NASA planet-hunter is injured and resting

Lisa Grossman, physical sciences reporter

(Image: NASA/Kepler mission/Wendy Stenzel)

NASA's planet-hunting Kepler telescope has put its search for alien Earths on hold while it rests a stressed reaction wheel.

The injured wheel normally helps to control the telescope's orientation, keeping it pointed continuously at the same patch of sky. Kepler stares at the thousands of stars in its field of view to watch for the telltale blinks that occur when a planet crosses in front of its star. It has found nearly 3000 potential planets outside our solar system since its launch in 2009, transforming the field of exoplanet research and raising hopes of someday finding alien life.

When it launched, Kepler had four reaction wheels: three to control its motion along each axis, and one spare. But last July, one wheel stopped turning. If the spacecraft loses a second wheel, the mission is over.

So when another wheel started showing signs of elevated friction on 7 January, the team decided to play it safe. After rotating the spacecraft failed to fix the problem, NASA announced yesterday that they're placing Kepler in safe mode for 10 days to give the wheel a chance to recover.

The hope is that the lubricating oil that helps the wheel's ball bearings run smoothly around a track will redistribute itself during the rest period.

The telescope can't take any science data while in safe mode. But if the wheel recovers on its own, Kepler's extended mission will run until 2016, leaving it plenty of time to make up for the lost days.

"Kepler is a statistical mission," says Charlie Sobeck, Kepler's deputy project manager at NASA's Ames Research Centre in Mountain View, California. "In the long run, as long as we make the observations, it doesn't matter a lot when we make the observations."

Despite the high stakes, the team doesn't seem too worried.

"Each wheel has its own personality, and this particular wheel has been something of a free spirit," Sobeck says. "It's had elevated torques throughout the mission. This one is typical to what we've seen in the past, and if we had four good wheels we probably wouldn't have taken any action."

"I prefer to picture the spacecraft lounging at the shore of the cosmic ocean sipping a Mai Tai so that she'll be refreshed and rejuvenated for more discoveries," wrote Kepler co-investigator Natalie Batalha in an email.

The team will check up on the wheel on 27 January and return to doing science as soon as possible.

There are two exoplanet missions currently being considered for after Kepler is finished, says Doug Hudgins at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. One, TESS (Terrestrial Exoplanet Survey Satellite), would scan the entire sky for planets transiting the stars nearest to the sun. The other, FINESSE (Fast Infrared Exoplanet Spectroscopy Survey Explorer), would take spectra of planets as they passed in front of their stars as a way to probe their atmospheres.

The missions are being evaluated now, and NASA will probably select one this spring, Hudgins says. The winner will launch in 2017.

If Kepler goes down with its reaction wheel, that won't affect which mission wins, he adds. "That's a straight-up competition based on the merits of the two concept study reports."

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Getting the law to work for you

SINGAPORE: The National Trades Union Congress and the Law Society of Singapore have launched a new initiative to educate working people on their legal rights.

The initiative called 'Law Works' will include a series of programmes that will be implemented to reach out to PMEs, working women and freelance professionals.

The year-long campaign will see the publication of a 10-part quick guide and on-site legal clinics.

At the clinics, workers will be able to consult with practising lawyers on specific legal issues.

Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon said this collaboration is very timely with the recent legislative changes.

These include the Retirement and Re-employment Act which was recently passed and the Employment Act which is currently being reviewed.

Chief Justice Menon said: "Amidst these changes to the labour laws, it is critical that workers be made aware of not only the existing legal position, and equally that they are apprised of such changes.

"The focus of the labour laws is firstly to safeguard the interests of workers by conferring rights upon them, and secondly to enable them to understand their obligations and responsibilities in the workplace."

- CNA/fa

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Crave Ep. 105: How to clip your nails in space

How to clip your nails in space, Ep. 105

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This week on Crave, we're back from
CES with a look at some of the wackier stuff we spotted at the show. Then, Canadian astronaut Christopher Hadfield gives us a highly important grooming lesson on the safest way to clip our nails in outer space, and the Hal 9000 computer replica from ThinkGeek refuses to cooperate.

Crave stories:

- From iPad toilets to alien apps, CES brims with oddities

- I took a power drill to an iPhone at CES

- Electric ZBoard is controlled with your weight

- Get ready to program! Lego's Mindstorms EV3 robots are here

- The mind-controlled helicopter from Puzzlebox

- How to clip your fingernails in space without inhaling them

- Movie-accurate HAL 9000 bosses you around the house

- Vroom vroom: Mario Kart gets real-life run

Social networking:

- Stephen on Twitter

- Stephen on Google+

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Attack at Algeria Gas Plant Heralds New Risks for Energy Development

The siege by Islamic militants at a remote Sahara desert natural gas plant in Algeria this week signaled heightened dangers in the region for international oil companies, at a time when they have been expanding operations in Africa as one of the world's last energy frontiers. (See related story: "Pictures: Four New Offshore Drilling Frontiers.")

As BP, Norway's Statoil, Italy's Eni, and other companies evacuated personnel from Algeria, it was not immediately clear how widely the peril would spread in the wake of the hostage-taking at the sprawling In Amenas gas complex near the Libyan border.

Map by National Geographic

Algeria, the fourth-largest crude oil producer on the continent and a major exporter of natural gas and refined fuels, may not have been viewed as the most hospitable climate for foreign energy companies, but that was due to unfavorable financial terms, bureaucracy, and corruption. The energy facilities themselves appeared to be safe, with multiple layers of security provided both by the companies and by government forces, several experts said. (See related photos: "Oil States: Are They Stable? Why It Matters.")

"It is particularly striking not only because it hasn't happened before, but because it happened in Algeria, one of the stronger states in the region," says Hanan Amin-Salem, a senior manager at the industry consulting firm PFC Energy, who specializes in country risk. She noted that in the long civil war that gripped the country throughout the 1990s, there had never been an attack on Algeria's energy complex. But now, hazard has spread from weak surrounding states, as the assault on In Amenas was carried out in an apparent retaliation for a move by French forces against the Islamists who had taken over Timbuktu and other towns in neighboring Mali. (See related story: "Timbuktu Falls.")

"What you're really seeing is an intensification of the fundamental problem of weak states, and empowerment of heavily armed groups that are really well motivated and want to pursue a set of aims," said Amin-Salem. In PFC Energy's view, she says, risk has increased in Mauritania, Chad, and Niger—indeed, throughout Sahel, the belt that bisects North Africa, separating the Sahara in the north from the tropical forests further south.

On Thursday, the London-based corporate consulting firm Exclusive Analysis, which was recently acquired by the global consultancy IHS, sent an alert to clients warning that oil and gas facilities near the Libyan and Mauritanian borders and in Mauritania's Hodh Ech Chargui province were at "high risk" of attack by jihadis.

"A Hot Place to Drill"

The attack at In Amenas comes at a time of unprecedented growth for the oil industry in Africa. (See related gallery: "Pictures: The Year's Most Overlooked Energy Stories.") Forecasters expect that oil output throughout Africa will double by 2025, says Amy Myers Jaffe, executive director of the energy and sustainability program at the University of California, Davis, who has counted 20 rounds of bidding for new exploration at sites in Africa's six largest oil-producing states.

Oil and natural gas are a large part of the Algerian economy, accounting for 60 percent of government budget revenues, more than a third of GDP and more than 97 percent of its export earnings. But the nation's resources are seen as largely undeveloped, and Algeria has tried to attract new investment. Over the past year, the government has sought to reform the law to boost foreign companies' interests in their investments, although those efforts have foundered.

Technology has been one of the factors driving the opening up of Africa to deeper energy exploration. Offshore and deepwater drilling success in the Gulf of Mexico and Brazil led to prospecting now under way offshore in Ghana, Mozambique, and elsewhere. (See related story: "New Oil—And a Huge Challenge—for Ghana.") Jaffe says the Houston-based company Anadarko Petroleum has sought to transfer its success in "subsalt seismic" exploration technology, surveying reserves hidden beneath the hard salt layer at the bottom of the sea, to the equally challenging seismic exploration beneath the sands of the Sahara in Algeria, where it now has three oil and gas operations.

Africa also is seen as one of the few remaining oil-rich regions of the world where foreign oil companies can obtain production-sharing agreements with governments, contracts that allow them a share of the revenue from the barrels they produce, instead of more limited service contracts for work performed.

"You now have the technology to tap the resources more effectively, and the fiscal terms are going to be more attractive than elsewhere—you put these things together and it's been a hot place to drill," says Jaffe, who doesn't see the energy industry's interest in Africa waning, despite the increased terrorism risk. "What I think will happen in some of these countries is that the companies are going to reveal new securities systems and procedures they have to keep workers safe," she says. "I don't think they will abandon these countries."

