Where Has All the Nitrogen Gone?

Where Has All the Nitrogen Gone? - The federal government isn’t the only group with a problem balancing its budget these days. Oceanographers have a budget problem too. Nitrogen — an essential nutrient for all life on the planet — is at the heart of this budget crisis. Some estimates of the amount of nitrogen leaving the ocean exceed estimates of the amount of nitrogen coming in by several hundred teragrams (that’s one billion kilograms) per year.

Does this mean that the ocean is actually losing nitrogen? Probably not, but it does mean that we don’t have a good understanding of where in the ocean nitrogen is coming and going. Over the next five weeks, I will be joining a team of researchers from around the world on a research cruise to the eastern tropical South Pacific off the coast of Chile to see if this could be one area where the “missing” nitrogen could be entering the ocean.

I just arrived in the port of Valparaíso, Chile, after a nearly 24-hour journey from Cape Cod, Mass. My home for the next five weeks is the 279-foot-long research vessel Melville, which is owned by the United States Navy and operated by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Our planned cruise track looks like a large rectangle with the long sides on the top and bottom. Along the way we’ll stop at six “stations,” or geographic way points, to collect water, deploy sampling devices, and hopefully retrieve some samplers we left out over a year ago. All our efforts will be centered around nitrogen.

Carolyn Buchwald Looking toward Valparaíso from the deck of the Melville.

Nitrogen can make it into the ocean in one of three ways: it can be deposited as particles from the atmosphere, it can come from the land via rivers or groundwater, or it can be taken directly from the atmosphere by specialized microscopic organisms that break the very strong chemical bond between two nitrogen atoms. It is this last pathway, called nitrogen fixation, that will be the focus of the cruise.

Nitrogen fixation, like every other major transformation in the nitrogen cycle, is carried out by microorganisms — bacteria and archaea. Though nitrogen fixation is the main topic of the cruise, many of the 20 researchers on board, including me, will be studying other parts of the nitrogen cycle to try to learn more about how the different reactions, and different microbes, work together.

Just as microbes work together, an essential part of oceanographic research is working with other scientists, and I’ll be doing lots of it on this cruise. One of the most important people for my work is Carly Buchwald, a graduate student in the Woods Hole-M.I.T. Joint Program. Carly and I began our work for this year’s cruise back in January, when we started planning details of our sampling plan and experiments with Karen Casciotti, an assistant professor at Stanford University and the principal investigator for the project. We’ll also be helping out with the larger goals of the cruise, collecting samples that will be used by scientists from the University of Southern California and the University of Miami to assemble a nitrogen budget for this region.

Our equipment and supplies left Los Angeles in a shipping container about two months ago. Before our ship leaves on Wednesday, our job is to unload the container and set up our laboratory space. We need to be ready to take and process samples by the time we arrive at the first station, 900 nautical miles and three days of steaming from the coast. The ship’s crew will also be busy, filling the hold with food and supplies, and fueling up for our 35 days at sea. I look forward to writing about the details of our scientific work, and of life at sea ( nytimes.com )

READ MORE - Where Has All the Nitrogen Gone?

Earth Hour Aims for Hope in Darkened World

Earth Hour Aims for Hope in Darkened World - Lights will go out around the world Saturday with hundreds of millions of people set to take part in the Earth Hour climate change campaign, which this year will also mark Japan’s earthquake and tsunami.

From across the Pacific, to Australia, Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas, iconic landmarks such as the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, New York’s Empire State building and the Eiffel Tower in Paris will go dark.

“Earth Hour is like a New Year’s Eve,” Earth Hour co-founder and executive director Andy Ridley told AFP from the group’s Sydney office.

“It’s meant to be a celebration — it’s a bit different this year because of the Japan stuff — but it’s meant to be about hope and the future.”

The full moon rises behind the statue of Mahathma Gandhi in Hyderabad on March 19, 2011. Full Moons vary in size because of the oval shape of the Moons orbit. It is an ellipse with one side (perigee) about 50,000 km closer to Earth than the other (apogee). Nearby perigee moons are about 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than lesser moons that occur on the apogee side of the Moons orbit. According to US Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. The full Moon of March 19 occurs less than one hour away from perigeea near-perfect coincidence that happens only 18 years or so

Ridley said in Sydney and other cities, some Earth Hour events would hold a minute’s silence to mark the devastating 9.0-magnitude quake and subsequent tsunami in Japan this month that left more than 25,000 people dead or missing.

The disaster followed a deadly earthquake in New Zealand’s Christchurch and massive floods in Australia in January, which devastated thousands of homes and ruined crops and infrastructure.

“It’s been a bad start to the year, and I guess it’s an opportunity to take a moment and think about that,” Ridley said, adding that the campaign had a different focus in every location and not all events would mention Japan’s catastrophe.

