From the BBC:

Deal to turn whisky 'leftovers' into biofuel for cars

By Ken Macdonald BBC Scotland Science Correspondent

A deal has been signed to turn by-products from a Scottish distillery into fuel for cars.

In what is claimed to be a world first, the Tullibardine distillery in Perthshire has linked up with a spin-out company from Napier University in Edinburgh.

They plan to use bacteria to feed on the "leftovers" from the whisky making process.

This will produce butanol which can be used to fuel vehicles.

More than 90% of the stuff that comes out of a whisky distillery is not whisky. It is leftovers like draff and pot ales - both produced in the early stages of the process.

They are high in sugar and are currently used for things like fertiliser and cattle feed.

Napier University's Biofuel Research Centre (BfRC) has already shown that the right bacteria can feed on those by-products to produce butanol - a direct replacement for vehicle fuel.

Now the spin-out company, Celtic Renewables, and independent malt whisky producer Tullibardine have signed a memorandum of understanding.

Together they will apply the process to thousands of tonnes of the distillery's leftovers.

Professor Martin Tangney, founder of Celtic Renewables, said: "Our partnership with Tullibardine is an important step in the development of a business which combines two iconic Scottish industries - whisky and renewables.

"This project demonstrates that innovative use of existing technologies can utilise resources on our doorstep to benefit both the environment and the economy."

Douglas Ross, managing director of Tullibardine, which spends £250,000 disposing of its by-products every year, said: "We are delighted to be partnering Celtic Renewables in this innovative venture, the obvious benefits of which are environmental.

"It takes a cost to us and turns it into something that has social as well as commercial value."

The project is being supported by a grant from the Scottish government's Zero Waste Scotland initiative.

Celtic Renewables said it eventually aimed to build a processing plant in Scotland, with the hope of building an industry that could be worth £60m a year.

From the BBC:

Missing children messages go on 404 error pages

Missing children are to be sought via the error pages websites display when people reach deleted webpages.

A European initiative is putting pictures and biographical details of missing children on the well-known 404 Not Found pages.

Hosting firms, ISPs and media companies have signed up to put the information on what would otherwise be empty pages.

Anyone who runs a website is being encouraged to join the initiative to raise the profile of missing children.

Snippet of code

The NotFound project has been created by Missing Children Europe, Child Focus, the European Federation for Missing and Sexually Exploited Children and several other European organisations.

While there are standard ways of setting up a 404 Not Found page, increasing numbers of websites are customising the error page to redirect web users who go astray or who visit an old page.

NotFound wants sites to add a snippet of code to those customised pages so they display data about missing youngsters.

So far, about 480 sites have signed up to the NotFound initiative and reconfigured their 404 page to help.

Maryse Roland, a spokeswoman for Child Focus, said a random process governed which missing child would be highlighted.

"It could be a recent disappearance, or on the contrary, a child that has been missing for a long time," she said.

"This project will allow us to once again concentrate the attention on children whom we haven't heard of for many years," said Ms Roland. "These children risk falling into oblivion."

Once sites have signed up and added the code supplied by the NotFound project, every time the page is displayed it will contain information about a missing child.

Francis Herbert, secretary general of Missing Children Europe, said: "We are always looking for new communication channels to distribute missing children messages and increase the chances to bring them home."

From the BBC:

'Early Mona Lisa' painting claim disputed

A foundation in Switzerland believes it has scientific evidence to prove that Leonardo Da Vinci painted an earlier version of the Mona Lisa.

The Zurich-based Mona Lisa Foundation claims the painting, discovered in 1913, portrays a younger version of Leonardo's masterpiece in the Louvre.

The foundation is basing its claim on 35 years of research.

But Oxford professor Martin Kemp insists there is "no basis for thinking that there was an earlier portrait".

The painting, which has been held in a bank vault for more than 40 years, was unveiled to the press in Geneva on Thursday.

Known as the Isleworth Mona Lisa, the painting shows a woman who appears to be approximately 10 years younger than the Louvre Mona Lisa.

The foundation insists it is the same woman - Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of wealthy Florentine merchant.

It claims Da Vinci painted the earlier image for her husband, and another, 10 years later, for a member of the Medici family.

It insists that historical evidence, critical comparison and scientific examination all support its theory.

"Not one piece of scientific evidence has so far been able to prove definitively that this is not a Leonardo Da Vinci," said foundation member and art historian Stanley Feldman on Thursday.

"We have investigated this painting from every relevant angle and the accumulated information all points to it being an earlier version of the Giaconda [Mona Lisa] in the Louvre."

The unveiling of the Isleworth Mona Lisa was accompanied by the launch of a book called Mona Lisa - Leonardo's earlier version.

Initially discovered in the Somerset home of an aristocrat in 1913 by art collector Hugh Blaker - who took it to his studio in Isleworth in south-west London - it was bought in 1960s by American art connoisseur Henry Pulitzer.

While in his possession and held in a Swiss bank, Pulitzer wrote and published a book, entitled Where is the Mona Lisa?

In it he presented the case that the painting was an unfinished portrait of Lisa del Giocondo by Leonardo da Vinci.

The painting is owned by an anonymous consortium, making it unclear who would benefit from it being attributed to the artist.

Leading specialist Alessandro Vezzosi, director of Museo Ideale Leonardo da Vinci, supports the foundation's two-version thesis.

But Professor Kemp, who was instrumental in identifying a major work by Leonardo Da Vinci in 2010, is convinced it is a copy.

"The Isleworth Mona Lisa mistranslates subtle details of the original, including the sitter's veil, her hair, the translucent layer of her dress, the structure of the hands," he said.

"The landscape is devoid of atmospheric subtlety. The head, like all other copies, does not capture the profound elusiveness of the original."

Professor Kemp also points out that the Isleworth version is painted on canvas, where Da Vinci's preferred choice was wood.

"The scientific analysis can at most state that there is nothing to say that this cannot be by Leonardo. The infrared reflectography and X-ray points very strongly to its not being by Leonardo."

Stanley Feldman has acknowledged the controversy surrounding the painting, saying: "There is always going to be somebody, somewhere who will dismiss it as a copy.

"We welcome every new discussion and every new piece of evidence that could support this painting, one way or another."

Here's the two paintings to compare. Firstly the Mona Lisa:

And then the Isleworth Mona Lisa:

From the BBC:

Liquid air 'offers energy storage hope'

Turning air into liquid may offer a solution to one of the great challenges in engineering - how to store energy.

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers says liquid air can compete with batteries and hydrogen to store excess energy generated from renewables.

IMechE says "wrong-time" electricity generated by wind farms at night can be used to chill air to a cryogenic state at a distant location.

When demand increases, the air can be warmed to drive a turbine.

Engineers say the process to produce "right-time" electricity can achieve an efficiency of up to 70%.

IMechE is holding a conference today to discuss new ideas on how using "cryo-power" can benefit the low-carbon economy.

The technology was originally developed by Peter Dearman, a garage inventor in Hertfordshire, to power vehicles.

A new firm, Highview Power Storage, was created to transfer Mr Dearman's technology to a system that can store energy to be used on the power grid.

The process, part-funded by the government, has now been trialled for two years at the back of a power station in Slough, Buckinghamshire.

More than hot air

The results have attracted the admiration of IMechE officials.

"In this case, it is a very clever application that really does look like a potential solution to a really great challenge that faces us as we increase the amount of intermittent power from renewables."

Dr Fox urged the government to provide incentives in its forthcoming electricity legislation for firms to store energy on a commercial scale with this and other technologies.

IMechE says the simplicity and elegance of the Highview process is appealing, especially as it addresses not just the problem of storage but also the separate problem of waste industrial heat.

The process follows a number of stages:

1. "Wrong-time electricity" is used to take in air, remove the CO2 and water vapour (these would freeze otherwise)
2. the remaining air, mostly nitrogen, is chilled to -190C (-310F) and turns to liquid (changing the state of the air from gas to liquid is what stores the energy)
3. the liquid air is held in a giant vacuum flask until it is needed
4. when demand for power rises, the liquid is warmed to ambient temperature. As it vaporizes, it drives a turbine to produce electricity - no combustion is involved

IMechE says this process is only 25% efficient but it is massively improved by co-siting the cryo-generator next to an industrial plant or power station producing low-grade heat that is currently vented and being released into the atmosphere.

The heat can be used to boost the thermal expansion of the liquid air.

More energy is saved by taking the waste cool air when the air has finished chilling, and passing it through three tanks containing gravel.

The chilled gravel stores the coolness until it is needed to restart the air-chilling process.

Delivering durability

Highview believes that, produced at scale, their kits could be up to 70% efficient, and IMechE agrees this figure is realistic.

"Batteries can get 80% efficiency so this isn't as good in that respect," explains Dr Fox.

"But we do not have a battery industry in the UK and we do have plenty of respected engineers to produce a technology like this.

"What's more, it uses standard industrial components - which reduces commercial risk; it will last for decades and it can be fixed with a spanner."

In the future, it is expected that batteries currently used in electric cars may play a part in household energy storage.

But Richard Smith, head of energy strategy for National Grid, told BBC News that other sorts of storage would be increasingly important in coming decades and should be incentivised to commercial scale by government.

He said: "Storage is one of four tools we have to balance supply and demand, including thermal flexing (switching on and off gas-fired power stations); interconnections, and demand-side management. Ultimately it will be down to economics."

Mr Dearman, who also invented the MicroVent resuscitation device used in ambulances, told BBC News he was delighted at the success of his ideas.

He said he believed his liquid air engine would prevail against other storage technologies because it did not rely on potentially scarce materials for batteries. "I have been working on this off and on for close on 50 years," he told BBC News.

"I started when I was a teenager because I thought there wouldn't be enough raw materials in the world for everyone to have a car. There had to be a different way. Then somehow I came up with the idea of storing energy in cold.

"It's hard to put into words to see what's happening with my ideas today."

John Scott, from the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), added: "At present, pumped-hydro storage is the only practical bulk storage medium in the British grid.

"However, locations are very restricted," he told BBC News. "In the future, if new storage technologies can be deployed at a lower cost than alternatives, it would benefit the power system."

A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) said it would shortly launch a scheme to incentivise innovation in energy storage. Other grants are available from Ofgem.

From the BBC:

Hip resurfacing prone to failure, say doctors

An operation used instead of a full hip replacement has a high failure rate and, in most instances, should no longer be offered, warn doctors.

Their advice is based on figures from the largest database on hip surgery.

Hip resurfacing - where the damaged bone is capped rather than replaced - is often recommended for younger, active patients who will need more surgery as the joint continues to wear.

Medical regulators say they will look at the Lancet journal findings.

The UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has already advised annual checks for people with large head metal-on-metal full hip replacements due to safety concerns. It is thought tiny pieces of metal can break off and leak into the blood.

The current study did not look at the safety of the metal resurfacing implants, although the researchers say there could be the same theoretical safety risk as with metal-on-metal hips.

Instead it looked at failure rates with metal-on-metal resurfacing - where the socket and ball of the hip bone has a metal surface applied to it rather than being totally replaced.

About seven in every 100 hip patients go for resurfacing rather than a full hip replacement, although the rate has been decreasing in recent years.

Some 32,000 people in England and Wales had this type of surgery between April 2003 and September 2011.

The Bristol University team looked at the National Joint Registry data to see how many of these implants failed in the first seven years after surgery and how they compared with conventional full or "total" hip replacements.

'Not for women'

The resurfacing implants failed more quickly than total hip replacements.

The five-year failure rate was about 5% on average compared with less than 2% for total hip replacement.

The failure rate in women was so high - up to five times greater - that the researchers believe resurfacing implants should never be used in women.

Similar, they should not be recommended to men - the only exception is men with particularly large hip bones who appear to fare as well with resurfacing as with a total hip replacement, say the researchers.

They estimate that a quarter of men may have bones large enough for resurfacing.

Prof Ashley Blom, who led the investigation said: "Resurfacing failure rates in women were unacceptably high. In view of these findings, we recommend that resurfacing procedures are not undertaken in women."

He said decisions about resurfacing procedures in men should be made carefully and only after measuring the size of the bones that are to be repaired or replaced.

But he said any person who has already been fitted with one should not be alarmed by the findings.

An advantage to resurfacing is that it is less invasive than a total hip replacement and leaves you with a greater range of movement after surgery.

New, stronger materials for prosthetics are being developed that will allow longer wear and better joint mobility.

Between April 2010 to April 2011, the NHS performed just over 70,000 hip replacements in England.

Dr Nicola Lennard, of the MHRA, said: "Decisions about what hip implants to use in patients are made by clinicians after careful consideration of the risks and benefits for each individual patient.

"For some patients a resurfacing hip implant may be the most clinically appropriate implant for them."

She said the MHRA was continuing to closely monitor all the latest evidence about these implants.

From the BBC:

'Scareware' trickster fined $163m by US authorities

A woman behind a massive "scareware" scam has been fined $163m (£101m) by US authorities.

Kristy Ross ran an operation that tricked its victims into thinking their computer had been infected with malicious software - and then charged them between $40 and $60 to "fix" it.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been pursuing the case since 2008.

Others investigated by the FTC have been ordered to return millions of dollars in earnings from similar scams.

In 2011, Marc D'Souza and his father, Maurice D'Souza, were ordered to give back $8.2 million of their "ill-gotten" profits.

'Elaborate'

In this week's case Ms Ross, who is now banned from selling computer security software, ran a scheme that used a pop-up advertisement to suggest a "system scan" was taking place.

The bogus scan would detect a host of "threats" on the user's system, and would prompt them to spend between $40 and $60 in order to solve the problem.

The FTC described the method as "elaborate and technologically sophisticated".

The scam products' names included Winfixer, DriveCleaner, FreeRepair, WinAntivirus, WinAntispyware and System Doctor.

Ms Ross was involved with two companies, Ukraine-based Innovative Marketing and ByteHosting Internet Services. It is believed that between them more than a million machines may have been targeted.

From the BBC:

Black mamba venom is 'better painkiller' than morphine

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News

A painkiller as powerful as morphine, but without most of the side-effects, has been found in the deadly venom of the black mamba, say French scientists.

The predator, which uses neurotoxins to paralyse and kill small animals, is one of the fastest and most dangerous snakes in Africa.

However, tests on mice, reported in the journal Nature, showed its venom also contained a potent painkiller.

They admit to being completely baffled about why the mamba would produce it.

The researchers looked at venom from 50 species before they found the black mamba's pain-killing proteins - called mambalgins.

Dr Eric Lingueglia, from the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology near Nice, told the BBC: "When it was tested in mice, the analgesia was as strong as morphine, but you don't have most of the side-effects."

Morphine acts on the opioid pathway in the brain. It can cut pain, but it is also addictive and causes headaches, difficulty thinking, vomiting and muscle twitching. The researchers say mambalgins tackle pain through a completely different route, which should produce few side-effects.

He said the way pain worked was very similar in mice and people, so he hoped to develop painkillers that could be used in the clinic. Tests on human cells in the laboratory have also showed the mambalgins have similar chemical effects in people.

But he added: "It is the very first stage, of course, and it is difficult to tell if it will be a painkiller in humans or not. A lot more work still needs to be done in animals."

Mamba magic

Dr Nicholas Casewell, an expert in snake venom at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, has recently highlighted the potential of venom as a drug source.

Commenting on this study he said: "It's very exciting, it's a really great example of drugs from venom, we're talking about an entirely new class of analgesics."

Dr Lingueglia said it was "really surprising" that black mamba venom would contain such a powerful painkiller.

Dr Casewell agreed that it was "really, really odd". He suggested the analgesic effect may work in combination "with other toxins that prevent the prey from getting away" or may just affect different animals, such as birds, differently to mice.

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society's Dr Roger Knaggs said: "We are witnessing the discovery of a novel mechanism of action which is not a feature of any existing painkillers."

He cautioned that the mambalgins worked by injections into the spine so would need "significant development" before they could be used in people.

From the BBC:

BBC and others targeted by Microsoft copyright takedown request

Microsoft wrongly made automated requests for pages on the BBC website to be removed from Google due to "copyright infringements".

The system also mistakenly requested the removal of content created by CNN, Wikipedia and the US government.

The sites were wrongly identified by software which crawls the web for attempts to illegally share Microsoft content.

Google has put the BBC on an approved list, so its pages were not affected.

Other sites targeted - which included Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post and Techcrunch - were similarly unaffected.

However, other sites like AMC Theatres and RealClearPolitics, who were also wrongly accused, had pages taken off Google search results.

Microsoft has not yet commented on the issue.

Number 45

Copyright holders are able to make requests to Google - or other sites - to take down content under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). A successful request means the content does not appear in search rankings.

The targeted web addresses appeared on a list published by Chilling Effects, a website which logs legal complaints about online activity. It is backed by several academic institutes such as Harvard and Stanford, as well as campaign group the Electronic Frontiers Foundation.

The majority of sites listed were from websites that typically index a large number of of illegal files.

The request, sent in July, contained hundreds of addresses, and appeared to pinpoint articles and pages containing the number 45.

For example, a BBC page following Day 45 of the Olympic Torch Relay was on the takedown list, as was a Wikipedia article on Caesar's Civil War, which ended in 45BC.

A leading technology blog covering BitTorrent and copyright issues has called for companies to be punished for wrongful takedown notices.

"Microsoft and other rightsholders are censoring large parts of the internet, often completely unfounded, and there is absolutely no-one to hold them responsible," TorrentFreak wrote.

"Websites can't possibly verify every DMCA claim and the problem will only increase as more takedown notices are sent week after week."

From the BBC:

US judge orders piracy trial to test IP evidence

A landmark case in the US will test whether internet piracy claims made by copyright firms will stand up in court.

Such cases rely on identifying the IP address of machines from which content was illegally downloaded as evidence of wrongdoing.

Experts have questioned whether the IP address is sufficient evidence because it identifies an internet connection rather than an individual.

An adult film studio must take cases to court, a judge has ruled.

Malibu Media has instigated 349 mass lawsuits, 43 in Pennsylvania this year.

Most of the cases are settled out of court.

In one lawsuit, five of the anonymous defendants protested when their internet service providers were ordered to reveal their identities.

In a motion filed to the court they accuse Malibu Media of pursuing the cases "to extort settlements".

Judge Michael Baylson, of the Pennsylvania District Court, summarised their issues: "Among other things, the declaration asserts that the BitTorrent software does not work in the manner plaintiff alleges, and that a mere subscriber to an ISP is not necessarily a copyright infringer, with explanations as to how computer-based technology would allow non-subscribers to access a particular IP address."

He went on: "In other words... there is no reason to assume an ISP subscriber is the same person who may be using BitTorrent to download the alleged copyrighter material."

Because of these doubts, he said that a trial was needed "to decide who's right".

Because an IP address is assigned to a connection rather than a device it is often unclear who is using it. It is also possible, if a householder has not secured his or her wi-fi connection, for a neighbour or passerby to use it.

The TorrentFreak news site, which first reported the news, said: "Without a doubt, the trial is expected to set an important precedent."

Disrepute

Increasingly copyright holders in the US have begun mass lawsuits against thousands of individuals accusing them of illegally downloading copyrighted material via file-sharing service BitTorrent.

By studying BitTorrent sites the copyright owners gather IP addresses linked to illegal files. Via court orders they force ISPs to reveal the identities of the owners of the computers.

The UK faced a similar case in 2011 when solicitor Andrew Crossley brought a trial against a group of alleged illegal downloaders.

The use of IP evidence was raised but the focus of the case became the way ACS Law had conducted itself, described by the judge as "amateurish and slipshod".

Judge Colin Birss QC accused Mr Crossley of bringing the "legal profession into disrepute" and the case was dismissed.

Currently, UK-based Ben Dover Productions is pursing claims against 2,845 O2 customers accused of illegally downloading pornographic films.

From the BBC:

British singer Sarah Brightman is to travel as a space tourist to the International Space Station.

The classical recording artist, once married to Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber, will be part of a three-person crew flying to the ISS.

After completing a tour in 2013, Ms Brightman will embark on six months of preparation at the Star City cosmonaut training centre in Moscow.

She will be the seventh space tourist to visit the ISS.

Once there, she says she intends to become the first professional musician to sing from space.

"This voyage is a product of a dream, my dream. Finally it can be a reality. I am more excited about this than anything I have done in my life to date," she told a news conference in Moscow.

She added that the schedule for her flight would "be determined very shortly by (Russian federal space agency) Roscosmos and the ISS partners."

Alexey Krasnov, head of the ISS programme at Roscosmos, said Ms Brightman had passed the required mental and physical examinations to fly into space.

Space Adventures, the Vienna-based company that organises flights for private spacefarers, did not disclose how much Ms Brightman had paid for her seat on the Soyuz.

But the last space tourist, Cirque du Soleil chief executive Guy Laliberte, paid around $35m for the privilege.

Sarah Brightman began her career with the dance troupe Hot Gossip, which had a chart hit in 1978 with I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper.

She subsequently starred on the West End stage in Cats and Phantom of the Opera, both penned by Andrew Lloyd Webber, whom she married in 1984.