This story is part of a special series that explores energy issues. For more, visit The Great Energy Challenge.

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Armstrong Tearful Over Telling Kids Truth

Lance Armstrong, 41, began to cry today as he described finding out his son Luke, 13, was publicly defending him from accusations that he doped during his cycling career.

Armstrong said that he knew, at that moment, that he would have to publicly admit to taking performance-enhancing drugs and having oxygen-boosting blood transfusions when competing in the Tour de France. He made those admissions to Oprah Winfrey in a two-part interview airing Thursday and tonight.

"When this all really started, I saw my son defending me, and saying, 'That's not true. What you're saying about my dad? That's not true,'" Armstrong said, tearing up during the second installment of his interview tonight. "And it almost goes to this question of, 'Why now?'

"That's when I knew I had to talk," Armstrong said. "He never asked me. He never said, 'Dad, is this true?' He trusted me."

He told Winfrey that he sat down with his children over the holidays to come clean about his drug use.

"I said, 'Listen, there's been a lot of questions about your dad, about my career and whether I doped or did not dope,'" he said he told them. "'I always denied that. I've always been ruthless and defiant about that, which is why you defended me, which makes it even sicker' I said, 'I want you to know that it's true.'"

He added that his mother was "a wreck" over the scandal.

Armstrong said that the lowest point in his fall from grace and the top of the cycling world came when his cancer charity, Livestrong, asked him to consider stepping down.

George Burns/Harpo Studios, Inc.

Lance Armstrong-Winfrey Interview: How Honest Was He? Watch Video

Lance Armstrong-Winfrey Interview: Doping Confession Watch Video

After the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency alleged in October that Armstrong doped throughout his reign as Tour de France champion, Armstrong said, his major sponsors -- including Nike, Anheuser Busch and Trek -- called one by one to end their endorsement contracts with him.

"Everybody out," he said. "Still not the most humbling moment."

Then came the call from Livestrong, the charity he founded at age 25 when he was diagnosed with testicular cancer.

"The story was getting out of control, which was my worst nightmare," he said. "I had this place in my mind that they would all leave. The one I didn't think would leave was the foundation.

"That was most humbling moment," he said.

Armstrong first stepped down as chairman of the board for the charity before being asked to end his association with the charity entirely. Livestrong is now run independently of Armstrong.

"I don't think it was 'We need you to step down,' but, 'We need you to consider stepping down for yourself,'" he said, recounting the call. "I had to think about that a lot. None of my kids, none of my friends have said, 'You're out,' and the foundation was like my sixth child. To make that decision, to step aside, that was big."

In Thursday's interview installment, the seven-time winner of the Tour de France admitted publicly for the first time that he doped throughout his career, confirming after months of angry denials the findings of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, which stripped him of his titles in October.

He told Winfrey that he was taking the opportunity to confess to everything he had done wrong, including for years angrily denying claims that he had doped.

READ MORE: Armstrong Admits to Doping

WATCH: Armstrong's Many Denials Caught on Tape

READ MORE: 10 Scandalous Public Confessions

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Wild weather: Extreme is the new normal

The wild weather that greeted the new year is a taste of things to come

ALL eyes have been on Australia in recent weeks as a blistering heatwave triggered huge wildfires. The result has been a slew of amazing stories, including a family escaping by jumping into the sea and meteorologists adding new colours to heat maps.

But Australia's fires are just the most dramatic of a cluster of ongoing extreme weather events, including droughts in the US and Brazil and a lethal cold snap in Asia (see "Drought, fire, ice: world is gripped by extreme weather").

Lumping extreme weather events under a single umbrella can be misleading. Al Gore got into trouble when his film An Inconvenient Truth stitched together footage of numerous hurricanes and presented them as "evidence" of climate change.

But in this case it seems there really is a bigger picture. Scientists have warned for years that extreme weather would become more common, and now it is. What's more, although single events can rarely be confidently attributed to climate change, clusters probably can.

Many expected that such weather disasters would be what finally spurs governments into action. Perhaps surprisingly, there are signs that this is happening. A report by GLOBE International - a collective of environmentally concerned parliamentarians, of which Gore was a founder - says that politicians are doing more to combat climate change than they are given credit for (see "Progress on climate change action at national level"). It is a reminder that the impotent United Nations negotiations are not the only game in town.

But don't expect too much. Even if we began seriously cutting emissions, it would make little difference in the short term. A new study on stopping the impacts of climate change shows that rapid emissions cuts now would have only a small effect by 2050. The big dividends only emerge around 2100 (Nature Climate Change, doi.org/j7g).

This effectively means that emissions cuts cannot help us or our children. That is not an argument for giving up, but it doesn't inspire confidence that emissions reductions will ever be made a priority.

The spate of extreme weather, then, is a snapshot of the not-too-distant future. Soon, this will be the new normal. We call events like the Australian heatwave "extreme weather", but within the next few decades they will simply be "weather".

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.

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Palestinians brace for new rightwing Israeli govt

RAMALLAH, Palestinian Territories: The Palestinians are bracing for a new right-wing government that Israel's election is expected to produce, hoping that international and domestic moves will strengthen their position.

"There is complete ignorance and denial of the peace process and the two-state solution," warned Palestinian analyst Mahdi Abdul Hadi, director of the Passia think tank.

"Nobody is talking about the Palestinians."

Hanan Ashrawi, a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), said: "The absence of peace and the Palestinian question in the Israeli electoral discourse points to an inability to confront reality."

Israelis go to the polls on Tuesday, when they are expected to vote in a government which polls indicate could be even more right-wing than the outgoing administration.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud, which is running on a joint list with the hardline nationalist Yisrael Beitenu of Avigdor Lieberman, a settler and former foreign minister, is projected to win most seats.

And polls show the third biggest party -- and probably Netanyahu's biggest coalition partner -- will be the hardline religious nationalist Jewish Home, whose leader has pledged to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state.

"We're expecting a change for the worse and an increase in Israeli extremism, especially as Netanyahu is now allied with the extremists, and that doesn't bode well," Ashrawi told AFP.

The view from the Gaza Strip was equally gloomy.

"This Israeli election is a race to shed Palestinian blood, increase settlement activity and expel Palestinians," said Fawzi Barhum, a spokesman for Gaza's ruling Islamist Hamas movement.

Israel and Hamas engaged in eight days of bloody fighting in November over rocket fire on the Jewish state, which ended with the deaths of 177 Gazans and six Israelis.

Although an Egypt-brokered truce deal has largely been respected, it is only a matter of time before Israel's new government is drawn into a new confrontation with Hamas, experts say.

With the general election just days away, many believe the only answer is to strengthen the Palestinians' standing internationally and work towards overcoming the bitter rivalry between Hamas and Fatah, which dominates the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority.

"There must be a new, strong and unified Palestinian position in the framework of a national unity programme to confront this Israeli challenge and to protect our people, our land and our holy places," Barhum said.

Implementation of a stalled reconciliation deal between Fatah and Hamas showed encouraging signs last month.

Passia's Abdul Hadi warned said that any progress would be in "slow motion" although integrating Hamas into the Palestinian political system "would be a clear message to Israelis: 'You cannot have your cake and eat it'."

The Palestinians hope the international community will pressure Israel to resume peace talks which have been on hold for more than two years over the issue of settlement construction.

"Palestinians... are hoping that something might come from Brussels or Washington," Abdul Hadi said.

In the meantime, with their new upgraded UN ranking as a non-member state, the Palestinians have a menu of more than 60 international organisations they could seek to join.

Speculation has centred on the possibility of them looking to join the International Criminal Court where they could challenge Israel on settlement building.

So far, the Palestinians have said they would only exercise that option as a last resort, in extreme cases such as settlement construction in the E1 area near Jerusalem which could potentially cut the West Bank in half.

A more immediate concern is a financial crisis faced by the Palestinian Authority, which has been unable to pay its employees after Israel withheld tax and tariff revenues as a punishment for the UN move.

"Maintenance -- survival of the PA, financially and politically -- both in house and in the region" will be high on the Palestinian agenda whoever comes to power in Israel on January 22, Abdul Hadi said.

- AFP/xq

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Crave giveaway: Laptop bag packed with CES 2013 swag

Gear, glorious gear. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET)

Last year, readers liked our CES swag giveaway so much that we're doing one again this year -- in a big way. CNET staffers collected so many great goodies at CES 2013 that we have enough freebies for two separate giveaways.

This week's winner will score, among other prizes, an itty-bitty 1GB NewKube Kube MP3 player; a Moshi VersaCover hard-shell case with foldable cover and stand for the
iPad Mini; and a Twig bendable docking cable for the iPhone and
iPod.

