Marie Curie - Biographical

Marie Curie, née Maria Sklodowska, was born in Warsaw on November 7, 1867, the daughter of a secondary-school teacher. She received a general education in local schools and some scientific training from her father. She became involved in a students' revolutionary organization and found it prudent to leave Warsaw, then in the part of Poland dominated by Russia, for Cracow, which at that time was under Austrian rule. In 1891, she went to Paris to continue her studies at the Sorbonne where she obtained Licenciateships in Physics and the Mathematical Sciences. She met Pierre Curie, Professor in the School of Physics in 1894 and in the following year they were married. She succeeded her husband as Head of the Physics Laboratory at the Sorbonne, gained her Doctor of Science degree in 1903, and following the tragic death of Pierre Curie in 1906, she took his place as Professor of General Physics in the Faculty of Sciences, the first time a woman had held this position. She was also appointed Director of the Curie Laboratory in the Radium Institute of the University of Paris, founded in 1914.

Her early researches, together with her husband, were often performed under difficult conditions, laboratory arrangements were poor and both had to undertake much teaching to earn a livelihood. The discovery of radioactivity by Henri Becquerel in 1896 inspired the Curies in their brilliant researches and analyses which led to the isolation of polonium, named after the country of Marie's birth, and radium. Mme. Curie developed methods for the separation of radium from radioactive residues in sufficient quantities to allow for its characterization and the careful study of its properties, therapeutic properties in particular.

Mme. Curie throughout her life actively promoted the use of radium to alleviate suffering and during World War I, assisted by her daughter, Irene, she personally devoted herself to this remedial work. She retained her enthusiasm for science throughout her life and did much to establish a radioactivity laboratory in her native city - in 1929 President Hoover of the United States presented her with a gift of $ 50,000, donated by American friends of science, to purchase radium for use in the laboratory in Warsaw.

Mme. Curie, quiet, dignified and unassuming, was held in high esteem and admiration by scientists throughout the world. She was a member of the Conseil du Physique Solvay from 1911 until her death and since 1922 she had been a member of the Committee of Intellectual Co-operation of the League of Nations. Her work is recorded in numerous papers in scientific journals and she is the author of Recherches sur les Substances Radioactives (1904), L'Isotopie et les Éléments Isotopes and the classic Traité' de Radioactivité (1910).

The importance of Mme. Curie's work is reflected in the numerous awards bestowed on her. She received many honorary science, medicine and law degrees and honorary memberships of learned societies throughout the world. Together with her husband, she was awarded half of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, for their study into the spontaneous radiation discovered by Becquerel, who was awarded the other half of the Prize. In 1911 she received a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, in recognition of her work in radioactivity. She also received, jointly with her husband, the Davy Medal of the Royal Society in 1903 and, in 1921, President Harding of the United States, on behalf of the women of America, presented her with one gram of radium in recognition of her service to science.

Cisco inspired by The Big Bang Theory

While Star Trek fans bang on about how their favourite show inspired mobile tech, Cisco has been taking its inspiration from situation comedy.
The Big Bang Theory had an episode where one of the characters built a "shelbot" so that he did not have to go to work. The robot works fine until it meets Steve Wozniak in a restaurant and cannot get his autograph.
Now it turns out that Cisco has teamed up with robotics firm iRobot to create their own enterprise version of the 'Shelbot'.
Dubbed Ava 500, it uses iRobot's autonomous navigation with Cisco's TelePresence system. It means that a remote worker sitting in front of a video collaboration system can meet with colleagues in an office setting and take part in a facility tour.
It is not clear if it can open the doors itself.
According to TechWorld, the technology involved is not that great a leap. Ava 500 is essentially a Cisco TelePresence EX60 personal video endpoint mounted on top of an iRobot mobile robotics platform, which can self-navigate busy environments like offices, manufacturing floors and laboratories without bumping into people or objects.
It is controlled using an iPad interface. The remote user can select his or her destination by tapping a location on a map or by choosing a room or employee name.
An available robot is then activated to virtually "take" the user to make the trip from the charging station to selected location. It can be done in "private" mode where the screen appears blank – or in "public" mode where the user's face is displayed.
Snorre Kjesbu, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Collaboration Technology Group, told Techworld that, while browser-based telepresence clients can allow people to be more mobile, Ava 500 allows them to roam from a distance.
It also means that people will no longer have to get out of their desk to see colleagues. If someone could work out a way for staff to go to the loo without having to leave their desk, they may never have to leave it. 

New memory stores light

Popular science magazine Nature is talking about a new prototype storage system that is faster than light and uses less power.
Ramamoorthy Ramesh, a materials scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and Junling Wang, a specialist in oxide materials at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have emerged from their smoke filled labs with a storage device which combines speed, endurance and low power consumption by uniting electronic storage with a read-out based on the physics that powers solar panels.
The machine is based around bismuth ferrite which uses binary digits, or bits, as one of two polarisation states, and can switch between these states when a voltage is applied.
This Ferroelectric RAM has been around for a while but not found widespread use. One problem is that the electrical signal used to read out a bit erases it, so the data must be rewritten every time.
What Ramesh and Wang have done is use another property of bismuth ferrite to read these memory arrays in a nondestructive way.
Earlier research in 2009 demonstrated that bismuth ferrite has a photovoltaic response to visible light. So if you hit it with light a voltage is created Shining light on the material doesn't change its polarization, and so does not erase the data stored in it.
Ramesh and Wang grew films of bismuth ferrite on top of a metal oxide, then etched it into four strips, created electrodes and uses these to polarize the cells, then shone light onto the whole array and found that it produced two types of voltage readings — one negative and one positive.
It took 10 nanoseconds to write to and read the cells, and recording the data requires about three volts. This is 10,000 times faster than flash which needs 15 volts to record. 

