From the BBC:

'No signal' from targeted ET hunt

The hunt for other intelligent civilisations has a new technique in its arsenal, but its first use has turned up no signs of alien broadcasts.

Australian astronomers used "very long baseline interferometry" to examine Gliese 581, a star known to host planets in its "habitable zone".

The hunt for aliens is fundamentally a vast numbers game, so the team's result should come as no surprise.

Their report, posted online, will be published in the Astronomical Journal.

In recent years, interest in such targeted searches has begun to surge as the hunt for planets outside the Solar System continues to find them at every turn.

Astronomers currently estimate that every star in the night sky hosts, on average, 1.6 planets - implying that there are billions of planets out there yet to be confirmed.

But a number of stars have already been identified as playing host to rocky planets at a distance not too hot and not too cold for liquid water - the first proxy for amenability to life.

ET or AT&T?

Gliese 581, a red dwarf star about 20 light-years away, is a particularly interesting candidate for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or Seti.

It has six planets, two of which are "super-Earths" likely to be in this habitable zone.

So astronomers at Curtin University's International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Australia, put one of radio astronomy's highest-resolution techniques to work, listening in to the star system.

Very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) is the process of using several or many telescopes that are distant from one another, carefully combining their signals to make them effectively act as one large telescope, peering intently at a tiny portion of the sky.

The team trained the Australian Long Baseline Array onto Gliese 581 for eight hours, listening in on a range of radio frequencies.

The result was radio silence - but the team used their experience to validate VLBI as a technique particularly suited to this kind of targeted search.

Seth Shostak, principal astronomer at the Seti Institute in the US, said that the approach's strength lies in the fraction of the sky it examines.

"It's like they're looking at the sky through a 6-foot-long cocktail straw - a tiny bit of the sky, so they're only sensitive to signals that are coming from right around that star system," he told BBC News.

That is useful not only for getting a high-resolution view, but for excluding the signals from Earthly technologies that plague Seti efforts.

"Figuring out 'is this ET or AT&T?' isn't always easy, and VLBI gives you a good way of discriminating, because if you find something from that tiny, tiny dot on the sky you can say that's not one of our satellites," Dr Shostak said.

He added that the team's negative result was not disheartening, because the odds have it that the hunt for aliens, if it is ever to find them, will require thousands or millions of observations of this kind.

"Consider the fact that you could've looked at the Earth for four billion years with radio antennas - here was a planet that's clearly in the habitable zone, has liquid oceans, and has an atmosphere - and yet unless you had looked in the last 70 years and were close enough, you wouldn't have found any intelligent life," he said.

"The fact that we look at one star system and don't find a signal doesn't tell you that there's no intelligent life."

How tiny insects survive the rain

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC Nature

A mosquito's tiny, low-weight body is the key to its ability to survive flying in the rain, according to scientists.

A team from the Georgia Institute of Technology filmed the insects as they collided with raindrops.

This showed that their bodies put up so little resistance that, rather than the drop of water stopping in a sudden, catastrophic splash, the mosquito simply combined with the drop and the two continued to fall together.

The team report their findings in PNAS.

As well as helping explain how the insects thrive in damp, humid environments, the research could ultimately help researchers to design tiny, flying robots that are just as impervious to the elements.

"I hope this will make people think a little bit differently about rain," said lead researcher David Hu.

"If you're small, it can be very dangerous. But it seems that these mosquitoes are so small that they're safe."

Dr Hu is interested in understanding completely the "tricks" that insects use to survive being so small.

After repeated attempts at what he described as the most difficult game of darts ever, he and his colleagues managed to hit flying mosquitoes with drops of water and capture footage of the result.

Each droplet was between two and 50 times the weight of a mosquito, so what they saw surprised them.

Describing the the results, Dr Hu cited the Chinese martial art of Tai chi.

"There is a philosophy that if you don't resist the force of your opponent, you won't feel it," he explained.

"That's why they don't feel the force; they simply join the drop, become one item and travel together."

When a moving object crashes into another, it is the sudden halt that produces a damage-causing force. For example, when a car hits a wall at 30mph, the stationary wall and the car have to absorb all of the energy carried by that moving car, causing a great deal of damage.

The trick for a mosquito is that it hardly slows the raindrop down at all, and absorbs very little of its energy.

Surviving the collision though, is not the end of the drama for a tiny insect. It has to escape from its watery cocoon before the droplet smashes the insect into the ground at more than 20mph.

This is where the insect's body, which is covered in water-repellent hairs, seems to give it another crucial survival technique.

Every mosquito studied in this experiment managed to separate itself from the water drop before it hit the ground.

From the BBC:

Willow Glass: ultra-thin glass can 'wrap' around devices

A new type of flexible ultra-thin glass has been unveiled by the firm that developed Gorilla Glass, currently used to make screens of many mobile devices.

Dubbed Willow Glass, the product can be "wrapped" around a device, said the New York-based developer Corning.

The glass was showcased at the Society for Information Display's Display Week, an industry trade show in Boston.

Besides smartphones, it could also be used for displays that are not flat, the company said.

But until such "conformable" screens appear on the market, the glass could be used for mobile devices that are constantly becoming slimmer.

"Displays become more pervasive each day and manufacturers strive to make both portable devices and larger displays thinner," said Dipak Chowdhury, Willow Glass programme director at Corning.

The prototype demonstrated in Boston was as thin as a sheet of paper, and the company said that it can be made to be just 0.05mm thick - thinner than the current 0.2mm or 0.5mm displays.

The firm has already started supplying customers developing new display and touch technology with samples of the product.

Next-gen gorilla glass?

The material used to make Willow Glass is the result of the firm's glassmaking process called Fusion.

The technique is melting the ingredients at 500C, and then producing a continuous sheet that can be rolled out in a mechanism similar to a traditional printing press.

This roll-to-roll method is much easier and faster for mass production than the sheet-to-sheet process normally used to make super-thin glass, the firm said.

In future, Willow Glass may replace the already widely-used Gorilla Glass, found on many smartphones and tablets.

At this year's CES trade show in Las Vegas, Corning unveiled Gorilla Glass 2, said to be 20% thinner than the original product but with the same strength.

The first-generation of Gorilla Glass, launched in 2007, has so far been used on more than 575 products by 33 manufacturers - covering more than half a billion devices worldwide.

It was first spotted by the Apple founder Steve Jobs, who contacted Corning when the firm was developing the screen for its first iPhone in 2006.

Other developments

Willow Glass is not the first attempt to produce a futuristic flexible display.

During the past few years, scientists around the world have been working with a material called graphene, first produced in 2004 - a super-conductive form of carbon made from single-atom-thick sheets.

In a past interview with the BBC, a researcher from Cambridge University, Prof Andrea Ferrari, said that prototypes of flexible touchscreens made out of graphene have already been developed - and that besides being ultra strong and flexible, in future such displays could even give the user "sensational" feedback.

"We went from physical buttons to touch screens, the next step will be integrating some sensing capabilities," said Prof Ferrari.

"Your phone will be able to sense if you're touching it, will sense the environment around - you won't have to press a button to turn it on or off, it will recognise if you're using it or not."

In a separate project, scientists from the Human Media Lab at Queen's University, Canada, and Arizona State University's Motivational Environments Research group, created a millimetres-thick prototype flexible smartphone in 2011, made of a so-called electronic paper.

The scientists said they used the same e-ink technology as found in Amazon's Kindle e-book reader, bonded to flex sensors and a touchscreen that interpreted drawings and text written on it.

"This computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper," said one of the researchers, Dr Roel Vertegaal.

"You interact with it by bending it into a cell phone, flipping the corner to turn pages, or writing on it with a pen."

From the BBC:

Green decline 'may bring irreversible change'

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

With forests and fish stocks declining, water demand rising and lack of action on climate change, humanity's path is anything but sustainable, the UN warns.

The Global Environmental Outlook says significant progress is seen on only four out of 90 environmental goals.

Meanwhile, a team of scientists warns that life on Earth may be on the way to an irreversible "tipping point".

The UN Environment Programme (Unep) urges leaders to agree tough goals at this month's Rio+20 summit.

Where governments have agreed specific treaties, it says, major change has transpired.

However, negotiations leading up to the summit appear mired in problems, with governments failing to find agreement since January on issues such as eliminating subsidies on fossil fuels, regulating fishing on the high seas and obliging corporations to measure their environmental footprint.

"GEO-5 reminds world leaders and nations meeting at Rio+20 why a decisive and defining transition towards a low-carbon, resource-efficient, job-generating 'green economy' is urgently needed," said Achim Steiner, Unep's executive director.

"If current trends continue, if current patterns of production and consumption of natural resources prevail and cannot be reversed, then governments will preside over unprecedented levels of damage and degradation."

Pollution costs

This is the fifth edition of the Global Environmental Outlook, Unep's blue-chip five-yearly assessment of the natural world.

The last, published in 2007, warned that factors such as rising demand for freshwater were affecting human wellbeing.

For the current edition, researchers assessed progress in 90 important environmental issues.

They concluded that meaningful progress had been made on just four - making petrol lead-free, tackling ozone layer depletion, increasing access to clean water and boosting research on marine pollution.

A further 40 showed some progress, including the establishment of protected habitat for plants and animals on land and slowing the rate of deforestation.

Little or no progress was noted for 24, including tackling climate change, while clear deterioration was found in eight, including the parlous state of coral reefs around the world.

For the remainder, there was too little data to draw firm conclusions.

This is despite more than 700 international agreements designed to tackle specific aspects of environmental decline, and agreements on alleviating poverty and malnutrition such as the Millennium Development Goals.

Among the report's "low-lights" are:

• air pollution indoors and outdoors is probably causing more than six million premature deaths each year
• greenhouse gas emissions are on track to warm the world by at least 3C on average by 2100
• most river basins contain places where drinking water standards are below World Health Organization standards
• only 1.6% of the world's oceans are protected.

A few hours after GEO-5's release, the journal Nature published a review of evidence on environmental change concluding that the biosphere - the part of the planet that supports life - could be heading for rapid, possibly irreversible change.

The authors, headed by Anthony Barnofsky from the University of California, Berkeley, combined information on major transformations in the Earth's past (such as mass extinctions) with models incorporating the present and the immediate future.

More than 40% of the Earth's land is used for human needs, including cities and farms; and with the population set to grow by a further two billion by 2050, that figure could soon exceed 50%.

Rising demand for resource-expensive foods such as beef could mean it happens by 2025, Prof Barnofsky's modelling suggests.

"It really will be a new world, biologically, at that point," he said.

"I think that if we want to avoid the most unpleasant surprises, we want to stay away from the 50% mark."

Rio calling

At the core of the Rio+20 agenda is the idea of changing many of the factors driving this pattern of environmental decline while also raising living standards for the world's poor.

Unep adds its voice to many others urging world leaders to seize this baton when they assemble in Rio on 20 June.

Population growth, unsustainable consumption in western and fast-industrialising nations, and environmentally destructive subsidies all need urgent action, it says.

A few years ago the World Bank concluded that destructive fishing practices, fuelled largely by subsidies, had depleted stocks so much that society was missing out on $50bn per year worth of fish it could otherwise have eaten.

The G20 has previously agreed to phase out fossil fuel subsidies - calculated at over $400bn per year - without setting firm targets or a timetable. Unep says leaders should make specific moves on this in Rio.

The summit - which marks 20 years since the Rio Earth Summit and 40 years since the very first UN environmental gathering in Stockholm - is likely to agree to develop a set of sustainable development goals (SDGs), a concept that Unep endorses.

It points out that factors such as air pollution and climate change are also imposing costs on the global economy - in the US, for example, air pollution is calculated to cut crop yields by $14-26bn each year.

"The moment has come to put away the paralysis of indecision, acknowledge the facts and face up to the common humanity that unites all peoples," said Mr Steiner.

"Rio+20 is a moment to turn sustainable development from aspiration and patchy implementation into a genuine path to progress and prosperity for this and the next generations to come."

From the Bee Bee Cee:

Honeybee virus: Varroa mite spreads lethal disease

By Victoria Gill BBC Nature

A parasitic mite has helped a virus wipe out billions of honeybees throughout the globe, say scientists.

