Perth, Australia, During Earth Hour | Photograph by Rhianna Hook, courtesy WWF

Comunicas Global.- The Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower, Beijing's Forbidden City, and hundreds of other world landmarks will be abruptly blacked out tonight.

But the 60-minute power outages—scheduled for 8:30 to 9:30 p.m., local time—won't be the results of a terrorist plot, natural disaster, or massive solar flare. They're all part of Earth Hour 2011.

The organizers behind the fifth annual Earth Hour urge people to turn off lights and other nonessential appliances in a symbolic show of support for action against climate change and for energy conservation in general.

In 2010, 128 countries and territories took part in Earth Hour. Eighty-nine national capitals participated, as did nine of the world's ten biggest cities, thousands of other communities, countless businesses, and hundreds of millions of individuals, according to WWF, the international conservation nonprofit, which organizes Earth Hour.

Earth Hour 2011 may be even larger, thanks in part to promotion by world leaders such as United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

"Let us join together to celebrate this shared quest to protect the planet and ensure human well-being," Ban said in a statement. "Let us use 60 minutes of darkness to help the world see the light."

Earth Hour 2011 to Be Extended?

Earth Hour itself doesn't have a significant impact on actual energy consumption or greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to global warming.

After all, even if electricity use stopped completely during Earth Hour, the event covers just 1 of the 8,766 hours in a year. Of course not everyone participates, and even in areas officially observing Earth Hour, plenty of essential lights and power-consuming appliances are left on.

But Earth Hour isn't about immediate energy impact, organizers say. Rather, it's about demonstrating commitment to change and serving as a jumping-off point for everyday actions.

That's why this year's event introduces "Beyond the Hour," an effort to challenge Earth Hour 2011 participants to choose an action that will help the environment and implement it over the coming year.

So far on the site people have pledged to recycle more, upgrade their light bulbs, ride bicycles, and give up meat, among other actions.

Earth Hour 2001 Backlash

Despite Earth Hour's growth since its introduction in Sydney in 2007, not everyone's on board. (Related: "Earth Hour 2009: A Billion to Go Dark Saturday?")

At least one group, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a D.C.-based nonprofit libertarian think tank, contends that Earth Hour sends the wrong message.

The organization is holding its own event during Earth Hour 2011—Human Achievement Hour 2011—to celebrate human inventions and innovations that "make today the best time to be alive." CEI's suggested Human Achievement Hour activities include taking a hot shower, watching TV, or phoning friends.

"They want people to turn off all of their lights for one hour on a Saturday night in spring as a symbol of a vote for action on climate change," said Michelle Minton, CEI's director of insurance studies.

"We believe that a vote has to have a choice, so Human Achievement Hour is the alternative, where people think good things about technology as a way to reach solutions to the problems of today and tomorrow."

Human Achievement Hour—including a party at CEI's offices that will stream live on CEI.org—isn't meant to oppose individuals who want to save energy, Minton explained.

But CEI takes issue with those who would, according to Minton, use the environmental movement to encourage governments to force people to conserve.

"We believe that freedom is what's necessary for individuals to come up with improved technologies not only in the West—where we can just flip the switch back on whenever we want—but also in the developing world," Minton said.

"In some places it's Earth Hour every hour of every day."

"Earth Hour Tonight: What Time? What's the Point?"

By Brian Handwerk for National Geographic

Comunicas.- YouTube's channel Citizentube has converted in the principal media stream for the people during the japanese earthquake.

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Comunicas, Japan.- Another day, another earthquake. Except the Magnitude 8.9 tremor off the coast of Honshu, Japan, will be a standout event for 2011 - if not in terms of the eventual death toll it brings, then certainly in scale.

There are usually only one or two quakes of M 8.0 and above every year. And even for a country such as Japan, which is very familiar with seismic hazards, this is extraordinary.

| Article by Jonathan Amos - Science correspondent of BBC

The history books show there have been seven quakes rated at M 8.0 or greater since 1891 in Japan. And with big tremors come big aftershocks.

