Delhi Earthquake, adjoining areas and no casualties reported

NEW DELHI: An earthquake of medium intensity jolted Delhi and its satellite towns on Monday afternoon, pulling panic-stricken people out of their homes and offices.

The tremors, measuring 4.9 on the Richter scale with Haryana’s Bahadurgarh

as epicentre, were felt across Delhi and its adjoining satellite towns of Ghaziabad and Noida in Uttar Pradesh at a 1:11pm, the MeT office said.

However, according to the US Geological Survey, the strength of the earthquake was measured 5.2 on the Richter scale.

The quake took place 9km below the surface. The tremors were felt for less than ten seconds.

“The intensity was 4.9 and the epicentre was Bahadurgarh, Delhi-Haryana Border,” a senior MeT official said.

There were no immediate reports of any casualty. The fire brigade and police said they have not received any immediate calls of casualty or damage.

According to the Seismic Zone Mapping done by the Geological Survey of India (GSI), Delhi is among 30 cities in the country falling in zone IV, which is defined as a severe intensity seismic zone.

This is the third tremor in Delhi, which is among the 30 cities which fall in the high risk seismic zone, since September last year.

Tremors were felt in the capital on September 18 last year following an earthquake with an intensity of 6.8 on the Richter scale having its epicentre near Sikkim-Nepal border.

On September eight last year, an earthquake of 4.2 on Richter Scale with Haryana’s Sonepat as epicentre, had rocked the capital.

I live with tremendous amount of guilt for having so many kids: Octomom

New York, April 21 (ANI): ‘Octomom’ Nadya Suleman has admitted that she’s living with a ‘tremendous amount of guilt” for giving birth to eight babies last year as an unemployed single mother of six.

Suleman appeared via satellite on Oprah Winfrey’s program to discuss what life has been like since becoming a tabloid target.

She said that being known as “Octomom” makes her feel like a “carnival attraction.”

On the show, Suleman also described the difficulty of raising so many children as a single mother.

She acknowledged not being able to provide the children with enough attention and support.

“I live every single day every hour of the day with a tremendous amount of guilt. And I feel guilty when I hold the one or two and then that I can”t be there for the others. And they”re crying. And then I feel guilty. Look at the older ones. They all have different unique needs. And I”ll live with this forever. But all I can do now is keep on going, keep moving,” the New York Daily News quoted her as saying. (ANI)

Scientists track space junk to save satellites

Researchers at the University of Western Australia (UWA) are tracking space junk in the Earth’s orbit in an effort to protect satellites from damage.

There are thousands of pieces of debris floating in space which threaten satellites and could potentially affect telecommunications, navigation and security.

Associate Professor David Coward says UWA has teamed up with French astronomers to create a database of debris, using astronomical telescopes.

He says that information can eventually be used to either destroy the debris or remove a satellite from its path.

“It’s increasing at an alarming rate. There’s about 30,000 new pieces of space debris going into space orbit every year,” he said.

“We’re planning a pilot study this year where we can test out a few of the techniques developed by our French collaborators, and then we can scale up to tracking hundreds of space debris a year.

“It can cause some serious damage and the problem with space debris is that it’s travelling at very high velocities.

“We’ve got all of our communication satellites that are vulnerable to space debris.”

Associate Professor Coward says his team will use robotic astronomical telescopes to track the location of debris.

European Hot 100 Singles for the 4/3/2010 issue

Now Last Weeks Peak

1 2 7 Alors On Danse – Stromae (/Vertigo/Mosaert)

2 3 8 Rude Boy – Rihanna (/SRP/Def Jam)

3 1 20 Tik Tok – Ke$ha (/Kemosabe/RCA)

4 4 4 Baby – Justin Bieber ft. Ludacris (/Schoolboy/Raymond Braun/Island)

5 31 6 Telephone – Lady Gaga ft. Beyonce (/Streamline/Konlive/Cherrytree/Interscope)

6 6 7 Memories – David Guetta ft. Kid Cudi (/Gum/Virgin)

7 5 21 Bad Romance – Lady Gaga (/Streamline/Konlive/Cherrytree/Interscope)

8 9 16 Fireflies – Owl City (/Universal Republic/Island)

9 0 Satellite – Lena Meyer-Landrut/USF (/USFO)

10 7 3 Pass Out – Tinie Tempah (/Parlophone)

New evidence points towards water on Moon

London, September 19 (ANI): Two separate lunar missions have found evidence which indicates that the polar regions of the moon are chock full of water-altered minerals.

