SCIENCE BOND

The infection, which causes symptoms including mild fever, conjunctivitis and headache, has already been found in 21 countries in the Caribbean, North and South America.  It has been linked to thousands of babies being born with underdeveloped brains and some countries have advised women not to get pregnant. No treatment or vaccine is available. The virus was first detected in 1947 in monkeys in Africa. There have since been small, short-lived outbreaks in people on the continent, parts of Asia and in the Pacific Islands.But it has spread on a massive scale in the Americas, where transmission was first detected in Brazil in May 2015.  Large numbers of the mosquitoes which carry the virus and a lack of any natural immunity is thought to be helping the infection to spread rapidly.Zika is transmitted by the bite of Aedes mosquitoes, which are found in all countries in the region except Canada and Chile. In a statement, The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO),...

The update contains a new data compression algorithm called Brotli, which Google first unveiled in September. It squishes the size of a website down by 26% more than Chrome's previous compression tool, Zopfli.Like Zopfli, the new algorithm is named after a Swiss baked good. (Brötli means 'small bread' in Swiss German.)  In a Google+ post, Google engineer Ilya Grigorik announced that Brotli will be coming to Chrome soon, likely in the browser's next major update. "At Google, we think that internet users' time is valuable, and that they shouldn't have to wait long for a webpage to load," Google (GOOG) said in a September blog post, when it first announced Brotli. "Because fast is better than slow."  Google made the code open-souce, meaning it can be used by any competing browser. Mozilla, for example, says it will use the code in Firefox.  Chrome has been on a tear lately, adding features left and right that speed up your browsing

The buyer was a former Googler, Sanmay Ved, who discovered Google.com on the list of domains available for sale on September 29. He bought it, charging the $12 fee to his Discover card, never really expecting the transaction to go through. "I was hoping I would get an error at sometime saying transaction did not go through, but I was able to complete purchase, and my credit card was actually charged!" he wrote in a post on LinkedIn last fall. He told that Money he made the purchase simply out of curiosity. "I thought at some point in time it would block me out, but I wanted to see how far it would go," he said.The transaction did go through - for about a minute. He said during that brief time he got a flood of information from Google users, though he was not able actually change the Google home page. Then he got an e-mail from Google canceling the transaction. Ved worked for 5-1/2 years at Google, according to his LinkedIn page, and likes the com...

Facebook had already banned the sale of guns without identity checks, but the new rules aim to stop all gun trade between individuals on the sites.  Businesses can still advertise guns on Facebook and Instagram.  The move comes three weeks after US President Barack Obama unveiled new restrictions on gun purchases.  Mr Obama's executive actions included background checks for all gun sellers and the requirement that states provide information on people disqualified from buying guns due to mental illness or domestic violence. The rule change brings gun sales under the same restrictions placed by Facebook on illegal drugs and pharmaceuticals by Facebook. The site has 1.59bn users worldwide.Facebook "was unfortunately and unwittingly serving as an online platform for dangerous people to get guns", Shannon Watts, of the Everytown for Gun Safety campaign group, told Associated Press. The group said it had found evidence that guns had been bought on the site and used...

The group behind the project is currently adapting the pods for use on the roads.  It has yet to unveil the exact design but confirmed that the adapted vehicles will not run on dedicated tracks.  Greenwich is one of four places in the UK where driverless pods and public reaction to them are being tested.  Trials will also take place in Bristol, Coventry and Milton Keynes. The £8m project is jointly funded by government agency Innovate UK and industry.  The Greenwich Automated Transport Environment project - or Gateway - will see seven driverless pods tested on the pavements around the Greenwich Peninsula, where the O2 Arena is based, from July.  Routes are still being worked out but are likely to include residential areas, the North Greenwich underground station and businesses around the arena. The so-called UltraPods currently in service at Heathrow carry passengers between the car park and Terminal 5. In the five years they have been in use, they ha...

The RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch tracks species such as starlings and song thrushes, which have declined by 80% and 70% since the survey began in 1979.  The unusual weather this winter could affect which birds are seen in gardens.  The RSPB said it was likely there would be fewer birds because they have been less reliant on garden feeders.  December was the warmest and wettest month in the UK in more than a century, before a cold snap was followed by unseasonable warmth in January.  The RSPB said it would be interesting to see how this had affected the long tailed tit, which suffers in harsh winters, and if there were lower numbers of species from the continent, including finches and blackbirds. RSPB wildlife adviser Ben Andrew said: "If the UK experiences a continuation of these milder temperatures, those taking part in Big Garden Birdwatch may notice their gardens quieter than in other years.  "The milder weather means there is more food available i...

