Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Most distant object in the universe spotted
by Rachel Courtland at NewScientist.com
Astronomers have spotted the most distant object yet confirmed in the universe – a self-destructing star that exploded 13.1 billion light years from Earth. It detonated just 640 million years after the big bang, around the end of the cosmic "dark ages", when the first stars and galaxies were lighting up space.
The object is a gamma-ray burst (GRB) – the brightest type of stellar explosion. GRBs occur when massive, spinning stars collapse to form black holes and spew out jets of gas at nearly the speed of light. These jets send gamma rays our way, along with "afterglows" at other wavelengths, which are produced when the jet heats up surrounding gas.
The burst, dubbed GRB 090423 for the date of its discovery last Thursday, was originally spotted by NASA's Swift satellite at 0755 GMT.
Within an hour, astronomers began training ground-based telescopes on the same patch of sky to study the burst's infrared afterglow. Some of the first observations were made on Mauna Kea in Hawaii with the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope and the Gemini North telescope.
Other telescopes later measured the spectrum of the afterglow, revealing that the burst detonated about 13.1 billion light years from Earth. "It's the most distance gamma-ray burst, but it's also the most distant object in the universe overall," says Edo Berger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a member of the team that observed the afterglow with Gemini North.
Stretched light
To gauge an object's distance, astronomers measure how much an object's light has been stretched, or reddened, by the expansion of space. This burst lies at a redshift of 8.2, more distant than the previous GRB record holder, which lay at a redshift of 6.7.
Other astronomers have claimed to find galaxies at even greater distances – at redshifts of 10 and 9, but those findings are still ambiguous, says Joshua Bloom of the University of California, Berkeley, who observed the afterglow using the Gemini South telescope in Chile. Until now, the record holder for the farthest galaxy had a spectroscopically confirmed redshift of 6.96.
The burst's immense distance makes the now-dead star the earliest object to be discovered from an era called 'reionisation', which occurred within the first billion years after the big bang. At that time, an obscuring fog of neutral hydrogen atoms was being burned off by radiation from the first stars and galaxies, and possibly also from the annihilation of dark matter particles.
'Watershed event'
"For astronomy, this is a watershed event," Bloom told New Scientist."This is the beginning of the study of the universe as it was before most of the structure that we know about today came into being."
The timing of the period of reionisation is still unclear, Bloom says. If astronomers can find more gamma-ray bursts at even greater distances, they could use their spectra to determine how quickly the universe became transparent and what was responsible for the process.
"In principle, you can see very early times in the universe [with GRBs], when everything else was too faint," says Nial Tanvir of the University of Leicester in the UK, a member of a team that used the Very Large Telescope in Chile to make one of the first measurements of the distance of the burst.
Distant blasts could also help pinpoint the locations of faint GRB host galaxies that could be detected by space telescopes like the soon-to-be-refurbished Hubble Space Telescope or NASA's infrared James Webb Telescope, which is set to launch in 2013.
Sensitive and fast
But building up a picture of the early universe will require finding many more distant bursts, and progress in discovering distant bursts has been slow. Swift has found 120 bursts with measured distances, but only three – including this one – date from the first billion years of the universe's history.
That is in part because stars did not form at high rates in the very early universe, before a redshift of about 5, and so they did not explode often as GRBs.
But it is also because infrared detectors that are both sensitive and quick enough to measure very distant, short-lived GRB afterglows have only recently begun operating. As a result, astronomers may have missed out on identifying some of the most distant GRBs identified by Swift.
Berger hopes the discovery of this object will hasten the development of new telescopes that could discover such afterglows with even greater efficiency.
"As a single object, [the burst] is an amazing proof of concept," says Berger. "I think we've shown that's a worthwhile investment because [distant bursts] actually do exist."
NASA is considering one such telescope, called the Joint Astrophysics Nascent Universe Satellite (JANUS), for funding this year
Astronomers have spotted the most distant object yet confirmed in the universe – a self-destructing star that exploded 13.1 billion light years from Earth. It detonated just 640 million years after the big bang, around the end of the cosmic "dark ages", when the first stars and galaxies were lighting up space.
The object is a gamma-ray burst (GRB) – the brightest type of stellar explosion. GRBs occur when massive, spinning stars collapse to form black holes and spew out jets of gas at nearly the speed of light. These jets send gamma rays our way, along with "afterglows" at other wavelengths, which are produced when the jet heats up surrounding gas.
The burst, dubbed GRB 090423 for the date of its discovery last Thursday, was originally spotted by NASA's Swift satellite at 0755 GMT.
Within an hour, astronomers began training ground-based telescopes on the same patch of sky to study the burst's infrared afterglow. Some of the first observations were made on Mauna Kea in Hawaii with the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope and the Gemini North telescope.
Other telescopes later measured the spectrum of the afterglow, revealing that the burst detonated about 13.1 billion light years from Earth. "It's the most distance gamma-ray burst, but it's also the most distant object in the universe overall," says Edo Berger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a member of the team that observed the afterglow with Gemini North.
Stretched light
To gauge an object's distance, astronomers measure how much an object's light has been stretched, or reddened, by the expansion of space. This burst lies at a redshift of 8.2, more distant than the previous GRB record holder, which lay at a redshift of 6.7.
Other astronomers have claimed to find galaxies at even greater distances – at redshifts of 10 and 9, but those findings are still ambiguous, says Joshua Bloom of the University of California, Berkeley, who observed the afterglow using the Gemini South telescope in Chile. Until now, the record holder for the farthest galaxy had a spectroscopically confirmed redshift of 6.96.
The burst's immense distance makes the now-dead star the earliest object to be discovered from an era called 'reionisation', which occurred within the first billion years after the big bang. At that time, an obscuring fog of neutral hydrogen atoms was being burned off by radiation from the first stars and galaxies, and possibly also from the annihilation of dark matter particles.
'Watershed event'
"For astronomy, this is a watershed event," Bloom told New Scientist."This is the beginning of the study of the universe as it was before most of the structure that we know about today came into being."
The timing of the period of reionisation is still unclear, Bloom says. If astronomers can find more gamma-ray bursts at even greater distances, they could use their spectra to determine how quickly the universe became transparent and what was responsible for the process.
"In principle, you can see very early times in the universe [with GRBs], when everything else was too faint," says Nial Tanvir of the University of Leicester in the UK, a member of a team that used the Very Large Telescope in Chile to make one of the first measurements of the distance of the burst.
Distant blasts could also help pinpoint the locations of faint GRB host galaxies that could be detected by space telescopes like the soon-to-be-refurbished Hubble Space Telescope or NASA's infrared James Webb Telescope, which is set to launch in 2013.
Sensitive and fast
But building up a picture of the early universe will require finding many more distant bursts, and progress in discovering distant bursts has been slow. Swift has found 120 bursts with measured distances, but only three – including this one – date from the first billion years of the universe's history.
That is in part because stars did not form at high rates in the very early universe, before a redshift of about 5, and so they did not explode often as GRBs.
But it is also because infrared detectors that are both sensitive and quick enough to measure very distant, short-lived GRB afterglows have only recently begun operating. As a result, astronomers may have missed out on identifying some of the most distant GRBs identified by Swift.
Berger hopes the discovery of this object will hasten the development of new telescopes that could discover such afterglows with even greater efficiency.
"As a single object, [the burst] is an amazing proof of concept," says Berger. "I think we've shown that's a worthwhile investment because [distant bursts] actually do exist."
NASA is considering one such telescope, called the Joint Astrophysics Nascent Universe Satellite (JANUS), for funding this year
Monday, April 27, 2009
Sleep Now, Remember Later
By Robert Stickgold, PH.D., and Peter Wehrwein | NEWSWEEK
For many years, people believed that the brain, like the body, rested during sleep. After all, we are rendered unconscious by sleep. Perhaps, it was thought, the brain just needs to stop thinking for a few hours every day. Wrong. During sleep, our brain—the organ that directs us to sleep—is itself extraordinarily active. And much of that activity helps the brain to learn, to remember and to make connections.
It wasn't so long ago that the rueful joke in research circles was that everyone knew sleep had something to do with memory—except for the people who study sleep and the people who study memory. Then, in 1994, Israeli researchers reported that the average performance for a group of people on a memory test improved when the test was repeated after a break of many hours—during which some subjects slept and others did not. In 2000, a Harvard team demonstrated that this improvement occurred only during sleep.
There are several different types of memory—including declarative (retrievable, fact-based information), episodic (events from your life) and procedural (how to do something)—and researchers have designed ways to test each of them. In almost every case, whether the test involves remembering pairs of words, tapping numbered keys in a certain order or figuring out the rules in a weather-prediction game, "sleeping on it" after first learning the task improves performance. It's as if our brains squeeze in some extra practice time while we're asleep.
This isn't to say that we can't form memories when we're awake. If someone tells you his name, you don't need to fall asleep to remember it. But sleep will make it more likely that you do. Sleep-deprivation experiments have shown that a tired brain has a difficult time capturing memories of all sorts. Interestingly, sleep deprivation is more likely to cause us to forget information associated with positive emotion than information linked to negative emotion. This could explain, at least in part, why sleep deprivation can trigger depression in some people: memories tainted with negative emotions are more likely than positive ones to "stick" in the sleep-deprived brain.
Sleep also seems to be the time when the brain's two memory systems—the hippocampus and the neocortex—"talk" with one other. Experiences that become memories are laid down first in the hippocampus, obliterating whatever is underneath. If a memory is to be retained, it must be shipped from the hippocampus to a place where it will endure—the neocortex, the wrinkled outer layer of the brain where higher thinking takes place. Unlike the hippocampus, the neocortex is a master at weaving the old with the new. And partly because it keeps incoming information at bay, sleep is the best time for the "undistracted" hippocampus to shuttle memories to the neocortex, and for the neocortex to link them to related memories.
How sleep helps us consolidate memories is still largely a mystery. A recent study from the University of Lübeck, in Germany, offers one clue. Subjects were given a list of 46 word pairs to memorize, just before sleep. Shortly after they fell asleep, as they reached the deepest stages of sleep, electrical currents were sent through electrodes on their heads to induce very slow brain waves. Such slow waves were induced at random in the brains of one group of subjects, but not another. The next morning, the slow-wave group had better recall of the words. Other types of memory were not improved, and inducing the slow waves later in the night did not have the same effect. Why and how the slow waves improved memory is not yet understood, but they are thought to alter the strengths of chemical connections, or synapses, between specific pairs of nerve cells in the brain. Memories are "stored" in these synapses: changing the strength of the synapses increases the strength of the memories they store.
It's not just memory that is improved by sleep. Recent studies indicate that sleep not only helps store facts, it also helps make connections between them. Scientific history is replete with tales of scientists with nocturnal "aha!" experiences. Dmitri Mendeleev awakened from a dream that gave him the idea for the periodic table of elements—a landmark in chemistry. Such anecdotes don't prove that sleep can produce insights, but a recent study by Ullrich Wagner and colleagues in Germany does. Wagner used a puzzle in which players were given a string of numbers, and required to make a series of seven calculations based on these numbers. The seventh calculation (which depended on the preceding six) was the "answer." Participants repeatedly played the same game with the same rules, but different sets of numbers. Some of the players played the game in the morning, then did other things for eight hours or so, then played the game again. Others played the game first in the evening, then slept, then played it again after awakening.
The players who slept did somewhat better—but that was not the important result. Cleverly, the researchers structured the game such that the second calculation always gave the same answer as the seventh calculation—the final answer. If players recognized this "hidden rule," they could get to the final answer much faster—and speed was a part of the game. The players who slept were almost three times more likely to have the insight that allowed them to spot the hidden rule—even though none of the players had been told there was a hidden rule to spot. Sleeping had allowed them to connect the dots.