The Earth Hour movement, which aims to raise awareness about climate change by switching off lights for 60 minutes, hopes to bring people together to think about what they can do to reduce harmful carbon pollution blamed for rising temperatures.

Environmental group WWF International helped initiate Earth Hour in Sydney in 2007, and by 2010 the energy-saving event had grown to engage hundreds of millions of people in 4,616 cities and 128 countries and territories.

“We didn’t imagine right at the beginning... it would be on the scale that it is now,” said Ridley.

“And the fact that it is so cross-cultural, beyond borders and race and religion,” he added, saying the event would never have grown so successfully without social networking sites such as Facebook.

This year organisers are focussing on connecting people online so they can inspire each other to go beyond the hour and make commitments to help the environment in their daily lives.

To do this they have created an online platform connected to the 14 top social media sites around the world, including Facebook and Twitter, which people will be easily able to access from mobile phones. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard this week backed Earth Hour.

“Earth Hour has become a special symbol of the determination of so many people to make a difference,” said Gillard, who is facing stiff opposition to her plan to introduce a tax on carbon pollution in Australia.

Ridley said that despite the growth of the event, which organisers said was the largest voluntary action ever witnessed in 2010, the ideals of the global movement had not changed.

“When we first started this we were trying to effectively take the temperature, we were trying to prove or see whether, contrary to some commentators, whether or nor people cared (about climate change),” he said.

“I think there is a massive consensus for action, not just on climate change.

“The idea of this is not to engage in the ’why we can’t do anything’ debate but absolutely talk about what can be done.” The first lights going off Saturday will be in Fiji and New Zealand’s Chatham Islands, before cities and landmarks around the world follow suit.

Other iconic structures due to go dark include the Sydney Opera House, Indonesia’s National Monument, London’s Eye and Brazil’s Christ the Redeemer statue. ( AFP )

READ MORE - Earth Hour Aims for Hope in Darkened World

How Japan's Tsunami Compares to History's Deadliest

How Japan's Tsunami Compares to History's Deadliest - An 8.9 magnitude earthquake struck 80 miles east of Japan's northern city of Sendai Friday, triggering a tsunami. The tsunami killed hundreds of people; many others are still missing. Japanese authorities expect the tsunami death toll to climb.

The earthquake in Japan triggered tsunami warnings not only for that country but for 50 others, including the U.S. The U.S. alert affects the west coast of the continental United States, including Alaska and Hawaii.

Friday's earthquake occurred in what is called the Japan Trench subduction zone and was the most intense to strike the area since 1973. An M7.8 earthquake in the Japan Trench killed three in 1994 while an M7.7 event killed 22 and injured more than 400 people in 1978. According to the USGS, foreshocks in the days before the quake included a 7.2 magnitude and three more measuring greater than M6, all on March 9.

As Japanese residents struggle to cope with the quake damage and brace for aftershocks, they are faced with the additional threat of flooding due to the tsunami.

Here's the rundown on tsunamis:

Toy lies in front of destroyed house - A toy lies in front of a destroyed house in the devastated city of Ofunato. Rescue teams from the US, Britain and China began assisting in the search for survivors following the devasting earthquake and ensuing tsunami on March 11

Tsunami at a Glance

A tsunami is a seismic sea wave, not a tidal wave as it is sometimes mistakenly called. Various underwater disturbances- including landslides, volcanic eruptions, and meteorite landings, in addition to earthquakes- can cause a tsunami.

Characteristics of Tsunami Waves

Tsunamis are fast moving, traveling at speeds of hundreds of miles per hour. When they slam into coastal areas, they can produce waves 100 feet or higher. Tsunami waves move outward in all directions from their origination point, increasing in height as they approach the shore.

Tsunami Risks

Drowning is the number one tsunami risk but there are others. Tsunamis can induce flooding, contaminate drinking water, and rupture gas lines and tanks, causing fires.

Tsunami Safety

"If you can see the wave you are too close to escape it," according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

A noticeable recession in the water away from the shoreline is "nature's tsunami warning," FEMA says. Anyone noticing such recession should move out of the area immediately.

When the tsunami subsides, flooding and contamination risks remain. Flooded and damaged areas should be avoided until emergency officials give the "all clear."

Deadliest Tsunamis in History

These tsunamis are among the deadliest in history:

• Indian Ocean tsunami, 2004: 150,00 killed or missing in 11 countries. This tsunami unleashed the energy equivalent of 23,000 atomic bombs, according to the USGS.
• Java, 1883: Krakatou volcano erupted, triggering tsunamis that killed 36,000 people.
• Honshu, Japan, 1896: 27,000 killed.
• Chile, 1868: 25,000 killed.
• Mindanao, Philippines, 1976: Between 5,000 and 8,000 killed.
• Chile, 1960: 2,300 killed.
• In the U.S., the deadliest tsunami occurred in Hawaii in 1946. 165 people, including school children, were killed when a tsunami wiped out Hilo's waterfront. The government established a Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii in the aftermath of that tsunami. ( news.yahoo.com )

READ MORE - How Japan's Tsunami Compares to History's Deadliest

British UFO Files Reveal Shocking Sightings And Hoaxes From 1950 To Present

British UFO Files Reveal Shocking Sightings And Hoaxes From 1950 To Present - Among many other shocking disclosures, a series of 8,500 documents released by the British National Archives have revealed that many Brits feared a devastating alien invasion back in 1967.

