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French scientists are trying to develop self-cleaning windows and windshields – with the help of butterfly wings.

Butterfly wings – and lotus leaves – can repel water with ease because of the microstructures on their surface.

The waffle-like structures found on butterfly wings can make it difficult for water droplets to spread out.

In a bid to develop self-cleaning windows and windshields, Christophe Peroz at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Aubervilliers has developed a quicker and cheaper technique to reproduce the microstructures on butterfly wings, which repel water and dirt.

The technique involves pouring a silicon-based polymer liquid over an actual wing or leaf and leaving it to dry, reports News.com.au

They then peeled off the solid polymer and used it as a mould for methyltriethoxysilane (MTEOS) - an agent used in glass-making.

It can be changed from a liquid to a gel by spinning it. The MTEOS is later poured onto the mould and spun, forming a 900-nanometre-thick film.

Many such films can be combined to create a large water-repellent surface for a window.

The International Space Station, one of the most ambitious space projects ever and a key launching board for exploration of the solar system, including Mars and beyond, turns 10 years old Thursday.

In orbit some 190 miles (350 kilometers) above the Earth, the ISS has a permanent crew of three astronauts that remain aboard for stays lasting several months. The crew will double to six in 2009 thanks to an addition brought by the space shuttle Endeavour, which is currently docked at the station.

The United States has financed the bulk of the project, estimated to cost some 100 billion dollars. Fifteen other countries have also contributed, including Russia, Japan, Canada, Brazil and eleven nations belonging to the European Space Agency.

“The ISS is the largest ever experiment in international technological cooperation,” said John Logsdon, a historian at the National Air and Space Museum in the US capital.

“I think it’s a necessary stepping stone to long-term human activities in new areas of operations,” Logsdon told AFP. The station is “off the planet and it’s the first step outward — not an end in itself, but a step along the way.”

Logsdon believes the best way to learn of the effects of long space flights to places like Mars is on the ISS, both by studying the microgravity environment and the social dynamic among the crew.

The ISS is also a key testing ground for technologies that allow humans to live in a contained environment, which include such technical challenges like recycling urine for drinking water.

“They will have to grow their food, plants,” Logsdon said. “The ISS is testing the technologies that will be needed for long-duration stays off the planet.

“You like to know it works before you commit a crew to stay on the moon. And the space station is a very good test place,” he said.

The destruction of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003 as it attempted to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere delayed work on the ISS for two years.

Yet when President George W. Bush decided in November 2005 that the United States would complete the station and honor its commitments, there “has been a very positive relationship” with the ISS partners, Logsdon said.

Budget constraints make cooperation in space exploration essential.

“The US on its current budget can perhaps get people back on the surface of the moon, but not do anything when they get there,” Logsdon said. “If we are serious about long-duration stays on the moon and eventually to Mars, it has to be an internationally funded system with … a different sharing of control in management than the space station partnership.”

Having for example a council with weighted voting that does not give Washington veto power over everything would be one solution, he said.

“The ISS is fundamentally a US project with international additions. I don’t think that will be the case for long-term exploration.”

The United States still has the resources to solely finance its space ambitions, but that will not last, according to NASA administrator Michael Griffin.

“I think Europe is absolutely ready to take the next step in space, which is to return with us to the Moon,” Griffin told AFP.

“I don’t think Europe is ready yet to do that job by itself, but I think there is no need for Europe to do it by itself.”

For Doug Millard, curator of space at the Science Museum in London, the Columbus laboratory — attached to the ISS in February — considerably enhanced Europe’s space capability. “It provides Europe with a little bit of real estate up in orbit, so it’s making the ISS properly international, as it was intended,” Millard said.

Japan’s Kibo laboratory was attached to the ISS three months later.

And just what are the benefits of having a team of humans living in space? Millard says it’s learning how the human body behaves in micro-gravity.

