SCIENCE BOND

A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said.  The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website.  Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...

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...

The organisms have a cylindrical stalk capped by a flat, semi-transparent disc that houses visible channels branching outwards.  These channels, which resemble tree-like diagrams known as dendrograms, are the basis for its scientific name - Dendrogramma.  The original specimens were described for the first time in 2014 by a team of Danish scientists, one of whom had been aboard the 1986 voyage and later transported the samples to Copenhagen.  The Danish team classified the creatures as belonging to their own unique taxonomic group in a paper published in the journal PLOS One.zoologists' toolkit," says Dr Tim O'Hara, a senior curator at Museum Victoria in Melbourne.  "Publishing a new phylum without actually showing how it was related to other animals through DNA was a very old-fashioned way of doing things. "They copped a bit of flak, but there the matter rested."  But in late 2015, after nearly 30 years without a reported sighting, the strange mu...

The Pink Light campaign was tested by 500 pregnant women in the city of Busan over a five-day period.  The women carried sensors that activated pink lights by priority seats on the Busan-Gimhae Light Rail service.  However some might be embarrassed by the extra attention, said podcaster and tech journalist Ellie Gibson.  The sensors have six months of battery life and must be carried outside a bag for maximum signal strength, although they are not waterproof, the Pink Light website (in Korean) says. The project was a collaboration between the city council and local businesses.Consideration for pregnant women should prevail and they should be able to use public transportation more easily and conveniently with this policy," said Suh Byung-soo, Busan's mayor. "Women should be able to use city facilities easily even when they are expecting."  Many pregnant women report difficulties getting seats on public transport, while passengers say they can't always...

It affects about one in every thousand MS patients and, according to the Canadian researchers, is proof that the disease is passed down generations.  Experts have long suspected there's a genetic element to MS, but had thought there would be lots of genes involved, as well as environmental factors.  The finding offers hope of targeted screening and therapy, Neuron reports.  The University of British Columbia studied the DNA of hundreds of families affected by MS to hunt for a culprit gene. They found it in two sets of families containing several members with a rapidly progressive type of MS.Although other factors may still be important and necessary to trigger the disease process, the gene itself is a substantial causative risk factor that is passed down from parents to their children, say the researchers.  The mutation is in a gene called NR1H3, which makes a protein that acts as a switch controlling inflammation.  In MS the body's immune system mistak...

The gang allegedly seeded websites with malware that gave them access to victims' PCs and, from there, their bank accounts.  Technical tricks used by the hackers made it hard for security software to spot the malicious code once it had compromised a machine.  It is believed to be the largest ever arrest of hackers in Russia.  The Russian authorities carried out raids in 15 regions across the country to round up the gang, the FSB internal security service said.  "As a result of house searches a large quantity of computer equipment was confiscated along with communications gear, bank cards in false names, and also financial documents and significant amounts of cash confirming the illegal nature of their activity," the FSB said. The gang is believed to have stolen cash using a malicious trojan called Lurk that it hid on some of Russia's most popular websites.Anyone visiting a website booby-trapped with Lurk would be infected with the malware. Once on a victim...

After shooting dead a gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo to save a 3-year-old boy, zoo officials said they had collected a sample of his sperm, raising hopes among distraught fans that Harambe could sire offspring even in death.  But officials at the main U.S. body that oversees breeding of zoo animals said it was highly unlikely that the Western lowland gorilla's contribution to the nation's "frozen zoo" of genetic material of rare and endangered species would be used to breed.  Currently, it's not anything we would use for reproduction," Kristen Lukas, who heads the Association of Zoos and Aquariums' Gorilla Species Survival Plan, said on Wednesday. "It will be banked and just stored for future use or for research studies." That undercuts a weekend statement by Cincinnati Zoo Director Thane Maynard that the death of the 17-year-old young silverback, who had been too young to breed, was "not the end of his gene pool."  Zoo officia...

The universe is expanding faster than previously believed, a surprising discovery that could test part of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, a pillar of cosmology that has withstood challenges for a century.  The discovery that the universe is expanding 5 percent to 9 percent faster than predicted, announced in joint news releases by NASA and the European Space Agency, also stirs hypotheses about what fills the 95 percent of the cosmos that emits no light and no radiation, scientists said on Thursday.  "Maybe the universe is tricking us," said Alex Filippenko, a University of California, Berkeley astronomer and co-author of an upcoming paper about the discovery. The universe's rate of expansion does not match predictions based on measurements of the remnant radiation left over from the Big Bang explosion that gave rise to the known universe 13.8 billion years ago.  One possibility for the discrepancy is that the universe has unknown subatomic particles, ...

Ghostly pale and totally blind, olms - fondly known by locals as "baby dragons" - only reproduce every 5-10 years and are thought to live to 100.  This clutch of eggs started to appear in January in an aquarium in Postojna Cave, a tourist destination where the creatures have lived for millennia.  Observing baby olms develop and hatch is a rare opportunity for science.  The first of 23 developed eggs hatched on 30 May; a second baby olm (pictured below) was slowly wriggling out of its egg on Wednesday night."It is the end of one part of the story and the beginning of a whole new chapter: feeding and living without the egg," said Saso Weldt, who looks after and studies the olms at Postojna Cave.  I was in the cave doing some other biological work. Since we have all the eggs on an IR camera, we saw that one was missing. Then you rewind and suddenly you realise, something has happened." Mr Weldt and his colleagues hope to see a full count of 23 healthy hat...