Rotten eggs stench reaches UK after French gas leak

PARIS (Reuters) - A cloud of harmless gas smelling of sweat and rotten eggs leaked out of a chemicals factory in northwest France and wafted across the English Channel as far as London on Tuesday.

The leak occurred on Monday morning at a Lubrizol France plant near Rouen, 120 km (75 miles) northwest of Paris, and winds blew the invisible gas cloud south over northern France on Monday night and then up into England on Tuesday.

The fire brigade in the county of Kent, southeast of London, warned residents to keep their doors and windows closed due to a gas cloud it believed had come from France and London police said it had reports of an acrid smell in southeast London.

Lubrizol France, which makes additives for industrial lubricants and paint, said the gas was mercaptan, also known as methanethiol, a colorless additive used in natural gas because its sulphurous smell enables gas leaks to be detected.

Internal operations director Pierre-Jean Payrouse said the company was battling to plug the leak, as the cloud spread over some 350 km (220 miles), but said it might take until the evening. The cause of the leak was still unknown.

"It's not so much a leak as a product that has decomposed, which smells very bad and which is escaping," Payrouse told RTL radio. "An investigation is under way (into what happened) but our priority is to deal with the problem."

The gas, which is non-toxic but is flammable in strong concentrations, prompted a flood of phone calls to emergency services in France in the early hours of Tuesday.

The Paris police department issued a statement saying the gas posed no health risks but warned that it smelled like a mixture of "sweat, garlic and rotten eggs".

A French Cup soccer match between Rouen and Olympique Marseille had to be postponed because of the stink, the French federation said.

A local news website said the gas had caused migraines, irritations and nausea among some residents of Rouen.

Britain's National Grid, which receives emergency phone calls when people smell gas, said it was experiencing a large volume of calls, as did smaller gas providers across southeast England.

London's Metropolitan Police tweeted: "We are aware of reports of a strong, noxious, gas-like smell in some South East London boroughs. No risks to public."

Ohio-based Lubrizol, founded in 1928 and part of U.S. conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway Inc since 2011, has production facilities in some 19 countries.

Payrouse said the last time the company had experienced a similar incident was in the late 1980s.

(Reporting by Catherine Bremer, Geert de Clercq and Julien Pretot in Paris, Karolin Schaps and Stephen Addison in London; Writing by Catherine Bremer; Editing by Alison Williams)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/gas-leak-causes-strong-odor-paris-western-france-024755078--finance.html

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To Catch A Marten: Seeking Clues In Olympic National Forest

A group of volunteers is helping biologists see whether there are any martens left in the Olympic National Forest in Washington state.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

A group of volunteers is helping biologists see whether there are any martens left in the Olympic National Forest in Washington state.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

It's about 25 degrees on a clear Saturday morning when Gregg Treinish ? executive director of Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation, a nonprofit that puts volunteers to work gathering data for scientists around the world ? gathers a small group of outdoor adventurers around him near the Duckabush River in the Olympic National Forest in Washington state.

The mission for this group: help biologists figure out whether there are any martens left in the Olympic National Forest. Volunteers will set up motion-activated cameras in some of the forest's snowiest, most remote territory.

The citizen scientists fill their packs with a strange assortment of gear, including chicken wire, hammers, folding saws and ? wait for it ? human-head-sized chunks of beaver carcass.

"I don't mind carrying dead things, but maybe I'll move my lunch," says Sonia Wolfman, a lawyer from Olympia, Wash., as she stuffs a black garbage bag full of beaver guts into her pack.

The beaver, which was provided by the Forest Service, will be used as bait to lure the martens in front of the remote cameras the volunteers plan to set up throughout the forest.

But in the Olympics anyway, catching a marten, a member of the weasel family, on camera is a rare occurrence.

"For the past 25 years, we've had three verifiable sightings," says Betsy Howell, a biologist with the Forest Service who helped organize this project. "Two were photographs and one was an animal caught in a trap."

Although martens are doing OK in parts of the mountain West, their numbers appear to have plummeted in recent decades in the coastal ranges of Oregon and Washington.

Until scientists know that for sure, these animals can't be recommended for protection under the Endangered Species Act. That's where these volunteers come in.

Volunteers with Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation set up motion-activated cameras in remote parts of Olympic National Forest in search of the American Marten.

Courtesy of Michael Murray

Volunteers with Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation set up motion-activated cameras in remote parts of Olympic National Forest in search of the American Marten.

