Saturn’s icy moon Dione has an atmosphere, albeit a thin one, astronomers have discovered.
Image courtesy SSI/NASA
(Source: National Geographic, via nucleation)
Libyan Woman Struggles to Tell Media of Her Rape
TRIPOLI, Libya — A Libyan woman burst into the hotel housing the foreign press in Tripoli on Saturday morning in an attempt to tell journalists that she had been raped and beaten by members of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s militia. After struggling for nearly an hour to resist removal by Colonel Qaddafi’s security forces, she was dragged away from the hotel screaming. “They say that we are all Libyans and we are one people,” said the woman, who gave her name as Eman al-Obeidy, barging in during breakfast at the hotel dining room. “But look at what the Qaddafi men did to me.”
She displayed a broad bruise on her face, a large scar on her upper thigh, several narrow and deep scratch marks lower on her leg, and marks that seemed to come from binding around her hands and feet.
She said she had been raped by 15 men. “I was tied up, and they defecated and urinated on me,” she said. “They violated my honor.”
Video from The Telegraph
An expert in the fight against child sexual abuse is raising the alarm about a technique the TSA is reportedly using to get children to co-operate with airport pat-downs: calling it a “game”.
Ken Wooden, founder of Child Lures Prevention, says the TSA’s recommendation that children be told the pat-down is a “game” is potentially putting children in danger.
Telling a child that they are engaging in a game is “one of the most common ways” that sexual predators use to convince children to engage in inappropriate contact, Wooden told Raw Story.
The TSA policy could “desensitize children to inappropriate touch and ultimately make it easier for sexual offenders to prey on our children,” Wooden added.
“How can experts working at the TSA be so incredibly misinformed and misguided to suggest that full body pat downs for children be portrayed as a game?” Wooden asked in an email. “To do so is completely contrary to what we in the sexual abuse prevention field have been trying to accomplish for the past thirty years.”
He added: “This policy is also incredibly insensitive to the countless victims who have already been traumatized by unwanted touching in their lives and could be re-traumatized by such pat-downs.”
(CNN) — Scientists have captured antimatter atoms for the first time, a breakthrough that could eventually help us to understand the nature and origins of the universe.
Researchers at CERN, the Geneva-based particle physics laboratory, have managed to confine single antihydrogen atoms in a magnetic trap.
This will allow them to conduct a more detailed study of antihydrogen, which will in turn allow scientists to compare matter and antimatter.
In a precursor to today’s experiment, in 2002 scientists at CERN produced antihydrogen atoms in large quantities, but they had an incredibly short lifespan — just several milliseconds — because the antihydrogen came into contact with the walls of their containers and the two annihilated each other.
In this latest experiment the lifespan of the antihydrogen atoms was extended by using magnetic fields to trap them and thus prevent them from coming into contact with matter.
“This will help us understand the structure of space and time. For reasons that no one yet understands, nature ruled out antimatter… this inspires us to work that much harder to see if antimatter holds some secret.”
It’s ridiculous to think that someone’s sexual orientation matters. It’s not a bachelor reality show. What matters is their military performance.
Read 2 stories of men who was stopped from serving for being gay.
“I made the list and put it in the computer and hit enter, then went to go do something,” Hörst said.
“When I came back, the computer was printing out a long list of all the molecules it had found, and I just stood there for a minute and went … that’s not right. I think any scientist’s reaction to seeing something exciting [in the data] is, I’ve done something wrong. So I went through it again and then went through the data by hand and—no [the molecules are] still there.”
Hörst added that the new results don’t necessarily mean Titan hosts these molecules: “It’s impossible to perfectly replicate Titan’s atmosphere in the lab,” she said. While Cassini can see the basic components of molecules on Titan, the probe doesn’t have the resolution to see exactly how the atoms are arranged.
But if Titan really does form nucleotides and amino acids in its haze, it may be that early Earth’s atmosphere also provided a global source of these molecules.
Gliese 581g in ‘Goldilocks zone’ of space where liquid water could exist is strong contender for a habitable world
Astronomers have discovered a potentially habitable planet of similar size to Earth in orbit around a nearby star.
A team of planet hunters spotted the alien world circling a red dwarf star called Gliese 581, 20 light years away.
The planet is in the “Goldilocks zone” of space around a star where surface temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to form.
“Our findings offer a very compelling case for a potentially habitable planet,” said Steven Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “The fact that we were able to detect this planet so quickly and so nearby tells us that planets like this must be really common.”
If confirmed, the planet would be the most Earth-like that has ever been discovered in another solar system and the first strong contender for a habitable one.
More than 400 exoplanets have been discovered by astronomers, but most are gas giants, like Jupiter, that would be inhospitable to life as we know it.
Astronomers used the Keck telescope in Hawaii to study the movement of Gliese 581 in exquisite detail and from their observations inferred the presence of a number of orbiting planets. The team report two new planets in the Astrophysical Journal, bringing the total number known to be circling the star to six.
One of the planets, named Gliese 581g, has a mass of three to four times that of Earth and takes 37 days to orbit the star. Astronomers believe it is a rocky planet with enough gravity to retain an atmosphere.
Unlike the previously discovered planets, Gliese 581g lies squarely in the region of space were life can thrive. “We had planets on both sides of the habitable zone — one too hot and one too cold — and now we have one in the middle that’s just right,” Vogt said.
One side of the planet is always facing the star, much as one side of the moon constantly faces Earth. This means that the far side of the planet is constantly in darkness. The most habitable region of the planet would be the line between the light and dark regions.
“Any emerging life forms would have a wide range of stable climates to choose from and to evolve around, depending on their longitude,” Vogt said.
The average temperature on the planet is estimated to be between -31 to -12C, but the ground temperature would vary from blazing hot on the bright side and freezing on the dark side.
“The number of systems with potentially habitable planets is probably on the order of 10 or 20 percent, and when you multiply that by the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, that’s a large number. There could be tens of billions of these systems in our galaxy,” said Vogt.
ಠ_ಠ
:(
RIP
An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday.
The soldier, who has only been identified as “Captain R”, was charged with relatively minor offences for the killing of Iman al-Hams who was shot 17 times as she ventured near an Israeli army post near Rafah refugee camp in Gaza a year ago.
The manner of Iman’s killing, and the revelation of a tape recording in which the captain is warned that she was just a child who was “scared to death”, made the shooting one of the most controversial since the Palestinian intifada erupted five years ago even though hundreds of other children have also died.
After the verdict, Iman’s father, Samir al-Hams, said the army never intended to hold the soldier accountable.
“They did not charge him with Iman’s murder, only with small offences, and now they say he is innocent of those even though he shot my daughter so many times,” he said. “This was the cold-blooded murder of a girl. The soldier murdered her once and the court has murdered her again. What is the message? They are telling their soldiers to kill Palestinian children.”
❞ -Not guilty. The Israeli captain who emptied his rifle into a Palestinain schoolgirl.
(via first-taste)
