Monday, February 1, 2010

A decades-old building collapsed along Ma Tau Wai Road in Hong Kong at about 1:30pm on Friday, local time. That building was located at 45J, Ma Tau Wai Road in Hung Hom. A shop on its ground floor was undergoing renovations when the building collapsed. The street was full of dust afterwards. Firefighters arrived at the scene to search survivors and they asked residents in the buildings nearby to evacuate the area. Those buildings included 45G and 45H.

Chief Executive Donald Tsang called for an investigation into the cause of the building collapse. He aimed at preventing similar incidents. The government required all old buildings with similar structures to undergo inspection, according to Secretary for Development Carrie Lam.

The government has confirmed that four people were dead in the incident. Rescue efforts ended on Saturday morning when the government confirmed that no one was missing. Lam visited the scene on Saturday afternoon and sought advice from the police and Buildings Department. The police has started its investigation into the incident. Secretary for Labour & Welfare Matthew Cheung said that the government would do its best to meet the victims’ needs.

The collapsed building was more than 50 years old. The government had inspected its five-storey structure before the incident and had ordered repairs. After the tragedy, the government announced that it would inspect buildings older than 50 years in one month. The government has restricted access to buildings at 45G and 45H as they were in danger.

Wednesday, April 13, 2005Mugur Is?rescu, the governor of the National Bank of Romania (BNR) predicted yesterday that Romania would adopt the euro sometime between 2012 and 2014, possibly joining the Exchange Rate Mechanism II as early as 2010.

In July 2004, Romania will revalue its currency, the leu, so that 10,000 old lei will equal 1 new leu, with 1 euro being equal to approximately 3.6 new lei. Dual pricing, in both the old leu and the new leu, has already been introduced from March 2005. The transition to the new leu is expected to stabilise the Romanian currency and prepare the country for euro adoption.

After Is?rescu’s declaration, many people commented that they were surprised by how late the target date for euro adoption had been set, being 7-9 years away. However, Is?rescu responded by stating that the new Central European members of the European Union, which joined in 2004, have not yet joined the euro, and that countries such as the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary are only expected to adopt the currency between 2008-2010, 4-6 years after accession. In Romania’s case, the adoption will take place 5–7 years after accession in 2007.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

NASA’s Cassini–Huygens spacecraft has discovered evidence for a large-scale saltwater reservoir beneath the icy crust of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The data came from the spacecraft’s direct analysis of salt-rich ice grains close to the jets ejected from the moon. The study has been published in this week’s edition of the journal Nature.

Data from Cassini’s cosmic dust analyzer show the grains expelled from fissures, known as tiger stripes, are relatively small and usually low in salt far away from the moon. Closer to the moon’s surface, Cassini found that relatively large grains rich with sodium and potassium dominate the plumes. The salt-rich particles have an “ocean-like” composition and indicate that most, if not all, of the expelled ice and water vapor comes from the evaporation of liquid salt-water. When water freezes, the salt is squeezed out, leaving pure water ice behind.

Cassini’s ultraviolet imaging spectrograph also recently obtained complementary results that support the presence of a subsurface ocean. A team of Cassini researchers led by Candice Hansen of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, measured gas shooting out of distinct jets originating in the moon’s south polar region at five to eight times the speed of sound, several times faster than previously measured. These observations of distinct jets, from a 2010 flyby, are consistent with results showing a difference in composition of ice grains close to the moon’s surface and those that made it out to the E ring, the outermost ring that gets its material primarily from Enceladean jets. If the plumes emanated from ice, they should have very little salt in them.

“There currently is no plausible way to produce a steady outflow of salt-rich grains from solid ice across all the tiger stripes other than salt water under Enceladus’s icy surface,” said Frank Postberg, a Cassini team scientist at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

The data suggests a layer of water between the moon’s rocky core and its icy mantle, possibly as deep as about 50 miles (80 kilometers) beneath the surface. As this water washes against the rocks, it dissolves salt compounds and rises through fractures in the overlying ice to form reserves nearer the surface. If the outermost layer cracks open, the decrease in pressure from these reserves to space causes a plume to shoot out. Roughly 400 pounds (200 kilograms) of water vapor is lost every second in the plumes, with smaller amounts being lost as ice grains. The team calculates the water reserves must have large evaporating surfaces, or they would freeze easily and stop the plumes.