Courtesy of Michael Murray

Treinish leads the group into the woods at a brisk pace. He's a tightly muscled guy with mountain-man hair and an easy smile. When he hikes, his eyes remain glued to the forest floor, scanning the snow. He picks out the tracks of mountain lion, elk, coyote, bobcat and a host of rodents along the trail, and points them out to the group. But no sign of martens.

After more than four miles of hiking up steep switchbacks and past sparkling icy rock faces, we get to a spot that looks like a place martens might hang out. To the untrained eye, it looks like every other snowy section of forest we've hiked through, but not to Treinish.

"It's a nice flat area here," he explains, pointing at a dip in the landscape where a young cedar and fir tree stand about 13 feet apart. "I kind of like how it funnels everything into there, so we'll go with that spot."

The group unloads its gear and starts setting up the station.

Jenna Walenga, a barista from Seattle, snaps on a pair of rubber gloves and prepares to reach into the bloody garbage bag. A few years ago, she hiked Mount Kilimanjaro. Today her job is to attach a hunk of dead beaver to one of these trees.

"I'm actually a vegetarian," she says, as she holds the carcass against the tree so another volunteer can nail it down beneath a layer of chicken wire.

On the opposite tree, the team sets up the motion-activated camera and aims it at the beaver carcass.

The chances of getting footage of martens in the Olympic National Forest are slim. Much of the old-growth forests the martens rely on in the coastal range has been cut down, and biologists worry that climate change will shrink the remaining cold alpine habitat.

No one knows how many martens might still live in the national forest, but Howell says they'd probably never be able to find out without the help of volunteers like these.

"We can do so much more together than we can do separately," Howell says. "The partnership is a great way to get work done that otherwise we just don't have funding or staff for anymore."

The volunteers will set up 11 other stations like this one throughout the forest. Then they'll come back in smaller groups to check the cameras every month or so to see whether any martens showed up to have their pictures taken.

It's still legal to trap martens in Washington and Oregon. But here in Olympic National Forest, there may not be any left to catch ? on camera, or otherwise.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2013/01/21/169912767/to-catch-a-marten-seeking-clues-in-olympic-national-forest?ft=1&f=1007

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Green Blog: On Our Radar: Obama on Climate Change

In his second inaugural address, President Obama declares that the nation must respond to the threat of climate change because a ?failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.? [Associated Press]

A week after air pollution reached toxic levels in Beijing, the city proposes rules that would increase fines for vehicle emissions and force more factories to shut down when smog reaches dangerous levels. [Bloomberg]

More than 800 scientists and engineers from around the world gather in New Orleans to discuss the repercussions of BP?s 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill on ecosystems and people in the gulf region. [The Times-Picayune]

The wind in the willows: scientists report that willow trees cultivated for green energy can yield up to five times more biofuel if they grow diagonally, or in windy conditions. [R&D]

Source: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/on-our-radar-obama-on-climate-change/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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PayNearMe Raises $10 Million Series D; Launches Self-Serve Platform To Allow Any Business Accept Remote Cash Payments

Cash-based payments platform?PayNearMe?has raised additional financing, the company announced today, in a Series D round led by August Capital with participation from other existing investors including Khosla Ventures, Maveron, and True Ventures. The news comes alongside the launch of the company's latest product, PayNearMe Express, a self-serve platform that lets any business sign up to accept cash payments from PayNearMe customers.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/ditfwv7v2e8/

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NASA's older Mars rover notches another milestone

This image provided by NASA shows the late-afternoon shadow cast by the Mars rover Opportunity at Endeavour Crater. The six-wheel rover landed on Mars in January 2004 and is still going strong. (AP Photo/NASA)

This image provided by NASA shows the late-afternoon shadow cast by the Mars rover Opportunity at Endeavour Crater. The six-wheel rover landed on Mars in January 2004 and is still going strong. (AP Photo/NASA)

LOS ANGELES (AP) ? Opportunity, NASA's other Mars rover, has tooled around the red planet for so long it's easy to forget it's still alive.

Some 5,000 miles away from the limelight surrounding Curiosity's every move, Opportunity this week quietly embarks on its tenth year of exploration ? a sweet milestone since it was only tasked to work for three months.

"Opportunity is still going. Go figure," said mission deputy principal investigator Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis.

True, it's not as snazzy as Curiosity, the most high-tech interplanetary rover ever designed. It awed the world with its landing near the Martian equator five months ago.

After so many years crater-hopping, Opportunity is showing its age: It has an arthritic joint in its robotic arm and it drives mostly backward due to a balky front wheel ? more annoyances than show-stoppers.

