Whose bright idea was that? Border between India and Pakistan is so brightly lit it can be seen from space

By Chris Parsons

Snaking for hundreds of miles across the earth's surface, this spectacular picture shows one of the planet's land borders like never before.

The dramatic picture shows a bright orange line jutting across the earth, indicating the border between India and Pakistan.

The stunning image of the earth, taken from the International Space Station last month, also shows busy cities show up as bright clusters hundreds of miles apart.

Spectacular: The International Space Station image captures the floodlit border between India, above the orange line, and Pakistan, below the border in the picture

The border between India and Pakistan, shown here on a conventional satellite image, is now under heavy surveillance through floodlights and fencing

The Indian government sanctioned a move to erect floodlights along the terrain separating India and Pakistan in the Gujarat sector in 2003 to prevent smuggling and arms trafficking.

In previous years the border has regularly seen attempts at infiltration by terrorists, as well as the smuggling of arms, ammunition and contraband.

In total, the Indian government hope to cover 1248 miles (2009 km) of the 1800-mile (2900 km) India-Pakistan border with floodlights.

Officials have so far erected floodlights along 286 miles (460 km) of Indian border with the Pakistan state of Punjab.

The extensive floodlighting continues for 635 miles (1022 km) across Rajasthan, 109 miles (176 km) across the Jammu international border, and 125 miles (202 km) through Gujarat.

So far 1156 miles (1861 km) of the border have been floodlit.

Plans are in place to erect a total 1269 miles (2043 km) of fencing along the nation's border.

The Indian government hope to have completely finished the floodlight operation by March 2012.

A similar fenced border zone operates along India's eastern border with Bangladesh, although it cannot be seen as vividly on images like this.

The Gujarat border region was notorious for being infiltrated until officials erected the floodlit border in 2003.

The spectacular image showing the floodlit border was taken by Expedition 28 International Space Station Crew on August 21.

More...

• Putting the 'tip' in tipping point: Could giant umbrellas, nets, harpoons and magnets capture the cloud of space junk scientists warn risks trapping us on Earth?
• Blink and you'll miss it: The first footage of hypersonic spacecraft's ill-fated test flight is released

Also visible on the picture as bright clusters is Lahore, Pakistan, nearest to the orange border line.

Islamabad, Pakistan, can also be seen towards the bottom of the picture, as well as New Delhi, India, at the top.

The floodlit border fencing built through the Indian government since 2003 is so bright it can be seen from space

Source

Witness Testimony and the Death Penalty: After Troy Davis, a Push for Eyewitness Reform

By Nathan Thornburgh

Virginia Davis, the mother of Troy Davis, holds a button in her lap pleading clemency for her son at her Savannah home, July 12, 2007. Georgia executed Troy Davis on September 21, 2011, for the murder of an off-duty police officer, a crime he denied committing.

Curtis Compton / Atlanta Journal-Constitution / AP

Nearly a week after the state of Georgia executed Troy Davis, the emotions surrounding his case have calmed. Protestors and reporters have long since dispersed from their vigil outside the prison. The Twitter hashtag #toomuchdoubt — as well as its Wednesday night successor #RIPTroyDavis — is no longer trending. That's not to say, however, that the case won't continue to have an outsized effect on the criminal justice system in the U.S. While his execution alone — no matter how passionate his supporters — won't bring the death penalty to an end, there is one area where activists are hoping to use Davis' death as an ongoing and emotional rallying cry for reform: eyewitness identification.

In the 48 hours leading up to Davis' execution, the nation heard that the case against Davis was built entirely on eyewitnesses who said they saw Davis gun down off-duty cop Mark McPhail. But of the nine witnesses who testified against Davis in his original trial, seven would go on to change their mind and recant. As many outside observers pointed out, they were either lying on the stand, or lying now. There are two essential takeaways, then, from Davis' execution: First, that eyewitnesses are extremely unreliable, and second, that because of that unreliability, the death penalty shouldn't hinge solely on eyewitness recall. (Read about whether Davis' execution will bring closure to the victim's family.)

That second point is why Al Sharpton and his National Action Network are now pushing for a new law in the wake of Davis' death. The law would forbid prosecutors from pursuing the death penalty in cases where there was no physical or scientific evidence. Under this law, he has said, "the Troy Davis case would never have been tried as a capital case in the first place."

Eyewitness problems plague non-death cases as well. In fact, the New York-based Innocence Project estimates that it's the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide. Some 75% of the false convictions they've uncovered not only involved non-matching DNA (the Innocence Project's specialty), but also eyewitness problems: poor handling, poor reliability, police coercion. The stories of hundreds of clients whose innocence was proven by DNA testing make up what Innocence Project co-founder Barry Scheck once referred to as "the greatest data set in the history of our criminal justice system." One clear finding in that data set is that a lot of Scheck's clients who were ruled innocent had also been positively (and ultimately, falsely) ID'd by witnesses in the original trial. As the number of cases where there is untested DNA dwindles in the U.S., Scheck says the Innocence Project is turning its attention to the next great area of need: eyewitness reform.(Read about Davis being executed in Georgia for killing an off-duty cop.)

Just what is so wrong with eyewitnesses? It depends on who you ask. UC Irvine psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has done considerable research into the inherent unreliability of memory, how easily suggestible and completely self-deceptive it can be. Santa Clara County Assistant District Attorney Karyn Sinunu-Towery points to a number of potential variables that might affect a witness' ability to recall accurately: how far away they were from the scene, what the light was like, whether they were afraid, whether they are of a different race than the person they witnessed.

Each one of those factors can contribute to error and the cumulative result, watchdogs say, is an unacceptably high risk that witnesses might get something wrong — a prospect that pleases neither defenders nor prosecutors like Sinunu-Towery. "We had a case a few years ago where there was a bad identification and there was a reversal," Towery says. "We don't want that. Every time there's a wrong identification, it means the real criminal is still out there."

Read about the outrage on the Internet over Davis' execution.

For all the attention placed on the recanting eyewitnesses in the Davis case, there wasn't much coverage of the fact that the witnesses may have been mishandled from the outset. Setting aside the various accusations that police pressured people into saying Davis did it, the police also broke a cardinal rule of witnesses: They allowed these strangers to interact with one another and sync stories. That is, the police actually brought all the witnesses together in the Burger King parking lot where the shooting took place and recreated the crime. Whether by mistake or by design, it had the effect of creating identical eyewitness accounts that hued to a central narrative, rather that revealing the messier vagaries of nearly a dozen people trying to remember what they had seen in a dark parking lots.

