Marines get counter-IED training from A-T Solutions
Washington (UPI) Nov 20, 2014 -
Training to counter improvised explosive devices is to be provided to the U.S. Marine Corps Engineer School by A-T solutions.
The training, plus ancillary support, for the school's counter-IED program comes a task order from the GSA Federal Systems Integration and Management Center on behalf of the Department of Defense's Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization Joint Cente ...
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NATO reports 400 intercepts of Russian aircraft in 2014
Tallinn (AFP) Nov 20, 2014 -
NATO said Thursday there have been around 400 intercepts of Russian military flights near its member countries this year, amid heightened tension between Moscow and the West over the Ukraine crisis.
"If you look at the number of intercepts around NATO, we can talk about 400 intercepts, 50 percent more than last year," NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters in western Estonia. ...
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Modernized Russian Tu-160 bomber completes 1st flight
Moscow (XNA) Nov 20, 2014 -
Russian strategic bomber Tu-160 has completed its first flight after modernization, the aircraft's design bureau Tupolev said Wednesday.
"On Nov. 16, 2014, the Tu-160 bomber performed the first flight after a major modernized overhaul," Tupolev said in a statement, adding that the flight lasted 2 hours and 40 minutes.
According to the company, the bomber took off from airfield in Kaz ...
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Swedish military gets upgraded radar facilityw/lll
Stockholm, Sweden (UPI) Nov 20, 2014 -
A refurbished and upgraded radar facility for air and surface surveillance has been returned to the Swedish armed forces.
The handover of the Radar 871 facility was effected by FMV, the country's military procurement agency.
Work on refurbishing and modernizing the facility began in 2007.
"This is an upgraded version of the Radar System 870 which the Armed Forces use for a ...
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Syrian team, Putin to discuss relaunching peace talks: source
Damascus (AFP) Nov 20, 2014 -
A high-level Syrian delegation is to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow to discuss a possible relaunch of peace talks with the opposition, a senior Syrian official said Thursday.
"President Putin will receive the delegation headed by Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem, and the meeting will centre on the relaunch of negotiations," he said of the talks next Wednesday with the k ...
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'Concerned' Kerry joins troubled Iran nuclear talks
Vienna (AFP) Nov 20, 2014 -
US Secretary of State John Kerry joined troubled Iran nuclear talks in Vienna on Thursday, four days before a looming deadline, with Russia warning that getting a deal will be "very difficult".
Speaking in Paris earlier, Kerry said that with British counterpart Philip Hammond - who said on Wednesday he was "not optimistic" - and the other powers he was "concerned about the gaps".
"We a ...
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China Premier calls for greater role in shaping Web
Hangzhou, China (AFP) Nov 20, 2014 -
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang Thursday demanded a greater role for Beijing in shaping the global Internet, calling for "order" online as he failed to address his government's censorship of content it deems politically sensitive.
"We believe in an open, transparent and above all safe Internet," Li said on the sidelines of a Chinese-created Internet conference.
"That requires an Internet shar ...
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China policies fuel tensions with US: commission
Washington (AFP) Nov 20, 2014 -
China's souring foreign investment climate, "unfair" trade practices and inceased military spending heightened tensions between the United States and Beijing in 2014, a US commission said Thursday.
Security ties between the two world powers deteriorated this year amid increased territorial disputes in the South China Sea.
These potential China-US military confrontations risk escalating i ...
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Crops play a major role in the annual CO2 cycle increase
Madison WI (SPX) Nov 20, 2014 -
Each year, the planet balances its budget. The carbon dioxide absorbed by plants in the spring and summer as they convert solar energy into food is released back to the atmosphere in autumn and winter. Levels of the greenhouse gas fall, only to rise again.
But the budget has gotten bigger. Over the last five decades, the magnitude of this rise and fall has grown nearly 50 percent in the No ...
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Japanese blueprint sees modern Atlantis spiral deep into ocean
Tokyo (AFP) Nov 20, 2014 -
Forget colonies in space, one Japanese construction company says in the future human beings could live in huge complexes that corkscrew deep into the ocean.
Blue sky thinkers say around 5,000 people could live and work in a modern-day Atlantis, a sphere 500 metres (1,500 feet) in diameter that houses hotels, residential spaces and commercial complexes.
The vast globe would float at the s ...
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'Horrific' record 1,020 rhino killed in South Africa
Johannesburg (AFP) Nov 20, 2014 -
A record 1,020 rhinos have been poached in South Africa this year, the government said Thursday, scuppering multiple efforts by authorities to curb the slaughter of the endangered species.
The vast Kruger National Park, has been hit the hardest by poachers, with 672 killed inside the park, which is roughly the size of Wales.
"To date, a total of 1,020 rhino have been killed for their hor ...
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Drones could work together to fight fires
Owego, N.Y. (UPI) Nov 19, 2014 -
Lockheed Martin and Kaman are pairing large- and small-rotor unmanned helicopters for fighting fires.
In a demonstration announced this week, Lockheed's Indago quad-rotor system searched for and found a fire hotspot with its electro-optical/infrared gimbaled imager and transmitted its location and other data to a controller, who then directed an unmanned K-Max helicopter to fill a baske ...
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Scientists rediscover long-lost region of the brain
Stanford, Calif. (UPI) Nov 20, 2014 -
A region of the brain known as the vertical occipital fasciculus, or VOF, was first identified in the latter half of the 19th century, but not long after its discovery, it went missing. It didn't literally disappear - only literarily.