“We imagine that between the ice and the ice core there is an ocean of depth and this is somehow connected to the surface reservoir,” added Postberg.

The Cassini mission discovered Enceladus’ water-vapor and ice jets in 2005. In 2009, scientists working with the cosmic dust analyzer examined some sodium salts found in ice grains of Saturn’s E ring but the link to subsurface salt water was not definitive. The new paper analyzes three Enceladus flybys in 2008 and 2009 with the same instrument, focusing on the composition of freshly ejected plume grains. In 2008, Cassini discovered a high “density of volatile gases, water vapor, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, as well as organic materials, some 20 times denser than expected” in geysers erupting from the moon. The icy particles hit the detector target at speeds between 15,000 and 39,000 MPH (23,000 and 63,000 KPH), vaporizing instantly. Electrical fields inside the cosmic dust analyzer separated the various constituents of the impact cloud.

“Enceladus has got warmth, water and organic chemicals, some of the essential building blocks needed for life,” said Dennis Matson in 2008, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“This finding is a crucial new piece of evidence showing that environmental conditions favorable to the emergence of life can be sustained on icy bodies orbiting gas giant planets,” said Nicolas Altobelli, the European Space Agency’s project scientist for Cassini.

“If there is water in such an unexpected place, it leaves possibility for the rest of the universe,” said Postberg.

Wednesday, November 1, 2006

If you put an elephant in front of a mirror, it will be able to recognize itself, according to a study performed by scientists on three female elephants at the Bronx Zoo located in New York City, New York.

During a test on the elephants named Happy, Maxine and Patty, a mirror was placed in their habitat and all three of the animals went over to the mirrors when they were released back into their habitats.

“Maxine, Patty and Happy immediately went over to the mirror when they were let out, which was really a surprise to us because most animals, when exposed to a mirror, act immediately as if it were another animal,” said a student who took place in the experiment and studies at Emory University located in Atlanta, Georgia, Josh Plotnik.

The mirrors were initially covered and when the elephants went to examine the new item, the cover was removed. Another elephant also began to play with a painted “white ‘X'” on its head when it walked in front of the mirror.

“They would go over smell it and then leave. They went straight for it — there was a lot of smelling the very first day. Both Maxine and Patty tried to climb the mirror wall and look over it,” added Plotnik.

Despite the activity, the elephants Plotnik says, who are usually very vocal to each other were silent during their examination of the mirrors.

“I was really surprised that there was no audible vocalization. These elephants are extremely vocal,” Plotnik said.

Until this study had been performed, only two other animals were known to be able to recognize themselves in mirrors – Dolphins and chimpanzees.

“This ability to recognize themselves in a mirror suggests a higher level of self-awareness,” said a senior scientist who was a co-publisher of the study, which was reported in the National Academy of Sciences, Diana Reiss.

Friday, February 13, 2009

The American civilian communications satellite Iridium 33 and the defunct Russian military communications satellite Kosmos-2251 collided over Siberia on Tuesday, according to NASA. The satellites, each weighing in excess of 1,000 pounds, and traveling at approximately 17,500 miles per hour, collided 491 miles above the earth.

The Iridium satellite was launched in 1997, and the Russian satellite was a Strela-2M model. The American satellite is expected to be replaced within the coming month as Iridium will maneuver one of its in-orbit satellites to replace the lost unit.

Although the first such satellite crash in space, such an event has been long predicted. Nicholas Johnson, chief scientist of NASA’s Orbital Debris Office at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center stated, “We knew this was going to happen eventually and this is it — this was the big one.”

While the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope are at minimal risk, the event does raise concerns that the debris cloud could collide with other satellites in the region, triggering an exponentially growing series of collisions and debris known as an ablation cascade.

The United States Strategic Command of the U.S. Department of Defense office is tracking the debris. The result of plotting analysis will be posted to a public website.