Science + Logic + Reason

" If you educate a mother you educate a generation" TAO

" Wise people seek solutions; The ignorant only cast blame " TAO

" The keenest sorro win life is to recognoze ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities" - SOPHOCLES

" All judgement is always wrong because it comes from inner pain " - THINK ABOUT IT

THE ONLY CONSATANT IN LIFE IS CHANGE -

THE GREATEST JOY IN NATURE IS THE ABSENCE OF MAN -Bliss Carman

Man is a complex being: he makes desets bloom and lakes die - Gill Stern

[Preciouslife1]

Leonid and others interested in science, here is a great site for Science and medecine news and stories:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/

Enjoy............ **PL1**

[Leonid]

Originally Posted by Preciouslife1

Leonid and others interested in science, here is a great site for Science and medecine news and stories:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/

Enjoy............ **PL1**

Merci beaucoup

[Preciouslife1]

Our planet is sending us warning signals and we as
a whole are not listening to. We go along each day in
our daily lives, going to our jobs and such, either
in ignorance, which just means lack of knowledge or in
denial about what is transpiring all around us.
We, as a race are polluting, poisoning, and altering our planet.
There are 6.5 billion people on the planet they estimate.
They say 7 billion by 2010. That despite diseases like
Aids, Malaria and HepC,and wars which take away millions of lives each year. Plastics, chemicals, fossil fuel burning, and just way too many inhabitants are stressing this planets delicate balance.


Hurricanes, Typhoons, wildfires, earthquakes, Tsunami's, Red Tides, el nino's, disease, all have had marked increases in intensity and frequency.
There is not much you can do as an idividual, but consume a little less, pollute a little less, drive a little less and anything that taxes, stresses our planet.
One person does not seem like a big difference, but 100 million, 200,300 million, a billion sure will.

A hurricane starts in Africa as a tiny swirl of wind that starts to build in intensity until it forms a tropical depression. What can we all do? Well if you have young children, each one of us had better do something, and fast as the planet was whispering to us, pssst hey you..slow it down, now she is talking and before she starts screaming somehow we had better listen. Next year's hurricane season will be upon us soon again, and we are no better prepared for a Category4-5 storm, then this time last year.
Heed the warnings mother earth is saying to us...our children's future depend on it.....

Think locally, plan globally and act accordingly...
Public service warning brought to you sadly as a wake
up call to arms.

Antarctic Ice Sheet Losing Mass, Says University Of Colorado Study
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/03/060302180504.htm

Huge, Wet And Mysterious: New Climate Study Probes The World's Largest Ocean Current
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/03/060301093222.htm

Researchers To Scrutinize Megacity Pollution During Mexico City Field Campaign
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/03/060302175906.htm
Wake up world, we are destroying our only sandbox that we have to play in......sadly.


P*L*1

"To escape criticism: do nothing, say nothing, be nothing."

[Preciouslife1]

View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.


http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/index.html

[Preciouslife1]

England's butterflies are at risk

LONDON, March 4 (UPI) -- England's butterflies are increasingly at risk, with the number of farmland butterflies declining by 30 percent over the last 10 years, a study finds.
The study, released by Biodiversity Minister Jim Knight, was conducted for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs by Butterfly Conservation.
"Butterflies are an iconic species in their own right, and they can be good indicators of the health of the entire ecosystem, so this decline is worrying," said Knight.
"The implications for other insects, birds and mammals are concerning. The fact that this overall decline has taken place across the board means that we need to look very carefully at how we can help butterflies throughout the countryside. We also need to monitor how well environmental stewardship supports butterfly populations -- particularly those most at risk."

[Preciouslife1]

Antarctica is shrinking

Gravity survey shows overall loss in ice. Jacqueline Ruttimann


Losing ground: as ice melts, the Antarctic is shrinking.
© GettyFirst Greenland, and now Antarctica. Research shows that both of these massive ice sheets are getting smaller.

"In my mind, there is no doubt that Antarctica is losing mass," said Isabella Velicogna of the University of Colorado at Boulder, and lead author of a paper published in Science1, the latest study in an avalanche of research on the topic.

Just two weeks ago, Science also published an article stating that Greenland is melting more quickly than it is growing (see 'Glacial pace picks up').

Previous work on both of these areas has shown that the edges of the ice sheets are melting while their centres are growing thanks to increased snowfall. It has been unclear until recently whether the sum of these two effects is a growing or shrinking mass of ice.

