BEIJING – A Chinese passenger train hit a record speed of 302 miles per hour (486 kilometers per hour) Friday during a test run of a yet-to-be opened link between Beijing and Shanghai, state media said.
The Xinhua News Agency said it was the fastest speed recorded by an unmodified conventional commercial train. Other types of trains in other countries have traveled faster.
A specially modified French TGV train reached 357.2 mph (574.8 kph) during a 2007 test, while a Japanese magnetically levitated train sped to 361 mph (581 kph) in 2003.
State television footage showed the sleek white train whipping past green farm fields in eastern China. It reached the top speed on a segment of the 824-mile (1,318-kilometer) -long line between Zaozhuang city in Shandong province and Bengbu city in Anhui province, Xinhua said.
[Rewind: Amtrack reveals vision for high speed rail]
The line is due to open in 2012 and will halve the current travel time between the capital Beijing and Shanghai to five hours.
The project costs $32.5 billion and is part of a massive government effort to link many of China's cities by high-speed rail and reduce overcrowding on heavily used lines.
[Related: Tense fight over U.S. high speed rail]
China already has the world's longest high-speed rail network, and it plans to cover 8,125 miles (13,000 kilometers) by 2012 and 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers) by 2020.
The drive to develop high-speed rail technology rivals China's space program in terms of national pride and importance. Railway officials say they want to reach speeds over 500 kph (312 mph).
By ANITA CHANG, Associated Press Anita Chang, Associated Press – Fri Dec 3, 4:18 am ET
China passenger train hits 300 mph, breaks record - Yahoo! News: "China passenger train hits 300 mph, breaks record"
Saturday, December 04, 2010
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
They're all out: 33 miners raised safely in Chile
SAN JOSE MINE, Chile – The last of the Chilean miners, the foreman who held them together when they were feared lost, was raised from the depths of the earth Wednesday night — a joyous ending to a 69-day ordeal that riveted the world. No one has ever been trapped so long and survived.
Luis Urzua ascended smoothly through 2,000 feet of rock, completing a 22 1/2-hour rescue operation that unfolded with remarkable speed and flawless execution. Before a jubilant crowd of about 2,000 people, he became the 33rd miner to be rescued.
"We have done what the entire world was waiting for," he told Chilean President Sebastian Pinera immediately after his rescue. "The 70 days that we fought so hard were not in vain. We had strength, we had spirit, we wanted to fight, we wanted to fight for our families, and that was the greatest thing."
The president told him: "You are not the same, and the country is not the same after this. You were an inspiration. Go hug your wife and your daughter." With Urzua by his side, he led the crowd in singing the national anthem.
The rescue exceeded expectations every step of the way. Officials first said it might be four months before they could get the men out; it turned out to be 69 days and about 8 hours.
Once the escape tunnel was finished, they estimated it would take 36 to 48 hours to get all the miners to the surface. That got faster as the operation went along, and all the men were safely above ground in 22 hours, 37 minutes.
The rescue workers who talked the men through the final hours were being hoisted one at time to the surface.
By MICHAEL WARREN, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 9 mins ago
Miner Luis Urzua, the last miner to be rescued, celebrates next to Chile's President Sebastian Pinera after being pulled to safety.
Luis Urzua ascended smoothly through 2,000 feet of rock, completing a 22 1/2-hour rescue operation that unfolded with remarkable speed and flawless execution. Before a jubilant crowd of about 2,000 people, he became the 33rd miner to be rescued.
"We have done what the entire world was waiting for," he told Chilean President Sebastian Pinera immediately after his rescue. "The 70 days that we fought so hard were not in vain. We had strength, we had spirit, we wanted to fight, we wanted to fight for our families, and that was the greatest thing."
The president told him: "You are not the same, and the country is not the same after this. You were an inspiration. Go hug your wife and your daughter." With Urzua by his side, he led the crowd in singing the national anthem.
The rescue exceeded expectations every step of the way. Officials first said it might be four months before they could get the men out; it turned out to be 69 days and about 8 hours.
Once the escape tunnel was finished, they estimated it would take 36 to 48 hours to get all the miners to the surface. That got faster as the operation went along, and all the men were safely above ground in 22 hours, 37 minutes.
The rescue workers who talked the men through the final hours were being hoisted one at time to the surface.
By MICHAEL WARREN, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 9 mins ago
Miner Luis Urzua, the last miner to be rescued, celebrates next to Chile's President Sebastian Pinera after being pulled to safety.
Monday, October 11, 2010
American, 2 Japanese Win Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Purdue University professor, Japanese Ei-ichi Negishi is a co-recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He shares the award with Japanese Akira Suzuki of Hokkaido University and American Richard Heck of the University of Delaware. Together, their work created a method to build complex organic molecules that are now used to manufacture a range of products - from pharmaceuticals to electronics. Our correspondent spoke with Negishi at his office in Indiana shortly after the Nobel announcement was made.
For 75-year-old Ei-ichi Negishi, winning the 2010 Nobel Prize in chemistry was an achievement more than 30 years in the making.
Negishi's research led to metal based reactions, called palladium catalyzed cross coupling, that enables the synthesis of complex organic compounds.
"It's like a LEGO game with chemical pieces," said Professor Negishi.
Negishi says his research discovered which metals serve as a catalyst to get organic compounds to "snap" together with other compounds.
The result is a process that efficiently and economically builds materials used to make products such as medicines to treat the HIV virus and colon cancer, and liquid visual displays for modern electronics.
"And many of them, used on TV display panels or cell phones - these liquid crystals, they are synthesized by using our cross coupling," said Negishi.
Although most people have used products that stem from Negishi's research, he says the medical benefits have been the most rewarding for him.
"Just by looking at the TV screen - without knowing what is behind the panel, you wouldn't appreciate what we have done," he said. "But medicine, if you take [it] and your life and health is improved or saved, and then you learn the process of making - what kind of chemistry has been used - I'm sure people will appreciate [it]."
Negishi is the third Purdue University professor win a Nobel Prize. His mentor, chemist Herbert C. Brown, was a co-recipient of the award in 1979. Negishi and fellow Nobel recipient Akira Suzuki studied under Brown at Purdue.
Negishi is the author of two books and more than 400 scientific articles. He says there is more research to perform in the ever-advancing field that led to his Nobel Prize.
"I can predict that many more innovative and modern advanced synthetic metals will arise," he said.
The Nobel Committee will present the $1.5-million award to Negishi and his fellow co-recipients in December in Sweden.
For 75-year-old Ei-ichi Negishi, winning the 2010 Nobel Prize in chemistry was an achievement more than 30 years in the making.
Negishi's research led to metal based reactions, called palladium catalyzed cross coupling, that enables the synthesis of complex organic compounds.
"It's like a LEGO game with chemical pieces," said Professor Negishi.
Negishi says his research discovered which metals serve as a catalyst to get organic compounds to "snap" together with other compounds.
The result is a process that efficiently and economically builds materials used to make products such as medicines to treat the HIV virus and colon cancer, and liquid visual displays for modern electronics.
"And many of them, used on TV display panels or cell phones - these liquid crystals, they are synthesized by using our cross coupling," said Negishi.
Although most people have used products that stem from Negishi's research, he says the medical benefits have been the most rewarding for him.
"Just by looking at the TV screen - without knowing what is behind the panel, you wouldn't appreciate what we have done," he said. "But medicine, if you take [it] and your life and health is improved or saved, and then you learn the process of making - what kind of chemistry has been used - I'm sure people will appreciate [it]."
Negishi is the third Purdue University professor win a Nobel Prize. His mentor, chemist Herbert C. Brown, was a co-recipient of the award in 1979. Negishi and fellow Nobel recipient Akira Suzuki studied under Brown at Purdue.
Negishi is the author of two books and more than 400 scientific articles. He says there is more research to perform in the ever-advancing field that led to his Nobel Prize.
"I can predict that many more innovative and modern advanced synthetic metals will arise," he said.
The Nobel Committee will present the $1.5-million award to Negishi and his fellow co-recipients in December in Sweden.
Thinnest Material Ever Captures Nobel Physics Prize
The Nobel Foundation has awarded one of its famed prizes to a pair of researchers who developed a carbon substrate that's so flat it's considered a brand new material. The breakthrough could lead to ultrafast microchip transistors and other advances.
The Nobel Prize for Physics went to Andre Geim, and Konstantin Novoselov, whose work in quantum physics yielded a new material called grapheme. The Foundation said graphene, as thin as one atom, is a two-dimensional precursor material that will make it possible for scientists to develop a range of new consumer and industrial products.
