Black hole IGR J17091-3624 might be the smallest known black hole, but it has the “cosmic equivalent of winds from a category five hurricane.”
That’s the conclusion of Dr. Ashley King, who led group of astronomers working with NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory and National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Expanded Very Large Array to observe the black hole, which I shall refer to as “Lenny” for the remainder of this article so I don’t inadvertently type the wrong numeric sequence.

(Why Lenny? That’s my way of honoring Leonard Susskind, who’s done quite a bit of work on Black Holes and was one of the originators of String Theory.)

Lenny is part of a binary system and is orbited by a star that’s similar to our own sun. It’s known as a stellar-mass black hole, meaning that its mass is similar to that of a large star. In this case, it’s about three times the mass of the Sun – at least, that’s the best mass estimate right now, though Dr. Peter Edmonds at the Chandra Observatory indicated to me that that estimate is “highly uncertain.”

What is clear about Lenny, though, is that despite its small size, it produces fearsome winds of ionic gasses near its disk. Winds that astronomers have clocked at 20 million miles per hour – or about 3% of the speed of light. Those types of speeds are usually only seen near supermassive black holes that are hundreds of thousands of times more massive than Lenny.

“It’s a surprise this small black hole is able to muster the wind speeds we typically only see in the giant black holes,” said researcher Jon M. Miller in a press release. “In other words, this black hole is performing well above its weight class.”

The winds are generated by the magnetic field of black holes, which interact with the high-temperature ions to cause rapid movements. Those movements either take the form of winds or jets. In the latter, the ionic gasses fire in a focused stream in a direction perpendicular to the accretion disk surrounding a black hole.

The winds observed around Lenny aren’t constant, and depending on the movement of the gasses and the magnetic field, both jets and winds are seen. In fact, it’s likely that jets are a fairly regular occurrence around Lenny, as the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer has observed a regular “heartbeat” of X-ray expulsions that would be consistent with a jet firing from the black hole.

What’s particularly interesting about the winds produced by Lenny is that they’re not only unusually fast for a black hole of its size, but it’s also causing more matter to fly away from the black hole than to be attracted to it. A lot more.

“Contrary to the popular perception of black holes pulling in all of the material that gets close, we estimate up to 95 percent of the matter in the disk around IGR J17091 is expelled by the wind,” said King.

It seems that the past year has really provided a wealth of new information about black holes and how they work, often to the surprise of the astronomers and physicists observing them. Hopefully, a lot of these surprises and information will go a long way towards gaining a greater understanding of how black holes work. And by doing so, hopefully physicists will understand more about the fundamental laws of nature.

Also, I’m hopeful that the name “Lenny” sticks for IGRJ17091-3624. Fingers crossed.

Source – Forbes

By: John G. West
Permanent Things, Eerdmans Publishing

The year was 1951, and England was embroiled in a bitter general election campaign. Six years earlier the Conservative Party of Winston Churchill had been thrown out of power. Now the same party, still led by the same indomitable Churchill, was attempting a comeback. The conventional wisdom was that the attempt would fail. The conventional wisdom was wrong. Voters went to the polls on October 25, and the next morning the whole world knew that the the Conservative Party had recaptured control of Parliament and Churchill had regained the post of Prime Minister.

Within a few weeks of the change of power, Churchill’s office sent a letter to C. S. Lewis, inviting him to receive the honorary title “Commander of the British Empire.” One can only guess what Lewis thought when he first read the letter, but one suspects that he appreciated it, for he greatly admired Churchill.1

Despite his admiration, however, Lewis declined the proposed honor. He wrote back to Churchill’s secretary that he was grateful for the recognition, but he worried about the political repercussions: “There are always… knaves who say, and fools who believe, that my religious writings are all covert anti–Leftist propaganda, and my appearance in the Honours List wd. of course strengthen their hands. It is therefore better that I shd. not appear there.”2 The letter is characteristic of Lewis, for it shows how diligently he tried to steer clear of partisan entanglements. He was never a party hack like John Milton; he never founded a political movement like G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc; he even shunned giving money to political causes. Prior to World War II, one of Lewis’s students informed him of his work on behalf of the Communist–backed loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. Lewis quickly told the student that he had a rule about not donating money “to anything that had a directly political implication.”3 After the War, Lewis continued to keep his distance from politics. According to stepson David Gresham, Lewis was skeptical of politicians and not really interested in current events.4 Lewis’s own writings seem to bear this out. His wry poem “Lines During a General Election” presents the following rather bleak assessment of politicians: “Their threats are terrible enough, but we could bear/ All that; it is their promises that bring despair.”5 And as far as caring about the “great issues” of his day, Lewis wrote his brother in 1940: “Lord! how I loathe great issues…’Dynamic’ I think is one of the words invented by this age which sums up what it likes and I abominate. Could one start a Stagnation Party–which at General Elections would boast that during its term of office no event of the least importance had taken place?”6

