Barcoding the Planet’s Plant Species

Hundreds of experts from 50 nations are set to agree on a “DNA barcode” system stored on a global database that will be available to scientists around the world that gives every plant on Earth a unique genetic fingerprint.

“Biodiversity scientists are using DNA technology to unravel mysteries, much like detectives use it to solve crimes,” said David Schindel, executive secretary for the Consortium for the Barcode of Life.

“Barcoding is a tool to identify species faster, more cheaply and more precisely than traditional methods, ” explained Patricia Escalante, head of the zoology department at Mexico’s National University (UNAM), which is hosting the gathering. Mexican researchers are also involved in a network to produce barcodes in key taxonomic groups, such as trees, fungi, bees and aquatic insects.

In an effort to limit the impact on the planet’s biodiversity, Dr Escalante said it was vital to establish a reliable monitoring system. “We need an accurate inventory,” she observed, “to recognize parasites of medical, economic or ecological importance. The technology will be used in a number of ways, including identifying the illegal trade in endangered species.

The agreement will be signed at the third International Barcode of Life conference in Mexico City on Tuesday.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/11/barcoding-the-planets-plant-species.html

Quakes from the 1800s still shaking planet

From New Scientist Magazine

SOME earthquakes can leave a legacy of aftershocks that last for centuries.

Low-level seismic rumbles appear to foreshadow many quakes. Yet not always: the 2008 Sichuan quake in China (pictured) came out of the blue. These rumbles may not be precursors but aftershocks – readjustments at a fault following a larger event, in some cases centuries earlier.

Seth Stein of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and colleagues analysed the rate of fault slip in various tectonic settings. At plate boundaries, motion rapidly “reloads” a fault with new stress and changes conditions there, so tremors that can be clearly identified as aftershocks typically end within a decade, they found. Far away from plate boundaries, however, fault reloading is much slower, and aftershocks can continue for hundreds of years. The New Madrid fault in Missouri, for instance, may be experiencing aftershocks from a quake in the early 1800s (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature08502).

Seismic activity away from plate boundaries “tells you more about where large quakes were than where the next one will be”, says Stein.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427334.600-quakes-from-the-1800s-still-shaking-planet.html

Researchers ask how best to engineer the planet

by Martin LaMonica

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–A group of academics on Friday considered the ultimate engineering challenge: building machines to stabilize the earth’s climate.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology convened a symposium here to discuss the potential benefits and pitfalls of geoengineering, also called climate engineering. Everything from shooting light-blocking particles into the atmosphere to “artificial trees” is being seriously studied, despite trepidation among researchers and opposition from others.

During talks Friday morning, academics said climate engineering techniques are not well understood and, because of the complexity of the global climate system, individual approaches are pockmarked with uncertainties.

Still, speakers at the event said it’s time to step up research in geoengineering to sort out which approaches are worth serious consideration. But they cautioned against expecting easy fixes or abandoning efforts to ratchet down the growth of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere.

“At this point the fear is that if we talk about this, people will stop cutting emissions, which is a rational fear. But the idea that we shouldn’t have a research program would be a real mistake,” said David Keith, the director of the ISEEE Energy and Environmental Systems Group at the University of Calgary during his talk the symposium, which was called Engineering a Cooler Planet.

Speakers said each climate engineering approach needs to be viewed with an associated cost and risk. For example, one relatively inexpensive idea is to shoot particles, called aerosols, into the air in order to block the amount of heat from the sun that reaches the earth’s surface.

The cooling effect from aerosols, such as sulfur dioxide, in the atmosphere is rapid–measured in days or years. But they also impact the planet’s water cycle. Early models show that large-scale efforts to inject aerosols in the atmosphere would likely make certain areas drier and affect the monsoons in India and Asia, said Joyce Penner, a professor of atmosopheric sciences at the University of Michigan.

Even with the risks and uncertainties of climate engineering, speakers said that there is risk with the so-called business-as-usual scenario where the concentration of greenhouse emissions continues to increase at its current pace.

These heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere are forecast to raise average global temperatures, speakers said. But there are a number of regional impacts from global warming, which will likely spur more research in planet-level engineering, said Thomas Karl, the director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.

For example, higher temperatures directly affect water and agriculture. The productivity and ability to reproduce of common crops goes down after certain temperature levels, Karl noted. Pests have a longer time to populate and weeds grow better with more carbon dioxide, too, he said. The west of the U.S. is already feeling the impact of droughts, which will continue if mountain snowpack decreases.

