For many scientists, the deep pain from this year's string of disasters is to a very large degree man-made.

From the Mississippi delta to the mountains of Kashmir and the beaches of the Andaman Sea, governments failed in almost every case to respect the basic laws of sustainable development.

In a nutshell, these rules are: don't house people in places that are at risk to disasters -- but if you do, respect natural defences; keep the population growth to sensible limits; build wisely and ensure high safety standards in construction; and set up effective alert and response networks in the event disaster does strike.

"We like to talk about natural disasters because it puts the blame on Mother Nature... (but) it's nonsense, it misrepresents what the causal factors really are," said Anthony Oliver-Smith, a doctor of anthropology at the University of Florida at Gainesville.

"Obviously, there are big, big hurricanes and there are big, big earthquakes that will create a certain amount of damage. But the degree and level of destruction is really much more a result of society than it is of the natural agent."

The October 8 earthquake that struck Kashmir, killing 73,000 in Pakistan and 1,400 in India, exposed shoddy construction standards in which homes and schools became killers and the lack of emergency backup in a vulnerable seismic region.

The Geological Survey of Pakistan described the temblor as "a wakeup call".

"Construction codes are non-existent, or criminally violated," it said.

"It is feared that if mushrooming construction of inferior quality continues unchecked in the cities, half the newly-constructed buildings will crumble in 20-30 years with just a moderate earthquake hitting the region."

In the case of the December 26 2004 Asian earthquake and tsunami, which killed at least 220,000 people, the toll was amplified by the burgeoning development on the Indian Ocean coastline, where villages, towns and tourist resorts have sprung up in the past decade.

This was most notable in Thailand, where hotel complexes were built right on the beach, thus putting them right in the path of a big wave, and mangroves and coral reefs, which would have dampened much of the impact, had been destroyed.

"Indiscriminate economic development and ecologically destructive policies have left many communities more vulnerable to disasters than they realise," said the Washington-based environmental group the Worldwatch Institute.

A classic example of this was the monsoon flooding that hit Mumbai in August, temporarily transforming the city of 15 million into the so-called "Venice of the East" where streets were drowned and more than 400 lost their lives.

Experts blamed the tragedy on decrepit drainage dating back to the British colonial era, explosive growth in slum housing and the loss of green areas and river channels that used to soak up rainwater seepage and then take it out to sea.

"A myopic view of development and misuse of no-development 'green' zones has virtually killed the city," said Chandrashekar Prabhu, an urban planner.

Such folly is not exclusive to a developing country.

On August 29, Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans -- a delta city built below floodlevel and whose coastal wetlands, which would have been a useful buffer against storm surge, had been destroyed by developers.

Katrina left a trail of a thousand dead across the US Gulf coast and an economic bill variously estimated from 80 billion to 200 billion.

It was the peak in an Atlantic hurricane season that broke records for duration, the number of storms -- 26 tropical storms, 14 of them hurricanes -- and severity, with three reaching the topmost category of five on the Saffir-Simpson intensity scale.

The tsunami and quakes were natural events whose impacts were magnified by human mistakes. The big, troubling question is whether Katrina and Co. were spawned by man.

Climate scientists are loath to pin a single event, or even a season, to the greenhouse-gas effect.

Despite this, a small but increasing number of experts are venturing the opinion that the 2005 hurricane season was no accident, for it coincides with ever-rising sea temperatures that fuel bad hurricanes, and a year set to be the warmest ever recorded.

Others urge caution, saying it could be years before we get confirmation as to whether 2005 was just a freak year for storms, part of a natural cycle for hurricanes, or the start of a man-made phenomenon.

Oliver-Smith says it is too early to say whether the string of catastrophes of the past 12 months has dented mankind's obsession with economic growth regardless of the cost.

"It's a tough call to say that people's consciousness is being changed by these disasters," he said. "We will do anything rather than change."

The first slide happened shortly before sundown, spreading stones and several tall trees across the road and bringing down power lines.

"There was a loud noise — I thought it was a plow coming through — then a flash of light, and then the big stuff started coming down," said Howard Curtis, who lives nearby.

Additional slides continued for roughly two hours. Police said no one was injured.

Rocks, trees and dirt fell some 60 feet from the cliffs that rise above the city, falling onto a block-long portion of Vermont Route 12. Officials estimated the boulders weighed from 20 to 30 tons.

Authorities evacuated about 50 residents of an apartment complex across the street from the cliffs as debris piled up to their doorsteps.

Emergency workers also evacuated several homes above where the slides began because of concern about parts of the cliff collapsing.

Stephen Gray, Montpelier's public works director, said the slide was probably caused by recent swings in the temperature combined with rain Sunday night. "We've had freeze and thaw, and then it probably froze again," he said.

Evan Shper, 16, was walking toward the center of the city when the rock slides began and dialed 911 on his cell phone.

"I stood there for about five seconds," he said. "Then we heard a huge sound. A huge part was coming down with a tree on it. I started running."

As well, there were electricity blackouts to some 70,000 homes and businesses in Quebec.

Still waiting for power

On Tuesday morning, some 2,000 homes, mostly in the areas around St-Bruno, Que. and St-Hyacinthe, Que, were still without power.

By late Monday night, the storm had already dumped more than 40 centimetres of snow on parts of Quebec and New Brunswick.

Elsewhere in the Atlantic provinces, people were bracing themselves after forecasts predicted they could see as much as 60 cm of snow, 60 millimetres of rain or wind gusts of more than 100 kilometres per hour.

"What a surprise," says Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) researcher Rob Suggs, who recorded the impact's flash. He and colleague Wes Swift were testing a new telescope and video camera they assembled to monitor the moon for meteor strikes. On their first night out, "we caught one," says Suggs.

The object that hit the moon was "probably a Taurid," says MSFC meteor expert Bill Cooke. In other words, it was part of the same meteor shower that peppered Earth with fireballs in late October and early November 2005. (See "Fireball Sightings" from Science@NASA.)

The moon was peppered, too, but unlike Earth, the moon has no atmosphere to intercept meteoroids and turn them into harmless streaks of light. On the moon, meteoroids hit the ground--and explode.

"The flash we saw," says Suggs, "was about as bright as a 7th magnitude star." That's two and a half times dimmer than the faintest star a person can see with their unaided eye, but it was an easy catch for the group's 10-inch telescope.

Cooke estimates that the impact gouged a crater in the moon's surface "about 3 meters wide and 0.4 meters deep." As moon craters go, that's small. "Even the Hubble Space Telescope couldn't see it," notes Cooke. The moon is 384,400 km away. At that distance, the smallest things Hubble can distinguish are about 60 meters wide.

This isn't the first time meteoroids have been seen hitting the moon. During the Leonid meteor storms of 1999 and 2001, amateur and professional astronomers witnessed at least half-a-dozen flashes ranging in brightness from 7th to 3rd magnitude. Many of the explosions were photographed simultaneously by widely separated observers.

Since the Leonids of 2001, astronomers have not spent much time hunting for lunar meteors. "It's gone out of fashion," says Suggs. But with NASA planning to return to the moon by 2018, he says, it's time to start watching again.

There are many questions that need answering: "How often do big meteoroids strike the moon? Does this happen only during meteor showers like the Leonids and Taurids? Or can we expect strikes throughout the year from 'sporadic meteors?'" asks Suggs. Explorers on the moon are going to want to know.

"The chance of an astronaut being directly hit by a big meteoroid is miniscule," says Cooke. Although, he allows, the odds are not well known "because we haven't done enough observing to gather the data we need to calculate the odds." Furthermore, while the danger of a direct hit is almost nil for an individual astronaut, it might add up to something appreciable for an entire lunar outpost.

Of greater concern, believes Suggs, is the spray—"the secondary meteoroids produced by the blast." No one knows how far the spray reaches and exactly what form it takes.

Also, ground-shaking impacts could kick up moondust, possibly over a wide area. Moondust is electrostatically charged and notoriously clingy. (See "Mesmerized by Moondust" from Science@NASA.) Even a small amount of moondust can be a great nuisance: it gets into spacesuit joints and seals, clings to faceplates, and even makes the air smell when it is tramped indoors by moonwalkers. Could meteoroid impacts be a source of lunar "dust storms?" Another question for the future....

Suggs and his team plan to make more observations. "We're contemplating a long-term monitoring program active not only during major meteor showers, but also at times in between. We need to develop software to find these flashes automatically," he continues. "Staring at 4 hours of tape to find a split-second flash can get boring; this is a job for a computer."

With improvements, their system might catch lots of lunar meteors. Says Suggs, "I'm ready for more surprises."

WASHINGTON — The familiar solar system that you learned about in school — nine well-behaved planets, from Mercury to Pluto, circling sedately in tidy paths around the sun — isn't what it used to be.

Astronomers recently have discovered a flock of at least eight other planet-like objects in sometimes wildly eccentric orbits. Four new "ice dwarfs," plus two more probable moons around Pluto, were announced in the last six months.

The latest mini-world, temporarily nicknamed "Buffy" and more than 5 billion miles from the sun, was revealed Dec. 13. The object, about half the size of Pluto, was spotted roaming through the so-called Kuiper Belt, a vast junkyard of icy, rocky bodies stretching for billions of miles beyond the orbit of Neptune.

The first scientific mission to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, a nine-year voyage to the outer solar system, is set to be launched in January.

"Next month, we set sail for Pluto," said Alan Stern, chief scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Unlike the rest of the planetary family, Pluto resides in the Kuiper Belt. But it's not alone there. More than 1,000 frozen chunks of debris left over from the formation of the solar system have been found since 1992. Astronomers expect at least half a million more pieces are out there.

"The discovery of the Kuiper Belt in the 1990s has given Pluto a place to call home, with icy brethren to call its own," said Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, in an e-mail.

"The Kuiper Belt is the largest structure in the solar system," Stern said recently. "We used to think Pluto was a misfit," he added. Now Earth and the other inner planets are the oddballs.

Even the inner solar system looks different. Astronomers no long believe that the four biggest planets have always been in their present orbits.

Instead, they now say, Jupiter has moved toward the sun from its original home. Saturn, Uranus and Neptune have slid outward from their birthplaces, according to Donald Yeomans, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.,

"The field of planetary science is currently enjoying an intense period of readjustment and discovery," Yeomans wrote in the journal Science.

