The odds of impact in the year 2029 by a recently discovered asteroid are unlikely to change much in the next few weeks, astronomers said Monday.
Last Thursday, Dec. 23, scientists announced that a space rock named 2004 MN4 had about a 1-in-300 chance of striking Earth on April 13, 2029. On Friday, the risk was upgraded as more observations rolled in. The asteroid was given an unprecedented risk rating of 4 on the Torino Scale, which means it warrants careful monitoring. The odds at various times were put at 1-in-63 and 1-in-45.
As of Monday, the chances of an impact on April 13, 2029 stood at about 1-in-40, or 2.6 percent.
Experts point out that means a 97.4 percent chance the giant boulder will miss, and they stress that the odds are likely to go down to zero, eventually, when more detailed observations of its path are made. Significant revision -- if it comes -- probably won't happen soon.
"Slow changes should be expected for the next days and weeks, but probably nothing too dramatic unless the Arecibo [Observatory] radar weighs in late January or early February," Don Yeomans, as asteroid expert at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told SPACE.com on Monday.
Surprisingly worrisome
2004 MN4 is about a quarter mile (400 meters) wide, large enough to cause considerable local or regional damage were it to hit the planet. It is larger than the asteroid that carved Meteor Crater in Arizona thousands of years ago, and much bigger than one that exploded in the air above Siberia in 1908, flattening thousands of square miles of forest.
This latest potentially threatening asteroid was discovered in June and spotted again this month. It circles the Sun, but unlike most asteroids that reside in a belt between Mars and Jupiter, the 323-day orbit of 2004 MN4 lies mostly within the orbit of Earth.
JPL scientists, and a separate research group in Italy, continually refine the projected orbit as new observations are provided by observatories around the world. Given the limited sightings, they can predict only a general area of space through which 2004 MN4 will pass when it makes what will be, at the least, a close flyby of Earth on April 13, 2029.
The odds of an impact by the newly discovered object took astronomers by surprise.
"I hadn't expected to see such a high probability of impact -- recognizing that there are still 39 chances in 40 that it won’t impact -- by such a large object in my lifetime," said Clark Chapman of the Southwest Research Institute.
Chapman studies asteroids and is a founding member of the B612 group, which promotes the idea of deflecting an asteroid if one is ever found to be on a collision course with our planet.
Quiet coverage
The lack of media hype surrounding 2004 MN4 has been another pleasant surprise.
In a handful of memorable instances going back about six years, scientists announced space rocks with long odds of Earth collisions, and media outlets made big headlines of the small data. Sometimes the scientists put the data out to the press in a manner that some considered inflammatory, and other times they were criticized for keeping it largely out of public view.
In each case, the impact odds evaporated within hours or days as the orbits were pinned down. But headlines were not typically rewritten, and scientists have grown to worry about alarming the public unnecessarily.
With 2004 MN4, Yeomans and his JPL colleagues quietly issued an informational statement on the JPL web site last Thursday and updated it Friday.
"We decided long ago that keeping the public and media in the dark was a very bad idea, so we try to maintain a sober assessment on the web site as often as necessary," Yeomans said. "So far the media has shown very good sense on this one. I hope this is due to our maturing ideas on near-Earth objects."
'Highly unusual'
Meanwhile, 2004 MN4 is remarkable given current asteroid search technology and the limited funding provided, mostly by NASA. Never has a space rock been found -- after several days of observation -- to have such high odds of collision on such a near-term future date.
"I think 2004 MN4 stands as highly unusual in the context of present survey programs," said Alan Harris, senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in La Canada, Calif. "That may change when we have new surveys."
As more detailed searches come online, more asteroids will be found, Harris said via email, but orbit forecasts are expected to be more accurate. Overall, he figures situations like that with 2004 MN4 will occur "somewhat more often, but not nearly in proportion to the increased discovery rate."
For now, scientists have plenty to worry about with 2004 MN4.
Harris said Arecibo observations, if they come in late January or early February, could "dramatically improve the determination of the orbit, which would change the impact probability estimate greatly one way or the other, most likely -- but not certainly -- downward."
Monday, November 15, 2004
Surprising Second Black Hole Found in Milky Way's Center By Robert Roy BrittSenior Science Writerposted: 15 November 200406:23 am ET
Astronomers think they have found a rare if not unique black hole very near the center of the Milky Way. That would make two of the beasts in that part of the galaxy.
The discovery also adds weight to the idea that black holes come in three sizes, essentially small, medium and large.
Stellar black holes -- the remains of collapsed stars, are common. They typically harbor as much mass as a few suns. And for years, scientists have known there are supermassive black holes in many galaxies; one with the mass of more than three million suns anchors the Milky Way.
The newly detected object appears to be an intermediate mass black hole, packing about 1,300 solar masses.
Intermediate mass black holes ought to exist, some theorists say, because they should have been the building blocks of supermassive black holes. A few should be left scattered around any respectable galaxy. But attempts to discover them -- data suggest two others exist in our galaxy -- have so far proved inconclusive.
Black holes can't be seen, because everything that falls into them, including light, is trapped. But the swift motions of gas and stars near an otherwise invisible object allows astronomers to calculate that it's a black hole and even to estimate its mass.
If the newfound object, catalogued as GCIRS 13E, is indeed a middleweight black hole, it is likely a rare variety, perhaps one of kind, that formed farther out and has been lured to the galactic center. It is now less than 1.5 light-years from the fringes of the known supermassive black hole. That's much closer than our Sun is to the next nearest star.
Orbiting the presumed middleweight are seven stars, each of which in its prime was more than 40 times the mass of the Sun. Even as corpses they contain five to 10 solar masses. The whole setup is racing around the galactic center at 626,300 mph (280 kilometers per second).
Theory holds that these stars could not have formed in their present location, because the gravity of the nearby supermassive black hole wouldn't have allowed a gas cloud to contract into a star, says study leader Jean-Pierre Maillard of the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris.
On the other hand, Maillard told SPACE.com, the stars could not have formed too far from their present location. Why? Because there wasn't time. Massive stars die young. The seven examined in the study can't be more than 10 million years old, or they would have exploded already. So the seven stars, along with the middleweight black hole, all had to migrate inward within the past 10 million years -- an eyeblink in the 13 billion years of the galaxy's lifetime.
All this means the cluster probably formed about 60 light-years out beyond its current orbit, the calculations show.
Maillard said the seven stars are the remains of what likely was once a cluster of many stars. In such a globular cluster, as astronomers call it, a middleweight black hole could develop through runaway star collisions, other research has found.
"It might be unique," Maillard said of the black hole candidate. Other middleweights might exist in the galaxy, he said, but probably none so close to the center.
The study relied on data from several telescopes, including the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii and the European Southern Observatory in Chile.
There are other clues as to what's there. The location of the apparent middleweight black hole coincides with a source of X-rays noted by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Black holes are known to create intense X-ray emissions as gas swirls inward and is superheated.
Maillard cautions, however, that more observations are needed to pin down with certainty the existence and identity of the object.
The discovery, announced last week, is detailed in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Astronomers think they have found a rare if not unique black hole very near the center of the Milky Way. That would make two of the beasts in that part of the galaxy.
The discovery also adds weight to the idea that black holes come in three sizes, essentially small, medium and large.
Stellar black holes -- the remains of collapsed stars, are common. They typically harbor as much mass as a few suns. And for years, scientists have known there are supermassive black holes in many galaxies; one with the mass of more than three million suns anchors the Milky Way.
The newly detected object appears to be an intermediate mass black hole, packing about 1,300 solar masses.
Intermediate mass black holes ought to exist, some theorists say, because they should have been the building blocks of supermassive black holes. A few should be left scattered around any respectable galaxy. But attempts to discover them -- data suggest two others exist in our galaxy -- have so far proved inconclusive.
Black holes can't be seen, because everything that falls into them, including light, is trapped. But the swift motions of gas and stars near an otherwise invisible object allows astronomers to calculate that it's a black hole and even to estimate its mass.
If the newfound object, catalogued as GCIRS 13E, is indeed a middleweight black hole, it is likely a rare variety, perhaps one of kind, that formed farther out and has been lured to the galactic center. It is now less than 1.5 light-years from the fringes of the known supermassive black hole. That's much closer than our Sun is to the next nearest star.
Orbiting the presumed middleweight are seven stars, each of which in its prime was more than 40 times the mass of the Sun. Even as corpses they contain five to 10 solar masses. The whole setup is racing around the galactic center at 626,300 mph (280 kilometers per second).
Theory holds that these stars could not have formed in their present location, because the gravity of the nearby supermassive black hole wouldn't have allowed a gas cloud to contract into a star, says study leader Jean-Pierre Maillard of the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris.
On the other hand, Maillard told SPACE.com, the stars could not have formed too far from their present location. Why? Because there wasn't time. Massive stars die young. The seven examined in the study can't be more than 10 million years old, or they would have exploded already. So the seven stars, along with the middleweight black hole, all had to migrate inward within the past 10 million years -- an eyeblink in the 13 billion years of the galaxy's lifetime.
All this means the cluster probably formed about 60 light-years out beyond its current orbit, the calculations show.
Maillard said the seven stars are the remains of what likely was once a cluster of many stars. In such a globular cluster, as astronomers call it, a middleweight black hole could develop through runaway star collisions, other research has found.
"It might be unique," Maillard said of the black hole candidate. Other middleweights might exist in the galaxy, he said, but probably none so close to the center.
The study relied on data from several telescopes, including the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii and the European Southern Observatory in Chile.
There are other clues as to what's there. The location of the apparent middleweight black hole coincides with a source of X-rays noted by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Black holes are known to create intense X-ray emissions as gas swirls inward and is superheated.
Maillard cautions, however, that more observations are needed to pin down with certainty the existence and identity of the object.
The discovery, announced last week, is detailed in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Monday, September 27, 2004
BEIJING, China (Reuters) -- Bubonic plague has killed one person and made another sick in China, the Health Ministry has said, appealing for efforts nationwide to prevent further outbreaks.
The cases were found earlier this year in China's impoverished west -- one in Gansu province's Sunan county and another in Qinghai province's Qilian county, the ministry said on its Web site, www.moh.gov.cn.
It did not say specifically when the cases were detected but the outbreak had been brought under control, the Beijing News quoted health officials as saying.
The bubonic plague bacterium, carried by rats and fleas, is commonly thought to have been the cause of the Black Death which decimated the population of Europe in the 14th century.
It has been largely eradicated worldwide, but surfaces from time to time.
Dozens of cases were reported in China in the 1990s.
Hubble Lifts Fog on Early Universe By Robert Roy BrittSenior Science Writerposted: 24 September 200406:42 am ET
Astronomers have found what they believe to be several of the earliest star-forming galaxies, in a detailed analysis of Hubble Space Telescope images released earlier this year.
The new examination of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UDF) imagery was done by five separate teams, working since the data was revealed to the public in March. The effort involves close scrutiny of blurry dots of distant light amid a zoo of galaxy shapes, many of which are slightly closer in space and more modern in time.
Researchers are looking for the first galaxies, whose radiation burned off a cosmic fog that enveloped the universe just after the Big Bang, according to theory.
Astronomers billed their findings, released Thursday, as a possible glimpse of the "end of the opening act" of galaxy formation.
The light from the young galaxies left them when the universe was just 5 percent of its present age, which is now approximately 13.7 billion years.
Cosmic fog
After the Big Bang, theorists say, the universe was hotter than the Sun. There were no stars, but rather a searing soup of hydrogen nuclei, and electrons that raced around on their own. As space expanded, the universe cooled, allowing the hydrogen nuclei to capture electrons, making what is called neutral hydrogen.
The universe was opaque, blocking the release of light like morning fog.
The first stars were incredibly massive, containing perhaps 200 times more material than the Sun, but they will perhaps never be seen because they were born amid this cosmic fog. In time, intense ultraviolet radiation from these stars stripped interstellar hydrogen of electrons. This reionization period, as it is called, lifted the fog, literally allowing light to travel through the growing cosmos.
The reionization epoch ended somewhere between 500 million and 1 billion years after the Big Bang.
Galaxies that developed during that time are so far away -- because everything in the universe has been expanding away from everything else ever since -- that they are difficult to detect.
The UDF images combined visible-light and infrared observations from Hubble. The result reveals that roughly a billion years after the Big Bang, the universe was already loaded with dwarf galaxies. Larger galaxies like our Milky Way had not yet formed (theorists think such mature galaxies evolved out of mergers of the smaller ones).
Tentative findings
The UDF contains somewhere between 54 and 108 of the most primordial known dwarf galaxies, all seen as dim red smudges.
The new investigation suggests galaxy formation began sometime prior to a billion years after the birth of the universe, but the five research teams don't agree on any specific timeline. A couple of intriguing new findings emerged, however.
When the UDF field iss compared to a broader and less sensitive survey of galaxies done by the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, there appears to be a concentration of the dwarf galaxies that spreads from one corner of the UDF field into the surrounding space.
Galaxy concentrations are expected, and they've been seen in the more modern universe. Finding one so early on means the more intense radiation from a tight collection of primordial galaxies would probably have caused more rapid reionization there than in surrounding areas with fewer galaxies.
"It is then likely that reionization proceeded at different speeds in different regions of the early universe," said James Rhoads of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Hubble for NASA.
Another team looked at how fast stars were born and found it to be lower than expected.
"At early times, the universe seems to undergo a rapid heating," explained Andrew Bunker of the University of Cambridge. "The main candidate for what caused this is ultraviolet radiation, which can be generated as stars are born.
"Our results suggest this was not the case, the small number of star forming galaxies found in the Ultra Deep Field may not be sufficient to do this. Perhaps this heating happened further back in time, closer to the Big Bang."
The lengthy observations needed to capture the scant number of photons coming from the nascent galaxies stretched Hubble to the limit of its abilities. Researchers said the next step in exploring the first epoch of galaxy formation will require upgrades to Hubble or the launch of a planned successor, the James Webb Space Telescope.
"For the first time, we at last have real data to address this final frontier -- but we need more observations," said Richard Ellis of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif.
Air Leaks from Mars via Planet's Tail By Robert Roy BrittSenior Science Writerposted: 27 September, 20047 a.m. ET
Like a comet, Mars has a tail, a stream of particles pushed away from the planet by the Sun's energy.
New measurements of the Martian tail reveal how much air the planet loses to space every day and allow scientists to estimate the tremendous loss that may have occurred billions of years ago, making the red planet the dry and cold world it is.
Theory holds that Mars once had a thick atmosphere, but today it is about 1 percent as dense as the air on Earth. Nobody is sure exactly where it all went, but a planetary tail, kicked up by a solar wind, is one likely culprit.
Naked to space
Unlike Earth, Mars is not protected by a strong magnetic field. So charged particles riding out on the solar wind -- a constant stream from the Sun -- are able to interact directly with Mars' atmosphere, energizing particles there until they reach the escape velocity of the planet.
"The atmosphere of an unmagnetized planet like the present Mars is effectively dehydrated by the solar wind," explained study leader Rickard Lundin of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics. "The solar wind carries energy and momentum directly into the ionosphere and upper atmosphere of Mars."
The escaping particles that were observed are called ions, Lundin explained. They are oxygen, hydrogen and molecules such as carbon dioxide that have lost an electron and become positively charged.
About 1 kilogram of mass is lost to space every second, Lundin told SPACE.com. That would be equal to 2.2 pounds of material if weighed on Earth.
Like a comet
Though the tail of Mars is not visible to the eye, the process is much like what the Sun does to volatile substances on the surface of a comet. "The tail of a comet illustrates this very well," Lundin said.
How all this affected ancient Mars is what scientists would really like to know.
Mars probably had a magnetic field 3.5 billion years ago, Lundin said, but it didn't stick. Thereafter, while the atmosphere was still presumably dense -- perhaps 10 times thicker than today -- the loss rate for water and other substances would have been perhaps 100 times higher than it is now, Lundin said.
The measurements were made by the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter. The results are detailed in the Sept. 24 issue of the journal Science.
Young Mars
Reconstruction of the red planet's past reveals acid rain and briny seas.
Four billion years ago, Mars's atmosphere was four times as dense as Earth's is today. What would Mars's oceans have looked like 4 billion years ago? Scientists have worked out the answer, and found a planet with a climate ideally suited to life. Their model also answers a planetary puzzle: if Mars was once a warm, wet 'greenhouse' planet rich in carbon dioxide, why does its surface contain so few carbonate minerals?Scientists believe that the martian atmosphere must once have been thick with carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that would have kept the young planet warm enough for liquid water to carve its mark so clearly on the landscape.Some of this carbon dioxide should have been trapped in tell-tale traces of carbonate minerals such as siderite (iron carbonate) that solidified from the oceans. Geologists have seen this happening on Earth, but NASA's orbiting craft, the Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey, have found very little carbonate on the red planet's surface.Alberto Fairen, a chemist from the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain, and his colleagues have worked out what kind of conditions must have been present on Mars for there to be so much carbon dioxide but so little carbonate. The answer, they conclude in an article published this week in Nature1, is that the oceans were acidic enough to stop any siderite solidifying. If Mars's oceans were richly salted with iron and sulphate ions, the seas' pH would have dropped to around 6.2; similar to some tap water, but not quite as acidic as vinegar. Earth's oceans today have a pH of about 8.As the oceans receded, any dissolved carbon dioxide would have been lost back into the atmosphere, and eventually stripped away from the planet by the harsh stream of solar particles bombarding the planet. There is evidence to support the scientists' scenario. NASA's exploration rover Opportunity recently found large quantities of sulphate minerals such as jarosite on Mars.Acid rainThe team has used this assumption to paint a detailed picture of the young planet. Today's martian atmosphere is at less than one-hundredth the pressure of Earth's atmosphere. But the scientists say that 4 billion years ago, volcanic eruptions would have flooded Mars with sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide, to create an atmosphere with four times the pressure of Earth's.This atmosphere supplied a steady drizzle of acid rain, which dissolved iron, magnesium and other minerals as it trickled into the oceans, putting roughly a gram of iron in every 22 litres of seawater. The briny seas would also have contained the same concentration of sulphate that is formed by dissolving a teaspoon of Epsom salts (magnesium sulphate) in about five litres of water."We know from the geological history that there has been plenty of volcanism on Mars, so these concentrations are reasonable if there was also a huge carbon dioxide reservoir," says Baker."The resulting scenario is very exciting because the cycle allows long residence times for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," adds Fairen. "Basically, the lack of carbonates in the martian surface could have helped to keep Mars warm for longer." A warm planet is good news for the prospect that life once existed there. The team's martian model shares much of its chemistry with parts of the Rio Tinto, in south-west Spain. This acidic river, in which high concentrations of iron and sulphur are dissolved, teems with living creatures including bacteria, yeast and fungi.
