Sudanese refugees find unlikely home in rural Australia

Sudanese refugees find unlikely home in rural Australia - A rural Australian gold mining and farming town famous as the birthplace of "Waltzing Matilda" poet Banjo Paterson seems an unlikely home for refugees fleeing decades of conflict in Sudan.

But what started with a single pioneering family has become a thriving community of more than 300 people from the strife-torn north African nation who call pastoral Orange home.

"Maybe its best town in the world, especially the weather," explained Sudanese refugee Fathi Shouma in broken English.

"It is like area where we come from in Sudan, it's looking like same area and reminding me I'm living in the same area when I was born. Happy life is going on here."

Shouma's road to peace has been a long one -- he and wife Neimat Darar spent three years in an Egyptian refugee camp after fleeing their native Nuba Mountains, in South Kordofan, amid raging civil war.

It was a time they would sooner forget; women were known to vanish and there were stories of refugees being killed for their organs, with overcrowding, heat and disease a fact of daily life.

"Egypt is very hard," says Darar, sadly. "We can thank the God because he take us from there and we come here safely."

Proudly serving coffee in the kitchen of their modest brick home as the laughter of their children can be heard from the front lawn, Egypt seems a world away from suburban Orange.

But an influx of Sudanese have made it a home away from home. At the time of last census in 2006, some 24 percent of people in Australia on refugee visas at that time were from Sudan, making it the number one country of birth for humanitarian migrants to Australia. Iraq was second, followed by Afghanistan.

It has been seven years since the first family -- Osman Tag, his wife and seven children -- left Sydney where most of the refugees are initially settled, to find a new life in the 37,000-person town famed for its mines, agriculture, rugby team and icy winters.

Paterson, one of Australia's most famous poets and author of the iconic national folk-song "Waltzing Matilda", drew inspiration from the region's rolling hills and rivers, and Tag was reminded of Sudan's mountain country.

"I was born in a small village, small town is better to get good friend," Tag told AFP.

Though they're less than one percent of the town's general population, the Sudanese account for about 11 percent of Orange's multicultural community, which city spokeswoman Anni Gallagher described as a "significant" number.

Two-thirds of them are children and the move to rural Australia has been a sometimes challenging experience.

Local cultural programmes include horse-riding and learning to swim in the bright blue waters of the local swimming pool -- rites of passage for the town's children but very foreign experiences for the young refugees.

"We had kids who are usually quite cocky, and they were quite frightened of the water, couldn't get their feet off the ground," said programme supervisor Karen Boyde.

For the parents, too, it can be overwhelming to navigate the bureaucracy of schools, job-seeking and tenancy with little or no English and very often no reading skills due to the oral nature of South Sudanese languages.

Local retirees Sam and Jenny Grosvenor were assigned to help Fathi and Neimat with simple tasks -- filling out forms and reading the newspaper -- but their relationship has blossomed over the years into a firm friendship.

"It's been deeply rewarding for us, they're amazing, they really are. We've learned from them as they have from us and we continue to learn," says Jenny.

They helped Darar find work as a meat-packer at the local supermarket, an early morning job that allows her to be home in time for her three children to return from school.

Shouma got a petrol station job after appearing in the town's newspaper.

Employment is a major challenge for the town's growing refugee population, along with housing and access to the intensive language and other skills training many dream of in order to get ahead.

Adjusting culturally to a new life can also be testing for those raised in the Sudanese tradition, where offspring remain in the family home until they are married, according to community elder Abdul Jabbard Hessein.

"Here it is different, after 16 they will depend on themselves and go out. It is not good for us," says Hessein.

It's been a culture shock for Orange too -- frictions between the Sudanese and local Aboriginal communities have flared from time to time and there was a degree of suspicion initially from some townsfolk.

"That changed overnight because of their warmth," says Jenny Grosvenor.

Rural Australia has not always responded warmly to Sudanese refugees --the nation's country music capital Tamworth famously rejected a request to resettle five families back in 2006 for fears it would spark a race riot, saying the refugees already living there had no respect for Australian laws and customs.

The town eventually reversed its decision, but not before a series of ugly public meetings that revealed deep prejudices and divisions over the issue.

Shouma and Darar are the first Sudanese to buy their own house in Orange, but they worry about family and friends still in Egypt and fleeing the bombing of their homelands.

"It's very difficult sometimes, we are thinking much. (But) we are looking (out) for kids, not for us. The kids are very happy," Shouma says. ( timeslive.co.za )

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How to protect your heart naturally

How to protect your heart naturally - Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women in America – so it’s important to take care of your ticker.

The Medicine Hunter, Chris Kilham, said there are natural ways to protect your heart, like taking hawthorn berry.

“There are probably a couple hundred different species of hawthorn trees,” Kilham said. “And it's the leaves and the flowers and the berries that are used to enhance heart health.”

Kilham said there is a massive body of science on hawthorn, which looks like fat, red peppercorns.

“We know that it strengthens the heart; it makes the contractions of the heart more even,” he said. “It actually enhances the amount of blood that comes out of the aorta. And it also reduces the sort of skittishness of the heart. If you get a fright or a shock it will keep the heart beat more regular and steady. So this is real medicine.”

