And now to a weird piece from the BBC today.

Bacteria can 'smell' their environment, research shows

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Research has shown that bacteria - among the simplest life forms on Earth - have a sense of smell.

Scientists from Newcastle University in the UK have demonstrated that a bacterium commonly found in soil can sniff and react to ammonia in the air.

It was previously thought that this "olfaction" was limited to more complex forms of life known as eukaryotes.

The finding, published in Biotechnology Journal, means that bacteria have four of the five senses that humans enjoy.

The discovery also has implications in the understanding and control of biofilms - the chemical coatings that bacteria can form on, for example, medical implants.

Bacteria have already demonstrated the ability to react to light, in analogy to sight, and to change the genes that they express when confronted with certain materials, in analogy to touch.

Sniff test

However, there is a distinction between an organism reacting to a chemical that it encounters directly (in analogy to the sense of taste) and a reaction to a chemical that is floating around in the air, says Reindert Nijland, lead author of the study.

"The difference is both in the mechanism that does the sensing, as well as in the compounds that are sensed," Dr Nijland, now at University Medical Centre Utrecht in the Netherlands, told BBC News.

"The compounds detected by olfactory organs are generally much more volatile than things you can taste like 'sweet' or 'salt', and therefore can provide information about things that can be much further away; you can smell a barbecue from a few blocks away whereas you have to physically touch and eat the steak to be able to actually taste it."

Bacteria are known to use their "senses" to detect chemicals that indicate the presence of other bacteria or competitors for food.

In some cases, they can produce a slimy material that causes them to stick together in what is known as a biofilm. Such biofilms can cause complications in cases ranging from implants to oil pipelines, but a familiar example is the plaque that forms on teeth.

Dr Nijland and Grant Burgess put a number of separate cultures of a bacterium called B. licheniformis in cylinders containing different "growth media" to cause them to multiply. Some were in a rich broth of food that allowed the bacteria to multiply quickly, releasing ammonia gas in the process, while others were in a medium that allowed the growth of biofilms - which can be initiated if the bacteria are in contact with ammonia.

They were surprised to find that some of the isolated bacteria cultures began to form biofilms spontaneously, with those physically closest to the "well-fed" bacteria showing the highest biofilm production.

The only explanation is that the bacteria sensed the presence of ammonia directly from the air above the cultures.

Film rights

Dr Nijland explained that the biofilm provides both a barrier and a means of transportation for the bacteria that have "smelled" nearby ammonia.

"It's tempting to speculate that [ammonia] provides the bacteria with information of a nearby nutrient source, since ammonia generally is a waste product of bacteria growing on a rich nutrient source," he said.

"The bacteria sense this, organise themselves in a biofilm which will prepare them for both competition with other species already feeding on the nutrient source, and enables swarming - migration via the matrix they have secreted to form the biofilm."

The surprise find has implications in our understanding of the difference between prokaryotes like bacteria, which have no neatly packaged parts within their cells, and the more advanced eukaryotes that include everything from yeast to humans.

"If very simple organisms such as bacteria are capable of this that would imply that this ability evolved much earlier than expected," said Dr Nijland.

"Understanding this phenomenon... will help us to develop methods to potentially interfere with this process and potentially develop new ways of preventing biofilm-related bacterial infections."

I wonder just how long this page is going to go before we get to a new page - 66 clicks down on the slider - must be setting some sort of forum record

Edited
And of course I posted this whilst we were on the previous page, so I was talking about page 5, not 6. - I must be psychic.

Where it all began (from the BBC):

Nineteenth century Edinburgh was a melting pot of ideas

In 1825 a boy called Bobby came to Edinburgh, as his father and grandfather had before him, to study medicine. He was 16 and wildly excited.



"We walked all about the town," he wrote to his father, "which we admire excessively. Bridge Street is the most extraordinary thing I ever saw. When we looked over the sides we could hardly believe our eyes when instead of a river we saw a stream of people!"



And what people. "Scotchmen are so civil and attentive," he wrote. "It is enough to make an Englishman ashamed of himself."



But the medical teaching he found there was in chaos. University professors competed with private lecturers and even came to blows in the street.



The slums were a shock too - thousands of rural poor and Irish labourers, crammed into stacked tenements.



Work had stopped on the new university buildings, begun when Bobby's father was a student. The Library was balanced on the top floor of a wooden structure of 1616 and scaffolding was everywhere.



Anatomy itself was pretty rocky too. Students learned dissection on bodies fresh-robbed from graves.

EDINBURGH INFLUENCE Joseph Lister - Experimented with antiseptics at Edinburgh University David Hume - At only 12 years old went to study in the city Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Professor on medical degree in the city said to have inspired Sherlock Holmes

In 1828, the traffic in corpses would be exposed when William Burke went on trial for murdering sixteen people - for the cash available on delivery at the back doors of medical schools.



The crash of falling stones which punctuated lectures also symbolized the shakiness of scientific theory.



In England, still quaking from the French Revolution, new theories had to enhance rather than undermine the status quo. In Edinburgh, university lecturers did the same. They supported "natural theology" - the "design" of living bodies was, of course, divine.



But Edinburgh's private lecturers were another matter. They had kept close ties with France through the Napoleonic Wars, and now were bringing direct to Scotland new theories, which approached the forms of living beings without reference to divinity.

Revelation



All this was utterly unlike anything Charles Robert Darwin had ever known. Within six years he'd be swarming up the Andes and aghast at slave auctions in Brazil.

His spell in Edinburgh was influential in Charles Darwin's education

But at 16 he found Bridge Street and the Edinburgh slums revelatory.



The two years he stayed here transformed him. After Latin and Greek at school, he was exploring an exciting new subject - natural history. Science was not even an autonomous profession, but natural history was as cutting edge as IT at the beginning of the 1980s.



At 17, he read his first scientific paper - on seaweed - to a student society.



He hired John Edmonstone, a freed slave from Guyana who earned his living stuffing birds for the Natural History Museum, to teach him taxidermy.



Edmonstone is now listed in The 100 Great Black Britons. Then, he lived in the same street just a few doors up from Bobby.



But Bobby could not bear what he was really here for - medicine.



He rushed trembling out of two operations and never went back. All that blood! No pain relief, no chloroform! A child sawn up, strapped screaming to a table, haunted him for years.



He dropped out and father was furious.



What do you do with a boy like that? You send him to Cambridge to study Divinity. Let Bobby be a vicar with a nice safe hobby, beetle-hunting.



Luckily, the science teaching Darwin found at Cambridge led to the Beagle, and from there to the theory of evolution.



But what set him on that path first was this whole great eye-opening city - Edinburgh.

Poet and author Ruth Padel is one of Charles Darwin's 72 great-great-grandchildren.

I can't see this one being a major film blockbuster

Sir Patrick Moore's Irish UFO film identified

A science fiction film featuring astronomer Sir Patrick Moore has been unearthed, more than 50 years since it was filmed in the grounds of an Irish country estate.

Them and the Thing was the work of aristocrat Desmond Leslie, a UFOlogist and amateur film-maker who was friends with Sir Patrick.

It was filmed in the mid-1950s at Castle Leslie in County Monaghan, three years before Sir Patrick began presenting The Sky at Night, one of the world's longest-running TV shows.

As with many 1950s alien B-movies, the film has a flying saucer, although most amateur directors back then had to make do with using car hubcaps or frisbees for their special effects.

Mr Leslie's resources were more grand; he improvised by putting a Spanish Renaissance shield from his castle on the end of a fishing line and shining mirrors at it.

Although the film failed to put Castle Leslie on the showbiz map, it would later come to worldwide attention in 2002 when it was the setting for Sir Paul McCartney's marriage to Heather Mills.

Sir Patrick, who would later return to Ireland in the mid-1960s as Armagh Planetarium's first director, says he has no memory of his brief movie career.

"Quite honestly I forget. It was more than 50 years ago - if I saw the film I'd remember," he says.

The astronomer's interest in space may have been more scientific than Mr Leslie's but the pair remained friends and went on to co-write a spoof book in 1972, How Britain won the Space Race.

Desmond Leslie wrote a number of books about UFOs and was an early adopter of electronic music, recording science fiction-inspired songs at his studio in Castle Leslie.

He reached his widest audience in 1962 when he punched theatre critic Bernard Levin on live television programme That Was The Week That Was, after taking offence at Levin's review of a play starring his then-wife.

He died in 2001.

Them and the Thing will be shown at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin on 21 August, as part of its Archive Home Movie Heritage festival.

A woolly story from the past from the BBC. That's the wonder of woolies:

By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News

Woolly mammoths died out because of dwindling grasslands - rather than being hunted to extinction by humans, according to a Durham University study.

After the coldest phase of the last ice age 21,000 years ago, the research revealed, there was a dramatic decline in pasture on which the mammoths fed.

The woolly mammoth was once commonplace across many parts of Europe.

It retreated to northern Siberia about 14,000 years ago, where it finally died out approximately 4,000 years ago.

The reasons for its extinction are unclear and have been a matter of heated scientific debate.

Some scientists have argued that it was principally the result of climate change while others say that it was driven by pressures of a growing human population, or even a cataclysmic meteor strike.

Now, according to Professor Brian Huntley of Durham University, that debate has been settled.

"What our results have suggested is that the changing climate - through the effect it had on vegetation - was the key thing that caused the reduction in the population and ultimate extinction of mammoths and many other large herbivores," he said.

Professor Huntley and his colleagues created a computer simulation of vegetation in Europe, Asia and North America over the last 42,000 years.

They did this by combining estimates of what the climate was like during this period with models of how various plants grow under different conditions.

They found that the cold and dry conditions during the ice age, with reduced concentrations of carbon dioxide, didn't favour the growth of trees.

So instead of forests there were vast areas of pasture, which was ideal for large herbivores, such as woolly mammoths. But as a result of a warmer, wetter climate and rising concentrations of carbon dioxide at the end of the ice age, trees emerged at the expense of the grasslands.

"During the height of the ice age, mammoths and other large herbivores would have had more food to eat," said Professor Huntley.

"But as we shifted into the post-glacial stage, trees gradually displaced those herbaceous ecosystems and that much reduced their grazing area."

All you ever wanted to know about sex (thats if you're an aspen tree):
More from the BBC:

Certain trees are able to clone themselves, which raises the tantalising possibility that they could effectively "live forever".

But a study published in the journal PLoS Biology has dashed that hope.

Dr Dilara Ally and her team at the University of British Columbia, Canada, found that the fertility of clones declines with age.

This means that a tree cannot clone itself indefinitely; it must eventually sexually reproduce, or it will die.

The secret of eternal life has been sought by human alchemists for centuries, but certain trees were thought to have evolved the knack, through cloning.

As all keen gardeners know, many trees have the ability to clone themselves. Transplant a "leaf cutting" and up pops a genetically identical plant without the need for sexual reproduction.

In the wild, trees resort to cloning when there are no members of the same species nearby with which to sexually reproduce. It is a strategy that has helped them avoid extinction.

In the new study, Dr Ally and her team studied populations of trembling aspen to investigate the effects of cloning on tree fertility.

