Luciole Press Blog

Photo: a bird's-eye-view of bungee jumper in Queenstown, New Zealand

kluciole — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 11:22:59 GMT

A man jumps from a bungee jump platform on Ben Lomond mountain in Queenstown, New Zealand.

(It's often called 'bungee' in the US, and 'bungy' in NZ)

Russian modern art gets younger, less politicized

kluciole — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 11:14:08 GMT

Russian modern art gets younger, less politicized
By Nastassia Astrasheuskaya | Reuters

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Up-and-coming artists competing for Russia's top contemporary art prize kicked off a marathon of exhibits in the Russian capital, which hosts the fourth Moscow Biennale.

A studio strewn with musty books, pages rustling in an artificial breeze; a multicolored play-dough cube squeezed into a cage; and a sphere made out of hundreds of plastic bags were among the 40 art works contesting the prestigious Kadinsky prize.

Named after abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1904), the award hands out cash-prizes of up to $55,100 to modern artists featured at Moscow's Central House of Artists.

"This exhibit cuts across Russia's contemporary art and art forms of today," said Shalva Breus, who founded the award in 2007.

Breus hailed an increase in the number of younger participants and avant-guard ideas alongside a steady decline in Soviet symbolism in Russian art.

"If three years ago, artists widely addressed imperial symbolism, be it of the Russian empire or the Soviet empire, there is no more of that today," he told Reuters at the opening. "There are many more abstract installations."

The fading references to Soviet symbolism in contemporary art highlights that award nominees are getting younger each year, with today's art students born at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The trend may also be market-driven, as younger collectors emerge in Russia, demanding art that speaks to post-Communist era, participants said.

"The buyers of Russian modern art are mostly Russians, and the new emerging trend is that there are a lot more younger collectors nowadays: The so-called 'Progressive Youth'," said Mikhail Molochnikov, a Russian artist working in Moscow, Berlin and Zurich galleries.

Globalization is also erasing the focus on local politics and history, experts said. Nevertheless, a few artists waxed nostalgic for Soviet times and one work -- "First Grade" -- depicted the legs of schoolchildren in traditional Soviet gear.

While themes are changing, Russian contemporary artists lagged behind their Western peers in the use of innovative materials, Breus said.

"We are trying to catch up with the West and we are copying European artists but we are definitely still falling behind," he said.

A jury will vote on the winners by the end of the exhibit, which is on until October 7. There are three categories in which to win: "Project of the Year," "Best Young Artist," and "Media-art Project of the Year."

The fourth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art opens on Thursday, lighting up galleries across the city until November.

($1 = 0.725 Euros)

(Reporting By Nastassia Astrasheuskaya; editing by Alissa de Carbonnel and Paul Casciato)

Article: HERE

Photo: Chewbacca shows up to New York Mets vs. Washington Nationals game

kluciole — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 11:10:00 GMT

A person dressed as the Star Wars character Chewbacca during a baseball game between the New York Mets and the Washington Nationals, in New York.

HERE

Roll over Einstein: Pillar of physics challenged. Subatomic particles seem to move faster than speed of light

kluciole — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 11:06:00 GMT

Roll over Einstein: Pillar of physics challenged
By FRANK JORDANS and SETH BORENSTEIN
- Associated Press

GENEVA (AP) — A startling find at one of the world's foremost laboratories that a subatomic particle seemed to move faster than the speed of light has scientists around the world rethinking Albert Einstein and one of the foundations of physics.

Now they are planning to put the finding to further high-speed tests to see if a revolutionary shift in explaining the workings of the universe is needed — or if the European scientists made a mistake.

Researchers at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside Geneva, who announced the discovery Thursday are still somewhat surprised themselves and planned to detail their findings on Friday.

If these results are confirmed, they won't change at all the way we live or the way the universe behaves. After all, these particles have presumably been speed demons for billions of years. But the finding will fundamentally change our understanding of how the world works, physicists said.

Only two labs elsewhere in the world can try to replicate the results. One is Fermilab outside Chicago and the other is a Japanese lab put on hold by the March tsunami and earthquake. Fermilab officials met Thursday about verifying the European study and said their particle beam is already up and running. The only trouble is that their measuring systems aren't nearly as precise as the Europeans' and won't be upgraded for a while, said Fermilab scientist Rob Plunkett.

"This thing is so important many of the normal scientific rivalries fall by the wayside," said Plunkett, a spokesman for the Fermilab team's experiments. "Everybody is going to be looking at every piece of information."

Plunkett said he is keeping an open mind on whether Einstein's theories need an update, but he added: "It's dangerous to lay odds against Einstein. Einstein has been tested repeatedly over and over again."

Going faster than light is something that is just not supposed to happen according to Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity — the one made famous by the equation E equals mc2. The speed of light — 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second) — has long been considered a cosmic speed limit.

"We'd be thrilled if it's right because we love something that shakes the foundation of what we believe," said famed Columbia University physicist Brian Greene. "That's what we live for."

The claim is being greeted with skepticism inside and outside the European lab.

"The feeling that most people have is this can't be right, this can't be real," said James Gillies, a spokesman for CERN.

CERN provided the particle accelerator to send neutrinos on a breakneck 454-mile (730-kilometer) trip underground from Geneva to Italy. France's National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research collaborated with Italy's Ran Sass National Laboratory for the experiment, which has no connection to the atomic-smashing Large Hadron Collider, which is also located at CERN.

Gillies told The Associated Press that the readings have so astounded researchers that "they are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they've done and really scrutinize it in great detail."

That will be necessary, because Einstein's special relativity theory underlies "pretty much everything in modern physics," said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN who was not involved in the experiment. "It has worked perfectly up until now." And part of that theory is that nothing is faster than the speed of light.

CERN reported that a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant.

