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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Ten healthy female students at a rural, co-ed North Carolina high school had repeated bouts of seizures, swooning and hyperventilation over a four-month period in 2002 -- an outbreak that experts are calling an example of mass hysteria.
The first girl began experiencing seizures in August. Over the next few weeks, more girls began to show the same symptoms. The attacks escalated throughout the fall months, then appeared to taper off by the winter holiday break.
One student experienced at least 30 attacks. All but one of the girls had no history of seizures.
Most of the attacks occurred while students were at school but not in class, such as during breaks or in hallways between classes.
Five of the students were current or former cheerleaders, but only two shared a classroom. None appeared to be experiencing more than their normal share of life's stressors, such as family problems or history of depression.
To investigate why these girls were experiencing seizures, Dr. E. Steve Roach of Wake Forest University in North Carolina and Dr. Ricky L. Langley of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services interviewed the students and their parents, and spoke with teachers and the school nurse. They also reviewed the students' class schedules and medical records, and tested the high school's buildings for environmental contaminants.
Writing in the Archives of Neurology, the authors conclude that the evidence "strongly suggested" that the girls were experiencing an episode of mass hysteria, defined as "the simultaneous occurrence of related signs or symptoms with a psychogenic basis in multiple individuals in a group."
The authors explain that they suspect mass hysteria because the episodes largely occurred at the same place, there was no other obvious explanation for them, and all of the girls' symptoms appeared and disappeared at around the same time.
Moreover, previous research has shown that mass hysteria typically strikes women more often than men, and may also occur more frequently in children and adolescents, they write.
Many episodes of mass hysteria are triggered by harmless odors or when a "prominent" person begins showing symptoms, they add. No environmental trigger was found, and since the first girl to experience seizures was a cheerleader and four others were as well, Roach and Langley suggest that seeing the symptoms in these girls "could have encouraged additional students to develop similar episodes."
Unfortunately, mass hysteria was not seriously considered as a possibility until after some time had passed, the authors note. By then, some girls said they had been teased, were unable to drive, and their mysterious conditions had placed a strain on family and personal life.
Moreover, "had the similarities between these individuals been noted earlier," some of the girls could have avoided some unnecessary diagnostic procedures and treatment, the investigators add.
"Although the underlying dynamics that initiate and perpetuate mass hysteria are poorly understood, its prompt recognition allows physicians to avoid unnecessary tests and treatments and to reassure both the affected individuals and the public," they write. SOURCE: Archives of Neurology, August 2004.

Monkeys go ape ...19/08/2004 21:18 - (SA)
Khartoum - Hordes of monkeys are running wild in the Sudanese state capital Kassala, attacking women and children and looting shops for food, Al-Anbaa newspaper reported on Thursday.
The groups are going on the rampage in two suburbs of the city, close to the frontier with Eritrea, the newspaper said.
The monkeys launch "organised attacks which last several hours", targeting "bakeries and grocery stores".
They attack women and children, run into homes, "breaking kitchen utensils and snatching food from the children" and open the doors of refrigerators to get at the food inside, according to one resident, Salah Osman al-Khedr.
He put the phenomenon down to the wholesale cutting down of trees which has deprived the monkeys of their sole source of food.
The attacks start at dawn and sometimes last until dusk, he said. - Sapa-AFP

Journalist Killed After Filming House Destroyed By U.S. Forces
19.08.2004
© Amnesty International A freelance Iraqi newsman workeding for the German television network Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) was killed on the way from Fallujah to Baghdad this week. According to sources in ZDF’s Baghdad office, the journalist called twice just before he was killed, the first time to report that he had just filmed a house destroyed by U.S warplanes, the second time to inform his colleagues that he was being attacked.

Japanese electronics maker Seiko Epson Corp.'s "Micro Flying Robot," that looks like a miniature helicopter about the size of a giant bug, is adjusted by Wang Wei, a Chinese postgraduate student studying mechanical engineering at Japan's Tsukuba University, during its demonstration at the company's Tokyo office Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2004. The still-not-for-sale 12.3 gram (0.4 ounce) 85 millimeter (3.35 inch)-tall robot, the company hopes will be used for security, disaster rescue and space exploration in the future, flies autonomously according toa flight-route program sent by Bluetooth wireless from a computer.

