January 2011 archive

Kate McAlpine, contributor

If the world ends in a blockbuster-like cataclysm in 2012, CERN will no longer be able to say, "but the Large Hadron Collider wasn't even on!" Officials decided on Monday to postpone a planned yearlong shutdown of the particle smasher by one year, until 2013.

The LHC is currently running at 7 trillion electronvolts (TeV), or half its design energy. It was supposed to shut down for a year at the end of 2011 to allow workers to thoroughly test and repair its superconducting magnets so they could handle the extreme current needed to steer a beam of protons at even higher energies.

But the LHC's beam intensity ramped up smoothly through 2010, and physicists reckon that the LHC could net 40 to 60 times as much data in 2011 as in the year before.

Running through 2012 would double that amount again – bringing the total to roughly half that generated by the LHC's older rival, the Tevatron at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois.

"Everything is running so well," says Guido Tonelli, spokesperson of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment. "Why should we wait?"

With that much data, discoveries like the Higgs boson, thought to give other particles mass, could go from just out of reach to within the LHC's grasp, depending on the mass of the Higgs, says Tonelli.

"The next two years will be the magic years, if we are lucky," he says.

Catherine de Lange, reporter


(Image: University of Abertay Dundee/Scottish Police Services Authority)

Picture the scene: a body is found dead after falling from a high balcony. As forensics teams gather at the scene they need to understand whether it was an accident or something more sinister. Now, the dead man's shirt might hold the answer.

A new technique developed by scientists at the University of Abertay in Dundee, UK, and The Scottish Police Services Authority can detect fingerprints on fabrics. The technique, which uses fine layers of gold and zinc in a vacuum to detect the print, is already used on hard surfaces, but has now been developed to work on fabrics too.  

Vikings' crystal clear method of navigation

The Viking sagas suggest "sunstones" could help locate the sun on a cloudy day, and now mounting evidence suggests the story is true

Tutankhamun relics escape looters again

The current unrest in Egypt poses a threat to treasures from the dawn of civilisation

How to cook up 'foamy' space-time in the lab

The quantum foam thought to constitute space-time could now be whipped up in the lab, by creating transient "black holes"

Visceral curator: Making art out of living tissue

Sci-art lab director Oron Catts tells us about art that gets under your skin through the media of in vitro meat and exposed DNA

Damaged bridges will cry for help before they fail

The catastrophic collapse of a highway crossing of the Mississippi river has spurred the development of sensor networks to make such structures safer

Haiti polio scare may be rare complication of cholera

With the cholera epidemic subsiding, fears that polio had broken out may be premature

Lady Gaga parody takes on genetics

A new music video gives a scientific twist to the hit song Telephone

The selfish metaphor: Conceits of evolution

Many people dismiss metaphors and imagery as surface polish. But just look at the way they have hijacked our thinking on evolution, says Mary Midgley

What do you get when you cross poets and geneticists?

A poetry competition has let imagination loose on the fertile topic of genomics

I, algorithm: A new dawn for artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence has finally become trustworthy enough to watch over everything from nuclear bombs to premature babies. Anil Ananthaswamy reports

Jeff Hecht, reporter

Safe again (Image: Chris Hondros/Getty)

Tutankhamun is famed the world over. Not because he abandoned the contentious religious experiments of his father, Akhenaten, but because his grave was not robbed in antiquity. Last week, his grave goods appear to have survived the looters once more.

A week of turmoil in Egypt that has reportedly left more than 100 people dead drew the country's cultural heritage into the conflict on Friday. Riot police withdrew from the area around the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, giving looters the opportunity to break in.

The museum is famed the world over for its antiquities, with treasures including the oldest known hieroglyphic inscription. Relics from the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun's tomb occupy almost half of its second floor.

Catherine Brahic, environment editor

Genetically modified crops can breathe a sigh of relief, after the US Department of Agriculture decided that farmers could plant GM alfalfa without restrictions.

The deliberations began in June last year, when the US Supreme Court found that a 2007 ban on selling Monsanto's Roundup Ready alfalfa - which is resistant to herbicides - was unjustified. However, the Supreme Court had left the final decision to the USDA.

Yesterday, agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack said: "After conducting a thorough and transparent examination of alfalfa through a multi-alternative environmental impact statement (EIS) and several public comment opportunities, APHIS has determined that Roundup Ready alfalfa is as safe as traditionally bred alfalfa." APHIS refers to the USDA's Animal Plant Health Inspection Service.

Farmer associations like the Illinois Farm Bureau and the American Soybean Association supported the decision. They had feared a decision to regulate alfalfa would set a precedent that could hinder engineered crops in the US. "Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack's decision is based on sound science and two decades of regulatory precedent," said Jim Greenwood, CEO of Biotechnology Industry Organization.

At the other end of the spectrum, the organic industry expressed its discontent. "This is very disappointing," Will Fantle, co-director of the Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute, told The Atlantic. "Tens of thousands of people spoke out against this contamination. They were completely ignored. It looks like the biotech industry has all the political power."

Don't expect these two sides of the debate to come to agreement anytime soon.
 

Challenger disaster: NASA's rude awakening

On 28 January 1986, NASA's space shuttle Challenger disintegrated just after lift-off - despite promises that the fleet of vehicles would be safer than previous craft.

Emotion 2.0

The word robot originally meant "forced labourer". But 90 years after the word was first used, robots could become a very different kind of companion

Do you speak the language of love?

A set of new studies predict your relationship's health from your writing style - and suggest marriage is good for your physical or mental well-being

Nabokov was right about butterflies

The author of Lolita was a fine butterfly taxonomist too - a new DNA analysis confirms what Nabokov termed his "drastic" reassessment of a major group

First HDR video system shows all the light and shade

Glaring, overlit faces and blacked-out night-time backgrounds could be thing of the past thanks to the world's first high-dynamic-range video system

Beetle pest may encourage nesting turtles to move

La Escobilla beach in Mexico is one of the world's largest sea turtle nesting sites - but troublesome beetles could force the turtles to move

Stretchy DNA shows off its elastic qualities

The discovery could help to develop anti-cancer drugs, and also points to a more prosaic role as a reference for measuring the tiniest of forces

Feedback: The dusky nightjar sings jazz

Eagles songs in a metal style, where to buy a dead rabbit with a side order of uranium, accidental sex changes, and more

Maser to predict Milky Way's fate

The laser-like spot of light could reveal the Andromeda galaxy's sideways motion - and whether it will eventually slam into the Milky Way

Spinning seeds inspire single-bladed helicopters

Mini helicopters that fly with a controlled spin like the seeds from the maple tree are much more stable in the air

Government disconnects Egypt from internet

Yesterday the Egyptian government shut down the country's connection to the internet, leaving its citizens unable to access websites hosted elsewhere

City fish take in antidepressants

If trout in the St Lawrence seaway around Montreal, Canada, look less stressed than usual, it could be that they're chilling out on Prozac

Best of web video: This month's top picks

From high-tech yarn to a Martian sunset, watch our top 10 pick of January's best science videos

Life expectancy rising slowly in the US

Smoking, overeating and a lack of exercise is causing life expectancy in the US is to rise more slowly than other western countries

Google censors peer-to-peer search terms

For some the company betrayed its own "don't be evil" mantra today when it removed references to file-sharing software from its search results

NASA's dreaming: Future space technologies

From antimatter rockets to flying robots, NASA's wish list of technologies for space exploration stretches the imagination

VW's diesel hybrid: most efficient car on the planet?

With an electric motor and small diesel engine, Volkswagen's XL1 sips just 0.9 litres of fuel per 100 kilometres - equivalent to 239 miles per gallon

Even young babies know who's boss

Children as young as 10 months use size to interpret social hierarchies

Did modern humans go global twice as early as thought?

Tools left by Homo sapiens in Arabia 120,000 years ago might mean we have to rethink when humans left Africa to colonise the world

New Scientist reporters

(Image: NASA)

On 28 January 1986, 25 years ago today, NASA's space shuttle Challenger disintegrated just 73 seconds after lift-off, killing all seven of its crew - despite promises that the shuttles would be safer than previous craft.

The accident was traced to a rubber O-ring used to seal the craft's solid rocket boosters. The faulty ring, made brittle by unusually cold weather at launch, allowed a jet of flame to ignite the hydrogen fuel in the external tank.

It wasn't NASA's last brush with tragedy. After a second accident destroyed the shuttle Columbia as it re-entered Earth's atmosphere in 2003, killing seven more astronauts, the agency drew up plans to scrap the shuttle fleet and replace it with something new.

The first part of that plan is about to be implemented, with the final shuttle flight scheduled for April. Afterwards, NASA will have to rely on Russian Soyuz capsules to get to and from the International Space Station, probably for at least a few years.

But its long-term plan is to hire space taxis, several of which are now being developed by private companies. Although some members of the US Congress fear that space-flight firms lack NASA's experience in building and launching spacecraft, there are reasons to believe these might be safer than the shuttle.

Catherine de Lange, reporter

As yet another of my friends prepares to tie the knot next month, I can't help but feel a twinge of jealousy. Try as I might to convince myself being single is better (no squabbles over the washing up, joint bank accounts or "not tonight I've got a headache" conversations to worry about), a new study is making those arguments hard to believe.

According to the review of almost 150 studies (Student BMJ, DOI: 10.1136/sbmj.d404), married people live longer, happier and healthier lives than singletons. What's more, the longer the couple are together, the smugger they can be, because these benefits only increase with time.

David Gallacher at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff, UK, who led the research, writes:

Love is a voyage of discovery from dopamine-drenched romance to oxytocin-induced attachment. Making this journey can be fraught with hazards and lead many to question the value of romance and commitment

Nevertheless, the impact of stable long-term exclusive relationships on longevity is well established. In a study of one billion person years across seven European countries the married persons had age-adjusted mortality rates that were 10 to 15 per cent lower than the population as a whole.

More specifically, men enjoyed better physical health whilst women enjoyed better mental health. According to CBS News:

The reason men enjoy better health when married is their partner's positive influence on lifestyle. The mental health bonus for women, the researchers say, may be because women place great value on the importance of the relationship

Be warned, however: don't go getting down on one knee for the wrong reasons. As The Telegraph explains, the study conceded: "not all relationships are beneficial, and it is better to be single than in a strained relationship."

Which leads me nicely onto another study, which might help you find out whether your relationship is destined to succeed.

Psychologists from the University of Texas at Austin have found that analysing the way that couples speak to each other can predict whether the relationship is destined for success or doomed to fail (Psychological Science, DOI: 10.1177/0956797610392928).