The aspen is particularly renowned for its ability to clone itself. Clones sprout from the roots and each is considered part of the same parent tree.

The single largest aspen clone - named Pando meaning "I spread" - is believed to be 80,000 years old and weighs 6,000 tonnes, which if confirmed would make it the world's oldest and heaviest organism.

Sex or Death

Dr Ally's team found that genetic mutations gradually build up with each subsequent generation of clone, resulting in a decline in fertility. This means that the aspen cannot clone itself indefinitely, but eventually must reproduce sexually or die.

The researchers used a novel "molecular clock technique" to work out the age of individual clones before measuring fertility.

This meant comparing the DNA of the clones to that of the parent to calculate the time since the clones first sprouted.

Prior to the advent of this method, clone age had to be determined by observing populations over long periods. With the aspen this would have been impractical.

"Imagine trying to follow cohorts of plants that live on average 100 years of age and don't start reproducing until they are 25; it's impossible within the timeframe of a PhD or even over an entire career," said Dr Ally.

The BBC's website has various articles on the coalition government's first 100 days. This article from the BBC is looking at environmental issues. and as some of atricles I have posted on this thread are envionmental, I thought I would post it. It is a long article.

A hundred days of the 'greenest-ever' government

Analysis by Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

In an era when everything environmental - incuding biodiversity, waste, and fish stocks - is measured with indicators announcing that you will be the UK's "greenest-ever government", begs a number of questions - most obviously, "measured how?"

If you preside over a fall in greenhouse gas emissions while seeing numbers of farmland birds tumble, for example, how should those two trends be balanced against each other? Which is more important in assessing whether you are the "greenest ever"?

For many in the climate field, the coalition government began with a positive bang, by announcing it would not support the construction of a new runway at Heathrow Airport.

This had become a symbolic indicator of whether government was prepared to fight the green corner against business interests.

But it was also a simple measure by which the Conservatives and Lib Dems could distance themselves from their Labour predecessors, given that all three main parties are basically in the same climate camp.

Since then, Chris Huhne's Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) has taken other small steps designed to stimulate a growth in green energy, such as allowing councils to sell renewable electricity generated on their lands - a policy that builds on Labour's introduction of feed-in tarriffs for renewables.

On the other hand, budget cuts for Decc have led to the scaling down or scrapping of funds designed to support offshore wind, biomass and geothermal energy.

There have been similar small steps towards improving home insulation, regarded in many circles as a win-win-win, as it reduces energy spend, cuts emissions and tackles fuel poverty.

But like Labour, the coalition is a long way short of establishing the nationwide energy efficiency scheme recommended by the Committee on Climate Change, the government's advisers, who called last year for a street-to-street programme that would insulate 10 million lofts and 7.5 million cavity walls by 2015.

More small steps are anticipated in coming months, including realisation of the Green Investment Bank, a review of the electricity market structure and a strategy to stimulate enregy micro-generation.

Climate of austerity

The potential of the new austerity to scupper Decc initiatives is a concern raised by Mike Childs, head of climate with Friends of the Earth UK.

"The future is looking ominous," he says.

"The Treasury is threatening the much-heralded 'Green Deal' on energy efficiency for homes, to starve the new Green Investment Bank of cash, and cut the Renewable Heat Incentive which would reduce rewards for generating heat from renewable sources."

So far, the government's headline commitment to cutting emissions and developing a low-carbon economy has not been challenged by the climate-sceptic rump of the Conservative Party; the maths of coalition politics do not permit it.

Nevertheless, practical moves to reduce emissions are influenced by numerous departments - the Treasury, Communities and Local Government, Transport - and some of those departments may see initiatives retarded rather than advanced by chiefs who do not share Mr Huhne's enthusiasm for carbon restraint.

Internationally, Mr Huhne recently joined counterparts from France and Germany in calling for the EU to raise its collective emissions-cutting pledge to 30% on 1990 levels by 2020, rather than the current 20%.

Although that has won plaudits, it is tempered by data showing that the recession has lowered emissions so much across the bloc that 30% looks much more achievable today than it did two years ago. Real ambition, some are saying, now implies calls for a 40% cut.

Overall, Decc's first 100 days under the coalition are marked by three over-arching themes:

• fiscal stringency
• consultation on detailed policy measures
• emphasising the tie-up between restraining emissions, energy security and "green" jobs

Mr Huhne has acknowledged that the UK lags most of western Europe woefully on renewables. Whether that gap shrinks or expands over the next few years will be a litmus test of the "greenest-ever" claim.

Wider vision

Under Labour, there were times when the word "environment" seemed to have become replaced by the narrower "climate", so high did the latter ride up the overall agenda - certainly in terms of the political noise.

On that measure, the coalition looks, sounds and feels very different.

Biodiversity, the economics of nature loss, reducing waste and producing energy from it: Caroline Spelman's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has been vocal on all of these issues during its initial 100 days.

Ms Spelman's initial list of priorities included:

• an "absolute commitment" to reversing the trend toward reduction in biodiversity
• seeking "genuine reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)... for farmers, taxpayers, consumers and the environment alike"
• maintaining an increase in the money that taxpayers spend on flood defences this year, with "no impact on the number of households that we protect"

There has certainly been more talk about biodiversity than was common under Labour, although you could argue this is largely down to the coalition's accession co-inciding with the run-up to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meeting in October.

But there are concerns that the government's structural and fiscal reforms are going to work against its headline commitment to the issue.

"It's difficult to be optimistic," says Matt Shardlow, chief executive of the wildlife charity Buglife.

"We've seen in the first 100 days an agenda dominated by cuts, and... there's a feeling of hard-won gains, such as the contribution of agro-environment resources of CAP spending to the environment, being under threat."

Ms Spelman has announced major cuts to the 90-odd "arm's-length" bodies funded by Defra.

Some are uncontroversial. But budgetary slashing for Natural England, the statutory conservation agency for England, has aroused major concern, with about one-third of its staff likely to go.

Twenty-five organisations including major players such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) have sent a letter to government warning that cuts "could have profound and perhaps irreversible consequences for wildlife, landscapes and people".

They have also raised the alarm over proposals to sell off some of the UK's wildlife reserves, although the full picture of what's being proposed has yet to emerge.

And the decision to axe funding for the Sustainable Development Commission has raised in some people's minds questions of whether the coalition is prepared to countenance the really big questions of whether the UK economy, with its continued commitment to growth, is developing along inherently unsustainable lines.

Local zero

Biodiversity protection may also suffer from the government's commitment to localism, according to Mr Shardlow.

Putting important wildlife sites under local aegis may sound attractive, but he argues that if your aim is a coherent biodiversity strategy across regions, then you have to organise work on a pan-regional basis.

"If you devolve it too far down, you go way beyond the place where the expertise lies," he says.

"You may have people in every village who know where they would like their playing ground to be situated, but you don't have people in every village who know how to conserve endangered bees."

Caroline Spelman's commitment to flood protection may have a sting in the tail as well. This forms a major component of Environment Agency spending; so if that is to be preserved, everything else the agency does may face a disproportionately large cut.

Defra is also talking a local game on waste and bio-energy, aiming to encourage local initiatives that would develop a "zero-waste UK", with technologies such as anaerobic digesters coming into increasing use.

But as with Labour, the question remains of how to make this happen without a raft of financial carrots and sticks - something that is likely to prove difficult given this government's cost-cutting agenda.

Culling costs

The Court of Appeal, meanwhile, has removed one of the coalition's biggest potential banana-skins, with its decision last month that the proposed badger cull in Wales could not proceed.

Urged on by Defra's Agriculture Minister Jim Paice, the coalition was set to begin culling in England within a few years.

As Labour realised, such a decision would be hugely contentious. The Welsh postponement gives a little more breathing space in which other cattle TB curbs can be shown to work, and for development of a vaccine to advance, making it less likely that the government will need to make a quick decision.

If you had to paint a picture of the coalition so far, you would probably sketch a stern-faced accountant at work inside a big tent carrying the word "society".

Strategies on environment and climate are tucked away in the tent somewhere. They already look different from when Gordon Brown and then David Cameron went to see the Queen 100 days ago; but what it all means for the environment has yet to become entirely clear.

These were seriously big birds with attitude - you wouldn't have wanted these in your back garden. From the BBC:

'Terror bird' was prize fighter

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

They are popularly called "terror birds", and with good reason.

The giant, flightless beasts that roamed South America for more than 50 million years following the demise of the dinosaurs were fearsome predators.

New research shows the birds' huge beaks could deliver swift and powerful pecks, very probably killing their victims in one blow before ripping the flesh from their bodies.

"They had the full kit," said palaeoscientist Steve Wroe.

"These birds had enormous beaks with big hooks on the end. But we've shown they had to use those beaks with some precision and caution," Dr Wroe, a researcher from the University of Sydney, Australia, told BBC News.

Hawk-like hook

Dr Wroe was part of an international team that has been investigating the predatory behaviour of these extraordinary creatures.

Referred to by scientists as phorusrhacids, the birds flourished when South America was an island continent. Ranging in height from under a metre up to three metres (3ft to 10ft), at least 18 species are known to have evolved before the animals became extinct just a few million years ago.

But because nothing on Earth today resembles the terror birds, it has been difficult to say much about their life habits.

To try to get on top of the issue, the team examined the skeleton of one particular creature called Andalgalornis.

This animal lived in northwestern Argentina about six million years ago. It was mid-sized, standing about 1.4m high (4ft 6in) and weighing about 40kg (88lb). Like all the terror birds, its skull was big (37cm; 15in) with a deep narrow bill armed with a hawk-like hook.

The team scanned the skull to picture its internal architecture and then applied an engineering technique known as finite element analysis (FEA) to assess its capabilities.

FEA is a common approach in advanced design and manufacturing that allows scientists to test the performance of load-bearing materials.

It involves creating a computer model of the skull which can then be subjected to the sorts of forces a real skeleton would experience in different types of attack behaviour.

The results demonstrated that Andalgalornis was built to jab at its prey - in much the same way as a technical boxer might make a series of swift, targeted jabs.

Other strategies ran the risk of injury by putting the slender beak under too much stress, the team found.

"It would have used a repeated, rapid strike - a downward strike, using the neck muscles to drive that big spike on the beak into the prey and then pull back and rip," explained Dr Wroe.

"It was really badly adapted for grabbing an object and shaking it."

Unusual collection

The research is detailed in a new paper in the journal PLoS One. Its lead author is Federico Degrange of the Museo de La Plata/CONICET in Argentina.

He commented: "No one has ever attempted such a comprehensive biomechanical analysis of a terror bird.

"We need to figure out the ecological role that these amazing birds played if we really want to understand how the unusual ecosystems of South America evolved over the past 60 million years."

Certainly, the terror birds would have had the opportunity to use their particular attack strategy on a remarkable array of animals.

Like the birds themselves, many other heavyweight and unusual-looking beasts emerged during South America's separation from the North.

These included giant sloths, huge armadillo-like creatures and even 3m-long rodents.

