SCIENCE BOND

On Thursday reports surfaced that a Russian hacker called Tessa88 was asking for 10 bitcoins (£4,000) for access to a list of 32 million names.  In a blogpost, Twitter said it was confident that the data had not come from a hack attack on its servers.  But after scrutinising the list, it had locked some accounts and users would need to reset their passwords. "The purported Twitter @names and passwords may have been amassed from combining information from other recent breaches, malware on victim machines that are stealing passwords for all sites, or a combination of both," wrote Michael Coates, chief security officer at Twitter, in the blogpost .  Security firm Leaked Source, which first shared information about the list, said its analysis suggested the information came from PCs infected with data-stealing malware.Twitter's cross-checking of the list showed that some of the log-in data being offered was real, said Mr Coates, and led to the micro-blogging servi...

The researchers report an experiment in Iceland where they have pumped CO2 and water underground into volcanic rock.  Reactions with the minerals in the deep basalts convert the carbon dioxide to a stable, immobile chalky solid.  Even more encouraging, the team writes in Science magazine, is the speed at which this process occurs: on the order of months.  Of our 220 tonnes of injected CO2, 95% was converted to limestone in less than two years, said lead author Juerg Matter from Southampton University, UK.  It was a huge surprise to all the scientists involved in the project, and we thought, 'Wow! This is really fast'," he recalled With carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere marching ever upwards and warming the planet, researchers are keen to investigate so called "carbon capture and storage" (CCS) solutions. Previous experiments have seen pure CO2 injected into sandstone, or deep, salty aquifers. Chosen sites - which have included disused oil...

The autonomous drone - dubbed 184 - can carry one passenger and was developed by Chinese company EHang.  A prototype was shown off at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, with the company hoping to sell the drones later this year.  Experts were divided over whether such a system would have mass appeal. Officials from the Nevada Institute for Autonomous Systems granted permission for the drone to be tested and offered to help EHang submit the results to the Federal Aviation Administration in a bid to win further approval.  It is not clear whether the drone will carry a passenger during tests.  "I personally look forward to the day when drone taxis are part of Nevada's transportation system," the institute's business development director, Mark Barker,told local the Las Vegas Review Journal. The prototype drone is over 4ft (1.2m) tall, weighs 440lb (200kg) and has eight propellers.  It can carry a single passenger for 23 minutes at 60mph...

Names have now been proposed for the four new chemical elements added to the periodic table in January.  They are nihonium (with the symbol Nh), moscovium (Mc), tennessine (Ts), and oganesson (Og).  Until now, the quartet have been referred to simply by the number of protons in each atom - 113, 115, 117 and 118, respectively.  The elements are the first to be included in the famous table since 2011, and complete its seventh row. The names must go out to consultation for five months, but if there are no objections their confirmation should be a formality.  This will come from the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. All four elements are extreme - the synthetic creations of scientists.  None of them exist in the natural state and were made by bombarding two smaller (albeit still very large) atomic nuclei together.  Theory predicts there are "islands of stability" where ...

The function for members to read messages by accessing the social network on a mobile phone web browser is being disabled.  A message  currently appears informing users of the coming change. On some handsets the Play Store then launches.  Facebook said the move is an extension of its 2014 Messenger policy.  Using the Messenger app is faster and enables richer interactions. We're continuing to bring the best experiences we can to the 900 million people on Messenger," it said in a statement. Messages are already inaccessible via the official Facebook app.  However, Devin Coldewey at technology news website Tech Crunch described it as "a hostile move".  Surely the mobile site is much used by people who have good reason not to download the app," he wrote. Some users have complained that they do not wish to use the app, citing battery life and privacy concerns."This move underlines what an important platform messaging is becoming for Facebook,"...

Data presented at the world's biggest cancer conference showed that time without a tumour progressing increased from 15 months to 25 months with palbiciclib.  However, fears have been raised that women in the UK will not benefit because of the cost.  Most women with breast cancer have tumours that are fuelled by oestrogen.  So after treatment, women often take drugs to block the sex hormone and stop the cancer coming back.  But sometimes this preventative measure fails and the tumours that come back are difficult to treat.  Palbociclib, developed by Pfizer, disrupts a pair of proteins - called CDK4 and CDK6 - which promote tumour growth.  The trial on 666 women, presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology, showed the drugs had "significant clinical benefit". Dr Nick Turner, from the Royal Marsden Hospital in London and involved in earlier research on the drug, told . The results are pretty impressive and we hope they will lead to the dru...