"Since it is practically transparent and a good conductor, graphene is suitable for producing transparent touch screens, light panels, and maybe even solar cells," said the Nobel Foundation, in a statement.
Geim and Novaselov derived graphene from ordinary graphite, which is found in everyday household objects like pencils. The researchers extracted flakes of the carbon-based material using nothing more extraordinary than a piece of Scotch tape. That breakthrough, simple on its surface, could lead to all sorts of new offerings.
Learn how to plan, implement, and manage data center standardization strategy
Data Center Efficiency Through Standardization
"When mixed into plastics, graphene can turn them into conductors of electricity while making them more heat resistant and mechanically robust. This resilience can be utilized in new super strong materials, which are also thin, elastic, and lightweight. In the future, satellites, airplanes, and cars could be manufactured out of the new materials," said the Nobel Foundation.
The Foundation also predicted that graphene could replace silicon as the primary substrate for microchips.
By Paul McDougall
InformationWeek
October 5, 2010 11:04 AM
The invention, just one atom thick, paves way for ultrafast transistors, lighter airplanes, and more fuel-efficient cars.
The Nobel Prize for Physics went to Andre Geim, and Konstantin Novoselov, whose work in quantum physics yielded a new material called grapheme. The Foundation said graphene, as thin as one atom, is a two-dimensional precursor material that will make it possible for scientists to develop a range of new consumer and industrial products.
"Since it is practically transparent and a good conductor, graphene is suitable for producing transparent touch screens, light panels, and maybe even solar cells," said the Nobel Foundation, in a statement.
Geim and Novaselov derived graphene from ordinary graphite, which is found in everyday household objects like pencils. The researchers extracted flakes of the carbon-based material using nothing more extraordinary than a piece of Scotch tape. That breakthrough, simple on its surface, could lead to all sorts of new offerings.
Learn how to plan, implement, and manage data center standardization strategy
Data Center Efficiency Through Standardization
"When mixed into plastics, graphene can turn them into conductors of electricity while making them more heat resistant and mechanically robust. This resilience can be utilized in new super strong materials, which are also thin, elastic, and lightweight. In the future, satellites, airplanes, and cars could be manufactured out of the new materials," said the Nobel Foundation.
The Foundation also predicted that graphene could replace silicon as the primary substrate for microchips.
By Paul McDougall
InformationWeek
October 5, 2010 11:04 AM
The invention, just one atom thick, paves way for ultrafast transistors, lighter airplanes, and more fuel-efficient cars.
Saturday, October 09, 2010
Nobel Peace Prize Given to Jailed Chinese Dissident
BEIJING — Liu Xiaobo, an impassioned literary critic, political essayist and democracy advocate repeatedly jailed by the Chinese government for his activism, has won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of “his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.”
Mr. Liu, 54, perhaps China’s best known dissident, is serving an 11-year term on subversion charges, in a cell 300 miles from Beijing, and remains unknown to most Chinese.
He is one of three people to have received the prize while incarcerated by their own governments, after the Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991, and the German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky in 1935.
By awarding the prize to Mr. Liu, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has provided an unmistakable rebuke to Beijing’s authoritarian leaders at a time of growing intolerance for domestic dissent and a spreading unease internationally over the muscular diplomacy that has accompanied China’s economic rise.
In a move that in retrospect appears to have been counterproductive, a senior Chinese official had warned the Norwegian committee’s secretary that giving the prize to Mr. Liu would adversely affect relations between the two countries.
The committee, in announcing the prize Friday, noted that China, the world’s second biggest economy, should be commended for lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
But it chastised the government for ignoring basic rights guaranteed by the Chinese Constitution and in the international conventions to which Beijing is a party. “In practice, these freedoms have proved to be distinctly curtailed for China’s citizens,” committee members said, adding, “China’s new status must entail increased responsibility.”
The Chinese Foreign Ministry reacted angrily to the news, calling it a “desecration” of the peace prize and saying it would harm Norwegian-Chinese relations. The Chinese government summoned Norway’s ambassador to protest the award, a spokesman for the Norwegian Foreign Ministry told reporters.
“The Nobel Committee giving the peace prize to such a person runs completely contrary to the aims of the prize,” Ma Zhaoxu, a spokesman said in a statement posted on the ministry’s Web site. “Liu Xiaobo is a criminal who has been sentenced by Chinese judicial departments for violating Chinese law.”
Headlines about the award were nowhere to be found in the Chinese-language state media or on the country’s main Internet portals. Broadcasts about Liu Xiaobo (pronounced Liew Sheeow-boh) on CNN, which reach only luxury compounds and hotels in China, were blacked out throughout the evening. Many mobile phone users reported not being able to transmit text messages containing his name in Chinese.
But on government-monitored microblogs like Sina.com, which regularly blocks searches for his name, the news still generated nearly 6,000 comments within an hour of the announcement.
The announcement also energized international calls for Mr. Liu’s release, including one from President Obama, who urged China to free him “as soon as possible,” saying that political reforms in China had not kept pace with its economic growth.
Given that he has no access to a telephone, it was unlikely that Mr. Liu would immediately learn of the news, his wife, Liu Xia, said. On Friday night, dozens of foreign reporters gathered outside the couple’s building in Beijing but they were prevented from entering by the police, who posted a sign saying the complex residents “politely refused” to be interviewed. Later, police led away Ms. Liu and her brother, who were told they were being escorted to see Mr. Liu, his brother, Liu Xiaoxuan, said on Saturday. But as of midday, the pair still could not be reached.
Mr. Liu is not expected to accept the prize in person. The award includes a gold medal, a diploma and the equivalent of $1.5 million.
The prize is an enormous psychological boost for China’s beleaguered reform movement and an affirmation of the two decades Mr. Liu has spent advocating peaceful political change in the face of unremitting hostility from the ruling Chinese Communist Party. Blacklisted from academia and barred from publishing in China, Mr. Liu has been harassed and detained repeatedly since 1989, when he stepped into the drama playing out on Tiananmen Square by staging a hunger strike and then negotiating the peaceful retreat of student demonstrators as thousands of soldiers stood by with rifles drawn.
“If not for the work of Liu and the others to broker a peaceful withdrawal from the square, Tiananmen Square would have been a field of blood on June 4,” said Gao Yu, a veteran journalist and fellow dissident who was arrested in the hours before the tanks began moving through the city.
Mr. Liu's most recent arrest in December 2008 came a day before a reformist manifesto he helped shape began circulating on the Internet. The petition, Charter ’08, demanded that China’s rulers guarantee civil liberties, judicial independence and the kind of political reform that would ultimately end the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.
“For all these years, Liu Xiaobo has persevered in telling the truth about China and because of this, for the fourth time, he has lost his personal freedom,” his wife said in an interview on Wednesday.
An inexhaustible writer, poet and piquant social commentator, Mr. Liu was among the first of his generation to return to college after the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976, when schools were shuttered and intellectuals were banished to the countryside.
In a book of dialogues he published under a pseudonym with the popular writer Wang Shuo, Mr. Liu later described those years as a “temporary emancipation from the education process,” but ultimately found them deeply disturbing for the cruelty they inspired. In one passage, he recalled taunting an old man suspected of sympathizing with Chiang Kai-Shek, the Nationalist leader who had been defeated by Mao Zedong’s Communist rebels. The abuse, he said, brought the man to tears. “In that era, when people were not treated as human, we were all guilty,” Mr. Liu said.
After graduating from the Chinese department at Jilin University, Mr. Liu enrolled at Beijing Normal University, where he was first a doctoral student and then a teacher. It was in the mid-1980s that he burst to fame for rousing lectures and incisive works of literary criticism that demanded an honest reckoning of the historical excesses under Mao. His writings were so bracing that school officials nearly denied him his doctoral degree.
In 1988, he left China for a series of speaking engagements in Norway, Hawaii and New York. It was in the spring of 1989, while a visiting scholar at Columbia University, that thousands of students began occupying Tiananmen Square, the ceremonial heart of the nation, with their calls for democracy and an end to official corruption. Mr. Liu later says he hesitated — he almost turned back during a change of planes in Tokyo — but returned to China that May as demonstrations spread across the country, paralyzing the leadership in Beijing.
In early June, as it became apparent the military would clear the square by force, Mr. Liu and three other well-known intellectuals staged a 72-hour hunger strike as a show of solidarity that he later said was necessary to earn the students’ trust as the movement lurched toward a violent end. In the early morning hours of June 4, as the army closed in, the men pried a stolen rifle from the hands of a distraught student and negotiated with military commissars to allow the protesters to safely exit the square.