As Reuters is reporting, the 35 previously classified files -- available online -- mainly cover the period from 1997 to 2005. Included are photographs, sketches and detailed accounts of flying saucer sightings, along with correspondence between the U.K. Ministry of Defense and witnesses.

"It was a large cigar-shaped vehicle with big projectiles on each side like wings," one man details in a 1998 account. "It seemed to have two very bright lights at the front and a white light flashing round and round underneath. ... As you can imagine, I felt quite shaken."

As the Independent reports, the extra-terrestrial files are a testament to how the massive global phenomenon was discussed at the highest level of government and security services worldwide. Also among the more prominent revelations are messages from the British Government to the Prime Minister of Grenada to response to that nation's attempts to sponsor a debate on UFOs at the United Nations in 1977-78, CBS reports.

The documents also reportedly detail how the government began making official inquiries into UFOs starting in 1950, following a series of reported sightings. The Ministry of Defense even set up a secret working group called the "Flying Saucer Working Party" to monitor the sightings, though the organization remained secret until 1988 when correspondence between Winston Churchill and the Air Ministry was revealed.

Other materials, however, suggest that the UFO craze has receded as of late, with sightings having dropped from a peak of 609 in 1996-97 to a measly 130 per year between 2001 and 2006. British defense officials are also reported to have discredited claims made by author Philip Corso in the popular 1997 book The Day After Roswell, noting that the retired U.S. colonel was not a reliable source of information. ( huffingtonpost.com )

READ MORE - British UFO Files Reveal Shocking Sightings And Hoaxes From 1950 To Present

What Ever Happened to the Amazon Rain Forest?

What Ever Happened to the Amazon Rain Forest?. Did we save it or what?. We used to hear so much about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, but lately not a word. So what happened—did we save it or not?

We didn't save it, but we haven't stopped trying. Environmentalists fret over the fate of the Amazon for good reason: It contains more than half of the planet's remaining tropical rainforest, one-fifth of our global freshwater, and as much as one-third of the world's biodiversity. Saving all this was once a rallying cry for green activists, and a few early triumphs made that goal seem likely. But attention soon shifted away from the rainforest to issues like climate change and organic agriculture, and now the Amazon is disappearing at about the same rate it was in the 1980s.

The Amazon River

Fifty years ago, the Amazon was still largely intact. Then in 1964, Brazil passed a law to encourage landless peasants to leave the slums and develop the interior. Anyone who could demonstrate that land was being put to "effective use" would get a title to it. As a result, the native forest-dwellers began to be displaced, and newcomers started clearing large areas for cattle production and rubber tapping. Without an extensive road network, however, the process was slow. Almost all of Brazil's forest remained untouched through the 1970s.

Starting in the early 1980s, however, the forest began to disappear at a much higher rate. With the help of investment money from the World Bank, farmers and ranchers built enough roads and settlements to destroy an average of 8,158 square miles of forest per year, an area about the size of New Jersey. That's when the environmentalists really got moving. In 1985, the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network began staging protests around the country and helped put an end to Burger King's $35 million "rainforest beef" contract in Central America.

The following year, the newly formed Rainforest Alliance held a workshop in New York City, which was covered in New York Times with an article titled "Concern for Rain Forest Has Begun To Blossom." The situation grew more intense in 1988, when an activist (and former rubber tapper) named Chico Mendes was assassinated by angry ranchers at his home in the Amazon. But the flashpoint came when the Brazilian government announced its most ambitious, and potentially its most devastating, proposal to date: a highway through the state of Acre to Lima, Peru, which would bisect the Amazon and connect its nascent industries to the Pacific coast and the economic engine of Japan.

Soon celebrities like Sting and crooner Phil Collins were rallying against the highway project, along with noted Latin American intellectuals: authors Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa signed a letter calling accusing the nation of a "policy of ecocide and ethnocide." The ruckus temporarily stalled the project, and Brazil enacted some modest conservation measures. In 1991, deforestation slowed to one of the lowest rates on record.

By that point, popular interest in the Amazon was on the decline. Using the Nexis news database, the Lantern found 993 articles about the Amazon forest in U.S. papers from 1990. In 1995, that number dips by more than one-third, even as deforestation rates spiked higher than they'd ever been. Today, about one-fifth of Brazil's remaining forests are officially protected, but huge swaths of land in states like Mato Grosso have been taken over by cattle plantations and soy. Brazilian laws require Amazonian landowners to maintain 80 percent forest cover, but the law is rarely enforced. Even now, Brazil continues to encourage landless peasants to flock to the Amazon, and it has yet to give up on the dream of a transoceanic highway.