"Should never happen." says Sinunu-Towery sharply. "Witnesses need to be able to tell their story alone." Sinunu-Towery says that local law enforcement in her area take this seriously, but even then, it's not always possible to keep witnesses from coordinating their stories. Even if police are a bit late responding to a scene, witnesses tend to start chatting and inadvertently match up their recollections. "I remember years ago there was a double homicide in a bar," she says. "There were a lot of inebriated witnesses, and it was pretty hard to keep them from talking with each other about what had happened." (Read about the failure of a legal 'safety' valve.)

False convictions, however, are not the fault of bad witnesses; they are the result of poorly trained judges and juries. And this is where Davis' case could make a lasting difference. Just two days before Davis' execution, the Innocence Project and a consortium of police and advocacy groups released a study that outlined best practices for lineups. For example, it turns out that if you have a full lineup that doesn't include the actual perpetrator, the witness will often just pick the one person in the lineup who looks closest to the guilty. Among the report's top findings: by far the most reliable practice is the double-blind sequential lineup, where the administrator doesn't know who the suspect is, and suspects or their photos are presented one-by-one instead of in a group.

There are other common-sense reforms that can help the courts use eyewitnesses properly. Standardizing police protocols would clearly help. So would better juror instructions. In California, jurors are told from the outset that eyewitness accounts may be unreliable, that they should be taken with a grain of salt. But not every state is so explicit. Without those wary-sounding juror instructions, many jurors in other states may think, as Sinunu-Towery once did, that the "best evidence in the world was having someone stand up in court and shout 'there's the guy that did it!'" In reality, she says, that could well be the least reliable evidence of the trial.(Read about five historically infamous executions.)

Some jurisdictions are taking action, while others are resisting. Santa Clara County, where Sinunu-Towery works, is one of the leaders in implementing best practices (the county will soon begin videotaping all lineups, for example). But California, under pressure from police groups who don't appreciate lawmakers telling them how to do their job, has blocked some legislative attempts to regulate the eyewitness process more heavily. Florida has been similarly reluctant. In August, New Jersey's Supreme Court ruled that eyewitness identification is routinely flawed, opening the door to statewide reform. Georgia, for its part, instituted reforms in 2008 that were at least partially in response to the already-brewing controversies surrounding the Troy Davis case. But even those, as the Pew Center on the States' online publication Stateline.org points out, were not mandatory.

Activists argue that should be uniform protocols throughout the country for how police handle witnesses and what juries are told about eyewitness reliability. It's something both sides can agree on (for the most part), and would provide an extra insurance policy against convicting the innocent. And, for Davis' family and supporters, it would be a sign of progress, reform and redemption — that perhaps his death was not in vain.

Source

Why Scientists Are Smarter Than Politicians

By Jeffrey Kluger

One of the best things about being an artist is that nobody can tell you you're doing things wrong. There's no true or false in a Picasso painting, no yes or no in a Mahler composition. That, of course, is how it should be.

The opposite is true for science — and that's how it should be too. The scientific method is defined by the search for the irreducible truth. The riddle of a disease isn't solved till you've isolated the virus; no particle is fully understood till it's been successfully smashed. It's not for nothing that recent news of a neutrino that may have traveled .0025% faster than light is causing such a stir. If that vanishingly tiny anomaly can't be resolved and disproven, a century of physics could collapse. (Read about how new research could turn physics on its head.)

But the stone walls between art and science aren't nearly as thick as they seem; indeed, in some ways they're entirely permeable. That's a lesson we badly need to learn if we're going to make sound policy decisions in an era in which science and politics seem increasingly at odds.

In the Oct. 3 issue of TIME, theoretical physicist Lisa Randall of Harvard University made a plea for greater deference to reason in the still-young but already-ugly 2012 presidential campaign. Randall lamented "the fundamental disregard for rational and scientific thinking" in a political culture in which Texas governor Rick Perry can dismiss evolution as "merely a theory that's out there," and Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann can traffic in poppycock about the HPV vaccine causing mental retardation.

Randall's new book, Knocking on Heaven's Door, takes the case one intriguing step further. The book explores some of the biggest ideas in contemporary physics and how they undergird such everyday matters as risk assessment, logic and even our understanding of beauty. But it's in her chapter on creativity — not a quality always associated with the data-crunching business of science — that she makes her most compelling case against the willful know-nothingism that plagues public debate. (Read about why Michele Bachmann is a real GOP contender.)

It takes a certain kind of hubris to be a pundit or politician and tell scientists — often many, many scientists — that they're wrong about what their studies have shown them. One of the things that makes it easy to make such counterfactual arguments is that there are often studies to back them up. The nonsense about vaccines causing autism began with a now- discredited 1998 paper by British physician Andrew Wakefield that linked the disorder to the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. A far greater number of studies have shown that climate change is by no means fully understood. Anyone — scientist or not — can read papers on both sides and seem to come to a well-reasoned conclusion either way.

What distinguishes scientists from the rest of us is their ability not just to understand the data but to derive the data — which is a bit like the difference between being able to graph a 95-yd. touchdown run and being able to execute one, cutting across the seam and exploiting the gaps in coverage that the average person would never see. That's what good scientists do every day. "The cracks and discrepancies that might seem too small or obscure for some," Randall writes, "can be the portal to new concepts and ideas for those who look at the problem the right way."

That's not easy, and not even all scientists do it artfully or well. Randall cites autistics and — not entirely in jest — bureaucrats and academics as good examples of how simply having extraordinary technical skills can be meaningless without the creativity to exploit them. She quotes Pushkin, who once said that "Inspiration is needed in geometry, just as much as in poetry." Similarly, some of the most touching scenes in the movie Rainman are those in which the autistic lead character recites Abbott and Costello's brilliant "Who's on first" sketch, hitting all of the words but understanding none of the wit. (Read about the 100 best TV shows of all time.)

