Browser makers demand screen time

Makers of small web browsers want their programs to be given more prominence on Microsoft's browser choice screen.

Six software firms have complained to the EU saying many do not realise their programs were on offer.

To see all 12 web browsers, users must scroll to the right when viewing Microsoft's ballot screen.

The choice is being offered as part of a settlement of an anti-trust case brought against Microsoft by the European Commission.

Global choice

"The final choice screen design leaves the vast majority of users unaware that there are more than five browsers to choose from," the six firms said in their petition.The petition is signed by the makers of the Avant, Flock, Maxthon, Slim, Sleipnir and Green browsers. The makers of the other browser on offer, K-Meleon, did not sign it.

From 1 March, the browser choice have been popping up on the screens of millions of Europeans who have Internet Explorer as their default web browser.

The browser choice screen is designed as a single panel. Scrolling to the right reveals all twelve browsers on offer.

"We are only requesting the simple addition of any text or design element, that would indicate to an average user that there are choices 'to the right of the visible screen'," said the petition.

Microsoft said that the browser choice screen was drawn up to be compliant with the deal agreed with the European Commission.

Early reports suggest the browser choice screen is leading to a rise in the numbers of people trying browsers other than Internet Explorer.

In a statement, Opera said it had seen downloads of its browser increase threefold since the choice screen system started rolling out.

At the same time, the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS) has asked for the browser choice system to be repeated around the world.

In a statement it called on "competition agencies around the world to give their consumers the benefit of browser choice, which will spur competition and improve the Web experience for all".

So far, the ECIS campaign has got no further than an open letter on the organisation's site. However, it did not rule out a more active campaign on the issue of browser choice.

ECIS members include long-time Microsoft rivals Oracle, IBM, Red Hat, Opera and Adobe.

Climate change human link evidence 'stronger'

A review from the UK Met Office says it is becoming clearer that human activities are causing climate change.

It says the evidence is stronger now than when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change carried out its last assessment in 2007.

The analysis, published in the Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change Journal, has assessed 110 research papers on the subject.

It says the Earth is changing rapidly, probably because of greenhouse gases.

In 2007 the IPCC's report concluded that there was "unequivocal" evidence that the Earth was warming and it was likely that it was due to burning of fossil fuels.

Since then the evidence that human activities are responsible for a rise in temperatures has increased, according to this new assessment by Dr Peter Stott and colleagues at the UK Met Office.

The Met Office study comes at a time when some have questioned the entire basis of climate science following recent controversies over the handling of research findings by the IPCC and the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

Dr Stott denies that the study has been published as part of a fight back by the climate research community.

"We started writing this paper a year ago. I think it's important to communicate to people what the science is showing and that's why I'm talking about this paper."

'Consistent picture'

The study, which looks at research published since the IPCC's report, has found that changes in Arctic sea ice, atmospheric moisture, saltiness of parts of the Atlantic Ocean and temperature changes in the Antarctic are consistent with human influence on our climate.

"What this study shows is that the evidence has strengthened for human influence on climate and we know that because we've looked at evidence across the climate system and what this shows very clearly is a consistent picture of a warming world," said Dr Stott.

The study brings together other research from a range of disciplines."We hadn't [until now] looked in detail at how the climate system was changing," says Dr Stott.

"[Our paper looks at] not just the temperatures but also the reducing Arctic sea ice and it includes changing rainfall patterns and it includes the fact that the atmosphere is getting more humid.

"And all these different aspects of the climate system are adding up to a picture of the effects of a human influence on our climate."

The Met Office study said that it was harder to find a firm link between climate change and individual extreme weather conditions - even though models predicted that extreme events were more likely.

According to the report: "Extremes pose a particular challenge, since rare events are by definition, poorly sampled in the historical record and many challenges remain for robustly attributing regional changes in extreme events such as droughts, floods and hurricanes."

Dinosaur extinction link to crater confirmed

An international panel of experts has strongly endorsed evidence that a space impact was behind the mass extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs.

They reached the consensus after conducting the most wide-ranging analysis yet of the evidence.

Writing in Science journal, they rule out alternative theories such as large-scale volcanism.

The analysis has been discussed at the 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in the US.

A panel of 41 international experts reviewed 20 years' worth of research to determine the cause of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) mass extinction, around 65 million years ago.