The good news is that interest in the Amazon has begun to take off again in recent years. That's mainly because of the role that forests play in staving off climate change: Scientists estimate that the Amazon itself has between 85 billion and 100 billion tons of carbon stored in its trees and shrubs, or about 11 years' worth of global emissions.* The dangers aren't limited to Brazil, of course—deforestation rates in Asia and parts of Africa now rival those seen the Americas. In 2009, the Guinness World Records named Indonesia as the country with the most rapidly disappearing forests—it's losing about 2 percent per year—although Brazil remains the leader in absolute terms.

Many environmentalists now pin their hopes on a U.N.-sponsored plan to use carbon credits as a means of reducing deforestation in developing nations. The so-called REDD Scheme will be on the table at the climate negotiations in Copenhagen next month. In the lead-up to those talks, Robin Williams, Sting, and a host of other aging celebrities have embarked on a "Rainforest SOS" campaign to stop tropical deforestation and prevent "run-away climate change." Most of the celebs on the roster are more than a little past their prime, but the destruction of the Amazon is just as timely as it ever was. ( slate.com )

READ MORE - What Ever Happened to the Amazon Rain Forest?

Dubai ruler's ambition sowed seeds of crisis

Dubai ruler's ambition sowed seeds of crisis. Extravagant sheik commanded desert state's meteoric rise, aided its bust - Dubai's ruler writes poetry, rides horses across the desert in long-distance endurance races and hobnobs with royals like the Queen of England. Mixing extravagance with boundless ambition, he commanded the desert city-state's meteoric rise — and helped sow the seeds, some observers say, of its debt crisis.

Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum's business-over-politics approach turned Dubai into a city-state with the surface trappings of Western liberalism — a thin veneer over the conservatism and strict political boundaries familiar throughout the Arab world.

Drink at the bars, wear bikinis at the beach, hit the discos and make money, was the overt message. But there was a red line in the sand: Don't question his grandiose plans or the foundations they were built on. Those foundations, it turns out, were not oil, but other people's money. Lots of it.

"In the past, the ruler was trusted on finances because everyone thought they were backed by oil," said Simon Henderson, a Gulf and energy specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "It will be different from now on."

Dubai is one of seven highly autonomous statelets that make up the United Arab Emirates. Though UAE capital Abu Dhabi has huge oil riches, neighboring Dubai has very little.

The 60-year-old Mohammed's confidence and ambition gave way to aspirations to place Dubai in the same league as London or New York.

Forging ahead with eye-popping development, he vigorously wooed investors, leading to excesses that created a speculative bubble. One of the biggest borrowers was the government's own development vehicle, the conglomerate Dubai World, which shook markets with its announcement last week that it needed to delay payments on part of its $60 billion debt.

Mohammed and his government, however, have refused to stand by the company's debts, and when the signs mounted that Dubai was falling victim to the world economic turmoil, he denied it and never came up with a recovery plan.

City's stunning makeover

Dubai's ruler supervised the Gulf city's stunning makeover in the past decade, turning it into a model for development in an Arab world plagued with poverty, corruption and nepotism.

Along with extravagant projects like artificial islands and glitzy skyscrapers, international schools, multinational companies and luxury hotels mushroomed around the city. They offered young Arab professionals jobs and a lifestyle they couldn't find or afford in Cairo or Beirut.

Like his Muslim city-state with a Western outlook, Mohammed, whose net worth is listed at $12 billion by Forbes, has held onto deeply rooted Arabian traditions while pursuing his ambitions for modernity.

He breeds camels and is a passionate lover of horses. He rides endurance races in the desert and drives a customized Mercedes four-wheel drive SUV along Dubai's sprawling highways. He listens to residents' complaints the old-fashioned way, in his diwan, or reception room, but also regularly updates his Facebook profile and exchanges tweets with Dubai's youth.

That mix has suited his personality and ruling style in a region where personality cults around leaders are considered part of good governance.

Taken in by Mohammed's marketing skills, deposed politicians, oil tycoons and powerful executives willingly participated in Dubai's real estate bonanza — no questions asked — as did professionals from Europe and Asia who flocked to the emirate, paying for condos and villas before building even started.

Some multinational companies even made the emirate their regional headquarters, and company executives rubbed shoulders with Hollywood stars like Charlize Theron and athletes like Tiger Woods.

Charmed by Mohammed's personality and his assurances, investors poured in billions.

Bubble bursts, ruler retreats

Taking advantage of cheap credit, developers — some run by the government and other's closely linked to it — built soaring skyscrapers and luxury residential compounds on man-made islands at a pace that outstripped real demand. Despite oversupply, real estate prices soared, in a mirror image of what happened in the United States before the subprime mortgage crisis sent the world into its worst recession in over six decades.

