Philippines rescuers scramble as 82 dead in typhoon

MANILA - The death toll from a powerful typhoon that ravaged the southern Philippines rose to 82 Wednesday, as rescuers battled to reach areas cut off in flash floods and mudslides.

Typhoon Bopha churned across the island of Mindanao, toppling trees and blowing away homes on Tuesday before weakening overnight as it headed towards the South China Sea.

It was however expected to dump more rain as it passes over the western island of Palawan on Wednesday morning, with the potential to wreak further destruction, officials said.

Interior Minister Mar Roxas said after an inspection visit to the storm-hit south that the confirmed death toll had risen from 52 to 82, with another 21 people missing.

There were 49 fatalities in a mudslide in the mountainous town of New Bataan alone, and another 33 died in rural settlements elsewhere in Mindanao.

Among the fatalities was a soldier who was part of a troop deployment sent to New Bataan in anticipation of the storm.

"It is quite sad and tragic. They were actually there to be ready to help our countrymen who may be in trouble," Roxas said.

The military was scrambling helicopters and heavy equipment Wednesday to New Bataan, where rainwater had gushed down from nearby slopes, creating a deadly swirl of rainwater, logs and rocks that crushed everything in its path.

The narrow mountain pass leading to the town was littered with fallen trees and boulders, virtually cutting it off from traffic, said Major General Ariel Bernardo, commander of the 10th Infantry Division which covers Mindanao.

"We are hoping to fly our helicopters to conduct reconnaissance and search and recovery," he said.

Parts of Mindanao remained without power and communications, with food and clean water in limited supply after Bopha carved a path of destruction.

"Three of our coastal municipalities remain isolated," said Governor Corazon Malanyaon of Davao Oriental province on the eastern coast of the island where the storm made landfall.

"Roads to these towns remain impassable. There are many fallen trees and debris and the bridge going there had collapsed."

She said rescuers were slowly trying to reach the stricken areas, using everything from heavy equipment to their bare hands and chain saws to clear the roads.

"It's like we're running an obstacle course," she said on local radio.

Malanyaon said initial reports said that nearly every building in the agricultural town of Cateel, one of the three towns isolated in Davao Oriental, had been damaged.

"About 95 per cent of the town centre's structures including hospitals, private homes, private buildings had their roofs blown away," she said.

Bernardo said the military was dispatching two companies to help in the search and rescue operations, but that it was also "a victim of the storm" after an army patrol base and a rescue truck were washed away in New Bataan.

"In one of our headquarters, no bunkers were left standing and all our communication equipment has been destroyed,' he said.

Bopha made landfall on the eastern coast of Mindanao early Tuesday, bringing driving rain and strong winds that forced more than 56,000 to seek refuge in emergency shelters.

It was the sixteenth storm this year to ravage the Philippines, which is hit with about 20 cyclones annually.

In December last year Mindanao was pummelled by tropical storm Washi which killed more than 1,200 and left hundreds of thousands homeless.

- AFP/ck

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Apple looks to double its N.C. biogas fuel cell farm

Apple's Maiden, N.C., data center could have up to 50 fuel cells running on renewable biogas.

(Credit:
Apple)

Ten megawatts of electricity is enough energy to power more than 6,000 homes. It is also the same amount of electricity that Apple is looking to produce with its biogas fuel cell project at its North Carolina data center.

The tech giant has filed a request with the N.C. Utilities Commission to double the size of its local fuel cell farm, according to the Charlotte Observer.

Currently, the data center has enough fuel cells to pump out 4.8 megawatts of electricity. Apple is asking to bump those numbers up to 50 fuel cells, which should be able to produce 10 megawatts of electricity.

If Apple is given approval to enlarge its farm, this data center would hold the country's largest fuel cell project not run by an electric utility, according to the Charlotte Observer.

