Stirring up thoughts of death may influence people's support of intelligent design and evolution, according to new research.

Led by researchers at the University of British Columbia, the paper details the results from five studies in the journal PLoS ONE. The team found that existential thoughts, or those in which people were reminded of their own mortality, led subjects to view the theory of intelligent design more positively.

In line with the scientific community, the authors state that evolution, especially descent with modification through natural selection, is largely accepted as a way to study biological change over time.

NEWS: Poll: Belief in Evolution Increases

Intelligent design, as defined by the authors, "proposes that naturalistic accounts are insufficient to explain complex organic phenomena and that therefore an intelligent and presumably supernatural 'designer' is responsible for the origin of all life." This theory is not the same as creationism.

Despite the fact that 43 percent of Americans favor teaching intelligent design alongside evolution in classrooms, the theory lacks scientific support for its claims, the authors write. This too is in line with scientific consensus.

So why do people support intelligent design without scientific proof, especially when claims on evolution are backed by science?

The need to maintain psychological security may play a role.

In four studies, approximately 1,400 subjects -- college students and adults in Canada and the United States -- were asked to write about their feelings after imagining their own death. Groups were told to read passages about evolution and intelligent design afterward. Then, subjects rated the expertise of the author and reported their own belief in a particular theory.

NEWS: Culture (Not Just Genes) Drives Evolution

In a fifth study, researchers asked 269 college students similar questions after being presented with an intelligent design approach and a naturalist passage authored by Carl Sagan.

The team found that favoring intelligent design wasn't necessarily tied to religion or education. Rather, people share similar emotional reactions when faced with existential thoughts. Since intelligent design favors the idea that human life was created intentionally rather than through random natural processes, the authors write, it makes sense for people to lean toward explanations that maintain humans' importance in the universe.

But in conditions in which subjects were exposed to Carl Sagan's passage, people were more likely to rate a naturalistic approach more favorably, perhaps because it supports evolution while still maintaining humans' uniqueness in the cosmos.

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It’s not a very fair fight. In one corner is a tiny ant. In the other is a large wasp, two hundred times heavier and capable of flying. If the two of them compete for the same piece of food, there ought to be no contest. But sometimes the wasp doesn’t even give the ant the honour of stepping into the ring. It picks up the smaller insect in its jaws, flies it to a distant site and drops it from a height, dazed but unharmed.

Julien Grangier and Philip Lester observed these ignominious defeats by pitting native New Zealand ants (Prolasius advenus) against the common wasp (Vespula vulgaris). The insects competed over open cans of tuna while the scientists filmed them.

Their videos revealed that ants would sometimes aggressively defend their food by rushing, biting and spraying them with acid. But typically, they were docile and tolerated the competing wasp. Generally, the wasp was similarly passive but on occasion, it picked up the offending ant and dropped it several centimetres away. In human terms, this would be like being catapulted half the length of a football field.

The wasps never tried to eat the ants, and they never left with one in their jaws. They just wanted them out of the picture. Indeed, the more ants on the food, the further away the wasps dropped them. This may seem like an odd strategy but at least half of the dropped ants never returned to the food. Perhaps they were physically disoriented from their impromptu flight, or perhaps they had lost the chemical trail. Either way, the wasps could feed with fewer chances of taking a faceful of acid.

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Want to build chemical robots that can morph to change shapes and squeeze into spaces that appear smaller than the bots? Then the guys who invented the first Internet want to talk to you.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency--DARPA--recently issued a request for proposals for what they call ChemBots. The robots would be built to gain access to denied or hostile areas and give war fighters advantage in a broad range of military operations.

DARPA issued a statement saying robots provide attractive and effective means of gaining entry and it wants to develop soft, flexible, and mobile robots that can squeeze and traverse through small openings in buildings, walls, and under doors. It wants the robots to be large enough to carry an "operationally meaningful payload."

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No, I have not converted to Buddhism. And yes, I am still an atheist. That said, I’ve been reading a book recommended by a friend of mine, Brad Warner’s Sex, Sin and Zen, which has given me the opportunity to run a little informal experiment about which I’ll tell you in a minute.

By Massimo Pigliucci

Warner is a Zen Buddhist monk, and the book is a light-hearted exploration of what Buddhism has to say regarding one of the things we care most about in life: sex. But this post, alas, is not about sex. Instead, it is about the reaction I got on my “official” Facebook page when I posted the following quote from the book (you can find the exact thread here):

Atheism, as rational and sensible as it is, will never be an adequate substitute for religion. It's like trying to substitute actual eating with a superbly argued essay on food.

The quote comes from a context in which Warner was discussing an article by Elisabeth Cornwell entitled “Why women are bound to religion: an evolutionary perspective,” which makes the commonsense argument that “in order for women to abandon religion and its securities, there needs to be something tangible to replace the support it offers.” Warner then goes on to explain that Buddha realized that “religion and spirituality were pretty much fucked up. But he also understood the very important role they play in human society. As Cornwell points out in her article on the evolution of religion, religion serves a need much, much deeper than anything the intellect can ever hope to reach.” And it is this passage that is followed by the quote I posted on Facebook.

I thought this was all obviously true, and in fact reflects a standing debate within both the atheist and secular humanist communities (they overlap, but they are most certainly not identical) to explain why religion — pace Nietzsche — is still very much alive and well in the 21st century. The response I got from my Facebook friends was somewhat surprising. There were more than 20 comments within a matter of minutes (35 as of the time of this writing), with 3,666 “impressions” (a number that Facebook provides to give you an idea of how many people have seen your post on their Wall —- the 666 figure is, I take it, just a coincidence).

If you scroll through the comments, two patterns emerge: first, most people missed what I thought was the obvious point of the quote (granted, I had the advantage of having read the full chapter, but still); second, the overwhelming majority of the posts were defensive to the utmost degree. Here is a sample:

"Avoiding wood alcohol, as rational and sensible as it is, will never be an adequate substitute for wood alcohol. It's like trying to substitute actual eating with a superbly argued essay on food."

"Whoever said that atheism is supposed to be a substitute for religion? I am an atheist and I do not want a substitute for religion. If I missed religion, I'd get myself some."

"This is a silly analogy. One could just as well say it's trying to substitute injecting yourself with syphilis with a superbly argued essay on not being a jackass."

"And I suppose that not collecting stamps is not a substitute for a hobby either..."
"If you really want baloney, you can still go to the supermarket."

"An aphorism can never be an adequate substitute for more complex writing. It is an argument from authority which uses a specific poetic approach to make the ideas more appealing."

"We're all born atheists. It' religion that's the substitute."

"Atheism does not contain ritual, ceremony, or practice, and so is not like eating."

"Avoiding poison, as rational and sensible as it is, will never be an adequate substitute for eating poison."

"Atheism could never be a substitute for religion, in the same way that not stamp collecting could never be a substitute for stamp collecting."

"This implies an unsubstantiated hunger that is not recognized by fulfilled agnostics."
You get the gist. There were, of course, also some readers who took the quote as an indication of a serious problem:

"Instead of substituting religion, if we start reflecting upon the need to fill the void it may get us some where... and in the process, hopefully, not fill the void with magic and wishful thinking."

"The bare thesis of atheism provides none of the social supports, ethical guidelines, or cosmological-metaphysical closure of religion. Humanism, however, can and does."

"There is a hole that needs filling (physical and metaphysical explanations, justifications for moral codes, social cohesion, sense of community, belonging, purpose, common goals, etc.) and religion just happened to develop in order to fill that hole."

"Atheism isn't in the business of replacing religion. Humanism is. Atheism is the demolition phase. Humanism is the new foundation."

The first set of quotes (and similar others on the thread) reflect an all too common reflexive attitude by several of my fellow atheists, a “(rhetorically) shoot first and understand later” sort of approach which is not exactly conducive to constructive discourse. This reflexive attitude seems to be based on two underlying assumptions: first, that whatever comes from religion must be bad, by definition; second, that atheists don’t need to do much more than point out how silly the other side is, and we are done. Both assumptions are highly questionable.

Without getting into a long history of both Western and Eastern thought — a history in which religions have played a major positive as well as negative role regardless of how much we would like them to play only a negative one — it seems to me undeniable that religions do indeed, as Buddha recognized and Warner re-articulated, fill a fundamental human psychological niche. That niche has to do not just with explanations of how the world works (an area in which science has steadily and inexorably overtaken religion even in the mind of many religious people), but with meaning, emotions, ethics, and the specter of final and total annihilation of the self.

It is these latter dimensions of the niche that most people refer to as “spirituality,” and neither science nor atheism can do a damn thing about them, unfortunately. Science can tell us which parts of the brain are responsible for our emotions, or are used when we engage in moral decision making, but that’s a completely different set of questions that has only a superficial bearing on the real issues.

Before you start furiously hitting your keyboard to pen long and angry responses to the above paragraph, please pause to think that nothing I am writing here can reasonably be construed as a defense of religion. But it is a (partial) explanation of why religion persists despite literally millennia of attempts by the secular-rational community to get rid of it. It is a fact that we better face and analyze, rather than run away from.