The big melt

Antarctica is twice as large as Australia and harbours 90% of Earth's ice. It is divided by the Transantarctic Mountain Range into two main ice sheets: the West Antarctic ice sheet, a large peninsula that stretches from the South Pole towards the southern tip of South America, and the East Antarctic ice sheet that forms the rest of the continent.

There is evidence that West Antarctica is melting. Two sections of the Larsen ice shelf, in the West Antarctic ice sheet, broke apart in 1995 and 2002, which has sped up the melting of glaciers that were behind it.

Whereas the melting of floating ice shelves does not add to sea-level rise, the melting of the sheets behind it does. Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey in South Georgia say that if the entire West Antarctic sheet melts it would catastrophically raise global sea levels by more than six metres. But the East Antarctic ice sheet is thought to be getting bigger thanks to increased snowfall, which could offset the melting.

There is no doubt that Antarctica is losing mass.
Isabella Velicogna,
University of Colorado at Boulder.To get the full picture, Velicogna and her colleagues used a special pair of NASA satellites known as the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE). These orbit in tandem several hundred metres from Earth and provide monthly estimates of Earth's global gravity field and mass distribution. If the lead satellite passes over a structure with a large mass that causes it to speed up, this pulls it away from the trailing satellite. So the changing distance between the two satellites helps to determine the mass of underlying objects.

By looking at data from Antarctica from April 2002 to August 2005, Velicogna calculates that Antarctica is losing something between 72 and 232 cubic kilometres of ice per year. This is *************************alent to an annual rise in the ocean of 0.4 millimetres.

Mass confusion

The main reason for the relatively large uncertainty in how much ice is being lost is that with GRACE data it is hard to distinguish a change in mass due to extra snowfall from a change in mass due to shifts in the crust beneath, says Velicogna.

The Antarctic is moving slowly upwards as it rebounds from the melting of glaciers that lay above it during the last ice age. As it shifts, the mass of the Earth's crust is redistributed. This has to be modelled and removed from the equation before the GRACE data can be used to show changes in ice mass.

"They're getting the important answer that Antarctica is losing ice mass," says Jay Zwally, a glaciologist from the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "But the numbers need more work done on them."

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Zwally and his colleagues recently used satellite data showing surface altitudes to work out the overall mass loss of Antarctica; they concluded it was losing a smaller 19-43 gigatonnes of ice per year, contributing 0.08 millimetres to sea-level rise2.

Velicogna remains optimistic that these kinds of studies will help to determine exactly how fast the ice is melting, and why. "Combining this with other data will give us the opportunity to understand the process that is causing mass loss," she says.

[Preciouslife1]

Experimental atomic clock uses ytterbium

BOULDER, Colo., March 6 (UPI) -- National Institute of Standards and Technology scientists in Boulder, Colo., say they have significantly improved the design of optical atomic clocks.
Working with Russian colleagues, NIST researchers say the new design, holding thousands of atoms in a lattice made of intersecting laser beams, causes ytterbium atoms to oscillate or "tick" at optical frequencies.
The new clock, scientists said, has the potential to be more stable and accurate than today's best time standards, which are based on microwaves at much lower frequencies.
More accurate time standards could improve communications, enhance navigation systems, and enable new tests of physical theories, among other applications.
The research is described in the March 3 issue of Physical Review Letters.

[Preciouslife1]

NASA's Cassini Discovers Potential Liquid Water On Enceladus

NASA's Cassini spacecraft may have found evidence of liquid water reservoirs that erupt in Yellowstone-like geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus. The rare occurrence of liquid water so near the surface raises many new questions about the mysterious moon.