Paradoxically, none of this means that Lewis never said anything important about politics. In fact, he said a great deal–more than most people probably realize. It is startling to note just how many political topics Lewis broached in his writings: crime, obscenity, capital punishment, conscription, communism, fascism, socialism, war, vivisection, the welfare state, the atomic bomb.7 When Lewis talked about these matters, however, it was not in the way most politicians do. He was wholly unconcerned with what political scientists today like to call “public policy”–that conglomeration of compromise, convention, and self–interest that forms the staple of much of our own political diet. If you expect to find a prescription for solving air pollution or advice on how to win an election, don’t bother reading Lewis. He has nothing to tell you. His concern was not policy but principle; political problems of the day were interesting to him only insofar as they involved matters that endured. Looked at in this light, Lewis’s penchant for writing about politics and his simultaneous detachment from the political arena seem perfectly explicable. It is precisely because Lewis was so uninterested in ordinary political affairs that he has so much to tell us about politics in the broad sense of the term. By avoiding the partisan strife of his own time, he was able to articulate enduring political standards for all time.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Lewis’s writings on tyranny and morality.

Fascism and communism were the two most obvious manifestations of tyranny about which Lewis wrote, but they were far from the only kinds of tyranny about which he was concerned.8 Tyranny comes in many forms, most of which are more subtle than Stalin’s gulag or Hitler’s death camps. Lewis knew this, and his most compelling writings on tyranny for us today focus on these more subtle forms of oppression. In particular, Lewis was concerned about the tyranny that could result from the union of modern science and the modern state.

To understand the dangers of a scientific state, one must first understand something about modern science.

Modern science is premised on the notion that all things are determined by material causes. It proposes strict laws that explain natural phenomena in terms of physical, environmental or hereditary necessities–e.g., the ball falls when dropped because of the law of gravity; the dog salivates at the sound of the bell because of environmental conditioning; the mosquito generates other mosquitoes because of its genetic code. Now no matter how necessary such materialistic determinism may be in the study of the natural world, it cannot be applied indiscriminately to humans without destroying the very possibility of knowledge and virtue. Such determinism destroys the possibility of knowledge, according to Lewis, because it undermines the validity of human reasoning;9 it destroys the possibility of virtue because it denies the free choice upon which all virtue depends.

If modern science is correct that human thought and conduct are functions of non–rational causes, then the nature of politics changes fundamentally. Under the old order, politics involved serious reflection about justice and the common good. But the more man thinks he is determined by non–rational causes, the less important serious reflection becomes. Under the new order, all that matters is achieving the end result. The only deliberation is among social science bureaucrats, and the only question is not “What is just?” but “What works?” Moreover, since the new order has dispensed with the notion of man as a moral agent, “what works” will almost inevitably be intrusive. As long as man was regarded as accountable for his actions, there were certain limits beyond which the state was not supposed to tread. Laws promulgated under the old system promised punishment, but they could not compel obedience. This is because the very idea of punishment presupposes free choice: One can only be punished after one has done something meriting punishment. If a person is willing to face the consequences of his actions, he can still break the law. His ability to choose is left intact.

If people act because of environmental and biological necessities, however, the government no longer need deal with them as free moral agents. Under the new system, preemption replaces punishment as the preferred method of social control. Instead of punishing you for making the wrong choice, the state simply eliminates your choice. So instead of laws telling us to wear seat–belts, we have passive restraints that automatically strap us into our car seats. Instead of simply being told to pay our taxes, our taxes are automatically deducted from our paychecks.

In this brave new world, the relationship between citizen and state begins to resemble the relationship between master and slave, as Lewis pointed out so perceptively in his essay, “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State.” The cardinal difficulty with this type of scientific paternalism is that it undercuts that which makes us human; in the name of saving man from his problems, it abolishes man: “The question… has become… whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State’s honey and avoiding the sting? Let us make no mistake about the sting. The Swedish sadness is only a foretaste. To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death–these are wishes deeply ingrained in … civilised man.”10

Lewis’s most haunting portrait of this kind of despotism came in his novel That Hideous Strength.11 There the spirit of modern social science becomes incarnate in the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments–NICE, for short. Of course, there is nothing nice about NICE; its social scientists are exactly the type of bureaucratic manipulators that Lewis attacked in nonfiction works like The Abolition of Man.12

At this point one can anticipate several objections: First, isn’t Lewis being unfair to science by implying that it inevitably leads to tyranny? And isn’t he being unfair to scientists by implying that all they want is power to enslave others? And don’t many modern problems–from air pollution to congestion on our freeways–require technological solutions that can be provided only by scientific experts?

Lewis was aware of such objections and replied that he wasn’t against science or scientists per se and that of course he did not think that science would necessarily lead to tyranny of the sort depicted in That Hideous Strength.13 One might be tempted to conclude from this that Lewis’s objection to science was narrow–that all he really opposed was the abuse of science. But such a conclusion would be misleading. For when Lewis said he wasn’t attacking “science” or “scientists” he seems to have had a very specific meaning in mind. He was not attacking science insofar as it was the quest for greater knowledge; he was attacking it insofar it was a quest for power–in particular, for power over man. In practice this meant that while Lewis accepted the legitimacy of natural science he rejected much of the social sciences. Learning about chemistry or biology was acceptable, if not honorable; trying to use chemical or biological maxims to understand the nature of man was not. A glimpse of this view can be found in the character of William Hingest in That Hideous Strength. Hingest is Lewis’s prototype for the “good scientist,” a brilliant and crusty physical chemist who thinks more highly of his family tree than of his scientific prowess.14 Hingest is interested in science for the sake of knowledge rather than power, and he takes a dim view of those who want to use science to control man.15 Indeed, he does not regard as science at all those disciplines that try to use the scientific approach to analyze man. When Mark Studdock talks to him about “sciences like Sociology,” Hingest coldly replies: “There are no sciences like Sociology.”16

