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Saturday, August 28, 2010
A group of researchers led by Terry Hazen, a senior ecologist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, have discovered a new species of microorganism. Hazen’s team started research in May this year. Their findings were based on more than 200 samples collected from 17 deep-water sites in the Gulf of Mexico between May 25 and June 2. The new species is distinctive for its oil-consuming activity in a wide range of conditions, and is playing a role in depletion of oil spills in the area. Scientists had been puzzled by the disappearance of oil in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Detailed maps were made on how the spilled oil went underwater and how far it was spread; however, some of it seemed to have disappeared. A grant from the Energy Biosciences Institute, and a partnership led by the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois that is funded by a USD 500 million, 10-year grant from BP, was the basis for support of the research. The U.S. Department of Energy and the University of Oklahoma Research Foundation also supported it. The field study was conducted during the first week. As Hazen said, “We deployed on two ships to determine the physical, chemical and microbiological properties of the deepwater oil plume. The oil escaping from the damaged wellhead represented an enormous carbon input to the water column ecosystem and while we suspected that hydrocarbon components in the oil could potentially serve as a carbon substrate for deep-sea microbes, scientific data was needed for informed decisions.” Sample analysis was eased because the researchers used the pocket-sized Berkeley Lab DNA sampler PhyloChip. It allowed researchers to detect the presence of thousands of species of bacteria in samples from a wide range of environmental sources, without the culturing procedures usually performed in a furnished lab workplace. With the device, Hazen and his co-researchers discovered that a dominant microbe, making up 90 percent of all the bacteria in the oil plume, is a new species, closely related to members of Oceanospirillales family, more specifically Oleispirea antarctica and Oceaniserpentilla haliotis. The previous works were measuring low levels of oxygen in certain areas to detect microbes activity. Researchers thought that increased activity would lead to more aerobic activities, such as breathing, which depletes the oxygen content in water. However, the newly discovered species doesn’t seem to be consuming much oxygen from the water column. The study found that oxygen saturation outside the oil plume was 67-percent, while within the plume, it was 59-percent. By Terry Hazen’s words, “The low concentrations of iron in seawater may have prevented oxygen concentrations dropping more precipitously from biodegradation demand on the petroleum, since many hydrocarbon-degrading enzymes have iron as a component… There’s not enough iron to form more of these enzymes, which would degrade the carbon faster but also consume more oxygen.” Analysis of changes in the oil composition as the plume extended from the wellhead pointed to faster than expected biodegradation rates with the half-life of alkanes ranging from 1.2 to 6.1 days. This microbe thrives in cold water, with temperatures in the deep recorded at 5 degrees Celsius (41 Fahrenheit). The summer observations showed the bacteria managed to consume the oil spill relatively quickly in June. Some commenters noted that the previously released oil dispersant COREXIT can have significantly eased the process of interaction of the microbes with the oil by making oil particles smaller and easier to access. As Hazen explained, “We’ve been out there continuously… Once the oil flow stopped on July 15, within two weeks we saw most of the plume disappear.” |
By Wikinews, the free news source Other stories: Science and technology
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Tuesday, June 7, 2011
British media has reported that Prince William and his recently wedded wife, Kate, are to move their London residence into Kensington Palace, close to Hyde Park.
Two units in the Palace, labeled Apartments 8 and 9, were previously occupied by Prince Charles and Diana, William’s parents, when they married in 1981. Prince William and his brother Prince Harry went to nursery and school nearby. Diana also lived in Kensington Palace after her separation and divorce from Prince Charles.
However, the newlyweds will not live in Apartments 8 and 9, as they are currently being used as office space. They will instead live in a small apartment that was previously occupied by staff. The palace has undergone some renovations, including asbestos removal.
The couple is also set to choose one “housekeeper-dresser”, who will provide valet service for the Duchess of Cambridge. Kate will continue to buy her own clothes, and the new servant is not to be seen as a “stylist”. The position has been advertised internally within Buckingham Palace.
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are expected to move within a few weeks, before they leave on a trip to Canada and the United States. The London residence is expected to be used only as a starter home for about a year. The couple will keep their permanent residence without personal staff in Anglesey, Wales, where William serves on the Royal Air Force as a search-and-rescue pilot. They will continue to run their Household Office at St James’s Palace.
Friday, July 13, 2007
| The BBC would like to apologise to both the Queen and Annie Leibovitz for any upset this may have caused. | ||
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has apologised to Queen Elizabeth II and photographer, Annie Leibovitz, after a trailer for a documentary suggested she had walked out of a portrait sitting when the photographer asked her to remove her crown.
