The Razor's Edge

Einstein's Telescope: Searching for Dark Matter and the Future of the Universe

2009-10-15T03:40:00.000-07:00

By DailyGalaxy.com

“Such stunning cosmic coincidences reveal so much about nature.”

~ Leonidas Moustakas, Jet Propulsion Laboratory

The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a never-before-seen optical alignment in space: a pair of glowing rings, one nestled inside the other like a bull's-eye pattern. The double-ring pattern is caused by the complex bending of light from two distant galaxies strung directly behind a foreground massive galaxy, like three beads on a string. The foreground galaxy is 3 billion light-years away, the inner ring and outer ring are comprised of multiple images of two galaxies at a distance of 6 and approximately 11 billion light-years.

The discovery was made by an international team of astronomers led by Raphael Gavazzi and Tommaso Treu of the University of Californi, Santa Barbara. Treu says the odds of seeing such a special alignment are so small that they “hit the jackpot” with this discovery. “When I first saw it I said ‘wow, this is insane!’ I could not believe it!”

But this sight is more than just an incredible novelty. It’s also a very rare phenomenon that can offer insights into dark matter, dark energy, the nature of distant galaxies, and the curvature of the Universe itself. The discovery is part of the ongoing Sloan Lens Advanced Camera for Surveys (SLACS) program.

The phenomenon, called gravitational lensing, occurs when a massive galaxy in the foreground bends the light rays from a distant galaxy behind it, in much the same way as a magnifying glass would. When both galaxies are perfectly lined up, the light forms a circle, called an “Einstein ring”, around the foreground galaxy. If another more distant galaxy lies precisely on the same sightline, a second, larger ring will appear.

“Such stunning cosmic coincidences reveal so much about nature. Dark matter is not hidden to lensing,” added Leonidas Moustakas of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasaden, California, USA. “The elegance of this lens is trumped only by the secrets of nature that it reveals.”

The dark matter distribution in the foreground galaxies that is warping space to create the Einstein's telescope, the gravitational lens, can be accurately mapped. In addition, the geometry of the two Einstein rings allowed the team to measure the mass of the middle galaxy precisely to be a value of 1 billion solar masses. The team reports that this is the first measurement of the mass of a dwarf galaxy at cosmological distance.

A sample of several dozen double rings such as this one would offer a purely independent measure of the curvature of space by gravity. This would help in determining what the majority of the Universe is made of, and the properties of dark energy.

Original observations made in 1970 revealed that gravitational motions of gas clouds in the Andromeda galaxy were occurring at speeds far greater than the entire observed mass of that galaxy could account for. Similar problems detected in the 1930's involving motions of entire galaxies had long been disregarded. Later observations confirmed that so-called "ordinary matter" is insufficient to account for observed gravitational effects in the cosmos. Thus the universe must contain huge amounts of "dark matter," that we cannot observe and the composition of which we do not know.

In 1998 reports of observations of distant supernovae revealed that the expansion of the universe was not slowing, as would be expected from long-term effects of gravity, but was instead accelerating. Something was overcoming the gravitational power of all of the matter in the universe. The acceleration, moreover, has not been present from the Big Bang on. For billions of years the speed of expansion slowed. Then, about 5 billion years ago, acceleration began. Obviously energy--a lot of it--- was required to explain these phenomena. This is "dark energy." We cannot detect it and currently know almost nothing about it.

Today scientists believe that 5% of the universe consists of "ordinary" [observable] matter, 23% of "dark" matter and 72% of "dark energy."

Scientists discover massive ring around Saturn

2009-10-07T03:49:00.000-07:00

From CNN.com

Scientists at NASA have discovered a nearly invisible ring around Saturn -- one so large that it would take 1 billion Earths to fill it.

The ring's orbit is tilted 27 degrees from the planet's main ring plane. The bulk of it starts about 3.7 million miles (6 million km) away from the planet and extends outward another 7.4 million miles (12 million km).

Its diameter is equivalent to 300 Saturns lined up side to side. And its entire volume can hold one billion Earths, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory said late Tuesday.

"This is one supersized ring," said Anne Verbiscer, an astronomer at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Verbiscer and two others are authors of a paper about the discovery published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The obvious question: Why did it take scientists so long to discover something so massive?

The ring is made up of ice and dust particles that are so far apart that "if you were to stand in the ring, you wouldn't even know it," Verbiscer said in a statement.

Also, Saturn doesn't receive a lot of sunlight, and the rings don't reflect much visible light.

But the cool dust -- about 80 Kelvin (minus 316 degrees Fahrenheit) -- glows with thermal radiation. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, used to spot the ring, picked up on the heat.

One of Saturn's moons, Phoebe, orbits within the ring. As Phoebe collides with comets, it kicks up planetary dust. Scientists believe the ice and dust particles that make up the ring stems from those collisions.

The ring may also help explain an age-old mystery surrounding another of Saturn's moons: Iapetus.

Astronomer Giovanni Cassini, who first spotted Iapetus in 1671, deduced the moon has a white and dark side -- akin to a yin-yang symbol. But scientists did not know why.

The new ring orbits in the opposite direction to Iapetus. And, say researchers, it's possible that the moon's dark coloring is a result of the ring's dust particles splattering against Iapetus like bugs on a windshield.

"Astronomers have long suspected that there is a connection between Saturn's outer moon Phoebe and the dark material on Iapetus," said Douglas Hamilton of the University of Maryland in College Park -- one of the three authors reporting on the findings in the journal Nature.

"This new ring provided convincing evidence of that relationship."

The dark secrets of the trillion-dollar oil trade

2009-09-28T04:15:00.000-07:00

From The Independent.com

With a combined capacity for 313,000 tonnes of oil, the Delta Ios and the NS Burgas supertankers were launched two months ago to criss-cross the globe in search of trade. Instead, the vast vessels were to be found yesterday lying idle off the coast of Singapore after their owners were paid by two of the world's richest and most secretive oil companies to turn them into floating petrochemical warehouses.

At first glance, the decision by Trafigura Group and Vitol Holding BV to charter the newly built ships at an estimated cost of £47,000 a day to do nothing for up to four months in South-east Asia while laden with cargos of diesel worth at least £77m per vessel makes little economic sense.

When this is combined with the fact that the Delta Ios and the NS Burgas are just two ships in an enormous fleet of tankers which are currently being paid about £80m a month by independent oil traders like Trafigura and Vitol, as well as giants such as Shell, to stay anchored around the globe with anything between 50 and 150 million barrels of redundant crude on board, it seem that the ruthless barons of black gold must be losing money as fast as they can make it.

Far from it. The phenomenon of "floating storage", which has been brought about by a huge over-supply of global tanker capacity and unusual market conditions, is just one example of the multitude of ways in which a small group of private, mostly Swiss-based companies have become adept at turning vast profits from the closed and often murky world of independent oil trading. A glut of oil caused by the recession means that crude available for immediate purchase is currently cheaper than that bought on longer-term or "future" contracts – a practice known as "contango". The result is that independent traders have been rushing to buy the cheaper "spot" oil and storing it wherever they can – namely in under-employed tanker fleets – in anticipation of a sharp rise in price as the global economy begins to recover. The resulting profit can be anything between 15 and 20 per cent – tens of millions of dollars – even after the cost of hiring a tanker is deducted.

It is a situation which prompted one senior oil company executive to declare that the spring and summer of 2009 represented "blessed times for trading". Another oil trader told The Independent: "Contango has been a real boon. The independents have become very adept at buying up tanker capacity as cheaply as possible, sitting on the stock and selling it on via arbitrage. They've been as slick as you like."

The deals are part of a world in which discretion and an ability to keep out of the public eye have long been treasured. While the oil majors such as ExxonMobil, Shell and BP operate as global corporations, the independents or "jobbers" have thrived in the grey zone of fast trading-room deals and personal contacts that allow access to lucrative oil reserves.

But increasingly the activities of the "big four" independent traders – Trafigura, Vitol, Gunvor (which has consistently denied reports that it is linked to the Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin) and the hugely successful Glencore – are coming under scrutiny. Questions are being asked about their role in uniting the oil wealth of some of the world's more unsavoury regimes with the open market.

Trafigura, which until August 2006 was barely known outside the oil trade – despite growing to become one of the world's biggest companies with a turnover of $73bn (£46bn) since it was founded 16 years ago – last week found itself making headlines around the world when it agreed to pay about £30m to thousands of residents of the Ivory Coast port of Abidjan who fell ill after toxic oil waste from a ship chartered by the company was dumped by a sub-contractor near the west African city.

The settlement of the claim brought on behalf of 31,000 Ivorians at the High Court in London after tonnes of foul-smelling sludge were fly-tipped in August 2006 was said by Trafigura to vindicate its position that there was no link between the waste and people who died or suffered serious illnesses.

But the Abidjan pollution disaster shone a light into the nature of the way these multibillion-pound "jobbers" of the oil trade make their money. In the case of Trafigura, the events of August 2006 were just part of a deal conducted across three continents in which a cheap, low-quality form of oil known as coker gasoline bought from a Mexican refinery was further refined in Europe, and the subsequent fuel was sold at a profit of about $7m per cargo.

Oil industry insiders have told The Independent that coker gasoline is just one of a myriad of methods used by independent traders to turn a profit, ranging from "paper" deals struck in the City of London's trading floors, to floating storage, to what is known as "physical trading" – transporting hundreds of consignments of different grades of oil on chartered tankers looking for the best price from dozens of offices across the globe. Executives, who are frequently equity partners in the companies, speak of constant shuttling around the world to close deals and negotiate prices.

By any standards, it is a huge and profitable industry. From a situation 20 years ago where the "majors" dominated the international trade, independents now account for about 15 per cent of world's $2 trillion oil industry.

Glencore, founded in 1974 by the controversial trader Marc Rich – who was indicted for tax evasion and later pardoned by President Bill Clinton – is estimated to supply 3 per cent of the world's daily oil consumption. The company is no longer involved with Mr Rich.

Between them, the "big four" had turnovers last year of about $415bn – equivalent to the GDP of Austria. Because the companies are privately owned, comprehensive profit figures are hard to come by, but Glencore announced a profit of $4.75bn for 2008. Trafigura made $440m last year.

In an industry which deals with a commodity for which many countries have gone to war, insiders say it is inevitable that traders will find themselves dealing with authoritarian oil-rich regimes and dabbling in controversial schemes. On at least one occasion, three of the big four – Glencore, Trafigura and Vitol – have been found to have crossed the line between incentives and kickbacks through their involvement in the United Nations' oil-for-food scheme to help Saddam Hussein's Iraq buy humanitarian supplies.

In the UN's Volcker report, all three companies were cited for paying surcharges demanded by Saddam's regime to win oil supply contracts. In 2007, Vitol pleaded guilty in America to paying $13m in surcharges, and the Swiss arm of Trafigura forfeited $20m. Both companies insisted that the deals had been handled in good faith via third parties. Glencore, which was cited for paying $6.6m in surcharges, denied any wrongdoing.

Glencore was also named in a 2005 High Court judgment as one of the companies which handled shipments of oil sold by the state-owned oil company of Congo-Brazzaville in central Africa. It was subsequently shown that cash derived from the shipments was used by the son of the country's President to pay credit card bills for shopping sprees in Paris. There was no suggestion that Glencore acted improperly.

All of the "big four" point out that they operate in accordance with international law and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's guidelines on business conduct. But campaigners complain that a lack of transparency in the industry means that proper scrutiny of the oil-rich governments in Africa and the middlemen they deal with is impossible.

Gavin Hayman, director of campaigns for Global Witness, said: "These companies play a major role in selling Africa's oil and their operations are notoriously opaque. It would be legitimate to ask: 'How do they get these contracts, do they sell the oil for its proper price, and do they send the money back to the correct place?'

"This lack of transparency creates a big risk that corrupt officials can siphon off some of the profits and deprive ordinary citizens of their rightful benefit from natural resource wealth."

Paralyzed Rats Walk Again

2009-09-21T04:23:00.000-07:00

Yahoonews.com

(HealthDay News) -- A three-pronged approach to treating spinal cord injuries allowed paralyzed rats to walk without receiving signals from the brain, scientists report.

Spinal cord injuries result in paralysis when the nerve fibers that carry information to and from the brain are damaged or severed. Much of the focus of research into spinal cord injuries has been exploring ways of regenerating those nerve fibers and connections, which has so far met with limited success in people.

In the new study, rats were treated with a combination of drugs, electrical stimulation of the spinal cord and locomotor training, a rehabilitation technique. The combined treatment enabled the rats to walk with a near-normal gait on a treadmill, without the muscles receiving signals from the brain.

"The study demonstrates that the lower spinal cord has circuitry that is sufficient to support virtually normal, weight-bearing locomotion," said senior study author V. Reggie Edgerton, a professor of physiological sciences and neurobiology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The study appears in the Sept. 20 online edition of Nature Neuroscience.

Previous research has been able to coax a stepping motion using one or two of those techniques, said Susan Howley, executive vice president of research for the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, which provided some funding for the current research. But this is the first study to achieve actual weight-bearing walking, as opposed to the motions of walking.

"The thing that's very exciting about this is that for the first time they actually showed they can get these rats, with no input from the brain, to step near normally," Howley said. "On the treadmill, they were able to bear weight and step virtually as well as they had been prior to the injury. That's a remarkable achievement."

In the study, researchers put rats whose lower legs were paralyzed in a harness on a slow-moving treadmill and gave them a drug called quipazine, a serotonin agonist that enhances the function of the spinal nerve circuitry. The researchers then used an epidural to apply electrical currents to the dura of the spinal cord, the protective membrane that surrounds it, below the point of injury.

The combination of drugs and electrical stimulation caused the rats to begin walking. Several weeks of daily locomotor training on the treadmill enabled near-normal weight-bearing walking -- including backward, sideways and running.

Because the brain was still unable to direct the walking, the rats could only walk when hooked up to electrical stimulation on the treadmill.

Previous studies have shown that the nerve circuitry of the spinal cord is able to generate rhythmic activity that can direct leg muscles to step, the researchers said. With the right input, the nerves can learn to interpret sensory information from the stepping motion even without help from the brain.

"Previous research has shown the spinal cord can learn whatever task it's being trained to do," Edgerton said. "The spinal cord can interpret the sensory information associated with the stepping, respond to that sensory information and sustain the stepping based on the sensory information."

Locomotive training is a rehabilitation technique that uses that concept to retrain the spinal cord circuitry after injury. Widely used in some European countries, locomotor training involves placing people with spinal cord injuries in harnesses while physical therapists move their legs in a walking motion.

People who undergo locomotor training often see improvements in respiration, bladder function, blood sugar levels and circulation below the level of the lesion, which can help prevent the skin breakdown that can occur as a result of paralysis, Howley said. Others even recover trunk stability, which can enable them to move from a bed to a wheelchair, or a wheelchair to a car, without assistance.

Though a treatment using the three-pronged approach is at least several years away, the study suggests the potential of using neuroprosthetic devices to activate spinal cord rhythmic circuitry, said study author Gregoire Courtine, a professor in the department of neurology at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. His team is currently developing a device that they hope to begin testing in small clinical trials in three to four years.

About 5.6 million Americans, or one in 50, has some level of paralysis, according to a survey released in April of 33,000 U.S. households by the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation. About one-quarter of the nearly 2 percent of the U.S. population living with paralysis is due to a spinal cord injury.

'Big Wave' Theory Offers Alternative to Dark Energy By Clara Moskowitz

2009-08-19T04:14:00.000-07:00

By Clara Moskowitz at Space.com

Mathematicians have proposed an alternative explanation for the accelerating expansion of the universe that does not rely on the mystifying idea of dark energy.

According to the new proposition, the universe is not accelerating, as observations suggest. Instead, an expanding wave flowing through space-time has caused distant galaxies to appear to be accelerating away from us. This big wave, initiated after the Big Bang that is thought to have sparked the universe, could explain why objects today appear to be farther away from us than they should be according to the Standard Model of cosmology.

"We're saying that maybe the resulting expanding wave is actually causing the anomalous acceleration," said Blake Temple of the University of California, Davis. "We're saying that dark energy may not really be the correct explanation."

The researchers derived a set of equations describing expanding waves that fit Einstein's theory of general relativity, and which could also account for the apparent acceleration. Temple outlines the new idea with Joel Smoller of the University of Michigan in the Aug. 17 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While more research will be needed to see if the idea holds up, "the research could change the way astronomers view the composition of our universe," according to a summary from the journal.

To convince other cosmologists, the new model will have to pass muster with further inquiry.

"There are many observational tests of the standard cosmological model that the proposed model must pass, aside from the late phase of accelerated expansion," said Avi Loeb, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "These include big bang nucleosynthesis, the quantitative details of the microwave background anisotropies, the Lyman-alpha forest, and galaxy surveys. The authors do not discuss how their model compares to these tests, and whether the number of free parameters they require in order to fit these observational constraints is smaller than in the standard model. Until they do so, it is not clear why this alternative model should be regarded as advantageous."

Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist Mario Livio agreed that to be seriously considered, the model must be able to predict properties of the universe that astronomers can measure.

He said the real test "is in whether they are able to reproduce all the observed cosmological parameters (as determined, e.g. by a combination of the Hubble Constant and the parameters determined by the CMB observations). To only produce an apparent acceleration is in itself interesting, but not particularly meaningful."

Inconvenient truths

Dark energy is itself a hasty fix to an inconvenient truth discovered by astronomers in the late 1990s: that the universe is expanding, and the rate of this expansion seems to be constantly picking up speed.

To explain this startling finding, cosmologists invoked dark energy, a hypothetical form of energy that is pulling the universe apart in all directions (note that dark energy is wholly separate from the equally mysterious concept of dark matter - a hypothetical form of matter that populates the universe, interacting gravitationally with normal matter, but which cannot be seen with light). In this interpretation, the whole universe is blowing up like a balloon, and from any given point within it, all distant objects appear to be speeding away from you.

But not everyone is happy with the dark energy explanation.

"It just seems like an unnatural correction to the equations - it's like a fudge factor," Temple told SPACE.com. "The equations don't make quite as much physical sense when you put it in. You just put it in to fit the data."

Temple and Smoller think the idea of an expanding wave makes more sense.

"At this stage we think this a very plausible theory," Temple said. "We're saying there isn't any acceleration. The galaxies are displaced from where they're supposed to be because we're in the aftermath of a wave that put those galaxies in a slightly different position."

Ripples in a pond

Temple compared the wave to what happens when you throw a rock into a pond. In this case, the rock would be the Big Bang, and the concentric ripples that result are like a series of waves throughout the universe. Later on, when the first galaxies start to form, they are forming inside space-time that has already been displaced from where it would have been without the wave. So when we observe these galaxies with telescopes, they don't appear to be where we would expect if there had never been a big wave.

One potential issue with this idea is that it might require a big coincidence.

For the universe to appear to be accelerating at the same rate in all directions, we in the Milky Way would have to be near a local center, at the spot where an expansion wave was initiated early in the Big Bang when the universe was filled with radiation.

Temple concedes that this is a coincidence, but said it's possible that we are merely in the center of a smaller wave that affects the galaxies we can see from our vantage point - we need not be in the center of the entire universe for the idea to work.

Molecules Wrestle for Supremacy in Creation of Superstructures

2009-08-14T03:47:00.000-07:00

From the University of Liverpool

Research at the University of Liverpool has found how mirror-image molecules gain control over each other and dictate the physical state of superstructures.

The research team studied ‘chiral’ or ‘different-handed’ molecules which are distinguishable by their inability to be superimposed onto their mirror image. Such molecules are common – proteins use just one mirror form of amino acids and DNA, one form of sugars. Chirality leads to profound differences in the way a molecule functions – for example, drugs such as thalidomide can have positive effects on a patient but can prove harmful in their mirror image form.

Molecules can also assemble in large numbers and form ‘superstructures’ such as snowflakes which are created from large numbers of water molecules. When chiral molecules assemble they can create ‘handed’ superstructures; for example left-handed molecules can assemble together to make a left-handed superstructure. The Liverpool team studied this process in detail by assembling molecules at flat surfaces and using imaging techniques to map the formation of superstructures at nanoscale level.

Before now, scientists have not known whether, in systems containing both left-handed and right-handed molecules, one mirror-form of a molecule could take supremacy over its opposite number in the creation of superstructures, dictating their physical state and chemical and biological properties.

The research found that when equal numbers of mirror-molecules are present at the surface, they organise into separate left and right-handed superstructures, each with distinctly different properties. Crucially, a small imbalance in the population leads to a dramatic difference and only the molecules in the majority assemble into its superstructure, while the minority is left disordered at the surface and unable to create advanced molecular matter.

Professor Rasmita Raval from the University’s Surface Science Research Centre said: “We were surprised at these results. All perceived wisdom was that the left and right-handed molecules would simply create their respective superstructures in quantities that reflected the molecular ratio – that is, we would observe proportional representation. Instead, what we obtained was a kind of ‘molecular democracy’ that worked on a ‘first-past-the-post’ system where the majority population wrested chiral control of the superstructures and the minority was left disorganised.”

Theoretical modelling carried out by the University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands found that this behaviour arises from the effects of entropy, or disorder, which leads the chiral molecules in the majority to preferentially organise into their superstructure.

The work has important implications in the pharmaceuticals industry and could lead to the development of surface processes to enable separation of drugs and products that are currently difficult to purify. The research also introduces the possibility that assembly processes at surfaces may naturally have led to the evolution of proteins and DNA – the molecules of life – containing just one mirror form of amino acids and sugars.

The research, in collaboration with the University of Eindhoven, is published in Nature Chemistry.

Bright Spot on Venus Stumps Scientists

2009-07-31T03:44:00.000-07:00

By Andrea Thompson, Senior Writer @ liveScience.com

A sudden bright spot that appeared in the clouds of Venus just days after a comet left a bruise on Jupiter has scientists stumped as to its cause.

Venus' bright spot, first noticed by amateur astronomer Frank Melillo of Holtsville, NY on July 19, is not the first such brightening noticed on our cloudy neighbor, said planetary scientist Sanjay Limaye of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"We have seen such events before," he told SPACE.com.

This time is a little different though because the brightening is confined to a smaller region, Limaye said. It also came in the wake of Jupiter's own new (dark) spot, believed to be the result of a comet impact — Limaye attributes the fortunate confluence of the two events for the attention Venus is now getting in the astronomical community.

After Melillo reported the spot, other amateur astronomers and the European Space Agency's (ESA) Venus Express spacecraft confirmed the presence of the blemish.

The new Venus Express images show that the bright spot actually appeared in the planet's southern hemisphere four days before Melillo saw it and that it has since begun to spread out, becoming stretched by the wind's in Venus' thick atmosphere.

But just what caused the brightening is still a mystery. Theories have abounded, from a volcanic eruption to solar particles interacting with the planet's atmosphere.

Limaye says the volcano explanation is unlikely, for several reasons: Volcanoes on Venus seem to be less likely to blow their tops in Mount St. Helens-type fashion, instead behaving more like the oozing lava factories of Hawaii, so their eruptions wouldn't likely produce huge clouds of ash and steam. Also, it is unlikely that the explosions would have the power to push through to the other layers of Venus' extremely dense atmosphere.

Limaye doesn't completely rule out the possibility, however. "It's possible, we just don't know," he said.

Another explanation is that a coronal mass ejection (an energetic plume of plasma from the sun's corona) or the solar wind could have interacted with the clouds of Venus.

These "could cause something, we don't know what," Limaye said.

Yet another possibility is some internal change in Venus' atmosphere that could alter cloud particles and make them more reflective (and therefore brighter as viewed from space).

"Clearly something in the cloud properties changed," Limaye said.

Even though these events have been seen previously, most notably in Jan. 2007, our limited knowledge about the workings of Venus' atmosphere and lack of enough spacecraft to comprehensively study the planet hasn't narrowed down the list of possible causes, Limaye said.

"Right now, I think it's anybody's guess," he said.

Scientists Claim New State of Matter Created

2009-07-29T03:46:00.000-07:00

By LiveScience Staff

Scientists claim to have created a form of aluminum that's nearly transparent to extreme ultraviolet radiation and which is a new state of matter.

It's an idea straight out of science fiction, featured in the movie "Star Trek IV."

The work is detailed in the journal Nature Physics.

The normal states of matter are solid, liquid and gas, and a fourth state, called plasma, is a superheated gas considered more exotic. Other experiments have created strange states of matter for brief periods. This one, too, existed only briefly.

To create the new, even more exotic stuff, a short pulse from a laser "knocked out" a core electron from every aluminum atom in a sample without disrupting the metal’s crystalline structure, the researchers explain.

''What we have created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before," said professor Justin Wark of Oxford University’s Department of Physics.

"Transparent aluminum is just the start," Wark said. "The physical properties of the matter we are creating are relevant to the conditions inside large planets, and we also hope that by studying it we can gain a greater understanding of what is going on during the creation of 'miniature stars' created by high-power laser implosions, which may one day allow the power of nuclear fusion to be harnessed here on Earth."

Fusion is a dream of scientists who would create cheap and plentiful power by fusing atoms together, as opposed to nuclear fission that generates electricity today.

The discovery was made possible with a high-powered synchrotron radiation generator called the FLASH laser, based in Hamburg, Germany. It produces extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light, each of which is more powerful than the output of a power plant that provides electricity to a whole city.

The Oxford team, along with their international colleagues, focused all this power down into a spot with a diameter less than a twentieth of the width of a human hair. At such high intensities the aluminum turned transparent.

While the invisible effect lasted for only an extremely brief period – an estimated 40 femtoseconds – it demonstrates that such an exotic state of matter can be created using very high power X-ray sources.

"What is particularly remarkable about our experiment is that we have turned ordinary aluminum into this exotic new material in a single step by using this very powerful laser," Wark said. "For a brief period the sample looks and behaves in every way like a new form of matter. In certain respects, the way it reacts is as though we had changed every aluminum atom into silicon: it’s almost as surprising as finding that you can turn lead into gold with light."

How world currencies have faired

2009-07-17T04:16:00.001-07:00

Dark Matter Helped Early Galaxies Survive "Massacre"

2009-07-14T04:11:00.000-07:00

By Ker Than
for National Geographic News

The "ignition" of the first stars half a billion years after the big bang led to a cosmic massacre that spared just one out of every thousand galaxies. Survival depended on having large clouds of the mysterious substance known as dark matter, a new supercomputer model suggests.

Within dark matter clouds, normal matter was in the process of coalescing into young stars.

These stars, however, would have been sending out damaging radiation.

Larger dark matter clouds would have attracted more normal, or visible, matter, which means that larger galaxies would have had enough material to survive even after being blasted by radiation from their neighbors.

Smaller galaxies, meanwhile, would have had all their stars and star-forming material vaporized, leaving behind barren dark matter clumps.

"This is a case where the bullies really win out," said study team member Carlos Frenk, an astrophysicist at Durham University in the U.K.

"The galaxies that managed to make the stars that fried the early universe were the ones that managed to accumulate dark matter the fastest."

"Missing" Satellites

For a long time after the galactic massacre, no new galaxies were able to form, according to the new simulations by Frenk and Takashi Okamoto of the University of Tsukuba in Japan.

Dark matter, meanwhile, continued to merge and grow into ever larger structures.

Then, around 10 to 12 billion years ago, some of the dark matter clumps grew massive enough to counteract the radiation from the survivor galaxies.

At this point the dark matter could once again "protect" normal matter, and larger galaxies were finally able to take shape.

This model, recently presented at the Royal Society 2009 Summer Science Exhibition in London, could explain the Milky Way's "missing satellite" problem, said astrophysicist Andrew Benson of the California Institute of Technology.

So far, astronomers know of only about 20 satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, but according to a key theory of galaxy formation, there should be thousands.

That's because big galaxies like the Milky Way are thought to have formed through the violent mergers of many smaller galaxies.

Any discarded remnants that didn't make it into the larger structure would have become satellite galaxies.

But if the new model is correct, then the Milky Way's "missing" satellite galaxies never formed in the first place, said Benson, who was not involved in the new study.

"Professor Frenk has shown that if you can prevent the formation of galaxies very early in the universe, you can reduce the number of galaxies that you would expect to see around the Milky Way down to a level that is more compatible with what we actually observe."

How we spend our paycheck

2009-07-10T03:38:00.001-07:00

Cosmic Ray Moon Shadow Could Reveal Dark Matter

2009-07-09T04:21:00.000-07:00

by technologyreview.com

If a strange excess of positrons hitting Earth are created by dark matter, then the way the Moon blocks these impacts could help confirm the idea

The Earth is constantly bombarded by high energy positrons and electrons. These bombardments generate showers of secondary particles that light up our skies at night, if you have the right equipment to see 'em: so-called Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes. The ratio of electrons to positrons is predicted fairly precisely by our models of the way cosmic rays interact with objects in the Milky Way.

But here's a conundrum. Various space-based experiments such as PAMELA have recently found an excess of positrons out there, particularly at energies above 10 GeV. That's totally unexpected and difficult to square with the conventional model.

The PAMELA measurement generated excitement because the dark matter brigade pounced on the result as evidence that dark matter particles must annihilating each other, producing the excess positrons in the centre of our galaxy. These guys were forced to put the champagne back on ice when other astrophysicists pointed out that the positrons could equally be created by particle cascades in the magnetospheres of nearby pulsars.

What's needed, of course, is more measurements of positron/electron ratios, particularly at energies up to a few TeV that cannot yet be made by space-based experiments.

Can the growing number of Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes help? On the face of it, that looks unlikely because there is no way to tell apart the showers created by positrons and electrons when they hit the atmosphere. At least, until now.

Today, Pierre Colin and pals at the Max-Planck-Institut fur Physik in Munich have come up with an ingenious idea that should be able to tell them apart. Most of the electrons and positrons come from the galactic centre. Colin and co point out that that when the Moon comes between us and the electron/positron source, it creates a shadow that is already used to calibrate Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes.

But here's the interesting idea: Colin and co say the shadow of charged particles should be deflected by the Earth's magnetic field. The electron shadow should be shifted eastward and the positron shadow westward. These Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes should therefore be able to spot the separate shadows, allowing the measurement of positron/electron ratios at energies up to several TeV, well beyond what space-based experiments can achieve.

What's more, Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes ought to be able to spot these shadows now as long as they can make measurements in the glare of the Moon. One such instrument called MAGIC, built by the Max-Planck-Institut fur Physik at Roque de los Muchachos in the Canary islands, exactly fits the bill.

The measurements will still be tricky however, particularly of the positron shadow which may well be superimposed on the shadow created by positively charged atoms in the cosmic ray spectrum. However, Colin and co think they ought to be able to pick out the electron shadow with just 50 hours of observing (although that may take several years given that the shadows occur only at certan times of the year).

That's an ingenious idea that may well give astronomers a way of determining what role dark matter plays, if any, in the creation of these excess positrons.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0907.1026: Observation of Shadowing of the Cosmic Electrons and Positrons by the Moon with IACT

How the Hubble Deep Field was Taken

2009-07-06T03:35:00.001-07:00

Are Planets "Living Super-Organisms"?

2009-07-01T03:39:00.000-07:00

by Casey Kazan

Japan's Maruyama Shigenori, one of the world's leading geophysicists, is working on a global formula for a new field of study that would include dozens of disciplines collaborating to produce an overall picture of the Earth. As he connects the links from astronomy to life sciences, an outline emerges of an all-encompassing image of entire planets which appear as living super-organisms.

Shigenori believes that expanding the study of life sciences to the core of our world and the depths of outer space will help us find distant relatives of our own Earth -- planets that could also sustain life.