What it comes down to is the way we use simple words such as "a", "that", "will" and "am" says study co-author James Pennebaker, in a press release. How we use these words constitutes our writing and speaking style.

One experiment analysed online chats between couples over ten days. "Almost 80 per cent of the couples whose writing style matched were still dating three months later, compared with approximately 54 per cent of the couples who did not match as well," according to British newspaper The Daily Telegraph.

The team even has an online app which analyses the way you and your lover communicate. I just tried it, and it seems my current love interest and I aren't speaking the language of love after all.

Oh well, there is one small consolatory detail. Gallagher's study says that divorce can have a devastating impact on health. At least that's something us singletons don't have to worry about.

Debora MacKenzie, correspondent

(Image: Horst Tappe/Getty)

Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita, right? Literary philistines like me will dimly know that this is a very famous novel about an older man who lusted after a young girl - as enshrined in the lyrics of a pop song. But Vladimir was also a scientist. He studied butterflies. And it seems he was good at it.

Nabokov fled Russia after the February revolution of 1917, and his skills as an amateur butterfly enthusiast got him a job in the US at what became the Harvard Museum of Natural History. He organised its butterfly collection, and actually wrote Lolita during butterfly-hunting car trips to the American west. He specialised in the Polyommatini, the blues, coppers and hairstreaks: one group of them - Nabokovia - is even named in his honour.

Compact 'eyeball' camera stretches to zoom

A flexible photodetector and stretchable lens lie at the heart of an exceptionally compact prototype zoom camera

Jetpack takes you on a magic carpet ride

See a jetpack that lets you fly above water with precise directional control, which will go on sale later this year

The right way for pigeons to follow their nose home

Evidence suggests pigeons follow their nose - not the Earth's magnetic field - to find their way home. A new study says only the right nostril will do

World's first brain scanner made for two

Dual-headed MRI can scan the brains of two people interacting with one another

Info-streams create cybermap of the scientific world

A global map of scientific collaborations has been created by drawing links between pairs of cities

Zoologger: The fish with no stomach for its prey

The stout longtom is not at all stout despite its healthy appetite - perhaps because it lacks a seemingly essential organ

Deep meaning in Ramanujan's 'simple' pattern

A fractal pattern has been discovered in sequences of numbers that captivated the legendary mathematician

Internet activist: Why I want to buy a satellite

Access to the internet is a human right, says Kosta Grammatis, who wants to buy a satellite to get the whole world online

Monkey business: should airlines transport lab animals?

Air Canada has said that it is legally obliged to carry lab animals, enraging anti-vivisectionists

Best of web video: Kinect-controlled robot

Our top video this month is a robot controlled with a Microsoft Kinect game controller

Soft-centred fossils reveal dinosaurs' true colours

Newly discovered traces of soft tissue provide unprecedented insights into how animals that died millions of years ago looked and lived. Jeff Hecht reports

Will we ever glimpse the universe's first stars?

The most distant galaxy yet found is seen as it was less than 500 million years after the big bang - New Scientist asks how much farther back we are likely to see

Big browsers hop aboard the 'Do Not Track' train

Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox browsers will now allow users to block advertisers' tracking software

Efficiency could cut world energy use over 70 per cent

Clean coal? Solar power? No need, according to a new study: massive energy savings can be realised simply by using less

WikiLeaks business model gains traction with big media

A slew of imitators is cropping up following WikiLeaks's success in stirring up international controversy. But are the sites secure?

Janelle Weaver, contributor

Pigeons are famous for navigating long distances of unfamiliar territory to find their way home. Recent studies suggest they're led by the nose - and now, researchers have confirmed that it's the right nostril that does all the work.

Biologist Anna Gagliardo of the University of Pisa in Italy and her collaborators have previously shown that pigeons may rely on odours carried on the wind - and not the Earth's magnetic field - to find their way home.

Now Gagliardo's team has discovered that the two nostrils are not equally useful. They crammed a rubbery paste into the left nostril of ten homing pigeons, and similarly bunged up the right nostril of another nine birds.

Peter Aldhous, San Francisco bureau chief


(Image: Computed by Olivier H. Beauchesne @ Science-Metrix, inc.  Data from Scopus, using books, trade journals and peer-reviewed journals)

Inspired by an earlier image showing connections among Facebook friends, Olivier Beauchesne of the consulting firm Science-Metrix has now created this global map of scientific collaborations.
 
From a huge database of scientific papers published between 2005 and 2009, Beauchesne drew links between cities each time two authors in different locations wrote a paper together.  The brightness of the lines depends on the number of collaborations between a pair of cities and the distance between them. The map shows Europe to be the hub of multi-city scientific collaboration - and also reveals some rising scientific centres, such as São Paulo in Brazil.
 
You can focus on collaborations in particular parts of the world using this zoomable map. 

Andy Coghlan, reporter

Anti-vivisectionists this week resurrected their campaign against the transportation of lab animals in passenger aircraft, denouncing Air Canada for transporting 48 lab monkeys to Toronto from China. But in a surprising line of defence, the airline says that because of a court ruling in 1998, it is legally obliged to carry lab animals on the grounds that they pose no in-flight nuisance to passengers.

The ruling came after Air Canada refused in 1994 to carry a shipment of lab monkeys from Barbados. The monkey supplier complained against the airline, resulting in the 1998 ruling, reports the Toronto Star. It points out that in the ruling, the "opinion" that the monkey shipment is offensive on "humane or moral grounds" wasn't sufficient to justify a ban.

"We cannot by law refuse the carriage of animals for the sole reason that they could ultimately be destined to a laboratory or for research," says an airline spokesman quoted by the newspaper.

Tiny orang-utan populations are surprisingly diverse

One of the most detailed analyses yet of the two species of orang-utan reveals surprising genetic diversity - good news for conservation efforts

Ma's gene does different things to pa's copy

A single gene with two identities can affect body growth or social behaviour depending on whether it's inherited from the mother or father

Mad cow disease is almost extinct globally

It's just 25 years since BSE was officially recognised as a disease - now it's almost extinct, but that doesn't mean we've seen the last case in people

Why lizards are destined to stay small(ish)

Watch a lizard turn the tables on a Harvard biomechanics researcher as he studies its running speed

Virtual blood and smoke give gore to student surgeons

New software helps novice surgeons learn what happens during an operation

UV makes tadpoles easy pickings

Too much ultraviolet radiation is bad for humans, but for tadpoles it is even worse news: it stops them escaping predators

Remember the lessons of past clinical trials abuses

Vulnerable people are increasingly targeted as subjects for clinical research. Have we forgotten the lessons of past abuses, asks Osagie K. Obasogie

Love hurts so bad, but feels so good

Watch New Scientist's geek wedding to see why we can't get enough of being in love

Magical mathematical squares made of Tetris bricks

The basis for Sudoku and a Chinese legend, magic squares now have a more complex, geometric cousin - see what they look like here

Transsexual differences caught on brain scan

A brain scan may help identify transsexual people before puberty to help prepare the way for possible later surgery

Plastic artificial retina is a hit with nerve cells

Nerve cells can interface with a light-sensitive semiconducting polymer, suggesting a new route towards the artificial retina

Best of web video: Sex-swapping butterfly dance

The number 2 spot in our video round-up goes to butterflies who know how to dance their way to a mate

Kids with low self-control are less successful adults

Youngsters with low self-control were more likely to be overweight and less likely to own their own home as an adult

What if the Earth stopped spinning?

Or what if our home planet had two moons, or none, or was a moon itself? Hazel Muir explores the science of six alternate Earths

America faces 'Sputnik moment', says Obama

The president's words will inspire scientists and educators, says Peter Aldhous, but political battles lie head

Speeding star creates bird-like space sculpture

NASA's WISE telescope captures what appears to be a cosmic cuckoo in a new infrared image of the star Zeta Ophiuchi

Atom counting helps kilogram watch its weight

The kilogram sorely needs to be redefined in terms of fundamental constants, but what's the best way to do that?

Workhorse of biology gets a virus - that's good news

A worm used to study many aspects of biology has caught a virus, promising fresh insights into virus-host interactions

Reversible computing gets rid of computer's garbage

Our computers are rife with wasted "garbage" calculations. A new type of computing could end all that, resulting in massive energy savings

After Stuxnet, Iran unleashes its cybercops

Following protests fuelled by online social media and a devastating computer worm attack, Iran is fighting back

Michael Marshall, environment reporter

Lucky to reach adulthood (Image: Kathie Atkinson/Photolibrary/Getty)

Too much ultraviolet radiation is bad for all of us, causing sunburn and sometimes skin cancer. But a study out this week shows that for tadpoles it is even more bothersome: it stops them escaping predators. In the grand scheme of threats to amphibians, how much of a problem is this?

It's been known for years that increased UV-B is harmful to many amphibians, but how that happens has been tricky to pin down: does it kill them when they are eggs, tadpoles or adults, and in what way?

Lesley Alton and colleagues at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, subjected striped marsh frog tadpoles to a 3 to 6 per cent increase in UV-B, which is the sort of increase they have experienced in the wild over the last 40 years, ever since the ozone layer began thinning because of CFC emissions.

The UV-treated animals hatched just as well as untreated ones. They also came out the same size and shape, and were able to swim just as fast. But they did less well when exposed to a predatory shrimp: their survival times fell by 25 per cent (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.2368).

Peter Aldhous, San Francisco bureau chief

Education, innovation and research - these were dominant themes of President Barack Obama's annual State of the Union address. The world has changed, Obama told Congress, and the US will only retain its competitive edge over nations like China and India if it invests in a skilled workforce and cutting-edge science and technology: "We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world."

As the word cloud below shows, Obama's speech was peppered with buzzwords that will gladden the hearts of scientists and educators across the US. His address will also please industrial leaders who have joined the nation's scientists in expressing alarm about America's ability to compete in a highly educated, high-tech world economy.

Rachel Courtland, reporter

Online games reveal players' personalities - to who?

Marketers want to divine what makes you tick - and then tailor their online offerings accordingly

Star clusters could lose galaxy status

Omega Centauri is facing an identity crisis, as an online poll is set up to decide how to distinguish between dwarf galaxies and star clusters

How the seahorse gained its shapely body

The seahorse's peculiar body shape is not just for show: it may be an adaptation for hunting prey

Cellphone network flaw is a gift to hackers

The con works by forcing a smartphone to connect to a fake mobile base station - it's much easier than you might think

Why space taxis might be safer than NASA's shuttle

On the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster, there are good reasons to think that the coming generations of commercial spacecraft will be safer

Drug shortage delays US executions

Hospira, the sole US maker of the anaesthetic used in lethal injections, announced last week that it would cease production. What are the implications?

