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Iceland’s government unveiled Tuesday a steep rise in its disputed commercial whale hunt, a sixfold increase allowing the killing of 150 fin whales and up to 150 minke whales a year. Iceland, which pulled out of an international whaling moratorium in 2006 after observing it for 16 years, had a quota of nine fin whales and 40 minke whales per year.

But outgoing Fisheries Minister Einar Gudfinnsson said the government would follow the recommendations of the Marine Research Institute, which suggested a quota of 150 fin whales and 100 to 150 minke whales a year over the next five years.

“I think that whalers will be satisfied by this quota,” Gudfinnsson told AFP.

Gudfinnsson is a member of the centre-right Independence Party, whose coalition government with the left-leaning Social Democrats collapsed on Monday following protests over its handling of the economic crisis.

The Social Democrats and Left Greens, who oppose whaling, have been asked by President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson to form a new minority coalition after the one led by Prime Minister Geir Haarde, of the Independence Party, resigned.

Foreign Minister Ingibjoerg Solrun Gisladottir, the Social Democratic leader, had blasted Gudfinnsson in May for authorising whale hunting again this year.

Conservationists blasted the new quota.

“I hope that the minister who will replace Einar (Gudfinnsson) will have the courage to recall this decision,” said Arni Finnsson, of the Icelandic Natural Conservation.

Iceland and Norway are the only two countries in the world that authorise commercial whaling. Japan officially hunts whales for scientific purposes, although the whale meat is sold for consumption.

The desire to contact intelligent life on other planets is much older than the UFO craze and the SETI movement. Several 19th century scientists contemplated how we might communicate with possible Martians and Venusians.

These early proposals - which predate by 150 years the first extraterrestrial message that was sent in 1974 - were based on visual signals, as the invention of radio was still decades away.

In fact, as history shows, ideas for interplanetary communication have largely been driven by whatever the current technology allowed - be it lamps, radios or lasers.

“You go with what you know,” said Steven Dick, NASA Chief Historian.

Are we alone?

Over two thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks argued over the existence of life on other planets, but the idea really took off after the Copernican revolution.

“Once it was realized that all the planets go around the sun, it was not hard to imagine that the other planets could be like Earth,” Dick said.

Galileo, Kepler and others considered the inhabitability of the planets, while being careful not to upset Church authority.

“The idea blossomed in the 17th century into the ‘plurality of worlds’ debate, but it remained controversial,” said Dick, who has written several books on the topic.

One of the most influential proponents for extraterrestrial life was Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, who wrote Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds in 1686.

Despite the interest, there was no recorded discussion of how we might locate or contact these potential aliens until more than a century later.

Crop triangles and burning canals

Florence Raulin-Cerceau of the Alexandre Koyre Center in Paris has documented the early attempts at communication with extraterrestrial intelligence (CETI), or what is now often called active SETI.

“As early as the 19th century, inventors imagined “sky telegraph” equipment to communicate with the supposed inhabitants of the solar system’s planets,” Raulin-Cerceau recently wrote with her colleague in the French magazine Pour la Science.

The first of these inventors was Carl Friedrich Gauss, the German mathematician. In the 1820s, he spoke of reflecting sunlight towards the planets with his land surveying invention, the heliotrope. He is also credited with the idea of cutting a giant triangle in the Siberian forest and planting wheat inside.

“The size and color contrast should have made the object visible from the moon or Mars, and the geometric figure could only be interpreted as an intentional construction,” Raulin-Cerceau wrote.

Twenty years later, the astronomer Joseph von Littrow came up with a similar idea to pour kerosene into a 30-kilometer-wide circular canal that would be lit at night to signal our presence.

Concentrated light

The second half of the 19th century saw more realistic proposals, according to Raulin-Cerceau.

In 1869, the French inventor and poet Charles Cros imagined using a parabolic mirror to focus the light from electric lamps towards Mars or Venus. He figured the light could be flashed on and off to encode a message.

“Cros granted that the planets could be inhabited by beings not able to respond, but he was still persuaded that ‘the eternal isolation of the spheres [will be] vanquished,’” wrote Raulin-Cerceau.

A light-based “Morse code” was also considered by the British statistician Francis Galton in 1896. He took care not to assume that Martians would have our same base-10 counting system, as they probably wouldn’t have 10 fingers.

Around the same time, A. Mercier, a member of the Astronomical Society of France, devised a plan to place several reflectors on the Eiffel Tower that could direct sunlight towards Mars. He also considered using the moon as a giant screen on which to project light beams.

