(07.07.08) Two great stories from the Telegraph, which I confess I'm posting mostly for the photographs and I suspect they did too. The first concerns a study that seeks to prove that octopuses have some sort of "handedness", that is they favour certain arms for certain tasks. On of the ways they're using to find out is giving them Rubik's cubes to play with, so click here for a photo of an octupus playing with one.

Twice a year Golden Ray fish migrate past the Yucatan Penninsula and they passage has been captured by amateur photographer Sandra Critelli. Click here for her amazing pictures.

(28.06.08) I say, Britain maybe about to claim another land speed record with a great bunch of lads and a steam powered car built in a garden shed (not really but almost). The previous record was set in 1906 at 128mph, the new car hopes to hit 175 with the help of valve from a camping gas stove. Read more here and visit there website here (I wish I could get to their open day, it sounds a great to spend a Sunday).

(26.06.08) The Japanese company Genepax has lodged a patent for a car that runs on water. Or rather it runs on hydrogen extracted by an electrical process that splits it from the oxygen atoms. The method of doing this has been known for a long time but the energy produced by the hydrogen has always been less than that required to devide the atoms, so the company must have found a new way of doing it. Read more here and here (translated page).

Dubai is planning an 80 storey tower that twists and generates it's own power via turbines between each floor which really needs to seen rather than explained, so click here.

(21.06.08) I think it was Fred Hoyle who first proposed that life originated in space and was brought to Earth by meteorite and now scientists have confirmed the presence of the precursors of DNA in just such a meteorite. They've found molecules of uracil and xanthine (no, me neither) which are necessary to creater DNA and RNA, making Hoyles's theory more than just plausible. Read more here.

(18.06.08) How good is an eye-witness? Not as good as one might imagine according researcers into memory. The problem is two-fold, firstly people are highly suggestable and secondly they add details they associate with the scraps they do actually remember. This has serious implications for criminal trials and scientists are suggesting that a new type of expert witness, one whom can help juries judge the reliabilty of the evidence they are being presented with. Read more here.

(16.06.08) The Phoenix Mars lander has found a layer of "sticky" soil 2 inches below the surface which scientists are speculating is either caused by salt or ice crystals. If it's the latter it's the strongest indication yet that life could existed and perhaps still does on the planet. Read more here.

(10.06.08) Touch Bionics, based in Livingston, has won the prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering's MacRobert prize for their truly extraordinary artificial hand called the i-LIMB. Controlled by muscle signal, it is capable of delicate touch and complex grips, giving users a remarkable dexterity. Read more here.

A washing machine that uses only one cup of water has been developed. It replaces the most of the water with reusable plastic chips and leaves clothes almost dry after washing, eliminating the need for a spin dry. Read more here.

(03.06.08) I'm really enjoying the BBC's Cosmic Quest, a look at Man's relationship with the universe and our slow journey to understanding our place in it. Click here to listen to it in either episode form or in the omibus edition.

(29.05.08) A company in California has developed a process which converts algae into an oil that can be refined into fuel to run conventional petrol engines. The aglae feeds on low quality water, sunlight and carbon dioxide and the resulting "green crude" would processed existing oil refineries. It offers a real alternative to conventional bio-fuels and has none of their drawbacks apparently. Read more here.

(26.05.08) The Phoenix lander has touched down on Mars after it's nine month journey from earth. The images sent back from the northern plains of the red planet are remarkably clear and reveal a near empty desolate landscape with features that scientists say are indicative of freezing water. Read more here.

(22.05.08) About once every 100 years a supernova appears in the Milky Way and for the first time we have captured the early years of one in fairly high definition. Click here for a remarkable series of images from various telescopes.

(14.05.08) The RSPB is recommending that people stop feeding birds, particularly chicks, bread because it has so little nutrional value that it could damage them and in the case of chicks, stop them developing to adulthood. They want us to consider other staples, such as oats. Not going to be as much fun in the park is it? Read more here.

(13.05.08) Microsoft has launched Worldwide Telescope, a free tools that uses images taken from the Hubble and Spritzer telescopes and allows users to explore a near seamless high definition view of space, both near and far. It's possible to pan across the sky, zoom in on planets and galaxies, view x-ray images from any spot on earth from the terrabytes of data stored online. To use it you need .Net Framework 2 and to download the application itself, both of which are available from the website here. Read more here.  

(16.04.08) Anthropologists have successfully reconstructed the vocal tract of a Neanderthal and managed to make it produce a sound, the vowel "e." The purpose is to find out whether they would have been capable of complex speech or could only produce simple sounds. Read more here or click here to hear the "e."

(02.04.08) Astronomers from St. Andrews University using the "very large array" of radio telescopes in the USA, have discovered an exo-planet in the very early stages of it's development. It's the youngest planet ever seen and hasn't even settled into a solid mass yet. I say solid but it will eventually become a gas giant, several times the size of Jupiter. 520 light years away in the Taurus constellation, it revolves a young,100 000 year old, star called HL Tal and is thought to be only 1600 years old. Read more here.

(31.03.08) Archeologists are digging up Stonehenge again and hope that modern carbon dating will be able to date it to within 25 years. Click here for more and watch the video at the top of the story, it's a fantastic history of the site in about a minute.

(26.03.08) The UKs largest meteorite impact site has been in the Minch between Lewis and the mainland. It happened 1.2 billion years ago and up until now it's been thought that the rock formations that it created were the result of volcanic activity. Read more here.

Cool elephants: It was first reported 100 years ago but was thought to be a myth until it was filmed recently, elephants store water in their throats and use it to cool down when they're in arid areas. Click here to read more and better still, watch a nice little film.

(25.03.08) A chunk of the Antartic ice shelf the size of the Isle of Man is about to fall off twenty years earlier than predicted. The Wilkins ice shelf has been there for 100 years and a Prof. Vaughan predicted in 1993 that it would be lost within 30 years if global warming continued. So it's quite serious. Read more here.

(19.03.08) The Hubble telescope has found methane on an exo-planet, the first time an organic molecule has been detected on planet a outside our solar system. It has also been confirmed that the Jupiter sized planet has water vapour, so it has two things considered to be precursors of life. Read more here.

(06.03.08) Whisky is good for water or a by product of it's production is very good at cleaning up contaminated ground and polluted water, a sort of natural Cillit-Bang. The scientists at Aberdeen Uni who carried out the tests claim that it's so effective that it will "revolutionise" the treatment of contaminated sites. This in turn could make whisky production much more profitable. Read more here.

Jodrell Bank is worried that it could face funding cuts and even closure, such is the crisis in UK science funding. Last year I reported that overseas projects were facing cuts and now it's spread to the very heartland of our space research. Read more here and write to your MP.

(02.03.08) A team at the University of Plymouth, a world leader in cognitive robotics apparently, is going to try and teach a robotic baby, well, toddler really, to talk and obey simple commands (which would be more than most real toddlers do, perhaps real success will be measured by little it obeys). The "baby" is somewhat creepy to behold, like something from a distopian Spielburg vision of the future, it's not so much that the body hasn't been covered and the mechanism is visible, it's that pure white head has enormous eyes and NO MOUTH. Read more here.

(20.02.08) When I started this page astronomers where still looking for the first earth like planet and some doubted that they would ever find one. Then one was found and over the next year more and more stars were identified with signs of planets in the "Goldilocks region", i.e. neither too hot nor too cold to sustain life. Now a new study has calculated that half the sun sized stars in the solar system could have rocky planets orbiting them and there maybe hundreds undiscovered worlds in it's outer regions. Read more here.

Luna eclipse: There's a luna eclipse in the early hours of tomorrow but the weather is so bad that we won't see it, which is possibly why there isn't anything about it on any of the websites I checked.Which is a pity because it will be one of the very dark ones that turn the moon a moody red and there won't be another visible from the UK until 2015 apparently.

(19.02.08) The fossiled remains of a huge frog have been found in Madagascar. Weighing 9lbs and 16 inches long, it roamed the island 70 millions years ago looking something like a squashed beach ball and was probably a hunter like it's relatives of today, the horned toads, feeding on insects, small vertabrates and possibly hatching reptiles. The team that found it have named it "Beelzebufo", which means "frog from hell". Read more here.

(28.08.01) During an operation on an obese man's brain scientists have discovered a possible method for restoring memory function. They were attempting to subdue the part of the brain that controls appetite by passing a current between to electrotes pushed into his skull (who knew?!). The operation was a failure but during it the man experienced an extremely vivid memory, recalling in detail an event that had occured thirty years ago. Over three weeks of further stimulation his memory was tested and results were found to improve significantly. Now it hoped that the technique can be developed into a treatmnt for Alzheimer's using a device that has helped sufferers of Parkinson's. Read more here.

(24.08.01) Bacteria talks! Individual cells within a host communicate with other cells to improve survival and trigger events according to Simon Spring of Cambridge University. For instance an infection in a body would need to know when it was large enough to survive once the body infected knew it existed. This brings about the possiblity of a new avenue of treatment the disruption of their method of interaction. Read more here, visit the research site here and here for a Radio 4 dicussion the subject here.

(19.01.08) Squirrels not only hide their food but actually go through elaborate ruses to convince other squirrels that they've buried some when they haven't. Read more here.

(18.12.07) A giant rat, five times the size of it's familier city dwelling cousin, is just one of the new creatures to be found by scientists exploring the untouched cloud forests of New Guinea. They've also found species of birds and marsupials never before seen by man. Read more here.

(09.12.07) The UK has it's own Moon project! Obviously it's not a manned mission but the entirely privately funded project to send a robot explorer their is still pretty exciting. Read more here and visit their website here.

(19.11.07) A chap, who The Telegarph describe as a "surfer dude," has come up with a unified theory which he calls "An exceptionally simple theory of everything" and it's being rather well received. Garrett Lisi actually has a doctorate in Theoretical Physics but he isn't attached to a university and appears to live somewhat hand to mouth existance. This hasn't stopped his theory getting some excellent reviews from leading physicists, not least because it makes many testable predictions. Read more here and here. "Simple" is a relative term.

(18.11.07) A shortage of funds may lead to UK astronomers losing access to optical telescopes around the world. The Gemini project gives them a share in two telescopes in Hawaii and Chile in a partnership with collegues in Canada, Australia and three S. American countries. Read more here.

Here's an interesting conumdrum, fish are disappearing due to over fishing, partly due to the demand for the oil that's supposed to be so good for us and scientists have developed genetically modified oil seed plants that can produce the prized Omega 3 fatty acid. Should we carry on fishing or allow the mass production of a GM food? Read more here.

(08.11.07) The wet summer has hit bird numbers across Britain very hard, with common species declining by up to 48%, according to the British Trust for Ornithology. Blue Tits seem to be the worst hit but Great Tits are down by 33% and Warblers by 27%. The effect maybe more noticable in England and Wales because Scotland hasn't that much wetter than normal. Read more here.

Planets numbers, by which I mean planets outside our solar system, on the hand, are up. It was in the lifetime of this website that the first ES planet was found and now there over 250 of them. The most exciting of the recent finds is a gas giant orbiting a star about the same age and size as our sun. It's in what's called the "Goldilocks" region, neither to hot nor to cold to allow for liquid water, so increasing the chances of life existing on it's large moons. Read much more here.

(28.10.07) Some Neanderthals were ginger haired DNA tests have revealed say researchers who tested for the same gene found in humans that controls skin and hair pigmentation. This doesn't mean that there was any interbreeding but that the species of humans living in similar environments evolved the same way in order to adapt to lower light levels as they moved north. Read more here.

(24.10.07) Silbury Hill may be giving up some of it's mysteries, if not of it's origins at least it shape, thanks to the work of archeologists working as part of the stabilization project. They've found medieval post holes around the top and, in the absence of any earlier remains, Roman pottery for example, have theorised that the top may have been sliced off to create a fortification. Read more here and see some pictures here.

(16.10.07) They've found a humongous new dinosaur in Patigonia, so big that it would use an Olympic swimming pool for paddling and then get out because there wasn't enough room (it's 33 metres long). Called the Futalognkosaurus dukei, it looks a lot like a brontesaurous to me and like it's more well known look-a-like, it was a plant eater. Read more here, with links to film of the fossils themselves.

(12.10.07) A farmer in China's southern Shaanxi province has taken 70 pictures of a tiger that has not been seen since 1964. The tiger has suffered from shrinking habit and Mao's declaring it a pest and experts say that there may be no more than 30 living in the wild. Click here for more.

(07.10.07) The creation of the first truly artifial lifeform may have already been created in a laboratory in San Diego. Craig Venter, "controversial DNA researcher" (it says here) claims to have made a synthetic chromosome from chemicals and he describes the process as a "very important philosophical step" for humanity. Apart from the philoshpy, it's thought that it will give greater control over genes, herald new energy sources and generally change the world. Read more here.

(03.10.07) A chemical found in Chile (the condiment that is) is offering the possibility of pain relief without lose of normal senstation, motor and brain function, described as the holy grail of pain relief by some. Some see problems introducing it into the body, which does seem something of a hurdle to straddle but if they're successful it will bring enormous benefits. Read more here.

A new grazing dinosaur has been discovered in the Utah desert and it's a big one. Weighing several tons and about 30 feet in length, it's most impressive feature is it's large beak and a great array of teeth. Read morehere.

(01.10.07) The Neanderthals ranged far further east than previously thought, all the way to southern Siberia. Fossils found in the 1930s have been DNA analyised (isn't that amazing?) and finally proved what up until now has just been a theory, another find that means that those long dead humanoids were far more successful that previously thought. Read more here.

(25.09.07) The efficacy of acupuncture is much in the news today, headlines include "Needles 'are best for back pain" from the BBC and "Acupuncture works for back pain" from CTV of Canada. And the study does seem to show just that but it also reveals that fake acupuncture is almost as good and far better than conventional medicine for treating back pain, a finding reflected in a small proportion of news reports. Read more here on the BBC and get the sceptical view here.

