mas-aripp

Greener The Earth by Decorating Your Walls

2010-09-26T00:06:00.000-07:00

Would you like to decorating your walls with those plants ?

Green roofs help to reduce the heat island effect in towns and cities because plants absorb less heat than concrete and can also cool the air via the process of evapotranspiration. This can save energy by cutting the need for air conditioning on hot days. What's more, they reduce the risk of flooding by absorbing water and, of course, they absorb carbon dioxide.

Most existing green roofs use various species of Sedum, because the plants can survive without rain for long periods, meaning they require little maintenance.

But Tijana Blanusa, a Royal Horticultural Society researcher based at the University of Reading in the UK, wanted to know if Sedum really is the best plant for the job.

She compared a variety of plants, including a Sedum mix, lamb's ear andelephant ear, to see if differences in leaf shape and structure would make a difference to the temperature of the air above them.

She found that lamb's ear, a silvery, hairy-leafed plant, had the consistently coolest leaves over a two-year period. "Even when it is really stressed, and the leaves of other plants get a few degrees warmer than when they are watered, the lamb's ear manages to keep its leaves cooler than those that don't have hairs," she says.

What's more, when she measured the air temperature 20 centimetres above each plant, she found that on the hottest summer afternoons the air above lamb's ear was also cooler than above the other plants.

Hope this article helps you out..... ^_^

What alien worlds orbit our nearest star?

2010-01-31T02:15:00.000-08:00

If we ever travel to the nearest solar system, it would be good to know the kind of planets to expect. Now we have the best hint yet.

The Alpha Centauri dual star system is thought to host rocky Earth-mass worlds, but this assumes they could form in the turbulent conditions associated with the opposing gravitational tugs of paired star systems.

Rocky planets are created from the merger of moon-sized planetary embryos which, in turn, form from the accretion of kilometre-sized planetesimals. However, there is no guarantee that such embryos could form in turbulent conditions.

To find out, Jian Ge of the University of Florida in Gainesville and colleagues built a computer simulation of Alpha Centauri, which showed that moon-sized protoplanets could indeed form after about a million years. No gas giants would be created though, as any gas would be dispersed by the turbulent conditions.

Phillipe Thebault of the Observatory of Paris in France describes the work as interesting, but says the issue is still far from settled. It is impossible to numerically study the planet accretion process in a turbulent system, such as Alpha Centauri, without some simplification, he says.

Source: arxiv.org/abs/1001.2614

Climate chief admits error over Himalayan glaciers

2010-01-31T01:54:00.000-08:00

The head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been forced to apologise for including in its 2007 report the claim that there was a "very high" chance of glaciers disappearing from the Himalayas by 2035.

Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, conceded yesterday that "the clear and well-established standards of evidence required by the IPCC procedures were not applied properly" when the claim was included in the 900-page assessment of the impacts of climate change.

The paragraph at issue reads: "Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high."

Single source

The report's only cited source was a 2005 report by the environment group WWF, which in turn cited a 1999 article in New Scientist.

The New Scientist article quoted senior Indian glaciologist Syed Hasnain, the then vice-chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, who was writing a report on the Himalayas for the International Commission for Snow and Ice. It said, on the basis of an interview with Hasnain, that his report "indicates that all the glaciers in the central and eastern Himalayas could disappear by 2035". The claim did not, however, appear in the commission's report, which was only made available late last year.

This week a group of geographers, headed by Graham Cogley of Trent University at Peterborough in Ontario, Canada, have written to the journal Science pointing out that the claim "requires a 25-fold greater loss rate from 1999 to 2035 than that estimated for 1960 to 1999. It conflicts with knowledge of glacier-climate relationships, and is wrong."

The geographers add that the claim has "captured the global imagination and has been repeated in good faith often, including recently by the IPCC's chairman". The IPCC's errors "could have been avoided had the norms of scientific publication, including peer review and concentration upon peer-reviewed work, been respected", they say.

Several of those involved in the IPCC review process did try to question the 2035 date before it was published by the IPCC. Among them was Georg Kaser, a glaciologist from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and a lead author of another section of the IPCC report. "I scanned the almost final draft at the end of 2006 and came across the 2035 reference." Kaser queried the reference but believes it was too late in the day for it to be reassessed.

Publicly available IPCC archives of the review process show that during the formal review, the Japanese government also questioned the 2035 claim. It commented: "This seems to be a very important statement. What is the confidence level/certainty?" Soon afterwards, a reference to the WWF report was added to the final draft. But the statement otherwise went unchanged.
Grey literature

One of the IPCC authors, Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, California, this week defended the use of so-called "grey" literature in IPCC reports. He told New Scientist that it was not possible to include only peer-reviewed research because, particularly in the chapters discussing the regional impacts of climate change, "most of the literature is not up to that gold standard".

The Himalaya claim appeared in the regional chapter on Asia. "There are only a few authors in each region, so it narrows the base of science," Schneider says.

Source : Many sources

Did You Know That Our Atmosphere Come From Outer Space ?

2009-12-19T05:23:00.000-08:00

Comets from outer space may have created Earth's atmosphere – not volcanoes spewing out gases from deep within the planet.

The origin of the gases in Earth's atmosphere has long been a puzzle. One of the main theories is that the gases bubbled up out of the mantle via volcanoes.

Greg Holland of the University of Manchester, UK, and colleagues have arrived at a different theory after collecting samples of the noble gas krypton from several hundred metres beneath New Mexico.

They found that the mantle's chemical fingerprint was rich in "heavy" isotopes of krypton such as krypton-86 and krypton-84, and poorer in "lighter" forms such as krypton-82. This is a composition that closely resembles meteorites –- support for the ideas that gas-rich meteorites colliding in the early solar system formed our planet.

"The results confirm one of the basic ideas of planetary formation theory, that most of the Earth formed by collisions of smaller objects like carbonaceous chondrites," says Scott Kenyon at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Light atmosphere

But where did the atmosphere come from –- it is rich in lighter isotopes so the mantle cannot be the source, says Holland. Earth's atmosphere cannot have gained a greater proportion of lighter isotopes since it formed. Because light isotopes of krypton escape into space more quickly than heavy isotopes, the atmosphere can only get "heavier"

If not the mantle then what? Chris Ballentine, a co-author and colleague of Holland's suggests that comets could be the answer. At the outer edges of the solar system, in the Kuiper Belt, are millions of icy bodies that formed when the solar system was born. These comets have noble gas signatures that resemble that of our modern atmosphere.

A shift in Jupiter's orbit around 4.5 billion years ago may have jarred the Kuiper Belt, flinging icy comets at the Earth. "Ancient Earth was strewn with huge volcanoes spewing out gas, but our research shows that the real source of Earth's first atmosphere was actually outer space," says Ballentine, a co-author of the paper and colleague of Holland's.

Source: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1179518

Devastating Indonesian Earthquake, It still to come !!

2009-10-04T06:26:00.000-07:00

The earthquake which devastated the city of Padang in Sumatra, Indonesia, this week, killing more than 1100 people, may have been only a hint of worse to come. Since 2004, geologists have been predicting a far nastier earthquake in the region – a shallow tremor that will rip the sea floor apart, trigger a devastating tsunami and kill far more people.

"Another earthquake is on its way, and all it will take to trigger it is the pressure of a handshake," says John McCloskey, a seismologist at the Environmental Sciences Research Institute at the University of Ulster in Coleraine, Northern Ireland.

Padang experienced a magnitude-7.6 earthquake on 30 September, just after 5 pm local time. Images of terrified relatives waiting to identify dead bodies, their T-shirts clutched over their noses to mask the stench, military officials stalking between bright yellow, zipped-up body bags and centuries-old Dutch colonial mansions obliterated in an instant have flooded around the world.

At first, geologists assumed this was the earthquake they had predicting for many years. "Padang has bad geology," explains McCloskey. "It sits 40 kilometres above the most earthquake-prone stretch of the interface between the Indo-Australian and Eurasian plates."

This interface has not experienced the stress relief of an earthquake for over 200 years, according to McCloskey's analysis of historical coral growth rings, which show no sign of seafloor uplift. GPS measurements of the rate of plate motion suggest that there has been around 13 metres of movement in this area over the same period. "A shallow earthquake at the plate interface off Padang is long, long overdue," says McCloskey.
Freak event

Yet the earthquake which struck this week off Padang did not occur at the plate interface, which lies 500 kilometres offshore. The epicentre was just 45 kilometres from Padang, far away from the plate interface. What's more, it originated 80 kilometres underground, far deeper than the place at which the Indo-Australian and Eurasian plates crunch together.

Further evidence comes from the orientation of the rupture caused by this week's quake. "The rupture spread in a north-south orientation, rather than east-to-west, as we would expect along the plate interface," says McCloskey.

All the clues add up to the earthquake being a freak rupture of an ancient stressed fracture zone embedded deep within the Indo-Australian plate rather than slippage at the plate interface. "What we're looking at is probably a vestigial crack left over from some distant spreading centre," says McCloskey.

So, what kind of damage will the tsunami-triggering earthquake that the geologists have been predicting near Padang inflict? McCloskey has built computer models of over 125 scenarios in which shallow, powerful earthquakes at the interface off Padang jolt the sea floor, triggering tsunamis. In most, devastating tsunamis are generated. They will reach the city about 30 minutes after the earthquake hits.

His simulations suggest that 25 per cent of tsunamis would be over 5 metres tall as they reached the coast; the highest waves would be 12 metres tall. "In reality, of course, waves will gather height and become more turbulent as they power inland, which means they could be far higher over the city," says McCloskey.
Escape routes

If the people of Padang are well prepared, then most should survive, says McCloskey. Within 30 minutes, the young and the fit should be able to reach the 10-metre elevation contour that rises 2 kilometres back from the coast, he says, which would at least protect them from waves lower than 10 metres.

However, over 100,000 people – a seventh of the city's population – are blocked from running directly to higher ground by the barbed wire-laced, 10-metre-high walls of a huge military airport.

"Padang needs to build a tunnel under that airport, because if they don't these poor people will have to run parallel to the coast for several hundred metres while the tsunami is coming at them," says McCloskey. So far, no steps have been taken to build such an exit route. "Sometimes you despair," he says.

Source : Journal references: Earth and Planetary Science Letters, DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2007.09.034; Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature07572

Technologies for Better and Cleaner World

2009-10-04T06:01:00.001-07:00

As we know that, preservation to build a better world environment are necessary. For instance, we should consider on energy usage. Nowadays, many researchers invent new green technology. There's a lot more to green technology than renewable energy.

From more efficient aircraft to thread made from chicken feathers, the world is awash with ingenious ideas. So we have scoured research labs and start-ups, and made some hard choices. Here you will find our pick of the best ideas to make our planet a more energy-efficient place.

Pee-n-grow

Manufacturing artificial fertiliser is a highly energy intensive process that consumes roughly 1 per cent of the world's energy supply. As odd as it sounds, using sterile, nitrogen-rich human urine instead could prevent the emission of more than 180 million tonnes of C02 each year. Urine collection systems with basement storage tanks have been built by the Stockholm Environmental Institute in more than 800 apartments in rural China, saving an estimated 20 tonnes of C02 emissions annually.

China: available now

Magnetic fridge

The two biggest consumers of electricity in the home - air conditioners and refrigerators - may soon become much more energy efficient thanks to a new method of cooling. Magnetic refrigeration subjects metal alloys to a magnetic field, causing them to cool down. Camfridge, based in Cambridge, UK, says its fridges and air conditioners will cut energy usage by around 40 per cent in comparison with conventional models.

Cambridge, UK: under development

Green machine

The world's first "virtually waterless" washing machine could soon slash the water and energy demands of dirty laundry. Prototypes developed by UK start-up Xeros rely on thousands of polarised nylon beads. These stick to dirt and gobble up stains, leaving clothes dry, and using 90 per cent less water and 40 per cent less energy than conventional washers and driers combined. If the estimated 300 million households worldwide with existing washers switched to these machines, annual C02 emissions would drop by 28 million tonnes.

Leeds, UK: available 2010

Better windows

Increase the number of layers of glass or plastic in a window and you'll save big on heating and cooling. Visionwall of Edmonton in Alberta, Canada, makes a quadruple-glazed window consisting of two layers of rigid polyethylene sandwiched between two glass layers which cuts heat loss by a factor of 4 compared with conventional double-glazed windows.

Edmonton, Canada: available now

The power of pond scum

Green algae grow like mad when fed CO2, and if turned into biofuel can yield up to 100 times the biofuel per hectare as corn, soy or sugar cane crops. Petroalgae of Melbourne, Florida, plans to license their first 2000-hectare commercial alga biodiesel plant in China next year and says the green stuff can ingest C02 straight from the smokestacks of power plants. If emissions from all the world's power plants were harnessed for alga growing and recycled as biodiesel, C02 emissions would drop by roughly 9 billion tonnes per year.

Melbourne, Florida, US: available 2010

Methane harvesting

Methane extracted from animal waste can be used as a fuel. The world's largest biogas plant in Penkun, Germany, was completed in 2008 and converts 84,000 tonnes of manure a year into usable fuel. The liquid manure, along with maize and grain, is fed into fermenters where the biomethane generates 20 megawatts of electricity and 22 megawatts of heat for the town's 50,000 inhabitants.

Penkun, Germany: available now

Superconducting grid

Up to 10 per cent of all electricity produced is lost before it even reaches the intended user due to inefficiencies in the grid. American Superconductor based in Devens, Massachusetts, has developed a superconducting wire that cuts transmission line losses threefold when chilled to -196 ° C. In 2008, the company supplied the wire for the world's first superconducting transmission line, a 600-metre, 574-megawatt cable in New York state.

US: available now

Giant microwave ovens

Known for their ability to warm food using little energy, microwaves could soon save the chemicals industry massive amounts of electricity by heating chemical reagents in much the same way. Each year, chemical manufacturers in the UK alone consume the equivalent of the electricity produced by 20 coal-fired power plants. Recent tests suggest that microwaves can cut energy requirements for heating in chemical production by as much as 90 per cent.

UK: under development

Pleasant light

Light-emitting diodes can produce the same light as incandescent or even compact fluorescent lighting for only a tiny fraction of the energy. However, the light they produce is pale and cool, which means people are reluctant to use them. UK-based company Oxford Advanced Surfaces has the answer. It is developing phosphorescent screens that convert blue-tinged LED light into the warm white light we are used to from conventional bulbs. Worldwide adoption of LEDs could cut global energy consumption for lighting in half, the company says.

UK: under development

Can Panda Saved By Building A Den ?

2009-07-23T05:59:00.000-07:00

Until recently, biologists believed that panda populations are limited mostly by the supply of their staple food, bamboo. But Ron Swaisgood of the San Diego Zoo in California and Zejun Zhang and Fuwen Wei of the Key Laboratory of Animal Ecology and Conservation Biology in Beijing, China, suspected that past logging might have deprived pandas of suitable family accommodation.

Female pandas like to build dens in the cavities of ancient trees, where their cubs spend the first four months. But most of these old-growth trees have been cut down in many panda reserves. As a result, females in the Foping Nature Reserve in Shaanxi province in central China tend to resort to caves. These are in short supply and also liable to flood, Swaisgood told a meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology in Beijing, this week. "We think pandas are restricted by the quality and quantity of the dens available," he says.

Through painstaking video recording, the researchers have documented female pandas' struggles in this substandard housing - including one heart-rending incident from 2007 that has challenged conventional wisdom about panda breeding.

About half the time pandas in captivity give birth to twins but seem to focus on only one cub, leading biologists to assume that abandoning one twin is the norm. Swaisgood and his colleagues aren't so sure, after observing a female who successfully raised twin cubs in a rocky cave for 16 days, until heavy rains lashed the study site. When the team returned, the mother and one of the cubs had gone. The other cub was found dead, 22 metres from the den, suggesting the mother had tried to remove both cubs but could save only one.

The researchers believe that it may be possible to boost panda populations by building more suitable dens from wood or rocks on higher ground - and they are starting a pilot project to put that idea to the test.

What We Don't Know About The Ozone Hole Now !

2009-06-26T07:18:00.000-07:00

The Southern Ocean has lost its appetite for carbon dioxide, and now it appears that the ozone hole could be to blame.

In theory, oceans should absorb more CO2 as levels of the gas in the atmosphere rise. Measurements show that this is happening in most ocean regions, but strangely not in the Southern Ocean, where carbon absorption has flattened off. Climate models fail to reproduce this puzzling pattern.

The Southern Ocean is a major carbon sink, guzzling around 15 per cent of CO2 emissions. However, between 1987 and 2004, carbon uptake in the region was reduced by nearly 2.5 billion tonnes – equivalent to the amount of carbon that all the world's oceans absorb in one year.

To figure out what is going on, Andrew Lenton, from the University of Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris, France, and his colleagues created a coupled ocean and atmosphere climate model, to investigate carbon absorption in oceans. Crucially, they included changes in the concentration of stratospheric ozone since 1975.

By running their model with and without the ozone depletion since 1975, Lenton and his colleagues were able to show that the ozone hole is responsible for the Southern Ocean's carbon saturation.

The effect could be down to the way decreasing stratospheric ozone and rising greenhouse gases are altering the radiation balance of the Earth's atmosphere. This has been predicted to alter and strengthen the westerly winds that blow over the Southern Ocean.

"We expected this transition to a windier regime, but it has occurred much earlier than we thought, seemingly because of the ozone hole," says Lenton.
'Unexpected effect'

Stronger surface winds enhance circulation of ocean waters, encouraging carbon-rich waters to rise from the deep, limiting the capability of surface water to absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Furthermore, the higher carbon levels in surface waters make them more acidic – bad news for many forms of ocean life, such as coral and squid.

"This result illustrates how complex the chain of cause and effect can be in the Earth system. No one would ever have predicted from first principles that increasing CFCs would have the effect of decreasing uptake of ocean carbon dioxide," says Andrew Watson, from the University of East Anglia, UK.

More About Conficker Worm

2009-06-14T07:06:00.001-07:00

No one knows the identity of Conficker's "patient zero" computer, or precisely when it was infected. It was probably a machine that the hackers already controlled. Once installed, the software set to work, surreptitiously scanning the internet for other vulnerable machines to send itself to.

The new worm soon ran into a listening device, a "network telescope", housed by the San Diego Supercomputing Center at the University of California. The telescope is a collection of millions of dummy internet addresses, all of which route to a single computer. It is a useful monitor of the online underground: because there is no reason for legitimate users to reach out to these addresses, mostly only suspicious software is likely to get in touch.

The telescope's logs show the worm spreading in a flash flood. For most of 20 November, about 3000 infected computers attempted to infiltrate the telescope's vulnerable ports every hour - only slightly above the background noise generated by older malicious code still at large. At 6 pm, the number began to rise. By 9 am the following day, it was 115,000 an hour. Conficker was already out of control.

That same day, the worm also appeared in "honeypots" - collections of computers connected to the internet and deliberately unprotected to attract criminal software for analysis. It was soon clear that this was an extremely sophisticated worm. After installing itself, for example, it placed its own patch over the vulnerable port so that other malicious code could not use it to sneak in. As Brandon Enright, a network security analyst at the University of California, San Diego, puts it, smart burglars close the window they enter by.

Conficker also had an ingenious way of communicating with its creators. Every day, the worm came up with 250 meaningless strings of letters and attached a top-level domain name - a .com, .net, .org, .info or .biz - to the end of each to create a series of internet addresses, or URLs. Then the worm contacted these URLs. The worm's creators knew what each day's URLs would be, so they could register any one of them as a website at any time and leave new instructions for the worm there.

It was a smart trick. The worm hunters would only ever spot the illicit address when the infected computers were making contact and the update was being downloaded - too late to do anything. For the next day's set of instructions, the creators would have a different list of 250 to work with. The security community had no way of keeping up.

No way, that is, until Phil Porras got involved. He and his computer security team at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, began to tease apart the Conficker code. It was slow going: the worm was hidden within two shells of encryption that defeated the tools that Porras usually applied. By about a week before Christmas, however, his team and others - including the Russian security firm Kaspersky Labs, based in Moscow - had exposed the worm's inner workings, and had found a list of all the URLs it would contact.

The Clearest Earth Sky !

2009-06-10T06:51:00.000-07:00

POSSIBLY the clearest skies on Earth have been found - but to exploit them, astronomers will have to set up a telescope in one of the planet's harshest climates.

Michael Ashley of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and his colleagues wanted to find the best sites for astronomy on the Antarctic plateau. Combining observations from satellites and ground stations with climate models, they evaluated different factors that affect telescope vision, such as the amount of water vapour, wind speeds and atmospheric turbulence.

The team found that the plateau offers world-beating atmospheric conditions - as long as telescopes are raised above its frozen surface. The ice makes the lowest layers of air on the plateau much colder than those above, forming an "inversion layer" that, together with the strong local winds, can lead to severe turbulence. This would blur a telescope's images.

The team's analysis showed the inversion layer is only about 20 metres thick, however. If a telescope was mounted above it, its view would be affected by far less turbulence than at other world-class observatory sites, says Ashley. "It's drier than Mauna Kea [in Hawaii] by a long way and drier than the Atacama desert [in Chile]," he says.

Such conditions would be good for studying star birth. Normally, water vapour in the atmosphere blocks telltale emissions from molecular clouds in star-forming regions of the Milky Way. But the air above the high area known as Dome A is so dry that a ground-based telescope there could observe stellar nurseries - something that's impossible anywhere else on Earth.

So far as Ashley's team know, Dome A seems the best site for astronomy (see map). China has already built a summer station there, with a small robotic observatory. Next best is Dome F, the site of a Japanese station.

But conditions may prove much better about 150 kilometres south-west of Dome A, at Ridge A (www.arxiv.org/abs/0905.4156). "We won't know until we make measurements there," says Ashley.

Life on the plateau isn't easy for telescopes, though. One problem is that ice can form on lenses and mirrors. Marc Sarazin of the European Southern Observatory's offices in Munich, Germany, says the harsh conditions demand the kind of approach used for space missions: "They will be single-purpose, short-lifetime instruments answering a precise scientific question," he says. General-purpose telescopes are best built in temperate latitudes like Chile's, he adds.