Following the initial M 8.9 event at 1446 local time (0546 GMT), a sequence of major tremors was initiated - six of them within an hour-and-a-quarter that were all bigger than or all equal to last month's quake in Christchurch, New Zealand (M 6.3). The largest of the aftershocks was a M 7.1.

Some of the early video footage to emerge from Japan was dramatic - city workers hanging on to their desks as everything rocked around them and buildings on fire being swept across farmland as tsunami waters washed inland.

The tectonics in this part of the world are, of course, well-understood. It is one of the most seismically active areas on Earth. The country accounts for about 20% of global quakes of Magnitude 6.0 or greater, and seismometers are recording some kind of event every five minutes, on average.

Japan lies on the infamous "Ring of Fire", the line of frequent quakes and volcanic eruptions that encircles virtually the entire Pacific Rim.

At this location, the dense rock making up the Pacific Ocean's floor is being pulled down (subducted) underneath Japan as it moves westwards towards Eurasia. The epicentre was well out to sea - some 130km from the city of Sendai; but at a relatively shallow depth below the seabed - just 24km.

"The earthquake happened on the Japan Trench which runs roughly north-south and the fault dips shallowly westwards towards Japan at about 15-20 degrees," explained Dr John Elliott from the Centre for the Observation and Modelling of Earthquakes and Tectonics (Comet) at Oxford University, UK.

"Given the size of the earthquake, the fault is likely to have ruptured for about 500km.

"The previous earthquake to rupture probably the same section of fault was the 1933 M 8.4 earthquake (3,000 deaths) and had a large associated tsunami as well."

As slipping occurs along these great lengths, the shifting sea floor lifts a great mass of water along the fault line, launching tsunami - principally along a line perpendicular to the fault, with lesser intensity in the directions along the fault's length.

For Friday's event, that means effects to the east - for instance at Hawaii - will be much more pronounced than those to the north and south.

The US-run Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said amplitudes (top to bottom of waves) of up 7.3m were recorded on the coast of Japan.

Japan's Kyodo news agency reported that a 10m wave (33ft) struck the port of Sendai, carrying ships, vehicles and other debris inland.

Even out in the deep ocean, the specialist tsunami warning buoys were recording wave amplitudes of a metre, which is considerable.

This means waves will have reached out across the Pacific, towards the Philippines, Hawaii and perhaps even to be recorded on the landmasses of North and South America.

What is likely to interest seismologists will be the association with a number of very strong foreshocks in recent days.

These began on 9 March with a M 7.2 event just 40km from Friday's earthquake, and continued with a further three earthquakes greater than M 6.0 on the same day.

In terms of public awareness and reaction, these foreshocks could turn out to be quite important because they will have reminded people what they are supposed to do in a big quake to protect themselves.

Remember, the scale used to measure earthquakes is not a simple linear one.

Each step in magnitude equates to a 32 times jump in the release of energy. As a consequence, Friday's M 8.9 event was some 250 times more energetic than anything seen on Wednesday this week; and about 1,400 times more energetic than the Great Hanshin, or Kobe, earthquake in 1995 (M 6.8).

Japan has had about 10 quakes since 1900 that have resulted in major casualties, typically a few thousand people each time.

"The exception is the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake, Tokyo, which killed 140,000," Dr Elliot said.

"The 1995 Kobe earthquake in southern Japan had about 6,500 deaths, but was different in that it was not a subduction event, and was located under a populated area."

More at BBC

Comunicas.- A silent killer sits on virtually every American household's dinner table. Salt — that ubiquitous spice that consumers sprinkle on everything from french fries to filet mignon — is responsible for millions of deaths and billions in health care costs every, single year. What's worse is that the problem is largely ignored by the government agencies that have the power to improve this public health crisis.

According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a health non-profit, the average American consumes about 4,000 milligrams of salt each day. That's almost twice as much as the 2,300 milligrams recommended by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) and Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Dietary Guidelines. If consumers actually stuck to this 2,300 milligrams per day, it would help alleviate a lot of medical problems, but some groups say that 2,300 milligrams is still about 8,000 milligrams too high for the everyday consumer.