“It’s an important choice to make even if we don’t do a thing–that’s a choice itself,” said Karl. “The consequences of not studying this are enormous–understanding the physical, ecosystem, and societal impacts.”

Engineering for a cooler planet
There are two general approaches to engineering for a cooler planet: reflecting sunlight back into space or removing carbon dioxide from the air and storing it.

Injecting sulfur-based aerosols in the atmosphere have a known cooling effect observed in volcanic eruptions, including Mount Pinatubo in 1991. The approach is more practical than, say, placing mirrors in space. But there still isn’t suitable understanding of how the entire climate system would react, including potential changes to ocean circulation, ocean ecosystems, and land precipitation, said Penner.

Also, blocking sunlight from space does not address the problems caused by higher concentrations of carbon dioxide on earth, notably ocean acidification which makes it more difficult for marine animals with shells or corals to grow, speakers

noted.

(Credit: Philip Boyd, University of Otago in Dunedin.)

Other approaches for reflecting heat back into space include spraying sea salt from special-purpose boats to enhance the reflectivity of clouds or installing white roofs on buildings to bounce more sunlight back into space.

Land-based approaches to reducing greenhouse gas concentrations include growing algae-based fuels at massive scale, storing carbon dioxide in underground geological formations, and making charcoal with plants to create a soil amendment called biochar.

There have also been 12 tests to stimulate plankton growth by “fertilizing” the ocean with iron. The goal is to create a rapid “plankton bloom” which will remove carbon dioxide and sequester it in the ocean. But this technique is difficult to verify and risks transforming the existing ocean ecosystems, said Tim Lenton, professor of earth system science at the University of East Anglia.

Because of the risk and uncertainly, Lenton said he is not convinced that climate engineering proposals to block solar radiation makes sense. On the other hand, land-based approaches create competition with other uses of land, notably agriculture.

One area that clearly needs further research is the life-cycle analysis of different climate engineering idea, Lenton said. For example, dumping iron into the ocean to grow plankton has an associated carbon footprint.

“You’ll find out when you do the full calculation, it’s very difficult to make it carbon negative,” he said. “Because of the emissions in simply deploying the technology, it will veto a number of options.”

The computational models to simulate the regional impact of climate changes need to be improved as well, said David Battisti, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington. In research he presented on Friday, Battisti found that once models took into account ice and ocean effects from aerosol injection, there was a significant variation on the projected impact on temperatures and precipitation.

The symposium at MIT is not the first meeting of scientists to consider geoengineering–the idea has been discussed for decades. But some of the academics on Friday said the current trajectory of climate change argues in favor of at least doing research on climate engineering techniques, even if these projects are ultimately never launched.

There is also a uncertainty around climate policy and how effective policies will be at cutting emissions, noted Keith. “It doesn’t mean that we have to do it. But it means that you do need to have the capability to do it,” he said.

In the near term, research in the field should be focused on ranking different proposals, addressing both scientific and political issues, said Philip Boyd, a professor of ocean biochemistry from the University of Otago in New Zealand.

Boyd has created a model that ranks geoengineering schemes in terms of efficacy, affordability, safety, speed of implementation, and the ability to stop a project. Societal and political factors need to be considered because conflicts over use of land, water, and the ocean creates a “geopolitical mess.”

“We pump up the potential for conflict,” he said. “It’s just a minefield in terms of teasing these apart.”

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10387137-54.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0

Giz Explains: Why Every Country Has a Different F#$%ing Plug

Ok, maybe not every country, but with at least 12 different sockets in widespread use it sure as hell feels like it to anyone who’s ever traveled. So why in the world, literally, are there so many? Funny story!

The more you look at the writhing orgy of plugs in the world, the sillier it seems. If you buy a phone charger at the airport in Florida, you won’t be able to use it when your flight lands in France. If you buy a three-pronged adapter for le portable in Paris, you might not be able to plug it in when your train drops you off in Germany. And when your flight finally bounces to a stop on the runway in London, get ready to buy a comically large adapter to tap into the grid there. But that’s cool! You can take the same adapter to Singapore with you! And parts of Nigeria! Oh yeah, and if said charger doesn’t support 240v power natively, make sure you buy a converter, or else it might explode.

And aside from a few oases, like the fledgling standardization of the Type C Europlug in the European Union, this is the picture all across the world.