A team studying honeybees in Hawaii found that the Varroa mite helped spread a particularly nasty strain of a disease called deformed wing virus.

The mites act as tiny incubators of one deadly form of the disease, and inject it directly into the bees' blood.

This has led to "one of the most widely-distributed and contagious insect viruses on the planet".

The findings are reported in the journal Science.

The team, led by Dr Stephen Martin from the University of Sheffield, studied the honeybees in Hawaii, where Varroa was accidentally brought from California just five years ago.

Crucially some Hawaiian islands have honeybee colonies that are still Varroa-free.

This provided the team with a unique natural laboratory; they could compare recently-infected colonies with those free from the parasite, and paint a biological picture of exactly how Varroa affected the bees.

The team spent two years monitoring colonies - screening Varroa-infected and uninfected bees to see what viruses lived in their bodies.

Dr Martin explained to BBC Nature that most viruses were not normally harmful to the bees, but the mite "selected" one lethal strain of one specific virus.

"In an infected bee there can be more viral particles than there are people on the planet," Dr Martin explained.

"There's a vast diversity of viral strains within a bee, and most of them are adapted to exist in their own little bit of the insect; they get on quite happily."

But the mite, he explained, "shifts something".

In Varroa-infected bees, over time, the vast majority of these innocuous virus strains disappear and the bees' bodies are filled with one lethal strain of deformed wing virus.

And when it comes to viral infection, it's the sheer quantity that kills; each viral particle invades a cell and takes over its internal machinery, turning the bee's own body against itself.

Although it is not clear exactly why this strain thrives in mite-infected bees, Dr Martin explained that it could be the one virus best able to survive being repeatedly transmitted from the mites to the bees and back, as the mites feed on the bees' blood.

The effect appears to take once the mites have changed this "viral landscape" in the bees' bodies, the change is permanent.

"So the only way to control the virus is to control the levels of the mite," said Dr Martin.

Prof Ian Jones, a virologist from the University of Reading said the findings mirrored "other known mechanisms of virus spread".

He added: "[This] reinforces the need for beekeepers to control Varroa infestation."

The British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) praised the research.

BBKA chairman Dr David Aston said it "increased our understanding of the relationships between Varroa and [this] significant bee virus."

He told BBC Nature: "These findings underline the need for further research into Varroa.

"There remains a clear and urgent need for an effective, approved treatment."

From the BBC:

Smart hand pumps promise cleaner water in Africa

By Matt McGrath Science reporter, BBC World Service

Rural communities across Africa may soon benefit from improved water supplies thanks to mobile phone technology.

UK researchers have developed data transmitters that fit inside hand pumps and send text messages if the devices break down.

The "smart" hand pumps will be trialled shortly in 70 villages in Kenya.

Details of the new approach have been published in the Journal of Hydroinformatics.

Hundreds of millions of people across rural Africa depend on hand pumps for their water supplies. But it is estimated that around one third are broken at any given moment. Often located in remote areas, repairs can sometimes take up to a month.

But one of the big changes in Africa in recent years has been the expansion of mobile phone networks. It is now estimated that more people in Sub-Saharan Africa have access to these networks than have access to improved water supplies.

Speed is the key

So researchers at Oxford University have developed the idea of using the availability of mobile networks to signal when hand pumps are no longer working. They have built and tested the idea of implanting a mobile data transmitter into the handle of the pump. Patrick Thomson is a member of the research team and explained how it works.

"It measures the movement of the handle and that is used to estimate the water flow of that hand-pump," he told the BBC.

"It can periodically send information by text message back to a central office which can look at that data and when a pump breaks, very quickly a mechanic can be despatched to go and fix it."

In just over a month, some 70 villages in Kyuso district in Kenya will have the smart hand pumps installed. The trial, which is funded by the UK's Department for International Development (DfID), will see if the new system can cut the time taken to repair pumps. Rob Hope is another member of the Oxford team.

"Twenty-four hours is the key aim. Eighty percent of breakdowns are small, involving rubber rings and seals and a mechanic would be able to fix them on the spot," he explained.

In the course of the Kenyan experiment the researchers hope to get enough data so that small changes in the way the pumps are handled could be used to anticipate a problem before it occurs.

"We think we can get to the point of predicting failure before it happens." said Rob Hope.

"That's exactly the type of thing we hope the trial will deliver."

Power in their hands

A number of big challenges remain to be ironed out, including the critical issue of power. The Kenya experiment will use long lasting batteries but the research team hopes to develop more sustainable ways of powering the transmitters.

Another larger trial due to take place in Zambia later this year will look at renewable resources such as kinetic energy from the motion of the handle and solar power.

Another challenge is the threat of theft and vandalism. The researchers acknowledge there is little they can do once the devices are installed but Rob Hope feels the support of the local community will prove an adequate deterrent.

"My sense is that if the hand-pump is of value to community they will maintain it. If we deliver maintenance in 24 hours, they will self-police," he said.

Speedy repairs to hand pumps could have dramatic effects on local communities - broken pumps mean more hours spent gathering the precious resource and people often turn to unsafe sources of drinking water.

And according to Andrew Mitchell, the UK's Secretary of State for International Development, keeping the pumps working means much more than drinking water.

"Water does not just save lives in the short term - it is also a cornerstone for delivering economic growth and helping countries to work their way out of poverty," he said.

"This is why UK aid will give an additional 15 million people access to clean water by 2015 and supporting a number of programmes, like this one, to help the world's poorest countries harness the full potential of their water resources."

The technology has other potential benefits. It will allow scientists to compile a real time database of how much water is being used across the continent. Greater predictability of breakdowns could also help drive down the cost of repairs.

From the BBC:

European Extremely Large Telescope given go-ahead

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

Construction of world's biggest optical telescope has been approved.

The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) will have a primary mirror some 40m in diameter, and will be built on top of a mountain in Chile.

Member states of the European Southern Observatory (Eso) organisation declared their support for the project on Monday at a meeting in Garching, Germany.

They have not yet, however, put all of the 1bn euros (£0.8bn) of financing in place.

That may be possible by December, at the organisation's next council meeting.

By then, Brazil should also have become the 15th full member of Eso, further spreading the E-ELT's cost and making it more affordable for all nations.

The telescope should be ready for use by about 2022, and will be one of the key astronomical facilities of 21st Century, complementing other huge observatories that will view the sky at different wavelengths of light.

Voting positions

The E-ELT will detect objects in the visible and near-infrared. Its 39.3m main mirror will be more than four times the width of today's best optical telescopes (antennas for radio telescopes are still very much bigger).

Its sensitivity and resolution should make it possible to image directly rocky planets beyond our Solar System.

The observatory should also be able to provide major insights into the nature of black holes, galaxy formation, the mysterious "dark matter" that pervades the Universe, and the even more mysterious "dark energy" which appears to be pushing the cosmos apart at an accelerating rate.

At the Garching meeting, six nations (Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland) were in a position to declare their full support to proceed with the project; four nations (Belgium, Finland, Italy, and the United Kingdom) declared their support pending approval from their governments; and the remaining four (Denmark, France, Portugal, Spain) said they continued to work towards full approval.

The commitments from two-thirds of the members are sufficient at this stage to permit Eso to proceed with the project.

Prof Isobel Hook is the UK E-ELT project scientist from the University of Oxford. She said Monday's decision was hugely exciting.

"We've all been working towards this moment for a long time, and this decision means we're now just a few years away from using this telescope," she told BBC News.

"The E-ELT's great size will give us much sharper images, provided we can correct for atmospheric turbulence [which makes stars twinkle], and that will be part of the telescope's design. The E-ELT will also have a much larger collecting area than any telescope we have now. That combination of sharpness and collecting area is what will make it so powerful."

The telescope will be sited on Cerro Armazones, a mountain that is just 20km from Cerro Paranal where Eso currently operates its Very Large Telescope (VLT) facility - a suite of interconnected optical telescopes that includes four units with primary mirrors measuring 8.2m.

Like Paranal, Armazones will enjoy near-perfect observing conditions - at least 320 nights a year when the sky is cloudless.

The famous aridity found in Chile's Atacama desert means the amount of water vapour in the skies above the observatory will be very limited, reducing further the perturbation starlight experiences as it passes through the Earth's atmosphere.

One of the first tasks will be to remove the top of the mountain to make a flat base for the telescope and its housing, which will be the size of a football stadium.

Even before that work is undertaken, a road will need to be constructed on the slopes of Cerro Armazones to get heavy earth-moving equipment on site.

The funding for the road and some design work on the E-ELT's Number Four mirror was approved at last December's council meeting.

Europe at the front

Eso's principles require 90% of the funding to be in place before spending goes beyond the initial civil works.

The total cost of the venture is currently projected to be 1,083 million euros (at 2012 prices).

Prof Gerry Gilmore at Cambridge University played a key role in the early definition phases of the E-ELT, bringing together various competing ideas into a single project.

He told the BBC: "We all know the grand questions we want to ask - 'What is time? What is existence? What is reality? Is there life out there?'. And we know that we need technology to answer those questions. So, to see this technology being brought together in the E-ELT, with European leadership, is simply wonderful."

From the BBC:

New holey material soaks up CO2

UK researchers have developed a porous material that can preferentially soak up CO2 from the atmosphere.

NOTT-202 is a "metal-organic framework" that works like a sponge, absorbing a number of gases at high pressures.

But as the pressure is reduced, CO2 is retained as other gases are released.

The development, reported in Nature Materials, holds promise for carbon capture and storage, or even for removing CO2 from the exhaust gases of power plants and factories.

Metal-organic frameworks have been considered promising structures to trap gases for a number of years. They are so named because they comprise atoms of a metallic element at their core, surrounded by scaffolds of longer, carbon-containing chains.

These complex molecules can be made to join together in frameworks that leave gaps suitable for capturing gases.

However, until now, such frameworks have been good primarily at gathering any gas passing through them; those that were selective for CO2 have proven to have a low capacity for storing the gas.

"Increasing the selectivity for CO2 in the presence of gaseous mixtures represents a major challenge if these systems are to find practical applications under dynamic conditions," the authors wrote.

The research started at the universities of Nottingham and Newcastle, where scientists discovered a chemical system that seemed to solve this problem of selectively storing a significant amount of CO2.

But to be sure of just what they had, they collaborated with a team at the Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire and the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Daresbury Laboratory to get a microscopic look at what they had created.

Using X-ray diffraction and detailed computer models, the researchers found that NOTT-202 is made up of two different frameworks that slot together incompletely, leaving "nanopore" gaps particularly suited to gathering up CO2.

This two-part structure, the researchers claim, is an entirely new class of porous material.

As such, research into just how similarly paired frameworks can be created may help researchers find a range of materials suited to soaking up specific gases.

From the BBC:

UK's data communication bill faces tough criticism

Civil liberty groups and ISPs have voiced concerns over the newly-published draft communications bill.

The controversial bill extends the type of data that internet service providers must keep.

The government said that updated legislation to take account of new technology was vital in the fight against criminals and terrorists.

But activists have dubbed it a snooper's charter.

"This is all about giving the police unsupervised access to data. It is shocking for a government that opposed Labour's plans on this to propose virtually the same thing," said Jim Killock, director of the Open Rights Group.

"It will cost billions of pounds and will end up only catching the stupid or the innocent. Terrorists will circumvent it."

Publishing the bill, Home Secretary Theresa May said: "Communications data saves lives. It is a vital tool for the police to catch criminals and to protect children.

"If we stand by as technology changes, we will leave police officers fighting crime with one hand tied behind their backs.

She was keen to point out that the proposals do not include reading the content of websites, email or social networks.

"Checking communication records, not content, is a crucial part of day-to-day policing and the fingerprinting of the modern age - we are determined to ensure its continued availability in cracking down on crime," she said.

But Mr Killock argues that knowing where a citizen has been online is equally intrusive.

Drawing a parallel he said: "If I'm having an affair then who I'm talking to is just as revealing as what I say," he said.

Technically feasible

The bill - an update to the controversial RIPA (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) legislation - lays out new duties for the UK communications companies.