The American Heart Association (AHA) is one organization that's working to seriously shave down Americans' sodium intake. AHA scientists recently wrote in the journal Circulation that in order to really combat maladies like cardiovascular disease and stroke, Americans should consume no more than 1,500 milligrams of salt daily, less than half the amount of salt that most diners swallow each day. CSPI agrees with the AHA, and both groups are calling on the USDA and HHS to incorporate this restriction into their new Dietary Guidelines, due to be released later this month.

Let's hope that the USDA and HHS consider these salt recommendations because America's addiction to sodium is as serious as a heart attack — literally. Eating too much salt — which virtually all Americans are guilty of — can contribute to high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, and kidney problems. About 90 percent of all Americans will develop high blood pressure at some point in their lifetimes — 90 percent! As the AHA reports, one study indicates that if Americans reduced their daily sodium intake to 1,200 milligrams, the country would reduce its health care costs by about $24 billion dollars per year.

To be fair, most of this excess sodium isn't coming from diners' salt shakers. About 77 percent of the stuff comes in the form of packaged, processed, and restaurant foods. One-half cup of Campbell's condensed Healthy Request Chicken Noodle soup contains 460 milligrams of sodium, about 20 percent of the current daily recommended salt serving (31 percent if recommendations were changed to 1,500 milligrams per day). This is how much sodium "health food" holds — the situation gets worse when looking at junk food. A McDonald's double cheeseburger carries 1,150 milligrams of sodium (pdf), about 48 percent of the current daily recommended serving (a whopping 77 percent of the daily recommended intake if guidelines were changed to 1,500 milligrams of sodium per day).

The fact is that America's salt addiction has flown under the radar for far too long, and even government agencies have given consumers the green light to go ahead and keep eating the stuff in excess. The AHA is doing its part to raise awareness about this public health crisis, but it needs help spreading the word about the dangers of salt. Altering the USDA/HHS Dietary Guidelines would send a clear message that we've got to combat this salt-eating epidemic

"Salt: The Deadliest Ingredient In America's Food Supply"

By Sarah Parsons / Change

Comunicas.- The vast majority of hi-tech attacks described as acts of cyber war do not deserve the name, says a report.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development study is part of a series considering incidents that could cause global disruption.

While pandemics and financial instability could cause problems, cyber attacks are unlikely to, it says.

Instead, trouble caused by cyber attacks is likely to be localised and short-lived.

However, it warns that governments need to plan for how it could mitigate the effects of both accidental and deliberate events.

'Great confusion'

Attempts to quantify the potential damage that hi-tech attacks could cause and develop appropriate responses are not helped by the hyperbolic language used to describe these incidents, said the OECD report.

"We don't help ourselves using 'cyberwar' to describe espionage or hacktivist blockading or defacing of websites, as recently seen in reaction to WikiLeaks," said Professor Peter Sommer, visiting professor at LSE who co-wrote the report with Dr Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute.

"Nor is it helpful to group trivially avoidable incidents like routine viruses and frauds with determined attempts to disrupt critical national infrastructure," added Prof Sommer.

The report acknowledged the risk of a catastrophic cyber incident, such as a solar flare that could knock out satellites, base stations and net hardware, but said that the vast majority of incidents seen today were almost trivial in comparison as they did not last long and only hit a few people or organisations.

Attempts to decide how to deal with the wide variety of potential attacks and attackers were being hampered because words used to describe incidents meant different things to different groups.

For instance, it said, an "attack" could mean phishing e-mails trying to steal passwords, a virus outbreak or a concerted stealthy attempt to break into a computer system.

"Rolling all these activities into a single statistic leads to grossly misleading conclusions," said the report. "There is even greater confusion in the ways in which losses are estimated."

The report also played down the risk of a conflict between nation states being played out over the net.

"It is unlikely that there will ever be a true cyberwar," said the report, most likely because no aggressor would stick to one class of weaponry. Also, it said, existing defences and the unpredictable effects of such an attack could limit its effectiveness.

However, it noted, that even if a cyberwar is unlikely to ever happen, there was no doubt that the weapons used in such a theatre of war were becoming ubiquitous and would likely be used in the future alongside conventional weapons as "force multipliers".

Under the heading of cyber weapons the report included viruses, worms, trojans, distributed-denial-of-service using botnets and unauthorised access to computers ie hacking.