(10.09.07) The US Geological Survey is predicting that two thirds of Polar bears will disappear by 2050 because of the ice lost due to global warning. The bears' life style means they are particularly vulnerable to the loss of ice and the acceleration in loss is likely to hit them hard. Read more here.

Possibly the best example of a Viking longship has been found under a pub car park in London. Sealed beneath 15ft of clay it may be missing some of the shields. Read more here.

(03.09.07) The clearest pictures of deep space have emerged from a Californian lab working with ground based telescopes. Using "adaptive optics", they eliminate the interferance caused by earths atmosphere by using images taken during the brief moments when it's still and stacking several of them one on top of another to produce a highly detailed picture. Apparently they are twice as sharp as those from the Hubble telescope. See and read more here.

(28.08.07) NASA is to release all the images taken on the Apollo mapping project at high resolution. Astonishingly high resolution actually, the largest downloadable version of the images are over a gigabyte in size. Fortunately they can be viewed at slightly lower res online but even then they are pretty impressive. The preview start in a fairly small box which you can then zoom in on until you are looking a very small area in very high detail, it will work well on a decent dialup connection. See for yourself here.

(24.08.07) Lawrence Rudnick, a professor of astronomy at Minisotta University, has discovered a huge whole in the universe. Spanning unimaginable distances, it contains nothing, not even a black hole, even lacking dark matter and it's discovery has prompted a whole (sorry) new area of speculation. Read more here.

Uranus has a ring and it's 42 year old cycle has just brought it around to the point where it is exactly parallel to earth, see and read more here.

(21.08.07) Archaeologists have found what could be the oldest human footprint in a desert oasis in Siwa. Carbon dating of plant fossils found in the surrounding rock suggest that it is 2 million years old but the age of the rock itself mean that it ould be even older, taking it beyond the 3 million year old remains of Lucy, the famous Ethiopian. Read more here.

Ever wanted an easy to undestand explanation of how hurrianes form? Well the BBC has one here.

(18.08.07) Two contrasting stories from France; in the Camargue the world renowned flock of flamingoes have failed to nest this due to a strike at the salt works. It's the effluent from the factory that's responsible for the salination of the lagoons that the birds favour and without it they have found elsewhere to nest. Read more here.

Meanwhile, a little further north at at La Voulte on the banks of the Rhone, what is described as a treasure trove of fossilised sea spiders has been discovered. Over 70 different specimens have been found, dating back to the Jurassic era when the region was under 200 feet of sea water and the discovery fills a large gap in the creatures patchy fossil record. Read more here.

(16.08.07) Mira A is a somewhat more romantic name than usual for a star that's appearing in the news, usually they've just got a number and a jokey name given to them by some guy in a lab. I'm glad this one has a nice name because it's worthy of one. It's got a tail. Like a comet and nothing like it has ever been seen before. See for yourself here.

(12.08.09) If the sky clears tonight we could be in for a spectacular display of shooting stars as the Perseid shower brushes our atmosphere. It will be most evident towards the north east and this year could be particularly good because it coincides with a new moon, meaning the sky will very dark. If it clears. Best times to view will be between 10pm and sunrise. Read more here.

(10.08.07) The Met Office has published it's most detailed long term weather predictions ever. They envisage two years of fairly stable conditions in the UK and then a rapid rise in temperatures from 2010 onwards. Fox News has labled the study as "Junk Science" and so we have a rare opportunity to compare the predictions of the believers and non-believers in global warming. Read more here and here. 

(08.08.07) The coral reefs are disappearing far more quickly than expected, at present at a rate of 1% a year and at a pace that appears to be accelerating. Climate change, nutrients leaching into the sea from modern farming techniques and distructive fishing practices are to blame according to experts. Read more here.

(06.08.07) Levitation was once part of the world of the mystic, then it was taken up by Sci-Fi writers and now it seems to become a scientific fact. Theoretical physicists at St. Andrew's university have proposed exploiting the very stuff that holds atoms together. They've worked out a way of reversing the Casimir effect, as it's called, and initially they hope to end the problem of the friction that prevents nanotechnology working as efficiently as it should but they think there's no reason why it couldn't eventually be used to levitate much larger objects. Read more here.

Once you've read that, you'll be ready for a leading scientists proposals for a time machine, which you can read here. The World of Warcraft is beginning to look more normal than reality.

(04.08.07) Cassini continues to answer questions that have puzzled scientists for years, the latest being what holds the G ring together, it being to far from any of the nearest celestial bodies for one of them to be exerting enough force on it or providing it with enough matter. It turns out that within the ring is further ring of denser material that throws up bright crystals as it is bombarded with tiny meteorites. Read more here. 

A study of temperature records from 46 locations around Europe, some going back to 1880, has found that the length of summer heatwaves is greater than previously thought. After correcting for the conditions in which older reading were taken, which was in a time before equipment that protected instruments from direct sunlight and ground heat, it was found that the length of heatwaves had doubled over the time period. Read more here. Meanwhile, George Bush appears to be more accepting of the need to do something about climate change and has called a conference of the fifteen leading economies in December, which is good news of sorts. Read more here.

(25.07.07) A huge Mastodon has been unearthed in Northern Greece, a Mastodon in Macedonia if you like, with tusks nearly twice the size of the otherwise equally bulky African Elephant. The tusks are 16 feet long! Read more here.


(23.07.07) It seems that the recent heavy rains may be due to human activity according to climatologists. According to a recent study, the north has got wetter, along with the areas south of the equator, where as those just north of it have suffered severe draught. Read more here.

Those old bulky space suits could be a thing of the past if MIT's new figure hugging little numbers are adopted and why wouldn't they be? Apart from looking spiffing, they're good for you! Read more here.

(20.07.07) As if it didn't have enough already, Saturn's sixtieth moon has been found. It's only about 2km across, which is pretty small for a moon and is made up of ice and rock. Dubbed Frank until it is officially named, it is another example of the fascinating environment discovered by Cassini. Read more here.

(18.07.07) The mystery of what created the English Channel and hence Britain, may have been solved. Examination of high resolution sonar images of the channel bed have revealed the destinctive marks of a huge torrent of water emerging from between the straights of Dover, the result of a the dam holding back a lake of water sitting in front of the ice shelf. It all happened about 200 000 years ago and confirms a theory long held that explains the distribution of many fossils and geological formations in the area. Read more here.

(14.07.07) A team of scientists workingacross Europe have developed a robot that learns to walk in much the same way as a human does and once it's learnt something it more or less automates the actions needed to repeat them. In this way it can adapt to it's environment and no longer needs to calculate ever single movement in the way that it's predecessors have done. Read more here.

(13.07.07) A Samoan butterfly thought to be close to extinction has almost entirely recovered thanks to a genetic change which has passed through the entire population in just a few generations. Researchers say that it's the most rapid evolutionary change ever witnessed. Read more here. Creationists are going to love this.

(11.07.07) Astronomers from Caltech have succeeded in detecting the oldest galaxies ever found. They existed when the Universe was only 500 million years old, that's 250 millions years further back in time than the previous oldest. Read more here andhere. 

Galaxy Zoo is a project that hopes to enrol the public into the task of classifying galaxies and so speed up the mapping of the Universe. You get a short tutorial and then are presented with a series of images and asked if they are of a elliptical or spiral galaxy and if the latter, which way it is spinning. Apparently humans are better than computers at pattern recognition. Read more here.

(07.07.07) Observations from the Cassini probe are helping to explain the unusual characterisitics of Saturn's Hyperion moon. Not only is it an odd shape but is only about half the density of water and covered in craters of exagerated shape. Read more here.

(03.07.07) The largest bird that ever lived was so big that it could only take off like a hang glider, running down hill and then jumping into an updraft. Once in the air it spent most of it's time gliding according to joint project undertaken by aeronautical engineers and archaeologists. And when you see the size of it you can well believe it! Read more here.

(01.01.07) A secret room has been found in the tomb of Qin Shihuang, China's first Emporer and home to the famous terracota army. About a hundred feet deep and with four stair like walls, the room appears in none of the records dating from the time of building, suggesting that is of great significance. Archaeologists are awaiting permission from the Chinese authorities to explore further. Read more here.

Archaeologists working in Peru have discovered near complete skeletons of as many as five new species of extinct penguins, the largest of which stood over five feet tall. Not only did it dwarf his modern relations, his beak was dramatically larger and more like a spear, similar to that of a heron. The penguins appear to have preffered the warmer climes of the tropical regions than the colder southern sea but sadly, in my opinion they died out 36 million years ago. Read more here.

(19.06.07) A British survey ship using a transit van sized remote sub. is exploring the Nazare Canyon of the coast of Portugal and making some remarkable finds. The trench is the size the Grand Canyo and although long known about, has never been explored before. At depths of around 3 miles scientists have found extensive signs of life, including the deepest shark sighting and a host of other animals. Click here for more, including video from the dives.

(18.06.07) While the UK was glued to "Britain's got Talent" or "Cardiff Singer of the World", Japan has been agog at the gestation process of a Manta Ray at the Okinawa Aquarium. On Saturday it gave birth to it's baby, the first born in captivity, and millions watched as it dropped from it's mother like, erm, something off Star Trek. Well that's what it reminded me of. See for yourself here and read all about it here.

(15.06.07) A new species of tree has been found Arran and named the Catacol Whitebeam. It's a cross between native Rowan and Whitebeam and makes the small island home to three unique species of tree. Even on Arran they're a rarity and efforts are now underway to conserve them. Click here to read more

(14.06.07) New Dinosaur identified: Fossils discovered in South Africa in 1993 but only recently examined, have turned out to be that of a previously unrecorded dinosaur. The Eocursor Parvus, as it's been dubbed, was about the size of a fox, very agile on it's two legs and a vegitarian. The little fellow was an early ancestor of a very large group of dinosaurs called the Ornithischians, which includes the Stegarsarous and as such, fills an important hole in the fossil record. Read more here. 

(07.06.07) Powdered Alcohol is just what the western world needs right now and happily some Dutch university students have invented it. Or rather re-invented it because I'm pretty sure those crazy Germans had a go at it some time ago. Anyway, it's here, just add water and you get a bubbly alcoholic drink tasting of...something or other. I'm not entirely sure that it's really powdered though because alcohol doesn't exist in a dry form, so it's probably encapsulated within a very very small, erm, capsule, so small it looks like powder. Anyway, read more here and if a teenager asks you buy them a bottle of water next time you're passing an off-license, you'll know why.

(05.06.07) Surgeons at the Moorefield Eye Hospital have successfully restored the eyesight of several people in the latter stages of age related blindness. The condition is caused by the cells on the retina immediately behind the eyes lens degenerating and the proceedure involves taking unaffected cells from the outer part of the retina and grafting them in a replacements. The operation is slow and takes to long for it to ever become a standard solution but the doctors involved hope that cells grown from stem cells in a dish will greatly speed things up, so bringing hope to, well, all of us I suppose. Read more here.

(08.5.07) Mount Etna has been more active than usual recently and since Sunday has been producing plumes of larva 200m high, along with a river of larva. Fortunately it is flowing across the uninhabited SE face and there is little prospect of the situation becoming dangerous. Click here for a BBC report.

Astronomers have discovered a massive supernova that is so big that they are wondering if it involves new process. 240 million miles away it is a hundred times larger than any seen before, so powerful that its luminosity started at the point where the previous brightest have peaked. Click here to read more and if you have broadband, to watch the video.

(03.04.07) An single annual intravenese infusion of zoledronic acid could cut the number of injuries suffered by people with Osteoporosis by up to 70%. The treatment that only takes fifteen minutes has been tested on 8000 people over three years and so the results bring real hope to the one in two women and the one in five men who develop condition after the age of fifty. Read more here.

A common toad has been found crawling across the mud over 300 feet below the surface of Loch Ness by a US team creating a sonar map of the Loch. It isn't Nessie but it is pretty amazing. Read more here.

(27.04.07) Kryptonite, the substance that could render Superman helpless, has been found in Siberia! Or rather a rock consisting of the same makeup, sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide, as described in the DC comics, has been found. However it doesn't match any of the six types listed on the Wikipedia page on the subject so it may not be quite so harmful to our hero. Read more here and here.

(25.04.07) An potentially earth like planet has been discovered orbiting one of the nearest 100 stars to earth and "only" 20 light years away. It's located in constellation of Libra and is about 1.5 times the size of earth, although it's 5 times the mass. It's also a lot closer to it's sun, orbiting it every thirteen days but that sun is a red dwarf, so it's not nearly as bright and scientists estimate that temperatures are between 0 and 40 degrees centigrade, which means that any water would be in liquid form. Which in turn means there could be life! Read more here.

(21.04.07) Tonight sees the peak of Lyrid meteor shower and although it looks likely to be cloudy now, we may get lucky and get some clear skys over the next couple of days. The meteors are so called because they appear to start from roughly the same part of the sky, almost overhead, which is why they usually appear to be heading towards the horizon (I always wondered why that was). Read more here.

(13.04.07) Dinosaurs, well the T-Rex anyway, probably tasted a bit like chicken according to researchers at the Harvard Medical School. They succeeded in isolating a protein from a 68 million year old fossil from surviving collagen tissue, which is pretty amazing as such tissue was thought to disappear after a million years. Read more here.

(06.04.07) Scientists at McGill University in Montreal have succeeded in identifying and then "tweaking" a gene that controls memory, enabling mice with a faulty version of the gene to learn and perform tasks more quickly. This raises hopes for a treatment for people suffering from memory loss in old age. Read more here.

You will have seen the climate change study featuring on the news, if you want to download and read the report itself click here.