The cases were found earlier this year in China's impoverished west -- one in Gansu province's Sunan county and another in Qinghai province's Qilian county, the ministry said on its Web site, www.moh.gov.cn.
It did not say specifically when the cases were detected but the outbreak had been brought under control, the Beijing News quoted health officials as saying.
The bubonic plague bacterium, carried by rats and fleas, is commonly thought to have been the cause of the Black Death which decimated the population of Europe in the 14th century.
It has been largely eradicated worldwide, but surfaces from time to time.
Dozens of cases were reported in China in the 1990s.
Hubble Lifts Fog on Early Universe By Robert Roy BrittSenior Science Writerposted: 24 September 200406:42 am ET
Astronomers have found what they believe to be several of the earliest star-forming galaxies, in a detailed analysis of Hubble Space Telescope images released earlier this year.
The new examination of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UDF) imagery was done by five separate teams, working since the data was revealed to the public in March. The effort involves close scrutiny of blurry dots of distant light amid a zoo of galaxy shapes, many of which are slightly closer in space and more modern in time.
Researchers are looking for the first galaxies, whose radiation burned off a cosmic fog that enveloped the universe just after the Big Bang, according to theory.
Astronomers billed their findings, released Thursday, as a possible glimpse of the "end of the opening act" of galaxy formation.
The light from the young galaxies left them when the universe was just 5 percent of its present age, which is now approximately 13.7 billion years.
Cosmic fog
After the Big Bang, theorists say, the universe was hotter than the Sun. There were no stars, but rather a searing soup of hydrogen nuclei, and electrons that raced around on their own. As space expanded, the universe cooled, allowing the hydrogen nuclei to capture electrons, making what is called neutral hydrogen.
The universe was opaque, blocking the release of light like morning fog.
The first stars were incredibly massive, containing perhaps 200 times more material than the Sun, but they will perhaps never be seen because they were born amid this cosmic fog. In time, intense ultraviolet radiation from these stars stripped interstellar hydrogen of electrons. This reionization period, as it is called, lifted the fog, literally allowing light to travel through the growing cosmos.
The reionization epoch ended somewhere between 500 million and 1 billion years after the Big Bang.
Galaxies that developed during that time are so far away -- because everything in the universe has been expanding away from everything else ever since -- that they are difficult to detect.
The UDF images combined visible-light and infrared observations from Hubble. The result reveals that roughly a billion years after the Big Bang, the universe was already loaded with dwarf galaxies. Larger galaxies like our Milky Way had not yet formed (theorists think such mature galaxies evolved out of mergers of the smaller ones).
Tentative findings
The UDF contains somewhere between 54 and 108 of the most primordial known dwarf galaxies, all seen as dim red smudges.
The new investigation suggests galaxy formation began sometime prior to a billion years after the birth of the universe, but the five research teams don't agree on any specific timeline. A couple of intriguing new findings emerged, however.
When the UDF field iss compared to a broader and less sensitive survey of galaxies done by the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, there appears to be a concentration of the dwarf galaxies that spreads from one corner of the UDF field into the surrounding space.
Galaxy concentrations are expected, and they've been seen in the more modern universe. Finding one so early on means the more intense radiation from a tight collection of primordial galaxies would probably have caused more rapid reionization there than in surrounding areas with fewer galaxies.
"It is then likely that reionization proceeded at different speeds in different regions of the early universe," said James Rhoads of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Hubble for NASA.
Another team looked at how fast stars were born and found it to be lower than expected.
"At early times, the universe seems to undergo a rapid heating," explained Andrew Bunker of the University of Cambridge. "The main candidate for what caused this is ultraviolet radiation, which can be generated as stars are born.
"Our results suggest this was not the case, the small number of star forming galaxies found in the Ultra Deep Field may not be sufficient to do this. Perhaps this heating happened further back in time, closer to the Big Bang."
The lengthy observations needed to capture the scant number of photons coming from the nascent galaxies stretched Hubble to the limit of its abilities. Researchers said the next step in exploring the first epoch of galaxy formation will require upgrades to Hubble or the launch of a planned successor, the James Webb Space Telescope.
"For the first time, we at last have real data to address this final frontier -- but we need more observations," said Richard Ellis of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif.
Air Leaks from Mars via Planet's Tail By Robert Roy BrittSenior Science Writerposted: 27 September, 20047 a.m. ET
Like a comet, Mars has a tail, a stream of particles pushed away from the planet by the Sun's energy.
New measurements of the Martian tail reveal how much air the planet loses to space every day and allow scientists to estimate the tremendous loss that may have occurred billions of years ago, making the red planet the dry and cold world it is.
Theory holds that Mars once had a thick atmosphere, but today it is about 1 percent as dense as the air on Earth. Nobody is sure exactly where it all went, but a planetary tail, kicked up by a solar wind, is one likely culprit.
Naked to space
Unlike Earth, Mars is not protected by a strong magnetic field. So charged particles riding out on the solar wind -- a constant stream from the Sun -- are able to interact directly with Mars' atmosphere, energizing particles there until they reach the escape velocity of the planet.
"The atmosphere of an unmagnetized planet like the present Mars is effectively dehydrated by the solar wind," explained study leader Rickard Lundin of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics. "The solar wind carries energy and momentum directly into the ionosphere and upper atmosphere of Mars."
The escaping particles that were observed are called ions, Lundin explained. They are oxygen, hydrogen and molecules such as carbon dioxide that have lost an electron and become positively charged.
About 1 kilogram of mass is lost to space every second, Lundin told SPACE.com. That would be equal to 2.2 pounds of material if weighed on Earth.
Like a comet
Though the tail of Mars is not visible to the eye, the process is much like what the Sun does to volatile substances on the surface of a comet. "The tail of a comet illustrates this very well," Lundin said.
How all this affected ancient Mars is what scientists would really like to know.
Mars probably had a magnetic field 3.5 billion years ago, Lundin said, but it didn't stick. Thereafter, while the atmosphere was still presumably dense -- perhaps 10 times thicker than today -- the loss rate for water and other substances would have been perhaps 100 times higher than it is now, Lundin said.
The measurements were made by the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter. The results are detailed in the Sept. 24 issue of the journal Science.
Young Mars
Reconstruction of the red planet's past reveals acid rain and briny seas.
Four billion years ago, Mars's atmosphere was four times as dense as Earth's is today. What would Mars's oceans have looked like 4 billion years ago? Scientists have worked out the answer, and found a planet with a climate ideally suited to life. Their model also answers a planetary puzzle: if Mars was once a warm, wet 'greenhouse' planet rich in carbon dioxide, why does its surface contain so few carbonate minerals?Scientists believe that the martian atmosphere must once have been thick with carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that would have kept the young planet warm enough for liquid water to carve its mark so clearly on the landscape.Some of this carbon dioxide should have been trapped in tell-tale traces of carbonate minerals such as siderite (iron carbonate) that solidified from the oceans. Geologists have seen this happening on Earth, but NASA's orbiting craft, the Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey, have found very little carbonate on the red planet's surface.Alberto Fairen, a chemist from the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain, and his colleagues have worked out what kind of conditions must have been present on Mars for there to be so much carbon dioxide but so little carbonate. The answer, they conclude in an article published this week in Nature1, is that the oceans were acidic enough to stop any siderite solidifying. If Mars's oceans were richly salted with iron and sulphate ions, the seas' pH would have dropped to around 6.2; similar to some tap water, but not quite as acidic as vinegar. Earth's oceans today have a pH of about 8.As the oceans receded, any dissolved carbon dioxide would have been lost back into the atmosphere, and eventually stripped away from the planet by the harsh stream of solar particles bombarding the planet. There is evidence to support the scientists' scenario. NASA's exploration rover Opportunity recently found large quantities of sulphate minerals such as jarosite on Mars.Acid rainThe team has used this assumption to paint a detailed picture of the young planet. Today's martian atmosphere is at less than one-hundredth the pressure of Earth's atmosphere. But the scientists say that 4 billion years ago, volcanic eruptions would have flooded Mars with sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide, to create an atmosphere with four times the pressure of Earth's.This atmosphere supplied a steady drizzle of acid rain, which dissolved iron, magnesium and other minerals as it trickled into the oceans, putting roughly a gram of iron in every 22 litres of seawater. The briny seas would also have contained the same concentration of sulphate that is formed by dissolving a teaspoon of Epsom salts (magnesium sulphate) in about five litres of water."We know from the geological history that there has been plenty of volcanism on Mars, so these concentrations are reasonable if there was also a huge carbon dioxide reservoir," says Baker."The resulting scenario is very exciting because the cycle allows long residence times for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," adds Fairen. "Basically, the lack of carbonates in the martian surface could have helped to keep Mars warm for longer." A warm planet is good news for the prospect that life once existed there. The team's martian model shares much of its chemistry with parts of the Rio Tinto, in south-west Spain. This acidic river, in which high concentrations of iron and sulphur are dissolved, teems with living creatures including bacteria, yeast and fungi.
Monday, September 20, 2004
Nanotubes work like radio antennas to convert light into electricity.
Carbon nanotubes, at just 50 nanometres wide, make perfect miniature aerials. Radio aerials have been around for over a century, and routinely receive information carried by radio waves into our homes. Now, finally, scientists have built an aerial that can do the same for light waves. The tiny antennas could be used in solar cells, or 'optical computers' that would move data round as light beams.Radio waves, like light waves, consist of an oscillating electric field. When radio waves hit a receiving aerial, which is generally made of metal wire, they move electrons back and forth inside it. This current can then be amplified and the signal converted into sound.But the aerial needs to be a roughly similar size to the wavelength of the incoming wave. This is easy enough for radio waves, which can have wavelengths measured in metres, but light-wave cycles are just a few hundred nanometres long, about 10,000 times smaller than the head of a pin.So physicist Yang Wang and his colleagues at Boston College, Massachusetts, have made an array of carbon nanotubes of just that length. The 50-nanometre-wide tubes make ideal miniature aerials because they conduct electricity well, so electrons can move freely up and down the tubes. When the researchers shone light waves at the tubes, they detected a current, resulting from electrons bouncing up and down in the tubes at around 1015 times every second.They have also created an array of nanotubes with a steady gradient of relatively short tubes at one end, through to long tubes at the other. This means that the whole array can detect visible light of any colour, says Zhifeng Ren, who worked on the project.The team found that when the light waves were oriented so that their electric field was perpendicular to the nanotubes, the electrical response disappeared. This confirms that the light wave's electric field is responsible for the current, says Wang.The work is tantalizing, says Mark Welland, a nanotechnology expert at the University of Cambridge, UK. He hopes the development could benefit optical computing. An array of carbon nanotubes could convert the light beam of data inside such a computer into an electrical signal, he says, providing an interface with conventional electronics.The nanotubes might also enable a radically new design of solar cell, he says. Arrays of the long, thin wires could be spread over large areas to catch as much light as possible, convert it to electricity and deliver it along a circuit. A single material that can do all these things is "exactly what the ideal solar cell would consist of," he points out.
Carbon nanotubes, at just 50 nanometres wide, make perfect miniature aerials. Radio aerials have been around for over a century, and routinely receive information carried by radio waves into our homes. Now, finally, scientists have built an aerial that can do the same for light waves. The tiny antennas could be used in solar cells, or 'optical computers' that would move data round as light beams.Radio waves, like light waves, consist of an oscillating electric field. When radio waves hit a receiving aerial, which is generally made of metal wire, they move electrons back and forth inside it. This current can then be amplified and the signal converted into sound.But the aerial needs to be a roughly similar size to the wavelength of the incoming wave. This is easy enough for radio waves, which can have wavelengths measured in metres, but light-wave cycles are just a few hundred nanometres long, about 10,000 times smaller than the head of a pin.So physicist Yang Wang and his colleagues at Boston College, Massachusetts, have made an array of carbon nanotubes of just that length. The 50-nanometre-wide tubes make ideal miniature aerials because they conduct electricity well, so electrons can move freely up and down the tubes. When the researchers shone light waves at the tubes, they detected a current, resulting from electrons bouncing up and down in the tubes at around 1015 times every second.They have also created an array of nanotubes with a steady gradient of relatively short tubes at one end, through to long tubes at the other. This means that the whole array can detect visible light of any colour, says Zhifeng Ren, who worked on the project.The team found that when the light waves were oriented so that their electric field was perpendicular to the nanotubes, the electrical response disappeared. This confirms that the light wave's electric field is responsible for the current, says Wang.The work is tantalizing, says Mark Welland, a nanotechnology expert at the University of Cambridge, UK. He hopes the development could benefit optical computing. An array of carbon nanotubes could convert the light beam of data inside such a computer into an electrical signal, he says, providing an interface with conventional electronics.The nanotubes might also enable a radically new design of solar cell, he says. Arrays of the long, thin wires could be spread over large areas to catch as much light as possible, convert it to electricity and deliver it along a circuit. A single material that can do all these things is "exactly what the ideal solar cell would consist of," he points out.
Friday, September 10, 2004
Global suicide toll exceeds war and murder
13:37 08 September 04
NewScientist.com news service
Suicide kills more people each year than road traffic accidents in most European countries, the World Health Organization is warning. And globally, suicide takes more lives than murder and war put together, says the agency in a call for action.
The death toll from suicide – at almost one million people per year – accounts for half of all violent deaths worldwide, says the WHO. “Estimates suggest fatalities could rise to 1.5 million by 2020,” the agency warned on Wednesday.
"Suicide is a tragic global public health problem,” says Catherine Le Galès-Camus, WHO’s assistant director general for non-communicable diseases and mental health. “There is an urgent need for coordinated and intensified global action to prevent this needless toll."
The WHO is holding a meeting of experts in Geneva, Switzerland, to address suicide prevention ahead of its “World Suicide Prevention Day” on Friday.
"It's important to realise that suicide is preventable," points out Lars Mehlum, president of the International Association for Suicide Prevention. "And that having access to the means of suicide is both an important risk factor and determinant of suicide."
Muslim countries
The number of suicides in most European countries exceeds the number of annual traffic fatalities, says the WHO. In 2001, the global toll from suicide was greater than the 500,000 deaths from homicide and the 230,000 deaths from war combined.
And an estimated 10 to 20 million people survive failed suicide attempts each year, resulting in injury, hospitalisation and trauma, says the agency. However, the ultimate extent of the problem is unknown as full reliable data is unavailable.
The highest suicide rates are found in Eastern Europe, says WHO, whereas people in Latin America, Muslim countries and a few Asian nations are least likely to die by their own hand.
Suicide rates tend to increase with age but “there has recently been an alarming worldwide increase in suicidal behaviours amongst young people aged 15 to 25”, warns WHO. Men also successfully commit suicide more than women – with the exception of rural China and parts of India.
Blister packs
The most common methods for committing suicide include swallowing pesticides, using firearms and overdosing on painkillers. Curbing access to these methods is a crucial factor in preventing suicide.
“One recent breakthrough was the move by many pharmaceutical companies to market painkillers in blister packs rather than more easily accessible bottles, which had a significant impact on their use as a suicide method,” says WHO.
High self-esteem and social “connectedness” can protect against suicide. Psychosocial interventions based on these and appropriate treatment of mental disorders has cut suicides among people at risk in countries such as the UK and Finland, says WHO.
13:37 08 September 04
NewScientist.com news service
Suicide kills more people each year than road traffic accidents in most European countries, the World Health Organization is warning. And globally, suicide takes more lives than murder and war put together, says the agency in a call for action.
The death toll from suicide – at almost one million people per year – accounts for half of all violent deaths worldwide, says the WHO. “Estimates suggest fatalities could rise to 1.5 million by 2020,” the agency warned on Wednesday.
"Suicide is a tragic global public health problem,” says Catherine Le Galès-Camus, WHO’s assistant director general for non-communicable diseases and mental health. “There is an urgent need for coordinated and intensified global action to prevent this needless toll."
The WHO is holding a meeting of experts in Geneva, Switzerland, to address suicide prevention ahead of its “World Suicide Prevention Day” on Friday.
"It's important to realise that suicide is preventable," points out Lars Mehlum, president of the International Association for Suicide Prevention. "And that having access to the means of suicide is both an important risk factor and determinant of suicide."
Muslim countries
The number of suicides in most European countries exceeds the number of annual traffic fatalities, says the WHO. In 2001, the global toll from suicide was greater than the 500,000 deaths from homicide and the 230,000 deaths from war combined.
And an estimated 10 to 20 million people survive failed suicide attempts each year, resulting in injury, hospitalisation and trauma, says the agency. However, the ultimate extent of the problem is unknown as full reliable data is unavailable.
The highest suicide rates are found in Eastern Europe, says WHO, whereas people in Latin America, Muslim countries and a few Asian nations are least likely to die by their own hand.
Suicide rates tend to increase with age but “there has recently been an alarming worldwide increase in suicidal behaviours amongst young people aged 15 to 25”, warns WHO. Men also successfully commit suicide more than women – with the exception of rural China and parts of India.
Blister packs
The most common methods for committing suicide include swallowing pesticides, using firearms and overdosing on painkillers. Curbing access to these methods is a crucial factor in preventing suicide.
“One recent breakthrough was the move by many pharmaceutical companies to market painkillers in blister packs rather than more easily accessible bottles, which had a significant impact on their use as a suicide method,” says WHO.
High self-esteem and social “connectedness” can protect against suicide. Psychosocial interventions based on these and appropriate treatment of mental disorders has cut suicides among people at risk in countries such as the UK and Finland, says WHO.
Stroke victim robbed of her dreams
15:30 10 September 04
NewScientist.com news service
The stuff that dreams are made of is a chunk of grey matter deep down at the back of the human brain, reveals a study of a rare form of brain damage.
The case of a woman who lost the ability to dream for several months after a stroke has raised some interesting questions about how and why people dream.
Soon after the stroke, the 73-year-old woman reported a peculiar and incredibly vivid hallucination or dream. She was not sure whether she was awake or asleep, says Claudio Bassetti, a neurologist at the University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland, who documented her case. After that, she lost the ability to dream completely for about three months. This suggests that hallucinations and dreaming have the same origin, says Bassetti.
There have been cases of dream loss reported before, but this is the first time that anyone has studied a case thoroughly with brain scans and tests in a sleep lab to establish that the lack of dreams was not just down to a memory deficit.
Bassetti and his colleague Matthias Bischof report that the damage was to a part of the visual or occipital cortex, towards the back of the brain, on both sides.
Mental images
But Mark Solms, a sleep researcher from the University of Cape Town in South Africa, suggests that frontal brain regions, important in motivation and emotion, are vital for generating dreams. He thinks the occipital region, at the back of the brain, is important not in dream generation but in dream representation.
“These structures light up when we produce mental images,” says Solms. “The function of these tissues is perception.”
