October 2009 archive

Debora MacKenzie, consultant

People are finally getting pandemic flu vaccine, and serious amounts of the stuff will be rolling off production lines in coming weeks. The handful of countries that will get some are launching one of the most ambitious mass vaccination programmes since Salk defeated polio. 

And I hereby predict that all pseudo-scientific hell is about to break loose.

Why? People get ill all the time for various reasons. Some even die - it happens. Inevitably there will be some people who do this just after being vaccinated. This is especially likely as among the first people to get the vaccine will be some who are already in a delicate condition, and at greater risk of having a severe or lethal case of this flu: diabetics, asthmatics, the very young, the pregnant.

The anti-vaccine brigade will jump on those cases and flog them for all they are worth as "proof" that vaccines are lethal/poisonous/a plot by some government or industry to achieve world domination. Count on it. And the rampant misinformation that is already, tragically, deterring even people who should know better from getting this vaccine will get worse.  

This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6pm yesterday until 6pm today. We're running it as an experiment. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.

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We still have a chance to save polar bears Polar bears and other ice-dependent species could survive if we act now to limit and manage human activity in the Arctic

Mock lunar lander to vie for $1m prize, despite fire In a departure from previous competitions, Masten Space Systems will get an extra chance at competing for a $1 million prize for building a rocket that can take off and land vertically

Dreams of Doom help gamers learn The dreams of video game players suggest that nocturnal visions have a practical role: helping us to learn new skills

Voices of long-dead stars haunt the galaxy Mysterious radio blips from apparently empty regions of space may be traces of an army of stellar corpses

From sanctuary to snake pit: the rise and fall of asylums Mental asylums have a bad name - but they were originally places of sanctuary. See how they lost their reputation in our photographic journey

Clever 'chopped' cars promise cheap electric commuting Fit existing cars with electric motors and software that understands commuters' driving patterns, and you could replace gas guzzlers for most journeys

Where do ghosts come from? Some places spook even those who scoff at the supernatural. Our reporter braved a night in a haunted castle to find out why

Pass, retweet or fail whale? Teacher tweets tell tales Easy-to-use micro-blogging feedback system proves a hassle-free way to assess how students feel about their courses

Fellatio keeps male fruit bats keen Female short-nosed fruit bats have been observed performing fellatio on males during copulation - it prolongs the mating act

Beginning of the end for the Latin-letter web The future of the internet came into slightly better focus today when its regulator, ICANN, announced it will allow the use of web addresses written wholly in non-latin characters

Heavy metal guitarist turns to stem cells to heal hand Tony Iommi, famous for rebuilding his fingertips from plastic after losing them in an industrial accident, has gone high-tech to fix his strumming hand

Will Russian spaceships go nuclear? Russia says it wants to build a nuclear-powered spaceship for "large-scale space exploration", but experts question the claim

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Tom Simonite, technology news editor

The future of the internet came into slightly better focus today when its regulator, ICANN, announced it will allow the use of web addresses written wholly in non-latin characters.

"Right now Internet address endings are limited to Latin characters - A to Z," explained ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush in the body's statement. This means that, although a Chinese site could have its first part written in traditional Chinese characters, say, its suffix must be the latin-character .cn domain.

From 16 November, a "fast track process" will begin that will allow countries to propose and register domains in their own character sets, creating a class of so-called international domain names (IDNs).

CNET reports that country codes such as .kr for Korea and .ru for Russia will be first in line, but that "international" versions other domains such as .com and .net will come afterwards.

As Chinese site Sun0769 put it - at least according to Google's translation - Latin's "monopoly" is ended.

Understandably, people previously prevented from using their own languages by that monopoly are pleased with the decision.

Michael Marshall, reporter

Budding rock gods, take note: the former Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi has damaged his hand so much from his noise-making that he has had to have stem cell therapy to mend it, reports The Times.

Speaking to BBC Radio 2's Radcliffe and Maconie Show, he said:

"I've had this problem with my hand and I've had this stem-cell treatment on it... The cartilage [was worn out between] the joints, and the joints [were] rubbing on the joints. It was bone to bone and it was getting a bit painful."

It's not clear from the reports exactly what sort of therapy Iommi has had, and his website makes no mention of it. But cartilage is a tissue that stem cell therapists can definitely rebuild.