According to a report in Nature News, early results from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), launched on June 18, are offering a wide array of watery signals.

The Moon, in fact, has water in all sorts of places: not just locked up in minerals, but scattered throughout the broken-up surface, and, potentially, in blocks or sheets of ice at depth.

“We are on the verge of a renaissance in our thinking about the poles of the Moon, including how water ice gets there,” said Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), which on October 9, will slam into a polar crater with the intention of ploughing up a plume of water ice for many telescopic eyes to see.

The initial LRO results confirm what was long suspected as a way for ice to stay trapped on the Moon for billions of years.

A thermal mapping instrument showed that permanently shadowed regions within deep polar craters are as cold as 35o Kelvin (-238o Celsius).

Project scientist Richard Vondrak said that they are the coldest spots in the Solar System – even colder than the surface of Pluto.

Variations in the flux of neutrons suggests variability in water content among craters.

But, the surprise comes from a different instrument on LRO, which counts slow-moving neutrons as a way of measuring hydrogen abundance in the top metre or so of the surface.

This hydrogen is often interpreted as a proxy for water ice, although it could also be molecular hydrogen or hydrogen trapped in other molecules.

The LRO instrument has already found a significant excess of hydrogen at the poles.

But, with added resolution, it is seeing surprising variability within the polar regions. Some of the craters appear enriched in hydrogen. Others are not.

Stranger still, some areas outside the crater walls, which were thought to get too hot for water to linger, show an excess of hydrogen.

Vondrak said this shows that the water could have arrived more recently, or that it can persist if buried as impacts till the lunar soil.

If the LCROSS impact spews up ice, it will eliminate the last vestiges of doubt about water on the Moon.

It could also start a new hunt: to find a record of impact events, such as water-rich comet strikes, that put the ice there in the first place. (ANI)

Invading black holes cause ‘cosmic flashes’

Washington, September 19 (ANI): Mathematicians at the University of Leeds, UK, have determined that cosmic flashes, known as gamma ray bursts, are produced by jets of plasma that originate from invading black holes.

Gamma ray bursts are beams of high-energy radiation that are similar to the radiation emitted by explosions of nuclear weapons.

The orthodox model for this cosmic jet engine involves plasma being heated by neutrinos in a disk of matter that forms around a black hole, which is created when a star collapses.

But, mathematicians at the University of Leeds, have come up with a different explanation: the jets come directly from black holes, which can dive into nearby massive stars and devour them.

Their theory is based on recent observations by the Swift satellite, which indicates that the central jet engine operates for up to 10,000 seconds – much longer than the neutrino model can explain.

Mathematicians believe that this is evidence for an electromagnetic origin of the jets, that is, that the jets come directly from a rotating black hole, and that it is the magnetic stresses caused by the rotation that focus and accelerate the jet’s flow.

For the mechanism to operate, the collapsing star has to be rotating extremely rapidly.

This increases the duration of the star’s collapse as the gravity is opposed by strong centrifugal forces.

One particularly peculiar way of creating the right conditions involves not a collapsing star, but a star invaded by its black hole companion in a binary system.

The black hole acts like a parasite, diving into the normal star, spinning it with gravitational forces on its way to the star’s centre, and finally eating it from the inside.

“The neutrino model cannot explain very long gamma ray bursts and the Swift observations, as the rate at which the black hole swallows the star becomes rather low quite quickly, rendering the neutrino mechanism inefficient, but the magnetic mechanism can,” said Professor Komissarov from the School of Mathematics at the University of Leeds.

