is the first convincing possible mechanism for a "pre-earthquake cue" that aquatic, semi-aquatic and burrowing animals might be able to sense and respond to.

"When you think of all of the many things that are happening to these rocks, it would be weird if the animals weren't affected in some way," she said.

Dr Freund said that the behaviour of animals could be one of a number of connected events that might forecast an earthquake.

"Once we understand how all of these signals are connected," he told BBC Nature, "if we see four of five signals all pointing in [the same] direction, we can say, 'ok, something is about to happen'."

From the BBC:

Climate deal pushed by poorest nations

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

The world's poorest countries have asked that talks on a new climate deal covering all nations begin immediately.

At the UN climate summit, the Least Developed Countries bloc and small island states tabled papers saying the deal should be finalised within a year.

Many of them are vulnerable to climate impacts such as drought or inundation.

The move puts the blocs on a collision course not only with many rich nations, but also with developing world partners such as China, India and Brazil.

These three developing world giants believe talks on a new mandate should not begin now because developed nations have yet to fulfil existing commitments.

But their smaller peers believe there is no time to lose.

"We put forward our mandate for a new legal agreement today to get things moving quickly in an effort to respond to the urgency of our challenge," said Selwin Hart, lead negotiator for Barbados, speaking for the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis).

"We can no longer afford to wait. We need to conclude the new deal in the next 12 months."

Water woes

The 48-country Least Developed Countries bloc (LDCs) includes drought-prone states such as Ethiopia and Mali, those with long flat coastal zones such as Bangladesh and Tanzania, and Himalayan mountain states including Bhutan and Nepal for whom melting glaciers pose serious dangers.

The 39-strong Aosis includes a plethora of Pacific and Caribbean islands, some of which are very low-lying and vulnerable to sea level rise.

The draft mandate that the LDCs launched into the current UN summit in Durban, South Africa, says that talks "shall begin immediately after 1 January 2012 and shall conclude... by COP18 (next year's summit)".

"All Parties must take urgent action to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and set a long term goal so as to hold the increase in global average temperature below 1.5C above pre-industrial levels and stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere below 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent (350ppm CO2e)," it continues.

The 1.5C goal is tougher than the 2C goal originally tabled by the European Union and subsequently adopted at last year's UN conference in Mexico.

But 1.5C is supported by more than half of the world's governments, including members of the LDCs and Aosis.

However, stabilising at 350ppm CO2e is a very demanding target, given that the current concentration is more than 450ppm.

The LDC draft mandate continues: "The negotiations shall also be guided by the fact that in order to achieve the long term goal, global emissions should peak by no later than 2015 and will need to be reduced by at least 85% below 1990 levels by 2050."

Measures stemming from the new mandate should "operate alongside" emission cuts made under the Kyoto Protocol.

The Aosis draft is much shorter but makes the same essential point - that negotiators should "develop and finalise a Protocol or other legally binding and ratifiable instrument(s) under the Convention to be presented for adoption by the COP at its 18th session".

Degrees of separation

Brazil and India have argued that no new process should begin before 2015; and China is also known to be resistant.

Along with Canada, the US, Japan and Russia, they have also argued that the current pledges on curbing emissions, which most countries tabled around the time of the Copenhagen summit two years ago and which run until 2020, should not be adjusted before that date.

But the UNFCCC is obliged to review those pledges in 2015; and the LDCs believe the 1.5C target will be very difficult if not impossible to achieve without strengthening the existing pledges.

In the past, the developing world has resisted endorsing a global target for emissions in 2050, as it implies that developing countries will have to accept binding cuts.

The LDCs and Aosis are used to finding themselves in the opposite corner to the US and other developed nations.

But going up against the might of fellow developing countries is a relatively new experience, and has been taken only because they did not see their interests as compatible with the waiting strategy of India, Brazil and China.

"Delaying a new agreement or deeper targets until 2020, as some of the big emitters have proposed, is not an option," Mr Hart told BBC News.

"It is quite frankly a dereliction of our collective responsibility to present and future generations."

The proposals are likely to gain support from the EU and some Latin American nations.

From the BBC:

Names proposed for new elements

Scientists have put forward their suggested names for the newest additions to the Periodic Table.

If the names are accepted, element 114 will become Flerovium (Fl) in honour of the physicist Georgiy Flerov.

While element 116 will become Livermorium (Lv), after the Californian laboratory where it was discovered.

The table's governing body will officially endorse the names in five month's time, 10 years after the elements were discovered.

The newest elements were among a handful of elements put forward for inclusion in the table in recent years.

They were accredited in June this year after a three year review by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP).

The other putative heavy elements, 113, 115, and 118, are still under review.

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), in collaboration with a team at the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions in Dubna, Russia, discovered the newest additions to the periodic table by smashing calcium ions into the element curium to create element 116, which quickly decays to element 114.

The teams also created element 114 separately by replacing curium with a plutonium target.

IUPAC will officially accept the proposed names after giving the public time to comment on the discoverers' choice.

From the BBC:

Silicon rival MoS2 promises small, low-energy chips

The first computer chip made out of a substance described as a "promising" alternative to silicon has been tested by researchers.

The Switzerland-based team used molybdenite (MoS2) - a dark-coloured, naturally occurring mineral.

The group said the substance could be used in thinner layers than silicon, which is currently the most commonly used component in electronics.

It said MoS2 could make smaller, more flexible chips that used less energy.

The substance is currently used as an ingredient in engine lubricants, ski waxes and as a strengthening agent for plastics.

Prof Andras Kis, the director of the Laboratory of Nanoscale Electronics and Structures (LANES) in Lausanne, published details of the research in the latest edition of the ACS Nano journal.

He said the team chose to experiment with this semiconductor, rather than another material, in part because it was easily available.

"There is something like 19 million metric tonnes around," Prof Kis told the BBC.

"You can just go on some websites on the internet and buy a 1cm by 1cm crystal for around $100 [£64]."

Surfaces oxidise

To obtain a thin layer of the material to work with, Prof Kis's team put a strip of sticky plastic over the crystal, peeled it off and then attached the sliver to a support. The plastic was then peeled off to leave the very thin layer of MoS2 exposed.

Using this, the team built a prototype microchip circuit to which they attached up to six serial transistors allowing them to carry out simple logic operations.

Although the integrated circuit was basic, Prof Kis said it proved that more complex designs would be possible on thinner chips than could be produced with silicon.

"The problem with silicon is that you cannot make very thin things from it because it is very reactive," he said.

"The surface likes to oxidise - to bind with oxygen and hydrogen - and that makes its electrical properties degrade when you want to make a very thin film."