Cassini Finds Two Small, Surprising Moons at Saturn
By Robert Roy BrittSenior Science Writer
posted: 16 August 200404:58 pm ET
The Cassini spacecraft has spotted two previously unknown and small moons orbiting Saturn in an unexpected location.
The satellites are tiny, about 2 miles (3 kilometers) and 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) in diameter. They orbit within 131,000 miles (211,000 kilometers) of the planet's center.
The discoveries bring the total of Saturn's known moons to 33. Number 31 was discovered last year with a ground-based telescope.

Prions speed evolution
Helen Pearson
Sloppy proteins may help organisms adapt.
Prions may offer a speedy way for yeast to evolve. Prions, the twisted proteins usually linked to disease, could help organisms adapt to tough situations by subtly altering the proteins manufactured by a cell1. The discovery backs the idea that proteins as well as DNA are vital in driving evolution.Prions are proteins that twist into one of two shapes. In mammals, one type of prion seems to be harmless in one form but is infectious in the other. It is thought to underlie mad cow disease and its human equivalent, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). But scientists studying yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) have found that, in some cases, infectious prions may have an important role. In a colony of yeast cells, some cells carry the 'normal' type of the protein, whereas others harbour the infectious form, which accumulates into clumps and is passed from one cell to another.Four years ago, Susan Lindquist and Heather True of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, showed that this yeast prion can change the way that cells behave. In their infectious form, the prions sometimes helped the yeast to adapt, changing their rates of survival when they were grown in various nutrients or temperatures.Now Lindquist and her colleagues have worked out how the prions do this. In its non-infectious form, the protein normally helps to read and convert the DNA code into other proteins. But in its infectious form, the prion stops working. This means that many proteins are manufactured slightly sloppily. Evolutionary short-cutThe team believes that prions may therefore offer a speedy way for yeast to evolve, because those cells with the infectious prion churn out a whole range of slightly altered proteins. Normally this is bad news for the yeast, but when the cells find themselves in a tough spot, one or two of them may grow better in the new conditions as a result, and so help the colony to survive.This mechanism may be important for helping yeast stay alive over the short term, says True. It gives the cells time to pick up the permanent genetic changes they need to survive, which are then passed on to subsequent generations.The finding runs against the general assumption in evolution that when organisms adapt to a change in their environment, they do so by acquiring random mutations in their DNA."I think the whole concept is very important," says molecular biologist Michael Snyder at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Other proteins in different organisms could do a similar thing, Snyder suggests, by subtly altering the shape or amount of proteins made. "We don't know how extensive this is," he says.

