Pictures: The Story Behind Sun Dogs, Penitent Ice, and More

Photograph by Art Wolfe, Getty Images

If you want the beauty of winter without having to brave the bone-chilling temperatures blasting much of the United States this week, snuggle into a soft blanket, grab a warm beverage, and curl up with some of these natural frozen wonders.

Nieve penitente, or penitent snow, are collections of spires that resemble robed monks—or penitents. They are flattened columns of snow wider at the base than at the tip and can range in height from 3 to 20 feet (1 to 6 meters). The picture above shows the phenomenon in central Chile. (See pictures of the patterns in snow and ice.)

Nieve penitente tend to form in shallow valleys where the snow is deep and the sun doesn't shine at too steep an angle, said Kenneth Libbrecht, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena who studies ice crystal formation.

As the snow melts, dirt gets mixed in with the runoff and collects in little pools here and there, he said. Since the dirt is darker in color than the surrounding snow, the dirty areas melt faster "and you end up digging these pits," explained Libbrecht.

"They tend to form at high altitude," he said. But other than that, no one really knows the exact conditions that are needed to form penitent snow.

"They're fairly strong," Libbrecht said. "People have found [the spires] difficult to hike through."

—Jane J. Lee

Published January 25, 2013

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Brazil Nightclub Fire: 232 Dead, Hundreds Injured

Flames raced through a crowded nightclub in southern Brazil early Sunday, killing more than 230 people as panicked partygoers gasped for breath in the smoke-filled air, stampeding toward a single exit partially blocked by those already dead. It appeared to be the world's deadliest nightclub fire in more than a decade.

Witnesses said a flare or firework lit by band members started the blaze in Santa Maria, a university city of about 225,000 people, though officials said the cause was still under investigation.

Television images showed smoke pouring out of the Kiss nightclub as shirtless young men who had attended a university party joined firefighters using axes and sledgehammers to pound at windows and walls to free those trapped inside.

Guido Pedroso Melo, commander of the city's fire department, told the O Globo newspaper that firefighters had a hard time getting inside the club because "there was a barrier of bodies blocking the entrance."

Teenagers sprinted from the scene desperately seeking help. Others carried injured and burned friends away in their arms.

"There was so much smoke and fire, it was complete panic, and it took a long time for people to get out, there were so many dead," survivor Luana Santos Silva told the Globo TV network.

The fire spread so fast inside the packed club that firefighters and ambulances could do little to stop it, Silva said.

Germano Roratto/AFP/Getty Images

Another survivor, Michele Pereira, told the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper that she was near the stage when members of the band lit flares that started the conflagration.

"The band that was onstage began to use flares and, suddenly, they stopped the show and pointed them upward," she said. "At that point, the ceiling caught fire. It was really weak, but in a matter of seconds it spread."

Guitarist Rodrigo Martins told Radio Gaucha that the band, Gurizada Fandangueira, started playing at 2:15 a.m. "and we had played around five songs when I looked up and noticed the roof was burning"

"It might have happened because of the Sputnik, the machine we use to create a luminous effect with sparks. It's harmless, we never had any trouble with it.

"When the fire started, a guard passed us a fire extinguisher, the singer tried to use it but it wasn't working"

He confirmed that accordion player Danilo Jacques, 28, died, while the five other members made it out safely.

Police Maj. Cleberson Braida Bastianello said by telephone that the toll had risen to 233 with the death of a hospitalized victim — he said earlier that the death toll was likely made worse because the nightclub appeared to have just one exit through which patrons could exit.

Officials counted 232 bodies that had been brought for identification to a gymnasium in Santa Maria, which is located at the southern tip of Brazil, near the borders with Argentina and Uruguay.

Federal Health Minister Alexandre Padhilha told a news conference that most of the 117 people treated in hospitals had been poisoned by gases they breathed during the fire. Only a few suffered serious burns, he said.

Brazil President Dilma Roussef arrived to visit the injured after cutting short her trip to a Latin American-European summit in Chile.

"It is a tragedy for all of us," Roussef said.

Most of the dead apparently were asphyxiated, according to Dr. Paulo Afonso Beltrame, a professor at the medical school of the Federal University of Santa Maria who went to the city's Caridade Hospital to help victims.

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Get cirrus in the fight against climate change

FEATHERY cirrus clouds are beautiful, but when it comes to climate change, they are the enemy. Found at high-altitude and made of small ice crystals, they trap heat - so more cirrus means a warmer world. Now it seems that, by destroying cirrus, we could reverse all the warming Earth has experienced so far.