The moving brain

Return to the Silence by Curious Directive provides a thought-provoking and moving look at neurological disorders, says David Cohen

Mum's stem cells could stop defects before birth

Transferring maternal stem cells to the fetus could be the key to curing genetic diseases in the womb

Freedom of information still a Climategate sore point

UK members of parliament have today published a report analysing the various inquiries into the leaked emails scandal that were carried out last year

The gospel of gaming

Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world will inspire and inform gamers and non-gamers alike

Best of web video: 'Sleeper agent' drugs attack cancer

At number 3 in our round-up of the top science videos on the web this month, cancer drugs evade detection thanks to a biological disguise

The hurt blocker: Scans pin down pain in the brain

Brain scans are confirming that pain really is in the mind - and that means we may be able to stop it without resorting to drugs or surgery. Clare Wilson investigates

Fred Pearce, consultant

Just when you thought we were done discussing "Climategate"... UK members of parliament have today published a report analysing the various inquiries that were carried out last year after more than 1000 emails belonging to scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich and held on the university server were leaked online.

The House of Commons science and technology committee agreed it is time to "move on" from the rows. But it warned that a few things still needed to be sorted out.

In particular, the MPs, under the chairmanship of the Labour party's Andrew Miller, found a continued "confusion about how freedom-of-information legislation should be applied to scientific research that must be resolved... as a matter of urgency".

Catherine de Lange, reporter

Studies in mice have shown that stem cell transplants for fetuses rarely work because they are rejected by the mother's immune cells present in fetal blood. The finding provides a clear solution: transplant the mother's own stem cells into the fetus to avoid rejection.

It's now easier than ever to diagnose congenital defects whilst a fetus is still developing in the womb. In theory, that should also lead to more treatment options.

Transplanting stem cells from the bone marrow of a suitable donor to the developing fetus, for example, was seen as a potentially exciting treatment for some congenital diseases.

In previous trials, however, these transplants tended to be rejected - which is surprising, as the immature fetal immune system should make it easier to slip foreign cells in without triggering an immune response.

Now, Amar Nijagal from the University of California, San Francisco and colleagues have shown why this is.

The challenge of the great cosmic unknowns

In The 4% Universe: Dark matter, dark energy, and the race to discover the rest of reality, Richard Panek explains how we came to know so little

Dragonfish nebula conceals giant star cluster

Inside the nebula's dark, gaping maw sits the Milky Way's most massive cluster of baby stars

Cooperative cellphone networks could cut energy waste

By sharing antennas, cellphone companies could save big on energy bills and carbon footprints. But can they stop competing long enough to get along?

Ancient puzzle gets new lease of 'geomagical' life

The basis for Sudoku and a centuries-old fascination for mathematicians, magic squares now have a more complex, geometric cousin

Artificial retinas help robot balance a pencil

Could this be the next executive toy - the most advanced pencil holder in the world?

Acrobatic flying robots steal the show

Semi-autonomous quadrotor helicopters are providing a glimpse of future flying robots: small, agile and cooperative

Amazon activist: I will not give up the fight

Evicted at gunpoint from the vast Bolivian national park she helped set up, Rosa Maria Ruiz is still battling to protect threatened areas of rainforest

Best of web video: Exoplanet art

In fourth place in our monthly video countdown, see artists' impressions of distant exoplanets

Quantum reality: The many meanings of life

Quantum theory is a scientific masterpiece - but physicists still aren't sure what to make of it. Michael Brooks goes in search of fresh perspectives

David Shiga, reporter

(Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GLIMPSE Team/M Rahman/U of Toronto)

Dragonfish are fearsome deep-sea predators with giant mouths, bulging eyes and a propensity for eating bioluminescent prey. Now it seems they have a celestial counterpart in the Dragonfish nebula. Hidden in its gaping maw may be the Milky Way's most massive cluster of young stars.

Mubdi Rahman and Norman Murray, both of the University of Toronto in Canada, found the first hint of the cluster in 2010 in the form of a big cloud of ionised gas 30,000 light years from Earth. They picked up the gas by its microwave emissions – suspecting that radiation from massive stars nearby had ionised the gas.

Now Rahman and his colleagues have identified a knot of 400 massive stars in the cloud's heart in images from the infrared 2 Micron All Sky Survey (Astrophysical Journal Letters, in press). The cluster probably contains many more stars too small and dim to see.

The surrounding cloud of ionised gas is producing more microwaves than clouds around other star clusters in our galaxy. That suggests the Dragonfish is the brightest and most massive young cluster discovered so far, with a total mass in the range of 100,000 times the mass of the sun.

"Until now, we've only seen clusters this size outside of our galaxy," Rahman says. Because it is so much closer, it can be studied in greater detail, he says.

Michael Marshall, environment reporter

These larvae have been infected by a parasitic worm, which has turned them a bright shade of red. But unlike most parasites, the worm has done so to warn off predators.

Parasites often change the behaviour and appearance of their hosts, as a way of getting picked up by the next host. For instance, the parasitic worm Leucochloridium paradoxum infects snails and transforms their normally slender antennae into thick, brightly-coloured lumps. These attract birds, which eat the snail and wind up infected with the parasite.

But Heterorhabditis bacteriophora is quite happy with the moth larvae it infests. So once this parasite gets inside its host, it releases bacteria. As well as breaking down the host's insides, these turn the moth larvae bright red.

Andy Fenton of the University of Liverpool, UK and colleagues found that robins prefer to eat uninfected larvae, and avoid the red infected ones. In effect, the parasite warns off predators that would otherwise kill it.

Journal reference: Animal Behaviour, DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2010.11.010

Triceratops may not be Torosaurus after all

The latest salvo in the "morphosaurus" debate suggests that Triceratops was not a juvenile Torosaurus - contradicting a 2010 study

Feedback: George Orwell, Big Brother and reality TV

Old-fashioned ideas lost in the mists of uragnosia, an Elf out of season, self-hating software and more

Hearing music through someone else's eyes

A synaesthetic performance at the South London Gallery attempts to communicate the truly subjective by melding music and art

Has China's new jet launched a stealth arms race?

China's first flight test of its new high-tech J-20 stealth military jet on 11 January has drawn a lot of attention

Cancer repairs itself by stealing from host cells

An unusual cancer that infects dogs can steal bits of cells from its host to repair itself

Royal rumpus over King Tutankhamun's ancestry

A DNA analysis last year hailed as "the final word" on the famous pharaoh's family tree has been criticised as anything but

Sterile giant tortoises used as Galapagos lawnmowers

Released last year, sterile giant tortoises are making way for Lonesome George's relatives on Pinta Island

Woman speaks after pioneering voice box transplant

First ever transplant of combined larynx, thyroid and windpipe has been a resounding success

Would you eat eight fruit and veg a day?

Upping daily fruit and veg intake to eight portions a day could reduce the risk of fatal heart attack - but it may be asking too much of people

Telltale chemistry could betray ET

Alien life may be hard to find because it's fundamentally unlike that on Earth - but a tendency to chemically alter its environment may give it away

Infectious moods: A depressing side effect

Chemical messengers from the immune system can wreak emotional havoc if they cross into the brain - even in people who otherwise seem healthy

What's the carbon footprint of war?

When a brutal war significantly reduces a human population, forests have the chance to re-grow and absorb carbon dioxide, a new study suggests

Green machine: Bringing a forest to the desert

Trees, greenhouses, and fresh water in the desert? Sounds like a mirage, but construction on such an oasis is expected to start next year

Laser attacks on planes doubled in 2010

For less than $30 you can purchase a laser pointer powerful enough to pinpoint a star in the night sky, or harass an airplane

Did pterosaurs fly out of their eggs?

A spectacular fossil apparently of a pterosaur and its egg provides some clues about the flying reptiles' mode of reproduction

Need a new metabolic pathway? Steal a few genes

Stolen genes explain how microbe came by a new metabolic pathway

Video game teaches you to make the perfect tortellini

A team of Italian researchers have come up with a game that teaches the ancient art of cooking tortellini

Jeff Hecht, consultant

Distinguishing closely-related species can be tricky, especially when all we have are fossil bones. To add to the problem, the juveniles of some species can look very different from adults. During growth, an animal may develop elaborate ornamentation - like the horns and skull frills of the horned dinosaurs.

Still, it was a surprise last year when John Scannella and Jack Horner from the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, reported that the well-known genus Triceratops and the lesser-known Torosaurus were actually the same species. Triceratops were simply junior members of the species, they concluded.

Scannella and Horner examined a lot of bones, and their evidence convinced many palaeontologists. Others, however, wanted more evidence - and a new re-examination of another horned dinosaur has raised doubts that Triceratops grew up to be Torosaurus.

Michael Marshall, environment reporter

An unusual cancer that infects dogs can steal bits of cells from its host to repair itself. The finding could help explain the progression of a similar cancer that threatens the Tasmanian devil population.

Canine transmissible venereal tumor (CTVT) is an infectious cancer, one of only two known to exist. It spreads from dog to dog when they mate, or through licking and biting. The CTVT cells currently circulating are the oldest surviving cancer known to science. 

Austin Burt and colleagues at Imperial College London looked at the genes carried in the tumour cells and their mitochondria (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1197696). As The Scientist reports:

The nuclear DNA of the tumours was almost identical to one another, but their mitochondrial DNA was often more similar to the mitochondrial DNA of dogs than to other tumours, suggesting the cancer had adopted its hosts' mitochondria on at least one occasion.

Ferris Jabr, reporter

In the past few years, some researchers have explored whether warfare and societal collapse might be explained in part by swings in climate.

A 2007 study found that periods of cold weather preceded 12 of 15 major conflicts in China's ancient dynasties. The frost would have created food shortages, the study suggested, which would have inspired rebellions and made communities more vulnerable to invasion. More recently, a study in Science argued that dramatic shifts in climate would have affected agriculture, contributing to the fall of the Roman Empire.

But what about the opposite effect? Can humanity's skirmishes change the climate?

Two-headed shark embryo found

A fish with two heads has been found preserved in a private collection

Quantum states last longer in birds' eyes

A light-activated compass at the back of some birds' eyes may preserve electrons in delicate quantum states for longer than the best artificial systems

This year's big question is Edgier than ever

The answers are in for this year's annual question from the Edge website, and they open your mind to all manner of interesting scientific concepts

Black market steals half a million pollution permits

The theft of permits for nearly half a million tonnes of carbon emissions shines a light on an emerging black market for the right to pollute the planet

Bye bye, unwanted flesh on Chatroulette

New software to detects skin tones on Chatroulette is set to block "misbehaving users" from posting obscene content

Republicans repeal healthcare reforms

Republican house passes bill to repeal Obama's healthcare reform, but does the president still hold the upper hand?

