BBC News | Science/Nature | Full Feed

Lions and cheetahs prove to be a big hit on the BBC's webcams

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 12:30:44 -0500

By Hugh Wilson

There have been many surprises on Big Cat Live, from Shakira the cheetah facing down a male lion, to Shakira's cub facing down a fully-grown male cheetah.

But for the crew, one of the greatest revelations of this year's show has been the success of Big Cat on the web.

For daily updates/webcams

Some of the most memorable scenes from the Masai Mara Reserve have been captured on the webcams - seven in all - that have been feeding live pictures continuously to the Big Cat Live website.

They have shown us nocturnal lion hunts, the first hesitant steps into the wide world of hyena and jackal cubs, and thermal footage showing a zebra seemingly attack a zebra foal in the heat of a cheetah attack.

The absence of cars and cameramen has ensured that the behaviour recorded has been entirely natural.

"Look at what is happening on the webcam now," says presenter and Mara native, Jackson Looseyia.

"We are seeing unusual behaviour - if there was a car there, or people walking there, these (jackal) cubs would be gone."

But the webcams are only one part of the Big Cat online experience. According to presenter Jonathan Scott, the team is "loving" Big Cat Raw, a web exclusive that follows the live television show on BBC One, and allows presenters to answer viewer's questions posted online.

"One of the great things is that it draws much more information out of us than we could possibly give on the live show," he says. "It's giving added value."The Big Cat Live message boards are also teeming with activity (nearly 5,000 posts on over 1,200 threads at time of writing).

Web producer Simon Mackie says that it feels like an almost continuous conversation with a dedicated Big Cat community.

"You pick up something on webcam, and within a few minutes there's a post on the message board about it, saying 'wow, did I just see some tiny hyena cubs' or whatever. People are waking up and posting for the latest news on Shakira's cubs, or even just to witness an African sunrise. They're really involved."

He admits that the continuous feed has thrown up dilemmas, like how much blood and gore can tastefully be shown at teatime. But the immediacy of the web has also thrown up unforeseen opportunities.

"Something like Jackson's Sound Safari is a great example," he says. "There were no plans for that. We just decided to hook Jackson up with a microphone and let him comment on the web feed. People love it."

The final episode of Big Cat Live on BBC One will be broadcast on Sunday at 1815 BST; but the webcams operate all day and all night, and the Big Cat team is sending text message updates to the website throughout the day.

US space tourist set for launch

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 10:23:32 -0500

US space tourist Richard Garriott will follow in the footsteps of his astronaut father when he blasts off into space on Sunday.
Mr Garriott has paid about $30m (Â£15m) for his 10-day trip to the International Space Station (ISS).
The Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft, mounted on a three-stage rocket, is due to launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, at 0701 GMT (0801 BST; 0301 EDT).
Richard's father, Owen Garriott, spent 60 days on a US space station in 1973.
He took extensive photographs of the Earth's surface during his stay on the Skylab orbital outpost in 1973.
Owen, 77, will support his son from mission control in Moscow.
Richard Garriott, a 47-year-old computer game designer, will be joined on the flight by US astronaut Mike Fincke, who becomes the space station's commander, and Russian flight engineer Yuri Lonchakov.
Experimental tasks
The professional astronauts will supervise the start-up of new life support equipment for the ISS. This should enable the full-time occupancy of the orbiting outpost to be increased from three to six crew members in May.Richard Garriott is a board member and investor in Space Adventures, the US company that has brokered flights aboard Russian craft for five other millionaires, including the first paying space tourist, California businessman Dennis Tito, in 2001.
He plans to carry out experiments during his voyage, including one involving protein crystal growth, on behalf of companies that he says have footed a "meaningful percentage" of the ticket price.
Mr Garriott has also said he would take photos to record how the Earth's surface has changed in the 35 years since his father's voyage.
Mr Fincke and Mr Lonchakov will replace the station's current crew - commander Sergei Volkov and flight engineer Oleg Kononenko - who are due to return home with Mr Garriott on 23 October after six months in space.
By coincidence, Volkov became the world's first second-generation space traveller in April. His father is the cosmonaut Alexander Volkov, a veteran of long-duration spaceflights to the Russian Salyut 7 and Mir orbiting stations.
The cosmonauts have been investigating the cause of two recent off-target landings by Soyuz craft, believed to have been the result of faulty explosive bolts on the vehicles
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Seeing red

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 07:57:17 -0500

More than 8,000 conservationists and policy makers are in Barcelona, Spain, for the IUCN World Conservation Congress.
Held once every four years, the gathering is viewed as a landmark event where future conservation strategies are developed.
In his daily diary, environment correspondent Richard Black reports on the topics beings discussed in the conference halls, and visits some of the fringe events.
MONDAY 06 OCTOBER - SEEING RED

"
At least 25% of mammals, including the Caspian seal, are at risk
Mammals facing extinction threat

I am hearing voices in my head.
One is saying "we've heard it all before"; another is asking "so what"
A third is contending "I don't believe it", while its less robust companion bewails "there's nothing we can do".
These voices are very familiar. They bug me every year when the Red List of Threatened Species comes out, and they were particularly prominent last year around the launch of the UN Environment Programme's Global Environmental Outlook (Geo-4).
They are all saying things that in their own way are quite sensible.
We have heard it before - the message of environmental doom is very familiar to anyone who reads further than Heat magazine and the immigrant-petrified middle tabloids.
The implications of biodiversity loss are nebulous next to a train crash, disaster seems hard to credit when our cat is well fed and the car works, and there probably is nothing that we can do.
So does that mean it is not worth hearing that 25% or 30% or 12% or 45% of one or other group of species is heading down the path to extinction
If I was about to be hit over the head with a large stick, I would prefer to know.
If a quarter of the world's mammals are heading for the mortuary drawer, again, I would like to know, even though I might not have a clue how to stop it.
In fact, working out how to stop it is probably the hardest task facing the human race. Nuclear disarmament looks like a doddle by comparison, because the root causes of biodiversity loss are simply what our successful species does to live, eat, develop and expand.
Presumably we are going to keep doing those things. So presumably other life-forms, less adaptable, will feel a tighter and tighter squeeze.
Until something gives.
Buying the argument
"Haven't you always wanted the chance to live a sustainable lifestyle
"Well now you can, thanks to the government's Sustain-a-bill!"
Scruffy is the new green

Unless I am mistaken, this is the future of advertising - at least, as foreseen by a panel of luminaries connected with the industry who held a post-tea break discussion at the congress.
"The advertising and marketing services industry has in part been responsible for encouraging overconsumption," Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of the marketing services group WPP, admitted in a pre-recorded video message.
"But we've but come to a stage where overconsumption is not necessarily the best route to follow, so responsible consumption is becoming increasingly important."
He picked out events that he believed showed businesses were transforming their paradigms towards sustainability, such as Rupert Murdoch's espousal of carbon neutrality and Richard Branson's investment in low carbon energy.
Dean Sanders, a former Kraft executive who now runs the marketers GoodBrand and Co, argued that advertisers weren't responsible for advertising environmentally damaging products - it was the fault of the companies that made those products.
And Cheryl Hicks from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) suggested advertisers could help sell people on a sustainable, low carbon, environment friendly lifestyle, if governments would only engage them to do so.
So there we are. Advertising and marketing agencies, or at least this small sample, see themselves as part of the solution to the growth in consumption that lurks - together with population growth - behind every other environmental problem.
Buy a used Red List, anyone"
SUNDAY 05 OCTOBER - THEY COME IN WAVES

