Flavonoids in orange juice suppress oxidative stress from high-fat, high-carb meal

Eating foods containing flavonoids -- orange juice, in this case -- along with a high-fat, high-carbohydrate fast-food meal neutralizes the oxidative and inflammatory stress generated by the unhealthy food and helps prevent blood vessel damage, a new study by endocrinologists shows.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Ancient snakes living on Madagascar

Blind snakes have been discovered to be one of the few species now living in Madagascar that existed there when it broke from India about 100 million years ago, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

New Paper Pinpoints a Seat of Self-Control in the Brain

The ability to delay gratification allows humans to accomplish such goals as saving for retirement, going to the gym regularly and choosing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In a new paper, a team of researchers for the first time causally shows that this ability is rooted in a part of the frontal lobe of the brain: the prefrontal cortex.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Microbial answer to plastic pollution?

Fragments of plastic in the ocean are not just unsightly but potentially lethal to marine life. Coastal microbes may offer a smart solution to clean up plastic contamination, according new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Molecular brake for the bacterial flagellar nano-motor

Researchers have now discovered that Escherichia coli bacteria harness a sophisticated chemosensory and signal transduction machinery that allows them to accurately control motor rotation, thereby adjusting their swimming velocity in response to changing environments. The research may foster the development of novel strategies to fight persistent infections.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Promoting healing by keeping skeletal stem cells 'young'

Scientists seeking new ways to fight maladies ranging from arthritis and osteoporosis to broken bones that won't heal have cleared a formidable hurdle, pinpointing and controlling a key molecular player to keep stem cells in a sort of extended infancy. It's a step that makes treatment with the cells in the future more likely for patients.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Secret to healing chronic wounds might lie in tiny pieces of silent RNA

Scientists have determined that chronic wounds might have trouble healing because of the actions of a tiny piece of a molecular structure in cells known as RNA. The researchers discovered in a new animal study that this RNA segment in wounds with limited blood flow lowers the production of a protein that is needed to encourage skin cells to grow and close over the sore.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 Mar 2010 | 6:00 am

Jaw bone grown from adult stem cells

Scientists have succeeded in growing a complex, full-size bone from human adult stem cells. A research team grew a temporomandibular joint from stem cells derived from bone marrow.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 Mar 2010 | 6:00 am

X-rays often inaccurate in the diagnosis of hip and pelvic fractures

Radiographs (standard X-rays) are often inconclusive in the detection of hip and pelvic fractures in the emergency department, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 Mar 2010 | 6:00 am

Targeted agent blocked growth of deadly brain cancer in preclinical studies

A drug already in clinical trials to treat a variety of tumors shows a remarkable ability to shut down growth of glioblastoma in both laboratory cells and in animals, say researchers. In their experiments, the agent put a brake on growth of laboratory cancer cell lines, and no mice with glioblastoma in their brain died as a result of their tumor while on therapy.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 Mar 2010 | 6:00 am

Obama to allow oil drilling off Virginia coast (AP)

AP - In a reversal of a long-standing ban on most offshore drilling, President Barack Obama is allowing oil drilling 50 miles off Virginia's shorelines. At the same time, he is rejecting some new drilling sites that had been planned in Alaska.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 31 Mar 2010 | 4:18 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Snowy weather with near-blizzard conditions was forecast to persist over the Rocky Mountains on Wednesday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 31 Mar 2010 | 3:26 am

Obama to permit oil exploration off Virginia coast (Reuters)

Reuters - President Barack Obama is to announce on Wednesday a plan to permit exploration for oil and natural gas off the coast of Virginia as a way to create jobs and reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 31 Mar 2010 | 3:00 am

Toads can 'predict earthquakes'

Common toads can sense an impending earthquake, fleeing their colony days before seismic activity strikes.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 31 Mar 2010 | 2:13 am

Climate science 'openness' urged

MPs investigating the recent climate change e-mail row demand greater transparency from climate scientists.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 31 Mar 2010 | 1:27 am

Hacked climate email inquiry cleared Jones but serious questions remain | Fred Pearce

Climate inquiry has dodged key questions in its rush to clear the name of the harangued head of the Climate Research Unit

Gaunt, beta-blocked and stood down from duty, Phil Jones is the fall guy for the wider failings that triggered the hacked climate email scandals. But at its hearings into the affair a month ago, the Commons science committee was kind to the director of the Climate Research Unit (CRU), but short-tempered with his grinning sidekick, the University of East Anglia's vice-chancellor Edward Acton.

And so, in their report, Jones gets the benefit of a few doubts. At their final drafting meeting last week, only the MPs' in-house cryptosceptic, Graham Stringer, voted against a sentence saying that, on the evidence they had, "the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact".

Instead, the university administration gets chastised for presiding over a culture of secrecy and possible illegality within the CRU that led to a public relations meltdown.

The MPs are clear that there are serious issues to address both in climate science and in the operation of freedom of information law in British universities. But in their desire not to single out Jones, they end up bending over backwards to support a man who is the pillar of the establishment they are criticising.

Of course, it must have been "frustrating" for Jones to handle freedom of information requests from people "he knew – or perceived – were motivated by a desire simply to undermine his work". But, as the MPs say, his "blunt refusals to share data, even unrestricted data" led to "unfortunate email exchanges" and was "inevitably counterproductive".

The MPs are right to absolve Jones of many of the crimes of which bloggers have accused him. The allegations surrounding his "tricks" and efforts to "hide the decline" are largely malicious inventions.

But, in their rush to judgment before parliament is dissolved for the general election, Phil Willis and his team avoided examining more complex charges, including those raised by the Guardian in its investigations in February.

Even so, they sometimes get confused. The MPs accept Jones's claim that CRU's habit of keeping secret much of its data, methodology and computer codes was "standard practice" among climate scientists. Yet they also note that Nasa scientists doing similar work are much more open. Not so standard, then.

And whatever standard practice may be, surely as one of climate science's senior figures, Jones should take some responsibility for its misdemeanours? Jones has worked for the CRU for more than 20 years and been its director for six. The MPs found there a "culture of withholding information" in which "information may have been deleted to avoid disclosure." It found this "unacceptable". Doesn't its director take responsibility?

