Thursday, May 23, 2013

Are oil pipeline spills inevitable?

Talking points over pipelines are focused on economic and energy security interests on one side of the argument versus emissions and cleanup on the other. Given the legacy of pipeline spills since the Keystone XL debate began more than four years ago, the "real" issue may be the lack of debate over just why so many of these pipelines have burst open in the first place.

By Daniel J. Graeber,?Guest blogger / May 22, 2013

A member of ExxonMobil's cleanup crew is reflected in water and oil in a drainage ditch in Mayflower, Ark., last month. Exxon said it was still looking into what caused a 22-foot gash to appear in the wall of its 65-year-old Pegasus oil pipeline.

Courtney Spradlin/Log Cabin Democrat/AP/File

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Exxon Mobil hasn't asked federal regulatory authorities to restart the Pegasus oil pipeline, which burst open in a neighborhood in Mayflower, Ark.? In March, a 22-foot rupture in the pipeline spilled about 5,000 barrels of diluted Canadian crude oil into an area of marshland, though the company?said?it's been effectively cleaning the area with long-term remediation in mind. Policymakers on both sides of the Canadian crude oil debate have focused on issues ranging from emissions to economic stimulus. If pipelines like Keystone XL have any chance of approval, perhaps pipeline integrity should be the focal point of real policy debates.

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Exxon said it was still looking into what caused a 22-foot gash to appear in the wall of its 65-year-old Pegasus oil pipeline. Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel said?his?office was pouring over 12,500 pages of information sent to his office by Exxon. Those documents were related to maintenance, inspection and safety of the 850-mile oil pipeline. Exxon, for its part, said it was combing over data taken from inside the pipeline itself in an effort to figure out what happened before the spill. That inspection, a spokesman?said, could take at least another month.

Exxon already removed the damaged section and replaced it with new pipe. About a month after the Arkansas incident, about a barrel of oil leaked from the same pipeline about 200 miles north of Mayflower. The "wait and see"?reaction?to the Pegasus spill, and potentially the delay in the restart, may be part of Exxon's evaluation of the debate over the Keystone XL pipeline. Last week, a measure dubbed the Northern Route Approval Act passed through a Republican-led committee on its way to the full House. The bill would leave the fate of Keystone Xl in the hands of policymakers, who may have a vested?interest?in seeing that the project gets built.?(Related article:?Exxon Oil Spill in Arkansas, Keystone Spoiler?)?

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Life scientists present new insights on climate change and species interactions

May 22, 2013 ? UCLA life scientists provide important new details on how climate change will affect interactions between species in research published online May 21 in the Journal of Animal Ecology. This knowledge, they say, is critical to making accurate predictions and informing policymakers of how species are likely to be impacted by rising temperatures.

"There is a growing recognition among biologists that climate change is affecting how species interact with one another, and that this is going to have very important consequences for the stability and functioning of ecosystems," said the senior author of the research, Van Savage, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and of biomathematics at UCLA. "However, there is still a very limited understanding of exactly what these changes will be. Our paper makes progress on this very important question."

Climate change is causing global increases in mean temperature, as well as more fluctuations and greater variability in temperature. Growing evidence suggests these changes are altering when and how species interact, and even which species are able to interact without going extinct, Savage said.

Already, climatic warming is rapidly altering the timing and rate of flowering in plants, as well as breeding and migration in animals -- changes that are likely to disrupt interactions between species.

"These changes may bring about novel and potentially unstable species interactions by causing warm-adapted species to seek out geographic regions and to experience seasonal periods that have historically been too cold for them until temperatures begin to rise," said lead author Anthony Dell, a former UCLA postdoctoral researcher now at Germany's University of Gottingen.

Such changes could destabilize entire ecosystems, such as rainforests or coral reefs, said co-author Samraat Pawar, a former UCLA postdoctoral researcher currently at the University of Chicago, who noted that although biologists are becoming increasingly aware that changes in species interactions are likely to be one of most important biological impacts of climate change, they have found it challenging to understand and predict.

Savage's research team has recently made significant progress on this front by developing a biotraits database. This massive dataset has been compiled from the literature and has been standardized and organized so that data can be combined and compared. This group has already used statistical analysis and mechanistic mathematical models to provide information on how various biological traits of organisms respond to changes in temperature and other environmental factors.

In particular, Savage and his team have looked at the impact temperature changes can have on the rate at which an organism uses energy, known as the metabolic rate. This fundamental process governs many aspects of an organism's life, including how much food it will eat, how fast it can move, how much it sleeps and how fast its heart beats. The team makes predictions about how an organism's activity -- and thus the broader ecology -- are affected by temperature.

In the current research, Savage and his colleagues examined how organisms' different physiological responses to rising temperatures could impact what are known as consumer-resource interactions. These are interactions between two organisms that lead to a "feeding" event -- a prime example being a predator (consumer) and its prey (resource). Taken as a whole, a collection of consumer-resource interactions constitutes the food chain or food web that drives the diversity, dynamics and stability of particular communities and ecosystems.

Their model accounts for the fact that a change in temperature is likely to result in some predators becoming better at capturing prey while some prey animals become more efficient at evading capture, leading to imbalances in the food chain and potential repercussions for ecosystems.