From Casio, there's a flash drive that can be worn as a bracelet, and another little flash drive from Pepcom. Then there's a much-abridged version of "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley. It was automatically shortened using a language heuristics engine from Stremor, maker of the TLDR (too long; didn't read) content-condensing plug-in for Chrome.

Oh, and did we mention the "Always On" and "Apple Byte" stickers signed, respectively, by hosts Molly Wood and Brian Tong? It all comes in a sturdy SwissGear CheckPoint-friendly computer backpack from Wenger. Woot.

Altogether, this swag stash would run you about $220, but you have the chance to get the whole thing for free. How? Well, there are a couple of rules here and there, so please read carefully. And be sure to check back next Friday for part two of our awesome-stuff-from-CES giveaway.

• Register as a CNET user. Go to the top of this page and hit the Join CNET link to start the registration process. If you're already registered, there's no need to register again.


• Leave a comment below. You can leave whatever comment you want. If it's funny or insightful, it won't help you win, but we're trying to have fun here, so anything entertaining is appreciated.


• Leave only one comment. You may enter for this specific giveaway only once. If you enter more than one comment, you will be automatically disqualified.
  


• The winner will be chosen randomly. The winner will receive one (1) CES swag bag, with a retail value of about $220.


• If you are chosen, you will be notified via e-mail. The winner must respond within three days of the end of the sweepstakes. If you do not respond within that period, another winner will be chosen.


• Entries can be submitted until Monday, January 21, at 12 p.m. ET.

And here's the disclaimer that our legal department said we had to include (sorry for the caps, but rules are rules):

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. A PURCHASE WILL NOT INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING. YOU HAVE NOT YET WON. MUST BE LEGAL RESIDENT OF ONE OF THE 50 UNITED STATES OR D.C., 18 YEARS OLD OR AGE OF MAJORITY, WHICHEVER IS OLDER IN YOUR STATE OF RESIDENCE AT DATE OF ENTRY INTO SWEEPSTAKES. VOID IN PUERTO RICO, ALL U.S. TERRITORIES AND POSSESSIONS AND WHERE PROHIBITED BY LAW. Sweepstakes ends at 12 p.m. ET on Monday, January 21, 2013. See official rules for details.

Good luck.

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Opinion: Lance One of Many Tour de France Cheaters

Editor's note: England-based writer and photographer Roff Smith rides around 10,000 miles a year through the lanes of Sussex and Kent and writes a cycling blog at: www.my-bicycle-and-I.co.uk

And so, the television correspondent said to the former Tour de France champion, a man who had been lionised for years, feted as the greatest cyclist of his day, did you ever use drugs in the course of your career?

"Yes," came the reply. "Whenever it was necessary."

"And how often was that?" came the follow-up question.

"Almost all the time!"

This is not a leak of a transcript from Oprah Winfrey's much anticipated tell-all with disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, but instead was lifted from a decades-old interview with Fausto Coppi, the great Italian road cycling champion of the 1940s and 1950s.

To this day, though, Coppi is lauded as one of the gods of cycling, an icon of a distant and mythical golden age in the sport.

So is five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil (1957, 1961-64) who famously remarked that it was impossible "to ride the Tour on mineral water."

"You would have to be an imbecile or a crook to imagine that a professional cyclist who races for 235 days a year can hold the pace without stimulants," Anquetil said.

And then there's British cycling champion Tommy Simpson, who died of heart failure while trying to race up Mont Ventoux during the 1967 Tour de France, a victim of heat, stress, and a heady cocktail of amphetamines.

All are heroes today. If their performance-enhancing peccadillos are not forgotten, they have at least been glossed over in the popular imagination.

As the latest chapter of the sorry Lance Armstrong saga unfolds, it is worth looking at the history of cheating in the Tour de France to get a sense of perspective. This is not an attempt at rationalisation or justification for what Lance did. Far from it.

But the simple, unpalatable fact is that cheating, drugs, and dirty tricks have been part and parcel of the Tour de France nearly from its inception in 1903.

Cheating was so rife in the 1904 event that Henri Desgrange, the founder and organiser of the Tour, declared he would never run the race again. Not only was the overall winner, Maurice Garin, disqualified for taking the train over significant stretches of the course, but so were next three cyclists who placed, along with the winner of every single stage of the course.

Of the 27 cyclists who actually finished the 1904 race, 12 were disqualified and given bans ranging from one year to life. The race's eventual official winner, 19-year-old Henri Cornet, was not determined until four months after the event.

And so it went. Desgrange relented on his threat to scrub the Tour de France and the great race survived and prospered-as did the antics. Trains were hopped, taxis taken, nails scattered along the roads, partisan supporters enlisted to beat up rivals on late-night lonely stretches of the course, signposts tampered with, bicycles sabotaged, itching powder sprinkled in competitors' jerseys and shorts, food doctored, and inkwells smashed so riders yet to arrive couldn't sign the control documents to prove they'd taken the correct route.

And then of course there were the stimulants-brandy, strychnine, ether, whatever-anything to get a rider through the nightmarishly tough days and nights of racing along stages that were often over 200 miles long. In a way the race was tailor-made to encourage this sort of thing. Desgrange once famously said that his idea of a perfect Tour de France would be one that was so tough that only one rider finished.

Add to this the big prizes at a time when money was hard to come by, a Tour largely comprising young riders from impoverished backgrounds for whom bicycle racing was their one big chance to get ahead, and the passionate following cycling enjoyed, and you had the perfect recipe for a desperate, high stakes, win-at-all-costs mentality, especially given the generally tolerant views on alcohol and drugs in those days.

After World War II came the amphetamines. Devised to keep soldiers awake and aggressive through long hours of battle they were equally handy for bicycle racers competing in the world's longest and toughest race.

So what makes the Lance Armstrong story any different, his road to redemption any rougher? For one thing, none of the aforementioned riders were ever the point man for what the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency has described in a thousand-page report as the most sophisticated, cynical, and far-reaching doping program the world of sport has ever seen-one whose secrecy and efficiency was maintained by ruthlessness, bullying, fear, and intimidation.

Somewhere along the line, the casualness of cheating in the past evolved into an almost Frankenstein sort of science in which cyclists, aided by creepy doctors and trainers, were receiving blood transfusions in hotel rooms and tinkering around with their bodies at the molecular level many months before they ever lined up for a race.

To be sure, Armstrong didn't invent all of this, any more than he invented original sin-nor was he acting alone. But with his success, money, intelligence, influence, and cohort of thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyers-and the way he used all this to prop up the Lance brand and the Lance machine at any cost-he became the poster boy and lightning rod for all that went wrong with cycling, his high profile eclipsing even the heads of the Union Cycliste Internationale, the global cycling union, who richly deserve their share of the blame.

It is not his PED popping that is the hard-to-forgive part of the Lance story. Armstrong cheated better than his peers, that's all.

What I find troubling is the bullying and calculated destruction of anyone who got in his way, raised a question, or cast a doubt. By all accounts Armstrong was absolutely vicious, vindictive as hell. Former U.S. Postal team masseuse Emma O'Reilly found herself being described publicly as a "prostitute" and an "alcoholic," and had her life put through a legal grinder when she spoke out about Armstrong's use of PEDs.

Journalists were sued, intimidated, and blacklisted from events, press conferences, and interviews if they so much as questioned the Lance miracle or well-greased machine that kept winning Le Tour.

Armstrong left a lot of wreckage behind him.

If he is genuinely sorry, if he truly repents for his past "indiscretions," one would think his first act would be to try to find some way of not only seeking forgiveness from those whom he brutally put down, but to do something meaningful to repair the damage he did to their lives and livelihoods.

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Armstrong Admits to Doping, 'One Big Lie'

Lance Armstrong, formerly cycling's most decorated champion and considered one of America's greatest athletes, confessed to cheating for at least a decade, admitting on Thursday that he owed all seven of his Tour de France titles and the millions of dollars in endorsements that followed to his use of illicit performance-enhancing drugs.

After years of denying that he had taken banned drugs and received oxygen-boosting blood transfusions, and attacking his teammates and competitors who attempted to expose him, Armstrong came clean with Oprah Winfrey in an exclusive interview, admitting to using banned substances for years.

"I view this situation as one big lie that I repeated a lot of times," he said. "I know the truth. The truth isn't what was out there. The truth isn't what I said.

"I'm a flawed character, as I well know," Armstrong added. "All the fault and all the blame here falls on me."

In October, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency issued a report in which 11 former Armstrong teammates exposed the system with which they and Armstrong received drugs with the knowledge of their coaches and help of team physicians.

