Deadly earthquake collapses bridge, gold mine in underdeveloped northern Myanmar

YANGON, Myanmar — A strong earthquake collapsed a bridge and damaged ancient Buddhist pagodas in northern Myanmar, and piecemeal reports from the underdeveloped mining region said mines collapsed and as many as 12 people were feared dead.

Myanmar’s Vice President Sai Mauk Hkam visited the damaged sites Monday, while authorities resumed their search for four missing workers near the collapsed bridge over the Irrawaddy River in Kyaukmyaung.

A slow release of official information left the actual extent of the damage unclear after Sunday morning’s magnitude-6.8 quake. Myanmar has a poor official disaster response system and lost upward of 140,000 people to a devastating cyclone in 2008.

“We have been told by the director of Relief and Resettlement Department that there were seven dead and 45 injured as of late Sunday evening. The figure could fluctuate,” said Ashok Nigam, the U.N. development program’s resident representative. He told The Associated Press that U.N. agencies had offered aid but “no formal request has been made yet.”

Myanmar’s second-biggest city of Mandalay is the nearest population center to the main quake but reported no casualties or major damage. Mandalay lies about 117 kilometers (72 miles) south of the epicenter near the town of Shwebo, and the smaller towns in the area that is a center for mining of minerals and gemstones were worse hit.

State media’s Sunday evening news said damage included 102 homes, 21 religious buildings, 48 government offices and four schools in the town of Thabeikyin. The gold-mining town is near the epicenter and had three dead and 35 injured.

The official tally overall is six killed and 64 injured, while independently compiled tallies say about a dozen people died.

An official from Myanmar’s Meteorological Department said the magnitude-6.8 quake struck at 7:42 a.m. local time.

The U.S. Geological Society reported a 5.8-magnitude aftershock later Sunday, but no further damage or casualties were reported.

State television warned residents that aftershocks usually follow a major earthquake and told people to stay away from high walls, old buildings and structures with cracks in them.

The biggest single death toll was reported by a local administrative officer in Sintku township — on the Irrawaddy River near the quake’s epicenter — who told The Associated Press that six people had died there and another 11 were injured.

He said some of the dead were miners who were killed when a gold mine collapsed. He spoke on condition of anonymity because local officials are normally not allowed to release information to the media.

Rumors circulated in Yangon of other mine collapses trapping workers, but none of the reports could be confirmed.

According to news reports, several people died when a bridge under construction across the Irrawaddy River collapsed east of Shwebo. The bridge linked the town of Sintku, 65 kilometers (40 miles) north of Mandalay on the east bank of the Irrawaddy, with Kyaukmyaung on the west bank.

The website of Weekly Eleven magazine said four people were killed and 25 injured when the bridge, which was 80 percent finished, fell. The local government announced a toll of two dead and 16 injured. All of the victims appeared to be workers.

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Ancient teeth show how big cats lived with bear dogs

New research has uncovered how saber-toothed cats and bear dogs managed to cohabitate peacefully more than nine million years ago.

A team of paleontologists from the University of Michigan and the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Spain took tooth enamel samples from two species of sabre-toothed cats and one species of bear dog that had been unearthed at sites near Madrid.

By analyzing the enamel and determining what the animals ate, the scientists were able to understand how they lived together in a woodland region.

“What they did to coexist was to avoid each other and partition the resources,” said Soledad Domingo, one of the authors of the study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B and a fellow at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Paleontology.

By analyzing what they ate, researchers surmised the leopard-sized cats and the bear dogs hunted the same prey: wild boar and horses.

However, the cats would have used tree cover to avoid encountering other bigger animals while the dogs hunted in a more open area that rarely overlapped with the cats' territory. The larger bear dogs would have no competition from the cats hunting for those same animals.

During that time, the late Miocene Period, the predators lived in a forested area that had spots of grassland.

The excavated sites in Spain, at Cerro de los Batallones, had an abundance of bones from meat-eating mammals, a situation which offers "a unique window to understand life in the past," Domingo says.

