SCIENCE BOND

Dame Sally Davies has written to all GPs and pharmacies to ensure they are prescribing the correct drugs after the rise of "super-gonorrhoea" in Leeds.  Her warning comes after concerns were raised that some patients were not getting both of the antibiotics needed to clear the infection.  Sexual health doctors said gonorrhoea was "rapidly" developing resistance.  A highly drug-resistant strain of gonorrhoea was detected in the north of England in March.  That strain is able to shrug off the antibiotic azithromycin, which is normally used alongside another drug, ceftriaxone.  In her letter, the chief medical officer said: "Gonorrhoea is at risk of becoming an untreatable disease due to the continuing emergence of antimicrobial resistance." But while an injection of ceftriaxone and an azithromycin pill are supposed to be used in combination, this may not always be the case for all patients.  Earlier this year, the British Association for Sexual He...

Researchers found that these species compensate for their poor flapping skills by seeking out turbulence at low altitudes.  The researchers say this explains their awkward, wobbling flying style near tree-tops.  The study is published in the journal The Auk: Ornithological Advances.  Sometimes called buzzards, Turkey vultures are the most widespread of these species in North America  They are unique among these birds as they use their sense of smell to find carrion.  For this study researchers in this study observed both Turkey and Black vultures in south eastern Virginia in the US.  According to the study's lead author Julie Mallon, then at the University of West Virginia, these particular vultures have evolved a different style of flying, skirting low along the edge of forests."They don't have the muscular power other raptors like eagles have to give chase, vultures don't pursue their prey and they've lost a lot of those adaptations that allowed them...

Chemists, however, are leading an effort to develop sensors to sniff it out.  The explosive, called triacetone triperoxide (TATP), is produced by combining chemicals sold in pharmacies and hardware stores.  Several research groups across the globe are now developing sensors to detect TATP before it can be detonated.  "Anyone who could follow a recipe to make a pumpkin pie could follow the recipe to make TATP," says Dr Kenneth Suslick, professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois.  That is why terrorists find the chemical so attractive, say experts. Suicide bombers all over the world have used TATP, from Palestinians in the West Bank to the "shoe bomber" Richard Reid.Chemists are seeking to exploit a physical characteristic of TATP known as vapour pressure. This property refers to how readily a compound converts from the solid to the gaseous state. Because TATP has a relatively high vapour pressure, it easily becomes a gas. Therefore, in theory, a ...

Mimicking each other's facial expressions is a human habit, which helps people to get along.  Dogs do the same to bond with other dogs, scientists report in the journal, Royal Society Open Science.  They think dogs may be showing a basic built-in form of empathy, enabling them to pick up on emotions.  And the phenomenon may have emerged in our canine companions during the process of domestication, say scientists from the Natural History Museum, University of Pisa.Until now, the idea - involved in social bonding - has only been described in humans and non-human primates such as chimps and orangutans.  It is why humans automatically mirror a smile or a laugh, enabling the sharing of emotions. The team of three researchers - working with the Unit of Cognitive Primatology and Primate Center in Rome - videotaped dogs playing in a park in Palermo, Italy.  They analysed the way the dogs were interacting, including signals used to show when a dog was being ...

Nasa said a problem with a seismometer provided by the French space agency meant the launch could not go ahead.  It is feared the mission could now face a two-year delay.  The InSight spacecraft was scheduled to take off between 4-30 March and land on the Red Planet six months later to examine Mars' geology in depth.  Nasa said it had decided to call off the launch because the agency was unable to fix a leak affecting the seismometer, which required a vacuum seal to cope with harsh conditions on Mars.  The instrument is designed to measure ground movements. "A decision on a path forward will be made in the coming months, but one thing is clear: Nasa remains fully committed to the scientific discovery and exploration of Mars," Nasa's John Grunsfeld was quoted as saying by the AFP news agency. The next time the earth and Mars are favourably aligned for a launch will be in 2018.  The mission is also intended to monitor the temperature on Mars, as wel...

The company, whose activities range from laptops to TVs to nuclear energy, is shedding the jobs in its consumer electronics division.  News of the predicted losses sent shares in Toshiba down by nearly 10%.  The restructuring comes after Toshiba admitted earlier this year that it had overstated profits for six years.  The scandal led to the resignation of Toshiba's president and vice-president. Masashi Muromachi took over as chief executive and president from previous president Hisao Tanaka.  As part of its restructuring, Toshiba will sell its TV and washing machine manufacturing plant in Indonesia to Hong Kong-based TV maker Skyworth for about 3bn yen. It is also looking for investors for its healthcare business. The 6,800 job cuts will go in its Lifestyle division, essentially its consumer electronics business, and Toshiba said the cuts would be made by March 2016.  A number of jobs will be lost by offering early retirement to those employed in Japa...

On Wednesday, the DMV published draft regulations which outline how the technology could be used on the roads.  The regulations say truly driverless cars would be "initially excluded" from operation.  Google's director of self-driving cars, Chris Urmson, said the move was "perplexing".  "This maintains the same old status quo and falls short on allowing this technology to reach its full potential, while excluding those who need to get around but cannot drive," he wrote in his blog.  "We've heard countless stories from people who need a fully self-driving car today. People with health conditions ranging from vision problems to multiple sclerosis to autism to epilepsy who are frustrated with their dependence on others for even simple errands."Google argues that driverless cars are much safer than manually driven cars, because they eliminate the human error that causes a majority of collisions. The technology has inspired a web ga...

