A RISE in the price of synthetic fertilisers and the boom in organic foods have renewed interest in guano, a traditional, sustainable fertiliser that is abundant here on Isla Guañape Norte – and many more islands off the coast of Peru. The dry climate preserves the phosphate and nitrate-rich droppings of seabirds such as the guanay cormorant, Peruvian pelican and booby, which feed on the local sea life, notably anchoveta.

In 1802, studied guano and its fertilising properties at Callao in Peru. His writings on the subject led to the start of commercial shipments of guano to Europe. Peru saw a huge surge in the trade between the 1840s and the 1870s, known as , when the proceeds of the industry accounted for most of the country’s income. It all came to an end with the war of the Pacific (1879-1884), which was linked in part to a dispute with Chile over access to the commodity.

Award-winning Chilean photographer Tomás Munita recently returned to the islands to record how labourers are collecting guano once again, under a drizzle of droppings.

“Peru is the only place in the world that is exploited commercially in this way, marking a comeback for small farmers and organic agriculture,” says Rodolfo Beltran, head of the in Lima and former director of . The government has taken measures to prevent overfishing and to protect the island ecosystems, he adds. “It’s a treasure.”

However, the population of guano-producing seabirds has fallen from 20 million in the 1950s, before there was industrial fishing in the region, to around 4 million today. To work out exactly how bird life has been affected by the fishery, climate variability and other factors, Sophie Bertrand, a fisheries ecologist from the , began a field trip this month to tag guano seabirds with GPS and dive sensors. “Guano exploitation is not incompatible with seabird conservation,” she says, “but strict measures may need to be observed so that it does not overlap with the breeding period.”

AS SOON as the sun sets over the Atacama desert in Chile the world’s most advanced visible-light observatory begins to catch rays that have taken billions of years to travel across the cosmos.

Recently, one of the four 8.2-metre telescopes that make up the (VLT) captured the brief but brilliant light of a distant explosion, a gamma-ray burst.

The light from the burst passed through its host galaxy and another nearby galaxy before reaching Earth, providing Sandra Savaglio of the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, and colleagues with a rare glimpse of the that formed about 1.8 billion years after the big bang.

By analysing the telltale “fingerprints” from different chemical elements the team was able to work out the composition of the galaxies. Early galaxies had been thought to contain mainly hydrogen and helium, as these were the materials produced by the big bang. Heavier elements, such as oxygen, nitrogen and carbon, were thought to gradually accrue as they were manufactured by the thermonuclear reactions that take place inside stars.

But that was not what the team found. “These galaxies have more heavy elements than have ever been seen in a galaxy so early in the evolution of the universe,” says Savaglio. “We didn’t expect the universe to be so mature, so chemically evolved, so early on.”

Results from the telescope also support the idea that gamma-ray bursts may be associated with massive star formation, in this case as the two galaxies merged.

The VLT has also been used to probe the early universe to find out when a fog of neutral hydrogen lifted to make the cosmos transparent to ultraviolet light. This brief but striking phase in history – called reionisation – .

GULLS are utterly fearless, as shown by this remarkable image of a white-tailed eagle under attack.

Herring gulls dive-bomb predatory birds at a steep angle from above and behind, as they make a piercing shriek – “kaiow!”.

The attacks typically occur when the gulls are defending themselves and are most frequently seen during the breeding season, when adults protect vulnerable offspring. Some gulls also defecate or even vomit on the predator for good measure.

So-called “mobbing” usually starts with one or two gulls, but may eventually attract a large number. “They nest in large, densely packed, noisy colonies and often gang up on a predator,” says , a professor of animal ecology at the University of Glasgow in the UK.

“They use mobbing to great effect,” she says. Even Monaghan has come under attack during the course of her studies. “They kick you in the head – their claws are sharp and can cut.”

“It’s often suggested that using birds of prey, flown by falconers, might act as a gull deterrent,” she says. “This picture suggests otherwise.”

Despite their aggressive, quarrelsome and omnivorous nature, Europe has seen a significant decline in herring gulls, lesser gulls and great black-backed gulls, the three largest populations. For example, figures from the UK’s suggest the British breeding population of herring gulls has halved since the late 1970s.

The cause of the declines is not yet known but could be the result of changes in their maritime environment, including pollution or developments in commercial fishing practices, says Monaghan.

“Because the number breeding in urban areas has increased (though still a small percentage of the overall UK population), people do not realise that the herring gull is disappearing from our coasts,” she says. “They might sadly fall silent one day.”

“The flash exposes the image,” says Huse. “So long as the shutter is open at the time around the reaction then you’ll capture it.”

of Princeton University and his colleagues have also been snapping bursting bubbles, this time on a liquid surface.