Given the enormous implications of the find, they spent months checking and rechecking their results to make sure there were no flaws in the experiment.

A team at Fermilab had similar faster-than-light results in 2007. But that experiment had such a large margin of error that it undercut its scientific significance.

If anything is going to throw a cosmic twist into Einstein's theories, it's not surprising that it's the strange particles known as neutrinos. These are odd slivers of an atom that have confounded physicists for about 80 years.

The neutrino has almost no mass, it comes in three different "flavors," may have its own antiparticle and even has been seen shifting from one flavor to another while shooting out from the sun, said physicist Phillip Schewe, communications director at the Joint Quantum Institute in Maryland.

Fermilab team spokeswoman Jenny Thomas, a physics professor at the University College of London, said there must be a "more mundane explanation" for the European findings. She said Fermilab's experience showed how hard it is to measure accurately the distance, time and angles required for such a claim.

Nevertheless, the Fermilab team, which shoots neutrinos from Chicago to Minnesota, will go back to work immediately to try to verify or knock down the new findings, Thomas said.

Drew Baden, chairman of the physics department at the University of Maryland, said it is far more likely that there are measurement errors or some kind of fluke. Tracking neutrinos is very difficult, he said.

"This is ridiculous what they're putting out," Baden said. "Until this is verified by another group, it's flying carpets. It's cool, but..."

So if the neutrinos are pulling this fast one on Einstein, how can it happen?

Stephen Parke, head theoretician at the Fermilab, said there could be a cosmic shortcut through another dimension — physics theory is full of unseen dimensions — that allows the neutrinos to beat the speed of light.

Indiana University theoretical physicist Alan Kostelecky says there may be situations when the background is different in the universe, not perfectly symmetrical as Einstein says. Those changes in background may change both the speed of light and the speed of neutrinos.

But that doesn't mean Einstein's theory is ready for the trash heap, he said.

"I don't think you're going to ever kill Einstein's theory. You can't. It works," Kostelecky said, adding there are just times when an additional explanation is needed.

If the European findings are correct, "this would change the idea of how the universe is put together," Columbia's Greene said.

But he added: "I would bet just about everything I hold dear that this won't hold up to scrutiny."

___

Borenstein reported from Washington.

Article: HERE

Photo: dragonfly lands on stalk of wheat during sunset on the Canadian prairies

kluciole — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 17:14:13 GMT

A dragonfly lands on a stalk of wheat ready for harvest during sunset on the Canadian prairies near Vulcan, Alberta.

HERE

New Zealand's premier naked rugby team beaten by Spanish women's team

kluciole — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 17:07:14 GMT

Spanish Conquistadoras' Anna Paloma tackles Dunedin's Nude Blacks player during their friendly rugby match at Kettle Park in Dunedin, New Zealand, Saturday, Sept. 10, 2011, prior to the Rugby World Cup match between England and Argentina. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

NZ naked rugby team exposed by Spanish women
AP

DUNEDIN, New Zealand (AP) — New Zealand's premier naked rugby team has been exposed.

The Dunedin-based Nude Blacks lost for the first time Saturday, beaten 25-20 by a clothed women's team from Spain.

The Nude Blacks — named for the country's elite All Blacks rugby team — played the exhibition hours ahead of Saturday's World Cup match between Argentina and England at the city's 30,000-seat Otago Stadium.

A more modest crowd of about 1,500 watched the all-male team get outclassed at the less prestigious Kettle Park by the visiting Spanish Conquistadores, who count a pole dancer, a teacher and a student among their number.

The Nude Blacks play an invitational side before every international rugby game in Dunedin.

Article: HERE

Female tiger in 'love triangle' kills her mate at the El Paso zoo

kluciole — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 17:03:05 GMT

In this July 28, 2011 photo provided by the El Paso Zoo, Wzui, a male Malayan Tiger, reclines at the El Paso Zoo in El Paso, Texas. Wzui was killed by his mate at the zoo on Thursday. Malayan tigers are an endangered species. (AP Photo/El Paso Zoo, Adrian Cisneros)

Tiger in "love triangle" kills mate at Texas zoo
By Patricia Giovine | Reuters

EL PASO, Texas (Reuters) - A female tiger has killed her mate at a West Texas zoo, authorities said on Friday, in a rare attack that came after months of simmering jealousy in a feline love triangle.

Three-year-old Malayan tiger Seri killed 6-year-old Wzui at about 4 p.m. on Thursday in an enclosure at El Paso Zoo, zoo spokeswoman Karla Martinez said on Friday,

As soon as the incident was reported, zookeepers closed the tiger exhibit and veterinary staff were called. They examined Wzui, and found he was dead.

"Tragic incidents such as this are not unheard of but we don't consider this common," zoo Director Steve Marshall said. Marshall described the deceased tiger as very down to earth and loving and said it would "be greatly missed."

Malayan tigers are a critically endangered species, with just 500 or so of the animals remaining in the wilds of Thailand and Malaysia, according to the World Wide Fund For Nature.

Both Seri and Wzui were on loan from other zoos as part of the American Zoo Association's Species Survival Plan to aid in their conservation through captive breeding.

Marshall said keepers had not observed any signs of aggression leading up to the attack, and that the two cats had been seen playing affectionately at the exhibit earlier in the day.

However, in June, zoo authorities reported what they called a "tiger love triangle" between Seri, Wzui and a 15-year-old female called Meli, who was transferred to El Paso from a zoo in Fresno, California, in 2001.

"The male tiger Wzui likes both females, but the two females don't like each other," the zoo said in a press release dated June 14. "The girls are jealous of each other," collections Supervisor Griselda Martinez said.

Staff expect that another tiger will be transferred to the El Paso Zoo to replace Wzui for breeding purposes.

