Mason Inman - science journalist

22 April 2008, for New Scientist

Beating the "botnets" – armies of infected computers used to attack websites – requires borrowing tactics from the bad guys, say computer security researchers.

A team at the University of Washington, US, want to marshal swarms of good computers to neutralise the bad ones. They say their plan would be cheap to implement and could cope with botnets of any size.

22 April 2008, for National Geographic News

Being a "locavore" and eating foods grown near where you live may not help the environment as much as you might think, according a new study.

When it comes to global warming, focusing simply on where food comes from will make only a small difference, the study's authors say.

18 April 2008, for New Scientist

Seismometers that monitor earthquakes also record smaller vibrations caused by ocean storm waves, even when located 1000 miles from the sea.

New scrutiny of that data, previously discarded as "noise", suggests that extreme storms are on the rise.

17 April 2008, for New Scientist

Lakes on the surface of Greenland's ice sheet are draining through the kilometre-thick ice and roaring to the bedrock with a flow rate exceeding that of Niagara Falls.

The worry has been that with further global warming such meltwater would increase and have a catastrophic effect on the ice sheet, lubricating its base and making it slide quickly into the ocean. But a new study suggests that the meltwater's effect is not as strong as feared.

17 April 2008, for New Scientist

A leading contender to replace silicon as the basis for computing has made another step forward.

Transistors one atom thick and ten atoms wide have been made by UK researchers. They were carved from graphene, predicted by some to one day oust silicon as the basis of future computing.

17 April 2008, for New Scientist

A tiny pair of robotic tweezers with the most sensitive grip yet can pick up and move individual cells without damaging them, guided by their own sense of touch.

They could be used to probe the properties of living tissue, or create microscale and nanoscale devices.

16 April 2008, for National Geographic News

James D. Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA's structure, is now the second person in the world to have his whole genome sequenced.

But he's the first to have it done with a next-generation technique that took a mere two months to complete and cost "only" a million U.S. dollars—a figure that might drop to $2,000 within six years, one expert predicts.

10 April 2008, for Nature Network Boston

Public discussion about climate change has always been heated, but online, those debates are notorious for being biased, poorly articulated, or simply ignorant.

Researchers at MIT are creating an online forum that they say will help foster more organized debate and critical thinking. 

9 April 2008, for New Scientist

Tracking people's every move using buildings packed with motion sensors is more effective than CCTV, and less invasive to privacy, say researchers who tried the technique on their own colleagues.

"We want to have a god's eye view of the entire space," says Yuri Ivanov of the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), who led the project with colleague Christopher Wren.

18 March 2008, for National Geographic News

China's greenhouse gas emissions are rising much faster than expected and will overshadow the cuts in global emissions expected due to the Kyoto Protocol, according to a new study.

Forecasts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had predicted that China's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions would rise by about 2.5 to 5 percent each year between 2004 and 2010.