“We’ve been doing this now for a few decades — the Russians set the agenda with Mir — but looking at NASA’s program of exploration, which pivots on a return to the Moon and ultimately a mission to Mars, then space station science and knowledge on the human condition in space is absolutely essential.”

Each day the ISS spends orbiting Earth is another opportunity to expand our body of knowledge, according to Millard.

“What’s going on in the ISS is an extension of thousands of laboratory and research facilities around the world, only it has the unique feature of being in microgravity.”

Alexandre Vorobiev, a spokesman for the Russian space agency, described the ISS as a “remarkable” project, “one of the factors that has helped Russia keep its space industry.”

He also said he was certain that given the financial constraints, “neither Russia nor the United States could go alone to the Moon or Mars,” but could do so only as partners.

Indonesia launched a high-tech tsunami warning system Tuesday in a bid to prevent a repeat of tragedies like the 2004 Asian tsunami that killed around 170,000 people in the archipelago nation.

The 1.4 trillion rupiah (130.2 million dollar) system will be able to detect an earthquake at sea and predict within five minutes whether it could cause a tsunami, the head of Indonesia’s geophysics agency Sri Woro Harijono said.

“The warning system can also predict the height and arrival time of the waves,” Harijono said. The system uses a series of four buoys linked to monitoring stations across the country.

The system, built with German technology and funding from a number of foreign nations, will eventually include 23 to 24 buoys, she said.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said at the launch that Indonesia needed the warning system, given the frequency of devastating earthquakes and tsunamis across its 17,000 seismically active islands.

“We are living on the edge. Three tectonic plates — the Eurasian, Indo-Australian and Pacific — meet here,” Yudhoyono said. “This kind of disaster can strike at any time.”

The series of buoys that are the backbone of the warning system are linked by cables to detectors that sit on the ocean floor and pick up on the deep-sea earthquakes that cause tsunamis.

The signals are then relayed to stations that send out an automated warning that a tsunami is coming.

Foreign donor countries will supervise the operation of the tsunami warning system for the first two years as it gets up and running, said Jan Sopaheluwakan from the Indonesian Institute of Sciences.

“After 2010, Indonesia will take full responsibility for running the system,” Sopaheluwakan said.

Indonesia was the country worst hit by the earthquake-triggered 2004 Asian tsunami, which killed 168,000 in the country’s Aceh province.

Researchers have demonstrated how chemical substances can be derived from waste products generated by the food industry, leftover biomass from agriculture and forestry, and residual materials.

The team of researchers is from the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology IGB in Stuttgart, Germany.

They demonstrated how the biotechnical recycling works, using colza, whey and crab shells as examples.

When producing biodiesel from colza oil, raw glycerol is accrued as a byproduct.

Scientists at the IGB have now developed a method of converting this raw glycerol into 1,3-propandiol - a chemical base for producing polyesters or wood paint.

Until now, 1,3-propandiol has always been chemically synthesized, but it can also be derived from glycerol by certain micro-organisms.

Clostridium diolis bacteria, for example, can produce a comparatively high yield of chemical feedstock. However, these bacteria cannot convert raw glycerol.

This is because raw glycerol contains fatty acids left over from the colza oil, and these have to be separated out.

“Furthermore, high concentrations of both the glycerol substrate and the 1,3-propandiol product inhibit the growth of the bacteria,” said Dr. Wolfgang Krischke of the IGB, pointing out another challenge in developing this biotechnological process.

“We have managed to solve this problem to a large extent by keeping the bioreactor in continuous operation, because once the glycerol has been almost fully converted, it loses its inhibiting effect. In this way, we have achieved a stable process with high product concentrations,” he added.

The fatty acids can be converted by yeasts to long chain dicarboxylic acids providing novel building blocks for polymer industries.

A Soyuz capsule carrying an American and two Russians touched down on target in Kazakhstan on Friday after a descent from the international space station, safely delivering the first two men to follow their fathers into space.

