WEATHER - It's on Steroids

"Extreme Weather Records 'Like a Baseball Player on Steroids'" PBS Newshour 7/10/2012

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): The past 12 months are the warmest ever recorded in the United States since record-keeping began in 1895. That word comes as a new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says climate change, including human factors, has increased the odds of extreme weather.

The severe storms that finally broke the deadly heat wave in the United States blew in with their own set of dangers this week. In Greensboro, North Carolina, residents are struggling to recover from flooding and power outages brought on by slow-moving storms yesterday. In Fredericksburg, Va., violent thunderstorms pummeled a cheerleading facility.

GIRL: We were scared, and we were just, like, praying to God and hoping that we weren't going to die.

GIRL: And we saw it. It just came in on us.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And in Houston, Texas, they sent ball players scrambling for cover.

The scares come after high temperatures are being blamed for at least 46 deaths and loss of power for close to a million people last week. For over 11 consecutive days, temperatures exceeded 100 degrees across much of the country.

Meanwhile, out West, wildfires fueled by near-record droughts have raged for weeks in Colorado, forcing residents to leave their homes. Nationwide, fires burned 1.3 million acres in June alone, the second highest acreage burned in June of any year.

Now the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, is reporting the first half of this year was in fact the hottest on record, with 170 all-time heat records matched or broken.

NOAA has issued a report attempting to assess the role climate change, including human factors, played, if any, in six global extreme weather events in 2011. About one of those, the report asked if the human influence on climate made the 2011 Texas drought more probable. It concluded that it did.

The report also examined climate change's role in last year's drought in East Africa, heat wave across Europe and floods in Thailand. Regarding Thailand, the report said climate change cannot be shown to have played any role in the excess rain and flooding.

For more on all this, we turn to Thomas Karl, director of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, which oversaw the studies.

INTERNET - View of Wikipedia Founder

"Russian Blackouts, Neutrality and Trusting Wikipedia" PBS Newshour 7/10/2012

Excerpt

SUMMARY: Hari interviews Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on today's blackouts in Russia, trusting crowd-sourced information and attracting more women to the Wikipedia community.

ECONOMICS - Immortality, Not Only a Science Story

"As Humans and Computers Merge ... Immortality?" PBS Newshour 7/10/2012

Excerpt

GWEN IFILL (Newshour): ..... we take a very different look at a future -- the future for human health and longevity.

Paul Solman, the NewsHour's economics correspondent, has been exploring the profound social and economic changes brought on by rapidly changing technology.

Tonight, he checks in with an inventor and futurist who takes the concept of advances in the medical field even further. It's part of his ongoing reporting Making Sense of financial news.

PAUL SOLMAN (Newshour): Earlier this year, we did several stories at a conference run by the futuristic California think tank Singularity University.

The stories were about-high tech's prodigious promise for the future, dirt-cheap energy, sky-high crop yields, labor-free machinery. Tonight comes the kicker, far longer, far healthier, conceivably even eternal life.

Why would immortality be an economics rather than a science story? Because the basic aim of economics is to maximize well-being, the greatest good for the greatest number. And a longer, healthier life is the most unambiguous good there is, says Singularity's co- founder, Ray Kurzweil, skeptics notwithstanding.

ALSO

PAUL SOLMAN: In the end, though, if Ray Kurzweil is correct, a key question. Should the dead eventually disappear, how would the world cope with an impossibly large number of the living? By colonizing space is one common high-tech answer.

And we will be covering that, if the NewsHour would want yet another story about the future, with one proviso. To paraphrase my beloved grandmother, we should live so long.

IRAN - Crazy Idea, Nuclear-Armed Makes for Stability

A crazy idea.... out of the NRA play-book (more armed citizens on the street make it safer) maybe?

"Nuclear-Armed Iran Would Bring 'Stability' But Risks" PBS Newshour 7/9/2012

Excerpt

SUMMARY: John Mearsheimer, political science professor at the University of Chicago, says a nuclear-armed Iran would bring stability to the region, but Dov Zakheim, former Pentagon official now with the Center for Naval Analyses, says it would trigger an arms race.