“Our knowledge of the amount of the matter that collects around the black hole and the rotation speed of the star allow us to calculate how long these long flashes will be – and the results correlate very well with observations from satellites,” he added. (ANI)

Pak inks 220-million-dollar satellite deal with China

Islamabad, Sep. 19 (ANI): Pakistan has signed an agreement with China to provide a 220-million-dollar financial grant to help the Islamic country launch a communication satellite.

The operational life of Pakistan’s existing satellite PAKSAT-1 will be over in November 2011.

Chinese Ambassador to Pakistan Luo Zhaohui and Pakistan’s Economic Affairs Secretary Farrukh Qayyum signed the contract.

“China has agreed to fund the project through a soft loan with low mark up for a period of 20 years,” the Daily Times quoted Qayyum, as saying.

The Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Organisation (SUPARCO) and the China Great Wall Industry Corporation have agreed to develop the new satellite PAKSAT-1R, which would replace PAKSAT-1 in September 2011, he added.

The satellite will support all conventional and modern fixed satellite service (FSS) applications.

The satellite will have 30 transponders, 18 in the Ku-band and 12 in C-band (ANI)

How life might evolve with “exotic” biochemistry and solvents

London, September 18 (ANI): Scientists at a new interdisciplinary research group in Austria are working to uncover how life might evolve with “exotic” biochemistry and solvents, such as sulfuric acid instead of water.

The research group for Alternative Solvents as a Basis for Life Supporting Zones in (Exo-) Planetary Systems was established by the University of Vienna.

Traditionally, planets that might sustain life are looked for in the ‘habitable zone’, the region around a star in which Earth-like planets with carbon dioxide, water vapor and nitrogen atmospheres could maintain liquid water on their surfaces.

Consequently, scientists have been looking for biomarkers produced by extraterrestrial life with metabolisms resembling the terrestrial ones, where water is used as a solvent and the building blocks of life, amino acids, are based on carbon and oxygen.

However, these may not be the only conditions under which life could evolve.

“It is time to make a radical change in our present geocentric mindset for life as we know it on Earth,” said scientist Johannes Leitner.

“Even though this is the only kind of life we know, it cannot be ruled out that life forms have evolved somewhere that neither rely on water nor on a carbon and oxygen based metabolism,” he added.

One requirement for a life-supporting solvent is that it remains liquid over a large temperature range.

Water is liquid between 0 degree Celsius and 100 degrees C, but other solvents exist which are liquid over more than 200 degrees C.

Such a solvent would allow an ocean on a planet closer to the central star.

The reverse scenario is also possible. A liquid ocean of ammonia could exist much further from a star.

Furthermore, sulfuric acid can be found within the cloud layers of Venus and it is now known that lakes of methane/ethane cover parts of the surface of the Saturnian satellite Titan.

Consequently, the discussion on potential life and the best strategies for its detection is ongoing and not only limited to exoplanets and habitable zones.

The newly established research group at the University of Vienna, together with international collaborators, will investigate the properties of a range of solvents other than water, including their abundance in space, thermal and biochemical characteristics as well as their ability to support the origin and evolution of life supporting metabolisms. (ANI)

NASA’s Swift satellite makes best-ever ultraviolet portrait of Andromeda galaxy

Washington, September 17 (ANI): NASA’s Swift satellite has acquired the highest-resolution view of a neighboring spiral galaxy ever attained in the ultraviolet.

The galaxy, known as M31 in the constellation Andromeda, is the largest and closest spiral galaxy to our own.

“Swift reveals about 20,000 ultraviolet sources in M31, especially hot, young stars and dense star clusters,” said Stefan Immler, a research scientist on the Swift team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“Of particular importance is that we have covered the galaxy in three ultraviolet filters. That will let us study M31′s star-formation processes in much greater detail than previously possible,” he added.

M31, also known as the Andromeda Galaxy, is more than 220,000 light-years across and lies 2.5 million light-years away.

On a clear, dark night, the galaxy is faintly visible as a misty patch to the naked eye.

Between May 25 and July 26, 2008, Swift’s Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) acquired 330 images of M31 at wavelengths of 192.8, 224.6, and 260 nanometers.