As for the objection that we must rely on the advice of scientists, because only they have the answers to today’s complicated problems, Lewis could not agree. Lewis does not dispute that scientists have plenty of knowledge; the problem is that most of it is irrelevant. Political problems are preeminently moral problems, and scientists are not equipped to function as moralists. Said Lewis: “I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value.”17

The cardinal danger of depending on science for political solutions, then, is that science is divorced from those permanent principles of morality upon which all just political solutions depend. Indeed, words like “justice,” “virtue,” “mercy” and “duty,” are terms without meaning within the scientific framework. And so while science is not necessarily tyrannical, it can easily become a tool for tyrants because it has no firm grounding in morality. The same goes for politics: Without a firm grounding in a firm morality, politics easily slides into tyranny.

But if morality is what we need, how do we go about achieving it? Lewis’s answer to this query is far more controversial than one might suppose.

Many Christians today argue that morality must be founded upon the Bible. The extent to which this belief holds sway can be seen in the catchwords Christians use when they become involved in politics; most argue for a return to “Biblical values,” “Christian values,” “transcendent religious truths,” or (to use the dominant phrase) “traditional values” based on the “Judeo–Christian tradition.” The terms differ slightly, but the bottom–line remains the same: The only real source of morality is Christian revelation.18

Lewis was aware of this view, but rejected it. As he wrote in his posthumously published essay on ethics:

It is often asserted… that the world must return to Christian ethics in order to preserve civilization… Though I am myself a Christian, and even a dogmatic Christian untinged with Modernist reservations and committed to supernaturalism in its full rigour, I find myself quite unable to take my place beside the upholders of …[this] view…

It is far from my intention to deny that we find in Christian ethics a deepening, an internalization, a few changes of emphasis in the moral code. But only serious ignorance of Jewish and Pagan culture would lead anyone to the conclusion that it is a radically new thing.19

Rejecting the notion of a peculiarly “Christian” morality, Lewis argued for the existence of a natural moral law known by all through human reason. This natural moral code cannot be escaped; it is the source from which all moral judgments come. Its fundamental truths–maxims like good should be done and evil avoided, that caring for others is a good thing, that dying for a righteous cause is a noble thing–are known independently of experience. They are grasped in the same way that we know that 2+2=4.

Lewis was certainly not the first to articulate the idea of natural law. As any good medievalist could tell you, “It’s all in Aquinas.” It is also in Paul, Augustine, Cicero, Grotius, Blackstone, and the Declaration of Independence. But this idea of natural law is precisely what many Christians reject, even those who cite Lewis. Unintended ironies often result. In an essay on “Law and Nature” written by one prominent evangelical, for example, extensive favorable citations of Lewis’s Abolition of Man appear on one page, while this denunciation of natural law appears on another: “Even if man can treat the so–called natural laws as absolutes for society and government, the consequence is cruelty to man. Without the reference point in the Bible, there is no basis to judge which laws of nature are applicable to government and man. Depending upon the man or elitist group in power, many different things can be perpetrated and be justified on the basis of natural law.”20

Lewis regarded this point of view as the cobelligerent of modern philosophy. For just as modern philosophy attacked the ability of reason to know an objective moral law, this sort of Christianity considered reason to be too corrupted by sin to know objective morality apart from the Bible. Lewis found this belief disheartening, as he wrote his brother: “Did you fondly believe –I did–that where you got among Christians, there at least you would escape from the horrible ferocity and grimness of modern thought? Not a bit of it. I blundered into it all, imagining that I was the upholder of the old, stern doctrines against modern quasi–Christian slush; only to find that my sternness was their slush…. They all talk like Covenanters or Old Testament prophets. They don’t think human reason or human conscience of any value at all….”21

As far as I know, Lewis never directly addressed the political difficulties of this rejection of natural law by Christians; yet these difficulties must be understood in order to fully grasp the importance of Lewis’s natural law teaching for us today.

The problem with tying all morality to the Bible is that it implies that those who don’t believe in the Bible cannot really be good citizens. After all, if only believers can have access to true morality through the Bible, perhaps only they can be trusted to make the laws. What has been called the theological–political problem resurfaces with a vengeance, for in this situation there exists no common ground on which believers and non–believers can meet for debate and joint action in the political arena. The natural law rescues us from this quagmire by articulating a morality shared by believer and unbeliever alike.

