SCIENCE BOND

Posts

The UK's premier prize for science books has been won by Gaia Vince

Adventures in the Anthropocene is her record of the people and places she encountered on a huge global tour. The book details how humans are altering the planet, but it also tells the stories of how we are learning to limit and cope with that change. The Royal Society Winton Prize is worth £25,000 to the winner. "Anthropocene" is the word used by many scientists to describe the epoch of humanity's profound influence on the Earth. There are arguments over when our activities started to distort natural processes, but there is no doubting the effects today. Pollution, species loss, over-exploitation of water and mineral resources, and of course climate change. The list goes on. This is "the age we made".Gaia knew all the data from her job as a science reporter, but she wanted to see the impacts first-hand. So, she put on hold the nine-to-five existence and bought a one-way ticket to Kathmandu, to start a personal odyssey and directly sample some of the...

Total lunar eclipse to meet supermoon

The Moon will turn a rusty hue in the early hours of Monday and may seem larger in the sky. The event is caused by a total lunar eclipse coinciding with another astronomical event called a supermoon. It's the second total lunar eclipse this year, but the first since 2008 where the whole eclipse will be visible from the UK. The entire eclipse will be visible from eastern North America, South America, West Africa and western Europe. Skywatchers in the western half of North America, the rest of Europe and Africa, the Middle East and South Asia will see a partial one. From the UK, observers will see the Moon pass through the Earth's shadow in the early hours of Monday morning. In North and South America the eclipse will be seen on Sunday evening. The last time a total lunar eclipse was visible in its entirety from the UK was 2008; the next time one will be visible after this is in 2019 The supermoon, where Earth's satellite is near its minimum distan...

Porn sites hit by malware hidden in adverts

The advertising, apparently for a service called Sex Messenger, also contained tools for identifying whether the user was genuine rather than a bot. It appeared on porn site xhamster, one of the world's most visited domains. However the firm said porn sites are no more dangerous than mainstream ones. The ad has now been removed. The malware, which also made use of the security of cloud-based platforms to hide what it was doing, worked by directing the user to a fraudulent page once it had determined that they were running Microsoft's Internet Explorer and had identified the device's security settings. So-called "malvertising" often installs ransomware on to a victim's machine. It loads a page containing false accusations of criminal activity and instructions for paying a fine. "These efforts ensure that only real users will get to see the exploit kit landing page therefore excluding honeypots and security researchers alike," wrote Ma...

Homo naledi fossil prints come to London

They are among the most sensational fossils to be found in Africa in recent years, and visitors to London's Natural History Museum can see what all the fuss is about on Friday. 3D prints of the remains of Homo naledi will be on display at the NHM's Science Uncovered event. They were given to the institution by the Johannesburg discovery team. Bones from perhaps 15 of the human-like creatures were recovered from a cave complex not far from the city. It is the biggest haul of fossil hominin remains ever identified on the African continent. The researchers - led by Lee Berger of Wits University - have scanned the bones to make faithful copies, and these have now been shared with the London museum. At Science Uncovered, Dr Louise Humphrey will be explaining their significance and what they could tell us about human origins. I think the effect on the field is transformative," she told, "not just because the morphology indicates a new specie...

The latest image of Pluto release from the New Horizons mission

The Nasa probe, which flew by the dwarf planet in July, continues to downlink its data, and as it comes in, the scientists get to work on it. The ripples stretch for many hundreds of km. It looks more like tree bark or dragon scales than geology," observed mission team member Bill McKinnon. This'll really take time to figure out; maybe it's some combination of internal tectonic forces and ice sublimation driven by Pluto's faint sunlight," the Washington University, St Louis, scientist said in a US space agency release. The best way to look at "scales" is to browse the new high-resolution enhanced colour view of Pluto that has been made available (PNG file, 70MB). The features are on the far eastern edge.This super image comes from the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera on New Horizons. It combines blue, red and near infrared (NIR) images. The enhanced view will help decode the various geological and climatological processes that hav...

Everyone surrounded by a unique "cloud" of millions of their own bacteria, by scientists at the University of Oregon in the US

Everyone is surrounded by a unique "cloud" of millions of their own bacteria, according to scientists at the University of Oregon in the US. Walk through someone else's cloud, and it will "rain" bacteria on your skin and be breathed into your lungs. The study on 11 people, published in the journal PeerJ, showed it was possible to identify people from their microbial miasma. One microbiologist said the findings were simply "gross". Studies have already shown that our microbiome - the collection of bacteria, viruses and fungi that live on our skin and in our bodies - outnumbers our own cells 10-to-one. These can be spread through direct contact, airborne emissions and shed skin cells in dust.People were kept in a sealed chamber for four hours with air pumped in through a filter to prevent contamination. Dishes and filters inside the chamber collected samples from the emanating cloud. One of the researchers, Dr James Meadow, said: "We...

Drones build rope bridge that humans can cross

Quadcopter drones have been programmed to build a rope bridge capable of supporting the weight of a human. The project was the result of a joint study by two researchers - one specialising in robotics, the other architecture - at ETH Zurich University's Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control and Gramazio Kohler Research. They hope the technology could eventually be used to save lives.