SCIENCE BOND

Li-fi can deliver internet access 100 times faster than traditional wi-fi, offering speeds of up to 1Gbps (gigabit per second).  It requires a light source, such as a standard LED bulb, an internet connection and a photo detector.  It was tested this week by Estonian start-up Velmenni, in Tallinn.  Velmenni used a li-fi-enabled light bulb to transmit data at speeds of 1Gbps. Laboratory tests have shown theoretical speeds of up to 224Gbps.  It was tested in an office, to allow workers to access the internet and in an industrial space, where it provided a smart lighting solution.  Speaking to the International Business Times, chief executive Deepak Solanki said that the technology could reach consumers "within three to four years".The term li-fi was first coined by Prof Harald Haas from Edinburgh University, who demonstrated the technology at a Ted (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in 2011. His talk, which has now been watched nearly two...

They used it to scan the blood vessels throughout the brain of a live rat.  Within a few years, the researchers say their system could reach the clinic and help with cancer and stroke diagnosis.  For the procedure, published in Nature, the rat was injected with millions of very tiny bubbles, which reflect sound waves much better than blood vessels.  "Ultrasound propagates easily in water - or in our organs, because almost 90% of our soft tissue is water," explained the study's senior author, Mickael Tanter, from the Institut Langevin in Paris.  "But as soon as it hits a very small microbubble of gas, there's a big reflection. It's a very good scatterer of ultrasound." This is what makes these bubbles, which are already used for some scans in humans, a "contrast agent" for ultrasound.But the key to getting a sharp, super-resolution image - unlike conventional ultrasound, which is limited to capturing objects at millimetre scales - was...

That is the conclusion of a study by US biologists, exploring how the colour is created in different tarantula species.  The hue is caused by tiny structures inside the animals' hairs, but those shapes vary across the family tree.  This suggests, the researchers say, that the striking blue is not driven by sexual selection - unlike many other bright colours in the animal kingdom.  This argument is also supported by the fact that tarantulas have poor colour vision, and do not appear to show off their hairy blue body parts during courtship.Nonetheless, Bor-Kai Hsiung and his colleagues found that 40 out of 53 groupings (genera) of tarantula exhibit a very vibrant blue.  "We collected published data and constructed a super-tree, which combined the previous published small trees," said Mr Hsiung, a PhD student at the University of Akron in Ohio and the first author of the study, published in Science Advances. They then mapped blueness onto that evolutionary tr...

If the lab technique works in the field, it could offer a new way of stopping the biting insects from spreading malaria to humans, they say.  The scientists put a new "resistance" gene into the mosquito's own DNA, using a gene editing method called Crispr.  And when the GM mosquitoes mated - their offspring inherited the same resistance, PNAS journal reports.  In theory, if these mosquitoes bite people, they should not be able to pass on the parasite that causes malaria.  About 3.2bn people - almost half of the world's population - are at risk of malaria.  Bed nets, insecticides and repellents can help stop the insects biting and drugs can be given to anyone who catches the infection, but the disease still kills around 580,000 people a year.   Scientists have been searching for new ways to fight malaria. The University of California team believe their GM mosquito could play a pivotal role - breeding resistant offspring to replace endemic, malaria...

The new problem - similar to the first - could leave users' personal information vulnerable, researchers backed by the US government said.  Dell said it had again released a fix, after doing the same for the first problem earlier this week.In a statement, Dell said that the second problem affected users who downloaded its Dell System Detect product between 20 October and 24 November 2015. It said the second issue was not pre-installed on computers - as the first was.  It said the product was removed from its site once the issue was spotted and a replacement application was made available.Earlier this week, Dell said it had inadvertently opened up a security hole in its computers when it pre-installed software on them. A self-signed root certificate authority (CA), which is used to identify trustworthy websites, was "implemented as part of a support tool and intended to make it faster and easier for our customers to service their system", Dell said. But the CA it ...

This initial venture will involve a satellite going to the Red Planet to study trace gases, such as methane, in the atmosphere.  The orbiter will also drop a probe on to the surface to test technologies needed to land the second mission - a rover - that should arrive in 2019.  The path to this point has been a tortuous one, with the programme coming close to collapse on several occasions.  ExoMars has gone through several iterations since being approved formally by European Space Agency (Esa) member states in 2005. Its vision has expanded from a small technology demonstration to a two-legged endeavour that will cost in the region of 1.3 billion euros.In all the upheaval, ExoMars has also now become a joint undertaking with the Russian space agency (Roscosmos).  The new partner literally rescued the project when the Americans dropped it as a priority, and will be providing key components and science instruments for both missions, as well as the Proton rockets t...