As a result the thinnest usable layers of silicon used in computer chips have been around two nanometres thick. MoS2, by contrast, can be used in layers just three atoms thick, allowing chips to be made at least three times smaller.

Stiff as steel

A key advantage of having a thinner material is that the transistors can also be shrunk in size.

"If you have a transistor that is very thin it will also automatically dissipate less power - so it spends less power. So in a nutshell it allows you to make electronics that spend less electrical energy," Prof Kis said.

MoS2 also has the advantage that it is as stiff as stainless steel, but is also capable of being flexible.

"It can be bent to large angles and can be stretched a lot," said Prof Kis.

"If you take a sheet of molybdenite you can stretch it so that it increases its length by 10% - that is a lot in this context.

"If you did the same with silicon it would break like glass."

The team said the material might be suitable for flexible electronics that could be rolled into tubes, attached to the skin or used to make mobile phones that curved themselves to fit the owner's face.

Low temperatures

MoS2 faces a challenge from graphene, another flexible semiconductor, as a potential replacement for silicon.

But the Swiss team believe their material has a key advantage - it can amplify electronic signals at room temperature, while graphene must be cooled to 70 Kelvin - cold enough for nitrogen to turn into liquid.

"If you look at the circuits in computers, for example, you have millions of transistors connected in series doing some kind of calculation," said Prof Kis.

"The important thing is that the signal that goes into the processor doesn't get reduced as a consequence of the operation, because then you'd lose your electrical signal in the chip.

"So it has to be constantly amplified. Silicon can do this and so can molybdenite, but graphene can only do it at very low temperatures."

Despite MoS2's potential, the researchers said it would be at least 10 to 20 years before it would be likely to enter commercial use.

In the meantime the group said it planned to explore whether it could make the mineral more conductive and would also try to find a less labour-intensive way of producing thin layers of the substance.

From the BBC:

IBM scientists unveil Racetrack memory chip prototype

Details of the first real-world test of a new memory chip technology have been revealed by IBM scientists.

The demonstration involved Racetrack memory - a system which stores information as magnetic patterns on tiny wires.

IBM said the technology promised faster data access speeds than were possible using hard drives or flash disks.

However it faces a challenge from other next-generation memory technologies being explored by other companies.

Speedy

The team - based in New York, California and Taiwan - has been working on the process since 2008.

The prototype chip consists of 256 Racetrack cells.

Each cell consisted of a single magnetic nanowire, 60-240 nanometres wide and 15-20 nanometres thick. A nanometre is a billionth of a metre.

Electric pulses are applied to the wires creating "domain walls" with "regions" between them.

These regions pass over a magnetic read/write head which faces them in one direction or another, representing the 0s and 1s of computer data.

The small magnetic regions can be "raced" at speed along the wires - giving the technique its name.

Advocates of Racetrack claim it could potentially read and write data hundreds of thousands of times faster than is possible on commercial hard disks.

That would put access speeds at roughly the rate offered by DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) chips. These are already used in current PCs to run programs, but "forget" data as soon as the computers' power supplies are switched off.

"This breakthrough could lead to a new type of data-centric computing that allows massive amounts of stored information to be accessed in less than a billionth of a second," said a statement from IBM.

Long-lasting

The scientists noted that the circuitry involved was created using IBM's standard microchip-making technologies, highlighting its potential as a realistic replacement to existing memory storage techniques.

Racetrack may also prove more durable. IBM aims to create a device that can be wiped and rewritten millions of times. By contrast many flash memory drives can become unreliable after any single bit has endured about 100,000 writes.

However, the researchers acknowledge that more work needs to be done to optimise their process and improve "cell operation repeatability".

That means there is still time for Samsung, Hewlett Packard, Micron Technologies and other IBM researchers to complete work on alternative memory storage techniques that they hope will become future standards.

More details of the Racetrack technology are due to be discussed at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' annual International Electron Devices meeting in Washington DC on Wednesday.

From the BBC:

Russian scientists to clone woolly mammoth

Scientists from Russia and Japan are undertaking a Jurassic Park-style experiment to bring the woolly mammoth out of extinction.

The scientists claim that a thigh bone found in August contains remarkably well-preserved marrow cells, which could form the starting point of the experiment.

The team claim that the cloning could be complete within the next five years.

But others have cast doubt on whether such a thing is possible.

Mother cow?

The team, from the Siberian mammoth museum and Japan's Kinki University, said that they planned to extract a nucleus from the animal's bone marrow and insert it into the egg of an African elephant.

Similar procedures have been done before with mixed results.

In 2009 it was reported that the recently extinct Pyrenean ibex was brought back to life briefly using 10-year-old DNA from the animal's skin. The cloned ibex died within minutes of being born, due to breathing difficulties.

The Roslin Institute, famous for cloning Dolly the sheep, no longer conducts cloning work but has published some thoughts on the possibilities of bringing extinct species back to life.

It said it was extremely unlikely such an experiment would be successful, especially using an elephant surrogate.

"First, a suitable surrogate mother animal is required. For the mammoth this would need to be a cow (as best biological fit) but even here the size difference may preclude gestation to term," it said.

The success rate for such an experiment would be in the range of 1-5%, it said.

The second issue would be the need for viable whole cells.

"If there are intact cells in this tissue they have been 'stored' frozen. However, if we think back to what actually happened to the animal - it died, even if from the cold, the cells in the body would have taken some time to freeze. This time lag would allow for breakdown of the cells, which normally happens when any animal dies. Then the carcass would freeze. So it is unlikely that the cells would be viable," it said.

Assuming that viable cells are found it becomes a numbers game, it went on.

"Let's say that one in a thousand cells were nevertheless viable, practical issues come into play. Given that we have an efficiency of 1% cloning for livestock species and if only one in a thousand cells are viable then around 100,000 cells would need to be transferred," it said.

Hybrid

Charles Foster, a fellow at Green Templeton College, Oxford, seemed more optimistic.

"The idea of mammoth cloning isn't completely ridiculous.

"How the resultant embryos would fare beyond the stage of a few cells is more or less unknown," he said.

While most of the genetic coding of the embryo would come from the mammoth, some would come from the elephant ovum.

"We really don't know what the contribution of that cytoplasmic material is, or how it would interact with 'alien' DNA," he said.

It would however mean that, even if successful, the clone would be a hybrid rather than a pure mammoth.

From the BBC:

Mars rover Opportunity finds 'most powerful' water clue

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News, San Francisco

Nasa's Mars rover Opportunity has found slivers of a bright material that looks very much like it is gypsum (calcium sulphate).

If confirmed, it would be the most unambiguous signal of water activity yet found on Mars by this mission, which manages to keep on rolling.

Creaking and arthritic it may be, but after nearly eight years, the rover is still delivering remarkable science.