Maruyama is creating a new institute called the Center for Bio-Earth Planetology will be launched in 2009 and fully dedicated to creating a new conception of life in space.He wants to find out if the continents will merge again in 250 million years to form a single super-continent; how meteorites change the chemical composition of the Earth; and what the connection is between the temperature of a planet and its magnetic field, which protects plants and animals from being bombarded with cosmic radiation, which in turn influences the rate of mutations and thus the development of new forms of life.

Maruyama is also provoking controversy in the with his new theory on the lifecycle of the Earth's crust.

To explain why contintental plates drift on the surface of the Earth's molten mantle, Maruyama argues that continents actually have life cycles. Old, cold plates on continental fringes sink to “plate graveyards” deep in the Earth’s mantle, and then rise again, creating volcanoes fueled by three-dimensional convection movements deep below the surface.

Maruyama is taking the ideas of continental-drift pioneer Alfred Wegener to a new level. Wegener was a German explorer and meteorologist who believed back in 1912 that the continents roamed about on the surface of the Earth -- an idea that was ridiculed by even his most supportive research colleagues as a "delirious vision" and "the wonderful dream of a great poet." It wasn't until the 1960s that studies of the ocean floor finally provided irrefutable proof that Wegener had been right after all.

Today, we all know that the continents are enormous plates that drift on the Earth's red-hot mantle like icebergs on the ocean. Yet to this day, the hypothesis still lacks a logical and convincing foundation. Nobody has been able to explain the actual mechanics behind the motor that drives the drifting and breaking-up of the continental plates.

The inner reaches of the Earth remain shrouded in mystery. Even the surface of has been explored more extensively. Because deep drilling comes to a halt after a maximum of 12 kilometers, the remaining 6,300 kilometers to the center of the Earth remain inaccessible.

In an interview with Der Spiegel, Maruyama gave the answer: "The continental drift that we observe on the surface of the Earth has its counterpart in the Earth's mantle. Old, cold plates are pushed down into the Earth's mantle on the continental edges," he explains. "At this point they collect large amounts of iron. You can imagine it as something similar to water condensation."

Weighted down by the iron, the plates sink farther and farther into the hot, molten rock until they reach the inner sanctum of the Earth's mantle. There, at a depth of 2,900 kilometers, they finally halt their decent and settle into "plate graveyards." This is presumably the outer edge of the earth's heavy core, where the temperature is 4,000 degrees Celsius (7,200 degrees Fahrenheit).

Maruyama continues: "But the capsized continents don't simply rest in their plate graveyards forever." Rather, they are about to experience a sudden resurrection. Heat and pressure in the depths trigger chemical processes, causing the plates to deposit their load of heavy elements. Once liberated of this burden, they become lighter than their surroundings, causing them to rise like corks in water. The result: Above the old plate graves, on the floor of the Earth's molten mantle, a mushroom-shaped upwelling of abnormally hot magma called a mantle plume makes its way toward the surface.

Eventually, the rising flow of molten rock reaches the crystallized crust and cuts through it like a welding torch. Volcanoes form, such as those on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Maruyama says the red hot lava that erupts on the volcanic island comes directly from an old plate cemetery 2,900 kilometers below the surface, where the remains of an ancient continent that broke up some 750 million years ago simmer to the surface. Maruyama's theory postulates the amazing comeback story of this ancient rock from the deep.

The key ingredient for the chemistry of the Earth's interior is the same one that determines the weather on the surface: water. The sunken ocean plates have old seawater locked in their mineral structure -- only a few parts per thousand, but enough to drastically change the characteristics of the rock.

Even minute quantities of water in the ex-floor of the ocean can significantly lower its melting point -- and this speeds up its eventual return to the surface. The water helps the rock to lose its load of heavy iron, thereby increasing the buoyancy of this old plate material.

The geophysicist thus paints a three-dimensional picture of the planet Earth where, in addition to the continents drifting on the surface, there is room for "anti-plate tectonics" at the base of the Earth's mantle. An "anti-crust" deep below reflects to a certain degree events on the surface, with "lakes" and "mountains" and "rivers" of viscous molten rock.

Earthquakes and computing power are the main requirements for researchers looking to piece together an x-ray-like image of the Earth's interior. The principle is simple enough: When an earthquake strikes, the seismic waves race clear across the Earth's mantle. It takes a full quarter of an hour for the shockwave to travel from Indonesia to Germany. The duration of this journey reveals a great deal to researchers. The waves are slowed down by viscous and hot regions, like mantle plumes, and accelerated by solid or cold objects.

Earthquakes similar to the one that hit Kobe in 1995 and killed nearly 5,100 Japanese -- are Maruyama's main source of data. The island nation lies directly on the West Pacific crossroads of three huge plates that ram into each other like cars in a highway pile-up: the Pacific, Australian and Eurasian tectonic plates.

Scientists Make Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light

2009-06-30T03:42:00.000-07:00

From Current.com

Scientist John Singleton insists that Albert Einstein wouldn't be mad at him, even though at first blush Singleton appears to have twisted the famous physicist's theories about light into a pretzel.

Most people think Einstein said that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but that's not really the case, Singleton said.

Einstein predicted that particles and information can't travel faster than the speed of light — but phenomenon like radio waves? That's a different story, said Singleton, a Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow.

Singleton has created a gadget that abuses radio waves so severely that they finally give in and travel faster than light.

The polarization synchrotron combines the waves with a rapidly spinning magnetic field, and the result could explain why pulsars — which are super-dense spinning stars that are a subclass of neutron stars — emit such powerful signals, a phenomenon that has baffled many scientists, Singleton said.

"Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit radio waves in pulses, but what we don't know is why these pulses are so bright or why they travel such long distances," Singleton said. "What we think is these are transmitting the same way our machine does."

And beyond explaining what has been a bit of a mystery to the astronomical community, Singleton's discovery could have wide-ranging technological impacts in areas such as medicine and communications, he said.

"Because nobody's really thought about things that travel faster than light before, this is a wide-open technological field," Singleton said.

One possible use for the resulting speedy radio waves — which are packed into a very powerful wave the size of a pencil point — could be the creation of a new generation of cell phones that communicate directly to satellites, rather than transmitting through relay towers as they now do.

Those phones would have more reliable service and would also be more difficult for hackers to intercept, Singleton said.

Another application could be in very targeted chemotherapy, where a patient takes the drugs, and the radio waves are used to activate them very specifically in the area around a tumor, he said.

If Einstein were still alive, he probably wouldn't be all that surprised by the discovery, Perez said, even if it does seem on the surface to conflict with some of his theories.

"He might have thought, 'why did this take so long,' " Perez said.

Scientists come a step closer towards building quantum computer

2009-06-29T03:44:00.000-07:00

From: littleabout.com

A team led by Yale University researchers has created the first rudimentary solid-state quantum processor, taking another step toward the ultimate dream of building a quantum computer.

They also used the two-qubit superconducting chip to successfully run elementary algorithms, such as a simple search, demonstrating quantum information processing with a solid-state device for the first time.

Our processor can perform only a few very simple quantum tasks, which have been demonstrated before with single nuclei, atoms and photons, said Robert Schoelkopf, the William A. Norton Professor of Applied Physics and Physics at Yale.

But this is the first time theyve been possible in an all-electronic device that looks and feels much more like a regular microprocessor, he added.

Working with a group of theoretical physicists led by Steven Girvin, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and Applied Physics, the team manufactured two artificial atoms, or qubits (quantum bits).

While each qubit is actually made up of a billion aluminum atoms, it acts like a single atom that can occupy two different energy states.

These states are akin to the 1 and 0 or on and off states of regular bits employed by conventional computers.

Because of the counterintuitive laws of quantum mechanics, however, scientists can effectively place qubits in a superposition of multiple states at the same time, allowing for greater information storage and processing power.

These sorts of computations, though simple, have not been possible using solid-state qubits until now in part because scientists could not get the qubits to last long enough.

While the first qubits of a decade ago were able to maintain specific quantum states for about a nanosecond, Schoelkopf and his team are now able to maintain theirs for a microseconda thousand times longer, which is enough to run the simple algorithms.

To perform their operations, the qubits communicate with one another using a quantum busphotons that transmit information through wires connecting the qubitspreviously developed by the Yale group.

The key that made the two-qubit processor possible was getting the qubits to switch on and off abruptly, so that they exchanged information quickly and only when the researchers wanted them to, said Leonardo DiCarlo, a postdoctoral associate in applied physics at Yales School of Engineering and Applied Science and lead author of the research paper.

Next, the team will work to connect more qubits to the quantum bus.

The processing power increases exponentially with each qubit added, so the potential for more advanced quantum computing is enormous, Schoelkopf said.

Woman illegally downloads 24 songs, fined to tune of $1.9 million

2009-06-19T04:15:00.000-07:00

By Elianne Friend
CNN

A federal jury Thursday found a 32-year-old Minnesota woman guilty of illegally downloading music from the Internet and fined her $80,000 each -- a total of $1.9 million -- for 24 songs.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset's case was the first such copyright infringement case to go to trial in the United States, her attorney said.

Attorney Joe Sibley said that his client was shocked at fine, noting that the price tag on the songs she downloaded was 99 cents.

She plans to appeal, he said.

Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America, said the RIIA was "pleased that the jury agreed with the evidence and found the defendant liable."

"We appreciate the jury's service and that they take this as seriously as we do," she said.

Thomas-Rasset downloaded work by artists such as No Doubt, Linkin Park, Gloria Estefan and

This was the second trial for Thomas-Rasset. The judge ordered a retrial in 2007 after there was an error in the wording of jury instructions.

The fines jumped considerably from the first trial, which granted just $220,000 to the recording companies.

Thomas-Rasset is married with four children and works for an Indian tribe in Minnesota.

Love

2009-06-15T03:27:00.000-07:00

What is love? Scientists have delved deep into this mystery of life. They have found that the melding two chemicals, Oxytocin and Vasopressin, within the brain have been linked to long term bonding. They also say that Serotonin plays a major role and that one in love resembles that of a person with an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Scientists are definitely not romantics. But even in the scientific community love remains a mystery, one rooted deep in our culture far beyond our written history.

So what is love? A mother holding her newborn for the first time. A father, still in his work clothes, playing catch with his son. That fluttering in your chest as you close your eyes for your first kiss. Two grandparents holding hands as they stroll down the street. Love comes in all forms, sexes, and states. It first strikes as a sickness. Lightheaded, butterflies begin their flapping within your gut, there is nothing like a newborn love. Scientists have found the protein NGF, Nerve Growth Hormone, to be at it’s highest levels when couples first fall in love. They have also found that this protein has also been associated with Alzheimer. Never invite a scientist to give a speech at your wedding. As the love ages, and the protein levels out, love changes and resembles more of a comforter. That warm blanket you know will be there when you come in from the blustering wind.

Love can also be elusive. We search our entire life for love or that which we were taught what love is supposed to be. But love comes to those that love. Like a piggy bank, the more you put into it the more you will get out. Love is also the sun that makes our souls grow. Without love, our branches droop, our being wilts, and we become dead inside. While love warms our soul, we need to toil the land, or relationships, in which it’s roots grow. One can’t just accept love and expect a garden to grow. We must get down, muddy our knees, and not be afraid to get dirt under our fingernails.

For love to last in this garden, one must use some important tools. One is sacrifice. We must be prepared to pull up the weeds that make the “I” for fertile soil that makes the “Us”. Now there is no way to pull out every single weed in this enormous garden and a healthy sense of the individual is a necessity in every relationship, but if the garden gets too overgrown with these weeds, the fruit will never be seen to have a chance to be plucked.

The rays of love is not enough to keep our garden alive. It is our job to keep the garden vibrant with the water of communication, trust, and compassion. Communication will clean the words left unsaid and the superfluous disagreements that linger far too long, Trust will the strengthen the roots even when you are apart, and Compassion will help you feel the weight of your words and the impact they create before the stems snap and break.

Make no mistake creating and maintaining this garden isn’t easy and the work will last your entire life. But with the right tools, the sustenance within will be all that you will need, want, and crave. So work hard, nurture your garden, and most importantly enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Sky 'rains tadpoles' over Japan

2009-06-11T03:39:00.000-07:00

By Danielle Demetriou in Tokyo
From The Telegraph

Residents, officials and scientists have been baffled by the apparent downpour of tadpoles in central Japan's Ishikawa Prefecture.

Clouds of dead tadpoles appear to have fallen from the sky in a series of episodes in a number of cities in the region since the start of the month.

In one incident, a 55-year-old man who was caught in a tadpole downpour described hearing a strange sound in the parking lot of a civic centre in the city of Nanao.

Upon further exploration, he found more than 100 dead tadpoles covering the windshields of cars in an area measuring 10 square metres.

Dead tadpole downpours were also reported by local officials 48 hours later in the city of Hakusan in the same prefecture.

The raining down of small creatures such as frogs and fish is a rare meteorological phenomenon that is reported from time to time across the world.

Scientists have widely attributed the surreal raining of animals to strong winds, storms and water sprouts sucking up creatures before depositing them further inland.

However, this explanation has not satisfied meteorologists in the Ishikawa region.

Officials at Kanazawa Local Meteorological Observatory told local media that they were unsure how the tadpoles had arrived as there had been no reports of strong winds at the time.

Another scientific explanation for raining animals relates to birds carrying the small creatures before dropping them as they fly overland.

However, dismissing this theory, a researcher at the Yamashina Institute for Ornithology in Abiko told Kyodo news: "Crows eat tadpoles but if these were spat out (by the birds), a wider area should have been covered."

One-fifth of us have lost sight of Milky Way

2009-06-10T03:48:00.000-07:00

by Heather Catchpole

SYDNEY: Light pollution has caused one-fifth of the world's population – mostly in mainland Europe, Britain and the U.S. – to lose their ability to see the Milky Way in the night sky.

"The arc of the Milky Way seen from a truly dark location is part of our planet's natural heritage," said Connie Walker, and astronomer from the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona.

Yet "more than one fifth of the world population, two thirds of the U.S. population and one half of the European Union population have already lost naked eye visibility of the Milky Way."

Star-free night

The phenomenon, caused by the reflection of manmade light by the Earth's atmosphere, impacts astronomical research and can even affect human health, warned Walker, who will present her research on Wednesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, California.

The effects of light pollution on human health can be as mild as the disruption of the circadian rhythm leading to problems sleeping, but it can also be serious, she said.

One study of 147 Israeli communities, published in 2008 in the journal Chronobiology International, found some evidence for an increased risk of breast cancer for women living in areas with the most light pollution. This is thought to be due to unnatural light at night affecting levels of hormones such as melatonin and estrogen.

Light pollution comes in a variety of forms such as 'over illumination', 'light trespass' and 'sky glow' – the orange glow that hangs over cities and is produced by upwards directed light.

Walker's research has found that cities using light fixtures that direct just 3% of their light upwards can almost double the sky glow experienced by astronomical observatories 100 km away. "Allowing 10% direct uplight increases this figure to 570%," said Walker, who is chair of the U.S. Dark Skies Working Group, part of the Dark Skies Awareness program, a global citizen science effort to raise awareness of light pollution.

GLOBE at night

"The point of raising awareness of light pollution is that it touches many areas of people's lives, from simply not being able to see the natural heritage of a starry night sky to affecting... the habits of animals, energy consumption, economic resources, and astronomical research," she said.

One project called GLOBE at Night, teaches members of the public "to record the brightness of the night sky by matching its appearance toward the constellation Orion with star maps of progressively fainter stars," said Walker.

These measurements are then submitted online and are used to create global maps of levels of light pollution. Over the last four years, the annual, two-week long GLOBE at Night events have resulted in 35,000 measurements contributed from over 100 countries.

Data from this project and others allowed Walker to estimate how much of the world's population is still able to see the Milky Way on a clear night.

John Norris, an astronomer from the Australian National University's (ANU) Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatories said light pollution was less of an issue in Australia, where cities are widely distributed.

But he said emission lines from the mercury and sodium in fluorescent or sodium streetlights can still create background light interference for astronomers observing at optical wavelengths.

"To get the same quality of data [as from a non light-affected area] I would have to observe longer to be able to subtract the background light pollution from the light of the star," said Norris, who added that astronomers "jealously seek to guard the darkness" of observatories.

"At the Anglo-Australian Observatory and ANU we seek to have agreements with government and local councils. If people want to build something that is going to produce light pollution they have to [first] seek approval and meet certain requirements," he said. "It's a win/win situation because it is more energy efficient to have a downwards-facing lamp rather than lighting up the sky."

New Hampshire Lake linked to ALS

2009-06-09T03:26:00.000-07:00

By KRISTEN SENZ
Sunday News Correspondent

ENFIELD – The risk of developing a fatal neurodegenerative disease is 25 times higher than the norm for people who live around Mascoma Lake, according to researchers studying the possibility of a link between lake bacteria and neurological illness.

Over a recent six-month period, three people residing on the north shore of Mascoma Lake were diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. So far, nine cases of the disease have been confirmed near the lake.

Doctors and scientists at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon say there is strong evidence that suggests cyanobacteria, single-celled organisms that form on lakes and ponds and release harmful toxins, are an environmental trigger for the development of ALS in people who are genetically predisposed to the illness.

"Statistically, if you live near some lakes, there appears to be a higher risk of ALS," said Dartmouth-Hitchcock neurologist Dr. Elijah Stommel.

The national incidence rate of ALS, a disease that attacks the nerve cells that control voluntary movement, is two people per 100,000. Around lakes and ponds with cyanobacteria blooms in New England, that rate increases to 4.5 people per 100,000. At Mascoma Lake, the rate is 50 people per 100,000.

Researchers in New Hampshire have yet to find the specific neurotoxin, known as BMAA (beta Methylamino L-alanine), that is believed to trigger ALS, but it has been found in water bodies with cyanobacteria blooms elsewhere in the world.

"We think we will be able to find the toxin," said Stommel, who is working with other doctors and researchers to collect water and fish samples, and to gather hair and brain tissue from people who have been diagnosed with ALS in Enfield.

People living around other lakes, including Winnisquam Lake in Belknap County and Willand Pond in Somersworth, also recently have been diagnosed with ALS, but the highest concentration of cases in the state has been found at Mascoma Lake.

Cyanobacteria, often referred to as blue-green algae, have survived on Earth for more than 200 million years and contain chlorophyll, which enables photosynthesis. The biological purpose for cyanobacteria blooms and the toxins they release remains unknown, said Dr. Tracie Caller, a resident at Dartmouth-Hitchcock who works with Stommel in studying the potential link to ALS.

"These are the oldest organisms on Earth," Caller said. "They actually are partly responsible for creating our atmosphere."

Dumping of sewage and other pollutants, including yard waste such as grass clippings, is believed to trigger cyanobacteria blooms. Nitrogen and phosphorous, which come from runoff created by development, also are recognized as contributors.

Pollution in Mascoma Lake was at its peak in the 1970s, prior to the passage of the federal Clean Water Act, Caller said, and exposure from that era may be responsible for the recent spike in ALS cases.

"The cases we're seeing now, we think might be related to what was going on 10, 20 or 30 years ago," she said.

Researchers first began studying unexpected pockets of ALS after a high concentration of cases was found in Guam among people who ate a certain type of bat. The bats fed on nuts that contained BMAA, which was found to have caused the disease. Other populations at higher risk for ALS include Italian soccer players and veterans of the first Iraq war, Caller said, but no one knows why.

Cyanobacteria blooms appear as a blue-green or pea-green scum on the surface of lakes, ponds and rivers. They release a variety of harmful toxins, including microcystine, which causes liver cancer and liver failure in humans and animals. Jody Connor, a limnologist with the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services, said the toxin has caused acute liver failure in dogs and has been responsible for some pet deaths.

"Oftentimes, pets die and nobody knows why, and a lot of times, vets don't know that pets that drink water with cyanobacteria are likely going to get sick," Connor said.

New Hampshire was one of the first states to develop a standard for cyanobacteria testing, as well as a procedure for related beach closures and lake advisories. And the limnology center, which Connor leads, is working to educate lake associations and the public.

Connor said it's important for people to heed the state's warnings, recognize what the blooms look like and know what to do if they see them. If you see scum on a lake's surface, even if it's only in one area, avoid swimming and keep pets out of the water. Take a picture of the bloom or collect a water sample, and call the state's cyanobacteria hotline at 419-9229.

"I carry the phone with me all the time, and I try to answer it seven days a week," he said.

If and when researchers find the tiny BMAA molecule in Mascoma Lake or elsewhere in the state, "I think it would really help us in preventing disease and/or maybe even finding a cure" for ALS, Caller said.

A definitive link could also have a dramatic impact on lakefront property values in New Hampshire.

Stommel and Caller are awaiting lab-test results from water and fish samples collected from Mascoma Lake, Winnisquam Lake, Willand Pond and Webster Lake in Franklin.

"We're hoping to sample as many lakes with blooms as we can get to this summer," Caller said.

First supernovae blew early galaxies apart

2009-06-08T03:30:00.000-07:00

by Heather Catchpole
Cosmos Online

SYDNEY: The universe's first stars blew small galaxies apart when they exploded, effectively quashing all nearby star formation, say Japanese astrophysicists.

The theory, based on analytical calculations of the energy and disruptive effects of early supernovae, adds another piece to the puzzle of what the first stars were like and how they influenced galaxy formation.

The first stars formed around 200 million years after the Big Bang in clumps of dark matter called dark matter haloes – the basic building blocks of galaxies.

Running out of gas

These stars were massive, probably 10 to 100 times bigger than the Sun. Like most massive stars, they would have burnt through their fuel within a few tens of millions of years and then exploded as either a type II supernova or a pair instability supernova.

The study, published in the current issue of the Astrophysical Journal, looks at what happened to the dark haloes near these massive explosions. Previously, experts were divided as to whether the first supernovae kick started star formation in the haloes or suppressed it.

Astrophysicists Masaru Sakuma from the University of Tsukuba, in Tsukuba, and Hajime Susa from Konan University in Kobe, Japan, say their model shows the shockwave from these supernovae would have expanded the gas shell within the stars' own galaxies, creating a gaseous 'wind' that stripped the gas out of nearby dark haloes.

First clues

This 'wind' would have swept the gas from dark haloes within a radius of up to 5,000 light-years around the supernova, depending on the force of the initial explosion and the mass of the dark haloes, the researchers say.

"[If] a neighbouring halo is located very close to the centre of the supernova explosion, the gas in the halo would be evacuated by the shock momentum... supernova feedback has basically negative effects on the star formation in surrounding halos," the researchers write.

Commenting on the research, Australian theoretical astrophysicist Stuart Wyithe, from the University of Melbourne, said the research answered a "little bit" of the big question of how the death of the first stars affected the early universe.
"Early galaxies are analogous to buckets of gas, with the gas confined by gravity rather than by walls. The supernova explosion blows the gas out of the first bucket. This moving gas then acts like a wind which in turn blows the gas out of small nearby galaxies," Wyithe said.

"[The research] doesn't address other issues about how much gas there is in the first place and what happens when there are many haloes [surrounding the supernovae]," he said. But added that the study is "solid piece of work."

"Analytic calculations like these can sometimes give quite good information, and I think in this case it does," said Wyithe. "It's not understood fully what role the first stars played in the reionisation of the early universe. This is a first step on the way to understanding that."

US in nuclear disclosure blunder

2009-06-04T03:27:00.000-07:00

From the BBC.com

A document providing confidential details of US civilian nuclear sites was accidentally posted on the internet, the government has admitted.

The 266-page document included the precise location of stockpiles of fuel for nuclear weapons, the Obama administration said.

The Government Printing Office website took down the posting on Tuesday after experts expressed concern.

US officials insisted the information detailed was not a security threat.

The document, which lists itself as "sensitive but unclassified", contains maps and information on hundreds of US civilian nuclear sites.

No military installations are included but the document does cover the nuclear weapons laboratories at Los Alamos, Livermore and Sandia.

Enriched uranium

An internet site of the Federation of American Scientists in Washington had highlighted the document's existence on Sunday, saying it was "a one-stop shop for information on US nuclear programs".

A spokesman for the printing office told the New York Times the document had been gathered "under normal operating procedures" and was removed on Tuesday pending a review.

US analysts said although much of the information was already available to the public, the disclosure, particularly of the location of the fuel stockpiles, was embarrassing for the government.

The Times said the document was collated as part of a US drive to make its civilian nuclear programme more transparent in the hope that other nations, particularly Iran, would follow suit.

It said the most serious disclosure was on the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, known as the Fort Knox of highly enriched uranium, the leading fuel for nuclear weapons.

Damien LaVera, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, confirmed the material should not have been released.

But he said: "The departments of energy, defence and commerce and the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] all thoroughly reviewed it to ensure that no information of direct national security significance would be compromised."

Mystery of Giant Ice Circles Resolved

2009-06-02T03:37:00.000-07:00

Jeremy Hsu
Staff Writer
livescience.com

Strange circles have once again appeared in the frozen surface of Lake Baikal in Siberia, as spotted by astronauts aboard the International Space Station this April. News reports described the ice rings as a puzzling phenomenon.

But experts say they can explain the mystery, and it's not aliens - methane gas rising from the lake floor represents the likely culprit.

Methane emissions can create a rising mass of warm water that begins swirling in a circular pattern because of the Coriolis force, or the phenomenon caused by the Earth's rotation that also helps create cyclones.

"Once the water mass reaches the underside of the ice on the surface of the lake, the warm water melts the ice in a ring shape," said Marianne Moore, a marine ecologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts who has spent much time studying Lake Baikal with Russian researchers. The lake is the largest (by volume) and deepest fresh water lake on Earth.

The latest ring patterns included a circle of thin ice with a diameter of 2.7 miles (4.4 km), although the circular patch was becoming a hole of open water. Astronauts spotted similar ice circles in both 1985 and 1994, and satellites have also made sightings over the past years.

This phenomenon is nothing new to the Russian government, which has documented circle sightings on an official Ministry of Natural Resources Web site.

"Interestingly, the government is also warning people that abnormally high emissions of methane may occur in these areas in the summer and fall, posing risks for ships," Moore told LiveScience.

The Russian Ministry of Natural Resources points out that random emissions of natural gas have probably always occurred in Lake Baikal. And such emissions would have created ice rings every few years.

"But, because of the huge size, it is practically impossible to see a ring standing on the ice or even from a mountain," the Ministry Web site notes. The Russian government has ordered daily space monitoring of the Lake Baikal area in recent years, which prompted many of the satellite sightings.

Tectonic activity deep in the Earth may be the trigger for such methane gas release, according to the Russian government.

That could have major consequences for Lake Baikal's rich array of plants and animals, Moore cautioned - especially in combination with a warming climate. Both could lead to spring ice disappearing more rapidly from Lake Baikal, which can typically hold onto an ice cover through June.

"Unlike other lakes in the world, spring ice is essential for the reproduction of the lake's top predator (the Baikal seal) and the dominant plants (under-ice phytoplankton) at the bottom of the food web," Moore said. "Without spring ice, the food web of this lake will be disrupted substantially."

DARK ENERGY - The Chameleon Particle

2009-06-01T03:26:00.000-07:00

By TPMCafe.com

Is the 'Chameleon Particle' dark energy...? Bonus news at the bottom.

There is a theory about dark energy that is gaining some traction. Its called the Chameleon Particle theory and it states that maybe dark energy is actually a particle that is hard to find because of its strange properties. When it combines with a photon (light) the combined particle changes its mass depending on its surroundings and makes it hard to find. Hence the monicker.

This is how wiki describes it:

The "chameleon" is a postulated scalar particle with a non-linear self-interaction which gives the particle an effective mass that depends on its environment: the presence of other fields.It would have a small mass in much of intergalactic space, but a large mass in terrestrial experiments, making it difficult to detect. The chameleon is a possible candidate for dark energy and dark matter, and may contribute to cosmic inflation.

Now the theory has some promise:

By comparing light emitted across a range of frequencies from the luminous centres of 77 active galaxies, Douglas Shaw at Queen Mary University of London and his colleagues have found what they call "good evidence" that some photons have gone missing in transit.

If the light is missing, they theorize, then maybe it changed into something else.

By itself, the findings dont show more than an unanswered question but if the theory is true the particle should be detectable. Because they would be able to change their mass, they should get heavier as they try to pass through a special chamber and thus get trapped. Then we could finally "see" them.

Chameleons can be confined in hollow containers because their mass increases rapidly as they penetrate the container wall, causing them to reflect. One strategy to search experimentally for chameleons is to direct photons into a cavity, confining the chameleons produced, and then to switch off the light source. Chameleons would be indicated by the presence of an afterglow as they decay back into photons

So now the first round of lab results are in. How'd it go? Not so good.

While they didn't find a signal in this round of work, the results did put constraints on some of the properties of the evasive particle, including its mass and its coupling to photons.

But the latest observations are reviving hope

...the group's analysis appears to get a boost from an independent study into an unusually high flux of high-energy photons spotted by the MAGIC telescope on La Palma and the VERITAS telescope in Arizona. The results have perplexed astronomers because very high-energy photons should be kept from reaching Earth by interactions with the cosmic microwave background radiation.

Now, they want to run the tests again in light of the latest observations.

The GammeV group is now preparing to test for chameleons in that "interesting range", says Weltman.

Can anybody spare a dime?

Stay Tuned...

Glowing Monkeys Make More Glowing Monkeys the Old-Fashioned Way

2009-05-28T03:27:00.000-07:00

By Alexis Madrigal

The first genetically modified primates that can pass their modifications to their offpsring have been created by Japanese scientists.

The marmosets, pictured above, express a green fluorescent protein in their skin. The gene for producing the glow was delivered to the first marmoset embryos via a modified virus. But now that modification method could become unnecessary. One male marmoset, number 666, fathered a child (pictured at right) that also contained the transgenes.

“The birth of this transgenic marmoset baby is undoubtedly a milestone,” developmental biologists Gerald Schatten and Shoukhrat Mitalipov at the Pittsburgh Development Center and Oregon Stem Cell Center, respectively wrote in a commentary accompanying the study Thursday in Nature. “The cumbersome and often frustrating process of making a transgenic animal from scratch need now only occur with founder animals.”

Transgenic animals are a key tool in the biomedical researchers’ toolbox. They allow scientists to model the function of genes and the efficacy of treatments. Many transgenic mice lines exist, but often the small rodents are too different from humans to effectively extrapolate their responses to human beings. Primates, on the other hand, are far closer biologically to humans, but before the new technique, creating primate models had proven difficult and expensive.

Now, biologists may be able to produce whole groups of marmosets that mimic humans with genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis.

“Subsequent generations can be produced by natural propagation, with the eventual establishment of transgene-specific monkey colonies — a potentially invaluable resource for studying incurable human disorders, and one that may also contribute to preserving endangered primate species,” Schatten and Shoukhrat continued.

Instead of using bonobos or chimps, the research team led by Erika Sasaki at the Central Institute for Experimental Animals in Japan picked the common marmoset because its “size, availability, and unique biological characteristics” make it a potentially useful animal, particularly in tough fields like neuroscience and stem cell research.

Federal Reserve Cannot Account for $9 Trillion

2009-05-26T04:09:00.000-07:00

By: Julie Crawshaw

The Federal Reserve apparently can't account for $9 trillion in off-balance sheet transactions.

When Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Orlando) asked Inspector General Elizabeth Coleman of the Federal Reserve some very basic questions about where the trillions of dollars that have come from the Fed's expanded balance sheet, the IG didn't know.

Worse, nobody at the Fed seems to have any idea what the losses on its $2 trillion portfolio really are.

"I am shocked to find out that nobody at the Federal Reserve is keeping track of anything," Grayson says.

Grayson asked Coleman if her agency had done any research into the decision not to save Lehman Brothers, which “sent shockwaves through the entire financial system,” Coleman said it had not.

“What about the $1 trillion plus expansion of the Federal reserve’s balance sheet since last September?” Grayson asked.