Rachel Courtland, reporter

Russia hopes to build a nuclear-powered spaceship for "large-scale space exploration", the AP reports.

This could be welcome news for the prospect of sending humans beyond the moon. Spacecraft powered by nuclear reactors are twice as efficient as rocket-propelled craft, so they could make significantly shorter trips around the solar system. But is the announcement to be believed?

This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6pm yesterday until 6pm today. We're running it as an experiment. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.

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Slim, warm superconductors promise faster electronics Some physicists said it would never happen, but an atom-thick layer is enough for high-temperature superconductivity

Autoimmune disease cells harnessed to fight cancer Cells that attack healthy tissue can have devastating consequences, but soon their formidable powers might be used for good

'Right to dry' could wean Americans off consumption It's time to put an end to crazy laws that mean millions of Americans use energy-hungry tumble dryers rather than a clothes line, says Alexander Lee

Why three buses come at once, and how to avoid it The clumping of commuter buses and trains could be avoided with a dash of meanness from operators and a bit of patience from passengers

China outperforms US on green issues The country is doing more to tackle climate change than it gets credit for: in fact, it beats the US in some key environmental measures

Timeline: The secret history of swine flu Six months ago, swine flu emerged as a massive threat to global health. It seemed to come out of nowhere, but our timeline explains how the origins of the H1N1 pandemic go back more than a century

Genome firm finds gene for sneeze, but no diseases yet A genome-scanning firm has identified some quirky genetic variants, but what about the more serious hunt for genes that make us susceptible to disease?

US swine flu vaccine too late to beat autumn wave By the time serious amounts of vaccine arrive in the US, it may be too late to stop most infections

Innovation: Ultimate jukebox is next step in net music No one cares what server music is stored on: we just want to hear it. A new online service promises to find what you want and play it - and it isn't Google's

Review: Art project aims to see history in a toy car Joshua Sofaer's ambitious project to create a comprehensive history of a single object has attracted researchers of all stripes

Universe's quantum 'speed bumps' no obstacle for light The prospect that light is slowed by quantum-scale graininess in space-time seems to be fading, thanks to observations by NASA's Fermi telescope

Quake at US lab could release lethal radiation An earthquake could release a fatal dose of radiation from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, a nuclear safety watchdog has warned

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Richard Fisher, deputy news editor

Deadly radioactive material could be released from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico during an earthquake, a nuclear safety panel has warned.

Los Alamos is believed to house large volumes of plutonium for weapons at a complex known as TA-55. The stuff is often held in "glove boxes": enclosed structures used to safely work on radioactive materials, according to the LA Times.

Worryingly, building engineers recently discovered that a well-known geological fault could slip much more violently than previously suspected.

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, a body that aims to minimise the risks of federal nuclear programmes, has written an open letter to US energy secretary Stephen Chu (PDF). It calls for urgent safety measures to be applied at Los Alamos to reduce the hazard and says the lab's safety measures are "flawed".

Under the board's worst-case scenario, a fire caused by a glove box that toppled over during a quake could release up to 100 times more radiation than permitted under Department of Energy standards, says the Associated Press. An exposed person close to the lab would get a dose that would be fatal in weeks.

This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6pm yesterday until 6pm today. We're running it as an experiment. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.

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Multiplying universes: How many is the multiverse? Imagine 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 10 million universes - oh, sorry, quantum physics says you can't

Brain scanners can tell what you're thinking about A real-time scan can reveal what you are looking at and recalling - is this mind reading?

Swine flu: Eight myths that could endanger your life As if the misinformation multiplying on the internet wasn't bad enough, even the official advice on 2009 H1N1 flu is sometimes wrong. Debora MacKenzie sorts myths from reality

Space shuttle successor completes crucial flight test NASA has successfully launched a test version of the Ares I rocket it is developing to replace the space shuttle

Living wallpaper that devices can relate to Electronic wallpaper can act as an interactive "skin", providing an aesthetically pleasing way of controlling a room's devices

Mothering matters, but grandmothering counts too Grandmothers stick around to protect the DNA they share with their grandchildren, new evidence suggests

Plan to protect polar bears' icy habitat The US has proposed designating part of Alaska's coast as "critical habitat" for polar bears - but will it be enough to save the species?