The new proposals would require ISPs to keep details of a much wider range of data including use of social network sites, webmail, voice calls over the internet, and gaming. Websites visited could be recorded, although pages within sites would not be.

BT said that it was considering the proposals and would report back to the parliamentary committee in due course.

The Internet Service Providers' Association said that it would be lobbying MPs in the coming months.

"Ispa has concerns about the new powers to require network operators to capture and retain third party communications data," said a spokesman.

"These concerns include the scope and proportionality, privacy and data protection implications and the technical feasibility.

"Whilst we appreciate that technological developments mean that government is looking again at its communications data capabilities, it is important that powers are clear and contain sufficient safeguards," it added.

The bill faces a tough ride through parliament with Lib Dem MPs and some Conservatives calling for it to be watered down or abandoned altogether.

Trevor Pearce, director general of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), warned that any attempts to undermine the legislation would have a direct effect on policing.

"Any significant reduction in the capability of law enforcement agencies to acquire and exploit intercept intelligence and evidential communications data would lead to more unsolved murders, more firearms on our streets, more successful robberies, more unresolved kidnaps, more harm from the use of class A drugs, more illegal immigration and more unsolved serious crime overall.

"This would mean Soca, the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] and other agencies relying more heavily on more expensive, more risky and potentially more intrusive techniques to locate and apprehend offenders."

Soca said that it uses communications data in 95% of the serious crime investigations it conducts.

From the BBC:

Anti-virus software sucks up too much security cash claims study

Governments should focus more funds on policing the internet and less on anti-virus software, according to new research.

Computer scientists at the University of Cambridge carried out the cybercrime study after being approached by the UK's Ministry of Defence.

The report indicated that the UK was spending almost £640m annually on the problem.

It said less than £10m of that sum was spent on cybercrime law enforcement.

The team worked with colleagues in Germany, the Netherlands, the USA and UK to compile the study. They considered all the main types of cybercrime, including online payment and banking fraud.

Cybercrime swamp

Lead author Prof Ross Anderson also told the BBC that less government money should be spent on monitoring phone and internet communications.

He said that police in the UK were often months behind and too focussed on surveillance, because resources had been misallocated.

"Some police forces believe the problem is too large to tackle," he said.

"In fact, a small number of gangs lie behind many incidents and locking them up would be far more effective than telling the public to fit an anti-phishing toolbar or purchase anti-virus software. Cybercrooks impose disproportionate costs on society."

According to Prof Anderson it is mainly the US government - and the FBI in particular - that carry out the "heavy lifting" when it comes to pursuing cybercrime.

"Cybercrime has created a swamp," he added. "You need to drain the swamp by arresting people."

Protecting consumers

A Cabinet Office spokesman welcomed the report and said that the government believed the threat was serious and needed to be tackled.

"Our approach strikes the right balance between defending our interests and pursuing cybercriminals" he said.

The Cabinet Office pointed to extra investment of £650m over four years to fund more cyber-specialists in police forces across the country.

Prof Anderson also recommended improving consumer protection legislation for victims of credit card fraud.

He said that the fear of fraud by businesses and consumers was leading some to avoid online transactions, imposing an indirect cost on the economy.

He noted that consumers in countries like the Netherlands, Finland and Ireland enjoyed much stronger protection.

From the BBC:

Adobe has as yet been unable to fix a problem which has left many Firefox users unable to watch Flash video online.

An update to the software - which is used by sites like YouTube - has been causing the Firefox browser to crash.

The problem was said to be affecting users of the browser on Windows Vista and Windows 7.

In a statement, Mozilla said: "Adobe and Mozilla are working closely to diagnose and address these issues."

It added: "In the meantime, Firefox users experiencing problems viewing videos in Flash Player should try the workarounds listed in this help article."

Among the suggested solutions is downgrading Adobe's software.

The update was initially released on 8 June.

No other browsers or operating systems are believed to have been affected by the problem.

From the BBC:

Rio+20: Agreement reached, say diplomats

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News, Rio de Janeiro

Negotiators have agreed a text to be approved by world leaders meeting this week in Rio in a summit intended to put society on a more sustainable path.

Environment groups and charities working on poverty issues believe the agreement is far too weak.

The Rio+20 gathering comes 20 years after the Earth Summit, also held in the Brazilian city.

The text has yet to be signed off by heads of government and ministers, but it seems that no changes will be made.

"We have reached the best possible equilibrium at this point; I think we have a very good outcome," said Brazilian Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota.

"We consider that the spirit of Rio has been kept alive after 20 years."

However, the European Union was unhappy with the level of ambition in the text, in particular Denmark, which holds the EU presidency.

But Danish Environment Minister Ida Auken told BBC News that she believed it would be signed off.

"The EU would have liked to see a much more concrete and ambitious outcome, so in that respect I'm not happy with it," she said.

"However we managed to get the green economy on the agenda, and so I think we have a strong foundation for this vision that can drive civil society and the private sector to work in the same direction, to understand that environment and the social side must be integrated into the heart of the economy."

For the US, lead negotiator Todd Stern described the deal as "a good step forward", adding that he did not expect heads of state and government to re-open discussions.

"I believe this document is done," he said pointing out that Brazil has "no plan or intention to let the document open up."

Dismay

Environment and development groups are dismayed by many aspects of the agreement.

In large part, it merely "reaffirms" commitments nations have made previously.

Activists mounted a huge Twitter campaign on Monday in an attempt to persuade governments to commit to ending fossil fuel subsidies.

However the final text reaffirms previous commitments to phase them out if they are "harmful and inefficient", without setting a date.

The text calls for "urgent action" on unsustainable production and consumption, but it gives no detail or a timetable on how this can be achieved, and no clear direction as to how the world economy can be put on a greener path.

Developing countries might have agreed to go further it developed countries had offered tangible financial support, but it did not do so.

Several processes will be established leading from the summit. One will eventually establish sustainable development goals (SDGs), but there is nothing in the agreement on what they might promise.

The UK's environment minister, Caroline Spelman, praised the deal on SDGs as a "good outcome".

"We have backed SDGs from the outset and helped drive them from a good idea to a new agreement that will elevate sustainability to the top of the agenda."

The UN Environment Programme will be strengthened, but not fundamentally reshaped, as some governments, in particular the French and Kenyans, wanted.

Another process will eventually lead to new protection for the open oceans, including the establishment of marine protected areas in international waters, and stronger action to prevent illegal fishing.

Corporations will not be obliged to measure their environmental and social performance. They are merely invited to do so.

Missed opportunity?

Overall, observers here, as well as some government delegates, felt the world community has missed an opportunity to change the world's development track.

"This damp squib of a draft negotiating text makes it clear the Rio talks lack the firepower needed to solve the global emergency we're facing," said Friends of the Earth's director of policy and campaigns, Craig Bennett, in Rio.

"Developed countries have repeatedly failed to live safely within our planet's limits. Now they must wake up to the fact that until we fix our broken economic system we're just papering over the ever-widening cracks."

More than 100 world leaders are expected in Rio from Wednesday to attend the summit.

They include presidents and prime ministers from the large emerging economies, including China, India, Indonesia and South Africa.

But US President Barack Obama will not be there, and neither will UK Prime Minister David Cameron or German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who are all sending ministers in their places.

From the BBC:

'Magnetic emulsions' could clean up oil spills

Researchers have unveiled a molecule that can make "magnetic emulsions", which has the potential to revolutionise the chemical industry.

Emulsions are blends which normally do not mix, like oil and water.

The team's custom-made molecule, described in Soft Matter, acts as an "emulsifier", coating oily materials and acting to blend the liquids.

But because the molecule responds to magnetic fields, it could be put to use in cleaning up oil spills.

The work is an extension of the "magnetic soap" the team reported in January and published in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

The earlier work showed promise for industrial and cleanup applications, but study co-author Julian Eastoe of the University of Bristol said the new paper demonstrates "a practical application without a shadow of a doubt".

The idea of an "emulsion" in paint may be the only familiar use of the word, but emulsions are tremendously common in industrial chemicals and also in many products found under the kitchen sink.

It makes them part of an industry worth billions of pounds.

What is clear from the team's demonstrations is that their magnetic emulsions will be useful in the cleanup of oil spills.

"We're making emulsions from essentially seawater and the kind of oils that would be spilled, and we're seeing that we can manipulate them using a magnetic field," Mr Eastoe told BBC News.

Heads and tails

At the heart of both ideas are what are known as surfactants - short for surface-active agents - that are based on metal atoms, which respond to magnetic fields.

These magnetic surfactants are long chains of atoms, with metal atoms at one end.

One end of these surfactant molecules is "hydrophilic", or water-loving, and the other "hydrophobic", or water-fearing.

In a mixture including water and oily substances, the molecules surround bubbles of oils, aligning themselves with their hydrophilic tails pointing outward into the water.

To achieve this effect, Prof Eastoe said the team changed their original formula.

"We've changed the identity of the magnetic component and made it much more active, by replacing what was iron by another iron complex or another complex of gadolinium," he said.

The result is that the magnetic molecules create emulsions even when added in small amounts to currently available surfactants - so they could be easily implemented into industrial or clean-up applications.

Prof Eastoe also says that the simple preparation of the molecules could mean they join a number of other approaches to deliver medicines to specific sites in the body using magnetic fields.

From the BBC:

Blade Runner: Which predictions have come true?

By Deirdre Finnerty BBC News

It's been 30 years since the release of Blade Runner and 10 years since Minority Report. Both are rich sources of predictions about the future. But what has actually come to pass?

Based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner - the tale of a hunt for four dangerous "replicant" humans - is a classic envisioning of a dystopian future, set in 2019 Los Angeles.

Minority Report, based on a short story by Dick of the same name, and set in Washington DC in 2054, is another cornucopia of technological possibility, where crime is predicted and therefore prevented.

So which predictions in these movies have been fulfilled?

Languages challenging English

As well as English, some of Blade Runner's 2019 LA residents speak a patois mixing European and east Asian languages.

There has certainly been language shift in Los Angeles, most notably a doubling of the number of Spanish speakers (those who speak the language at home) in the past 30 years from 1.5 million in 1980 to 3.6 million in 2010 (including Spanish Creole).

Internationally, Spanish is also significant and futuregazers have gone as far as predicting that one day Mandarin Chinese could become the default language of business worldwide.

Speaking to the New York Times in 2009, French linguist Claude Hagege, author of On the Death and Life of Languages, said that Hindi and Mandarin could replace English some day.

Gesture-based computer interfaces

John Anderton, Tom Cruise's character in Minority Report, dons a data glove to use a rather elegant gesture-based interface. Wired magazine reported back in 2008 that such interfaces would soon become a reality.

John Underkoffler, the scientist who developed the system for Minority Report, set up Oblong Industries to develop and market it. He told TED in 2010: "We're not finished until all the computers in the world work like this."

The triumph of touchscreen interfaces is an obvious prelude. The Apple iPhone has offered "pinch", "pull" and "swipe" features for the past five years, and the Microsoft Kinect games system allows users to control the action with their movements.

The most recent addition is the Leap gesture-based computer interaction system, launched in May. The USB device tracks an area of 8 cu ft for movement, and is capable of differentiating between fingers, thumbs and pencils.

Hover cars

While gesture-based interfaces might seem imminent, at the other end of the prediction spectrum there's hover cars, a concept that is yet to become reality.

As well as flying, vertical take-off and landing, the police car used by Rick Deckard - played by Harrison Ford - in Blade Runner is capable of ground travel.

The car driven by Anderton in Minority Report has an electric engine, body panels that change colour, is self-cleaning and can repair itself. The doors and ignition require a DNA match, meaning it is not easily stolen.

That's not to say there are no flying cars. In April, TekGoblin reported that US company Terrafugia had created the first prototype flying car which meets the standards of the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) and the NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration).

But with an expected price tag of about £180,000 ($280,000), it looks like car travel in the air will still not be a daily occurrence for many.

Iris recognition technology

While hover cars are still fantasy, the iris scanning of Minority Report is a reality for many air travellers.

In the film, crime has been eliminated with the aid of technology that constantly monitors citizens. Wall-mounted devices scan human eyes to confirm identity.