When the global financial crisis hit Dubai, prices collapsed by 50 percent in a year while the cheap funding dried up, meaning other projects either sat unfinished or were scrapped.

Now, as the emirate's largest government-owned conglomerate, Dubai World, reels under the weight of its $60 billion in debts, Mohammed has retreated from the limelight.

Given how intertwined Dubai is with its ruler and members of the Maktoum dynasty, the fallout could create trouble for Mohammed, who must now either hope that the neighboring emirate of Abu Dhabi will step in with some sort of bailout or that creditors will see they have little choice but to agree to restructuring debt.

"It will be very difficult for Sheik Mohammed to survive this one," said Christopher Davidson, an expert in Gulf affairs at Britain's Durham University and author of two books on the Emirates. He said Mohammed misled investors by giving them the impression he had money to back his plans.

The Associated Press e-mailed requests for an interview with Mohammed but they were not answered.

Dubai World's debt not addressed

Dubai officials said the city's government will not be responsible for the company's debts and Mohammed has shown little inclination over the past week to address Dubai World's debt problems directly.

When he recently came forward, he accused the media of exaggerating the situation and arguing that the market reaction showed a "lack of understanding of what is going on in Dubai."

The lack of clarity from Dubai's ruling and corporate elite has been evident over the past year, when Dubai became the Gulf region's biggest credit crunch victim.

At a rare meeting with reporters two months ago, Mohammed's answer to a question about Dubai's debt-load was: "I assure you we are all right. ... We are not worried."

By November, he had grown more testy. In a meeting with international investors in November, he switched from Arabic to English to tell naysayers in the media to "shut up." ( msn.com )

READ MORE - Dubai ruler's ambition sowed seeds of crisis

Is Gene-Therapy Medical Treatment Ready for Prime Time?

Is Gene-Therapy Medical Treatment Ready for Prime Time?At first it sounded like science fiction, curing genetic diseases by giving people new genes. Then it seemed like simple fiction: while theoretically possible, gene therapy

appeared unlikely to become a true therapeutic option, the field having suffered years of complications and high-profile setbacks. But over the past year, a series of small but intriguing advances has suggested that the technique may hold real future potential.

In September, researchers at the University of Washington reported in the journal Nature that they had produced color vision in squirrel monkeys, which are normally born colorblind. Using a tiny syringe, researchers injected the single missing gene for color vision into the monkeys' eyes. The result was clear: monkeys that previously could not distinguish red, green and gray were easily able to pass a simian equivalent of a color-detection test.
Another study published in the Lancet in October found that gene therapy had restored partial vision to five children and seven adults with a congenital eye disease that causes blindness. And a paper published earlier this month in Science reported the successful treatment of two children with ALD, or adrenoleukodystrophy - a neurological disorder that leads to progressive brain damage and death in two to five years.

In the most recent study, published in November, researchers at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, reported they had successfully gotten monkeys to grow bigger, stronger muscles within weeks - no anabolic steroids, exercise or genetic engineering required. Scientists injected genes directly into the right quadriceps of six healthy monkeys, and eight weeks later, the changes were plainly visible. The muscles in each monkey's right leg were larger and measurably more forceful than those in the left leg, and the effects remained for 15 months.

That study built on previous research by the Columbus-based team, which had successfully used gene therapy to treat rodents with the muscle-wasting disease muscular dystrophy. "We wanted to raise the bar and test a species closely related to humans," says neuroscientist Brian Kaspar, a co-leader of the study published in Science Translational Medicine.
The single gene injected into the monkeys was coded for the naturally occurring protein follistatin, which blocks the function of another protein called myostatin that hinders muscle growth. Past research in mice that were genetically engineered to have an extra copy of the follistatin-producing gene has shown that blocking myostatin, by increasing follistatin, causes muscles to bulk up fast. What Kaspar and his team found was that the same effect could be achieved simply by injecting genes - ferried aboard a small, non-disease-causing virus known as AAV, or adeno-associated virus - into the muscle. They further discovered that once the gene was delivered into the muscle-cell nucleus, muscles began producing their own constant supply of follistatin, and muscle fibers

kept growing. Think of it as the body producing its own muscle-boosting drugs.

The findings got headlines, not least because they immediately raised the possibility of power-hungry athletes someday using gene doping to improve performance - a technique that would be much harder to detect than using performance-enhancing drugs. And while myostatin-blocking drugs are not yet available, the pharmaceutical companies Amgen and Wyeth are currently experimenting with myostatin inhibitors, with encouraging early results, and it's clearly something that antidoping agencies around the world are concerned about. The World Anti-Doping Agency has banned gene doping, and included "agents modifying myostatin function(s)" on its list of prohibited substances.