George Burns/Courtesy of Harpo Studios, Inc./AP Photo

Lance Armstrong Admits Using Performance-Enhancing Drugs Watch Video

Lance Armstrong's Oprah Confession: The Consequences Watch Video

The U.S. Postal Service Cycling Team "ran the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen," USADA said in its report.

As a result of USADA's findings, Armstrong was stripped of his Tour de France titles. Soon, longtime sponsors including Nike began to abandon him, too.

READ MORE: Did Doping Cause Armstrong's Cancer?

Armstrong said he was driven to cheat by a "ruthless desire to win."

He told Winfrey that his competition "cocktail" consisted of EPO, blood transfusions and testosterone, and that he had previously used cortisone. He would not, however, give Winfrey the details of when, where and with whom he doped during seven winning Tours de France between 1999 and 2005.

He said he stopped doping following his 2005 Tour de France victory and did not use banned substances when he placed third in 2009 and entered the tour again in 2010.

"It was a mythic perfect story and it wasn't true," Armstrong said of his fairytale story of overcoming testicular cancer to become the most celebrated cyclist in history.

READ MORE: 10 Scandalous Public Confessions

PHOTOS: Olympic Doping Scandals: Past and Present

PHOTOS: Tour de France 2012

Armstrong would not name other members of his team who doped, but admitted that as the team's captain he set an example. He admitted he was "a bully" but said there "there was a never a directive" from him that his teammates had to use banned substances.

"At the time it did not feel wrong?" Winfrey asked.

"No," Armstrong said. "Scary."

"Did you feel bad about it?" she asked again.

"No," he said.

Armstrong said he thought taking the drugs was similar to filling his tires with air and bottle with water. He never thought of his actions as cheating, but "leveling the playing field" in a sport rife with doping.

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Kinect sensor poised to leap into everyday life

WHEN Microsoft's Kinect gaming sensor first exploded onto the gaming scene in 2010, it wasn't long before people started getting excited about what it might make possible.

But despite some imaginative hacks, and even a stint in the operating theatre, the breakthrough depth-sensing technology that made Kinect such a success has had a hard time moving beyond the lab or living room. Now the firm behind the 3D sensor at the heart of the Kinect system is pushing to make the leap into a wide variety of consumer fields far removed from gaming.

At the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last week, Israeli firm PrimeSense showed how their depth sensor, called Carmine, is being put to use in myriad applications. And a smaller version of the sensor may soon be sitting in your smartphone or tablet.

"We're taking it way beyond the living room and putting it into almost anything," says PrimeSense's head of commercial markets, Ohad Shvueli.

Retail is the sector that looks to benefit the most. One firm, Shopperception, uses the sensor to constantly scan the area in front of the shelves in a supermarket to gauge shoppers' behaviour. Because the sensor can track arm movements - just like in Kinect - it knows when a shopper has picked up a certain product. The data is compiled and retailers can see a "heat map" of exactly where on a shelf most customers are reaching.

The sensor is also being put to use by Portuguese firm CoVii, which has written software that lets the sensor turn any simple flat-screen TV or monitor into a "touch-sensitive" device - only the user doesn't have to touch the screen. Because it can detect how far a user's hand is from the screen, it lets people interact by hovering their finger a set distance from the surface - something that would be perfect for interactive advertising displays that could be kept safe behind glass windows.

Meanwhile, California-based Matterport has been using the sensor to cheaply create an accurate, 360-degree 3D scan of a room that is complete within 10 minutes. Such mapping would make buying furniture for your living room a cinch, for example.

Styku, also at CES, has been using the sensor to create a virtual changing room where online shoppers scan their bodies at home and create an avatar to try on outfits to see how they look.

Sean Murphy, an industry analyst for the Consumer Electronics Association, which organises CES, says 3D sensing and gestural control are poised to become a much bigger part of our lives. "It really is the next frontier for getting people interacting with the world around them," he says.

Shvueli agrees, and is pushing hard for the technology to mature into a mainstay of our everyday lives. "Despite Kinect, 3D sensing is a non-existent market at the moment," he says. "We are in the very early stages of making it integrated into everything."

To that end, he says a new version of the sensor, called Capri, will bring depth-sensing to mobile devices. Capri is far smaller than the Carmine sensor, thanks to better heat dissipation. "Once Capri is in a tablet or a smartphone it is going to break the mass market wide open," Shvueli claims. He expects to have Capri sensors installed in commercially available devices next year.

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Nokia to cut up to 300 jobs in IT unit

HELSINKI: Nokia said on Thursday it will cut up to 300 jobs in a restructuring of its global IT organisation.

"As part of the planned changes, Nokia plans to transfer certain activities and up to 820 employees to HCL Technologies and TATA Consultancy Services," the company said in a statement.

The Espoo-based company said the majority of those affected by the changes were based in Finland.

The plan would increase efficiency, reduce costs and create an IT organisation "appropriate for Nokia's current size and scope," it added.

"These are the last anticipated reductions as part of Nokia's focused strategy announcement of June 2012," the company said.

In June last year, the company said it planned 10,000 job cuts by the end of 2013 amid massive cost-saving measures.

Once the leader in mobile phones, Nokia has been losing market share as consumers move to smartphones powered by Apple's iOS or Google's Android operating system.

The company was the world's number one mobile phone maker for more than a decade but lost that title to Samsung in 2011 and has registered six straight quarterly losses.

Credit rating agencies have downgraded the beleaguered Finnish phone giant amid worries over its future profitability and its cash position.

However, shares in the company soared last week after it published partial fourth quarter earnings that were better than expected.

It is scheduled to present its full fourth quarter and full-year 2012 earnings report on January 24.

- AFP/al

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CNET Member Giveaway: Fitbit Flex

Fitbit Flex

(Credit:
Fitbit)

After a great CES full of exciting tech and new ideas, we are back and hard at work. A little tired, but also thrilled to bring an exciting opportunity to the CNET audience. We'd like our users to be able to experience a little CES, so we are giving five lucky CNET members the chance to win the Best of CES award-winning Fitbit Flex. Coming out this spring, the Fitbit Flex won for best in Wearable and Health Tech, beating out a large and extremely competitive set for the coveted title.

The Flex is an activity monitor designed to be worn all day to track movement, sleep, and calories burned. The device syncs with your computer or smartphone via Bluetooth to record steps, distance traveled, and estimated calories burned through exercise. What's more, it's able to not only monitor your activity, but also your sleep.

We chose the Fitbit Flex as a Best of
CES gadget, but we're also interested to hear what you are looking forward to seeing hit the market this year. Tell us what tech you are looking forward to seeing or even buying in 2013 for a chance to win!

Interested in winning this Best of CES gadget? Here are the rules:

• Register as a CNET user. Go to the Join the Conversation section below this blog post and hit the Add Your Comment button. If you're not already registered, please do so. If you're already registered, there's no need to register again -- you just need to be logged in.


• Leave a comment below-- tell us what tech you are most looking forward to seeing hit the market or buying this year.


• Leave only one comment. You may enter for this specific giveaway only once. If you enter more than one comment, you will be automatically disqualified.


• There will be five (5) winners chosen randomly. Each winner will receive one (1) Fitbit Flex, which has a list price of $99.95.


• If you are chosen, you will be notified via e-mail. The winner must respond within three days of the end of the sweepstakes. If you do not respond within that period, another winner will be chosen.


• Entries can be submitted until Friday, February 1, at 11:59pm. PST.


• Thanks for entering the contest, and good luck!

Some legalese:

* NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. A PURCHASE WILL NOT INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING. YOU HAVE NOT YET WON. MUST BE LEGAL RESIDENT OF ONE OF THE UNITED STATES OR CANADA (EXCLUDING QUEBEC), 18 YEARS OLD OR AGE OF MAJORITY, WHICHEVER IS OLDER IN YOUR STATE OF RESIDENCE AT DATE OF ENTRY INTO SWEEPSTAKES. VOID IN PUERTO RICO, ALL U.S. TERRITORIES AND POSSESSIONS AND WHERE PROHIBITED BY LAW. SWEEPSTAKES ENDS 02/01/13. SEE RULES FOR DETAILS.

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6 Ways Climate Change Will Affect You

Photograph by AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez

The planet keeps getting hotter, new data showed this week. Especially in America, where 2012 was the warmest year ever recorded, by far. Every few years, the U.S. federal government engages hundreds of experts to assess the impacts of climate change, now and in the future.

From agriculture (pictured) to infrastructure to how humans consume energy, the National Climate Assessment Development Advisory Committee spotlights how a warming world may bring widespread disruption.

Farmers will see declines in some crops, while others will reap increased yields.