One of the big questions in science is what will be the eventual fate of the universe. This article courtesy of the BBC shows one outcome. However this is just a theory - it's a bit difficult to prove though. I had an argument with someone some months ago. He was abdolutely insistent that everything (and I mean everything) could be defined in mathematical terms. I had put forward the idea that there could be things which were beyond the comprehension of even the most brilliant minds. Try explaining to your pet why we read a newspaper and your pet cannot understand. Try getting Stephen Hawking to explain some scientific theory to a baby and the baby cannot understand. So why should't there be some things which not even Stephen Hawking can understand. That does not mean that they do not exist. But the man I was talking with could not accept this.

So this theory can only be based on the level of human understanding - it does not follow that it is the complete picture. But that is only my opinion and I apologise in advance to anyone who is upset by tha above. At the end, it is just my opinion and aobviously others will have different opinions.

Anyway, the article in question:

Fate of Universe revealed by galactic lens

By Howard Falcon-Lang Science reporter

A "galactic lens" has revealed that the Universe will probably expand forever.

Astronomers used the way that light from distant stars was distorted by a huge galactic cluster known as Abell 1689 to work out the amount of dark energy in the cosmos.

Dark energy is a mysterious force that speeds up the expansion of the Universe.

Understanding the distribution of this force revealed that the likely fate of the Universe was to keep on expanding.

It will eventually become a cold, dead wasteland, researchers say.

The study, conducted by an international team led by Professor Eric Jullo of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, is published in the journal Science.

Dark energy makes up three-quarters of our Universe but is totally invisible. We only know it exists because of its effect on the expansion of the Universe.

To work out how dark energy is spread through space, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the way that light from distant stars was distorted around Abell 1689, a nearby cluster of galaxies.

Abell 1689, found in the constellation of Virgo, is one of the biggest galactic clusters known to science.

Because of its huge mass, the cluster acts as a cosmic magnifying glass, causing light to bend around it.

The way in which light is distorted by this cosmic lens depends on three factors: how far away the distant object is; the mass of Abell 1689; and the distribution of dark energy.

The astronomers were able to measure the first two variables using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, enabling them to calculate this crucial third factor.

Cold comfort

Knowing the distribution of dark energy tells astronomers that the Universe will continue to get bigger indefinitely.

Eventually it will become a cold, dead wasteland with a temperature approaching what scientists term "absolute zero".

Professor Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University, a leading cosmologist and co-author of this study, said that the findings finally proved "exactly what the fate of the Universe will be".

Another Winston Churchill story from the BBC this afternoon:

Butterflies flutter again at Churchill's home

By Mark Kinver Science and environment reporter, BBC News

Butterflies are being bred at the former home of Winston Churchill for the first time in half a century.

The National Trust has renovated a butterfly house built by the British wartime prime minister at his Chartwell residence in Kent, South-East England.

Documents show he intended to begin breeding butterflies in 1939, but had to wait until the end of World War II.

As well as being an enthusiast for the insects, Churchill was also said to be a "pioneer of butterfly gardening".

"It's amazing to think that Churchill was planning this butterfly house at the start of the war, no doubt a welcome distraction from the weighty affairs of state," said Martin Warren, chief executive of Butterfly Conservation.

"His pioneering garden inspired many others and helped spread an enthusiasm for butterfly gardening," Dr Warren added.

"Many UK butterflies are in dramatic decline and so it is great news that they are thriving at Chartwell this year."

Lifelong passion

It is understood that Winston Churchill planned to begin breeding butterflies in the summer of 1939, when he consulted a leading expert of the time, L Hugh Newman.

However, the arrival of World War II meant the plans were put on hold until 1946, when Newman's designs for a butterfly house came to fruition.

The building was originally a game larder, which was then converted into a cool summer house before Churchill had it adapted to become a butterfly house.

"Even war leaders love butterflies," said Matthew Oates, nature conservation adviser for the National Trust.

"As a young man, he was a serious butterfly collector on his travels across the world and later would have spent many a summer enjoying the beauty of butterflies in his garden at Chartwell."

Chartwell was bought by Churchill in 1924, and remained his home until his death in 1965.

"It was way ahead of its time with its focus on making sure that there was a wildlife friendly garden," explained Mr Oates.

"Mixed in with the more formal nature of an English country garden, Churchill insisted that buddleia and thistles were planted to attracted butterflies and other insects."

A team from the National Trust recreated the butterfly house using descriptions taken from articles written by L Hugh Newman, and this summer saw the first peacocks and painted ladies emerge.

Visitors to the house will also be able to stroll along the butterfly walk, following in the footsteps of the garden party guests of the wartime leader.

I didn't know you were that into physics Loro
I love it myself
Though I personally am stuck in the "maths can explain it all" camp

muf, I'm not particularly into physics as such, but have an interest in lots of things as you probably can guess from the wide variety of posts I make here. The areas which I have little interest in are celebrities and "reality" TV

So this is something I heard on the radio this morning - again from the BBC:

Crash scam figures at record high, insurers warn

By Ben Ando BBC News crime reporter

"Crash for cash" scams where fraudsters stage accidents to claim on other drivers' insurance are at an all-time high, the BBC has learned.

The Insurance Fraud Bureau (IFB) estimates around 30,000 accidents were staged last year.

The scams cost insurers about £350m in 2009 and added £44 to the premium of every driver in the country.

Birmingham was the UK's top fraud hot-spot and incidents rose in parts of London, the industry-funded body said.

Until recently the claims were largely confined to north-west England, and the other four top spots for insurance fraud of this sort were filled by Liverpool, Blackburn, Manchester and Leeds.

Vulnerable victims

But the scam appears to be moving south, with parts of London in the top 10 for the first time. East London takes sixth position while north London is in ninth position.

The fraudsters ensure an innocent motorist drives into the back of their vehicle by braking suddenly on a clear road or roundabout. Often they use the handbrake so there are no warning lights.

It is usually accepted that a driver rear-ending another car must be at fault.

Sgt Mark Beales, from Greater Manchester Police, said fraudsters choose their "victim" drivers carefully.

"What these fraudsters tend to pick on are people who are single mums or elderly people, people who are less likely to cause them any issues. They also target drivers of commercial vehicles, because drivers tend not to care as much if they're not driving their own vehicle," he said.

The claims made average around £17,000 and can include demands for payment of storage costs and recovery fees as well as the usual personal injury claims.

Earlier this month two men, 35-year-old Rehan Javed and his brother Rezwan, 33, from Burnley in Lancashire, were convicted of running a £12m scam.

They processed many of the claims themselves via their own claims management company.

Glen Marr, from the IFB, said the scam costs everyone: "We estimate there are around 30,000 staged accidents a year costing the insurance industry £350m.

"And overall, fraud adds £44 to the insurance premium of every motorist - no matter what no claims bonus or safe driving record he or she may have."

'Nightmare'

IFB investigators say in one case they are currently working on, the fraudsters even called the fire brigade to have a passenger cut from the car to lend weight to their claims - yet the vehicle was barely damaged and the "injured passenger" had got out of the car and been walking about in the immediate aftermath of the accident.

Their advice to motorists caught in such an accident is to stay calm, not to accept liability and, if possible, to record photographs of the other driver and any other passengers in the car on their mobile phone.

For those who have been targeted by fraudsters, it can be a terrifying experience.

In October 2007, 82-year-old Alma Gallanders and her husband were driving home after visiting their son in hospital in Manchester. As they crossed a roundabout near the Trafford shopping centre, they were struck by another car.

"He hit us on the right wing and he wound down the window down and said 'you crashed into my car', and my husband and I said, 'Don't be ridiculous, you ran into us'," she remembered.

The cars - their Nissan Micra and his black Lexus - were barely dented. But the driver of the other vehicle, Abdullah Ahmed, made a claim for thousands of pounds in personal injuries, vehicle repairs and storage.

The 24-year-old also claimed that the Gallanders had racially abused him. They were then called to the police station to be interviewed and a file was passed to the Crown Prosecution Service.

Meanwhile though, officers started investigating Ahmed's black Lexus. Though he'd claimed storage costs, police proved he'd actually been driving it since the accident.

They were also astonished to find that the car had been involved in at least three almost identical crashes in preceding months.

In court, Ahmed pleaded guilty and admitted the allegations of racism were fabricated.

In April this year he was given a two year jail sentence, with 12 months suspended.

But Alma is still angry at the weeks of uncertainty and trauma she and her husband faced.

"It was a nightmare, you didn't go to sleep, you were so worried and what made it even worse was that we were completely innocent of everything.

"Our only crime was being on that road at that time."

To report insurance fraud call the IFB's cheat line on 0800 328 2550

Yummy news for older women who like chocolate - it can be good for you  More from the BBC: (no, I don't get a commission from them )

Dark chocolate can be good for the heart, study says

Older women who eat dark chocolate once or twice a week could be lowering their risk of heart failure, says a US study.

It found those eating chocolate once or twice a week cut the risk of developing heart failure by a third, but those eating it every day did not benefit.

The Boston study, in a journal of the American Heart Association, looked at nearly 32,000 Swedish women aged between 48 and 83 over nine years.

Dieticians say eating chocolate too often can be damaging and unhealthy.

The study notes that one or two 19 to 30 gram servings of dark chocolate a week led to a 32% reduction in heart failure risk.

This fell to 26% when one to three servings a month were eaten.

But those who ate chocolate every day did not appear to reduce their risk of heart failure at all.

The researchers conclude the protective effect of eating chocolate reduces as more or less is eaten than the optimum one to two servings a week.

'Flavanoids'

Too much chocolate is unhealthy because it contains high levels of sugar and fat which can make people put on weight, the researchers say.

But chocolate also contains high concentration of compounds called flavonoids which can lower blood pressure and protect against heart disease, previous studies have found.

The researchers behind this study say this is the first time long-term effects related specifically to heart failure have been shown.

Dr Murray Mittleman is study leader and director of the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Research Unit at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston.

He said: "You can't ignore that chocolate is a relatively calorie-dense food and large amounts of habitual consumption is going to raise your risks for weight gain.

"But if you're going to have a treat, dark chocolate is probably a good choice, as long as it's in moderation," Dr Mittleman said.

Cocoa content

Differences in chocolate quality will affect the study's implications, the authors say. Higher cocoa content is associated with greater heart benefits.

Although the chocolate consumed by the Swedish women in the study was milk chocolate, it contained a high concentration of cocoa solids - about 30%.

This is equivalent to dark chocolate by UK standards.

Dark chocolate can contain as much as 75% cocoa while standard milk chocolate may have 25% or less cocoa.

Victoria Taylor, senior dietitian at the British Heart Foundation, said the study showed the importance of finding the right balance in our diets.

"Before you rip open those sweet treats, remember that whilst antioxidants in chocolate may be helpful to your heart, they can also be found in fruit and veg - foods which don't come with the saturated fat and high calories that chocolate does," she said.

 

A unique story from the BBC news for Somerset:

Wells Cathedral clock to go electric

A historic clock is to go electric - because the man whose family has kept it ticking for 80 years is retiring.

Generations of Paul Fisher's family have wound the clock at Wells Cathedral.

But, after Mr Fisher announced his decision to quit, the cathedral said it was to fit an electric motor.