(28.03.07) Until now the accepted wisdom has been that the mass extinction of dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago, allowed the mammals to evolve into the dominent force they (we) are today but paper published in Nature suggests this may not be the case. Studies of a massive family tree of mammalian life suggests that the bursts in evolution for various species occurred either millions of years before or after the great extinction. The few species that did have a surge afterwards were actually short lived and died out soon afterwards. Read more here.

(22.03.07) Bdelloid rotifers are microscopic aquatic creatures that have evolved over forty million years to become a very significant example of evolution. It's the fact that they have evolved that is remarkable because they are asexual and yet have adapted to varying environment to develop into distinct species. Up until now it was thought that sexual reproduction and the combining of DNA was required for development but now scientists are going to have to rethink. Click here for more.

The Hinode space telescope has produced some remarkable images and video of the Sun which are well worth checking out here (article) and here (NASA page of videos).

The first burrowing dinosaurs have been discovered in an underground den in Montana, USA. Bipedal and looking a bit like dog sized velociraptures, a whole family was found together, giving scientists a great oppurtunity to study their new find. Read more here.

(20.03.07) The World Wildlife Fund has published a report on the world's ten most threatened rivers, including the Ganges, the Rio Grande and perhaps surprisinly, the Danube. Problems range from polution to over exploitation and the evidence presented makes you wonder what the future holds for some of them. Read their press release and download the report here.

(18.03.07) A vast amount of ice has been discovered at Mar's south pole by the European Express Orbitor, so much that they calaculate that if it melted it cover the surface to a depth of 36 feet! The ice, up to 2.3 miles thick, is buried beneath a cap of frozen carbon dioxide and is composed of 90% water and 10% dust. From what I've read elsewhere, if the CO2 was released, the planet would warm, the ice would melt and the planet would become somewhat more inhabital, well to fish at least. Read more here.

(15.03.07) A rare bird has been spotted in Manchester (insert obvious joke here), the Irlam Wheatear. It's thought to have rare condition that causes it to migrate in the wrong direction, rather than moving from the Middle East to Africa, it ended up here. It's now moved on, it's hoped in the right direction. Read morehere.

(02.03.07) There's a hole in the earth's crust and plucky UK boffins (like scientists but with thicker glasses) are going to investigate! Well it's not really a hole, it's a bit of the crust which has split open and hasn't sealed up again properly when the magma emerges. Rather than form new crust its made something called serpentinite and is a lot thinner than the normal 7km crust. Will the earth survive? Find out here.

(28.02.07) Snails use each other's slime trails to help them get around faster and with less effort researchers at Sunderland University have found. By doing so they not only move quicker but don't have to lay down as much mucus, meaning they can keep going longer. This means that gardeners hoping to catch them and presumably slugs, would be adviced to put their traps along trails, especially where they cross, so that they can catch any following the same path. Read more here.

(27.02.07) Chinese scientists have suceeded in guiding a pigeons flight by remote control. The poor birds had electrodes connected to their brains and battery packs and the "pilots" were able to direct every aspect of their flight. They've no idea what they're going to do with their work but given the history of military explotation of animals, they tried to get pigeons to guide bombs in WWII incidently, I think we can guess. Read more here. 

(26.02.07) James Cameron, who directed the Titanic, has come up with a film, a documentry, with an even more sensational subject, the last resting place of Jesus. He claims that a family tomb found in Jerusalem in 1980 contains the ossuaries, lime stone coffins, of Jesus "son of Joseph", Mary, Mathew, Joseph (Jesus's brother) and perhaps most sensationally, Judah "son of Jesus." Cameron or rather the archeologist he has worked with say that they have DNA, precise dating evidence and that the combination of names is too unlikely to be merely coincidental. Nay sayers on the other hand point out that there was a far more limited number of common names at the time and that indeed this is just a coincidence. Click here for more and here for a picture of the tomb.

(24.02.07) Robots that sense emotions sound rather dystopian but their creation is the goal of Feelix Growing, a consortium of institutions from six European countries. They believe that robots with complex tasks, patient care for example, can't truly intergrate into their environment without being able to interact with people as individuals and to do this they need emotion. Read more here and visit their website here.

(23.02.07) Chimpanzes in Senegal have been observed using spears to hunt. The spears are made by gnawing the ends of sticks to a point are then employed to prise small mamals from there hiding places. The method is primarily used by females and the young and anthropologists postulate that this could confirm to some degree that it was human females that first used weapons to hunt. Read more here.

(20,02.07) The UK's first deep sea survey robot has been carrying out successful dives in the Antartic seas, returning with pictures of a very cold but far from lifeless world from depths of as much as 2 miles. I was quite surprised to discover that this was our first such device, read more, with pictures, here.

(16.02.07) An implant that connects the retina to a camera could eventually give sight back to the blind if trials in the US prove successful. People using a crude prototype report being able to see shapes and movement for the first time and the developers hope to refine the equipment in a new larger trial. Read more here.

Over 150 lakes have been discovered beneath the antartic ice sheet. Connected by fast flowing rivers, the lakes are filling and emptying at great speed and scientists are speculating on the effect they might be having in the degradation of the sheet and the erosion of the ground below. Read more here.

(14.02.07) Cosmic rays and fluctuations in the Sun's magentic field which effect their impact on earth could be playing a part in the warming of the planet. The theory goes that cosmic rays cause ionization in the upper atmosphere, which in turn affects cloud cover and clouds reflect heat from the Sun. Even if true, this is not to say that human activity is not also playing a large part but what is certain is that this will be ceased upon by the anti-global warming lobby as another reason not to restrict emmisions. Read more here.  

(09.02.07) The Germans may no longer need to find "vays of making you talk" if studies at Lipzeig University continue to go well. They've developed scanning equipment that can tell, with a success rate, whether someone is going to add or subtract two numbers. It doesn't sound much but they hope to refine the process and eventually help paralysed people operate devices. Read more here. Sorry about the old joke, couldn't help myself.

(08.02.07) 5000 year old remains found in Mantua, the very city that Shakespear exciled Romeo to, are causing much excitement amongst archeologists because they are the first time two adults have been unearthed in an embrass. Women and with babes in arms are not that uncommon but two adults is unheard of. Sadly it may not be as romantic as it first appears and one could have been sacrificed to provide company for the other in the after life. They think it was the woman but she was shot in the side, the man in the back, which seems a more efficient execution to me. Read more here. 

(01.02.07) The Climate Change report I wrote about last week and that's all over today's news reports, is published today and you can download a .pdf of the summary here or read a summary of the summary here.

(30.07.01) Archeologists have unearther an ancient settlement used by the builders of Stonehenge and then by people visiting the monument. Both places are connected to the river Avon and the new site even had a henge of its own, all be it one constructed from wood. The henge was aligned to the midwinter solstice sunest rather than the sunrise as was its larger neighbour. Dwellings were constructed from timber and the remains of furniture such as beds and dressers have been found, along with the discarded bones from feasts. Read more here.  

Lupercale, the legendary cave in which Romulos and Remus were succeled by a wolf, has been discovered in the foundations of the ruins of Augustine's palace. The cave was found as the foundations were being excavated and remote cameras have revealed grotto like interior with walls decorated in jewels and tile. Read more here.

(24.01.07) Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is due out next week and paints a bleak picture of the state of the planet. The panel, made up of 2000 scientists and 154 countries, says that sea temperatures are rising in virtually all parts of the ocean, ice is retreating in both hemispheres and that sea levels are rising by 2mm a year. They predict that environmental changes and catostrophic events will result in millions of people being displaced. Still, at least George Bush has seen the light. Read more here.

An ancient shark has been filmed and caught in the seas off Japan. The Frilled Shark has been around 80 million years and looks more like scary eel than the sharks we're familier with. It's normally found at depths of around 600 metres so it's rarely seen, let alone filmed. It looks a bit unwell in the video, which could explain why it was in such shallow waters. See the video here and read more here.

(23.01.07) Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Well it's not a plane but it maybe a dinosaur that used feathers on it's back and front legs to fly or glide between trees like bi-plane. Paleontologists have been re-examing a well known fossil from China and have come up with a new theory about how it might have exploited its unusual limbs. Read more here.

(19.01.07) Early last year I recommended the BBC Weather project as something people concerned about the environment could get involved in. Like other shared computing projects it utilised the "down" time of private computers to process large amounts of data but I found the software so poor that I quickly changed my mind and told you to forget about it. Happily, not everyone had the same experience and now the initial results are in. They predict that UK temperatures will be an average of 1.2 degrees higher by 2020 than they were in the '70s. This doesn't seem much but when you live in a country where the traditional winters hover around freezing point, a small rise can mean the difference between annual frosts and frost becoming a rarity. Read more here.

(15.01.07) Researchers at London's Hammersmith Hospital have been awarded a grant from the Welcome Trust to develop an anti-obesity drug based on a naturally occurring hormone found in the gut. It is part of the system that regulates hunger and it's hoped that if administered to obese people, in chewing gum for instance, it will surprese their desire to eat. Read more here.

(09.01.07) Radio astronomers have produced the most detailed image ever of a quasar, mapping the gasses around a massive black hole. "Detailed" is a relative term because the resolution is down to object 3000 light years apart but considering how far away it is that's pretty remarkable. Read more here.

(08.01.07) Astronomers have created a three dimensial map of dark matter, which is pretty impressive for what is described as a theoretical concept. They've done it by looking at how light from distant galaxies is distorted by its gravitational pull which must have taken ages. Read more, with illustrations, here.

(07.01.06) Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Monterotondo, Italy, have isolated a key molecule in the process that turns experience into memory. The interesting thing about this article is the very clear way it explains what is known the process, so even though one feels sorry for some of the mice, it's well worth reading. Click here.

(06.01.07) Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, has been investing his hard earned savings in space rocket that, like Branson's, he hopes will bring near-space travel to the masses or at least the masses with masses to spend on a space ride. He's just test launched his craft, which unlike Branson's doesn't piggy back on another craft to take off and got it up and down to, wait for it, 85 meters. The craft is reminicent of illustrations in Verne's "Rocket to the Moon", click here to see for yourself (that's not just the nose cone in the picture, that's the whole thing).

(02.01.07) A company called On Demand Books has launched a machine capable of printing and binding a book in seven seconds. It costs £25000 and has a library of 2.5 million publications but is capable of printing anything presented in a MS format at a cost of a penny a page. This means that a small shop could have the stock of Waterstones and offer short print runs to self publishers, of which we there quite a few. Read more here and visit the company's website here. The machine has an oddly '50's look to me but what it can do is amazing.

(21.012.06) The fossilised remains of a two headed Choristodere reptile has been found in China and it's the earliest example of axial bifurcation, as the abnormality is known, ever found. Read more here. 

(19.12.06) Over 50 new species of plants and animals have been found in the Borneo rain forest, including tree frogs, thirty distinct fish and sixteen types of ginger. They've found a fish living in a peat bog that's less than half an inch long, making it the second smallest animal with a back bone. Read more here. 

(18.12.06) Researchers at the University of Washington have demonstrated "in principle" a robot being directed by brain waves. Thirty two sensors attached to the operators skull directed a simple robot around a room and commanded it to pick up objects. They think it will eventually be developed to help disabled people but I wonder if it's first applications will be working in toxic environments. Read more here.

(15.12.06) Sea levels: There are many predictions of the effect of global warming on sea levels and some are very alarming, so a report by Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research seems rather reassuring, even though it predicts storm surges and rise of up to 140 cm. It uses what it describes as a "semi-emperical" model, so called because it follows rises seen over the last century, rather than just theroretical models. Read more here.

(14.12.06) The fossilised remains of a flying mammal, possibly predating the earliest birds, have been discovered in China and it's discoverers say that it is a brand new genus of animal. Squiral sized and gliding rather than flying, much like modern gliding marsupials, it lived 125 million years ago. Read more here.

(12.12.06) A census of the oceans, started in 2001, has made some amazing discoveries, revealing new life from the sea off New York to the deepest ocean trench. Phenomena include a shoal of fish the size of Manhattan, a shrimp thought to have been extinct for 50m years and a crab so hairy that its been given it's own biological family. Read more here.

The North Pole could be in open water by 2040 according to scientists who predict the total disappearance of the ice cap by that date. Which is very bad news for anyone living near sea level as it would result in a rise of around twenty feet and that's not including any additional water coming from antartic and glacial melt. Read more here.

On the other hand, the sun maybe cooling down, which may save us all. The Sun goes through cycles, sometimes hotter, sometimes cooler, and temperatures might be taking a downturn, similar to that experienced in what is known as the "little ice age". This is a controversial theory as many argue that the LCA was restricted to about half of the northern hemisphere but if it's correct then we might have some restbite from rising temperatures in which to get global emissions down. Read more here.

(09.12.06) Just in time for Christmas, the French have come up with the ideal present for the budding phycisist, a partical accelerator that fits on a desk. Two laser beams are fired into plasma, accelerating it's electrons to speeds that would normally require apperatus the size of a room.Read more here.

(06.12.06) At last! An eco-friendly car that even Jeremy Clarkson will love. The Tesla, developed by a US company and Lotus and will be manufactured in the UK, is a sports car capable of reaching 130 mph, does 0 - 60 in four seconds, has a range of 250 miles on one charge and takes three and half hours to recharge. Costing around £48 000, roughly the price of a Jag, it costs about a hapenny a mile to run. Two things are really important about, one, it will make electric cars desireable and two, the range makes it a practical choice. Not everyone will be able to afford or want a sports car but the technology will be applicable to other types of car. Read more on the companies website here.

(04.12.06) Archaeologists working in Botswana have discovered a cave and carved rock formation dedicated to a python which dates back 70 000 years, making it by far the oldest evidence of religion ever found. There's evidence of thousands of offerings, covering many years and even that the priest or shaman may have exploited the cave to amplify his/her voice to give the impression that the python was talking. Read more here.

(03.12.06) The theory electrical power could be broadcast rather than distributed via wire has been around sometime but now US researchers have brought it a step closer by publishing a theoretical method of doing it. Personally, I'm not sure I'd want to live in such an environment. Read how here.