A key biological trait driving different responses to temperature change among consumers and resources is body velocity -- the speed at which an animal moves. Cold-blooded animals, for example, tend to move faster as their body temperature increases. The biologists predict that one of the primary impacts of global warming will be increasing the amount of time and speed with which organisms move around a landscape and thus encounter and interact with one another.

Specifically, the researchers say, the effects of climatic warming will be determined by the ways in which predators seek their prey -- by moving around the landscape in search of mobile prey (active-capture), by remaining stationary and waiting for moving prey (sit-and-wait) or by moving around in search of immobile prey (grazing) -- as well as by whether interacting predator-prey species are both cold-blooded, both warm-blooded or one of each.

Because of the effect of temperature on body velocity, biologists predict that encounter rates between predators and prey will increase with rising temperatures if the foraging strategy is active-capture (both predator and prey moving through the landscape), as with an eagle hunting a fish. However, if both species respond to temperature in identical ways, these changes may not lead to significant shifts in their interactions.

With a sit-and-wait strategy, often used by snakes and lizards, the effects of temperature change would arise primarily via the moving prey species, potentially creating a very strong asymmetry between predator and prey. In this case, the asymmetry may profoundly alter the nature of the interaction, so that the two species have much higher or lower abundances and may no longer be able to coexist in the feeding relationship without one or both going extinct.

Similarly, increasing temperatures are likely to have significant impacts on interactions between warm-blooded and a cold-blooded animals, such as warm-blooded birds that feed on cold-blooded lizards, or snakes that feed on squirrels. In these cases, the internal body temperature of the cold-blooded animal -- the lizard or snake -- will vary when the climate changes. As a result, the organism's physiology will change and, in turn, influence its body velocity, activity and reaction rates. In contrast, warm-blooded animals, whose body temperature is largely independent of external climate, will not experience much change, again creating an asymmetry between species.

Using the biotraits database, the authors show that trait-specific asymmetries exist in organisms' responses to temperature change and are likely to be a major factor in determining the effects of climate change on species interactions.

Naturally, the researchers say, it is impossible to study all the species on the planet, but with their new mathematical model, predictions can be made about effects of warming on different types of consumer-resource interactions.

"The large diversity of species that make up natural ecosystems mean it is logistically infeasible to study every species interaction in a community and make predictions about how these interactions will be affected by climate warming," Savage noted. "However, models that assume all species respond to temperature in the same way will both miss the large diversity in ecological systems and therefore miss the most important consequences that arise from differential and asymmetric responses to temperature among species."

"In this paper we forge a middle ground between these two extremes," Dell said. "We allow different species to have different thermal responses and show this is essential for predicting species responses to climate change, while also having our categories be much broader than every species on the planet. This new model can help form the foundation for a more predictive framework for understanding the effects of climate change on communities and ecosystems."

The research was federally funded by the National Science Foundation (grant DEB 1021010.)

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/C8cb7owOo7k/130522095817.htm

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Immigration reform bill largely untouched going into fifth day of debate

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) speaks during the markup for the immigration reform bill on Capitol Hill May 9, 2013 in Washington,??

A bipartisan group of senators begin their fifth full day of debating changes to the immigration reform bill Tuesday. So far, the so-called mark up process has left the sweeping overhaul of the nation's immigration laws--which would legalize most of the country's 11 million undocumented immigrants--largely untouched. On Tuesday, the senators will address some of the final controversial changes to the bill, including increasing the number of visas for the high tech industry and whether to allow people in same-sex marriages to apply for green cards for their spouses.

Republicans are outnumbered on the 18-member Senate Judiciary Committee, and two of them--Sens. Jeff Flake and Lindsey Graham--helped draft the original bipartisan bill in the first place. Nonetheless, Republican senators have been able to push through a few amendments that they say will strengthen the enforcement portion of the bill. On Monday, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, introduced an amendment that requires officials at 30 major airports to take the fingerprints of departing foreign visitors, as a way to better keep track of which people on temporary visas have left the country when they were supposed to. Graham, meanwhile, passed an amendment that prevents people applying for asylum from returning to their home countries to visit unless they show there is good cause to do so. Grassley also passed an amendment that would bar unauthorized immigrants with three drunken driving convictions from legalizing.

Attempts by Republican senators to levy tougher criminal penalties on people who illegally enter the country or to prevent unauthorized immigrants from ever becoming citizens have failed, to the disappointment of groups that oppose the reform bill.

"We don't think the changes are very meaningful," said Steven Camarota, the director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that promotes lower levels of immigration.

Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the center, said that the group wanted the greater enforcement of the border and employment verification portions of the bill to take place before any undocumented immigrant is eligible to legalize his or her status. Efforts to change the bill to do so in the committee have failed.

Meanwhile, immigrant rights groups are cautiously optimistic. "So far, so good," said Lynn Tramonte, deputy director of America's Voice, an immigrant advocacy group. "It's clear that the opponents of immigration reform are just trying to find every little way to pick apart the bill in hopes of destabilizing the coalition," but haven't been successful, she added.

Democrats successfully passed amendments that will allow unauthorized immigrants to pay their legalization fees in installments and restricting the circumstances when immigration detainees can put in solitary confinement.