Welcome to One Per Cent

Introducing New Scientist's inspirational technology blog

Hunt for the molecules that hold ecosystems together

Keystone molecules manipulate all stages of life, from reproduction to dispersal and even to survival itself

Print your own flute

A 3D printer has created a flute and could soon be used to prototype new and exotic instruments

Video games may not boost teenage obesity after all

Young gamers rejoice - video games may not make you fat. A study of schoolchildren in the US suggests the pastime is not driving childhood obesity

Welcome weeds: How alien invasion could save the Earth

Far from ravaging threatened ecosystems, non-native species could be powerful allies in the fight to save them

Zoom into the Orion Nebula

See the "stellar nursery" as never before, thanks to an image picked up by an amateur that was missed by the pros

Infectious moods: T-cell recall

The decline in our memories in old age could be partly due to the ageing of immune cells, opening up new prospects for treatments

Polygamy boosts mouse sperm fitness

Bigger, better sperm give polygamous mice the edge in the mating game

Probe to survey comet dented by Deep Impact mission

NASA's Deep Impact mission failed to spot the crater it gouged out of a comet in 2005 – now another probe will try to image the damage during an upcoming fly-by

Supreme court upholds NASA background checks

The US's highest court rules that scientists working on government space programmes must submit to background checks

Bedbug DNA reveals pockets of resistance to pesticides

Having trouble removing bedbugs, even with pesticides? It might be down to their genes

Whopping crayfish species stayed hidden for decades

A colourful crayfish twice the size of its close relatives has been found lurking under a rock in a creek in Tennessee

Malaria caught on camera breaking and entering cell

The parasite responsible for malaria has been filmed invading a human red blood cell for the first time

Michael Marshall, environment reporter

(Image: S. M. Delpiani, M. Y. Deli Antoni, S. A. Barbini, D. E. Figueroa/Journal of Fish Biology)

A pair of sharks, both with two heads, have been found hidden away in a private collection. This specimen, one of two, had been sitting in a jar since its discovery in 1934, off the coast of Argentina.

Both specimens were male fetuses and were removed from a pregnant female tope shark. As well as two heads, each fetus had duplicated dorsal fins.

Dicephaly, as the condition is known, is most common in reptiles, amphibians and fish. Such animals normally die very young, as this remarkable choristodere fossil shows. A double-headed snake made the news in 2006, after its carer taught the two heads to take it in turns feeding.

It's unclear what caused the fetuses to develop in this way: parasites, poor nutrition, genetic disorders and pollution could all be to blame.

Journal reference: Journal of Fish Biology, DOI: 10.1111/j.1095-8649.2010.02890.x

Jessica Hamzelou, reporter

Barack Obama speaks about healthcare reform legislation at the American Nurses Association House of Delegates (Image: Rex Features)

The House of Representatives voted yesterday to repeal Obama's bill on healthcare reform.

The vote was won by 245 to 189, as three Democrats joined all 242 Republicans in voting to scrap the Affordable Care Act which was passed by Congress last year.

Those who voted for the repeal argue that making the healthcare system more efficient will result in job losses, and that businesses forced into offering health insurance to employees will suffer.

The bill will cripple small businesses, Republican representative Joe Wilson told the Boston Globe:

The liberal healthcare takeover destroys jobs, limits freedoms, and expands big government

MacGregor Campbell, contributor

In a unanimous decision, the US Supreme court ruled on Wednesday that scientists and engineers working on government space programmes must submit to extensive background checks as a condition of their employment.

New Scientist reported on this case back in October, when oral arguments were heard. At issue was a 2005 lawsuit filed by 28 employees at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The suit sought to bar the institution from requiring background checks that the plaintiffs claimed violated their privacy.

Niall Firth, technology editor

It's already been used to make giant shadow puppets, light sabres and give people robotic alter-egos, among a host of other applications.

Now a group of students at the University of Washington are using a hack of Microsoft's Kinect controller to help give robotic surgeons a greater sense of touch when they are performing operations. It's like a giant, high-tech version of the classic 1980s game Operation, in fact.

While robot-assisted surgery is far from new, what robots lack is the ability to tell their human counterparts when they have grazed a vein or are scratching bones. The team have changed all that by hacking the Kinect and combined it with gaming force-feedback - or haptic - technology to create a 3D model of a human body which tells them when they might be too close to a vital organ.

The code written for the Kinect lets it react to incursions by the robotic surgeon's scalpel into restricted areas of the body and sends information back to the joystick used to control the robot, stopping it from moving.

The Kinect's relatively poor resolution would need upgrading for the hack to work in real operations. Still, the university team say that a piece of hardware to do the same job would normally have cost as much as $50,000. By contrast, the Kinect costs a scant $150, so it could be modified extensively to get it ready for surgery while remaining a comparative bargain.

Michael Marshall, reporter

The economic jungle: How ecologists could save banking

Banks behave much like ecosystems - with similar risk of collapse. Change those risks and we could stave off another crisis

Slime moulds bet the farm on survival

Some slime moulds sow bacterial "seeds" when they reach a new environment to boost their growth rates

First silicon entanglement will aid quantum computing

The state of entanglement has been created in silico for the first time. The feat could lead to quantum computers made like ordinary computer chips

Faecal transplant eases symptoms of Parkinson's

Diabetes and even obesity, as well as Parkinson's disease, might be cured just by replacing the bacteria in your gut

Imagine that: Images of nature shaping science

A new gallery highlights the critical role images have played throughout the history of science

Chameleon tanks blend into background

New cloaking technologies could make a tank "disappear", "sweat" or even look like a cow

Zoologger: Well-fed black widows promise safe sex

Half-eaten food strewn all over the place? Bulbous female? Game on, thinks the male black widow spider

Pharaonic forensics: What killed Tutankhamun?

Broken bones, explosive embalming and a missing heart: the mysterious death of Egypt's boy king is the ultimate cold case - and it's far from closed

Antibody transplant: last resort for swine flu

Transferring blood plasma from recovering swine flu patients to the severely ill could save their lives

Mini robot helicopters build towers, pyramids or walls

Watch tiny flying robots controlled by algorithms construct any cubic structure on their own

Stormy words over NASA's rocket deadline

NASA claims it can't meet Congressional demands to produce a hefty rocket by 2016, while a report points out budget waste

MMR scandal: Was there a cover-up?

Journalist Brian Deer has stuck the knife in one last time in the third and final of his investigatory papers

Are yellow-loving sharks colour-blind?

There's good evidence that sharks prefer to attack yellow targets - but a new study suggests they do so despite being colour-blind.

Crabs with abs force their neighbours to swap homes

Pity the hermit who has strong and jealous neighbours - see how strong crabs force weaker ones to swap shells

Gulf oil spill: From news to epic art photography

The Gulf oil spill was big news in 2010; now in 2011 it's making big prints for fine art photographer Edward Burtynsky

Infectious moods: The happiness injection

Down in the dumps? A shot of friendly bacteria could give you the boost you need

Hottest planet is hotter than some stars

A newly confirmed planet is a scorching 3200 °C - its proximity to its host star is only partly to blame

Bear trouble? There's a Taser for that...

Taser has introduced a new weapon designed to incapacitate bears and other large animals. Can this possibly be a good thing?

Movie cigarettes make smokers mentally 'light up'

Exposure to smoking on screen may make it harder for smokers to quit, brain scans show

Catherine de Lange, reporter

(Image: Paul Grover/Rex Features)

Since this article was first posted on 6 January, Brian Deer has stuck the knife in one last time in the third and final of his investigatory papers. Today he channels his criticism at the role The Lancet and the medical community played in what he claims was an apparent cover-up of the flaws in the original research paper.

Deer says that if the case had not eventually been brought to the General Medical Council "the fraud by which Wakefield concocted fear of MMR would forever have been denied and covered up".

The Lancet has issued a statement in reply. The journal stands by its decisions and says that by retracting the names of 10 of the 13 authors of the paper in 2004, and by the full retraction of the paper after the GMC hearing, it was acting according to the evidence it had at the time. It doesn't address the specific examples that Deer highlights in his article - in particular the findings that the research wasn't ethically approved. It ends by stating that "we all have a shared responsibility" towards maximising the opportunities that vaccines will provide in the future.

Andrew Wakefield has been called many things since publishing his paper linking the MMR vaccine and autism in 1998. Now, he can add "'fraud" to the list, as BMJ this week publishes a series of papers claiming that the work was not only misleading, but also fraudulent.

In his BMJ blog post, the journalist responsible for investigating Wakefield's claims - The Sunday Times's Brian Deer - goes as far as to say the research, which "triggered a decade-long health scare" was a "fix". Deer compared it to the "Piltdown Man", a famous scientific hoax in which archaeologist Charles Dawson combined the jaw of an orang-utan with the skull of a modern man, claiming it to be the fossilised remains of early man.

Wendy Zukerman, Asia-Pacific reporter

A new study suggests sharks may be colour-blind - despite decades-old evidence that they are attracted to yellow.

According to US navy reports from the 1970s, "a standard yellow life vest occupied by a child dummy was repeatedly attacked at the surface by blue sharks, Prionace glauca. Strikes on a red infant flotation device were few, while a similar black flotation device suffered only two strikes."

Monochrome attack (Image: Masa Ushioda/SplashdownDirect/Rex Features)

The finding prompted the "yum, yum, yellow" slogan, which eventually attracted the attention of TV's MythBusters. Their tests found "plausible" evidence that the US navy's advice is sound.

But Nathan Scott Hart at the University of Western Australia in Crawley and colleagues have now found that sharks possess only one type of cone cell - the cells within the eye responsible for colour vision - and are unlikely to be able to perceive a multicolour world.

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent

(Image: Bob Hallinen/Anchorage Daily News/MCT via Getty Images)

Taser International, the Arizona based stungun maker, today launched a novel version of its often controversial nonlethal weapon: but it's one geared for felling wild animals like grizzly bears, rather than police suspects or airport detainees.

The purpose of the device is to give park rangers, hunters and hikers the ability to disable bears, elk and moose that harry their camp sites - perhaps giving them time to get to the safety of a car or trail lodge. As the weapon has been made waterproof (and even saltwater proof) even fishermen in the wilds will have the chance to fell a bear, too.

