Another Apocalypse Scenario: Earth Could Be Hit by “Continent” Killer Asteroid in 2036

By Genalyn.C

A 20 million ton asteroid, dubbed as "the continent killer", is currently heading towards Earth and could be on a massive collision with the planet in approximately 25 years.

The asteroid, Apophis, is heading towards the planet at 23,000 miles per hour, according to Alex Hannaford of the Telegraph. The asteroid is more than 800 feet wide and is made of a mixture of rock, ice and dust.

According to Hannaford, there are two possible scenarios when this happens.

"The first, and thankfully most likely, is that Apophis will fly by in April 2029, the year it is due to make its first ‘close approach', and that's the last we'll hear of it," said Hannaford.

The second scenario is more grim. According to Hannaford, during the approach the asteroid will pass through what scientists refer to as a ‘keyhole', a small area of space that can alter the asteroid's course due to Earth's gravity.

"If this happens, it'll be on a massive collision course with us seven years later, likely to be April 13, 2036 - Easter Sunday," the report said.

However, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California has said that it is too early to predict which of the two possibilities is more likely.

"We don't know precisely where Apophis is headed but we will soon, when it becomes observable again, probably in 2012 or 2013," said Paul Chodas of the U.S. space agency's Near Earth Object (NEO).

"Once we get radar on it we will be able to nail down its orbit and we will know the chances of it going through the keyhole and hitting in 2036. By that time, it could be a four in a million chance, and that could very well go down to zero," he added.

The world at seven billion

by BBC

As the world population reaches seven billion people, the BBC's Mike Gallagher asks whether efforts to control population have been, as some critics claim, a form of authoritarian control over the world's poorest citizens.

The temperature is some 30C. The humidity stifling, the noise unbearable. In a yard between two enormous tea-drying sheds, a number of dark-skinned women patiently sit, each accompanied by an unwieldy looking cloth sack. They are clad in colourful saris, but look tired and shabby. This is hardly surprising - they have spent most of the day in nearby plantation fields, picking tea that will net them around two cents a kilo - barely enough to feed their large families.

Vivek Baid thinks he knows how to help them. He runs the Mission for Population Control, a project in eastern India which aims to bring down high birth rates by encouraging local women to get sterilised after their second child.

As the world reaches an estimated seven billion people, people like Vivek say efforts to bring down the world's population must continue if life on Earth is to be sustainable, and if poverty and even mass starvation are to be avoided.

There is no doubting their good intentions. Vivek, for instance, has spent his own money on the project, and is passionate about creating a brighter future for India.

But critics allege that campaigners like Vivek - a successful and wealthy male businessman - have tended to live very different lives from those they seek to help, who are mainly poor women.

These critics argue that rich people have imposed population control on the poor for decades. And, they say, such coercive attempts to control the world's population often backfired and were sometimes harmful.

Population scare

Most historians of modern population control trace its roots back to the Reverend Thomas Malthus, an English clergyman born in the 18th Century who believed that humans would always reproduce faster than Earth's capacity to feed them.

Giving succour to the resulting desperate masses would only imperil everyone else, he said. So the brutal reality was that it was better to let them starve.

Rapid agricultural advances in the 19th Century proved his main premise wrong, because food production generally more than kept pace with the growing population.

But the idea that the rich are threatened by the desperately poor has cast a long shadow into the 20th Century.

From the 1960s, the World Bank, the UN and a host of independent American philanthropic foundations, such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, began to focus on what they saw as the problem of burgeoning Third World numbers.

The believed that overpopulation was the primary cause of environmental degradation, economic underdevelopment and political instability.

Massive populations in the Third World were seen as presenting a threat to Western capitalism and access to resources, says Professor Betsy Hartmann of Hampshire College, Massachusetts, in the US.
"The view of the south is very much put in this Malthusian framework. It becomes just this powerful ideology," she says.

In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson warned that the US might be overwhelmed by desperate masses, and he made US foreign aid dependent on countries adopting family planning programmes.

Other wealthy countries such as Japan, Sweden and the UK also began to devote large amounts of money to reducing Third World birth rates.

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Nuclear radiation from Fukushima twice more than estimated: report

NEW YORK — The Fukushima nuclear disaster released twice as much of a radioactive substance into the atmosphere as Japanese authorities estimated, reaching 40% of the total from Chernobyl, a preliminary report says.

The estimate of much higher levels of radioactive cesium-137 comes from a worldwide network of sensors. Study author Andreas Stohl of the Norwegian Institute for Air Research says the Japanese government estimate came only from data in Japan, and that would have missed emissions blown out to sea.

The study did not consider health implications of the radiation. Cesium-137 is dangerous because it can last for decades in the environment, releasing cancer-causing radiation.

The long-term effects of the nuclear accident are unclear because of the difficulty of measuring radiation amounts people received.

In a telephone interview, Stohl said emission estimates are so imprecise that finding twice the amount of cesium isn’t considered a major difference. He said some previous estimates had been higher than his.

The journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics posted the report online for comment, but the study has not yet completed a formal review by experts in the field or been accepted for publication.

Last summer, the Japanese government estimated that the March 11 Fukushima accident released 15,000 terabecquerels of cesium. Terabecquerels are a radiation measurement. The new report from Stohl and co-authors estimates about 36,000 terabecquerels through April 20. That’s about 42% of the estimated release from Chernobyl, the report says.

An official at the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, the Japanese government branch overseeing such findings, said the agency could not offer any comment on the study because it had not reviewed its contents.