Over the next few days as the crackdown began in earnest and many protest organizers fled China, Mr. Liu was arrested and later castigated in the state press as a traitorous “black hand” who had helped orchestrate what the government termed a counter-revolutionary rebellion.
After his release in 1991, Mr. Liu was stripped of his teaching job but he continued to gather petitions pressing for democracy, human rights and the reassessment of the government’s verdict on the Tiananmen protests. In 1995, his unbowed activism brought another arrest leading to an eight-month detention and in 1996, he was sentenced to three years in a labor camp for a series of essays that criticized the government and called for an end to official corruption.
In those days, Mr. Liu bicycled across the city to the compounds where foreigners worked and lived to fax off his writings to overseas journals.
Zhang Zuhua, a former Communist Youth League official who later played a pivotal role in drafting Charter ’08, said Mr. Liu was a solitary advocate in the 1990s, when fear, exile and the pursuit of self-enrichment silenced most Chinese intellectuals.
“While others were researching the same problems from a theoretical or policy standpoint, he was actively protesting and actually doing things,” Mr. Zhang said.
When Mr. Liu emerged from prison in 1999, the Internet had taken hold in China and was beginning to transform the nature of public discourse. At first reluctant to use a computer, Mr. Liu quickly became a prolific commentator on overseas Web sites, later calling the Internet “God’s gift to China.” Over the years, he published more than 1,000 articles.
Inspired by a number of documents, including the United States Constitution and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, Charter '08 was in some ways a culmination of Mr. Liu’s search for pragmatic ways to push for political reform in China. Although he initially heeded his wife’s pleas not to join the drafting, he later immersed himself in the three-year effort, revising it numerous times and working to convince more than 300 people — intellectuals, workers and party members — to add their names.
In its brief life on the Internet, the petition gathered some 10,000 signatures before censors stymied its spread. In the Internet crackdown that followed, scores of blogs were shut down, the initial 300 signatories were interrogated and Mr. Liu was taken to an undisclosed location and held virtually incommunicado for a half year before his arrest.
At a two-hour trial last December, the government cited Charter '08 and six essays he had written to argue that Mr. Liu had exceeded the right to free expression by “openly slandering and inciting others to overthrow our country’s state power,” according to the verdict. Mr. Liu countered that he had simply advocated a gradual and nonviolent change in governance.
In a statement he gave to the court before his sentencing on Christmas Day, he said he held no grudge against those who sought to silence him and he even thanked his captors for treating him with dignity.
“I firmly believe that China’s political progress will never stop, and I’m full of optimistic expectations of freedom coming to China in the future, because no force can block the human desire for freedom,” he said. “China will eventually become a country of rule of law in which human rights are supreme. I’m also looking forward to such progress being reflected in the trial of this case, and look forward to the full court’s just verdict — one that can stand the test of history.”
By ANDREW JACOBS and JONATHAN ANSFIELD
Published: October 8, 2010
Mr. Liu, 54, perhaps China’s best known dissident, is serving an 11-year term on subversion charges, in a cell 300 miles from Beijing, and remains unknown to most Chinese.
He is one of three people to have received the prize while incarcerated by their own governments, after the Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991, and the German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky in 1935.
By awarding the prize to Mr. Liu, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has provided an unmistakable rebuke to Beijing’s authoritarian leaders at a time of growing intolerance for domestic dissent and a spreading unease internationally over the muscular diplomacy that has accompanied China’s economic rise.
In a move that in retrospect appears to have been counterproductive, a senior Chinese official had warned the Norwegian committee’s secretary that giving the prize to Mr. Liu would adversely affect relations between the two countries.
The committee, in announcing the prize Friday, noted that China, the world’s second biggest economy, should be commended for lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
But it chastised the government for ignoring basic rights guaranteed by the Chinese Constitution and in the international conventions to which Beijing is a party. “In practice, these freedoms have proved to be distinctly curtailed for China’s citizens,” committee members said, adding, “China’s new status must entail increased responsibility.”
The Chinese Foreign Ministry reacted angrily to the news, calling it a “desecration” of the peace prize and saying it would harm Norwegian-Chinese relations. The Chinese government summoned Norway’s ambassador to protest the award, a spokesman for the Norwegian Foreign Ministry told reporters.
“The Nobel Committee giving the peace prize to such a person runs completely contrary to the aims of the prize,” Ma Zhaoxu, a spokesman said in a statement posted on the ministry’s Web site. “Liu Xiaobo is a criminal who has been sentenced by Chinese judicial departments for violating Chinese law.”
Headlines about the award were nowhere to be found in the Chinese-language state media or on the country’s main Internet portals. Broadcasts about Liu Xiaobo (pronounced Liew Sheeow-boh) on CNN, which reach only luxury compounds and hotels in China, were blacked out throughout the evening. Many mobile phone users reported not being able to transmit text messages containing his name in Chinese.
But on government-monitored microblogs like Sina.com, which regularly blocks searches for his name, the news still generated nearly 6,000 comments within an hour of the announcement.
The announcement also energized international calls for Mr. Liu’s release, including one from President Obama, who urged China to free him “as soon as possible,” saying that political reforms in China had not kept pace with its economic growth.
Given that he has no access to a telephone, it was unlikely that Mr. Liu would immediately learn of the news, his wife, Liu Xia, said. On Friday night, dozens of foreign reporters gathered outside the couple’s building in Beijing but they were prevented from entering by the police, who posted a sign saying the complex residents “politely refused” to be interviewed. Later, police led away Ms. Liu and her brother, who were told they were being escorted to see Mr. Liu, his brother, Liu Xiaoxuan, said on Saturday. But as of midday, the pair still could not be reached.
Mr. Liu is not expected to accept the prize in person. The award includes a gold medal, a diploma and the equivalent of $1.5 million.
The prize is an enormous psychological boost for China’s beleaguered reform movement and an affirmation of the two decades Mr. Liu has spent advocating peaceful political change in the face of unremitting hostility from the ruling Chinese Communist Party. Blacklisted from academia and barred from publishing in China, Mr. Liu has been harassed and detained repeatedly since 1989, when he stepped into the drama playing out on Tiananmen Square by staging a hunger strike and then negotiating the peaceful retreat of student demonstrators as thousands of soldiers stood by with rifles drawn.
“If not for the work of Liu and the others to broker a peaceful withdrawal from the square, Tiananmen Square would have been a field of blood on June 4,” said Gao Yu, a veteran journalist and fellow dissident who was arrested in the hours before the tanks began moving through the city.
Mr. Liu's most recent arrest in December 2008 came a day before a reformist manifesto he helped shape began circulating on the Internet. The petition, Charter ’08, demanded that China’s rulers guarantee civil liberties, judicial independence and the kind of political reform that would ultimately end the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.
“For all these years, Liu Xiaobo has persevered in telling the truth about China and because of this, for the fourth time, he has lost his personal freedom,” his wife said in an interview on Wednesday.
An inexhaustible writer, poet and piquant social commentator, Mr. Liu was among the first of his generation to return to college after the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976, when schools were shuttered and intellectuals were banished to the countryside.
In a book of dialogues he published under a pseudonym with the popular writer Wang Shuo, Mr. Liu later described those years as a “temporary emancipation from the education process,” but ultimately found them deeply disturbing for the cruelty they inspired. In one passage, he recalled taunting an old man suspected of sympathizing with Chiang Kai-Shek, the Nationalist leader who had been defeated by Mao Zedong’s Communist rebels. The abuse, he said, brought the man to tears. “In that era, when people were not treated as human, we were all guilty,” Mr. Liu said.
After graduating from the Chinese department at Jilin University, Mr. Liu enrolled at Beijing Normal University, where he was first a doctoral student and then a teacher. It was in the mid-1980s that he burst to fame for rousing lectures and incisive works of literary criticism that demanded an honest reckoning of the historical excesses under Mao. His writings were so bracing that school officials nearly denied him his doctoral degree.
In 1988, he left China for a series of speaking engagements in Norway, Hawaii and New York. It was in the spring of 1989, while a visiting scholar at Columbia University, that thousands of students began occupying Tiananmen Square, the ceremonial heart of the nation, with their calls for democracy and an end to official corruption. Mr. Liu later says he hesitated — he almost turned back during a change of planes in Tokyo — but returned to China that May as demonstrations spread across the country, paralyzing the leadership in Beijing.