"Having delegates fly in to international conferences isn't very smart when the conference has a strong environmental theme and aviation is widely seen as Public Carbon Enemy number one.
Messages about saving the planet do not mix well with talk of air miles and upgrades - though the mix does happen.
OK, so most green groups offset these days - but that's not a flawless process.
Hence the decision by the World Conservation Congress organisers to invite delegates to sail.
Blown by the wind, navigating by the stars, perhaps doing a little sustainable fishing on the way - what better way to arrive ethically and climatically clean.
So the bright Catalonian morning saw perhaps 15 boats, maybe a few more, moored up in the dock before making the short hop to the conference centre itself, where they would "deliver their message".
The message appeared to be that more awareness of issues like climate change, biodiversity loss and marine pollution would be a good thing - which probably 99% of people in the conference centre would agree with anyway.
Stormy waters
There were some interesting vessels on display, ranging from the mighty research ship MarViva (which I mistook for a tug at first sight), complete with submersibles and an engine that racked up decibels with the abandon of Led Zeppelin, down to ordinary yachts.
One that caught my eye was the Tara, a futuristic metal-hulled research boat which has just spent 16 months drifting in the Arctic. Yes, drifting - allowing itself to become enmeshed in ice when the ice built up - although director Etienne Bourgois told me the ice turned out to be about half as thick as they were expecting.
Tara facts three and four: when ice converges on the boat it is lifted out of the water onto the floes, with no damage; and the crew spent 18 months seeing no-one but each other.
Then there was the Largyalo, a catamaran with giant canoes as the bits that go in the water (I believe they're still called hulls on a catamaran but don't quote me).
The inspiration was Polynesian, the boat's "constructor" Petra told me. It's sure to catch attention during its planned 1,000-day, 100-port trip raising awareness about climate change.
And that is really the point. The initiative was called Sailing to Barcelona, but delivering their message here will be as plain sailing as you can get - everyone wants to hear it.
The big world is a stormier place, where the worthiest messages get tossed around on angry seas, and sometimes wrecked before their time."
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Nasa committed to Mars rover plan

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 04:26:23 -0500

Nasa is pushing ahead with plans to launch its next Mars mission in 2009, but acknowledges that extra funds are required to make it happen.
The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) will be the biggest planetary rover yet; it will be the size of a Mini Cooper.
Engineers are grappling with a number of technical challenges, such as the complexity of the motors that will drive the vehicle across the surface.
The budget has already grown to $1.9bn from the original cost of $1.6bn.
Nasa will not currently say precisely how much extra cash is needed.
It is looking for support in Congress but is also assessing other missions to see if there is money that can be reallocated to MSL.
MSL is a "smart" rover that would be dropped on to the surface of the Red Planet by a rocket-powered "skycrane"; bouncing bags would not support its mass.
The vehicle would operate for at least one Martian year, doing biology experiments as well extending the geology work currently being conducted by the Mars Exploration Rovers on the planet today.
The Mars Science Laboratory is designed to pave the way for a future mission that would return rocks to Earth.
Mars missions launch when the planets are favourably aligned. These opportunities arise roughly every two years.
If MSL misses its 2009 slot, it faces a lengthy delay that is potentially much more expensive than the additional staffing and resources needed to keep the project on its current schedule
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

World's loneliest bug may offer clues to life on other planets

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 11:53:42 -0500

A bug which lives entirely on its own and survives without oxygen in complete darkness underground has been discovered in South Africa.
Desulforudis audaxviator, or bold traveller as it is known in English, relies on water, hydrogen and sulphate for its energy.
Because it gets by without oxygen, it could offer clues as to whether life exists on other planets.
The loneliest living species known to science was found inside a gold mine.
The rod-shaped bacterium was found 2.8km (1.74 miles) beneath the surface of the Earth in Mponeng's Driefontein mine near Johannesburg, living in complete isolation, total darkness and 60C (140F) heat.
The find represents the first known ecosystem with a single biological species, scientists say.
It was identified in DNA extracted from water-filled cracks in the mine.
Dr Dylan Chivian of California's Berkley National Laboratory, who is part of the team which made the discovery, explained its significance.
"Early Earth and other planets didn't have a lot of oxygen on them, so life has evolved to use oxygen in order to get its energy," he told BBC Radio 5 Live.
"You know, if we ever discover life on other planets, it may very well be that they live without oxygen and instead potentially use chemicals like sulphate to get their energy."
The bug's name is partially based on a sentence in Latin from Jules Verne's novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth: "Descende, Audax viator, et terrestre centrum attinges", which translates as "Descend, Bold Traveller, and attain the centre of the Earth"
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Hydrogen centre 'first in the UK'

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 06:22:46 -0500

A hydrogen energy research centre, described as the first of its kind in the UK, has opened near Swansea.
The Â£2.2m centre at the University of Glamorgan aims to demonstrate the viability and safety of producing hydrogen from renewable sources.
The university hopes the site will attract pioneering research projects that will accelerate the advancement of the technologies.
The unit was officially opened by Rhodri Morgan, Wales' First Minister.
Mr Morgan said hydrogen energy could play a key role in tackling some of the problems facing society.
"Hydrogen provides a potential solution to a number of the most significant energy challenges that we face today and can therefore help to address climate change and reduce our dependency on fossil fuels," he added.
"Wales is one of the leaders in researching the development of technology, and I am most impressed at the level of technology and expertise in this field that exists at this centre."
Professor Dennis Hawkes, the head of the centre, which forms part of the university's Faculty of Health, Sport and Science, said he hoped the facility would place the UK at the forefront of energy research.
"Rather than an isolated one-off demonstration, this centre provides the basis for a range of hydrogen energy and transport activities.
"It brings together technology and expertise and will provide a platform for new business development, growth and employment in the region."
He added that the centre will also be open to groups, including school children, in order to demonstrate how hydrogen could be produced from renewable sources.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Call to maintain climate targets

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 03:41:39 -0500
By Roger Harrabin
BBC Environment Analyst
Ed Miliband, the new energy and climate secretary, has urged Europe's leaders to withstand recession fears and maintain climate change ambitions.
It was still possible to cut greenhouse gases in Europe 20% by 2020, he said.
Mr Miliband also argued EU targets would also help the economy by creating new jobs in clean technology.
There were huge gains to be made through efficiency measures which would improve energy security without needing to increase energy imports, he added.
This case is also being made strongly by the French presidency.
Mr Miliband is attending the EU council of energy ministers, a meeting which will set the tone for next week's EU summit, where there will be multiple pressures to water down the climate package in response to the recession.
Aircraft fuel
The energy and climate secretary will propose an element of watering down himself, suggesting aviation should be withdrawn from the EU's targets to increase renewable energy sources in all sectors by 20% by 2020.
He thinks this is irrational because the only existing source of alternative fuel for planes is biofuel, which is itself increasingly blamed for environmental destruction.
Otherwise, he argues, the climate package should stand.
"We need to stick to our climate change targets, to stick to our targets on renewables. We also need to show we can tackle climate change in a way that is fair and affordable for ordinary families," he said.
Mr Miliband said he would be continuing the UK's bid for a reduction in VAT on energy-saving goods, a suggestion treated with scepticism by the Germans until now.
He also stressed that climate change policy had to be seen as an opportunity.
"What people are increasingly realising is that energy affordability and climate change come together. If we can find ways of saving energy it cuts their bills but it also contributes to [cutting] our carbon emissions," he said.
The crunch will come next week when Poland and other east European nations will press for the continuation of free allocations of carbon permits for their power sector. Germany and Italy will argue that export sectors should also be handed out free permits.
Both would drive down the cost of carbon permits in the EU emissions trading system and therefore reduce the impetus for industry to make energy efficiencies.
Environmentalists' worries
There is cynicism among environmentalists about the bid from the power firms to be given free permits.
Power firms across the EU are believed to have gained a windfall worth tens of billions of pounds because they have increased their prices to consumers as if they had to buy permits in the EU trading scheme even though they have been receiving the permits free of charge.
Another proposal lodged with the commission would allow some EU sectors, such as transport, to trade away 65% of their carbon targets by buying carbon permits from developing countries.
Environmentalists also warn the EU's claims to lead the world in a new global climate deal next year may be crumbling in the face of the recession.
This fear was raised earlier this week by the economist Lord Stern, author of the Stern Review on climate change.
He said climate should be seen in the same way as the credit crunch, which could have been averted if people had put the right measures in places 10-15 years ago
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Nature loss 'dwarfs bank crisis'