For any highly accomplished person, creativity begins with the least creative mindset possible — a near-obsessive ability to think endlessly about a problem, and indeed an inability not to think about it. "Even if golf pros perfect their swing over countless repeated attempts," Randall writes, "I don't believe everyone can hit a ball a thousand times without becoming exceedingly bored or frustrated." Tiger Woods could do that and — at least before his current woes on the links — the results showed not just in championship play, but in flat-out inspirational play. Something similar is true of science too.

"Once skills...become second nature, you can call them up much more easily when you need them," Randall writes. "Such embedded skills often continue operating in the background — even before they push good ideas into your conscious mind." Larry Page once told Randall that the "seed idea" for Google came to him in a dream, but that was only after he had been absorbed by the problem for months. We never questioned Woods' swing, and we certainly don't question the brilliance of what Page helped invent. But we feel free to sneer at what scientists tell us when it serves our political ends.

None of this means we should defer to scientists simply because they have the degrees to back up their claims. That kind of blind belief in the well-lettered has led to everything from the disgrace that was the eugenics movement to the nincompoopery of the vaccine scare. What's more, Randall herself is a scientist and not above a little inside-the-clubhouse bias. Still, history has tended to prove the points she makes.

Several years ago, when I was writing a book about the polio vaccine, I had the opportunity to spend months wading through the personal papers of Jonas Salk. It was only when I had gone through few the first few thousand letters, memos, notebooks and even scrawled phone messages that it occurred to me that I hadn't stumbled on a single doodle — not one. It became something of a game to look for one and finally, deep in a notebook in which Salk was recording data from a mouse study, there it was — a tiny triangular design made of perhaps six or seven pen strokes. That was it, the entire body of Jonas Salk's art work. And yet the inspiration to create a vaccine that hundreds of other scientists had sought — and the millions of lives that were saved as a result of it — is surely artistry of a far higher kind.

Scientists aren't always right, but when they talk, they deserve at least the initial presumption of wisdom. All of us — especially the people who seek to lead us — could well learn something from listening to what they have to say.

Source

Andy Rooney to Step Down from 60 Minutes

Don't you hate when a fixture of the past several decades of your life comes to an end, reminding you of your own inexorable process of aging? That will happen this Sunday, when 60 Minutes' Andy Rooney, the proud original H8R, will announce that he is ending his regular commentaries at the end of 60 Minutes.

Rooney, who began doing "A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney" in 1978 (he joined CBS in 1949), is 92 years old, so it's not surprising that he might want to take a break at this juncture in his life. But it's been one of the more fantastic runs in broadcast TV history.

Rooney was nearly 60 when he began his commentaries, so he's going to be cemented in the minds of his audience as—so the popular shorthand goes—a kvetcher, a curmudgeon, a grouser, raising his prodigiously bushy eyebrows in skepticism at a foolish world. For more than three decades, he found any number of annoyances to bemoan, from art to technology to travel. (He also sometimes weighed in on heftier issues, like the war in Iraq.)

And yet, weirdly, it's not a complete stretch to see TV's cranky old man as the prototype of the blogger, or at least a certain kind of observational blogger, employed as he was for so long to skewer, satirize and give voice to gripes. His style ("Don't you hate when...") has been easy enough to spoof—fair play, after all, for a guy whose meal ticket is making fun—but it was also economical and distinctive in its voice. (A recent Internet meme, the Andy Rooney Game, involved taking a Rooney video essay and stripping out everything but the first and last sentence, which, often, would pretty much imply the entire piece in between.)

Perhaps Andy Rooney has finally exhausted life's supply of irritations. But they will remain for the rest of us, and many writers who use snark as a weapon carry a little of his influence. I'm one of them, even if I haven't regularly watched his commentaries in years. While it's easy to sum him up as an old grouch, telling the world to get off his televisual lawn, one of my favorite observations of his was a very unstereotypically-Rooney sentiment, about how myopic it is for one generation to assume that everything new is worse. I read it in a book of his essays when I was in high school: "It's just amazing how long this country has been going to hell without ever having got there."

It'll have to get there without him now. Congrats on a long, grumpy ride, Mr. Rooney.

CBS's announcement follows:

ANDY ROONEY TO STEP DOWN
FROM HIS “60 MINUTES” ROLE

Andy Rooney will announce on this Sunday's 60 MINUTES that it will be his last regular appearance on the broadcast. Rooney, 92, has been featured on 60 MINUTES since 1978.

He will make the announcement in his regular essay at the end of the program, his 1097th original essay for 60 MINUTES. It will be preceded by a segment in which Rooney looks back on his career in an interview with Morley Safer.

“There's nobody like Andy and there never will be. He'll hate hearing this, but he's an American original,” said Jeff Fager, chairman CBS News and the executive producer of 60 MINUTES. “His contributions to 60 MINUTES are immeasurable; he's also a great friend. It's harder for him to do it every week, but he will always have the ability to speak his mind on 60 MINUTES when the urge hits him.”

Rooney began his run on 60 MINUTES in July 1978 with an essay about the reporting of automobile fatalities on the Independence Day weekend. He became a regular feature that fall, alternating weeks with the dueling James J. Kilpatrick and Shana Alexander before getting the end slot all to himself in the fall of 1979. In Rooney's first full season as the 60 MINUTES commentator, the broadcast was the number one program for the first time.

He had been a contributor to 60 MINUTES since the program's inception. During the first season of the broadcast in 1968 he appeared a few times in silhouette with Palmer Williams, 60 MINUTES' senior producer, in a short-lived segment called “Ipso and Facto.” It was one of many experiments the program's creator, Don Hewitt, tried as an end for the program. Hewitt settled with the Point/Counterpoint segment that Kilpatrick and Alexander appeared in for a few years before finding the perfect coda for 60 MINUTES in Andy Rooney.

Rooney also produced 60 MINUTES segments for Harry Reasoner during the broadcast's first few seasons.

He wrote his first television essay, a longer precursor of the type he does on 60 MINUTES, in 1964, “An Essay on Doors.” From 1962 to 1968, he collaborated with Reasoner, with Rooney writing and producing and Reasoner narrating, on such notable CBS News specials as “An Essay on Bridges” (1965), “An Essay on Hotels” (1966), “An Essay on Women” (1967), “An Essay on Chairs” (1968) and “The Strange Case of the English Language” (1968). That same year, he wrote two CBS News specials in the series “Of Black America.” His script for “Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed” won him the first of four Emmy awards.