But more interesting than the location is the fact that everything else about the woman seemed to be normal. She showed no signs of any problems with memory, attention or any other mental abilities, and beyond a few visual disturbances in the first few days, normal vision. “She has no other cognitive problems after a full clinical assessment,” says Bassetti. “She has a normal visual imagination.”
Brief awakenings
“To me, this suggests - at least in adulthood - that dreams may not have any major function,” says Bassetti. “It supports the hypothesis that dreams reflect mental activity in the brain, but don’t have a specific function of their own.”
Even the woman’s rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep - the light sleep-state most commonly associated with dreaming - was normal. This reinforces the idea that REM sleep and dreaming have different origins and physical mechanisms, says Bassetti. But it also suggests that the function significance of dreams and REM sleep have been a little overemphasised, at least in adulthood, he adds.
Not everyone agrees with the interpretation. Solms points out that although mostly the woman’s sleep pattern is normal, it did seem to be disrupted by more frequent brief awakenings than expected.
“This is very interesting in a speculative direction,” he says. One of the oldest theories of dreaming is that dreams protect sleep. “If something threatens awakening, you have a dream experience instead.” People often dream about their alarm clocks, he points out.
Journal reference: Annals of Neurology (DOI: 10.1002/ana.20246)
15:30 10 September 04
NewScientist.com news service
The stuff that dreams are made of is a chunk of grey matter deep down at the back of the human brain, reveals a study of a rare form of brain damage.
The case of a woman who lost the ability to dream for several months after a stroke has raised some interesting questions about how and why people dream.
Soon after the stroke, the 73-year-old woman reported a peculiar and incredibly vivid hallucination or dream. She was not sure whether she was awake or asleep, says Claudio Bassetti, a neurologist at the University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland, who documented her case. After that, she lost the ability to dream completely for about three months. This suggests that hallucinations and dreaming have the same origin, says Bassetti.
There have been cases of dream loss reported before, but this is the first time that anyone has studied a case thoroughly with brain scans and tests in a sleep lab to establish that the lack of dreams was not just down to a memory deficit.
Bassetti and his colleague Matthias Bischof report that the damage was to a part of the visual or occipital cortex, towards the back of the brain, on both sides.
Mental images
But Mark Solms, a sleep researcher from the University of Cape Town in South Africa, suggests that frontal brain regions, important in motivation and emotion, are vital for generating dreams. He thinks the occipital region, at the back of the brain, is important not in dream generation but in dream representation.
“These structures light up when we produce mental images,” says Solms. “The function of these tissues is perception.”
But more interesting than the location is the fact that everything else about the woman seemed to be normal. She showed no signs of any problems with memory, attention or any other mental abilities, and beyond a few visual disturbances in the first few days, normal vision. “She has no other cognitive problems after a full clinical assessment,” says Bassetti. “She has a normal visual imagination.”
Brief awakenings
“To me, this suggests - at least in adulthood - that dreams may not have any major function,” says Bassetti. “It supports the hypothesis that dreams reflect mental activity in the brain, but don’t have a specific function of their own.”
Even the woman’s rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep - the light sleep-state most commonly associated with dreaming - was normal. This reinforces the idea that REM sleep and dreaming have different origins and physical mechanisms, says Bassetti. But it also suggests that the function significance of dreams and REM sleep have been a little overemphasised, at least in adulthood, he adds.
Not everyone agrees with the interpretation. Solms points out that although mostly the woman’s sleep pattern is normal, it did seem to be disrupted by more frequent brief awakenings than expected.
“This is very interesting in a speculative direction,” he says. One of the oldest theories of dreaming is that dreams protect sleep. “If something threatens awakening, you have a dream experience instead.” People often dream about their alarm clocks, he points out.
Journal reference: Annals of Neurology (DOI: 10.1002/ana.20246)
Likely First Photo of Planet Beyond the Solar System
By Robert Roy BrittSenior Science Writerposted: 10 September 200408:50 am ET
A group of European-led astronomers has made a photograph of what appears to be a planet orbiting another star. If so, it would be the first confirmed picture of a world beyond our solar system.
"Although it is surely much bigger than a terrestrial-size object [like Earth], it is a strange feeling that it may indeed be the first planetary system beyond our own ever imaged," said Christophe Dumas, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory.
SPACE.com revealed a similar imaging effort of another planet candidate in May by a U.S.-led team that used the Hubble Space Telescope. That possible planet has not been confirmed and could be a dim star in the background of the picture.
Otherwise, all of the more than 120 known extrasolar planets have been detected indirectly, by noting the shadow of a planet crossing in front of a star or a planet's gravitational effect on a star. Because planets are so dim compared to stars, technology has not been able to spot them amid stellar glare.
That is, perhaps, until now.
Young planet
The new picture shows a dim, red point of light that Dumas and his colleagues think is a young, giant planet something like Jupiter. It orbits a failed star known as a brown dwarf, a very dim type of star -- its core does not support nuclear fusion -- that astronomers have for years hoped would make for good planet hunting.
The brown dwarf, catalogued as 2M1207 and just 8 million years old, is 42 times less massive than the Sun, or some 25 times heftier than Jupiter.
The setup is 230 light-years away.
The possible planet is about five times as massive as Jupiter, the observations show. An analysis of its emissions found it contains water, which suggests its mass is in the range of planets rather than stars, the researchers announced today.
The object is still contracting into its final form and so is very warm, some 1,830 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 Celsius), according to the research team, which was led by ESO's Gael Chauvin.
The photograph was made at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile with an infrared camera, which records heat rather than visible light. A system of adaptive optics on the Very Large Telescope (it's 27 feet wide, or 8.2 meters) corrects for blurring effects of Earth's atmosphere, making detailed observations possible.
The discovery will be detailed in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
If it is a planet, the object orbits 55 times farther from the brown dwarf than Earth is from the Sun, or roughly twice the Earth-to-Neptune distance.
One remaining question, however, is whether the thing might instead be a star that's in the foreground or background and not gravitationally bound to the brown dwarf, a scenario the researchers say is "statistically very improbable."
Additional observations to monitor the movement of the two objects will reveal the answer within two years, the astronomers say.
How it formed
In separate work, Ray Jayawardhana of the University of Toronto has been studying the brown dwarf in question, 2M1207. He agrees that the newfound object is most likely in orbit around the brown dwarf. It could be a very dim brown dwarf in the foreground, he said, but that's doubtful.
The water found in the atmosphere, in the form of steam, "means it would have to be pretty cool and couldn't possibly be a star," Jayawardhana told SPACE.com.
Jayawardhana's team found that 2M1207, like a real star, has a surrounding disk of hydrogen gas, the leftovers of the brown dwarf's formation. But in contrast to how planets probably developed in our solar system, he does not think the planet was born out of the brown dwarf's disk. Instead, the planet and brown dwarf likely "formed together out of a clump of gas and dust," he said.
Another unsettled issue is whether an object of five Jovian masses is truly a planet. Some astronomers put the upper limit for planetary mass at 13 times what's in Jupiter. Others argue that a planet is must orbit a star and have formed out of its leftovers. There is no official definition for the term "planet."
Jayawardhana doesn't care what the new object is called, it is still very interesting from a physics perspective.
"This discovery opens up a whole new regime of objects for us to look at and learn about," he said.
By Robert Roy BrittSenior Science Writerposted: 10 September 200408:50 am ET
A group of European-led astronomers has made a photograph of what appears to be a planet orbiting another star. If so, it would be the first confirmed picture of a world beyond our solar system.
"Although it is surely much bigger than a terrestrial-size object [like Earth], it is a strange feeling that it may indeed be the first planetary system beyond our own ever imaged," said Christophe Dumas, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory.
SPACE.com revealed a similar imaging effort of another planet candidate in May by a U.S.-led team that used the Hubble Space Telescope. That possible planet has not been confirmed and could be a dim star in the background of the picture.
Otherwise, all of the more than 120 known extrasolar planets have been detected indirectly, by noting the shadow of a planet crossing in front of a star or a planet's gravitational effect on a star. Because planets are so dim compared to stars, technology has not been able to spot them amid stellar glare.
That is, perhaps, until now.
Young planet
The new picture shows a dim, red point of light that Dumas and his colleagues think is a young, giant planet something like Jupiter. It orbits a failed star known as a brown dwarf, a very dim type of star -- its core does not support nuclear fusion -- that astronomers have for years hoped would make for good planet hunting.
The brown dwarf, catalogued as 2M1207 and just 8 million years old, is 42 times less massive than the Sun, or some 25 times heftier than Jupiter.
The setup is 230 light-years away.
The possible planet is about five times as massive as Jupiter, the observations show. An analysis of its emissions found it contains water, which suggests its mass is in the range of planets rather than stars, the researchers announced today.
The object is still contracting into its final form and so is very warm, some 1,830 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 Celsius), according to the research team, which was led by ESO's Gael Chauvin.
The photograph was made at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile with an infrared camera, which records heat rather than visible light. A system of adaptive optics on the Very Large Telescope (it's 27 feet wide, or 8.2 meters) corrects for blurring effects of Earth's atmosphere, making detailed observations possible.
The discovery will be detailed in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
If it is a planet, the object orbits 55 times farther from the brown dwarf than Earth is from the Sun, or roughly twice the Earth-to-Neptune distance.
One remaining question, however, is whether the thing might instead be a star that's in the foreground or background and not gravitationally bound to the brown dwarf, a scenario the researchers say is "statistically very improbable."
Additional observations to monitor the movement of the two objects will reveal the answer within two years, the astronomers say.
How it formed
In separate work, Ray Jayawardhana of the University of Toronto has been studying the brown dwarf in question, 2M1207. He agrees that the newfound object is most likely in orbit around the brown dwarf. It could be a very dim brown dwarf in the foreground, he said, but that's doubtful.
The water found in the atmosphere, in the form of steam, "means it would have to be pretty cool and couldn't possibly be a star," Jayawardhana told SPACE.com.
Jayawardhana's team found that 2M1207, like a real star, has a surrounding disk of hydrogen gas, the leftovers of the brown dwarf's formation. But in contrast to how planets probably developed in our solar system, he does not think the planet was born out of the brown dwarf's disk. Instead, the planet and brown dwarf likely "formed together out of a clump of gas and dust," he said.
Another unsettled issue is whether an object of five Jovian masses is truly a planet. Some astronomers put the upper limit for planetary mass at 13 times what's in Jupiter. Others argue that a planet is must orbit a star and have formed out of its leftovers. There is no official definition for the term "planet."
Jayawardhana doesn't care what the new object is called, it is still very interesting from a physics perspective.
"This discovery opens up a whole new regime of objects for us to look at and learn about," he said.
Tuesday, September 07, 2004
THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic blasted a decision to impose defense lawyers on him as "legal fiction" on Tuesday as his first witness began her testimony at his war crimes trial.
The court assigned Milosevic two British counsel last week to speed up the hearing which has been delayed numerous times because of his ill health.
Milosevic, a law graduate from Belgrade University, had been conducting his own defense since his trial opened in February 2002.
He has declined to see British lawyers Steven Kay and Gillian Higgins.
Milosevic criticised the decision to impose counsel as Kay prepared to call the first defence witness -- retired Belgrade law professor Smilja Avramov, who taught him when he was an undergraduate.
"You took away my right to defense and put it in the hands of Mr Kay. He does not represent me. He represents you," Milosevic told the court.
"Defense through an imposed lawyer is a simple legal fiction. I insist that you give me back my right to defence," Milosevic said before presiding judge Patrick Robinson cut him off.
The decision to impose counsel marked a turning point in what is regarded as Europe's most significant war crimes trial since top Nazis were tried at Nuremberg after World War II, prompting speculation about Milosevic's cooperation in court in the months ahead.
The former Yugoslav leader is charged with 66 counts of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s.
The defense has opened months later than planned because of repeated disruptions due to Milosevic's heart condition and high blood pressure.
Milosevic frowned as Kay started to question Avramov.
"He was an excellent student. He displayed a great deal of interest, especially in international economic law. He had intellectual curiosity," she told the court.
The court assigned Milosevic two British counsel last week to speed up the hearing which has been delayed numerous times because of his ill health.
Milosevic, a law graduate from Belgrade University, had been conducting his own defense since his trial opened in February 2002.
He has declined to see British lawyers Steven Kay and Gillian Higgins.
Milosevic criticised the decision to impose counsel as Kay prepared to call the first defence witness -- retired Belgrade law professor Smilja Avramov, who taught him when he was an undergraduate.
"You took away my right to defense and put it in the hands of Mr Kay. He does not represent me. He represents you," Milosevic told the court.
"Defense through an imposed lawyer is a simple legal fiction. I insist that you give me back my right to defence," Milosevic said before presiding judge Patrick Robinson cut him off.
The decision to impose counsel marked a turning point in what is regarded as Europe's most significant war crimes trial since top Nazis were tried at Nuremberg after World War II, prompting speculation about Milosevic's cooperation in court in the months ahead.
The former Yugoslav leader is charged with 66 counts of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s.
The defense has opened months later than planned because of repeated disruptions due to Milosevic's heart condition and high blood pressure.
Milosevic frowned as Kay started to question Avramov.
"He was an excellent student. He displayed a great deal of interest, especially in international economic law. He had intellectual curiosity," she told the court.
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- The radio telescope at Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory will begin mapping the known galaxy on Friday, scientists said.
The radio telescope, the world's most sensitive listening device that is powerful enough to hear planets forming several billion lights years away, received six more radio receivers to expand its range.
The $1 million upgrade, nicknamed the ALFA project, was completed a few weeks ago and 12 scientists will begin using the telescope Friday to map the night sky for future generations, astronomer Dan Werthimer said.
Arecibo expects to find thousands of new pulsars, supernovas, black holes and planets.
The map, with its collection of detailed data about location, identity and properties of what is in space, will go far beyond anything currently in use, researchers say. No such map has been made until now because the telescope had a limited field of view.
"The new upgrade is like having seven Arecibo observatories at once," Werthimer said. "You can see seven different parts of the galaxy simultaneously. The mapping will be seven times faster."
The mapping could be completed in a few months if the observatory devoted all of its telescope hours to the ALFA project, said Sixto Gonzalez, observatory director. However, the process is likely to take at least two years to allow other astronomers to work on other projects like searching for extraterrestrial life, he said.
ALFA, which stands for the Arecibo L-Band Feed Array, discovered its first pulsar last month during a test run, Gonzalez said.
The 1,000-foot-wide parabolic receiver -- composed of 38,000 aluminum tiles -- allows researchers to listen to sounds in space instead of depending on optics, like the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.
The information gathered will be compiled in a worldwide database scientists can access on the Internet, scientists say.
The observatory and its gargantuan dish were built in 1963 by the Department of Defense. It is now run by Cornell University under the National Foundation of Science.
The telescope's 1974 discovery of a twin neutron stars won a pair of scientists the Nobel Prize in 1993 by proving Albert Einstein's theory of gravity waves. Other finds include ice on Mercury and the first known planets outside our solar system.
However, the dish is best known for its cameo appearances in such films as "Contact" and the James Bond adventure "Golden Eye," although the search for alien life takes up less than 1 percent of the telescope's time.
The radio telescope, the world's most sensitive listening device that is powerful enough to hear planets forming several billion lights years away, received six more radio receivers to expand its range.
The $1 million upgrade, nicknamed the ALFA project, was completed a few weeks ago and 12 scientists will begin using the telescope Friday to map the night sky for future generations, astronomer Dan Werthimer said.
Arecibo expects to find thousands of new pulsars, supernovas, black holes and planets.
The map, with its collection of detailed data about location, identity and properties of what is in space, will go far beyond anything currently in use, researchers say. No such map has been made until now because the telescope had a limited field of view.
"The new upgrade is like having seven Arecibo observatories at once," Werthimer said. "You can see seven different parts of the galaxy simultaneously. The mapping will be seven times faster."
The mapping could be completed in a few months if the observatory devoted all of its telescope hours to the ALFA project, said Sixto Gonzalez, observatory director. However, the process is likely to take at least two years to allow other astronomers to work on other projects like searching for extraterrestrial life, he said.
ALFA, which stands for the Arecibo L-Band Feed Array, discovered its first pulsar last month during a test run, Gonzalez said.
The 1,000-foot-wide parabolic receiver -- composed of 38,000 aluminum tiles -- allows researchers to listen to sounds in space instead of depending on optics, like the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.
The information gathered will be compiled in a worldwide database scientists can access on the Internet, scientists say.
The observatory and its gargantuan dish were built in 1963 by the Department of Defense. It is now run by Cornell University under the National Foundation of Science.
The telescope's 1974 discovery of a twin neutron stars won a pair of scientists the Nobel Prize in 1993 by proving Albert Einstein's theory of gravity waves. Other finds include ice on Mercury and the first known planets outside our solar system.
However, the dish is best known for its cameo appearances in such films as "Contact" and the James Bond adventure "Golden Eye," although the search for alien life takes up less than 1 percent of the telescope's time.
Friday, September 03, 2004
BEIJING, China (Reuters) -- Bubonic plague has killed one person and made another sick in China, the Health Ministry has said, appealing for efforts nationwide to prevent further outbreaks.
The cases were found earlier this year in China's impoverished west -- one in Gansu province's Sunan county and another in Qinghai province's Qilian county, the ministry said on its Web site, www.moh.gov.cn.
It did not say specifically when the cases were detected but the outbreak had been brought under control, the Beijing News quoted health officials as saying.
The bubonic plague bacterium, carried by rats and fleas, is commonly thought to have been the cause of the Black Death which decimated the population of Europe in the 14th century.
It has been largely eradicated worldwide, but surfaces from time to time.
Dozens of cases were reported in China in the 1990s.
The cases were found earlier this year in China's impoverished west -- one in Gansu province's Sunan county and another in Qinghai province's Qilian county, the ministry said on its Web site, www.moh.gov.cn.
It did not say specifically when the cases were detected but the outbreak had been brought under control, the Beijing News quoted health officials as saying.
The bubonic plague bacterium, carried by rats and fleas, is commonly thought to have been the cause of the Black Death which decimated the population of Europe in the 14th century.
It has been largely eradicated worldwide, but surfaces from time to time.
Dozens of cases were reported in China in the 1990s.
'100 bodies' in siege school
Commandos hunt down hostage-takers
Friday, September 3, 2004 Posted: 10:26 AM EDT (1426 GMT)
BESLAN, Russia (CNN) -- More than 100 bodies have been found in a Russian school gym after troops stormed the building in a bid to end a terrifying hostage crisis, news agencies reported.
Russia's Interfax reported the toll Friday, citing its own correspondent. The figured matched an earlier report from Britain's ITV, which said its cameraman had managed to look inside the gym.
