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EU insecticide ban triggers legal action.

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European moves to temporarily ban the use of three insecticides linked to declines in bee populations have been met with legal action from two of the world’s biggest agricultural companies.

Syngenta, headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, said yesterday that it was challenging the European Commission’s ban on the controversial ‘neonicotinoid’ pesticides. The ban, which comes into force on 1 December, will last two years and cover three neonicotinoids: clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam.

pesticide

In a statement, the company said the commission’s decision was taken “on the basis of a flawed process”. John Atkin, the company’s chief operating officer, added that the commission was wrong to link thiamethoxam to declines in bee health.

Syngenta is challenging the thiamethoxam ban only, but another company — Bayer CropScience of Monheim, Germany — said yesterday that it had also begun legal action challenging the ban on all three chemicals. In a statement, it said that the Commission’s move is “unjustified, disproportionate and goes beyond the existing regulatory framework”.

A body of scientific evidence from laboratories studies shows that these chemicals can have a negative impact on bee health. A number of researchers have advocated that their use be restricted, according to the precautionary principle. But other scientists say that some of the laboratory research on the subject doesn’t necessarily reflect the real situation out in the field A spokeswoman for the European Commission said that its measures were based on scientific information and the conclusions of the European Food Safety Agency, which has ruled that these insecticides could pose a risk to bees in some circumstances.

Source: nature.com

used� a�� ��� well as onboard computers, which data from 350 instrumentation points, to record every move of the 10,300-pound aircraft and its contents. The helicopter’s unusual black-and-white-speckled paint job — a photographic technique called full field photogrammetry — also aided in the data collection effort.

“High speed cameras filming at 500 images per second tracked each black dot, so after everything is over, we can plot exactly how the fuselage reacted structurally throughout the test,” said NASA test engineer Justin Littell.

This was the first of two planned tests using Navy-provided CH-46E Sea Knight fuselages. A similar helicopter equipped with additional technology, including high-performance, lightweight composite airframe retrofits, will be used in a crash test next summer. Both are part of the Rotary Wing Project in NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate.

NASA will use the results of both tests in efforts to improve rotorcraft performance and efficiency. Researchers also want to increase industry knowledge and create more complete computer models that can be used to design better and safer helicopters.

The ultimate goal of NASA’s rotary wing research is to help make helicopters and other vertical take-off and landing vehicles more serviceable — able to carry more passengers and cargo — quicker, quieter, safer and greener, and lead to more extensive use in the airspace system.

For this test, Langley used six of its own crash test dummies. In addition to the fuselage, the Navy contributed seats, crash test dummies, a manikin and other elements of the test. The Army provided a manikin and a crash test dummy that simulated a patient lying in a stretcher. The Federal Aviation Administration provided a side-facing specialized crash test dummy and part of the data acquisition system. Cobham Life Support-St. Petersburg, a division of CONAX Florida Corporation, contributed an active restraint system for the cockpit.

Source: NASA

They Cracked This 250-Year-Old Code, and Found a Secret Society Inside.

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The master wears an amulet with a blue eye in the center. Before him, a candidate kneels in the candlelit room, surrounded by microscopes and surgical implements. The year is roughly 1746. The initiation has begun.

The master places a piece of paper in front of the candidate and orders him to put on a pair of eyeglasses. “Read,” the master commands. The candidate squints, but it’s an impossible task. The page is blank.

The candidate is told not to panic; there is hope for his vision to improve. The master wipes the candidate’s eyes with a cloth and orders preparation for the surgery to commence. He selects a pair of tweezers from the table. The other members in attendance raise their candles.

The master starts plucking hairs from the candidate’s eyebrow. This is a ritualistic procedure; no flesh is cut. But these are “symbolic actions out of which none are without meaning,” the master assures the candidate. The candidate places his hand on the master’s amulet. Try reading again, the master says, replacing the first page with another. This page is filled with handwritten text. Congratulations, brother, the members say. Now you can see.

For more than 260 years, the contents of that page—and the details of this ritual—remained a secret. They were hidden in a coded manuscript, one of thousands produced by secret societies in the 18th and 19th centuries. At the peak of their power, these clandestine organizations, most notably the Freemasons, had hundreds of thousands of adherents, from colonial New York to imperial St. Petersburg. Dismissed today as fodder for conspiracy theorists and History Channel specials, they once served an important purpose: Their lodges were safe houses where freethinkers could explore everything from the laws of physics to the rights of man to the nature of God, all hidden from the oppressive, authoritarian eyes of church and state. But largely because they were so secretive, little is known about most of these organizations. Membership in all but the biggest died out over a century ago, and many of their encrypted texts have remained uncracked, dismissed by historians as impenetrable novelties.

It was actually an accident that brought to light the symbolic “sight-restoring” ritual. The decoding effort started as a sort of game between two friends that eventually engulfed a team of experts in disciplines ranging from machine translation to intellectual history. Its significance goes far beyond the contents of a single cipher. Hidden within coded manuscripts like these is a secret history of how esoteric, often radical notions of science, politics, and religion spread underground. At least that’s what experts believe. The only way to know for sure is to break the codes.

In this case, as it happens, the cracking began in a restaurant in Germany.

Source: http://www.wired.com

 

Mammoth carcass found in Siberia.

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A well-preserved mammoth carcass has been found by an 11-year-old boy in the permafrost of northern Siberia.

The remains were discovered at the end of August in Sopochnaya Karga, 3,500km (2,200 miles) northeast of Moscow.

A team of experts from St Petersburg then spent five days in September extracting the body from frozen mud.

The mammoth is estimated to have been around 16 years old when it died; it stood 2m tall and weighed 500kg.

It has been named Zhenya, after Zhenya Salinder, the 11-year-old who found the carcass while walking his dogs in the area.

Alexei Tikhonov, from the St Petersburg Zoology Institute, who led the team excavating the mammoth, said this specimen could either have been killed by Ice Age humans, or by a rival mammoth.

He added that it was well preserved for an adult specimen.

His colleague Sergei Gorbunov, from the International Mammoth Committee, which works to recover and safeguard such remains, said: “We had to use both traditional instruments such as axes, picks, shovels as well as such devices as this “steamer” which allowed us to thaw a thin layer of permafrost.

“Then we cleaned it off, and then we melted more of it. It took us a week to complete this task.”

But several juvenile examples have come to light that are more complete.

Earlier this year, a very well preserved juvenile mammoth nicknamed Yuka was unveiled by scientists.

Found in the Yakutia region of Russia, it preserves much of its soft tissue and strawberry-blonde coat of hair. There were also signs from its remains that humans may have stolen the carcass from lions and perhaps even stashed it for eating at a later date.

Source:BBC