Ashley thinks the biggest difficulty lies elsewhere. "The main problems in Antarctica aren't so much the engineering," he says. "It's more convincing people that it is not as scary as it sounds."

Swine Flu in Europe Countries

2009-06-10T06:36:00.000-07:00

Hospitals in Greece have identified H1N1 swine flu in two students who had no contact with known cases of the virus and had not been in countries with widespread infection. The infections were discovered even though the students should not have been tested for swine flu under European rules. The Greek authorities say this shows the rules must change.

Indeed, an investigation by New Scientist earlier this month showed that the EU rules would exclude exactly such cases and could make H1N1 appear much less widespread in Europe than it is.

Takis Panagiotopoulos of the Hellenic Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in Athens and colleagues reported on 28 May in Eurosurveillance, a weekly bulletin published by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in Stockholm, Sweden, that two Greek men returning home from Scotland had tested positive this week for H1N1 swine flu.

The two go to university in Edinburgh and had attended term-end parties at the end of last week. Both developed coughs and fevers at the weekend before flying back to Greece, where one went to hospital in Athens on Tuesday.

"The examining physician decided to take a pharyngeal swab, which was tested at the National Influenza Reference Laboratory for Southern Greece, although the patient did not meet the European Union and national criteria for the new influenza A (H1N1) testing," the team reports.

The swab was tested with a kit for H1N1 distributed by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and was positive for swine flu. The student in Athens warned the second student, who was now in Thesaloniki. He also tested positive. Both cases were mild.

Contacts of the two in Greece and Scotland and on the flights are being traced.

The Greek cases are "community acquired", meaning they have no contacts with known cases or countries with swine flu. The ECDC guidelines adopted by most EU countries, including Greece, recommend testing for H1N1 only when people have such contacts, excluding community acquired cases.

"It is of concern that with the present EU [testing criteria] we are by definition going to miss cases infected locally in the event of established community transmission," the Greek team warns. "It is probably necessary to modify the present EU definition … to also include clusters of patients with influenza-like illness, irrespective of travel history," they say, especially as the tourist season is getting under way.

Officially, swine flu has increased very slowly in Britain, even though the virus appears to be as contagious as ordinary flu. John Oxford of the University of London says the UK may have tens of thousands of mild, untested cases. The US CDC says there could be 100,000 cases in the US, even though only a few thousand, mostly severe, cases have been tested.

Finding community acquired cases outside the Americas is a requirement for declaring H1N1 swine flu an official pandemic, which the WHO has not yet done.

Have You Heard Betelgeuse The Shinking Star

2009-06-10T06:17:00.000-07:00

Pinned prominently on Orion's shoulder, the bright red star Betelgeuse hardly seems like a wallflower. But a new study suggests the giant star has been shrinking for more than a decade.

Betelgeuse is nearing the end of its life as a red supergiant. The bright, bloated star is 15 to 20 times more massive than the sun. If it were placed at the centre of the solar system, the star would extend out to the orbit of Jupiter.

But the star's reach seems to be waning. New observations indicate the giant star has shrunk by more than 15 per cent since 1993. This could be a sign of a long-term oscillation in its size or the star's first death knells. Or it may just be an artefact of the star's bumpy surface, which may appear to change in size as the star rotates.

Betelgeuse is enshrouded by vast clouds of gas and dust, so measuring its size is difficult. To cut through this cocoon, Charles Townes of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues used a set of telescopes that are sensitive to a particular wavelength of the star's infrared light.

The team used these instruments to measure the size of Betelgeuse's disc on the sky. Over a span of 15 years, the star's diameter seems to have declined from 11.2 to 9.6 AU (1 AU, or astronomical unit, is the distance from the Earth to the sun).

Space shuttle releases upgraded Hubble

2009-05-19T08:39:00.000-07:00

A spruced-up Hubble Space Telescope has been released back into space after five days of spacewalks to repair and upgrade the ageing observatory.

The space shuttle Atlantis will now make its way back to Earth, ending the $1.1 billion mission, which aimed to extend Hubble's life to at least 2014 and vastly improve its vision.

Six days after grabbing hold of the telescope with the shuttle's 15-metre-long robotic arm, astronaut Megan McArthur lifted the telescope from the shuttle's payload bay and placed it back in its own orbit at 1257 GMT.

Now, the 19-year-old telescope will undergo an intensive testing period, in which astronomers and engineers will calibrate and assess the health of the newly-installed and repaired instruments. NASA hopes Hubble science operations will reach "full stride" by September, Hubble programme manager Preston Burch told reporters on Monday.
Two-day trip

It took Atlantis two days to rendezvous with Hubble after a morning launch last week. A series of five back-to-back spacewalks began the next day.

Day one: Spacewalk virgin Andrew Feustel and veteran Hubble mechanic John Grunsfeld battled a stuck bolt to replace Hubble's "workhorse" camera, which since 1993 has taken some of the scope's most iconic images. In its place, the duo installed a modern set of eyes – the $132 million Wide Field Camera 3. The team also replaced a faulty data router. The Hubble upgrade mission was delayed six months to prepare the spare.

Day 2: New gyros, needed to stabilise the telescope, were the top priority of the mission. Rookie spacewalker Michael Good and Hubble veteran Mike Massimino installed the gyros and replaced three of Hubble's six batteries.

Day 3: Astronauts Grunsfeld and Feustel took their second spacewalk on Saturday to install a new instrument, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, and repair Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The delicate repair job was mostly successful, restoring the camera's wide-field channel, which is responsible for some stunning images, including the Ultra Deep Field, the deepest visible light image of the universe yet taken. However, the camera's high-resolution channel, which can block the bright light from a star to image fainter objects around it, could not be restored.

Day 4: The second day of camera repair work became the longest spacewalk of the mission, at 8 hours 2 minutes. A handrail with one recalcitrant fastener stood between astronaut Massimino and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, which can be used to measure the composition and motion of celestial objects. Massimino eventually used brute force to remove the handrail, then removed more than 100 screws to access the camera. Burch says initial tests suggest the camera, which was downed by power problems in 2004, has been restored.

Day 5: Eager to get the most out of the last day of spacewalks, Grunsfeld and Feustel started Monday's work an hour early. The astronauts exceeded expectations for the spacewalk, replacing the remainder of Hubble's old batteries and some degraded insulation, as well as replacing a sensor used to hold the telescope steady.
Museum pieces

Atlantis is set to land at NASA's Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida on Friday.

It will touch down with two Hubble relics – the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 and COSTAR, a corrective optics box that was used to blurring caused by a flaw in Hubble's primary mirror. All Hubble instruments now have built-in corrective optics, so the box is no longer needed. Both devices are destined to become museum specimens at the Smithsonian Institution.

By : Rachel Courtland

What is Stonehenge For ?

2009-05-07T07:27:00.000-07:00

Stonehenge is one of the world ancient mistery. Archaeologists who carried out a dig in April say new radiocarbon dating evidence suggests the first stones brought to Stonehenge were erected around 2300BC - around 300 years earlier than previously believed.

The findings will be featured in the Timewatch documentary Stonehenge Deciphered to be broadcast on both BBC2 in the UK and the Smithsonian Channel in the US on Saturday.

Previous Stonehenge theories include it having been a prehistoric observatory, a temple, a giant calendar or a royal burial ground.

What is known is that the monument was built in stages between 3000BC and 1600BC. Prior to the erection of a double circle of bluestones brought 140 miles from south Wales and the subsequent placing of the larger famous Sarsen stones, was the building of a circular earthwork and placing of timber posts within the enclosure.

Darvill and Wainwright's team inferred the arrival of the bluestones as between 2400BC and 2200BC, from the positions of 14 samples of organic material such as carbonised plant remains and bone in their trench. This is precisely the date range for the Amesbury Archer, a man believed to have originated in the Alps, who was buried five miles from Stonehenge, and whose remains show evidence of an infected kneecap and a serious tooth abscess - potentially backing their healing hypothesis.

The new bluestone dates could undermine the main rival theory proposed by Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield, namely that the monument was primarily a burial ground for a Neolithic elite and a place at which people paid their respects to their ancestors.

Darvill says the monument was an important place of burial but only up until 2500BC or 2400BC - before the erection of the stones.

Archaeologists are split on the issue and dismiss each other's explanations. Asked about the elite cemetery theory, Wainwright said people must back up their ideas with "hard evidence", adding "the time has passed for mysticism to play a large role".

On the other side of the debate, Mike Pitts, editor of British Archaeology, describes the healing centre theory as "a fairy story".

Radiocarbon dating in the 1990s on samples from earlier digs places the erection of the Sarsens at 2500 - 2400BC, yet Darvill places them at 2100BC. Pitts said: "There is no evidence for that at all. These dates are completely baffling. They have to say that because we know from archaeological evidence that the first bluestones in the centre were there before the Sarsens were put up. I'm suspicious as to why this dating comes out so fortunately as fitting their theory."

Still, the stonehenge remains as a mistery...

No Stress, Great Life !

2009-05-07T06:28:00.000-07:00

It can't be denied that stress can easily occurs in this globalization era. It is important to move away the stress from our daily activity.

For decades, medical researches are strenuously working to sum up the ways, to protect our health .Few of the suggestions being concluded by the practitioners are to control weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, sugar levels, etc.

Scientists believe that stress is a fundamental issue which leads to death of maximum people around the globe. They believe that stress releases or leaves a bad effect in the body's Endocrine system. This process starts in the hypothalamus (a part of the brain), which sends a message to the body's master gland which is known as the pituitary gland. It signals the adrenal glands to release abnormally high amounts of the stress hormone cortisone. This will result in abdominal fat storage and raised insulin levels (which have been linked to heart attacks, diabetes and stroke), high sugar level and blood pressure and other problems.

Tips to live a healthier life

Living a healthier life is a wish of every one. But it can only be achieved when we follow certain guidelines strictly.

1 LIMIT YOUR EATABLES:

Scientists have suggested that people with an uncontrollable diet are the victims of stress. Due to the excess in eatables, the metabolism rate of the person decreases. Nutritionists recommend a diet rich in whole grains, fruit land vegetables and low in saturated fat, cholesterol, salt and refined sugar. This proper diet is the basic way to live a healthy life.

2) REGULAR EXERCISE:

For year, depression is linked to an increased risk of heart attack. Exercise is an often overlooked antidepressant and helps the stressed person to live a free and healthier life. 30 minutes of brisk walk at least three times w week help person to be fit and fine.

3) CONTROL YOUR BAD HABITS:

Heavy drinking will lead the person to complete dizziness and then the fat body will lead to death. Smoking is very dangerous for many reasons besides lung cancer and emphysema. The study showed that after sixty minutes smoking, smokers still showed increased levels of cortisone, promotes abdominal fat storage.

Moderate caffeine consumers don't seem to be harmed. But the recent studies suggest that the person who has high blood pressure and the family history of hypertension and drinks a lot of caffeinated coffee while under stress, he may experience a dangerous rise in the blood pressure.

4) SLEEP WELL:

Sleeping for about seven hours will help the person to stay fit and fine and the stress will be released.

If you follow a better lifer style, then doubtless, you will be able to reduce the risk of your life. Be happy and follow good diet is the secret to healthier life style.

Hope this article helps you .....

Get Windows 7 More Than A Year For Free !

2009-05-03T07:40:00.000-07:00

We already knew that Windows 7 is almost certain to be with us in all its finished, Microsoft-saving glory in the summer, but had you cottoned on to the fact that you can get the release candidate next week and run it for free for a year anyway?

Microsoft has confirmed that the 5 May RC of the new OS will not expire until 1 June 2010, which means more than a year of free play for anyone installing it next week. It hasn't explained why.

Previously, Windows Vista's candidate releases remained fully functional only for around eight months, nominally for testing purposes, but there was no shortage of cracks available online to keep them going indefinitely.

So far, the Windows 7 RC has been available to professional subscribers to Microsoft's MSDN and TechNet sites, although both have been reporting early hitches as download requests overwhelmed their servers.

Can We Make A Clean Fuel From Greenhouse's Gas ?

2009-05-03T06:29:00.000-07:00

Molecules of CO2 are very stable, so processes that convert the gas to methanol normally require high temperatures and pressure. They also use catalysts containing toxic metal ions. "Our catalyst isn't toxic, and the reaction happens rapidly at room temperature," says team leader Jackie Ying.

The catalyst used by Ying's team is a type of chemical called an N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC). The mechanism by which the NHC speeds up the conversion is uncertain, but it appears to change the shape of the CO2 molecule, "activating" it in a way that makes it easier for hydrogen to bond with its carbon atom, says team member Yugen Zhang.

The catalyst may also help to release hydrogen from hydrosilane molecules, which are the source of hydrogen in the new process. Hydrosilane is an expensive chemical usually used to make computer chips, so the team wants to find a cheaper source.

"Potentially, it's a means for taking carbon dioxide out of the air and making it into something useful," says Dongke Zhang, director of the Centre for Petroleum, Fuels and Energy at the University of Western Australia in Perth. As well as being a fuel, methanol can be used as a feedstock for the chemical industry.Zhang's team is developing a technique for converting CO2 into methanol using high-frequency electromagnetic fields or plasmas to activate the gas.

Increasing Male Sex Drive and Libido Naturally !

2009-04-24T23:44:00.000-07:00

In order to determine ways to increase male sex drive and libido it is imperative for you to understand what causes a decline in sex drive and male libido. There could be a variety of reasons ranging from emotional and psychological reasons to physical factors playing with your libido. Emotional and psychological factors have a deep impact on your sexual health. Stress is perhaps the major cause of concern among men facing low libido or erectile dysfunction. Living in a fast pace world extracts it' s price by affecting your sex drive. Depression, anxiety other negative feelings could also be behind your sagging libido.

As far as physical aspect is concerned it is scientifically established that men lose testosterone at 10% a decade after the age of 30 and by the time you are 40 you start feeling the effects of low testosterone.

The key to increasing your sex drive and libido is to increase testosterone levels that get depleted with age. Testosterone enhancement is possible through natural means which include :

A good diet that is rich in proteins and limited in carbohydrates and moderate in essential fats. (Carbohydrates specially those that consist of simple sugars such as potatoes increase insulin and cortisol levels in your blood which affects testosterone production negatively.)

Regular exercise - You must understand that both lack of physical activity and over training can lead to low testosterone levels. The ideal period to workout is 45-60 minutes in a single routine. Any more than that and your body starts producing Cortisol which inhibits and diminishes testosterone production in your body.

Reduced Stress - Stress is one of the major psychological factor affecting your sex drive and testosterone levels besides negative feelings like guilt, anxiety and depression. A relaxed state of mind is highly important for elevating your sex drive.

Good Sleep - A good sleep is going to help you raise your sex drive substantially.

Natural Supplements - Natural supplements like PROVACYL can help you raise your testosterone and sex drive without any side effects. Provacyl is a supplement made from quality ingredients, made to promote your body's natural testosterone production. Because it's a supplement and not a medication, you don't need a prescription and it's free of any side effects. You've undoubtedly heard of how good ginkgo biloba is for you, rejuvenating your blood flow and improving sexual function, or that Brazil's acai fruit is a great antioxidant. These are just a few of the herbal ingredients. On top of these though, Provacyl also combines Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), which converts into testosterone and other sex hormones, and Growth Hormone (GH), which has been applauded by medical researchers as the fountain of youth.

So don't just sit back and let old age happen to you. By following a regimen, you can slow down and even reverse aging.

237 Reasons People Want to Have Sex

2009-04-24T23:42:00.000-07:00

"I wanted to get rid of a headache."

"I wanted to be nice."

"I wanted to feel closer to God."

"I wanted to change the topic of conversation"

These are some of the reasons researchers found that people engage in sex. Two clinical psychology professors at the University of Texas conducted a study, published in the August issue of the Archives of Sexual Behaviour, to find out people’s top reasons for having sex.

Professors Cindy Meston and David Buss performed their study in two parts. First they asked 444 people, from age 17 to 52, to give "all the reasons you can think of why you, or someone you have known, has engaged in sexual intercourse in the past." This netted them 715 reasons, which they narrowed down (after removing duplicate answers) to 237.

The second part of their study involved surveying about 1,500 undergraduate students to rank the reasons from a scale of 1 to 5 according to how often they had done the deed for that reason. This gave them their ranking system.

Meston told reporters that she and Buss performed the study to challenge existing assumptions and to provide answers for professionals treating people with sexual disorders, or to improve programs for safe sex.

"You need to know why people are having sex if you’re trying to put into place a safe-sex program," said Meston to the press. "If you assume people have sex because they’re in the heat of the moment, then you tell them to carry condoms. But if they’re doing it for revenge or because they want to enhance their social status, that will require a different strategy."

Meston said that she was surprised at the high number of various reasons people gave. Most people, she said, would guess that there are a relatively small number of standard reasons given, i.e. they are in love, want to create a child, are attracted to the other person. But "…we found that people are having sex for lots of other reasons."

Some of them were expected: "I wanted to please my partner," "To celebrate a special occasion," or, "I realized I was in love." And some of the reasons were really strange. Among the more unusual reasons listed in the study were "Because of a bet," "The person offered me drugs," "It was an initiation rite," and the very unpleasant, "To give someone a sexually transmitted disease."

The study’s co-author David Buss, author of the well known "The Evolution of Desire," said to the The New York Times, "I was truly astonished by this richness of sexual psychology."

Keep in mind that the rankings were created by 1,500 college undergraduates. Meston agrees that the subject group may skew the results, and she’d expect different rankings from older people. However, the students only came up with the ranking; the reasons were derived from the first phase of the study, in which the ages of the test group was ranged from 17 to 52.

One aspect of the study that has been surprising (other than some of the reasons themselves) is the fact that there were not many differences in the responses from men and women. Both the top 10 and the bottom 10 reasons given my men and women were very similar. The number one reason given by both sexes was "I was attracted to the person," and eight of the top ten were the same, including, "It’s fun," "To express my love for the person," and "I was horny."

"It refuted a lot of gender stereotypes…that men only want sex for the physical pleasure and women want love," said Meston to reporters. "That’s not what I came up with in my findings." Meston added that there were only slight differences; for example, men were more likely "to be opportunistic towards having sex, so if sex were there and available they would jump on it," (so to speak), "…somewhat more so than women."

Yes, that is actually what she said.

Reaction to the results of the study have been overwhelming—apparently people are very interested in reading about the reasons we have sex. Online bloggers have offered several suggestions for reason #238, including, "To make my husband stop whining," "It keeps my face out of the refrigerator," and my personal favorite, "Uh, you need a reason?"

Earthquakes As A Quick Tsunami Warning ??

2009-04-24T23:21:00.000-07:00

Tsunami warnings could reach vulnerable coastlines within minutes, thanks to an early-warning system that gauges how long an earthquake rumbles.

Most tsunami-warning systems work by measuring an undersea earthquake's magnitude, because those above magnitude 7.5 are considered highly likely to generate a tsunami. However, it takes at least 30 minutes to measure this accurately.

Previous studies have shown that quakes that shake for a long time are more likely to produce a tsunami. Now Anthony Lomax, a consultant seismologist based in Mouans-Sartoux, France, and Alberto Michelini of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Rome, Italy, have developed a way to spot this signature quickly.

The pair studied the seismic waves from 76 underwater earthquakes. Sure enough, rumbles that produced high-frequency waves for more than 50 seconds had a high probability of generating a damaging tsunami wave. Using this information, they developed an algorithm to filter out quake duration from seismic data. If adopted in an early-warning system, "it could provide a warning within 10 to 15 minutes", says Lomax. The work will appear in Geophysical Research Letters.

"Used alongside other methods it could be promising," says Emile Okal, a seismologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

How to save the world from an asteroid impact ?

2009-04-10T08:46:00.000-07:00

Year 2036. A large asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. Unless it is stopped, it will crash into the Pacific Ocean, creating a devastating tsunami. What should we do?

We could blast the asteroid with a nuclear bomb, but that would risk shattering it into smaller pieces that could still threaten Earth. Or maybe we should try to force it off course by slamming into it with a heavy object - an unproven and therefore risky technique. Now there may be a third option: gently nudging the asteroid away from Earth without breaking it apart, either by exploding a nuclear device at a distance or zapping it with high-powered lasers.

Astronomers have found thousands of asteroids that pass near Earth's orbit, and a few of these are on trajectories that give them a small chance of hitting Earth. The most worrying is a 270-metre-wide asteroid named Apophis, which has a 1 in 45,000 chance of hitting us in 2036.

To investigate the best way to deflect this and other asteroids onto a harmless path, a team led by David Dearborn of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California has modelled the impact of a nuclear explosion on an object's trajectory. Their virtual asteroid was 1 kilometre in diameter and made of rocky rubble loosely bound together by gravity, which is considered by many planetary scientists to be the most likely composition for small asteroids.

Thirty years before the asteroid was set to collide with Earth, a nuclear blast, equivalent to 100 kilotonnes of TNT, was set off 250 metres behind it. The nudge from the explosion increased its velocity by 6.5 millimetres per second, a slight change but enough for it to miss us.

The technique also reduced the risk of a break-up - just 1 per cent of the asteroid's material was dislodged by the blast, and of that only about 1 part in a million remained on a collision course with Earth. Dearborn adds that the technology for this method is already established, unlike for the use of a heavy object to shove the asteroid onto a different path - the "kinetic impactor" strategy. "Should an emergency arise, we should know that [the technology] is available, and we should have some idea of how to properly use it," he says.

He has now begun simulating the effect of nudging an asteroid with a smaller nuclear explosion - less than 1 kilotonne - 1 metre below its surface. This would reduce the device's weight, making it easier and quicker to launch. He will discuss the work next month at the 1st IAA Planetary Defense Conference in Granada, Spain.

A less established and gentler approach would be to nudge the asteroid away from Earth using lasers. In this theory, being investigated by Massimiliano Vasile of the University of Glasgow in the UK and colleagues with funding from the European Space Agency, a fleet of eight or more spacecraft, each carrying a laser, would be sent to rendezvous with the asteroid. Hovering a few kilometres away, each craft would unfurl a 20-metre-wide mirror made of a flexible material such as Mylar. The mirror would focus the sun's rays onto the spacecraft's solar panels, powering the laser.