I’d hesitate to refer to power sockets as a part of a country’s culture, because they’re plugs—they don’t really mean anything. But in the sense that they’re probably not going to change until they’re forcefully replaced with something wildly new, it’s kind of what they are.

There are around 12 major plug types in use today, each of which goes by whatever name their adoptive countries choose. For our purposes, we’re going to stick with U.S. Department of Commerce International Trade Administration names (PDF), which are neat and alphabetical: America uses A and B plugs! Turkey uses type C! Etc. Thing is, these names are arbitrary: the letters are just assigned to make talking about these plugs less confusing—they don’t actually mandate anything. They’re not standards, in any meaningful sense of the word.

And even worse, these sockets are divided into two main groups: the 110-120v fellas, like the the ones we use in North America, and the 220-240v plugs, like most of the rest of the world uses. It’s not that the plugs and sockets themselves are somehow tied to one voltage or another, but the devices and power grids they’re attached to probably are.

How This Happened

The history of the voltage split is a pretty short story, and one you’ve probably heard bits and pieces of before. Edison’s early experiments with direct current (DC) power in the late 1800s netted the first useful mainstream applications for electricity, but suffered from a tendency to lose voltage over long distances. Nonetheless, when Nikola Tesla invented a means of long-distance transmission with alternating current (AC) power, he was doing so in direct competition with Edison’s technology, which happened to be 110v. He stuck with that. By the time people started to realize that 240v power might not be such a bad idea for the US, it was the 1950s, and switching was out of the question.

Words were exchanged, elephants were electrocuted, and eventually, the debate was settled: AC power was the only option, and national standardization started in earnest. Westinghouse Electric, the first company to buy Tesla’s patents for power transmission, settled on an easy standard: 60Hz, and 110v. In Europe—Germany, specifically—a company called BEW exercised their monopoly to push things a little further. They settled somewhat arbitrarily on a 50Hz frequency, but more importantly jacked voltages up to 240, because, you know, MORE POWER. And so, the 240 standard slowly spread to the rest of the continent. All this happened before the turn of the century, by the way. It’s an old beef.

For decades after the first standards, newfangled el-ec-trick-al dee-vices had to be patched directly into your house’s wiring, which today sounds like a terrifying prospect. Then, too, it was: Harvey Hubbell’s “Separable Attachment Plug“—which essentially allowed for non-bulb devices to be plugged into a light socket for power—was designed with a simple intention:

My invention has for its object to…do away with the possibility of arcing or sparking in making connection, so that electrical power in buildings may be utilized by persons having no electrical knowledge or skill.

Thanks, Harvey! He later adapted the original design to include a two-pronged flat-blade plug, which itself was refined into a three-pronged plug—the third prong is for grounding—by a guy named Philip Labre in 1928. This design saw a few changes over the years too, but it’s pretty much the type Americans use now.

Here’s the thing: Stories like that of Harvey Hubbell’s plug were unfolding all over the world, each with their own twist on the concept. This was before electronics were globalized, and before country-to-country plug compatibility really mattered. The voltage debate had been pared down to two, which made life a bit easier for power companies to set up shop across the world. But once they were set up, who cared what style plug their customers used? What were you gonna do, lug your new vacuum cleaner across the ocean on a boat? Early efforts to standardize the plug by organizations like the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) had trouble taking hold—who were they to tell a country which plug to adopt?—and what little progress they did make was shattered by the Second World War.

Take the British plug. Today, it’s a huge, three-pronged beast with a fuse built right into it—one of the weirder plugs in the world, to anyone who’s had a chance to use one. But it isn’t Britain’s first plug, or even their first proprietary plug. In the early 1900s the Isles’ cords were capped with the British Standard 546, or Type D hardware, which actually include six subversions of its own, all of which were physically incompatible with one another. This worked out fine until the Second World War, when they got the shit bombed out of them by Germany, and had to rebuild entire swaths of the country in the midst of a severe shortage of basic building supplies— copper, in particular. This made rewiring stuff an expensive proposition, so the government was all, “we need a new plug, stat!”

Here was the pitch: Instead of wiring each socket to a fuseboard somewhere in the house, which would take quite a bit of wire, why not just daisy-chain them together on one wire, and put the fuses in each plug? Hey presto, copper shortage, solved. This was called the British Standard 1363, and you can still find them dangling from wires today. Notice how even in the 1940s and ’50s—practically yesterday!—the UK was devising a new type of plug without any regard for the rest of the world.