Read more: http://news.techeye.net/science/new-memory-stores-light#ixzz2X2TryspQ

Scientists working on smart contact lenses

Although Google Glass has yet to hit retail and flop, scientists are already working on next generation wearable devices and they include smart contact lenses.
One of the main problems facing Google Glass is its sheer bulk. The device is still pretty big, yet despite its size it doesn’t offer a lot of battery life. Scientists in Korea and Switzerland believe smart contact lenses, built using a new generation of nanomaterials, are the way to go.
A team led by Jang-Ung Park at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology managed to mount a light emitting diode on an off the shelf contact lens. The team came up with a special material of their own to make it possible - a stretchy mix of graphene and silver nanowires, reports Technology Review.
They tested their contraption on rabbits. The fluffy test subjects didn’t seem to mind, and did not rub their eyes.
Meanwhile a Swiss team at Sensimed is working on a smart lens for 24-hour monitoring of eye pressure in glaucoma patients. Like the bunnies, they don’t seem to mind, either. University of Washington professor and Google Glass project founder Babak Parviz has also dabbled in contact-lens displays, but they were built using rigid, non-transparent materials.

Read more: http://news.techeye.net/science/scientists-working-on-smart-contact-lenses#ixzz2X2TbnOm6

Researchers create wooden battery

Scientists have taken a leaf from the book of nature and developed a thin, long-lasting, efficient and environmentally friendly battery that uses wood.
According to Design and Trend, the components in the battery, tested by scientists at the University of Maryland, are a thousand times thinner than paper.
Researchers Liangbing Hu, Teng Li and others emerged from their smoke filled labs having made a battery built around a sliver of wood coated with tin.
They think it is much better than batteries that use stiff, non-flexible substrates. Current batteries are too brittle to withstand the swelling and shrinking that happens as electrons are stored in and used up from the battery.
Hu said that idea came from looking at trees. Wood fibers that make up a tree once held mineral-rich water, and so are ideal for storing liquid electrolytes, making them not only the base but an active part of the battery.
They used wood as the base of an experimental sodium-ion battery, choosing sodium over lithium.
Sodium does not store energy as efficiently as lithium, so would not be as much use in mobile phones - instead, its low cost and common materials would make it ideal to store huge amounts of energy at once such as solar energy at a power plant.
The team noticed that after charging and discharging the battery hundreds of times, the wood ended up wrinkled but intact. Computer models showed that that the wrinkles effectively relax the stress in the battery during charging and recharging, so that the battery can survive many cycles, putting it among the longest lasting of all sodium-ion nanobatteries.
Wood fibers are soft enough to serve as a mechanical buffer, and so can accommodate changes in tin, which the researchers say is key to their long-lasting sodium-ion batteries. 

Read more: http://news.techeye.net/science/researchers-create-wooden-battery#ixzz2X2TAARqn

Oddest Couple Share 250 Million Year Old Burrow

Scientists from South Africa, Australia and France have discovered a world first association while scanning a 250 million year old fossilised burrow from the Karoo Basin of South Africa.

The burrow revealed two unrelated vertebrate animals nestled together and fossilised after being trapped by a flash flood event. Facing harsh climatic conditions subsequent to the Permo-Triassic (P-T) mass extinction, the amphibian Broomistega and the mammal forerunner Thrinaxodon cohabited in a burrow.
Scanning shows that the amphibian, which was suffering from broken ribs, crawled into a sleeping mammal's shelter for protection. This research suggests that short periods of dormancy, called aestivation, in addition to burrowing behaviour, may have been a crucial adaptation that allowed mammal ancestors to survive the P-T extinction.
The international team of scientists was led by Dr Vincent Fernandez from Wits University, South Africa and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France. The other authors from Wits University include Prof. Bruce Rubidge (Director of the newly formed Palaeosciences Centre of Excellence at Wits), Dr Fernando Abdala and Dr Kristian Carlson. Other authors include Dr Della Collins Cook (Indiana University); Dr Adam Yates (Museum of Central Australia) and Dr. Paul Tafforeau (ESRF).
After many impressive results obtained on fossils, synchrotron imaging has led to revived interest in the studies of the numerous fossilised burrows discovered in the Karoo Basin of South Africa and dated to 250 million years ago. The first attempt to investigate one of these burrow-casts surprisingly revealed a world-first association of two unrelated animals.
The fossil was recovered from sedimentary rock strata in the Karoo Basin. It dates from 250 million years ago, at the beginning of the Triassic Period. At that time, the ecosystem was recovering from the Permo-Triassic mass extinction that wiped out most of life on Earth. In the Pangea Supercontinent context, what is now South Africa was an enclave in the southern half called Gondwana. It was the scene of pronounced climatic warming and increased seasonality marked by monsoonal rainfall. To survive this harsh environment, many animals, including mammal-like reptiles (mammal forerunners), developed a digging behaviour, attested by the numerous fossilised burrow casts discovered in the Karoo Basin. These casts have long been thought to enclose fossilised remains, triggering interest from palaeontologists. Early this year, an international group of scientists started to research the contents of these burrows using X-ray synchrotron computed microtomography.
Two burrow casts were selected from the collection at Wits to be scanned using the state-of-the-art facility at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF). Using the unique properties of the X-ray beam which enables non-destructive probing, the scan of the first burrow started to reveal the skull of a mammal-like reptile called Thrinaxodon, an animal previously reported in another burrow.
As the scan progressed, the three-dimensional reconstruction displayed results beyond expectations: the mammal-like reptile was accompanied by an amphibian Broomistega, belonging to the extinct group of Temnospondyl.
"While discovering the results we were amazed by the quality of the images," says lead author Fernandez, "but the real excitement came when we discovered a second set of teeth completely different from that of the mammal-like reptile. It was really something else."
Besides the pristine preservation of the two skeletons, the team focused on the reasons explaining such an unusual co-habitation. Fernandez explains: "Burrow-sharing by different species exists in the modern world, but it corresponds to a specific pattern. For example, a small visitor is not going to disturb the host. A large visitor can be accepted by the host if it provides some help, like predator vigilance. But neither of these patterns corresponds to what we have discovered in this fossilised burrow."
The scientists gathered all the information to try to reconstitute the events that led to this incredible fossil aggregation, testing scenarios one after another. "It's a fascinating scientific question: what caused the association of these two organisms in the burrow? One of the more obvious possibilities is a predator-prey interaction, but we inspected both skeletons looking for tooth marks or other evidence implying predation, ultimately finding no support for one having attempted to feed on the other," says Carlson.