Which brings me to the second assumption that seems to underlie many of my readers’ responses: surely once we explain to people that there are no gods, once we break the spell to use my friend Daniel Dennett’s phrase, people will flock to atheism in droves and we’ll be done with religion once and for all. Hence the popularity in certain quarters of the New Atheists’ attacks on religion — as well as their abysmal failure to make a dent in the phenomenon of religion itself. To be fair, one can hardly expect a handful of books to change society (well, except for the Old Testament, or the Christian Gospels, or the Quran, or the Vedas, or the Theravada, or...), but the disheartening fact is that there really isn’t anything new in the New Atheism. As documented by Jennifer Michael Hecht in her super Doubt: A History we have been going at it for millennia, and yet religions persist, largely unperturbed by the barrage of rational arguments against them. Do you see why Warner is right, that we do have a problem?

The quotes from my Facebook responses which struck closest to what I think is a good analysis are those that present atheism as the first of two punches that the secular movement is attempting to deliver to the religious juggernaut, what philosopher Francis Bacon (in the context of how science works) called the pars destruens (the project of destruction). Bacon then argued that one doesn’t get very far by just demolishing things, one has to build something in their stead, what he termed the pars construens (the construction project). Here the pars construens can be played by secular humanism, which — unlike atheism — is a philosophy with positive values.

There are a couple of problems, however. I have already nodded at the most obvious one: not all atheists are secular humanists. This is because it is easier to agree on what we all do not believe than on what we do believe. Secular humanism, at least as presented in the various Humanist Manifestos, adopts a number of positions that are clearly reflective of European style progressive liberalism, which means that our libertarian friends (a sizable minority within the atheism movement), not to mention the comparatively few (in my experience) conservative atheists, immediately (and ill advisedly, in my opinion) jump ship. I know a good number of atheists who proudly distance themselves from secular humanism.

The other thing is, humanist groups and even humanist inspired congregations have been around for quite some time now, but they haven’t made much of a dent. Think of the American Humanist Association, the Council for Secular Humanism, the Society for Ethical Culture, the American Ethical Union, and even — to some extent — the Unitarians. I mean, it’s not like we haven’t been trying. But have you been at any meetings or platforms of any of these groups? They are usually attended by a small number of people, more often than not with a population characterized by an aging demographic. They are simply not going to be the response to religion that we are looking for, no matter how much good they do for the people that support them.

So we do have a problem, and we don’t seem to know what to do about it. Let me leave you with a few more thoughts from Warner — not because I endorse everything he says (I’m certainly not about to enlist as a Buddhist), but because it provides us with much food for thought, if we can manage to stop the damn knee-jerk reaction that is sure to powerfully present itself a few lines into his writings:

"A lot of people consider Buddhism a form of atheism. In a sense it is, in that it does not have a god in the usual sense of the word. We don’t have a deity figure. We don’t have a creation myth. We don’t fear reprisals from cosmic grandpa if we fail to worship him properly. Yet ... the universe in Buddhist terms is not dead matter or a cosmic void. It is a living, intelligent thing we all partake in. ... If God is a big ‘ol white dude in the sky who smites sinners and rewards football players, then I’m an atheist. If God exists outside the universe, I’m an atheist. If God cares more for one religion than another, I’m an atheist. And if God believes that women are inferior to men, I’m an atheist. ... I don’t worship God as an old man on a throne beyond the orbit of Jupiter, but I do worship the universe. The universe is more than dead matter. It’s more than insubstantial spirit."

Well, I don’t think the universe is any such thing, but clearly our message is much harder to successfully deliver. Is there any way around this, or is secularism forever destined to be a minority position among humankind?

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Some cheerful news on the climate change front today, as US government boffins report that ice breaking off the Antarctic shelves and melting in the sea causes carbon dioxide to be removed from the environment. This powerful, previously unknown "negative feedback" would seem likely to revise forecasts of future global warming significantly downwards.

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) which funded the iceberg study, describes the results as having "global implications for climate research".

"These new findings... confirm that icebergs contribute yet another, previously unsuspected, dimension of physical and biological complexity to polar ecosystems," says Roberta Marinelli, director of the NSF's Antarctic Organisms and Ecosystems Program.

A team of NSF-funded scientists examined the effects on an area of the Weddell Sea of a large (20 mile long) berg moving through, melting as it went and diluting the salty sea water - also adding key nutrients carried from the land. They found that after the iceberg had passed, levels of CO2 had plunged and much more chlorophyll was present. Chlorophyll is the substance in green plants which lets them suck in nasty CO2 and emit precious life-giving oxygen: in the Weddell Sea it was present in phytoplankton, tiny seagoing plantoids which are thought to account for half the carbon removed from the atmosphere globally.

The scientists say that more and more icebergs are set to be found in the seas around the Anatarctic as more ice breaks off the shelves attached to the peninsula which reaches up from the polar continent towards South America. This should mean more phytoplankton and thus less CO2.

The iceberg team consider that the increased number of bergs coming from the western Antarctic is the result of warming temperatures in the region, though recent research from British boffins has suggested that in fact other factors may be in play - at least in the case of the Pine Island Glacier, one of the major sources of sea ice in that area.

If the phytoplankton-boosting effect of the bergs is as big as the NSF appears to be suggesting, however, it would seem that any carbon-driven temperature rise could be at least partly self-correcting.

Increased iceberg shedding would seem likely to be seen mainly or only around the western peninsula: antarctic sea ice shelves elsewhere are actually growing, not shrinking, and at such a rate as to outweigh the peninsular losses. The past three decades have seen the south-polar ice sheets grow by 300,000 square kilometres overall.

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ft. The US Navy has indicated that it would like to have unmanned, robotic spyplane/bombers operating from its aircraft carriers "in the 2018 timeframe", which suggests that flying kill-robots will soon be in the same league as the most powerful manned combat aircraft.Present-day robotic warplanes such as the well-known Predator and its variants (for example the even larger and still more powerful Reaper) are heavily armed and highly capable, but in the world of major air forces they're still quite feeble. Rather than supersonic jet propulsion they typically rely on comparatively slow propellors, and their weaponry options are comparatively restricted.

In short, in a fight, humans would easily win an air war against the robots - at the moment.

But that could change in as little as seven years. The US Naval Air Systems Command (aka NAVAIR) yesterday issued an announcement that it would like contractors to conceptually demonstrate that it's possible to deploy an Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) system "in the 2018 timeframe". The UCLASS is to be "persistent" - ie it should be possible for a naval air wing to keep robot spyplane-bombers in the air around the clock for long periods - and it should be able to operate based aboard a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier (CVN).

According to the announcement:

    The envisioned capability will include CVN launch; CVN based flight control inside the Carrier Controlled Airspace (CCA) and within line-of-sight (LOS) of the CVN; and land-based mission control outside the CCA and LOS with the CVN utilizing existing DoD Unmanned Air System (UAS) control systems (modified as necessary); and recovery back aboard the CVN. Additionally, the air vehicle will be operable from BLOS land-based, fixed site airfields utilizing the remote vehicle control architecture, and interfaced with other Navy airborne systems during mission operations. Persistence should allow a single carrier to provide sustained 24/7 ISR capabilities even when conducting 12-hour flight deck operations. The envisioned system may require aerial refueling capability.

Most of this will be demonstrated as part of the ongoing X-47B programme, intended to show that unmanned jets can do carrier operations. The first X-47B took to the air last month, though only from a normal landbased runway: it and its companion aircraft are expected to achieve the full panoply of carrier operations - catapult launch, tailhook/arrester-wire landing, even air-to-air refuelling - by the end of 2013.

Carrier tailhook landings are seen as one of the most difficult piloting feats to master, and keeping human pilots qualified in this tricky skill requires a lot of expensive training time. Then, humans' endurance is limited - even where there are two pilots and room to stretch out for a nap (as in the case of the B-2 Stealth bomber) there's a limit to how long a manned aircraft can keep on topping up its tanks using air-to-air refuelling and stay in the sky.

Not so the UCLASS, which could remain on patrol as an airborne spyeye for days or even weeks on end, sustained by airborne fuel supplies as required.

If the X-47B is anything to go by, the UCLASS would also be far and away the most powerful war robot yet fielded, boasting full-fat jet propulsion and Stealth features to match the latest manned aircraft. The just-issued NAVAIR document also specifies that it is to have the option of carrying a wide range of "mission packages" - including both surveillance sensors and, of course, weapons.

In short the UCLASS is likely to be the first combat robot which could actually give a manned fighter plane some trouble - and it could be here a lot sooner than had been expected.

That said, NAVAIR also specifies that "weapons release will be accomplished under positive human control": there is no suggestion - as there is in some other robo-bomber projects - of autonomous weapons release. In any case autonomous weapons release is already a practical reality: the Tomahawk cruise missiles used to suppress Colonel Gadaffi's air defences last week are effectively autonomous robot kamikazes - they decide on their own whether or not they've found the right place/thing to blow up.

