Austria suggests interning migrants on Greek islands

June 05, 2016

BERLIN (AP) — Austria's foreign minister is proposing interning migrants on Greek islands. In a newspaper interview, Sebastian Kurz says Europe could copy Australia's model of intercepting migrant boats offshore — either sending them back or keeping them in island camps until their asylum claims have been processed.

Human rights groups have criticized the practice as inhumane and a breach of international law. Kurz told Austrian newspaper Die Presse in an interview published Sunday that "of course the Australian model can't be copied one-to-one, but the basic principle can be applied to Europe too."

He said someone who is on an island such as Lesbos and stands little chance of getting asylum is more likely to return home than someone who already has an apartment in Vienna or Berlin.

Prominent activist freed in Bahrain leaves for Denmark

June 11, 2016

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A prominent activist in Bahrain said early Saturday she left the tiny island kingdom after recently being freed from prison, the latest protester to go into exile five years after its Arab Spring demonstrations.

Zainab al-Khawaja is the daughter of well-known activist Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, who himself is serving a life sentence over his role in the protests that saw the island's Shiite majority and others demand more political freedom from its Sunni rulers.

In a series of messages on Twitter, al-Khawaja said she had left the country. Her family confirmed she left with two children to Denmark, where she also has citizenship. The "regime that thinks exile means moving us away from our land should know, we carry (hashtag)Bahrain in our hearts wherever we go," she wrote.

Al-Khawaja was detained March 14 and faced three years in prison on charges related to her participation in anti-government protests, including tearing up pictures of Bahraini King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. She was in prison with her infant son, Abdulhadi, prior to her release.

Al-Khawaja said Bahrain was preparing to file new charges against her that would have made her detention "indefinite." Bahrain's government and its state-run news agency did not immediately comment on al-Khawaja leaving the country.

Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, crushed the 2011 protests after several weeks with the help of troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In the time since, the island has faced low-level unrest, protests and attacks on police.

Other prominent opposition figures and human-rights activists remain imprisoned. Some have had their citizenship stripped by the government and been deported.

Astronomers smash cosmic records to see hydrogen in distant galaxy

Perth, Australia (SPX)
Jun 06, 2016

An international team of scientists has pushed the limits of radio astronomy to detect a faint signal emitted by hydrogen gas in a galaxy more than five billion light years away - almost double the previous record.

Using the Very Large Array of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the US, the team observed radio emission from hydrogen in a distant galaxy and found that it would have contained billions of young, massive stars surrounded by clouds of hydrogen gas.

As the most abundant element in the Universe and the raw fuel for creating stars, hydrogen is used by radio astronomers to detect and understand the makeup of other galaxies.

However, until now, radio telescopes have only been able to detect the emission signature of hydrogen from relatively nearby galaxies.

"Due to the upgrade of the Very Large Array, this is the first time we've been able to directly measure atomic hydrogen in a galaxy this far from Earth," lead author, Dr Ximena Fernandez from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, said.

"These signals would have begun their journey before our planet even existed, and after five billion years of travelling through space without hitting anything, they've fallen into the telescope and allowed us to see this distant galaxy for the very first time."

As an archaeologist digs down they find older and older objects. The same is true for astronomers - as they build bigger telescopes and develop new techniques to see farther into the Universe, they look further and further back in time.

"This is precisely the goal of the project, to study how gas in galaxies has changed through history," Dr Fernandez said.

"A question we hope to answer is whether galaxies in the past had more gas being turned into stars than galaxies today. Our record breaking find is a galaxy with an unusually large amount of hydrogen."

This success for the team comes after the first 178 hours of observing time with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope for a new survey of the sky called the 'COSMOS HI Large Extragalactic Survey', or CHILES for short.

Once it's completed the CHILES survey will have collected data from more than 1,000 hours of observing time.

In a new approach, members of the team including Dr Attila Popping from International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research and the ARC Centre of All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) in Australia are working with Amazon Web Services to process and move the large volumes of data via the 'cloud'.

"For this project we took tens of terabytes of data from the Very Large Array, and then processed it using Amazon's cloud-based servers to create an enormous image cube, ready for our team to analyse and explore," Dr Popping said.

Professor Andreas Wicenec, head of the Data Intensive Astronomy team at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, said the limiting factor for radio astronomers used to be the size of the telescope and the hardware behind it.

"It's fast becoming more about the data and how you move, store and analyse vast volumes of information," he said.

"Big science needs a lot of compute power - right now we're designing systems to manage data for several large facilities around the world and the next generation of radio telescopes, including China's 500m radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array and the SKA's pathfinder telescopes that are already up and running in outback Western Australia."

Source: Space Daily.
Link: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Astronomers_smash_cosmic_records_to_see_hydrogen_in_distant_galaxy_999.html.

SpaceX could send people to Mars by 2024, Elon Musk says

by Shawn Price
Los Angeles (UPI)
Jun 3, 2016

SpaceX Chief Elon Musk is predicting his company will be able to launch humans to Mars by 2024.

