Ready to land
After a two-year journey, the Japanese spacecraft Hyabusa, aka Muses-C, went into orbit 20 kilometres above the potato-shaped asteroid Itokawa on Monday. The probe will spend five months examining the asteroid before landing, collecting a sample and returning to Earth by mid-2007.
Power after the storm
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The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission last week gave the Waterford 3 nuclear power plant in Louisiana permission to restart after its week-long shutdown in the wake of hurricane Katrina. The plant suffered minimal damage but engineers are carrying out some long-standing valve repairs before restarting.
How to breed superbugs
Overuse of antibiotics really does drive the evolution of superbugs. The Antibiotic Resistance, Prevention and Control project looked at 300 European hospitals and found that those using most antibiotics had the highest levels of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Hospitals with tightest infection control, such as isolating patients with MRSA, had lowest levels.
Supersize square-eyes
The amount of television children watch appears to be a better predictor of obesity than either diet or exercise. New Zealand researchers recorded TV habits, body mass index and the socio-economic status of children from 1000 families every two years from the ages of 3 to 15 years and found that fatter children watched significantly more TV than other kids (International Journal of Obesity, DOI: 10.1038/sj.ijo.0803071).
Bat clue in SARS riddle
A SARS-like virus has been found in 40 per cent of horseshoe bats in Hong Kong. Kwok-Yung Yuen at the University of Hong Kong and his colleagues say that the bat virus resembles the civet coronavirus that causes SARS, though they don鈥檛 know for certain if this is the origin of SARS.