Plumes of icy material extend above the southern polar region of Saturnâ??s moon Enceladus as imaged by the Cassini spacecraft in February 2005. The monochrome view is presented along with a color-coded version on the right. The latter reveals a fainter and much more extended plume component. (Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)
"We realize that this is a radical conclusion -- that we may have evidence for liquid water within a body so small and so cold," said Dr. Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo. "However, if we are right, we have significantly broadened the diversity of solar system environments where we might possibly have conditions suitable for living organisms."
High-resolution Cassini images show icy jets and towering plumes ejecting large quantities of particles at high speed. Scientists examined several models to explain the process. They ruled out the idea that the particles are produced by or blown off the moon's surface by vapor created when warm water ice converts to a gas. Instead, scientists have found evidence for a much more exciting possibility -- the jets might be erupting from near-surface pockets of liquid water above 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit), like cold versions of the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone.
Mission scientists report these and other Enceladus findings in this week's issue of Science.
"We previously knew of at most three places where active volcanism exists: Jupiter's moon Io, Earth, and possibly Neptune's moon Triton. Cassini changed all that, making Enceladus the latest member of this very exclusive club, and one of the most exciting places in the solar system," said Dr. John Spencer, Cassini scientist, Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo.
"Other moons in the solar system have liquid-water oceans covered by kilometers of icy crust," said Dr. Andrew Ingersoll, imaging team member and atmospheric scientist at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. "What's different here is that pockets of liquid water may be no more than tens of meters below the surface."
Other unexplained oddities now make sense. "As Cassini approached Saturn, we discovered that the Saturnian system is filled with oxygen atoms. At the time we had no idea where the oxygen was coming from," said Dr. Candy Hansen, Cassini scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. "Now we know that Enceladus is spewing out water molecules, which break down into oxygen and hydrogen."
Scientists are also seeing variability at Enceladus. "Even when Cassini is not flying close to Enceladus, we can detect that the plume's activity has been changing through its varying effects on the soup of electrically-charged particles that flow past the moon," said Dr. Geraint H. Jones, Cassini scientist, magnetospheric imaging instrument, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany.
Scientists still have many questions. Why is Enceladus currently so active? Are other sites on Enceladus active? Might this activity have been continuous enough over the moon's history for life to have had a chance to take hold in the moon's interior?
"Our search for liquid water has taken a new turn. The type of evidence for liquid water on Enceladus is very different from what we've seen at Jupiter's moon Europa. On Europa the evidence from surface geological features points to an internal ocean. On Enceladus the evidence is direct observation of water vapor venting from sources close to the surface," said Dr. Peter Thomas, Cassini imaging scientist, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
In the spring of 2008, scientists will get another chance to look at Enceladus when Cassini flies within 350 kilometers (approximately 220 miles), but much work remains after Cassini's four-year prime mission is over.
"There's no question that, along with the moon Titan, Enceladus should be a very high priority for us. Saturn has given us two exciting worlds to explore," said Dr. Jonathan Lunine, Cassini interdisciplinary scientist, University of Arizona, Tucson, Ariz.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the Caltech, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL.
For images and more information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov .

[Preciouslife1]

Scientists Piece Together The Most Distant Cosmic Explosion

It came from the edge of the visible universe, the most distant explosion ever detected.

