Blizzard Drops 2 Feet of Snow on Northeast

A behemoth storm packing hurricane-force wind gusts and blizzard conditions swept through the Northeast on Saturday, dumping more than 2 feet of snow on New England and knocking out power to 650,000 homes and businesses.

More than 28 inches of snow had fallen on central Connecticut by early Saturday, and areas of southeastern Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire notched 2 feet or more of snow — with more falling. Airlines scratched more than 5,300 flights through Saturday, and New York City's three major airports and Boston's Logan Airport closed.

The wind-whipped snowstorm mercifully arrived at the start of a weekend, which meant fewer cars on the road and extra time for sanitation crews to clear the mess before commuters in the New York-to-Boston region of roughly 25 million people have to go back to work. But it also could mean a weekend cooped up indoors.

For a group of stranded European business travelers, it meant making the best of downtime in a hotel restaurant Friday night in downtown Boston, where snow blew outside and drifted several inches deep on the sidewalks.

The six Santander bank employees found their flights back to Spain canceled, and they gave up on seeing the city or having dinner out.

AP Photo/Standard Times, Peter Pereira

Blizzard 2013: Boston Families Brace for Extreme Weather Watch Video

"We are not believing it," said Tommaso Memeghini, 29, an Italian who lives in Barcelona. "We were told it may be the biggest snowstorm in the last 20 years."

The National Weather Service says up to 3 feet of snow is expected in Boston, threatening the city's 2003 record of 27.6 inches. A wind gust of 76 mph was recorded at Logan Airport.

In heavily Catholic Boston, the archdiocese urged parishioners to be prudent about attending Sunday Mass and reminded them that, under church law, the obligation "does not apply when there is grave difficulty in fulfilling this obligation."

Halfway through what had been a mild winter across the Northeast, blizzard warnings were posted from parts of New Jersey to Maine. The National Weather Service said Boston could get close to 3 feet of snow by Saturday evening, while most of Rhode Island could receive more than 2 feet, most of it falling overnight Friday into Saturday. Connecticut was bracing for 2 feet, and New York City was expecting as much as 14 inches.

Early snowfall was blamed for a 19-car pileup in Cumberland, Maine, that caused minor injuries. In New York, hundreds of cars began getting stuck on the Long Island Expressway on Friday afternoon at the beginning of the snowstorm and dozens of motorists remained disabled early Saturday as police worked to free them.

About 650,000 customers in the Northeast lost power during the height of the snowstorm, most of them in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Plymouth, Mass., lost electricity and shut down Friday night during the storm. Authorities say there's no threat to public safety.

At least four deaths were being blamed on the storm, three in Canada and one in New York. In southern Ontario, an 80-year-old woman collapsed while shoveling her driveway and two men were killed in car crashes. In New York, a 74-year-old man died after being struck by a car in Poughkeepsie; the driver said she lost control in the snowy conditions, police said.

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Zoologger: 'It's a boy!' Monkey midwife delivers baby

Zoologger is our weekly column highlighting extraordinary animals – and occasionally other organisms – from around the world

Species: Rhinopithecus bieti
Habitat: Evergreen forests in an isolated mountainous area of south-west China

Humans aren't built for giving birth. Babies' heads are big to accommodate their big brains, but the mother's hips are small because they walk upright. As a result, birth takes hours and is extremely painful – and midwives almost always help out.

Other animals may find birth difficult, particularly if the babies have been gestating for a long time and have grown large. Nevertheless, most mammals have it easier than humans. Monkeys give birth in less than ten minutes.

So it is a surprise that female black snub-nosed monkeys may be assisted by "midwives" when they give birth. This behaviour has only been seen once in this species, but it suggests that it's not just human mothers that need help giving birth.

Black snub-nosed monkeys live in societies called bands, which can be over 400 strong. Each is divided into smaller groups of around 10 monkeys. Most groups contain one male and several females plus offspring, but there are also all-male groups.

Wen Xiao of Dali University in Yunnan, China, and colleagues have been observing black snub-nosed monkeys in the province for years, but had never seen one give birth: the monkeys normally deliver at night. Then on 18 March last year, they got lucky.