The pair divorced in 1990 and Brightman embarked on a solo singing career. She helped popularise the classical crossover genre, scoring a worldwide hit with her duet with Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli, Time To Say Goodbye.

From the BBC (the OFT report does not name the retailers):

Online retailers told to change websites by OFT

More than a third of the UK's top online retailers could be breaking consumer laws, the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has said.

A check of 156 popular websites suggested that 62 may not be fully complying with consumer protection law.

The OFT found unreasonable restrictions on refunds and compulsory charges being added without prior warning at the online checkout.

It has asked the retailers to change their websites before Christmas.

Packaging problem

In this year's sweep, the biggest so far, the regulator checked the sites of the 100 most-used online retailers in the UK, as well as the most popular clothing sites.

Among the most common problems found by the OFT were retailers wrongly telling their customers that returned goods must be in their original packaging or in their original condition.

The OFT explained that this could be in breach of the buyer's right to inspect or assess a product.

Nearly two-thirds of all the retailers checked failed to provide an email contact address, as opposed to a web contact, which is a breach of the E-Commerce regulations.

Of the 60% of sites that notified buyers there would be compulsory charges, such as delivery, in addition to the up-front price, 24% of those then added extra, unexpected, charges as well.

These included card charges, and booking and luggage fees.

Overall though, the OFT's survey found that most online retail websites complied with their other obligations under the distance selling regulations.

"The OFT recognises that most businesses want to play fair with their customers and to comply with the law," said Cavendish Elithorn, a senior director at the OFT.

"We encourage all online retailers to check their websites so customers can be confident their rights are being respected when they shop online."

It has now written to all of those who may be misleading consumers.

Those who do not change their sites to comply with the law could be taken to court and face fines, the OFT said, although in past cases, most have altered their sites without it going this far.

Online shopping has boomed in the past decade and the OFT has regularly warned retailers to make sure they are not ignoring their legal obligations.

Consumers shopping online, by phone or mail order, are covered by the Distance Selling Regulations in addition to their regular rights, which ensure that all goods bought are fit for purpose, for example.

The distance sales rules state that goods should be delivered within 30 days and that shoppers should be given a 7-day cooling-off period in which they can cancel an order and get a full refund. This period is longer for financial products.

From the BBC:

Sitting for long periods 'is bad for your health'

Sitting for long periods increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease and death, researchers suggest.

The scientists from Leicester and Loughborough Universities say harm is done even if people also exercise.

The study, published in Diabetologia, analysed 18 existing studies involving almost 800,000 people.

Diabetes UK said anyone who spent a lot of time sitting or lying down would "obviously benefit" from moving more.

The researchers say the opportunities for sedentary behaviour in modern society such as watching TV, sitting in a car or using a computer are "ubiquitous".

Of course, in modern society many people head to the gym for a burst of exercise to redress the balance.

But the research team, led by Dr Emma Wilmot from the Diabetes Group at the University of Leicester, says while going to the gym or pool after work is better than heading straight for the sofa, spending a long time sitting down remains bad for you.

Healthy lifestyle?

Each of the studies they assessed used different measures - for example more or less than 14 hours a week watching TV, or self-reported sitting time of less than three hours a day to more than eight.

The researchers say this means it is not possible to give an absolute limit for how much sedentary time is bad for you.

But Dr Emma Wilmot, who led the study, said it was clear that those who sat the most had a higher risk of diabetes, heart disease and death than those who sat the least.

She said: "If a worker sits at their desk all day then goes to the gym, while their colleague heads home to watch TV, then the gym-goer will have better health outcomes.

"But there is still a health risk because of the amount of sitting they do.

"Comparatively, the risk for a waiter who is on their feet all day is going to be a lot lower."

She added: "People convince themselves they are living a healthy lifestyle, doing their 30 minutes of exercise a day.

"But they need to think about the other 23.5 hours."

'Easy change'

The strongest associations in the analysis were between prolonged sitting and diabetes.

There is evidence that being sedentary negatively affects glucose levels and increases insulin resistance - but scientists do not yet know how.

Dr Wilmot said the study's message could help those at high risk of diabetes, such as obese people or those of South Asian ethnic origin, because it was an easy lifestyle change to make.

Prof Stuart Biddle, of Loughborough University, who also worked on the study, said: "There are many ways we can reduce our sitting time, such as breaking up long periods at the computer at work by placing our laptop on a filing cabinet.

"We can have standing meetings, we can walk during the lunch break, and we can look to reduce TV viewing in the evenings by seeking out less sedentary behaviours."

Dr Matthew Hobbs, head of research at Diabetes UK, said people should not be discouraged from exercising.

He added: "What is clear is that anyone who spends lots of time sitting or lying down would benefit from replacing some of that time by standing or walking.

"Aside from any direct effect reducing the amount of time you spend sitting down may have, getting more physical activity is a great way of helping maintain a healthy weight, which is the best way of minimising your risk of Type 2 diabetes."

From the BBC:

Smoking in the car 'breaks toxic limit'

By Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC News online

Smoking in the car, even with the windows open or the air conditioning on, creates pollution that exceeds official "safe" limits, scientists say.

Any child sitting in the back of a car when someone in the front is smoking would be exposed to this.

A Scottish team who took measurements during 85 car journeys found readings broke World Health Organization limits, Tobacco Control journal reports.

The British Medical Association says all smoking in cars should be banned.

Currently, it is legal in the UK.

'Civil rights'

Children are particularly susceptible because they have faster breathing rates, a less developed immune system and are largely unable to escape or avoid exposure to second-hand smoke, says Dr Sean Semple, of the University of Aberdeen.

Using a device strapped to the back seat of the car, the researchers logged and then analysed air quality data during a number of journeys ranging from about 10 minutes to an hour in duration.

In 49 of the 85 journeys in total, the driver smoked up to four cigarettes.

During these 49 smoking journeys, levels of fine particulate matter averaged 85µg/m3, which is more than three times higher than the 25µg/m3 maximum safe indoor air limit recommended by the World Health Organization.

Even if the driver smoked only one cigarette and had the window wide open, particulate matter levels still exceeded the limit at some point during the journey.

On average, the level of second-hand smoke was between one-half and one-third of that measured in UK bars before the ban on smoking in public places came into force.

Levels averaged 7.4µg/m3 during the 34 smoke-free journeys.

The research authors say: "The evidence from this [research] paper is that second-hand smoke concentrations in cars where smoking takes place are likely to be harmful to health under most ventilation conditions.

"We believe that there is a clear need for legislation to prohibit smoking in cars where children are present."

But Simon Clark, director of the smokers' lobby group Forest, says: "We don't encourage adults to smoke in a car if small children are present, out of courtesy if nothing else, but we would strongly oppose legislation to ban smoking in cars.

"According to research, 84% of adults don't smoke in a car with children present so legislation to ban it would be disproportionate.

"In terms of civil rights we are entering difficult territory. For most people a car is their private space. If you ban smoking in cars with children, the next logical step is to ban parents from smoking in the home.

"Parents must be allowed to use their common sense, and most of the time they do. There is no need for further regulation."

But Prof John Britton, chair of the Royal College of Physicians Tobacco Advisory Group, says a ban is necessary to protect children.

He said estimates suggested that each year passive smoking in children accounted for more than 20,000 cases of lower respiratory tract infection, 200 cases of bacterial meningitis, and 40 sudden infant deaths.

And last November the British Medical Association said an outright ban - even if there were no passengers - would be the best way of protecting children as well as non-smoking adults.

From the BBC:

Computer viruses and malware 'rampant' in medical tech, experts warn

By Dave Lee Technology reporter, BBC News

High-risk medical technology has been found to be infected by computer viruses and malware, health and security experts have said.

They fear that the virus infections could become so severe that a patient may end up getting harmed.

Out-dated computer systems which were not able to be changed were to blame for the vulnerabilities, the experts said.

One US hospital is said to be deleting viruses from up to two machines a week.

The warnings were given as part of a panel discussion in Washington DC, as reported by Technology Review from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mark Olsen, chief information security officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, said the hospital had 664 pieces of medical equipment running on old versions of Windows.

This means the equipment is affected by weaknesses which later releases of Windows have since fixed.

Kevin Fu, a leading expert in medical technology, explained that the machines were not updated because of fears that doing so would mean they were in breach of regulations put in place by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The FDA approve the use of technology by testing safety rather than security - meaning any potential exposure to cyberthreats is not considered.

Raised eyebrows

"I find this mind-boggling," Mr Fu told Technology Review. "Conventional malware is rampant in hospitals because of medical devices using unpatched operating systems. There's little recourse for hospitals when a manufacturer refuses to allow [operating system] updates or security patches."

There are also fears, the panel agreed, that medical devices could even end up being part of botnets - large networks of hijacked computers that are often used to send out spam email.

Medical devices could be struck down by slow performance related to being infected, Mr Fu told the BBC.

"Imagine you have a heart monitor that's running Windows and it gets infected by a computer virus and slows down.

"This mere slowing down of the computer could cause the device to miss a sensor reading. It certainly raises an eyebrow. Who's watching out for that?"

He said that there is no evidence as yet that the malware is reaching medical machines as a result of being targeted by criminals.

Instead, he said it was more likely to be "collateral damage" from conventional malware designed to infect normal PCs.

"What we're finding is that software has brought tremendous benefit to medicine, but we've kind of forgotten that there's these inconvenient risks of software," he said.

In the UK, the NHS faces similar challenges.

"The need to implement security and privacy at the design of all systems, whether they're embedded or not is of paramount importance, particularly to the health industry," said Raj Samani, who worked in the health sector and is now chief technology officer for security specialists McAfee.

A Channel 4 investigation in 2008 discovered that NHS computers had been affected by more than 8,000 viruses.

From the BBC:

UK experiences 'weirdest' weather

By Roger Harrabin Environment analyst

The UK has experienced its "weirdest" weather on record in the past few months, scientists say.

The driest spring for over a century gave way to the wettest recorded April to June in a dramatic turnaround never documented before.

The scientists said there was no evidence that the weather changes were a result of Man-made climate change.

But experts from three bodies warned the UK must plan for periodic swings of drought conditions and flooding.

The warning came from the Environment Agency, Met Office and Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) at a joint briefing in London.

Terry Marsh, from the CEH, said there was no close modern precedent for the extraordinary switch in river flows. The nearest comparison was 1903 but this year was, he said, truly remarkable.

What was also remarkable - and also fortunate - was that more people did not suffer from flooding. Indeed, one major message of the briefing was that society has been steadily increasing its resilience to floods.