The extinction wiped out more than half of all species on the planet, including the dinosaurs, bird-like pterosaurs and large marine reptiles, clearing the way for mammals to become the dominant species on Earth.Their review of the evidence shows that the extinction was caused by a massive asteroid or comet smashing into Earth at Chicxulub on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

When the 10km-15km space rock struck the Yucatan, the explosive energy released was equivalent to 100 trillion tonnes of TNT - over a billion times more explosive than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The huge crater that remains from the event is some 180km in diameter and surrounded by a circular fault about 240km in diameter.

"You can actually trace debris right up to the rim of the crater from across the world," Co-author Dr David Kring, from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, told.

"You can start in Europe, cross the Atlantic and it just thickens as you approach the Chicxulub impact crater."In the new study, scientists examined the work of palaeontologists, geochemists, climate modellers, geophysicists and sedimentologists who have been gathering evidence about the K-T extinction.

They conclude that the Chicxulub space impact is the only plausible explanation for the devastation evident in geological records.

The initial impact would have triggered large-scale fires, huge earthquakes, and continental landslides which generated tsunamis.

Dr Gareth Collins, one of the review's co-authors from Imperial College London, said the asteroid hit Earth "20 times faster than a speeding bullet".

He added: "The explosion of hot rock and gas would have looked like a huge ball of fire on the horizon, grilling any living creature in the immediate vicinity that couldn't find shelter."

Dr Joanna Morgan, another co-author from Imperial, commented: "The final nail in the coffin for the dinosaurs happened when blasted material was ejected at high velocity into the atmosphere. This shrouded the planet in darkness and caused a global winter, killing off many species that couldn't adapt to this hellish environment."The review confirms that a unique layer of debris ejected from a crater is compositionally linked to the Mexican crater and is also coincident with rocks associated at the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary.

The team also says that an abundance of shocked quartz in rock layers across the world at the K-T boundary lends further weight to conclusions that a massive meteorite impact happened at the time of the mass extinction. This form of the mineral occurs when rocks have been hit very quickly by a massive force. It is only found at nuclear explosion sites and at asteroid impact sites.

"Combining all available data from different science disciplines led us to conclude that a large asteroid impact 65 million years ago in modern day Mexico was the major cause of the mass extinctions," said author Dr Peter Schulte, assistant professor at the University of Erlangen in Germany.

David Kring explained: "I have been invited to give colloquia at a number of universities across North America and I had always been surprised by the number of people who didn't think the connection was as firm as it was.

"I think it was very important for this distinguished panel of experts from around the world who have seen the evidence from their own geographic quarter to debate the issue and come to a final resolution. I think it is that international consensus that is so important in this case."Scientists have previously argued about whether the extinction was caused by a space impact or by volcanic activity in the Deccan Traps in India, where there were a series of super-volcanic eruptions that lasted approximately 1.5 million years.

These eruptions spewed more than 1,000,000 cu km of basaltic lava across the Deccan Traps - enough to fill the Black Sea twice. These were thought to have caused a cooling of the atmosphere and acid rain on a global scale.

Despite evidence for relatively active volcanism in the Deccan Traps at the time, marine and land ecosystems showed only minor changes within the 500,000 years before the time of the K-T mass extinction.

Furthermore, computer models and observational data suggest the release of gases such as sulphur into the atmosphere after each volcanic eruption in the Deccan Traps would have had a short-lived effect on the planet.

The panel also discounted previous studies that suggested the Chicxulub impact occurred 300,000 years prior to the mass extinction event.

Scientists estimate that this type of impact occurs on average about once every 100 million years; about five have occurred during the evolution of complex life on Earth.

The importance of Chicxulub was cemented by the announcement in 1991 of the discovery of shocked quartz in a 1.6km-deep drill hole from the crater.

David Kring, Alan Hildebrand and William Boynton presented their results at that year's LPSC, then held at Nasa's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Dr Kring explained that he was "elated" with the consensus about the link between Chicxulub and the K-T mass extinction.

Probe may have found cosmic dust

Scientists may have identified the first specks of interstellar dust in material collected by the US space agency's Stardust spacecraft.

A stream of this dust flows through space; the tiny particles are building blocks that go into making stars and planets.

The Nasa spacecraft was primarily sent to catch dust streaming from Comet Wild 2 and return it to Earth for analysis.

But scientists also set out to capture particles of interstellar dust.

The material was gathered by the Stardust probe in a seven-year, 4.8-billion-km (2.9 billion miles) interplanetary voyage.It extended a retractable device containing cells filled with a material called aerogel, a porous substance designed to trap dust molecules.

