Chemistry Nobel: Lindahl, Modrich and Sancar win for DNA repair

The 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded for discoveries in DNA repair.

Tomas Lindahl and Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar were named as the winners on Wednesday morning at a news conference in Stockholm, Sweden.

Their work uncovered the mechanisms used by cells to repair damaged DNA - a fundamental process in living cells and important in cancer.

Prof Lindahl is Swedish, but has worked in the UK for more than three decades.

The prize money of eight million Swedish kronor (£634,000; $970,000) will be shared among the winners.

"It was a surprise. I know that over the years I've occasionally been considered for a prize, but so have hundreds of other people. I feel lucky and proud to be selected today," Tomas Lindahl, from the UK's Francis Crick Institute, told journalists.

Claes Gustafsson, from the Nobel Committee, said the recipients had "explained the processes at the molecular level that guard the integrity of our genomes".

Monitoring and repair

DNA is open to an onslaught of different phenomena that can generate defects in our genomes.

UV radiation and molecules known as free radicals can cause damage. Furthermore, defects can arise when DNA is copied during cell division - a process that occurs millions of times each day in our bodies.

"Cigarette smoke contains small reactive chemicals, which bind to the DNA and prevent it from being replicated properly - so they are mutagens. And once there is damage in the DNA this can cause diseases including cancer," said Prof Lindahl, who for 20 years ran the Clare Hall laboratories in Hertfordshire - now part of Cancer Research UK.

To address those defects, a host of molecular systems continuously monitor and de-bug our genetic information. The three new laureates mapped in detail how some of these mechanisms worked.

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Devon Greater Horseshoe Bat Project gets £707k of lottery funding

A project to help one of Europe's most endangered bat species has been awarded £707,000 of National Lottery funding.

The Devon Greater Horseshoe Bat Project will restore habitats, protect 11 "priority roosts" and work with landowners.

Devon is the species stronghold, with a third of the UK's 6,500 bats found in the county, project organisers have said.

Funding has come from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

'Population crash'

The project is being led by the Devon Wildlife Trust in partnership with 18 organisations and the funding will allow the scheme to continue for the next five years.

Ed Parr Ferris, project manager, said: "The greater horseshoe bat is a species that has seen its European population crash in the last 100 years, and has disappeared from more than half its British range.

"Cattle-grazed pastures, wildflower-rich meadows, hedges, woodland edges, orchards and streams all play a key part in the bat's complex lives.

"The project will work with local farmers and communities to improve and conserve these features, which will be to the benefit not only of greater horseshoe bats but also Devon's wealth of other wildlife and our treasured landscapes."

The species is one of the UK's biggest bats with a wingspan of almost 16in (40cm).

'Priority roosts'

• The project will work with landowners and local people close to the most important sites for the bats
• The areas include the Avon Valley, Berry Head, Branscombe, Bovey Tracey, the Tamar Valley, and Southleigh
• The project's ultimate goal is to restore the landscapes the bats need to travel through and feed in around these priority roosts.

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Neutrino 'flip' wins physics Nobel Prize

The discovery that neutrinos switch between different "flavours" has won the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics.

Neutrinos are ubiquitous subatomic particles with almost no mass and which rarely interact with anything else, making them very difficult to study.

Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald led two teams which made key observations of the particles inside big underground instruments in Japan and Canada.

They were named on Tuesday morning at a news conference in Stockholm, Sweden.

Goran Hansson, secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which decides on the award, declared: "This year's prize is about changes of identity among some of the most abundant inhabitants of the Universe."

Telephoning Prof McDonald from the conference, he said: "Good morning again - I'm the guy who woke you up about 45 minutes ago."

Prof McDonald was in Canada, where he is a professor of particle physics at Queen's University in Kingston. He said hearing the news was "a very daunting experience".

"Fortunately, I have many colleagues as well, who share this prize with me," he added. "[It's] a tremendous amount of work that they have done to accomplish this measurement.

"We have been able to add to the world's knowledge at a very fundamental level."

Prof Kajita, from the University of Tokyo, described the win as "kind of unbelievable". He said he thought his work was important because it had contradicted previous assumptions.

"I think the significance is - clearly there is physics that is beyond the Standard Model."

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New 'hog-nosed rat' discovered in Indonesia

A team of scientists have discovered a new species of rat in Indonesia.

The species, which has been named Hyorhinomys stuempkei - hog-nosed rat - has "distinct and unique features uncommon to other rats", they said.

Five of the rodents were discovered on Sulawesi island earlier in January by researchers from Australia, Indonesia and the US.

Museum Victoria's mammal curator Kevin Rowe said the species was "previously undocumented".

"We were on a mission to survey remote mountains in the area and to put evolution in Asia and Australia into context," Mr Rowe said.

"Nothing is currently known about these rats and how widely they were distributed throughout the forests."

'Remarkable morphological evolution'

Mr Rowe, who specialises in rodent evolution, spent six weeks in Indonesia with other scientists and a group of locals trying to reach the remote forest area.

He also shared with the BBC the "exciting moment" of finding a hog-nosed rat.

