'Johannes Kepler' space freighter launch delayed

A technical problem prevented Europe's unmanned space freighter from launching to the space station on Tuesday.

The Johannes Kepler robotic truck was due to lift off from French Guiana on an Ariane 5 rocket.
But with barely four minutes left on the countdown clock, the mission was called off by the rocket's operator.
Telemetry suggested the Ariane had a measurement fault in its fuelling system. A Wednesday launch has now been set for 1850 local time (2150 GMT).
At more than 20 tonnes, the European Space Agency (Esa) truck is set to become the heaviest payload an Ariane rocket has ever lifted into the sky.
The robotic ship will be delivering food, air, fuel, experiments and other equipment to the International Space Station (ISS).
Another key task for the freighter in the coming months will be to push the orbiting platform to a higher altitude.
The ISS has a tendency to lose height over time as it brushes through the residual atmosphere still present 350km above the Earth.
Johannes Kepler will dock with the rear of the platform and use its propulsive might to boost the station's orbit.
One consequence of Tuesday's postponement at the Kourou spaceport is that Nasa's shuttle Discovery will also now be delayed in its mission to the ISS.
The freighter and the shuttle use the same data relay satellites in flight, and mission managers will not permit the two ships to be en route to the station at the same time.
With Discovery due to launch only a day after Kepler docks at the ISS, any hold up in the freighter's schedule immediately impacts the shuttle's timeline, too.
A Wednesday launch for Kepler would have it docking with the ISS on 24 February, with a Discovery launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida then taking place on 25 February.
The Ariane missions that launch telecommunications satellites enjoy an extended "window" in which to get the rocket off the ground, meaning the vehicle can be held for a few minutes if a technical issue arises that can be solved easily. But because the freighter must chase down the over-flying space station, its launch opportunity is necessarily instantaneous. If it does not launch in the moment, its ability to catch the platform in orbit is lost for that day.

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An artist's impression of ATV2 Johannes Kepler flying over France

New solar fuel machine 'mimics plant life'

Continue reading the main storyIn the prototype, sunlight heats a ceria cylinder which breaks down water or carbon dioxide

The machine uses the Sun's rays and a metal oxide called ceria to break down carbon dioxide or water into fuels which can be stored and transported.A prototype solar device has been unveiled which mimics plant life, turning the Sun's energy into fuel.

Conventional photovoltaic panels must use the electricity they generate in situ, and cannot deliver power at night.

Details are published in the journal Science.

The prototype, which was devised by researchers in the US and Switzerland, uses a quartz window and cavity to concentrate sunlight into a cylinder lined with cerium oxide, also known as ceria.

Ceria has a natural propensity to exhale oxygen as it heats up and inhale it as it cools down.

If as in the prototype, carbon dioxide and/or water are pumped into the vessel, the ceria will rapidly strip the oxygen from them as it cools, creating hydrogen and/or carbon monoxide.

Hydrogen produced could be used to fuel hydrogen fuel cells in cars, for example, while a combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide can be used to create "syngas" for fuel.

It is this harnessing of ceria's properties in the solar reactor which represents the major breakthrough, say the inventors of the device. They also say the metal is readily available, being the most abundant of the "rare-earth" metals.

Methane can be produced using the same machine, they say.

Refinements needed

The prototype is grossly inefficient, the fuel created harnessing only between 0.7% and 0.8% of the solar energy taken into the vessel.

Most of the energy is lost through heat loss through the reactor's wall or through the re-radiation of sunlight back through the device's aperture.

But the researchers are confident that efficiency rates of up to 19% can be achieved through better insulation and smaller apertures. Such efficiency rates, they say, could make for a viable commercial device.

"The chemistry of the material is really well suited to this process," says Professor Sossina Haile of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). "This is the first demonstration of doing the full shebang, running it under (light) photons in a reactor."

She says the reactor could be used to create transportation fuels or be adopted in large-scale energy plants, where solar-sourced power could be available throughout the day and night.

However, she admits the fate of this and other devices in development is tied to whether states adopt a low-carbon policy.

"It's very much tied to policy. If we had a carbon policy, something like this would move forward a lot more quickly," she told the BBC.

It has been suggested that the device mimics plants, which also use carbon dioxide, water and sunlight to create energy as part of the process of photosynthesis. But Professor Haile thinks the analogy is over-simplistic.

"Yes, the reactor takes in sunlight, we take in carbon dioxide and water and we produce a chemical compound, so in the most generic sense there are these similarities, but I think that's pretty much where the analogy ends."

The PS10 solar tower plant near Seville, Spain. Mirrors concentrate the sun's power on to a central tower, driving a steam turbine

Daniel Davies, chief technology officer at the British photovoltaic company Solar Century, said the research was "very exciting".

"I guess the question is where you locate it - would you put your solar collector on a roof or would it be better off as a big industrial concern in the Sahara and then shipping the liquid fuel?" he said.

Solar technology is moving forward apace but the overriding challenges remain ones of efficiency, economy and storage.

New-generation "solar tower" plants have been built in Spain and the United States which use an array of mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto tower-mounted receivers which drive steam turbines.

A new Spanish project will use molten salts to store heat from the Sun for up to 15 hours, so that the plant could potentially operate through the night.

Physicists burst bubble mystery

The high-speed footage shows that a bursting bubble will create a perfect ring of "daughter bubbles"

With the help of high speed video, scientists have discovered that there is far more to bursting bubbles than meets the eye.