In 2009, David Mitchell of the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada, proposed a radical way to stop climate change: get rid of some cirrus. Now Trude Storelvmo of Yale University and colleagues have used a climate model to test the idea.

Storelvmo added powdered bismuth triiodide into the model's troposphere, the layer of the atmosphere in which these clouds form. Ice crystals grew around these particles and expanded, eventually falling out of the sky, reducing cirrus coverage. Without the particles, the ice crystals remained small and stayed up high for longer.

The technique, done on a global scale, created a powerful cooling effect, enough to counteract the 0.8 °C of warming caused by all the greenhouse gases released by humans (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1002/grl.50122).

But too much bismuth triiodide made the ice crystals shrink, so cirrus clouds lasted longer. "If you get the concentrations wrong, you could get the opposite of what you want," says Storelvmo. And, like other schemes for geoengineering, side effects are likely - changes in the jet stream, say.

Different model assumptions give different "safe" amounts of bismuth triiodide, says Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter, UK. "Do we really know the system well enough to be confident of being in the safe zone?" he asks. "You wouldn't want to touch this until you knew."

Mitchell says seeding would take 140 tonnes of bismuth triiodide every year, which by itself would cost $19 million.

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Sailing: Olympic sailing champion visits Singapore

SINGAPORE: Xu Lijia, the 25 year old who became the first Chinese to win a gold medal in the dinghy class after finishing first in the laser radial class at the 2012 London Olympics, is in town.

The Chinese athlete shared her experiences with local sailors at a talk, which attracted 500 participants. The talk also saw the launch of the Character Development Through Sailing programme.

The Shanghai native, who won bronze in the same class at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, said that it was not just about winning, but also enjoying the journey.

She had to beat many odds including injuries, physical limitations and the lack of a proper support structure for the sport in China.

"It is about promotion, promoting this sport not only in Singapore, China but... in whole of Asia. I hope that Asia can become stronger and stronger and (compete) with the European countries," she said.

- CNA/jc

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In Swartz protest, Anon hacks U.S. site, threatens leaks

In response to the death of tech activist Aaron Swartz, hacktivist collective Anonymous hacked a U.S. government Web site related to the justice system and posted a screed saying it would begin leaking a cache of government documents if the justice system is not reformed.

The group hacked the Web site for the United States Sentencing Commission late Friday, posting a message about what it's calling "Operation Last Resort," along with a set of downloadable encrypted files it said contain sensitive information. The sentencing commission is the caretaker of the guidelines for sentencing in U.S. federal courts.

"Two weeks ago today, a line was crossed," the group's statement reads. "Two weeks ago today, Aaron Swartz was killed. Killed because he faced an impossible choice. Killed because he was forced into playing a game he could not win -- a twisted and distorted perversion of justice -- a game where the only winning move was not to play."

The recent suicide of Swartz, a proponent of freely accessible information, has been blamed by some on what they say were outrageously aggressive efforts on the part of the U.S. Attorney in Massachusetts to punish Swartz for his alleged theft of millions of articles from a database of academic journals. The 26-year-old Swartz, who struggled with bouts of depression, had been charged with 13 felonies and threatened with decades in prison and fines exceeding $1 million. U.S. Attorney Carmin Ortiz says Swartz' lawyers were also offered a plea bargain in which he'd plead guilty and serve perhaps 6 months.

Anonymous encouraged its followers to download the files on the hacked site, a set of nine downloads named after the U.S. Supreme Court's nine justices and collectively referred to by the hacking collective as a "warhead."

"Warhead-US-DOJ-LEA-2013.AEE256 is primed and armed. It has been quietly distributed to numerous mirrors over the last few days and is available for download from this website now. We encourage all Anonymous to syndicate this file as widely as possible."

The group wouldn't specify what, exactly, is in the files, saying only that "the contents are various and we won't ruin the speculation by revealing them. Suffice it to say, everyone has secrets, and some things are not meant to be public. At a regular interval commencing today, we will choose one media outlet and supply them with heavily redacted partial contents of the file."