The trailer shows a clip of the photographer telling the Queen, “I think it will look better without the crown because the garter robe is so…” The Queen responded with “Less dressy! What do you think this is?” The following clip shows the Queen walking down a corridor saying, “I’m not changing anything. I’ve had enough dressing like this, thank you very much.”
It has since been clarified that this second clip shows the Queen arriving at the sitting, not departing.
In a statement the BBC said, “In this trailer there is a sequence that implies that the Queen left a sitting prematurely. This was not the case and the actual sequence of events was mis-represented. The BBC would like to apologise to both the Queen and Annie Leibovitz for any upset this may have caused.”
The BBC blamed a production error for the mistake, saying, “This assembly was never intended to be seen by the public or the press. Unfortunately, this assembly was given in error to the BBC personnel who were preparing the BBC One autumn launch tape.”
The company responsible for the editing of the documentary, RDF Media, also apologized to the Queen. Michael Grade, previous controller of BBC One, blamed the mistake on “young, untrained” workers who “don’t understand that the basic ethic of broadcasting in this country is trust.”
Photographer, Leibowitz, commenting about the session in Vanity Fair even before the release of the trailer, said, “She doesn’t really want to get dressed up any more. She just couldn’t be bothered and I admired her for that.”
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
On Sunday, Wikinews interviewed creator of memorial site LisaMcPherson.org, former Lisa McPherson Trust employee and long time Scientology critic Jeff Jacobsen.
LisaMcPherson.org is a memorial site created in 1997 containing information on her death and the resulting legal case against the Church of Scientology.
Lisa McPherson died in 1995 while in the care of the Church of Scientology. After a car accident, she became mentally unstable. Scientologists removed her from the hospital and placed her in the Introspection Rundown, she died 17 days later while still in care of the Church. She was used as an icon during Project Chanology, the protest of the Church of Scientology by Anonymous. Protesters were pictured with signs that said “Remember Lisa McPherson” and “Ask Scientology Why Lisa McPherson Died”, other protesters had posters with her picture on it.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Lam Luong, a 37 year old shrimp fisherman from Irvington, Bayou La Batre, Alabama, United States, has confessed to throwing his four children off an 80 feet high bridge after a fight with his wife the day before. Police have charged Luong with 4 counts of capital murder.
Family members and friends told Fox News that the couple had been fighting over several things, including Luong’s girlfriend, on Sunday evening and Monday morning. Luong later drove off with his four children, whom he reported missing to the police and claimed he had left them with his girlfriend who lives in a hotel. Police however became suspicious due to “holes in his story” and he later changed his story. The Associated Press say that the authorities believe that Dauphin Island Bridge is where Luong threw the four children, of which he was the biological father of three, into the water.
Initially the family had feared that Luong had traded his children to fund a drug habit. Luong’s wife, Ngoc Phan, is at the family home which they shared with her mother. She was not available to comment to the media, but other family members said that they still have hope that the children are alive.
Police and other authorities are using divers, dogs and helicopters to search for the bodies in a 100-square-mile area with a total of 70 people on the case. The search had to be called off on Wednesday due to fog. Luong is scheduled to appear in court on Thursday January 10, 2008.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
| Never again, never again should Wall Street greed bring such suffering to our country. | ||
The US House of Representatives passed a significant overhaul of financial regulations that strengthens the government’s hold on banks and also creates a new federal agency to oversee consumer lending on Wednesday.
“Never again, never again should Wall Street greed bring such suffering to our country,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-MD after the bill was passed by the House.
The House vote, which was mainly split over party lines, had 237 representatives in favor and 192 opposed. Only three Republicans voted for the bill, though this was an increase from December, when no Republicans voted for the previous version of the bill. This new bill combines the old December bill with a newer one passed by the more conservative Senate last month.
But even though the Senate passed their bill already, support for the one passed Wednesday looks a little uncertain. Since earlier this year the Democrats lost their 60 vote filibuster majority, they had to secure the votes of a few more moderate Republican senators to beat back procedural hurdles. Democrats struggled to win the full support of these senators even after backing down on a US$19 billion tax on big banks and hedge funds, which had been opposed by Republicans. This group of senators includes Scott Brown, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. All three voted for the Senate bill last month.
The $19 billion tax was inserted in the 2000 page plus bill late last week, which came as a surprise to many large banks. Brown initially objected to the tax, and threatened to vote against the entire bill if the tax was not removed. Instead, the new way of financing the bill’s cost will be using $11 billion in cash that came from ending the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), a bill passed in 2008 that bailed out struggling banks, and also by increasing rates that banks pay to insure bank deposits to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. However, the increase in rates won’t affect banks with assets of less then $10 billion.