The MPs kept their criticism for the university. Its "failure to grasp fully the potential damage [from] non-disclosure of FOIA requests was regrettable".

Also possibly illegal, it might have added.

UEA is rightly in deep doo-doo. The MPs find that its information officers colluded with CRU to subvert legitimate freedom of information requests, and "found ways to support" the culture of secrecy. In a key statement that not even the proliferation of acronyms can disguise, they say: "We must put on record our concern about the manner in which UEA allowed CRU to handle FOIA requests."

The wider research community also has questions to answer. "We recommend that all publicly funded research groups consider whether they are being as open as they can be, and ought to be, with the details of their methodologies," the MPs say. That sounds like a good follow-up for the committee after the general election.

But apart from Acton, the person who will read this report with most gloom, may be Sir Muir Russell, the Scottish grandee appointed by Acton to review the activities of Jones and his colleagues.

The MPs agree with the sceptic Lord Lawson, who gave evidence, that Russell's inquiry should conduct his interviews and hearings "in public wherever possible". Unless Russell has spoken to nobody in the past four months, he evidently is not doing that. They say his inquiry should "publish all written evidence on its website as soon as possible". Yesterday, a month after the deadline for submissions closed, none had been posted.

Worse, the MPs have given him long list of things to investigate or rule on, such as deciding whether emails were deleted in breach of FOI law. Or coming up with rules for CRU on sharing data. And such as deciding whether Jones "subverted the peer-review process". They also suggest that a test of how truly independent the Russell inquiry is will be whether it gives the UEA an advance copy. This story is far from over yet.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 31 Mar 2010 | 12:45 am

Catlin Arctic survey: stormy winds, thin ice and polar bear prints

The Catlin Arctic expedition team battles on against the elements and finds a surprising amount of thin and melting ice

Since myself, Martin and Charlie – the Catlin Arctic survey explorer team – were dropped off on the Arctic ice and collected our very first science samples, we've had an eventful time. We've had a mixture of really evil cold and windy weather, beautiful sunny days, gloomy foggy days and of course a storm or two.

All part of the Arctic experience – but this time one of the horrors has been incredibly strong north winds. The cold is amplified but we also feel as if we are living in a grinder. No matter how far north we trek, we are constantly being driven south by the wind. So at the end of each day we are almost back where we started. It's annoying – but we are ploughing on and hoping for the wind to change soon.

We've also been seeing vast areas of open water and very thin ice – it's the first time any of us have experienced anything quite like this on such a large scale. The way the ice is behaving is simply the strangest we have ever seen. We've spent days on ice that was bending, bouncing and wobbling as we passed over it. Martin's feet went through a few times – his walking on thin ice technique rather resembling a rhino!

There was one massive area which I knew would not take our weight – and having tried to skirt around it for quite some time I decided that I would have to go for a swim. The idea was for me to swim over with ropes attached back and front to the sledges, and then for me to pull the others over, sitting on the floating sledges one by one. As it turned out, once I'd got my immersion suit on I was able to slither across the ice on my belly like a snake for about 30 metres and then pull the guys across.

We've had a few more problems with the scientific equipment freezing up but have managed to overcome the glitches and have carried on with the drilling, water-sampling, bottling and filtering. It's an activity that we do every three days, in the hope of gaining greater insight into ocean acidifcation up here in the Arctic.

The most exciting highlight of last week for us was spotting some very fresh footprints – some from an Arctic fox and others from polar bear prints. From the prints it appeared that the bear had suddenly broken into a gallop – I'm just pleased that it wasn't heading our way at the time.

Last weekend we were hit by another storm and were struggling against frostbite in our hands and toes. But things have settled down again now and we are pleased to report that our progress across the ice has got a bit better now. We are still continuing to do about five miles a day on our trekking days – but the southerly drift of the ice seems to be slowing down so our actual distance covered should get a bit better.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 31 Mar 2010 | 12:30 am

Meat-Eating Vs. Driving: Another Climate Change Error? (Time.com)

Time.com - Climate change advocates are on the defensive after a beef-industry consultant points out a flawed comparison
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 31 Mar 2010 | 12:20 am

Toads able to detect earthquake days beforehand, says study

Research found toads deserted their mating site 74km from epicentre of L'Aquila earthquake in Italy, with ionospheric disruptions a possible cause

Toads may be able to detect imminent earthquakes, according to scientists. The finding will add to the accounts through the centuries where animals, from dogs to rats, snakes and chickens, are said to have behaved strangely before an earthquake.

In the study published today in the Journal of Zoology, a colony of toads deserted their mating site three days before an earthquake struck L'Aquila in Italy last year – the epicentre was 74km from the area where the animals had normally gathered. No toads returned to the site until 10 days later, after the last of the significant aftershocks had finished.

The discovery was made by accident by Rachel Grant, a life scientist at the Open University. She was studying the effects of lunar cycles on the toads' behaviour and reproduction. "I was going out every evening at dusk and counting how many toads were active and how many pairs there were. Normally they arrive for breeding in early March and you get large numbers of males at the breeding site. The females get paired fairly quickly. They stay active and obvious around the breeding site until the spawning is over in April or May."

One day she noticed there were no toads. "Sometimes during the breeding season you get a drop in numbers if there's been a very cold night but usually, the day after, they come back again. It was very unusual that there was none at all."

There could be several mechanisms for animals to sense the beginnings of an earthquake, wrote Grant in the Journal of Zoology. They could detect seismic waves directly or ground tilt (which can occur in the minutes before a quake). In addition there might be anomalies in the Earth's magnetic field.

Looking for clues to explain the toads' behaviour, Grant found that scientists had noticed disruptions in the ionosphere, the uppermost electromagnetic layer of the earth's atmosphere, at the time of the L'Aquila earthquake, which the toads may have detected. Previous earthquakes have had similar ionospheric disruptions associated with them. "I've spoken to seismologists who said there were a lot of gases released before the earthquake, a lot of charged particles. Toads and amphibians are very sensitive to changes in environmental chemistry and I think these gases and charged particles could have been detected by the toads."

