Tigers fast dying out despite campaigns

The world’s tiger population is declining fast despite efforts to save them, and new strategies are urgently needed to keep the species from dying out, international wildlife experts say.

‘‘We are assembled here to save tigers that are at the verge of extinction,’’ Nepal’s secretary of forest and soil conservation, Yuvaraj Bhusal, told a conference on Tuesday of tiger experts from 20 countries, including the 13 where wild tigers are still found.

An estimated 3500 to 4000 tigers now roam the world’s forests, down from the more than 100,000 estimated at the beginning of the 20th century. All the remaining tigers are in Asia.

Participants at the conference, including the World Bank, the World Wildlife Fund and other groups, plan to discuss strategies for tiger conservation, as well as challenges such as poaching, the trade of tiger parts and conflicts between tigers and local populations.

A Sumatran tiger died after being caught in a pig snare last week in Indonesia, the country’s news agency, Antara, reported on Monday. The report said the tiger died as it was being prepared for surgery on Monday. Only about 250 Sumatran tigers remain in the wild.

via Tigers fast dying out despite campaigns.

Steel crashes onto San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge bridge

High winds hampered efforts Wednesday to make repairs and reopen the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge after two rods and a 5,000-pound crossbeam fell into traffic lanes.

Three cars were damaged, and one person suffered minor injuries when the metal debris fell onto the heavily used span during rush hour Tuesday.

Construction crews working through the night fought winds that gusted to 35 mph as they brought in heavy machinery to try to move the metal and make the repairs.

“We have several thousand pounds of steel we have to place hundreds of feet off the deck, so worker safety is a concern,” said Bart Ney, a spokesman for the state Transportation Department

There was a chance the bridge could reopen Thursday, he said, noting wind was a contributing factor in the failure of the rods.

Traffic was jammed early Wednesday on other San Francisco-area highways, as motorists looked for alternatives to the bridge, which carries about 280,000 cars each day.

The pieces that broke were part of major repairs done over Labor Day weekend after crews discovered a cracked link during an earthquake safety upgrade. The rods that broke were holding a saddle-like cap that had been installed over the cracked link.

When a rod snapped about 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, it brought down a steel patch roughly three feet long, authorities said.

“It’s a very fortunate situation,” said California Highway Patrol Sgt. Trent Cross. “It was in the heart of the evening commute and you had a 5,000 pound chunk of metal fall approximately 100 feet.”

The Bay Area Rapid Transit Agency increased service to accommodate commuters.

Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a civil engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has spent 20 years studying the Bay Bridge, called the initial crack a “warning sign” of potentially bigger safety issues with the bridge.

“The repair they were doing was really a Band-Aid,” said Astaneh-Asl, who criticized Caltrans at the time for rushing to reopen the bridge.

Astaneh-Asl said the failure of the repair job demonstrates the need for a longer-term solution. The age and design of the bridge make it susceptible to collapse, especially if commercial tractor-trailers are allowed to continue using it, he said.

“I think Caltrans is putting public relations ahead of public safety,” he said.

via Winds slow repairs after metal crashes onto bridge – Yahoo! News.

Scary. That falling beam could have killed someone.

Asteroid blast reveals holes in Earth’s defences

As the US government ponders a strategy to deal with threatening asteroids, a dramatic explosion over Indonesia has underscored how blind we still areMovie Camera to hurtling space rocks.

On 8 October an asteroid detonated high in the atmosphere above South Sulawesi, Indonesia, releasing about as much energy as 50,000 tons of TNT, according to a NASA estimate released on Friday. That’s about three times more powerful than the atomic bomb that levelled Hiroshima, making it one of the largest asteroid explosions ever observed.

However, the blast caused no damage on the ground because of the high altitude, 15 to 20 kilometres above Earth’s surface, says astronomer Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario (UWO), Canada.

Brown and Elizabeth Silber, also of UWO, estimated the explosion energy from infrasound waves that rippled halfway around the world and were recorded by an international network of instruments that listens for nuclear explosions.

The explosion was heard by witnesses in Indonesia. Video images of the sky following the event show a dust trail characteristic of an exploding asteroid.