"Spielberg hired a team of futurologists to predict technologies," says John de Nardo, editor of SF Signal, a speculative fiction blog.

Even though they cannot be used on moving individuals, as in Minority Report, iris detection devices are used at border agencies all over the world, and were in use at Manchester and Birmingham airports until relatively recently.

Facial recognition technology has been developed and has been rolled out in 25 bars in San Francisco. In this case the technology is not being used for national security - but to provide a snapshot of the type of crowd frequenting these establishments.

Personally targeted advertising

The iris recognition technology led to Anderton being bombarded by images targeted specifically at him.

"We are not far away from that," says science fiction writer Robert J Sawyer. Already, internet advertising can be personally tailored to match users' interests.

The parallels between services like Google's DoubleClick and the Minority Report scenario have been made. There has also been much discussion about Facebook ads being based on information users share about themselves.

In 2011, a report by the Centre for Future Studies predicted that advertisements would soon be able to adapt to our moods - a technology known as "gladvertising". And according to Digital Ape, the effect of Intel's new digital signage systems will be video feeds that can tailor ads to the age and gender of shoppers. Intel itself says the system will release "commercial, financial and entertainment information to specific people groups at specific times".

So perhaps the ads that targeted Anderton are not too far away.

Predictions of wrongdoing

Predictive policing is a big part of Minority Report, in which three psychics, known as pre-cogs, have the ability to see into the future and therefore help stop criminal activity.

"It's about the notion that criminality is innate in people," says Sawyer.

Obviously no force in the world is going to be putting psychics at the heart of their strategy, but there has been growing interest in the idea of mapping future crime trends and even predicting which individuals could become a problem.

In 2006, Tony Blair said state intervention could become "pre-birth even" as it was possible to predict that children born in some circumstances could later become anti-social.

Memphis Police Department in Tennessee is working with IBM on a system that analyses crime trends to predict where police should be deployed. IBM say this has helped reduce crime by 30%.

And while we cannot reliably predict who will commit crime in the future, neuroscientists are investigating a way to predict mistakes. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a study recording neurological patterns which preceded errors.

This could lead to a system that allows us to intercept our mistakes before we make them - so we won't need the police to do it for us.

Advances in artificial intelligence

While the replicants in Ridley Scott's film seem to be synthetic humans rather than true robots, the film still explores the idea of artificial intelligence.

A key device in the movie is that the replicants do not have a normal emotional range, something that can be detected using a "Voight-Kampff" test to measure empathic responses.

There seems an echo of the many tests used now to measure advances in AI.

Sawyer points out that already scientists have developed machines which can be awarded the Loebner Prize, being deemed human-like by a team of experts.

This is based on a test devised by mathematician Alan Turing to determine whether machines can think and use natural language.

But Prof Colin Allen, director of the cognitive science programme at Indiana University, says technology is "not very close" to a machine which can fully pass the Turing test.

At the moment, the closest is IBM's Watson, which beat human contestants on US gameshow Jeopardy.

Companies have not yet been able to create a machine that can combine human behaviour and language with the mechanics of human movement, Sawyer adds.

Privatisation of space exploration

Blade Runner envisioned a world where the majority of humankind has chosen to live in more pleasurable "off-world colonies" run by private companies. If such an event happens in the future, it might well be the work of the private sector.

We are now in an era of "gradual decrease in state funding available for space exploration programmes", says Sawyer.

"The political will is not there right now for that kind of exploration," says Karen Burnham, editor of Locus magazine. She points out that Nasa funding fell below 1% of American federal spending in the 1970s and currently represents a mere 0.5% of the 2012 budget.

Although private companies have begun to take over, Burnham says they are a long way from being able to colonise other planets. The private sector has not yet found a way to make space exploration "profitable" beyond 25,000 miles up.

So it looks doubtful that humans will emigrate to other planets by 2019, even though if Newt Gingrich had won the Republican nomination for the American presidential election, he had discussed building a Moon colony to house 13,000 people by 2020

Robot morality

Drawing on the themes in Dick's original story, Blade Runner raised ethical issues surrounding the consequences of creating intelligent life forms in our likeness.

The complication in the film particularly is that the replicants are not robots - they are made of organic materials and bleed, just as humans do. But they lack empathy and were artificially created.

"The question that Blade Runner raises is whether we should award personhood status to machines," says Dr Anne Foerst, associate professor of computer science at St Bonaventure University, New York.

Blade Runner goes "way beyond" the question of artificial intelligence, using the metaphor of technology to explore why society decides certain groups of people are acceptable and others not.

Getting intelligent robots to conform to moral rules is a live area of debate and research, Allen says. At the moment work is under way on developing a control system for military robots "to make sure they abide by the rules of combat", and creating robots for use in the care of elderly people.

From the BBC:

'Twisted light' carries 2.5 terabits of data per second

Researchers have clocked light beams made of "twisted" waves carrying 2.5 terabits of data - the capacity of more than 66 DVDs - per second.

The technique relies on manipulating what is known as the orbital angular momentum of the waves.

Recent work suggests that the trick could vastly boost the data-carrying capacity in wi-fi and optical fibres.

The striking demonstration of the approach, reported in Nature Photonics, is likely to lead to even higher rates.

Angular momentum is a slippery concept when applied to light, but an analogy closer to home is the Earth itself.

Our planet has "spin angular momentum" because it spins on its axis, and "orbital angular momentum" because it is also revolving around the Sun.

Light can have both these types, but the spin version is the far more familiar - as what is commonly called polarisation, or the direction along which light waves wiggle. Polarising sunglasses and many 3D glasses work by passing one polarisation and not another.

In many data-carrying applications involving light, more data is packed on to light waves by encoding one polarisation with one data stream, and another with a different stream.

That means twice as much information can fit within the same "bandwidth" - the range of colours that the transmitting equipment is able to process.

Twisted mission

Orbital angular momentum, or OAM, on the other hand, has only recently come to the fore as a promising means to accomplish the same trick.

The idea is not to create light waves wiggling in different directions but rather with different amounts of twist, like screws with different numbers of threads.

Most recently, Bo Thide of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics and a team of colleagues in Italy demonstrated the principle by sending beams made up of two different OAM states across a canal in Venice, an experiment they described in the New Journal of Physics.

Most data traffic in optical fibres around the world is made up of different data streams on slightly different colours of light, which are split into their constituent colours at the receiving end in a technique called multiplexing.

To fully realise OAM's potential, similar multiplexing of different "twists" must be developed.

Alan Willner and his team at the University of Southern California, along with colleagues at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Tel Aviv University, have now demonstrated one way to do that.

The team prepared two sets of four light beams, each with a set level of OAM twist, and each of the eight containing its own data stream.

The two sets were then filtered to have different polarisations, and arranged into a single beam with four streams at the centre and four in a doughnut-shape around the edge.

At the receiving end, the process is undone and the single beam was unpacked to yield its eight constituent beams, together carrying about 2.5 terabits per second.

Initial experiments were only carried out over a distance of about a metre, and Prof Willner said that challenges remained for adapting the approach to fibres or for longer-distance transfer.

"One of the challenges in this respect is turbulence in the atmosphere," he explained.

"For situations that require high capacity... over relatively short distances of less than 1km, this approach could be appealing. Of course, there are also opportunities for long-distance satellite-to-satellite communications in space, where turbulence is not an issue."

Commenting on the work in an accompanying article in Nature Photonics, Juan Torres of the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona wrote that it "contributes a new chapter to the long history of telecommunications by demonstrating the potential of OAM... for increasing the transmission capacity".

However, he said that for wider application, a number of robust tools would be needed to manipulate OAM states and to create and deliver beams made up of several of them.

"The true impact of this development in the telecommunications industry will depend on how several important issues... are addressed and solved," he wrote.

From the BBC:

Trust bids to secure white cliffs of Dover

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

The National Trust is launching a £1.2m appeal to purchase and safeguard part of the white cliffs of Dover.

The trust says purchasing the mile-long stretch to the east of Dover will allow it to prevent building, ensure a public right of way and conserve nature.

The cliffs mark the UK's closest point to France; troops defended here against the Romans' arrival, and many Dunkirk evacuees landed on the local beaches.

The chalkland supports wildlife including insects, birds and plants.

The Adonis blue butterfly has a particular liking for chalk.

"Immortalised in song and literature, the white cliffs of Dover have become one of the great symbols of our nation," said Fiona Reynolds, the trust's director-general.

"We now have a once in a lifetime opportunity to secure their future for everyone to enjoy."

The surface of the cliffs, which can be seen from France on a clear day, is kept white by constant erosion.

They were voted the UK's third best "natural wonder" in a 2005 Radio Times poll, behind the Dan yr Ogof caves and Cheddar Gorge, but ahead of such landmarks as the Giant's Causeway and Loch Lomond.

Pony power

Purchasing this stretch of coast would fill in the gap between two segments already owned by the National Trust, creating a five-mile (8km) contiguous reserve with guaranteed rambling rights and nature protection.

Birds such as kittiwakes and fulmars nest on the cliff face, while peregrine falcons wheel above.

The trust uses Exmoor ponies to graze the chalky topside, enabling plants such as oxtongue broomrape to thrive.

Managers are keen to extend these measures to the new stretch, which currently belongs to a local landowner.

"We own pockets of land either side; but it's a gap in the middle, and from a wildlife point of view you have a gap where you go into farmland and there's not much we can do for wildlife or for people," said Brian Whittaker, acting property manager for the white cliffs.

"The ponies are the best lawnmowers you can get - it's a natural way to look after the grassland, and creates a great deal of attraction for visitors," he told BBC News.

The cliffs are receding at an average rate of 1cm (0.4in) per year, but occasionally large chunks crash into the sea.

The white cliffs of Dover gained nationwide fame through Dame Vera Lynn's eponymous wartime ballad, while Matthew Arnold's 1867 poem Dover Beach focussed on the pounding of the seas rather than the impacts of war

From the BBC:

Ants call for emergency backup with chemical trail

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC Nature

Brazilian "big-headed" ants use chemical trails to drag others into helping them carry food, a study shows.

Researchers found that when an ant discovered food that was too large to carry, it immediately set off for the nest, laying a pungent chemical trail.

This almost instantly caused hundreds of other ants to rush in and help drag back the oversized snack.

The team thinks the species' "chemical breadcrumb trail" is the fastest and most accurate ever recorded.

The findings from this study are reported in the journal Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology.

To me, to you

Only ants and humans are able to "organise themselves into teams" to lift heavy objects.

Although many ant species use chemical trails to organise themselves into food-collecting groups, the big-headed ant has an "extreme" chemical enlisting strategy, says the University of Sussex team.

Tomer Czaczkes, the scientist who led the study - and who filmed the ants at work in the forests of Brazil - said that the insects were "incredibly accurate" when it came to following the trail laid down by a fellow forager.

"When an ant finds something delicious," he said, "she has to lay a trail really quickly, because competition is fierce.

"The pheromone trail starts working immediately. Any ants caught in its net are funnelled towards the food item."

In their experiments, Dr Czaczkes and his colleagues left food items outside an ants' nest and filmed the reaction.

When one "scout ant" found the food, it would try to move it, give up and return to the nest, laying the pheromone trail on its way back.

Within two seconds, other ants would emerge from the nest and start following the scent to the food item.

This strong-smelling trail decays quickly, lasting just six minutes. This is a crucial part of its purpose, as it does not lure ants from the nest pointlessly, after a food has gone.

"That's important, because for an ant, it's dangerous to be out of the nest," said Dr Czaczkes.

But because the trail also intercepted ants that were already outside the nest - dragging them towards the food item, the tiny, industrious insects were able to retrieve food up to 8m from their nest.

From the BBC:

'Fracking' safe with strong regulation, report says

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

A gas extraction method which triggered two earth tremors near Blackpool last year should not cause earthquakes or contaminate water but rules governing it will need tightening, experts say.

"Fracking" involves pumping water and chemicals into shale rock at pressure.

The joint report from the Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering say the technique is safe if firms follow best practice and rules are enforced.

Exploratory fracking is being mooted in at least seven sites around the UK.

The report was commissioned by the government's chief scientist, Sir John Beddington, following the decision last year to halt the UK's most advanced project, in Lancashire, after fracking caused small earth tremors.