Images of space transformed by chips Long before digital cameras hit the shops, their technology was used in astronomy. A gallery of images shows how CCDs showed us space as never before

Dangling stockings reveal whales' sex drive It's a neat way to sample sex hormones from the spout of air, water and lung mucus that whales blow into the air as they surface to breathe

Dream job 6: Science festival director Our final Graduate Careers Special true-life story: how medical microbiology and immunology led Natalie Ireland to the Manchester Science Festival

'Superspreading' doctors cause most infections The dirty hands of doctors and nurses act as germ "superspreaders" of everything from swine flu to hospital superbugs

Super slow-motion camera can follow firing neurons An image sensor that can capture 1 million frames per second could film action too fast for conventional cameras - even the firing of brain cells

Probably guilty: Bad mathematics means rough justice Statistics can stump the best brains - but when courts get it wrong the consequences can be dire. New Scientist brings you five fallacies to forgo

Cervical cancer vaccine reminds girls of sexual risks No reason to worry that vaccination will encourage girls to have more sex, suggests a survey of British teenagers

Genetic evidence for human-Neanderthal hanky panky? The Neanderthal genome sequence has not yet been published, but already there are rumours that Neanderthals and early humans had sex, says Ewen Callaway

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Ewen Callaway, reporter
 
The scientist behind the Neanderthal genome project said he's certain that Neanderthals and our ancestors had sex.

The claim is making its way around the internet today, based largely off of a story in The Sunday Times.

"I'm sure in a way that they had sex, but what I'm interested in was it productive in the sense of giving offspring that contributed to us, and that I think we'll be able to answer quite rigorously with the genome sequence we'll have," said Svante Pääbo, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, during a recent conference.

Pääbo's team is expected to publish a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome by year's end, but it's unclear whether or not there is any indication of admixture.

This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6pm yesterday until 6pm today. We're running it as an experiment. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.

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Static electricity worry halts NASA rocket test flight The threat of 'triboelectrification' forces NASA to postpone the first scheduled launch of the Ares I-X, a prototype of the rocket intended to replace the space shuttle

Lost limb leads to flexible new body image Amputees who feel the presence of a phantom limb can be trained to move it in impossible ways, which could allow new ways to ease phantom pain

Space debris threat to future launches Rocketing volumes of space debris are going to add significantly to the complexity of future space flights

US FDA says omega-3 oils from GM soya are safe to eat Biotech giants have a green light to market crops genetically modified to produce the health-promoting oils, which are mostly got from fish at present

Paper ideal for growing tumours in the lab Modern offices may scorn the stuff, but paper is being used to build scaffolds for living model tumours and damaged hearts

How laundry could slash US carbon emissions If Americans adopted 17 behavioural changes they could cut US CO₂ emissions by over 7 per cent by 2019

Industrial robot hones virtual autopsies Autopsies are messy, upsetting for the family, and you only get one chance to see the body whole. "Virtual autopsies" tackle all three problems at once

Dream job 5: Climate impact scientist Another Graduate Careers Special true-life story: Gillian Kay takes the science done at the UK Met Office and makes it relevant to ordinary people

Monster supernovae may explain galaxy's mystery haze The "WMAP haze" - a mysterious microwave glow at the Milky Way's centre - may be explained by amplified cosmic rays from large supernovae

Real sea monsters: The hunt for predator X Forget dinosaurs - their huge marine cousins were the most ferocious creatures the planet has ever seen

Asteroid blast reveals holes in Earth's defences An explosion over Indonesia, equivalent to a 50-kiloton nuclear bomb, was not spotted before impact

High testosterone linked to miserly behaviour A cream that boosted levels of the sex hormone in men made them less generous when playing an economic game, a study found

Canada's tar sands may be just too dirty Even carbon capture and storage may be unable to cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to make the Athabasca tar sands an environmentally friendly source of useable fuel

Have your say on homeopathy The British parliament's science and technology committee wants to know what you think about the evidence for homeopathic products

Disgraced cloning scientist convicted, but not jailed The long-awaited verdict in the trial of Woo Suk Hwang leaves him free to pursue animal research, says Peter Aldhous. But he is still shunned by many scientists

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Michael Le Page, features editor

Do you think the invention of vaccines and antibiotics pale into insignificance compared with the invention of homeopathy? Or, like me, are you shocked by the fact that the British government spends taxpayers' money on treatments for which there is no scientific evidence of effectiveness?