Why is this important? Some sleep researchers believe that for every two hours we spend awake, the brain needs an hour of sleep to figure out what all these experiences mean, and that sleep plays a crucial role in constructing the meaning our lives come to hold. Breakdowns in such sleep-dependent processing may contribute to the development of depression, and may explain why some people who experience horrific traumas go on to develop PTSD.
A better understanding of how sleep knits our memories together could lead to new technologies that improve learning, memory and creativity, and even help treat some psychiatric disease. But perhaps the most important reason for studying sleep is simply this: we are a curious species; we spend about a third of our lives asleep; and we realize how little we understand about that third of our lives. So we continue experimenting, hoping to understand sleep better. And perhaps someday we will. After we've slept on it.
Stickgold is associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Wehrwein is editor of the Harvard Health Letter. For more information, go to health.harvard.edu/Newsweek.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Scientists make super-strong metallic spider silk
By Ben Hirschler
LONDON (Reuters) – Spider silk is already tougher and lighter than steel, and now scientists have made it three times stronger by adding small amounts of metal.
The technique may be useful for manufacturing super-tough textiles and high-tech medical materials, including artificial bones and tendons.
"It could make very strong thread for surgical operations," researcher Seung-Mo Lee of the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle, Germany, said in a telephone interview.
Lee and colleagues, who published their findings in the journal Science, found that adding zinc, titanium or aluminum to a length of spider silk made it more resistant to breaking or deforming.
They used a process called atomic layer deposition, which not only coated spider dragline silks with metal but also caused some metal ions to penetrate the fibers and react with their protein structure.
Lee said he next wanted to try adding other materials, including artificial polymers like Teflon.
The idea was inspired by studies showing traces of metals in the toughest parts of some insect body parts. The jaws of leaf-cutter ants and locusts, for example, both contain high levels of zinc, making them particularly stiff and hard.
Spider silk has long fascinated scientists but producing it in commercial quantities is difficult because spiders kept in captivity tend to eat each other.
As a result, researchers have looked at alternative ways of producing silk without spiders, by duplicating their spinning technique.
Approaches being tried include deriving fiber from the milk of transgenic goats with an extra spider-silk gene and adapting silk produced by other insects, such as silkworms.
(Editing by Tim Pearce)
LONDON (Reuters) – Spider silk is already tougher and lighter than steel, and now scientists have made it three times stronger by adding small amounts of metal.
The technique may be useful for manufacturing super-tough textiles and high-tech medical materials, including artificial bones and tendons.
"It could make very strong thread for surgical operations," researcher Seung-Mo Lee of the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle, Germany, said in a telephone interview.
Lee and colleagues, who published their findings in the journal Science, found that adding zinc, titanium or aluminum to a length of spider silk made it more resistant to breaking or deforming.
They used a process called atomic layer deposition, which not only coated spider dragline silks with metal but also caused some metal ions to penetrate the fibers and react with their protein structure.
Lee said he next wanted to try adding other materials, including artificial polymers like Teflon.
The idea was inspired by studies showing traces of metals in the toughest parts of some insect body parts. The jaws of leaf-cutter ants and locusts, for example, both contain high levels of zinc, making them particularly stiff and hard.
Spider silk has long fascinated scientists but producing it in commercial quantities is difficult because spiders kept in captivity tend to eat each other.
As a result, researchers have looked at alternative ways of producing silk without spiders, by duplicating their spinning technique.
Approaches being tried include deriving fiber from the milk of transgenic goats with an extra spider-silk gene and adapting silk produced by other insects, such as silkworms.
(Editing by Tim Pearce)
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Dark Matter, Dark Energy; Now There’s “Dark Gulping”
From Universetoday.com
For all you dark matter and dark energy fans out there, now there’s another new “dark” to add to the list. It’s called “dark gulping,” and it involves a process which may explain how supermassive black holes were able to form in the early universe. Astronomers from the University College of London (UCL) propose that dark gulping occurred when there were gravitational interactions between the invisible halo of dark matter in a cluster of galaxies and the gas embedded in the dark matter halo. This occurred when the Universe was less than a billion years old. They found that the interactions cause the dark matter to form a compact central mass, which can be gravitationally unstable, and collapse. The fast dynamical collapse is the dark gulping.
Dr. Curtis Saxton and Professor Kinwah Wu, both of UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory, developed a model to study the process. They say that the dark gulping would have happened very rapidly, without a trace of electro-magnetic radiation being emitted.
There are several theories for how supermassive black holes form. One possibility is that a single large gas cloud collapses. Another is that a black hole formed by the collapse of a giant star swallows up enormous amounts of matter. Still another possibility is that a cluster of small black holes merge together. However, all these options take many millions of years and are at odds with recent observations that suggest that black holes were present when the Universe was less than a billion years old. Dark gulping may provide a solution to how the slowness of gas accretion was circumvented, enabling the rapid emergence of giant black holes. The affected dark mass in the compact core is compatible with the scale of supermassive black holes in galaxies today.
Dark matter appears to gravitationally dominate the dynamics of galaxies and galaxy clusters. However, there is still a great deal of conjecture about origin, properties and distribution of dark particles. While it appears that dark matter doesn’t interact with light, it does interacts with ordinary matter via gravity. “Previous studies have ignored the interaction between gas and the dark matter,” said Saxton, “but, by factoring it into our model, we’ve achieved a much more realistic picture that fits better with observations and may also have gained some insight into the presence of early supermassive black holes.”?
According to the model, the development of a compact mass at the core is inevitable. Cooling by the gas causes it to flow gently in towards the center. The gas can be up to 10 million degrees at the outskirts of the halos, which are few million light years in diameter, with a cooler zone towards the core, which surrounds a warmer interior a few thousand light years across. The gas doesn’t cool indefinitely, but reaches a minimum temperature, which fits well with X-ray observations of galaxy clusters.
The model also investigates how many dimensions the dark particles move in, as these determine the rate at which the dark halo expands and absorbs and emits heat, and ultimately affect the distribution of dark mass the system.
“In the context of our model, the observed core sizes of galaxy cluster halos and the observed range of giant black hole masses imply that dark matter particles have between seven and ten degrees of freedom,”?said Saxton. ?”With more than six, the inner region of the dark matter approaches the threshold of gravitational instability, opening up the possibility of dark gulping taking place.?
The findings have been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
For all you dark matter and dark energy fans out there, now there’s another new “dark” to add to the list. It’s called “dark gulping,” and it involves a process which may explain how supermassive black holes were able to form in the early universe. Astronomers from the University College of London (UCL) propose that dark gulping occurred when there were gravitational interactions between the invisible halo of dark matter in a cluster of galaxies and the gas embedded in the dark matter halo. This occurred when the Universe was less than a billion years old. They found that the interactions cause the dark matter to form a compact central mass, which can be gravitationally unstable, and collapse. The fast dynamical collapse is the dark gulping.
Dr. Curtis Saxton and Professor Kinwah Wu, both of UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory, developed a model to study the process. They say that the dark gulping would have happened very rapidly, without a trace of electro-magnetic radiation being emitted.
There are several theories for how supermassive black holes form. One possibility is that a single large gas cloud collapses. Another is that a black hole formed by the collapse of a giant star swallows up enormous amounts of matter. Still another possibility is that a cluster of small black holes merge together. However, all these options take many millions of years and are at odds with recent observations that suggest that black holes were present when the Universe was less than a billion years old. Dark gulping may provide a solution to how the slowness of gas accretion was circumvented, enabling the rapid emergence of giant black holes. The affected dark mass in the compact core is compatible with the scale of supermassive black holes in galaxies today.
Dark matter appears to gravitationally dominate the dynamics of galaxies and galaxy clusters. However, there is still a great deal of conjecture about origin, properties and distribution of dark particles. While it appears that dark matter doesn’t interact with light, it does interacts with ordinary matter via gravity. “Previous studies have ignored the interaction between gas and the dark matter,” said Saxton, “but, by factoring it into our model, we’ve achieved a much more realistic picture that fits better with observations and may also have gained some insight into the presence of early supermassive black holes.”?
According to the model, the development of a compact mass at the core is inevitable. Cooling by the gas causes it to flow gently in towards the center. The gas can be up to 10 million degrees at the outskirts of the halos, which are few million light years in diameter, with a cooler zone towards the core, which surrounds a warmer interior a few thousand light years across. The gas doesn’t cool indefinitely, but reaches a minimum temperature, which fits well with X-ray observations of galaxy clusters.
The model also investigates how many dimensions the dark particles move in, as these determine the rate at which the dark halo expands and absorbs and emits heat, and ultimately affect the distribution of dark mass the system.
“In the context of our model, the observed core sizes of galaxy cluster halos and the observed range of giant black hole masses imply that dark matter particles have between seven and ten degrees of freedom,”?said Saxton. ?”With more than six, the inner region of the dark matter approaches the threshold of gravitational instability, opening up the possibility of dark gulping taking place.?
The findings have been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Lightest Known Exoplanet Discovered
From Space.com
The lightest exoplanet yet discovered — only about twice the mass of Earth — has been detected, astronomers announced today.
"With only 1.9 Earth-masses, it is the least massive exoplanet ever detected and is, very likely, a rocky planet,"said Xavier Bonfils of Grenoble Observatory in France, a member of the team that made the discovery, which was announced at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom.
The planet was found in the famous system Gliese 581 and has been dubbed "Gliese 581 e." It was detected using the low-mass-exoplanet hunter HARPS spectrograph attached to the 3.6-metre ESO telescope at La Silla, Chile.
Measurements with the telescope also helped to refine the orbit of the new planet's solar system sibling, a planet called Gliese 581 d, placing it well within the habitable zone, where liquid water oceans could exist.
"The holy grail of current exoplanet research is the detection of a rocky, Earth-like planet in the 'habitable zone' — a region around the host star with the right conditions for water to be liquid on a planet's surface," said Michel Mayor from the Geneva Observatory, who led the European team that made the finding.
Planet Gliese 581 e orbits its host star — located only 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra — in just 3.15 days. Being so close to its host star, the planet is not in the habitable zone.
With the discovery of Gliese 581 e, the planetary system now has four known planets, with masses of about 1.9 Earth-masses (planet e), 16 Earth-masses (planet b), 5 Earth-masses (planet c), and 7 Earth-masses (planet d).
"Gliese 581 d, which orbits the host star in 66.8 days, is probably too massive to be made only of rocky material, but we can speculate that it is an icy planet that has migrated closer to the star," said team member Stephane Udry of Geneva University in Switzerland. "'D' could even be covered by a large and deep ocean — it is the first serious 'water world' candidate."
Low-mass red dwarf stars such as Gliese 581 are potentially fruitful hunting grounds for low-mass exoplanets in the habitable zone. The gravitational pull of orbiting exoplanets introduces a slight wobble to the star's motion. Because the habitable zone of cool stars like Gliese 581 is so close to the star, the planets within this zone exert a stronger pull, and so the wobble of the star is more pronounced, though detecting the signal is still a challenge.
Over the last two decades, scientists have spotted more than 300 extrasolar planets circling other stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Most of these planets have been about the size of Jupiter or larger.
"It is amazing to see how far we have come since we discovered the first exoplanet around a normal star in 1995 — the one around 51 Pegasi," said Mayor, who helped find that planet. "The mass of Gliese 581 e is 80 times less than that of 51 Pegasi b. This is tremendous progress in just 14 years."
The team plans to continue looking for Earth-like, rocky planets around other stars.
"With similar observing conditions an Earth-like planet located in the middle of the habitable zone of a red dwarf star could be detectable," Bonfils said. "The hunt continues."