Under the right conditions, a bursting bubble on a liquid surface does not simply vanish, but creates a perfect ring of tiny "daughter bubbles".
This occurs as the ruptured bubble retracts into the liquid, forming a doughnut shape of trapped air.
You may see a ring of "daughter bubbles" while washing up The scientists reported their discovery in the journal Nature.
In the paper, the team described a "bubble-bursting cascade".
"When one of these daughter bubbles ruptures, a ring of even smaller bubbles forms," the researchers wrote.
Eventually, the daughter bubbles are sufficiently tiny that they rupture to form sharp "jets" that propel small aerosol droplets into the atmosphere.
James Bird from Harvard University, who led the research, explained that his main interest was in the fundamental physics of how bubbles behave. But his discovery could eventually help to fine-tune many manufacturing processes.
"Where small bubbles are detrimental, such as in glass manufacturing, our results provide insight into how the parameters might be tuned to reduce the daughter bubbles," Dr Bird explained.
'Pop science' He said that he happened upon the popping phenomenon accidentally while "playing around in the lab late one night".
"My colleague Laurent and I were trying to see if bubbles behaved like drops when they contacted a surface," he told BBC News.
"Our intended goal failed completely, but instead we were staring at popping hemispherical soap bubbles [and] we noticed this ring of daughter bubbles that neither of us could explain."
High speed footage captured the bursting "cascade" The scientists pointed that the finding could even have implications for health research - aerosol droplets from bursting bubbles have been implicated in the transmission of diseases in swimming pools and hot tubs.
They are also thought to be involved in the exchange of material and heat between the ocean and the atmosphere, so these results could help shed light on those processes.

Black hole 'hurled out of galaxy'

 

The red circle indicates where a black hole may be

A supermassive black hole may have been observed in the process of being hurled from its parent galaxy at high speed.

The finding comes from analysis of data collected by the US Chandra space X-ray observatory.
However, there are alternative explanations for the observation.
The work, by an international team of astronomers, has been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Normally, each galaxy contains a supermassive black hole at its centre.
Given that these objects can have masses equivalent to one billion Suns, it takes a special set of conditions to cause this to happen.
High-speed exit

The authors believe this could be the result of the merger of two smaller black holes.
But there are alternative explanations for the bright X-ray source; it could also be a Type IIn supernova, or an ultra-luminous X-ray source (ULX) with an optical counterpart (which could represent several phenomena).
Simulations using supercomputers suggest that when this happens, the larger black hole that results is shot away at high speed.
 

Black holes may be expelled from their host galaxies after mergers However, this depends on the direction and velocity at which the two black holes are rotating before their collision.
Marianne Heida of the University of Utrecht used data in the Chandra Source Catalogue to compare hundreds of thousands of sources of X-rays with the positions of millions of galaxies.
The material that falls into black holes heats up dramatically on its final journey, which often means that black holes are strong X-ray sources.
X-rays are also able to penetrate the dust and gas that obscures the centre of a galaxy, giving astronomers a clear view of the region around the black hole, with the bright source appearing as a star-like point.
Looking at one galaxy in the Catalogue, Ms Heida noticed that the point of light was offset from the centre and yet was so bright that it could be associated with a supermassive black hole.
Ms Heida said: "We have found many more objects in this strange class of X-ray sources. With Chandra we should be able to make the accurate measurements we need to pinpoint them more precisely and identify their nature."

World's 2010 nature target 'will not be met'

 
Threats to biodiversity, such as habitat loss, are still on the increase

The world's governments will not meet their internationally-agreed target of curbing the loss of species and nature by 2010, a major study has confirmed.

Virtually all species and ecosystems show continued decline, while pressures on nature are increasing, it concludes.
Published in the journal Science, the study confirms what conservationists have known for several years.
The 2010 target was adopted in 2002, but the scientists behind this study say implementation has been "woeful".
"Our analysis shows that governments have failed to deliver on the commitments they made in 2002," said research leader Stuart Butchart, from the UN Environment Programme's World Conservation Monitoring Centre (Unep-WCMC) and BirdLife International.
"Biodiversity is still being lost as fast as ever, and we have made little headway in reducing the pressures on species, habitats and ecosystems."
Unep chief scientist Joseph Alcamo added: "Since 1970, we have reduced animal populations by 30%, the area of mangroves and seagrasses by 20% and the coverage of living corals by 40%.
"These losses are clearly unsustainable."
Growing gap The study combined more than 30 indicators of how species and ecosystems are changing.
These encompass plants and animals from land and sea.
Very few of the indicators gave any hint that biodiversity loss was decreasing at all.
Meanwhile, measures of threat - such as loss of habitat, climate change and colonisation by harmful non-native species - were virtually all increasing.
Policies to restrict the threats to biodiversity are simply not up to the job, the authors argue.
"Although nations have put in place some significant policies to slow biodiversity declines, these have been woefully inadequate, and the gap between the pressures on biodiversity and the responses is getting ever wider," said Dr Butchart.
While about 12% of land is now under some kind of protection, not all of it is effectively managed.
And less than 1% of the world's oceans is protected.
'No excuse' Conservationists hope that laying the sheer scale of the issue before governments will induce them to take tougher steps in the near future.
"We can no longer use the excuse that we don't know enough about the loss of diversity of life on our planet," said Jean-Christophe Vie, deputy head of the Species Programme at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
"The role of governments is paramount; but the magnitude and rate of loss of biodiversity means that everyone, from individuals to businesses, must act now to save all life on Earth before we reach breaking point."
Governments will review their failure to meet the 2010 target, and probably set new ones, at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) summit in Nagoya, Japan, in October.
New targets are likely to be directed at stemming the threats to biodiversity, such as unsustainable agriculture, pollution and the growing scale of cities and transport networks.
"World leaders faced the economic crisis head on," noted Simon Stuart, head of IUCN's Species Survival Commission.
"We need that same level of investment and commitment for the environment."