(01.12.06) A meteorite that was created in primordial times may carry signs of life created outside earth's atmosphere. Found an the Takish Lake, Yukon, after locals spotted it fall, it contains bubbles similar to cells which organic molecules on their surfaces, giving rise to the possibility that the "spark" that triggered the development of life on earth evolved outside it. Read more here. 

(28.11.06) The delicate workings of a 2000 year old computer have been revealed for the first time. The fragments found in a Roman shipwreck over a hundred years ago have been reassembled in virtual form thanks to modern imaging techniques and there workings understood for the first time. The intricate mechanism could have been used to calculate to solar and lunar eclipses according to the anglo-greek team that worked on the project. Read more here.

(13.11.06) An international group of 240 scientists have published the genome of the sea urchin, the first organism that's independent from previous genomes to be sequenced for some years. They estimate that the sequence runs to 24000 pairs, many of which are shared with humans. Read more here.

(08.11.09) Stem cells transplanted into the damaged retiners of blind mice has led to them regaining a degree of sight. Researchers at the University of London say that it could lead to treatments for people whose sight has failed due to everything from aging to diabeties. Read more here.

(07.11.06) Inside Out was a regional programme and only available to Satellite viewers who could track down but if you have broadband you can watch it online by clicking here. It's the short news item but if you click on the link to the right you'll get the full twelve minute version.

(06.11.06) Potholers have rediscovered a huge cave in Derbyshire which is almost double the floor to ceiling height of the previous record holder at 140m. That's taller than the London Eye or two and half times the height of Nelson's column! They were following up accounts discovered dating from 1793 which recorded the existance of a vast cave complex beyond a well known system beneath Castleton. After clearing a rockfall and long exploration they came across the "new" cave which has been dubbed Titan. Click here for more or watch tonight's Inside Out on BBC1.

(03.11.06) A study of ocean biodiversity has found that 30% of the species consumed by humans have "crashed", by which they mean they are at 10% of the level they were in the 1950s. If trends continue all key stocks will have gone the same way by 2048. The report, due to be published in The Scientist today, is summarised on the National Geographic here.

(01.11.06) Gaia theory has been one of the great inspirations of the ecological movement and even if it's sometimes misinterpreted due to being named after a goddess, it still rings true to many, including me. Basically it states that the living earth, it's atmosphere and seas work like a single organism. Scientists have discovered a wonderful example of this in the Amazon rainforest, where dust blown from a tiny part of the Sahara provides the nutrients required to replenish the forests soil. Click here for more on Gaia and here for the news story. Thanks to Steve for the links.

(27.10.06) Nasa is sending two spacecrafts to map Sun activity and so will able to create 3d models of what's happening on the surface, hopefully providing us with a better idea of what to expect from the storms that erupt. The storms send out streams of particles that can disrupt satellites and even ground based electrical installations, causing disruption and expensive losses. Read more here.

(23.10.06) The complete works of Darwin have been made available online for the first time. It includes not only the text but images of the original documents, making it a fascinating insight into one of the most influential minds ever to write on science. See for yourself here.

(20.10.06) Invisibilty has been a fantasy from ancient myth to modern science fiction but it has just taken a step closer to reality. US and British scientists working at Duke University have demonstrated a device that bends light waves around a copper cylinder making it impossible to see. Read more here.

(08.10.06) The Mars Orbiter has taken a picture on the Mars rover on the edge of the crater it's been wandering around for last months. If only it been holding up a sign reading "Hello Mum". Read more here (click on the image to enlarge).

(05.10.06) The teleportation of matter has been a staple of sci-fi ever since George Roddenbury wanted a cheap alternative to mocking up shuttle craft for the first Star Trek series and it took a small step to becoming reality when researchers successfully transmitted the quantum information from one group of atoms through a light beam to another. Well, not quite the same as "beam me up Scotty" but interesting non-the-less. Read more here.  

(03.10.06) George Smoot has won the Nobel prize for physics for his work on astronomical background radiation. You may recall the distinctive oval image that hubble (I think) took a few years ago that confirmed that what  phyisists had thought the early universe looked like was true and it was Smoots work that led to this. Read more on the wonderfully named Smoot hereand about cosmic radiation here.

(02.10.06) "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" is one of the most famous sentences ever utterred but it has been a source of constant embarrassement for it's author, Neil Armstrong. He was sure that he spoke the missing "a" and now analysts back him up with new research that reveals that it was radio static that censored him at the crucial moment. So from now on the quote is "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind"; somehow, it doesn't have quite the same ring to it. Read more here.

(28.09.06) YouTube has a great video taken from a camera strapped to a NASA rocket booster, you've probably seen the first few seconds on the telly but this goes all the way up and then all the way down, right to the splash down. Click here to see it.

(26.09.06) A planet, far larger than Jupitor and yet far lighter has been discovered orbiting a star in a binary system 450 million light years from earth. Scientists are at a lose to explain the unusual properties of the new planet and it might take a rewriting of formation theory to understand. Read more here.

The earth is warmer than its ever been in the last 12000 years and its the result of the rapid increase in temperatures that has occurred over the last 30 years. Oh dear. Read more here. Note to self: Must dig up the item about the cooling sun to cheer us all up.

(24.09.06) Astronomers working of deep field images taken by the Hubble telescope have found over 500 small galaxies. Formed one billion years after the big bang, their very faint light has taken thirteen billion years to reach us and provide, according to the researchers, an invaluable insight into the early universe. Read the press release here and visit the Hubble page here for pictures.

(20.09.06) The National Geographic has film of the walking sharks available and very odd they look too. Rather than link straight to the page I've chosen their most recent video page because they've got a lot of great stuff this month, the lion cub vs. porcupine is particularly worth watching. It does take a while to load even on broadband though and advice people to avoid the one about Mexico City's sewers. Click here and dive in.

(21.09.06) Astronomers have discovered a very odd solar system orbiting a dwarf star, at least I think that's what they've found. The articles are a bit confusing but it appears that a dwarf star is in the orbit of a bigger dwarf star and is distorting the planet that also orbits it. I think. Read more here and here. If any readers or their relations can explain what this is all about I love to hear from them!

(19.09.06) Otters are seeing off the mink in areas where they've been reintroduced around the UK and in turn this is having a benificial affect on the water vole population, which there's been considerable concern about. Read more here and if you'd like to see a lot of very cute pictures of three orphaned otters, click here.

(18.09.06) A seas off a tiny archipelago of islands of the western tip of Papua has been revealed as one of the most biologically diverse in the world with the discovery of more than 50 new aquatic species. They include a strange shark that "walks" across the seabed on its fins and a dull brown wrasse that erupts in a blaze of colour when its courting. Read more here.

(13.09.06) Siberia is burping the world to death according to researchers studying methane emerging from its rapidly melting perma-frost. Global warming has led to the ice trapping the gasses released by thousands of years worth of decaying plants being released into the atmosphere all at the same time, which in turn will lead to yet more warming. We're all doomed I tells you! Read more here.

For reasons that no one seems to understand, people are emerging from permenant vegatative states after being given a common sleeping pill. It is justifiably being called a miracle cure for some, read more here.

(06.09.06) Calling all telepaths! Do you sonetimes know who's called before you pick up the phone? Well you're not alone and it may not be due to the usual explanations of subconsciously realising that a loved one is due to call and forgetting the number of times you think it's one person when it's another.

Rupert Sheldrake of Trinity College, Oxford, carried out a study of people who thought they could predict who was calling, asking them to nominate four callers. They were then put in a room with a phone, the caller was decided by dice roll and they were asked which one was about to. They proved correct 45% of the time, much higher than the 25% chance would achieve. The results have met with a barrage of derision, which just makes it all the more fun. Read more here and Google to see how many scientists are annoyed.   

(28.08.06) The Flores "hobbits" continue to spark debate about their status in human evolution, a sort of Pluto of the sapians. The latest research suggest a pygmy population suffering from microcephalia, abnormally small brain and skull development. Read more here. While the possibility that there was a previously unkown species of human living until fairly recently if exciting, what I find really interesting about this whole story is that a local legend, dismissed by science as a fairy story eventually turned out to be true.

(25.08.06) It's official, the seasons ain't what they used to be. Data from all over Europe has been analised and it clearly shows that spring is starting earlier and autumn later, leading to a shift in the breeding patterns and the relocation of many species. A snippet from the report reveals that a 30% decline in cuckoos mean that they are no longer a reliable indicator for the start of spring. Read more here.

On the other hand, if the above points to global warming, the news that the hole in the ozone layer is no longer expanding and may actually be contracting, is encouraging. You will recall that is was the discovery that the apparently inert CFC gas used in refigerators and aerosols was distroying it that led to them being banned about 20 years ago and its heartening to know that we can do something about environmental problems if we have the will. Read more here.

(20.08.06) An Irish company is claiming to have discovered a free source of energy in the fields generated by magnets and a following a lack of interest within the scientific community, has had a flood of responces to an advert asking for testers in the Economist magazine. The story is being picked up by the press but is still being met with scepticism by other researchers, while some have noted that the company, Steorn, is a survivor of the dotcom boom and could be using the claim to build a reputation as an e-marketing business. Read more here, here and visit the company here.

Mars: An orbiting camera has spotted geysers spewing carbon dioxide at speeds of 100mph from the surface of the planet. They erupt when the distant sun touchs ground covering vast slabs of frozen CO2, causing it to erupt. Read more here.

(18.08.06) You probably heard that this week an international conference of scientists decided to define exactly what a planet was and that this meant that many more objects were going to be added to the nine that have made up our solar system until now. This has resulted in the Moon becoming a candidate for planetude, if there is such a word and about time too in my opinion. As any fool knows, the Moon doesn't revolve around the Earth, rather they both revolve around a point of gravitational balance, that, because it's inside the earth makes it appear as if it does. So, we could be living in a binary planet system, something which up until now has been the stuff of science fiction novels. Click here for more.

(13.08.06) This weekend, well last night actually, offers the best chance of seeing the shooting stars produced by the Perseid meteor shower and with tonight's clear sky (at time of writing), its a great time to get outside and witness one of natures treats. Read more here or wait for dark and go outside!

The Greenland ice sheet is melting faster than ever, losing about 240 cubic kilometers a year. If it completely melted it would lead to sea level rise of 21 feet. Fortunately there's well over 2 million cubic kilometers to go. Read more here.

(30.07.06) Cassinni has found what appear to be lakes on Titan, making it the only other body in the solar system to have an existing system that produces them. Possibly they could be made up of liquid methane or ethane, whatever that is, and there also appear to be rivers leading into them. Read more here.

(26.07.06) Inspired by the ability of the gecko to climb vertical both wet and dry surfaces, researchers at defence firm BAE, have invented a material that can stick a car to a ceiling. They anticipate it being used to improve car tyres and even enable people to climb buildings. I anticipate a new wave of extreme sports. Read more here.


(25.07.06) It is, as you've possibly noticed, very hot. Just how hot is revealed by satellite images of the UK (well mostly England and Wales, which is annoying), which show an island baking in the heat. The link below leads to a techy BBC, suitable for Science News, but most of the fun is to had from the image galleries it in turn links to. I wish I'd snapped the stag I found having a lie down in a stream to cool off now, maybe I'll catch it again tomorrow. Read more here.

(22.07.06) A new species of plesiosaur may be named after the amateur palaeontologist who found it. Nigel Armstrong (!?), an electrician from Doncaster, found the 70 million year old remains in a cliff face south of Filey, in the Humber region and experts say that they form a missing link that explain the crocodile like dinosaur's evolution. Read more here.

(14.07.06) I'm not sure this counts as science but I don't have a page for eccentrics on hopeless quests, so here goes. A team of "dragon hunters" or "cryptozoologists" as I'm sure they'd rather be called, are at this very moment combing Gambia for the mythical and huge Ninki-Nanka, a monster do terrifying that just seeing it can cause witnesses to die. Described as having a horse like head and a 30 foot body covered in shiny scales, it has been reported all over Gambia and across west Africa. Read more here and read the expeditions weblog here.

(12.07.06) A man paralysed from the neck down has had an implant placed on the surface of his brain that allows him to control a computer cursor by thought alone. The 1 cm² implant has 100 receptors that penetrate 1mm into the brain above the area that controls limb movement and the developers are amazed at the accuracy of movement achieved. The patient can now operate a computer, turn lights on and off, and most importantly, change TV channels. Read more here.

(04.07.06) Desert ants use an internal pedometer to calculate how far they travel from the nest, possibly combining this with an awareness of the position of the sun to find their way home. In a somewhat macabre experiment, researchers shortened and lengthened ant legs and found that this led to them either not going far enough or over shooting a known source of food. Read more here.

(25.06.06) Hubble's main camera has stopped working and no one is quite sure why. On Monday it sent a message saying that voltages were higher than recommended and its engineers speculate that the failure could be due to a blown transistor or the memory becoming corrupted. Fortunately the other camers on the craft are still functioning. Read more here and visit the Hubble gallery here.

(23.06.06) An ancient spiders web has been found in Spain. Its victims, a fly, a mite, a bettle and a wasp were trapped by the web, of which 26 strands are also preserved, 110million and then by tree sap which eventually turned into amber. What happened to the spider is unknown. Read more here.  

The beginning of the age of vanity has been put back 50 000 years with the discovery of sea shells drilled so they could be strung on a necklace. The tiny beads have been found in burial sites in Algeria and Israel and significantly change the way we will have to look at these ancient ancestors. Read more here.

(22.06.06) Magnetism not gravity, is the force that pulls matter into the dense center of a black hole researchers in Michigan say. Gravity pulls objects towards the hole but without magnetism it would remain in stable orbit around the center. Read more here.