Sudden impact

The amount of energy released suggests the object was about 10 metres across, the researchers say. Such objects are thought to hit Earth about once per decade.

No telescope spotted the asteroid ahead of its impact. That is not surprising, given that only a tiny fraction of asteroids smaller than 100 metres across have been catalogued, says Tim Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Yet objects as small as 20 or 30 metres across may be capable of doing damage on the ground, he says.

“If you want to find the smallest objects you have to build more, larger telescopes,” says Spahr. “A survey that finds all of the 20-metre objects will cost probably multiple billions of dollars.”

The US Office of Science and Technology Policy, which advises the White House, must develop a policy to address the asteroid hazard by October 2010 under a deadline imposed by 2008 legislation. It is likely to be influenced by a report from the National Research Council on the asteroid problem, which is expected by year’s end.

via Asteroid blast reveals holes in Earth’s defences – space – 26 October 2009 – New Scientist.

Indian engineer ‘builds’ new glaciers to stop global warming

A retired Indian engineer is waging his own one-man battle to stop global warming melting away the Himalayan glaciers: He claims he has discovered a way to create new glaciers.

Chewang Norphel, 76, has “built” 12 new glaciers already and is racing to create five more before he dies.

By then he hopes he will have trained enough new “icemen” to continue his work and save the world’s “third icecap” from being transformed into rivers.

His race against time is shared by Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister who called on the region’s Himalayan nations, including China, Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan, to form a united front to tackle glacial melting.

The great Himalayan glaciers, including Kashmir’s Siachen glacier, feed the region’s most important rivers, which irrigate farm land in Tibet, Nepal, Bangladesh and throughout the Indian sub-continent. The apparent acceleration in glacial melting has been blamed for the increase in floods which have destroyed homes and crops.

Chewang Norphel, the “Iceman of Ladakh”, however believes he has an answer.

By diverting meltwater through a network of pipes into artificial lakes in the shaded side of mountain valleys, he says he has created new glaciers.

A dam or embankment is built to keep in the water, which freezes at night and remains frozen in the absence of direct sunlight. The water remains frozen until March, when the start of summer melts the new glacier and releases the water into the rivers below.

So far, Mr Norphel’s glaciers have been able to each store up to one million cubic feet of ice, which in turn can irrigate 200 hectares of farm land. For farmers, that can make the difference between crop failure and a bumper crop of more than 1,000 tons of wheat.

The “iceman” says he has seen the effects of global warming on farmland as snows have become thinner on the ground and ice rivers have melted away never to return.

His own work has now been recognised by the Indian government, which has given him £16,000 to build five new glaciers. But time is his enemy, he told The Hindustan Times. “I’m planning to train villagers with instruction CDs that I have made, so that I can pass on the knowledge before I die,” he said.

via Indian engineer ‘builds’ new glaciers to stop global warming – Telegraph.

KFC’s Colonel Sanders tricks his way into UN to pose for ‘official’ photo

Dressed in the fast food icon’s familiar white suit and black bow tie, the actor evaded tight security to gain access to the restricted areas of the complex.

He even posed for a photograph with Ali Treki, the new president of the UN General Assembly, before the alarm was raised and he was ejected.

A spokeswoman for Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, yesterday said that an investigation had been launched into the security breach, which was dreamed up by KFC as a promotional stunt.

“It should not have happened – that I will stress, and very strongly,” Michele Montas told Canwest News Service, the Canadian news agency.

“There was some lapse in security and the individual in question was, on the initiative of one security guard, taken into the UN.”

As part of its campaign to promote a new menu range, KFC is “lobbying” the UN for the fictional Grilled Nation to be accepted as a member state.

The fast food giant has written to Mr Ki-moon personally asking for grilled chicken lovers to be be represented at the assembly, in a letter dismissed by Mrs Montas as “absolutely void”.

A spokesman for Dr Treki, a former Libyan foreign minister, denied that he held a meeting with the Colonel Sanders impersonator, claiming that he only shook his hand out of courtesy during the incident on Thursday.

The actor, named by KFC as Robert Thompson, also posed for photos in the main General Assembly hall beneath the UN logo.