“We have different connotations,” Coleman replied. “We’re actually conducting a fairly high-level review of the various lending facilities collectively.”

Translation: Nobody at the Fed knows where the money went.

Do you know what who got the $1 trillion or more in the Fed's expansion of its balance, Grayson pressed.

"I do not know. We have not looked at this specific area at the particular point on that specific review," Coleman answer.

What about the trillions of off-balance transactions since last September, Grayson asked.

Coleman demurred again, saying the IG does not have jurisdiction to audit the Federal Reserve.

Grayson pointed out that it was the inspector general's job to audit such spending and asked again if the office had done any investigation at all.

Coleman's answer: Not enough yet to even respond. "We are in not a position to say if there losses."

Grayson concluded, "I am shocked to find out that nobody at the Federal Reserve, including the inspector general, is keeping track of this."

Meanwhile, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says the bank is working on ways to rein in the massive balance sheet commitments.

"A majority of the members who made these projections just recently took 2 percent as being an appropriate number" for inflation, Bernanke said Monday.

"Somewhere between 1-1/2 to 2 percent is basically the number that our committee has individually stated is the appropriate medium-term inflation rate.

"To achieve that we need to demonstrate that we will be able to exit from the balance sheet position that we currently have, and have been working on this intensively," Bernanke said in response to questions after a speech to a conference organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, reported by Reuters.

Jesse Reading

2009-05-22T18:35:00.000-07:00

Good News, Short People: Your Senses May Be Faster Than Tall People’s

2009-05-20T03:47:00.000-07:00

By Discovermagizine.com

Short people may be disadvantaged on the basketball court, in the workplace, and when trying to see over large crowds, but they just might be quicker in sensing the world around them—because, well, their signals don’t have to travel as far to get to their brains.

In effect, this means that tall people are living in the past, if only by a tenth of a second. This is all according to neuroscientist David Eagleman, whose essay entitled “Brain Time” suggests that “if the brain wants to get events correct timewise, it may have only one choice: wait for the slowest information to arrive.”

See, before the brain can process external events, it must receive and synchronize all incoming sensory data—from the eyes, ears, tongue, and skin. But these messages come at different times and speeds. For example, if someone touches your nose and your foot at the same time, you register the touches simultaneously, even though the signals had to travel farther from your foot to your brain than they did from your nose.

As such, according to Eagleman, the brain may wait for the last signal to arrive before it processes what a group of signals mean. Because sensory signals need more time to travel the longer limbs of tall people, he says, their brains could experience a (very very small) processing delay.

The average tall person, therefore, “will live his sensory life on a teeny delay.” Though it’s still not enough to make short people superior at basketball. With the occasional exception.

Is Everything Made of Mini Black Holes?

2009-05-18T03:22:00.000-07:00

Written by Nancy Atkinson

In 1971 physicist Stephen Hawking suggested that there might be “mini” black holes all around us that were created by the Big Bang. The violence of the rapid expansion following the beginning of the Universe could have squeezed concentrations of matter to form miniscule black holes, so small they can’t even be seen in a regular microscope. But what if these mini black holes were everywhere, and in fact, what if they make up the fabric of the universe? A new paper from two researchers in California proposes this idea.

Black holes are regions of space where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape, and are usually thought of as large areas of space, such as the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies. No observational evidence of mini-black holes exists but, in principle, they could be present throughout the Universe.

Since black holes have gravity, they also have mass. But with mini black holes, the gravity would be weak. However, many physicists have assumed that even on the tiniest scale, the Planck scale, gravity regains its strength.

Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider are aimed at detecting mini black holes, but suffer from not knowing exactly how a reduced-Planck-mass black hole would behave, say Donald Coyne from UC Santa Cruz (now deceased) and D. C. Cheng from the Almaden Research Center near San Jose.

String theory also proposes that gravity plays a stronger role in higher dimensional space, but it is only in our four dimensional space that gravity appears weak.

Since these dimensions become important only on the Planck scale, it’s at that level that gravity re-asserts itself. And if that’s the case, then mini-black holes become a possibility, say the two researchers.

They looked at what properties black holes might have at such a small scale, and determined they could be quite varied.

Black holes lose energy and shrink in size as they do so, eventually vanishing, or evaporating. But this is a very slow process and only the smallest back holes will have had time to significantly evaporate over the enter 14 billion year history of the universe.

The quantization of space on this level means that mini-black holes could turn up at all kinds of energy levels. They predict the existence of huge numbers of black hole particles at different energy levels. And these black holes might be so common that perhaps “All particles may be varying forms of stabilized black holes.”

“At first glance the scenario … seems bizarre, but it is not,” Coyne and Cheng write. “This is exactly what would be expected if an evaporating black hole leaves a remnant consistent with quantum mechanics… This would put a whole new light on the process of evaporation of large black holes, which might then appear no different in principle from the correlated decays of elementary particles.”

They say their research need more experimentation. This may come from the LHC, which could begin to probe the energies at which these kinds of black holes will be produced.

China Grapples With Bigger Role in New World Order, Zhou Says

2009-05-15T03:38:00.000-07:00

By Kevin Hamlin at Bloomberg.com

China’s policy makers, grappling with their bigger voice on the global stage, have yet to agree on what they want from a new world financial order, central bank Governor Zhou Xiaochuan said.

“Many issues are new to us and we haven’t formed a collective opinion about them,” said Zhou, speaking at a conference in Shanghai today. “There are some scholars’ views on those issues but we haven’t reached a consensus at a national level or set any goal.”

Zhou this year has already called for the creation of a new international reserve currency and his central bank blamed the financial crisis on “complacency” and a conviction in the U.S. that markets always correct themselves. China, the only major economy among the top five globally that is still growing, wants the International Monetary Fund reorganized to give developing countries more voice.

“In the past China only dealt with internal adjustments needed to take advantage of opportunities in the world,” said Shanghai-based Andy Xie, former chief Asia economist for Morgan Stanley. “Now China faces the challenge of participating in reorganizing the world. That’s never happened before.”

China needs to think carefully about what it wants, what it stands for, and how it will participate in a remaking of the global financial order, Zhou said.

High-Profile Role

China’s fallen into its higher-profile role on the global stage as a consequence of the global crisis and it’s not prepared,’’ said Dwyfor Evans, a strategist with State Street Global Markets in Hong Kong. “Zhou’s saying to policy makers: ‘We need a coherent global strategy rather than the unilateral strategy we’ve had in the past.’”

The central bank’s research arm in March said that “market forces, if unchecked, will lead to asset bubbles and ultimately a disastrous market clearing in the form of a financial crisis like the current one.”

A lack of coordination among regulatory agencies and communication between regulators and central bankers and finance ministers in some advanced countries hampered efforts to manage the financial crisis, the research arm said.

Zhou said that the global financial crisis can’t be resolved by the G-7 alone and added that emerging economies need to have more involvement in working out solutions.

-With assistance" for Li Yanping in Shanghai. Editors: David Tweed, Russell Ward

To contact the reporter on this story: Kevin Hamlin in Beijing at khamlin@bloomberg.net

The genomes of 50 HIV-resistant people may open new doors to understanding disease

2009-05-13T03:43:00.000-07:00

By Kendall Morgan at insciences.com

Durham, NC -- In the 1970s and 1980s, before safety measures were in place to screen out tainted blood, people with hemophilia were routinely exposed to HIV-infected blood products. Most of those patients became infected and later died of AIDS, but a significant minority – some 20 percent of those who were almost certainly exposed to the virus repeatedly – did not.

Now, David Goldstein, director of the IGSP’s Center for Human Genome Variation, and his colleagues think that the complete genome sequences of those fortunate few will be key in the search for rare genetic variants that offer significant protection from HIV. Indeed, such host resistance to HIV is uncommon, existing in only a small percentage of the general population. It has been traced, in part, to the presence of genetic variants linked to the ability to block infection.

“But these known variants explain only a very small amount of the differences among individuals exposed to the HIV virus,” says Goldstein. “We think there are probably other, much rarer variants that also play a role. We just haven't had the right setting or tools to find them. But now we do,” supported by a $3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Goldstein’s group will sequence the full genomes of 50 HIV-resistant people with hemophilia whose ability to ward of the infection can’t be explained by previously identified protective gene variants.

As of mid-December, they had already completed the first of those genomes at a moderate level of coverage. Given that other efforts to sequence human genomes to date have focused on sampling “normal” individuals representing different geographical regions, that first sequence is notable in and of itself; it will become the first complete “human disease genome” known to science, IGSP Associate Investigator Kevin Shianna says. Ultimately, they expect to churn out all 50 complete human genome sequences over a period of six months, a feat made possible by seven next-generation sequencing machines known as Illumina Genome Analyzers.

“One way to look at it is that we will be generating the equivalent of a Human Genome Project every week,” Goldstein said. “We’re gearing up now to produce data in volumes that are absolutely unprecedented.”

A Deluge of Data

That quantity of data presents major challenges. With genome-wide association studies (GWAS), there are a fixed number of possible variations researchers can always rely on, and even that can be overwhelming because there are millions of them.

That’s where Goldstein team member Dongliang Ge, now a new IGSP faculty member, enters the picture. Ge developed software called Sequence Variant Analyzer to sort out the absolute overload of information to come from the new whole-genome sequencing studies.

The data coming from the next-generation sequencing machines in the Genome Analysis Facility that Shianna runs will enter a streamlined pipeline for analysis, Ge explains.

The Analyzer will filter through variants in search of those with potential functional relevance, automatically assigning each to one of 16 possible categories. For instance, it will determine which changes alter the makeup of a protein or which insert a “stop” in a location that would cause complete loss of a protein or even which might lead to changes in other functional entities in the genome. They’ll also be able to detect immediately which variations have been seen before and which are unique. Researchers interested in particular pathways, such as those important to the functioning of the immune system, can easily filter the variation to find the relevant bits.

“We think we can catch just about anything we know about,” Ge says.

Goldstein agrees, adding that the new tool essentially encapsulates the “theory of everything. It takes everything we know about the human genome to find those variants with potential functional relevance.”

Eventually, they’ll narrow the list of contenders down by comparing the 50 HIV-resistant genomes to one another and to control sequence from participants in the 1000 Genomes Project, an international effort designed to create the most detailed picture so far of human genome variation by sequencing 1,000 individuals from all over the world.

The Case of the Missing Heritability

The ongoing study is just the beginning of a broader effort by Goldstein’s team to investigate what is still a very new idea: that even common diseases are caused in large part by rare changes in the genome. The idea has arisen from the realization that previous studies of common disease have turned up disappointingly little in the way of common genetic causes.

“There have now been comprehensive screens for common variants for most common diseases, and I believe we’ve gotten out most of what’s to be had,” Goldstein says. “We are left with a dark matter problem. If you assess heritability, it’s high for everything. Then you look at common variation and we’re missing a lot of the genetic control. It could be some other phenomenon masquerading as heritability, but I think it’s relatively rare and highly penetrant things that are now missed.”

In support of such a notion, a recent report in Science, which included Goldstein as a collaborator, found new genetic variants associated with schizophrenia, all of which are rare deletions or duplications in the genome.

The approach the IGSP team is taking now in HIV resistance – sequencing the complete genomes of people with extreme characteristics – may be the best way to find such rare and elusive genetic variants. Shianna said they also plan to do a whole-genome sequencing study of people with schizophrenia who are resistant to treatment. They have plans on the horizon to sequence people at the extremes of cognition, including a group with well-documented “photographic” memories, meaning that they have essentially perfect recall of everything that has ever happened to them. And, in the HIV realm, Goldstein’s group will also sequence people at another extreme: those who immediately progress to AIDS almost as soon as they become infected with HIV.

This new approach to genomics will no doubt be an important tool in many cases, says Greg Wray, director of the IGSP’s Center for Evolutionary Genomics and overseer of the IGSP’s core DNA sequencing facility. But it won’t necessarily apply in all instances.

“For some diseases, the rare stuff will be critical,” Wray says. “Given the costs, the big challenge will be to determine which diseases are best approached from this perspective. In some cases GWAS or microarrays that measure gene expression may be all we need to know. There are a growing number of approaches and no one will be right in every case.”

While Goldstein agrees, he and his team are confident that the new approach will soon lead them to new HIV-resistance variants. And though few people may carry them, those variants could prove to have incredible significance for many more individuals.

“We hope this project will yield new information that will help us to further understand disease resistance and to identify new targets and guidance for drug and vaccine development," says Goldstein. "Rare human genetic variation is a new frontier for discovery.”

A Scientist's Guide to Finding Alien Life: Where, When, and in What Universe

2009-05-12T03:25:00.000-07:00

By Adam Frank at Discovermagazine.com

Things were not looking so good for alien life in 1976, after the Viking I spacecraft landed on Mars, stretched out its robotic arm, and gathered up a fist-size pile of red dirt for chemical testing. Results from the probe’s built-in lab were anything but encouraging. There were no clear signs of biological activity, and the pictures Viking beamed back showed a bleak, frozen desert world, backing up that grim assessment. It appeared that our best hope for finding life on another planet had blown away like dust in a Martian windstorm.

What a difference 33 years makes. Back then, Mars seemed the only remotely plausible place beyond Earth where biology could have taken root. Today our conception of life in the universe is being turned on its head as scientists are finding a whole lot of inviting real estate out there. As a result, they are beginning to think not in terms of single places to look for life but in terms of “habitable zones”—maps of the myriad places where living things could conceivably thrive beyond Earth. Such abodes of life may lie on other planets and moons throughout our galaxy, throughout the universe, and even beyond.

The pace of progress is staggering. Just last November new studies of Saturn’s moon Enceladus strengthened the case for a reservoir of warm water buried beneath its craggy surface. Nobody had ever thought of this roughly 300-mile-wide icy satellite as anything special—until the Cassini spacecraft witnessed geysers of water vapor blowing out from its surface. Now Enceladus joins Jupiter’s moon Europa on the growing list of unlikely solar system locales that seem to harbor liquid water and, in principle, the ingredients for life.

Astronomers are also closing in on a possibly huge number of Earth-like worlds around other stars. Since the mid-1990s they have already identified roughly 340 extrasolar planets. Most of these are massive gaseous bodies, but the latest searches are turning up ever-smaller worlds. Two months ago the European satellite Corot spotted an extrasolar planet less than twice the diameter of Earth (see “The Inspiring Boom in Super-Earths”), and NASA’s new Kepler probe is poised to start searching for genuine analogues of Earth later this year. Meanwhile, recent discoveries show that microorganisms are much hardier than we thought, meaning that even planets that are not terribly Earth-like might still be suited to biology.

Together, these findings indicate that Mars was only the first step of the search, not the last. The habitable zones of the cosmos are vast, it seems, and they may be teeming with life.

The Solar System Habitable Zone
One of the guiding tenets in the search for life as we know it (the only kind we can meaningfully speculate about) is that it requires water. Until recently, that rule led scientists to think only in terms of places just like home: temperate, rocky planets with bodies of liquid water on their surfaces. From there it was a simple matter to calculate where such worlds could exist within our solar system.

“If you define a habitable zone in terms of favorable climate, you get a pretty narrow band of orbits around the sun,” says Greg Laughlin of the University of California at Santa Cruz. “You can move the Earth inward toward the sun a couple of percent or move it outward by at most about 30 percent before the climate runs into a serious problem.” From this perspective, there is no other promising location for life in our solar system. Even if many other stars have solar systems too, planets that happen to orbit in just the right place to support life could be pretty rare.

That would be a depressing end to the story of habitable zones, if not for a series of amazing findings that life on Earth is not what everyone thought it was. “No one really expected it,” says Chris McKay, one of the pioneers of astrobiology—the hybrid field that studies how life could arise and evolve elsewhere in the universe. “People found strains of bacteria that don’t use food from the surface, don’t use oxygen from the surface, and don’t use sunlight from the surface.”

These newly revealed life-forms, called extremophiles, thrive in conditions so harsh a biologist 50 years ago would not have dreamed it possible. Giant tube worms, crabs, and shrimp live in the dark, a mile below the ocean surface, huddled around superheated geothermal vents. These vents are known as black smokers for the plumes of dark hydrogen sulfide they belch into the ocean. The organisms around them survive off chemicals from the vents in an ecosystem that operates without photosynthesis.

To McKay, these creatures are not the most exciting types of extremophiles, however. “They still rely on oxygen that is indirectly created by sunlight,” he says. Far more compelling are the bacteria that have been found thriving deep underground. One type lives five miles deep in the bowels of South African gold mines. “These creatures get their energy from sources we never imagined,” McKay exclaims. “The South African extremophile bacteria are powered by the radioactive decay of unstable atoms in the rocks. Sunlight and surface water play no role. It’s amazing!”

Extremophiles feeding on nonsolar energy sources show how alien life might similarly arise and thrive deep underground, far from surface water and sunlight. “Habitable planets don’t need to be like Earth,” McKay says. “That realization has driven the biggest expansion in our understanding of habitable zones.”

By happy coincidence, the discovery of extremophiles coincided with new studies showing that the solar system might have many previously unexpected warm, wet locations. In the 1990s the Galileo space probe collected convincing evidence that Jupiter’s large moon Europa has a global ocean of liquid water beneath its frozen surface. (NASA just announced plans to return there in 2027 to get a better look.) The recent discovery of the geysers on Enceladus added a second twist, making planetary scientists wonder if there are even more such hot spots scattered around the solar system. These locations lack sunlight and access to the surface—but apparently some kinds of life do nicely without either.

“When you take the discovery of liquid water below the surface of Europa and Enceladus and put it together with our understanding of terrestrial extremophiles,” McKay says, “you can see why the definition of ‘habitable zone’ had to change.”

The Galactic Habitable Zone
Astrobiologists’ new, grander view of habitability gets even more expansive when they look out to the galaxy around us. The Milky Way contains perhaps 200 billion stars. Now that we know a significant fraction of stars have planets, that number translates into (as Carl Sagan might say) billions and billions of worlds. Red dwarf stars, which are by far the most common stars in our galaxy, were once considered unlikely places to find Earth-like planets, but new studies contradict that view. And the extremophiles tell us that life could potentially take hold even on planets not much like our own.

All of that is the good news. But things are not quite so simple, because galaxies—like solar systems—have habitability zones of their own. Not all parts of a galaxy are suited to life. In 2004 astrobiologist Charley Lineweaver of Australian National University published a paper that broadly mapped out our galaxy, the Milky Way, with an eye toward possibilities and dangers for alien biology. In this case, the crucial factor is not the presence of water; it is the proximity of violent, massive stars.

The galaxy’s brightest, hottest, heaviest stars turn out to be crucial for both planets and biology. They are the universe’s only source of crucial heavy elements like silicon (which makes up more than a quarter of Earth’s crust), potassium (essential for the action of cells), and iron (which carries oxygen in our blood). These elements are forged in the stars’ fiery nuclear furnaces. Massive stars end their lives with supernova explosions that spray the heavy elements into space, where they are incorporated into the next generation of stars and help seed the formation of planets.

In thinking about the galactic habitable zone, Lineweaver made the presence of heavy elements his prime criterion. The rate at which massive stars form drops sharply as you venture outward from the Milky Way’s center, and the abundance of heavy elements falls with them. Lineweaver calculates that when the sun formed 4 billion years ago, the outer third of the galaxy lacked enough heavy elements to support life. Since then the elements have become more widely distributed, and now only the galaxy’s outer rim is too undernourished to form Earths easily. Our location, about two-thirds of the way toward the Milky Way’s stellar rim, lies at the center of the currently life-friendly region of the galaxy; the inner part of the galaxy turns out to be hostile to life too.

Massive stars give, but they also take away—and that puts the inner limit on the galactic habitable zone. The supernova explosions that create and spread heavy elements also unleash a torrent of high-energy radiation: gamma rays, X-rays, and ultraviolet light. Those stellar explosions can have lethal effects on planets orbiting stars even tens of light-years away. In the crowded central regions of the galaxy, home to large numbers of massive stars, supernovas are so common that the evolution of complex life-forms might be difficult if not impossible.

The big question is how bad the supernova effect is. Lineweaver and his colleagues calculate that radiation poisoning could exclude the inner 20 percent of the Milky Way, which encompasses about half of all the stars in the galaxy. “You are looking for that sweet spot,” says Fred Adams of the University of Michigan, “where you are not so close to the center that conditions are hostile and not so far out that the metal abundance is too low.” But the Milky Way is huge, so Adams suggests putting things in perspective. “At worst the amount of galactic real estate favorable to life is reduced by a factor of two or three,” he says.

The amount of real estate that is off-limits depends heavily on how life responds to strong doses of radiation. Remarkably, we may already have good information about that locked away in the fossil record right here on Earth.

Every 62 million years, something bad happens to Earth’s biodiversity,” says Adrian Melott of the University of Kansas. “Paleontologists have built up large data sets of all the animals in the fossil record. With these data you can look to see how biodiversity changed with time.” His provocative studies, backed by the work of other groups, show that drops in biodiversity—sometimes indicating mass extinctions—seem to follow a periodic cycle.

Melott links the changes in biodiversity to the motion of the sun and planets through our galaxy. “As the sun orbits the Milky Way, it also bobs up and down, rising above the plane of the disk and then diving below it,” he says. “Every time the sun rises up and pokes out of the ‘north’ side of the galaxy’s disk, our biodiversity goes way, way down.” He notes that the Milky Way’s north side points toward the Virgo cluster, an enormous nearby gathering of galaxies. Our galaxy (and, by extension, our planet and ourselves) is falling toward Virgo at about 120 miles per second.

According to Melott, as the Milky Way plows through intergalactic material, a powerful shock wave forms ahead of it. Shock waves create energetic subatomic particles called cosmic rays, which can tear apart biomolecules and damage DNA beyond repair. Normally the galaxy’s magnetic fields protect us from that radiation. Every 62 million years, though, the sun bobs up above the disk into the danger zone, Melott finds. “When the sun pokes up above the galaxy’s plane on the north side,” he says, “the entire planet gets a giant dose of cosmic rays.”

All stars follow a similar bobbing motion as they move through the galaxy, but ones in the inner regions do so at a faster pace, which may bolster Lineweaver’s view that those regions are less likely to contain complex life. Then again, a certain amount of radiation is a part of life—in fact, an essential part. Radiation helps drive mutation, and mass extinctions clear the way for evolutionary change. That view tends to bolster Adams’s optimistic outlook. “We want enough radiation to pose a challenge and spur development of new life-forms but not so much as to sterilize the whole planet,” Melott concludes.

The Temporal Habitable Zone
Melott’s hypothesis about mass extinctions shows how habitable zones may be measured not just in space but also in time. It turns out that “when” is just as important as “where” for the existence of life.

Supernovas come into play here, too. When the universe emerged from the Big Bang, it consisted almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. Good luck trying to make a planet, much less a person, out of that. Carbon, oxygen, iron, and the like had to wait for stars—especially the massive ones—to form and create heavier elements via nuclear fusion. Those processed elements escaped in stellar winds or supernova explosions and then got picked up by subsequent generations of stars. Building up the elements needed for life this way takes billions of years. The entire universe was, therefore, a nonhabitable zone for perhaps the first few billion years of its 13.7-billion-year history.

Once the universe is full of heavy elements, the tables turn and the mortal nature of stars becomes a limitation. The sun, a medium-size star, is about halfway into its total lifetime of 10 billion years. In another 5 billion years it will swell into a red giant and either consume our planet or bake its surface to concrete. Even sooner, in as little as a billion years, the sun’s gradually increasing luminosity may make Earth unbearable for life. Brighter, more massive stars, which guzzle their nuclear fuel more quickly, may burn out too quickly to allow complex life to evolve.

Fortunately, the realization that dim red dwarf stars could potentially support Earth-like planets greatly stretches out the temporal habitable zone. The dimmest, most economical of those stars might live 10 trillion years, a thousand times as long as the sun. Then again, current studies suggest that the universe will probably expand forever. If so, the cosmos as we know it—full of stars and, maybe, full of life—will be a fleeting moment in an endless duration of cold, dark nothingness.

Feeling grim again? Don’t worry; the latest physics theories point to yet another habitable zone that would allow life to go on long after the last star has expired.

The Multiverse Habitable Zone
These days, the largest habitable domain to consider is no longer our universe but the hypothetical universe of universes, what cosmologists call the multiverse. After our universe has gone black, perhaps another (or many others) will carry on life’s flame.

The idea that our universe—everything we can observe, including the laws of physics that shape it—is just one among a vast ensemble may seem the stuff of science fiction, but cosmologists build multiverse models using a theory called inflation. Inflationary cosmology, currently the dominant model of the early universe, holds that the entire observable cosmos began as a speck within a far larger (perhaps infinite) existence emerging from the Big Bang. Within 10^-30 second after the moment of creation, this speck underwent a period of hyper-rapid expansion—hence “inflation”—becoming everything we see today. As bizarre as this model sounds, it has some reasonable observational support.

Some cosmologists go further and argue that inflation could also happen in other places and at other times, when these other bits of creation break out, undergo their own inflation, and become separate pocket universes. Physicists call this multiplication of reality “eternal inflation.” It leads to an almost limitless number of separate universes, each with its own laws of physics. (This dovetails with the equally weird predictions from string theory, a model of fundamental physics that suggests there could be something like 10⁵⁰⁰ different sets of laws.) “In some of these universes the force of gravity might be stronger or weaker than our own,” Fred Adams says. “In others the electromagnetic force that controls atoms and molecules could be different. The consequences for the formation of life in these different kinds of universes might be dramatic.”

Although there is no evidence for these multiverses, that has not stopped theorists from speculating about them. In our universe the laws of physics seem precisely calibrated to allow the existence of long-lived stars, planets with stable orbits, and molecules that allow complex chemistry. All of these seem to be prerequisites for life. “One of the things people always ask about is the behavior of stars in alternate universes,” Adams says. “If you have universes where stars can’t form, then it’s likely those would be pretty sterile places.”

Adams took this question seriously and began a study of alternative physics and its effect on the existence of stars. “I decided to do an actual calculation,” he says. “Could I get all this speculation down to a well-posed problem?” Each of the four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces) has a kind of theoretical knob that can be turned up or down to change its strength. “I decided to calculate a bunch of theoretical stellar models, looking to see what range of forces gave me working stars,” Adams continues. The results surprised a lot of people.

“Many people claim that only a minute fraction of bubble universes would have the right conditions to harbor life,” Adams says. His calculations found instead that functioning stars would be more resilient to variations in physics than anyone expected. Since stars are a prerequisite for life, the findings could indicate far more possibilities for viable habitats. Fully a quarter of his models led to long-lived stars, but with an important caveat. Adams cannot say how probable any given strength of gravity or electromagnetism would be in a randomly chosen pocket. “What you need is to fold what I have done into a probability distribution across the multiverse,” he says. In other words, we need to know the statistics of variation in the laws of physics of pocket universes—and in inflationary cosmology there is no principle that guides the choice of physics in each of them.

Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, has a controversial idea that makes some testable predictions about those other universes. In the process, he makes the case for habitability look even better than Adams inferred.

During the early 1990s Smolin proposed a multiverse model that differs strongly from inflationary cosmology’s pocket universes. His model focuses on the way that black holes warp space and time. Since the 1960s some theorists have floated the idea that when a massive star collapses into a black hole, it gives rise to a new universe. Smolin is building on that concept.

Black-hole-generated universes differ from the ones associated with eternal inflation in an important regard. With inflation there is no connection between the physics of one universe and that of another. The black-hole model, Smolin argues, strongly trends to certain types of physics. “Any universe that produces more black holes will create more daughter universes,” he says, “and its physics will be passed on to those daughters.” As a result, there should be a process analogous to natural selection favoring universes whose physics leads to the formation of more black holes. Such universes should dominate the multiverse.

Smolin’s model has two notable advantages. First, it explains why our universe has the physical laws that it does, since universes like ours that can create the massive stars that produce black holes are strongly selected. Second, it explains why our physical laws allow life to exist: The elements that permit the existence of stars happen to be the same ones that allow the existence of our kind of biology.

Actually, there is a third advantage. Smolin claims his black-hole multiverse hypothesis can be tested. Since universes that give rise to the largest number of black holes have the most offspring, our universe should be optimal for making black holes. Smolin’s predictions, including ideas about cosmological inflation and the mass of the heaviest stable neutron star, have held up so far. “The theory is falsifiable,” he says. “If observations come out contrary to my predictions, then the idea is wrong.”

But if Smolin is correct, we inhabit not just a universe but an entire multiverse that may be teeming with life—a habitable zone unbound.

See Adam Frank's recent book, The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate, and the companion blog to the book.

Hubble Photographs Giant Eye in Space

2009-05-11T03:27:00.000-07:00

This article was written by Robert Roy Britt with reporting assistance by Tariq Malik from Cape Canaveral. SPACE.com is providing continuous coverage of NASA's last mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Hubble Space Telescope's legendary Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 has produced one of its last images, a gorgeous shot of a planetary nebula.

The nebula, a colorful cloud of gas and dust named Kohoutek 4-55 (or K 4-55), has an eye that appears to be looking right back at Hubble.

The image was taken May 4 and released today.

Monday, NASA aims to send the space shuttle Atlantis to Hubble, where astronauts will replace the camera with the Wide Field Camera 3, among other upgrades and fix-it projects.

At a press conference today, space agency officials said the camera will make one last image tomorrow, of a nearby galaxy named IC 5152, but that image won't be released immediately.

Planetary nebulas have nothing to do with planets. They were named so because in early telescopes, they had the fuzzy look of planets in our outer solar system. In fact planetary nebulas sit throughout our galaxy. This one contains the outer layers of a red giant star that were expelled into space as the star entered its death throes.

Ultraviolet radiation from the remaining hot core of the star zaps the ejected gas shells, making them glow. A bright inner ring is surrounded by a bipolar structure. The entire system is then surrounded by a faint red halo, seen in the emission by lit-up nitrogen gas. This multi-shell structure is fairly uncommon in planetary nebulas, astronomers said.

The Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 instrument, the size of a baby grand piano, was installed in 1993 to replace the original Wide Field/Planetary Camera. Among its iconic images:

Eagle Nebula's "pillars of creation."
Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9's impacts on Jupiter's atmosphere.
The 1995 Hubble Deep Field – the longest and deepest Hubble optical image of its time.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. Images are processed at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which conducts Hubble science operations.

Lynyrd Skynyrd Bassist Dies

2009-05-08T03:34:00.001-07:00

Ean Evans, the bassist for Lynyrd Skynyrd, has died after a long battle with cancer.

It's the second death in the storied band this year. In January, Billy Powell, the former keyboardist, also died.

In 1977 three band members died in a plane crash.

Dark matter signal recedes into the shadows

2009-05-07T04:17:00.000-07:00

From NewScientist.com

Dark matter seems to be receding further into the shadows. Last year, researchers thought they may have spotted its signature when a balloon-borne experiment called ATIC detected a bizarre spike in the number of high-energy electrons streaming in from space.

But now, NASA's Fermi space telescope finds no such spike – only subtle hints of a slight increase, suggesting that dark matter is not leaving any obvious trace in the charged particles detected from space.

Nobody knows exactly what dark matter is, but the leading theoretical model posits that it is made of up of particles called WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles). When two WIMPS collide, the theory says, they annihilate, producing radiation and a cascade of particles, including electrons.

So researchers were excited last November, when a team studying data from two ATIC balloon flights over Antarctica reported finding many more electrons than expected at high energies around 600 gigaelectronvolts. Less exotic objects, such as pulsars and supernova remnants, also accelerate charged particles to high energies, so the ATIC data could potentially be explained by such garden-variety fare.

But the abundance and high energies of the 'extra' electrons detected, coupled with another unexpected cosmic ray result measured a few months earlier by a satellite called PAMELA, raised the tantalising possibility that dark matter – perhaps of an exotic type – might be responsible.

