INFO GURU

The massive popularity of iPods and other portable music players could mean many more people will develop hearing loss, according to experts.

If the volume through headphones is too high, there is a real risk of permanent damage to hearing, they say.

Sydney's National Acoustic Laboratories found a quarter of personal music system users in a random sample listened to music at dangerous volumes.

Millions of people now own MP3 players and Apple has sold more than 20 million iPods.

A recent study by the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID) found 39% of 18 to 24-year-olds listened to personal music players for at least an hour every day and 42% admitted they thought they had the volume too high, according to the BBC News website.

The RNID regards 80 decibels as the level at which hearing is threatened - 20 less than a pneumatic drill.

Some MP3 players can reach 105 decibels. EU iPods have a sound limiter to comply with noise safety levels; however, sometimes users hack through this in order to listen to it louder.

The RNID said it was possible that any rise in popularity of personal music players might lead to more cases of hearing loss in the future.

Graham Frost, chairman of the British Society of Audiology, said the risk of damage increased with noise level and duration of use of personal music systems.

He said it could take months or years for that become apparent to the individual.

On 6 September 2007, the UK government commissioned a review of the risks children faced from exposure to harmful or inappropriate material on the internet or in video games.

Psychologist Dr Tanya Byron was asked to lead the six-month review and the report detailing the work was published on 27 March.

Here are some of the key points taken from the report.

Children will be children - pushing boundaries and taking risks.

The safety of children should be a central concern for parents and society as a whole.

The report wants search sites to show when searches are safe

[The] remit has been to look at the grey areas - of legal, adult material such as 18 rated video games, and the risks to children online from a huge range of potentially harmful or inappropriate (but legal) content, contact with others and their own conduct.

Mixed research evidence on the actual harm from video games and use of the internet does not mean that the risks do not exist.

To help measure and manage those risks there needs to be a focus on what the child brings to the technology and use our understanding of children's development to inform an approach that is based on the "probability of risk" in different circumstances.

Efforts should be focused on reducing the availability of harmful and inappropriate material in the most popular part of the internet.

Parents also have a key role to play in managing children's access to such material.

Parents need help to keep up with their children online

The internet cannot be made completely safe. Because of this, children's resilience to the material to which they may be exposed must be build up to ensure they have the confidence and skills to navigate these new media waters more safely.

There are also steps that need to be taken in the UK and on a global platform to make the waters of new technology easier to navigate safely. This is about providing children and their parents with the proper tools, clear standards and signposts and somewhere to go when things go wrong.

Alongside new technology a new culture of responsibility is needed, where all in society focus not on defending entrenched positions, but on working together to help children keep themselves safe, to help parents to keep their children safe and to help each other support children and parents in this task.

Create a UK Council on Child Internet Safety that leads development of a strategy with two core elements:

1) better regulation - in the form of voluntary codes of practice that industry can sign up to.

2) better information and education, where the role of government, law enforcement, schools and children's services will be key.

The report wants games clearly labelled with age ratings

The council should investigate how the law around harmful and inappropriate material could be usefully clarified (including suicide websites) and explore appropriate enforcement responses.

Develop an independently monitored voluntary code of practice on the moderation of user generated content, including making specific commitments on take-down times.

All computers sold for home use should have kitemarked parental control software and ISPs should offer and advertise this prominently when people sign up.

The council should ensure search providers agree to make it obvious what level of search is on (e.g. safe or moderate) and give users the option to "lock it" on. Every search engine clearly link to child safety information and safe search settings on the front page of their website.

A properly funded public information and awareness campaign on child internet safety to change behaviour.

Sustainable education and children's services initiatives to improve the skills of children and their parents around e-safety.

Creation of a "one stop shop" for child internet safety within the DirectGov information network, based on extensive research about what different groups of users want.

The report wants new home computers fitted with filters

100% of schools should have Acceptable Use Policies that are regularly reviewed, monitored and agreed with parents and students.