“An Essay on War” (1971), done for PBS, was his first appearance on television as himself and won Rooney his third Writers Guild Award.

Later, he wrote, produced and narrated a series of broadcasts for CBS News on various aspects of American life, including “Mr. Rooney Goes to Washington,” for which he won a Peabody Award, “Andy Rooney Takes Off,” “Mr. Rooney Goes to Work” and “Mr. Rooney Goes to Dinner.” Beginning in 1979, he wrote a weekly syndicated newspaper column that was recognized by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists when he was presented with its Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award in June 2003. That September, he was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Emmy. The Overseas Press Club gave him its President's Award in 2010 for his reporting in World War II for The Stars and Stripes.

Rooney joined CBS in 1949 as a writer for “Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts,” a Top 10 hit that was number one in 1952. He also wrote for “The Garry Moore Show” (1959-65), helping it to achieve hit status as a Top 20 program. At the same time, he wrote for CBS News public-affairs broadcasts such as “The Twentieth Century,” “News of America,” “Adventure,” “Calendar” and “The Morning Show with Will Rogers, Jr.”

In addition to magazine articles he wrote earlier in his career, Rooney is the author of 16 books, most recently Andy Rooney: 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit, was published by PublicAffairs in 2009. Rooney's other books are: Air Gunner; The Story of The Stars and Stripes; Conquerors' Peace; The Fortunes of War; A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney; And More by Andy Rooney; Pieces of My Mind; Word for Word; Not That You Asked...; Sweet and Sour; My War; Sincerely, Andy Rooney; Common Nonsense, Years of Minutes and Out of My Mind.

Rooney was born Jan. 14, 1919, in Albany, N.Y. He attended Colgate University until he was drafted into the Army in 1941. In February 1943, he was one of six correspondents who flew with the Eighth Air Force on the first American bombing raid over Germany.

Rooney lives in New York. He has three daughters and a son.

Source

Western powers angered as Israel agrees settler homes

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Israel's move could be seen as provocative

Palestinian UN membership bid

• Q&A: Bid explained
• Israeli view
• Palestinian view
• End of new beginning?

Western powers have expressed dismay at Israeli plans to build 1,100 more homes on a settlement on Jerusalem's edge.

The US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the move "counter-productive" to peace talks while the EU said the plan should be "reversed".

The announcement comes days after Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas called for full UN membership for a Palestinian state.

The new houses are to be constructed Israel at Gilo, in East Jerusalem.

Almost 500,000 Jews live in settlements on occupied territory. The settlements are illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.

'Provocative'

US-brokered peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians are deadlocked over the issue of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Mrs Clinton said Israel's move would damage attempts to resume direct negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.

Gilo is built on land captured by Israel in 1967

"We have long urged both sides to avoid any kind of action which could undermine trust, including, and perhaps most particularly, in Jerusalem, any action that could be viewed as provocative by either side," she said.

The European Union's Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton told the EU parliament that she heard "with deep regret" that Israeli settlement plans were continuing.

"This plan should be reversed. Settlement activity threatens the viability of an agreed two-state solution and runs contrary to the Israeli-stated commitment to resume negotiations."

She said she would raise the issue with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when she next met him.

"He should stop announcing them and, more importantly, stop building them," she said, adding that it was wrong to get people to live in a place from which they may have to move from after any negotiated settlement is achieved.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague too urged Israel to revoke its decision.

"Settlement expansion is illegal under international law, corrodes trust and undermines the basic principle of land for peace," he said in a statement.

'Nice gift'

The plan for construction in Gilo includes the construction of small housing units, public buildings, a school and an industrial zone, according to the Ynet news website.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

Settlement activity threatens the viability of an agreed two-state solution ”

Catherine Ashton EU Foreign Policy Chief

"It's a nice gift for Rosh Hashanah [Jewish New Year]," Yair Gabay, a member of the Jerusalem planning committee, told Ynet.

The authorities have now approved the building of almost 3,000 homes in Gilo over the past two years.

The chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said the decision represented a rejection of a proposal by the Quartet of Mid East negotiators - the US, the EU, Russia and the UN - for new talks between the Palestinians and Israelis, expected to be made officially on Friday.

"With this, Israel is responding to the Quartet's statement with 1,100 'NOs'," he said.

On Monday, a divided UN Security Council met behind closed doors for its first discussion of last week's Palestinian application for full state membership of the UN.

The request needs the support of nine of the 15 members of the council, but the US has said it will veto the bid.

'Discriminatory demolitions'

Israel built the settlement at Gilo on land it captured in 1967. It later annexed the area to the Jerusalem municipality in a move not recognised by the international community.

Israel says it does not consider areas within the Jerusalem municipality to be settlements.

Gilo lies across a narrow valley from the Palestinian village of Beit Jala. It became a target for militants during the second Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation in 2000.

Meanwhile, the UN rapporteurs on housing, water, sanitation and food rights said there had been a "dramatic increase" in the demolitions this year.

"The impact and discriminatory nature of these demolitions and evictions is completely unacceptable," they said in a statement.

"These actions by the Israeli authorities violate human rights and humanitarian law and must end immediately."

Source

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Commentary

What is Palestine supposed to do when Israel keeps taking more and more of it's land?

It does a peaceful resolution of asking for U.N membership, so that it can negotiate with Israel on similar footing, and the U.S threatens a veto?

Facts on the ground. That's what Israel is trying to change. If it can get enough Israelis living on Palestinian land, it will change the facts on the ground and take more land than it deserves.

Palestinians have broken zero U.N resolutions. Israel has broken more than 50.

The U.S is not an even handed broker, and the veto and oppression of the Palestinian people is proof of that.

Actions speak louder than words.

Social networking in its oldest form

26 September 2011 Last updated at 03:28 ET Help

Over the last two decades, Harold Hackett has sent out over 4,800 messages in a bottle from Prince Edward Island, Canada's smallest province along the Atlantic coastline.

Every message asks for the finder to send a response back to Hackett, and since 1996 he has received over 3,100 responses from all over the world.

In this First Person account, Hackett talks about the items people have sent him and the unexpected side effects from his hobby.

Source

Are viruses the way to green manufacturing?

By Karen Weintraub Cambridge, Massachusetts

WATCH: Angela Belcher, W.M. Keck Professor of Energy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

If Prof Angela Belcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gets it right, the future of manufacturing will rest on the shoulders of tiny organisms.