Lead scientist Steve Squyres said the find was "so cool".

"To me, this is the single most powerful piece of evidence for liquid water at Mars that has been discovered by the Opportunity rover," the Cornell University researcher told journalists.

"We have found sulphates before. Those sulphates were formed somewhere - we don't know where.

"They've been moved around by the wind, they've been mixed in with other materials - it's a big, jumbled-up, fascinating mess.

"This stuff formed right here. There was a fracture in the rock, water flowed through it, gypsum was precipitated from the water. End of story. There's no ambiguity."

Prof Squyres was giving an update on the rover mission here at the 2011 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, the largest annual gathering of Earth and planetary scientists.

Opportunity was put on the Red Planet back on 25 January, 2004, with the expectation that it would complete at least three months of operations.

But the robot has exceeded everyone's expectations and continues to operate despite some worn mechanisms and instrument glitches.

Since its landing on the Meridiani plain just south of Mars' equator, the robot has trundled more than 30km to the rim of a huge crater known as Endeavour.

Acid test

Opportunity is currently investigating a raised piece of ground referred to as Cape York where it has found two exciting new rocks.

Opportunity has examined the deposit using its Microscopic Imager, its Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer and the multiple filters of its mast camera.

All the indications are that this vein is relatively pure calcium sulphate, although some further analysis will be required to put all doubts to bed.

Like all the interesting deposits examined by Opportunity, the vein has also been given a name. The science team has called this one "Homestake".

The other new rock of note found by Opportunity is nicknamed "Tisdale". It has a zinc concentration higher than anything previously seen by Opportunity.

The concentration is so high in fact that it approaches levels seen in commercial zinc ores here on Earth.

Invariably, such deposits are the result of hydrothermal activity - hot water flowing through rocks and laying down zinc-rich minerals.

The team cannot exclude the possibility just yet that the zinc may simply be a thin exterior coating. Future studies will have to establish the zinc goes right through Tisdale or similar rocks in the area. If that can be done, it would put the hydrothermal theory on a firmer footing.

All of Opportunity's findings are helping to fill in a story about a wetter, warmer Mars that existed billions of years ago.

As always, such discoveries raise absorbing new questions about the possibility that simple lifeforms could have existed during these ancient times. In this respect, the gypsum discovery makes the potential for habitability more likely.

"The gypsum is intriguing because it allows the possibility - although it does not require it - that the water was not as acid as some of the other waters that we've seen evidence for," Prof Squyres told BBC News.

"The other waters... were probably very acidic - pH of five, four, three. Gypsum doesn't require that, and so this may hint at a kinder, gentler chemistry of the water for life."

Opportunity's operations will slow in the coming months as it conserves energy to make it through a fifth Martian winter. During winter, the amount of sunlight reaching its solar panels is reduced, and high-energy activities like driving are kept to a minimum.

It currently costs Nasa about $12m a year to run the mission. Given the rover's current status and performance, the space agency could be continuing to spend such money for a few more years yet.

Only two other wheeled space vehicles have travelled further than Opportunity. The Lunokhod 2 rover that the Soviets sent to the Moon in 1973 covered 37km, and the American "Lunar buggy" deployed with Apollo 17 covered 36km.

But Opportunity, which has completed 34km, should overtake both.

"It's the only horse competing in this particular derby," observed rover project scientist Bruce Banerdt.

From the BBC:

Nanoparticle hollowing method promises medical advances

By Leo Kelion Technology reporter

A process to "carve" highly complicated shapes into nanoparticles has been unveiled by a team of researchers.

It involves a chemical process which hollows out the particles into shapes such as double-walled boxes and multi-chambered tubes.

The researchers said this would aid the creation of more complex nano-objects.

They said these could ultimately be used to revolutionise medical tests and aid drugs treatments.

Ion attack

The research was carried out by the Catalan Institute of Nanotechnology in Bellaterra, Spain and is published in the latest issue of Science.

To deliver their results the scientists refined a series of existing corrosion techniques including the "galvanic effect".

This involved treating tiny silver cubes with cationic gold - a type of gold that had had some electrons removed from its atoms, turning it into an ion.

When brought together at room temperature the cationic gold "attacked" the silver, stealing its electrons.

The loss of the electrons turned the affected silver atoms into ions which dissolved into a provided solution.

Meanwhile, by gaining electrons the cationic gold was transformed into "normal" metallic gold which was then deposited onto the top of the silver cube.

"This protects the silver - and as the cube's surface becomes covered, the reaction becomes more aggressive in other parts of the cube that have not been coated," said Prof Victor Puntes, the team's principal researcher.

"In the end you end up with a single hole on the surface of the silver which is not covered by gold where the reaction advances and then enters the cube from inside."

The professor said this prompted a second process known as the Kirkendall effect where silver atoms from inside the cube started "migrating" to the gold outside "offering themselves up" thus creating a void inside the cube.

"We can control the process to make different holes resulting in different structures," Prof Puntes added.

Although both the galvanic effect and the Kirkendall have been used for years, the scientists said that previous efforts to combine them in this way had failed because the galvanic effect was too aggressive.

They said their innovation was to introduce a range of factors which made the silver more resistant, the cationic gold less aggressive and dissolved by-products of the process which would have otherwise interfered with the structure's development.

Nano-device drugs

Although the process has only just been outlined, the scientists are excited by its potential uses for the medical industry.

They said particles could be hollowed out so that they absorbed different energy wavelengths, helping to create body scanners that would be more accurate than current magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) equipment.

The researchers added that the technique could also aid drug delivery.

"It's a wonderful molecular suitcase," said Prof Puntes.

"You can have different sizes of cavity meaning that different-sized molecules enter different rooms of a structure. So you can have complex and controlled relief on the nanoscale - like cell dosing - dosing with a mixture of drugs that would otherwise be difficult to carry out."

Other examples given included the creation of components for nanoscale robots and new techniques to remove pollution from the environment.

However, the professor acknowledged that at this early stage he could only guess at the eventual uses such nanomaterials would have.

"When people first invented plastic they didn't know what to do with it, we knew electricity was around for over a thousand years before we learned how to do something useful with it," Prof Puntes said.

"This creates different materials so they will probably have lots of different properties."

What are the chances of that happening?

From the BBC:

What are the chances of six double-yolkers?

By Wesley Stephenson BBC Radio 4, More or Less

What are the chances of finding half-a-dozen double-yolk eggs in a single box?

Last Sunday in a kitchen in suburban West London, what looked like a statistical miracle took place.

In the course of making profiteroles, two friends cracked four eggs one-by-one into a mixing bowl. The first was a double-yolker. The second, was also a double-yolker. With a sense of anticipation they crack the third - again a double yolker. Surely not the fourth as well? As they cracked the final egg, another double-yolker fell into the mixing bowl.

