'Doomsday Clock' moved forward. What has scientists worried?

'Doomsday Clock' moved forward. What has scientists worried? - Scientists say they moved the 'Doomsday Clock' a minute closer to midnight because nations are failing to sufficiently address nuclear proliferation, climate change, and other global threats.

Citing “inaction” on renewed nuclear proliferation, climate change, and the urgent need to find sustainable sources of energy, a group of scientists has moved the “Doomsday Clock” a minute closer to midnight, saying nations are “failing to change business as usual.”

It was a back-to-the-future moment for the “Doomsday Clock,” which just two years ago had been shifted backward to indicate global catastrophe was a bit less imminent.

Directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, a group originally composed of University of Chicago scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, created the clock in 1947 to use the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) to convey the peril of nuclear weapons proliferation. Through the cold war it tolled, reminding nations of the silent danger.

Over the years, the hands of the clock have moved around a lot. In 1949, the clock was moved to three minutes to midnight when President Harry Truman told the American public that the Soviets had tested their first nuclear device – starting the arms race. By 1991, with the cold war officially over and the US and Russia slashing their nuclear arsenals, the clock retreated to 17 minutes to midnight.

Terrorism, tensions between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan, renewed friction between the US and Russia, North Korea's nuclear push, and other tensions had pushed the clock to five minutes to midnight by 2007.

But movement on nuclear arms talks, climate change, and other threats so buoyed the scientists two years ago that they ordered the so-called Doomsday Clock's minute hand to be pushed backward to six minutes before midnight.

Now, despite the Arab Spring and other pro-democracy movements around the world, including in Russia, lowering clouds have rolled back in for these scientists. So much so that on Tuesday the BAS directors announced they were moving the minute hand of the clock back to the 2007 position – 11:55.

“Two years ago, it appeared that world leaders might address the truly global threats that we face,” the BAS directors said in a statement. “In many cases, that trend has not continued or been reversed.”

“Inaction on key issues including climate change, and rising international tensions motivate the movement of the clock,” the group said in its statement. “As we see it, the major challenge at the heart of humanity’s survival in the 21st century is how to meet energy needs for economic growth in developing and industrial countries without further damaging the climate, exposing people to loss of health and community, and without risking further spread of nuclear weapons.”

But in a year in which the Mayan calendar and other doomsday prophesies are getting more than their share of attention, how seriously, really should the public take this obviously subjective – and critics might argue meaningless – relic of the cold war?

“Is this ridiculous thing still around?” Darrin Cothran, a commenter on a Los Angeles Times web page noting the clock's shift moaned. “Time to tell these elderly gentlemen that it's time to retire.”

“They're just trying to stay relevant,” piped up an anonymous commentator on Slashdot. “We all forgot about them when the Cold War ended, and they crave attention again.”

Others, however, argue in favor of at least some type of global warning clock – as a simple indicator for society that unseen looming problems exist and need public attention.

Daniel Abbasi, a former senior adviser at the Environmental Protection Agency, has argued that the world needs a Global Climate Change Index akin to the Dow Jones Industrial Average to chart humanity's gains – and reversals. It needs to be simple enough to keep public eyes from glazing over and still hold policymakers’ feet to the fire on really lowering greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.

Bulletin scientists argue that the need for their clock remains strong. Key recommendations for a safer world that they say have not been taken up include:

• Ratification by the US and China of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
• Implementing multinational management of the civilian nuclear energy fuel cycle with strict standards for safety, security, and nonproliferation of nuclear weapons
• Strengthening the International Atomic Energy Agency's capacity to oversee nuclear materials and technology development
• Adopting climate change agreements to reduce carbon dioxide emissions
• Transforming the coal power sector of the world economy to retire older plants and require new plants to capture and store carbon dioxide they produce
• Increasing public and private investments in alternatives to carbon-emitting energy sources, such as solar and wind, and technologies for energy storage

“Whether meeting the challenges of nuclear power, or mitigating the suffering from human-caused global warming, or preventing catastrophic nuclear conflict in a volatile world, the power of people is essential,” Kennette Benedict, executive director of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said in a statement.

“For this reason, we ask other scientists and experts to join us in engaging ordinary citizens,” she said. “Together, we can present the most significant questions to policymakers and industry leaders. Most importantly, we can demand answers and action.” ( csmonitor.com )

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400-Year-Old Playing Cards Reveal Royal Secret

400-Year-Old Playing Cards Reveal Royal Secret - Call it a card player's dream. A complete set of 52 silver playing cards gilded in gold and dating back 400 years has been discovered.

