This is a digest of the stories posted to NewScientist.com from 6pm yesterday until 6pm today.
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This is a digest of the stories posted to NewScientist.com from 6pm yesterday until 6pm today.
Jessica Griggs, careers editor
Have cloned meat and dairy products found their way onto the shelves of shops in Europe? Yes, if you believe the Swiss government and the claims of an unnamed British dairy farmer who told The New York Times that he is selling milk from a cow bred from a clone.
This is a digest of the stories posted to NewScientist.com from 6pm yesterday until 6pm today.
Michael Marshall, environment reporter
Today the World Heritage Committee decided to take the Galapagos Islands off its Danger List, as the risks to their remarkable fauna have apparently been mitigated. And in other news, mice have nothing to fear from cats.
The list is made up of 30 sites around the world, all of them designated World Heritage Sites because of their ecological or cultural importance, that are thought to be in danger. So if the Galapagos are now off the list, does that mean that the islands, with their unique animal life, are now safe?
Not if the official statement from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is anything to go by.
Michael Marshall, environment reporter
Ocean life is being wiped out from the bottom up. The global population of microscopic plants that float in ocean water and support most marine life has declined by 1 per cent every year since 1899.
That's the conclusion of a new study of the microorganisms, published in Nature. The annual falls translate to a 40 per cent drop in phytoplankton since 1950.
Boris Worm and his colleagues at Dalhousie University in Canada also noted that the declines had accelerated since 1950. They were correlated with rising sea surface temperatures, suggesting that climate change may be at least partly to blame.
David Shiga, reporter
A pair of Earth-orbiting satellites designed to study the auroras are making a detour to visit the moon.
The two spacecraft are part of a fleet of five launched into Earth orbit by NASA in 2007 on a mission called THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms). They have been studying the space storms that trigger the northern and southern lights, or auroras, on Earth.
But two of the satellites were set to go on death row earlier this year. If they had been left in their original orbits, the solar-powered craft would have made lengthy passages through Earth's shadow in March 2010, fatally draining their batteries, according to a Discovery News story.
To avoid this and to squeeze some more science out of the two spacecraft, the THEMIS team decided to send them farther from Earth and park them in orbit around the moon.
But there was a problem. Getting into orbit around the moon takes a lot of energy, and the two spacecraft simply didn't have enough fuel to get the job done. So the team devised a clever, roundabout way to get there on a shoestring.
"We realized that if we had enough fuel to change their orbits, the moon's gravity would start pulling them up," the mission's chief scientist Vassilis Angelopoulos of the University of California, Berkeley, told Discovery News.
The spacecraft were already in elongated orbits that passed close to Earth at one end and looped far into space at the other end. Starting in 2009, the spacecraft used their thrusters to extend the far end of their orbits, setting them up for close encounters with the moon.
The gravitational slingshot effect from these lunar encounters, as well as the probes' close passes near Earth, changed their trajectories drastically – you can see the technical details here (pdf). Their own thrusters should be able to do the rest of the job, putting them in orbit around the moon in 2011. There, they will measure tenuous gas surrounding the moon, called the exosphere, and record the interaction of the solar wind with the moon.
Not bad for two spacecraft that would have been space junk by now without this creative rescue plan.
Rachel Courtland, reporter
Nature - and the news media, it seems - abhors a vacuum. That could explain the recent uproar over a talk by Dimitar Sasselov, a member of the planet-hunting Kepler space telescope's science team.
Kepler launched in March 2009 and has been hard at work staring at the same patch of sky in search of characteristic dips in starlight that would signal a passing planet. Progress has been fairly quick. Not long after reaching orbit, the telescope team released the vital stats on five confirmed planets and announced it had found 706 stars that seem to have planet potential.
But NASA has allowed data on 400 of these stars, which include the brightest and easiest to study, to be held back from public release until February 2011. This secrecy has frustrated some astronomers and fuelled a hunger for news of more planets, particularly Earth-like ones.
Enter Sasselov, who presented a talk at a TEDGlobal conference in Oxford on 16 July (you can watch the video here). In his presentation, Sasselov presents a chart (shown above) that suggests Kepler has found about 140 "Earth-like" candidates smaller than two times the radius of the Earth.
This is a digest of the stories posted to NewScientist.com from 6pm yesterday until 6pm today.
Gareth Morgan, technology editor
Another day, another envelope-pushing design from Apple intended to make us rethink the way we interact with our computers. Welcome to the Magic Trackpad.
