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Friday, January 20, 2012

Arctic Ribbon Seal Found in Seattle

A Seattle resident recently got a big surprise when she discovered a strange-looking furry visitor on her property.
"She woke up and it was lying on her dock, hanging out and sleeping -- just chilling," said Matthew Cleland, district supervisor in western Washington for the USDA's Wildlife Services, and the recipient of a photo of the bizarre intruder.
"I thought, 'That's an interesting-looking creature,'" Cleland told OurAmazingPlanet. "I had no idea what it was."
A quick glance through a book in his office soon revealed it was a ribbon seal, an Arctic species that spends most of its life at sea, swimming the frigid waters off Alaska and Russia.
Somehow, the seal turned up on the woman's property, about a mile from the mouth of the Duwamish River, a highly industrialized waterway that cuts through southern Seattle. In 2001, the EPA declared the last 5.5 miles (9 kilometers) of the river a Superfund site -- an area contaminated with hazardous substances in need of cleanup.
The sighting was "pretty exciting," said Arctic seal researcher Peter Boveng, leader of the National Marine Mammal Laboratory's Polar Ecosystems Program. "It's really unusual."

Ribbon seals, named for the unmistakable stark white markings that ring their necks, flippers and hindquarters, typically shun dry land.
Boveng said the animals spend only a few months per year on sea ice, to molt and give birth, and have almost never been seen so far south. "So it's a surprise, but knowing the species, it's not a complete surprise to me," he said. "They're good travelers."
The ribbon seal, which Boveng identified as an adult male, "looked to be in really good shape," he said. "We don't have any way to rule out other possibilities, but I'd say it's almost certain that it swam there."
Satellite tracking studies have revealed that ribbon seals do sometimes make it as far as the north Pacific Ocean, south of the Aleutian islands, but much about the species remains mysterious. Because they spend so much of their lives in the open water, it's a challenge to track them.
"Unfortunately we don't know a lot about their numbers," Boveng said. "There's never been a reliable survey."
A conservation groups has made efforts to list ribbon seals as an endangered species because of concerns about disappearing sea ice in the Arctic. So far the federal government has declined to do so, but is continuing to review the case for listing.
The Seattle ribbon seal appears to be only the second on record to make it so far south.
In 1962, a ribbon seal showed up on a beach near Morro Bay, Calif., a town about 200 miles (320 kilometers) north of Los Angeles. According to contemporary reports, the seal was in good shape, but totally bald except for hair on the head, neck and flippers. It died a month later at the local aquarium.
The Seattle ribbon seal's story is unknown, but one could be forgiven for thinking it a harbinger of things to come. This week, cold winds from Alaska helped create a record winter storm in Seattle, slamming the metro area with 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 centimeters) of snow.
The ribbon seal hasn't been seen again since it was first spotted last week.
"It stirred up a lot of interest," Cleland said. "There are a lot of people out here looking for it



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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/20/ribbon-seal-on-dock-near-seattle_n_1219535.html

Monday, January 16, 2012

Russian space craft crash

MOSCOW — A Russian space probe designed to boost the nation’s pride on a bold mission to a moon of Mars has come down in flames, showering fragments into the south Pacific west of Chile’s coast, officials said.
Pieces from the Phobos-Ground, which had become stuck in Earth’s orbit, landed in water Sunday 1,250 kilometers (775 miles) west of Wellington Island in Chile’s south, the Russian military Air and Space Defense Forces said in a statement carried by the country’s news agencies.



