- Email: [email protected]
Submarine cables prove a gift to spooks
For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
Green pay-off
role the interface region plays in powering the corona,” says IRIS mission scientist Jeffrey Newmark. On 26 June, an aircraft carrying a rocket with the telescope inside will launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and will release its payload 12 kilometres up. The rocket will then carry the telescope to its orbit, some 660 kilometres above Earth’s surface. IRIS will track short-lived jets of plasma, which the IRIS team hope will help explain why the corona, at 1 million kelvin, is so much hotter than the surface, at a mere 6000 K.
60 Seconds
expand into, such as creating more resilient products that withstand severe weather. It also provides more opportunities to gain customers by offering sustainable products.
GO GREEN, get rich. Firms that become environmentally friendly will profit the most. “Companies that adapt quickest to the new environmental realities are the likeliest to thrive,” “Companies that adapt quickest to the new says Kaveh Zahedi of the United Nations Environment Programme. environmental realities are the likeliest to thrive” In a report released this week, UNEP identified the threats Last year, researchers compared and opportunities posed by 180 companies and found that the environmental degradation to more environmentally friendly 10 business sectors. Threats businesses were more profitable include disrupted supply chains, in the long run than their lessfor example. But a changing sustainable competitors. environment offers new areas to
Trio of alien planets Cable hotspots a gift for UK spies
Nik Jewell/nomadphotographs.com
ALIENS could be watching aliens IT’S a golden age for spying. The subsea fibre-optic cables that carry watching aliens. That’s a realistic telephone and internet traffic are a prospect now that three technological marvel – and a gift to potentially habitable planets – intelligence agencies. The cables a record – have been glimpsed make landfall at just a handful of orbiting the same star. locations, meaning vast quantities Earlier studies had suggested of data can be sucked out at one site that a nearby star, Gliese 667C, and, according to Edward Snowden, had three planets, only one of the prolific US National Security which might support life. But the Agency whistleblower, that is what very presence of multiple planets British intelligence has been doing made their precise number hard for the last 18 months. to tease out. In a leak to The Guardian Now Guillem Anglada-Escudé newspaper on 22 June, Snowden said of the University of Göttingen in the UK Government Communications Germany and his colleagues have Headquarters in Cheltenham is reanalysed the original data and siphoning data from at least 200 added some new observations. fibre-optic telecommunications They found evidence for up to cables – including many of the seven worlds, including three rocky planets where temperatures should suit life (Astronomy & Astrophysics, in press). The three are close enough to each other that any intelligent life there with the ability to build rockets could visit the neighbours in just one to two months. In 2010, two of the paper’s authors were praised and then criticised when they claimed to have found the first potentially habitable rocky planet around the star Gliese 581 – a discovery others were unable to confirm. AngladaEscudé is not worried: “We made sure to be very careful this time.” –Bude: prime site for snoopers–
transatlantic subsea cables that hit British shores at Bude in Cornwall. The tapping project, known as Tempora, allows phone calls to be monitored, as well as emails on offshore American-hosted webmail services such as Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook. “It is astonishing access they are getting with Tempora,” says Eric King of pressure group Privacy International in London. “Every piece of data that leaves the UK, and every piece of international data that flows through the UK – which is 99 per cent of the world’s communications – is available to them.” King and colleagues predicted as much in 2011 when they published a list of providers of subsea cable-tapping technology.
Light-bulb star The oldest known relative of starfish looked like a light bulb. Fossils of a bulbous animal called Helicocystis moroccoensis have been discovered in rocks 510 million years old. Five grooves spiralled around the bulb to the mouth at the top (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/ rspb.2013.1197).
Solar silver lining You might think the best place for solar panels in the US would be in sunny California, but that’s not the case. Solar panels would cut more greenhouse gas emissions in cloudier states like Nebraska, provided they are close to coal-fired power plants and can compete with them for business (PNAS, doi.org/m29).
Landmark decision Women in the UK with a family history of certain cancers will be offered tamoxifen and raloxifene by the National Health Service as a protection against breast cancer under new guidelines. The drugs can reduce the incidence of cancer by up to 40 per cent in people at increased risk. A five-year course could prevent breast cancer in 1 of every 42 women taking it.
Europeans take heart The number of people dying from heart disease in Europe has halved over the last 30 years, thanks mainly to reductions in smoking (European Heart Journal, DOI: 10.1093/ eurheart/eht159). Heart disease is still Europe’s biggest killer, however, and the increased rate of diabetes and obesity is raising death rates among the young, warn the authors.
BigBrain mapped The most detailed map of the brain ever made, called BigBrain, should lead to a more accurate picture of how its different regions function. It was created by embedding a 65-year-old woman’s brain in wax, before slicing it into more than 7400 sections and imaging it (Science, doi.org/m3b).