Stormy solution to rain crisis
EDWARD CODY
WITH water increasingly scarce in its parched and heavily populated north-eastern plain, China has become the world’s leading rainmaker, using aircraft, rockets and even anti-aircraft guns to seed the clouds for precious moisture. The hunt has become so intense that rival regions sometimes compete for clouds sailing across the sky. Now, in 23 of the country’s 34 provinces, the provincial, county and municipal governments have set up what they call weather modification bureaus assigned to bombard the heavens regularly with chemicals in the hope of squeezing out more rainfall for China’s 1.3 billion residents. The heavy cloud seeding is a dramatic example of China’s increasing difficulty in finding enough natural resources as its economy expands rapidly and its huge population consumes more goods. According to Hu Zhijin, of the Weather Modification Research Centre at the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Science, official statistics show that 30 modified aircraft, 6,900 anti-aircraft guns and 3,800 rocket launchers, some mounted on trucks, were used repeatedly in attempts to change the weather across China’s driest areas in 2003. The effort is just as sustained this year, in response to drought conditions across a wide swathe of the country. The result is that rainmakers across China have accumulated more hands-on practice than their counterparts elsewhere, wringing water from the clouds for season after season in intense government-sponsored programmes. "They have been doing it for a long time," said Zhijin. "They do it every year. They have more experience, and they invest more funds in it." In a recent conversation, Ban Xianxiu, the director of Liaoning province’s Weather Modification Bureau, discussed the fine points of rockets versus antiaircraft guns for coaxing rain from the clouds. The guns do better with small, fat clouds, he said, while rockets can spread chemicals over a wider area. Planes cover a wider area still, if the clouds blow in as flat layers. The Liaoning bureau, 350 miles north-east of Beijing, has salted the clouds about twice a month so far this year, he said but for all their skill China’s rainmakers can work their magic only if the weather co-operates, by sending damp clouds near drought-affected areas. "We can only modify the weather," said Xianxiu. "We can’t create it." The thirst for rain has become so great in the drought-plagued north-east of the country that some cities and counties have quarrelled over clouds that drift in with the promise of moisture while rainmakers stand poised below with their weapons at the ready. Five major regions of Henan province, about 400 miles south of Beijing, all seeded clouds around the same time last month during a bad dry spell. But one of them, Pingdingshan, received most of the rain that finally fell on 10 July, mostly because it was in the path of prevailing winds. The region measured more than four inches of rain, according to local meteorologists, while the city of Zhoukou recorded little more than an inch. The result led to Zhoukou’s meteorological officials claiming the Pingdingshan Weather Modification Office had repeatedly seeded clouds which, if nature had been allowed to follow its course, would have scudded along to other places - such as Zhoukou - before delivering their rainfall. Nonsense, replied the Pingdingshan office. "We didn’t grab the clouds away from other cities," declared the office director, who gave his name only as Wang. "What we are doing is quite a scientific thing. And we reported our cloud-seeding schedule to the provincial government. I believe other cities also did so. The water-vapour resource is not like water resources in a river, which could be intercepted from points upstream. Nor is it like a cake - if I have a bite, others get only a smaller piece. Besides, clouds change while floating in the sky, so it is quite complicated." Chinese rainmakers, like their counterparts elsewhere, spread silver iodide or liquid nitrogen in moist clouds to produce ice crystals, which turn into rain as they fall to warmer air below. The chemical products can be sprayed from a plane or shot into the air with rockets - sometimes 100 at a time - or fired up by the anti-aircraft guns using special shells roughly similar to fireworks. Such science is widely known and was applied in the United States and elsewhere as early as the 1950s. However, because of its severe weather problems, China has put the know-how to practical use more often than other countries in recent decades. So far, added the Pingdingshan official, there have not been any signs that frequent cloud seeding harms the environment, although scientists are watching. In March 2002, as the practice spread, the Chinese central government handed down a directive regulating weather modification. Mainly it mandated cooperation and information-sharing by provinces, counties and cities, and barred cloud seeding by unofficial groups. In the Weather Modification Bureau in Jilin province, north of Beijing, staff file an annual cloud-seeding plan in line with the directive, although the bureau director pointed out that the clouds’ mobility and the uneven distribution of water vapour within them make the enterprise unpredictable at best. Nevertheless, he added, his office frequently is in touch with neighbouring provinces on cloud-seeding plans in the area along the North Korean border. "Sometimes we even have combined action with them," said the official, who insisted on being identified only as Zheng. "Although the effect would be great if several provinces work together when there is a huge cloud system in the sky, in reality, we seldom do that."

Alzheimer's linked to lowbrow jobsMichael Hopkin
Mentally stimulating careers may protect against dementia.
Mundane jobs may contribute to Alzheimer's. A mentally stimulating career may help to reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease, research suggests. According to a study carried out in the United States, those who develop the debilitating form of dementia are more likely to have had jobs that do not tax the brain.The discovery lends weight to the 'use it or lose it' theory, says Kathleen Smyth of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, who led the research. Experts have previously suggested that keeping the mind active, through reading or crossword puzzles, can help to stave off dementia in old age.The latest work, however, shows that mental stimulation throughout life can influence the development of Alzheimer's. The researchers examined 122 people with Alzheimer's disease and 235 healthy subjects, and compared the mental demands they had faced throughout their careers, from their twenties right through to their fifties.The average level of mental strain on the two groups was equal during their twenties. But those without Alzheimer's tended to have had jobs that were more mentally taxing from their thirties through to retirement, the researchers report in the journal Neurology1. "In their thirties, forties and fifties there was a divergence that persisted," Smyth says. The researchers are not sure exactly how the effect works. Perhaps Alzheimer's disease has an early impact that prevents sufferers from entering mentally demanding professions such as writing, accountancy or law, Smyth suggests.But it may be more likely that the brain really does benefit from sustained activity, rather than a lifetime spent working in a factory. Smyth suggests that people who stimulate their minds might build up a reserve of nerve cells in the brain. This would allow them to remain clear-headed even as their brains became clogged with the clots of protein that characterize Alzheimer's. Alternatively, those who exercise their grey matter might simply be better practised at thinking. This would make them more likely to perform well in the mental tests used to diagnose the disease, suggests Clive Ballard, director of research at the Alzheimer's Society, a British charity. "Are they really at lower risk of the disease or are they just better at doing tests?" he asks.Ballard also suggests that, as people with intellectual careers tend to enjoy higher socioeconomic status, they may have better access to healthcare. He points to the recent suggestion that hormone-replacement therapy may protect against Alzheimer's. In actual fact, he stresses, the effect is probably due to the more privileged lifestyles of those who use the therapy.
Ballard does concede that the latest study is an improvement on previous efforts to compare Alzheimer's sufferers with healthy controls. "Case-control studies are always tricky," he says. "But what is different about this is that it is done decade by decade, so it is better informed."