All eight lasers would then be simultaneously fired at a single spot on the asteroid's surface, vaporising that region and creating a plume of gas that should provide enough thrust to push the asteroid off course (see diagram). This relatively gentle nudging, over a period of months or years, would not break the asteroid up into any smaller pieces, the team say.

Vasile, who will also be presenting his idea at the conference, touts the flexibility and reliability of the approach. "You have a formation of satellites and if one breaks you have the others [for back-up]," he says. "And it's scalable, so if you have a bigger asteroid or you want to have a faster deflection then you add more spacecraft."

Whichever option is ultimately chosen, reliability will be essential for a task as critical as asteroid deflection, says Bill Ailor of the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, California, who is chairing next month's conference. "Launch vehicles fail at a rate of about 1 in 100, and new spacecraft might fail at the rate of 1 in 3, [which] has to be factored into the overall design of your deflection," he says. "We're in a sense betting the planet that we're going to make this work."

DNA analysis may be done on Mars for first time

2009-04-10T07:49:00.000-07:00

In August 1996, molecular biologist Gary Ruvkun was about to reveal one of the biggest discoveries of his scientific career. His lab at Harvard Medical School had recently found a gene called age-1 that determines lifespan in roundworms. Their work offered the tantalising possibility that tinkering with molecular pathways might extend the lifespan of other organisms – and perhaps even humans.

Harvard sent out a press release and Ruvkun prepared for an onslaught of media attention. But it never came. Two days before his team's paper came out, scientists analysing a meteorite from Mars called ALH84001 made headlines worldwide. Then-US president Bill Clinton even got in on the announcement.

"My grad student leans in the door and says, 'They've just announced life on Mars,'" recalls Ruvkun. "That would really f--- us," Ruvkun replied, thinking his student was joking.

Scientists have since raised serious doubts about the existence of the purported fossilised microbes in the meteorite (see image).

But now, more than a decade after his work was overshadowed by news of possible life on Mars, Ruvkun has joined the hunt to find it. Moreover, he and his colleagues want to sequence its DNA.
Toehold for life

Today, Mars is a frozen, barren world. Ultraviolet light and energetic space particles stream in through its thin atmosphere, sterilising any life – at least as we know it – on its bone-dry surface.

But recent research suggests life might find a niche just below the surface, where liquid water could be widespread. The discovery of plumes of methane in the planet's atmosphere also hints at subsurface life, since some terrestrial microbes produce the gas.

Chemical signs of life can be ambiguous, but Ruvkun and his team hope to find its unequivocal signature by sending a DNA amplifier and sequencer to Mars in the next decade. They're betting that any life on the Red Planet shares an evolutionary heritage with life on Earth, and therefore contains a similar genetic code – a requirement that other scientists say is too narrowly focused, since Martian life may have evolved independently and therefore may have very different chemistry.

"This is a pure jackpot scheme. You either discover the most important thing for a long time, or you discover nothing," says Ruvkun, who in 2008 won the Lasker Award, an honour shared by 75 scientists who later went on to nab a Nobel.

Hurricane Pacifier ?

2009-04-10T07:37:00.000-07:00

Interest in hurricane mitigation has peaked since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, and any means of limiting the damage wrought by these huge storms would be welcomed by governments and vulnerable populations alike.

Now an Israeli team says it has developed a way to take the sting out of the storms. Their new patent application says seeding hurricanes with smoke particles could lower wind speeds enough to mitigate their destructive potential.

A hurricane's destructive potential is proportionally related to the strongest winds inside it, and only a small reduction in wind speed is needed to dramatically reduce the damage it causes.

Hurricanes derive their immense power from warm waters on the surface of the sea. As the water evaporates, it rises into the hurricane and eventually condenses and falls as rain, releasing its latent heat energy as it does so - a process known as "heat cycling".

Daniel Rosenfeld and colleagues at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem say injecting smoke into the lower parts of a hurricane causes water vapour to condense at a lower altitude than usual, and form droplets that are too small to fall as rain.

Instead these are swept into higher and more peripheral regions of the storm, eventually reaching a point where they freeze. This provides an injection of energy on the edges of the storm that destabilises its destructive centre and causes a lowering of windspeeds.

At least, it works that way in Rosenfeld's computer-simulated hurricanes. The team has not tried the idea in the wild yet.

They have, though, calculated how much smoke might be needed to pull off their trick: about 10 cargo aircraft could carry enough material to generate the smoke particles needed to seed a single hurricane.

Aliens share our genetic code ?

2009-04-10T07:31:00.000-07:00

What similarities will alien life forms have to living things here on Earth? We won't know until we find some, but now there is evidence that at least the basic building blocks will be the same.

All terrestrial life forms share the same 20 amino acids. Biochemists have managed to synthesise 10 of them in experiments that simulate lifeless prebiotic environments, using proxies for lightning, ionising radiation from space, or hydrothermal vents to provide the necessary energy. Amino acids are also found inside meteorites formed before Earth was born.

Paul Higgs and Ralph Pudritz at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, point out that all these experiments produced a subset of the same 10 amino acids and calculate that these 10 require the least amount of energy to form.
This, they argue, suggests that if alien life exists it probably has the same 10 amino acids at its core.

Universal code?

They show how the other 10 may have been added one by one as early life on Earth became more sophisticated. More controversially, they go on to argue that this process dictated the evolution of the genetic code, suggesting it too is universal.

Darren Griffin, a geneticist at the University of Kent, UK, suggests Higgs and Pudritz are pushing their conclusions too far.

"Laws of physics govern the universe, and it seems reasonable to suggest that there are laws of molecular biology that may also be universal," he says. "But it seems unlikely that the very same genetic code would arise on another planet, even if there are similarities in the fundamental molecules such as amino acids."

Journal reference : Physics arXiv preprint

Mind over body?

2009-03-17T08:07:00.000-07:00

Can people think themselves sick? This is what psychiatrist Simon Wessely explores. His research into the causes of conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome and Gulf war syndrome has led to hate mail, yet far from dismissing these illnesses as imaginary, Wessely has spent his career developing treatments for them. Clare Wilson asks what it's like to be disliked by people you're trying to help

How might most of us experience the effects of the mind on the body?

In an average week you probably experience numerous examples of how what's going on around you affects your subjective health. Most people instinctively know that when bad things happen, they affect your body. You can't sleep, you feel anxious, you've got butterflies in your stomach... you feel awful.

When does that turn into an illness?

Such symptoms only become a problem when people get trapped in excessively narrow explanations for illness - when they exclude any broader consideration of the many reasons why we feel the way we do. This is where the internet can do real harm. And sometimes people fall into the hands of charlatans who give them bogus explanations.

Is that how chronic fatigue syndrome can start?

Often there is an organic trigger like glandular fever. That's the start, and usually most people get over it, albeit after some weeks or months. But others can get trapped in vicious circles of monitoring their symptoms, restricting their activities beyond what is necessary and getting frustrated or demoralised. This causes more symptoms, more concerns and more physical changes, so much so that what started it all off is no longer what is keeping it going.

One of the enigmas is why certain infections, like glandular fever, have an increased likelihood of triggering chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), while others, such as influenza, do not. We also don't know why people who have had depression are twice as likely to develop CFS. I get cross with people who want to explain one and not the other. Some people take too psychiatric a view of CFS and ignore the infective trigger, whereas others want to think only about the infection.

So how do you treat CFS?

The first thing you have to do is engage people. I see them for 2 hours, which enables me to take a proper history to ensure I understand their symptoms and how the illness is affecting them. This helps people to open up, as they can see I am interested in their problems and taking them seriously.

With many people I genuinely do not know why they are ill. Or if I do, if they had glandular fever five years ago, say, I tell them there is nothing I can do about the original trigger. What makes a difference is what happens next. Then we get on to the practical stuff, such as finding out how people deal with the condition. Are there things they are doing that may not be the best for recovery? Then I recommend cognitive behavioural therapy and tailored programmes of gradually increasing activity levels.

How successful is your treatment of CFS?

Roughly a third of people completely recover and a third show good improvement. About a third we can't do much for.

What about those people who have such severe CFS they are bedridden?

In that kind of disability, psychological factors are important and I don't care how unpopular that statement makes me. We also have to consider what those years of inactivity have done to their muscles. People know that if you break your leg, when you take the plaster off there's nothing much left. If you've been in a wheelchair for some years, the laws of physiology haven't stopped.

Your most cited paper claims that conditions such as CFS, irritable bowel syndrome and fibromyalgia are all the same illness.

If you ask people with irritable bowel syndrome whether they suffer from fatigue, they all say yes. It's just gastroenterologists don't ask that question. Likewise, if you talk to someone with CFS, you find that nearly all of them have gut problems. If you systematically interview people with these illnesses, you find that a big proportion of these so-called discrete syndromes have a large overlap with the others. You have to think that we have got the classifications wrong.

So do you think these syndrome labels are arbitrary?

Each country has different syndromes. They don't have CFS in France; they have a strange one, spasmophilia, where a person has unexplained convulsions. In Sweden they have dental amalgam syndrome, which hasn't really caught on here. In Germany they believe low blood pressure is bad.

Solar power schemes could protect nature reserves

2009-03-17T08:01:00.000-07:00

TWO great challenges of the 21st century - green energy and wildlife conservation - could have a symbiotic solution.

Michael McGuigan of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, has suggested that combining solar power plants with nature reserves could tackle both problems. A sanctuary for 300 tigers, for example, would cover a patch of land about 50 kilometres across. Surrounding this with a 5-kilometre-wide ring of solar panels would create a power plant producing 60 gigawatts of electricity

Some of that power could be used to electrify nearby villages. That would reduce the need for rural populations to forage for firewood, removing a major source of conflict between wild animals and villagers.

Asir Johnsingh, an expert on tiger conservation and adviser for WWF based in Bangalore, India, agrees that where sanctuaries border villages and cultivated land, solar power plants would benefit the local population. For example, poor communities near the Kalakad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve in Tamil Nadu, India, are supplied with gas cylinders for their energy needs. "But gas may become expensive," he says.

Volcanic roar may reveal jet physics at work

2009-03-17T07:43:00.000-07:00

he first close-range, low-frequency recordings of volcanic eruptions have revealed a surprising similarity to the noise made by jet engines. The finding may provide clues to what happens prior to volcanic explosions.

Hear an infrasound recording of an eruption at Mount St Helens, speeded up 200x (Credit: American Geophysical Union. File: .mov format)

Robin Matoza of the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues measured infrasonic signals from volcanic eruptions around the globe, getting as near to them as 13 kilometres – relatively close for these sorts of measurements. This was the first time that infrasonic signals from very large eruptions had been measured at relatively close range.

When the team speeded up the frequency of the volcano recordings to within the range of human hearing, the distribution of frequencies closely resembled those of a Boeing 747 jet engine.

"The science of jet noise is very well understood," says Matoza. "If we can understand how this works for volcanoes, we may be able to infer properties of eruption columns."

They already have a few ideas. The roar produced in engines is partly down to turbulent air near the inner walls of the engine. The fact that a similar sound is generated by both vulcanian and plinian eruptions – blasts with tall, dense ash columns – suggests it is created as ash and gas blasts up near the inner surface of the volcano's mouth.
Aircraft warnings

Explosive eruptions are far too violent to measure directly using sensors or planes, says Darcy Ogden at Stanford University, so the finding could be a useful way of discovering the velocities, densities and pressures inside the volcanic plume.

"This information about the internal dynamics of the plume then helps us understand more about how plumes work. The more we understand about how plumes work, the better we are at mitigating volcanic hazards," she says.

The recordings could also be used to warn pilots of eruptions hidden by clouds. "If you get a big jet noise like this, it's a very strong indication that a volcano eruption definitely has occurred," says Matoza.

Launch of European gravity satellite delayed

2009-03-17T07:40:00.000-07:00

The much-anticipated launch of the European Space Agency's new gravity mapping satellite has been delayed until Tuesday or later as teams work to resolve issues with the probe's launch tower.

The Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE), was set to launch on Monday from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia, which lies some 800 km north of Moscow.

But the countdown to its launch was stopped seconds before lift-off because the launch tower failed to retract.

The agency hopes to attempt to launch again at 1421 GMT on Tuesday, the probe's next launch window. But a new launch date has not yet been set because ESA is still investigating what went wrong.

"We're confident that it will launch tomorrow, but we're expecting more information to come," says Robert Meisner of ESA's Earth Observation Programme.

Monday's delay is not the first for the gravity probe. The spacecraft was previously set to take off in September 2008, but the launch was delayed several times while engineers worked to correct a problem in the guidance and navigation system of the probe's Russian Rockot launcher.

Once in orbit, the €350 million probe is set to map the Earth's gravity field in unprecedented detail, a measurement which is expected to refine models of the planet's climate and ocean circulation patterns.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Google Adsense Tip and Trick 3

2009-03-15T00:43:00.000-07:00

Have you placed multiple ad spread out your blog?
Well, another way to increase ad revenue is to use multiple ad units. According to Google’s TOS you are allowed to post up to three ad units per page. Similar to standard search results the highest paying ad units will be served first and the lowest being served last. If there is enough of an ad inventory, place all three ad units. However you should pay attention to the payouts.

Current assumption is you get 60% of the revenue (on a $0.05 click you get $0.03). So if a click from the third ad unit is only paying between 3 to 5 cents you may want to omit it from your page. This is one are where giving your ad units channels does have value. If one ad unit is getting a higher percentage of click throughs you’ll want to make sure the highest paying ads are being served there. TIP:Use CSS positioning to get your highest paying ads serving in the location with the highest CTR.

Google Adsense Tips and Tricks 2

2009-03-15T00:40:00.000-07:00

The other tips to make the rounds is using images placed directly above or below an adsense leaderboard. This has been used for a while but came out in a digital point forum thread where a member talked about quadrupling their CTR. Basically you set up the adsense code in a table with four images that line up directly with the ads. Whether or not this is deceptive is fuzzy and very subjective.

Obviously four blinking arrows would be ‘enticing people to click’ and be against the adsense TOS. However placing pictures of 4 laptops over laptops ads isn’t, so use your best judgment here and look at it from the advertiser or Google’s perspective. If you have a question as to your implementation being ‘over the line’ write to adsense and ask them to take a look.

As far as using the images, I’ve done it and can tell you it definitely works. You get the best results when the images ‘complete the story the ads are telling’. For example if you have ads about apple pies, use pictures of freshly baked apple pies, instead of granny smith, Macintosh, pink lady, and braeburn apples. TIP: Don’t limit yourself to using images only on that size ad unit, it works just as well with the other sizes, like the 336 rectangle.

PS : This tip can jeopardize your blog because it isn’t fair one. In opposite, it can increase your CTR.

Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers

2009-03-01T06:33:00.000-08:00

Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography.

A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.

"When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different," says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.

However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.

Edelman spends part of his time helping companies such as Microsoft and AOL detect advertising fraud. Another consulting client runs dozens of adult websites, though he says he is not at liberty to identify the firm.

That company did, however, provide Edelman with roughly two years of credit card data from 2006 to 2008 that included a purchase date and each customer's postal code.

After controlling for differences in broadband internet access between states – online porn tends to be a bandwidth hog – and adjusting for population, he found a relatively small difference between states with the most adult purchases and those with the fewest.

The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. "The differences here are not so stark," Edelman says.

Number 10 on the list was West Virginia at 2.94 subscriptions per 1000, while number 41, Michigan, averaged 2.32.

Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year's presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.

Old-fashioned values
Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code's religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.

Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don't explicitly restrict gay marriage.

To get a better handle on other associations between social attitudes and pornography consumption, Edelman melded his data with a previous study on public attitudes toward religion.

States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement "I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage," bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement "AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behaviour."

"One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you're told you can't have this, then you want it more," Edelman says.

Playing Yo-yo in the Dark Teach a Robot?

2009-03-01T06:09:00.001-08:00

A ROBOT that can play with a yo-yo in the dark may sound as useful as a chocolate teapot, but it could be an important step towards creating highly mobile, low-cost robots.

Studying the motions involved in rhythmic activities such as playing with a yo-yo and juggling could help make robots more stable when walking, says Peter Bentley, a specialist in bioinspired computing at University College London. "The cyclic dynamics of the yo-yo may share some properties with the cyclic behaviours of limb movement," he says. "So if we can get robots to play yo-yos more effectively we may be able to get them to walk and run more effectively, too."

A team led by roboticist Leon Zlajpah at the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has previously developed software that allowed a robot's arm to control a simulated yo-yo on a computer screen. The robot used a camera to watch the progress of the yo-yo, allowing a control system to pull it upwards just before it reached the end of its string.

However, the sophisticated sensors and computer processing needed for a robot to perform tasks using their vision alone are expensive, says Miriam Zacksenhouse, a roboticist at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. Cheaper robots that can work in all conditions, including darkness or bad weather, will need to feel their way through tasks such as walking or running.

So Zacksenhouse and her colleagues have developed a robot that can use a yo-yo without any visual information. Instead it responds to the change of force, or kick, just before the yo-yo reaches the end of its unwinding string.

Their trick, to be reported in IEEE Transactions on Robotics, is to use the sensors on the robot's arm to detect this kick and feed it back into the robot's control system. It is then used to tune the electronic circuit that drives the arm, so that it locks itself to the motion of the yo-yo. "We have learned to stabilise the yo-yo motion using the simple force feedback that arrives once every cycle, instead of continuous, complicated visual feedback," says Zacksenhouse.

Air-breathing planes: the spaceships of the future?

2009-03-01T05:57:00.000-08:00

Getting to space has never been simple. A standing army of thousands is needed to launch the space shuttle, land it safely, and refurbish it so it is once again ready for flight.

And even the most basic space rockets require multiple stages, whose weight is mostly taken up by oxidisers needed to burn fuel. Rockets launch vertically to minimise the time they spend where Earth's gravity is strongest and shed stages to reduce their weight as they climb.

For decades, engineers have dreamed of a better way: a single-stage-to-orbit vehicle that would be lighter, cheaper, and easy to reuse. A fleet of these vehicles, supporters say, could be almost as easy to maintain as conventional jet planes, reducing the preparation time before each launch from months to days or even hours.

Since most of a rocket's weight is taken up by oxidiser, one logical approach is to save weight by developing an engine that can use oxygen from the atmosphere to burn fuel at least part of the way.

Are we getting any closer to this goal? Last week, the UK firm Reaction Engines announced they had received €1 million from the European Space Agency to develop three key parts for an air-breathing rocket engine. The firm hopes those components could one day help fulfill a decades-old plan to build a space plane called Skylon, which could take off and land on a runway like a conventional jet.

How do air-breathing engines work?

The basic air-breathing engine uses inlets at the front of the vehicle to suck in air. What happens after that depends on the design.

One common engine is the ramjet, which uses the geometry of the engine to slow air down. But ramjets are only useful at relatively low speeds. At hypersonic speeds - above 5 times the speed of sound, or Mach 5 - the slowed air is too hot to be useful for combustion.

A popular solution to this problem is the scramjet, which does not slow air down very much, but instead quickly mixes the fast-flowing air with fuel together to create thrust. But scramjets are only useful above Mach 5, meaning another system, perhaps a conventional rocket, is needed to propel the plane to hypersonic speeds.

How to Survive the Coming Century

2009-03-01T05:49:00.000-08:00

ALLIGATORS basking off the English coast; a vast Brazilian desert; the mythical lost cities of Saigon, New Orleans, Venice and Mumbai; and 90 per cent of humanity vanished. Welcome to the world warmed by 4 °C.

Clearly this is a vision of the future that no one wants, but it might happen. Fearing that the best efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions may fail, or that planetary climate feedback mechanisms will accelerate warming, some scientists and economists are considering not only what this world of the future might be like, but how it could sustain a growing human population. They argue that surviving in the kinds of numbers that exist today, or even more, will be possible, but only if we use our uniquely human ingenuity to cooperate as a species to radically reorganise our world.

The good news is that the survival of humankind itself is not at stake: the species could continue if only a couple of hundred individuals remained. But maintaining the current global population of nearly 7 billion, or more, is going to require serious planning.

Four degrees may not sound like much - after all, it is less than a typical temperature change between night and day. It might sound quite pleasant, like moving to Florida from Boston, say, or retiring from the UK to southern Spain. An average warming of the entire globe by 4 °C is a very different matter, however, and would render the planet unrecognisable from anything humans have ever experienced. Indeed, human activity has and will have such a great impact that some have proposed describing the time from the 18th century onward as a new geological era, marked by human activity. "It can be considered the Anthropocene," says Nobel prizewinning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.

A 4 °C rise could easily occur. The 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose conclusions are generally accepted as conservative, predicted a rise of anywhere between 2 °C and 6.4 °C this century. And in August 2008, Bob Watson, former chair of the IPCC, warned that the world should work on mitigation and adaptation strategies to "prepare for 4 °C of warming".

A key factor in how well we deal with a warmer world is how much time we have to adapt. When, and if, we get this hot depends not only on how much greenhouse gas we pump into the atmosphere and how quickly, but how sensitive the world's climate is to these gases. It also depends whether "tipping points" are reached, in which climate feedback mechanisms rapidly speed warming. According to models, we could cook the planet by 4 °C by 2100. Some scientists fear that we may get there as soon as 2050.

If this happens, the ramifications for life on Earth are so terrifying that many scientists contacted for this article preferred not to contemplate them, saying only that we should concentrate on reducing emissions to a level where such a rise is known only in nightmares.

"Climatologists tend to fall into two camps: there are the cautious ones who say we need to cut emissions and won't even think about high global temperatures; and there are the ones who tell us to run for the hills because we're all doomed," says Peter Cox, who studies the dynamics of climate systems at the University of Exeter, UK. "I prefer a middle ground. We have to accept that changes are inevitable and start to adapt now."

