The fossil, a one millimetre-wide crustacean called an ostracod, was found in Brazil and examined by David Siveter at the University of Leicester. It was preserved with its shell open displayed another surprise – not one but two penises.

“We think there are two penises as they evolved from a set of appendages. The female also has two vaginas and their copulation may last from a few seconds up to a few minutes,” says Siveter. “They display the longest and most ostentatious display of sex in the fossil record.”

“Although we have recognised gender in the fossil record for 500 million years this is the first example of a penis of this age,” he adds.

Most ostracods are tiny marine creatures, but they have the largest sperm to body ratio in the natural world – up to ten times their body size. Those with the largest sperm have needed to devise a special system to enable them to fertilise a female.

“They have to use a type of bicycle pump to eject the sperm into the female,” Seviter says.

This research was presented at the British Association Festival of Science in Leicester, UK

Stone tools from the oldest such site in India suggests early humans living one million years ago had the ability to plan ahead, work in groups and possibly even communicate.

But despite achieving these feats with a brain just half the size of modern humans, they appear to have been rather forgetful too.

Cambridge University’s Michael Petraglia is excavating a limestone quarry in the southwest Indian state of Karnataka that has given up stone tools of the Acheulean type. This technology is over 1.7 million years old and typically features hand axes and cleavers.

“This site could be one million years old, which would make it twice as old as any other Acheulean site in India” he says. It provides a unique window on how the tools were manufactured, he says.

Petraglia found that early humans had imported hard basaltic hammer stones from two kilometres away into the quarry. These were then used to remove and fashion the limestone into cleavers and axes.

“We replicated this technique and found that it took two people to lift the limestone slabs to break off the smaller pieces needed to make the tools,” he says. “This indicates that they worked in groups and could have had the ability to communicate by gesturing in order to move and manipulate the rock.”

These tools seem to have been used for many purposes, including butchery. “We found remnants of plant residue, wood and also large animal carcasses in the quarry,” says Petraglia.

He also revealed that the team had found stone tools scattered up to five kilometres away from the quarry site: “We found no tools outside this distance which suggests they dropped them soon after leaving the site.”

Petraglia presented his work at the British Association Festival of Science in Leicester, UK.

“If we’re all on the database, we’re all in exactly the same boat – the issue of discrimination disappears,” says Alec Jeffreys of the University of Leicester, UK.

More than 1.5 million DNA profiles are currently held in the police’s National DNA Database. The target is to have about three million profiles by April 2004.

Jeffreys says a complete national database should be controlled by an independent body and be limited to storing DNA information that only permits an identification – it should not carry DNA data that could be used to infer appearance, or susceptibility to disease.

Court orders

The original physical sample should be destroyed, Jeffreys adds, to prevent anyone gaining such information in the future. He is concerned that forensic scientists might attempt to use retrieved DNA to discover a person’s ethnicity, hair or eye colour, when the police have no clear suspect in mind.

Police might also wish to retain information on cleared suspects, because they think they might go on to commit a crime in future, he says.

As a further safeguard, he thinks the police should be forced to go to court to obtain the address of a criminal suspect identified using the database: “The police should be able to prove that a sample from a crime scene matched a DNA profile on the database before being supplied with their identity.”

Jeffreys revolutionised forensic and legal medicine by accidentally inventing DNA fingerprinting in 1984. He realised that analysing repeats of certain stretches of DNA can allow identification of an individual. The technique is widely used to in criminal investigations as well as to solve paternity disputes.

Jeffreys presented his research at the British Association Festival of Science in Leicester.

David Sims, of the Marine Biological Association, says: “They are very active creatures that are constantly prospecting for plankton and do not descend to deep waters and sit on the sea bed to hibernate as previously thought.”

The migration patterns were tracked using by attaching small satellite tags to 20 of the huge creatures.

“They explore large expanses of the ocean and are always on the lookout for plankton,” says Sims. “We were able to show incredible behaviours and journeys where they travelled thousands of miles in a month or two.”

He found that one of the sharks travelled from the English Channel to the Scottish Hebridean Islands in 76 days, feeding on the zooplankton along the continental shelf edge. Another descended to over 750 metres.

Basking sharks can weigh up to seven tonnes and reach 12 metres in length but are completely harmless to humans. They are solitary animals that feed on plankton and have been hunted to near extinction for their liver oil and fins.