Interfax said dozens of people were killed when the roof collapsed at the school. Itar-Tass said more than 400 hostages and local residents had been injured and taken to hospitals.
An earlier report said 10 dead were taken from the scene. One local official said earlier that "most" of the hostages had survived.
Russian officials confirmed that dead bodies had been found at the scene, Itar-Tass said.
Interfax said 10 of the hostage-takers were killed in the standoff at the school in North Ossetia, near Chechnya.
Rebels in Chechnya have been fighting Russian forces and demanding independence for that small republic.
Hostage-takers and their captives fled in a scene of chaos amid explosions and gunfire as commandos stormed the building. Itar-Tass said soldiers blew a hole in the building to help hostages escape.
Russian special forces stormed the school after the hostage-takers opened fire as troops tried to remove bodies of those killed when the siege began two days ago.
Fighting was continuing on the school grounds.
An Interior Ministry official said troops seized the gym where hostages were held but that militants may be holding hostages in other buildings.
Some hostage-takers were still holed up in a building, according to one report, but special forces were not able to go in after them because the area was mined.
Russian commandos were pursuing the hostage-takers who fled. One media report said 13 militants had managed to escape.
There was another report that troops surrounded a residence where several militants were thought to have taken refuge.
There was also a report of two women terrorists dressed in white who were trying to flee and blend into the population.
Structures were said to be ablaze near the school. Huge explosions could be heard and plumes of smoke seen near the school. Small arms fire crackled.
The explosions could have resulted from mines and booby-traps planted near the school by militants, experts say.
Interfax quoted a defense official saying that "the terrorists planted a lot of mines and booby-traps filled with metal bolts in the gym."
Casualty figures trickled over the news wires but could not be confirmed. However, images were broadcast of dead and wounded people, as well as scores of survivors running from the school.
Friday's developments came as dozens of captives escaped amid sporadic explosions and small-arms fire that lasted more than an hour. Russian helicopters circled overhead but were never seen to open fire.
Scenes of the chaotic, chilling events unfolded on television.
Half-naked children dashed out of the school in every direction. Some were carried and helped by parents and adults. Many were bleeding. Others screamed. Many received medical treatment and food and water outside.
Paramedics pulled children out in stretchers and put them into cars and ambulances. Some were bandaged and badly injured; others were just simply distraught and relieved to be free.
Anxious adults milled around an area near the school where Russian soldiers were stationed.
The standoff began when the armed attackers raided the school on the first day of classes Wednesday. It lasted for well over 40 hours.
The attackers had been holding more than 350 children, parents and teachers hostage, although relatives and at lease one freed hostage put the number closer to 1,000.
During the ordeal, the terrorists did not allow water and food into the building.
One unidentified woman freed on Thursday told Izvestia newspaper that during the night children began to cry.
"Then the fighters would fire in the air to restore quiet. In the morning they told us they would not give us anything more to drink because the authorities were not ready to negotiate.
"When children went to the toilet, some tried to drink from the tap. The fighters stopped them straight away."
The crisis follows a bloody week in Russia.
A female suicide bomber killed nine people outside a Moscow subway station on Tuesday. Two suspected Chechen female suicide bombers downed two jetliners on August 24, killing all 89 people aboard the planes.
Russian officials have said the new wave of attacks is an attempt at revenge for last weekend's elections in Chechnya in which a Kremlin-backed candidate won the presidency.
The crisis is reminiscent of the October 2002 siege of a Moscow theater, when Chechen rebels threatened to kill some 700 hostages and demanded an end to the war in Chechnya.
Many of those attackers were women, with explosives belts strapped to their body, while the men were armed with pistols and rifles. Two massive bombs also had been placed in the theater.
That standoff ended when Russian forces piped poison gas into the theater to knock out everyone inside, but more than 120 hostages and 41 attackers were killed, most of them from the gas.
Commandos hunt down hostage-takers
Friday, September 3, 2004 Posted: 10:26 AM EDT (1426 GMT)
BESLAN, Russia (CNN) -- More than 100 bodies have been found in a Russian school gym after troops stormed the building in a bid to end a terrifying hostage crisis, news agencies reported.
Russia's Interfax reported the toll Friday, citing its own correspondent. The figured matched an earlier report from Britain's ITV, which said its cameraman had managed to look inside the gym.
Interfax said dozens of people were killed when the roof collapsed at the school. Itar-Tass said more than 400 hostages and local residents had been injured and taken to hospitals.
An earlier report said 10 dead were taken from the scene. One local official said earlier that "most" of the hostages had survived.
Russian officials confirmed that dead bodies had been found at the scene, Itar-Tass said.
Interfax said 10 of the hostage-takers were killed in the standoff at the school in North Ossetia, near Chechnya.
Rebels in Chechnya have been fighting Russian forces and demanding independence for that small republic.
Hostage-takers and their captives fled in a scene of chaos amid explosions and gunfire as commandos stormed the building. Itar-Tass said soldiers blew a hole in the building to help hostages escape.
Russian special forces stormed the school after the hostage-takers opened fire as troops tried to remove bodies of those killed when the siege began two days ago.
Fighting was continuing on the school grounds.
An Interior Ministry official said troops seized the gym where hostages were held but that militants may be holding hostages in other buildings.
Some hostage-takers were still holed up in a building, according to one report, but special forces were not able to go in after them because the area was mined.
Russian commandos were pursuing the hostage-takers who fled. One media report said 13 militants had managed to escape.
There was another report that troops surrounded a residence where several militants were thought to have taken refuge.
There was also a report of two women terrorists dressed in white who were trying to flee and blend into the population.
Structures were said to be ablaze near the school. Huge explosions could be heard and plumes of smoke seen near the school. Small arms fire crackled.
The explosions could have resulted from mines and booby-traps planted near the school by militants, experts say.
Interfax quoted a defense official saying that "the terrorists planted a lot of mines and booby-traps filled with metal bolts in the gym."
Casualty figures trickled over the news wires but could not be confirmed. However, images were broadcast of dead and wounded people, as well as scores of survivors running from the school.
Friday's developments came as dozens of captives escaped amid sporadic explosions and small-arms fire that lasted more than an hour. Russian helicopters circled overhead but were never seen to open fire.
Scenes of the chaotic, chilling events unfolded on television.
Half-naked children dashed out of the school in every direction. Some were carried and helped by parents and adults. Many were bleeding. Others screamed. Many received medical treatment and food and water outside.
Paramedics pulled children out in stretchers and put them into cars and ambulances. Some were bandaged and badly injured; others were just simply distraught and relieved to be free.
Anxious adults milled around an area near the school where Russian soldiers were stationed.
The standoff began when the armed attackers raided the school on the first day of classes Wednesday. It lasted for well over 40 hours.
The attackers had been holding more than 350 children, parents and teachers hostage, although relatives and at lease one freed hostage put the number closer to 1,000.
During the ordeal, the terrorists did not allow water and food into the building.
One unidentified woman freed on Thursday told Izvestia newspaper that during the night children began to cry.
"Then the fighters would fire in the air to restore quiet. In the morning they told us they would not give us anything more to drink because the authorities were not ready to negotiate.
"When children went to the toilet, some tried to drink from the tap. The fighters stopped them straight away."
The crisis follows a bloody week in Russia.
A female suicide bomber killed nine people outside a Moscow subway station on Tuesday. Two suspected Chechen female suicide bombers downed two jetliners on August 24, killing all 89 people aboard the planes.
Russian officials have said the new wave of attacks is an attempt at revenge for last weekend's elections in Chechnya in which a Kremlin-backed candidate won the presidency.
The crisis is reminiscent of the October 2002 siege of a Moscow theater, when Chechen rebels threatened to kill some 700 hostages and demanded an end to the war in Chechnya.
Many of those attackers were women, with explosives belts strapped to their body, while the men were armed with pistols and rifles. Two massive bombs also had been placed in the theater.
That standoff ended when Russian forces piped poison gas into the theater to knock out everyone inside, but more than 120 hostages and 41 attackers were killed, most of them from the gas.
Thursday, September 02, 2004
Mystery Dust Coats Local Neighborhood
City Analyzes Pollution Monitoring Stations To Track Source
POSTED: 8:30 p.m. EDT September 1, 2004
Authorities are working to locate the source of a mysterious orange dust that covered a local neighborhood on Wednesday.
Residents in the area of Charles and Division streets, near Jefferson Avenue and Schaeffer, woke to find the substance on their homes and cars, Local 4 reported.
"When I was leaving for work at quarter after 6, I could see it in my headlight coming down like rain, a red dust material," said Dave Long, of River Rouge.
Residents in the industrial city told Local 4 they've seen dust before, but said the orange color was unusual.
"I'm thinking I'm being poisoned over here or something," said Rae Ray, who lives in the area.
City officials said a contractor is analyzing three pollution monitoring stations to try to determine the contents of the dust.
"They questioned witnesses, obtained samples and took photographs, tried to trace the path of it to determine whether or not it was airborne or the result of truck traffic," said River Rouge City Attorney David Bower.
River Rouge is 70 percent industrial and has frequently filed lawsuits against companies suspected of polluting, Local 4 reported.
Resident Debbie Laxton said she will keep her 4-year-old son indoors until she finds out more about the dust.
"It's scary. We wonder if it's toxic, if it's going to cause some type of permanent damage," Laxton said.
Local 4 learned that the orange color of the dust is often associated with iron products.
Officials hoped to know the contents and source of the substance by Wednesday night.
City Analyzes Pollution Monitoring Stations To Track Source
POSTED: 8:30 p.m. EDT September 1, 2004
Authorities are working to locate the source of a mysterious orange dust that covered a local neighborhood on Wednesday.
Residents in the area of Charles and Division streets, near Jefferson Avenue and Schaeffer, woke to find the substance on their homes and cars, Local 4 reported.
"When I was leaving for work at quarter after 6, I could see it in my headlight coming down like rain, a red dust material," said Dave Long, of River Rouge.
Residents in the industrial city told Local 4 they've seen dust before, but said the orange color was unusual.
"I'm thinking I'm being poisoned over here or something," said Rae Ray, who lives in the area.
City officials said a contractor is analyzing three pollution monitoring stations to try to determine the contents of the dust.
"They questioned witnesses, obtained samples and took photographs, tried to trace the path of it to determine whether or not it was airborne or the result of truck traffic," said River Rouge City Attorney David Bower.
River Rouge is 70 percent industrial and has frequently filed lawsuits against companies suspected of polluting, Local 4 reported.
Resident Debbie Laxton said she will keep her 4-year-old son indoors until she finds out more about the dust.
"It's scary. We wonder if it's toxic, if it's going to cause some type of permanent damage," Laxton said.
Local 4 learned that the orange color of the dust is often associated with iron products.
Officials hoped to know the contents and source of the substance by Wednesday night.
They have become legendary in UFO circles. Huge, silent-running “Flying Triangles” have been seen by ground observers creeping through the sky low and slow near cities and quietly cruising over highways.
The National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), has catalogued the Triangle sightings, sifting through and combining databases to take a hard look at the mystery craft. Based in Las Vegas, Nevada, NIDS is a privately funded science institute with a strong research focusing on aerial phenomena.The results of their study have just been released and lead to some unnerving, still puzzling conclusions.
The study points out: “The United States is currently experiencing a wave of Flying Triangle sightings that may have intensified in the 1990s, especially towards the latter part of the 1990s. The wave continues. The Flying Triangles are being openly deployed over and near population centers, including in the vicinity of major Interstate Highways.”
Covert operations?
A key NIDS conclusion is that the actions of these triangular craft do not conform to previous patterns of covert deployment of unacknowledged aircraft. Furthermore, “neither the agenda nor the origin of the Flying Triangles are currently known.”
The years 1990-2004 have seen an intense wave of Flying Triangle aircraft, the study observes. Sifting through reports by hundreds of eyewitnesses, the NIDS assessment states that the behavior of the vehicles “does not appear consistent with the covert deployment of an advanced DoD [U.S. Department of the Defense] aircraft.” Rather, it is consistent with (a) the routine and open deployment of an unacknowledged advanced DoD aircraft or (b) the routine and open deployment of an aircraft owned and operated by non-DoD personnel, suggests the NIDS study.
“The implications of the latter possibility are disturbing, especially during the post 9/11 era when the United States airspace is extremely heavily guarded and monitored,” the NIDS study explains. “In support of option (a), there is much greater need for surveillance in the United States in the post 9/11 era and it is certainly conceivable that deployment of low altitude surveillance platforms is routine and open.”
Open, even brazen
According to Colm Kelleher, NIDS Administrator, the newly completed quasi “meta-analysis” of Flying Triangles melds three major U.S. databases: NIDS, the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) and data collected by independent researcher, Larry Hatch, the creator and owner of one of the largest and most comprehensive UFO databases in the world.
Kelleher said, the analysis indicates that deployment of Flying Triangles is open, not covert, and involves low-flying, brightly lit aircraft routinely deployed over populated areas including cities and Interstate highways.
“However, I cannot say whether these are U.S. Air Force aircraft. We simply don't know,” Kelleher told SPACE.com . “But it does not appear to be consistent with the covert patterns of deployment we saw with the F-117 and B-2 prior to their acknowledgement. This is open, even brazen,” he stated.
Stealth aircraft
For example, a perfunctory look at the how past DoD stealth aircraft programs were kept from public eye -- although eventually came to light -- is different from the patterns for the Flying Triangles.
Prior to acknowledgement of the F-117 and B-2 aircraft, only rare night time sightings occurred in the sparsely populated sections of Nevada, California and a few other states. Flying at low altitude over populated areas was rarely reported for the F-117 or B-2.
“In contrast, the Flying Triangle deployment, especially during the 1990s, appears more consistent with the open and public operation of these aircraft,” the study explains. The trend of open deployment of the Flying Triangles is not consistent with secret operation of an advanced DoD aircraft.
No attempt to hide
The database-driven study of the Flying Triangle shows the following patterns:
-- Sightings take place near cities and on Interstate highways-- They are seen at low altitude in plain sight of eyewitnesses-- They fly at extremely low speed or hover in plain sight of eyewitnesses-- The vehicles sometime fly with easily noticeable bright lights -- either blinding white lights, or have “bright disco lights” that usually flash combinations of red, green or blue.
The NIDS study emphasizes that the flying of these vehicles may be more in harmony with an attempt to display or to be noticed. There appears to be little or no attempt to hide. That finding has led to a modification of an earlier NIDS hypothesis that the Triangles are covertly deployed DoD aircraft.
While it is too early to dismiss the previously published NIDS correlation between Triangle sightings and a subset of U.S. Air Force Bases, the apparent association with centers of population may point away from a covert program. “Rather, it is consistent with routine and open deployment of an advanced aircraft,” the NIDS study concludes. Clustered on both coasts
During the ensuing years (2000-2004), NIDS received hundreds of reports from people in the United States and Canada reporting large triangular aircraft, often silent and often flying at very low altitude and at low air speed. In many cases, the objects were brightly lit. NIDS files also include reports of Flying Triangles from remote areas.
In mid 2004, NIDS reviewed its database that contains the locations of the Triangle sightings in the United States. The sightings of Triangles appear primarily adjacent to population centers and along Interstate Highways, with sightings clustered on both coasts.
NIDS has amassed almost 400 separate sightings of triangular/boomerang/wedge-shaped objects. Many of these craft are brightly lit, low flying, and traveling at unexpectedly low air speeds.
In earlier reports, NIDS outlined a tentative correlation between reported sightings of Triangles and the locations of Air Mobility Command and Air Force Materiel Command bases in the United States.
Like a Star Trek "uncloaking"
According to ground observers, the features of a Black Triangle are indeed impressive.
For example, the NIDS study includes the observation of a Port Washington Wisconsin person who encountered a large object that flew over her home at 500 feet altitude in October 1998. Her eyeing of the clear starry night was interrupted as the craft came into her field of view.
“Suddenly this monstrosity came out of the ‘blue’, just like a Star Trek 'uncloaking', no kidding…so quiet I couldn’t believe it and so huge…no more than 500 feet or so up, and big enough to take up my field of sky vision,” she reported.
Crude mathematics, the witness recounted, would make the vessel about 200 feet wide and 250 feet long.
Two camps
In wrapping up its look at the burgeoning number of Flying Triangle sightings in the United States, NIDS also took into account the work of writers and researchers delving into the topic both in the United States and abroad.
Those analyses fall into two camps: The Triangles are human-made, while the other says they are not.
“In 2004 it is extremely difficult to distinguish between these two possibilities since the former option overlaps heavily with legitimate national security concerns, while in the absence of much more physical evidence, the latter option is not testable,” the NIDS assessment concludes.
The National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), has catalogued the Triangle sightings, sifting through and combining databases to take a hard look at the mystery craft. Based in Las Vegas, Nevada, NIDS is a privately funded science institute with a strong research focusing on aerial phenomena.The results of their study have just been released and lead to some unnerving, still puzzling conclusions.
The study points out: “The United States is currently experiencing a wave of Flying Triangle sightings that may have intensified in the 1990s, especially towards the latter part of the 1990s. The wave continues. The Flying Triangles are being openly deployed over and near population centers, including in the vicinity of major Interstate Highways.”
Covert operations?
A key NIDS conclusion is that the actions of these triangular craft do not conform to previous patterns of covert deployment of unacknowledged aircraft. Furthermore, “neither the agenda nor the origin of the Flying Triangles are currently known.”
The years 1990-2004 have seen an intense wave of Flying Triangle aircraft, the study observes. Sifting through reports by hundreds of eyewitnesses, the NIDS assessment states that the behavior of the vehicles “does not appear consistent with the covert deployment of an advanced DoD [U.S. Department of the Defense] aircraft.” Rather, it is consistent with (a) the routine and open deployment of an unacknowledged advanced DoD aircraft or (b) the routine and open deployment of an aircraft owned and operated by non-DoD personnel, suggests the NIDS study.
“The implications of the latter possibility are disturbing, especially during the post 9/11 era when the United States airspace is extremely heavily guarded and monitored,” the NIDS study explains. “In support of option (a), there is much greater need for surveillance in the United States in the post 9/11 era and it is certainly conceivable that deployment of low altitude surveillance platforms is routine and open.”
Open, even brazen
According to Colm Kelleher, NIDS Administrator, the newly completed quasi “meta-analysis” of Flying Triangles melds three major U.S. databases: NIDS, the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) and data collected by independent researcher, Larry Hatch, the creator and owner of one of the largest and most comprehensive UFO databases in the world.
Kelleher said, the analysis indicates that deployment of Flying Triangles is open, not covert, and involves low-flying, brightly lit aircraft routinely deployed over populated areas including cities and Interstate highways.
“However, I cannot say whether these are U.S. Air Force aircraft. We simply don't know,” Kelleher told SPACE.com . “But it does not appear to be consistent with the covert patterns of deployment we saw with the F-117 and B-2 prior to their acknowledgement. This is open, even brazen,” he stated.