For now there's no decision on UCLASS, anyway. NAVAIR are merely looking to shell out $2m or so on a study telling them whether the idea - and the timeline - are feasible or not.

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Comment Sensationalism has always been part of the popular media - but Fukushima is a telling and troubling sign of how much the media has changed in fifty years: from an era of scientific optimism to one where it inhabits a world of fantasy - creating a real-time Hollywood disaster movie with a moralising, chivvying message.

Not so long ago, the professionals showed all the deferential, forelock-tugging paternalism of the dept of "Keep Calm And Carry On". That era lasted into the 1960s. Now the driving force is the notion that "We're all DOOMED – and it's ALL OUR FAULT" that marks almost every news bulletin. Health and environment correspondents will rarely be found debunking the claims they receive in press releases from lobby groups – the drama of catastrophe is too alluring. Fukushima has been the big one.

The Fukushima situation has yet to cause any measurable radiological health effects, and workers at the site were far less hard hit by the quake, tsunami and related events than just about anyone in the disaster zone, but nonetheless the nuclear story rapidly eclipsed the tens of thousands killed directly by the quake. TV's reaction to the crisis shows how at odds it is with a more rational audience, those who know something about radiation, its consequences, and the human body's capacity to absorb it and recover from it. The crisis for the media is that thanks to the internet, we can now all bypass these conduits for superstition and stupidity.

We've given the media's treatment of Fukushima plenty of attention in the past fortnight, so it's hardly worth reiterating. The reactors endured a Force 9 earthquake and 15m high tsunami – and three safety systems failed. The ageing plant was never going to explode or meltdown ("like a dirty bomb" we were told); the containment vessels held firm.

In the first weekend, TV chose "experts" who could be relied upon to ignore this - and instead highlight the mythology of nuclear hazards. I noted two examples in the first forty eight hours. The BBC chose a radiation expert called Dr Christopher Busby, billing him as a former adviser to the government on radiation.

"If this stuff comes out then it's going to make what's happened so far, in terms of the tsunami damage, look a little bit like an entrée to the real course," predicted Busby, sending viewers diving behind the sofa.

But Busby's chief notoriety is his modelling work on natural background radiation, which is highly controversial. It's often self-published, and the Journal of Radiological Protection put out a paper (PDF/45KB) debunking his work, pointing out serious flaws.

"Chris Busby ... is apparently quite prepared to self-publish reports containing glaring errors in data and/or analyses; nonetheless, the findings are duly given publicity in the media, presumably a principal objective. Efforts should be made to enable journalists, in particular, to distinguish between the reliability to be placed upon the results given in self-published documents and those appearing in scientific journals," the journal noted in 2004.

Was he there to keep the plot of the disaster movie rolling, or to provide clear scientific advice?

Busby, it must be remembered, is also a scientific advisor to the Green Party. As the Institute of Physics pointed out:

"Chris Busby is essentially an aspiring politician who happens to have scientific qualifications – he is the Green Party’s spokesperson on science and technology and has stood for election to the European Parliament – and, in my view, his actions must be seen in this light. It would be asking too much of him to make substantial concessions on the very issue that has brought the media publicity that provides the fuel to drive a political career."

Meanwhile Channel 4 found a Professor Walt Patterson, from think-tank Chatham House, who also talked up the disaster. An advocate of global governance and a critic of nuclear power (and more recently fossil fuels) for 40 years, his reaction was predictable. Another anti-nuclear activist, John Large, also passed himself off as an unbiased pundit on the news channels. He's Greenpeace's favourite "hired gun".

"What the Japanese government are trying to do is consistent with a major radiological disaster," Patterson opined on Channel 4 News. And what I try to do with a football, sometimes, is consistent with a World Cup winning hat-trick. But not quite the same thing.

Admittedly, it's hard to find talking heads at weekends. But even if Bohr, Einstein and Teller had been wandering past the gates of TV centre (or Horseferry Road) that weekend, one suspects the producers wouldn't have been interested. They wouldn't fit the script.

Words like "meltdown" and "radiation leak" have a mythical potency – and TV reported the mythology, not the facts. Fukushima came to represent man's hubris and his folly in "defying nature". The Daily Mail, for example, helpfully made this quite clear: "Nature's Deadly Rage, it fumed. You could hear echoes all over the media. BBC TV News described "nature’s fury".

It's an interesting metaphor.

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International boffins are meeting in Blighty today with the aim of setting up a European solar radiation-storm warning service. With the Sun expected to belch forth increasing amounts of bad "space weather" in coming years, the scientists warn that billions of pounds' worth of damage could be done to satellites in orbit.
The new warning setup is to be called SPACECAST.

“Space weather is a serious natural hazard and better forecasting is a priority for Europe," says Professor Richard Horne of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), leading on the project for the UK.

"This is especially important as we approach maximum levels of solar activity and increased numbers of magnetic storms. SPACECAST will provide forecasts of disruptive space weather events and issue warnings and alerts for periods of high risk."

According to Horne and his colleagues, the solar sunspot cycle is to peak over the next few years: however, the actual storms which affect electronic equipment in the vicinity of Earth don't quite match this cycle and the storm peak is expected to lag about two years behind the sunspot maximum. The years 2013 to 2015 are expected to be especially stormy in space - with perhaps as many as 60 events per year that could cause serious problems.

The European Union is especially keen to get a rad-storm service up and running as its new Galileo nav-sat constellation is set to come into service (at initial levels of capability) just as the storm cycle peaks. SPACECAST, which has EU funding of €2.5m so far, is to be up and running from 2012.

The risk to satellites has already been proven, with a particularly violent 2003 storm affecting some 47 spacecraft - and totally writing off one which had cost a cool $640m. Modern assessments of the famous Carrington super-storm of 1859 have suggested that another such monster would cause as much as $30bn of satellite damage should it strike today's civilisation rather than the electronically primitive one of the mid-19th century.

NASA, which has itself warned in recent times of the hazard of a devastating "space Katrina", is involved with SPACECAST. Boffins from Finland, France, Belgium and Spain will also join the BAS on the project. ®

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A NASA spacecraft watching the sun has caught a dazzling view of a solar eruption that launched a vast tendril of magnetic plasma into space.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the sun tentacle, which scientists call a solar prominence, on March 19 as it erupted into space with a rounded, twisting motion.

The eruption occurred over five hours as SDO watched the sun in the ultraviolet range of the light spectrum, SDO mission scientists said in a statement. The solar observatory watched as the prominence twisted up from the sun and expanded, then became unstable. [Video: Round Eruption From the Sun]

Ultimately, the sun filament lost cohesion and its particles streamed away from the sun.

"Prominences are elongated clouds of plasma that hover above the sun's surface, tethered by magnetic forces," SDO mission scientists explained.

The sun is currently in the midst of an active phase of its 11-year solar weather cycle and has kicked up a series of powerful eruptions and flares in recent months. The SDO spacecraft and other space observatories are keeping a close watch on the sun to monitor is solar weather activity. [Amazing Sun Photos from Space]

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Bigfoot caught on tape?

A Shelby, North Carolina man claims to have a video of the legendary Bigfoot.

Thomas Byers was driving with a friend when he says he saw Bigfoot cross Golden Valley Church Road in Rutherford County Tuesday evening. Naturally, he whipped out his video camera and was able to capture a five-second video from about 15 to 20 feet away.

"It ran across the road and into the woods right in front of us and I was able to film it," Byers wrote in an e-mail to WCNC NewsChannel 36 in Charlotte, N.C. "In the short video you can hear it snarl or growl at me."

And Bigfoot, it seems, is in desperate need of a shower. "One thing I know is the smell of it was horrid. It smelled like a cross between road kill and a skunk. And it did not like the fact that I was there on the road with it. In the video you can hear it snarl or growl at me as it crosses the road."

Byers details the event on a personal website where he has posted the video plus a few pictures. In the description, he explains that Bigfoot, or Knobby as it's known locally, has been "spotted for years."

Commenters on his site remained divided over the authenticity of the video.

"Unfortunately, until one is captured or killed and delivered to a lab, nothing can be proven," said online user 'Mike'. "Any sighting could be staged, or a prank by someone in a primate-like costume."

"I personally believe you," said 'Luke'. "But if you want to convince the skeptics out there you need a better video and physical evidence such as droppings."

As the debate rages on over whether or not this was the real deal, Byers is satisfied simply to have experienced the moment. "It was truly one of the most amazing things that I have ever seen," he said on his website.

Representatives of the American Bigfoot Society and the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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NEW YORK-- Here's some good news in the wake of Japan's disaster: A new study says big earthquakes don't set off other dangerous ones around the globe.

Big quakes do trigger local aftershocks, but researchers found no sign of setting off moderate-sized events beyond about 600 miles away.

That won't surprise most experts, said lead study author Tom Parsons. But it's different from his prior research, which did find a global effect for setting off small quakes, said Parsons, of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif.