In terms of radical design, there's only so much you can say about a flat board. And this is more out-of-the-laptop than out-of-the-box thinking. MacBook users will be instantly familiar with Apple's "new" input device
But the real significance is that it really does lend some weight to the oft-predicted death of the mouse. Apple has, after all, since its early days been one of the computer pioneers of the graphical user interface that depend on the mouse. It has point-and-click baked into its computing DNA - even if not everyone found its one-button mouse intuitive to use.
Sujata Gupta, reporter
Another oil leak, unrelated to the Deepwater Horizon blowout, hit Louisiana's coastal waters yesterday when a dredge barge being towed by a tugboat hit a shallow well. Photos show oil gushing more than 6 metres into the air.
The accident occurred some about a 100 kilometres south of New Orleans in the already hard-hit Barataria bay. Deepwater clean-up vessels were dispatched to the site and responders laid out some 1800 metres of boom to contain the spill.
It's not clear how much oil actually spilled into the Gulf of Mexico, but unlike its big brother out to sea this spill appears to have petered out by midday.
On the bright side, said Thad Allen, the retired coastguard admiral tasked with coordinating the government's response to the Deepwater spill, everybody was ready for action when the spill occurred. "One of the positive things, I suppose, about having this response going on is we have a significant amount of resources...
It all makes one wonder just how many little leaks - both natural and unnatural - regularly go unnoticed. Just over a week ago, Allen had to explain that leaks appearing 5 kilometres from the Deepwater well head were also unrelated to the blowout.
This is a digest of the stories posted to NewScientist.com from 6pm yesterday until 6pm today.
Gareth Morgan, technology editor
It's like something out of a Templar's mystical ritual: seven key holders are each assigned to guard a part of a key, and in times of great crisis, five of them must come together for the key's power to be unleashed and save the day. But this is no fantasy tale; it's the latest attempt to safeguard the internet.
The plan was drawn up by the internet domain name watchdog ICANN as a means to protect the internet in the event of a major attack on its infrastructure. The complete key can be used to reboot the systems at the heart of the internet which direct users to the genuine websites.
Maggie McKee, physical sciences news editor
Chalk one up for the graybeards. The oldest spacecraft now operating around Mars has produced the best ever map of the Red Planet (if the map does not load, heavy traffic may have temporarily crashed the site).
NASA's Mars Odyssey reached the planet in 2001 and researchers have now stitched together 21,000 of its images into a global map. When seen as a whole, the gray-scale map isn't much to look at, but its power snaps into focus when viewers zoom in on particular features, whose details can be seen at scales as small as 100 metres across - see a 140-km-wide image of Mars's "Grand Canyon" below. (Cameras such as HiRISE on the newer Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can spot things about 1 metre wide, but have covered only small portions of the planet.)
"The map lays the framework for global studies of properties such as the mineral composition and physical nature of the surface materials," says Odyssey scientist Jeffrey Plaut of JPL in a statement.
The new map was released just days after NASA announced that Odyssey had gone into 'standby' mode on 14 July after an electronic component responsible for moving its solar array suffered a glitch. The probe switched to a backup component and returned to work on Friday, but it was not the first sign of trouble for the ageing spacecraft, which was temporarily sidelined due to memory problems in late 2009. If the craft can hang on for another five months or so, it will smash the longevity record for a Martian spacecraft, set by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor. That probe orbited the Red Planet for a little over nine years, from September 1997 until November 2006.
(Valles Marineris canyon system image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Arizona State University)
This is a digest of the stories posted to NewScientist.com from 6pm on Friday until 6pm today.
This is a digest of the stories posted to NewScientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today.
David Shiga, reporter
Chemists have been fascinated by the tiny balls of carbon known as buckyballs since they were first made in the laboratory in 1985.
But apparently nature knows how to make them, too – and in great abundance.
Previous studies of the debris around impact craters on Earth have suggested that buckyballs might be found in space, and spectral observations of star light have hinted that they may even nest together like Russian dolls, but their existence beyond Earth has never been confirmed.
Now, a team of astronomers has found that in the dusty environment around a white dwarf star lying about 6500 light years from Earth, a few per cent of the carbon is in the form of buckyballs.
The astronomers used the Spitzer Space Telescope to detect the distinctive infrared spectrum of buckyballs made of 60 and 70 carbon atoms in a dusty nebula around the white dwarf.
The team suspects that abundant carbon and a lack of hydrogen in the nebula created just the right environment to give rise to buckyballs. When hydrogen is present, it combines with carbon, preventing the pure-carbon spheres from forming.
