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13 July 2013 | NewScientist | 7 a new radio telescope array. Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute notes that the UK also has access to optical telescopes in the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, which would let them look for laser signals from advanced aliens in parts of the sky that the US’s telescopes in the northern hemisphere cannot see. The request comes as the UK is reducing funding for space science. “While I am a huge fan of these efforts, the timing is simply not good for public funding to be diverted towards it,” says astronomer Stephen Lowry at the University of Kent, UK. WHO sizes up MERS PUBLIC health emergency or not? That is the question being debated this week at a World Health Organization teleconference on Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS), which has killed at least 44 people to date. The meeting takes place at a fairly busy time for Muslim pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia, where most MERS cases so far have been reported. Keiji Fukuda, the WHO’s head of health security, says the MERS coronavirus could go three ways: it could simply fade away, go on causing low numbers of cases, or it could “explode” causing much larger clusters of cases. If it does, the experts at the teleconference will be poised to advise the WHO on how to respond, he says. Should the WHO declare MERS a public health emergency of international concern, it would move the virus up governments’ list of priorities, encouraging them to prepare to deal with it. A campaign of testing for antibodies to the virus is already under way to try to spot previously undetected mild cases of MERS. If many turn up, it would suggest that the virus is less deadly than it might appear, but may spread more easily than we realise. Safer wind turbines IT WAS music to the ears of the anti-wind lobby – in December 2011, a wind turbine at Ardrossan in the UK spectacularly exploded during a storm. Pictures of the flaming debris shower flashed across global media, triggering claims that turbines cannot cope in extreme weather. But Infinis, the operator of the wind farm, claims in a report into the incident that the turbines should be able to withstand such conditions if new safety measures are put in place. It says winds that day reached 176 kilometres per hour, forcing the turbine blades – locked in place because of the hurricane- force winds – to turn against their brake pads, resulting in extremely high temperatures. Infinis says fireproof materials, sensors and extinguishers built into turbines should, in future, prevent this from triggering an explosion. The UK Health and Safety Executive is examining the recommendations. “Fireproof materials, sensors and extinguishers built into turbines should prevent explosions” YOU wait 15 million years for an organism, and then hundreds come along at once. Antarctica’s Lake Vostok, sealed off from the world by 3700 metres of ice for that interminable time, is one of the most extreme environments on Earth. Biologists have long dreamed of the strange forms of life that may call its chilly waters home – and now we find it may be teeming with oddballs. Scott Rogers and colleagues at Bowling Green State University in Ohio took samples of “accretion ice” – water from the lake that has frozen to the undersurface of the glacier trapping it – and sequenced any DNA contained within. They found 3500 gene sequences, 1600 of which matched sequences from known organisms (PLoS One, doi.org/ m5z). Of these matches, 94 per cent came from bacteria, some of which belong to species that normally live inside animals. The rest came from more complex organisms like fungi, crustaceans and molluscs. That still leaves 2000 as yet unidentified. “We found much more complexity than anyone thought,” says Rogers. “It really shows the tenacity of life.” However, the DNA could be contamination. The ice cores – sampled in the 1990s – were drilled with non-sterile equipment. We will have to wait for Russian samples of the lake water to be analysed. Sergey Bulat of the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute tells us their analysis will be completed later this year. Oddball species emerge from lake –Not such a biological wasteland– ALEXEY EKAIKIN/REUTERS 60 SECONDS Hit the road, rover After seven months of sampling Martian soil near its landing site, NASA’s Curiosity rover has started driving towards its main destination, a hill called Mount Sharp. Curiosity will trek 8 kilometres to reach layered sediments on the mountain’s lower slopes – thought to offer the best chance of finding signs of life. Solar success The first plane to fly across the US day and night on solar power alone has completed its five-leg journey, landing in New York on Sunday. The single-seated craft took off from San Francisco in May, flown alternately by Swiss pilots André Borschberg and Bertrand Piccard. The pair intend to fly around the world in 2015 in a two-seater version of the plane. Air raising risk Prolonged exposure to particulate air pollution – tiny pieces of matter in the atmosphere – increases the risk of lung cancer, even when levels are below those considered acceptable by the European Union. That’s according to a meta-analysis of 17 studies in nine countries and 313,000 people. The authors found no threshold below which there was no risk (The Lancet Oncology, DOI: 10.1016/S1470-2045(13)70279-1). Weather death toll The noughties were a dangerous decade. More than 370,000 people were killed by extreme weather events between 2001 and 2010 – a 20 per cent rise over the previous decade, according to a report by the World Meteorological Organization. Movers and shakers Not content with being the fastest animal on Earth, the Anna’s hummingbird is also the fastest shaker. An ultra-slow-motion camera has caught the birds performing a micro-shimmy that is 10 times faster than the speed at which a dog shakes after a bath (Journal for Biomechanics of Flight, in press). For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