Now imagine every other developed country in the world doing the same thing, with a totally different set of historical circumstances. That’s how we ended up here, blowing fuses in our Paris hotel rooms because our travel adapters’ voltage warning were inexplicably written in Cyrillic. Oh, and it gets worse.

You know how the British had control over India for, like, ninety years? Well, along with exporting cricket and inflicting unquantifiable cultural damage, they showed the subcontinent how to plug stuff in, the British way! Problem is, they left in 1947. The BS 1363 plug—the new one—wasn’t introduced until 1946, and didn’t see widespread adoption until a few years later. So India still uses the old British plug, as does Sri Lanka, Nepal and Namibia. Basically, the best way to guess who’s got which socket is to brush up on your WW1/WW2 history, and to have a deep passion for postcolonial literature. No, really.

Is There Any Hope for the Future?

No. I talked to Gabriela Ehrlich, head of communications for the International Electrotechnical Commission, which is still doing its thing over in Switzerland, and the outlook isn’t great. “There are standards, and there is a plug that has been designed. The problem is, really, everyone’s invested in their own system. It’s difficult to get away from that.”

When Holland’s International Questions Commission first teamed up with the IEC to form a committee to talk about this exact problem in 1934. Meetings were stalled, there was some resistance, blah blah blah, and the committee was delayed until 1940. Then a war—a World War, even!—threw a stick in the committee’s spokes, (or a fork in their socket? No?), and the issue was effectively dropped until about 1950, when the IEC realized that there were “limited prospects for any agreement even in this limited geographical region (Europe).” It’d be expensive to tear out everyone’s sockets, and the need didn’t feel that urgent, I guess.

Plus, the IEC can’t force anyone to do anything—they’re sort of like the UN General Assembly for electronics standards, which means they can issue them, but nobody has to follow them, no matter how good they are. As time passed, populations grew, and hundred of millions of sockets were installed all over the world. The prospect of switching hardware looked more and more ridiculous. Who would pay for it? Why would a country want to change? Wouldn’t the interim, with mixed plug standards in the same country, be dangerous?

But the IEC didn’t quite abandon hope, quietly pushing for a standard plug for decades after. And they even came up with some! In the late 80s, they came up with the IEC 60906 plug, a little, round-pronged number for 240v countries. Then they codified a flat-pronged plug for 110-120v countries, which happened to be perfectly compatible with the one we already use in the US. As of today, Brazil is the only country that even plans to adopt the IEC 60906, so, uh, there’s that.

I asked Gabriela if there was any hope, any hope at all, for a future where plugs could just get along:

Maybe in the future you’ll have induction charging; you have a device planted into your wall, and you have a [wireless] charging mechanism.

Last time I saw a wireless power prototype was at the Intel Developer Forum in 2008, and it looked like a science fair project: It consisted of two giant coils, just inches apart, which transmitted enough electricity to light a 40w light bulb. So yeah, we’ll get this power plug problem all sorted by oh, let’s say, 2050?

She took care to emphasize that the standards are still there for people to adopt, so countries could jump onboard, but even in a best-case scenario, for as long as we use wires we’ll have at least two standards to deal with—a 110-120v flat plug and the 240-250v round plug. For now, the Commission is taking a more practical approach to dealing with the problem, issuing specs for things like laptop power bricks, which can handle both voltages and come with interchangeable lead wires, as well as as something near and dear to our hearts: “We have to move forward into plugs we can really control,” Gabriela told me. She means new stuff like USB, which is turning into the de facto gadget charging standard. The most we can hope for is a future where AC outlets are invisible to us, sending power to newer, more universal plugs. My phone’ll charge via USB just as well in Sub-Saharan Africa as it will in New York City; just give me the port.

In the meantime, this means that things really aren’t going to change. Your Walmart shaver will still die if you plug it into a European socket with a bare adapter, Indians will still be reminded of the British Empire every time they unplug a laptop, Israel will have their own plug which works nowhere else in the world, and El Salvador, without a national standard, will continue to wrestle with 10 different kinds of plug.

In other words, sorry.

Many thanks to Gabriela Ehrlich and the IEC, as well as the Institute for Engineering and Technology and Wiring Matters (PDF), and USC Viterbi’s illumin review. Map adapted from Wikimedia Commons by Intern Kyle

Still something you wanna know? Still can’t figure out how to plug in your Bosnian knockoff iPhone? Send questions, tips, addenda or complaints to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.