Scientists do not yet know whether myostatin-related gene therapy will even work in humans. Given the financial and regulatory hurdles to launching a first-phase trial, it could take years and several million dollars before researchers could replicate their animal findings in people. But advances like the muscle trial in monkeys help attract funds - largely from advocacy groups like the Muscular Dystrophy Association and charitable organizations founded by patient families, as well as drug companies and the federal government - to a field that has until now been somewhat better known for its failures. In 2003, for instance, two French children with a rare genetic immune disorder developed leukemia after they received gene-therapy injections containing retroviruses. The other 18 children in the trial were cured, but the setback reverberated through the field, dissuading researchers and funding. "A lot of financial interest has disappeared since it became clear that it's going to take a long time and it's not going to be easy [to develop gene-therapy drugs]," says Hank Greely of Stanford University's Center for Biomedical Ethics.

But despite gene therapy's public-image problem, scientists are optimistic. Many believe that over the next four to five years, they will be able to apply what they have learned from studying gene therapies for rare diseases to the treatment of more common ailments like epilepsy, arthritis and congestive heart failure. "[Gene therapy] still needs one killer app. One clear, unambiguous success," says Greely. "And then the money will flood in." ( time.com )

READ MORE - Is Gene-Therapy Medical Treatment Ready for Prime Time?

Website emails from beyond the grave

Website emails from beyond the grave. The fear of dying suddenly, without the chance to mend wrongs or say goodbye, has prompted an Australian entrepreneur to start a website where people can contact loved ones from beyond the grave.

Security systems retailer Peter Ingram watched as his aunt lost her ability to speak, write, or even smile within just two weeks of being diagnosed with a brain tumour.

She was fully conscious and able to understand what was happening around her, but remained silent until her death, taking her secrets, thanks and regrets to the grave.

The website lets loved ones leave messages - or embarrassing videos - for after they pass away. Picture: AFP

"I'd known her for 20 years and to me that was devastating," Mr Ingram said.

He recently launched Australia's first virtual time-capsule site, FromBeyond2u.com, where the living can leave videos, photographs and documents to be sent out to loved ones after death.

The site charges $US1 for users to store their "cherished digital memories" and programme farewell messages for the time of their death and on fixed dates such as birthdays or anniversaries into the future.

"It's not a new concept, leaving things, letters for people, videos, messages, but the internet has changed what we can do with it," Mr Ingram said.

"You can keep in touch today, tomorrow and beyond."

Subscribers can write their own eulogy and create a multimedia tribute for use at their funeral, and bequeath their photo and video files.

Whilst living, they can use the site as a place to store and share their files with friends and family all over the world.

A certificate with an activation code in the event of death is given to every user to be left with their will or next of kin.

Taboo topics

The website could, of course, have less savoury applications, Mr Ingram said.

"I had a radio station ask me the other day 'What if people leave nasty messages? Maybe I want to tell my mother-in-law for the next 10 years that I didn't like her,'" he said.

"I guess she can change her email address if you keep on badgering her with emails, but that's not what it's about."

People could also use the future messages service to posthumously speak to a mistress or spill their darkest secrets, knowing they wouldn't have to deal with the consequences, he added.

"That's none of my business, you can do whatever you want," he laughed.

Sharing with family

Mr Ingram said he had already accumulated plenty of embarrassing footage of his "angelic" son on the site in preparation for his 21st birthday celebrations.

"This is you chucking a tantrum, this is you when you're nine years old telling me you'll always love me, even when you're a teenager," he joked.

"Hopefully at his 21st I will have 12 or 13 years of backed-up photos and memories and hopefully I'll be there. But if I do kick the bucket they'll all be there for him," he said.

Users can also leave more obscure instructions they might overlook in a legal will, such as where they kept their motorcycle keys or hid precious things, he said.

Far from being morbid or narcissistic, Mr Ingram believes the site encourages sharing with family and community.

"I think the number one (aim is) definitely sharing the love with loved ones and being there for them, and not to be forgotten, that's a fear of mine," he said. / news.com.au

READ MORE - Website emails from beyond the grave

Aussies would give up sex before internet

Aussies would give up sex before internet. Victorians would give up sex, partner or car before internet. It's official - Victorians simply can't live without the internet.

A new survey shows most of the state would give up sex, our car or even our partner before surrendering the beloved internet.

When given a list of things they could survive without for a month, seven out of 10 Victorians said they would rather give up their partner than their internet - higher than the national average, the Herald Sun reports.

Victorians also claimed they could give up chocolate or their daily coffee in favour of the worldwide web.

Some respondents also claimed they could give up chocolate or their daily coffee in favour of the worldwide web / File

The list of things they were asked to rank in order included sex, their car, mobile phone, annual overseas holiday and landline telephone.

Internet users in NSW, South Australia and Queensland were less likely to trade their partner for the net.