Hawthorn is widely used in Europe and the U.S. for strengthening the heart muscle, improving nerve function to the heart, making heartbeat more regular and improving blood flow, Kilham said.

If you have a weak heart, are over the age of 45 or just want to maintain good cardiovascular health – then taking a hawthorn supplement or drinking tea with hawthorn berries and leaves is a good idea, Kilham said.

“This is real herbal medicine with real science behind it, and it's just plain good for the heart, which as you know, we all need," Kilham added. ( Foxnews.com )

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Sleep is sleep. Diet is diet.

Sleep is sleep. Diet is diet. Then again cutting back on sleep reduces the benefits of dieting, according to a study published October 5, 2010, in the Annals of Internal Medicine. When dieters in the study got a full night's sleep, they lost the same amount of weight as when they slept less. When dieters got adequate sleep, however, more than half of the weight they lost was fat. When they cut back on their sleep, only one-fourth of their weight loss came from fat.

Dieters also felt hungrier with a lack of sleep. When sleep was restricted, dieters produced higher levels of ghrelin, a hormone that triggers hunger and reduces energy expenditure.


"If your goal is to lose fat, skipping sleep is like poking sticks in your bicycle wheels," said study director Plamen Penev, MD, PhD, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Chicago. "Cutting back on sleep, a behavior that is ubiquitous in modern society, appears to compromise efforts to lose fat through dieting. In our study it reduced fat loss by 55 percent."


The study, performed at the University of Chicago's General Clinical Resource Center, followed 10 overweight but healthy volunteers aged 35 to 49 with a body mass indexexercise. ranging from 25, considered overweight, to 32, considered obese. Participants were placed on an individualized, balanced diet, with calories restricted to 90 percent of what each person needed to maintain his or her weight without


Each participant was studied twice: once for 14 days in the laboratory with an 8.5-hour period set aside for sleep, and once for 14 days with only 5.5 hours for sleep. They spent their waking hours engaged in home- or office-like work or leisure activities.


Normal sleep is a variable depending on age and time period during the 24 hour day. Babies might sleep up to 18 hours in a day. Adults may only need 7 to 8 hours on average.


During the two-week, 8.5-hours-in-bed phase, volunteers slept an average of 7 hours and 25 minutes each night. In the 5.5-hour phase, they slept 5 hours and 14 minutes, or more than two hours less. The number of calories they consumed, about 1,450 per day, was kept the same.


The volunteers lost an average of 6.6 pounds during each 14-day session. During weeks with adequate sleep, they lost 3.1 pounds of fat and 3.3 pounds of fat-free body mass, mostly protein. During the short-sleep weeks, participants lost an average of 1.3 pounds of fat and 5.3 pounds of fat-free mass.


Getting adequate sleep also helped control the dieters' hunger. Average levels of ghrelin did not change when dieters spent 8.5 hours in bed. When they spent 5.5 hours in bed, their ghrelin levels rose over two weeks from 75 ng/L to 84 ng/L.


Ghrelin is a hormone produced mainly by cells lining the human stomach and epsilon cells of the pancreas that stimulates hunger. Ghrelin levels increase before meals and decrease after meals. It is considered the counterpart of the hormone leptin, produced by adipose tissue, which induces satiation when present at higher levels


Higher ghrelin levels have been shown to "reduce energy expenditure, stimulate hunger and food intake, promote retention of fat, and increase hepatic glucose production to support the availability of fuel to glucose dependent tissues," the authors note. "In our experiment, sleep restriction was accompanied by a similar pattern of increased hunger and ” reduced oxidation of fat."


The tightly controlled circumstances of this study may actually have masked some of sleep's benefit for dieters, suggested Penev. Study subjects did not have access to extra calories. This may have helped dieters" to stick with their lower-calorie meal plans despite increased hunger in the presence of sleep restriction," he said.


The message for people trying to lose weight is clear, Penev said. "For the first time, we have evidence that the amount of sleep makes a big difference on the results of dietary interventions. One should not ignore the way they sleep when going on a diet. Obtaining adequate sleep may enhance the beneficial effects of a diet. Not getting enough sleep could defeat the desired effects." ( enn.com )

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Soft Cheese for a Clean Planet

Soft Cheese for a Clean Planet. A foodie's guide to planet-friendly fromage. I'm planning a big holiday shindig, and I was going to put out my usual enormous cheese-and-cracker spread. This year I've been wondering: What's the environmental impact of cheese?

Cheese is certainly one of life's great pleasures. (The Lantern is with Liz Lemon and G.K Chesterton on this point.) But there's no doubt that cheese of any type—pasteurized or not; made from the milk of cows or goats or sheep—has a significant impact on the environment compared with other food products. So by all means enjoy your spread, but it might be worth scaling back a bit on the size for the sake of the planet.

It turns out that cheese may do as much harm to the environment as some kinds of meat. Based on figures from Sweden, the production of a 1.5-ounce serving of cheese might be expected to produce around 16 ounces of carbon dioxide equivalent. Depending on which study you consult, a 2- to 3-ounce serving of cooked, boneless chicken meat should yield between 4.3 and 31 ounces of CO₂-equivalent (PDF). (You'd get about the same number of calories from each.)