Installed in 1392, the clock face is the oldest in the world. The original motor mechanism was replaced in 1882 and now operates in the Science Museum.

The clock features figures of two knights and two Saracens who go around in a circle in a jousting tournament every 15 minutes.

Mr Fisher, 63, said: "My father and my grandfather, my son and grand daughters have all wound the clock.

"The whole family has joined in as we have to have holidays and people go down sick and at certain times people have had to go to war."

'A lot of relief'

Mr Fisher and his family have had to climb 50 steps twice a week to the cathedral's gallery to wind up three sets of weights.

A jeweller and watchmaker by trade, Mr Fisher said he was retiring because his knees were going as the steps were quite high.

After he finishes winding it for the last time before the electric motor kicks in on Monday, he said: "I shall have a bit of a tear, but a lot of relief."

He said his son, who is taking over the running of his jewellery shop, could not commit to winding the clock three times a week.

But both of them will continue to carry out maintenance checks twice a year and will be on hand should there be a power cut.

Paul Robinson, from the cathedral, said: "It is an end of an era and it's very poignant for us all here.

"We look at the clock which has been here for 600 years and it had been wound manually over the last 80 years by the Fisher family.

"They have done a sterling job for us and we were then faced with the difficult decision as to what we do.

"Do we find someone else to do it; someone else who has a similar level of commitment to be here twice a week come rain and shine?

"We felt that might be something that's just a little bit too much of a challenge for other people so we decided to come into the 21st Century."

Here's a clip showing the clock in action.

 
Lol

So have they decided to replace the old clock in the tower at St Mary's Church? I don't know if the church is listed, but even if it's not, I can see getting the necessary faculty (that's the church authorities equivalent of planning permission) will be lengthy and difficult. Out church is a 20th century urban church - nothing like being listed - and we have to have an external ramp re health & safety law. And it's taking ages to convince the church bureacracy for us to have the faculty. The trouble is that they insist that it has to blend in with the existing church. And if it's difficult for us, it's going to be a nightmare for St Mary'.s

The real nightmare on elm street - more from the BBC:

A fresh outbreak of Dutch elm disease is threatening the existence of the UK's remaining English elm trees.

Most people under the age of 40 will never have seen the elm landscapes so loved by Constable or Turner.

They may have read John Betjeman's eulogies to the English elm, and might even have heard of the ancient elm under which John Wesley reputedly preached in Stony Stratford. (I am currently growing an elm sapling, taken from that great tree before it was finally removed a few years ago).

But they won't have actually have seen any of these wonderful trees that once graced the British countryside.

For they were wiped out in their many millions from the 1970s, when a virulent strain of a fungal disease arrived on imported Canadian logs and fanned out from ports in Bristol, Southampton and London killing between 25-30 million trees.

Dutch elm disease, named because much of the research into it was conducted in Holland, soon overwhelmed the English elm, a tree that once towered over our hedgerows.

Its misfortune was to have been introduced by the Romans to prop up their vines, and be descended from the same root stock. While other varieties of elm demonstrated some resistance, the English elm had none.

"It's caused by a fungus which is carried around by a beetle," explained Mary Parker, Dutch elm disease control officer for East Sussex County Council.

"They feed on the twigs - as they do so they bite through the bark and the spores that are on their back get in under the bark, travel down the tree and the water vessels, and as they do so it causes a reaction and kills the tree."

Scientific research conducted over the past 20 years by Andrew Brookes of Portsmouth University and Eric Collin of Cemagref in France, suggests that no native British elm is resistant to Dutch elm disease.

That the elm hung on in any number in Brighton, Eastbourne, Seaford and parts of East Sussex, was very much down to the forward thinking and swift action by elm specialist pioneers such as John Gibbs and local authorities over the past 40 years.

Immediate sanitation felling, and pruning out of the disease, saved the English elm from near extinction.

Few survivors

Today, when people see Brighton's famous trees - the Preston Park Twins, reputedly the oldest remaining English elm in the world, or the hollow veteran at Brighton Pavilion, which was planted in 1776, the year of American independence - they simply cannot believe their eyes.

"I get gasps of excitement when they [visitors] see the large English elm," the pavilion's head gardener Robert Hill-Snook told me, "because they haven't seen an elm since their childhood and they look at them [the trees] as if they're going back into the past."

Brighton is home to the National Elm Collection, and the council continues to safeguard these very special trees.

The variety, rarity and age profiles of the elm population of the town's Preston Park should surely make this public space a candidate for Unesco World Heritage Status.

Aside from East Sussex and the Isle of Man, the only recorded English elm survivors in Britain are two remarkable trees in an isolated spot in the Cotswolds, and an old tree that graces a graveyard near Dervaig on the Isle of Mull in Scotland.

But this has been a very bad year for Dutch elm disease, possibly one of the worst since the mid 1970s.

To the east of Brighton, in the beautiful elm landscapes of the South Downs, almost every hedgerow is showing the tell tale signs of the disease; yellowing and browning leaves, and rapid die back.

The once relatively disease-free Friston Forest is riddled with Dutch elm disease, and it is spreading rapidly.

The work of the local authorities, of countless tree lovers, specialists and the vigilance of the public over 40 years, is at very real risk of being undone.

The hot, dry weather may be one factor, but there are others.

Strict legislation

Last year, charges for sanitation felling were brought in for the first time in rural areas.

Of course some landowners can afford to pay for 50% of the tree felling costs, but it has become apparent that some irresponsible landowners are letting diseased and dead trees stand, spreading the infection.

Then there is increased red tape, and the problems associated with those whose ultimate responsibility it is to police what is a Dutch elm disease control area, where strict legislation governs tree removal and disposal.

Then there are the costs. East Sussex County Council is contributing £249,000 this year to the battle against Dutch elm disease.

But much local anger is being directed towards the Forestry Commission.

One of those who believe the commission has largely given up this year, is Friston Forest resident Gay Biddlecombe.

"I've got five elm trees in my garden and because the Forestry Commission have seemed to do nothing about the disease in the forest, my trees have now got the disease," she says.

The Forestry Commission told Newsnight that it is about to send more teams in to tackle the outbreak that threatens elms - not only in the forest - but in an immediate seven-mile radius.

But it also says that the future is not bright for a healthy elm population in the Friston Forest area.

What is needed, say elm experts, is an emergency sanitation programme of tree felling, running through the winter into next year, and working from the coast up through the valleys.

Nationally, budget restraints could lead to further pressure to cut costs - or impose them - thus threatening these emblematic trees which are woven into our very history and culture.

Watch Mark Seddon's film in full on Tuesday 24 August 2010 at 2230 BST on BBC Two

Dutch elm disease

 devastated elms throughout Europe and North America in the second half of the 20th century. It is caused by a micro-fungus transmitted by two species of Scolytus elm-bark beetle which act as vectors. The disease affects all species of elm native to North America and Europe, but many Asiatic species have anti-fungal genes and are resistant. Fungal spores, introduced into wounds in the tree caused by the beetles, invade the xylem or vascular system. The tree responds by producing tyloses, effectively blocking the flow from roots to leaves. Woodland trees in North America are not quite as susceptible to the disease because they usually lack the root-grafting of the urban elms and are somewhat more isolated from each other. In France, inoculation of over three hundred clones of the European species with the fungus failed to find a single variety possessed of any significant resistance.

The first, less aggressive strain of the disease fungus, Ophiostoma ulmi, appeared in Europe in 1910 and had spread to North America by 1928, but declined in the 1940s. The second, far more virulent strain of the disease Ophiostoma novo-ulmi was identified in Europe in the late 1960s, and within a decade had killed over 20 million trees (approximately 75%) in the UK alone. Approximately three times more deadly, the origin of the new strain remains a mystery; earlier believed to have been endemic to China, surveys there in 1986 found no trace of it, although bark beetles were common. The most popular hypothesis is that it arose from a hybrid between the original O. ulmi and another strain endemic to the Himalaya, Ophiostoma himal-ulmi.^[15]

While there is no sign of the current pandemic waning, there is some hope in the susceptibility of the fungus to a disease of its own caused by d-factors: naturally occurring virus-like agents that can severely debilitate it and reduce its sporulation.^[16]

Owing to its geographical isolation and effective quarantine enforcement, Australia has so far been unaffected by Dutch Elm Disease, and as such retains many stands of English Elms; the long avenues of Royal Parade and St Kilda Road in Melbourne,[20] and Grattan Street in Carlton, Victoria, are three examples.

The provinces of Alberta and British Columbia in western Canada are also free of Dutch Elm disease. Aggressive means are being taken to prevent any occurrences of the disease in these two provinces. In fact, Alberta has the world's largest stands of elms unaffected by the disease, and many streets and parks in Edmonton and Calgary are still lined with large numbers of healthy mature trees.

The city of Brighton & Hove on the South Coast of England has retained a high proportion of its Elms. In the 1970s the Parks and Gardens departments of the two towns (since amalgamated into one city) pursued a vigorous policy of spotting and clearing infected elms, which is continued today within the designated "Elm Disease Management Area". Among the many trees thus preserved are several magnificent examples in and around the Royal Pavilion Gardens.

 

Australia and areas of Canada not effect eh!

Excellent find Loro

muf, good report. I think that the Dutch Elm disease outbreal back in the 1970s was the first natural disaster that I was aware of as an adult. and the utter destructiveness of the disease. Let's hope that they can find a way of destroyinh the fungus.

And a healthy eating story this afternoon from the BBC:

Green leafy veg 'may cut diabetes risk'

By Emma Wilkinson Health reporter, BBC News

A diet rich in green leafy vegetables may reduce the risk of developing diabetes, UK research says.

In an analysis of six studies into fruit and vegetable intake, only food including spinach and cabbage was found to have a significant positive effect.

A portion and a half a day was found to cut type 2 diabetes risk by 14%, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) reports.

But experts urged people to continue to aim for five portions of fruit and vegetables a day.

The researchers from Leicester University reviewed data from the studies of 220,000 adults in total.

They found that eating more fruit and vegetables in general was not strongly linked with a smaller chance of developing type 2 diabetes but "there was a general trend in that direction".

Yet when it came to green leafy vegetables, which the researchers said also includes broccoli and cauliflower, the risk reduction was significant.

The team calculated that a daily dose of 106g reduced the risk of diabetes by 14% - a UK "portion" is classed as 80g.

It is not clear why green leafy vegetables may have a protective effect but one reason may be they are high in antioxidants, such as vitamin C and another theory is that they contain high levels of magnesium.

Study leader Professor Melanie Davies, professor of diabetic medicine at the University of Leicester, said the message to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day remains an important one.

But she added: "People like very specific health messages.

"We know that intake of fruit and vegetables is important, but this study suggests that green leafy vegetables seem to be particularly important in terms of preventing diabetes."

The team are now planning a study in people at high risk of developing the condition to see if increasing their intake of vegetables like spinach and kale can help to reduce their chances of being diagnosed with diabetes.

Fruit and veg

In 2008/09, the National Diet Nutrition Survey showed that, although fruit and vegetable intake has risen over the past decade, only a third of men and women eat the recommended five-a-day.