Paul Mustow, head of flood management at the Environment Agency, told BBC News that 4,500 properties had been flooded this year.

"But if you look back to 2007 when over 55,000 properties were flooded, we were relatively lucky - if lucky is the right word - for the impacts we saw this summer," he said.

"The rainfall patterns affected different areas - and also there were periods of respite between the rain which lessened the impact."

Fast moving

He said 53,000 properties would have been flooded this year without flood defences. In total, he said, 190,000 properties had received flood protection in recent years.

Mr Mustow claimed that flood defences repaid their investment by a factor of 8-1 but admitted that continuing to invest would be a "challenge", after government cuts to planned projects.

But he said that new streams of joint funding from local authorities and private developers had allowed 60 schemes to happen that otherwise would not have gone ahead.

He said: "We have to get our heads round the possibility now that we're going to have to move very quickly from drought to flood - with river levels very high and very low over a short period of time.

"We used to say we had a traditional flood season in winter - now often it's in summer. This is an integrated problem - there's no one thing that's going to solve it. The situation is changing all the time."

But scientists present from the Met Office and CEH said not much could be read into the weird weather. Terry Marsh from CEH said: "Rainfall charts show no compelling long-term trend - the annual precipitation table shows lots of variability."

Sarah Jackson from the Met Office confirmed that it did not discern any pattern that suggested Man-made climate change was at play in UK rainfall - although if temperatures rise as projected in future, that would lead to warmer air being able to carry more moisture to fall as rain.

She said that this year's conditions were partly caused by a move to a negative phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation which would be likely to lead to more frequent cold, drier winters - like the 1960s - and also wetter summers for 10-20 years.

"Longer term we will see a trend to drier summers but superimposed on that we will always see natural variability," she said.

Whatever happens with the weather, the Environment Agency expects that more and more people will be protected from floods and droughts thanks to water sharing between farmers, water transfer between water companies, and better management of leaks and demand.

But Mr Mustow admitted that much more needed to be done to ensure that farmers did not increase flood risk with land drainage schemes and that developers and builders ensured that new developments allowed water to drain into the soil rather than flushing into the sewers.

From the BBC:

Moon formation: New spins put on old questions

Scientists have put a new turn on the theory of how the Moon was created.

It has long been thought that the lunar body resulted from an impact between the early Earth and another planet-sized object 4.5 billion years ago.

But this theory predicts Earth and its satellite should have a quite different chemical make-up - and the data shows in fact they are very similar.

Now, new modelling reveals that if the Earth had a much faster spin before the impact, the theory fits the chemistry.

It is one idea to fix the composition conundrum explored in two papers published this week by the journal Science.

The giant impact hypothesis was first posited in the 1970s. It holds that the Moon formed from the debris kicked into orbit by the collision of a smaller proto-planet with the infant Earth.

But the early models indicated that much of this debris would have originated from the impactor, whose composition would most probably have differed substantially from that of Earth.

This is not reflected in the analysis of Earth and Moon rocks – for example, their oxygen isotope, or atom type, compositions are identical.

Matija Cuk, from the Seti Institute, and colleagues ran new simulations in which the early Earth was rotating on its axis in just a few hours prior to the impact - compared to the present 24 hours.

In such a scenario, the team could get debris material thrown into a Moon-forming disc around the Earth that had the right chemical make-up. In other words, it was substantial Earth material from its mantle that was ejected in the collision.

After the impact, the gravitational interaction between the Sun and the Moon could then have slowed the fast rotation of the Earth to the speed we now experience.

Robin Canup from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and colleagues took a different approach.

Their simulations involved larger impactors hitting an Earth of comparable size and at comparatively lower speeds. Again, the team was able to produce a Moon with the same chemical composition as the Earth.

From the BBC:

Babbage builders turn down Kickstarter

By Zoe Kleinman Technology reporter, BBC News

An ambitious 10-year project to build the world's first computer, the Analytical Engine, will rely on donations via the website JustGiving.

Although Kickstarter, the crowdfunding website, is about to launch in the UK, the team say the 10% commission it charges for its service is too high.

It will cost £250,000 to build the steam-powered machine.

It was designed by Charles Babbage in the 1800s, and Ada Lovelace wrote mathematical "programmes" for it.

The project is named Plan 28 after the most complete of the 100 plans drawn up by Mr Babbage - although one single complete plan does not exist.

It has been registered as a charity, said John Graham-Cumming, who came up with the idea.

"We were going to use Kickstarter but the fees are high if you're a charity," he told the BBC and said that Gift Aid, where a charity can reclaim tax from a donation from a tax payer, was important to the project.

Mr Graham-Cumming said he was not planning to approach the government for funding.

During Mr Babbage's time he was given the equivalent of "two battleships" worth of funding from the government of the day to build the predecessor to the Analytical Engine, which he called the Difference Engine - but he failed to complete that either, much to the annoyance of officials.

"That didn't work out so well last time around," said Mr Graham-Cumming.

"You could say it was the first failed government IT project."

Historical artefact

Babbage's handwritten notes and plans, which span thousands of pages, have now been fully digitised by the Science Museum in London.

The next step is to build a working 3D simulation of the machine, which is designed to be the size of a steam locomotive.

It will probably take up to three years to complete, said Mr Graham-Cumming.

"By then we might just be able to 3D print it," he said.

The value of building the Analytical Engines lies in its fundamental contribution to computer science, according to Mr Graham-Cumming.

"We are building an historical artefact," he said.

"We're not building it to try to compute on it - it is less powerful than the ZX81 [Sinclair computer from 1981]."

Other members of the team include Tim Robinson, who built a model of the machine out of Meccano pieces, and computer historian Dr Doran Swade.

But would Charles Babbage have approved?

"I can't decide whether he would be happy or exasperated that it has taken so long," said Mr Graham-Cumming.

From the BBC:

Superman: Clark Kent quits reporting at the Daily Planet

Superman is giving up his once-promising career in journalism.

Alter ego Clark Kent is resigning from the post of star reporter at the Daily Planet, the Metropolis newspaper where he has worked since the first Superman comics were published in the 1940s.

DC Comics, which publishes the Superman stories, says Kent will walk out in protest that hard news has given way to too many "soft" entertainment stories.

The move has been prompted by the Daily Planet's takeover by a conglomerate.

The publisher has hinted that the Man of Steel might even go the way of many journalists and become a blogger, in an effort to get his views across to a wider audience.

"Why am I the one sounding like a grizzled ink-stained wretch who believes news should be about, I don't know, news?" says a disillusioned Kent, according to a leaked panel from Wednesday's edition of the comic that appeared on the Newsarama.com website.

New Superman writer Scott Lobdell told USA Today newspaper: "This is really what happens when a 27-year-old guy is behind a desk and he has to take instruction from a larger conglomerate with concerns that aren't really his own."

From the BBC:

Click here to see this article with pictures

Southampton scientists change the colour of gold

Scientists in Southampton are now able to change the colour of gold.

The technique involves embossing tiny raised or indented patterns on the metal's surface which alters the way it absorbs or reflects light.

Prof Nikolay Zheludev, who leads the nanophotonics and metamaterials team at Southampton University, said it means gold can be made red or green or a multitude of other hues.

It can also be applied to other metals such as silver and aluminium.

The shape, height and depth of the embossed patterns determines how light behaves when it hits the metal and therefore what colour is created, said Prof Zheludev.

"This is the first time the visible colour of metal has been changed in this way.

"The colours of the objects we see all around us are determined by the way light interacts with those objects.

Security feature

"For instance, an object that reflects red light but absorbs other wavelengths will appear red to the human eye.

"This is the fundamental principle we have exploited in this project. By embossing metals with patterns only around 100 nanometres across, we've found that we can control which wavelengths of light the metal absorbs and which it reflects."

Prof Zheludev said the team is trying to market the technique, which could be used in jewellery making, commercially.

He believes it could also be incorporated into documents and banknotes as a security feature because the metals are difficult to forge.

Details of the research have been published in the journals Optics Express and the Journal of Optics..

The scientists received funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council as part of a £5m project looking at photonic nanostructures.

From the BBC:

Big Issue in the North magazine goes digital

The Big Issue magazine, now a traditional feature of the High Street in many of the UK's major cities, is going digital.

It will not mean the end of the vendors - homeless people who rely on the income they make from sales.

Instead they will sell a token offering online access to the magazine alongside the hard copies.

The idea is the brainchild of the Big Issue in the North and will be piloted in Manchester from Monday 29 October.

If the pilot is a success, it will be rolled out across north-west England and Yorkshire.

More choice

Users opting for the digital version will be sold a £2 card with a unique code which, when typed into a web browser or scanned with a mobile phone, will download the digital edition of the magazine.

In the week before it goes on sale, the public will be able to sample the digital version for free via a barcode found on flyers and posters.

Caroline Price, director of the Big Issue in the North, said: "This is not about replacing our traditional print magazine. It is about moving with the times and giving people a choice in how they read the magazine."

"The Big Issue in the North's primary aim is to provide homeless people with the opportunity to earn an income. In order to continue to do this, we need to ensure we appeal to a broad range of readers, including people who choose to read newspapers and magazines online," she added.

I saw a programme about the moon a while back and that was EXACTLY how they were saying the moon formed. They were presenting it as fact, not as a new hypothesis.

From the BBC:

Microsoft reverses adult game ban on Windows 8

Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, Skyrim and other mature games will no longer be banned from the European Windows 8 Store.

The store is the official outlet for programs Microsoft has tested to ensure they work with Windows 8.

A mismatch in the US and Europe over game ratings led to the games' exclusion outside North America.

Microsoft has relaxed its restrictions so the titles will be tested to work on PCs and tablets running Windows 8.

Tablet trouble

In the US games such as Call of Duty, Skyrim and Mass Effect typically win a "mature" rating under its ESRB system. This means anyone aged 17 and over can play them.

By contrast in Europe these titles and many others are marked as Pegi 18 which means only adults can buy and play them.

Before now Microsoft operated a blanket ban on adult-only content on its Windows 8 Store.

"It basically ends up disqualifying games that would be ESRB Mature," Antoine Leblond, Microsoft corporate vice president of web services told tech news site Gizmodo.

This had the potential to cause problems on desktop PCs and laptops as it would have meant that the games would not be certified as working with Microsoft's new operating system. The games would also not be promoted via the Windows Store.

The Windows 8 testing and certification system has won criticism from many games makers. Markus Persson, creator of Minecraft, said it risked turning the PC into a closed platform. Gabe Newell, head of game maker Valve, said Windows 8 could be a "catastrophe" for it and other developers.

Games that do go through the testing and certification process are likely to work with Windows 8 though users will have to find and install the titles themselves.