Data until the end of October showed this year's temperatures running "well above" any previous 12 month period.  The researchers say the five year period from 2011 to 2015 was also the warmest on record.  The rise, they state, was due to a combination of a strong El Nino and human-induced global warming.  The WMO said their preliminary estimate, based on data from January to October, showed that the global average surface temperature for 2015 was 0.73 degrees C above the 1961-1990 average.  Their scientists also found that global temperatures were approximately 1 degree C above the 1880-1899 period, mirroring a recent finding by the UK Met Office.The record-breaking five year period from 2011 to 2015 was 0.57C above the average for 1961-1990. The WMO said that levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached new highs. In the northern hemisphere, the spring of 2015 saw the three-month global average concentration of CO2 cross the 400 parts per million...

Intended eventually to carry people just above the atmosphere, the re-usable vehicle launched from west Texas on Monday with no-one aboard.  Both parts of New Shepard - the capsule and its propulsion unit - landed safely, Mr Bezos' company said.  On the maiden outing in April, the propulsion module was lost on the way down because of a hydraulic failure.  True to his way of working, the US billionaire gave no specific notice of the flight, stating last week only that another mission would occur "very soon".  This means all the video and information about the event have come out directly from Mr Bezos' space operation, Blue Origin.New Shepard has the capability to transport six individuals to just above 100km in altitude. It reached this mark during Monday's test, ascending to 329,839ft (100.5km).  Its propulsion unit is designed to take off and land vertically so that it can be used time and time again.  Following the test flight, that unit touched dow...

The engineered Mediterranean fruit flies possess a gene that prevents female flies from reaching adulthood.  When released into the environment, they mate with wild members of the same species and pass on the gene to their offspring, which die before they can cause damage to crops.  The flies have been produced by the British-based company Oxitec.  This invasive species causes millions of dollars in damage to Australian crops each year. The Department of Agriculture and Food in Western Australia (DAFWA) has now announced it will conduct an indoor assessment of the engineered fruit flies.  Eggs were imported from the UK and reared at DAFWA research facilities. Their potential for pest control will now be assessed in glasshouse trials. In Western Australia, the Mediterranean fruit fly (Ceratitis capitata), also known as the Medfly, is a major problem for commercial orchards and householders.  It feeds on more than 250 types of fruit, including citrus,...

It said it had introduced the technology to help people get better results when they search.  Often, it said in a blogpost, the best answers to a query were found in an app rather than a web page.  Initially nine apps have been selected to work with the streaming system as it is tested.  Jennifer Lin, Google engineering manager, said the firm started indexing information found in apps two years ago to bolster its larger corpus of search data.  About 40% of searches done via Google now turn up content found in apps such as Facebook, Instagram, Airbnb or Pinterest, she said.  Until now, Google has only answered queries with information that is available both on the web and in apps. Now, however, it is starting to show results that are only found in apps.  One example of when these results would show up might be when someone is looking for hotels during a spur-of-the-moment trip to an unfamiliar city, wrote Ms Lin in the blog. Google said it was...

According to new data, up to 57% of all Amazonian trees may already fit the criteria of being globally threatened.  If confirmed, the estimates would raise the number of threatened plant species on Earth by almost a quarter.  Forest cover in the Amazon has been shrinking for decades, but little is known about the impact on individual plant species.  The trees at risk include iconic species like the Brazil nut tree, food crops such as cacao, the source of chocolate, as well as rare trees that are almost unknown to science.  The research, published in the journal, Science Advances, compared data from almost 1,500 forest plots with maps of current and predicted forest loss to estimate how many tree species have been lost and how many are likely to disappear by the middle of the century. It found that the Amazon - the world's most diverse forest - could be home to more than 15,000 tree species.  Of these, between 36% and 57% are likely to qualify as being g...