Chair announced for 'Climategate' science probe

The row surrounds e-mails hacked from the University of East Anglia

A chairman has been appointed to an independent review into the science published by the research unit at the centre of the "Climategate" row.

Lord Oxburgh is a former chairman of the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology.
"The shadow hanging over climate change and science more generally at present makes it a matter of urgency that we get on with this assessment," he said.
The Lord's appointment was made on the recommendation of the UK Royal Society.
The e-mails issue came to light in November last year, when hundreds of messages between scientists at the University of East Anglia's (UEA) Climate Research Unit (CRU) and their peers around the world were posted on the world wide web, along with other documents.
Critics said that the e-mail exchanges reveal an attempt by the researchers involved to manipulate data.

CRU SCIENCE REVIEW PANEL Chair - Ron Oxburgh FRS (Lord Oxburgh of Liverpool) Huw Davies, professor of physics at the Institute for Atmospheric & Climate Science at ETH Zurich Kerry Emanuel, professor of meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lisa Graumlich, directs the school of natural resources and the environment at Arizona University David Hand, professor of statistics in the department of mathematics at Imperial College London Herbert Huppert, professor of theoretical geophysics at the University of Cambridge Michael Kelly, Prince Philip professor of technology at the University of Cambridge

Lord Oxburgh will lead the second independent review into the e-mail controversy and will scrutinise scientific material from the CRU.
The CRU Scientific Assessment Panel is distinct from the panel chaired by Sir Muir Russell, which will look at the methods and practices used by scientists at the research unit.
Sir Muir's review will, among other things, examine e-mail exchanges for evidence of suppression or manipulation of data at odds with acceptable scientific practice and look into CRU's compliance with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Both inquiries are funded by UEA.
Ron Oxburgh trained as a geologist and has worked in academia, the civil service and in business. He has been chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and was non-executive chairman of Shell Transport and Trading until the Company merged with Royal Dutch Petroleum to form Royal Dutch Shell in 2005.
He is currently president of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association and chairman of wind energy firm Falck Renewables.
Picking the team
UEA will be aware of allegations of bias directed at the review chaired by Sir Muir Russell. Even before that review could begin its work, one of its members, Dr Philip Campbell, the editor-in-chief of Nature journal, resigned.
Dr Campbell stood down because of remarks he had made last year in the Chinese media in which he said the scientists mentioned in the e-mails had "behaved as researchers should".
The university says the panel comprises scientists who use techniques similar to those used in CRU but who largely apply them to other areas of research, as well as those with experience in climate science and related research.
Professor Trevor Davies, UEA's pro-vice-chancellor for research commented: "Our concern has been to bring together a distinguished group of independent scientists who understand the difference between assertion and evidence, and are familiar with using the latter to judge the validity of conclusions arising from science research."
The university says the CRU Scientific Assessment Panel will have access to any publications or materials it requests, and all information considered will be listed in the eventual report.
UEA, in consultation with the Royal Society, has suggested that the panel looks in particular at key publications from the body of CRU's research which were referred to in the university's recent submission to the Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee.
The panel will meet in Norwich in April and will be given the opportunity to see original data and speak to those who carried out the work.

Bluefin tuna ban proposal meets rejection

Large modern tuna boats have revolutionised the industry

A proposal to ban the export of Atlantic bluefin tuna, which is a sushi mainstay in Japan, has been rejected by a UN wildlife meeting.

Thursday's decision occurred after Japan, Canada and many poor nations opposed the measure on the grounds it would devastate fishing economies.
Monaco tabled the plan at the meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).
Stocks have fallen by about 85% since the industrial fishing era began.
Monaco argued that the organisation responsible for managing the bluefin fishery - the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (Iccat) - had not implemented measures strict enough to ensure the species' survival.
Scientists and campaigners working with conservation organisations were disappointed with the outcome.
"We think it is quite a blow, because Iccat has not been able to demonstrate that it is able to implement procedures that will lead to [the bluefin's] recovery," said Glenn Sant, leader of the global marine programme with Traffic, the international wildlife trade monitoring network.
"There was really no question that it met the [scientific] criteria for listing," he told BBC News from the conference in Doha, Qatar.
"Listing" is the technical term for imposing restriction on international trade through CITES.
Bluefin tuna was slated for listing on Appendix One - a complete ban.
Big margins
CITES votes can be reviewed on the meeting's final day, but the margin of defeat suggests this one will not be, said Mr Sant.
The first vote - on an EU amendment that weakened the original Monaco proposal but still endorsed the ban - was defeated by 72 votes to 43.
he vote on the original motion then went down by 68 votes to 20. EU nations had to abstain on the second vote as delegates did not have the authority from their governments to vote for it.
The EU has to vote as a bloc in these negotiations, and nations with active tuna fleets such as France, Italy and Spain had been unwilling to support an outright, immediate ban
Japan - the principal bluefin-consuming nation - had made its opposition to the proposal clear before the CITES meeting started. It argues that commercial fisheries should be managed through bodies such as Iccat.
Sue Lieberman, director of international policy with the Pew Environment Group, suggested lobbying from the fishing industry was ultimately responsible for the defeat.
"This meeting presented a golden opportunity for governments to take a stand against overfishing, and too many governments failed to do so," she said.
"The market for this fish is just too lucrative, and the pressure from fishing interests too great, for enough governments to support a truly sustainable future for the fish."