Scientists no longer are sure what a planet is and how many reside in our system. In addition, 160 extra-solar planets have been discovered around other stars, not the sun, in the last 10 years.

The International Astronomical Union, a worldwide alliance of astronomers, has been struggling for about two years to agree on a definition for planets. Three proposed definitions are being studied, but a decision isn't likely until spring, according to Robert Williams, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

Depending on what definition is adopted, Pluto may be demoted from its status as the solar system's smallest planet to what astronomers call a "trans-Neptunian object." That's a fancy name for any world beyond Neptune, which is 2.8 billion miles from the sun or 30 times farther than Earth.

Teachers are scrambling to stay current.

"It's a very exciting and fast-changing area," said Richard Pogge, an astronomy professor at Ohio State University in Columbus. "It requires us to get out and do research on our own, since the textbooks are behind."

Pogge uses classroom computers to connect his students to NASA's Web site and other Internet pages to view the latest findings.

Science museums and planetariums have special problems since they can't afford to update expensive exhibits when a new object is found.

"It's hard to hit a moving target," said Tyson of the Hayden Planetarium, who's writing a book on the difficulty of defining Pluto.

Pluto would remain a planet if the International Astronomical Union accepts a definition that would declare a planet to be any round object larger than 1,000 kilometers — 625 miles — across that's orbiting the sun.

So far, nine such mini-worlds, including Pluto (diameter 1,430 miles), are known to dwell in the frigid Kuiper Belt.

They are "a completely different type of object that predominates in the outer solar system beyond Neptune," Pogge said.

The largest and most distant of the ice dwarfs is nicknamed Xena after the television warrior princess. Discovered in 2003, it's 1,600 miles across and 20 percent bigger than Pluto is. Xena has a moon of its own, named Gabrielle after the TV Xena's sidekick.

If Xena and Pluto are counted, our solar system has 10 planets; if they're not, it has eight. But if all the known objects larger than 625 miles across are included, there would be 17 planets with more expected soon.

A small Kuiper Belt mini-worlds is nicknamed Santa and has a moonlet named Rudolph. Until the International Astronomical Union assigns official names, the others are known as Easter Bunny, Orcus, Quaoar, Ixion and now Buffy. The most distant such object is called Sedna; its elliptical orbit carries it more than 9 billion miles beyond the sun.

As an added complication, new moons keep popping up around planets, and some old moons are found to be performing unusual tricks. Even some asteroids have tiny moons of their own. One asteroid has two moonlets.

In November, two possible new moons were sighted around Pluto. If confirmed, that would mean Pluto has three satellites, counting its previously known moon, Charon.

"The total number of natural satellites orbiting the major planets has grown to more than 150, with more than 50 percent of these discoveries occurring within the last six years," said Yeomans of the Jet Propulsion Lab.

Unlike our own moon, which is geologically dead, at least four moons show signs of activity.

Titan, Saturn's largest moon, has rainfall and rivers of liquid methane (natural gas), and renews its atmosphere by venting more methane from below the surface.

Enceladus, another of Saturn's moons, spews huge jets of icy particles, probably driven by subsurface radioactivity. Jupiter's moon Io is wracked by volcanic explosions and gigantic lava flows. Neptune's moon Triton has active geysers of dust and gas.

"For planetary explorers like us, there is little that can compare to the sighting of activity on another solar system body," said Carolyn Porco, an astronomer at the Space Science Institute in Boulder.

Giove-A is a test satellite that paves the way for a network of 30 more to be launched in 2006 and beyond. Together they will form Galileo, a £2.3bn global positioning system more reliable and accurate than GPS.

Galileo has been hailed in Europe as a means to make money. The highly accurate tracking system means road charging could be automated, air traffic monitored with unprecedented precision and goods tracked to people's doors. With mobile phones due to include satellite-positioning receivers, emergency calls will be traced to within a metre. If industry embraces Galileo, it could drive a multibillion euro market, say experts.

But Galileo is largely a political project, aimed at asserting Europe's independence. Although GPS is free and ubiquitous, it is optimised for America and the accuracy of the system can drift by more than 30ft. GPS is controlled by the US military which has the power to degrade or switch off the signal at will. Because Galileo will be a highly accurate civilian system run by a private consortium, supporters believe it will usher in a new range of safety-critical services, such as aircraft and emergency vehicle guidance systems.

Richard Peckham of EADS Astrium, a partner in the project, says that the Galileo network is being launched at a time of increasing dependence on satellite positioning systems. "Car satellite navigation systems seem to be this year's top selling Christmas gadget," he said. "It is becoming an intrinsic part of life."

With Galileo, services that can position goods, people and vehicles to within three feet will be possible. While ramblers might make do with the free signal, emergency services could use an encrypted, more accurate signal to guide ambulances, fire engines or police cars to their locations with unprecedented precision.

Mike Dillon of ESYS, an electronics company involved in the project, says that ultimately Galileo could be used for automatic road charging, and improving safety on Europe's roads by warning drivers of accident blackspots, junctions or curves in the roads. "Right now there are around 1.3bn accidents causing 40,000 fatalities each year," he said. "That's the equivalent of two jumbo jets full of passengers crashing every day."

Although the European Space Agency is forbidden to take part in military projects, officials accept that once the signals are being broadcast the defence industry will undoubtedly take advantage of them, and develop devices that can operate with both GPS and Galileo.

According to plans, the Galileo satellites will be launched into orbit eight at a time. There they will form three rings around the Earth, with the full cluster of 30 due to be in place and working by 2010.

Giove-A, which was built in a record two years and three months by Surrey Satellites, is crucial to Galileo's success. The satellite must be in orbit and transmitting useful positioning signals by July 2006 to meet a deadline set by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). If the deadline passes and no Galileo signals are being broadcast from space, the European Space Agency will lose permission to use the frequencies and the project will be knocked back to the drawing board. With more than €130m (£89m) invested, missing the deadline is an outcome the British government will not be keen to witness.

If the launch is successful, news that the satellite is working is likely to come from Chilbolton Observatory in Hampshire early on Wednesday morning. Scientists at the observatory will use a 25m receiving dish to hunt the heavens for signals from Giove-A as evidence that it reached the right orbit and powered up.

A failed launch will not necessarily mean the end of Galileo. A back-up satellite, which carries more new technology than Giove-A is on standby for launch to meet the ITU deadline.

Since its inception the Galileo project has been marred by disputes over financial contributions within the EU and rows with the US over the frequencies Galileo satellites would broadcast on. Military officials in America initially raised strong objections to Galileo because one of its signals was on a frequency close to the encrypted military signal used by US forces.

Their objections centred on the argument that if the US wanted to deny satellite positioning services to other countries they were in conflict with, they would have to jam Galileo's signal, but in doing so risked jamming their own. Under intense pressure which nearly saw the Galileo project scrapped entirely, the EU backed down and moved the frequencies Galileo will broadcast on. The US also balked at China's signing of a multimillion pound contract to be part of the Galileo project.

The launch tonight has special poignancy for engineers at the firm behind the satellite. It carries its own unusual cargo, a plaque inscribed with the name of Tom Fairbairn. The 25-year-old engineer worked on the probe at Surrey Satellites, a university spin-off company, until his life was cut short by the tsunami that struck the shores of the Indian Ocean on Boxing day last year.

Mr Fairbairn died with his parents when waves battered Khao Lak in Thailand where they were holidaying. "We hope the plaque will be a fitting tribute to Tom," said Phil Davies of Surrey Satellites.

Footnote

GPS The US network is the most popular global satellite positioning system in the world. GPS satellites broadcast signals which, when picked up by a device on the ground, can show a user's location to within 10 metres or so. The Russian Glonass system and Europe's fledgling Galileo project work in the same way.

Test satellite Giove-A will not be part of the final 30 satellites that make up the Galileo network. It will try out new technology developed for the project and ensure that the European Space Agency claims the frequencies reserved for Galileo.

Encrypted GPS and Galileo have signals that anyone can pick up free of charge, but they also broadcast more reliable and accurate encrypted signals that have to be unscrambled. To use the US military GPS signal, US and allied forces must use special decryption software. The same signal is used by satellite-guided missiles.

European Space Agency Supported with money from member states, the ESA is embarking on ever more ambitious forays into space. The ESA is not allowed to fund military projects. To some, that position is compromised by the surety that Galileo will be exploited by the defence industry.

The Russian system, known as Glonass, and the European Space Agency's Galileo system will compete with and complement the American Global Positioning System, originally designed to locate targets for guided missiles, but now used in a host of civilian applications.

The Glonass network of 24 geostationary satellites is not scheduled to be in operation before 2008, but according to the Ria-Novosti news agency, Putin told the cabinet, "We have to see what we can do in 2006 and 2007 to develop the commercial utilization of this system."

Russia has already launched 17 of the planned system satellites, including three placed into orbit on Sunday, but Putin warned that some of these may be out of date by the time the navigation system is inaugurated unless the development is hurried along.

Russia also has a hand in the competing Galileo system. One of its rockets is scheduled to lift off from the Baikonur launch site in Kazakhstan on Wednesday carrying a British-built test satellite for the European network.

While both the American and Russian systems are under military control, Galileo will be strictly intended for civilian satellite navigation after its inauguration scheduled for 2010.

[...] Hofmann became curious about the problem as an undergraduate when a professor introduced him to it.

The professor was unable to solve the problem. Hofmann, 47, would have more success when the problem began to take over his life in 1996. Until he solved it in 2000, it was the last thing he thought about before he went to bed and the first thing he thought about when he woke. He spent two to eight hours each day on the problem, working periodically with several colleagues. [...]

The problem, known as Kato's Conjecture, applies to the theory of waves moving through different media, such as seismic waves traveling through different types of rock. It bears the name of Tosio Kato, a now-deceased mathematician at the University of California-Berkeley, who posed the problem in research papers first written in 1953 and again in 1961.

Part of the problem, called the one-dimensional version, was solved about 20 years ago. Though it was a breakthrough, work remained. Hofmann solved the problem in all its dimensions in a 120-word paper that he wrote with several colleagues — Pascal Auscher, Michael Lacey, John Lewis, Alan McIntosh and Philippe Tchamitchian.

