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Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 6/7/2016 12:18:26 AM
	India’s Crippling Heat Wave Continues With Temperatures Over 116°F June 6, 2016 More than 130 people have now died from the heat wave and resultant drought Despite the onset of the monsoon in several parts of the country, India continues to reel under a brutal heat wave that has now lasted more than two months and claimed dozens of lives. On Monday, temperatures rose to more than 47°C (116.6°F) in the western state of Rajasthan — which also recorded India’s hottest day ever at 123.8°F last month — the Press Trust of India reported. Some respite is expected, however, with the India Meteorological Department (IMD) predicting the onset of annual rains, called the Southwest Monsoon, across India later this week. Local Met departments in the capital Delhi, where temperatures rose to 42.6°C (108.7°F), also anticipated thunderstorms late Monday, as did authorities in other north Indian states like Punjab, Haryana and the union territory of Chandigarh. More than 130 people have now died from the heat wave and resultant drought affecting large swathes of the country. [NDTV]
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 6/7/2016 12:38:26 AM
	COSMOS NEWS TECHNOLOGY 6 JUN 2016 Magma chamber grows beneath New Zealand Yes, there seems to be a massive reservoir of hot rock building up below the North Island, but it's not necessarily a concern. Belinda Smith reports. Champagne Pool in Rotorua, New Zealand. Beneath the area lies a growing reservoir of magma, new research suggests. CREDIT: PISKUNOV / GETTY IMAGES The culprit behind a recent swarm of earthquakes in New Zealand's Bay of Plenty has been found: a growing bubble of magma less than 10 kilometres below ground. Geophysicists from the New Zealand research institute GNS Science, led by Ian Hamling, tracked how the ground lifted and sank in the Taupo Volcanic Zone, a 30-kilometre zone that runs northeast from the centre of the North Island to the Bay of Plenty coast. They saw the northern section deformed in a way consistent with a ballooning reservoir of magma beneath. "There is every possibility the magma body under the Bay of Plenty coast had been there for centuries, and possibly even longer," Hamling says. Volcanism and New Zealand go hand in hand – especially in the North Island where Rotorua, a town famous for its hot springs, and Lake Taupo sit atop the Taupo Volcanic Zone. The zone was formed as the Pacific plate, on which New Zealand sits, slowly slides beneath the Australasian plate at the rate of 38 to 49 millimetres per year. Across its northern segment, earthquakes have shaken coastal towns such as Matata, with several thousand reported between 2003 and 2011. So Hamling and colleagues used a combination of survey data dating back to the 1950s, as well as recent GPS and satellite images, to measure how much the earth around the area has lifted or compressed. A drawing looking south along the Taupo Volcanic Zone showing the subduction of the Pacific Plate under the North Island of New Zealand. Uplift of the surface measured by satellite radar and GPS suggests the presence of a magmatic body beneath the Bay of Plenty coast at a depth of 9.5 kilometres. CREDIT: IAN HAMLING While a 2015 study, also led by Hamling, showed central and southern sections of the zone have tended to sink a little, the most recent work saw some 400 square kilometres around Matata lifted by 40 centimetres since 1950 – with a burst between 2003 and 2011. Half of this area was off shore. The pattern and amount of lift couldn't have been produced by tectonic processes (or movements in the crust), so they modelled how a magma reservoir might affect the overlying earth. The best fit was a blob of magma around 9.5 kilometres below ground, which inflated by around 0.2 cubic kilometres since 1950. Such reservoirs of hot rock are common, Hamling says, and uncovering one does not mean a volcanic eruption is around the corner. "While there is absolutely no evidence pointing to volcanic unrest in coastal Bay of Plenty, this finding underlines the fact that we live in a geologically active country where it pays to be prepared." The work was published in Scientific Advances. Belinda Smith is Cosmos deputy news editor.
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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Luis Miguel

1162

61587

Lima

RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?

6/7/2016 1:14:32 AM

Antarctica is melting and shows no sign of slowing down

By Andrea Thompson on Jun 3, 2016
Cross-posted from Climate Central

Over the past few years, the evidence has piled up that glaciers in parts of Antarctica have been melting and retreating at an increasingly worrying — and potentially unstoppable — pace.

Now, new research shows that glaciers in a region of West Antarctica that has received relatively little attention to date have lost a considerable amount of ice. And that ice melt and retreat has been going on for decades, longer than previously thought.

The Bellingshausen Coast in West Antarctica.Robert Bingham

The findings, detailed in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, have implications for understanding the potential sea-level rise that the vast icy expanse of Antarctica could unleash as the Earth’s temperature continues to rise.