Advocates expect the mark up process to end this week, with the full bill introduced on the Senate floor sometime after the Senate's Memorial day recess in early June. The House, which is working on its own version of a bill, is expected to release their draft version in early June, as well.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/immigration-reform-bill-largely-untouched-going-fifth-day-140819202.html

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AP photographer describes destroyed Okla. school

A woman carries a child through a field near the collapsed Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Okla., Monday, May 20, 2013. The relationship between the woman and the child was not immediately known. A tornado as much as a mile (1.6 kilometers) wide with winds up to 200 mph (320 kph) roared through the Oklahoma City suburbs Monday, flattening entire neighborhoods, setting buildings on fire and landing a direct blow on an elementary school. (AP Photo Sue Ogrocki)

A woman carries a child through a field near the collapsed Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Okla., Monday, May 20, 2013. The relationship between the woman and the child was not immediately known. A tornado as much as a mile (1.6 kilometers) wide with winds up to 200 mph (320 kph) roared through the Oklahoma City suburbs Monday, flattening entire neighborhoods, setting buildings on fire and landing a direct blow on an elementary school. (AP Photo Sue Ogrocki)

A child calls to his father after being pulled from the rubble of the Tower Plaza Elementary School following a tornado in Moore, Okla., Monday, May 20, 2013. A tornado as much as a mile (1.6 kilometers) wide with winds up to 200 mph (320 kph) roared through the Oklahoma City suburbs Monday, flattening entire neighborhoods, setting buildings on fire and landing a direct blow on an elementary school. (AP Photo Sue Ogrocki)

Rescue workers dig through the rubble of a collapsed wall at the Plaza Tower Elementary School to free trapped students in Moore, Okla., following a tornado Monday, May 20, 2013. (AP Photo Sue Ogrocki)

A boy is pulled from beneath a collapsed wall at the Plaza Towers Elementary School following a tornado in Moore, Okla., Monday, May 20, 2013. (AP Photo Sue Ogrocki)

A fire burns in the Tower Plaza Addition in Moore, Okla., following a tornado Monday, May 20, 2013. A tornado as much as a mile (1.6 kilometers) wide with winds up to 200 mph (320 kph) roared through the Oklahoma City suburbs Monday, flattening entire neighborhoods, setting buildings on fire and landing a direct blow on an elementary school. (AP Photo Sue Ogrocki)

(AP) ? I left the office as soon as I saw the tornado warnings on TV. I had photographed about a dozen twisters before in the past decade, and knew that if I didn't get in my car before the funnel cloud hit, it would be too late.

By the time I got to Moore, all I could see was destruction. I walked toward a group of people standing by a heaping mound of rubble too big to be a home. A woman told me it was a school.

I expected chaos as I approached the heaping mounds of bricks and twisted metal where Plaza Towers Elementary once stood. Instead, it was calm and orderly as police and firefighters pulled children out one-by-one from underneath a large chunk of a collapsed wall.

Parents and neighborhood volunteers stood in a line and helped pass the rescued children from one set of arms to another to get them out of harm's way. Adults carried the children through a field littered with shredded pieces of wood, cinder block and insulation to a triage center in a parking lot.

They worked quickly and quietly so rescuers could try to hear voices of children trapped beneath the rubble.

Crews lifted one boy from under the wall and were about to pass him along the human chain, but his dad was there. As the boy called out for him, they were reunited.

In the 30 minutes I was outside the destroyed school, I photographed about a dozen children pulled from under the rubble.

I focused my lens each one of them. Some looked dazed. Some cried. Others seemed terrified.

But they were alive.

I know students are among those who died in the tornado, but for a moment, there was hope in the devastation.

___

AP Photographer Sue Ogrocki has worked in Oklahoma for more than 10 years where she has covered about a dozen tornados.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-05-21-Oklahoma%20Tornado-Photographer/id-4a6dcbef107a4c7b9ef5a33b8f2fe17c

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What Once Was

This is the auto-generated OOC topic for the roleplay "What Once Was"

You may edit this first post as you see fit.

...If I keep living like the world is over, then will it surprise me when it does end?

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RolePlayGateway/~3/9NKnltdA6_0/viewtopic.php

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Saturday, May 4, 2013

Change of Subject: Rhode Island legalizes gay marriage, and I'm ...

Is there any evidence at all that this tide of history is doing anything other than flowing one way?? Any prominent supporters of same-sex marriage who've "evolved" into opposition? Any strong repeal efforts? Any credible studies showing legalized gay marriage is releated to negative social or economic consequences?

I'm asking because I've looked and haven't seen any.

Source: http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2013/05/gaywed.html

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Ancient Earth May Have Smelled Like Rotten Eggs

Copyright ? 2013 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

IRA FLATOW, HOST:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. Imagine stepping onto the Earth two billion years ago, taking a stroll along the shores of an ancient beach near the northern edge of what today is Lake Superior. You wouldn't see any trees. They didn't hit the scene until, oh, another billion-and-a-half years. What you might see, though, if you had a microscope, were tiny bacteria-like organisms on the shore having a ball eating each other.

But it wasn't so much of what you might see in our imaginary stroll. What we're going to be talking about, it's what you might smell, because these microbes may have perfumed the shores of this ancient lake with a recognizable scent of rotten eggs. Mmm. That's according to a paper out this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists.

My next guest was one of the authors. Martin Brasier is a professor of palaeobiology at the University of Oxford in England. He joins us by phone. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.

MARTIN BRASIER: Hello, nice to be with you.

FLATOW: You believe that at one time, say, a few billion years ago, the whole Earth may have smelled like rotten eggs?