The images represent a total exposure time of 24 hours.

The task of assembling the resulting 85 gigabytes of images fell to Erin Grand, an undergraduate student at the University of Maryland at College Park who worked with Immler as an intern this summer.

“After ten weeks of processing that immense amount of data, I’m extremely proud of this new view of M31,” she said.

Several features are immediately apparent in the new mosaic.

The first is the striking difference between the galaxy’s central bulge and its spiral arms.

“The bulge is smoother and redder because it’s full of older and cooler stars,” Immler explained. “Very few new stars form here because most of the materials needed to make them have been depleted,” he added.

Dense clusters of hot, young, blue stars sparkle beyond the central bulge.

M31′s disk and spiral arms contain most of the gas and dust needed to produce new generations of stars.

Star clusters are especially plentiful in an enormous ring about 150,000 light-years across.

“Swift is surveying nearby galaxies like M31 so astronomers can better understand star- formation conditions and relate them to conditions in the distant galaxies where we see gamma-ray bursts occurring,” said Neil Gehrels, the mission’s principal investigator at NASA Goddard. (ANI)

Early man used crude version of ‘sat nav’ system to navigate across England

London, September 15 (ANI): In a new research, a scientist has found that prehistoric man navigated his way across England using a crude version of a satellite navigation system, which was based on stone circle markers.

According to a report in the Telegraph, the research, by historian and writer Tom Brooks, shows that Britain’s Stone Age ancestors were “‘sophisticated engineers” and far from a barbaric race.

Brooks studied all known prehistoric sites as part of his research.

He found that the prehistoric man was able to travel between settlements in England with pinpoint accuracy, thanks to a complex network of hilltop monuments.

These covered much of southern England and Wales and included now famous landmarks such as Stonehenge and The Mount.

New research suggests that they were built on a connecting grid of isosceles triangles that ‘point’ to the next site.

Many are 100 miles or more away, but GPS co-ordinates show all are accurate to within 100 metres.

This provided a simple way for ancient Britons to navigate successfully from point A to B without the need for maps.

“To create these triangles with such accuracy would have required a complex understanding of geometry,” said Brooks.

“The sides of some of the triangles are over 100 miles across on each side and yet the distances are accurate to within 100 metres. You cannot do that by chance,” he added.

“So advanced, sophisticated and accurate is the geometrical surveying now discovered, that we must review fundamentally the perception of our Stone Age forebears as primitive, or conclude that they received some form of external guidance,” he further added.

Brooks analyzed 1,500 sites stretching from Norfolk to north Wales. These included standing stones, hilltop forts, stone circles and hill camps.

Each was built within eyeshot of the next.

Using GPS co-ordinates, he plotted a course between the monuments and noted their positions to each other.

He found that they all lie on a vast geometric grid made up of isosceles ‘triangles’. Each triangle has two sides of the same length and ‘point’ to the next settlement.

Thus, anyone standing on the site of Stonehenge in Wiltshire could have navigated their way to Lanyon Quoit in Cornwall without a map.

According to Brooks, many of the Stone Age sites were created 5,000 years ago by an expanding population recovering from the trauma of the Ice Age.

“The triangle navigation system may have been used for trading routes among the expanding population and also been used by workers to create social paths back to their families while they were working on these new sites,” he said. (ANI)

Antarctica’s secret water network far more dynamic than believed

London, September 15 (ANI): The first complete map of the lakes beneath Antarctica’s ice sheets reveals the continent’s secret water network is far more dynamic than we thought, and could be acting as a powerful lubricant beneath glaciers, contributing to sea level rise.

According to a report in New Scientist, Ian Joughin at the University of Washington in Seattle and colleagues developed the map.

Unlike previous lake maps, which are confined to small regions, Joughin and colleagues mapped 124 subglacial lakes across Antarctica using lasers on NASA’s ICESat satellite.

The team also observed the lakes draining and filling.

While interior lakes tended to be static, many coastal lakes changed significantly. Some even appear to be connected by channels under the ice hundreds of kilometres long.