Tiger decline is 'sign of world's failure'

There are now considerably more tigers in captivity than in the wild

Governments need to crack down on illegal tiger trading if the big cats are to be saved, the UN has warned.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) meeting in Doha, Qatar heard that tiger numbers are continuing to fall.
Organised crime rings are playing an increasing part in illegal trading of tiger parts, CITES says, as they are with bears, rhinos and elephants.
Interpol is working with CITES to track and curb the international trade.
Last year, World Bank chief Robert Zoellick said the global black market in wildlife products was worth about $10bn per year, making wildlife the third most valuable illicit commodity after drugs and weapons.

Global medicine

Despite attempts to protect tigers, numbers have approximately halved over the last decade, with fewer than 3,200 remaining in the wild.
The decline is seen across sub-species and in most range states. Many populations are small, and are threatened by deforestation as well as poaching.
"If we use tiger numbers as a performance indicator, then we must admit that we have failed miserably and that we are continuing to fail," said CITES secretary-general Willem Wijnstekers.

Skinning the tiger Enlarge Image

"Although the tiger has been prized throughout history, and is a symbol of incredible importance in many cultures and religions, it is now literally on the verge of extinction."
CITES enforcement officials said government agencies including police and customs needed to step up efforts to combat the illegal trade.
Although China and other East Asian countries are the principal consumers of tiger parts, exports travel much further afield.
Earlier this month, Operation Tram, co-ordinated by Interpol and including enforcement authorities in 18 countries, netted medicines containing wildlife products worth an estimated $10m.
Tigers, bears and rhinos were among the animals used in making the medicines.

Traditional cures

Conservationists also point to China's tiger farms as a threat to the wild animals.
Although China does not officially permit the sale of goods from these farms, in practice several investigations have revealed tiger parts are being sold.
Campaigners warn this perpetuates a market into which wild tiger parts can be sold, often commanding a higher value as products made from wild animals are perceived to be more "potent."
Just before the CITES meeting opened, the World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies (WFCMS) called on traditional medicine practitioners to abandon the use of tiger parts.
"We will ask our members not to use endangered wildlife in traditional Chinese medicine, and reduce the misunderstanding and bias of the international community," said WFCMS deputy secretary Huang Jianyin.
"The traditional Chinese medicine industry should look for substitutes and research on economical and effective substitutes for tiger products."
A resolution before the fortnight-long CITES meeting calls for greater co-operation between regional enforcement authorities to cut down the tiger product trade, and to ensure that breeding operations are "consistent with the conservation of wild populations".

Solar plane makes record flight

Technical Director Chris Kelleher on the solar plane's 3 day flight

A UK-built solar-powered plane has set an unofficial world endurance record for a flight by an unmanned aircraft.

The Zephyr-6, as it is known, stayed aloft for more than three days, running through the night on batteries it had recharged in sunlight.
The flight was a demonstration for the US military, which is looking for new types of technology to support its troops on the ground.
Craft like Zephyr might make ideal platforms for reconnaissance.
They could also be used to relay battlefield communications.
Chris Kelleher, from UK defence and research firm QinetiQ, said Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offer advantages over traditional aircraft and even satellites.
"The principal advantage is persistence - that you would be there all the time," he told BBC News. "A satellite goes over the same part of the Earth twice a day - and one of those is at night - so it's only really getting a snapshot of activity. Zephyr would be watching all day."
Deployment close
The latest flight was conducted at the US Army's Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona.
The Zephyr flew non-stop for 82 hours, 37 minutes.
That time beats the current official world record for unmanned flight set by the US robot plane Global Hawk - of 30 hours, 24 minutes - and even Zephyr's own previous best of 54 hours achieved last year.
However, the Yuma mark remains "unofficial" because QinetiQ did not involve the FAI (Federation Aeronautique Internationale), the world air sports federation, which sanctions all record attempts.
The US Department of Defense funded the demonstration flight under its Joint Capability Technology Demonstration (JCTD) programme.
This programme is designed to advance the technologies American commanders would most like to see in the field.
"We think Zephyr is very close to an operational system - within the next two years is what we're aiming for," Mr Kelleher said. "We have one more step of improvements; we trying to design a robust and reliable system that will really sit up there for months; and we want to push the performance."

Energy density

The trial, which took place between 28 and 31 July, also included the participation of the UK Ministry of Defence.
The 30kg Zephyr was guided by remote control to an operating altitude in excess of 18km (60,000ft), and then flown on autopilot and via satellite communication.
It tested a communications payload weighing approximately 2kg.