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 19:23:07 -0500
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website, Barcelona
The global economy is losing more money from the disappearance of forests than through the current banking crisis, according to an EU-commissioned study.
It puts the annual cost of forest loss at between $2 trillion and $5 trillion.
The figure comes from adding the value of the various services that forests perform, such as providing clean water and absorbing carbon dioxide.
The study, headed by a Deutsche Bank economist, parallels the Stern Review into the economics of climate change.
It has been discussed during many sessions here at the World Conservation Congress.
Some conservationists see it as a new way of persuading policymakers to fund nature protection rather than allowing the decline in ecosystems and species, highlighted in the release on Monday of the Red List of Threatened Species, to continue.
Capital losses
Speaking to BBC News on the fringes of the congress, study leader Pavan Sukhdev emphasised that the cost of natural decline dwarfs losses on the financial markets.
"It's not only greater but it's also continuous, it's been happening every year, year after year," he told BBC News.
"Teeb will... show the risks we run by not valuing [nature] adequately.""
Andrew Mitchell
Global Canopy Programme

"So whereas Wall Street by various calculations has to date lost, within the financial sector, $1-$1.5 trillion, the reality is that at today's rate we are losing natural capital at least between $2-$5 trillion every year."
The review that Mr Sukhdev leads, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (Teeb), was initiated by Germany under its recent EU presidency, with the European Commission providing funding.
The first phase concluded in May when the team released its finding that forest decline could be costing about 7% of global GDP. The second phase will expand the scope to other natural systems.
Stern message
Key to understanding his conclusions is that as forests decline, nature stops providing services which it used to provide essentially for free.
So the human economy either has to provide them instead, perhaps through building reservoirs, building facilities to sequester carbon dioxide, or farming foods that were once naturally available.
Or we have to do without them; either way, there is a financial cost.
The Teeb calculations show that the cost falls disproportionately on the poor, because a greater part of their livelihood depends directly on the forest, especially in tropical regions.
The greatest cost to western nations would initially come through losing a natural absorber of the most important greenhouse gas.
Just as the Stern Review brought the economics of climate change into the political arena and helped politicians see the consequences of their policy choices, many in the conservation community believe the Teeb review will lay open the economic consequences of halting or not halting the slide in biodiversity.
"The numbers in the Stern Review enabled politicians to wake up to reality," said Andrew Mitchell, director of the Global Canopy Programme, an organisation concerned with directing financial resources into forest preservation.
"Teeb will do the same for the value of nature, and show the risks we run by not valuing it adequately."
A number of nations, businesses and global organisations are beginning to direct funds into forest conservation, and there are signs of a trade in natural ecosystems developing, analogous to the carbon trade, although it is clearly very early days.
Some have ethical concerns over the valuing of nature purely in terms of the services it provides humanity; but the counter-argument is that decades of trying to halt biodiversity decline by arguing for the intrinsic worth of nature have not worked, so something different must be tried.
Whether Mr Sukhdev's arguments will find political traction in an era of financial constraint is an open question, even though many of the governments that would presumably be called on to fund forest protection are the ones directly or indirectly paying for the review.
But, he said, governments and businesses are getting the point.
"Times have changed. Almost three years ago, even two years ago, their eyes would glaze over.
"Today, when I say this, they listen. In fact I get questions asked - so how do you calculate this, how can we monetize it, what can we do about it, why don't you speak with so and so politician or such and such business."
The aim is to complete the Teeb review by the middle of 2010, the date by which governments are committed under the Convention of Biological Diversity to have begun slowing the rate of biodiversity loss.
Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Gut 'tasting' could beat poisons

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 19:01:37 -0500

The human intestine detects potential poisons passing into it - and may take action to reduce the harm they cause.
US researchers have found a link between receptors in the gut which detect bitter foods and higher levels of a digestion-slowing hormone.
The same hormone also reduces appetite - perhaps to stop us eating any more.
The scientists, writing in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, say it means that sweeter-tasting medicines could be more effective.
"The whole scientific area of 'nutrient sensing' is really getting quite big"
Professor Soraya Shirazi-Beechey
University of Liverpool

Humans, and other animals, have evolved to dislike bitter tastes, probably because many natural plant poisons carry these flavours.
The researchers from the University of California at Irvine, led by Dr Timothy Osborne, are suggesting that when we do manage to eat something bitter, another defence mechanism may kick in.
It has been established for some time that the same taste receptors which are found on the tongue, and help us differentiate between sweet and bitter flavours, are found in the gut.
While the tongue-based receptors send a message to the brain, those in the gut are thought to trigger other chemical signals involved in digestion, although these have yet to be fully understood.
The US team found that when the bitter taste receptors in the gut are activated, this leads to the production of a hormone called cholecystokinin.
This is already known to not only slow up "motility", the rate at which food passes through the digestive system from the stomach, but also suppress appetite.
Slow the flow
The researchers believe that keeping potentially poisonous food in the stomach for longer might mean a bigger chance it would be expelled before its ingredients are absorbed.
Additionally, suppressing appetite might mean that less of the poison is eaten.
They are now eyeing the practical uses of their findings - and suggest that some medication might be absorbed more quickly if it was not so bitter tasting.
Professor Soraya Shirazi-Beechey, from the University of Liverpool, led research which proved that the action of "sweet" taste receptors in the gut could actually alter the way that glucose was absorbed into the body.
She said it was "quite reasonable" that bitter receptors might also have an effect on digestion.
"The whole scientific area of 'nutrient sensing' is really getting quite big. This is the first time that the link between bitter taste receptors and this hormone has been made."
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Minister wants astronaut 'icon'

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:00:57 -0500
By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News
Britain's new science minister has made it clear that he thinks the country ought to have an astronaut.
Lord Drayson said the UK needed "icons" for science, to encourage the next generation to take up subjects that would boost the knowledge economy.
Human spaceflight was one of those arenas that could inspire young people, he told BBC News.
The minister is awaiting the outcome of a formal review into UK policy. It will report in the next few months.
"I need to see what the review comes up with, but you can detect from what I say that I'm an enthusiast because I see the value," he said.
"I was nine when man landed on the Moon and I know how things have an influence on the young generation.What I need to do as science minister is make sure that the current generation of young people are as excited by science as I was."
Lord Drayson tells the story of how he took his family on a tour of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida this year, and how enthused his children became about the prospect of going into space.His 11-year-old daughter was committed to becoming an astronaut, he said.
The European Space Agency (ESA) is currently recruiting its next batch of astronauts and several Britons remain in the selection race.Whether any of them actually get called into the astronaut corps, however, may depend on the UK putting many millions of pounds into an ESA programme it has steadfastly refused to fund for 20 years.
Whatever the outcome, the minister says Britain will continue to be a leader in space and he lauds its companies for their "transformational role" in turning the sector into such an important part of UK PLC.
Science enforcer
Lord Drayson is a multi-millionaire businessman who made his fortune in biotechnology.
He was asked to take up the science brief by Prime Minister Gordon Brown in last week's reshuffle.
It sees the peer return to government after taking a year out to concentrate on motor racing in the US, where he has been running an Aston Martin in the American Le Mans Series.
He said he had no hesitation in coming back to take up what he described as his "dream job".
On Thursday, he called together the science correspondents of London's leading press and broadcasting outlets, to outline his priorities for the months ahead.
"My agenda is to be a champion for science, engineering and innovation within the government and to build on the real success that my predecessors and this government has had with its science.
"We have doubled the budget, we have transformed the way science is commercialised, we have got the infrastructure of the science base into really good shape.
"My job is to defend that, to maintain that, but to take it to the next step."
New opportunities
Lord Drayson will be in the cabinet.He will be tasked with making sure that good science underpins government policy.And in the distraction of the financial turmoil that surrounds the world economy currently, he said he would press the need for the UK to maintain investment in science and innovation.
"At this time of uncertainty when other countries may be looking at cutting their science budget, or the companies in those countries are looking at cutting their science, I believe this is an opportunity for us to move up the competitive league table; because, of course, we will come out of this downturn.
"We want to position the United Kingdom to be stronger at the end of it; and this is the time for us to provide the stability such that those SMEs - hi-tech young companies - can see that we are committed to what we have been doing over the last years."
And to those who would inevitably have to leave the financial sector because of the downturn, he said there would be opportunities for them in science.
"When I was in the biotech industry I lost a few, really excellent good scientists to the City.Now is a good time for them to consider thinking about coming back into science," he told BBC News.
"How about being a science teacher We need more science teachers who are qualified in the sciences. Â[or] think about starting up a science-based enterprise."
Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Pledge to protect Sumatran forest