(Editing by Tim Gaynor and Cynthia Johnston)

Article: HERE

Second article:

Texas zoo: Tiger's killing of mate surprising

By JUAN CARLOS LLORCA | AP

EL PASO, Texas (AP) — The killing of a rare Malayan tiger by his mate caught handlers at the El Paso Zoo completely by surprise because there were no warning signs and the pair were seen playing together only hours earlier, the zoo director said Friday.

Seri, the 3-year-old female who was sent to El Paso from the San Diego Zoo about 15 months ago, seemed to have bonded with 6-year-old Wzui during the two-and-a-half months they were together, said Steve Marshal, the director of the El Paso Zoo. The tigers had tried mating, and hours before Thursday's attack were seen frolicking and "being affectionate," he said.

"We did not see any indication this was coming. It took us completely by surprise, the staff is shocked," Marshal said.

A zoo visitor witnessed the attack, but Marshal declined to publicly identify the witness. He said Seri killed Wzui by chomping down on the side of his neck and choking him.

"We arrived too late," Marshall added.

Tara Harris, the conservation director at the Minnesota Zoo, said attacks such as Thursday's almost never happen.

"Tigers do fight with one another, that's not rare. But it is very rare that one would kill another, specially a female killing a male. It is an anomaly," Harris said Friday by phone.

Wzui, who was born at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Nebraska, and arrived in El Paso nine months ago from the Tulsa Zoo, in Oklahoma, will be cremated after a necropsy is performed. Seri will be examined for injuries before being returned to her display area, which will likely be in about two days, Marshal said.

Malayan tigers are rare — Wzui's death left just 57 in North America — and zoo officials said they have been told that the Tiger Special Species Survival Plan, which assigns the tigers to zoos for mating, has made finding a new suitable mate for Seri a priority. The program pairs the animals in a way that best keeps their species' limited gene pool stable.

"That is our mission ... her genetic material is extremely important," Marshall said. He said it doesn't appear Seri is pregnant.

When Wzui arrived at the zoo the keepers started a slow process of introduction for both animals. "It went great. It didn't take very long for them to like each other," said Marshall.

He said the zoo will revise its protocols for the introduction and cohabitation of tigers. Some zoos keep the tigers together all the time, while others only pair them during mating season. Seri and Wzui were living together in the same area. Marshal said there are pros and cons to each approach. He said the zoo hasn't decided which approach it will take once a new mate for Seri arrives.

There is a third tiger at the El Paso Zoo, a 15-year-old female named Melor or "Meli" as the keepers affectionately call her. When Wzui arrived at the zoo it was clear they liked each other even though they were not in the same area they could see and smell each other. "He started chuffing," Marshall said referring to a specific sound male tigers make when they like a female. However, Melor is past her reproductive age.

He was then introduced to Seri, a female just about to reach sexual maturity and liked her as well. "It was the females that did not like each other," Marshal added.

The Malayan tiger was classified as a subspecies with the help of DNA analysis in 2004. It is an endangered subspecies and it is believed that only about 500 of them remain in the wild in the Malayan Peninsula.

___

Online:

http://www.elpasozoo.org/

Article: HERE

"Once in a lifetime event" -- Check out the supernova in the Big Dipper constellation!

kluciole — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 20:17:36 GMT

Maximum brightness: After a couple of days the supernova will fade away and will be visible only with a telescope until around mid-October

Grab your binoculars - the brightest supernova explosion since 1954 will be visible this week

By Rob Waugh
8th September 2011

There will be a once-in-a-lifetime event in the night sky over the next few days – as a star exploding 21 million light years away becomes so bright it will be visible through binoculars across Britain.

The supernova is predicted to reach its brightest between September 9 and 12, and will be the brightest since 1954, visible all over Britain, weather permitting. A team of scientists at Oxford University are tracking it using the Hubble Space Telescope.

The explosion is so bright because the star is very close to Earth, cosmically speaking, in the Big Dipper constellation, Ursa Major. Most supernovae are more than 1 billion light years away.

This photo of the supernova was released on September 7 - over the next few nights, the flare will be visible to amateur sky watchers as a pale blue light. This image was created using several filters from the ultra-violet to the infra-red

Star diagram locating the location of a powerful supernova in the Pinwheel Galaxy in the Big Dipper constellation - Ursa Major

Dr Mark Sullivan, the astrophysicist leading the Oxford team examining the supernova, designated PTF-11kly, said: ‘This is accessible to anyone with a decent pair of binoculars. For many it could be a once in a lifetime chance to see a supernova blossom and then fade before their eyes. We may not see another like it for over 100 years.’

It will appear, blueish-white, just above and to the left of the last two stars in the Big Dipper. Watchers are advised to stay away from street lights for maximum visibility.

The supernova explosion was first detected on August 24, by University of California at Berkeley scientist, Peter Nugent, using the wide angle 1.2-meter Samuel Oschin Telescope in California. It has grown brighter by the minute. Located in the Pinwheel Galaxy, it was 20 times brighter in one day.

It has been among the earliest detections of a supernova in history, and has caused huge excitement among astronomers who are tracking it using all available equipment with a view of the galaxy.

Spectacle: A supernova is when a dying star expels gas, radiation and dust into space at incredible speeds

'This is practically in our back yard. There are billions of stars in a galaxy. This supernova will outshine them all this weekend,' said Nugent. Scientists say that the extraordinary phenomenon will likely become the most-studied supernova in history.

After a few days it will fade away and be visible only with a telescope until mid-October. The best way to spot it is in the hours after nightfall, by looking east of the ‘handle’ of The Plough constellation.

Supernovae of this type, classified as a 'Type 1a' event, occur when a super-dense white dwarf star, about the size of Earth but with more mass than the sun, explode. The blast hurls matter in all directions at nearly one-tenth the speed of light.