Created in Germany around 1616, the cards were engraved by a man named Michael Frömmer, who created at least one other set of silver cards.

According to a story, backed up by a 19th-century brass plate, the cards were at one point owned by a Portuguese princess who fled the country, cards in hand, after Napoleon's armies invaded in 1807.

At the time they were created in 1616 no standardized cards existed; different parts of Europe had their own card styles. This particular set uses a suit seen in Italy, with swords, coins, batons and cups in values from ace to 10. Each of these suits has three face cards — king, knight (also known as cavalier) and knave. There are no jokers.

In 2010, the playing cards were first put on auction by an anonymous family at Christie's auction house in New York. Purchased by entrepreneur Selim Zilkha, the cards were recently described by Timothy Schroder, a historian with expertise in gold and silver decorative arts, in his book "Renaissance and Baroque Silver, Mounted Porcelain and Ruby Glass from the Zilkha Collection"(Paul Holberton Publishing, 2012).

"Silver cards were exceptional," Schroder writes. "They were not made for playing with but as works of art for the collector's cabinet, or Kunstkammer." Today, few survive. "[O]nly five sets of silver cards are known today and of these only one — the Zilkha set — is complete."

On the cards, two of the kings are depicted wearing ancient Roman clothing while one is depicted as a Holy Roman Emperor and another is dressed up as a Sultan, with clothing seen in the Middle East. . The knights and knaves are depicted in different poses wearing (then-contemporary) Renaissance military or courtly costumes. Each card is about 3.4 inches by 2 inches (8.6 centimeters by 5 centimeters) in size and blank on the back.

Gilding with mercury

Creating the card set would have been a hazardous job. For the gilding, its designers used mercury, a poisonous substance that can potentially kill.

"You ground up gold into kind of a dust, and you mix it with mercury, and you painted that onto the surface where you wished the gilding to appear," Schroder told LiveScience in an interview. The mercury gets burned off in a kiln, a process "that would leave the gold chemically bonded to the silver."

The process is illegal today, he noted, and even in Renaissance times, it was known to be hazardous. "I don't think they quite understood why it was dangerous, but they did appreciate the dangers of it," Schroder said.

A gift from a princess?

The owner of the 17th-century card set is not known. However, according to a tradition detailed by the anonymous family who sold it, in the early 19thcentury, the cards were in the possession of Infanta Carlota Joaquina, a daughter of a Spanish king, who was married to a prince in Portugal. She fled to Brazil when Napoleon's armies marched into Iberia in 1807, apparently taking the silver cards with her.

After Napoleon forced her brother, Ferdinand VII, to abdicate the throne of Spain, she made several attempts to take over the Spanish crown and control the country's holdings in the New World. According to the family tradition, she gave the card set to the wife of Felipe Contucci, a man who helped in her efforts.

While this story cannot be proven, Schroder said he has "very little reason to doubt it." He added that "when the cards were acquired by Mr. Zilkha, they came in an early 19th-century leather box which had a brass plate in them, which also appeared to date from the early or middle of the 19th century, with this provenance engraved on it."

Contucci's plot

Spain still controlled a vast empire in the New World at the time of Napoleon's invasion. Among its territories was the viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata, a large swath of land centred in Buenos Aires (in modern-day Argentina).

In November 1808, Contucci was in contact with leaders in Buenos Aires, according to a conference paper presented last February by Anthony McFarlane, a professor at the University of Warwick. Contucci told the princess they had made her an offer that would see her gain control of a new kingdom in South America.

McFarlane writes that "Contucci raised her hopes by informing in mid-November 1808 that 124 leading men were ready to support a military intervention by a military force led by the Infante Pedro Carlos [a relative of the princess] and supported by Admiral Smith [of Britain], to install her (as) the constitutional monarch of an independent kingdom."

However, this plan was foiled when government officials from Portugal, Spain and Britain all objected to it.

Then, in August 1809, the Spanish ambassador arrived in Rio with instructions from the Junta Central (the Spanish government not controlled by Napoleon), "to prevent Carlota from entering Spanish territory and to deflect her ambitions to become Regent," writes McFarlane.

Carlota's dream of becoming a ruling queen was simply not in the cards. ( LiveScience.com )

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Galapagos tortoise can be revived

Galapagos tortoise can be revived — Lonesome George, the late reptile prince of the Galapagos Islands, may be dead, but scientists now say he may not be the last giant tortoise of his species after all.