Although she's probably told the story a thousand times, Prof Belcher still talks with reverence about the shell she cradles in her hand.

The humble abalone, a slimy sea snail that occasionally ends up as someone's dinner, pulls calcium and carbon from sea water and transforms them into a durable, protective shell. Crusty and dingy on one side, shimmery and alluring on the other, this body armour is 3,000 times stronger than chalk, which is its chemical equivalent.

Abalone shells have inspired Prof Belcher's work for more than two decades and brought her to the pinnacle of science.

And they have implications for the future of manufacturing, green energy, medicine and science - just for starters.

Continue reading the main story

Some ideas, some technologies may sound like science fiction, but they are fast becoming science fact. In our eight-part series we will be exploring ideas that are the future of technology.

• Read/write your own genetic code
• Special report: Ideas that could change the world

New materials for vexing problems

Prof Belcher's work unites the inanimate world of simple chemicals with proteins made by living creatures, a mash-up of the living and the lifeless.

She is motivated, she says, by a simple question: "How do you give life to non-living things?"

Like the abalone collecting its materials in shallow water and then laying them down like bricks in a wall, Belcher takes basic chemical elements from the natural world: carbon, calcium, silicon, zinc. Then she mixes them with simple, harmless viruses whose genes have been reprogrammed to promote random variations.

The resulting new materials just might address some of our most vexing problems.

"What drives me is solving important problems," Prof Belcher says. "I look at what are the important problems: energy, healthcare, water."

Help from nature

To that end, her work has already led to efficient solar cells and powerful batteries (that she hopes one day will be good enough to run her car); a possibly cheaper, greener way of producing plastics; and a potentially better way to peer into deeply buried tumours in the breast and abdomen. This summer her lab started a water purification project.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

I think 50 years from now, we'll look back on biology... and say this is one of the fundamental tools we developed in this century.”

Prof Yet-Ming Chiang Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Prof Belcher is far from the only scientist trying to solve important problems with help from nature. There are glues inspired by gecko feet, robots designed to mimic bugs, and myriad other examples.

The distinctiveness of Prof Belcher's work, colleagues say, lies in her use of biology to synthesise new materials for such a wide range of uses, to develop an entirely new method for producing entirely novel materials.

"Her methodologies for directing and assembling materials I think will be unique," says Yet-Ming Chiang, an MIT professor who collaborates with Prof Belcher on battery research. "I think 50 years from now, we'll look back on biology as an important part of the toolkit in manufacturing... we'll look back and say this is one of the fundamental tools we developed in this century."

In her element

Nature has done an amazing job of making materials that create and feed themselves with readily abundant, non-toxic resources. But it took a long time to get good at this stuff. The first life forms appeared 500 million years ago, and the big explosion of diversity in the Cambrian period, took 50 million years.

As Prof Belcher jokes with a straight face, it's hard to convince funders and graduate students to sign on for a 50-million-year-long project.

Angela Belcher can be a quite funny person, particularly in her speeches - although you have to pay close attention to realise she's just made a joke.

She doesn't signal ahead of time that it's coming, or even crack a smile when it does. It's almost as if she's checking to see if you're really paying attention.

"Angela's technology is literally like Project God," say colleagues

One of her favourite things to talk about in speeches are the periodic tables she hands out to incoming freshmen at MIT each year. "Welcome to MIT. Now you're in your element," they proclaim. She gave one to President Barack Obama when he toured her lab last year. "He promised to look at it periodically," she tells crowds.

The periodic table is more than a prop for Prof Belcher, though. It's also her muse. Abalone genes code for proteins that call pull calcium and carbon from the sea; diatoms, a type of phytoplankton, do the same with silicon to make their own glass "houses."

Prof Belcher is now in the process of throwing viruses together with different elements from the periodic table to see what she can make.

Putting evolution to work

Instead of waiting 50 million years, she's speeding up the evolutionary process by running 1 billion experiments at a time. She starts with a billion viruses, harmless to everything except bacteria, that have been genetically altered so they each create slightly different proteins.

These viruses are mixed together with whatever elements Belcher has chosen from the periodic table - and out of the billion different proteins the viruses make, roughly 100 will link up with the elements the way she wants. Further testing narrows the candidate proteins down to a handful that have promising capabilities.

The viruses are the factories producing the material - their genes are programmed to link the organic and inorganic - but they are not present in the final product, so there's no potential risk of viruses running amok, says Prof Belcher.

She's found a few candidate viruses that can link methane and oxygen to form ethylene, a building block of plastics, fertilizers and tires. This ethylene assembly line can take place at room temperature, using natural gas, which is low polluting and abundant; current production requires lots of energy from high-pollution fossil fuels.

"There is some poetic justice in that we're using nature's techniques to be better stewards of the resources nature gave us," says Alex Tkachenko, president of Siluria Technologies, a small San Francisco start-up that Belcher founded to commercialise the process.

"Angie's technology is literally like 'Project God,'" says Mr Tkachenko. "You can produce materials the way nature makes them, so you can essentially remake the whole world in the way you like it."

Looking ahead

Just 43 years old, Prof Belcher is already at the pinnacle of science.

The mother of two boys - one and four years old - she is a full professor at MIT, supporting the work of roughly three dozen students. She was awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant, has been named a Time Magazine climate change "hero", and won every major award for young scientific innovators.

In addition to doing research and starting companies, she still teaches undergraduates, and rarely turns down a speaking request, whether to potential donors or school girls.

To say Prof Belcher has wide-ranging scientific interests is an understatement. At MIT, she works in the departments of Materials Science and Engineering as well as Biological Engineering - but her official title is Professor of Energy, and she sits in a new building designed for cancer researchers.

"Even in a place like MIT where you can't walk down the hall without running into someone famous, she stands out for her scientific vision and scientific bandwidth and ability to touch all areas of the community," says Prof Chiang.

Another colleague, engineering professor Paula T. Hammond, describes Angela Belcher as "the ultimate creative thinker."

"She does not get stuck or fenced in by other people's definitions or commonly accepted attitudes," says Prof Hammond. "She does not think 'within' a field, but beyond fields, allowing her to make connections between nature, medicine, energy, etc."