The contents of the encrypted files can apparently be accessed only with a decryption key, and Anonymous said it didn't necessarily want to provide that key to its followers -- it mentioned "collateral damage" as a result of any leaks and said "It is our hope that this warhead need never be detonated." But the group said the U.S. government must begin acting on reforms to the justice system suggested by the system's critics, and in spelling out its demands more specifically, it mentioned plea bargaining and suggested the overhaul of legislation such as the mid-1980s antihacking law entitled the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

...in order for there to be a peaceful resolution to this crisis, certain things need to happen. There must be reform of outdated and poorly-envisioned legislation, written to be so broadly applied as to make a felony crime out of violation of terms of service, creating in effect vast swathes of crimes, and allowing for selective punishment. There must be reform of mandatory minimum sentencing. There must be a return to proportionality of punishment with respect to actual harm caused, and consideration of motive and mens rea [criminal intent]. The inalienable right to a presumption of innocence and the recourse to trial and possibility of exoneration must be returned to its sacred status, and not gambled away by pre-trial bargaining in the face of overwhelming sentences, unaffordable justice, and disfavourable odds. Laws must be upheld unselectively, and not used as a weapon of government to make examples of those it deems threatening to its power.

The group said it had acquired the files by compromising various government Web sites and installing "leakware," which it has since removed to cover its tracks.

Here's the video Anon posted on the commission's site. A Google cache of the hacked home page, which includes the text version of the screed, can be seen here.

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Pictures: The Story Behind Sun Dogs, Penitent Ice, and More

Photograph by Art Wolfe, Getty Images

If you want the beauty of winter without having to brave the bone-chilling temperatures blasting much of the United States this week, snuggle into a soft blanket, grab a warm beverage, and curl up with some of these natural frozen wonders.

Nieve penitente, or penitent snow, are collections of spires that resemble robed monks—or penitents. They are flattened columns of snow wider at the base than at the tip and can range in height from 3 to 20 feet (1 to 6 meters). The picture above shows the phenomenon in central Chile. (See pictures of the patterns in snow and ice.)

Nieve penitente tend to form in shallow valleys where the snow is deep and the sun doesn't shine at too steep an angle, said Kenneth Libbrecht, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena who studies ice crystal formation.

As the snow melts, dirt gets mixed in with the runoff and collects in little pools here and there, he said. Since the dirt is darker in color than the surrounding snow, the dirty areas melt faster "and you end up digging these pits," explained Libbrecht.

"They tend to form at high altitude," he said. But other than that, no one really knows the exact conditions that are needed to form penitent snow.

"They're fairly strong," Libbrecht said. "People have found [the spires] difficult to hike through."

—Jane J. Lee

Published January 25, 2013

Read More..

Newtown Families March for Gun Control in DC

Jan 26, 2013 4:59pm

(YURI GRIPAS/AFP/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Near-freezing temperatures didn’t stop several thousand gun-control activists from bearing their pickets today, carrying signs emblazoned with “Ban Assault Weapons Now” and the names of gun violence victims in a demonstration organized as a response to the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn. last month.

Walking in silence, the demonstrators trudged between Capitol Hill and the Washington Monument over a thin layer of melting snow. They were joined by politicians and some families of the Newtown victims.

March organizer Shannon Watts said the event was for the “families who lost the lights of their lives in Newtown, daughters and sons, wives and mothers, grandchildren, sisters and brothers gone in an unfathomable instant.”

“Let’s stand together and use our voices, use our votes to let legislators know that we won’t stand down until they enact common sense gun control laws that will keep our children out of the line of fire,” she told demonstrators.

Watts founded One Million Moms for Gun Control after the killing of 20 first graders and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown in December. In a profile with the New York Times, Watts said her 12-year-old son had suffered panic attacks after learning of last summer’s Aurora, Colo., theater shooting, leaving her at an impasse over how to talk to him about the latest tragedy.

Also among the speakers was a survivor of the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, Collin Goddard.

“We need to challenge any politician who thinks it’s easier to ask an elementary school teacher to stand up to a gunman with an AR-15 than it is to ask them to stand up to a gun lobbyist with a checkbook,” he said.

The demonstration comes amid a push by progressive lawmakers to enact stricter gun control measures as a response to the trend of recent mass killings, although any hypothetical bill would likely face strong opposition in Congress.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., was among the demonstrators today.

“The idea that people need high-capacity magazines that can fire 30, 50, 100 rounds has no place in a civilized society,” he said. “Between the time we’re gathered here right now and this time of day tomorrow, across America, 282 Americans will have been shot.”

The congressman was quoting statistics compiled by the Brady Campaign to Stop Gun Violence.

INFOGRAPHIC: Guns by the Numbers

Last week President Obama proposed a sweeping overhaul of federal measures regulating gun ownership, including a universal background check system for sales, banning assault weapons,  and curbing the amount of ammunition available in weapon clips.

