LaNUBlog™

As the Moon moves into the Earth's shadow it changes colour to blood red or brown Skywatchers in the Americas will be able to catch a rare celestial show as Earth's shadow falls across the Moon. On Tuesday morning (BST), the Moon changes colour from orange to blood red or brown in a total lunar eclipse.

An Italian student suffering from a rare disease has denounced death threats she received after defending medical experiments on animals. Caterina Simonsen said more than 30 "death wishes" and 500 abusive messages were sent to on her Facebook page.

The health of the world’s oceans is deteriorating even faster than had previously been thought, a report says. A review from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), warns that the oceans are facing multiple threats. They are being heated by climate change, turned slowly less alkaline by absorbing CO2, and suffering from overfishing and pollution. The report warns that dead zones formed by fertiliser run-off are a problem. It says conditions are ripe for the sort of mass extinction event that has afflicted the oceans in the past. It says: “We have been taking the ocean for granted. It has been shielding us from the worst effects of accelerating climate change by absorbing excess CO2 from the atmosphere. “Whilst terrestrial temperature increases may be experiencing a pause, the ocean continues to warm regardless. For the most part, however, the public and policymakers are failing to recognise - or choosing to ignore - the severity of the situation.” It says t...

Some 200 years after Mary Shelley used lightning to breath life into Frankenstein's monster, scientists have copied her idea to power a phone. The proof-of-concept experiment was conducted at the University of Southampton in collaboration with Nokia. The mobile firm warned users "not to try this at home". Harnessing nature in this way could provide power sources where electricity is in short supply, said experts. Huge step Using a transformer, the team recreated a lightning bolt in the lab by passing 200,000 volts across a 30cm (11in) air gap. "We were amazed to see that the Nokia circuitry somehow stabilised the noisy signal, allowing the battery to be charged," said Neil Palmer, from the University of Southampton's high voltage laboratory. The proof-of-concept experiment is a step towards harnessing the energy from lightning "This discovery proves devices can be charged with a current that passes through the air, and is a huge step towards understandi...

The planet in question is Kepler-7b, a large gaseous world like Jupiter, roughly 1,000 light-years away. The researchers used data from Nasa's Spitzer and Kepler space telescopes to study the exoplanet, which orbits close to its parent star. Their results suggest the hot giant is marked by high clouds in the west and clear skies in the east. The findings have been accepted for publication in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters. "By observing this planet with Spitzer and Kepler for more than three years, we were able to produce a very low-resolution 'map' of this giant, gaseous planet," said co-author Brice-Olivier Demory of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, US. "We wouldn't expect to see oceans or continents on this type of world, but we detected a clear, reflective signature that we interpreted as clouds." Astronomers have previously been able to make temperature maps of planets orbiting other stars, but this is the fir...

Species affected by rainforest fragmentation are likely to be wiped out more quickly than previously thought, scientists have warned. A study found that some small mammal species on forest islands, created by a hydroelectric reservoir, in Thailand became extinct in just five years. It also showed that populations in the fragmented habitats were also at risk from another threat - invasive species. The findings have been published in the journal Science. Results showed that almost all small mammals disappeared from patches of fragmented forest smaller than 10 hectares (25 acres) within just five years, and larger plots - measuring up to 56ha - recorded the loss of small animals within 25 years. Co-author Luke Gibson from the National University of Singapore said the team was very surprised by the findings, describing it "like an ecological Armageddon". "None of us expected such a dramatic change from 20 years ago," he told the BBC's Science in Action progr...

Continued,.... "Anything that can help to give people with depression a different experience by lifting their mood temporarily might well aid them in overcoming their difficulties," he says. "But a complete recovery usually comes when people are able to see changes in all the other areas of difficulty as well." A worldwide phenomenon? So far, the effect of the sea on health has only been investigated on UK volunteers. Taking the sea air *.In 1757, Dr Richard Russell wrote about the therapeutic benefits of seawater. "You need to drink seawater, bathe in it, and eat all forms of seafood in which all the virtue of the sea can be found," he wrote. He thought it could relieve conditions as diverse as flatulence, leprosy, gonorrhoea and cancer. *.The 18th Century saw the invention of bathing machines and the first swimsuits. But it was in the 19th Century that seaside resorts really took off, initially as destinations for the upper classes who wished to...

We have long taken it for granted that a lungful of sea air and getting sand between our toes is good for our wellbeing. But does being by the seaside really make a difference to health? The Victorians clearly thought so, building beach huts and promenades at beautiful locations along the UK coastline. But even the latest census data reveals that people living near the sea are happier than those inland. So what's going on? A new study at the University of Exeter is trying to find out - and if we can harness the benefits for people living miles from the sea. What we're really interested in doing is reconnecting people with the natural environment Dr Mathew White, Environmental Psychologist, University of Exeter Medical School "We know that city living can really affect our mental health and wellbeing, and undermine it, but also our physical health, particularly through the release of stress hormones and exercising less," says Dr Mathew White, who is leading the ...