Previously, fish, rodents and snakes have been anecdotally associated with unusual behaviour more than a week before an earthquake or at distances greater than 50km.

In 2003, Japanese doctor Kiyoshi Shimamura found that there was a jump in dog bites and other dog-related complaints before and after earthquakes. Before the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, a disaster that killed more than 6,000 people, he found that accounts of dogs barking "excessively" went up by 18% on average in the months before the earthquake. Above the epicentre on Awaji Island, there was a 60% increase in complaints compared with a year earlier.

Grant's work is not the first time toads have been associated with sensing the precursors of earthquakes. "In 2008, there was a big earthquake in Szechuan province in China and there was unusual migration of toads seen," she said. "I'd like to study it further and look at animal behaviour in combination with seismological and geophysical precursors."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 31 Mar 2010 | 12:00 am

Iranian nuclear scientist defects to U.S.: report

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An Iranian nuclear scientist who has been missing since June has defected to the United States and is helping the CIA, ABC news reported on Tuesday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 10:03 pm

Susceptibility to Autism Tied to Genes (HealthDay)

HealthDay - TUESDAY, March 30 (HealthDay News) -- Researchers have discovered two genes for brain proteins that seem to be linked to autism disorders.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 9:49 pm

Ministers to urge better dialogue on oil price volatility (AFP)

AFP - Energy producers and consumers were set Wednesday to urge improved dialogue on tackling oil price volatility in a joint ministerial declaration to be issued at the end of a key forum.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 9:14 pm

Special Report: Fast machines, genes and the future of medicine

WASHINGTON/CHICAGO/LONDON (Reuters ) - Francis Collins, who helped map the human genome, did not get around to having his own genes analyzed until last summer. And he was surprised by what he learned.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 7:53 pm

Atom smasher will help reveal 'the beginning' (AP)

AP - The world's largest atom smasher threw together minuscule particles racing at unheard of speeds in conditions simulating those just after the Big Bang — a success that kick-started a megabillion-dollar experiment that could one day explain how the universe began.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 7:13 pm

Ancient Blind Snakes Hitched Ride on Drifting Continents

Blind snakes living in Madagascar were there when the spit of land broke off of India 100 million years ago.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Mar 2010 | 7:13 pm

Ancient Blind Snakes Hitched Ride on Drifting Continents (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Blind snakes are small worm-like creatures that likely feel their way through underground homes by sensing chemicals through their skin.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 6:21 pm

Toads Anticipate Earthquakes

Toads might sense earthquakes before they happen and then hop to safety.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Mar 2010 | 6:01 pm

Apple Sued Over iPad Patent Infringement

A Taiwanese company wants to ban imports of iPads, iPhones and other Apple products because of multitouch patent infringements.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Mar 2010 | 5:58 pm

Spelbots: Female African-American Robot Designers

Historically black liberal arts college for women in Atlanta competes strongly in RoboCup, the Olympics of robotics and artificial intelligence.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Mar 2010 | 5:49 pm

Breast cancer gene patents judged invalid

Court ruling may spell bad news for biotech industry.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/bYLBuSkrquA" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 30 Mar 2010 | 5:34 pm

Judge asked to stop New Orleans hospital projects (AP)

AP - Preservationists say the construction of two hospitals to replace ones damaged by Hurricane Katrina would wipe out a historic New Orleans neighborhood, and they want a federal judge to block the projects.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 5:33 pm

A Green Driver Braves Manhattan

Ford invited me to take a new electric version of their commercial van, the Transit Connect, for a test drive in Manhattan today ahead of the auto show that starts Friday. The city had flood-inducing rain and high winds. Plus, ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 30 Mar 2010 | 5:24 pm

NASA Prepares 'Global Hawk' for Takeoff (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - NASA is gearing up Global Hawk, a remote-controlled airplane, for its first scientific flights in coming weeks. With its capacity for long-distance, high-altitude flights that can last over a day, Global Hawk presents a new chapter in Earth science for NASA. "It's a very exciting time," said Chris Naftel, project manager for Global Hawk. "This is the very first time that Global Hawk will be used for science." Northrop Grumman originally manufactured the two Global Hawks now being retrofitted by NASA several years ago. ...
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 5:16 pm

Notes and queries: Which came first, orange the colour or orange the fruit? When Blur were better than Oasis

Which came first, orange the colour or orange the fruit? Why you couldn't ambush the 9th Legion at night; When Blur were better than Oasis

Is an orange called an orange because it's orange, or is orange orange because of the orange? Which came first, the fruit or the colour?

The fruit came first. The English word "orange" has made quite a journey to get here. The fruit originally came from China – the German word Apfelsine and the Dutch sinaasappel (Chinese apple) reflect this – but our word ultimately comes from the Old Persian "narang". Early Persian emperors collected exotic trees for their landscape gardens, which may well have included orange trees. Arabs later traded the fruit and spread the word all the way to Moorish Spain; the Spanish word for orange is "naranja". In Old French, the fruit became "orenge" and this was adopted into Middle English, eventually becoming our orange, fruit as well as colour.

Anna Alberda Ellis, Huddersfield

As the instance of "pume orenge" in a 13th-century Anglo-Norman manuscript indicates, orange was in fact first used as an adjective. Yet, the Persian word from which "orange" is derived did not refer to the colour of the fruit, but to the bitterness of its skin. Orange as a colour adjective dates from the early 16th century; therefore we can say that the orange is called orange because it is orange, as well as orange is orange because of the orange.

Wilfried Heinz, Tübingen, Germany

There are very few pure colour names like black, white, red, blue, green or brown; most of the hundreds of words we use for colours come from things such as fruit, flowers, precious stones and other objects, eg cerise, turquoise, indigo, violet, amber. Witness a recent Simon Hoggart's sketch (Guardian, March 19): "His [Sir Hayden Phillips's] face, normally the colour of terracotta, went through plum tomato, to brick red and on to tomato."