Won't more atmospheric carbon mean longer growing seasons? Not quite. Over the next several decades, the yield of virtually every crop in California's fertile Central Valley, from corn to wheat to rice and cotton, will drop by up to 30 percent, researchers expect. (Read about "The Carbon Bathtub" in National Geographic magazine.)

Lackluster pollination, driven by declines in bees due partly to the changing climate, is one reason. Government scientists also expect the warmer climate to shorten the length of the frosting season necessary for many crops to grow in the spring.

Aside from yields, climate change will also affect food processing, storage, and transportation—industries that require an increasing amount of expensive water and energy as global demand rises—leading to higher food prices.

—Daniel Stone

Published January 16, 2013

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Why musical genius comes easier to early starters

Good news for pushy parents. If you want your child to excel musically, you now have better justification for starting their lessons early. New evidence comes from brain scans of 36 highly skilled musicians, split equally between those who started lessons before and after the age of 7, but who had done a similar amount of training and practice.

MRI scans revealed that the white matter in the corpus callosum – the brain region that links the two hemispheres – had more extensive wiring and connectivity in the early starters. The wiring of the late starters was not much different from that of non-musician control participants. This makes sense as the corpus callosum aids speed and synchronisation in tasks involving both hands, such as playing musical instruments.

"I think we've provided real evidence for something that musicians and teachers have suspected for a long time, that early training can produce long-lasting effects on performance and the brain," says Christopher Steele of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and head of the team.

Sweet spot

Steele says that younger-trained musicians may have an advantage because their training coincides with a key period of brain development . At age 7 or 8, the corpus callosum is more receptive than ever to the alterations in connectivity necessary to meet the demands of learning an instrument.

However, he stresses that these connectivity adaptations are no guarantee of musical genius. "What we're showing is that early starters have some specific skills and accompanying differences in the brain, but these things don't necessarily make them better musicians," he says. "Musical performance is about skill, but it is also about communication, enthusiasm, style and many other things we don't measure. So while starting early may help you express your genius, it won't make you a genius," he says.

Nor should older aspiring musicians despair. "They should absolutely not give up. It is never too late to learn a skill," says Steele.

Journal reference: Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.3578-12.2013

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.

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Man charged over Changi Village murder

SINGAPORE : A man has been charged with murder, following a fight at Changi Village that left a man dead.

44-year-old Low Chuan Woo is alleged to have caused the death of 45-year-old Mohd Iskander Ishak on Monday night at a pub at Changi Village.

Media reports quoted eyewitnesses who said Mr Mohd Iskander was stabbed repeatedly.

He was taken to Changi General Hospital, but died from his injuries.

In court on Wednesday, Low was calm as charges were read to him.

Some of his family members were spotted in the public gallery.

He will be be back in court on January 23.

- CNA/ms

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Prosecutor in Aaron Swartz 'hacking' case comes under fire

Carmen Ortiz, U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts

(Credit:
U.S. Department of Justice)

A politically ambitious Justice Department official who oversaw the criminal case against Aaron Swartz has come under fire for alleged prosecutorial abuses that led the 26-year-old online activist to take his own life.

Carmen Ortiz, 57, the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts who was selected by President Obama, compared the online activist -- accused of downloading a large number of academic papers -- to a common criminal in a 2011 press release. "Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar," Ortiz said at the time. Last fall, her office slapped Swartz with 10 additional charges that carried a maximum penalty of 50 years in prison.

"He was killed by the government," Swartz's father, Robert, said at his son's funeral in Highland Park, Ill., today, according to a report in the Chicago Sun Times.

Last Wednesday, less than three months before the criminal trial was set to begin, Ortiz's office formally rejected a deal that would have kept Swartz out of prison. Two days later, Swartz killed himself.

"He was being made into a highly visible lesson," says Harvey Silverglate, a Cambridge, Mass., attorney who first met Swartz in 2001 and spoke with him after his arrest. "He was enhancing the careers of a group of career prosecutors and a very ambitious -- politically-ambitious -- U.S. attorney who loves to have her name in lights."

Ortiz' spokeswoman did not respond to questions from CNET today. The spokeswoman, Christina Sterling, had said earlier this week: "We want to respect the privacy of the family and do not feel it is appropriate to comment on the case at this time."

Replies Silverglate, the defense attorney and author of the book "Three Felonies a Day:" "It nearly made me puke. Out of deference to the family they weren't going to respond to the charges? It wasn't 'out of deference to the family.' It was out of deference to their careers."

Swartz was accused of 13 felony counts relating to connecting a computer to MIT's network without authorization and retrieving over four million academic journal articles from the JSTOR database (he was allowed to access JSTOR, but not to perform a bulk download). The advocacy group Demand Progress, which Swartz had helped to create and which helped to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act a year ago, likened it to "trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library." (Swartz also sold a company he founded called Infogami to Reddit and was one of the co-creators of the RSS standard for syndicating content.)

If Swartz had stolen a $100 hard drive with the JSTOR articles, it would have been a misdemeanor offense that would have yielded probation or community service. But the sweeping nature of federal computer crime laws allowed Ortiz and Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann, who wanted a high-profile computer crime conviction, to pursue felony charges. Heymann threatened the diminutive free culture activist with over 30 years in prison as recently as last week.

The Boston U.S. Attorney's office was looking for "some juicy looking computer crime cases and Aaron's case, sadly for Aaron, fit the bill," Elliot Peters, Swartz's attorney at the Keker & Van Nest law firm, told the Huffington Post. Heymann, Peters says, thought the Swartz case "was going to receive press and he was going to be a tough guy and read his name in the newspaper."

Heymann was also the Boston office's point person in a second investigation that spurred another young hacker to kill himself. In 2008, 24-year-old Jonathan James committed suicide after being named a suspect in a federal cybercrime investigation. His suicide note said: "I have no faith in the 'justice' system. Perhaps my actions today, and this letter, will send a stronger message to the public."

"The charges were ridiculous and trumped-up"

Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide two days after federal prosecutors rejected his attorney's proposal for no prison time.

(Credit:
Fred Benson/ Creative Commons: Flickr)

Ortiz has now found herself in an unusual -- and uncomfortable -- position: as the target of an investigation instead of the initiator of one.

An online petition asking President Obama to remove her from office has garnered 35,000 signatures. The threshold at the time for triggering an official White House response, which has not yet happened, was 25,000. (A separate petition asking for the removal of prosecutor Stephen Heymann has attracted only 4,000 signatures so far.)

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, a California Republican, said he has launched an investigation into Ortiz's prosecution of Swartz. It's a bipartisan sentiment: Rep. Jared Polis, a Colorado Democrat and former Internet entrepreneur, told the Hill that: "The charges were ridiculous and trumped-up. It's absurd that he was made a scapegoat."

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat whose district includes the heart of Silicon Valley, published draft legislation today (PDF) called "Aaron's Law" that would no longer make it a crime to violate terms of service agreements.

Ortiz had been a rising star in the Democratic Party: a law-and-order Hispanic prosecutor who had won high-profile convictions including Salvatore DiMasi, the former Massachusetts House speaker. The Boston Globe named her "Bostonian of the Year" in 2011 and reported last month that Ortiz was a potential gubernatorial candidate.

Swartz's friends and family have, in the days since his death, argued that Ortiz, Heymann, and assistant U.S. attorney Scott Garland employed tactics should have been reserved for serious criminals, not an activist who merely downloaded more articles than JSTOR would have preferred. A Swartz family statement posted at RememberAaronSW.com says: "The U.S. attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims."

Larry Lessig, the Harvard law professor who spoke at Swartz's funeral today along with Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, said in a blog post that even though Swartz had no intention of profiting from any downloaded journal articles, "our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed."

Alex Stamos, who the defense had planned to call as an expert witness on computer intrusion, said: "I know a criminal hack when I see it, and Aaron's downloading of journal articles from an unlocked closet is not an offense worth 35 years in jail." Law professor Tim Wu added that Ortiz's "legal authority to take down Swartz was shaky" after a federal appeals court ruling last year.

It's true that Swartz would not have faced 50 years in prison; that was, after all, the maximum sentence for his supposed felonies, not the minimum one. But Ortiz and her staff were intent on requiring that he plead guilty to multiple felonies and serve significant time behind bars.

Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society and former criminal defense attorney, elaborated on why Swartz was so reluctant to plead guilty:

There was great practical risk to Aaron from pleading to any felony. Felons have trouble getting jobs, aren't allowed to vote (though that right may be restored) and cannot own firearms (though Aaron wasn't the type for that, anyway). More particularly, the court is not constrained to sentence as the government suggests. Rather, the probation department drafts an advisory sentencing report recommending a sentence based on the guidelines. The judge tends to rely heavily on that "neutral" report in sentencing... If he plead guilty to a felony, he could have been sentenced to as many as 5 years, despite the government's agreement not to argue for more. Each additional conviction would increase the cap by 5 years, though the guidelines calculation would remain the same. No wonder he didn't want to plead to 13 felonies. Also, Aaron would have had to swear under oath that he committed a crime, something he did not actually believe.