What are the chances of that? Huge, one might suspect.

This actually happened to Jen Clarke, a colleague of the More or Less Team on Radio 4, and her friend Lynsey.

According to the British Egg Information Service, one in every thousand eggs on average is a double-yolker. They're not sure how they've come to this figure but you would like to think that the British Egg Information Service was able to supply useful information about British Eggs, so let's give them the benefit of the doubt.

So, if the probability of finding an egg with two yolks is 1/1000 - then to find the likelihood of discovering four in a row you simply multiply the probabilities together four times. One thousand to the power of four brings us to the grand total of one trillion - that's the new-school US-style trillion with 12 zeroes.

If true that would mean the event that occurred in Jen's kitchen was a trillion-to-one event. But is it true? No is the short answer.

It's not as simple as that. What you have to consider is the fact that these eggs may be likely to come in clusters.

Here we need to turn to an expert. Richard Kempsey is agriculture director at Stonegate, which supplies eggs to supermarkets. He says double-yolked eggs almost always come from young hens about 20-to-28 weeks old.

"In reality it gets its mechanics just slightly wrong. You get a young bird and it comes to lay its first egg and it releases more than one egg yolk. It forms a shell around the egg and out pops a rather large egg with two egg yolks in it."

The chances of getting a double-yolk from one of these hens is much higher. One in every 100 eggs from these birds are double-yolk.

We've also learned from our research that the eggs in a box are very likely to come from the same flock, and flocks are usually around the same age. On that basis we can say that while chance of finding one double-yolk egg may be 1/1000, the chance of finding a second is considerably higher - more like 1/100.

And the same goes for the third and fourth eggs. So taking all that into account lets do the sum 1000 x 100 x 100 x 100 - that equals one billion - so the probability of finding four eggs in a row in a single box is one in a billion.

A one-in-a-billion event is still pretty big, although compared to a one-in-a-trillion chance the difference is huge. A trillion is 1000 bigger than a billion and amounts to the difference between something happening once a week compared with once every 20 years.

So the event that occurred in Jen's kitchen was a billion-to-one event? Probably not. There's another big factor we need to consider - the size of the eggs. Double-yolk eggs are far more likely to be large. Yet the eggs that young birds lay are normally small.

Any large eggs that are laid would be picked out and boxed together. This means if you find a large double-yolk egg - and you know the other eggs in the box are from the same young flock - then the chance that the other eggs are also double-yolkers becomes a lot more likely. In the most extreme case, you'd find that if the first egg is a double-yolker, all the eggs are double-yolkers.

So bearing all this in mind what happened when we went back to the last two eggs in Jen's box? Well as if to prove us right it turned out egg five and egg six were both double-yolkers.

On our initial naive reading this would be a one-in-a-quintillion double-yolk streak. But as with most things there's actually a more obvious explanation

From the BBC:

Student phishing scam: Two men remanded over fraud

Two men have been charged over a £1m email scam which took money from the bank accounts of hundreds of students.

Police said students on government loans were sent phishing emails urging them to provide their banking details.

Damola Olatunji, 26, of Hamsterley Avenue, Manchester, and Amos Mwangi, 25, of Rochdale Way, Deptford, London, face a charge of conspiracy to defraud.

They were remanded in custody until 17 February by Westminster Magistrates' Court, central London.

Their next appearance is due to be at Southwark Crown Court in south-east London.

Mr Olatunji is also charged with possession of an article for use in fraud.

Further arrests

Five other people arrested in the investigation have been bailed until March pending further inquiries.

They are a 25-year-old woman arrested in Manchester, a 49-year-old woman and a 31-year-old man held in Stratford, north-east London.

Two men, aged 38 and 35, were also detained in Bolton, Greater Manchester.

They were all arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and money-laundering offences and bailed until March.

The Metropolitan Police's e-crime unit was first alerted to the scam in August and worked with the Student Loans Company, the banking industry and internet service providers during its investigation.

Phishing is the sending of a legitimate-looking email in an attempt to gather personal and financial information from recipients.

From the BBC:

Rare gene links vitamin D and multiple sclerosis

A rare genetic variant which causes reduced levels of vitamin D appears to be directly linked to multiple sclerosis, says an Oxford University study.

UK and Canadian scientists identified the mutated gene in 35 parents of a child with MS and, in each case, the child inherited it.

Researchers say this adds weight to suggestions of a link between vitamin D deficiency and MS.

The study is in Annals of Neurology.

Multiple sclerosis is an inflammatory disease of the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord).

Although the cause of MS is not yet conclusively known, both genetic and environmental factors and their interactions are known to be important.

Oxford University researchers, along with Canadian colleagues at the University of Ottawa, University of British Columbia and McGill University, set out to look for rare genetic changes that could explain strong clustering of MS cases in some families in an existing Canadian study.

They sequenced all the gene-coding regions in the genomes of 43 individuals selected from families with four or more members with MS.

The team compared the DNA changes they found against existing databases, and identified a change in the gene CYP27B1 as being important.

When people inherit two copies of this gene they develop a genetic form of rickets - a disease caused by vitamin D deficiency.

Just one copy of the mutated CYP27B1 gene affects a key enzyme which leads people with it to have lower levels of vitamin D.

Overwhelming odds

The researchers then looked for the rare gene variant in over 3,000 families of unaffected parents with a child with MS.

They found 35 parents who carried one copy of this variant along with one normal copy.

In every one of these 35 cases, the child with MS had inherited the mutated version of the gene.

The likelihood of this gene's transmission being unconnected to the MS is billions to one against, say the researchers.

Prof George Ebers, lead study author at Oxford University, says the odds are overwhelming.

"All 35 children inheriting the variant is like flipping a coin 35 times and getting 35 heads, entailing odds of 32 billion to one against."

He added: "This type of finding has not been seen in any complex disease. The uniform transmission of a variant to offspring with MS is without precedent but there will have been interaction with other factors."

Prof Ebers believes that this new evidence adds to previous observational studies which have suggested that sunshine levels around the globe - the body needs sunshine to generate vitamin D - are linked to MS.

He maintained that there was now enough evidence to carry out large-scale studies of vitamin D supplements for preventing multiple sclerosis.

"It would be important particularly in countries like Scotland and the rest of the UK where sunshine levels are low for large parts of the year. Scotland has the greatest incidence of multiple sclerosis of any country in the world."

Dr Doug Brown, head of biomedical research at the MS Society, called it an important development.

"This shines more light on the potential role of vitamin D deficiency on increasing the risk of developing MS.

"This research is gathering momentum and will be the subject of discussion at an international expert meeting in the USA this month, the outcomes of which will shape future research that will give us the answers we so desperately need about the potential risks and benefit of vitamin D supplementation."