An ABC News/Washington Post poll released Thursday found 53 percent of Americans viewed Obama’s gun control plan favorably, 41 percent unfavorably. The division was visible today, as a handful of gun-rights advocates also turned out on the National Mall to protest what they believe would be infringements on their Second Amendment liberties.

ABC’s Joanne Fuchs contributed to this report.

SHOWS: Good Morning America World News

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Today on New Scientist: 25 January 2013

Hagfish gulped up in first video of deep-sea seal hunt

Watch the first sighting of a seal's underwater eating habits spotted by a teenager watching a live video feed

World's oldest portrait reveals the ice-age mind

A 26,000-year-old carved ivory head of a woman is not just an archaeological find - a new exhibition in London wants us to see works like this as art

Dung beetles navigate using the Milky Way

Forget the Pole Star: on moonless nights dung beetles use the Milky Way to follow a straight path with their dung ball

Stress's impact can affect future generations' genes

DNA analysis has yielded the first direct evidence that chemical marks which disable genes in response to stress can be passed on to offspring

Uncharted territory: Where digital maps are leading us

The way we use maps is evolving fast, says Kat Austen, and it will change a great deal more than how we navigate

Feedback: Tales of the stony turd industry

Fossilised faeces in Shitlington, confusing railway notices, organic water, and more

Duolingo gives language learning a jump start

First evidence that Duolingo, a new website that helps you learn a language while translating the web, actually works

Dolphins form life raft to help dying friend

A group of dolphins was caught on camera as they worked together to keep a struggling dolphin above water by forming an impromptu raft

Zoologger: Supercool squirrels go into the deep freeze

Hibernating Arctic ground squirrels drop their body temperatures to -4 °C, and shut their circadian clocks off for the winter

Greek economic crisis has cleared the air

The ongoing collapse of Greece's economy has caused a significant fall in air pollution, which can be detected by satellites

Body armour to scale up by mimicking flexible fish

Armour that is designed like the scales of the dragon fish could keep soldiers protected - while still letting them bend

Astrophile: Split personality tarnishes pulsars' rep

Pulsars were seen as cosmic timekeepers, but the quirky way in which one example shines suggests we can't take their behaviour for granted

Shrinking proton puzzle persists in new measurement

The most precise experiment yet to find the proton's radius confirms that it can appear smaller than our theories predict - is new physics needed?

Tight squeeze forces cells to take their medicine

A short sharp squash in these channels and a cell's membrane pops open - good news when you want to slip a molecule or nanoparticle in there

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Apple loses world's most valuable company crown

NEW YORK: Apple shares extended their losses Friday, ending a miserable week for the California tech giant as it surrendered its position as the world's biggest company based on market value.

Apple ended down 2.36 per cent at US$439.88, giving it a market capitalisation of $413 billion -- while oil giant ExxonMobil rose 0.36 per cent to US$91.68 with a market cap of US$418 billion, to edge into first place.

The shares of both firms zig-zagged during the session, with Apple at various points regaining the top spot before falling back.

Apple first overtook ExxonMobil in August 2011 as the most valuable company in the world based on the value of its stock.

A year later, Apple dethroned longtime rival Microsoft as the most valuable company in history based on the value of its stock at US$622 billion.

But the company took a bruising this week after Wednesday's gloomy forecast accompanying its record quarterly profit announcement prompted pessimism over the tech giant's slowing growth trajectory.

Apple's profit was US$13.1 billion on revenue of US$54.5 billion in the fiscal quarter that ended on December 29, with sales of iPhones and iPads setting quarterly highs.

But despite those figures, investors soured on Apple after it forecast that revenue for the current quarter would range from US$41-43 billion and that it would have a gross margin of 37.5 to 39.5 per cent, lower than expectations.

Analysts remained cautious about Apple, which had seen a meteoric rise last September to over US$700 a share but it has slid 37 per cent since then. The company shed some US$60 billion on Thursday and around US$10 billion more Friday.

Some express concern that Apple has lost its edge in innovation since the death of Steve Jobs, and is losing ground to rivals such as Samsung, which leads the mobile phone market, and to others using Google's Android operating system.

Jinho Cho at Mirae Asset Securities said Apple will likely increase carrier subsidies in 2013 and launch "an entry-level iPhone" to compete better in emerging markets.

"These moves by Apple should lead to stiffer competition for greater carrier subsidies among smartphone makers, thus driving down handset industry-wide operating margins," the analyst said.

Colin Gillis at BGC Financial said Apple is facing new challenges.