JSTOR has said since 2011 that it had no interest in pursuing criminal charges, and added last weekend that it "regretted" having been drawn into "this sad event." MIT, which reportedly did encourage Ortiz to pursue the case, is now conducting an internal investigation.

Last Wednesday, two days before Swartz took his life, JSTOR said it was making its archives of more than 1,200 different academic journals free for the public to read.

Computer prodigy Aaron Swartz remembered

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Mars Rover Finds Intriguing New Evidence of Water

The first drill sample ever collected on Mars will come from a rockbed shot through with unexpected veins of what appears to be the mineral gypsum.

Delighted members of the Curiosity science team announced Tuesday that the rover was now in a virtual "candy store" of scientific targets—the lowest point of Gale crater, called Yellowknife Bay, is filled with many different materials that could have been created only in the presence of water. (Related: "Mars Has 'Oceans' of Water Inside?")

Project scientist John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said during a press conference that the drill area has turned out "to be jackpot unit. Every place we drive exposes fractures and vein fills."

Mission scientists initially decided to visit the depression, a third of a mile from Curiosity's landing site, on a brief detour before heading to the large mountain at the middle of Gale Crater. But because of the richness of their recent finds, Grotzinger said it may be some months before they begin their trek to Mount Sharp.

The drilling, expected to start this month, will dig five holes about two inches (five centimeters) into bedrock the size of a throw rug and then feed the powder created to the rover's two chemistry labs for analysis.

The drill is the most complex device on the rover and is the last instrument to be used. Project Manager Richard Cook, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that operating it posed the biggest mechanical challenge since Curiosity's high-drama landing. (Watch video of Curiosity's "Seven Minutes of Terror.")

A Watery Past?

That now-desiccated Mars once had a significant amount of surface water is now generally accepted, but every new discovery of when and where water was present is considered highly significant. The presence of surface water in its many possible forms—as a running stream, as a still lake, as ground water soaked into the Martian soil—all add to an increased possibility that the planet was once habitable. (Watch a video about searching for life on Mars.)

And each piece of evidence supporting the presence of water brings the Curiosity mission closer to its formal goal—which is to determine whether Mars was once capable of supporting life.

Curiosity scientists have already concluded that a briskly moving river or stream once flowed near the Gale landing site.

The discovery of the mineral-filled veins within Yellowknife Bay rock fractures adds to the picture because those minerals can be deposited only in watery, underground conditions.

The Curiosity team has also examined Yellowknife Bay for sedimentary rocks with the rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI).  Scientists have found sandstone with grains up to about the size of a peppercorn, including one shaped like a flower bud that appears to gleam. Other nearby rocks are siltstone, with grains finer than powdered sugar. These are quite different from the pebbles and conglomerate rocks found in the landing area, but all these rocks are evidence of a watery past. (Related: "A 2020 Rover Return to Mars?")

One of the primary reasons Curiosity scientists selected Gale crater as a landing site was because satellite images indicated that water-formed minerals were present near the base of Mount Sharp. Grotzinger said that the minerals' presence so close to the landing site, and some five miles from the mountain, is both a surprise and an opportunity.

The current site in Yellowknife Bay is so promising, Grotzinger said, that he would have been "thrilled" to find similar formations at the mission's prime destination at the base of Mount Sharp.  Now the mission can look forward to the surprises to come at the mountain base while already having struck gold.

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NRA Ad Calls Obama 'Elitist Hypocrite'

Jan 16, 2013 12:04am

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo

As the White House prepares to unveil a sweeping plan aimed at curbing gun violence, the National Rifle Association has launched a preemptive, personal attack on President Obama, calling him an “elitist hypocrite” who, the group claims, is putting American children at risk.

In 35-second video posted online Tuesday night, the NRA criticizes Obama for accepting armed Secret Service protection for his daughters, Sasha and Malia, at their private Washington, D.C., school while questioning the placement of similar security at other schools.

“Are the president’s kids more important than yours? Then why is he skeptical about putting armed security in our schools, when his kids are protected by armed guards at their school?” the narrator says.

“Mr. Obama demands the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes, but he’s just another elitist hypocrite when it comes to a fair share of security,” it continues. “Protection for their kids and gun-free zones for ours.”

The immediate family members of U.S. presidents – generally considered potential targets – have long received Secret Service protection.

The ad appeared on a new website for a NRA advocacy campaign – “NRA Stand and Fight” — that the gun-rights group appears poised to launch in response to Obama’s package of gun control proposals that will be announced today.

It’s unclear whether the video will air on TV or only on the web. The NRA did not respond to ABC News’ request for comment.  The domain for the website is registered to Ackerman McQueen, the NRA’s long-standing public relations firm.

The White House had no comment on the NRA ad.

In the wake of last month’s mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the Obama administration has met with a cross-section of advocacy groups on all sides of the gun debate to formulate new policy proposals.

The NRA, which met with Vice President Joe Biden last week, has opposed any new legislative gun restrictions, including expanded background checks and limits on the sale of assault-style weapons, instead calling for armed guards at all American schools.

Obama publicly questioned that approach in an interview with “Meet the Press” earlier this month, saying, “I am skeptical that the only answer is putting more guns in schools. And I think the vast majority of the American people are skeptical that that somehow is going to solve our problem.”

Still, the White House has been considering a call for increased funding for police officers at public schools and the proposal could be part of a broader Obama gun policy package.

Fifty-five percent of Americans in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll say they support adding armed guards at schools across the country.

“The issue is, are there some sensible steps that we can take to make sure that somebody like the individual in Newtown can’t walk into a school and gun down a bunch of children in a shockingly rapid fashion.  And surely, we can do something about that,” Obama said at a news conference on Monday.

“Responsible gun owners, people who have a gun for protection, for hunting, for sportsmanship, they don’t have anything to worry about,” he said.

ABC News’ Mary Bruce and Jay Shaylor contributed reporting. 

SHOWS: Good Morning America World News

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Poison pill: Not all mercury is toxic

A global treaty on mercury pollution will do more harm than good if it bans the vaccine preservative thiomersal

NEXT week, governments from around the world will gather in Geneva to finalise a long-overdue treaty on mercury. The aim of the negotiations is laudable: to ban those mercury-laden products and pollutants that are a danger to human health and the environment.

Among the targets are some of the most toxic products of the industrial age, including methyl mercury. This notorious compound killed and injured thousands in the Japanese city of Minamata in the 1950s and 1960s and still poses a significant global health risk.

Another compound facing a possible ban, however, is a benign medicinal preservative called thiomersal (thimerosal in the US). Although it contains mercury, there is no evidence that it is harmful. In fact, it helps save the lives of well over a million children every year. Banning it would be a grave mistake.

Thiomersal aside, the world clearly needs to deal with mercury pollution. Mercury is a powerful neurotoxin that is especially dangerous to unborn children. Estimating its global impact is difficult but in some populations almost 2 per cent of children are born with mental retardation caused by mercury poisoning.

Much of this mercury comes from industry, which consumes about 3400 tonnes of the element a year. About a third of this is used in batteries, 800 tonnes in a process called chlor-alkali manufacturing and 650 tonnes in so-called artisanal mining.

Most eventually finds its way into the environment, along with mercury released from burning coal, smelting metal, making cement and incinerating waste. Large quantities of mercury are also released by natural processes such as volcanic eruptions, forest fires and erosion. The United Nations Environment Program estimates that the total global emissions of mercury are between 4400 and 7500 tonnes a year.

Mercury released into the environment eventually finds its way into oceans, lakes and rivers, where it is converted into methyl mercury by microorganisms. This toxic compound accumulates up the aquatic food chain and is often concentrated at high levels in fish, shellfish and marine mammals - and ultimately in the people who eat them. Methyl mercury in food is the biggest cause of mercury poisoning.

In comparison to industrial and natural mercury emissions, thiomersal is negligible. The European Union's vaccine industry uses less than 0.25 tonnes of thiomersal a year, corresponding to just 100 kilograms of mercury. The American Academy of Pediatrics has described this as "infinitesimally small".

Thiomersal also serves an irreplaceable function. It has been added to medical products since the 1930s as a preservative, including in vaccines packaged in multi-dose vials. These are especially vulnerable to bacterial and fungal contamination because many doses are drawn from each vial. Single-dose vials, in contrast, are used once and then thrown away.