Researchers took the animals' teeth and using a dentist's drill, removed specimens from 27 saber-toothed cats and bear dogs.

Those specimens were run through a stable carbon isotope analysis, which allowed scientists to measure the ratio of carbon 13 molecules to carbon 12.

Both carbon 12 and 13 are present in the carbon dioxide plants ingest during photosynthesis. When a plant is eaten, it leaves an isotopic signature on teeth and bones.

“This would be the same in your tooth enamel today,” says Domingo. “We could have idea of what you eat [if] we sampled [your enamel].”

The carbon isotopes revealed the cats remained in the leafy areas of the habitat instead of venturing into the open areas where the bear dogs were.

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The Republican Id

This patch of southern Ohio between Cincinnati and Dayton is not the up-for-grabs Ohio you’ve read so much about. This is decided country, where House Speaker John Boehner is running for re-election unopposed, where “Defeat Obama” and “Romney/Ryan” lawn signs glisten in the chilly drizzle.

At the heart of it is a university whose students, according to a poll by the campus paper, favor Romney by 49 percent to 40 percent, and tend to think, as one senior half-joked, “that Sean Hannity is the news.” This is clearly not the place to gauge the last-minute mood swings of a state that many consider decisive.

It is, however, an interesting place to ponder the governing mentality of a Romney/Ryan administration, if that is what voters deliver on Tuesday. Miami University, a pretty grid of red brick, lawns and autumn foliage, is the place where Paul Ryan’s view of the world jelled, under the tutelage of an economist he describes as his mentor. I decided to spend my last column before the election peeking through this little window into the Republican id. If Mitt Romney is our next president, many in the party hope Ryan will play the role of chief ideologist. And if Romney loses, Ryan starts the 2016 campaign for his party’s nomination near the front of the line.

Ryan’s alma mater draws mostly white, upper-middle-class students from Midwest Republican families that are attracted to Miami as a place unlikely to turn their children against them. A well-endowed business school (Ryan majored in economics and political science) and a robust frat culture (Ryan was an enthusiastic Delta Tau Delta) tend to reinforce the conservative values represented by the Republican ticket — with one important asterisk we’ll get to later. In 2008, many Miami students veered out of character, thrilled by the historic Obama campaign, but now that enthusiasm has given way to disappointment and to something few of these kids have ever experienced: economic anxiety.

The macroeconomics professor who helped shape Paul Ryan is a voluble, passionate supply-sider and self-described “hard-core libertarian” named William R. Hart, known as Rich. Listening to him, you can imagine that you are hearing what Paul Ryan would say if he were not inhibited by the demands of electoral politics. Hart is the opposite of politic — to the point of regularly, publicly denouncing Miami University for what he regards as declining academic rigor and coddling of students, all in the university’s pursuit of “money, money, money.” Hart is not a coddler. He proudly reports that of the 112 students who took his latest Principles of Macroeconomics exam, 56 failed and 27 got D’s.

Rich Hart does not speak for Paul Ryan, but he spent many hours talking to Ryan, his eager student, and regards the candidate as a good friend and kindred spirit. What they share is an enduring and astringent kind of Republicanism that rests on a reverence for self-reliance, a conviction that government assistance leads to crippling dependency.

Hart sees the election not as a difference of approaches but a clash of philosophies. “Do we want to become a sort of European socialist welfare state?” he asked when we chatted in his office, decorated with Elvis and Nascar memorabilia, with Paul Krugman’s economics textbook demoted to a doorstop. “Or do we want to be a free-market capitalist economy where people who are productive get rewarded for working hard and creating wealth? What happens with these European welfare states is, everybody’s equally poor. I much prefer a little income inequality.”