"Philosophically, the reason research in math matters is that by pursuing math ideas that are deep and interesting for their own sake, you will get real-world applications in the future," Hofmann said.

"It is like making investments." [...]

In experiments described in the Dec. 22, 2005, issue of Nature,* the researchers added to a catalog of confirmations that matter and energy are related in a precise way. Specifically, energy (E) equals mass (m) times the square of the speed of light (c2), a prediction of Einstein's theory of special relativity.

By comparing NIST measurements of energy emitted by silicon and sulfur atoms and MIT measurements of the mass of the same atoms, the scientists found that E differs from mc2 by at most 0.0000004, or four-tenths of 1 part in 1 million. This result is "consistent with equality" and is 55 times more accurate than the previous best direct test of Einstein's formula, according to the paper.

Such tests are important because special relativity is a central principle of modern physics and the basis for many scientific experiments as well as common instruments like the global positioning system. Other researchers have performed more complicated tests of special relativity that imply closer agreement between E and mc2 than the NIST/MIT work, but additional assumptions are required to interpret their results, making these previous tests arguably less direct.

The Nature paper describes two very different precision measurements, one done at NIST by a group led by the late physicist Richard Deslattes, and another done at MIT by a group led by David Pritchard. Deslattes developed methods for using optical and X-ray interferometry--the study of interference patterns created by electromagnetic waves--to precisely determine the spacing of atoms in a silicon crystal, and for using such calibrated crystals to measure and establish more accurate standards for the very short wavelengths characteristic of highly energetic X-ray and gamma ray radiation.

According to the basic laws of physics, every wavelength of electromagnetic radiation corresponds to a specific amount of energy. The NIST team determined the value for energy in the Einstein equation, E = mc2, by carefully measuring the wavelength of gamma rays emitted by silicon and sulfur atoms.

"This was Dick's original vision, that a comparison like this would someday be made," said Scott Dewey, a NIST physicist who is a co-author of the Nature paper. "The idea when he started working on silicon was to use it as a yardstick to measure the wavelengths of gamma rays, and use this in a test of special relativity. It took 30 years to realize his idea."

The NIST/MIT tests focused on a well-known process: When the nucleus of an atom captures a neutron, energy is released as gamma ray radiation. The mass of the atom, which now has one extra neutron, is predicted to equal the mass of the original atom, plus the mass of a solitary neutron, minus a value called the neutron binding energy. The neutron binding energy is equal to the energy given off as gamma ray radiation, plus a small amount of energy released in the recoil motion of the nucleus.

The gamma rays in this process have wavelengths of less than a picometer, a million times smaller than visible light, and are diffracted or bent by the atoms in the calibrated crystals at a particular energy-dependent angle. Using a well-known mathematical formula, scientists can combine these angles with values for the crystal lattice spacing to determine the energy contained in individual gamma ray particles.

In the experiments described in Nature, NIST scientists measured the angle at which gamma ways are diffracted by crystals with known lattice spacings at the Institut Laue Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble, France. The ILL has the world's premier facility for colliding nuclei and neutrons and capturing the resulting gamma rays at the same instant. Accurate gamma-ray measurements are particularly challenging because the diffraction angles are less than 0.1 degree. The measurements were done using an instrument that was originally designed and built at NIST.

The MIT team measured the mass numbers used in the tests of Einstein's formula by placing two ions (electrically charged atoms) of the same element, one with an extra neutron, in a small electromagnetic trap. Scientists counted the revolutions per second made by each ion around the magnetic field lines within the trap.

The difference between these frequencies can be used to determine the masses of the ions. The experiment was performed with both silicon and sulfur ions. The novel two-ion technique virtually eliminates the effect of many sources of "noise," such as magnetic field fluctuations, that reduce measurement accuracy. This work led to greatly improved values for the atomic masses of silicon and sulfur.

* S. Rainville, J.K. Thompson, E.G. Myers, J.M. Brown, M.S. Dewey, E.G. Kessler Jr., R.D. Deslattes, H.G. Börner, M. Jentschel, P. Mutti, D.E. Pritchard. 2005. A direct test of E = mc2. Nature. Dec. 22, 2005.

The Chinese drug was developed by a research group at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, which could not be reached for comment about the report.

"We have completed clinical experiments, and find it is more effective on humans than Tamiflu," the newspaper quoted Li Song, a leading scientist in the academy's research group, as saying.

No details were given on whether any clinical tests had been conducted on the drug and whether it had been approved for production and sales.

The new drug will cost only a quarter to a third of the price of Tamiflu, which sells for 29.8 yuan (3.73 US dollars) per capsule in China, Li told a high-profile forum on prevention and control of avian influenza Monday.

He said the new medicine would be produced by domestic firms and stockpiled for use in the event of a bird flu pandemic.

A spokesman for the World Health Organization's China office said he had no information about the drug.

Tamiflu is acknowledged as being effective against human infections of the deadly H5N1 virus and is being stockpiled by various countries for use in case of a pandemic.

China has reported six human infections of bird flu, including two fatalities, and 31 outbreaks among poultry this year.

This month, Shanghai Pharmaceutical Group (SPG) became the first company in Asia to secure a licence from Roche to produce and sell a generic version of Tamiflu.

China has announced several breakthroughs on bird flu in recent days, but it was unclear whether the discoveries had been subjected to international scrutiny.

State media said Monday that China has developed a new, more efficient and cheaper bird flu vaccine which can also protect its massive poultry population against deadly Newcastle disease.

One billion shots are expected to be produced by the end of this month. The vaccine will be used from the beginning of next year in combination with other treatments.

China has the world's largest poultry industry, with 14 billion poultry produced a year.

Bird flu has cost the industry more than 60 billion yuan (7.5 billion dollars) in losses between October and December alone, China Daily said, citing official figures.

The bird flu virus has killed more than 70 people in Asia since 2003. It is currently spread among animals and from animals to humans. Scientists fear it could mutate to a strain easily spread between humans, causing a pandemic.

The sanctions cover six Chinese government-run companies, two Indian firms and one Austrian company, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The penalties have been under consideration since April and were approved by Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick within the past several weeks.

An announcement will be published in the U.S. government's Federal Register in the next several days -- and perhaps as early as today, the officials said.

The sanctions were imposed under the Iran Nonproliferation Act, which Congress passed in 2000 to deter international support for Iran's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and missile-delivery systems.

The penalties, which will last until December 2007, bar the companies from doing business with the U.S. government and prohibit U.S. firms from obtaining export licenses to sell sensitive products to these companies. The details of the transfers to Iran were not disclosed.

The sanctions are part of a more aggressive policy aimed at identifying foreign companies engaged in helping rogue states gain access to weapons technology. So far, 40 companies and people have been punished since 2001.

They come as the United States and Europe consider whether to seek U.N. Security Council action on Iran's covert nuclear arms programs. Iran has violated International Atomic Energy Agency commitments by denying access to numerous nuclear-related facilities. The U.S. government suspects oil-rich Iran is building nuclear weapons under the cover of producing civilian facilities for generating electrical power.

These latest sanctions show that China is continuing to support the missile and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs of states that support international terrorism.

"We think these transfers helped [Iran's] ballistic missile and WMD programs," a senior official said.

Beijing has denied U.S. reports that the government or any of its companies have supplied missile- or weapons-related goods and technology to Iran and other rogue states and, in 2004, denounced a previous round of sanctions as "wrong."

A Chinese Embassy spokesman could not be reached for comment yesterday.

The Chinese companies involved in the transfers are the China National Aerotechnology Import Export Corp., known as CATIC; the missile exporter China North Industries Corp., known as NORINCO; Zibo Chemet Equipment Co.; the Hongdu Aviation Industry Group; Ounion International Economic and Technical Cooperative Ltd.; and the Limmt Metallurgy and Minerals Co.

The officials said that three of the Chinese companies have been sanctioned in the past for illicit arms transfers -- CATIC, NORINCO and Zibo.

"NORINCO is a serial proliferator," one official said. "All these sanctions are for transfers to Iran."

The 2000 law requires the U.S. government to impose sanctions on companies or people that supply Iran with goods, services or technology related to nuclear weapons, missiles and toxic chemicals that can be used to make chemical arms.

Zibo is known to make glass-lined containers that can be used to make chemical weapons. CATIC and Norinco are involved in manufacturing missiles.

A CIA report to Congress made public last year stated that Chinese companies' supplies of ballistic missile-related assistance have "helped Iran move toward its goal of becoming self-sufficient in the production of ballistic missiles."

Chinese firms also have provided dual-use missile-related items, raw materials and assistance to Iran, Libya and North Korea, the CIA report stated.

The two Indian chemical companies that will be sanctioned are Sabero Organics Chemical and Sandhya Organics Chemical. The Austrian firm Steyr-Mannlicher, which makes high-quality assault weapons, also is being sanctioned.

The sanctions announcement will also state that the U.S. government is lifting sanctions imposed last year on Chaudhary Surendar, one of two Indian nuclear scientists who had been linked to Iran's nuclear program.

India's government had denied that Mr. Surendar was linked to Iranian proliferation activities.

Mr. Surendar was sanctioned in September 2004 for his role in providing weapons of mass destruction and missile goods to Iran under the Iran Nonproliferaiton Act. The other scientist, Y.S.R. Prasad, continues to face sanctions until they expire in September.

Bush said "the material and equipment, including any indirect technical benefit that could be derived from such export, will not measurably improve the missile or space launch capabilities" of China.

The US leader has to give clearance for such exports under a national defense law.

The United States is concerned over China's military-buildup and that Beijing may use its manned space program to achieve its military ambitions.

Back in 1990, it was the high point of the crop circle hysteria gripping the world.

Dozens of volunteers, a host of foreign TV cameras, the world's foremost crop circle experts and the British Army launched a round-the-clock vigil from the famous white horse above Bratton, near Westbury, in a bid to spot a crop circle being made.

And within days it appeared Operation Blackbird had been successful - night vision cameras spotted something in a field below, and, sure enough, a new crop circle could be seen as dawn broke. For a few hours, the world reported the crop circle mystery as solved - but operation leader Colin Andrews soon realised he had been hoaxed and the figures on night-vision cameras were not aliens but local mischief-makers.

According to Mr Andrews, however, across Wiltshire a more mysterious and sinister event was happening, which has remained top secret ever since.