COMMENT: This pro-argument ignores that Iran is run by Islamist fanatics that are bent on the destruction of the 'West' which includes America. Fanatics are NOT known for following the logic of the presenters in the article.

HEALTHCARE - Concierge Medicine

"Concierge Medicine: Greater Access for a Fee" PBS Newshour 7/9/2012

Excerpt

SUMMARY: Health correspondent Betty Ann Bowser looks at a new health care trend called concierge medicine that involves offering specialized care for those who can afford the price tag.

GWEN IFILL: It's a common refrain. Patients say it's getting harder to see a doctor. And when they do, they feel pressed for time. But for a price, a small, but growing number of clinics offer a more boutique relationship, a model of care that raises questions about equality and access.

COMMENT: Again, this is an example that highlights the REAL problem with health care in the U.S., money.

Our econmic system is putting a price-tag on our lives, and if we cannot afford to pay to stay healthy? ....go into a corner and die. Immoral and unethical in my book.

HEALTH - Black Lung Disease Rising

"Deadly Black Lung Disease Rises Among Coal Miners" PBS Newshour 7/9/2012

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): .... a new investigation finds a resurgence of a deadly disease in coal mining country.

Again, Hari Sreenivasan.

HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour): More than four decades ago, Congress set a goal of eradicating black lung disease by passing a law that limited miners' exposure to coal dust.

But a joint investigation by NPR and the Center for Public Integrity found many miners are still exposed to too much dust, leading to a doubling of black lung rates in just a decade.

The disease, which can be accompanied by coughing, congestion and difficulty with breathing, is debilitating and irreversible. More than 10,000 miners died from it nationwide between 1995 and 2004. The analysis shows many cases in Appalachia, a region that includes parts of Virginia, Kentucky and West Virginia.

In West Virginia alone, more than 2,000 miners died over a decade.

Howard Berkes of NPR was one of the lead reporters on this story. He joins me now from Salt Lake City.

Other significant excerpts

HOWARD BERKES, National Public Radio: But the other thing that's occurred is that the law that was passed to protect miners from black lung and from the dust that causes black lung was never really seriously enforced. It was filled with loopholes from the very beginning that enabled mining companies to basically game the system.



HARI SREENIVASAN: Your reporting indicates discrepancies between when federal inspectors decide to measure the coal dust in the mines vs. when the companies report it themselves. How does that happen?

HOWARD BERKES: Well, that happens in part because, in the system, which is partially dependent on self-policing by mining companies, a federal mine inspector goes into a mine and takes a measurement for coal dust and finds there's a violation, that there's too much coal dust.

The mining company then has the opportunity to take five of its own samples of coal dust and then average them. And right off the bat, just the averaging could lower the reading. And if the averaging is below the standard, the limit, the safe limit for coal dust, then the violation is erased.

And what we found is that there were more than 50,000 coal dust -- valid coal dust samples taken that were above the federal limit, but only 2,400 violations were issued. We don't know exactly what happened with each of those cases, but it suggests that there were thousands of coal miners in those cases who were exposed to excessive coal dust, but the system that is easily gamed by mining companies was such that those overexposures didn't result in violations issued to those companies.

COMMENT: Need I say, Republicans don't mind. This is better than tough government regulation of the mining industry (which could jeopardize industry 'donations' to the Republican cause).

EGYPT - New President Thumbs Military Council

"Egypt’s President Orders Return of Parliament" by KAREEM FAHIM and MAYY EL SHEIKH, New York Times 7/8/2012

Excerpt

President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt on Sunday unexpectedly ordered the country’s Islamist-led Parliament to reconvene, challenging earlier decisions by Egypt’s most powerful generals and judges to dissolve the legislative body.

Mr. Morsi’s decree appeared to be a bold effort to claim authority for his 10-day-old presidency, and it raised the specter of a new confrontation between the president and his Islamist supporters on the one hand, and the military council and Egypt’s highest court on the other. The announcement sowed confusion in Cairo, not least over whether Mr. Morsi had the power to issue such a decree.

The speaker of the Parliament said it would meet within “hours.” Military officers, judges and political parties all announced emergency meetings. Beyond that, there was no immediate response from the military council, which took power in Egypt after former President Hosni Mubarak was forced from office last year.

