Responding to a year of natural disaster - BBC

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4553286.stm


Last Updated: Wednesday, 28 December 2005, 00:43 GMT
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Responding to a year of natural disaster

By Paul Reynolds World Affairs correspondent, BBC News website

It has been a year of so many major natural disasters - the aftermath of the tsunami in Asia, the earthquake in Kashmir, the hurricane in New Orleans - that philosophers in the Middle Ages would have concluded that God was angry and man was being punished.


Natural disasters claimed many thousands of lives in 2005








In our day, with the exception of some fundamentalist preachers, we tend not to judge ourselves by the disasters themselves but by the way we respond to them.
And as far as the biggest disaster, the tsunami - in which about a quarter of a million people died - was concerned, the world responded better than some people, myself included, had feared.
There are still some serious problems, especially those of reconstruction, but the immediate relief effort was huge and the money raised both by governments and individuals was significant.
"The tsunami started in the most dramatic way possible, with nature at its worst and humanity at its best," said the UN emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland.
"It was a year where we by and large rose to the challenge like never before. The speed with which people got food, water, medical relief and emergency shelters was very impressive."
He summed up: "I think the world was great in the tsunami."

Money talks

Now you can argue with that and say that humanity is not at its best when it fails to put warning systems into place - and at one stage monitors in the Pacific and a meteorologist in Thailand knew what was happening but did not know who to call.
And inevitably there were failures to get help where it was needed quickly, but Mr Egeland's judgement will probably not be seriously challenged a year on.
The money alone tells its own story. According to figures complied by Reuters, about $7bn (£4bn) was raised by governments and more than $5 billion by private donations.

A particular phenomenon was the way in which money from ordinary people was sometimes larger than the amounts given by their government

The United States ($2.337bn) led the donors, followed by Germany ($1.307bn), Britain ($1.108bn), Australia ($1.023bn), with collective contributions from the Asia Development Bank, the EU and the World Bank and substantial sums from Japan, Canada, the Netherlands, France and others.
A particular phenomenon was the way in which money from ordinary people was sometimes larger than the amounts given by their governments.
The US government gave $857m (the largest of any government donation) and $1.48bn came from individuals. The same was true for Germany ($643m from government and $663m from citizens) and Britain ($445m and $663m), France ($182m and $405m) and Sweden, which lost many people in Thailand ($90m and $137m).
In some other countries, especially the Netherlands and Canada, citizen donors ran their government contributions close.

Road to recovery

The tsunami moved money as well as emotions. The large amounts show how powerful an issue aid and development has become in Western societies.
But, and it is a big but, if the world has got better at sending immediate help, there is still a lot to do when it comes to reconstruction.
Oxfam International issued a report recently stating that "providing shelter for those displaced is proving the toughest challenge one year on."
However, in a more encouraging second report, it said: "More than half the people are back to work and economies are fast returning to normal."
Rebuilding is an old problem in the provision of aid. "Recovery is far more difficult than relief," said Eric Schwartz, the UN's deputy special envoy for tsunami recovery.
A UN team reported: "We are concerned that a year later, reconstruction efforts are plagued by serious delays and have not been awarded the priority they so urgently warrant."
Many victims, probably a majority of the estimated 1.8 million who were left homeless, are still living in temporary shelters, especially in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, the worst-hit countries.

Kashmir quake

This is even truer of the second worst disaster, the earthquake in Kashmir in October, which affected mainly the Pakistani side of the Line of Control and killed about 87,000 people.

Here the relief effort was not quite so quick, perhaps partly because of the mountains. The United States again provided the most aid and brought in helicopters, which are still there. Britain sent some as well, but the old political rivalry with India prevented the arrival of substantial help from Pakistan's neighbour.

A cold winter awaits the survivors of the Kashmir earthquake

And again there has been a great deal of individual giving, for example from the hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris who live in Britain. But it is touch and go whether enough has been done to stop people from freezing in the forthcoming winter. Jan Egeland is not so optimistic about this relief effort. He said that hundreds of thousands of lives were at stake.