Stars shine by burning hydrogen -- The process is called nuclear fusion. Hydrogen burning produces helium "ash." As the star runs out of hydrogen (and nears the end of its life), it begins burning helium. The ashes of helium burning, such as carbon and oxygen, also get burned. The end result of this fusion is iron. Iron cannot be used for nuclear fuel. Without fuel, the star no longer has the energy to support its weight. The core collapses. If the star is massive enough, the core will collapse into a black hole. The black hole quickly forms jets; and shock waves reverberating through the star ultimately blow apart the outer shells. Gamma-ray bursts are the beacons of star death and black hole birth. (Image Credit: Nicolle Rager Fuller/NSF)
In this week's issue of Nature, scientists at Penn State University and their U.S. and European colleagues discuss how this explosion, detected on 4 September 2005, was the result of a massive star collapsing into a black hole.
The explosion, called a gamma-ray burst, comes from an era soon after stars and galaxies first formed, about 500 million to 1 billion years after the Big Bang. The universe is now 13.7 billion years old, so the September burst serves as a probe to study the conditions of the early universe.
"This was a massive star that lived fast and died young," said David Burrows, senior scientist and professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, a co-author on one of the three reports about this explosion published this week in Nature. "This star was probably quite different from the kind we see today, the type that only could have existed in the early universe."
The burst, named GRB 050904 after the date it was spotted, was detected by NASA's Swift satellite, which is operated by Penn State. Swift provided the burst coordinates so that other satellites and ground-based telescopes could observe the burst. Bursts typically last only 10 seconds, but the afterglow will linger for a few days.
GRB 050904 originated 13 billion light years from Earth, which means it occurred 13 billion years ago, for it took that long for the light to reach us. Scientists have detected only a few objects more than 12 billion light years away, so the burst is extremely important in understanding the universe beyond the reach of the largest telescopes.
"Because the burst was brighter than a billion suns, many telescopes could study it even from such a huge distance," said Burrows, whose analysis focuses mainly on Swift data from its three telescopes, covering a range of gamma-rays, X-rays, and ultraviolet/optical wavelengths, respectively. Burrows is the lead scientist for Swift's X-ray telescope.
The Swift team found several unique features in GRB 050904. The burst was long, lasting about 500 seconds; and the tail end of the burst exhibited multiple flares. These characteristics imply that the newly created black hole didn't form instantly, as some scientists have thought, but rather it was a longer, chaotic event.
Closer gamma-ray bursts do not have as much flaring, implying that the earliest black holes may have formed differently from ones in the modern era, Burrows said. The difference could be because the first stars were more massive than modern stars. Or, it could be the result of the environment of the early universe when the first stars began to convert hydrogen and helium (created in the Big Bang) into heavier elements.
GRB 050904, in fact, shows hints of newly minted heavier elements, according to data from ground-based telescopes. This discovery is the subject of a second Nature article by a Japanese group led by Nobuyuki Kawai at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
GRB 050904 also exhibited time dilation, a result of the vast expansion of the universe during the 13 billion years that it took the light to reach us on Earth. This dilation results in the light appearing much redder than when it was emitted in the burst, and it also alters our perception of time as compared to the burst's internal clock.
These factors worked in the scientists' favor. The Penn State team turned Swift's instruments onto the burst about 2 minutes after the event began. The burst, however, was evolving as if it were in slow-motion and was only about 23 seconds into the bursting. So scientists could see the burst at a very early stage.
Only one quasar has been discovered at a greater distance. Yet, whereas quasars are supermassive black holes containing the mass of billions of stars, this burst comes from a single star. The detection of GRB 050904 confirms that massive stars mingled with the oldest quasars. It also confirms that even more distant star explosions---perhaps from the first stars, theorists say--can be studied through a combination of observations with Swift and other world-class telescopes.
"We designed Swift to look for faint bursts coming from the edge of the universe," said Neil Gehrels of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., Swift's principal investigator. "Now we've got one and it's fascinating. For the first time we can learn about individual stars from near the beginning of time. There are surely many more out there."
Swift was launched in November 2004 and was fully operational by January 2005. Swift carries three main instruments: the Burst Alert Telescope, the X-ray Telescope, and the Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope. Swift's gamma-ray detector, the Burst Alert Telescope, provides the rapid initial location and was built primarily by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt and Los Alamos National Laboratory and constructed at GSFC. Swift's X-Ray Telescope and UV/Optical Telescope were developed and built by international teams led by Penn State and drew heavily on each institution's experience with previous space missions. The X-ray Telescope resulted from Penn State's collaboration with the University of Leicester in England and the Brera Astronomical Observatory in Italy. The Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope resulted from Penn State's collaboration with the Mullard Space Science Laboratory of the University College-London. These three telescopes give Swift the ability to do almost immediate follow-up observations of most gamma-ray bursts because Swift can rotate so quickly to point toward the source of the gamma-ray signal.

[Preciouslife1]

Sandia's Z Machine Exceeds Two Billion Degrees Kelvin; Temperatures Hotter Than The Interiors Of Stars

Sandia's Z machine has produced plasmas that exceed temperatures of 2 billion degrees Kelvin -- hotter than the interiors of stars.