They are listed as an endangered species, but Sims found that they spent 99 per cent of their time outside the area of UK protection, 12 miles off the coast. In the US, they have extended basking shark protected areas out to 300 miles from the East coast. Sims believes the UK must consider similar action.

Sims presented his research at the British Association Festival of Science in Leicester.

Over five million tonnes of CO₂have been pumped into sandstone under the Sleipner Field since 1996. The greenhouse gas had been separated from extracted natural gas and would normally have been released into the atmosphere.

Andrew Chadwick, at the British Geological Survey, and colleagues used seismic images collected before and during the experiment to track where the CO₂ has collected. At the moment, it is buried underneath a layer of impermeable shale rock, 1000 metres beneath the seabed.

“This method of carbon dioxide sequestration is probably one of the most powerful techniques we have for the next 50 years for reducing CO₂ emissions,” says Chadwick. “We believe it is safe, technically feasible and certainly has very little environmental downside.”

Trapped gas

The reservoir for the buried CO₂ is a permeable and porous sandstone, called the Utsira sand. The pores initially contain salt water but is displaced when the carbon dioxide is pumped in. The gas then spreads up through the sandstone, becoming trapped between layers of shale and mudstone.

Seismic images reveal that the CO₂ is not leaking back to the seabed. In the last two years it has migrated to the top of the sandstone layer, resembling a 1700 metre bubble.

This underground location has the potential to store up to 600 billion cubic metres of CO₂, says Chadwick. So, if only one per cent of it was used, it could trap a year’s worth of CO₂ from over 900 coal-fired or 2300 gas-fired 500 MW power stations.

“It is viable means of reducing industrial CO₂ emissions” says Chadwick. “But there are cost implications and you would need to find suitable storage locations. The obvious places are exhausted oil and gas fields as we now know gas does not easily escape from these.”

Chadwick was presented his work to the British Association Festival of Science in Leicester on Tuesday.

Marisa Taylor-Clarke at University College London poked volunteers’ forearms with a two-pronged, compass-like device. They were asked to tell whether they had been touched in one place or two, under four different experimental conditions.

In no instance were the volunteers able to see the actual touch. In the first, they saw their forearms immediately before and afterwards. In the second, the area about to be touched was magnified. In the third, they looked at another object, and in the fourth, their arm was in total darkness throughout.

Taylor-Clarke found that activity in the somatosensory cortex in the brain, which is activated by touch, was much greater when the volunteers had just been looking at their arm, particularly when that area had been magnified. Their ability to sense touch was also improved.

“This is the first time that looking at a part of your body has been shown to improve your sense of touch,” she says.

Stroke treatments

Up until now, the somatosensory cortex was thought to be independent of the other four senses. But the new research shows that sight can influence the way we feel pain or pleasure, says Taylor-Clarke.

She thinks the discovery could lead to improved treatments for patients recovering from strokes and disorders of body awareness such as autopagnosia, which involves a difficulty in locating body parts.

Stroke is the biggest cause of serious disability. It affects 300,000 people every year in England alone, causing impaired mobility, speech and severe loss of skin sensation. “We may be able to recreate the link between tactile and visual processes by creating a therapy to restore the sense of touch in affected people,” says Taylor-Clarke.

She presented her research at the British Association Festival of Science in Leicester.

The vitamin A was administered to 3.2 million children under five years old in the form of a bottled syrup. But less than 24 hours later the first deaths had been reported and thousands were taken to hospital after complaining of nausea, fever and vomiting.

Local reports say 15 children have died and over 3000 have been taken ill. The authorities in Assam have halted the administration of vitamin A to children while an investigation takes place.

Initially, it was reported that the infants may have received more than the recommended dose of the vitamin, due to confusion over the correct size of spoon. However, senior Assam district administration officials deny this, claiming that the children were being given the vitamin with two millilitre spoons provided by UNICEF, in keeping with the prescribed dose.

Suspicion had also fallen on a polio vaccine administered to some as part of the same programme. But a UNICEF spokeswoman in India told żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ that the children who became ill had not received the vaccine.

The Indian authorities are now investigating the possibility that the vitamin supplements were contaminated and are awaiting results from laboratory tests. Assam’s health minister Bhumidhar Barman stated: “If reports say the vitamin solutions were contaminated, we will take the harshest of legal steps against UNICEF.”

Years of success

Wivina Belmont, at UNICEF headquarters in Geneva, told żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ: “Vitamin A has been successfully administered in India over the past 20 years and no incident such as this has occurred before. Out of the 3.2 million children given the vitamin that day, only two or three areas have been affected.”

