And think also about poverty, health care, education, the environment, etc. etc. All of which sums of money were asked for in recent years, far less than the capitalist bailout sums of now. Sums of money refused then. Far bigger sums granted to the bankers now.
Water bears are the first animals in the world to have survived exposure to the vacuum and radiation of space
Water bears (tardigrades) are the first animals in the world to have survived exposure to the vacuum and radiation of space. This has been established by Ingemar Jönsson, a researcher at Kristianstad University in Sweden.
It has been nearly a year since the ecologist Ingemar Jönsson had some 3,000 microscopic water bears sent up on a twelve-day space trip. The aim of the research project, which was supported by the European Space Agency, was to find out more about the basic physiology of tardigrades by seeing if they can survive in a space environment.
“Our principal finding is that the space vacuum, which entails extreme dehydration, and cosmic radiation were not a problem for water bears. On the other hand, the ultraviolet radiation in space is harmful to water bears, although a few individual[s] can even survive that,” says Ingemar Jönsson.
The next challenge facing Ingemar Jönsson is to try to understand the mechanisms behind this exceptional tolerance in water bears. He suspects that even the water bears that got through the space trip without any trouble may in fact have incurred DNA damage, but that the animals managed to repair this damage.
“All knowledge involving the repair of genetic damage is central to the field of medicine,” says Ingemar.
“One problem with radiation therapy in treating cancer today is that healthy cells are also harmed. If we can document and show that there are special molecules involved in DNA repair in multicellular animals like tardigrades, we might be able to further the development of radiation therapy.”
Ingemar Jönsson can be reached at phone: +46-(0)70 2666 541 or e-mail at: ingemar.jonsson@hkr.se
Water bear facts
Water bears (tardigrades) are multicellular, invertebrate animals about one millimeter in size. They exist in nearly all ecosystems of the world. What makes them unique is that they can survive repeated dehydration and can lose nearly all the water they have in their bodies. When dehydrated, they enter into a dormant state in which the body contracts and metabolism ceases. In this death-like dormant state, water bears manage to maintain the structures in their cells until water is available and they can be active again.
The probe passed just 93km from the rock on 23 July, allowing its High Resolution Stereo Camera to take extremely detailed pictures.
Potato-shaped Phobos is 27km in its longest dimension and is thought to be a captured-asteroid or a remnant of the material that formed the planets.
The new images include portions of the moon not previously photographed.
They also show clearly the satellite’s famous grooves.
How these were generated is not entirely understood. Some scientists believe they have been gouged out by material thrown up from the surface of Mars by space impacts.
Other researchers think they could have resulted from the surface regolith, or soil, slipping into internal fissures.
The images are sure to provide new insights. At their best, the pictures have a resolution of 3.7m per pixel.They will also assist the Russians in their planning of the Phobos-Grunt mission. Launching next year, this venture will try to place a spacecraft on the moon to gather samples for return to Earth.
PHOBOS - MARTIAN MOON
Measures 27 x 22 x 18km; could be a captured asteroid
Orbits less than 6,000km above Mars; slowly falling inwards
First high-res probe images taken by Mariner 9 in 1971
Dedicated Soviet probes, Phobos 1 & 2, were lost
Its 10km-wide Stickney crater records huge impact
This video from England in 2007 is called May Day Demo - Justice for Cleaners Speeches. It says about itself:
Speeches from Justice for Cleaners demonstration in central London - immigrant workers fight for a London Living Wage, block traffic in central London as they march from University to University - SOAS, UCL Birckbeck and LSHTM, all of which pay below the London Living wage of £7.05 per hour.
Such criticism is reserved for low-paid public-sector workers who are condemned for complaining about having a pay “increase” of below 2 per cent imposed on them when even the retail prices index indicates a rate of double that.
But, in a phony evocation of social cohesion, the Prime Minister and Chancellor claim that we are all in this economic crisis together and must tighten our belts to see it through.
Equality of sacrifice? That sounds good. Just like the Dunkirk spirit in a modern setting.
So let’s hear it for supermarket giant Tesco and the sacrifices that its shareholders have been making.
Don’t hold your breath. It scraped by on an 11 per cent jump in profits to a fairly tidy £2.75 billion.
Let’s hear it too for Jake Ulrich, the managing director of Centrica Energy, the parent company of British Gas, who suggested most helpfully that, if we have difficulties paying his company’s bills, we could turn down the thermostat and wear two jumpers instead of one.
This is the same Centrica that announced earlier this year that its latest annual operating profits were up 40 per cent to £1.95 billion.
And just to put things in context, British Gas profits jumped to £571 million from £95 million in 2006.
For his part in delivering these profits, Mr Ulrich was paid a salary of £1.1 million and a bonus of £536,000. Not much necessity for him to double up on jumpers.
Whereas it may be considered unreasonable by some to suggest that the bodies of Mr Ulrich and his colleagues should be detached from their heads, they should certainly be detached from much of their ill-gotten wealth.
Big business and the rich should be paying more in tax.
They can certainly afford it.
Since 2006, the share of national income, excluding oil, going in profits has risen to 26 per cent from 22 per cent, while the share for wages has slipped from 26 per cent to 24 per cent, which was the norm under the Tories.
We need price freezes on selected essential products, windfall taxes on the energy, food and banking transnational companies and higher tax rates on the wealthy.