Could aliens have seen any of these light displays?

“It depends on how much money you think the Martians are spending on their telescopes,” said Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute.

Radio turns on

It is now generally assumed that radio is a more suitable means of extraterrestrial communication. Radio waves are less affected by cosmic dust than visible light, and there is less of a radio background to deal with in the sky.

Two of radio’s pioneers showed interest in interplanetary radio communication. In 1901, Nikola Tesla reported receiving a strange signal, possibly from Mars, on his giant transmitting tower in Colorado Springs. Nineteen years later, Guglielmo Marconi told reporters about his detection of radio emissions that appeared to come from outer space.

However, the switch to radio-based SETI did not happen immediately.

As late as the 1920s, many people (including Albert Einstein) still considered visual-based communication more practical, since radio transmitters were not yet capable of focusing a beam on a distant planet.

What’s more, scientists gradually became convinced that Mars did not have the right conditions to support life, so any presumed extraterrestrials likely lived much, much further away.

“It seemed hopeless to receive messages from other stellar systems, so people said ‘Forget it.’” Shostak explained.

It wasn’t until 1959 that radio-based SETI started to be taken seriously. In that year, Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison showed that radar transmitters of the time were already powerful enough to send signals many light years through space.

“If we can do it, then the aliens might be doing it,” Shostak said.

In the year that followed, Frank Drake performed Project Ozma, the first radio sky survey to look for intelligent signals.

And then in 1974 - a century and half after Gauss - Drake transmitted the first actual SETI message using the Arecibo radio telescope. Scientists are still waiting for a response.

German scientists have developed a novel technology for synthesizing chemicals from plant material that could produce biofuel for just over 0.50 euros a liter.Developed by scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany, this novel technology is known as bioliq, and is able to produce a range of different types of liquid fuel and chemicals from plant material such as wood and straw.

Bioliq involves first heating the plant material in the absence of air to around 500 degrees Celsius, a process known as pyrolysis, which produces a thick oily liquid containing solid particles of coke termed biosyncrude.

The biosyncrude is then vaporised by exposing it to a stream of oxygen gas, before being heated at high pressures to a temperature of around 1400 degrees C.

Known as gasification, this process transforms the liquid biosyncrude into a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen termed syngas.

After any impurities are removed from this syngas, it can be catalytically converted into a range of different chemicals and fuels, including methanol, hydrogen and a synthetic version of diesel.

This stage of the technology is fairly well developed, as syngas derived from coal and natural gas is already used to produce liquid fuels on a commercial scale in South Africa.

Bioliq is now taking its first steps towards commercialization.

In conjunction with the German process engineering company Lurgi, KIT is starting to construct a pilot plant based on the bioliq technology, which should be fully completed in 2012.

Providing the technology works at this scale, the question then will be how best to implement bioliq at a larger scale, so that it can effectively compete with fossil fuels.

To try to come up with an answer, a team of KIT scientists led by Nicolaus Dahmen has used a simple economic model to calculate the cost of producing fuel at a bioliq plant with an annual production capacity of around 1 million tonnes.

They estimated that if sufficient plant material was transported on trucks, it would quickly bring the road network around the plant to a halt.

“Biomass is pre-treated in around 50 regionally distributed pyrolysis plants to produce the biosyncrude,” explained Dahmen. “This can then be transported economically over long distances to supply a central fuel production plant with a high capacity,” he added.

So, Dahmen and his colleagues produced an economic model based on this set-up, which suggests that the bioliq technology can potentially produce liquid fuels for 0.50 euros a litre.

A new software will convert ordinary laptops into powerful supercomputers to extract features and patterns from enormously complex data sets.The tool - a set of problem-solving calculations known as an algorithm - is compact enough to run on computers and laptops with as little as two gigabytes of memory.

It has been designed and developed by scientists at University of California, Davis (UC-D), and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

They have already used it to probe a slew of phenomena represented by billions of data points, including analysing and creating images of flame surfaces; searching for clusters and voids in a virtual universe experiment; and identifying and tracking pockets of fluid in a simulated mixing of two fluids.

‘What we’ve developed is a workable system of handling any data in any dimension,’ said Attila Gyulassy, who led the five-year development effort while pursuing a PhD in computer science at UC Davis.

‘We expect this algorithm will become an integral part of a scientist’s toolbox to answer questions about data,’ he said.

