Iran's Rouhani hints will balance hardline, reformist demands

By Yeganeh Torbati

DUBAI (Reuters) - Iran's president-elect Hassan Rouhani said on Saturday he would appoint ministers from across its political spectrum as Iranian voters had chosen a path of moderation over extremism.

His victory in the June 14 vote has lifted hopes of a thaw in Iran's antagonistic relations with the West that might create openings for defusing its nuclear dispute with world powers. Rouhani has pledged a more conciliatory approach than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, under whose belligerent presidency the Islamic Republic drew ever more punishing international sanctions.

Rouhani's pledge of an inclusive cabinet could reassure conservative hardliners who look askance at the endorsement he was granted by reformists in the election.

In turn, reformists will hope to regain some political influence - with the aim of easing repression at home and Iran's isolation abroad - after being sidelined under Ahmadinejad, who by law could not run for a third consecutive term.

"The future government must operate in the framework of moderation ...(and it) must avoid extremism, and this message is for everyone," Rouhani, a former chief nuclear negotiator, said in a speech carried live on state television.

"The next cabinet will be trans-factional ... This government is not obligated to any party or faction, and will work to choose the most qualified people from all sides and factions, under conditions of moderation and temperance."

Analysts say Rouhani, a mid-ranking Shi'ite Muslim cleric who has held sensitive security posts since the 1980s, enjoys an insider status and close relationship with theocratic Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and may be able to build bridges between factions to yield reforms.

But Khamenei will retain the final say on policies that most concern world powers, including Iran's nuclear program and its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad against rebels trying to overthrow him.

CONSTRUCTIVE INTERACTION

Rouhani also urged moderation in Iranian policies towards the rest of the world and called for a balance between "realism" and pursuing the ideals of the Islamic Republic.

"Moderation in foreign policy is neither submission nor antagonism, neither passivity nor confrontation. Moderation is effective and constructive interaction with the world," he said.

"The Islamic Republic of Iran, as a major regional power or the biggest regional power..., must play its role and for this we need moderation."

Western powers suspect Iran of seeking to develop a nuclear weapons capability, which Tehran denies. The Islamic Republic is now languishing under increasingly tough sanctions limiting its oil sales, a crucial source of revenue, obstructing its foreign trade and stoking higher inflation and unemployment.

Iran's friends and foes indicated shortly after Rouhani's election triumph they did not believe it would bring fundamental change in Iranian foreign policy.

Tehran is at loggerheads with Western powers on a range of foreign policy issues including its shadowy nuclear program and its support for Syria's Assad, the Lebanese Shi'ite militant movement Hezbollah and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.

U.S.-allied Gulf Arab countries have also accused Iran of interfering in their affairs, though Tehran denies trying to subvert Saudi Arabia and its wealthy Gulf neighbors.

Rouhani, who will take office in early August, said he was dedicated to "mutual relaxation of tensions" with other states.

(Reporting by Yeganeh Torbati; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/irans-rouhani-hints-balance-hardline-reformist-demands-113226534.html

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Samsung ATIV Q puts Windows and Android on a single tablet

Samsung today in London announced the ATIV Q tablet, sporting Windows and Android in a single platform. It's a dual-boot OS device that brings Windows 8 alongside the best of Android.

But the high-res display is just half of what makes this an intriguing device.

Be sure to check out our hands-on!

read more

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/K6PFnx8UIoc/story01.htm

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Toxic substance in Fukushima water

19 June 2013 Last updated at 05:32 ET

High levels of a toxic radioactive isotope have been found in groundwater at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant, its operator says.

Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) said tests showed Strontium-90 was present at 30 times the legal rate.

The radioactive isotope tritium has also been detected at elevated levels.

The plant, crippled by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, has recently seen a series of water leaks and power failures.

The tsunami knocked out cooling systems to the reactors, which melted down.

Water is now being pumped in to the reactors to cool them but this has left Tepco with the problem of how to safely store the contaminated water.

There have been several reports of leaks from storage tanks or pipes.

