'Potentially Hazardous' Asteroid Spotted Due to Pass Earth in One Month
dailymail - Astronomers have spotted a 'potentially hazardous' asteroid less than one month before it is due to pass close to Earth.
The object, given the name '2010 ST3', is 150 metres in diameter and will pass within four million miles of Earth in mid-October.
It was discovered using the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) PS1 telescope in images taken on September 16th, when it was about 20 million miles away.
It is the first 'potentially hazardous object' (PHO) to be discovered by the Pan-STARRS survey, using a new telescope designed to scan the skies for dangerous asteroids.
'Although this particular object won't hit Earth in the immediate future, its discovery shows that Pan-STARRS is now the most sensitive system dedicated to discovering potentially dangerous asteroids,' said Robert Jedicke, a University of Hawaii member of the PS1 Scientific Consortium, who is working on the asteroid data from the telescope.
'This object was discovered when it was too far away to be detected by other asteroid surveys,' Jedicke noted.
Most of the largest PHOs have already been catalogued, but scientists suspect that there are many more under a mile across that have not yet been discovered.
These could cause devastation on a regional scale if they ever hit our planet. Such impacts are estimated to occur once every few thousand years.
Timothy Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center (MPC), said, 'I congratulate the Pan-STARRS project on this discovery.
'It is proof that the PS1 telescope, with its Gigapixel Camera and its sophisticated computerized system for detecting moving objects, is capable of finding potentially dangerous objects that no one else has found.'
Pan-STARRS expects to discover tens of thousands of new asteroids every year with sufficient precision to accurately calculate their orbits around the sun.
Any sizable object that looks like it may come close to Earth within the next 50 years or so will be labeled 'potentially hazardous' and carefully monitored.
NASA experts believe that, given several years warning, it should be possible to organize a space mission to deflect any asteroid that is discovered to be on a collision course with Earth.
PS1 and its bigger brother, PS4, which will be operational later in this decade, are expected to discover a million or more asteroids in total.
They will also spot more distant targets such as variable stars, supernovas, and mysterious bursts from galaxies across more than half the universe. PS1 became fully operational in June 2010.
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Pumping Ice-Cold Fluid Into Patients' Veins Could Bring Them 'Back From the Dead'
dailymail - Victims of violent crime and road accidents could be 'brought back from the dead' with a pioneering new treatment.
Surgeons often only have minutes to save patients who have sustained gunshot, knife or car crash wounds.
But scientists said doctors could gain extra time to operate by pumping ice-cold fluid into a patient's veins.
The huge drop in body temperature slows the dying process and stops the brain from shutting down before the heart stops beating.
Research leader Dr Hasan Alam, at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, claims the procedure could save 90 per cent of patients with fatal wounds.
He said: 'By cooling them rapidly in this fashion, we can convert that almost-certain death into almost-certain survival.
'We're talking about 90 per cent-plus survival with normal cognitive function, normal brain activity, normal organ function. It's challenging but it's doable.'
Dr Alam has successfully performed his 'suspended animation' technique in operations on hundreds of pigs and now hopes to begin tests on humans.
The surgery involves pumping a chilled fluid called a 'plasma expander', which contains nutrients and chemicals to preserve organs, into a patient's blood vessels.
Under normal circumstances, humans suffer brain damage if they are deprived of oxygen for five minutes and death follows 15 minutes later.
However, cooling the body slows metabolic activity, thereby reducing the need for oxygen.
Once surgery to repair a wound is complete, the patient is gradually warmed up by infusing their own blood back into their bodies.
Dr Kevin Fong, consultant anaesthetist at University College London Hospital, believes the discovery could "revolutionise" surgery.
He said: 'Death is not a moment but a process which we might be able to stretch out, giving doctors a chance to intervene.
'Hypothermia is helping us re-draw the line between life and death, and it has the potential to revolutionise everything from trauma surgery to resuscitation medicine.'
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Pray Vigil at Possessed M25 Junction
getsurrey - Junction nine of the M25 may have been hexed, the pastor of an Evangelical church has claimed.
Gerald Coates, of the Pioneer Engage Church in Epsom Road, Leatherhead, believes someone "motivated by dark forces" could have been recording messages of evil onto cassette tapes and then strewing the reel around areas they wish to curse.
Mr Coates, who lives in Effingham, said he had found large amounts of tape reels in the area, including around the roundabouts that lead onto junction 9 of the motorway.
He believes this could be the explanation for what he described as a "wholly disproportionate" number of crashes on the Leatherhead section of the M25, as well as the number of people who have taken their lives by jumping from footbridges.
Mr Coates and Tom Winter, a 17-year-old member of his church who lives with him, organised a vigil on the Kingston Road bridge over the carriageway on Saturday (September 18) to pray for the safety of those driving below.
The pastor said 25 to 30 people attended, and he was hopeful the event would have an effect on the accident and fatality rates.
"We are going to be monitoring the number of crashes carefully now," he said.