For instance, when upstream lakes under the Recovery glacier drained 3 cubic kilometres of water, lakes downstream gained a similar amount.

Water flowing under glaciers can act as a lubricant, causing land ice to accelerate into the sea and add to rising sea levels.

“The implications for the flow of ice are potentially quite significant,” said Andy Smith of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK.

“Those lakes with no clear drainage channels are of particular interest because they could be spreading a thin film of lubricating water under glaciers,” he added. (ANI)

Jupiter made comet its temporary moon for 12 years in mid-20th century

Washington, September 14 (ANI): An international team of astronomers has discovered that Jupiter had captured the comet 147P/Kushida-Muramatsu as its temporary moon in the mid-20th century, in an irregular orbit for about twelve years.

There are only a handful of known comets where this phenomenon of temporary satellite capture has occurred and the capture duration in the case of Kushida-Muramatsu, which orbited Jupiter between 1949 and 1961, is the third longest.

The phenomenon was detected by an international team led by Dr. Katsuhito Ohtsuka that modeled the trajectories of 18 “quasi-Hilda comets”, objects with the potential to go through a temporary satellite capture by Jupiter that results in them either leaving or joining the “Hilda” group of objects in the asteroid belt.

Most of the cases of temporary capture were flybys, where the comets did not complete a full orbit.

However, Dr. Ohtsuka’s team used recent observations tracking Kushida-Muramatsu over nine years to calculate hundreds of possible orbital paths for the comet over the previous century.

In all scenarios, Kushida-Muramatsu completed two full revolutions of Jupiter, making it only the fifth captured orbiter to be identified.

According to Dr. David Asher, “Our results demonstrate some of the routes taken by cometary bodies through interplanetary space that can allow them either to enter or to escape situations where they are in orbit around the planet Jupiter.”

Asteroids and comets can sometimes be distorted or fragmented by tidal effects induced by the gravitational field of a capturing planet, or may even impact with the planet.

The most famous victim of both these effects was comet D/1993 F2 (Shoemaker-Levy 9), which was torn apart on passing close to Jupiter and whose fragments then collided with that planet in 1994.

Previous computational studies have shown that Shoemaker-Levy 9 may well have been a quasi-Hilda comet before its capture by Jupiter.

“Fortunately for us Jupiter, as the most massive planet with the greatest gravity, sucks objects towards it more readily than other planets and we expect to observe large impacts there more often than on Earth,” said Dr. Asher.

“Comet Kushida-Muramatsu has escaped from the giant planet and will avoid the fate of Shoemaker-Levy 9 for the foreseeable future”, he added. (ANI)

World’s smallest satellite tags to track rare Kittlitz’s Murrelet seabirds

Washington, September 6 (ANI): Scientists have attached the world’s smallest satellite tags to the members of the rare and rapidly declining Kittlitz’s Murrelet seabirds, in order to track them.

Most of these birds are found in remote, glaciated regions of Alaska, but their wintering grounds have long been unknown.

Thanks to tiny solar-powered satellites tags that can be attached to small seabirds, researchers from the USGS (US Geological Survey) and US Fish and Wildlife Service can now study their nesting, foraging and migration ecology.

This new technology is even capable of operating successfully in the most extreme subarctic marine environment.

Data collected from these tags may help inform conservation strategies for this rare species.

Scientists report that all tags are functioning and they expect to see birds migrate soon to their wintering grounds. (ANI)

China to assist Pak launch its first satellite

Islamabad, Sep.5 (ANI): Taking their bilateral relations to a next level, China has said that it would provide financial assistance to Pakistan for launching its first satellite.

Addressing a press conference here, Chinese Ambassador to Pakistan Lou Zhaohui said China is ready to extend all help to Pakistan regarding its space mission, and a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in this regard would be signed next week.

Zhaohui also informed that Chinese President Hu Jintao would meet his Pakistani counterpart in New York later this month on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly.

He said the meeting will focus on strengthening bilateral ties of the two nations.

“The focus would be on a wide range of regional and international issues, but of course the emphasis would be on bilateral relations. The interaction will further deepen friendship with China,” The Dawn quoted Zhaohui, as saying.