Prof Belcher does not seem to dwell on her accomplishments or the compliments of her colleagues. She's also not interested in changing the world in 50 years - she wants to do it now.

"We like to dream, but we also like to build things that can be integrated into people's everyday lives," Belcher said. "Everything to me is a material - material for cancer or material for energy doesn't matter."

Source

Q&A: Palestinian bid for full membership at the UN - The strength of 120 countries united for Peace - U.N Standing Ovation!

Q&A: Palestinian bid for full membership at the UN

Recent rally against Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory on the anniversary of the 1967 war.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has formally submitted a request to join the United Nations as a full member state. He said the request entailed international recognition on 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as a capital.

The idea is strongly opposed by Israel and its close ally, the United States.

Here is a guide to what is likely to happen and its significance.

Q. What are the Palestinians asking for?

The Palestinians, as represented by the Palestinian Authority, have long sought to establish an independent, sovereign state in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza - occupied by Israel since the 1967 Six Day War. However, two decades of on-and-off peace talks have failed to produce a deal. The latest round of negotiations broke down one year ago.

Late last year, Palestinian officials began pursuing a new diplomatic strategy: asking individual countries to recognise an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 borders. Now they want the UN to admit them as a full member state. Currently the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) only has observer entity status. This would have political implications and allow Palestinians to join UN agencies and become party to international treaties, such as the International Criminal Court, where they could take legal action to challenge the occupation of territory by Israel.

In a televised speech on 16 September, Mr Abbas said: "We are going to the United Nations to request our legitimate right, obtaining full membership for Palestine in this organisation".

Q. What is the general process?

There are clear procedures at the UN which began its annual General Assembly General Debate in New York on 21 September.

In order for the Palestinians to be admitted as a member state, they would need the approval of the 15-member UN Security Council. Any Council recommendation for membership would then need a two-thirds majority vote in the 193-member General Assembly for final approval.

Palestinians believe over two-thirds of the General Assembly would recognise their statehood.

At the start of the process, Mr Abbas submitted a request to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon on 23 September. Mr Ban then needs to hand the application to the Security Council which would establish a committee.

The Council would need nine votes out of 15 and no veto from any of its permanent members to pass a decision. However, the US has made clear it will wield its veto power. The UK and France would almost certainly abstain because they cannot endorse UN membership of a state they have not recognised bilaterally.

If as expected, the US vetoes, or the PLO decides to back down on its plan for full membership, it can submit a resolution to the General Assembly. A vote could be held within 48 hours of submission but would probably be delayed until after the General Debate ie late September or early October. This would give more time to negotiate a text that would have maximum support, from European countries in particular. Approval would require a simple majority of those present. There is no veto.

Q. What might a resolution say?

A resolution could ask for support for the Palestinians to be admitted to the UN as a "non-member observer state", an upgrade from the PLO's current status as observer. This status is held by the Vatican and has been held in the past by countries such as Switzerland.

Continue reading the main story

Palestinian UN membership bid

• Palestinians currently have permanent observer entity status at the UN
• They are represented by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO)
• Officials now want an upgrade so a state of Palestine has full member status at the UN
• They seek recognition on 1967 borders - in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza
• Enhanced observer member status could be an interim option

This would improve the Palestinians' chances of joining UN agencies and the ICC, although the process would be neither automatic nor guaranteed. Among Palestinians, there are also questions over whether an observer state of Palestine could represent the diaspora community of refugees in the same way as the PLO does. Speaking on 16 September, Mr Abbas denied the status of the PLO would be affected.

Diplomats say that elements of a General Assembly resolution could also include acknowledgement of the number of countries that have recognised Palestinian statehood (currently 126 according to the Palestinian ambassador at the UN), and an appeal to the Security Council to accept the Palestinians as a full member. The resolution could also include parameters for future negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

The Palestinians can follow either the Security Council or General Assembly paths, or do both.

Q. Is this symbolic or would it change facts on the ground?

Continue reading the main story

Who currently recognises Palestine?

	Yes	No
Source: UN, Foreign ministries
Permanent Security Council members (with veto)	China Russia	France UK US
Non-permanent Security Council members	Bosnia- Hercegovina Brazil Gabon India Nigeria Lebanon S. Africa	Colombia Germany Portugal
All General Assembly members	122	71

Getting UN recognition of Palestinian statehood on 1967 borders would largely have symbolic value, building on previous UN decisions. Already Security Council resolution 242, which followed the Six Day War, demanded the "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict". Although Israel disputes the precise meaning of this, there is wide international acceptance that the pre-1967 frontiers should form the basis of a peace settlement.

The problem for the Palestinians is that Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects these borders as a basis for negotiations. In May, when President Barack Obama called for border talks based broadly on 1967 lines, Mr Netanyahu described the idea as "unrealistic" and "indefensible". He says that new facts on the ground have been created since 1967: almost half a million Israelis live in more than 200 settlements and outposts in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Mutually agreed land swaps have been discussed in previous talks as a way to overcome this problem.

The Palestinians argue that admission of Palestine as a full member state at the UN would strengthen their hands in peace talks with Israel especially on the final status issues that divide them: the status of Jerusalem, the fate of the Jewish settlements, the precise location of the border, the right of return of Palestinian refugees, water and security. Israel says that any upgrade of the Palestinian status at the UN, is a unilateral act that would pre-empt the final status talks.

Q. Why is this happening now?

The main reason is the impasse in peace talks. However, the Palestinians also argue that their UN plan fits with an agreed deadline. The Middle East Peace Quartet - the European Union, United States, Russia and UN - committed itself to the target of achieving a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict by September 2011. Last year, the US President Barack Obama also expressed a hope that this deadline would be met. The Palestinian Authority Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, says that Palestinians have succeeded in building up state institutions and are ready for statehood. The World Bank and IMF have said the same.

Recent Arab uprisings also appear to have energised Palestinian public opinion. Officials have urged civil society groups to hold peaceful demonstrations to show their backing for the UN bids.

Q. How is this different from previous declarations?

In 1988, the late Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, unilaterally declared a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders. This won recognition from about 100 countries, mainly Arab, Communist and non-aligned states - several of them in Latin America. UN membership of Palestine as a sovereign state would have much greater impact as the UN is the overarching world body and a source of authority on international law.