Last week, we reported that US taxpayers could end up paying for faith healing as a result of various clauses added to healthcare legislation. In the UK, the government has long paid for people to get homeopathic treatments via the NHS and even licenses homeopathic medicines.

Now, at last, these policies are being scrutinised.

Peter Aldhous, San Francisco bureau chief

This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6pm Friday until 6pm today. We're running it as an experiment. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.

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Could phones bridge the photo-sharing generation gap? A novel photo-sharing application for mobile phones aims to appeal to the Flickr and Kodak generations alike

How to catch the Sahara's sun for Europe Which technology can deliver an ambitious plan to cover a sizeable area of the Sahara desert in solar power plants?

Contenders square up in battle of the lunar landers Rocket teams will compete this week in back-to-back trials for $1.65 million in a long-running NASA challenge

Dream job 4: Perfumer Another Graduate Careers Special true-life story: chemistry and biology gave Dominique Gindre the foundations for his work as a "nose"

The truth about the disappearing honeybees Heard what Einstein said about humans having four years to live if the bees died out? Well he didn't and we won't, say Marcelo Aizen and Lawrence Harder

Women's egg freezing gets boost First systematic study shows good pregnancy rate, but it is too soon for healthy women to use the technique to delay childbearing

Solar superpower: Should Europe run on Sahara sun? Giant electricity plants in the Sahara desert could provide 15 per cent of Europe's power. But there may be better solar solutions closer to home

Testicular tumours linked to offsprings' disease Undetected tumour cells may produce faulty sperm - which could be why older fathers are more likely to have children with genetic diseases

Dream job 3: Lead programmer for a dot-com start-up Another true-life story from our Graduate Careers Special: moving from a physics lab to Reddit.com, Christopher Slowe took a tip from drug dealers

How to turn pig poo into green power Anaerobic digestion is the most effective and environmentally sound method for generating electricity from pig slurry

Vive la différence of languages Languages are dying out at an alarming rate. But On the Death and Life of Languages by Claude Hagège shows that all may not be lost

Dream job 2: Exotic psychologist Another true-life story from our Graduate Careers Special: altered states of consciousness are everyday reality for Nicola Holt, parapsychologist

'We live in a tenth-of-a-second world' A history of human reaction time, A Tenth of a Second by Jimena Canales investigates its role in physiology, sports measurement and astronomy

Memory and forgetting in the digital age Do you want to remember everything? Total Recall by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell says you do; Delete by Victor Mayer-Schonberger says you don't

Seven questions that keep physicists up at night From the nature of matter to that of reality itself, physicists are pondering the big questions at a 10-day physics festival in Canada

Obama says US in global race to develop clean energy At a speech at MIT on Friday, the president said that "the nation that wins this competition will be the nation that leads the global economy"

Disgraced cloning scientist convicted, but not jailed The long-awaited verdict in the trial of Woo Suk Hwang leaves him free to pursue animal research, says Peter Aldhous. But he is still shunned by many scientists

Meet Peristera, the 'female pigeon' exoplanet Following the convention for naming planets in our own solar system, astronomer Wladimir Lyra has proposed names for 400 exoplanets, with some unusual results

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Debora MacKenzie, consultant

US President Barack Obama has declared the swine flu pandemic a national emergency. The aim is to make it easier for hospitals to deal with the flood of cases that may appear in coming weeks.

The US had already said in April that the H1N1 virus was a public health emergency. This announcement allowed 12 million doses of the antiviral drug Tamiflu to be released from national stockpiles.

Friday's declaration makes it easier for hospitals to get waivers from rules governing federal funding programmes such as Medicare. They may need such waivers to cope with extreme situations, such as putting more beds in wards, transferring patients to other hospitals and overflow wards in other buildings, and setting up "triage tents" outside hospital doors. Some have already done this to separate the severely ill from less urgent cases, allowing quicker care and less contagion in overcrowded waiting rooms.

Last week Tom Frieden, the head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said cases of pandemic flu were continuing to climb rapidly in the US, with "many millions" of cases, 20,000 hospitalised cases and more than 1000 deaths confirmed by a positive test for the virus.