This is not to say that the only justification for natural law is political. The overarching reason for Christians to believe in natural law is because it is demanded by revelation itself. Lewis knew this with full force, but before examining his comments we would do well to refer to the Apostle Paul. In chapter two of Romans, Paul argues that “when Gentiles… do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.”22

Now according to Paul, the Gentiles have a knowledge of morality even without having Old Testament revelation. They do that which is right “by nature.” That “by nature” does not mean “by instinct” here is clear from the context, for Paul goes on to describe the process by which the Gentiles come to moral knowledge “by nature”–and the process is a rational one. It consists of the inner mental dialogue of the conscience with “thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.” Nor does Paul diminish the rationality of this knowledge by the phrase “written on [or 'in'] their hearts.” As Lewis argued in The Discarded Image, Paul’s statement here is in complete harmony with the ancient view that morality is dictated by “right reason”–and more particularly, with the Stoic conception of natural law: “The Stoics believed in a Natural Law which all rational men, in virtue of their rationality, saw to be binding on them. St. Paul['s]… statement in Romans (ii 14 sq.) that there is a law ‘written in the hearts’ even of Gentiles who do not know ‘the law’ is in full conformity with the Stoic conception, and would for centuries be so understood. Nor, during those centuries, would the word hearts have had merely emotional associations. The Hebrew word which St. Paul represents by kardia would be more nearly translated ‘Mind’.”23

Though Romans 2:14–15 is the single explicit reference in the New Testament to natural law theory, its importance should not be minimized on that account. For it is the context in which this reference to natural law appears that shows us its true importance, not the absence of other references to natural law in the Bible. In the immediate context of the passage, Paul is trying to explain how a just God can condemn wicked Gentiles who have not had the benefit of the Mosaic law. Paul argues that the Gentiles have “no excuse” because they themselves recognize the substance of the moral law by nature. In other words, the natural law allows God to justly condemn wicked Gentiles.

In the broader context of Pauline theology, the necessity of a natural law becomes even more evident once one focuses on the proper function of Old Testament law. Paul emphasized that Old Testament law was worthless as a method to save people from their sins because no one could ever hope to perfectly fulfill it. All the Old Testament law did was to make the Jews conscious of sin so that they would know that they needed a savior; the law demonstrated their need for repentance before God.24 But Christ died to save Gentiles as well as Jews. Because God never promulgated the moral law to them through revelation, Gentiles must have been conscious of their sin through some other route, or they never would have known of their need to repent. This “other route” is natural law. Without it, the Gentiles could not repent and be saved.

Viewed in this way, it does not matter that Romans is the only place where Paul explicitly delineates the natural law for the Gentiles, because the need for a natural law is presupposed by the very preaching of the gospel of repentance to anyone who is not a Jew. As Lewis noted in his essay on ethics: “The convert accept[s]… forgiveness of sins. But of sins against what Law? Some new law promulgated by the Christians? But that is nonsensical. It would be the mockery of a tyrant to forgive a man for doing what had never been forbidden until the very moment at which the forgiveness was announced…Essentially, Christianity is not the promulgation of a moral discovery. It is addressed only to penitents, only to those who admit their disobedience to the known moral law.”25

Lewis made this same argument somewhat more fully in The Problem of Pain.26

Lest one think that I am overstating the case for natural law, let me present a caveat: Natural law provides a basis for Christians to enter politics, but it does not provide simple–minded solutions to specific political problems. Nor did Lewis claim that it would–nor for that matter has any other thinker within the natural law tradition. As Lewis more than once explained (echoing Aristotle’s Ethics): “[M]oral decisions do not admit of mathematical certainty.”27 Natural law only supplies general moral precepts; prudence is required to correctly apply those precepts in particular situations. Hence there is always the chance that one’s political decision will be wrong.28

Contrary to those Christians who reject natural law, however, this problem of uncertainty cannot be solved by replacing the law of nature with the law of revelation as expressed in the Bible. The Bible rarely gives particular advice on specific political issues. It does not tell us whether to build nuclear missiles or invade Panama; it does not inform us what type of social programs to enact, if any; it does not guide us in our choice of the best tax system. The Bible invariably requires interpretation if it is to be used as a political guidebook, and interpretation opens the door for misconstruction. The Bible is infallible; but its interpreters are not. So the Bible can be abused and misused as much as natural law.

Now I am not arguing–and I know Lewis would not argue–that the Bible has no role in the area of morality. But in a society that is not a theocracy the Bible can never be the only standard of morality. The Christians who lived during the American Founding recognized this fact, and their political rhetoric was fashioned accordingly. They spoke regularly of the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” and of acting in accord with both “reason and revelation.” They saw natural law as the necessary meeting point for citizens of all religious beliefs.29 Like the early American Christians, Lewis recognized the inescapable need for natural law. Christians today would do well to heed his advice.

For Notes And Index Visit – The Discovery Institute

NEW DELHI — Researchers digging through mud in northeast India have discovered a new family of legless amphibians in a rare scientific breakthrough detailed in a study released on Wednesday.

The family of burrowing, tailless creatures was identified by scientists working for five years in remote Indian states including Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland.

“DNA analysis has confirmed that this is an entirely new family,” S.D. Biju, a professor at the University of Delhi who led the project with team members from Britain and Belgium, told AFP.

“Habitat destruction is a big problem for amphibians worldwide, and discoveries like this prove that we must protect the environment to save parts of the natural world we know little about,” he said.