Some analysts said it seemed likely that the army knew of Mr. Morsi’s plans, while others found it hard to believe the generals would tolerate such an open challenge to their power. “The decree could create a political crisis,” said Gamal Eid, a prominent human rights lawyer. “He has been waiting to make a decision to prove he is president of a republic.”

The military council ordered Parliament dissolved just before the presidential election last month, after a court ruled that the law under which it had been elected was partly unconstitutional. In the same stroke, the military assumed legislative power and severely limited the authority of the presidency, in what many likened to a coup aimed at curbing the power of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement that held about half the seats in Parliament.

When Mr. Morsi, the Brotherhood’s candidate, won the presidency, many wondered whether he would directly confront the military council, known as the SCAF, or seek an accommodation, an approach the Brotherhood often seemed to favor. “This could be the early signs of a deal, or the early signs of a battle between the military council and the Brothers,” said Ahmed Ragheb, a human rights lawyer. “Morsi used his powers as president, just like the military used its power as acting president before.”

The announcement on Sunday suggested that Mr. Morsi was willing to stake his credibility on a challenge to the military’s version of power sharing, which left the president’s legislative agenda and even his budget dependent on the generals.

LIBYA - First Free Elections

"Libya Prepares for First Free Elections After Gadhafi Regime" PBS Newshour 7/6/2012

RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): Libya will hold its first free election in over 50 years tomorrow, nine months after the death of Moammar Gadhafi. The election for the 200-member transitional parliament comes as the weak security situation enables armed conflicts in some regions.

That hasn't stopped the mounting excitement, as we see in this report by Lindsey Hilsum of Independent Television News.

LINDSEY HILSUM: For four decades, only one man's image was allowed. Now thousands of faces look out from billboards across Libya. It's almost too much to believe.

Lamia Abusidra is canvassing votes on the corniche in Benghazi. Her party, she says, wants to unite Libyans. It's led by an Islamist, but she's something of a liberal.

MIAMI ABUSIDRA, Homeland Party candidate: People that thought that Belhadj's al-Watan, or the Homeland Party, is an Islamist party were shocked by someone leading the Benghazi list who is unveiled. And that shock made them think more and made a lovely dialogue, a very strong dialogue open in the community.

LINDSEY HILSUM: It's all a bit confusing.

WOMAN (through translator): Every day, we think we like one candidate. Then, the next day, we see another. I can't make my decision until Election Day.

LINDSEY HILSUM: None of which means anything to Salem Abushrida. He has no faith that an elected government will rein in the armed men who kidnapped him in Tripoli last week and tortured his son, Abu Saleh, to death. The family supported Gadhafi, but this wasn't revenge, he says; the murderers simply wanted to steal the family farm.

SALEM ABUSHRIDA, father: For this reason, they killed my son, for this reason try to kill me. For this reason, they are going to kill me again. They will try. I know it.

LINDSEY HILSUM: Democracy won't curb the militiamen who spearheaded the revolution and now run riot, he says.

SALEM ABUSHRIDA: There is no future, I don't think. The problem, they destroy the country.

LINDSEY HILSUM: Even in eastern Libya, cradle of the revolution, not everyone supports the election. In fact, they're sabotaging it. They say western Libya is being given too many parliamentary seats. The east is being neglected, as it was under Gadhafi.

In the eastern town of Derna, I came across a small demonstration of men calling for the boycott. The east deserves more power, they said.

MAHMOUD SALAMA, Libya: The west stole our revolution. We started the revolution here.

LINDSEY HILSUM: So on Saturday, no voting?

MAHMOUD SALAMA: No, on Saturday, no voting.

LINDSEY HILSUM: No voting?

MAHMOUD SALAMA: No voting.

LINDSEY HILSUM: A candidate came by trying to rescue her posters.

ASMA MOHAMMED SWAYZI, candidate (through translator): I'm very sad to see my people with this mentality. Libya is free, but we want an election and a new government. It's OK. This is freedom, but they shouldn't tear down posters. We want life to get better. Why damage things? We want to settle down and rebuild the country.

LINDSEY HILSUM: Suddenly, everyone wants a say.