"Our main conclusions are that the environmental risks of hydraulic fracturing for shale can can be safely managed provided there is best practice observed and provided it's enforced through strong regulation," said the report's chair, Prof Robert Mair from Cambridge University.

"The UK regulatory system is up to the job for the present very small scale exploration activities, but there would need to be strengthening of the regulators if the government decides to proceed with more shale gas extraction, particularly at the production stage," he told BBC News.

Waste water

The report contains 10 top-line recommendations for strengthening regulations, including:

• Comprehensive monitoring of methane in water and the atmosphere before, during and after operations
• Use of an independent well examiner empowered to carry out onsite inspections on demand
• Better co-ordination between the various government agencies involved

Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, involves drilling down into shale formations and fracturing the rock using explosives or hydraulic pressure.

Water is pumped in containing sand particles that prop open the cracks in the shale, allowing the gas out, and a tiny amount of chemicals.

In the US, concerns have been raised that the gas or the chemicals can enter drinking water supplies.

However, the report concludes that gas contamination should not be a problem - the risk is "very low" - provided that fracking takes place at a depth of many hundreds of metres, a long way below the level of aquifers, and that the wells are properly constructed.

Each well is lined with layers of steel and cement; and if this stays intact, the scientists conclude, gas leakage should not be a problem.

They also say that with good management of waste water, chemical contamination should be avoided; they criticise the US practice of leaving it in open ponds, which would not be permitted in the UK.

The report says the risk that fracking will generate significant seismic events is also small.

The actual explosions are far too small to be noticed at the surface, said Prof Zoe Shipton from the University of Strathclyde.

"If the fluid moves into existing faults in the rock that are close to slipping anyway, you'll bring that slippage forward in time," she said.

"But the Magnitude 2.3 event in Blackpool last year - that is like a lorry going past your house - in fact the British Geological Survey can't measure below Magnitude 2 in towns because of the traffic."

Climate concerns

The European industry is in its infancy compared with the US, and governments' views on the technology are mixed.

Fracking has been banned in France, but countries such as Poland are taking a strong interest.

UK ministers see shale gas as a way of cheaply bridging the transition to a low-carbon fuel mix, despite calculations showing that widespread adoption without carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology would mean future UK governments missing their legally-binding greenhouse gas emission reduction targets.

Prof Mair said climate impacts were outside his remit, but a detailed look at the issue should happen at some stage.

"The Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering believe this is an issue that needs to be addressed," he said.

"It's a very wide issue - energy policy, CO2 reduction, all of that needs to be looked at - and gas in general is part of that."

From the BBC:

Top of the drops: Rain makes umbrella play music

Gene Kelly is not the only one singing in the rain - German hardware hackers have come up with an umbrella that makes music when it is wet.

Berlin-based Alice Zappe and Julia Lager fitted 12 touch-sensitive sensors to the inner canopy of a brolly.

The sensors were connected to a simple circuit board that spotted when each sensor was struck by a raindrop.

It plays a different beep for each sensor to generate a random 8-bit tune in response to the falling rain.

The gadget was put together in a day for a 24-hour hardware hacking event in Amsterdam so had to be relatively simple, said Ms Zappe.

She said the idea for the umbrella came out of a visit to a design exhibition the day before that left the pair wondering how everyday objects could be connected by music.

Many of their ideas, such as a making a web app that recommended food based on the bands someone likes, proved too complicated, so the pair plumped for the musical umbrella.

The first version of the umbrella has the sensors and wires fixed to the canopy cloth using duct tape.

The sensors are made of a piezoelectric material that generates a tiny charge when it is stressed or distorted.

The charges generated when the piezoelectric sensors were hit by raindrops were picked up by an Arduino microcontroller. This has a simple silicon chip on a circuit board studded with many different connectors that can take in data, analyse it and then produce a response via one of its many outputs.

Arduino microcontrollers are popular with many hobbyist hardware hackers because they make it easy to get different components working together.

One tricky part of the project, said Ms Zappe, was tuning the microcontroller so it generated enough beeps to make a pleasant tune. Too sensitive and listeners would get a frenetic cacophony in the lightest shower. Not sensitive enough and the music would be too plodding and sporadic to be interesting.

Testing the sensitivity of the sensors was tricky, said Ms Zappe, because no rain fell on the day it was being built. A bit of messy experimentation in a kitchen did not really help, she said, so the pair had to go on a foraging trip for a watering can.

"We went out to the city on a quest that cost us hours of precious hackathon time," she told the BBC. "It was ridiculous."

The delay meant there was no time to work on connecting the Arduino to an Android phone because writing software to do that task would have taken too long. As a result, said Ms Zappe, they were forced to fall back on the built-in 8-bit tone generator on the Arduino microcontroller as a musical source.

"We wanted to present something simple that actually works rather than something complicated we wouldn't be able to finish in the given time," she said.

"In the end we were quite satisfied with our prototype although we have to admit it does get a bit annoying after some time," said Ms Zappe.

The pair are now working on an improved version of the umbrella. This will have wires and sensors sewn on to the canopy and be able to play more pleasant sounds.

"It will also allow you to choose from a few different sounds like piano, guitar, drums and bells - and of course 8-bit," she said.

I found a video clip of this musical umbrella:

From the BBC:

'Paint-on' batteries demonstrated

Researchers have shown off a means to spray-paint batteries onto any surface.

Their batteries, outlined in Scientific Reports, are made up of five separate layers, each with its own recipe - together measuring just 0.5mm thick.

To demonstrate the technique, the team painted batteries onto steel, glass, ceramic tile and even a beer stein.

The approach will be of particular interest in industrial applications, as it is compatible with existing spray-painting technology.

The most common batteries are made up of negative and positive halves (the anode and the cathode), a material to separate them, and "current collector" layers at top and bottom to gather up the electric charges moving through.

Many batteries are made in a kind of "Swiss roll" geometry, in which the layers are rolled up into a cylindrical or round-edged rectangular shape.

But as more consumer technology is developed with challenging shapes and sizes, or "form factors", the need for batteries of non-standard shapes is rising.

Flexible paper batteries have been demonstrated, and there is clear interest in "structural batteries" built for example into the surfaces of electric vehicles.

The new work, from Rice University in Texas, US, opens up completely new avenues for putting batteries on nearly any surface in a simple and robust way.

Pulickel Ajayan and his colleagues chemically optimised the recipe for each of their five layers, using blends of chemicals common in lithium-ion batteries as well as novel materials including carbon nanotubes - tiny "straws" of carbon with incredible electronic properties.

But for the process to result in a working battery, all five layers must stick together and work in synchrony, and the tricky step was finding a separator material that kept the whole stack in one piece.

When the team hit on using a chemical called poly-methylmethacrylate, they had a structure that would stick even to curved surfaces.

"This means traditional packaging for batteries has given way to a much more flexible approach that allows all kinds of new design and integration possibilities for storage devices," said Prof Ajayan.

"There has been a lot of interest in recent times in creating power sources with an improved form factor, and this is a big step forward in that direction."

From the BBC:

Graphene gives Thomas Edison's battery a new life

A rechargeable battery technology developed by Thomas Edison more than a century ago has been upgraded by Stanford University researchers.

The original nickel-iron battery was made at the beginning of the 20th Century to power electric cars.

But today, only a few companies use it, mainly to store surplus electricity from solar panels and wind turbines.

The original Edison battery takes hours to charge, but the improved version charges in minutes.

The research appears in the journal Nature Communications.

The original battery consists of a cathode made of nickel and an anode made of iron, bathed in an alkaline solution.

Carbon is usually used as the conductive element - but to improve its performance, the Stanford team used graphene, a sheet of carbon just one atom thick.

"In conventional electrodes, people randomly mix iron and nickel materials with conductive carbon," said Stanford postgraduate student Hailiang Wang, lead author of the study.

"Instead, we grew nanocrystals of iron oxide onto graphene, and nanocrystals of nickel hydroxide onto carbon nanotubes."

This method helped the scientists increase the charging rate of the battery by nearly 1,000 times, he added.

Electric cars

The prototype battery is only powerful enough to operate an electric torch, but the team hopes that one day it will be used to power modern electric vehicles - or at least as a "power boost" source.

"Hopefully we can give the nickel-iron battery a new life," said Hongjie Dai, a professor of chemistry at Stanford.

Mr Wang said their battery could complement the lithium-ion batteries currently used in many electric vehicles, giving them "a real power boost for faster acceleration and regenerative braking".

It could also be used in emergency situations, when something needs to be charged very quickly.

Electric cars are not a new concept, the first one appeared in the 19th Century.

Many of the ones made in the early 1900s were powered by the Edison battery, which was also used as back-up power source for railways and the mining industry.

From the BBC:

Higgs boson: The poetry of subatomic particles

The Higgs boson, which scientists at Cern appear to be homing in on after 45 years, gets its name, as everyone knows, from British physicist Peter Higgs, one of the first to propose its existence.

But what about the other part of this great name - boson? This, in fact, is also named after a physicist, the Indian contemporary of Einstein, Satyendra Nath Bose.

Physicists from Russia to California have given lots of curious and sometimes poetic names to the subatomic particles discovered over the last century or so. Here are 10 of them.

1. Higgs boson / God particle

The Higgs boson, proposed by Peter Higgs in 1964, if it exists, is what gives matter mass. It has also been named the name God particle by American physicist Leon Lederman. "He wanted to refer to it as that 'goddamn particle' and his editor wouldn't let him," Higgs told the Guardian. So "God particle" it was.

2. Quark

A fundamental particle that combines to form a range of other particles, including the particles that make up the atomic nucleus - protons and neutrons.

The term was drawn from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake by American physicist Murray Gell-Mann (born 1929) in 1962. He had already come up with the sound, and was thinking of spelling it "kwork".

"Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word 'quark' in the phrase 'Three quarks for Muster Mark'," he explained in his book the Quark and the Jaguar.

3. Hadron

4. Boson

A class of particles often associated with forces (as the carriers of the force). They obey Bose-Einstein statistics, named after the Indian physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose (1894-1974). The suffix "-on" is Greek, and became standard for newly discovered particles a century ago.

5. Fermion

6. Gluon

A type of boson responsible for the strong force between quarks. The term derives from the English word "glue". It was first proposed in 1962 by Murray Gell-Mann, who suggested the existence of particles composed of a number of gluons, which he called glueballs.

7. Neutrino

Uncharged particles created as a result of certain types of radioactive decay, with a tiny mass even by the standards of subatomic particles. Neutrino means "small neutral one" in Italian. The particle was first proposed by Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958) in 1930, who gave it the name "neutron". Enrico Fermi renamed it three years later, as "neutron" (from the Latin for "neutral") had begun to be used to refer to the uncharged particle present in the atomic nucleus, along with the proton.

8. Electron

An indivisible quantity of electric charge, proposed in 1894 by the Irish physicist, George Johnston Stoney (1826-1911). Derived from the word "electric" (or the Latin "electrum") plus the Greek suffix "-on".

9. Meson

A particle made of a quark and an anti-quark. The name comes from the Greek "meso" meaning "mid", because mesons, when first observed, appeared to have a mass somewhere between that of an electron, and nucleons (the particles - protons and neutrons - making up the atomic nucleus). The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is a detector on the LHC with which the Cern scientists believe they have found evidence of the new particle consistent with the Higgs boson. It is designed to measure the energy and momentum of muons and some other particles produced by collisions within the collider.

10. Muon

One of a large range of particles named after letters of the Greek alphabet, in this case "mu". It was originally thought to be a type of meson (the mu meson, as distinct, say, from the pi meson), but was later renamed. Mesons came to be defined as particles made up of quarks, while muons are elementary particles.

And five more...