Artist impression of Broomistega seeking shelter in Thrinaxodon's burrow.

His colleague, Cook, adds that the consecutive broken ribs resulted from a single, massive trauma. The amphibian clearly survived the injury for some time because the fractures were healing, but it was surely quite handicapped. According to Fernandez this Broomistega is the first complete skeleton of this rare species that has been discovered. "It tells us that this individual was a juvenile and mostly aquatic at that time of its life," he says.
The scientists eventually concluded that the amphibian crawled into the burrow in response to its poor physical condition but was not evicted by the mammal-like reptile.
Numerous Thrinaxodon specimens have been found in South Africa, many of them fossilised in a curled-up position. Abdala says: "I have always been fascinated by the preservation of Thrinaxodon fossils in a curled-up position that show even tiny bones of the skeleton preserved. It's as if they were peacefully resting in shelters at the time of death."
The shelters prevented disturbance of the skeletal remains from scavengers and weathering. "We also think it might reflect a state of torpor called aestivation in response to aridity and absence of food resources," Abdala says.
Piecing all the clues together, the team finally elucidated the enigmatic association, concluding that "the mammal-like reptile, Thrinaxodon, was most probably aestivating in its burrow, a key adaptation response together with a burrowing behaviour which enabled our distant ancestors to survive the most dramatic mass extinction event. This state of torpor explains why the amphibian was not chased out of the burrow," says Rubidge.
Both animals were finally entrapped in the burrow by a sudden flood and preserved together in the sediments for 250 million years.
Tafforeau says: "Thanks to the unique possibilities for high quality imaging of fossils developed during the last decade at the ESRF, these unique specimens remain untouched, protected by their mineral matrix. Who knows what kind of information we'll be able to obtain from them in the future and which would have been completely lost if the specimen had been prepared out of its burrow cast?"

Google files facial password patent to increase Android security

London: Google has filed a patent suggesting users pull a series of faces, like sticking out their tongue or wrinkling their nose, in place of a password to unlock their Android phones or tablets.

Google says requiring specific gestures could prevent the existing Face Unlock facility being fooled by photos, reports BBC News.

The document - which was filed in June 2012 but has only just been published - suggests the software could track a "facial landmark" to confirm a user not only looks like the device's owner but also carries out the right action.

It says examples of the requests that might be made include, a frown, a tongue protrusion, an open-mouth smile, a forehead wrinkle and an eyebrow movement.

It says the check would work by comparing two images taken from a captured video stream of the user's face to see if the difference between them showed the gesture had been made. The filing also notes several ways the software might check that the device was being shown a real person's face rather than doctored photographs.

These include studying other frames from the captured video stream to check that the person had made a sequence of movements to achieve the commanded gesture, and confirming all of the frames actually showed the person's face.

In addition it says the software could monitor if there were changes in the angle of the person's face to ensure the device was not being shown a still image with a fake gesture animated on top. Such efforts might help address criticism that its current face detection software is insecure.

Google, Facebook deny compromising personal data

New Delhi: Amidst an uproar in the US over the issue of government secretly tracking information on foreigners from Internet firms, Google and Facebook have categorically denied their participation in such a project.

Both the US-based technology giants said that their organisations were not aware about the existence of such a programme -- code-named PRISM -- until it hit national and international headlines.

In a post on his profile on Facebook yesterday, its founder Mark Zuckerberg said: "Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers.

"We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or metadata in bulk, like the one Verizon reportedly received. And if we did, we would fight it aggressively. We hadn't even heard of PRISM before yesterday."

Similarly, Google Co-founder and CEO Larry Page and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond in a post on the search giant's official blog said: "First, we have not joined any program that would give the US government or any other government direct access to our servers.

