Chinese probe crashes into moon

A Chinese lunar probe has crashed into the moon in what Beijing has called a controlled collision.
The Chang'e 1 lunar satellite hit the moon's surface at 1613 local time (0813 GMT) at the end of a 16-month moon-mapping mission.
China launched the spacecraft in late October 2007 on a mission to survey the entire surface of the moon.
China's ever-more ambitious space programme includes plans for a space station and landing a man on the moon.
Future missions
Launched into space on one of China's Long March 3A rockets, the probe mapped the moon's surface using stereo radar.
Chang'e 1 was under the remote control of two stations in Qingda, eastern China, and Kashgar in the north-west of the country, the Xinhua news agency said.
China became only the third nation - after the Soviet Union and the US - to put a manned spacecraft in orbit in 2003.
State media said on Sunday China would launch a space module next year and carry out the country's first space docking.
"The module, called Tiangong-1, will provide a "safe room" for Chinese astronauts to live and conduct scientific research in zero gravity," Chinese state media said.
"Weighing about 8.5 tonnes, Tiangong-1 is able to perform a long-term unattended operation, which will be an essential step toward building a space station," it added.

In reality, David Copperfield enjoys filling his life with great ...

Albany Times Union - Albany,NY,USA, Sunday, 27 April 2008
Illusionist David Copperfield is a busy man, what with performing more than 500 shows a year; keeping an eye on his charitable Project Magic foundation; adding new toys to his magic museum; and making sure the "sugar sand" beaches of his ultra-exclusive Caribbean island resort, Musha Cay at Copperfield Bay, are kept free from trash and controversy.Copperfield, who appears Saturday at the Palace Theatre for two shows, is known for making unexpected things -- the Statue of Liberty, for example -- disappear.He's had a little harder time making some serious legal problems evaporate. In October, Copperfield was the target of an investigation into a Seattle woman's claims that she was raped and assaulted by Copperfield at Musha Cay; the FBI confiscated computers and cash from Copperfield's warehouse in Las Vegas. Copperfield has denied any wrongdoing.He was subsequently sued by a group of promoters who claim the magician backed out of performances in light of the controversy. Copperfield has countersued.
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But in an e-mail interview with the Times Union, Copperfield again showed off his skills, answering almost all of our questions but making all our queries about these cases vanish from our list. Presto!Q: Does the world still have a sense of wonder?A: The ability to amaze and create a sense of childlike wonder in an audience, no matter what the age, is to me, the basic tenet of the art of magic, and this I believe is still very much in existence. I would hope that children still want be magicians. I still have young kids in my audiences at my shows that meet with me after the show and tell me their dream is to someday perform on stage like David Copperfield. As long as you allow yourself to imagine the impossible, the world will always have a sense of wonder.Q: What effect has the Internet and sites like YouTube had on the world of magic?A: My show is constantly evolving. ... New tricks are added, old ones are dropped ... so it stays fresh. It's the randomly selected participants from the audience that make it fresh each and every show, and also provide some of the best comic relief. I believe that seeing illusionists in person will beat watching an illusion on a computer screen any day.Science and technology have often been used by the magician before they came into the marketplace on a mass basis. For example, prior to the moving picture going into theaters, magicians were using the technique of images in motion as illusions in their shows. At that time the process was so new an audience perceived it as magic. ... You always need to stay one step ahead of the technology game to wow the audience.Q: You founded the International Museum and Library of the Conjuring Arts as a cache of magic memorabilia and as a resource for fellow magicians. With so many objects in the collection, have you had time to inspect and enjoy them all?A: As a hobby, I wanted to give back to the magic world, offering an amazing resource of historical material to those serious about the art of magic. So when one giant collection became available 15 years ago, I bought it all and began my quest for bringing some of the greatest illusions, books and related art all under one roof at a secret location located in the Nevada desert for scholars and other magicians to study and view.