However, the ban could have caused bigger problems with Windows RT. This is the version of Windows 8 meant for tablets and the only way to get software for it is via the store. This is to ensure the programs work well with touchscreen interfaces typically found on tablets.

Relaxing the rules means the games can now get into the Windows Store and be guaranteed to run on Windows 8 be it running on a PC or tablet.

The change is due to come into force by the end of 2012, Mr Leblond told Gizmodo.

From the BBC:

Click here to see this article with a video clip of the inside

'Oldest Maya tomb' found in Guatemala's Retalhuleu

One of the oldest Maya tombs ever found has been uncovered in western Guatemala, say archaeologists.

Located at a temple site in Retalhuleu province, the grave is thought to be that of an ancient ruler or religious leader who lived some 2,000 years ago.

Carbon-dating indicated the tomb had been built between 700 and 400 BC, said government archaeologist Miguel Orrego.

A rich array of jade jewels, including a necklace depicting a vulture-headed human figure, were found.

The scientists found no bones at the tomb in the Tak'alik Ab'aj site - some 180km (110 miles) south of Guatemala City - probably because they had disintegrated.

But the vulture-headed figure appears to identify the tomb's occupant as an ajaw - or ruler - because the symbol represented power and economic status and was given to respected elder men.

Big chief

The scientists named the grave's occupant K'utz Chman, which in the Mayan language, Mam, means Grandfather Vulture.

"He was a big chief", said Mr Orrego. "He bridged the gap between the Olmec and Mayan cultures in central America."

The leader may have been the first to introduce elements which later became characteristic of the Maya culture, such as the building of pyramids and the carving of sculptures depicting the royal families, Reuters news agency cited historians as saying.

The Olmec empire began to fade at around 400 BC, while the Maya civilisation was starting to grow and develop, said Christa Schieber, another archaeologist working at the site.

The Mayas went on to rule much of Central America from 250 to 800 AD; their empire extended from modern-day Honduras to central Mexico.

From the BBC:

Bananas could replace potatoes in warming world

By Matt McGrath Science reporter, BBC World Service

Climate change could lead to bananas becoming a critical food source for millions of people, a new report says.

Researchers from the CGIAR agricultural partnership say the fruit might replace potatoes in some developing countries.

Cassava and the little known cowpea plant could play increasingly important roles in agriculture as temperatures rise.

People will have to adapt to new and varied menus as traditional crops struggle say the authors.

Responding to a request from the United Nations' committee on world food security, a group of experts in the field looked at the projected effects of climate change on 22 of the world's most important agricultural commodities.

Blooming bananas

They predict that the world's three biggest crops in terms of calories provided - maize, rice and wheat - will decrease in many developing countries.

They suggest that the potato, which grows best in cooler climates, could also suffer as temperatures increase and weather becomes more volatile.

The authors argue that these changes "could provide an opening for cultivating certain varieties of bananas" at higher altitudes, even in those places that currently grow potatoes.

Dr Philip Thornton is one of those behind the report. He told BBC News that while bananas also have limiting factors, they may be a good substitute for potatoes in certain locations

"It's not necessarily a silver bullet but there may be places where as temperatures increase, bananas might be one option that small holders could start to look at."

The report describes wheat as the world's most important plant derived protein and calories source.

But according to this research, wheat will face a difficult future in the developing world where higher prices for cotton, maize and soybeans have pushed wheat to marginal land, making it more vulnerable to stresses induced by climate change.

One substitute, especially in South Asia, could be cassava which can tolerate a range of climate stresses.

But how easy will it be to get people to adjust to new crops and new diets?

Bruce Campbell is program director of the climate change, agriculture and food security research group (CCAFS) which co-ordinates work among leading institutions around the world. He told BBC News that the types of changes that will happen in the future have already happened in the past.

"Two decades ago there was almost no rice consumption in certain areas of Africa, now there is. People have changed because of the pricing, it's easier to get, it's easier to cook. I think those sort of shifts do occur and I think they will in future."

Protein under pressure

One of the big concerns among researchers is how to tackle the need for protein in the diet. Soybeans are one of the most common sources but are very susceptible to temperature changes.

The scientists say that the cowpea, which is known in sub-Saharan Africa as the "poor man's meat" is drought tolerant and prefers warmer weather and could be a reasonable alternative to soya. The vines of the cowpea can also be used as a feed for livestock.

In some countries, including Nigeria and Niger, farmers have already moved away from cotton production to growing cowpeas.

There are also likely to be developments animal protein sources says the report including a shift from to smaller livestock.

This is an example of something that's happening already," says Bruce Campbell. "There's been quite a shift from cattle keeping to goat keeping in southern Africa in face of droughts - when the farmers see the problems they are having with production, they really are willing to shift.

"Change is really possible. It's not just a crazy notion."

One of the strangest articles I've seen on the BBC website:

Rats and humans meet via virtual reality and robotics

Robots and virtual reality have been used to let rats and humans interact.

A research project has seen human subjects control a rat-sized robot, and rats control a human-shaped avatar in a VR environment.

The meetings were engineered as a way to test "beaming" in which people interact with others via digital representations of themselves.

The research could ultimately give insights into animal behaviour and help humans visit distant places.

Rat rewards

The cross-species interactions were brought about by computer scientists at University College London (UCL) and the University of Barcelona.

Beaming combines both robotics and virtual reality and tries to improve on flatscreen display-based video conferencing techniques.

"Video conferencing does not give participants the physical sensation of being in the same shared space, and certainly not the physical capability to actually carry out actions in that space," said Prof Mandayam Srinivasan from UCL who was part of the research team behind the experiment.

The human subjects involved in the research were in a VR lab in Barcelona. Cameras tracked their movements and were used to control a rat-sized robot that shared a cage with the rodent subjects. The cage was in an animal care facility about 12km (7.4 miles) away from the VR lab.

Similarly, the movements of the rats were tracked in their cage and used to control an avatar projected into the VR world the human subjects experienced via a head-mounted display.

This set-up, said the researchers, let each participant interact with an appropriately-sized subject. The results have been published in the journal Plos One.

Tests were carried out with 18 human subjects who interacted individually with one of two rats.

In their interaction the rats and people played two rounds of a five-minute game. The game was designed to encourage the two subjects to approach each other.

In one of the games, human subjects were told that the avatar they were seeing was controlled by a human when actually its movements were still determined by the rat. This test was done to see if human reactions to avatars changed if they thought a human was involved.

Results suggest that interacting with a rat-sized robot controlled by a human did not bring about big changes in rat behaviour. Generally, said the researchers, the rats hugged the walls while the humans moved around in the middle of the real and virtual spaces as they tried to get closer to the rodent.

Prof Srinivasan said the tests showed that the technology could, in the future, help scientists or others explore places to dangerous or distant to visit any other way.

In addition, he said, they might see animal behaviour in a totally new way "as if it were the behaviour of humans".

Link to a BBC news story about an elephant who is able to mimic a few words of Korean by placing the tip of his trunk into his mouth. One video clip and a couple of audio clips.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/scie...environment-20142858

From the BBC:

Broadband '2,000 times' faster aim of Bangor scientists

By George Herd BBC Wales news

Broadband speeds that are 2,000 times faster, without a massive hike in costs?

"Yes" say a team of UK researchers, who believe they are on the way to cracking how to cram more data down optic fibres - without breaking the bank.

The scientists at Bangor University in north Wales have already managed to pump 20 gigabits of data - the equivalent of 20 movies - every second.

They are now working on a three-year project to make it commercially viable.

On a simple level, current fibre optic networks work by taking digital data, the zeros and ones that make up computer codes and digital information, and turn it into pulses of light.

Optic limitations

But as the length of a fibre optic cable increases, and the amount of data being pumped is also stepped up, errors can start to creep in.

The effect is known as dispersion.

At the moment, ways at tackling that problem have looked at measures such as increasing the physical number of fibre optic strands in cables, increasing the number of lasers coding and decoding the digital data, and signal amplification technologies.

"The trouble is, that can all cost a lot of money," said Dr Roger Giddings, one of the team running the Ocean project in north Wales.

"So the focus for the Ocean project is really to find out if we can do it in a cost-effective way, and is it a viable way of doing it in a commercial setting?"

The researchers have taken a very different approach to the problem, by tweaking some well-understood technology that is already being used in wireless networks and digital broadcasting.

It is known as the mouthful that is called: Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing, or OOFDM.

'Unique' approach

In Bangor, the process takes raw digital data, converts it to a series of physical electrical waves, and then into an optical signal that a laser can pump down a cable.

The breakthrough is that the team have managed to design the electronic kit that can both code and decode these optical signals on the fly.

"There are probably less than 10 groups in the world who have been looking at this sort of problem," said Dr Giddings.

"But we are the only group who has got this end-to-end system.

"This is the only system that we know of in the world that we can demonstrate working in real-time - with a real-time transceiver and a real-time receiver."

Not only has the team managed to run data through optic fibres at 20Gbps, they are confident of hitting speeds later of about 40Gbps.

Real-world speeds

So how does that play in the current real world of broadband connections?

Across the world, a handful of cities are now offering 1Gbps connections, such as Kansas in the US, which is part of a pilot by the internet giant Google.

The fastest speed offered to the UK public is a 1.5Gbps broadband connection trialled by Virgin Media in east London.

But in reality, according to the ISPreview website, in October the fastest download speeds actually available in Britain stood at 33.4Mbps - just 0.17% of the speed of the theoretical a 20Gbps connection.

So the challenge now for the Bangor researchers is to turn the laboratory bench technology into an electronics module that could find its way into current fibre networks - at the right price.

But the scientists are not on their own - they have the help of world renowned industry partners.

Onboard in the Ocean project are microchip experts Fujitsu Semiconductors Europe; the developers of the MPEG video format, Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute; optic fibre innovators Finisar Israel; and VPIsystems, one of the world leaders in network data analysis.

"We hope to a have a working module at the end of the three-year project, and we are one year into it at the moment" said Dr Giddings.

From the BBC:

'Twisted light' data-boosting idea sparks heated debate

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

An idea to vastly increase the carrying capacity of radio and light waves has been called into question.

The "twisted light" approach relies on what is called light's orbital angular momentum, which has been put forth as an unexploited means to carry data.

Now a number of researchers, including some formally commenting in New Journal of Physics, say the idea is misguided.

Responding in the same journal, the approach's proponents insist the idea can in time massively boost data rates.

That promise is an enticing one for telecommunications firms that are running out of "space" in the electromagnetic spectrum, which is increasingly crowded with allocations for communications, broadcast media and data transmission.

So others are weighing in on what could be a high-stakes debate.