The molecules are about three times larger than water molecules at about 1 nanometre across, reports Space.com:
Michael Le Page, biology features editor
"Snow chaos: and still they claim it's global warming." "Snowmageddon delivers another blow to global warming." "The mini ice age starts here."
A few months ago, these were the kind of headlines that were appearing in newspapers and blogs. After very cold winter weather in many parts of the northern hemisphere, the notion of global warming was ripe for mockery. The family of senator Jim Inhofe - who called global warming "a hoax", built an igloo in Washington DC, with a sign saying "Al Gore's new home".
And now? The winter weather has given way to a series of extraordinary heatwaves.
This is a digest of the stories posted to NewScientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today.
Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent
Beware stowaways (Image: Francis Dean/Rex Features)
For the original article, see below.
Further information posted on Dell's community forum reveals that the trojan in the affected motherboards is stored in onboard flash memory rather than firmware ROMs. And the malware at issue is called w32.spybot.worm, which normally spreads using file-sharing networks and an internet chat client.
"The worm was discovered in flash storage on the motherboard during Dell testing. The malware does not reside in the firmware," says a Dell technician on the forum.
Because the trojan executes under Windows, infections can be cleaned out by antivirus software. Whether such software can clean up the motherboard flash infection is unclear, as such software usually scrubs only hard drives and - optionally - USB memory sticks. But Dell is replacing all affected boards in any case.
Overnight, Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager of server platforms at Dell, emailed this update on the affair:
Dell is aware of the issue and is contacting affected customers. The issue affects a limited number of replacement motherboards in four servers - PowerEdge R310, PowerEdge R410, PowerEdge R510 and PowerEdge T410 - and only potentially manifests itself when a customer has a specific configuration and is not running current antivirus software. This issue does not affect systems as shipped from our factory and is limited to replacement parts only. Dell has removed all impacted motherboards from its service supply chain and new shipping replacement stock does not contain the malware.
Computer maker Dell is warning, according to The Register, that some of its server motherboards have been delivered to customers carrying an unwanted extra: computer malware. It could be confirmation that the "hardware trojans" long posited by some security experts are indeed a real threat.
Unlike hard-drive-based computer viruses which can be disabled by antivirus software, a hardware trojan lives out of reach of such defences. It comprises some kind of alteration - by sabotage or accident - to the very heart of a computer: its microprocessors, memory chips or circuit boards.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today.
Ewen Callaway, reporter
Read more: Click here to read our story about how a vaginal gel could slow the spread of HIV
A report that a microbicidal gel nearly halved infection rates among several hundred South African women has dominated news coverage of this week's International AIDS meeting in Vienna, Austria.
The study is the first solid proof that HIV-killing gels can reduce transmission of the virus, and it could offer women a powerful tool to protect themselves from infection. "It's a game changer," Bruce Walker, an AIDS expert at Harvard Medical School who wasn't involved in the study, told the New York Times.
More quietly, though, other successes in battling the AIDS pandemic have come out of Vienna.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today.
Arran Frood, contributor
MDMA, the drug commonly known as ecstasy, can help treat people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when used in conjunction with psychotherapy, according to a study published today in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
The finding, if replicated, will be historic: the first time that MDMA has been shown to offer therapeutic benefits to patients when used in clinical practice.
MDMA was used as a therapy drug from the late 1970s despite there being little scientific evidence for its effectiveness. In what was called the second summer of love in the late 1980s, it escaped to the dance floor and was banned before any clinical human trials could be performed.
To better understand potential benefits of the drug, Michael Mithoefer, a psychiatrist and clinical researcher practising privately in South Carolina, and colleagues gave either MDMA or a placebo to 20 patients with PTSD, mostly female victims of sexual abuse, who had not responded to conventional drugs.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm on Friday until 6 pm today.
Kate McAlpine, reporter
Virgin Galactic's VSS Enterprise, which shares a name with the famous ship from Star Trek, has reached the stratosphere with a crew onboard.
One day, the rocket will be released from the mothership and fly in an arc that reaches space for a few minutes - not high enough for orbit. But it's not yet ready to leave the nest: this time, the VSS Enterprise remained attached to its carrier, VMS Eve. The crew performed system tests on the rocket ship and reported "objectives achieved."
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today.
Caitlin Stier, intern
Doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston faced tough decisions when a family requested they harvest eggs from a 36-year-old woman, after she suffered a pulmonary embolism and was put on life support.
The case, reported this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, raises important questions about the reproductive rights of patients and families in an age where posthumous reproduction is possible.