Zephyr should be in commanders' hands within two years

At first sight, the propeller-driven Zephyr looks to be just another model aircraft, and it is even launched by hand. But this "pilotless" vehicle with its 18-metre wingspan incorporates world-leading technologies.
Its structure uses ultra-lightweight carbon-fibre material; and the plane flies on solar power generated by amorphous silicon solar arrays no thicker than sheets of paper. These are glued over the aircraft's wings.
To get through the night, the propellers are powered from lithium-sulphur batteries which are topped up during the day.
"A lot of effort has gone into power storage and light-weighting the systems," explained Mr Kelleher. "Lithium sulphur is more than double the energy density of the best alternative technology which is lithium polymer batteries.
"They are an exceptional performer. We've worked with the Sion Corporation. They've had them in development for years. We're actually the first application in the world for them."
Vulture venture
Zephyr has demonstrated that it can cope with extremes of temperature - from the blistering 45C heat found at ground level in Arizona's Sonoran Desert, to the minus 70C chill experienced at altitudes of more than 18km (60,000ft).
The engineers from the Farnborough-based company are now collaborating with the American aerospace giant Boeing on a defence project codenamed Vulture.
This would see the biggest plane in history take to the sky, powered by the sun and capable of carrying a 450-kilo (1,000lb) payload.
US commanders say the design must be able to maintain its position over a particular spot on the Earth's surface uninterrupted for five years.
QinetiQ is also developing UAV technology for civilian uses.
It has been working recently with Aberystwyth University on field monitoring trials, plotting areas of ground that may or may not need fertiliser applications.

Lightweight plane (30-34kg/70lb) is launched by hand

Coms or surveillance payload of about 2kg (4.5lb)

Flies autonomously and can climb to more than 18km (60,000ft)

By day, Zephyr flies on solar power and recharges its batteries

Advanced amorphous silicon solar arrays supplied by Unisolar

Rechargeable lithium-sulphur batteries supplied by Sion Corp

LHC to shut down for a year to address safety concerns

By Judith Burns Science reporter, BBC News

The damage that occurred in 2008 took 14 months to repair

A director at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva has told BBC News that some mistakes were made in construction.

Dr Steve Myers said these faults will delay the machine reaching its full potential for two years.
The atom smasher will reach world record power later this month at 7 trillion electron volts (TeV).
But the machine must close at the end of 2011 for up to a year for work to make the tunnel safe for proton collisions planned at twice that level.
The machine only recently restarted after being out of action for 14 months following an accident in September 2008.
Dr Myers said: "It's something that, with a lot more resources and with a lot more manpower and quality control, possibly could have been avoided but I have difficulty in thinking that this is something that was a design error."
He said: "The standard phrase is that the LHC is its own prototype. We are pushing technologies towards their limits."
"You don't hear about the thousands or hundreds of thousands of other areas that have gone incredibly well.
"With a machine like the LHC, you only build one and you only build it once."

The CMS detector can be put through its paces at reduced power

He said the second problem is not with the most complex technology but involves the copper sheaths around the superconducting joints in the tunnel.
The copper sheaths are a failsafe mechanism designed to take up the current if one of the magnets in the Large Hadron Collider warms up - an incident known as a "quench".
The 2008 accident caused one tonne of helium to leak into the tunnel and resulted in a series of "quenches" and a 40m Swiss franc (£24m) repair bill.
Engineers believe the machine is now safe to run at 7TeV but are anxious to avoid another breakdown.
So they have taken the decision to run the machine for 18 to 24 months at half-maximum power before switching it off for a year to carry out improvements to the 27km tunnel.
Dr Myers said the decision was taken jointly with the physicists working on the four giant particle detectors on the LHC.
He said they appreciate the chance to test their own equipment while the machine is running at half its maximum power.

Collisions at enormous energy

The Large Hadron Collider sends beams of protons in opposite directions around the tunnel at close to the speed of light. These cross and collide, smashing into each other with enormous energy.
The ultimate aim is to collide particles head on at 14TeV to recreate the conditions in the moments after the Big Bang.
Scientists hope they will see new subatomic particles in the debris and gain insights into how the universe came into being, billions of years ago.
The machine is buried 100m below the French-Swiss border.
Cern officials say running the LHC at 7TeV will enable physicists to explore another secret of the universe, namely the nature of the "dark matter" that accounts for most of the mass in the observable universe.

Probe may have found cosmic dust

By Paul Rincon Science reporter, BBC News, The Woodlands, Texas

Stardust landed back on Earth in January 2006

Scientists may have identified the first specks of interstellar dust in material collected by the US space agency's Stardust spacecraft.

A stream of this dust flows through space; the tiny particles are building blocks that go into making stars and planets.
The Nasa spacecraft was primarily sent to catch dust streaming from Comet Wild 2 and return it to Earth for analysis.
But scientists also set out to capture particles of interstellar dust.
The material was gathered by the Stardust probe in a seven-year, 4.8-billion-km (2.9 billion miles) interplanetary voyage.
It extended a retractable device containing cells filled with a material called aerogel, a porous substance designed to trap dust molecules.
A capsule containing the precious samples was then returned to Earth in January 2006.
Team members have now reported the possible discovery of two contemporary interstellar dust grains in the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector (SIDC) deployed during the mission.
Dr Andrew Westphal, from the University of California, Berkeley, announced the find at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in The Woodlands, Texas.
'Cautiously excited'
The discovery was made by a member of the public, using the Stardust@Home internet application, which invited participants to search the aerogel collection medium for tiny particles of the dust.
"There are two particles, but they are in the same track. So when they hit the aerogel, they were together - they are two components of the same particle," Dr Westphal told BBC News.
"But they are very different from each other. That in itself is interesting, because if this does turn out to be interstellar dust, then it is a bit more heterogeneous than people thought."