Ofsted take steps to hold schools to account on their performance on e-safety.

Sustained, high profile and targeted efforts by industry to increase parents' understanding and use of age-ratings and controls on consoles.

That the statutory requirement to age classify games be extended to include those receiving 12+ ratings.

Introduce a hybrid classification system with BBFC logos on the front of all games (18,15,12,PG and U). Pegi to rate all 3+ and 7+ games and their equivalent logos (across - all age ranges) will be on the back of all boxes.

That there should be focused efforts to monitor enforcement of the statutory age ratings at the point of sale.

The BBFC and Pegi develop a joint approach to rating online games and driving up safety standards for children and young people in the games, under the auspices of the UK Council for Child Internet safety.

Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey have just returned from one of the most ambitious projects of the season: to drill an ice core from the top of a mountain high on the Antarctic Peninsula.

"The Peninsula is the fastest warming place in Antarctica and one of the three fastest-warming in the world," explained team leader Dr Robert Mulvaney.

"Over the last 50 years, it has probably warmed about 2 .5C, which is spectacular," he told Discovery on the BBC World Service.

From the broad 1,630m summit of Mount Haddington, the highest point on James Ross Island near the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, you get a spectacular view.

Far to the west are high ice cliffs, 1,000m high, leading up to the mountains of the mainland peninsula.

Had you been standing there in 1916, you might have seen the remnants of Ernest Shackleton's party drifting past on sea-ice following the loss of HMS Endurance.

The latest vessel to bear that name, which carried us and the scientists, was able to sail right into the channel that separates James Ross Island from the mainland.

Twenty years ago that channel was permanently blocked by ice.

Different views

Fifty kilometres to the south, there used to be the vast Larsen B ice shelf which broke up spectacularly in 2002 over the space of a few weeks.

The core records climate conditions over thousands of years

Now, the Wilkins ice shelf on the other side of the peninsula appears to be disintegrating.

All these changes would seem to be signs of global warming, but are they just a recent phenomenon or part of a natural cycle?

There is controversial evidence from sediment cores drilled from where the Larsen B Ice Shelf used to be that suggest it may have broken up previously.

"Marine sediments tell us that an ice shelf break-up happened around 5,000 years ago as well. This core will tell us for certain if it got warmer then, too," Dr Mulvaney said.

It should also tell him about how the great Antarctic ice sheets began to retreat at the end of the last ice age.

Open water: A sight Shackleton would have liked to have seen

"I have drilled two cores in the region; this one and on Berkner Island, 1,500km to the south," he explained.

"These were both part of the western Antarctic ice sheet in the last ice age, but that retreated rapidly as the ice age came to an end.

"That gives some feeling for how fast the ice sheets can actually retreat. So, it gives clues about how the ice sheet might retreat from other areas if they warm in the future."

To the base

To complete this borehole, helicopters from HMS Endurance had to transport 20 tonnes of supplies and equipment to the mountaintop.

A team of seven scientists lived there in tents for 50 days, working in shifts so that they could continue drilling 16 hours a day.

The main working tent itself had to have a slot in the roof and trench in the floor to accommodate the tall drill, and enable it to swing to the horizontal to extract the ice core.

Ash layer: Evidence of past eruptions

At intervals in the ice, there are grey bands of volcanic ash. James Ross Island and some of its neighbours are volcanic, though there is no sign of activity there today.

After some initial bad weather and snow drifting over and even into their tents, the drill team made good progress and, by mid February, had reached a depth of 363m. It was Robert Mulvaney's turn to work the drill.

"I got 20cm into my run (normally you try and drill 1.5m on each run). I got just 22 cm and the drill got stuck. Of course, my colleagues said, you're rubbish at drilling, let me take over," he recalled.

"But we brought the drill back to the surface and we knew straight away that we had got to the bottom. You can't go further than that."