• Lepton - a type of elementary particle (examples include electrons and neutrinos), from the Greek "leptos" meaning "small" or "thin"
• Photon - a light quantum, the name derived from the Greek "phos" meaning "light"
• Skyrmion - a type of fermion proposed by British physicist Tony Skyrme (1922-1987)
• Proton - name given to Hydrogen nucleus by Ernest Rutherford in 1920, from the Greek "protos" meaning "first"
• WIMP - weakly interactive massive particle

A bit more information about quarks not mentioned above, There are 6 types of quarks - up, down, strange, charm, top and bottom. A proton consists of 2 up quarks and 1 down quark, but a neutron consists of 1 up quark and 2 down quarks. Quarks have different properties, one of which is the electric charge. This can be either 1/3rd or 2/3rds of the "elementary charge". Some of the quarks such as the up have an electric charge of +2/3rd. The others such as the down have an electric charge of -1/3rd. (In anti-matter, the up has -2/3rds and the down +1/3rd).

Tomorrow, how to build your own Hadron collider in your garage

From the BBC:

'Most realistic' robot legs developed

US experts have developed what they say are the most biologically-accurate robotic legs yet.

Writing in the Journal of Neural Engineering, they said the work could help understanding of how babies learn to walk - and spinal-injury treatment.

They created a version of the message system that generates the rhythmic muscle signals that control walking.

A UK expert said the work was exciting because the robot mimics control and not just movement.

The team, from the University of Arizona, were able to replicate the central pattern generator (CPG) - a nerve cell (neuronal) network in the lumbar region of the spinal cord that generates rhythmic muscle signals.

The CPG produces, and then controls, these signals by gathering information from different parts of the body involved in walking, responding to the environment.

This is what allows people to walk without thinking about it.

The simplest form of a CPG is called a half-centre, which consists of just two neurons that fire signals alternatively, producing a rhythm, as well as sensors that deliver information, such as when a leg meets a surface, back to the half-centre.

'New approach'

The University of Arizona team suggests babies start off with this simplistic set-up - and then over time develop a more complex walking pattern.

They say this could explain why babies put onto a treadmill have been seen to take steps - even before they have learnt to walk.

Writing in the journal, the team says: "This robot represents a complete physical, or 'neurorobotic' model of the system, demonstrating the usefulness of this type of robotics research for investigating the neuropsychological processes underlying walking in humans and animals".

Dr Theresa Klein, who worked on the study, said: "Interestingly, we were able to produce a walking gait, without balance, which mimicked human walking with only a simple half-centre controlling the hips and a set of reflex responses controlling the lower limb.

"This underlying network may also form the core of the CPG and may explain how people with spinal cord injuries can regain walking ability if properly stimulated in the months after the injury."

Matt Thornton, gait analysis laboratory manager at the UK's Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, said the work was "an interesting development".

He added: "Previous robotic models have mimicked human movement: this one goes further and mimics the underlying human control mechanisms driving that movement.

"It may offer a new approach to investigate and understand the link between nervous system control problems and walking pathologies."

Mr Thornton said existing systems for analysing how people walk, so-called gait analysis performed by the RNOH and others, accurately measure hip, knee, and ankle joint movements in 3D while patients walk on a treadmill. Patients react differently, depending on their condition.

He added: "At present this type of analysis provides us with detailed information about the joints, bones and muscles.

"The robotic model may go one step further in linking these problems to the nervous system, which actually controls the movement.

"The implications for increased understanding of, for example, patients with spinal cord injury are very exciting."

From the BBC:

Thousands face internet loss as FBI shuts off servers

More than 300,000 people, including many in the US and UK, could lose internet access later as the FBI shuts off servers used by cyber thieves.

The FBI seized the servers in November 2011 during raids to break up a gang of criminals who used viruses to infect more than four million victims.

Victims' web searches were routed through the servers so they saw adverts that led to the gang being paid.

Many machines still harbour the gang's malicious code.

Global clean up

The gang racked up more than $14m (£9m) by hijacking web searches and forcing victims to see certain adverts. They managed to do this because their servers were taking over a key web function known as domain name look-up.

Domain names are the words humans use, such as bbc.co.uk, for websites. These are converted into the numerical values that computers use by consulting domain name servers (DNS).

When a person types a name into a browser address bar, often their computer will consult a DNS server to find out where that website resides online.

The gang infected computers with malware called DNS Changer because it altered where a PC went to convert domain names to numbers.

Since the FBI raids the gang's servers have been run by Californian company ISC.

Over the last few months, the FBI has worked with many ISPs and security firms to alert victims to the fact that their PC was infected with DNS Changer. Online tools are available that let people check if they are infected.

This has meant the original population of four million infected machines has been whittled down to just over 300,000, according to statistics gathered by the DNS Changer Working Group.

The largest group of machines still harbouring the infection are in the US but many other nations, including Italy, India, the UK and Germany, have substantial numbers still checking in with the ISC servers.

These servers will be shut down on 9 July.

The result could be that some people lose net access because the PCs that are still victims of DNS Changer will suddenly have nowhere to go when they need to look up the location of a particular domain.

It might take some time for the problems to become apparent, said Sean Sullivan, a security researcher at F-Secure.

"Initially some domains will be cached which will mean web access will be spotty," he said. "People will be confused about why some things work and some do not."

Other security experts said it might take time for the remaining infected machines to be cleaned up.

"Reaching victims is a very hard problem, and something we have had issues with for years," said Johannes Ullrich, a researcher with the Sans security institute.

He expected the impact to be "minimal" because many of these systems were no longer used or maintained.

From the BBC:

Green food report favours home-grown curry

By Mark Kinver Environment reporter, BBC News

England could spice up its food production by growing more herbs and spices, says a report looking at the nation's future food security.

It said it could become possible if the UK's climate changes, as could growing chickpeas "for roti-bread flour".

Experts involved in the government-convened Green Food Project also called for improvements in yields, resource efficiency and wildlife protection.

The findings will be unveiled by Farming Minster Jim Paice.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs set up the project in order to bring together representatives in farming, manufacturing, science and conservation to look at measures to ensure the UK's food system can cope with future pressures.

Among the issues facing the sector are climate change, a growing population, changes in diet and eating habits.

"With our increasingly hungry world, every country must place its part to produce more food and improve the environment," Mr Paice said.

"We're not talking about Soviet-style targets but an overall approach in which the whole food chain pulls together."

Food for thought

The project consisted of five subgroups to look at particular areas within the food system - wheat, dairy, bread, curry and geographical areas - with the goal of consider ways to "reconcile how we will achieve our goals of improving the environment and increasing good production".

The project's steering group identified a number of "strategic steps" that could be taken to strengthen the food chain, including:

• Research and technology - improve knowledge base and science capability; also improve forecasting potential scenarios the sector will face in the future
• Knowledge exchange - improve the way in which research and advice is shared between food, farming and environmental sectors
• Investment - giving farmers and businesses confidence that investments will improve future performance
• Ecosystem services - develop a clear understanding of the economic costs and environmental risks of allowing such services to deteriorate
• Consumption and waste - initiate further work on how to tackle problems within the food system surrounding consumption, demand and waste

Among the organisations represented were the National Farmers' Union, the British Retail Consortium, the Food and Drink Federation, WWF and the RSPB.

Commenting on the report, RSPB conservation director and member of the steering group Martin Harper said: "It is clear that food production and consumption urgently need to change.

"The project is an important first step towards working out what England's contribution should be to help food production to become more sustainable and shared more equitably."

Another member of the steering group, WWF-UK's head of food programme Mark Driscoll, also described the report as a first step, but said more needed to be done.

"The establishment of a consumption forum, but this has to be much more than just a talking shop," he said.

"It must report back with clear recommendations and a timetable for action from government, business and civil society."

A shocking story from the BBC:

T-shirts developed that could charge mobile phones

Scientists at the University of South Carolina have found a way to use a cheap T-shirt to store electrical power.

It could pave the way for clothes that are able to charge phones and other devices.

Experts predict that new technologies including roll-up smartphones and laptops will be on the market soon.

These developments would spur on the need for "flexible energy storage", said the professor behind the project.

Xiaodong Li, a professor of mechanical engineering at the university teamed up with post-doctorate researcher Lihong Bao to find a solution.

The pair wrote up their findings for the Advanced Materials journal.

They used a T-shirt bought from a local discount store, which was soaked in a solution of fluoride, dried and then baked in an oxygen-free environment at high temperature.

Hybrid fabric

The fibres in the fabric converted from cellulose to activated carbon during the process, but the material remained flexible.

By using small parts of the fabric as an electrode, the researchers showed that the material could be made to act as a capacitor.

Capacitors store an electrical charge and are components of nearly every electronic device on the market.

By coating the individual fibres of the carbonised fabric with manganese oxide just a nanometre thick, the electrode performance of the fabric was further enhanced.

"This created a stable, high-performing supercapacitor," said Prof Li.

The hybrid supercapacitors proved resilient - even after thousands of charge-discharge cycles their performance did not diminish more than 5%, the researchers said.

"By stacking these supercapacitors up, we should be able to charge portable electronic devices such as cell phones," Prof Li added.

"We wear fabric every day. One day our cotton T-shirts could have more functions; for example, a flexible energy storage device that could charge your cell phone or your iPad."

From the BBC:

Graphene holes 'heal themselves'

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Graphene - the "wonder material" made of sheets of carbon just one atom thick - undergoes a self-reparing process to correct holes, researchers report.

Graphene's outstanding mechanical strength and electronic properties make it a promising material for a wide range of future applications.

But its almost ethereal thinness makes it easily damaged when working with it.

The study, published in Nano Letters, suggests it can be repaired by simply exposing it to loose carbon atoms.

It was carried out by researchers at the University of Manchester, UK - including Konstantin Novoselov, who shared a Nobel prize as graphene's co-discoverer - and at the SuperStem Laboratory of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in Daresbury, UK.

The team was initially interested in the effects of adding metal contacts to strips of graphene, the only way to exploit its phenomenal electronic properties.

The process routinely creates holes in the atom-thick sheets, so the researchers were trying to understand how those holes form, firing electron beams through graphene sheets and then studying the results with an electron microscope.

But to their surprise, they found that when carbon atoms were also near the samples, the atoms snapped into place, repairing the two-dimensional sheet.

"It just happened that we noticed it," said co-author of the study Quentin Ramasse of the SuperStem laboratory.

"We repeated it a few times and then tried to understand how that came about," he told BBC News.

The team found that when metal atoms were around, they too would snap into the edges of the holes, and when carbon was around as part of molecules called hydrocarbons, the carbon atoms from them could form irregular shapes in the sheets.

But pure carbon atoms would bump metal atoms out of the way, perfectly repairing the holes and forming a fresh and uninterrupted lattice of hexagons - textbook graphene - as they report in an online preprint of the article.

"If you can drill a hole and control that 'carbon reservoir', and let them in in small amounts, you could think about tailoring edges of graphene or repairing holes that have been created inadvertently," Dr Ramasse said.

"We know how to connect small strips of graphene, to drill it, to tailor it, to sculpt it, and it now seems we might be able to grow it back in a reasonably controlled way."

From the BBC:

Virgin could take on Devon children care contract

Virgin Care has been named as preferred bidder to run a £130m contract for children's services in Devon.

The company, which runs children's services in Surrey, could take over in March 2013 for three years.

It beat off competition from Devon Partnership Trust with Barnado's, Young Devon and Interserve and Serco with Cornwall Partnership Trust.

But a paediatric expert called the decision to privatise children's services "absolutely appalling".

'Less than perfect'

Stuart Logan, professor of paediatric epidemiology at the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry in Exeter, said the NHS was one of the most cost efficient health providers in the developed world.

"These are some of the most vulnerable, most challenged children in our society and apart from the practical side, it just feels wrong that people should be making a profit out of providing services for these children," he said.

"While our service is less than perfect at the moment, at least all of us who work with these children are driven by trying to do the best we can for them."

"What worries me most is that as soon as you bring in a company whose principal aim is to make a profit, it changes the way you think about the service."

Currently, services are delivered by about 1,100 staff employed by NHS Devon and Devon County Council.

The NHS said appointing a single organisation to run all the services across the county would offer the best and most integrated care.

A Virgin Care spokesman said: "Clinical excellence is paramount.

"The brand brings with it good customer service and we believe we only provide services that are good enough for our own families."

'Many benefits'

Services for about 2,400 children with physical and sensory disabilities, children's mental health services and school nurses and health visitors will be affected.