All the heavy atoms in this room were in interstellar dust Don Brownlee, University of Washington

The initial speck, known as particle 30, was spotted by Bruce Hudson, from Ontario in Canada. Under the agreement made between the science team and participants in Stardust@Home, Mr Hudson was allowed to choose a name for the particle; he called it Orion.
After preliminary analyses, the scientists found another grain upstream, which Bruce Hudson named Sirius.
But Dr Westphal stressed that the find "could be a false alarm".
"The right way to say it is we're cautiously excited," he told me.
"We have very limited data on it so far and the reason is deliberate. The analyses we are doing have the potential to do some minor damage to the particles. We don't think it will and we'll be careful to limit our analyses.
"So far this particle is unique... if we drop it on the floor, it will cost $300m to get another one."
Heavy atoms
Scientists have identified 28 definite impact "tracks" in the interstellar dust collector. But most of these come from angles indicating they are little particles of debris from impacts with the spacecraft's solar panels. However, particle 30 is one of seven with ambiguous trajectories.
Interstellar dust is formed when gas is ejected from stars and condenses to form grains. This dust then has to survive in the interstellar medium - the matter which exists between stars - where it is battered by cosmic radiation and shock processes.
It carries with it the heavy atoms that go into making the stars and planets. Our own Solar System was also constructed with these building blocks.

Stardust flew by Comet Wild 2 in 2004

The possible dust grains were collected as Stardust travelled with the interstellar dust stream which passes through our Solar System.
The spacecraft's chief scientist, Dr Don Brownlee from the University of Washington in Seattle, told BBC News: "All the heavy atoms in this room were in interstellar dust... so we want to know what this stuff is."
He added: "This dust, once it's formed, and once it's heated or changed [initially] it is set for billions of years.
Dr Westphal told BBC News: "It is very fine-grained material, which is what you'd expect for interstellar dust. It has an elemental composition which is consistent with what you would expect for interstellar dust. And it has a composition for other elements which are not inconsistent, but a bit surprising."
The researchers have so far analysed magnesium, aluminium, iron, chromium, manganese, nickel, copper and gallium from the particles.
A new mineral found in a type of particle known as interplanetary dust has recently been named Brownleeite after Dr Brownlee, who is regarded as a founder of the field of cosmic dust research. The discovery has been published in the journal American Mineralogist.
Though highly prized by Stardust's team, interstellar dust can be a nuisance in optical astronomy, because it can obscure objects in regions of the sky targeted for observation.
Paul.Rincon-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

Whaling worsens carbon release, scientists warn

Whales store carbon by the tonne

A century of whaling may have released more than 100 million tonnes - or a large forest's worth - of carbon into the atmosphere, scientists say.
Whales store carbon within their huge bodies and when they are killed, much of this carbon can be released.
US scientists revealed their estimate of carbon released by whaling at a major ocean sciences meeting in the US.
Dr Andrew Pershing from the University of Maine described whales as the "forests of the ocean".
Dr Pershing and his colleagues from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute calculated the annual carbon-storing capacity of whales as they grew.
"Whales, like any animal or plant on the planet, are made out of a lot of carbon," he said.
"And when you kill and remove a whale from the ocean, that's removing carbon from this storage system and possibly sending it into the atmosphere."
He pointed out that, particularly in the early days of whaling, the animals were a source of lamp oil, which was burned, releasing the carbon directly into the air.
"And this marine system is unique because when whales die [naturally], their bodies sink, so they take that carbon down to the bottom of the ocean.
"If they die where it's deep enough, it will be [stored] out of the atmosphere perhaps for hundreds of years."

Ocean trees

In their initial calculations, the team worked out that 100 years of whaling had released an amount of carbon equivalent to burning 130,000 sq km of temperate forests, or to driving 128,000 Humvees continuously for 100 years.
Dr Pershing stressed that this was still a relatively tiny amount when compared to the billions of tonnes produced by human activity every year.
But he said that whales played an important role in storing and transporting carbon in the marine ecosystem.
Simply leaving large groups of whales to grow, he said, could "sequester" the greenhouse gas, in amounts that were comparable to some of the reforestation schemes that earn and sell carbon credits.
He suggested that a similar system of carbon credits could be applied to whales in order to protect and rebuild their stocks.
"The idea would be to do a full accounting of how much carbon you could store in a fully populated stock of fish or whales, and allow countries to sell their fish quota as carbon credits," he explained.
"You could use those credits as an incentive to reduce the fishing pressure or to promote the conservation of some of these species."

Is bigger better?

Other scientists said that he had raised an exciting and interesting problem.
Professor Daniel Costa, a marine animal researcher from the University of California, Santa Cruz, told BBC News: "So many more groups are looking at the importance of these large animals in the carbon cycle.
"And it's one of those things that, when you look at it, you think: ' This is so obvious, why didn't we think of this before?'."
Dr Pershing pointed out that whales, with their huge size, were more efficient than smaller animals at storing carbon.
He used the analogy of a small dog compared to a large dog.
"My wife's 6lb (2.7kg) toy poodle eats one cup of food per day and my dog - a 60lb standard poodle - eats five cups of food per day," he said.
"That's only five times as much food but my dog weighs ten times as much."
He said that the marine carbon credit idea could be applied to other very large marine animals, including endangered bluefin tuna and white sharks.
Dr Pershing said: "These are huge and they are top predators, so unless they're fished they would be likely to take their biomass to the bottom of the ocean [when they die]."
The American Geophysical Union's Ocean Sciences meeting has been taking place this week in Portland, Oregon.

Shuttle Endeavour delayed in night flight to ISS

"We're going to go into a 24 hour scrub"

Low cloud at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida has prevented the shuttle Endeavour from launching on its latest mission to the space station.