Taser says that it designed the weapon - the Taser Wildlife Electronic Control Device (ECD) - in response to reports from wildlife managers who have often turned to regular tasers in extremis to cope with certain situations. The weapon is a variant of the firm's three-shot semi-automatic pistol but with its voltage waveform modified to knock out large creatures.

"It is designed to incapacitate larger animals more effectively and safer than current animal control tools," says Rick Smith, CEO. "It will help wildlife professionals protect wildlife by offering another tool to help resolve human-animal conflicts."

Taser cites a number of newspaper stories in which people had to use regular tasers to subdue animals. Some rehearse the animal rights arguments against such use. The targets animals varied from elk to moose, deer and grizzlies.

This would be laughable if it wasn't so obviously cruel. Taser has a point - a very small one - in that some bears' lives might be saved if fishermen and other adventurers in grizzly country replace the firearms they sometimes use to defend themselves from attack with Tasers.

But research about bears shows that they are rarely aggressive, and most dangerous encounters are the avoidable result of human stupidity or bears' desperation, rather than rogue animals inured to humans.

As for other animals - like bison - there's plenty of visual evidence that it's the people who are the instigators, not the animals.

My worry? That this weapon, despite its high (almost $2000) price tag, could encourage a new breed of ugly, empty-headed tourist behaviour: will people approach animals they should keep away from knowing that if they have an animal-felling Taser they can get away with it?

Given the way regular Tasers have been misused - with their use sometimes a first resort and then being used to deliver repeated stun shocks to boot - it's hard to see how this hardware could encourage a better relationship between people and animals.

Eradication from above

Rodents can threaten island ecosystems. In the Galapagos Islands, rangers are releasing poison bait from helicopters to try and eradicate the pests

Winging it: NASA's aviation vision

Wraparound winglets and decibel-dashing deltas feature in NASA's vision of next-generation aircraft

Chinese megacities foster unlikely green citizens

A survey shows that, in China, the urban elite is most likely to get environmental gold stars

Road train technology can drive your car for you

Linking cars together into long, wirelessly controlled "trains" could make driving safer and cut fuel and carbon emissions

The medicine maker: I never thought my work could harm

David Nichols describes his shock at discovering his research had been exploited to make "legal highs" - with potentially lethal consequences

What's wrong with Steve Jobs, and will Apple suffer?

Steve Jobs's sick leave has generated the sort of news coverage normally reserved for a member of the first family - so what's wrong with him?

Become a virtual film-maker

A new device lets you explore virtual worlds and film your own scenes in 3D environments

The internet's dark heart

The Offensive Internet, a collection of powerful academic essays, weighs the case that the internet offends as much as it empowers

Competition finds next generation of cybersleuths

A British competition to find the next generation of cybersecurity experts is showing that amateurs can often spot the clues that professionals miss

Rise of the robot astronomers

Long nights spent peering into the cosmos are over, for humans at least. Artificial intelligence will take charge of the planet's greatest telescopes

Laser-controlled worms lay eggs on cue

See how genetic engineering and laser optics combine in an unusual experiment to control a worm in real time

Infectious moods: Bugs that cause bizarre behaviour

Sometimes it takes antibiotics, not a psychologist, to cure strange obsessions

Plagues of lemmings driven by winter breeding

Lemming outbreaks are caused by the rodents' ability to breed throughout the long Arctic winters

The genetic basis of friendship networks

Friends are unusually alike in certain genes, suggesting that it's not just reproductive partner choice that is influenced by genetics

Djuke Veldhuis, reporter


(Image: AP Photos/Dolores Ochoa)

Often arriving as stowaways on ships, rodents are one of the single greatest threats to island ecosystems. With no natural predators, they wreak havoc on local species, particularly ground-nesting birds' eggs and chicks, and small mammals.
 
The Galapagos Islands are no exception. The Galapagos National Park hopes to completely eradicate rats and has succeeded in doing so on several islands by using poisoned bait. This week the work continues, with helicopters releasing rat bait across Rabida Island and others.
 
There are limitations to this method on islands home to the Galapagos hawk (Buteo galapagoensis), however. This native bird currently resides on four of the islands being treated, and counts rats among its prey. If poison entered this endangered species' food chain, it could be catastrophic. So a new project is under way to take the hawks into temporary captivity while the poisoned bait does its job.

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent

(Image: NASA)

Because it mainly talks about outer space, you could be forgiven for not knowing that the first 'A' in NASA actually stands for aeronautics - giving the National Aeronautics and Space Administration a role in shaping the future of American aviation. And in future, as we all know, aircraft are going to have to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, burn less fuel and lessen the noise nuisance to people who live near airports. So since October 2008, engineers at NASA's Fundamental Aeronautics Program in Langley, Virginia, have been considering ideas from industry and academia on how aircraft might offer these capabilities.

The NASA team has now given three firms the go-ahead to develop their ideas further. Stealth fighter maker Lockheed Martin's idea - above - is easily the most radical. It proposes a jetliner with two engines slung beneath a horizontal stabiliser formed from hyper-extended "winglets" that extend over the top of the plane. Winglets prevent eddy current drag at the wing tips wasting fuel - and this design seems to take that concept to the max. 

(Note: my earlier assumption that there was just one engine visible in the Lockheed Martin design stands corrected - thanks to all who pointed it out.)  

Andy Coghlan, reporter

(Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty)

Steve Jobs's sick leave has generated the sort of news coverage normally reserved for a member of the first family. The speculation is of two types: what might be wrong with him, and the implications for Apple.

Most likely, as explained in the San Jose Mercury News is one of two possible outcomes: first, as backed by ABC News, that a rare form of pancreatic cancer diagnosed and successfully treated in 2004 has returned; second, as articulated by the San Francisco Chronicle, that his body is rejecting the liver transplant he received in 2009.

Beyond that, there are numerous other possibilities relating both to the original cancer and to likely complications of the transplant, each with its own implications for his future health.

Cyberwar countermeasures a waste of money, says report

The dangers of a cyber-attack are being overhyped, says the writer of the Hacker's Handbook

Beware the seductions of sociable machines

Our lives have become bold technological experiments, but we need to think hard before letting the computers and robots take over, says Sherry Turkle

Casting a critical eye on climate models

Today's climate models are more sophisticated than ever - but they're still limited by our knowledge of the Earth. So how well do they really work?

Infectious moods: How bugs control your mind

The brain is supposed to be isolated from the immune system - but now it seems that happiness, depression and even mental illness really can be catching

Explosive death for MRSA

A new antibody that causes MRSA to explode when it tries to divide raises universal vaccine hopes

Djuke Veldhuis, reporter



(Image: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA/Rex Features)

Water is the order of the day as passengers wait for trains in a flooded station in São Paulo, Brazil. On Wednesday heavy rain in Brazil triggered floods and devastating mudslides which have already claimed the lives of over 500 people.  On the same day flood waters in Brisbane reached a 4.46-metre peak as the Australian state of Queensland struggles with the effects of La Niña.

Should we wean babies off breast milk before 6 months?

New advice suggests babies fed only on breast milk for six months may be at higher risk of a variety of ills, such as anaemia and obesity

Amazon servers used to crack Wi-Fi passwords

Roth took advantage of Amazon's new servers to crack his neighbour's network in 20 minutes

South Sudan's votes could kill an ancient disease

More is riding on this week's south Sudan referendum than peace in the area - eradication of guinea worm is tantalisingly within reach

Engineered chickens can't pass on flu

A genetically modified chicken that can carry bird flu without infecting others could make bird vaccination obsolete - if people will eat its meat

Feedback: Can this cable turn water into wine?

What a $10,000 digital audio cable can do for you, signposts with a dilemma, the advantages of homeopathic education, and more

Female crickets fall for serenades of younger males

The songs of older males almost always fall on deaf insect ears when they have young rivals

Brainstorm in a teacup

Catherine de Lange finds subtlety and science in an exhibition that some critics describe as gratuitous and controversial

Vacuum of space no match for the mighty radish

Radish, lettuce and wheat plants can survive for at least half an hour in a near vacuum, showing a resilience known in only a few other forms of life

Blood test accurately predicts Down's syndrome

Can a simple blood test eliminate the need for risky invasive testing?

Internet archaeology: Dig into Wikipedia's deep past

Wikipedia turns 10 tomorrow and the site's first edits have just been uncovered. Dive in and see what you can find

Crystal sieves could make oil sands greener

Naturally occurring crystals could help scrub greenhouse gases from fossil fuels

Prion disease can spread through air

Mice exposed to aerosols of prion-infected brain tissue developed the disease scrapie

New dinosaur adds to the mystery of Triassic Park

The Triassic dinosaurs of Argentina were more diverse and abundant than we thought - so why did they take 30 million years to rise to dominance?

Fall of Roman Empire linked to wild shifts in climate

Tree rings tell the history of the rise and fall of European civilisations for 2500 years

Andy Coghlan, reporter

Jacob Aron, contributor

Security expert Thomas Roth has used Amazon's EC2 cloud computing service to break the Wi-Fi protected access (WPA) encryption method often used to store Wi-Fi passwords. Roth took advantage of Amazon's new graphics processing unit (GPU) clusters to crack his neighbour's network in 20 minutes, and now says an updated version of his software could do the job in 6.

WPA stores passwords using an algorithm known as SHA-1, which has already been shown to be insecure, but Roth didn't actually exploit this kind of insecurity. Instead, he brute-forced the algorithm by running through around 400,000 passwords per second in an attempt to find the correct password - and he plans to increase the speed to 1 million passwords per second.

Roth says that GPUs are hundreds of times faster than standard quad-core central processing units (CPUs) when it comes to cracking SHA-1, and Amazon provides a cluster of these processors for $2.10 per hour, allowing Roth to break into a Wi-Fi network for a theoretical cost of just 21 cents per password - though the cost is likely to be higher as Amazon charges per complete hour. He plans to release the tool he used at the Black Hat hacker conference in Washington DC next week.

Wendy Zukerman, Asia-Pacific reporter

The flood gates have opened in various countries across the world - but is La Niña to blame for it all?

While Queensland reels from the worst floods to affect the state in decades, recent rains have been causing havoc elsewhere.

Non-stop rain in Brazil since the New Year left many areas in the region cut off by floods and landslides this week. At the last count, the BBC reported over 500 fatalities. The BBC's Rafael Spuldar in Teresopolis, Brazil, writes: "There is mud everywhere - some of it more than 3 metres high. Cars are destroyed and turned upside down, from small sports cars to big trucks."

And in the Philippines heavy rains over two weeks in late December and January caused floods and landslides through about a third of the country's 80 provinces, reported Reuters. There are 42 confirmed dead, most of whom either drowned or were buried by mudslides.

