Asteroid Impact Early Warning System Unveiled
technologyreview - At about 3am on 8 October last year, an asteroid the size of a small house smashed into the Earth's atmosphere over an isolated part of Indonesia. The asteroid disintegrated in the atmosphere causing a 50 kiloton explosion, about four times the size of the atomic bomb used to destroy Hiroshima. The blast was picked up by several infrasound stations used by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization to monitor nuclear tests.
No-one was injured in blast but the incident highlights the threat that planet faces from near Earth asteroids. Astronomers expect a strike like this once every 2-12 years. And the US congress has given NASA the task of sweeping the skies to identify anything heading our way. So far NASA has looked for objects of a kilometre or more in size and determined that none of these is on track to hit Earth in the foreseeable future.
But what of smaller objects? Various estimates show that an impact with an asteroid just 50 metres across would cause some 30,000 deaths (compared with 50 million deaths from an impact with a 1 kilometre-sized object).
This raises two important questions. The first is how best can astronomers monitor the skies for these smaller objects. The second is what to do should we find something heading our way.
Today, John Tonry from the University of Hawaii gives us his view. He believes the goal of finding 90 per cent of city-destroying asteroids in time to deflect them is extremely challenging. He says a more realistic target is to evacuate the area under threat. And for that we'll need just three week's notice.
Given these constraints, he reckons he can do the job with an array of eight 25cm aperture telescopes with a wide field of view that simultaneously scan the visible sky twice a night. He calls this early warning system the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System or ATLAS.
This is certainly a cost effective solution. The telescopes should be easy and cheap to construct. "We believe that a fully equipped telescope with focusser, fifilters, shutter, camera adapter and mount should cost about $50k," says Tonry (although who he means by 'we' isn't clear). There'd be an additional cost of $50k for the CCDs plus operational costs.
That's chickenfeed compared to the damage an asteroid could do. So it certainly looks as if the proposal is affordable. It also offers a useful additional benefit: the ability to monitor other rapidly changing events in the heavens, such as supernovas and gravitational lensing events.
A more difficult question to answer is whether three weeks is long enough to evacuate a city that may be home to several million people. It may be only a matter of time before we are forced to try.
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Thailand police find 2,000 fetuses in temple
BBC - Thai police say they have found the remains of more than 2,000 fetuses, thought to be from illegal abortions, hidden at a Buddhist temple in Bangkok.
The remains were discovered in the temple's mortuary in containers usually used for bodies awaiting cremation.
Police were alerted by a terrible smell after the temple's furnace broke down.
Two temple workers and a woman believed to have been paid to collect and dispose of fetuses from illegal abortion clinics have been arrested.
The bodies, wrapped in plastic bags, were discovered in a newly opened area of the mortuary, days after authorities found 348 in another room.
A 33-year-old woman has admitted taking money to collect foetuses from several clinics.
She earned just over $16 (£10) for each fetus she delivered to the temple.
Police said two temple workers had been charged with hiding the bodies.
Abortion is illegal in Thailand unless pregnancy is the result of rape or incest or a mother's health is at risk.
Police say they have begun raiding some of the 4,000 clinics in Bangkok they suspect are used to perform illegal abortions.
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The remains were found in containers usually used for bodies awaiting cremation
The case has also focused attention on the abortion business in Thailand, says the BBC's Vaudine England, in Bangkok.
Wealthy women can get abortions in safe facilities but the vast majority of Thai women wanting an abortion use clinics which could put their health and safety at great risk, our correspondent says.
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First Americans 'reached Europe five centuries before Columbus discoveries'
guardian - When Christopher Columbus paraded his newly discovered American Indians through the streets of Spanish towns at the end of the 15th century, he was not in fact introducing the first native Americans to Europe, according to new research.
Scientists who have studied the genetic past of an Icelandic family now claim the first Americans reached Europe a full five centuries before Columbus bumped into an island in the Bahamas during his first voyage of discovery in 1492.
Researchers said today that a woman from the Americas probably arrived in Iceland 1,000 years ago, leaving behind genes that are reflected in about 80 Icelanders today.
The link was first detected among inhabitants of Iceland, home to one of the most thorough gene-mapping programs in the world, several years ago.
Initial suggestions that the genes may have arrived via Asia were ruled out after samples showed they had been in Iceland since the early 18th century, before Asian genes began appearing among Icelanders.
Investigators discovered the genes could be traced to common ancestors in the south of Iceland, near the Vatnajˆkull glacier, in around 1710.
"As the island was practically isolated from the 10th century onwards, the most probable hypothesis is that these genes correspond to an Amerindian woman who was taken from America by the Vikings some time around the year 1000," Carles Lalueza-Fox, of the Pompeu Fabra university in Spain, said.
Norse sagas suggest the Vikings discovered the Americas centuries before Columbus got there in 1492.
A Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, in the eastern Canadian region of Terranova, is thought to date to the 11th century.
Researchers said they would keep trying to determine when the Amerindian genes first arrived in Iceland.
"So far, we have got back to the early 18th century, but it would be interesting to find the same sequence further back in Icelandic history," Lalueza-Fox said.
The genetic research, made public by Spain's Centre for Scientific Research, was due to be published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
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Ghost?
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Ghost in the Cemetery?
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This was caught on video in the Colonial Park Cemetery in Savannah, GA. What do you think? It's on YouTube for now...check it out.