Bearing in mind that a generation alive today might experience the scary side of these climate predictions, let us head bravely into this hotter world and consider whether and how we could survive it with most of our population intact. What might this future hold?

The last time the world experienced temperature rises of this magnitude was 55 million years ago, after the so-called Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event. Then, the culprits were clathrates - large areas of frozen, chemically caged methane - which were released from the deep ocean in explosive belches that filled the atmosphere with around 5 gigatonnes of carbon. The already warm planet rocketed by 5 or 6 °C, tropical forests sprang up in ice-free polar regions, and the oceans turned so acidic from dissolved carbon dioxide that there was a vast die-off of sea life. Sea levels rose to 100 metres higher than today's and desert stretched from southern Africa into Europe.

While the exact changes would depend on how quickly the temperature rose and how much polar ice melted, we can expect similar scenarios to unfold this time around. The first problem would be that many of the places where people live and grow food would no longer be suitable for either. Rising sea levels - from thermal expansion of the oceans, melting glaciers and storm surges - would drown today's coastal regions in up to 2 metres of water initially, and possibly much more if the Greenland ice sheet and parts of Antarctica were to melt. "It's hard to see west Antarctica's ice sheets surviving the century, meaning a sea-level rise of at least 1 or 2 metres," says climatologist James Hansen, who heads NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. "CO2 concentrations of 550 parts per million [compared with about 385 ppm now] would be disastrous," he adds, "certainly leading to an ice-free planet, with sea level about 80 metres higher... and the trip getting there would be horrendous."

10 Steps to Writing a Successful Series on Your Blog

2009-02-19T07:07:00.000-08:00

When it comes to the way I build a series of posts on a blog my workflow is a little different to Eric’s (although there are some real similarities also). Let me outline how it usually works for me (and it does vary from time to time).

1. Identify a topic - this is of course key when it comes to developing a successful series (as it is with single posts also). As I reflect upon most of the series of posts I’ve written here at ProBlogger over the past year it’s interesting to see that in virtually every case the series has started in my mind as a single post. For example - one of my first ever blog series was one I wrote on AdSense for Bloggers. This 8 part series started (in my mind) as a medium sized post. As I started writing I soon realized that there was more that I could write than would comfortably fit in one post and so the series began.

The key of course is to make sure you choose a topic that is large enough to warrant multiple posts (you don’t want to write a series just for the sake of it) but manageable enough not to overwhelm you. Some topics are so large that they could almost be a blog in and of themselves.
The ideas from most of the series that I do generally do come from the themes that I see in the interactions that I have with my readers. Questions that they ask are usually key in triggering my thinking in this way.

2. Write a list - this second step will not surprise regular ProBlogger readers as you know I love a good list and that lists (like in this very post) are pretty central to my blogging style. When I make the decision that a topic is big enough for a series I generally start with a bit of a brainstorming session and compile a list of the main points that I want to make.
These lists generally start out as bullet point lists of keywords and phrases written up either in a TextEdit document or even straight in an ecto draft. Once I’ve got a list of keywords I then go back and add a few descriptive sentences under each point to flesh them out a little. It’s amazing how many of these sentences make it into eventual posts. I find once I’m on a roll that a lot of it just flows and I can end up with a list of 10 or so ideas pretty quickly.
The list is rarely the final list that I end up going with (some don’t make it and others are added) but it does form the basis for my series with each point usually ending up as a post of it’s own.

3. Set Targets - at this point I generally set myself some goals for the series and try to establish boundaries for it. Looking at the list I can generally tell how many posts I’ll need to complete it which in turn helps me decide how long it will run for. I generally try to run them for a 1 week period (starting on a Monday and ending on a Friday) but have been known to run them over longer and shorter time frames. It’s good to know up front what you’re aiming for so I think about questons of how many posts, how many I’ll post per day, how long the series will run etc.

4. Set up Draft Posts - with these details settled I then take the list I’ve created and take whatever I’ve written for each post so far (often just a few keywords and a sentence or two) and copy and paste them into some draft posts on my blog. I give each one a draft title (often changed later) and just leave them each there as drafts for me to work on in the coming days.

5. Pick a Title - the name that you give your series can actually be a very important factor in it’s success and I would recommend that it be something you give serious consideration to. I guess in this decision I’m thinking about branding and how the series might be marketed. Picking the title for a series is pretty similar to the process of choosing one for individual posts and are often a combination of choosing something that is catchy as well as choosing something with some good keywords in it (for SEO purposes).

6. Announce the Series - up to this point all my work is in private but I put the pressure on myself now by announcing the series with an introductory post. This serves a number of purposes including letting your readers know what to expect (it creates some anticipation) but also making me accountable to finish what I’ve started. There’s nothing like telling your readers that you’ll be writing X number of posts on a topic to keep you motivated and accountable for the task.

7. Write an Introduction to the Series - The Introductory post is generally the same one that I do the announcement in. In it I try to do two main things. Firstly I outline where we’ll be headed over the coming days. This might even include announcing your actual topics (if you’re that organized) but could be more general also. Secondly (and more importantly) the focus of the introductory post is to help highlight the ‘need’ that the series will help to address.
I’m a firm believer that the most successful posts and series of posts that I’ve written have been popular because they meet some sort of need that people have.

8. Write a Post per Day - This is one of the main differences between my approach and Eric’s . He writes all of his posts in advance and sets them to go off over a future period of time. While this works for some it doesn’t quite fit with my own rhythm of blogging - I much prefer to tackle writing a post per day. This is for two main reasons - mainly to keep my posts fresh (I find that it’s not until my readers begin to interact with the series that the the series really takes off and I start to write my best stuff after reading their comments. Writing in advance doesn’t doesn’t give me the opportunity to build what I’m writing upon the wider community’s experience. The other reason is because I find writing multiple posts on the one topic in a short period of time is too much for me. I’m much better when I break things down. This is just my personal preference and helps me keep things more manageable.

9. Interlink your Posts - I see a lot of bloggers attempting to write blog posts as a series that don’t do this and think it’s a big mistake. While your current regular readers will be able to follow your post by logging on each day or reading it in RSS - future readers of your blog might not has as much luck as they often come in via a search engine to a middle post in the series and if you haven’t linked to the rest will have to go searching for it.
there are a number of ways of interlinking your series. Here are a few of them:
1. Central Page - in this case you have one page/post on your blog that you link to from each post in your series that lists links to each post in the series. For an examples of this check out my blogging for beginners series central page and the 31 Days to Building a Better Blog central page. Another variation of this is to make your introductory post the central page and as you write other posts add them to it.
2. Links at the beginning and/or end of posts - in this strategy each post in your series will link to other posts in the series. There are two ways of doing this. You can either just link to the post before and after the post in the series or you can link to all the posts in the series from each post (for example my AdSense for Blogging series and my Blogging for Change Series for two variations on this).
3. Combine all the posts on a central page to make a longer post - I’ve only done this a couple of times and it’s not my preferred method but another strategy is simply to write another longer compilation post at the end of the series that combines everything you’ve written before. Examples of when I’ve done this is on my Search Engine Optimization for Bloggers series as well as my declaring war on blogger apathy series.

10. Finish your series well - While it might sound obvious to ‘finish your series’ I think it’s important to do this well. Readers like closure (as do bloggers themselves) and it’s often good to finish a series with a short summary of what’s been written and/or some reflections on the process of writing the series itself. Especially helpful in a concluding post (or just a concluding paragraph in the last post) is the invitation for readers to add their own thoughts and points. On most occasions in my experience a series could have other posts added to it and so it’s a good thing to acknowledge this and invite others to continue it in comments (or on their own blog). In this way you not only get reader interaction but also develop a more well rounded coverage of the topic as your readers add their own expertise and experience.

4 TIPS TO MAKE YOUR ASTOUNDING FIRST IMPRESSION WEBSITE

2009-02-19T06:58:00.000-08:00

I’ll start by asking a question, what would you do if somebody suggest you to change a little of your pages and the result is your profit increase at about 200% or even more? What would you going to do ?

Actually, the strategy is very easy, by adding the magnificent header to your article and wait for the overflowing visitors to your website.

Header placed on top of the page, choosing attractive words would be a great deal for the header. Not only that, header supporting by its content made the visitors felt satisfied after they read your article and will not be forgotten, maybe for everlasting. It will effected them and eventually they are missing about your next writing.

Actually, the header must represent about your website. You must trying to get both of header and website topic under the same theme. Furthermore, the positive impact to your visitors can be made by choosing appropriate images. Once they impressed with your articles, they are not going to anywhere. Professionalism and trust are the factors you have to consider, and also the images quality leads to your extraordinary website. A header could also give contribution to navigate the visitors attention so they are willing to explore the rest of you pages.

In opposite, if your header design is not ‘well-mannered’ and looks terrible, well, the visitors would leave your website. And it means that no product sold, no impression for your page and of course no cash you can earn!

Get your professional header by doing these following tips :

1. You should trying to make your header design by yourself. Perhaps it needs more time, skill, and software but if your page rank increases, earning more cash isn’t just a dream.

2. You can buy or take it from image design software. The more professional design will affect the readers’ attention. They will like it and needing to find another articles

3. Header Generator could be a good software. Use this and start making a professional look of header design. Don’t worry, you would not be sorry after your new header is done.

4. Another option is asking the professional header designer to build one for you. After your header finished you can posted it immediately and smile for high traffic awaiting.

Change your header if you want popularise your site, Trust me !

Online Auction

2009-02-19T06:57:00.000-08:00

Claude Bourgoin said that many people spend small fortunes on PPC advertising, search engine optimization, and other methods to get traffic to their websites. Others use direct mail and direct response advertising to get leads for their products. These people understand the value of traffic leads, and qualified traffic and the cost associated to lead generation systems.

From an online auction you can easily create a completely automated system for capturing the names and email addresses of people who look at your auctions. Once you've set up your system, you'll run auctions for some low priced, easy to ship items specifically selected to appeal to your best prospects. You can even sell digitally delivered items such as e-Books or software utilities on eBay and skip going to the post office for the delivery of your items.

Once you have him or her visiting your listing you could describe how your other items may be of interest offering links to your web site taking them to the specific pages of your site that would be relevant to them. Once the customer enters your site the auctions's job has finished and now it's your site job to compel the user for signing up to your news letter, buying an higher priced item. Look at your other offering and any other information you wish to share.

Now, every time you run an auction, you will generate two types of prospects:
People who looked at your auctions, and gave you an email address and people who bought the introductory product. Your cost for generating leads are your listing fees, for some auctions this is free and for eBay this can be as low as $0.20. If a product is sold the profits would offset your listing costs and could even generate a profit. There are no cheaper more effective lead generation methods allowing you to pre-qualify your leads more accurately offering you this level of exposure.

Top 5 Ways to Earn Extra Money Online at Home for Free

2009-02-19T06:49:00.000-08:00

Here are five legitimate online opportunities for everybody to earn extra cash fast:

1. Get paid to read email

This is probably one of the oldest online income opportunity. In order to get started all you need is your own e-mail address. If you have an Internet access at home, you probably already have an e-mail address too? Otherwise, you can open your own email account and receive your personal e-mail address for free at:

http://www.yahoo.com or http://www.hotmail.com

Actually, be prepared to use your e-mail address with any of the extra income opportunities that I have listed in this article.

How 'get paid to read email' programs work? Simply, online advertisers pay commissions to the paid email companies for sending their advertisements via e-mail to members who want to get paid for reading emails. When you receive a paid e- mail, in order to receive your cash you should click on the link and visit an advertiser's web site.

How much you can earn? Not much. The paid email companies pay from $0.01 up to $1.00 per e-mail that you read. Usually the more they pay, the higher is their payout minimum. It means that you can request your payment only after you have earned a certain amount of money.

It really wouldn't be worth your time if paid e-mail companies didn't have referral or affiliate programs. As an affiliate you can refer new members to their programs and get paid a percentage of what your referrals earn.

Note that if you want to make serious money you'll need to recruit at least several hundred referrals. Not to worry though - there are some free ways to accomplish that, as you will soon discover. Besides, visitor to sign up conversion ratios are very high, since get paid to read programs are totally free to join!

It is very important to select only legitimate paid email companies. Here's a short list of proven 'get paid to read e-mail' companies:

i) WowEarnings - http://www.cash4offers.com/r/wowearn
ii) InboxDollars - http://www.cash4offers.com/r/idollars
iii) E-mailPaysU - http://www.cash4offers.com/r/epaysu

2. Get paid to take surveys

When you join paid survey programs, online merchants pay you for your opinions on their products and services. The problem is that in order to access top paid survey companies you have to pay an access fee.

Here are some top-notch web sites that offer huge databases of paid survey programs:

i) Survey Scout - http://www.cash4offers.com/r/sscout
ii) Paid For Free - http://www.cash4offers.com/r/paid4free
iii) Survey Platinum - http://www.cash4offers.com/r/surveyp

3. Get paid to complete offers

At the moment, this is one of the most lucrative ways to earn extra money online working from home. Again, online merchants pay commissions to visitors... but not for opinions, not for their ads delivered via e-mail, but for trying their products and services. The offers include credit card applications, ISP services, membership clubs, free trials and samples, etc.

You can earn up to $70 extra money just for a single offer completed. Usually, the more extra cash you earn per offer, the more you have to pay per S&H or trial membership. However, if you really need a product or service that is offered, this is a great opportunity to accept it on the Internet, simply using your computer at home. Plus, you get paid extra cash for accepting terrific deals!

Top get paid for offers programs:

i) Cash4Offers - http://www.cash4offers.com
ii) WowEarnings - http://www.cash4offers.com/r/wowearn
iii) CashFiesta - http://www.cash4offers.com/r/cashf
iv) SearchCactus - http://www.cash4offers.com/r/scactus
v) InboxDollars - http://www.cash4offers.com/r/idollars

4. Get paid to shop online

This way to earn extra money is very similar to paid offers opportunity. You get paid a certain percentage of what you spend at online stores.

Cash4Offers and WowEarnings have super get paid to shop online stores. So, if you like to shop online, why not get paid for doing it?

5. Get paid for marketing affiliate programs

As I mentioned earlier, you cannot earn a lot cash unless you join affiliate programs of these 'get paid to' companies, and earn commissions from your referrals.

If you don't want to get involved in the affiliate marketing, the only option is to join a get paid to complete offers company and earn several hundred dollars by completing offers that interest you.

However, if you are serious about making extra income online from the comfort of your home, you should join 'get paid to' (or other) affiliate programs and promote them on the Internet.

Ideally, you should create your own web site. Here are some useful resources from top online affiliate marketers that will help you to get started:

i) Corey Ruld - http://www.cash4offers.com/r/crcourse
ii) James Martell - http://www.cash4offers.com/r/jm
iii) Ken Evoy - http://www.cash4offers.com/r/sbires

Of course, you can succeed as an affiliate even without your own web site. The best free way to drive targeted traffic to your affiliate programs is by writting your own articles and submitting them to major article directories:

* http://www.goarticles.com
* http://www.articlecity.com
* http://www.article-emporium.com
* http://www.ezinearticles.com
* http://groups.yahoo.com/group/article_announce

If you think that you cannot write, check out Jim Edwards' "Turn Words Into Traffic" letter. I hope that he will convince you that you can: http://www.cash4offers.com/r/jearticles

When joining a 'get paid to' affiliate program look what affiliate marketing tools & resources the company gives you. The only 'get paid to' affiliate program that offers two-tier affiliate commissions, ready-to-use articles, free reports that you can give away to your web site visitors, affiliate e-course and much more, is Cash4Offers.

As you can see, some 'get paid to' companies offer you several ways to earn extra money in one place. For example, WowEarnings gives you an all-in-one-place extra income opportunity to get paid to read e-mails, complete offers, shop and refer your friends.

But if you want to make the most extra income working from home in your spare time, you should get involved with affiliate marketing, and start with the Cash4Offers affiliate program.

Pay Per Click Search Engine Tips

2009-02-19T06:40:00.000-08:00

To be an advertiser in pay per click through search engine is a great deal of competition. You want to be the one ?. Check this tips below :

1. Use quality pay per click search engines that already have a high volume of traffic. It doesn't matter how cheap the bid for your key words may be if there is little traffic on the search engine and your key words are never clicked on.

2. Know your market. If you are selling "vacations to Indonesia" do some research to find out what words and phases folks who are thinking of traveling to Thailand are actually using in their searches. An excellent tool to assist in this research is Wordtracker . Wordtracker will quickly help you to decide which key words are truly worth bidding on.

3. Quality pay per click search engines will have starting bids from one cent to five cents per key word. It is important to know that about 80% of the traffic for any key word will go to the top three bids. So if you want a lot of traffic to your web site try to position yourself in the top three spots. Just as with real estate location makes all the difference in results.

4. Set up a realistic budget for each search engine. Quality pay per click search engines get a lot of traffic so be prepared for a lot of traffic to your site if you bid on popular key words.

5. Popular key words can be expensive so choose your key words with great care. It is best to stay away from key words that are too general in nature. Thus to continue with the example above bidding on the key word "vacations" would not be wise if you are selling vacations to Indonesia. Yes, you would get a ton of traffic but it would be more than likely be too general and you would spend a lot of money for poor results. It is almost always a better strategy to bid on phases instead of one general keyword. Therefore bidding on "vacations to Indonesia" would be a far better choice than bidding on "vacations".

If you are selling vacations to Borobudur Indonesia it would be better to bid on "vacations to Borobudur " than on "vacations to Indonesia". The more keywords that you can find that exactly match up with whatever it is that you are selling and that folks will be searching for the more money you will save (less money will get you in the top three spots) and the better your results will be.

Wordtracker is an excellent tool that can find key word phases that are actually being searched for and that you would probably never think of going it alone.

6. Think about using a lot of keywords rather that a common few. The common few will be expensive and will likely deliver to your web site a lot of poorly targeted traffic with poor conversion ratios (traffic to sales). People search for the darnest things and those who actually plan on buying something usually search by using phrases. With some effort you can find phrases that are cheap and that will deliver highly targeted traffic...the kind that converts into sales.

7. No matter how much traffic you drive to a web site if you are marketing sorry products or services or if you have excellent products and services but you have a sorry website you are wasting your time and money. Everything must be right to achieve business success. Make sure that your site is "order taking ready" before you turn on your pay per click traffic.

Google Adsense Tip and Trick 3

2009-02-19T06:39:00.000-08:00

Have you placed multiple ad spread out your blog?
Well, another way to increase ad revenue is to use multiple ad units. According to Google’s TOS you are allowed to post up to three ad units per page. Similar to standard search results the highest paying ad units will be served first and the lowest being served last. If there is enough of an ad inventory, place all three ad units.

However you should pay attention to the payouts. Current assumption is you get 60% of the revenue (on a $0.05 click you get $0.03). So if a click from the third ad unit is only paying between 3 to 5 cents you may want to omit it from your page. This is one are where giving your ad units channels does have value. If one ad unit is getting a higher percentage of click throughs you’ll want to make sure the highest paying ads are being served there. TIP:Use CSS positioning to get your highest paying ads serving in the location with the highest CTR.

Google Adsense Tips and Tricks 2

2009-02-19T06:38:00.000-08:00

The other tips to make the rounds is using images placed directly above or below an adsense leaderboard. This has been used for a while but came out in a digital point forum thread where a member talked about quadrupling their CTR. Basically you set up the adsense code in a table with four images that line up directly with the ads. Whether or not this is deceptive is fuzzy and very subjective. Obviously four blinking arrows would be ‘enticing people to click’ and be against the adsense TOS. However placing pictures of 4 laptops over laptops ads isn’t, so use your best judgment here and look at it from the advertiser or Google’s perspective. If you have a question as to your implementation being ‘over the line’ write to adsense and ask them to take a look.

As far as using the images, I’ve done it and can tell you it definitely works. You get the best results when the images ‘complete the story the ads are telling’. For example if you have ads about apple pies, use pictures of freshly baked apple pies, instead of granny smith, Macintosh, pink lady, and braeburn apples. TIP: Don’t limit yourself to using images only on that size ad unit, it works just as well with the other sizes, like the 336 rectangle.

PS : This tip can jeopardize your blog because it isn’t fair one. In opposite, it can increase your CTR.

Google Adsense Tips and Tricks 1

2009-02-19T06:36:00.000-08:00

Once you know you are going to put adsense on your website you’re going to have to consider where to put it. If this is new site it’s easier, if it’s an existing site it’s more difficult. While every website is different, Google has published some heat maps showing the optimal locations. No surprise that the best spots are middle of the page and left hand side. Now I’ve done really well by placing it on the right, but you should know why you’re doing it that way before hand, and be prepared to change it if it doesn’t work out.
Google has also has published a list of the highest performing ad sizes:

· 336×280 large rectangle
· 300×250 inline rectangle
· 160×600 wide skyscraper
From the sites that I run, I do really well with the 336 rectangle and 160 skyscraper. My next best performing ad size is the 728 leaderboard, I don’t really use the 300 inline rectangle too often. So really it depends on how well you integrate these into your site. Placement can have a dramatic effect on performance. TIP: When working on a new site or new layout you may want to give each location it’s own channel for a little while until you understand the users behavior.
Another ‘trick’ that can increase your CTR is by blending your adsense into your body copy. For example if your body copy is black, remove the adsense border and make the title, text, and URL black.TIP: Try changing all of your page hyperlinks to a high contrast color (like dark red or a bold blue) then change the adsense title to the same color.
The one area where I’ve found blended ads don’t perform as well is forums, especially ones with a high volume of repeat members. Regular visitors develop banner blindness pretty quickly. One ‘trick’ to keep the ads from being ignored is to randomize the color and even the placement. As with any of the decisions about location, placement and color it’s a trade off. How much do you emphasize the ads without annoying your visitors. Remember it’s better to have a 1% CTR with 500 regular visitors as opposed to a 5% CTR with 50 visitors. TIP: For forums try placing the adsense ads directly above or below the the first forum thread.

Click Fraud Problem

2009-02-19T06:26:00.000-08:00

Click fraud has become a major problem for online marketers. If you participate on Google adesense or adwords campaigns or Overture, you must already pay a lot for your campaigns.