Meanwhile, in another emergency move last week the US Food and Drug Administration authorised peramivir, an antiviral drug still in the final stages of testing, for emergency use. It is similar to the only major alternative to Tamiflu, Relenza, but unlike Relenza, it can be given intravenously rather than being inhaled - something severely ill patients cannot always do.

David Shiga, reporter

The profusion of planets discovered around other stars in the past 15 years has led to a naming problem. Most of these exoplanets are known only by drab scientific designations like MOA-2007-BLG-400-L b.

Unsatisfied with this situation, Wladimir Lyra, an expert on planet formation, has proposed new names for all 400 of them.

To complete this gargantuan task, he made "extensive use of Wikipedia" and chose names based mostly on Greek and Roman mythology, following the tradition that gave us the official names of the planets in our own solar system.

He also ran the names by a Greek-speaking colleague, who pointed out that one of his choices, Peristera, simply means "female pigeon" in Greek and therefore sounds "a little funny", though Lyra declined to change it.

Jeff Hecht, contributor

Have we been missing the real killer of the dinosaurs? This week, Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University told the Geological Society of America that the fatal blow was struck by a 40-kilometre object that blasted a 500-km hole into the continental shelf west of India, called the Shiva structure (see National Geographic News story). That would be by far the biggest impact known in the Earth's entire history, dwarfing the 300-km Vredfort crater formed 2.02 billion years ago in South Africa (see a gallery of the world's best impact craters).

"The dinosaurs were really unlucky," says Chatterjee. If he's right, that would be a major understatement. He dates the Shiva structure to the same time as two other cataclysms that also have been called dinosaur-killers: the impact of a 10-km asteroid that formed the 170-km Chicxulub crater along the Mexican coast, and the massive volcanic eruptions that formed the Deccan traps in India. Indeed, Chatterjee told geologists that the Shiva impact probably triggered some eruptions of the devastating Deccan flood lavas.

But his words didn't convince other geologists, who have traced Chicxulub debris around the world.

Richard Fisher, deputy news editor

Global warming scepticism among US citizens appears to be on the rise. According to a survey of 1500 people by Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press, only 57 per cent of Americans believe there is solid scientific evidence for global warming. In 2007, the figure was 77 per cent. The decline has been sharpest among independent voters and Republicans.

Fewer respondents saw global warming as a very serious problem: 35 per cent today, down from 44 per cent in 2008.

There was some good news for those who support legislation currently being considered by Congress that would place a cap on US emissions. Over half of the respondents supported the idea of the US joining with other countries in setting standards to address climate change, and half favour setting limits on carbon emissions, even if it affects energy prices and industry.

All that said, over half (55 per cent) had not heard of the cap-and-trade legislation under consideration.

Jim Giles, consultant

Should US health insurers fund spiritual healing? As members of both the Senate and the House of Representatives slug it out over issues like government-funded health insurance, clauses that could force health insurers to pay for religious and spiritual healing have slipped into at least two of the healthcare reform bills currently making their way through Congress.

One of the House bills, for example, states that insurers shall not "discriminate in approving or covering a healthcare service on the basis of its religious or spiritual content", as long as that service is tax-deductible. There is similar language in one of the Senate healthcare bills.

Christian Scientists are the only religious group whose practitioner services are currently tax-deductible and they believe strongly in the healing power of prayer.

Rachel Courtland, reporter

A planetary scientist who has helped spearhead the search for water on the Moon was arrested on Monday on a charge of attempted espionage.

Stewart Nozette, a former government researcher, has been charged with selling defence secrets to an undercover US agent he believed to be an Israeli intelligence officer. According to a 16 October affidavit, Nozette allegedly collected two payments in September totaling $11,000. In exchange he responded to a series of questions posed by the agent with classified information that "directly concerned United States satellites, early warning systems, means of defence or retaliation against large-scale attack" and other concerns.

Linda Geddes, reporter

Fertility doctors are usually congratulated for assisting in the conception and delivery of healthy babies. But when eight are delivered at once, questions have to be raised about the doctor's judgement.

This week the American Society of Reproductive Medicine expelled Michael Kamrava - the fertility doctor based in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, who treated octuplets mum Nadya Suleman - from its professional organisation. Although this won't stop him from practising medicine, it should send a strong message to prospective parents about how fellow fertility doctors view his actions.