Scientists from 67 national academies have issued a strong rebuttal of creationism and its trojan horse, "intelligent design" and the creeping acceptance of it as a respectable theory in schools. Unfortunately the statement has been welcomed by the creationists, who think it shows that the scientists are "rattled". Read more here.

(18.06.06) Global warming could lead to the melting of the perma frost that covers much of the northern latitudes sometime in this century and trigger the release of the 500 gigatons of carbon trapped. A gigaton = a billion tons. I think I'm going to stop reading these environmental reports for a bit. You can read more here though.

(16.06.06) Scientists in China have discovered an almost complete fossilised skeleton of an aqautic bird dating from between a 100 and a 115 million years ago. They're surprised that such an ancient bird is so modern in appearance and claim that it may nint that birds evolved in aquatic rather than purely terrestrial environments. Read more here.

(12.06.06) The European Space Agency is to send another probe to Mars, this time to drill beneath surface. They hope to find evidence of life past or present using a rover called ExoMars, built by Leicester University. Astonishingly the machine weighs only 800g! Read more here.

A new species of insect has been discovered living beneath the bark of dead aspen trees in the Cairngorms. The tiny 2mm fly, named Christii, was found during a study that also uncovered 20 plants, invertebrates and fungi species. Read more here. 

(11.06.06) Climate change appears to be causing several species to be not only changing their behaviour, hibernating, breeding or migrating at different times but to be passing on inheritable genetic changes to their off-spring in responce to the changing conditions. The forty year time span that these changes is relatively short and a sign of the adaptability of some species. Read more here.


(08.06.06) I stumbled across a wonderful website today, a sort of undersea version of the NASA site. Run by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it has details of all there monitoring and exploratory work, with an emphasis on education, so there's a lot information accessible to the everyone. For those with broadband there's video but everyone will be able to enjoy the extensive galleries and data. Click here to see for yourself.

(06.06.06) Mini-solar systems are more complex than previously thought, certainly more complex than I thought, I didn't even know there was such a thing. But there is and close to the stars, one hundredth of the size of our sun, are tiny planets called planemos but they're not orbiting them apparently. I don't quite understand this. Read more here.

(05.06.06) Surgeons at the Papworth Hospital have suceeded it transplanting a still beating heart in an operation that heralds a great step forward in organ transplant. Hitherto organs were kept in a sort "suspended animation" while they are transported, being able to keep them "alive" means that they can been transported further and wanted deteriorate on the way. Read more here or here with an graphic photo.

(02.06.06) Japan has enjoyed another success with the first landing of a space probe on a near earth asteroid. In fact the Hayabusa craft has landed on the Itokawa asteroid three times but contact was lost after the second landing in November and only reaquired in January. To researchers surprise the asteroid isn't a single object but is made up of several rocks held together by their gravitational fields. Read more here.

(29.05.06) Japan's ATR Institute and Honda have developed a new brain machine interface that will robots to be manipulated by thought alone. So far they have achieved 85% accuracy in mimicing finger movement, all be it with a seven second delay between the neurological signal and the mechanical response but that's pretty astounding considering that the work is based on an article only published last year. Read more here. 

The tropics have expanded an average of 147 miles in the last 27 years and if the trend continues tropical storms will push north, sub-tropical deserts will expand and southern Europe will be deprived of winter snow and rain. One suggested cause is the rise in average sea temperatures but the not all the data is consistent with global warming projections, leading scientists to wonder if there is something missing from their assumptions. Read more here.

(26.05.06) Scientists in the US and Scotland have published blueprints for an invisibilty cloak that would bend light around it, so anyone looking at it would see what was behind it not the material itself. It sounds like sci-fi fantasy but they think that working prototypes could be avialable in 18 months. Read more here.

(23.05.06) Solar cycles contribute to global warming because they can lead to the release of greenhouse gases reseachers in Europe and California have found. While in the past this has lead to increase in temperatures on Earth, once the cycle has turned, the world cools again. Now scientists are positing that the human contribution to green house gases is both increasing the effect of the solar cycle and will prevent the earth cooling as it has in the past. Read more here.

(22.05.06) The true nature of the Florres remains, dubbed "hobbits" because of their size, continues to be a source of controversy. The dispute revolves around whether they were a seperate race of human or if they were just homosapians that suffered from some desease that caused their small stature. The latest articles argue for the latter but this is going to run and run. Read more here.

(17.05.06) The coral reefs around the Seychelles have failed to recover from the bleaching that occurred in the late 90's as a result of a rise in sea temperature. That rise was caused El Nino which is a symptom of global warming. 90% of the inner reef has shown very little sign of recovery and where the structure of the bed has collapsed the entire eco system has gone along with it. Read more here.  

(13.05.06) It has been generally thought that the people of Neolithic Britain lived a fairly peaceful life but a study of skulls of the period reveal a more violent society. 1 in 20 showed damage from a blunt edge trauma and a 1 in 50 chance of being killed by a blow to the head and compared to today's 1 in 60000 mureder rate, it was a violent time. Read more here.

(09.05.06) Marine biologists at St Andrews University have discovered that dolphins have names that they communicate to one and other through whistles, demostrating that not only do they have highly evolved brains but that they have evolved to perform similar functions to humans. Read more here.

(08.05.06) A four year official investigation into UFOs has found that while they exist, they are the result of atmospheric conditions rather than extraterrestrial popping in for a visit. I'm disappointed but somehow, not surprised. Read more here.

(05.05.06) The ozone layer is showing signs of recovery following the ban on chlorine based pollutants in the '80s but scientists warn that it's not all good news. "Recovery" actually means stabilisation at present levels with some thickening in northern latitudes but other factors mean that the infamous "holes at the poles" are unlikely to be plugged. Read more here.

The data from last years Titan probe (remember the dramatic landing images?) have been analised to reveal a dramatically scupltured landscape reminiscent of the pulp sci-fi novels of the '50 and '60s. Read and see more here.

Saturn's great red spot has an emerging rival which has grown to half the diameter of its larger neighbour. "Red spot Jnr", as it's been dubbed is the first time that scientists have been able to observe the emergence of one of these huge storms, the original was there when telescopes were first trained on the planet 400 years ago. Read more here.

(02.05.06) Biologists in New Zealand have answered a question that has been baffling the scientific community all the way back to Charles Darwin, why do the tropics produce such a huge variety of species comparred to the temperate regions. They've discovered that on average there is twice the rate of molecular change in tropical plants, some varieties are up to fourteen times faster and this rapid change leads to the development of new species. Read more here.

(01.05.06) Astronomers have been watching the romantically named 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann comet disintergrate for about three years, now the hubble telescope has captured it on film and revealed far more detail than was previously known about. The new pictures show 33 chunks breaking away from the decaying nucleus as it continues its spiral towards the sun. Before it gets there it will pass Earth at about thirty times the distance of the moon, so lets hope for a few clear nights. Read more here and click on the video link next to the picture, there are versions of the video to suit all connection speeds.

The Late Bronze Age history of the Aegian will have to be rewritten following a more exact dating of the Santorini (a Greek island) volcanic explosion. The new date comes from the study of tree rings and puts the eruption back about hundred years which means that all the trading and cultural links of the time have to be reassesed. Read more here.

(26.04.06) A joint survey by by the Botanical Society of the British Isles (BSBI) and conservation charity Plantlife has come up with some surprising results and it's not all doom and gloom. The post WWII/agriculture intensivication decline in weeds appears to have halted and some wild plants are thriving in the nutrient rich soil produced by hi-tech farming. Some are in decline, the plants that favour a low nutrient soil but things aren't as bad as we suspected. Read more here.

(23.04.06) Scientists have come up with a timeline for Mars' development describing three dramatically different eras. Forming as a planet around 4.6 billion years ago, there is evidence of vast quanities of water and clay, this started to dry out in the second era in which volcanoes threw sulphur into the atmosphere. The third and present era started 3.2 to 3.5 billion years, around the time the seas and first signs of life were appearing on earth, is the Mars we see today. Read more here.

(19.04.06) Hooray for big dinosaurs! And hooray for the Canadians for finding an absolutely huge one, possibly the biggest meat eating dino ever. Named Mapusaurus, I like it when they give them easy names, it was longer and heavier than the T-Rex and absolutely dwarfs the dog pictured with it. Read more here, click to enlarge the picture to see the dog.

(17.04.06) The first images of Venus's south pole have come back from the Venus Express, revealing a surprisingly symetrical squirl in the false colour pictures. Read and see more here.

Fossils found in Ethiopia put back the date of the earliest Australopithecus, thought to be a distant ancestor of man, a further 200 000 years to 4.2 million years ago. This early ancestor of present day humans is of the same group that gave us the famous "Lucy", discovered by Leekie and dating to around 3.2 million years ago. It fills a gap in the fossil record between her and her ancestor Ardipithecus. Read more here.

(12.04.06) Venus Express has successfully completed the long journey and its first orbit of Venus. Scientists hope to find out why a planet so similar to earth in so many ways has such a different environment. For instance, why does the atmosphere rotate fifty times faster than the ground below it? Read more on the project's website here.

(08.04.06) Uranus has a blue ring, similar to the one around Saturn and only the second discovered in our solar system. Made up of very small particles, hence the universal colour, it may have come into being because Unranus's moon, Mab, captured the larger particles that would have given it reddish colour. Read more here.

(05.04.06) Fossils of a 350 million year old fish have been found that show clear evidence of an animal adapted to live in water and on land. It has a neck, which fish lack, meaning that they have to turn their whole body to turn their heads, limbs including fingers and toes and eyes positioned on the top of the head rather than on the side. It's been named Tiktaalik, which means "big fish that lives in shallow water" in the local native language and it was big, the skull would need two hand s to hold it. Read morehere.

(04.04.06) Researchers in North Caroliner have successfully grown a human bladder from cells taken from the patients own organ and transplanted it back into their body. The operations were carried out in 1999 and it is only after carful observation that they publicising the achievement. The complex proceedur involved taking a postage stamp sized piece of tissue from the patient, growing it on a biodegradable scaffold and placing it in the body. They warn that a bladder is much simpler organ than, say, a heart but this does raise the possibility of the end of long waits for suitable donors for many people. Read more here. 

(03.04.05) Lack of sleep can contribute to obesity and diabetes according to a new study. It has long been known that obesity can cause people to have trouble sleeping and now it would appear that sufferers can be trapped in a viscous cycle in which their weight makes it hard to sleep and the lack of sleep triggers a desire to eat. Researchers found that as little as two nights disturbed sleep released hormones affecting appetite and increased levels of insulin is also associated with sleep deprevation. Read more here.


(29.03.06) A solar eclipse visible around the equator (it was very partial from the UK) has captivated people wherever it passed. Clear skys drew millions out to see it from Bombay to Mexico as this article reveals. Click on the photo link too for a slideshow that can only be described as "heartwarming".

Papers of Robert Hooke, one of the founders of the Royal Society and yet a somewhat forgotten figure, go on sale at Bonhams auctioneers and are being described as science's missing link. Discovered by chance in a cupboard in a house in Hampshire, they record his early experiments and contain corrospondence with Newton, with whom he had a great rivallary in which he came off the worst. Read more here and about the man here.

(28.03.06) "European researchers have reported the creation of an interface between mammalian neurons and silicon chips", according to VuNet, bringing closer the prospect of processors that can help people with brain damage and human/computer interfaces which don't have any exterior apperatus. It's illustrated with an entirely inappropriate picture of the Terminator but apart from that, click here for a really interesting article. 

(27.03.06) The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has sent back its first images and it's noticable what a difference the high resolution camera makes. Only one has been released but it gives an idea how much more information will be available to researchers. Click here for the NASA page and click on the link in the text for 100% crop from the picture.

By the by; I haven't seen any articles about this but it strikes me that the rate of expansion reported in the early universe story (see below) is many times the speed of light, by the time the outer most object had travelled half the diameter of the observable universe, the light from it would have moved less than a millimeter from th center. How is this possible?

(17.03.06) That woodpecker that was found in Arkansas and thought to be a surviving example of the hitherto extinct Ivory Billed Woodpecker may not be according to researchers in Massachusetts. Or it might still be according to others. I hope it is. Read more here.

The early universe has been analyised and mapped and the picture of the first moments of the place we live is astonishing. The universe appears to have expanded from the size of a marble to a volumn greater than the observable universe in less than a trillion-trillionth of a second and the map reveals how it resulted in clumps of matter and hence galaxies, planets etc, rather than just a soup of matter. Read more here, the link may not last long but it does has the best image I could find.

(11.03.06) Cassini continues to make suprising discoveries as it explores Saturn's environment. The latest news is that there is evidence of water on one of the moons, Enceladus or rather, in it, as it's below the surface. A recent flyby produced pictures of great plumes of the stuff emerging into space, giving rise to the possibility of life existing in this most unlikely of places. Read more here.

(06.03.06) I've read some great Nessie theories over the years, surviving dinosaurs, stray seals, even trans-dimensional beings but this takes the biscuit! Neil Clarke, a Glasgow palaeontolgist, believes the modern sightings, that date back to the 1930's, could be the result of circus owners of the day excercising their elephants in the loch as they toured the highlands. It all makes sense when you see the drawing of an elephant swimming! Read more here and thanks to Steve for the link.

(04.03.06) The Pentagon is planning to use brain implants to control sharks and employ them for tracking enemy ships amongst other things. It sounds far fetched but it's a lot cheaper than training dolphins who just swim off at the first oppurtunity. Its not the first time they've tried remote control on small brained creatures, Karl Rove was running George Bush by radio during the last Presidential election according to some. Read more here.

Antartica is shrinking faster than previously thought and is losing 152 cubic km a year according scientists in Colorado who have used two satellites to observe the ice sheet. If it lost just its western sheet enough water would be released to raise sea levels by twenty feet. Read slightly more here.