Fertility clinics have reportedly honoured requests to retrieve sperm from a recently deceased partner, but there are no documented cases of doctors harvesting eggs in the same situation.
David Greer, one of the specialists who treated the woman, told Boston.com that the request "made [the doctors] very uncomfortable":
"It forced us to think about what is the right thing to do here, what is the ethical thing."
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today.
Should the ability of governments to eavesdrop be a factor in deciding where a communications company is based? Apparently so, at least according to US law enforcement officials.
The issue came up after ICQ, an instant messaging service, was purchased for $187.5 million by the Russia investment company Digital Sky Technologies. ICQ may no longer be fashionable in US and Britain, but it remains popular in eastern Europe and Russia.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today.
Sujata Gupta, reporter
BP may have installed a brand new containment cap on top of its broken Deepwater Horizon well, but tests to see whether the new cap will work have been delayed.
The tests should have begun yesterday and no clear reason was given for the delay. On its website, BP stated that they postponed the test after meeting with US Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu.
Gareth Morgan, technology news editor
Driver error and not technology glitches were the root cause of accidents in which Toyota cars accelerated out of control. That's according to the Wall Street Journal, which has spoken to people involved in US Department of Transportation tests.
Those tests involved analysing dozens of data recorders from cars involved in crashes. And the initial results show that in an unspecified number of cases throttles were wide open and brakes were not engaged - consistent with the driver inadvertently stepping on the gas when they intended to slam on the brakes.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today.
Michael Marshall, environment reporter
Update 14 July 2010: At the last minute, BP's engineers were forced to delay their testing of the new cap. The Financial Times reports that the US energy secretary Steven Chu "stepped in to force BP to delay these integrity tests" until additional analyses had been performed. BP hopes that these analyses will be completed today.
The US Gulf coast is waiting on tenterhooks to find out if the Deepwater Horizon oil leak has finally been halted.
At 7 pm local time on Monday, BP fitted a new cap known as Top Hat 10 to its notorious well. It hopes that this cap will be strong enough to seal the leak, at least until the relief wells that are being drilled start working next month.
The new cap's design has never been used at such depths and pressures before. BP began testing it today to see if it could contain the oil, a process that could take up to 48 hours. As oil builds up under the cap the pressure should rise; if it does not, that will suggest oil is still leaking. In a statement BP said that "its efficiency and ability to contain the oil and gas cannot be assured".
Meanwhile the US government has renewed a moratorium on deep-sea drilling in the Gulf of Mexico until 30 November - but it may not last. A similar moratorium, adopted on 27 May, was quickly contested in court by oil and gas companies operating in the gulf. It was thrown out by a district judge in New Orleans, Louisiana, on 22 June.
Michael Marshall, environment reporter
A volcano that towers 3000 metres above the sea floor, yet remains hidden beneath the waves, has been found off the coast of Indonesia by a US-Indonesia joint expedition.
The volcano was found off the island of Sulawesi and has been named Kawio Barat. It is unclear whether it is active.
"This is a huge undersea volcano, taller than all but three or four mountains in Indonesia," the expedition's US chief Jim Holden said in an official statement.
Debora MacKenzie, consultant
What rich country has the most people with HIV? The US, with 1.1 million infected. And later today US President Obama will announce his long-awaited programme to fight the deadly disease.
Early leaks say spending won't increase beyond the current $19 billion a year; instead the President will re-target existing funds toward states and groups with the greatest need. The plan recognises that many Americans with HIV are not diagnosed, and many are delayed in receiving anti-HIV drugs despite evidence that earlier treatment is better. The result? One new US infection every ten minutes.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm on Friday until 6 pm today.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today.
Sujata Gupta, reporter
Nearly three months since the Deepwater Horizon rig started to spew oil in to the Gulf of Mexico, is BP about to finally seal the well?
The drilling of relief wells is ahead of schedule, says BP. Originally slated for completion around mid-August, officials are now saying that one of the wells could intercept the busted well in as little as seven to ten days. Government officials warn, though, that plugging the well with mud and cement, a process known as "bottom kill," via the relief well could take several days or more to complete.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm on yesterday until 6 pm today.
Kate McAlpine, reporter
It may sound as useful as a solar-powered torch, but an aircraft fuelled by the sun has accomplished its first ever manned night flight.
The aircraft, built by Swiss company Solar Impulse, also broke the records for highest altitude and longest duration for a piloted solar flight.