Freeze-frame planet
Fossils of microbial life are difficult to find even on Earth, with the most sophisticated tools. And they don't endure well over billions of years. Higher forms of life -- larger, multicellular, and with more structure -- leave traces that are easier to detect. So far, the Mars rovers have found no obvious fossils big enough to be clearly observed and credible.
Most experts doubt that conditions on Mars could have supported the evolution of life beyond its most primitive forms.
"More evolved life…we would have seen fossils of it by now, and we haven’t," McKay said. Yet the chemistry and the indications of water at both rover landing sites, he said, is certainly favorable for the development of microbial life.
Future orbiting and landing spacecraft are now being built to study Mars in far greater detail using more powerful devices than those utilized to date. "In my view, it’s a terrible waste of landers not to have a life-detection instrument on every lander," McKay stated. "The public is smart enough to understand that a negative result doesn’t mean there’s no life on Mars."
There is fear within the Mars research community, McKay continued, that a negative result would essentially kill the program. "I don’t think that’s the case at all."
Up to now, Mars is a freeze-frame planet, profiled in camera clicks. In the near future, the prospects are good for streaming video to present the red planet in motion, as never seen before.

Polluted U.S. Beaches Closing in Record Numbers
J.R. PeggEnvironment News Service (ENS)
Fri., Aug. 6, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, August 6, 2004 (ENS) - The number of closings and advisories at U.S. oceans and Great Lakes beaches last year rose 51 percent from 2002, according to an annual survey released Thursday by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The study, based on federal and state data, finds 2003 was the worst year for beach closings and advisories since the environmental organization began monitoring beach water pollution 14 years ago. High bacteria levels - indicating the presence of human or animal waste - prompted 88 percent of the closing and advisory days in 2003. "Millions of Americans go to the beach every summer to enjoy the sun, the sand, and the surf," said Nancy Stoner, director of NRDC's Clean Water Project. "Too often they have to stay out of the water or risk getting sick." Last year there were more than 18,000 days of beach closings and advisories - an increase of 6,206 days. Better monitoring of beach water quality accounts for some of the increase in closings and advisories, according to NRDC, but so does the continued failure of most municipalities to identify and control sources of beach water pollution. The report finds that local authorities did not know the sources of pollution causing or contributing to 68 percent of the closing and advisory days last year. This is the highest rate of "unknown" sources since NRDC first issued its annual beach report in 1991. Florida, which saw its closing and advisory days increased by 128 percent, accounted for more than a third of the overall increase. The NRDC accounts this to the state's increased monitoring and its adoption of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) health standards. Mississippi's closing and advisory days increased 337 percent, the largest percentage jump between 2002 and 2003. The report highlights four communities that NRDC believes do not regularly monitor beach water or notify the public if health standards are exceeded. The list of NRDC's "Beach Bums" includes: Kennebunkport, Maine; Bar Harbor, Maine; St. Lawrence County, New York; and Frenchman's Bar in Vancouver, Washington. "We know that the high bacteria levels that cause most closings and advisories come from two sources - inadequately treated sewage and contaminated stormwater," Stoner said. "We have a major water system breakdown across the country, and local, state and federal authorities need to wake up and fix it." NRDC is calling for authorities to focus on preventing raw sewage discharges, reducing contaminated stormwater runoff, and setting strong public health standards for bacteria, viruses, parasites and other pollutants. Health and water quality standards currently vary among states and coastal territories, and municipalities are struggling to upgrade the nation's aging sewage infrastructure. The average age of collection system components is about 33 years, but some pipes still in use are almost 200 years old. The problem carries a hefty price tag - federal estimates suggest there is a national funding gap as high as $1 trillion for water infrastructure. NRDC criticizes the Bush administration for a proposed $500 million cut in federal grants for sewage treatment plant upgrades and for policies to change the regulation of sewage treatment discharges. The Bush proposal would give plants greater flexibility to discharge wastewater that has not been sent through secondary treatment units. EPA officials and industry representatives note that this blended waste must still meet discharge standards, but environmentalists say those standards do not cover viruses or parasites and believe the plan violates the Clean Water Act. "Inadequately treated sewage can cause vomiting and diarrhea for healthy people, but can be life threatening for young children and the elderly," said Stoner. "The EPA's policy is irresponsible." NRDC praised four municipalities for their efforts not just to monitor water quality and inform the public, but also for taking steps to address sources of beach pollution by improving sewage or storm water treatment, limiting coastal development, or preserving coastal wetlands. The report applauded the efforts of: Willard Beach, South Portland, Maine; Town Beach, Warren, Rhode Island; Ocean City, Maryland; and Newport Beach, California.