"Anyone with a poster is a traitor," says one man. "The election is as farce," says another. "No, it's freedom," says a third.

It's chaos. But think, until last year, no one in Libya was allowed to have any opinions at all.

The line between discussion and disruption is not well understood. Yesterday, suspected eastern federalists burned a warehouse full of ballot boxes and voting slips.

Democracy is very new in Libya, and many still resort to violence if they can't get their own way. The poll will go ahead on Saturday. But the question is, will Libyans accept the results?

RAY SUAREZ: We have more about Libya on our Web site, including a report on Libyan hopes that peaceful elections will encourage more foreign investment in their oil industry.

BANKS - Britain's Barclays

"Britain's Barclays Investigated for Rigging 'Libor' Rates" PBS Newshour 7/6/2012

Excerpt

MARGARET WARNER (Newshour): The scandal ventures on a key interest rate called LIBOR and on attempts to manipulate it.

Last week, Barclays paid $450 million in fines to settle accusations by British and U.S. regulators that it helped rig the LIBOR rate in a way that benefited its business. LIBOR is the acronym for the London Interbank Offered Rate. It is determined by what banks report they are paying to borrow from other banks.

The rate has huge significance. It's used to set interest rates in more than $350 trillion of contracts globally, ranging from home mortgages to complicated financial swaps. The settlement set off a firestorm, leading to the resignation this week of Barclays CEO Robert Diamond and hearings in Parliament. Regulators are looking at other global banks as well.

For more, we turn to David Enrich, European banking editor for The Wall Street Journal.

EDUCATION - A Different Music Program

"Maestros Mix With Students for Castleton Music Festival" PBS Newshour 7/6/2012

Excerpt

SUMMARY: In rural Virginia, a month-long program of recitals, concerts and operas is both a traditional summer music festival as well as an opportunity for students to train with music greats. Jeffrey Brown visits with founder and renowned conductor Lorin Maazel.

OPINION - Romney's Staff Weak?

"The Fault, Dear Romney, Is Not in the Staff" by Michael Grunwal, Time Magazine 7/6/2012

The tepid June jobs report could relegate the calls for a shake-up in Team Romney to the dumpster of stupid campaign controversies, along with the candidate’s ruminations on lemonade, that 13-year-old conservative who isn’t conservative anymore and the rest of last week’s flotsam and jetsam. But now that Rupert Murdoch, Jack Welch and the Wall Street Journal editorial page have all complained that Romney needs more seasoned advisers, the ritual-sacrifice speculation will probably keep percolating throughout the fall. Which is just perverse. I think Team Romney is doing a terrific job selling an extremely flawed product.

Elections are usually decided by the facts on the ground, not by campaign strategists, and while tactics can help at the margins, top-line numbers tend to overwhelm all rational analysis. For example, John McCain lost, so the media concluded in retrospect that everything he did was dumb, but I actually think most of the risks he took made sense under the difficult circumstances. Now Romney is a few points behind a vulnerable incumbent in the polls, so it’s become fashionable to blame his staff for failing to “craft a clear message,” for bobbing and weaving about Romney’s plans and principles while trying to redirect attention to President Obama.

Well, here’s a clear message: There is no clear message that can get Mitt Romney to the White House, except for “Obama isn’t working,” which happens to be the Romney campaign’s clear message. It would be suicidal for Eric Fehrnstrom and his team to try to articulate Romney’s plans, because the details of the Republican policy agenda of tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for everyone else is wildly unpopular. And it would be impossible for Team Romney to articulate the candidate’s principles, for reasons that should be obvious by now. If the Obamacare obfuscations out of Boston about taxes and penalties sound like word salad, that’s because word salad is the only path to victory for the father of Obamacare.

With unemployment still hovering above 8%, the President would be in deep trouble against a generic Republican like Tim Pawlenty or John Thune and would probably be unelectable against a Republican with genuine appeal to independents, like Jon Huntsman Jr. or, for that matter, John McCain circa 2008. It’s amazing that a Republican with Swiss bank accounts, a history of offshoring and a ludicrously chameleonic political persona made it out of the GOP primary. But doesn’t that suggest that maybe those “idiots” in Boston are smarter than Murdoch thinks?