BRASIER: No, that's not what we really would be saying in the paper. We were saying that this particular area, there was this particular gas, which we associate with the smell of rotten eggs, hydrogen sulfide, was sufficiently prevalent that it helped to preserve, in fact, some of the earlier signs of fossilized life in these rocks.

So it wouldn't have been everywhere, but it would probably have been a little bit more noticeable than it is now.

FLATOW: Tell us about the rocks you were looking at. What was inside of them?

BRASIER: Yeah, well, the locality we were looking at is historically rather interesting. It's on the northern short of Lake Superior and it was almost exactly 60 years ago some of the oldest fossils were ever found in it by a Harvard professor, Elso Barghoorn, and an American mineralogist, Stanley Tyler.

And they noticed that inside some very glassy rocks from this particular locality, you could see little filaments, tiny little filaments about a thousandth or so of a millimeter across, preserved inside and that they had the appearance of what we would now call blue-green algal cyanobacteria. Well, this signal has been known for quite a while, and there are a range of different types, but we recently re-examined the material and discovered that funny things were happening to this particular assemblage so that the algal remains were being consumed in some way.

Some of them were full of holes, some of them much more full of holes than other types, and that in fact there was an association between these patterns and they're being turned into a material called iron sulfide or pyrite. People may know it as fool's good.

And this is the product of hydrogen sulfide. It means that there was actually a gas, H2S, smelling like rotten eggs, being produced as the waste product by creatures eating other creatures.

FLATOW: So when you find pyrite, you're finding the waste product of the creatures?

BRASIER: Very often that's the case, certainly in surface sediments if they come from a lake or from the sea. They're the waste product. We can test them by looking at various isotopes. So there are different isotopes of sulfur, and there's a specific pattern of the isotopes of sulfur that's characteristic for this particular pathway.

And we were able to find that, and not only that but in some examples of the material we looked at we could see little sort of bean-shaped cells, not much more, again, than a micron or a thousandth of a millimeter across, which were sitting on the tissue on the cells of material that was itself being consumed.

So we hypothesize anyway that these may be the creatures caught in the act of eating other creatures.

FLATOW: And so the world was filled at that time with these microscopic creatures, right?

BRASIER: Yes, these would be very ancient. And we've long suspected that this sort of thing goes back or should go back a long, long way. And people have found the chemical signals, the brassy fool's gold they've found. They've even found the isotopic shifts. But this is, I think, the earliest record where we can see actually turned into this shiny material the fossils themselves. We can see them actually preserved in three dimensions.

And it's new techniques that we have now that we can use to analyze these in three dimensions and start to pick out their relationships. And that's one of the exciting things that's happening at the moment.

FLATOW: Would there be other places around the world where you'd find the same rocks and fossils?

BRASIER: Yes, I think there probably would be. There are certainly places in Australia and potentially in South Africa where one could look. But the number of places where rocks of this age are preserved or well-preserved is rather few. Most of them have got sort of cooked and baked and shoved up and down by mountain buildings and the like.

And so you often have to look inside the interiors of very large and very ancient continents: North America around the margins of Canada; or in Australia, both of which are very ancient continental masses.

FLATOW: So what happened to the smell? Why doesn't the world smell like rotten eggs today?

BRASIER: Well, it's true that these bacteria are still active, and of course if you pass a blocked drain or something like that, you can see that smell, and it's exactly the same activity going on. Bacteria are eating other things, eating algae, eating other bacteria. And the reason you don't smell it is because the creatures that were living at the surface, the fossils that we first saw, were producing oxygen by photosynthesis.

And that oxygen has now built up to such a level that it destroys the hydrogen sulfide. So it doesn't normally get up into the atmosphere. You don't notice it very much. So that's probably the reason, really - there's too much oxygen, or it's being consumed by other kinds of bacteria a little bit further up the food chain.

FLATOW: Do we humans have similar bacteria living in our guts? We talk a lot about the human biome a lot on this program.

BRASIER: Yeah, my understanding is that this kind of bacterium is found in the guts of many people and is responsible for sulfurous smells. And it's somewhat unavoidable. They're so widespread that they're practically everywhere, and they're probably in the digestive tract of many of us helping to break down the materials that we've had for dinner. So they're there inside us as well.

FLATOW: So we're actually carrying around remnants of billions of years ago within our bodies?

BRASIER: Yeah, I think it's a rather fascinating thought. I'm rather intrigued to follow up other aspects of this. Many of the creatures that were living at the surface of the planet and helping to make it what it was back then are now living inside us, where they're protected from oxygen. So they're living in a kind of space suit. But there they are. They're still around us and inside us.

FLATOW: We're sort of the zoo that keeps them alive.

BRASIER: Yeah, that's right. We are a kind of zoo of deep prehistory, and not just us, of course, but pretty well all the other living things around us. Anything that's got a digestive tract and is consuming food matter of some sort is likely to have a very rich flora of bacteria and primitive organisms hopping around.

FLATOW: If you can find these kinds of primitive organisms, could you find things like evidence of, like, ancient viruses that might have been around?

BRASIER: Well, that's an interesting question, and people have tried to look. The difference between what we've been finding and the virus is that the virus doesn't have a rigid cell wall to protect it. It just invades other things that have cell walls. So it makes it much harder to see and much harder to fossilize. It's often the cell wall or the protective material around it which goes into the fossil record.