“It is important for the leaderships to establish personal friendship,” he added. (ANI)

NASA all set to launch infrared eye to hunt for dark asteroids

Sydney, September 3 (ANI): NASA is preparing to launch an infrared telescope that will hunt down dark asteroids that have slipped beneath our radar.

According to a report by ABC Science, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft recently arrived at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California ahead of its launch later this year.

With a quartet of infrared sensors and a wide view, WISE is designed to survey the whole sky in infrared light.

It’s not the first telescope to do so, but scientists expect WISE’s observations will be 500 times sharper than a survey conducted in 1980s by IRAS, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, according to astronomer Martin Cohen of the University of California at Berkeley.

The data will be complied into an all-sky infrared atlas, a tome that is expected to include about 300 million objects, including around 100,000 asteroids.

Many of the asteroids seen by WISE will be known objects.

Scientists hope to use the new observations to nail down details, such as an asteroid’s diameter and surface reflectivity.

“With ground-based scopes, it’s just a point source. You can’t tell size directly,” said University of Texas astronomer Dr Robert McMillan who leads Spacewatch, an asteroid-survey project.

“A big object that is dark and a small object that is bright are going to look like they have the same brightness,” he added.

The solar system contains several million asteroids, most of which reside in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

About 7000 asteroids have been identified that cross or come close to Earth’s orbit.

WISE will be able to spot asteroids emitting heat due to direct exposure from the Sun, as opposed to visible-light searches that find asteroids that are reflecting sunlight.

“Those are two different physical effects,” said McMillan. “An asteroid that has very dark colour in invisible light is going to get heated up more, just like a black car in a parking lot is going to get heated up more than a white car,” he added.

Scientists hope to get enough positioning information to follow up targets with ground-based observations.

McMillan expects that WISE will discover a few hundred new asteroids.

The information will be folded into ongoing surveys to map asteroids that could impact Earth and cause widespread damage.

Other WISE targets include brown dwarfs, which are Jupiter-sized stars that never got their nuclear fusion engines running, and ultra-luminous galaxies, which pump out the equivalent of about 1000 Sun-sized stars every year. (ANI)

Intensified search operations for missing Andhra CM resume

Hyderabad/New Delhi, Sep.3 (ANI): Search operations for missing Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy resumed at first light on Thursday morning.

State Government sources said that they have narrowed down the search to a 20-square kilometer radius in the Nallamalla Forest Range where they believe the seven-seat Bell helicopter carrying the chief minister may have gone down on Wednesday at around 9.30 a.m.eddy’s chopper went missing while he was on his way from Kurnool to Chittoor.

He is accompanied by his Principal Secretary S Subramanyam and Chief Security Officer A S C Wesley. There were two pilots also on board the twin-engined Bell 430 helicopter that lost contact with Air Traffic Control at the Begumpet Airport in Hyderabad when it was headed for Chittoor district, about 600 kilometres from Hyderabad.

Indian Space Research Organisation chief G. Madhavan Nair and his team are monitoring a low flying remote sensing plane. Satellite images are being used to try and trace the place. So far, 41 images have been taken but none of them have revealed any information about the chief minister’s whereabouts.

As of now the Indian Government has said that it has not requested the United States for help in the matter, but has confirmed that the unmanned vehicle that is presently deployed in the north eastern part of the country is being kept on standby.

The Army, Indian Air Force (IAF), Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel, Andhra Police Greyhound commandos along with local police and district officials has entered the Nallamalla Forests to launch the massive search and rescue operation for Reddy.

About 250 Army personnel with night vision devices have joined the search operations.

“We have deployed two columns and one Ghatak (jungle warfare specialist) platoon in the area for searching the Chief Minister. Our troops are equipped with night vision devices such as goggles and hand held thermal imagers,” Army officials said.

Congress president Sonia Gandhi is expected to arrive in Hyderabad shortly to be with Reddy’s anguished family members and to get a hands on assessment of the search operation.