"Particle physicists have not had much to get excited about in the last 10 years – they were all ready for the Large Hadron Collider and then had a big setback" when it broke down, says Douglas Finkbeiner, a dark matter theorist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "Then PAMELA and ATIC came along with extra high-energy signals that could not be easily explained, and it was fun to think about."

Now, however, astrophysicists using the Fermi telescope say they don't see a dramatic spike in the number of high-energy electrons in space. "Our energy spectrum doesn't have prominent features," says Alexander Moiseev, a Fermi team leader at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Pros and cons

What could explain the discrepancy? For one thing, the two experiments have different strengths and weaknesses.

ATIC flew in Earth's atmosphere, which can create extra "noise" in its signal, while Fermi is a space mission. ATIC's balloon flights also lasted for no more than three weeks, while Fermi is constantly taking data from orbit.

Indeed, the Fermi team analysed more than 4 million high-energy electrons detected with the telescope over the course of about six months to arrive at their result, collecting hundreds of times more data at these energies than any previous measurement. "We are practically free of statistical errors," Moiseev told New Scientist.

But ATIC has a thicker calorimeter, an instrument at the bottom of its detector that incoming space particles strike, generating showers of other particles. "The deeper or thicker that calorimeter is, the less of that shower energy sneaks out the bottom," says ATIC team leader John Wefel of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

"They can contain 68% of the energy, and we contain 85% of the energy," Wefel told New Scientist. As a result, he says there is more uncertainty in Fermi's measurement of the energy of incoming particles, which could broaden out any dramatic spikes like the one seen by ATIC.

"The reason they're not seeing that peak structure is because they have much poorer energy resolution in their instrument," says Wefel. He adds that his team has analysed a third balloon flight since the original ATIC announcement in November and finds the same sharp peak as before.
Instrumental effect?

The Fermi team acknowledges that it has a thinner calorimeter but says its detector is better in other ways – it boasts an instrument that tracks the path of incoming particles, for example – something that ATIC does not have. It has also run detailed computer algorithms that show its energy resolution is sharp enough to be able to see a spike in energetic electrons. "We would see an ATIC-like bump with huge confidence if it were there," maintains Moiseev.

Gregory Tarle, a physicist at the University of Michigan who is not affiliated with either team, agrees. The bump seen by ATIC "was probably an instrumental effect they hadn't compensated for", he says.

Both experiments have to grapple with the same basic challenge, Tarle explains – distinguishing between electrons and the much more abundant protons that pass through their detectors from space. Since neither experiment uses a magnetic field that could tell the two kinds of charged particles apart, the teams must try to do this by analysing the characteristics of the particle showers in their detectors.

"It's hard to make these measurements – very hard," says Tarle. But he says Fermi's calorimeter is better suited for the analysis than ATIC's. It is made of atoms that have a higher number of protons, which do not readily interact with protons coming in from space. That causes "less contamination in the electron

So if the ATIC bump isn't real, what does that mean for dark matter?

Tarle says it means that high-energy electron detectors such as ATIC and Fermi do not show any evidence for dark matter. "There's nothing in their data that could indicate new physics," he says.

But other researchers say Fermi's data does show what may be a subtle sign of dark matter. If they look at the data in the most conservative way, Fermi team members do not see this potential signature – they say the electron energy spectrum they measure is smooth, without any wiggles that might indicate 'extra' electrons.

If they are not as conservative, however, Fermi team members say they see a slight bump in the number of electrons at higher energies – though nothing as dramatic as ATIC's.

That gentle bump, they say, might be due to a slight theoretical underestimation of how many high-energy cosmic rays are produced in objects such as pulsars – an idea Tarle favours.

"The most likely explanation of the excess electrons at high energy seen by Fermi is that the theoretical estimates are wrong," Tarle says. "There is no reason to believe that these theoretical predictions based on lower energy data are valid in the high-energy regime of Fermi."
'Hard to fit'

Alternatively, it might be due to one or more nearby sources that are pumping out energetic electrons. The sources are thought to be nearby because high-energy electrons lose energy as they travel through space, so for them to arrive at the energies that Fermi detects, they must have come from somewhere within about 3000 light years of Earth.

The nearby sources could be pulsars, but "dark matter is not ruled out" as a possible source, says Moiseev.

Finkbeiner agrees. Last year, he and colleagues came up with a new model of dark matter that could account for both the PAMELA and ATIC signals.

After the Fermi team released its results at a physics meeting earlier this week, Finkbeiner said his inbox was flooded with emails saying, "So, annihilating dark matter is dead, right?" he says. "Nothing could be further from the truth."

"It was always a little bit hard to fit the ATIC bump," he says, explaining that such a sharp spike hints that dark matter might be annihilating straight to electrons – a process that is theoretically forbidden.
'Less information'

His and other dark matter models instead argue that annihilating dark matter particles create intermediate particles – such as pions – before producing electrons.

"It's hard to make a sharp feature but easy to make a broad, smooth feature" like the one Fermi may be seeing, he says, adding that the same is true for electrons produced in astrophysical sources such as pulsars.

"In a way, it's a relief we don't have to make the ATIC bump, but if ATIC is real, it would really be telling us something," Finkbeiner told New Scientist. "We're not likely to learn as much about dark matter from [Fermi's electron spectrum] – basically, we have less information than we had before."
Tricky observation

If further observations with Fermi suggest there is not even a gentle rise in the number of high-energy electrons it detects, that will make any annihilating dark matter difficult to observe – but it will necessarily not rule it out, says Finkbeiner.

"Before the ATIC and PAMELA results, the expected annihilation signal for the leading dark matter candidate, the WIMP, was much smaller, so failure to find a signal with Fermi does not in any way rule out conventional WIMP annihilation," he says.

"Of course, there could be no signal at all: dark matter could just sit there and gravitate and do absolutely nothing else," he adds. "That's kind of the most boring scenario: we can never learn what kind of particle it is."
Tracing the source

The Fermi team hopes to shed light on the issue by continuing to collect electron data from all over the sky. It's difficult to trace the source of electrons that fall into its detector because the charged particles are diverted by magnetic fields in space. But if Fermi detects even a slight excess of electrons in one region of the sky, it might point to their source, says Moiseev.

Fermi is also hunting for possible signs of dark matter in the distribution of gamma-ray photons in the sky. Gamma rays are thought to be produced by annihilating dark matter and unlike electrons, are not affected by intervening magnetic fields (see Where will new Fermi telescope find dark matter?).

Future experiments might also provide a cross-check of both ATIC and Fermi. One, called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, may fly to the International Space Station before the shuttles are retired in 2010. It uses a magnetic field to separate charged particles and has a calorimeter a little thicker than Fermi's.

Journal reference: Physical Review Letters (vol 102, p 181101)

NASA's Fermi Explores High-energy "Space Invaders"

2009-05-05T03:48:00.000-07:00

From Nasa.gov

Since its launch last June, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered a new class of pulsars, probed gamma-ray bursts and watched flaring jets in galaxies billions of light-years away. Today at the American Physical Society meeting in Denver, Colo., Fermi scientists revealed new details about high-energy particles implicated in a nearby cosmic mystery.

"Fermi's Large Area Telescope is a state-of-the-art gamma-ray detector, but it's also a terrific tool for investigating the high-energy electrons in cosmic rays," said Alexander Moiseev, who presented the findings. Moiseev is an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Cosmic rays are hyperfast electrons, positrons, and atomic nuclei moving at nearly the speed of light. Astronomers believe that the highest-energy cosmic rays arise from exotic places within our galaxy, such as the wreckage of exploded stars.

Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT) is exquisitely sensitive to electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons. Looking at the energies of 4.5 million high-energy particles that struck the detector between Aug. 4, 2008, and Jan. 31, 2009, the LAT team found evidence that both supplements and refutes other recent findings.

Compared to the number of cosmic rays at lower energies, more particles striking the LAT had energies greater than 100 billion electron volts (100 GeV) than expected based on previous experiments and traditional models. (Visible light has energies between two and three electron volts.) The observation has implications similar to complementary measurements from a European satellite named PAMELA and from the ground-based High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.), an array of telescopes located in Namibia that sees flashes of light as cosmic rays strike the upper atmosphere.

Last fall, a balloon-borne experiment named ATIC captured evidence for a dramatic spike in the number of cosmic rays at energies around 500 GeV. "Fermi would have seen this sharp feature if it was really there, but it didn't." said Luca Latronico, a team member at the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Pisa, Italy. "With the LAT's superior resolution and more than 100 times the number of electrons collected by balloon-borne experiments, we are seeing these cosmic rays with unprecedented accuracy."

Unlike gamma rays, which travel from their sources in straight lines, cosmic rays wend their way around the galaxy. They can ricochet off of galactic gas atoms or become whipped up and redirected by magnetic fields. These events randomize the particle paths and make it difficult to tell where they originated. In fact, determining cosmic-ray sources is one of Fermi's key goals.

What's most exciting about the Fermi, PAMELA, and H.E.S.S. data is that they may imply the presence of a nearby object that's beaming cosmic rays our way. "If these particles were emitted far away, they’d have lost a lot of their energy by the time they reached us," explained Luca Baldini, another Fermi collaborator at INFN.

If a nearby source is sending electrons and positrons toward us, the likely culprit is a pulsar -- the crushed, fast-spinning leftover of an exploded star. A more exotic possibility is on the table, too. The particles could arise from the annihilation of hypothetical particles that make-up so-called dark matter. This mysterious substance neither produces nor impedes light and reveals itself only by its gravitational effects.

"Fermi's next step is to look for changes in the cosmic-ray electron flux in different parts of the sky," Latronico said. "If there is a nearby source, that search will help us unravel where to begin looking for it."

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership mission, developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy and important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the U.S.

Austrian breakthrough in quantum cryptography

2009-05-04T03:49:00.000-07:00

from psyorg.com

Austrian physicists say a breakthrough in next-generation quantum cryptography could allow encrypted messages to be bounced off satellites, the British journal Nature reported Sunday.

A team from Austria's Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) managed to send entangled photons 144 kilometres (90 miles) between the Spanish islands of Las Palmas and the Balearics.

Because of the success of the test, the IQOQI team said it was now feasible to send this kind of unbreakable encrypted communication through space using satellites.

Quantum cryptography works by sending streams of light particles, or photons, making it entirely secure, as any eavesdropping would leave traces and immediately be detected.

In quantum cryptography, photons are used as the key for the encrypted communication -- just as mathematical formula are used in conventional cryptography.

Girl, 8, gets divorced in Saudi Arabia

2009-05-01T04:00:00.000-07:00

By Richard Spencer in Dubai

The case has prompted the kingdom to re-evaluate its conservative attitudes to marriage.

The girl's marriage was arranged by her father and backed twice by a judge on the condition that it was not consummated until she reached puberty.

Her mother, who is separated from the father, objected to the arrangement and twice sought a divorce on her daughter's behalf. It was refused both times by the judge, Sheikh Habib Al-Habib, after the girl's husband refused to agree.

The judge did say that when the girl reached puberty she could herself seek a divorce.

The case was widely publicised and prompted heated debate in the country, which is currently giving more rights to women than have previously been granted. It was also condemned by human rights groups abroad.

King Abdullah, seen as a reformist, appointed the first ever woman deputy minister earlier this year.

One of his advisers, Mohsen al-Obaikan, an Islamic scholar, went public to demand that a legal age for marriage be set at 18. The justice ministry said it was considering reforming the law, which until now has given no minimum.

The justice minister said he wanted to end the "arbitrary" control of marriages by girl's fathers.

However, the country's highest religious authority, the Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Shaikh, said that marrying girls even under the age of 15 was not against Sharia - Islamic law which forms the basis of the Saudi legal system.

The Saudi Gazette reported that the marriage of the eight-year-old, who has never been named, was annulled in a private out-of-court settlement between the two families in the city of Onaiza.

Most such marriages are arranged by families in return for money. In this case, the father was said to need to pay off a personal debt to the husband, a friend.

The girl herself has been living with her mother, and was never told that she was married, or of the international controversy her case had provoked.

Earlier, Anne Veneman, director of Unicef, said: "Unicef joins many in voicing concern that child marriage contravenes accepted international standards of human rights."

How the Brain re-wires itself

2009-04-29T04:06:00.001-07:00

Most distant object in the universe spotted

2009-04-28T03:54:00.000-07:00

by Rachel Courtland at NewScientist.com

Astronomers have spotted the most distant object yet confirmed in the universe – a self-destructing star that exploded 13.1 billion light years from Earth. It detonated just 640 million years after the big bang, around the end of the cosmic "dark ages", when the first stars and galaxies were lighting up space.

The object is a gamma-ray burst (GRB) – the brightest type of stellar explosion. GRBs occur when massive, spinning stars collapse to form black holes and spew out jets of gas at nearly the speed of light. These jets send gamma rays our way, along with "afterglows" at other wavelengths, which are produced when the jet heats up surrounding gas.

The burst, dubbed GRB 090423 for the date of its discovery last Thursday, was originally spotted by NASA's Swift satellite at 0755 GMT.

Within an hour, astronomers began training ground-based telescopes on the same patch of sky to study the burst's infrared afterglow. Some of the first observations were made on Mauna Kea in Hawaii with the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope and the Gemini North telescope.

Other telescopes later measured the spectrum of the afterglow, revealing that the burst detonated about 13.1 billion light years from Earth. "It's the most distance gamma-ray burst, but it's also the most distant object in the universe overall," says Edo Berger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a member of the team that observed the afterglow with Gemini North.
Stretched light

To gauge an object's distance, astronomers measure how much an object's light has been stretched, or reddened, by the expansion of space. This burst lies at a redshift of 8.2, more distant than the previous GRB record holder, which lay at a redshift of 6.7.

Other astronomers have claimed to find galaxies at even greater distances – at redshifts of 10 and 9, but those findings are still ambiguous, says Joshua Bloom of the University of California, Berkeley, who observed the afterglow using the Gemini South telescope in Chile. Until now, the record holder for the farthest galaxy had a spectroscopically confirmed redshift of 6.96.

The burst's immense distance makes the now-dead star the earliest object to be discovered from an era called 'reionisation', which occurred within the first billion years after the big bang. At that time, an obscuring fog of neutral hydrogen atoms was being burned off by radiation from the first stars and galaxies, and possibly also from the annihilation of dark matter particles.
'Watershed event'

"For astronomy, this is a watershed event," Bloom told New Scientist."This is the beginning of the study of the universe as it was before most of the structure that we know about today came into being."

The timing of the period of reionisation is still unclear, Bloom says. If astronomers can find more gamma-ray bursts at even greater distances, they could use their spectra to determine how quickly the universe became transparent and what was responsible for the process.

"In principle, you can see very early times in the universe [with GRBs], when everything else was too faint," says Nial Tanvir of the University of Leicester in the UK, a member of a team that used the Very Large Telescope in Chile to make one of the first measurements of the distance of the burst.

Distant blasts could also help pinpoint the locations of faint GRB host galaxies that could be detected by space telescopes like the soon-to-be-refurbished Hubble Space Telescope or NASA's infrared James Webb Telescope, which is set to launch in 2013.
Sensitive and fast

But building up a picture of the early universe will require finding many more distant bursts, and progress in discovering distant bursts has been slow. Swift has found 120 bursts with measured distances, but only three – including this one – date from the first billion years of the universe's history.

That is in part because stars did not form at high rates in the very early universe, before a redshift of about 5, and so they did not explode often as GRBs.

But it is also because infrared detectors that are both sensitive and quick enough to measure very distant, short-lived GRB afterglows have only recently begun operating. As a result, astronomers may have missed out on identifying some of the most distant GRBs identified by Swift.

Berger hopes the discovery of this object will hasten the development of new telescopes that could discover such afterglows with even greater efficiency.

"As a single object, [the burst] is an amazing proof of concept," says Berger. "I think we've shown that's a worthwhile investment because [distant bursts] actually do exist."

NASA is considering one such telescope, called the Joint Astrophysics Nascent Universe Satellite (JANUS), for funding this year

Sleep Now, Remember Later

2009-04-27T04:24:00.000-07:00

By Robert Stickgold, PH.D., and Peter Wehrwein | NEWSWEEK

For many years, people believed that the brain, like the body, rested during sleep. After all, we are rendered unconscious by sleep. Perhaps, it was thought, the brain just needs to stop thinking for a few hours every day. Wrong. During sleep, our brain—the organ that directs us to sleep—is itself extraordinarily active. And much of that activity helps the brain to learn, to remember and to make connections.

It wasn't so long ago that the rueful joke in research circles was that everyone knew sleep had something to do with memory—except for the people who study sleep and the people who study memory. Then, in 1994, Israeli researchers reported that the average performance for a group of people on a memory test improved when the test was repeated after a break of many hours—during which some subjects slept and others did not. In 2000, a Harvard team demonstrated that this improvement occurred only during sleep.

There are several different types of memory—including declarative (retrievable, fact-based information), episodic (events from your life) and procedural (how to do something)—and researchers have designed ways to test each of them. In almost every case, whether the test involves remembering pairs of words, tapping numbered keys in a certain order or figuring out the rules in a weather-prediction game, "sleeping on it" after first learning the task improves performance. It's as if our brains squeeze in some extra practice time while we're asleep.

This isn't to say that we can't form memories when we're awake. If someone tells you his name, you don't need to fall asleep to remember it. But sleep will make it more likely that you do. Sleep-deprivation experiments have shown that a tired brain has a difficult time capturing memories of all sorts. Interestingly, sleep deprivation is more likely to cause us to forget information associated with positive emotion than information linked to negative emotion. This could explain, at least in part, why sleep deprivation can trigger depression in some people: memories tainted with negative emotions are more likely than positive ones to "stick" in the sleep-deprived brain.

Sleep also seems to be the time when the brain's two memory systems—the hippocampus and the neocortex—"talk" with one other. Experiences that become memories are laid down first in the hippocampus, obliterating whatever is underneath. If a memory is to be retained, it must be shipped from the hippocampus to a place where it will endure—the neocortex, the wrinkled outer layer of the brain where higher thinking takes place. Unlike the hippocampus, the neocortex is a master at weaving the old with the new. And partly because it keeps incoming information at bay, sleep is the best time for the "undistracted" hippocampus to shuttle memories to the neocortex, and for the neocortex to link them to related memories.

How sleep helps us consolidate memories is still largely a mystery. A recent study from the University of Lübeck, in Germany, offers one clue. Subjects were given a list of 46 word pairs to memorize, just before sleep. Shortly after they fell asleep, as they reached the deepest stages of sleep, electrical currents were sent through electrodes on their heads to induce very slow brain waves. Such slow waves were induced at random in the brains of one group of subjects, but not another. The next morning, the slow-wave group had better recall of the words. Other types of memory were not improved, and inducing the slow waves later in the night did not have the same effect. Why and how the slow waves improved memory is not yet understood, but they are thought to alter the strengths of chemical connections, or synapses, between specific pairs of nerve cells in the brain. Memories are "stored" in these synapses: changing the strength of the synapses increases the strength of the memories they store.

It's not just memory that is improved by sleep. Recent studies indicate that sleep not only helps store facts, it also helps make connections between them. Scientific history is replete with tales of scientists with nocturnal "aha!" experiences. Dmitri Mendeleev awakened from a dream that gave him the idea for the periodic table of elements—a landmark in chemistry. Such anecdotes don't prove that sleep can produce insights, but a recent study by Ullrich Wagner and colleagues in Germany does. Wagner used a puzzle in which players were given a string of numbers, and required to make a series of seven calculations based on these numbers. The seventh calculation (which depended on the preceding six) was the "answer." Participants repeatedly played the same game with the same rules, but different sets of numbers. Some of the players played the game in the morning, then did other things for eight hours or so, then played the game again. Others played the game first in the evening, then slept, then played it again after awakening.

The players who slept did somewhat better—but that was not the important result. Cleverly, the researchers structured the game such that the second calculation always gave the same answer as the seventh calculation—the final answer. If players recognized this "hidden rule," they could get to the final answer much faster—and speed was a part of the game. The players who slept were almost three times more likely to have the insight that allowed them to spot the hidden rule—even though none of the players had been told there was a hidden rule to spot. Sleeping had allowed them to connect the dots.

Why is this important? Some sleep researchers believe that for every two hours we spend awake, the brain needs an hour of sleep to figure out what all these experiences mean, and that sleep plays a crucial role in constructing the meaning our lives come to hold. Breakdowns in such sleep-dependent processing may contribute to the development of depression, and may explain why some people who experience horrific traumas go on to develop PTSD.

A better understanding of how sleep knits our memories together could lead to new technologies that improve learning, memory and creativity, and even help treat some psychiatric disease. But perhaps the most important reason for studying sleep is simply this: we are a curious species; we spend about a third of our lives asleep; and we realize how little we understand about that third of our lives. So we continue experimenting, hoping to understand sleep better. And perhaps someday we will. After we've slept on it.

Stickgold is associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Wehrwein is editor of the Harvard Health Letter. For more information, go to health.harvard.edu/Newsweek.

Scientists make super-strong metallic spider silk

2009-04-24T04:14:00.000-07:00

By Ben Hirschler

LONDON (Reuters) – Spider silk is already tougher and lighter than steel, and now scientists have made it three times stronger by adding small amounts of metal.

The technique may be useful for manufacturing super-tough textiles and high-tech medical materials, including artificial bones and tendons.

"It could make very strong thread for surgical operations," researcher Seung-Mo Lee of the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle, Germany, said in a telephone interview.

Lee and colleagues, who published their findings in the journal Science, found that adding zinc, titanium or aluminum to a length of spider silk made it more resistant to breaking or deforming.

They used a process called atomic layer deposition, which not only coated spider dragline silks with metal but also caused some metal ions to penetrate the fibers and react with their protein structure.

Lee said he next wanted to try adding other materials, including artificial polymers like Teflon.

The idea was inspired by studies showing traces of metals in the toughest parts of some insect body parts. The jaws of leaf-cutter ants and locusts, for example, both contain high levels of zinc, making them particularly stiff and hard.

Spider silk has long fascinated scientists but producing it in commercial quantities is difficult because spiders kept in captivity tend to eat each other.

As a result, researchers have looked at alternative ways of producing silk without spiders, by duplicating their spinning technique.

Approaches being tried include deriving fiber from the milk of transgenic goats with an extra spider-silk gene and adapting silk produced by other insects, such as silkworms.

(Editing by Tim Pearce)

Dark Matter, Dark Energy; Now There’s “Dark Gulping”

2009-04-23T03:43:00.000-07:00

From Universetoday.com

For all you dark matter and dark energy fans out there, now there’s another new “dark” to add to the list. It’s called “dark gulping,” and it involves a process which may explain how supermassive black holes were able to form in the early universe. Astronomers from the University College of London (UCL) propose that dark gulping occurred when there were gravitational interactions between the invisible halo of dark matter in a cluster of galaxies and the gas embedded in the dark matter halo. This occurred when the Universe was less than a billion years old. They found that the interactions cause the dark matter to form a compact central mass, which can be gravitationally unstable, and collapse. The fast dynamical collapse is the dark gulping.

Dr. Curtis Saxton and Professor Kinwah Wu, both of UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory, developed a model to study the process. They say that the dark gulping would have happened very rapidly, without a trace of electro-magnetic radiation being emitted.

There are several theories for how supermassive black holes form. One possibility is that a single large gas cloud collapses. Another is that a black hole formed by the collapse of a giant star swallows up enormous amounts of matter. Still another possibility is that a cluster of small black holes merge together. However, all these options take many millions of years and are at odds with recent observations that suggest that black holes were present when the Universe was less than a billion years old. Dark gulping may provide a solution to how the slowness of gas accretion was circumvented, enabling the rapid emergence of giant black holes. The affected dark mass in the compact core is compatible with the scale of supermassive black holes in galaxies today.

Dark matter appears to gravitationally dominate the dynamics of galaxies and galaxy clusters. However, there is still a great deal of conjecture about origin, properties and distribution of dark particles. While it appears that dark matter doesn’t interact with light, it does interacts with ordinary matter via gravity. “Previous studies have ignored the interaction between gas and the dark matter,” said Saxton, “but, by factoring it into our model, we’ve achieved a much more realistic picture that fits better with observations and may also have gained some insight into the presence of early supermassive black holes.”?

According to the model, the development of a compact mass at the core is inevitable. Cooling by the gas causes it to flow gently in towards the center. The gas can be up to 10 million degrees at the outskirts of the halos, which are few million light years in diameter, with a cooler zone towards the core, which surrounds a warmer interior a few thousand light years across. The gas doesn’t cool indefinitely, but reaches a minimum temperature, which fits well with X-ray observations of galaxy clusters.

The model also investigates how many dimensions the dark particles move in, as these determine the rate at which the dark halo expands and absorbs and emits heat, and ultimately affect the distribution of dark mass the system.

“In the context of our model, the observed core sizes of galaxy cluster halos and the observed range of giant black hole masses imply that dark matter particles have between seven and ten degrees of freedom,”?said Saxton. ?”With more than six, the inner region of the dark matter approaches the threshold of gravitational instability, opening up the possibility of dark gulping taking place.?

The findings have been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Lightest Known Exoplanet Discovered

2009-04-22T04:05:00.000-07:00

From Space.com

The lightest exoplanet yet discovered — only about twice the mass of Earth — has been detected, astronomers announced today.

"With only 1.9 Earth-masses, it is the least massive exoplanet ever detected and is, very likely, a rocky planet,"said Xavier Bonfils of Grenoble Observatory in France, a member of the team that made the discovery, which was announced at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom.

The planet was found in the famous system Gliese 581 and has been dubbed "Gliese 581 e." It was detected using the low-mass-exoplanet hunter HARPS spectrograph attached to the 3.6-metre ESO telescope at La Silla, Chile.

Measurements with the telescope also helped to refine the orbit of the new planet's solar system sibling, a planet called Gliese 581 d, placing it well within the habitable zone, where liquid water oceans could exist.

"The holy grail of current exoplanet research is the detection of a rocky, Earth-like planet in the 'habitable zone' — a region around the host star with the right conditions for water to be liquid on a planet's surface," said Michel Mayor from the Geneva Observatory, who led the European team that made the finding.

Planet Gliese 581 e orbits its host star — located only 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra — in just 3.15 days. Being so close to its host star, the planet is not in the habitable zone.

With the discovery of Gliese 581 e, the planetary system now has four known planets, with masses of about 1.9 Earth-masses (planet e), 16 Earth-masses (planet b), 5 Earth-masses (planet c), and 7 Earth-masses (planet d).

"Gliese 581 d, which orbits the host star in 66.8 days, is probably too massive to be made only of rocky material, but we can speculate that it is an icy planet that has migrated closer to the star," said team member Stephane Udry of Geneva University in Switzerland. "'D' could even be covered by a large and deep ocean — it is the first serious 'water world' candidate."

Low-mass red dwarf stars such as Gliese 581 are potentially fruitful hunting grounds for low-mass exoplanets in the habitable zone. The gravitational pull of orbiting exoplanets introduces a slight wobble to the star's motion. Because the habitable zone of cool stars like Gliese 581 is so close to the star, the planets within this zone exert a stronger pull, and so the wobble of the star is more pronounced, though detecting the signal is still a challenge.

Over the last two decades, scientists have spotted more than 300 extrasolar planets circling other stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Most of these planets have been about the size of Jupiter or larger.

"It is amazing to see how far we have come since we discovered the first exoplanet around a normal star in 1995 — the one around 51 Pegasi," said Mayor, who helped find that planet. "The mass of Gliese 581 e is 80 times less than that of 51 Pegasi b. This is tremendous progress in just 14 years."

The team plans to continue looking for Earth-like, rocky planets around other stars.

"With similar observing conditions an Earth-like planet located in the middle of the habitable zone of a red dwarf star could be detectable," Bonfils said. "The hunt continues."

And HARPS isn't the only instrument looking for low-mass, Earth-like planets. NASA's new Kepler space telescope will also be peering through the galaxy in search of smaller alien worlds. It was launched on March 6 and sent back its first images last Thursday.

Unexpected Expectations

2009-04-19T16:21:00.001-07:00

He entered and wasn't what I expected. His clothes were wrinkled, hair a mess or what he had left up there was defying gravity, a smell of whisky wisped off his breath and an old typewriter teetered under his arm. It was the fact that he only had one arm, an eye patch, and a wooden leg that threw me off. How could he write with one arm? I welcomed him in and he hobbled over to my couch, threw himself down, and placed his typewriter on his lap. He slurred a story about his days in Nam, and began to fumble with a series of papers folded in his jacket. He needed to get some writing done before he met his editor tomorrow.

Slumping back into the kitchen, I dialed the phone.

"Mary, you won't believe this but Tyson Wilson is here."

"The Tyson Wilson?"

"Yes and he's not what I expected," I said. "He's a drunk."

"Got any food?" he yelled from the living room.

I covered the phone with my hand. "I'll make something," I yelled back, and then whispered into the phone. "He's a mess. Got-to-go. He's coming."

He limped into the kitchen and opened the fridge. After rummaging around the back recesses, he pulled out a jar of mayonnaise and pickles and walked past me without a word. I wanted to follow him to see what he was going to do with that combination, but I leaned on the counter and wondered what have I gotten myself into. After the second reverberating belch, he came back into the kitchen and began to open the cabinets.

“Can I help you with anything?” I replied with a bit of agitation.

“Do you have anything to drink?” he asked. “I didn’t see a liquor cabinet.”

“I don’t drink.”

He laughed as if it were a joke. When he noticed that I was serious, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “To each their own.”

How could this man write such glorious prose. He made me cry at the end of Capricorn’s Dream. He went back to his typewriter and pounded away at the keys. I’ve toiled over years of writing, holding his work like it was from a living god, and he’s a mess, someone I wouldn’t lend a dollar to if I saw him on the street. Another belch erupted from the room. Was I fooled? I was determined to dig deeper and went into the living room. He was sprawled on the couch, typewriter balancing on his potbelly, and a pickle with mayonnaise draped at its end dangled in his mouth like a cigar.

“What are you working on?” I asked.

“The last bit of Leo’s Revelation,” he answered and reached for another pickle. He knocked over a stack of papers and they scattered on the floor.

Bending over, I helped gather them. The writing was a mess, spelling errors, run on sentences, words that didn’t exist littered the pages. He snatched them from my hand.

“No one and I mean no one reads my writing before it is complete,” he said and stared at me. I began to feel nervous and backed away. He swallowed the last of the pickle, slurped the juice from his index finger and went back to the couch.

“I’m going to bed,” I said and went up the stairs.

Shutting the bedroom door, I listened to him pound on the keys. I then went to the closet and dug under the dirty clothes on the floor for a brown paper bag. This guy wasn’t going to get the best of me, not under my roof. I found what I was looking for and placed it on my lap. I cracked my knuckles, slid in a blank sheet of paper, and began to type

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Was Waterboarded 183 Times in One Month

2009-04-19T09:12:00.000-07:00

By: emptywheel

I've put this detail in a series of posts, but it really deserves a full post. According to the May 30, 2005 Bradbury memo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002.

On page 37 of the OLC memo, in a passage discussing the differences between SERE techniques and the torture used with detainees, the memo explains:

The CIA used the waterboard "at least 83 times during August 2002" in the interrogation of Zubaydah. IG Report at 90, and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM, see id. at 91.

Note, the information comes from the CIA IG report which, in the case of Abu Zubaydah, is based on having viewed the torture tapes as well as other materials. So this is presumably a number that was once backed up by video evidence.

The same OLC memo passage explains how the CIA might manage to waterboard these men so many times in one month each (though even with these chilling numbers, the CIA's math doesn't add up).