Send an email to John Herrman, the author of this post, at jherrman@gizmodo.com.

http://gizmodo.com/5391271/giz-explains-why-every-country-has-a-different-fing-plug?skyline=true&s=x

Savior Bud Sucks Moisture From Trees for Drinking Water

Image via Yanko

For dry areas, every drop of drinking water is important. Moisture collectors are a big help, and this concept design, modestly called the Savior Bud, is one idea to help gather up moisture from a tree’s respiratory process and create drinking water.

Shown off at Yanko Design, the Savior Bud – designed specifically for African landscapes – is hung from a tree branch with the tree’s leaves inside. It collects the moisture expelled from the leaves.

The process goes like this:1. Find a broadleaf tree with lots of leaves.

2. Opening the Savior Bud like a giant clamp, surround a few leaves, and release. The Savior Bud should now be containing the leaves like you see in the picture below, sort of like a greenhouse.

3. In about four hours, the leaves will have produced about one cup of water. Turning the bottom of the bud like a faucet will release the water to be put into a separate container for drinking.

An obvious issue is hanging the device from a tree that won’t also expel any toxins along with moisture.

More on Gathering Water
Fog & Dew Collectors: Design For A Thirsty World
The Low Down on Home Water Makers and 7 to Choose From
Out of Water? How We Might Make More

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/10/savior-bud-sucks-moisture-from-trees-for-drinking-water.php

EU SARTRE Project Targets Autonomous Road Trains; Enhanced Safety and Lower Fuel Consumption

An autonomous road train as envisioned by SARTRE.

The new EU project SARTRE (Safe Road Trains for the Environment) project will develop and test technology for vehicles that can drive themselves in long road trains on motorways. This technology has the potential to improve traffic flow and journey times, offer greater comfort to drivers, reduce accidents, and improve fuel consumption and hence lower CO₂ emissions. The energy saving resulting from such a road train is expected to be in the region of 20%, depending upon vehicle spacing and geometry.

Part-funded by the European Commission under the Framework 7 program, SARTRE will be led by Ricardo UK Ltd and will be a collaboration between Idiada and Robotiker-Tecnalia of Spain; Institut für Kraftfahrwesen Aachen (IKA) of Germany; and SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden, Volvo Car Corporation and Volvo Technology of Sweden.

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The SARTRE project brings together a unique mix of technologies, skills and expertise from European industry and academia, with the aim of encouraging the development of safe and environmentally effective road trains. By developing and implementing the technology at a vehicle level, SARTRE aims to realize the potentially very significant safety and environmental benefits of road trains without the need to invest in changes to road infrastructure.

—Tom Robinson, Ricardo UK, SARTRE project coordinator

SARTRE aims to encourage a step change in personal transport usage through the development of safe environmental road trains (platoons). Systems will be developed in prototype form that will facilitate the safe adoption of road trains on un-modified public highways with full interaction with non-platoon vehicles. The SARTRE project formally started in September 2009 and will run for a total of three years. Specific objectives of the project are:

1. To define a set of acceptable platooning strategies that will allow road trains to operate on public highways without changes to the road and roadside infrastructure.
2. To enhance, develop and integrate technologies for a prototype platooning system such that the defined strategies can be assessed under real world scenarios.
3. To demonstrate how the use of platoons can lead to environmental, safety and congestion improvements.
4. To illustrate how a new business model can be used to encourage the use of platoons with benefits to both lead vehicle operators and to platoon subscribers.

The basic concept is that each road train or platoon will have a lead vehicle that drives exactly as normal, with full control of all the various functions. This lead vehicle is driven by an experienced driver who is thoroughly familiar with the route. For instance, the lead may be taken by a taxi, a bus or a truck. Each such road train will consist of six to eight vehicles.

As the participants meet, each vehicle’s navigation system is used to join the convoy, where the autonomous driving program then takes over. A driver approaching his destination takes over control of his own vehicle, leaves the convoy by exiting off to the side and then continues on his own to his destination. The other vehicles in the road train close the gap and continue on their way until the convoy splits up.

The first test cars equipped with this technology will roll on test tracks as early as 2011. The vehicles will be equipped with a navigation system and a transmitter/receiver unit that communicates with a lead vehicle. Since the system is built into the cars, there is no need to extend the infrastructure along the existing road network.

I do appreciate that many people feel this sounds like Utopia. However, this type of autonomous driving actually doesn’t require any hocus-pocus technology, and no investment in infrastructure. Instead, the emphasis is on development and on adapting technology that is already in existence. In addition, we must carry out comprehensive testing to verify our high demands on safety.