Hazel Muir, contributor

A rich harvest of 32 new extrasolar planets announced today has bumped up the known number of alien worlds to more than 400.

The discoveries are thanks to an instrument called HARPS, which analyses starlight gathered by the European Southern Observatory's 3.6-metre telescope in Chile.

HARPS can identify planets by measuring back-and-forth stellar "wobbles" as small as 3.5 kilometres per hour, a steady walking pace, due to the gravitational pull of planets orbiting around them.

Nora Schultz, contributor

A mother can who is suffering from cancer can pass on the disease to her unborn child in extremely rare cases, suggests a new case report published in PNAS this week.

According to researchers in Japan and at the Institute for Cancer Research in Sutton, UK, a Japanese mother had been diagnosed with leukaemia a few weeks after giving birth, whereas tumours were discovered in her daughter's cheek and lung when she was 11 months old.

Genetic analysis showed that the baby's cancer cells had the same mutation as the cancer cells of the mother. But the cancer cells contained no DNA whatsoever from the father, as would be expected if she had inherited the cancer from conception. That suggests the cancer cell made it into the unborn child's body across the placental barrier.

Richard Webb, physics features editor

Could the Large Hadron Collider be sabotaging itself from the future? That's the suggestion of a couple of reasonably distinguished theoretical physicists, which has received a fresh airing in the New York Times today.

Actually, it's the Higgs boson that is doing the sabotage. Apparently, among the many singular properties of the Higgs that the LHC is meant to discover could be the ability to turn back time to stop its cover being blown.

Or as the New York Times puts it: 

"the hypothesized Higgs boson... might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather."

That is the ultimate reason, suggest the duo - Danish string theory pioneer Holger Bech Nielsen and the Japanese physicist Masao Ninomiya - why Congress stopped the funding for the USA's Superconducting Super Collider in 1993, and why the LHC itself suffered such an embarrassing meltdown shortly after starting up last year.

Shanta Barley, reporter

Billionaire George Soros, one-time railway porter, will invest $1 billion of his own money in clean energy technology to combat climate change, says The Guardian.

He will also create an organization to advise policy makers on environmental issues, which will receive an annual stipend of $10 million over the next 10 years.

Michael Marshall, reporter

The more we find out about the Hanford site in Washington, which the US used to make plutonium in the early stages of the cold war, the more it sounds like a 1950s sci-fi B-movie.

Earlier this year researchers discovered radioactive wasp nests, and the world's first (more or less) weapons-grade plutonium turned up in a glass jar on a rubbish dump.

Now a helicopter survey has turned up another, er, quirk of ecology: radioactive jackrabbit droppings.

Colin Barras, technology reporter

Ever since Neowin.net revealed on Monday that the details of some 10,000 Hotmail accounts had been leaked online, the story has only got more complex. Microsoft confirmed the breach in short order and suggested it was due to a phishing attack.

But by Tuesday it emerged that not only Microsoft Live email users were affected. The BBC reported that a second list had appeared, containing the email details of 20,000 users of Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL and Gmail. Google confirmed a suspected phishing attack later that day, and said steps were being taken to encourage affected users to update their account details.

By Wednesday, the passwords of the compromised accounts were public knowledge, leading to criticism of users' password choices. The Register said secure payments firm The Logic Group had discovered that "123456" was the most common password on the initial 10,000-long list of Hotmail accounts, appearing 64 times. The second most popular password? "123456789".

Henry Spencer, computer programmer, spacecraft engineer and amateur space historian

About 50 years ago, as the US worked towards putting its first men in space, a few people thought there was another option: women in space. The facts about this episode have been somewhat obscured by the myths that have grown up around it.

In 1960-61, a small group of female pilots went through many of the same medical tests as the Mercury astronauts, and scored very well on them – in fact, better than some of the astronauts did. A new study that presents the first published results of their physiological tests shows that much is fact.