World 'to fail' on nature target

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News website, Barcelona

Europe has made the most progress on curbing biodiversity loss
The world's governments will fail to meet their agreed target of curbing biodiversity loss by 2010, according to experts questioned by BBC News.
Nearly 200 countries signed up to the target in 2002.
Ten leading conservationists asked here at the World Conservation Congress were unanimous that the goal cannot be met.
All the global indicators of progress are heading in the wrong direction, and few governments have even translated the target into national legislation.
Not all the experts questioned would go on the record, and some said there was a reluctance to embarrass governments over their failures on the matter.
Others suggested the target was unachievable even at its inception six years ago.
Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), told BBC News that the 2010 target was achievable if governments acted urgently, but conceded that "all indicators are telling us it is unlikely".
Last week saw the publication of the Red List of Threatened Species, showing that between a quarter and a third of mammals are at risk of extinction.
It also saw the head of an EU-commissioned review into the economics of biodiversity loss say that degradation of forests worldwide cost the global economy more each year than the current banking crisis.
Measured approach
The CBD was agreed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, but not until 10 years afterwards did it acquire a firm, supposedly binding target - "to achieve by 2010 a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national level as a contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefit of all life on Earth".
Virtually all of the trends that drive the loss of species and ecosystems are continuing at a global level
Georgina Mace, director of the Centre for Population Biology at Imperial College London, said that on the worldwide basis there was absolutely no chance of achieving it.
"We don't have many measures of biodiversity at a global level, but there are a few," she said.
"They measure things like the rate at which species are moving down the categories of threat on the Red List towards extinction, they measure average trends in various populations that have been measured over time, they measure trends on habitat change."
"And at global level, all those data that we have show either continuing downward rates of loss or maybe continuing rates of loss - so some of them aren't getting worse, some are just staying at the same rate of loss - but none of them are getting better," she added.
In addition, virtually all of the trends that drive the loss of species and ecosystems are continuing at a global level.
"The biodiversity convention doesn't deal with cross-cutting issues such as logging, road building, climate change, pollution and the expansion of agriculture," said Gordon Shepherd, director of global policy at the environmental group WWF.
"In reality the people who own decision-making in those areas, be they in governments or in business, have much more power than environment ministers, who don't have tools to get to grips with over-use [of natural resources] or over-consumption."

Some experts say the target set by the convention was too ambitious
Political paths
However, Sebastian Winkler from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said the time period from 2002 to 2010 was so short that we should not have expected to see any changes in the real world.
He suggested a different way of measuring the lack of progress - that only 16 governments have followed through on their commitment to integrate the 2010 target into national plans for tackling biodiversity loss.
Mr Winkler runs an IUCN initiative called Countdown 2010, which aims to engage stakeholders across the world such as local authorities and get them to commit to actions that could improve prospects in their own regions.
"Now the CDB is trying to use Countdown 2010 as a fig leaf for governments - we have 800 partners, they're each taking at least 10 actions, so that's 8,000 actions and that's what they hope to report back as progress," he said.
By March next year, governments must submit assessments of their own progress to the CBD, which will compile them into a global assessment.
Sweet dreams
Thomas Lovejoy, president of the Washington DC-based think-tank, the Heinz Center, said there were signs of progress in different corners of the world, citing Costa Rica and Bhutan among countries that were taking the issue seriously.
There's no longer a question whether there will be a sixth major extinction in Earth history. It's already happening, and the question is how big we'll allow it to get
Sebastian WinklerIUCN
"In 43 years we've gone from one protected forest in the Amazon to 40% of the area under some form of protection," he said.
"It's not enough to maintain the integrity of the ecosystem but it's a huge achievement."
Europe is the continent which has made most progress towards the target. According to one recent study, it is on course to curb biodiversity loss - but by 2050, rather than 2010.
Mr Djoghlaf said the 2010 initiative had at least put the issue of natural decline into the political and public spotlight.
"There is more and more increased awareness, people are ready to be engaged, business behaviour is changing, biodiversity is becoming a business case because businesses know the market of tomorrow is green, and they have to adapt," he said.
Most of the other leading figures I spoke to here about the issue were not willing to go on the record, although all said in private there was no chance of achieving the target.
Sebastian Winkler said it was important to keep governments engaged with the issue.
"Martin Luther King said 'I have a dream', not 'I have a nightmare'," he said.
"And if we always paint nightmares, we will not engage the international community."
But Mr Lovejoy suggested that at the level of species and ecosystems, the nightmare was already unfolding.
"There's no longer a question whether there will be a sixth major extinction in Earth history," he said.
"It's already happening, and the question is how big we'll allow it to get."

