Courtesy: BBC News -Science and Nature Department
An extremely rare female frog has been spotted for the first time in 20 years.
The tiny tree frog, Isthmohyla rivularis, was seen in Costa Rica's Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve.
This species was thought to have become extinct two decades ago, but last year a University of Manchester researcher caught a glimpse of a male.
However, the discovery of the female and more males suggests this species is breeding and has been able to survive where many other frogs have not.
Andrew Gray, a herpetologist from Manchester Museum at the University of Manchester, said: "This has been the highlight of the whole of my career. "Now that we know that both sexes exist in the wild, we should intensify efforts to understand their ecology and further their conservation."
The BBC has been following the team from the University of Manchester and Chester Zoo that is working on amphibian conservation programmes
The BBC video of the frog is the first-known footage of this species.
The 2.5cm-long female, which was released after the discovery, was brown with metallic green speckles and was packed full of eggs.
A difficult task
Finding female frogs is extremely difficult; males make a distinctive call but females are silent for most of the time.
And tracking down this particular species in a great expanse of rainforest was even more difficult - the team had few clues about where the frogs might be, and the search could only take place at night.
The team trekked deep into the forest to a spot close to where the male Isthmohyla rivularis was spotted last year.
The researchers first discovered another male from its soft insect-like call.
The conservationists then trained their torches on the undergrowth, and eventually Luis Obando, head of park maintenance at Monteverde's Tropical Science Center, found the tiny female, which was sitting on a leaf.
Mr Gray told the BBC: "It is hard to describe just how unlikely it was to have discovered a female of this particular species.
"The only time you ever come across a female is by chance - and it is only once in a blue moon that they come down to lay their eggs. You really have to be in the right place at the right time.
"You could come out here every night for a year and not see a thing.
"I really think that this time we have had luck on our side." The discovery of both sexes of this species has given the researchers hope that this population may be surviving against the odds.
Mr Gray explained: "Last year, when we saw the male, we had no idea whether this was one of the last few remaining male specimens of this species.
"But now we have found the female, there is hope that the species may recover.
"It still seems that these critically endangered creatures are on the very brink of extinction - and although we have been intensively searching the streams all through the night, it appears that the density of the population is precarious."
The researchers swabbed the frogs before they were released to see if they are carrying the chytrid fungus - a disease thought to have killed of many other species in this area.
They also used a spectrometer to look at the properties of the frogs' skin to try to find out why this species has survived where others have not.
"It is imperative for the future conservation of Costa Rican amphibians that collaborative efforts harness the skills of biologists, researchers, educators and committed individuals, if we are to save these rare species," Mr Gray added.
Scientists have hailed a successful switch-on for an enormous experiment which will recreate the conditions a few moments after the Big Bang.
They have now fired two beams of particles called protons around the 27km-long tunnel which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The £5bn machine on the Swiss-French border is designed to smash protons together with cataclysmic force.
Scientists hope it will shed light on fundamental questions in physics.
The first - clockwise - beam completed its first circuit of the underground tunnel at just before 0930 BST. The second - anti-clockwise - beam successfully circled the ring after 1400 BST.
So far, all the beams have been stopped, or "dumped", after just a few circuits.
On Thursday, engineers hoped to inject clockwise and anti-clockwise protons again, but this time they plan to "close the orbit", letting the beams run continuously for a few seconds each.
The BBC understands that low-energy collisions could happen in the next few days. This will allow engineers to calibrate instruments, but will not produce data of scientific interest.
"There it is," project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap. There were cheers in the control room when engineers heard of the successful test.
The LHC is arguably the most complicated and ambitious experiment ever built; the project has been hit by cost overruns, equipment trouble and construction problems. The switch-on itself is two years late.
The collider is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research - better known by its French acronym Cern.
The vast circular tunnel - or "ring" - which runs under the French-Swiss border contains more than 1,000 cylindrical magnets arranged end-to-end.
The magnets are there to steer the beam around this vast circuit. Eventually, two proton beams will be steered in opposite directions around the LHC at close to the speed of light, completing about 11,000 laps each second.
At allotted points around the tunnel, the beams will cross paths, smashing together near four massive "detectors" that monitor the collisions for interesting events.
Scientists are hoping that new sub-atomic particles will emerge, revealing fundamental insights into the nature of the cosmos.
Major effort
"We will be able to see deeper into matter than ever before," said Dr Tara Shears, a particle physicist at the University of Liverpool.
"We will be looking at what the Universe was made of billionths of a second after the Big Bang. That is amazing, that really is fantastic."
The LHC should answer one very simple question: What is mass?"We know the answer will be found at the LHC," said Jim Virdee, a particle physicist at Imperial College London.
The favoured model involves a particle called the Higgs boson - dubbed the "God Particle". According to the theory, particles acquire their mass through interactions with an all-pervading field carried by the Higgs.
The latest astronomical observations suggest ordinary matter - such as the galaxies, gas, stars and planets - makes up just 4% of the Universe.
The rest is dark matter (23%) and dark energy (73%). Physicists think the LHC could provide clues about the nature of this mysterious "stuff".
But Professor Virdee told BBC News: "Nature can surprise us... we have to be ready to detect anything it throws at us."
Full beam ahead
Engineers injected the first low-intensity proton beams into the LHC in August. But they did not go all the way around the ring.
Technicians had to be on the lookout for potential problems.
Steve Myers, head of the accelerator and beam department, said: "There are on the order of 2,000 magnetic circuits in the machine. This means there are 2,000 power supplies which generate the current which flows in the coils of the magnets."
If there was a fault with any of these, he said, it would have stopped the beams. They were also wary of obstacles in the beam pipe which could prevent the protons from completing their first circuit.
Mr Myers has experience of the latter problem. While working on the LHC's predecessor, a machine called the Large-Electron Positron Collider, engineers found two beer bottles wedged into the beam pipe - a deliberate, one-off act of sabotage.
The culprits - who were drinking a particular brand that advertising once claimed would "refresh the parts other beers cannot reach" - were never found.
In order to get both beams to circulate continuously, engineers will "close the orbit". The beams themselves are made up of several "packets" - each about a metre long - containing billions of protons.
The protons would disperse if left to their own devices, so engineers use electrical forces to "grab" them, keeping the particles tightly huddled in packets.
Once the beams are captured, the same system of electrical forces is used to give the particles an energetic kick, accelerating them to greater and greater speeds.
Long haul
The idea of the Large Hadron Collider emerged in the early 1980s. The project was eventually approved in 1996 at a cost of 2.6bn Swiss Francs, which amounts to about £1.3bn at present exchange rates.
However, Cern underestimated equipment and engineering costs when it set out its original budget, plunging the lab into a cash crisis.Cern had to borrow hundreds of millions of euros in bank loans to get the LHC completed. The current price is nearly four times that originally envisaged.
During winter, the LHC will be shut down, allowing equipment to be fine-tuned for collisions at full energy.
"What's so exciting is that we haven't had a large new facility starting up for years," explained Dr Shears.
"Our experiments are so huge, so complex and so expensive that they don't come along very often. When they do, we get all the physics out of them that we can."
Engineers celebrated the success with champagne, but a certain brand of beer was not on the menu.
My Opinion:
In my view the BIGBANG experiment cannot be over rated as a wonderful experiment. This people are playing beyond the God. One day everyhting will go from the hands of humans and the earth will cause total destruction. Now itself if the experiment goes wrong the earth is gonna melt.