The Soyuz TMA-12 capsule landed at 9:37 a.m. local time, about 55 miles north of Arkalyk in north-central Kazakhstan, Russian Mission Control spokesman Valery Lyndin told The Associated Press.

Search and recovery crews buzzed in on Mi-8 helicopters and extracted Richard Garriott, Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko from the capsule, which landed on its side on the brushy surface under a clear sky.

“What a great ride that was,” said Garriott, an American computer game designer who paid some $30 million for a 10-day stay on the space station. Sitting in an armchair and wrapped in a blue blanket against the near-freezing temperature on the steppe, he smiled broadly.

“This is obviously a pinnacle experience,” Garriott said in televised comments.

Garriott was greeted by his father, Owen Garriott, a retired NASA astronaut who flew on the U.S. space station Skylab in 1973.

“Hey, Papa-san,” said Richard Garriott, 47. The pair shook hands.

“How come you look so fresh and ready to go?” Owen Garriott, 77, asked his son.

“Because I’m fresh and ready to go — again,” he replied.

Not right away, though.

“I’m looking forward to some fresh food and to calling my loved ones,” said Garriott, who lives in Austin, Texas, and was seen off by his girlfriend and brother, among others, when he rocketed up to the station on another Soyuz craft on Oct. 12.

“I’ve got my father here, but I’ve got other family back home I want to get a hold of.”

Volkov sat next to Garriott. The son of a cosmonaut, he beat out Garriott as the first human being to follow a parent into space when he flew up to the space station six months ago. Kononenko, who also spent 199 days in space, was the last out of the capsule and could not be seen in the TV footage.

The head of the Russian space agency Roskosmos, Anatoly Perminov, said on state-run Vesti-24 television that Kononenko had a tougher time than his crewmates during the descent but “feels good now.” It was the first space mission for all three men.

The uneventful descent was a relief for space officials — and the crew — after technical problems caused unusually steep “ballistic descents” for the last two returning crews, putting them hundreds of miles off course and subjecting them to stronger gravitational force than in a usual.

On a Soyuz returning in May, the malfunction of an explosive bolt delayed the separation of the re-entry capsule from the rest of the ship. It forced the crew — including a U.S. astronaut and South Korea’s first space traveler — to endure a rough ride as the gyrating capsule descended facing the wrong way.

It took nearly half an hour for search helicopters to locate the capsule, which landed some 20 minutes late and 260 miles off target, and determine the crew was unharmed.

Last October, a computer glitch sent Malaysia’s first astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts on a steeper-than-normal path during their return to Earth.

Russian space officials said changes had been made to equipment and computer programming to prevent another ballistic descent, but they were clearly relieved at Friday’s on-time, on-target landing.

The Soyuz TMA-12’s module separated without a hitch before it entered the atmosphere, and a series of parachutes gradually slowed its speed from 755 feet per second to about 5 feet per second.

“I can’t recall a more ideal landing,” Perminov said.

Garriott, who created the Ultima computer game series, spent time on the station conducting experiments — including some whose sponsors helped pay for a trip he said cost him a large chunk of his wealth. He also took pictures of the Earth’s surface to measure changes since his father did the same 35 years ago.

Garriott took a Soyuz up to the 10-year-old station along with U.S. astronaut Michael Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Lonchakov, who will stay in orbit for six months. Also on board is U.S. astronaut Gregory Chamitoff.

The U.S. shuttle Endeavor is due to launch in November and carry equipment needed for raising the number of astronauts living at the orbiting outpost from three to six. That transition should occur in the first half of next year.

The head of the Russian state-controlled RKK Energiya company, which builds the Soyuz spacecraft and Progress cargo ships, said Friday that construction of ships for the next few missions was on schedule, but further plans could be jeopardized by a money crunch caused by the nation’s financial crisis. Vitaly Lopota said the banks had been slow to provide loans to the company, and he urged the government to quickly earmark funds.