Continue reading the main story

Detecting increasing levels of the highly radioactive substance Strontium-90 indicates that Tepco is still struggling to contain the Fukushima reactors.

Water continues to be a massive problem as the company is running out of storage space for the large amounts of the liquid they use every day as to cool the plant.

On top of that around 400 tonnes of groundwater flow into the reactor buildings every day. They have even dug up 12 relief wells near the site in an effort to halt the ingress.

As to the high levels of Strontium-90 detected, it has a half life of 29 years. This means that in humans it can continue to irradiate them for many years. It can be ingested from food or water and tends to concentrate in the bones and is believed to cause cancer there.

In animal studies, exposure to Strontium-90 also caused harmful reproductive effects. These effects happened when animals were exposed to doses more than a million times higher than typical exposure levels for humans.

Sea samples

Strontium-90 is formed as a by-product of nuclear fission. Tests showed that levels of strontium in groundwater at the Fukushima plant had increased 100-fold since the end of last year, Toshihiko Fukuda, a Tepco official, told media.

Mr Fukuda said Tepco believed the elevated levels originated from a leak of contaminated water in April 2011 from one of the reactors.

"As it's near where the leak from reactor number two happened and taking into account the situation at the time, we believe that water left over from that time is the highest possibility," he said.

Tritium, used in glow-in-the-dark watches, was found at eight times the allowable level.

Mr Fukuda said that samples from the sea showed no rise in either substance and the company believed the groundwater was being contained by concrete foundations.

"When we look at the impact that is having on the ocean, the levels seem to be within past trends and so we don't believe it's having an effect."

But the discovery is another setback for Tepco's plan to pump groundwater from the plant into the sea, correspondents say.

Nuclear chemist Michiaki Furukawa told Reuters news agency that Tepco should not release contaminated water into the ocean.

"They have to keep it somewhere so that it can't escape outside the plant," he said. "Tepco needs to carry out more regular testing in specific areas and disclose everything they find."

The Fukushima power plant has faced a series of problems this year. Early this month, radioactive water was found leaking from a storage tank.

The plant also suffered three power failures in five weeks earlier this year. A leak of radioactive water from one of the plant's underground storage pools was also detected in April.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-22964089#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

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Knork ? A friend for your spork

You’ve no doubt heard of a spork which looks like a spoon with short fork-like tines on the edge. Campers and EDC fans like them because they combine two tools into one. Enter the Knork?which?looks like an ordinary stainless steel fork till you take a closer look. The outside tines have been beveled without being [...]

Source: http://the-gadgeteer.com/2013/06/16/knork-a-friend-for-your-spork/

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Planets are basically gigantic cosmic dust bunnies, new study says

A new study suggests that planets form from dust that gathers in vortexes in the disk of dust and gas surrounding a young star.

By Pete Spotts,?Staff writer / June 6, 2013

This image shows planet Saturn taken Dec. 2010 by the Cassini camera showing a storm, upper center. Planets form from dust that gathers in vortexes in the disk of dust and gas surrounding a young star, a new study suggests.

NASA/AP/File

Enlarge

Every home has nooks and crannies where dust bunnies form and grow. The same may hold true for budding solar systems, which might not form planets without cosmic dust traps, according to a new study.

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The research suggests that vortexes in the extended disks of dust and gas surrounding young suns can corral tiny dust grains long enough to allow them to coalesce into objects big enough to stand a good chance of surviving to planethood.

If the work holds up to further scrutiny, it could help astrophysicists solve a longstanding planet-formation puzzle, according to the team reporting its results in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

Current models of planet formation generally build rocky planets, or the rocky cores of gas giants, by accreting material from a protoplanetary disk's inventory of gas and dust grains. These grains initially are less than a millionth of a meter wide. Over a span of about 10 million years, a disk's typical lifetime, such tiny particles eventually gather themselves into objects with up to 10 times Earth's mass, the researchers say.

The problem? Once the grains reach size scales ranging from a millimeter to a meter across, they tend to collide and break up. Or they experience aerodynamic drag from the material in the disk, slow down, and begin to fall in toward their host star, the researchers explain. Objects about 1 meter across tend to get drawn to the star if they are within 1 astronomical unit (AU), or about 93 million miles, from their star. At 50 AU, grains as small as 1 millimeter begin their death spiral.