Ormond Uren, London NW5

A new film, Centurion, suggests that a Roman legion (the 9th) was wiped out in Scotland in AD117. Did this really happen?

The film Centurion is not based upon the book The Eagle of the Ninth, beyond the idea of the disappearing ninth legion (N&Q, 24 March). Award-winning novelist Rosemary Sutcliff's story is of a young Roman who goes on a quest with his slave Esca to discover the fate of his father's lost ninth legion, restore his father's reputation, and retrieve the lost eagle. It is the basis of the film The Eagle of the Ninth, being made by Kevin Macdonald. My evidence for this? I look after Rosemary Sutcliff's books and legacy, as her onetime godson and cousin..

Anthony Lawton, Leicester

I would be very surprised if a Roman legion would have been destroyed as it slept in camp (N&Q, 24 March). A Roman legion in enemy territory would have built a marching fort, which would have prevented it being rushed by an attacking force. Sentries would have been placed to give early warning of an attack.

Also, a night attack is very difficult to organise. An interesting parallel is the attempted night attack by the Jacobite army on the government army before the battle of Culloden in 1746. Despite being on home ground and having local guides, the Jacobites got lost and the attack had to be abandoned. The difficulties facing a tribal chieftain in the Roman period would, if anything, have been greater. So it is very unlikely to have happened that way.

Andrew Tampion, Hinckley, Leics

What is there in a song that makes someone like it? I love key changes, but no one else seems to – why is this?

I think that musicians regard a key change as a cheap method of creating emotion in a song: the shift in key is a very functional way of seeming to make the song "soar". A song such as Oasis's All Around the World illustrates this; the chorus is simply too dull without the key change, which gives it the feel of being anthemic. Compare this to, say, Blur's Tender (to reopen mid-90s wounds), which stays in one key and has a hook that is repeated a lot: it stays interesting because of subtle changes in lengths of chorus, guitar line and backing vocals.

Keith Williams, London

Any answers

When a major work of art is sold to an anonymous buyer, does it completely vanish or do insiders in the art world know where it is?

Sally Howel, London SW2

Is any research going on into a depilatory to replace shaving? There is something a bit bronze age about scraping one's face with a razor.

Alan Rooks, Leicester

Send questions and answers to nq@guardian.co.uk. Please include name, address and phone number.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 30 Mar 2010 | 5:05 pm

Climate researchers 'secrecy' criticised – but MPs say science remains intact

Leaked emails from UK's Climate Research Unit show scientists withheld information - but inquiry blames university

MPs today strongly criticised the University of East Anglia for not tackling a "culture of withholding information" among the climate change scientists whose private emails caused a furore after being leaked online in November.

The parliamentary science and technology select committee was scathing about the "standard practice" among the climate science community of not routinely releasing all its raw data and computer codes – something the committee's chair, Phil Willis MP, described as "reprehensible". He added: "That practice needs to change and it needs to change quickly."

But the committee did not condemn the actions of Prof Phil Jones, the head of the UEA's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) because it said he should have been better supported by the university in dealing with requests for data under the Freedom of Information Act. It added that the scientific reputation of Jones and the CRU was untarnished.

The committee's report entitled The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, said the focus on Jones and the CRU in the row about the hacked emails had been "largely misplaced" and that "on accusations relating to freedom of information, we consider that much of the responsibility should lie with UEA, not CRU". In evidence to the inquiry, Jones admitted that he had sent some "awful emails".

"He probably wishes that emails were never invented," said Willis at a press conference. "But apart from that we do believe that Prof Jones has in many ways been scapegoated as a result of what really was a frustration on his part that people were asking for information purely to undermine his research."

Willis said that while the committee recognised Jones's frustration, this was "no excuse" for not responding properly to FOI requests. "It is important in terms of scientific endeavour that that material is made available," said Willis. He added that the committee accepted that Jones had released all the data that he was able to.

The MPs admitted that their enquiry into the emails was limited in its scope as only a single evidence session was held and the committee's deliberations had to be rushed through ahead of the general election. However, it also concluded:

• There was no evidence to challenge the "scientific consensus" that global warming is induced by human activities.

• The balance of evidence "patently" failed to support the view that the phrases "trick" and "hide the decline" used by Jones in one email were part of a conspiracy to hide evidence that did not support his view. The report reads, "[Trick] appears to be a colloquialism for a "neat" method of handling data," while "[hide the decline] was a shorthand for the practice of discarding data known to be erroneous"..

• On peer review, "the evidence we have seen does not suggest that Jones was trying to subvert the peer review process" and academics should not be criticised for "informal comments" on papers, MPs said. However, the report recommends that this should be examined in detail by a separate review of CRU's science being headed by Lord Oxburgh.

• The MPs were unable to look in detail at allegations that data had been deleted by Jones.

• The MPs expressed regret that the UK's deputy information commissioner had made a statement saying, in their words, that "at least some of the requested information should have been disclosed" without his office having conducted a formal investigation. However, they agreed that there was a prima facie case for the university to answer and that the Information Commissioner's Office should conduct an investigation.

• The MPs also said the independent inquiry set up by UEA under Sir Muir Russell should be conducted in public

Professor Myles Allen, a leading climate scientist at Oxford University, said that free exchange of data with fellow scientists was a fundamental requirement of academic research. He added: "There was an assumption within the climate science community that we could use our professional judgment to distinguish between professional scientists and activists or members of the public."

"The big implication in all this for science is that the [FOI Act] is taking away our liberty to use our own judgment to decide who we spend time responding to. And that has a cost," he said.

Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment said the report, "does not really shed any more light on the controversy surrounding the emails ... and will not stop the conspiracy theories being spread by so-called 'sceptics'.

"The committee clearly did not have the time or resources to examine all the email messages and so has been unable to provide a thorough analysis of their significance," he said.

Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, welcomed the committee's call for greater transparency, but said, "It doesn't look like an even-handed and balanced assessment. It looks like an attempt to whitewash and I fear it will be perceived exactly as that. I fear this will backfire because people will not buy into it."