Astronauts Tim Kopra and Scott Kelly, from the US space agency Nasa, are going outside the ISS to fix a broken component.  As they suited up and prepared to go out into space, they received assistance from Tim Peake and Sergey Volkov.  Mr Peake arrived at the ISS on Tuesday.  He is the first UK astronaut to be selected by the European Space Agency and will spend six months aboard the space stationThe space walk was due to start at 13:10 GMT (08:10 EST) and should last between three and three-and-a-half hours, Nasa said.  But the astronauts' preparations proceeded faster than expected and the walk commenced at about 12:45 GMT."It will be a very busy and interesting day for Tim," said Libby Jackson from the UK Space Agency.  The space walk is the seventh time ISS crew members have ventured outside in 2015.  It is taking place so the astronauts can try to fix a stalled component called the "mobile transporter" - a rail car that moves a robotic arm up an...

PC reenactments recommend the plesiosaur traveled through the water like a penguin, utilizing its front appendages as oars and back appendages for guiding.   The animal's swimming walk has been a puzzle since bones of the first known example were uncovered from underneath a Dorset precipice 200 years prior.   The plesiosaur was found by the fossil seeker Mary Anning in 1821.  At the time even the name dinosaur had not been developed.   An experimental paper disclosing Anning's locate a couple of years after the fact brought up the issue of how the marine animal swam, given its strange sets of wing-like flippers. The open deliberation has proceeded until today, with a PC recreation in view of a Jurassic fossil example giving proof for penguin-like motion.Dr Adam Smith of Nottingham Natural History Museum chipped away at the study.  He clarified that scientistss were isolated on whether the marine animal utilized its four appendages as a part of a paddlin...

Ally Louise Smith was born by C-section on Friday weighing just 2lb 5oz after her mother, Heidi Loughlin, was told she had to bring her treatment forward."I want to fast-forward now until March when she will be coming home and my chemo will be over," she told.Photographs of Ally, who is being treated in the neo natal intensive care unit, were released on Tuesday.  Ms Loughlin, a Metropolitan Police officer, from Portishead, North Somerset, told "It's almost like lifting a piece of toast, that's how tiny she feels.  "She came out crying, which we really didn't expect because she is so little."Ms Loughlin found out she had inflammatory breast cancer when she was 13 weeks pregnant. Doctors gave her the option of terminating the pregnancy to begin aggressive chemotherapy.  But Ms Loughlin, who also has two little boys, decided to have the less aggressive chemotherapy to give the baby the best chance.  After the treatment failed, doctors sai...

Ovarian tumours are often deadly as they are caught too late.  A 14-year study on 200,000 women, published in the Lancet, has been welcomed as a potentially landmark moment in cancer screening.  But the researchers and independent experts say it is still too soon to call for mass screening because of concerns about the analysis.  Ovarian cancer is difficult to pick up as symptoms, including abdominal pain, persistent bloating and difficulty eating, are common in other conditions.The UK Collaborative Trial of Ovarian Cancer Screening is one of the biggest clinical trials ever conducted and is supposed to give the definitive verdict on screening.  It monitored levels of a chemical called CA125 in women's blood. Doctors tracked changes in the levels of CA125, which is produced by ovarian tissue, over time and if levels became elevated then the women were sent for further tests and ultimately surgery.  The results are now in, but the interpretation is a ...

However, the cautious recommendations from the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) will, initially at least, insist on a fully licensed driver being behind the wheel, ready to take over in an emergency or if the technology fails.  California has been the testing ground for most of the development, and so regulations in the state are considered to be precedent-setting.  Prospective users of self-driving cars will need to undergo special training, and manufacturers would be required to monitor the cars' use.  Answering a common query, regulators said any traffic violations or accidents would remain the responsibility of the human driver.Many firms are investing heavily in researching and creating self-driving vehicles, such as Ford, Uber and Tesla. Google, which leads the research field, has made a self-driving car without any controls such as steering wheels or pedals.But the DMV's proposals would mean such vehicles would not, for the foreseeable future at least, be ...

Finches in the Galapagos Islands are being threatened by a parasitic fly that attacks their young.  A new mathematical model suggests that the birds may succumb to this pest in 50 years.  But the authors say that human intervention could alleviate the risk of extinction.  During his time on the Galapagos in the early 1830s, Charles Darwin noticed that finches on different islands in the chain were quite similar but had large variations in their beaks, depending on the local food source.  Because the islands - which belong to Ecuador - are so far from the mainland, Darwin concluded that the birds had begun as one species and then started to evolve into separate varieties of finch.  There are between 14 and 18 species on the Galapagos - but this study looked at one of the most common, the medium ground finch. Around 270,000 of these birds are found on Santa Cruz island.The finches are threatened by a nest fly which lays parasitic larvae in their nests which...