Researchers say they may be able to resurrect the Pinta Island subspecies by launching a cross-breeding program with 17 other tortoises found to contain genetic material similar to that of Lonesome George, who died June 24 at the Pacific Ocean archipelago off Ecuador's coast after repeated failed efforts to reproduce.

 

Associated Press/Galapagos National Park, File - FILE - In this July 21, 2008 file photo released by Galapagos National Park, a giant tortoise named "Lonesome George" is seen in the Galapagos islands, an archipelago off Ecuador's Pacific coast. Lonesome George, the late reptile prince of the Galapagos Islands, may be dead, but scientists now say he may not be the last giant tortoise of his species after all. (AP Photo/Galapagos National Park, File)

Edwin Naula, director of the Galapagos National Park, said in a telephone interview on Thursday that the probability is high it can be accomplished.

"It would be the first time that a species was recovered after having been declared extinct," Naula said.

But it won't happen overnight.

"This is going to take about 100 to 150 years," Naula added.

Scientists took DNA samples from 1,600 tortoises on Wolf volcano, and found the Pinta variety in 17, though their overall genetic makeup varied.

Through cross-breeding, "100 percent pure species" can be achieved, said Naula, a biologist.

He said the 17 tortoises were being transferred from Isabela island, where the volcano is located, to the park's breeding center at Santa Cruz, the main island on the archipelago whose unique flora and fauna helped inspire Charles Darwin's work on evolution. The results are to be published in the journal Biological Conservation, the park said.

The study on Wolf volcano was conducted by Yale University and the Galapagos park with financial help from the Galapagos Conservancy.

In a news release, the park said scientists speculate that giant tortoises from Pinta island might have arrived at Wolf volcano after being taken off by whaling ships for food and later cast overboard.

At least 14 species of giant tortoise originally inhabited the islands' 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) off Ecuador's coast and 10 survive.

A visit to Lonesome George became de rigueur for celebrities and common folk alike among the 180,000 people who annually visit the Galapagos.

Before humans arrived, the islands were home to tens of thousands of giant tortoises. The number fell to about 3,000 in 1974, but the recovery program run by the national park and the Charles Darwin Foundation has succeeded in increasing the overall population to 20,000.

Lonesome George's age at death was not known, but scientists believed he was about 100, not especially old for a giant tortoise. ( Associated Press )

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Did Lioness Really Befriend Baby Antelope?

Did Lioness Really Befriend Baby Antelope? - While documenting a lion hunt in Uganda recently, a photographer came across a surprising sight: a lioness seeming to "adopt" a baby antelope after killing and eating its mother.

In photographer Adri De Visser's photo series of the incident, which has been reproduced all over the Web in recent days, the lioness nuzzles the tiny, orphaned calf, picks it up by the scruff of its neck and hauls it off "like one of her own cubs," as the Daily Mail put it. According to many media outlets, the lioness's maternal instincts kicked in when confronted with the poor, defenseless youngster.

But is that really what happened?

Far from it. Everybody likes a good story about a lion lying down with a lamb. But in nature, "the lamb always gets eaten," said ecologist Craig Packer, director of the Lion Research Center at the University of Minnesota. "It's quite common for cats to play with their prey and they can look very gentle doing it. But it always ends in tears," he said.

According to Packer, the scene depicted in the photos is familiar to anyone who has studied lions, and to anyone who has ever watched their cat catch a mouse. "These are just variations on the theme of cat-and-mouse, where cats capture their prey and play with it until they either get bored and leave it or get hungry and eat it," he told Life's Little Mysteries.

Lions and other large cats can be surprisingly gentle when playing with young, feeble prey, he noted, but only in order to keep the creature alive and prolong the game of cat-and-mouse.

Despite being in danger, the baby kob (a type of antelope) in the photos doesn't try to escape the lion. Packer explained that its flight instinct hasn't kicked in yet. Like baby impalas and gazelles, baby kobs are "hiders." While their mothers graze, they hide in the underbrush, staying still and docile to minimize their chance of detection. "So, when they are detected, they just kind of stand around," Packer said. "They don't know how to run away. When they see the lion, they are responding to the presence of a large, warm body."