One of Gyulassy’s tests of the algorithm was to use it to analyse and track the formation and movement of pockets of fluid in the simulated mixing of two fluids: one dense, one light.

The complexity of this data set is so vast - it consists of more than one billion data points on a 3-D grid - it challenges even supercomputers, Gyulassy said.

Yet the new algorithm with its streamlining features was able to perform the analysis on a laptop computer with just two gigabytes of memory, said a UC-D release.

Although Gyulassy had to wait nearly 24 hours for the little machine to complete its calculations, at the end of this process he could pull up images in mere seconds to illustrate phenomena he was interested in, such as the branching of fluid pockets in the mixture.

The paper was published in the November-December issue of IEEE Transactions on Visualisation and Computer Graphics.

A nearly complete skull of a primitive cheetah that sprinted about in China more than 2 million years ago suggests the agile cats originated in the Old World rather than in the Americas.

The skull was discovered in Gansu Province, China, and represents a new cheetah species, now dubbed Acinonyx kurteni. The animal probably lived some time between 2.2 million and 2.5 million years ago, the researchers estimate, making the specimen one of the oldest cheetah fossils identified to date.

“This is extremely exciting stuff,” said Luke Hunter, executive director of Panthera, an organization that aims to conserve the world’s wild cats. “We know amazingly little about the evolutionary history of most of the large cats, with the cheetah being a prime example: The existing fossils we have are largely similar to the modern cheetah,” said Hunter, who was not involved in the current discovery.

Cheetahs are the fastest land animals, capable of reaching speeds of 75 mph (120 kph), but they are not good climbers, unlike others in the cat family - Felidae. Still they are carnivores, like the other big cats. Today, cheetahs live primarily in Africa in the wild. Their status is threatened worldwide.

Cheetah features

Scientists have long debated the origin of these super-fast felines, with clues coming from relatively few fossils. These include the European Acinonyx pardinensis with an estimated age of 2.2 million years, and the North African A. aicha, which dates to about 2.5 million years ago.

Making things more confusing, fossils of cheetah-like cats in the Miracinonyx genus (also called American cheetahs) have been discovered in North America.

“This new fossil is around as old as the oldest cheetah fossils we already have,” Hunter told LiveScience, “but unlike all those, it has a unique set of ‘primitive’ characteristics that strongly suggest it is an earlier ancestor to all cheetahs, allowing us to go back deeper in the evolutionary sequence of the cheetah.”

For instance, the cat had enlarged sinuses for air intake during sprinting, as do modern cheetahs. But its teeth showed primitive features.

“The enlarged sinuses cause the forehead of the skull to bulge. If you look at a cheetah’s skull, it is remarkably tall and domed compared to similar sized cats such as pumas, ocelots or leopards, in particular around the upper nose region,” said researcher Per Christiansen of the Zoological Museum in Denmark.

“Our specimen also has a bulging nose, and, presumably large air sinuses for fast running,” Christiansen said. “So running fast and becoming really good at it was one of the first steps in cheetah evolution. Later, the teeth changed as well.”

Christiansen and Ji Mazák of the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum detailed the finding this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research was supported by a grant from the Carlsberg Foundation.

Cat home

The scientists say the newly analyzed cheetah is the most primitive known to date, which sheds light on cheetahs’ original home.

“Because this new skull is more primitive than both cheetahs and Miracinonyx cats, and was found in China, it argues for a Eurasian/African ancestry of the entire group, with the Miracinonyx cats (or their ancestors) dispersing into the Americas later,” Hunter said.

The new species brings the tally to five or six (scientists are not sure whether one of the previously found specimens is from a cheetah) cheetah and cheetah-like species known, with only one still alive today. (The living cheetah, Acinonyx jubatus, is found almost exclusively along African grasslands and semi-deserts.)

“It suggests that the ’sprinting cat’ specialization is a fragile one, prone to extinction even under natural circumstances,” Hunter said. “In light of this, we need to remind ourselves how imperiled the cheetah of today finds itself, where the threats are primarily human ones. If we lose this cheetah, it would be the end of this wonderful, unique lineage of sprinting cats.”

A new research has determined that rocks on Mars are on the move, rolling into the wind and forming organized patterns.Images taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit show small rocks regularly spaced about 5 to 7 centimeters apart on the intercrater plains between Lahontan Crater and the Columbia Hills.

The new finding counters the previous explanation of the evenly spaced arrangement of small rocks on Mars.

That explanation suggested that the rocks were picked up and carried downwind by extreme high-speed winds thought to occur on Mars in the past.

