On the radar

The pick of the science news

" Dad, I found a fossil!

Nine-year old Matthew Berger's call to his father, palaeontologist Lee, after the boy stumbled upon the remains of an ancient hominid species while running after his dog in South Africa in 2008, as reported by The New York Times.

Since then, archaeologists have found more remains at the site and named the species Australopithecus sediba, which they controversially claim could be a “missing link” human ancestor thought to have lived almost two million years ago.

Science superstars

Last month RTÉ launched a poll where you could vote for the greatest Irish person ever, but there were no scientists among the proposed candidates.

The science.ie website has redressed the balance with their own online poll of Irish inventors, mathematicians, engineers and scientists and the results are in.

Chemist Robert Boyle took the top honour, followed by mathematician William Rowan Hamilton.

In third place came Ernest Walton (whose other accolades include a Nobel prize) for splitting the atom.

First woman past the post was Kathleen Lonsdale in fourth place – she worked out the structure of benzene – followed swiftly by Dorothy Price for introducing the BCG vaccine against tuberculosis into Ireland.

See science.ie

Salmonella alert

Resistant strains of Salmonella are beginning to emerge in people infected with HIV in Africa, according to a study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases.

The bacteria appear to invade and persist in cells of the bone and marrow, making the infection harder to treat.

“This suggests that the high rate of HIV and other diseases that affect the immune system in Africa has provided an environmental niche in which new, more dangerous strains of Salmonella have been able to emerge,” says researcher Dr Melita Gordon from the University of Liverpool.

“We are now studying ways in which these multi-drug resistant infections can be treated better without encouraging the emergence of newer forms of resistance to antibiotics.”