The real Colonel Sanders died in 1980, half a century after devising the “secret recipe” of herbs and spices that is still used for cooking chicken in KFC restaurants today.

via KFC’s Colonel Sanders tricks his way into UN to pose for ‘official’ photo – Telegraph.

Phantom limbs make impossible moves

‘It’s all in the mind’, takes on a whole new meaning with research revealing that phantom limbs can be taught to do physiologically impossible tasks.

The research could have ramifications for how we view the interaction between mind and body, and how amputees perceive limbs where there are none.

Clinical neurologist with the Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute, Dr Lorimer Moseley, says it shows for the first time that body images can be formed independent of any outside sensory input.

“The experiment shows that the brain can create a completely new way of working the body and it can do that without any external feedback,” he said.

Dr Moseley’s work, done with Swiss neuroscientist Dr Peter Brugger, appears this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Rewiring the brain

When we try to identify an image of a left or right hand we mentally rotate our hands to adopt the position shown. Dr Moseley and Dr Brugger took advantage of this innate ability, measuring how long it took.

By showing images of the hand at two extremes of an impossible wrist movement, it was possible to determine that those manipulating phantom limbs were envisaging a shortcut movement that is anatomically impossible.

But those with real limbs were unable to operate their envisaged wrist in the same way and took the long route. This may be because of the continuous feedback from the existing limb.

The amputees who envisaged the shortcut simultaneously reported a profound change in the internal image of the wrist – they now perceived a wrist that would allow the movement.

“The brain’s sense of how to implement this movement depended on the brain reconstructing the limb in order to let this movement happen according to the normal principles of physics,” Dr Moseley says.

Dr Moseley says that they were surprised to find that afterwards, the amputees had difficulty envisaging their phantom limbs doing the more routine tasks again.

The researchers believe this implies that our body image must obey Newton’s laws, and we may make adjustments to ensure they continue to do that even when the mind is making the rules for itself.

More broadly, it demonstrates that profound changes can occur to body image and self awareness that are independent of outside input. …

But what is the practical significance of being able to teach imaginary wrists to do impossible things?

In the near future, the findings could potentially be used to help guide amputees experiencing acute pain in phantom limbs to internally adjust their body image in a way that will remove the pain, says Dr Moseley.

via Phantom limbs make impossible moves – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).

Md. cop accused of pulling gun at haunted house

A Baltimore city police officer delivered the fright of a lifetime to a haunted house employee, pulling a gun on the chain-saw-wielding man at the end of his act, authorities said Monday.

Sgt. Eric Janik, 37, was charged with assault and reckless endangerment for pointing his service handgun at the worker, who was dressed as Leatherface, the killer from “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” Baltimore County police said.

The employee, Mike Morrison, followed Janik and several other people up a staircase Sunday night at the end of the haunted house tour in a bid to get “one last scream” out of them, police said.

When the group exited into a parking lot, Janik pulled his gun and pointed it at Morrison from less than 10 feet away, according to police and Morrison, who said he dropped the chain saw, put his hands up and backed away. The saw had no chain.

Only then did Janik identify himself as a police officer, said Morrison, who retreated into the building.

“I started shaking pretty bad,” he told The Associated Press.

Another employee of the House of Screams called police. According to charging documents, Janik smelled of alcohol and told police two different stories about what he did with the gun. First, he denied drawing the weapon, but later he said he pointed it at the ground.

Morrison and two other witnesses told police that Janik pointed the gun at Morrison’s chest. Janik had no listed number and a voice mail for his attorney, Shaun Owens, was not immediately returned.

A security guard had been following Janik’s group, which included his 9-year-old daughter, through the haunted house because Janik appeared to be drunk when he arrived, House of Screams owner Tony Sapanero said.

Morrison said Janik’s daughter appeared to be disturbed by his act, in which he pretends to cut one woman in half and disembowel another with the chain saw.

Janik was suspended with pay after police commanders learned of what happened and could be without pay after a hearing Tuesday morning, city police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said.

City police officers are required to carry their service weapons while off duty within city limits and can carry them at their own discretion outside the city, Guglielmi said.

via Md. cop accused of pulling gun at haunted house – The Denver Post.

Tweeters ask: is there anybody (famous) there?

