Preposterous Guru

Discovered it in 1998, astronomers have been unable to say what the mysterious force is, except that it is invisible and makes up a "large chunk of our universe", or 72 per cent of its size.

The galaxies, found in the constellation of Virgo, is one of the biggest galactic clusters known to science.

Due to its huge mass, scientists say it "acts as a cosmic magnifying glass", causing light to bend around it.

He said the study's conclusion meant scientists could say for the first time that the expansion of the universe "will continue to accelerate and the universe will expand forever".

The animals, estimated to be eight weeks old, were taken to Scotland from Norway last year as part of the Scottish Beaver Trial.

Simon Jones, Scottish beaver trial project manager with the trust, said the kits marked a ''fantastic step forward'' for the trial.

Roseanna Cunningham, Scottish Environment Minister, said: ''It's exciting to see these beavers thriving in Knapdale Forest and producing beaver kits so soon after their reintroduction.

''We were hoping that this would happen and I'm looking forward to watching the progress of the beaver families over the coming years.''

Dr Jeffrey Ellenbogen, assistant professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, said: "Noise-induced sleep disruption is one of the most common complaints that people have for why they have difficulty sleeping.

It says even low concentrations of the pesticides may be more deadly then previously thought due to their high persistence in soil and water, supporting claims for the role that pesticides may play in bee deaths.

'The acceptable limits are based mainly on short-term tests. If long-term studies were to be carried out, far lower concentrations may turn out to be hazardous. This explains why minute quantities of imidacloprid may induce bee decline in the long run,' says study author Dr. Henk Tennekes.

Buglife campaigner Vicky Kindemba has welcomed the new research, saying it adds support to calls for a suspension in the use of the pesticides in the UK.

'This new information adds to the growing body of evidence that neonicotinoid pesticides are very harmful and even at extremely low levels in our environment they could still negatively impact on UK wildlife including pollinators, soil organisms and aquatic invertebrates,' Kindemba said.

The Soil Association said other products containing the pesticides  should also be withdrawn from general sale in UK supermarkets, hardware stores and garden centres.

'If the honeybee disappeared off the surface of the globe forever we'd be facing up to an unimaginable food crisis,' said a spokesperson. 'This latest research only adds to the evidence that is already strong enough to justify an immediate ban on neonicotinoids today.'

The campaign group has written to the chief executives of B&Q, Wilkinson's and Wyevale asking them to withdraw any products containing neonicotinoid pesticides from their store.

Responding to the new study, Defra said the UK would not be following some other EU countries in restricting the use of neonicotinoids.

'This research highlights a need for more data on long-term risks to bee health. We have already been considering this and pesticide companies will soon need to provide this data under new EU rules.

'We will keep this area under review and will not hesitate to act if there is any evidence of an unacceptable risk to bees,' said a spokesperson.

Explaining his theory in the journal Physics Letters B, he said he used the Einstein-Cartan-Kibble-Sciama (ECKS) theory of gravity, in his analysis to account for the angular momentum of particles in a black hole. Doing this it made it possible to calculate a quality of space-time called torsion, a property believed to repel gravity.

He says instead of matter reaching infinite density in a black hole called "singularities" in Einstein's theory of relativity - the behaviour of the space-time acts more like a spring being compressed with matter rebounding and expanding continuously.

Dr Poplawski explains that this "bounce-back" effect is caused by the torsion of space-time having a repulsive force against the gargantuan strength of gravity in a black hole.

Dr Poplawski also claims that this recoiling effect could be what has led to our expanding universe that we observe today and could explain why our universe is flat, homogeneous and isotropic without needing cosmic inflation.

It is hard to see how we could test whether or not Dr Poplawski's theory is correct; the force of gravity in black holes is such that nothing can escape, so no information about what is going on inside one can ever reach us.

However, according to Dr Poplawski, if we were living in a spinning black hole then the spin would transfer to the space-time inside, meaning the universe would have a preferred direction - something we would be able to measure. Such a preferred direction could be related to the observed imbalance of matter and anti-matter in the universe and could explain the oscillation of neutrinos.

The discovery could help explain how life manages to survive in the deep ocean far out to sea away from the nutrient rich waters that are found close to land, as the rivers carry sediment and nutrients with them.

The scientists, based at the University of Leeds, used a robotic submarine to study for the first time a deep channel that had been found on the sea bed.

They found a river of highly salty water flowing along the deep channel at the bottom of the Black Sea, creating river banks and flood plains much like a river found on land.

Dr Dan Parsons, from the university's school of earth and environment, said: "The water in the channels is denser than the surrounding seawater because it has higher salinity and is carrying so much sediment.

"It flows down the sea shelf and out into the abyssal plain much like a river on land. The abyssal plains of our oceans are like the deserts of the marine world, but these channels can deliver nutrients and ingredients needed for life out over these deserts.

"This means they could be vitally important, like arteries providing life to the deep ocean.

"The key difference we found from terrestrial rivers was that as the flow goes round the bend, the water spirals in the opposite way to rivers on land."