“I think this study just underscores that West Antarctica, in general, is not only exceptionally vulnerable to retreat triggered by ocean melting at the coastline, but that it is happening now and it is showing no sign of slowing down,” study coauthorRobert Bingham of the University of Edinburgh said in an email. “This whole process is pretty pervasive.”

West Antarctica ice loss

Since satellites first began looking down on Antarctica in the 1990s, polar scientists have noticed rapid changes in the ice of West Antarctica, particularly along its coastlines. It is here that the massive glaciers — essentially rivers of ice — that flow from the continent’s interior meet the sea and the ice begins to float.

The floating sections, known as ice shelves, help regulate the flow of the glaciers behind them. As those ice shelves shrink or collapse, the flow of the glaciers speeds up, increasing the amount of previously land-bound ice that is added to the world’s oceans, like ice cubes to a glass of water.

Warm ocean water is circulating under these ice shelves, eating away at them and causing them to thin, as well as pushing back the grounding line, or the point where land-bound ice begins to float. As the grounding line retreats, it exposes thicker and thicker portions of the glacier, increasing its flow.

Several major ice shelves have collapsed in the last two decades, and the speeds of several crucial glaciers, such as Pine Island Glacier, have accelerated. Recent studies suggest some have even reached a point of no return.

All told, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet contains enough ice to add 10 to 13 feet to global sea-level rise were it all to melt; even an incomplete melt would imperil low-lying coastal areas around the planet. One sector, the Amundsen Sea Embayment, contains several of the most worrisome glaciers. It alone currently accounts for about 10 percent of sea-level rise.

But close behind it is a neighboring area, called the Bellingshausen Sea or the South Antarctica Peninsula. It accounts for about one-third of the ice loss from the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet (the Amundsen accounts for nearly half), and a study last year showed its glaciers have sped up considerably since 2009. But it has been relatively little studied, especially compared to the more attention-grabbing parts of the Amundsen.

Unmonitored melt

During a 2009-2010 field mission, Bingham looked to shed more light on the region by scanning the ground below one of the fastest-moving Bellingshausen glaciers, the Ferrigno Ice Stream. He found a huge canyon underneath that is likely funneling warm ocean water under the ice.

“This only served to highlight to me that there is so much about the Bellingshausen Sea sector of West Antarctica that has gone unmonitored while most of the world’s eyes (glaciologically speaking) were looking beyond to Pine Island Glacier,” Bingham said.

To get a better picture of the overall ice loss in the area, Bingham and his Ph.D. student, Frazer Christie, analyzed hundreds of satellite images of the area going back to 1975 and tracked the position of the grounding line along 1,240 miles of coast.

They found that 65 percent of the coastline had seen grounding line retreat since 1990, while only 7 percent had seen an advance. The total amount of ice lost over the last 40 years is about 390 square miles, an area about the size of Dallas.

The results “show that this whole coastline has been in a state of retreat since records began in the early 1970s,” Bingham said. That contrasts with previous thinking that only certain glaciers, like the Ferrigno Ice Stream, were seeing significant ice loss while the rest were fairly stable.

“The study illustrates that Antarctica is not immune to changes and that some of what we are seeing today started decades ago,” Eric Rignot, a NASA glaciologist who was not involved with the work, said in an email.

One notable oddity was the Venable Ice Shelf, which has thinned, but hasn’t retreated much. The researchers think it is pinned to a ridge on the seafloor that is keeping it stable for now. Scientists think the same was true of Pine Island Glacier — for a while.

Exactly what the pervasive ice loss in the Bellingshausen Sea area means for future global sea-level rise isn’t entirely clear, in part because of the paucity of data from the area. Bingham says that researchers need a better idea of the topography underlying the ice so they can better model how it will change in the future.

“The Bellingshausen Sea region of West Antarctica stands as one of the least surveyed regions of ice and ocean on the planet,” he said.

Also needed is a clearer picture of ocean circulation there and in the entire West Antarctic region.

“The Antarctic Peninsula certainly does not receive as much attention as it should,” Rignot said. “I would recommend more work in this area, which is illustrative of what will happen farther south as climate gets warmer.”