Red river brings cancer, Chinese villagers say

(CNN) -- Liangqiao, a small collection of huts and farms in southern China, is known as a cancer village

It is where Hu Xiaoping, a husband and father and a farmer, died an agonizing death at age 30 one year after being diagnosed with colon cancer.
His widow, Zhu Chun Yun, blames his death on the brown and rust-colored water from the river, which farmers use to irrigate their crops.
"The doctor in the hospital told us not to live here," she told CNN through an interpreter. "He said don't eat the rice and don't drink the water."
Residents of Liangqiao say their river is polluted because of the iron-ore mine about 35 miles away, which is run by a nationally owned company.
Mining for iron-ore exposes naturally occurring heavy metals like arsenic and cadmium, which are both carcinogens. Without proper water treatment facilities, water contaminated with high levels of these metals is hazardous and can Jingjing Zhang, an environmental lawyer who is working the villagers who want to sue the government, said the Dabaoshan mine has been polluting the Hengshui River for decades.
"I always had a dream to live in a place where there's a clean river I can swim in, but this dream seems very difficult to achieve in China now," she said.
Twenty-eight people in this village of 400 have died over the last 10 years from cancer -- a rate much higher than the rest of country. The overall mortality rate for 2006 was 137 deaths per 100,000 residents.
Pollution is a serious problem throughout China.
The Chinese ministry of health reported that increased pollution has made cancer the leading cause of death in the country.
China, along with the United States, is a leading emitter of greenhouse gases, which experts say can contribute to global warming. In terms of total emissions, China is projected by the International Energy Association to become the world's leading greenhouse gas producing country this year.

It can also impact the U.S. food supply. The amount of food imported from China has grown dramatically in the past decade. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the United States imported $4.1 billion worth of seafood and agricultural products from China in 2006. In 1995, it was $800 million.
In June, the United States banned five types of fish and shrimp from China because inspectors found traces of cancer-causing chemicals and antibiotics in the products.
Small villages like Liangqiao have little recourse against big companies that might be polluting their air or water.
CNN talked to the mine's director who acknowledged environmental issues with the mine, but said it wasn't a problem that could be solved overnight. He said some of the smaller, privately owned mines should share blame for the problems.
The mine has given the villagers some compensation. About 1,700 Yuan ($200) for the whole village, Zhang told CNN.
Zhang continues to build her case against the mine, trying to win compensation for medical testing, health care and damage to the village's rice crops. She hopes to go to trial next year.
Water tests from Huanan Agricultural University have concluded the Hengshui is indeed too toxic for any human use, in stark contrast to what Jingjing said the government told the villagers.
They told her "we already meet all environmental standards," she said.
China is trying to address its pollution problem. In September, the Chinese State Environmental Protection Administration shut down 400 companies for water-pollution violations and suspended 249 other businesses, according to China Daily. And last week China announced a joint campaign with the European Union to clean up China's two largest river basins. The government hopes to have a dramatically cleaner country by August, when it will be host to the Olympics.
It is too late for Zhu's husband. She said that after he got cancer he was unable to work and he reluctantly went for medical treatment.
"He didn't want to go to the hospital because he worried we didn't have enough money to bring up our daughter," she said.
Zhu told CNN she doesn't have time to be sad. All she worries about is caring for daughter and her small plot of land.
The villagers have figured out a way to pipe clean drinking water down from a nearby mountain, but they still use the dirty water to irrigate the crops.

Top 10 endangered places to visit

There are all manner of sites which you should see before you die – but what about those places that you ought to see before they ‘die’ or disappear forever?
Some places in the world are at risk because of environmental factors, such as pollution or rising water levels, while others are at risk because of deforestation, armed conflict or other actions. Such places can be areas of outstanding natural beauty, or magnificent examples of humankind’s ingenuity – and so it would be a shame if you didn’t see them before they disappear for good.