Why is cheese so resource-intensive? As we've discussed before, raising a milk-bearing animal puts out a significant amount of greenhouse gases, thanks in large part to the methane those ruminants emit. Feed production also contributes to global warming, and animal waste has implications for both water and air quality. A 2002 life cycle assessment of a popular Swedish semi-hard cheese (the Seussian-sounding Ängsgården Hushållsost) found that milk alone accounted for 94 percent of the total greenhouse gases—not to mention 99 percent of the acidic compounds, 93 percent of the smog-creating particles, and nearly 100 percent of the substances that contribute to eutrophication, a kind of fish-killing nutrient pollution.

The good news is that the American dairy industry hopes to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent in the next 10 years, through strategies like adjusting cows' diets and installing methane digesters to turn manure into electricity. Some farms are already implementing these measures, so you might want to look at where cheese makers are getting their milk.

The Lantern realizes it won't be easy to track down this information. But if the eerily well-informed salespeople at her local fromagerie are any indication, provenance is becoming more important in the cheese world, at least on the fancy end of the spectrum. And while artisanal cheeses aren't necessarily going to be greener than the mass-produced kind—particularly given that small cheese plants tend to be less energy-efficient than large ones—you will be able to learn more about your cheese if it comes from a small producer. ( slate.com )

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Eyelids stuck to zips on Christmas jumpers among bizarre hospital injuries

Eyelids stuck to zips on Christmas jumpers among bizarre hospital injuries. People catching their eyelids on new Christmas jumpers and glitter fragments in eyeballs are among some of the bizarre injuries logged by hospital doctors over the festive period.

A casualty doctor has warned that carving the Christmas turkey while drunk or popping champagne corks could seriously damage the population's health on Christmas Day.

Dr John Heyworth, emergency department consultant at Southampton General Hospital, said that every year over the festive period he deals with a host of injuries as families get together. More bizarre accidents medics have seen include: exploding Christmas tree lights, which caused small burns to eyelids and eyeballs, and zips caught on eyelids as people struggled to try on a new jumper.

Also on the list are burns from the oven, older people choking on their turkey and nasty hand and limb injuries caused by people trying to get stones out of avocados - something that is becoming an increasing issue.

Others can turn up at accident & emergency with eye injuries from poking themselves with Christmas tree branches while getting presents from under it.

Eye unit staff commonly see children suffering after poking themselves or others in the eye with new toys and glitter fragments in the eye from cards or craft activities.

Dry eyes from sleeping with eyes open after excess alcohol consumption is common.

Mr Heyworth said: ''Every Christmas without fail we see the same injuries caused by preparing and cooking the Christmas dinner.

''People are likely to burn themselves on the oven or cut themselves as they carve the turkey - particularly if they have been drinking alcohol.

''We will always see someone who chokes over Christmas, often the elderly. They will choke on a piece of meat because they don't chew it properly,'' he said.

''If people are looking after or hosting elderly people for Christmas dinner, it is important to take extra care of them. It seems like a basic thing, but someone will choke on turkey over Christmas - it happens every single year.''

Rob Crouch, an emergency nurse, said: ''Last year I remember incidents with people trying to get stones out of avocados.

''Instead of putting a knife across the stone and twisting, people tend to stab down and then either go through or slip off into the hand, often resulting in a nasty injury.''

Emma Powditch, a hospital sister, added: ''The main problems people come in with over Christmas include scratches to the eye from Christmas tree branches as they place and retrieve gifts from under the tree and corks hitting the eye, which causes significant bruising and swelling to lids as well as inflammation and swelling within the eye.

''We would just say don't put presents too far back under the tree and open bottles pointing away from your own and others' faces to avoid unnecessary and damaging injury to the eyes.'' ( telegraph.co.uk )

READ MORE - Eyelids stuck to zips on Christmas jumpers among bizarre hospital injuries

Newt protein could hold promise for humans

Newt protein could hold promise for humans. Molecule helps stimulate stem cells that ultimately form new limbs . Limb loss for a salamander is nothing to get up in arms about—they just re-grow a new one. But how? One molecule could be behind their remarkable limb-sprouting ability, according to a new study that could also grow the field of human regenerative medicine.

The ability to conjure up an arm or leg after amputation works only in Hollywood, like when boy-wizard Harry Potter endures the pain of re-growing arm bones. Real regenerative medicine lags far behind fiction.

Science

Two newts are compared 40 days after a limb was amputated: The newt on the right received the nAG protein, which scientists say stimulates regeneration. The newt on the left was part of a control group and did not receive nAG. The yellow star indicates the point at which the limb was denervated.

While some political barriers to the stem-cell research required in regenerative medicine have been eliminated and private stem-cell funding has stepped up, the many scientific unknowns of regenerating limbs and organs have hindered progress.

A few years ago, a man in Cincinnati who accidentally severed a fingertip applied a substance made from pig bladder thought to promote tissue regeneration. The tip of his finger grew back within six weeks, though this is a single case and just a bit of the finger grew back.

The new study, published in the Nov. 2 issue of the journal Science, shows a protein called nAG helps to stimulate the proliferation of stem cells that ultimately form new limbs in red-spotted newts (Notophthalmus viridescens), a type of salamander.