He said: "The public knew but half of what was going on at the time. While the media present at Operation Blackbird were looking at the right hand, they did not see what happened with the left.

"The British Army were looking at a secret site and a very important place nearby."

Strange things did happen at the Operation Blackbird HQ in Bratton - a strange hum, odd bass noises in the dead of night, and people seeing flashes of energy in the night sky.

"While, above Bratton, there was a formation appearing in front of the cameras which was supposed to convince the world of a hoax, the Army filmed a UFO at the secret site, and crop circles appeared next to the hill.

"The crop circle story will not be complete until Operation Blackbird is fully understood and why, and who, is behind the larger plan" added Mr Andrews.

Why he has chosen now to reveal more information now might have something to do with him winding down his research into the crop circle phenomenon. He recently put his entire collection of photos, videos, books, sketches and reports up for sale on eBay.

SOTT Correspondent in Singapore

The use of the term antigravity has been a hindrance to earnest research. Dr. Ron Koczor of the Science Directorate, NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center knows about choosing the terminology to match your audience. Speaking for himself, he said, “When you talk to the general public or the kids whose eyes are half-glazed with anticipation, call it antigravity. But when you talk to people who control the course of research and who themselves have the credibility of their decisions questioned by higher-ups, I think you need to rethink your use of that term.”

In Part 1 of this series the term gravity-lensing replaced antigravity as a description of the phenomenon observed by inventor Marcus Hollingshead. But what should we call its range of effects including propulsion, standing fields, etc?

If gravity-lensing aligns with the Earth’s gravitational field then it produces the effect of more than 1G of gravity, also known as hypergravity (hG). If it is contra-aligned then it produces less than 1G of gravity, also known as microgravity (mG or μG). What would a future with modified (either hG or μG ) gravity — call it modG — look like and what are the potential impacts for propulsion?

Attempts to modify gravity for propulsion are not isolated to inventors. NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and BAE Systems (a major British aerospace company) have all conducted gravity research. It has been reported on by corporate journals such as Business Week, mainstream magazines like Popular Mechanics and in scientific journals such as the American Institute of Physics.

How could an inventor have succeeded where NASA failed? Without verification the claims about such a device sound like science fiction. But many inventions and discoveries were science fiction until the very day they were revealed.

If true, what we’ll see is that the long dreamed of skycar of the future may be preceded by a sky conveyor belt, and the futuristic spaceport will look more like Duluth harbor than Star War’s Mos Eisley.

Future Visions

In 1979 the visual futurist Syd Mead depicted a family arriving at a picnic in a hovering station wagon in his book "Concept" for U.S. Steel. That friendly image of a hovering automobile contrasts greatly with the flying police vehicles Mead later designed for the dystopic film "Blade Runner". In that movie the spinner vehicles were a symbol of police power and authority while common citizens were restricted to ground transportation.

As the film “The Fifth Element” portrayed, traffic can also take over a city and dehumanize it. As early as 1940 Norman Bel Geddes in his publication “Magic Motorways” portrayed a city dominated by the automobile with nothing of human scale in sight. Would flying cars doom cities to become the megastructures of film, or is that just in the movies?

Gravityships

In a 2004 interview [.wma download] with the editor of the American Antigravity newsgroup, Hollingshead mentioned that one of the first applications he considered for his device was to reduce the load (also the inertia) of commercial aircraft. But sci-fi fans want to know, "Where is my flying car?"

First, is it a car? All but hovering vehicles that rely upon ground-effect for lift are classified as aircraft under the UN's International Civl Aviation Organization (ICAO). So flying cars that lift more than a few feet off the ground might be classified as aircraft, but a modG craft would operate like no known aircraft.

It would be highly maneuverable and operate low to the ground like a helicopter — but it’s not a rotorcraft. In the U.S. the closest applicable Federal Aviation Association (FAA) category is that of an airship, an engine-driven, lighter-than-air vehicle that can be controlled in flight.

Since a gravity airship is not conventional and not a gas-filled envelope (as required by the FAA) it needs to be called something else. For now, let's call this vehicle a gravityship because rather than being dependent upon the force of Earth’s air to produce buoyancy it is dependent upon the force of Earth’s gravity.

As a commuter vehicle it would probably operate in Class G airspace. It is uncontrolled airspace where helicopters operate: altitudes 1200 feet above ground level (AGL) and less. In Class G airspace the rules for right-of-way are a little like boating, where the slower and less maneuverable your craft the greater your right-of-way. For example, a motorboat yields to a sailboat, which yields to a canoe. In Class G airspace a power-driven, heavier-than-air craft gives way to airships, gliders and balloons. Hang gliders or cluster balloons may be of some concern, but the real issue here is rules of the HIGH-way when encountering other gravityships.

The Crowded Skies

Look up. Not many blimps in the sky today. But if personal gravityships are produced then the skies are going to get crowded. Where do you “build” a highway in uncontrolled airspace? Is it a corridor above existing boulevards and interstate highways? Why even follow a highway if you are not constrained by lanes? Straight line express to your destination? Hubs? Spokes? Interchanges? Sounds confusing and dangerous. We will need an airspace control system to keep us safe.

Luckily there is a candidate technology for airspace that is already positioned to make our land-based highways safer. It’s called the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). The U.S. Department of Transportation is using the ITS architecture to integrate intelligent vehicles with intelligent infrastructure for a safer, more efficient transportation system. Implementing a similar system of intelligent sensors and adaptive integrated systems into gravityships would be a necessity. Without ITS for airspace it would be like watching a demolition derby — overhead!

So smart sensors and ITS help vehicles avoid collisions and manage incidents. But what about defining the boundaries of lanes? Keeping arteries flowing smoothly? There could be floating traffic signals and buoys (our thanks to the Jetsons for those innovations), but why clutter the sky with added devices? This is where efforts to establish wireless cities might mesh with the use of gravityships.

Wireless Mesh Avoids Mess

Dozens of cities across the globe are planning muniwireless networks as alternatives to DSL and Cable modem connections to the Internet. One concern for deploying wireless is the power of the signal to punch through your home’s exterior and interior walls to reach your receiver. But this is not a concern when you’re trying to detect the signal above the nodes where there are no barriers.

When you have a clear view of a node it’s known as line-of-sight (LoS). The LoS range for even older wireless technology is measured in the kilometers. The altitude limit of Class G airspace is less than half a kilometer. That’s plenty of range for sending information to vehicles flying overhead. Information to navigate, communicate and locate (see insert).

Networked Platforms

Question: How do you ensure the success of a new technology today?

Answer: Make it an essential strategy for the corporate giant Wal-Mart.

This has been true with RFID chips and it could be true with modG. The biggest horizontal industry in the world is logistics (getting raw materials in, processing of products, packaging them, transporting them, warehousing them, distributing them, retailing them to the consumer). Wal-Mart succeeds as they do because they own the complete supply chain. If Wal-Mart knew there was a technology to transport and distribute their goods for pennies less on the dollar, they would bring it to maturity.

A grid of pilotless platforms controlled by ITS and carrying a wide range of cargo containers could navigate between cities/nodes by satellite GPS and within cities by Wi-Fi. Shipping goods between cities is perhaps the largest growth area for modG, even surpassing transport for people.

The system could be designed using the model of the Internet. Individual packetized shipments could travel point-to-point to their destinations as if they were physical manifestations of TCP (transmission data) packets used to deliver information over the Internet. Distribution centers would be unnecessary.

Local point-of-delivery transport within neighborhoods could be navigated by means of municipal mesh wireless location services tracking packages, confirming delivery and alerting the receiver of delivery via their IP or email address. Recipients could even change the final delivery destination on-the-fly by querying the system. This would allow recipients to have packages follow them to whatever location they might be within a city.

It would take many years of testing before such a freight-based ITS would be ready to graduate to human passengers in gravityships. Until that time the skies would be mostly filled with platforms and packages. Only the occasional early-adopter would fly their unlicensed experimental gravityship (or perhaps a gravitycycle?).

Is There Spaceport in Your Future?

Paul Horwood, moderator of the Antigravity_open-source newsgroup, relays in a posting that Hollingshead claims to have a contract with the European Space Agency to produce propulsive drives. Further, that he has over 50 million pounds in investment funds and employs 50 people. How would ESA use such a drive?

The International Space Station and shuttle demonstrated the potential for large-scale production of new materials and pharmaceuticals in microgravity. But an ability to control gravity through modG would mean that microgravity and zero-gravity production could be conducted on the ground in conventional manufacturing facilities. Factories in space would be unnecessary. So the remaining rationale for going into orbit would be for transporting people and raw materials.

The people interested in traveling to space would be either space tourists or astronauts. The Ansari X Prize was a step toward space tourism and commercialization. Virgin Galactic (owned by Sir Richard Branson) has now set plans for the first commercial spaceport to be located in New Mexico and be completed by 2009 or 2010. Tourism is the necessary focus of this effort because, even though the tickets are $200,000 and there are hundreds who have signed up, the ships can not reach orbit. Nevertheless, it should be quite a ride!

If you can use modG to deliver platforms inexpensively above the atmosphere then every one of them becomes not just a satellite but a geosynchronous satellite, suitable for all sorts of communications needs. They can move synchronously above the Earth because platforms wouldn’t have to reach orbital speed (17,000 to 18,000 mph) to stay aloft. The Earth only rotates at a bit over 1,000 mph at the equator, which is why one of the first jobs for the platforms would be to remove the millions of pieces of debris traveling at orbital speed. Why? Because they are traveling past you faster than a rifle bullet!

Payload for the platforms would be astronauts and rocket fuel. Remember that gravity decreases with the inverse square of the distance. It may be an inexpensive means for launching and landing compared to rockets, but between planets (or the moon, or asteroids) you’d get more propulsion from rockets.

Saving your rocket fuel for the large distances between destinations decreases transit time and allows for greater payloads on the return trip. Minerals from the moon? Corner the market on hematite “blueberries” from Mars? Possibly, but the business argument is still difficult to make. Even so, someone will want to have their kitchen counters built with slabs of sedimentary stone from Mars or mine the kimberlite pipes of Olympus Mons.

