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Katrina allows internet to prove its worth
Thirty years after the internet was created as a communications system of last resort, the network fulfilled its mission in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but in ways more sweeping than its founders could have imagined.
It reunited families and connected them with shelter. It turned amateur photographers into chroniclers of history and ordinary people into pundits. It allowed television stations to keep broadcasting and newspapers to keep publishing. It relayed heartbreaking tales of loss and intimate moments of triumph.
In the process, the internet cemented itself further into the American mainstream, demonstrating the flexibility that its designers envisioned and a vibrancy they did not. “The Web has become the media of public service, of communication, of original content,” said Jeffrey Cole, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication’s Centre for the Digital Future.
“I think this will be viewed as the first event that demonstrates what the Web has become in terms of being transformational in people’s lives.” The Net was designed as a decentralized military network that could keep commanders in contact even if most of the nation’s infrastructure was wiped out in a nuclear war.
But the commercial and social applications of the last 10 years have outstripped that original vision. Indeed, even as government agencies struggled to respond to Katrina, millions of regular people mobilized themselves online.
The postings at online bulletin board Craigslist have been jammed with offers of shelter from across the country. More than half of the $503 million in donations that have poured into the American Red Cross have been made online. In the nearly two weeks since Katrina came ashore, Yahoo News posted the four busiest days in its history.
Exploding star
In the equivalent of spotting a bonfire at the dawn of time, Nasa’s orbiting Swift satellite has detected the most-distant exploding star — a cosmic suicide that took place just 500 million years or so after the creation of the universe, scientists say.
Located 12.6 billion light years from Earth, the explosion shows that giant stars formed earlier than previously thought. “This is the first direct evidence of very early stars,” said Neil Gehrels of the Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, US.
“It tells us when the dark ages of the early universe were coming to an end.” In cosmic terms, the “dark ages” were a time when the universe went black a few hundred million years after the Big Bang flooded the universe with light and matter. The dark ages lasted a few hundred million more years until stars began to form, relighting the universe.
“For the first time we can learn about individual stars from near the beginning of time,” said Gehrels, the principal investigator on the Swift mission. “There are surely many more out there.”
Swift was launched almost a year ago to detect gamma ray bursts and determine their origin. Scientists have since concluded that the longer-duration bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe, are essentially the birth cries of black holes. — Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times
Ozone hole growing
A huge ozone hole has developed over Antarctica for the second year running, exposing southern Argentina and Chile to high levels of damaging ultraviolet radiation from the Sun.
The “hole” over the South Pole — actually an annual thinning of the ozone layer during the months of September and October — currently measures about 25 million square kilometres and growing, according to European Space Agency satellite data, and it may yet become the biggest hole in history.
While this seems at odds with recent announcements that the amount of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the lower atmosphere has finally started to decline, those chemicals will remain in the atmosphere for many decades.
Meanwhile, increases in other ozone-depleting substances like methyl bromide are rising and continued illegal use of CFCs means the fight to protect the ozone layer is far from over. “New holes will likely develop for at least the next 30 to 40 years,” says Craig Long, a meteorologist with the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Centre, located in the eastern state Maryland.
“This year’s Antarctic hole should reach its maximum size in late September,” said Long. — Dawn/IPS News Service
Airlift plan
Conservation experts are planning an audacious Noah’s Ark-style rescue mission to save hundreds of amphibian species threatened by a mysterious killer fungus.
Campaigners say a huge airlift of tens of thousands of the animals into captive breeding programmes may be the only way to save from extinction frogs, toads, newts and salamanders in the path of the rapidly spreading disease.
Claude Gascon, head of the amphibians programme at the US-based group Conservation International, said: “It’s kind of a Noah’s Ark for amphibians. Because this fungus is something that is so deadly where it occurs, there really is no hope of saving a lot of these species if we leave them in the wild.”
About 1,800 amphibian species are teetering on the brink of extinction, he added. The chytridiomycosis fungus is concentrated in Australia, the Caribbean and North and Central America. It has been found infesting the common midwife toad in mainland Europe and biologists say it is only a matter of time until it reaches Britain.
It can spread up to 20 miles a year. Dr Gascon said: “It’s probably 10 times the equivalent of all human diseases like malaria, Sars, avian flu and HIV combined. This is one disease that within a decade could wipe out a third of all amphibian species worldwide.”
Trademark fight
Internet giant Google is facing the threat of renewed legal action over alleged intellectual property rights infringement.
A British firm that claims to own the trademark Gmail, the name chosen for the internet giant’s email service, said last week it was planning “further legal action” after 15 months of negotiations between the two parties collapsed. Independent International Investment Research (IIIR) claims it registered the trademark in May 2002, two years before Google chose the name for its new email service.
Despite entering “confidential negotiations” to protect its trademark in April last year, IIIR said talks had broken down, despite proposals to settle from both sides. — Dawn/The Guardian News Service
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