Parsons and Aaron Velasco of the University of Texas at El Paso reported the work online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

They looked at worldwide earthquake records for the 30 years ending in 2009. There were 205 big earthquakes, with magnitude of 7 or more, and 25,222 moderate ones with magnitudes between 5 and 7.

Then the researchers looked at the timing of these events for evidence that the larger quakes triggered the moderate ones. They checked for delays of up to 24 hours, long enough to let the seismic waves from the big quakes peter out.

They did find an increase in moderate quakes, but only within about 600 miles of the initial event, and nearly all within 375 miles. At distances beyond 600 miles, the number of moderate quakes after a big event was no higher than normal.

While the study didn't look at whether big quakes trigger other big quakes far away, the new data suggest they do not, Parsons said. Anyway, since the world averages only about seven quakes at magnitude 7 or above per year, any such effect would have been noticed already, he said.

The new result agrees with what most seismologists believe just from experience, said Klaus Jacob of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "It's nice to see it confirmed with a thorough study," Jacob said.

Parsons said that after the magnitude-9 Japan event on March 11 he watched the global map of earthquakes to look for any distant effect. He saw none.

"It appears to fall in line with what we've seen before," Parsons said.

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A  new videogame that requires you to abduct women and give them a "reassuring slap" if they freak out has gamers and women's rights-groups crying foul.

Brace yourself for the awfully sexist world of Duke Nukem Forever.

The game's 1996 precursor Duke Nukem 3D -- which sold 3.5 million copies, made millions for its developers and transformed the entire world of video games -- depicted women as strippers and prostitutes.  The new iteration of the game, set for release this spring, takes sexism to a new level -- starting with Duke receiving implied oral sex from twins in school uniforms.

"It was offensive then and it's even more offensive now," Jamia Wilson, vice president of the Women's Media Center, told FoxNews.com. "These depictions of women are extremely harmful, especially to young women," she added.

Duke Ferris, editor-in-chief at gamehelper.com, said sexism is an intentional part of Duke Nukem Forever. “The game is meant to objectify women -- that's the point,” he said.

Gearbox Studios bought the rights to the game last year, following 15 years of delays and disappointments that made the Duke a running joke among gamers. They described an especially controversial multiplayer mode called "Capture the Babe" in an interview with the Official Xbox Magazine.

The magazine described it as "more goofy than offensive."

"The 'Babe' will sometimes freak out while you're carrying her (somewhat understandably we'd say), at which point you have to hit a button to gently give her a reassuring slap," the magazine wrote.

The Entertainment Software Rating Board labels all video games as a guide for parents (E for Everyone, T for Teen). It described some of the sequences gamers will encounter: "A couple of missions within this level require players to recover sex toys and pictures of topless women. A few sequences strongly imply sexual acts: Two women appear to perform fellatio on the central character," reads one passage.

“Our job is to provide consumers with information and guidance that helps them choose games they deem suitable for themselves and their families," Eliot Mizrachi, a spokesman for the group, told FoxNews.com.

The game will be available in stores and online, where customers must click a button stating they are 17 years of age or older -- the only barrier to children buying such a game.

The ESRB argues that its ratings effectively allow consumers to self-police: If you find that sort of thing offensive, simply don't let your kids buy the game.

"This game carries a Mature rating indicating that it’s intended for ages 17 and up, and retailers overwhelmingly enforce their store policies requiring that M-rated games not be sold to a customer under that age without a parent’s consent,” Mizrachi said.

strippers from Duke Nukem Forever trailer

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford defended the Capture the Babe mode in an interview published in Xbox Magazine.

"Our goal isn't to shock people, but I think there's some stuff that'll be just a bit uncomfortable," he said. "We try to get right up to that edge and then relax enough so people don't reject it."

They may have crossed the line this time.

Following the what-were-they-thinking response shared across the gaming community, Gearbox announced Thursday yet another delay to the overdue game's release. Duke Nukem Forever, which had been slated for release May 3, is now scheduled for June 14.

The company did not say whether the delay was related to the controversy.

» Read More...

Spaceships powered primarily by water could open up the solar system to exploration, making flights to Mars and other far-flung locales far cheaper, a recent study has found.

A journey to Mars and back in a water-fueled vehicle could cost as little as one space shuttle launch costs today, researchers said. And the idea is to keep these "space coaches" in orbit between trips, so their relative value would grow over time, as the vehicles reduce the need for expensive one-off missions that launch from Earth.

The water-powered space coach is just a concept at the moment, but it could become a reality soon enough, researchers said. [Video: Space Engines: The New Generation]

"It's really a systems integration challenge," said study lead author Brian McConnell, a software engineer and technology entrepreneur. "The fundamental technology is already there."

Space coach: The basics

The space coach concept vehicle is water-driven and water-centric, starting with its solar-powered electrothermal engines. These engines would super-heat water, and the resulting steam would then be vented out of a nozzle, producing the necessary amount of thrust.

Electrothermal engines are very efficient, and they're well-suited for sustained, low-thrust travel, researchers said. This mode of propulsion would do the lion's share of the work, pushing the space coach from Earth orbit to Mars.

Smaller chemical rockets could be called into service from time to time when a rapid change in velocity is needed, McConnell said.

The space coach's living quarters would be composed of a series of interconnected habitat modules. These would be expandable and made of fabric, researchers said — much like Bigelow Aerospace's inflatable modules, which have already been deployed and tested in low-Earth orbit.

Water would be a big part of the space coach's body, too, according to the study. Packed along the habitat modules, it would provide good radiation shielding. It could also be incorporated into the fabric walls themselves, freezing into a strong, rigid debris shield when the structure is exposed to the extreme cold of space.

Rotating the craft could also generate artificial gravity approximating that of Earth in certain parts of the ship, researchers said.

Slashing the cost of space travel

The dependence on water as the chief propellant would make the space coach a relatively cheap vehicle to operate, researchers said. That's partly because electrothermal engines are so efficient, and partly because the use of water as fuel makes most of the ship consumable, or recyclable.

Because there are fewer single-use materials, there's much less dead weight. Water first used for radiation shielding, for example, could later be shunted off to the engines. Combined, these factors would translate into huge savings over a more "traditional" spacecraft mission to Mars using chemical rockets, according to the study.

"Altogether, this reduces costs by a factor of 30 times or better," McConnell told SPACE.com. He estimates a roundtrip mission to the Martian moon Phobos, for example, could be made for less than $1 billion.

A space coach journey would also be more comfortable, McConnell added. The ship would carry large quantities of water, so astronauts could conceivably grow some food crops and — luxury of luxuries — even take hot baths now and again.

McConnell and co-author Alexander Tolley published their study last March in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.

A fleet of space coaches?

McConnell envisions space coaches cruising around the solar system, each individual vehicle fueling up with water in low-Earth orbit when the need arises. In the future, fuel could be sourced along a space coach's travels — for example, water could be mined from an asteroid or a Martian moon.

Parts could be swapped out and upgraded on orbit as well, helping to keep the space coaches in good operating condition for several decades, McConnell said. Each mission undertaken from low-Earth orbit would be far cheaper than anything launching from the ground.

McConnell thinks an entire fleet of space coaches could one day populate the heavens, flying a variety of different flags — as long as somebody takes the initial plunge.

"If one party decides to do this, I think it would spur a lot of other activity," McConnell said. "I think countries wouldn't want to get left behind."

From vision to reality

No huge technological leaps are required to make the space coach a reality, McConnell said. Bigelow's expandable habitats are already space-tested, for example, as are several varieties of electrothermal engine.

"There's not a lot of new technology that needs to be built," McConnell said.

Electrothermal engines that use water as fuel, however, have not been flight-tested, so some work needs to be done on the propulsion system. McConnell envisions holding a design competition for the engines, as well as one for the overall ship design — cash-reward contests that would be like smaller versions of the Google Lunar X Prize, which is a $30 million private race to the moon.

Once winners of these competitions emerge, ground-testing and, eventually, flight-testing would follow. McConnell declined to put forth any specific timelines, but he's optimistic about the possibilities.

"I think things could happen very quickly," he said. "It's really just a matter of convincing decision-makers that this is worth getting into."

» Read More...

A week ago Saturday, my three Honors students and I went on a field trip led by Gary Fleeger of the Pennsylvania Geological Survey, to examine some cool glacial features in western Pennsylvania. The trip was associated with the joint meeting of the northeastern & north-central sections of the Geological Society of America, held in Pittsburgh.

My favorite part of the trip was examining a glacial delta complex near Jacksville, Pennsylvania. We started off with a real treat: checking out the Jacksville Esker:

Here’s a link to a much bigger version of this photograph.

This was my first-ever actual real-life esker. It was pretty cool. Here’s a Google Map “terrain” view:

The first photo was taken from W. Liberty road, a bit east of the intersection with Dickey Road, looking north.