"This would be worth a Nobel prize, if they're right. Can you imagine, if all communications could be done on one frequency?" asked Bob Nevels of Texas A&M University, a former president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Antennas and Propagation Society.

"If they've got such a great thing, why isn't everyone jumping up and down? Because we know it won't work," he told BBC News.

The disagreement in New Journal of Physics provides a window on the time-honoured practice of open debate in academic journals (as opposed to the increasingly widespread approach of debating issues before they are even formally published): a kind of "he says, she says" with references.

Wiggle room

The principle behind the idea is fairly simple. Photons, the most basic units of light, carry two kinds of momentum, a kind of energy-of-motion.

One, spin angular momentum, is better known as polarisation. Photons "wiggle" along a particular direction, and different polarisations can be separated out by, for example, polarising sunglasses or 3D glasses.

But they also carry orbital angular momentum - in analogy to the Earth-Sun system, the spin angular momentum is expressed in our planet spinning around its axis, while the orbital angular momentum manifests as our revolution around the Sun.

The new technique aims to exploit this orbital angular momentum, essentially encoding more data as a "twist" in the light waves.

That the phenomenon exists is not in question - it has been put to use recently in studying black holes, for example.

What makes the current debate devilishly complex is arguing whether experiments by Bo Thide of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics and colleagues really do use and benefit from it.

The team has carried out very public demonstrations of the idea, sending data across a Venice lagoon in a test first described in a New Journal of Physics article. But even before that article made it to press, other researchers were questioning the approach's validity.

In a paper in IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, Lund University's Ove Edfors argued that what was going on was a version of "multiple input, multiple output" - or Mimo - data transmission, a technique first outlined in the 1970s.

"I've been trying to have a discussion with these guys, asking for arguments - because all the arguments they have put forward have been perfectly explainable by standard theories," Prof Edfors told BBC News.

"What I get back is 'you don't understand, you're not a physicist', and I say 'well, try to convince me'."

Julien Perruisseau-Carrier at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland (EPFL), and colleagues make much the same argument in their comment paper published this week. But it seems clear that the controversy arises as a conflict between the disciplines of physics and engineering.

"These people are physicists, they have their own research," Prof Perruisseau-Carrier told BBC News. "But the authors are trying to spin off some of their work into a telecommunications issue.

"The fact is they didn't understand that what they were doing, as we explained, is a subset of something very well-known and documented."

Detractors argue that the demonstrations so far have only used two "modes" to transmit information, perfectly replicating a Mimo setup - and that if Prof Thide and colleagues try to extend the work - to the promised tens or hundreds of possible modes, they will fail.

For his part, Prof Thide insists that it is the engineers who have misunderstood.

"The typical wireless engineer, even if a professor, doesn't know anything about angular momentum," he told BBC News.

"The points made by these people... are in contradiction to each and every textbook there is in electrodynamics. This is not something invented by us, something we found out on a coffee break - this is on solid theoretical foundations going back through several Nobel prizes."

But the groundswell of resistance to the technique seems to be growing. Prof Nevels and his Texas A&M colleague Laszlo Kish have put together a paper that they believe is the simple, final proof of its impossibility - and more academics are signing on as co-authors.

Prof Perruisseau-Carrier says that the idea will prove itself valid or otherwise soon enough.

"They mentioned they have some contact with telecoms companies - we were very happy to see that. There's no doubt that as soon as they defer to a real expert, that people will notice [that the idea is flawed]," he said.

"We are convinced that this will not go anywhere."

From the BBC:

'Super-Earth' exoplanet spotted 42 light-years away

Astronomers have spotted another candidate for a potentially habitable planet - and it is not too far away.

The star HD 40307 was known to host three planets, all of them too near to support liquid water.

But research to appear in Astronomy and Astrophysics has found three more - among them a "super-Earth" seven times our planet's mass, in the habitable zone where liquid water can exist.

Many more observations will be needed to confirm any other similarities.

But the find joins an ever-larger catalogue of more than 800 known exoplanets, and it seems only a matter of time before astronomers spot an "Earth 2.0" - a rocky planet with an atmosphere circling a Sun-like star in the habitable zone.

HD 40307, which lies 42 light-years away, is not particularly Sun-like - it is a smaller, cooler version of our star emitting orange light.

But it is subtle variations in this light that permitted researchers working with the Rocky Planets Around Cool Stars (Ropacs) network to find three more planets around it.

The team used the Harps instrument at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla facility in Chile.

Harps does not spot planets directly - it detects the slight changes in colour of a stars' light caused by planets' gentle gravitational tugs - the "redshift" and "blueshift" that small motions cause.

Most recently, the instrument was used to spot an exoplanet circling our second-nearest stellar neighbour, Alpha Centauri B.

It is by its nature a high-precision measurement, and it has only been with the team's improved analysis of the natural variations in HD 40307's light that the team could unpick just how many tugs were changing it.

"We pioneered new data analysis techniques including the use of the wavelength as a filter to reduce the influence of activity on the signal from this star," said University of Hertfordshire researcher and lead author of the paper Mikko Tuomi.

"This significantly increased our sensitivity and enabled us to reveal three new super-Earth planets around the star known as HD 40307, making it into a six-planet system."

The outermost of the three new finds, HD 40307g, orbits the star in about 200 Earth-days and has a mass at least seven times that of Earth, joining a growing class of exoplanets called super-Earths.

The team say that the next step is to used space-based telescopes to get a more direct look at the planet and assess its composition.

From the BBC:

Invisibility cloaking in 'perfect' demonstration

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Scientists have succeeded in "cloaking" an object perfectly for the first time, rendering a centimetre-scale cylinder invisible to microwaves.

Many "invisibility cloak" efforts have been demonstrated, but all have reflected some of the incident light, making the illusion incomplete.

A Nature Materials study has now shown how to pull off the trick flawlessly.

However, the illusion only works from one direction and would be difficult to achieve with visible light.

The idea of invisibility cloaking got its start in 2006 when John Pendry of Imperial College London and David Schurig and David Smith of Duke University laid out the theory of "transformation optics" in a paper in Science, demonstrating it for the first time using microwaves (much longer wavelengths than we can see) in another Science paper later that year.

The papers sparked a flurry of activity to move the work on to different wavelengths - namely those in which we see.

As the "Where's my cloak of invisibility?" article points out, the field has moved on considerably since then.

But no effort to date has been able to achieve the "perfect" cloaking that the theory originally described.

The structures that can pull off this extraordinary trick of the light are difficult to manufacture, and each attempt has made an approximation to the theoretical idea that results in reflections.

So someone would not see a cloaked object but rather the scene behind it - however, the reflections from the cloak would make that scene appear somewhat darkened.

Now, Prof Smith and his Duke colleague Nathan Landy have taken another tack, reworking how the edges of a microwave cloak line up, ensuring that the light passes around the cloak completely with no reflections.

The trick was to use a diamond-shaped cloak, with properties carefully matched at the diamond's corners, to shuttle light perfectly around a cylinder 7.5cm in diameter and 1cm tall.

"This to our knowledge is the first cloak that really addresses getting the transformation exactly right to get you that perfect invisibility," Prof Smith told BBC News.

However, the cloaking game is always one of trade-offs; though the illusion is perfect, it only works in one direction.

"It's like the card people in Alice in Wonderland," Prof Smith explained. "If they turn on their sides you can't see them but they're obviously visible if you look from the other direction."

The design principles that make the cloak work in microwaves would be difficult to implement at optical wavelengths. But microwaves are important in many applications, principally telecommunications and radar, and improved versions of cloaking could vastly improve microwave performance.

"The cloak we demonstrated in 2006 as a kind of microwave device would be very poor, but this one gets us to something that could be potentially useful," Prof Smith said.

"I think it's something that a lot of people can build on. Everything in this field is going to come down to what you can make, what you can design. And I think this steps up the design."

From the BBC:

Popular physics theory running out of hiding places

By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News

Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider have detected one of the rarest particle decays seen in Nature.

The finding deals a significant blow to the theory of physics known as supersymmetry.

Many researchers had hoped the LHC would have confirmed this by now.

Supersymmetry, or SUSY, has gained popularity as a way to explain some of the inconsistencies in the traditional theory of subatomic physics known as the Standard Model.

The new observation, reported at the Hadron Collider Physics conference in Kyoto, is not consistent with many of the most likely models of SUSY.

Prof Chris Parkes, who is the spokesperson for the UK Participation in the LHCb experiment, told BBC News: "Supersymmetry may not be dead but these latest results have certainly put it into hospital."

Supersymmetry theorises the existence of more massive versions of particles that have already been detected.

Their existence would help explain why galaxies appear to rotate faster than the Standard Model would suggest. Physicists have speculated that as well as the particles we know about, galaxies contain invisible, undetected dark matter made up of super particles. The galaxies therefore contain more mass than we can detect and so spin faster.

Researchers at the LHCb detector have dealt a serious blow to this idea. They have measured the decay between a particle known as a Bs Meson into two particles known as muons. It is the first time that this decay has been observed and the team has calculated that for every billion times that the Bs Meson decays it only decays in this way three times.

Prof Val Gibson, leader of the Cambridge LHCb team, said that the new result was "putting our supersymmetry theory colleagues in a spin".

The results are in fact completely in line with what one would expect from the Standard Model. There is already concern that the LHCb's sister detectors might have expected to have detected superparticles by now, yet none have been found so far.

If supersymmetry is not an explanation for dark matter, then theorists will have to find alternative ideas to explain those inconsistencies in the Standard Model. So far researchers who are racing to find evidence of so called "new physics" have run into a series of dead ends.

"If new physics exists, then it is hiding very well behind the Standard Model," commented Cambridge physicist Dr Marc-Olivier Bettler, a member of the analysis team.

The result does not rule out the possibility that super particles exist. But according to Prof Parkes, "they are running out of places to hide".

Supporters of supersymmetry, however, such as Prof John Ellis of King's College London said that the observation is "quite consistent with supersymmetry".

"In fact," he said "(it) was actually expected in (some) supersymmetric models. I certainly won't lose any sleep over the result."

From the BBC:

'Rogue planet' spotted 100 light-years away

Astronomers have spotted a "rogue planet" - wandering the cosmos without a star to orbit - 100 light-years away.

Recent finds of such planets have suggested that they may be common, but candidates have eluded close study.

The proximity of the new rogue planet has allowed astronomers to guess its age: a comparatively young 50-120 million years old.

The planet, dubbed CFBDSIR2149-0403, is outlined in a paper posted online to appear in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Rogue planets are believed to form in one of two ways: in much the same way as planets bound to stars, coalescing from a disk of dust and debris but then thrown out of a host star's orbit, or in much the same way as stars but never reaching a full star's mass.

