Possible extraterrestrial life on a moon of Saturn

Inside a moon of Saturn, beneath its icy veneer and above its rocky core, is a sea of water the size of Lake Superior, scientists announced on Thursday.
The findings, published in the journal science, confirm what planetary scientists have suspected about the moon, Enceladus, ever since they were astonished in 2005 by photographs showing geysers of ice crystals shooting out of its south pole. For many researchers, this tiny, shiny cue ball of a moon, just over 300 miles wide, is now the most promising place to look for life elsewhere in the solar system, even more than Mars. Enceladus (pronounced en-SELL-a-dus) is caught in a gravitational tug of war between Saturn and another moon, Dione, which bends its icy outer layer, creating friction and heat. In the years since discovering the geysers, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has made repeated flybys of Enceladus, photographing the fissures (nicknamed tiger stripes) where the geysers originate, measuring temperatures and identifying carbon-based organic molecules that could serve as building blocks for life. The discussion on the possibility of extraterrestrial life in the solar system centers on four bodies: Mars; Enceladus; Europa, a moon of Jupiter; and Titan, another moon of Saturn. Dr. McKay, who was not involved with gravity measurements, noted that only Enceladus was known to possess the four essential ingredients for life, at least as it exists on Earth: liquid water, energy, carbon and nitrogen. Still, life on Enceladus is perhaps a long shot. The sea is at freezing temperature and in continual darkness. And the water may have been liquid only in the recent past, a few tens of millions of years, a blink in the 4.5-billion-year history of the solar system. But scientists also do not know how long it takes life to get started, and some think it could happen quickly.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/04/04/science/space/a-moon-of-saturn-has-a-sea-scientists-say.html?from=science

Scare Tactics Over Foreign Drugs

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/opinion/scare-tactics-over-foreign-drugs.html

About five million Americans buy medication internationally each year because of high costs in the United States. These drugs are considered “foreign unapproved drugs” by the Food and Drug Administration, and federal law makes it illegal to buy them. Generally, though, purchases go through without a hitch. Only rarely do customs agents seize an order. For almost 15 years big drug companies have vigorously lobbied Congress and the federal government to stop Americans from buying foreign medicines. As part of that lobbying, they have made it seem as if all medications purchased from Canada and other international sources are the same as those that come from websites that sell counterfeit drugs. Even the F.D.A. has made that suggestion. In testimony in February before a House subcommittee hearing to explore the public health threat of counterfeit drugs, Howard R. Sklamberg, a deputy commissioner at the F.D.A., said that foreign unapproved drugs posed the same health risks as counterfeit drugs. Equating people who buy and sell safe medication, such as pharmacy owners in Canada, with criminals who sell counterfeit drugs will lead to overly zealous enforcement actions that will curtail access to lower-cost medication in other countries. In fact, Section 708 of the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act, which passed in 2012, allows United States Customs to destroy genuine medications mailed to patients in the United States from Canadian and other foreign pharmacies. Regulations to implement that section of the law will be published by mid-April.

Driving under the influence of marijuana

If you are pulled over on suspicion of drunken driving, the police officer is likely to ask you to complete three tasks: Follow a pen with your eyes while the officer moves it back and forth; get out of the car and walk nine steps, heel to toe, turn on one foot and go back; and stand on one leg for 30 seconds. Score well on all three of these Olympic events, and there’s a very good chance that you are not drunk. This so-called standard field sobriety test has been shown to catch 88 percent of drivers under the influence of alcohol. But it is nowhere near as good at spotting a stoned driver. In a 2012 study published in the journal Psychopharmacology, only 30 percent of people under the influence of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, failed the field test. And its ability to identify a stoned driver seems to depend heavily on whether the driver is accustomed to being stoned.We may not have as much to fear from stoned driving as from drunken driving. Some researchers say that limited resources are better applied to continuing to reduce drunken driving. Stoned driving, they say, is simply less dangerous. Still, it is clear that marijuana use causes deficits that affect driving ability, Dr. Huestis said. She noted that several researchers, working independently of one another, have come up with the same estimate: a twofold increase in the risk of an accident if there is any measurable amount of THC in the bloodstream. The estimate is based on review papers that considered the results of many individual studies. The results were often contradictory — some of the papers showed no increase in risk, or even a decrease — but the twofold estimate is widely accepted. The difference in risk between marijuana and alcohol can probably be explained by two things, Dr. Huestis and Dr. Romano both say. First, stoned drivers drive differently from drunken ones, and they have different deficits. Drunken drivers tend to drive faster than normal and to overestimate their skills, studies have shown; the opposite is true for stoned drivers.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/health/driving-under-the-influence-of-marijuana.html

City to Fit All Streetlights With Energy-Saving LED Bulbs

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/nyregion/city-to-fit-all-streetlights-with-energy-saving-led-bulbs.html

The amber glow of the New York City streetlight is going away. In an energy-saving effort, the city plans to replace all of its 250,000 streetlights with brighter, whiter, energy-saving, light-emitting diode fixtures in one of the nation’s largest retrofitting projects, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, said in a news conference on Thursday. 