Although Mars is a windy planet, it would be difficult for the wind to carry the small rocks, which range in size from a quarter to a softball, according to Jon D. Pelletier, associate professor of geosciences at The University of Arizona in Tucson.

Pelletier and his colleagues suggest that wind blows sand away from the front of the rock, creating a pit, and then deposits that sand behind the rock, creating a hill. The rock then rolls forward into the pit, moving into the wind.

As long as the wind continues to blow, the process is repeated and the rocks move forward.

“You get this happening five, 10, 20 times then you start to really move these things around,” said Pelletier. “They can move many times their diameter,” he added.

The process is nearly the same with a cluster of rocks.

However, with a cluster of rocks, those in the front of the group shield those in the middle or on the edges from the wind, according to Pelletier.

Because the middle and outer rocks are not directly hit by the wind, the wind creates pits to the sides of those rocks.

Therefore, they roll to the side, not directly into the wind, and the cluster begins to spread out.

To investigate the regular patterns of the rocks on Mars, Pelletier combined three standard numerical computer models.

The first modeled air flow, the second modeled erosion and deposition of sand and the third modeled the rocks’ movement.

He also conducted what is known as a Monte Carlo simulation, which applies his combination numerical model over and over to a random pattern of rocks to see how the rocks ultimately end up.

Pelletier ran the simulation 1,000 times. The rocks ended up into a regular pattern 90 percent of the time.

As an independent verification, he also compared the pattern predicted by the numerical model to the distances between each rock and its nearest neighbor in the Mars images.

The patterns of the Martian rocks matched what the model predicted.

In a NASA-funded study, researchers at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington have detailed how extreme solar eruptions could severely affect for communications, power grids and other technology on Earth.The study offers some of the first clear economic data that effectively calculates today’s risk of extreme conditions in space driven by magnetic activity on the sun and disturbances in the near-Earth environment.

Instances of extreme space weather are rare and are categorized with other natural hazards that have a low frequency but high consequences.

“Obviously, the sun is Earth’s life blood. To mitigate possible public safety issues, it is vital that we better understand extreme space weather events caused by the sun’s activity,” said Richard Fisher, director of the Heliophysics division at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The sun periodically releases billions of tons of matter called coronal mass ejections other than emitting a continuous stream of plasma called the solar wind.

And these immense clouds of material, when directed toward Earth, can lead to large magnetic storms in the magnetosphere and upper atmosphere and the resulting space weather can affect the performance and reliability of space-borne and ground-based technological systems.

Space weather can produce solar storm electromagnetic fields that trigger extreme currents in wires, disrupting power lines, causing wide-spread blackouts and affecting communication cables that support the Internet.

Also, severe space weather produces solar energetic particles and the dislocation of the Earth’s radiation belts, which can damage satellites used for commercial communications, global positioning and weather forecasting.

Ever since the telegraph was invented in the 19th century, space weather has been recognized as causing problems with new technology.

It is possible to diminish a catastrophic failure of commercial and government infrastructure in space and on the ground by raising public awareness, improving vulnerable infrastructure and developing advanced forecasting capabilities.

Society could become more vulnerable in the future if there are no preventive actions or plans leading to the trend of increased dependency on modern space-weather sensitive assets.

The study, which had national and international experts from industry, government and academia working on it, documents the possibility of a space weather event that has societal effects and causes damage similar to natural disasters on Earth.

“Whether it is terrestrial catastrophes or extreme space weather incidents, the results can be devastating to modern societies that depend in a myriad of ways on advanced technological systems,” said Daniel Baker, professor and director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Baker chaired the panel that prepared the report.

Astronomers at Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, have spotted a mega maser emission inside a galaxy at the edge of the visible cosmos, which is the telltale sign of the presence of water.According to a report in New Scientist, the telltale sign of the water is maser emission - the microwave equivalent of laser light - coming from warm water vapour inside a distant quasar.

The quasar, called MG J0414+0534, is so distant that its light has travelled for 11.1 billion years to reach the Earth, having left when the universe was only 2.5 billion years old.

It beats the previous distance record for a watery galaxy by many billions of light years.

“We now know water is out there,” said Violette Impellizzeri from the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.

“Because water masers arise close to the cores of galaxies, our result opens new interesting possibilities for studying supermassive black holes at a time when galaxies were forming,” she added.

Impellizzeri’s team used the 100-metre Effelsberg radio telescope to observe the quasar, which is particularly bright thanks to an effect called gravitational lensing.