Biju said that it had been a challenging physical job digging with spades at 250 locations looking for the worm-like creatures, which are about 20 centimetres (eight inches) long and often 25 centimetres deep into the earth.

The new family, the 10th from the caecilian group of amphibians, has been called Chikilidae after the name used by the local Garo tribal language.

“This discovery has shown that northeast India is uniquely rich in wildlife and ecosystems,” said Biju. “We have to understand more about the region.”

One threat to harmless amphibians in India is from locals who kill them believing they are venomous snakes, the study said.

The findings have published by the Royal Society of London journal Proceedings B.

Copyright © 2012 AFP

Yoga Dogs by Dan Borris shows how man’s best friends achieve enlightenment through self-reflection (“You yourself deserve love and affection and warm spot in the bed where someone just got up”) and yoga (achieved with a little digital help).

Learn more about Yoga Dogs at yogadogz.com

WASHINGTON — Dire shortages of two critical cancer drugs — shortfalls that have threatened the lives and care of thousands of patients — should be resolved within weeks, federal drug officials said.

The two drugs are Doxil and methotrexate, and in both cases supplies in the United States are being bolstered by shipments from abroad. Shortages of scores of other drugs continue.

“We’re not out of the woods,” said Dr. Sandra L. Kweder of the Food and Drug Administration’s drug center. “But these two particular shortages have been very, very upsetting to patients and to us.”

Dr. Peter C. Adamson, chairman of the Children’s Oncology Group, which is financed by the National Cancer Institute, said he was pleased that the immediate threat of a methotrexate shortage had passed. “But this is at best a Band-Aid approach to the problem,” he said.

Shortages of both drugs developed when Ben Venue Laboratories temporarily closed its manufacturing facility in Bedford, Ohio, because it could not guarantee product safety.

In the case of Doxil, which is used to treat ovarian cancer, multiple myeloma and AIDS-related Kaposi’s sarcoma, the F.D.A. has decided to allow temporary shipments from India of Lipodox, which is similar to Doxil and is made by Sun Pharma Global.

And the pharmaceutical company Hospira is rushing 31,000 vials — enough to last the entire nation a month — of preservative-free methotrexate from its plant in Australia to the United States. Hospitals began receiving the drug, which is vital in the treatment of a common form of childhood leukemia, on Tuesday. The F.D.A. has also hastened the approval of an application by APP Pharmaceuticals to manufacture methotrexate, an application that has languished since 2010.

There is a years-long backlog of applications for new generic drugs at the F.D.A. because the government does not have the money to hire enough reviewers to analyze the applications or inspectors to visit the facilities, many of them abroad. The generic drug industry tired of waiting for Congress to fully finance the F.D.A.’s generic drug office and this year proposed providing the agency with $299 million in annual fees to finance the review process.

Dr. Kweder said the agreement on generic drug fees — part of a package of F.D.A. fee proposals that Congress is expected to consider in the coming months — should eventually help prevent some drugs from going into short supply.

The F.D.A. on Tuesday also released a lengthy list of instructions for drug companies to follow when their manufacturing of critical medicines is threatened. At least 180 drugs, a record number, have been in short supply at one time or another over the past year. President Obama issued an executive order last year that was intended to ameliorate the situation; it requires drug companies to alert the F.D.A. when potential problems threaten supplies. Legislation on the issue is also pending in Congress.

Source – NY Times

Army Sgt. Sandra Coast graduated from U.S. Army Basic Combat Training at the age of 51, finishing training with one of the highest physical fitness test scores in her company after having to lose 30 pounds just to qualify for basic training.

“I was impressed, because she can do everything the younger soldiers do,” Army 1st Sgt. John Byars said of Coast, according to the Armed Forced Press Service (AFPS). “She never expected us to feel sorry for her. She even got one of the highest Army physical fitness test scores in the company. She is a prime example that age is just a number. She ran faster than soldiers young enough to be her kids.”

Coast served in the Navy from 1982 to 1993, so she was allowed to enter military service at her age, whereas most civilians would not be eligible. “Everybody in the world thinks I am a total nutcase,” she told AFPS. “I just want to support our troops. I love all of them.”

The age difference between Coast and most recruits was sometimes hard for her, but did not impede the other recruits’ support for her. “They treat me as an equal,” Coast said. “The males, especially, have the utmost respect. They will do little things that they probably aren’t supposed to do, like give me their seat on the bus and hold the doors for me. It’s the little things that mean so much.”

Coast will not serve in active duty situations, due to her age, but instead serve with a virtual unit that works by phone and internet. She also has a son in the United States Marine Corps. “I am thrilled to wear the title of sergeant in the U.S. Army, but the title that is also very near and dear to my heart is Marine mom,” Coast added to AFPS. “You can’t beat that.”

Source – Washington Examiner

Researchers have unearthed a forest in northern China preserved under a layer of ash deposited 300 million years ago.

Preservation of the forest, just west of the Inner Mongolian district of Wuda, has been likened to that of the Italian city of Pompeii.

The researchers were able to “reconstruct” nearly 1,000 sq m of the forest’s trees and plant distributions.

This rare insight into how the region once looked is described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The excavations sampled three sites across a large expanse that was covered with about a metre of ash.