A capsule containing the precious samples was then returned to Earth in January 2006.

Team members have now reported the possible discovery of two contemporary interstellar dust grains in the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector (SIDC) deployed during the mission.

Dr Andrew Westphal, from the University of California, Berkeley, announced the find at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in The Woodlands, Texas.

'Cautiously excited'

The discovery was made by a member of the public, using the Stardust@Home internet application, which invited participants to search the aerogel collection medium for tiny particles of the dust.

"There are two particles, but they are in the same track. So when they hit the aerogel, they were together - they are two components of the same particle," Dr Westphal told.

"But they are very different from each other. That in itself is interesting, because if this does turn out to be interstellar dust, then it is a bit more heterogeneous than people thought."The initial speck, known as particle 30, was spotted by Bruce Hudson, from Ontario in Canada. Under the agreement made between the science team and participants in Stardust@Home, Mr Hudson was allowed to choose a name for the particle; he called it Orion.

After preliminary analyses, the scientists found another grain upstream, which Bruce Hudson named Sirius.

But Dr Westphal stressed that the find "could be a false alarm".

"The right way to say it is we're cautiously excited," he told me.

"We have very limited data on it so far and the reason is deliberate. The analyses we are doing have the potential to do some minor damage to the particles. We don't think it will and we'll be careful to limit our analyses.

"So far this particle is unique... if we drop it on the floor, it will cost $300m to get another one."

Heavy atoms

Scientists have identified 28 definite impact "tracks" in the interstellar dust collector. But most of these come from angles indicating they are little particles of debris from impacts with the spacecraft's solar panels. However, particle 30 is one of seven with ambiguous trajectories.

Interstellar dust is formed when gas is ejected from stars and condenses to form grains. This dust then has to survive in the interstellar medium - the matter which exists between stars - where it is battered by cosmic radiation and shock processes.

It carries with it the heavy atoms that go into making the stars and planets. Our own Solar System was also constructed with these building blocks.The possible dust grains were collected as Stardust travelled with the interstellar dust stream which passes through our Solar System.

The spacecraft's chief scientist, Dr Don Brownlee from the University of Washington in Seattle, told: "All the heavy atoms in this room were in interstellar dust... so we want to know what this stuff is."

He added: "This dust, once it's formed, and once it's heated or changed [initially] it is set for billions of years.

Dr Westphal told: "It is very fine-grained material, which is what you'd expect for interstellar dust. It has an elemental composition which is consistent with what you would expect for interstellar dust. And it has a composition for other elements which are not inconsistent, but a bit surprising."

The researchers have so far analysed magnesium, aluminium, iron, chromium, manganese, nickel, copper and gallium from the particles.

A new mineral found in a type of particle known as interplanetary dust has recently been named Brownleeite after Dr Brownlee, who is regarded as a founder of the field of cosmic dust research. The discovery has been published in the journal American Mineralogist.

Though highly prized by Stardust's team, interstellar dust can be a nuisance in optical astronomy, because it can obscure objects in regions of the sky targeted for observation.

Money sharing comes to Facebook

Friends on social networking site Facebook can now send small payments directly to each other via an application called Buxter.

Buxter handles transactions in Euros or US dollars, with plans to launch in Sterling in the next four weeks.

Other currencies are subject to a 5% conversion fee at the point of upload to a Buxter account.

The company behind the application is ClickandBuy which operates an online payment service across the web.

More than 13 million people across the world already have accounts with it, and a ClickandBuy account is required in order to use Buxter.

Transactions between Buxter accounts are free to make and receive but a 1.9% commission fee, minimum 2 euros or $3 (£2), is charged to move the money to another source such as a bank account.

"People share their statuses, their information and their pictures on Facebook so the question is why not share money there too?" Christian von Hammel-Bonten, senior vice president at ClickandBuy told.

The application is designed for fairly small payments (a maximum of 50 euros (£45) can be held in any one account) and transactions can only be made among people who are friends on Facebook.

Mr von Hammel-Bonten said he hoped people would use the service to pay each other for shared expenses such as cinema tickets and restaurant bills initially.

"We're not trying to compete with national banking systems. This is not somewhere to pay your gas or rent," he said.

PlayStation 3 gaming console clock bug 'fixed'

Sony has said that a millennium-style bug that prevented thousands of PlayStation 3 owners from using its online games network has been resolved.