Speaking at Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. on Wednesday, Musk said if there are no delays, there could be a human colony on Mars by 2025 and promised to give more details of his company's "architecture for Mars colonization" at a global space conference in September.

"What really matters is being able to transport large numbers of people and ultimately millions of tons of cargo to Mars," Musk said. "That's what's necessary in order to create a ... growing city on Mars."

SpaceX announced plans in April to send an unmanned Dragon Version 2 craft to the red planet possibly as soon as 2018, with the goal of landing large payloads there without parachutes or airbags or aerodynamic decelerators.

Musk acknowledged a schedule more ambitious than NASA's, that isn't intending to put a man on Mars until the at least the 2030s.

"When I cite a schedule, it is actually the schedule I think is true," said Musk. "It's not some fake schedule that I don't think is true. It may be delusional. That is entirely possible from time to time. But it's never some knowingly fake deadline ever."

He also implied he could one day move to Mars for good. "I think if you're going to choose a place to die, then Mars is probably not a bad choice," Musk said.

Source: Mars Daily.
Link: http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/SpaceX_could_send_people_to_Mars_by_2024_Elon_Musk_says_999.html.

NATO troops in massive airborne exercise in Poland

June 07, 2016

TORUN, Poland (AP) — Some 2,000 NATO troops from the U.S., Britain and Poland are conducting an airborne operation as part of the biggest exercise performed in Poland since the 1989 end of communism and amid concerns over Russia.

The troops are to parachute Tuesday near the central city of Torun, where they are to secure a bridge on the Vistula River, as part of Polish-led exercise that involves some 31,000 troops. Russia considers NATO troops' presence close to its border as a security threat. President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday in Moscow that the military exercise in Poland "does not contribute to the atmosphere of trust and security on the continent."

The Polish command of the exercise says the operation is transparent and international observers have been invited.

Periodic table elements named for Moscow, Japan, Tennessee

June 08, 2016

NEW YORK (AP) — You'll soon see four new names on the periodic table of the elements, including three that honor Moscow, Japan and Tennessee. The names are among four recommended Wednesday by an international scientific group. The fourth is named for a Russian scientist.

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, which rules on chemical element names, presented its proposal for public review. The names had been submitted by the element discoverers. The four elements, known now by their numbers, completed the seventh row of the periodic table when the chemistry organization verified their discoveries last December.

Tennessee is the second U.S. state to be recognized with an element; California was the first. Element names can come from places, mythology, names of scientists or traits of the element. Other examples: americium, einsteinium and titanium.

Joining more familiar element names such as hydrogen, carbon and lead are: — moscovium (mah-SKOH'-vee-um), symbol Mc, for element 115, and tennessine (TEH'-neh-seen), symbol Ts, for element 117. The discovery team is from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Vanderbilt physics professor Joseph Hamilton, who played a role in the discoveries, proposed naming an element for Tennessee. He had hoped to use the symbol Tn, but it had been used in the past and couldn't be reassigned to the new element.

— oganesson (OH'-gah-NEH'-sun), symbol Og, for element 118. The name honors Russian physicist Yuri Oganessian. — nihonium (nee-HOH'-nee-um), symbol Nh, for element 113. The element was discovered in Japan, and Nihon is one way to say the country's name in Japanese. It's the first element to be discovered in an Asian country.

An official at a Japanese institute involved in the discovery said the name was chosen to recognize government funding for the project. "We wanted to show our research has been supported by the Japanese people," said Kosuke Morita, a research group director at the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-based Science.

The public comment period will end Nov. 8.

AP reporters Sheila Burke in Nashville and Satoshi Sugiyama in Wako, Japan, contributed to this report.

Boxing legend Muhammad Ali dies at 74

June 4, 2016

Muhammad Ali, one of the most influential sports figures in the 20th century, has passed at the age of 74 in Phoenix, U.S., a family spokesman has confirmed to media.

A boxing legend, Ali won the heavyweight title three times and was known for his unorthodox fighting style merging power and agility. Off the ring, he was famous throughout the globe for his charismatic personality, as well as social and political activism.

“After a 32-year battle with Parkinson’s disease, Muhammad Ali has passed away at the age of 74. The three-time World Heavyweight Champion boxer died this evening,” family spokesman Bob Gunnell told NBC News.

In 1967, three years after he won his first title, Ali refused to be drafted during the Vietnam War even though he registered for military service, presenting himself as a conscientious objector. Ali was stripped of his title, had his boxing license suspended, and a court found him guilty of draft evasion. His conviction was eventually reversed by the Supreme Court.

As the tide turned and public opinion shifted on the war, Ali became a spokesman for the anti-war sentiment, giving speeches at universities across the United States, even as he became increasingly active in the Civil Rights movement.

A convert to Islam, Ali advocated religious freedom. Initially a member of the Nation of Islam movement, which combined elements of religion and African American political activism, Ali converted to Sunni Islam after falling out with the group in 1975.

Ali leaves behind his wife Lonnie, seven daughters and two sons, as well as a legacy likely to remain unmatched as a boxer and world-renowned public figure.

Source: Middle East Monitor.
Link: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20160604-boxing-legend-muhammad-ali-dies-at-74/.