The undersea river discovered by Dr Parsons and his colleagues, which is yet to be named, stems from salty water spilling through the Bosphorus Strait from the Mediterranean into the Black Sea, where the water has a lower salt content.

This causes the dense water from the Mediterranean to flow like a river along the sea bed, carving a channel with banks around 115 feet deep and 0.6 of a mile wide. It is the only active undersea river to have been found so far.

Scientists have long suspected they can form, after sonar scans of the sea bed have revealed meandering channels in many of the world's oceans, although none have been found before to be have currents of water flowing through them.

Among the largest of these channels is off the coast of Brazil where the Amazon enters the Atlantic Ocean.

Most are believed to have formed when sea levels were much lower and the channels have been found to be up to 2,500 miles long and be several miles wide.

The channel in the Black Sea, although much smaller, is the only one to be found still flowing and proves that these mysterious channels are formed by underwater rivers.

Unlike ocean trenches, which are geological formations that form at the deepest parts of the ocean due to movements of the tectonic plates, the undersea river channels meander like rivers on land and form banks in the same way by eroding the silt from the bottom of the channel and building it up at the edges.

Dr Parsons found that the Black Sea river is flowing at around four miles per hour with 22,000 cubic metres of water passing through the channel every second - 350 times greater than the flow of the Thames and 10 times greater than Europe's biggest river, the Rhine.

The Black Sea river flows only for around 37 miles until it reaches the edge of the sea shelf and dissipates into the deep sea.

Dr Parsons said data from the research will also be important for oil companies looking to drill in areas where these rivers exist.

In two separate research voyages, independent scientists have detected what were described as "astonishingly high" levels of methane, or natural gas, bubbling from the well site, setting off a chain of reactions that suck the oxygen out of the water. In some cases, methane concentrations are 100,000 times normal levels.

Other scientists as well as sport fishermen are reporting unusual movements of fish, shrimp, crab and other marine life, including increased shark sightings closer to the Alabama coast.

Larry Crowder, a marine biologist at Duke University, said there were already signs that fish were being driven from their habitat.

"The animals are already voting with their fins to get away from where the oil spill is and where potentially there is oxygen depletion," he said. "When you begin to see animals changing their distribution that is telling you about the quality of water further offshore. Basically, the fish are moving closer to shore to try to get to better water."

Such sightings - and an accumulation of data from the site of the ruptured well and from the ocean depths miles away - have deepened concerns that the enormity of the environmental disaster in the Gulf has yet to be fully understood. It could also jeopardise the Gulf's billion-dollar fishing and shrimping industry.

In a conference call with reporters, Samantha Joye, a scientist at the University of Georgia who has been studying the effects of the spill at depth, said the ruptured well was producing up to 50% as much methane and other gases as oil.

The finding presents a new challenge to scientists who so far have been focused on studying the effects on the Gulf of crude oil, and the 5.7m litres of chemical dispersants used to break up the slick.

Neuroscientists at Dundee University, Royal Holloway and University College London will investigate the hypothesis as part of a £10m research programme launched today aimed at finding ways to stop the decline in the numbers of bees and other insect pollinators in the UK.

Insects such as bees, moths and hoverflies pollinate around a third of the agricultural crops grown around the world. If all of the UK's insect pollinators were wiped out, the drop in crop production would cost the UK economy up to £440m a year, equivalent to around 13% of the UK's income from farming.

According to the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, three of the 25 British species of bumblebees are already extinct and half of the remainder have shown serious declines, often up to 70%, since around the 1970s. In addition, around 75% of all butterfly species in the UK have been shown to be in decline. The new £10m Insect Pollinators Initiative (IPI), the largest programme to date of its kind, will look at the multiple reasons thought to be behind this devastation in insect population.

The UN's biodiversity report - dubbed the Stern for Nature - is expected to say that the value of saving "natural goods and services", such as pollination, medicines, fertile soils, clean air and water, will be even higher - between 10 and 100 times the cost of saving the habitats and species which provide them.

In the UK, a third of high priority species and two thirds of habitats are declining, according to government figures that emerged today on the UK's Biodiversity Action Plan. Since 1994 despite the extra attention provided by the plan, 5% of the species it covered are thought to have gone extinct.

Around the world the picture is as bad or worse: the International Union for the Conservation of Nature believes one in five mammals, one in three amphibians and one in seven birds are extinct or globally threatened, and other species groups still being assessed are showing similar patterns.

Simon Stuart, a senior IUCN scientist, has warned that for the first time since the dinosaurs humans are driving plants and animals to extinction faster than new species can evolve.

For decades, nature lovers have watched the fens being drained, or noticed the decline of cuckoos in spring and butterflies in summer. But until recently these changes have been overshadowed by growing fears about the impact of climate change.

However, as the impact of these species losses around the world have mounted - riots over food shortages, costly floods and landslides, expensive bills for cleaning polluted water, and many more disasters - attention has finally started to turn to the impact of human beings literally consuming the planet's natural resources.