NASA gets that sinking feeling

A NASA satellite designed to measure CO2 levels in such detail that it could locate carbon sinks and sources has failed to reach orbit after it was launched this morning.

The latest news suggests that the moulded structure that encapsulates the satellite while it's travelling through the atmosphere (called a fairing) didn't fall off like it should have. The extra weight of the fairing still on the rocket meant that it didn't have enough power to get into orbit and instead it crashed into the ocean off Antarctica.

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) had been eight years in the planning and was considered a vital step in learning more about the carbon cycle and how it may be affected by climate change.

It's not yet known whether a new OCO will be built but I'm sure NASA would ensure the new OCO will find the sinks rather than doing the sinking itself!

Image: NASA TV

Messing about with robots

I've spent most of my waking hours this week managing an event in the Antenna gallery called 'Robot Playground'. To get a flavour of our very own robot extravaganza, check out at these different accounts from the Telegraph, Times, Sun (including a photo of yours truly) and New Scientist. We also covered the event on our website.

The star of the show was undeniably 'BERTI', a slightly scary robot that can mimic human gestures (see the video below). But what really caught people's attention was the fact that BERTI can play (and usually win) games of 'rock-paper-scissors' against his human master, Paul Bremner of Bristol Robotics Lab.

Craig Fletcher and Graham Whiteley, the two guys who built BERTI were also on hand to chat about the technology used (it's damn complicated) and the next robot they're planning. Craig and Graham told me that BERTI Mark 2 is going to have a face-shaped screen that can have images projected onto it, which sounds eerily like the scramble suits from Philip K. Dick's 'A Scanner Darkly'.

Alongside BERTI we featured a 'robot nursey', populated by baby bots whose personalities are shaped by interacting with people. There's loads of information on this project in the New Scientist video and on the researchers website.

Image: Gaetan Lee/Science Museum

Found - A sink in Africa

A new study published in Nature today has found a large carbon sink in the tropical forests of Africa.

Each year humans emit around 9 billion tonnes of carbon, but only 4 billion tonnes remain in the atmosphere. Like a giant game of hide and seek, scientists have been looking for 20 years, trying to find where that missing 5 billion tonnes of carbon goes.

It is well known that approximately half of that missing carbon goes into the oceans, and half somewhere on land.

This new research by Dr Simon Lewis, of Leeds University, has shown that around 5% of our total emissions are being absorbed by African forests. When this new data is combined with other data from Amazonian and Asian forests, scientists think they have now found at least half the total land sink.

Dr Simon Lewis is online to answer some of our questions about the research.

When satellites collide

It's like something from a Bond film: on Tuesday, 400 miles above Siberia, a defunct Russian satellite and a US-owned communications satellite collided at 420 mph, smashing each other into more that 500 fragments. Apparently it's the first time two satellites in orbit have collided, but I doubt if it'll be the last. There's a lot of junk up there!

Image: ESA

Happy Darwin day

To celebrate the bicentenary of the great man's birth, two British psychologists have created this odd little optical illusion. Monkey-beards, whatever next!?

How to see the illusion: Set your computer monitor to maximum brightness and then stare at the centre of the picture for about 30 seconds without moving your eyes. Next, look to a white wall and blink a few times. The monkeys should suddenly transform into a perfect picture of Darwin!

The world's fastest electric motorbike

Here's something for the environmentally-conscious speedfreak. Mission One is a rather beautiful 150-mph electric motorbike. Unveiled in California last week, the prototype bike runs on lithium-ion batteries, just like mobile phones, and has zero exhaust pipe emissions.

Image: Mission Motors

Meet SandBot

Walking on sand isn't easy, but this little robot has got it sussed. 'SandBot' uses 6 hook-like limbs to motor its way through grainy terrain. Click here for the full story.

Bushfires and climate change

“Australia is experiencing its worst drought for over a hundred years and this, combined with record-breaking temperatures in the last few weeks, makes it hardly surprising that this season's wildfires are worse than anything that has gone before. With climate change models predicting an even drier and hotter Australia in coming decades, the scene could well be set for even worse to come.”