Space travel suggests establishment of a spaceport. Traditional rocketry required a large area near open water or desert for boosters to fall (or fail) downrange. Kennedy Space Center is located on the coast of Florida. The Canadian Space Agency operates the Churchill Rocket Research Range on Hudson Bay. Using modG propulsion there would be no boosters and no downrange — just up. A more fitting model reflecting the smaller area needs would be a large airport or shipping port.

Each nation, region and state would want to create their own facilities to benefit local commerce and to draw talent, jobs and investors. A major international airport and shipping port already transporting millions of tons of cargo a year would be a prime candidate for the location of the first industrial spaceport. Okay. Where do we locate the first one?

Mt. Flatten Redux

Remember Bullwinkle J. Moose of upsidaisium fame? His home was Frostbite Falls in northern Minnesota. How fitting it would be to establish the first industrial spaceport in northern Minnesota at the tip of Lake Superior. The city of Duluth has an international port there, one of the largest in America as gauged by tonnage. It has an international airport and a world-class aircraft maintenance facility. The B. J. Moose Spaceport. Kind of catchy.

"You can rear them by the thousands, and you can train them within a matter of minutes," says Joe Lewis, a U.S. Agriculture Department entomologist. "This is just the very tip of the iceberg of a very new resource."

Lewis and others at the University of Georgia-Tifton Campus developed a handheld "Wasp Hound" to contain the wasps while they sniff out chemicals and other substances.

Lewis and his partner, University of Georgia biological engineer Glen Rains, say their device is ready for pilot tests and could be available for commercial use in five to 10 years.

Rains says the wasps could one day be used instead of dogs to check for explosives in cargo containers coming in to the nation's seaports, in vehicles crossing at border checkpoints, at airports and anywhere else where security should be tight.

"It's real easy to learn how to work with them," he says about the wasps. "You could show somebody what to do in 30 to 40 minutes. And they're very specific in what they learn."

This new method comes as the government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on high-tech equipment and training since 9/11 to secure the nation from another terrorist attack.

Bomb-sniffing dogs cost thousands of dollars and take months to train. High-tech equipment can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit and often has spotty performance.

"We don't have portable, flexible systems," Lewis says.

Scientists started working with the species, a type of parasitic wasp called Microplitis croceipes, decades ago — long before the terrorist attacks in 2001.

In the 1990s, the Defense Department paid for part of that work to find out whether wasps could be used for a variety of defense purposes, including sniffing out land mines. They couldn't do that well because the areas they would have to check are too vast.

The scientists — funded by the Agriculture Department and the University of Georgia — have looked at other uses for the wasps.

Rains says the wasps can be trained to detect fungal diseases on crops while the damage is still below ground and can't be seen.

This method would help farmers avoid having to spread toxic fungicide over an entire crop after the disease spreads. Rains says farmers would save money, and consumers and the environment would benefit as well.

The wasps may also be trained for medical uses, including detecting cancer or ulcers by smelling someone's breath.

They probably can be trained like dogs to find bodies buried in rubble, Rains says.

Given the strong government effort since 9/11 to focus on the nation's security, the scientists see a vast market for the wasps to detect explosives.

The wasps are trained with sugar water by using the classical conditioning techniques made famous by Pavlov's dogs. Rains says the wasps are sensitive to a host of chemical odors, including 2,4-DNT, a volatile compound used in dynamite.

To do their work, five wasps — each a half-inch long — are placed in a plastic cylinder that is 15 inches tall. This "Wasp Hound," which costs roughly $100 per unit, has a vent in one end and a camera that connects to a laptop computer.

When the wasps pick up an odor they've been trained to detect they gather by the vent — a response that can be measured by the computer or actually seen by observers.

Lewis says the wasps, when exposed to some chemicals, "can detect as low as four parts per billion, which is an incredibly small amount."

He says the "ability to capture nature and its marvels is ... revolutionary."

Rains says, "The sensitivity of animals (and insects) to chemicals in general is probably beyond what we can comprehend. We don't really know what the limits are."

Vitamin D is made by the action of sunlight on the skin, which accounts for 90 per cent of the body's supply. But the increasing use of sunscreens and the reduced time spent outdoors, especially by children, has contributed to what many scientists believe is an increasing problem of vitamin D deficiency.

After assessing almost every scientific paper published on the link between vitamin D and cancer since the 1960s, US scientists say that a daily dose of 1,000 international units (25 micrograms) is needed to maintain health. " The high prevalence of vitamin D deficiency combined with the discovery of increased risks of certain types of cancer in those who are deficient, suggest that vitamin D deficiency may account for several thousand premature deaths from colon, breast, ovarian and other cancers annually," they say in the online version of the American Journal of Public Health.

The dose they propose of 1,000IU a day is two-and-a-half times the current recommended level in the US. In the UK, there is no official recommended dose but grey skies and short days from October to March mean 60 per cent of the population has inadequate blood levels by the end of winter.

The UK Food Standards Agency maintains that most people should be able to get all the vitamin D they need from their diet and "by getting a little sun". But the vitamin can only be stored in the body for 60 days.

High rates of heart disease in Scotland have been blamed on the weak sunlight and short summers in the north, leading to low levels of vitamin D. Differences in sunlight may also explain the higher rates of heart disease in England compared with southern Europe. Some experts believe the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet may have as much to do with the sun there as with the regional food.

Countries around the world have begun to modify their warnings about the dangers of sunbathing, as a result of the growing research on vitamin D. The Association of Cancer Councils of Australia acknowledged this year for the first time that some exposure to the sun was healthy.

Australia is one of the world's sunniest countries and has among the highest rates of skin cancer. For three decades it has preached sun avoidance with its "slip, slap, slop" campaign to cover up and use sunscreen. But in a statement in March, the association said: "A balance is required between avoiding an increase in the risk of skin cancer and achieving enough ultraviolet radiation exposure to achieve adequate vitamin D levels." Bruce Armstrong, the professor of public health at Sydney University, said: " It is a revolution."

In the latest study, cancer specialists from the University of San Diego, California, led by Professor Cedric Garland, reviewed 63 scientific papers on the link between vitamin D and cancer published between 1966 and 2004. People living in the north-eastern US, where it is less sunny, and African Americans with darker skins were more likely to be deficient, researchers found. They also had higher cancer rates.

The researchers say their finding could explain why black Americans die sooner from cancer than whites, even after allowing for differences in income and access to care.

Professor Garland said: "A preponderance of evidence from the best observational studies... has led to the conclusion that public health action is needed. Primary prevention of these cancers has been largely neglected, but we now have proof that the incidence of colon, breast and ovarian cancer can be reduced dramatically by increasing the public's intake of vitamin D." Obtaining the necessary level of vitamin D from diet alone would be difficult and sun exposure carries a risk of triggering skin cancer. "The easiest and most reliable way of getting the appropriate amount is from food and a daily supplement," they say.

The cost of a vitamin D supplement is about 4p a day. The UK Food Standards Agency said that taking Vitamin D supplements of up to 1,000IU was " unlikely to cause harm". [...]

The finding may help explain how SSRIs work and why it takes a few weeks before some antidepressants begin to have an effect.

The research team from Johns Hopkins University found that SSRIs increased the density of nerve impulse-carrying axons in the frontal and parietal lobes of the neocortex and part of the limbic brain that controls smell, emotions, motivations, and organs that work reflexively, such as the heart, stomach and intestines.

"It appears that SSRI antidepressants rewire areas of the brain that are important for thinking and feeling, as well as operating the autonomic nervous system," study leader and neuropathologist Dr. Vassilis E. Koliatsos said in a prepared statement.

It has long been thought that antidepressants work by increasing synaptic concentrations of the brain chemicals serotonin and norepinephrine, enhancing or stimulating their transference.

"But our findings -- that serotonin reuptake modulators increase the density of nerve synapses, especially in the front part of the brain -- may offer a better explanation of why antidepressants are effective and why they take time to work," Koliatsos said.

The study appears in the January issue of the Journal of Neurochemistry.

The virus uses the MSN Messenger client to send download links to all of an infected user's contacts, and connects the user's machine to a second "botnet" server, which could then could be used to install unauthorized software on the machine.

Infection Spreads

Victims are being infected by clicking and installing the BETA8WEBINSTALL.EXE file that is being distributed via these download links, F-Secure says.

"There is no MSN Messenger 8 yet. Not in public beta anyway." writes F-Secure Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen, writing on a company blog.

Microsoft recently released MSN Messenger 7.5.

A representative of Microsoft's public relations agency was not able to comment for this story.

"We're going to look at what happens this year," said Naval Research Laboratory physicist Ronald Beard. "If there are no significant problems, the whole issue will go away, but I don't expect that to happen."

Leap seconds are an outgrowth of the post-World War II development of increasingly accurate clocks based on the regular vibration, or "resonance," of atoms as they pass through a magnetic field. In 1958 an atomic second was defined as the time it takes for an atom of cesium 133 to tick through 9,192,631,770 cycles.

At that point atomic time and astronomical time are approximately the same, with the traditional astronomical second defined as 1/86,400th of a "mean solar day," the average time between two consecutive noons.

The trouble is that the heavens behave more capriciously than cesium. Also, the length of Earth's day is increasing by about two milliseconds per century because of the tides, whereas today's atomic clocks, unaffected by cosmic events, tick away with an accuracy within one second for every 20 million years.

Because of this discrepancy, atomic time has been pulling ahead of astronomical time for the past 47 years. To fix this, the International Telecommunication Union in 1972 stipulated that "Coordinated Universal Time," an atomic time used as the world standard, could not diverge from astronomical time by more than 0.9 seconds.

A "DIFFICULT" COMPROMISE

The adjustment tool was the leap second, to be added or subtracted at the discretion of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, either at the end of June or the end of the year. Beginning in 1972, there have been 21 leap seconds, the last one in 1998.

"Astronomers wanted a time scale that represented the Earth's movement, and the clock community wanted a smooth scale," said physicist Judah Levine of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado, who favors eliminating leap seconds. "The compromise has become increasingly difficult to maintain."

The majority of scientists appear to agree that adding leap seconds, up to now an infrequent exercise, is likely to become a twice-a-year experience in about a century as Earth keeps slowing and the unvarying atomic clocks keep ticking away.

And unlike leap years or daylight saving time, software designers cannot plan ahead because leap seconds get added only when they are needed. The current seven-year hiatus is twice as long as any previous gap.