Rhododendron birth

A female monkey gave birth to her first infant within fifteen minutes late one morning. While sitting in a rhododendron tree, she began twisting her body and calling faintly. After 10 minutes she started screaming, and then another female climbed up the tree. She was an experienced mother, and sat beside the labouring female while the crown of the infant's head appeared. Once the head was fully exposed, the "midwife" pulled the baby out with both hands and ripped open the birth membranes.

Within a minute, the mother had reclaimed the infant from the midwife, severed the umbilical cord, and begun eating the placenta. A few minutes later, the midwife went back down to the forest floor to forage.

"This is a fairly rare observation," says Sarah Turner of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who was not involved in the Yunnan study. She says female monkeys often pull their babies out themselves, and the midwife may have adapted this behaviour. "It's hard to know what's going on in her head," says Turner, but it seems she was genuinely helping.

That could be because female black snub-nosed monkeys tend to stay in the group they were born in. As a result, the females in a group are likely to be closely related and to have strong social bonds. Animals often help their relatives because doing so preserves their own genes, a phenomenon called kin selection.

The juvenile females in the group watched the birth closely, and may have picked up a few tips. Turner says many primates remain with their groups while giving birth, giving juveniles a chance to learn.

Survival aid

In a human childbirth, having help on hand can be vitally important should things go wrong, Wen notes. "The assistance means the infant has a better chance of surviving," he says. There could be a similar benefit for monkeys aided by a midwife.

But primates, with the exception of humans, rarely help each other give birth. In one case, a male cottontop tamarin was seen pulling at his infant's shoulders until they emerged. Another report claims that a female capped langur was groomed by other females during birth, perhaps in an attempt to ease her distress.

While primates generally give birth unassisted, other creatures get more help. In possibly the cutest observation in all of natural history, male Djungarian hamsters regularly assist with deliveries, pulling infants out with their front paws and incisors.

Journal reference: Behavioural Processes, doi.org/kd9

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Berlusconi fraud trial delayed until after election

ROME: An Italian court on Friday ruled to postpone Silvio Berlusconi's appeal against a tax fraud conviction until after the election on February 24-25 following a request from lawyers for the scandal-tainted former premier.

Prosecutors will present their final arguments against the business tycoon at a hearing on March 1 and the final verdict is expected on March 23.

Berlusconi, who is running for a parliamentary seat in the vote, was convicted in October last year for fraud linked to his business empire Mediaset.

He was sentenced to one year prison and given a five-year ban from holding public office.

The sentence has been suspended pending his appeal.

Berlusconi's lawyers said their client planned to make a speech at the hearing on March 1.

The 76-year-old media tycoon and three-time prime minister, who has been a central figure in Italian politics for two decades, has been involved in dozens of court cases.

All previous convictions against him have either been overturned on appeal or the trials have expired under the statute of limitations.

Berlusconi is also a defendant in another trial for having sex with an underage prostitute and abusing the powers of his office when he was prime minister.

In both trials, Berlusconi's lawyers have argued the court cases should be suspended because he cannot attend hearings during the campaign.

A verdict in the sex trial is expected after the election.

-AFP/fl

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Apple releases raw support for Nikon D5200, Sony RX1

The Sony RX1 comes with an optional viewfinder, shown here perched atop the camera body in the flash hot shoe. The camera comes with a Carl Zeiss lens, too.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

With the release of its raw compatibility update 4.04, Apple software now can handle raw-format photos from two hot new cameras, the Nikon D5200 SLR and the high-end compact Sony RX1.

The D5200 is a relatively inexpensive SLR whose 24-megapixel sensor looks to have promisingly high performance -- the top rating for an APS-C-sized sensor, according to DxO Labs' DxOMark test results. The $2,800 RX1 has an even larger full-frame sensor, also with a 24-megapixel resolution, but its design uses a fixed 35mm lens.

Also supported in the Apple update is support for raw photos from Pentax's K-5 II and K-5 IIs, which also get high marks from the DxO sensor test.

Apple has been turning the crank faster to keep up with the constant stream of new cameras, with eight raw support updates in the last year. Each update means that software such as iPhoto and Aperture that rely on OS X's raw-image support can handle newer cameras' formats. Raw photos, available on higher-end cameras, offer higher image quality and more flexibility than JPEGs, but they also require some manual processing that makes them less convenient than JPEGs.