Paul Comer, from the charity MS Trust, said the research strengthened the case for vitamin D being one potential contributory cause of MS.

"Current opinion suggests that a combination of genetic predisposition, environmental factors such as exposure to sunlight and possibly some sort of trigger, such as a viral infection, interact in some way to start the development of MS.

"We welcome any research that clarifies the interplay between these factors. This is another step towards finding ways to reduce the risk of developing MS, but it is likely to be some years yet before we can gauge the significance of vitamin D deficiency to MS."

From the BBC:

Missing Doctor Who episodes discovered

By Shaun Ley Presenter, BBC Radio 4

Doctor Who fans are getting a fresh opportunity to travel back in time with the discovery of two missing episodes from the long-running BBC series.

The 1965 and 1967 episodes star William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, the first two actors to play The Doctor.

They are among more than 100 instalments which were not retained by the BBC.

The announcement was made on Sunday at Missing Believed Wiped, an event held at the British Film Institute (BFI).

The BFI, based in London, has been working with broadcasters and film collectors to recover missing recordings of many different television series.

Television programmes only began to be routinely recorded in the late 1950s. Previously, they were broadcast live.

Even when it became possible to make recordings, video tape was so expensive that most transmission tapes were wiped, so they could be re-used.

In the 1970s, the BBC commissioned a report by the historian Lord Briggs. His findings prompted efforts to improve the archiving of television programmes.

Although original transmission tapes did not survive, programmes were transferred on to film for broadcasters abroad and it is these prints that the BFI sometimes recover.

Doctor Who was sold all over the world in the 1960s.

The latest two episodes to be found were in the private collection of a former TV engineer, Terry Burnett, who bought them at a school fete in Hampshire in the 1980s.

Mr Burnett had no idea the BBC did not have the recordings - it was only when he mentioned them casually in conversation to Ralph Montagu, head of heritage at Radio Times, that their significance was recognised.

Airlock is the third episode of a four-part story called Galaxy Four, transmitted in the autumn of 1965.

Hartnell is accompanied by Peter Purves, later a presenter on the children's series Blue Peter, and Maureen O'Brien, now better known as a novelist.

The plot involves the desperate attempts by the Drahvins, a race of cloned females, to escape a planet which is about to explode. The story also marks the only appearance in the series of tiny robots known as the Chumblies.

The other re-discovered episode is the second part of The Underwater Menace, from early 1967.

It sees a mad scientist attempting to restore Atlantis by draining the ocean into the Earth's core.

Patrick Troughton, in only his third appearance as The Doctor, was apparently unimpressed with the production.

In a recent biography, his son Michael says he argued with the director Julia Smith - who went on to become the original producer of EastEnders - complaining bitterly about the "ridiculous costumes and make-up of the fish people".

Innes Lloyd, who produced The Underwater Menace later admitted, "it did look like something from a '50s American 'B' movie".

The find makes only a modest dent in the number of missing episodes, with 106 instalments broadcast between 1964 and 1969 still being sought.

Among other items recovered and shown at Sunday's event were Emergency Ward 9, a play by Dennis Potter, and a comedy sketch featuring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

From the BBC:

MIT's trillion frames per second light-tracking camera

A camera capable of visualising the movement of light has been unveiled by a team of scientists in the US.

The equipment captures images at a rate of roughly a trillion frames per second - or about 40 billion times faster than a UK television camera.

Direct recording of light is impossible at that speed, so the camera takes millions of repeated scans to recreate each image.

The team said the technique could be used to understand ultrafast processes.

The process has been dubbed femto-photography and has been detailed on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab's website.

"There's nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera," said Andrea Velten, one of the researchers involved in the project.

Scan lines

To create the technique, the scientists adapted a "streak tube" - equipment used to take data readings from light pulses.

It works in a similar fashion to the way pictures are created on traditional television cathode ray tubes, scanning one thin horizontal line at a time.

Since each image is only equivalent to one scan line on the television set, many hundred scans had to be taken to create a single frame.

The scientists did this by repeating each shot, angling the camera's view with mirrors to record a different scan line of the object.

As a result, the technique is only suitable for capturing an event that can be recreated exactly the same way multiple times.

Laser illumination

To create a moving picture, a laser pulse was used to illuminate the scene - flashing briefly once every 13 billionth of a second.

These pulses triggered the streak tube, which captured the light that returned from the scene.

The laser and the camera were carefully synchronised to ensure each pulse was identical. When the scan lines were stitched together, they appeared to have been taken at the same time.

It took about an hour to take enough shots to make a final video representing a fraction of a second of real time, leading one member of the team to dub the equipment "the world's slowest fastest camera".

Light analysis

Software was then used to turn all the images into movies lasting roughly 480 frames.

One showed a pulse of light, less than a millimetre long, travelling through a soft drink bottle at a rate of half a millimetre per frame.

Another showed different wavelengths of light rippling over the surface of a tomato and the table it was sitting on.

In addition to revealing new ways of seeing the world, the MIT scientists say the process could have some practical uses.

"Applications include industrial imaging to analyse faults and material properties, scientific imaging for understanding ultrafast processes and medical imaging to reconstruct sub-surface elements, ie 'ultrasound with light,'" they say on their website.

From the BBC:

Royal wedding tops Google's Zeitgeist 2011 search list

In 2011, Britons were keen to find out how to wallpaper and all about the latest fitness craze Zumba.

That's according to Google's annual Zeitgeist - a look back at the most popular search terms of the year.

The royal wedding topped the list of "fastest rising" search terms, with Apple's yet-to-be-released iPhone 5 coming in second place.

The most intriguing list was the "what is" top 10, with a diverse set of queries including "what is scampi".

Nephrops

Interest in scampi has gone up by over 80% over the year but David Jarrad, director of the Shellfish Association of Great Britain, is at a loss to say why.

"I'm quite surprised. It has been a traditional pub grub for many decades and it remains the UK's most popular and valuable shellfish by a long way," he said.

But he could not explain why interest had spiked so much this year.

He could, however, offer an explanation of what scampi is for those who have not yet Googled it.

"Scampi is the tail of a Nephrops, also known as a Dublin Bay prawn or Norwegian lobster," he said.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg will be heartened to know that the British public, despite voting against AV (Alternative Vote) in a referendum, did want to know more about it. It topped the "what is" list.

Complex subjects

Revealing themselves to be a diligent lot, Britons also sought out tips on how to revise. It topped the "how to" list, followed by another teenage obsession - how to snog.

"As usual, search is helping people satisfy their appetite for celebrity pictures and salacious gossip - and this year is no different, with Kim Kardashian and Rebecca Black coming to the fore and Ricky Gervais the only man gatecrashing the female-dominated top 10 celebs list," said a Google spokesman.