The matter from the explosion will eventually form new stars and planets. Such events, which include one in five supernovae, provide scientists with essential information on how the universe expands.

Similar supernovae are known to have occurred in the Pinwheel Galaxy at least three times before -- in 1909, 1951 and 1970. But the instruments available to today's scientists are far more sophisticated, and its early detection is giving scientists an unprecedented glimpse of one of the universe's most violent events.

Brighter supernovae can happen - the brightest of all are the ones in our own galaxy. But the last of these happened in 1572. It was visible with the naked eye for months.

Historical records indicate that an even more spectacular supernova in the Milky Way lit up the sky in 1006 A.D, and was recorded in detail by Chinese, Egyptian and Arabic astronomers. Modern-day astronomers have estimated it was so bright that people could have read manuscripts at midnight by its light.

'Once-in-a-lifetime chance': This is accessible to anyone with a decent pair of binoculars

Article: HERE

TIME article: Why Some Languages Sound So Fast

kluciole — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 20:07:51 GMT

Why Some Languages Sound So Fast
By JEFFREY KLUGER | Time.com

Here's one of the least-interesting paragraphs you've ever read: "Last night I opened the front door to let the cat out. It was such a beautiful night that I wandered down to the garden to get a breath of fresh air. Then I heard a click as the door closed behind me."

OK, it becomes a little less eye-glazing after that, with the speaker getting arrested while trying to force the door back open. Still, we ain't talking Noel Coward here. All the same, this perfectly ordinary passage and a few others like it are part of an intriguing study just published in the journal Language - a study that answers one of the longest-standing questions about human speech. (Read why speaking more than one language may delay Alzheimer's.)

It's an almost universal truth that any language you don't understand sounds like it's being spoken at 200 miles per hour - a storm of alien syllables almost impossible to tease apart. That, we tell ourselves, is simply because the words make no sense to us. Surely our spoken English sounds just as fast to a native speaker of Urdu. And yet it's equally true that some languages seem to zip by faster than others. Spanish blows the doors off French; Japanese leaves German in the dust - or at least that's how they sound.

But how could that be? The dialogue in movies translated from English to Spanish doesn't whiz by in half the original time, after all, which is what it would have to do if the same lines were being spoken at doubletime. Similarly, Spanish films don't take four hours to unspool when they're translated into French. Somewhere among all the languages must be a great equalizer that keeps us conveying information at the same rate even if the speed limits vary from tongue to tongue.

To investigate this puzzle, researchers from the Universite de Lyon recruited 59 male and female volunteers who were native speakers of one of seven common languages - English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin and Spanish - and one not so common one: Vietnamese. They instructed them all to read 20 different texts, including the one about the housecat and the locked door, into a recorder. All of the volunteers read all 20 passages in their native languages. Any silences that lasted longer than 150 milliseconds were edited out, but the recordings were left otherwise untouched. (Read about the death of a language.)

The investigators next counted all of the syllables in each of the recordings, and further analyzed how much meaning was packed into each of those syllables. A single syllable word like "bliss," for example, is rich with meaning - signifying not ordinary happiness but a particularly serene and rapturous kind. The single syllable word "to" is less information-dense. And a single syllabile like the short i sound, as in the word "jubilee," has no independent meaning at all.

With this raw data in hand, the investigators crunched the numbers together to arrive at two critical values for each language: The average information density for each of its syllables and the average number of syllables spoken per second in ordinary speech. Vietnamese was used as a reference language for the other seven, with its syllables (which are considered by linguists to be very information dense) given an arbitrary value of 1.

For all of the other languages, the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable is, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second - and the slower the speech thus was. English, with a high information density of .91, is spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. Spanish, with a low-density .63, rips along at a syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82. The true speed demon of the group, however, was Japanese, which edges past Spanish at 7.84, thanks to its low density of .49. Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information.

"A tradeoff is operating between a syllable-based average information density and the rate of transmission of syllables," the researchers wrote. "A dense language will make use of fewer speech chunks than a sparser language for a given amount of semantic information." In other words, your ears aren't deceiving you: Spaniards really do sprint and Chinese really do stroll, but they will tell you the same story in the same span of time.

None of that, of course, makes the skull-cracking business of trying to learn a new language any easier. It does, however, serve as one more reminder that beneath all of the differences that separate Tagalog from Thai from Norwegian from Wolof from any one of the world's 6,800 other languages, lie some very simple, very common rules. The DNA of speech - like our actual DNA - makes us a lot closer to one another than we think.

Read about speaking invented languages.

Read about how two speakers of a dying language refuse to talk to each other.

View this article on Time.com

Article also HERE

Scientists find gene that controls chronic pain

kluciole — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 20:01:34 GMT

Scientists find gene that controls chronic pain
By Kate Kelland | Reuters

LONDON (Reuters) - British scientists have identified a gene responsible for regulating chronic pain, called HCN2, and say their discovery should help drug researchers in their search for more effective, targeted pain-killing medicines.

Scientists from Cambridge University said that if drugs could be designed to block the protein produced by the gene, they could treat a type of pain known as neuropathic pain, which is linked to nerve damage and often very difficult to control with currently available drugs.

"Individuals suffering from neuropathic pain often have little or no respite because of the lack of effective medications," said Peter McNaughton of Cambridge's pharmacology department, who led the study.

"Our research lays the groundwork for the development of new drugs to treat chronic pain by blocking HCN2."

Pain is an enormous health burden worldwide, estimated to cost more than 200 billion euros ($281 billion) a year in Europe and around $150 billion a year in the United States.

Studies show that around 22 percent of people with chronic pain become depressed and 25 percent go on to lose their jobs. A 2002/03 survey by a group called Pain in Europe estimated that as many as one in five Europeans suffers chronic pain.

