SCIENCE BOND

The Bloodhound Super-Sonic Car was supposed to go racing later this year, to try to raise the current mark of 763mph (1,228km/h) to over 800mph.  But the project does not yet have the funds needed to run the vehicle on its specially prepared track in South Africa.  It is hoped the delay will enable more sponsorship deals to be sealed.  "It's in the nature of land speed record attempts that they tend to be a bit hand-to-mouth," said Bloodhound director, Richard Noble.  "But the good thing is that we have a steady stream of offers coming in. It's hard work to get them done, and they can always collapse.  "What tends to happen is that the nearer you get to actually running, the whole thing turns. We've just got to get on with it," he told. The car itself is virtually complete. At 13m in length and weighing more than 7 tonnes, Bloodhound had its static debut in London last September.Its one major outstanding element is its rocket system. This...

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...

The in-vitro fertilisation success paves the way for conserving endangered breeds and could help in the fight against human and animal diseases, say researchers at Cornell University.  The seven beagle and cross-bred beagle-spaniel puppies were born to a surrogate mother.  They were from the same litter but have three sets of parents.  Frozen embryos were implanted in a female dog using techniques similar to those used in human fertility clinics.  Problems with freezing embryos have caused difficulties in the past, but the group say they have perfected this and other techniques.Lead researcher Dr Alex Travis, from Cornell's college of veterinary medicine, said: "We have seven normal happy healthy puppies."  He added: "Since the mid-1970s, people have been trying to do this in a dog and have been unsuccessful.  "Now we can use this technique to conserve the genetics of endangered species."The researchers say IVF is a powerful tool to help endangered spe...

Many birds are at risk when they stop to feed, rest or breed en route, say scientists.  They are calling for new reserves around the world to protect migratory species.  Most migratory birds have declined in past decades, from threats such as habitat loss and hunting.  Migrant birds are the endurance fliers of the bird kingdom, making remarkable journeys across land and sea.  The arctic tern, for example, flies the equivalent of the distance to the Moon and back three times in its lifetime.  And the bar-tailed godwit may fly for more than 10,000km (6,000 miles) in a single stint, the longest continuous journey that has ever been recorded for a land bird. Dr Claire Runge, of the University of Queensland, the lead researcher of the study, said more than half of migratory bird species travelling the world's main flyways had suffered serious population declines in the past 30 years."This is due mainly to unequal and ineffective protection across their mig...

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...

It replicates the repeating lattice of sodium and chloride ions found in a crystal of salt (NaCl).  Standing more than 3m tall, the model was built by Dr Robert Krickl from nearly 40,000 balls and 10km of sticks.  The world record attempt will be adjudicated by the Guinness Book of Records on 23 November.  It will be on public display until 30 November, and has already been commemorated on an Austrian postage stamp.Because of the regular pattern it is built up from, which causes hundreds of the "ions" to form precise lines from multiple angles, the huge model has a rather dazzling appearance. It also has particular significance this week, Dr Krickl said.  "This week it's the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prize for discovering what I show with this model: the arrangement of atoms in crystals."  The British father-and-son team of William and Lawrence Bragg won the physics Nobel in 1915 for originating the technique that is now known as X-ray crystallog...