She has already sent Union Law Minister and Congress general secretary in charge of Andhra Pradesh affairs Veerappa Moily and Union Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office Prithviraj Chauhan to the city to monitor developments. Chauhan told press persons that the State and Central Governments are sparing no efforts to search for the chief minister.

Meanwhile, National Security Advisor M.K. Narayanan has said that while both the state and central governments are extremely concerned and worried about the missing chief minister, all available resources are being deployed for the search.

He said Army and Air Force helicopters have been conducting a search of the region. He also confirmed that two fixed-wing aircraft with synthetic aperture radar capabilities have been pressed into service.

Forces on the ground are also on the lookout for the missing helicopter and its individuals. arayanan said that the lack of communication is a major problem and also ruled out the probability of a Naxal strike.

“I don’t think the Naxals have the capability to bring down a helicopter,” he said.

“There is no question about calling off the search till we discover what happened there. We are hopeful we will find the Chief Minister, his chief secretary and PSO without serious injuries,” he added. (ANI)

Popular Arab TV Program exposes real Al Qaeda

Dubai, Sep.2 (ANI): The Al Arabiya satellite television channel has come up with a popular program titled “Death Making,” that exposes another side of Al Qaeda.

Hosted by female correspondent Rima Salha, the Dubai-based show is heading into its third year on Al Arabiya and aims to influence how the Arab world views Al Qaeda, reports Fox News.

It is a unique program that lets jihadists tell their stories, and then shows the results of their actions.

“It’s not enough to tell you that Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization. You have to understand why, what it means, how everything works, and what the end goal is for them,” Al Arabia’s general manager Abdul Rahman al-Rashed explains.

For her work, Salha, who is Lebanese, gets death threats, including when Osama bin Laden’s number two, Ayman al Zawahiri, singled the show and Al Arabiya out, by weaving video of both into one of his multi-media diatribes against mass media.

Despite the threats, Salah is undeterred. She goes to the jihadists, wherever they are: in refugee camps off limits even to security forces and to Iraq. She and her team convince subjects to talk to them. It’s not easy, but some of these militants apparently think they stand to benefit from a bit of publicity.

The topic of terrorism is so hot that Salha gets attacked from all sides. (ANI)

Antarctica’s plumbing system more dynamic than previously believed

Washington, Sept 2 (ANI): Scientists, using space-based lasers on a NASA satellite have created the most comprehensive inventory of lakes that actively drain or fill under Antarctica’s ice, which has revealed a continental plumbing system that is more dynamic than previously thought.

“Even though Antarctica’s ice sheet looks static, the more we watch it, the more we see there is activity going on there all the time,” said Benjamin Smith of the University of Washington in Seattle, who led the study.

Unlike most lakes, Antarctic lakes are under pressure from the ice above. That pressure can push melt water from place to place like water in a squeezed balloon.

The water moves under the ice in a broad, thin layer, but also through a linked cavity system. This flow can resupply other lakes near and far.

Understanding this plumbing is important, as it can lubricate glacier flow and send the ice speeding toward the ocean, where it can melt and contribute to sea level change.

But figuring out what’s happening beneath miles of ice is a challenge.

Researchers led by Smith analyzed 4.5 years of ice elevation data from NASA’s Ice, Cloud and land Elevation satellite (ICESat) to create the most complete inventory to date of changes in the Antarctic plumbing system.

The team has mapped the location of 124 active lakes, estimated how fast they drain or fill, and described the implications for lake and ice-sheet dynamics.

Smith, Helen Fricker, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and colleagues extended their elevation analysis to cover most of the Antarctic continent and 4.5 years of data from ICESat’s Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS).

By observing how ice sheet elevation changed between the two or three times the satellite flew over a section every year, researchers could determine which lakes were active.

They also used the elevation changes and the properties of water and ice to estimate the volume change.

Only a few of the more than 200 previously identified lakes were confirmed active, implying that lakes in East Antarctica’s high-density “Lakes District” are mostly inactive and do not contribute much to ice sheet changes.

Most of the 124 newly observed active lakes turned up in coastal areas, at the head of large drainage systems, which have the largest potential to contribute to sea level change.