In early June, as it became apparent the military would clear the square by force, Mr. Liu and three other well-known intellectuals staged a 72-hour hunger strike as a show of solidarity that he later said was necessary to earn the students’ trust as the movement lurched toward a violent end. In the early morning hours of June 4, as the army closed in, the men pried a stolen rifle from the hands of a distraught student and negotiated with military commissars to allow the protesters to safely exit the square.
Over the next few days as the crackdown began in earnest and many protest organizers fled China, Mr. Liu was arrested and later castigated in the state press as a traitorous “black hand” who had helped orchestrate what the government termed a counter-revolutionary rebellion.
After his release in 1991, Mr. Liu was stripped of his teaching job but he continued to gather petitions pressing for democracy, human rights and the reassessment of the government’s verdict on the Tiananmen protests. In 1995, his unbowed activism brought another arrest leading to an eight-month detention and in 1996, he was sentenced to three years in a labor camp for a series of essays that criticized the government and called for an end to official corruption.
In those days, Mr. Liu bicycled across the city to the compounds where foreigners worked and lived to fax off his writings to overseas journals.
Zhang Zuhua, a former Communist Youth League official who later played a pivotal role in drafting Charter ’08, said Mr. Liu was a solitary advocate in the 1990s, when fear, exile and the pursuit of self-enrichment silenced most Chinese intellectuals.
“While others were researching the same problems from a theoretical or policy standpoint, he was actively protesting and actually doing things,” Mr. Zhang said.
When Mr. Liu emerged from prison in 1999, the Internet had taken hold in China and was beginning to transform the nature of public discourse. At first reluctant to use a computer, Mr. Liu quickly became a prolific commentator on overseas Web sites, later calling the Internet “God’s gift to China.” Over the years, he published more than 1,000 articles.
Inspired by a number of documents, including the United States Constitution and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, Charter '08 was in some ways a culmination of Mr. Liu’s search for pragmatic ways to push for political reform in China. Although he initially heeded his wife’s pleas not to join the drafting, he later immersed himself in the three-year effort, revising it numerous times and working to convince more than 300 people — intellectuals, workers and party members — to add their names.
In its brief life on the Internet, the petition gathered some 10,000 signatures before censors stymied its spread. In the Internet crackdown that followed, scores of blogs were shut down, the initial 300 signatories were interrogated and Mr. Liu was taken to an undisclosed location and held virtually incommunicado for a half year before his arrest.
At a two-hour trial last December, the government cited Charter '08 and six essays he had written to argue that Mr. Liu had exceeded the right to free expression by “openly slandering and inciting others to overthrow our country’s state power,” according to the verdict. Mr. Liu countered that he had simply advocated a gradual and nonviolent change in governance.
In a statement he gave to the court before his sentencing on Christmas Day, he said he held no grudge against those who sought to silence him and he even thanked his captors for treating him with dignity.
“I firmly believe that China’s political progress will never stop, and I’m full of optimistic expectations of freedom coming to China in the future, because no force can block the human desire for freedom,” he said. “China will eventually become a country of rule of law in which human rights are supreme. I’m also looking forward to such progress being reflected in the trial of this case, and look forward to the full court’s just verdict — one that can stand the test of history.”
By ANDREW JACOBS and JONATHAN ANSFIELD
Published: October 8, 2010
Tuesday, October 05, 2010
Nobel physics prize for ultrathin carbon discovery
STOCKHOLM – Two Russian-born scientists shared the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for "groundbreaking experiments" with the thinnest, strongest material known to mankind รข€” a carbon vital for the creation of faster computers and transparent touch screens.
University of Manchester professors Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov used Scotch tape to isolate graphene, a form of carbon only one atom thick but more than 100 times stronger than steel, and showed it has exceptional properties, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
Experiments with graphene could lead to the development of new superstrong materials with which to make satellites, airplanes and cars, as well as innovative electronics, the academy said in announcing the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) award.
Geim compared the material to plastic in its ability to revolutionize the world.
"It has all the potential to change your life in the same way that plastics did," he told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "It is really exciting."
The Nobel academy said computers will become more efficient as "graphene transistors are predicted to be substantially faster than today's silicon transistors."
"Since it is practically transparent and a good conductor, graphene is suitable for producing transparent touch screens, light panels and maybe even solar cells," the academy said in its citation.
Geim, 51, is a Dutch national while Novoselov, 36, holds both British and Russian citizenship. Both are natives of Russia and started their careers in physics there. They first worked together in the Netherlands before moving to Britain, and they reported isolating graphene in 2004.
Novoselov is the youngest winner since 1973 of a prize that normally goes to scientists with decades of experience. The youngest Nobel laureate to date is Lawrence Bragg, who was 25 when he shared the physics award with his father William Bragg in 1915.
"It's a shock," Novoselov told the AP. "I started my day chatting over Skype over new developments — it was quite unexpected."
Geim said he didn't expect to win the prize this year either and had forgotten that it was Nobel time when the prize committee called him from Stockholm.
The two scientists used simple Scotch tape as a crucial tool in their experiments, peeling off thin flakes of graphene from a piece of graphite, the stuff of pencil leads.
"It's a humble technique. But the hard work came later," Geim told the AP.
Paolo Radaelli, a physics professor at the University of Oxford, marveled at the simple methods used by Geim and Novoselov.
"In this age of complexity, with machines like the super collider, they managed to get the Nobel using Scotch tape," Radaelli said.
Geim last year won the prestigious Korber European Science Award for the discovery, the University of Manchester said.
"This was a well-deserved award," said Phillip F. Schewe, spokesman for the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Maryland.
"Graphene is the thinnest material in the world, it's one of the strongest, maybe the strongest material in the world. It's an excellent conductor. Electrons move through it very quickly, which is something you want to make circuits out of," Schewe said.
He said graphene may be a good material for making integrated circuits, small chips with millions of transistors that are the backbone of all modern telecommunications. Its properties could also lead to potential uses in construction material, Schewe said, but added it would take a while "before this sort of technology moves into mainstream application."
The 2010 Nobel Prize announcements started Monday with the medicine award going to British researcher Robert Edwards, 85, for work that led to the first test tube baby. That achievement helped bring 4 million infants into the world so far and has raised challenging new questions about human reproduction.
The chemistry prize will be announced Wednesday, followed by literature on Thursday, the peace prize on Friday and economics on Monday Oct. 11.
The prestigious awards were created by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel and first given out in 1901. The prizes are always handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.
By KARL RITTER and LOUISE NORDSTROM, Associated Press Writers
University of Manchester professors Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov used Scotch tape to isolate graphene, a form of carbon only one atom thick but more than 100 times stronger than steel, and showed it has exceptional properties, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
Experiments with graphene could lead to the development of new superstrong materials with which to make satellites, airplanes and cars, as well as innovative electronics, the academy said in announcing the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) award.
Geim compared the material to plastic in its ability to revolutionize the world.
"It has all the potential to change your life in the same way that plastics did," he told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "It is really exciting."
The Nobel academy said computers will become more efficient as "graphene transistors are predicted to be substantially faster than today's silicon transistors."
"Since it is practically transparent and a good conductor, graphene is suitable for producing transparent touch screens, light panels and maybe even solar cells," the academy said in its citation.
Geim, 51, is a Dutch national while Novoselov, 36, holds both British and Russian citizenship. Both are natives of Russia and started their careers in physics there. They first worked together in the Netherlands before moving to Britain, and they reported isolating graphene in 2004.
Novoselov is the youngest winner since 1973 of a prize that normally goes to scientists with decades of experience. The youngest Nobel laureate to date is Lawrence Bragg, who was 25 when he shared the physics award with his father William Bragg in 1915.
"It's a shock," Novoselov told the AP. "I started my day chatting over Skype over new developments — it was quite unexpected."
Geim said he didn't expect to win the prize this year either and had forgotten that it was Nobel time when the prize committee called him from Stockholm.
The two scientists used simple Scotch tape as a crucial tool in their experiments, peeling off thin flakes of graphene from a piece of graphite, the stuff of pencil leads.
"It's a humble technique. But the hard work came later," Geim told the AP.
Paolo Radaelli, a physics professor at the University of Oxford, marveled at the simple methods used by Geim and Novoselov.
"In this age of complexity, with machines like the super collider, they managed to get the Nobel using Scotch tape," Radaelli said.
Geim last year won the prestigious Korber European Science Award for the discovery, the University of Manchester said.