Stealth aircraft
For example, a perfunctory look at the how past DoD stealth aircraft programs were kept from public eye -- although eventually came to light -- is different from the patterns for the Flying Triangles.
Prior to acknowledgement of the F-117 and B-2 aircraft, only rare night time sightings occurred in the sparsely populated sections of Nevada, California and a few other states. Flying at low altitude over populated areas was rarely reported for the F-117 or B-2.
“In contrast, the Flying Triangle deployment, especially during the 1990s, appears more consistent with the open and public operation of these aircraft,” the study explains. The trend of open deployment of the Flying Triangles is not consistent with secret operation of an advanced DoD aircraft.
No attempt to hide
The database-driven study of the Flying Triangle shows the following patterns:
-- Sightings take place near cities and on Interstate highways-- They are seen at low altitude in plain sight of eyewitnesses-- They fly at extremely low speed or hover in plain sight of eyewitnesses-- The vehicles sometime fly with easily noticeable bright lights -- either blinding white lights, or have “bright disco lights” that usually flash combinations of red, green or blue.
The NIDS study emphasizes that the flying of these vehicles may be more in harmony with an attempt to display or to be noticed. There appears to be little or no attempt to hide. That finding has led to a modification of an earlier NIDS hypothesis that the Triangles are covertly deployed DoD aircraft.
While it is too early to dismiss the previously published NIDS correlation between Triangle sightings and a subset of U.S. Air Force Bases, the apparent association with centers of population may point away from a covert program. “Rather, it is consistent with routine and open deployment of an advanced aircraft,” the NIDS study concludes. Clustered on both coasts
During the ensuing years (2000-2004), NIDS received hundreds of reports from people in the United States and Canada reporting large triangular aircraft, often silent and often flying at very low altitude and at low air speed. In many cases, the objects were brightly lit. NIDS files also include reports of Flying Triangles from remote areas.
In mid 2004, NIDS reviewed its database that contains the locations of the Triangle sightings in the United States. The sightings of Triangles appear primarily adjacent to population centers and along Interstate Highways, with sightings clustered on both coasts.
NIDS has amassed almost 400 separate sightings of triangular/boomerang/wedge-shaped objects. Many of these craft are brightly lit, low flying, and traveling at unexpectedly low air speeds.
In earlier reports, NIDS outlined a tentative correlation between reported sightings of Triangles and the locations of Air Mobility Command and Air Force Materiel Command bases in the United States.
Like a Star Trek "uncloaking"
According to ground observers, the features of a Black Triangle are indeed impressive.
For example, the NIDS study includes the observation of a Port Washington Wisconsin person who encountered a large object that flew over her home at 500 feet altitude in October 1998. Her eyeing of the clear starry night was interrupted as the craft came into her field of view.
“Suddenly this monstrosity came out of the ‘blue’, just like a Star Trek 'uncloaking', no kidding…so quiet I couldn’t believe it and so huge…no more than 500 feet or so up, and big enough to take up my field of sky vision,” she reported.
Crude mathematics, the witness recounted, would make the vessel about 200 feet wide and 250 feet long.
Two camps
In wrapping up its look at the burgeoning number of Flying Triangle sightings in the United States, NIDS also took into account the work of writers and researchers delving into the topic both in the United States and abroad.
Those analyses fall into two camps: The Triangles are human-made, while the other says they are not.
“In 2004 it is extremely difficult to distinguish between these two possibilities since the former option overlaps heavily with legitimate national security concerns, while in the absence of much more physical evidence, the latter option is not testable,” the NIDS assessment concludes.
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Getting a Grip on Antimatter
By Michael SchirberStaff Writerposted: 31 August 200406:35 am ET
Research into what separates matter from antimatter is accelerating in particle physics experiments around the world. Scientists are hoping the difference will help explain why you, me and all the things around us are made of matter instead of its opposite.
Shortly after the Big Bang theoretically kicked off everything, the universe was a hot soup of equal parts matter and antimatter, scientists say. Why the former came to dominate is a question that physicists have yet to answer fully.
Recent results from the BaBar experiment in California have confirmed one departure between the two substances, but to solve the puzzle more deviations will have to be found.
"This was a very important step on the road to understanding the matter-antimatter asymmetry," said David MacFarlane, a physicist with the BaBar group. "This asymmetry is one of the fundamental questions of cosmology."
With equal mass but opposite electric charge, there are anti-particles that correspond to the proton, the electron, and the whole zoo of fundamental particles that physicists have so far catalogued.
Strange as they sound, these particles do exist, and they can be created. They just don't last long. If the existential partners come together, they completely annihilate each other.
This yin and yang of physics has been fodder for many science fiction plots. And the copious amount of energy that comes out of matter-antimatter annihilations might one day be put to use as a fuel source.
Alien screening
In his 1961-62 lectures, the Caltech professor Richard Feynman had his students imagine a distant alien civilization on an antimatter planet. If we were to contact them through radio, Feynman asked, how would we tell that they were made of antimatter?
Although the charges would all be reversed, their anti-hydrogen, anti-carbon, etc. would weigh as much as our elements. The energy levels would be the same as well. So their chemistry textbooks would be identical to ours.
There are, however, certain high-energy interactions that in our world behave as if left-handed, whereas in the antimatter world behave as if right-handed. But how do you tell someone which way is "left" over an interplanetary telephone? Feynman’s point was that you can’t, if all you can do is compare physics experiments.
The fact that antimatter acts as a mirror image of matter is called charge-parity (CP) symmetry. After Feynman’s lecture, experimentalists observed a few rare occasions where this symmetry was not upheld, and therefore, one could tell whether the alien on the other line was matter or antimatter.
A necessary disobedience
A world that always obeyed CP symmetry would be unlikely to have civilizations, planets, or galaxies. Played out on the matter-antimatter battlefield of the primordial universe, CP symmetry would lead to the complete destruction of everything.
In 1964, physicists discovered that the rules of CP were sometimes broken by particles called kaons. This violation showed up as a difference in the decay of kaons and anti-kaons, but it only happened in four out of a million events. This was enough, however, to give Andrei Sakharov, the Russian physicist, an idea for how the cosmos escaped mutual annihilation.
Sakharov determined that there were three criteria for allowing matter to win out over the Big Bang stalemate. One of these criteria was CP violation.
Before Sakharov, cosmologists did not have a way to approach the matter-antimatter asymmetry. "The discovery of CP violation made it a scientific question," said Michael Dine of the University of California Santa Cruz.
But the problem remained difficult. Much of the work since Sakharov’s revelation has gone into perfecting the Standard Model of particle physics. It took time to figure just how much CP violation was allowed in the Standard Model. It turns out, not very much.
Nearly forty years after CP violation was seen in kaons, scientists are just now beginning to detect the effect in another particle, the B meson.
B factories
B mesons are heavier than kaons, so they take more energy to create. They also have many more ways, or modes, to decay. "Each of these modes is harder to study," said Gordon Kane from the University of Michigan, "but they are more sensitive to CP violation."
To probe this sensitivity, some accelerators have become dedicated factories of B mesons.
At the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), high-speed electrons crash into high-speed anti-electrons. The energies of these opposing beams are tuned so that 25 percent of the collisions result in the creation of a B meson and an anti-B meson.
The BaBar experiment at the SLAC is a host of detectors that surround the collision point. BaBar has recorded more than 200 million B meson pairs. Both the particle and the anti-particle last only 1.5 trillionths of a second before decaying, but in high-energy physics, this is a relatively long lifetime.
The BaBar team focused their attention on one particular decay mode involving a kaon and another particle called a pion. "We found 910 examples of the B meson decaying to a kaon and a pion, but only 696 examples for the anti-B meson," explained BaBar physicist Marcello Giorgi. This 13 percent difference, announced earlier this month, was not surprising.
"It was expected in the Standard Model, but calculations are very complicated," Kane said. Theorists could only predict that the CP violation in this mode should be somewhere between 10 and 20 percent.
Not disobedient enough
For Kane and others, agreement with the Standard Model is not cause for celebration. "For people like me, it is somewhat disappointing," Dine said. "We were hoping for some discrepancy."
About a decade ago, cosmologists figured out that the Standard Model predicted a matter-antimatter asymmetry that was too small by a factor of 10 billion.
Part of the reason for this enormous failure is the smallness of the CP violation in the Standard Model. Scientists are exploring theories that go beyond the Standard Model. "There have to be other sources of CP violation," Dine said.
BaBar’s results, although not offering a solution to the cosmological puzzle, do provide a benchmark in searches for these kinds of new physics.
"They will help us identify when something is different," MacFarlane said.
There may be evidence for such anomalies in other B decays. Both BaBar and another B factory in Japan called Belle have tentatively detected a small discrepancy with the Standard Model in their data, as may have Fermilab in Chicago. "At this moment this is tantalizing," MacFarlane said.
Other scientists are withholding judgment. "I have a wait and see attitude," said Dine. "But I am speaking as one who is a little jaded."
By Michael SchirberStaff Writerposted: 31 August 200406:35 am ET
Research into what separates matter from antimatter is accelerating in particle physics experiments around the world. Scientists are hoping the difference will help explain why you, me and all the things around us are made of matter instead of its opposite.
Shortly after the Big Bang theoretically kicked off everything, the universe was a hot soup of equal parts matter and antimatter, scientists say. Why the former came to dominate is a question that physicists have yet to answer fully.
Recent results from the BaBar experiment in California have confirmed one departure between the two substances, but to solve the puzzle more deviations will have to be found.
"This was a very important step on the road to understanding the matter-antimatter asymmetry," said David MacFarlane, a physicist with the BaBar group. "This asymmetry is one of the fundamental questions of cosmology."
With equal mass but opposite electric charge, there are anti-particles that correspond to the proton, the electron, and the whole zoo of fundamental particles that physicists have so far catalogued.
Strange as they sound, these particles do exist, and they can be created. They just don't last long. If the existential partners come together, they completely annihilate each other.
This yin and yang of physics has been fodder for many science fiction plots. And the copious amount of energy that comes out of matter-antimatter annihilations might one day be put to use as a fuel source.
Alien screening
In his 1961-62 lectures, the Caltech professor Richard Feynman had his students imagine a distant alien civilization on an antimatter planet. If we were to contact them through radio, Feynman asked, how would we tell that they were made of antimatter?
Although the charges would all be reversed, their anti-hydrogen, anti-carbon, etc. would weigh as much as our elements. The energy levels would be the same as well. So their chemistry textbooks would be identical to ours.
There are, however, certain high-energy interactions that in our world behave as if left-handed, whereas in the antimatter world behave as if right-handed. But how do you tell someone which way is "left" over an interplanetary telephone? Feynman’s point was that you can’t, if all you can do is compare physics experiments.
The fact that antimatter acts as a mirror image of matter is called charge-parity (CP) symmetry. After Feynman’s lecture, experimentalists observed a few rare occasions where this symmetry was not upheld, and therefore, one could tell whether the alien on the other line was matter or antimatter.
A necessary disobedience
A world that always obeyed CP symmetry would be unlikely to have civilizations, planets, or galaxies. Played out on the matter-antimatter battlefield of the primordial universe, CP symmetry would lead to the complete destruction of everything.
In 1964, physicists discovered that the rules of CP were sometimes broken by particles called kaons. This violation showed up as a difference in the decay of kaons and anti-kaons, but it only happened in four out of a million events. This was enough, however, to give Andrei Sakharov, the Russian physicist, an idea for how the cosmos escaped mutual annihilation.
Sakharov determined that there were three criteria for allowing matter to win out over the Big Bang stalemate. One of these criteria was CP violation.
Before Sakharov, cosmologists did not have a way to approach the matter-antimatter asymmetry. "The discovery of CP violation made it a scientific question," said Michael Dine of the University of California Santa Cruz.
But the problem remained difficult. Much of the work since Sakharov’s revelation has gone into perfecting the Standard Model of particle physics. It took time to figure just how much CP violation was allowed in the Standard Model. It turns out, not very much.
Nearly forty years after CP violation was seen in kaons, scientists are just now beginning to detect the effect in another particle, the B meson.
B factories
B mesons are heavier than kaons, so they take more energy to create. They also have many more ways, or modes, to decay. "Each of these modes is harder to study," said Gordon Kane from the University of Michigan, "but they are more sensitive to CP violation."
To probe this sensitivity, some accelerators have become dedicated factories of B mesons.
At the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), high-speed electrons crash into high-speed anti-electrons. The energies of these opposing beams are tuned so that 25 percent of the collisions result in the creation of a B meson and an anti-B meson.
The BaBar experiment at the SLAC is a host of detectors that surround the collision point. BaBar has recorded more than 200 million B meson pairs. Both the particle and the anti-particle last only 1.5 trillionths of a second before decaying, but in high-energy physics, this is a relatively long lifetime.
The BaBar team focused their attention on one particular decay mode involving a kaon and another particle called a pion. "We found 910 examples of the B meson decaying to a kaon and a pion, but only 696 examples for the anti-B meson," explained BaBar physicist Marcello Giorgi. This 13 percent difference, announced earlier this month, was not surprising.
"It was expected in the Standard Model, but calculations are very complicated," Kane said. Theorists could only predict that the CP violation in this mode should be somewhere between 10 and 20 percent.
Not disobedient enough
For Kane and others, agreement with the Standard Model is not cause for celebration. "For people like me, it is somewhat disappointing," Dine said. "We were hoping for some discrepancy."
About a decade ago, cosmologists figured out that the Standard Model predicted a matter-antimatter asymmetry that was too small by a factor of 10 billion.
Part of the reason for this enormous failure is the smallness of the CP violation in the Standard Model. Scientists are exploring theories that go beyond the Standard Model. "There have to be other sources of CP violation," Dine said.
BaBar’s results, although not offering a solution to the cosmological puzzle, do provide a benchmark in searches for these kinds of new physics.
"They will help us identify when something is different," MacFarlane said.
There may be evidence for such anomalies in other B decays. Both BaBar and another B factory in Japan called Belle have tentatively detected a small discrepancy with the Standard Model in their data, as may have Fermilab in Chicago. "At this moment this is tantalizing," MacFarlane said.
Other scientists are withholding judgment. "I have a wait and see attitude," said Dine. "But I am speaking as one who is a little jaded."
Monday, August 30, 2004
The planet goes haywire Fires and floods, heatwaves and hurricanes - it's been a year of extreme weather. And there's more on the way as global warming kicks in, warns John Vidal Friday August 27, 2004
The Guardian
June was cold, the wettest in Britain for 100 years. At one point, it rained non-stop for more than 58 hours in London, the longest downpour ever recorded in the city. The result was severe flooding throughout the south-east. July, too, was miserable and August was "exceedingly cool, wet and windy" with strong gales, storm damage and a rotten harvest. Scotland shivered.
This was not the lost summer of 2004, but of 1903, well before global warming was ever considered as even a minor player in the world's climates.
There will always be freak weather and temperature and rainfall extremes, but what is extraordinary is that very wet summers such as those of 1903 or 2004, as well as intense heatwaves, storms and droughts, are coming thicker and faster as the world heats up. Ten of the past 14 years have been the hottest recorded, and this is linked by scientists to a rapid rise in levels of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere - which according to ice core samples tested in the Antarctic, are the highest in 440,000 years and still rising.
Almost all climate scientists, atmospheric chemists and oceanographers say the greenhouse effect has arrived and that we should expect more droughts, hurricanes, flash floods, forest fires and giant storms. The kind of extreme weather that happened once in 100 years, they say, could soon take place every 20 years.
There's plenty of evidence that 2004 is falling into this pattern. There have been major fires in southern France, California, Greece, Ireland, Nicaragua and Alaska, where five million acres have been burning. Drought is affecting large areas of east and southern Africa and there have been intense heatwaves in Spain, Portugal, Japan, and Australia.
But 2004 may be remembered for its floods. Just eight months into the year, Bangladesh, and to a lesser extent India and Nepal, have had some of the severest seen in decades, with tens of millions made homeless. Less noticed have been major floods in Hungary, Vietnam, Kenya, Romania, Lagos, Nicaragua, Iran, Siberia, Bosnia and Papua New Guinea. Meanwhile, 17,000 people needed help after huge snowstorms in the Andes and Korea, and there were heavy falls in unlikely countries such as southern Greece, Jordan and Syria.
Last week the European environment agency produced evidence that Europe was warming faster than expected and that the number of natural disasters had more than doubled in the past decade. Last year's pan-European drought cost 20,000 lives and billions of euros and the later floods affected at least 600,000. The agency, which said that most European glaciers were in fast retreat, warned people to expect more flash floods, mudslides, storms and droughts.
Happily, fewer people have died as a result of extreme weather this year. Last year was one of the worst on record, with the Red Cross estimating that up to 700 "natural disasters" claimed 50,000 lives, almost five times as many as in in 2002. Heatwaves in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan took temperatures up to 50C (122F). In China floods along the Huai and Yangtze rivers swept through 650,000 homes.
The economic cost of extreme weather is soaring. This month's Hurricane Charley caused £10bn of damage in the US. Typhoons in China and Taiwan have also caused enormous losses. Last year's losses worldwide topped £34bn.
But the most unusual weather event in 2004 could have been the 90mph hurricane that hit Catarina in southern Brazil in March. Hurricanes have never been recorded in the southern Atlantic, because the atmosphere does not provide enough "spin" near the surface to get them started and winds higher in the atmosphere tend to shear off any that threaten to form.
Whether it was a true freak of nature or what we can expect with global warming is hotly debated. Climate change scientists in Britain have predicted for some time that such unprecedented events in the south Atlantic would one day be a possibility. But few believed it would happen so soon.
New jaw grown on patient's back
The new bone was grown in a muscle on the patient's backA German man has been able to eat his first proper meal in nine years after surgeons rebuilt his face using a pioneering jaw-bone graft.
The 56-year-old man - who tucked into bread and sausages - had only been able to eat soft food and soup since part of his jaw-bone was removed due to cancer.
University of Kiel researchers "grew" a replacement jaw-bone in a muscle in the patient's back and grafted it in place.
The procedure, previously only tried on animals, was detailed in The Lancet.
The operation took place nine weeks ago, and the patient can now eat steak - but it has to be cut up for him because he has no teeth to bite through the meat.
The patient says he now wants a set of teeth fitted, so he can eat his steak before it gets cold. Doctors say he could get them next year.
3D scans
In cases such as his, surgeons usually take a piece of bone from elsewhere in the body, often the thigh, to repair the jaw.
But this damages the bone in that part of the body, which can itself lead to serious illness.
A patient who had previously lost his mandible through the result of a destructive tumour can now sit down to chew his first solid meals in nine years
Dr Stan Gronthos, Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science, Adelaide, Australia In this case, the patient's jaw had been bridged with a 7cm titanium reconstruction plate since his initial operation.