Limb loss

Stem cells have the ability to differentiate, or specialize into various tissues needed to create body parts. When a newt or other amphibian loses a limb, cells in the region regress to a time when they were just naive cells that had not yet specialized, a process called de-differentiation. These stem cells grow and divide at the tip of the stump (where the limb was once attached) to form a larger mass of cells called the blastema.

"Those cells grow and divide and they give rise to the structures that have been amputated," said study team member Jeremy Brockes of the University College London. "So if you amputate at the wrist, those cells will give rise to a hand; if you amputate at the shoulder, they'll give rise to an arm."

Brockes, lead author Anoop Kumar of the University College London and colleagues ran experiments in which they chopped off red-spotted newts' limbs and the attached nerves. The nerves are needed to stimulate the production of the nAG protein, so the nerve-severing essentially removed the newts' source of nAG. Then they zapped the cells of the now-exposed body region with electrical pulses so they could deliver little bundles of DNA carrying genes for the protein nAG. Within 30 to 40 days, the newts had regenerated their lost limbs, digits and all. However, the new limbs had less muscle mass than the original ones.

Further lab experiments revealed the nAG protein—a molecule—works directly on the blastema cells, causing them to grow and divide.

"It essentially tells us that one single molecule is able to support the proliferation of blastema cells right from the start of regeneration all the way through to the formation of the digits," said biologist David Stocum of Purdue University in Indiana, who wrote an accompanying article in Science. Stocum was not involved in the current study.

Stocum adds that several other growth factors are known to stimulate the proliferation of blastema cells, though these molecules haven't been tested rigorously like in the recent study.

Growing human limbs

The big question is whether the same regenerative mechanism applies to humans.

"If you can make those cells de-differentiate, then you've got to make them divide to produce a blastema, and nAG would be a molecule that you could use to make that happen," Stocum said in a telephone interview.

But that doesn't mean human-limb regeneration is right around the corner, by a long shot. "What everybody is interested in, of course, are things about the extension to humans," Brockes told LiveScience. "I'm really very cautious about that."

Brockes noted that in order to move human limb regeneration forward scientists need to figure out if there is a human equivalent to the blastema that salamanders form after a limb gets amputated.

"I don't think we generate those [blastema] cells after injury in a way that a newt does," Brockes said. ( LiveScience.com )

READ MORE - Newt protein could hold promise for humans

Forget polar bears, worry about humans

Forget polar bears, worry about humans. WHEN I was a postdoc, I was often short of money and used to earn a little extra cash by telling fortunes using a pack of 15th-century tarot cards. Like other practitioners, I was always praying that one card would not appear. It shows a grinning skeleton carrying a giant scythe standing above a field littered with severed heads. It is card number 13, Death, and few customers reward you generously after they encounter it.

Although I know the card well, I was still surprised when an image of it popped into my mind out on the Arctic seas, in the middle of a large field of broken ice floes some 1200 kilometres from the North Pole. I was in a ship that was cruising slowly off the long, low, snow-streaked island of Svenskeøya on the eastern side of Svalbard, researching a book about the Arctic.

In the far distance, a female polar bear was watching us. It was a mark of her great self-confidence that she immediately decided that our 100-metre-long ship might be worth hunting. She intercepted us quickly and tried to climb on board.

The side of the ship proved a little too high, so after half an hour of nibbling the ship's bow and scratching its sides, she tried a different strategy. She lay down on the edge of a nearby ice floe, gave a long yawn, folded her paws under her chin and apparently fell asleep. There was just something suspicious about her cocked ears.

Patient "still hunting" at the edge of an ice floe is the polar bear's number one technique for catching seals. A bear may sit or stand like this for an hour or more, utterly still but alert, until a seal surfaces for air. Then there is a flurry of bloody action. Knowing this, I was not much inclined to climb down onto the ice to take a close-up photograph, beautiful though she was.

Not long ago, tourists on ships passing through this region would amuse themselves by shooting polar bears. But since the 1970s, the Norwegian government has been protecting bears here with such seriousness that locals joke: "You are better off shooting a man than a bear - the authorities will investigate you less thoroughly."

That security no doubt helped give this female the swagger to hunt a large ship. Even so, she eventually grew bored, stood up and strolled off out to sea across a vast patchwork of broken ice floes, some not much bigger than herself. Her exit left me feeling sad. I already knew from the work of the US Geological Survey (USGS) that her grand-cubs may well be the last polar bears to live here. In 2008, the USGS combined models of the future state of the Arctic ice with what was known about the life of bears. Polar bears are utterly dependent on ice as a platform to hunt seals. As the Arctic summer ice disappears, the hunting period is growing shorter and breeding success is falling. Sometimes these days there is too much water to swim back to land and bears drown.

The bleak conclusion of one USGS model was "extirpation by 2050" for the bears of Svalbard. A few areas did better, but only in the frozen channels among the northerly Canadian islands might bears survive as rulers of the ice until the end of the century. These are grim forecasts but they are also conservative because they are based on models that aren't keeping up with the terrible speed of the ice's collapse.