Groups File Complaint With State Department Against Three American Companies Named in UN Report
Allegations of Complicity in Fueling Civil War in Democratic Republic of the Congo
Friend of the Earth-United States (FoE) and the UK-based group Rights and Accountability in Development (RAID) filed a formal complaint with the U.S. State Department today against three American companies. In October 2002, a United Nations (UN) Panel of Experts accused the companies of helping to fuel the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
The Panel named Cabot Corporation, Eagle Wings Resources International and OM Group, Inc. as having violated the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) “Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises,” a set of international standards for responsible corporate behavior.
FoE and RAID filed an official complaint today because the State Department, which has oversight for determining whether U.S. companies have breached the OECD Guidelines, has declined to undertake an independent investigation into whether these companies might have contributed to the war in the DRC.
“If the State Department refuses to conduct an independent investigation, a troubling message will be sent to U.S. companies. They’ll know that they can get away with helping to finance violent conflict and human rights abuses without any repercussions,” said Colleen Freeman, policy analyst with Friends of the Earth. “We ought to know whether American companies contributed to one of Africa ’s deadliest wars so it doesn’t happen again.”
The Panel’s three-year investigation found that sophisticated “elite networks” of high‑level political, military and businesspersons, in collaboration with various rebel groups, intentionally fueled the conflict in order to retain control over the country’s vast natural resources. The Panel implicated many Western companies for directly or indirectly helping to fuel the war.
In its final, October 2003 report, the Panel said that no further investigation was required into the activities of Cabot, Eagle Wings and OM Group. But the Panel did make clear that “resolution should not be seen as invalidating the Panel’s earlier findings with regard to the activities of these actors.”
“Now that a formal complaint has been submitted, the U.S. government, as a signatory to the OECD Guidelines, is obligated to examine whether breaches have occurred,” said Patricia Feeney, director of RAID. “Clearly there are many unanswered questions that the State Department must examine. The conduct of the U.S. companies has to be measured against internationally agreed standards in a transparent process – not behind closed doors.”
Boston-based Cabot Corporation allegedly purchased coltan from the DRC during the war. While Cabot has denied these allegations, a report by the Belgian Senate states that Eagle Wings Resources International had a long‑term contract to supply Cabot with coltan. Current Deputy Director of the Department of Treasury, Samuel Bodman, was CEO and Chairman of Cabot from 1997-2001.
Trinitech Holdings is the holding company for Ohio-based companies, Eagle Wings Resources LLC and Trinitech International, Inc. Eagle Wings Resources International (EWRI) is a joint venture between Dutch company, Chemie Pharmacie Holland BV (CPH) and Trinitech Holdings. The Panel asserts that EWRI received privileged access to coltan sites and captive labor because of its close ties to the Rwandan military. The Panel has accused the Rwandan regime of mass-scale looting, systemic exploitation, and the organization of an elite network centrally located in the Rwandan Defense Department, set up specifically to exploit the DRC’s natural resources.
Ohio-based OM Group’s joint venture with a Belgian national, George Forrest, Groupement pour le Traitement des Scories du Terril de Lumbumbashi, Ltd. (GTL) is accused by the Panel of deliberately ignoring technical agreements that provide for the construction of two electrical refineries and a converter for germanium processing in the DRC from the “Big Hill” project. Instead, semi‑processed ore from the mine was shipped to OM Group’s processing facility in Finland , thereby robbing the state mining company, Gécamines, of millions of dollars in revenue. At issue is whether the complex corporate structure was intended to deny Gécamines the benefits of the future sales of minerals with significant commercial potential at a time when the country was at war and there was no functioning government or mining ministry to protect the interests of Gécamines and by extension, the Congolese people.
Separate to the Panel’s allegations concerning the Big Hill project, a recently released World Bank environmental report raised concerns about the exploitation of radioactive minerals from concessions owned by Gécamines, such as the Shinkolobwe uranium mine. There is evidence that Societe pour le Traitement des Scories du Terril de Lubumbashi (STL) – a company created by GTL in 1997 – processed radioactive minerals to obtain cobalt at the company’s plant in Lubumbashi , which is situated close to a hospital. The Belgian Senate concluded that airborne and waterborne pollution could not be discounted. At issue is whether the measures in place at OM Group’s plant in Lubumbashi were sufficient to prevent radioactive contamination of the Congolese workforce and whether the local population was exposed to unacceptably high risk of pollution from the operations of the plant.
“It has been nine months since the United Nations published the Panel’s final report and so far the only serious attempt to respond to the Panel’s allegations has been made by Belgian judges investigating money laundering and illicit arms transactions linked to the trade in coltan and diamonds by Belgian companies and banks. In South Africa , the courts have also started to uncover assets held in the names of senior Congolese political figures as a result of breach of contract lawsuits brought by businessmen against the DRC Government,” said Feeney.
The basis for the complaints is RAID’s report entitled “Unanswered Questions: Companies, Conflict and the Democratic Republic of Congo .”