The craft took off at 6:51 local time yesterday morning from the Payerne airbase in Switzerland. André Borschberg, one of the cofounders of the project and the craft's sole pilot, guided its gradual ascent during the day.
Its power was collected by 12,000 solar panels built into its 63-metre wingspan. During the hours of bright sun, batteries siphoned off some energy to power the plane through the night.
(Image: L.Calçada/ESO)
Kate McAlpine, reporter
A relatively small black hole has been spotted blowing bubbles with diameters of more than 300-1500 light years.
Robert Soria of the University College London and colleagues pored over images and data from the European Southern Observatory and Chandra X-ray Observatory, zeroing in on an unusually large remnant from a supernova explosion. Its host galaxy appears in the Sculptor constellation of Earth's southern sky, around 12.7 million light years away.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm on Tuesay until 6 pm today.
Caitlin Stier, reporter
Second-hand Prozac in waste water could be sending shrimps' swimming patterns haywire, making them easy targets for predators.
Alex Ford and Yasmin Guler at the University of Portsmouth in the UK collected local shrimp, Echinogammarus marinus, and observed their behaviour in the lab. The shrimp were exposed to different levels of the antidepressant fluoextine - or Prozac - to test whether the presence of the drug would affect the way the shrimp respond to light.
In humans, Prozac acts as a mood enhancer by prolonging the effect of serotonin at nerve terminals. The shrimp, on the other hand, responded to increased serotonin levels by swimming towards the light (Aquatic Toxicology DOI:10.1016/j/aquatox.2010.05.019).
The pair found that shrimps exposed to the same Prozac levels present in waste water that flows to rivers and estuaries are five times more likely to swim toward the light instead of away from it. This behaviour could make the shrimp easy prey for fish and birds.
''Crustaceans are crucial to the food chain and if shrimps' natural behaviour is being changed because of antidepressant levels in the sea this could seriously upset the natural balance of the ecosystem," Ford is reported as saying in The Telegraph.
"It's no surprise that what we get from a pharmacy will be contaminating the waterways," Ford told The Sun, who helpfully illustrated what a prawn on Prozac might look like.
Though prescriptions for antidepressants are on the increase, the environmental effects of drugs in waste water have received little attention, say the researchers. What's more, the problem could extend beyond antidepressants: between 30 and 90 per cent of ingested drugs remain active after excretion.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm on Monday until 6 pm today.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm last Friday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
Image: ESA,HFI and LFI consortia
Kate McAlpine, reporter
Researchers on the Planck telescope, the biggest cosmology experiment in nearly a decade, have released their first full sky map of the cosmic microwave background.
The image shows the Milky Way as a bright, horizontal band through the centre with "streamers" of cold dust extending above and below. But the interesting part to researchers is the scattering of yellow flecks in the red background. These oldest photons in the universe are thought to have been generated about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when matter was finally cool enough to start forming atoms.
To view the map in other wavelengths of light, such as X-ray or radio,
check out the University of Cardiff's interactive "Chromoscope". And the European Space Agency has annotated the map with astronomical features.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
Rachel Courtland, reporter
The reclusive Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman has turned down a million-dollar prize for solving one of the most difficult problems in mathematics.
Perelman is known for his proof of the Poincaré conjecture, a topological claim governing the properties of three-dimensional spheres. In 2000, the Clay
Mathematics Institute named the conjecture as one of seven great, unsolved problems in mathematics. It offered a $1 million prize for the resolution of each of these "Millennium" problems.
It didn't take long in the case of the Poincaré conjecture. In 2002, Perelman, then a mathematician at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in St Petersburg, Russia, published the first in a series of papers that solved the hundred-year-old puzzle.
This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.
Michael Marshall, environment reporter
Humans are pumping extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but isn't that just plant food?
After all, plants take in CO2 and use it to make sugar, so any extra CO2 ought to be good news for plants - and as a bonus they should take the stuff out of the atmosphere for us.
This is one of those ideas that looks good at first glance, but doesn't quite work in the real world. The main problem is that plants do not live by CO2 alone: they need other nutrients, like water and nitrogen, and if they don't have them in abundance they won't take in any more CO2.
But what if we gave them a helping hand, by making sure they had plenty of nitrogen-rich fertiliser?
Cigarette packets stripped bare and hidden away:
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Cigarette packets stripped bare and hidden away:
My lungs: My choice. Nobody else's. If we're going to treat cigarettes in this manner, let's d...
Cigarette packets stripped bare and hidden away:
Does the government think a Junky cares how his Heroin is wrapped? A fag smoker who is hooked f...