In the far north, the biggest and fastest change to our planet ever caused by human activity is under way. As the Earth warms, more and more of the frozen Arctic seas are melting away. Each winter, the ice grows until it covers an area more than one and a half times as great as the US. In summer, that ice used to melt to half the winter area. Now, after a catastrophic collapse in 2007, close to two-thirds of the ice is vanishing. Compared with a decade earlier, the Arctic is losing an extra area of ice each summer six times as large as California. Estimates of when the ice will completely disappear each summer now range from 2013 to 2050.

Other charismatic Arctic beasts will also struggle. After the bear, the narwhal is most at risk. Off the coast of northern Greenland in 2008 I had the good fortune to see narwhal surface among the ice. For a brief moment, three improbably long spiral horns broke through the water and waved above the sea like magic wands. One animal twisted around and, for a second, his grey, wet body glistened in the low sunlight. Then all three dived and were gone.

Under threat, too, will be the walrus, so recently recovered from mass commercial hunting, the white beluga whale and the bowhead whale, which is still only slowly gaining numbers after centuries of slaughter. All use ice to rest, hide or feed.

Hearing this, you might think it is obvious why the image of Death came to my mind. But it is not so simple. Although I always found it hard to reassure anxious customers, the real meaning of the card is transformation. A death is an ending and a new beginning, and that is what I was seeing as I travelled round the Arctic.

A great transformation is under way. The change from ice to water is an end for many familiar creatures but, in a wider sense, it is not an end. The Arctic is being reborn as a sea that is more similar to southerly seas. Whales, fish, birds and plankton that are more at home in warmer waters are already invading the Arctic. Off the coast of Alaska, for example, pollock are moving north, bringing also the salmon that feed on them. This is the beginning of a new Arctic ecosystem that is forming as the old Arctic dies. As yet, we cannot see the exact shape of the new world, or how many of its older inhabitants will hang on in remote, icier spots. But we can guess who will be its new ruler, the top predator which will topple the polar bear from its throne.

We cannot see the exact shape of the new Arctic but we can guess its new ruler

Already, in the far north, I have seen pods of killer whales. These animals have a tail fin that makes it hard for them to surface where there is much thick ice. The disappearance of the ice is increasingly exposing the beluga, narwhal and bowhead to this ferocious predator. In some parts of the Arctic, beluga whale, known as the canary of the sea for their constant chattering, have fallen silent. Killer whales are close and are listening out for prey.

In purely biological terms, the new Arctic will be more productive than the old, because there is more water, open to sunlight for longer, with more plankton growing in it, and more food supports more life. The first signs are already there. After the sudden collapse of the sea ice in 2007, a satellite-borne sensor, measuring the water's "greenness", showed that the total productivity of the Arctic seas leapt by 40 per cent. That is a big increase.

Louis Fortier, a marine biologist at Laval University in Quebec, Canada, explained it like this: "If you look at it simply from the point of view of biological productivity, that will increase as the ice disappears. It's just that the life there, the specialists which we are all fond of, like the polar bear, the walrus and some other species which we have in our unconscious mind, are going to get into trouble."

Is there comfort in knowing that polar bears hunting on ice will be replaced by killer whales swimming in a warmer, more productive sea? For me, the answer is "not much", but it will be the consequence of what we have done to Earth. And looking at the changes to the Arctic as a transformation does lead to a larger thought. For too long, too many fruitless efforts to combat climate change have been billed as "Saving the Planet". Right now, in the last week or two before the climate negotiations at Copenhagen, there are few signs of dramatic action. Perhaps that is because the message is wrong. As the changes in the Arctic show, the planet continues. Species come and species go. The planet does not need saving, even from us.

Species come, species go. The planet does not need saving, even from us

Far better that the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is portrayed as simple self-interest; that we focus on the coming losses of agricultural production, the droughts, the mass migrations and political instability that will follow rapid climate change. Political will might be better stiffened by listening to generals rather than to environmentalists. As a former head of the US Central Command, Anthony Zinni, explained, if we don't pay the price to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, "we will pay the price later in military terms".

Then we might turn again to the far north, not to worry about bears, but in fear of the Arctic's revenge (New Scientist, 28 March, p 32). For millions of years, the brilliant white ice around the North Pole has reflected the summer sunlight back into space, helping cool the planet. As the ice turns sea dark and soaks up the sun, global warming will really take off. Already the signs are there: in areas where the sea ice has gone, summer temperatures are between 3 °C and 5 °C higher than the average of the previous 20 years.

As the differences in temperature between the Arctic and the equator lessen, the weather and rain patterns all over the northern hemisphere are altering. As the new Arctic sea heats up, a pool of warm air is spreading across the nearby lands. Shrubs and trees are creeping north across the tundra. Dark vegetation soaks up more heat and the warming gains pace. Methane is bubbling from tundra lakes and shallow shelf seas as the permafrost at their bottoms thaws and micro-organisms digest their carbon.

Elsewhere, the top layer of permafrost is rotting away. It contains enough carbon to more than double the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, taking us back to an era when temperatures were more than 7 °C higher than they are now.

Of course, the carbon will not be released all at once. Instead, the Arctic will favour a long, slow revenge, spread over hundreds of years. As well as this, with the same painful slowness, the melting ice caps will make sea levels rise perhaps a metre this century and then every century for a thousand years. Once these changes really get going, they will be unstoppable.