Q. Who supports and opposes the UN option?

Recent polls suggest this course of action is supported by most ordinary Palestinians in the occupied territories. Mr Abbas's main Fatah faction backs it, although there is less enthusiasm from its political rival, Hamas, the Islamic group which governs Gaza.

After the recent Palestinian reconciliation deal, Hamas leaders accepted there was a broad consensus on the establishment of a Palestinian state within 1967 borders, though they formally still refuse to recognise Israel. Following Mr Abbas's speech on 16 September, they described the UN appeal as carrying "great risks".

Within the wider region, the 22-member Arab League has given this approach its full backing.

The latest US push to bring the Israelis and Palestinians back to negotiations quickly stalled.

The main opposition comes from Israel. "Peace can only be achieved around the negotiating table. The Palestinian attempt to impose a settlement will not bring peace," Mr Netanyahu told a joint session of the US Congress in May. Israeli officials have warned that any UN bid could terminate the peace process. They also worry that possible Palestinian accession to the ICC could lead to the pursuit of war crimes charges at the Hague and say there is potential for rising tensions to trigger violence in the West Bank. Settlers there have received Israeli military training in preparation for this scenario.

The US has joined Israel in vociferously urging the Palestinians to drop their UN bid and return to negotiations, which were previously derailed by the settlement issue. In his recent major speech on the Middle East, President Obama dismissed the Palestinian push as "symbolic actions to isolate Israel at the United Nations". The White House sent two envoys to the region to try to persuade the Palestinians to change their minds. However, Palestinian officials say the Americans presented no alternative to going to the UN.

Only nine out of 27 European Union countries have formally recognised a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders. Others are looking increasingly favourably on the idea. This is mainly because of their frustration with Mr Netanyahu's government in Israel-Palestinian peace talks and what they see as its recalcitrance over settlements. Britain, France and Germany are likely to support a General Assembly resolution only if it includes a clear roadmap back to the negotiating table.

In the coming days, both Palestinian and Israeli delegations will be on a diplomatic drive to win countries around to their point of view.

Source

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas makes UN statehood bid

President Abbas received a standing ovation as he announced his application to the UN

Continue reading the main story

Palestinian UN membership bid

• Q&A: Bid explained
• Israeli view
• Palestinian view
• EU tested

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has submitted his bid to the UN for recognition of a Palestinian state.

To rapturous applause in the General Assembly, he urged the Security Council to back a state with pre-1967 borders.

He said the Palestinians had entered negotiations with Israel with sincere intentions, but blamed the building of Jewish settlements for their failure.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said he was reaching out to Palestinians and blamed them for refusing to negotiate.

"I continue to hope that President Abbas will be my partner in peace," he said in his speech in New York.

"Let's meet here today in the United Nations. Who's there to stop us?"

Mr Netanyahu added that the core of the conflict was not settlements but the refusal of the Palestinians to recognise Israel as a Jewish state.

Meanwhile the Quartet of Middle East mediators - the UN, EU, US and Russia - said in a statement it wanted Israelis and Palestinians to meet within one month to agree an agenda for talks, and aim for a peace deal by the end of 2012.

Continue reading the main story

At the scene

Kevin Connolly BBC News, Ramallah

Mahmoud Abbas was greeted with warm enough applause in New York but in Clock Square in Ramallah, where a huge crowd gathered around a big screen to watch him in the purple light of evening, the reception was rapturous.

He is not a spellbinding speaker and he may never hold a crowd in quite this way again. The gathering in Ramallah had hoped that he would portray their case to be included among the nations of the world with passion and they weren't disappointed.

It was not a vast gathering but it was tightly packed into the small square, and the noise reverberated around the streets of the city.

Mr Abbas sometimes frustrates his Palestinian followers but in defying the US threat to veto his application, he has delighted them. Everyone packed into Clock Square knows this will not produce statehood immediately but there is a vague hope that it will enhance Palestinian status in future talks.

Hours after receiving it, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon transmitted the Palestinian request to the Security Council.

Nawaf Salam, Lebanon's ambassador to the UN and the current Security Council president, said the application would be discussed on Monday.

In order to pass, it would need the backing of nine out of 15 council members, with no vetoes from the permanent members, but it could take weeks to reach a vote.

Israel and the US say a Palestinian state can only be achieved through talks with Israel - not through UN resolutions.

'Come to peace'

President Barack Obama told Mr Abbas on Thursday that the US would use its UN Security Council veto to block the move.

"I call upon the distinguished members of the Security Council to vote in favour of our full membership," Mr Abbas told the General Assembly, in what was for him an unusually impassioned speech.

He added that he hoped for swift backing. Many delegates gave him a standing ovation, and some were clapping and even whistling in support.

BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen says this is significant because the Palestinians may yet apply to the General Assembly for enhanced status if their Security Council bid fails.

"I also appeal to the states that have not yet recognised the State of Palestine to do so," Mr Abbas said.

"The time has come for my courageous and proud people, after decades of displacement and colonial occupation and ceaseless suffering, to live like other peoples of the earth, free in a sovereign and independent homeland," he said.

Benjamin Netanyahu: "Palestinians should first make peace with Israel, and then get their state."

He urged Israel to "come to peace".

And he said the building of Jewish settlements was "the primary cause for the failure of the peace process".

A spokesman for the Islamist movement Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, criticised the speech.

Salah Bardawil said Mr Abbas had deviated from the aspirations of the Palestinian people by accepting the 1967 borders, which he said left 80% of Palestinian land inside Israel.

'Future and destiny'

Meanwhile in the West Bank, crowds roared their approval as Mr Abbas demanded UN acceptance of a Palestinian state within pre-1967 borders.

"With our souls, with our blood, we will defend Palestine," they said.

Continue reading the main story

Palestinian UN membership bid

• Palestinians currently have permanent observer entity status at the UN
• They are represented by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO)
• Officials now want an upgrade so a state of Palestine has full member status at the UN
• They seek recognition on 1967 borders - in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza
• Enhanced observer member status could be an interim option

• Q&A: Palestinians' UN statehood plans
• Palestinian request
• Why Obama has turned towards Israel

Mr Abbas had called for peaceful marches in support of his initiative, but some clashes were reported:

• One Palestinian was shot dead by Israeli troops during clashes in the village of Qusra, south of Nablus, Palestinian sources say
• At the Qalandiya checkpoint, Israeli troops fired tear gas on stone-throwing Palestinian youths
• In the village of Nabi Saleh, protesters burned Israeli flags and pictures of President Obama

The process began with Mr Abbas presenting a written request for a State of Palestine to be admitted as a full UN member state to the UN secretary general.