Apple announced in May that it intended to have its $1 billion data center in Maiden, N.C., run entirely off renewable energy by the end of the year. The company said it was building two solar array installations in the area, which when combined will bring in 84 million kilowatt-hours of power annually. And, it was also at work on a biogas fuel cell installation.

By using biogas rather than natural gas to power its fuel cells, Apple is tapping into what many consider a renewable resource -- namely trash piling up in landfills that creates methane gas.

"The use of biogas, which displaces conventional natural gas, to generate electricity will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and smog-forming pollutants while also diversifying the fuel used to generate electricity," Apple said in its May filing.

Earlier this year, Apple's North Carolina data center became the target of attacks from Greenpeace, which launched a campaign to pressure cloud-computing providers to use more clean energy. In response, Apple said the Maiden facility would be one of the most efficient data centers in the country, with 60 percent of its power to be supplied by its on-site renewable-energy power sources and with the remaining 40 percent coming from renewable "local and regional sources."

The start-up and testing phase of Apple's North Carolina fuel cell project got underway last month, according to the Charlotte Observer. And, if the company gets approval to expand, it hopes to have its fuel cell electricity output at 10 megawatts by January.

CNET contacted Apple for comment. We'll update the story when we get more information.

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Scientific Results From Challenger Deep

Jane J. Lee

The spotlight is shining once again on the deepest ecosystems in the ocean—Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench (map) and the New Britain Trench near Papua New Guinea. At a presentation today at the American Geophysical Union's conference in San Francisco, attendees got a glimpse into these mysterious ecosystems nearly 7 miles (11 kilometers) down, the former visited by filmmaker James Cameron during a historic dive earlier this year.

Microbiologist Douglas Bartlett with the University of California, San Diego described crustaceans called amphipods—oceanic cousins to pill bugs—that were collected from the New Britain Trench and grow to enormous sizes five miles (eight kilometers) down. Normally less than an inch (one to two centimeters) long in other deep-sea areas, the amphipods collected on the expedition measured 7 inches (17 centimeters). (Related: "Deep-Sea, Shrimp-like Creatures Survive by Eating Wood.")

Bartlett also noted that sea cucumbers, some of which may be new species, dominated many of the areas the team sampled in the New Britain Trench. The expedition visited this area before the dive to Challenger Deep.

Marine geologist Patricia Fryer with the University of Hawaii described some of the deepest seeps yet discovered. These seeps, where water heated by chemical reactions in the rocks percolates up through the seafloor and into the ocean, could offer hints of how life originated on Earth.

And astrobiologist Kevin Hand with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, spoke about how life in these stygian ecosystems, powered by chemical reactions, could parallel the evolution of life on other planets.

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Tasting DNA-Altered Salmon That May Hit US Plates

Deep in the rain forests of Panama, in a secret location behind padlocked gates, barbed-wire fences and over a rickety wooden bridge, grows what could be the most debated food product of our time.

It may look like the 1993 hit movie "Jurassic Park," but at this real-life freshwater farm scientists are altering the genes not of dinosaurs -- but of fish.

They are growing a new DNA-altered saltwater fish in the mountains, far from the sea -- a salmon that could be the first genetically altered animal protein approved for the world to eat. If it is approved, this would be a landmark change for human food.

But it is one critics call "Frankenfish."

"The idea of changing an animal form, I think, is really creepy," said Gary Hirshberg, founder of Stonyfield Farm, an organic dairy farm. "When you move the DNA from a species into another species ... you create a new life form that's so new and so unique that you can get a patent for it."

And until now, AquaBounty, the multinational biotech company that for 20 years has been developing this giant fish, has kept it under close wraps.

The press has never been invited to its Prince Edward Island laboratory on the Canadian maritime coast, and its fish farm location in Panama has been kept secret out of fear of sabotage.

The Food and Drug Administration has seen it, but few from the outside. In fact, the last public tour of any kind was four years ago.