He said he agreed with the committee that the "trick" and "hide the decline" comments in an email written by Jones were not evidence of a conspiracy to fabricate climate change data, "Of course not. It's not a conspiracy." He said the email was part of an "internal debate" about how to merge two data-sets together.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 30 Mar 2010 | 5:05 pm

Guardian Daily podcast: Former PM dismisses Cameron’s Conservatives; and UK’s shocking cancer misdiagnoses

Tony Blair has returned to the political fray with a speech in his former constituency of Sedgefield in which he took apart the Conservatives' ptich to voters and praised Gordon Brown's leadership. Guardian columnist Michael White says - love him or hate him - the former prime minister's poltiical skills are still peerless.

An alarmingly high number of cancers are being misdiagnosed due to mistakes by doctors and nurses - and NHS patients are dying as a result, according to a report seen by health correspondent Denis Campbell.

Russian security officials have warned there may be further terrorist attacks following Monday's suicide bombings on the Moscow metro, reports Luke Harding.

After 20 years and billions of pounds of investment, the most complex machine ever built - Cern's Large Hadron Collider - has begun working. As our science correspondent Ian Sample explains, it aims to reproduce what happened just after the big bang.

As Latino singer Ricky Martin announces on his website that he's gay, Guardian music writer Rosie Swash considers how easy it is for modern pop stars to be open about their sexual orientation.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 30 Mar 2010 | 5:01 pm

Can Toads Predict Earthquakes?

Last spring, a group of biologists were studying the mating habits of the common toad (Bufo bufo) in the L'Aquila province of Italy. As temperatures warm each year, male toads gather en masse at small ponds to compete for the ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 30 Mar 2010 | 5:00 pm

Clear-Winged Woolly Bat Sings Like No Other

This bat has the highest pitched call of any animal ever documented, putting even the best human sopranos to shame.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 30 Mar 2010 | 5:00 pm

Which States Pay Highest Gas Prices

Drivers in some states pay more than others when it comes to price spikes at the pump.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Mar 2010 | 4:34 pm

Students From Arctic Town Venture to Antarctica

Thinking about setting one of your teen-aged kids adrift on an ice floe? Geoff Green of "Students on Ice" will do it for you.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 30 Mar 2010 | 3:45 pm

8 Reasons Our Waistlines Are Expanding

Why are we so fat? From better hygiene to foods that mimic drugs, the answers may shake up your diet.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Mar 2010 | 3:39 pm

New Evidence of Ice Age Comet Found in Ice Cores

A new study cites spikes of ammonium in Greenland ice cores as evidence for a giant comet impact at the end of the last ice age, and suggests that the collision may have caused a brief, final cold snap before the climate warmed up for good.

In the April Geology, researchers describe finding chemical similarities in the cores between a layer corresponding to 1908, when a 50,000-metric-ton extraterrestrial object exploded over Tunguska, Siberia, and a deeper stratum dating to 12,900 years ago. They argue that the similarity is evidence that an object weighing as much as 50 billion metric tons triggered the Younger Dryas, a millennium-long cold spell that began just as the ice age was loosing its grip (SN: 6/2/07, p. 339).

Precipitation that fell on Greenland during the winter after Tunguska contains a strong, sharp spike in ammonium ions that can’t be explained by other sources such as wildfires sparked by the fiery explosion, says study coauthor Adrian Melott, a physicist of the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

The presence of ammonium suggests that the Tunguska object was most likely a comet, rather than asteroids or meteoroids, Melott says. Any object slung into the Earth’s atmosphere from space typically moves fast enough to heat the surrounding air to about 100,000° Celsius, says Melott, so hot the nitrogen in the air splits and links up with oxygen to form nitrates. And indeed, nitrates are found in snow around the Tunguska blast. But ammonium, found along with the nitrates, contains hydrogen that most likely came from an incoming object rich in water — like an icy comet.

More than a century after the impact, scientists are still debating what kind of object blew up over Tunguska in 1908. They also disagree about whether an impact or some other climate event caused the Younger Dryas at the end of the ice age. But the presence of ammonium in Greenland ice cores at both times is accepted.

“There’s a remarkable peak of ammonium ions in ice cores from Greenland at the beginning of the Younger Dryas,” comments Paul Mayewski, a glaciologist at the University of Maine in Orono who was not involved in the new study. The new findings are “a compelling argument that a major extraterrestrial impact occurred then,” he notes.

Whenever a comet strikes Earth’s atmosphere, it leaves behind a fingerprint of ammonium, the researchers propose. Immense heat and pressure in the shock wave spark the creation of ammonia, or NH3, from nitrogen in the air and hydrogen in the comet. Some of the ammonium, or NH4+, ions generated during subsequent reactions fall back to Earth in snow and are preserved in ice cores, where they linger as signs of the cataclysmic event.

Although an impact big enough to trigger the Younger Dryas would have generated around a million times more atmospheric ammonia than the Tunguska blast did, the concentrations of ammonium ions in the Greenland ice of that age aren’t high enough.

But the relative dearth of ammonium in the ice might simply be a result of how the ice cores were sampled, Melott and his colleagues contend. Samples taken from those ice cores are spaced, on average, about 3.5 years apart, and ammonia could have been cleansed from the atmosphere so quickly that most of the sharp spike might fall between samples.

Image: Aftermath of the Tunguska event.

See Also:

• Asteroid Impact Craters on Earth as Seen From Space
• Saving Earth From an Asteroid Will Take Diplomats, Not Heroes
• How to Defend Earth Against an Asteroid Strike
• Earth to Get Close Shave Wednesday From Newly Discovered Asteroid
• Wednesday’s Near-Earth Asteroid Caught on Film

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 30 Mar 2010 | 3:18 pm

Amateur Astronomer Catches Comet Breakup

An amateur astronomer wound up looking at the right place at the right time to capture the breakup of a comet. The International Astronomical Union called the observation a “major astronomical discovery.”
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 30 Mar 2010 | 3:04 pm

Bemused by the news | Rebecca Front

After weeks in a pretend plywood house, I'm struck by the random reality of the print media

For the past six weeks I've been living in a looking-glass world. I've spent 11 hours a day, six days a week, filming in a perfect plywood replica of a house. It had a staircase that led nowhere, a pretend garden with pretend sunlight (an enormous spotlight on a tripod), and a "view" from the window of a photographed street. It was all very bewildering. What made it all the more strange is that I'm a regular and thorough reader of newspapers, and I wasn't able to read one. I heard the odd news bulletin on the radio, but that's not the same as getting stuck into all that detail and analysis.