"Indeed, the US government does not have direct access or a 'back door' to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday."

The top Google honchos added that the issue was about press reports alleging that Internet companies have joined a secret US government program called PRISM to give the National Security Agency direct access to Google's servers.

On government requests for data, Zuckerberg said: "When governments ask Facebook for data, we review each request carefully to make sure they always follow the correct processes and all applicable laws, and then only provide the information if is required by law.

Likewise, Page and Drummond in their blog post said Google provides data to governments only as per the law.

"Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don?t follow the correct process. Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users? data are false, period," the post said.

It further added: "Until this week's reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users' call records.

"We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users? Internet activity on such a scale is completely false."

"Finally, this episode confirms what we have long believed there needs to be a more transparent approach. Google has worked hard, within the confines of the current laws, to be open about the data requests we receive," they said.

Stalagmites Provide New View of Abrupt Climate Events Over 100,000 Years

A new set of long-term climate records based on cave stalagmites collected from tropical Borneo shows that the western tropical Pacific responded very differently than other regions of the globe to abrupt climate change events. The 100,000-year climate record adds to data on past climate events, and may help scientists assess models designed to predict how Earth's climate will respond in the future.

The new record resulted from oxygen isotope analysis of more than 1,700 calcium carbonate samples taken from four stalagmites found in three different northern Borneo caves. The results suggest that climate feedbacks within the tropical regions may amplify and prolong abrupt climate change events that were first discovered in the North Atlantic.
The results were scheduled to be published June 6 in Science Express, the electronic advance online publication of the journal Science, and will appear later in an issue of printed publication. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.
Today, relatively subtle changes in the tropical Pacific's ocean and atmosphere have profound effects on global climate. However, there are few records of past climate changes in this key region that have the length, resolution and age controls needed to reveal the area's response to abrupt climate change events.
"This is a new record from a very important area of the world," said Kim Cobb, an associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "This record will provide a new piece of the puzzle from the tropical Pacific showing us how that climate system has responded to forcing events over the past 100,000 years."
Among the findings were some surprises that show just how complicated Earth's climate system can be. While the stalagmite record reflected responses to abrupt changes known as Heinrich events, another major type of event -- known as Dansgaard-Oeschger excursions -- left no evidence in the Borneo stalagmites. Both types of abrupt climate change events are prominently featured in a previously-published stalagmite climate record from China -- which is only slightly north of Borneo.
"To my knowledge, this is the first record that so clearly shows sensitivity to one set of major abrupt climate change events and not another," said Cobb. "These two types of abrupt change events appear to have different degrees of tropical Pacific involvement, and because the tropical Pacific speaks with such a loud voice when it does speak, we think this is extremely important for understanding the mechanisms underlying these events."
The researchers were also surprised to discover a very large and abrupt signal in their stalagmite climate records precisely when super-volcano Toba erupted nearby, roughly 74,000 years ago.
The team recovered the stalagmites from caves in Gunung Mulu and Gunung Buda National Parks, in northern Borneo, which is located a few degrees north of the Equator in the western Pacific. Back at their Georgia Tech lab, they analyzed the stalagmites for the ratio of oxygen isotopes contained in samples of calcium carbonate, the material from which the stalagmites were formed. That ratio is set by the oxygen isotopes in rainfall at the site, as the water that seeped into the ground dissolved limestone rock and dripped into the caves to form the stalagmites. The stalagmites accumulate at a rate of roughly one centimeter every thousand years.
"Stalagmites are time capsules of climate signals from thousands of years in the past," said Stacy Carolin, a Georgia Tech Ph.D. candidate who gathered and analyzed the stalagmites. "We have instrumental records of climate only for the past 100 years or so, and if we want to look deeper into the past, we have to find records like these that locked in climate signals we can extract today."
In the laboratory, Carolin sawed each stalagmite in half, opening it like a hot dog bun. She then used a tiny drill bit to take samples of the calcium carbonate down the center at one-millimeter steps. Because the stalagmites grew at varying rates, each sample represented as little as 60 years of time, or as much as 200 years. The precise ages of the samples were determined by measuring uranium and thorium isotope ratios, an analysis done with the help of Jess F. Adkins, a professor at the California Institute of Technology and a co-author of the study.
Rainfall oxygen isotopic ratios are good indicators of the amount of rainfall occurring throughout the region, as determined by a modern-day calibration study recently published by another graduate student in Cobb's lab.
Merging data from the four different stalagmites provided a record of precipitation trends in the western Pacific over the past 100,000 years. That information can be compared to stalagmite and ice core climate records obtained elsewhere in the world.
"This record, which spans the entire last glacial period, adds significantly to the understanding of how various climate forcings are felt by the western tropical Pacific," Carolin added.
Climate scientists are interested in learning more about abrupt climate changes because they indicate that the climate system may have "tipping points." So far, the climate system has responded to rising carbon dioxide levels at a fairly steady rate, but many scientists worry about possible nonlinear effects.

