Two British adventurers will fly a helium balloon to the edge of space next summer in an attempt to break the 40-year-old world altitude record.

Colin Prescot and Andy Elson, who tried to fly a balloon around the world in 1998, are aiming to reach 132,000ft (24.6 miles) aboard Qinetiq 1, the largest manned balloon ever built. The present record, set in 1961 by two US Navy pilots, one of whom died in the attempt, stands at 113,740ft.

The balloonists will ascend on an open platform, wearing Russian space suits that will protect them against the cold and low pressure that would otherwise cause their blood to boil at 60,000ft.

Qinetiq 1 will stand 1,270ft tall, as high as the Empire State Building, and will be filled with 750,000 cubic feet of helium. As the balloon rises, the gas will expand to a volume of more than 40 million cubic feet as the pressure drops. Launch is scheduled for July, probably from an aircraft carrier moored off the Cornish coast. The balloon, which will fly for about 12 hours, will be visible with the naked eye from 600 miles away. Mr Prescot described the mission as the “ultimate challenge” in ballooning.

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THE remains of a giant prehistoric crocodile that preyed on dinosaurs have been discovered in an ancient river bed in the Sahara Desert.

The “supercroc”, which lived 110 million years ago, was 40ft long and weighed nine tonnes, more than 20 times as heavy as a modern crocodile, to which it is related, although it is not a direct ancestor.

Its Latin name is Sarchosuchus imperator, meaning “flesh crocodile emperor”, and it would have ambushed large animals, including long-necked dinosaurs, as they drank at the edge of a river. Using its powerful jaws, it would have dragged its prey under water to drown it, rather as a modern Nile crocodile tackles a wildebeest.

Paul Sereno, professor of palaeontology at Chicago University and a National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence, has discovered 12 specimens in Niger, which have provided the first picture of what Sarchosuchus looked like and how it lived.

“It was a stealth predator, surging out of the water to grab even large animals on the shore and force them under water,” he says. “It would have been able to tackle anything equal to its own bodyweight - even a heavy dinosaur would have been no match for it in the water.”

The structure of its teeth and jaws shows that dinosaurs were almost certainly its staple diet, with three herbivores providing its meals - the duck-billed, sail-backed ouranosaurus; lourdosaurus, a relative of the iguanadon; and nigerosaurus, a long-necked animal related to the brontosaurus.

www.nationalgeographic.comsupercroc National Geographic supercroc page A TEAM of surgeons working in New York has used a remote-controlled robot to operate on a patient on the other side of the Atlantic, in the world’s first example of intercontinental surgery.

In Operation Lindbergh, named after the first man to fly across the Atlantic, the gall bladder of Madeleine Schall, a 68-year-old French woman, was removed in Strasbourg using “virtual scalpels” controlled from 4,300 miles away.

As Jacques Marescaux, who led the surgical team, made scalpel movements on a computer in New York, a robot named Zeus replicated them precisely to conduct the operation. There were no complications, and the patient has recovered completely.

Video footage of each scalpel movement was relayed to the doctors with a time delay too short to be noticed by the human brain. The Zeus equipment took 16 minutes to set up, and the procedure was completed in 54 minutes.

This success, details of which were published in the journal Nature, heralds an era in which surgeons will be able to operate on patients anywhere in the world without leaving their theatres.

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