Djuke Veldhuis, reporter

A simple blood test for Down's syndrome could provide an alternative to invasive testing in pregnant women.

Over 700 women from Hong Kong, the UK and the Netherlands at risk of having a fetus with Down's underwent the new screening procedure. Researchers successfully detected Down's in all 86 confirmed cases. The researchers believe 98 per cent of invasive diagnostic procedures could be avoided.

Jim Giles, consultant

Wikipedia turns 10 on 15 January. It's been an extraordinary decade for the site: an experimental approach to content generation has evolved, in the face of some fairly vitriolic early criticism, into a site with 17 million articles in 27 languages that is consulted by 400 million people a month. Not bad for project that, as one of its own editors wrote, "only works in practice. In theory, it's a total disaster."

Anniversaries are good time to dig out those embarrassing baby photos. In the case of Wikipedia, the photos and records of the first edits to the site were long considered lost. But late last year a staff member at the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees the site, stumbled across some back up copies.

The records are tricky to search, as they are only available as an alphabetical list of entries. To get started, here are some of the more illuminating (or insulting) edits that I came across:

Brisbane's history of flooding

This is not the first time that the city of Brisbane has been affected by floods, as historic maps reveal

Is first life-friendly exo-planet an 'eyeball'?

One way that Gliese 581 g could host life is if it is a frozen world with a single, pupil-like ocean of liquid water

Can DNA reveal invasive aliens?

Environmental DNA evidence is being rolled out on a grand scale in the US to track invasive species, but the nation's legal system is lagging

Google unveils Conversation Mode for Translate app

English-speaking Android owners can now converse in Spanish thanks to a new version of Google's Translate app

Online game helps predict how RNA folds

EteRNA has already attracted the brain power of 5000 players, who aim to design useful synthetic molecules

China makes 96 arrests over toxic milk scandal

China has detained 96 people suspected of lacing milk with melamine to increase protein content and price - a similar scam killed six in 2008

Irrationality vs vaccines: Fighting for reality

Three books investigate how so many people have become so dangerously irrational about vaccines - part of a general confusion between fact and belief

Sex and space travel don't mix

Pregnant women and their fetuses are not severely affected by air travel - but the same may not be true for space travel

24 hour play-time: Get ready for the game of your life

A new revolution is under way, and it's about to make life a lot more fun

Elevate yourself to become more virtuous

Positioning people at elevated heights can make them more compassionate, helpful, co-operative and charitable

Neanderthals' ugly faces weren't adaptations to cold

Scans of the skulls of Neanderthals suggest the shape of their faces didn't evolve to warm inhaled air

Queensland flood waters threaten Great Barrier Reef

The Queensland floods peaked today around Brisbane, leaving a trail of destruction. The environmental damage continues as they head seawards

Vaccine fridge keeps its cool during 10-day power cut

A phase-changing material can keep a steady cool temperature for up to 10 days with no need for batteries

Video goggles capture what you see

Extreme sports goggles with a built-in high definition camera can film your experience on the slopes or even underwater

Djuke Veldhuis, contributor

Brisbane is no stranger to flooding. As the maps below show, there's a grim inevitability to the floods occurring in the Australian city this week - but a review of dam capacity suggests that the flood risk might lessen in future.

In February 1893 the Brisbane river burst its banks because of a deluge caused by a tropical cyclone. Over the space of eight days, over 2 metres of rain fell on the city. Around a dozen people lost their lives, while hundreds of houses and the Victoria Bridge swept away. At 8.3 metres, the 1893 flood waters' peak (see map below) was almost double that of this week's flood.

(Image: Survey Office)

Jacob Aron, contributor

The universal translator is here - if you don't mind huddling around your phone to carry on the conversation.

English-speaking Android owners can now converse in Spanish thanks to a new version of Google's Translate app. The experimental Conversation Mode, currently only in "alpha" testing, analyses English speech and reads out a computerised Spanish translation. Native Spanish speakers can then respond in their own language and have it converted back in to English.

Andy Coghlan, reporter

Wendy Zukerman, Asia-Pacific reporter

(Image: Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty)

Flood waters in Brisbane reached a 4.46-metre peak at 5.30 am local time today - lower than the 5.2-metre peak predicted earlier this week. By noon, the Bureau of Meteorology reported that the Brisbane river was at 3.91 metres and steady.

But with an offshore cyclone now forecast, Reuters reports that further floods are feared - and Brisbane already faces a clean-up operation that may last for months, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

As things stand, 15 people are now confirmed dead, and a further 61 people remain missing, reports Australia's Broadcasting Corporation. The environmental implications of the floods are also likely to be profound.

The sundogs of Stockholm

Parhelia, also known as sundogs, are extra images of the sun created by falling ice crystals in the Earth's atmosphere

Glasses-free 3D TV tries to broaden out its appeal

Look forward to "autostereoscopic" displays, which aim separate images at the viewer's right and left eye, with no need for special glasses

Zoologger: The butterfly that sleeps its way to safety

Faced with an onslaught of parasitic wasps, the large white butterfly goes into suspended animation

Pandas like to live around old trees

If China wants to save its remaining pandas, it should preserve old-growth forests. Their large trees may provide suitable dens for nursing mothers

Pi's nemesis: Mathematics is better with tau

It's time to kill off pi, says physicist Michael Hartl, who believes that an alternative mathematical constant will do its job better

Spinning cosmic dust motes set speed record

The mind-boggling measurements should lead to a more accurate map of the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the big bang

How icicles get their myriad shapes

A video of growing icicles reveals why these structures develop ripples or multiple tips

Fledgling space firm will use old Soviet gear

Excalibur Almaz plans to use decades-old space modules to support researchers and tourists it wants to ferry into space

Game on: When work becomes play

The realms of space invaders and spreadsheets are merging: are you ready to play your entire life as a game?

We can feed 9 billion people in 2050

Future humans need not starve in order to preserve the environment, according to a major report on sustainability

Housing 9 billion won't take techno-magic

Humanity already has at its disposal all the tools needed to make room for 9 billion people without killing the planet

Foxes zero in on prey via Earth's magnetic field

This makes them the first animal thought to use the field to judge distance rather than direction

Most detailed image of night sky unveiled

Millions of images taken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey since 1998 have been stitched together into a detailed mosaic covering a third of the sky

Hanny's ghostly green blob

In a new image of Hanny's Voorwerp, it looks like a green blob is stretching out to engulf the Milky Way. The real story is almost as interesting

Djuke Veldhuis, reporter


(Image: Peter Rosén)

These parhelia, also known as sundogs, are extra images of the sun created by falling ice crystals in the Earth's atmosphere. Captured last year in Stockholm, Sweden, the mock suns appear as patches of light about 22 degrees to the left and right of the actual sun. Most prominent when the sun is low, sundogs are visible all over the world and tend to form in high and cold cirrus clouds. They are caused by light shining through ice crystals, which act like millions of miniature lenses. 

Michael Marshall, environment reporter

If China wants to save its remaining pandas, it should preserve old-growth forests. A major study covering 70 per cent of their range shows they prefer old trees, perhaps because they contain large cavities that can be used as maternity dens.

Giant pandas are famously endangered, with no more than 3000 individuals left in the wild, all of them in China.

Between 1999 and 2003, the Chinese State Forestry Administration carried out a detailed survey of the bears' habitats. Fuwen Wei of the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing and colleagues have now been through the mass of data that was collected, to find out what their favourite haunts are (Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2010.1081). It seems the picky giants don't like new-build homes.

Jessica Griggs, careers editor
(Image: NASA, ESA, W. Keel (University of Alabama) and the Galaxy Zoo Team)

Niall Firth, technology editor

The long wait is finally over. Apple's iPhone 4 is to be made available on the US Verizon network, it was announced today.

The move ends AT&T's exclusive deal with the smartphone and gives US buyers a choice for the first time since the smartphone was launched in 2007.

The iPhone 4 will become available to buy on the network on February 10th and will be priced between be $199.99 for the 16GB model and $299.99 for the 32GB model with a two-year contract.

Some analysts believe the move will help slow down the encroachment of Google's Android operating system on Apple's market share.  AT&T did its best to dampen the excitement surrounding the announcement by suggesting that Verizon's network would not be able to match it for speed.

Niall Firth, technology editor

Oh dear, just what the US authorities didn't want: a group of pesky European politicians poking their noses into the ongoing investigation surrounding Wikileaks.

A powerful group of Euro-MPs have demanded "clarification" over the US demand for information from Twitter about WikiLeaks figures such as Julian Assange. The move is just another addition to the already febrile atmosphere surrounding the whistleblowing website.

On Friday, US investigators had a court document approved which called for Twitter to hand over details of WikiLeaks' account. Assange has said he believes that other firms such as Facebook and Google have already been ordered to hand over information on his organisation.

The subpoena has proved controversial, not least because many believe that the investigators are merely "fishing" for information that might incriminate Assange and his colleagues.

Colin Barras, environment and life sciences news editor

(Image: Tom Hauck/Getty)

It might or might not be one of the greatest upsets in NFL history, but one thing is beyond doubt: Marshawn Lynch's heroic 67-yard touchdown that snatched an unlikely victory for Seattle Seahawks against New Orleans Saints moved the Earth - literally.

John Vidale at the University of Washington in Seattle is director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network - a collection of seismograph stations in Washington and Oregon used to monitor the Cascadia subduction zone. He's also one of the unlucky Seahawks fans who missed this week's game. But when Vidale caught up with the game highlights online, he saw something unusual.

Niall Firth, technology editor

(Image: Google)

You could say it rather defeats the game's purpose.

But Google has unveiled a new version of its Goggles app that it says can solve any Sudoku puzzles just by snapping a picture of it. The internet giant has produced a short video which it has posted on its blog and YouTube which shows how the puzzle-solving application works.

The firm sent one of its software engineers, simply equipped with a Google Nexus S smartphone, to take on 2009 Sudoku champion Tammy McLeod. Even with a decent headstart, the human competitor was well and truly trounced by the Sudoku novice equipped with the app.

The user simply takes a photo of the puzzle with the smartphone's camera and text recognition software recognises the numbers and works out the answer within seconds, before filling in the grid's squares. Unsurprisingly, Google Goggles is banned from Sudoku competitions.

Wendy Zukerman, Asia-Pacific reporter

A 9-year-old boy in Japan has uncovered the tooth of an armoured dinosaur from the early Cretaceous period, the oldest such tooth discovered in the country.