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 13:04:29 -0500

By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website, Barcelona
Indonesian authorities have pledged to stop the loss of forests and species in Sumatra, one of the world's most ecologically important islands.
Representatives of the island's 10 provinces, national government and the environment group WWF launched the deal at the World Conservation Congress.
Sumatra has lost about half of its forest cover in the last 20 years.
It is home to a number of important and iconic species such as the tiger, orangutan, rhinoceros and elephant.
The island has suffered floods and forest fires in recent years that have been widely attributed to illegal forest clearance.
Two years ago, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was forced to apologise to Singapore and Malaysia when smog from burning Sumatran forest covered the neighbouring countries.
The need to deal with these issues appears to have played a big part in persuading the authorities to act.
"In the rainy months, we are seeing landslides and flooding more often, and it is time to make a real change," said Indonesia's deputy environment minister Hermien Roosita at a news briefing here.
"Every governor from the 10 provinces and four (national) ministries have signed this monumental commitment to ecosystem restoration of the island and protecting the remaining natural forest."
More than 13% of the island's forests lie on peat, which contain vast amounts of carbon that would be lost to the atmosphere if the trees were removed, accelerating climate change.
"When you look at the flora and fauna in this area and the rate of loss that's going on, this is a substantial commitment to protect and restore forests," said Gordon Shepherd, WWF's director of global policy.
The government has already regulated to stop clearance of virgin forest for palm oil plantations - grown for food, industry and biofuels - but the government acknowledges the ban may not be completely effective
Good planning
As well as protecting and restoring forest, the authorities have pledged to make development on Sumatra obey principles of "ecosystem-based planning", where any projects detrimental to the island's ecological health would be banned.
However, the vice-governor of the province of West Sumatra, Marlis Rahman, said help from the west would be needed to help meet the commitments.
"We are calling on the international community to support us in implementing this commitment on the ground and help us to find extra livelihoods by protecting our forests," he said.
Mr Rahman did not put a figure on how much money might be needed, although he said say technical help was also part of the equation.
With this agreement, Sumatra appears to have put itself in a good position to gain from measures to reduce deforestation as a way of combating climate change.
Such measures are highly likely to become a formal part of any future international agreement on climate going beyond the Kyoto Protocol.
Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Susan Watts blog

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 12:48:47 -0500
The companies offering algae as a universal cure-all
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

In bloom

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 11:56:11 -0500

By Paul Henley
BBC News, Roosendaal
"It's exciting because it's achievable," says Peter van den Dorpel, as he looks over the big plastic tubes full of various shades of green algae.
His company has designed, produced and marketed the crop in its bid to be the first to provide the aviation industry with a feasible alternative to fossil fuel.
We are standing in an enormous greenhouse near Roosendaal in the south of The Netherlands.
Most of the greenhouse is growing tomatoes with impressive efficiency. One corner is dedicated to the cultivation of algae - in a similarly efficient way, according to Mr van den Dorpel.
"It's actually like growing tomatoes; the algae need similar things," he says.
This crop uses the warmth, light and a steady feed of carbon dioxide and nutrients to reproduce faster than any other plant on earth.
"While we speak, we are expanding thousands and thousands of square metres of sites in greenhouses here in Holland"
Peter van den Dorpel, Algae-Link

The amount of algae in these tubes can double daily. And that is both the attraction and the problem with algae as a commercial crop.
What Algae-Link's system claims to crack, possibly for the first time, is the problem of clogging. A patented internal cleaning system keeps the set-up harvesting twenty-four hours a day.
Once the cells of the algae are split into their constituent parts (an established science with all biofuel crops but a more secretive part of the process in this case), the green mass can be sold as feed for fish and oyster farms and the vegetable oil can be processed into engine fuel.
What will be crucial is to produce the raw material in sufficient quantities. Cynics are saying a land mass anything up to the size of Ireland would have to be devoted to algae production to fuel the world's civil aviation industry.
But that may not be out of the question. With algae cultivation in tubes, farming is feasible on otherwise unusable land; there are already projects up and running in the Gobi desert of northern China.
CO2 eater
But the big "green factor" associated with algae is that it needs CO2 to grow.
About 1kg of algae is reported to "eat" 3kg of CO2, which means tubes of algae could be laid out on brownfield sites next to a power station or a food processing plant to soak up emissions.
Algae-Link in the Netherlands already has a tie-in deal with KLM/Air France.
In fact, almost all the major airlines are keen to be the first to get a passenger plane in the air powered entirely by green energy alternatives and, as things stand, algae is looking the best bet.
The fact that not a single jet plane has yet flown on algae-based fuel is not stopping some in the industry confidently predicting it happening as soon as 2010.
Certainly, Europe's biggest aircraft maker, Airbus, based in Toulouse in the south of France, welcomes the idea.
Russ Walker, their chief scientist in charge of researching greener fuels, tells me algae biofuel will be "very good for our customers (the airlines) because they are potentially going to be charged, through EU legislation, for their CO2 emissions.
He adds: "Therefore, if they can have a product which is more environmentally friendly, it is a big advantage for them. And what's good for our customers is good for us."
Economics, then, may prove to be the driving force.
Some environmentalists are sceptical. Greenpeace think the speculation about algae provides a handy green disguise for the aviation industry which is actually anything but green.
"There are many questions about it", says Douglas Parr, chief scientific advisor for Greenpeace UK.
"How much land will it use How efficient will it be Will it ever be commercially demonstrated But our main worry is that it comes as a distraction from the fact that aviation has got to do plenty of things aside from algae research in order to become truly sustainable."
Back in the greenhouse in Holland, algae pioneer Peter van den Dorpel is sticking to his guns. Economies of scale, he insists, will not defeat him.
"While we speak, we are expanding thousands and thousands of square metres of sites in greenhouses here in Holland and in the open air in the south of Spain and in China. So we are ramping up these locations to very significant areas of land."
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

'Unbreakable' encryption unveiled

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 07:50:46 -0500

By Roland Pease
BBC Radio Science Unit
Perfect secrecy has come a step close with the launch of the world's first computer network protected by unbreakable quantum encryption at a scientific conference in Vienna.
The network connects six locations across Vienna and in the nearby town of St Poelten, using 200 km of standard commercial fibre optic cables.
Quantum cryptography is completely different from the kinds of security schemes used on computer networks today.
These are typically based on complex mathematical procedures which are extremely hard for outsiders to crack, but not impossible given sufficient computing resources or time.
But quantum systems use the laws of quantum theory, which have been shown to be inherently unbreakable.
"Real breakthroughs are not found because you want to develop some new technology, but because you are curious and want to find out how the world is"
Anton Zeilinger, Vienna University