British plans to allow scientists to use hybrid animal-human embryos for stem cell research won final approval from lawmakers Wednesday in a sweeping overhaul of sensitive science laws. The House of Commons also clarified laws that allow the screening of embryos to produce babies with suitable bone marrow or other material for transplant to sick siblings.

It was the first review of embryo science in Britain in almost 20 years.

The legislators voted 355 to 129 to authorize the proposals after months of sometimes bitter debate that has pitted Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government and scientists against religious leaders, anti-abortion campaigners and others anxious about medical advances.

Brown says he believes scientists seeking to use mixed animal-human embryos for stem cell research into diseases such as Parkinson’s will help improve — and save — millions of lives.

Decisions by Britain’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, an independent body which regulates fertility and embryo research in the U.K., to allow the practice have previously been vulnerable to challenges in court.

While Britain has been seen as a world leader in stem cell and cloning research, similar work to create human embryos from animal eggs is also being conducted in China and the United States.

British lawmakers had already endorsed individual proposals, but Wednesday’s vote involved the complete draft bill.

“One in seven couples need help with fertility treatment, 350,000 people live with Alzheimer’s, every week there are five children born and three young people die from cystic fibrosis — all issues that this bill addresses,” Health Minister Dawn Primarolo told lawmakers, opening a debate on the draft laws.

Britain’s government opted not to allow legislators to use the debate to consider the country’s abortion laws — last drafted in 1990 — frustrating hopes of both anti-abortion lawmakers and those seeking to liberalize current regulations.

Ministers said lawmakers needed to focus on important revisions to rules governing stem cell research and other scientific advances, rather than examine the emotive issue of abortion — which isn’t covered by the draft laws.

Brown is a strong advocate of stem cell science and has said Britain owes it to future generations to support the research. Opponents warn an easing of laws on creating embryos could lead to the genetic engineering of human beings.

The process involves injecting an empty cow or rabbit egg with human DNA. A burst of electricity is then used to trick the egg into dividing regularly, so that it becomes a very early embryo, from which stem cells can hopefully be extracted.

Scientists say the embryos would not be allowed to develop for more than 14 days, and are intended to address the shortage of human eggs available for stem cell research.

Under the new laws, in-vitro fertilization clinics will no longer have to consider the need for a child to have a father when deciding whether to offer treatment to lesbian couples.

Those opposed to the proposal insist the change fails to acknowledge the role of a father in a child’s life.

Opposition Liberal Democrat lawmaker Evan Harris said he had hoped the debate would allow him to put forward proposals to extend the right to have an abortion to women in Northern Ireland — where terminations are not permitted.

Nadine Dorries, a lawmaker with the main opposition Conservatives who attempted in May to reduce the upper time limit for abortions in Britain, said the government had ducked a potential fight over terminations.

British lawmakers voted in May in favor of keeping the current upper time limit for abortions of 24 weeks.

A snow storm and some of the coldest air of the season swept across the central Plains early Wednesday, while rain splattered the southern Plains and the West stayed clear.

Showers, thunderstorms and snow will gradually increase in intensity throughout the day across much of the Midwest and central Rockies.

This storm system will be moving eastward very slowly Wednesday and Thursday as a strong high pressure system hovers over the East, slowing down its forward speed. This could prolong winter storm conditions across the Midwest over the next few days.

Moving south, the storm system’s cold front will push southeast through the southern Plains and into the lower Mississippi Valley by Thursday morning, triggering rain and thunderstorms.

Over the Northeast, lingering rain and snow showers are expected to diminish around midday, with skies clearing. Brisk north winds will kick in, keeping temperatures in the 40s and 50s Wednesday.

Out West, high pressure will bring warm and sunny weather to west of the Rockies into the weekend. However, fire weather will continue to be a concern for southwestern California as gusty dry northeast winds persist and humidity remains low.

Temperatures in the Lower 48 states on Tuesday ranged from a low of 15 degrees at Embarrass, Minn., to a high of 98 degrees at Thermal, Calif.