"While we are incrementally more positive on the stock, we also mention that competition is increasing for the company," he said in a research note.

"We see competitors are using price as a lever to get traction in the market. Apple may also run into difficulty posting both the volumes and maintaining its prices over the next several quarters."

- AFP/jc

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How to use the Font panel in OS X

Many programs, such as Microsoft Office, support their own interfaces for various fonts you may have installed on your Mac; however, many other programs like TextEdit and Apple's Pages use Apple's central Font panel to provide font management. This panel can usually be invoked by pressing Command-T in programs that support it, where you will be presented with a column-oriented view of font collections that you can navigate through, select, and set the size for.

While convenient for quickly selecting and setting font sizes, the Font panel also contains a number of additional features that can be applied to your text.

The Font panel by default includes a preview window and effects settings in addition to listing your fonts.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Topher Kessler/CNET)

Preview font style
The first feature may or may not already be enabled in the Font panel, but its function is to preview the font you have selected. Though some programs support previewing fonts in a drop-down font menu, this can sometimes bog a system down if you have hundreds of fonts installed that all are accessed and loaded at once (though modern systems handle this far better). To preview a font, simply locate the small dot slider at the top of the Font panel and drag it down to reveal the preview area, or select "Show Preview" from the small gear menu to the bottom left. Now you can see the font name displayed in its actual font, and at the size you have selected.

Set color, style, and other effects
Another feature that is usually enabled by default is the effects bar, where you can set styles like underscores, strikethroughs, font color, and highlight colors. You can also enable text shadows in programs that support this. This bar should be between the preview and above the font listings, so if it is not there, enable it by selecting "Show Effects" from the gear menu.

Set up favorites and collections
The Font panel will show you all fonts, but does so by listing those in the collection you have chosen. The system includes a number of built-in collections such as those for language-specific fonts, fixed-width fonts, fun fonts, and those that are most compatible with specific tasks like PDF or Web content management. You can add or remove any font from these collections by dragging them to and from the collections.

The "Edit Sizes" option in the gear menu will bring up this settings panel. Note that by resizing the Font panel window and preview areas you can collapse the standard column-browser view, as shown here.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Topher Kessler/CNET)

You can also create your own font collections by clicking the plus button and then dragging fonts to it. Apple does include a couple of special collections, which are the Recently Used list and the favorites. The favorites will contain specific font and size pairings that you have added to this list by choosing "Add to favorites" from the gear menu.

Hidden settings (gear menu)
The Font panel does have some additional features that are relatively hidden but may be exceptionally useful; they can be accessed through the gear menu. The first of these is the option to adjust the list and range of sizes that are available in the Font panel. While you can manually change the value in the Size box to the right of the panel to adjust the font, the selectable common font size numbers below this box can be customized. To do this, choose "Edit Sizes" from the gear menu and you can add or remove sizes from the list, show or hide aspects of the size controls, and set the maximum and minimum point values of the slider.

The second hidden feature is the Typography panel, which may be the most useful hidden feature in the Font panel. As with the others, this one is available in the gear menu, and will present contextually relevant font- and character-specific typography options you can use in your document. These include the enabling of ligatures, and special treatment of numbers, capitals, and numbering styles.

The Typography panel holds a number of secrets for making full use of a specific font.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Topher Kessler)

Another aspect of this panel holds an answer to a question many may have about how to use some fancy characters that are previewed in fonts like the stylistic Zapfino. The preview text for these fonts may contain elaborate characters, but when you type these characters, you get a fairly bland version of them. To get to these characters, you can use the glyph variants that will appear in the Typography panel for characters in fonts that support them. You can select individual character variants at the bottom of the Typography panel, or you can choose a predefined glyph variant set and end up with dramatically different styles when using the same font.

One of the more useful Typography panel features is the contextual fractional forms option, where if enabled will take any fraction you type and condense it into a character-size fraction. Many fonts support common fractions such as halves, thirds, and fourths, but if you need a similar view for 1/243, you can do so with contextual fractional forms. Another useful option is the conversion of lower- and upper-case characters into small capital letters, which is quite convenient for headlines, signs, and other needs for emboldening text.

The last features in the Font panel gear menu are quick access links to other font-handling features in the OS. One of these is the colors panel (which is also available in the effects bar), but you can also access the Character Viewer and open the Font Book program to better manage your font collections.

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Questions? Comments? Have a fix? Post them below or !
Be sure to check us out on Twitter and the CNET Mac forums.

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