And HARPS isn't the only instrument looking for low-mass, Earth-like planets. NASA's new Kepler space telescope will also be peering through the galaxy in search of smaller alien worlds. It was launched on March 6 and sent back its first images last Thursday.
The lightest exoplanet yet discovered — only about twice the mass of Earth — has been detected, astronomers announced today.
"With only 1.9 Earth-masses, it is the least massive exoplanet ever detected and is, very likely, a rocky planet,"said Xavier Bonfils of Grenoble Observatory in France, a member of the team that made the discovery, which was announced at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom.
The planet was found in the famous system Gliese 581 and has been dubbed "Gliese 581 e." It was detected using the low-mass-exoplanet hunter HARPS spectrograph attached to the 3.6-metre ESO telescope at La Silla, Chile.
Measurements with the telescope also helped to refine the orbit of the new planet's solar system sibling, a planet called Gliese 581 d, placing it well within the habitable zone, where liquid water oceans could exist.
"The holy grail of current exoplanet research is the detection of a rocky, Earth-like planet in the 'habitable zone' — a region around the host star with the right conditions for water to be liquid on a planet's surface," said Michel Mayor from the Geneva Observatory, who led the European team that made the finding.
Planet Gliese 581 e orbits its host star — located only 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra — in just 3.15 days. Being so close to its host star, the planet is not in the habitable zone.
With the discovery of Gliese 581 e, the planetary system now has four known planets, with masses of about 1.9 Earth-masses (planet e), 16 Earth-masses (planet b), 5 Earth-masses (planet c), and 7 Earth-masses (planet d).
"Gliese 581 d, which orbits the host star in 66.8 days, is probably too massive to be made only of rocky material, but we can speculate that it is an icy planet that has migrated closer to the star," said team member Stephane Udry of Geneva University in Switzerland. "'D' could even be covered by a large and deep ocean — it is the first serious 'water world' candidate."
Low-mass red dwarf stars such as Gliese 581 are potentially fruitful hunting grounds for low-mass exoplanets in the habitable zone. The gravitational pull of orbiting exoplanets introduces a slight wobble to the star's motion. Because the habitable zone of cool stars like Gliese 581 is so close to the star, the planets within this zone exert a stronger pull, and so the wobble of the star is more pronounced, though detecting the signal is still a challenge.
Over the last two decades, scientists have spotted more than 300 extrasolar planets circling other stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Most of these planets have been about the size of Jupiter or larger.
"It is amazing to see how far we have come since we discovered the first exoplanet around a normal star in 1995 — the one around 51 Pegasi," said Mayor, who helped find that planet. "The mass of Gliese 581 e is 80 times less than that of 51 Pegasi b. This is tremendous progress in just 14 years."
The team plans to continue looking for Earth-like, rocky planets around other stars.
"With similar observing conditions an Earth-like planet located in the middle of the habitable zone of a red dwarf star could be detectable," Bonfils said. "The hunt continues."
And HARPS isn't the only instrument looking for low-mass, Earth-like planets. NASA's new Kepler space telescope will also be peering through the galaxy in search of smaller alien worlds. It was launched on March 6 and sent back its first images last Thursday.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Unexpected Expectations
He entered and wasn't what I expected. His clothes were wrinkled, hair a mess or what he had left up there was defying gravity, a smell of whisky wisped off his breath and an old typewriter teetered under his arm. It was the fact that he only had one arm, an eye patch, and a wooden leg that threw me off. How could he write with one arm? I welcomed him in and he hobbled over to my couch, threw himself down, and placed his typewriter on his lap. He slurred a story about his days in Nam, and began to fumble with a series of papers folded in his jacket. He needed to get some writing done before he met his editor tomorrow.
Slumping back into the kitchen, I dialed the phone.
"Mary, you won't believe this but Tyson Wilson is here."
"The Tyson Wilson?"
"Yes and he's not what I expected," I said. "He's a drunk."
"Got any food?" he yelled from the living room.
I covered the phone with my hand. "I'll make something," I yelled back, and then whispered into the phone. "He's a mess. Got-to-go. He's coming."
He limped into the kitchen and opened the fridge. After rummaging around the back recesses, he pulled out a jar of mayonnaise and pickles and walked past me without a word. I wanted to follow him to see what he was going to do with that combination, but I leaned on the counter and wondered what have I gotten myself into. After the second reverberating belch, he came back into the kitchen and began to open the cabinets.
“Can I help you with anything?” I replied with a bit of agitation.
“Do you have anything to drink?” he asked. “I didn’t see a liquor cabinet.”
“I don’t drink.”
He laughed as if it were a joke. When he noticed that I was serious, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “To each their own.”
How could this man write such glorious prose. He made me cry at the end of Capricorn’s Dream. He went back to his typewriter and pounded away at the keys. I’ve toiled over years of writing, holding his work like it was from a living god, and he’s a mess, someone I wouldn’t lend a dollar to if I saw him on the street. Another belch erupted from the room. Was I fooled? I was determined to dig deeper and went into the living room. He was sprawled on the couch, typewriter balancing on his potbelly, and a pickle with mayonnaise draped at its end dangled in his mouth like a cigar.
“What are you working on?” I asked.
“The last bit of Leo’s Revelation,” he answered and reached for another pickle. He knocked over a stack of papers and they scattered on the floor.
Bending over, I helped gather them. The writing was a mess, spelling errors, run on sentences, words that didn’t exist littered the pages. He snatched them from my hand.
“No one and I mean no one reads my writing before it is complete,” he said and stared at me. I began to feel nervous and backed away. He swallowed the last of the pickle, slurped the juice from his index finger and went back to the couch.
“I’m going to bed,” I said and went up the stairs.
Shutting the bedroom door, I listened to him pound on the keys. I then went to the closet and dug under the dirty clothes on the floor for a brown paper bag. This guy wasn’t going to get the best of me, not under my roof. I found what I was looking for and placed it on my lap. I cracked my knuckles, slid in a blank sheet of paper, and began to type
Slumping back into the kitchen, I dialed the phone.
"Mary, you won't believe this but Tyson Wilson is here."
"The Tyson Wilson?"
"Yes and he's not what I expected," I said. "He's a drunk."
"Got any food?" he yelled from the living room.
I covered the phone with my hand. "I'll make something," I yelled back, and then whispered into the phone. "He's a mess. Got-to-go. He's coming."
He limped into the kitchen and opened the fridge. After rummaging around the back recesses, he pulled out a jar of mayonnaise and pickles and walked past me without a word. I wanted to follow him to see what he was going to do with that combination, but I leaned on the counter and wondered what have I gotten myself into. After the second reverberating belch, he came back into the kitchen and began to open the cabinets.
“Can I help you with anything?” I replied with a bit of agitation.
“Do you have anything to drink?” he asked. “I didn’t see a liquor cabinet.”
“I don’t drink.”
He laughed as if it were a joke. When he noticed that I was serious, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “To each their own.”
How could this man write such glorious prose. He made me cry at the end of Capricorn’s Dream. He went back to his typewriter and pounded away at the keys. I’ve toiled over years of writing, holding his work like it was from a living god, and he’s a mess, someone I wouldn’t lend a dollar to if I saw him on the street. Another belch erupted from the room. Was I fooled? I was determined to dig deeper and went into the living room. He was sprawled on the couch, typewriter balancing on his potbelly, and a pickle with mayonnaise draped at its end dangled in his mouth like a cigar.
“What are you working on?” I asked.
“The last bit of Leo’s Revelation,” he answered and reached for another pickle. He knocked over a stack of papers and they scattered on the floor.
Bending over, I helped gather them. The writing was a mess, spelling errors, run on sentences, words that didn’t exist littered the pages. He snatched them from my hand.
“No one and I mean no one reads my writing before it is complete,” he said and stared at me. I began to feel nervous and backed away. He swallowed the last of the pickle, slurped the juice from his index finger and went back to the couch.
“I’m going to bed,” I said and went up the stairs.
Shutting the bedroom door, I listened to him pound on the keys. I then went to the closet and dug under the dirty clothes on the floor for a brown paper bag. This guy wasn’t going to get the best of me, not under my roof. I found what I was looking for and placed it on my lap. I cracked my knuckles, slid in a blank sheet of paper, and began to type
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Was Waterboarded 183 Times in One Month
By: emptywheel
I've put this detail in a series of posts, but it really deserves a full post. According to the May 30, 2005 Bradbury memo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002.
On page 37 of the OLC memo, in a passage discussing the differences between SERE techniques and the torture used with detainees, the memo explains:
The CIA used the waterboard "at least 83 times during August 2002" in the interrogation of Zubaydah. IG Report at 90, and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM, see id. at 91.
Note, the information comes from the CIA IG report which, in the case of Abu Zubaydah, is based on having viewed the torture tapes as well as other materials. So this is presumably a number that was once backed up by video evidence.
The same OLC memo passage explains how the CIA might manage to waterboard these men so many times in one month each (though even with these chilling numbers, the CIA's math doesn't add up).
...where authorized, it may be used for two "sessions" per day of up to two hours. During a session, water may be applied up to six times for ten seconds or longer (but never more than 40 seconds). In a 24-hour period, a detainee may be subjected to up to twelve minutes of water appliaction. See id. at 42. Additionally, the waterboard may be used on as many as five days during a 30-day approval period.
So: two two-hour sessions a day, with six applications of the waterboard each = 12 applications in a day. Though to get up to the permitted 12 minutes of waterboarding in a day (with each use of the waterboard limited to 40 seconds), you'd need 18 applications in a day. Assuming you use the larger 18 applications in one 24-hour period, and do 18 applications on five days within a month, you've waterboarded 90 times--still just half of what they did to KSM.
The CIA wants you to believe waterboarding is effective. Yet somehow, it took them 183 applications of the waterboard in a one month period to get what they claimed was cooperation out of KSM.
That doesn't sound very effective to me.
Sign the petition telling Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate torture here.
Update: Here's one reason to demand a special prosecutor to investigate these actions. In addition to revealing the sheer number of times KSM and Abu Zubaydah were waterboarded, the memos reveal that the interrogators who waterboarded these men went far beyond even the expansive guidelines for torture described in the Bybee Memo, notably by dumping water onto their nose and mouth, rather than dribbing it on.
The IG Report noted that in some cases the waterboard was used with far greater frequency than initially indicated, see IG Report at 5, 44, 46, 103-04, and also that it was used in a different manner. See id. at 37 ("[T]he waterboard technique ... was different from the technique described in the DoJ opinion and used in the SERE training. The difference was the manner in which the detainee's breathing was obstructed. At the SERE school and in the DoJ opinion, the subject's airflow is disrupted by the firm application of a damp cloth over the air passages; the interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth in a controlled manner. By contrast, the Agency Interrogator ... applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee's mouth and nose. One of the psychologists/interrogators acknowledged that the Agency's use of the technique is different from that used in SERE training because it is "for real--and is more poignant and convincing.") [my emphasis]
There's been a lot of discussion about whether those who did what the OLC memos authorized should be prosecuted. But in the case of those who waterboarded KSM and Abu Zubaydah, that's irrelevant, because they did things the OLC memos didn't authorize.
I've put this detail in a series of posts, but it really deserves a full post. According to the May 30, 2005 Bradbury memo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002.
On page 37 of the OLC memo, in a passage discussing the differences between SERE techniques and the torture used with detainees, the memo explains:
The CIA used the waterboard "at least 83 times during August 2002" in the interrogation of Zubaydah. IG Report at 90, and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM, see id. at 91.
Note, the information comes from the CIA IG report which, in the case of Abu Zubaydah, is based on having viewed the torture tapes as well as other materials. So this is presumably a number that was once backed up by video evidence.
The same OLC memo passage explains how the CIA might manage to waterboard these men so many times in one month each (though even with these chilling numbers, the CIA's math doesn't add up).
