ON THE RADAR

The pick of the science news

"We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders . . . We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories

– President Obama in his inaugural address

Talk up the new

Nanotechnology, stem cells and nuclear fusion get talked up and down in the press, but how does the public see "new sciences"? That's up for discussion this afternoon and tomorrow at a symposium in Dublin City University. Negotiating New Sciences in Society brings together experts in science, communication and ethics from Ireland and beyond to look at topics ranging from the ethics of tissue engineering to how nanotechnology is represented in cinema.

Tickets for the symposium, hosted by Celsius research group, cost €50 and include a dinner tonight, hosted by DCU's Foresight Unit. For details, e-mail padraig.murphy@dcu.ie

Introducing a Super-Neptune

Astronomers have discovered a sizeable planet orbiting a star approximately 120 light years from earth.

The newly discovered body, known as HAT-P-11b, has been dubbed a "Super-Neptune" planet because, at 4.7 times the diameter of earth, it is a little larger than Neptune.

HAT-P-11b revolves around its parent star every 4.88 days and "transits" in front of that star, causing it to dim periodically, a factor which helped astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to work out the planet's mass and radius.

The Omega effect

Giving premature baby girls a strong boost of Omega-3 fatty acids appears to have beneficial effects, according to new research from Australia.

In a study of more than 600 babies born more than seven weeks early, girls who received high doses of Omega-3 in breast milk or formula until their original due date performed better on average as toddlers in memory and mental development tests.

But the high-dose Omega-3 did not have the same effect on boys.

"The lack of responsiveness of boys to the intervention is puzzling, and the reasons are unclear," write the researchers in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

By numbers

10,000,000

and counting – the number of PCs thought to be infected to date by the Downadup worm, which gets into a machine through a hole in Microsoft Windows

0.25

The width, in millimetres, of a tiny engine developed at Australia’s Monash University that could power a medical micro-robot through a small human artery