BAGHDAD — A bomb in a sprawling Shiite Muslim neighborhood of Baghdad killed at least 72 people and wounded more than 135 Wednesday, highlighting the danger that Iraq will slip back into violence after a deadline for U.S. combat troops to leave its cities — now less than a week away. It was unclear who was responsible for the bomb, which was hidden in a motorcycle with a vegetable cart attached. Some blamed Sunni insurgents from Al Qaeda in Iraq or remnants of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, but others raised the possibility that the bombing was the result of disputes among Shiite factions. In either case, such bloodshed represented a major challenge for Prime Minister Nouri Maliki. Maliki, a Shiite, has asserted that Iraqi forces are ready to take on responsibility for security with limited help from the U.S. military. His government has declared June 30, the deadline for U.S. troops to pull back from Iraq’s cities, a national holiday. Maliki has acknowledged there will be attacks in the days ahead, but insists Iraqi forces are up to the task. Last week, the senior U.S. military commander in Iraq, Gen. Ray Odierno, expressed confidence in the Iraqi […]
BERLIN — A bird-bone flute unearthed in a German cave was carved some 35,000 years ago and is the oldest handcrafted musical instrument yet discovered, archaeologists say, offering the latest evidence that early modern humans in Europe had established a complex and creative culture. A team led by University of Tuebingen archaeologist Nicholas Conard assembled the flute from 12 pieces of griffon vulture bone scattered in a small plot of the Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany. Together, the pieces comprise a 8.6-inch (22-centimeter) instrument with five holes and a notched end. Conard said the flute was 35,000 years old. ‘It’s unambiguously the oldest instrument in the world,’ Conard told The Associated Press this week. His findings were published online Wednesday by the journal Nature. The reassembled instrument was too fragile to be played, but Conard worked with another academic to make a copy of it from the same type of bone and to play it and produce recordings of songs such as ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ Other archaeologists agreed with Conard’s assessment. April Nowell, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Victoria in Canada, said the flute predates previously discovered instruments ‘but the dates […]
Scientists are coming ever closer to understanding the cellular navigation tools that guide birds in their unerring, globe-spanning migrations. The latest piece of the puzzle is superoxide, an oxygen molecule that may combine with light-sensitive proteins to form an in-eye compass, allowing birds to see Earth’s magnetic field. ‘It connects from the subatomic world to a whole bird flying,’ said Michael Edidin, an editor of Biphysical Journal, which published the study last week. ‘That’s exciting!’ The superoxide theory is proposed by Biophysicist Klaus Schulten of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, lead author of the study and a pioneer in avian magnetoreception. Schulten first hypothesized in 1978 that some sort of biochemical reaction took place in birds’ eyes, most likely producing electrons whose spin was affected by subtle magnetic gradients. In 2000, Schulten refined this model, suggesting that the compass contained a photoreceptor protein called cryptochrome, which reacted with an as-yet-unidentified molecule to produce pairs of electrons that existed in a state of quantum entanglement – spatially separated, but each still able to affect the other. According to this model, when a photon hits the compass, entangled electrons are scattered to different parts of the […]
Banning or restricting the use of certain types of fishing gear could help the world’s coral reefs and their fish populations survive the onslaughts of climate change according to a study by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and other groups. The international team of scientists has proposed that bans on fishing gear – like spear guns, fish traps, and beach seine nets – could aid in the recovery of reefs and fish populations hard hit by coral bleaching events. Around the world corals have been dying at alarming rates, due to unusually warm water events resulting from global warming. Research carried out in Kenya and Papua New Guinea has shown that certain types of gear are more damaging to corals, to coral-dependent fish and to the key species of fish that are needed to help reefs recover from bleaching or storm damage. ‘This is creating a double jeopardy for both the corals and certain types of reef fish. They are already on the edge because of overfishing- and the additional impact caused by a bleaching can push them over Dr Cinner explains. The result […]
NEW YORK — The solar energy industry will grow faster than expected during the next few years as American utilities invest heavily in large-scale solar farms, analysts with Barclays Capital said Tuesday in a research note. Barclays analyst Vishal Shah noted that demand for utility-scale solar projects could eventually make up half of the U.S. market. Major utilities could install about 5 gigawatts of solar photovoltaic projects during the next three years, the analyst said. Solar power is still a tiny player on the American electrical grid, however. The utility-scale projects currently in operation in the U.S. provide 444 megawatts of energy to the grid according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. That’s enough to power 2.8 million homes, and it’s only a fraction of the power generated by another alternative energy source, the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station near Phoenix. That amount is expected to jump more than 12-fold in the next few years, however, with dozens of new solar plants under development in California, Arizona, Florida and Hawaii. Shah said SunPower Corporation, First Solar Inc., Suntech Power Holdings Co. and Yingli Green Energy will be the primary players in utility-scale projects in […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