Secret Chamber inside of Clearwater Connection cave in Gunung Mulu National Park

"As a society, we haven't really thought enough about the fact that we are moving Earth's climate system toward a new state very quickly," said Cobb. "It's important to remember that the climate system has important nonlinearities that are most evident in these abrupt climate events. Ultimately, we'd like to be able to reproduce the global signatures of these abrupt climate events with numerical models of the climate system, and investigate the physics that drive such events."
For Carolin, studying the half-meter-long stalagmites brought an awareness that Earth has not always been as we know it today.
"You have to be impressed with the scope of what you are studying, and recognize that the state our climate is in today is incredibly different from Earth's climate during the last Ice Age," she said. "As we consider how humans may be affecting climate, dissecting what was going on tens of thousands of years ago in all regions of the globe can help scientists better predict how the Earth will respond to modern climate forcings."
In addition to those already mentioned, the research team included Brian Clark, manager of the Gunung Mulu National Park where the samples were gathered; Syria Lejau and Jenny Malang, Gunung Mulu cave guides who aided in sample collection; Jessica Conroy, a Georgia Tech postdoctoral fellow; and Andrew Tuen, a professor at the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak.
This research was funded by the National Science Foundation through PECASE Award ATM-0645291. The findings and conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF.

Evidence of drinkable water found on Mars

London: NASA scientists have revealed that the Opportunity rover has made new discoveries about early water on Mars which may have been drinkable.

The unmanned solar-powered vehicle, described as "arthritic" as it nears 10 years since its launch, has just analysed what may be its oldest rock ever, known as Esperance 6.

It contains evidence that potentially life-supporting water once flowed in abundance, leaving clay minerals behind, Sky News reported.

Principal investigator Steve Squyres of Cornell University said that this is powerful evidence that water interacted with this rock and changed its chemistry, changed its mineralogy in a dramatic way.

He described the research as "some of the most important" of the decade-long mission because it showcases a very different chemistry than most of the previous discoveries about water on Mars, which is now quite dry.

Scientists believe that a lot of water once flowed through the rocks through some sort of fracture, leaving an unusually high concentration of clay.

The analysis reveals traces of what may have been a drinkable type of water that dates to the first billion years of Martian history.

UN chief hails role of science in combating climate change

United Nations: Science plays a key role in finding new ways to combat climate change, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said on Saturday, stressing that governments must use scientific data to mobilise resources and take action against the global threat.

"The reason climate change has risen on the global agenda is because the facts don't lie. Our world is warming, and our greenhouse gas emissions are a significant cause," Ban told members of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, in the US state of Colorado.

"We know this thanks to you, scientists and researchers studying the data and refusing to be swayed by politics, sceptics and interest groups," he said.

Ban pointed out that in recent years climate change has risen to the top of the UN's agenda as an urgent priority that is affecting all countries in increasingly extreme ways, from flooding in Asia to tornadoes in the United States and drought in the Sahel.

"We need people like you, and institutions like this, to analyse the trends, sort the data and produce useful information for forming policy," Ban said.

"Your work makes my job easier. I am committed to mobilising political will at the highest levels to address this global challenge," he said.

Next year, Ban will convene a high-level meeting of world leaders to mobilise political will for a binding climate change agreement by 2015, and he emphasised that the continuous contribution of the scientific community will be crucial for decision-making in this regard.

"Over the next two years, I will engage leaders at the highest level from governments, business, finance, science and civil society and harness the full strength of the UN system to catalyse ambitious action to reduce emissions and strengthen climate resilience," Ban said.

He also encouraged scientists to build collaborations that transcend borders and that help build capacity for research and decision-making in developing countries since they are often the most vulnerable to climate change and do not have the ability to generate and apply relevant climate information.

"To successfully reduce the risks posed by climate change, we will need the full engagement of everyone including the scientists and meteorologists who have their fingers on the pulse of our planet," Ban said.

Environment Day: India's green mission caught in funds' crunch

New Delhi: India's ambitious plans to fight climate change by enhancing the forest cover at a cost of Rs. 46,000 crore by 2020 have been stuck with no funds available since it was cleared by the Prime Minister's Council on Climate Change in 2011.

The Green India Mission, one of eight such under the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC), had aimed to increase the forest cover by five million hectares and improve the quality of forests on another five million hectares.

"The Green India Mission has stopped as there are no funds coming. At the time of the mission's announcement, it was decided that funds will come from a number of ministries and the Planning Commission," V. Rajagopalan, secretary, environment ministry, told IANS.

"About Rs.2, 000 crore was to come under NREGS (National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme) from the rural development ministry while the Planning Commission was also to give funds. Some money was to come under the National Environment Fund but we have got nothing in the last two years," he added.

With the mission being stuck and affecting the afforestation drive, the environment ministry has now decided to approach the union cabinet.

"We are going to the cabinet to come out with a formal funding structure for the mission so that money starts flowing," Rajagopalan said.

The mission aims to reach an annual carbon dioxide sequestration - the amount of CO2 the forest cover can absorb - of 50 to 60 million tonnes by 2020.

The mission also focusses on improving ecosystem services, including biodiversity, hydrological services and carbon sequestration, and aims to increase forest-based livelihood income for three million forest-dependent families.

India currently has 23 percent of its land mass (70 million hectares) under forest cover. The aim is to eventually raise this to 33 percent (100 million hectares) but no timeline has been set for this.

R.K. Pachauri, chief of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), called for better coordination among various ministries and states for better implementation of the mission.

"It is sad that the mission has stopped. I hope there is better coordination among all stakeholders for better implementation," Pachauri told IANS.

"In India, politics is bigger than anything," he said.

The mission also aims at monitoring additional parameters like ground cover, soil condition, erosion and infiltration and groundwater levels.