AquaBounty Creates 'Fort Knox for Fish'

ABC News was given exclusive access to see the facilities up close and an opportunity to taste this mysterious fish that FDA scientists say "is as safe as food from conventional Atlantic salmon," although have yet to officially approve it for public sale.

Ron Stotish, the president and CEO of AquaBounty Technologies, the company that created and hopes to market the eggs of this salmon to independent fish farms around the world, told ABC News it has employed bio-security measures, creating a "Fort Knox for fish," to ensure safety for the fish and prevent cross-contamination with the wild.

Entry to both facilities begins with body suits and iodine baths for shoes, which serves to keep the fish safe from germs.

Inside these protected tanks, America gets the first up-close look at the final product, the fish that has the food police up in arms.

"These are very healthy, beautiful Atlantic salmon," Stotish said.

With one big difference -- the growth rate of a regular salmon compared to that of an AquaBounty genetically modified fish.

While the AquaBounty fish do not grow to a size larger than normal salmon, they get to full size much faster, cutting costs for producers.

A normal-size 1-year-old Atlantic salmon averages 10 inches long, while the genetically modified fish at the same age is more than two times larger, coming in at 24 inches.

Salmon is the second most popular seafood in America. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the average size of an Atlantic salmon is 28 inches to 30 inches and 8 pounds to 12 pounds after two years at sea.

How do they accomplish the accelerated growth?

"They differ by a single gene," Stotish said.

But, it's that single gene change that makes the DNA-altered salmon grow much faster than a normal Atlantic salmon, because it's really three fish in one.

AquaBounty scientists have taken a growth gene from the Chinook salmon and inserted it into the DNA of the Atlantic salmon because Chinooks grow fast from birth, while Atlantics do not.

"Salmon in their first two years of life grow very slowly," Stotish said.

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Heavy hydrogen excess hints at Martian vapour loss

Gravity means most things are lighter on Mars but it seems the Red Planet likes its hydrogen heavy. In its first chemical analysis of the Martian soil, the Curiosity rover has discovered an unusually high proportion of heavy hydrogen, also known as deuterium. Combined with future results, the finding may help pin down when and how Mars lost most of its atmosphere.

Most hydrogen atoms contain just a proton and an electron, but some contain an extra neutron, forming deuterium. On Earth, deuterium is much rarer than hydrogen – for example, in our oceans one in every 6420 hydrogens also has a neutron. As deuterium is thought to have been produced in the big bang, it should have once appeared in similar abundances on all the planets in the solar system.

That's why the new discovery by Curiosity, which landed in an area of Mars called Gale Crater on 6 August, is intriguing. After heating a soil sample to 1100 °C and analysing the resulting vapour, Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) experiment found a deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio that is five times higher than that on Earth: one deuterium for every 1284 hydrogens.

"This is one of those ratios that's just way, way different," SAM principal investigator Paul Mahaffy told a press conference on 3 December at the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting in San Francisco.

Bygone water

Mars's atmosphere is much thinner than Earth's and is thought to be vanishing. Mahaffy suggests that Mars could have lost a bunch of its light hydrogen when its climate was warmer and wetter. Ultraviolet light from the sun could have broken up water vapour in the atmosphere, creating free hydrogen. The lighter isotopes of hydrogen would then escape into space more rapidly, leaving proportionately more deuterium behind.

Knowing the modern deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio doesn't paint that picture on its own. But looking at the ratio captured in hydrated minerals on Aeolis Mons, a mountain thought to preserve a layered history of Martian geology, could help fill in the historical record. "It will help us understand the processes that may have stripped an early atmosphere from Mars," Mahaffy said.

More details will come with the MAVEN mission, set to launch in 2013, which will measure the current rate at which hydrogen is escaping from the atmosphere.

"Those escape rates extrapolated back in time, combined with atmospheric measurements we're making, and hopefully combined with what we might find in very ancient rocks 3.5 billions years ago when a lot more water could have been at Gale Crater, all of those will help us make a model of the early environment and whether it's conducive to life," Mahaffy said.