Vaccinating from multi-dose vials is cheaper than from single-dose ones. Multi-dose vials also take up less space, reducing the amount of refrigerated storage required to get them to where they are needed. They are thus particularly important for poorer countries, which do not have the money or facilities to use single-dose vials for large-scale immunisation programmes.

Currently 120 countries, accounting for 64 per cent of global births, depend on thiomersal-containing vaccines. These prevent an estimated 1.4 million child deaths a year, according to the World Health Organization. At present there is no substitute.

Thiomersal is also added to influenza vaccines, which can be important in developed countries. The consequences of banning the compound are therefore wide-reaching and dramatic.

A number of developing countries have expressed concern over thiomersal's proposed ban. Public health experts around the world, including the WHO, have no doubt about the importance of allowing it to remain in vaccines.

So why has thiomersal been dragged into the negotiations? The debate is partly fuelled by a historic confusion between risks ascribed to methyl mercury and the ethyl mercury in thiomersal. In 1999, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the US Public Health Service issued a joint statement recommending the removal of thiomersal from vaccines as a precautionary measure, following a US Food and Drug Administration review.

At the time there was abundant evidence that methyl mercury was toxic, but little evidence on ethyl mercury. Additional pressure came from rumours of a link between thiomersal and autism. Since then, however, numerous studies have shown that thiomersal is harmless.

In 2006, an expert panel convened by the WHO issued a statement on thiomersal in vaccines, concluding that there was "no evidence of toxicity". It highlighted the fact that while methyl mercury builds up in the body, ethyl mercury is excreted rapidly. The American Academy of Pediatrics has since endorsed the WHO's position.

Nonetheless, a handful of well-meaning campaigners still believe that thiomersal is harmful. Led by two groups - the Coalition for Mercury-free Drugs and SafeMinds - they have brought the thiomersal "debate" into negotiations designed to address environmental problems.

What happens next depends on the negotiators. The latest draft treaty does not specifically name thiomersal, but there is a clause that leaves the door open for additional items to be added.

There is no question that mercury is dangerous. But thiomersal is not a threat, and banning it would create far more human misery than failing to negotiate a treaty at all.

Heidi Larson is an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who studies public trust in vaccines

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.

If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.

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Japan, US fighter planes in joint drill

TOKYO: US and Japanese fighter jets on Tuesday carried out joint air exercises, an official said, days after Chinese and Japanese military planes shadowed each other near disputed islands in the East China Sea.

The five-day exercise involves six US FA-18 fighters and around 90 American personnel, along with four Japanese F-4 jets and an unspecified number of people, the official said.

The drill is being carried out over Pacific waters off the coast of Shikoku, the fourth largest of Japan's islands.

It comes weeks after hawkish new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe won an election landslide following campaign promises to re-invigorate Tokyo's security alliance with Washington and take a more robust line against Beijing.

The exercise also comes as a stand-off between China and Japan over the sovereignty of the disputed East China Sea islands shows no signs of letting up.

Tokyo reportedly scrambled fighter jets on Thursday to head off Chinese military planes in an area adjoining the airspace of the Japanese-controlled Senkaku islands, which Beijing claims as the Diaoyus.

A Chinese defence ministry official later said two J-10 fighters flew to the area to monitor two Japanese F-15 fighters that had trailed a Chinese Y-8 aircraft, according to China's official Xinhua news agency.

On Tuesday, one Chinese state-owned Y-12 plane flew close to -- but not inside -- the airspace of the disputed islands, triggering the scrambling of Japanese fighter jets, the defence ministry in Tokyo said.

The row between Asia's two largest economies over the uninhabited, but potentially resource-rich islands blistered in September when Tokyo nationalised three of them.

Chinese government ships have repeatedly gone to the archipelago's territorial waters since then.

Beijing insists it is simply patrolling islands it has owned since ancient times. Commentators say China wants to prove that Japan does not have effective control over the chain and draw Tokyo into concessions.

On Sunday, Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force carried out the nation's first military exercise designed to recapture "a remote island invaded by an enemy force".

Some 300 troops took part in the 40-minute drill with 20 warplanes and more than 30 military vehicles at the Narashino Garrison in Chiba, southeast of Tokyo.

Some 80 personnel from the SDF's First Airborne Brigade rappelled from helicopters to demonstrate manoeuvres to counter an enemy invasion of a remote island.

In October Japan and the US dropped plans for a joint drill to simulate the retaking of a remote island, reportedly because Tokyo did not wish to provoke Beijing further.

There was no outward indication that the joint Japan-US exercise that began Monday and runs until Friday was aimed at China, and the area being used was a long way from any contentious zone.

The official told AFP the drill had previously been staged from Iwakuni in the far west of Honshu, but had been moved to Miyazaki in the south of Kyushu out of consideration for people living near the base.

While the security alliance receives wide public support in Japan, there are tensions between bases and their host communities, particularly over noise and the risk of accidents, as well as associated crime.

-AFP/ac

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Why a smartphone may not be the best choice for everyone

Smartphones are hitting the mainstream market. And that means old and young want a piece of the action. But at more than $1,000 per year for service, a smartphone may not be the best choice for every consumer.

In this edition of Ask Maggie, I help a reader decide if he should get his parents smartphones or if he should spare them the hefty monthly service fees and get them new basic feature phones. I also help another reader decide if there is a less-expensive alternative to Verizon that will allow him to keep his unlimited data plan.

Feature phone vs. Smartphone

Dear Maggie,
My parents are moving to a new house and they currently have feature phones on T-Mobile. They Love the price of their plans and are happy with the features. Unfortunately, T-Mobile does not have coverage at the new house, and their coverage maps show that as well. So they asked me to research which carriers do offer service. And it looks like Verizon is the best option. I know Verizon now forces new customers onto their share anything plans. So my question to you is this: Would it be worth getting my parents iPhones? My sister, brother-in-law and myself all have iPhones (4S, 4, 5 respectively) and my dad has the
iPad 2. Would it be worth it to give them one of the three devices, or should we just go with feature phones? My dad is intrigued about the portable maps. And he's interested in a smartphone. My mom is indifferent at best. I was thinking of getting my dad an
iPhone 5 and my mom an
iPhone 4S.

Thank you,
Ted

Dear Ted,
First, I want to clarify something. Your parents do not need to get a Share Everything Plan from Verizon Wireless if they do not wish to get a smartphone. If they decide to stay with regular feature phones and they are new subscribers to Verizon, there are the traditional post-paid service options available. They could also consider pay-as-you-go service or special senior citizen services.

With this in mind, they have two options. They can continue to use basic feature phones and pay a lot less in service fees, or they can get smartphones where the functionality of the phone will be greatly increased but so will the overall cost.

Whether your parents should get iPhones or any smartphones really depends entirely on if you think they would use the features on a smartphone. Also, you should really consider the added cost, and whether adding smartphones to their lives is in their budget. After all, it's not the cost of the devices that are expensive so much as the service that comes with it.

I don't know how old your parents are or how tech-savvy they are. But if they're anything like my 70-year old aunt, who insisted on getting an Android smartphone from Verizon a couple of years ago and recently upgraded to the iPhone 5, the truth is they probably don't really need a smartphone. My aunt, whom I love dearly and who often asks my advice and then ignores it, has been a smartphone owner for more than two years now. And despite my best efforts to educate her on the functionality of her phones, the only thing she uses her smartphone for is to answer and make phone calls. She just learned how to text message, and she occasionally checks email from her phone, although she never replies to such messages.

Not only has she spent a lot of money on devices that she doesn't really know how to use and likely will never use to their full potential, but she's also stuck paying an overly expensive phone bill each month.

By contrast, my father, who is 71 years old and as cheap as I am, has a basic prepaid phone from AT&T. I bought the phone for him two years ago, and as part of his Christmas present every year, I put $100 on his prepaid account, which is good for an entire year. He uses the phone so infrequently that the $100 typically gets him through the entire year. If you do the math, that's cell service for $8.30 a month. Even if he uses $200 in a year, that's a phone bill of only $16.60 a month.

Your options

Let's get back to your parents and look at their options.

If your parents are on a tight budget and they don't use their phones very much, like my dad, then you could try a pay-as-you-go plan like the one I bought for my dad. Verizon has an offer that is similar. If you put $100 on the phone, you have a year to use all the money. But each call will cost 25 cents a minute. Text and picture messages will also be charged 20 cents and 25 cents, respectively. While the notion of a meter running while you talk may be too scary for some consumers, the reality is that it's much more cost-effective if you don't use a cell phone very much.

Again, I don't know your parents, so I don't know if they spend hours gabbing on their cell phones. But my guess is that if they are like the senior citizens in my family, they still have a regular home phone which they use for lengthy conversations. And their cell phones are often used for "emergencies," or when they are out and about for short conversations.