That's the opinion of Professor Bill McGuire, Director of the Hazard Research Centre at University College London. What do people think - is Australia facing an increasingly fiery future?

Image: NASA

Big boa suggests a warmer world

Reptiles grow according to the temperature they live in. The biggest reptiles on Earth are found in the tropics and they gradually get smaller the closer to the Poles they live.

A study published in Nature Magazine today has found a fossil of a snake that would have been at least 13meters long and weighed over a ton! This is larger than any other snake living now or at any time in the past. The gigantic size of the snake suggests that the climate of the South American Rainforest it lived in was about 5 degrees warmer than today’s temperatures.

This gives us a little insight into what the world could again look like if we continue to warm our world with greenhouse gases. What else could we be in for?

This site has more great photos of the fossils. http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/science/2009/02/scientists-discover-worlds-lar.html

Image: Kenneth Krysko

Atronomers spy a distant earth-like planet

We know of more than 300 planets outside our solar system, but the most recently discovered of these 'exoplanets' is making headlines across the world. So what's getting atronomers so excited? Well, the catchily named COROT-Exo-7b is the most Earth-like exoplanet to be spotted yet. Unlike all the others, which are large and gassy, COROT-Exo-7b is small and rocky, just like Earth.

Astronomers detected COROT-Exo-7b as it passed in front of its star (just like the picture above of Mercury orbiting in front of the Sun).

So could COROT-Exo-7b harbour alien life? With a larva-covered surface of between 1,000 and 1,500 degrees Celcius, we can probably rule that out.

Image: Hinode JAXA/NASA/PPARC

Traffic tips from ants

Leafcutter ants have to contend with many things on their daily commute – lugging enormous bits of plant is a fairly gruelling example – but traffic jams aren’t one of them. When two opposite streams of the insects meet in a narrow space, they instinctively (and selflessly) change their behaviour to avoid a gridlock.

The scientists studying leafcutters say that if we were prepared to give control of our cars to a central network based on the ants' behaviour, congestion and road accidents would become a thing of the past. It sounds like a great idea to me, but then I'm not a driver...

Acid oceans a sad story for clownfish

As the seas soak up the CO2 we've pumped into the atmosphere, they're becoming more and more acidic. We've know this for a while now, but the consequences for the creatures that live beneath the waves are only now becoming clear.

A study just out has found that baby clownfish can't sniff out suitable habitats or identify their parents in acidic waters. This could be devastating for a whole range of fish species, say the researchers.

In a similar study published in November, scientists found that Humboldt squid are much lazier in acidic oceans and so far more likely to be munched by a sperm whale.

I wonder whether fish and squid will evolve to cope with acid seawater. There certainly seems to be strong selection pressure in favour of any that can function at low pH.

Image: Sprain

Fighting obesity with a condom

Scientists are hoping that a 'gastric condom' could be a cheap and efficient way for helping people who are dangerously obese to lose weight.

Inserted through the mouth and into the gut, the "Endobarrier" lines the walls of the intestine, preventing nutrients from being taken up.

It doesn't sound very pleasant, but I imagine it's preferable to gastric bypass surgery.

Image: Ludovic Rhodes/iStockphoto

Extinct animal lives again... for seven minutes

Wiped out by over-enthusiastic hunters, the Pyrenean ibex, a kind of mountain goat, has been brought back to life by cloning technology. Sadly, the cloned kid's weak lungs could only keep it going for 7 minutes after birth.

The last Pyrenean ibex, a female called Cecilia, was found dead in 2000. Scientists used DNA from her skin cells to create a clone, inserting Ceclia's DNA into the eggs of a domestic goat - a closely related species.

As always, people are getting very excited about Crichton-esque possibilities. But resurrecting long-dead animals like mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers is much more challenging due to the degraded state of ancient DNA, though there have been some recent breakthroughs.

It looks to me like the ibex clone is more significant for efforts to safeguard living species that are critically endangered.

But even if Cecilia's clone had survived, scientists would still have needed to create a male companion for her to ensure the survival of the species. This seems like quite a considerable barrier to me!