Bee-killing hornets invade France
PARIS, Nov. 8 (UPI) -- Invasive bee-killing Asian hornets have arrived in Paris and one man has died after being stung by the black and yellow striped insects, officials said.
France has officially declared the pest, which is rapidly advancing to the north, a "harmful and invasive exotic species," Britain's The Daily Telegraph reported Thursday.
The hornets, which experts said may have arrived in southwestern France in a consignment of Chinese pottery in late 2004, have no indigenous predators in France.
Beekeepers in France said they are worried about their hives, as honeybees are the hornet's main source of food.
The hornets, which hover over hives and attack bees in flight, can destroy a beehive in a matter of hours.
A 54-year old man died Monday near the Loire wine-growing village of Saumur after disturbing a hornet nest while cutting his hedge.
The hornets, in an ongoing move northward, could cross into Britain by 2014, Franck Muller of the Museum of National History in Paris said.
"We have modeled its potential spread by cross-checking data from France and Asia, and concluded it is capable of living anywhere in Europe and certainly in Britain," he said.
Credit card has LCD screen and keyboard
SINGAPORE, Nov. 8 (UPI) -- MasterCard says it is introducing a credit card with an LCD display and a keyboard with touch-sensitive buttons that would allow entering banking passwords.
The high-tech card, which will be launched in Singapore in January before being offered globally, features the ability to create a "one-time password," eliminating the need for a separate device required by some banks to log into online banking, the BBC reported.
Many of the world's banks require customers to log in to online banking by using a small security device, usually a token or keychain device.
While significantly more secure than common static username and password login systems, many people have balked at carrying yet another device on their person to use online banking, an issue MasterCard said its card was developed to address.
"We brainstormed on ways to make it convenient and yet secure for customers," said V. Subba from Standard Chartered Bank, which is collaborating with MasterCard.
"The question was: Instead of sending customers another bulky token, could we replace something which already exists in the customer's wallet? That was when credit, debit and ATM cards immediately came to mind."
Future versions of the card could display added information such as account balances, MasterCard said.
Plans for manned space missions advance
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Nov. 8 (UPI) -- Work to re-purpose a launch complex at Florida's Cape Canaveral to support human space flights could create 250 to 300 new jobs, officials say.
United Launch Alliance, the company that provides launch services for NASA, said it has selected Hensel Phelps Construction Co. of Orlando to help plan modifications to Space Launch Complex 41 to prepare it for commercial crew missions using Atlas V launch rockets, Florida Today reported Thursday.
In work expected to take 21 months, Hensel Philips will work with ULA in the design and development of an access tower that would allow astronauts to enter a spacecraft sitting atop Atlas rockets, along with other modification to the complex.
"We look forward to working with Hensel Phelps to take the next steps in launching crew from SLC-41 and providing safe and reliable crew launch services as early as 2015," George Sowers, ULA vice president of Human Launch Services, said in a statement.
Three private companies -- Boeing, SpaceX and Sierra Nevada Corp. -- are developing space capsules for NASA's Commercial Crew Program.
Distant planet could be candidate for life
HATFIELD, England, Nov. 8 (UPI) -- European astronomers say they've discovered a planet orbiting a nearby sun at just the right distance for an Earth-like climate that could support life.
The star, 44 light years away has three planets, they said, and one of them is in the so-called Goldilocks Zone, the limited band of distance from a sun where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist.
The team of German and British astronomers said the planet is likely receiving about the same amount of solar energy as Earth gets from our sun.
"The star HD 40307 is a perfectly quiet old dwarf star, so there is no reason why such a planet could not sustain an Earth-like climate," Guillem Angla-Escude of Germany's University of Goettingen told Sky News.
Of the more than 800 planets that have been discovered outside our solar system since the early 1990s, only a handful are in their star's habitable zone.
Fewer still are planets in the zone that rotate, as the one around HD 40307 does, to create a daytime and nighttime, which increases the chance of an Earth-like environment.
"Just as Goldilocks liked her porridge to be neither too hot nor too cold but just right, this planet, or indeed any moons that it has, lie in an orbit comparable to Earth, increasing the probability of it being habitable," astronomer Hugh Jones of the University of Hertfordshire in Britain said.
The finding was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