Without something to stall that migration, accretion stalls and no planets form. Could large "dust traps," which theorists had proposed earlier, be an answer?

Nienke van der Marel, a PhD candidate in astronomy at the Leiden Observatory at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, and colleagues turned to a well-studied protoplanetary disk to see what light it might shed on the question.

The disk surrounds a young star known as Oph ITS 48, about 390 light-years from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus.

Past observations of the disk revealed a relatively dust-free sector attributed to a large planet sweeping up material in its path. Ms. van der Marel and her colleagues were interested in the distribution of millimeter-scale dust in the disk ? the low end of the problematic size range.

Other observations at millimeter wavelengths hinted at the presence of a concentrated blob of millimeter-scale particles gathered in one region of the disk. But the observations weren't detailed enough to know "if it was real or an artifact," says Til Birnstiel, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and a member of the team reporting the results.

So the team used the new Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) high in Chile's Atacama Desert to make additional, more-detailed observations. The data revealed a crescent-shaped concentration of millimeter-scale dust some at a distance of between 45 and 80 AU from Oph ITS 48. This stood in stark contrast to the micron-sized grains and to gas, which were far more uniformly distributed throughout the disk.

Running a "dust trap" model to see if it could explain the observations, the team found that it could. The researchers propose that the planet clearing out the dust-free gap in the inner ring is generating turbulence in the gas along the edges of its path. On the outside edge, this turbulent "wake" is herding the millimeter-scale grains into a vast vortex-like dust trap. They can't break through it to continue their inward migration.

It takes only about a 10 percent change in the density of the gas in a vortex to set up a 100-fold increase in the density of the dust, according to the researchers. A relatively small vortex may last for only about 100,000 years, but the dust concentrations themselves can linger for millions of years before dispersing completely. A vortex as immense as the one at Oph ITA 48 could last for quite a while.

Mr. Birnstiel cautions that the calculations the team performed were relatively crude ? in effect to see if the "dust trap" model had the potential to explain what the team observed. At Oph ITS 48, the dust trap is so far removed from the star than anything forming inside it will be more akin to the planetesimal-scale objects in the Kuiper Belt in our solar system than to planets, he says.

In addition, the observations of Oph ITS 48 raise something of a chicken-and-egg conundrum, suggests Philip Armitage, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dust traps don't solve the original planet-formation problem if it takes a planet plowing through a protoplanetary disk to generate them, he writes in a commentary on the results, also appearing in Friday's issue of Science.

For now, the presence of a planet in the system is the most straightforward explanation for generating the vortexes that would trap dust, Birnstiel says. But it may not be the only one.

"It could be some kind of internal mechanism which is at work" in the disk, he says. Whatever it is, "you would need something that is persistent, that keeps perturbing the disk all the time."

As the final dish-shaped antennas at ALMA are brought on line, the team hopes to make more detailed observations if the inner disk at Oph ITS 48 as well as additional observations of its outer disk. These will provide important tests for the dust-trap hypothesis, Birnsteil says.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/-ZBPkL0Meqo/Planets-are-basically-gigantic-cosmic-dust-bunnies-new-study-says

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NWS: Number of Midwest, Plains tornadoes unclear

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) ? National Weather Service meteorologists say it's unclear how many tornadoes touched down Friday evening.

Dozens of tornado warnings were issued across a wide swath of the Midwest, including Oklahoma and Missouri, as a large storm front moved through the region. Nine died and dozens were injured.

Weather service meteorologists said Saturday that crews have to assess the damage before determining whether it was caused by tornadoes or severe thunderstorms. Cars were toppled on an interstate in the Oklahoma City area, and aerial images showed damaged to homes and businesses in the suburbs of St. Louis.

They said they expected to have an estimate by Saturday afternoon.

A cold front will move through the Plains and Midwest today, lessening the chances for severe weather.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nws-number-midwest-plains-tornadoes-unclear-133458553.html

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