Jerrie Cobb, the first woman to volunteer for the astronaut testing programme, stands beside a Mercury capsule. Cobb started flying at age 12 and held numerous world aviation records for speed, distance and altitude. She had logged more than 10,000 hours of flight time, double what the most experienced pilot of the Mercury 7 group of astronauts, John Glenn, had. During her physiological testing, she spent more than 9 hours in a tank of cold water meant to induce total sensory deprivation before the staff called off the experiment; previous tests on hundreds of other subjects had suggested that 6 hours was the limit before hallucinations started. A new study reports that Cobb tested in the top 2 per cent of all astronaut candidates, male and female. (Image: NASA)

Jessica Hamzelou, reporter

A pair of amateur fossil enthusiasts have uncovered the world's biggest dinosaur footprints. Found in the Jura plateau near the south-eastern city of Lyon, the prints are thought to belong to a giant vegetarian sauropod.

The round prints are about one and a half metres wide, which palaeontologists at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) reckon were made by animals around 7.5 metres tall, weighing around 40 tonnes.

Although they were discovered in April, the footprints weren't verified until Tuesday by a team at the University of Lyon, which included Pierre Hantzpergue.

According to French newspapers, the tracks were revealed by local deforestation.

Jim Giles, reporter

The daunting task of reining in greenhouse gas emissions just got a smidgen easier, thanks to the world's ailing economy.

In 2009, total emissions of carbon dioxide are expected to be 3 per cent lower than in 2008 as economies suffer the fallout from last year's banking crisis, the International Energy Agency (IEA) announced on 6 October. This is a steeper drop than at any time in the past 40 years.

That's a substantial shot in the arm for emission control efforts. In the US, for example, senators are preparing to debate a bill that calls for 20 per cent cuts by 2020. Reduced energy use and a drop in consumer purchases mean that US emissions will fall by 6 per cent this year before any action has been taken.

Tom Simonite, technology editor

Defence giant Boeing has released video of its Advanced Tactical Laser being fired from an aircraft at a (stationary) vehicle. You can download three videos of the event or watch two of them on youtube.

It may sound exciting, but the videos are actually a little underwhelming. The infrared laser beam is invisible, so what you see is a small fire igniting, apparently spontaneously, on a jeep's bonnet. But their unspectacular nature is a plus point for some: US air force officials have recently praised laser weapons for their "plausible deniability".

Even so, the videos may not do much to win over those who are sceptical about laser weapons. PopSci points out that the US air force's own scientific advisory board said in 2008 that "the Advanced Tactical Laser testbed has no operational utility" - while The Register's correspondent suggests that a C-130 with conventional weapons, or a helicopter sniper "would be more useful. And a lot cheaper."

Andy Coghlan, reporter

If there's one image of evolution that absolutely everyone knows instantly, it's that one with the monkeys evolving stepwise into a human. I Google-imaged "evolution of man" and versions of it came up instantly.

Now, it seems, that same picture has been interpreted by some creationists as a "religious image", and therefore incompatible with the constitutional division between church and state in the US.

So how did this matter come to a head? It was because a school band in Missouri were spotted wearing T-shirts bearing a design also based on the "religious image".

Shanta Barley, reporter

Two major quakes struck the Pacific region yesterday - were they related?

The magnitude-8.0 earthquake that struck the Samoan islands on Tuesday happened just 15 hours before the magnitude-7.6 earthquake off Padang, Sumatra's largest city (and a surfing mecca).

Just a coincidence? Probably, says David Booth, a seismologist at the British Geological Survey. He says there is little evidence to suggest that the two quakes are linked, as they occurred on separate fault systems. "The events happening on the same day could easily be a coincidence," he says .

That said, a study by Fenglin Niu of Rice University in Houston, Texas, and colleagues published in the journal Nature yesterday - by coincidence - suggests that 2004's monster earthquake in the Indian Ocean, which triggered a series of devastating tsunamis, may have led to a weakening of the San Andreas fault far away in California.

Andy Coghlan, reporter

Despite huge efforts to provide all HIV-infected people in the world with antiretrovirals, HIV continues to prove a formidable foe. The problem is that the virus is spreading faster than access to the drugs. In 2007 there were 2.7 million new infections, bringing the number of people with HIV to 33 million. Two-thirds of them are in sub-Saharan Africa.

The good news is last year the number of HIV-positive people in poorer countries who are receiving antiretroviral therapy jumped by just over 1 million, from 33 per cent to 42 per cent.

But the figures, released yesterday jointly by the World Health Organization and the United Nations bodies UNAIDS and UNICEF, also reveal that because of lack of access to testing, less than 40 per cent of people who are infected know they are.