Tweeters are being invited to submit questions for the spirits of departed celebrities including Michael Jackson and William Shakespeare as part of the world’s first Twitter seance.

A psychic medium will then try to contact the stars — who were chosen along with actor River Phoenix and Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain from nominations sent in by the public — at the London-based seance on Friday, the day before Halloween.

Other prominent dead figures nominated by tweeters keen to pose questions during the “tweance” included John Lennon, Marilyn Monroe, Abraham Lincoln and Houdini.

Twitter users will be able to follow the seance live on the micro-blogging site, which psychic Jayne Wallace will use to relay any responses she receives from the spirits.

via Tweeters ask: is there anybody (famous) there? – Yahoo! News.

British to block illegal filesharers’ internet connections, find the best free music

Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, warned internet users today that the days of “consequence-free” illegal filesharing are over as he unveiled the government’s plan for cracking down on online piracy.

Mandelson, speaking at the government’s digital creative industries conference, C&binet, confirmed that the internet connections of persistent offenders could be blocked – but only as a last resort – from the summer of 2011.

He added that a “legislate and enforce” strategy was the only way to protect the intellectual property rights of content producers.

The strategy, which will be officially set out in the government’s digital economy bill in late November, will involve a staged process of warning notifications with internet suspension as a last resort.

“It must become clear that the days of consequence-free widespread online infringement are over,” Mandelson said. “Technical measures will be a last resort and I have no expectation of mass suspensions resulting.”

The legislation is expected to come into force in April next year.

The effectiveness of the warning letters to persistent illegal filesharers will be monitored for the first 12 months. If illegal filesharing has not dropped by 70% by April 2011, then cutting off people’s internet connections could be introduced three months later, from the summer of that year.

“If we reach the point of suspension for an individual, they will be informed in advance, having previously received two notifications – and will have the opportunity to appeal,” Mandelson added. “The British government’s view is that taking people’s work without due payment is wrong and that, as an economy based on creativity, we cannot sit back and do nothing as this happens.” …

Cutting off illegal filesharers’ internet access was originally ruled out in Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report released in June.

via Lord Mandelson sets date for blocking filesharers’ internet connections | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

Somehow I think the file sharers will find a way around this.  Not sure why people need to bother sharing files illegally, however. There is so much free music out there!  You can probably find hours of free songs you like just as much as the ones you don’t want to pay for. Songs on this site are free to download, for example.  Try this:

Fingertips…  calls itself “An intelligent guide to free and legal music on the web”. Each week Fingertips reviews several free music downloads. Rather than trying to be an exhaustive source of music downloads, Fingertips tries to select a few of the very best.

There was a really promising open source project called iRATE radio … not sure if someone is going to take it over and maintain it. I may do that. Seems really cool.

It’s difficult to find music that’s actually worth listening to. Although many bands offer music on their websites, there’s no real way to tell if it’s any good without actually downloading it. The labels do serve the (somewhat) legitimate purpose of picking out the good from the bad. But we can do that ourselves with legal downloads by using collaborative filtering, for example by downloading music with iRATE radio, which you’ll find at http://irate.sourceforge.net/.

- Set it to automatic download in the settings.
- Rate songs and more will download.
- Hit the trash button to remove a song from your list.
- Windows users, the mp3 songs are located in a folder on your hard drive. Search for the “/irate/download/” folder to find them. You’ll have to rename them and copy them to somewhere else, it seems, to keep them.
- I’m still trying to figure out how to get my music on there…

Russian space chief proposes nuclear spaceship

Russia’s space agency chief is proposing to build a new spaceship with a nuclear engine.

Anatoly Perminov told a government meeting Wednesday that the preliminary design could be ready by 2012. He said it will then take nine more years and 17 billion rubles (about $600 million or 400 million euros) to build the ship.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev urged the Cabinet to consider providing the necessary funding.

Perminov’s ambitious statement contrasted with the current state of the Russian space program.

Russia is using 40-year old Soyuz booster rockets and capsules to send crews to the International Space Station. Development of a replacement rocket and a prospective spaceship with a conventional propellant has dragged on with no end in sight.

via Russian space chief proposes nuclear spaceship – Space- msnbc.com.

This probably means they already have secret nuclear spaceships and they want to go public.