So as soon as I emerged blinking into real, proper daylight, I began to wade through print, and it's been quite an education. If you've ever tried to read a paper in a language you're not very familiar with, you'll have an inkling of what it's felt like. Once you read beyond the headlines, you find yourself in a strange hinterland somewhere between not enough detail and way, way too much. Complexities are often assumed to be understood, leaving you feeling as though you missed the day at school when the rules of netball were explained, while other stories are so over-analysed that you feel they must be important, though you can't for the life of you understand why.

This is what I've gleaned so far. It seems that Samantha Cameron, who's not actually a politician, has won an election that has yet to be called, by dint of being pregnant. Police in Exeter have been sneaking into people's properties to prove how easy it is to get burgled. Most of the nation's youth is now addicted to a drug called meow meow, which nobody knew existed until yesterday. Oh, and it turns out Tony Blair liked Gordon Brown all along.

There has been a budget, which some people said was brave and some people said was inadequate. But even while it was being discussed, the chancellor took the time to tell us he preferred Scarlett Johansson to Cheryl Cole. He has also made it clear that he will not after all be taxing death – a shame, really, as it would have been a neat coalition of the only two certainties in life.

The Large Hadron Collider – which is, it turns out, a very, very long way underground and thus easily forgotten, suddenly got lively again and started spinning and spurting and particulating. It looked as though we were one step closer to understanding the big bang. Unfortunately, as this coincided with the announcement of Andy Burnham's elderly care initiative, the nation's attention was diverted back to the very beginning of life, just as it should have been focused on brightening up the end.

And it's agreed to make what we think of as a "day" several hours longer in future. I don't quite know how this is to be achieved, but it will be a good thing for farmers, schoolkids and the environment, and a bad thing for vampires and Exeter police's burglary squad. A woman who likes films has been chosen to replace a man who likes films on a programme about films. Oh, and Kevan Jones, the defence minister, revealed himself to be the only person in the universe with a bad word to say about Joanna Lumley.

Now I've dipped a toe back into the "real" world, I'm frankly baffled by it. Was it always this confusing? In the past, I've swum along happily on the tide of whatever was considered news. But after this absence, what counts as news seems an utterly random collection of events and prejudices. I'll get back into the swim of it, of course, before I go back to pretending to be somebody else in a plywood house. You could try it, too. Go into hibernation like a Blue Peter tortoise for a few weeks, and see how the news looks when you emerge. Though you might want to wait until after SamCam's been made prime minister.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 30 Mar 2010 | 3:00 pm

Geoengineers get the fear

Researchers fail to come up with clear guidelines for experiments that change the planet's climate.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 30 Mar 2010 | 2:56 pm

NASA Prepares 'Global Hawk' for Takeoff

NASA is gearing up Global Hawk, a remote-controlled airplane, for its first scientific flights in coming weeks.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Mar 2010 | 2:27 pm

Synching Europe's big science facilities

Momentum grows for body to coordinate the continent's research infrastructure.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 30 Mar 2010 | 2:05 pm

How the LHC Will Search For Exotic Magnetic Particles

Physicist James Pinfold describes how his detector at the LHC particle accelerator will search for fabled particles called magnetic monopoles.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Mar 2010 | 1:55 pm

10 Surprising Sex Discoveries

Researchers are constantly coming up with new discoveries that teach us more about the many surprising ways sex plays out in our lives and how it affects us.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Mar 2010 | 1:52 pm

Space probe set to size up polar ice

Europe's ice-monitoring project gets a second chance after 2005 launch mishap.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 30 Mar 2010 | 1:51 pm

Mephedrone on borrowed time

'Legal high' set to become illegal despite resignation of crucial drugs adviser.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 30 Mar 2010 | 12:52 pm

Mini-Big Bangs created in cosmos origins project

GENEVA (Reuters) - Physicists smashed sub-atomic particles into each other with record energy on Tuesday, creating thousands of mini-Big Bangs like the primeval explosion that gave birth to the universe 13.7 billion years ago.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 12:39 pm

Bats Use Sun to Calibrate Geomagnetic Compass

Bats are nocturnal, but some need sunlight to set their internal compass.

“Recent evidence suggests that bats can detect the geomagnetic field,” wrote Max Planck Institute ornithologists Richard Holland, Ivailo Borissov and Bjorn Siemers in an article published March 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We demonstrate that homing greater mouse-eared bats calibrate a magnetic compass with sunset cues.”

Previously, Holland showed that interfering with the magnetic field around bats impaired their long-distance navigation abilities. Those findings suggested that while bats used echolocation for short-distance steering, they rely on some geomagnetic sense to guide nocturnal flights that take them dozens of miles from home. The details, however, were hazy.

In the new study, Holland’s team captured 32 greater mouse-eared bats. Half of them were placed inside a pair of giant, coiled magnets that created a geomagnetic field misaligned with Earth’s, temporarily scrambling their own geomagnetic sense. All were released in an unfamiliar location 15 miles from their home cave.

Bats that were captured at night flew home unerringly, regardless of what the researchers had done. They’d already set their compasses by the sun. But if the bats were captured and magnetically disoriented at twilight, when they would normally be flying around calibrating their compasses, they could no longer find their way home. The bats appear to use the twilight as a point of reference while setting their compasses for the rest of the night.

How the compass works is still a mystery. Some birds use sunset for navigational calibration, but the similarities likely end there. While birds’ eyes contain geomagnetically sensitive molecules that are activated by photons, Holland has previously shown that bats don’t have this system. Instead, some of their cells appear to be laden with magnetite.

Bats that fly only in the dead of night, such as vampire bats, could provide an interesting comparison, wrote the researchers.