But some of my colleagues have thought they have found viral-like structures, sort of polygonal-shaped structures a bit like modern viruses - very, very tiny, but have been unable to convince themselves and other people that no other explanation can be brought forward for these things. So that's still very much an open question.

But it would be nice if we could, but a little bit hard to really confirm it.

FLATOW: Now, for folks who are getting out, the weather is getting nice, spring is upon us, tell me about the spot where the fossils came from. Could you go out there and still find that same spot as you walk about?

BRASIER: Yes, you can. It's actually on a - there is a trail out towards this site. It's quite near to Thunder Bay, and it is - it's a national park. So obviously it's protected, and collecting is not allowed or anything like that. But you can find the Gunflint Trail. There's a Gunflint Trail in the USA, and there's an equivalent one near to Thunder Bay and near to the town of Schreiber in Ontario.

So it would be possible, but it's a very long hike. It's something like a 10-mile hike from where you leave the car. So you would have to be...

FLATOW: Bring lunch.

BRASIER: You would have to be very enthusiastic and energetic. And I have met hikers there on that locality, but it's - you want very good weather because the rocks are very slippy(ph), and they slope down into Lake Superior, which is not a good piece of water to disappear into.

FLATOW: How did the first geologists find this spot there? Did they stumble on it? Where they looking for it?

BRASIER: It's a very interesting question, and Stanley Tyler was hunting for iron. In fact, the deposits which these come from are the rock type from which much of the iron that built up the Detroit car industry comes from. So he was following that, those layers around, and they thought they would possibly find life. And he was - the story goes that he was on a fishing expedition and he actually moored his boat on the shoreline there and happened to notice some very interesting glassy-looking rocks, which were rather black in color.

And he knew that the black meant that there was organic matter, that it was carbon, a bit like coal, and collected some material, cut it into little slices and then sent it off to his friend in Harvard, who confirmed that there were amazingly beautiful fossils inside.

These were the first really good fossils from that far back in time, and when they were first found, nobody knew they were as old two billion years. They were thought to be a few hundreds of millions of years. But now we know they're very ancient.

FLATOW: Very interesting. Thank you, thank you, Dr. Brasier.

BRASIER: You're very welcome indeed.

FLATOW: Quite interesting. Martin Brasier is professor of palaeobiology, University of Oxford in England, and talking with us about going out looking, go looking for those rock formations, maybe this weekend, out there in Canada or in - well, around the Detroit area.

Copyright ? 2013 NPR. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to NPR. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

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Source: http://www.npr.org/2013/05/03/180824400/ancient-earth-may-have-smelled-like-rotten-eggs?ft=1&f=1007

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Friday, May 3, 2013

Saturn's youthful appearance explained

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

As planets age they become darker and cooler. Saturn however is much brighter than expected for a planet of its age - a question that has puzzled scientists since the late sixties. New research published in the journal Nature Geoscience has revealed how Saturn keeps itself looking young and hot.

Researchers from the University of Exeter and the Ecole Normale Sup?rieure de Lyon found that layers of gas, generated by physical instability deep within the giant planet, prevent heat from escaping and have resulted in Saturn failing to cool down at the expected rate.

Professor Gilles Chabrier from Physics & Astronomy at the University of Exeter said: "Scientists have been wondering for years if Saturn was using an additional source of energy to look so bright but instead our calculations show that Saturn appears young because it can't cool down. Instead of heat being transported throughout the planet by large scale (convective) motions, as previously thought, it must be partly transferred by diffusion across different layers of gas inside Saturn. These separate layers effectively insulate the planet and prevent heat from radiating out efficiently. This keeps Saturn warm and bright."

Characterised by its distinctive rings, Saturn is one of the largest planets in our Solar System, second only in size to massive Jupiter. It is primarily made of hydrogen and helium and its excessive brightness has previously been attributed to helium rains, the result of helium failing to mix with Saturn's hydrogen rich atmosphere.

Layered convection, like that recently discovered in Saturn, has been observed in the Earth's oceans where warm, salty water lies beneath cool and less salty water. The denser, salty water prevents vertical currents forming between the different layers and so heat cannot be transported efficiently upwards.

These findings suggest that the interior structure, composition and thermal evolution of giant planets in our Solar System, and beyond, may be much more complex than previously thought.

###

University of Exeter: http://www.exeter.ac.uk

Thanks to University of Exeter for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/128060/Saturn_s_youthful_appearance_explained

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Special Report: How Google UK clouds its tax liabilities

By Tom Bergin

LONDON (Reuters) - In November 2012, Google's Vice President for Northern and Central Europe was called to an oak-paneled conference room overlooking the Thames to testify to a parliamentary committee about how firms like his reap billions in revenue in Britain but pay very little corporate income tax.

Matt Brittin, dressed in a fitted blue suit and open-necked white shirt, smiled confidently as he explained that Google Inc. wasn't liable for taxation on UK sales because these were all handled from its European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. "Nobody (in the UK) is selling," Brittin told the Public Accounts Committee (PAC).

That's not how Simon Andrews, founder of advertising agency Addictive, has experienced Google UK. "All the people you tend to deal with are in London," said Andrews, whose business plans and buys advertising campaigns on behalf of clients. "You would never know about the Dublin thing apart from if you looked closely at the address on the invoices. All the people are based in London."

