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LA Times: Core Evidence That Humans Affect Climate Change

Ice drilled in Antarctica offers the fullest record of glacial cycles and greenhouse gas levels.

By Usha Lee McFarling, Times Staff Writer

An ice core about two miles long — the oldest frozen sample ever drilled from the underbelly of Antarctica — shows that at no time in the last 650,000 years have levels of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane been as high as they are today.

The research, published in today's issue of the journal Science, describes the content of the greenhouse gases within the core and shows that carbon dioxide levels today are 27% higher than they have been in the last 650,000 years and levels of methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas, are 130% higher, said Thomas Stocker, a climate researcher at the University of Bern and senior member of the European team that wrote two papers based on the core.

The work provides more evidence that human activity since the Industrial Revolution has significantly altered the planet's climate system, scientists said.

Kansas Education Board First to Back 'Intelligent Design' Schools to Teach Doubts About Evolutionary Theory

TOPEKA, Kan., Nov. 8 -- The Kansas Board of Education voted Tuesday that students will be expected to study doubts about modern Darwinian theory, a move that defied the nation's scientific establishment even as it gave voice to religious conservatives and others who question the theory of evolution.

By a 6 to 4 vote that supporters cheered as a victory for free speech and opponents denounced as shabby politics and worse science, the board said high school students should be told that aspects of widely accepted evolutionary theory are controversial. Among other points, the standards allege a "lack of adequate natural explanations for the genetic code."

The bitterly fought effort pushes Kansas to the forefront of a war over evolution being waged in courts in Pennsylvania and Georgia and statehouses nationwide. President Bush stated his own position last summer, buoying social conservatives when he said "both sides" should be taught.

"This is a great day for education. This is one of the best things that we can do. This absolutely teaches more about science," said Steve E. Abrams, the Kansas board chairman who shepherded the conservative Republican majority that overruled a 26-member science committee and turned aside the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Teachers Association.

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Sue Gamble said the board, by dropping a phrase that defined science as "a search for natural explanations of observable phenomena," was opening the door to supernatural explanations.

New York Times: Three Days After Losing Katrina Duties, FEMA Chief Resigns Post

The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael D. Brown, resigned today, three days after he was removed from the day-to-day management of the Hurricane Katrina relief effort amid heavy criticism of his performance. The White House quickly announced an interim successor, a FEMA official with decades of experience at the local-government level in emergency work.

A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005. Flood waters continue to rise in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina did extensive damage when it made landfall on Monday. (AP Photo/Dave Martin)

Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans, Louisiana.(AFP/Getty Images/Chris Graythen)

Although many people over 30 have never heard of MySpace, it has about 27 million members, a nearly 400 percent growth since the start of the year. It passed Google in April in hits, the number of pages viewed monthly, according to comScore MediaMetrix, a company that tracks Web traffic. (MySpace members often cycle through dozens of pages each time they log on, checking up on friends' pages.) According to Nielsen/NetRatings, users spend an average of an hour and 43 minutes on the site each month, compared with 34 minutes for facebook.com and 25 minutes for Friendster.

Yahoo! News / Reuters: Montana's governor eyes coal to solve U.S. fuel costs

Montana's governor wants to solve America's rising energy costs using a technology discovered in Germany 80 years ago that converts coal into gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel.

The Fischer-Tropsch technology, discovered by German researchers in 1923 and later used by the Nazis to convert coal into wartime fuels, was not economical as long as oil cost less than $30 a barrel.

But with U.S. crude oil now hitting more than double that price, Gov. Brian Schweitzer's plan is getting more attention across the country and some analysts are taking him very seriously.

Montana is "sitting on more energy than they have in the Middle East," Schweitzer told Reuters in an interview this week.

"I am leading this country in this desire and demand to convert coal into gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel. We can do it in Montana for $1 per gallon," he said.

"We can do it cheaper than importing oil from the sheiks, dictators, rats and crooks that we're bringing it from right now."

The governor estimated the cost of producing a barrel of oil through the Fischer-Tropsch method at $32, and said that with its 120 billion tons of coal -- a little less than a third of the U.S total -- Montana could supply the entire United States with its aviation, gas and diesel fuel for 40 years without creating environmental damage.

WARNING A) This book is not for kids. It's heady and violent and has an experimental narrative structure that they probably won't dig on anyway. B) This is a complicated character with a great deal of back story, so while it is a self contained read, it also does rely on past "occurrences" for much of it's emotional resonance. It's sort of like tuning into a soap opera mid-season… except that this soap opera has monsters fucking in it!! And remember, you don't have to read it, you just have to buy it.

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You can buy it at Amazon.com (or just look at the cover)… of course
comic book stores really do need you're business more than some
massive corporate conglomerate.

Reuters: S. Korean man dies after 50 hours of computer games

SEOUL (Reuters) - A South Korean man who played computer games for 50 hours almost non-stop died of heart failure minutes after finishing his mammoth session in an Internet cafe, authorities said on Tuesday.

The 28-year-old man, identified only by his family name Lee, had been playing on-line battle simulation games at the cybercafe in the southeastern city of Taegu, police said.

Lee had planted himself in front of a computer monitor to play on-line games on August 3. He only left the spot over the next three days to go to the toilet and take brief naps on a makeshift bed, they said.

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Lee had recently quit his job to spend more time playing games, the daily JoongAng Ilbo reported after interviewing former work colleagues and staff at the Internet cafe.

After he failed to return home, Lee's mother asked his former colleagues to find him. When they reached the cafe, Lee said he would finish the game and then go home, the paper reported.

He died a few minutes later, it said.

La Vida Robot How four underdogs from the mean streets of Phoenix took on the best from M.I.T. in the national underwater bot championship.