In an accompanying editorial in the BMJ, Professor Jim Mann from the University of Otago in New Zealand, stressed that the message of increasing overall fruit and vegetable intake must not be lost "in a plethora of magic bullets," even though green leafy vegetables clearly can be included as one of the daily portions.

Dr Iain Frame, director of research at Diabetes UK said: "We already know that the health benefits of eating vegetables are far-reaching but this is the first time that there has been a suggested link specifically between green leafy vegetables and a reduced risk of developing type 2 diabetes."

But he warned the evidence was limited and it was too early to isolate green leafy vegetables and present them alone as a method to cut the chances of developing the condition.

"We would be concerned if focusing on certain foods detracted from the advice to eat five portions of fruits and vegetables a day, which has benefits in terms of reducing heart disease, stroke, some cancers and obesity as well as type 2 diabetes."

Diabetes UK is currently funding research into whether fermentable carbohydrates found in foods such as asparagus, garlic, chicory and Jerusalem artichokes could help weight loss and prevent Type 2 diabetes.

I wonder if this is what the future holds:


More from the BBC:

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

A senior astronomer has said that the hunt for alien life should take into account alien "sentient machines".

Seti, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has until now sought radio signals from worlds like Earth.

But Seti astronomer Seth Shostak argues that the time between aliens developing radio technology and artificial intelligence (AI) would be short.

Writing in Acta Astronautica, he says that the odds favour detecting such alien AI rather than "biological" life.

Many involved in Seti have long argued that nature may have solved the problem of life using different designs or chemicals, suggesting extraterrestrials would not only not look like us, but that they would not at a biological level even work like us.

However, Seti searchers have mostly still worked under the assumption - as a starting point for a search of the entire cosmos - that ETs would be "alive" in the sense that we know.

That has led to a hunt for life that is bound to follow at least some rules of biochemistry, live for a finite period of time, procreate, and above all be subject to the processes of evolution.

But Dr Shostak makes the point that while evolution can take a large amount of time to develop beings capable of communicating beyond their own planet, technology would already be advancing fast enough to eclipse the species that wrought it.

"If you look at the timescales for the development of technology, at some point you invent radio and then you go on the air and then we have a chance of finding you," he told BBC News.

"But within a few hundred years of inventing radio - at least if we're any example - you invent thinking machines; we're probably going to do that in this century.

"So you've invented your successors and only for a few hundred years are you... a 'biological' intelligence."

From a probability point of view, if such thinking machines ever evolved, we would be more likely to spot signals from them than from the "biological" life that invented them.

'Moving target'

John Elliott, a Seti research veteran based at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, says that Dr Shostak is putting on a firmer footing a feeling that is not uncommon in the Seti community.

"You have to start somewhere, and there's nothing wrong with that," Dr Elliott told BBC News.

"But having now looked for signals for 50 years, Seti is going through a process of realising the way our technology is advancing is probably a good indicator of how other civilisations - if they're out there - would've progressed.

"Certainly what we're looking at out there is an evolutionary moving target."

Both Dr Shostak and Dr Elliott concede that finding and decoding any eventual message from such alien thinking machines may prove more difficult than in the "biological" case, but the idea does provide new directions to look.

Dr Shostak says that artificially intelligent alien life would be likely to migrate to places where both matter and energy - the only things he says would be of interest to the machines - would be in plentiful supply. That means the Seti hunt may need to focus its attentions near hot, young stars or even near the centres of galaxies.

"I think we could spend at least a few percent of our time... looking in the directions that are maybe not the most attractive in terms of biological intelligence but maybe where sentient machines are hanging out."

This is an extraordinary story from the BBC today, where it appears that a protein which is found in sufferers of rheiumatoid arthritis apparently can guard against the development of Alzheimers.

Arthritis protein 'guards against Alzheimer's disease'

By Caroline Parkinson Health reporter, BBC News

A protein produced in cases of rheumatoid arthritis appears to protect against the development of Alzheimer's disease, US scientists have said.

In the Journal of Alzheimer's Research study, mice with memory loss given the protein fared better in tests.

A synthetic version of GM-CSF protein is already used as a cancer treatment.

UK experts said the study was "an important first step" and tests were needed to see if the drug worked for people with Alzheimer's.

In people with rheumatoid arthritis, the immune system goes into "overdrive" and produces attacking proteins - including GM-CSF.

Rubbish collectors

It had already been recognised that people with rheumatoid arthritis were less likely to develop Alzheimer's, but the protective link had been thought to be due to non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) taken by people with the condition.

However tests showed this was not the case.

In this study, University of South Florida researchers genetically altered mice to have memory problems similar to those seen in Alzheimer's disease, which is a form of dementia.

They then treated them - and some healthy mice - with the protein. Other mice - both healthy ones and those with Alzheimer's symptoms - were given a dummy (placebo) treatment.

At the end of the 20-day study, the Alzheimer's mice treated with GM-CSF fared substantially better on tests measuring memory and learning, and performed at a similar level to mice of the same age without the condition.

Even the healthy mice treated with GM-CSF performed slightly better than their untreated peers.

Mice with Alzheimer's that were given the placebo continued to do poorly in the tests.

The researchers have suggested the protein may attract an influx of cells called microglia from the peripheral blood supply around the brain, which then attack the characteristic plaques that form in people with Alzheimer's.

Microglia are like the body's natural "rubbish collectors" that go to damaged or inflamed areas to get rid of toxic substances.

The brains of GM-CSF-treated Alzheimer's mice showed more than a 50% decrease in beta amyloid, the substance which forms Alzheimer's plaques.

The researchers also observed an apparent increase in nerve cell connections in the brains of the GM-CSF-treated mice, which they say could be a reason memory decline was reversed.

'Crucial next stage'

Dr Huntington Potter, who led the research at the University of South Florida's Health Byrd Alzheimer's Institute, said: "Our findings provide a compelling explanation for why rheumatoid arthritis is a negative risk factor for Alzheimer's disease."

An artificial version of GM-CSF, a drug called Leukine, is already approved by the US Food and Drug Administration and has been used to treat cancer patients who need to generate more immune cells.

Dr Potter added. "Our study, along with the drug's track record for safety, suggests Leukine should be tested in humans as a potential treatment for Alzheimer's disease."

Dr Simon Ridley, head of research at the UK's Alzheimer's Research Trust, said: "Positive results in mice can be an important first step for any new treatment, and it's encouraging the team is already planning the crucial next stage of a trial in people.

"We won't know whether GM-CSF can help people with Alzheimer's until clinical trials are completed".

Dr Susanne Sorensen, head of research at the Alzheimer's Society, said: "This exciting research provides a possible answer to the long, unexplained question of why rheumatoid arthritis could reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease.

"Given the identified protein is already available as a drug that is proven to be safe in humans, the time taken to develop an Alzheimer's disease treatment could be substantially reduced.

"However, we must not jump the gun. Much more research is needed before we can say for certain that the findings demonstrated in mice would also occur in humans."

I know I said that I had no interest in celebrities, but this is a bit different - the true identity of The Stig may soon become published, but not if the BBC can stop it. This article from the BBC so it may be a bit one-sided

Top Gear Stig legal wrangle goes to court

Publisher HarperCollins and the BBC have begun a court battle over a book that reveals the identity of Top Gear's The Stig.

Both sides appeared in London's High Court on Monday after the BBC confirmed it was trying to halt its publication.

The Stig never removes his helmet on the BBC Two show and the BBC says the book's publication breaches contractual and confidentiality obligations.

HarperCollins said it would "vigorously defend" its right to publish the book.

The dispute comes amid suggestions from several newspapers speculating that the character's true identity is former Formula Three driver Ben Collins, based on the financial reports of his company.

HarperCollins confirmed that it is being sued by the corporation over the impending publication of the book.

In a statement, it said: "We are disappointed that the BBC has chosen to spend licence fee payers' money to suppress this book and will vigorously defend the perfectly legitimate right of this individual to tell his story."

The BBC confirmed it is in a legal dispute over the publication of a book relating to Top Gear as this "breaches agreed contractual and confidentiality obligations relating to the show".

It added that it was "no surprise" that Ben Collins' company listed Top Gear amongst its work as the driver had "appeared numerous times on the programme and he often supplied other drivers for both the programme and Top Gear Live".

'Confidentiality clauses'

A BBC spokesman said: "This situation has come about as a result of an attempt by an external party to profit from unauthorised use of the Top Gear brand, one of the BBC's biggest and most watched shows in the UK and around the world.

"As a result, it is important that the BBC does all it can to uphold confidentiality clauses that have been agreed to in relation to the show."

The BBC has never confirmed who The Stig is and maintains revealing his identity would spoil viewers' enjoyment of the show.

The Stig's identity has puzzled fans for years with many speculating the role is shared by several drivers.

Former Formula 1 driver Perry McCarthy was the original Stig, wearing black overalls for his appearances.

He left the show in 2003 and then a "new" Stig dressed in white took over.

McCarthy later disclosed his identity in an autobiography.

This was on the radio news this morning - more from the BBC:

Rich exoplanet system discovered

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC News

Astronomers have discovered a planetary system containing at least five planets that orbit a star called HD 10180, which is much like our own Sun.

The star is 127 light years away, in the southern constellation of Hydrus.

The researchers used the European Southern Observatory (Eso) to monitor light emitted from the system and identify and characterise the planets.

They say this is the "richest" system of exoplanets - planets outside our own Solar System - ever found.

Christophe Lovis from Geneva University's observatory in Switzerland was lead researcher on the study. He said that his team had probably found "the system with the most planets yet discovered".

"This also highlights the fact that we are now entering a new era in exoplanet research - the study of complex planetary systems and not just of individual planets," he said.

The research has been submitted for publication to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Eso's High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (or Harps) instrument was responsible for the discovery.

Harps measures the wobble of a star; this gives a measure of how much it is being tugged on by an orbiting planet.

"If there is one planet it will induce a little movement - the star will come towards us and move away," Dr Lovis explained to BBC News.

"And what works for one [planet] works for many."

With many planets orbiting the star, its movement becomes a very complex "superposition" of several different planet-induced movements.

Using Harp, Dr Lovis and his team were able to measure this and break it down, in order to calculate how many planets were in the system, how great each of their masses was, and even the path of each individual planet's orbit.

The researchers said the system around HD 10180 as unique in several respects.

It has at least five "Neptune-like planets" lying within a distance equivalent to the orbit of Mars, making it more populated than our own Solar System in its inner region. And all the planets seem to have almost circular orbits.

Dr Lovis said: "Studies of planetary motions in the new system reveal complex gravitational interactions between the planets and give us insights into the long-term evolution of the system."

False alarm?

So far, the astronomers have picked up clear signals from five planets, along with two slightly "fuzzier" signals. One of these possible sixth and seventh planets was estimated to be just 1.4 times the mass of the Earth; if its presence in the system was confirmed, it would be the lowest mass exoplanet yet discovered.

It is also predicted to be very close to its host star - just 2% of the Earth-Sun distance, so one year on this planet would last only 1.2 Earth days.