The sediment that comprises this esker was deposited by a stream flowing within glacial ice, and transporting meltwater (and its entrained sediment) out and away from the glacier, in this case towards the southeast. There, the meltwater reached a lake that had formed in front of the glacier (a so-called proglacial lake), where the sediment was deposited in a large delta that grew (“prograded“) out into the lake over time. The lake here has long since drained away, just as the glacier that produced it has melted, but the sediment is still there. This is not the superlatively-poorly-sorted glacial sediment that we call “till,” but a more washed, tumbled, processed, sorted, and overall mature package known as “outwash.” Because it’s concentrated in sand and gravel (and relatively deficient in boulders and mud), outwash deposits make for good places for people to get the sand and gravel we need for construction. The Glacial Sand and Gravel Company is quarrying the delta deposits near Jacksville, and they were kind enough to let us visit their operation to check out the sediments. Here’s some of our crew in the gravel pit:

See those tilted layers? Those are foreset beds from the proglacial delta. They aren’t horizontal beds that were later tectonically tilted — this is more or less the inclination at which they were deposited.

As a river flows into a calm body of water like the ocean or a proglacial lake, the water loses velocity. It can’t carry as much sediment when it’s flowing slowly, so the sediment gets deposited. This forms a delta.  Some of the sediment gets deposited at the bottom of the delta’s multiple channels, called distributaries. These distributary deposits are more or less horizontal, and relatively thin in spite of being coarser-grained (because they are in the fastest moving current). They are called topset beds. Sediment dumped off the advancing “nose” of the delta (at the outer tip of the distributaries) is deposited at a slight angle, and these are the foreset beds you see in the picture above. In the deeper, calmer water, we get more horizontal beds, but they are finer-grained due to calmer depositional conditions. These are the bottomset beds.

» Read More...

NASA is looking for U.S. high school students to participate in their INSPIRES program: Interdisciplinary National Science Program Incorporating Research Experience. Students who get in will get access to all kinds of cool stuff:

    The selected students and their parents will participate in an online learning community with opportunities to interact with peers, NASA engineers and scientists. The online community also provides appropriate grade-level educational activities, discussion boards and chat rooms for participants to gain exposure to careers and opportunities available at NASA.

That’s nice, but the real deal is this part:

    Students selected for the program also will have the option to compete for unique grade-appropriate experiences during the summer of 2012 at NASA facilities and participating universities. The summer experience provides students with a hands-on opportunity to investigate education and careers in the STEM disciplines.

Man, I would’ve killed for that opportunity when I was in high school! So if you’re a teacher with some good students, a parent, or a high school kid yourself, check out the program. And if it looks good to you, apply! The deadline for applications is June 30.

Hey. Sometimes, it is rocket science.

March 24th, 2011 4:43 PM Tags: education, INSPIRES
by Phil Plait in Cool stuff, NASA | 21 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >
21 Responses to “NASA wants smart high school kids”

   1. 1.   Archimedes Says:
      March 24th, 2011 at 4:59 pm

      Grrrr… Why only US high school students?? Why doesnt something similar for European students exist?? :/
   2. 2.   IVAN3MAN_AT_LARGE Says:
      March 24th, 2011 at 5:15 pm

      NASA won’t find any here: NeighborhoodScout’s Top 100 Worst Performing Public Schools in the U.S.
   3. 3.   Empirical Says:
      March 24th, 2011 at 5:47 pm

      That NASA is plundering ankle biters for new ideas leaves unresolved the obvious probem: NASA. What America needs is a rocket with tremendous expense, near-zero payload, questionable reliability, and no mission. Add some Japanese radwaste for an ISS FUBAR coronal ejection toasty tan. NASA can deliver! Projects Mxyztplk and Btfsplk.

      They will cost double and be late, then be canceled while still paying full price for let contracts. There is no more sincere delivery than that.
   4. 4.   RwFlynn Says:
      March 24th, 2011 at 6:06 pm

      I’ve always loved NASA’s willingness to work with kids and young adults. This makes me wish I were just a few years younger.
   5. 5.   Floyd Says:
      March 24th, 2011 at 6:13 pm

      There should be a NASA program for high IQ school and college students. NASA should check out the national SATs or ACT scores and put top performers in a summer program before college.
   6. 6.   NCC-1701Z Says:
      March 24th, 2011 at 6:20 pm

      This is for smart American high school kids? Uh, good luck with that. Given the way Republicans feel about science, ‘smart’ and ‘American’ are rapidly becoming mutually exclusive.
   7. 7.   Grand Lunar Says:
      March 24th, 2011 at 6:50 pm

      Oh how I wish I could participate in that!
      But I was born 12 years too early…..
   8. 8.   Other Paul Says:
      March 24th, 2011 at 7:19 pm

      @NCC-1701Z : Surely it just makes smart Americans easier to identify?
   9. 9.   Cathy Says:
      March 24th, 2011 at 7:52 pm

      I was going to work at NASA when I grew up. It was my dream for about ten years. Then I hit my barrier in integral calculus and realized that I lacked the math chops to make a career out of it. (Now I write science fiction instead so I’m having fun anyway.)

      Still, I would have jumped on an opportunity like this in high school. The closest I got was being an assistant for a StarLab!
  10. 10.   matt Says:
      March 24th, 2011 at 11:19 pm

      Nasa always has the best acronyms. I always wondered if they had someone full time to think them up.
  11. 11.   Atheist Panda Says:
      March 25th, 2011 at 2:47 am

      @7. Grand Lunar: Me too, only 30 years too early, and on the wrong continent….
  12. 12.   MadScientist Says:
      March 25th, 2011 at 2:54 am

      @Archimedes: You’ll have to nag ESA about a European equivalent.

      @#6: There may be a lot of idiot GOP members trying hard to ruin the US education system, but there are still a lot of smart kids and plenty of opportunities for them.
  13. 13.   gss_000 Says:
      March 25th, 2011 at 4:51 am

      There are programs for college and grad students to spend a summer at NASA too. Campuses are crawling with students. I spent a summer at Goddard and it was a blast. For instance, while us grad students got to hear lectures made specially for us by researchers, the college students were taken up into a plane to make atmospheric measurements. NASA’s great for all level of students.

      As for why only American students, there are a lot of clearance issues at these facilities. When it comes to students, its just easier if you’re an American citizen. Although there was a Japanese student attending an American college in my group so maybe there are ways non-Americans can participate.
  14. 14.   Jim Gerard Says:
      March 25th, 2011 at 5:19 am

      Thanks for the shout-out, Phil! I run the Online Learning Community for INSPIRE (note there is no S at the end, in case your searches come back wrong), where our students meet virtually during the year to “Discover, Connect, Equip”. Every Thursday we host a live chat with a NASA engineer, scientist or manager to connect with the students. Last night we heard about the new Sustainability Base from the associate director of the Ames Research Center in California. I wonder if a certain former NASA Bad Astronomer wouldn’t mind taking an hour of time to talk to our community about promoting science?
  15. 15.   jrpowell Says:
      March 25th, 2011 at 8:03 am

      Both of my daughters will be applying for this program. Thanks for letting us know!
  16. 16.   Ray Says:
      March 25th, 2011 at 8:06 am

      INSPIRES? What a sorry excuse for an acronym. Probably thought of the acronym first and then fit in the rather tortured program name afterwards. Has the rancid smell of a committee meeting all over it.
  17. 17.   Krikkit Says:
      March 25th, 2011 at 8:48 am

      I have been involved in these little outreach programs before, I tell you they are not worth the waste of time.

      They are highly bureaucratic, often run by people with half the IQ of the participants, are incredibly boring, and do not accomplish a damn thing.

      They look good on your resume’, though.
  18. 18.   MichaelL Says:
      March 25th, 2011 at 10:59 am

      Maybe they need to give this kid a call:
      http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1369595/Jacob-Barnett-12-higher-IQ-Einstein-develops-theory-relativity.html
  19. 19.   JimB Says:
      March 25th, 2011 at 11:21 am

      @NCC-170Z: All I can say is that *this* parent (and his wife) are doing all we can to fight against that with our son. So far, so good. Too bad he’s in 5th grade, or we’d be signing him up NOW. (As much as I’d like to be of an age to participate, I don’t want to go through high school again. Now, college…..:) )

      Thanks for posting this Phil.
  20. 20.   Matt Says:
      March 25th, 2011 at 12:15 pm

      I was part of a similar program in 2007 called High School Aerospace Scholars. It was a fantastic experience. The best part was getting exclusive tours of the facilities at Johnson Space Center, meeting several Astronauts (including a geologist who visited the Moon in the 70′s!), and working with real NASA scientists and engineers on mock missions. We even got to sit in the mission control center during a Shuttle mission to the ISS.

» Read More...

If you follow me on Twitter you may have figured out I’m otherwise occupied for right now, and have spotty internet access. But I happened to have a connection for a few minutes, and got a press release from the folks at Rutgers and the Chandra X-Ray Center about a supernova remnant, and the picture of this old exploded star was simply too cool not to share right away:
Pretty freaky, eh? [Click to ensupernovenate.]