He was also taking the blood-thinning drug warfarin for an aortic aneurysm, which meant the traditional bone graft method carried a risk of post-operative bleeding.
So it was decided to attempt the new technique.
After taking a 3D computer tomography (CT) scan of the patient's head, they used computer aided design to recreate the missing portion of the jaw-bone (mandible).
The design was used to construct a teflon model, which was then covered with a titanium cage.
The teflon was then removed, and the cage filled with bone mineral blocks, coated with bone marrow and a protein which accelerates bone growth.
The transplant was then implanted into the latissimus dorsai muscle, below the right shoulder blade.
Doctors monitored its development, and CT scans showed new bone was forming.
After seven weeks of growth, the graft was removed, along with a flap of muscle containing blood vessels.
It was then attached to the stumps of the patient's original lower jaw.
The transplant enabled the patient to chew again, and within four weeks he was able to eat solid foods.
'Quality of life'
The researchers, led by Dr Patrick Warnke of the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at the University of Kiel, say there is a need for greater understanding about the long-term effects of the procedure.
Writing in The Lancet, they said: "The exciting nature of the result achieved in this patient to date has prompted our group to extend this trial.
"For us to draw firm conclusions, an extended period of follow-up is necessary."
But Dr Warnke told BBC News Online he hoped the procedure could help many other patients, adding: "In addition to helping patients such as this man, we hope it could be used in orthopaedic surgery."
He said implanting the cage into the patient's muscle meant his own tissue developed around it.
"Because it was his own tissue, we don't expect any problems of rejection."
He added: "It was a very successful operation, because when we fitted it to his existing jaw, it was a very good fit, We didn't have to make a lot of changes."
Dr Stan Gronthos, of the division of haematology at the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science in Adelaide, Australia, said the German research proved this technique could help patients with damaged jaw-bones.
He wrote in The Lancet: "Meanwhile, as the debate continues, a patient who had previously lost his mandible through the result of a destructive tumour can now sit down to chew his first solid meals in nine years, courtesy of a new mandible-like structured implant, resulting in an improved quality of life for that individual."
Scaled-Up Darkness
Could a single dark matter particle be light-years wide?
By George Musser UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY/KECK OBSERVATORY
SMALL GALAXIES such as NGC 3109 are rarer and less compacted than they would be if matter clumped freely, perhaps because colossal particles that might be the universe's "missing mass" resist clumping.In 1996 Discover magazine ran an April Fools' story about giant particles called "bigons" that could be responsible for all sorts of inexplicable phenomena. Now, in a case of life imitating art, some physicists are proposing that the universe's mysterious dark matter consists of great big particles, light-years or more across. Amid the jostling of these titanic particles, ordinary matter ekes out its existence like shrews scurrying about the feet of the dinosaurs.
This idea arose to explain a puzzling fact about dark matter: although it clumps on the vastest scales, creating bodies such as galaxy clusters, it seems to resist clumping on smaller scales. Astronomers see far fewer small galaxies and subgalactic gas clouds than a simple extrapolation from clusters would imply. Accordingly, many have suggested that the particles that make up dark matter interact with one another like molecules in a gas, generating a pressure that counterbalances the force of gravity.
The big-particle hypothesis takes another approach. Instead of adding a new property to the dark particles, it exploits the inherent tendency of any quantum particle to resist confinement. If you squeeze one, you reduce the uncertainty of its position but increase the uncertainty of its momentum. In effect, squeezing increases the particle's velocity, generating a pressure that counteracts the force you apply. Quantum claustrophobia becomes important over distances comparable to the particle's equivalent wavelength. Fighting gravitational clumping would take a wavelength of a few dozen light-years.
What type of particle could have such astronomical dimensions? As it happens, physicists predict plenty of energy fields whose corresponding particles could fit the bill--namely, so-called scalar fields. Such fields pop up both in the Standard Model of particle physics and in string theory. Although experimenters have yet to identify any, theorists are sure they're out there.
Cosmologists already ascribe cosmic inflation, and perhaps the dark energy (distinct from dark matter) that is now causing cosmic acceleration, to scalar fields. In these contexts, the fields work because they are the simplest generalization of Einstein's cosmological constant. If a scalar field changes slowly, it resembles a constant, both in its fixed magnitude and in its lack of directionality; relativity theory predicts it will produce a gravitational repulsion. But if the field changes or oscillates quickly enough, it produces a gravitational attraction, just like ordinary or dark matter. Physicists posited bodies composed of scalar particles as long ago as the 1960s, and the idea was revived in the late 1980s, but it only really started to take hold four years ago.
Two leaders of the subject are Tonatiuh Matos Chassin of the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Mexico City and Luis Ureña López of the University of Guanajuato. At a workshop at the Central University of Las Villas (UCLV) in Cuba in June, they described how scalar particles can reproduce the internal structure of galaxies: when the particles clump on galactic scales, they overlap to form a Bose-Einstein condensate--a giant version of the cold atom piles that experimenters have created over the past decade. The condensate has a mass and density profile matching those of real galaxies.
That inflation, dark energy and dark matter can all be laid at the doorstep of scalar fields suggests that they might be connected. Israel Quiros of UCLV argued at the workshop that the same field could account for both inflation and dark energy. Other physicists have worked on linking the two dark entities. "As my senior colleagues used to say, 'You only get to invoke the tooth fairy once,'" says Robert Scherrer of Vanderbilt University. "Right now we have to invoke the tooth fairy twice: we need to postulate a yet to be discovered particle as dark matter and an unknown source for dark energy. My model manages to explain both with a single field."But all these models suffer from a nagging problem. Because the wavelength of a particle is inversely proportional to its mass, the astronomical size corresponds to an almost absurdly small mass, about 10-23 electron volts (compared with the proton's mass of 109 electron volts). That requires the laws of physics to possess a hitherto unsuspected symmetry. "Such symmetries are possible, although they appear somewhat contrived," says physicist Sean Carroll of the University of Chicago. Moreover, the main motivation for big particles--their resistance to clumping--has become less compelling now that cosmologists have found that more prosaic processes, such as star formation, can do the trick. Still, as physicists cast about for some explanation of the mysteries of dark matter, it is inevitable that some pretty big ideas will float around.
Brain may produce its own antipsychotic drug
09:30 30 August 04
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition.
A cannabis-like substance produced by the brain may dampen delusional or psychotic experiences, rather than trigger them.
Heavy cannabis use has been linked to psychosis in the past, leading researchers to look for a connection between the brain's natural cannabinoid system and schizophrenia.
Sure enough, when Markus Leweke of the University of Cologne, Germany, and Andrea Giuffrida and Danielle Piomelli of the University of California, Irvine, looked at levels of the natural cannabis-like substance anandamide, they were higher in people with schizophrenia than in healthy controls.
The team measured levels of anandamide in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of 47 people suffering their first bout of schizophrenia, but who had not yet taken any drugs for it, and 26 people who had symptoms of psychosis and have a high risk of schizophrenia.
Compared with 84 healthy volunteers, levels were six times as high in people with symptoms of psychosis and eight times as high in those with schizophrenia.
"This is a massive increase in anandamide levels," Leweke told the National Cannabis and Mental Illness Conference in Melbourne, Australia, last week. And that is just in the CSF. Levels could be a hundred times higher in the synapses, where nerve signalling is taking place, he says.
Cause or effect
But were the high anandamide levels triggering the psychotic symptoms or a response to them? Leweke and his colleagues found, to their surprise, that the more severe people's schizophrenia was the lower their anandamide levels.
The team's theory is that rather than triggering psychosis, the substance is released in response to psychotic symptoms to help control them. People with the worst symptoms might be unable to produce sufficient anandamide to prevent them.
At some point in their lives, between 5 and 30 per cent of healthy people have had symptoms such as delusions or hallucinations, which can be triggered by something as simple as sleep deprivation. "All of us are potentially psychotic," says David Castle of the University of Melbourne. So for the body to have a system that prevents these experiences getting out of hand makes sense, he says.
The new findings suggest antipsychotic drugs could be developed that target the anandamide system, but it will not be simple. The active ingredient in cannabis, THC, binds to anandamide receptors.
But people with schizophrenia who use cannabis actually have more severe and frequent psychotic episodes than those who do not. This may be because THC makes anandamide receptors less sensitive.
Leweke's team also found anandamide levels lowest in people with schizophrenia who used cannabis more frequently, suggesting it may disrupt the system in other ways too. Up to 60 per cent of people with schizophrenia use cannabis.
A study by Castle, also reported at the Melbourne meeting, has found that people use the drug to get rid of unpleasant emotions associated with the disease such as anxiety and depression.
The Guardian
June was cold, the wettest in Britain for 100 years. At one point, it rained non-stop for more than 58 hours in London, the longest downpour ever recorded in the city. The result was severe flooding throughout the south-east. July, too, was miserable and August was "exceedingly cool, wet and windy" with strong gales, storm damage and a rotten harvest. Scotland shivered.
This was not the lost summer of 2004, but of 1903, well before global warming was ever considered as even a minor player in the world's climates.
There will always be freak weather and temperature and rainfall extremes, but what is extraordinary is that very wet summers such as those of 1903 or 2004, as well as intense heatwaves, storms and droughts, are coming thicker and faster as the world heats up. Ten of the past 14 years have been the hottest recorded, and this is linked by scientists to a rapid rise in levels of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere - which according to ice core samples tested in the Antarctic, are the highest in 440,000 years and still rising.
Almost all climate scientists, atmospheric chemists and oceanographers say the greenhouse effect has arrived and that we should expect more droughts, hurricanes, flash floods, forest fires and giant storms. The kind of extreme weather that happened once in 100 years, they say, could soon take place every 20 years.
There's plenty of evidence that 2004 is falling into this pattern. There have been major fires in southern France, California, Greece, Ireland, Nicaragua and Alaska, where five million acres have been burning. Drought is affecting large areas of east and southern Africa and there have been intense heatwaves in Spain, Portugal, Japan, and Australia.
But 2004 may be remembered for its floods. Just eight months into the year, Bangladesh, and to a lesser extent India and Nepal, have had some of the severest seen in decades, with tens of millions made homeless. Less noticed have been major floods in Hungary, Vietnam, Kenya, Romania, Lagos, Nicaragua, Iran, Siberia, Bosnia and Papua New Guinea. Meanwhile, 17,000 people needed help after huge snowstorms in the Andes and Korea, and there were heavy falls in unlikely countries such as southern Greece, Jordan and Syria.
Last week the European environment agency produced evidence that Europe was warming faster than expected and that the number of natural disasters had more than doubled in the past decade. Last year's pan-European drought cost 20,000 lives and billions of euros and the later floods affected at least 600,000. The agency, which said that most European glaciers were in fast retreat, warned people to expect more flash floods, mudslides, storms and droughts.
Happily, fewer people have died as a result of extreme weather this year. Last year was one of the worst on record, with the Red Cross estimating that up to 700 "natural disasters" claimed 50,000 lives, almost five times as many as in in 2002. Heatwaves in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan took temperatures up to 50C (122F). In China floods along the Huai and Yangtze rivers swept through 650,000 homes.
The economic cost of extreme weather is soaring. This month's Hurricane Charley caused £10bn of damage in the US. Typhoons in China and Taiwan have also caused enormous losses. Last year's losses worldwide topped £34bn.
But the most unusual weather event in 2004 could have been the 90mph hurricane that hit Catarina in southern Brazil in March. Hurricanes have never been recorded in the southern Atlantic, because the atmosphere does not provide enough "spin" near the surface to get them started and winds higher in the atmosphere tend to shear off any that threaten to form.
Whether it was a true freak of nature or what we can expect with global warming is hotly debated. Climate change scientists in Britain have predicted for some time that such unprecedented events in the south Atlantic would one day be a possibility. But few believed it would happen so soon.
New jaw grown on patient's back
The new bone was grown in a muscle on the patient's backA German man has been able to eat his first proper meal in nine years after surgeons rebuilt his face using a pioneering jaw-bone graft.
The 56-year-old man - who tucked into bread and sausages - had only been able to eat soft food and soup since part of his jaw-bone was removed due to cancer.
University of Kiel researchers "grew" a replacement jaw-bone in a muscle in the patient's back and grafted it in place.
The procedure, previously only tried on animals, was detailed in The Lancet.
The operation took place nine weeks ago, and the patient can now eat steak - but it has to be cut up for him because he has no teeth to bite through the meat.
The patient says he now wants a set of teeth fitted, so he can eat his steak before it gets cold. Doctors say he could get them next year.
3D scans
In cases such as his, surgeons usually take a piece of bone from elsewhere in the body, often the thigh, to repair the jaw.
But this damages the bone in that part of the body, which can itself lead to serious illness.
A patient who had previously lost his mandible through the result of a destructive tumour can now sit down to chew his first solid meals in nine years
Dr Stan Gronthos, Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science, Adelaide, Australia In this case, the patient's jaw had been bridged with a 7cm titanium reconstruction plate since his initial operation.
He was also taking the blood-thinning drug warfarin for an aortic aneurysm, which meant the traditional bone graft method carried a risk of post-operative bleeding.
So it was decided to attempt the new technique.
After taking a 3D computer tomography (CT) scan of the patient's head, they used computer aided design to recreate the missing portion of the jaw-bone (mandible).
The design was used to construct a teflon model, which was then covered with a titanium cage.
The teflon was then removed, and the cage filled with bone mineral blocks, coated with bone marrow and a protein which accelerates bone growth.
The transplant was then implanted into the latissimus dorsai muscle, below the right shoulder blade.
Doctors monitored its development, and CT scans showed new bone was forming.
After seven weeks of growth, the graft was removed, along with a flap of muscle containing blood vessels.
It was then attached to the stumps of the patient's original lower jaw.
The transplant enabled the patient to chew again, and within four weeks he was able to eat solid foods.
'Quality of life'
The researchers, led by Dr Patrick Warnke of the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at the University of Kiel, say there is a need for greater understanding about the long-term effects of the procedure.
Writing in The Lancet, they said: "The exciting nature of the result achieved in this patient to date has prompted our group to extend this trial.
"For us to draw firm conclusions, an extended period of follow-up is necessary."
But Dr Warnke told BBC News Online he hoped the procedure could help many other patients, adding: "In addition to helping patients such as this man, we hope it could be used in orthopaedic surgery."
He said implanting the cage into the patient's muscle meant his own tissue developed around it.
"Because it was his own tissue, we don't expect any problems of rejection."
He added: "It was a very successful operation, because when we fitted it to his existing jaw, it was a very good fit, We didn't have to make a lot of changes."
Dr Stan Gronthos, of the division of haematology at the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science in Adelaide, Australia, said the German research proved this technique could help patients with damaged jaw-bones.
He wrote in The Lancet: "Meanwhile, as the debate continues, a patient who had previously lost his mandible through the result of a destructive tumour can now sit down to chew his first solid meals in nine years, courtesy of a new mandible-like structured implant, resulting in an improved quality of life for that individual."
Scaled-Up Darkness
Could a single dark matter particle be light-years wide?
By George Musser UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY/KECK OBSERVATORY
SMALL GALAXIES such as NGC 3109 are rarer and less compacted than they would be if matter clumped freely, perhaps because colossal particles that might be the universe's "missing mass" resist clumping.In 1996 Discover magazine ran an April Fools' story about giant particles called "bigons" that could be responsible for all sorts of inexplicable phenomena. Now, in a case of life imitating art, some physicists are proposing that the universe's mysterious dark matter consists of great big particles, light-years or more across. Amid the jostling of these titanic particles, ordinary matter ekes out its existence like shrews scurrying about the feet of the dinosaurs.
This idea arose to explain a puzzling fact about dark matter: although it clumps on the vastest scales, creating bodies such as galaxy clusters, it seems to resist clumping on smaller scales. Astronomers see far fewer small galaxies and subgalactic gas clouds than a simple extrapolation from clusters would imply. Accordingly, many have suggested that the particles that make up dark matter interact with one another like molecules in a gas, generating a pressure that counterbalances the force of gravity.
The big-particle hypothesis takes another approach. Instead of adding a new property to the dark particles, it exploits the inherent tendency of any quantum particle to resist confinement. If you squeeze one, you reduce the uncertainty of its position but increase the uncertainty of its momentum. In effect, squeezing increases the particle's velocity, generating a pressure that counteracts the force you apply. Quantum claustrophobia becomes important over distances comparable to the particle's equivalent wavelength. Fighting gravitational clumping would take a wavelength of a few dozen light-years.
What type of particle could have such astronomical dimensions? As it happens, physicists predict plenty of energy fields whose corresponding particles could fit the bill--namely, so-called scalar fields. Such fields pop up both in the Standard Model of particle physics and in string theory. Although experimenters have yet to identify any, theorists are sure they're out there.
Cosmologists already ascribe cosmic inflation, and perhaps the dark energy (distinct from dark matter) that is now causing cosmic acceleration, to scalar fields. In these contexts, the fields work because they are the simplest generalization of Einstein's cosmological constant. If a scalar field changes slowly, it resembles a constant, both in its fixed magnitude and in its lack of directionality; relativity theory predicts it will produce a gravitational repulsion. But if the field changes or oscillates quickly enough, it produces a gravitational attraction, just like ordinary or dark matter. Physicists posited bodies composed of scalar particles as long ago as the 1960s, and the idea was revived in the late 1980s, but it only really started to take hold four years ago.
Two leaders of the subject are Tonatiuh Matos Chassin of the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Mexico City and Luis Ureña López of the University of Guanajuato. At a workshop at the Central University of Las Villas (UCLV) in Cuba in June, they described how scalar particles can reproduce the internal structure of galaxies: when the particles clump on galactic scales, they overlap to form a Bose-Einstein condensate--a giant version of the cold atom piles that experimenters have created over the past decade. The condensate has a mass and density profile matching those of real galaxies.
That inflation, dark energy and dark matter can all be laid at the doorstep of scalar fields suggests that they might be connected. Israel Quiros of UCLV argued at the workshop that the same field could account for both inflation and dark energy. Other physicists have worked on linking the two dark entities. "As my senior colleagues used to say, 'You only get to invoke the tooth fairy once,'" says Robert Scherrer of Vanderbilt University. "Right now we have to invoke the tooth fairy twice: we need to postulate a yet to be discovered particle as dark matter and an unknown source for dark energy. My model manages to explain both with a single field."But all these models suffer from a nagging problem. Because the wavelength of a particle is inversely proportional to its mass, the astronomical size corresponds to an almost absurdly small mass, about 10-23 electron volts (compared with the proton's mass of 109 electron volts). That requires the laws of physics to possess a hitherto unsuspected symmetry. "Such symmetries are possible, although they appear somewhat contrived," says physicist Sean Carroll of the University of Chicago. Moreover, the main motivation for big particles--their resistance to clumping--has become less compelling now that cosmologists have found that more prosaic processes, such as star formation, can do the trick. Still, as physicists cast about for some explanation of the mysteries of dark matter, it is inevitable that some pretty big ideas will float around.