The team managed to drill a small amount of the frozen clay and rock fragments from beneath the ice. This should enable the researchers to date when ice first covered the region.

'Night life'

Completion of core saw a small celebration.

"Next day, two Twin Otter planes took out the ice cores and left empty the ice cave in which we had stored them. So we set it up with Tilly lamps and candles and we sat around on food boxes and partied well into the next night.

"We called it 'The Pit' - the most exclusive nightclub venue in the region," said Dr Mulvaney.

Now, the ice cores are on their way back to the UK for analysis.

When the team pulled out, all its equipment went too

Trapped within the ice are tiny bubbles of ancient air which should reveal atmospheric composition - and in particular carbon dioxide concentrations - well back into the last ice age, possibly 30,000 years ago.

The proportions of different types, or isotopes, of oxygen in the ice should give the team the sea temperature at the time to an accuracy better than one degree. When the sea is warmer, a greater proportion of the heavier oxygen isotope evaporates to leave its signature in the ice.

There are also tiny traces of other chemicals in the ice layers.

The amount of some of them, notably sea salt, should show if there was open sea nearby at the time the layers formed. If there is very little salt, then there were probably extensive ice shelves preventing it getting blown onto the island.

The helicopters from HMS Endurance eventually returned to retrieve the "Antarctic night-clubbers". Everything was shipped out. Nothing but clean white snow drifts across the summit of Mount Haddington.

"When we leave the site, we take everything with us," said Dr Mulvaney.

"We've left nothing in the hole, nothing on the surface. Everything goes out. That's very important to us."

You can listen live to Discovery on the BBC World Service at 1230 GMT on Wednesdays. Follow the link to the website to listen again

By 2020 the terms 'interface' and 'user' will be obsolete as computers merge ever closer with humans.

It is one of the predictions in a Microsoft-backed report drawn from the discussions of 45 academics from the fields of computing, science, sociology and psychology.

It predicts fundamental changes in the field of so-called Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

By 2020 humans will increasingly interrogate machines, the report said.

In turn computers will be able to anticipate what we want from them, which will require new rules about our relationship with machines.

Smart devices

The keyboard, mouse and monitor will increasingly be replaced by more intuitive forms of interaction and display, including tablet computers, speech recognition systems and fingertip-operated surfaces.

Boundaries between humans and computers will become blurred over the next decade as devices are embedded in objects, our clothing or, in the case of medical monitoring, in our bodies.

Although paper will still be a reality in 2020, digital paper will also flourish allowing us to create, for example, social network magazines that update in real time.

Without proper consideration and control it is possible that we - both individually and collectively - may no longer be in control of ourselves or the world around us Being Human - Microsoft HCI report

Digital storage of even more aspects of our lives, from mobile phone calls to CCTV footage, could be a reality by 2020 and, in combination with an omnipresent network will mean privacy will be a key focus of the HCI community.

Our "digital footprint" - the sharing of more and more aspects of our lives through digital photography, podcasting , blogging and video - is set to get bigger and this will raise key questions about how much information we should store about ourselves.

Losing control

The ever-present network will channel mass market information directly to us while disseminating our own intimate information.

The report dubs this the era of so-called hyper-connectivity and predicts it will mean a growth in "techno-dependency".

This ever more intimate relationship between humans and computers will be a double-edged sword, it suggests.

The report compares the widespread introduction of the calculator - widely blamed for a fall in the standard of mental arithmetic - with what may happen as computers become more intelligent and take on new responsibilities.

"Without proper consideration and control it is possible that we - both individually and collectively - may no longer be in control of ourselves or the world around us," the report warns.

As well as the need for language to reflect the newly expanded human/computer environment so too the concept of teaching computer science will need to be adapted.

"Not just teaching children about how computers and applications work, but about their wider impact," reads the report.

Among its recommendations for the future direction of HCI, the report suggests there needs to be greater engagement with government and policy makers.