"This was a well-deserved award," said Phillip F. Schewe, spokesman for the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Maryland.
"Graphene is the thinnest material in the world, it's one of the strongest, maybe the strongest material in the world. It's an excellent conductor. Electrons move through it very quickly, which is something you want to make circuits out of," Schewe said.
He said graphene may be a good material for making integrated circuits, small chips with millions of transistors that are the backbone of all modern telecommunications. Its properties could also lead to potential uses in construction material, Schewe said, but added it would take a while "before this sort of technology moves into mainstream application."
The 2010 Nobel Prize announcements started Monday with the medicine award going to British researcher Robert Edwards, 85, for work that led to the first test tube baby. That achievement helped bring 4 million infants into the world so far and has raised challenging new questions about human reproduction.
The chemistry prize will be announced Wednesday, followed by literature on Thursday, the peace prize on Friday and economics on Monday Oct. 11.
The prestigious awards were created by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel and first given out in 1901. The prizes are always handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.
By KARL RITTER and LOUISE NORDSTROM, Associated Press Writers
Monday, October 04, 2010
IVF developer Robert Edwards wins Nobel Prize in medicine Read more
STOCKHOLM — Robert Edwards of Britain won the 2010 Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for developing in-vitro fertilization, a breakthrough that has helped millions of infertile couples worldwide have children.
Edwards, an 85-year-old professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge, started working on IVF as early as the 1950s. He developed the technique, in which egg cells are fertilized outside the body and then implanted in the womb, together with gynocologist surgeon Patrick Steptoe, who died in 1988.
On July 25, 1978, Louise Brown in Britain became the first baby born through the groundbreaking procedure, marking a revolution in fertility treatment.
"(Edwards') achievements have made it possible to treat infertility, a medical condition afflicting a large proportion of humanity, including more than 10 percent of all couples worldwide," the medicine prize committee in Stockholm said in its citation.
"Approximately 4 million individuals have been born thanks to IVF," the citation said. "Today, Robert Edwards' vision is a reality and brings joy to infertile people all over the world."
The probability of an infertile couple taking home a baby after a cycle of IVF today is 1 in 5, about the same that healthy couples have of conceiving naturally.
Steptoe and Edwards founded the first IVF clinic at Bourn Hall in Cambridge.
In a statement, Bourn Hall said one of Edwards' proudest moments was discovering that 1,000 IVF babies had been born at the clinic since Brown, and relaying that information to a seriously ill Steptoe shortly before his death.
"I'll never forget the look of joy in his eyes," Edwards said.
The statement said Edwards was "not well enough to give interviews" on Monday.
Brown, 32, reportedly is a postal worker in the English coastal city of Bristol. In 2007 she gave birth to her first child — a boy named Cameron. She said the child was conceived naturally.
Aleksander Giwercman, head of reproduction research at the University of Lund in Sweden, said Edward's achievements also have been important for other areas, including cancer and stem cell research.
"We received a tool that could be used for many other areas," Giwercman said. "Many of the illnesses that develop when we are adults have their origin early on in life, during conception."
The medicine award was the first of the 2010 Nobel Prizes to be announced. It will be followed by physics on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday, literature on Thursday, the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday and economics on Monday Oct. 11.
The prestigious awards were created by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, and first handed out in 1901, five years after his death. Each award includes 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1.5 million), a diploma and a gold medal.
Famous Nobel winners include President Barack Obama, who received last year's peace prize; Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and Winston Churchill. But most winners are relatively anonymous until they suddenly are catapulted into the global spotlight by the prize announcement.
Edwards, an 85-year-old professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge, started working on IVF as early as the 1950s. He developed the technique, in which egg cells are fertilized outside the body and then implanted in the womb, together with gynocologist surgeon Patrick Steptoe, who died in 1988.
On July 25, 1978, Louise Brown in Britain became the first baby born through the groundbreaking procedure, marking a revolution in fertility treatment.
"(Edwards') achievements have made it possible to treat infertility, a medical condition afflicting a large proportion of humanity, including more than 10 percent of all couples worldwide," the medicine prize committee in Stockholm said in its citation.
"Approximately 4 million individuals have been born thanks to IVF," the citation said. "Today, Robert Edwards' vision is a reality and brings joy to infertile people all over the world."
The probability of an infertile couple taking home a baby after a cycle of IVF today is 1 in 5, about the same that healthy couples have of conceiving naturally.
Steptoe and Edwards founded the first IVF clinic at Bourn Hall in Cambridge.
In a statement, Bourn Hall said one of Edwards' proudest moments was discovering that 1,000 IVF babies had been born at the clinic since Brown, and relaying that information to a seriously ill Steptoe shortly before his death.
"I'll never forget the look of joy in his eyes," Edwards said.
The statement said Edwards was "not well enough to give interviews" on Monday.
Brown, 32, reportedly is a postal worker in the English coastal city of Bristol. In 2007 she gave birth to her first child — a boy named Cameron. She said the child was conceived naturally.
Aleksander Giwercman, head of reproduction research at the University of Lund in Sweden, said Edward's achievements also have been important for other areas, including cancer and stem cell research.
"We received a tool that could be used for many other areas," Giwercman said. "Many of the illnesses that develop when we are adults have their origin early on in life, during conception."
The medicine award was the first of the 2010 Nobel Prizes to be announced. It will be followed by physics on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday, literature on Thursday, the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday and economics on Monday Oct. 11.
The prestigious awards were created by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, and first handed out in 1901, five years after his death. Each award includes 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1.5 million), a diploma and a gold medal.
Famous Nobel winners include President Barack Obama, who received last year's peace prize; Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and Winston Churchill. But most winners are relatively anonymous until they suddenly are catapulted into the global spotlight by the prize announcement.
Friday, April 16, 2010
2010 Pulitzer Prize
The 2010 Pulitzer Prizes were awarded on Monday, April 12, 2010. In journalism, The Washington Post won four awards while The New York Times won three.[1] For the first time, an online source, ProPublica, won in what had previously been the sole province of print.[1] A musical, Next to Normal, won the Drama award for the first time in 14 years.[2] Country singer-songwriter Hank Williams, who died at age 29 in 1953, received a special citation.[3] Below, the winner(s) in each category are listed first, followed by the finalists.
Monday, April 12, 2010
World's deepest known undersea volcanic vent found
LONDON – Scientists using a remote-controlled submarine have discovered the deepest known volcanic vent and say the superheated waters inside could contain undiscovered marine species and perhaps even clues to the origin of life on earth.
Experts aboard the RRS James Cook said they found the underwater volcanic vent more than three miles (five kilometers) beneath the surface of the Caribbean in an area known as the Cayman Trough, a deep-sea canyon that served as the setting for James Cameron's underwater thriller "The Abyss."
Geologist Bramley Murton, the submersible's pilot, said exploring the area was "like wandering across the surface of another world," complete with spires of multicolored mineral deposits and thick collections of fluorescent blue microorganisms thriving in the slightly cooler waters around the chimneys.
The scenes "were like nothing I had ever seen before," Murton said.
Volcanic vents are areas where sea water seeps into small cracks that penetrate deep into the earth's crust — some reaching down more than a mile (two kilometers.) Temperatures there can reach 750 degrees Fahrenheit (400 degrees Celsius), heating the water to the point where it can melt lead.
The blazing hot mineral-rich fluid is expelled into the icy cold of the deep ocean, creating a smoke-like effect and leaving behind towering chimneys of metal ore, some two stories tall. The spectacular pressure — 500 times stronger than the earth's atmosphere — keeps the water from boiling.
The environment in volcanic vents may appear brutal: the intense heat and pressure combines with toxic metals to form a highly acidic undersea cocktail. But vents host lush colonies of exotic animals such as blind shrimp, giant white crabs, and even large red-lipped tubeworms whose lack of any apparent digestive system once left scientists scratching their heads.
At the base of this ecosystem present are chemical-eating bacteria who draw on the hydrogen sulphide and methane erupting from the vents to make food.
"Although those are lethally hostile conditions for surface-dwellers like us, life exists at all depths in the oceans, right down to the bottom of the deepest trenches," said marine biologist Jon Copley in an e-mail interview from the James Cook.
"We're still figuring out how."
Because the vent area is nearly half a mile deeper than any previously discovered, scientists speculate that it could be the hottest ever found. Study of the vent could yield a variety of new insights into the history of the ocean, the physics of so-called "supercritical fluids" — liquids so hot they act like gasses — and the chemical makeup of the deep ocean.