The military space tracking facilities were monitoring the probe’s crash, its spokesman Col. Alexei Zolotukhin said. Zolotukhin said the deserted ocean area is where Russia guides its discarded space cargo ships serving the International Space Station.
RIA Novosti news agency, however, cited Russian ballistic experts who said the fragments fell over a broader patch of Earth’s surface, spreading from the Atlantic and including the territory of Brazil. It said the midpoint of the crash zone was located in the Brazilian state of Goias.
The $170 million craft was one of the heaviest and most toxic pieces of space junk ever to crash to Earth, but space officials and experts said the risks posed by its crash were minimal because the toxic rocket fuel on board and most of the craft’s structure would burn up in the atmosphere high above the ground anyway.
The Phobos-Ground was designed to travel to one of Mars’ twin moons, Phobos, land on it, collect soil samples and fly them back to Earth in 2014 in one of the most daunting interplanetary missions ever. It got stranded in Earth’s orbit after its Nov. 9 launch, and efforts by Russian and European Space Agency experts to bring it back to life failed.
Prof. Heiner Klinkrad, Head of The European Space Agency’s Space Debris Office that was monitoring the probe’s descent, said the craft didn’t pose any significant risks.
“This one is way, way down in the ranking,” he said in a telephone interview from his office in Berlin, adding that booster rockets contain more solid segments that may survive fiery re-entries.
Thousands of pieces of derelict space vehicles orbit Earth, occasionally posing danger to astronauts and satellites in orbit, but as far as is known, no one has ever been hurt by falling space debris.
Russia’s space agency Roscosmos predicted that only between 20 and 30 fragments of the Phobos probe with a total weight of up to 200 kilograms (440 pounds) would survive the re-entry and plummet to Earth.
Klinkrad agreed with that assessment, adding that about 100 metric tons of space junk fall on Earth every year. “This is 200 kilograms out of these 100 tons,” he said.
The Phobos-Ground weighed 13.5 metric tons (14.9 tons), and that included a load of 11 metric tons (12 tons) of highly toxic rocket fuel intended for the long journey to the Martian moon of Phobos and left unused as the probe got stranded in orbit around Earth.
Roscosmos said that all of the fuel will burn up on re-entry, a forecast Klinkrad said was supported by calculations done by NASA and the ESA. He said the craft’s tanks are made of aluminum alloy that has a very low melting temperature, and they will burst at an altitude of more than 100 kilometers (60 miles).

Iranian nuclear scientist killed

On the morning of 11 January Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the deputy head of Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, was in his car on his way to work when he was blown up by a magnetic bomb attached to his car door. He was 32 and married with a young son. He wasn't armed, or anywhere near a battlefield.
Since 2010, three other Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in similar circumstances, including Darioush Rezaeinejad, a 35-year-old electronics expert shot dead outside his daughter's nursery in Tehran last July. But instead of outrage or condemnation, we have been treated to expressions of undisguised glee.
"On occasion, scientists working on the nuclear programme in Iran turn up dead," bragged the Republican nomination candidate Rick Santorum in October. "I think that's a wonderful thing, candidly." On the day of Roshan's death, Israel's military spokesman, Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai, announced on Facebook: "I don't know who settled the score with the Iranian scientist, but I certainly am not shedding a tear" – a sentiment echoed by the historian Michael Burleigh in the Daily Telegraph: "I shall not shed any tears whenever one of these scientists encounters the unforgiving men on motorbikes."
These "men on motorbikes" have been described as "assassins". But assassination is just a more polite word for murder. Indeed, our politicians and their securocrats cloak the premeditated, lawless killing of scientists in Tehran, of civilians in Waziristan, of politicians in Gaza, in an array of euphemisms: not just assassinations but terminations, targeted killings, drone strikes.
Their purpose is to inure us to such state-sponsored violence against foreigners. In his acclaimed book On Killing, the retired US army officer Dave Grossman examines mechanisms that enable us not just to ignore but even cheer such killings: cultural distance ("such as racial and ethnic differences that permit the killer to dehumanise the victim"); moral distance ("the kind of intense belief in moral superiority"); and mechanical distance ("the sterile, Nintendo-game unreality of killing through a TV screen, a thermal sight, a sniper sight or some other kind of mechanical buffer that permits the killer to deny the humanity of his victim").
Thus western liberals who fall over one another to condemn the death penalty for murderers – who have, incidentally, had the benefit of lawyers, trials and appeals – as state-sponsored murder fall quiet as their states kill, with impunity, nuclear scientists, terror suspects and alleged militants in faraway lands. Yet a "targeted killing", human-rights lawyer and anti-drone activist Clive Stafford Smith tells me, "is just the death penalty without due process".
Cognitive dissonance abounds. To torture a terror suspect, for example, is always morally wrong; to kill him, video game style, with a missile fired from a remote-controlled drone, is morally justified. Crippled by fear and insecurity, we have sleepwalked into a situation where governments have arrogated to themselves the right to murder their enemies abroad.
Nor are we only talking about foreigners here. Take Anwar al-Awlaki, an Islamist preacher, al-Qaida supporter – and US citizen. On 30 September 2011, a CIA drone killed Awlaki and another US citizen, Samir Khan. Two weeks later, another CIA-led drone attack killed Awlaki's 21-year-old son, Abdul-Rahman. Neither father nor son were ever indicted, let alone tried or convicted, for committing a crime. Both US citizens were assassinated by the US government in violation of the Fifth Amendment ("No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law").
An investigation by Reuters last October noted how, under the Obama administration, US citizens accused of involvement in terrorism can now be "placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions … There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel … Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate."
Should "secret panels" and "kill lists" be tolerated in a liberal democracy, governed by the rule of law? Did the founders of the United States intend for its president to be judge, jury and executioner? Whatever happened to checks and balances? Or due process?
Imagine the response of our politicians and pundits to a campaign of assassinations against western scientists conducted by, say, Iran or North Korea. When it comes to state-sponsored killings, the double standard is brazen. "Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them," George Orwell observed, "and there is almost no kind of outrage … which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side".
But how many more of our values will we shred in the name of security? Once we have allowed our governments to order the killing of fellow citizens, fellow human beings, in secret, without oversight or accountability, what other powers will we dare deny them?
This isn't complicated; there are no shades of grey here. Do we disapprove of car bombings and drive-by shootings, or not? Do we consistently condemn state-sponsored, extrajudicial killings as acts of pure terror, no matter where in the world, or on whose orders, they occur? Or do we shrug our shoulders, turn a blind eye and continue our descent into lawless barbarism?