Finally, it said, while the net may be a vector for attack it might also help in the event of a large-scale event.

"If appropriate contingency plans are in place, information systems can support the management of other systemic risks," it said.

"They can provide alternate means of delivering essential services and disseminate the latest news and advice on catastrophic events, reassuring citizens and hence dampening the potential for social discontent and unrest."

Via BBC

Comunicas.- Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest has fallen to its lowest rate for 22 years, Brazil's government has said.

Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira said 6,450sq km (2,490 sq miles) of forest were cleared between August 2009 and July 2010, a drop of 14% compared with the previous 12 months.

Deforestation is thought to be responsible for about 20% of CO2 emissions worldwide.

Brazil has pledged to reduce its emissions by 80% by 2020.

It has said it expects to reach the target by 2016.

Ms Teizeira described the figures as "fantastic" and said Brazil was committed to reducing deforestation still further.

Deforestation rates have been falling in Brazil since a peak in 2004, when 27,000 sq km of forest were destroyed.

But the latest figure, which represents an area more than half the size of Lebanon, still exceeds a government target for this year of 5,000 sq km, AFP news agency says.

Ms Teixeira was speaking ahead of her departure for the UN Climate Change Conference currently taking place in Cancun, Mexico.

BBC

Comunicas.- The US has designated a "critical habitat" for polar bears living on Alaska's disappearing sea ice.

The area - twice the size of the United Kingdom - has been set aside to help stave off the danger of extinction, the US Fish and Wildlife Service said.

The territory includes locations where oil and gas companies want to drill.

Environmentalists hope the designation will make it more difficult for companies to get permits to operate in the region.

"This critical habitat designation enables us to work with federal partners to ensure their actions within its boundaries do not harm polar bear populations," said Tom Strickland, assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks.

Any proposed economic activity in the area, which covers 187,000 sq miles (almost 500,000 sq km) must now be weighed against its impact on the polar bear population, Mr Strickland said in a statement.

Most of the designated habitat is sea ice and includes some of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, where the oil company Shell wants to drill.

Shell was due to start drilling in the Arctic earlier this year, until the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico brought the plans to a temporary halt. It is now aiming to start drilling in 2011.

Environmentalists welcomed the move.

"Now we need the Obama administration to actually make it mean something so we can write the bear's recovery plan - not its obituary," said Kassie Siegel from the Center for Biological Diversity.

Ms Siegel urged the US government to impose a moratorium on oil and gas drilling in bear habitat areas.

Environmentalists also want the polar bear to be listed as an endangered species. Currently the US interior department describes them as "threatened" or likely to become endangered because the sea ice on which they live and hunt is melting.

Via BBC

Comunicas.- The Large Hadron Collider has successfully created a "mini-Big Bang" by smashing together lead ions instead of protons.

The scientists working at the enormous machine on Franco-Swiss border achieved the unique conditions on 7 November.

The experiment created temperatures a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun.

The LHC is housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border near Geneva.

Up until now, the world's highest-energy particle accelerator - which is run by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) - has been colliding protons, in a bid to uncover mysteries of the Universe's formation.

Proton collisions could help spot the elusive Higgs boson particle and signs of new physical laws, such as a framework called supersymmetry.

But for the next four weeks, scientists at the LHC will concentrate on analysing the data obtained from the lead ion collisions.

This way, they hope to learn more about the plasma the Universe was made of a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.

One of the accelerator's experiments, ALICE, has been specifically designed to smash together lead ions, but the ATLAS and Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiments have also switched to the new mode.

One of the lead-ion collisions at the LHC

'Strong force'

David Evans from the University of Birmingham, UK, is one of the researchers working at ALICE.

He said that the collisions obtained were able to generate the highest temperatures and densities ever produced in an experiment.

"We are thrilled with the achievement," said Dr Evans.

"This process took place in a safe, controlled environment, generating incredibly hot and dense sub-atomic fireballs with temperatures of over ten trillion degrees, a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun.

"At these temperatures even protons and neutrons, which make up the nuclei of atoms, melt resulting in a hot dense soup of quarks and gluons known as a quark-gluon plasma."