Social status influences brain structure
Helen Pilcher
Assertive rats sprout extra nerve cells.
Brain power: the nerve cells of dominant rats survive longer than those of subordinate animals. Assertiveness really is all in the mind. Dominant rats have more new nerve cells in a key brain region than their subordinates, a study reveals. The finding hints that social hierarchies can influence brain structure, and raises questions over the use of standard animal behaviour tests in laboratory research. Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy and Elizabeth Gould from Princeton University, New Jersey, studied the brains of around 40 rats that had been left to form social hierarchies in a semi-natural setting. Their results are published in The Journal of Neuroscience1.In each experiment, four males and two females were placed inside a large box comprising an underground tangle of burrows and chambers and a feeding area above. Within three days, the males had established their preferred pecking order: an aggressive leader who attracted the females and three defensive subordinates. Two weeks later, the high-status animals were found to have around 30% more neurons in their hippocampus, a brain region implicated in learning and memory, than they had before. Neurons in this area are constantly recycled, says Kozorovitskiy. Around 9,000 new nerve cells are born every day, but most die within a week. In the dominant animals, however, the new cells survive for longer.Although their exact function is unknown, it is thought that these extra neurons could help the animals adapt to their position of power. Whether the same phenomenon occurs in humans is not known. Other factors, such as exercise and environmental enrichment, trigger the production of new nerve cells in the same area. "These cells are amazingly responsive to environmental conditions," says neuroscientist Tracey Shors from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.Social climbing The strain of rat that Kozorovitskiy and Gould used is normally passive, and does not form dominance hierarchies when housed in standard laboratory cages without tunnels.Although the researchers had hoped that placing the animals in burrows would encourage them to form hierarchies, they were surprised to see the animals' social structure change so quickly, with a wealth of individual differences in behaviour appearing within days.Kozorovitskiy suggests that studying rats in burrows is likely to be much more relevant to understanding human behaviour than tests carried out in standard cages."Standard laboratory housing may suppress individual variability," agrees neuroscientist Larry Young from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. "So the behaviour you see may be different from that you would observe in nature." Most laboratory protocols suppress individual differences between test animals. But many researchers are now moving towards tests that enhance individual behaviour. These models should be more relevant to human disease, says Young.

I do not have the energy or desire to continue to count on m to be there for me. I know now that i am worth something by the very fact that i am a living creature, not because he says that i am. I don't need him anymore, at least that is what i would like to think. I don't want to need him anymore, is what i should say. I also don't want to need tim, but he fulfills me on a much larger scale, one i could not have hoped to understand before. i know that i can die alone and it will be alright, because i carry my worth with me in my heart and mind.