Scientists have known about the HCN2 gene, which is found in pain-sensitive nerve endings, for several years, but had not yet fully understood its role in regulating pain.

Because a related gene called HCN4 plays a critical role in controlling electrical activity in the heart, McNaughton's team suspected that HCN2 might have a similar function and regulate electrical activity in pain-sensitive nerves.

For the study, published in the journal Science on Thursday, the researchers engineered the removal of the HCN2 gene from pain-sensitive nerves and then used electrical stimuli on these nerves in lab dishes to find out how the nerves had been changed by the removal of HCN2.

The scientists then studied genetically modified mice in which the HCN2 gene had been deleted. By measuring the speed the mice withdrew from different types of painful stimuli, the scientists were able to show that deleting the HCN2 gene took away neuropathic pain.

They also found that deleting HCN2 appeared to have no effect on normal acute pain -- such as the type of pain caused by accidentally cutting yourself or biting your own tongue -- a factor they said was important since this type of pain acts as a useful warning signal to the body.

"What is exciting about the work on the HCN2 gene is that removing it -- or blocking it pharmacologically -- eliminates neuropathic pain without affecting normal acute pain," McNaughton said in a statement about this work. "This finding could be very valuable clinically because normal pain sensation is essential for avoiding accidental damage."

Neuropathic pain, which is distinguished from inflammatory pain, is seen in patients with diabetes -- a condition which affects an estimated 280 million people around the world -- and as a painful after-effect of shingles and of chemotherapy in cancer patients. It is a also common factor in lower back pain and other chronic painful conditions.

(Reporting by Kate Kelland, Editing by Sitaraman Shankar)

Article: HERE

Israel Museum returns art to Jewish artist Max Liebermann's heirs

kluciole — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 19:53:19 GMT

The painting "Die Heimkehr des Tobias" ( The Return of Tobias) by German-Jewish painter Max Liebermann (1847-1935)

Israel Museum returns art to Jewish artist's heirs
By DANIELLA CHESLOW - Associated Press

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel's national museum said Thursday that it has returned a painting to the estate of its creator, decades after the masterpiece was looted from a Jewish museum in Nazi Germany.

The Israel Museum said "The Return of Tobias," a 1934 painting by German Jewish artist Max Liebermann, is now in Berlin after it was determined the work belongs to Liebermann's heirs.

Liebermann, who died in 1935 at the age of 88, was a prolific painter who led the avant garde artistic society known as the Berlin Secession. He also served as president of the Prussian Academy of Arts during the 1920s and early 1930s. Some of his works have been valued at more than $1 million.

The Israel Museum's director, James Snyder, said Liebermann loaned his painting to the Jewish Museum in Berlin in the 1930s. The work, along with many others, disappeared from the museum during World War II. German Nazis stole countless art treasures from museums across Europe.

After the war, the American-initiated Jewish Restitution Successor Organization searched for stashes of stolen art and distributed those pieces with no known heirs to Jewish institutions worldwide.

Liebermann's painting was one of more than 1,000 such works delivered to Jerusalem's Bezalel National Museum, the precursor to the Israel Museum, in the 1950s.

Over the last year, art historians began delving into the background of the painting while preparing for an exhibit on looted art in the Berlin Centrum Judaicum, Snyder said. Liebermann's work was one of 12 pieces the Israel Museum agreed to send to Germany for the exhibit.

The research determined the piece was originally a loan from the artist — and therefore should be returned to his heirs. While "The Return of Tobias" was originally due to stay in Berlin for the three-month exhibition beginning this month, the piece will remain in Germany with his family.

"The fact that Max Liebermann was a prominent German artist of his time and living in Berlin, coupled with the new research that enabled us to discover that this work belonged to him, adds particular poignancy to our being able to restore it to his heirs now," Snyder said.

"The Return of Tobias" is the third of Liebermann's works to be returned to the family, according to the Israel Museum. The painting shows a scene from the Book of Tobit, part of the Catholic and Orthodox Bible and included in the Apocrypha of the Old Testament, in which Tobit's son returns home with a cure for his aging father's blindness.

Israeli art appraiser Shimon Leumi of the Shorashim art gallery in Tel Aviv estimated its worth at $150,000 to $200,000. Leumi said Liebermann's pieces fetch anywhere from $100,000 to $1 million or higher, with a rising value in Germany.

Liebermann and his wife Martha were avid art collectors, amassing thousands of paintings and drawings, with an emphasis on French impressionists. But the collection was scattered in the 1930s and 1940s, sold or expropriated, said Dr. Martin Fass, director of a museum devoted to Liebermann and housed in the artist's former villa in Berlin.

Worldwide, experts say, between 250,000 and 600,000 pieces of art looted by the Nazis were never claimed and remain in the possession of museums, governments and private collectors.

Over the years, the Israel Museum has returned about 30 pieces to owners or heirs, spokeswoman Dena Scher said.

Article: HERE

Photo: the India-Pakistan border, taken by the International Space Station

kluciole — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 19:44:51 GMT

The India-Pakistan border shown as an orange line in this shot taken by the International Space Station (ISS), due to floodlights used for surveillance purposes.

HERE

Seemingly drunk Swedish moose found stuck in tree

kluciole — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 19:12:13 GMT

A seemingly intoxicated moose is discovered entangled in an apple tree by a stunned Swede in Goteborg, Sweden late Tuesday Sept. 6 2011 (AP)

Seemingly drunk Swedish moose found stuck in tree
AP

STOCKHOLM (AP) — A seemingly intoxicated moose has been discovered entangled in an apple tree by a stunned Swede.

Per Johansson says he heard a roar from his vacationing neighbor's garden in southwestern Sweden late Tuesday and went to have a look. There, he found a female moose kicking about in the tree. The animal was likely drunk from eating fermented apples.