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.

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British press 'delighted' but anxious over royal baby

LONDON: Britain's press on Tuesday celebrated the "delightful" news that Prince William and his wife Catherine are to have a baby, but the expectant mother's bout of morning sickness tempered spirits.

The couple announced on Monday they are expecting their first child, ending fevered speculation about a baby destined to become Britain's monarch whether it is a boy or a girl.

But the former Kate Middleton, 30, is in hospital suffering from severe morning sickness, St James's Palace announced in a statement.

Popular tabloid The Sun ran with "Kate Expectations" as its front-page headline,

The Daily Telegraph said the news of Catherine's pregnancy was cause for national celebration.

"Who would not be delighted at the prospect of a mother's first child, especially a mother who has won affection with her natural beauty and straightforward character?" said its editorial.

The palace said Catherine was admitted on Monday afternoon to the King Edward VII Hospital in central London with "hyperemesis gravidarum", which it defined as "very acute morning sickness", which requires extra hydration and nutrients.

The Telegraph's headline asked "Could it be twins for the Duchess?" pointing out that the condition is more often experienced by women expecting twins.

The Sun called the sudden announcement "fantastic news".

"As William and Kate embark on this new journey, the nation wishes the nervous Royal couple well," said its editorial.

"But as well as being an immensely happy period in any couple's life, pregnancy is also a nerve-wracking experience... so it's worrying that Kate has been diagnosed with hyperemesis gravidarum.

"We can be sure, however, that she'll be given the best possible care in the months ahead," it added.

The Times splashed "We're Expecting" above its front-page story, but warned that the couple were facing a new level of press scrutiny.

"If the Duke and Duchess, who have always been protective of their privacy, felt that they lived their lives in a goldfish bowl beforehand, that is as nothing to what will happen to them now," wrote columnist Valentine Low.

"For the Duke and Duchess... the rather rushed announcement on a dull Monday afternoon represents a pivotal moment in their lives.

"Their emotions are just the same as any young parents-to-be: happiness, excitement, apprehension. Just with the added factor that their baby will one day be King or Queen," he added.

The Daily Mail summed up the mood with its headline, "A nation's joy, a husband's nerves" while tabloid the Daily Mirror speculated on its front page that the Duchess could be hospitalised "for days".

- AFP/ck

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Facebook wins preliminary OK of 'Sponsored Stories' settlement

Facebook has won preliminary approval of a proposed settlement of a class-action lawsuit filed over the social network's use of members' names and images in advertising.

Under the settlement's terms, Facebook agreed to pay $10 to each user who objected to being included in the social network's "Sponsored Stories" advertisements, as well initiate user controls that allow users to be excluded from the program.

U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg said today the settlement "has no obvious deficiencies" and "appears to be the product of serious" negotiations between lawyers for Facebook and the group of Facebook users who brought the lawsuit last year, according to a report in the San Jose Mercury News.

In a brief statement, Facebook said it was pleased with the preliminary approval of the settlement.

Facebook's Sponsored Stories ads essentially displayed a user's name, picture, and a tagline asserting that the person "likes" a particular advertiser. These particular ads initially appeared only in Facebook's right column, but the social network soon moved them directly into users' news feeds, identifying them as "sponsored" stories.

The original five plaintiffs claimed the social network violated users' right to privacy by publicizing their "likes" in advertisements without asking for permission or offering compensation.

This is the second settlement proposed in the lawsuit. The first, reached in May, was rejected by Seeborg after U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh backed out of the case.

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Mars Rover Detects Simple Organic Compounds

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has detected several simple carbon-based organic compounds on Mars, but it remains unclear whether they were formed via Earthly contamination or whether they contain only elements indigenous to the planet.

Speaking at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Francisco, Curiosity mission leaders also said that the compound perchlorate—identified previously in polar Mars—appeared to also be present in Gale Crater, the site of Curiosity's exploration.

