Monday, November 28, 2005

SpaceX called off the much-delayed inaugural launch of their new Falcon 1 rocket on Saturday from Kwajalein’s Omelek Island launch site. The intent was to launch the U.S. Air Force Academy’s FalconSat 2 satellite, which will monitor plasma interactions with the Earth’s upper atmosphere and magnetosphere.

The launch was delayed, then finally cancelled after an oxygen boil-off vent had accidentally been left open. The oxygen was unable to cool the helium pressurant, which then proceeded to evaporate faster than it could be replenished. A main computer issue, probably serious enough to cause a scrub on its own, was also discovered.

This long-anticipated flight was originally expected to be launched in January 2005, however a series of setbacks forced a series of delays, with the flight most recently scheduled to be in early 2006. It was intended to be launched from the Kwajalein atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

The maiden voyage was originally intended to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California with a Naval Research Laboratory satellite and a Space Services Incorporated space burial payload.

Monday, February 18, 2008

The family of Amy Fitzpatrick, an Irish expat who disappeared from Mijas, Spain on New Year’s Night, has announced a reward for reliable information which could lead to finding the missing teenager. The news came in a statement from Dave Mahon, the partner of Amy’s mother, Audrey, who said all information would be treated in the strictest confidence, and calling on anyone who may have a possible lead to contact either the family or the Civil Guard. In the statement Mahon said that “a substantial reward is on offer to anyone who can provide reliable information on Amy’s whereabouts. Any information received will be treated within the strictest confidence.”

There has been no news on whether detectives have managed to locate a vehicle which they believe Amy may have taken, a British-registered white Ford Fiesta, with the registration number C955 SLK. Anyone who may see the vehicle is asked not to touch it to avoid destroying any evidence, and to call 062 urgently.

Amy disappeared when she was walking home to the Riviera del Sol Urbanisation from the Calypso area at around 10 p.m. on New Year’s Night, and was wearing black track suit bottoms and a T-shirt with the word ‘Diesel’ when she was last seen. She has black hair, and is 1.65 m tall. The contact telephone numbers for any information on her whereabouts are 112, 952 487 036, 062, 686 044 181 and 952 474 030.

This article is based on Fitzpatrick family offers reward in search for missing Mijas teenager by TypicallySpanish.com which has a copyright policy compatible with our CC-BY 2.5. Specifically “CC-BY-3.0“

Thursday, February 1, 2018

On Tuesday, English football club Manchester United announced Spanish midfielder Juan Mata has a one-year contract extension with the club. The club triggered the one-year-contract extension clause in Mata’s contract which would keep Mata tied with the club until 2019.

Speaking about the Spaniard, Manchester United’s manager José Mourinho said Mata is “[a]n important player for me; an important player for the club; an important player for the other players.” Juan Mata joined The Red Devils in 2014 on a four-and-half-year contract. Mata made the switch from London club Chelsea FC for then-club record transfer fee £37.1 million under David Moyes’ management. Mourinho was Chelsea’s manager that time.

As of Tuesday, the Spaniard played 172 matches and scored 39 goals for Manchester United, and featured this season in 26 games in all competitions. In his tenure at the Old Trafford, he has won the FA Cup, EFL League Cup as well as the UEFA Europa League trophy.

The 29-year-old midfielder’s contract was previously set to expire at the end of the season. Manchester’s veteran midfielder Michael Carrick is set to retire at the end of the season. Earlier in January, United signed Chilean forward Alexis Sanchez from another London club Arsenal FC, on the expense of Armenian midfielder Henrick Mkhitaryan in the swap deal. Mourinho, who has been in-charge of Manchester United for one and half years, said they “need to get a player to compensate the situation” of Carrick’s retirement.

Monday, November 21, 2016

UK Prime Minister Theresa May and opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn both spoke at the annual Confederation of British Industry conference today, talking about Britain after its planned ‘Brexit’ from the European Union, and future plans for business.