According to Robert Bindschadler, a glaciologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, “The survey shows that most active subglacial lakes are located where the ice is moving fast, which implies a relationship.” (ANI)

Beefed-up diets of Asia’s middle class may lead to chronic food shortages

Washington, August 30 (ANI): Scientists have said that the beefed-up diets of Asia’s expanding middle class could lead to chronic food shortages for the water-stressed region.

According to a report in National Geographic News, the threat was highlighted in a study by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which estimate that Asian demand for food and livestock fodder will double in 40 years.
Asia’s growing economy and appetite for meat will require a radical overhaul of farmland irrigation to feed a population expected to swell to 1.4 billion by 2050, scientists warned at Stockholm’s World Water Week recently.
At current crop yields, East Asia would need 47 percent more irrigated farmland and to find 70 percent more water, the study found.
South Asia would have to expand its irrigated crop areas by 30 percent and increase water use by 57 percent.
Given existing agriculture pressure on water resources and territory, that’s an impossible scenario, according to the study authors.

Scientists urge modernization of existing large-scale irrigation systems, most of which were installed in the 1970s and 1980s.
It’s estimated that India, the world’s largest consumer of underground water, has 19 million unregulated groundwater pumps.
Groundwater in northern India is receding by as much as a foot (0.3 meter) a year due to rampant water extraction, most of it for crop irrigation, according to a study.
More than 109 cubic kilometres of groundwater were drained from the region between 2002 and 2008, according to the satellite image-based study led by scientists with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
“Governments’ inability to regulate this practice is giving rise to scary scenarios of groundwater over-exploitation, which could lead to regional food crises and widespread social unrest,” said Tushaar Shah of IWMI.

As for China, the country’s per capita “water footprint” for food production has almost doubled since 1985, according to Junguo Liu of the Beijing Forestry University.
“A switch from traditional rice and noodles to a meatier diet is behind the change,” Liu said. “Changes in food consumption are the major cause of worsening water scarcity in China,” he added.
Total water requirements for food production in China are predicted to rise by 40 to 50 percent in the next 30 years, he further added.
“Where do you get such a big amount of water? It is a really big question and a big challenge,” he said.
“If other developing countries follow China toward a Western diet, the global water shortage becomes even more serious,” he added. (ANI)

Taliban claim successful sabotage of Afghan presidential vote

Kabul, Aug. 29 (ANI): Taliban fighters say they have successfully sabotaged the Afghanistan presidential voting process without sending in a single suicide bomber.

A Globe and Mail report says that their claim that the mere threat of violence suppressed turnout enough to cast doubt on the credibility of the vote, which is being increasingly undermined by allegations of fraud.

“It’s like the election didn’t happen at all,” said one senior Taliban commander, who was instrumental in planning the insurgents’ strategy after the their leader, Mullah Omar, ordered the elections disrupted.

He spoke to The Globe And Mail by satellite phone after meeting with a dozen other senior militant commanders in a region bordering Pakistan to discuss the election.

“We have succeeded in our plan. Even in Kandahar city, most of the people were sitting in their houses. We showed the government could not do a good election,” said the commander, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

His claims were echoed by other, less senior Taliban fighters interviewed by The Globe in Afghanistan’s southern provinces, where turnout was particularly low – 10 per cent in some districts – and allegations of fraud are most pronounced.

While the United Nations, American, Canadian and Afghan officials have praised the vote as a success, the Taliban’s new declarations of victory are finding growing resonance in official circles.

Tooryalai Wesa, the governor of Kandahar province, did not dismiss the Taliban’s claim of triumph. “The election was complicated,” he said.

“They did manage to give a sense that anything was possible. They did make it seem like they were quite a lot bigger than they were. I’d score it as a win for them,” the analyst said.

At least 30 people died on election day, including two people who were hanged from a tree near the Arghandab River. At least two others had their right index fingers cut off after they voted. Dozens of rockets fell on Kandahar and Helmand province.

However, the election was largely free of the massive scale of violence threatened by the Taliban, who promised to disrupt it at all costs. (ANI)