For the past several months, it has been parked on a clay-rich hill along the western rim of Endeavour Crater that's unlike any scenery it encountered before. It plans to wrap up at its current spot in the next several months and then drive south where the terrain looks even riper for discoveries.

Long before Curiosity became everybody's favorite rover, Opportunity was the darling.

The six-wheel, solar-powered rover parachuted to Eagle Crater in Mars' southern hemisphere on Jan. 24, 2004, weeks after its twin Spirit landed on the opposite side of the planet.

During the first three months, there were frequent updates about the twin rovers' antics. The world, it seemed, followed every trail, every rock touched and even kept up with Spirit's health scare that it eventually recovered from.

Opportunity immediately lived up to its name, touching down in an ancient lakebed brimming with minerals that formed in the presence of water, a key ingredient for life. After grinding into rocks and sifting through dirt, Opportunity made one of the enduring finds on Mars: Signs abound of an ancient environment that was warmer and wetter than today's dusty, cold desert state.

Spirit, on the other hand, landed in a less interesting spot and had to drive some distance to find geologic evidence of past water. After six productive years wheeling around, it fell silent in 2010, forever stuck in Martian sand.

Opportunity went on to poke into four other craters, uncovering even more hints that water existed on Mars long ago.

The rover "is not like a lander staring at the same real estate. We've gone to different terrains, explored different geology and answered different questions on Mars," said project manager John Callas of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which runs the $984 million project.

What's still unknown is whether Mars ever had the right environmental conditions to support microscopic organisms ? something Curiosity is trying to answer during its two-year mission. Besides water, it's generally agreed that a power source like the sun and carbon-based compounds are essential for life.

Unlike the flashier Curiosity, armed with the latest tools, Opportunity is not equipped with a carbon detector. Its latest crater destination, which it arrived at last year after an epic three-year journey, contains sections rich in clay deposits. Clays typically form in the presence of water and can be a fine preserver of carbon material. But scientists will never know.

As it enters its tenth year on Mars, Opportunity will continue studying the chemical makeup and pinning down the ages of several interesting rocks at its location for several more months before adding more mileage to the 22 miles it has logged since landing.

As for the hunt for carbon, all eyes are on Curiosity, set to drive later this year to the base of a mountain where rock layers containing clay minerals have been detected.

Callas, the JPL project manager, said Curiosity has a long way to go to catch up with Opportunity, which has nearly a decade head start on the Martian surface.

"Mars is big enough for more than two rovers to explore," he said.

___

Follow Alicia Chang at http://twitter.com/SciWriAlicia

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-01-21-Mars%20Rover/id-7f73e21ed9f24475a0af5972521a8b30

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Health News - Protein essential for healthy eyes described by ...

Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in collaboration with researchers at the Salk Institute in California, have found for the first time that a specific protein is essential not only for maintaining a healthy retina in the eye, but also may have implications for understanding and possibly treating other conditions in the immune, reproductive, vascular and nervous systems, as well as in various cancers.

Dr. Tal Burstyn-Cohen of the Hebrew University Institute of Dental Sciences

Their work, reported online in the journal Neuron, highlights the role of Protein S in the maintenance of a healthy retina through its involvement in the process of pruning photoreceptors, the light-sensitive neurons in the eye. (This process is also referred to as phagocytosis.) These photoreceptors keep growing and elongating from their inner end. In order to maintain a constant length, they must be pruned from their outer end by specialized cells called retinal pigment epithelial cells.

Without such pruning -- which also clears away many free radicals and toxic by-products generated during visual biochemical reactions -- photoreceptors would succumb to toxicity and degenerate, leading if unchecked to blindness. A receptor molecule called Mer is a key in photoreceptor pruning, and is therefore vital for retinal health. Mutations in the mouse, rat and human Mer genes cause retinal degeneration, which finally leads to blindness.

The Hebrew University study published in Neuron focuses on the molecules activating Mer in this pruning mechanism. Although two such molecules ? Gas6 and Protein S -- were identified previously, it was yet to be proven that they also play a role in a living organism. To show this, Dr. Tal Burstyn-Cohen of the Hebrew University Institute of Dental Sciences and colleagues at the Salk Institute in California found in their experiments on laboratory animals that both Gas6 and Protein S are needed to activate phagocytosis, or pruning, of retinal photoreceptors, and thus keep a healthy retina.

These findings could have practical implications, since Protein S also functions as a potent blood anticoagulant. People with Protein S deficiency are at risk for life threatening thrombosis (blood clots) and thromboembolism (a clot that breaks loose and is carried by the blood stream to plug another vessel).