Salmon give birth to trout
Michael Hopkin
Surrogate sperm technique allows cross-species fatherhood.
Trout have been given life by a species from the other side of the world. Japanese researchers have pioneered a breeding technique that allows salmon to father baby trout. The method could potentially revolutionize fish-farming and even resurrect extinct species, they claim.The researchers managed to create male salmon that produce sperm of a closely related trout species. When used to fertilize trout eggs, the sperm produced perfectly healthy young trout, report Goro Yoshizaki and his colleagues at the University of Marine Sciences and Technology in Tokyo.The technique involves cells called primordial germ cells (PGCs), which are found in embryos and can develop into either eggs or sperm. Yoshizaki's team injected PGCs from rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) into young male masu salmon (Oncorhynchus masou), and let the salmon mature.When sperm from the fully-grown salmon were used to fertilize trout eggs, 0.4% of the resulting offspring were healthy trout, showing that the injected PGCs had developed into trout sperm. The rest of the offspring fathered by the salmon died at a young age, showing that they were hybrids created as the trout eggs were fertilized by ordinary salmon sperm, the team reports in this week's Nature1.Fishy familyIt is the first time that transplanted PGCs from one species have successfully produced offspring through a surrogate parent of another species, says Yoshizaki. The achievement is made even more remarkable by the fact that the salmon and trout are native to east Asia and North America, respectively, and are separated by around 8 million years of evolution.The researchers are also investigating whether PGCs transplanted into female fish will develop into eggs. They expect to find out next year, as female masu salmon take three years to mature compared with the males' two.If the technique does work for eggs as well as sperm, then PGCs may offer the chance to preserve endangered species or even raise extinct ones from the dead, Yoshizaki predicts. "We can preserve frozen PGCs forever," he says. "So theoretically, even if a species goes extinct, we can transplant the cells into a closely related species."
Even if a species goes extinct, we can transplant the cells into a closely related species.
Goro YoshizakiUniversity of Marine Sciences and Technology, Tokyo
PGCs may become a useful conservation tool, says Brendan McAndrew, who studies fish rearing at the University of Stirling, UK. But he adds that the technique has not yet been tested on species with more complex development. "Nearly everything you try in rainbow trout seems to work," he says. "Other species may not be so simple."If the technique does work in other species, it could be a boon to sushi lovers, Yoshizaki hopes. Bluefin tuna is a key ingredient in many sushi recipes, but because they weigh up to 500 kilograms, adult fish are difficult and expensive to house on fish farms. If the related, but much smaller, mackerel can be made to produce tuna eggs and sperm, Yoshizaki suggests, the young tuna could be reared in huge numbers and then released into the sea to be caught by local fishermen.It is an interesting way to tackle Japan's insatiable appetite for bluefin tuna, says McAndrew. But he argues that traditional conservation measures are ultimately more reliable than high-tech fixes. "Mackerel are more complex than trout, so it might not work," he warns. "Maybe they're better off not fishing their wild tuna so hard."

'Dead zone' spreads across Gulf of Mexico
HOUSTON, Texas (Reuters) -- A huge "dead zone" of water so devoid of oxygen that sea life cannot live in it has spread across 5,800 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico this summer in what has become an annual occurrence caused by pollution.
The extensive area of uninhabitable water may be contributing indirectly to an unusual spate of shark bites along the Texas coast, experts said.
A scientist at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium said Tuesday measurements showed the dead zone extended from the mouth of the Mississippi River in southeastern Louisiana 250 miles west to near the Texas border and was closer to shore than usual because winds and currents.
"Fish and swimming crabs escape (from the dead zone)," said Nancy Rabalais, the consortium's chief scientist for hypoxia, or low oxygen, research. "Anything else dies."
In the last 30 years, the dead zone has become an annual summer phenomenon, fed by rising use of nitrate-based fertilizers by farmers in the Mississippi watershed, Rabalais told Reuters.
The nitrates, carried into the gulf's warm summer waters by the river, feed algae blooms that use up oxygen and make the water uninhabitable.
The dead zone's size has varied each year depending on weather conditions, but averages about 5,000 square miles and remains in place until late September or early October.
Virtually nothing is being done to stop the flow of nitrates into the river, meaning the dead zone will reappear every year, Rabalais said.
The dead zone forces fish to seek better water, which may be a reason for the recent shark bites on Texas beaches.
Three people have been bitten by sharks along the upper Texas coast this year -- a high number for a state that has recorded only 18 shark attacks since 1980.
Terry Stelly, an ecosystem biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, said increasing numbers of sharks have been found in recent years in the waters along the Texas-Louisiana border, near the edge of the dead zone.
Along with other factors, "chances are good they (sharks) were looking for higher dissolved oxygen in the water," he said.
Rabalais agreed, saying "The higher number of sharks in shallow waters may very likely be due to the low oxygen being close to the shore at the time of the attacks."
"The available habitat for the sharks is definitely less when the low oxygen is so widespread," she said. -

Cop on trial for not complying with zero tolerance policy on homeless By News Article Aug 2, 2004, 09:03

A New York City police officer is fighting for his job and his pension after refusing an order to arrest a homeless man. Officer Eduardo Delacruz was a member of the Homeless Outreach Unit, when his superiors changed the unit's policy for dealing with homeless people. Under the new zero-tolerance policy, Delacruz said that he was told to ask people if they wanted to go to a shelter, and if the person refused and lacked "proper identification," he was to arrest them.