Hart’s policy expectations for a Romney/Ryan regime are familiar from the campaign. They include rolling back environmental regulations that slow development of natural gas and coal. (“Not green energy,” he said with disgust. “Fossil fuel energy.”) They include entrusting health care for the poor, and as much else as possible, to the mercies of the states; requiring that Medicare compete in a voucher market; cutting marginal tax rates, of course. What is striking, talking to Ryan’s mentor, is not the policies but the fervor and the deep suspicion of the other side’s motives.

“My liberal friends say, well, Paul Ryan doesn’t care about the poor,” Hart said. “I would argue it’s the Democrats who don’t care about the poor. They’re the ones that make them wards of the state. And just write them welfare checks.”

This enslavement, as Hart sees it, is not well-intentioned nannying gone wrong, but cynical self-interest by liberal groups: “My view of the N.A.A.C.P. is, you can’t represent a group of downtrodden if you don’t have a permanent group of downtrodden to represent.”

Ryan, his former professor says, wants to “make these people productive members of society, where they can lift themselves up. Maybe others think along these lines, but he’s the only one that would actually try to implement policies.”

In his infamous 47-percent video and in some of his primary-season rhetoric, Mitt Romney leaned toward this view — that programs like food stamps and welfare and jobless benefits and the minimum wage had produced a parasite class. But in Romney, that feels like a casual attitude born of lifelong privilege. In Ryan, I think, it is bedrock. It’s not just a belief that austerity works, but an embrace of austerity as a moral imperative.

“I don’t know how I would have handled the 47 percent comment, if only because I would never have said such a thing,” Hart told me. “Although I understand the context of the remark given the dependency state that government policies have created for so many. Instead, I would have stressed from the outset the need for policies to end long-term dependency by so many on government handouts, policies that wean them off the taxpayer dole and make them productive elements of society — make them givers rather than takers.”

The vision of hands-off government will strike many — strikes me — as harsh, and particularly harsh now, against the backdrop of the storm’s ravages. Romney spent last week avoiding his earlier suggestion that the Federal Emergency Management Agency be disbanded, and you aren’t hearing anything of the kind from Ryan. When I put that to Hart in a follow-up e-mail, he replied, a little grudgingly, that it was “not inappropriate to have a federal agency to ‘coordinate’ relief efforts after national disasters. Having said that, my bet is FEMA, like most government agencies, is too big/bloated and could coordinate relief efforts with (far) fewer resources than it currently receives from taxpayers.”

It is possible that Romney’s inherent pragmatism, the moderation that emerged late in his campaign, could drive his presidency. I hope so. But that would require the cooperation of Ryan’s fellow House Republicans, who revere Ryan more than Romney and who seem unlikely to regard a Republican victory as a mandate for compromise.

“I just don’t think Paul would have gotten on the ticket if he didn’t get some kind of firm commitment,” Hart told me.

The one area where Ryan’s libertarian mentor is utterly out of sync with the Republican ticket is on social issues like abortion rights and gay marriage. “I want the Democrats out of my damn pocketbook,” he said, “and I want the Republicans out of my bedroom.”

This is also where Miami University’s student body is about as liberal as the rest of its generation, according to the university’s own research. Ryan’s no-exceptions opposition to abortion and embrace of the Defense of Marriage Act are such anathema here that the campus Republican chairman, Baylor Myers, told me his executive committee voted to avoid social issues altogether.

“We won’t discuss it this election,” he said. “Our entire focus is economic.” He added that he wished the national Republican Party would drop abortion from its platform and “reform its position” on gay rights. Because if the economy revives and questions of jobs and growth no longer overshadow issues of personal liberty, Paul Ryan can no longer count on being the big man on this campus.

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A Diet That Asks You Not to Lose Weight

As anyone who’s ever been on a diet knows, losing weight is easier than keeping it off. “Long-term maintenance remains elusive,” the researchers write.

The problem, they say, is that people tend to abandon the changes they’ve made during a weight loss program, such as healthy eating, physical activity, and keeping a record of everything they eat. Typically, people regain 30% to 50% of the weight lost in the first year after stopping the program.