The difference is important. For tax purposes, Google, which is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., says it does not have a British presence. From 2006 to 2011, Google generated $18 billion in revenues from the UK, according to statutory filings, and paid just $16 million in taxes. If the UK tax authority were to decide that UK-based employees do sell to British clients, UK law could consider Google to have a tax residence, lawyers and academics say.

Google UK Ltd. employed 1,300 people at the end of 2011, of whom 720 were engaged in "the provision of marketing services" to Google Ireland, according to its accounts. Google's chairman, Eric Schmidt, defended the internet search giant's low tax bills in the UK last month, saying the company's arrangements are within the law.

A Reuters examination of Google's activities in Britain shows many roles that actually target, negotiate and close sales of Google's advertising products to its customers. Research included interviews with more than a dozen customers and former staff, job advertisements, CVs and endorsements on networking website LinkedIn.

There may be a fine line between marketing and sales, but the idea that Google does not sell in Britain raised a chuckle from Andrew Johnson, a manager at digital marketing agency Stickyeyes who is based in the northern city of Leeds. His company, which has annual turnover of around 15 million pounds ($23 million), buys a range of services from Google and he has had meetings with account managers in London. "I suppose it goes back to the famous quote that we're all sales people ultimately because we're all trying to sell something," he said. "But they do lots of sales pitches. That's how we view them. They view them as new product pitches, we call them sales pitches."

On its corporate website, Google UK says London is home base to "a number of EMEA sales & marketing leaders", adding, "Most offices outside Mountain View focus on engineering or sales; we do both."

In late March and early April, the website advertised dozens of London-based sales jobs, whose responsibilities included "negotiating deals", closing "strategic and revenue deals" and achieving "quarterly sales quotas."

The LinkedIn profiles of around 150 London-based employees said they were involved in formulating sales strategy, managing sales teams, closing deals or other sales work. Some employees describe how they meet - or exceed - sales targets.

David Smith is Strategic Partner Lead at Google in London, according to his LinkedIn profile in late April. His profile said his role involves "selling Media Platforms Solutions to existing Publishers, Agencies and Marketers" and noted that "I constantly exceed target." His former boss endorsed this claim, posting a recommendation saying he "demonstrated his ability to grow clients at exponential rates taking one agency from $50k a year to over $1MM annually." Smith, like other Google employees named in this story, did not respond to requests for comment.

Google customers also endorse its London-based sales staff on LinkedIn, at least six profiles show. "An outstanding sales professional" is how David McLeman described Koert Holtgreve, Regional Sales Lead for UK, Ireland & Benelux at Google UK, from the time they worked together. McLeman did not respond to requests for comment.

Lawyers and academics say that if Google's UK staff did agree to sales with UK customers, that could open the possibility of much bigger tax bills. The tax authority in France has already challenged a similar structure that the company used in relation to its French subsidiary. But questions of tax often sit in a legal grey area, where a country's tax authority and the courts ultimately decide.

Google's Director for External Relations Peter Barron said if UK customers want to buy advertising from Google, the company's UK marketing staff would encourage them to do so; but only staff in Ireland sold to UK clients. "We comply with all the tax rules in the UK," he said.

Google has not been accused of violating UK tax laws. Britain's tax authority, Her Majesty's Customs and Revenue (HMRC), and Google's auditor, Ernst & Young, declined to comment, citing taxpayer and client confidentiality.

Margaret Hodge, chairwoman of the Public Accounts Committee, which heard Brittin speak in November, said the fact Google told parliament it does not sell in the UK while advertising London-based jobs for salespeople is a "very serious" matter. The discrepancy raises questions about whether Google does operate within the law, she said, and whether it misled parliament - a rare offence which in the past has cost government officials their jobs.

"It's difficult to reconcile the statements made by the witness (Brittin) and the evidence Reuters has uncovered," Hodge said. She said she plans to recall Brittin to appear before her committee. "We will need to very quickly call back the Google executives to give them a chance to explain themselves and to ensure that actually what they told us first time around is not being economical with the truth."

Google director Barron said Brittin firmly rebutted any suggestion he misled the committee. But Barron declined to say whether UK-based employees do actually negotiate terms with clients, or why job advertisements told candidates they would be required to perform such tasks.

"Our advertisements for UK staff sometimes refer to sales skills and many of the roles include Sales in the title as we are seeking to attract people with those skills and that background," he added. "We accept that the wording of some job adverts may have been confusing and we are working to make it clearer."

TANGIBLE PRESENCE

Google makes almost all its money from internet advertising - selling space on its own website, arranging ads on those run by others and offering services, such as tools to monitor internet traffic. Most UK employees work in a multicolored office block just off Oxford Street - the capital's main shopping area - fitted out with exposed air conditioning pipes, buttoned fabric walls, floral wallpaper, outsized lampshades and cafeterias offering free food and drinks.

Brittin told the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee Google declares hardly any taxable profit in the UK because all its profits are derived from the computer codes developed in California.

He said Google employs "a couple of hundred" staff in Dublin who are responsible for selling to UK clients. The London employees are "digital consultants" who simply educate potential clients about how its products work and direct them to Dublin if they express an interest to buy anything.

The UK unit's accounts show it doesn't receive revenue from sales, but fees from Google Ireland and Google Inc., which are supposed to cover costs and include a small premium. Google UK Ltd. reported losses every year between 2006 and 2011, which allowed it to build up tax credits - used to offset future tax bills - of almost $20 million.