• Venice
  The Amazon rainforest
  The Old City of Jerusalem
  Machu Picchu
  Mtwapa Heritage Site
  Mount Everest
  Belize barrier reef
  Pompeii
  Tuvalu
  West Bank, Luxor

unique record

Archaeologists, by definithowever, the scope of their work has entered
Wild Chimps Rocked On: Apes left unique record of stone tools

ion, uncover the remnants of past human activity. With the first excavation of chimpanzee stone tools at an African site, virgin terrain.
STRIKING FINDS. Archaeologists have identified hammering stones at a chimpanzee nut-cracking site in western Africa.Image by C. Boesch, Montage by Steve Smart
Chimps transported suitable pieces of stone to the undated site and used them to crack open nuts placed on thick tree roots, according to Julio Mercader of George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
"At least some wild chimpanzees have produced stone [artifacts] and left behind an archaeological record of their nut-cracking behavior," says Mercader, who directed the excavation. He described the recent discoveries at the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society, held last week in Denver.
Researchers previously had reported that chimps living in western Africa's Taï forest avidly stockpile stones at places with broad tree roots or stumps that serve as anvils for cracking nuts. This activity may represent a learned behavior peculiar to the local animals, since chimps living in other parts of Africa don't use stone implements (SN: 6/19/99, p. 388).
Mercader and his coworkers excavated a Taï forest site called Panda 100. Trees bearing so-called Panda nuts grew in this region until 1996, when they died out. The chimp artifacts haven't been dated yet.
The researchers chose their dig site after noticing four large tree roots that displayed pounding marks made by stones. Excavation of trenches at the site yielded two more tree roots with similar markings. Fragments of nutshells were recovered around all six roots.
Moreover, Mercader's group unearthed 479 stone artifacts, often in close proximity to the shell fragments. These artifacts included the remains of hammering stones, thin flakes that had been pounded off those stones, and pieces of shattered rock.
The earliest known stone tools, made by human ancestors in eastern Africa around 2.6 million years ago, consisted of sharpened chopping implements and larger rocks used as anvils. Chimps' hammering stones recovered at Panda 100 are about the same size as those ancient choppers, Mercader says. However, implements used by human ancestors show more evidence of having been intentionally modified than do those attributed to chimps, he notes.
The Taï forest discoveries suggest that archaeologists may be able to investigate links between nut-cracking tools employed by chimps and human ancestors, says wild-chimp researcher William McGrew of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Homo species cracked nuts with stone implements at least 780,000 years ago (SN: 2/23/02, p. 117: Available to subscribers at "There seems to be a signature of chimpanzee archaeology at Panda 100, which is pretty cool," remarks Nicholas Toth of Indiana University in Bloomington, who studies ancient stone tools. Still, he adds, "the Taï forest material that I've seen looks fairly crude."
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Why study foreign languages?

Here are fifteen things studying a new language might do for you. Foreign language study
1. broadens your experiences; expands your view of the world
2. encourages critical reflection on the relation of language and culture, language and thought; fosters an understanding of the interrelation of language and human nature
3. develops your intellect; teaches you how to learn
4. teaches and encourages respect for other peoples
5. contributes to cultural awareness and literacy, such as knowledge of original texts
6. builds practical skills (for travel or commerce or as a tool for other disciplines)
7. improves the knowledge of your own language through comparison and contrast with the foreign language
8. exposes you to modes of thought outside of your native language
9. a sense of relevant past, both cultural and linguistic
10. balances content and skill (rather than content versus skill)
11. expands opportunities for meaningful leisure activity (travel, reading, viewing foreign language films)
12. contributes to achievemnet of national goals, such as eceonomic development or national security
13. contributes to the creation of your personality
14. enables the transfer of training (such as learning a second foreign language)
15. preserves (or fosters) a country’s image as a cultured nation
The above modified from Alan C. Frantz, “Seventeen Values of Foreign Language Study” (ADFL Bulletin, vol. 28, Nr.1, Fall 1996).