The researchers wondered what would happen if overweight or obese women got a chance to practice the skills needed to keep weight off without having to worry about slimming down first. They enrolled 267 overweight or obese women ages 21 and older.

Capitalizing on Motivation

“People come in really motivated,” researcher Michaela Kiernan, PhD, says of those about to start a weight loss program. The premise of her study, Kiernan says, was to “get them to channel that good energy on maintenance.”

So Kiernan, a senior research scientist at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, and her collaborators assigned the women to two groups: One was “maintenance first,” and the other “weight loss first.”

Both groups met for 28 weeks, but the maintenance-first group spent the first eight weeks learning maintenance skills, while the weight loss-first group spent the last eight weeks learning how to keep the weight off by learning problem-solving skills.

The weight loss method was identical for both groups.

The maintenance-first group was told not to lose weight during the first eight weeks of the study. During this time they learned a set of skills designed to optimize day-to-day satisfaction with lifestyle and self-regulatory habits.

The maintenance-first group also took part in experiments -- one week they pretended they were on vacation and ate five high-calorie meals -- designed to help them master skills used to maintain their weight, such as tweaking their diet or activity levels without keeping records, an approach Kiernan calls “relaxed awareness.”

Long-Term Success

At the end of their 28-week programs, the women in both groups had lost a similar amount of weight, about 17 pounds, or about 9% of their starting weight. The researchers then left the participants on their own for a year. When the women were weighed at the end of that year, the maintenance-first women had regained only three pounds on average, compared to seven pounds for the weight loss-first women.

“I think this just opens up the range of alternatives that people have,” says Kiernan, adding that she’d like to conduct a similar study with men and with a more diverse group of women.

Social psychologist Paul Fuglestad, PhD, is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota who studies weight loss interventions. He says he suspects the content of the maintenance-first approach, more than the timing, did the trick.

“I think that it just made people a little more satisfied with the maintenance/weight control process,” Fuglestad says. “It seemed like it would be something more realistic that people could embrace and follow for the long-term.”

Kiernan’s study was published online in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.

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Ukraine election set to give majority to president Viktor Yanukovych's party

The Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych's party appears to have won parliamentary elections that were tainted by the jailing of the top opposition leader, according to preliminary results.

Despite a strong showing by pro-western opposition parties, Yanukovych's Regions party seems set to retain its parliamentary majority, with its candidates leading in individual races across the country.

With the former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko in jail and widespread fears of election fraud, the west is paying close attention to the vote in the ex-Soviet state, which lies between Russia and the European Union and serves as a key conduit for the transit of Russian energy supplies to many EU countries.

By Monday morning votes had been counted at 30% of polling stations nationwide, and Yanukovych's party was ahead with 37% in the proportional share of the vote. It was also poised to win about 115 of the 225 seats allocated in individual races, meaning loyalists to the president are likely to hold a majority in the 450-seat parliament.

International observers will issue their verdict on the fairness of the vote later on Monday. If the election is deemed undemocratic it could stall Kiev's efforts to join the EU and push it towards Moscow.

"We believe that this is an indisputable victory," said the prime minister, Mykola Azarov, after the polls closed on Sunday. "Above all, it shows the people's trust in the course that is being pursued."

With Yanukovych under fire over the jailing of Tymoshenko, his main rival, and rampant corruption and slow reforms, the opposition appears to have made a strong showing. The early results show Tymoshenko's party had about 20% of the vote, the pro-western Udar party led by the boxing champion Vitali Klitschko had 13% and the far-right Svoboda party 8%. The Communist party, Yanukovych's traditional allies, appeared to have won about 15% of the vote.

Arseniy Yatsenyuk, aTymoshenko ally, said: "This clearly shows that the people of Ukraine support the opposition, not the government."

Opposition parties alleged widespread violations such as vote-buying and multiple voting on election day, but an independent local election monitor said it remained to be seen whether the violations would significantly affect the overall elections results. Authorities insisted the election was honest and democratic.