One tricky part is determining if rogue planet candidates are as massive as the "failed stars" known as brown dwarfs, further along in stellar evolution but without enough mass to spark the nuclear fusion that causes starlight.

Either way, the objects end up free of a host star's gravity. Given that most planets we know of are found through the effects they have on their host star's light, pinning down rogue planets has proven difficult.

An international team went on a vast hunt for the planets using the Canada France Hawaii Telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea and the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and came up with just one candidate.

"This object was discovered during a scan that covered the equivalent of 1,000 times the [area] of the full moon," said study co-author Etienne Artigau of the University of Montreal.

"We observed hundreds of millions of stars and planets, but we only found one homeless planet in our neighbourhood."

But crucially, the new find appears to be moving along with a similarly itinerant group of celestial objects, called the "AB Doradus moving group" - a collection of about 30 stars which are of roughly the same composition and are believed to have formed at about the same time.

Because CFBDSIR2149-0403 appears to be moving with the group - to a certainty of 87% - astronomers believe it too formed with the stars, about 50 -120 million years ago.

It is this estimate of age that allows astronomers to use computer models of planet evolution to make further guesses as to the planet's mass and temperature.

The team believe it has a temperature of about 400C and a mass between four and seven times that of Jupiter - well short of the mass limit that would make it a likely brown dwarf.

What remains unclear is just how the planet came to be - the tiny beginnings of a star, or planet launched from its home? Study co-author Philippe Delorme of the Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics of Grenoble, said that the latter implied a great many planets like it.

"If this little object is a planet that has been ejected from its native system, it conjures up the striking image of orphaned worlds, drifting in the emptiness of space," he said.

From the BBC:

Online shopping technology faces OFT focus

UK regulators have begun seeking information on how firms may be monitoring online shoppers in order to target them with different prices.

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) will consider how consumer data is collected and if any activities could be illegal.

The OFT said it wanted to gather more information in order to assess if the area needs investigating.

OFT chief executive Clive Maxwell said the ways in which data is collected and used was evolving rapidly.

"It is important we understand what control shoppers have over their profile and whether firms are using shoppers' profiles to charge different prices for goods or services," he said.

The OFT said it wanted to hear from any interested parties, including online retailers and software providers, and would publish its findings in spring 2013.

It will be consulting with international regulators, including the US Federal Trade Commission, on commercial uses of consumer data.

Businesses have sophisticated technology to monitor online behaviour, collect information about shopping habits and websites visited, and the services consumers have looked at.

Internet shopping is one of the retail sector's few growth areas, with the Office for National Statistics reporting on Thursday that online sales were 11% higher in October than a year earlier.

The OFT said it wanted to consider whether consumers understood and were aware of how their information was used when they go online, and whether some firms' activities were illegal.

Mr Maxwell said: "Innovation online is an important driver of economic growth. Our call for information forms part of our ongoing commitment to build trust in online shopping so that consumers can be confident that businesses are treating them fairly.

"We know that businesses use information about individual consumers for marketing purposes. This has some important potential benefits to consumers and firms. But the ways in which data is collected and used is evolving rapidly."

From the BBC:

Viewpoint: Small firms prove to be weak link to hackers

By Prof Alan Woodward Department of Computing, University of Surrey

Small businesses - those employing a few hundred people or less - are increasingly becoming the target of hackers.

They may not think they have any data worth stealing but even the smallest company can be custodian to information that represents hard cash to criminal gangs: credit card details, customers' names and addresses, or the designs vital to an innovative start-up - all have a ready criminal market.

When attention grabbing headlines such as "UK suffering 1,000 attacks an hour" are reported there is a tendency to assume this as an issue only for the larger enterprises; household names that we think of as the powerhouse of our economy.

However, that is a dangerous mistake to make.

There is mounting evidence that small businesses could be our Achilles heel when it comes to cyber-security. And, it is these small businesses which are the foundations upon which our economy rests: destabilise them and everything else comes crashing down.

Weak protection

Over the past 12 months a number of surveys have emerged which suggest that in excess of 60% of these small businesses have suffered some form of successful malware attack.

When you realise that even basic security precautions will result in the majority of attacks "bouncing off", you begin to understand they must be quite poorly prepared for the hackers to be so successful.

It's not entirely surprising that small businesses are quite so poorly defended.

Someone running a small business is not necessarily going to have security as their main priority.

They are typically entrepreneurs not security experts. Money is always tight and there is a natural dynamic tension between need and cost.

You can see which way the tension is tending when you read in the same surveys that nearly 20% of small businesses only concern themselves with cyber-security following an intrusion. More worrying still, one report indicates that 10% of small businesses would have no way of knowing if they had been successfully attacked.

Breached back doors

Criminals also recognise that smaller businesses can often be a way of reaching onward to the larger firms.

It is as true now as it ever was that the weakest part of a chain is where you should attack, and the supply chains in our modern global, hyper-connected economy are highly extended and, for larger international corporations, you can have upwards of 5,000 to 10,000 smaller suppliers inputting to your end products and services. That represents a lot of potential back doors.

To date, selling security software has been akin to selling insurance.

Sadly the perception is that it will "never happen to me" so smaller businesses put off what they see as a significant expense for what they see as a very remote eventuality.

There is even a suggestion in some surveys that smaller businesses are tempted to use unlicensed security software, or, worse, that which they are offered for "free".

Unfortunately, such software is far from a protection but is sometimes the very vehicle for carrying malicious software into the companies systems.

You should use "free" software only if you are sure it is from a reputable company, and that the company which built it provides it directly.

Insecure suppliers

As smaller businesses feed the larger businesses, those larger businesses are becoming acutely aware that potentially valuable assets could be at risk somewhere further down their supply chain.

Take for example a car manufacturer which designs a cutting-edge headlight design.

They don't fabricate the lights themselves but pass the designs to a smaller manufacturer who in turn may subcontract elements of the manufacture.

That cutting-edge design, worth considerable sums in intellectual property, can end up with a relatively small business and is then protected using only their security, not that of the large car manufacturer.

Hence, if a small business is to join part of one of these large supply chains, they can differentiate themselves from the competition by demonstrating that they can protect the intellectual property entrusted to them to the same degree as it is protected at the start of its journey.

An emerging trend is for those who disseminate valuable intellectual property to large distributed supply chains to track and audit who has access to what data. If the smaller business proves to be a source of a leak then they will not be in that supply chain for very long I would suggest.

Small businesses cannot put off considering cyber-security any longer.

Just as you hire in expertise for doing the accounts, there are many who can advise on the best way to protect you and your clients' valuable data.

Failure to do so will ultimately cause the business to fail either through direct losses from an attack, or from being dropped by customers who feel their data is inadequately protected.

Alan Woodward is a visiting professor at the University of Surrey's department of computing. He has worked for the UK government and consults on issues including cyber-security, covert communications and forensic computing.

On the Science Museum blog:

Oh Brother where art thou…

By Rachel Boon, Assistant Curator of Technologies and Engineering

Clack clack clack clack… ping! The sound of a typewriter sweeping across the page, already becoming a faint memory, will soon fall silent as the mass manufacturing of this technology ends in the UK. Typewriters are iconic machines and have served as the tool of communication over the last 130 years. Whether it’s the legacy of the Beat generation of authors; William Burroughs or Jack Kerouac capturing post-war America on the page, or images of secretaries fiercely typing away, the typewriter has been indoctrinated into our historical and cultural heritage.

The place which celebrated the end of UK typewriter production was Ruabon, at the Brother Factory set within the beautiful Welsh countryside. The factory’s 200 employees witnessed the final model of the Brother CM-1000 being packed into its box to a soundtrack of emotional sighs and cheers. This object is the 5,855,533rd of its type to be produced but the only one which has a place in the Science Museum collection. Brother have kindly donated this last British made typewriter to the Museum, which will be an invaluable addition to the 200 typewriters already in our collection.

John Liffen, Curator of Communication at the Science Museum inspects the Brother CM-1000 (l) and Wheatstone telegraph printer (r), which share a similar printing mechanism

Interestingly, the CM1000 (above left) shares a similar mechanism with another object in our collection, one of the earliest telegraph printers built by Sir Charles Wheatstone in the mid 19th century (above right). This latest addition to the collection will enable us to tell the story of how technology has evolved and been shaped by our communication needs.

From the BBC:

Quantum cryptography done on standard broadband fibre

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

The "uncrackable codes" made by exploiting the branch of physics called quantum mechanics have been sent down kilometres of standard broadband fibre.

This "quantum key distribution" has until now needed a dedicated fibre separate from that used to carry data.

But a new technique reported in Physical Review X shows how to unpick normal data streams from the much fainter, more delicate quantum signal.

It may see the current best encryption used in many businesses and even homes.

The quantum key distribution or QKD idea is based on the sharing of a key between two parties - a small string of data that can be used as the basis for encoding much larger amounts.

Tiny, faint pulses of laser light are used in a bid to make single photons - the fundamental units of light - with a given alignment, or polarisation. Two different polarisations can act like the 0s and 1s of normal digital data, forming a means to share a cryptographic key.

What makes it secure is that once single photons have been observed, they are irrevocably changed. An eavesdropper trying to intercept the key would be found out.

Sending these faint, delicate quantum keys has until now been done on dedicated, so-called "dark fibres", with no other light signals present.

That is an inherently costly prospect for users who have to install or lease a separate fibre.

So researchers have been trying to work out how to pull off the trick using standard, "lit" fibres racing with data pulses of millions of photons.

Slice of time

Now Andrew Shields of Toshiba's Cambridge Research Laboratory and his colleagues have hit on the solution: plucking the quantum key photons out of the fibre by only looking in a tiny slice of time.

Dr Shields and his team developed detectors fit to catch just one photon at a time, as well as a "gate" that opens for just a tenth of a billionth of a second - at just the time the quantum key signal photons arrive, one by one.

The team achieved megabit-per-second quantum key data rates, all the while gathering gigabit-per-second standard data.

"Trying to use such low-level signals over 'lit fibre' has been rather like trying to see the stars whilst staring at the Sun," said computer security expert Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey.

"What these researchers have developed is to use a technique that rapidly switches between the various light sources using the fibre such that one source isn't swamping the other," he told BBC News.

Paul Townsend of University College Cork led research published in the New Journal of Physics in 2011 aiming to do the same trick over 10km of fibre - but the new work was carried out over 90km of fibre at data rates hundreds of times higher.

"The work of this group, our own and others is showing how to address some of the critical practical problems that have to be addressed in order to get QKD out of the lab and into real fibre networks," he told BBC News. "This is a major advance in this respect."