“The cues used by the bats to indicate their position can only be speculated on at this stage,” they wrote, noting that ornithologists have argued over the bird compass for decades. “For animals that occupy ecological niches where the sunset is rarely observed, this is a surprising finding.”

Images: 1) Greater mouse-eared bat/Gilles San Martin/Flickr. 2) The directions flown by control and experimental control bats when their magnetic fields were disrupted at sunset (above) and after dark/PNAS.

See Also:

• Reverse-Engineering the Quantum Compass of Birds
• Hacking Salmon’s Mental Compass to Save Endangered Fish
• Google Earth Reveals Sixth Sense of Cattle, Deer
• Cockroaches Use Earth’s Magnetic Field to Steer

Citation: “A nocturnal mammal, the greater mouse-eared bat, calibrates a magnetic compass by the sun.” By Richard A. Holland, Ivailo Borissov, and Björn M. Siemers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 107 No. 13, March 30, 2010.

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecological tipping points.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 30 Mar 2010 | 12:16 pm

Undersea Search Resumes for France Flight 447

On June 1, 2009, Air France Flight 447 disappeared in turbulent weather en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. For the remainder of the summer, two major efforts were launched by search and rescue crews to find the remains ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 30 Mar 2010 | 11:43 am

Toyota safety probe taps rocket scientists

WASHINGTON/TOKYO (Reuters) - U.S. auto safety regulators said on Tuesday they will tap the expertise of the country's top space and aeronautics experts to analyze Toyota Motor Corp's electronic throttles to see if they are behind the reports of unintended acceleration that have hounded the automaker.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 11:40 am

Africa bids to host mega radio telescope

CARNARVON, South Africa (Reuters) - Africa stands a good chance of beating Australia in a race to host the world's most powerful radio telescope able to peer back billions of years in time, a South African minister said on Tuesday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 11:13 am

Underwear Sends Text Message

File this under "What will they think of next?" A firm in Australia called Simavita has invented a pair of electronic underpants for people who have incontinence that works to monitor and relay information about "accidents." According to the web ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 30 Mar 2010 | 10:51 am

Mysterious Lead Coffin Found Near Rome

Archaeologists are examining a 1,000 pound lead coffin found near Rome to find out who or what is buried inside.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Mar 2010 | 10:37 am

Phew, It Works! Science Begins at the LHC

Early this morning, two proton beams collided in the Large Hadron Collider’s 17-mile-long ring at a combined energy of 7 TeV, three times higher than ever before. Finally, the flood of data particle physicists have been anticipating for years for has begun.

“It’s a great day  to be a particle physicist,” said General Rolf Heuer, director of CERN where the LHC is located, in a press release Tuesday. “A lot of people have waited a  long time for this moment, but their patience and dedication is starting to pay dividends.”

Getting the LHC started has not been easy. In September 2008 as it was first turned on, physicists around the world celebrated like never before. Just a week later when the LHC suffered a mechanical failure, it silenced the cheering abruptly like a visiting team hushing the home crowd with a buzzer-beating three-pointer.

Several more setbacks pushed the restart back a full year, and when the machine was turned on again, the celebration was more subdued, and until today, the physics world hadn’t fully exhaled. The first page of the first chapter has finally been turned.

“With these record-shattering collision energies, the LHC experiments are propelled into a vast region to explore,” said physicist Fabiola Gianotti, spokesperson for the ATLAS experiment on the LHC. “The hunt begins for dark matter, new forces, new dimensions and the Higgs boson.”

It remains to be seen how quickly the new machine will begin picking off its prey, however. Catching something as mysterious, elusive and possibly nonexistent as the Higgs boson takes more than just high energy. The beams must be calibrated, and recalibrated and tamed into submission. Scientists must get to know the LHC’s typical data output before they can successfully find the anamolies that will be evidence of yet unknown particles and phenomena.

In the meantime, physicists continue to work on the well-oiled, well-understood Tevatron at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. The LHC’s shadow has been lurking ever closer to the previous world-record holder for the highest energy, but the delayed start and slower ramp-up time put the Tevatron scientists into an unexpected overtime period, and they have continued to work hard chasing results — the Higgs boson in particular.

The LHC will run at its current energy for a year and a half, if all goes well. At this point, physicists expect it will have essentially caught up with the Tevatron, and the race will be over. Regardless of whether it has captured the Higgs boson by then, the Tevatron will be benched indefinitely, and the LHC will take a time out for maintenance and then ramp up to its combined collision energy target of 14 TeV.

Image: CERN

See Also:

• Last Days of Big American Physics: One More Triumph, or Just Another Heartbreak?
• Large Hadron Collider Sets World Record
• High-Energy Particle Physics Demystified
• An Insider’s Guide to the Large Hadron Collider

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 30 Mar 2010 | 9:58 am

Scientist takes on astrologer MP

Science writer Michael Brooks plans to stand in the general election against Bosworth MP David Tredinnick, who wants homeopathy to keep receiving NHS funding

Science, most people would agree, has been quite a success. It has improved life expectancy, given us the wonder of the internet and the tools to feed vast numbers of people. It has taught us the history of the universe and shown us the wonderful secrets of life. It has even been able to put your entire CD collection neatly in your pocket.

So why don't we value it in this country? We have taken this shining example of the best that human beings can do, and put it in the care of people who don't really don't care about it.

I'm talking about our MPs. Many of them don't seem to get just how important science is. They allowed the government to bail out the financial sector to the tune of billions but barely raised a murmur when the government declared that science can't expect to be properly funded in this financial climate. When the industries built on physics inject as much money into Britain's GDP as the financial services sector, that's not rational.

But that's the point. MPs don't have to be rational. It's not a standard we've ever held them to. Which is why we now have 70 of them trying to suppress a science-based recommendation that the NHS stop funding homeopathy.

Their ringleader is David Tredinnick, MP for Bosworth. When the Science and Technology Select Committee recommended that taxpayers not foot the bill for what seems to be a placebo, he tabled an early day motion suggesting the committee's analysis was flawed.