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Sun unleashes intense X-class flare; active sunspot region rotating towards Earth

Via NASA: “A solar flare on Oct. 22, 2012, as captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)”

The sun belted out the most powerful type of solar flare Monday night, known as an X-class flare (the weaker flare classes are M-class, medium-sized, and C-class, small-sized). It was the latest in a flurry of 4 flares hurled out by the sun since the weekend.

Fortunately, the X-class flare was not directed at Earth. But space weather forecasters caution the very active sunspot region - known as AR1598 - responsible for these flares is slowly rotating towards Earth in the coming days.

“[T]he potential for continued activity remains so stay tuned for updates as Region 1598 makes its way across the visible disk,” writes NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center.

Monday night’s flare, rated X1.8, was the 15th X-class flare emitted during the current solar cycle, which began February 15, 2011.

The number associated with the flare class indicates strength. An X3 flare is three times as strong as an X1 flare.

“The largest X-class flare in this cycle was an X6.9 on Aug. 9, 2011,” NASA writes. “This is the 7th X-class flare in 2012 with the largest being an X5.4 flare on March 7.”

No earth-bound coronal mass ejection (CME), or burst of plasma - was associated with Monday night’s flare. Earth-directed CMEs can produce aurora ( northern lights) and geomagnetic storms capable of disrupting satellite communications and the electrical grid.

The flare did produce a short-lived high-frequency radio blackout.

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Fresh Windows, but Where’s the Start Button?

Fresh Windows, but Where’s the Start Button?

At a Microsoft store in Bellevue, Wash., a customer got an introduction to Windows 8 on a tablet on Thursday. Microsoft made Windows 8 a one-size-fits-all operating system for tablets, conventional computers, and newer devices.

Over the years, Keith McCarthy has become used to a certain way of doing things on his personal computers, which, like most others on the planet, have long run on Microsoft’s Windows software.

But last week, when he got his hands on a laptop running the newest version of Windows for the first time, Mr. McCarthy was flummoxed.

Many of the familiar signposts from PCs of yore are gone in Microsoft’s new software, Windows 8, like the Start button for getting to programs and the drop-down menus that list their functions.

It took Mr. McCarthy several minutes just to figure out how to compose an e-mail message in Windows 8, which has a stripped-down look and on-screen buttons that at times resemble the runic assembly instructions for Ikea furniture.

“It made me feel like the biggest amateur computer user ever,” said Mr. McCarthy, 59, a copywriter in New York.

Windows, which has more than a billion users around the world, is getting a radical makeover, a rare move for a product with such vast reach. The new design is likely to cause some head-scratching for those who buy the latest machines when Windows 8 goes on sale this Friday.

To Microsoft and early fans of Windows 8, the software is a fresh, bold reinvention of the operating system for an era of touch-screen devices like the iPad, which are reshaping computing. Microsoft needs the software to succeed so it can restore some of its fading relevance after years of watching the likes of Apple and Google outflank it in the mobile market.

To its detractors, though, Windows 8 is a renovation gone wrong, one that will needlessly force people to relearn how they use a device every bit as common as a microwave oven.

“I don’t think any user was asking for that,” said John Ludwig, a former Microsoft executive who worked on Windows and is now a venture capitalist in the Seattle area. “They just want the current user interface, but better.”

Mr. Ludwig said Microsoft’s strategy was risky, but it had to do something to improve its chances in the mobile business: “Doing nothing was a strategy that was sure to fail.”

Little about the new Windows will look familiar to those who have used older versions. The Start screen, a kind of main menu, is dominated by a colorful grid of rectangles and squares that users can tap with a finger or click with a mouse to start applications. Many of these so-called live tiles constantly flicker with new information piped in from the Internet, like news headlines and Facebook photos.

