Recent Posts
Egyptian courts have handed down unprecedented numbers of death sentences in recent months, most of them for violent crime. "Two hundred and thirty death sentences in six months", read the Jun. 24 headline of independent daily Al- Dustour. "Fifty in the last week alone".
link: allAfrica.com: Egypt: 230 Death Sentences in Six Months (Page 1 of 1)
Donor assistance is urgently needed as the health situation in southern and central Somalia, including its violence-wracked capital, Mogadishu, continues to deteriorate, the United Nations humanitarian arm said today.
Violence in the impoverished Horn of Africa nation has impeded access to essential and life-saving health services, as well as to clean water and sanitation, according to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
The rift between the Presidency and the House of Representatives over the 2009 Appropriation Act assumed a new dimension yesterday as lawmakers in the green chamber of the National Assembly shunned an invitation extended to them from the Presidency to discuss the implementation of the troubled budget.
The House has, however, restrained itself from making good its threat to commence the impeachment proceedings against President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua.
House spokesman, Hon. Eseme Eyiboh, disclosed yesterday that the House was bidding its time to allow for some constructive engagements and would only deploy the impeachment instrument as a "last resort".
link: allAfrica.com: Nigeria: Budget 2009 - Presidency, House Face-Off Worsens (Page 1 of 1)
The fascinating Eagle Nebula is a dust filled stellar nursery filled with dust and lit up by bright infant stars. This new image, captured by the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter Telescope at La Silla, Chile, is one of the widest high-resolution shots of the nebula ever taken.
The “Pillars of Creation,” made famous by a photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, can be seen near the center of the image and the “Spire” appears to the left. The pillars are being shaped out of dust by the strong winds and intense ultraviolet light created by star births.
The nebula gets its name from its overall shape, which looks a little like an eagle with the pillars for talons.
link: Spectacular Wide-Field View of Eagle Nebula in High-Res | Wired Science | Wired.com
Mysterious, glowing clouds previously seen almost exclusively in Earth’s polar regions have appeared in the skies over the United States and Europe over the past several days.
Photographers and other sky watchers in Omaha, Paris, Seattle, and other locations have run outside to capture images of what scientists call noctilucent (”night shining”) clouds. Formed by ice literally at the boundary where the earth’s atmosphere meets space 50 miles up, they shine because they are so high that they remain lit by the sun even after our star is below the horizon.
The clouds might be beautiful, but they could portend global changes caused by global warming. Noctilucent clouds are a fundamentally new phenomenon in the temperate mid-latitude sky, and it’s not clear why they’ve migrated down from the poles. Or why, over the last 25 years, more of them are appearing in the polar regions, too, and shining more brightly.
“That’s a real concern and question,” said James Russell, an atmospheric scientist at Hampton University and the principal investigator of an ongoing NASA satellite mission to study the clouds. “Why are they getting more numerous? Why are they getting brighter? Why are they appearing at lower latitudes?”
Nobody knows for sure, but most of the answers seem to point to human-caused global atmospheric change.
link: Mysterious, Glowing Clouds Appear Across America’s Night Skies | Wired Science | Wired.com
Super high-resolution spy satellites have been imaging sea ice at the poles for the last decade on behalf of earth scientists. But the images has been kept from the public and nearly all scientists, too.
Over the last 10 years, a tiny group of scientists with security clearance was able to see some of the images, but couldn’t use them publicly.
Now, mere hours after a National Academy of Sciences committee recommended that the intelligence community “should release and disseminate all Arctic sea ice” imagery that can be created from the classified satellite data, the United States Geological Service has published the set of high-res images.
link: Spy Satellite Sea Ice Images Finally Made Public | Wired Science | Wired.com
Colombia has called off the hunt to kill a drug lord's escaped hippo and will instead try to relocate the beast after its mate was shot dead by order of the government, sparking outrage from animal rights groups.
The giant animals were imported from Africa by late cocaine king Pablo Escobar and put in his zoo. They escaped in 2006 to live in the wild near the Magdalena river in northern Colombia, causing concerns about local public safety.