For more than 100 years, the VOF was absent from scientific literature, and modern scientists failed to recognize the snake-like neural pathway as a dist ...
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Great apes facing 'direct threat' from palm oil farming
Kuala Lumpur (AFP) Nov 20, 2014 -
The destruction of rainforests in Southeast Asia and increasingly in Africa to make way for palm oil cultivation is a "direct threat" to the survival of great apes such as the orangutan, environmentalists warned Thursday.
They said tropical forests were tumbling at a rapid rate, with palm plantations a key driver, despite efforts by the industry's Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) t ...
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Out of India
Baltimore MD (SPX) Nov 21, 2014 -
Working at the edge of a coal mine in India, a team of Johns Hopkins researchers and colleagues have filled in a major gap in science's understanding of the evolution of a group of animals that includes horses and rhinos. That group likely originated on the subcontinent when it was still an island headed swiftly for collision with Asia, the researchers report in the online journal Nature Communi ...
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Salinity matters when it comes to sea level changes
Livermore CA (SPX) Nov 21, 2014 -
Using ocean observations and a large suite of climate models, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists have found that long-term salinity changes have a stronger influence on regional sea level changes than previously thought.
"By using long-term observed estimates of ocean salinity and temperature changes across the globe, and contrasting these with model simulations, we have unc ...
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Satellite View of the U.S. Wrapped in a Frozen Blanket
Greenbelt MD (SPX) Nov 20, 2014 -
As icy cold Canadian air settled over the eastern two-thirds of the U.S. bringing snow and bitter cold, NOAA's GOES-East satellite captured this infrared view of what looks like a frozen blanket over the region.
NOAA's GOES-East satellite provides visible and infrared images over the eastern U.S. and the Atlantic Ocean from its fixed orbit in space. In an infrared image taken on Nov. 18 at ...
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Volcanic ash - getting a clearer picture
London, UK (SPX) Nov 20, 2014 -
ZEUS, a device developed by the Met Office and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to improve our understanding of atmospheric volcanic ash distribution, is to be fitted to a British Airways 747 aircraft for a year to collect data from around the globe.
Following the Icelandic volcanic eruption in 2010, which caused widespread flight disruption, scientists at the Met Office and ...
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'Aquatic osteoporosis' jellifying lakes
Kingston, Canada (SPX) Nov 20, 2014 -
A plague of "aquatic osteoporosis" is spreading throughout many North American soft-water lakes due to declining calcium levels in the water and hindering the survival of some organisms, says new research from Queen's University.
Researchers from Queen's, working with colleagues from York University and the University of Cambridge, as well as other collaborators, have identified a biologic ...
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Prehistoric Landslide Was Bigger Than Three Ohio Counties
Kent OH (SPX) Nov 20, 2014 -
A catastrophic landslide, one of the largest known on the surface of the Earth, took place within minutes in southwestern Utah more than 21 million years ago, reports a Kent State University geologist in a paper published in the November issue of the journal Geology.
The Markagunt gravity slide, the size of three Ohio counties, is one of the two largest known continental landslides (larger ...
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New Technique Allows Ultrasound To Penetrate Bone, Metal
Raleigh NC (SPX) Nov 21, 2014 -
Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a technique that allows ultrasound to penetrate bone or metal, using customized structures that offset the distortion usually caused by these so-called "aberrating layers."
"We've designed complementary metamaterials that will make it easier for medical professionals to use ultrasound for diagnostic or therapeutic applications ...
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Cut the salt: Green solutions for highway snow and ice control
Pullman WA (SPX) Nov 21, 2014 -
Ice-free pavement. "Smart snowplows." Vegetable juice ice-melt. Cold-climate researchers at Washington State University are clearing the road with green alternatives to the salt, sand and chemicals typically used for highway snow and ice control.
As a nation, "we are kind of salt addicted, like with petroleum, as it's been so cheap and convenient for the last 50 years," said Xianming Shi, ...
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Caltech geologists discover ancient buried canyon in South Tibet
Pasadena CA (SPX) Nov 21, 2014 -
A team of researchers from Caltech and the China Earthquake Administration has discovered an ancient, deep canyon buried along the Yarlung Tsangpo River in south Tibet, north of the eastern end of the Himalayas. The geologists say that the ancient canyon--thousands of feet deep in places--effectively rules out a popular model used to explain how the massive and picturesque gorges of the Himalaya ...
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Second bird flu outbreak found on Dutch farm
The Hague (AFP) Nov 20, 2014 -
Dutch officials have detected a second case of bird flu on a southern Netherlands farm, officials said Thursday, but could not yet say whether the strain was of a highly contagious variety discovered earlier this week.
The latest outbreak was detected in three barns containing 43,000 chickens on a farm at Ter Aar, just east of The Hague, the Dutch food and safety watchdog NVWA said.
The ...
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$9.3 bn pledged to help poor nations combat global warming
Berlin (AFP) Nov 20, 2014 -
Nations meeting in Berlin Thursday pledged $9.3 billion (7.4 bn euros) for a climate fund to help poor countries cut emissions and prepare for global warming, just shy of a $10bn target.
The South Korea-based Green Climate Fund (GCF) aims to help developing nations invest in clean energy and green technology and build up defences against rising seas and worsening storms, floods and droughts. ...
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