He wants pupils to plant rocket seeds that have been in orbit with him, and compare their growth with rocket plants that have stayed on Earth. Mr Peake has outlined details of the project in a message from the space station which will be sent to schools. The study will help find ways to grow food in space which will be essential if humans travel to distant planets. In his message, the European Space Agency (Esa) astronaut explains that he will be sending more than a million seeds back to Earth in a month's time. "Conditions here on the International Space Station are quite different from on planet Earth, due to us being weightless here in orbit." In his hands are a bag of seeds which occasionally float away. Unperturbed, he gently pulls them back towards him and continues."This experiment will aim to see if microgravity can affect the growth mechanisms in seeds," he adds. The seeds will be distributed to up to 10,000 schools. Pupils will compare the gro...

How often have we heard others talk about how ‘intelligent’ they consider someone to be? Intelligence is a description of how good someone is at mentally doing something. Intelligence involves thought. Intelligence includes the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend ideas and language and to learn. Do you consider yourself to be intelligent? Schools and the education system would have us believe that we are only intelligent if we are able to solve complex abstract problems or remember facts and figures. I would agree that this is a type of intelligence and this type of intelligence is normally referred to as IQ or ‘intelligence quotient’ (a phrase coined by an American psychologist named Lewis Terman). A small proportion of the population has a high IQ and they find the academic type of learning and activities in school relatively easy. But the vast majority of people don’t. So where does that leave everyone else?  Well, the good news...

The old cliché, "If you want a friend, get a dog" still stands in the 21st Century. It is well established in the medical community that animals can do much to extend the human life span as well as improve the quality of life. Don't live on or vicariously through your computer.  A pastor once said his job was to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. Thus we have the difference between a real live pet and an inanimate electro-mechanical object - in this case the personal computer. The pet comforts while the computer, improperly used and/or over used, is a thief and a murderer.  Besides, the computer, especially if you run a Microsoft Operating System and Microsoft production software, requires much more maintenance than does a pet. This alone is enough to drive most users' blood pressure through the roof. How many times do you suspect that needs to happen before it begins to take a toll on the human body? It is even more aggravating than t...

The hardware was exactly the same as that used last November, "demonstrating reuse", the Amazon.com founder wrote on his blog.  The flight took place on Friday from Mr Bezos' Texas test and launch facility.  As has become his practice, he gave no general public notice of the event and released only limited details afterwards, along with a glossy video.  November's outing marked the first time a rocket had launched a space mission vertically from the ground and then brought all elements - booster and capsule - softly and safely back to Earth. Although all the flights so far undertaken by Mr Bezos have been unmanned, he does eventually plan to fly passengers. "The very same New Shepard booster that flew above the Karman line and then landed vertically at its launch site last November has now flown and landed again, demonstrating reuse," the businessman said.  "This time, New Shepard reached an apogee of 333,582ft (101.7km) before both capsule...

Doctors hope that making fertilisation more natural will mean healthier pregnancies.  The Complete Fertility clinic in Southampton is first in the UK to use the AneVivo device method.  It is a tiny tubular capsule that is loaded with the sperm and egg before being placed into the uterus.  Prof Nick Macklon, head of the clinic, insisted it was not a gimmick.He told "At this stage we are just offering it to private patients. If the NHS want to use it then they would need to know that it is cost effective. We do not know that yet.  "But that doesn't mean new technology like this can't be introduced in a cautious manner. I'm very keen that we study new innovation in IVF."The technique, which costs around £700 per go, has been approved by the UK's fertility watchdog, the HFEA. International trials in around 250 women suggest that it achieves a similar pregnancy rate to conventional IVF, says Prof Macklon.  But it reduces how long the growing embryo...

A transcript of court proceedings from a copyright lawsuit against Google allegedly contains reference to a deal between the Silicon Valley firms.  The alleged agreement involves Google paying Apple a percentage of revenue - as much as 34% - gained through iOS devices.  Both companies declined to comment.  Bloomberg added that the referenced document has since been removed from the web.  "The transcript vanished without a trace from electronic court records at about 15:00," the report noted. The court proceedings in question regard a lawsuit by Oracle Corp. in which the firm claims that Google used its Java software to develop Android but failed to pay for it.Analyst firms, such as Morgan Stanley, have quoted the $1bn figure in the past, but this appears to be the first time that a reference has been found in court documents.  "It's a very lucrative business to be the browser of choice on a device or the search engine on a device," Chris Green, a tech...