The BBC's Kim Ghattas at the UN says that until the last minute, Western diplomats tried and failed to stop the Palestinians making the request.

Even now, efforts are under way to restart direct talks between the Israelis and Palestinians in an attempt to defuse tensions, our correspondent says.

Currently the Palestinians have observer status at the UN.

Source

'First Irish case' of death by spontaneous combustion

Dr McLoughlin said he had attempted to find an explanation

Related Stories

• Does spontaneous human combustion exist?

A man who burned to death in his home died as a result of spontaneous combustion, an Irish coroner has ruled.

West Galway coroner Dr Ciaran McLoughlin said it was the first time in 25 years of investigating deaths that he had recorded such a verdict.

Michael Faherty, 76, died at his home in Galway on 22 December 2010.

Deaths attributed by some to "spontaneous combustion" occur when a living human body is burned without an apparent external source of ignition.

Typically police or fire investigators find burned corpses but no burned furniture.

An inquest in Galway on Thursday heard how investigators had been baffled as to the cause of Mr Faherty's death at his home at Clareview Park, Ballybane.

Forensic experts found that a fire in the fireplace of the sitting room where the badly burnt body was found, had not been the cause of the blaze that killed Mr Faherty.

The court was told that no trace of an accelerant had been found and there had been nothing to suggest foul play.

The court heard Mr Faherty had been found lying on his back with his head closest to an open fireplace.

The fire had been confined to the sitting room. The only damage was to the body, which was totally burnt, the ceiling above him and the floor underneath him.

Dr McLoughlin said he had consulted medical textbooks and carried out other research in an attempt to find an explanation.

He said Professor Bernard Knight, in his book on forensic pathology, had written about spontaneous combustion and noted that such reported cases were almost always near an open fireplace or chimney.

"This fire was thoroughly investigated and I'm left with the conclusion that this fits into the category of spontaneous human combustion, for which there is no adequate explanation," he said.

'Sharp intake of breath'

Retired professor of pathology Mike Green said he had examined one suspected case in his career.

He said he would not use the term spontaneous combustion, as there had to be some source of ignition, possibly a lit match or cigarette.

"There is a source of ignition somewhere, but because the body is so badly destroyed the source can't be found," he said.

He said the circumstances in the Galway case were very similar to other possible cases.

"This is the picture which is described time and time again," he said.

"Even the most experienced rescue worker or forensic scientist takes a sharp intake of breath (when they come across the scene)."

Mr Green said he doubted explanations centred on divine intervention.

"I think if the heavens were striking in cases of spontaneous combustion then there would be a lot more cases. I go for the practical, the mundane explanation," he said.

Source

Light speed: Flying into fantasy

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

A photo from Cern's past, or a wormhole?

Related Stories

• Cern mulls 'crazy' physics find
• Particle 'flips to all flavours'
• Light-speed trick in stock trades

What if particles really can exceed the speed of light?

It is a fascinating and provocative question.

But first, it should be said that Thursday's news that physicists have seen subatomic particles called neutrinos exceed the Universe's speed limit is a picture of science still at work.

The researchers at Cern in Switzerland and Gran Sasso in Italy have tried really hard to find what they might be doing wrong - over three years and thousands of experiments - because they can hardly believe what they are seeing.

The publication of their results is a call for help to pick holes in their methods, and save physics as we now know it.

"The scientists are right to be extremely cautious about interpreting these findings," said Jim Al-Khalili, a physicist from the University of Surrey, who suggested that a simple error in the measurement is probably the source of all the fuss.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

We'll never get old - politicians would stay young forever”

Sergio Bertolucci Cern

But he has gone further.

"So let me put my money where my mouth is: if the Cern experiment proves to be correct and neutrinos have broken the speed of light, I will eat my boxer shorts on live TV."

Let us be clear: it would be a tremendously exciting time for physics, and a daunting one for physicists, but it is not going to change the price of milk.

Perhaps the most exciting thing is that time travel would look more feasible.

The speed of light is the cornerstone in Einstein's theory of special relativity, which is what gives us the concept of causality: causes precede effects, wherever you are.

Remove that requirement, and time becomes a much more fluid thing than the one-way arrow we think it to be.

Don't go buying one just yet

If an effect can precede a cause, showers of neutrons might arrive here on Earth before a supernova actually kicks off on the other side of the galaxy.

OK, here's what we really want: Back to the Future-style popping around in time might be within our reach.

It gets weirder. Einstein may not have been wrong if we concede that there are extra dimensions of space that particles can nip into and out of, and some theories have already been around a while that suggest it.

"They're not mainstream theories, but they're fine," Brian Cox, a physicist who has worked at Cern, told the BBC.

"Let's say you go from London to Sydney - you fly around the Earth," Prof Cox explained. "The other way to do it is to go through digging a big tunnel straight through the Earth, and that's the shortcut.

"In some ways extra dimensions can behave like that and ... the neutrinos could be taking a shortcut through another dimension."

That leads neatly on to the "wormholes" popularised in science fiction, connecting one place in space to another vastly distant one.

Quantum questions

The list goes on - and there is a host of other implications, most of which arise because the speed of light figures in so many equations in science.

Neutrinos are already unusual - they are often called "ghost particles"

It holds all of quantum mechanics together, for example, and that has given us the modern era of electronics, the internet, and the gizmo on which you are reading this.

Get an information-carrying particle going faster than light, and you change computing altogether. How about solving tomorrow's problems today?

This, again, is all speculation. But even Cern's director of research Sergio Bertolucci briefly got into the game.

"We all like the idea of travel in time, but it would be very difficult," he told the BBC.

"You can imagine: we'll never get old - politicians would stay young forever."

But Antonio Ereditato, part of the Opera collaboration that found the curious result, is holding fire on what it all might mean if true.

"I would prefer not to elaborate on that," he said.

"I'm sure that there are many, many colleagues in our community who will start to elaborate, but our task for the moment is one step behind: to make sure - absolutely sure - that this is a real effect and as solid as we think.

"But this must be confirmed by other colleagues. This is the way our work is done."

Source