The science involved is pretty interesting (see the Chandra page about it), but basically, this shows high-energy X-rays (in blue) and lower energy X-rays (in red) emitted by extremely hot gas in the supernova (the entire image is superposed on the correct background from the Digitized Sky Survey to show the positions of stars). This emission traces the magnetic fields in the gas (which is actually ionized and therefore a plasma), and this in turn has yielded some surprises for the scientists. Again read the page for the details, which are cool.

But in the meantime, the image itself gives an almost three-dimensional feel to the supernova remnant, doesn’t it? The roiling gas is expanding away from the blast site at thousands of kilometers per second, driven by the explosion that, when it blew, was the equivalent of more than the energy given off by the Sun over its entire lifetime!

» Read More...

This image is from my favorite Red Planet paparazzo, the HiRISE camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It shows three craters, each about 1.5 to 2 km (0.9 to 1.2 miles) across… and they all formed at the same time!

How can I tell? Well, for one thing, if this were a coincidence, with three impacts happening at very different times, then you’d see overlap in the crater rims; the earliest crater would be partially obscured by the later crater, and that in turn by the most recent impact. But that’s not the case here, since the rims aren’t overlaying each other. In fact, the straight walls between them are exactly what you’d expect if you have impact explosions happening simultaneously: the expanding shock waves smack into each other and create a linear feature.

Not only that, but let your eye follow the straight lines between craters up and down, above and below the craters themselves and onto the landscape. You can see that the hellish expanding wall of fire etched itself onto the Martian surface well beyond just the crater rims, and those linear features match the crater wall orientation. I annotated the image here to show you what I mean; the red lines are just outside the linear features.

I can picture what must have happened, millions of years ago over Mars…

An asteroid or perhaps a comet is orbiting the Sun, minding its own business. Most likely it’s a frail body, easily broken apart, but held together by its own gravity. As long as it’s left undisturbed, that is. And what’s that looming ahead? A small planet, but too large to avoid. It grows larger, and larger still… As the object plunges into the thin air of Mars, it breaks up into three similar sized pieces, each perhaps a hundred meters or so across, the size of a football stadium. Moving at the blinding speed of 30 kilometers per second, each of the three pieces hit. Given the crater centers are only about 2 kilometers apart, all three pieces impacted the surface within a fraction of a second of each other.

At essentially the same moment, three fireballs are created, explosions equivalent to the detonations of tens of millions of tons of TNT. Each creates a circular shock wave expanding along the ground, and within a few seconds the shock waves collide. On either side of the center impact, two focused walls of flame and debris are created, blasting up and down in nearly straight lines. The explosions of the two outer impacts expand left and right in near perfect half-circles.

Later, much later, when the area cooled off, what remained is what we see today. Three conjoined craters, the magnitude and fury of their impacts faded by time, but still readable in the landscape. They’re filled with rippling sand dunes now, grains of rust and basalt blown by the ever-present Martian winds. But they’re a reminder of a time, long ago, when, for a few moments, the wind blew much, much harder.

» Read More...

One of my favorite asteroids is Kleopatra: a big, 217 km (135 mile) long main-belt rock that’s a wee bit weird. This image may give you a hint as to why:
It’s shaped like a cartoon dog bone! It circles the Sun out past Mars, tumbling end-over-end, and its origins have always been something of a mystery. However, new observations and analysis reveal quite a bit about how this asteroid got its unusual shape. I won’t spoil it, but instead simply point you to Emily Lakdawalla’s excellent summary of Kleopatra on The Planetary Society blog. It’s a tale of collisions, spin, and eventual reconciliation, as many good stories are.

One thing I didn’t know is that Kleo has two moons: Alexhelios and Cleoselene. They orbit the asteroid in the plane of the its rotation, and may be cast-offs from the formation of Kleo itself. Read Emily’s article for the whole scoop.

Man, the solar system is a cool place. And there’s still so much left to see!

» Read More...

Troops opened fire on protesters in cities across Syria and pro- and anti-government crowds clashed in the capital's historic old city as one of the Mideast's most repressive regimes sought to put down demonstrations that exploded nationwide demanding reform.

The upheaval sweeping the region definitively took root in Syria as an eight-day uprising centred on a rural southern town dramatically expanded into protests by tens of thousands in multiple cities. The once-unimaginable scenario posed the biggest challenge in decades to Syria's iron-fisted rule.

Protesters wept over the bloodied bodies of slain comrades and massive crowds chanted anti-government slogans, then fled as gunfire erupted, according to footage posted online. Security forces shot to death more than 15 people in at least six cities and villages, including a suburb of the capital, Damascus, witnesses told The Associated Press. Their accounts could not be independently confirmed.

The regime of President Bashar Assad, an ally of Iran and supporter of militant groups around the region, had seemed immune from the Middle East's three-month wave of popular uprising.

His security forces, which have long silenced the slightest signs of dissent, quickly snuffed out smaller attempts at protests last month.

Syrians also have fearful memories of the brutal crackdown unleashed by his father, Hafez Assad, when Muslim fundamentalists in the central town of Hama tried an uprising in 1982: Thousands were killed and parts of the city were flattened by artillery and bulldozers.

The Assads' leadership - centred on members of their Alawi minority sect, a branch of Shiite Islam in this mainly Sunni nation - have built their rule by mixing draconian repression with increasing economic freedom, maintaining the loyalty of the wealthy Sunni merchant class in the prosperous cities of Damascus and Aleppo.

Bashar Assad now faces the same dilemma confronted by the leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain - ratchet up violence or offer concessions. A day earlier, his government seemed to test the latter track, offering to consider lifting draconian emergency laws and promising increased pay and benefits for state workers.

As massive crowds rejected the offers, the worst violence appeared centred around Daraa, where the arrest of a group of young men for spraying anti-regime graffiti last week set off a cycle of growing demonstrations and increasingly violent government crackdowns.

The Syrian government said 34 had been slain in Daraa before Friday, while the UN human rights office put the figure at 37. Activists said it was as high as 100.

Thousands poured into Daraa's central Assad Square after Friday prayers, many from nearby villages, chanting "Freedom! Freedom!" and waving Syrian flags and olive branches, witnesses said. Some attacked a bronze statue of Hafez Assad. One witness told The Associated Press that they tried to set it on fire, another said they tried to pull it down.

Troops responded with heavy gunfire, according to a resident who said he saw two bodies and many wounded people brought to Daraa's main hospital.

After night fell, thousands of enraged protesters snatched weapons from a far smaller number of troops and chased them out of Daraa's Roman-era old city, taking back control of the al-Omari mosque, the epicenter of the past week's protests.

The accounts could not be immediately independently confirmed because of Syria's tight restrictions on the press.

In Damascus, the heart of Bashar Assad's rule, protests and clashes broke out in multiple neighbourhoods as crowds of regime opponents marched and thousands of Assad loyalists drove in convoys, shouting, "Bashar, we love you!"

The two sides battled, whipping each other with leather belts, in the old city of Damascus outside the historic Umayyad mosque, parts of which date to the 8th century. About three kilometres away, central Umayyad Square was packed with demonstrators who traded punches and hit each other with sticks from Syrian flags, according to Associated Press reporters at the scene.

An amateur video posted on the internet showed hundreds of young men marching though Damascus' old covered bazaar, some riding on others' shoulders and pumping their fists in the air as they chanted: "With our souls, with our blood, we sacrifice for you, Daraa!"

Security forces chased and beat some 200 protesters chanting "Freedom, Freedom!" on a bridge in the centre of the city, an activist said.

After dark, troops opened fire on protesters in the Damascus suburb of Maadamiyeh, a witness told the AP. An activist in contact with people there said three had been killed.

The scenes of chaos and violence shocked many in this tightly controlled country where protests are usually confined to government-orchestrated demonstrations in support of the regime, and political discussions are confined to whispers, mainly indoors.

"There's a barrier of fear that has been broken and the demands are changing with every new death," said Ayman Abdul-Nour, a Dubai-based former member of Assad's ruling Baath Party. "We're starting to hear calls for the regime's ouster."

Also startling was the scope of the protests - in multiple cities around the country of nearly 24 million.

Troops opened fire on more than 1,000 people marching in Syria's main Mediterranean port, Latakia. One activist told the AP that witnesses saw four slain protesters in a hospital. Another was reported killed in the central city of Homs, where hundreds of people demonstrated in support of Daraa and demanded reforms, he said. The activist, like others around the country, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation by the regime.

Demonstrators in the southern village of Sanamein tried to march to Daraa in support of the protesters, but were met by troops who opened fire, said an activist in Damascus in touch with witnesses there. He said the witnesses reported as many as 20 fatalities, though it was impossible to confirm the number.

A video posted on Facebook by Syrian pro-democracy activists showed five dead young men lying on stretchers in Sanamein as men wept around them. The voice of a woman could be heard saying, "Down with Bashar Assad."

An unidentified Syrian official asserted that an armed group attacked the army headquarters in Sanamein and tried to storm it, leading to a clash with guards.

Further protests erupted in the town of Douma, outside the capital, and the cities of Raqqa in the north and Zabadani in the west, near the border with Lebanon, a human rights activist said, reporting an unknown number of protesters detained.