Brain may produce its own antipsychotic drug
09:30 30 August 04
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition.
A cannabis-like substance produced by the brain may dampen delusional or psychotic experiences, rather than trigger them.
Heavy cannabis use has been linked to psychosis in the past, leading researchers to look for a connection between the brain's natural cannabinoid system and schizophrenia.
Sure enough, when Markus Leweke of the University of Cologne, Germany, and Andrea Giuffrida and Danielle Piomelli of the University of California, Irvine, looked at levels of the natural cannabis-like substance anandamide, they were higher in people with schizophrenia than in healthy controls.
The team measured levels of anandamide in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of 47 people suffering their first bout of schizophrenia, but who had not yet taken any drugs for it, and 26 people who had symptoms of psychosis and have a high risk of schizophrenia.
Compared with 84 healthy volunteers, levels were six times as high in people with symptoms of psychosis and eight times as high in those with schizophrenia.
"This is a massive increase in anandamide levels," Leweke told the National Cannabis and Mental Illness Conference in Melbourne, Australia, last week. And that is just in the CSF. Levels could be a hundred times higher in the synapses, where nerve signalling is taking place, he says.
Cause or effect
But were the high anandamide levels triggering the psychotic symptoms or a response to them? Leweke and his colleagues found, to their surprise, that the more severe people's schizophrenia was the lower their anandamide levels.
The team's theory is that rather than triggering psychosis, the substance is released in response to psychotic symptoms to help control them. People with the worst symptoms might be unable to produce sufficient anandamide to prevent them.
At some point in their lives, between 5 and 30 per cent of healthy people have had symptoms such as delusions or hallucinations, which can be triggered by something as simple as sleep deprivation. "All of us are potentially psychotic," says David Castle of the University of Melbourne. So for the body to have a system that prevents these experiences getting out of hand makes sense, he says.
The new findings suggest antipsychotic drugs could be developed that target the anandamide system, but it will not be simple. The active ingredient in cannabis, THC, binds to anandamide receptors.
But people with schizophrenia who use cannabis actually have more severe and frequent psychotic episodes than those who do not. This may be because THC makes anandamide receptors less sensitive.
Leweke's team also found anandamide levels lowest in people with schizophrenia who used cannabis more frequently, suggesting it may disrupt the system in other ways too. Up to 60 per cent of people with schizophrenia use cannabis.
A study by Castle, also reported at the Melbourne meeting, has found that people use the drug to get rid of unpleasant emotions associated with the disease such as anxiety and depression.
Thursday, August 26, 2004
Chaotic homes hamper child development
10:18 26 August 04
Growing up in a chaotic home could be bad for a child's developing mind.
An association between disorganised, noisy and cramped homes and lower childhood intelligence has been observed before. But whether socio-economic status (SES), genetics or the environment itself is the cause has never been clear.
So Stephen Petrill at Pennsylvania State University and his colleagues turned to a database of twins born in the UK between 1994 and 1996. By noting differences between genetically identical twins, and fraternal twins, who share only half their genes, the researchers hoped to tease apart the influence of genes and environment.
The team collected information about nearly 8000 3- and 4-year-old twins, on SES, household chaos and cognitive ability, which they measured with quizzes and vocabulary and grammar tests.
The results showed that the homes of wealthier and better-educated parents were slightly more organised. But after controlling for the large genetic contribution to intelligence, the team found that chaos had an influence on cognitive skills independently of SES.
"It just makes sense," says Robert Plomin, a co-author of the paper. "If a kid is in a really chaotic home, it's hard to imagine that they can learn in a normal way. Their surroundings just aren't subtle enough for them to tease apart the world."
The findings also suggest that when the environment is more stressful, intelligence is more likely to be constrained by genes, he says.
10:18 26 August 04
Growing up in a chaotic home could be bad for a child's developing mind.
An association between disorganised, noisy and cramped homes and lower childhood intelligence has been observed before. But whether socio-economic status (SES), genetics or the environment itself is the cause has never been clear.
So Stephen Petrill at Pennsylvania State University and his colleagues turned to a database of twins born in the UK between 1994 and 1996. By noting differences between genetically identical twins, and fraternal twins, who share only half their genes, the researchers hoped to tease apart the influence of genes and environment.
The team collected information about nearly 8000 3- and 4-year-old twins, on SES, household chaos and cognitive ability, which they measured with quizzes and vocabulary and grammar tests.
The results showed that the homes of wealthier and better-educated parents were slightly more organised. But after controlling for the large genetic contribution to intelligence, the team found that chaos had an influence on cognitive skills independently of SES.
"It just makes sense," says Robert Plomin, a co-author of the paper. "If a kid is in a really chaotic home, it's hard to imagine that they can learn in a normal way. Their surroundings just aren't subtle enough for them to tease apart the world."
The findings also suggest that when the environment is more stressful, intelligence is more likely to be constrained by genes, he says.
African epidemic feared following the reappearance of the disease.
Health professionals aim to immunize 74 million children in 22 countries in October and November.© WHOPolio has re-emerged in Guinea and Mali, countries that had previously freed themselves of the disease. The finding raises fears that a major polio epidemic could hit west and central Africa. It is thought that the virus spread from Nigeria, one of the last strongholds of the disease. The new cases mean there are now 12 formerly polio-free countries that have been re-infected with virus since January 2003.Guinea and Mali are home to one and two new cases respectively. Three new cases of polio paralysis have also been confirmed in Sudan's conflict-stricken Darfur region."It is a serious problem," says Bruce Aylward, coordinator of the World Health Organization's Global Polio Eradication Initiative. It highlights the need to boost population immunity levels across west and central Africa.Breached defencesGuinea and Mali are outside a ring of African countries that performed coordinated immunization campaigns in February and March 2004 to try to halt the spread of polio from Nigeria and Niger. Further synchronized vaccinations are planned in 22 countries, including Nigeria and Niger, in October and November 2004. Health professionals aim to immunize 74 million children under the age of 5.But the Global Polio Eradication Initiative has warned that plans could be hampered by a cash shortfall of US$100 million. Although similar campaigns in 2000 and 2001 stopped polio transmission in most of these countries, civil unrest in Côte d'Ivoire and Darfur will make it hard to reach every child this year. "It's a major challenge that has to be planned for," says Aylward. But he is optimistic that years of experience gained in troubled regions such as Sudan and the Congo will help health workers to achieve their goal. Polio is still routinely found in six countries: Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Niger, Afghanistan and Egypt. But the virus has been known to spread from these hotspots to at least ten other countries, including Sudan. Concern has been mounting throughout the year over the situation in Nigeria's Kano state where unfounded rumours linking the polio vaccine with HIV put immunization plans on hold. Vaccinations resumed just a short time ago, on 31 July. "The new outbreaks are likely to shake people out of any complacency they have been feeling since the Kano vaccinations resumed," says Aylward.
Health professionals aim to immunize 74 million children in 22 countries in October and November.© WHOPolio has re-emerged in Guinea and Mali, countries that had previously freed themselves of the disease. The finding raises fears that a major polio epidemic could hit west and central Africa. It is thought that the virus spread from Nigeria, one of the last strongholds of the disease. The new cases mean there are now 12 formerly polio-free countries that have been re-infected with virus since January 2003.Guinea and Mali are home to one and two new cases respectively. Three new cases of polio paralysis have also been confirmed in Sudan's conflict-stricken Darfur region."It is a serious problem," says Bruce Aylward, coordinator of the World Health Organization's Global Polio Eradication Initiative. It highlights the need to boost population immunity levels across west and central Africa.Breached defencesGuinea and Mali are outside a ring of African countries that performed coordinated immunization campaigns in February and March 2004 to try to halt the spread of polio from Nigeria and Niger. Further synchronized vaccinations are planned in 22 countries, including Nigeria and Niger, in October and November 2004. Health professionals aim to immunize 74 million children under the age of 5.But the Global Polio Eradication Initiative has warned that plans could be hampered by a cash shortfall of US$100 million. Although similar campaigns in 2000 and 2001 stopped polio transmission in most of these countries, civil unrest in Côte d'Ivoire and Darfur will make it hard to reach every child this year. "It's a major challenge that has to be planned for," says Aylward. But he is optimistic that years of experience gained in troubled regions such as Sudan and the Congo will help health workers to achieve their goal. Polio is still routinely found in six countries: Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Niger, Afghanistan and Egypt. But the virus has been known to spread from these hotspots to at least ten other countries, including Sudan. Concern has been mounting throughout the year over the situation in Nigeria's Kano state where unfounded rumours linking the polio vaccine with HIV put immunization plans on hold. Vaccinations resumed just a short time ago, on 31 July. "The new outbreaks are likely to shake people out of any complacency they have been feeling since the Kano vaccinations resumed," says Aylward.
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) -- Russian officials say they have found no survivors among the 89 passengers and crew aboard two Russian jet liners that crashed near simultaneously under suspicious circumstances after taking off from the same airport.
Russian search and rescue officials early Wednesday found the flight data recorders from the two Russian jetliners, Russia's Emergency Ministry said.
"At this time, no signs have been found of terrorist acts," Federal Security Service spokesman Nikolai Zakharov told Russia's Interfax news agency.
He said the investigation is focusing on possible fouled aviation fuel or pilot error, although witnesses heard explosions associated with the planes going down.
However, Interfax quoted a Russian security source who said one of the planes, the Tu-154, transmitted a signal indicating a hijacking was under way before the plane crashed.
The source also told Interfax a criminal investigation has been opened in the case after an air traffic controller reported receiving information that an attack had been made on the crew of the second airliner.
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Federal Security Service -- the country's top intelligence agency -- to investigate the near-simultaneous incidents, Russian authorities said.
About 2,000 people were combing the crash sites, the Emergency Ministry said. A number of bodies have been recovered at each location.
The first plane, a Volga-Avia Express Tupolev 134, was en route to Volgograd, in southern Russia, from Moscow's Domodedovo Airport -- the city's main airport for domestic flights -- with 35 passengers and a crew of eight.
It disappeared from radar at 10:56 p.m. (2:56 p.m. ET) Tuesday, and its wreckage was found about 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of Moscow near Tula, according to the Emergency Ministry.
"First I heard a roaring noise as if a plane was driving by my house," a witness said of the late-night disturbance. "Then there were loud noises as if somebody was knocking on my window. I even went outside to check. There was nobody there so I went to bed."
Other witnesses told Interfax they saw the plane explode before it crashed.
The second plane -- a Siberia Tupolev 154 with 46 people on board -- was about 100 miles (160 km) from Rostov-on-Don when it dropped off radar screens at 10:59 p.m., the state news agency Novosti reported.
That jet also took off from Domodedovo Airport and was bound for the Black Sea resort town of Sochi, an Emergency Ministry spokeswoman reported.
The crash sites are about 450 miles (724 km) apart.
Russian authorities said they had increased security at airports following an explosion at a Moscow bus station earlier Tuesday, which injured three people.
"If this were just one, you would look toward some sort of aircraft issue," Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, told CNN. "But with two of them going down so close together, it's awfully ominous."
The incidents also took place just days before a regional election in the rebellious southern territory of Chechnya, where Russian troops have battled separatist guerrillas for the past five years.
Chechen separatists have been blamed for numerous bombings and other attacks in Russia in recent years, including the seizure of hundreds of hostages at a Moscow theater that ended with more than 100 hostages dead.
'Super Earth' Discovered at Nearby Star By Robert Roy BrittSenior Science Writerposted: 25 August 200410:06 am ET
European astronomers have discovered one of the smallest planets known outside our solar system, a world about 14 times the mass of our own. It could be a rocky planet with a thin atmosphere, a sort of "super Earth," the researchers said today.
This is no typical Earth, however. It completes its tight orbit in less than 10 days, compared to the 365 required for our year. Its daytime face would be scorched.
It is not possible to know exact surface conditions of the planet, said Portuguese researcher Nuno Santos, who led the discovery. "However, we can expect it to be quite hot, given the proximity to the star."
Hot as in around 1,160 degrees Fahrenheit (900 Kelvin), Santos told SPACE.com.
Still, the discovery is a significant advance in technology that reveals a solar system slightly similar to our own in ways not seen until now.
The star is similar to our Sun and just 50 light-years away. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers). Most of the known planets beyond the nine we're most familiar with are hundreds or thousands of light years distant.
The star, mu Arae, is visible under dark skies from the Southern Hemisphere. It harbors two other planets. One is Jupiter-sized and takes 650 days to make its annual trip around the star. The other is farther out and was confirmed to exist by the new observations.
Nearly all of the more than 120 planets found beyond our solar system are gaseous worlds as big or larger than Jupiter, mostly in tight orbits that would not permit a rocky planet to survive. Search techniques have so far not allowed the discovery of anything smaller than Saturn around Sun-like stars.
A trio of roughly Earth-sized planets was found to orbit a dense corpse of star known as a neutron star. They are oddballs, however, circling rapidly around a dark star that would not support life. Some planet hunters don't consider these three to be as important as planets around normal stars.
At 14 times the mass of Earth, the newfound planet -- circling a star similar in size and brightness to our Sun -- is about as heavy as Uranus, a world of gas and ice. Theorists say 14 Earth-masses is roughly the upper limit for a planet to possibly remain rocky, however. And because this planet is so close to its host star, it likely had a much different formation history than Uranus.
In our solar system, the four innermost planets are all rocky.
The leading theory of planet formation has the gas giants forming from a rocky core, a process in which the core develops over time, then reaches a tipping point when gravity can rapidly collect a huge envelope of gas. This theory suggests the newfound planet never reached that critical mass, said Santos, of the Centro de Astronomia e Astrofisica da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal.
"Otherwise the planet would have become much more massive," Santos said via e-mail.
"This object is therefore likely to be a planet with a rocky core surrounded by a small gaseous envelope and would therefore qualify as a super-Earth," the European team said in a statement.
The discovery was made with a European Southern Observatory telescope at La Silla, Chile. There are no conventional pictures of the object, as it was detected by noting it gravitational effect on the star. The search project leading to the discovery is led by Michel Mayor of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland.
While researchers do not know the full range of conditions under which life can survive, the newly discovered world, with its hot surface, is not the sort of place biologists would expect to find life as we know it.
Santos said life on the world is not likely. But, he added, "one never knows."
Lop-sided features linked to temperMichael Hopkin
Poor development in the womb could lead to aggressive behaviour.
Asymmetrical people are more easily stressed by frustrating phone calls. © Punchstock Sometimes it can be worth judging by appearances: it seems that people with less symmetrical features are likely to be more aggressive. In a study of stressful telephone conversations, those with uneven faces and bodies were more prone to angry reactions.A lack of symmetry is known to be a hallmark of slightly imperfect development, so the researchers speculate that people with ill-matched external features may also have small defects in their nervous systems, which impair their ability to control aggressive impulses.A link between asymmetry and aggression has been suggested before but never properly tested. Previous attempts have relied on subjects to report faithfully their own levels of aggression, or used violent offenders who are often abnormally aggressive.Zeynep Benderlioglu of Ohio State University in Columbus and her colleagues got around the problem by recruiting 100 volunteers and tricking them. After measuring their ears, wrists, palms, ankles, feet and elbows to quantify their symmetry, the researchers told the subjects that they were testing the influence of symmetry on persuasive skills.On the lineThe researchers asked each of the volunteers to make two telephone calls attempting to solicit charity donations, promising them free cinema tickets if they were successful. What they did not reveal was that the charity was fake, and the prospective charity donors were really members of the team primed to react in a certain way.The first 'charity target' was friendly, claiming they had no money to give and apologizing profusely. But the second was far more hostile, being rude to the volunteers and claiming that the charity was a waste of money.What the volunteers also did not know was that the researchers had rigged the telephones to measure how forcefully they replaced the receiver after the call. "I do feel quite guilty for deceiving them," says Benderlioglu. "But it was in the name of science."Rude rageAsymmetrical subjects were more likely to slam the telephone receiver down at the end of a call than symmetrical people, indicating that rejection made them angrier, the researchers report in the American Journal of Human Biology1.Asymmetry is generally caused by conditions in the womb that are less than ideal, points out Benderlioglu. She believes the result shows that the environment in which a fetus develops has subtle effects on the nervous system as well as the more obvious effects on external features. Mothers who drink, smoke or are ill during pregnancy may be more likely to end up with unruly children, she suggests.Battle of the sexesThe team also found differences between the responses of men and women. Female volunteers were more likely to be enraged by the rude call recipients. But male subjects slammed the phone down harder on the polite charity targets.So why did the men not become the most angry when faced with both rejection and rudeness? Men can become aggressive more quickly then women, but are also quicker to back down if things start to look hairy, Benderlioglu suggests. "They don't seem to be able to tolerate as much anger as women," she says. "Men are much more attentive to their bodily state, such as heart-beat."Nevertheless, both sexes, no matter how symmetrical, can suffer unproductive attacks of rage. As a final part of the study, the researchers asked volunteers to select one of three follow-up letters to send to the charity targets. Subjects generally chose the harshest letter for the rude respondent, telling them that they were doing "a disservice to the community", which was hardly the best way to encourage future donations.
The World's No.1 Science & Technology News Service
Martian teardrop carved in crater
18:04 24 August 04
NewScientist.com news service
Wind sculpted basaltic sand dunes millions of years ago
Dark, rippling dunes of volcanic ash - similar to Hawaii's black sand beaches - cast a teardrop shape in an ancient Martian crater, reveal the latest images from Mars Express.
Wind is likely to have carved the 12-kilometre-long tear shape a million or more years ago when the Martian atmosphere was thicker, says Gerhard Neukum, principal investigator of the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Europe's Mars orbiter.
Now, the atmosphere has thinned so much that the dune's shape is likely to remain fixed for at least hundreds of thousands of years, he says.
Perspective views such as teardrop take hours to process by hand (Image: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin G. Neukum)
The sand's dark colour suggests it is basaltic, or volcanic in origin. Neukum believes an impact created the 45-kilometre-wide crater perhaps a billion years ago, ejecting the basalt from a subsurface layer of volcanic ash.
The fact that the sand remains dark - as opposed to reddening with time - suggests the material has not been altered by water or other chemical processes.
"This blackish, bluish material was not so much known before," Neukum told New Scientist. Unlike Mars Express, previous orbiters have not been able to image the planet in full colour and 3-D. "Previously, one could not distinguish it very well - it appeared darker but it could have been any colour."