Also supported in the update are Leica's D-Lux 6, V-Lux 4, and X2, and Pentax's Q and K-30.

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Asteroid to Make Closest Flyby in History

Talk about too close for comfort. In a rare cosmic encounter, an asteroid will barnstorm Earth next week, missing our planet by a mere 17,200 miles (27,700 kilometers).

Designated 2012 DA14, the space rock is approximately 150 feet (45 meters) across, and astronomers are certain it will zip harmlessly past our planet on February 15—but not before making history. It will pass within the orbits of many communications satellites, making it the closest flyby on record. (Read about one of the largest asteroids to fly by Earth.)

"This is indeed a remarkably close approach for an asteroid this size," said Paul Chodas, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Near Earth Object (NEO) program office in Pasadena, California.

"We estimate that an asteroid of this size passes this close to the Earth only once every few decades."

The giant rock—half a football field wide—was first spotted by observers at the La Sagra Observatory in southern Spain a year ago, soon after it had just finished making a much more distant pass of the Earth at 2.6 million miles (4.3 million kilometers) away.

This time around however, on February15 at 2:24 pm EST, the asteroid will be passing uncomfortably close—ten times closer than the orbit of the moon—flying over the eastern Indian Ocean near Sumatra (map). (Watch: "Moon 101.")

Future Impact?

Chodas and his team have been keeping a close eye on the cosmic intruder, and orbital calculations of its trajectory show that there is no chance for impact.

But the researchers have not yet ruled out future chances of a collision. This is because asteroids of this size are too faint to be detected until they come quite close to the Earth, said Chodas.

"There is still a tiny chance that it might hit us on some future passage by the Earth; for example there is [a] 1-in-200,000 chance that it could hit us in the year 2080," he said.

"But even that tiny chance will probably go away within the week, as the asteroid's orbit gets tracked with greater and greater accuracy and we can eliminate that possibility."

Earth collision with an object of this size is expected to occur every 1,200 years on average, said Donald Yeomans, NEO program manager, at a NASA news conference this week.

DA14 has been getting closer and closer to Earth for quite a while—but this is the asteroid's closest approach in the past hundred years. And it probably won't get this close again for at least another century, added Yeomans.

While no Earth impact is possible next week, DA14 will pass 5,000 miles inside the ring of orbiting geosynchronous weather and communications satellites; so all eyes are watching the space rock's exact trajectory. (Learn about the history of satellites.)

"It's highly unlikely they will be threatened, but NASA is working with satellite providers, making them aware of the asteroid's pass," said Yeomans.

Packing a Punch

Experts say an impact from an object this size would have the explosive power of a few megatons of TNT, causing localized destruction—similar to what occurred in Siberia in 1908.

In what's known as the "Tunguska event," an asteroid is thought to have created an airburst explosion which flattened about 750 square miles (1,200 square kilometers) of a remote forested region in what is now northern Russia (map).

In comparison, an impact from an asteroid with a diameter of about half a mile (one kilometer) could temporarily change global climate and kill millions of people if it hit a populated area.

Timothy Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center at Cambridge, Massachusetts, said that while small objects like DA14 could hit Earth once a millennia or so, the largest and most destructive impacts have already been catalogued.

"Objects of the size that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs have all been discovered," said Spahr. (Learn about what really happened to the dinosaurs.)

A survey of nearly 9,500 near-Earth objects half a mile (one kilometer) in diameter is nearly complete. Asteroid hunters expect to complete nearly half of a survey of asteroids several hundred feet in diameter in the coming years.

"With the existing assets we have, discovering asteroids rapidly and routinely, I continue to expect the world to be safe from impacts in the future," added Spahr.

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Door-to-Door Search for Suspected Cop Killer

More than 100 police officers were going door-to-door and searching for new tracks in the snow in hopes of catching suspected cop-killer Christopher Dorner overnight in Big Bear Lake, Calif., before he strikes again, as laid out in his rambling online manifesto.

Police late Thursday night alerted the residents near Big Bear Lake that Dorner was still on the loose after finding his truck burning earlier in the day.

San Bernardino County Sheriff's spokeswoman Cindy Bachman said authorities can't say for certain that he's not in the area. More than half of the 400 homes in the area had been searched by police as of late Thursday. Police traveled in two-man teams.