The protests in Damascus appeared led by relatively well-off Syrians, many of whom who have been calling for reforms for years and have relatives jailed as political prisoners.

They contrast sharply with the working-class Sunni protesters in conservative Daraa, where small farmers and herders pushed off their land by drought have increasingly moved into the province's main city and surrounding villages, looking for work and in many cases growing angry at the lack of opportunity.

The protests in Daraa appeared to take on a sectarian dimension, with some accusing the regime of using Shiite Hezbollah and Iranian operatives in the crackdown.

The origin of the protests, far from urban centres, makes Syria's uprising similar to Tunisia's, in which demonstrations in towns and villages spread to cities, said Bassam Haddad, director of the Middle East studies program at George Mason University.

That doesn't necessarily mean the regime is in danger, he said. "If this continues at the level we see right now or if the regime finds a way to deal with the protests at this level, the Syrian regime will be able to weather the storm." But he said the bloodshed could only cause protests to expand.

The White House urged Syria's government to cease attacks on protesters and Turkey said its neighbour should quickly enact reforms to meet legitimate demands. The UN said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spoke to Assad Friday morning and underlined "that governments had an obligation to respect and protect their citizens' fundamental rights."

» Read More...

From Sydney to Seoul, London to Lima, Dubai to Davis Station in frozen Antarctica, hundreds of millions of people are expected to switch off their lights to mark 'Earth Hour'.

The movement that began in Sydney in 2007 to raise awareness about climate change now brings together people from around the world to turn the lights off for 60 minutes to reduce energy consumption.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged people to celebrate the shared quest to "protect the planet and ensure human well-being".

"Let us use 60 minutes of darkness to help the world see the light," he said of the event, which kicks off in the Pacific, taking in New Zealand, Fiji and Australia, before rolling to Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas.

Earth Hour, designed as a symbolic act to make people aware of everyday energy use, has evolved into a global movement which governments around the world have acknowledged as a positive step.

"The simple and powerful idea of switching off lights for an hour to drive action on climate change began in Sydney and has been embraced around the world," said Prime Minister Julia Gillard from Canberra's Parliament House, a landmark which will go dark from 8.30pm.

British Prime Minister David Cameron said sharing responsibility was the key to fighting climate change, describing Earth Hour as "a huge symbol of global solidarity, an inspiring display of international commitment".

Earth Hour co-founder and chief executive Andy Ridley said hundreds of millions of people took part in last year's event and he was hopeful of the same response, with 133 countries and territories signing on this year.

He added that social media sites such as Facebook had helped the movement's success, which has seen city officials switch off the lights in famous locations such as the Eiffel Tower and New York's Times Square.

"Social media is an incredibly powerful tool - it's not the only thing and other traditional tools are still important - but the difference now is that if you want to have a revolution, you don't have to take over the radio station," Ridley said from his Sydney office this week.

Earth Hour this year will focus on connecting people online so they can inspire each other to go beyond the hour and make commitments to help protect the environment, he said.

To do this, Earth Hour has created an online platform connected to the 14 top social media sites around the world, available in several languages, which people will be easily able to access from mobile phones.

Ridley said he never expected the Earth Hour movement to become so large.

"We didn't imagine right at the beginning... it would be on the scale that it is now. And the fact that it is so cross cultural, beyond borders and race and religion," he said.

- AFP

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he effort to steer Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant away from disaster suffered another setback as workers discovered widespread uncontrolled leaking of radioactive water at the six-reactor site.

Q: What's new about this?

A: Since the tsunami knocked out power, plant workers have been intentionally venting radioactive steam into the air to keep overheated reactor cores from bursting. Radioactive steam has also gone aloft from overheated storage pools for used fuel. Now radioactive water has also been discovered at the bottom of turbine buildings at units 1 and 3 adjacent to the reactors. Similar flooding in units 2 and 4 is being checked; it is likely radioactive too.

Q: Where did this radioactive water come from?

A: Plant officials and government regulators say they don't know. It could come from more than one source: A leaking reactor core, associated piping or a spent fuel pool, of which there are seven. Officials won't even rule out the idea that it may have come from overfilling the pools with emergency cooling water. The flooding is deepest at Unit 3 - where it is waist-high - and may have flooded basement areas at other buildings.

Equipment in Unit 3 could have sprung a leak on March 14, when a powerful hydrogen gas explosion blew apart that unit's reactor building.

Q: Does the leaking water make meltdown more likely?

A: Probably not at the current rate of leakage. The fuel rods inside units 1, 2 and 3 are believed to be partially melted already. However, with desperate efforts to keep the units cool using sea water, temperatures in recent days have stayed well within a safe zone at all the reactors. If these conditions prevail, there will be no further core melting, despite leakage. The temperatures of the spent fuel pools also have been under control, but occasional spikes have spurred worry.

Q: So why should we care about the leaking?

A: For one thing, it puts more radioactive contamination into the local environment, probably mostly into the ground and sea. It could add more radiation exposure to people near the plant. It has stalled work to restore in-house cooling systems needed to keep the plant safe in the long term. Perhaps the leaking comes from cooling equipment that must be repaired before other work can advance.

Q: When will they get the plant back on a sure footing?

A: It now appears certain to take days, possibly even weeks, to bring Fukushima Daiichi under complete control with normal cooling systems in place. And until that happens, the twin spectres of total meltdown and spent fuel pool fire will shadow the work and the Japanese nation.

- AP

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Nuclear experts from Greenpeace have started monitoring radiation near the stricken Fukushima No. 1 atomic power plant.

Greenpeace said it believed Japanese authorities may have been underplaying the scale of the disaster at the quake- and tsunami-hit plant and wanted to assess the radiation levels and risks to the local population for itself.

"Since the beginning of the Fukushima nuclear crisis, the authorities have consistently appeared to underestimate both the risks and extent of radioactive contamination," Greenpeace's Jan van de Putte said in a statement.

Japanese engineers are working to pump out puddles of radioactive water at the earthquake-crippled plant.

Radioactive water has been found in three of the six reactors at Fukushima Daiichi, where three workers sustained burns after being exposed to radiation levels 10,000 times higher than normally found.

The high radioactivity in the water is likely to slow efforts to stabilise the reactors.

The water in both cases contained iodine, caesium and cobalt 10,000 times the normal level, said a spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO).

The water was found in the basement of the turbine building of reactor one - a day after similar readings in the reactor three turbine basement heightened fears that the reactor vessel or its valves and pipes were leaking.

The worst-case scenario at reactor three would be that the fuel inside the reactor core, a volatile uranium-plutonium mix, has gone critical and burnt its way through the bottom of its steel pressure vessel.

However, the nuclear safety agency has also said that other data suggested that the reactor vessel was still stable.

"We need to be careful that water contaminated with highly radioactive material will not leak outside," Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency spokesman Hideyuki Nishiyama said late on Friday.

Pools of water of up to one metre were also found in the basement of the turbine buildings of reactors number two and four, he said, adding that their contents were being examined.

Japanese leaders defended their decision not to evacuate people from a wider area around the plant, insisting they are safe if they stay indoors. But officials also said residents may want to voluntarily move to areas with better facilities, since supplies in the tsunami-devastated region are running short.

The escalation in the nuclear plant crisis came as the death toll from the quake and tsunami passed 10,000 yesterday.

Across the battered northeast coast, hundreds of thousands of people whose homes were destroyed still have no power, no hot meals and, in many cases, no showers for 14 days.

The uncertain nuclear situation again halted work at the Fukushima Daiichi complex, where authorities have been scrambling to stop the overheated facility from leaking dangerous radiation.

Low levels of radiation have been seeping out since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out the plant's cooling system, but a breach could mean a much larger release of contaminants.

The most likely consequence would be contamination of the groundwater.

"The situation today at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant is still very grave and serious. We must remain vigilant," a sombre Prime Minister Naoto Kan said.

"We are not in a position where we can be optimistic. We must treat every development with the utmost care."

The possible breach in the plant's Unit 3 might be a crack or a hole in the stainless steel chamber of the reactor core or in the spent fuel pool that's lined with several feet of reinforced concrete. The temperature and pressure inside the core, which holds the fuel rods, remained stable and was far lower than what would further melt the core.

Plant officials and government regulators say they don't know the source of the radioactive water discovered at Units 1 and 3. It could have come from a leaking reactor core, associated pipes, or a spent fuel pool. Or it may be the result of overfilling the pools with emergency cooling water.

Friday marked two weeks to the day since the magnitude-9.0 quake triggered a tsunami that flattened cities along the northeastern coast.

With the cleanup and recovery operations continuing and more than 17,400 listed as missing, the final number of dead was expected to surpass 18,000.

Kan apologised to farmers and business owners for the toll the radiation has had on their livelihoods: Several countries have halted some food imports from areas near the plant after elevated levels of radiation were found in raw milk, sea water and 11 kinds of vegetables, including broccoli, cauliflower and turnips.