(28.02.06) A rare giant squid is to go on display at the Natural History Museum having been caught off the coast of the Falkland Islands. Measuring over 8.6 metres in length, the female wasn't even fully grown when she was snared by the trawler, they can grow to 18 metres. They live at depths of between 200 and 1000m and are usually only found washed up dead on beaches, which what makes the aquisition of complete specimen so thrilling. Read morehere.

The M4 distributed computing project has succeeded in cracking one of the three original enigma encoded messages picked up during WWII. The project is similar to Seti, UD or the BBC Climate Change Experiment (which is proving somewhat problematic btw), distributing tasks across remote computers and returning the results to a central server. Evidently very successfully, as they only got up and running of Jan 9th. The message reads:

Forced to submerge during attack, depth charges. Last enemy location 08:30h, Marqu AJ 9863, 220 degrees, 8 nautical miles, (I am) following (the enemy). (Barometer) falls (by) 14 Millibar, NNO 4, visibility 10.

Read more here.

(27.02.06) Mammals may have taken to the water 100 million years earlier than previously thought if scientists working in China are correct. They've unearthed the remains of what appears to be a furry beaver like animal in what is rapidly becoming one of the most exciting fossil beds in the world. Read more here.

The Chelsea Tractor, or 4X4, could be the subject to an extra £200 in road tax if treasury plans go ahead. Interestingly this is well below the amount that researchers say affects buying decisions, suggesting that the Government is more interested in raising revenue than reducing climate emisions. Read more here.

(22.02.06) Honda is looking for a typical UK family to test drive their fuel cell powered people carrier. The car runs on a hydrogen powered fuel cell which in turn runs an electric motor. The UK test follows similar tests around the world which have put 20 cars into everyday use. Read more here.

(20.02.06) The news that the Greeenland ice sheet is collapsing at a much faster rate than previously thought is leading scientists to revise estimates of how fast the sea level might rise in the near to medium term. The ice sheet contains enough water to put it up by as much as twenty feet, which sounds a bit alarmist but it is just a matter of calculating the volume of the ice and the area of the ocean, which hardly advanced science. Read more here and don't buy a house to close to the sea.


(15.02.06) Cassini has recorded a huge storm in Saturn's atmosphere and its shape bears a striking resemblance to a three legged Celtic rune. Read more here and if you have time, I recommend the galleries the page connects to.

(11.02.06) A new genus of dinosaur has been discovered in China that gives insight into the development of T.Rex and today's birds. The three meter long (do they mean tall?) predator has been named Guanlong wucaii, which translates as "crowned dragon of the five coloured rocks," which is just wonderful. Read more here.

NASA has discovered rings of dust, the precursor of planet formation, around stars previously thought far to big. The giant stars are so huge that earth they would swallow earth if it was as close to their center as it is to our sun's. Read more here.

(09.02.06) There's a new heavy weight champion in the dinosaur division and it's the spinosaorus. It's displaced the gigantasurus and the silghtly smaller T.Rex as the largest known following the examination of a skull that had been in private hands for some time. Weighing in at around eight tons and over fifty feet long, it lived the swamps and water edge of the Sahara around 100 million years ago on a diet of fish. Click here for more, including a good graphic.


(07.02.06) Dark matter is apparently the most pervasive element of the universe but so little has been known about it that it has amounted to little than a idea. Now scientists have made the first breakthrough that may lead to us understanding what it really is and their findings are surprising. Rather than being made up of very slow moving particles that have accumolated in small areas, it appears to consist of very fast moving particles spread over vast areas. Read more here.

(31.01.06) Anyone who has been watching the recent documentries on the advance of creationism and its trogan horse, intelligent design, in the USA, will be depressed by the news that 39% of people in the UK favour one or other of the two ideas. The poll, carried out by MORI for the BBCs Horizon, asked 2000 people how they thought life evolved on earth, on the bright side 48% chose evolution and it was the over 55's who were more likely to believe in devine intervention (Di), which suggests that the belief is in decline. A rather scary 44% thought Di should be included in science lessons. Read more here and compare with a recent US poll here.

(15.01.06) The Stardust capsule has returned to earth after a 2.9 billion mile journey around the solar system during which it has collected a whole thimble full of dust from comets and the like. Although many thousands of tons of space dust and debris fall on earth every year, this is the first time that scientists have had an oppurtunity to examine uncontanimated samples. Read more here.

(05.01.05) Mars: Evidence previously thought to point to the existance of pools of standing water in ancient times, may have been the result of meteor impact an article in Nature argues. Everyone still agrees that water did exist in liquid form at some point but life would have had a greater chance of evolving if it stood still for a bit. Read more here.

(28.12.05) The European Space Agency today launched the first of the thirty satelites that will eventually provide an alternative to GPS. GPS is run by the US military and not only will the new system be run by a civilian agency, it will be considerably more accurate. This means that it will have a lot more applications and there are estimates that 140 000 jobs could be created for a market that could be worth as much as €300bn by 2020. Read more here.

Astronomers have now found eight large, planet-like, objects in the Kuiper Belt, once thought only to be the home of Pluto and a lot of rubble left over from the formation of the Solar System. They're also rethinking the ancient history of some of the other planets, theorising that Jupiter, Mars, Uranus and Saturn have moved considerable distances since they were first formed. Read more here.

(17.12.05) It's long been thought  humans first reached Britain half a million years ago but that has had to be revised by 200 000 years following the discovery of flint tools near Lowestoft on the Suffolk coast. The tools were able to be accurately dated because of the presence of voles and snails in the same strata. The tools had been used to butcher animals and possibly humans by a group of humans being reffered to as Parkfield man after the area they were found in. Read more here.

(10.12.05) Magnetic North which is adjacent to the north pole at the moment, could have moved to Siberia by 2055. It does tender to wander about apparently and we've been fortunate to have lived through about 400 years of relative stability, otherwise it might have taken longer to find everything. One of the implications of the shift is the possibility of the northern lights being visible further south from the UK's point of view. Read more here.

(28.11.05) British (yes - British!) scientists have drilled the smallest ever hole in hard materials, such as steel. At 22 microns, they measure smaller than a thin human hair and one wonders how hey succeeded without breaking the drill (my thin drills last no time at all). Read more here.

(21.11.05) The Vatican have come out against "intelligent design", the quasi scientific theory that is widely regarded as creationism in disguise. ID is very popular in the US, which has a significant number of people who believe that the universe was created in the way described in the Bible and it could be included as part of the scientific curriculum in many states in the near future, if it's supporters get their way. Read more on the Vatican  astronomer's views here.

(19.11.05) Documents obtained under the freedom of information act reveal the extent of the UFO invasion of Wales. Dozens of objects have been recorded by the MOD but they are only investigated for their threat potential and if they pose none, no further investigation is undertaken. The most dramatic report is that of a family that believe that they disappeared for hours after encountering a purple triangler space craft. Read more here.

(17.11.05) Europe's oldest map has been unearthed in southern Italy and it depicts the tip of the peninsula in terms recognisable to people today. Settlements are donated by name next to a dot and the sea is represented by a wavy line. The map dates from 500BC, which seems relatively modern to me, you'd have thought that a sea that touched two landmasses and had explored and traded with much of them for many hundreds of years would have produced something much earlier. On the other hand, they did make the map on a pot, so at least people would held it the right way up. Read more here.

(06.11.05) Fuel for thought: Randell Mills of Harvard claims to have built a prototype that generates a 1000 times more heat than conventional fuel sources. It uses small amounts of water, a catalyst and a super heated element to split the hydrogen and oxegen in the water apart, which are in turn used to generate energy.

But critics question the technique because the new form of hydrogen it relies on, Hydrino, breaks the laws of physics. Time will resolve the debate because major companies has backed the work with tens of millions of dollars in investment and Mills says they are only months away from luanch. Read more here.

Astronomers using the Spritzer space telescope have detected the faint glow of the first stars to appear after the big bang. Emerging less than 200 million after the birth of the universe the stars were formed from the hydrogen, helium and lithium produced by the bang and went onto to provide the material for the stars we see today. Read more here.

(01.11.05) Pluto may have it's own moons, if astronomers using the Hubble telescope are correct. It would go some way to confirming Pluto's status as a planet, which has always been a matter of debate. Read more here.


(28.10.05) Mars won't be closer to earth until 2018 as it is this weekend, which is sure to reignite the chain letter that claims that you won't have a better view of the planet for hundereds of years. Well it does usually. Click here for more detail, which includes a really good description of how to measure distance above the horizon and a great photo taken by an ameteur with a 7" telescope and a webcam.

(14.10.05) Black holes, may not be the harbingers of doom that we once thought. Observations form the Chandra telescope suggest that stars are evolving around the BH at the center of our (eek! - on no, it's OK) galaxy. Astronemors suggest that a ring of gas insulates the stars from the BH's gravitational power. Read more here.

The argument surrounding of the exact nature of the "hobbit" remains found Indonesia has tipped towards the theory that these are a previously unknown race of humans, rather than a few individuals affected by illness, with the discovery of more skeltons. Read more here.

(05.10.05) To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the article that lauched Arthur C. Clarke's career the BBC broadcast a rare interview with the great man today. The old Wireless World article predicted that radio signals would be broadcast from "rocket platforms", an extraordinary thought at the time and his ideas are just as worth hearing today. Click here for the program page, the "listen again" link is at the bottom.

(03.10.05) The putative 10th planet Xena has a moon according to astronomers in Hawaii (Jealous?  Well so am I but then they don't get out much during the day). And they've called it Gabrielle after another character in the popular TV show. I think if its big and round and has a moon it must be planet. Read more here.

Meanwhile a nobel prize has been awarded to two Australians who have proved that stomach ulcers are due to infection and not stress. Which is a relief.

(13.09.05) A solar flare has knocked out medium and short wave radio communications in both halves of the American continent and caused power surges and blinded satelites. More problems are predicted as the flare traverses earth's view of the star. We often receive warnings about flares but this is causing real problems. Read morehere.

Astrophysicists looking into deep space have observed the most distant, and therefore the oldest, cosmic explosion ever seen. According to them it reveals how dark matter intergrated into the universe we see and gave birth to the universe as we know it. Read more here.


(09.09.05) New evidence suggests that pterosaurs, the big flying dinosuar that looked a bit like giant bat with a head like seagull (well sort of) , were even bigger than previously thought. New fossil discoveries indicate that they had a wingspan of around 18 meters, twice that of a spitfire. Read more here.

Deep Impact, which bashed into that comet with such force, has produced evidence that comets contain some the key chemicals needed to create life. This bolsters the theory that life on earth originated in outer space. Read more here.

(07.09.05) The Scottish Executive says "tens of millions" of pounds of support will available for renewable energy progects around the nations coast and there seems to a new emphasis on tidal power this time. This could of great interest to those in the local community who see combining energy generation with a bridge as a way of funding a fixed link to the mainland. Read more here.

(02.09.05) Beavers: The Scottish Executive has turned down the SNH's proposal to reintroduce beavers to Scotland. Scottish Natural Heritage had wanted to create a habitat for them in the Knapdale Woods, a "special area of conservation" and it was fears of possible negative affects on that area that prompted that refusal. Read more here.

Researchers at Imperial College have discovered that injecting people with oxyntomodulin, a chemical that the stomach produces as it fills up, results in them wanting to eat less and to dramatic weight loss. Read more here. 

(29.08.05) Scientists at Purdue University have developed a new way of storing hydrogen for use in fuel cells, bringing the possibility of more powerful and portable sources of power for a wide variety of applications. Read more here.

(26.08.05) Scientists have proved the theory that the the earth's core is spinning faster than the surface. Not much faster, just one revolution every 900 years in fact. Read more here.

The James Webb telescope, successor to Hubble, is running well over a budget and may have to cut back on it's original spec. before it gets up and running. It features a mirror, made of a rare metal rather than glass, six times the size of it's predessocor's and hopes to be able to see even further back in time. They will have to get it right first time this time because there is no possibility of servicing it once it's been launched because it's orbit is so high. Read more here (Wash Post link -get it while you can) and here.

(23.08.05) In the United States wildcat kittens have been born to cloned parents, the first time that this has been achieved. The researchers hope that this will improve the chances of reviving endangered species, which is a good thing I suppose. The reality is that there are far too many endangered species and this does nothing to replace the environment lose that is causing the problem in the first place. Read more here.


(20.08.05) I came across Megalithic.co.uk (click here) while searching for obscure place name and what nice bit of serendipity it turned out to be. It's a very well organised amateur catalogue of megalithic sites across world which relies on members to send in items to be added to its lists. Some of it could be better done, the interactive maps are confusing to use but the search function works very well. There's lots of stuff on Scotland in general and Mull in particular but there are great gaps when it comes to other NAIDC islands. If you're interested in ancient sites and know how to point a camera, then you could contribute to the growing archive too.

(06.08.05) The Antartic Larson B ice shelf has collapsed in what is the largest shelf loss in 10 000 years. This has triggered the movement of glaciers that it had been holding back but are now moving towards the sea at eight times their previously speed. Scientists say this is almost certainly due to global warming. Read more here.

Cassini: It's a while since I reported about our little friend investigating Saturn and it's rings and moons. It's been busy, finding huge impact craters on tiny moons, getting great pictures of Saturns own "northern lights" and much else too, click here to read more.

(03.08.05) The Koreans have added to the managery of cloned animals by producing an Afghan hound that they've called Snuppy. They are claiming that because dogs suffer from similar deseaces to humans, this will is scientific step forward. Snuppy I have some good news and some bad news, the good news is that you're not on the menu tonight, the bad news is...Read more here.

George Bush has stirred up a already hightened debate in the US by saying that he would like to see ID taught in schools so that students "could see what the debate is about". ID stands for "intelligent design", an idea that evolved (ha!) from creationist beliefs. Read morehere.