The firm said that the fault had been caused by machines that had "recognised the year 2010 as a leap year".

The problem did not affect the newer "slim" models of the PS3, Sony said.

The Japanese electronics giant had previously advised gamers to stop using their games console until the problem was fixed.

"We are aware that the internal clock functionality in the PlayStation (PS3) units other than the slim model, recognized the year 2010 as a leap year," said Patrick Seybold of the firm in a blog post."Having the internal clock date change from 29 February to 1 March (both GMT), we have verified that the symptoms are now resolved and that users are able to use their PS3 normally."

The problem meant that PS3 owners were unable to connect to the PlayStation Network, used by millions around the world to play online games and download movies.

It said that if gamers still experienced problems, they should adjust the date settings manually or via the internet.

Some have likened the problem to the millennium bug.

The problem, also known as the Y2K bug, was predicted to cause a global computer meltdown when computer clocks changed at the end of the millennium. In the end, few problems were experienced.

Nose scanning techniques could sniff out criminals

We already have iris and fingerprint scanning but noses could be an even better method of identification, says a study from the University of Bath, UK.

The researchers scanned noses in 3D and characterised them by tip, ridge profile and the nasion, or area between the eyes.

They found 6 main nose types: Roman, Greek, Nubian, hawk, snub and turn-up.

Since they are hard to conceal, the study says, noses would work well for identification in covert surveillance.

The researchers say noses have been overlooked in the growing field of biometrics, studies into ways of identifying distinguishing traits in people.

"Noses are prominent facial features and yet their use as a biometric has been largely unexplored," said the University of Bath's Dr Adrian Evans.

"Ears have been looked at in detail, eyes have been looked at in terms of iris recognition but the nose has been neglected."

The researchers used a system called PhotoFace, developed by researchers at the University of the West of England, Bristol and Imperial College, London, for the 3D scans.Several measurements by which noses can be recognised were identified and the team developed recognition software based on these parameters.

"This initial work is nowhere as good as iris identification but the nose has pros and cons," said Dr Evans.

"There's no magic biometric that solves all your problems. Irises are a powerful biometric but can be difficult to capture accurately and can be easily obscured by eyelids or glasses. People can easily cover up their ears, with their hair for example.

"Of course you can have a broken nose or wear a false nose or have plastic surgery but to have nose surgery to change your identity is fairly drastic.

"Irises are very good for recognition but you can put in dilation drops which change the iris completely. No technique is infallible," he said.

The research is based on a study of 40 noses and the data base has now been expanded to 160 for further tests to see if the software can pick out people from a larger group and distinguish between relatives.

Dr Evans hopes the method can be proven to be effective on this larger sample. "The technique certainly shows potential, perhaps to be used in combination with other identification methods," he said.

Etched ostrich eggs illustrate human sophisticationEtched ostrich eggs illustrate human sophistication

Inscribed ostrich shell fragments found in South Africa are among the earliest examples of the use of symbolism by modern humans, scientists say.

The etched shells from Diepkloof Rock Shelter in Western Cape have been dated to about 60,000 years ago.

Details are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers, who have investigated the material since 1999, argue that the markings are almost certainly a form of messaging - of graphic communication.

"The motif is two parallel lines, which we suppose were circular, but we do not have a complete refit of the eggs," explained Dr Pierre-Jean Texier from the University of Bordeaux, Talence, France."The lines are crossed at right angles or oblique angles by hatching. By the repetition of this motif, early humans were trying to communicate something. Perhaps they were trying to express the identity of the individual or the group," he told.

Symbolic thought - the ability to let one thing represent another - was a giant leap in human evolution, and sets our species apart from the rest of the animal world.

Understanding when and where this behaviour first emerged is a key quest for scientists studying human origins.

Arguably the earliest examples of conceptual thought are the pieces of shell jewellery discovered at Skhul Cave in Israel and from Oued Djebbana in Algeria. These artefacts are 90,000-100,000 years old.

Shell beading from 75,000 years ago is also found at Blombos Cave in South Africa, as well as a number of ochre blocks that have engravings not dissimilar to those at Diepkloof.However, the significance of the Diepkloof finds may lie in their number, which proves such markings could not have been simple doodlings.

"What is extraordinary at Diepkloof is that we have close to 300 pieces of such engravings, which is why we are speaking of a system of symbolic representation," Dr Texier said.

The team, which includes Dr Guillaume Porraz from the University of Tubingen, tried themselves to recreate the markings using pieces of flint.