"We had been setting up overnight traps for a few days - that was when I stumbled upon a completely new rat," he said.

"I hollered immediately for my colleagues as I knew it was a new species."

The rats appeared "healthy, with full stomachs", weighing at an estimated 250g.

Mr Rowe also added that there were rats on Sulawesi island similar to the newly discovered mammal, but they "weren't the same".

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Wild mammals 'have returned' to Chernobyl

Removing humans from what is now the exclusion zone around the damaged Chernobyl nuclear reactor has allowed wildlife to return, researchers say.

They say a long-term census of mammals in the area has shown that wildlife numbers are likely to be "much higher than they were before the accident".

Professor Jim Smith of the University of Portsmouth led the study, published in the journal Current Biology.

He stressed that this "does not mean that radiation is good for wildlife".

"It's just that the effects of human habitation, including hunting, farming, and forestry, are a lot worse," Prof Smith said.

With the help of with colleagues from the Polesky State Radioecological Reserve in Belarus, the researchers examined data from aerial surveys that counted large mammals including roe deer, elk, wild boar and wolves.

They also carried out tracking studies in the winter - using footprints in snow to calculate the numbers of different mammal species. And measuring the levels of radioactive contamination in those tracks.

"The numbers of animals we see in Chernobyl is similar to the populations in uncontaminated nature reserves," Prof Smith said.

The number of wolves was particularly striking - up to seven times higher than in nearby nature reserves of a comparable size. Prof Smith attributed this to the lack of hunting in the exclusion zone.

A 30km exclusion zone now surrounds the infamous Chernobyl nuclear power plant. And Prof Smith says the picture from this study reveals what happens in terms of wildlife conservation "when you take humans out of the picture".

But, he said, the study did not look at the health effects of radiation on individual animals.

That is something that Prof Tim Mousseau from the University of South Carolina, has spent many years trying to unpick in his studies of wildlife - particularly bird populations - in the exclusion zone.

Prof Mousseau said the study was a "very positive move forward in conducting research concerning the potential health and environmental impacts of nuclear accidents".

"Much more research on this is desperately needed," he added.

But Prof Mousseau is also troubled by "the characterisation that Chernobyl and the surrounding area is teeming with wildlife".

"This study only applies to large mammals under hunting pressure, rather than the vast majority of animals - most birds, small mammals, and insects - that are not directly influenced by human habitation," he told BBC News.

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Plant uses raindrops to eat ants

A carnivorous pitcher plant uses power from falling raindrops to fling ants to their doom, biologists have discovered.

The team, from the University of Bristol, found that raindrops kick off very fast vibrations in the lid of the plant's jug-shaped leaves.

This propels ants from the lid into the pitcher trap below, where they drown and are consumed by digestive juices.

The findings, published in the journal PNAS, are based on high-speed cameras and laser vibration measurements.

Using these instruments, Dr Ulrike Bauer and her colleagues recorded extremely fast movement in the lid of the pitcher leaf, after it was hit by a raindrop.

It wobbles like a stiff spring, she said.

"You have a raindrop hitting the surface and that causes it to move down, fast. Then because of this spring property, it moves to a certain point and springs back.

"You get an oscillation, very similar to when you put a ruler on the edge of your desk and flick the end down with your finger."

New moves

This movement is unique in the plant kingdom, Dr Bauer said - partly because of its speed, which easily outstrips the insect-trapping manoeuvres of other carnivorous plants, and partly because of the way it exploits an external energy source.

"Having a fast movement in a plant is unusual in itself," she explained, "but having a fast movement that doesn't require the plant to invest any energy - it just requires it to build the structure - that's something quite surprising."

The findings place the species in the study, Nepenthes gracilis, into its own carnivorous category; it belongs neither with "active" carnivorous plants, like flytraps, nor motionless "passive" insect eaters - like most other pitcher plants.

Key to the pitcher's rain-powered trap is the stiffness of its lid. When the team studied another species, which catches ants using only the slippery rim of its pitcher, they found it had a more bendy lid.

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Cacti facing extinction, study warns

Almost one-third of cactus species are under threat as a result of over-harvesting and illegal trade in the plants, a global study has concluded.

Conservationists voiced concern, saying the level of threat to cacti was much greater than previously thought.

The plants are a vital component of arid ecosystems, providing a source of food and water for many animals.

The results of the assessment by the International Union for Conservation of Nature appear in Nature Plants journal.

According to the study, 31% of the world's 1,480 cactus species were under pressure from human activity, such as illegal trading, agriculture and aquaculture as well as land-use change.

"The results of this assessment come as a shock to us," said lead author Barbara Goettsch, co-chairwoman of the IUCN's Cactus and Succulent Plant Specialist Group.

"We did not expect cacti to be so highly threatened and for illegal trade to be such an important driver of their decline."

The assessment reported that the illegal trade of live plants and seeds for the horticultural industry and private collections, as well as their unsustainable harvesting, affected 47% of threatened species.

These plants which have evolved to cope with the harsh conditions found in arid landscapes are native to North and South America, with exception of one species that is native in southern Africa and South Asia.

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