Romney is in a tricky position. He can’t completely renounce all the right-wing red meat he pushed during the primary; conservatives would freak out if he flip-flopped again on repealing Obamacare or vetoing the Dream Act or advocating gay rights or Medicare cuts. But he wants independent voters to hold out hope that he’s really a reasonable guy who was just sucking up to the Tea Party for electoral purposes and would govern from the middle once he got to the White House. The Romney campaign has taken a lot of flak for its incoherent response to Obama’s support for gay marriage and for undocumented workers who came to America as kids, but there wasn’t a coherent response that would have won him any votes. His current mix of mumbo jumbo plus Obama bashing plus trying to change the subject back to the economy makes a lot of sense. Every day that the focus is on Obama and the economy is a good day for Romney.

This is not to say that Fehrnstrom and his team are political geniuses; I vaguely remember him from when we were both reporters in Boston, and nothing about his byline stood out as particularly original. Obviously, he shouldn’t have said that Etch A Sketch thing, since he’s representing an Etch A Sketch candidate. His real problem is that the candidate can’t be fired. For partisans who genuinely want Romney to win — and it’s not entirely clear if Murdoch is one of them, despite his dutiful tweet about how he wants Romney to “save us from socialism, etc.” — it’s easier to complain about the staff.

But hey, Mr. Murdoch, maybe you should worry a bit more about your own staff — or what’s left of it after the phone-hacking indictments.

SCIENCE - Relistic Walking Robot Legs

"US Researchers Believe They’ve Developed ”Most Realistic’ Robot Legs Ever" Daily Disruption 7/6/2012

A group of US researchers has produced a robotic set of legs which they believe is the first to fully model walking in a biologically accurate manner.

The neural architecture, musculoskeletal architecture and sensory feedback pathways in humans have been simplified and built into the robot, giving it a remarkably human-like walking gait that can be viewed in this video (below).

The biological accuracy of this robot, which has been presented July 6, in IOP Publishing’s Journal of Neural Engineering, has allowed the researchers to investigate the processes underlying walking in humans and may bolster theories of how babies learn to walk, as well as helping to understand how spinal-cord-injury patients can recover the ability to walk.

A key component of the human walking system is the central pattern generator (CPG). The CPG is a neural network in the lumbar region of the spinal cord that generates rhythmic muscle signals. The CPG produces, and then controls, these signals by gathering information from different parts of the body that are responding to the environment. This is what allows people to walk without needing to think about it.

The simplest form of a CPG is a half-center, which consists of just two neurons that fire signals alternatively, producing a rhythm. The robot contains an artificial half-center as well as sensors that deliver information back to the half-center, including load sensors that sense force in the limb when the leg is pressed against a stepping surface.

Co-author of the study, Dr Theresa Klein, said: “Interestingly, we were able to produce a walking gait, without balance, which mimicked human walking with only a simple half-center controlling the hips and a set of reflex responses controlling the lower limb.”

The researchers, from the University of Arizona, hypothesize that babies start off with a simple half-center, similar to the one developed in this robot, and over time they ‘learn’ a network for a more complex walking pattern. This could explain why babies have been seen to exhibit a simple walking pattern when placed on a treadmill even before they have learned to walk — a simple half-center is already in place.

“This underlying network may also form the core of the CPG and may explain how people with spinal cord injuries can regain walking ability if properly stimulated in the months after the injury,” Dr Klein continued.

LIBYA - First Election Jitters

"Libya on edge before first post-Gadhafi election" by MAGGIE MICHAEL, Associated Press 7/6/2012

Calls for a boycott and other unrest on the eve of Libya's first vote since the overthrow of longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi raised fears of election violence, even as campaigning came to an end Friday for a contest seen as a milestone on the country's rocky path toward democracy.

The Saturday election of a 200-member transitional parliament caps a messy nine-month transition after a ruinous 2011 civil war that ended in October with the death of Gadhafi, whose four-decade rule left the country deeply divided along regional, tribal and ideological lines.

The parliament will elect a new transitional government to replace the one appointed by the National Transitional Council that led the rebel side during the eight-month war and held power in its aftermath.