Victorian families have doubled and even tripled their internet usage in the past five years, the Optus Family Communication Survey reveals.

But only 26 per cent is reserved for work or study.

The rest is spent browsing entertainment sites or social sites for personal reasons.

It revealed kids aged 10 to 17 are twice as likely to use the internet as a gateway for social networking than as a tool to help with their homework.

Asked how the internet improved the quality of their family life, nine out of 10 Victorians said it was the best way of obtaining new information.

Eight out of 10 prized it for cheap and effective communication, while others love its ability to let them work from home. / news.com.au

READ MORE - Aussies would give up sex before internet

How to delete your Facebook profile in five minutes

How to delete your Facebook profile in five minutes. DoesDOES Facebook make it unnecessarily hard to delete your profile?

An article on The Punch today details how difficult it has been in the past to delete your profile from the social networking site.

“I set about looking for the Delete button. Ever seen that option? I’ll save you the hassle. There isn’t one,” wrote contributor Lachlan Hardy.

In the end, Hardy was forced to delete each bit of information – such as who his friends were, who he was in a relationship with and so on – individually.

That was about 18 months ago. Since then Facebook has copped more than a few criticisms over the way it handles user data – including a report by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada that found some of its practices may be illegal – and has announced some measures to address them.

So, I figured it was time for another test with a dummy account under the name “Andy Ramadge” – complete with silly photo.

The quick version

If you’re reading this article because you want a quick way to delete your account, log in to your Facebook profile and then follow this link. It should take you straight to the “Delete my account” form.

Read on for how to get to that page within Facebook.

Deleting your profile

The first place most people would look for a delete option is on the Account Settings page. And they’d be out of luck. From there you can only deactivate your profile.

Deactivating your profile is like putting it on ice. Facebook will keep all of your information, but won’t use it or display it to anyone else. This is so you can take a break for a while and come back to it later.

However, I want to delete my profile – so that all my data is removed from Facebook’s servers.

The next thing I did was search for a help page. There’s a button called About at the bottom of each page that will take you to Facebook’s profile, where you can read product announcements and so on.

On the left-hand side, there’s a link to the Help Center (sic). It’s not particularly prominent, but it is there.

The Help Center contains links to question and answer pieces on things to do with Facebook, grouped by topic. Except there’s no topic for either deleting or deactivating your profile.

Thankfully, there’s a list of the most popular search terms on the right. The third and fourth terms, when I checked, were about deleting your profile.

Clicking on one of the relevant search terms will, finally, take you the question and answer page titled “Deactivating, Deleting, and Memorializing Accounts”.

One of the questions is “How do I permanently delete my account?” The answer will try to talk you into deactivating your account instead of deleting it, before eventually offering a link to the page you want.

The last step, a form titled “Delete my account”, is pretty simple. It gives you a warning and asks you to provide your password and fill in one of those visual word tests to make sure you’re not a robot.

And that’s it, sort of. After filling in the form, Facebook will deactivate your account immediately and schedule it for deletion in 14 days, giving you a window of time to change your mind.

“Andy Ramadge” immediately disappeared from search and other people’s news feeds.

Conclusion

Facebook certainly doesn’t make it easy to delete your account. There is no obvious link to the right form, so you have to go searching for it.

Along the way you will be bombarded left and right with information about deactivating your account instead of deleting it.

However it still only took me five minutes to find the right form and fill it out, wiping poor old “Andy Ramadge” off the social networking site for good. / news.com.au

READ MORE - How to delete your Facebook profile in five minutes

Google launches new commenting tool, SideWiki

Google launches new commenting tool, SideWiki. Google has unveiled a new tool that allows notes and comments to be posted alongside web pages for others to read.

Google Sidewiki appears as a narrow pop-up browser panel on the left hand side of a website and displays messages from users about the content of the page.

The messages are visible to other users of Sidewiki who visit the site and they can post their own comments but they cannot edit the comments of others.

A website about museums in New York City, for example, would have an extra panel featuring relevant notes and comments from other visitors.

Google, in a blog post, said the new service was a way for web users to contribute "insights" and "helpful information" next to any web page.

An exmaple image of a SideWiki panel. Picture: Google

The internet search and advertising giant said it had developed an algorithm to ensure that the "most useful, high-quality entries" are displayed at the top of a Sidewiki panel.

Sidewiki is a feature of Google Toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers and Google said it would be available soon for Chrome, its own web browser.

The service is similar to other services launched in the past and it met with mixed reviews from technology bloggers.

Ars Technica said Sidewiki was "intriguing" but "it's unclear if the service will really deliver a lot of value" and it could end up being "little more than a glorified comment system".

PaidContent.org said Sidewiki "may anger some online publishers who have commenting systems of their own that they'd prefer visitors continue to use".

A blogger for TechCrunch said he does not have high hopes for Sidewiki.

