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Gore Authors New Global Warming Book PARK CITY, Utah, January 25, 2006 (ENS) - Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore will publish a new book about global warming in April entitled, "An Inconvenient Truth."The book, to be published by Rodale Books, was announced at the screening of the documentary film "An Inconvenient Truth" at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah on Tuesday. In the film, Gore guides audiences through indisputable evidence of the environmental impact of global warming. Rodale Books President Tami Booth Corwin and Vice President and Executive Editor Leigh Haber acquired the book and audio rights in an agreement with Andrew Wylie of the Wylie Agency. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. In the book, Gore writes about global warming and shares his personal story about how the issue became of urgent importance to him. His 1992 book, entitled "Earth In The Balance," was critically praised and became a national bestseller, establishing him as a spokesperson on the issue. The subject has become increasingly vital to him since then. The film was directed by Davis Guggenheim and produced by Laurie David, Lawrence Bender and Scott Z. Burns, and was executive produced by Jeff Skoll and Davis Guggenheim for Participant Productions, producers of "Good Night and Good Luck" and "Syriana." "Former Vice President Gore has presented his views in speeches around the world to tens of thousands of people, and we expect tremendous interest in the book," said Corwin. "We are pleased to publish his views about global warming. His concern for the environment fits with our own concern for health and wellness around the world." Rodale will utilize its "Rodale 360" integrated marketing strategies to support the project across its multiple media platforms and distribution channels, including direct marketing to its extensive database of more than 25 million customers, and content placement in its magazines. The company publishes some of the best-known health and wellness lifestyle magazines, including Men's Health, Prevention, Women's Health, Runner's World, Bicycling, Backpacker and Organic Gardening, and is also the largest independent book publisher in America.
Delaware River Tanker Spill Cost $150 Million to Clean PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania, January 25, 2006 (ENS) - The U.S. Coast Guard has completed the investigation into the cause of the oil spill from the Greek tanker Athos I that occurred on the Delaware River on November 26, 2004.Coast Guard investigators concluded that the vessel hit a submerged anchor while maneuvering through Anchorage #9 enroute to its berth at the Citgo Asphalt Refining Facility in Paulsboro, New Jersey. The anchor punctured the vessel’s bottom plating in a ballast tank and a cargo tank, resulting in the release of nearly 264,000 gallons of crude oil. The cleanup of nearly 57 miles of shoreline in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware was finished just last month. More than 18,000 tons of oily solids were removed at a cost of more than $150 million. Following the incident, surveys of the river bottom in the vicinity of the incident were conducted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and commercial surveyors contracted by the vessel’s owner. The surveys revealed numerous submerged objects in the area, including a large concrete block and a pump casing. The vessel actually struck all three of these objects, but analysis of paint chips and the unique shape and dimensions of the hull damage revealed the anchor as the source of the puncture. "There was no evidence that any violation of applicable international rules, federal law or regulations contributed to this incident," said Capt. David Scott, Commander of Coast Guard Sector Delaware Bay. "The vessel came up river with a draft of 36 feet, 6 inches. Our investigator’s review of the vessel’s voyage management plan indicated that appropriate calculations were made to ensure adequate under keel clearance for the prevailing 40 foot channel depth." Coast Guard investigators were unable to determine the owner of the 18,000 pound anchor, nor establish how long it was submerged in Anchorage #9. "Evidence suggests the anchor may have been lodged in the vessel for a brief time," Scott said, "therefore we were not able to determine its precise location, nor its orientation before coming in contact with the vessel." Because bottom surveys conducted after the incident revealed numerous submerged objects in that area, the Coast Guard has recommended that navigation guidelines currently in effect for the Delaware River be reviewed. "In addition, we’ve also recommended that legislation be adopted that requires immediate reporting to the Coast Guard of any objects that have been lost or discarded into a navigable channel or anchorage that can impede safe navigation," said Scott. "We will continue to monitor the affected areas, and are prepared to take appropriate action in the event any residual Athos I related oil is detected in the future," Scott said. For further information please contact Sector Delaware Bay Public Affairs Officer, Lt. Rick Minnich, at 215-271-4862. The final investigation report can be accessed on the internet by going to: www.marineinvestigations.us - click on casualty reports - click on miscellaneous investigation reports.
Flu Virus Replication Pattern Revealed MADISON, Wisconsin, January 25, 2006 (ENS) - Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have solved a genetic puzzle for an influenza virus in a breakthrough that is expected to yield new antiviral drugs and better vaccine production.The new work, which is reported in the January 26 edition of the journal "Nature," is important as the biomedical community and governments worldwide develop strategies to cope with the prospect of an avian influenza pandemic. "We've found that the influenza virus has a specific mechanism that permits it to package its genetic materials" as it creates its infectious particles, says influenza researcher Yoshihiro Kawaoka, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine. Kawaoka is also a professor at the University of Tokyo. Viruses, including influenza viruses, depend on the cells of their hosts to survive. They infect cells and use them to help make more infectious particles, which are released from the infected cell and go on to infect other cells. Using a technique known as electron tomography, which allows scientists to generate three-dimensional images of microscopic organisms, Kawaoka and his colleagues, dissected a virus and its infectious particles to find out how the virus assembles and organizes the strands of RNA that carry its genes so it can leave one cell and go on to infect other cells. Virologists have long debated whether the RNA segments in flu viruses assembled at random into the virions or were somehow incorporated into the infectious particle in an organized way. Kawaoka found that the viruses assemble their infectious genetic elements in a systematic fashion. They are always arranged in a circle of seven surrounding another segment for a total of eight RNA fragments. "No one has identified this before, perhaps because no one has ever tried to make serial sections of the virus," Kawaoka said. Kawaoka and his team conducted the research using a long-studied influenza A virus, the family responsible for regular influenza outbreaks, including such medical calamities as the 1918 influenza pandemic. "We need to have more antivirals for influenza," said Kawaoka, "and as these segments get incorporated into the particle as a set, it suggests these elements could be a target for disruption. There must be a genetic element in each of the eight segments that allows them to interact." The research may be useful for developing vaccines for a range of diseases, including HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, Kawaoka says. The new work, according to Kawaoka, benefited from a critical observation made possible by the dissection of the virus and its virions. The virus particles, when observed as a cross section, always displayed the circle of seven RNA fragments surrounding another segment pattern. In addition to Kawaoka, authors of the "Nature" paper include Takeshi Noda, Hiroshi Sagara of the University of Tokyo; Albert Yen and Holland Cheng of the Karolinska Institute, Sweden; Ayato Takada of Japan's Science and Technology Agency; and Hiroshi Kida of Hokkaido University. The work was funded by the Japan Science and Technology Agency; the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology; the Japanese Ministry of Health Labor and Welfare; the Swedish Research Council; and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Hearing Granted on Proposed Nuclear Irradiator at Honolulu Airport HONOLULU, Hawaii, January 25, 2006 (ENS) - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board has granted a petition for a hearing on a proposal to locate a nuclear food irradiator at Honolulu International Airport.The petition was filed on October 3, 2005, by the public interest law firm Earthjustice on behalf on behalf of the community group Concerned Citizens of Honolulu. The petitioners are concerned that accidents and natural disasters might cause radioactive releases from the facility. The board will hold a hearing to determine whether Commission staff violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) when it refused to prepare an environmental impact statement or environmental assessment for the project. The board has not yet announced the hearing date. “It is great the board is going to hold the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s staff accountable for its refusal to conduct any environmental review for this project,” said Concerned Citizens member Bernie Young. “I may not be a nuclear physicist, but it’s only common sense to take a hard look at threats to the community’s safety and health before you let someone put a facility packed with radioactive material in the middle of urban Honolulu, near the ocean and military bases,” he said. Paina Hawaii, LLC has applied to build and operate an irradiator next to the Reef Runway to treat fruit and vegetables for fruit flies. The facility would contain up to one million curies of Cobalt-60. Noting the potential “consequences of siting an irradiator on the ocean’s edge at the Honolulu Airport, subject to the risks of aircraft crashes, tsunamis, and hurricanes,” the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board questioned the NRC staff’s failure to explain its refusal to perform any environmental review. At the hearing, Concerned Citizens will have the opportunity to present evidence that these risks triggered the NRC’s obligation to prepare a comprehensive environmental review of the proposal. “The board’s decision ensures that the serious threats the irradiator would pose to public health and safety and the environment will not be swept under the rug,” said Earthjustice attorney David Henkin. “The public deserves a thorough review of these threats, as well as a candid evaluation of alternate sites or technologies that could achieve the project’s goals with less risk," he said. "This is what the law requires and what we will continue to fight to secure.” NEPA requires each federal agency, including the Commission, that is considering approval of a project that might have a significant impact on the human environment to prepare either an environmental assessment or a more comprehensive environmental impact statement. The purpose of this review is to put on the table, for the deciding agency’s and the public’s view, a sufficiently detailed statement of environmental impacts and alternatives so as to permit informed decisionmaking. NEPA provides opportunities for the public to participate in the review process, to ensure the NRC does not overlook issues of concern to the community.
Air Force, Whole Foods Top EPA List of Green Power Buyers WASHINGTON, DC, January 25, 2006 (ENS) - The U.S. Air Force and Whole Foods Market lead the EPA's Green Power Top 25 list of companies, organizations and government agencies that have purchased the most renewable energy and are part of the EPA's Green Power Partnership. The Air Force purchases more than 1 million MWh annually for its bases across the country. The Air Force has held the No. 1 spot since the Green Power Top 25 list started in September 2004. Whole Foods Market leads all corporate purchasers. The company Whole Foods Market announced earlier this month that it has bought enough wind power to equal all of the electricity it uses. Whole Foods made the largest purchase of renewable energy credits (RECs) in the United States, buying more than 458 million kilowatt-hours of RECs from wind power facilities. That makes Whole Foods the only Fortune 500 company to offset 100 percent of its electricity use with RECs. RECs represent the environmental attributes of renewable power and are a convenient way for individuals and businesses to support renewable energy, particularly when their local utilities do not offer renewable power through a green power program. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency holds the number three spot, Johnson & Johnson is number four, while the U.S. Energy Department is number five. Starbucks is in sixth place, the World Bank holds seventh, and Safeway, Inc. is in eighth place. The U.S. General Services Administration (Region 2) and the financial services company HSBC North America round out the top ten. The EPA announced that Green Power Partners are now purchasing more than four million megawatt hours of renewable energy, an increase of nearly 100 percent since the end of 2004. The 2006 Top 25 green power purchasers are buying enough energy to power more than 300,000 homes a year, which is also comparable to removing the emissions of nearly 400,000 cars from the road annually, the agency said. More than half of the Top 25 EPA green power purchasers are comprised of U.S. corporations, a number that continues to increase every year. For more information on EPA's Top 25 list, visit: http://www.epa.gov/greenpower/partners/top25.htm
Scripps' Paul Dayton Awarded New Ecology Prize from Spain SAN DIEGO, California, January 25, 2006 (ENS) - Paul Dayton, a biological oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, will be the first recipient of a new international ecology prize awarded in honor of one of the field's founding fathers. The Autonomous Government of Catalonia in Spain presented Dayton with the Ramon Margalef Prize in Ecology and Environmental Sciences in a ceremony in Barcelona January 18. The prize includes a monetary award of 100,000 euros (US $121,000). A jury of scientists representing Catalonia, the European Union and the rest of the international ecology community chose Dayton for the award, citing a career of research milestones that have helped set the course for subsequent research within the entire field of ecology. The Catalan government created the prize to honor Ramon Margalef i Lopez, a renowned University of Barcelona researcher who died in May 2004. As a member of the Biological Oceanography Curricular Group within the Integrative Oceanography Division at Scripps, Dayton has focused his research on coastal, estuarine and Antarctic habitats over the course of a 35 year career at Scripps. In groundbreaking fieldwork on rocky shore habitats off the coast of Washington, he created an empirical means of understanding how major forces like competition and disturbances affect the spatial variability of marine organism communities. The results of his studies have become bedrock principles of ecology, Scripps said in a statement. Dayton is an expert on California nearshore habitats as well as Antarctic seafloor ecosystems. In addition he has spent much of his career documenting the environmental effects of overfishing and has performed seminal studies on the effects of climatic episodic events like El Nino on coastal habitats, especially kelp forests. "Paul Dayton is one of the last true naturalists, a scientist who thinks broadly, a poet of science in Margalef's terms. Paul knows how ecosystems function from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from coral reefs to kelp forests, from the Sierras to the desert," said Enric Sala, a marine biologist who serves as deputy director of the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at Scripps. He is a colleague of Dayton's and a former student of Margalef's. "We at Scripps are very fortunate to have as a colleague one of the most extraordinary ecologists worldwide," Sala said. Margalef helped to usher in an era that saw ecology become a distinct science. In the mid-1940s, he emerged from the Republican army into which he had been drafted during the Spanish civil war to launch groundbreaking studies of phytoplankton communities in lakes. From there, he went on to forge ecology as an independent field engaged in the study of biological systems. His 1974 work, Ecologia, went on to become the textbook of ecology through much of the Spanish-speaking world. "Some of his ideas developed in the 1950s are only now being understood and applied," noted Sala. "He was a poet-scientist, a naturalist, a generalist, a broad thinker, who created a phenomenal school and trained many world-class scientists." The prize adds to many honors bestowed upon Dayton over his career. He is the only person ever to have won both the George Mercer and William Cooper awards from the Ecological Society of America. He received the 2004 E.O. Wilson Naturalists Award from the American Society of Naturalists and a Scientific Diving Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy of Underwater Sciences in 2002. He has also served as a director of the Ocean Conservancy and the National Research Council Panel on Marine Protected Areas.
New Lakes Found Two Miles Beneath Antarctic Ice Sheet NEW YORK, New York, January 25, 2006 (ENS) - Lying beneath more than two miles of Antarctic ice, Lake Vostok may be the best known and largest subglacial lake in the world, but it is not alone there. Another neighboring lake, the size of the state of Rhode Island and yet another, slightly smaller lake, have been described for the first time by scientists from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a member of The Earth Institute at Columbia University.The researchers describe the size, depth and origin of Vostok's two largest neighbors in the February 2006 issue of "Geophysical Review Letters." The two ice-bound lakes are referred to as 90ºE and Sovetskaya for the longitude of one and the Russian research station coincidentally built above the other. The scientists' found that, as suspected with Lake Vostok, an exotic ecosystem may still be thriving in the icy waters 35 million years after being sealed off from the surface. Scientists have identified more than 145 other lakes trapped under the ice. Geophysicists Robin Bell and Michael Studinger of Lamont-Doherty combined data from ice-penetrating radar, gravity surveys, satellite images, laser altimetry and records of a Soviet Antarctic Expedition that traversed the lakes in 1958-1959 without detecting them. The shorelines of the lakes appeared in satellite images of the region as perturbations in the surface of the East Antarctic ice sheet. Because the ice is floating on the surface of the lakes, the ice sheet exhibits slight depressions over the lakes that appear in radar and laser elevations. Bell and Studinger, along with colleagues from the University of New Hampshire and NASA, report that the 90ºE Lake has a surface area of 2,000 km2, which is about the size of Rhode Island, and is second only to Lake Vostok's 14,000 km2 surface area. Sovetskaya Lake was calculated to be about 1,600 km2. Both are sealed beneath more than two miles of ice. The lake depths, estimated to be at least 900 meters, were calculated from gravity data taken during aerial surveys in 2000 and 2001. Because gravitational force is directly related to mass, a decrease in gravitational pull over the ice sheet corresponds to a decrease in mass beneath the ice. "Over the lakes, the pull of gravity is much weaker, so we know there must be a big hole down there," said Bell. Their depth, along with the fact that they are parallel to each other and Lake Vostok, indicate that the lake system is tectonic in origin, the authors conclude. Shallow lakes scooped out by glaciers or a meteorite impact can quickly fill with sediment, and thus are short lived. Lakes created by faulted blocks of the Earth's crust, however, are deeper and don't fill in as rapidly. Many of the smaller sub-glacial lakes scientists have identified so far are believed to be shallow "ephemeral" lakes that were suddenly sealed off by the ice. The combination of heat from below and a thick layer of insulating ice above keeps the water temperature at the top of 90ºE and Sovetskaya at a balmy –2 degrees Celsius, despite temperatures on the surface that can drop to –80 degrees Celsius in winter. Since the lakes are bounded by faults, Bell said it is likely the lakes receive flows of nutrients that could support unique ecosystems. Laser mapping of the ice sheet surface by NASA's Ice Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) revealed that this water-ice boundary, or ceiling, is tilted. "Since the surface is tilted, we know that the ice sheet changes thickness over the lake and that will drive circulation in the lake," said Bell. "This will provide mixing and distribute whatever nutrients are in the lake, which is an important component of subglacial ecosystems." This, along with the tectonic origin of the lakes, supports the idea that despite climate changes on the surface over the last 10 million to 35 million years, the volume of the lakes have remained constant, providing a stable, if inhospitable, environment that may harbor an ancient and alien ecosystem adapted to life beneath the ice sheet.
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