Unfounded criticism of America’s next-generation moon rocket is hurting NASA morale but hasn’t stopped progress on the craft, the space agency’s administrator Michael Griffin said Tuesday.

Griffin said critics in the media and on anonymous Internet blogs can “chip away” at the agency by questioning the motives and ethics of engineers designing the new rockets.

Briefing charts used by NASA managers sometimes show up on Web sites without the proper context, he said, and opponents of the agency’s plans to replace the space shuttle with two new rockets have wrongly accused NASA managers of incompetence and worse.

“Are we at a place where differences of engineering (opinion) are cited as evidence of lying or malfeasance? This is not how any of us were taught to conduct an engineering discussion,” he said at a symposium of top NASA leaders and industry executives in Alabama.

Griffin said the criticism hasn’t slowed development of the Ares rockets being designed for the Constellation program to lift astronauts and cargo to the space station, the Moon and eventually Mars, but it is still hurting.

“I think there is a certain amount of damage to people’s morale that accrues when they know themselves that they are doing good work and telling the truth and the product of their work is besmirched anonymously by others who bring forward no data and can do so almost continuously,” he said.

A NASA safety panel reported in August that the space agency and its moon program had problems related to employee morale, funding and leadership.

NASA plans to fly a test version of the Ares rocket in late spring or early summer and retire the space shuttle in 2010. The first missions aboard Ares are scheduled for 2015.

Griffin said NASA is studying the effects of both delaying the shuttle’s retirement and speeding up work on Ares. Some lawmakers are worried that NASA might not be able to reach the space station if the shuttle is down and Ares isn’t ready.

“I’m not blind to the fact that several legislators have called out the need to look at such questions in the next Congress, and I think if such questions are going to be asked, it’s best for the answers to come from NASA,” he said.

Frank A. Slazer, the president of the American Astronautical Society, which promotes space science and exploration, said he expects either Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain to continue the Constellation program after taking office in January.

NASA spending on the project is “infinitesimally small” compared to the $700 billion financial bailout approved by Congress, he said, and the government-funded program will provide a boost to the technology sector amid a crunch in commercial credit.

President Bush signed a bill that would provide $20.2 billion for NASA in the upcoming year, including an additional $1 billion to speed up work on Constellation. But the next administration and Congress must decide how much of that money to actually spend.

Discovering exactly how the Big Bang created the universe may now be a step closer - thanks to the combined efforts of physicists.

Experimental physicists from the University of Arizona worked with theoretical physicists from the University of Queensland Ashton Bradley and Matthew Davis to determine how Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) form.

A Bose-Einstein condensate is a state of matter formed at ultra-cold temperatures, where atoms behave like waves. It was first predicted by Einstein in 1924; S.N. Bose was a young Indian physicist who used the theory to explain certain behaviours of light.

Its practical implications are still not fully appreciated, but the development of ‘atom lasers’ may advance the production of nanotechnology and it may also have applications for super-powerful ‘quantum computers’.

Bradley said scientists have been able to make vortices - alignments of atoms forming rotating whirlpools within the otherwise stationary atoms of the BEC - by stirring them, said an Otago University press release.

But, until now, they had only suspected that vortices may form spontaneously under the right conditions. For years, physicists have speculated about the possibility of vortices being created as a BEC is born.

‘Many people still thought that vortices would not be formed spontaneously, because vortices are quite energetic compared to the ground state of the system.’

The Arizona-Queensland collaboration has been able to show that vortices spontaneously appear between 25 to 50 percent of the time.

‘We know that the vortices are a consequence of critical fluctuations occurring as the gas cools, becoming a superfluid Bose-Einstein condensate.’

Bradley said that, by quantifying the occurrence of vortex formation in BECs, physicists understand a little more about the behaviour of the atoms in other phase transitions, such as the emergence of structure in the universe after the Big Bang.

These findings appeared in Nature.