The county council said the services had been put out to tender because of the government's national transforming community services directive in 2009, requiring all primary care trusts to become commissioning-only organisations.

That meant that NHS Devon could no longer provide these integrated services, according to the county council.

Child protection services will continue to be managed by Devon County Council.

Rebecca Harriott, director of commissioning development at NHS Devon, said: "Bringing together community-based health and social care staff has brought many benefits for children, young people, parents and carers.

"Keeping these services together and developing them further means finding the right provider with the right vision and commitment.

"Today's announcement is just one step towards this."

Analysis

The private and voluntary sectors have provided care for NHS patients for years, such as drug and alcohol services and physiotherapy.

For many, however, the prospect of the massive global brand that is Virgin taking charge of health and care services for some of the most vulnerable in society is a step too far.

Some parents and paediatricians question whether the profit-making corporation they associate with trains, plains and phone contracts will really do what is best for ill and disabled children.

NHS Devon and the county council say appointing a single organisation to provide health and social care in the community will offer children and their families a stronger joined-up service.

They clearly believe Virgin Care has the potential to deliver. Some families and health professionals need more persuading.

From the BBC:

Light trick to see around corners

Scientists have found a novel way to get images through "scattering" materials such as frosted glass or skin, and even to "see around corners".

Much research in recent years has focused on correcting for scattering, mostly for medical applications.

But the new trick, reported in Nature Photonics, is quick, simple and uses natural light rather than lasers.

It uses what is called a spatial light modulator to "undo" the scattering that makes objects opaque or non-reflecting.

A camera that can "see around corners" garnered much attention in 2010, using a series of timed laser pulses to illuminate a scene and working out what is around a corner from the timing of the reflections.

The prototype device was just one of a great many research efforts trying to crack the problem of scattering.

But for some applications, the "time-of-flight" approach that the laser-based camera uses is not sufficient.

"If you want to look to see an embryo developing inside an egg but the eggshell scatters everything, or you want to look through the skin, scattering is the main enemy there, and time-of-flight is not a good solution," explained senior author of the study Yaron Silberberg Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

For those kinds of problems, Prof Silberberg and colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have pushed the limits of what spatial light modulators (SLMs) can do.

SLMs modify what is known as the phase of an incoming light beam. Like a series of waves on the ocean that run over rocks or surfers, the waves in light can be slowed down or redirected when they hit scattering materials.

SLMs are made up of an array of pixels that can correct for this by selectively slowing down some parts of the beam and allowing others to pass untouched - when an electric field is applied to a pixel, it changes the speed at which light passes through it.

Out of left field

Prof Silberberg and his team first set up their SLM by shining light from a normal lamp through a highly scattering plastic film and allowing a computer to finely tune the SLM until they could see a clear image of the lamp through the film.

Keeping the SLM set this way, they were then able to obtain clear images of other objects through the film - the SLM effectively turns the film back into a clear sheet.

"What we have shown is that you don't need lasers - everybody else was doing this with lasers, and we showed you can do it with incoherent light from a lamp or the Sun - natural light," Prof Silberberg told BBC News.

But the team then realised that the same approach can work in reflection - that is, not passing through a scattering material but bouncing off of it, such as the case of light bouncing off a wall at a corner.

They then showed the procedure works just as well when the light from an object bounces off a piece of paper; the SLM could "learn" how to undo the paper's scattering effect, making it a nearly perfect reflector.

As Prof Silberberg puts it: "You can take a piece of wall and effectively turn it into a mirror, and this is the part that makes everybody raise an eyebrow."

However, he said that the primary use for the technique will be in biological and medical studies - especially tackling the highly scattering white brain matter in neurological imaging - rather than the business of seeing through thin materials or around corners.

"I don't want to say that it solves the problems of secret organisations and Peeping Toms and so on, that's not going to be so simple. But the principle is there.

"We have not started to tackle these things... but I see how much interest this raises and think maybe we should."

From the BBC:

Academics say 'no truth' to lying eyes theory

Research by academics at two universities have concluded that the common belief of lying eyes is a myth.

Many psychologists think when a person looks up to their right they are likely to be telling a lie and glancing up to the left is said to indicate honesty.

However, the experts from Edinburgh University and Hertfordshire University carried out tests and found the theory to be wrong.

The research appeared in the online journal Public Library of Science ONE.

The claimed link between eye movements and truth telling is a key element of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), a method of enhancing people's lives using psychological techniques.

One aspect of NLP involves teaching people about the relationship between eye movements and thought.

According to the theory, when right-handed people look up to their right they are likely to be visualising a "constructed" or imagined event.

In contrast when they look to their left they are likely to be visualising a "remembered" memory.

For this reason, when liars are constructing their own version of the truth, they tend to look to the right.

The idea was tested by filming volunteers and recording their eye movements as they told the truth or lied.

A second group of volunteers was then asked to watch the films and try to detect the lies by watching the eye movements.

Co-author Dr Caroline Watt, from Edinburgh University, said: "A large percentage of the public believes that certain eye movements are a sign of lying, and this idea is even taught in organisational training courses.

"Our research provides no support for the idea and so suggests that it is time to abandon this approach to detecting deceit."

Psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman, from Hertfordshire University, said: "The results of the first study revealed no relationship between lying and eye movements, and the second showed that telling people about the claims made by NLP practitioners did not improve their lie detection skills."

A follow-up study involved analysing videos of high-profile press conferences in which people appealed for help in finding missing relatives, or claimed to have been victims of crime.

While some were telling the truth, others turned out to be lying.

Again, there was no evidence of a correlation between lying and eye movements.

Another graphene story from the BBC:

Graphene transistors in high-performance demonstration

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

The hope for the "miracle material" graphene to fulfil its promise in electronics has received a boost - by changing the recipe when cooking it.

Graphene, one-atom-thick sheets of carbon, can carry electric charges far faster than currently used materials.

But it has proven difficult to make it behave as a semiconductor like silicon, or to attach "contacts" to the sheets.

A study in Nature Communications solves those problems by cooking up graphene from a material called silicon carbide.

Since its discovery in 2004, graphene has been the focus of intense research efforts to exploit its phenomenal mechanical strength and its favourable electronic properties.

Because sheets of it are so thin and it conducts electric charges so well, it is already being used as a crystal-clear "electrode" for solar cells, and will soon find its way into consumer products including smartphones and televisions.

The greatest hope, however, is that it can be used in semiconductor applications, working with or replacing the industry's standard material of silicon.

To make faster computer chips, the industry has been working relentlessly to shrink the individual transistors - and is heading for a physical limit to just how small they can go.

Since charges zip through graphene hundreds of times faster than in silicon, a jump in speed could be made with no decrease in size - but efforts to integrate graphene into chips have been difficult.

One-chip wonder

One problem is that while pure graphene is a particularly good conductor, it is a terrible semiconductor - the kind of material needed to make transistors. While a number of different transistors have been produced using graphene, they have required modifications to it that degrade its electrical performance.

Another issue is the fact that adding metal contacts to graphene - to shuttle electric charges into and out of it - is tricky, and often results in damage.

To tackle both issues, researchers at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany have enlisted the help of a somewhat lesser-known material called silicon carbide - a simple crystal made of silicon and carbon.

In 2009, several members of the same team reported in Nature Materials that when wafers of the material were baked, silicon atoms were driven out of the crystal's topmost layer, leaving behind just carbon in the form of graphene.

In the new work, the team joined Swedish research institute Acreo AB, using a high-energy beam of charged atoms to etch "channels" into thin silicon carbide wafers defining where different transistor parts would be.

The team's crucial step was to allow a bit of hydrogen gas in during this process. This affected how the top graphene layer was chemically joined to the underlying silicon carbide: either making a given region conducting or semiconducting, depending on the etched channels.

The way the hydrogen atoms fit themselves into the interface changes the nature of the chemical bonds between the two layers.

Quentin Ramasse, a researcher at the SuperStem Laboratory in Daresbury, UK - whose work recently showed that holes in graphene holes "heal themselves" - called the work "really impressive".

"That's really what they've nailed: controlling that last little bit of bonding to make one type of contact or another," Dr Ramasse told BBC News.

"That's what the hold-up has been, being able to tailor that contact to suit whatever you want to use it for, and have it all in the one chip."

"You read everywhere that graphene is magical for this reason and that, and it's good to be reminded that you can put it in real devices and make it scalable and actually use it for technological applications," he said. "That's a very good step forward."

From the BBC:

Climate ocean tech fix 'can work', research suggests

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

Fertilising the oceans with iron to combat climate change can lock carbon away for centuries, research suggests.

Tiny marine plants induced to grow by the iron sink to the ocean floor taking carbon with them, a German-led team reports in Nature journal.

Iron fertilisation is one of the oldest ideas for a climate "technical fix".

But much more research is needed before the approach could be put to use, the scientists say, and cutting emissions should be the priority.

There have been about 12 iron fertilisation experiments at sea down the years, stimulated by the pioneering theory of oceanographer John Martin.

In the 1980s, he proposed that in many parts of the oceans, the growth of phytoplankton - tiny marine plants, or algae - was limited by lack of iron.

Adding iron, he suggested, would enable the plants to make full use of nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus; and as they grew, they would absorb carbon dioxide.

This has since become the most researched of all the proposed "geoengineering" approaches - technical fixes for climate change.

Many experiments have shown that adding iron stimulates the phytoplankton to grow and absorb CO2; but whether the carbon is released again as the plants die, or through respiration of tiny animals (zooplankton) that eat them, has never been clear.

The new paper, which relates to the European Iron Fertilization Experiment (EIFEX) performed in 2004 in the Southern Ocean, is the first to give a clear positive answer to that question.

Clearing the waters

EIFEX deposited about five tonnes of iron sulphate into an eddy in the Southern Ocean currents. Scientists showed that the water in the eddy was pretty much self-contained, its rotation largely isolating it from the rest of the ocean.

Releasing the iron caused a big bloom of algae, which died off again in the days following the release as the iron concentration dwindled.

Over a seven-week period, scientists monitored the water inside and outside the eddy before, during and after deployment of the iron sulphate.

"We had instruments that we could deploy right down to the seafloor, which is at 3,800m depth," said Victor Smetacek, lead researcher on the new paper.

"We also had water bottles that we could close at specific depths, removing the water samples, and we did a huge number of measurements on the phytoplankton and its environment - the nutrients, the iron, and the zooplankton," the Alfred Wegener Institute scientist told the BBC.

These measurements showed that about half of the carbon absorbed from the surface waters was taken down to the sea floor when the phytoplankton died.

"We've quantified this response and were able to guess at the reasons that made the algae sink out of the water column," said Prof Smetacek.

"The organic carbon in the dead algae leaked out and became a sticky mess, you could say, and this picked up other particles and we have these large flocs (flakes of solid matter) sinking out."

Carbon dioxide is constantly being exchanged between the surface of the ocean and the atmosphere.

The presumption is that once the carbon has made it to the ocean floor in solid form, it will remain there for centuries. Meanwhile, the surface water, which is now relatively depleted in carbon, will absorb more from the atmosphere.

'A lof of work ahead'

Dr Michael Steinke from the UK's University of Essex, who was not involved in the study, said it provided "the very first evidence of a man-made conduit between the increasingly CO2-burdened atmosphere and the deep sea".

However, one clear lesson from the number of iron fertilisation experiments down the years is that each patch of ocean is different; to work well, it needs to have the right mix of nutrients and the right kinds of organisms.

The biggest experiment of all, Lohafex, dealt a blow to hopes of utilising ocean fertilisation when it reported three years ago that six tonnes of iron produced little extra plankton growth.

"Will this [new paper] open up the gates to large-scale geoengineering using ocean fertilisation to mitigate climate change?" asked Dr Steinke rhetorically.

"Likely not, since the logistics of finding the right spot for such experiments are difficult and costly. Of the twelve fertilisation experiments of this kind... this group's experiment is the only example to date that demonstrates the all-important carbon burial in the deep sea sediments, away from the atmosphere."

Prof John Shepherd from the UK's National Oceanography Centre, who chaired the Royal Society report Geoengineering the Climate, said impacts on sea life needed to be taken into account before iron fertilisation could be contemplated as a real-life "technical fix".