It was to be implemented through an autonomous organisational structure to reduce red-tape and rigidity while ensuring accountability. However, nothing has progressed so far.

Heavy Einstein spaceship will leave a glamorous legacy

• 16:49 06 June 2013 by Celeste Biever
• For similar stories, visit the Picture of the day and Space flight Topic Guides

(Image:ESA/S. Corvaja)

Albert Einstein the man was a heavyweight of science, and so is the spaceship that bears his name. The juggernaut is the heaviest yet of a fleet of Automated Transfer Vehicles (ATVs) built and operated by the European Space Agency.

The picture above shows Einstein lifting off yesterday from Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, propelled by an Ariane 5 rocket. Now the uncrewed spaceship is parked in orbit 260 kilometres above Earth's surface, preparing to dock with the International Space Station in nine days' time.

The ATV fleet first took to the skies in 2008 with the launch of Jules Verne. The roll call of famous science-related Europeans continued with Johannes Kepler in 2011 and Edoardo Amaldi last year. The fifth and final ATV, Georges Lemaître, is scheduled for launch next year.

At 20,190 kilograms, Albert Einstein is the heaviest ATV yet, outweighing its immediate predecessor by 150 kg. Its cargo includes 2580 kg of propellants for reboosting the station's orbit and 860 kg more destined for the tanks of its Russian Zvezda module. It will also carry 570 kg of drinking water and 100 kg of oxygen and air to sustain the ISS's crew. After delivering its supplies, the craft will, like its predecessors, be filled with space-station garbage and sent down to burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

Despite their evocative names and pioneering docking technology, the ATVs have played a mundane, though essential, role so far. But their contribution to future space flight could be more glamorous. If ESA and NASA plans come good, they will live on in the form of the Orion Multipurpose Crew Vehicle, designed to take astronauts to deep space. It is a NASA project, but last year the US space agency announced that Europe would provide crucial technology derived from the ATV.

Social Networks Could Help Prevent Disease Outbreaks in Endangered Chimpanzees

Many think of social networks in terms of Facebook friends and Twitter followers, but for recent University of Georgia doctoral graduate Julie Rushmore, social networks are tools in the fight against infectious diseases.

Rushmore, who completed her doctorate in the Odum School of Ecology in May, analyzed the social networks of wild chimpanzees to determine which individuals were most likely to contract and spread pathogens. Her findings, published in the Journal of Animal Ecology on June 5, could help wildlife managers target their efforts to prevent outbreaks and potentially help public health officials prevent disease in human populations as well.
Effective disease intervention for this species is important for a number of reasons. Wild chimpanzees are highly endangered, and diseases -- including some that also infect humans -- are among the most serious threats to their survival. And due to habitat loss, chimpanzees increasingly overlap with human populations, so disease outbreaks could spread to people and livestock, and vice versa.
Disease prevention in wildlife is logistically challenging, and resources are scarce, Rushmore explained. Even when vaccines are available, it is impractical to vaccinate every individual in a wildlife population. She and her colleagues decided to use social network analysis to pinpoint individuals most important in disease transmission.
"Modeling studies in humans have shown that targeting central individuals for vaccination is significantly more effective than randomly vaccinating," Rushmore said. "There have been a few social network studies in wildlife systems -- bees, lions, meerkats, lizards and giraffes -- but this is the first paper to map out social networks in the context of disease transmission and conservation for wild primates."
Rushmore observed a community of wild chimpanzees in Kibale National Park in Uganda, recording the interactions of individuals and family groups over a nine-month period to determine which individuals -- and which types of individuals -- were most central.
"Chimpanzees are ideal for this study because to collect this observational behavioral data, you don't need to collar them or use any invasive methods. You can essentially just observe chimpanzees in their natural environment and identify them individually based on their facial features," she said.
Rushmore collected information about the traits of individual chimpanzees including age, sex, rank and family size. Rank for adult males was based on dominance, while for adult females and juveniles it was based on location: Those that lived and foraged in the interior of the community's territory were considered of higher rank than those that roamed its edges.
From December 2009 to August 2010, Rushmore recorded the interactions of chimpanzees in the community at 15-minute intervals between 6 a.m. and 7:30 p.m., four to six days per week. She mapped her observations onto a diagram showing how often each individual associated with the others.
This analysis revealed that the most central figures in the network turned out to be high-ranking mothers and juveniles with large families. "They form nursing parties -- essentially like day care -- where several families will hang out together," she said. "In that way they become quite central because they have contact with a large portion of the community."
Second in centrality were the high-ranking males.
"There are many studies in humans, and at least one in chimpanzees, showing that from an immunological perspective, juveniles and children are really important for maintaining diseases in populations through play and things like that," she said.
"In addition, high-ranking male chimpanzees are often immunosuppressed because they have high levels of testosterone and have been shown to have higher rates of parasitism. So it seems that in addition to being central to the network, the juveniles and the high-ranking males in particular could also have lower immunity than other individuals, which might help facilitate them acquiring and transmitting pathogens."
Rushmore's findings have implications for disease prevention beyond chimpanzees.
"This work can easily be applied to other systems," she said. "You could use similar methods to identify which traits are predictive of centrality. The theme that would carry over from our findings is that these central individuals are likely important to target for vaccination or treatment."
Rushmore and her colleagues are continuing their research into social networks and disease. They currently are using infectious disease models to simulate outbreaks on these networks and to develop targeted pathogen interventions.
"Ultimately, we want to develop vaccination strategies that could both prevent large outbreaks and lower the number of animals requiring vaccination," Rushmore said.
The study's co-authors were Damien Caillaud of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International and the University of Texas at Austin, Leopold Matamba of the UGA department of mathematics, Rebecca M. Stumpf of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Stephen P. Borgatti of the University of Kentucky and Sonia Altizer of the UGA Odum School of Ecology.