...where authorized, it may be used for two "sessions" per day of up to two hours. During a session, water may be applied up to six times for ten seconds or longer (but never more than 40 seconds). In a 24-hour period, a detainee may be subjected to up to twelve minutes of water appliaction. See id. at 42. Additionally, the waterboard may be used on as many as five days during a 30-day approval period.
So: two two-hour sessions a day, with six applications of the waterboard each = 12 applications in a day. Though to get up to the permitted 12 minutes of waterboarding in a day (with each use of the waterboard limited to 40 seconds), you'd need 18 applications in a day. Assuming you use the larger 18 applications in one 24-hour period, and do 18 applications on five days within a month, you've waterboarded 90 times--still just half of what they did to KSM.
The CIA wants you to believe waterboarding is effective. Yet somehow, it took them 183 applications of the waterboard in a one month period to get what they claimed was cooperation out of KSM.
That doesn't sound very effective to me.
Sign the petition telling Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate torture here.
Update: Here's one reason to demand a special prosecutor to investigate these actions. In addition to revealing the sheer number of times KSM and Abu Zubaydah were waterboarded, the memos reveal that the interrogators who waterboarded these men went far beyond even the expansive guidelines for torture described in the Bybee Memo, notably by dumping water onto their nose and mouth, rather than dribbing it on.
The IG Report noted that in some cases the waterboard was used with far greater frequency than initially indicated, see IG Report at 5, 44, 46, 103-04, and also that it was used in a different manner. See id. at 37 ("[T]he waterboard technique ... was different from the technique described in the DoJ opinion and used in the SERE training. The difference was the manner in which the detainee's breathing was obstructed. At the SERE school and in the DoJ opinion, the subject's airflow is disrupted by the firm application of a damp cloth over the air passages; the interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth in a controlled manner. By contrast, the Agency Interrogator ... applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee's mouth and nose. One of the psychologists/interrogators acknowledged that the Agency's use of the technique is different from that used in SERE training because it is "for real--and is more poignant and convincing.") [my emphasis]
There's been a lot of discussion about whether those who did what the OLC memos authorized should be prosecuted. But in the case of those who waterboarded KSM and Abu Zubaydah, that's irrelevant, because they did things the OLC memos didn't authorize.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Physicists See The Cosmos In A Coffee Cup
By ScienceDaily.com
A Duke University professor and his graduate student have discovered a universal principle that unites the curious interplay of light and shadow on the surface of your morning coffee with the way gravity magnifies and distorts light from distant galaxies.
They think scientists will be able to use violations of this principle to map unseen clumps of dark matter in the universe.
Light rays naturally reflect off a curve like the inside surface of a coffee cup in a curving, ivy leaf pattern that comes to a point in the center and is brightest along its edge.
Mathematicians and physicists call that shape a "cusp curve," and they call the bright edge a "caustic," based on an alternative dictionary definition meaning "burning bright," explains Arlie Petters, a Duke professor of mathematics, physics and business administration. "It happens because a lot of light rays can pile up along curves."
Drawn by the mathematically-inclined artist Leonardo da Vinci in the early 16th century, caustics can be seen elsewhere in everyday life, including sunlight reflecting across a swimming pool's surface and choppy wave-light patterns reflecting off a boat hull.
Caustics also show up in gravitational lensing, a phenomenon caused by galaxies so massive that their gravity bends and distorts light from more distant galaxies. "It turns out that their gravity is so powerful that some light rays are also going to pile up along curves," said Petters, a gravitational lensing expert.
"Mother Nature has to be creating these things," Petters said. "It's amazing how what we can see in a coffee cup extends into a mathematical theorem with effects in the cosmos."
From the vantage point of Earth, the entire cosmos looks like a vast interplay of gravity and light that can extend far back into spacetime. "As with any illumination pattern, some areas will be brighter than others," Petters said. "And the brightest parts will be along these caustic curves."
Interpreting data from telescope surveys correctly requires understanding the distortions inherent in lensing, which sometimes warps a more distant point of light into multiple and magnified copies of themselves.
Petters and other researchers have previously found that, if such a light source seems to be juxtaposed within the confines of a caustic arch, two duplicate images will appear to be positioned abnormally close to each other and also seem equally bright. And because these clones are of seemingly equal brightness, subtracting one luminosity from the other results in a difference of zero.
In an article appearing in the March 23 Journal of Mathematical Physics, Petters and graduate student Amir Aazami extended the mathematics of such relatively simple examples to include what Petters called "higher order caustics." In such situations the interplay of light and gravity may extend further into spacetime and undergo various forms of "caustic metamorphosis" in the process.
Aazami was informally testing out a special case of their evolving caustics theorem called an "ellyptic umbilic" by using a technical computing software program called Mathematica when he noticed a pattern.
"It kept getting zero over and over again," Aazami said, no matter what scenario he tried the software on. "So I thought, 'it's making a mistake.' And I went back and looked again, and I kept getting zero. And I said, 'this is beginning to make sense!' That was the 'Ah Ha!' moment."
Petters realized his graduate student had found a universal mathematical principle so pervasive that it can impose balance on the most complicated gravitational lensing illusions. For instance, if lensing produces four light source copies of uneven brightnesses, the relative dimness of some is precisely balanced by the relative luminosity of others so they cancel each other out.
"It's miraculous that they cancel out," Petters said. "This relates to very sophisticated mathematics that you would never think could have anything to do with nature."
The Duke researchers said that for the simplest caustics, the theorem has already been corroborated by a few actual gravitational lensing observations. And they expect the higher order caustics to be observed once the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), now being assembled in Chile, begins what Petters called "the most massive survey of the sky known" in a few years.
"We feel very confident that these universal invariants will show themselves in the data to come from the LSST," he said.
Another scenario he predicts are exceptions to the rule: "For one of the higher order caustics, if there are two pairs of lensed images that are close to each other but not equally bright, then the theorem is violated," he said.
"The reason would be some substructure in the galaxy," he said, likely dark matter near one of the images that causes it to be demagnified.
Dark matter is a mysterious substance that astronomers cannot directly observe but can "sense" by its gravitational tug on light. By using the LSST in conjunction with their theorem, astronomers "would be able to identify dark matter substructures in complex galactic systems," Petters predicted
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.
A Duke University professor and his graduate student have discovered a universal principle that unites the curious interplay of light and shadow on the surface of your morning coffee with the way gravity magnifies and distorts light from distant galaxies.
They think scientists will be able to use violations of this principle to map unseen clumps of dark matter in the universe.
Light rays naturally reflect off a curve like the inside surface of a coffee cup in a curving, ivy leaf pattern that comes to a point in the center and is brightest along its edge.
Mathematicians and physicists call that shape a "cusp curve," and they call the bright edge a "caustic," based on an alternative dictionary definition meaning "burning bright," explains Arlie Petters, a Duke professor of mathematics, physics and business administration. "It happens because a lot of light rays can pile up along curves."
Drawn by the mathematically-inclined artist Leonardo da Vinci in the early 16th century, caustics can be seen elsewhere in everyday life, including sunlight reflecting across a swimming pool's surface and choppy wave-light patterns reflecting off a boat hull.
Caustics also show up in gravitational lensing, a phenomenon caused by galaxies so massive that their gravity bends and distorts light from more distant galaxies. "It turns out that their gravity is so powerful that some light rays are also going to pile up along curves," said Petters, a gravitational lensing expert.
"Mother Nature has to be creating these things," Petters said. "It's amazing how what we can see in a coffee cup extends into a mathematical theorem with effects in the cosmos."
From the vantage point of Earth, the entire cosmos looks like a vast interplay of gravity and light that can extend far back into spacetime. "As with any illumination pattern, some areas will be brighter than others," Petters said. "And the brightest parts will be along these caustic curves."
Interpreting data from telescope surveys correctly requires understanding the distortions inherent in lensing, which sometimes warps a more distant point of light into multiple and magnified copies of themselves.
Petters and other researchers have previously found that, if such a light source seems to be juxtaposed within the confines of a caustic arch, two duplicate images will appear to be positioned abnormally close to each other and also seem equally bright. And because these clones are of seemingly equal brightness, subtracting one luminosity from the other results in a difference of zero.
In an article appearing in the March 23 Journal of Mathematical Physics, Petters and graduate student Amir Aazami extended the mathematics of such relatively simple examples to include what Petters called "higher order caustics." In such situations the interplay of light and gravity may extend further into spacetime and undergo various forms of "caustic metamorphosis" in the process.
Aazami was informally testing out a special case of their evolving caustics theorem called an "ellyptic umbilic" by using a technical computing software program called Mathematica when he noticed a pattern.
"It kept getting zero over and over again," Aazami said, no matter what scenario he tried the software on. "So I thought, 'it's making a mistake.' And I went back and looked again, and I kept getting zero. And I said, 'this is beginning to make sense!' That was the 'Ah Ha!' moment."
Petters realized his graduate student had found a universal mathematical principle so pervasive that it can impose balance on the most complicated gravitational lensing illusions. For instance, if lensing produces four light source copies of uneven brightnesses, the relative dimness of some is precisely balanced by the relative luminosity of others so they cancel each other out.
"It's miraculous that they cancel out," Petters said. "This relates to very sophisticated mathematics that you would never think could have anything to do with nature."
The Duke researchers said that for the simplest caustics, the theorem has already been corroborated by a few actual gravitational lensing observations. And they expect the higher order caustics to be observed once the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), now being assembled in Chile, begins what Petters called "the most massive survey of the sky known" in a few years.
"We feel very confident that these universal invariants will show themselves in the data to come from the LSST," he said.
Another scenario he predicts are exceptions to the rule: "For one of the higher order caustics, if there are two pairs of lensed images that are close to each other but not equally bright, then the theorem is violated," he said.
"The reason would be some substructure in the galaxy," he said, likely dark matter near one of the images that causes it to be demagnified.
Dark matter is a mysterious substance that astronomers cannot directly observe but can "sense" by its gravitational tug on light. By using the LSST in conjunction with their theorem, astronomers "would be able to identify dark matter substructures in complex galactic systems," Petters predicted
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Man Stuck In Tree Suffocates, Dies
PHOENIX -- A man is dead after being trapped more than 50 feet up in a palm tree, but fire officials say it probably wasn't the chainsaw wound to his leg that killed him.
The man was hired to cut palm trees at a residence on Earll Drive near 26th Place. At one point, a portion of the palm tree he was working on slid, fell down and trapped him.
The man's two coworkers climbed the tree to help him before someone called 911 an estimated 15 minutes later, according to the Phoenix Fire Department.
A technical rescue crew was dispatched, and firefighters managed to coax one of the coworkers down before climbing the tree and bringing the second down.
According to Steven Oetinger, a member of the crew that attempted the rescue, when they cleared the brush at the top of the tree and reached the victim, he was dead.
"When we got to the victim, the victim was not breathing (and) did not have a pulse," Oetinger said. "The crown of the tree was pretty much sitting on top of his lap."
A chainsaw had also severely wounded the man's leg.
"They said he had a pretty good laceration," said Battalion Five Chief Jim Walter. "They said it was at least down to the bone."
However, Walter said, "That's probably not what killed him. It was the fact that he couldn't breathe with the weight of the palm fronds on his chest."
When a crown of a palm tree falls, "you have several hundred pounds -- up to a thousand pounds -- on you … You just can't breathe," Walter said.
Oetinger said this sort of incident is a common occurrence, and fire crews make it a point to train for it.
"Palm tree workers will get up into the tree, and large portions of the dead prongs will break away from the tree, slide down on top of them, entrapping them," he said.
The name of the victim has not been released. The Phoenix Police Department will investigate the incident.
The man was hired to cut palm trees at a residence on Earll Drive near 26th Place. At one point, a portion of the palm tree he was working on slid, fell down and trapped him.