"But what we're also seeing is that people are turning to Google to understand complex subjects like the alternative vote system and searching for tips and tricks on how best to revise for exams," he added.

Singer Adele made it into two top 10s - number two on the fastest-rising people list, just above the less obvious pop star Rebecca Black, whose debut single catapulted her into the limelight when it was released on YouTube to universal derision.

She also came seventh in "fastest-rising" searches, just below Ryan Dunn - the star of TV show Jackass who died in a car crash this year.

Illustrating the British obsession with the latest gadgets and a love of a bargain, both the iPad 2 and Groupon also featuring in the "fastest-rising" list.

There was interest in cookies, presumably the coding kind, possibly based on new guidelines about how websites can use them.

Copyright also featured, which will please the content industry, keen to educate people that downloading content free is illegal.

From the BBC:

Could it actually rain apples?

By Caroline McClatchey BBC News Magazine

There are reports that a deluge of apples fell from the sky in Coventry, battering car bonnets and littering people's gardens. But could it actually rain apples?

Everyone has heard the expression it's raining cats and dogs. But in Coundon in Coventry the allegation is that it rained apples.

Drivers say scores of small green ones brought traffic to a standstill on the B4098, while a resident told the Daily Mail he opened his front door to find his garden full of dented apples.

There is no other evidence that it did actually "rain apples", but it would not be the first time that strange items have dropped from the sky.

Many of the biblical-sounding stories involve fish and frogs. One of the earliest accounts of frog and fish storms was given by the Roman writer Pliny in his Natural History written during the 1st Century AD.

One story from 1859 tells of two showers at 10-minute intervals covering a part of Aberdare in live minnow and smooth-tailed sticklebacks.

Frog falls were recorded in Llanddewi, Powys, in 1996 and two years later in Croydon, south London. In 2000, hundreds of dead silver sprats fell out of the sky during a rainstorm in the seaside resort of Great Yarmouth.

There have also been maggot downpours - in Acapulco in 1967 and during a yachting event at the 1976 Olympic Games.

Such freak events have been attributed to a rare but not uncommon weather phenomenon. Given strong enough winds, in thunderstorms for example, small whirlwinds and mini-tornadoes may form.

If the storm brews out at sea, or crosses a river, these can scoop up water and small fish swimming close to the surface. Sooner or later, the clouds carrying them will open and drop their strange cargo.

Cars and houses have been swept up by tornadoes, so apples are well within the realms of possibility, says Dr Lisa Jardine-Wright, a physicist at the Cavendish Laboratory, based at Cambridge University.

"A tornado which has swept through an orchard will be strong enough to 'suck up' small objects like a vacuum [cleaner]. These small objects would then be deposited back to earth as 'rain' when the whirlwind loses its energy."

There are other theories surrounding the apples, such as the notion that they could have fallen from a plane.

But why would anyone do that? Falling off the back of a lorry would be a more plausible explanation.

Scientists would need to analyse the state of the apples and assess the damage in order to try to determine the source, says Dr Jardine-Wright.

"By comparing this damage with a series of experiments, we would be able to determine how much energy and momentum the apples had when they collided.

"However, as objects fall they eventually reach a maximum (terminal) velocity after which they accelerate no more - an apple falling from more than about 20m has reached this maximum velocity so broadly speaking any apple falling from above this height would cause approximately the same amount of damage.

"Therefore without further information, for example weather conditions, direction of fall etc. it is difficult to scientifically distinguish their source."

At the time the apples supposedly fell from the sky, it was pretty calm over Coventry, according to the BBC Weather Centre. The Met Office says there were no reports of tornadoes in the area.

Dr Curtis Wood, a meteorologist from the University of Reading, says that while the UK often tops world rankings in terms of the number of tornadoes per square kilometre - in total around 10 to 50 tornadoes per year - they tend not to be very strong.

If there had been a tornado in Coventry, he says, it would have needed to have found a box of apples or an orchard within a few hundred metres of where the apples were found.

"The tornadoes don't get very strong and they are not going to transport items very far."

It is not the first apple shower to be reported in the UK, according to Paul Sieveking, co-editor of the Fortean Times, a magazine dedicated to the world of strange phenomena.

In November 1984, 300 apples - of the Bramley and Cox varieties to be precise - landed in a back garden in Accrington, Lancashire.

"The couple woke up to a thunderous noise and thought it was hail. The apples kept on falling for an hour, so it could not have been a plane."

Reluctant to guess the source of the Coventry apples, Sieveking says he is tolerant of uncertainty and human beings love a good puzzle.

From the BBC:

Internet Explorer: Microsoft plans 'silent' updates

From January, Internet Explorer (IE) users will be automatically updated to the latest version of the browser.

Microsoft said it was starting the project to update millions of machines to improve security online.

Future updates to the browser would be applied without a user's knowledge to help beat scammers catching people out with fake updates.

Those who did not want their browser updated could opt out or uninstall the software, said Microsoft.

"The Web overall is better - and safer - when more people run the most up-to-date browser," wrote Ryan Gavin, Microsoft's IE boss, in a blogpost explaining the plan.

He said the data gathered by Microsoft for its security intelligence reports showed that many cyber criminals targeted old or outdated software when they tried to trick people into installing fake updates.

To beat such scams, Mr Gavin, said that once the latest version of the browser was installed all future updates would arrive silently and be applied without a user getting involved.

Chester Wisniewski, senior security advisor at Sophos, said the plan would aid those who did not see the importance of staying up to date.

"Microsoft has been struggling with browser stragglers for years," he said in a statement.

Demise of IE6

The giant upgrade programme will affect IE users running Windows XP, Vista and 7, and will first be rolled out in Australia and Brazil. Only those Windows users with automatic updates turned on will be enrolled in the programme.

Those using Windows XP will be upgraded to IE8, while those on Vista and 7 get bumped up to IE9. This will probably mean the demise of IE6, a 10-year-old version of the browser that Microsoft has been trying to kill off for a while.

Figures gathered by Microsoft suggest IE6 is used by about 8.3% of people around the world, with the biggest number of users in China, where almost 28% of people remain wedded to it.

Globally, Internet Explorer is still the most popular browser, with more than 52% of people using it, according to net market research firm Net Applications. Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome are battling it out for second place.

Microsoft said it had made tools that would let people avoid or uninstall the more up-to-date versions of the browsers if they wanted to stay with an older copy.

This reminds me of the classic Ealing comedy "The Man in the White Suit".

From the BBC:

Self-cleaning cotton nanoparticle coating invented

Efforts to create self-cleaning cotton fabrics are bearing fruit in China.