Dr Lovis said he was 99% certain that this small planet was there.

"There are five signals that are really strong that we have no doubt, but we have another two with a 'false alarm' probability of 1%," he said.

Martin Dominik, an astronomer and exoplanet hunter from the UK's University of St Andrews said the complexity and structure of this system made it an interesting discovery.

"The richness of the system of planets around HD 10180 with its many characteristic features marks the way forward towards gathering the information that will put our own existence into cosmic context," he told BBC News.

He cautioned against describing this as the "richest system" saying that it was not clear whether other systems that had already been detected hosted further planets.

Dr Dominik added: "I am tempted to consider the detected system as one of the most 'informative' ones.

"Like most discoveries in science, the findings come with more questions than answers; but in my opinion, this is what really advances a field."

It's E - asy when you know how: another BBC posting:

The day I ate as many E numbers as possible

Food labels such as "natural" and "pure" are confusing shoppers, according to a survey. But even more misunderstood are the E numbers that populate ingredient lists, says Stefan Gates, who set out to see if additives are as bad as is often assumed.

Why would anyone do something as irresponsible as try to overload on sweeteners, flavourings, emulsifiers and preservatives, when food additives are a byword for culinary evil?

In Europe, these are given E numbers; in the United States and elsewhere, the full name is increasingly listed on food labels.

Yet how many consumers would believe that such additives may actually be good for us? The boom in organic and natural foods in recent years betrays our trust in nature over science. Yet a survey by Which? magazine has found terms such as "natural", "fresh", "pure" and "real", which readily appear on the front of food packaging, are confusing consumers because they are largely unregulated.

Conversely, it is the additives tucked way in the small print of a product's ingredients list that are heavily regulated. And when you look at clinical rather than anecdotal evidence, and speak to clinical dieticians, it appears these are actually good for us - and many seem to be very good for us indeed.

This flies in the face of popular perception, so I decided to use myself as a nutritional and medical guinea pig. A lot of fine and expensive foods are made using Es as preservatives, including the best wines (E220 - sulphur dioxide) and the finest hams (E252 - potassium nitrate).

But posh nosh isn't synonymous with additives in the way convenience food is.

So I stocked up on fizzy drinks, ready meals, sweets, frozen pizzas, crisps, battered onion rings, hot dogs (in bread rolls, ready to zap), packet soups and instant noodles for my e-binge. I also laid in a fair amount of salami and ham, partly because of the preservatives E250 and E252, and partly because if I'm poisoning myself, I might as well eat something I love.

The sweets contained a rainbow of colours, the pizzas a hodgepodge of emulsifiers, stabilisers and preservatives, and the crisps boasted a gallimaufry of flavour enhancers. And the instant soup? A melange of pretty much every E number under the sun.

Are these actually bad for you? Words like "preservative", "emulsifier" and "stabiliser" sound bizarre and scary for something you put in your mouth. But lemon juice is an antioxidant preservative, also known as E330 (citric acid), egg yolk is emulsifier E322 (lecithin) when added to oil to make mayonnaise, and stabilisers include E460, or cellulose, which comes straight from plants.

And the E numbered nitrate and nitrite preservatives in bacon, ham and sausages, linked to bowel cancer by the World Cancer Research Fund? Removing these would increase the risk of food poisoning caused by botulism, a virulent pathogen all but eradicated from our food, not least because a natural version - saltpetre - has been used for centuries.

Jelly to start the day

Then started the eating of the Es. My kids kindly made me some very colourful jellies for breakfast, then poured me a vast bucket of cereals, which contained vitamins such as E101 (vitamin B2) and E170 (calcium carbonate), a nutritional calcium supplement.

I washed this down with a yoghurt drink containing E410 - locust bean gum, added for dietary fibre - and snacked on a steady intake of Wotsits and Monster Munch - both shaped corn snacks - Pringles and prawn cocktail crisps.

By 10am I'd eaten enough for a whole day and felt bilious and shameful - but undeterred. At lunch I downed several frozen pizzas, then veered dangerously from Pot Noodle to UHT squirty cream. I then ate a few chocolate bars.

In the evening I was reduced to liquidising food in a blender to get it down. I necked chicken poppets mixed with battered onion rings, and dessert was a smoothie of cheesecake, chocolate milkshake and crisps - a surprising tasty combo.

By the end of the day I felt like a balloon of slurry on the verge of bursting. I'd eaten 50 different E numbers, but have I eaten enough to poison myself?

No, said my GP, Dr Jonty Heaversedge, who explained that the basic toxicology principle for safe consumption was a 100-fold safety margin.

Scientists work out how much of any E number an animal can eat on a daily basis before having any ill effects, divide that by 10 (in case humans are more sensitive than animals) and then divide by 10 again, just to be safe.

Many Es are so safe there is no acceptable daily intake (ADI) level - this is the case for 32 of my 50 Es. Others have strict ADIs, although these limits aren't indicated on food packaging. Of E202, the preservative potassium sorbate, for instance, you can eat up to 25mg for each kg of your body weight.

Despite my greed, I only reached 50% of my ADI on two out of all the Es I have eaten - annatto, or E160b, a natural yellow dye used in foods such as cheesy crisps, fish fingers and pastry, and E250, sodium nitrite, a cured meat preservative. On the latter, I was way over - up to 704% of the acceptable daily intake if all the ham, bacon and salami I'd eaten contained the maximum possible levels.

So, had I overdosed? Yes, but not on E numbers.

Dr Heaversedge wasn't worried about my E consumption, not even sodium nitrite (remember that 100-fold safety margin). What he was horrified by was the fact I'd eaten 418% of my recommended daily allowance of fat, 500% of my salt RDA and 218% of my sugar RDA. So the biggest nutritional culprits in my binge came in purely organic form and had no E numbers.

Our fear of additives can be dangerous - it belies the much bigger nutritional implications of unbalanced diets, food poisoning, physical inactivity and dietary disorders. You shouldn't eat too many E numbers, but then you shouldn't eat too much of anything - remember, there's cyanide in apples, but they're still good for you.

I heard this story on the radio this morning. Again from the BBC:

MI5 suspected Bond screenwriter was communist agent

The man who wrote the screenplay for a James Bond film was himself suspected of being a communist agent, newly released Security Service files show.

The MI5 file on Wolf Mankowitz, a "convinced Marxist," shows he was monitored for more than a decade.

Mr Mankowitz wrote the screenplay for the unofficial Bond film Casino Royale in 1967 and was also involved in the film Dr No.

The files are available at the National Archives in Kew.

Mr Mankowitz, who died in 1998, introduced film producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman to each other.

He was subsequently involved in writing the script for their first Bond film together, Dr No.

Born in London's East End, Mr Mankowitz attended Cambridge University where he joined the University's Socialist Society and met his wife Ann, a Communist Party member.

'Highly strung'

MI5 first became interested in Mr Mankowitz in 1944, when the couple were living in Newcastle.

A letter mentioning the pair from suspected communist David Holbrook was intercepted by MI5, prompting the agency to ask Newcastle police to investigate them.

Mr Holbrook wrote that the couple were "avoiding National Service and doing themselves well" earning £6 a week lecturing for the left-wing Workers' Educational Association.

Reporting back to MI5, Newcastle police said Mr Mankowitz "is known to frequently discuss the theories of Marxism with his friends whilst in lodgings".

Despite surveillance by the authorities, Mr Mankowitz was able to enlist with the Territorial Army.

His commanding officer described him as a "highly strung individual of nervous temperament" who was awaiting an interview with a psychiatrist.

But he doubted he was a subversive influence.

"Even if he possesses communist views I do not think he has the personality or strength of character to pass them on to his fellow soldiers," the officer wrote.

"There is no evidence that he has attempted to air these views whilst with this unit," he added.

Surveillance

In 1948 Mr Mankowitz applied for a job with the Government Central Office of Information but was blocked from joining the organisation.

In a letter, MI5 told the COI he was "known to be the husband of a Communist Party member and himself a convinced Marxist".

In 1951, Mr Mankowitz was commissioned by the BBC to translate the Chekhov play The Bear. MI5 warned the corporation of Mr Mankowitz's communist past but suggested his working on the translation did not pose a threat.

Mr Mankowitz was still of interest to the security agency into the mid-1950s, particularly after he visited Moscow in 1956 as a guest of the Soviet Union.

He visited the World Youth Fair in Moscow during a 10-day visit and announced to the press on his return his ambition to set up a "British Soviet co-film production".

But interest in Mr Mankowitz tailed off after he cancelled a follow-up visit to Moscow, choosing to go to the West Indies instead on film location.

Another story from the BBC. What surprises me that Marie Curie doesn't get a mention in the article. Just a brief extract from Wikipedia on her:
Her achievements include the creation of a theory of radioactivity (a term she coined), techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and the discovery of two new elements, polonium and radium. Under her direction, the world's first studies were conducted into the treatment of neoplasms (cancers) using radioactive isotopes
Hence the connection to the famous cancer charity.

Famous female scientists are unknown to UK public

Two-thirds of the British public are unable to name a single famous female scientist, according to an ICM poll.

The same survey, organised by the Royal Society, revealed that 90% of 18-24 year-olds could not name a female scientific figure - either current or historical.

Almost half were able to name at least one famous male scientist, such as Albert Einstein.

The Royal Society's Lorna Casselton described the results as "frustrating".

But the same poll also indicated that parents see scientists as good role models for their daughters.

Scientist or pop star?

Respondents were offered a choice of six "role model types" for a daughter - ranging from a doctor or lawyer to an athlete or pop star.

Almost half of the 1,000 adults questioned chose "life-saving doctor", while "Nobel prize-winning scientist" came second, with 20% selecting it as their first choice.

According to the findings, public knowledge of the role played by women in major scientific breakthroughs is also low.

Just 6% of those polled knew that a female scientist (Jocelyn Bell Burnell) played a major part in the discovery of pulsar stars. Only 18% were aware that another woman, Dorothy Hodgkin, discovered the structure of insulin.

Professor Casselton, who is vice-president of the Royal Society, said: "People are still unaware of the contribution made by women to science in the past, [but] overall I am encouraged by the findings of this poll.

"They suggest public perceptions of women in science are changing. [We] want to encourage more girls (and their parents) to see science as an achievable and desirable career path.

"Most importantly we want to encourage them to see science not only as a fulfilling career but one that can change the world and contribute to our quality of life."

A very brief localish story from the BBC. I wonder if the swan had read the signposts and had got confused - "No - Hanley Swan is 20 miles south of here, you silly swan"

A man suffered a broken collarbone when he was struck by a low-flying swan and knocked off his motorbike in Worcestershire.

The incident happened in Crossway Green, in Stourport-on-Severn, shortly after 1145 BST, yesterday

West Midlands Ambulance Service said it treated the motorcyclist for his injuries at the scene.

He was then taken to hospital for further assessment and treatment, an ambulance service spokeswoman said.

Another item from the BBC I heard on the news this morning:

Wheat genome may help tackle food shortages

By Katia Moskvitch Science reporter, BBC News

UK scientists have released draft sequences of the wheat genome, which they think could make a vital contribution to securing global food supplies.