Sandia's Z machine firing. The "arcs and sparks" formed at the water-air interface travel between ********************l conductors. (Photo by Randy Montoya)
The unexpectedly hot output, if its cause were understood and harnessed, could eventually mean that smaller, less costly nuclear fusion plants would produce the same amount of energy as larger plants.
The phenomena also may explain how astrophysical entities like solar flares maintain their extreme temperatures.
The very high radiation output also creates new experimental environments to help validate computer codes responsible for maintaining a reliable nuclear weapons stockpile safely and securely -- the principle mission of the Z facility.
"At first, we were disbelieving," says Sandia project lead Chris Deeney. "We repeated the experiment many times to make sure we had a true result and not an 'Ooops'!"
The results, recorded by spectrometers and confirmed by computer models created by John Apruzese and colleagues at Naval Research Laboratory, have held up over 14 months of additional tests.
A description of the achievement, as well as a possible explanation by Sandia consultant Malcolm Haines, well-known for his work in Z pinches at the Imperial College in London, appeared in the Feb. 24 Physical Review Letters.
Sandia is a National Nuclear Security Administration laboratory.
What happened and why?
Z's energies in these experiments raised several questions.
First, the radiated x-ray output was as much as four times the expected kinetic energy input.
Ordinarily, in non-nuclear reactions, output energies are less -- not greater -- than the total input energies. More energy had to be getting in to balance the books, but from where could it come?
Second, and more unusually, high ion temperatures were sustained after the plasma had stagnated -- that is, after its ions had presumably lost motion and therefore energy and therefore heat -- as though yet again some unknown agent was providing an additional energy source to the ions.
Sandia's Z machine normally works like this: 20 million amps of electricity pass through a small core of vertical tungsten wires finer than human hairs. The core is about the size of a spool of thread. The wires dissolve instantly into a cloud of charged particles called a plasma.
The plasma, caught in the grip of the very strong magnetic field accompanying the electrical current, is compressed to the thickness of a pencil lead. This happens very rapidly, at a velocity that would fly a plane from New York to San Francisco in several seconds.
At that point, the ions and electrons have nowhere further to go. Like a speeding car hitting a brick wall, they stop suddenly, releasing energy in the form of X-rays that reach temperatures of several million degrees -- the temperature of solar flares.
The new achievement -- temperatures of billions of degrees -- was obtained in part by substituting steel wires in cylindrical arrays 55 mm to 80 mm in diameter for the more typical tungsten wire arrays, approximately only 20 mm in diameter. The higher velocities achieved over these longer distances were part of the reason for the higher temperatures.
(The use of steel allowed for detailed spectroscopic measurements of these temperatures impossible to obtain with tungsten.)
Haines theorized that the rapid conversion of magnetic energy to a very high ion plasma temperature was achieved by unexpected instabilities at the point of ordinary stagnation: that is, the point at which ions and electrons should have been unable to travel further. The plasma should have collapsed, its internal energy radiated away. But for approximately 10 nanoseconds, some unknown energy was still pushing back against the magnetic field.
Haines' explanation theorizes that Z's magnetic energies create microturbulences that increase the kinetic energies of ions caught in the field's grip. Already hot, the extra jolt of kinetic energy then produces increased heat, as ions and their accompanying electrons release energy through friction-like viscous mixing even after they should have been exhausted.
High temperatures previously had been assumed to be produced entirely by the kinetic flight and intersection of ions and electrons, unaided by accompanying microturbulent fields.
Z is housed in a flat-roofed building about the size and shape of an aging high-school gymnasium.
This work has already prompted other studies at Sandia and at the University of Nevada at Reno.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0308212104.htm

###

Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness.

[Preciouslife1]