If these thoughts don't make people wake up, then we really are in deep trouble. As it happens, there's a tarot card for those who can't change, which was just as unpopular as Death with my customers. It is number 15: "blind abandonment to self-destructive materialism".

Its symbol is the Devil.

( newscientist.com )

READ MORE - Forget polar bears, worry about humans

Contact lenses to get built-in virtual graphics

Contact lenses to get built-in virtual graphics. A contact lens that harvests radio waves to power an LED is paving the way for a new kind of display. The lens is a prototype of a device that could display information beamed from a mobile device.

Realising that display size is increasingly a constraint in mobile devices, Babak Parviz at the University of Washington, in Seattle, hit on the idea of projecting images into the eye from a contact lens.

One of the limitations of current head-up displays is their limited field of view. A contact lens display can have a much wider field of view. "Our hope is to create images that effectively float in front of the user perhaps 50 cm to 1 m away," says Parviz.

His research involves embedding nanoscale and microscale electronic devices in substrates like paper or plastic. He also wears contact lenses. "It was a matter of putting the two together," he says.

Fitting a contact lens with circuitry is challenging. The polymer cannot withstand the temperatures or chemicals used in large-scale microfabrication, Parviz explains. So, some components – the power-harvesting circuitry and the micro light-emitting diode – had to be made separately, encased in a biocompatible material and then placed into crevices carved into the lens.

One obvious problem is powering such a device. The circuitry requires 330 microwatts but doesn't need a battery. Instead, a loop antenna picks up power beamed from a nearby radio source. The team has tested the lens by fitting it to a rabbit.

Parviz says that future versions will be able to harvest power from a user's cell phone, perhaps as it beams information to the lens. They will also have more pixels and an array of microlenses to focus the image so that it appears suspended in front of the wearer's eyes.

Despite the limited space available, each component can be integrated into the lens without obscuring the wearer's view, the researchers claim. As to what kinds of images can be viewed on this screen, the possibilities seem endless. Examples include subtitles when conversing with a foreign-language speaker, directions in unfamiliar territory and captioned photographs. The lens could also serve as a head-up display for pilots or gamers.

Mark Billinghurst, director of the Human Interface Technology Laboratory, in Christchurch, New Zealand, is impressed with the work. "A contact lens that allows virtual graphics to be seamlessly overlaid on the real world could provide a compelling augmented reality experience," he says. This prototype is an important first step in that direction, though it may be years before the lens becomes commercially available, he adds.

The University of Washington team will present their prototype at the Biomedical Circuits and Systems (BioCas 2009) conference at Beijing later this month. ( newscientist.com )

READ MORE - Contact lenses to get built-in virtual graphics

Four ways to feed the world

Four ways to feed the world. IT IS humanity's oldest enemy. Despite all our science, a sixth of people in the developing world are chronically hungry. At a summit in Rome this week, world leaders reaffirmed a pledge to end hunger "at the earliest possible date".

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) wanted them to promise to end hunger by 2025, but the delegates declined. They said instead that they would keep trying to meet their previous goal: to halve chronic hunger from 20 per cent of people in developing countries to 10 per cent by 2015 (see graph). But can they? Based on their performance so far, the FAO considers it "unlikely".

That, agricultural experts tell New Scientist, is because governments have broken their promises and slashed aid budgets for agriculture. The hungry poor fell to 16 per cent in 2007, mainly thanks to Asia's economic boom, but recession and soaring food prices pushed it back to 17 per cent in 2008.

"Ending hunger by 2025 is not realistic," says Joachim von Braun of IFPRI, a food-policy institute in Washington DC. "Halving it might be, but it requires sustained action."

It gets worse: global population is set to grow to 9.1 billion by 2050, while global warming will have a serious impact on farming. What can be done?

The FAO says feeding 9 billion people will require a near-doubling in food production. All nations will have to take part, but attention will be focused on poor countries, where there is most room for improvement and where better farming will give poor farmers income to buy food. The FAO says farming investment in poor countries must grow from $142 billion per year to $209 billion.

Agricultural research must also increase. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) - the international, mainly government-funded labs that perform farm research for poor countries - says agricultural R&D spending for developing countries needs to grow from $5.1 billion to $16.4 billion per year by 2025. Its researchers say that in theory, given funds, they can boost agriculture enough to double food production, although global warming may make this impossible. These are their top priorities.

1 Hold on to water

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization says irrigated areas must expand by 11 per cent by 2025, yet the ancient aquifers that feed much of the world's food production are running dry.

Johan Rockström of the Swedish Resilience Centre in Stockholm says we need to rethink water. "Blue" water, which flows in streams, is the usual basis for farm planning yet accounts for just 5 to 15 per cent of the water flowing through farming systems. The rest, "green" water, is either lost through run-off or evaporation or passes usefully through crops. There are several ways to capture more of this green water in crops, including soil-covering mulches, terraces, and underground tanks filled by the run-off from tropical downpours. In parts of Kenya and China such tanks can get a crop through the dry spell that frequently follows a downpour.