Colombia was shocked on Friday when photographs were published of the dead hippo, named "Pepe", and by news that the hunt was still on for his mate, "Matilda," who gave birth to a calf in the wild.
link: Hunt called off for drug lord's hippo | Oddly Enough | Reuters
Photographer Julius Shulman, whose images of California's modernist architecture drew worldwide admiration for the minimalist mid-century style, had died at the age of 98.
The man many consider to be the finest architectural photographer in history died on Wednesday night at his Laurel Canyon home, said gallery owner Craig Krull, who recently opened an exhibition of Shulman's latest work.
Shulman's most famous image was a 1960 photo titled Case House Study #22, in which two women sit in a glass house seemingly suspended in mid-air with the lights of Los Angeles twinkling below.
link: Famed architectural photographer Shulman dies at 98 | U.S. | Reuters
Keith Bradsher writes:
Ending his first official visit to China, the United States energy secretary, Steven Chu, said the two nations had agreed to plan joint studies on ways to improve the energy efficiency of buildings, a major issue in addressing China’s contribution to climate change.
Mr. Chu said that the United States and China had drafted a memorandum of understanding for creating a team of experts that would study ways to provide heat, air-conditioning and light for buildings while minimizing their electricity needs. He spoke after touring an American-built model house with energy-efficient windows, appliances and other features with Chinese officials and the United States commerce secretary, Gary Locke.
link: U.S. and China Agree to Study Energy-Efficient Buildings - NYTimes.com
Henry Fountain writes:
In the continuing battle between bats and tiger moths, score one for the tiger moths. A study shows that one moth species uses a different kind of defensive technique to avoid becoming bat fodder.
Many bats use echolocation — a type of sonar using ultrasonic pulses — to find insects and other prey. It’s long been known that tiger moths produce ultrasonic clicks of their own, and earlier studies showed that these sounds have two functions. For some moth species that are toxic to bats, the clicks warn the bats to stay away. For others, the clicks startle the bats, allowing the moths time to escape.
In a paper in Science, Aaron J. Corcoran and William E. Conner of Wake Forest University, and Jesse R. Barber of Colorado State University, show that for one tiger moth species, Bertholdia trigona, the clicks serve a third function. They keep big brown bats, which would normally dine on B. trigona, at bay by jamming their sonar.
link: Observatory - Tiger Moths Jam Bat Sonar - NYTimes.com
Karen Schrock writes:
Some scientists conclude that music’s influence may be a chance event, arising from its ability to hijack brain systems built for other purposes such as language, emotion and movement. As Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker famously put it in his 1997 book How the Mind Works (W. W. Norton), music is “auditory cheesecake,” a confection crafted to tickle the areas of the mind that evolved for more important functions. But as a result of that serendipity, music seems to offer a novel system of communication rooted in emotions rather than in meaning. Recent data show, for example, that music reliably conveys certain sentiments: what we feel when we hear a piece of music is remarkably similar to what everybody else in the room is experiencing.
link: Why Music Moves Us: Scientific American
Gina Bellafante writes:
In the early 1970s Lillian Bassman, among the most important fashion photographers of the 20th century, made the decision to dispose of her career, quite literally. Artists do this all the time without the intent — giving themselves over to excess, retreating to ashrams — but Ms. Bassman’s approach was aggressive and determined. Disillusioned by the costuming of the late 1960s, she had had enough of fashion and expressed her disdain by destroying decades’ worth of negatives and placing others in a trash bag in the coal room of her Upper East Side carriage house. Her era of furtive eroticism was over, and there was no point in scrapbooking it.