Loosely translated, the Dracoraptor part means "dragon thief" hanigani honours Rob and Nick Hanigan - the two fossil-hunting brothers who found it.  In a new analysis, scientists say the specimen is possibly the oldest known Jurassic dinosaur from the UK.  It also marks a key moment in dinosaur evolution, they tell PLoS One journal.  Dr Dave Martill from Portsmouth University and colleagues say some 40% of the animal was preserved, including its skull, claws, teeth and foot bones.  Forty percent is a lot in fossil terms and has allowed most of the animal to be reconstructed because of the symmetry that exists in the body.  The team says very precise dating was made possible in this case because the remains were sandwiched between well-documented fossils of ammonites (extinct molluscs) and conodonts (a tiny eel-like creature). This age - of 201.3 million years (plus or minus 200,000 years) - puts Dracoraptor hanigani right at the base of the Jurassic P...

The discovery was made by renowned Indian biologist Sathyabhama Das Biju and a team of scientists, in the jungles of north-eastern India.  It is hoped the frogs might now be found across a wide area, from China to Thailand. Studies of the frog have also led scientists to reclassify it as an entirely new genus.The golf ball-sized frog lives in tree holes up to 6m (19ft) above ground, which may have helped it stay undiscovered.  Although other scientists have suggested it may have gone unnoticed simply because there are so few scientists working in the remote region.  The height at which they live is not their only quirk, with females laying their fertilised eggs in tree holes filled with water, only to return after the tadpoles hatch, to feed them with unfertilised eggs. Unlike most frogs, adults also eat vegetation rather than insects and larvae.The newly uncovered frogs were first found by accident in 2007, during a search for other animals.  Mr Biju,...

Palaeontologist Diego Pol is talking about a very special fossil specimen, a giant dinosaur he excavated in the desert of central Argentina. This titan of the Cretaceous Period, or at least a fibreglass replica of its skeleton, has now taken up residence as an exhibit in New York's American Museum of Natural History (AMNH).  The cast is 122ft long (37.5m) and represents a giant plant-eating titanosaur that lived in the forests of Patagonia between 100 and 95 million years ago. It may well be the biggest dinosaur yet discovered, but is so new it doesn't yet have a formal scientific name.  The dinosaur cast was unveiled before a packed crowd of media on 14 January. The skeleton grazes the 19ft-high (5.8m) ceilings of the museum's Wallach Orientation Center and its head and neck stick out of the room, gazing towards the lifts. The story behind the exhibit is told in a new BBC One documentary presented by Sir David Attenborough. For Sir David, who is well known for...

Water. This drives every compressed air user nuts!!! Every time they use an air tool, blow-off gun, or even fill the inflatable air mattress, water appears along with the compressed air.  The water is a problem if the compressed air is moving through a tool that can rust or be negatively affected by airborne particles, and, given enough 'fill-ups and empties' a significant amount of water will appear in anything which you inflate or run with compressed air. Why? Well, we know that relative humidity is the measure of water moisture in the air expressed as a percentage. At a relative humidity of 90% for example (really hot and sticky) the atmosphere is holding 90% of the total amount of water vapour it can hold. When the relative humidity in the air exceeds 100%, it usually rains.   That, unfortunately, seems to happen mostly on weekends! :-) Now, let's take some of that atmosphere with it's 90% relative humidity and compress it. What do we want the f...

When the sky is blue and clear it is because molecules in the air reflect blue light from the sun more than they are reflecting red light. The sun has all the colors of the rainbow in it; when reflected through a prism or these little molecules, you see different colors. All those colors you see in the sky are based on this principle. So just like when you shine a white light through different angles of a prism, the molecules reflect different colors when the sun is lower in the sky, such as sunset when you see the red and oranges. At sunset, the blue is then out of your line of sight.  This can be a very deep subject. You have to understand prisms and even which kinds of molecules reflect the different colors. So many really technical things to consider. In about 1859 man named John Tyndall took steps in the name of science to explain the sky's color. He proved that light passes through clear fluid and acts like a prism by polarizing the light with specific qualit...

