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Puffins, with their bright beaks, upright walk and all-action lifestyle, are amongst the most familiar and beloved of Britain's coastal birds. But they are also mysterious, as Oxford scientists explain in The One Show tonight.

Tim Guilford of Oxford University's Department of Zoology studies Atlantic Puffins [Fratercula arctica] on Skomer Island, Pembrokeshire: 'People literally flock to see these beautiful birds busy with their comings and goings to their cliff-top burrow nests during the high summer,' Tim tells us.

'By August, though, the Puffins have gone for the winter. The question is: where?' 

He explains that, like many seabirds that leave our shores every summer, their over-wintering behaviour remains little understood. 

'Traditional methods for studying seabird movements involve the recovery of uniquely numbered metal leg rings from birds found washed up on beaches or found in fishing nets,' he says.

'Logging the distribution of such ‘ringing recoveries’ can provide an idea of where birds go on migration. But Puffin recoveries are few and far between, providing poor resolution and suggesting that they may overwinter far out at sea.'

But this seasonal 'blank' is now being filled in thanks to the development of miniature tracking technologies. Biologists at the Department of Zoology in Oxford, and Microsoft Research in Cambridge, have been using archival light logging devices built by the British Antarctic Survey to record daily positions of Puffins breeding at Skomer Island throughout the winter. 

These 'geolocators' weigh just 1.5g and can be carried safely on a leg ring, and use stored light level records to provide an estimate of Latitude (day length) and Longitude (time of midday). The accuracy is not high compared to satellite tracking (around 100-200km), but still offers a remarkable view of the migratory behaviour of birds weighing just a few hundred grams. 

Tim adds: 'The aim of the project is to understand the at-sea behaviour and movement ecology of a range of predatory seabirds, including the Puffin.  Similar studies on different colonies are ongoing at other institutions, such as CEH Edinburgh.'

'It will be particularly interesting to determine whether there are differences in over-wintering behaviour between Puffins breeding on the Pembrokeshire islands, where breeding and over-wintering survival have been relatively high in recent years, and those breeding in the North East of the UK where birds are sometimes much less successful.'

The project is still in its early stages, as the researchers gather data on the Puffin's mysterious winter behaviour, but we hope to update you with what they discover.

An item on this research airs on BBC One's The One Show on 1 September 2009 at 7pm.

UPDATE: If you missed last night's programme you can watch the report on BBC iPlayer [23:33]

Whilst it officially opens tomorrow, if you're in Oxford you can already enjoy the new From Earth to the Universe exhibition in University Parks today.

The exhibition deserves a special mention, not least because one of the 28 panels is sponsored by our friends at Galaxy Zoo, the project that gets members of the public involved in online astronomy research.

The project is just part of festivities for the International Year of Astronomy.

Images: Thanks to Lorna Stevenson for these photos.

A question put to an Oxford physicist by one of his students has led to the invention of a cheap domestic wind turbine that gets the most out of variable wind power.

As this Guardian article explains John Gregg of Oxford University's Department of Physics specialises in spintronics and magnetic instrumentation but, as part of an introductory physics course, a student asked: How can an induction motor work as a generator?

In trying to find a satisfactory answer John discovered that the sort of simple induction motor used in many domestic appliances could be turned into a cheap machine for turning wind energy into power.

The real breakthrough came when he realised that the heating elements in hot water tanks aren't bothered about variable voltages or frequencies - one of the barriers to manufacturing cheap and efficient conventional wind turbines. He told The Guardian's Michael Pollitt: 'That's why we can make it cheaply and why it performs well because we are not handcuffed by the necessity to deliver 240V 50Hz.'

At the heart of the turbine is a 7.5kW induction motor that generates power continuously, feeding it into the home hot water system with any surplus energy channelled into central heating through a heat exchanger.

John explained: 'Because the generator is configured as a constant power source and acts effectively as a generator and a continuously variable electronic gearbox, the turbine aerofoils operate on the peak of their performance curves at all times, and all the power they deliver is harvested and channelled to the load. So, the diminished wind power that you get at low altitude is used to maximum effect.' 

The team who worked with John to develop and patent the new turbine through Oxford's Oxford University Innovation (they are currently setting up a spinout called RenewOx) believe that the system could generate up to 60 per cent of a household's domestic energy needs.

The turbine could be mass-produced for a very low manufacturing cost and could potentially pay for itself in between 3-7 years (a massive improvement over conventional turbines that take up to 50 years to pay for themselves).

As John comments, this just goes to show how teaching smart undergraduates can challenge tutors and inspire exciting new projects - and that those who shun undergraduate teaching to concentrate on research just might be missing out.

The turbine was developed by John Gregg and built by Reg Bendall of the Clarendon Laboratory. It uses a 10 kilowatt set of blades supplied courtesy of Eirecomposites.

New calculations suggest that the halos caused when dark matter particles collide could be frequent enough to help us detect them within a year.

The team, including Joseph Silk of Oxford University's Department of Physics, detailed their findings in a recent Science Express paper reported by PhysOrg.com.

Previous studies had suggested that such quantum collisions - termed annihilations - would be few and far between, and so the gamma rays they emit would be hard to pick up even by orbiting satellite telescopes such as NASA's Fermi.

But the team's analysis of data from previous observations picked up more collisions than expected. They theorised that this might be down to an attractive force, the Sommerfeld effect, pulling dark matter particles more closely together and so making collisions more likely.

By applying these new calculations to a model of a dark matter cloud the size of our Milky Way the researchers were able to predict that Fermi should be able to detect a few subhalos caused by these collisions in its first year of operation, and find at least ten after five years.

Such observations would give the first direct evidence for the existence of dark matter - something that would rate as one of the all-time great physics discoveries.

The work was carried out by Michael Kuhlen of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Piero Madau of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Joseph Silk of the University of Oxford.

As BBC Online and New Scientist report methane is disappearing from Mars far faster than it vanishes on Earth, but why?

This is the big question posed by the French research behind these reports published in this week's Nature.

But, although the researchers gather the suspects - life, volcanism, an unknown natural process - in the drawing room like a scientific episode of Agatha Christie's Poirot, the findings get us no closer to knowing who the real culprit is.

Fred Taylor of Oxford's Department of Physics, for one, isn't clear what's new here: 'We have known for some time that the photochemical lifetime of methane on Mars is too long to be consistent with the recent measurements,' he tells us.

'Therefore there must be another sink for methane on Mars, probably oxidising material like peroxides and perchlorates in the soil. It would actually be surprising if this were not the case, as this new paper recognises near the end.'

He goes on to point out that it's also not news that there's little chance of life near the surface of Mars, which is why all planned missions aim to dig deep into the Martian soil to look for telltale signs of biological activity.

Fred adds: 'What is interesting is that there is methane there in the first place. Whatever its source, it is probably being vented from well below the surface, and if it isn't a biological source it still must be something interesting like geothermal activity or small cometary impacts.'