Mapping the potential for combining all of these approaches shows that the largest untapped potential to improve water productivity is in the savannahs, says Rockström. This is sometimes counter-intuitive, he adds. "Dry Namibia and Botswana have more than enough green water to feed themselves."

2 Stop ploughing

For 1000 years, farmers have turned over the top layer of soil to bury and kill weed seeds. This is expensive, damages soils and releases greenhouse gases.

Most maize and soya growers in the Americas have abandoned the plough for "no-till" farming: they merely scratch furrows in the ground to plant their seed and handle weeds with herbicides and herbicide-resistant genetically modified crops.

But farmers do not need those if they smother weeds with organic residue such as straw, and rotate crops to frustrate pests, says Bram Govaerts of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) in Mexico, a CGIAR lab. This is known as conservation agriculture, and besides conserving soil, nutrients and energy, it cuts water loss. Govaerts has been managing experimental plots in Mexico using these methods, and finds that conservation agriculture can yield as much as traditional agriculture in good years, and even more during drought.

3 Go back to basics

Creating high-yielding seeds is only worthwhile if farmers have access to them, and can sell their produce for a profit. "There are varieties of maize that resist climate stress or disease, but how do you get them to farmers?" asks Prabhu Pingali, deputy head of agriculture at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Nerica rice is a case in point. This dryland variety was bred in the 1990s by CGIAR scientists who crossed Asian rice with an African species. Nerica competes better with weeds than other varieties, yields more and contains more protein. But few African farmers have heard of it.

Government services that taught farmers new techniques were dismantled during the debt crisis of the 1980s, says Papa Seck, head of the CGIAR's African Rice Center in Cotonou, Benin. "We need them back."

Even if they have access to better seed varieties, African farmers often don't invest in boosting production because they don't have access to markets and therefore cannot sell their extra crops for a profit. And sold or not, crops are often poorly stored and lost to rot: half the bananas grown in Kenya are lost each year, says Peter Hartmann of IITA, CGIAR's tropical agriculture lab in Ibadan, Nigeria. He says Africa would not need imported food aid if it could use all the crops it produces.

You have to look at the whole food system to boost production, says Hartmann. For instance, IITA bred higher-yielding, disease-resistant cassava and helped set up factories to grind the crop into flour; but then discovered uptake was limited because there was limited transport: cassava grows in southern Nigeria, the trucking industry is in the north. After publicity brought truckers in, production grew from 35 million to 45 million tonnes, on less land, from 2004 to 2007.

4 Boost yields

Mark Rosegrant of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) calculates that crops that will yield 25 per cent more food would boost African food production more than doubling irrigation would. It might also be easier. "We have tremendous options to enhance yields," says Hans Braun, head of wheat at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center.

Last week the world's wheat scientists launched a consortium to raise wheat yield by genetically re-engineering the crop's photosynthesis, no less. "It is inefficient compared with some plants," says Braun. "Improvements are feasible, and will dramatically increase water efficiency, heat tolerance and yield." They plan to equip wheat with more efficient variants of the key photosynthetic enzyme rubisco, and with suites of genes to convert it from the C3 photosynthetic system to the C4 system found in maize, which fixes more carbon per unit of light. Meanwhile, CGIAR's International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines is developing C4 rice.

Braun says the key is money. The yields of new varieties of maize are climbing twice as fast as yields of rice and wheat. This is because maize is bred mainly by private companies, which invest $1.5 billion a year in it. Wheat and rice breeding, by contrast, is done mostly in government labs. Wheat gets only about $350 million a year. Apart from Chinese hybrid rice varieties, rice yields have been stagnant for years. ( newscientist.com )

READ MORE - Four ways to feed the world

US could ban caffeine-alcohol drinks within months

US could ban caffeine-alcohol drinks within months. THE US Food and Drug Administration is unimpressed by the fad for drinks that contain a double hit - alcohol and caffeine. Unless makers supply the FDA with scientific evidence that the drinks are safe they could be banned within months.

The agency is worried that consuming the drinks - which can mask the effect of alcohol - leads to rash behaviour, car crashes, violence and assaults. The FDA issued the ultimatum last week in response to a request made by the National Association of Attorneys General. "Caffeine added to alcohol poses a significant public health threat," said a task force headed by the attorney-generals of Utah, Guam and Connecticut.

The FDA allows caffeine concentrations of up to 200 parts per million in soft drinks, but adding caffeine to alcohol is unregulated. At least two of the 27 companies contacted have already withdrawn their drinks.

In 2006, Cecile Marczinski and Mark Fillmore of the University of Kentucky found that consumers of the drinks felt they were less inebriated than when imbibing alcohol alone, even though they made just as many errors in standard tests of alertness and reaction time. ( newscientist.co )

READ MORE - US could ban caffeine-alcohol drinks within months

Writing Origin 'like confessing a murder'

Charles Darwin: Writing Origin 'like confessing a murder'. Death is no barrier to New Scientist. 150 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, we have obtained an interview with its author.

What was it like, coming up with the idea that changed the world?

Like confessing a murder.

The emotional and physical struggle you went through must have taken its toll.

I have suffered from almost incessant vomiting for nine months, & that has so weakened my brain, that any excitement brings on whizzing & fainting feelings.