The basic idea of quantum cryptography was worked out 25 years ago by Charles Bennett of IBM and Gilles Brassard of Montreal University, who was in Vienna to see the network in action.
"All quantum security schemes are based on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, on the fact that you cannot measure quantum information without disturbing it," he explained.
"Because of that, one can have a communications channel between two users on which it's impossible to eavesdrop without creating a disturbance. An eavesdropper would create a mark on it. That was the key idea."
In practice this means using the ultimate quantum objects: photons, the atoms of light. Incredibly faint beams of light equating to single photons fired a million times a second raced between the nodes in the Vienna network.
Each node, housed in a different Siemens office (Siemens has provided the fibre links), contains a small rack of electronics - boxes about the size of a PC, and a handful of sensitive light detectors.
Numerical key
From the detected photons, a totally secret numerical key can be distilled, which encodes the users' data much like the keys used in normal computer networks do.
The advantage is that no-one else can know the key without revealing themselves.
As we saw in the demonstration: when an intruder did try to listen in on the quantum exchange, photons became scrambled, and a rise in the error rate at the node detectors signalled the attack. The system automatically shut down without being compromised.
More importantly, the demonstration also showed that the network is robust.
If one quantum link breaks down, the connections can be re-routed via other nodes, much as phone calls get re-routed automatically through a telecoms network, so that any two users on the network can remain in continuous secure contact.
Dr Hannes Huebel of Vienna University, operating one of the nodes, explained how robustness is now as important as security in the development of quantum encryption systems.
"We are constantly in touch with insurance companies and banks, and they say it's nearly better that they lose 10 million euros than if the system is down for two hours, because that might be more damaging for the bank," said Dr Huebel.
"So that's what we have to prove, that we have a reliable system that delivers quantum keys for several weeks without interruption, and then they might be more interested."
Polarised light
The final element of the EU-sponsored project (called SECO-QC) was the interconnection of different realisations of quantum cryptography.
There are many ways photons of light can encode a numerical key: through the direction they're polarised (like Polaroid glasses) for example, or the precise timing of their arrival.
Different schemes have different strengths and weaknesses, and a viable network would have handle whatever individual users choose to use, explained the project's director, Christian Monyk - just as a mobile phone network has to handle handsets from many manufacturers.
Quantum cryptography is a surprising outgrowth of recondite arguments that bounced around for decades about the meaning of quantum mechanics.
Albert Einstein, who discovered the quantum properties of photons of light - indeed, discovered the very concept of the photon - always resisted quantum theory's spooky behaviour, "God does not play dice", being among his oft-quoted objections.
But experiments eventually proved that he apparently does, and also laid the technical foundations for today's quantum information revolution - cryptography, teleportation, and computation.
One of the grandees of quantum science, Vienna University's Anton Zeilinger, used the occasion to argue for continued funding of fundamental science in these increasingly application-focused days.
"Real breakthroughs are not found because you want to develop some new technology, but because you are curious and want to find out how the world is," Dr Zeilinger said.
"It may not have surprised the founding fathers of quantum science that technology has advanced so that you can play with individual quantum systems, in great detail.
"Maybe this would not surprise, but what could surprise them is that people are thinking and doing practical applications."
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

The Tech Lab

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 07:23:32 -0500

Professor Steve Furber is one of the pioneers of the UK's computer industry. He was principal designer of the BBC Micro that gave many of Britain's current computer bosses their first taste of technology. He has now turned his attention to mimicking the human brain.

"Most of the frontiers of science, from particle physics to radio astronomy, seem to be concerned with the incredibly small or the unimaginably large.
But there is a lump of stuff inside each of our heads that we could easily hold in our hands and look at, yet we have no idea how it works.
We know that our brains are built from a hundred billion small cells called neurons, and these cells sit in a biochemical bath and send electrical pulses to each other every so often.
It is a strange thing to realise that everything that we see, smell, hear, think, dream and say - indeed our very being - is just a consequence of those billions of cells inside our heads going "ping" from time to time.
We now have a fair idea of how those neurons are organised into major functional areas within the brain. Hi-tech scanners give us ever-more detailed glimpses into which brain areas are active, and in what order, when we receive particular inputs or think particular thoughts.
But we still have no idea of the spike "language" that the neurons use to talk to each other, nor how that spiking activity becomes coherent thoughts and actions.
Brain power
Understanding the brain has turned out to be far more difficult than anyone imagined. Early AI focussed on symbolic logic, which computers are very good at but people aren't so that wasn't really getting at what it means for a human to be intelligent. Can we expect computers ever to begin to emulate the achievements of human intelligence
There are two ways to look at this question: Firstly, to ask when computers may be powerful enough to simulate the detailed workings of the brain, to which the answer seems to be that we aren't there yet, but we are getting close.
Secondly we can ask when we might know how to program those computers to perform this task, to which the answer is still unknown.
At the dawn of the computer age 60 years ago machines were a million million times too slow to model the brain in real time, but Petaflop supercomputers have closed that gap.
The programming challenge remains immense, though initiatives such as EPFL's Blue Brain project in Switzerland are addressing this head-on.
That is gathering huge quantities of biological data on the types and behaviours of neurons, and building high-fidelity biological models on a high-end IBM supercomputer.
"As for improvements in computer software that might emerge from the quest to understand the inner working of the brain, the potential for improvement in natural language interfaces is almost limitless."
Steve Furber

Neurons are very complex living cells that have evolved to perform an information processing function within a living organism.
One of the great unknowns in understanding the brain is the extent to which the finer details of a neuron's structure is important to its information processing function, as opposed to being required to stay alive, maintain chemical balance, take up energy, or just being an artefact of evolution and the way the cell has developed within the organism.
Model makers
At Manchester we make the assumption that most of the phenomena we are interested in arise at the network level, so we discard much of the biological detail in favour of modelling larger numbers of simpler neurons. But, as the famous paraphrase of Einstein insists, "everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler."

How far can we go before we risk losing some vital aspect of the neuron's information processing function This question will only be answered as we begin to understand the operational principles at work inside the brain - as we begin to learn the language of the spikes.
Researchers around the world are using computer models to test the hypotheses of brain function that have emerged from work by neuroscientists and psychologists. What today's "brain modelling" computers offer is a platform that enables those models to be scaled up and to become increasingly accurate, and to enable scientists to get ever closer to the "big picture".
WHAT IS THE TECH LAB
The world's leading thinkers give a personal view of future technologies

Where will this research lead us The ultimate goal is the Grand Challenge of understanding the architecture of brain and mind but this is still some way beyond our grasp.
In the nearer term we can expect to see a growing understanding of brain subsystems, and from that understanding new computational approaches will emerge with applications in control, robotics and elsewhere.
Data damage
The benefits of success in this research endeavour will be considerable, in directing therapies for brain injury and mental illness (it's always easier to fix something when you know how it works) and in the design of computers and computer software that will be less stupid and more able to cope with component failure (the adult brain loses a neuron a second without obvious ill effect).
We have recently begun collaborating with psychologists to build a computer model of normal human language capable of learning to read, comprehend and speak basic English words.
After training the model can be selectively "damaged" in ways that reproduce the patterns of behaviour observed in individuals who have suffered brain damage.
The model will then be used to test the effectiveness of various different speech therapies, and its predictions checked against the results of using those therapies with stroke patients who have language problems.
As the computing platforms used for this work scale up in performance, the accuracy and scope of the models they can support will scale up too, and we hope to gain an ever-deeper understanding of how the brain support language, how it can fail, and the best ways to achieve recovery from those failures.
The need for computers to become better at coping with component failure is underlined by the trends in the semiconductor technology from which they built.
As transistors approach atomic scales there is an inevitable degradation in the consistency of their operation and designers are searching for ways to build microchips that can tolerate high rates of transistor failure.
The brain is an existence proof that it is possible to accommodate high component failure rates without significant loss of functionality, and there is much to be learnt from biology about building reliable systems on unreliable technology.
As for improvements in computer software that might emerge from the quest to understand the inner working of the brain, the potential for improvement in natural language interfaces is almost limitless.
At present you have to put a lot of effort into learning how to use your computer effectively. Imagine if this changed around, and it became the computer's job to learn how to be useful to you, just like a good human personal assistant. This would require the computer to build a model of how you - and in particular your mind - work.
The fear you may have of humanoid robots taking over the world as a result of computers approaching the capability of modelling the human brain can be dispelled relatively easily.
Any computer capable of running these models will be large, expensive and very power-hungry for the foreseeable future.
Biology will continue to offer the cheapest way of making portable, low-power brains (in highly dangerous embodiments) for a long time yet."
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Is anybody listening out there? Earth sends messages into space