"Marking up the web has limited appeal to the average consumer," he wrote. / news.com.au

READ MORE - Google launches new commenting tool, SideWiki

Google gets fresh as search race heats up

Google gets fresh as search race heats up. Google has rolled out search engine refinements as Microsoft strives to lure people to Bing and Twitter heightens appetites for real-time updates and news.

Google modifications include tools that let people limit online searches to only serve up results from the past hour, or by specific date ranges.

"This can be particularly helpful when you're looking for the freshest information," Google engineer Patrick Riley and product manager Nundu Janakiram said in a blog post.

"Or, if you have some idea of when the information you're looking for may have been published to the web."

Site selection

Google users can choose to be shown search only results from blogs, news, or web pages that they have visited or those they haven't visited.

"This can be particularly helpful when you're researching something you've already explored and you want to return right where you left off," Google said.

"To use this option you'll need to be signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled."

A new tool also modifies searches to include more or fewer shopping websites depending on how interested people are in commercial pitches online.

Google put the features in a Search Options side panel it added to search results pages in May. To access the new tools, one clicks on a "show options" link displayed above search results.

Bing's 'decision engine'

The Bing search engine Microsoft launched in May was designed to intuitively understand what people are seeking online and challenge Google.

The US software colossus described Bing as a "Decision Engine" aimed at online shoppers trying to make buying decisions, plan trips, research health matters, or find local businesses.

Bing posted a slight increase in its share of the US search market in August, the third month in a row of modest gains, according to online tracking firm comScore.

Bing increased its market share to 9.3 per cent in August from 8.9 per cent in July and 8.4 per cent in June, comScore said.

Google remained the overwhelming leader of the lucrative US search and advertising market in August with a 64.6 per cent market share, a dip of 0.1 per cent from July. Yahoo!'s share was unchanged at 19.3 per cent in August.

New partnerships

Yahoo and Microsoft, after months of negotiations, unveiled a 10-year web search and advertising partnership in late July that set the stage for a joint offensive against Google.

Under the agreement, Yahoo will use Microsoft's search engine on its own sites while Yahoo will provide the exclusive global sales force for premium advertisers.

Microsoft is also integrating messages from prominent Twitter users into results generated by Bing.

Twitter is seen by some technology analysts as the next frontier in the field of web search because of the real-time nature of the messages from its users.

Twitter's real-time stream of messages of 140-character-or-less is not currently searchable on Google.

Microsoft said its efforts with Bing and Twitter were "an initial foray into integrating more real time data into our search results." / news.com.au

READ MORE - Google gets fresh as search race heats up

Nanoparticles may be used to help kill tumours

Nanoparticles may be used to help kill tumours. British scientists are developing ways to use nanoparticles as tiny magnets that can heat up and kill cancer cells without harming healthy cells around them.

The researchers have found that iron-oxide nanoparticles can be attached to cancer-seeking antibodies, or injected into cancer-seeking stem cells, which take them straight to the tumours they need to kill.

Heating the cells to just 5 or 6 degrees Celsius above body temperature, in a new device called a magnetic alternating current hyperthermia, or MACH, machine, can kill the cancer cells.

The researchers said the MACH device was like a microwave, heating only targeted cells.

"This offers a new way to treat cancer," the team from University College London said.

"If we get the magnetic particles to migrate to cancer cells, we can kill only the cancer cells, leaving the healthy cells unharmed – the ultimate targeted therapy."

The scientists said the work was at an early stage and no tests had yet been done on humans. They predicted another decade of developing, refining and testing the techniques before they could be licensed to treat cancer.

"We are aiming to be ready to go to clinical trials at the end of three years," said Professor of Physics Quentin Pankhurst.

The scientists said they had already seen the stem cell delivery technique work in mice.

Mark Lythgoe, director of the university's centre for advanced biomedical imaging, said he and colleagues had shown in a study due to be published soon that certain cells, called mesenchymal stem cells (MSC), when loaded with magnetic nanoparticles, would take them direct to secondary lung tumours, or lung metastases.

"We have now just started the trial where we put those animals into the heating system... to see whether it has killed the lung metastases," he said.

Two other methods were also showing promise, one using cancer-seeking antibodies to carry nanoparticles to head and neck tumours, and another using magnetic fields to steer the tiny magnets to specific parts of the body which need treatment.

"The idea is that we could use these three guided techniques to get the cells to go to the tumour," said Mr Lythgoe.

"Then when you've got them there, you put the patient into the MACH system, it heats up the iron oxide particles like a microwave."

Heat is known to kill cancer cells but scientists are seeking ways to target the heat more specifically so healthy cells are not destroyed.

Research presented last month by German scientists showed that heat-treated tumours responded better to chemotherapy, meaning the technique could allow chemotherapy doses to be reduced in the future, reducing toxic side effects. / news.com.au

READ MORE - Nanoparticles may be used to help kill tumours