Nasa officials stood the orbiter down with under 10 minutes left on the countdown clock.
Endeavour encountered no technical issues as it prepared to lift off and will try again on Monday morning.
It will be delivering a connecting unit and a large bay window to the international orbiting platform.
The shuttle mission is the first since President Barack Obama announced a new vision for US human space exploration.
Last Monday, he cancelled the rockets and capsule Nasa was developing to replace the shuttle, and urged the commercial sector to provide future transport needs.

NODE 3 - 'TRANQUILITY' Key unit connects and helps manage other ISS modules Multiple docking ports for visiting vehicles or future modules 7m by 4.6m; a mass of 14 tonnes, but will be fitted out in orbit Sophisticated life support systems will include air cleaning unit Cupola to be fixed to an Earth-facing port once in orbit Panoramic views provide ideal control room for robotic arm Named after Sea of Tranquility, the Apollo 11 landing site

Sunday's launch was postponed because the thick layer of cloud which moved in over Kennedy would have prevented launch officials from following visually the progress of the ascent, but also because the cloud would have hampered the safe return of the shuttle to Kennedy were it to encounter a problem and need to abort its flight.
The head of the US space agency, Charlie Bolden, was in attendance at Kennedy.Speaking to reporters, he conceded Mr Obama's new path was causing anxiety among Nasa workers and in Congress.
"This is going to be complex and complicated, and we've got to work all this stuff out," he said.
Endeavour's 13-day mission, which includes three spacewalks, will be the last night launch for a shuttle. The four missions that follow Endeavour will all take place in daylight hours.
Once installed on station, the Node 3 and Cupola modules will make the platform 90% complete.
The mission is an important moment for the European Space Agency's (Esa) contribution to the ISS project. Both modules being ferried to orbit were constructed in Italy by Thales Alenia Space.
Node 3 connecting unit will house the station's core life-support systems.
The node has several berthing ports that could conceivably even allow the ISS to be expanded one day.

"Node 3 is an interconnecting module," explained Simonetta Di Pippo, Esa's director of human spaceflight.
"It's a door open to the future, because if we decide to develop new modules, new extensions, new capabilities, we will be able to do it because we are now launching Node 3."
The Cupola is a dome-shaped module with seven windows. At 80cm (31.5in) in diameter, its top window will be the biggest ever flown in space.
The module will act as a control room to direct robotic operations on the exterior of the platform, and provide a vantage point for the astronauts to view their home planet.
Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

Laser fusion test results raise energy hopes

The experiment focuses 192 high-power laser beams to a tiny target

A major hurdle to producing fusion energy using lasers has been swept aside, results in a new report show.

The controlled fusion of atoms - creating conditions like those in our Sun - has long been touted as a possible revolutionary energy source.
However, there have been doubts about the use of powerful lasers for fusion energy because the "plasma" they create could interrupt the fusion.
An article in Science showed the plasma is far less of a problem than expected.
The report is based on the first experiments from the National Ignition Facility (Nif) in the US that used all 192 of its laser beams.
Along the way, the experiments smashed the record for the highest energy from a laser - by a factor of 20.
Star power
Construction of the National Ignition Facility began at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1997, and was formally completed in May 2009.
The goal, as its name implies, is to harness the power of the largest laser ever built to start "ignition" - effectively a carefully controlled thermonuclear explosion.

INERTIAL CONFINEMENT FUSION 192 laser beams are focused through holes in a target container called a hohlraum Inside the hohlraum is a tiny pellet containing an extremely cold, solid mixture of hydrogen isotopes Lasers strike the hohlraum's walls, which in turn radiate X-rays X-rays strip material from the outer shell of the fuel pellet, heating it up to millions of degrees If the compression of the fuel is high enough and uniform enough, nuclear fusion can result Giant laser experiment powers up

It is markedly different from current nuclear power, which operates through splitting atoms - fission - rather than squashing them together in fusion.
Proving that such a lab-based fusion reaction can release more energy than is required to start it - rising above the so-called breakeven point - could herald a new era in large-scale energy production.
In the approach Nif takes, called inertial confinement fusion, the target is a centimetre-scale cylinder of gold called a hohlraum.
It contains a tiny pellet of fuel made from an isotope of hydrogen called deuterium.
During 30 years of the laser fusion debate, one significant potential hurdle to the process has been the "plasma" that the lasers will create in the hohlraum.
The fear has been that the plasma, a roiling soup of charged particles, would interrupt the target's ability to absorb the lasers' energy and funnel it uniformly into the fuel, compressing it and causing ignition.
Siegfried Glenzer, the Nif plasma scientist, led a team to test that theory, smashing records along the way.
"We hit it with 669 kilojoules - 20 times more than any previous laser facility," Nif's Siegfried Glenzer told BBC News.
That isn't that much total energy; it's about enough to boil a one-litre kettle twice over.
However, the beams delivered their energy in pulses lasting a little more than 10 billionths of a second.
By way of comparison, if that power could be maintained, it would boil the contents of more than 50 Olympic-sized swimming pools in a second.
'Dramatic step'
Crucially, the recent experiments provided proof that the plasma did not reduce the hohlraum's ability to absorb the incident laser light; it absorbed about 95%.
But more than that, Dr Glenzer's team discovered that the plasma can actually be carefully manipulated to increase the uniformity of the compression.