Years later Ms. Bassman, who is 92, relented and retrieved her discarded images, seeking creative ways to reprint them. Some of these pictures will be on view at a new show at KMR Arts in Washington Depot, Conn. (which begins Saturday and runs through Sept. 5), juxtaposed with an anatomically resonant series on sidewalk cracks that she produced in the ’70s. The exhibition serves as a preamble to a moment of renewed interest in Ms. Bassman’s career; this fall Abrams will publish a book of her work, “Lillian Bassman: Women,” which will accompany a show at the Staley-Wise Gallery. And in November the Deichtorhallen museum in Hamburg, Germany, will mount a retrospective of her photography, along with that of her husband, Paul Himmel, who died in February.
link: Culture - In Lillian Bassman’s Salvaged Photographs, a Rediscovery of Femininity - NYTimes.com
Giovanni Frazzetto, Qualia Bar, 2004-6 In an ironic twist, Frazzetto's conceptual Qualia Bar (2004-06) converts ineffable sensation into a molecular formula. Qualia here acquire a synthetic and reproducible nature. The desired state of sentience is achieved through the intake of a shot of coloured liquor.
link: Neuroculture - Home Page
A man accused of having beaten his two young children to death with a metal bar was lynched Wednesday by his neighbors in a rural part of the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco, police said.
The father, a farmer identified as Raimundo Ribamar Ferreira, was stabbed and hacked to death by an unknown number of people, some of whom were wielding machetes, after his wife denounced him for killing the two children.
The identities of the members of the lynch mob have not been determined by the police.
Ferreira’s wife told police that he came home drunk Tuesday night and, after the couple argued, he attacked his children with a steel bar.
The couple’s 2-year-old daughter died right away upon being struck multiple times with the bar, but the 9-month-old baby boy survived long enough to be taken to the hospital, where he died.
The local police commander, Glaukus Menck, said that dozens of the family’s neighbors lynched the attacker in front of his house, but none of them has been identified or arrested because nobody is willing to cooperate with the authorities’ investigation.
link: Latin American Herald Tribune - Neighbors Lynch Brazilian Accused of Killing His Kids
Five people were injured by shotgun pellets and at least 15 were arrested on the second day of a general strike in the northeastern Dominican Republic to demand the government complete various public works projects.
The injured from Tuesday’s protest activities bring to eight, including one police officer, the number of people who have been hurt since the start of the strike.
Demonstrators burned tires in the municipalities of Cevicos and Las Matas, the scenes of the largest protests, while unknown people knocked over electric power poles cutting power to several communities.
Masked demonstrators early on Tuesday attacked the police station in the community of La Cueva, but officers there responded to the attack without causing any reported injuries, authorities said.
link: Latin American Herald Tribune - Five Injured in Protests in Dominican Republic
DNA has been found to have a bizarre ability to assemble itself, even at a distance, when according to known science it shouldn't be able to. Explanation: None, at least not yet.
Scientists are reporting evidence that contrary to our current beliefs about what is possible, intact double-stranded DNA has the “amazing” ability to recognize similarities in other DNA strands from a distance. Somehow they are able to identify one another, and the tiny bits of genetic material tend to congregate with similar DNA. The recognition of similar sequences in DNA’s chemical subunits, occurs in a way unrecognized by science. There is no known reason why the DNA is able to combine the way it does, and from a current theoretical standpoint this feat should be chemically impossible.
Even so, the research published in ACS’ Journal of Physical Chemistry B, shows very clearly that homology recognition between sequences of several hundred nucleotides occurs without physical contact or presence of proteins. Double helixes of DNA can recognize matching molecules from a distance and then gather together, all seemingly without help from any other molecules or chemical signals.
link: Does DNA Have 'Telepathic' Properties? -Experts Say "Yes"
Jacob Sloan writes:
According to a new study, the more unpopular, uncommon or feminine a boy's name is, the more likely he will be imprisoned as an adult.
A report in Social Science Quarterly analyzed 15,000 names and found that factors associated with unpopular and androgynous names "increase the tendency toward juvenile delinquency" and, eventually, criminality as an adult. Boys with such names faced ridicule from peers and subtle discrimination in the workforce, and often came from families of low socioeconomic status.
What names are most likely to lead to a life of crime? Alec, Ernest, Garland, Ivan, Kareem, Luke, Malcolm, Preston, Tyrell, and Walter.
link: Disinfo.com - Boys With Unusual or Feminine Names End Up In Jail
Eva Golinger: Washington and the Coup in Honduras: Here's the evidence!
The US Department of State had prior knowledge of the coup.
The Department of State and the US Congress funded and advised the actors and organizations in Honduras that participated in the coup.