Google Ireland Ltd. reported sales of 12.5 billion euros ($16.4 billion) in 2011, but profits of only 24 million euros, and an Irish corporation tax bill of 8 million euros. The low profit comes from the fact it pays most of its turnover to an affiliate in Bermuda, which levies no income tax on foreign-controlled corporations, for the right to use the computer algorithms.

Chairman Schmidt has said he is "very proud" of Google's corporate structure. "It's called capitalism," he told Bloomberg News in December. "We are proudly capitalistic. I'm not confused about this."

COOL STUFF

Matt Brittin's comments to parliament sit uneasily with the recruitment section of Google's website.

There, the company makes a clear distinction between marketing and sales. It divides its roles into three main categories: "Build cool stuff", which includes technical and research roles, "do cool stuff", which includes marketing and administrative functions, and "sell cool stuff".

"Sell cool stuff" includes four sales sub-categories: Sales & Account Management covers revenue-generating roles. Product & Customer Support helps "improve user experience" and collects feedback; Partnerships covers business development; Sales Operations involves supporting sales people. Google's website says the London office is home to teams in all four areas.

In mid-April, the corporate website advertised 39 London-based positions within the sales team. It offered 21 jobs in Sales & Account Management and nine with Partnerships sub-categories - roles for which the ads tell candidates they will need to be involved in negotiating and closing deals. Only seven London-based jobs were advertised within the "Marketing and Communications" subcategory.

OVER-ACHIEVERS

The way Google staff describe their work also differs from Brittin's words.

Account Manager Indi Burton, for example, outlines her role on her LinkedIn profile: "From the initial first call to establish the right contact, I pitch clients over the phone and face to face. Once the client is on board I manage and grow the account and client relationship." None of the people whose LinkedIn profiles are cited in this story responded to attempts to contact them; Google declined to comment on the profiles.

Adrian Joseph, Google's London-based Head Of Search Advertising Solutions for Northern & Central Europe, who describes himself as a black belt in judo and cites table tennis and investing in fine wine among his interests, says on his LinkedIn profile that he has "responsibility for driving all Search advertising revenue."

Jerome Beauguitte, a Senior Account Executive, said his role was to "develop a strategic client acquisition plan targeting top accounts in Europe ... Identify and close enterprise and subscription-based sales opportunities."

Peter Lorant, as Head of Channel Partners (EMEA), said he was "Responsible for channel revenue" and "Over-achieved New Business Quota in 2011 & 2012."

"VERY SALESY"

Johnson, the Google customer at Stickyeyes, said that "smaller spending clients" go through the Dublin call center, but those spending more than 250,000 pounds a year receive dedicated support from Google representatives in the UK. The culture is "very, very salesy," he said. "Anything they've got new that they want you to spend more money on, it's all about selling you their new products."

Two former London-based sales staff also told Reuters the larger customers were dealt with by London.

Marcos Steverlynck worked as a sales and business development professional at Google in London from 2007 to 2011. He said the focus was on closing deals. "It could be either contacting potential partners directly or partners contact you and basically, negotiating the deals with them."

When large, strategic deals had to be escalated for approval, they went to U.S. offices rather than to Ireland, said Steverlynck, who now runs an online art dealership. Google declined to comment on how decisions on big deals were handled.

WHAT IS SELLING?

Google's practice of not reporting sales from UK clients to be assessed for income tax in Britain is based on the legal assumption that it does not have a taxable presence in the country, a "permanent establishment" known as a PE, lawyers and academics say. Tax lawyer Miles Dean, founder and partner of law firm Milestone, said the company can avoid having a taxable presence if all sales to UK clients are made directly with Google Ireland Ltd.

Google declined to say what its staff in Ireland do with contracts agreed with UK clients. When asked if they send out contracts to UK clients that have been agreed in principle by UK sales staff, Barron declined to comment.

A sales contract carrying the name of Google Ireland is not enough to ensure that Google Ireland has no taxable presence in the UK, said Angharad Miller, senior lecturer in tax at Bournemouth University, who worked for 13 years with large accounting firms before becoming an academic. "It can be enough (to establish a taxable presence) that the contract is in substance made in the UK," she said. "If they're closing deals (in the UK), they are living quite dangerously."

Google declined to comment on what impact negotiating sales in the UK would have on its tax status.

Dean, the tax attorney, said it was impossible to tell whether Google's activities were in line with the law without seeing the contract for services between Google Ireland and Google UK, but that negotiating deals could be problematic. "The best advice, in order to avoid a PE, is that negotiation can't take place in the UK," he said.

"Because the more of that decision-making process that you bring into the UK, that management process, and negotiation, is obviously of some relevance in the formation of contracts. That would generally be outside the scope of an agreement between the head office in Ireland and the UK subsidiary or the marketing company," he added.

EUROPE-WIDE ARRANGEMENT

In France, the tax authority is investigating the company's claim that its French unit conducts limited support activities on behalf of Google Ireland. A source close to Google has confirmed news reports that France has demanded 1.7 billion euros in back taxes from the company on the grounds that it is really engaged in sales, not just marketing, in the country.