(30.07.05) A new large planet has been found in the Kuiper belt, the latest in a series of objects that in the same region of the solar system that is home to Pluto. The new planet is three times the size of Pluto and 96 times the distance of the Earth from the Sun. It's made of ice and has a massive 560 year orbit. Click here for more.  

(29.07.05) Japanese inventor Professor Ishiguro has developed a lifelike robot called Repliee Q1. With flexible latex skin and sensors that detect movement and touch, it looks like for all the world like an attractive young woman. It only operates in seated position but people interacting with it soon forget that its a robot (or should that be android?) and treat it like a human being. Read more here.

(25.07.05) The US House of Representitives has voted to fund another manned flight to the moon by 2020 and then on to Mars on an, as yet, unspecified date. The house approved funding of over $34 billion for NASA and projects including a new space station. Read more here.

Google has launched a map search for the moon, in honour of the first landing. The page opens on the photo image of the section where six landers touched down, with handy markers so you can zoom in on their individual sites. The page works like a normal satellite image or map, you can pan in four directions an zoom in on any part of it. The picture loads in sections, taking about a minute on a reasonable dialup connection and highly detailed, stunning in fact. Click here to see for self.


(15.07.05) It's like an illustration from cheap Sci-fi novel come true, astronomer Maciej Konacki, who sounds like character from one, didn't say of his discovery of a planet surviving in a tri-star solar system. The planet's existance challenges commonly held theories about the conditions that produce planets and it shouldn't exist at all according to some. Click here to read more in an article which includes a fab video of what the view from an imaginery moon orbiting the planet.

(05.07.05) Humans may have reached the Americas 30 000 years earlier than previously thought according to scientists from Liverpool's John Moore's University, who have discovered a trail of footprints in a lava flow. This could dramatically change our knowledge of how the continent was populated, read more here.

(04.07.05) As you wil have seen on the TV news, the deep impact mission was a spectacular success. The same cannot be said for the live NASA TV coverage which I watched first thing this morning. It was like a wedding video made by an amateur who decided to focus on the congregation, rather than the happy couple, as the rings were exchanged. Anyway, enough moaning, get the real details of the mission here.

(03.07.05) Deep Impact (see story of 13.01.05) has reached it's destination and the missile will hit the asteroid at 6.52 am tomorrow. They think it'll make a hole the size of a football pitch. Hopefully it will be shown on one of the news channels but if you don't have satellite television and would like to see it live click here for NASA web TV. You can find lots more information on this facsinating project here.

(01.07.05) Saturn's Rings have their own atmosphere, which exists indepndently of the planet they orbit. A Cassini flyby has determined that there is a thin layer of oxyegen surrounding the debris that make up the rings. They have also found that the planet is rotating more slowly than previously thought, something they can't explain yet. Read more, with pictures, here.


(30.05.05) Seti, the mass distributed search for extraterrestrial life, is set to have it's own telescope for the first time. Read slightly more here. 

(28.05.05) An Indian scientist has discovered that Saturn, and possibly other large planets, reflect the sun's X-ray emissions. Although diffuse, the reflections can be analyzed to produce accurate data on Sun activity, which means that we can see, all be it indirectly, what is happening on the side of the Sun that faces away from us. Read more here, the "Chandrayaan-I mission" referred to in the article is India's project to send a remote controlled craft to the moon btw.


(22.05.05) British woodland birds are on the decline, according to a survey from the RSPB. Ironically this is happening as traditional woodland acerage is on the increase for the first time in decades and ornothologists are unsure what the cause might be. Read more here. 

(20.05.05) Human cloning has become a reality, well, this side of the Atlantic anyway. Scientists at Newcastle University have succeeded in cloning blank state stem cells.These are the most basic building blocks of a human and are capable of developing into any part of the human body. So if injected into the heart they should turn into heart muscle, into the brain, into brian cells. Read more:- http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=553832005.


(14.05.05) The mystery of the waggle dance has been solved. For a very long time it's be believed that bees tell other bees of the location of good sources of pollen by perfoming a complex figure of eight dance on retutning to the hive but there was no proof. Now there is, click here for more, including a fantastic picture of a bee with a radar antena on its back.

(11.05.05) Only days after the last flight of the Skylark, a new rocket was unveiled today, capable of lifting a load equivalent to the weight of a double decker bus. It's the latest of the Starchaser rockets, built privately and originaly as a hobby, in true British tradition. Read more here.

(08.05.05) The gradual reduction in world smog levels may be having the bizarre side affect of actually speeding global warming. The theory is that the smog particals shielded us from sun light and that air temperature is rising as they reduce. It's a very complicated world...read more here.

(06.05.05) A new species of dinosaur has been found in Utah and it's feathered! Not only that but scientists think that it marks a change in diet, from carni to herbi-vore. Read more, including quite a scarey picture, here.

(03.05.05) Is there life on Mars? Well, yes, there may well be claims astrobiologist (as appossed to annoying TV presenter) Ian Wright of the Open University. He says that enough evidence has accumolated from the recent missions to the red planet for the presence of life NOW to be a real possibility. One of the most significant pieces of evidence come from the wonderfully named Vittorio Formisano, he has found evidence of significant quantities of the by products of methane in the Martian atmosphere. Apart from proving that Mars is pretty smelly, methane is an indicator of biological process or life as it's more commonly called. Read more here and thanks to Steve for the tip. 

(02.05.05) Britains contribution to the space race, the Skylark rocket, was launched for last time today. It first broke out of the earth's gravitational field in the 50's and has since been used to take all sorts of payloads up to see how they reacted to a weightless environment. Read more here.

(01.05.05) The European Southern Observatory in Chile has taken the first photograph of a planet orbiting a sun other than our own. The gas giant, around the size of Jupiter revolves around a dying and both objects can be seen in the image. Click here for the photo itself and here for an artists impression.

(29.04.05) NASA Robots surveying the ocean depths (were they lost? That's the wrong direction surely?) have found conclusive evidence that the heat exchange between earth and space is seriously out of kilter, so proving that the earth is indeed heating up. They describe it as a "smoking gun", which can't help things either. Read more here.

(28.04.05) A woodpecker thought to be extinct for over 60 years has been spotted in Arkansas and has created a huge stir in the birdwatching world. Looking far more exotic than our "spotted" variety, it's been caught on video by an eagle eyed twitcher, read more here. 

(26.04.05) The Hubble telescope celebrated it's 15th year yesterday and has opened new galleries and activities on it's website to celebrate. It's hard to believe that it's been up there for so long but not hard to appreciate how much it has expanded, quite literaly, expanded our viw of the universe. There's really to much to pick out just one thing, so click here to visit the website and take your pick.

(26.04.05) Toads are exploding in the Altona district of Hamburg and no one knows why. Witnesses report that they first swell to twice their normal size, crawl around for bit and then go bang, sending their entrails up to a meter. It's well known that toads can double their size at will but why they have lost the ability to stop expanding is a mystery. All the poor fellas come from the same pond, known as "the pond of death"...read more here.


(21.04.05) NASA's Spitzer telescope has detected what appears to be an asteroid belt orbiting a sun similar to our own. It's the third belt to be found but the first around a mature star and is a mere 41 light years away, Read more here, along with an artists impression and streaming video.

(19.04.05)  Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have been smashing quarks and gluons into each other in an attempt to replicate the early conditions of the Universe and have come to the idea that it wasn't gaseous but fluid in nature, which is something of a surprise.  Read more here.

(15.04.05) A pregnant dinosaur, complete with eggs, has been found in the Jiangxi province of China's south east. The find sheds light on how the dinosaurs gave birth, which appears to be more bird like than reptilian. Reptiles lay their eggs all the same time, while birds do so one at a time. This mother had two eggs inside her, one for each oviduct. The eggs were about 7" inches long, which seems a bit small for a creature between 10 and 13 feet in length. Read more here.

(12.04.05) Japan's space agency is hoping to persuade it government to fund it's plans for the moon base that it would like to build by 2025. Although Japan has a huge trade deficit (who'd have thought?), a rivalry with China, that is an echo of the space race between Russia and the USA in the 60's, might persuade them to dig deep. Read more here.

(29.03.05) Thankfully, yesterday's earthquake, devastating as it was, didn't result in another tsunami. However, experts are saying that the quake may have been only an aftershock from Boxing day's quake and that the stress that one produced may not have been relieved and another shock could occur anytime in the next year. The next quake would be further south and of similar strength. On the good side, it seems that tsunami warnings and alerts were affective this time and had one occurred far fewer people would have suffered.

It's the stuff off science fiction, dna extracted from dinosaur bones. Jurassic Park proposed the idea that blood taken from a mosquito trapped in amber was the way to obtain it because at the time it was thought that no soft material survived the process of fossilisation. Now Dr. Mary Schweitzer, of the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences has succeeded in isolating soft material from T Rex bones and has replicated the process in two other specimens. A quite remarkable achievement, considering the bones are around 80 million years old. Read more here. 

(28.03.05) I'm sorry to report that the predictions made on the 16th (see below) have come true and there has been a second major earthquacke in the Indian Ocean region. The 8.2 quacke hit Sumatra, an island which suffered in the tsunami only weeks ago and experts predict that it will result in another tsunami but not of the same magnitude. However it will be sometime before we know for sure. Read a little more here.

(20.03.05) Replicators, until now the stuff of Star Trek dreams or Stargate nightmares, are closer to becoming a reality. They won't be capable of making food, microwaves have got the quick preparation of stuff that's very much like food pretty much sown up but they will be able to make just about anything else. Designed to home production units which will configured to make simple things like kitchen utensils to something as complex as a digital camera, it's hoped they will be available in four years time. Read more here.

(18.03.05) After the search for life, the discovery of water was probably the main goal of the missions to Mars. We've all read of the increasing evidence and seen the images that show what are probably old water courses and errosion but a recent NASA picture cleary shows the presence of ice on the planets surface. The image is a little hard to take in, the ice sheets sit in a landscape that resembles a sandstone desert and the scale is huge with the cliffs in the picture are over two kilometers high. See for yourself here.

(17.03.05) Old bones found. Palaeontologists in Ethiopia have announced they have discovered the oldest biped skeleton ever unearthed. It is between 3.8 and 4 million years old and was found 60 kilometres from the site where Lucy was discovered in 1974, that find has been dated as being between 2.8 and 3.2 million years old. It was only by examining the ankle bone that the scientists were able to determine that the new find was capable of walking upright. Read more here.

The Cassini spacecraft has sent back a picture of the surface of Enceladus that makes it look like the south pole but with more craters. The small Saturn moon is only 500 kilometres in diameter but has a thin atmosphere suggesting that it is still active and possibly has ice volcanos or geysers. Read more here.

(16.03.05) A study into the affects of the Indian Ocean tsunami suggest that another quake in the region could be iminante. The slip in the earth's crust was so severe that pressure has been put on a neighbouring plate that will have to be relieved. Scientists say that the need for an early warning system is now urgent. Read more here.

(16.02.05) Mars Spirit Rover has found a rock described as "probably the most interesting and important rock Spirit has examined" by NASA. It appears to be part of the old structure of the planet and shows more evidence of the past presence of water on the surface. Read more here.

(14.02.05) NASA has a wonderful page called "Picture of the Day", which is exactly what it sounds. You can click on the reasonable sized image and get a much bigger (sometimes they take a while to download) or browse through the archive of previous pictures. They range from "Mysterious streak over Ohio" to exloding galaxies and maps of gravity on earth (if you move to the US midwest you might lose weight). Click here for the picture of the day and here for the archive. Note these aren't the same pages that you find on the NASA main site, they're not so sophisticated but load much faster.

(02.02.05) You'll probably have seen the reports over the last couple of days about the new estimates for global climate change. You probably didn't know that the computing work was largely done on home computers just like yours and you can take part in the research too. It's another of the shared computing networks similar to SETI which searches for extraterrestrial life and United Devices, which does cancer research. Read more here, there's a link to the software download at the bottom of the story. Thanks to Steve for the tip.

(01.02.05) Renta-scope! Bradford Robotic Telescope, run by Bradford University and based in Tennerife, is offering amateur astronomers the opportunity to book time on the scope and ask it to look at areas of space that interest them. Aimed mainly at schools but open to anyone, allows us all to gain access to resources previously open only to the professional researcher. The website is excellent too, with lots of photo galleries and interactive features. Get someone to recommend it to your local school! Click here for more.

(21.01.05) Exciting news from Titan reveals a topsy turvy world where methane, rather than water, is the great force that carves the landscape and water, in the form of ice, replaces rock as the surface it cuts through. Methane falls from clouds onto ice and flows down to the sea in a mirror of the water cycle on earth. Read more, with some great pictures, here.

(17.01.05) The ESA has released more pictures from the Huygens probe, including another 360° degree picture from the decent. There's also some of the raw pictures available. Click here for the entire catalogue of publicly available pictures from the Saturn progect.

(15.01.05) The first pictures from the Huygens probe came back late last night have been posted on the ESA website, they include the first view from the surface and 360° view taken while the craft descended. Most exciting to me was the sound recoding taken on the way down, I think it's the first natural sound we've heard from outside the earth and it's quite eerie listening to what appears to be wind from another world. Click here for the ESA pages.

(14.01.05) The European Space Agency's Huygens probe has successfully completed it's seven year jouney and landed on Saturn's moon, Titan. Launched from the Cassini space craft (see below), it decended through the moons dense atmosphere, landed and is now sending back data. When last reported it had been sending for over five hours, a great achievement for the scientists who have been working on the project for up to 25 years. Titan is unusual in that it has an atmosphere and a complex geography, described as resembling earth in it's very early years. Read more here. 

(13.01.05) Deep Impact, NASA's dual craft probe to investigate the nature of comets, has launched successfully last night and gone straight into safe mode. This is an automatic response to a problem but those running the progect believe that it's a response to severe temperature, rather than serious diffuculty.