Perhaps, in this case, the lioness eventually killed and ate the baby kob. Perhaps she got bored before she got hungry, and let the creature wander off and starve to death. "Nobody follows these things so persistently that they can tell you what happens at the end of the encounter," Packer said. "But either way, nature is not 'The Lion King,' with the warthog and all that. This story ended." ( LiveScience.com )

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'Britishisms' Creeping into American English

'Britishisms' Creeping into American English - British people have long bemoaned the gradual encroachment of Americanisms into everyday speech, via Hollywood films and sitcoms. Now, "Britishisms" are crossing the pond the other way, thanks to the growing online popularity of British media such as Harry Potter, Downton Abbey and The Daily Mail.

For example, BBC News reports that "ginger" as a descriptor of a red-haired, freckly person has shot up in usage in the United States since 1998. That's the year the first Harry Potter book, with its Weasley family of gingers, hit store shelves. The trend shows up in Google ngram searches, which track the frequency of words and phrases appearing in print.

The Britishism invasion also includes "cheeky," "twee," "chat-up," "sell-by date" and "the long game," as well as "do the washing up," "keen on," "bit" (as in "the best bit"), "to book" (e.g. a flight), "called X" (instead of "named X") and "to move house."

A few of these now sound so familiar to American ears that their recent Limey origins might come as a surprise.

While some of these British terms have gained ground because they sound pleasantly posh to American ears, Jesse Sheidlower, American editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary, says others simply fill a gap where there is no equivalent in American English. "One-off," as in something which is done, or made, or which happens only once, and "go missing," instead of the vaguer "disappear," are two examples.

According to Sheidlower, the small but noticeable increase in the American usage of traditionally British terms doesn't bother Americans nearly as much as Americanisms bother many Brits.

"In the U.K., the use of Americanisms is seen as a sign that culture is going to hell," he told BBC News. "But Americans think all British people are posh, so — aside from things that are fairly pretentious — no-one would mind."

This laissez-faire linguistic attitude hasn't always been the American way. Early in U.S. history, when the nation was striving to distinguish itself from its former landlords, the dictionary maker Noah Webster set about establishing a distinctly American form of English. Webster's legacy includes the lack of "u" in words like "color" and the "-er" ending in words like "center" — spelling variants he viewed as superior to their British counterparts (colour and centre).

Some of the economical spellings Webster adopted, such as "public" instead of the British "publick," have since spread back to England. Clearly, in the continuously evolving languages of these transatlantic allies, there is give and take. ( LiveScience.com )

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Synthetic marijuana on the rise: looks like pot, but 'far worse'

Synthetic marijuana on the rise: looks like pot, but 'far worse' - Synthetic marijuana is marketed as a cheap way to get a legal marijuana-like high. But health experts say it is 'way more' than marijuana and is 'very dangerous.'

Antidrug activists are concerned by the rising use of manmade drugs known as synthetic marijuana, which purport to be a legal way to a herbal high but are actually dangerous chemical concoctions that are banned in many states.

Synthetic Marijuana Causing Intoxication in Kids (ABC News)

The drugs, often sold in gas station and convenience stories under names like “K-2” and “Spice,” are known to cause bouts of paranoia and agitation, as well as psychosis. Some teens have coined the term “couch lock” to describe one effect – an inability to move despite being conscious.

“This is nasty, evil, and very scary stuff,” says Nancy Knott, a drug counselor with Scripps Alcohol and Treatment Center in La Jolla, Calif. She relates a recent episode in which one teen considered himself to be Christ Jesus and could not be dissuaded.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that 1 in 9 high school seniors has tried the drugs. Calls to poison centers about the drugs rose from 2,900 in 2010 to 7,000 in 2011 and hit 1,200 in the first two months of 2012.

Makers produce chemicals synthetically and then spray them onto dry herbs and plants, hoping to mimic the appearance of marijuana. The chemicals are three to five times more potent than the THC found in marijuana, “leading to symptoms including loss of consciousness, paranoia, and occasionally, psychotic episodes,” says Tod Burke, a professor of criminal justice at Radford University in Virginia.

As of March 2011, 20 states had imposed bans and additional legislation is pending in 37 states, Professor Burke says.

Synthetic marijuana makers have tried to stay ahead of law enforcement by constantly altering their products chemically, replacing banned substances with new ones that have similar properties. This has lured workers searching for ways to get high but also pass drug tests, as well as teens seeking the latest “new high.”

“It’s easy for entrepreneurs in US labs or overseas to manipulate the molecular structure and come back with another product promising the same kinds of highs,” says Grant Smith of Drug Policy Alliance.

Counselor Ms. Knott says that a generation of parents who smoked pot in the 1960s and ’70s are partly responsible for rising use. They are allowing their kids to smoke marijuana “because we did” – but aren’t aware of the highly detrimental effects of the new synthetics.