French tax officers raided Google's Paris offices in 2011 on a "presumption of fraud", according to court documents seen by Reuters and reported in French and international press. That was based in part on evidence including testimony from a Google customer who said advertising contracts came in Google Ireland's name, but were processed by Google representatives in Paris and that he had only had contact with Google France employees. The French tax authority and Google declined to comment on the investigation.

The UK authority has taken a less aggressive approach to big international companies. HMRC declined to say when it last raided the premises of a multinational seeking evidence of tax avoidance or evasion.

Some lawmakers said they were surprised the UK tax authority has not yet challenged the structures used by internet companies such as Google to avoid paying taxes on profits earned from UK customers.

"HMRC has to be much more assertive and aggressive on behalf of the UK taxpayer to ensure that we really do get the proper tax back for the economic activity that takes place in this country," Hodge said.

British Prime Minister David Cameron has responded to concern about corporate tax avoidance by saying he wants a change in international rules to ensure companies pay their fair share of tax. HMRC said it used a wide variety of information sources to ensure companies pay the right amount of tax. ($1 = 0.6455 British pounds) ($1 = 0.7634 euros)

(Last year, a Google executive defended its low UK tax bill by telling parliament the company does not have sales operations in Britain. This Reuters examination raises questions about that.)

(Additional reporting by Natalie Huet in London and Jean-Baptiste Vey in Paris; Edited by Sara Ledwith and Simon Robinson)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/special-report-google-uk-clouds-tax-liabilities-061907458.html

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Daughter bitter at newly found mom

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) ? The teenage daughter of a woman who just revealed she abandoned her family 11 years ago said Thursday the disclosure has angered her and she is not eager to restart their relationship.

Morgan Heist, who learned last week Brenda Heist had surfaced in the Florida Keys, said the news has made her recall with bitterness the years of mourning she endured when she assumed her mother was dead and feared she'd been murdered.

"I ached every birthday, every Christmas," said 19-year-old Morgan Heist, a freshman at a community college outside Philadelphia. "My heart just ached. I wasn't mad at her. I wanted her to be there because I thought something had happened to her. I wish I had never cried."

Brenda Heist's mother, Jean Copenhaver, said Thursday that her daughter "had a real traumatic time" but was doing OK.

Brenda Heist was released from police custody on Wednesday and is staying with a brother in northern Florida for now, Copenhaver said.

Copenhaver, of Brenham, Texas, said she had spoken with Heist several times since Friday, when the 54-year-old woman turned herself in to police in Florida and was identified as a missing person.

"She just said she thought the family wouldn't want to talk to her because of her leaving," Copenhaver said. "And we all assured her that wasn't the case and we all loved her and wanted to be with her."

Morgan Heist said she's not sympathetic, partly because her mother had a choice, unlike the family she secretly abandoned.

"It's definitely very selfish," Morgan Heist said. "She clearly did not think of me or my brother or my dad at all with that decision. She thought of herself."

Heist told police she made a spur-of-the-moment decision in 2002 to join a group of homeless hitchhikers on their way to Florida, walking out on Morgan, 8, and her brother, then 12.

Brenda and her husband, Lee, were living together but going through an amicable divorce when she learned she had been denied housing support, police said. She was crying about that in a Lancaster park when three strangers befriended her and offered to let her join them.

Morgan Heist said her parents had agreed to live near each other once they divorced. Brenda Heist had been a bookkeeper at a car dealership.

"It's more of a mystery than ever," she said. "Her life was not hard at all."

Brenda Heist told police she slept under bridges and survived at times by scavenging food from restaurant trash and panhandling. But Lititz Police Detective John Schofield said Thursday he is looking into reports that have come in over the past day suggesting Brenda Heist's time in Florida included much less miserable periods.

"We're getting several calls from people down in Florida that knew her who want to say she's not being truthful with us," Schofield said.

Heist told a detective with the Monroe County Sheriff's Office that she had recently been arrested in the Tampa Bay region and might be in violation of probation. She told the detective she used the name Kelsie Lyanne Smith and provided a date of birth.

Jail and court records show Kelsie Lyanne Smith, with a matching birth date, was arrested in January on misdemeanor charges of marijuana possession, possession of drug paraphernalia and providing false identification to law enforcement. After pleading guilty, Smith was sentenced to time served and was released on Feb. 13. She was also ordered to pay court costs but failed to do so and was found delinquent on April 15.

Copenhaver said she has not pressed her daughter about what led her to walk away from the life she knew in Pennsylvania and then live underground for more than a decade.

"We haven't gone into that with her," Copenhaver said. "She just needs time to recover, and have some peace and that. She'll tell us when she's ready."

She agreed to pass along a message from The Associated Press, asking Brenda Heist for an interview.

Heist told police she contacted them after feeling like she was at the end of her rope and tired of running.

"She's doing OK," Copenhaver said. "She's got a long way to go. She had a real traumatic time, but she's doing OK."

She said Heist was born in South Carolina, then moved as her father was transferred by the Air Force to Italy and Missouri before ending up in San Antonio, where she graduated from high school.

When she vanished, Lee Heist, was investigated but was cleared as a suspect. He raised the children without her and got the courts to declare her legally dead. He has since remarried.

Police erroneously said on Wednesday that daughter Morgan Heist was a sophomore at West Chester University. She is a freshman at Montgomery County Community College.

___

Associated Press writer Curt Anderson in Miami contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/daughter-voices-anger-mom-found-11-years-190028861.html

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