He also thanked utility workers, firefighters and military personnel for "risking their lives" to cool the overheated facility.

The nuclear crisis has compounded the challenges faced by a nation already saddled with a humanitarian disaster.

Much of the frigid northeast remains a scene of despair and devastation, with Japan struggling to feed and house hundreds of thousands of homeless survivors, clear away debris and bury the dead.

"It's still like I'm in a dream," said Tomohiko Abe, a 45-year-old machinist who was in the devastated coastal town of Onagawa trying to salvage any belongings he could from his ruined car.

"People say it's like a movie, but it's been worse than any movie I've ever seen."

Officials have evacuated residents within 20 kilometres of the plant and advised those up to 30 kilometres away to stay indoors to minimise exposure. The US has recommended that people stay 80 kilometres away from the plant.

Government spokesman Yukio Edano insisted that people living 20 to 30 kilometres from the plant should still be safe from radiation as long as they stay indoors.

But since supplies are not being delivered to the area fast enough, he said it may be better for residents to voluntarily evacuate to places with better facilities.

"If the current situation is protracted and worsens, then we will not deny the possibility of [mandatory] evacuation," he said.

Edano said the government "will continue to revisit this and as we have done so, we will provide whatever advice as necessary. Safety is the priority."

NISA spokesman Hidehiko Nishiyama said later that plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. was issued a "very strong warning" for safety violations and that a thorough review would be conducted once the situation stabilises.

A breach could mean a leak has been seeping for days, likely since the hydrogen explosion at Unit 3 on March 14.

It's not clear if any of the contaminated water has run into the ground. Radiation readings for the air yesterday were not yet available, but detections in recent days have shown no significant spike.

Elevated levels of radiation have turned up elsewhere, including the tap water in several areas of Japan. In Tokyo, tap water showed radiation levels two times higher than the government standard for infants, who are particularly vulnerable to cancer-causing radioactive iodine, officials said.

The scare caused a run on bottled water in the capital, and Tokyo municipal officials are distributing it to families with babies.

Previous radioactive emissions have come from intentional efforts to vent small amounts of steam through valves to prevent the core from bursting. However, releases from a breach could allow uncontrolled quantities of radioactive contaminants to escape into the surrounding ground or air.

Edano said "safety measures may not be adequate" and warned that may contribute to rising anxiety among people about how the disaster is being managed.

"We have to make sure that safety is secured for the people working in that area. We truly believe that is incumbent upon us," the chief Cabinet secretary told reporters.

Meanwhile, damage to factories was taking its toll on the world's third-largest economy and creating a ripple effect felt worldwide.

Nissan Motor Co. said it may move part of its engine production line to the United States because of damage to a plant.

The quake and tsunami are emerging as the world's most expensive natural disasters on record, wreaking up to US$310 billion (NZ$411bn) in damages, the government said.

"There is no doubt that we have immense economic and financial damage," Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda said.

"It will be our task how to recover from the damage."

At Sendai's port, brand new Toyota cars lay crushed in piles. At the airport, flooded by the tsunami, US Marines used bulldozers and shovels to shift wrecked cars that lay scattered like discarded toys.

Still, there were examples of resilience, patience and fortitude across the region.

In Soma, a hard-hit town along the Fukushima prefecture coast, rubble covered the block where Hiroshi Suzuki's home once stood. He watched as soldiers dug into mounds of timber had been neighbours' homes in search of bodies. Just three bodies have been pulled out.

"I never expected to have to live through anything like this," he said mournfully.

Suzuki is one of Soma's luckier residents, but the tsunami washed away the shop where he sold fish and seaweed.

"My business is gone. I don't think I will ever be able to recover," said Suzuki, 59.

Still, he managed to find a bright side.

"The one good thing is the way everyone is pulling together and helping each other. No one is stealing or looting," he said.

"It makes me feel proud to be Japanese."

- AP, AFP

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Coalition forces have carried out a seventh day of air and missile strikes against the Libyan regime's forces as Nato appointed a Canadian general to oversee the campaign.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy held out hopes of a diplomatic initiative to end the conflict, announcing that Britain and France were jointly preparing a "political and diplomatic" solution.

"There will certainly be a Franco-British initiative to clearly show the solution is not only military but also political and diplomatic," Sarkozy said referring to key talks in London on Tuesday.

Nato named three-star Canadian general, Lieutenant-General Charles Bouchard, to run Nato's Libya operations, enforcing a UN-mandated no-fly zone and arms embargo.

Bouchard will also take command of the entire military campaign to protect civilians from troops loyal to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi when and if the 28-member alliance takes the reins from a US-led coalition.

Qatar meanwhile became the first Arab country to take part in the military campaign, its air force and the French military announced.

Two Mirage fighter planes from Qatar carried out an "air interdiction mission" alongside two French jets, the French military said on its website.

Coalition war planes meanwhile pounded Gaddafi's forces in the strategic eastern town of Ajdabiya, boosting rebel efforts to launch new offensives.

Two huge explosions were heard from the city and smoke clouds billowed into the sky as the pace of air strikes escalated.

Terrified residents were fleeing the city, 160 kilometres south of the rebel strongholds of Benghazi and Tobruk.

A French fighter jet destroyed an artillery battery overnight outside Ajdabiya.

Gaddafi forces also pounded the rebel-held city of Misrata, 214 kilometres east of Tripoli, with artillery last night, killing a mother and her four children, a witness said.

"The artillery shelling has been going on since Thursday night," said the witness contacted by telephone.

"They are firing on everything that moves."

"There is no water, no electricity and supplies are running short," in Misrata, Libya's third city, he said, adding that residents were cowering indoors.

On Thursday a doctor treating the wounded at a hospital in Misrata said attacks by Gaddafi's forces since March 18 "have killed 109 people and wounded 1300 others, 81 of whom are in serious condition".

Anti-aircraft fire had raked the Libyan skies overnight, with at least three explosions shaking the capital Tripoli and the eastern suburb of Tajura.

At least one blast was heard from the centre of the city, while others came from Tajura, home to military bases.

US warships and submarines had fired 16 new Tomahawk cruise missiles at Libyan targets in the 24 hours to 0500 GMT yesterday (6pm last night NZST), the Pentagon said, adding that coalition war planes carried out 153 sorties over the same period.

The total number of Tomahawks launched at Libya rose to at least 170.

Libyan state television said "civilian and military sites in Tripoli and Tajura" had come under fire from "long-range missiles".

A thick pall of smoke rose above Tajura and streets were practically deserted despite Friday prayers.

Hooded, armed men stood guard at the main junctions.

Meanwhile Libyan health ministry official Khaled Omar told reporters that 114 people had been killed and 445 wounded in four days of coalition strikes on Libya between Sunday and Wednesday.

Omar said 104 people were killed in Tripoli and its suburbs, while 10 were killed in Sirte, Gaddafi's hometown, some 600 kilometres south of the capital.

Libya's official Jana news agency announced that Gaddafi had decided to promote all serving soldiers, officers and security agents, as well as interior ministry employees.

The report came a day after the United States urged Libyan troops to stop fighting.

In Addis Ababa, a high-level delegation sent by the embattled Libyan leader joined African Union talks on the crisis, which also included EU, UN, Arab League and Islamic Conference representatives and said Tripoli was ready to implement a road map envisaged by the conference.

The AU roadmap calls for an immediate end to all hostilities, "cooperation on the part of the relevant Libyan authorities to facilitate humanitarian aid," and "protection for all foreign nationals, including African migrant workers".

At Nato headquarters, military planners were drawing up plans to take over the broader mission in anticipation of a decision by ambassadors of the 28-nation alliance on Sunday, Nato officials said.

Until the alliance agrees to take over all operations, Nato's task will be limited to preventing Gaddafi's jets from flying while the coalition will continue to target artillery on the ground.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said he expected Nato to take full command of military operations in Libya "within a matter of days".

On Thursday, a Libyan war plane that had dared to flout the no-fly zone was destroyed by a French fighter after it landed in Misrata.

Coalition air strikes since Saturday have been targeting air defences in a bid to protect civilians under the terms of a UN resolution.

The US general in charge of the operation, General Carter Ham, said coalition forces imposing the no-fly zone "cannot be sure" there have been no civilian deaths, but are trying to be "very precise".

The Pentagon said 12 countries were now taking part in the coalition seeking to enforce the no-fly zone, including Arab countries Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said "significant progress" had been made in just five days, but that the "danger is far from over," and Gaddafi's forces "remain a serious threat to the safety of the people".

She also underscored "crucial" Arab support for the operation, and praised Qatar and the UAE for joining the coalition.

And US President Barack Obama held a conference call on Friday with key congressional leaders on Libya and aides said he would speak to Americans soon amid rising domestic scrutiny of the mission.

Meanwhile, Libyan authorities moved to scotch rumours circulating in Tripoli that a fuel shortage was imminent, saying oil distribution companies had "large quantities" of fuel.

Reports of an oil shortage had circulated in recent days in the Libyan capital prompting endless queues at petrol stations.

- AFP

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