Many in Libya's oil-rich east feel slighted by the NTC-issued election laws, purportedly based on population, that allocate their region less than a third of the parliamentary seats, with the rest going to the western region that includes Tripoli and the sparsely-settled desert south.

In what it called an attempt to defuse east-west tensions, the NTC decreed on Thursday that the new parliament will not be responsible for naming the panel that will draft a new constitution. Instead, the drafters will be directly elected by the public in a separate vote at a later date.

But this has not satisfied some in the east, who press for a boycott.

"We don't want Tripoli to rule all of Libya," said Fadlallah Haroun, a former rebel commander in the east's regional capital Benghazi.

Late Thursday, former rebel fighters from the east shut down three eastern oil refineries — in Ras Lanouf, Brega and Sidr — to press the transitional government to cancel the vote, Haroun said. He added that militiamen also have cut the country's main coastal highway linking east to west.

Earlier this week, ex-rebel fighters and other angry protesters in Benghazi and in the nearby town of Ajdabiya attacked elections offices, setting fire to ballot papers and other voting materials.

Haroun said boycott supporters would take to the streets on election day to "prevent people from voting, because this is a vote that serves those who stole the revolution from us." He said they would not take up arms but when asked how they would stop voters, he said, "We will see tomorrow."

Many in the west are equally dissatisfied with the decree, saying it will undercut the authority of the new parliament.

"The National Transitional Council acts like a rooster with its head cut off," said Yassar al-Bashti, a candidate with the liberal Free Libyans Party. "They want to weaken the new parliament after their failures over the past months."

The vote also will be a test of the strength of Islamist parties, which have gained influence in Libya and other nations following the ouster of authoritarian regimes run by strongmen like Gadhafi and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak. Groups vying for power range from the politically savvy Muslim Brotherhood to the ultraconservative Salafis and former jihadists.

Late Thursday, just before a 24-hour pre-vote ban on campaigning went into effect, supporters of the Justice and Construction party co-founded by the Muslim Brotherhood marched through the streets of Tripoli carrying the party's flags. The Alliance of National Forces, led by secular-leaning former premier Mahmoud Jibril, paraded in cars plastered with party posters. The National Front, which descends from a Gadhafi-era opposition movement, lit the sky over the capital with fireworks.

A day earlier, the former rebel commander and former jihadist Abdel-Hakim Belhaj, who co-founded the Homeland, or Al-Watan party, spoke to hundreds of supporters in the heart of Tripoli, endorsing democracy that will serve Islamic Shariah law.

Those four parties are seen as front-runners in a highly unpredictable race.

Libyan observers however say that voters are likely to cast ballots based on personalities they know, rather than ideology. In this conservative, almost entirely Muslim country, nearly all politicians accord Shariah a role in the constitution.

The NTC also decreed Thursday that the new constitution will definitely give a role to Islamic law, a move that appeared intended at preventing parties from turning the race to an Islamist-versus-secular contest.

Some 2.8 million voters, out of more than three million eligible, have registered for the polls. New parliamentary elections are to be held in 2013, after the constitution is drafted and approved in a referendum.

Observers expect that no party is likely to win an outright majority and the shape of the final government will likely depend on post-election alliances.

"We might see the Justice and Construction party striking alliance with Jibril's party, or we might see all Islamists forming one bloc in parliament," said Mohammed Bu-Sedr, a political prisoner during the Gadhafi era who now serves as adviser to the NTC's head and is running as an independent candidate in Benghazi.

ASTRONOMY - Darkmatter Seen!

"Scientists Observe the Mysterious Hidden Structure of the Universe for the First Time Ever" by Jesus Diaz, Gizmodo 7/6/2012

In 1933, Fritz Zwicky—a Swiss astronomer working at CalTech—had an amazing revelation. He realized that the amount of matter that we can see through our telescopes doesn't match the behavior of the Universe. There had to be something else that we couldn't see. Something that accounts for an astonishing 83 percent of all existing matter but is invisible to us.

Or it was. Now, for the first time in history, a team of astronomers has observed these hidden tendrils that extend everywhere. Dark matter, the mysterious substance that appears to give the Universe its structure, has finally been revealed.

The results of the study were published in Nature last Wednesday, going mostly unnoticed because of the announcement of the Higgs boson.

