The biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history lies at anchor east of Singapore. Never before photographed, it is bigger than the U.S. and British navies combined but has no crew, no cargo and no destination – and is why your Christmas stocking may be on the light side this year The ‘ghost fleet’ near Singapore The ‘ghost fleet’ near Singapore. The world’s ship owners and government economists would prefer you not to see this symbol of the depths of the plague still crippling the world’s economies The tropical waters that lap the jungle shores of southern Malaysia could not be described as a paradisical shimmering turquoise. They are more of a dark, soupy green. They also carry a suspicious smell. Not that this is of any concern to the lone Indian face that has just peeped anxiously down at me from the rusting deck of a towering container ship; he is more disturbed by the fact that I may be a pirate, which, right now, on top of everything else, is the last thing he needs. His appearance, in a peaked cap and uniform, seems rather odd; an o fficer without […]
BP, the UK energy group, has discovered a ‘giant oilfield in the Gulf of Mexico that shows a new frontier opening up for US oil production. The Tiber field, in more than 1,200m of water about 250 miles south-east of Houston, is one of the biggest discoveries in recent years. It is thought to hold at least 3bn barrels of oil – of which about 500m would be recoverable with today’s technology – and could be significantly larger. The field was found by the deepest oil well ever drilled, reaching more than 9.4km – almost six miles – below the sea bed. BP is pioneering the exploration of the Lower Tertiary or Paleogene area of the Gulf of Mexico, which lies deeper than the strata that provide most of the region’s known reserves. The Tiber discovery, following the Kaskida field found in 2006 – which is also believed to hold 3bn-plus barrels of oil – is further evidence that there are large volumes yet to be found in the Gulf. BP believes there could be a further 20bn barrels or more in the deep water, on top of the US’s proved reserves of about 30bn […]
The ability to digest the milk sugar lactose first evolved in dairy farming communities in central Europe, not in more northern groups as was previously thought, finds a new study led by UCL (University College London) scientists published in the journal PLoS Computational Biology. The genetic change that enabled early Europeans to drink milk without getting sick has been mapped to dairying farmers who lived around 7,500 years ago in a region between the central Balkans and central Europe. Previously, it was thought that natural selection favoured milk drinkers only in more northern regions because of their greater need for vitamin D in their diet. People living in most parts of the world make vitamin D when sunlight hits the skin, but in northern latitudes there isn’t enough sunlight to do this for most of the year. In the collaborative study, the team used a computer simulation model to explore the spread of lactase persistence, dairy farming, other food gathering practices and genes in Europe. The model integrated genetic and archaeological data using newly developed statistical approaches. Professor Mark Thomas, UCL Genetics, Evolution and Environment, says: ‘Most adults worldwide do not produce the enzyme lactase and so are […]
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar launched the Obama administration’s first coordinated response to the impacts of climate change Monday, which he said would both monitor how global warming is altering the nation’s landscape and help the country cope with those changes. Salazar will lead a new ‘climate change response council’ that will coordinate action among the department’s eight bureaus and offices. A secretarial order will create eight ‘regional climate change response centers’ in areas ranging from Alaska to the Northeast and build landscape conservation cooperatives that will create strategies for the eight regions with the help of state and local groups, and other federal agencies. Interior manages one-fifth of the nation’s land mass and nearly 1.7 billion acres on the Outer Continental Shelf. ‘The Department of Interior must continue to change how it does business and respond to the issues of energy and climate change, which I see as the signature issues of the 21st century,’ Salazar said at a news conference. ‘The time this department operated under silos is a time that’s over.’ To curb climate change, Interior will explore methods to sequester carbon by storing it underground and by absorbing it through forests and rangelands, […]
Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, has called on politicians to ditch GDP as a measure of national wealth and replace it with one that quantifies well-being alongside economic strength. Mr Sarkozy claimed the focus on GDP as the main measure of prosperity had helped to trigger the financial crisis. Speaking at the launch of a report he commissioned from Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz , President Sarkozy said France would pioneer the new technique and urge other countries to follow suit. ‘GDP has increasingly become used as a measure of societal well-being, and changes in the structure of the economy and our society have made it an increasingly poor one,’ Mr Stiglitz said. ‘It is time for our statistics system to put more emphasis on measuring the well-being of the population than on economic production.’ Increased household debt may drive up output numbers, without generating real growth in wealth, Mr Stiglitz argued. Similarly, the numbers do not take into account government contribution to economic output, which ranges from 39pc in the US to 48pc in France, or difficulties in estimating improvements in the quality of products such as cars. Mr Sarkozy claimed the focus […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