What is harder to find are many of the conventions that have been a part of PCs since most people began using them, like the strip of icons at the bottom of the screen for jumping between applications. The mail and calendar programs are starkly minimalist. It is as if an automaker hid the speedometer, turn signals and gear shift in its cars, and told drivers to tap their dashboards to reveal those functions. There is a more conventional “desktop” mode for running Microsoft Office and older programs, though there is no way to permanently switch to it.

Microsoft knew in the summer of 2009 that it wanted to shake up Windows. It held focus groups and showed people prototypes of the tile interface and its live updates.

“We would get this delightful reaction of people who would say, ‘This is so great, and it has Office too,’ ” said Jensen Harris, Microsoft’s director of program management for the Windows user experience.

Sixteen million people have been using early versions of the software. The boldness of the changes has delighted some users, who say they believe that for the first time, the company is taking greater creative risks than its more celebrated rival, Apple.

“I think it’s functional, clean,” said Andries van Dam, a pioneer in computer graphics and a Brown University computer science professor, who receives research money from Microsoft. “I welcome it.”

Younger users may be more likely to embrace the new approach. Joanna Lin, 23, who works in sales and marketing for a hotel chain in New York, said she was impressed with the software. “The feeling was very fluid,” said Ms. Lin, who was the most enthusiastic of five people that The New York Times asked to briefly try Windows 8 last week. “Definitely a step up from Windows 7.”

But the product is a major gamble for Microsoft, a company whose clout in the technology industry has been waning. The PC business, which generates much ofMicrosoft’s revenue, is in a severe slump as newer products like smartphones and tablets take more dollars from peoples’ wallets.

To help it gain traction in the mobile market, Microsoft made Windows 8 a one-size-fits-all operating system for touch-screen tablets, conventional computers with keyboards and mice, and newer devices that combine elements of both. (Confusingly, Microsoft is also introducing a separate but similar operating system, Windows RT, that cannot run older programs.)

Apple took the opposite approach with the Mac and mobile devices like the iPad, which have distinct interfaces, albeit with some shared technologies. Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has said of Microsoft’s strategy: “You can converge a toaster and refrigerator, but these things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user.”

Jakob Nielsen, a user interface expert at the Nielsen Norman Group, conducted tests with four people who used a traditional computer running Windows 8 and found that they had “a lot of struggles” with the new design. Mr. Nielsen said they appeared to become especially confused when shifting back and forth between the modern Windows 8 mode and the desktop mode.

Mr. Nielsen said Windows 8 was more suitable for tablet computers with their smaller displays, but it was not helpful for workers who needed to have lots of applications visible at once.

“I just think when it comes to the traditional customer base, the office computer user, they’re essentially being thrown under the bus,” Mr. Nielsen said.

Microsoft disputes this idea. Mr. Harris said most test users did not have trouble juggling the two modes — and regardless, workers were more likely to operate in desktop mode if they wanted to see many applications simultaneously.

Microsoft is convinced that most people will quickly become accustomed to Windows 8. But to help ease the transition, the software offers tutorials when it is first started up. And Microsoft is spending more than $500 million on a marketing campaign that is partly intended to familiarize people with the new design.

Mr. Harris said the company needed to modernize Windows for the way people use computers today: “We’re not surprised people have a strong reaction to it.”

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Kutcher tops Forbes' list of highest paid TV actors

Actor Ashton Kutcher sits courtside during Game 2 of the Los Angeles Lakers against Denver Nuggets NBA Western Conference quarter-final basketball playoff game in Los Angeles, California May 1, 2012.

Credit: Reuters/Alex Gallardo

(Reuters) - When Ashton Kutcher replaced Charlie Sheen on the hit comedy "Two And a Half Men", he also took his place as television's highest-paid actor, according to Forbes' annual survey released on Wednesday.

According to Forbes magazine, the actor earned 24-million US dollars ($A23.47 million) between May 2011 and May 2012.
Most of that cash came from his work as Charlie Sheen's replacement on sitcom Two and a Half Men.
Meanwhile Hugh Laurie came in second and Ray Romano third.
Alec Baldwin Aldwin from 30 Rock, Tim Allen from Last Man Standing, The Big Bang Theory stars Jim Parsons and Johnny Galecki, and Kutcher's co-star Jon Cryer also landed in the top 10.