The man's two coworkers climbed the tree to help him before someone called 911 an estimated 15 minutes later, according to the Phoenix Fire Department.
A technical rescue crew was dispatched, and firefighters managed to coax one of the coworkers down before climbing the tree and bringing the second down.
According to Steven Oetinger, a member of the crew that attempted the rescue, when they cleared the brush at the top of the tree and reached the victim, he was dead.
"When we got to the victim, the victim was not breathing (and) did not have a pulse," Oetinger said. "The crown of the tree was pretty much sitting on top of his lap."
A chainsaw had also severely wounded the man's leg.
"They said he had a pretty good laceration," said Battalion Five Chief Jim Walter. "They said it was at least down to the bone."
However, Walter said, "That's probably not what killed him. It was the fact that he couldn't breathe with the weight of the palm fronds on his chest."
When a crown of a palm tree falls, "you have several hundred pounds -- up to a thousand pounds -- on you … You just can't breathe," Walter said.
Oetinger said this sort of incident is a common occurrence, and fire crews make it a point to train for it.
"Palm tree workers will get up into the tree, and large portions of the dead prongs will break away from the tree, slide down on top of them, entrapping them," he said.
The name of the victim has not been released. The Phoenix Police Department will investigate the incident.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
You are being lied to about pirates
By Johann Hari
Who imagined that in 2009, the world’s governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the U.S. to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth.
But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as “one of the great menaces of our times” have an extraordinary story to tell - and some justice on their side.
Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the “golden age of piracy” - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: Pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can’t?
In his book “Villains of All Nations,” the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London’s East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the cat o’ nine tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.
Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls “one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the 18th century.”
They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed “quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy.” This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.
The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: “What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live.”
In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its 9 million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.
Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.
Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the U.N. envoy to Somalia, tells me: “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it.” Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to “dispose” of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: “Nothing. There has been no cleanup, no compensation and no prevention.”
At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia’s seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300 million worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia’s unprotected seas.
The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: “If nothing is done, there soon won’t be much fish left in our coastal waters.”
This is the context in which the men we are calling “pirates” have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a “tax” on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coast Guard of Somalia - and it’s not hard to see why.
In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was “to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters … We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas.” William Scott would understand those words.
No, this doesn’t make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Program supplies. But the “pirates” have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defense of the country’s territorial waters.”
One of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was “to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters … We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas.”
During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America’s founding fathers paid pirates to protect America’s territorial waters, because they had no navy or coast guard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?
Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn’t act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, we begin to shriek about “evil.” If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gunboats to root out Somalia’s criminals.
The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarized by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know “what he meant by keeping possession of the sea.” The pirate smiled and responded: “What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor.”
Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?
Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper. He has reported from Iraq, Israel/ Palestine, the Congo, the Central African Republic, Venezuela, Peru and the U.S., and his journalism has appeared in publications all over the world. To contact him, email johann@johannhari.com or visit his website at JohannHari.com. This column previously appeared in the Independent and Huffington Post, where the following postscript was added:
Postscript: Some commentators seem bemused by the fact that both toxic dumping and the theft of fish are happening in the same place - wouldn’t this make the fish contaminated? In fact, Somalia’s coastline is vast, stretching 3,300km (over 2,000 miles). Imagine how easy it would be - without any coast guard or army - to steal fish from Florida and dump nuclear waste on California, and you get the idea. These events are happening in different places but with the same horrible effect: death for the locals and stirred-up piracy. There’s no contradiction.
Who imagined that in 2009, the world’s governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the U.S. to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth.
But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as “one of the great menaces of our times” have an extraordinary story to tell - and some justice on their side.
Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the “golden age of piracy” - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: Pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can’t?
In his book “Villains of All Nations,” the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London’s East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the cat o’ nine tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.
Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls “one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the 18th century.”
They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed “quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy.” This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.
The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: “What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live.”
In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its 9 million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.
Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.
Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the U.N. envoy to Somalia, tells me: “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it.” Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to “dispose” of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: “Nothing. There has been no cleanup, no compensation and no prevention.”
At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia’s seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300 million worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia’s unprotected seas.
The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: “If nothing is done, there soon won’t be much fish left in our coastal waters.”
This is the context in which the men we are calling “pirates” have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a “tax” on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coast Guard of Somalia - and it’s not hard to see why.
In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was “to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters … We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas.” William Scott would understand those words.
No, this doesn’t make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Program supplies. But the “pirates” have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defense of the country’s territorial waters.”
One of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was “to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters … We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas.”
During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America’s founding fathers paid pirates to protect America’s territorial waters, because they had no navy or coast guard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?
Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn’t act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, we begin to shriek about “evil.” If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gunboats to root out Somalia’s criminals.
The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarized by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know “what he meant by keeping possession of the sea.” The pirate smiled and responded: “What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor.”
Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?
Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper. He has reported from Iraq, Israel/ Palestine, the Congo, the Central African Republic, Venezuela, Peru and the U.S., and his journalism has appeared in publications all over the world. To contact him, email johann@johannhari.com or visit his website at JohannHari.com. This column previously appeared in the Independent and Huffington Post, where the following postscript was added:
Postscript: Some commentators seem bemused by the fact that both toxic dumping and the theft of fish are happening in the same place - wouldn’t this make the fish contaminated? In fact, Somalia’s coastline is vast, stretching 3,300km (over 2,000 miles). Imagine how easy it would be - without any coast guard or army - to steal fish from Florida and dump nuclear waste on California, and you get the idea. These events are happening in different places but with the same horrible effect: death for the locals and stirred-up piracy. There’s no contradiction.
Friday, April 10, 2009
The Road to Area 51
After decades of denying the facility's existence, five former insiders speak out
Area 51. It's the most famous military institution in the world that doesn't officially exist. If it did, it would be found about 100 miles outside Las Vegas in Nevada's high desert, tucked between an Air Force base and an abandoned nuclear testing ground. Then again, maybe not— the U.S. government refuses to say. You can't drive anywhere close to it, and until recently, the airspace overhead was restricted—all the way to outer space. Any mention of Area 51 gets redacted from official documents, even those that have been declassified for decades.
It has become the holy grail for conspiracy theorists, with UFOlogists positing that the Pentagon reverse engineers flying saucers and keeps extraterrestrial beings stored in freezers. Urban legend has it that Area 51 is connected by underground tunnels and trains to other secret facilities around the country. In 2001, Katie Couric told Today Show audiences that 7 percent of Americans doubt the moon landing happened—that it was staged in the Nevada desert. Millions of X-Files fans believe the truth may be "out there," but more likely it's concealed inside Area 51's Strangelove-esque hangars—buildings that, though confirmed by Google Earth, the government refuses to acknowledge.
It has become the holy grail for conspiracy theorists, with UFOlogists positing that the Pentagon reverse engineers flying saucers and keeps extraterrestrial beings stored in freezers. Urban legend has it that Area 51 is connected by underground tunnels and trains to other secret facilities around the country. In 2001, Katie Couric told Today Show audiences that 7 percent of Americans doubt the moon landing happened—that it was staged in the Nevada desert. Millions of X-Files fans believe the truth may be "out there," but more likely it's concealed inside Area 51's Strangelove-esque hangars—buildings that, though confirmed by Google Earth, the government refuses to acknowledge.
The problem is the myths of Area 51 are hard to dispute if no one can speak on the record about what actually happened there. Well, now, for the first time, someone is ready to talk—in fact, five men are, and their stories rival the most outrageous of rumors. Colonel Hugh "Slip" Slater, 87, was commander of the Area 51 base in the 1960s. Edward Lovick, 90, featured in "What Plane?" in LA's March issue, spent three decades radar testing some of the world's most famous aircraft (including the U-2, the A-12 OXCART and the F-117). Kenneth Collins, 80, a CIA experimental test pilot, was given the silver star. Thornton "T.D." Barnes, 72, was an Area 51 special-projects engineer. And Harry Martin, 77, was one of the men in charge of the base's half-million-gallon monthly supply of spy-plane fuels. Here are a few of their best stories—for the record:
On May 24, 1963, Collins flew out of Area 51's restricted airspace in a top-secret spy plane code-named OXCART, built by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. He was flying over Utah when the aircraft pitched, flipped and headed toward a crash. He ejected into a field of weeds.
Almost 46 years later, in late fall of 2008, sitting in a coffee shop in the San Fernando Valley, Collins remembers that day with the kind of clarity the threat of a national security breach evokes: "Three guys came driving toward me in a pickup. I saw they had the aircraft canopy in the back. They offered to take me to my plane." Until that moment, no civilian without a top-secret security clearance had ever laid eyes on the airplane Collins was flying. "I told them not to go near the aircraft. I said it had a nuclear weapon on-board." The story fit right into the Cold War backdrop of the day, as many atomic tests took place in Nevada. Spooked, the men drove Collins to the local highway patrol. The CIA disguised the accident as involving a generic Air Force plane, the F-105, which is how the event is still listed in official records.
As for the guys who picked him up, they were tracked down and told to sign national security nondisclosures. As part of Collins' own debriefing, the CIA asked the decorated pilot to take truth serum. "They wanted to see if there was anything I'd for-gotten about the events leading up to the crash." The Sodium Pento-thal experience went without a hitch—except for the reaction of his wife, Jane.On May 24, 1963, Collins flew out of Area 51's restricted airspace in a top-secret spy plane code-named OXCART, built by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. He was flying over Utah when the aircraft pitched, flipped and headed toward a crash. He ejected into a field of weeds.
Almost 46 years later, in late fall of 2008, sitting in a coffee shop in the San Fernando Valley, Collins remembers that day with the kind of clarity the threat of a national security breach evokes: "Three guys came driving toward me in a pickup. I saw they had the aircraft canopy in the back. They offered to take me to my plane." Until that moment, no civilian without a top-secret security clearance had ever laid eyes on the airplane Collins was flying. "I told them not to go near the aircraft. I said it had a nuclear weapon on-board." The story fit right into the Cold War backdrop of the day, as many atomic tests took place in Nevada. Spooked, the men drove Collins to the local highway patrol. The CIA disguised the accident as involving a generic Air Force plane, the F-105, which is how the event is still listed in official records.
"Late Sunday, three CIA agents brought me home. One drove my car; the other two carried me inside and laid me down on the couch. I was loopy from the drugs. They handed Jane the car keys and left without saying a word." The only conclusion she could draw was that her husband had gone out and gotten drunk. "Boy, was she mad," says Collins with a chuckle.
At the time of Collins' accident, CIA pilots had been flying spy planes in and out of Area 51 for eight years, with the express mission of providing the intelligence to prevent nuclear war. Aerial reconnaissance was a major part of the CIA's preemptive efforts, while the rest of America built bomb shelters and hoped for the best.
"It wasn't always called Area 51," says Lovick, the physicist who developed stealth technology. His boss, legendary aircraft designer Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson, called the place Paradise Ranch to entice men to leave their families and "rough it" out in the Nevada desert in the name of science and the fight against the evil empire. "Test pilot Tony LeVier found the place by flying over it," says Lovick. "It was a lake bed called Groom Lake, selected for testing because it was flat and far from anything. It was kept secret because the CIA tested U-2s there."
When Frances Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk, Russia, in 1960, the U-2 program lost its cover. But the CIA already had Lovick and some 200 scientists, engineers and pilots working at Area 51 on the A-12 OXCART, which would outfox Soviet radar using height, stealth and speed.