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 23:40:22 -0500

Messages are to be beamed to a planet 20 light years from Earth in the hope they will reach intelligent alien life.
Some 501 photos, drawings and text messages are being transmitted by a giant radio-telescope in Ukraine normally used to track asteroids.
The target planet was chosen as it is thought capable of supporting life.
Any reply to the messages - collated through a competition by the social networking website Bebo - would not reach Earth for 40 years.
The competition - A Message From Earth - invited Bebo's 12m users to send in missives they would like extra-terrestrials to receive.
Topics submitted ranged from the environment, politics and world peace to family relationships and the sender's first kiss.
Having been translated into a binary format, the 500 selected will be sent 120 trillion miles into space via high-powered radio waves from the National Space Agency of Ukraine's RT-70 radar telescope in Evpatoria.
Here we are
The beamed communication will be transmitted at 0600 GMT, passing the moon in just 1.7 seconds and taking less than seven hours to leave our solar system.
Organisers hope the hi-tech package will reach its target - the planet Gliese 581C - in early 2029.
"If anybody's out there and they find that signal, they at least know it that... there must be a planet with some pretty clever things on it"
Seth Shostak
SETI astronomer

Bebo spokesman Mark Charkin said: "A Message From Earth presents an opportunity for the digital natives of today... to reconnect with science and the wider universe in a simple, fun and immersive way."
Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer from the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence Institute in California, said whether aliens who might receive the messages would understand them was beside the point.
"The point might simply be: well, here we are; we're clever enough to build a radio transmitter," he told the BBC.
"So if anybody's out there and they find that signal, they at least know it that, in the direction of that star system over there, there must be a planet with some pretty clever things on it.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

New fungi species unearthed in UK

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 20:24:38 -0500

Several species of fungi new to the UK have been unearthed by mushroom experts at the National Trust's Clumber Park.
Conservationists say the wet summer means some species of fungi have thrived this year.
And the recent warmer winters means there could be even more exotic mushrooms to be found in this country.
Experts say it is likely these new discoveries have always been at the Nottinghamshire park, but that they flourished in the extremely wet August.
Mushroom spores can also travel great distances on the air and in water.
One of the new species to be identified has the Latin name of Tuber mesentericum, which is also known as the Bagnoli truffle.
This is prized in Italy for its intense flavour.
However, another new discovery is from a family of fungi commonly known as pinkgills, some of which can be very poisonous.
Dr Peter Roberts, from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, says it has already been an amazing season for rare and interesting fungi, with at least 10 species new to the UK reported in the last two weeks alone.
But the same period has seen experts warning the public not to eat mushrooms unless they can be certain they are of the non-toxic variety.
The author of the Horse Whisperer book, Nicholas Evans, was taken to hospital last month after picking and eating poisonous mushrooms while on holiday in Scotland.
The writer and his wife Charlotte were in Moray when their party cooked and ate mushrooms picked in woodland
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Fisheries waste 'costs billions'

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 16:41:54 -0500
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website, Barcelona
The world's fishing fleets are losing billions of dollars each year through depleted stocks and poor management, according to a UN report.
The World Bank and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) calculate the losses at $50bn per year.
Half the world's fishing fleet could be scrapped with no change in catch.
The report was launched at World Bank headquarters in New York and has been debated here at the World Conservation Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
Entitled The Sunken Billions: Economic Justification for Fisheries Reform, it argues that reforming the way fisheries are managed could restore stocks and build profits.
"There are two reasons why we are experiencing the huge loss," said Rolf Willman, a senior fisheries planning officer at FAO and one of the report's authors.
"No take zones" have been shown to improve fish stocks and biodiversity
Fishing ban brings seas to life

"One is that global fish stocks are much lower than they could be, so it is harder to catch the amount of fish that we could.
"If stocks were higher we could catch the same amount at lower cost.
"The second reason is that where fishing is poorly regulated, we have much greater harvesting capacity than we need," he told BBC News.
In fact, he said, the world's fleets could catch the same amount of fish with half the capacity, which would increase profits as well as putting less pressure on fragile stocks.
The UN agency puts the current value of the global fisheries industry at about $80bn per year.
Net loss
Nearly one third of the world's fisheries are severely depleted, and there have been several high-profile examples of complete collapse, such as the Grand Banks cod stocks off Canada's eastern coast.
A recent study estimated that if current trends continued, there would be no commercially viable marine fisheries left within half a century.

"Sustainable fisheries require political will to replace incentives for overfishing with incentives for responsible stewardship"

Kieran Kelleher,
World Bank fisheries team leader

All this may be bad news for fish, but it is also bad news for fishermen, says the report.
Fleets are spending ever more effort, but catches are not rising - they have been roughly stable at about 80 million tonnes annually for a decade.
And it is not becoming any more profitable. There is less to catch, the fish available are generally of lower economic value, and costs are rising.
Other academics have pointed the finger at subsidies that they say drive the irrational expansion of fleets.
A 2006 study put the extent of subsidies globally at about $30bn.
The new report identifies some countries where good management is conserving stocks and leading to a profitable industry, including Iceland, New Zealand and parts of Australia and the US - but even here, improvements could be made, it concludes.
The challenge now, it says, is to spread reforms into other fisheries where overcapacity is fast depleting stocks.
"Sustainable fisheries require political will to replace incentives for overfishing with incentives for responsible stewardship," said Kieran Kelleher, the World Bank's fisheries team leader.
"It is not just about boats and fish. This report provides decision makers with the economic arguments for the reforms needed."
Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Water policy 'failing to deliver'

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 16:38:35 -0500
By Mark Kinver
Science and environment reporter, BBC News
The UK's current water policy will fail to cope with extreme weather events that are projected to affect the nation in the future, a report has warned.
A study by the National Trust said the prospect of more frequent droughts and floods meant an urgent rethink was needed to update existing measures.
Paying farmers to restore wetlands or using land to store water were among the ideas suggested by the authors.
They added that an integrated "source to sea" strategy was urgently needed.
"For too long we've taken water for granted," said Fiona Reynolds, the Trust's director general.
"We ignore its importance and its potential to impact on all our lives at our peril," she added.
"We are now dealing with a legacy of water mismanagement and misuse of its apparent plentiful supply.
"It is vital that landowners, farmers, the water industry, the government and its agencies come together and work with natural processes to safeguard water from source to sea."
'Too much, too little'
The authors called for funding to be used more effectively, and outlined a five-point action plan to update the current strategy.
"There is significant potential for measures to pay farmers and land managers for providing 'water services'," the authors wrote.
These services included storage of water on flood plains, wetland restoration and the use of "buffer strips" to reduce pollution.
"Such measures also have other benefits, including carbon storage, boosts to wildlife and landscape benefits, and are often cheaper than 'end-of-pipe' solutions," they added.
"We cannot continue to take water for granted. Climate change means we'll increasingly have too much of it in some places, and too little in others."
One of the projects featured in the report looked at innovative ways to manage the landscape at Upper Wharfedale in the Yorkshire Dales.
The goal of the project was to alleviate problems, such as flooding further downstream.
"Much of our traditional approach to water management, certainly when it comes to rivers, had a very local focus," explained Stuart Lane, director of the Institute of Hazard and Risk Research at Durham University.
"For example, if there was a river that was filling up with sediment, the decision was taken to dredge the river to remove the sediment build-up.
"What we recognised very early on was that what was really causing these problems was what was happening in the wider landscape.
"If we could manage what was happening in the wider landscape then we could allow our rivers to work much more sustainably without having to continually intervene," he told BBC News.
Professor Lane, who has been involved in the Upper Wharfedale project for about nine years, said that the area had experienced deforestation over the centuries, which had changed the dynamics of the upland landscape.
"One of the things that we showed within our project was to what extent that land-use change had increased the deliver of sediment to the river system," he said.
The researchers used a computer model to simulate the impact of localised planting of native woodlands in the river's smaller tributaries.
"We showed that this could reduce the amount of sediment being transported into the river by an order of magnitude sufficient to prevent the river downstream being continually dredged."
Another measure involved relocating a section of floodbank so the river could move more freely within the floodplain.
Local knowledge
The report also called on the government to improve the way it communicated the risks of droughts and floods.
"How do you persuade local communities to believe what scientists like myself are saying is actually worth doing"
Professor Stuart Lane,
Durham University