Belmont disagrees with local reports on the number of casualties: “According to our sources there has been one death and out of the 750 children that became ill, all of them are now out of hospital.”

She believes contamination of the vitamin A is unlikely, as quality-assurance tests were done both in India and in Australia.

“We are waiting on the state government’s results before we know what happened, although the symptoms such as stomach cramps and vomiting could be a reaction to vitamin A,” Belmont adds.

Recommended dose

Vitamin A is an essential vitamin necessary for night vision, growth of skin, bones and reproductive organs. Lack of vitamin A may also lead to eye infections and slowed growth.

The World Health Organization’s recommended doses of vitamin A for India are 100,000 units for children aged six months to one year, and 200,000 units for those between one and five years.

“This far exceeds the recommended daily amounts for children in the UK, 1155 units,” says Gail Goldberg at the British Nutrition Foundation. “But these supplements are for children in remote areas with a vitamin A deficiency.”

United Airlines plan to install the guns on its 530 aircraft, stowed in the cockpit in electronically coded boxes. It will also re-enforce the doors of the cockpits with an iron bar device.

Andrew Studdert at United Airlines says: “Tasers are an important addition to enhanced cockpit security and will incapacitate an attacker without endangering the aeroplane.”

The stun gun tags an attacker from up to 6.5 metres (21 feet) away and issues an electrical charge. This instantly disables the target by immobilising their voluntary muscles, with the effect lasting for about 15 minutes.

Wrong hands

However, some experts think it may be a gamble to put weapons on aircraft, potentially endangering the airplane and its passengers.

Edward Downs, a commercial aircraft pilot and editor of the industry publication, Jane’s Avionics, told żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ in September: “Once you have introduced weapons, they could get into the wrong hands and then you have armed the terrorists. We go to a lot of effort to make sure weapons don’t get onto planes.”

Downs added that Tasers could cause serious disruption to an aircraft’s electronic navigation equipment if fired in the cockpit.

But United Airlines’s Kevin Johnson told żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ: “In the current climate we believe it is the right step to take. We would not introduce anything that would endanger the lives of our passengers.”

Bullet hole

Conventional firearms are not generally considered for use in airborne security because of the damage a bullet would wreak on the aircraft. However, the stun guns should not damage the planes, says Steve Tuttle of Taser International in Arizona.

“We have done extensive testing over the past few days and found that the Taser stun guns will not breach the aircraft in any way,” he says.

But he notes: “There has been one incident where, in talking to the control tower, a clicking could be heard in the background due to the radio frequency of the gun.”

The smaller US airline Mesa is also in the process of installing the “Taser” technology saying it is a significant policy change for the airline industry that will provide pilots and passengers an important safety tool.

The man was recently imprisoned for having unprotected sex with a woman after being diagnosed with the virus, setting a legal precedent. The verdict criminalises anyone who infects a sexual partner, having known they were HIV-positive but not declared so.

The British Medical Journal study predicts that if the number of HIV tests taken decreased by 25 per cent, there would be a resultant increase of more than a third in sexually transmitted infections.

Karen Frobel, chair of the Scottish Voluntary HIV Forum, says: “I think that now you may hesitate in advising someone to have a test for HIV as you need to weigh up the benefits of being tested, against the possibility of legal action if someone was infected.”

Confidential question

“There is potential for similar cases in the rest of the UK,” says Sheila Bird, from the MRC Biostatistics Unit in Cambridge and lead author of the new study. She adds: “Due to this verdict people may also be less willing to take part in HIV studies.”

Annabel Kanabus of Avert, an AIDS Education And Research Trust, agrees: “This has enormous implications for medical research and puts a question over the extent to which things are actually confidential.” At the moment HIV testing is confidential in order to encourage people to take the test and seek counselling.

In the future, Bird believes that a national proforma should be issued to provide guidelines for HIV patients and counsellors that would explain the legal situation for all involved.

Future research

A legal precedent similar to the Scottish case was set in Canada in 1998. The Supreme Court convicted a man charged with aggravated assault, after he had had unprotected sex with two women without disclosing his HIV positive status.

“Finding out what happened following this ruling in Canada is difficult as it is hard to quantify this type of data,” says John Godwin at the UK National Aids Trust.

But Bird told żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ that such research could take place in Scotland: “Scotland is uniquely placed as it has an excellent surveillance system which records not only a HIV positive result but also HIV negative. This tells us how many people with a high risk profile came forward for testing.”