"At some point this will become so annoying that someone will want to change it," said astronomer Dennis McCarthy, retired director of the U.S. Naval Observatory's Directorate on Time and an advocate of abolishing the leap second. "I'm quite confident that people are not going to be happy with multiple leap seconds per year."

So why not get rid of them? Industry could enjoy the regularity of atomic clocks without risking technological collapse on New Year's Eve. And the divergence from solar time would not be more than one or two seconds per year, perhaps two minutes per century.

"The idea that it's going to be midnight in the middle of the afternoon is just nonsense," Levine said.

Others, however, suggest that the hardship caused by leap seconds may be overblown, if not illusory, as experts on both sides of the debate agree that there is little data beyond a few anecdotes to suggest that leap seconds have in the past created havoc in time-sensitive endeavors.

"The case hasn't been made," said University of Virginia astronomer Ken Seidelmann. "All there is is rumor that they're inconvenient, but we've had them for 30-plus years and there's no outcry. I see no reason to get rid of them."

Furthermore, Seidelmann added, astronomers and satellite operators deploy sensitive equipment on the ground and in space on the assumption that the Coordinated Universal Time signal will match up within a second of astronomical time, critical in decisions such as when and how to point solar panels or satellite imagers.

Still, cautioned McCarthy, "we need to make a decision" about the leap second because engineers are designing satellite systems today that "will be used 20 years from now. We need to do them a service so they're not stuck."

"A PHILOSOPHICAL FEELING"

In recent years, time mavens opened a discussion about what to do, and a "general consensus" emerged that "the advantage to astronomy was not worth the pain and suffering of leap seconds," Levine said. "It looked like a done deal."

But it wasn't. Earlier this year Britain's Royal Astronomical Society decried a U.S. proposal to abolish the leap second, suggesting that doing so would disrupt not only astronomers but "all who study environmental phenomena related to the rising and setting of the sun."

In November, a working group of the International Telecommunication Union meeting in Geneva decided to postpone discussions of the U.S. proposal, which would have abandoned leap seconds in 2007 and let Coordinated Universal Time and astronomical time diverge for several hundred years before inserting a "leap hour." The group said more time was needed to form a consensus, and suggested that this year's leap second offered a welcome opportunity to determine whether change is necessary.

But since 1972 they have been reconciled to within 0.9 seconds of each other using leap seconds announced from the Paris Observatory. This produces a compromise called Co-ordinated Universal Time, which is why the most accurate clocks in the world were set to show an extra second as 23:59:60 last night, before 00:00:00.

Many other clocks and computers also had to be reset, by operators who really did not see the point. They call leap seconds a dangerous and unnecessary disruption to the complex software used to run everything from mobile phone networks and power grids to traffic lights and life-support systems. That is why American scientists have proposed abolishing the leap second - or at least letting their own version of time drift as much as an hour away from old-fashioned "sun time" before it has to be reset, which could take hundreds of years. The prevalence of technology would then make atomic time the standard, and the old kind just a minority pursuit.

The world's top techies first challenged the stargazers at a meeting in Geneva in November, but they agreed to disagree until after last night's leap second. The debate continues to tick away like a time bomb inside the International Telecommunications Union, where governments and private companies work together to keep the blizzard of emails, radio and television broadcasts, faxes, phone calls, satellite signals and internet activity in the world from meltdown. All these things rely on accurate digital sources of time - which is why technology and the corporations funding it are pushing a debate that could lead to the most profound change in the way we measure time since the beginning of human history.

We have always instinctively measured time according to the movement of the sun. The Egyptians had sundials dividing daylight into 10 parts, plus one for dawn and one for dusk. Water clocks measured out the time from when the sun appeared overhead at noon to when it returned the next day, but the use of 24 identical hours became widespread only with the weight-driven mechanical timepieces of the 15th century.

This story is told at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, where tourists from Australia and Japan stand astride the meridian and have themselves photographed with one foot in the eastern hemisphere and one foot in the west. "The centre of time and space," is what Greenwich calls itself, with language echoing the days of certainty, precision and empire. (The train drivers of the Raj were regulated by time defined here.)

For £1, Cindy Marshall from Nebraska buys a certificate declaring to one-100th of a second that she was at this Unesco World Heritage Site at 15.09.05.01. "That's so cool," she says. "How do they determine that?" Then she asks what everybody asks at Greenwich, even now: "Is my watch right?"

People have been checking their timepieces here since Charles II set up the Royal Observatory to seek a solution to the problem of longitude. Sailors needed to know where they were in the world, so the first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, was appointed to map out the stars and prepare accurate charts of their movements to aid navigation. It was decided that zero degrees longitude should be at Greenwich: then if sailors knew when it was noon in London they could use the amount of time it took for the sun to appear over their own head to calculate their position. But no clocks worked at sea, until John Harrison invented his watch H4, and was awarded, after considerable wrangling, a prize by the Crown.

There was still no standard time in Britain until the railways came. That noon in London was 11.44am in Plymouth did not matter until there was a timetable to observe. A master clock was set up at Greenwich in 1852 to send electrical pulses out to clocks across the country. Some called this "railway aggression", resenting government interference in their lives, but by 1855 nearly all public clocks in the country kept the same time.

Similar things were happening across the world. In 1884, delegates from 25 countries met in Washington to set up a series of time zones. For every 15 degrees of longitude there would be an hour difference. There had to be a base level and there was some dispute about whether it should really be at Greenwich - but since American railways and most of the ships in the world kept time on that basis, it was agreed. So Greenwich acquired the status it is so proud of today, with £15m being spent on four new galleries and a planetarium to celebrate its position at the heart of time. It is still at the prime meridian, but soon even that may be only history. If the world goes over to atomic time, the rotation of the earth will mean the meridian gradually slips eastwards.

"Greenwich is just a museum now," said Peter Whibberley, senior time scientist at the National Physics Laboratory in Teddington, Middlesex, where two scientists built the first working atomic clock in 1955. It used caesium-133, as modern versions do, although they are more accurate. There are 230 of them in 65 laboratories across the world, and 100 in orbit around the earth, all sending data to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris. Mr Whibberley is the man who added the leap second to the caesium clock which is kept at Teddington in stable laboratory conditions, with humidity, temperature and vibrations all controlled.

At the NPL, a second is not defined as a tick-tock, a 60th of a minute or the time it takes to fall in love, but as 9,192,631,770 cycles of electromagnetic radiation in an atom of caesium-133. The method is apparently accurate to within one second every 60 million years. Mr Whibberley reset his clock in advance of New Year's Eve. "Apart from having a quick drink, there's not much you can do with an extra second," he said."That's probably what I'll be doing."

Extra drink or not, the NPL is not in favour of only using atomic time. It sympathises with astronomers, whose work tracking distant stars would be thrown into chaos. The Royal Astronomical Society said last week: "Over a few decades, when the error might grow up to half a minute or so, one can imagine the arguments that lawyers and insurance companies might have about whether an event had occurred before or after midnight."

Nevertheless, the heads of American technology corporations tend to get their way, and they seem to think of Greenwich Mean Time and the rotation of the Earth as quaint, old-fashioned, a bit wobbly - and 32 seconds slow. So if you saw someone pop their cork half a minute early last night, it was probably one of them. Ahead of their time or out of step? Only time will tell.

From sundials to atomic clocks

1: Our understanding of the passage of time has always been based on the movement of the sun and Earth. The ancient Egyptians had sundials dividing daylight into 10 parts plus dusk and dawn. The rotation of the Earth, "moving" the sun from directly overhead on one day to the same position on the next, has formed the basis of time-keeping ever since. This includes Greenwich Mean Time, whose status as a universal standard for the world is under threat. But everyone agrees that 24 hours equals one day

2: The Greeks were the first to use water clocks regulated by a constant drip from a stone vessel. The same principle powered the first known mechanical clock, which was built in a tower 30ft high by the astronomer and inventor Su Song in China in 1088. A globe inside the tower rotated once a day

3: The next step forward was to use a system of falling weights to drive the mechanism, instead of water. This made possible the large public clocks that would be built into towers in town centres across the world, starting with Italy in the 14th century

4: The need for sailors to know where they were led to agreement that the position of the sun at noon in Greenwich, London, should be considered 0 degrees longitude. This called for a clock that stayed accurate at sea in any temperature and regardless of motion. H4 was invented by John Harrison

5: Until the coming of the railways it did not matter that noon in London was 11.44am in Plymouth. But in 1852 a master clock was set up to send electrical pulses from Greenwich across the country. Despite some local opposition, soon all British public clocks were set by it

6: In October 1884, delegates from 25 countries met in Washington to decide on a system of time zones for the whole world. Since most of the vessels at sea already used charts with Greenwich as 0 degrees longitude, this was declared the prime meridian

7: The position of Greenwich as the centre of time was first threatened when quartz clocks were made in the 1920s. They count the seconds using the vibration of electricity through crystals, and have nothing to do with the sun. They made good cheap watches, but were soon surpassed in accuracy

8: Time changed for ever when the first atomic clock was built at the National Physics Laboratory in Middlesex in 1955. Accurate to within a second every 300 years, it established a new standard, far more reliable than the rotation of the Earth

9: The modern atomic clock uses the gas caesium-133 in a vacuum. Lasers are used to push the atoms together into a ball, which cools them. The ball is then projected a metre upwards through magnets and a microwave chamber, which heats the atoms. Any that have absorbed energy glow as they fall back down to where they came from, past a detector

10: Each atom is like a mini solar system, with electrons orbiting a central nucleus. As the electrons absorb or release energy, they move up or down to different orbits. This produces electromagnetic radiation, which vibrates at a precise frequency. Recording this vibration with the detector in the clock gives scientists a measure of time accurate to within a second every 60 million years: one second equals 9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation from a caesium-133 atom. The need to reconcile this new standard of time with the old version leads to leap seconds.

For four decades, Gerster, 77, has been flying over sites from the Parthenon to Ayers Rock to provide archaeologists with the big picture. Seen from high above, even the most familiar turf can appear transformed, with a coherence and detail invisible on the ground.