But Delacruz said his sense of morality, dictated by his strong religious beliefs, compelled him to treat the homeless with more kindness and flexibility than his superiors demanded. "I didn't see them as homeless," he said. "I saw them as people. I'd say a majority of New York City is just a paycheck away from being homeless."

When Delacruz refused an order to process a man who had been arrested for sleeping near Union Square, he was given a 30-day suspension. He now faces a departmental trial, which could cost him his job. He is being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union

August 3, 2004 - MESSENGER Launched Early This Morning On 7-Year Trip to Mercury.

Anthrax outbreak kills wild chimps
Illegal trade could spread disease to humans.
The chimps died within hours of symptoms appearing. Anthrax has killed at least six wild chimpanzees in the tropical rainforest of the Ivory Coast - the first time the disease has been seen in these animals and in this type of habitat. As well as threatening great ape populations, the discovery raises fears that the disease could spread to humans through the illegal trade in bushmeat.Researchers studying chimps (Pan troglodytes verus) in the Taï National Park saw 8 animals disappear or die suddenly between October 2001 and June 2002. Healthy animals became weak, vomited and died within a few hours of symptoms appearing.Post mortems revealed that the animals suffered massive internal bleeding, suggesting bacterial infection as a possible cause. Genetic analysis of 6 animals showed Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that causes anthrax, to be the culprit. The results are reported in this week's Nature1."Finding anthrax was a big surprise," says Georg Pauli from the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, Germany, who studied the primates. There have been no previous reports of anthrax in wild chimps, and the bacterium, which also infects humans and hooved animals, has not been found in Africa's tropical rainforests before.Spread of infection"It's a serious problem for chimps," says conservationist Peter Walsh from Princeton University, New Jersey. Africa's 100,000 to 200,000 remaining wild chimps are already under threat from commercial hunting, habitat destruction and the Ebola virus. It is not clear whether the anthrax outbreak is a one-off, or if there are likely to be further incidents.The disease could also spread to humans. The bacterium forms hardy spores that can be breathed in, consumed in contaminated food and water, or can infect the skin through human-to-animal contact.Although illegal, the bushmeat trade continues to thrive, so hunters could catch anthrax when handling infected corpses.

MORE SIGNS OF MAGNETIC POLE REVERSAL
Signs that the reversal is about to happen again are nowhere more apparent than over Southern Africa, according to Dr Pieter Kotze, head of the geomagnetism group at the Hermanus Magnetic Observatory in the southern Cape. Satellites in low-Earth orbit over Southern Africa are already showing signs of radiation damage suffered as a result of the Earth's magnetic field weakening above our part of the planet. The field forms the magneto sphere, which, like the Earth's ozone layer, protects the planet from the sun's harmful radiation. Other symptoms destined to become apparent in the years ahead include the aurora australis, or southern lights. Usually seen only over the South Pole, these will become visible closer to the equator as the Earth's magnetic field weakens and disappears. Eventually, on past form, the field will reappear but with magnetic north and south pole changing places, as they have done for billions of years. The (temporary) disappearance of the magnetic field ahead of its reversal will lead to increased occurrences of radiation-induced cancer, Kotze said. Commenting on the New York Times report, Kotze said that the decay in the Earth's magnetic field was becoming increasingly apparent in "the South Atlantic anomaly", a huge deviation in the Earth's magnetic field discovered with the help of the Hermanus Magnetic Observatory. This month, the European Space Agency (ESA) approved a multimillion-euro space mission, called Swarm, to measure the anomaly, which stretches from Southern Africa towards South America. The ESA's scientists believe that this anomaly, as revealed by the occasional "geomagnetic jerk" to which our part of the world is prone, will provide a clue to predicting the next "flip" in the Earth's magnetic field, now 250 000 years overdue - as these things go. Three ESA satellites, flying in low-Earth orbit (400km to 500km up) after their launch in 2009, will measure the variation over Southern Africa. The observatory has also recorded a faster-growing deviation between true north and magnetic north over Southern Africa during the past 10 years, drifting steadily westward. Taken together, the blip and this drift point to an imminent reversal in the Earth's north-south magnetic alignment. "We should be able to work out the first predictions by the end of the [Swarm] mission," Gauthier Hulot, an ESA geophysicist and a colleague of Kotze's, told the New York Times. Kotze said that, "these are all indications that we have conditions similar to the last reversal, 780 000 years ago. So it means that we are due for another one soon." In geological terms, however, "soon" could mean anytime between tomorrow and the next 3 000 years.