Col. Slater was in the outfit of six pilots who flew OXCART missions during the Vietnam War. Over a Cuban meat and cheese sandwich at the Bahama Breeze restaurant off the Las Vegas Strip, he says, "I was recruited for the Area after working with the CIA's classified Black Cat Squadron, which flew U-2 missions over denied territory in Mainland China. After that, I was told, 'You should come out to Nevada and work on something interesting we're doing out there.' "
Even though Slater considers himself a fighter pilot at heart—he flew 84 missions in World War II—the opportunity to work at Area 51 was impossible to pass up. "When I learned about this Mach-3 aircraft called OXCART, it was completely intriguing to me—this idea of flying three times the speed of sound! No one knew a thing about the program. I asked my wife, Barbara, if she wanted to move to Las Vegas, and she said yes. And I said, 'You won't see me but on the weekends,' and she said, 'That's fine!' " At this recollection, Slater laughs heartily. Barbara, dining with us, laughs as well. The two, married for 63 years, are rarely apart today.
"We couldn't have told you any of this a year ago," Slater says. "Now we can't tell it to you fast enough." That is because in 2007, the CIA began declassifying the 50-year-old OXCART program. Today, there's a scramble for eyewitnesses to fill in the information gaps. Only a few of the original players are left. Two more of them join me and the Slaters for lunch: Barnes, formerly an Area 51 special-projects engineer, with his wife, Doris; and Martin, one of those overseeing the OXCART's specially mixed jet fuel (regular fuel explodes at extreme height, temperature and speed), with his wife, Mary. Because the men were sworn to secrecy for so many decades, their wives still get a kick out of hearing the secret tales.
Barnes was married at 17 (Doris was 16). To support his wife, he became an electronics wizard, buying broken television sets, fixing them up and reselling them for five times the original price. He went from living in bitter poverty on a Texas Panhandle ranch with no electricity to buying his new bride a dream home before he was old enough to vote. As a soldier in the Korean War, Barnes demonstrated an uncanny aptitude for radar and Nike missile systems, which made him a prime target for recruitment by the CIA—which indeed happened when he was 22. By 30, he was handling nuclear secrets.
"The agency located each guy at the top of a certain field and put us together for the programs at Area 51," says Barnes. As a security precaution, he couldn't reveal his birth name—he went by the moniker Thunder. Coworkers traveled in separate cars, helicopters and airplanes. Barnes and his group kept to themselves, even in the mess hall. "Our special-projects group was the most classified team since the Manhattan Project," he says.
Harry Martin's specialty was fuel. Handpicked by the CIA from the Air Force, he underwent rigorous psychological and physical tests to see if he was up for the job. When he passed, the CIA moved his family to Nevada. Because OXCART had to refuel frequently, the CIA kept supplies at secret facilities around the globe. Martin often traveled to these bases for quality-control checks. He tells of preparing for a top-secret mission from Area 51 to Thule, Greenland. "My wife took one look at me in these arctic boots and this big hooded coat, and she knew not to ask where I was going."
So, what of those urban legends—the UFOs studied in secret, the underground tunnels connecting clandestine facilities? For decades, the men at Area 51 thought they'd take their secrets to the grave. At the height of the Cold War, they cultivated anonymity while pursuing some of the country's most covert projects. Conspiracy theories were left to popular imagination. But in talking with Collins, Lovick, Slater, Barnes and Martin, it is clear that much of the folklore was spun from threads of fact.
As for the myths of reverse engineering of flying saucers, Barnes offers some insight: "We did reverse engineer a lot of foreign technology, including the Soviet MiG fighter jet out at the Area"—even though the MiG wasn't shaped like a flying saucer. As for the underground-tunnel talk, that, too, was born of truth. Barnes worked on a nuclear-rocket program called Project NERVA, inside underground chambers at Jackass Flats, in Area 51's backyard. "Three test-cell facilities were connected by railroad, but everything else was underground," he says.
And the quintessential Area 51 conspiracy—that the Pentagon keeps captured alien spacecraft there, which they fly around in restricted airspace? Turns out that one's pretty easy to debunk. The shape of OXCART was unprece-dented, with its wide, disk-like fuselage designed to carry vast quantities of fuel. Commercial pilots cruising over Nevada at dusk would look up and see the bottom of OXCART whiz by at 2,000-plus mph. The aircraft's tita-nium body, moving as fast as a bullet, would reflect the sun's rays in a way that could make anyone think, UFO.
In all, 2,850 OXCART test flights were flown out of Area 51 while Slater was in charge. "That's a lot of UFO sightings!" Slater adds. Commercial pilots would report them to the FAA, and "when they'd land in California, they'd be met by FBI agents who'd make them sign nondisclosure forms." But not everyone kept quiet, hence the birth of Area 51's UFO lore. The sightings incited uproar in Nevada and the surrounding areas and forced the Air Force to open Project BLUE BOOK to log each claim.
Since only a few Air Force officials were cleared for OXCART (even though it was a joint CIA/USAF project), many UFO sightings raised internal military alarms. Some generals believed the Russians might be sending stealth craft over American skies to incite paranoia and create widespread panic of alien invasion. Today, BLUE BOOK findings are housed in 37 cubic feet of case files at the National Archives—74,000 pages of reports. A keyword search brings up no mention of the top-secret OXCART or Area 51.
Project BLUE BOOK was shut down in 1969—more than a year after OXCART was retired. But what continues at America's most clandestine military facility could take another 40 years to disclose.
ANNIE JACOBSEN is an investigative reporter who sat for more than 500 interviews after she broke the story on terrorists probing commercial airliners. When she isn’t digging into intelligence issues for the likes of the National Review, she’s snapping together Legos with her two boys.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
ANZ Royal Bank Nation third most corrupt
| Written by George McLeod | |
| Thursday, 09 April 2009 | |
| Corruption Index
The report by the Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (PERC) scores 16 Asian countries based on interviews with 1,700 expatriate business leaders. It ranked Singapore and Hong Kong as the Asian region's least corrupt countries, with Indonesia and Thailand at the bottom, below Cambodia. The organisation was not available for comment Wednesday. Local business leaders welcomed the report's findings, saying it corresponded to the oft-overlooked reality on the ground. "I have always maintained that Cambodia isn't as bad as it is made out to be," said John Brinsden, vice chairman for ACLEDA Bank and a spokesman for the International Business Club of Cambodia. "I've been to a number of countries where I've seen corruption at a worse scale than in Cambodia. It's nice to see Cambodia isn't at the bottom of this report," he told the Post Wednesday. He cautioned that corruption remains an issue for businesses in Cambodia, but said other problems were more serious. "Probably the biggest problem in Cambodia, from a business perspective, is [the lack of] availability of cheap electricity and poor enforcement of laws, as well as infrastructure. Corruption is not the top of the list," he said. [corruption] is an issue that many investors seem to find a way to work around. According to the head of Cambodia's largest investment fund, corruption has not prevented Cambodia from being a favourable environment to do business. "[Corruption] is an issue that many investors seem to find a way to work around," said Douglas Clayton, managing partner of Leopard Capital. "And when we compare the expenditure on the airport in Thailand and the airport in Cambodia versus the final product delivered, you can draw your own conclusions," he said. Conflicting reports Despite such consensus within the private sector, other surveys suggest that corruption is the No 1 concern of businesses in Cambodia. The World Bank annual report released in January said that more than 50 percent of businesses cited corruption as a top complaint, followed by macroeconomic stability and anticompetitive informal practices. "Corruption remains widespread, in its many forms.... The perception of corruption is high, even compared to countries at the same level of development," said the report. The report also said that poor governance in Cambodia is a major problem. "There are multiple facets of corruption: (i) at the service delivery (ii) in public procurement (both small and large contracts); and (iii) in gaining favour for policy decisions," the report states. Corruption watchdog Transparency International also issued a harsh assessment of Cambodia's level of corruption, putting the country at 166 out of 181 countries. Thailand was ranked 80 and Indonesia 126 by the same organisation in its report last year. "It depends on how they measure [corruption]," said Kevin Britten, managing director of The Secretary. "I have always been disappointed in my business dealings with Thailand. "But I think I am quite typical in saying that I have had good experiences in Cambodia." The PERC system rated countries from zero to 10, with zero as the least corrupt and 10 as the most corrupt. Indonesia earned a score of 8.32, Thailand 7.63 and Cambodia 7.25. |
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Red Cross says doctors helped CIA "torture"
By Jane Sutton Jane Sutton – Tue Apr 7, 4:04 pm ET
MIAMI (Reuters) – Health workers violated medical ethics when they helped interrogate terrorism suspects who were tortured at secret CIA prisons overseas, the International Committee of the Red Cross said.
The medical workers, thought to be doctors and psychologists, monitored prisoners while they were mistreated at CIA prisons and advised interrogators whether to continue, adjust or halt the abuse, the ICRC said in a report based on interviews with 14 prisoners in 2007.
One prisoner alleged that medical personnel monitored his blood oxygen levels while he was subjected to waterboarding, a simulated drowning designed to induce panic and widely considered to be torture, the ICRC said.
Other prisoners said that as they stood shackled with their arms chained above their heads, a doctor regularly measured the swelling in their legs and signaled when they should be allowed to sit down.
The ICRC interviewed 14 men who had been held in secret CIA prisons overseas before being sent to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2006.
The 14 are considered by the United States to be "high-value" al Qaeda suspects who plotted or carried out mass murders, including the September 11 attacks and the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings. They had been held by the CIA, most for more than three years, in extreme isolation and had not been allowed contact with each other when the ICRC interviewed them at Guantanamo in November 2007.
The ICRC said their claims had credence because they gave similar accounts of their treatment, including the actions of medical monitors whose names they never learned.
The ICRC monitors compliance with the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of war captives and keeps its reports secret, sharing them only with the detaining government.
The report, written in 2007, was posted on the New York Review of Books website on Monday night by journalist Mark Danner, who has not said publicly how he obtained it.
"VIOLATED ETHICAL DUTY"
He first published excerpts last month, including a portion in which the ICRC concluded the al Qaeda captives' treatment in the CIA prisons "constituted torture" and violated international law.
The report alleges collars were placed around some prisoners' necks and used to slam their heads against the walls, and that they were forced to stand with their arms shackled above them for two or three days and left to urinate or defecate on themselves.
The prisoners told the ICRC they were beaten and kicked, left naked for long periods, subjected to sleep deprivation, loud music, cold temperatures, rape threats and forced shaving. Some said they were denied solid food unless they cooperated with interrogators and one said he was confined in a crouching position in a box too short to stand in.
A previously undisclosed portion of the report concluded that medical workers who monitored or took part in the interrogations had violated their ethical duty to do no harm, preserve dignity and act in patients' best interest.
The ICRC said "any interrogation process that requires a health professional to either pronounce on the subject's fitness to withstand such a procedure, or which requires a health professional to monitor the actual procedure, must have inherent health risks."
"As such, the interrogation process is contrary to international law and the participation of health personnel in such a process is contrary to international standards of medical ethics," the ICRC concluded.
The "high-value" captives quoted in the report are still at the Guantanamo prison, which President Barack Obama has ordered shut down by January 2010, and debate continues over what should be done with them.
A military judge released a statement last month in which some of them bragged that they were "terrorists to the bone".
Bush administration officials have said the "enhanced interrogation" of those prisoners produced information that helped thwart attacks but have never provided specifics.
(Editing by Pascal Fletcher and Jackie Frank)
MIAMI (Reuters) – Health workers violated medical ethics when they helped interrogate terrorism suspects who were tortured at secret CIA prisons overseas, the International Committee of the Red Cross said.
The medical workers, thought to be doctors and psychologists, monitored prisoners while they were mistreated at CIA prisons and advised interrogators whether to continue, adjust or halt the abuse, the ICRC said in a report based on interviews with 14 prisoners in 2007.
One prisoner alleged that medical personnel monitored his blood oxygen levels while he was subjected to waterboarding, a simulated drowning designed to induce panic and widely considered to be torture, the ICRC said.