The research, lead by Jörg Dietrich, an astronomer at the University of Munich Observatory in Germany, observed the large-scale structure filaments intersections in which galaxy clusters occur:

[This marks] the first time we have observationally verified this very important theoretical prediction.

These dark tendrils have been impossible to observe until now because they are not dense enough. But Dietrich and his colleagues have been able to locate a filament that could be observed, a gigantic dark matter tendril that is 18 megaparsecs long. It connects Abell 222 and Abell 223, two galaxy clusters located 2.7 billion light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Cetus.

The team was able to observe the dark matter not only because of the vast size of the filament, but because of its orientation: it is perpendicular to Earth, along our line of view. That made it more dense from our perspective, increasing the gravitational lensing that deforms the light of objects behind it. By observing this optical distortion over 40,000 background galaxies, they know that the mass in the filament is between 6.5 × 10^13 and 9.8 × 10^13 times the mass of the Sun.

They used data from the XMM-Newton spacecraft, processed with a new computer analysis technique that revealed the precise shape of the filament, thus showing the dark matter and confirming the theoretical model proposed by Zwicky at the beginning of the 20th century.

Until know, there has never been direct observation of this substance. You could have seen the effect in the 3D map of the universe below, which shows how galaxies are clumped along an apparently branched structure. However, this was just an indication of the existence of something invisible with enough gravitational power to make those shapes.Both astronomers and physicists are very excited about this discovery. Astrophysicist Mark Bautz, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks that "what's exciting is that in this unusual system we can map both dark matter and visible matter together and try to figure out how they connect and evolve along the filament." Alexandre Refregier, a cosmologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, thinks that this observation will complement the work to find dark matter on Earth at laboratories like the Large Hadron Collider or Fermilab.

Slowly, every day, we are uncovering the secrets of the Universe one by one. And we'll continue to, until the Universe gets tired of us and sends us an giant asteroid to get rid of those pesky humans.

SAN DIEGO - Fire-Rescue Overtime

"San Diego Fire-Rescue requires mandatory overtime" AP, Mercury News 7/6/2012

Officials say the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department is so understaffed that overtime is mandatory. And if firefighters continually refuse, they can be warned, suspended and even terminated.

Chief Javier Mainar tells KNSD-TV that volunteers are sought first, but if that fails, there is a rotation list and if people refuse, they are subject to discipline that escalates.

Firefighters are used to extra shifts because paying overtime is sometimes cheaper than new hires.

San Diego has 800 firefighters, down 125 from 2009. In those three years, no recruits have been hired and many veterans have retired.

Two new, 16-week academy classes are scheduled and 50 or 60 people should graduate. San Diego Firefighters Local 145 president Frank De Clercq says that should help but it won't fix the problem.

COMMENT: OK, which would be cheaper for the city budget in the long run, hire more people or pay overtime?

SYRIA - "Friends of Syira" Should Not Allow Conflict to Continue

aka "Friends do not allow friends to drive drunk."

"Clinton: 'Friends of Syria' must unite to stop Russia, China 'blockading' progress" CBS/AP 7/6/2012

Excerpt

The United States and its international allies called Friday for new, global sanctions against President Bashar Assad's regime, stepping up the pressure after the defection of a top general dealt a major blow to the Syrian leader.

The question, explains CBS News State Department correspondent Margaret Brennan, is whether Russia and China will finally and completely sever the financial lifeline which is keeping Assad in power. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has said they've essentially given Assad a free pass by failing to implement sanctions and continuing to import Syrian oil.

Washington urged countries around the world to demand that the two nations force Assad to step down.

Meanwhile, Syrian Brig. Gen. Manaf Tlass, a member of the elite Republican Guards and a son of a former defense minister, abandoned Assad's regime, according to Western officials. It was the highest profile departure in 16 months of bloodshed that activists say has killed more than 14,000 people.

The uprising in Syria began in March 2011 with peaceful protests calling for Assad's ouster but has become increasingly militarized as the opposition took up arms to fight a brutal government crackdown. Military defections also have been on the rise.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Tlass had defected and was en route to France, where he has a sister and where world diplomats met Friday to bolster the Syrian opposition. Later, Fabius backtracked, saying he was not sure of Tlass' final destination.