...where authorized, it may be used for two "sessions" per day of up to two hours. During a session, water may be applied up to six times for ten seconds or longer (but never more than 40 seconds). In a 24-hour period, a detainee may be subjected to up to twelve minutes of water appliaction. See id. at 42. Additionally, the waterboard may be used on as many as five days during a 30-day approval period.

So: two two-hour sessions a day, with six applications of the waterboard each = 12 applications in a day. Though to get up to the permitted 12 minutes of waterboarding in a day (with each use of the waterboard limited to 40 seconds), you'd need 18 applications in a day. Assuming you use the larger 18 applications in one 24-hour period, and do 18 applications on five days within a month, you've waterboarded 90 times--still just half of what they did to KSM.

The CIA wants you to believe waterboarding is effective. Yet somehow, it took them 183 applications of the waterboard in a one month period to get what they claimed was cooperation out of KSM.

That doesn't sound very effective to me.

Sign the petition telling Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate torture here.

Update: Here's one reason to demand a special prosecutor to investigate these actions. In addition to revealing the sheer number of times KSM and Abu Zubaydah were waterboarded, the memos reveal that the interrogators who waterboarded these men went far beyond even the expansive guidelines for torture described in the Bybee Memo, notably by dumping water onto their nose and mouth, rather than dribbing it on.

The IG Report noted that in some cases the waterboard was used with far greater frequency than initially indicated, see IG Report at 5, 44, 46, 103-04, and also that it was used in a different manner. See id. at 37 ("[T]he waterboard technique ... was different from the technique described in the DoJ opinion and used in the SERE training. The difference was the manner in which the detainee's breathing was obstructed. At the SERE school and in the DoJ opinion, the subject's airflow is disrupted by the firm application of a damp cloth over the air passages; the interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth in a controlled manner. By contrast, the Agency Interrogator ... applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee's mouth and nose. One of the psychologists/interrogators acknowledged that the Agency's use of the technique is different from that used in SERE training because it is "for real--and is more poignant and convincing.") [my emphasis]

There's been a lot of discussion about whether those who did what the OLC memos authorized should be prosecuted. But in the case of those who waterboarded KSM and Abu Zubaydah, that's irrelevant, because they did things the OLC memos didn't authorize.

The IRS vs. Robert Kahre

2009-04-16T03:59:00.000-07:00

Physicists See The Cosmos In A Coffee Cup

2009-04-15T04:09:00.000-07:00

By ScienceDaily.com

A Duke University professor and his graduate student have discovered a universal principle that unites the curious interplay of light and shadow on the surface of your morning coffee with the way gravity magnifies and distorts light from distant galaxies.

They think scientists will be able to use violations of this principle to map unseen clumps of dark matter in the universe.

Light rays naturally reflect off a curve like the inside surface of a coffee cup in a curving, ivy leaf pattern that comes to a point in the center and is brightest along its edge.

Mathematicians and physicists call that shape a "cusp curve," and they call the bright edge a "caustic," based on an alternative dictionary definition meaning "burning bright," explains Arlie Petters, a Duke professor of mathematics, physics and business administration. "It happens because a lot of light rays can pile up along curves."

Drawn by the mathematically-inclined artist Leonardo da Vinci in the early 16th century, caustics can be seen elsewhere in everyday life, including sunlight reflecting across a swimming pool's surface and choppy wave-light patterns reflecting off a boat hull.

Caustics also show up in gravitational lensing, a phenomenon caused by galaxies so massive that their gravity bends and distorts light from more distant galaxies. "It turns out that their gravity is so powerful that some light rays are also going to pile up along curves," said Petters, a gravitational lensing expert.

"Mother Nature has to be creating these things," Petters said. "It's amazing how what we can see in a coffee cup extends into a mathematical theorem with effects in the cosmos."

From the vantage point of Earth, the entire cosmos looks like a vast interplay of gravity and light that can extend far back into spacetime. "As with any illumination pattern, some areas will be brighter than others," Petters said. "And the brightest parts will be along these caustic curves."

Interpreting data from telescope surveys correctly requires understanding the distortions inherent in lensing, which sometimes warps a more distant point of light into multiple and magnified copies of themselves.

Petters and other researchers have previously found that, if such a light source seems to be juxtaposed within the confines of a caustic arch, two duplicate images will appear to be positioned abnormally close to each other and also seem equally bright. And because these clones are of seemingly equal brightness, subtracting one luminosity from the other results in a difference of zero.

In an article appearing in the March 23 Journal of Mathematical Physics, Petters and graduate student Amir Aazami extended the mathematics of such relatively simple examples to include what Petters called "higher order caustics." In such situations the interplay of light and gravity may extend further into spacetime and undergo various forms of "caustic metamorphosis" in the process.

Aazami was informally testing out a special case of their evolving caustics theorem called an "ellyptic umbilic" by using a technical computing software program called Mathematica when he noticed a pattern.

"It kept getting zero over and over again," Aazami said, no matter what scenario he tried the software on. "So I thought, 'it's making a mistake.' And I went back and looked again, and I kept getting zero. And I said, 'this is beginning to make sense!' That was the 'Ah Ha!' moment."

Petters realized his graduate student had found a universal mathematical principle so pervasive that it can impose balance on the most complicated gravitational lensing illusions. For instance, if lensing produces four light source copies of uneven brightnesses, the relative dimness of some is precisely balanced by the relative luminosity of others so they cancel each other out.

"It's miraculous that they cancel out," Petters said. "This relates to very sophisticated mathematics that you would never think could have anything to do with nature."

The Duke researchers said that for the simplest caustics, the theorem has already been corroborated by a few actual gravitational lensing observations. And they expect the higher order caustics to be observed once the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), now being assembled in Chile, begins what Petters called "the most massive survey of the sky known" in a few years.

"We feel very confident that these universal invariants will show themselves in the data to come from the LSST," he said.

Another scenario he predicts are exceptions to the rule: "For one of the higher order caustics, if there are two pairs of lensed images that are close to each other but not equally bright, then the theorem is violated," he said.

"The reason would be some substructure in the galaxy," he said, likely dark matter near one of the images that causes it to be demagnified.

Dark matter is a mysterious substance that astronomers cannot directly observe but can "sense" by its gravitational tug on light. By using the LSST in conjunction with their theorem, astronomers "would be able to identify dark matter substructures in complex galactic systems," Petters predicted

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

Man Stuck In Tree Suffocates, Dies

2009-04-14T03:22:00.000-07:00

PHOENIX -- A man is dead after being trapped more than 50 feet up in a palm tree, but fire officials say it probably wasn't the chainsaw wound to his leg that killed him.

The man was hired to cut palm trees at a residence on Earll Drive near 26th Place. At one point, a portion of the palm tree he was working on slid, fell down and trapped him.

The man's two coworkers climbed the tree to help him before someone called 911 an estimated 15 minutes later, according to the Phoenix Fire Department.

A technical rescue crew was dispatched, and firefighters managed to coax one of the coworkers down before climbing the tree and bringing the second down.

According to Steven Oetinger, a member of the crew that attempted the rescue, when they cleared the brush at the top of the tree and reached the victim, he was dead.

"When we got to the victim, the victim was not breathing (and) did not have a pulse," Oetinger said. "The crown of the tree was pretty much sitting on top of his lap."

A chainsaw had also severely wounded the man's leg.

"They said he had a pretty good laceration," said Battalion Five Chief Jim Walter. "They said it was at least down to the bone."

However, Walter said, "That's probably not what killed him. It was the fact that he couldn't breathe with the weight of the palm fronds on his chest."

When a crown of a palm tree falls, "you have several hundred pounds -- up to a thousand pounds -- on you … You just can't breathe," Walter said.

Oetinger said this sort of incident is a common occurrence, and fire crews make it a point to train for it.

"Palm tree workers will get up into the tree, and large portions of the dead prongs will break away from the tree, slide down on top of them, entrapping them," he said.

The name of the victim has not been released. The Phoenix Police Department will investigate the incident.

You are being lied to about pirates

2009-04-12T17:44:00.000-07:00

By Johann Hari

Who imagined that in 2009, the world’s governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the U.S. to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth.

But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as “one of the great menaces of our times” have an extraordinary story to tell - and some justice on their side.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the “golden age of piracy” - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: Pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can’t?

In his book “Villains of All Nations,” the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London’s East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the cat o’ nine tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls “one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the 18th century.”

They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed “quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy.” This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.

The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: “What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live.”

In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its 9 million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the U.N. envoy to Somalia, tells me: “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it.” Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to “dispose” of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: “Nothing. There has been no cleanup, no compensation and no prevention.”

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia’s seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300 million worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia’s unprotected seas.

The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: “If nothing is done, there soon won’t be much fish left in our coastal waters.”

This is the context in which the men we are calling “pirates” have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a “tax” on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coast Guard of Somalia - and it’s not hard to see why.

In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was “to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters … We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas.” William Scott would understand those words.

No, this doesn’t make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Program supplies. But the “pirates” have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defense of the country’s territorial waters.”

One of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was “to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters … We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas.”

During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America’s founding fathers paid pirates to protect America’s territorial waters, because they had no navy or coast guard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn’t act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, we begin to shriek about “evil.” If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gunboats to root out Somalia’s criminals.

The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarized by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know “what he meant by keeping possession of the sea.” The pirate smiled and responded: “What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor.”

Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper. He has reported from Iraq, Israel/ Palestine, the Congo, the Central African Republic, Venezuela, Peru and the U.S., and his journalism has appeared in publications all over the world. To contact him, email johann@johannhari.com or visit his website at JohannHari.com. This column previously appeared in the Independent and Huffington Post, where the following postscript was added:

Postscript: Some commentators seem bemused by the fact that both toxic dumping and the theft of fish are happening in the same place - wouldn’t this make the fish contaminated? In fact, Somalia’s coastline is vast, stretching 3,300km (over 2,000 miles). Imagine how easy it would be - without any coast guard or army - to steal fish from Florida and dump nuclear waste on California, and you get the idea. These events are happening in different places but with the same horrible effect: death for the locals and stirred-up piracy. There’s no contradiction.

The Road to Area 51

2009-04-10T03:55:00.000-07:00

After decades of denying the facility's existence, five former insiders speak out

by Annie Jacobsen

Area 51. It's the most famous military institution in the world that doesn't officially exist. If it did, it would be found about 100 miles outside Las Vegas in Nevada's high desert, tucked between an Air Force base and an abandoned nuclear testing ground. Then again, maybe not— the U.S. government refuses to say. You can't drive anywhere close to it, and until recently, the airspace overhead was restricted—all the way to outer space. Any mention of Area 51 gets redacted from official documents, even those that have been declassified for decades.

It has become the holy grail for conspiracy theorists, with UFOlogists positing that the Pentagon reverse engineers flying saucers and keeps extraterrestrial beings stored in freezers. Urban legend has it that Area 51 is connected by underground tunnels and trains to other secret facilities around the country. In 2001, Katie Couric told Today Show audiences that 7 percent of Americans doubt the moon landing happened—that it was staged in the Nevada desert. Millions of X-Files fans believe the truth may be "out there," but more likely it's concealed inside Area 51's Strangelove-esque hangars—buildings that, though confirmed by Google Earth, the government refuses to acknowledge.

The problem is the myths of Area 51 are hard to dispute if no one can speak on the record about what actually happened there. Well, now, for the first time, someone is ready to talk—in fact, five men are, and their stories rival the most outrageous of rumors. Colonel Hugh "Slip" Slater, 87, was commander of the Area 51 base in the 1960s. Edward Lovick, 90, featured in "What Plane?" in LA's March issue, spent three decades radar testing some of the world's most famous aircraft (including the U-2, the A-12 OXCART and the F-117). Kenneth Collins, 80, a CIA experimental test pilot, was given the silver star. Thornton "T.D." Barnes, 72, was an Area 51 special-projects engineer. And Harry Martin, 77, was one of the men in charge of the base's half-million-gallon monthly supply of spy-plane fuels. Here are a few of their best stories—for the record:

On May 24, 1963, Collins flew out of Area 51's restricted airspace in a top-secret spy plane code-named OXCART, built by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. He was flying over Utah when the aircraft pitched, flipped and headed toward a crash. He ejected into a field of weeds.

Almost 46 years later, in late fall of 2008, sitting in a coffee shop in the San Fernando Valley, Collins remembers that day with the kind of clarity the threat of a national security breach evokes: "Three guys came driving toward me in a pickup. I saw they had the aircraft canopy in the back. They offered to take me to my plane." Until that moment, no civilian without a top-secret security clearance had ever laid eyes on the airplane Collins was flying. "I told them not to go near the aircraft. I said it had a nuclear weapon on-board." The story fit right into the Cold War backdrop of the day, as many atomic tests took place in Nevada. Spooked, the men drove Collins to the local highway patrol. The CIA disguised the accident as involving a generic Air Force plane, the F-105, which is how the event is still listed in official records.

As for the guys who picked him up, they were tracked down and told to sign national security nondisclosures. As part of Collins' own debriefing, the CIA asked the decorated pilot to take truth serum. "They wanted to see if there was anything I'd for-gotten about the events leading up to the crash." The Sodium Pento-thal experience went without a hitch—except for the reaction of his wife, Jane.

"Late Sunday, three CIA agents brought me home. One drove my car; the other two carried me inside and laid me down on the couch. I was loopy from the drugs. They handed Jane the car keys and left without saying a word." The only conclusion she could draw was that her husband had gone out and gotten drunk. "Boy, was she mad," says Collins with a chuckle.

At the time of Collins' accident, CIA pilots had been flying spy planes in and out of Area 51 for eight years, with the express mission of providing the intelligence to prevent nuclear war. Aerial reconnaissance was a major part of the CIA's preemptive efforts, while the rest of America built bomb shelters and hoped for the best.

"It wasn't always called Area 51," says Lovick, the physicist who developed stealth technology. His boss, legendary aircraft designer Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson, called the place Paradise Ranch to entice men to leave their families and "rough it" out in the Nevada desert in the name of science and the fight against the evil empire. "Test pilot Tony LeVier found the place by flying over it," says Lovick. "It was a lake bed called Groom Lake, selected for testing because it was flat and far from anything. It was kept secret because the CIA tested U-2s there."

When Frances Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk, Russia, in 1960, the U-2 program lost its cover. But the CIA already had Lovick and some 200 scientists, engineers and pilots working at Area 51 on the A-12 OXCART, which would outfox Soviet radar using height, stealth and speed.

Col. Slater was in the outfit of six pilots who flew OXCART missions during the Vietnam War. Over a Cuban meat and cheese sandwich at the Bahama Breeze restaurant off the Las Vegas Strip, he says, "I was recruited for the Area after working with the CIA's classified Black Cat Squadron, which flew U-2 missions over denied territory in Mainland China. After that, I was told, 'You should come out to Nevada and work on something interesting we're doing out there.' "

Even though Slater considers himself a fighter pilot at heart—he flew 84 missions in World War II—the opportunity to work at Area 51 was impossible to pass up. "When I learned about this Mach-3 aircraft called OXCART, it was completely intriguing to me—this idea of flying three times the speed of sound! No one knew a thing about the program. I asked my wife, Barbara, if she wanted to move to Las Vegas, and she said yes. And I said, 'You won't see me but on the weekends,' and she said, 'That's fine!' " At this recollection, Slater laughs heartily. Barbara, dining with us, laughs as well. The two, married for 63 years, are rarely apart today.

"We couldn't have told you any of this a year ago," Slater says. "Now we can't tell it to you fast enough." That is because in 2007, the CIA began declassifying the 50-year-old OXCART program. Today, there's a scramble for eyewitnesses to fill in the information gaps. Only a few of the original players are left. Two more of them join me and the Slaters for lunch: Barnes, formerly an Area 51 special-projects engineer, with his wife, Doris; and Martin, one of those overseeing the OXCART's specially mixed jet fuel (regular fuel explodes at extreme height, temperature and speed), with his wife, Mary. Because the men were sworn to secrecy for so many decades, their wives still get a kick out of hearing the secret tales.

Barnes was married at 17 (Doris was 16). To support his wife, he became an electronics wizard, buying broken television sets, fixing them up and reselling them for five times the original price. He went from living in bitter poverty on a Texas Panhandle ranch with no electricity to buying his new bride a dream home before he was old enough to vote. As a soldier in the Korean War, Barnes demonstrated an uncanny aptitude for radar and Nike missile systems, which made him a prime target for recruitment by the CIA—which indeed happened when he was 22. By 30, he was handling nuclear secrets.

"The agency located each guy at the top of a certain field and put us together for the programs at Area 51," says Barnes. As a security precaution, he couldn't reveal his birth name—he went by the moniker Thunder. Coworkers traveled in separate cars, helicopters and airplanes. Barnes and his group kept to themselves, even in the mess hall. "Our special-projects group was the most classified team since the Manhattan Project," he says.

Harry Martin's specialty was fuel. Handpicked by the CIA from the Air Force, he underwent rigorous psychological and physical tests to see if he was up for the job. When he passed, the CIA moved his family to Nevada. Because OXCART had to refuel frequently, the CIA kept supplies at secret facilities around the globe. Martin often traveled to these bases for quality-control checks. He tells of preparing for a top-secret mission from Area 51 to Thule, Greenland. "My wife took one look at me in these arctic boots and this big hooded coat, and she knew not to ask where I was going."

So, what of those urban legends—the UFOs studied in secret, the underground tunnels connecting clandestine facilities? For decades, the men at Area 51 thought they'd take their secrets to the grave. At the height of the Cold War, they cultivated anonymity while pursuing some of the country's most covert projects. Conspiracy theories were left to popular imagination. But in talking with Collins, Lovick, Slater, Barnes and Martin, it is clear that much of the folklore was spun from threads of fact.

As for the myths of reverse engineering of flying saucers, Barnes offers some insight: "We did reverse engineer a lot of foreign technology, including the Soviet MiG fighter jet out at the Area"—even though the MiG wasn't shaped like a flying saucer. As for the underground-tunnel talk, that, too, was born of truth. Barnes worked on a nuclear-rocket program called Project NERVA, inside underground chambers at Jackass Flats, in Area 51's backyard. "Three test-cell facilities were connected by railroad, but everything else was underground," he says.

And the quintessential Area 51 conspiracy—that the Pentagon keeps captured alien spacecraft there, which they fly around in restricted airspace? Turns out that one's pretty easy to debunk. The shape of OXCART was unprece-dented, with its wide, disk-like fuselage designed to carry vast quantities of fuel. Commercial pilots cruising over Nevada at dusk would look up and see the bottom of OXCART whiz by at 2,000-plus mph. The aircraft's tita-nium body, moving as fast as a bullet, would reflect the sun's rays in a way that could make anyone think, UFO.

In all, 2,850 OXCART test flights were flown out of Area 51 while Slater was in charge. "That's a lot of UFO sightings!" Slater adds. Commercial pilots would report them to the FAA, and "when they'd land in California, they'd be met by FBI agents who'd make them sign nondisclosure forms." But not everyone kept quiet, hence the birth of Area 51's UFO lore. The sightings incited uproar in Nevada and the surrounding areas and forced the Air Force to open Project BLUE BOOK to log each claim.

Since only a few Air Force officials were cleared for OXCART (even though it was a joint CIA/USAF project), many UFO sightings raised internal military alarms. Some generals believed the Russians might be sending stealth craft over American skies to incite paranoia and create widespread panic of alien invasion. Today, BLUE BOOK findings are housed in 37 cubic feet of case files at the National Archives—74,000 pages of reports. A keyword search brings up no mention of the top-secret OXCART or Area 51.

Project BLUE BOOK was shut down in 1969—more than a year after OXCART was retired. But what continues at America's most clandestine military facility could take another 40 years to disclose.

ANNIE JACOBSEN is an investigative reporter who sat for more than 500 interviews after she broke the story on terrorists probing commercial airliners. When she isn’t digging into intelligence issues for the likes of the National Review, she’s snapping together Legos with her two boys.

ANZ Royal Bank Nation third most corrupt

2009-04-09T03:27:00.000-07:00

Written by George McLeod
Thursday, 09 April 2009
Corruption Index Singapore - 1.07 Hong Kong - 1.89 Australia - 2.40 United States - 2.89 Japan - 3.99 South Korea - 4.64 Macau - 5.84 China - 6.16 Taiwan - 6.47 Malaysia - 6.70 Philippines - 7.0 Vietnam - 7.11 India - 7.21 Cambodia - 7.25 Thailand - 7.63 Indonesia - 8.32 Source: Political and Economic Risk Consultancy CAMBODIA was ranked less corrupt than Thailand on Wednesday by a Hong Kong-based organisation, counter to the findings of other recent graft surveys, but still came in third from bottom. The report by the Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (PERC) scores 16 Asian countries based on interviews with 1,700 expatriate business leaders. It ranked Singapore and Hong Kong as the Asian region's least corrupt countries, with Indonesia and Thailand at the bottom, below Cambodia. The organisation was not available for comment Wednesday. Local business leaders welcomed the report's findings, saying it corresponded to the oft-overlooked reality on the ground. "I have always maintained that Cambodia isn't as bad as it is made out to be," said John Brinsden, vice chairman for ACLEDA Bank and a spokesman for the International Business Club of Cambodia. "I've been to a number of countries where I've seen corruption at a worse scale than in Cambodia. It's nice to see Cambodia isn't at the bottom of this report," he told the Post Wednesday. He cautioned that corruption remains an issue for businesses in Cambodia, but said other problems were more serious. "Probably the biggest problem in Cambodia, from a business perspective, is [the lack of] availability of cheap electricity and poor enforcement of laws, as well as infrastructure. Corruption is not the top of the list," he said. [corruption] is an issue that many investors seem to find a way to work around. According to the head of Cambodia's largest investment fund, corruption has not prevented Cambodia from being a favourable environment to do business. "[Corruption] is an issue that many investors seem to find a way to work around," said Douglas Clayton, managing partner of Leopard Capital. "And when we compare the expenditure on the airport in Thailand and the airport in Cambodia versus the final product delivered, you can draw your own conclusions," he said. Conflicting reports Despite such consensus within the private sector, other surveys suggest that corruption is the No 1 concern of businesses in Cambodia. The World Bank annual report released in January said that more than 50 percent of businesses cited corruption as a top complaint, followed by macroeconomic stability and anticompetitive informal practices. "Corruption remains widespread, in its many forms.... The perception of corruption is high, even compared to countries at the same level of development," said the report. The report also said that poor governance in Cambodia is a major problem. "There are multiple facets of corruption: (i) at the service delivery (ii) in public procurement (both small and large contracts); and (iii) in gaining favour for policy decisions," the report states. Corruption watchdog Transparency International also issued a harsh assessment of Cambodia's level of corruption, putting the country at 166 out of 181 countries. Thailand was ranked 80 and Indonesia 126 by the same organisation in its report last year. "It depends on how they measure [corruption]," said Kevin Britten, managing director of The Secretary. "I have always been disappointed in my business dealings with Thailand. "But I think I am quite typical in saying that I have had good experiences in Cambodia." The PERC system rated countries from zero to 10, with zero as the least corrupt and 10 as the most corrupt. Indonesia earned a score of 8.32, Thailand 7.63 and Cambodia 7.25.

Red Cross says doctors helped CIA "torture"

2009-04-08T03:38:00.000-07:00

By Jane Sutton Jane Sutton – Tue Apr 7, 4:04 pm ET

MIAMI (Reuters) – Health workers violated medical ethics when they helped interrogate terrorism suspects who were tortured at secret CIA prisons overseas, the International Committee of the Red Cross said.

The medical workers, thought to be doctors and psychologists, monitored prisoners while they were mistreated at CIA prisons and advised interrogators whether to continue, adjust or halt the abuse, the ICRC said in a report based on interviews with 14 prisoners in 2007.

One prisoner alleged that medical personnel monitored his blood oxygen levels while he was subjected to waterboarding, a simulated drowning designed to induce panic and widely considered to be torture, the ICRC said.

Other prisoners said that as they stood shackled with their arms chained above their heads, a doctor regularly measured the swelling in their legs and signaled when they should be allowed to sit down.

The ICRC interviewed 14 men who had been held in secret CIA prisons overseas before being sent to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2006.

The 14 are considered by the United States to be "high-value" al Qaeda suspects who plotted or carried out mass murders, including the September 11 attacks and the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings. They had been held by the CIA, most for more than three years, in extreme isolation and had not been allowed contact with each other when the ICRC interviewed them at Guantanamo in November 2007.

The ICRC said their claims had credence because they gave similar accounts of their treatment, including the actions of medical monitors whose names they never learned.

The ICRC monitors compliance with the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of war captives and keeps its reports secret, sharing them only with the detaining government.

The report, written in 2007, was posted on the New York Review of Books website on Monday night by journalist Mark Danner, who has not said publicly how he obtained it.

"VIOLATED ETHICAL DUTY"

He first published excerpts last month, including a portion in which the ICRC concluded the al Qaeda captives' treatment in the CIA prisons "constituted torture" and violated international law.

The report alleges collars were placed around some prisoners' necks and used to slam their heads against the walls, and that they were forced to stand with their arms shackled above them for two or three days and left to urinate or defecate on themselves.

The prisoners told the ICRC they were beaten and kicked, left naked for long periods, subjected to sleep deprivation, loud music, cold temperatures, rape threats and forced shaving. Some said they were denied solid food unless they cooperated with interrogators and one said he was confined in a crouching position in a box too short to stand in.

A previously undisclosed portion of the report concluded that medical workers who monitored or took part in the interrogations had violated their ethical duty to do no harm, preserve dignity and act in patients' best interest.

The ICRC said "any interrogation process that requires a health professional to either pronounce on the subject's fitness to withstand such a procedure, or which requires a health professional to monitor the actual procedure, must have inherent health risks."

"As such, the interrogation process is contrary to international law and the participation of health personnel in such a process is contrary to international standards of medical ethics," the ICRC concluded.

The "high-value" captives quoted in the report are still at the Guantanamo prison, which President Barack Obama has ordered shut down by January 2010, and debate continues over what should be done with them.

A military judge released a statement last month in which some of them bragged that they were "terrorists to the bone".

Bush administration officials have said the "enhanced interrogation" of those prisoners produced information that helped thwart attacks but have never provided specifics.

(Editing by Pascal Fletcher and Jackie Frank)

Astronomers: Dark Matter Guides Universe's Structure

2009-04-06T03:28:00.000-07:00

Posted by Bob Evans on Apr 5, 2009 02:00 PM at informationweek.com

A 10-year study of 100,000 galaxies close to our own offers compelling proof that long-hypothesized "dark matter" does exist and is in fact a guiding force behind the structure of the universe, a team of Australian, British, and American astronomers revealed this week.

Saying that "the universe we see is really quite structured," one of the lead researchers explained that the 10-year "census" of galaxies near our own Milky Way offers powerful evidence that this invisible dark matter "seems to hold the galaxies together."

The dark matter's influence on galaxies "stops their constituent stars from flying off and it seems to be driving the large-scale galaxy clusters and super clusters" that are the largest objects in the universe, said Dr. Heath Jones of the Anglo Australian Observatory in an article on the website of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Offering rich details about the direction, speed, shape, and evolving structure of 100,000 galaxies, the 10-year study offered great promise because of its exhaustive scope: it analyzed those dynamic properties for a much larger number of galaxies than any other study had ever attempted.

In reviewing the data from the study, Jones said, it became clear that directly observable visible objects could not possibly have exerted sufficient gravitational force to account for all of the movement and dynamics of the galaxies being studied.

And in hypothesing about what other, nonvisible forces could account for that additional gravitational effect, theories about dark matter completed that equation very nicely, he told the ABC:

"The galaxies just aren't uniform. They are scattered throughout the universe," he said. "What we find is that they tend to clump and cluster together. So you'll get galaxies clustering along nice delicate filamentary chains. You get some galaxies that will congregate in their clusters and you will get clusters of galaxies collecting in super clusters of galaxies, so the universe that we see is really quite structured….
"Astronomers know that this dark matter must exist in the universe," he said. "We can't see it with our telescopes directly, but by studying large objects like galaxies and how they move with respect to each other we can infer its existence quite accurately."

In addition to the compelling evidence the study provides for the existence of dark matter, Jones said, it also offers equally compelling proof that the universe is expanding and will continue to do so, rather than at some point collapsing back in upon itself as some astronomers have theorized.

So back in the world of IT – which for a while looked like it, too, would expand infinitely -- perhaps dark matter will turn out to be the devilish factor that has long distorted ERP projects and seems to torment most government IT efforts; maybe Jones and his team can tackle that in a future study.

And in the meantime, the new evidence that the universe is expanding forever will be of no comfort to the existentially tormented boyhood character of Alvie Singer in the classic movie, "Annie Hall."

Simulations and Ancient Magnetism Suggest Mantle Plumes May Bend Deep Beneath Earth's Crust

2009-04-03T04:07:00.000-07:00

By: Contact: Jonathan Sherwood
jonathan.sherwood@rochester.edu
585.273.4726

Computer simulations, paleomagnetism and plate motion histories described in today's issue of Science reveal how hotspots, centers of erupting magma that sit atop columns of hot mantle that were once thought to remain firmly fixed in place, in fact move beneath Earth's crust.

Scientists believe mantle plumes are responsible for some of the Earth's most dramatic geological features, such as the Hawaiian islands and Yellowstone National Park. Some plumes may have shallow sources, but a few, such as the one beneath Hawaii, appear to be rooted in the deepest mantle, near Earth's core.

Such deep plumes have long been thought to be so immobile that the motions of continental and oceanic plates were measured against them, but University of Rochester geophysicist John Tarduno and his colleagues at Ludwig-Maximilians, Münster, and Stanford universities have combined magnetic evidence from the Pacific sea floor with computer modeling to show how the plume beneath Hawaii likely bent—its root barely moving while its top moved nearly 1,000 miles across the underside of the Pacific Ocean.

"In 2003, we showed that the hotspot—the plume—that created the Hawaiian chain of islands must have moved. We suggested that mantle motion was involved, but the cause of the change in motion remained a mystery," says Tarduno.

Tarduno cites five possible mechanisms in Science, but one in particular, he says, stands out as a likely explanation for the way the Hawaiian chain of islands and seamounts formed. "We know from theory and from models, including work by Ulrich Hansen and Norm Sleep, that a plume can move slightly near its base, potentially contributing to motion of the Hawaiian hotspot and hotspots elsewhere," says Tarduno. "But a key observation came from a numerical simulation resulting from Hans-Peter Bunge's models, which show how the upper end of the plume, starting at 1500 depth, can drift like a candle flame drawn toward a draft."

The draft in this case, he says, is an ancient oceanic ridge in the Pacific where the seafloor spreads, allowing magma to bubble up through the ocean crust. The ancient ridge is now lost to subduction, but its past presence is recorded by a few magnetic lineations in oceanic crust south of the Bering Sea. The ridge was active around 80 million years ago but extinguished completely by 47 million years ago. Those dates correspond very closely with the motion history Tarduno detected in the Hawaiian hotspot.

In 2001, Tarduno and an international team spent two months aboard the ocean drilling ship JOIDES Resolution, retrieving samples of rock from the Emperor-Hawaiian seamount chain miles beneath the sea's surface. The team started at the northern end of the chain, near Japan, braving cold, foggy days and dodging the occasional typhoon to pull up several long cores of rock as they worked their way south. Using a highly sensitive magnetic device called a SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device), Tarduno's team discovered that the magnetism of the cores did not fit with the conventional wisdom of fixed hotspots.

The magnetization of the lavas recovered from the northern end of the Emperor-Hawaiian chain suggested these rocks were formed much farther north than the current hotspot, which is forming Hawaii today. As magma forms, magnetite, a magnetically sensitive mineral, records the Earth's magnetic field just like a compass. As the magma cools and becomes solid rock, the "compass" orientation is locked in place, preserving a precise record of the latitude of origin.