The possible discovery of organics—or carbon-based compounds bonded to hydrogen, also called hydrocarbons—could have major implications for the mission's search for more complex organic material.

It would not necessarily mean that life exists now or ever existed on Mars, but it makes the possibility of Martian life—especially long ago when the planet was wetter and warmer—somewhat greater, since available carbon is considered to be so important to all known biology.

(See "Mars Curiosity Rover Finds Proof of Flowing Water—A First.")

The announcements came after several weeks of frenzied speculation about a "major discovery" by Curiosity on Mars. But project scientist John Grotzinger said that it remains too early to know whether Martian organics have been definitely discovered or if they're byproducts of contamination brought from Earth.

"When this data first came in, and then was confirmed in a second sample, we did have a hooting and hollering moment," he said.

"The enthusiasm we had was perhaps misunderstood. We're doing science at the pace of science, but news travels at a different speed."

Organics Detected Before on Mars

The organic compounds discovered—different combinations of carbon, hydrogen, and chlorine—are the same or similar to chlorinated organics detected in the mid-1970s by the Viking landers.

(Related: "Life on Mars Found by NASA's Viking Mission?")

At the time, the substances were written off as contamination brought from Earth, but now scientists know more about how the compounds could be formed on Mars. The big question remains whether the carbon found in the compounds is of Martian or Earthly origin.

Paul Mahaffy, the principal investigator of the instrument that may have found the simple organics—the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM)—said that while the findings were not "definitive," they were significant and would require a great deal of further study.

Mahaffy also said the discovery came as a surprise, since the soil sample involved was hardly a prime target in the organics search. In fact, the soil was scooped primarily to clean out the rover's mobile laboratory and soil-delivery systems.

Called Rocknest, the site is a collection of rocks with rippled sand around them—an environment not considered particularly promising for discovery. The Curiosity team has always thought it had a much better chance of finding the organics in clays and sulfate minerals known to be present at the base of Mount Sharp, located in the Gale Crater, where the rover will head early next year.

(See the Mars rover Curiosity's first color pictures.)

The rover has been at Rocknest for a month and has scooped sand and soil five times. It was the first site where virtually all the instruments on Curiosity were used, Grotzinger said, and all of them proved to be working well.

They also worked well in unison—with one instrument giving the surprising signal that the minerals in the soil were not all crystalline, which led to the intensive examination of the non-crystalline portion to see if it contained any organics.

Rover Team "Very Confident"

The simple organics detected by SAM were in the chloromethane family, which contains compounds that are sometimes used to clean electronic equipment. Because it was plausible that Viking could have brought the compounds to Mars as contamination, that conclusion was broadly accepted.

But in 2010, Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center and Rafael Navarro-Gonzalez of the National Autonomous University of Mexico published an influential paper describing how dichloromethane can be a byproduct of the heating of other organic material in the presence of the compound perchlorate.

They conducted the experiment because NASA's Phoenix mission had discovered large amounts of perchlorate in the northern polar soil of Mars, and it seems plausible that it would exist elsewhere on the planet.

"In terms of the SAM results, there are two important conclusions," said McKay, a scientist on the SAM team.

"The first is confirming the perchlorate story—that it's most likely there and seems to react at high temperatures with organic material to form the dichloromethane and other simple organics."

"The second is that we'll have to either find organics without perchlorates nearby, or find a way to get around that perchlorate wall that keeps us from identifying organics," he said.

Another SAM researcher, Danny Glavin of Goddard, said his team is "very confident" about the reported detection of the hydrocarbons, and that they were produced in the rover's ovens. He said it is clear that the chlorine in the compounds is from Mars, but less clear about the carbon.

"We will figure out what's going on here," he said. "We have the instruments and we have the people. And whatever the final conclusions, we will have learned important things about Mars that we can use in the months ahead."