What is click fraud?

Click fraud is the deliberate clicks to PPC search engine ads for completely other reasons than expressing interest for buying the related products or services.

Overture defines click fraud as clicks arising for reasons other than the good-faith intention of an Internet user to visit a web site to purchase goods or services or to obtain information.

Google defines click fraud, or invalid clicks, as any method used to artificially and/or maliciously generate clicks or page impressions.

In simple words, Click fraud means that someone is cheating you and that you pay too much for your pay per click campaigns.

Who is doing that?

Three main groups click on pay per click ads, without real interest in the offered goods:

People who joined Google AdSense or other per click affiliate programs click on the ads on their own web site to make a little income. Often, these people cooperate with other webmasters to click on each other's ads.

Some unethical companies click on the pay per click ads of competitors to drive up their advertising costs.

Companies (often in India, Russia and China) hire people who are paid to click on ads.
Google and other search networks provide refunds to advertisers when click fraud has been discovered.

Google and Overture employ "fraud squads," or teams of people dedicated to fighting click schemes. But at least two marketing executives say such countermeasures are missing fraudulent clicks that are responsible for between 5 percent and 20 percent of advertising fees paid to all search networks.

This is a huge problem. There is no “pay per click” Company denying that click fraud exists. Web analytics companies estimates that the 50% of all click activity is fraudulent.

This means that your pay per click marketing activities are half effective as they could be because of click fraud.

Most advertisers are aware of the click-fraud issue but have not delved into it because of the technical complexities involved. Others are concerned that they could jeopardize their relationships with the powerful search networks if they complain too loudly.

No reason accepted if you are denying your ads were clicked many times from same computer everyday and you will get banned. Be careful not to click your own ads on your website because it will gave you penalty and the company will sent you out from Google Adsense member.

Placing Ads in Your Affiliate Sites

2009-02-19T06:23:00.001-08:00

Placing Adsense on affiliate sites is tricky. Are you giving up a $10, $20, or $30 sale for a $1 click? This is something you have to test on your own to figure out. If you aren’t converting now it’s definitely worth a try. I like to use adsense on my article pages. For example let’s say you had an affiliate website where you sold shoes. You’re going to need some related articles to ‘flesh out’ the site. Things like ‘getting a shoe shine’ or ‘finding a shoe repair shop’ these are excellent spots for adsense. While you won’t get rich, they will usually provide a small steady income and cover things like hosting costs.

If you find you have pages getting more than 50 clicks per month add more pages about this topic, and link the pages together. Mine you logs for the search terms

Google Adsense

2009-02-19T06:18:00.000-08:00

What is google adsense ? Have you heard it before ?

Google Adsense is a program for web publishers that allow them to generate revenue from content they publish on the internet. They can paste script provided by Google into their web page and after the Google mediabot crawls the page advertising that is relevant to the content on the page is displayed. The advertisements then appear in your website.

Google pay the publisher to their account each time a visitor clicks one of the Adsense ads. Advertisers pay Google each time their ad is clicked and publisher get the share of the product’s profit. The publishers are not allowed to do self-click to ads in their website because it can suspected as a fraud-click. That is an illegal activity forbidden by google. If they still doing that, so google has the right to null their google adsense’s account.

Furthermore, publishers are paid at the end of each month if their account balance exceeds $100.00. if their account balance didn’t exceed that amount, it will accumulated together with next month achievement. The payment can be obtained by publisher within two ways; by check or by direct to deposit. The check sent to their address, so make sure to write it clear.
Actually, it is very simple to join Google Adsense, there is one principle in Adsense. Google publishers only need to get content up on the internet and Google does the rest. Of course, the one who will get a lot of money must working hard for their goal that is earn as much money as possible.

3 Very Simple Steps to Making Money Online

2009-02-19T06:17:00.000-08:00

Network Marketing or MLM (Multi Level Marketing) is one of the biggest earning potentials on the internet today. The internet is a multi billion dollar industry where the advantages of trading are virtually endless. Here are some of the key reasons why I highly recommend Network Marketing. But if you dislike the points I mentioned, you can freely give comments.

The ability to not only work from home but from almost any location in the world as long as you have access to the internet was the biggest attraction for me personally. It opens a whole new world of possibilities in regards to the way you can live your life.

You work the hours you want, and you are also your own boss. It is much easier to motivate yourself when you know your efforts are going to increase your own earning potential and not the person you are working for. Also your earning potential is endless and your business grows by itself once you have the right tools in place.

Another huge benefit of Network Marketing is the amount needed to invest is far smaller than virtually any other business so you really have very little to lose. However one of the reasons a lot of people fail at Network Marketing is because they want something for nothing. Expecting to make huge profits with no time and money invested will get you no where.

This leads me to my next point of working smarter rather than harder. How you market your business is crucial to its success. You are competing in a global market with millions of potential customers; however reaching these customers is your biggest challenge. There are so many marketing tools on the market today of which a large majority of them will generate very little if any residual profits for your company. The most effective tools for you to use are the ones which will target motivated individuals who are already interested in the products and or services which you offer.

You could for example invest substantial amounts of money on tools which promise millions of hits to your site and gain absolutely no business whatsoever. On the other hand you could invest smarter and utilise the tools which target those potential associates as mentioned above for a much smaller investment. And this is where the beauty of the plug in profit system is so evident. All the most effective tools and methods are supplied for you to save you years of trial and error.

Peoples have their own ways to earn money, if we could do better why not trying the same way I already taken?

How to Make Professional-Look Blog

2009-02-19T06:07:00.000-08:00

Adding some gadget on your blog looks funky and sometimes attracts many of visitors and they probably stay for long time in your blog, but there are things you should avoid in developing your blog into more professional-look blog. Here some tips for you to make your blog looks more professional.

1. Template
After your template uploaded, try to check it on many of web browser. How does it look in IE, Mozilla, Opera, etc. Your visitors are not only using IE or Mozilla or another web browser.

2. Color
Using an appropriate colors can help your blog looks more professional. Try using blending color and pick any color that match with the theme of your blog. do not using pink as your business blog background.
3. Clock
Do not put a clock on your blog. It can slowdown your page until it completely opened.
4. Calendar
This calendar is useful for those who want to see the information only about date. You can put it in your blog. But, putting calendar to display your post is not suggested.
5. Counter
If your blog already published in few days, never try to put counter on your gadget. This will occurs your visitors judgment about your blog. Although, there are some counter provider will give you an opportunity to manipulate your counter by giving an instant lots of recent visitors counter, try not to using this kind of method to deceiving your visitors.
6. Ask Visitor
Never ask your visitor to click your ads in many ways. Avoid using “click this ad” or another provocation to click your ads.
7. Ads
Putting many ads is absolutely gave us many of advantages. Especially, it can generate cash from our blog. But remember, your visitor will starting to leave if there are many ads spread out in all over your blog. They are willing to read your articles, most of them did not want to see many of ads. Just minimize your ads and maximize your post.
8. Song
Using background song can make visitor get surprised. They are not realize when browse your blog, a song directly played. Of course, playing music is not forbidden, but for those who have slow internet connection, background music can occurs their speed. No problem if your blog is about music or personal blog, but for business blog, I suggested to avoid using song in the background.
9. Visitor Status
Are you KGB or CIA agent?. If you are not one of them, avoid to display your visitor’s status because your blog is not a spy tools.
10. Non-related Gadget
Why do you add forex corners if your blog is all about computer?. Adding many kinds of gadget actually really fun, but it will looks weird.
11. Copy-Paste
If you want to copy-paste the other’s content to be copied into your blog, you must repair the whole articles including links.
12. Punctuation
Double check the punctuation of your articles. Meaning depends on right punctuation.
13. Picture
Putting a big picture or many of small picture can slowdown your blog to completely opened. They rather looking other blog to visit than waiting your densely populated blog.
14. Broken Link
Frequently check your dead-link. Usually, visitor will not go back to your blog if they discontented because they can find where the links lead. Moreover, they thought that your blog is not manage well.
15. Post
Don’t ever try to post other’s articles because your visitor will think that they better directly go to the actual source.
16. Source
Always put your source. Basically, professional blog always put the sources below the articles. If you take other’s articles, make sure to add their source name or links.
17. Comments
How to response visitor’s comments?. Well, never trying to insult the comments although its very annoying. Don’t take too seriously if there are any controversial ones.
18. Domain Name
There are some ways to shorten your domain name. If you make a blog using blogger.com, you can make it short and it’s absolutely free. Just googling it.
19. Profile
Just write down your complete profile. So, your visitor know you more. I suggest that showing the real of you is not a big deal if you want to famous your name. but, if you don’t want to show up yourself its all up to you. Using alias sometimes gave us advantages.

The professional-look blog can be achieved if you really want to make it. Keep it simple and your visitors will keep your blog up for a long time.

Basic Of Blogging

2009-02-19T06:05:00.000-08:00

In the mid-1990s, web logging appeared on the net first time. The term 'web log' was initially coined refer to a server's log file and then expanded to include the meaning of online personal journaling. Later on, to avoid confusion, the word 'blog' was adopted to refer to personal journaling. Today a blog is defined as an online publication where an author puts his or her personal thoughts and opinions from the most intimate to corporate ideas, concerns or events, in chronological order on the net.

Although, there are as many kinds of blogs on line as there are people, most of these will roughly fall into these kind of bloggers: Personal Bloggers (the original use of blogging), then there are the organizational and business Bloggers.

Organizational blogs are meant to facilitate communications between its internal and external audiences. It may also provide information for the external publics' use.

Business blogs promote products or services for profit. They also increase awareness about the company, as well as establish itself as an authority with customers, vendors, through publications that demonstrate their expertise in the market.

What are the kinds of contents that readers can find in a blog that's for distribution? The authors' ideas, opinions, expertise in his/her field of work, resumes, and home recipes, pictures, streaming audio or video clips, e-books, poetry, works, products, services and consultations.

Why have blogs become very popular compared to websites or email? Most websites are infrequently updated, while blogs have instant publishing tools which permit the author to regularly update & introduce new content. Although both have great content, websites are usually impersonal in informing their audience. While blogs allow the readers to leave their comments and feedback, to hold two-conversations with the author, who usually does the publishing and can immediately respond to his/her readers.

It is undeniable that the blogs' abilities made it as a marketing tools. Furthermore, a blog is very efficient, easy and cheap. Also using blog can spread out any information quickly.

4 TRICKS HOW COMMENT SIGNATURE TO BE MORE EFECTIVE

2009-02-19T06:02:00.000-08:00

I have read many of comments from other blog that I had visited and suddenly I just want to click every links that exist. Usually, after see the guest’s name that somewhat unique, I became curious about this person. Then, I click the name and suddenly directed to that person’s website or blog. So, lets take the advantage from this facility, that is, lead somebody’s guest book visitor to your specific page. It is beautiful, isn’t it?

You can lead them to your :

1.Top Articles
Leading the visitor to your top articles can get them stay and explore your pages. Different person perhaps not doing the same thing, but this tricks always work. Try it!
2.Contest Blog
Are you became a contestant in a blog contest?. If so, why don’t you make links that lead to your contest blog. This will give you benefits because the visitor directly go to your contest blog. Hopefully, they will give you comment, or suggestion or not doing anything. But that’s not problem. You can still attracts many of visitor using this method.
3.Personal Blog
If you want to famous yourself, just make links to your personal blog. This will give your visitor know exactly about you. Well, nobody loves you if you not show up, right?
4.Affiliation Page
An affiliation page is one of internet browser’s looking for. This keyword gaining the third place of search engine rank. I have predicted that you visitors will like to surf your affiliation page because the offers are superb. For those who loves money will dig about that information (if they are not already knew before).
5.Forum
Now it’s time to show your forum and gain a lot of members. Leading the visitors to your forum maybe interesting them to be a member of your forum. Everybody lives to share to others, right?

So, after you read this articles, are you still want to lead your visitor candidates to your home page ?

Iranian space programme more advanced than thought?

2009-02-12T06:14:00.000-08:00

Iran's first satellite launch aboard a home-grown rocket last week has left observers puzzled over just how it was done. Was the satellite launched by a feeble rocket pushed to its limits, or has Iran's secretive space programme managed to develop a far more powerful launch vehicle without anyone noticing? The answer will affect how soon the country might achieve its stated goal of sending humans into space.

Iran launched its satellite – called Omid, or "Hope" – on 2 February. According to Iranian media, it is a 40-centimetre cube weighing 25-kilograms, and is equipped with radio transmitters.

Foreign tracking stations and amateur sky watchers have been following the craft's relatively low orbit, which is expected to decay over weeks or months due to atmospheric drag.

At first, it was thought that the launch vehicle, called Safir-2, was derived from relatively feeble missiles that burn ambient-temperature liquid fuel, which Iran was already known to have.

Two of these missiles stacked one on top of the other could boost a third, small, solid-fuel rocket that could take a lightweight payload like Omid to orbit.

Two stages
But evidence has begun to emerge that the rocket might be more powerful than this. Amateur observers report that the last stage of the rocket, which is also in orbit, is much brighter than the satellite itself, suggesting it is too large to be the third stage of a relatively modest rocket.

Geoffrey Forden of MIT, who specialises in the analysis of foreign countries' launch capabilities, is one of those now mulling over whether the rocket had just two stages, with a second stage that was much more powerful than anything Iran was known to possess. This would be possible using a cryogenic fuel system involving liquid oxygen.

If true, this would have important implications for Iran's ambition to launch astronauts into space, something Reza Taghipour, head of Iran's Aerospace Industries Organization, has said the country hopes to do before 2021.

Green tea makes for healthier hearts

2009-02-10T08:10:00.000-08:00

Drinking several cups of green tea each day may substantially reduce a person's risk of cardiovascular disease, a study of more than 40,000 people in Japan has found. But the new findings also cast doubt on the prevalent idea that the drink offers protection against cancer.

Controlling for lifestyle factors, those who consumed more than five cups of green tea daily had a 26% lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease than those who consumed less than one cup per day.

Exactly how the tea protects against heart disease remains unclear, but Kuriyama speculates that antioxidant chemicals in green tea, called polyphenols, reduce the action of free radicals in the body, which may damage cells.

Milton Schiffenbauer of Pace University in New York, US, says that by protecting against this damage, polyphenols may reduce the blood vessel inflammation thought to promote cardiovascular disease.

The new study did not find evidence to support the idea that green tea consumption reduces the risk of cancer. The Japanese researchers found no significant difference in cancer-related mortality among the different groups.

Previous studies suggest the drink may protect against cancer of the prostate or lung. They have also isolated specific receptors on the surfaces of cancer cells that green tea compounds may interact with.

"It's been suggested time and time again that it does provide protection against cancer," says Schiffenbauer, whose previous work found evidence that black and green tea also deactivates viruses, including herpes.

He adds that although the new research from Japan found no link between tea consumption and cancer risk, more research is needed to resolve the conflict between this and previous cancer-related studies.

About Me

2009-02-08T07:34:00.000-08:00

Hi, I'm Arif and I create this blog to improve my writing skill. Also, trying to learn and develop it so it will getting better. Prior to earn some cash, I spent several years as a teacher until present day and realized that sharing my knowledge to others are wonderful and fun, and I really enjoyed it. View my complete profile here

Antarctic bulge could flood Washington DC

2009-02-07T08:48:00.000-08:00

Rather than spreading out evenly across all the oceans, water from melted Antarctic ice sheets will gather around North America and the Indian Ocean. That's bad news for the US East Coast, which could bear the brunt of one of these oceanic bulges.

Many previous models of the rising sea levels due to climate change assumed that water from melted ice sheets and glaciers would simply run into the oceans and fill them uniformly. These models predict a 5-metre rise in sea levels if the West Antarctic ice sheet melts, but fail to acknowledge three important factors.

First, Jerry Mitrovica and colleagues from the University of Toronto in Canada considered the gravitational attraction of the Antarctic ice sheets on the surrounding water, which pulls it towards the South Pole. As the ice sheet melts, this bulge of water dissipates into surrounding oceans along with the meltwater. So while the sea level near Antarctica will fall, sea levels away from the South Pole will rise.

Once the ice melts, the release of pressure could also cause the Antarctic continent to rise by 100 metres. And as the weight of the ice pressing down on the continental shelf is released, the rock will spring back, displacing seawater that will also spread across the oceans.

Redistributing this mass of water could even change the axis of the Earth's spin. The team estimates that the South Pole will shift by 500 metres towards the west of Antarctica, and the North Pole will shift in the opposite direction. Since the spin of the Earth creates bulges of oceanic water in the regions between the equator and the poles, these bulges will also shift slightly with the changing axis.

The upshot is that the North American continent and the Indian Ocean will experience the greatest changes in sea level - adding 1 or 2 metres to the current estimates. Washington DC sits squarely in this area, meaning it could face a 6.3-metre sea level rise in total. California will also be in the target zone.

"Policy-makers must realise that the effects could be greater or smaller in different areas," says team member Natalya Gomez. The team have so far only considered one ice sheet, so the effects of other ice sheets across the world could also have a similar impact, she says.

However, these models assume that all the West Antarctic sea ice will melt, but Peter Convey from the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge points out this may not necessarily be the case. "It would be dangerously easy to get people to focus on the 6-metre figure, but it just might not happen like that," he says.

Jonathan Gregory from the University of Reading in the UK, who is part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, however, thinks the work should be helpful once this has been reliably evaluated.

Adopted from David Robson

Obama reaches out to Muslim world

2009-01-28T05:20:00.000-08:00

US President Barack Obama has used his first formal TV interview since taking office to reach out to the Muslim world - saying Americans are not its enemy.

Speaking to the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya network, Mr Obama reiterated that the US would extend the hand of friendship to Iran if it "unclenched its fist".

It comes as his Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, travels to the region, heralding a new burst of diplomacy.

He will meet Egypt's leader to discuss the Gaza ceasefire and peace efforts.

Egypt has been mediating between Israel and the Palestinians, and between rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah.

Mr Obama told Al-Arabiya that the US sometimes made mistakes and stressed that his administration would adopt a more open diplomatic approach.

"As I said in my inauguration speech, if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us," he said.

"It is very important for us to make sure that we are using all the tools of US power, including diplomacy, in our relationship with Iran."

On Middle East peace, Mr Obama reiterated his administration's support for Israel and its security but also suggested Israelis would have to make some tough choices.

"Ultimately we cannot tell either the Israelis or the Palestinians what is best for them. They are going to have to make some decisions," he said.

"But I do believe the moment is ripe for both sides to realise that the path that they are on is one that is not going to result in prosperity and security for their people. And that instead, it's time to return to the negotiating table."

Asked about verbal attacks made on him in recent videos released by al-Qaeda, Mr Obama responded: "What that tells me is that their ideas are bankrupt."

The BBC's Justin Webb in Washington says that for most of the interview, Mr Obama appeared determined to be emollient and - as he put it repeatedly - respectful, stressing that the US would begin by listening rather than dictating.

sorce : BBC NEWS

U.N. Chief Condemnation

2009-01-16T07:49:00.000-08:00

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon led international protests Thursday describing the Palestinian death toll as "unbearable" as Israeli air strikes hit a hospital, media building and UN compound.

He also said the death toll from the war, now nearing 1,100, has become "unbearable."

"I have conveyed my strong protest and outrage and demanded a full explanation from the defense minister and foreign minister," Ban told reporters in Tel Aviv after the strike on a UN compound in Gaza.

The U.N. suspended its operations in Gaza after Israeli shells smashed into the compound, setting fire to warehouses holding badly-needed aid.

A building housing the offices of several media organizations, a hospital wing and the United Nations headquarters in Gaza City were struck by Israeli forces Thursday, Al Arabiya TV and witnesses reported, prompting the U.N. to suspend operations.

Three Israeli tank shells smashed into UNRWA, the U.N.'s main relief agency in Gaza, wounding three workers, the pan-Arab news station reported, in an attack condemned by the U.N. chief.

The Israeli airstrike on the al-Shorouk media building killed two Abu Dhabi TV journalists and wounded several others, Al Arabiya TV reported.

A wing of a-Quds Hospital in Gaza City caught fire after another Israeli strike, witnesses said, though it was not immediately clear whether there were injuries.

Al Arabiya TV reported that the Israeli tanks encircled the house of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahaar in Gaza City. Palestinian fighters said a number of Israeli soldiers were injured in a military unit in west Gaza, Al Arabiya said.

UNWRA spokesman Adnan Abu Hasna told AFP it was suspending all operations because of the shelling.

One of the buildings, containing "hundreds of tons" of humanitarian aid, was on fire, while other parts of the compound sustained shrapnel damage, another UNRWA official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Earlier, the compound was damaged when another Israeli shell landed next to the building, which is near the Islamic University in the centre of Gaza City,

Chris Gunness, a Jerusalem-based spokesman for the agency, said hundreds people were taking refuge inside the compound when it was hit.

Israel Kills Interior Minister in Gaza

2009-01-16T07:09:00.000-08:00

Israel killed one of Hamas's top leaders in Gaza, interior minister Said Siam, the most senior leader to have been killed in the 20-day-old war in the enclave, as U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon led international protests describing the Palestinian death toll as "unbearable".

"Leader Said Siam, his son and his brother fell as martyrs in Gaza," reported Al-Quds television, based in Beirut.

The three died in an Israeli air strike on the house of Siam's brother north of Gaza City.

Siam was in charge of 13,000 police and security men, many of whom are actively involved in fighting Israel. He founded the Executive Force, a Hamas security branch originally set up to rival Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's presidential guard.

The Good, the Bad and the Ozone

2009-01-05T06:31:00.000-08:00

The Good, the Bad and the Ozone06.04.04 Ozone is a big buzz word these days. We mostly hear about the ozone layer, and the importance of protecting it. But if you want to understand what ozone's all about, you need to understand that it can be good, and it can be bad.

+ The good kind of ozone

The stratosphere is the layer of the atmosphere from 10 to 30 miles above sea level. When there's ozone in this layer, it protects us from solar radiation. How? Simple chemistry.