If the Hawaiian hot spot had always been fixed at its current location of 19 degrees north, then all the rocks of the entire chain should have formed and cooled there, preserving the magnetic signature of 19 degrees even as the Pacific plate dragged the new stones north-westward. Tarduno's team, however, found that the more northern their samples, the higher the samples' latitude. The northern-most lavas they recovered were formed at over 30 degrees north about 80 million years ago, nearly a thousand miles from where the hot spot currently lies.

"The only way to account for these findings is if the hotspot itself was moving south," says Tarduno. His magnetic readings leveled off at a latitude of nearly 19 degrees, suggesting that the magma plume ceased moving in the area it resides in today.

In addition to the "draft" created by the upwelling of magma into the paleo-ridge, Tarduno says that theory and computer simulations suggest that the most a plume can bend under such conditions would result in about 1,000 miles of movement across the crust—matching what he sees as the distance between the start and stop points of the Hawaiian hotspot. He points out that the bending of a mantle plume helps reconcile the evidence of mobile hotspots on the Earth's crust with the theories that suggest plumes originate in the deepest mantle where high viscosity limits rapid motion. He points out that the plume-ridge capture mechanism may also help explain seemingly anomalous volcanic features on the seafloor, and help geoscientists to use ancient volcanic tracks to understand the past flow of Earth mantle.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Deep Solar Minimum

2009-04-02T04:01:00.000-07:00

By Sciencenasa.com
April 1, 2009: The sunspot cycle is behaving a little like the stock market. Just when you think it has hit bottom, it goes even lower.

2008 was a bear. There were no sunspots observed on 266 of the year's 366 days (73%). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days: plot. Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008.

Maybe not. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of March 31st, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year's 90 days (87%).

It adds up to one inescapable conclusion: "We're experiencing a very deep solar minimum," says solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center.

"This is the quietest sun we've seen in almost a century," agrees sunspot expert David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center.

see caption

Above: The sunspot cycle from 1995 to the present. The jagged curve traces actual sunspot counts. Smooth curves are fits to the data and one forecaster's predictions of future activity. Credit: David Hathaway, NASA/MSFC. [more]

Quiet suns come along every 11 years or so. It's a natural part of the sunspot cycle, discovered by German astronomer Heinrich Schwabe in the mid-1800s. Sunspots are planet-sized islands of magnetism on the surface of the sun; they are sources of solar flares, coronal mass ejections and intense UV radiation. Plotting sunspot counts, Schwabe saw that peaks of solar activity were always followed by valleys of relative calm—a clockwork pattern that has held true for more than 200 years: plot.

The current solar minimum is part of that pattern. In fact, it's right on time. "We're due for a bit of quiet—and here it is," says Pesnell.

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But is it supposed to be this quiet? In 2008, the sun set the following records:

A 50-year low in solar wind pressure: Measurements by the Ulysses spacecraft reveal a 20% drop in solar wind pressure since the mid-1990s—the lowest point since such measurements began in the 1960s. The solar wind helps keep galactic cosmic rays out of the inner solar system. With the solar wind flagging, more cosmic rays are permitted to enter, resulting in increased health hazards for astronauts. Weaker solar wind also means fewer geomagnetic storms and auroras on Earth.

A 12-year low in solar "irradiance": Careful measurements by several NASA spacecraft show that the sun's brightness has dropped by 0.02% at visible wavelengths and 6% at extreme UV wavelengths since the solar minimum of 1996. The changes so far are not enough to reverse the course of global warming, but there are some other significant side-effects: Earth's upper atmosphere is heated less by the sun and it is therefore less "puffed up." Satellites in low Earth orbit experience less atmospheric drag, extending their operational lifetimes. Unfortunately, space junk also remains longer in Earth orbit, increasing hazards to spacecraft and satellites.

see caption

Above: Space-age measurements of the total solar irradiance (brightness summed across all wavelengths). This plot, which comes from researcher C. Fröhlich, was shown by Dean Pesnell at the Fall 2008 AGU meeting during a lecture entitled "What is Solar Minimum and Why Should We Care?"

A 55-year low in solar radio emissions: After World War II, astronomers began keeping records of the sun's brightness at radio wavelengths. Records of 10.7 cm flux extend back all the way to the early 1950s. Radio telescopes are now recording the dimmest "radio sun" since 1955: plot. Some researchers believe that the lessening of radio emissions is an indication of weakness in the sun's global magnetic field. No one is certain, however, because the source of these long-monitored radio emissions is not fully understood.

All these lows have sparked a debate about whether the ongoing minimum is "weird", "extreme" or just an overdue "market correction" following a string of unusually intense solar maxima.

"Since the Space Age began in the 1950s, solar activity has been generally high," notes Hathaway. "Five of the ten most intense solar cycles on record have occurred in the last 50 years. We're just not used to this kind of deep calm."

Deep calm was fairly common a hundred years ago. The solar minima of 1901 and 1913, for instance, were even longer than the one we're experiencing now. To match those minima in terms of depth and longevity, the current minimum will have to last at least another year.

see captionIn a way, the calm is exciting, says Pesnell. "For the first time in history, we're getting to see what a deep solar minimum is really like." A fleet of spacecraft including the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), the twin STEREO probes, the five THEMIS probes, Hinode, ACE, Wind, TRACE, AIM, TIMED, Geotail and others are studying the sun and its effects on Earth 24/7 using technology that didn't exist 100 years ago. Their measurements of solar wind, cosmic rays, irradiance and magnetic fields show that solar minimum is much more interesting and profound than anyone expected.

Above: An artist's concept of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. Bristling with advanced sensors, "SDO" is slated to launch later this year--perfect timing to study the ongoing solar minimum. [more]

Modern technology cannot, however, predict what comes next. Competing models by dozens of top solar physicists disagree, sometimes sharply, on when this solar minimum will end and how big the next solar maximum will be. Pesnell has surveyed the scientific literature and prepared a "piano plot" showing the range of predictions. The great uncertainty stems from one simple fact: No one fully understands the underlying physics of the sunspot cycle.

Pesnell believes sunspot counts will pick up again soon, "possibly by the end of the year," to be followed by a solar maximum of below-average intensity in 2012 or 2013.

But like other forecasters, he knows he could be wrong. Bull or bear? Stay tuned for updates.

Man Fires At McDonald's Window Over Breakfast Menu

2009-03-31T03:21:00.000-07:00

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) ―Police said a customer fired one or two shots into a Salt Lake City McDonald's after the driver of the car he was in was told the restaurant was not serving lunch yet. Police said the female driver of a white Dodge Intrepid pulled up to the drive-thru and ordered from the lunch menu early Sunday but was told only breakfast was available.

Police said two men then got out of the car and one pulled a sawed-off shotgun from the trunk, shooting into the drive-thru window once or twice, The Salt Lake Tribune reported Monday. No one was injured.

The car then left the scene.

Mad cow disease suspected in Spanish doctor's death

2009-03-29T19:17:00.000-07:00

From Per Nyberg

(CNN) -- A Spanish pathologist who specialized in a human strain of mad cow disease died Saturday, and officials suspect the disease played a role in his death, officials said.

The doctor was head of the anatomy pathology section at the University Hospital Principe de Asturias in Alcala de Henares, outside of Madrid, according to the Madrid regional government's health office. He died Saturday night, at the hospital where he worked, officials said. The doctor's name was not released at the request of his family.

Several samples have been sent off for testing, the office said, but results are expected to take a month.

The doctor was well known both in and outside Spain for his work in the pathology field. His speciality was the human strain of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

It is not known how the doctor might have contracted the disease, but the health office said it was not thought to be through ingestion of contaminated meat. Authorities are investigating whether the doctor had been exposed to contaminated human tissue through his work.

Since 2001, 702 Creutzfeldt-Jakob cases have been reported in Spain, of which 87 have been reported in Madrid. Five people have died.

Cannibal Mom eats her friend

2009-03-27T04:14:00.000-07:00

By Will Stewert

A CANNIBAL mum axed a friend to death, cooked her body and ate the meat — while the killer’s young son looked on.

Olesya Mostovschikova, 27, told police she rowed with Tatiana Romanchuk, 32, during a booze-up.

Officer Oleg Lobach said Olesya calmly told cops: “I took the axe and hit her a number of times on her head.

“Then I cut off her ears, gouged out one eye, cut off an arm and a hand. I then cooked the parts in the oven.”

Another friend, who is being treated as a witness, claims that she was forced to eat the flesh.

Cops say Olesya’s son, seven, witnessed the murder and the cooking. He is now in care.

Locals at Irkutsk, in Siberia, Russia, found Tatiana’s legs in a rubbish bin.

Spacetime May Have Fractal Properties on a Quantum Scale

2009-03-26T03:34:00.000-07:00

By Lisa Zyga

Spacetime May Have Fractal Properties on a Quantum Scale

As scale decreases, the number of dimensions of k-Minkowski spacetime (red line), which is an example of a space with quantum group symmetry, decreases from four to three. In contrast, classical Minkowski spacetime (blue line) is four-dimensional on all scales. This finding suggests that quantum groups are a valid candidate for the description of a quantum spacetime, and may have connections with a theory of quantum gravity. Image credit: Dario Benedetti.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Usually, we think of spacetime as being four-dimensional, with three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. However, this Euclidean perspective is just one of many possible multi-dimensional varieties of spacetime. For instance, string theory predicts the existence of extra dimensions - six, seven, even 20 or more. As physicists often explain, it’s impossible to visualize these extra dimensions; they exist primarily to satisfy mathematical equations.

As if extra dimensions weren’t strange enough, new research has probed an even more mind-bending possibility: that spacetime has dimensions that change depending on the scale, and the dimensions could have fractal properties on small scales. In a recent study, Dario Benedetti, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, has investigated two possible examples of spacetime with scale-dependent dimensions deviating from classical values at short scales. More than being just an interesting idea, this phenomenon might provide insight into a quantum theory of relativity, which also has been suggested to have scale-dependent dimensions. Benedetti’s study is published in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

“It is an old idea in quantum gravity that at short scales spacetime might appear foamy, fuzzy, fractal or similar,” Benedetti told PhysOrg.com. “In my work, I suggest that quantum groups are a valid candidate for the description of such a quantum spacetime. Furthermore, computing the spectral dimension, I provide for the first time a link between quantum groups/noncommutative geometries and apparently unrelated approaches to quantum gravity, such as Causal Dynamical Triangulations and Exact Renormalization Group. And establishing links between different topics is often one of the best ways we have to understand such topics.”

In his study, Benedetti explains that a spacetime with quantum group symmetry has in general a scale-dependent dimension. Unlike classical groups, which act on commutative spaces, quantum groups act on nocommutative spaces (e.g. where xy doesn’t equal yx), which emerges through their unique curvature and quantum uncertainty. Here, Benedetti considers two types of spacetime with quantum group symmetry - a quantum sphere and k-Minkowski spacetime - and calculates their dimensions. In both spaces, the dimensions have fractal properties at small scales, and only reach classical values at large scales.

“In simple words, the relation between quantum groups and noncommutative geometry is as follows,” he explained. “Classically, we know that certain spaces are invariant under the action of some classical groups; for example, Euclidean space is invariant under rotations and translations. A quantum group is a deformation of a given classical group, and is such that no classical space can have it as a symmetry group. The invariant space has to be as well a deformation of a classical space, a deformation that makes it noncommutative. No relation of all this to fractals is known, but in my work I've found that they do have a common property, that is, a non-integer dimension (at some scale).”

Compared to a Euclidean sphere, a quantum sphere’s curvature and uncertainty make it a noncommutative space. When calculating the spectral dimension of the quantum sphere, Benedetti found that it closely resembles a standard sphere on large scales; however, as the scale decreases, the dimensions of the quantum sphere deviate and go down to zero. He describes this phenomenon as a signature of the fuzziness, or uncertainty, of the quantum sphere, and also as resulting from fractal behavior at small scales.

In the second kind of space, k-Minkowski spacetime, the dimensions also deviate from the constant behavior of classical Minkowski spacetime. While the latter always has four dimensions, independent of the scale, the number of dimensions in the quantum version decreases to three as a function of the scale. In both k-Minkowski spacetime and the quantum sphere, the dimensionality becomes non-integral, which is a typical signature of fractal geometry.

Benedetti’s results match previous approaches to quantum gravity, which also point to the emergence of a ground-scale spacetime with fractal properties. Together, these studies may help scientists understand the unique Planck scale properties of spacetime, and possibly tie in to a quantum theory of gravity. For instance, as Benedetti explains, the fractal nature of quantum spacetime might enable gravity to cure its own ultraviolet behavior by dimensional reduction.

“The main problem with gravity is that apparently it cannot be quantized as other field theories; in jargon it is said to be non-renormalizable,” he said. “This problem is specific to four-dimensional spacetime. If spacetime had only two dimensions, then quantum gravity would be much simpler and treatable. The problem with a two-dimensional theory is that it is unphysical, as we see four dimensions at our scales. Things can be solved combining four and two dimensions at different scales. That is, if gravity itself provides a mechanism by which the dimension of spacetime depends on the scale at which we probe it (four at our and larger scales and two at very short scales), then we could have a physical theory (compatible with observations) that is free of quantum (short scale) troubles.”

More information: Benedetti, Dario. “Fractal Properties of Quantum

Ron Paul questions Bernacke

2009-03-25T04:00:00.000-07:00

Super-sized Supernova Explosion Observed Start to Finish Including Black Hole Ending

2009-03-24T03:55:00.000-07:00

ScienceDaily (Mar. 23, 2009) — In the first observation if its kind, scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science and San Diego State University were able to watch what happens when a star the size of 50 suns explodes. As they continued to track the spectacular event, they found that most of the star’s mass collapsed in on itself, resulting in a large black hole.

While exploding stars – supernovae – have been viewed with everything from the naked eye to high-tech research satellites, no one had directly observed what happens when a really huge star blows up. Dr. Avishay Gal-Yam of the Weizmann Institute’s Faculty of Physics and Prof. Douglas Leonard of San Diego State University recently located and calculated the mass of a gigantic star on the verge of exploding, following through with observations of the blast and its aftermath. Their findings have lent support to the reigning theory that stars ranging from tens to hundreds of times the mass of our sun all end up as black holes.

A star’s end is predetermined from birth by its size and by the ‘power plant’ that keeps it shining during its lifetime. Stars, among them our sun, are fueled by hydrogen nuclei fusing together into helium in the intense heat and pressure of their inner cores. A helium nucleus is a bit lighter than the sum of the masses of the four hydrogen nuclei that went into making it and, from Einstein’s theory of relativity (E=MC2), we know that the missing mass is released as energy.

When stars like our sun finish off their hydrogen fuel, they burn out relatively quietly in a puff of expansion. But a star that’s eight or more times larger than the sun makes a much more dramatic exit. Nuclear fusion continues after the hydrogen is exhausted, producing heavier elements in the star’s different layers. When this process progresses to the point that the core of the star has turned to iron, another phenomenon takes over: In the enormous heat and pressure in the star’s center, the iron nuclei break apart into their component protons and neutrons. At some point, this causes the core and the layer above it to collapse inward, firing the rest of the star’s material rapidly out into space in a supernova flash.

A supernova releases more energy in a few days than our sun will release over its entire lifetime, and the explosion is so bright that one occurring hundreds of light years away can be seen from Earth even in the daytime. While a supernova’s outer layers are lighting up the universe with dazzling fireworks, the star’s core collapses further and further inward. The gravity created in this collapse becomes so strong that the protons and electrons are squeezed together to form neutrons, and the star’s core is reduced from a sphere 10,000 kilometers around to one with a circumference of a mere 10 kilometers. Just a crate-full of this star’s material weighs as much as our entire Earth. But when the exploding star is 20 times the mass of our sun or more, say the scientists, its gravitational pull becomes so powerful that even light waves are held in place. Such a star – a black hole – is invisible for all intents and purposes.

Until now, none of the supernovae stars that scientists had managed to measure had exceeded a mass of 20 suns. Gal-Yam and Leonard were looking at a specific region in space using the Keck Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope. Identifying the about-to-explode star, they calculated its mass to be equal to 50-100 suns. Continued observation revealed that only a small part of the star’s mass was flung off in the explosion. Most of the material, says Gal-Yam, was drawn into the collapsing core as its gravitational pull mounted. Indeed, in subsequent telescope images of that section of the sky, the star seems to have disappeared. In other words, the star has now become a black hole – so dense that light can’t escape.

Dr. Avishai Gal-Yam’s research is supported by the Nella and Leon Benoziyo Center for Astrophysics; the Peter and Patricia Gruber Award; the Legacy Heritage Fund; and the William Z. and Eda Bess Novick Young Scientist Fund.

Follow the Bailout Cash

2009-03-23T04:20:00.000-07:00

By Michael Isikoff and Dina Fine Maron | NEWSWEEK

There was plenty of outrage on Capitol Hill last week over the executive bonuses paid out by AIG after getting federal bailout money. But another money trail could make voters just as angry: the campaign dollars to members of Congress from banks and firms that have received billions via the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

While a few big firms, such as Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase, have curtailed their campaign giving, others are quietly doling out cash to select members of Congress, particularly those who serve on committees that oversee TARP. In recent filings with the Federal Election Commission, the political action committee for Bank of America (which got $15 billion in bailout money) sent out $24,500 in the first two months of 2009, including $1,500 to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and another $15,000 to members of the House and Senate banking panels. Citigroup ($25 billion) dished out $29,620, including $2,500 to House GOPWhip Eric Cantor, who also got $10,000 from UBS which, while not a TARP recipient, got $5 billion in bailout funds as an AIG "counterparty." "This certainly appears to be a case of TARP funds being recycled into campaign contributions," says Brett Kappell, a D.C. lawyer who tracks donations. (A spokesman for Cantor did not respond to requests for comment. A spokeswoman for Hoyer said it's his "policy to accept legal contributions.")

The cash flow is already causing angst inside the Beltway. "The last thing I want to do is wake up one morning and see our PAC check being burned on C-Span," said one bank lobbyist, who asked not to be identified because of the issue's sensitivity. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Financial Services chair Rep. Barney Frank both said recently they won't take donations from TARP recipients. But House Democratic fundraisers have quietly passed the word that the party's campaign committee will resume accepting them—but down the road, not right now. Said one fundraiser, who also requested anonymity, "These are treacherous waters."

Drexler's Dark Matter Probably Causes the Stunted Mass-Growth of Galaxy Clusters Observed by Harvard

2009-03-19T05:14:00.000-07:00

From Newswire.com

SILICON VALLEY, Calif., March 18 (AScribe Newswire) -- A discovery was recently reported of the stunted mass-growth of galaxy clusters during the last 5 1/2 billion years, by researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. This finding appears to involve the mysterious anti-gravity dark energy concept originally conceived to explain the 1998 supernova-based discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.

The Harvard researchers used NASA's Earth-orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory to measure the hot gas in over 80 galaxy clusters in order to estimate the rate of mass growth for groups of galaxy clusters.

The general consensus of the galaxy-cluster researchers and interested cosmologists is that the results are compelling and that the 1998 and recent dark energy manifestations probably represent the same or similar cosmic phenomena. The parallel successes by two different astronomical techniques have confirmed the existence of a very mysterious dark energy and give hope of further scientific progress.

Some relevant published comments by the galaxy-cluster researchers to journalists are as follows:

"Comparing their data to models of cosmic evolution, Dr. [Alexey] Vikhlinin [of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics] found that the most massive clusters are only about a fifth as plentiful today as they would be in a universe without dark energy. 'The clusters', he said, 'are still growing, but very slowly.'"

"'What we find is that the growth of structure [of galaxy clusters] has slowed down during the last 5 1/2 billion years, and this is unmistakably a signature of dark energy,' said Alexey Vikhlinin."

"'This result could be explained as arrested development of the universe,' said Alexey Vikhlinin. 'This stifling of growth is the unmistakable signature of an antigravitational force that astronomers have labeled dark energy.'" (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/dark_energy_astronomy/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier)

"Dr. [Alexey] Vikhlinin lamented that there were not yet very many such theories to knock down yet, but there were sure to be more on the table soon."

"Vikhlinin and colleagues used NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory (http://chandra.harvard.edu/) to measure the hot gas in 86 galaxy clusters. These groups of hundreds or thousands of galaxies are filled with 100-million-degree-gas that can best be detected with X-ray telescopes."

Is there a dark energy theory that is compatible with the supernova-based accelerating expansion of the universe observed in 1998 that also can explain the recent Harvard-Smithsonian discovery of the stunted ordinary-mass growth of galaxy clusters during the last 5 1/2 billion years? Let us try one such theory/explanation as follows:

If for some reason the mass of all the dark matter of the universe were continuously eroding and thus declining, we would not be surprised to observe the stunting of the ordinary-mass growth of galaxy clusters over time. There are two reasons for this:

Firstly, the eroding dark matter mass around each galaxy is about ten times greater than the ordinary mass of each galaxy. Secondly, the ordinary-mass growth of galaxy clusters relies upon the gravitational accretion into the clusters of nearby stars, dust, gas, and galaxies located outside the clusters, which gravitational accretion is significantly restrained by the eroding and declining dark matter mass.

Let us now consider what phenomenon could cause all the dark matter throughout the universe to be eroding and declining, as posited above. There is only one dark matter candidate whose mass is continuously eroding and declining; it is relativistic-baryon dark matter, also known as relativistic-proton dark matter, discovered by Bell Labs-trained Jerome Drexler in 2002. It erodes relativistic mass through a phenomenon called synchrotron emission of photons, which comes about when relativistic protons/baryons dart across transverse magnetic field lines in the cosmos.

Thus, both the 1998 and recent Harvard/NASA dark energy observations can be plausibly explained by means of the erosion of the dark matter mass throughout the universe via synchrotron emission of infrared, ultraviolet, and soft X-ray photons, provided that dark matter is indeed comprised primarily of relativistic-protons orbiting galaxies and groups of galaxies. There is considerable published evidence supporting the existence of relativistic-proton dark matter.

For example, the discoveries of the anti-gravity or repulsive-gravity dark energy phenomenon in 1998 and again recently, using a different astronomical technique, appear to support Jerome Drexler's thrice-published dark matter/dark energy theory (see Drexler's 2003 book, "How Dark Matter Created Dark Energy And The Sun," his 2006 book, "Comprehending And Decoding The Cosmos" and his 2008 book, "Discovering Postmodern Cosmology.")

Drexler's three books provide more than fifteen cosmic-phenomena examples that justify the reliance on relativistic-proton dark matter. These works disclose and explain many cosmic mystery phenomena that only can be explained in a plausible manner by evoking the relativistic-proton dark matter. They include the source of the ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, the nature of the cosmic web, how the big bang satisfied the Second Law of Thermodynamics, how cosmic inflation's hyper-growth of the universe started and stopped and why the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

Some published relevant comments by respected leaders in the field, about the Harvard-Smithsonian dark energy research, are as follows:

"This is very impressive and important work."

"The results provide a crucial cross-check against the pre-existing set of cosmological results."

"As a result, many astronomers and physicists are desperate for evidence of another explanation. Dr. [Adam] Riess said of the cosmological constant, 'The biggest thing we could learn is by ruling that out.'"

"Indeed, several theorists said the future now looked dim for alternative theories of gravity, in particular a variant from string theory, which incorporates extra dimensions and which predicts enhanced growth of structures like galaxy clusters."

"We've discovered this incredible dark energy; we don't understand what the hell it is."

"'This is very impressive and important work,' says Charles Bennett (http://cosmos.pha.jhu.edu/bennett/), who heads NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, a satellite that measures the big bang's afterglow. 'The results provide a crucial cross-check against the pre-existing set of cosmological results.'"

"Theorist David Spergel of Princeton University agrees, saying the fact that different techniques are all consistent is a 'triumph.'"

"He says the new study will help pin down dark energy's properties, paving the way for researchers to one day determine what it is."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF THE THREE BOOKS: Jerome Drexler is a former member of the technical staff and group supervisor at Bell Labs, former research professor in physics at New Jersey Institute of Technology, founder and former Chairman and chief scientist of LaserCard Corp.(Nasdaq: LCRD). He has been awarded 76 U.S. patents, honorary Doctor of Science degrees from NJIT and Upsala College, a degree of Honorary Fellow of the Technion, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship at Stanford University, a three-year Bell Labs graduate study fellowship, the 1990 "Inventor of the Year Award" for Silicon Valley and recognition as the original inventor in 1978 of the now widely used digital optical disk "Laser Optical Storage System" and the LaserCard(R) nanotech data memory. He is a member of the Board of Overseers of New Jersey Institute of Technology and an Honorary Life Member of the Technion Board of Governors.

The Real AIG Scandal

2009-03-18T04:03:00.000-07:00

By Eliot Spitzer

Everybody is rushing to condemn AIG's bonuses, but this simple scandal is obscuring the real disgrace at the insurance giant: Why are AIG's counterparties getting paid back in full, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars?

For the answer to this question, we need to go back to the very first decision to bail out AIG, made, we are told, by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, then-New York Fed official Timothy Geithner, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke last fall. Post-Lehman's collapse, they feared a systemic failure could be triggered by AIG's inability to pay the counterparties to all the sophisticated instruments AIG had sold. And who were AIG's trading partners? No shock here: Goldman, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and on it goes. So now we know for sure what we already surmised: The AIG bailout has been a way to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that had received TARP money already.

It all appears, once again, to be the same insiders protecting themselves against sharing the pain and risk of their own bad adventure. The payments to AIG's counterparties are justified with an appeal to the sanctity of contract. If AIG's contracts turned out to be shaky, the theory goes, then the whole edifice of the financial system would collapse. But wait a moment, aren't we in the midst of reopening contracts all over the place to share the burden of this crisis? From raising taxes—income taxes to sales taxes—to properly reopening labor contracts, we are all being asked to pitch in and carry our share of the burden. Workers around the country are being asked to take pay cuts and accept shorter work weeks so that colleagues won't be laid off. Why can't Wall Street royalty shoulder some of the burden? Why did Goldman have to get back 100 cents on the dollar? Didn't we already give Goldman a $25 billion capital infusion, and aren't they sitting on more than $100 billion in cash? Haven't we been told recently that they are beginning to come back to fiscal stability? If that is so, couldn't they have accepted a discount, and couldn't they have agreed to certain conditions before the AIG dollars—that is, our dollars—flowed?

The appearance that this was all an inside job is overwhelming. AIG was nothing more than a conduit for huge capital flows to the same old suspects, with no reason or explanation.

So here are several questions that should be answered, in public, under oath, to clear the air:

What was the precise conversation among Bernanke, Geithner, Paulson, and Blankfein that preceded the initial $80 billion grant?
Was it already known who the counterparties were and what the exposure was for each of the counterparties?
What did Goldman, and all the other counterparties, know about AIG's financial condition at the time they executed the swaps or other contracts? Had they done adequate due diligence to see whether they were buying real protection? And why shouldn't they bear a percentage of the risk of failure of their own counterparty?
What is the deeper relationship between Goldman and AIG? Didn't they almost merge a few years ago but did not because Goldman couldn't get its arms around the black box that is AIG? If that is true, why should Goldman get bailed out? After all, they should have known as well as anybody that a big part of AIG's business model was not to pay on insurance it had issued.
Why weren't the counterparties immediately and fully disclosed?

Failure to answer these questions will feed the populist rage that is metastasizing very quickly. And it will raise basic questions about the competence of those who are supposedly guiding this economic policy.

Fermilab Closer To Discovering Higgs Boson 'God Particle'

2009-03-16T03:50:00.000-07:00

From RedOrbit.com

The U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced on Friday that physicists have come closer to finding the elusive "God Particle," which could one day explain why particles have mass, the American Free Press reported.

The American research institute had previously claimed it was moving ahead of its European rival in the race to discover one of the biggest prizes in physics, the elusive Higgs Boson particle.

Fermilab reported that its researchers have managed to shrink the territory where they expect the so-called “God Particle” to be found.

British physicist Peter Higgs set out to answer the question that baffled physicists: how do particles acquire mass?

In 1964, he came up with the idea that a background field must exist that would act like treacle, meaning particles passing through it would acquire mass by being dragged through a mediator, which theoreticians dubbed the Higgs Boson.

The Higgs became known as the "God Particle" because it is everywhere but remains frustratingly elusive.

Finding confirmation of the Higgs would answer many questions about the so-called Standard Model, the theory that summarizes our present knowledge of particles
. Scientists throughout the years have narrowed down the ranges of mass that the Higgs is likely to have.

European physicists are also searching for the Higgs, amongst other things, with the Big Bang atom-smasher, the Large Hadron Collider.

However, the LHC suffered a months-long setback after being switched on in September 2008 at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) below the Franco-Swiss border.

Researchers at the rival Fermilab have increased efforts to discover the Higgs before the LHC is back on track in September of this year.

Femilab said in a press release that researchers at CERN had already determined that the Higgs must weigh more than 114 GeV/c2. Calculations of quantum effects involving the Higgs Boson require its mass to be less than 185 GeV/c2.

Physicists at CERN were able to carve out a section in the middle of that range using Fermilab's Tevatron collider, establishing that the particle it cannot have a mass in between 160 and 170 GeV/c2.

Two major research groups have analyzed three inverse femtobarns of collision data, the scientific unit that scientists use to count the number of collisions. They say that each experiment expects to receive a total of about 10 inverse femtobarns by the end of 2010.

Fermilab researcher Rob Roser said a particle collision at the Tevatron collider can produce a Higgs boson in many different ways, and the Higgs particle can then decay into various particles.

"Each experiment examines more and more possibilities. Combining all of them, we hope to see a first hint of the Higgs particle."

Man survives plunge over Niagara Falls

2009-03-12T03:34:00.001-07:00

By Gary Bender

(CNN) -- A man went over Niagara Falls and survived Wednesday afternoon, one of the few people to ever survive the plunge unprotected, authorities said.

It is unclear whether the man chose not to aid in his rescue or was physically unable to do so, officials say.

1 of 2

The man was seen entering the icy water just above Horseshoe Falls, on the Canadian side, and apparently jumped in about 2:15 p.m, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Fire Chief Lee Smith said.

Smith said the unidentified man was in the near-freezing water for "40-plus" minutes before he was rescued by Niagara Parks Police and Niagara Falls firefighter Todd Brunning.

Brunning, who was tethered to shore, swam about 60 meters (nearly 200 feet) into the river and was able to get hold of the man and bring him to shore.

Niagara Parks Police initially used a helicopter from a private company, Niagara Falls Helicopters, to attempt a rescue of the man. When that failed, they used the wind from the chopper's rotors to push the man closer to shore, Smith said.

He said the man was "being rotated in a cyclic fashion" by the river's very strong currents.

The man did not aid in his rescue, officials said, though it was not immediately clear whether he was physically unable to or he did not want to do so.

Niagara Falls Fire Capt. Dave Belme said the man was not wearing any clothes when he was rescued, but he added that it's not unexpected for a person to lose things while being washed down the falls.

The man's "chances of survival without the quick response would be lessened," Smith said.

All of the agencies train for situations like this, he said, and they are put to the test about a dozen times a year. Still, he called Wednesday's rescue "amazing."

Disease sucking life out of bat population

2009-03-11T03:29:00.000-07:00

By MARIBETH WARD, Staff Writer

First the honeybees were afflicted with a mysterious ailment and now bats are dying. An unprecedented die-off of thousands of hibernating bats in the Northeast has caused biologists and researchers from around the country to try to determine the cause, and to assess the threat to bat populations nationwide.

The disorder, dubbed white-nose syndrome (WNS) because of the presence of a white fungus around the muzzles of some affected bats, is a major concern to the bat conservation community.