Challenges, opportunities, and responsibility
Vladimir V. Putin
http://www.star.com.jo/viewNews/Deta....aspx?nid=1897
The upcoming G8 summit in St. Petersburg At the beginning of 2006, Russia assumed the G8 Presidency. We understand very well that this requires serious work and implies a great deal of responsibility. It is not the organizational activities alone that lie ahead. More importantly, we will need to discuss and jointly determine the priorities and substantive areas of work for this highly respected forum, which has served as a key mechanism for coordinating approaches to meeting the most significant challenges of world development for more than 30 years. We have suggested to our partners that we should focus on three serious and pressing issues: Global energy security, combating infectious diseases, and education. These three priorities are oriented towards achieving an objective, which we hope is clear to all our partners, namely improving the quality of life and living standards of the present and future generations. Energy The establishment of a reliable and comprehensive system of energy security is clearly one of the strategic goals for the G8 and the world community as a whole. During the Russian Presidency, not only will we seek to develop fundamental approaches to meeting current challenges in this field but also outline our coordinated policy for the long term. Today, the lack of stability in the hydrocarbon markets poses a real threat to global energy supply. In particular, the gap between supply and demand continues to widen. The apparent increase in energy consumption in Asian countries is caused not only by market fluctuations but also by a host of other factors related to policy and security. In order to stabilize the situation in this field, coordinated activities of the entire world community are needed. In our view, it is especially important to develop a strategy for achieving global energy security. It should be based on a long-term, reliable and environmentally sustainable energy supply at prices affordable to both the exporting countries and the consumers. In addition to reconciling the interests of stakeholders in the global energy interaction, we will have to identify practical measures aimed at ensuring sustainable access of the world economy to traditional sources of energy, as well as promoting energy-saving programs and developing alternative energy sources. In this connection, Russia calls on the G8 countries and the international community to focus their efforts on developing innovative technologies. This could serve as an initial step in creating a technological basis for energy supply of mankind in the future, when the energy potential in its present form is exhausted. The way most people see it, energy security has mainly to do with the interests of industrially developed countries. It should be kept in mind, however, that almost two billion people in today's world do not enjoy modern-day energy services, while many of them lack access to even electricity. Their access to many benefits and advances of civilization has been virtually blocked. Lately, experts have been actively discussing ways of increasing energy use in developing countries through a more intensive development of non-conventional energy sources. It is our strong belief that energy redistribution guided wholly by the priorities of a small group of most developed countries does not serve the goals and purposes of global development. We will strive to create an energy security system sensitive to the interests of the whole international community. Health Throughout its history, the human race finds itself fighting against a genuine threat to its survival – that of the spread of infectious diseases. The progress made might seem encouraging: Smallpox was eliminated once and for all throughout the world while fight against poliomyelitis is drawing to a close. Yet our times are also plagued by the outbreaks of both known and new and highly dangerous diseases such as AIDS, exotic viral hemorrhagic fever, microplasma infections, and bird flu. Today, infections account for every third death in the world. According to experts, in the years to come there is a high probability of a new strain of pandemic influenza that would claim millions of lives. Russia would like to suggest the reactivation of efforts in this regard, including the adoption of a strategic action plan of the G8 to fight bird flu and prevent new human flu pandemics. Marked by a different degree of intensity in different regions, infectious diseases, working as a litmus test, expose social and economic problems, aggravate social inequality and contribute to discrimination. There is another fundamental aspect. In recent years, our world has suffered the devastation of earthquakes, floods and tsunamis with increasing frequency. Urbanization, wider transport networks and industrial infrastructure make us much more vulnerable to these emergencies than before. They cause damage not only to the economy and social sphere; their heaviest toll is the outbreaks of infectious diseases, which claim thousands of lives. Therefore we view as another priority the establishment of a global system for natural disaster warning and mitigating their epidemiological consequences. Thought might also be given to the possibility of creating a unified infrastructure capable of responding to the emergence and spread of epidemic in a prompt manner. Of course, the G8 should continue to promote scientific capacity-building and pool together intellectual and material resources of the world community for the development of new safe vaccines and promising highly sensitive means to diagnose infectious diseases, as well as for the implementation of education and prevention programmes. Education Our common tasks in the area of education deserve serious attention. In a post-industrial information society, education becomes a prerequisite for success in the daily life and a major input into the economic development. Moreover, as technologies improve, labor market favors higher-skilled specialists, and education requirements are constantly increasing as a result. Its goals and *********************************** are consequently changing. Access to global wealth of information dramatically changes education methodologies themselves. Transfer to continuous education is taking place now. Preconditions are in place to form a common education space. Certainly, these trends are gaining momentum, primarily in developing countries. At the same time, many nations and regions still face an acute problem of accessibility of even the basic education. We view this as a true "humanitarian disaster", as a serious threat to the world community. Widespread illiteracy is a breeding ground for the advocates of inter-civilizational strife, xenophobia and national and religious extremism, and in the final analysis for international terrorist activities. In this context, it is important to formulate a wider and more systematic approach to education in both developing countries and the world at large. In particular, if the employment problem is to be successfully resolved, the notion of education must, as it seems, include not only general education but also vocational and technical training encompassing all levels of education, from basic to higher one. Many developing countries experience serious difficulties with introducing advanced education methods and information technologies. In this respect, it is necessary to make more efficient use of the most advanced resources, including the Internet and other newest means of information and knowledge distribution, in the field of education. Russia stands ready to assist in mobilizing the world community's efforts aimed at raising the quality and compatibility of requirements to professional education as a key condition for the use and propagation of innovations. Along with the three priorities on the agenda of the Russian Presidency mentioned above, the G8 will continue in 2006 its work on such key issues as the fight against international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. And certainly, as before, our efforts will remain focused on the settlement of regional conflicts, primarily in the Middle East and in Iraq, and on stabilizing the situation in Afghanistan. We fully realize that not a single Presidency is capable of offering comprehensive solutions to the problems of the modern world being discussed by the G8. At the same time, from summit to summit, the Group is getting a better vision of these problems and strives to find the most workable approaches to their solution through its joint efforts. Russia is ready to contribute actively to further progress in this direction. Continuity and evolution—these words are the motto of the Russian Presidency that has commenced. Vladimir V. Putin is President of the Russian Federation RIA Novosti Challenges, opportunities, and responsibility