Working people are fed up with being exploited by big business and abused by new Labour.
Virgin’s Richard Branson is laying on a three and half hour trip 70 miles up into the stratosphere to the edge of space for the world’s super-rich, where travellers can experience just four to six minutes of weightlessness: here.
Total Solar Eclipse on August 1: Where, How to See It
Anne Minard
for National Geographic News
July 22, 2008
Solar eclipses have been blamed in the past for war, famine, and the deaths of kings. But the upcoming total eclipse on August 1 will mostly be celebrated by excited skywatchers—even if it won’t break any records.
The sun will be completely obscured for just under two and a half minutes, “a tad on the short side,” according to astrophysicist Fred Espenak, an eclipse expert based at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. …
When it starts, this year’s full eclipse will be visible from a narrow arc spanning the Northern Hemisphere.
Its path will begin in Canada and continue northeast across Greenland and the Arctic, then southeast through central Russia, Mongolia, and China.
The eclipse will start around 8:30 a.m. Greenwich mean time in the eastern part of the arc, leading to totality in just under an hour.
In a much wider swath of the globe—including northeastern North America along with most of Europe and Asia—people will be able to see a partial eclipse.
The multibillion-dollar Cassini orbiter has officially ended its four-year primary mission to Saturn — ushering in a two-year extended mission that will focus on the ringed planet’s mysterious moons.
The primary mission began when the spacecraft entered Saturnian orbit on July 1, 2004 (or June 30 in some time zones). Cassini produced the first pictures that pierced the haze surrounding Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon. The orbiter also sent down a European-built piggyback lander called Huygens, which beamed back pictures from Titan’s surface. The Cassini-Huygens observations revealed that Titan was laced with hydrocarbon seas and channels.
Cassini also discovered geysers of ice spewing from Enceladus, another Saturnian moon that may harbor subsurface oceans and perhaps even life.
Titan and Enceladus are the primary targets for Cassini’s extended mission, which NASA approved in April. Cassini will also monitor seasonal effects on Titan and Saturn, explore Saturn’s magnetic field and witness Saturn’s equinox on Aug. 11, 2009, when sunlight will pass directly through the plane of the planet’s rings.
The spacecraft’s new agenda has been dubbed the Cassini Equinox Mission in honor of the astronomical event, which occurs roughly every 15 years.
The fastest spinning natural object in the Solar System has been discovered by a British amateur astronomer.
The compact stony asteroid 2008 HJ - completes a full rotation once every 42.7 seconds, according to its discoverer Richard Miles.
That measurement smashes the previous record held by the asteroid 2000 DO8, which spins once every 78 seconds.
The new finding was made by the amateur astronomer while operating the Faulkes Telescope South in Australia.
2008 HJ is estimated to be some 12m by 24m in size - smaller than a tennis court. Yet it probably has a mass in excess of 5,000 tonnes.
It was moving at almost 162,000km/h (100,000 mph) when it hurtled past the Earth in late April. Despite being classified as a “near-Earth asteroid”, it came no closer than one million km and never posed a threat to our planet.
But the discovery adds to astronomers’ sparse understanding of very small asteroids in near-Earth orbits.
Dr Petr Pravec, an astronomer at the Ondrejov Observatory in the Czech Republic, and an expert in the field, commented: “A period of 42.7 seconds for an asteroid with a size of about 20 meters is perfectly consistent with theory.
“There may be a significant population of asteroids measuring up to a few tens of metres across, rotating in less than a minute, that have not been observed until now.”
Mr Miles made the discovery while operating the Australian telescope remotely, via the internet, from his home in Dorset.
Britain: Science cuts threaten Jodrell Bank radio telescope
17 April 2008
The Labour government of Prime Mister Gordon Brown is pushing ahead with unprecedented cuts in the UK science budget, with many critical programmes and facilities now threatened. In March, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) outlined a Programmatic Review listing all the science projects it funds in order of priority.
The review followed the STFC’s December 11 budget announcement proposing severe cuts to the budgets of critical physics research and astronomy projects in the UK. The council cited an £80 million shortfall in its £670 million triannual budget as the reason for the cuts.
The report divides scientific projects into High, Medium-High, Medium-Lower and Lower categories. Scientists fear that funding may be withdrawn from those facilities deemed to be “Lower Priority” and some of those listed as “Medium-Lower Priority.” Some 18 projects are listed as “Medium-Lower Priority” and a further 25 as “Lower Priority.”
Among the many projects described as being of “Lower Priority” are the following:
* MERLIN, e-MERLIN and “Jive”—The Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network (MERLIN) is an array of radio telescopes centred on the world-famous Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire and is operated by the nearby University of Manchester. The array is distributed around Britain, with separations of up to 217 km. The project is preparing to complete a full £8 million upgrade to fibre-optic cables, enabling the full use of each dish to be made. The latter is known as e-MERLIN. …
Immediately following the publication of the STFC review, there were protests throughout the astronomy and physics communities and among scientists in general. Sir Bernard Lovell, who founded and oversaw the construction of Jodrell Bank and who still works there at the age of 96, said, “We are all astonished. I’m sure some solution will be found. It is the wrong time to close it. The work is of such fundamental importance. It would just not be sensible for them to pull the plug now.”
