Scientists eye unusual swarm of Yellowstone quakes

By MEAD GRUVER, Associated Press Writer

CHEYENNE, Wyo. – Yellowstone National Park was jostled by a host of small earthquakes for a third straight day Monday, and scientists watched closely to see whether the more than 250 tremors were a sign of something bigger to come. Swarms of small earthquakes happen frequently in Yellowstone, but it's very unusual for so many earthquakes to happen over several days, said Robert Smith, a professor of geophysics at the University of Utah.

"They're certainly not normal," Smith said. "We haven't had earthquakes in this energy or extent in many years."

Smith directs the Yellowstone Seismic Network, which operates seismic stations around the park. He said the quakes have ranged in strength from barely detectable to one of magnitude 3.8 that happened Saturday. A magnitude 4 quake is capable of producing moderate damage.

"This is an active volcanic and tectonic area, and these are the kinds of things we have to pay attention to," Smith said. "We might be seeing something precursory.

"Could it develop into a bigger fault or something related to hydrothermal activity? We don't know. That's what we're there to do, to monitor it for public safety."

The strongest of dozens of tremors Monday was a magnitude 3.3 quake shortly after noon. All the quakes were centered beneath the northwest end of Yellowstone Lake.

A park ranger based at the north end of the lake reported feeling nine quakes over a 24-hour period over the weekend, according to park spokeswoman Stacy Vallie. No damage was reported.

"There doesn't seem to be anything to be alarmed about," Vallie said.

Smith said it's difficult to say what might be causing the tremors. He pointed out that Yellowstone is the caldera of a volcano that last erupted 70,000 years ago.

He said Yellowstone remains very geologically active — and its famous geysers and hot springs are a reminder that a pool of magma still exists five to 10 miles underground.

"That's just the surface manifestation of the enormous amount of heat that's being released through the system," he said.

Yellowstone has had significant earthquakes as well as minor ones in recent decades. In 1959, a magnitude 7.5 quake near Hebgen Lake just west of the park triggered a landslide that killed 28 people.

MP3 player saves skiers lost on Alps

From Telegraph.co.uk

The 22-year-old men, one a skier and the other a snowboarder, were suffering from mild hypothermia as they endured overnight temperatures as low as minus 15 degrees Celsius.

Both had set off from the resort of Savognin, in south east Switzerland, on Friday, but could not find their way back.

They were able to alert the authorities using a mobile phone, but it when it ran out of battery power all they had left was an MP3 player, which the snowboarder had been using to listen to music.

Airborne rescuers were eventually able to reach the pair high on a wooded slope after being guided by the light of the digital music player.

Gery Baumann, spokesman for mountain rescue service Rega, said: "The two winter sports enthusiasts were found by the crew of the Rega helicopter shortly after midnight – thanks to the faint light of their MP3 player.

"Apart from mild hypothermia, they were safe and well."

The rescued pair, who have not been named, were both French.

Scientists discover new forest with undiscovered species on Google Earth

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent


The pygmy chameleon: Conservationists have found a host of new species after discovering uncharted new territory on the internet map Google Earth.
The pygmy chameleon Photo: Julian Bayliss/RBG Kew
Driving up to Mount Mabu in the distance: Scientists discover new forest on Google Earth
Mount Mabu itself is under threat as Mozambique's economy grows and people use the wood for fuel Photo: Julian Bayliss/RBG Kew

The mountainous area of northern Mozambique in southern Africa had been overlooked by science due to inhospitable terrain and decades of civil war in the country.

However, while scrolling around on Google Earth, an internet map that allows the viewer to look at satellite images of anywhere on the globe, scientists discovered an unexpected patch of green.

A British-led expedition was sent to see what was on the ground and found 7,000 hectares of forest, rich in biodiversity, known as Mount Mabu.

In just three weeks, scientists led by a team from the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew found hundreds of different plant species, birds, butterflies, monkeys and a new species of giant snake.

