Baja Calana

Leader Chris Froome has been questioned about his performance during this year's race but the Team Sky rider has denied doping.

Howman said that the numbers of riders doping had fallen "majorly" since Armstrong won Tours from 1999 to 2005, adding: "I have great respect for the way in which the UCI [world cycling's governing body] are now running their anti-doping programme."

But it may already be too late for the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria. This once-rich oasis straddling age-old caravan routes, featuring colonnaded porticos and the sleek sandstone Tower of Elahbel, fell to IS on 21 May 2015.

The city is now strewn with landmines.

And according to reports, the militants promptly destroyed the 1,900-year-old Lion of Al-lat statue.

No wonder archaeologist Roger Michel is in a hurry to preserve - if only in digital form - the relics lying in the militants' onward path.

Mr Michel's team from the Institute of Digital Archaeology - a joint venture between Harvard University and the Classics Conclave - is hoping to flood the area with 3D cameras and enlist local partners to photograph as many items of historical interest as they can.

"If we can get 5,000-to-10,000 [3D cameras] in the field in the next three or six months," he says, "then, if we can't protect these things at the ground, we can at least preserve a highly detailed record of what's there."

He is relying on a patchwork of local museums, non-governmental organisations and volunteers to carry out the digital archiving.

But taking and uploading complex photos in hot, desert conditions where internet access is patchy is challenging.

The cameras need to be robust, have a long battery life and be capable of uploading large files.

"We're working a lot on the battery, since there will be limited access to electricity," Mr Michel says.

They have partnered with New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World to store the 3D images, and with Massachusetts Institute of Technology Three Dimensional Printing Laboratory to print them.

The threat from IS has added a new urgency to archaeologists' attempts to record mankind's cultural history.

The Universities of Oxford and Leicester have been using satellite imagery and aerial photography as part of a project called Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa.

The £1.2m project will create an open-access database, registering information about each site and its condition, all in easily accessible Geographic Information System [GIS] format.

Remote monitoring is particularly useful in war-ravaged countries like Syria, Iraq, and Libya where on-the-ground surveys are dangerous.

Bisphosphonates are mainly used to prevent bone loss in osteoporosis.

It is thought they can effectively starve any cancerous cells that do spread to the bone to stop them growing.

Some women take them after a cancer has been detected in their bones.

But the Early Breast Cancer Trialists' Collaborative Group, co-ordinated by the University of Oxford, analysed the impact of intervening earlier.

It analysed data from 26 separate trials of women who were given the drug for up to five years after a cancer was removed from their breast.

The results showed a 28% reduction in cancers emerging in the bone, but only in post-menopausal women.

Deaths were cut by 18% over the 10 years after they were first diagnosed.

Prof Rob Coleman, who analysed the data at the University of Sheffield, told the BBC News website: "The magnitude of the benefit on mortality was bigger than we had anticipated - a risk reduction of 18% is quite sizeable."

However, the drug is not licensed for use unless a cancer has been discovered in the bone.

And as the drug is out of patent there is little financial incentive for a pharmaceutical company to change the licence.

Prof Coleman added: "The access issue is an important one. It would be a great shame if the systems we have to work with prove to be a block.

"Normally the problem is we can't afford [a new drug] but this is peanuts, it's that there isn't a mechanism for this and there needs to be."

Lady Morgan, chief executive of Breast Cancer Now, said: "We believe that this is one of the most important steps forward in breast cancer treatment since the introduction of Herceptin over 10 years ago, but this time we're talking about a few pence rather than thousands of pounds, and millions saved by the NHS.

"However, despite costing less than five pence a day per patient, this treatment runs the risk of 'sitting on the shelf', and not realising its full benefit for the 34,000 [post-menopausal] women who could be eligible to take it each year."

An NHS cancer task force led by the head of Cancer Research UK new guidelines to be produced on bisphosphonates.

Eben Upton, Alan Mycroft, and four other academics at the University of Cambridge's Computer Laboratory had noted a decline in skills and numbers of students applying to read Computer Science.

Twenty years before, applicants would have been avid tinkering hobbyists; lately, they may have only done a small amount of web design.

The European Commission has predicted a shortfall of 900,000 adequately skilled programmers and other technology professionals in Europe by 2020.

So the sextet founded the Raspberry Foundation as a charity to revive Britain's garage-geek spirit.

When British astronaut Tim Peake heads to the International Space Station this November, he will bring two augmented space Raspberries, called Astro Pis.

They will run experiments devised by primary and secondary school students, says Dr Upton, Raspberry's chief executive. The older students will also code them.

Programming is changing briskly.

Coding in the cloud is one trend likely to carry on, spreading collaborators across continents.

So also is the explosion of new languages, like Facebook's Hack scripting language or Apple's Swift, alongside classical tongues like C and Java.