Other prisoners said that as they stood shackled with their arms chained above their heads, a doctor regularly measured the swelling in their legs and signaled when they should be allowed to sit down.
The ICRC interviewed 14 men who had been held in secret CIA prisons overseas before being sent to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2006.
The 14 are considered by the United States to be "high-value" al Qaeda suspects who plotted or carried out mass murders, including the September 11 attacks and the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings. They had been held by the CIA, most for more than three years, in extreme isolation and had not been allowed contact with each other when the ICRC interviewed them at Guantanamo in November 2007.
The ICRC said their claims had credence because they gave similar accounts of their treatment, including the actions of medical monitors whose names they never learned.
The ICRC monitors compliance with the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of war captives and keeps its reports secret, sharing them only with the detaining government.
The report, written in 2007, was posted on the New York Review of Books website on Monday night by journalist Mark Danner, who has not said publicly how he obtained it.
"VIOLATED ETHICAL DUTY"
He first published excerpts last month, including a portion in which the ICRC concluded the al Qaeda captives' treatment in the CIA prisons "constituted torture" and violated international law.
The report alleges collars were placed around some prisoners' necks and used to slam their heads against the walls, and that they were forced to stand with their arms shackled above them for two or three days and left to urinate or defecate on themselves.
The prisoners told the ICRC they were beaten and kicked, left naked for long periods, subjected to sleep deprivation, loud music, cold temperatures, rape threats and forced shaving. Some said they were denied solid food unless they cooperated with interrogators and one said he was confined in a crouching position in a box too short to stand in.
A previously undisclosed portion of the report concluded that medical workers who monitored or took part in the interrogations had violated their ethical duty to do no harm, preserve dignity and act in patients' best interest.
The ICRC said "any interrogation process that requires a health professional to either pronounce on the subject's fitness to withstand such a procedure, or which requires a health professional to monitor the actual procedure, must have inherent health risks."
"As such, the interrogation process is contrary to international law and the participation of health personnel in such a process is contrary to international standards of medical ethics," the ICRC concluded.
The "high-value" captives quoted in the report are still at the Guantanamo prison, which President Barack Obama has ordered shut down by January 2010, and debate continues over what should be done with them.
A military judge released a statement last month in which some of them bragged that they were "terrorists to the bone".
Bush administration officials have said the "enhanced interrogation" of those prisoners produced information that helped thwart attacks but have never provided specifics.
(Editing by Pascal Fletcher and Jackie Frank)
Monday, April 6, 2009
Astronomers: Dark Matter Guides Universe's Structure
Posted by Bob Evans on Apr 5, 2009 02:00 PM at informationweek.com
A 10-year study of 100,000 galaxies close to our own offers compelling proof that long-hypothesized "dark matter" does exist and is in fact a guiding force behind the structure of the universe, a team of Australian, British, and American astronomers revealed this week.
Saying that "the universe we see is really quite structured," one of the lead researchers explained that the 10-year "census" of galaxies near our own Milky Way offers powerful evidence that this invisible dark matter "seems to hold the galaxies together."
The dark matter's influence on galaxies "stops their constituent stars from flying off and it seems to be driving the large-scale galaxy clusters and super clusters" that are the largest objects in the universe, said Dr. Heath Jones of the Anglo Australian Observatory in an article on the website of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Offering rich details about the direction, speed, shape, and evolving structure of 100,000 galaxies, the 10-year study offered great promise because of its exhaustive scope: it analyzed those dynamic properties for a much larger number of galaxies than any other study had ever attempted.
In reviewing the data from the study, Jones said, it became clear that directly observable visible objects could not possibly have exerted sufficient gravitational force to account for all of the movement and dynamics of the galaxies being studied.
And in hypothesing about what other, nonvisible forces could account for that additional gravitational effect, theories about dark matter completed that equation very nicely, he told the ABC:
"The galaxies just aren't uniform. They are scattered throughout the universe," he said. "What we find is that they tend to clump and cluster together. So you'll get galaxies clustering along nice delicate filamentary chains. You get some galaxies that will congregate in their clusters and you will get clusters of galaxies collecting in super clusters of galaxies, so the universe that we see is really quite structured…."Astronomers know that this dark matter must exist in the universe," he said. "We can't see it with our telescopes directly, but by studying large objects like galaxies and how they move with respect to each other we can infer its existence quite accurately."
In addition to the compelling evidence the study provides for the existence of dark matter, Jones said, it also offers equally compelling proof that the universe is expanding and will continue to do so, rather than at some point collapsing back in upon itself as some astronomers have theorized.
So back in the world of IT – which for a while looked like it, too, would expand infinitely -- perhaps dark matter will turn out to be the devilish factor that has long distorted ERP projects and seems to torment most government IT efforts; maybe Jones and his team can tackle that in a future study.
And in the meantime, the new evidence that the universe is expanding forever will be of no comfort to the existentially tormented boyhood character of Alvie Singer in the classic movie, "Annie Hall."Friday, April 3, 2009
Simulations and Ancient Magnetism Suggest Mantle Plumes May Bend Deep Beneath Earth's Crust
By: Contact: Jonathan Sherwood
jonathan.sherwood@rochester.edu
585.273.4726
Computer simulations, paleomagnetism and plate motion histories described in today's issue of Science reveal how hotspots, centers of erupting magma that sit atop columns of hot mantle that were once thought to remain firmly fixed in place, in fact move beneath Earth's crust.
Scientists believe mantle plumes are responsible for some of the Earth's most dramatic geological features, such as the Hawaiian islands and Yellowstone National Park. Some plumes may have shallow sources, but a few, such as the one beneath Hawaii, appear to be rooted in the deepest mantle, near Earth's core.
Such deep plumes have long been thought to be so immobile that the motions of continental and oceanic plates were measured against them, but University of Rochester geophysicist John Tarduno and his colleagues at Ludwig-Maximilians, Münster, and Stanford universities have combined magnetic evidence from the Pacific sea floor with computer modeling to show how the plume beneath Hawaii likely bent—its root barely moving while its top moved nearly 1,000 miles across the underside of the Pacific Ocean.
"In 2003, we showed that the hotspot—the plume—that created the Hawaiian chain of islands must have moved. We suggested that mantle motion was involved, but the cause of the change in motion remained a mystery," says Tarduno.
Tarduno cites five possible mechanisms in Science, but one in particular, he says, stands out as a likely explanation for the way the Hawaiian chain of islands and seamounts formed. "We know from theory and from models, including work by Ulrich Hansen and Norm Sleep, that a plume can move slightly near its base, potentially contributing to motion of the Hawaiian hotspot and hotspots elsewhere," says Tarduno. "But a key observation came from a numerical simulation resulting from Hans-Peter Bunge's models, which show how the upper end of the plume, starting at 1500 depth, can drift like a candle flame drawn toward a draft."
The draft in this case, he says, is an ancient oceanic ridge in the Pacific where the seafloor spreads, allowing magma to bubble up through the ocean crust. The ancient ridge is now lost to subduction, but its past presence is recorded by a few magnetic lineations in oceanic crust south of the Bering Sea. The ridge was active around 80 million years ago but extinguished completely by 47 million years ago. Those dates correspond very closely with the motion history Tarduno detected in the Hawaiian hotspot.
In 2001, Tarduno and an international team spent two months aboard the ocean drilling ship JOIDES Resolution, retrieving samples of rock from the Emperor-Hawaiian seamount chain miles beneath the sea's surface. The team started at the northern end of the chain, near Japan, braving cold, foggy days and dodging the occasional typhoon to pull up several long cores of rock as they worked their way south. Using a highly sensitive magnetic device called a SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device), Tarduno's team discovered that the magnetism of the cores did not fit with the conventional wisdom of fixed hotspots.
The magnetization of the lavas recovered from the northern end of the Emperor-Hawaiian chain suggested these rocks were formed much farther north than the current hotspot, which is forming Hawaii today. As magma forms, magnetite, a magnetically sensitive mineral, records the Earth's magnetic field just like a compass. As the magma cools and becomes solid rock, the "compass" orientation is locked in place, preserving a precise record of the latitude of origin.
If the Hawaiian hot spot had always been fixed at its current location of 19 degrees north, then all the rocks of the entire chain should have formed and cooled there, preserving the magnetic signature of 19 degrees even as the Pacific plate dragged the new stones north-westward. Tarduno's team, however, found that the more northern their samples, the higher the samples' latitude. The northern-most lavas they recovered were formed at over 30 degrees north about 80 million years ago, nearly a thousand miles from where the hot spot currently lies.
"The only way to account for these findings is if the hotspot itself was moving south," says Tarduno. His magnetic readings leveled off at a latitude of nearly 19 degrees, suggesting that the magma plume ceased moving in the area it resides in today.
In addition to the "draft" created by the upwelling of magma into the paleo-ridge, Tarduno says that theory and computer simulations suggest that the most a plume can bend under such conditions would result in about 1,000 miles of movement across the crust—matching what he sees as the distance between the start and stop points of the Hawaiian hotspot. He points out that the bending of a mantle plume helps reconcile the evidence of mobile hotspots on the Earth's crust with the theories that suggest plumes originate in the deepest mantle where high viscosity limits rapid motion. He points out that the plume-ridge capture mechanism may also help explain seemingly anomalous volcanic features on the seafloor, and help geoscientists to use ancient volcanic tracks to understand the past flow of Earth mantle.
This research was funded by the National Science Foundation.
jonathan.sherwood@rochester.edu
585.273.4726
Computer simulations, paleomagnetism and plate motion histories described in today's issue of Science reveal how hotspots, centers of erupting magma that sit atop columns of hot mantle that were once thought to remain firmly fixed in place, in fact move beneath Earth's crust.
Scientists believe mantle plumes are responsible for some of the Earth's most dramatic geological features, such as the Hawaiian islands and Yellowstone National Park. Some plumes may have shallow sources, but a few, such as the one beneath Hawaii, appear to be rooted in the deepest mantle, near Earth's core.
Such deep plumes have long been thought to be so immobile that the motions of continental and oceanic plates were measured against them, but University of Rochester geophysicist John Tarduno and his colleagues at Ludwig-Maximilians, Münster, and Stanford universities have combined magnetic evidence from the Pacific sea floor with computer modeling to show how the plume beneath Hawaii likely bent—its root barely moving while its top moved nearly 1,000 miles across the underside of the Pacific Ocean.
"In 2003, we showed that the hotspot—the plume—that created the Hawaiian chain of islands must have moved. We suggested that mantle motion was involved, but the cause of the change in motion remained a mystery," says Tarduno.
Tarduno cites five possible mechanisms in Science, but one in particular, he says, stands out as a likely explanation for the way the Hawaiian chain of islands and seamounts formed. "We know from theory and from models, including work by Ulrich Hansen and Norm Sleep, that a plume can move slightly near its base, potentially contributing to motion of the Hawaiian hotspot and hotspots elsewhere," says Tarduno. "But a key observation came from a numerical simulation resulting from Hans-Peter Bunge's models, which show how the upper end of the plume, starting at 1500 depth, can drift like a candle flame drawn toward a draft."
The draft in this case, he says, is an ancient oceanic ridge in the Pacific where the seafloor spreads, allowing magma to bubble up through the ocean crust. The ancient ridge is now lost to subduction, but its past presence is recorded by a few magnetic lineations in oceanic crust south of the Bering Sea. The ridge was active around 80 million years ago but extinguished completely by 47 million years ago. Those dates correspond very closely with the motion history Tarduno detected in the Hawaiian hotspot.