Due to the pristine preservation of some of the plants, the team estimate the ash fell over the course of just a few days, felling and damaging some of the trees and plants under its weight but otherwise keeping them intact.

“It’s marvelously preserved,” said study co-author Hermann Pfefferkorn of the University of Pennsylvania in the US.

“We can stand there and find a branch with the leaves attached, and then we find the next branch and the next branch and the next branch. And then we find the stump from the same tree. That’s really exciting.”

The team identified six groups of trees, ranging from low-lying tree ferns to now-extinct 25m trees Sigillaria and Cordaites, as well well-preserved specimens of another extinct group called Noeggerathiales.

Based on the findings, the team worked with a painter to depict what the forest would have looked like before the ash cloud descended.

Prof Pfefferkorn said that, as a particularly complete and well-caught moment in time, the forest would serve as a “baseline” for assessing future finds.

“It’s like Pompeii,” he said. “Pompeii gives us deep insight into Roman culture, but it doesn’t say anything about Roman history in and of itself.

“But on the other hand, it elucidates the time before and the time after. This finding is similar. It’s a time capsule and therefore it allows us now to interpret what happened before or after much better.”

Source – BBC News

Artists Rendering

NEW YORK — An astronaut attempting to visit recently discovered planet GJ1214b would land in hot water — literally, US scientists say.
Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said they have identified an entirely new kind of planet, dominated not by rock, gas or other common materials, but water.
The planet is “a waterworld enshrouded by a thick, steamy atmosphere,” they said in a statement, after scrutinizing the planet with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
“GJ1214b is like no planet we know of,” astronomer Zachary Berta said. “A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water.”
GJ1214b was discovered in 2009 by the ground-based MEarth Project. Described as a “super-Earth,” it is about 2.7 times Earth’s diameter and weighs almost 7 times as much.
Further studies in 2010 led to scientists suspecting that the planet, where the temperature is some 450 degrees Fahrenheit (232 Celsius), was largely covered in water. This was confirmed by Berta and his co-authors using Hubble to study the planet when it crossed in front of its host star.
The light of the star, filtered through the planet’s atmosphere, gave clues to the mix of gasses, backing up the water vapor theory.
“The Hubble measurements really tip the balance in favor of a steamy atmosphere,” Berta said.
Further measurements and estimates led scientists to conclude that the planet has much more water than Earth and much less rock. That, together with high temperatures and pressure, likely produce some highly exotic results, including “hot ice,” scientists say.
Our solar system contains three basic planet types: rocky, like Earth; gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn; and ice giants like Uranus.

Source – AFP News

From Huddled Dalmation Pelicans To Cycling French Fries On Swiss Slopes. The Good Report Brings You The Best Pictures And Stories Of The Day

Source – CS Monitor

A window of time has just opened in Yosemite National Park when nature photographers wait, as if for an eclipse, until the moment when the sun and earth align to create a fleeting phenomenon. This marvel of celestial configuration happens in a flash at sunset in mid-February – if the winter weather cooperates.

On those days the setting sun illuminates one of the park’s lesser-known waterfalls so precisely that it resembles molten lava as it flows over the sheer granite face of the imposing El Capitan. Every year growing numbers of photographers converge on the park, their necks craned toward the ephemeral Horsetail Fall, hoping the sky will be clear so they can view the spectacle first recorded in colour in 1973 by the late renowned outdoors photographer Galen Rowell.

“Horsetail is so uniquely situated that I don’t know of any other waterfall on earth that gets that kind of light,” said Michael Frye, who wrote the book The Photographer’s Guide to Yosemite. “How many are perched on a high open cliff? Most are in an alcove or canyon and won’t get the sun setting behind it. Yosemite’s special geography makes this fall distinctive,” he said. “If you hit it at just the right time, it turns this amazing colour of gold or red-orange,” said Frye, a photo instructor with the Ansel Adams Gallery in the park. To be successful in photographing the watery firefall, it takes luck and timing, and the cooperation of nature.

Horsetail Fall drains a small area on the eastern summit of El Capitan and flows only in the winter and spring in years with adequate rain and snow, which is scarce this year. Experts say it doesn’t take a lot of water for the fall to light up. Most importantly, the southwestern horizon must be clear, and February is the time of year when storm clouds often obscure the setting sun.

When conditions come together, the scrawny Horsetail Fall is the shining star of a park famed for its other waterfalls – raging Yosemite Fall and Bridalveil Fall. But Horsetail is the longest free-falling one, with a drop of 450 metres before it hits granite and spills another 150 metres.

The fire lights up around dusk and lasts for about two minutes. The best views are east of El Capitan along the main roads into and out of Yosemite Valley. Most photographers gather at the El Capitan picnic area, a small pullout marked only by a sign with a table etched on it. But park officials say the inexperienced can look for the hordes of tripods and cameras to find a vantage point.

Recent storms and snowfall mean the finicky fall is flowing again, and park officials are hopeful it will last until February 24, which is generally the last day of the year it can be seen.

Once an obscure event, park officials say that internet discussions have made it more popular in recent years.

“The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class — it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.” – Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964)

She is not a household name, nor is she someone encountered in most U.S. history books. Yet this woman’s life spanned from the post-slavery era to the civil rights movement, and throughout all those years, she fervently pushed for progress, particularly for education and progress for African-American women.