Most bats with WNS are little brown bats, but endangered Indiana bats have also died, raising concerns about the impacts on a species already at risk. Other affected bat species include the Eastern Pipistrelle, the Northern Long-Eared bat, and the Small-Footed bat.

The syndrome was first detected at caves and mines in New York last winter, where it is believed to be associated with the deaths of approximately 8,000 to 11,000 bats.

This winter, WNS was again been found at the previously affected sites, and has spread to additional sites in New York as well as sites in Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut. Approximately 400,000 to 500,000 bats hibernate at affected sites.

Researchers know there is a serious problem -- hundreds of thousands of bats have died as a result -- but they are still baffled by the disease. The fungus is clearly associated with white nose syndrome, but scientists still do not know whether it is causing the disease or simply a symptom of a virus that has yet to be identified.

David Blehert, a microbiologist with the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., explained that the dead bats are found only at caves where bats hibernate. Bats tend to stay in hibernation through the end of April, so researchers need to use the next two months to collect whatever information they can.

What is more troubling to Blehert is the disease's ability to spread. Imagine a contaminated cave being the center of a bull's eye. The target itself would extend about 150 miles in all directions from the cave.

Indiana bats, protected by the federal Endangered Species Act as well as state laws, range across much of the eastern United States. Indiana supports the largest hibernating population of the species. About 238,000 Indiana bats, approximately 46 percent of the total population, winter in Indiana caves. Another 15 states have populations of hibernating Indiana bats.

Indiana State University's Center for North American Bat Research and Conservation has established a fund for research and response activities related to WNS. Information is available at www.indstate.edu/ecology/centers/bat.htm

In addition, Bat Conservation International has established a Fund for White-nose Syndrome Research. Information is available at www.batcon.org

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is working closely with the affected states, where biologists are investigating the geographic extent of the outbreaks and collecting samples of affected bats.

They are developing a geographic database to track the location of sites where WNS has been found, and are collecting information at each site, such as the number of bats affected.

This information will be critical in tracking the extent and spread of WNS and in coordinating research efforts. The Service is also partnering with the Northeastern Cave Conservancy to track movements of cavers who have visited affected sites in New York www.necaveconservancy.org

Fish and Wildlife Services have asked cavers to observe all existing seasonal cave closures at known Indiana bat hibernacula, and when possible, to avoid caves or passages of caves containing large hibernating populations of any bat species.

While caving, anyone who observes a hibernating bat with a white muzzle or other odd white, fungus-like patches should follow the guidelines below.

* Do not touch any bats (living or dead), especially those with a white muzzle/nose.

* If you have a camera with you, please take a few photographs of the potentially affected bat(s).

* Exit the cave immediately, avoiding contact with other bats, and please do not enter any other caves prior to reporting your potential WNS observations to your state fish and wildlife agency or your nearest U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Field Office.

* Anyone who observes any unusual numbers of bats outside during cold weather, especially near a cave or mine where bats hibernate, is asked to report those observations as well. An increased number of bats flying outside and increased reports of dead bats in the vicinity of hibernacula have been observed in affected areas in the Northeast.

Drug from Genetically Altered Goats Gets FDA Stamp of Approval

2009-03-10T03:46:00.000-07:00

By Elizabeth Walling, citizen journalist

(NaturalNews) In early February 2009 the FDA officially approved the genetically engineered drug ATryn. Developed by GTC Biotherapeutics, ATryn contains the anti-clotting protein antithrombin, which is produced in the milk of genetically altered goats.

The goats come from embryos which have been injected with a human gene and then placed in a surrogate female. When the altered goats are born and mature, the gene causes them to produce a large amount of antithrombin in their milk. This technique of growing genetically altered animals for pharmaceutical purposes is dubbed "pharming." Genetically crossing two species in this manner is cause for suspicion and even alarm. There is no possible way to predict the consequences of this kind of experimentation.

Questions remain as to why such a controversial method is necessary for producing antithrombin. Based on sales in Europe of a similar drug, sales for ATryn are not expected to be sizable. The drug is not designed to replace conventional blood thinners, but instead is made for use only during risky periods of surgery or childbirth. Not to mention the fact that there are alternative methods that use human plasma and cell cultures to produce the protein. While these techniques are more expensive and produce less antithrombin, they are also far less disconcerting when compared to the alternative. It makes you wonder why we must to go to such extremes to produce the drug in this manner.

It can be difficult to control what results from genetic mutation. In the past, there have been cases where animals altered with human genes suffered from unanticipated degeneration. Critics say the kind of suffering some of these animals may go through cannot be considered ethical. The Humane Society of the United States says these practices perpetuate the idea that animals are mere objects to use for our own devices as opposed to feeling creatures.

There are many other concerns related to the way ATryn is produced. These include the possibility of germs from the goats contaminating the drugs or even the chance that products from these goats could enter the mass food supply. If breeding is not highly controlled, there is a chance these mutated genes could spread among wild or commercial animals. Some are concerned that the FDA`s new policy does not require genetically engineered products to be labeled accordingly. After all, if such products are allowed to enter the market, we should have the right to be able to identify and refuse them if we so choose.

We have to ask ourselves if we are truly ready for an onslaught of genetically altered drugs in the market. That is exactly what we are inviting by approving this drug. Even if you are wondering if ATryn is really so bad, the fact remains that the approval of such a drug is really just the first step down a troubling road that may lead to dire consequences.

Big Bang Debunked by Paradigm Shift

2009-03-09T03:33:00.000-07:00

by Stephen Mooney

The basis of science is the interpretation of observation, which occurs through the application of a fundamental perspective. My fundamental perspective is that of materialism. For me, everything in the Universe is composed of matter and is the product of the process of matter. And this includes that thing called energy. It's generally thought that physics is a fundamental perspective, and is committed to materialism. It's my contention that it's not committed to materialism and is not a fundamental perspective. With its unquestioning reliance upon mathematics and measurements, establishment physics is an abstractionist perspective or paradigm that doesn't adequately represent the materialist nature of the Universe.

With my materialist perspective, I conducted a simple electrostatic experiment. When I rubbed a glass rod and placed it near a suspended pith ball, it attracted the pith ball. Physics sees this attraction as being the result of dislike charges. This begs the question of how dislike charges cause attraction. I decided that the attraction was caused by the pith ball absorbing emission from the glass rod, and that this emission forms an unbroken connection between the two objects.

I use the term emission, which is made of matter, to represent the fundamental thing from which everything is composed. The latest thinking by physics sees the cause of the attraction in terms of the exchange of matterless particles called photons, and light being composed of photons. I also use the term emission to include all forms of microscale dispersion. For Physics, "the fundamental thing of which everything is composed" are particles composed of sub-atomic particles which are composed of sub-atomic particles, etc. I decided to cut to the chase and use the term emission because I wanted to avoid having particles moving through an otherwise empty space. Emission includes the visible part of the spectrum and extends, through on-going dispersion and in levels, all the way down to the extreme microscale.

The simple electrostatic experiment also led me to see dislike charges as having different levels of emission. This came about because I could see that repulsion, which physics sees as the result of like charges, was the product of equivalent emissions. Two objects of equivalent emission push away from each other by way of their emission. Attraction sees the different levels of emission interacting. This interaction itself entails absorption and emission at a sub-atomic and sub-particle level of matter. It also entails emission being absorbed via the emission of an object. This emission decreases in density with the distance from the object, forming an emission field around the object.

My simple electrostatic experiment also led me to the observation that everything is either in a state of absorption exceeding emission or emission exceeding absorption. This means that everything is either increasing or decreasing in matter at any given moment in time. The idea that things can have an unchanging mass, as the amount of matter, is not a fact but an assumption of the abstractionist paradigm.

Noticing that the physics formula for electrostatic attraction takes the same form as that of Newton's law of gravity, I immediately realized that all attraction in the Universe is the result of the absorption of emission. This includes the attraction between particles called the strong and weak nuclear force, and the attraction between large objects called the gravitational force.

It so happens that the physics definition of illumination (the emission called light) includes it falling off by the square of the distance from the source. This is in the same way as Newton's law sees gravity falling off by the square of the distance. It's obvious that this "falling-off" equates to the decrease in density of the emission field around all objects.

I informed various University physics departments of my observations. If it couldn't be expressed as a mathematical equation and/or a measurement, they didn't want to know. Undeterred, I decided to investigate an original gravitational experiment conducted by a chemist named Henry Cavendish. I requested a copy of Cavendish's original article in Philosophical Transactions of 1798 from the head of Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University. It arrived in the mail within a couple of weeks.

Henry Cavendish took over the work of one John Michell who "contrived a method of determining the density of the Earth, by rendering sensible the attraction of small quantities of matter". Michell built what is called a torsion balance. This entails suspended weights and a means for measuring the attraction between the weights. Cavendish Experiment is claimed to be one of the great physics experiments. Later it was seen as the first experiment to determine the value of a factor which physics calls the gravitational constant.

On reading the Cavendish paper I was struck by two results. The first entails repulsion. Cavendish discovered that "the arm moved backwards, in the same manner that it before move forward". Gravity is not supposed to involve repulsion. The second result was that after heating one of the weights "the effect was so much increased, that the arm was drawn 14 division aside, instead of about three". Heating one of the weights increased the attraction. I had no problem with this. The heating increased the emission of the weight and when this was absorbed by the other weight it increased the attraction. So what about this gravitational constant measured by Cavendish? It's actually a measure of electrostatic attraction.

The gravity measured by the torsion balance is that which stops the whole apparatus from floating away. That downward attraction that everything on Earth experiences. To the extent that this downward attraction acts to reduce the horizontal (electrostatic) attraction between the weights on the Cavendish torsion balance, it can be said to measure gravity. Physics claims that the torsion balance can be isolated from the possibility that there will be any electrostatic (horizontal) attraction between the weights. However, as everything absorbs and emits as a product of its very existence, it's not possible to completely isolate anything.

A short time after my consideration of the Cavendish paper one Malcolm Longair (who later ironically became the head of Cavendish Laboratory) toured Australia demonstrating the measurement of some of the constants of physics. He held a public lecture at Melbourne University, and I attended. He conducted the Cavendish Experiment and proclaimed that the value for the gravitational constant was within acceptable limits. At the conclusion of the demonstration he stated that physics encourages questions and critical appraisal. I went up to him and quietly pointed out that the Cavendish Experiment was nothing more than a demonstration of electrostatic attraction. Malcolm Longair, who appeared to me to a sincere person, went red in the face, threw his arms in the air, and stated that you cannot interpret it that way. This member of the physics establishment was not about to allow me to question one of their assumptions. His reaction confirmed for me that I was on the right track.

As objects are attracted through the absorption of emission, then the space between objects must be composed of emission. Space is not a vacuum, as claimed by some physicists. Some physicists will also claim that my explanation is not possible because the idea of space being composed of emission has been experimentally proven false. This entails an experiment conduct by Michelson and Morely. It involved using an instrument called an interferometer. Michelson and Morely were looking for a static medium (called an ether) which caused drag on the movement of the Earth. They could not detect any drag, and that's because it doesn't exist. The Earth via its emission field absorbs the emission that impacts upon the Earth. The emission of the Earth is also via this emission field. The emission field is not static in relation to the movement of the Earth.

The Earth remains in its orbit around the Sun through the absorption of the emission of the Sun via the emission field of the Earth. At least part of the Sun's emission would be absorbed via the Earth's emission field and its poles into the core.

I see the inner most core of the Earth entailing a dissymmetrical duality from which the emission/magnetic field of the Earth is generated. This duality would involve one being a state of absorption exceeding emission and the other emission exceeding absorption. From time to time, these would attain their maximum state of absorption and emission respectively and each would flip-over into the alternative state. Could this be the basis of the Earth's magnetic poles reversing from time to time? Yes.

Albert Einstein came up with the idea of curved space to account for the cause of gravity. The Sun, for example, is said to curve the space around it due to its mass. It's said that this idea has been proven by the fact that the emission (light) from distant galaxies is bent around the Sun. This is called "gravitational lensing". Is curved space the best explanation of this phenomena? No. The best explanation is that the emission of the Sun decreases in density with the increase in distance from the surface of the Sun. How about this density falling-off by the square of the distance in accordance with Newton's law of gravity. The emission called light passing near the Sun absorbs emission from the Sun's emission field, and its path is bent in the same way as the path of an electron is bent in an electromagnetic (emission) field.

Physics treats time as an independent dimension. It claims that time slows down with acceleration, or at lest increased motion, and sees this as proven by experiment. If you take two identical clocks and place one on the surface of the Earth and the other on the top of a high tower, the clock at the top of the tower will be moving faster than the clock on the surface, due to the rotation of the Earth. Experiment indicates that the clock at the top of the tower runs slower than the clock on the surface of the Earth. Physics claims that this proves that time runs more slowly with the increase in motion. Actually, the result is due to the difference in the density of the emission impacting upon the clocks and not the mere motion of the clocks. The density of emission at the top of the tower is less than at the surface of the Earth. We are talking about atomic clocks, which keep time through atomic decay.

The result of the atomic clocks experiment means that the rate of atomic decay is dependent upon, or relative to, the density of the impacting emission. As the density of impacting emission is variable, as a space-craft traveled into a region of decreased density of emission the rate of atomic decay of it as matter would decrease. And the opposite would also be the case. As the density of emission impacting upon the Earth would increase over time, then the rate of atomic decay on Earth would increase over time. Matter should always be seen as relatively, and not absolutely, stable.

Treating time as an independent dimension is simply absurd. Time is a measure of process or duration. It's not a thing-in-itself. If you treat time as a thing-in-itself, then you fail to see the material cause of its variability. That is precisely what physics has done with the atomic clocks experiment.

As emission travels across the Universe through interaction with emission it must, if not absorbed by a large scale object, eventually obtain its maximum state of dispersion. I came across an idea called the Virtual Universe Hypothesis. This sees the Universe popping into existence from what are called "quantum effects" of so-called empty space. I immediately realized that the Universe has a ultimate microscale groundstate fabric of dispersion, and that from this groundstate stars and emerge. This groundstate is a structure of dissymmetry, which can be represented as a dissymmetrical duality, and entails rotation. It forms the core of everything and accounts for the rotation of particles and planets and stars and galaxies. I had arrived at the bottom of the Universe and the basis of the process of construction called nuclear fusion.

The groundstate fabric of space can also be seen as cycles of fluctuation or pulsation. A unit of emission would absorb emission and then fall back as that absorbed emission was itself emitted. This groundstate has been detected, and is called the cosmic background microwave radiation by physics. The groundstate would not have a uniform distribution, because it's the result of emission from galaxies and stars in different stages of development in difference regions of space. For it to have a uniform distribution would require that the emission was from a single source in one location. Which obviously is not the case.

The idea that the space between things is composed of emission that is made of matter, appears to fly in the face of common sense. How could we see through space if it was made of matter. We don't see through space, we see with space in the sense of the emission image of an object impacting upon our retina and being processed by our brains.

I see the construction process called nuclear fusion entailing the absorption of emission within a context of increasing density of impacting emission. A visible star is a state of emission exceeding absorption. Needless to say, I intentionally ignored what the abstractionist paradigm had to say about the formation of stars and the nuclear fusion process. Why would I believe a paradigm that doesn't have a truly fundamental basis, involves inconsistency, and can't even discover the true cause of gravity.

There are two basic types of star. The first type has a stage of absorption exceeding emission of light. That sounds like the definition of a blackhole. Instead of stars ending as blackholes, some begin as blackholes. This type of star would absorb emission and construct the heavier elements, and the increasing density of the impacting emission acting as pressure would see the star ignite and become a visible star as a second stage of its development.

Could this fusion from the groundstate fabric of space also see the formation of the core of spiral galaxies? Stars and solar system form within the emission field of the galaxy. The cause of the spiral nature of the arms can be accounted for by the vertical and transverse aspects of the total emission field of the galaxy.

Nuclear explosion can be accounted for in terms of pressure or compression forcing matter to the groundstate and in so doing releasing it as an extreme expansion event of emission (energy).

The bursts of gamma radiation detected from all directions in the cosmic sky would be exploding embryonic blackhole stars. Having formed through the absorption of emission, and being states of absorption exceeding emission, they find themselves in a context of ever increasing density of impacting emission and as a consequence of the pressure they explode.

As gravity is the product of the absorption of emission and not some magical attribute of matter, curved space, or the exchange of particles called gravitons, a star cannot collapse under its own gravity and form a blackhole, if physics really believed that gravity is caused by the exchange of gravitons, it would have given up on the idea of stars collapsing into blackholes by now. Mind you, if they have detected first stage stars they would have detected blackholes and assume that they're the result of a collapsing star. How would you detect a first stage (blackhole) star? By the absence of light? As the emission passing near a first stage (blackhole) star would be bent through interacting with its emission field (gravitational lensing), could this be detected? Or, what about the emission field around the first stage star itself emitting a low level of detectable emission (radiation). Yes, Stephen Hawking was right after all.

Stephen Hawking, the physicist from Cambridge University, came up with the idea that blackholes might emit a low level radiation. This idea is remarkable when you consider the context within which it emerged. Blackholes were thought to be the consequence of the increasing matter (mass) of a star. The increasing matter was seen as being the product of nuclear fusion within the star constructing heavier and heavier elements. With the increasing matter came increasing gravity, until a point was reached when the gravity was so great that the star collapsed in on itself. Not even light was supposed to be able to avoid being drawn into this collapsed star. This blackhole theory requires that you embrace the cause of gravity as being a magical attribute of matter. It's within this context that Stephen Hawking proposed that at least some emission was able to escape the "magic" and be detected.

A visible (second stage) star loses solid matter, which was constructed in its first stage, through its conversion into emission and so decreases in matter over time.

There are two basic types of star. The first type has a stage of absorption exceeding light on new extremes in weather". This item quoted one Sami Solanki of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research: "...the sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1000 years..." Our Sun is a second stage star and increases in emission over time.

First stage stars explode, due to pressure derived from the increasing density of the impacting emission. These are referred to as supernova. Second stage stars would, in their final phase, gently dissipate. This dissipation is the basis of the solar discs from which solar systems are constructed. Gently dissipating stars is the source of the abundance of hydrogen and helium in the Universe. Is there only one type of star with two stages? Stars also form within the gentle dissipation (hydrogen and helium) of stars, which forms what is known as solar discs and elliptical galaxies. The final phase of these stars is also gentle dissipation into hydrogen and helium. They are a form of second stage star.

Binary stars systems are also known to exist. They form within and from the hydrogen and helium of stars that have gently dissipated, and which form elliptical galaxies. It's from these elliptical galaxies that they derive their orbital motion. If these stars had a total inequivalence of emission they would attract each other and not form a binary structure. If they had simple equivalence of emission they would repel each other. They are kept in contact with each other and locked in their orbital motion because the levels of equivalence and inequivalence within their emissions limit the repulsion/attraction. One level of inequivalence or equivalence would be enough to lock the stars in their binary orbital motion. Eventually both stars would obtain a final phase of gentle dissipation, and add yet more hydrogen and helium to space.

The rotation of stars is derived from the inherent rotation at the groundstate fabric of space, and so applies to both first and second stage stars. The rate of rotation of stars increases over time.

A pulsar is a first stage star being squeezed by the density of the impacting emission, resulting in jets of emission from its poles, which would not be equal in their intensity due to the dissymmetrical nature of its core. A quasar is a second stage star reaching the end of its life, and thus accounting for the extreme intensity of its emission.

Gravity as experienced on the surface of the Earth is connected through absorption and emission to the emission field of the Earth. This emission field extends down to the ultra microscale because it can readily pass through, by way of absorption and emission, more highly constructed matter. For the gravity of the Earth to be uniform over time would require that the emission field of the Earth to be uniform in its density over time. In turn, this would require that the total matter of the Earth would be uniform over time. As all objects are either increasing or decreasing in matter, this is simply not possible. As the Earth is clearly a state of absorption exceeding emission, it increases in matter over time. This leads to the density of its emission field and its gravity increasing over time. In the time of the dinosaurs, the gravity of Earth would have been less than it is now.

The rotation of the Earth is decreasing. What is the cause? As the gravity of the Earth is increasing and the emission of the Sun is increasing, this give rises to an increase in the attraction between the Earth and the Sun. The cause of the decrease in the rotationof the Earth is inertia.

Physics defines inertia as "the property of a body, proportional to its mass, which opposes a change in the motion of the body." (Larousse, Dictionary of Science and Technology) You will notice that inertia is presented as a "magical" property of matter. Physics offers no explanation of the mechanism which causes this "magic" to exist. Actually, every example of inertia is an example of attraction acting on a body. A body on the surface of the Earth opposes a change in its motion due to gravity attracting the body downwards. The mechanism of inertia is, therefore, the same as the mechanism of gravity, i.e. the absorption of emission. No magic.

As the attraction between the Earth and the Sun is increasing, the average distance between the Earth and the Sun must be decreasing. Is this already known?

The average distance between the Earth and the Moon is increasing. This is because of the increase in the emission of the Sun pulling the Moon away from the Earth through the Moon absorbing the emission of the Sun. In other words, the balance of the gravitational attraction to the Sun and the Earth has increased towards the Sun. Which is want you would expect with an increase in the emission of the Sun.

Physics claims that the decrease in the rotation of the Earth and the moving away of the Moon derives from a tidal bulge in the Earth, and as the Earth tries to drag this bulge along its rotation is decreased and that this loss of angular momentum is transferred to the Moon lifting it into a higher orbit.

The only way that the decrease in the rotation of the Earth (the loss of angular momentum) could cause the Moon to move away would be if the rotation of the Earth was responsible for the Moon's distance from the Earth in the first place. Which isn't the case. Also the physics claim takes no account the impact of the emission field of the Sun on the Moon, nor the increase in the density of the emission field of the Sun over time. The abstractionist paradigm believes that gravity never changes over time. That it's a constant. This is complete nonsense.

The Moon exists within the emission field of the Earth, which involves both perpendicular and transverse aspects. The orbital motion of the Moon is derived from it being dragged around by way of its material (field) connection to the Earth. The contra-orbiting of natural satellites (moons) can only be accounted for by the transverse aspect of emission fields.

Before our Sun has gently dissipated, it will have destroyed all the planets. This will occur through the increase in gravity within the solar system drawing the planets toward the Sun until each in turn explodes.

There is a component of repulsion within emission (energy) fields that entail attraction, through the equivalence of some levels of emission within the field. This repulsion component is manifest by the field falling off in density by the square instead of exponentially. The waves of emission of fields are constructed by convergence, because of the equivalence of some of the levels of emission. If there wasn't an equivalence of some of the levels of emission within an emission field, then there wouldn't any emission waves to detect.

It's a fact of observation that gravity entails acceleration and not simply uniform motion. An object attracted to the surface of the Earth accelerates towards the Earth. The only logical way to explain this acceleration is by the absorption of emission from an emission field which increases in density with the decrease in the distance to the surface of the Earth. This would also entail the object increasing in matter. Relativity theory states that matter (mass) increases with acceleration, but doesn't offer an explanation of the material cause.

Millions of dollars of public money has been spent building "gravity wave detectors", in the hope of detecting gravity waves from distance galaxies and stars. If you go outside and measure the emission (light) from galaxies and stars, you will have detected their gravity waves. The whole community has to pay for the mistakes that result from the confined thinking of the physics establishment.

Another physics wild goose chase involves the idea that the Universe contains missing "dark matter" that is undetectable by its emission. It's said that the existence of this matter is inferred from its gravitational effects on visible matter. This "dark matter" is, of course, the groudstate emission fabric that is space and it has an effect on visible matter through being absorbed. If physics wasn't locked into the idea that the emission called light was matterless, it would have realized its mistake long ago.

The atmosphere of the Earth is retained in position through its interaction with the emission field of the Earth. Physics states that the atmosphere of the Earth decreases in density with the distance from the surface of the Earth, and offers no explanation of the mechanism by which the Earth retains its atmosphere. It's no mere coincidence that both the atmosphere of the Earth and the emission field of the Earth decrease in density with the distance from the surface of the Earth. As the emission field of the Earth increases in density over time this would increase the density of the atmosphere leading to increased global warming by way of a greenhouse effect. Increased carbon emission in combination with increasing density of the emission field would result in global warming at an ever increasing rate. Given that the increasing density of the Earth's emission field is not taken into account when calculating the reduction of carbon emissions that needs to occur, such reduction amounts will inevitably be under-estimates.

Around1923 an American astronomer by the name of Edwin Hubble decided that all the other Galaxies in the Universe were accelerating away from our point of observation, and that the further they are away the faster they were accelerating. This was derived from the observation that the light from distant galaxies was shifted to the red (wide) end of the wavelength spectrum. He seen this redshift being the result of what is called the Doppler Effect. He thought that as the galaxies were accelerating away, the Universe must be expanding and had begun with a big bang. This big bang theory was adopted by most of the physics establishment.

In 1928 a Swiss astronomer by the name of Fritz Zwicky rejected Hubble's assumption by proposing that the light lost energy as it traveled. He called this his "tired light" theory. Given that light disperses as it travels across the Universe, and that this dispersion involves increasing wavelength, the redshift phenomena is indicative of light traveling towards us and not the galaxies accelerating away.

If the redshift of the light from galaxies was due to them accelerating away, then physics is claiming that if they were not accelerating away their light would travel towards us without increasing in wavelength, it would not disperse, and would be just as strong as it was at its source. The cosmic sky would be ablaze with so much light that we wouldn't be able to distinguish anything. The light (emission) from our Sun would have the same wavelength when it reached to Earth as it has at the surface of the Sun.

Unless physics can prove that the Doppler Effect wavelength increase is in addition to that which occurs through the light traveling, then they have no irrefutable evidence. However, physics does propose that there is another source of redshift. It states that light increases in wavelength in a gravitational emission field. This is called the "gravitational redshift". As everything has a gravitational emission field which decreases in density with the distance from the source of the field, then the light emitted from everything decreases in wavelength with the distance from the object. The light emitted from galaxies and stars decreases in wavelength as a product of it traveling through space, because space is composed of the emission of objects and forms an emission field around those objects. Or, to put it more simply, cosmic redshift and gravitational redshift are one and the same thing.

Physics claims further evidence for its big bang theory. This involves the detection of the cosmic background microwave radiation, which it sees as being left over from the big bang. The cosmic background microwave radiation is, of course, representative of the groundstate fabric of space. Needless to say, the groundstate could not have a uniformity in its state of construction across the cosmic sky. For it to be uniform, would require the light from every galaxy and star to disperse as if was from one galaxy or star.

Hubble's assumption is wrong. The galaxies are not accelerating away from us and the Universe did not begin with a big bang.

Here's another shock for the physics establishment. You can't measure cosmic distance from the light emitted by objects such as galaxies or stars. More specifically, you can't distinguish between the distance of a galaxy or star and its brightness from the redshift of its light. Is a star of a given brightness far way relative to one less bright? Or are they both the same distance away and it's simply that one has less brightness because its younger? All the desire in the world to have a means for measuring cosmic distance will not change the situation.

Physics uses measured values called universal physical constants. As change is an inherent aspect of the Universe, physics should explain how these values can remain constant over extended space and time. It doesn't offer any such explanation. When Malcolm Longair concluded his demonstration of some of the constants of physics at Melbourne University, he stated that "One day physics might even understand why the constants have the values that they do". This was presented as if it was some great mystery of the Universe. The constants have the values that they do, in a particular space and time, for no other reason than that is the way in which they are measured, constructed from the emission fabric that is space within the context of impacting emission. If there were particles that were massless, as claimed by physics, then they would be matterless and made of nothing. As this is impossible, it's easy to see that the massless (matterless) status of these particles is not real and is merely an assumption of the abstractionist paradigm.

Physics also claims that when two particular types of particle meet they destroy each other. This is put down to one particle being matter and the other being anti-matter, and offers no explanation of mechanism. I see the particles destroying each other through the density of their emission fields causing compression leading to explosion. In my science, an explanation of mechanism beats no explanation of mechanism every time. Also, for the mutual explosion to occur the particles would have to have equivalent levels of emission at the time of their explosion. How about two particles, of different levels of emission, being attracted through their absorption of emission and each attaining their maximum state of absorption and then exploding due to the compression from the density of the impacting emissions. Sounds good to me.

Another "mystery" of physics is called the wave/particle duality. Sometimes the emission called light is detected as a wave function and sometimes as a photon particle. As a particle is a fusion of emission, then the wave function must be un-fused emission. We can say the wave function is composed of particles smaller than the photon and is spread out, or dispersed, so that it's detected as a wave function. The greater the dispersion of the emission the greater the wavelength. I've notice that some physicists talk as if the wave function is more than the detection of emission as a wavelength. Even going so far as to claim that everything is composed of nothing more than (emission) waves. This is to commit the fallacy of misplace concreteness, or reification.

The abstractionist paradigm sees the Universe having inherent uncertainty. This is presented with the Uncertainty Principle, which states that "there is a fundamental limit to the precision with which a position co-ordinate of a particle and its momentum in that direction can be simultaneously known." (Larousse, Dictionary of Science and Technology) If something is in a static position then it doesn't have a velocity, and if it has a velocity then it's not in a static position. Surely, position and momentum (matter by velocity), are mutually exclusive. The only way that both factors could be known to any level of precision simultaneously would be if the particle does not have a static position but is, in fact, moving at some velocity in a particular direction.

Physics claims that the inherent uncertainty also relates to the "quantum", or ultra microscale, and that "it has nothing to do with the ability (or inability) of our instruments to make accurate measurements." (John Gribbin, Companion to the Cosmos) At the ultra microscale the absorption/emission of the matter of the instrument with which you measure interacts with the absorption/emission of that which is being measured. If what you were measuring was a wavelength, then this could entail the matter of the measurement instrument absorbing some of the emission of the wave causing it to collapse to a lower state of construction. This is usually referred to as, "the collapse of the wave function". The Universe would involve inherent uncertainty, if we were talking about that which is below the level of the groundstate of space. That is a region which is beyond our capacity to known and understand.

Within the abstractionist paradigm is Quantum theory. This is based on the observation that emission (energy) comes in discrete packets or "quanta", and not as an undifferentiated stream. Quantum theory does not ask how these quanta are made or construction. I see emission (energy) being constructed from the convergence of other quanta of lessor construction.

Just because the abstractionist paradigm is the basis of technology, doesn't mean that it's the ultimate means for understanding the Universe. It seems that for many practitioners of the abstractionist paradigm, making measurements and preforming mathematical equations can be an end in-itself and a substitute for logical thinking. We can say that their thinking has been confined by the limitations of the abstractionist paradigm.

The Universe is infinite in space and time, distance and duration. There are obviously an infinite number of things constructed by the process that is the Universe. There is an infinite number of galaxies and stars and planets and biology, etc. However, can there be an infinite number of types of things? If there were an infinite number of types of things, then there would be an infinite variety of things and not the types of things that we observe. We observe that galaxies and stars form types with the same characteristics. We observe that plants and animals also form types with the same characteristics. If you were to say that these types are merely a consequence of the way in which we humans are able to observe, the so called anthropic principle, then I would say that we're only able to understand the Universe as humans. And then there is the fact that we humans are a product of the process of the Universe, so it's entirely reasonable to assume that our observations are in accordance with the Universe: that they're objectively real.

Although the finite number of types of things would be an extremely large number, it leads to an extraordinary conclusion. Everything which can be constructed by the process that is the Universe, must exist/re-exist an infinite number of times in an infinite number of places in the Universe.

The Universe is a totally systematic materialist and connected process of absorption and emission, attraction and repulsion, construction and destruction, dispersion and explosion, division and integration, and evolution and development. Everything that can be constructed by the process exists within the parameters of the groundstate of space and the explosion of galaxies.