There has been one organisational improvement. The UN has just set up a $500m fund for immediate disaster relief, something Mr Egeland has long been arguing for. A word about New Orleans: here the portrait of quick relief and delayed reconstruction was reversed. The problem in New Orleans was the slow response - at all levels of government - but here is no issue about reconstruction. The money available is immense. The US Congress has appropriated $62bn and the eventual sum, some conservative budget-waters fear, could run to $200bn. And there is no doubt of the ambition. The levees will be rebuilt and strengthened and the city will be repopulated.

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For Scientist and Englishwoman, Pluto Mission is Precious - space.com

By Tariq MalikStaff
Writerposted: 23 December 2005
08:45 am ET

It is the first ever flight to Pluto and the first planetary flyby in decades, but for its lead scientist and one Englishwoman NASA’s New Horizon mission will mark a milestone for space exploration.
New Horizons is set to launch on Jan. 17 atop an Atlas 5 booster and begin what is hoped to be a nearly 10-year trip to Pluto, but just getting to the launch pad has been a feat of no small effort.
“If somebody would have come to me 17 years ago and told me what a circuitous route it would take to get to the launch pad, I would have never believed it,” Alan Stern, principal investigator for the New Horizons mission, said in an interview.
The mission also resonates with 87-year-old Epsom, England resident Venetia Burney Phair who, as an 11-year-old girl in 1930, happened to mention to her grandfather that Pluto seemed a reasonable name for the then newly-discovered ninth planet.
“I think it’s marvelous that they can contemplate sending something quite so far away, and so small when you get to it,” Phair said of the mission during a telephone interview. “I only hope nothing goes wrong.”
Discovered in 1930, Pluto orbits the Sun from an average distance of about 3.6 billion miles (5.9 billion kilometers). New Horizons is set to swing past the planet in 2015, if all goes well, and observe the distant world over a five-month period.

Pluto, the harbinger

Budget clashes and funding scrambles have dogged the mission’s long development, but have not tempered its importance for planetary science, according to Stern.
“I call Pluto the harbinger,” he said, adding that the planet was the first hint that large objects sat beyond Neptune. “And then it was found to have a big satellite, so it was the harbinger of giant impacts,” Stern said of Pluto’s moon Charon, which is believed to have originated during a cataclysmic collision.
Pluto marked the first find in the Kuiper Belt – a region icy objects extending out from the orbit of Neptune. In 1988, astronomers discovered its thin atmosphere, with hints of exotic ices, and this year the Hubble Space Telescope picked up signs that Pluto may sport two additional moons, Stern said.
“It really is heralding ahead of its time, over and over again, the richness of what nature did out there,” Stern said.
With the discovery of several new planet hopefuls beyond Pluto, the Kuiper Belt is reshaping long-held beliefs on fundamental planetary science, making it even more imperative to send a probe and see what’s out there, he added.
“We’ve discovered that our entire view [of planets] is wrong,” Stern said. “It’s just joyous to me.”

What’s in a name

Phair, who has followed Pluto’s evolution from planet to ice dwarf to somewhere in-between, said the honor of naming what has become a much-debated planet arose from sheer luck.
The subject came up over breakfast while Phair’s – then Venetia Burney – grandfather read about the new planet in their Oxford, England home, she said.
“I thought in the back of my head, why not call it Pluto,” she said, adding that her class was studying the planets at the time and she had already read about the different Roman gods. “It’s stuck with me all this time, so it must have been a good lesson.”
Phair said her grandfather passed the suggestion Pluto – the Roman god of the underworld – on to Oxford University professor Herbert Hall Turner, and it eventually made its way to Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, where Clyde Tombaugh used to discover the planet in 1930.
“It was extremely lucky,” Phair said. “And it’s been extremely amusing for me to hear from all sorts of people.”
The debate over Pluto’s planethood status, and now over what constitutes a planet in general, has been somewhat amusing for Phair.
“It’s extraordinary,” she said of Pluto. “The more they downgrade it, the more publicity it seems to have. I think the whole mission is very exciting and I’ve always said that I’m lucky to have lived to now to see it.”