Nasa has extended contracts to existing commercial cargo carriers, Orbital ATK and SpaceX, but has added a third team: the Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC).  This new entrant will fly an automated mini-shuttle called Dream Chaser.  Esa has agreements to co-operate with SNC, which should now lead to European companies providing components.  Chief among these contributions will be the International Berthing and Docking Mechanism (IBDM) - a new system developed in Europe to join spacecraft together.  Dream Chaser will have one at its rear to make a sealed connection to a free port on the orbiting platform.  Astronauts will move through the IBDM to access the vehicle's several tonnes of supplies.The selection of SNC by Nasa to run at least six cargo sorties to the ISS, starting no earlier than 2019, should trigger a multi-million-euro contract between Esa and QinetiQ of Belgium. The firm will lead a consortium in the production of the first IBDM - a prototyp...

The incident took place in the city of Belgorod, 670km (440 miles) south of the capital, Moscow, on 29 December.  The patient had earlier kicked a nurse, after which the doctor punched him in the head, Russian media reported.  Investigators think it was a case of "involuntary manslaughter", one official told Russian TV, but have launched a criminal case.  The story went viral after the CCTV footage came to light. Yelena Kozyreva from the local investigations committee said they believed there was no malicious intent in the doctor's actions.  Relatives identified the patient as Yevgeniy Bakhtin, 56, a resident of Belgorod,LifeNews TV reported.  The doctor has been named as Ilya Zelendinov, according to the privately owned channel Ren TV.

It also cleans the user with an aerated wand, which delivers warm water and warm air "from a seated position", a spokeswoman said.  Despite a $9,800 (£6,704) price tag, more than 40 million earlier versions of the Neorest toilets have been sold.  Bathroom firm Toto said the new prototype was still in development.  Its self-cleaning process uses a combination of a disinfectant and a glaze - made out of zirconium and titanium dioxide - which coats the bowl."Once it flushes it sprays the interior of the bowl with electrolysed water," explained Toto spokeswoman Lenora Campos. She said the "proprietary process" essentially turns the water into a weak bleach.  "This bleaches the interior, killing anything in the bowl," said Ms Campos.  Meanwhile an ultraviolet light in the lid charges the surface.  That makes it super-hydrophilic - or water-loving, so nothing can stick to it - and also photocatalytic, enabling oxygen ions to break down bacteri...

Stardust visited Comet Wild 2 in 2004, catching samples from its dusty tail in specially made slabs of "aerogel".  By studying the tracks with microscopes and synchrotron X-rays, researchers aim to reconstruct exactly what kind of particles first hit the gel.  They are also identifying extra, tiny grains to be extracted and tested.  "We want to tell people where the interesting grains are," said Amanda White, a student working on the project at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.She presented her work this week at the 227th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Florida.  Most work on Stardust samples to date has selected the grains using regular optical images, concentrating on the relatively large particles that burrowed their way right into the foam. But when the dust first slammed into the gel at 6km/s (13,421mph) it carved out complex shapes, often resembling a teardrop, with a large bulb near the entry point that gradually n...

It confirms what was already suspected about our galaxy's growth: it started in the middle and grew outward.  This can be seen in the abundance of old stars near the centre of the disc.  Presented at the 227th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Florida, it is the largest such map ever assembled.  "We're characterising in really unprecedented detail how the galaxy is formed, via this snapshot of stellar ages across the disc," lead researcher Melissa Ness told.  The tendrils of the map extend out from the Earth, beyond the centre of the galaxy in one direction, and out to the very far reaches of the disc in the other. "And we not only have these ages in the plane of the disc, but also moving up above the galactic plane," added Dr Ness, who works at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.To calculate the age of each star, she and her colleagues used data from two telescopes.  Firstly, the Apogee project - part of the ground-bas...

Because of their abundance of stars, these "globular clusters" were an early favourite in the Seti field.  But recent efforts to scour the sky for planets orbiting alien stars have had little success within star clusters.  Now, two astronomers say there is good reason to keep up the search.  Rosanne Di Stefano from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, US, and Alak Ray from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India, have described what they call the "globular cluster opportunity".  At an average age of 10 billion years (much wrinklier than the Sun, at four billion), globular clusters don't have many young stars, rich in the metallic elements needed to build planets. But Dr Di Stefano, speaking in Florida at the 227th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, pointed out that recent discoveries had placed exoplanets - especially small, rocky ones like Earth - around stars much less metal-rich than our Sun."When Seti first ...