The gravity of a foreground galaxy acts like a cosmic telescope, magnifying the quasar’s light and distorting it into four separate images.

Two of the four components were bright enough to reveal strong water maser emission, which the team confirmed using the Very Large Array in New Mexico.

The maser emission is 10,000 times as luminous as the Sun.

The water maser emission occurs because water molecules are bumped into excited states by collisions with other particles. They then re-emit their extra energy as microwaves.

In doing so, they prompt other excited molecules to emit microwaves at the same frequency, amplifying the signal.

Only about 5 percent of nearby energetic galaxies contain detectable water masers.

The fact that Impellizzeri’s team discovered one in the first distant galaxy they looked at suggests these masers must have been far more common in the early universe than they are now.

“The fact that it’s the first one is fantastic,” MPI team member John McKean told New Scientist. “It will really motivate others to look for objects like this,” he added.

A detailed analysis of the measurements of five different satellites has revealed the existence of the warm plasma cloak, a new region of the magnetosphere.This region is the invisible shield of magnetic fields and electrically charged particles that surround and protect Earth from the onslaught of the solar wind.

The study was conducted by a team of scientists headed by Charles Chappell, research professor of physics and director of the Dyer Observatory at Vanderbilt University.

“Although it is invisible, the magnetosphere has an impact on our everyday lives,” Chappell said.

“For example, solar storms agitate the magnetosphere in ways that can induce power surges in the electrical grid that trigger black outs, interfere with radio transmissions and mess up GPS signals. Charged particles in the magnetosphere can also damage the electronics in satellites and affect the temperature and motion of the upper atmosphere,” he added.

The other regions of the magnetosphere have been known for some time.

Chappell and his colleagues pieced together a “natural cycle of energization” that accelerates the low-energy ions that originate from Earth’s atmosphere up to the higher energy levels characteristic of the different regions in the magnetosphere.

This brought the existence of the new region into focus.

The warm plasma cloak is a tenuous region that starts on the night side of the planet and wraps around the dayside but then gradually fades away on the afternoon side.

As a result, it only reaches about three-quarters of the way around the planet.

It is fed by low-energy charged particles that are lifted into space over Earth’s poles, carried behind the Earth in its magnetic tail, but then jerked around 180 degrees by a kink in the magnetic fields that boosts the particles back toward Earth in a region called the plasma sheet.

“We have recognized all the other regions for a long time, but the plasma cloak was a fuzzy thing in the background which we didn’t have enough information about to make it stand out. When we got enough pieces, there it was!” said Chappell.

NASA appears to have resolved problems with a new urine recycling system on the International Space Station, bolstering hopes it will be able to expand the research outpost’s crew next year, officials at the U.S. space agency said on Tuesday. Reusing wastewater is essential for doubling the size of the crew living aboard the station from three members to six, especially since the space shuttles, which produce water as a byproduct of their electrical systems, are to be retired in two years.

The device, part of a $250 million new life-support system aboard the station, shut down during three previous attempts to purify urine. NASA wants the visiting shuttle Endeavour crew to bring home processed samples for analysis before declaring the water purification system suitable for use.

Two rounds of modifications to stabilize the device’s centrifuge appear to have worked, flight director Brian Smith said on Tuesday. It completed a full five-hour run Monday and was nearing completion of a second full run early Tuesday.

Engineers planned to keep the device operating all day in hopes of producing enough processed urine before Endeavour’s departure on Friday. The device was ferried into orbit and installed in the station’s Destiny laboratory after the shuttle arrived on November 16.

The shuttle’s stay at the station was extended a day to wait for the samples.

“We’re going to try to keep it going all day and have the crew just reload the (urine) tank as it gets low,” Smith said.

Also Tuesday, NASA tested the station’s newly repaired solar wing rotary joint, which was cleaned and restored during four spacewalks by Endeavour astronauts.

The joint had been contaminated by metal filings, prompting NASA to lock it in place to prevent damage. Immobilizing the wing, however, prevented panels from tracking the sun for full power.

While the crews slept, engineers on the ground watched as the joint automatically pivoted to track the sun for the first time in a year.

“There’s months worth of testing left to go before we can really determine what impact all four (spacewalks) had on that joint,” Smith said.

Endeavour is due back at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday after 16 days in orbit.

NASA plans eight more flights to the station, a $100 billion project of 16 nations, before the shuttles are retired in 2010.