The samples which the team took are now back in Britain for analysis.

So far three new butterflies and one new species of snake have been discovered but it is believed there are at least two more new species of plants and perhaps more new insects to discover.

Julian Bayliss, a scientist for Kew based in the region, discovered Mount Mabu while searching on Google Earth for a possible conservation project. He was looking at areas of land 5,400ft (1,600m) above sea level where more rainfall means there is likely to be forest.

To his surprise he found the patches of green that denote wooded areas, in places that had not previously been explored. After taking a closer look on more detailed satellite maps, he went to have a look.

An expedition was organised for this autumn with 28 scientists from the UK, Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania and Switzerland. The group was able to stay at an abandoned tea estate but had to hack through difficult terrain and use 70 porters in order to carry out their investigations.

Within weeks they had discovered three new species of Lepidoptera butterfly and a new member of the Gaboon viper family of snakes that can kill a human in a single bite. There were also blue duiker antelope, samango monkeys, elephant shrews, almost 200 different types of butterflies and thousands of tropical plants.

Jonathan Timberlake, expedition leader, said digital imagery has helped scientists to discover more about the world. He believes there may be other small pockets of biodiversity around the world that are yet to be discovered that could be stumbled upon by searching on Google Earth, especially in areas like Mozambique or Papua New Guinea which have not been fully explored yet.

Mr Timberlake said discovering new species is not only important to science but helps to highlight conservation efforts in parts of the world threatened by logging and development.

Mount Mabu itself is under threat as Mozambique's economy grows and people use the wood for fuel or clear the land to grow crops.

"We cannot say we have discovered all the biodiversity areas in the world, there are still ones to discover and it helps to find new species to make people realise what is out there," he said.

Where'd the bailout money go? Shhhh, it's a secret

By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – It's something any bank would demand to know before handing out a loan: Where's the money going? But after receiving billions in aid from U.S. taxpayers, the nation's largest banks say they can't track exactly how they're spending the money or they simply refuse to discuss it.

"We've lent some of it. We've not lent some of it. We've not given any accounting of, 'Here's how we're doing it,'" said Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in emergency bailout money. "We have not disclosed that to the public. We're declining to."

The Associated Press contacted 21 banks that received at least $1 billion in government money and asked four questions: How much has been spent? What was it spent on? How much is being held in savings, and what's the plan for the rest?

None of the banks provided specific answers.

"We're not providing dollar-in, dollar-out tracking," said Barry Koling, a spokesman for Atlanta, Ga.-based SunTrust Banks Inc., which got $3.5 billion in taxpayer dollars.

Some banks said they simply didn't know where the money was going.

"We manage our capital in its aggregate," said Regions Financial Corp. spokesman Tim Deighton, who said the Birmingham, Ala.-based company is not tracking how it is spending the $3.5 billion it received as part of the financial bailout.

The answers highlight the secrecy surrounding the Troubled Assets Relief Program, which earmarked $700 billion — about the size of the Netherlands' economy — to help rescue the financial industry. The Treasury Department has been using the money to buy stock in U.S. banks, hoping that the sudden inflow of cash will get banks to start lending money.

There has been no accounting of how banks spend that money. Lawmakers summoned bank executives to Capitol Hill last month and implored them to lend the money — not to hoard it or spend it on corporate bonuses, junkets or to buy other banks. But there is no process in place to make sure that's happening and there are no consequences for banks who don't comply.

"It is entirely appropriate for the American people to know how their taxpayer dollars are being spent in private industry," said Elizabeth Warren, the top congressional watchdog overseeing the financial bailout.

But, at least for now, there's no way for taxpayers to find that out.

Pressured by the Bush administration to approve the money quickly, Congress attached nearly no strings on the $700 billion bailout in October. And the Treasury Department, which doles out the money, never asked banks how it would be spent.