The Mainichi Daily News reports that the tooth belonged to a herbivorous dinosaur that chewed the cud approximately 110 million years ago.

Surprisingly, the excavated tooth is not much bigger than an adult's - 5.7 millimetres long, 3.7 millimetres wide and 2 millimetres thick. It went on display at the Museum of Nature and Human Activities this week.

According to the Mainichi, the tooth's jaggy rims and worn tip suggest it fell from the dinosaur while it was still alive.

Maggie McKee, physical sciences news editor

And then there was one. The ageing Tevatron collider will bow out of the race to find the elusive Higgs particle, thought to endow other particles with mass, later this year, leaving the task to its rival, the Large Hadron Collider.

The Tevatron, based at Fermilab near Chicago, Illinois, was set to shut down in September 2011. But last year, a panel that advises the US government on physics matters recommended extending (pdf) the Tevatron's operations by three years, to 2014, if additional funds could be added to the budget for high-energy physics.

Now, the US Department of Energy, which funds Fermilab, says no such funding is forthcoming. "Unfortunately, the current budgetary climate is very challenging," writes William F Brinkman, director of the DOE's Office of Science in a letter (pdf) to the advisory panel.

Djuke Veldhuis, reporter

(Image: Luke Marsden/Newspix/Rex Features)

Over 100 baby bats riddled with maggots and fly eggs have been found scratching for survival on the Gold Coast, Australia. The bats left their perches to feed and were then unable to fly back up.

"They're coming down to feed on the ground. That makes them vulnerable. It's not a natural occurrence and shows there is trouble in the environment," says Trish Wimberley, director of the Australian Bat Clinic and Wildlife Trauma Centre, which is caring for the four week old orphans.

"Bats are a barometer to what is going on in the environment. They're our canaries down the coal mine," she adds.

The survivors are being bottle fed and will be kept hanging on clothes lines until they are ready to fly again in approximately four weeks time.

 

Peter Nowak, contributor, Las Vegas

(Image: Peter Nowak)

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas saw the introduction of several new nifty home robots, but whether they will actually see the inside of anyone's house is still a big question.

The nascent market is being hampered by several converging factors. On one hand, small firms are being held back by a lack of manufacturing capability. On the other, big companies are not entirely willing to take risks on untested products.

DreamBots, a tiny Israel-based company, was at CES showing off its prototype Whee-Me, billed as the world's first massage robot. The small, car-like device drives around on the user's back, massaging with its silicon wheels as it goes. Sensors tell the robot when it is starting to travel down an incline and therefore in danger of falling off, whereupon it reverses course back to safety.

The company was at the trade show looking for a manufacturing deal, which will ultimately decide whether the Whee-Me lives or dies - a fact of life for many robotics firms.

"Without manufacturing, small companies usually die off," says chief operating officer Nevo Alva. "It's unfortunate, but true."

Big companies such as LG, however, are starting to dabble in home robots. The South Korean company announced the HomeBot vacuum cleaner at the show, following the success of iRobot's market-leading Roomba. The HomeBot is similar to the Roomba but rather than simply cleaning a floor randomly, it maps out and remembers rooms in the home.

The HomeBot also has Wi-Fi, a camera and an associated Android app, which lets it double as a home security robot as the user controls it remotely from a smart phone.

For the big guys, getting their robots to market isn't a problem, but figuring out whether they're worth their often high cost is.

The solution, according to LG spokesperson Frank Lee, isn't necessarily simple. The electronics industry as a whole needs to figure out how to be more adaptable and nimble before some of the more interesting robotics prototypes make it into the home.

"Market forces are part of it but the industry has to change itself and redefine itself to allow new entrants to come in," he says.

Peter Nowak, contributor, Las Vegas

(Image: Peter Nowak)

Aside from tablets and internet-connected televisions, the other technology grabbing headlines at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is 4G wireless.

U.S. cellphone providers and handset makers alike are touting super-fast fourth-generation networks that can support the sexiest new handsets announced at CES, such as the Motorola Atrix 4G and HTC Thunderbolt 4G.

So should non-Americans feel bad about the apparently-outdated 3G phones they're using? Not exactly.

"It's really three-and-a-half G," says Kevin Restivo, senior mobility analyst for research firm IDC. "4G is a term being used to get people excited about these wider wireless highways they're building."

While the jump from second-generation wireless services to 3G, a process that took place in many developed countries over the past decade, was a significant shift in network and handset technology, the move to what's being called 4G is considerably less dramatic. Ultimately, it's about faster 3G.

Wireless carriers in other countries have the same networks as U.S companies such as AT&T and Verizon, yet they don't call them 4G. In Canada, for example, Bell and Telus jointly launched a new super-fast network in late 2009, a time when 4G wasn't yet a fashionable term.

"If [they were launching the network] today and they were to imitate their American counterparts, they'd be marketing it as a 4G network," Restivo says.

Handset makers, however, suggest it's more than just a marketing term. The realization of what 4G is will happen once the new uses enabled by faster speeds start to materialize.

"That's where you'll see people expect to do things like streaming video no matter where they are," says Tyler Lessard, vice-president of global alliances and developer relations for BlackBerry maker Research In Motion, which announced a 4G-enabled PlayBook tablet for U.S. carrier Sprint at CES. "The reality is today, not a lot of the market is consuming those kinds of services."

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent

It's too early to tell if the face of computer software distribution changed this week, but the signs after day one suggest that it did - bigtime. Apple, the Cupertino, California based computer and cellphone designer is claiming that on 6 January - the first day it's Mac App Store was open - a million people checked in to download some software.

If true, that is an astonishing start. Techsite Ars Technica says: "Despite its flaws, the Mac App Store is undoubtedly going to become the go-to place for most average Mac users." So  there'll be no more dashing to Currys Digital, Best Buy or even the Apple Store for your dose of shrink-wrapped Mac code in future.  

This will doubtless horrify opponents of the closed, moderated environment popularised by the iPhone appstore. In books like The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It, internet pundits like Jonathan Zittrain bemoan the stifling of innovation such closed software distribution models present. You can see why: in recent weeks Apple ditched a Wikileaks reader app from its iPhone appstore - and last year deleted a bunch of erotic ebooks and apps, too.

There's no reason the Great and Powerful Apple couldn't make the Mac App Store a walled garden too. But on the upside, people should get a malware-free software shopping environment that saves them the hassle of visiting a great many other software pay-to-download sites - with all the risk of spoof sites stealing your credit card details that that entails.  

What is less astonishing than the first-day-download-tally, perhaps, is that some people are already trying to game the system. Gizmodo says a hacking group called Hackulous is waiting on unleashing a way to copy Mac App Store software for free - bizarrely because it doesn't want to upset early Mac App Store developers. Hmm. And another pirating hack, involving Twitter-for-Mac, is linked to here.

And what of Windows? Because running Windows on a Mac is easy, some (that'll be me) may have been be expecting to be able to buy Windows apps at the Mac App Store - a notion bolstered by Steve Jobs a few weeks back when he said: "The App Store revolutionised mobile apps. We hope to do the same for PC apps with the Mac App Store by making finding and buying PC apps easy and fun." 

But an Apple spokesman just confirmed to me that is not the case. "Steve was referring to personal computing apps, not Windows Apps," he says. Little p, little c.

Darn.

 

Celeste Biever, physical sciences news editor


(Image: NASA Goddard/SDO/AIA)

What makes the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, conspicuously hotter than the star's surface? The answer may be newly-discovered jets of plasma that burst, fountain-like, up from the sun's surface at speeds of up to 100 kilometres per second.

Debora MacKenzie, contributor

Scientists tend to feel they are singled out for more woe than most in the job stakes. But are they justified in their moaning?

A California-based job-search company called CareerCast has for several years compiled a ranking of jobs according to a desirability measure that goes well beyond income. For each type of job CareerCast figures in rankings of stress, physical demands, hazardous or unpleasant working environments, whether there's a lot of jobs going, and likelihood of pay increases, as well as salary.

And surprise, scientists and engineers come out looking rather good. 

Peter Nowak, contributor, Las Vegas

The last time I went into the kitchen to fetch a midnight snack, I couldn't help but look at my refrigerator wistfully and think, "If only I could send tweets from you."

Fortunately, Samsung has got me and the millions of other late-night snackers/Twitterers who are surely out there covered. At this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the
South Korean company introduced a fridge equipped with speakers, a touch-screen and wi-fi, which means downloadable apps - including Twitter - are at the ready.



(Image: Peter Nowak)

All kidding aside, why would anybody in their right mind want to tweet from their refrigerator?
"It's for sharing recipes," said Samsung spokesperson Adam Lee.

Uh huh, sure. It's a safe bet this is one app that will get little use and will ultimately find itself under the heading of "bad convergence ideas," right up there with television-equipped refrigerators from LG.

Shaoni Bhattacharya, consultant

Peter Nowak, contributor, Las Vegas

(Image:Peter Nowak)

Of all the companies pushing 3D, none is more heavily invested than Sony. After all, the company doesn't just make the stuff that shows it - televisions, Blu-ray players and video game consoles - it also actually makes the stuff that's shown, through its television and movie arms. Sony is thus alone in purveying 3D on all levels: production, distribution and display.

Understandably, 3D dominated the company's press conference on Wednesday at the Consumer Electronics Show. As well as the usual televisions and Blu-ray players, Sony is putting the technology into virtually all of its new products, including laptops, camcorders and even Bloggie mini-cameras.

But Sony and its rivals have acknowledged that the current generation of 3D is only a stop-gap until the technology everyone really wants - 3D without the glasses - finally arrives.

Niall Firth, technology editor

Whether it's red tilapia dying en masse in Thailand or thousands of blackbirds dropping out of the sky over Arkansas it might seem like the entire natural world has given up the ghost. Now this startling new map shows every instance of falling birds and dying fish across the globe over the past few weeks.



(Image: 2011 Google/NASA)

Created by an anonymous user and posted on the aggregator website Digg, each pin represents a mention in the media of an instance of a large number of animals dying suddenly.

The map shows that most deaths have taken place in a cluster across the US east coast and a smattering around the UK.

Catherine de Lange, reporter

(Image: Irene Miguel-Aliaga)

Insect poo is possibly the last thing pregnant women have on their minds, but a closer look at fly faeces is helping to explain pregnancy-related bloating in people.

The fruit fly gut (shown above in red) is equipped with a nervous system that is a simplified version of our own. Irene Miguel-Aliega and colleagues at the University of Cambridge used genetic manipulation to switch fly gut nerve cells (shown in green) on or off - and examined the flies' faeces to see how metabolism was affected.