The researchers also say their efforts could help British farmers to develop new strains with greater yields.

Global wheat production has been under threat in recent years from increasing demand and climate change.

Wheat is regarded as one of the most important crops for human consumption.

The results of the study, led by Neil Hall from the University of Liverpool, are available for public use.

They are meant to enable other scientists and breeders worldwide to "analyse the sequence and use it in a new breeding method called macro-assisted selection that could dramatically increase the speed and efficiency of plant breeding," said Mike Bevan, the director of the John Innes centre, who took part in the research.

"This is very important these days because we could be racing against the clock of decreasing food security," he added.

Wheat shortages 'possible'

Recently, Russia, one of the biggest producers of wheat, banned all export of wheat after severe drought and wildfires charred crops around the country.

The move raised worldwide concerns about possible wheat shortages and has sent wheat prices soaring.

Major floods in Pakistan and mudslides in China made wheat prices spike even further. Canada and several other countries also expect their wheat harvest to be much lower than last year due to weather conditions.

Wheat, with an estimated world harvest of more than 550 million tonnes, is considered one of major staple foods in European agriculture, as well as in India, China and Africa.

But breeders often do not know how to select traits for a healthy yield. Scientists say the recent genome sequencing will give them the tools needed to do just that.

Wheat physiologist Matthew Reynolds from a non-profit research organisation CIMMYT (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center), said that sequencing the wheat genome was a way to develop more productive, resource-efficient varieties of this crop.

"Such varieties are crucial to meet increased demand from growing and more prosperous populations, confront the challenges of climate change and looming scarcities of land, water, and fertiliser, and avoid global food shortages and price spikes that particularly harm the poor," he told BBC News.

"Sequencing the wheat genome could help identify and manipulate specific genes for useful traits, such as tolerance to drought, resistance to crop diseases, or better grain quality... we can expect that improved crop management will be at least 50% of the solution."

'Very complex'

The wheat genome is five times larger than the human genome and is known to be a very complex structure, comprised of three independent genomes.

Sequencing it was a significant challenge to scientists, said Professor Bevan.

He added that rice and maize genomes that were decoded in the past were much smaller.

The researcher explained that the decoding was done with help of advanced sequencing technology developed by the company 454 Life Sciences.

Professor Hall said that this "next generation" technology allowed scientists to decode the wheat genome a lot faster than was the case with the human genome several years ago.

"Sequencing the human genome took 15 years to complete, but with huge advances in DNA technology, the wheat genome took only a year," he explained.

"We are now working to analyse the sequence to highlight natural genetic variation between wheat types, which will help significantly speed up current breeding programmes [and help tackle] the problem of global food shortage."

Some stories from the BBC scream out to me saying please post me, please post me. Such as this one:

Plants send SOS signal to insects

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC News

Plants can summon insects to their aid to avoid being munched to death by caterpillars, scientists have found.

Leafy tobacco plants have evolved a "chemical SOS" that attracts predatory insects that eat the attackers.

In the journal Science, researchers revealed that the caterpillars' saliva activates this signal.

The modified signal causes Geocoris insects, which feed on the caterpillar larvae and eggs, to swoop in - rescuing the plant and gaining a meal.

The work was carried out by Silke Allmann of the Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Ian Baldwin of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Germany.

They discovered that when the plants were attacked by tobacco hornworm caterpillars, Manduca sexta, the caterpillar saliva caused a chemical change in "green leaf volatiles" - pungent chemicals that the plants produce. The familiar smell of cut grass is generated by green leaf volatiles (GLVs).

The scientists studied the effect further by setting up a fake plant attack.

They glued caterpillar eggs onto two groups of tobacco plants, using cotton swabs to coat the eggs on one group of plants with the plant's own GLVs. The eggs on the other plants were treated with GLV mixed with caterpillar spit.

The plants "perfumed" with the plant chemical alone had only 8% of their eggs attacked, whereas plants perfumed with the plant and caterpillar-derived chemical mixture chemical lost almost a quarter of their eggs.

All of these missing eggs had been eaten by the Geocoris bugs, which were attracted by the chemicals.

The modified chemical seems to "betray the location of the feeding caterpillar", the researchers concluded in their paper.

"Why the larvae would produce such an apparently [disadvantageous chemical] in their saliva remains to be determined."

More from the BBC:

Scheme to 'pull electricity from the air' sparks debate

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Tiny charges gathered directly from humid air could be harnessed to generate electricity, researchers say.

Dr Fernando Galembeck told the American Chemical Society meeting in Boston that the technique exploited a little-known atmospheric effect.

Tests had shown that metals could be used to gather the charges, he said, opening up a potential energy source in humid climates.

However, experts disagree about the mechanism and the scale of the effect.

"The basic idea is that when you have any solid or liquid in a humid environment, you have absorption of water at the surface," Dr Galembeck, from the University of Campinas in Brazil, told BBC News.

"The work I'm presenting here shows that metals placed under a wet environment actually become charged."

Dr Galembeck and his colleagues isolated various metals and pairs of metals separated by a non-conducting separator - a capacitor, in effect - and allowed nitrogen gas with varying amounts of water vapour to pass over them.

What the team found was that charge built up on the metals - in varying amounts, and either positive or negative. Such charge could be connected to a circuit periodically to create useful electricity.

The effect is incredibly small - gathering an amount of charge 100 million times smaller over a given area than a solar cell produces - but seems to represent a means of charge accumulation that has been overlooked until now.

Dr Galembeck suggests that with further development, the principle could be extended to become a renewable energy resource in humid parts of the world, such as the tropics.

Charged debate

However, while the prospect of free electricity from the air is tantalising, the prospect of harnessing enough of it to be widely useful is still a matter of some debate.

Hywel Morgan of the University of Southampton says that a similar effect has been known for some time; he points out that tribocharging - the generation of charge by rubbing wool over amber or water droplets over water droplets - is the origin of thunderstorms.

"What we think is happening is he's pumping the water vapour across his capacitor and during the pumping mechanism, tribocharging the water vapour."

That would result in a charge, but would not be the same as simply pulling the charge from still, wet air.

Marin Soljacic, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist behind a wireless power transmission technology, known as Witricity, disagrees.

He calls the paper "very interesting" and "a good area of research".

He concurs, however, that the amount of charge gathered in the initial tests suggests the effect may be difficult to put to good use, saying that "at this point it is far-fetched to see how it could be used for everyday applications".

"It really warrants future research and understanding what all the limitations of this are, how far it can go," he told BBC News.

"[Prof Morgan] is right that a similar and closely-related effect is known to exist, but we're very pressed for finding new sources of renewable energy, [so] I think it's a bit early to discard this research."

Dr Galembeck is familiar with the controversy that this kind of work generates, saying that disagreement about the mechanism behind it forms "the motif for bitter discussions among scientists".

"There have been many attempts to harness electricity from the atmosphere and most had bad endings."

Where was Bruce Willis when the dinosaurs needed him? Another story from the BBC:

Double meteorite strike 'caused dinosaur extinction'

By Howard Falcon-Lang Science reporter, BBC News

The dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago by at least two meteorite impacts, rather than a single strike, a new study suggests.

Previously, scientists had identified a huge impact crater in the Gulf of Mexico as the event that spelled doom for the dinosaurs.

Now evidence for a second impact in the Ukraine has been uncovered.

This raises the possibility that the Earth may have been bombarded by a whole shower of meteorites.

The new findings are published in the journal Geology by a team lead by Professor David Jolley of Aberdeen University.

When first proposed in 1980, the idea that a meteorite impact had killed the dinosaurs proved hugely controversial. Later, the discovery of the Chicxulub Crater in the Gulf of Mexico, US, was hailed as "the smoking gun" that confirmed the theory.

Double trouble

The discovery of a second impact crater suggests that the dinosaurs were driven to extinction by a "double whammy" rather than a single strike.

The Boltysh Crater in the Ukraine was first reported in 2002. However, until now it was uncertain exactly how the timing of this event related to the Chicxulub impact.

In the current study, scientists examined the "pollen and spores" of fossil plants in the layers of mud that infilled the crater. They found that immediately after the impact, ferns quickly colonised the devastated landscape.

Ferns have an amazing ability to bounce back after catastrophe. Layers full of fern spores - dubbed "fern spikes" - are considered to be a good "markers" of past impact events.

However, there was an unexpected discovery in store for the scientists.

They located a second "fern spike" in a layer one metre above the first, suggesting another later impact event.

Professor Simon Kelley of the Open University, who was co-author on the study, said "We interpret this second layer as the aftermath of the Chicxulub impact".

This shows that the Boltysh and Chicxulub impacts did not happen at exactly the same time. They struck several thousand years apart, the length of time between the two "fern spikes".

Uncertain cause

Professor Kelley continued: "It is quite possible that in the future we will find evidence for more impact events".

Rather than being wiped out by a single hit, the researchers think that dinosaurs may have fallen victim to a meteorite shower raining down over thousands of years.

What might have caused this bombardment is highly uncertain.

Professor Monica Grady, a meteorite expert at the Open University who was not involved in the current study, said "One possibility might be the collison of Near Earth Objects".

Recently, Nasa launched a program dubbed "Spaceguard". It aims to monitor such Near Earth Objects as an early warning system of possible future collisons.

A story about one on the more remote parts of this country from the BBC:

The new residents of St Kilda archipelago

By Steven McKenzie BBC Scotland Highlands and Islands reporter

Eighty years after it was evacuated, St Kilda is a temporary home to as many people as there were on the islands at the time they were abandoned.

The last 36 St Kildans left on 29 August 1930 because life had become too difficult on the remote archipelago.

But summer can see as many as 35 people living on the main island of Hirta.

They are a mix of staff from owners National Trust for Scotland (NTS), Ministry of Defence workers, volunteers and scientists.

Their occupations would have been alien to the weavers and crofters who once lived in one of the remotest corners of the British isles.

St Kilda is managed by NTS, but defence staff and employees from defence contractor QinetiQ also work at the test rocket tracking station.

Over the winter, the military station has about 10 staff, each living on the islands for a month at a time. Trust employees leave the islands for the winter.

With its sheer cliffs and monster tooth-like sea stacs, the group of islands have been described as a "lost world" and could easily have made a fitting backdrop to Steven Spielberg's film Jurassic Park.

Loom spinners

But for short periods of time it is called home by its new residents.

A spokeswoman for NTS said: "The numbers of people staying on St Kilda can change from day to day.

"Over the summer it can go up to 30 to 35 people and they are made up of National Trust for Scotland staff, contractors, researchers and volunteers in trust work parties."

Last Thursday, there were 22 people on St Kilda but two were due to leave by the end of Friday.

Recent census have recorded people on the archipelago.

Nine were recorded in 1981, but none in 1991 or 2001, highlighting the temporary nature of its population today.

Papers from the 1901 records lists dozens of people, families with members aged from seven to 76 and occupations such as hand loom spinners of wool and grounds officer and crofter.

People had lived on St Kilda, the westernmost islands of the Outer Hebrides, since prehistoric times.

But life there was constantly challenged by the weather, disease and later a growing dependency on links with mainland Britain.