Most tantalizing is the prospect that the expedition, led by geochemist Douglas Connelly of Britain's National Oceanography Center, could also reveal a variety of new life forms specially adapted to the Trough's punishing environment.
"The deep sea is full of surprises," a statement posted to the expedition's Web site said. "We may find species unlike any seen before. The Cayman Trough may be like (Arthur) Conan Doyle's 'Lost World,'" a novel that imagines an area populated by prehistoric monsters hidden deep in the Amazon.
Other scientists said they were excited by the discovery.
"I'm extremely curious to see and hear what they have found there in terms of biology," said Maya Tolstoy, a marine geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
This vent and others like it are also of interest to scientists because of the role some scientists believe they played in the creation of life on earth.
Copley said it has been theorized that life may have originated in similar environments early in the Earth's history — in part because the microorganisms found in deep-sea vents appear close to some of the Earth's most ancient organisms.
Still, Copley said, "there are a lot of assumptions in that deduction."
"The origin of life is one of the greatest unanswered questions in science, and at the moment vents are one of the contenders, but they are certainly not the only one."
The Cayman Trough vent was discovered on April 6, according to Copley, who said the team used a cube-shaped submersible linked to the ship by three miles (five kilometers) of cable. Copley said the discovery had been three years in the making and built on the work of a U.S.-led survey of the area last year.
He said the find illustrated how little was known about what lurks at the bottom of the sea, a sentiment backed by Tolstoy.
"We know more about the surface of the Moon and Mars than we do about our own planet because two-thirds of our planet is covered by ocean making it very hard to explore," she said.
"We've only seen a tiny fraction of the deep sea floor so there are undoubtedly many more vents and other amazing things to discover."
___
On the Net:
RRS James Cook: http://www.thesearethevoyages.net/
By RAPHAEL G. SATTER, Associated Press Writer Raphael G. Satter, Associated Press Writer
Experts aboard the RRS James Cook said they found the underwater volcanic vent more than three miles (five kilometers) beneath the surface of the Caribbean in an area known as the Cayman Trough, a deep-sea canyon that served as the setting for James Cameron's underwater thriller "The Abyss."
Geologist Bramley Murton, the submersible's pilot, said exploring the area was "like wandering across the surface of another world," complete with spires of multicolored mineral deposits and thick collections of fluorescent blue microorganisms thriving in the slightly cooler waters around the chimneys.
The scenes "were like nothing I had ever seen before," Murton said.
Volcanic vents are areas where sea water seeps into small cracks that penetrate deep into the earth's crust — some reaching down more than a mile (two kilometers.) Temperatures there can reach 750 degrees Fahrenheit (400 degrees Celsius), heating the water to the point where it can melt lead.
The blazing hot mineral-rich fluid is expelled into the icy cold of the deep ocean, creating a smoke-like effect and leaving behind towering chimneys of metal ore, some two stories tall. The spectacular pressure — 500 times stronger than the earth's atmosphere — keeps the water from boiling.
The environment in volcanic vents may appear brutal: the intense heat and pressure combines with toxic metals to form a highly acidic undersea cocktail. But vents host lush colonies of exotic animals such as blind shrimp, giant white crabs, and even large red-lipped tubeworms whose lack of any apparent digestive system once left scientists scratching their heads.
At the base of this ecosystem present are chemical-eating bacteria who draw on the hydrogen sulphide and methane erupting from the vents to make food.
"Although those are lethally hostile conditions for surface-dwellers like us, life exists at all depths in the oceans, right down to the bottom of the deepest trenches," said marine biologist Jon Copley in an e-mail interview from the James Cook.
"We're still figuring out how."
Because the vent area is nearly half a mile deeper than any previously discovered, scientists speculate that it could be the hottest ever found. Study of the vent could yield a variety of new insights into the history of the ocean, the physics of so-called "supercritical fluids" — liquids so hot they act like gasses — and the chemical makeup of the deep ocean.
Most tantalizing is the prospect that the expedition, led by geochemist Douglas Connelly of Britain's National Oceanography Center, could also reveal a variety of new life forms specially adapted to the Trough's punishing environment.
"The deep sea is full of surprises," a statement posted to the expedition's Web site said. "We may find species unlike any seen before. The Cayman Trough may be like (Arthur) Conan Doyle's 'Lost World,'" a novel that imagines an area populated by prehistoric monsters hidden deep in the Amazon.
Other scientists said they were excited by the discovery.
"I'm extremely curious to see and hear what they have found there in terms of biology," said Maya Tolstoy, a marine geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
This vent and others like it are also of interest to scientists because of the role some scientists believe they played in the creation of life on earth.
Copley said it has been theorized that life may have originated in similar environments early in the Earth's history — in part because the microorganisms found in deep-sea vents appear close to some of the Earth's most ancient organisms.
Still, Copley said, "there are a lot of assumptions in that deduction."
"The origin of life is one of the greatest unanswered questions in science, and at the moment vents are one of the contenders, but they are certainly not the only one."
The Cayman Trough vent was discovered on April 6, according to Copley, who said the team used a cube-shaped submersible linked to the ship by three miles (five kilometers) of cable. Copley said the discovery had been three years in the making and built on the work of a U.S.-led survey of the area last year.
He said the find illustrated how little was known about what lurks at the bottom of the sea, a sentiment backed by Tolstoy.
"We know more about the surface of the Moon and Mars than we do about our own planet because two-thirds of our planet is covered by ocean making it very hard to explore," she said.
"We've only seen a tiny fraction of the deep sea floor so there are undoubtedly many more vents and other amazing things to discover."
___
On the Net:
RRS James Cook: http://www.thesearethevoyages.net/
By RAPHAEL G. SATTER, Associated Press Writer Raphael G. Satter, Associated Press Writer
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Possible new human ancestor found in Siberia
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Genetic material pulled from a pinky finger bone found in a Siberian cave shows a new and unknown type of pre-human lived alongside modern humans and Neanderthals, scientists reported on Wednesday.
The creature, nicknamed "Woman X" for the time being, could have lived as recently as 30,000 years ago and appears only distantly related to modern humans or Neanderthals, the researchers reported.
"It really just looked like something we had never seen before," Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told a telephone briefing.
"It was a sequence that looked something like humans but really quite different."
Writing in Nature, Krause and colleagues said they sequenced DNA from the mitochondria, a part of the cell, which is passed down virtually intact from a woman to her children. They compared it to DNA from humans, Neanderthals and apes.
The sequence indicates the hominin's line diverged about a million years ago from the line that gave rise to both humans and Neanderthals and that split about 500,000 years ago.
That makes it younger than Homo erectus, the pre-human that spread out of Africa to much of the world about 1.9 million years ago.
"It is some new creature that has not been on our radar screen so far," said Svaante Paabo, a colleague of Krause's who specializes in analyzing ancient DNA.
And it would have lived near to both modern humans and Neanderthals. "There were at least three ... different forms of humans in this area 40,000 years ago," Paabo said.
Krause and Paabo are careful not to name the creature a new species just yet. They are now working to sequence nuclear DNA -- the DNA that makes up most of the genetic code, which will tell a great deal more about "Woman X".
NEW SCIENCE OF EVOLUTION
The genetic sequence tells scientists little about what the creature would have looked like or whether it interacted with other humans living in the Altai mountains of Siberia, where the pinky finger bone was found.
The work, done using a DNA sequencer made by Illumina Ltd, suggests a new way is opening to identify the ancestors of humanity. Krause and Paabo had only a tiny fragment of bone to work with and cannot reconstruct a skeleton in the time-honored manner of most paleontologists.
But there may be more there. The cold, dry conditions of the Altai mountains preserve the DNA. Stone tools also have been found in the area, as well as the bones of woolly mammoths but only tantalizing fragments of human bone and teeth.
Researchers have sequenced DNA from mammoths frozen in Siberia and the same team has sequenced DNA from Neanderthals.
Paabo and Krause said it is theoretically possible the creature is related to another potential third species of human -- Homo floresiensis, nicknamed "hobbit" -- which lived on an island in modern-day Indonesia about 17,000 years ago.
The team has tried without success to get DNA from hobbit bones. Most skeletons of pre-humans have been found in warm places such as Africa, but hot, wet conditions break down DNA.
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor Maggie Fox, Health And Science Editor – Wed Mar 24, 2:03 pm ET
The creature, nicknamed "Woman X" for the time being, could have lived as recently as 30,000 years ago and appears only distantly related to modern humans or Neanderthals, the researchers reported.
"It really just looked like something we had never seen before," Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told a telephone briefing.