"In the Middle Eastern and classical [archaeology] world, it's a tool people recognize as extremely valuable," says archaeologist William Sumner, a University of Chicago professor emeritus, of aerial photography. "The thing about Georg's images is they are superb. If there's anything to be seen, it's in his images."

In Gerster's recent book, The Past From Above: Aerial Photographs of Archaeological Sites (J. Paul Getty Museum), places we've seen a thousand times in pictures from ground level take on a whole new meaning. His photographs dramatize the scale of ancient structures and show them, as if for the first time, in relation to their surroundings.

Stonehenge, so impressive at eye level, is a little underwhelming from above; the Great Wall of China appears shockingly large. And some mysterious structures -- the Nazca lines, 300 giant figures etched into desert sand beginning in 200 B.C. and located south of Lima, Peru, for example -- seem as if they were designed to be seen from above.

Gerster, who was born in Switzerland and lives near Zurich, developed a passion for aerial photography in 1963, when, at 35, he chartered a small plane to photograph Egyptian and Sudanese sites about to be flooded by construction of the Aswan High Dam. Since then, he has photographed sites in 108 countries and Antarctica, usually while perched in an open doorway as his plane or helicopter roars over a site.

Not a new idea

Of course, the urge to get above it all has obsessed photographers since the invention of the camera. The first known aerial photograph was taken from a balloon in 1858.

But not until the invention of the airplane did the idea of photographing ruins become practical. Even then, it was usually a byproduct of military reconnaissance. German pilots documented Egypt's pyramids during World War I. Between the wars, British military fliers made important advances in aerial photography.

Even aviator Charles Lindbergh found the idea captivating, making low flights over the jungles of Central America in 1929 to search for hidden Mayan ruins while his wife, Anne, took photographs.

Modern technology has only expanded archaeologists' interest in aerial imaging. Today, "landscape archaeology" is one of the field's hottest disciplines, combining satellite imagery (including declassified spy photos from the 1960s) with Global Positioning System data to tease out a landscape's hidden details, such as long-buried roads and canal systems.

Not welcome everywhere

Yet, despite growing academic acceptance (and even appetite) for aerial archaeology, there are places where it has become a virtual impossibility. In unstable areas of the Middle East -- a region rich in photogenic ruins -- aerial photographers are viewed with hostility. "All the secrecy is ridiculous, but still when you come and want to take aerial photographs, you're regarded as a spy," says Gerster.

That pressure makes Gerster's work from the 1960s and '70s all the more valuable. "A lot of the areas he covered are denied to us today because of the suspicion of archaeologists," says Harvard University landscape archaeologist Jason Ur. "I just can't get good low-level aerial photography of Syria."

Since Gerster visited Iraq in 1973, many of the sites he documented have been damaged by war and looting. As politics, development and time take their toll on the world's precious ruins, the irreplaceable images by Gerster and others become even more important portraits of the past.

A prime number is a positive number divisible by only itself and 1 _ 2, 3, 5, 7 and so on.

The number that the team found is 9.1 million digits long. It is a Mersenne prime known as M30402457 _ that's 2 to the 30,402,457th power minus 1.

Mersenne primes are a special category expressed as 2 to the "p" power minus 1, in which "p" also is a prime number.

"We're super excited," said Boone, a chemistry professor. "We've been looking for such a number for a long time."

The discovery is affiliated with the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, a global contest using volunteers who run software that searches for the largest Mersenne prime.

The Home Office report showed that 5.24% of the UK population now has a DNA profile held on the database. This compares with an EU average of 1.13% and 0.5% in the US.

The number of crimes solved through DNA technology has quadrupled over the past five years.

There has been a 74% rise in the number of crimes where potential DNA material is collected, and a 75% increase in the number of matches of suspects to crime scenes.

Police can now track down offenders by matching samples with other family members who may be on the database.

The number of samples on the database has trebled in the last five years - beyond the target set by the Home Office.

It includes more than 15,000 volunteers, including victims of crime, who gave samples in response to police appeals.

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokeswoman Lynne Featherstone said: "There is no purpose or justification for keeping the DNA record of anyone who is not charged with an offence.

"This is an intolerable infringement of liberty and personal privacy.

"We cannot be absolutely certain that there will be no misuse of the DNA database.

"There are no real safeguards in place to control it.

"With the growing concern about racial profiling and disproportionality in criminal investigations, the need to keep innocent people on the DNA database is questionable."

Shadow Home Office minister Damian Green said: "If the government wants a database that has the details of everyone, not just criminals, they should be honest about it.

But he added that a DNA database was essential "to reverse the trend of rising crime in Britain".

In a case last November, a 50-year-old builder was found guilty of a murder and rape he committed in Essex 27 years ago.

He was stopped for drink driving in 2004 and his DNA matched a sample on the database taken from the original crime scene.

Several English forces have also been testing a mobile laboratory which cuts the time taken to produce DNA matches.

However, police identifying the bodies of victims of the Asian tsunami found samples can degrade, noting that it may not always be possible to identify people from their DNA.

The case pits against each other two men in their 70s, who are from the same central Italian town and even went to the same seminary school in their teenage years.

The defendant, Enrico Righi, went on to become a priest writing for the parish newspaper. The plaintiff, Luigi Cascioli, became a vocal atheist who, after years of legal wrangling, is set to get his day in court later this month.

"I started this lawsuit because I wanted to deal the final blow against the Church, the bearer of obscurantism and regression," Cascioli told Reuters.

Cascioli says Righi, and by extension the whole Church, broke two Italian laws. The first is "Abuso di Credulita Popolare" (Abuse of Popular Belief) meant to protect people against being swindled or conned. The second crime, he says, is "Sostituzione di Persona," or impersonation.

"The Church constructed Christ upon the personality of John of Gamala," Cascioli claimed, referring to the 1st century Jew who fought against the Roman army.

A court in Viterbo will hear from Righi, who has yet to be indicted, at a January 27 preliminary hearing meant to determine whether the case has enough merit to go forward.

"In my book, The Fable of Christ, I present proof Jesus did not exist as a historic figure. He must now refute this by showing proof of Christ's existence," Cascioli said.

Speaking to Reuters, Righi, 76, sounded frustrated by the case and baffled as to why Cascioli -- who, like him, came from the town of Bagnoregio -- singled him out in his crusade against the Church.

"We're both from Bagnoregio, both of us. We were in seminary together. Then he took a different path and we didn't see each other anymore," Righi said.

"Since I'm a priest, and I write in the parish newspaper, he is now suing me because I 'trick' the people."

Righi claims there is plenty of evidence to support the existence of Jesus, including historical texts.

He also claims that justice is on his side. The judge presiding over the hearing has tried, repeatedly, to dismiss the case -- prompting appeals from Cascioli.

"Cascioli says he didn't exist. And I said that he did," he said. "The judge will to decide if Christ exists or not."

Even Cascioli admits that the odds are against him, especially in Roman Catholic Italy.

"It would take a miracle to win," he joked.

Townshend, 60, guitarist in the 60s band The Who, said his hearing was irreversibly damaged by years of using studio headphones and that he now is forced to take 36-hour breaks between recording sessions to allow his ears to recover.

"I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal components deaf," he said on his Web site. "Hearing loss is a terrible thing because it cannot be repaired. If you use an iPod or anything like it, or your child uses one, you MAY be OK ... But my intuition tells me there is terrible trouble ahead."

Referring to the increasingly popular practice of downloading music from the Internet, Townshend said: "The downside may be that on our computers _ for privacy, for respect to family and co-workers, and for convenience _ we use earphones at almost every stage of interaction with sound."

The Who rock group was famous for its earsplitting live performances, but Townshend said his problem was caused by using earphones in the recording studio.

"This case is truly heartbreaking," said its chief executive, Deborah Annetts. "The government must make time in parliament for the assisted dying for the terminally ill bill. Only this bill could have prevented Anne Turner from taking her life early. If this bill had been law, Anne would not have been forced to go to Zurich while she was still able to travel, for help to die. She would be alive today."

Dr Turner, who would have been 67 today, said in an interview shortly before her death that she did not want to reach the point where she could not travel to a country where assisted suicide is legal. "I think it's dreadful that somebody like myself has to go to Switzerland to do this, which is an awful hassle," she said.

"I want to go there while I still can, because I have to be able to swallow a solution of barbiturates. I know that people say that I look well, but I'm not. My condition has deteriorated an awful lot, particularly my speech. I hate talking on the phone now and, really, I don't like talking much at all."

Further evidence of Dr Turner's preparation and determination was apparent in the sheaf of envelopes she is seen clutching in the interview. She had prepared more than 100 typed letters for her family, friends and neighbours telling them of her plans. Each carried a personal, handwritten message on the back.

They were left in her kitchen and delivered to each recipient by her cleaner yesterday lunchtime.

The typed message in the letters read: "I have no shortage of people to convince me that life with the illness is worth living ... Because the law in the UK is not currently supportive, I have had extra complications which have required a certain degree of secrecy.

"I am firm in my belief that I must end my life now while I'm still able. I hope to have spared you some of the protracted grief."

Her son, Edward, 39, speaking to the Guardian from Zurich hours after her death, said the experience had been hard for Dr Turner's three children. "For us as a family it has been a really horrific experience and we did it for my mother," he said. "We wanted to help her in whatever way we had to." Dr Turner, who retired early from her job running a family planning clinic to nurse her husband, who had multiple system atrophy, would have had an average life expectancy of seven years with PSP, but would have faced the lingering death suffered by Dudley Moore, who died in 2002 of the same condition.

The rare disease causes degeneration of the nerve endings. Balance, vision, movement, speech and the ability to swallow all deteriorate. Death is usually triggered by something else, such as pneumonia or choking.

A former GP and campaigner for voluntary euthanasia yesterday told the Guardian that he watched a terminally ill woman from Glasgow take a lethal dose of barbiturates at the Dignitas clinic. Michael Irwin said: "I've never seen anyone actually commit suicide before. I wasn't sad or tearful. I was glad for her. This was a life she didn't want to lead any more." The 75-year-old widow from Glasgow, whose identity her family wants to keep secret, had multiple system atrophy and was in a wheelchair.