Engineers have created a chemical coating that causes cotton materials to clean themselves of stains and remove odours when exposed to sunlight.

The researchers say the treatment is cheap, non-toxic and ecologically friendly.

Retail experts say the innovation could prove a hit with retailers thanks to a growing demand for "functional clothing".

The research was carried out by engineers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Hubei University for Nationalities, and is published in the latest issue of the Applied Materials and Interfaces journal.

The study focuses on titanium dioxide - a chemical known to be an "excellent catalyst in the degradation of organic pollutants".

The substance is already used in self-cleaning windows, odour-free socks and stay-clean kitchen and bathroom tiles.

Initial efforts to extend its use to cotton fabrics proved limiting because the substance's self-cleaning properties could only be "excited" under ultraviolet lights, making it impractical for everyday use.

Creating the coating

The team's breakthrough was to create a nanoparticle alcohol-based compound made up of titanium dioxide and nitrogen.

The mixture was added to triethylamine, an acid neutraliser commonly used in dyes. After being stirred for a 12 hours at room temperature, the liquid was heated at 100C (212F) for a further six hours.

The cotton fabrics were then immersed in the mixture before being squeezed dry, heated and immersed in hot clean water.

Finally the coated materials were treated with silver iodide particles, which aid light-based reactions.

To test the effectiveness of their invention, the engineers marked the fabrics with an orange dye stain and exposed them to the sun. After two hours in the light, the team said 71% of the stain had been removed - a "dramatic" improvement over previously trialled techniques.

Long-lasting

The experiment was repeated on the same cloth five times with no loss of activity - suggesting that the enhancement was stable. Washing and drying the material did not reduce its effectiveness.

Clothes industry experts said there should be huge interest in the process if it could be rolled-out on an industrial scale.

"This kind of functional clothing has already proved very popular, especially in Japan where the authorities ordered a crackdown on air conditioning use after March's earthquake caused power shortages," said Isabelle Cavill, a clothing analyst at Planet Retail.

"It is also likely to prove popular in other parts of Asia where the heat causes sweat problems."

Ms Cavill noted that the Japanese retailer Uniqlo has started promoting a "Silky Dry" range of clothing that promises to keep skin dry and odour-free thanks to special "high-tech processing neutralisers".

The firm also markets a "Heattech" line which "creates heat" to keep users warm.

Meanwhile, scientists at the University of Sheffield have been researching a fabric conditioner that helps purify the air around people wearing treated clothes.

"The main retailers to pick up on this latest innovation are likely to be those selling basicware," said Ms Cavill.

"In the West that could mean Wal-Mart or Marks and Spencer would want to invest in the Chinese technology to take advantage of functional clothing becoming more popular with shoppers."

From the BBC:

Stonehenge rocks Pembrokeshire link confirmed

Experts say they have confirmed for the first time the precise origin of some of the rocks at Stonehenge.

It has long been suspected that rhyolites from the northern Preseli Hills helped build the monument.

But research by National Museum Wales and Leicester University has identified their source to within 70m (230ft) of Craig Rhos-y-felin, near Pont Saeson.

The museum's Dr Richard Bevins said the find would help experts work out how the stones were moved to Wiltshire.

For nine months Dr Bevins, keeper of geology at National Museum Wales, and Dr Rob Ixer of Leicester University collected and identified samples from rock outcrops in Pembrokeshire to try to find the origins of rhyolite debitage rocks that can be found at Stonehenge.

By detailing the mineral content and the textural relationships within the rock, a process known as petrography, they found that 99% of the samples could be matched to rocks found in this particular set of outcrops.

Rhyolitic rocks at Rhos-y-felin, between Ffynnon-groes (Crosswell) and Brynberian, differ from all others in south Wales, they said, which helps locate almost all of Stonehenge's rhyolites to within hundreds of square metres.

Within that area, the rocks differ on a scale of metres or tens of metres, allowing Dr Bevins and Dr Ixer to match some Stonehenge rock samples even more precisely to a point at the extreme north-eastern end of Rhos-y-felin.

Dr Rob Ixer of Leicester University called the discovery of the source of the rocks "quite unexpected and exciting".

'Perseverance'

"Being able to provenance any archaeologically significant rock so precisely is remarkable," he said.

"However, given continued perseverance, we are determined that we shall uncover the origins of most, if not all of the Stonehenge bluestones so allowing archaeologists to continue their speculations well into a third century."

With the location identified, archaeologists will now be able to dig to try and uncover how the stones from Pembrokeshire reached Stonehenge.

"Many have asked the question over the years, how the stones got from Pembrokeshire to Stonehenge," said Dr Bevins. "Was it human transport? Was it due to ice transport?

"Thanks to geological research, we now have a specific source for the rhyolite stones from which to work and an opportunity for archaeologists to answer the question that has been widely debated.

"It is important now that the research continues."

Work is continuing to identify the source of four other stones at Stonehenge which do not come from Rhos-y-felin, he said.

Theory

Experts have long theorised on how the stones were transported from Pembrokeshire to the Stonehenge site when the monument was built from around 3000 BC to 1600 BC.

Perceived wisdom had it that the giant slabs were moved via raft, up the Bristol Channel and River Avon.

But as Pont Saeson is to the north of the Preselis some believe its unlikely that they would have been able to navigate the terrain in order to get the enormous rocks to the coast.

An alternative theory was that nature drove the stone to Stonehenge, in the path of an Ice Age glacier, although the absence of any other Welsh rock in the region seemed to have ruled out the possibility.

In April 2000 a National Lottery Heritage Lottery Fund plan was launched to replicate the 240-mile (386 km) journey of a giant stone from west Wales to Salisbury Plain, by land and sea.

The millennium bluestone project, which tried to use only muscle power and the technology of the ancients, ended in disaster when the stone sank in Milford Haven estuary.

From the BBC:

First Earth-sized planets spotted

By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News

Astronomers have detected the first Earth-sized planets, which are orbiting a star similar to our own Sun.

In the distant past they may have been able to support life and one of them may have had conditions similar to our own planet - a so-called Earth-twin - according to the research team.

They have described their findings as the most important planets ever discovered outside our Solar System.

Details of the discovery are outlined in Nature journal.

Dr Francois Fressin, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge, US, who led the research, said that the discovery was the beginning of a "new era" of discovery of many more planets similar to our own.

Both planets are now thought to be too hot to be capable of supporting life.

But according to Dr Fressin, the planets were once further from their star and cool enough for liquid water to exist on their surface, which is a necessary condition for life.

"We know that these two planets may have migrated closer to their Sun," he told BBC News. "(The larger of the two) might have been an Earth twin in the past. It has the same size as Earth and in the past it could have had the same temperature".