"Those are legitimate questions that should have been asked on Day One," said Rep. Scott Garrett, R-N.J., a House Financial Services Committee member who opposed the bailout as it was rushed through Congress. "Where is the money going to go to? How is it going to be spent? When are we going to get a record on it?"

Nearly every bank AP questioned — including Citibank and Bank of America, two of the largest recipients of bailout money — responded with generic public relations statements explaining that the money was being used to strengthen balance sheets and continue making loans to ease the credit crisis.

A few banks described company-specific programs, such as JPMorgan Chase's plan to lend $5 billion to nonprofit and health care companies next year. Richard Becker, senior vice president of Wisconsin-based Marshall & Ilsley Corp., said the $1.75 billion in bailout money allowed the bank to temporarily stop foreclosing on homes.

But no bank provided even the most basic accounting for the federal money.

"We're choosing not to disclose that," said Kevin Heine, spokesman for Bank of New York Mellon, which received about $3 billion.

Others said the money couldn't be tracked. Bob Denham, a spokesman for North Carolina-based BB&T Corp., said the bailout money "doesn't have its own bucket." But he said taxpayer money wasn't used in the bank's recent purchase of a Florida insurance company. Asked how he could be sure, since the money wasn't being tracked, Denham said the bank would have made that deal regardless.

Others, such as Morgan Stanley spokeswoman Carissa Ramirez, offered to discuss the matter with reporters on condition of anonymity. When AP refused, Ramirez sent an e-mail saying: "We are going to decline to comment on your story."

Most banks wouldn't say why they were keeping the details secret.

"We're not sharing any other details. We're just not at this time," said Wendy Walker, a spokeswoman for Dallas-based Comerica Inc., which received $2.25 billion from the government.

Heine, the New York Mellon Corp. spokesman who said he wouldn't share spending specifics, added: "I just would prefer if you wouldn't say that we're not going to discuss those details."

The banks which came closest to answering the questions were those, such as U.S. Bancorp and Huntington Bancshares Inc., that only recently received the money and have yet to spend it. But neither provided anything more than a generic summary of how the money would be spent.

Lawmakers say they want to tighten restrictions on the remaining, yet-to-be-released $350 billion block of bailout money before more cash is handed out. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said the department is trying to step up its monitoring of bank spending.

"What we've been doing here is moving, I think, with lightning speed to put necessary programs in place, to develop them, implement them, and then we need to monitor them while we're doing this," Paulson said at a recent forum in New York. "So we're building this organization as we're going."

Warren, the congressional watchdog appointed by Democrats, said her oversight panel will try to force the banks to say where they've spent the money.

"It would take a lot of nerve not to give answers," she said.

But Warren said she's surprised she even has to ask.

"If the appropriate restrictions were put on the money to begin with, if the appropriate transparency was in place, then we wouldn't be in a position where you're trying to call every recipient and get the basic information that should already be in public documents," she said.

Garrett, the New Jersey congressman, said the nation might never get a clear answer on where hundreds of billions of dollars went.

"A year or two ago, when we talked about spending $100 million for a bridge to nowhere, that was considered a scandal," he said.

Sun Induces Strange 'Breathing' of Earth's Atmosphere

From Wired.com

SAN FRANCISCO, California — New satellite observations have revealed a previously unknown rhythmic expansion and contraction of Earth's atmosphere on a nine-day cycle.

This "breathing" corresponds to changes in the sun's magnetic fields as it completes rotations once every 27 days, NASA and University of Colorado, Boulder, scientists said Monday at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting.

The sun's coronal holes, seen as dark regions in the image above, direct plasma away from the sun and out into the solar system. When these particles get to the Earth, they heat the upper atmosphere, causing the outer atmosphere to expand and contract.

"What's going on in the solar side is indeed mysterious and challenges the solar physics understanding," said Stan Solomon, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who was not involved in the research.

The finding emphasizes the many ways that solar activity impacts the Earth — and its increasingly space-utilizing humans.