"Ostrich egg shells are quite hard. Doing such engravings is not so easy. You have to pass through the outer layer to get through the middle layer," Dr Texier explained.

The team's experiments also suggest that the colouration of the fragments is natural and not the result of the application of pigments.

The group was able to reproduce similar hues by baking pieces of shell near a fire. Professor Chris Stringer, of London's Natural History Museum, said the find was important.

"Here we've got something that we can compare with later material that clearly does have important signalling value in the populations," he.

"It's a very nice link between the Middle Stone Age, the later Stone Age and even recent population in South Africa. One question now is whether this is a special site, or as we excavate more sites will we find this material is more widespread?"

Ice deposits found at Moon's pole

A radar experiment aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 lunar spacecraft has identified thick deposits of water-ice near the Moon's north pole.

The US space agency's (Nasa) Mini-Sar experiment found more than 40 small craters containing water-ice.

But other compounds - such as hydrocarbons - are mixed up in lunar ice, according to new results from another Moon mission called LCROSS.

The findings were presented at a major planetary science conference in Texas.

The craters with ice range from 2km to 15km (one to nine miles) in diameter; how much there is depends on its thickness in each crater. But Nasa says the ice must be at least a couple of metres thick to give the signature seen by Chandrayaan-1.

Dr Paul Spudis, from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, estimated there was at least 600 million metric tonnes of water-ice held within these impact craters.

The equivalent amount, expressed as rocket fuel, would be enough to launch one space shuttle per day for 2,200 years, he told journalists at the 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

What all these craters have in common are large areas of their interiors that never see sunlight.

Extreme cold

Temperatures in some of these permanently darkened craters can drop as low as 25 Kelvin (-248C; -415F) - colder than the surface of Pluto - allowing water-ice to remain stable.

"It is mostly pure water-ice," said Dr Spudis. "It could be under a few tens of centimetres of dry regolith (lunar soil)."

This protective layer of soil could prevent blocks of pure ice from vaporising even in some areas which are exposed to sunlight, he explained.In February, President Barack Obama cancelled the programme designed to return Americans to the Moon by 2020.

However, Dr Spudis said: "Now we can say with a fair degree of confidence that a sustainable human presence on the Moon is possible. It's possible using the resources we find there.

"The results from these missions, that we have seen in the last few months, are totally revolutionising our view of the Moon."

Chandrayaan-1 was India's contribution to the armada of unmanned spacecraft to have been launched to the Moon in recent years. Japan, Europe, China and the US have all sent missions packed with instruments to explore Earth's satellite in unprecedented detail.

In Nasa's LCROSS mission, a rocket and a probe were smashed into a large crater at the lunar south pole, kicking up water-ice and water vapour.

Spectral measurements of material thrown up by the LCROSS impact indicate some of the water-ice was in a crystalline form, rather than the "amorphous" form in which the water molecules are randomly arranged.

Water source

"There's not one flavour of water on the Moon; there's a range of everything from relatively pure ice all the way to adsorbed water," said the mission's chief scientist Anthony Colaprete, from Nasa's Ames Research Center.

"And here is an instance inside Cabeus crater where it appears we threw up a range of fine-grained particulates of near pure crystalline water-ice."

Overall, results from recent missions suggest there could be several sources for lunar ice.

One important way for water to form is through an interaction with the solar wind, the fast-moving stream of particles that constantly billows away from the Sun.

Space radiation triggers a chemical reaction in which oxygen atoms already in the soil acquire hydrogen nuclei to make water molecules and the simpler hydrogen-oxygen (OH) molecule. This "adsorbed" water may be present as fine films coating particles of lunar soil.

In a cold sink effect, water from elsewhere on the lunar surface may migrate to the slightly cooler poles, where it is retained in permanently shadowed craters.

Scientists have also reported the presence of hydrocarbons, such as ethylene, in the LCROSS impact plume. Dr Colaprete said any hydrocarbons were likely to have been delivered to the lunar surface by comets and asteroids - another vital source of lunar water.

However, he added, some of these chemical species could arise through "cold chemistry" on interstellar dust grains accumulated on the Moon.

In addition to water, researchers have seen a range of other "volatiles" (compounds with low boiling points) in the impact plume, including sulphur dioxide (SO2) and carbon dioxide (CO2).

The results from the Mini-Sar instrument are due to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The team is currently analysing results for craters at the Moon's south pole.