The two probes have interlinked missions. While one orbits the comet, the other will smash into it, the results of the impact being relayed via the orbiter back to earth. Read more on the progect here and the launch here.

(23.12.04) The UK Infrared Telescope, based in Hawaii, has produced some wonderful pictures of the Orion galaxy, making objects that have never been seen before visible. The Wide Field Camera is the worlds most powerful infrared camera and is capable of capturing areas of the sky the size of the full moom (that doesn't sound that big but is loads bigger than before). Click here for the BBC story, including a very good image of the new findings.

(21.12.04) A joint project between NASA and the EU space agency has put a satellite in orbit around Earth to monitor pollution. to quote the website... " HIRDLS is a multi-channel limb-viewing infrared (IR) radiometer for high resolution monitoring of upper tropospheric, statospheric, and mesospheric temperature, trace chemicals, and geopotential height gradients."...and I couldn't have put it better myself. Click here to visit the website, which has animations of the scientific results and some great low orbit images.

(17.12.04) Science magazine has announced it's breakthroughs of the year and top of the heap is the Mar's Rovers' discovery of water. Other contenders for the top spot included the first cloning of a human being and the discovery of dwarf humans in Indonesia. Read more here.

(04.12.04) Back to Mars: Having sojourned around Saturn and other celestial bodies for a while, it's worth checking back with the Mars Rover, which is still rolling around the Martian landscape gathering information. It's now in an area that the scientists say is rich with the potential to reveal evidence of past life (in the rocks, as oppossed to martians who think they're descended from Cleopatra). The BBC has a very good summary of things, including some nice pictures and useful links, click here to read it.

(21.11.04) NASA has launched the Swift observatory, so called because of its ability to quickly change its orientation in space. This is necessary because its task is to detect and analyse the gamma-ray bursts that occur briefly before disappating. Scientists believe they are produced by a stars collapse and may be the precusor of a black hole. Read more here.

Here's a nice understatement from a guy who programmed the mars rovers "Writing the code for spacecraft is no harder than for any other realtime life or mission-critical application. The thing that is hard is debugging a problem from another planet." Thanks to James for sending it in along with the link to kissmyfloppy.


(15.11.04) Robo Roach: Scientists from France, Switzerland and Belgium have developed a robot that mimics cockroachs so well that it can infiltrate their colonies and influence their behaviour. It is hoped that the robot will lead to better control methods and is the first working example of what could be a long line of decoy-bots that could be used for such things as regulating when a flock of chickens lays eggs. Read more here If you watched "Terminator 3 - Rise of the machines" last night, this story might seem quite sinister.

(12.11.12) Smart 1 has reached the Moon's gateway, that is the point at which it is pulled more by the Moon's than Earth's gravity and is about to start its journey to a stable orbit. The probe is a European project and one can only hope that it is more successful than our Mars landers. Thankfully it hasn't I hope they aren't taking advice from the BBC (click here) who think that the Moon is our only satelite when there are actually two (click here), the second being Cruithne, a 3 mile wide piece of rock that takes 700 years to complete its eccentric orbit. Of course a true pedant might argue that Cruithne is our only true moon because the one we call "the moon" is actually a planet and one half of a binary system, the other half being the Earth. Real pedants say there were three men with beards in ZZTop, so what do they know? Read the BBC story, the probe is fascinating  and doesn't waste time on my digressions, even the engine is something from a science fiction story.      

(09.11.12) Space Odyssey on BBC 1 at 9pm tonight is not to be missed. Useing the latest scientific discoveries and technology it imagines how astronauts would fair if they went on a tour around the solar system, where they would have got to if they'd continued at the same rate of progress that enabled them to reach the moon in 1969. The BBC has a great page of links on the programme, along with other recent space related items. Don't miss it!

Did you know that the static that appears on your TV when it isn't tuned into a program are the remenants of waves from the big bang?

(28.10.04) The papers were full of the hobbits today and the Guardian had a particularly good piece that went into much more detail than yesterdays reports. For instance did you know the little people shared the island with giant rats that were as tall as they were? Or that the islanders say that the last of them were seen just before the Dutch arrived in the 19th century? It's one of those scientific stories that really fires the imagination. The online version lacks the graphics of the paper version but Nature has some great images and graphics that more than makes up for them. Click here for the Guardian and here for Nature.

(27.10.04) Can it be true? Tea has been found to have a similar affect on the brain as the drugs prescribed for alzheimer's  and it may prevent it's onset. Surprising that there are any suffers in Britain at all when you think about it, if only we didn't do so many other things that were bad for us. Like drink coffee for instance. Read more here.

Scientists (where would this page be without them?) have found skeletons on Flores island, halfway between Australia and Asia, of humanoids that only grew to the size of three year old western humans. They may have lived as recently as 13 000 years ago and would have certainly interacted with modern people. The island has an extensive folklore about a "little people" and the discovery gives credence to the worldwide stories of small people. Read more on the National Geographic here and here on Canada News which has better pictures.

(16.10.04) All those evenings spent putting the world to rights may not have been wasted if you enter the X Prize competition. Run by the World Technology and X Prize Foundations they plan to offer large cash sums for people who come with genuine solutions to the great problems that face humankind, from starvation to medical research and the energy crisis. The exact amount of the prizes hasn't been set yet but they're likely to in the millions of dollars. Find out more by clicking here for the BBC news story and here for the X Prize site itself.

(09.10.04) Further signs of water have been found by the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Spirit, which failed to find evidence when it landed in a supposed lake has now travelled several kilometers to the foot of some basalt hills which show clear signs of water erosion, while Opportunity has reached the bottom of the crater it landed in and again has found rocks affected by water. Read more here, including an astonishingly clear photo, which along with the descriptions of basalt hills make you realise that our neighbour is made of very much the same stuff as Earth is.

(05.10.04) Mount St Helens, as you will have seen on the news, is showing signs of activity and scientists are testing ash for signs of magma, which would indicate a full scale eruption is imminent. I found a webcam that shows the volcano in rather low resolution but enough to be able to see the steam coming out of it and I was struck with how similar it is to the Kinloch's view of Ben More, itself an extinct volcano. Click here for Mount St Helens and here for Mull's older version (you'll probably have to check the archive as it's covered in cloud at the moment).

(29.09.04) The Asteroid Toutatis, named after a Celtic tribal protection god, passes earth tonight and will be four times the distance to the moon at it's closest point. It's quite large, 2.9 long by 1.5 miles wide and shaped a bit like a flint arrow head. It will be another 500 years until it gets this close again and you can watch it's progress as it whizzes by at 24 000 mph on BBC2 tonight at 11.45. Read more about this fascinating object here and here.

(27.09.04) Richard Branson has announced the signing of a £14 million contract to lease privately developed "rocket -planes" and bring low orbit space travel to the masses. Well a small part of them anyway. He estimates that 3000 people worldwide will be willing to pay the £100 000 fee. Me, I'll be waiting for Stelios to bring us "EasySpace". In the meantime read more here.

The European Space Agencies XXM-Newton observatory has reported the collision of to massive galaxy clusters, each containing thousands of galaxies. The resulting storm resembled terrestrial weather fronts meeting, producing huge storms which cast galaxies far from their normal paths. Click here for more including an animation of the collision based on photos.

(26.09.04) A TV programme investigating the conspiracy theory that the moon landings were faked by NASA provoked an avalanche of, oh, three emails. The theory has been around since the seventies and even inspired a film, Capricorn One but it's on the Internet that they've really started to flourish. They're now part of a pantheon of space related conspiracies, which include things like NASA hiding evidence of life on Mars. Fortunately there are some excellent websites that cover the subject from a rational point of view, my favourite is Bad Astronomy which has a page devoted to the moon landings here. The main website has lot of information on other space nonsense here.

(23.09.04) Scientists studying the West Antarctic Ice Sheet are raising the alarm over a recent rapid increase in it's rate of melt. The sheet has been melting naturally since the last ice age and some argue that the last ice age never ended there. It cannot be ruled out that the increase is due to global warming, which is of interest to us up north because similar findings in the arctic could presage the turning off of the gulf stream and rapid drop in temperatures in Scotland. Read more here.

(21.09.04) Sugar spun* gas clouds The discovery of  glycolaldehyde  molecules in a vast gas cloud in space has increased the possibilty that the building blocks of life developed or originated extraterrestrialy. Glycolaldehyde is one of the two sugar molecules that are needed to create DNA, the basis of life on earth. The cloud is in the Sagittarius area of the sky and 3 light years across. Read more here. 

(17.09.04) A Nicaraguan school for the deaf, neglected due to the long running conflicts and lack of funds, has given birth to a new sign language. The children invented their own signing because there was no one to teach them a formal one. Apparently it started with a few a basics, a big shrug for "I've no idea what you're trying to say" I imagine and developed into a sophisticated method of communication. Scientists are now studying how the complex language development for clues to how all human language might have evolved. Read more here.

(10.09.04) Cannabis has long term benefits to MS suffers an initial study has found. The study was prompted by anecdotal stories of people self medicating and it being used as a defence by those supplying them when prosecuted. The trial only lasted 15 weeks and will prompt further studies but it is hoped that it will lead to the drug becoming available in a theraputic form. Read more here.

Good news for the world of astronomy following the disapointment of Genesis. They've released the first picture of a planet revolving around another sun, the romantically named 2M1207. The planet is 5 times the size of Jupitor. On a more "domestic" level, two new moons and a faint dust ring have been found around Saturn. See our planetry neighbour here and Saturn here.

(08.09.04) The Genesis Probe has crashed in the Utah desert after the parachutes failed to open which meant that the Hollywood helicopter stunt pilots had no chance to catch it. Scientists haven't had a chance to examine the contents but the very sad picture on the BBC website suggest that there isn't much hope that the contents is intact and uncontaminated. Click here for further disappointment.

(06.09.04) The Genesis Probe which has been collecting atoms between the Earth and the Sun for the last three years is due to return on the 8th. Scientists are very excited because it will give them the opportunity to see if their theories of what our little star is made of are borne out by physical evidence. If that wasn't exciting enough they're employing hollywood stunt pilots to catch the probe in mid-air as it speeds towards the Utah desert. Read more here.

(02.09.04) ET phones us? SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) is getting quite excited about an anomalous signal picked up from an apparently empty region of space. They're not certain that the source is artificial, i.e. created by an alien but it is a destinct possibilty. Other explanations include interference from a ground based source and, almost as intrigueing as aliens, is the possibilty of a new stellar phenomena like the pulsar, the radio signals they produce were first taken as an alien radio broadcast. Read more here and if you want to become part of the SETI project click here.

(29.08.04) Doctors have successfully grown a jaw bone under the muscle tissue of a man who lost much of his original one after cancer surgery. First they built a wire frame and placed it, along with bone inducing chemicals, marrow and bone blocks, under the skin just below his armpit. It was then implanted, replacing the titanium plate that had been bridging the damaged bone. He is now eating solid food for the first time in nine years and says he now wants some tooth implants. Well, who wouldn't? Read more here.

(27.08.04) An Asteroid the size of a garden shed became the closet "near miss" object ever recorded when it passed within 4100 miles of earth last March. Objects this size frequently hit earth but break up as they enter the atmosphere (fortunately). The significance is that it is now possible track such objects with greater accuracy and this announcement is just one of many over the last two years. This was the second near miss in March which broke the record, read more about the old record here and the new here.

(10.08.04) Seti is claiming that earth is slowly becoming less visible to alian civilisations as more and more devices are shielding themselves against radio emissions. Earths radio "cloud" stretches out 50 light years and will eventually reach nearby stars but they will have to enjoy our cultural output while they can as radio leaks come to an end. So expect an invasion from little green men wanting to know who won Big Brother 5 anytime now*. Click here for more here *As seen on Futurama

(09.08.04) Japanese boffins (scientists with extra pens in their top pockets) have developed the first automanous security robot but Robocop it ain't. Standing a metre in height and only capable of issueing stern commends and belching smoke it is somewhat less intimidating than our little mascot on the left. Still its only the first of its kind and once the Texans allow them to carry guns they're bound to make an impact. Read slightly more here.

(07.08.04) NASA has just upgraded its computing capacity by a factor of ten by purchasing off-the-shelf systems and putting them together to create a super computer. It's also adopted Linux as the operating system which is interesting in itself. Some of the figures are amazing, it will use over 10 000 processors and had have storage space equivalent to 800 000 cds. The new computer will be used to simulate missions, weather systems and engineering problems. Read more here.

(04.08.04) Small, dense and prone wild temperature swings, Mercury is the latest planet to be probed by NASA. They hope to answer some of the mysteries of our sun side neighbour, such as why its less popular in the public imagination than Mars...Read more here.

(24.07.04) Cassini continues to make remarkable discoveries and observations. The latest is the first direct observations of lightning on the surface of Saturn, read more here.

(02.07.04) You've probably all been following the progress of the Cassini probe, named after the Italian astomoner who discovered Saturns moons, over the last week. The NASA website has a great picture of the gap between the rings of Saturn that the probe passed through yesterday, it really gives you an idea of what a remarkable feat it was. Click here and check out the rest of the website images, there's some wonderful stuff.

(21.06.04) Teleportation, long a staple of science fiction and Star Trek in particular (which used it because it was cheapest way of getting people down to a planet), has come a step closer as researchers report transporting atomic properties from one place to another without a physical link. However they don't think this will lead to transportation of larger objects anytime soon, rather they expect it to be used in quantum computing and the development of super computers (actually we have those already, so they'll be really superduper computers, technically speaking). Read more here.

Today saw the first commercial space flight which took pilot Mike Melvill 62 miles above the earth's surface and just out of its atmosphere. Thousands travelled from all over the world to witness the 90 minite flight, heralded as the first step towards leisure flights (which will probably be called EasySpace). That is still some way of however and the current estimated cost in excess of $10 million beyond most of us even if save up a lot of airmiles. Read more here.