When they pop, (Nature, ). The physics of the process is the same with any liquid – even viscous oil – and Stone’s team believes the work could provide insights into how aerosols form.

Another team has looked at the fate of particles inside a hypothetical atomic-scale balloon when it pops. Do the particles scatter according to the rules of classical mechanics or are they governed by quantum lore?

The answer is both, according to of the University of Massachusetts Boston and colleagues (). Olshanii says that there may be implications for the emerging field of quantum computing. “We could try to minimise quantum information loss,” he says.

TINY stars are being created by the world’s largest and most energetic lasers in the hope of tapping what could be a relatively clean energy source – nuclear fusion.

The National Ignition Facility at in California is at the forefront of efforts to harness the power of fusion. It is also being used to understand how materials behave under extreme temperatures and pressures, similar to those found inside a detonating nuclear warhead.

Pulses from 192 high-powered lasers converge inside the 10-metre-diameter target chamber (main photo and bottom left) to deposit up to 500 trillion watts of power for 20 nanoseconds. The target is a gold-plated cylinder the size of a pencil eraser (8.4 millimetres by 4.6 millimetres), called a . Inside is a polished beryllium sphere measuring 2 millimetres across (bottom centre), which contains deuterium and tritium, isotopes of hydrogen.

The hohlraum is placed precisely in the centre of the chamber by a positioner (bottom right) before the lasers are switched on. . Temperatures soar to 100 million °C and the isotopes fuse, creating conditions approaching those found only inside stars and thermonuclear weapons.

The stellar splash of energy and radiation is studied through in the target chamber. The chamber is 30 centimetres thick and made of metal covered by a layer of concrete laced with boron to absorb the neutrons.

The facility . By the end of next year, Livermore hopes to reach “ignition” – the point when more energy is produced from fusion than is used to generate the laser pulse.

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory recently announced that it is joining forces with British firm , based in Aldermaston, and the in Harwell to develop laser fusion.

SUNSHINE can be turned into electricity at night in this thermosolar plant. , in Fuentes de Andalucía near Seville in Spain, is the first commercial-scale plant to use an innovative “battery” that stores energy as molten salts.

More than 2600 heliostats – flat mirrors – over 185 hectares reflect and concentrate sunlight onto the top of a tower. , potassium and sodium nitrate salts are heated to 565 °C and then pass through a heat exchanger where they turn water into steam to drive turbines in the 19.9 megawatt plant.

When there’s more heat than is needed to turn the turbines, some of the hot salt solution is stored in a tank. This battery allows electricity to be generated for up to 15 hours when there’s no sunshine. “In summertime, we expect to run continuously most days,” says Santiago Arias, technical director of Torresol Energy, which owns the plant.

In the winter, daily sunlight is inadequate for the plant to operate at full power throughout the night. Arias says Torresol can either run the plant until the battery is exhausted, or it can modulate the power of the turbine during darkness so it is at its maximum between 11 and 11.30 pm, when electricity demand – and price – peaks, “so we are able to reach the next day without stopping the turbine”.

In this way Gemasolar should be able to generate electricity for 6500 hours a year, which the company claims is up to three times as long as other renewable energies.

Torresol is also building twin 50 MW , oil in a pipe is heated by sunlight reflected from parabolic mirrors. They, too, will have molten salt batteries, able to generate power for 7.5 hours after the sun sets. The plants will begin commercial operation on 1 January 2012.

TRUE to its name, the is the largest of all octopus species.

The animals, , grow to 45 kilograms and typically measure around 4 metres from arm tip to tip. Yet they only live for a maximum of five years.

This remarkable image comes from , a collection of photographs that is published this month by Abrams. In it the fantastic and unusual marine creatures have been treated as still life objects by American photographer Mark Laita.

Underwater photography often gives animals a blue-green tint, because of absorption in the red part of the light spectrum. To show colours as they actually are, Laita photographed the creatures in tanks using studio strobe lighting.

By using tanks, both in his studio in Los Angeles and at public aquariums, he could create images which capture the ethereal and otherworldly nature of marine life.

In many images he ensured his subjects were reflected near the surface of their watery world. “I found the shapes, colors, and dancing, aqueous impressions spellbinding,” writes Laita in the book’s foreword.

As the common name suggests, this species of octopus – Enteroctopus dofleini – is found in the North Pacific Ocean, along the continental shelf from the Aleutian Islands west of Alaska to Baja California in Mexico and north-eastern Japan.

They feed on bivalves, crabs and lobsters and will often take their prey back to their den, a crevice or gap big enough to accommodate an individual’s beak, the only hard part of an octopus. The octopus’s musculature stands in for a skeleton, giving it a flexible structure so that a large animal is able to squeeze into a small space.

When it has finished its meal, the octopus pushes the remains out of the den’s opening, creating an “octopus garden”, or , of empty shells.