29 June 2013 | NewScientist | 5
Green pay-off
role the interface region plays in powering the corona,” says IRIS mission scientist Jeffrey Newmark. On 26 June, an aircraft carrying a rocket with the telescope inside will launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and will release its payload 12 kilometres up. The rocket will then carry the telescope to its orbit, some 660 kilometres above Earth’s surface. IRIS will track short-lived jets of plasma, which the IRIS team hope will help explain why the corona, at 1 million kelvin, is so much hotter than the surface, at a mere 6000 K.
60 Seconds
expand into, such as creating more resilient products that withstand severe weather. It also provides more opportunities to gain customers by offering sustainable products.
GO GREEN, get rich. Firms that become environmentally friendly will profit the most. “Companies that adapt quickest to the new environmental realities are the likeliest to thrive,” “Companies that adapt quickest to the new says Kaveh Zahedi of the United Nations Environment Programme. environmental realities are the likeliest to thrive” In a report released this week, UNEP identified the threats Last year, researchers compared and opportunities posed by 180 companies and found that the environmental degradation to more environmentally friendly 10 business sectors. Threats businesses were more profitable include disrupted supply chains, in the long run than their lessfor example. But a changing sustainable competitors. environment offers new areas to
Trio of alien planets Cable hotspots a gift for UK spies
Nik Jewell/nomadphotographs.com
ALIENS could be watching aliens IT’S a golden age for spying. The subsea fibre-optic cables that carry watching aliens. That’s a realistic telephone and internet traffic are a prospect now that three technological marvel – and a gift to potentially habitable planets – intelligence agencies. The cables a record – have been glimpsed make landfall at just a handful of orbiting the same star. locations, meaning vast quantities Earlier studies had suggested of data can be sucked out at one site that a nearby star, Gliese 667C, and, according to Edward Snowden, had three planets, only one of the prolific US National Security which might support life. But the Agency whistleblower, that is what very presence of multiple planets British intelligence has been doing made their precise number hard for the last 18 months. to tease out. In a leak to The Guardian Now Guillem Anglada-Escudé newspaper on 22 June, Snowden said of the University of Göttingen in the UK Government Communications Germany and his colleagues have Headquarters in Cheltenham is reanalysed the original data and siphoning data from at least 200 added some new observations. fibre-optic telecommunications They found evidence for up to cables – including many of the seven worlds, including three rocky planets where temperatures should suit life (Astronomy & Astrophysics, in press). The three are close enough to each other that any intelligent life there with the ability to build rockets could visit the neighbours in just one to two months. In 2010, two of the paper’s authors were praised and then criticised when they claimed to have found the first potentially habitable rocky planet around the star Gliese 581 – a discovery others were unable to confirm. AngladaEscudé is not worried: “We made sure to be very careful this time.” –Bude: prime site for snoopers–
transatlantic subsea cables that hit British shores at Bude in Cornwall. The tapping project, known as Tempora, allows phone calls to be monitored, as well as emails on offshore American-hosted webmail services such as Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook. “It is astonishing access they are getting with Tempora,” says Eric King of pressure group Privacy International in London. “Every piece of data that leaves the UK, and every piece of international data that flows through the UK – which is 99 per cent of the world’s communications – is available to them.” King and colleagues predicted as much in 2011 when they published a list of providers of subsea cable-tapping technology.
Light-bulb star The oldest known relative of starfish looked like a light bulb. Fossils of a bulbous animal called Helicocystis moroccoensis have been discovered in rocks 510 million years old. Five grooves spiralled around the bulb to the mouth at the top (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/ rspb.2013.1197).
Solar silver lining You might think the best place for solar panels in the US would be in sunny California, but that’s not the case. Solar panels would cut more greenhouse gas emissions in cloudier states like Nebraska, provided they are close to coal-fired power plants and can compete with them for business (PNAS, doi.org/m29).
Landmark decision Women in the UK with a family history of certain cancers will be offered tamoxifen and raloxifene by the National Health Service as a protection against breast cancer under new guidelines. The drugs can reduce the incidence of cancer by up to 40 per cent in people at increased risk. A five-year course could prevent breast cancer in 1 of every 42 women taking it.
Europeans take heart The number of people dying from heart disease in Europe has halved over the last 30 years, thanks mainly to reductions in smoking (European Heart Journal, DOI: 10.1093/ eurheart/eht159). Heart disease is still Europe’s biggest killer, however, and the increased rate of diabetes and obesity is raising death rates among the young, warn the authors.
BigBrain mapped The most detailed map of the brain ever made, called BigBrain, should lead to a more accurate picture of how its different regions function. It was created by embedding a 65-year-old woman’s brain in wax, before slicing it into more than 7400 sections and imaging it (Science, doi.org/m3b).
29 June 2013 | NewScientist | 5