Centennial sandwich

For Stern, the timing of New Horizons seems particularly apt.
The probe’s launch window runs mostly between two key dates, beginning with the 100th anniversary of the birth of Gerard Kuiper (Dec. 7) – the Dutch-American astronomer who first postulated that debris from the solar system sat outside Neptune’s orbit. At the other end of the launch window, Feb. 4 to be exact, is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto 75 years ago on Feb. 18.
“Here we are with a launch date that perched right between these centennials,” Stern said, adding that family members of both Tombaugh and Kuiper plan to be present for New Horizons’ launch.
“This is really the completion of the initial reconnaissance of the planets, even though we know that most of the planets haven’t been discovered yet,” Stern said. “This is really a marker.”

Pluto-Bound Probe Ready For Long Journey
New Discoveries Await Out on the Horizon
New Horizons: Voyage To The Edge Of The Solar System

Women go to bed for space science - BBC

The volunteers underwent more than 180 tests while in bed







http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4526132.stm


Last Updated: Tuesday, 13 December 2005, 21:11 GMT
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Women go to bed for space science

Twelve women have spent two months in bed with their feet higher than their head - all in the name of science.

Designed to recreate the effects of weightlessness, the experiment was run by the European Space Agency in France.
The women, volunteers from Switzerland, Scotland, Finland and France, had to carry out all daily activities in their bed, tilted back at a six degree angle.
Now back on their feet for final tests, the women said they were proud to have helped future female cosmonauts.
The ESA hopes the results of the study will help scientists anticipate the medical problems that may arise as space missions go further and last longer.
The women underwent more than 180 tests and were kept under constant video scrutiny before being allowed out of bed on 30 November.
They were split into three groups, one fed a special diet, one asked to carry out certain muscular exercises and the other used as a control group.

'Childhood dream'

During the 60-day "bed-rest" stint they were allowed books, TV, music and internet access but had face-to-face contact only with medical staff.
Their rehabilitation will come to an end next week, after living in the MEDES medical research centre in Toulouse in France for 101 days in total, including three weeks at either end of the bed-rest.
Doctors predicted the physical effects would include a swollen face, blocked nose, twinges and aches, muscle wastage and loss of bone mass.
The volunteers, who had to be aged between 25 and 40, in good health and fluent in English or French, were paid 15,200 euros (£10,000) for their participation.
Stephanie Gacher, 31, told a press conference she was "proud" to have come within touching distance of her childhood dream of going into space.
"I gave a part of myself for future female cosmonauts," said Martine Riou, quoted by the AFP news agency.
Another group of 12 completed the bed-rest stint earlier this year.
Twelve scientific teams from 11 different countries are involved in the study. They are expected to start publishing their findings next year.

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Last-minute climate deals reached - BBC

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4515898.stm


Last Updated: Saturday, 10 December 2005, 12:11 GMT
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Last-minute climate deals reached




US negotiators have faced heavy criticism







Ministers at the climate change conference in Montreal have made a series of breakthroughs in plans to combat global warming.

On the conference's last day, Kyoto Protocol signatories agreed to extend the treaty on emissions reductions beyond its 2012 deadline.
And a broader group of countries including the US agreed to non-binding talks on long-term measures.
The US had refused to accept any deal leading to commitments to cuts.
Earlier, former President Bill Clinton said the US approach was "flat wrong".
After Mr Clinton's remarks - which were warmly received - the official US team appeared to shift its position.