Financial institutions are likely to be the first who are interested in the technology when it does escape the lab, senior author of the paper Dr Shields told BBC News.

"We're not too far away from that type of application already," he said.

"QKD isn't so expensive, probably comparable to a high-grade firewall - in the range of tens of thousands of pounds. So certainly in a corporate environment it's already affordable, and as time goes on I'm sure we'll see the technology get cheaper and cheaper."

However, not everyone is convinced that the wider world needs QKD.

"This is of academic interest only," Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer at BT, told BBC News.

He referred to a 2008 article for Wired magazine arguing that the security of the codes themselves was not the weakest link in the security chain.

In it, he wrote, "it's like defending yourself against an approaching attacker by putting a huge stake in the ground - it's useless to argue about whether the stake should be 50 feet tall or 100 feet tall, because either way, the attacker is going to go around it".

But both Prof Woodward and Dr Shields suggest that coming advances in quantum computing - while perhaps not reaching consumers either - could see the end of the "public key encryption" that the internet currently depends upon. That could make the distribution of keys the new weak point.

Prof Woodward said: "The irony is that quantum techniques might lead to the demise of modern internet-based encryption, but quantum techniques could provide an alternative that is fundamentally more secure anyway."

From the BBC:

DVD trick makes for cheap boost to imaging and sensing

Researchers in the US have hugely boosted the sensitivity of a widespread imaging and sensing technique, using an off-the-shelf DVD.

Fluorescence spectroscopy is used to diagnose disease, image inside cells or detect toxins - but signals are weak.

A report in Nanotechnology has outlined how to boost those signals 200-fold, making use of a DVD's ready-made pits and grooves.

That could help put the technique in far more labs - or hands - worldwide.

Fluorescence describes the process in which the energy of light put into a molecule is redistributed, leading to a relatively long-lasting "glow" - it is at work in fluorescent lamps and many things that seem to glow under a "blacklight".

This has turned out to be a tremendously successful way to examine the world down at the molecular level. Scientists can "tag" molecules with a part that fluoresces and then use microscopes to see exactly what it is doing.

Some of these tags only switch on when a particular chemical is present - for instance a toxin or an explosive.

Lightning rods

At that molecular level, the light signals are profoundly weak. One way to boost them developed in recent years is to make use of what are called surface plasmons - the propensity of light waves from a sample to excite electrons in a surface beneath it, thereby boosting the signal.

This surface plasmon resonance is itself improved when the surface has nanometre-scale structure - tiny bumps or features of a size not too different from the wavelength of the light.

Making these nanometre-scale features for the task has been an inherently complex and expensive business, but there is one industry in which the costs of such precision-made structures have plummeted: DVDs.

Shubhra Gangopadhyay of the University of Missouri-Columbia and her colleagues started with commercial DVDs - sourced from a nearby store for $10 - and removed the protective outer layer to expose the nano-structure beneath.

They coated the DVDs with a stretchy polymer that dries to form something like a rubber stamp with an almost-perfect imprint of the DVD's surface, which can be ink-stamped onto any surface and then coated with a thin layer of metal.

"Almost-perfect" because the process of peeling the stamp from the DVD creates tiny imperfections, what the team call nano-gaps, just billionths of a metre wide.

Prof Gangopadhyay said that these gaps act like "lightning rods", drawing together and intensifying the fluorescence signal, making it easier to detect.

In recent experiments, she said, DVD-stamped surfaces have shown a 30-fold jump in light from the molecules of interest - analytes - whereas the nano-gaps boost that signal by 200 times.

"Usually when people try to look for low concentrations of analytes, they have to use very expensive microscopes, costing over a million dollars," she told BBC News.

"The interesting thing is that this can be integrated with simple microscopes - that's what we're using."

The team is pursuing a two-fold goal with the new technique.

"One is to give it to researchers, so everyone who has a simple microscope can utilise it to do great science - including high school kids," Prof Gangopadhyay said.

Secondly the team aims to put the idea to use in simple, cheap diagnostics for use in the developing world - looking for the molecular markers for the HIV virus, toxins, even explosives.

"This field can go far in the future," she said. "I think it has big implications."

From the BBC:

European Parliament warns against UN internet control

The UN should not be allowed to take over control of the internet, Euro MPs have warned.

International governments are set to agree a new information and communications treaty next month.

Reports in the Russian press have suggested the Kremlin and others wanted control of key internet systems passed to a UN agency.

Internet control currently lies largely with US-based groups such as Icann, which regulates the web address system.

The European Parliament has said the UN's International Telecommunications Union (ITU) was "not the appropriate body" to have authority.

The ITU has said a new treaty was needed to ensure "the free flow of information around the world, promoting affordable and equitable access for all and laying the foundation for ongoing innovation and market growth".

The UN agency is hosting the conference to draw up the treaty between 3 and 14 December in Dubai.

Members of the European Parliament backed a resolution which urged member states to reject changes to the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR) which would "negatively impact the internet, its architecture, operations, content and security, business relations, internet governance and the free flow of information online".

'Equal rights'

The ITRs are designed to ensure interoperability of telecoms equipment and services across the world. The last major revision was in 1988.

The negotiation process surrounding a new treaty has been criticised for being conducted largely out of the public's eye.

However, a site called Wcitleaks, run by researchers at George Mason University, has published several document's relating to the new treaty.

Among them was a proposal from Russia suggesting that the US should have less control over the internet's operation.

"Member states shall have equal rights to manage the internet, including in regard to the allotment, assignment and reclamation of internet numbering, naming, addressing and identification resources and to support for the operation and development of basic internet infrastructure," it said in a document submitted on 17 November.

'Limited access'

The European Parliament's objection follows loud opposition from search giant Google, which has invited concerned internet users to sign a petition.

"The International Telecommunication Union is bringing together regulators from around the world to renegotiate a decades-old communications treaty," the company wrote.

"Some proposals could permit governments to censor legitimate speech - or even allow them to cut off internet access.

"Other proposals would require services like YouTube, Facebook, and Skype to pay new tolls in order to reach people across borders. This could limit access to information - particularly in emerging markets."

ITU secretary-general Dr Hamadoun Toure has signalled that if there were any serious disagreements he would try to avoid putting an issue to a majority vote.

"We never vote because voting means winners and losers and you can't afford that," he told the BBC in July.

"Whatever one single country does not accept will not pass."

From the BBC:

Namib Desert beetle inspires self-filling water bottle

A US start-up has turned to nature to help bring water to arid areas by drawing moisture from the air.

NBD Nano aims to mimic the way a beetle survives in an African desert to create a self-filling water bottle capable of storing up to three litres every hour.

The insect harvests moisture from the air by first getting it to condense on its back and then storing the water.

Using nature as an inspiration for technology, known as biomimicry, is increasingly widespread.

NBD Nano, which consists of four recent university graduates and was formed in May, looked at the Namib Desert beetle that lives in a region that gets about half an inch of rainfall per year.

Using a similar approach, the firm wants to cover the surface of a bottle with hydrophilic (water-attracting) and hydrophobic (water-repellent) materials.

The work is still in its early stages, but it is the latest example of researchers looking at nature to find inspiration for sustainable technology.

"It was important to apply [biomimicry] to our design and we have developed a proof of concept and [are] currently creating our first fully-functional prototype," Miguel Galvez, a co-founder, told the BBC.

"We think our initial prototype will collect anywhere from half a litre of water to three litres per hour, depending on local environments."

The founders want to use a fan to get the surrounding air to pass over the surface of the bottle. The air would then condense and get stored inside the device.

"Dry places like the Atacama Desert or Gobi Desert don't have access to a lot of sources of water," said Mr Galvez.

"So if we're creating [several] litres per day in a cost-effective manner, you can get this to a community of people in Sub-Saharan Africa and other dry regions of the world. And if you can do it cheaply enough, then you can really create an impact on the local environment."

About three billion people on Earth - almost one in two - live in water-scarce conditions, with demand growing drastically, while supply remains constant, according to the World Health Organization.

Energy efficiency

In some countries, condensation devices on rooftops already harvest water from the air - but these technologies consume large amounts of energy to produce small amounts of water.

NBD Nano's prototype seems to be more energy-efficient, but it still would not be able to satisfy the needs of an entire community, Erik Harvey from WaterAid charity told the BBC.

"Even in water-scarce areas, communities need more water than what they would consume for themselves - livestock and agriculture in arid environments are very important," he said.

But it does not mean the start-up is wasting time developing a water bottle, he said.

"There is a range of viable markets for them, like the military or the outdoors market, people going camping, and the advantage that they may have is a much lower energy input device," said Mr Harvey.

Nature copycats

A number of companies have recently been researching nature-inspired solutions to real-life problems.

Electronics firm Qualcomm studied light reflection on butterfly wings to design its Mirasol e-reader display.

And Canadian company Whalepower mimics humpback whale flippers in its wind turbines and fans to reduce drag.

San Diego Zoo in California recently opened a Centre for Bioinspiration.

And there is a Biomimicry Institute in Montana, US, where consultants work with companies, helping them to apply nature-inspired solutions to particular problems.

A semi-local story from the BBC:

YouView is sued over YourView naming dispute

UK internet TV provider YouView has been sued for trademark infringement in a dispute over the product's name.

Gloucestershire-based telecoms company Total had registered the name YourView for one of its products in June 2009.

Earlier this month the High Court upheld a ruling that the name was "confusingly similar" to YouView, prompting the action.

YouView, a joint venture involving BBC, ITV, BT and others, said it had "no intention of changing its name".

The spokeswoman added: "This matter is complex and subject to a number of ongoing legal actions and will be settled in the courts."

'Without regard'

The YouView name was registered with the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) nine months after Total registered YourView, a name it had given to an online portal for its customers.

Total's managing director Stuart Baikie said: "Despite the recent vindication of our position in the appeal proceedings we believe that YouView has continued to act without regard to our registered mark and business interests.

"We have had no choice but to issue infringement proceedings and we are confident of success."

As well as seeking a financial settlement, Total wants an injunction which would prevent YouView from using its name.

The company would not speculate on the level of damages it expected to receive.

Catch-up

Launched in July this year, YouView is a joint venture involving the BBC, ITV, BT, Channel 4, Channel 5, TalkTalk and media services firm Arqiva.

It offers viewers access to 70 live Freeview channels and a seven-day catch-up service.

The project had originally been set to launch in 2010 - but the project was hit by numerous delays.

YouView, which has been supported by a large national advertising campaign, has been criticised by analysts who said the technology came too late, and was too expensive.

Since launch, the price of the service's set-top box has dropped from £299 to £248.