The dignity trade

Dignitas was founded by a Swiss lawyer, Ludwig Minelli, in 1998. The Zurich-based charity's aim is to help people with chronic illnesses to die a quick and painless death. Its motto is "Live with dignity, die with dignity." Patients die by drinking a lethal dose of barbiturate that kills them in about five minutes. The suicide is recorded on video to prove it is voluntary and the tape is examined by police and a coroner. Over the last eight years the organisation has assisted in the deaths of more than 450 people from around Europe, 42 of whom were from the UK. Although the law here prohibits assisted suicide, no one has yet been prosecuted for travelling to Switzerland to help a relative die.

"The data also reveal that from 2000 to now the clouds have changed so that the Earth may continue warming, even with declining sunlight," said study leader Philip R. Goode of the New Jersey Institute of Technology. "These large and peculiar variabilities of the clouds, coupled with a resulting increasing albedo, presents a fundamental, unmet challenge for all scientists who wish to understand and predict the Earth's climate."

Cloud changes

Earth's albedo is measured by noting how much reflected sunlight in turn bounces off the Moon, something scientists call earthshine. The observations were made at the Big Bear Solar Observatory in California.

The findings will be published Jan. 24 in Eos, a weekly newspaper of the American Geophysical Union.

On any given day, about half of Earth is covered by clouds, which reflect more sunlight than land and water. Clouds keep Earth cool by reflecting sunlight, but they can also serve as blankets to trap warmth.

High thin clouds are better blankets, while low thick clouds make better coolers.

Separately, satellite data recently showed that while the difference between high and low clouds had long been steady at 7-8 percent, in the past five years, for some unknown reason, the difference has jumped to 13 percent. High, warming clouds have increased while low clouds have decreased.

What about global warming?

Earth's albedo appears to have experienced a similar reversal during a period running from the 1960s to the mid-1980s.

Goode's team says there may be a large, unexplained variation in sunlight reaching the Earth that changes over the course of two decades or so, as well as a large effect of clouds re-arranging by altitude.

How do the findings play into arguments about global warming and the apparent contribution by industrial emissions? That's entirely unclear.

"No doubt greenhouse gases are increasing," Goode said in a telephone interview. "No doubt that will cause a warming. The question is, 'Are there other things going on?'"

What is clear is that scientists don't understand clouds very well, as a trio of studies last year also showed.

"Clouds are even more uncertain than we thought," Goode said.

The bones were found during a dig before the site is developed as part of a $630 million shopping mall.

University of Leicester archaeologists say the find promises to shed new light on the way people lived and died in the Middle Ages.

"We think, probably outside London, this must be one of the largest parish graveyards ever excavated," said Richard Buckley, director of University of Leicester Archaeology Services.

"Archaeology will tell us a lot from the rubbish people throw away. We can really learn about the lives they were leading.

"But it's very rare that we get a look at a (whole) population itself. It's quite a tightly dated group."

Buckley said the graveyard was probably used from the 12th century until the demolition of a church at the site in 1573.

Communal graves and the many skeletons of children provide evidence of high infant mortality and contagious diseases, Buckley said.

What is believed to be Britain's largest medieval cemetery was found at Bishopsgate London in 1999. It contained more than 10,000 bodies.

The authors noted that their results seem to conflict with laboratory and animal studies suggesting that omega-3 fatty acids may have a protective effect against cancer, but they chalked up this discrepancy to the inadequacies of cancer models, and to differences between omega-3 forms found in foods and in dietary supplements.

The finding that omega-3 is a bust as a cancer preventive came just as the American Heart Association took the air out the sails of soy protein for heart disease, saying that it's not effective for lowering LDL cholesterol, does not improve HDL or triglycerides, and has no effect on blood pressure.

In a review of 38 articles describing the effects of omega-3 consumption (either from foods or from dietary supplements) on cancer, Dr. MacLean and colleagues found that "omega-3 fatty acids appear not to affect a mechanism of cancer development that is common across the different types of cancers evaluated in this report. Likewise, there is little to suggest that omega-3 fatty acids reduce the risk of any single type of cancer."

The researchers scoured the medical literature for studies that looked at the effects of omega-3 fatty acids on tumor incidence, and they narrowed their search to studies with a prospective cohort design that considered different levels of omega-3 consumption.

Two reviewers independently extracted from the studies detailed data about the incidence of cancer, the type of cancer, the number and characteristics of patients, details on the exposure to omega-3 fatty acids, and the elapsed time between the intervention and outcome measurements.

The reviewers identified 20 cohorts from seven countries for 11 different types of cancer, and up to six different ways to categorize omega-3 fatty acid consumption. The cohorts ranged in size from 6,000 to 121,000, and had follow-up periods ranging from 9,000 to 1.5 million person-years.

More than half of the studies focused on breast, colorectal or prostate cancer. The rest looked at the effects of omega-3 on either aerodigestive cancers (i.e., squamous cell carcinoma of the oral cavity or pharynx, esophagus, or larynx); or other malignancies, such as bladder, lung, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, ovarian, pancreatic, basal cell carcinoma, and stomach.

The authors found that among 65 estimates of the association between omega-3 fatty acid consumption and cancer, only eight were statistically significant, and there was conflicting evidence for an association with cancer risk across many of the studies.

For example, they found one study indicating that for breast cancer there was an increased risk for cancer associated with omega-3 (incidence risk ratio 1.47; 95% confidence interval, 1.10-1.98), but three other suggesting a decreased risk (RR, 0.68-0.72). Still seven other estimates showed no significant association between breast cancer risk and omega-3 consumption.

Similarly, only one study showed a significant association between omega-3 and reduced risk of colorectal cancer (RR, 0.49; 95% CI, 0.27-0.89), whereas 17 other studies showed no association.

As for a possible association between lung cancer and omega-3, one study showed an increased risk (IRR, 3.0; 95% CI, 1.2-7.3), another showed a decreased risk (RR, 0.32; 95% CI, 0.13-0.76), and four others showed no significant associations.

In the case of advanced prostate cancer, again, one study showed an increased risk (RR, 1.98; 95% CI, 1.34-2.93), one estimated a decreased risk (RR, 0.43; 95% CI, 0.22-0.83) and 15 others found no association.

One study looking at basal cell carcinoma found a slightly increased risk (RR, 1.13; 95% CI, 1.01-1.27), but for all the other types of cancer there were no significant associations reported.

"A large body of literature spanning numerous cohorts from many countries and with different demographic characteristics does not provide evidence to suggest a significant association between omega-3 fatty acids and cancer incidence," Dr. MacLean and colleagues wrote.

"Dietary supplementation with omega-3 fatty acids is unlikely to prevent cancer," they concluded.

Primary source: Journal of the American Medical Association
Source reference:
MacLean CH et al. Effects of Omega-3 Fatty Acids

on Cancer Risk. A Systematic Review. JAMA. 2006;295:403-415

Cao fell ill with a fever on January 12 and had been receiving treatment in a hospital in the provincial capital, Chengdu. She was Sichuan's second human case of bird flu this month, after the Chinese health ministry announced last week that a 35-year-old woman from the province died of the disease on January 11.

To date, seven of the 10 Chinese people officially confirmed to have contracted bird flu have died.

China's Ministry of Health was not immediately available for comment.

In Cao's case, and most of China's other reported human bird flu infections, there was no officially confirmed outbreak of the H5N1 strain of bird flu among poultry in the area beforehand.

China, along with Vietnam, has suffered numerous outbreaks in poultry since October and Beijing has launched sweeping measures to stop the virus from spreading and infecting more people.

Experts believe the H5N1 virus is contracted through close contact with sick birds, and fear that as the virus spreads it will mutate to enable it to spread easily from human to human, sparking a pandemic that could claim many millions of lives.

Despite the doubts, the painting, entitled Gentleman in Green Coat, is to go on show in Salzburg soon as part of Austria's year-long celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth.

If it is in fact Mozart, the portrait would show the premature aging of a bon vivant who died when he was only 35.

The face is lined, the hair is graying and the tired features speak to a lifetime of experience. The man is smiling but without great conviction.

Something about the impressive mane, the intelligence in the gaze and the nonchalance of the pose prompt the viewer to think that the model was not just anyone.

Yet the subject appears banally human, with slouching shoulders, rings under his eyes and the start of a double chin.

Perhaps it is Mozart, but if so it is an image that dramatically corrects the angelic figure familiar from the half dozen portraits judged to be authentic.

It meshes, however, with the biographical details known from the end of his short life, in which his body was ravaged by excesses with alcohol and women. The swollen face in the painting, for example, could easily reflect treatment for syphilis, from which Mozart is widely believed to have suffered.

The picture, signed by a renowned portraitist of the era, Johann Georg Edlinger, was completed in 1790 in Munich, where the composer spent a brief period a year before his death.

While he stayed in the Bavarian capital, he frequented The Black Eagle inn, whose patron was a friend of the artist.

The Gentleman in Green Coat remained in Munich for a century and a half before Berlin's Gemaeldegalerie museum bought it from an art dealer in 1934.

But the painting remained in a depot in eastern Berlin during World War II and Germany's four-decade-long division until it went on display again last year.

"There is no reason to doubt it is Mozart," museum director Wolf Lindemann said, although "definitive proof" will never be possible.

A descendant of the painter, Wolfgang Seiller, was the one who drew the link to Mozart by comparing the physical traits of the model with those of another portrait of the composer in a similar pose on display in Bologna, Italy.

The historical archives in Munich, however, offer several pieces of evidence that cast doubts on Berlin's claims.

If Mozart were the model, the painting would have somehow made reference to music as a form of "recognition of his art by the German royal courts", the city wrote in a report on the painting.

Secondly, historical records indicate that Mozart only spent a week in Munich in the autumn of 1790, where he gave a concert for the Neapolitan king.

Skeptics say that it would have been difficult for him to find the time to pose for a painter known for interminable sittings.

The city of Munich also argues that a known portrait of Mozart would surely have been put on display in the months following his death on December 5, 1791.

And finally, the painting is part of a set with a female portrait, yet Mozart's wife Constanze was not in Munich at the time.

Mozart might have had himself secretly painted with a favorite mistress but in those days, "even the greatest libertine would not have gone that far", said the director of the Munich archives, Richard Bauer.

Bauer, who said that the Gentleman in Green Coat is far more likely to be a wealthy merchant, noted that "subjective physical similarities that are not backed up with other indices have never been enough to identify people. Not under the law, and not in the history of art."