The Curiosity rover's failure to detect methane on Mars is a blow to theories that the planet may still host some types of life, say mission scientists. Telescopes and satellites have reported seeing small but significant volumes of the gas, but the six-wheeled robot can pick up no such trace. On Earth, 95% of atmospheric methane is produced by microbial organisms. Researchers have hung on to the hope that the molecule's signature at Mars might also indicate a life presence. The inability of Curiosity's sophisticated instrumentation to make this detection is likely now to dent this optimism. "Based on previous measurements, we were expecting to go there and find 10 parts per billion (ppbv) or more, and we were excited about finding it. So when you go to search for something and you don't find it, there's a sense of disappointment," said Dr Chris Webster, the principal investigator on Curiosity's Tuneable Laser Spectrometer (TLS). The Nasa rover...

There is a surprising amount of water bound up in the soil of Mars, according to an analysis done onboard the US space agency's (Nasa) Curiosity rover. When it heated a small pinch of dirt scooped up from the ground, the most abundant vapour detected was H2O. Curiosity researcher Laurie Leshinand colleagues tell Science Magazinethat Mars' dusty red covering holds about 2% by weight of water. This could be a useful resource for future astronauts, they say. "If you think about a cubic foot of this dirt and you just heat it a little bit - a few hundred degrees - you'll actually get off about two pints of water - like two water bottles you'd take to the gym," Dr Leshin explained. "And this dirt on Mars is interesting because it seems to be about the same everywhere you go. If you are a human explorer, this is really good news because you can quite easily extract water from almost anywhere." The dean of science at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institu...

Oxygen may have been accumulating in Earth's atmosphere hundreds of millions of years earlier than we thought. An international team has made the claim in Nature magazine after studying the oldest soils on Earth. The researchers say elements in the three-billion-year-old material show evidence for oxidative weathering. This is some 700 million years before the Great Oxidation Event when other geological data points to a dramatic rise in free O2 in the atmosphere. If confirmed, it is a significant observation because it suggests the ability of ancient lifeforms to produce oxygen may also have got going earlier than previously recognised. "Oxygenic photosynthesis is a very complicated metabolism and it makes sense that the evolution of such a metabolism would take perhaps two billion years - that we might not see its manifestation until the Great Oxidation Event. But now that we see oxygen much earlier in the atmosphere, it tells us that even really complex metabolisms can ...

Continued......., ....It's inevitable that a world largely hidden from view would suffer from misconceptions, says John Fraser Hart, co-author of The Unknown World of the Mobile Home, but they are nicer and more spacious than people realise. He thinks their image as dens of sex, crime and hard drinking is partly due to television. The Canadian series Trailer Park Boys is one example, and in films like Boys Don't Cry, bad things happen in these places, which aren't just on the edge of town, they're on the edge of civilisation. This seedy image has been further enhanced by depictions in pulp fiction novels. And such negative representations are expressed in one insulting term - "trailer trash". But interestingly, some of the residents at Oak Haven think there's some truth in the stereotype. "A lot of the trailer parks, there's a lot of trouble, they're so cramped together, and you have a lot of low income people moving into trailers," s...

Continued,..... "My father was a railroad man and I was raised on a farm so I always collected antiques," says Butch Comer, 66(above with partner Eleanor), pointing to an array of collectibles around his bedroom. "I love it because you can come out and sit in a chair and no-one is raising hell." Gary Miller, 72, is poking around in his shed, behind the 70ft home where he has lived for 27 years. "It's quiet. There'sno bunch of drunks hanging around having parties. After the five kids got off on their own, we moved down here. It's the first property we ever owned. I would rather live in a house, it seems safer. In storms, you have to watch these things but we don't have that many big ones." The homes at Oak Haven are typical in that they are rarely moved but the first mobile homes were true to their name and towed. "In the Great Depression in the 1930s, people started living in trailers which were designed for travelling and vacat...

An estimated 20 million Americans live in mobile homes, according to new Census figures. How did this become the cheap housing of choice for so many people? "From the state where 20% of our homes are mobile 'cause that's how we roll, I'm Brooke Mosteller, Miss South Carolina." Not the usual jaunty PR message you expect to hear at Miss America. And Mosteller caused a minor stormfor presenting what some South Carolina natives felt was a negative slight on the state. A few days after her comments, US Census figures confirmed that her state did indeed have the highest proportion of mobile homes - also known as trailers or manufactured housing - though the figure is closer to 18% than 20%. Mobile homes have a huge image problem in the US, where in many minds they are shorthand for poverty. But how accurate is this perception? Comparing the top 10 mobile home states with the 10 most deprived states suggests a loose correlation. South Carolina is not among the 10 p...

The deliberate large-scale manipulation of the Earth's environment, called geoengineering, could be one way to cool the Earth or help reduce levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But scientists are aware that these technologies are in very early stages of development and remain untested on a global scale. Although there are great risks in deliberately interfering with nature to cool the planet, some researchers say that if the concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere reach a critical stage, geoengineering might become the only way to take control of our climate. On the other hand, others worry that having the technology to "reverse" climate change could be seen as a get-out-of-jail-free card and that more effort should be put on existing ways of reducing emissions. Steve Rayner of the Oxford Geoengineering Programme, UK, says that there is no easy answer, but it would be "irresponsible for us not to explore the potential to understand the technologies a...