—Erik Coelingh, technical director of Active Safety Functions at Volvo Cars

If successful, the benefits from SARTRE are expected to be significant. The estimated fuel consumption saving for high speed highway operation of road trains is in the region of 20 percent depending on vehicle spacing and geometry. Safety benefits will arise from the reduction of accidents caused by driver action and driver fatigue. The utilization of existing road capacity will also be increased with a potential consequential reduction in journey times. For users of the technology, the practical attractions of a smoother, more predicable and lower cost journey which offers the opportunity of additional free time, will be considerable.

Researchers see road trains primarily as a major benefit to commuters who cover long distances by motorway every day, but they will also be of potential benefit to trucks, buses, coaches vans and other commercial vehicle types.

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2009/10/sartre.html

H1N1 Running Rampant Amid Shortage of Vaccine

By Marrecca Fiore

H1N1 flu is running rampant throughout the U.S., and the country will have received only 25 percent of the vaccine that was expected by the end of October, Sen. Joe Lieberman told a Senate committee hearing Wednesday.

The grim news was the focus of a special hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, at which three Cabinet secretaries were called to address the panel: Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

As of last week, there were more than 5,000 cases of flu reported, compared to 7 cases in October of last year. More than 800 people have died from H1N1, including 86 children, according to the latest reports from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“It’s moved with alarming speed and took an exceptionally high toll at a time of year when we don’t encounter a high number of flu cases,” said Lieberman, I-Conn, who leads the Senate’s homeland security committee. “Flu spikes typically occur in January. We’re in October … and the number of cases is higher than what we usually see at the flu’s peak in January.”

//

Full Coverage H1N1: Click here

LiveShots Blog: H1N1

CDC officials say there should be widespread availability of the vaccine by mid-November.

Sebelius blamed the vaccine shortage on lower than predicted yields from vaccine manufacturers and on some manufacturing “glitches” that have occurred since May. She said the yields are now more in line with original predictions and that any glitches have been corrected.

“We anticipate a robust production line moving forward,” she said.

She said the vaccine that has been received by the U.S. is safe and “right on target” as far as matching the H1N1 strain that is circulating and that most people will require just one vaccination rather than the two originally predicted. Two vaccinations are recommended for children under the age of 10.

Napolitano said federal officials had assumed there would be a lag in vaccine availability and a spike in the flu, so officials are not surprised that H1N1 has spiked at a time when there is not enough vaccine available.

Sebelius said the country is working with five manufacturers to get the vaccine out to the states as quickly as possible and that within another month there should be enough vaccines available for whomever wants to get one. She said so far states have requested 11 millions doses of H1N1 vaccine and the government is shipping it out to states as it becomes available.

Updated guidance has been offered to schools, governments and the private sector on how to handle outbreaks, Napolitano said.

“We could have a surge before everyone is vaccinated and we need to keep the country moving,” she said.

The words came offered little comfort to senators.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said she is concerned about the lack of vaccine — her state is only set to receive another 340,000 doses next week. She’s also concerned that there’s not enough pediatric Tamiflu available. Collins said this is of particular worry because children are at high-risk for complications and death from the H1N1 flu virus.

In fact, Sebelius said half of flu hospitalizations this year have involved people under the age of 25, and 90 percent of deaths have occurred in people under the age of 65. This is the opposite of what usually happens in a typical flu season when most hospitalizations and deaths typically involve people over the age of 65.

Lieberman said he is concerned that hospitals are not equipped to handle widespread outbreaks of the virus. He said some health officials predicted as many 300,000 flu patients could require ICU treatment in hospitals this year. Typically, about 200,000 people are hospitalized with influenza each flu season, and less than half require ICU treatment.

“I’m worried the virus is getting ahead of the public health system’s ability to control it,” Lieberman said.

A study released Tuesday from Purdue University said it may be too late for the H1N1 vaccine to be of any benefit to Americans, as they may contract the virus before the vaccine takes effect. The study said most people would be infected during the month of October at a time when the vaccine is not available to most Americans.

Click here read more about that study.

Sebelius disagreed and said government health officials anticipate a spike in both seasonal and H1N1 cases going forward, not a drop off — meaning that the vaccine will not reach the majority of Americans too late. She added that even those infected with H1N1 in the spring should consider getting the vaccine once widespread availabilty is made.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,568838,00.html

Bill would double cap on H-1B visas

My Question is why? – if we have an high unemployment rate stateside, why increase H-1B visas?  Use the available workers, even if they need a bit of training in new areas.