The news conference was on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, where lights have already been replaced, expecting to save more than $70,000 and nearly 248,000 kilowatt-hours a year in energy. Unlike standard lights, which last six years, LED bulbs can burn for 20 years before they need to be replaced, the administration said, and the project is expected to save $14 million a year in energy and maintenance costs. The project is the first to receive financing through the Accelerated Conservation and Efficiency initiative or “ACE,” the administration said, a $100 million competitive program that the Department of Citywide Administrative Services created to expedite such sustainability projects.

Workers at Nuclear Waste Site in New Mexico Inhaled Radioactive Materials

Thirteen employees who worked the night shift at a nuclear waste burial site in New Mexico after an underground leak are carrying radioactive materials in their bodies, but it is too soon to say how much health risk this poses, Energy Department officials said on Thursday. The workers inhaled plutonium and americium, which if lodged in the body bombards internal organs with subatomic particles for the rest of the person’s lifetime. The dose calculation is a bit arcane because the dose in such cases will be delivered over many years.  Sensors in the salt mine detected a leak at about 11:30 p.m. on Feb. 14. At that hour, no one was in the mine, and automatic systems reduced the ventilation and ran the exhaust through high efficiency particulate filters, officials said, minimizing the flow of materials to the surface. The next morning, after officials realized that the surface was contaminated, they told the workers at the site to “shelter in place,” and all were scanned for external radioactive materials before they were sent home; no contamination was found. The mine has not been operating since then.
mobile.nytimes.com/2014/02/28/us/workers-at-nuclear-waste-site-in-new-mexico-inhaled-radioactive-materials.html?referrer=

China's pollution crisis threatens car sales

The Chinese government is limiting the number of new vehicle registrations in many major cities this year in hopes of clearing the country's thick, smoggy air. Sales in the largest cities could be limited to 300,000, while a limited number of smaller cities will have caps closer to 25,000. On top of that, a group of cities are even banning some cars from the streets on certain days to lighten traffic and decrease pollution. Auto companies have in recent years expanded rapidly in China, where growing demand and rising wages have fueled a car-buying boom. China is now the world's largest car market, cementing the country's status as a top destination for automakers. But now, the government's new rules are expected to dampen China's auto-spending spree. In the short term, auto sales could benefit as consumers race to buy cars before the new restrictions are implemented. But that sugar rush won't last -- growth in passenger vehicle sales is expected to slow from an estimated 15% in 2013 to 10% this year, according to a report by Japanese brokerage Nomura. 

http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/20/autos/china-autos-pollution/

Sea Levels Rising

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/science/earth/grappling-with-sea-level-rise-sooner-not-later.html?ref=science&_r=0

Much of the population and economy of the country is concentrated on the East Coast, which the accumulating scientific evidence suggests will be a global hot spot for a rising sea level over the coming century. The detective work has required scientists to grapple with the influence of ancient ice sheets, the meaning of islands that are sinking in the Chesapeake Bay, and even the effect of a giant meteor that slammed into the earth. The work starts with the tides. Because of their importance to navigation, they have been measured for the better part of two centuries. While the record is not perfect, scientists say it leaves no doubt that the world’s oceans are rising. The best calculation suggests that from 1880 to 2009, the global average sea level rose a little over eight inches. That may not sound like much, but scientists say even the smallest increase causes the seawater to eat away more aggressively at the shoreline in calm weather, and leads to higher tidal surges during storms. The sea-level rise of decades past thus explains why coastal towns nearly everywhere are having to spend billions of dollars fighting erosion. The evidence suggests that the sea-level rise has probably accelerated, to about a foot a century, and scientists think it will accelerate still more with the continued emission of large amounts of greenhouse gases into the air. The gases heat the planet and cause land ice to melt into the sea. The official stance of the world’s climate scientists is that the global sea level could rise as much as three feet by the end of this century, if emissions continue at a rapid pace. But some scientific evidence supports even higher numbers, five feet and beyond in the worst case.