The Pentagon trained, schooled, commanded, funded and armed the Honduran armed forces that perpetrated the coup and that continue to repress the people of Honduras by force.
Eva Golinger: The US military presence in Honduras, that occupies the Soto Cano (Palmerola) military base, authorized the coup d'etat through its tacit complicity and refusal to withdraw its support of the Honduran military involved in the coup.
The US Ambassador in Tegucigalpa, Hugo Llorens, coordinated the removal from power of President Manuel Zelaya, together with Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon and John Negroponte, who presently works as an advisor to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
link: Pan-African News Wire: Washington and the Coup in Honduras: Here's the Evidence
A work of art believed to be Michelangelo's first painting, completed when he was just 12 or 13 years old, has been acquired by a museum in Texas in deal that leaves other major galleries taking notice.
John Crace writes:
To many scholars he is still the sublime English poet. To the rest of us, he's the blind bloke who wrote the scarily long and difficult epic about heaven, hell and the failure of the English revolution we were made to read at school. But John Milton, whose 400th birthday is celebrated this year, deserves to be remembered for rather more than Paradise Lost. Step aside Martin Amis, Will Self et al; Milton is in a league of his own for neologisms.
According to Gavin Alexander, lecturer in English at Cambridge university and fellow of Milton's alma mater, Christ's College, who has trawled the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for evidence, Milton is responsible for introducing some 630 words to the English language, making him the country's greatest neologist, ahead of Ben Jonson with 558, John Donne with 342 and Shakespeare with 229. Without the great poet there would be no liturgical, debauchery, besottedly, unhealthily, padlock, dismissive, terrific, embellishing, fragrance, didactic or love-lorn. And certainly no complacency.
link: John Crace on Milton's contribution to the english language | UK news | The Guardian
Ewen Callaway writes:
We're all familiar with the stereotype of the tortured artist. Salvador Dali's various disorders and Sylvia Plath's depression spring to mind. Now new research seems to show why: a genetic mutation linked to psychosis and schizophrenia also influences creativity.
The finding could help to explain why mutations that increase a person's risk of developing mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar syndrome have been preserved, even preferred, during human evolution, says Szabolcs Kéri, a researcher at Semmelweis University in Budapest, Hungary, who carried out the study.
Kéri examined a gene involved in brain development called neuregulin 1, which previous studies have linked to a slightly increased risk of schizophrenia. Moreover, a single DNA letter mutation that affects how much of the neuregulin 1 protein is made in the brain has been linked to psychosis, poor memory and sensitivity to criticism.
About 50 per cent of healthy Europeans have one copy of this mutation, while 15 per cent possess two copies.
link: Artistic tendencies linked to 'schizophrenia gene' - health - 16 July 2009 - New Scientist
Nobody knows for sure what the gunk is, but Petty Officer 1st Class Terry Hasenauer says the Coast Guard is sure what it is not.
"It's certainly biological," Hasenauer said. "It's definitely not an oil product of any kind. It has no characteristics of an oil, or a hazardous substance, for that matter.
"It's definitely, by the smell and the makeup of it, it's some sort of naturally occurring organic or otherwise marine organism..."
"It's pitch black when it hits ice and it kind of discolors the ice and hangs off of it," Brower said. He saw some jellyfish tangled up in the stuff, and someone turned in what was left of a dead goose -- just bones and feathers -- to the borough's wildlife department.
"It kind of has an odor; I can't describe it," he said.
link: Mystery blob devouring Alaska coastline - Boing Boing
Newly re-elected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad launched a fierce attack on the West on Thursday, saying Iran's enemies had tried to interfere and foment aggression in its disputed presidential vote last month.
"In this recent election the enemy tried to bring the battlefront to the interior of this country," Ahmadinejad told a big crowd in the northeastern city of Mashhad.
"But I have told the enemies ... that this nation ... will strike you in the face so hard you will lose your way home," he said in comments translated by English-language Press TV.
link: Ahmadinejad: Iran will strike enemies in the face | International | Reuters
Paul Rincon writes:
The Cheddar Gorge in Somerset was one of the first sites inhabited by humans when they returned to Britain towards the end of the last Ice Age.