It also says about a fifth of the cesium fell on land in Japan, while most of the rest fell into the Pacific Ocean. Only about 2% of the fallout came down on land outside Japan, the report concluded.

Experts have no firm projections about how many cancers could result because they’re still trying to find out what doses people received. Some radiation from the accident has also been detected in Tokyo and in the United States, but experts say they expect no significant health consequences there.
Still, concern about radiation is strong in Japan. Many parents of small children in Tokyo worry about the discovery of radiation hotspots even though government officials say they don’t pose a health risk. And former Prime Minister Naoto Kan has said the most contaminated areas inside the evacuation zone could be uninhabitable for decades.

Stohl also noted that his study found cesium-137 emissions dropped suddenly at the time workers started spraying water on the spent fuel pool from one of the reactors. That challenges previous thinking that the pool wasn’t emitting cesium, he said.

Study shows why it's hard to keep weight off

by Gina Kolata, New York Times

For years, studies of obesity have found that soon after fat people lost weight, their metabolism slowed and they experienced hormonal changes that increased their appetites. Scientists hypothesised that these biological changes could explain why most obese dieters quickly gained back much of what they had so painfully lost.

But now a group of Australian researchers have taken those investigations a step further to see if the changes persist over a longer time frame. They recruited healthy people who were either overweight or obese and put them on a highly restricted diet that led them to lose at least 10 percent of their body weight. They then kept them on a diet to maintain that weight loss. A year later, the researchers found that the participants' metabolism and hormone levels had not returned to the levels before the study started.

The study, being published on Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, is small and far from perfect, but confirms their convictions about why it is so hard to lose weight and keep it off, say obesity researchers who were not involved the study.

They cautioned that the study had only 50 subjects, and 16 of them quit or did not lose the required 10 percent of body weight. And while the hormones studied have a logical connection with weight gain, the researchers did not show that the hormones were causing the subjects to gain back their weight.

Nonetheless, said Dr. Rudolph Leibel, an obesity researcher at Columbia, while it is no surprise that hormone levels changed shortly after the participants lost weight, "what is impressive is that these changes don't go away."

Dr. Stephen Bloom, an obesity researcher at Hammersmith Hospital in London, said the study needed to be repeated under more rigorous conditions, but added, "It is showing something I believe in deeply - it is very hard to lose weight." And the reason, he said, is that "your hormones work against you."

In the study, Joseph Proietto and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne recruited people who weighed an average of 209 pounds. At the start of the study, his team measured the participants' hormone levels and assessed their hunger and appetites after they ate a boiled egg, toast, margarine, orange juice and crackers for breakfast. The dieters then spent 10 weeks on a very low calorie regimen of 500 to 550 calories a day intended to makes them lose 10 percent of their body weight. In fact, their weight loss averaged 14 percent, or 29 pounds. As expected, their hormone levels changed in a way that increased their appetites, and indeed they were hungrier than when they started the study.

They were then given diets intended to maintain their weight loss. A year after the subjects had lost the weight, the researchers repeated their measurements. The subjects were gaining the weight back despite the maintenance diet - on average, gaining back half of what they had lost - and the hormone levels offered a possible explanation.

One hormone, leptin, which tells the brain how much body fat is present, fell by two-thirds immediately after the subjects lost weight. When leptin falls, appetite increases and metabolism slows. A year after the weight loss diet, leptin levels were still one-third lower than they were at the start of the study, and leptin levels increased as subjects regained their weight.

Other hormones that stimulate hunger, in particular ghrelin, whose levels increased, and peptide YY, whose levels decreased, were also changed a year later in a way that made the subjects' appetites stronger than at the start of the study.

The results show, once again, Dr. Leibel said, that losing weight "is not a neutral event," and that it is no accident that more than 90 percent of people who lose a lot of weight gain it back. "You are putting your body into a circumstance it will resist," he said. "You are, in a sense, more metabolically normal when you are at a higher body weight."

A solution might be to restore hormones to normal levels by giving drugs after dieters lose weight. But it is also possible, said Dr. Jules Hirsch of Rockefeller University, that researchers just do not know enough about obesity to prescribe solutions.

One thing is clear, he said: "A vast effort to persuade the public to change its habits just hasn't prevented or cured obesity."

"We need more knowledge," Dr. Hirsch said. "Condemning the public for their uncontrollable hedonism and the food industry for its inequities just doesn't seem to be turning the tide."

A glimpse into the future from Microsoft and (maybe) RIM

by Jameson Berkow

Predicting what the next generation of technology will look like is something on which multibillion-dollar companies are based.

That is, if their predictions are accurate.

In the first video embedded below, Microsoft Corp. provides its vision of the world five to 10 years from now. The world’s largest software company, continuing in its long-established tradition of crystal ball gazing, clearly foresees a future where intelligent systems bringing humanity all the information it needs anywhere, at any time, without the recipient ever being aware of the technologies involved.

In the second and third videos — rumoured to be commissioned by Research In Motion Ltd. — the fortune-telling is focused on mobile devices. The videos were posted by the gadget blog PocketNow on Thursday, which claims they were commissioned by RIM and then posted to an online portfolio site before being marked private.

We reached out to RIM to verify the authenticity of the videos, but so far have not heard back from the company.

The videos showcase full touchscreen handheld devices capable of interacting with what seems to be virtually everything they might encounter in nature, similar to the Microsoft notion of technology fading into the background of daily life while at the same time permeating everything.

Watch Video Here