Rock and a hard place

One of the planets, named Kepler 20f, is almost exactly the size of the Earth. Kepler 20e is slightly smaller at 0.87 times the radius of Earth and is closer to its star than 20f.

They are both much closer to their star than the Earth is to the Sun and so they complete an orbit much more quickly: 20e circles its star in just six days, 20f completes an orbit in 20 days whereas the Earth takes a year.

The researchers say that these planets are rocky and similar in composition to our own planet.

Dr Fressin says that the planets' composition may be similar to Earth's with a third of it consisting of iron core. The remainder probably consists of a silicate mantle. He also believes that the outer planet (Kepler 20f) may have developed a thick, water vapour atmosphere.

The discovery is important because it is the first confirmation that planets the size of Earth and smaller exist outside our Solar System. It also shows that the Kepler Space Telescope is capable of detecting relatively small planets around stars that are thousands of light-years away.

The telescope has discovered 35 planets so far. Apart from 20e and f, they have all been larger than the Earth.

Up until now, the most significant discovery, also by a group including Dr Fressin, was of a planet nearly two-and-a-half times the size of Earth that lay in the so-called "Goldilocks zone". This is the region around a star where it is neither too hot, nor too cold, but just right for liquid water and therefore life to exist on the planet.

But Dr Fressin believes that the two new planets are a much more important discovery.

The telescope is scanning 150,000 stars and Professor Andrew Coates of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in Surrey believes that they will soon find a planet the size of Earth in the Goldilocks Zone.

"With every new discovery we're getting closer to the 'holy grail' of an Earth-like planet around a Sun-like star," he said.

From the BBC:

Metal undergoes novel transition under extreme pressure

Under extreme pressures and temperatures, one of the main materials of the Earth's interior has exhibited a never-before-seen transition.

Iron oxide was subjected to conditions similar to those at the depth where the Earth's innermost two layers meet.

At 1,650C and 690,000 times sea-level pressure, the metal changed the degree to which it conducted electricity.

But, as the team outlined in Physical Review Letters, the metal's structure was surprisingly unchanged.

The finding could have implications for our as-yet incomplete understanding of how the Earth's interior gives rise to the planet's magnetic field.

While many transitions are known in materials as they undergo nature's extraordinary pressures and temperatures, such changes in fundamental properties are most often accompanied by a change in structure.

These can be the ways that atoms are arranged in a crystal pattern, or even in the arrangement of subatomic particles that surround atomic nuclei.

Core values

A team at the Carnegie Institution for Science subjected the material to pressures up to 1.4 million times atmospheric pressure at sea level, and temperatures up to 2,200C.

They found that it pulls off the trick of changing its electrical properties without any shifting of shape - it can be an insulator or conductor depending just on temperature and pressure.

Combined with computer simulations of just what was going on with the material's electrons, the group claim that the results show a new type of metallisation.

"At high temperatures, the atoms in iron oxide crystals are arranged with the same structure as common table salt," said Ronald Cohen, a co-author of the study. "Just like table salt, iron oxide at ambient conditions is a good insulator—it does not conduct electricity."

"Our new results show, instead, that iron oxide metallises without any change in structure and that combined temperature and pressure are required. Furthermore, our theory shows that the way the electrons behave to make it metallic is different from other materials that become metallic."

A mixture of magnesium and iron oxide makes up much of the Earth's mantle - the solid layer just outside the planet's liquid outer core. The fact that iron oxide behaves as a metal means it will electrically link the core and mantle, affecting the way the magnetic field makes its way to the Earth's surface and beyond.

From the BBC:

Sun 'stops chickenpox spreading'

Exposure to sunlight may help impede the spread of chickenpox, claim researchers.

The University of London team found chickenpox less common in regions with high UV levels, reports the journal Virology.

Sunlight may inactivate viruses on the skin, making it harder to pass on.

However, other experts say that other factors, including temperature, humidity, and even living conditions are equally likely to play a role.

The varicella-zoster virus is highly contagious, while it can be spread through the coughs and sneezes in the early stages of the infection, the main source is contact with the trademark rash of blisters and spots.

Pollution

UV light has long been known to inactivate viruses, and Dr Phil Rice, from St George's, University of London, who led the research, believes that this holds the key why chickenpox is less common and less easily passed from person to person in tropical countries.

It could also help explain why chickenpox is more common in the colder seasons in temperate countries such as the UK - as people have less exposure to sunlight, he said.

He examined data from 25 earlier studies on varicella-zoster virus in a variety of countries around the world, and plotted these data against a range of climatic factors.

This showed an obvious link between UV levels and chickenpox virus prevalence.

Even initially confusing results could be explained - the peak incidence of chickenpox in India and Sri Lanka is during the hottest, driest and sunniest season.

However, Dr Rice found that, due to atmospheric pollution, UV rays were actually much lower during this season compared with the rainier seasons.

He said: "No-one had considered UV as a factor before, but when I looked at the epidemiological studies they showed a good correlation between global latitude and the presence of the virus."

Professor Judy Breuer from University College London said that while UV could well be contributing to the differences in the prevalence of chickenpox between tropical and temperate regions, there were other factors which needed to be considered.

She said: "Lots of things aside from UV could affect it - heat, humidity and social factors such as overcrowding.

"It's quite possible that UV is having an effect, but we don't have any firm evidence showing the extent this is happening."

Today, the Telegraph has published the top ten list of unusual requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIs) receibed by local councils. These were:

The top 10 unusual FoIs received by councils in the past year are:

• How does the council plan to help the brave soldiers of our infantry if and when Napoleon and his marauding hordes invade the district?

(West Devon District Council)

• What preparations has the council made for an emergency landing of Santa's sleigh this Christmas? Who would be responsible for rescuing Santa? Who would be responsible for rounding up the reindeer, and who would have to tidy the crash site?

(Cheltenham Borough Council)

• How many drawing pins are in the building and what percentage are currently stuck in a pin board?

(Hampshire County Council)

• What preparations has the council made for a zombie attack?

(Bristol City Council and Leicester City Council)

• What plans are in place to deal with an alien invasion?

(Merseyside Fire & Rescue Service)

• How many holes in privacy walls between toilet cubicles have been found in public lavatories and within council buildings?

(Cornwall Council)

• How does the council manage to cope with the vagaries of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle? How does it function given the inherent unpredictability?

(Wealden District Council)

• How much money has been paid to exorcists over the past 12 months?

(Cornwall Council)

• Provide details of uniforms worn by Civil Enforcement Officers including descriptions of embroidered logos and markings, as well as any difference between summer/winter wear.

(Allerdale District Council)

• What is the total number of cheques issued by the council in the past year, and how many did it receive?

(Scarborough Borough Council)