“They see this stuff around and think it’s just marijuana,” says Knott. “So their kids are using it, and their kids’ friends – and then they find out after it’s too late that it was way more than marijuana.”

Kids are emboldened by this permissiveness, she adds: “The kids figure their parents were experimenters back in the day, and so why shouldn’t we be?”

They are also looking for ways to manage rising stress levels, says Elizabeth Dowdell, associate professor in the college of nursing at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. “In today's world many teens and young adults have higher stress and anxiety levels than those of previous generations,” she says. “They are looking for something that is cheap and easy to get to give a high that numbs them to the stress and/or anxiety of their world.”

Marijuana advocates are quick to say marijuana is safer.

“The sad thing is that many people use these substances because they are afraid of the criminal penalties for marijuana,” says Morgan Fox, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project. “If we would simply allow adults to use marijuana in a regulated, controlled framework, the market for these potentially dangerous synthetic substances would vanish overnight and there would be no one left to sell them to teens.”

For now, the answer to synthetic marijuana is “education, education, education of teens, teachers, nurses, doctors, parents,” says Ms. Dowdell, via e-mail.

Others agree.

“Kids need to learn that these are very dangerous,“ says Christina Hantsch, head of toxicolcogy at the Loyola University Medical Center. “They tell me they would never try cocaine or heroin because they are too dangerous, and yet they are willing to try these, which can be far worse.” ( Christian Science Monitor )

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How Zombie Ants Lose Their Minds

How Zombie Ants Lose Their Minds - New gruesome details have emerged explaining how a parasitic fungus manipulates an unfortunate ant, filling its head with fungal cells and changing its muscles so the ant can grab a leaf in a death grip just when and where the fungus wants it.

Research in a Thai rain forest has shown the fungi, a species of Ophiocordyceps, forces an infected ant to wander drunkenly over the forest's low leaves before clamping its jaws around the main vein on the underside of a leaf in an ant zombie graveyard.

By watching 16 infected ants bite down, the researchers found that their last bites took place around noon, indicating they are synchronized to either the sun or a related cue, like temperature or humidity.

"Synchronized arrival of zombie ants at the graveyards is a remarkable phenomenon. It adds a layer of complexity on what is already an impressive feat," wrote David Hughes, a study researcher from Pennsylvania State University, in an email to LiveScience. "However, although ants bite at noon they don't in fact die until sunset. Likely this strategy ensures (the fungus) has a long cool night ahead of it during which time it can literally burst out of the ant's head to begin the growth of the spore-releasing stalk"

The bizarre sequence that leads up to the ant's death is completely out of step with its normal behavior and appears to be a way for the fungus to get itself to the perfect spot to spread its spores, according to the researchers.

The ants, a species called Camponotus leonardi, live in the canopies of trees, but come to the ground occasionally, where they contract the fungus. Healthy ants travel on trails unlike infected ones, which zigzag in a drunken walk over low vegetation, sometimes falling and convulsing before taking their final bite.

Hughes and colleagues observed a total of 42 infected ants, some of which they dissected. While holding its death grip, the ant's head was filled with fungal cells and the muscles that operated the ant's mandible, or jaw, was atrophied, they found.

"In the context of biting, it allows the mandibles, we feel, to work in one direction and one direction only," Hughes told LiveScience. "Normally, they open and close, but in this case they can only close."

This keeps the dying ant from losing its grip. The fungus also appears to suck all of the calcium out of the muscles, causing a condition similar to rigor mortis, he said.

Fungi have been observed to manipulate the behavior arthropods as well, including crickets, bees, wasps and perhaps even spiders.

"We are quite confident we could see this and similar phenomenon across a broad range of organisms, because it is such a neat evolutionary trick if you are fungus to use the muscles of an animal to transport you to another environment," he wrote. (Many fungi rely on wind or other means to passively disperse their spores.)

More broadly, many parasites -- be they plant, animal or virus -- can alter the behavior of their hosts.

In the most recent study, published in the journal BMC Ecology, Hughes and colleagues observed and examined healthy and infected ants to compare their movements and reveal the physiological effects of the fungus. In a previous study, published in 2009, they found that the fungus manipulates infected ants to take it to ideal places for it to reproduce in the forest understory. As result the dead ants wound up on leaves on the north-northwestern side of plants approximately 9.8 inches (25 centimeters) above the ground. ( LiveScience )

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