This analysis revealed that proteins released during reproduction (highlighted in blue) are responsible for bloating in pregnant fruit flies. The proteins, which activate certain gut neurons, seemed to slow down digestion and cause water and nutrients to be retained (Cell Metabolism, DOI: 10.1016/j.cmet.2010.12.010). The researchers suspect that a similar mechanism is at work in pregnant women.

BT under fire over move against 'net neutrality'

Critics say this is the dawn of a "two-tier internet" in which richer firms can pay to have their content pushed through more quickly

Europe and North America brace for flu surge

Health agencies suggest people in risk groups, such as pregnant women, get vaccinated against seasonal flu

How to sort the dwarfs from the planets

A newly discovered dearth of cosmic objects at a particular range of masses could provide a clean way to divide planets and brown dwarfs

African vultures dying of poison

Livestock farmers who leave dead goats laced with a pesticide to kill hyenas and lions are inadvertently wiping out vultures

Cluster model shows how first cells could have divided

Biochemists have come up with model of a protocell which displays a rudimentary form of cell division, one of the key transitions in the history of life

Haiti to get cholera vaccination

The World Health Organization will start using vaccine in April to stem the epidemic in Haiti, although stocks are too low to provide for everyone

Getting medieval: The first firefights

Flame-throwing lances and fiery arrows: all in a day's work for a medieval armourer. But what was the secret of their inflammatory art?

California court allows police to search cellphones

A ruling by the state supreme court now allows police to search arrested suspects' cellphones without a warrant

Niall Firth, technology editor

It can be rather difficult to get excited about net neutrality, it's true. But amid the furious polemic from activists and the hard-nosed pragmatism of the big communications companies it is easy to lose sight of the fact that what is at stake is the way we access information on the internet.

In the UK, stones are being flung at telecoms giant BT after the launch of its new Content Connect feature, which will give internet service providers (ISPs) the chance to prioritise video from certain sources, such as YouTube, for an extra fee.

Joel Shurkin, contributor

That the law often lags behind technology by now is an axiom. It happened again this week when the California supreme court ruled that police can search through a suspect's cellphone without a warrant after the arrest. The court ruled that once arrested, defendants can expect to lose rights of privacy guaranteed by the US constitution.

The court, in a five-to-two decision, had to use 30-year-old precedent to decide the case. It ruled that "the police, having lawful custody of the individual, necessarily have the authority to search the arrestee's body and seize anything of importance they find there."

A man named Gregory Diaz was busted in Ventura County for a sale of ecstasy. Ninety minutes after the arrest, while Diaz was being questioned at the police station, a policeman searched his cell phone and found a message confirming the drug sale.

Justice Ming Chin wrote that under precedent going back to the 1970s, the US supreme court ruled that police could search anything a defendant was carrying when arrested, including cigarette packs and clothing without a warrant. The two dissenters said the police should have gone to a judge and convinced him or her they would probably find incriminating evidence just as they do in other circumstances.

Other courts, including one US federal judge and the Ohio supreme court have ruled the other way, reasoning that cellphones' immense data storage capabilities and their access to email and social networks means they should be granted more stringent privacy protection than a package of cigarettes. The conflicting rulings may ultimately land the issue in the US supreme court, as the law tries to drag itself into the 21st century.

Oxygen crash led to Cambrian mass extinction

A dramatic drop in the amount of oxygen in the seas caused a mass extinction 499 million years ago

UK forensics cuts: International justice will suffer

The decision to close the UK's main forensics laboratory will have worldwide ramifications, says Niels Morling

Make way for mathematical matter

Solids, liquids, gases, even Bose-Einstein condensates: so passé. A plethora of new forms of matter, designed by mathematicians, may soon come into view

Last chance to hold Greenland back from tipping point

New data and models show that Greenland's ice cap, the world's second largest, is on track to hit a point of no return in 2040

Apple service briefly suspended in Saudi Arabia

The battle between governments and the internet took another turn yesterday when Saudi Arabia appeared to block access to Apple's MobileMe service

Channel surfing gets the Kinect treatment

A gesture-based TV remote-control system could be good news for those tired of hunting for the channel changer

Zoologger: How to get elected in a termite democracy

If you want to become the king or queen termite, you need to get busy canvassing - and feed your fellows out of your anus

Mysteries of Lake Vostok on brink of discovery

For 14 million years, Antarctica's Lake Vostok has been sealed off, but now a Russian drill is nearing the surface

January 2011 photo competition: Renewal

This month, we want your pictures on the theme of rebirth, recycling and revival

Stem cells hold key to cure for baldness

Bald patches turn out to have a full quota of dormant hair stem cells - and the race is on to revive them

Apollo 13: Houston, we've had a problem

Forty years after NASA's ill-fated fifth moon mission, we tune in to the astronauts' conversations thanks to newly released transcripts

Jamaican 'ninja bird' used wings as nunchucks

A flightless ibis that lived in Jamaica until 10,000 years ago turned its hand bones into miniature baseball bats to defend its territory and probably its young

Hunters hunted: The revenge of robo-deer

Shooting out of season? Beware - your quarry may not be all that it seems, thanks to taxidermy with a touch of Terminator

CES: Thought-controlled iPad app gets in your head

Startup company InteraXon is set to debut an iPad app that let's you control onscreen events using only your thoughts.

Hollywood's 3D hangover

Excitement for 3D movies appears to be waning, as films shot in the high-tech format underperformed at the box office this past holiday season.

The solar system spins onto the iPad

A new app teaches you about the solar system through stunning images, 3D models and reams of encyclopedia-style entries.

Jeff Hecht, contributor



(Image: Nicholas Longrich/Yale University)

The wings of flightless birds usually shrink after they abandon flight. But a flightless ibis that lived on Jamaica until about 10,000 years ago turned its hand bones into miniature baseball bats to defend its territory and probably its young.

By avian standards, that is seriously weird. "No animal has ever evolved anything quite like this," says Nick Longrich, a Yale University researcher who describes it in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"We don't know of any other species that uses its body like a flail. It's the most specialised weaponry of any bird I've ever seen."

Peter Nowak, correspondent

(Image: Peter Nowak)

Touchscreens? So two years ago. Gesture recognition? How 2010. Everyone knows the future lies in thought-controlled interfaces.

At least that's what InteraXon, a tiny Toronto startup, is hoping to convince attendees of at this year's Consumer Electronics Show. The company, which made waves at the 2010 winter Olympics by allowing users in Vancouver to control the lights on the CN Tower in Toronto with mere thought, will be showing off two new applications for its mind-control technology at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

Jeff Hecht, correspondent

Just months ago, Hollywood was so exhilarated by 3D that some directors worried there might be no future for movies in old-fashioned 2D. But the box office figures are now in for 2010, and they are not pretty.

US cinema attendance last year was down 8.1 percent, and box office take in the 10 days to 26 December - a key holiday period - was down 30 percent, reports the Financial Times (free sub required).

Box-office income for the year was down only 2.6 percent, however, due to higher ticket prices, particularly for 3D blockbusters.

What happened? This year's series of heavily promoted 3D films didn't sustain the excitement created by "Avatar" - and its record box-office income. Instead, 3D is looking like a gimmick that doesn't pull US audiences back for more.

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent

(Image: Touch Press LLP)

Few iPad applications have demonstrated the astonishing learning potential of the touchscreen better than The Elements, a stunning touch-driven visualisation of the denizens of the periodic table. Choose any element and you can see gorgeous high res photos (or movies) of it and, thanks to the touchscreen, spin the picture any which way. Short of lab work, it makes science tactile in a whole new way.

Described by one website as "the app that's had many reviewers nearly swooning with giddy geek pleasure", The Elements has sold 160,000 copies to date. Now the publisher Touchpress has brought out a follow-up, Solar System for iPad, with which it's hoping to make a similarly deep impact.

Check out the video after the break...

Winning over the Republicans

Scientists need to understand the agenda of the new power in Congress and engage with it, says Peter Aldhous

Obama gives go-ahead to new food safety law

New law gives the FDA more power to inspect food producers but critics say changes will not make food safer

Partial eclipse robs northern Europe of sun

Northern Europeans don't see much of the sun in January, and this morning our star was obscured even more than normal

Shower of dead birds: apocalypse or accident?

A short sharp shower of blackbirds may have been caused by a fireworks display

Battle looms over US science funding

As Republicans take control of the US House of Representatives, science could take a hit - despite a Congressional measure to boost funding

Computer cities: From scrap to skyscraper

Artist Franco Recchia builds miniature metropolises out of junked computer parts

La Niña and monsoonal winds flood northern Australia

A strong La Niña and an active monsoonal trough are responsible for the devastating floods in Queensland

Near-death neurologist: Dreams on the border of life

Neurologist Kevin Nelson explains how the brain slips into a strange state of hybrid consciousness during a near-death experience

Weird warriors: The animal world's dirtiest fighters

From sea beasts that disembowel themselves to lizards that make knives out of their own broken bones, you don't want to mess with these kick-ass critters

Celeste Biever, physical sciences news editor

Northern Europeans don't see much of the sun in January, and this morning our star was obscured even more than normal. Thanks to a much-anticipated partial solar eclipse, it was reduced to a crescent.

The eclipse was visible in parts of Europe, Asia and the Middle East, but its effects were most dramatic in Sweden, where as much as 85 per cent of the sun's disc was obscured, according to The Guardian.

Michael Marshall, environment reporter

(Image: Danny Johnston/AP)

Thousands of fish and birds have died in the southern US - but don't fret. This is not the end times.

Rather than the rapture, a rain of blackbirds that fell on a city in Arkansas may have been caused by new year fireworks. The loud bangs and flashes apparently scared the birds, causing them to collide with each other and with buildings, and drop dead to the ground.

UK newspaper The Guardian describes the event:

It began, in portentous fashion, approximately half an hour before midnight on New Year's Eve, when the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission (AGFC) began hearing reports of blackbirds falling from the sky in Beebe, a town of approximately 5000 people in the centre of the state. Before midnight struck thousands of birds dropped in an area about a mile long and half a mile wide, mostly dead but some still alive.

It's all very Fortean, but rains of animals do seem to happen on occasion and plenty of explanations are available.

Jeff Hecht, correspondent

Will playing 3D games on Nintendo's new 3DS game console ruin your child's vision for life? We may never know, but should you take the chance?

A statement first posted on the games company's Japanese web site cautions that children under age six should not use 3D features because the 3D effect could impair their development of natural binocular vision. Press reports range from straight accounts of the warning to complaints that no testing backs up the warning.

What are the facts?