In 2001, Tarduno and an international team spent two months aboard the ocean drilling ship JOIDES Resolution, retrieving samples of rock from the Emperor-Hawaiian seamount chain miles beneath the sea's surface. The team started at the northern end of the chain, near Japan, braving cold, foggy days and dodging the occasional typhoon to pull up several long cores of rock as they worked their way south. Using a highly sensitive magnetic device called a SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device), Tarduno's team discovered that the magnetism of the cores did not fit with the conventional wisdom of fixed hotspots.
The magnetization of the lavas recovered from the northern end of the Emperor-Hawaiian chain suggested these rocks were formed much farther north than the current hotspot, which is forming Hawaii today. As magma forms, magnetite, a magnetically sensitive mineral, records the Earth's magnetic field just like a compass. As the magma cools and becomes solid rock, the "compass" orientation is locked in place, preserving a precise record of the latitude of origin.
If the Hawaiian hot spot had always been fixed at its current location of 19 degrees north, then all the rocks of the entire chain should have formed and cooled there, preserving the magnetic signature of 19 degrees even as the Pacific plate dragged the new stones north-westward. Tarduno's team, however, found that the more northern their samples, the higher the samples' latitude. The northern-most lavas they recovered were formed at over 30 degrees north about 80 million years ago, nearly a thousand miles from where the hot spot currently lies.
"The only way to account for these findings is if the hotspot itself was moving south," says Tarduno. His magnetic readings leveled off at a latitude of nearly 19 degrees, suggesting that the magma plume ceased moving in the area it resides in today.
In addition to the "draft" created by the upwelling of magma into the paleo-ridge, Tarduno says that theory and computer simulations suggest that the most a plume can bend under such conditions would result in about 1,000 miles of movement across the crust—matching what he sees as the distance between the start and stop points of the Hawaiian hotspot. He points out that the bending of a mantle plume helps reconcile the evidence of mobile hotspots on the Earth's crust with the theories that suggest plumes originate in the deepest mantle where high viscosity limits rapid motion. He points out that the plume-ridge capture mechanism may also help explain seemingly anomalous volcanic features on the seafloor, and help geoscientists to use ancient volcanic tracks to understand the past flow of Earth mantle.
This research was funded by the National Science Foundation.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Deep Solar Minimum
By Sciencenasa.com
April 1, 2009: The sunspot cycle is behaving a little like the stock market. Just when you think it has hit bottom, it goes even lower.
2008 was a bear. There were no sunspots observed on 266 of the year's 366 days (73%). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days: plot. Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008.
Maybe not. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of March 31st, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year's 90 days (87%).
It adds up to one inescapable conclusion: "We're experiencing a very deep solar minimum," says solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center.
"This is the quietest sun we've seen in almost a century," agrees sunspot expert David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center.
see caption
Above: The sunspot cycle from 1995 to the present. The jagged curve traces actual sunspot counts. Smooth curves are fits to the data and one forecaster's predictions of future activity. Credit: David Hathaway, NASA/MSFC. [more]
Quiet suns come along every 11 years or so. It's a natural part of the sunspot cycle, discovered by German astronomer Heinrich Schwabe in the mid-1800s. Sunspots are planet-sized islands of magnetism on the surface of the sun; they are sources of solar flares, coronal mass ejections and intense UV radiation. Plotting sunspot counts, Schwabe saw that peaks of solar activity were always followed by valleys of relative calm—a clockwork pattern that has held true for more than 200 years: plot.
The current solar minimum is part of that pattern. In fact, it's right on time. "We're due for a bit of quiet—and here it is," says Pesnell.
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But is it supposed to be this quiet? In 2008, the sun set the following records:
A 50-year low in solar wind pressure: Measurements by the Ulysses spacecraft reveal a 20% drop in solar wind pressure since the mid-1990s—the lowest point since such measurements began in the 1960s. The solar wind helps keep galactic cosmic rays out of the inner solar system. With the solar wind flagging, more cosmic rays are permitted to enter, resulting in increased health hazards for astronauts. Weaker solar wind also means fewer geomagnetic storms and auroras on Earth.
A 12-year low in solar "irradiance": Careful measurements by several NASA spacecraft show that the sun's brightness has dropped by 0.02% at visible wavelengths and 6% at extreme UV wavelengths since the solar minimum of 1996. The changes so far are not enough to reverse the course of global warming, but there are some other significant side-effects: Earth's upper atmosphere is heated less by the sun and it is therefore less "puffed up." Satellites in low Earth orbit experience less atmospheric drag, extending their operational lifetimes. Unfortunately, space junk also remains longer in Earth orbit, increasing hazards to spacecraft and satellites.
see caption
Above: Space-age measurements of the total solar irradiance (brightness summed across all wavelengths). This plot, which comes from researcher C. Fröhlich, was shown by Dean Pesnell at the Fall 2008 AGU meeting during a lecture entitled "What is Solar Minimum and Why Should We Care?"
A 55-year low in solar radio emissions: After World War II, astronomers began keeping records of the sun's brightness at radio wavelengths. Records of 10.7 cm flux extend back all the way to the early 1950s. Radio telescopes are now recording the dimmest "radio sun" since 1955: plot. Some researchers believe that the lessening of radio emissions is an indication of weakness in the sun's global magnetic field. No one is certain, however, because the source of these long-monitored radio emissions is not fully understood.
All these lows have sparked a debate about whether the ongoing minimum is "weird", "extreme" or just an overdue "market correction" following a string of unusually intense solar maxima.
"Since the Space Age began in the 1950s, solar activity has been generally high," notes Hathaway. "Five of the ten most intense solar cycles on record have occurred in the last 50 years. We're just not used to this kind of deep calm."
Deep calm was fairly common a hundred years ago. The solar minima of 1901 and 1913, for instance, were even longer than the one we're experiencing now. To match those minima in terms of depth and longevity, the current minimum will have to last at least another year.
see captionIn a way, the calm is exciting, says Pesnell. "For the first time in history, we're getting to see what a deep solar minimum is really like." A fleet of spacecraft including the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), the twin STEREO probes, the five THEMIS probes, Hinode, ACE, Wind, TRACE, AIM, TIMED, Geotail and others are studying the sun and its effects on Earth 24/7 using technology that didn't exist 100 years ago. Their measurements of solar wind, cosmic rays, irradiance and magnetic fields show that solar minimum is much more interesting and profound than anyone expected.
Above: An artist's concept of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. Bristling with advanced sensors, "SDO" is slated to launch later this year--perfect timing to study the ongoing solar minimum. [more]
Modern technology cannot, however, predict what comes next. Competing models by dozens of top solar physicists disagree, sometimes sharply, on when this solar minimum will end and how big the next solar maximum will be. Pesnell has surveyed the scientific literature and prepared a "piano plot" showing the range of predictions. The great uncertainty stems from one simple fact: No one fully understands the underlying physics of the sunspot cycle.
Pesnell believes sunspot counts will pick up again soon, "possibly by the end of the year," to be followed by a solar maximum of below-average intensity in 2012 or 2013.
But like other forecasters, he knows he could be wrong. Bull or bear? Stay tuned for updates.
April 1, 2009: The sunspot cycle is behaving a little like the stock market. Just when you think it has hit bottom, it goes even lower.
2008 was a bear. There were no sunspots observed on 266 of the year's 366 days (73%). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days: plot. Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008.
Maybe not. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of March 31st, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year's 90 days (87%).
It adds up to one inescapable conclusion: "We're experiencing a very deep solar minimum," says solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center.
"This is the quietest sun we've seen in almost a century," agrees sunspot expert David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center.
see caption
Above: The sunspot cycle from 1995 to the present. The jagged curve traces actual sunspot counts. Smooth curves are fits to the data and one forecaster's predictions of future activity. Credit: David Hathaway, NASA/MSFC. [more]
Quiet suns come along every 11 years or so. It's a natural part of the sunspot cycle, discovered by German astronomer Heinrich Schwabe in the mid-1800s. Sunspots are planet-sized islands of magnetism on the surface of the sun; they are sources of solar flares, coronal mass ejections and intense UV radiation. Plotting sunspot counts, Schwabe saw that peaks of solar activity were always followed by valleys of relative calm—a clockwork pattern that has held true for more than 200 years: plot.
The current solar minimum is part of that pattern. In fact, it's right on time. "We're due for a bit of quiet—and here it is," says Pesnell.
Sign up for EXPRESS SCIENCE NEWS delivery
But is it supposed to be this quiet? In 2008, the sun set the following records:
A 50-year low in solar wind pressure: Measurements by the Ulysses spacecraft reveal a 20% drop in solar wind pressure since the mid-1990s—the lowest point since such measurements began in the 1960s. The solar wind helps keep galactic cosmic rays out of the inner solar system. With the solar wind flagging, more cosmic rays are permitted to enter, resulting in increased health hazards for astronauts. Weaker solar wind also means fewer geomagnetic storms and auroras on Earth.
A 12-year low in solar "irradiance": Careful measurements by several NASA spacecraft show that the sun's brightness has dropped by 0.02% at visible wavelengths and 6% at extreme UV wavelengths since the solar minimum of 1996. The changes so far are not enough to reverse the course of global warming, but there are some other significant side-effects: Earth's upper atmosphere is heated less by the sun and it is therefore less "puffed up." Satellites in low Earth orbit experience less atmospheric drag, extending their operational lifetimes. Unfortunately, space junk also remains longer in Earth orbit, increasing hazards to spacecraft and satellites.
see caption
Above: Space-age measurements of the total solar irradiance (brightness summed across all wavelengths). This plot, which comes from researcher C. Fröhlich, was shown by Dean Pesnell at the Fall 2008 AGU meeting during a lecture entitled "What is Solar Minimum and Why Should We Care?"
A 55-year low in solar radio emissions: After World War II, astronomers began keeping records of the sun's brightness at radio wavelengths. Records of 10.7 cm flux extend back all the way to the early 1950s. Radio telescopes are now recording the dimmest "radio sun" since 1955: plot. Some researchers believe that the lessening of radio emissions is an indication of weakness in the sun's global magnetic field. No one is certain, however, because the source of these long-monitored radio emissions is not fully understood.
All these lows have sparked a debate about whether the ongoing minimum is "weird", "extreme" or just an overdue "market correction" following a string of unusually intense solar maxima.
"Since the Space Age began in the 1950s, solar activity has been generally high," notes Hathaway. "Five of the ten most intense solar cycles on record have occurred in the last 50 years. We're just not used to this kind of deep calm."
Deep calm was fairly common a hundred years ago. The solar minima of 1901 and 1913, for instance, were even longer than the one we're experiencing now. To match those minima in terms of depth and longevity, the current minimum will have to last at least another year.
see captionIn a way, the calm is exciting, says Pesnell. "For the first time in history, we're getting to see what a deep solar minimum is really like." A fleet of spacecraft including the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), the twin STEREO probes, the five THEMIS probes, Hinode, ACE, Wind, TRACE, AIM, TIMED, Geotail and others are studying the sun and its effects on Earth 24/7 using technology that didn't exist 100 years ago. Their measurements of solar wind, cosmic rays, irradiance and magnetic fields show that solar minimum is much more interesting and profound than anyone expected.
Above: An artist's concept of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. Bristling with advanced sensors, "SDO" is slated to launch later this year--perfect timing to study the ongoing solar minimum. [more]
Modern technology cannot, however, predict what comes next. Competing models by dozens of top solar physicists disagree, sometimes sharply, on when this solar minimum will end and how big the next solar maximum will be. Pesnell has surveyed the scientific literature and prepared a "piano plot" showing the range of predictions. The great uncertainty stems from one simple fact: No one fully understands the underlying physics of the sunspot cycle.
Pesnell believes sunspot counts will pick up again soon, "possibly by the end of the year," to be followed by a solar maximum of below-average intensity in 2012 or 2013.
But like other forecasters, he knows he could be wrong. Bull or bear? Stay tuned for updates.
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