[Preciouslife1]

Source: Johns Hopkins University
Posted: March 17, 2006
New Satellite Data On Universe's First Trillionth Second



Time Line of the Universe The expansion of the universe over most of it's history has been relatively gradual. The notion that a rapid period "inflation" preceded the Big Bang expansion was first put forth 25 years ago. The new WMAP observations favor specific inflation scenarios over other long held ideas. (Credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team)
Scientists peering back to the oldest light in the universe have new evidence for what happened within its first trillionth of a second, when the universe suddenly grew from submicroscopic to astronomical size in far less than a wink of the eye.
Using new data from a NASA satellite, scientists have the best evidence yet to support this scenario, known as "inflation." The evidence, from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite, was gathered during three years of continuous observations of remnant afterglow light -- cosmic background radiation that lingers, much cooled, from the universe's energetic beginnings 13.7 billion years ago.
In 2003, NASA announced that the WMAP satellite had produced a detailed picture of the infant universe by measuring fluctuations in temperature of the afterglow -- answering many longstanding questions about the universe's age, composition and development. The WMAP team has built upon those results with a new measurement of the faint glare from the afterglow to obtain clues about the universe's first moments, when the seeds were sown for the formation of the first stars 400 million years later.
"It amazes me that we can say anything about what transpired within the first trillionth of a second of the universe, but we can," said Charles L. Bennett, WMAP principal investigator and a professor in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University. "We have never before been able to understand the infant universe with such precision. It appears that the infant universe had the kind of growth spurt that would alarm any mom or dad."
WMAP results have been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal and are posted online at http://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/results.
The newly detected pattern, or polarization signal, in the glare of the afterglow is the weakest cosmological signal ever detected -- less than a hundredth of the strength of the temperature signal reported three years ago.
"This is brand new territory," said Princeton University physicist Lyman Page, a WMAP team member. "We are quantifying the cosmos in a different way to open up a new window for understanding the universe in its earliest times."
Comparing the brightness of broad features to compact features in the afterglow light (like comparing the heights of short-distance ripples versus long-distance waves on a lake) helps tell the story of the infant universe. One long-held prediction was that the brightness would be the same for features of all sizes. In contrast, the simplest versions of inflation predict that the relative brightness decreases as the features get smaller. WMAP data are new evidence for the inflation prediction.
The new WMAP data, combined with other cosmology data, also support established theories on what has happened to matter and energy over the past 13.7 billion years since its inflation, according to the WMAP researchers. The result is a tightly constrained and consistent picture of how our universe grew from microscopic quantum fluctuations to enable the formation of stars, planets and life.
According to this picture, researchers say, only 4 percent of the universe is ordinary familiar atoms; another 22 percent is an as-yet unidentified dark matter, and 74 percent is a mysterious dark energy. That dark energy is now causing another growth spurt for the universe, fortunately, they say, more gentle than the one 13.7 billion years ago.
WMAP was launched on June 30, 2001, and is now a million miles from Earth in the direction opposite the sun. It is able to track temperature fluctuations at levels finer than a millionth of a degree.

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The WMAP team includes researchers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; The Johns Hopkins University; Princeton University; the Canadian Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto; the University of Texas at Austin; Cornell University; the University of Chicago; Brown University; the University of British Columbia; the University of Pennsylvania; and the University of California, Los Angeles.
For images and more information: http://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/results

[Preciouslife1]

Pacific Ocean getting warmer, more acidic.

SEATTLE, March 31 (UPI) -- Testing by U.S. scientists finds that the Pacific Ocean is getting warmer and more acidic, while the amount of oxygen is decreasing.
Scientists with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and the University of Washington say the ocean is becoming increasingly acidic because of its absorption of carbon dioxide, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported Friday.
"You don't have to believe in climate change to believe that this is happening," said Joanie Kleypas, an oceanographer with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a non-profit organization based in Boulder, Colo. "Acidification is more frightening than a lot of the climate change issues."
Carbon dioxide is a byproduct of burning fossil fuels and in the past 200 years, the ocean has absorbed about half of what's been released into the atmosphere, the scientists say.
The pH of the saltwater has dropped 0.025 units since the early 1990s, the pH scale is exponential, so a one-unit drop is a 10-fold decrease, therefore the new measurement puts the ocean on track for a dramatic decline by the end of the century, the scientists say.

SAD.....PL1