Regular oxygen molecules, known to science-types as O2, are made up of two oxygen atoms stuck together. Solar energy shoots in from space and splits that molecule into two atoms. When one of those stray atoms attaches to a full-fledged O2 molecule, you've got, well, O3, otherwise known as ozone. All that action blocks solar radiation, and keeps it from reaching us.

Image above: The second largest ozone hole ever observed is seen above Antarctica in this image from September 2003. Credit: NASA

How can solar radiation be harmful to life on Earth? Part of that radiation is ultra-violet, or UV radiation. It's an intense energy from the Sun that can cause a whole lot of damage. Skin cancer is the most dramatic result of a too much UV radiation, but there's a lot more too. Photosynthesis in plants is also affected, and that causes problems for the whole food chain. See where this is headed? We need to protect our ozone shield, and we can do so by decreasing the pollution that our industrial society puts out in large amounts every day.

+ The bad kind of ozone

Let's come down a little closer to Earth. The troposphere is everything below the stratosphere, from sea level to about 10 miles above. It's where everything lives. Things that happen to the troposphere happen to us; there's nothing indirect about it.

Put a little ozone in the troposphere and you've got some big problems. Remember those dramatic chemical reactions that happened up in the stratosphere? Living things are made of atoms and molecules too, so when we expose them to ozone, we've got some serious chemical reactions on our hands.

NASA Aircraft Examine Impact of Forest Fires on Arctic Climate

2009-01-05T06:12:00.000-08:00

As the summer fire season heats up, NASA aircraft are set to follow the trail of smoke plumes from some of Earth's northernmost forest fires, examining their contribution to arctic pollution and implications for climate change.

Starting June 29, NASA's DC-8 and P-3B aircraft, based at a Canadian military base in Cold Lake, Alberta, will begin their final three-week deployment of the Arctic Research of the Composition of the Troposphere from Aircraft and Satellites, or ARCTAS, mission. A third NASA aircraft, the B-200 King Air, will fly from Yellowknife, Canada. The mission is the most extensive field campaign ever to study the chemistry of the Arctic's lower atmosphere. The three airborne laboratories are equipped to fly through the smoke plumes of northern-latitude forest fires. The resulting data, when combined with simultaneous satellite measurements, could reveal the impact of forest fires on the arctic atmosphere.

"The summer campaign will focus on boreal forest fire emissions," said Jim Crawford, manager of the Tropospheric Chemistry Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Coupled with the observations of arctic haze during the spring deployment based in Alaska, these data will improve our understanding of the relative importance of these two influences on arctic atmospheric composition and climate."

Boreal forests, which span Earth's northern latitudes, have seen a rise in natural forest fires during the last decade. Researchers have debated the degree to which these fires contribute to the Arctic's atmosphere compared to other sources, such as human-caused emissions from lower latitudes. The ARCTAS flights through smoke plumes, over and downwind from their source, will reveal their composition and transport path.

Researchers also will use the data to examine how the chemistry of smoke plumes changes over time and distance. Plume chemistry can contribute to the formation of ozone in the lower atmosphere. Particulates in smoke plumes can affect Earth's radiation balance with consequences for climate change.

The mission also is expected to help researchers interpret data from NASA satellites orbiting over the Arctic. NASA's Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation, or CALIPSO, satellite can measure the height of various plume components in the atmosphere, information critical to predicting plume movement. Researchers will use data from ARCTAS to validate observations from CALIPSO and other satellites to improve model predictions of fire impacts on chemistry and climate.

"Aircraft experiments provide the greatest possible detail on the state of the atmosphere, but only for short, intense periods of sampling," Crawford said. "By conducting these flights in tight coordination with satellites and computer models, airborne observations lead to improvements in the interpretation of satellite observations and better representation of atmospheric processes in chemistry and climate models. This improves our confidence in models' ability to monitor and predict future changes."

The Yellowknife site also will host a portable science station from Pennsylvania State University that collects ground-based ozone and aerosol measurements, in conjunction with daily launches of balloon-borne instruments planned by Environment Canada and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The ARCTAS flights are being coordinated with research flights from Kangerlussuaq, Greenland being conducted by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique -- a French government-funded research organization -- and the German Aerospace Center.

The summer deployment of ARCTAS follows a spring deployment based in Fairbanks, Alaska. That mission focused on atmospheric composition, pollution transport pathways, and the formation of "arctic haze," which is fueled by sunlight that causes chemical reactions in pollutants that accumulate over the winter.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/arctas/summer_deploy.html

Gaza Will Become Zionist's Cemetery

2009-01-05T06:04:00.000-08:00

Iran, which has seen angry protests since the Israeli raids began last week, also added its voice.

Ali Larijani, the parliament speaker, praised Palestinian resistance against the ground invasion.

"Zionists should know that Gaza will become their cemetery," he said on Sunday.

Even Egypt, which has faced criticism from the Arab and Muslim world, condemned the Israeli incursion, and called on the UN to work to end the violence.

In Britain, where one of the world's largest demonstrations against the Israeli incursion took place on Saturday, Gordon Brown, the prime minister, took a more measured approach, saying that Israel's ground offensive had created a "very dangerous moment" before calling for increased efforts on both sides to secure a ceasefire.

"First we need an immediate ceasefire, and that includes a stopping of the rockets into Israel. Secondly, we need some resolution of the problem over arms trafficking into Gaza and, thirdly, we need the borders and the crossings open and that will need some international solution."

For its part, the US state department said it told the Israeli government that any military action should be "mindful of the potential consequences to civilians".

It also condemned Hamas, saying the group was holding the people of Gaza "hostage" and contributing to a "very bad daily life" for the coastal territory's residents.

Mars Rovers Near Five Years of Science and Discovery

2009-01-05T05:53:00.000-08:00

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity may still have big achievements ahead as they approach the fifth anniversaries of their memorable landings on Mars.

Of the hundreds of engineers and scientists who cheered at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., on Jan. 3, 2004, when Spirit landed safely, and 21 days later when Opportunity followed suit, none predicted the team would still be operating both rovers in 2009.

"The American taxpayer was told three months for each rover was the prime mission plan," said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The twins have worked almost 20 times that long. That's an extraordinary return of investment in these challenging budgetary times."

The rovers have made important discoveries about wet and violent environments on ancient Mars. They also have returned a quarter-million images, driven more than 21 kilometers (13 miles), climbed a mountain, descended into craters, struggled with sand traps and aging hardware, survived dust storms, and relayed more than 36 gigabytes of data via NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter. To date, the rovers remain operational for new campaigns the team has planned for them.

"These rovers are incredibly resilient considering the extreme environment the hardware experiences every day," said John Callas, JPL project manager for Spirit and Opportunity. "We realize that a major rover component on either vehicle could fail at any time and end a mission with no advance notice, but on the other hand, we could accomplish the equivalent duration of four more prime missions on each rover in the year ahead."

Occasional cleaning of dust from the rovers' solar panels by Martian wind has provided unanticipated aid to the vehicles' longevity. However, it is unreliable aid. Spirit has not had a good cleaning for more than 18 months. Dust-coated solar panels barely provided enough power for Spirit to survive its third southern-hemisphere winter, which ended in December.

"This last winter was a squeaker for Spirit," Callas said. "We just made it through."

With Spirit's energy rising for spring and summer, the team plans to drive the rover to a pair of destinations about 183 meters (200 yards) south of the site where Spirit spent most of 2008. One is a mound that might yield support for an interpretation that a plateau Spirit has studied since 2006, called Home Plate, is a remnant of a once more-extensive sheet of explosive volcanic material. The other destination is a house-size pit called Goddard.

"Goddard doesn't look like an impact crater," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y. Squyres is principal investigator for the rover science instruments. "We suspect it might be a volcanic explosion crater, and that's something we haven't seen before."

A light-toned ring around the inside of the pit might add information about a nearby patch of bright, silica-rich soil that Squyres counts as Spirit's most important discovery so far. Spirit churned up the silica in mid-2007 with an immobile wheel that the rover has dragged like an anchor since it quit working in 2006. The silica was likely produced in an environment of hot springs or steam vents.

For Opportunity, the next major destination is Endeavour Crater. It is approximately 22 kilometers (14 miles) in diameter, more than 20 times larger than another impact crater, Victoria, where Opportunity spent most of the past two years. Although Endeavour is about 12 kilometers (7 miles) from Victoria, it is considerably farther as the rover drives on a route evading major obstacles.

Since climbing out of Victoria four months ago, Opportunity has driven more than a mile of its route toward Endeavour and stopped to inspect the first of several loose rocks the team plans to examine along the way. High-resolution images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which reached Mars in 2006, are helping the team plot routes around potential sand traps that were not previously discernable from orbit.

"We keep setting the bar higher for what these rovers can do," said Frank Hartman, a JPL rover driver. "Once it seemed like a crazy idea to go to Endeavour, but now we're doing it."

Squyres said, "The journeys have been motivated by science, but have led to something else important. This has turned into humanity's first overland expedition on another planet. When people look back on this period of Mars exploration decades from now, Spirit and Opportunity may be considered most significant not for the science they accomplished, but for the first time we truly went exploring across the surface of Mars."

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rovers for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. For more information about Spirit and Opportunity, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/rovers .

Israeli Tanks Enter Gaza Strip

2009-01-05T05:49:00.000-08:00

Thousands of Israeli troops backed by tanks and helicopter gunships surrounded Gaza's largest city and fought militants at close range Sunday, the first full day of an overwhelming ground offensive in the coastal territory.

Israel said it has inflicted a heavy blow against Hamas as it expands a weeklong offensive meant to stop rocket fire on southern Israel. But spiraling civilian casualties among Palestinians fueled an international outcry, even as the U.S. blocked approval of a U.N. Security Council statement Saturday night calling for an immediate cease-fire.

Israel's ground forces moved in after nightfall Saturday following hours of intense, fiery artillery shelling to clear the way, and Hamas warned that its fighters would turn Gaza into an Israeli "graveyard."

On Sunday, Israeli soldiers fought primarily in open areas in the launching zones used by Gaza's militants to send rockets raining down on Israeli cities. As the troops in three brigade-size formations moved in, residents of those Israeli cities began cautiously emerging from bomb shelters in hopes that the rocket fire would taper off.

Backing up the troops, mobile artillery units fired shells that exploded in veils of white smoke over Gaza's urban skyline. Tanks pushed south of Gaza City as deep as the abandoned settlement of Netzarim, which Israel left along with other communities when it pulled out of Gaza in 2005.

That effectively cut off Gaza City, the territory's largest population center with some 400,000 residents, from the rest of Gaza to the south.

Israel's military chief said Hamas fighters were trying to draw soldiers deeper into Gaza's sprawling, densely packed urban areas, where the military said militants were shielding themselves behind civilians.

"You entered like rats," Hamas spokesman Ismail Radwan told Israeli soldiers in a statement on Hamas' Al Aqsa TV. "Gaza will be a graveyard for you, God willing," he said.

Israeli forces have not yet entered urban areas, said Brig. Gen. Avi Benayahu, the chief army spokesman. He warned, however, that the operation was not a "school trip" and would be long and demanding.

The ground invasion risks turning into intense urban combat, with house-to-house fighting, sniper fire and booby-traps. Hamas is believed to have some 20,000 gunmen and has had time to prepare.

To guard against hidden explosives, Israel's ground forces moved through fields and orchards with bomb-sniffing dogs.

Since the ground assault began, 64 Palestinian civilians have been killed, said Dr. Moaiya Hassanain, a Health Ministry official. The new deaths brought the death toll in the Gaza Strip to more than 512 since Dec. 27. The tally is based on figures from the U.N. and Palestinian health officials as well as a count by The Associated Press.

Five Israelis have been killed since the offensive began. One soldier has been killed in the ground operation and about 40 were wounded, some of them in heavy exchanges of fire near the militant stronghold of Jebaliya, a town on Gaza City's northern outskirts, the army said. Heavy Israeli casualties could undermine what has so far been overwhelming public support for the operation.

At one hospital in the northern village of Beit Lahiya, medics carrying three injured children in their arms rushed them to treatment. One of the children had a blood-soaked bandage wrapped around his head and covering his eyes.

An Israeli shell also struck an ambulance in the town, killing a paramedic, said Marwan Abu Ras, a hospital administrator. The relief organization Oxfam, which said the ambulance belonged to a partner organization, al-Awda Hospital, confirmed the shelling.

An airstrike hit another ambulance belonging to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza City, killing three other paramedics, said medic Jamal Hawajiri. That ambulance crew was driving to a Hamas training site where there were reports of wounded.

An Israeli army spokesman said he had no information on the incidents.

The Israeli army said it had killed dozens of armed Hamas gunmen, but Gaza officials could confirm only a handful of dead fighters — in part because rescue teams could not reach the battle zones.

Condemnation of Israel's ground operation poured in from the Middle East and Europe.

"The violence has to stop," said EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner.

U.S. officials maintained their firm support for Israel and squarely blamed Hamas.

Vice President Dick Cheney said Israel "didn't seek clearance or approval from us" before pushing into Gaza.

Sens. Harry Reid and Dick Durbin — the top two Democrats in the chamber — and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell all described Israel's actions as understandable.

"I think what the Israelis are doing is very important," Reid said. "I think this terrorist organization, Hamas, has got to be put away. They've got to come to their senses."

Israeli President Shimon Peres said that Israel had to push forward and that a cease-fire was pointless without a halt to Hamas rocket fire.

"Well, clearly, if there is somebody (who) can stop terror with a different strategy, we shall accept it," he said on ABC's "This Week."

"We shall not accept the idea that Hamas will continue to fire and we shall declare a cease-fire. It does not make any sense."

Palestinians said the Israeli military broke into broadcasts on the Hamas TV channel, Al Aqsa, appealing to Palestinians not to agree to serve as human shields for the militants. The message read, "Israel is acting only against Hamas and has no interest in harming you."

The ground operation is the second phase in an offensive that began as a weeklong aerial onslaught aimed at halting Hamas rocket fire that has reached deeper and deeper into Israel, threatening major cities and one-eighth of Israel's population of 7 million.

More than 45 rockets and mortar shells fell in Israel on Sunday morning, sending residents scrambling for bomb shelters. Four Israelis were lightly wounded.

In Gaza City, civilians cowered inside as battles raged, while terrified residents in other areas fled in fear. In the southern town of Rafah, one man loaded a donkey cart with mattresses and blankets preparing to flee.

Lubna Karam, 28, said she and the other nine members of her family spent the night huddled in the hallway of their Gaza City home. The windows of the house were blown out days earlier in an Israeli airstrike, and the family has been without electricity for a week, surviving without heat and eating cold food.

"We keep hearing the sounds of airplanes and we don't know if we'll live until tomorrow or not," she said.

Severe damage to Gaza's phone network was pushing the territory closer to complete isolation. The Palestinian phone company Paltel Group said 90 percent of Gaza's cellular service was down, as well as many landlines, because of frequent power cuts and the inability of technicians to reach work sites.

In his first public comments on the operation, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told his Cabinet Sunday that Israel could not allow its civilians to continue to be targeted by rockets from Gaza.

"This morning I can look every one of you in the eyes and say the government did everything before deciding to go ahead with the operation. This operation was unavoidable," he said.

Military intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin told the Cabinet Hamas was using mosques, public institutions and private houses as ammunition stores. His comments were relayed to the press by the Cabinet secretary, Oved Yehezkel.

Israel on Sunday approved the mobilization of thousands of reservists, in addition to tens of thousands called up on Saturday. Defense officials said the extra forces could enable a far broader ground offensive.

The troops could also be used in the event Palestinian militants in the West Bank or Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon decide to launch attacks, as Hezbollah did in 2006 when Israel was in the midst of a large operation in Gaza.

Israeli Tanks Ready To Enter Gaza

2009-01-04T08:18:00.000-08:00

Israeli troops and tanks crossed into the Gaza Strip under the cover of darkness Saturday, signaling the start of a bloody ground offensive that military leaders warned would not be short.

Hamas, which seized control of Gaza a year and a half ago and has been attacking Israel with rockets, responded with defiant threats.

"We will fight till our last breath. Your invasion of Gaza will not be a cakewalk. Gaza will be your cemetery," Hamas spokesman Ismail Radwan said.

Israeli officials called up tens of thousands of reservists and warned the incursion would not end quickly.

"It won't be easy and it won't be short," Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in a televised address. "We do not seek war, but we will not abandon our citizens to the ongoing Hamas attacks."

The escalation prompted Arab nations to ask the United Nations Security Council to call for an immediate ceasefire - echoing U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's demand for an end to the violence.

The invasion started a week after Israel began slamming Hamas targets with air strikes, aiming to end rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza.

A column of military vehicles backed by combat helicopters rolled into northern Gaza as forces marched across the border.

Gun battles could be heard, and the night sky was illuminated by heavy artillery gunfire that sent bright lights streaking over the densely packed neighborhoods.

It was unclear how deeply the forces planned to drive into the strip, but security officials said the objective was not to reoccupy Gaza but to seize areas Hamas was using to launch rockets into Israel.

"Residents of Gaza are not the target of the operation," the Israeli Defense Force said in a statement.

"Those who use civilians, the elderly, women and children as 'human shields' are responsible for any and all injury to the civilian population," the statement said.

More than 400 Palestinians have been killed in a week of air strikes by Israel.

Before Saturday's troop movements, Israeli artillery pounded 40 targets, including a mosque where at least 11 people, including some children, died.

Hamas launched six rockets into Israeli territory, striking a house and a bomb shelter in the southern city of Ashkelon. There were no injuries reported.

With some 10,000 troops massed on the border ready to charge forward, the army dropped leaflets in downtown Gaza City early Saturday, warning people to stay off the streets.

Many residents spent the day trying to stockpile food and water, but after eight days of fighting, supplies were scarce and bread lines stretched for blocks.

As the invasion began, most people heeded the warnings and the city appeared abandoned with families huddled in their homes around the radio.

The Israeli Army also jammed Al-Aqsa TV, which is run by Hamas, and a 15-minute address was broadcast every hour by an Israeli speaking in Arabic.

"Hamas has abandoned you. Do not let Hamas use your children as human shields," said the broadcast.

Holed up in her Gaza City apartment, high school student Nour Saroor, 17, listened for news with her family.

"We are going to die," she said. "They are going to kill us. I am afraid to die," she said.

There was widespread international concern at the sudden escalation of violence.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband repeated calls for an "immediate ceasefire" and said the situation caused "alarm and dismay."

The French Foreign Ministry said, "France condemns the Israeli ground offensive against Gaza as it condemns the continuation of rocket firing."

A White House spokesman said President Bush was briefed in the afternoon by officials who have been in contact with the Israelis.

Egypt Seen as Complicit in Gaza Assault

2009-01-04T08:03:00.000-08:00

"Israel would not have hit Gaza like this without a green light from Egypt," Hamdi Hassan, MP for the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest opposition movement, told IPS. "The Egyptian government allowed this assault on Gaza in hopes of finishing off Hamas."

On Saturday (Dec. 27), Israel began a series of devastating air strikes on targets throughout the Gaza Strip, controlled since the summer of last year by Palestinian resistance faction Hamas. According to Israeli officials, the campaign -- which has included hundreds of air strikes -- comes in retaliation for rockets fired by Palestinian resistance factions.

More than 200 Palestinians were reportedly killed on the first day of the operation, making it the single most lethal day for Palestinians in the history of the 60-year-old conflict. Four Israelis, meanwhile, have reportedly been killed by Palestinian rocket fire since the air campaign began.

In the meantime, Israel has continued to amass tanks along its border with the Gaza Strip amid predictions of an imminent ground assault.

"What's happening in Gaza represents an unprecedented crime against humanity," said Hassan. "Enormous military power -- featuring the latest U.S. weaponry -- is being brought to bear against a poverty-stricken and largely defenceless population."

Ever since Hamas wrested control of the strip from the U.S.-backed Palestinian Authority (PA) last year, Egypt -- like Israel -- has kept its border with the enclave tightly sealed. The border closures, in tandem with the neutralisation of the strip's airports and maritime ports by Israel, has effectively cut the territory off from the rest of the world, and brought it to the brink of humanitarian disaster.

"The international community has condoned the siege of Gaza and allowed the Palestinians to be punished for democratically electing Hamas," said Hassan, noting that the Islamist group swept the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections.

Egypt has said it cannot reopen the Rafah crossing, the sole transit point along Egypt's 14 km border with the Gaza Strip, in the absence of PA officials and EU observers, as stipulated in a 2005 U.S.-sponsored trilateral agreement between Israel, the PA and the EU.

Critics, however, reject this argument, and say there is no legal justification for keeping the border permanently closed to people and goods.

"Egypt isn't even a signatory to the agreement, which expired after one year and was never renewed," said Hassan. "Those cooperating with Israel are simply using this outdated agreement as an excuse to keep Rafah sealed."

Despite increasingly vocal demands -- by both street protestors and opposition MPs -- to open the border to aid convoys in the wake of the recent Israeli assaults, the Egyptian government has dragged its feet.

"For the first two days of the campaign, the authorities forbade all aid convoys from entering Gaza," Magdi Hussein, secretary-general of Egypt's Islamist-leaning Labour Party (officially frozen since 2000) told IPS. "On the third and fourth days, limited aid was allowed in -- but this was only due to mounting popular pressure."

In a televised address Dec. 30, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak defended Egypt's position by again referring to the 2005 border agreement. "Egypt doesn't want to sanctify the division (between the Hamas-run Gaza Strip and the PA-run West Bank) by opening the Rafah crossing in the absence of the PA and European observers," he said.

For the last five days, Egypt has witnessed thousands-strong demonstrations at university campuses, mosques and professional syndicates. Amid an increasingly tight security presence, protestors have called for the permanent reopening of the Rafah border crossing and the severing of Egypt's diplomatic relations with Israel.

"That protests are being staged all over Egypt -- and will persist as long as the aggression continues -- is an indication of the level of popular outrage," said Hassan. "If the government doesn't change its position and allow aid to flow freely into Gaza, the situation could become very dangerous."