The camera, which has been taking data since January 2004, captured the latest images in May at a resolution of 16 metres. The two-kilometre deep depression lies in a basin of craters in Mars's southern hemisphere called Argyre Planitia.
"The HRSC is doing very, very well," says Neukum. But he adds that right now the camera is taking images for just 10 minutes during each of Mars Express's seven-hour orbits. That is because the closest part of the spacecraft's orbit, which takes an elliptical path around the planet's poles, changes with time.
Now the closest approach is relatively far from the planet and occurs over the planet's night side, limiting photo opportunities. But the geometry will begin to improve again in September.
Russian search and rescue officials early Wednesday found the flight data recorders from the two Russian jetliners, Russia's Emergency Ministry said.
"At this time, no signs have been found of terrorist acts," Federal Security Service spokesman Nikolai Zakharov told Russia's Interfax news agency.
He said the investigation is focusing on possible fouled aviation fuel or pilot error, although witnesses heard explosions associated with the planes going down.
However, Interfax quoted a Russian security source who said one of the planes, the Tu-154, transmitted a signal indicating a hijacking was under way before the plane crashed.
The source also told Interfax a criminal investigation has been opened in the case after an air traffic controller reported receiving information that an attack had been made on the crew of the second airliner.
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Federal Security Service -- the country's top intelligence agency -- to investigate the near-simultaneous incidents, Russian authorities said.
About 2,000 people were combing the crash sites, the Emergency Ministry said. A number of bodies have been recovered at each location.
The first plane, a Volga-Avia Express Tupolev 134, was en route to Volgograd, in southern Russia, from Moscow's Domodedovo Airport -- the city's main airport for domestic flights -- with 35 passengers and a crew of eight.
It disappeared from radar at 10:56 p.m. (2:56 p.m. ET) Tuesday, and its wreckage was found about 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of Moscow near Tula, according to the Emergency Ministry.
"First I heard a roaring noise as if a plane was driving by my house," a witness said of the late-night disturbance. "Then there were loud noises as if somebody was knocking on my window. I even went outside to check. There was nobody there so I went to bed."
Other witnesses told Interfax they saw the plane explode before it crashed.
The second plane -- a Siberia Tupolev 154 with 46 people on board -- was about 100 miles (160 km) from Rostov-on-Don when it dropped off radar screens at 10:59 p.m., the state news agency Novosti reported.
That jet also took off from Domodedovo Airport and was bound for the Black Sea resort town of Sochi, an Emergency Ministry spokeswoman reported.
The crash sites are about 450 miles (724 km) apart.
Russian authorities said they had increased security at airports following an explosion at a Moscow bus station earlier Tuesday, which injured three people.
"If this were just one, you would look toward some sort of aircraft issue," Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, told CNN. "But with two of them going down so close together, it's awfully ominous."
The incidents also took place just days before a regional election in the rebellious southern territory of Chechnya, where Russian troops have battled separatist guerrillas for the past five years.
Chechen separatists have been blamed for numerous bombings and other attacks in Russia in recent years, including the seizure of hundreds of hostages at a Moscow theater that ended with more than 100 hostages dead.
'Super Earth' Discovered at Nearby Star By Robert Roy BrittSenior Science Writerposted: 25 August 200410:06 am ET
European astronomers have discovered one of the smallest planets known outside our solar system, a world about 14 times the mass of our own. It could be a rocky planet with a thin atmosphere, a sort of "super Earth," the researchers said today.
This is no typical Earth, however. It completes its tight orbit in less than 10 days, compared to the 365 required for our year. Its daytime face would be scorched.
It is not possible to know exact surface conditions of the planet, said Portuguese researcher Nuno Santos, who led the discovery. "However, we can expect it to be quite hot, given the proximity to the star."
Hot as in around 1,160 degrees Fahrenheit (900 Kelvin), Santos told SPACE.com.
Still, the discovery is a significant advance in technology that reveals a solar system slightly similar to our own in ways not seen until now.
The star is similar to our Sun and just 50 light-years away. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers). Most of the known planets beyond the nine we're most familiar with are hundreds or thousands of light years distant.
The star, mu Arae, is visible under dark skies from the Southern Hemisphere. It harbors two other planets. One is Jupiter-sized and takes 650 days to make its annual trip around the star. The other is farther out and was confirmed to exist by the new observations.
Nearly all of the more than 120 planets found beyond our solar system are gaseous worlds as big or larger than Jupiter, mostly in tight orbits that would not permit a rocky planet to survive. Search techniques have so far not allowed the discovery of anything smaller than Saturn around Sun-like stars.
A trio of roughly Earth-sized planets was found to orbit a dense corpse of star known as a neutron star. They are oddballs, however, circling rapidly around a dark star that would not support life. Some planet hunters don't consider these three to be as important as planets around normal stars.
At 14 times the mass of Earth, the newfound planet -- circling a star similar in size and brightness to our Sun -- is about as heavy as Uranus, a world of gas and ice. Theorists say 14 Earth-masses is roughly the upper limit for a planet to possibly remain rocky, however. And because this planet is so close to its host star, it likely had a much different formation history than Uranus.
In our solar system, the four innermost planets are all rocky.
The leading theory of planet formation has the gas giants forming from a rocky core, a process in which the core develops over time, then reaches a tipping point when gravity can rapidly collect a huge envelope of gas. This theory suggests the newfound planet never reached that critical mass, said Santos, of the Centro de Astronomia e Astrofisica da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal.
"Otherwise the planet would have become much more massive," Santos said via e-mail.
"This object is therefore likely to be a planet with a rocky core surrounded by a small gaseous envelope and would therefore qualify as a super-Earth," the European team said in a statement.
The discovery was made with a European Southern Observatory telescope at La Silla, Chile. There are no conventional pictures of the object, as it was detected by noting it gravitational effect on the star. The search project leading to the discovery is led by Michel Mayor of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland.
While researchers do not know the full range of conditions under which life can survive, the newly discovered world, with its hot surface, is not the sort of place biologists would expect to find life as we know it.
Santos said life on the world is not likely. But, he added, "one never knows."
Lop-sided features linked to temperMichael Hopkin
Poor development in the womb could lead to aggressive behaviour.
Asymmetrical people are more easily stressed by frustrating phone calls. © Punchstock Sometimes it can be worth judging by appearances: it seems that people with less symmetrical features are likely to be more aggressive. In a study of stressful telephone conversations, those with uneven faces and bodies were more prone to angry reactions.A lack of symmetry is known to be a hallmark of slightly imperfect development, so the researchers speculate that people with ill-matched external features may also have small defects in their nervous systems, which impair their ability to control aggressive impulses.A link between asymmetry and aggression has been suggested before but never properly tested. Previous attempts have relied on subjects to report faithfully their own levels of aggression, or used violent offenders who are often abnormally aggressive.Zeynep Benderlioglu of Ohio State University in Columbus and her colleagues got around the problem by recruiting 100 volunteers and tricking them. After measuring their ears, wrists, palms, ankles, feet and elbows to quantify their symmetry, the researchers told the subjects that they were testing the influence of symmetry on persuasive skills.On the lineThe researchers asked each of the volunteers to make two telephone calls attempting to solicit charity donations, promising them free cinema tickets if they were successful. What they did not reveal was that the charity was fake, and the prospective charity donors were really members of the team primed to react in a certain way.The first 'charity target' was friendly, claiming they had no money to give and apologizing profusely. But the second was far more hostile, being rude to the volunteers and claiming that the charity was a waste of money.What the volunteers also did not know was that the researchers had rigged the telephones to measure how forcefully they replaced the receiver after the call. "I do feel quite guilty for deceiving them," says Benderlioglu. "But it was in the name of science."Rude rageAsymmetrical subjects were more likely to slam the telephone receiver down at the end of a call than symmetrical people, indicating that rejection made them angrier, the researchers report in the American Journal of Human Biology1.Asymmetry is generally caused by conditions in the womb that are less than ideal, points out Benderlioglu. She believes the result shows that the environment in which a fetus develops has subtle effects on the nervous system as well as the more obvious effects on external features. Mothers who drink, smoke or are ill during pregnancy may be more likely to end up with unruly children, she suggests.Battle of the sexesThe team also found differences between the responses of men and women. Female volunteers were more likely to be enraged by the rude call recipients. But male subjects slammed the phone down harder on the polite charity targets.So why did the men not become the most angry when faced with both rejection and rudeness? Men can become aggressive more quickly then women, but are also quicker to back down if things start to look hairy, Benderlioglu suggests. "They don't seem to be able to tolerate as much anger as women," she says. "Men are much more attentive to their bodily state, such as heart-beat."Nevertheless, both sexes, no matter how symmetrical, can suffer unproductive attacks of rage. As a final part of the study, the researchers asked volunteers to select one of three follow-up letters to send to the charity targets. Subjects generally chose the harshest letter for the rude respondent, telling them that they were doing "a disservice to the community", which was hardly the best way to encourage future donations.
The World's No.1 Science & Technology News Service
Martian teardrop carved in crater
18:04 24 August 04
NewScientist.com news service
Wind sculpted basaltic sand dunes millions of years ago
Dark, rippling dunes of volcanic ash - similar to Hawaii's black sand beaches - cast a teardrop shape in an ancient Martian crater, reveal the latest images from Mars Express.
Wind is likely to have carved the 12-kilometre-long tear shape a million or more years ago when the Martian atmosphere was thicker, says Gerhard Neukum, principal investigator of the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Europe's Mars orbiter.
Now, the atmosphere has thinned so much that the dune's shape is likely to remain fixed for at least hundreds of thousands of years, he says.
Perspective views such as teardrop take hours to process by hand (Image: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin G. Neukum)
The sand's dark colour suggests it is basaltic, or volcanic in origin. Neukum believes an impact created the 45-kilometre-wide crater perhaps a billion years ago, ejecting the basalt from a subsurface layer of volcanic ash.
The fact that the sand remains dark - as opposed to reddening with time - suggests the material has not been altered by water or other chemical processes.
"This blackish, bluish material was not so much known before," Neukum told New Scientist. Unlike Mars Express, previous orbiters have not been able to image the planet in full colour and 3-D. "Previously, one could not distinguish it very well - it appeared darker but it could have been any colour."
The camera, which has been taking data since January 2004, captured the latest images in May at a resolution of 16 metres. The two-kilometre deep depression lies in a basin of craters in Mars's southern hemisphere called Argyre Planitia.
"The HRSC is doing very, very well," says Neukum. But he adds that right now the camera is taking images for just 10 minutes during each of Mars Express's seven-hour orbits. That is because the closest part of the spacecraft's orbit, which takes an elliptical path around the planet's poles, changes with time.
Now the closest approach is relatively far from the planet and occurs over the planet's night side, limiting photo opportunities. But the geometry will begin to improve again in September.
Monday, August 23, 2004
Africa's locust crisis worsens
Helen Pearson
Insect swarms swelling towards plague in Africa as Australia prepares for separate attack.
Experts are worried that locust swarms may destroy African crops. Experts are warning that swarms of locusts munching their way across Africa may yet reach plague proportions - while Australia is bracing itself for the onslaught of another species of the voracious insect.African desert locusts (Schistocerca gregaria), bunch together into flying swarms that can strip fields of crops overnight. Since late last year, rainy weather has encouraged them to breed in north-western Africa and numbers have gradually climbed.This week, the Food and Agriculture Organization warned that swarms are escalating in Mauritania, Mali and Niger and are spreading east into Chad. The pace of breeding is unprecedented, says Clive Elliott, part of the FAO's locust-forecasting group in Rome. "The number of swarms is larger than anybody expected."Experts are concerned that the locusts will spread as far as Sudan and the Middle East, at which point the situation would be classified as a plague. The swarms could also survive for several years. Elliott says that the situation already looks worse than an equivalent period during the most recent plague, between 1986 and 1989. Driving forceRainy weather has been the main driver behind the locusts' spread, as it provides them with green vegetation to feed on and damp sandy soil in which to lay eggs. Each time the insects spawn a new generation, which they have done at least four times since last October, their numbers swell by a factor of about 20.Elliott says that financial support is now coming from the international community. But exactly how the situation pans out will depend on the impact of control efforts and weather conditions. Part of the reason that the previous plague ended in 1989 was simply because freak winds gusted swarms out into the Atlantic. In the midst of the locust battle, the FAO is pushing for studies into new ways to control the insects besides conventional organophosphate pesticides sprayed from planes. It hopes to test a chemical that stops the insects manufacturing a protein called chitin in their hard outer skeleton. The chemical could be laid down to form barriers in the desert, killing juvenile locusts by preventing them from growing a new coat after moulting. Down underIn Australia, meanwhile, experts warned this week of an imminent attack on crops by the Australian plague locust (Chortoicetes terminifera). The current wet weather means that the insects' could conceivably reach plague levels, as they last did in 1987."The insects developed after heavy rains in parts of southern Queensland and northern New South Wales in January, and laid eggs that are expected to hatch shortly. Although the exact scale of the expected population boom is difficult to predict, Laury McCulloch, director of the Australian Plague Locust Commission in Canberra, expects a serious outbreak that will affect areas otherwise clear of locusts for 25 years.But the Australian infestation will not rival that in Africa, McCulloch says. There, "there is a high risk that a worst-case scenario may be unfolding," he says.
Hunger Map uses Internet to spotlight global crisis points
In an effort to highlight major global hunger emergencies in real-time, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has unveiled a colour-coded Internet map guiding visitors to the agency's worldwide fight against the scourge.Posted on the Rome-based agency's website, the "Hunger Map" charts the geography of hunger hotspots around the world with red indicating high levels of under nourishment, orange moderate levels and green extremely low levels."There are more than 800 million undernourished women, men and children in the world, but how many people know where they live?" WFP Executive Director James T. Morris said. "The WFP 'Hunger Map' puts them on the map."WFP first plotted the geographical coordinates of hunger in printed form four years ago, but this is the first online version with real-time updates linked to background information on WFP operations in individual countries. It is also designed for use as an education tool in schools.Crises highlighted in the inaugural edition include: Darfur, west Sudan where WFP is struggling against lack of security, heavy rains and logistical obstacles to feed over 1 million people displaced by civil conflict; the worst floods to sweep Bangladesh in 30 years, which have left millions threatened by hunger and disease; severe food shortages in the Andean mountains of Peru caused by freak freezing weather; and Afghanistan - plagued by war, drought and poverty.The red band spreads across sub-Saharan Africa, where one in three people suffers hunger, and stretches into Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mongolia and Haiti. In these regions hunger claims more lives than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.The orange band tracks the Equator, stretching from Central Africa through India and the Philippines to Central America. Clicking on each country gives more detailed information about the number of undernourished as a percentage of the total population and on WFP efforts to fight their hunger.The green shading is limited to North America, Canada, Argentina, Europe and Australia, but varying degrees of under nourishment dominate the rest of the world.
Helen Pearson
Insect swarms swelling towards plague in Africa as Australia prepares for separate attack.
Experts are worried that locust swarms may destroy African crops. Experts are warning that swarms of locusts munching their way across Africa may yet reach plague proportions - while Australia is bracing itself for the onslaught of another species of the voracious insect.African desert locusts (Schistocerca gregaria), bunch together into flying swarms that can strip fields of crops overnight. Since late last year, rainy weather has encouraged them to breed in north-western Africa and numbers have gradually climbed.This week, the Food and Agriculture Organization warned that swarms are escalating in Mauritania, Mali and Niger and are spreading east into Chad. The pace of breeding is unprecedented, says Clive Elliott, part of the FAO's locust-forecasting group in Rome. "The number of swarms is larger than anybody expected."Experts are concerned that the locusts will spread as far as Sudan and the Middle East, at which point the situation would be classified as a plague. The swarms could also survive for several years. Elliott says that the situation already looks worse than an equivalent period during the most recent plague, between 1986 and 1989. Driving forceRainy weather has been the main driver behind the locusts' spread, as it provides them with green vegetation to feed on and damp sandy soil in which to lay eggs. Each time the insects spawn a new generation, which they have done at least four times since last October, their numbers swell by a factor of about 20.Elliott says that financial support is now coming from the international community. But exactly how the situation pans out will depend on the impact of control efforts and weather conditions. Part of the reason that the previous plague ended in 1989 was simply because freak winds gusted swarms out into the Atlantic. In the midst of the locust battle, the FAO is pushing for studies into new ways to control the insects besides conventional organophosphate pesticides sprayed from planes. It hopes to test a chemical that stops the insects manufacturing a protein called chitin in their hard outer skeleton. The chemical could be laid down to form barriers in the desert, killing juvenile locusts by preventing them from growing a new coat after moulting. Down underIn Australia, meanwhile, experts warned this week of an imminent attack on crops by the Australian plague locust (Chortoicetes terminifera). The current wet weather means that the insects' could conceivably reach plague levels, as they last did in 1987."The insects developed after heavy rains in parts of southern Queensland and northern New South Wales in January, and laid eggs that are expected to hatch shortly. Although the exact scale of the expected population boom is difficult to predict, Laury McCulloch, director of the Australian Plague Locust Commission in Canberra, expects a serious outbreak that will affect areas otherwise clear of locusts for 25 years.But the Australian infestation will not rival that in Africa, McCulloch says. There, "there is a high risk that a worst-case scenario may be unfolding," he says.
Hunger Map uses Internet to spotlight global crisis points
In an effort to highlight major global hunger emergencies in real-time, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has unveiled a colour-coded Internet map guiding visitors to the agency's worldwide fight against the scourge.Posted on the Rome-based agency's website, the "Hunger Map" charts the geography of hunger hotspots around the world with red indicating high levels of under nourishment, orange moderate levels and green extremely low levels."There are more than 800 million undernourished women, men and children in the world, but how many people know where they live?" WFP Executive Director James T. Morris said. "The WFP 'Hunger Map' puts them on the map."WFP first plotted the geographical coordinates of hunger in printed form four years ago, but this is the first online version with real-time updates linked to background information on WFP operations in individual countries. It is also designed for use as an education tool in schools.Crises highlighted in the inaugural edition include: Darfur, west Sudan where WFP is struggling against lack of security, heavy rains and logistical obstacles to feed over 1 million people displaced by civil conflict; the worst floods to sweep Bangladesh in 30 years, which have left millions threatened by hunger and disease; severe food shortages in the Andean mountains of Peru caused by freak freezing weather; and Afghanistan - plagued by war, drought and poverty.The red band spreads across sub-Saharan Africa, where one in three people suffers hunger, and stretches into Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mongolia and Haiti. In these regions hunger claims more lives than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.The orange band tracks the Equator, stretching from Central Africa through India and the Philippines to Central America. Clicking on each country gives more detailed information about the number of undernourished as a percentage of the total population and on WFP efforts to fight their hunger.The green shading is limited to North America, Canada, Argentina, Europe and Australia, but varying degrees of under nourishment dominate the rest of the world.
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