Perhaps it is fitting that in the current U.S. Passport, which features numerous quotes from famous American men, Anna Julia Cooper stands alone — as the only woman and the only African-American — who is quoted for her advocacy of freedom as a birthright of humanity.

Her Beginning
Anna Julia Cooper was born in 1858 to an enslaved woman in Raleigh, North Carolina. Anna and her sister were thought to have been fathered by their mother’s white master.

In 1867, two years after the end of the Civil War, Anna was able to attend Saint Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute, a coeducational school for former slaves. She received the equivalent of a high school education and taught for a couple of years.

In 1877 she married George A.G. Cooper, who had been a teacher at the school. As was the custom, Anna Cooper was no longer able to teach once she married. When her husband died unexpectedly two years later, Cooper needed to regroup. She decided the best plan was to pursue a college degree. She attended Oberlin College in Ohio on a tuition scholarship, earning a BA in 1884 and a Masters in Mathematics in 1887.

After graduation, Cooper returned to Raleigh to teach. Soon she was invited to teach math and science at the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth (later known as M Street and today as Dunbar High School) in Washington, DC so she moved there. From 1902-1906 she was principal of the school but her curriculum, which involved college prep for the students, ran afoul of the D.C. school board’s thinking. In 1906 she resigned.

While living in D.C., she also worked at Frelinghuysen University, an adult education school that offered liberal arts and professional courses for working African Americans. From 1930-40 she served as president of Frelinghuysen University. Cooper believed that education was the key to success, and she particularly advocated for women to have equal rights in both education and in the world in general, including the right to vote.

In Washington, D.C., Cooper helped establish local organizations for women, young people, and the poor. Since the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) did not accept African-American members, she created “colored” branches to provide support for young blacks moving from the South into Washington, D.C. These and other organizations she formed helped address issues involving education, housing, and unemployment.

Published Black Feminist Work
In 1892, Cooper published her first book, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South. In addition to calling for equal education for women, A Voice from the South advanced her belief that educated African-American women were key to uplifting the entire race.

The book of essays gained national attention, and Cooper began lecturing across the country on topics such as education, civil rights, and the status of black women. In 1893, she was invited to speak about the needs of African-American women at the Chicago World’s Fair, and in 1900, she was one of only two African-American women to address the first Pan-African Conference in London. Many additional speaking opportunities followed.

In 1911 she began work toward a doctoral degree at Columbia University in New York, but in 1915 a death in the family curtailed her academic work. She took time off to absorb the responsibility of raising her brother’s five grandchildren. In 1924 she moved to Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne in order to continue work on her doctorate. In 1925, at the age of sixty-seven, Cooper became the fourth African American woman to obtain a Doctorate of Philosophy.

On February 27, 1964, Cooper died in Washington, D.C. at the age of 105, having been an effective advocate for African-Americans from the post-slavery era to the civil rights movement.

In the current U.S. Passport, several American men are quoted for their wise sayings, but Anna Julia Cooper is the only woman of any color who is quoted. Hers reads:

“The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class — it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.”

Source – Huffington Post

Imagine traveling the world without opening your wallet!

Portlander Scott Ford did just that, saving more than $75,000 on airfare, hotels and rental cars all because he volunteered to get bumped from his flights!

Do you want to travel for free? Here are a few of Scott’s tips:

Schedule flights with as many connections as possible (each connection gives you a chance to be bumped)

Try to book the fullest/most popular flights

Stick with one airline and take full advantage of its frequent flier program

Don’t be afraid to negotiate. For instance, if they offer you a $300 voucher when you’re bumped, ask for additional frequent flier miles.

For more information, visit Scott’s website.

Source – KATU

Sharks have a reputation for being ruthless, solitary predators, but evidence is mounting that certain species enjoy complex social lives that include longstanding relationships and teamwork.

A new study, published in the latest Animal Behaviour, documents how one population of blacktip reef sharks is actually organized into four communities and two subcommunities. The research shows for the first time that adults of a reef-associated shark species form stable, long-term social bonds.

The image contrasts with usual reports on this species, which mistakenly sinks its sharp teeth into surfers and swimmers from time to time.

Lead author Johann Mourier told Discovery News that “other species, such as grey reef sharks and scalloped hammerheads form polarized groups where individuals have a specific place, and such species may also have complex social organization.”

Mourier, a scientist at the Center for Island Research and Environmental Study (CNRS-EPHE), and colleagues Julie Vercelloni and Serge Planes conducted the study at Moorea Island in the Society archipelago, French Polynesia. A total of seven sites were surveyed on a regular basis along just over 6 miles of the north shore of Moorea. The surveys included nearly hour-long dives at a depth close to 50 feet, with the diver photographing nearby sharks.

Analysis of the gathered data determined that the sharks were not within non-random collections, but rather had organized themselves into meaningful social groups.

“The four main communities are mixed-sex communities that use a specific home range, however, within these communities individuals tend to associate more often with others of the same sex and length,” Mourier said.

In a prior study, he determined that length is proportional to a shark’s age, with male blacktip reef sharks being mature at about the age of 7 and measuring around 3.6 feet long. Females are slightly larger than males.