Demonstrators in several Arab capitals have vented their rage outside Egyptian embassies. Protestors have reportedly attacked Egyptian consular offices in Sudan and Yemen.

"Demonstrations around Egyptian embassies abroad show that the Arab and Muslim people across the region recognise Egypt's complicity with Israel in keeping the border closed without legal justification," said Hassan.

Suspicions of Egyptian complicity with Israel against Hamas are not limited to the border issue. Many also suspect a degree of Egyptian-Israeli coordination in advance of the air campaign -- an impression reinforced by the fact that Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was in Cairo, where she met with Mubarak and Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul-Gheit, less than 48 hours before the assaults began.

At a joint press conference with Aboul-Gheit in Cairo Dec. 25, Livni vowed to retaliate against Palestinian rocket fire from the Gaza Strip. "This is something that has to be stopped," she said of the relatively ineffectual rocket salvoes. "And this is what we're going to do."

While Aboul-Gheit used the occasion to publicly urge restraint by both sides, many independent commentators believe that, while in Cairo, Livni received a tacit go-ahead from Egyptian officials for the campaign.

"It was at the Livni-Mubarak talks that Egypt gave Israel the green light to strike Gaza," said Hassan. Contentiously, he went on to point to statements by Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum that Hamas had received false assurances from Egypt, immediately following the Cairo talks, that an Israeli attack on the strip was not imminent.

On Sunday (Dec. 28), a presidential spokesman strongly denied Barhoum's claims. "No Egyptian official sent any assurances to Hamas in this regard," he was quoted as saying in the state press.

Misgivings about possible Egyptian connivance with Israel against Hamas have not been limited to opposition figures and political commentators. On the campaign's third day, thousands of demonstrators in Cairo chanted: "Oh, Mubarak, what do you say? Why was Livni here anyway?"

In a Battle for Legitimacy

2009-01-04T07:56:00.000-08:00

With this growth in confidence, the fog of war over the Israeli decision-making process leading into the latest phase of the operation is fast dissipating: following the Hamas decision not to renew the six-month ceasefire, as early as Christmas Eve -- three days before the launching of the air assault -- the full Israeli cabinet had given the war the green light including, in principle, a major ground incursion.

Then, last Thursday, after Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni's parrying trip to President Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris, the leadership triangle -- Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defence Minister Ehud Barak and Livni -- discussed developments from midnight into the early hours of Friday, then convened a secret security cabinet meeting at the defence headquarters compound in Tel Aviv.

The meeting lasted until well after the onset of the Jewish Sabbath. Religious ministers, though willing to transgress the Sabbath, were persuaded by the prime minister to depart at 4 pm "to avoid arousing suspicion that something is imminent." They left behind proxy votes, adding to the broad support for the ground operation. There were only two abstentions -- from ministers who wanted to include a 'third half' of the war, overthrow of the Hamas regime.

Not only does the war continue to enjoy widespread public support, but Israeli officials are basking in a perception that their operation enjoys a fair degree of legitimacy in the region, and around the world: officials point to Egypt's blaming of Hamas as "responsible" for the slide into hostilities, the failure of the Arab League to adopt a unified stand, the postponement of any UN Security Council resolution until at least midweek and the Czech declaration (as rotating president of the EU) acknowledging the "defensive" nature of the Israeli offensive. Above all, they stress the unflinching support of U.S. President George W. Bush, the silence of president-elect Barack Obama and the fact that no U.S. envoy has been dispatched to the area.

Overall, Israel may be upbeat, but Defence Minister Ehud Barak is at pains to stress that not all is rosy: "I don't want to delude anyone. The ground operation will be neither easy, nor simple," he warned at Sunday morning's cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. A prime target is control of the launching pads from which Hamas units have been rocketing towns and villages up to 40 km inside Israel. The declared objective is to change the rules on the ground so as to eradicate the Hamas will to continue firing, not necessarily its capability to do so.

Israeli officials believe also that the decision to launch the ground operation puts Israel well on the way to accomplishing its broader mission, the restoration of long-term deterrence. Danny Rotschild, a major general in the reserves, interviewed on Israel Radio, said, "Deterrence is composed of two facets -- not only a determination to act, but the willingness to take difficult decisions to act." This, added Rotschild, is now clear to all in the region -- Palestinians, Hizbullah, Syria and Iran.

Hamas may have its back to the wall but there is growing concern that the longer they manage to survive the Israeli assault -- from the air and on the ground -- and even to continue shooting into Israel, Hamas could gain in legitimacy. It already seems to be doing so. One Palestinian, interviewed on international television, said scornfully, "The Israelis say they are fighting Hamas and not the Palestinian people of Gaza. We all Hamas."

Israeli commentator Zvi Barel writes in the liberal daily Haaretz of the possibility that Hamas will still be in a position to call some shots. "When the war ends, Gaza will no longer be ruled by a 'terrorist organisation', but by a government with status which will set terms for any regional move Israel aspires to carry out. Hamas stands to gain through war what it has failed to achieve through its sweeping victory in the Palestinians election."

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is straddling a difficult line -- between the need in adversity for national unity under his rule, and the lingering hope nurtured by some Palestinians that, for all its bravado, Hamas will end up having its wings clipped.

Full-fledged diplomatic efforts for a new reality in the aftermath of the war have yet to begin in earnest, at a time when a series of transitions of power are taking place -- in the U.S., in Israel, and possibly within the Palestinian Authority where President Mahmoud Abbas may be forced to call new elections. At the peak of the fighting, one thing is already clear: The outcome of the war will also largely be about who on the Palestinian side will have their legitimacy enhanced or reduced once the guns fall silent -- Hamas or President Abbas.

Israel Looking to Silence Hamas Forever

2009-01-04T07:49:00.000-08:00

"Their shooting has no point and no logic. Nobody understands what are Hamas's goals," said Peres, speaking alongside Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who was briefing the President on the state of the war Tuesday evening.

"The Gaza offensive will not end until our goals are reached," said Olmert in response to reports that Israeli defence officials were considering a 48-hour truce in the devastating air attacks prior to possibly launching a major ground operation.

So, what are Israel's goals?

There seems to be national consensus -- at least among Israeli Jews -- on the two declared objectives of the military operation: long-term ceasefire, and deterrence -- that Hamas is compelled to hold its fire.

The Israeli consensus extends to another front -- there is already a 'ceasefire' with respect to the Feb. 10 Knesset (parliament) election. So much so, that the front-runner in the polls, right-wing Likud opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu, has been enlisted to front Israel's information campaign to the world.

Netanyahu, even within the guise of national advocate, is positing the war targets in much starker terms than the governing centre-left coalition. On Wednesday morning he stressed in an interview on Israel Radio that the choice lies with Hamas -- agree to a real ceasefire, or risk Israel following up its offensive and forcing regime change in Gaza. Otherwise, argued Netanyahu, Israel would have achieved nothing "since next time Hamas will be in a position to shell and rocket towns as far afield as Tel Aviv itself."

When former prime minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally withdrew all Israeli settlers and troops from Gaza three years ago, he was less focused on creating conditions favourable for a full-fledged peace process, and more on positioning Israel better to fight the Palestinians if that became necessary. Since then, and especially with the ensuing Hamas takeover of Gaza 18 months ago -- after Hamas won the election in Gaza in 2006 -- Israel's punishing military action now could never have been legitimate to the international community.

Despite the temptation to take the 'smash 'em to bits' option all the way and to oust Hamas from power "once and forever", that does not seem to be on the cards. There is simply no answer to the question of who would take charge of Gaza in place of Hamas: Israel is not interested in re-engaging Gaza and, in the present circumstances, it is unimaginable for the Palestinian Authority to be carried back to Gaza on the shoulders of the Israel military. Israel has been through that in 1982 in Lebanon after they routed the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and tried to install a friendly regime in Beirut.

A second option would be to go all the way with the Gaza disengagement policy -- leaving Israel no longer responsible for any developments in Gaza. That too, however, is unfeasible, at least in the short term, since it would mean permanent Hamas entrenchment in Gaza and allowing it to argue -- as Hezbollah did in Lebanon two years ago -- that it has beaten Israel in battle.

It would in effect transform the two-state solution into a three-state solution -- between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza separately, something that would change the agreed parameters of the whole peace process and thus condemn any negotiations on the future at least on east Jerusalem and the West Bank to definite failure; few in the international community, or in the Arab world, are keen on that.

Thus, the legitimacy of self-defence being so critical to Israel, whatever secret wishes they harbour, the government projects its war aims in not overly-ambitious terms: make conditions so painful for Hamas that it will have to subscribe to a long-standing ceasefire.

That said, Israeli leaders continue to retain an element of ambiguity about the purpose of the war. Sizeable ground forces have been massed around Gaza. But even within Israel, there is growing concern about whether the use of force might not be disproportionate.

Israeli Television Channel 2 reported an opinion poll conducted on Wednesday which shows 58 percent of the Israeli public opposed to a ceasefire, as against 42 percent who believe a ceasefire should come into force right away. Analysts noted that of the 42 percent in favour many are likely to be Arab Israelis who appear to be strongly critical of the war. Arabs comprise almost 20 percent of the Israeli population.

Against this potential escalation, prize-winning novelist David Grossman has called for a temporary pause in the fighting by Israel, in effect to test Hamas's intentions while implicitly testing this Israeli strategic ambiguity. In the liberal Tel Aviv daily Haaretz, Grossman suggested: "We will hold our fire unilaterally and completely for the next 48 hours. Even if you fire at Israel, we will not respond...Israel must constantly check to see when its force has crossed the line of legitimate and effective response and from what point it is once again trapped in the usual spiral of violence."

The coming 48 hours will be critical in testing an ever-relevant equation in Middle East stability -- will Israel accept the limits of its own power, and will the Palestinians -- in this instance Hamas -- abide by the limits of their own weakness? (END/2008)

Peace Process Blown to Bits

2009-01-04T07:46:00.000-08:00

"Even before Israel's latest bombardment of Gaza, the so-called peace process was dead," Magdi Hussein, secretary-general of Egypt's Islamist-leaning Labour Party (officially frozen since 2000), told IPS.

On Saturday (Dec. 27), Israel began a series of punishing air strikes throughout the Gaza Strip, which is controlled by Palestinian resistance faction Hamas. According to Israeli officials, the campaign comes in retaliation for rockets fired at Israel by Palestinian resistance factions.

On Monday (Dec. 29), Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Ahmed Qureia announced the suspension of negotiations with Israel.

"It's impossible to hold peace negotiations with Israel while its army is committing massacres against our people in the Gaza Strip," Qureia was quoted as saying. "U.S.-sponsored talks with Israel are now suspended due to the bloody scene that the Gaza Strip is witnessing."

The current round of negotiations began in November 2007 with a peace summit in Annapolis in Maryland (in the U.S.), where U.S. President George W. Bush voiced his hope that a just settlement of the conflict could be reached before the end of his final year in office. The Annapolis summit was followed by a series of negotiations between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The PA rules the West Bank.

Up until this point, however, Abbas's frequent talks with his Israeli counterpart have failed to bring any gains to the Palestinian side, with Israel continuing to reject key Palestinian demands. These demands -- encapsulated in the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative -- include an Israeli withdrawal to pre-1967 borders, the return of Palestinian refugees to what is now Israel, and the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Abbas's negotiations with Olmert have also failed to significantly reduce the number of Israeli military roadblocks riddling the Palestinian West Bank, or stop the continuous construction of Jewish-only "settlements" on occupied Arab land.

According to Hussein, the Annapolis summit and the ensuing round of negotiations -- like other past U.S.-backed peace initiatives -- was never meant to produce results.

"These intermittent 'peace' projects like Annapolis amount to little more than public relations exercises -- they have never achieved anything positive," he said. "They are ploys used to deceive the Arab governments and people. They are intended to fail."

Bush's call for a Palestinian state before the end of 2008, Hussein added, "was never even remotely credible."

Nevertheless, in mid-December, the 15-member United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution, backed by the U.S. and Russia, calling for "an intensification of diplomatic efforts" aimed at reaching a viable settlement. The resolution -- the council's first on the issue in almost five years -- urged both sides to "refrain from any steps that could undermine confidence or prejudice the outcome of negotiations."

"Since the resolution doesn't demand that either side make concessions, it's hard to see how it will change the status quo," Abdelaziz Shadi, political science professor and coordinator of Cairo University's Israel Studies Programme, told IPS.

"In any case," said Hussein, "the recent criminal assault on the Gaza Strip proves that Israel will never respect the terms of any UNSC decision."

The issue of holding talks with Israel, meanwhile, has split the Palestinian cause into two rival camps. While Abbas's U.S.-backed Fatah movement, which heads the PA, has maintained a strategy of negotiation with the self-proclaimed Jewish state, the Islamist resistance group Hamas -- which won Palestinian legislative elections in 2006 -- follows a strict policy of resistance against Israel.

Since Hamas wrested control of the Gaza Strip from the PA in a pre-emptive coup last year, the two factions have seen bitter rivalry, with intermittent fighting and mass arrests. Meanwhile, Israel and Egypt -- with the blessings of the PA -- have sealed their borders with the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, effectively isolating it from the rest of the world and bringing it to the brink of humanitarian disaster.

"There doesn't appear to be any hope for reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas," said Shadi. "While vainly negotiating with Israel, Abbas has refused to talk to Hamas, which he still resents for its seizure of Gaza last year."

To make matters worse, Dec. 19 saw the expiration of a fragile, six-month ceasefire agreement between Israel and resistance factions -- chief among them Hamas -- in the Gaza Strip.

Brokered by Egypt in mid-June, the truce called for the halt of Israeli military operations against targets in the Gaza Strip and the gradual reopening of Gaza's borders. In return, resistance factions in the Hamas-run enclave were to refrain from launching cross-border rocket attacks on Israel.

Even before its official expiration, the ceasefire had been subject to frequent violations. These included a number of deadly Israeli military operations in Gaza and retaliatory rocket fire -- which caused little or no damage -- by Palestinian resistance groups.

According to Egyptian commentators, Israel bears most of the blame for the collapse of the ceasefire, particularly in light of its refusal to open its borders with the Gaza Strip to food and medical supplies, desperately needed by the strip's roughly 1.5 million inhabitants.

"Along with staging numerous attacks in the Gaza Strip in violation of the ceasefire's terms, Israel has continued with minor exceptions to keep Gaza's borders tightly sealed," said Hussein. "The Israelis were the only real beneficiaries of the ceasefire, which served to halt rocket attacks from Gaza for the most part while allowing Israel to maintain its siege of the territory."

Making the future of the peace process even more tenuous is the fact that the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert led by the 'centrist' Kadima Party, may soon be replaced by one led by the extremist Likud Party. According to Israeli opinion polls, Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu -- known for his opposition to negotiations -- is tipped to win upcoming Israeli elections in February.

According to Shadi, though, whatever political party heads the next government in Israel -- be it Labour, Kadima or Likud -- the Palestinian peace track is sure to suffer. "No matter who wins elections in Israel, they can be counted on not to offer any concessions whatsoever to the Palestinians," he said.

Shadi went on to note that Israel's latest assaults on the Gaza Strip must be seen within the context of Israeli domestic electoral politics.

"The electoral period in Israel -- when candidates try to prove their military credentials -- is always an occasion for escalations against the Palestinians, not for taking moderate positions vis-à-vis the peace process," he said. "In the days and weeks ahead, Israel can be expected to take further military steps against the resistance." (END/2008)

Security Council Mildly Rebukes Israel’s Gaza Attacks

2009-01-04T07:44:00.000-08:00

The statement was predictable because the United States, a traditionally loyal Israeli ally, would never agree to anything smacking of a "censure" or "condemnation" of Israel -- even as the death toll rose to more than 300 Palestinians, mostly civilians. A single Israeli was killed during the three-day attacks.

Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, points out that the Security Council "reflected the strategic goals and alliances of the most powerful veto- wielding countries, particularly that of the United States."

"But other elected members of the Council, including sometimes principled non-aligned governments in South Africa, Indonesia, Libya and elsewhere, surrendered to U.S. pressure," Bennis told IPS.

Besides the five veto-wielding permanent members -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the U.S. -- the non-permanent members also include Belgium, Burkina Faso, Costa Rica, Croatia, Italy, Panama and Vietnam.

"Clearly the Security Council has abdicated its responsibility; its statement rejected any acknowledgement of Israeli violations of international law, let alone anything to hold Israel accountable for those violations," said Bennis, author of several publications, including ‘Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN.’

At the time of going to press, there were no further scheduled meetings of the Security Council even though Israel continued air strikes, with a possible ground attack in the works.

The President of the General Assembly Father Miguel d'Escoto, however, was consulting with member states over possible diplomatic action by the 192- member Assembly.

With the Security Council deadlocked, Bennis said the General Assembly, the most representative and most democratic organ of the United Nations, must now take the lead in responding to the latest crisis in Gaza.

She said the Assembly should meet in emergency session -- and should remain in session until a clear plan is devised and approved -- to determine how to implement the U.N.’s responsibility to protect occupied peoples facing military aggression and to hold the Occupying Power -- Israel -- accountable for its violations of international law.

"There are no vetoes in the General Assembly; U.S. diplomats maintain the power of economic, political and diplomatic threats and bribes, but they have no legal way to stop a determined majority from acting."

She also said that important U.N. officials -- including d'Escoto Brockmann and the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Territories Prof. Richard Falk -- have issued statements making clear both Israel’s violations and U.N. obligations to respond and to hold Israel accountable.

With the Security Council paralysed by U.S. veto threats and other Council members’ fear of the U.S., the General Assembly must assert its pre- eminence in the U.N. system, relying if necessary on the ‘Uniting for Peace’ precedent, to take real responsibility as required by the U.N. Charter, to stop the Israeli assault and protect the Palestinian people, Bennis added.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, trying to be even-handed in his statement, "condemned" the rocket attacks by the militant Palestinian group Hamas, which prompted the Israeli military onslaught, and called on both Israel and Hamas to "halt their acts of violence."

"A cease-fire must be declared immediately. They must also curb their inflammatory rhetoric," Ban told reporters Monday.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay not only condemned the rocket attacks by Hamas but also criticised "Israel’s disproportionate use of force."

Asked if the secretary-general should have made a stronger statement, Ambassador Riyad Mansour of the Palestine Observer Mission told reporters Monday: "We are satisfied with some of the language he used -- specifically when he referred to Israel complying with its obligations under international humanitarian law."

"Yes, if it is up to us, we would like to see the secretary-general use different language with regard to certain issues," he said. Nevertheless, "all in all, we believe that the position of the secretary-general is reflecting closer to the consensus [in the Security Council]".

D'Escoto, on the other hand, has been harshly critical of the actions of Israel.

The Israeli air strikes, he said, represent severe and massive violations of international humanitarian law as defined in the Geneva Conventions -- both in regard to the obligations of an Occupying Power and in the requirements of the laws of war.

Those violations include: collective punishment, targeting civilians, and disproportionate military response.

D'Escoto said that the 1.5 million people who live in the crowded Gaza Strip are being punished for the actions of a few militants.

He also pointed out that the air strikes have not only destroyed every police and security office of Gaza’s elected government, but also killed and injured hundreds of civilians. At least one strike reportedly hit groups of students attempting to find transportation home from the university.

"I remind all member states of the United Nations," D’Escoto said, "that the U.N. continues to be bound to an independent obligation to protect any civilian population facing massive violations of international humanitarian law regardless of what country may be responsible for those violations."

"I call on all Member States, as well as officials and every relevant organ of the U.N. system, to move expeditiously not only to condemn Israel’s serious violations, but to develop new approaches to providing real protection for the Palestinian people," he said in a statement released Sunday.

Asked if the situation would change when the new Barack Obama administration takes office January 22, Bennis said that Israeli military strategists clearly believed they were safer launching the Gaza assault while [U.S. President George W.] Bush, and not Obama, was in the White House.

‘It is unclear whether President Obama will have a different policy for the Palestinian-Israeli issue than his predecessor."

"What is clear is that if critics of Washington’s business-as-usual uncritical military, economic and political support for Israel remain silent, hoping for a serious change, there will be no change," she predicted.

Israeli Attack Seen as Complicating Obama’s Plans

2009-01-04T06:48:00.000-08:00

Indeed, if the current campaign goes on much longer and the Israelis launch a major ground invasion of Gaza as they now appear to be preparing to do, Obama could face a major international crisis -- comparable to Israel’s failed 2006 war against Lebanon’s Hezbollah -- just as he takes office in three weeks’ time.

"With this assault, the fallout has already started to spread considerably beyond the constituency of people who are Palestinians," noted Helena Cobban, a veteran Middle East analyst, who cited popular protests in Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere in the Arab world since the Israeli campaign began Saturday on her blog, justworldnews.org.

"It has already started, and we can confidently expect that the longer Israel’s assault is maintained, the higher the regional stakes will rise."

The Israeli attacks, which came a week after the expiration of an increasingly shaky six-month cease-fire, have so far reportedly killed more than 300 Palestinians, while two Israelis have died in rocket attacks launched from Gaza.

While Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak initially insisted that Israel’s war aims were designed to re-instate and strengthen the cease-fire, the former prime minister who hopes to reclaim that post as head of the Labour Party in Feb. 10 elections, appeared to broaden them in a speech to the parliament Monday in which he pledged "war to the bitter end" against Hamas -- the Islamist party that controls Gaza. Deputy Prime Minister Haim Ramon said Israel aimed to "topple Hamas."

As with the 2006 war, the administration of President George W. Bush has offered strong backing for the Israeli attack, demanding that Hamas stop firing rockets into Israel and agree to a "sustainable and durable ceasefire."

"The United States understands that Israel needs to take actions to defend itself," said White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe at Bush’s ranch in Texas, where the outgoing president is spending the Christmas holiday. Johndroe called the leadership of Hamas "nothing but thugs" during a briefing on Sunday.

Meanwhile, Obama, who is vacationing in Hawaii, has declined to comment on the violence and the threat of larger crisis. "The fact is that there is only one president at a time, and that president now is George Bush," Obama's top political adviser, David Axelrod, said on a nationally televised public-affairs programme Sunday.