With the help of police and rescue services, the 45-year-old Johansson later managed to set the moose free in part by sawing off tree branches.

But the animal appeared confused and wandered into Johansson's garden, where she was still resting Thursday.

Other neighbors in the Goteborg suburb Saro had seen the animal sneaking around the area for days. Johansson said the moose appeared to be sick, drunk or "half-stupid."

Article: HERE

Photo: Maori Warrior Toa Waaka issues the ‘Wero’ during the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand

kluciole — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 19:08:31 GMT

Maori Warrior Toa Waaka issues the ‘Wero’ - a traditional Maori challenge - to the Springbok squad during the South Africa IRB Rugby World Cup 2011 in New Zealand.

HERE

Wildlife photographer captures amazingly intimate portraits of pride of lions

kluciole — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 12:15:28 GMT

Puzzled: A curious young lioness gazes into the camera, below, which had been set up on a tree in the wild on a game reserve in Zimbabwe

So close you can almost feel her breath: How wildlife photographer captured amazingly intimate portraits of pride of lions

By Craig Mackenzie
2nd September 2011

Taking pictures of big cats is always a tricky business, but if you want really intimate shots you have to get as close to them as you dare without becoming their dinner.

That's how wildlife photographer Chris Weston snapped these amazing shots of a pride of lions while documenting big game in Zimbabwe.

He used a remote camera fixed to a tree so he could capture them in off-guard moments and even put one inside a dead carcass and propped it up as though it were alive so he could see the moment the animals attacked.

The 44-year-old from Weymouth spent six weeks gaining the lions' trust, but insisted he was 'never really' in any danger.

He added: 'There is always an element of that when working with animals, especially wild ones, but it's key to be able to read their body language and the way they communicate with you.'

Chris, who has travelled all over the world to film large mammals, wanted to capture the personality of an animal in the same way a portrait artist would with a human subject.

'Lenses change the perspective of the way we see things,' he said. 'What I like to do is show it as we see it and the standard lens is 50mm which means you have to get relatively close.

'The idea is to give the viewer an idea of the personality of that individual animal.

The lion king: The leader of the pride runs towards the Chris Weston's camera. He had spent six weeks gaining the trust of the big cats

Attack: A camera hidden in a carcass captures the moment just before two of the animals swoop

'In much the same way as you would take a person's portrait, you can't be standing half a mile away with a long lens. You have to get close and establish some kind of relationship.'

Chris spends a long time building a relationship with his subjects and has returned to shoot this pride in the Ngamo Game Reserve on several occasions over the past five years.

'Lions are generally wary of humans but people would be surprised at how non-aggressive they are,' he said.

'What's surprising is that when you spend a lot of time with the lions you begin to get a sense of their individual characteristics.

'It's very much like making friends with an animal - and you can only do that when you are relatively close to them.'

After coming up with the idea to put the camera in the tree it took Chris about three days to get the picture he wanted.

Chris also took to the water to document the lions swimming. He said: 'Most cats don't like water so seeing them swimming was very interesting.'

Article: HERE

Searing words: Nepal's prize-winning poet with cerebral palsy, Jhamak Kumari Ghimire

kluciole — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 12:11:04 GMT

Thanks to Kyoto Journal for posting the links on Facebook:

A STREET CHILD'S QUESTION TO HIS FATHER

Baba! I'll ask you a question
if you won't shout it down
for though you can boast
a hundred thousand offspring
I have only one father

Baba! Have you forgotten me
amid the hordes of your offspring
I am your fugitive child
Have you forgotten your
sleepless communion with my mother?
How could you embrace me
a new ray rising from wrong time?
I am the avenging apparition
of wrong time

Read the rest, and more of her poetry HERE

Ms Ghimire has published four volumes of poetry, two books of short stories and many newspaper columns.

Nepal's prize-winning poet with cerebral palsy
By Thomas Bell
Kathmandu

September 2, 2011

A young woman with cerebral palsy, whose only way of communicating is by writing with her foot, has won Nepal's most prestigious literary prize.

Jhamak Kumari Ghimire, 30, won the Madan Puraskar prize for her book of autobiographical essays, "Is life a thorn or a flower?"

In this she describes her struggle for self-expression after being born into an ordinary village family in the hills of eastern Nepal with disabilities that left her unable to speak or use her hands.

She was not sent to school and taught herself to write by listening to her sister studying. In her prize-winning book she describes the first time she wrote the letter 'ka' (क) - the first letter of the devanagari alphabet in which Nepali is written.

"I could not share that moment's joy with anyone, but my first letter was written in the dust on the ground and in my heart I could pronounce it. I was so happy that I rewrote the letter 'ka' many times."

Ms Ghimire recalls how writing on the ground made her foot bleed, yet her efforts went unnoticed at first.

"Just so that people would see what I had written I wrote a big 'ka' and left it there, but far from looking at my letter people stepped on it and it was erased. My first letter got erased without anyone seeing it."

Her journey to literary recognition was a slow one. She has described being beaten by her parents, who believed that writing on the ground would cause bad luck.

'Elegant expression'

The difficulties she faced are shared by many disabled people growing up in Nepal.

The New York-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch recently released a report describing how disabled children are frequently denied access to education in Nepal and suffer abuse and neglect in their communities.

Ms Ghimire's father, Krishna Prasad Ghimire, has described how a neighbour suggested that he kill his disabled daughter when she was seven by throwing her in a river.

"I was very sad that day," he said. "Today I am very happy. My daughter has made our whole family proud."

Besides her prize-winning essays Ms Ghimire has published four volumes of poetry, two books of short stories and many newspaper columns.

Her latest book, "Is life a thorn or a flower?", is in its third Nepalese language edition. In an interview, Ms Ghimire promised readers of English that the book will soon be available in translation.