May formally announced plans to cut corporation tax from 20%, without giving details, in order to discourage businesses from leaving the UK post-Brexit. Corbyn said in his speech he believes investment by the government on things such as infrastructure improvements is shared ground between Labour and businesses but “businesses will need to contribute” meaning “some increase in corporation tax” under his administration.

Theresa May also toned down plans to put ordinary workers on corporate boards, a campaign promise from running to become leader of the ruling Conservative Party. She said she is working to create a “model that works for everyone” after consulting firms and the general public, with possible plans including panels or advisory committees. The General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress responded by saying “Theresa May made a clear promise to have workers represented on company boards […] This is not the way to show that you want to govern for ordinary working people.” Jeremy Corbyn also criticised this announcement saying “we need to see genuine employee representation at board level, which the prime minister promised, but I see is already backing away from.”

Theresa May also announced she wishes to spend £2Bn annually in research and development, as well as plans to start a small business research initiative to look into helping innovators get ahead. Jeremy Corbyn however said he plans to spend 3% of the UK’s GDP on R&D, significantly more than specified by May.

Jeremy Corbyn’s plans for the UK’s economy focussed on investment. Speaking at the conference he said “First and foremost, a Labour government will prioritise investing in our economy.” As well as the investment in research, Corbyn also promised funds for areas including house building and infrastructure. This would be controlled by the proposed “National Investment Bank”. Corbyn said “Our National Investment Bank will deliver long term strategic investment in our under-powered infrastructure and provide the patient finance that our businesses need across the country.”

May told the conference she would not give “a running commentary on every twist and turn” of the Brexit negotiations. This comes after allegation in the press that she she has no plan to keep under wraps, a claim that has been backed up by an alleged leaked internal government memo that talks about a “lack of overall negotiation strategy” within government.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

George W. Bush vowed to get the USD 700 billion economic rescue plan through congress in a statement to the media made today.

“Yesterday, the House of Representatives voted on a financial rescue plan that had been negotiated by Congressional leaders of both parties and my administration,” Bush reminded the audience. “Unfortunately, the measure was defeated by a narrow margin. I’m disappointed by the outcome, but I assure our citizens and citizens around the world that this is not the end of the legislative process.”

“Producing legislation is complicated, and it can be contentious. It matters little what a path a bill takes to become law,” he continued. “We’re at a critical moment for our economy, and we need legislation that decisively address the troubled assets now clogging the financial system, helps lenders resume the flow of credit to consumers and businesses, and allows the American economy to get moving again.”

Market Data

“I recognize this is a difficult vote for members of Congress. Many of them don’t like the fact that our economy has reached this point, and I understand that. But the reality is that we are in an urgent situation, and the consequences will grow worse each day if we do not act. The dramatic drop in the stock market that we saw yesterday will have a direct impact on the retirement accounts, pension funds, and personal savings of millions of our citizens. And if our nation continues on this course, the economic damage will be painful and lasting.”World and US markets today are up after severe declines yesterday. Most have recovered 30% of their previous losses, meaning that the potential government expenditure was similar to the market losses.

Bush then said that he knows “many Americans are especially worried about the cost of the legislation.” He then attempted to justify the cost. “The bill the House considered yesterday commits up to 700 billion taxpayer dollars to purchase troubled assets from banks and other financial institutions. That, no question, is a large amount of money. We’re also dealing with a large problem. But to put that in perspective, the drop in the stock market yesterday represented more than a trillion dollars in losses.”

If passed, the bailout plan would have allowed for the United States government to purchase devalued mortgage backed securities, resulting from the subprime mortgage crisis, from troubled financial institutions. The US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said the plan could cost up to $700 billion.

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

In late 2010 a geological expedition to Antarctica drilled through the Ross Ice Shelf so they could send an ROV under it. What they found was unexpected: Sea anemones. In their thousands they were doing what no other species of sea anemone is known to do — they were living in the ice itself.