"It was a sequence that looked something like humans but really quite different."
Writing in Nature, Krause and colleagues said they sequenced DNA from the mitochondria, a part of the cell, which is passed down virtually intact from a woman to her children. They compared it to DNA from humans, Neanderthals and apes.
The sequence indicates the hominin's line diverged about a million years ago from the line that gave rise to both humans and Neanderthals and that split about 500,000 years ago.
That makes it younger than Homo erectus, the pre-human that spread out of Africa to much of the world about 1.9 million years ago.
"It is some new creature that has not been on our radar screen so far," said Svaante Paabo, a colleague of Krause's who specializes in analyzing ancient DNA.
And it would have lived near to both modern humans and Neanderthals. "There were at least three ... different forms of humans in this area 40,000 years ago," Paabo said.
Krause and Paabo are careful not to name the creature a new species just yet. They are now working to sequence nuclear DNA -- the DNA that makes up most of the genetic code, which will tell a great deal more about "Woman X".
NEW SCIENCE OF EVOLUTION
The genetic sequence tells scientists little about what the creature would have looked like or whether it interacted with other humans living in the Altai mountains of Siberia, where the pinky finger bone was found.
The work, done using a DNA sequencer made by Illumina Ltd, suggests a new way is opening to identify the ancestors of humanity. Krause and Paabo had only a tiny fragment of bone to work with and cannot reconstruct a skeleton in the time-honored manner of most paleontologists.
But there may be more there. The cold, dry conditions of the Altai mountains preserve the DNA. Stone tools also have been found in the area, as well as the bones of woolly mammoths but only tantalizing fragments of human bone and teeth.
Researchers have sequenced DNA from mammoths frozen in Siberia and the same team has sequenced DNA from Neanderthals.
Paabo and Krause said it is theoretically possible the creature is related to another potential third species of human -- Homo floresiensis, nicknamed "hobbit" -- which lived on an island in modern-day Indonesia about 17,000 years ago.
The team has tried without success to get DNA from hobbit bones. Most skeletons of pre-humans have been found in warm places such as Africa, but hot, wet conditions break down DNA.
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor Maggie Fox, Health And Science Editor – Wed Mar 24, 2:03 pm ET
Friday, January 22, 2010
Sunflower DNA map could produce plants for fuel
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. – A $10.5 million research project aimed at mapping the DNA sequence of sunflowers could one day yield a towering new variety for both food and fuel.
Researchers envision crossbreeding a standard sunflower with the Silverleaf species out of Texas to produce a hybrid with bright yellow flowers bursting with tasty seeds and thick stalks filled with complex sugars that can be turned into ethanol.
The wild, drought-resistant Silverleaf is known for its woody stalks, which can grow up 15 feet tall and 4 inches in diameter.
"Since it's the closest relative of the cultivated sunflower, it should be perhaps reasonably straightforward to move some of the traits," said Loren Rieseberg, a University of British Columbia botany professor and leader of the DNA sequencing project.
The Genomics of Sunflower project is funded by Genome Canada through the Canadian government, Genome BC, the U.S. Energy and Agriculture departments and France's National Institute for Agricultural Research.
Its goal is to locate genes responsible for agriculturally important traits such as seed oil content, flowering, drought and pest tolerance. Participants plan to map the genome for the greater sunflower family, known in the science world as Compositae and including more than 24,000 species of sunflowers, lettuce, artichokes, daisies, ragweed, dandelions and other plants.
Scientists hope that within four years, they'll be able to develop a basis for a breeding program in which understanding of the plants' genes dramatically reduces the time it takes to develop hybrids.
Rieseberg's work with co-investigator Steve Knapp from the University of Georgia has already been helpful to the industry, said Larry Kleingartner, executive director of the Mandan, N.D.-based National Sunflower Association.
Their research helped identify a trait that imparts resistance to downy mildew, which destroys plant tissue, and its association with a gene that imparts resistance to rust, a fungus that affects yield and quality, Kleingartner said.
"That kind of information is so important so we don't have to go through eight years of grow outs to see if we've got this resistance in this hybrid," he said. "We can just do it on a very molecular basis."
The sunflower mapping venture is the latest of several plant genome projects.
In 2008, a group of researchers led by Washington University in St. Louis mapped the corn genome and posted its research on the Internet. The $29.5 million project, funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Energy and Agriculture departments, will allow seed companies to tweak the genome to increase the plant's productivity.
Scientists also have mapped the genes of the black cottonwood tree, rice, the potato, the pinot noir grape and a weed called Arabidopsis thaliana.
Sunflowers are a nearly $14 billion a year industry, with some 32 million metric tons produced worldwide each year, according to the National Sunflower Association. In the United States, they're grown primarily in North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, Minnesota and Colorado. They're used primarily for cooking oil, although the seeds also are found in snacks and other products.
The family's genome is 3.5 billion letters long, which is slightly larger than the human genome.
Researchers say mapping the family's entire sequence could lead to crop improvement, weed control and the development of wood-producing varieties that could be used for flooring and other products. Increasing the complex sugars in Silverleaf's stalk would make it a viable feedstock for ethanol, Rieseberg said.
"It's extremely drought tolerant and grows very, very tall," he said. "And what's remarkable is that it's pretty much wood from bottom to top, and yet it's an annual."
The nation's 170 operating ethanol plants can produce 10.6 billion gallons of the fuel per year, according to the Renewable Fuels Association, but the vast majority of that fuel comes from corn. Growing criticism from a diverse alliance of cattle ranchers, grocers and environmentalists about using corn for fuel has prompted the industry to look at nonfood feedstocks such as switchgrass, corn stover and wood waste.
Congress had hoped ethanol production from nonfood sources would reach 100 million gallons in 2010, but companies are expected to fall far short of that goal.
___
On the Net:
National Sunflower Association: http://www.sunflowernsa.com/
By DIRK LAMMERS, Associated Press Writer Dirk Lammers, Associated Press Writer
Researchers envision crossbreeding a standard sunflower with the Silverleaf species out of Texas to produce a hybrid with bright yellow flowers bursting with tasty seeds and thick stalks filled with complex sugars that can be turned into ethanol.
The wild, drought-resistant Silverleaf is known for its woody stalks, which can grow up 15 feet tall and 4 inches in diameter.
"Since it's the closest relative of the cultivated sunflower, it should be perhaps reasonably straightforward to move some of the traits," said Loren Rieseberg, a University of British Columbia botany professor and leader of the DNA sequencing project.
The Genomics of Sunflower project is funded by Genome Canada through the Canadian government, Genome BC, the U.S. Energy and Agriculture departments and France's National Institute for Agricultural Research.
Its goal is to locate genes responsible for agriculturally important traits such as seed oil content, flowering, drought and pest tolerance. Participants plan to map the genome for the greater sunflower family, known in the science world as Compositae and including more than 24,000 species of sunflowers, lettuce, artichokes, daisies, ragweed, dandelions and other plants.
Scientists hope that within four years, they'll be able to develop a basis for a breeding program in which understanding of the plants' genes dramatically reduces the time it takes to develop hybrids.
Rieseberg's work with co-investigator Steve Knapp from the University of Georgia has already been helpful to the industry, said Larry Kleingartner, executive director of the Mandan, N.D.-based National Sunflower Association.
Their research helped identify a trait that imparts resistance to downy mildew, which destroys plant tissue, and its association with a gene that imparts resistance to rust, a fungus that affects yield and quality, Kleingartner said.
"That kind of information is so important so we don't have to go through eight years of grow outs to see if we've got this resistance in this hybrid," he said. "We can just do it on a very molecular basis."
The sunflower mapping venture is the latest of several plant genome projects.
In 2008, a group of researchers led by Washington University in St. Louis mapped the corn genome and posted its research on the Internet. The $29.5 million project, funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Energy and Agriculture departments, will allow seed companies to tweak the genome to increase the plant's productivity.
Scientists also have mapped the genes of the black cottonwood tree, rice, the potato, the pinot noir grape and a weed called Arabidopsis thaliana.
Sunflowers are a nearly $14 billion a year industry, with some 32 million metric tons produced worldwide each year, according to the National Sunflower Association. In the United States, they're grown primarily in North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, Minnesota and Colorado. They're used primarily for cooking oil, although the seeds also are found in snacks and other products.
The family's genome is 3.5 billion letters long, which is slightly larger than the human genome.