Quarks and gluons are sub-atomic particles - some of the building blocks of matter. In the state known as quark-gluon plasma, they are freed of their attraction to one another. This plasma is believed to have existed just after the Big Bang.

He explained that by studying the plasma, physicists hoped to learn more about the so-called strong force - the force that binds the nuclei of atoms together and that is responsible for 98% of their mass.

After the LHC finishes colliding lead ions, it will go back to smashing together protons once again.

Via BBC

Comunicas.- Governments are increasingly taking the economic value of nature into account in policy-making, with growing interest in results from a UN-backed analysis.

The Brazilian and Indian governments are among those keen to use findings from The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (Teeb) project.

Final results from the three-year study were unveiled here at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity meeting.

Nature's services must be counted if they are to be valued, its leader said.

Pavan Sukhdev, a Deutsche Bank capital markets expert who leads Teeb on secondment to the UN Environment Programme (Unep), said that if society did not properly account for services that nature provides, they would be lost.

In an earlier analysis, Teeb calculated that the economic value of services being lost - including water purification, pollination of crops and climate regulation - amounts to $2-5 trillion dollars per year, with the poor hardest hit.

Here, Mr Sukhdev and his team concentrated on ideas for implementation - how to turn the findings of the study into real politics.

And the first thing for governments to do, he said, was to carry out national equivalents of the global Teeb study - to analyse the real value of ecosystem services to their economies.

"Conventional methods of accounting such as GDP accounting will not capture them - so we need... to rapidly upgrade the system of national accounts," he said.

"You cannot manage what you do not measure."

Politics of conservation

While a number of countries including Brazil and India do have systems in place to reward forest conservation, implementing the full Teeb vision would amount to a root and branch overhaul of economic incentives and taxes.

But some moves could and should be quickly made, said Pavan Sukhdev.

The first thing was to "flatten the footbal field", which currently sees huge subsidies given to oil and gas production - largely in richer countries.

"Collectively, $650bn of subsidies for oil and gas?

"Surely, this is not a Mother Theresa business - it is not a charity - it doesn't need subsidy," he told BBC News.

"I would like governments to look at and start disclosing their subsidies, and gradually work to reduce them and indeed eliminate them; because if want businesses to arise which have a better footprint and a lower cost to society, the first thing you have to do is to stop favouring those that don't."

The draft agreement from this CBD meeting would see countries agreeing to incorporate biodiversity values into their national accounting by 2020, and eliminating by the same date subsidies that are detrimental to biodiversity.

But many nations are holding to the point, in negotiations, that "nothing is agreed until everything is agreed"; and although many developing countries support the Teeb concept, factional politics could yet prevent the endorsement of such a vision here.

Via BBC

Comunicas.- Emergency services in Hungary are trying to stop a torrent of toxic red sludge flowing into major waterways, including the River Danube.

A state of emergency has been declared in three western counties after the chemical waste burst from a reservoir at an alumina plant.

Four people are known to have died, with 120 injured. Six more are missing.

At least seven villages and towns are affected including Devecser, where the torrent was 2m (6.5ft) deep.

Video

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The flood swept cars from roads and damaged bridges and houses, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of residents.

The sludge - a mixture of water and mining waste containing heavy metals - is considered hazardous, according to Hungary's National Directorate General for Disaster Management (NDGDM).

While the cause of the deaths has not been established officially, it is believed the victims probably drowned.

Some 600,000-700,000 cubic metres (21m-24m cubic feet) of sludge escaped from the plant, 160km (100 miles) from the capital, Budapest.

With 7,000 people affected directly by the disaster, a state of emergency was declared in the county of Veszprem where the spill occurred, and Gyor-Moson-Sopron and Vas, where the sludge appeared to be heading.

At least 390 residents have been relocated and 110 rescued from flooded areas, the NDGDM said.

Nearly 500 police officers and soldiers, including six emergency detection teams, have been deployed. Plaster has been poured into the Marcal river in a bid to bind the sludge and stop further flooding.

Dr Attila Nyikos, of the NDGDM, told the BBC News website that a police investigation had been opened and tests were still being carried out to determine the environmental impact of the leak.

BBC