'Map for the future'

The BBC's Tim Hirsch in Montreal says the deal was finally agreed in a mood of some euphoria after a last-minute procedural objection by the Russians held up the talks for several hours.

CONFERENCE BUSINESS
--> Details of how to implement the Kyoto Protocol finalised
--> Agreement among Kyoto signatories on plan to deepen emissions cuts after 2012
--> US and other Kyoto non-signatories persuaded to take part in non-binding dialogue workshops

Formal talks can now begin over the precise targets which will be set when the first phase of the Kyoto agreement expires in 2012.
Our correspondent says that, crucially, it sets the scene for discussing how large developing countries like India and China could be brought into the system of limiting greenhouse gas emissions.
Canadian Environment Minister Stephane Dion, who is hosting the conference, described the agreement as "a map for the future, the Montreal Action Plan, the MAP".
Last week delegates finalised a rule book for Kyoto, formally making it fully operational after years of negotiation and ratification.
The 1997 treaty commits industrialised countries to cut their combined carbon emissions to 5% below 1990 levels by 2008-12.

'Meet and surpass'

The US appears to have been stung by negative coverage in the US media after it walked out in protest at Canadian attempts to get it to accept mandatory targets, as well as by Mr Clinton's strong comments , our correspondent says.

"There is no longer any serious doubt that climate change is real, accelerating and caused by human activities"

Bill Clinton

Former US president

Mr Clinton attacked a central plank of the Bush administration's resistance to targets for cutting emissions - that it would harm the US economy.
If the US "had a serious, disciplined effort to apply on a large scale existing clean energy and energy conservation technologies... we could meet and surpass the Kyoto targets easily in a way that would strengthen, not weaken, our economies," he said.
Global warming and melting ice, he suggested, could lead to a future climate conference in Canada being held on "a raft somewhere".
The US has still not budged on its opposition to the Kyoto treaty, and faced heavy criticism for its stance.
Jennifer Morgan, climate-change expert for environmental group WWF, said US negotiator Harlan Watson's decision to leave the talks overnight showed "just how willing the US administration is to walk away from a healthy planet and its responsibilities".
The US rejected the criticism.
"If you want to talk about global consciousness, I'd say there's one country that is focused on action... dialogue... co-operation and... helping the developing world, and that's the United States," said state department spokesman Adam Ereli in Washington.
Despite the row, environmentalists said the conference had been in most respects a success, reaching agreements on how to quantify gas emissions and how to penalise nations for failing to meet Kyoto targets.
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In Dog Genome, Scientists See Man's Best Hope - Washington Post

The DNA "letters" of a female boxer named Tasha have been sequenced. (National Human Genome Research Institute Via Ap)









http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/07/AR2005120702457.html