No surprises there. Tredinnick is a believer in the power of the stars to direct our fate and heal our bodies. He claimed more than £700 of taxpayers' money – repaid earlier this year – for astrology computer software and training. Today in the Leicester Mercury he asks why, when healthcare systems in India and China have linked medicine and astronomy for centuries, we don't think about doing the same. "Are we really just dismissing their views?" he asks. Well, yes, we are. We've done the analysis and are reasonably sure that balls of burning gas millions of miles away in outer space won't directly affect our health.

The worldview that links the position of the stars with your wellbeing has no trouble with homeopathy, of course. The real surprise is that, so far, 69 other MPs have signed Tredinnick's motion. No wonder that, despite all its successes, science struggles to get the funding it needs. A significant number of MPs display no respect for science whatsoever.

Part of the problem is that scientists are such a pushover. Their obsessive interest in finding out how everything in the world works means they're not like bankers. You can treat them like dirt and they'll still turn up to work in the morning. They won't necessarily like it, but they will accept low-paid jobs that have absolutely no security. Just ask any post-doctoral researcher working in a university.

In many ways, working in science is its own reward, but it's time we stopped taking scientists for granted. Maybe, for the sake of all our futures, we need to start protecting them. The first step in that direction would be to populate the House of Commons with people who understand what science is, what it can give and what it needs to function well and deliver even more prosperity.

We need more MPs who will make it a priority to attend meetings about scientific issues, protect science funding, respect the conclusions of scientific advisers, turn up for votes on climate change motions, that kind of thing. Which is why I'm willing to start things off by standing against David Tredinnick in the general election. It's the Battle of Bosworth II: The rise of the nerds.

Michael Brooks is a consultant to New Scientist magazine and the author of 13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Intriguing Scientific Mysteries of our Times (Profile)

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 30 Mar 2010 | 9:44 am

Elephants' Legs Work Like Four-Wheel Drive

Unlike all other four-legged animals, elephants use each limb for braking and accelerating.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 30 Mar 2010 | 9:39 am

Ceiling at Nero's Golden Palace Collapses In Rome

Part of the ceiling of Nero's 2,000-year-old Golden Palace collapsed in Rome Tuesday morning, leaving a huge hole in the ground. Experts believe water had seeped into the ceiling, causing it to literally crumble away.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 30 Mar 2010 | 9:30 am

Mass Animal Grave Unearthed in China Zoo

The 10-foot deep pit was believed to contain 30 to 40 carcasses, including endangered tigers and lions.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 30 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Large Hadron Collider breaks high-energy records

Large Hadron Collider produces first particle collisions and a round of applause from anxious scientists

Staff working on the largest, most complex scientific instrument in the world joined in a standing ovation earlier today as the machine began its long search for new particles, forces and extra dimensions of space.

Applause and cheers broke out across Cern, the European Nuclear Research Organisation near Geneva, at 12.06pm BST, the moment when subatomic particles travelling at close to the speed of light were slammed together in the machine, creating the highest energy particle collisions a laboratory has ever achieved.

The Large Hadron Collider, which took more than 15 years to design, plan and build, went back into service late last year after a massive electrical failure closed it down for 18 months of repair work in September 2008. Engineers had been running the machine at low energy before stepping up to high energy collisions today.

"It's a great day to be a particle physicist," Cern's director general, Rolf Heuer, said. "A lot of people have waited a long time for this moment, but their patience and dedication is starting to pay dividends."

The £6bn collider occupies a 27km circular tunnel 100 metres beneath the French-Swiss border and accelerates two counter-rotating beams of protons to within a whisker of the speed of light. The beams are crossed at four points around the underground tunnel, bringing the protons into head-on collisions inside giant detectors.

The collisions create tiny fireballs that mimic conditions that prevailed in the universe during the first fractions of a second after the big bang, some 13.7bn years ago.

The day started with frustration as two attempts to collide the particle beams failed. The first glitch was caused by a power unit tripping; the second by a sensitive magnet protection system over-reacting to stray currents in the machine.

The machine was designed to collide beams of protons with a combined energy of 14 trillion electron volts (TeV), but in January, Cern managers announced that as a precaution, the collider would operate at only half this energy until the end of 2011. By colliding protons at 7TeV, the machine is now at least three times more energetic than the US Tevatron collider near Chicago.

"With these record-shattering collision energies, the LHC experiments are propelled into a vast region to explore, and the hunt begins for dark matter, new forces, new dimensions and the Higgs boson," said Fabiola Gianotti, spokesman for the huge Atlas collaboration at the LHC.

Dark matter is the mysterious, invisible substance that hugs galaxies and makes up around a quarter of the universe. It is so named because it neither shines nor reflects radiation.

The LHC puts Cern back in the hunt for the long-sought Higgs boson, a particle that was postulated in 1964 by Peter Higgs, a British physicist, and several other researchers. If the Higgs particle exists, it suggests there is an invisible field permeating all of space that gives mass to fundamental particles, such as the quarks and electrons found in atoms.

The collider will close for a year at the end of 2011 for maintenance work and to fit additional safety measures that will protect the machine from breaking when it runs at full energy in 2013.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 30 Mar 2010 | 8:16 am

Island chosen for nuclear plant

Two of the UK's biggest energy providers announce plans for a new nuclear power station on Anglesey.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Mar 2010 | 5:29 am

Collider sees high-energy success

The Large Hadron Collider marks a new era in science as it achieves record-breaking high-energy particle collisions.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Mar 2010 | 5:13 am

Magnets can modify our morality, scientists discover

Scientists have shown they can change people's moral judgements by disrupting a specific area of the brain with magnetic pulses.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Mar 2010 | 4:20 am

Gloom and Gaia

James Lovelock's bleak prediction for planet earth
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Mar 2010 | 4:14 am

'Roadrunner' dinosaur discovered

One the smallest and most agile theropod dinosaurs yet discovered is unearthed by scientists in China.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Mar 2010 | 3:36 am

Green Room

The curious and complex case of the Kiwi hedgehog
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Mar 2010 | 2:33 am