Mourier suspects the sharks join together in communities for protection and to avoid aggression with each other. He and his colleagues also observed a remarkable feat, “when a group of about four or five blacktip reef sharks herded a school of fishes around a coral structure.” This suggests they can cooperate with each other to hunt as a team.

Yet another perk to organizing could be that each shark becomes a comforting landmark for others in the group. As Mourier said, “Using a home range and knowing all individuals may help individuals to have a better knowledge of their environment.”

The researchers point out that sharks’ relative brain mass-body ratios have been found to be comparable to those of mammals, indicating that they are capable of complex social behaviors on par with those demonstrated in birds and mammals.

It could just be that the highly mobile nature of sharks, combined with the difficulty of following individuals in the open sea, has kept their social interactions hidden away from human eyes until recent years.

In another study, led by Demian Chapman, researchers showed that lemon sharks at the Bimini islands, Bahamas, tended to stay near their coastal birthplace for many years.

“We were very surprised to see that many lemon sharks lingered for years around the island where they were born — often more than half of their development to adulthood,” said Chapman, a shark scientist with the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook University.

In both studies, age therefore seems to help shape a shark’s social life. Family ties may also be important to sharks, a possibility that Mourier and his colleagues are investigating now.

The scientists clipped the fins of 70 percent of the sharks involved in this latest study and are analyzing the bits for DNA.

He said, “This will soon reveal if they tend to group with relatives, as is the case in other social animals, such as for some mammals.”

Source – Discovery

Two pilots in northern California were lucky to be alive Monday after they escaped a midair collision without serious injuries.

A helicopter clipped a small plane in the skies over northern California on Sunday evening, sending both crashing to the ground, CNN affiliate KCRA reported, citing the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office.

The collision snapped off the helicopter’s tail, but firefighters found the pilot sitting in the car of a driver who had stopped to help, the station said.

“She was a little shaken up, but she was completely with it,” said Capt. Brandon Wilson of the Rio Vista Fire Department. “Initially, she didn’t want to go to the hospital.

“The person that was flying it was very lucky — very lucky — to walk away pretty much uninjured.”

The helicopter, a Robinson R22, went down about eight miles south of the Rio Vista Airport, between San Francisco and Sacramento. It collided with a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza, which landed near Byron Airport, some 20 miles to the south, said Ian Gregor of the Federal Aviation Administration.

Footage of the helicopter showed it resting in a field. KCRA said its severed tail rotor landed about 50 feet away from the fuselage.

The plane’s pilot was not injured.

“Absolutely a best-case scenario, very lucky for everybody involved,” Wilson said.

Source – CNN

MOSCOW — It was an Ice Age squirrel’s treasure chamber, a burrow containing fruit and seeds that had been stuck in the Siberian permafrost for over 30,000 years. From the fruit tissues, a team of Russian scientists managed to resurrect an entire plant in a pioneering experiment that paves the way for the revival of other species.

The Silene stenophylla is the oldest plant ever to be regenerated, the researchers said, and it is fertile, producing white flowers and viable seeds.

The experiment proves that permafrost serves as a natural depository for ancient life forms, said the Russian researchers, who published their findings in Tuesday’s issue of “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” of the United States.

“We consider it essential to continue permafrost studies in search of an ancient genetic pool, that of pre-existing life, which hypothetically has long since vanished from the earth’s surface,” the scientists said in the article.

Canadian researchers had earlier regenerated some significantly younger plants from seeds found in burrows.

Svetlana Yashina of the Institute of Cell Biophysics of the Russian Academy Of Sciences, who led the regeneration effort, said the revived plant looked very similar to its modern version, which still grows in the same area in northeastern Siberia.

“It’s a very viable plant, and it adapts really well,” she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from the Russian town of Pushchino where her lab is located.

She voiced hope the team could continue its work and regenerate more plant species.

The Russian research team recovered the fruit after investigating dozens of fossil burrows hidden in ice deposits on the right bank of the lower Kolyma River in northeastern Siberia, the sediments dating back 30,000-32,000 years.

The sediments were firmly cemented together and often totally filled with ice, making any water infiltration impossible — creating a natural freezing chamber fully isolated from the surface.

“The squirrels dug the frozen ground to build their burrows, which are about the size of a soccer ball, putting in hay first and then animal fur for a perfect storage chamber,” said Stanislav Gubin, one of the authors of the study, who spent years rummaging through the area for squirrel burrows. “It’s a natural cryobank.”

The burrows were located 125 feet (38 meters) below the present surface in layers containing bones of large mammals, such as mammoth, wooly rhinoceros, bison, horse and deer.

Gubin said the study has demonstrated that tissue can survive ice conservation for tens of thousands of years, opening the way to the possible resurrection of Ice Age mammals.

“If we are lucky, we can find some frozen squirrel tissue,” Gubin told the AP. “And this path could lead us all the way to mammoth.”

Japanese scientists are already searching in the same area for mammoth remains, but Gubin voiced hope that the Russians will be the first to find some frozen animal tissue that could be used for regeneration.

“It’s our land, we will try to get them first,” he said.

Source – Washington Post