Two adult males in the Kanyawara chimpanzee community rest in Kibale National Park, Uganda

Scientists Discover How HIV Kills Immune Cells; Findings Have Implications for HIV Treatment

Untreated HIV infection destroys a person's immune system by killing infection-fighting cells, but precisely when and how HIV wreaks this destruction has been a mystery until now. New research by scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, reveals how HIV triggers a signal telling an infected immune cell to die. This finding has implications for preserving the immune systems of HIV-infected individuals..
                                               

Scanning electron micrograph of HIV particles infecting a human T cell.

HIV replicates inside infection-fighting human immune cells called CD4+ T cells through complex processes that include inserting its genes into cellular DNA. The scientists discovered that during this integration step, a cellular enzyme called DNA-dependent protein kinase (DNA-PK) becomes activated. DNA-PK normally coordinates the repair of simultaneous breaks in both strands of molecules that comprise DNA. As HIV integrates its genes into cellular DNA, single-stranded breaks occur where viral and cellular DNA meet. Nevertheless, the scientists discovered, the DNA breaks during HIV integration surprisingly activate DNA-PK, which then performs an unusually destructive role: eliciting a signal that causes the CD4+ T cell to die. The cells that succumb to this death signal are the very ones mobilized to fight the infection.
According to the scientists, these new findings suggest that treating HIV-infected individuals with drugs that block early steps of viral replication -- up to and including activation of DNA-PK and integration -- not only can prevent viral replication, but also may improve CD4+ T cell survival and immune function. The findings also may shed light on how reservoirs of resting HIV-infected cells develop and may aid efforts to eliminate these sites of persistent infection

Irish Chronicles Reveal Links Between Cold Weather and Volcanic Eruptions

Medieval chronicles have given an international group of researchers a glimpse into the past to assess how historical volcanic eruptions affected the weather in Ireland up to 1500 years ago.
        

By critically assessing over 40,000 written entries in the Irish Annals and comparing them with measurements taken from ice cores, the researchers successfully linked the climatic aftermath of volcanic eruptions to extreme cold weather events in Ireland over a 1200-year period from 431 to 1649.
Their study, which has been published today, 6 June, in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, showed that over this timescale up to 48 explosive volcanic eruptions could be identified in the Greenland Ice Sheet Project (GISP2) ice-core, which records the deposition of volcanic sulfate in annual layers of ice.
Of these 48 volcanic events, 38 were associated, closely in time, with 37 extreme cold events, which were identified by systematically examining written entries in the Irish Annals and picking out directly observed meteorological phenomena and conditions, such as heavy snowfall and frost, prolonged ice covering lakes and rivers, and contemporary descriptions of abnormally cold weather.

New research shows that explosive volcanic eruptions are strongly, and persistently, implicated in the occurrence of cold weather events over this long timescale in Ireland. In their severity, these events are quite rare for the country's mild maritime climate

Lead author of the study, Dr Francis Ludlow, from the Harvard University Center for the Environment and Department of History, said: "It's clear that the scribes of the Irish Annals were diligent reporters of severe cold weather, most probably because of the negative impacts this had on society and the biosphere.
"Our major result is that explosive volcanic eruptions are strongly, and persistently, implicated in the occurrence of cold weather events over this long timescale in Ireland. In their severity, these events are quite rare for the country's mild maritime climate."
Through the injection of sulphur dioxide gas into the stratosphere, volcanic eruptions can play a significant role in the regulation of the Earth's climate. Sulphur dioxide gas is converted into sulphate aerosol particles after eruptions which reflect incoming sunlight and result in an overall temporary cooling of the Earth's surface.
Whilst the global effects of recent eruptions are quite well-known, such as the Mount Pinatubo eruption almost 22 years ago (15 June 1991), less is known about their effects on climate before the beginning of instrumental weather recording, or their effects on regional scales; the Irish Annals provided an opportunity to explore both of these issues.
The Irish Annals contain over one million written words and around 40,000 distinct written entries, detailing major historical events on an annual basis, and providing both systematic and sustained reporting of meteorological extremes.
The dating and reliability of the Annals can be gauged by comparing reported events to those which are independently known, such as solar and lunar eclipses.
"With a few honourable exceptions, the Irish record of extreme events has only been used anecdotally, rather than systematically surveyed and exploited for the study of the climate history of Ireland and the North Atlantic, and so the richness of the record has been largely unrecognized," continued Dr Ludlow.
Although the effect of big eruptions on the climate in summer is largely to cause cooling, during the winter, low-latitude eruptions in the tropics have instead been known to warm large parts of the northern hemisphere as they cause a strengthening of the westerly winds that brings, for example, warmer oceanic air to Europe; however, this study identified several instances when low-latitude eruptions appeared to correspond to extreme cold winters in Ireland.
One example is the 1600 eruption in Peru of Huaynaputina, which the researchers found, against expectations, to be associated with extreme cold winter weather in Ireland in the following years.
"The possibility that tropical eruptions may result in severe winter cooling for Ireland highlights the considerable complexity of the volcano-climate system in terms of the regional expression of the response of climate to volcanic disturbances.
"It is on the regional scale that we need to refine our understanding of this relationship as ultimately, it is on this scale that individuals and societies plan for extreme weather," continued Dr Ludlow.