"I do believe we will see far fewer incidents, but if the trend is not reversed then we will return for another vigil in mid-December."
Mr Coates said the reaction to Saturday’s prayers had been better than he expected.
"Appropriately enough, there had been a major crash at junction 11 and the traffic was backed all the way up to junction 9," he added.
"We prayed silently and aloud, in groups and alone and standing and on our knees.
"People were waving and shouting and beeping their horns, the whole atmosphere was great."
"Black apparition"
Mr Coates said he was not certain there was a hex on the road but that he could not think of another explanation for the collision rates.
"When I moved here eight years ago it quickly became clear to me that there is a wholly disproportionate number of crashes between junctions 10 and 9 and 9 and 8 compared to other areas," he added.
"I cannot think of any natural reason why that would be, because the human failures of not checking a mirror or a blindspot or whatever happen everywhere rather than being concentrated in one small area.
"One man said he had seen this black apparition standing over the M25 and it was that which caused a crash.
"I think people could be cursing it. One thing that people who are involved in the occult do, these people who are motivated by dark forces, is make recording on cassette tapes and then pull them out and put them around the area they have cursed.
"I have been finding huge amounts of this stuff in the area, including around the roundabout that leads onto the motorway."
The M25 around junctions 8, 9 and 10 has seen a number of serious and fatal crashes over the past few years.
In July, four people were left with serious injuries after the airport bus they were travelling in overturned near Redhill.
In February last year, 21-year-old Shivali Dave died after a crash between junctions 8 and 9, and last November one man was injured when five cars collided in the same area.
One of the worst incidents in the history of the M25 was in May 2007, when six people were killed after a van carrying a group of friends on their way home from a stag weekend crashed into the back of a lorry.
A number of people have also taken their lives by jumping from bridges over the motorway.
Grieving widow Janet Catsaras plunged to her death two days before Christmas in 2008, and in 2005 a 52-year-old man from Ashtead died after falling from the Green Lane Bridge.
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SKYNET? Robots Changing the Face of War
abc.net.au - A United States military analyst says robots are driving a fundamental shift in the way the Afghanistan war is conducted.
Many countries are increasingly relying on robotic technology, such as unmanned drones and remote-controlled buggies, to further their war efforts.
Military analyst Peter Singer says the US has over 7,000 remote-controlled robots in the air and over 12,000 on the ground.
He says the US uses remote-controlled drones to launch missile strikes from the air as well as remote-controlled buggies to detect roadside bombs.
"There are 44 other nations in the world, including Australia, which use unmanned systems," he said.
"The key with all these unmanned systems is not just that there's not a person inside, it's also that they're growing more and more intelligent; more and more autonomous."
Mr Singer says recent advances in technology are redefining the role of humans on the battlefield.
"You may have a Reaper drone, which is the replacement for the Predator drone, which can - as opposed to the Predator - take off and land on its own," he said.
"That plane, with no pilot inside of it, is over Afghanistan. The pilot, though, is geographically located - dislocated, so to speak - outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, at an airforce base there."
Mr Singer says there is a fundamental change in the experience of going to war.
"I remember speaking with a commander of a Predator squadron out in Nevada, he said: 'I wake up in the morning, I drive into work, for 12 hours I'm going to war; I'm putting missiles on enemy targets, then I get back in the car and I drive home. And 20 minutes after being at war, I'm sitting at the dinner table with my kids, talking about their school work'," he said.
Mr Singer says while war is changing for individuals, it is also changing for nations as a whole.
He says the US has carried out more than five times the number of unmanned strikes on Pakistan than it has manned strikes during the Kosovo war.
"We don't call it the 'Pakistan war'. [But] it's five times the size," he said.
"For some reason we've redefined 'war'.
"I think it's because of the role of this technology and how it changes our notion of what it means for a nation to go to war."
Technology out of control
Mr Singer says while remote-controlled drones are saving soldiers' lives, people still need to figure out where accountability falls when robots suffer an "oops moment" on the battlefield.
"An example of an oops moment that's already happened was a couple of years ago in South Africa. An automated anti-aircraft cannon was supposed to fire up into the sky for a training exercise. It had a, quote, 'software glitch'," he said.
"We've all had software glitches before. [But] in this case, it actually caused the automated cannon to level and fire in a circle. It killed nine soldiers before it ran out of ammunition."
Mr Singer says people will need to adjust to the presence of robots on the battlefield.
He says soldiers used to share a sense of danger with those they were targeting, but now that is not necessarily the case.
"There was a duality of those who were putting themselves at risk and those who they were putting at risk. That's changing with this technology," he said.
"Every revolution, whether we're talking about the introduction of gunpowder, or the introduction of computers or the machinegun, or now robotics - every revolution has two sides to it.
"Every revolution has both positive ripple effects and negative ripple effects, and really, it's up to us to figure out how to navigate between them."
Fortean / Oddball News: 'Potentially Hazardous' Asteroid, Saving Trauma Patients and War Robots
