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?