"I am very happy to get the award," she wrote, replying to questions with a pen between her toes. "But at the same time I feel a sense of responsibility. I will start writing again soon," she added.

The prominent Nepalese novelist and translator Manjushree Thapa has praised Ms Ghimire's work.

"Jhamak Kumari Ghimire's expression seems to have gained elegance not despite, but because of, the physical challenges she has overcome," she said.

Ms Thapa referred to one of Ms Ghimire's best known poems, "A street child's question to his father", in which the author uses the metaphor of a street child and his father to address the Nepalese nation as the "father" of all its destitute citizens.

Ms Thapa said, "She speaks for an entire generation when she writes: 'Father! Why are you siring / renegade children like me?'"

Article: HERE

Scientists in US warn NASA the amount of space junk orbiting Earth is at tipping point

kluciole — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 12:04:40 GMT

Surrounded: This NASA image shows the wider circle of space junk surrounding Earth, as well as the tighter cluster of objects in low orbit around the planet

Junk cloud: Left, this computer-generated NASA graphic shows objects of space junk in Earth's orbit that are currently being tracked - hundreds of thousands more are not being tracked - and the size of the objects has been exaggerated in this CG image to add emphasis to the threat

Article and Images HERE

Thanks to Carla Potter for posting this on Facebook --

Scientists in the US have warned NASA that the amount of so-called space junk orbiting Earth is at tipping point.

A report by the National Research Council says the debris could cause fatal leaks in spaceships or destroy valuable satellites.

It calls for international regulations to limit the junk and more research into the possible use of launching large magnetic nets or giant umbrellas.

The debris includes clouds of minuscule fragments, old boosters and satellites.

Some computer models show the amount of orbital rubbish "has reached a tipping point, with enough currently in orbit to continually collide and create even more debris, raising the risk of spacecraft failures," the research council said in a statement on Thursday.

Read the rest HERE

Quake risk to reactors greater than thought

kluciole — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 11:59:41 GMT

In this May 18, 2011 file photo, a worker is seen in the area surrounding a tree farm in North Perry, Ohio, near the two cooling towers of the Perry Nuclear Power Plant looming in the background. (AP Photo/Amy Sancetta, File)

Quake risk to reactors greater than thought
By DINA CAPPIELLO - Associated Press
JEFF DONN - Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The risk that an earthquake would cause a severe accident at a U.S. nuclear plant is greater than previously thought, 24 times as high in one case, according to an AP analysis of preliminary government data. The nation's nuclear regulator believes a quarter of America's reactors may need modifications to make them safer.

The threat came into sharp focus last week, when shaking from the largest earthquake to hit Virginia in 117 years appeared to exceed what the North Anna nuclear power plant northwest of Richmond was built to sustain.

The two North Anna reactors are among 27 in the eastern and central U.S. that a preliminary Nuclear Regulatory Commission review has said may need upgrades. That's because those plants are more likely to get hit with an earthquake larger than the one their design was based on. Just how many nuclear power plants are more vulnerable won't be determined until all operators recalculate their own seismic risk based on new assessments by geologists, something the agency plans to request later this year. The NRC on Thursday issued a draft of that request for public comment.

The review, launched well before the East Coast quake and the Japan nuclear disaster in March, marks the first complete update to seismic risk in years for the nation's 104 existing reactors, despite research showing greater hazards.

The NRC and the industry say reactors are safe as they are, for now. The average risk to U.S. reactors of core damage from a quake remains low, at one accident every 500 years, according to the AP analysis of NRC data.

The overall risk at a typical reactor among the 27 remains very slight. If the NRC's numbers prove correct, that would mean no more than one core accident from an earthquake in about 30,000 years at the typical reactor among the 27 with increased risk.

But emails obtained in a more than 11,000-page records request by The Associated Press show that NRC experts were worried privately this year that plants needed stronger safeguards to account for the higher risk assessments.

The nuclear industry says last week's quake proved reactors are robust. When the rumbling knocked out off-site power to the North Anna plant in Mineral, Va., the reactors shut down and cooled successfully, and the plant's four locomotive-sized diesel generators turned on. The quake also shifted about two dozen spent fuel containers, but Dominion Virginia Power said Thursday that all were intact.

Still, based on the AP analysis of NRC data, the plant is 38 percent more likely to suffer core damage from a rare, massive earthquake than it appeared in an analysis 20 years ago.

That increased risk is based on an even bigger earthquake than the one last week. Richard Zuercher, a spokesman for Dominion, the plant operator, says the earlier estimate "remains sound because additional safety margin was built into the design when the station was built."

The safety cushion would shrink, though, if the plant's risk is found to be greater.

Federal scientists update seismic assessments every five to six years to revise building codes for some structures. But no similar system is in place for all but two of the nation's 104 reactors — even though improving earthquake science has revealed greater risks than previously realized.

The exception is Diablo Canyon in earthquake-prone California, which has been required to review the risk of an earthquake routinely since 1985. The NRC does not require plants to re-examine their seismic risks to renew operating licenses for 20 years.

After the March earthquake in Japan that caused the biggest nuclear crisis since Chernobyl, NRC staffers fretted in emails that the agency's understanding of earthquake risk for existing reactors was out of date.

In a March 15 email, for example, an NRC earthquake expert questioned releasing data to the public showing how strong an earthquake each plant was designed to withstand. The seismologist, Annie Kammerer, acknowledged that recent science showed stronger quakes could happen. "Frankly, it is not a good story for us," she wrote to agency colleagues.

Kammerer's boss, Brian Sheron, who heads the NRC's Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research, wrote in a March 14 email that updated numbers showed the government "didn't know everything about the seismicity" in the central and the eastern part of the country.