Forbes estimated Kutcher earned $24 million from May 2011 to May 2012, while Sheen, now starring in "Anger Management" on cable television following a very public firing from the hit CBS show, didn't even make the top 10.

Sheen's $40 million a year ago however easily out-earned Kutcher by some $16 million. Steve Carell, also in the top 10 last year with $15 million before he left "The Office," was also nowhere to be found this year.

Earnings runners-up included "House" star Hugh Laurie and Ray Romano of now-canceled "Men of a Certain Age," with $18 million each.

Other highly compensated actors in the top 10 list included Emmy winner Alec Baldwin of "30 Rock," "Last Man Standing" star Tim Allen, "Men" co-star Jon Cryer and "The Big Bang Theory"'s Jim Parsons and Johnny Galecki.

Forbes said its estimates did not include deductions for manager and agent fees, or "the other costs of being a celebrity."

The entire list can be seen here .

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Exoplanet around Alpha Centauri is nearest-ever

Astronomers have found the nearest planet outside our Solar System, circling one of the stars of Alpha Centauri just four light-years away.

The planet has at minimum the same mass as Earth, but circles its star far closer than Mercury orbits our Sun.

It is therefore outside the "habitable zone" denoting the possibility of life, as the researchers report in Nature.

However, studies on exoplanets increasingly show that a star with one planet is likely to have several.

At the very least, the work answers the question first posed in ancient times about planets around our nearest stellar neighbours.

The closest star to the Sun is Proxima Centauri, which is believed to be part of a three-star system that includes the brighter stars Alpha Centauri A and B.

The planet was found near Alpha Centauri B by the Harps instrument at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla facility in Chile.

That puts it far closer to Earth than any of the more than 840 confirmed exoplanets

Like a dance between one enormous and one tiny partner, as an exoplanet orbits its much larger host star, its gravity causes the star to move in a small orbit.

Harps and instruments like it measure the subtle change in colour - the redshift or blueshift - of the host star's light as its orbit moves it slightly closer to and further away from Earth.

The planet whips around Alpha Centauri B in just 3.6 days, and is estimated to have a surface temperature of about 1,200C.

Many planets in similar orbits are "tidally locked", meaning the same side is always facing the host star, but further observations will be required to find out if that is the case

Since the very first planets outside our solar system were discovered in the early 1990s, the hope has been to find an "Earth twin" - a planet like ours, orbiting a star like ours, at a distance like ours.

The new planet around Alpha Centauri B matches Earth only in terms of its mass - making it among the smallest exoplanets we know of.

But in a catalogue with hundreds of confirmed planets and thousands of planet candidates added since 1992, it is otherwise unremarkable - except for its proximity.

"Alpha Centauri B is of course a very special case - it's our next door neighbour," said Stephane Udry of the Observatory in Geneva and senior author of the paper.

"So even if the discovery just stands perfectly normally in the discoveries we have had up to now, it's a landmark discovery, because it's very low-mass and it's our closest neighbour."

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Tale of two magmas may be to blame for explosive volcanic eruptions

The last time the Las Cañadas volcano erupted was more than 150,000 years ago, but scientists from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom studying the volcano's explosive past say they have determined what causes massive eruptions like the prehistoric blast.

The Las Cañadas volcano has seen at least seven major eruptions in the last 700,000 years, and according to a new study published in Scientific Reports, they may now have found the root of the devastating blasts. The history of the caldera -- located on the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands -- is well documented, but the new research is the first to nail down a possible cause of such eruptions.

"Despite considerable scientific interest in the volcano and associated hazards including major landslides, little is known about the triggers for these large-scale events," the study's authors write.

