Funds Should be Returned to U.S. Treasury, Says National Center for Public Policy Research

Washington, DC - In the face of rising unemployment and record-breaking deficits, policy experts at the National Center for Public Policy Research are criticizing the Obama Administration for awarding a half million dollar grant from the economic stimulus package to Penn State Professor Michael Mann, a key figure in the Climategate controversy.

"It's outrageous that economic stimulus money is being used to support research conducted by Michael Mann at the very time he's under investigation by Penn State and is one of the key figures in the international Climategate scandal. Penn State should immediately return these funds to the U.S. Treasury," said Tom Borelli, Ph.D., director of the National Center's Free Enterprise Project.

Professor Mann is currently under investigation by Penn State University because of activities related to a closed circle of climate scientists who appear to have been engaged in agenda-driven science. Emails and documents mysteriously released from the previously-prestigious Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom revealed discussions of manipulation and destruction of research data, as well as efforts to interfere with the peer review process to stifle opposing views. The motivation underlying these efforts appears to be a coordinated strategy to support the belief that mankind's activities are causing global warming.

After Microsoft confirmed that a hole in its Internet Explorer browser was used in the December cyber attacks on Google and at least 33 other outfits, a trio of security-conscious nations - Germany, France, and Australia - went so far as to warn their citizens against the use of IE. And that led to a very good week for the likes of Opera and Mozilla.

Following an IE warning from the German government, Opera saw German downloads of its desktop browser more than double. And in Australia, where a similar warning was issued, its downloads leaped 37 per cent.

Meanwhile, Mozilla saw a "statistically significant rise" in the number of downloads originating from both Germany and France, the third nation to warn against the use of IE. In the chart below - supplied by Mozilla - the orange area shows an estimated 300,000 extra downloads in Germany over the past four days:

The Internet originated on American soil. In 1969, the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Defense Department established the world's first testing packet-switched network (PSN) to connect four universities on US soil. The world saw a remarkable expansion of the scale and number of Internet users from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. In September 1989, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was founded with a grant from the US Department of Commence to administer the Internet terminal server. Over the past 40 years, the US has been dominating the world Internet as the core technique holder with an inherent advantage of being the cradle of the Internet.

There are 13 terminal servers in the world to keep the Internet running, with a master server and nine of the 12 secondary servers stationed in the US. In terms of technique, the network of a country will disappear from the world Internet if its domain name registry is blocked or deleted from the terminal server. This kind of conduct is not legally binding with the law of any country except ICANN. In April 2004, Libya was unseen on the Internet for three days after the collapse of the domain name registry of the country "LY" caused by a domain administration dispute.

Are we ready to act if an asteroid or comet were to pose a threat to our planet? No, says a new report from the National Research Council. Plus, we don't have the resources in place to detect all the possible dangerous objects out there. The report lays out options NASA could follow to detect more near-Earth objects (NEOs) that could potentially cross Earth's orbit, and says the $4 million the U.S. spends annually to search for NEOs is insufficient to meet a congressionally mandated requirement to detect NEOs that could threaten Earth. "To do what Congress mandated NASA to do is going to take new technology, bigger telescopes with wider fields," said Don Yeomans, Manager of NASA's Near Earth Object Program Office, speaking at the American Geophysical Union conference last month.

However, Yeomans said work is being done to improve the quality and quantity of the search for potentially dangerous asteroids and comets. "We have a long term goal to have three more 1.8 meter telescopes," he said, "and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope with an 8.4 meter aperture in 2016. Once these new facilities are in place, the data input will be like drinking from a fire hose, and the rate of warnings will go up by a factor of 40."

Washington - The United States is doing little to defend the planet against potentially devastating asteroids and is not doing the basic searches that Congress has ordered, according to a report released on Friday.

While most of the really big and obvious threats are being found, almost nothing is being done to find the smaller objects that are arguably a more likely threat, the strongly worded report from the National Academy of Sciences said.

"It means we are not looking for the small ones which can cause huge damage on earth," astronomer Mike A'Hearn of the University of Maryland, who helped chair the committee that wrote the report, said in a telephone interview.

"Why has nothing been done? I don't know," added A'Hearn, who was principal investigator of NASA'S 2005 Deep Impact mission to knock open the comet 9P/Tempel.