By Grant Gross

A bill introduced in the U.S. Congress would double the number of immigrant worker visas available each year under the H-1B program, earning the legislation praise from Microsoft.

The Innovation Employment Act, introduced by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, (D-Ariz.), late Thursday, would increase the cap in H-1B visas from 65,000 a year to 130,000 a year. In addition, there would be no cap on H-1B applications for foreign graduate students attending U.S. colleges and studying science, technology and related fields. Currently, there’s a 20,000-a-year cap on visas for graduate students in all fields.

The legislation would increase the H-1B cap to 180,000 in the years 2010 to 2015 if the 130,000 cap is reached the year before.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates called for an increase in the H-1B visa cap while testifying before the House of Representatives Science and Technology Committee Wednesday. In recent years, the H-1B cap has been filled days — or even the same day — after the government opened the application period.

“We provide the world’s best universities … and the students are not allowed to stay and work in the country,” Gates said Wednesday. “The fact is, [other countries'] smartest people want to come here and that’s a huge advantage to us, and in a sense, we’re turning them away.”

Microsoft praised Giffords’ bill. The legislation “would boost America’s competitiveness by giving U.S. employers the flexibility they need to hire the best talent available to fill a severe shortage of qualified U.S. high-skilled workers,” Jack Krumholtz, management director of federal government affairs for Microsoft, said in a statement. The bill would also increase U.S. jobs; Microsoft hires an additional four people to support each H-1B worker, Krumholtz said.

The U.S. government will begin accepting visa applications for next year in April, and Microsoft predicted the cap would be filled the same day, as it was in 2007. “The current system effectively prevents American companies from hiring this year’s foreign-born university graduates,” Krumholtz added.

The Giffords’ bill would also increase penalties for H-1B fraud and allows the U.S. Department of Labor to reject H-1B applications for “clear indicators of fraud,” in addition the current rule of rejecting only applications that are inaccurate or incomplete. The bill puts important safeguards on the H-1B program in place, said C.J. Karamargin, a spokesman for Giffords.

The bill would prohibit companies from hiring H-1B workers, then outsourcing them to other companies, he said. H-1B opponents have complained that outsourcing companies are among the top users of H-1B visas.

The would also prohibit companies with more than 50 employees that have more than half of their staff as H-1B workers from hiring more H-1Bs, and it would prohibit employers from advertising jobs as available only to H-1B workers, Karamargin said. “The bill would put some teeth in the Department of Labor’s oversight role” of the program, he said.

Continue reading – http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139623/Bill_would_double_cap_on_H_1B_visas

Afghanistan Runoff Accepted By Hamid Karzai, Will Be November 7

TODD PITMAN and HEIDI VOGT

KABUL — Afghanistan’s election commission Tuesday ordered a Nov. 7 runoff in the disputed presidential poll after a fraud investigation dropped incumbent Hamid Karzai’s votes below 50 percent of the total. Karzai accepted the finding and agreed to a second-round vote.

The announcement came two months to the day after the first-round vote and follows weeks of political uncertainty at a time when Taliban strength is growing.

Karzai said final results showing the need for a runoff were “legitimate, legal and according to the constitution of Afghanistan.”

The Afghan leader spoke at a press conference alongside U.S. Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the head of the U.N. in Afghanistan, Kai Eide – a sign of the intense international pressure which preceded the announcement.

Karzai and Kerry were in talks as late as Tuesday afternoon, suggesting that up until the last moment there was a chance he would return to insisting on a first-round victory.

President Barack Obama welcomed Karzai’s willingness to run in a new election against his main rival Abdullah Abdullah, saying his decision “established an important precedent for Afghanistan’s new democracy.”

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown also commended Karzai, as did U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Ban, however, also stressed that a runoff will be a “huge challenge” and promised more help from the world body.

Shortly before the press conference, the chairman of the Independent Election Commission, Azizullah Lodin, said the commission, which organized the Aug. 20 vote, did not want to “leave the people of Afghanistan in uncertainty” any longer. He said Karzai no longer had more than 50 percent of the vote needed for a first-round victory and ordered a Nov. 7 runoff.