We're likely to learn to code younger, and differently. The has 6.2 million registered users.

The Internet of Things, driverless cars, and drones will all yield more programmable platforms - but will coding for your cappuccino maker drastically change programming?

And what will the coding workplace be like, when today's Raspberry rugrats have grown into tomorrow's programming prodigies?

Speaking to Science in Action on the BBC World Service, Dr Longrich explained that the creature's tail wasn't paddle-shaped for swimming and it had no sign of fins; meanwhile its long trunk and short snout were typical of a burrower.

"It's pretty straight-up adapted for burrowing," he said.

When Dr Longrich first saw photos of the 19.5cm fossil, now christened, he was "really blown away" because he was expecting an ambiguous, in-between species.

Instead, he saw "a lot of very advanced snake features" including its hooked teeth, flexible jaw and spine - and even snake-like scales.

"And there's the gut contents - it's swallowed another vertebrate. It was preying on other animals, which is a snake feature.

"It was pretty unambiguously a snake. It's just got little arms and little legs."

Deadly embrace?

John Jenkins, Kepler data analysis lead at Nasa's Ames Research Center in California, added: "It's a real privilege to deliver this news to you today. There's a new kid on the block that's just moved in next door."

The new world joins other exoplanets such as Kepler-186f that are similar in many ways to Earth.

Determining which is most Earth-like depends on the properties one considers. Kepler-186f, announced in 2014, is smaller than the new planet, but orbits a red dwarf star that is significantly cooler than our own.

Kepler-452b, however, orbits a parent star which belongs to the same class as the Sun: it is just 4% more massive and 10% brighter. Kepler-452b takes 385 days to complete a full circuit of this star, so its orbital period is 5% longer than Earth's.

The mass of Kepler-452b cannot be measured yet, so astronomers have to rely on models to estimate a range of possible masses, with the most likely being five times that of Earth. If it is rocky, the world would likely still have active volcanism and its gravity would be roughly twice that on our own planet.

The new world is included in a haul of 500 new possible planets sighted by the Kepler space telescope around distant stars.

Twelve of the new candidates are less than twice Earth's diameter, orbiting in the so-called habitable zone around their star.

This zone refers to a range of distances at which the energy radiated by the star would permit water to exist as a liquid on the planet's surface if certain other conditions are also met.

Of these 500 candidates, Kepler-452b is the first to be confirmed as a planet.

Dr Suzanne Aigrain, from the University of Oxford, who was not involved with the study, told BBC News: "I do believe the properties described for Kepler-452b are the most Earth-like I've come across for a confirmed planet to date.

"What seems even more significant to me is the number of planets in the habitable zone of their host stars with radii below two Earth radii; 12 is quite a few compared to the pre-existing Kepler planet catalogue.

"It bodes well for their attempts to provide a more robust measure of the incidence of Earth-like planets, which is the top-level goal of the Kepler mission."

"We've got to the point where in 2014, developing countries almost caught up with developed countries in terms of overall dollar investment," Mr McCrone says.

"In some places it's happening without any subsidy support too."

Big business and governments have also increased their support for clean technology - through venture investments in innovative start-ups and subsidies like tax breaks respectively.

"Without them the industry would be in a much tougher position," says Frans Nauta, deputy director of entrepreneurship at Climate-KIC, an EU-funded programme that supports cleantech start-ups.

GTRIIP, a start-up founded in Singapore that has opened offices in the US, has developed a documentless check-in service using the iPhone's biometric features.

Guests can securely check in at participating hotel chains using Apple's Touch ID fingerprint recognition technology to access the booking details saved on their device.

At the hotel, receptionists have their own "kiosk app" for checking in guests.

Co-founders Maxim Thaw Tint and Stanley Myo Lwin, both frequent travellers, were frustrated with time-consuming hotel processes and the need to carry multiple IDs or reservation documents.

"When we researched the existing biometric technologies we found that the Apple Touch ID is out there since 2013 together with the iPhone 5S," says Mr Thaw Tint.

"We decided to leverage on this because we don't want to reinvent the wheel."

GTRIIP is of particular interest to business travellers, says Mr Thaw Tint, who will often choose the same hotel group, due to their loyalty program.

British 100m champion CJ Ujah and fellow Britons James Dasaolu, Richard Kilty and James Ellington will also be taking part in the 100m.

Organisers say tickets are still available for the event, which has not been a sell-out despite its world-class field.

When someone is lost like that, of course it is a shock, but there is no question in my mind about carrying on in racing, no doubts about getting back in the car.

I have no fear. I'll just get in and drive like I always do - you can't let things like that affect you. And it will make no difference to my focus and commitment.

I am going to Hungary with the intention to win and to extend my championship lead, as always.

Hungary marks the halfway point of the season and I have to say that, from the perspective of my racing, it has been a pretty awesome year so far.