The U.S. Defense Department confirmed that Tlass had defected and was heading to Turkey, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby called his defection "a crack in the inner circle" for Assad.

Clinton hailed the defection of top military officials in Assad's inner circle, telling reporters that "regime insiders and the military establishment are starting to vote with their feet."

She said this shows that "those with the closest knowledge of Assad's actions and crimes are moving away. We think that's a very promising development. It also raises questions for those remaining in Damascus, who are still supporting this regime."

A member of Syria's opposition National Council, Hassem Hashimi, described Tlass as a powerful figure in the Assad regime. "The defection of Tlass will encourage a lot of similar people to defect as well," he told The Associated Press in Paris.

Clinton joined senior officials from about 100 other countries in Paris to win wider support for a Syrian transition plan unveiled last week by U.N. mediator Kofi Annan. Joined by America's allies, she called for "real and immediate consequences for non-compliance, including sanctions," against the Assad regime.

But with neither Moscow nor Beijing in attendance, much remained dependent on persuading the two reluctant U.N. veto-wielding powers to force Assad into abiding by a cease-fire and the transition strategy. Clinton urged governments around the world to direct their pressure toward Russia and China as well.

JOBS - June Jobs Report

Up Front: I wish we (U.S.) would stop this month-by-month myopic focus on both jobs and economics. For heavens sake, these things do NOT change that fast. We need to focus on a long outlook, like what's the trend for the last 12mts. Also, crystal balls are a myth, so the economists' view just could be wrong.

"Job Growth Remains Tepid" by CATHERINE RAMPELL, New York Times 7/6/2012

Excerpt

The nation’s employers created almost enough jobs to keep up with population growth in June, but not nearly enough to reduce the backlog of nearly 13 million unemployed workers.

The economy added 80,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department reported Friday, after a revised increase of 77,000 in May. The unemployment rate remained at 8.2 percent.

Economists are expecting tepid job growth for the rest of the year, too.

“This economy has no forward momentum and little help from monetary or fiscal policy,” Kathy Bostjancic, director of macroeconomic analysis for the Conference Board, said. “As if that were not enough, ill winds are blowing in from both a contracting Europe and slowing growth in emerging markets. Also, domestic lawmakers’ inaction on the upcoming ‘fiscal cliff’ creates uncertainty that is not conducive to hiring.”

NUCLEAR POWER - Report on Fukushima, Was Manmade Accident

"Report Blames Japanese Government for Nuclear Meltdown" PBS Newshour 7/5/2012

Excerpt

RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): The Fukushima nuclear accident is often seen as a consequence of a rare natural disaster. But a tough new report from Japan concludes that the accident was manmade in more ways than one.

The traditional narrative of what went wrong in Japan in early 2011 had gone like this. After withstanding a powerful 9.0-magnitude earthquake on March 11, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant lost all power to three of its six units when a tsunami destroyed its emergency generators and cooling pumps. With those offline and severe flood damage to structures and equipment, meltdowns soon followed and seemed unavoidable. But a new report released today says otherwise.

HISTORY - U.S. Supreme Court 2012 Session

"Examining the Supreme Court Session Through the Lens of History" PBS Newshour 7/4/2012

Excerpt

SUMMARY: The Supreme Court's latest term was dominated by high-impact decisions on health care, immigration, criminal sentencing and more. Judy Woodruff looks at how it all played out and examines the historical significance with Marcia Coyle of the National Law Journal and presidential historian Michael Beschloss.

SCIENCE - The 'God' Particle

"What the 'Rock Star' Discovery of the Higgs Boson Means for Science" PBS Newshour 7/4/2012

Excerpt

SUMMARY: What exactly is the Higgs boson, and why is its discovery so fundamental to understanding particle physics? Author and Guardian science correspondent Ian Sample has the details.

RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): To help us further grasp today's news and exactly what a Higgs boson is, we're joined by Ian Sample, science correspondent for The Guardian newspaper and author of a book about the Higgs boson called "Massive: The Hunt for the God Particle." He was at the press conference today in Geneva, and joins us now from London.