"From the Earth's perspective, we're in the sun's outer atmosphere," said Jeffrey Thayer, an aerospace engineer at UC-Boulder.

The new discovery could help scientists and engineers design better satellites that account for the changing conditions in the ionosphere. Eventually, it might be possible to predict the severity of ionospheric storms and protect the world's communication infrastructure.

The scientists used changes in the density of the Earth's atmosphere to pinpoint this previously unknown pattern. As the atmosphere contracts or expands, it also gets more or less dense, respectively. In response to the "hills and valleys of density," satellites subtly speed up or slow down, recording those motions with on-board accelerometers. And that's the data that allowed the scientists to back into the discovery of this new atmospheric cycle.

Solomon said that while the cycle on Earth is interesting, the really strange aspect of this work is what it says about our local star.

"What's going on in the sun that's causing all this?" Solomon said. "It's not entirely clear. That part of it is quite mysterious."

See Also:

• High-Resolution Image of the Sun's Jets
• And the Sun Isn't Causing Global Warming Either
• Get Your Own Three-Dimensional Sun!
• Sun's Plasma Bursts Use Earth as "Magnetic Slingshot"
• Astronomers Find Rare Twin of Sun
• Planet Survives Its Sun's Explosion. But Don't Get Any Ideas ...

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and project site, Inventing Green: the lost history of American clean tech; Wired Science on Facebook.

Image: Credit, NASA, Solar and Heliospheric Observatory

Bush attacked by shoe

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Water found in hot planet's orbit

By Julian Siddle
Science Reporter, BBC News

The atmosphere of the fiery planet was analysed by measuring heat radiation

Scientists say they have found evidence for water vapour in the atmosphere of a planet 63 light-years from Earth.

The "hot Jupiter" planet's surface temperatures exceed 900C.

Writing in the journal Nature, the scientists say their discovery may help find planets that can support life.

In a separate study, the US space agency (Nasa) says it has found carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of the same planet.

Molten core

The planet known as HD 189733b is classed as a hot Jupiter due to its fiery molten centre and heavily gaseous atmosphere, which mimics the atmosphere of Jupiter, the gas giant in our own solar system.

The generation of heat by the planet's core provides the key to why scientists have been able to identify water vapour in its atmosphere.

Gases in the planet's atmosphere modify the wavelengths of heat radiation coming from the planet's hot surface. These wavelengths can be detected by space telescopes such as Hubble or the Sun-orbiting Spitzer telescope used in this study.

The type of gas present in the planet's atmosphere can be determined by looking at the spread of infrared radiation reaching the telescope, each gas producing a different wavelength.

Dr Drake Deming from Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland, US, has looked for signs of water on similar gas giants in the past. He says water vapour in the atmosphere leaves an unmistakeable signal.

"It produces a unique fingerprint, water vapour modulates the shape of the radiation in a very characteristic way," he said.

As the planet is so far away it is hard to determine how much of the radiation detected by the telescope comes from this gas giant and how much from the star it orbits.

The scientists solved this problem by studying its orbit.

"There is a time when we know the planet is not visible, so we know the light comes only from the star," says Dr Carl Grillmair from the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, who led the research.

They found HD 1897733b goes round its star every 2.2 days, by taking measurements over several orbiting cycles and deducting the radiation produced during the time when they couldn't see the planet - when it was behind its star - they were able to see how much radiation the planet emitted on its own.

"The key to these measurements is the eclipse geometry, we have a unique moment in which to observe the star in isolation," said Dr Deming.

Carbon Dioxide

The scientists were puzzled by earlier observations of HD 189733b and similar gas giants. They expected to see water vapour, but the telescopes did not detect any.

"We concluded there was no water a couple of years ago, the theoreticians were upset, they'd predicted it would be there. We didn't understand it. We looked much harder we watched it for over 120 hours, and sure enough there was the signature matching brilliantly with the models," said Dr Grillmair.