Axelrod went on to quote Obama as defending Israel’s retaliation against Gaza-based militants who launched rockets into the southern Israeli town of Sderot when he visited there in July.

"If somebody was sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that… And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing," Obama had said at the time. In his speech to the Knesset Monday, Barak significantly repeated the quotation in defending Israel’s action.

During the presidential campaign, Obama repeatedly insisted that he -- in contrast to his predecessor -- would make Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations a top priority "from day one" in his administration. He re- iterated his intention explicitly when he introduced the senior members of his foreign-policy team in Chicago earlier this month.

A number of Obama’s informal advisers -- including former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski -- have publicly urged the president-elect to follow through on that commitment, arguing that nothing could do more to help Washington recover its badly damaged credibility in the Arab and Islamic worlds than to lead a major effort at achieving a two- state solution.

But such an effort is now seen as increasingly problematic, particularly if the Gaza conflict escalates further, according to most experts here.

"It clearly, clearly complicates any effort to engage in a vigorous diplomatic effort, because the Israeli operation in the Gaza Strip has necessarily weakened [Palestine Authority President] Mahmoud Abbas and his efforts to negotiate with the Israelis," said Steven Cook, a Middle East analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations, who also noted the conflict also created "an untenable situation for the Syrians to continue" their Turkish-mediated peace talks with Israel.

The violence "is going to make an already dramatically complicated situation worse," Aaron Miller, a former senior U.S. state department Middle East negotiator now at the Woodrow Wilson Centre for International Scholars, told the Wall Street Journal. "Obama’s going to inherit a crisis without the capacity to do much about it," he told Politico.com.

Not everyone is so pessimistic, however. Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator currently based at the New America Foundation and the Century Fund here, noted that the current crisis serves as a reminder that the Israeli- Palestinian conflict cannot be ignored.

"[These] events should be ‘Exhibit A’ in why the next U.S. government cannot leave the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to fester or try to ‘manage’ it -- as long as it remains unresolved, it has a nasty habit of forcing itself onto the agenda," he wrote in his blog, prospects for peace.com.

"The new administration needs to embark upon a course of forceful regional diplomacy that breaks fundamentally from past efforts," he added, noting that a consensus within the foreign policy establishment has emerged in favour of a more-assertive peace-making role, including setting forth the basic elements of final settlement, as laid out by Brzezinski and Scowcroft, among other major players.

Cook also agreed that Obama’s decisive electoral victory and his vision of more aggressive Middle Eastern diplomacy will give him more leverage over the Israelis who "aren’t looking for a fight with" with the new president.

Still, the ongoing violence makes it "hard to see any scenario which produces remotely positive results for anyone involved," according to Marc Lynch, a professor at George Washington University who specialises in Arab media and public opinion.

"A bloody retaliation against Israelis seems highly likely, and if Abbas is seen as supporting the Israeli offensive against his political rivals, then Hamas may well emerge from this even stronger within Palestinian politics," he wrote in his widely read abuaardvark.com blog. "The offensive is highly unlikely to get rid of Hamas, but it will likely leave an even more poisoned, polarised and toxic regional environment for a new President who had pledged to re- engage with the peace process."

Lynch and Cook, among others, also believe that the continued fighting in Gaza will re-open and widen the breach -- already made clear during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war between Arab regime allied to the U.S. and their own publics -- to the benefit of Iran and its regional allies, not to mention radical Sunni forces, including al Qaeda.

The fact that Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah called Monday for Arabs and Muslims to launch "uprisings" in support of Gaza "should be cause for concern," according to Cook, who noted that the catalyst for the 2006 war was an attack on an Israeli patrol designed to divert the Israelis from ongoing military operations in Gaza.

"Obama has scrupulously [and wisely] adhered to the ‘one President at a time’ formula in foreign policy up to this point," Lynch wrote, "but you have to wonder how long he can sit by and watch the prospects for meaningful change in the region battered while the administration sits by and cheers."

War In Palestine

2009-01-04T06:41:00.000-08:00

The strike, inspired by opposition Fatah party-affiliated union leaders, was predictably strongest in the West Bank where Fatah have their main base, but was also surprisingly solid in Hamas’ Gaza heartland. Approximately half of Palestinian state employees have walked out, with support being strongest amongst teachers, while many police have stayed on duty, purportedly to prevent clashes between Fatah and Hamas supporters. The government has declared the strike illegal and called for workers to return to work.

A union spokesman has played down the anti-government nature of the strike, styling it as lobbying, saying “our strike is not directed against the government but it is a message to the government that they must act to end the crisis of salaries.” Most schools in the West Bank are closed as the new term begins, and Fatah claims that 70% of Gaza schools are closed too. Hamas has deployed armed men at schools to try, unsuccessfully, to ‘persuade’ teachers to return to work, while in the West Bank Hamas supporters tried to smash open padlocked school gates while armed Fatah supporters stood outside others to “enforce” the strike.

While the strike is widely seen as a Fatah tactic to gain bargaining power in their attempts to form a ‘unity government’ with Hamas, a Hamas spokesman has said the strike is undermining 'national unity' and any such plans. The Fatah-affiliated union leader said the strike has “succeeded 95% so far”. One teacher opposed the strike as a party-political spat that was only harming ordinary people, "they're driving us crazy, both Fatah and Hamas. They haven't done anything to get the Palestinian people ahead." However in Gaza many teachers who do not support Fatah have nonetheless honoured the strike out of solidarity with their colleagues.

Meanwhile in Israel two Bedouin schools have been hit by strikes after government ministers ignored the findings of an inspection, which reported overcrowding and safety hazards. Also in the Israeli district of Talibeh, municipal workers including teaching assistants are striking over the 7-month non-payment of salaries, while school strikes are affecting 42 Israeli schools over the lack of defences against Qassam rocket fire.

Stop Smoking ! Can You ?

2008-12-06T06:08:00.000-08:00

Perhaps if you only had a cigarette once a month the side effects would be much less damaging to your health but the truth is smokers just have one cigarette a month? Most people that smoke, smoke at least every day and often numerous times in a day, some spend most of their waking hours with a cigarette in their mouth. It is not new news that smoking cause's cancer contributes to heart disease and affects the health of those that inhale second hand smoke. At the end of the day smoking is unhealthy and should be replaced with a healthy habit.

According to research published in The Lancet medical journal, 4.83 million people died from smoking worldwide in 2000 - 2.41 million in developing countries and 2.43 million in rich nations.

You know it's harmful, why do it?

People begin to smoke for various reasons:

* To relieve stress
* Peer pressure
* As a social thing
* To loose weight

Sings of a Smoking Addiction:

If you or a loved one is a smoker and wonder if you are addicted answer these questions:

* If you wanted to could you stop without emotional or physical discomfort?
* With the knowledge that smoking is dangerous, even deadly do you continue to do it?
* Do you have clear withdrawal symptoms?
* Does smoking consume your thoughts?
* Is smoking preventing you from being successful in life?

Alternative Therapies that can Help

There are several therapies that will offer assistance with this quest to regain your independence over the cigarette.

* Acupuncture utilizes the theory that the body is made up of meridians which allow energy to flow free throughout the body. Internal and external factors may cause blockages in these meridians and by stimulating specific acupuncture points the energy is re-activated. Acupuncture utilizes specific body and ear points to help smoker quit. It replaces the craving for cigarettes with healthy energies.
* Hypnotherapy. A hypnotherapist creates an environment where their patient can relax into a state where they are easily influenced by ideas. Several sessions of being exposed to gentle encouragements from the therapist will soon become the desires of the smoker who wants to quit. Hypnotherapy works on re-patterning bad habits with healthy habits.
* Massage therapy or Yoga might help in an indirect way by relieving stress. Often people smoke to relive stress, if this is the case then relive stress through a healthy habit.

Is the Anti-Aging Fight a Losing Battle?

2008-12-06T06:02:00.000-08:00

No one admits to wanting to grow old gracefully, and today, modern technology modern science have combined to make it easier not to. People are now using both synthetic and homeopathic alternatives, and are going to fancy salons or just fighting the fight on the home front with all the new products available. More and more people, men as well as women, have decided to try to delay the ravages of time.

Our bodies consist primarily of water, so replenishing the moisture in our bodies is one of the first steps in the anti-aging fight. Maintaining the level of liquids in the body helps to maintain overall health, and nothing is more youthful than a healthy look. Moisture in the body keeps your skin soft and supple. Dry skin is one of the most aging features we can have. Nutritionists recommend that, in order to keep our body amply moisturized, we should drink eight 8-oz glasses of water a day.
Moisturizing your face is a great idea, especially if you use a product that contains SPF 15 or higher. Make it a point to moisturize every morning in order to order to avoid dry, dull skin that's far more likely to start the wrinkling process before its time. This can - and should - be done by men and women alike. After all, aging knows no bias.

Many people do not realize how important exercise is in the anti-aging process. First of all, a fit body looks younger, and good circulation will improve skin tone and appearance. Additionally, when your health is good, you bolster your immune system, stabilize your blood sugar levels, and lower your cholesterol and blood pressure. All of these give a healthy, youthful appearance. Exercise also maintains good bone density, so that you will stand straight and tall. Nothing says "old" like stooping or having dowager's hump.

Another common sense weapon in the battle against aging is a good night's sleep. Lack of sleep causes aging because the body's cells are not regenerating as they should.If you don't get the right amount of rest each night, all of your body's systems will suffer and you will show your age earlier. We all know the symptoms of lack of sleep: bags under the eyes, memory loss, lethargy and depression. What could be more aging than those? And what difference does it make if you use all the fancy skin care products, if, because of lack of sleep, you look years older than you actually are.

Another negative aspect in the fight to appear younger is today's emphasis on having a thin body. Some weight will give your face a fuller appearance, and make it look like there is a reduction in the appearance of wrinkles. Thin faces show aging much more than fuller ones. In addition to wrinkles showing, your face will appear drawn and aged because of bone loss in the cheek and jaw. A thin facewil look much older than a full face. Don't overeat just to plump up your wrinkles, but ignore the the emphasis on being rail thin; this is not going to help for a younger look. Try a diet of healthy eating and exercise.

We will all grow old-what's the alternative? So the best attitude is to try to do it gracefully and embrace the changes your body is making. If you are fit and healthy, you will look the best for your own age, so taking care of yourself is the best approach. That, and having good genes.

Which virus will birds give us next?

2008-12-01T06:06:00.000-08:00

IT ISN'T just flu that we have birds to thank for over the millennia. It seems they also gave us one kind of common cold - and it made the jump relatively recently.

In 2001 Ron Fouchier and colleagues at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, discovered human metapneumovirus, one of many viruses that cause common colds. Although the resulting illness is usually mild, and most children have had it at least once by the age of 5, hMPV can cause lethal lung infections in small children.

By analysing similar viruses in birds, Fouchier's team has worked out that hMPV started as a bird virus and mutated to a form capable of infecting humans 200 years ago (Journal of General Virology, DOI: 10.1099/vir.0.2008/006957-0).

Because hMPV made the jump so recently, and is highly successful at infecting humans, Fouchier says it offers an opportunity to study how animal viruses adapt to people. His team is helping to build a catalogue of viruses in animals that often infect humans, with the aim of predicting which ones are most likely to become a danger to humans next.

Anti-fat pill could help keep the weight off

2008-11-29T07:55:00.000-08:00

A pill might replace that third helping of turkey at future Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. A newly-discovered chemical found naturally in our body blocks hunger and weight gain.

Mice and rats - and presumably humans - produce the chemical after eating a fatty meal. When researchers gave the rodents an extra dose, they ate less and shed weight, with no ill effects.

If similar tests in larger animals pan out, humans will be next, says Gerald Shulman, a molecular biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut whose team discovered this new role for the molecule, called N-acylphosphatidylethanolamine (NAPE).

"We have this epidemic of obesity and we have very few agents that are able to effectively treat obesity," he says. "We'd be quite interested in trying a clinical trial to see if giving this back would reduce food intake in humans."

Fatty foods, be they milkshake, French fry or Big Mac, have long confounded researchers seeking to explain how our body determines when it has had enough. Levels of fatty acids - the building blocks of junk foods - actually fall when people gorge on greasy foods, only to increase with hunger.

This peculiar behaviour prompted Shulman, Yale biologist Matthew Gillum and their colleagues to scour blood for compounds that shot up after a fatty meal.

NAPE fit the bill. Fatty acids in food get converted to NAPE in the gut before heading to the bloodstream. From there, the chemical races into the brain's appetite centre, in the hypothalamus, and shuts down neurons involved in signalling hunger, Shulman's team found.

World's forests face climate-change crisis

2008-11-29T07:28:00.000-08:00

The world's forests - and the billion people who depend on them - are facing devastation from climate change unless we "evolve" with the changing situation, according to a new report.

The Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) reviewed the scientific literature on the effects of climate change on forests and concluded that it will have a dramatic effect on forests, irrespective of the future rate of greenhouse-gas emissions.

Within the next 100 years, tropical regions are likely to heat up at a faster rate than the global average. Rainfall and summer monsoons will increase in some areas, while annual rainfall will decrease in others; tropical cyclones may become more severe, and droughts, floods and wildfires are likely to be more common, according to the report (pdf format).

Unless immediate adaptive action is taken, says lead author Bruno Locatelli of CIFOR, these changes will lead to a self-perpetuating cycle, where destruction of the forests leads to an increased amount of carbon in the atmosphere, which will in turn cause further climate change, and so on. The report identifies two categories of adaptation.

"The first is to buffer ecosystems against climate-related disturbances like improving fire management to reduce the risk of uncontrolled wildfires or the control of invasive species," he says. "In plantations, we can select species that are better suited to coping with the predicted changes in climate."

"The second would help forests to evolve towards new states better suited to the altered climate," Locatelli says. "In this way we evolve with the changing climate rather than resist it."

Efforts to deal with the problem tend to focus on reducing deforestation, but the report calls for more emphasis on urgent adaptation measures to help the forests and forest communities to cope with the inevitable changes. "In this way we evolve with the changing climate rather than resist it," he says.

Dave Reay, a climate-change researcher at the University of Edinburgh, UK, agrees with the recommendations, but points out that mitigation is still key.

"Much more important than climate-change impacts, in terms of the next few decades, is human activity," he says. "It's deforestation and degradation - that's what's going to destroy these huge carbon sinks before climate change has a chance to get at them."

Planned cluster bomb hunts targets down

2008-11-29T06:34:00.000-08:00

THE US air force is seeking to develop a cluster weapon that releases a swarm of bomblets that could each pursue and destroy targets many kilometres away, New Scientist has learned.

"This is a dangerous and very worrying development," says Noel Sharkey, a specialist in the ethics of autonomous systems at the University of Sheffield in the UK. Sharkey has argued that giving a robot the power to decide when and who to attack raises serious practical and ethical questions, and says the same would apply to the proposed weapon.

The US Department of Defense revealed its requirements for the weapon in an online research request. In it, the air force asked American aerospace firms to submit proposals by 24 September for a weapon that "engages multiple targets" using "guided smart submunitions". The request says the submunitions - the formal term for bomblets - should be equipped with sensors capable of locking on to targets up to 5 kilometres away, and should have enough onboard power to chase a moving target for up to 5 minutes.

"These new bomblets would effectively be miniaturised air-to-surface missiles," says Colin King, an analyst with Jane's, a defence publisher based in the UK.

The air force hopes the guided weapons will "increase accuracy and reduce collateral damage". That will depend on the reliability of the weapon's decision-making software and its sensors, although according to Sharkey there is no way these "smart" submunitions will be able to distinguish between combatants and civilians. "If a target moves into a highly populated area, I can't think of any sensors that could reliably discriminate between civilian and military vehicles," he says.

Existing "smart" cluster bombs scatter bomblets equipped with lasers and infrared sensors, which allows them to identify targets such as tanks and trucks. That's not necessarily enough to tell friend from foe, but at least their range is limited - to about 350 metres in the case of the US-made BLU-108. The proposal, however, calls for bomblets that lock back on to targets if they happen to lose track of them, meaning they might lock on to the wrong vehicle.

"The distinction between military and civilian targets cannot be made by electronics: it has to be a human decision," says Richard Moyes of Landmine Action in London. "Relying on computerised sensors to attack targets raises fundamental moral and legal questions."

It's not clear if such weapons would breach the Convention on Cluster Munitions due to be signed by 109 countries in Oslo in December. The CCM permits cluster weapons as long as they can reliably identify targets and deactivate or self-destruct if they miss. The US is not signing up, because it says it is building weapons intelligent enough to render themselves harmless if they stray off course (New Scientist, 7 June, p 25).

80 killed in Mumbai terror attack

2008-11-29T06:19:00.000-08:00

Mumbai: At least 80 people, including a foreign tourist and four top police officers, were killed and over 250 injured as terrorists struck in yet another series of planned and synchronised gunfire and bomb attacks in the heart of India's financial capital late on Wednesday, authorities said.

Terrorists were reported to be holding tourists and other guests hostage in two five-star hotels, the Taj Intercontinental and Trident (formerly Oberoi), facing the waterfront across the Arabian Sea close to the city's most important landmark, the Gateway of India.

Four top police officials, including Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) chief Hemant Karkare, were among the 10 policemen killed in the gunbattles with the terrorists, police confirmed.

Among terror targets was the city's busiest railway station, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST), formerly the Victoria Terminus that is a World Heritage site.

A nationwide alert was sounded and all airports in the country put on high-security surveillance following the attacks that came less than a month after over 50 people died in serial terror bombings in the northeastern state of Assam.

Army was called in to bring the situation under control and restore the sense of security in the city that was literally shaken the attacks, one of the worst in the country.

"This is a most audacious attack. It is a very serious situation and gun battles are still on in at least three places," said Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh.

Mumbai Police Commissioner Hasan Ghafoor said the attacks were suspected to be "coordinated terrorist acts", and added that automatic weapons like AK-47 and AK-56 and semi-automatic rifles as well as grenades were apparently used.

Did lack of comet impacts help life evolve?

2008-11-29T06:11:00.000-08:00

It seems we got off lightly in the cosmic lottery. Deadly comet impacts may be much rarer in our solar system than in others nearby.

We can't directly measure the rate of comet collisions in other solar systems but we can detect signs of the dust that such smashes kick up because the dust gets warmed by the star and so gives off infrared radiation. That radiation shows up as extra infrared in the spectrum of light coming from the star. Because such dust should dissipate quickly, it is thought to provide a good snapshot of the recent collision rate.

Jane Greaves of the University of St Andrews, UK, analysed observations by the Spitzer Space Telescope and found that the vast majority of sun-like stars near us have more dust than our solar system does and therefore have had more collisions in their vicinity. Our solar system may be one of the few that have been safe for life. Greaves presented her results at the Cosmic Cataclysms and Life symposium in Frascati, Italy, this month.

Humans may have prevented super ice age

2008-11-28T06:38:00.000-08:00

Our impact on Earth's climate might be even more profound than we realise. Before we started pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the planet was on the brink of entering a semi-permanent ice age, two researchers have proposed.

Had we not radically altered the atmosphere, say Thomas Crowley of the University of Edinburgh, UK, and William Hyde of the University of Toronto in Canada, the current cycle of ice ages and interglacials would have given way in the not-too-distant future to an ice age lasting millions of years.

"It's not proven but it's more than just an interesting idea," says Crowley.

For much of the 500 million years or so since complex life evolved, Earth's climate has been much hotter than it is now, with no ice at the poles. During the last of these "hothouse Earth" phases, from around 100 to 50 million years ago, the Antarctic was covered by lush forests and shallow seas submerged vast areas of America, Europe and Africa.

Supersonic water jets shoot from Saturn moon

2008-11-27T06:23:00.000-08:00

Supersonic jets of water vapour are blasting from Saturn's moon Enceladus, reveal observations from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Some say the newly discovered features bolster the case for a reservoir of liquid water - which could potentially host life - just beneath the moon's surface.

The high-powered jets lie within wider plumes of water vapour and ice, found in 2005, which extend hundreds of kilometres from the moon's south pole.

The supersonic jets were detected during a flyby on 24 October 2007, when the probe's Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) observed a star as it passed behind the plumes. By measuring how much starlight was absorbed during the passage, scientists discerned four distinct jets in the plume.

The jets were still tightly focused at an altitude of 15 km above the surface, suggesting they were moving faster than 2100 km per hour. Such high speeds imply that the jets are fed by pressurised water vapour that shoots through narrow openings - which act like rocket nozzles - in the moon's icy surface.

The simplest way to generate such pressures is by evaporating a reservoir of liquid water that lies close to the moon's surface, says lead author and UVIS team member Candice Hansen of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The heat needed to evaporate the water might be generated in part by Saturn's gravity, which squeezes and stretches the moon.

But some researchers say the plumes might originate from subsurface ice instead. In one scenario, the strains from Saturn's tugs could cause a shell of ice to grind and vaporise, particularly if the shell lay over a 'lubricating' ocean of liquid water buried relatively deep below the surface.

Electric production car just keeps on going

2008-11-26T07:27:00.000-08:00

Electric vehicles are all the rage, but few have pushed the design envelope as far as the Aptera Typ-1, which hits the streets of California in December. Aptera Motors claims that its vehicle can travel up to 190 kilometres on a single charge, aided by roof-mounted solar cells. The vehicle, which is officially classified as a motorbike, will sell for $27,000.

A petrol/electric hybrid version with a longer range is due to be launched in 2009 for $30,000.

Cellphone clusters give traffic jams away

2008-11-26T06:14:00.001-08:00

Should you get off the motorway now, or carry on and hope the traffic clears? Your cellphone could soon have the answer.

Researchers at Nokia and the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a system that collects GPS data from mobile phones in moving vehicles and uses it to create traffic maps. The maps are available on the internet or sent to your cellphone to provide local traffic analysis.

Alex Bayen at UC Berkeley says that if enough people download the free software (from http://traffic.berkeley.edu), the system should help relieve congestion, even on small intercity roads. And in case you're worried that the neighbours will now be able to follow your every move, he says that the system anonymises GPS data so that it will be impossible to track individual cars.