The winter rain makes a mess of West Phoenix. It turns dirt yards into mud and forms reefs of garbage in the streets. Junk food wrappers, diapers, and Spanish-language porn are swept into the gutters. On West Roosevelt Avenue, security guards, two squad cars, and a handful of cops watch teenagers file into the local high school. A sign reads: Carl Hayden Community High School: The Pride's Inside.

There certainly isn't a lot of pride on the outside. The school buildings are mostly drab, late '50s-era boxes. The front lawn is nothing but brown scrub and patches of dirt. The class photos beside the principal's office tell the story of the past four decades. In 1965, the students were nearly all white, wearing blazers, ties, and long skirts. Now the school is 92 percent Hispanic. Drooping, baggy jeans and XXXL hoodies are the norm.

The school PA system crackles, and an upbeat female voice fills the bustling linoleum-lined hallways. "Anger management class will begin in five minutes," says the voice from the administration building. "All referrals must report immediately."

Across campus, in a second-floor windowless room, four students huddle around an odd, 3-foot-tall frame constructed of PVC pipe. They have equipped it with propellers, cameras, lights, a laser, depth detectors, pumps, an underwater microphone, and an articulated pincer. At the top sits a black, waterproof briefcase containing a nest of hacked processors, minuscule fans, and LEDs. It's a cheap but astoundingly functional underwater robot capable of recording sonar pings and retrieving objects 50 feet below the surface. The four teenagers who built it are all undocumented Mexican immigrants who came to this country through tunnels or hidden in the backseats of cars. They live in sheds and rooms without electricity. But over three days last summer, these kids from the desert proved they are among the smartest young underwater engineers in the country.

Cultural Differences Seen in Male Perceptions of Body Image

All Things Considered, March 15, 2005   Preliminary results of a study from the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital finds that Taiwanese men are not as dissatisfied with their bodies as Western men. Sean Cole explores the permutations of body image perception among men.

Guardian Unlimited: Tsunami Death Toll Climbs to 52,000 By ANDI DJATMIKO Associated Press Writer

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (AP) - Mourners in Sri Lanka used their bare hands to dig graves Tuesday while hungry islanders in Indonesia turned to looting in the aftermath of Asia's devastating tsunamis. Thousands more bodies were found in Indonesia, dramatically increasing the death toll across 11 nations to more than 52,000.

Indonesia's Health Ministry said in a statement that more than 27,000 people were confirmed killed in parts of Sumatra island, the territory closest to the epicenter of Sunday's earthquake, which sent a giant tsunami rolling across the Indian Ocean.

But the ministry said it had not yet counted deaths along the inundated and shattered towns of Sumatra's western coast, which soldiers and rescue workers were unable so far to reach - including the district of Meulaboh, where earlier the head of another agency estimated that 10,000 people were killed.

When those regions are included in the ministry count, the death toll could rise dramatically yet again.

TV footage from overflights of Meulaboh and other parts of the west coast showed thousands of homes underwater. Refugees fleeing the coast described surviving for days on little more than coconuts before reaching Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh province on Sumatra's northern tip, which itself was largely flattened by the quake.

"The sea was full of bodies," said Sukardi Kasdi, who reached the capital from his town of Surang.

Herald Sun: Scammers scan $3.2m roulette win

THREE gamblers who pulled off an audacious coup at the Ritz in London using James Bond-style gadgetry to calculate where a roulette ball would land can keep their $3.2m winnings.

Scotland Yard, which seized cash and froze bank accounts during a nine-month investigation into the sting, has decided there are no grounds to prosecute the gamblers.
The decision will prompt the Ritz and other casinos to heighten security.

The gaming trio -- described by police sources as a chic Hungarian woman, aged 32, and two elegant Serbian men, aged 33 and 38 -- were alleged to have smuggled a laser scanner linked to a micro-computer into the casino inside a mobile phone.

The scanner measured the speed of the ball as the croupier released it, identified where it dropped, and measured the wheel's declining orbit.

These factors were beamed to the micro-computer, which calculated into which section of numbers on the wheel the ball would settle.

This information was then flashed onto the screen of the mobile just before the wheel made its third spin, by which time all bets must be placed.

Having reduced their odds from 37-1 to 6-1, the trio bet on all six numbers in that section to ensure they would win.

On the first night they won almost $250,000. They returned the next night to win almost $3 million. The gamblers cashed their chips, declined offers of a free caviar-and-champagne dinner to celebrate and left.

The casino's security experts examined closed-circuit television footage and officers from Scotland Yard's gaming squad arrested the trio at a hotel nearby on suspicion of obtaining their winnings by deception.

They had been reporting to police on bail but have now been told they are free to leave Britain.

The Yard said: "The case has been stamped 'no further action'. All the money impounded at the outset of the inquiry has been returned."

Legal sources said the gamblers had to be let off because they had not violated any law. The scanner did not interfere with the ball or wheel. It provided information but did not manipulate the game. - SUNDAY TIMES

Washington Post: Tidal Waves Kill More Than 10,000 in Asia
Huge Earthquake Sparks Tsunamis Throughout Southeast Asia

JAKARTA, Indonesia Dec. 26 -- A gargantuan earthquake centered off the west coast of Indonesia unleashed a series of tidal waves Sunday morning that crashed into coastal towns, fishing villages and tourist resorts from India and Sri Lanka to Thailand and Malaysia, killing more than 10,000 people and leaving many more missing.

The U.S. Geological Survey measured the earthquake at 8.9 on the Richter scale, making it the fifth strongest since 1900. It was the largest since 1964, when Alaska was jolted by a quake measuring 9.2.

The initial quake struck the western tip of Indonesia's Sumatra island shortly after 7 a.m. local time, flattening buildings and sending a wall of water about five yards high into the cities and towns of Aceh province, according to witnesses reached by telephone.