(GRIST)

"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 6/7/2016 11:06:57 AM
	Russia is 'paving the way' for a major re-escalation in Syria By Natasha Bertrand 21 hours ago (REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov/File Photo) Russian President Vladimir Putin with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, left, and Federal Security Service Director Alexander Bortnikov. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters Monday that Russia would provide "the most active" support to the Syrian army to keep the strategic city of Aleppo and the surrounding area from falling into the hands of "terrorists." "What is happening in and around Aleppo now is what we had warned the Americans about beforehand — and they know it: that we will in the most active way support the Syrian army from the air not to allow the seizure of this territory by terrorists," Lavrov said. Lavrov's comments, which come one day after Russia's deputy defense minister announced that there was still "much to be done to support the Syrian army" — have added to speculation that Russia is preparing to revamp its military operations in Syria three months after announcing it had begun to withdraw. Moscow intervened on behalf of embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad in September, turning the tide of the war in Assad's favor with relentless airstrikes targeting anti-Assad rebels near Turkey's border and Aleppo, which is now the war's epicenter. Putin shocked the world when he announced in March that Russia would begin to withdraw "the main part" of its military presence in Syria four months after intervening. Jeff White, a defense fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told Business Insider at the time that Putin had "left some important military tasks unfinished," including the encirclement of Aleppo. Perhaps for that reason, Russia left many of its military resources in Syria intact in the event it would need to re-escalate. "The notion that Russia needs to 'return' to Syria is fallacious," Mark Kramer, the program director for the Project on Cold War Studies at Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, told Business Insider on Monday. "Even after Putin announced that Russia was ending its military operation a few months ago, Russian planes continued to provide bombing support for Syrian forces, albeit much less frequently than before," he added. Experts say it now appears Moscow is setting the stage for a large-scale offensive against Syria's more mainstream opposition, considered terrorists by forces loyal to Assad, by ramping up its antiterrorist rhetoric, reinforcing its ground role via military advisers and private contractors, and escalating the rate and breadth of airstrikes around Aleppo's frontlines and in Idlib province. (Institute for the Study of War) On Saturday, the former chief of the general staff for the Russian armed forces said Russia "should act more forcefully" against Syria's "terrorists," who were given time to prepare for an offensive by the cessation-of-hostilities agreement brokered between the US and Russia in late February. The French daily newspaper Le Figaro reported in early May that Russia had contracted private "mercenaries" to fight for Assad, and Al-Monitor reported last week that ground forces and paratroopers had been deployed to Russia's port on Syria's western coast "to support more than 3,000 Russian volunteers dispatched to the region in the last few weeks, in a bid to revive coordination with the Syrian Arab Army." The rate and breadth of Russian airstrikes in Aleppo and opposition-held territory in Idlib province tripled over the course of three days last week, according to the Institute for the Study of War, marking what it called "a dangerous shift in the Russian airstrike pattern to levels only seen prior to the brokering of the cessation of hostilities agreement in late February 2016."iew gallery (Hosam Katan/Reuters) Residents with a Nusra Front flag in April 2015 during a demonstration celebrating their takeover of Idlib and calling for the implementation of the Islamic Sharia law, in Al-Sakhour neighborhood of Aleppo. Zeina Khodr, a correspondent for Al Jazeera based out of Doha, put it bluntly: "Moscow may be justifying and paving the way for a large-scale offensive against [Al Qaeda affiliate] Jabhat al-Nusra." In that way, however, Russia is evidently also preparing for a large-scale offensive against Syria's mainstream rebels — many of whom have continued to coexist with Nusra in the name of survival. "I have an impression, which is supported by yet unconfirmed facts, that these [moderate] groups intentionally occupy al-Nusra front positions in order to prevent al-Nusra from being attacked," Lavrovtold Sputnik News last month. That Nusra is not protected by the terms of the cease-fire has created a loophole for the Russians to attack mainstream rebel groups in the midst of the cease-fire. Many of these groups are backed by the West, and that some have reportedly chosen to coordinate with Nusra against forces loyal to Assad "has exposed the Achilles' heel of the American strategy in Syria: the line between terrorist and 'moderate rebel' is pencil-thin." That is according to The Daily Beast's Nancy Youssef, who was told last week by a US intelligence official that Lavrov's recent proposal that the US and Russia coordinate their airstrikes in Syria to target Nusra militants "was a blatant attempt to deflect attention from the targeting of moderate opposition" forces in Syria. (REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi) Protesters with Free Syrian Army flags and chanting slogans during an antigovernment protest in the town of Marat Numan in Idlib Province, Syria, on March 4. "Despite claims they are focusing on" Al Qaeda in Syria and ISIS, the official said, "Russia and Assad have primarily targeted the moderate opposition." Lavrov offered to halt airstrikes long enough to allow the rebels to back away from Nusra positions, but the US refused the proposal. The rebels did not back away despite urging from US Secretary of State John Kerry, and Moscow is evidently now taking advantage of a lack of "cooperation" from Washington and stalled peace talks in Geneva — Mohammad Alloush resigned from his position as the opposition's chief negotiator last month — to re-escalate its military presence. "It can be said that for the first time the military and the diplomatic positions have converged on the need to restrengthen [Russia's] credibility," Mohammad Ballout wrote in Al-Monitor on Friday. "This might pave the way for a partial re-adoption of the military option." Kramer, of Harvard, noted that Russia "may well escalate its operations back up to something close to their October through March levels." "But if so," he added, "that would represent a fairly embarrassing admission that the Syrian regime is unable to sustain progress on its own."
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
	+2