"There is a need to raise general awareness and facilitate practical adaptation by promoting actions that people can take in everyday life," it recommended.
Professor Lane added that policy-makers had failed to understand how rural communities worked, and what was the best way to deliver change on the ground.
"How do you persuade local communities to believe what scientists like myself are saying is actually worth doing"
He used the example of upland drainage systems, which saw thousands of kilometres of drains, also known as grips, being installed in the years after World War II.
"These areas were drained in order to give us more productive agricultural land. Now, 40 years on, we are telling them to block their grips.
"So when you consider what people must think, when they were told until the late 1970s that they had to drain their land only to be told to reverse all of their effort and block the drains.
"Their first question is going to be: are we going to tell them to put their drains back in again in 30 or 40 years time"
"So it is not just an economic question, it is also about encouraging local communities to believe what is being talked about is necessary."
Currently, about 10% of the sites owned by the Trust are located in areas deemed to be at very high risk of flash flooding.
But by 2050, it said that more than one third of its sites were likely to be affected by either floods or droughts
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Lands of plenty?

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 08:48:15 -0500

From the begging bowl to the bread basket: in just two years, Malawi has gone from famine to food surplus - a minor agricultural miracle.
By applying a mixture of crop breeding, soil management, irrigation and diversification, agro-science experts are helping subsistence farmers to cope with climate change and buck the trend in neighbouring African countries.
BBC science and environment reporter James Morgan has gone into the field to meet the families who are sowing the seeds of a uniquely African green revolution - one which is as kind to the environment as it is to the economy.
Sunday 5 October - sizing up the miracle of Malawi

""If [environmentalists] lived for just one month among the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertiliser and irrigation canals."
So said Norman Borlaug, one of the founding fathers of the original Green Revolution - credited with wiping out starvation in Asia.
But can technology really be the saviour of Africa's struggling farmers It has become a terribly unfashionable opinion in the UK, where "green" campaigners are no longer content to denounce GM crop trials. They simply rip them up.
"Responsible biotechnology is not the enemy," said Borlaug. "Starvation is."
I have decided to take Norm up on his wager, by coming to Malawi to see for myself.
Because no matter how many UN reports I've ploughed through, grasping the root cause of the current "food crisis" in Africa is anything but straightforward.
And neither is my journey to Malawi - a sweaty overnight haul which takes me via Kenya, Zambia, and several re-runs of Indiana Jones films. But for heroic inspiration, I look instead to a speech by Kofi Annan, the new chairman of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra) - a $200m, pan-African programme, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates and Rockefeller foundations.
"Let us generate a uniquely African Green revolution," says Annan, cutting a heroic pose on my crumpled transcript. "There is nothing more important than this."
It is difficult to argue. Over the last 50 years, African farmers have laboured in the heat, while countries like Mexico, India and the Philippines have undergone a green revolution - applying novel fertilisers and pesticides to churn out bumper harvests of new high-yield varieties of wheat and rice.
Empowering farmers
Meanwhile, Africa has been cultivating greater and greater poverty statistics.
Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world where per capita food production has steadily declined.
"The harvests have been great, but still the food prices in Malawi are still rocketing"
Malcolm Fleming

One third of Africans are malnourished. Soils are among the most depleted on Earth. Farmers do not have access to productive seed varieties and those that do have neither the knowledge nor the tools to reap the harvest. Slash and burn still reigns.
Climate change is forecasting ever more variable rainfalls, and more frequent droughts. Add in soaring fuel prices and the scourge of HIV/Aids, and the average African finds himself surrounded in the kind of perilous predicament which from which even Harrison Ford would struggle to escape.
But it is this very challenge that has drawn the world's crop scientists and agro-economists to Malawi. They hope to pioneer novel farming systems that propel Africa towards a new era of food security.
It has already been dubbed by members of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as "a greener revolution".
"Greener" because it works with ecosystems, not against them. A revolution that is "pro-poor and pro-environment", in the words of Mr Annan.
The talk around the conference tables is of "empowering" subsistence farmers to find their own, local solutions - farming techniques which are sustainable, affordable and tailored to local soils, markets and eating preferences.
Over the next week, I'll be taking a look at these projects first hand - catching fish in the desert, planting strange trees in the middle of maize crops.
I'm wondering how women and men, who have been sowing the same maize seeds for generations, really feel about the new hybrid varieties of seeds which are more nutritious, but also more hungry for expensive pesticide and fertiliser.
'Against the grain'
Most of all, I'm curious to find out whether the "miracle" we have read about here in Malawi is bona fide or illusory. Is the revolution underway, or a simple matter of better rainfall
The facts are these. During the last decade, Malawi suffered six successive years of food shortage, culminating in 2005. One third of the population - 4.5million people - went hungry.
Step forward two years, and Malawi is exporting more than one million metric tonnes of maize, its staple crop.
The government, against the advice of the IMF and the World Bank, has handed out vouchers to 1.5m of the country's poorest farmers, enabling them to buy "inputs" - seeds, fertiliser and pesticides. Meanwhile, yields have mushroomed. Malawians are selling maize to Kenya and giving food aid to Zimbabwe.
The success was hailed last year with Oxfam's Malcolm Fleming describing to the BBC how Malawi was going against the grain of African agriculture.
So when I bump into Malcolm, a well-kent face in my native Scotland, on the flight to Lilongwe, I don't hesitate to offer a warm handshake of congratulations.
"I'm afraid that things have moved on since then," he sighs. "The harvests have been great, but still the food prices in Malawi are still rocketing."
Why "That's the question," he continues. "The closer I look, the more complicated it becomes. But from what I gather, the maize is being sold abroad at greater prices, and that keeps the prices up in Malawi."
Malcolm is here doing research in the lead up to World Food Day on 16 October. Helping him to raise awareness is another familiar Scottish face, but I'm afraid I am sworn to secrecy. All will be revealed in due course.
"Rising food prices might not be much of a problem for me or you," says Mr Fleming, "but if you spend 80% of your household income on food, and then the price doubles..."
It is a welcome serving of realism pie to chew on as I step out of Lilongwe airport.
The pavements are covered in a blanket of purple blossom - it looks like a fairytale. And the boys cartwheeling down the red dirt roads seem full of beans. But the lumps in their bellies tell a different story."
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Messenger extends Mercury vista

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 08:35:52 -0500

The Mercury Messenger probe has returned another batch of stunning pictures of the innermost world.
The Nasa spacecraft swept over the surface of the planet on Tuesday, passing just 200km above the rocky terrain at closest approach.
Some 1,200 images were obtained - many of regions never before been seen up close by a probe.
The flyby also gave Messenger the gravity tug it needed to get on to the right path to go into orbit in 2011.
"The Messenger team is extremely pleased by the superb performance of the spacecraft and the payload," said chief scientist Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.
PLANET MERCURY
Closest planet to the Sun; smallest in Solar System
Visited by Mariner 10 in 1970s; by Messenger currently
Diameter: 4,880km, about one-third the size of Earth
Densest planet in Solar System; 5.3x that of water
Caloris basin is largest known feature (1,300km in diameter)
Possibility of water-ice in permanently shadowed craters
Huge iron core takes up more than 60% of the planet's mass
Surface temperatures swing between 425C and -180C
Has an extremely thin atmosphere (exosphere)
Only inner planet besides Earth with global magnetic field
Q&A: Mercury space probe