Living Fossils? Actually, Sturgeon Fish Are Evolutionary Speedsters

 Efforts to restore sturgeon in the Great Lakes region have received a lot of attention in recent years, and many of the news stories note that the prehistoric-looking fish are "living fossils" virtually unchanged for millions of years.
             

                                But a new study by University of Michigan researchers and their colleagues reveals that in at least one measure of evolutionary change -- changes in body size over time -- sturgeon have been one of the fastest-evolving fish on the planet.

A lake sturgeon from the Great Lakes....

"Sturgeon are thought of as a living fossil group that has undergone relatively slow rates of anatomical change over time. But that's simply not true," said Daniel Rabosky, assistant professor in the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and a curator of herpetology at the Museum of Zoology.
"Our study shows that sturgeon are evolving very quickly in some ways. They have evolved a huge range of body sizes. There are dwarf sturgeon the size of a bass and several other species that are nearly as big as a Volkswagen."
The sturgeon finding is just one result in a wide-ranging study of the rates of species formation and anatomical change in fish. The work involved assembling one of the largest evolutionary trees ever created for any group of animals. The evolutionary relationships between nearly 8,000 species of fish are delineated in the branches of the tree, allowing the researchers to make inferences about all 30,000 or so species of ray-finned fish.
The study's findings are scheduled for online publication in Nature Communications on June 6. Rabosky and Michael Alfaro of the University of California, Los Angeles, are the lead authors. U-M computational evolutionary biologist Stephen Smith is a co-author.
The main goal of the project was to test a longstanding idea in evolutionary biology that has anecdotal support but which had never been rigorously evaluated, Rabosky said. It was Charles Darwin who coined the term "living fossil" to describe extant creatures, such as the gar (another Great Lakes resident) and the lungfish, which have been present for many millions of years in the fossil record yet appear to have undergone very little anatomical change.
Paleontologists have long suspected that these observations reflect a fundamental coupling between the rates of species formation and anatomical change: groups of organisms that contain lots of species also seem to have greater amounts of anatomical variation, while groups with only a few species, such as the gar, lack much morphological variety.
Rabosky and his colleagues assembled a time-calibrated evolutionary tree for 7,864 living fish species using DNA sequence data and body-size information from publicly available databases. Their data set was so large that they had to develop new computer programs from scratch to analyze it.
The new computer models and the vast amount of data enabled the team to study the correlation between how quickly new species form and how rapidly they evolve new body sizes on a scale that had not previously been possible.
They found a strong correlation between the rates of species diversification and body size evolution across the more than 30,000 living species of ray-finned fish, which comprise the majority of vertebrate biological diversity.
"We're basically validating a lot of ideas that have been out there since Darwin, but which had never been tested at this scale due to lack of data and the limits of existing technologies," Rabosky said.
Most of the fish groups fall into one of two categories. Fish like the gar form species very slowly and show little range in body size. Others, like the salmon family -- which includes salmon, trout, whitefish and char -- do both: they form species quickly and have a wide range of body sizes.
Sturgeon have been around more than 100 million years and today consist of 29 species worldwide, including the lake sturgeon found in the Great Lakes. They don't fit the general pattern found by Rabosky's team; there are few sturgeon species but a great variety in body size.
"In that sense, they're kind of an outlier," Rabosky said.
In addition to Rabosky, Alfaro and Smith, authors of the Nature Communications paper are Francesco Santini of the Universita di Torino in Italy, Jonathan Eastman of the University of Idaho, Brian Sidlauskas of Oregon State University and Jonathan Chang of UCLA.
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Miller Institute for Basic Research at the University of California, Berkeley.

Sex is the key to changing the vole Makes them monogamous and loyal

Over the years there has been a sea change in the hearts and minds of people about the vole.

Some put this down to the fact that really there are much worse things out there - things with a fruity flavour and those organisations which claim to do no evil but pay no taxes.

Now scientists have worked out why people are feeling a lot more positive about the vole and it is all down to brain chemistry and sex.

Researchers have confirmed that sex induces permanent chemical modifications in the chromosomes, affecting the expression of genes that regulate sexual and monogamous behaviour.

According to a study published in Nature Neuroscience, prairie voles mate for life. The voles' pair bonding, sharing of parental roles and egalitarian nest building in couples makes them a good model for understanding the biology of monogamy and mating in humans.

Neuroscientist Mohamed Kabbaj and his team at Florida State University in Tallahassee took voles which had been housed together for six hours but had not mated. The researchers injected drugs into the voles' brains near a region called the nucleus accumbens, which is closely associated with the reinforcement of reward and pleasure.

Animals that had been permitted to mate also had high levels of vasopressin and oxytocin receptors, confirming that sex activates this brain area which leads to partner preference.

It is not just the drug though. It takes a drug plus about six hours of living together for the Voles to think they have found their dream partner. This might explain why Steve Ballmer has stayed as Microsoft's CEO for so long.