By the end of this week it could be illegal for any European child under 16 to use Facebook - or Snapchat or any messaging service - without the express consent of their parents. That, according to some interpretations, would be the result of a vote by an obscure committee to raise the digital age of consent from 13 to 16.  I certainly didn't but I am told it is built into the decisions that many online firms make about the age they will allow people to join. In the United States a law called Coppa (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) gives extra online protection to children under 13, and Europe has had a similar policy - which is why the likes of Facebook have not allowed children in until they become teenagers.  Now, though, the European Parliament's civil liberties and home affairs committee is considering a change which is opposed both by social media firms and many child protection experts. A last minute amendment to Europe's Data Protecti...

The DSCOVR spacecraft, which was launched in February, has a camera that stares constantly at the sunlit face of the Earth.  The images are being used to track moving features such as clouds and dust storms, and to monitor the climate.  But on 27 September, it was in just the right position to see the Moon go behind the Earth and into its shadow.  On the ground at this time, skywatchers would have observed the lunar body turn a shade of red.  It does this because some sunlight is still able to reach the Moon's surface after being filtered through the Earth's atmosphere.  "Our camera is normally centred on the Earth but we use the Moon for calibration," explained Jay Herman, the US space agency's (Nasa) lead investigator onDSCOVR's Epic camera system.  "That's what we were doing on this occasion. We were staring at the Moon and the Earth moved in front about four hours before the eclipse was seen on Earth. And that's because we were at an an...

The study, State of the UK's Butterflies 2015, suggests 76% of resident and regular migrant butterflies have declined.  Some common species have suffered what the charity calls "major slumps".  Thousands of data-gathering volunteers enabled scientists to build up this long-term national picture.  And Butterfly Conservation and the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH), which helped produce this report, encouraged the public to take part in surveys to help monitor trends in UK biodiversity.While the main conclusions suggest a bleak outlook for the insects, the research did reveal some rare species were benefiting from targeted conservation.  According to Richard Fox, of Butterfly Conservation, one of the lead researchers, this was thanks to landscape-scale projects - protecting and restoring threatened habitats, such as managed wildflower-rich grasslands and heath-lands.  The threatened Duke of Burgundy butterfly, for example, has seen a recent increase i...

Tim Peake Major Tim and fellow crew members Russian Yuri Malenchenko and American Tim Kopra, are due to dock with the ISS at 17:24 GMT (23:24 Kazakh time).  The former Army pilot is making history as the first official UK astronaut.  He was waved off by his wife and two sons at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan earlier on Tuesday.  The launch was from the same place where Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space in 1961.At blast-off, the rocket generated 422.5 tonnes of thrust - equivalent to 26 million horse power.  The launch went with no reported problems and after one minute, the rocket was soaring upwards at 1,000mph (1,600km/h).  After two minutes, the four boosters strapped around the rocket were jettisoned.  Zero gravity was reached by the Soyuz spacecraft after nine minutes of travel.Working with mission controllers on Earth, the crew will now be nudging the space capsule towards its rendezvous with the International Space Station (ISS...

Her annual report, which focuses on women this year, said tackling obesity should be a national priority to avert a "growing health catastrophe".  She said the food industry needed to do more or it should face a sugar tax.  Dame Sally is also calling for better treatment of ovarian cancer and more open discussion on incontinence.  England's top doctor said obesity was so serious it should be a priority for the whole population, but particularly for women because too often it shortened their lives.  In England in 2013, 56.4% of women aged 34-44 and 62% of women aged 45-54 were classified as overweight or obese.  Obesity increases the risk of many diseases including breast cancer, type 2 diabetes and heart disease.  Dame Sally warned that if the food industry did not clean up its act then new taxes may be the only option.She told "I think it is inevitable that manufacturing has to reformulate and resize, that supermarkets and others need to stop ch...

According to security firm Symantec, the amount of malware aimed at Apple's mobile operating system (iOS) has more than doubled this year, while threats to Mac computers also rose.  Security firm FireEye also expects 2016 to be a bumper year for Apple malware.  Systems such as Apple Pay could be targeted, it predicts.  Apple is an obvious target for cybercriminals because its products are so popular, said Dick O'Brien, a researcher at Symantec.  While the total number of threats targeting Apple devices remains low compared with Windows and Android, Symantec is seeing the range of threats multiply.  Last year, it was seeing a monthly average of between 10,000 and 70,000 Mac computers infected with malware.  This is far fewer than Windows desktops and we don't want to scaremonger. Apple remains a relatively safe platform but Apple users can no longer be complacent about security, as the number of infections and new threats rise," said Mr O'Brien. ...

The venture's backers include Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel, Indian tech giant Infosys and Amazon Web Services.  Open AI says it expects its research - free from financial obligations - to focus on a "positivetelsa human impact".  Scientists have warned that advances in AI could ultimately threaten humanity.  Mr Musk recently told students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that AI was humanity's "biggest existential threat".  Last year, British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking told  AI could potentially "re-design itself at an ever increasing rate", superseding humans by outpacing biological evolution.  However, other experts have argued that the risk of AI posing any threat to humans remains remote.  A statement on OpenAI's website said the venture aims "to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need...