"We are now on the correct trajectory for eventual insertion into orbit around Mercury, and all of our instruments returned data as planned from the side of the planet opposite to the one we viewed during our first flyby.
"When these data have been digested and compared, we will have a global perspective of Mercury for the first time."
The first planet from the Sun has not been the target of spacecraft mission since Mariner 10 made three flyby in the 1970s.But the probe managed to map less than half of the planet's surface.
On Messenger's first flyby in January, its cameras returned pictures of about 20% of the surface area missed by Mariner 10.
On Tuesday's pass, Messenger captured another 1,200 high-resolution and colour images, revealing a further 30% of Mercury's surface that had never before been seen by spacecraft before.
The pictures show the expected mix of craters, ridges and scarps.The previously unseen regions also reveal an extensive pattern of rays - what look almost like stripes - that run from north to south.
The Messenger team will study the data in detail to try to gain new insights into this remarkable world.
So long neglected, Mercury is once again the subject of great interest.
The European Space Agency (Esa) has recently approved construction of a mission to the planet called BepiColombo.
It will be launched in 2013. The mission consists of two spacecraft - an orbiter for planetary investigation, led by Esa, and one for magnetospheric studies, led by the Jaxa (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency).
The satellite duo will reach Mercury in 2019 after a six-year, seven-billion-km flight towards the inner Solar System.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

'Glowing' jellyfish grabs Nobel

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 05:58:36 -0500

A clever trick borrowed from jellyfish has earned two Americans and one Japanese scientist a share of the chemistry Nobel Prize.
Martin Chalfie, Roger Tsien and Osamu Shimomura made it possible to exploit the genetic mechanism responsible for luminosity in the marine creatures.
Today, countless scientists use this knowledge to tag biological systems.
These glowing markers will show how brain cells develop or cancer cells spread through tissue.
The Nobel Prizes - which also cover physics, medicine, literature, peace and economics (more properly called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize) - are valued at 10m Swedish Kronor (Â£800,000; $1.4m).
Laureates also receive a medal and a diploma.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Particle physics celebrates Nobel

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 05:33:08 -0500

The Nobel Prize in physics is to be shared by two Japanese citizens and an American, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced.
Yoichiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa provided new insights into the building blocks of matter.
Nambu identified a mechanism called spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics.
Kobayashi and Maskawa predicted the existence of at least three families of elementary particles known as quarks.
According to the Standard Model of particle physics, quarks are the sub-units of protons and neutrons, which together make up the nuclei of atoms.
The Nobel Prizes - which also cover chemistry, medicine, literature, peace and economics (more properly called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize) - are valued at 10m Swedish Kronor.
Laureates also receive a medal and a diploma.
Last year's winners in physics were France's Albert Fert and Germany's Peter Gruenberg for work on the discovery of giant magnetoresistance.
Their breakthrough paved the way for much of modern gadgetry by allowing industry to develop sensitive reading tools to pull data off hard drives in computers, iPods and other digital devices.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Silver lining

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 08:02:07 -0500

VIEWPOINT
Russell Mittermeier
Climate change could actually benefit some of the world's most endangered species, says Conservation International president Russell Mittermeier. In this week's Green Room, he explains that conservationists should capitalise on the worldwide attention being given to global warming.
"The good news is that the unprecedented spotlight on climate change is also shedding light on how tropical forests balance our Earth's climate"

"Climate change could be the best thing that ever happened to the amazing array of animal and plant species that make up the Earth's biodiversity.
Don't get me wrong; climate change is the most serious environmental threat we have ever encountered, and it is already taking a terrible toll on species, as well as people, all over the world.
The silver lining is that climate change has triggered a universal wake-up call that we all hear, and are beginning to heed.
Never before have so many sectors of society been equally concerned and motivated to combat an environmental threat.
Of course, some die-hard pessimists say it's too late, that the climate change train has left the station and there is nothing we can do but get ready for catastrophic consequences.
Nothing could be more wrong.Just ask the thousands of participants at the World Conservation Congress (WCC) now taking place in Barcelona, Spain.
MAMMALS IN PERIL
Hunting and habitat loss has left the Caspian seal struggling to survive
Mammals facing extinction threat

Representatives from governments, indigenous peoples, industry and environmental groups are meeting to present innovations and create partnerships.
Climate change and protecting species are focal points, and pessimism is not on the agenda.Instead, smart constructive ideas for solutions are being shared.
We estimate the Earth harbours a minimum of six million living species, from microscopic bacteria to magnificent great apes.
The major news announced at the WCC on Monday was that the latest assessment of the world's mammals shows more than 20% to be threatened with extinction.
That includes 188 mammals, such as the Iberian Lynx, in the highest threat category of Critically Endangered.
This assessment is part of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, which now includes 44,838 species, of which 16,928 (38%) are threatened with extinction.
Self preservation society
Why should people care about the fate of these plants and animals
In the most simple terms, we should care because the quality of our lives ultimately depends on them.
Without species diversity, we wouldn't have the healthy ecosystems that supply our food, cleanse our air and water, provide sources of life-saving medicines and help stabilise our climate.
We would also miss out on a free and ubiquitous source of miraculous beauty and endless possibilities.
We continue to discover new species every day.Just since 1994, we've discovered 54 new lemur species on the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar.
The thrill of documenting a new primate is tempered, however, with the knowledge that many species will become extinct before they are even discovered.
On a global scale, we're losing species 1,000 times faster than what scientists consider normal.
It is an insidious, silent epidemic that could wreck our planet's ability to heal itself.
While the Red List does make headlines, somehow the irreplaceable loss of species does not stay in the minds of the general public, and it has certainly never prompted major financial investments.
This has always puzzled me. As a colleague of mine puts it: "Imagine what would happen to us if rainfall was a thousand times more than normalWhat if snowfall were a thousand times more than normalWhat if rates of disease transmission for malaria or HIV/AIDS were a thousand times higher than they are nowThat is what is happening to plant and animal biodiversity today."
Just as climate change threatens us with rising sea levels, droughts, floods and more category five hurricanes, it is also one of the greatest threats to species.
We could lose more than 30% of the Earth's plants and animals this century due to shifts in the Earth's climate.
Conservationists describe the outlook for primates as "depressing"
Primates 'face extinction crisis'

So where is the silver lining
The good news is that the unprecedented spotlight on climate change is also shedding light on how tropical forests balance our Earth's climate.
At least and possibly much more than 20% of the greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change come from forest destruction - that's more than from all the world's cars, trucks, airplanes and trains combined.
At the same time, forests are effectively our life support system, absorbing carbon dioxide and emitting oxygen.
Those same tropical forests are also home to the world's greatest preponderance of species diversity.
Remove the forests and you will also exterminate countless species.By the same token, the species are essential to healthy forests for many reasons, including pollination and seed dispersal.
There is still time to protect these forests while also providing economic opportunities to developing countries and local people.
One of the key issues at the WCC in Barcelona is how conserving standing tropical forests to fight climate change must be included in a new United Nations agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, the current climate change treaty that expires in 2012.
If we ensure that nations will be compensated for forest conservation that reduces emissions, we will also contribute to redressing some of the huge economic imbalances that exist in the world, since many tropical forest countries are among the more economically stressed.
A message Barcelona can send to the rest of the world is that it is not too late to protect species as well as combat climate change.
On both counts, the welfare of humanity is at stake."
Russell A. Mittermeier is president of Conservation International and chairman of global conservation group IUCN's Species Survival Commission's Primate Specialist Group
The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental topics running weekly on the BBC News website
Do you agree with Russell Mittermeier Can the focus on climate change be positively harnessed by conservationists Will paying tropical forest nations be a way to tackle climate change and protect biodiversity for future generations Or has the climate train left the station and we must prepare to face the consequences
Send us your comments using the form below:
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation