Syria: Orthodox church opens doors for Muslim and Christian refugees in Aleppo

Δημοσιεύτηκε στις 18 Αυγ 2016

An emergency relief centre was opened by the Saint Elias Orthodox Cathedral in Aleppo, Thursday, with the aim of providing shelter and humanitarian aid to Christian and Muslim refugees from the surroundings of war-torn Aleppo, in the face of the intensifying battles.

An estimated 4,000 families are currently being taken care of by the Aleppo Orthodox Church, with half of them reportedly being Muslim.

World's 'largest aircraft' gets off ground

The Airlander 10 hybrid airship prepares to land after its maiden flight at Cardington Airfield near Bedford on August 17, 2016 (AFP Photo/Justin Tallis)

London (AFP) - The world's "largest aircraft" embarked on its maiden flight on Wednesday, four days after a previous attempt was abandoned due to technical issues.

The Airlander 10 -- part plane, part airship -- took to the skies amid cheers and applause from crowds gathered at an airfield in Cardington, central England.

The successful flight comes 85 years after another airship -- the ill-fated R101 -- took off from the same airfield in October 1930 before crashing in France, killing 48 people and effectively ending the development of airships in Britain.

Originally developed for the US army as a surveillance aircraft, the 92-metre- (302 feet-) long Airlander 10, also has potential uses in the commercial sector, such as carrying cargo, according to makers Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV).

The firm, which describes the Airlander as the "largest aircraft currently flying", received a British government grant of 2.5 million pounds ($3.7 million, 2.9 million euros to develop the project.

The Airlander can fly at up to 4,880 metres (6,000 feet) and reach speeds of 148 kilometres per hour (92 miles per hour), according to HAV.

Filled with helium, it can stay airborne for more than two weeks unmanned and up to five days if manned.

Its first flight was delayed on Sunday due to a technical fault, which was resolved in time for the aircraft to take off in clear weather conditions for Wednesday's 30-minute flight.

HAV CEO Stephen McGlennan said the aircraft was cheaper and greener than helicopter technology.

"It's a great British innovation. It's a combination of an aircraft that has parts of normal fixed wing aircraft, it's got helicopter, it's got airship," he said.

A project to develop the aircraft for surveillance use by the US military was shelved due to budget cuts.

A geologist has found part of a lost ocean that existed long before the Atlantic

The suspected location of a slab of ancient buried seafloor. NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Earth isn't the steadfast planet we assume it to be. Its continent-size slabs constantly move, buckle, and vanish beneath each other over the millennia, all while hardly leaving a trace.

But geologist Roi Granot, a senior lecturer at Ben Gurion University in Israel, says he's discovered the most ancient slab of seafloor on Earth to date.

The supercontinent Pangea, shown with the borders of modern nations. The Tethys Sea is at center.Massimo Pietrobon/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

The roughly 60,000-square-mile piece of crust has been hiding below the eastern Mediterranean Sea for about 340 million years (give or take 30 million years).

That means it's from right around when Earth's landmasses came together to form the supercontinent Pangea, which later separated into the continents we recognize today.

It's also about 70% older than any other seafloors researchers know of, including those of the Atlantic and Indian oceans.

What's more, Granot thinks the ancient slab might be a remnant of Earth's long-lost Tethys Sea (or Ocean).

"[W]e don't have intact oceanic crust that old … It would mean that this ocean was formed while Pangea, the last supercontinent, was still in the making," Granot wrote in an email to Business Insider.

No one had spotted the slab before because it's buried under more than 8 miles of sediment, according to Granot's new study, published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

To test his hunch that the Mediterranean Sea was hiding something big, Granot conducted four research cruises from October 2012 through October 2014.

A crew towed three large sensors behind a boat, zigzagging across the sea during each trip to hunt for magnetic anomalies — the signatures of magnetic rocks locked in crust that was made by undersea volcanic ridges — buried deep beneath miles of ocean sediment.

The 310- to 370-million-year-old slab of seafloor is shaded in dark blue. Roi Granot/Nature Geoscience

A pattern of magnetic anomalies, Granot reasoned, might reveal the existence of an ancient block of seafloor crust.

And after 2 years of gathering data, his results revealed just that.

"I was shocked," said Granot, who was stuck on a 16-hour flight when he finished processing the data. "The picture was quite clear — I see oceanic crust! Since I had no one to share my new understanding, I had to walk back and forth in the airplane until [we] landed."

The findings could mean the Tethys Ocean formed about 50 million years before scientists thought.

"But we are not sure that it is really part of the Tethys Ocean. It could be that this oceanic crust is not related at all," Granot said, noting that it instead may be part of some other, unknown ocean bottom.

And aside from rewriting textbooks on plate tectonics, Granot says the discovery "could also help to understand heat flow in the eastern Mediterranean, which in turn will help to assess the potential of hydrocarbon [oil and gas reserves] in that region."

Other geologists will likely be working to confirm this finding, and Granot noted in the paper that the different tectonic possibilities that may have generated this discovery should all be tested in future studies.

Vehicle Accident in Greece

A speedboat and a tourist vessel have collided off the Greek island of Aegina, leaving at least three people dead and three others injured. Greece's coast guard is conducting a search-and-rescue operation after the collision involving a tourist boat which was transporting people from Aegina in the Saronic Gulf near Athens to a beach on the nearby deserted islet of Moni. There were believed to have been about 15 to 20 people onboard the tourist boat but it was unclear how many people were on the speedboat, the coast guard said. The agency said a number of people were rescued and it was focusing on finding survivors. Aegina's proximity to the Greek capital makes it a popular destination for Greeks and foreign tourists.