Author of the National Geographic e-book Mars Landing 2012, Marc Kaufman has been a journalist for more than 35 years, including the past 12 as a science and space writer, foreign correspondent, and editor for the Washington Post. He is also author of First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth, published in 2011, and has spoken extensively to crowds across the United States and abroad about astrobiology. He lives outside Washington, D.C., with his wife, Lynn Litterine.

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Suspect Allegedly Told Cops He Traveled to Kill

A man charged in the death of a teenage barista in Alaska told police that he traveled the country with the sole purpose to kill strangers because he "liked to do it," prosecutors said today.

Vermont and federal prosecutors detailed the meticulous and cold-blooded murder of Bill and Lorraine Currier in Essex, Vt., last year and said the information came from Israel Keyes before he killed himself in an Alaska jail cell Sunday. Keyes provided details that only the perpetrator would know, police said.

Keyes, 34, the owner of an Anchorage construction company, was in jail charged with the February murder of Samantha Koenig, 18. While in jail he had been confessing to at least seven other killings in Washington, New York and Vermont.

Now that he is dead, investigators are wondering how many more killings Keyes might be responsible for and why he committed the crimes.

"He provided some motivation, but I don't think it's really [possible] to pigeonhole why he did this," Tristram Coffin, U.S. Attorney in Vermont, said at a news conference today. "He described to investigators that this was a volitional act of his. He wasn't compelled by some uncontrollable force, but it was something that he could control and he liked to do it. Why someone likes to act like that, nobody knows."

Missing Alaska Barista Had Past Restraining Order Watch Video

Authorities described the murders of the Curriers in great detail, offering insight into how the twisted killer traveled to murder, his criteria for choosing random victims and his careful planning of of the murders.

"When [Keyes] left Alaska, he left with the specific purpose of kidnapping and murdering someone," Chittenden County State Attorney T. J. Donovan said at the press conference. "He was specifically looking for a house that had an attached garage, no car in the driveway, no children, no dog."

The Curriers, unfortunately, fit all of Keyes' criteria. He spent three days in Vermont before striking. He even took out a three-day fishing license and fished before the slayings.

In June 2011, Keyes went to their house and cut a phone line from outside and made sure they did not have a security system that would alert police. He donned a head lamp and broke into their house with a gun and silencer that he had brought with him.

Keyes found the couple in bed and tied them up with zip ties. He took Lorraine Currier's purse and wallet as well as Bill Currier's gun. He left the man's wallet.

He put the couple in their own car and drove them to an abandoned farmhouse that he had previously scoped out. Keyes tied Bill Currier to a stool in the basement and went back to the car for Lorraine Currier.

"Keyes saw that Lorraine had broken free from the zip ties and observed that she was running towards Main Street," Donovan said. "He tackled her to regain control of her."

Keyes took Lorraine Currier to the second floor of the farmhouse and tied her up. He rushed to the basement when he heard commotion and found that Bill Currier's stool had broken and he was partially free.

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Tiny tug of war in cells underpins life

TUG of war could well be the oldest game in the world. Cells use it for division, and now researchers have measured the forces involved when an amoeba plays the game.

Hirokazu Tanimoto and Masaki Sano at the University of Tokyo, Japan, studied what happens during the division of Dictyostelium - a slime mould that has barely changed through eons of evolution. The amoeba uses tiny projections or "feet" to gain traction on a surface.

The pair placed the amoeba on a flexible surface embedded with fluorescent beads. They used traction force microscopy to measure how the organism deformed the pattern of beads: the greater the deformation, the greater the force.

Dictyostelium normally exerts a force of about 10 nanonewtons when it moves, but the pair found this roughly doubles during division. That's because the cell uses its feet to pull itself in opposite directions, as if playing tug of war with itself.

The forces involved are about 100 billion times smaller than those used in the human form of the game, Tanimoto says (Physical Review Letters, in press).

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.

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