Knowing what caused the eruptions could be key to developing an advance warning system before the volcano erupts again, which would prove devastating to the island populated today by more than 900,000 people.

According to researchers, the eruptions were caused when younger, hotter magma mixed with cooler, older magma within the volcano, causing a buildup of pressure that resulted in ash and debris columns reaching 15 miles into the air.

"By comparison, even the smallest of these eruptions expelled over 25 times more material than the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, Iceland," a report from the University of Southampton said. That eruption disrupted European air travel for nearly a week as ash caused hazards to aircraft.

Researchers determined the Las Cañadas trigger by examining igneous rocks formed during the previous eruptions, when "crystal mush" lining the walls of the underground magma chamber mixed with magma left over from the blast. Those rocks indicated the blending of the two types of magma and the resulting explosion.

Another serious eruption from the volcano in the Canary Islands, off the northwest coast of Africa, has the potential for major impacts across that continent and Europe, so knowing what causes the eruptions could be key to an advance warning system.

“Our findings will prove invaluable in future hazard and risk assessment on Tenerife and elsewhere," said Dr. Tom Gernon, one of the authors of the study. "The scale of the eruptions we describe has the potential to cause devastation on the heavily populated island of Tenerife and major economic repercussions for the wider European community."

Whether the same combination of old and new magma could be responsible for similar eruptive events in the last hundreds of thousands of years isn't clear, but the new study represents a good jumping-off point for further research.

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Presidential contest tight nationally ahead of second debate

On the eve of their second debate, President Obama and challenger Mitt Romney remain locked in a virtual dead heat nationally, with Republicans showing increased enthusiasm for their nominee after his big win in the first debate, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Likely voters in the new poll split 49 percent for Obama to 46 percent for Romney, basically unmoved from the poll two weeks ago, just before the two candidates met in Denver for their first debate. On topic after topic, the survey portrays an electorate that remains deeply divided along partisan lines and locked in its views.

Nearly two-thirds say they do not need any more information before Election Day, and barely one in eight is undecided or says there is a chance he could change his vote. Even as voters overwhelmingly perceive that Romney won the first debate, the vast majority say their opinion of the president did not shift as a result.

But more people changed their views of Romney, largely in a positive direction. Overall, more than twice as many say their opinions of the former Massachusetts governor improved than say they worsened as a result of the debate. The strongest reaction is among Romney backers, 70 percent of whom say Denver made them think more highly of the GOP nominee.

The improvement in views of Romney carries directly into the underpinnings of his support: Fewer of his supporters now express anxiety about a Romney administration, and the number of his backers saying they support him “very enthusiastically” jumped by double digits. Among the likely voters supporting Romney, 62 percent now do so intensely, exactly double the number who were eagerly lined up behind Republican nominee John McCain at this stage in the campaign four years ago.

Meanwhile, enthusiasm for the president has also ticked higher, but it remains below where it was four years ago. Of course, at this time in October 2008, Obama held a 10-percentage-point lead over the Republican senator from Arizona. In the new poll, a three-point edge does not represent a statistically significant advantage.

Beyond enthusiasm, Obama lags behind 2008 in assembling a winning coalition because groups of voters highly likely to back his candidacy — including Democrats, non-whites and younger voters — are far less interested in the campaign this time around.

But the president is buoyed in the final stretch by improving attitudes about the direction of the country, although his fellow Democrats are the ones becoming more sanguine. Among all voters, 42 percent now say the country is headed in the right direction, yet another tick upward, and 13 percentage points higher than before the party conventions. Still, most — 56 percent — see things as pretty seriously on the wrong track.

Obama gets some credit — but little from Republicans — for one recent sign of improvement in the economy: the drop in the unemployment rate to 7.8 percent in September, breaking a record 43-month stretch above 8 percent. A slim majority of voters give him at least some credit for the decline, but less than one in four says he should get “a lot” of credit for it. Most Republicans, however, give him no credit at all for this, reflecting the big partisan divide on all matters.

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