New radiocarbon dates on bones from Gough's Cave show people were living there some 14,700 years ago.
The results confirm the site's great antiquity and suggest human hunters re-colonised Britain at a time of rapid climate warming.
link: BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Cave record of Britain's pioneers
Matt Walker writes:
A tiny species of shrew has been rediscovered in the wild, more than a century after first being described.
In 1894, a handful of specimens of the Nelson's small-eared shrew were collected in southern Mexico.
But the shrew was never seen again, and was considered by many experts to already be extinct.
That was until two researchers found three shrews in a small patch of forest, a find that is reported in the journal Mammalian Biology.
link: BBC - Earth News - 'Extinct' tiny shrew rediscovered
A Russian human rights group has blamed Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya's Kremlin-backed president, for the kidnap and murder of an award winning activist.
Natalia Estemirova's body was found on Wednesday near the city of Nazran in Ingushetia, the region neighbouring Chechnya, just hours after she was seized from her home in Grozny, the Chechen capital.
"I know, I am sure of it, who is guilty for the murder of Natalya ... His name is Ramzan Kadyrov," Oleg Orlov, the chairman of Memorial, said in a statement posted on the group's website late on Wednesday.
"Ramzan already threatened Natalya, insulted her, considered her a personal enemy.
"We do not know if he gave the order himself or his close associates did so to please their boss."
link: Al Jazeera English - Europe - Chechen president blamed for murder
Jeffrey Gettleman writes:
The envelope, please — those are the words on many Kenyans’ lips.
Ever since last year’s eruption of post-election violence, which killed more than 1,000 people and threatened to drive this once promising country off a cliff, Kenyans have been waiting to hear who masterminded the bloodshed and who will pay the price.
A Kenyan commission investigated the violence in October and came up with a list of several top suspects, widely believed to include some of the nation’s most powerful men. The names were sealed in a square brown paper envelope (incongruously wrapped with a white ribbon) and handed over to Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the United Nations who took on the role of peacemaker.
Kenyan politicians had promised Mr. Annan that they would form a special tribunal to try the suspects here, ending a longstanding culture of impunity that feeds the ethnic-political bloodshed that convulses Kenya nearly every election.
But so far, nothing. Kenya’s leaders, paralyzed by competing agendas and the prospect of prosecuting their own, have refused to set up a tribunal. So last week, Mr. Annan upped the ante. He sent the envelope with the names to the International Criminal Court at The Hague, which has now indicated that it will step in if Kenya fails to act.
Sam Dillon writes:
Historically, the achievement gap between America’s black and white students was widest in Southern states, where the legacies of slavery and segregation were reflected in extremely low math and reading scores among poor African-American children.
But black students have made important gains in several Southern states over two decades, while in some Northern states, black achievement has improved more slowly than white achievement, or has even declined, according to a study of the black-white achievement gap released Tuesday by the Department of Education.
As a result, the nation’s widest black-white gaps are no longer seen in Southern states like Alabama or Mississippi, but rather in Northern and Midwestern states like Connecticut, Illinois, Nebraska and Wisconsin, according to the federal data.
In interviews, top education officials in several states expressed disappointment at the magnitude of those gaps.
“This won’t be a total surprise,” said Roger D. Breed, Nebraska’s education commissioner, “but it’ll be a shock to Nebraskans that the gap here is as big as it is.”
link: Regional Shift Seen in Education Gap - NYTimes.com
S. John Tilak writes:
The current recession -- considered by some to be the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s -- is unprecedented as it is the first time when people had such widespread access to the world wide web.
Some 52 percent of American adults have either lost their jobs, seen their investments fall by more than half their value, suffered a pay cut or watched their house lose half its value during the downturn in the past year, according to the study, which is based on interviews with 2,253 adults.
U.S. employers cut far more jobs than expected in June and the unemployment rate hit 9.5 percent, the highest in nearly 26 years.
Creative juices have been flowing online in the down economy. Overall, 34 percent of online economic users have created content and commentary about the recession in places like blogs, social network sites and Twitter, the study found.
link: Recession sends Americans to the Internet | Technology | Reuters