On Wednesday, Collins wrote a statement saying that she now planned to vote for the bill. However, Brown remained on the fence and said he would use recess during the week of July 4th to examine the details of the bill. He credited Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd for “thinking outside the box” in coming with a new way to fund the bill.
Other Republicans were much more opposed to the bill, and attacked it for failing to place tighter restrictions on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants that helped trigger the economic and housing meltdowns. House Republican leader John Boehner compared the new bill to using a nuclear weapon on an ant. In response, President Barack Obama said in a speech in Racine, Wisconsin that “[i]f the Republican leader is that out of touch with the struggles facing the American people, he should come here to Racine and ask people if they think the financial crisis was an ant.”
Saturday, August 6, 2016
Concerns about water quality at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games have expanded to include the inside training pool: top Australian swimming coach Michael Bohl moved his Olympic athletes from the main training pool on Thursday citing fear of infection.
The team had a pre-booked session in the training pool where they would have practiced uninterrupted. However, during the session the water in the pool turned, as Bohl described, “cloudy” and “soupy looking”. Concerned about his athletes’ health, he moved them from the training pool to the busier, but cleaner, main competition pool.
Bohl took his concerns to officials and was told the matter would be looked into.
This comes off the back of other water concerns in Rio, particularly in the Guanabara Bay venue for outdoor water events. An Associated Press-commissioned study found Rio’s Olympic waterways contained as much as 1.7 million times worse viral levels than the emergency threshold in Europe or the US. As a result, athletes were advised to keep their mouths closed and avoid putting their heads underwater or risk falling ill.
Swimming events at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games are to begin today.
Saturday, March 24, 2018
On Thursday, Charles Lazarus, the founder of United States toy retailer Toys “R” Us, died in Manhattan, New York, New York of respiratory failure. He was 94. His death came a week after Toys “R” Us announced that all of the stores were closing.
Toys “R” Us issued a statement in which they said, “There have been many sad moments for Toys “R” Us in recent weeks, and none more heartbreaking than today’s news about the passing of our beloved founder, Charles Lazarus. He visited us in New Jersey just last year and we will forever be grateful for his positive energy, passion for the customer and love for children everywhere. Our thoughts and prayers are with Charles’ family and loved ones.”
Michael Goldstein, who was a close friend and former Toys “R” Us chairman, said: “He was the father of the toy business. He knew the toys and loved the toys and loved the kids who would shop in the stores. His face lit up when he watched kids playing with toys.” In a phone interview Goldstein said that Charles Lazarus died in Manhattan.
Lazarus no longer held a stake in the chain, CNN reported. Lazarus took over his father’s bicycle repair shop in 1948 at the age of 25 and changed it to baby furniture. He opened the first Toys “R” Us store in 1957. Lazarus had remained its CEO until 1994.
Saturday, August 26, 2006
In what Humberside Police are describing as a “nasty” attack, a four year-old boy was left with a fractured skull after being battered with a brick. The incident happened on wasteland close to the child’s home in Hessle, East Yorkshire.
Charlie Davis was discovered by a couple on Thursday. He was in a puddle of blood and part of his ear was hanging off; doctors at Hull Royal Infirmary later performed surgery to repair it. He is still in hospital, and doctors say that his brain is not injured, despite having a fractured skull.
A spokeswoman from Humberside Police said: “This little boy has suffered a nasty attack and has some horrible injuries.”
Police think Charlie, who was playing with a friend, was molested by a male youth. His injuries suggest that he dragged the child across the ground, kicked him in the face, tied him to a tree and struck him with a brick.
The police spokeswoman added that police are pursuing several lines of inquiry. “There has been information suggesting possible suspects and these form one of the lines of inquiry being pursued.”
The assault is thought to have happened before lunchtime on Thursday next to Station Road which is near the Hull to Hessle railway line. “It is currently unclear how the child got to the area. He may have gone of his own accord, he might have been chased there or he may have been taken by someone against his will,” said the police spokeswoman.
Charlie, who was meant to be going on holiday with his family today, is too disturbed to talk to detectives about the incident. The spokeswoman said: “We do understand that the victim was struck with a brick which has resulted in his injuries. But, clearly, until police can get an account from the four-year-old victim it is not possible to confirm any more details of the incident.”
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
The World Health Organization (WHO) is a program of the United Nations and a global authority on human health. In an interview with Wikinews, the WHO tells about the current H1N1 pandemic.
The organization’s 93rd update as of March 26, 2010 states 213 countries, territories, and other communities have laboratory-confirmed cases and there have been at least 16,931 confirmed deaths, including 4,653 deaths in Europe and 7,673 in the Americas.
Wikinews reporter Mike Morales talks with Karen Mah, a media relations representative for the WHO, and asks her several questions.