These results further open new avenues of research into the role of Protein S in activating the receptors in other tissues where their function was shown to be important, such as in the immune, reproductive, vascular and nervous systems, as well as in various cancers where activation of receptors has been observed. For example, since Protein S is important for blood vessel formation, neutralizing Protein S in the blood vessels supplying blood to cancer growths could interfere with the cancerous blood supply.

This project was initiated during Dr. Burstyn-Cohen?s postdoctoral training at the Salk Institute in California, and continued as a collaborative work from her newly established lab at the Hebrew University Institute of Dental Sciences.

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Source: http://www.healthcanal.com/eyes-vision/35500-Protein-essential-for-healthy-eyes-described-Hebrew-University-researchers-also-has-implications-for-other-medical-conditions.html

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South Koreans face lonely deaths as Confucian traditions fade

SEOUL (Reuters) - When South Korean widow Yoon Sook-hee, 62, died after a bout of pneumonia in mid-January, she joined a growing number of old people in this Asian country who die alone and was cremated only thanks to the charity of people who never knew her.

Once a country where filial duty and a strong Confucian tradition saw parents revered, modern day South Korea, with a population of 50 million, has grown economically richer, but family ties have fragmented. Nowadays 1.2 million elderly South Koreans, just over 20 percent of the elderly population, live - and increasingly die - alone.

Yoon's former husband, whom she divorced 40 years ago, relinquished responsibility after being contacted by the hospital and told of her death. Her only son was unreachable as he had long broken off all contact with his parents.

"There are many elderly people who are incredibly depressed because they don't have a place to put their bodies after they die," said Kang Bong-hee, representative of a federation of funeral directors that manages funerals free of charge for those who are unable to afford their own.

"They collect what little money they have and they come and ask us what to do (with their bodies) after they die."

Kang was one of the volunteers who put together a makeshift funeral for Yoon, with most of the funds coming out of his own pocket.

South Korea is ageing at the fastest pace of all industrial nations, with the proportion of elderly rising to 11.8 percent of the population in 2012, up from 7.2 percent in 2002 and just 3.8 percent in 1980.

A report from the Welfare Ministry published in May last year predicted the ratio would grow to 15.7 percent in 2020 and to 24.3 percent in 2030, thanks to a declining birthrate that has dropped from six per woman of childbearing age to just one.

POVERTY ADJACENT TO "GANGNAM STYLE"

While South Korea and Seoul were catapulted onto the global map by rapper Psy's "Gangnam Style" hit featuring the affluent suburb south of the Han River, the reality for older people is far less glamorous.

A toilet is the first thing you see when you step into 73-year-old Kong Kyung-soon's tiny apartment. It has barely two square meters of living space despite being adjacent to Gangnam.

Kong, who boils water in a rice cooker to save money, divorced more than 30 years ago after her husband was caught having a string of affairs. A love child, she says, was the final straw.

"If I get sick, it will just be the end for me," she said, adding she pays 360,000 won ($340) a month for rent and living costs out of the roughly 500,000 won she gets from government welfare checks and public transportation subsidies.

She is one of 234,000 elderly South Koreans, or 19.7 percent of all those over 65 years old, living alone as of last year, who were living on government welfare. No data is available on what percent of those are female.

When asked why she didn't ask for help from her children, Kong said times have changed and she should care for herself.

"Whenever I tell my sister I want to die, she tells me I can after I make 500,000 won for my funeral expenses," said Kong, wiping tears from her eyes. Her sister, two years her senior, lives with her husband in another neighborhood.

"I have prayed to the Lord that I will do good if he can spare me just 10,000 won."

The South Korean government tries to help, but in a nation where welfare spending came at second lowest among OECD countries in 2009, resources are limited.

It passed its first wide-ranging law on welfare for the elderly in 1981, focusing on the early detection and treatment of illnesses as well as the well-being of the elderly.

Services that send a caretaker to visit the home of elderly people living alone at least once a week started in 2007. These caretakers usually keep in contact with an average of 30 elderly citizens and are instructed to call them frequently.

Local governments in some areas take a more subtle approach by leaving small bottles of popular yogurt drinks at front doors every day. If unopened bottles start piling up, it's usually a bad sign.

Still, that doesn't address the main problem of the old, Kang said.

"From where I see it, the elderly just want someone to talk to. What's most important about elderly welfare is to prevent them from feeling lonely."

($1 = 1058.7500 Korean won)

(Additional reporting by Jane Chung; Editing by Elaine Lies)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/south-koreans-face-lonely-deaths-confucian-traditions-fade-051325261.html

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