A tiny asteroid that buzzed Earth last week highlighted our planet's vulnerability to objects whose peculiar orbits put them in a game of hide-and-seek with us.

An Earth-based telescope spotted the 10-metre space rock hurtling our way just three days before a near miss on 13 January, when it flew by at just one-third of the distance to the moon (see Object headed towards Earth an asteroid, not junk). The asteroid is never expected to hit Earth and would burn up before hitting the ground in any case. But its unusual orbit (see diagram) seems ingeniously designed to evade our surveys. It is likely that a handful of objects large enough to cause harm are hiding under similar circumstances.

Howard Carter, the British archaeologist who discovered the tomb of the Egyptian king Tutankhamen in 1922, cheated the Egyptian authorities in an attempt to get a share of the fabulous treasure, German Egyptologists claim.

Carter, whose sensational discovery in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor is widely regarded as the greatest archaeological find of all time, broke laws by smuggling objects from the tomb out of the country and entering and disturbing the burial chamber without the presence of Egyptian officials, experts in Germany are saying.

They say Carter's claim that the 3,200-year-old grave had already been robbed in ancient times was probably a lie designed to circumvent a law that stated that any treasure found intact had to remain in Egypt, but that the contents of a disturbed tomb could be divided up between Egypt and the finders.

Researchers at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR) at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Moores UCSD Cancer Center have shown one way in which gliomas, a deadly type of brain tumor, can evade drugs aimed at blocking a key cell signaling protein, epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR),that is crucial for tumor growth. In a related finding, they also proved that a particular EGFR mutation is important not only to initiate the tumor, but for its continued growth or "maintenance" as well.

The findings, which appear during the week of January 18 in an online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provide both new insights into the behavior of gliomas as well as potential new drug targets and treatment strategies.

"The results suggest that the expression of EGFR is required for tumors to keep growing, and we've shown for the first time that there are mechanisms that the tumor is using to circumvent the need for the receptor," said Frank Furnari, PhD, associate professor of medicine at the UCSD School of Medicine and associate investigator at the San Diego branch of the LICR, adding that other cancers may use similar tactics. "We need to find out more about the signaling pathways that brain tumors use to get around targeted therapeutics, such as those directed at EGFR."

Surgeons made cadavers blink with artificial muscles, experiments that could in the future help restore the ability of thousands of patients with facial paralysis to open and close their eyes on their own.

Some people can't blink their eyes. In most patients with so-called permanent eyelid paralysis, the cranial nerve that controls involuntary eye blinking has been damaged by an accident, stroke, injury or surgery to remove a facial tumor. Many of these patients have no functioning nerves nearby that can be rerouted to close the eyelid. Others are born with Mobius syndrome, which is characterized by underdeveloped facial nerves. These people are expressionless and can neither blink nor smile.

Without lubrication from the blinking lid, the eye can develop ulcers and the person can eventually go blind. Currently, eyelid paralysis is treated by one of two approaches. One is to transfer a muscle from the leg into face. However, this option requires six to 10 hours of surgery, creates a wound that can impair the body elsewhere, and is not always suitable for elderly or medically fragile patients.

"I would estimate under 100 of those are done in the United States every year," said researcher Craig Senders, an otolaryngologist at the University of California at Davis.

The other treatment involves suturing a small gold weight inside the eyelid, which helps close the eye with the aid of gravity. Although such therapy is successful in more than 90 percent of patients, the resulting blink is slower than normal and cannot be synchronized with the opposite eye, and some patients also have a hard time keeping the weighted lid closed when lying down to sleep. In the United States, roughly 3,000 to 5,000 patients undergo this surgery every year.

New photographs taken by a satellite in orbit around the moon have revealed one of its most prominent craters in a whole new light.

The moon's Tycho Crater, though average in size, is special because it appears to have formed relatively recently. The vast crater still looks pristine in the new images, while older craters are slowly covered by newer impacts as their features are obscured over the years.

Like all the moon's craters, Tycho is thought to have formed when a space rock slammed into the surface. Since the moon lacks Earth's protective atmosphere, which vaporizes small asteroids on collision courses, even tiny rocks can make a dent on the lunar surface.