The 130-tonne target chamber is kept under vacuum for the experiments

"For the first time ever in the 50-year journey of laser fusion, these laser-plasma interactions have been shown to be less of a problem than predicted, not more," said Mike Dunne, director of the UK's Central Laser Facility and leader of the European laser fusion effort known as HiPER.
"I can't overstate how dramatic a step that is," he told BBC News. "Many people a year ago were saying the project would be dead by now."
Adding momentum to the ignition quest, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced on Wednesday that, since the Science results were first obtained, the pulse energy record had been smashed again.
They now report an energy of one megajoule on target - 50% higher than the amount reported in Science.
The current calculations show that about 1.2 megajoules of energy will be enough for ignition, and currently Nif can run as high as 1.8 megajoules.
Dr Glenzer said that experiments using slightly larger hohlraums with fusion-ready fuel pellets - including a mix of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium as well as tritium - should begin before May, slowly ramping up to the 1.2 megajoule mark.
"The bottom line is that we can extrapolate those data to the experiments we are planning this year and the results show that we will be able to drive the capsule towards ignition," said Dr Glenzer.
Before those experiments can even begin, however, the target chamber must be prepared with shields that can block the copious neutrons that a fusion reaction would produce.
But Dr Glenzer is confident that with everything in place, ignition is on the horizon.
He added, quite simply, "It's going to happen this year."

MRSA superbug strain 'tracked' via genome

The appearance of MRSA has been linked to widespread antibiotic use

Researchers have developed a technique for precisely tracking the spread of the superbug MRSA in hospitals.

The team from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge looked at the genomes of MRSA strains from across the globe and at one hospital in Thailand.

They were able to spot small changes that allowed them to track the strain back to an individual patient.

They say this adds to the understanding of how MRSA can spread so rapidly and should lead to better treatments.

DNA sequencing

The research, which is published in the journal Science, involved teams in the UK, Thailand, Portugal and the United States.

Scientists used new high-throughput DNA sequencing technologies to compare MRSA samples from patients to show how they were genetically related.

They were able to spot single-letter differences in the genetic code.

They looked at two different sets of samples: one set taken from people across the globe and another from a single hospital in Thailand.

They sequenced the entire genomes of each sample.

In the hospital setting it revealed single letter genetic changes in the samples showing that no two infections were caused by entirely identical bacteria.

This allowed them to discover whether one patient had infected another or whether the infection had come in from another source.

They found that the MRSA strain studied acquired about one single-letter change in its genetic code every six weeks.

Worldwide search

They also looked at samples from hospitals in several parts of the world collected over more than 20 years.

The rate of mutation apparently supports the theory that MRSA emerged in the 1960s at the time of widespread antibiotic use.

Professor Sharon Peacock, a microbiologist at the University of Cambridge said: "The implications for public health are clear. This technology represents the potential to trace transmission pathways of MRSA more definitively so that interventions or treatments can be targeted with precision and according to need."

Researchers say it would be too expensive to use the technology widely at present but the cost should fall in the next few years.

Professor Mark Enright, an expert in molecular epidemiology at Imperial College, London, said the work gave researchers "a good idea as to how this particular type of MRSA has evolved and how it behaves in and out of hospitals".

"This work is a great demonstration of new, rapid DNA sequencing that in the near future will be how important pathogens such as MRSA will be identified," he said.

"Such unambiguous identification will form the basis for rapid diagnostics of microbial infection and will tell us how they spread in hospitals identifying each human host and surface in chains of transmission between patients."

Alligators and birds share lung structure and ancestor

How do alligators breathe?

Alligators and birds share a breathing mechanism which may have helped their ancestors dominate Earth more than 200 million years ago, scientists say.

Research published in the journal Science found that like birds, in alligators air flows in one direction.

Birds' lung structure allows them to breathe when flying in low oxygen, or hypoxic, conditions.

This breathing may have helped a common ancestor of birds and alligators thrive in the hypoxic period of the Triassic.

Mammals 'hiding'

"It might explain a mystery that has been around for quite some time", Dr Colleen Farmer from the University of Utah told BBC News.

The mystery in question is why the archosaurs came to dominate Earth after the planet's worst mass extinction 251 million years ago.

Archosaurs evolved into two different branches which developed into crocodilians, dinosaurs, flying pterosaurs and eventually birds.

Synapsids, which evolved to include mammals, had been dominant in the Permian period before the mass extinction.

Some survived but were toppled from their perch by the archosaurs.

Any mammal-like synapsid survivors "were teeny liittle things hiding in cracks" said Dr Farmer. "I think it's because they couldn't compete.

"It wasn't until the die-off of the large dinosaurs 65 million years ago that mammals made a comeback and started occupying body sizes larger than an opossum."

To demonstrate alligator lung mechanisms, the scientists measured airflow in anesthetised animals, showing it flows in one direction rather than in and out of chambers.

They also pumped water containing tiny fluorescent beads into the lungs of dead alligators to observe the flow.

Studies on these alligators may explain why some animals ruled the Earth.

Puzzle solved

The researchers believe the similarity in lung structure may explain why some animals were better able to adapt after the extinction, when oxygen levels dropped.

"We know that birds are really good at breathing in hypoxic conditions. They can fly at altitudes that would kill a mammal," said Dr Farmer.

"Many archosaurs, such as pterosaurs, apparently were capable of sustaining vigorous exercise. Lung design may have played a key role in this capacity.

"That's been a puzzle, why do birds have these very different lungs? But now we can date it back to the common ancestor of birds and crocodilians.

"It implies that all dinosaurs, herbivores like Triceratops and carnivores like Tyrannosaurus, had bird-like lungs," Dr Farmer added.