The actual pigeons could generalise precisely what they learned, correctly distinguishing tumours within invisible microscope images.  In addition, they performed well with a particular mammogram-classifying task, though an extra mammogram analyze (recognising shady lumps) turned out way too tough.  The actual pigeons' capacity may help increase completely new image-based analysis technological know-how. Probable zero bigger than the tip of this catalog little finger, the actual pigeon's human brain on the other hand provides remarkable functions.  Pigeons can easily recognize identities along with emotive expressions about human looks, letters on the alphabet, misshapen drug products, and also art simply by Monet compared to Picasso, inches stated Prof Edward Wasserman from your School regarding Iowa, the co-author on the review. "Their aesthetic storage volume is every bit as remarkable, which has a established remember in excess of 1, 900 images. inches...

There's no feeling quite like the tightening of the stomach you get when you accidentally stumble across an old post involving you and a former loved one in happier times.  It's even more brutal when you notice that person's surname has since changed.   The world's biggest social network has just announced that it is trialing new tools to make it less painful when handling a relationship gone sour. R ight now, if you decide you don't want to be reminded of a certain someone's existence on planet Earth, you would need to unfriend or block them.  The problem is that they will most likely find out you've done that, which isn't exactly ideal - nothing says "playing it cool" like blocking someone on Facebook. Relationships on Facebook are a big deal - a judge in New York said using Facebook to send a divorce summons was completely legal.  Facebook's new break-up tool is about altering what an ex can see, but without them knowing y...

They identified bacteria able to shrug off the drug of last resort - colistin - in patients and livestock in China.  They said that resistance would spread around the world and raised the spectre of untreatable infections.  It is likely resistance emerged after colistin was overused in farm animals.  Bacteria becoming completely resistant to treatment - also known as the antibiotic apocalypse - could plunge medicine back into the dark ages.Common infections would kill once again, while surgery and cancer therapies, which are reliant on antibiotics, would be under threatChinese scientists identified a new mutation, dubbed the MCR-1 gene, that prevented colistin from killing bacteria.  The report in the Lancet Infectious Diseases showed resistance in a fifth of animals tested, 15% of raw meat samples and in 16 patients.And the resistance had spread between a range of bacterial strains and species, including E. coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa...

Russia's federal anti-monopoly service said that Google abused its dominant position by requiring mobile firms to install the apps. Apps for YouTube and Google's photography and maps services were at the center of the row. Google said no operator was compelled to install its apps and there was plenty of competition for its services.When it reached its decision in September, the anti-monopoly watchdog gave Google until 18 November to change its contracts with phone firms so its apps were not favored. The firm could face penalties of up to 15% of its 2014 revenue in Russia if it did not change its practices.  Google has not complied with this decision and has now published comments on its official Russian blog explaining why. "We intend to challenge the decision in court and explain why we believe it to be unfounded," said Google (link in Russian).  It laid out five reasons why it believed there was little evidence that its own Android ap...

Salmon Fish The Food and Drug Administration said it had given approval on the grounds that "food from the fish is safe to eat".  The biotech company behind the fish, AquaBounty, first submitted its application almost 20 years ago.  Opponents say consumers do not want to eat genetically engineered seafood.  They have also expressed concern that the salmon could pose risks to other fish if it were to escape into the environment.  Dr Bernadette Dunham of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine said: "The FDA has thoroughly analysed and evaluated the data and information submitted by AquaBounty Technologies regarding AquAdvantage Salmon and determined that they have met the regulatory requirements for approval, including that food from the fish is safe to eat."The FDA ruled that the salmon must be raised in tanks on land at only two facilities in Canada and Panama. It will not be bred or raised in the US.  Safety measures include producing fish that are ste...

Both male and female cordon-bleu birds bob up and down while singing to their mates.  Now, using high-speed video cameras, a team from Japan and Germany has spotted a remarkable quick-step that the birds perform mid-hop during this display.  The research appears in the open access journal Scientific Reports.  Because each bird's dance became more vigorous if its mate was on the same perch, the team thinks the vibrations might be adding a tactile element to the courtship ritual.  Alternatively, the rat-a-tat flourish might be a musical accompaniment to the bird's song, or a visual display - or it might be a wooing strategy that targets multiple senses.  It's a really rare phenomenon that songbirds produce non-vocal sounds," said senior author Masayo Soma, from Hokkaido University in Japan. "Some species produce non-vocal sounds with their wings, but they usually don't use their feet."Non-singing birds are also known to perform elaborate dances that ca...