"Whilst the new research is an interesting and valuable contribution in this evolving field, it does not address the potential ecological side effects of such a technology and it still just a single study in what is a poorly understood field," he said.

Prof Smetacek's own analysis is that even if it were deployed on a vast scale, ocean fertilisation could only take up about a quarter of the extra carbon dioxide being deposited in the atmosphere by humanity's industry, transport and agriculture.

"This is not a solution - the first thing we need to do is reduce emissions, that's absolutely essential," he said.

From the BBC:

Green streets can cut pollution, says study

By Mark Kinver Environment reporter, BBC News

The creation of "green walls" in urban areas could cut pollution by up to 30%, scientists have suggested.

UK researchers say more trees and other vegetation at street level would clean air in areas that are normally exposed to higher pollution levels.

Plants in towns and cities have been shown to remove nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and particulate matter (PM), both of which are harmful to human health.

The findings appear in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

"Up until now, every initiative around reducing pollution has taken a top-down approach, [such as] scrapping old cars, adding catalytic converters, bringing in the congestion charge - some of which have not had the desired effect," said co-author Rob MacKenzie from the University of Birmingham.

"The benefit of green walls is that they clean up the air coming into and staying in the street canyon," Prof MacKenzie observed.

"Planting more [green walls] in a strategic way could be a relatively easy way to take control of our local pollution problems."

Street canyons refer to the effect created by high buildings lining a street, preventing much of the pollution escaping.

Previous studies have shown that greening urban spaces can cut pollution, but only by about 5%. This study suggests that strategic placement of vegetation in street canyons can cut air pollution by up to 30%.

Green walls, consisting of climbing plants such as ivy, built on billboard-like structures could act as air pollution filters, the team said.

Nicola Cheetham, head of environment (surface transport) for Transport for London (TfL), welcomed the findings.

"Our own research, conducted by Imperial College London, shows the ability of different plants to trap particulate matter," she said.

Ms Cheetham added that TfL had just installed its second green wall in the capital to help mitigate the pollution associated with heavy flows of urban traffic.

The team reached their findings about the effectiveness of green walls by using a computer model that showed the effect of street canyons trapping air at street level and the accumulation of pollution.

The model also showed that street trees were effective filters, but only in less polluted streets and provided the trees' canopies did not result in the pollution being trapped at ground level.

Co-author Tom Pugh, from Lancaster University, said one of the challenges of greening urban areas was ensuring the plants were able to survive in the projected change in conditions.

"More care needs to be taken as to how and where we plant vegetation," Dr Pugh said.

"[We need to make sure] that it does not suffer from drought, become heat stressed or vandalised."

Anne Jaluzot from the co-ordinating group Trees and Design Action Group told BBC News that councils were planting too many small trees that did nothing for biodiversity, flood prevention or pollution control. She said they should concentrate on finding space for a smaller number of very big trees.

She also said money was being wasted on designer green walls - vertical planting systems. "These green walls often look great, but they're unsustainable because of the high maintenance costs and need for fertilisers.

"Councils and developers would often be better to simply cover a wall with ivy and other creepers," she said.

From the BBC:

Vast aquifer found in Namibia could last for centuries

By Matt McGrath Science reporter, BBC World Service

A newly discovered water source in Namibia could have a major impact on development in the driest country in sub-Saharan Africa.

Estimates suggest the aquifer could supply the north of the country for 400 years at current rates of consumption.

Scientists say the water is up to 10,000 years old but is cleaner to drink than many modern sources.

However, there are concerns that unauthorised drilling could threaten the new supply.

Huge resource

For the people of northern Namibia water is something that they either have too much of or too little.

The 800,000 people who live in the area depend for their drinking water on a 40-year-old canal that brings the scarce resource across the border from Angola.

Over the past decade the Namibian government have been trying to tackle the lack of a sustainable supply in partnership with researchers from Germany and other EU countries.

They have now identified a new aquifer called Ohangwena II, which flows under the boundary between Angola and Namibia.

On the Namibian side of the border it covers an area roughly 70 km by 40 km (43 miles by 25 miles).

According to project manager Martin Quinger, from the German federal institute for geoscience and natural resources (BGR), it's a substantial body of water.

"The amount of stored water would equal the current supply of this area in northern Namibia for 400 years, which has about 40 percent of the nation's population."

"What we are aiming at is a sustainable water supply so we only extract the amount of water that is being recharged.

"What we can say is that the huge amount of stored water is will always be enough for a back up for an area that is currently supplied only by surface water."

This region is dependent on two rivers for its water supply. But this has restricted agricultural development to areas close to these water sources. Mr Quinger says that the new aquifer has great potential to change the nature of farming in the area.

"For the rural water supply the water will be well suited for irrigation and stock watering, the possibilities that we open with this alternative resource are quite massive." he explains.

As well as providing a new source for agriculture in a region the aquifer will augment existing potable supplies. Martin Quinger says the discovery may be up to 10,000 years old but it is still good to drink.

"If the water [has spent] 10,000 years underground, it means it was recharged at a time when environmental pollution was not yet an issue, so on average it can be a lot better than water that infiltrates in cycles of months or years."

Dangerous drilling

The natural pressure that the water is under means that it is easy and cheap to extract. But because a smaller salty aquifer sits on top of the new find it raises the possibility that unauthorised drilling could threaten the quality of the water.

Martin Quinger says that random drilling into the aquifer could be dangerous.

"If people don't comply with our technical recommendations they might create a hydraulic shortcut between the two aquifers which might lead to the salty water from the upper one contaminating the deep one or vice versa."

One of the biggest advantages of the new aquifer could be in helping people cope with climate change.

The researchers estimate that it could act as a natural buffer for up to 15 years of drought.

As well as identifying the new water source a key aim for the researchers involved is to develop the capacity among young Namibians to manage their country's water resources before the funding from the EU runs out.

From the BBC:

Click here to see this article with pictures

Satellites reveal sudden Greenland ice melt

Greenland's massive ice sheet has melted this month over an unusually large area, Nasa has said.

Scientists said the "unprecedented" melting took place over a larger area than has been detected in three decades of satellite observation.

Melting even occurred at Greenland's coldest and highest place, Summit station.

The thawed ice area jumped from 40% of the ice sheet to 97% in just four days from 8 July.

Although about half of Greenland's ice sheet normally melts over the summer months, the speed and scale of this year's melting surprised scientists, who described the phenomenon as "extraordinary".

Nasa said that nearly the entire ice cover of Greenland, from its thin, low-lying coastal edges to its centre, which is 3km (two miles) thick, experienced some degree of melting at its surface.

"When we see melt in places that we haven't seen before, at least in a long period of time, it makes you sit up and ask what's happening," Nasa chief scientist Waleed Abdalati said.

"It's a big signal, the meaning of which we're going to sort out for years to come."

He said that, because this Greenland-wide melting has happened before, Nasa is not yet able to determine whether this is a natural but rare event, or if it has been sparked by man-made global warming.

Scientists said they believed that much of Greenland's ice was already freezing again.

Until now, the most extensive melting seen by satellites in the past three decades was about 55% of the area.

Ice last melted at Summit station in 1889, ice core records show.

The news comes just days after Nasa satellite imagery revealed that a massive iceberg, twice the size of Manhattan, had broken off a glacier in Greenland.

"This event, combined with other natural but uncommon phenomena, such as the large calving event last week on Petermann Glacier, are part of a complex story," said Nasa's Tom Wagner.

Thanks for that Loro, I'd missed this 

From the BBC:

Hunter gatherer clue to obesity

By Helen Briggs BBC News

The idea that exercise is more important than diet in the fight against obesity has been contradicted by new research.

A study of the Hadza tribe, who still exist as hunter gatherers, suggests the amount of calories we need is a fixed human characteristic.

This suggests Westerners are growing obese through over-eating rather than having inactive lifestyles, say scientists.

One in 10 people will be obese by 2015.

And, nearly one in three of the worldwide population is expected to be overweight, according to figures from the World Health Organization.

The Western lifestyle is thought to be largely to blame for the obesity "epidemic".

Various factors are involved, including processed foods high in sugar and fat, large portion sizes, and a sedentary lifestyle where cars and machines do most of the daily physical work.

The relative balance of overeating to lack of exercise is a matter of debate, however.

Some experts have proposed that our need for calories has dropped drastically since the industrial revolution, and this is a bigger risk factor for obesity than changes in diet.

A study published in the PLoS ONE journal tested the theory, by looking at energy expenditure in the Hadza tribe of Tanzania.

The Hadza people, who still live as hunter gatherers, were used as a model of the ancient human lifestyle.

Members of the 1,000-strong population hunt animals and forage for berries, roots and fruit on foot, using bows, small axes, and digging sticks. They don't use modern tools or guns.

A team of scientists from the US, Tanzania and the UK, measured energy expenditure in 30 Hadza men and women aged between 18 and 75.

They found physical activity levels were much higher in the Hadza men and women, but when corrected for size and weight, their metabolic rate was no different to that of Westerners.

Diverse lifestyles

Dr Herman Pontzer of the department of anthropology at Hunter College, New York, said everyone had assumed that hunter gatherers would burn hundreds more calories a day than adults in the US and Europe.

The data came as a surprise, he said, highlighting the complexity of energy expenditure.

But he stressed that physical exercise is nonetheless important for maintaining good health.

"This to me says that the big reason that Westerners are getting fat is because we eat too much - it's not because we exercise too little," said Dr Pontzer.

"Being active is really important to your health but it won't keep you thin - we need to eat less to do that.

"Daily energy expenditure might be an evolved trait that has been shaped by evolution and is common among all people and not some simple reflection of our diverse lifestyles."

From the BBC:

Valve boss Gabe Newell calls Windows 8 a 'catastrophe'

Operating system Windows 8 will be a "catastrophe" for PC game makers, according to Valve Software's boss.

Speaking at the Casual Connect game conference in Seattle, Gabe Newell said the next version of Windows could mean big changes to the PC market.

Many took his comment as a criticism of the changed user interface in Windows 8 as well as its built-in Windows Store.

The Windows Store could dent the success of Valve's own online market, Steam, through which players buy games.

Mr Newell, who worked for Microsoft for 13 years on Windows, said his company had embraced the open-source software Linux as a "hedging strategy" designed to offset some of the damage Windows 8 was likely to do.

"We want to make it as easy as possible for the 2,500 games on Steam to run on Linux as well," said Mr Newell.

"Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space."

The arrival of Windows 8 would be likely to drive some PC makers and others out of the business because it put so much pressure on their sales margins, Mr Newell added.

He said the success of Valve, known for its Half Life, Left4Dead and Portal titles, had been down to the open nature of the PC.

"We've been a free rider, and we've been able to benefit from everything that went into PCs and the internet," he told the conference. "And we have to continue to figure out how there will be open platforms."

However, he added, the openness that helped Valve as well as firms such as Google and Zynga could disappear with Windows 8.

"There's a strong temptation to close the platform," he said, "because they look at what they can accomplish when they limit the competitors' access to the platform, and they say, 'That's really exciting.'"

This is seen by commentators to be a reference to the inclusion of a Windows Store in the Microsoft operating system.

This is a shop through which users will be able to buy apps for their Windows 8 device.

On some versions of Windows 8, it will be the only way to get downloadable software such as games.

Microsoft takes a cut, up to 30%, of every sale made through this store.

This could be a significant threat to the massively successful Steam online game store that Valve runs and which gives it a commission on every title sold through the online market.

A Windows Store closed to everyone but Microsoft might reduce the range of games available for sale through Steam.

Windows 8's links with Microsoft's Xbox Live online game service could also dent the appeal of Steam for many people.

Mr Newell said Valve was preparing for the future in other ways. In particular, he said, it was trying to make tools and services that players could use to make games and gaming more fun for everyone.

"We think the future is very different [from] successes we've had in the past," he said.

"When you are playing a game, you are trying to think about creating value for other players, so the line between content player and creator is really fuzzy."

One harbinger of this future was perhaps found, he said, in the success of one Team Fortress player in Kansas who was earning $150,000 (£97,000) a year making virtual hats.

"This isn't about video games," he said. "It's about thinking about goods and services in a digital world."