Discovered by the ANDRILL [Antarctic Drilling] project, the team was so unprepared for biological discoveries they did not have suitable preservatives and the only chemicals available obliterated the creature’s DNA. Nonetheless Marymegan Daly of Ohio State University confirmed the animals were a new species. Named Edwardsiella andrillae after the drilling project that found it, the anemone was finally described in a PLOS ONE paper last month.

ANDRILL lowered their cylindrical camera ROV down a freshly-bored 270m (890ft) hole, enabling it to reach seawater below the ice. The device was merely being tested ahead of its planned mission retrieving data on ocean currents and the sub-ice environment. Instead it found what ANDRILL director Frank Rack of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, a co-author of the paper describing the find, called the “total serendipity” of “a whole new ecosystem that no one had ever seen before”.

The discovery raises many questions. Burrowing sea anemones worm their way into substrates or use their tentacles to dig, but it’s unclear how E. andrillae enters the hard ice. With only their tentacles protruding into the water from the underneath of the ice shelf questions also revolve around how the animals avoid freezing, how they reproduce, and how they cope with the continuously melting nature of their home. Their diet is also a mystery.

E. andrillae is an opaque white, with an inner ring of eight tentacles and twelve-to-sixteen tentacles in an outer ring. The ROV’s lights produced an orange glow from the creatures, although this may be produced by their food. It measures 16–20mm (0.6–0.8in) but when fully relaxed can extend to triple that.

Genetic analysis being impossible, Daly turned to dissection of the specimens but could find nothing out of the ordinary. Scientists hope to send a biological mission to explore the area under the massive ice sheet, which is in excess of 600 miles (970km) wide. The cameras also observed worms, fish that swim inverted as if the icy roof was the sea floor, crustaceans and a cylindrical creature that used appendages on its ends to move and to grab hold of the anemones.

NASA is providing funding to aid further research, owing to possible similarities between this icy realm and Europa, a moon of Jupiter. Biological research is planned for 2015. An application for funding to the U.S. National Science Foundation, which funds ANDRILL, is also pending.

The ANDRILL team almost failed to get any samples at all. Designed to examine the seafloor, the ROV had to be inverted to examine the roof of ice. Weather conditions prevented biological sampling equipment being delivered from McMurdo Station, but the scientists retrieved 20–30 anemones by using hot water to stun them before sucking them from their burrows with an improvised device fashioned from a coffee filter and a spare ROV thruster. Preserved on-site in ethanol, they were taken to McMurdo station where some were further preserved with formaldehyde.

((Wikinews)) How did you come to be involved with this discovery?

Marymegan Daly: Frank Rack got in touch after they returned from Antarctica in hopes that I could help with an identification on the anemone.

((Wikinews)) What was your first reaction upon learning there was an undiscovered ecosystem under the ice in the Ross Sea?

MD I was amazed and really excited. I think to say it was unexpected is inaccurate, because it implies that there was a well-founded expectation of something. The technology that Frank and his colleagues are using to explore the ice is so important because, given our lack of data, we have no reasonable expectation of what it should be like, or what it shouldn’t be like.

((Wikinews)) There’s a return trip planned hopefully for 2015, with both biologists and ANDRILL geologists. Are you intending to go there yourself?

MD I would love to. But I am also happy to not go, as long as someone collects more animals on my behalf! What I want to do with the animals requires new material preserved in diverse ways, but it doesn’t require me to be there. Although I am sure that being there would enhance my understanding of the animals and the system in which they live, and would help me formulate more and better questions about the anemones, ship time is expensive, especially in Antarctica, and if there are biologists whose contribution is predicated on being there, they should have priority to be there.

((Wikinews)) These animals are shrouded in mystery. Some of the most intriguing questions are chemical; do they produce some kind of antifreeze, and is that orange glow in the ROV lights their own? Talk us through the difficulties encountered when trying to find answers with the specimens on hand.