Luis Miguel

1162

61587

Lima

RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?

6/7/2016 2:58:59 PM

Human-pig hybrids for organ transplants could develop into monsters with 'OUR brains'

SCIENTISTS trying to grow our body parts inside pigs to end the shortage of organs needed for transplants could inadvertently make animals with human brains, it has emerged.

By JON AUSTIN
PUBLISHED: 09:16, Mon, Jun 6, 2016 | UPDATED: 18:00, Mon, Jun 6, 2016

BBC

Human cells being injected into a pig embryo.

It was revealed today that in a futuristic Dr Frankenstein-like experiment, scientisist in the US have injected human stem cells into pig embryos to produce human-pig embryos known as chimeras.

But, concern has already surfaced that playing God in this way could open the door to pig's developing with human intelligence and too much like us.

There are fears that mixing pig and human genes in this way coud see the animals develop looking like animals but with human brains or boosted intelligence.

The research is so controversial that last year, the main US medical research agency, the National Institutes of Health, imposed a moratorium on funding such experiments.

Its main concern is that the human cells might migrate to the developing pig's brain and make it, in some way, more human.

Pablo Ross, a reproductive biologist who is leading the research, said this is unlikely but is a key reason why the research is proceeding with such caution.

He said: "We think there is very low potential for a human brain to grow, but this is something we will be investigating."

Mr Ross, whose team is from University of California, Davis, says the hybrids should look and behave like normal pigs except that one organ will be composed of human cells.

But, amid concerns that the human-pig chimeric embryos could develop too much like us, the inch-long embryoes are only being allowed to develop inside the sows for 28 days before the pregnancies are terminated and the tissue removed for analysis.

One of the sows who is pregnant with a human-pig hybrid.

In Greek mythology, chimeras were fire-breathing monsters composed of several animals - part lion, goat and snake.

Other teams in the United States have created human-pig chimeric embryos but none has allowed the foetuses to be born, because of the fears of the hybrid creation.

Walter Low, professor in the department of neurosurgery, University of Minnesota, said pigs were an ideal "biological incubator" for growing human organs, and could potentially be used to create not just a pancreas but hearts, livers, kidneys, lungs and corneas.

He said if the iPS cells were taken from a patient needing a transplant then these could be injected in a pig embryo which had the key genes deleted for creating the required organ, such as the liver.

He said: "The organ would be an exact genetic copy of your liver but a much younger and healthier version and you would not need to take immunosuppressive drugs which carry side-effects."

Alarmingly, his team is also trying to create dopamine-producing human neurons from chimeric embryos to treat patients with Parkinson's disease.

These embryos have been allowed to develop for up to 62 days - the normal gestation period is around 114 days.

Like the team in California, Prof Low said they were monitoring the effects on the pig brain: He said: "With every organ we will look at what's happening in the brain and if we find that it's too human like, then we won't let those foetuses be born".

We think there is very low potential for a human brain to grow, but this is something we will be investigating.
Dr Pablo Ross

The BBC's medical correspondent Fergus Walsh was given exclusive access to the research for Panorama - Medicine's Big Breakthrough: Editing Your Genesto be shown tonight at 8.30pm on BBC One.

Creating the chimeric embryos takes two stages.

First, a technique known as CRISPR gene editing is used to remove DNA from a newly fertilised pig embryo that would enable the resulting foetus to grow a pancreas.

This creates a genetic "niche" or void.

Then, human induced pluripotent (iPS) stem cells are injected into the embryo.

The iPS cells were derived from adult cells and "dialled back" to become stem cells capable of developing into any tissue in the body.

The team at UC Davis hopes the human stem cells will take advantage of the genetic niche in the pig embryo and the resulting foetus will grow a human pancreas.