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/16/iran-scientists-state-sponsored-murder?newsfeed=true

Zombie Bees in North America

      
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Researchers have found a type of parasite that turns bees into zombies, causing them to exhibit strange behavior before dying.
The discovery was made by accident, after San Francisco State University professor of biology John Hafernik collected some bees he found outside his office so that he could feed them to a praying mantis he had collected on a recent field trip.
“Being an absent-minded professor, I left them in a vial on my desk and forgot about them. Then the next time I looked at the vial, there were all these fly pupae surrounding the bees," he told AFP.
Parasite burrows out of bee
After zombification, the bee dies and
its murderous parasite burrows free
The parasites were identified as Apocephalus borealis, a phorid fly native to North America, and they attack bees by injecting eggs into their abdomens. Once hatched, the parasites kill the bees within a couple of weeks and emerge from the body when they have finished feeding – but it’s the behavior they induce in bees that scientists have found fascinating.
Infected bees exhibit jerky limb movement and general weakness, then leave the hive and congregate around bright lights – behavior more akin to moths. The scientists are trying to determine whether the bees leave the hive of their own accord, or are forced out by healthy members of the swarm.
"When we observed the bees for some time – the ones that were alive - we found that they walked around in circles, often with no sense of direction," said Andrew Core, a graduate student in Hafernik's lab. "They kept stretching [their legs] out and then falling over. It really painted a picture of something like a zombie."
The zombie problem looks to be severe, with infected bees found in 77 per cent of the samples collected in the San Francisco Bay Area. The team suggests this might be one cause of the collapse in bee populations seen in the last five years. Mobile phones have been fingered as one culprit, but scientists are coming to the conclusion that more than one factor must be involved. ®


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/05/scientists_parasite_zombie_bees/

Drugs Being Tested on Children in India











 BHOPAL: Indian activists have reacted in anger after 12 doctors were fined just 5,000 rupees ($94) each for conducting secret drug trials on children and patients with learning disabilities.
The Madhya Pradesh state government said the tests had not been cleared by health authorities, and it added that the doctors refused to disclose further details citing patient confidentiality laws.
Anand Rai, a doctor who acted as a whistle-blower over the case, told AFP on Tuesday he was angered and frustrated that the scale of the punishment would not deter future illegal trials.
“The Madhya Pradesh government has now slapped a nominal 5,000-rupee penalty on the 12 government doctors who were involved in the bizarre case,” he said. “The penalty was for their failure to inform about the trials.”
“All drug trials were performed on patients who had gone to these government hospitals for routine treatment. It’s a criminal offence to put them under drug trials without their consent.”