He suggests the planet's proximity to the star means its atmosphere is constantly changing.

"With planets this close to their star, the star covers perhaps half the planet, you're going to get enormous heat loads that create storms, perhaps clouds one year and none the next - this thing is changing right before our eyes" said Dr Grillmair.

The scientists suggest high clouds created by the storms may have hidden the water vapour in the earlier observations, they are confident that the latest findings are correct.

"What's new about this is it's unequivocal," says Dr Deming.

In a separate development, Nasa says the Hubble space telescope has detected carbon dioxide in HD189733's atmosphere.

Although the agency is keen to stress the planet is far too hot to support life, it says the finding represents an important proof of concept, showing that it is possible to detect CO2 in the atmospheres of distant planets orbiting other stars, and that the same method could be used to look at planets which might support life.

"The very fact we are able to detect it and estimate its abundance is significant for the long-term effort of characterising planets to find out what they are made of and if they could be a possible host for life," said Mark Swain, a research scientist at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who analysed the Hubble images.

Hiroshima Atomic Drop

Hedge Funds to Cancer Patients: “Die.”

by RoryKearney

It is just what we have been saying all along.

The thugs on wall street have been crushing the stocks of certain companies that do cancer research. Here is the undisputed proof of what has been going on with Dendreon, a company that makes Provenge, a prostate cancer immunotherapy, that was voted 17-0 safe and 13-4 efficacious, by an FDA hand picked panel of experts and then delayed by the FDA for reasons I believe had nothing to do with the science and everything to do with profiteering and power mongering by those inside the FDA, NCI and Wall Street.

1 out of every 6 men gets prostate cancer and since that terrible FDA decision almost 50,000 American men, including thousands of men around the world, have died without access to this non toxic, non invasive treatment. We were so incensed about this FDA failure to address the health needs of these men, that we formed CareToLive, a not for profit group, and sued the FDA to gain access to this treatment.

Unfortunately we are caught in a catch 22, as the courts to date have said that the FDA has not denied the treatment, but has only delayed it. It is almost 2 years since the delay, and in the meantime CareToLive has lost 3 members who sought access to Provenge. Tell Stephen Study, John Fish and Richard Ripp, that Provenge was just delayed and not denied. We have several members desperate for access. The FDA continues along in la la land as they feed at the public trough and gather fat Federal salaries, pensions and perks, without a care in the world for the men and their families who are suffering.

Wall street, conflicted doctors on the panel, and who knows what conflicts the FDA & NCI had, cashed out some enormous payoffs. One of the NCI doctors, Dr. Alison Martin, was quickly transferred out the Federal Agency, and landed a cushy job at a new Michael Milken healthcare "charitable" organization. Although he runs the largest prostate cancer foundation in the world, he is still, strangely silent on the Provenge debacle. He was, and probably still is, invested in Proquest Investments, who had significant money in other prostate cancer treatments. I assume his pardon by George Bush will be forthcoming. What a guy. Faster Cures, but only for the "chosen ones". Chemotherapy and radiation are huge money makers for the industry.

We currently have a writ in front of the Supreme Court pending. We remain cautiously hopeful, that they will hear our case and get to the bottom of all this.

Visit http://www.CareToLive.com to see more about this story.

Man attacks father with Christmas tree

From the AP

PARRISH, Fla. (AP) — Authorities say a west Florida man who lives with his parents has been arrested on a felony assault charge after he used a Christmas tree as a weapon to attack his father.

According to the Manatee County sheriff's report a 37-year-old man was arrested last week after he threw a 3-foot Christmas tree at his father. The tree missed, but the man then tried to use the steel base from the tree to strike his father.

His father and mother were able to grab his arms to prevent the attack. Deputies say the tree could have caused serious injuries because the metal base weighs about five pounds.

The man was charged with felony assault. He denied trying to strike his father.