In Dog Genome, Scientists See Man's Best Hope

By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 8, 2005; Page A01

There probably isn't a tail-wagging gene or a face-licking gene. But there undoubtedly are groups of genes that explain why retrievers chase sticks, spaniels jump in the water at every opportunity, and border collies like to herd sheep and small children.
The biological basis of the astonishing variety of behaviors of man's best friend is a big step closer to comprehension today with the publication of the dog's genome -- its 2.41 billion nucleotides, or DNA "letters."
The dog -- in the form of a female boxer named Tasha -- joins the human, the chimpanzee, the mouse and the rat on the list of mammals whose genetic instruction manual has been transcribed. The genomes of the fruit fly, a microscopic worm, yeast and several bacteria have also been decoded.
But the dog genome is far more than a curiosity. It is already providing insights into evolution and will probably make dogs the chief tool for understanding the genetic diseases of people.
Certain breeds are at much higher risk than others for specific ailments. Samoyeds have a tendency to become diabetic, Rottweilers develop the bone cancer osteosarcoma, springer spaniels are at risk for epilepsy, and Doberman pinschers suffer from narcolepsy much more often than other canines. All these diseases have human counterparts.
"This offers a strategy for tracking down the location of genes involved in medical conditions that in the past we have just not been able to tackle," said Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, which helped pay for the work.
Eric S. Lander, director of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., where the research was done, said: "The genetic structure of dog breeds is so much clearer than in the human population that it will make genetic analysis much simpler."
The work is the product of nearly 250 scientists organized through the institute, which is affiliated with Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A much less detailed version of the dog genome by a different research group was published two years ago.
In size, appearance and behavior, the dog is the most diverse species on Earth. It was the first animal domesticated from the wild, at least 15,000 years ago. Its many subspecies, or breeds, were sculpted by man, so it's no surprise that should want to shine the illuminating light of genome science on his longtime companion.
A genome is the total mass of genetic instruction an organism inherits. It consists of strings of DNA nucleotides, the biological equivalent of letters. The instructions on how to build a body -- including permanent structures such as teeth and brain cells as well as short-lived substances such as blood and hormones -- are contained in the order of the nucleotide "letters" on the strings. Humans have about 3 billion nucleotides in their genome.
Stretches of hundreds or thousands of nucleotides are copied inside cells and direct them to produce specific proteins, the building blocks of organisms. These stretches are called genes.
Humans have about 22,000 genes. Dogs, according to the new research, have about 19,300. A given gene usually comes in slightly different variations, similar to pencils with different colored lead, or scissors of varying size and shape.
The dog -- in the form of a female boxer named Tasha -- joins the human, the chimpanzee, the mouse and the rat on the list of mammals whose genetic instruction manual has been transcribed. The genomes of the fruit fly, a microscopic worm, yeast and several bacteria have also been decoded.
But the dog genome is far more than a curiosity. It is already providing insights into evolution and will probably make dogs the chief tool for understanding the genetic diseases of people.
Certain breeds are at much higher risk than others for specific ailments. Samoyeds have a tendency to become diabetic, Rottweilers develop the bone cancer osteosarcoma, springer spaniels are at risk for epilepsy, and Doberman pinschers suffer from narcolepsy much more often than other canines. All these diseases have human counterparts.
"This offers a strategy for tracking down the location of genes involved in medical conditions that in the past we have just not been able to tackle," said Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, which helped pay for the work.
Eric S. Lander, director of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., where the research was done, said: "The genetic structure of dog breeds is so much clearer than in the human population that it will make genetic analysis much simpler."
The work is the product of nearly 250 scientists organized through the institute, which is affiliated with Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A much less detailed version of the dog genome by a different research group was published two years ago.
In size, appearance and behavior, the dog is the most diverse species on Earth. It was the first animal domesticated from the wild, at least 15,000 years ago. Its many subspecies, or breeds, were sculpted by man, so it's no surprise that should want to shine the illuminating light of genome science on his longtime companion.
A genome is the total mass of genetic instruction an organism inherits. It consists of strings of DNA nucleotides, the biological equivalent of letters. The instructions on how to build a body -- including permanent structures such as teeth and brain cells as well as short-lived substances such as blood and hormones -- are contained in the order of the nucleotide "letters" on the strings. Humans have about 3 billion nucleotides in their genome.
Stretches of hundreds or thousands of nucleotides are copied inside cells and direct them to produce specific proteins, the building blocks of organisms. These stretches are called genes.
Humans have about 22,000 genes. Dogs, according to the new research, have about 19,300. A given gene usually comes in slightly different variations, similar to pencils with different colored lead, or scissors of varying size and shape.All dogs are descended from gray wolves, which were originally domesticated in East Asia. Some breeds, such as the Akita, have existed for more than 1,000 years. Most, though, are the product of selective breeding in the past 400 years to create specific characteristics.
That breeding has, in effect, concentrated specific versions of specific genes in specific populations of dogs. The result is a breed with physical and behavioral traits that existed in ancestral dogs but are now greatly magnified.
This results in animals that can look and act very different even though they scarcely differ from one another in their genetic identity. On a genetic level, breeds differ from one another only about as much as humans do. Gray wolves have more in common with Mexican hairless Chihuahuas than with coyotes, which they more closely resemble.
As traits have coalesced in breeds, so have specific diseases. That happened because genes involved in the diseases are physical neighbors of the trait genes; they move together in long stretches of DNA called haplotype blocks.
The blocks are 50 times as long in dogs as in people. This is because most breeds are only 30 to 90 generations old, much younger than human populations.
By studying the genomes of dogs of the same breed that have the same disease -- for example, a group of German shepherds with kidney cancer -- scientists can identify the genes responsible. Because the blocks are so large, researchers can narrow the possible location of disease genes to a few "neighborhoods" in the genome. They can then search in those stretches of DNA for the culprit genes.
"Breed-creation gives us a genome structure that makes it very easy to find disease genes," said Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, the lead author of the paper, which appears in the journal Nature. "We now have the tools; we have actually started cancer studies."
Similarly, scientists may be able to figure out what genes contribute to complex behaviors such as retrieving and pointing. They will look for haplotype blocks shared by different breeds with the same trait -- all retrievers or all pointers -- but that aren't found in breeds lacking the trait.
That work will be harder, Lindblad-Toh said. Nevertheless, it may provide insights into behavioral genetics, which historically have been the murkiest and most controversial part of the field.
Other less practical but equally interesting insights are already arising from the dog genome.
As with human DNA, only about 5 percent of dog DNA carries genetic information. The function, if any, of the rest (often termed "junk DNA") is unknown.
The exact number of genes in people, chimpanzees, mice, rats and dogs is uncertain, but it is now clear that of the 5 percent of genetic information in the genome, less than half that represents "classical" genes that encode the instructions to make proteins. The rest is DNA that regulates the activity of those genes.
The dog researchers identified 0.2 percent of the genome that comprises "highly conserved" DNA -- the stretches that are essentially identical in all individuals and across species -- but that do not code for proteins. They found that half of this favored DNA resides in the neighborhood of only 200 genes, some of which are involved in embryonic development and nerve growth. It appears to be crucial in the regulation of those genes.
"Which is to say, those genes must be very special. You just don't want to mess with them," Collins said. "This will undoubtedly cause other investigators to look at those 200 genes and ask why they are so important."