MD The samples we have are small in terms of numbers and they are all preserved in formalin (a kind of formaldehyde solution). The formalin is great for preserving structures, but for anemones, it prevents study of DNA or of the chemistry of the body. This means we can’t look at the issue you raise with these animals. What we could do, however, was to study anatomy and figure out what it is, so that when we have samples preserved for studying e.g., the genome, transcriptome, or metabolome, or conduct tests of the fluid in the burrows or in the animals themselves, we can make precise comparisons, and figure out what these animals have or do (metabolically or chemically) that lets them live where they live.

Just knowing a whole lot about a single species isn’t very useful, even if that animal is as special as these clearly are — we need to know what about them is different and thus related to living in this strange way. The only way to get at what’s different is to make comparisons with close relatives. We can start that side of the work now, anticipating having more beasts in the future.

In terms of their glow, I suspect that it’s not theirs — although luminescence is common in anemone relatives, they don’t usually make light themselves. They do make a host of florescent proteins, and these may interact with the light of the ROV to give that gorgeous glow.

((Wikinews)) What analysis did you perform on the specimens and what equipment was used?

MD I used a dissecting scope to look at the animal’s external anatomy and overall body organization (magnification of 60X). I embedded a few of the animals in wax and then cut them into very thin slices using a microtome, mounted the slices on microscope slides, stained the slices to enhance contrast, and then looked at those slides under a compound microscope (that’s how I got the pictures of the muscles etc in the paper). I used that same compound scope to look at squashed bits of tissue to see the stinging capsules (=nematocysts).

I compared the things I saw under the ‘scopes to what had been published on other species in this group. This step seems trivial, but it is really the most important part! By comparing my observations to what my colleagues and predecessors had found, I figured out what group it belongs to, and was able to determine that within that group, it was a new species.

((Wikinews)) It was three years between recovery of specimens and final publication, why did it take so long?

MD You mean, how did we manage to make it all happen so quickly, right? 🙂 It was about two years from when Frank sent me specimens to when we got the paper out. Some of that time was just lost time — I had other projects in the queue that I needed to finish. Once we figured out what it was, we played a lot of manuscript email tag, which can be challenging and time consuming given the differing schedules that folks keep in terms of travel, field work, etc. Manuscript review and processing took about four months.

((Wikinews)) What sort of difficulties were posed by the unorthodox preservatives used, and what additional work might be possible on a specimen with intact DNA?

MD The preservation was not unorthodox — they followed best practices for anatomical preservation. Having DNA-suitable material will let us see whether there are new genes, or genes turned on in different ways and at different times that help explain how these animals burrow into hard ice and then survive in the cold. I am curious about the population structure of the “fields” of anemones — the group to which Edwardsiella andrillae belongs includes many species that reproduce asexually, and it’s possible that the fields are “clones” produced asexually rather than the result of sexual reproduction. DNA is the only way to test this.

((Wikinews)) Do you have any theories about the strategies employed to cope with the harsh environment of burrowing inside an ice shelf?

MD I think there must be some kind of antifreeze produced — the cells in contact with ice would otherwise freeze.

((Wikinews)) How has such an apparently large population of clearly unusual sea anemones, not to mention the other creatures caught on camera, gone undetected for so long?

MD I think this reflects how difficult it is to get under the ice and to collect specimens. That being said, since the paper came out, I have been pointed towards two other reports that are probably records of these species: one from Japanese scientists who looked at footage from cameras attached to seals and one from Americans who dove under ice. In both of these cases, the anemone (if that’s what they saw) was seen at a distance, and no specimens were collected. Without the animals in hand, or the capability of a ROV to get close up for pictures, it is hard to know what has been seen, and lacking a definitive ID, hard to have the finding appropriately indexed or contextualized.

((Wikinews)) Would it be fair to say this suggests there may be other undiscovered species of sea anemone that burrow into hard substrates such as ice?

MD I hope so! What fascinates me about sea anemones is that they’re able to do things that seem impossible given their seemingly limited toolkit. This finding certainly expands the realm of possible.