(For More Details) - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/20/afghanistan-runoff-necess_n_326900.html

Scientists Integrate Nitrogen Cycle into Climate Model; Results Suggests Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations May End Up Higher Than Expected

Schematic illustrating feedback pathways coupling terrestrial carbon and nitrogen cycles in the integrated model. Blue arrows show, in general, the processes represented in previous carbon-only land model components. Orange arrows show the additional processes represented in the coupled carbon-nitrogen land model, differentiated here between rapid internal cycling (solid arrows), and slower fluxes between land pools, the atmosphere, and ground water (dashed arrows). Source: Thornton et al. (2009)

A team of climate scientists from eight US national labs and academic institutions have successfully incorporated the nitrogen cycle into global simulations for climate change for the first time, questioning previous assumptions regarding carbon feedback and potentially helping to refine model forecasts about global warming.

The results illustrate the complexity of climate modeling by demonstrating how natural processes still have a strong effect on the carbon cycle and climate simulations. In this case, scientists found that the rate of climate change over the next century could be higher than previously anticipated when the requirement of plant nutrients are included in the climate model.

<!––>The study, by scientists from institutions including the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL); the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR); the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL); Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; UC Irvine; Cornell University; UC Berkeley; and the University of Kansas, was published 8 October in Biogeosciences, an interactive open access journal of the European Geosciences Union.

Inclusion of fundamental ecological interactions between carbon and nitrogen cycles in the land component of an atmosphere-ocean general circulation model (AOGCM) leads to decreased carbon uptake associated with CO₂ fertilization, and increased carbon uptake associated with warming of the climate system. The balance of these two opposing effects is to reduce the fraction of anthropogenic CO₂ predicted to be sequestered in land ecosystems.

—Thornton et al. (2009)

To date, climate models have ignored the nutrient requirements for new vegetation growth, assuming that all plants on earth had access to as much nutrient flow as needed. By taking the natural demand for nutrients into account, the authors have shown that the stimulation of plant growth over the coming century may be two to three times smaller than previously predicted.

However, this reduction in growth is partially offset by another effect on the nitrogen cycle: an increase in the availability of nutrients resulting from an accelerated rate of decomposition of dead plants and other organic matter that occurs with a rise in temperature.

Combining these two effects, the authors discovered that the increased availability of nutrients from more rapid decomposition did not counterbalance the reduced level of plant growth calculated by natural nutrient limitations; therefore less new growth and higher atmospheric CO₂ concentrations are expected.

…we note that the present simulations have not included the influence of disturbance history and land use. These factors have been shown to interact strongly with C-N dynamics. We are currently exploring these interactions in the context of the fully-coupled climate system model, and we expect that these interactions will result in larger values of atmospheric CO₂ concentration than predicted here.

—Thornton et al. (2009)

ORNL’s Peter Thornton, lead author of the paper, describes the inclusion of these processes as a necessary step to improve the accuracy of climate change assessments.

We’ve shown that if all of the global modeling groups were to include some kind of nutrient dynamics, the range of model predictions would shrink because of the constraining effects of the carbon nutrient limitations, even though it’s a more complex model.

—Peter Thornton

The inclusion of the nitrogen cycle marks one more step toward a more realistic prediction for the future of the earth’s climate. Nevertheless, potentially significant processes and dynamics are still missing from the simulations. Thornton also stresses the importance of long-term observation so scientists can better understand and model these processes.

A 15-year study of the role nitrogen plays in plant nutrition at Harvard Forest was an important observational source used to test their mathematical representation of the nitrogen cycle—a long experiment by any standards, but still an experiment that, according to Thornton, could improve the accuracy of the simulation if conducted even longer.

Other shortcomings of climate simulations include the disregard of changing vegetation patterns due to human land use and potential shifts in types of vegetation that might occur under a changing climate, although both topics are the focus of ongoing studies.

The research was funded by the DOE Office of Science. Additional resources were contributed by NASA Earth Science Enterprise, Terrestrial Ecology Program; National Center for Atmospheric Research through the NCAR Community Climate System Modeling program and the NCAR Biogeosciences program.

Resources

• P. E. Thornton, S. C. Doney, K. Lindsay, J. K. Moore, N. Mahowald, J. T. Randerson, I. Fung, J.-F. Lamarque, J. J. Feddema, and Y.-H. Lee (2009) Carbon-nitrogen interactions regulate climate-carbon cycle feedbacks: results from an atmosphere-ocean general circulation model. Biogeosciences, 6, 2099-2120

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2009/10/nitrogen.html