Active Moon of Saturn Excites Astronomers - AP/space.com

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/ap_051206_saturn_moon.html

Active Moon of Saturn Excites Astronomers
By The Associated Press
posted: 06 December 200508:44 pm ET
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) --
The international Cassini spacecraft has found visual evidence that Saturn's moon Enceladus is geologically active.
Recent images taken by the spacecraft show streams of fine, icy particles rising from the moon's south pole, suggesting they originated from warm zones in the region.
The discovery puts Enceladus in the class of geologically active moons with Jupiter's Io and Neptune's Triton.
It's unclear what causes the geologic activity, but scientists think it's due to internal heating caused by radioactivity or tides.
Cassini passed through the plume stretching up to 300 miles above Enceladus' surface in July. During that flyby, instruments aboard the spacecraft measured the plume's makeup and found water vapor and icy particles.
"This has been a heart-stopper, and surely one of our most thrilling results,'' Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., said in a statement.
Results were presented Tuesday at an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a joint NASA-European Space Agency project. The combined craft was launched in 1997 and arrived in orbit around Saturn last year. Huygens, a probe developed and controlled by the ESA, touched down on the giant moon Titan earlier this year.

Rim of 'Erebus' - NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA03622
The center upper portion of this image shows a portion of the rim of "Erebus Crater" in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars. This approximately true-color view from the panoramic camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is a composite of frames acquired on the rover's 657th Martian day, or sol, (Nov. 28, 2005). This is a small portion of a large panorama. Other portions of the panorama were still being shot three sols later. This view is a composite of separate images taken through the camera's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer filters.