Thursday, March 5, 2015

Yuriy Kolobov, the former finance minister of Ukraine has been arrested in Spain on charges of fraud and embezzlement. Kolobov was wanted, along with former President Viktor Yanukovych, accused of fraud which cost Ukraine billions of dollars in assets. The Spanish civil guard arrested him on Wednesday, at a flat in Altea, in the Province of Alicante.

A brief statement from the Ukrainian interior ministry said: “We confirm the information that [Mr Kolobov] has been detained.” No comment was made by Spain’s interior ministry. A judge at Spain’s High Court will question Kolobov, before dealing with the extradition process. Kolobov, 41, is the first member of Yanukovich’s administration to be arrested on charges relating to fraud. The current Ukrainian government continue efforts to recover lost assets. The Interim Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, told parliament that Yanukovich has left Ukraine with $75 billion of debt.

Interpol issued warrants for Yanukovich, Kolobov, and former Prime Minister Mykola Azarov. It is doubtful Yanukovich, who is now in Russia, could be extradited back to Ukraine. Kolobov previously held the position of deputy head of Ukraine’s central bank, before being selected as Finance minister in 2012.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Scoring five goals in 22:44, Manchester United came back from a 0–2 deficit at the half to run out comfortable 5–2 winners over Tottenham Saturday in English Premier League action. With the victory, United moved three points clear of second-place Liverpool, with United having a game-in-hand. Liverpool earned a 3–1 victory over Hull City earlier in the day, allowing the Reds to hold the top position in the table for about two hours, before United reclaimed the top spot. Third-place Chelsea earned a narrow victory and fourth-place Arsenal is off until Sunday.

At Old Trafford, Darren Bent opened the scoring in the 29th minute and Luka Modri? added another three minutes later to put visitors two up over the champions. In the second half, United turned the tables quickly, scoring four goals in the first 25 minutes of the half. Cristiano Ronaldo put United on the board after Spurs keeper Heurelho Gomes unfairly challenged Michael Carrick inside the box. Wayne Rooney equalised for United in the 67th minute and added an assist a minute later when Ronaldo hit a diving header past Gomes. Rooney added an assurance goal three minutes later, before Dimitar Berbatov closed the scoring in the 79th minute after Gomes allowed a shot to slip out of his reach.

For Liverpool, Dirk Kuyt scored the winning goal in the 63rd minute to give the Reds a much needed three points in their quest for the Premier League title. Xabi Alonso opened the scoring for Liverpool, giving the visitors the lead for good. After Kuyt’s goal, Hull pulled a goal back on a smash by Geovanni. Kuyt later added another in the 89 minute. The 3–1 victory game Liverpool a precious three points, enough to go ahead of United in the table on goal difference. The lead was short as United regained the spot with their victory in the late game.

Chelsea’s narrow victory come when Salomon Kalou converted a Frank Lampard cross in the 55th minute. West Ham United had a chance to equalise with the Blues, but Chelsea keeper Petr ?ech saved a Mark Noble penalty kick. The penalty was awarded when Kalou fouled Hérita Ilunga. Chelsea is now six points behind United and three back of Liverpool.

Fifth-place Aston Villa drew 1–1 at Bolton and sixth-place Everton fell 1–2 at home to Manchester City. Ashley Young scored for the Villians just before half-time and Tamir Cohen equalised on sixty minutes for Bolton. For Everton, Dan Gosling 90th minute goal would not be enough as goals from Robinho and Stephen Ireland put City over the top for good. The point for Villa put them two points clear of Everton. The victory moved Manchester City into the 9th spot in the table.

In other action, Fulham earned a 1–0 victory over Stoke City, enough to bump them up to the seventh spot in the table. West Bromwich Albion gained a convincing 3–0 victory over Sunderland, with goals from Jonas Olsson, Chris Brunt and Juan Carlos Menseguez.

Two games will be played Sunday as Arsenal hosts Middlesbrough in the afternoon and Blackburn Rovers hosts Wigan in the night game. One game will be played on Monday as Newcastle hosts Portsmouth.