Microsoft launches Windows laptop

Microsoft has launched a laptop dubbed the Surface Book, as part of a suite of new Windows 10 products.

It also showed off two new smartphones, an updated Surface tablet and a new fitness band.

Much is riding on the launches as chief executive Satya Nadella sets out to prove Microsoft can compete with its rivals.

Analysts said the new laptop may help revive the ailing PC market.

The laptop, Microsoft's first, was the highlight of a tranche of new products shown off at an event in New York.

It is designed to take on Apple's Macbook, with Microsoft directly comparing the products.

It said that, just as its Surface tablet was a hybrid between a tablet and a laptop, so the Surface Book would "reinvent categories".

Analysts seemed impressed.

"It is a highly innovative, flagship device that will act as a much-needed halo product for Windows 10 and the broader PC market and proves that innovation in personal computing is not just confined to Apple's Cupertino campus," said Ben Wood, head of research at CCS Insight.

The device, which weighs 1.6lbs (0.7 kilograms) and is 7.7mm thick, comes with a touchscreen that can be separated from the keyboard. It will be available at the end of October for $1,499 (£984).

Microsoft also showed off two new smartphones - the 5.2in Lumia 950 ($549) and the slightly larger Lumia 950 XL ($649) both of which will be available in November.

Features include a 20 megapixel camera, a dedicated camera button, the ability to capture 4K video and 32 gigabytes of storage.

A cheaper Lumia 550 will be available in December, priced $139.

Mr Wood said Microsoft still had a "mountain to climb" to regain relevance in the smartphone market.

"These new Lumia devices tick all the boxes in terms of specifications and features but they are unlikely to be enough to lure customers away from the iPhone or Android-powered rivals," he said.

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How worried is Silicon Valley about Safe Harbour?

The Safe Harbour ruling made on Tuesday has potentially big implications for some giants of Silicon Valley when it comes to how they look after our private data.

Safe Harbour was designed as a "streamlined and cost-effective" way for US firms to get data from Europe without breaking its rules.

Companies in the US were able to self-certify that they had put the appropriate data privacy measures in place.

In the wake of the Snowden allegations, the top European court has ruled that Safe Harbour is invalid.

The White House has expressed disappointment that a "critical" agreement had been struck down because of "incorrect assumptions about data privacy protections in the United States".

But the question is - what's changed?

I've spent the day canvassing the views of firms in Silicon Valley. Most didn't want to talk on the record and were taking a wait-and-see approach as to what happens next.

Of those that did have something to say, here's a selection.

Microsoft

Microsoft provides cloud services - online storage - for many businesses around the world. In a blog post, the company said: "For Microsoft's enterprise cloud customers, we believe the clear answer is that yes they can continue to transfer data by relying on additional steps and legal safeguards we have put in place."

Talking about its own services, such as Hotmail, the company said: "We also don't believe today's ruling has a significant impact on our consumer services. Our terms of use make clear that to provide these services, we transfer data between users, which occurs for example, when one user sends email or other online content to another user."

But it called for renegotiation of Safe Harbour to be swift.

"Many European nations are currently considering amendments to their surveillance laws. Rather than just expand governments' surveillance authority as some are seeking to do, the focus should be on striking the right balance between security and privacy without sacrificing one for the other."

Internet Association

The Internet Association represents some of the biggest players in Silicon Valley and beyond, including Twitter, Google, Facebook, Netflix and Uber.

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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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