Verizon also offers a special discounted plan for senior citizens. If your parents are over age 65 and you buy them basic feature phones, you can get the 65 Plus plan for $59.98 a month. This price includes service for two feature phones and will give them 450 anytime minutes, 1,000 night and weekend minutes, unlimited Verizon-to-Verizon phone calls, and pay-as-you-go text messaging. If your parents are big talkers, this might be a decent option. But keep in mind those monthly charges add up, and it will still cost $720 for the year.

Unfortunately, Verizon doesn't offer a similar plan for seniors who want smartphones. So if you wanted to get your dad a smartphone and give your mom a feature phone, you'd probably subscribe to a family share plan where they'd share the unlimited voice minutes and text messaging, and your dad would get a chunk of data to use each month. This particular configuration at the lowest data tier would cost $120 a month. If both your parents have iPhones, the cost would be $130 a month if they shared 1GB of data. That's about $1,440 and $1,560, respectively, for the year.

Another option for your parents might be to go with a prepaid brand that uses Verizon's network. For example, Walmart's Straight Talk prepaid service allows you to choose phones that operate either on Verizon's network or AT&T's. It's a little tricky to know which phones will operate on AT&T and which on Verizon. On the Web site, you can type in your ZIP code, and it will display the phones available in that area. In theory, all the phones should then work where your parents live if they pop up on the page. But if you wanted to make sure you got a Verizon phone, a Straight Talk service representative told me on the phone that any phones with the letter "C" after them operate on Verizon's CDMA network. And devices with the letter "G" operate on AT&T's GSM network.

Since your parents were T-Mobile customers, there is also a chance their old phones could be used with Straight Talk, which means they don't need to buy new devices or even try to learn how to use a new device. In this case, the phones would operate on AT&T's network and if the phones are unlocked, you could just put the Straight Talk SIM in the device and it would work. But this will only work if there is AT&T coverage where they live and if the former T-Mobile devices are unlocked.

For a basic feature phone, Straight Talk offers service with 1,000 minutes of talk time and 30MB of data for $30 a month. If you want a smartphone, the Straight Talk service is a pretty good deal. It costs $45 a month and you get unlimited voice calls, texting, and data. (Note: Be careful of services that claim to offer "unlimited data." Typically, these plans do have a limit. In the case of Straight Talk, there is no limit listed in the service conditions, but the company says it doesn't allow "excessive" data usage. I've seen reports of some people getting notices when their data usage has been less than 1GB a month.) At $45 a month for two smartphones that is $1,080 for the year.

Straight Talk is offering the iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S through Walmart. But it only offers these devices in certain markets. As best I can tell from talking to representatives, it seems like most of those markets are in Florida. So if your parents are snow birds or live in Florida full time, they may be in luck.

At any rate, you will need to check to see if the Walmart Straight Talk iPhone is even available where your parents live. One other thing to keep in mind if you are considering a prepaid plan or pay-as-you-go service is that you will have to buy devices at full price. This may not be so bad if you're just buying cheap feature phones. But if you're buying smartphones, like the iPhone, it can be expensive paying for two devices at full price. But when you compare this to getting a subsidy with a higher monthly fee, buying the device at full price with a lower-cost plan usually works out to be a better deal.

The bottom line is that iPhones and really any smartphone are expensive devices to own. So unless your parents plan to use the features of these device, it's probably a waste of money. A less-expensive option for them would be to get a pay-as-you-go service on a basic feature phone and then buy a small tablet like the iPad Mini, the Nexus 7 Android tablet, or a Kindle Fire, which can be used on Wi-Fi networks for free. This way they can access the Internet and all kinds of apps, but they won't have to pay for the expensive data services associated with owning a smartphone.

I hope that advice was helpful.

Where can I get a Verizon-like data service at non-Verizon prices?

Dear Maggie,
I'm a longtime Verizon Wireless customer. I'm considering switching carriers to save money. I'm thinking that Boost Mobile, Metro PCS or T-Mobile might offer something better. I'm currently using an outdated HTC Thunderbolt. I can upgrade my device at any time with Big Red, but I don't want to lose my unlimited data. Is there any other company that can offer me a similar plan and service ($85 a month plan) as Verizon?

Thanks,
Shaboss

Dear Shaboss,
The short answer to your question is "yes." But there are a few caveats. When you give up Verizon Wireless, you are giving up a network and service you have been happy with. You can go to another carrier and get a less-expensive service, but you may have to make a few sacrifices depending on where you live and what other services are offered.

The three providers you mention in your question all offer unlimited 3G/4G wireless services at roughly the same price as what you pay now or for a bit less per month. But there are a few catches.

T-Mobile offers an unlimited everything plan for smartphones that includes unlimited data, voice, and text service for $89 a month. This is only $4 more a month than what you pay now. The service is very similar to Verizon's in terms of speed. While the service today is not 4G LTE, T-Mobile uses a technology called HSPA+ and in many areas the speeds are as fast as Verizon's network. And the data is truly unlimited. At this price point, T-Mobile does not throttle or slow down customers who hit a certain threshold of data usage. So if unlimited data at 4G speeds is what you're looking, T-Mobile offers the closest thing to Verizon.

Here's the catch. T-Mobile's nationwide network coverage is not nearly as comprehensive as Verizon's. Be sure that T-Mobile offers service where you live and work. But also be aware that when you travel outside major cities, your service may be more limited in certain areas than it was with Verizon.

Sprint Nextel also offers unlimited data service. You didn't mention it as an option in your question. But because you are considering Boost Mobile, which is owned by Sprint, I figured you should know what Sprint offers as well. Sprint's Everything Data plan comes with 450 voice minutes, plus unlimited data and texting service, and costs $80 a month. Sprint offers 3G and 4G LTE service, but its 4G LTE network is not as extensive as Verizon's. So unless you live an area with 4G LTE, you'll be stuck on Sprint's slower 3G service. In general, Sprint's coverage is also not as extensive as Verizon's service. So make sure you check regarding availability.

MetroPCS offers 4G LTE service in some cities, and it has a very attractive price tag of $60 a month for a service that offers unlimited data, voice, and text messaging. MetroPCS, which is currently in the process of being bought by T-Mobile, also claims that it doesn't slow or throttle customers who exceed a certain threshold of usage on their unlimited data plans. But the network coverage issues that plague T-Mobile when compared to Verizon are even a bigger issue for MetroPCS. MetroPCS is a small regional carrier. It operates in a lot of large cities, but its service is not everywhere. And so if you get this service, you need to be aware of this fact and make sure you have coverage where you most need it. Another thing to keep in mind is that MetroPCS doesn't own as much spectrum as Verizon does in markets where it operates 4G LTE, and so its 4G LTE network may not offer the same level of performance due to capacity constraints.

Boost Mobile is a prepaid brand owned by Sprint. It uses Sprint's 3G and 4G WiMax networks to deliver service. It does not use Sprint's LTE network. It also has a very attractive $55 a month price tag for its unlimited services. But I would warn you that the WiMax network does not have the performance or coverage that Verizon's 4G LTE network has. So that may be a concern for you as well. Virgin Mobile is another Sprint-branded prepaid service. You may want to consider this service too. It offers an unlimited data service for $35 a month. While it calls its data service "unlimited," it's really capped at 2.5GB per month. Also, this service will have many of the same coverage and speed issues that Boost has since it also uses Sprint's 3G and 4G WiMax networks.

If I were to recommend one of these three services for you, I'd probably recommend T-Mobile because it offers the widest network with the highest network speeds.

You may also want to consider some other prepaid services that use Verizon's network. For example, a company called Page Plus Cellular uses Verizon's 3G network. But it offers its prepaid service plans at a fraction of the price Verizon charges. And as I mentioned in the previous answer, prepaid brand Straight Talk, which is sold through Walmart Web sites and retail locations, also sells devices that operate on Verizon's network.

The main drawback to using a Verizon reseller is that you will only get access to Verizon's 3G network. So if you want a device that uses the 4G LTE network, you won't get those speeds on these services.

Depending on where you live, there may be other regional carriers or prepaid providers you may want to consider. For example, C Spire operates in the Southeastern U.S., and it offers many of the hottest new phones as well as service that's typically less than what Verizon or AT&T offer. But make sure it operates in the places where you live and work.

I hope this advice was helpful. Good luck!

Ask Maggie is an advice column that answers readers' wireless and broadband questions. The column now appears twice a week on CNET offering readers a double dosage of Ask Maggie's advice. If you have a question, I'd love to hear from you. Please send me an e-mail at maggie dot reardon at cbs dot com. And please put "Ask Maggie" in the subject header. You can also follow me on Facebook on my Ask Maggie page.

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