Researchers say mapping the family's entire sequence could lead to crop improvement, weed control and the development of wood-producing varieties that could be used for flooring and other products. Increasing the complex sugars in Silverleaf's stalk would make it a viable feedstock for ethanol, Rieseberg said.
"It's extremely drought tolerant and grows very, very tall," he said. "And what's remarkable is that it's pretty much wood from bottom to top, and yet it's an annual."
The nation's 170 operating ethanol plants can produce 10.6 billion gallons of the fuel per year, according to the Renewable Fuels Association, but the vast majority of that fuel comes from corn. Growing criticism from a diverse alliance of cattle ranchers, grocers and environmentalists about using corn for fuel has prompted the industry to look at nonfood feedstocks such as switchgrass, corn stover and wood waste.
Congress had hoped ethanol production from nonfood sources would reach 100 million gallons in 2010, but companies are expected to fall far short of that goal.
___
On the Net:
National Sunflower Association: http://www.sunflowernsa.com/
By DIRK LAMMERS, Associated Press Writer Dirk Lammers, Associated Press Writer
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Bible Possibly Written Centuries Earlier, Text Suggests
Scientists have discovered the earliest known Hebrew writing — an inscription dating from the 10th century B.C., during the period of King David's reign.
The breakthrough could mean that portions of the Bible were written centuries earlier than previously thought. (The Bible's Old Testament is thought to have been first written down in an ancient form of Hebrew.)
Until now, many scholars have held that the Hebrew Bible originated in the 6th century B.C., because Hebrew writing was thought to stretch back no further. But the newly deciphered Hebrew text is about four centuries older, scientists announced this month.
"It indicates that the Kingdom of Israel already existed in the 10th century BCE and that at least some of the biblical texts were written hundreds of years before the dates presented in current research," said Gershon Galil, a professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Haifa in Israel, who deciphered the ancient text.
BCE stands for "before common era," and is equivalent to B.C., or before Christ.
The writing was discovered more than a year ago on a pottery shard dug up during excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa, near Israel's Elah valley. The excavations were carried out by archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At first, scientists could not tell if the writing was Hebrew or some other local language.
Finally, Galil was able to decipher the text. He identified words particular to the Hebrew language and content specific to Hebrew culture to prove that the writing was, in fact, Hebrew.
"It uses verbs that were characteristic of Hebrew, such as asah ('did') and avad ('worked'), which were rarely used in other regional languages," Galil said. "Particular words that appear in the text, such as almanah ('widow') are specific to Hebrew and are written differently in other local languages."
The ancient text is written in ink on a trapezoid-shaped piece of pottery about 6 inches by 6.5 inches (15 cm by 16.5 cm). It appears to be a social statement about how people should treat slaves, widows and orphans. In English, it reads (by numbered line):
1' you shall not do [it], but worship the [Lord].
2' Judge the sla[ve] and the wid[ow] / Judge the orph[an]
3' [and] the stranger. [Pl]ead for the infant / plead for the po[or and]
4' the widow. Rehabilitate [the poor] at the hands of the king.
5' Protect the po[or and] the slave / [supp]ort the stranger.
The content, which has some missing letters, is similar to some Biblical scriptures, such as Isaiah 1:17, Psalms 72:3, and Exodus 23:3, but does not appear to be copied from any Biblical text.
By Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Staff Writer
The breakthrough could mean that portions of the Bible were written centuries earlier than previously thought. (The Bible's Old Testament is thought to have been first written down in an ancient form of Hebrew.)
Until now, many scholars have held that the Hebrew Bible originated in the 6th century B.C., because Hebrew writing was thought to stretch back no further. But the newly deciphered Hebrew text is about four centuries older, scientists announced this month.
"It indicates that the Kingdom of Israel already existed in the 10th century BCE and that at least some of the biblical texts were written hundreds of years before the dates presented in current research," said Gershon Galil, a professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Haifa in Israel, who deciphered the ancient text.
BCE stands for "before common era," and is equivalent to B.C., or before Christ.
The writing was discovered more than a year ago on a pottery shard dug up during excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa, near Israel's Elah valley. The excavations were carried out by archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At first, scientists could not tell if the writing was Hebrew or some other local language.
Finally, Galil was able to decipher the text. He identified words particular to the Hebrew language and content specific to Hebrew culture to prove that the writing was, in fact, Hebrew.
"It uses verbs that were characteristic of Hebrew, such as asah ('did') and avad ('worked'), which were rarely used in other regional languages," Galil said. "Particular words that appear in the text, such as almanah ('widow') are specific to Hebrew and are written differently in other local languages."
The ancient text is written in ink on a trapezoid-shaped piece of pottery about 6 inches by 6.5 inches (15 cm by 16.5 cm). It appears to be a social statement about how people should treat slaves, widows and orphans. In English, it reads (by numbered line):
1' you shall not do [it], but worship the [Lord].
2' Judge the sla[ve] and the wid[ow] / Judge the orph[an]
3' [and] the stranger. [Pl]ead for the infant / plead for the po[or and]
4' the widow. Rehabilitate [the poor] at the hands of the king.
5' Protect the po[or and] the slave / [supp]ort the stranger.
The content, which has some missing letters, is similar to some Biblical scriptures, such as Isaiah 1:17, Psalms 72:3, and Exodus 23:3, but does not appear to be copied from any Biblical text.
By Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
Hubble telescope shows earliest photo of universe
WASHINGTON – The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the earliest image yet of the universe — just 600 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was just a toddler.
Scientists released the photo Tuesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. It's the most complete picture of the early universe so far, showing galaxies with stars that are already hundreds of millions of years old, along with the unmistakable primordial signs of the first cluster of stars.
These young galaxies haven't yet formed their familiar spiral or elliptical shapes and are much smaller and quite blue in color. That's mostly because at this stage, they don't contain many heavy metals, said Garth Illingworth, a University of California, Santa Cruz, astronomy professor who was among those releasing the photo.
"We're seeing very small galaxies that are seeds of the great galaxies today," Illingworth said in a news conference.
Until NASA's Hubble telescope was repaired and upgraded last year, the farthest back in time that astronomers could see was about 900 million years after the Big Bang, Illingworth said. Hubble has been key in helping determine the age of the universe at about 13.7 billion years, ending a long scientific debate about a decade ago.
As far back as Hubble can see, it still doesn't see the first galaxies. For that, NASA will have to rely on a new observatory, the $4.5 billion James Webb telescope, which is set to launch in about four years.
"We are on the way to the beginning," said astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson of the American Museum of Natural History. "Every step closer to the beginning tells you something you did not know before."
The new Hubble picture captures those distant simpler galaxies juxtaposed amid closer, newer and more evolved ones. The result is a cosmic family photo that portrays galaxies at different ages and stages of development over the course of more than 13 billion years.
Tyson, who was not involved in the Hubble image research, said most people only like their own baby pictures, but Hubble's photo is different: "These are the baby pictures for us all, hence the widespread interest."
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein, Ap Science Writer – Tue Jan 5, 6:27 pm ET
Scientists released the photo Tuesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. It's the most complete picture of the early universe so far, showing galaxies with stars that are already hundreds of millions of years old, along with the unmistakable primordial signs of the first cluster of stars.
These young galaxies haven't yet formed their familiar spiral or elliptical shapes and are much smaller and quite blue in color. That's mostly because at this stage, they don't contain many heavy metals, said Garth Illingworth, a University of California, Santa Cruz, astronomy professor who was among those releasing the photo.
"We're seeing very small galaxies that are seeds of the great galaxies today," Illingworth said in a news conference.
Until NASA's Hubble telescope was repaired and upgraded last year, the farthest back in time that astronomers could see was about 900 million years after the Big Bang, Illingworth said. Hubble has been key in helping determine the age of the universe at about 13.7 billion years, ending a long scientific debate about a decade ago.
As far back as Hubble can see, it still doesn't see the first galaxies. For that, NASA will have to rely on a new observatory, the $4.5 billion James Webb telescope, which is set to launch in about four years.
"We are on the way to the beginning," said astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson of the American Museum of Natural History. "Every step closer to the beginning tells you something you did not know before."
The new Hubble picture captures those distant simpler galaxies juxtaposed amid closer, newer and more evolved ones. The result is a cosmic family photo that portrays galaxies at different ages and stages of development over the course of more than 13 billion years.
Tyson, who was not involved in the Hubble image research, said most people only like their own baby pictures, but Hubble's photo is different: "These are the baby pictures for us all, hence the widespread interest."
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein, Ap Science Writer – Tue Jan 5, 6:27 pm ET
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)