SCIENCE BOND

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Origin of mystery deep sea mushroom revealed

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...

A bluetooth system that alerts underground train users to give up their seats for pregnant travellers has been trialled in South Korea

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...

Scientists discover gene that causes multiple sclerosis

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...

Russian hacker gang arrested over $25m theft

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...

Genes of slain Cincinnati gorilla still live on

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...

Astronomers say universe expanding faster than predicted

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, ...

Eggs laid by a peculiar salamander in a Slovenian cave have started to hatch

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...