Smallpox ravaged Hirta in the 1720s and killed almost 200 St Kildans.

One adult and 18 children survived along with three men and eight boys who had been stranded on a sea stac for nine months after a boat failed to collect them following a seabird, or guga, hunt.

Landlord MacLeod of Dunvegan moved tenants from Skye and Harris to the archipelago in an effort to repopulate it.

Survivors quarantined

However, descendants of these new St Kildans were on the move themselves.

In the 1850s, 42 of the islanders emigrated to Australia, half of them dying on the way.

Eric Richards, professor of history at Flinders University in Adelaide, believes the deaths and the survivors' first experiences of Australia deterred potential emigrants.

The survivors were quarantined on arrival in Port Phillip and were also treated less well because they spoke Gaelic and not English.

Prof Richards said the tales of woe was a factor in ending large-scale emigration from the Highlands.

The 19th Century also saw tourists visiting the islands and an effort to improve life for the islanders.

One of the so-called improvements was 16 new houses that were built in the village in 1860.

These new houses were cold and it was necessary to import coal from the mainland, the supplies of peat not being enough to heat them.

Neither could they be repaired with local materials.

During World War I a Royal Navy detachment to Hirta meant regular deliveries of mail and food for sailors and the islands' residents.

However, the end of the war and withdrawal of the unit reinforced a feeling of isolation among the community.

The winter of 1929 was so hard some inhabitants died.

The remaining 36 islanders wrote to the government asking to be taken off and start a new life on the mainland. Hirta was abandoned the following year.

But today, St Kilda is far from being deserted islands.

 

And as a bonus, here is a short film about St Kilda

 

Another story from the BBC - this time about the Slavonian grebe:

Hope for insights into Slavonian grebe

New research is to be done into the behaviour of one of the UK's rarest birds.

Breeding pairs of Slavonian grebe can only be found in northern Scotland, according to RSPB Scotland.

The number of pairs has fallen to 22 - the lowest level since monitoring records began.

But this year has been one of the best breeding seasons with 17 chicks - six at Loch Ruthven where there were no young in the previous two years.

What made 2010 a good year for the birds remains unclear, but RSPB Scotland suspect a drier and less windy spring may have helped.

Stormy conditions can damage nest sites.

Stuart Benn, RSPB Scotland's conservation officer for the south Highlands, said there was much to learn about the birds' behaviour.

He said: "What is clear is that while populations are thriving in Iceland and Norway, things aren't going so well here.

"It would be good to find out why that is and what things we, as conservationists, could be doing to turn around the fortunes of Scotland's Slavonian grebe population.

"To do this we'll need to focus our research on key areas such as the role of weather and climate, when and why chicks die and compare our results with other countries whose populations are faring well."

Rafts are also to be built and placed on lochs to provide the grebe with potential nest sites.

 

And a clip of one of them:

A major report on climate change is due out today. This BBC article sets out the background, but is published before the report is issued:

UN climate change panel to face Himalaya error verdict

An international committee reviewing the "processes and procedures" of the UN's climate science panel is set to report on Monday.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has faced mounting pressure over errors in its last major assessment of climate science in 2007.

The review was overseen by the Inter-Academy Council, which brings together bodies such as the UK's Royal Society.

The findings are to be unveiled at a news conference in New York.

The IPCC has admitted it made a mistake in its 2007 climate assessment in asserting that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.

But officials at the UN organisation said this error did not change the broad picture of man-made climate change.

In February, the IPCC suggested setting up an independent review, feeling that its 20-year-old rules and working practices perhaps needed an overhaul.

There was also a sense the UN body may have been ill-equipped to handle the unprecedented attention in the wake of "Himalayagate" and the release of e-mails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and the the University of East Anglia, in the UK.

Governments endorsed the idea, and in March UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon commissioned the review from the Inter-Academy Council (IAC), an international umbrella body for science academies.

The council established a a 12-member review panel, chaired by US economist Professor Harold Shapiro, a former adviser to two former US presidents, George H W Bush and Bill Clinton.

'Grey literature'

The IAC will deliver its report to Mr Ban and to IPCC chair Dr Rajendra Pachauri in New York on Monday. A source told BBC News that no advance copies of the report had been shown to UN officials.

The review will not address the state of knowledge in climate science, but will instead review processes at the UN body, including the use of non-peer reviewed sources, and quality control on data.

 

The use by the IPCC of so-called "grey literature" - that which has not been peer-reviewed or published in scientific journals - has been subjected to particular scrutiny, partly because this type of material was behind the glacier error.

A conflict of interest charge has also been levelled at Dr Pachauri over his business interests.

Speaking at the review's opening session, held in Amsterdam in May, Dr Pachauri admitted his organisation had been ill-prepared and ill-resourced to deal with the recent criticism it has received.

"We have to listen and learn all the time and evolve in a manner that meets the needs of society across the world," he told the review panel.

Critics have previously called on Dr Pachauri to resign, a step the IPCC chair has said he has no intention of making.

Referring to the Himalayas error at an IAC session in Montreal in June, former IPCC chair Professor Robert Watson told the committee: "To me the fundamental problem was that when the error was found it was handled in a totally and utterly atrocious manner."

He added: "The IPCC needs to find a mechanism so that if something needs to be corrected there is a rapid way to get a correction made."

The IAC was established in 2000 to assist in providing evidence-based advice to international bodies such as the United Nations and World Bank.

And the BBC article on the report now published (this is a different article to the above though it uses the same photos):

UN climate body 'needs reforms', review recommends

By Paul Rincon Science reporter, BBC News

The UN's climate science body needs "fundamental" reforms, including a shorter term for its chairperson, an international review has concluded.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has faced mounting pressure over errors in its last major assessment of climate science in 2007.

The review commends the IPCC on the way it carried out previous assessments.

But the report recommends changes to the way the body is run and the way science is presented.

Critics have previously called on the UN panel's chair, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, to resign. Responding to the report at a news conference in New York, Dr Pachauri said he wanted to stay to implement changes at the organisation.

The IPCC has admitted it made a mistake in its 2007 climate assessment in asserting that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. But officials at the UN organisation said this error did not change the broad picture of man-made climate change.

In the past year, unprecendented scrutiny has been levelled at climate science and political negotiations aimed at combating climate change such as the recent Copenhagen summit, where world leaders failed to reach a global agreement.

The IPCC's reports are designed to provide a detailed assessment of the state of climate science; they are read by policy-makers around the world and inform political talks.

In February, the UN panel suggested setting up an independent review, feeling that its 20-year-old rules and working practices perhaps needed an overhaul. It was overseen by the Inter-Academy Council (IAC), an international umbrella body for science academies.

There was also a sense the UN body may have been ill-equipped to handle the unprecedented attention in the wake of "Himalayagate" and the release of e-mails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and the the University of East Anglia, in the UK.

The e-mails issue came to light in November last year, when hundreds of messages between CRU scientists and their peers around the world were posted on the internet, along with other documents.

Critics said the e-mail exchanges revealed an attempt by the researchers to manipulate data and three independent reviews were initiated into the affair.

Public scrutiny

This review of the IPCC's was officially at a news conference in New York on Monday. Among the IAC committee's recommendations was that the UN body appoint an executive director to handle day-to-day operations and speak on behalf of the body.

It also said the current limit of two six-year terms for the chair of the organisation is too long.

The report says that the post of IPCC chair and that of the executive director should be limited to the term of one climate science assessment.

Asked if he would consider resigning if requested to, the current chair Dr Pachauri told reporters he would abide by any decision the IPCC made. Dr Pachauri became head of the organisation in 2002 and was re-elected for his second term in 2008.

Speaking at news conference in New York, Harold Shapiro, who chaired the IAC committee's review, said: "Overall, in our judgment, the IPCC's assessment process has been a success and has served society well."

But he said fundamental changes would help the IPCC continue success under a "public microscope". Dr Shapiro also conceded that the controversy over errors in climate science assessments had dented the credibility of the process.

'Slow' response

The report also suggests the UN body establish an executive committee which should include individuals from outside the IPCC or even outside the climate science community in order to enhance the UN panel's credibility and independence.

The review did not address the state of knowledge in climate science, but instead concentrated on review processes at the UN body, including the use of non-peer reviewed sources, and quality control on data.

The review committee said the processes used by the UN panel to review material in its climate assessment reports were thorough.

But the IAC said that the IPCC's response to revelations of errors in its 2007 assessment had been "slow and inadequate", adding that procedures needed stronger enforcement to minimise the number of errors.

The review also called for more consistency in how the IPCC's different working groups characterised uncertainties in climate science.

The report says that each working group used a different variation of the IPCC's uncertainty guidelines and the committee found that the guidance was not always followed.

The use by the IPCC of so-called "grey literature" - that which has not been peer-reviewed or published in scientific journals - has been subjected to particular scrutiny of late, partly because this type of material was behind the glacier error.

The committee said that such literature was often relevant and appropriate for inclusion in the IPCC's assessment reports. But it said authors needed to follow the IPCC's guidelines more closely and that the guidelines themselves are too vague.

The report's recommendations are likely to be considered at the IPCC's next plenary meeting in Busan, South Korea, from 11-14 October.

 

Crunch time for the apple (more from the BBC):

Apple DNA code is cracked by geneticists

A team of 86 global scientists have sequenced the genetic code of the Golden Delicious apple for the first time.

The DNA breakthrough could result in new and improved apple varieties which are more resistant to disease.

Scientists from 20 institutions took two years to unravel the code - the largest plant genome uncovered to date.

The findings are published in the leading journal Nature Genetics.

'Competitive advantage'

Professor Riccardo Velasco at the Edmund Mach Foundation in Italy, who led the research team, said that sequencing the genome "would have huge implications for applied breeding".

"This breakthrough will help us to develop high quality traits and bring new things to the apple market," he told BBC News.

Kate Evans from Washington State University's Tree Fruit Research and Extension Centre said the discovery would help the "long-term sustainable production" of apples.

Scientists hope improvements to the popular Golden Delicious variety - which originated in West Virginia, US, more than a century ago - could enhance the taste, look, and crunchiness of the fruit.

The researchers were also able to trace the apple's ancestry, and found the domestic fruit's wild ancestor Malus sieversii originally grew in the mountains of southern Kazakhstan. There are more than 7,500 varieties of apple known today.

The researchers also discovered that the huge size of the apple genome originated when it got accidentally duplicated far back in its evolutionary history.

A large number of genes can give plants a competitive advantage, providing more in-built defences against disease.

The whole concept of the IPCC is fatally flawed!
It was set-up to prove that humans are causing climate change through global warming and has endeavored to do just that!
So it has collected all the theories together that try to prove the positive and published them. Everything they have collected has equally plausible counter theorems and sometime more plausible  which are over looked in the whitewash.
They say they look at all the science and they probably do, but all they are interested in is proving their positive. And the sheer size of the disciplines make it almost impossible to falsify without a body of similar size and resources, an anti-iPCC, to come up with  an opposite overall hypothosis of I'd guess, equal plausibility.....leaving only minor points of contention ...<models>

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