"And isn't there a prediction that the West Coast is likely to get hit with some huge earthquake in the next 30 years or so? Yet we relicense their plants," he wrote.

The NRC flagged the 27 plants for possible upgrades by calculating the likelihood of a severe accident based on 2008 hazard maps from the U.S. Geological Survey and comparing it to the seismic risk estimated in 1989 or 1994. Those data were used the last time existing reactors evaluated their earthquake hazards.

The NRC identified the 27 reactors with the greatest risk increase but did not provide the risk numbers. The AP used the NRC's data and methodology to calculate the risk increase for each reactor.

The Perry 1 reactor in Ohio tops the list with the steepest rise in the chance of core damage: 24 times as high as thought in 1989. The four other plants with the largest increases include River Bend 1 in Louisiana, up nine times; Dresden 2-3 in Illinois, eight times; Farley 1-2 in Alabama, seven times, and Wolf Creek 1 in Kansas, also seven times. The smallest increase was the 38 percent at North Anna.

Todd Schneider, a spokesman for First Energy Corp., which operates the Perry plant, said the increase in its seismic risk estimated by the NRC is misleading. He said Perry is capable of withstanding an even larger earthquake than is typical for the region.

Personnel at a handful of other plants, including Indian Point outside New York City and Oconee in South Carolina, have already redone the NRC's calculations, and they show a much lower risk of core damage from earthquakes. Those calculations have not yet been reviewed by the agency, which along with other federal agencies is developing a baseline earthquake risk for every nuclear power plant to use.

Predicting earthquake probability and damage is dicey; the Japanese nuclear industry was taken by surprise in March when a quake-driven tsunami far surpassed predictions and swamped the Fukushima Dai-ichi site.

The U.S. nuclear industry may not be fully ready, either. Current regulations don't require the NRC to make sure nuclear reactors are still capable of dealing with a new understanding of the threats.

It's not just earthquakes. It is all types of events, including floods, tornadoes and hurricanes, said an NRC official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the agency's recent seismic work.

The worry about earthquakes is not so much direct damage to the reactor vessel, the hardened enclosure where the nuclear reaction takes place, but to water tanks and mechanical and electrical equipment needed when disaster strikes. The failure of those systems could disable cooling needed to prevent meltdowns of radioactive fuel.

In some of the emails obtained by the AP, NRC staffers worried that U.S. reactors had not thoroughly evaluated the effects of aftershocks and the combined impact of a tsunami and earthquake. They suggested plants might need more durable piping as well as better flood barriers and waterproof storage of essential equipment. Staffers talked of a need for bigger supplies of fuel and batteries for extended losses of all electrical power. One email expressed concern about some key pumps at Dresden that might fail in an earthquake.

In a separate problem reported last month, GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy acknowledged that its older control rods could get stuck if an earthquake struck when reactors were running at low power. Control rods are needed to stop the nuclear reaction. The manufacturer has alerted the operators of 35 U.S. reactors at 24 sites, who are checking whether replacements are needed. The AP documented scores of instances of such wear and tear in a range of equipment in a June investigative series showing that safety standards have been relaxed to keep aging reactors within the rules.

When the NRC ran preliminary calculations of quake risk last year, it was the first time the agency had reassessed the threat since most plants were built.

"The plants were more vulnerable than they realized, but they weren't unsafe. We look at rare, rare events," said Kammerer, the NRC seismologist.

Plants built a generation ago were designed to withstand an earthquake larger than any known to have occurred in the area. But since then, scientists have been able to better estimate the earthquakes that are possible. And in some cases, those rare quakes could be larger and more frequent than those the plants were designed for.

"If they met a certain level, they didn't look any further," Gregory Hardy, an industry consultant at Simpson, Gumpertz and Hegger in Newport Beach, Calif., said of some of the industry's earlier assessments. "Forty years ago, when some of these plants were started, the hazard — we had no idea. No one did."

Seismologists inside the agency didn't recognize that increasing earthquake risk was an issue until operators started applying to build new reactors at existing plant sites in the central and eastern United States in 2003. Those applications included a thorough analysis of the risk posed by earthquakes, which is required for all new nuclear power plants.

In some cases, the result was much higher than risk calculations performed by the industry in the early 1990s as part of a broader assessment of worst-case disasters.

"We did have some idea that the hazard was going up" in the period between the late 1990s analysis and the applications for new reactors, said Clifford Munson, a senior technical adviser in the NRC's Office of Nuclear Reactors. But Munson said some of the research indicated that there was disagreement on whether the ground motion predicted would damage nuclear power plants.

Kamal Manoly, another NRC senior technical adviser, said, "There was nothing alarming (enough) for us to take quick action."

But a task force requested by President Barack Obama to make U.S. safety recommendations after the Japanese accident has questioned that. Its three-month review concluded that existing reactors should re-examine their earthquake risk more often.

Some operators are expressing caution about the NRC's initial analysis, and say their own early calculations show that their facilities are at much lower risk. The differences between the calculations of government and industry have prompted some to call for a third-party review.

"It sort of defies logic to ask the regulated entity to do the seismic analysis to determine whether upgrades are necessary or relicensing is appropriate," said California Sen. Sam Blakeslee, a geophysicist who pushed a bill through the Legislature giving the California Energy Commission a role in assessing seismic risk, particularly at Diablo Canyon. "There needs to be a more arm's length relationship in getting this technical information."

There will always be uncertainties, experts say.

"If all these plants were subjected to large earthquakes, that's the only way anybody can say for sure. But the only ones we know of are in Japan," said Hardy, referring to the quake that struck in March and another in 2007 that damaged the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant.

"There is a pretty good technical feeling that U.S. plants are going to be safe," Hardy said, "but there is just a question of how much work it will take to show it."

___

Donn reported from Boston.

Article: HERE