Take a look at the hovering F-35B through a high definition thermal imager

Aug 14 2016 - 

By David Cenciotti

A FLIR 380-HDc thermal imager has captured this cool footage of the F-35B during the display at the Farnborough International Air Show.

Last month we published a screenshot taken by an IR camera of a crime fighting helicopter that filmed an F-22 Raptor on the ground at RAF Fairford where the radar-evading 5th generation aircraft had deployed to take part in the Royal International Air Tattoo airshow.

The footage in this post shows the heat signature of another stealthy (and quite controversial) aircraft, the Lockheed Martin F-35B, the STOVL (Short Take Off Vertical Landing) of the Joint Strike Fighter.

Pretty cool, isn’t it?

The video was filmed by Star SAFIRE 380-HDc a compact, high performance, stabilized, HD imaging systems specifically engineered for helicopter.

According to FLIR, the manufacturer of the Star SAFIRE 380-HDc and a leader in such systems, the camera “provides an unmatched SWaP-C advantage for airborne applications that demand high performance ISR [Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance] in a light-weight, compact package. Specifically tailored to excel at long range performance under extreme rotary aircraft conditions.”

Needless to say, the IR signature of the F-35B during hovering is impressive.

The heat signature of a LO (Low Observability) aircraft is also what IRST (Infra Red Search and Track) sensors of a “legacy” unstealthy aircraft will seek during an aerial engagement against a stealth plane.

Image credit: screenshot from FLIR footage

Philippines: Five killed, 1000s evacuated as tornado and flooding strike Manila(video)

A concrete wall collapsed in Sta. Cruz, Manila on Saturday, leaving several residents dead and injured.The incident happened on Saturday morning along Doroteo Jose corner Oroquieta St., affecting more than 40 homes in the area.Johnny Yu, head of the Manila Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office (MDRRMO), said two people died while 15 others were injured in the accident.Philippine Red Cross Chairman Sen. Richard Gordon told CNN Philippines that a 14-year-old girl was among the two declared dead. He added one person is still in a coma.The injured residents are being treated in nearby hospitals."Hopefully there will be no other victims anymore, but we're still doing our best and hoping for the best," said Gordon. Gordon believes heavy rains and weak foundation of the homes caused the collapse.

Houthi rebels destroy Saudi Army in Najran

Houtis rebels destroy Saudi M60 Patton main battle tank and High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) in Najran province.

Saudi Arabia says that seven Saudi soldiers were killed during clashes with Yemeni forces — backed by fighters of Ansarullah movement — close to the kingdom’s southwestern border region of Najran.

Houthi fighters routinely clash with Saudi border guards both along the frontier and inside the Saudi territory.

About 10,000 people have been killed since the conflict in Yemen began in late 2014. Yemenis say most of those dead have been civilians killed in Saudi air strikes.

Promiscuous’ enzymes can compensate for disabled genes

Bacteria devise metabolic work-around when important biochemical reactions are thwarted

BY 

LAUREL HAMERS 

12:03PM, AUGUST 12, 2016

PINCH HITTERS  When E. coli (shown here) loses genes that make important enzymes, other enzymes will find a new way to do the same job. 

NIAID/FLICKR (CC BY 2.0)

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WASHINGTON — When bacteria lose genes needed to make enzymes for important chemical reactions, defeat isn’t inevitable. Sometimes other enzymes will take on new roles to patch together a work-around chain of reactions that does the job, biologist Shelley Copley reported August 4 at the 2nd American Society for Microbiology Conference on Experimental Microbial Evolution.

Bacteria that can adapt in this way are more likely to survive when living conditions change, passing along these new tricks to their descendants. So studying these biochemical gymnastics is helping scientists to understand how evolution works on a molecular level.

Working with different strains of Escherichia coli bacteria, Copley and colleagues deleted genes responsible for making crucial enzymes. The team then watched the microbes replicate for many generations to see how they worked around those limitations.

Most enzymes are highly specialized: They only work well to speed up one type of reaction, the way a key fits only one lock. But some enzymes are more like master keys — they can boost multiple reactions, though they tend to specialize in one. These so-called “promiscuous” enzymes can switch away from their specialty if conditions change.

Copley’s team found that new enzymes would sub in to replace the missing ones. For instance,E. coli missing an enzyme needed to make vitamin B6 synthesized the vitamin using a different set of enzymes. But surprisingly, the promiscuous enzymes didn’t end up directly triggering the same reaction as the enzymes they replaced. Instead, the replacement enzymes cobbled together a different (often longer) work-around series of reactions that ultimately achieved the same function.

“We were rerouting metabolism,” said Copley, of the University of Colorado Boulder.

By modifying the bacteria’s genes and forcing the microbes to survive with a more limited chemical toolkit, Copley’s work gives a more detailed look at the biochemistry underlying evolution, says biologist Gavin Sherlock of Stanford University, who was not involved in the research.

Betul Kacar, a synthetic biologist at Harvard University, says promiscuity could also be a window into the past, giving hints about enzymes’ previous roles earlier in evolutionary history. The role that an enzyme jumps in to play in a pinch could have once been its main job. “Trying to understand how novel pathways arise, what kind of mechanistic underlying forces shape those trajectories, is quite essential,” she says.

Bacteria can piece together all sorts of alternative routes in response to missing enzymes, depending on specific environmental conditions, Copley said. The ones that are most successful are more efficient —they have fewer steps, or they yield more of the desired reaction product.