You would clearly rather I didn't excite you further, but I must say that when I grasped your idea that life has been changing, evolving, for billions of years, I was captivated.

You cannot imagine how pleased I am that the notion of Natural Selection has acted as a purgative on your bowels of immutability. Whenever naturalists can look at species changing as certain, what a magnificent field will be open.

Quite so. Now I must put to you the question that authors are inevitably asked: how did you get your ideas?

It seemed to me probable that allied species were descended from a common parent. But for some years I could not conceive how each form became so excellently adapted to its habits of life. I then began systematically to study domestic productions, & after a time saw clearly that man's selective power was the most important agent. I was prepared from having studied the habits of animals to appreciate the struggle for existence, & my work in geology gave me some idea of the lapse of past time. Therefore when I happened to read "Malthus on population" the idea of Natural selection flashed on me.

The "greatest idea anyone has ever had" just flashed on you! Your modesty and rigorous experimental approach are an inspiration to us all. But what would you say to young scientists starting out now?

When I joined the "Beagle" as Naturalist I knew extremely little about Natural History, but I worked hard.

You have been one of the most influential scientists of all time, yet your work continues to generate controversy, especially among those of a religious persuasion. You famously said there was grandeur in evolution, but does an atheist outlook help you get through the day?

It has always appeared to me more satisfactory to look at the immense amount of pain & suffering in this world, as the inevitable result of the natural sequence of events, i.e. general laws, rather than from the direct intervention of God.

Would you describe yourself as an atheist?

In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. – I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.

What about the perceived conflict between religious beliefs and your theories?

It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist & an evolutionist.

Some of your bulldogs would deny that. They are sometimes accused of overdoing the fight against those who deny evolution.

I feel sure that our good friend Huxley, though he has much influence, would have had far more if he had been more moderate & less frequent in his attacks.

Your daughter Annie died when she was 10 years old, and this tragic event is said to have influenced you greatly. Can you explain your feelings about this?

Thank God she suffered hardly at all, & expired as tranquilly as a little angel. – Our only consolation is, that she passed a short, though joyous life. – She was my favourite child; her cordiality, openness, buoyant joyousness & strong affection made her most loveable. Poor dear little soul. Well it is all over.

You are sometimes accused - unfairly, it seems to me - of racism. What are your views on slavery, which was still very widespread when you were on the Beagle?

I have seen enough of Slavery & the dispositions of the negros, to be thoroughly disgustedgreatest curse on Earth Slavery abolished. with the lies and nonsense one hears on the subject in England... Great God how I shd like to see that

Have these views had an effect on your politics?

I would not be a Tory, if it was merely on account of their cold hearts about that scandal to Christian Nations, Slavery.

Thanks so much for agreeing to talk to us.

I daresay you will say that I am an odious plague.

Not at all. It has been an honour.

*All of Darwin's quotes are taken from his vast correspondence, collected online at the Darwin Correspondence Project. The words attributed to Darwin are as he wrote them. The questions have been framed to conform as far as possible to the context in which Darwin was writing. Hyperlinks lead to the letters from which they are taken. ( newscientist.com )

READ MORE - Writing Origin 'like confessing a murder'

These Stones Really are Rolling

These Stones Really are Rolling - These extraordinary pictures reveal a bizarre event that is puzzling the science world - rocks that glide across the desert. Amid the eerie silence and the 50C heat of California's Death Valley these giant boulders appear to move smoothly - and unaided - across the desert.

The rocks, some as heavy as 17 stone, edge along in bizarre, straight-line patterns across the ultra-flat surface of the valley. They can travel more than 350 yards a year.

Rock on: More of the boulders and the eerie paths they leave across the Valley

Scientists believe the phenomenon is caused by a coming together of specific weather conditions. Studies suggest a combination of 90mph winds, ice formations at night and thin layers of wet clay on the surface of the desert all help to push them along.

Photographer Mike Byrne, 40, has spent years documenting the stones' mysterious movements. As his amazing pictures show these real-life rolling stones leave trails across the sand in places almost untouched by man.

He said: 'Some of these rocks are as heavy as a person, it is really is strange to imagine them gliding across the desert like this.

'They must be the original real-life rolling stones, they just keep moving through the sand and I don't believe anyone has really 100 per cent worked it out yet.

'Most of the stones are found on an old lake bed, known as the Racetrack Playa, where the ground is particularly flat.

'It has been documented over the years and it is something very special to witness, although I know climatologists believe the phenomenon could disappear in a few years as the temps continue to rise.

'One of the strongest theories about what the rocks move is that water rising from beneath the surface of the sand is pushed by the wind creating a surface the rocks can move along.'

Death Valley is the lowest point in the U.S., at 282ft below sea level. It is almost completely flat and holds the record for the second highest temperature ever recorded on earth, a blistering 58C.

In the 1990s a study by a team of scientists lead by Professor John Reid, from Hampshire College, Massachusetts, attempted to explain the rocks' movement. His study concluded that the rocks may be moved when they become embedded in sheets of ice forming at night on the surface of the sand.

As the sand melts Prof Reid said that the rocks were moved along by the ice and wind, thus forming the patterns. ( kompas.com )

READ MORE - These Stones Really are Rolling