Ajay Singh, the leader of opposition in the Madhya Pradesh assembly, described the fine as “ridiculous”.
The doctors, two of whom denied any wrong-doing to AFP, are alleged to have been paid by companies to conduct trials in the central city of Indore on drugs to treat sexual dysfunction and other problems.


http://tribune.com.pk/story/315943/anger-over-secret-drug-trials-on-indian-children/

Nodding Disease runs rampant in Uganda

Uganda: Pader Runs Out of Drugs for Controlling Nodding

Jacky Adure17 January 2012
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Pader — Parents in Pader District have to dig deeper into their pockets to get medicine for controlling nodding disease among their children.

The district two weeks ago ran out of epilepsy drugs (Phenobarbitoin and Carbamaxpine) which are used to control the nodding disease. The areas where the disease is most severe are Atanga, Lapul, Angagura, Awere and Puranga sub-counties.



Ms Ventorino Aol of Lacekocot, whose two grandchildren are battling the disease, had to seek medication at Gulu Hospital, about 45 kilometers away. Transport from Pader to Gulu is about Shs15,000. The district has been largely dependant on the Transcultural Psychosocial Organisation, an NGO, that has been providing treatment for managing the disease since its outbreak three years ago.

In Angagura Health Centre III, medical workers say they are stuck with over 200 children who were receiving treatment from the centre but now have nothing to control the ailment, whose cause and mode of spread is still unknown.



Dr Jacinto Amandua, commissioner for clinical services, asked the health workers to be patient as the Ministry of Health sends more drugs. He, however, cautioned that the drugs be administered to those with severe signs to avoid disastrous side-effects.

Dr Amandua said although the disease is overwhelming Kitgum and Pader districts, the ministry with its partners are working closely to ensure that all efforts are directed at its control as they await the results of sample tests from Atlanta, USA.

The District Health Officer, Ms Janet Oola, however, said following the drug shortage, the district procured more drugs a few days ago. "When we ran short of drugs, we ordered for an emergency supply from the National Medical Stores," she said. However, when Daily Monitor visited some of the health facilities last week, they had not yet received the medicine.

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The district chairman, Mr Alfred Akena, in an interview with Daily Monitor on Sunday, said they are overwhelmed by the disease because parents can no longer concentrate on income generating activities as they have to attend to their sick children. "We have fears that the coming months would not be good for the people because almost every family here is affected by the disease," Mr Akena said.

Mr Akena said the district has raised about Shs3b to support families that have been affected by the disease. Nodding disease is a fatal, mentally and physically disabling disease that stunts the growth of its victims. Bouts of nodding and seizure usually begin when food is served.

http://allafrica.com/stories/201201170100.html

Sunday, January 15, 2012

LETS PUT A STOP TO IT

Stop the Internet Blacklist Legislation

The Internet Blacklist Legislation - known as PROTECT IP Act in the Senate and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House - is a threatening sequel to last year's COICA Internet censorship bill. Like its predecessor, this legislation invites Internet security risks, threatens online speech, and hampers Internet innovation. Urge your members of Congress to reject this Internet blacklist campaign in both its forms!

Big media and its allies in Congress are billing the Internet Blacklist Legislation as a new way to prevent online infringement. But innovation and free speech advocates know that this initiative is nothing more than a dangerous wish list that will compromise Internet security while doing little or nothing to encourage creative expression.

As drafted, the legislation would grant the government and private parties unprecedented power to interfere with the Internet's domain name system (DNS). The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to redirect or dump users' attempts to reach certain websites' URLs. In response, third parties will woo average users to alternative servers that offer access to the entire Internet (not just the newly censored U.S. version), which will create new computer security vulnerabilities as the reliability and universality of the DNS evaporates.

It gets worse: Under SOPA's provisions, service providers (including hosting services) would be under new pressure to monitor and police their users’ activities. While PROTECT-IP targeted sites “dedicated to infringing activities,” SOPA targets websites that simply don’t do enough to track and police infringement (and it is not at all clear what would be enough). And it creates new powers to shut down folks who provide tools to help users get access to the Internet the rest of the world sees (not just the “U.S. authorized version”).

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has placed a hold on the Senate version of the bill, taking a principled stand against a very dangerous bill. But every Senator and Representative should be opposing the PROTECT IP Act and SOPA. Contact your members of Congress today to speak out!

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