Cause and effect is not a simple one to one relationship, but a two to one relationship involving internal process and external impact giving rise to an effect. If the number of possible types of things is finite, then every type of thing can be represented by a number within a typology. As everything can be seen are part of an hierarchal structure of types from the most simple to the most complex, then this typology would take an hierarchical form. This in turn would involve dissymmetry. This materialist typology would constitute a paradigm that was both descriptive and predictive, and pertain to the whole of science. That part of physics which relates to the natural Universe, would be represented on such a paradigm. It would begin with the groundstate of space, and specify and so described the construction of everything. See the structure of numbers and arrows below. This is the materialist typology paradigm of science, and it predicts

that hydrogen has a fourth isotope (quadritium) which is the 4 at [2]. The other elements follow sequentially, as levels of construction. In time, the paradigm will be applied to all areas of science and determine the future course of our history.

Out there in the Universe there are an infinite number of people just like me typing this very sentence, in every sense of the past and the present and future. In this space that I presently occupy, an infinite number of beings have and will occupy the same space in different times. The Earth has formed and evolved and been destroyed an infinite number of times. You are not alone in the Universe. There are an infinite number of yourself out there. However, it's probably not a practical proposition to go out there and meet one or some of your other selves. Not only do you live an infinite number of times, but you do so in every possible social context that can be inflicted upon a human being. You should, as a matter of science, give consideration to those who live in oppressive contexts because that is you in at least some of those other spaces and times.

The meaning and purpose of existence is the realization of potential, within the context within which each thing exists. The potential of the Earth is realized within the context of its internal process and its external environment, which happens to include biological beings that presently call it home. The potential of an individual human is realized within the context of there individual biological inheritance and there particular social context. The meaning and purpose of the Universe, if we can call it that, is the realization of its construction possibilities. We are a realization of the construction possibilities of the Universe.

This essay demonstrates that if you take the results of some basic experiments and and observations and interpret them with a fundamental perspective and logical consistency, you can show that many of the assumptions and theories of physics are false, and discover profound things about the Universe for the very first time.

PS. Today is the 6th of March 2009. This morning I finally realized that the numbers down the center of the paradigm are subject to transposition, e.g. (1) in 3 <---- (1) becomes 3. Last night I had come to a dead end. I tried to change the direction of the arrows, but nothing worked. Convinced that the paradigm didn't work, I decided to confine the essay to just debunking physics. I thought I had failed, and removed all mention of the paradigm from the essay. I even removed the last five lines of the poem. These were replaced with: and I fell, to the ground, again.

This morning I thought how could it be possible that I couldn't invent the ultimate paradigm of science. I had come so far that the very idea was simply absurd. In a mind numbing quandary, I begun sketching on a piece a paper how to explain to someone the way the groundstate fluctuated. There were little circles with arrows pointing toward and then away from the circles representing the absorption and emission of a unit of the groudstate. Then all of a suddenly I realized that it was in front of me all the time. The center numbers transpose. I was back. The numbness in my brain dissipated. I immediately resurrected the original last five lines of the poem. Now I could say with full conviction that "the revolution is here". I could also relax in the knowledge that the paradigm and how it worked was out there and available for all to apply. I could pursue its application at a gentle pace, and continue to make extraordinary discoveries about our Universe. Would you believe that our solar system begun with twelve planets? Welcome to the future, one and all. We did it.

Fish with human faces spotted in South Korea

2009-03-04T03:36:00.000-08:00

From the Telegraph.com

A fish with a human face is making waves in South Korea.The 'humanoid' carp are attracting attention in the town of Chongju, South Korea.

The "humanoid" carp are attracting attention in the town of Chongju in the centre of the country where they live in a small pond.

They are believed to be hybrid descendants of two carp species – the carp and the leather carp, also known as a tangerine fish.

Both fish are females and more than three feet long. They appear to have distinctive human noses, eyes and lips.

The fish live in a pond behind the home of a 64-year old South Korean man and have been there since 1986 although their looks are only just starting to attract attention.

"My fish have been getting more and more human for the past couple of years," the owner said.

He added that he knows of other fish with similar features, and as they are both females it will be impossible for them to breed and have fish-faced offspring.

This is the second time in recent months that carp have made headlines in Asia. Last November a shoal of the fish in Changsha, in China's Hunan Province turned on a duck who landed on their lake looking for food.

The Koi carp took exception to the intruder and fought back, bunching together into a seething mass to assert their authority, forcing the duck to fly away.

Hamas: U.S. used donors meeting to press us

2009-03-03T03:34:00.000-08:00

From ChinaNews.com

GAZA, March 3 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. administration politically used Gaza reconstruction conference to put pressure and strip political stances from Hamas, the Islamic movement said on Tuesday.

The U.S. administration and some of the international donors, who met in Egypt Sunday, "have attempted to politically invest the money and use Gaza Strip's need of reconstruction as a way to extort Hamas," said Fawzi Barhoum, Hamas' spokesman.

The donors raised about 4.5 billion U.S. dollars in aid to rebuild the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip following a large-scale Israeli military offensive that took place in December and January.

Hamas, which seized Gaza by force from President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement in 2007, was not invited to the conference and the donors stressed that Hamas should be put aside from overseeing there construction process.

"The aim of the conferees was to bolster Abu Mazen's (Abbas) authority of West Bank and to intervene in our internal affairs," Barhoum said.

As Egypt succeeded to resume reconciliation talks between Hamas and Fatah, Barhoum warned that the conference may "badly reflect on the unity talks in Cairo."

Senator’s bill would make it illegal for anyone under 18 to have a cigarette lighter

2009-03-02T03:26:00.000-08:00

By Scott Rothschild

Topeka — Firefighters and health officials Tuesday called for new restrictions aimed at keeping cigarette lighters out of the hands of children.

“Too many children have access to cigarette lighters because the lighters are displayed in stores where children can easily see them, reach them, take them or purchase them,” said state Sen. Oletha Faust-Goudeau, D-Wichita.

She told the Senate Federal and State Affairs Committee that she has seen cigarette lighters displayed next to candy on low shelves at checkout counters in many stores.

Her bill, Senate Bill 106, would make it illegal for a retailer to sell cigarette lighters to anyone under 18 and also make it illegal for anyone under 18 to have a lighter. Any person violating the measure would be subject to a $25 fine and court costs.

Retailers also would be required to keep the lighters out of reach, probably behind the counter.

“In our fire prevention efforts, we feel that there is absolutely no reason for any child under the age of 18 to have free access to or possess a cigarette lighter or any open flame device,” said Lt. Mark Chairs of the Wichita Fire Department.

Kansas Department of Health and Environment Secretary Roderick Bremby also supported the bill. He said that from 2002 to 2006, 1,285 fires were set by children, resulting in five deaths, 51 civilian injuries and 10 firefighter injuries, with more than $7.5 million in property losses.

But a representative of convenience stores said the proposed legislation added another layer of regulation and didn’t fix the problem.

Tom Palace, executive director of the Petroleum Marketers and Convenience Store Association, said the bill had several problems. He said it didn’t define cigarette lighter, and it forced clerks to ask for identification for someone purchasing “a 99 cent Bic lighter.”

He said many convenience stores didn’t have any space left behind the counter because of all the items they are required to place there, such as cigarettes and certain cold medicines.

And while firefighters and KDHE voiced support for the bill, the Kansas Fire Marshal’s Office opposed it, saying it didn’t have the $248,000 start-up costs to conduct the proposed required inspections.

State Sen. Tim Owens, R-Overland Park, also voiced concerns, saying that the way the bill was written, if a youngster started a fire with a cigarette lighter then he or she couldn’t be charged with arson, but the lesser crime of possessing a lighter.

The committee took no action on the measure.

Do Astronomers Believe in Extraterrestrial Life?

2009-02-26T04:21:00.000-08:00

by Phil Plait

The scoop: Believing that intelligent extraterrestrial life -- better known as alien life -- exists is one thing.

Believing that they have visited Earth in our short time on the planet is another. Astronomer, author and blogger Phil Plait explains.

When I give public talks, I can almost guarantee that during the Q&A I'll get asked: Do I believe in aliens and UFOs?

My answer usually gets a laugh: "Yes, and no."

As far as aliens go, I suspect pretty strongly that there's life in space. We know of over 300 planets orbiting other stars, and we've only just started looking. In our Milky Way Galaxy alone there are probably literally billions of planets. Life on Earth got started pretty rapidly, relatively speaking, after the crust cooled and liquid water formed, so we know it's not tough for life to get its start... and it's entirely possible there is microbial life inside icy moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn.

So thinking aliens exist has a pretty decent scientific basis. But them coming here is an entirely different beast.

There are tens of thousands of UFOs reported every year. That's one of the reasons a lot of people think aliens are visiting us: there's no way that there could be that many reports if some of them weren't real!

But that's bad reasoning. In fact, the vast majority of reported UFOs are mundane things in the sky. The planet Venus is incredibly bright; most people don't believe me when I point it out to them. They think it's a nearby airplane, or some other bright earthbound object.

Not only that, but if you're driving, it appears to follow you through the trees because it's so far away. If it's low to the horizon, turbulent air makes it flicker and change color. Does this sound familiar? How many UFO reports have you heard that say a huge object (people often mistake brightness for size) was following someone in their car, and it was rapidly changing color?

Yup. Venus.

Manmade satellites pass overhead several times an hour, and some brighten tremendously as a solar panel or mirrored surface catches the sun. Meteors blaze across the sky, ice crystals refract sunlight and moonlight, atmospheric effects make a distant object appear distorted and weirdly shaped. All of these have been mistaken for alien spacecraft.

So I know that most people misinterpret what they see. But there's something else too. If alien spaceships are really out there abducting us and playing chicken with our airplanes, then you'd expect that people who spend more time looking at the sky would see more of them. And who spends lots of time looking up?

Amateur astronomers. They are dedicated observers, out every night peering at the sky. If The Truth Is Out There, then amateur astronomers would be reporting far and away the vast majority of UFOs.

But they don't. Why not? Because they understand the sky! They know when a twinkling light is Venus, or a satellite, or a military flare, or a hot air balloon, and so they don't report it.

That, to me, is the killer argument that aliens aren't visiting us. If they were, the amateur astronomers would spot them.

Of course, you might say "But just because they don't see UFOs doesn't mean they aren't real. It just takes one to prove aliens are coming here!" That might be correct, but remember, we started off thinking they're coming here because so many UFOs are reported! Once you realize that the overwhelming majority of UFO cases are just everyday things, then that "it just takes one" argument gets a whole lot weaker.

But I'll surprise you, though: I agree. It really only does just take one. But that one better have good proof! Something better than a single eyewitness, a badly sketched object, a fuzzy photograph, or out-of-focus video (heck, with digital effects the way they are today, you can't even trust video that's crystal clear). It needs a sample of non-terrestrial metal. An actual alien. Some incontrovertible evidence that is impossible to deny.

But we never get that. Why not? I think it's because we're not being visited. When Klaatu comes and lands on the White House lawn, I'll be willing to change my mind. But until then, well, keep watching the skies. Learn what's up there, and what isn't. You might someday spot the genuine article.

But even if you don't, you get to discover what's really up there... and there's treasure aplenty in the sky to be had, even by us folks stuck here on planet Earth.

Phil Plait is an astronomer, lecturer and author who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope for 10 years. He is the creator of the Bad Astronomy blog and president of the James Randi Educational Foundation.

Dark Energy to Erase Big Bang's Fading Signal

2009-02-24T03:26:00.000-08:00

Irene Klotz, Discovery News

When astronomers in the distant future cast their eyes around the cosmos, they will come to the conclusion that our galaxy is alone in the universe.

Even with the most sensitive detectors, future scientists will not be able to observe the leftover radiation from the Big Bang explosion, study the motion of distant galaxies to conclude that space is expanding or even see distant objects.

In the future, the force astronomers now known as dark energy, will stretch the universe beyond detection, with objects receding faster than the speed of light.

"Nothing can move through space faster than the speed of light, but space can do whatever the hell it wants as far as we know," Arizona State University cosmologist Lawrence Krauss said last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.

Even without dark energy, there are regions of space moving away from us faster than the speed of light, Krauss added.

"When that happens, they carry objects with them, like a surfer on a wave. The light from those objects cannot reach us. So, eventually the universe will disappear before our eyes," Krauss said.

Scientists have some time to figure it out. Based on the currently understood estimates of inflation, the new dark ages won't occur for another 50 billion years or so. The sun would have long since died, likely taking Earth along with it, but civilizations could be living elsewhere in the galaxy.

"It's perfectly reasonable to expect that there will be civilizations not that different than our own that could arise, but they will live in an empty, dark universe," Krauss said.

Scientists are on a quest for what may be the smoking gun for this inflationary view of the universe -- gravitational waves, which might have been imprinted as polarity in the background radiation left over by the Big Bang explosion.

"I think we'll know in 10 years time whether we can detect gravitational waves," said Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Alan Guth.

In April, the European Space Agency plans to launch its Planck telescope which will study cosmic background radiation. Physicists also may get some clues from experiments conducted in the world's biggest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, which will be used to produce subatomic particles that may represent conditions in the extreme, high-energy environment of space.

"We live at a very interesting time, namely the only time in which we can empirically verify that we live in a very interesting time," Krauss said.

Hong Kong stocks up on Citi report, China measures

2009-02-23T04:21:00.000-08:00

Associated Press

Hong Kong's main index surged nearly 4 percent Monday amid reports the U.S. government might take a bigger stake in troubled banking giant Citigroup.

The blue-chip Hang Seng benchmark closed up 475.93 points, or 3.8 percent, at 13,175.10.

Expectations of further government stimulus measures to help China's real estate industry also buoyed shares.

The Wall Street Journal said late Sunday that New York-based Citigroup (nyse: C - news - people ) was negotiating to increase the U.S. government's stake in the teetering lender to as much as 40 percent.

"People are taking it as a positive sign," said Francis Lun, general manager of Fulbright Securities Ltd. "It shows the government will not allow a major bank to fail again. They've learned their lesson with Lehman Brothers (nyse: LEHMQ - news - people ) that the ramifications are so great, sometimes no amount of money can rebuild confidence."

Gains were widespread, with developers rising sharply.

Top Hong Kong developer Sun Hung Kai added 3.7 percent, while Cheung Kong (other-otc: CHEUY.PK - news - people ) advanced 4.4 percent. Sino Land was up 5.3 percent.

Al-Qaeda founder launches fierce attack on Osama bin Laden

2009-02-21T17:15:00.000-08:00

By David Blair in Cairo

Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, who goes by the nom de guerre Dr Fadl, helped bin Laden create al-Qaeda and then led an Islamist insurgency in Egypt in the 1990s.

But in a book written from inside an Egyptian prison, he has launched a frontal attack on al-Qaeda's ideology and the personal failings of bin Laden and particularly his Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Twenty years ago, Dr Fadl became al-Qaeda's intellectual figurehead with a crucial book setting out the rationale for global jihad against the West.

Today, however, he believes the murder of innocent people is both contrary to Islam and a strategic error. "Every drop of blood that was shed or is being shed in Afghanistan and Iraq is the responsibility of bin Laden and Zawahiri and their followers," writes Dr Fadl.

The terrorist attacks on September 11 were both immoral and counterproductive, he writes. "Ramming America has become the shortest road to fame and leadership among the Arabs and Muslims. But what good is it if you destroy one of your enemy's buildings, and he destroys one of your countries? What good is it if you kill one of his people, and he kills a thousand of yours?" asks Dr Fadl. "That, in short, is my evaluation of 9/11."

He is equally unsparing about Muslims who move to the West and then take up terrorism. "If they gave you permission to enter their homes and live with them, and if they gave you security for yourself and your money, and if they gave you the opportunity to work or study, or they granted you political asylum," writes Dr Fadl, then it is "not honourable" to "betray them, through killing and destruction".

In particular, Dr Fadl focuses his attack on Zawahiri, a key figure in al-Qaeda's core leadership and a fellow Egyptian whom he has known for 40 years. Zawahiri is a "liar" who was paid by Sudan's intelligence service to organise terrorist attacks in Egypt in the 1990s, he writes.

The criticisms have emerged from Dr Fadl's cell in Tora prison in southern Cairo, where a sand-coloured perimeter wall is lined with watchtowers, each holding a sentry wielding a Kalashnikov assault rifle. Torture inside Egyptian jails is "widespread and systematic", according to Amnesty International.

Zawahiri has alleged that his former comrade was tortured into recanting. But the al-Qaeda leader still felt the need to compose a detailed, 200-page rebuttal of his antagonist.

The fact that Zawahiri went to this trouble could prove the credibility of Dr Fadl and the fact that his criticisms have stung their target. The central question is whether this attack on al-Qaeda's ideology will sway a wider audience in the Muslim world.

Fouad Allam, who spent 26 years in the State Security Directorate, Egypt's equivalent of MI5, said that Dr Fadl's assault on al-Qaeda's core leaders had been "very effective, both in prison and outside".

He added: "Within these secret organisations, leadership is very important. So when someone attacks the leadership from inside, especially personal attacks and character assassinations, this is very bad for them."

A western diplomat in Cairo agreed with this assessment, saying: "It has upset Zawahiri personally. You don't write 200 pages about something that doesn't bother you, especially if you're under some pressure, which I imagine Zawahiri is at the moment."

Dr Fadl was a central figure from the very outset of bin Laden's campaign. He was part of the tight circle which founded al-Qaeda in 1988 in the closing stages of the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. By then, Dr Fadl was already the leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, an extremist movement which fought the Cairo regime until its defeat in the 1990s.

Dr Fadl fled to Yemen, where he was arrested after September 11 and transferred to Egypt, where he is serving a life sentence. "He has the credibility of someone who has really gone through the whole system," said the diplomat. "Nobody's questioning the fact that he was the mentor of Zawahiri and the ideologue of Egyptian Islamic Jihad."

Terrorist movements across the world have a history of alienating their popular support by waging campaigns of indiscriminate murder. This process of disintegration often begins with a senior leader publicly denouncing his old colleagues. Dr Fadl's missives may show that al-Qaeda has entered this vital stage.

Jobless hit with bank fees on benefits

2009-02-20T04:39:00.000-08:00

By CHRISTOPHER LEONARD, AP Business Writer

For hundreds of thousands of workers losing their jobs during the recession, there's a new twist to their financial pain: Even as they're collecting unemployment benefits, they're paying bank fees just to get access to their money.

Thirty states have struck such deals with banks that include Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp., JP Morgan Chase and US Bancorp, an Associated Press review of the agreements found. All the programs carry fees, and in several states the unemployed have no choice but to use the debit cards. Some banks even charge overdraft fees of up to $20 — even though they could decline charges for more than what's on the card.

"It's a racket. It's a scam," said Rachel Davis, a 38-year-old dental technician from St. Louis who was laid off in October. Davis was given a MasterCard issued through Central Bank of Jefferson City and recently paid $6 to make two $40 withdrawals.

The banks say their programs offer convenience. They also provide at least one way to tap the money at no charge, such as using a single free withdrawal to get all the cash at once from a bank teller. But the banks benefit from human nature, as people end up treating the cards like all the other plastic in their wallets.

The fees are raising questions from lawmakers who just recently voted to infuse banks with taxpayer money to keep them afloat.

Steven Adamske, spokesman for the U.S. House Financial Services Committee, said he wasn't aware of the debit card programs before he was contacted by the AP, but was concerned about card holder fees.

"Our hope ... would be that banks who are getting federal assistance would forgo these kinds of fees as we're trying to help everyone in society deal with this recession," Adamske said.

Some banks, depending on the agreement negotiated with each state, also make money on the interest they earn after the state deposits the money and before it's spent. The banks and credit card companies also get roughly 1 percent to 3 percent off the top of each transaction made with the cards.

Neither banks nor credit card companies will say how much money they are making off the programs, or what proportion of the revenue comes from user versus merchant fees or interest. It's difficult to estimate the profits because they depend on how often recipients use their cards and where they use them.

But the potential is clear.

In Missouri, for instance, 94,883 people claimed unemployment benefits through debit cards from Central Bank. Analysts say a recipient uses a card an average of six to 10 times a month. If each cardholder makes three withdrawals at an out-of-network ATM, at a fee of $1.75, the bank would collect nearly $500,000. If half of the cardholders also dial customer service three times in any given week (the first time is free; after that, it's 25 cents a call), the bank's revenue would jump to more than $521,000. That would yield $6.3 million a year.

Rachel Storch, a Democratic state representative, received a wave of complaints about the fees from autoworkers laid off from a suburban St. Louis Chrysler plant. She recently urged Gov. Jay Nixon to review the state's contract with Central Bank with an eye toward reducing the fees.

"I think the contract is unfair and potentially illegal to unemployment recipients," she said.

Central Bank did not return two messages seeking comment.

Glenn Campbell, a spokesman for Rep. Russ Carnahan, D-Mo., said the congressman would support a review of the debit card programs nationwide.

Another 10 states — including the unemployment hot spots of California, Florida and South Carolina — are considering such programs or have signed contracts. The remainder still use traditional checks or direct deposit.

With the national unemployment rate now at 7.6 percent, the market for bank-issued unemployment cards is booming. In 2003, states paid only $4 million of unemployment insurance through debit cards. By 2007, it had ballooned to $2.8 billion, and by 2010 it will likely rise to $10.5 billion, according to a study conducted by Mercator Advisory Group, a financial industry consulting firm.

The economic stimulus plan signed by President Barack Obama this week will increase federal unemployment benefits by $40 billion this year. Subsequently, there will be more money from which banks can collect fees. The U.S. Department of Labor allows the fees as long as states create a way for recipients to get their money for free, spokeswoman Suzy Bohnert said.

"Beyond that, the individual decides how to manage his drawdowns using the debit card," she said in an e-mail.

A typical contract looks like the agreement between Citigroup and the state of Kansas, which took effect in November. The state expects to save $300,000 a year by wiring payments to Citigroup instead of printing and mailing checks.

Citigroup's bill to the state: zero. The bank collects its revenue from fees paid by merchants and the unemployed.

"If you use your card the right way, you're not going to pay fees at all," said Paul Simpson, Citigroup's global head of public sector, health care and wholesale cards.

But that's not always practical.

Arthur Santa-Maria, a laid-off engineer who lives just outside Albuquerque, N.M., said he didn't pay any fees the first time he was laid off, for several months in 2007. His unemployment benefits were paid by paper checks. He found a new job last year but was laid off again last fall.

This time, he was issued a Bank of America debit card — a "prepaid" card in industry lingo — but he was surprised to learn he had to pay fees to get his money. He asked the bank to waive them. It said no. That's when Santa-Maria called back to ask how to check his account online. He logged on and saw that the call cost him a half dollar. To avoid more fees, Santa-Maria found a Bank of America ATM at a strip mall and withdrew $80 at no charge. When he got back to his car, he decided to take out the rest of his money — $250 — and deposit it in his bank account.

Afterward, Santa-Maria logged on to his account and saw a charge of $1.50 for two withdrawals in one day.

"They're trying to use my money to make money," Stanta-Maria said. "I just see banks trying to make that 50 cents or a buck and a half when I should be given the service for free."

New Mexico authorities bargained with Bank of America to get lower fees for unemployment recipients, said Carrie Moritomo, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Workforce Solutions. The state saves up to $1.5 million annually by switching from checks to debit cards.

Bank of America spokeswoman Britney Sheehan pointed out that the fees charged in New Mexico are similar to those charged in the 29 other states with unemployment debit cards. The bank believes "the fee schedule is reasonable and consistent with similar programs," she said.

Banks could issue unemployment debit cards with no fees for cardholders, but that would likely mean that states would have to pay more of the administrative costs, said Mark Harrington, director of marketing for Citigroup's prepaid card services. If a state demanded no cardholder fees and could pay the difference, Citigroup might enter such a contract.

"We would be open to that," Harrington said. "We're not looking to structure any programs where we would lose money, but we're definitely flexible."

Simpson noted that the cards can save money for jobless workers who have no bank accounts. In the past, these people had to use corner check-cashing shops that charged fees as high as 2 percent, or $6 for a $300 check. Now, they can swipe their cards at McDonald's, Wal-Mart or elsewhere for free.

Kenna Gortler, a laid-off paper mill worker in Oregon, said her union is advising members to avoid the debit cards and sign up to get their benefits through direct deposit. More than 300 of her fellow workers have lost their jobs at the mill in the last three months, and horror stories about ATM fees and overdraft charges are starting to filter back to others who are just now signing up for their benefits.

"It's discouraging," Gortler said. "People have limited funds and they don't need to be giving money to the banks. They need to be keeping that money to feed their families and pay bills."

Gaza victims describe being used as human shields by Hamas

2009-02-19T04:39:00.001-08:00

by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook
Palestinian Media Watch
p:+972 2 625 4140 e: pmw@pmw.org.il
f: +972 2 624 2803 w: www.pmw.org.il

Members of a Gaza family whose farm was turned into a "fortress" by Hamas
fighters have reported that they were helpless to stop Hamas from using them
as human shields. They told the official Palestinian Authority daily
newspaper that for years Hamas has used their property and homes for
military installations from which to launch rockets into Israel, dig tunnels
and store arms. According to the victims, those who tried to object were
shot in the legs by Hamas.

The following are excerpts from the article from the official Palestinian
Authority daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida:

"The Abd Rabbo family kept quiet while Hamas fighters turned their farm in
the Gaza strip into a fortress. Right now they are waiting for the aid
promised by the [Hamas] movement after Israel bombed the farm and turned it
into ruins...

The hill on which the Abd Rabbo family lives overlooks the Israeli town
Sderot, a fact that turned it into an ideal military position for the
Palestinian fighters, from which they have launched hundreds of rockets into
southern Israel during the last few years. Several of the Abd Rabbo family
members described how the fighters dug tunnels under their houses, stored
arms in the fields and launched rockets from the yard of their farm during
the nights.

The Abd Rabbo family members emphasize that they are not [Hamas] activists
and that they are still loyal to the Fatah movement, but that they were
unable to prevent the armed squads from entering their neighborhood at
night. One family member, Hadi (age 22) said: "You can't say anything to the
resistance [fighters], or they will accuse you of collaborating [with
Israel] and shoot you in the legs."

[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Jan. 27, 2009]

String theory officially useful, may not represent reality

2009-02-18T04:06:00.000-08:00

By John Timmer

Brookhaven National Laboratory has what is currently one of the highest energy particle accelerators on the planet. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) hosts collisions between the nuclei of gold atoms that are moving at roughly 99 percent of the speed of light, creating a quark soup similar to the one that existed immediately after the big bang. But the scientists running the experiments started noticing something funny about the data: instead of expanding evenly outward, the collision debris were ellipsoidal (think a 3-D ellipse). What was even stranger was that this sort of behavior had already been described, for a gas of lithium atoms at the opposite end of the temperature spectrum, at a fraction of a microkelvin. As these groups were talking about a collaboration, things got stranger still when string theorists started citing this work, since the behavior had already been predicted through their work—a fact that the physicists weren't aware of until a science reporter called to ask what they thought about it.

The tale of this unlikely collaboration unfolded at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, where the introductory remarks described just how far apart these systems are. In terms of temperature, the RHIC and chilled lithium differ by 19 orders of magnitude (that's a factor of 1019). When it comes to density, the difference is an astonishing 25 orders of magnitude. Meanwhile, the bit of string theory that describes the normal, four-dimensional (3-D + time) behavior of these systems can be predicted by modeling a four-dimensional sphere wrapped around a five dimensional black hole.
Quantum viscosity runs hot and cold

The cold atomic cloud is probably easiest to understand, although John Thomas of Duke, who does the work, claimed that, when dragged to wine tastings with his wife's friends, "I wait until everyone's sufficiently drunk before explaining what we do." His short description is that he makes bowls of light; in principle, the first steps in his system involve the sort of laser cooling that our Chris Lee has described in the past. This can only get things down to a bit under a kelvin above absolute zero, but Thomas then loosens the laser trap, and a few atoms evaporate off, taking most of the remaining heat with them. The end result is an atomic cloud at one-tenth of a microkelvin.

The 6Li atoms that he uses have up and down spins that form an analog of the cooper pairs of electrons that cause high-temperature superconductivity, so his system allows theorists to test some of their ideas in an accessible experimental system. But it also has interesting properties when in a magnetic field. At a specific magnetic field strength, the interactions between the paired atoms start to go asymptotic and, when at a very precise point, the interactions vanish and quantum effects dominate. When the laser trap is released again, the atoms expand elliptically, displaying essentially the smallest amount of quantum viscosity possible. Because the system is experimentally possible, they were able (on the advice of string theorists—more on that below) to measure both the viscosity and entropy, and found that they were related directly to one divided by four π.
Smaller accelerator, bigger atoms: Brookhaven's RHIC

Out at the other end of the temperature spectrum, the collisions in the RHIC were producing what Brookhaven's Barbara Jacack termed "quark soup." In normal matter, quarks interact by exchanging gluons with a limited number of partners. But, at the densities that exist immediately after these collisions, quarks can exchange multiple gluons with multiple partners, leading to longer-range interactions that are more similar to those in a liquid. Two aspects of the behavior seen by RHIC's detectors, however, were a bit surprising. The first is the ellipsoidal expansion that marks the behavior of perfect quantum liquids that we mentioned above. The second is that, although radiation can pass across the small cluster of quark soup, the actual quarks, it appeared, could not. Jacack likened the fact that even the heavy charm quark didn't make it across the collision to a set of bowling pins stopping an incoming ball.

Like Thomas, talking to string theorists allowed Jacack and her team to look for some specific properties—in this case, shock waves of a particular type—of the quark soup. So far, it's looking like they're there. RHIC is about to undergo a retrofit that should make it easier to study this, and the stimulus package may have some money for the DOE that could accelerate the work.
The theory needs a five-dimensional black hole, but reality may not

Clifford Johnson of USC then spoke about how a specific application of string theory helped tie everything together. As he described it, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) works very well at describing the interactions of a limited number of particles, and its successes in the early 1970s caused researchers to abandon an earlier version of string theory. But QCD doesn't work that well at the densities seen in the RHIC, where ensembles of particles have emergent behavior—as Johnson noted, a single water molecule isn't wet; that's a property that emerges from a population of water molecules. And this, along with a few other vexing problems, has allowed string theory back in the game.

"String theory," Johnson said, "having failed to explain something, got resurrected a few years on and was used to explain everything," or at least provide a quantum description of gravity. He got interested in the problem of describing quantum black holes, which are far smaller than the macroscopic ones we've observed in space. Based on their emission of quantum radiation, they have to have an internal structure, one that our lack of a quantum gravity is preventing us from probing. (During the questions, it became clear that Johnson is one of the few people hoping that the LHC does spawn a small black hole.) It turns out, using the math of string theory, it's easy to examine a five-dimensional black hole simply by wrapping a four-dimensional sheet around it. When you do that, however, a lot of three-dimensional QCD behavior pops out of the equations—"the bugs of string theory become features," as Johnson put it.
Image courtesy of icanhascheezburger.com

In the extra dimensions, gravitons get pulled towards, and then bounce off, the black hole, undergoing interference as they do. That interference apparently describes the behavior seen in both of these real-world systems. Johnson was emphatic that this doesn't mean that the experiments that have used these string theory models are a test of the theory; rather, it means that the predictions of string theory are being used to guide experiments, which is a measure of its utility.

As for whether there's really an extradimensional black hole tucked away in these conditions, Johnson described himself as "agnostic." It may be possible, he said, to find a way to describe this behavior without resorting to anything beyond our familiar dimensions, but, at the moment, string theory's models are simple and functional, so there's no reason not to use them. In the meantime, everyone seems excited about the prospect of further collaboration. As Jacack said when showing a slide with a certain image of a kitten playing with yarn, "you know your field has hit the big time when you make it into lolcats."