Bachman urged people in the area not to answer the door, unless they know the person or see a law enforcement officer in uniform.

After discovering Dorner's burning truck near a Bear Mountain ski resort, police discovered tracks in the snow leading away from the vehicle. The truck has been taken to the San Bernardino County Sheriffs' crime lab.

Read More About Chris Dorner's Allegations Against the LAPD

Bachman would not comment on Dorner's motive for leaving the car or its contents, citing the ongoing investigation. Police are not aware of Dorner's having any ties to others in the area.

Former LAPD Officer Christopher Dorner Sought: 'Armed and Dangerous' Watch Video

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She added that the search in the area would continue as long as the weather cooperates. About three choppers were being used overnight, but weather conditions were deteriorating, according to Bachman.

"He could be anywhere at this point," said San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon, who is expected to address the media later this morning.

Dorner, 33, a former Los Angeles police officer and Navy reservist, is suspected of killing one police officer and injured two others Thursday morning in Riverside, Calif. He was also accused of killing two civilians Sunday. And he allegedly released an angry "manifesto" airing grievances against police and warning of coming violence toward cops.

In the manifesto Dorner published online, he threatened at least 12 people by name, along with their families.
"Your lack of ethics and conspiring to wrong a just individual are over. Suppressing the truth will leave to deadly consequences for you and your family," Dorner wrote in his manifesto.

One passage from the manifesto read, "I will bring unconventional and asymmetrical warfare to those in LAPD uniform whether on or off duty."

"I never had the opportunity to have a family of my own," it read. "I'm terminating yours."

Hours after the extensive manhunt dragged police to Big Bear Lake, CNN's Anderson Cooper said Dorner had sent him a package at his New York office that arrived Feb. 1, although Cooper said he never knew about the package until Thursday. It contained a DVD of court testimony, with a Post-It note signed by Dorner claiming, "I never lied! Here is my vindication."

PHOTOS: Former LAPD Officer Suspected in Shootings

It also contained a keepsake coin bearing the name of former Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton that came wrapped in duct tape, Cooper said. The duct tape bore the note, "Thanks, but no thanks Will Bratton."

Bratton told Cooper on his program, "Anderson Cooper 360," that he believed he gave Dorner the coin as he was headed overseas for the Navy, Bratton's practice when officers got deployed abroad. Though a picture has surfaced of Bratton, in uniform, and Dorner, in fatigues, shaking hands, Bratton told Cooper he didn't recall Dorner or the meeting.

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Widespread high-tech doping blights Australian sport

Aussie rules need a rethink. Scientists and clinicians are in the crosshairs of Australia's top crime fighters as the sports-mad country tries to confront widespread doping.

After a year-long investigation, the Australian Crime Commission (ACC) has just released a 44-page report summarising its findings. It notes that entire teams have been doping with the assistance of top sports scientists and doctors. No teams, support staff or individual sports have been publicly singled out yet, although the CEOs of several major sports governing bodies have promised to cooperate with the relevant agencies.

"This is the blackest day in Australian sport," Richard Ings, the former head of the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority (ASADA), told ABC television.

The ACC report warns that "as professional sports become increasingly complex and reliant on sports scientists and other individuals with specialist skill sets, these individuals will pose a threat to the integrity of professional sport in Australia".

It notes that with the ever-increasing focus on sports science, "remaining competitive at the elite level is now dependent on access to the best sports scientists and use of the latest technology". As a result, it says, sports scientists have gained increasing influence in sporting clubs, and are "pushing legal and regulatory boundaries in relation to sport supplementation programs and medical treatments given to players".

Widespread drug use

The report says there is widespread use of a number of drugs including growth hormone releasing hexapeptide (GHRP), across the major codes. It says Google searches for GHRP are more common in Australia than in the US or UK.

The report also outlines the use of "a range of substances that have [from] limited to no history of use in humans", including Actovegin, which is an extract of calf blood thought to increase muscle absorption of glucose and oxygen. It notes these substances are not prohibited, and that their impact on the health of players is unknown.

Sports economist Ross Booth told New Scientist that the role of sports science in team sports has grown partly because many sports governing bodies impose caps on the amount clubs can pay players. "Some teams have a lot more revenue than others but they can't buy the players," he says. "Where a team or sport gets the edge is spending on sport science."

With that emphasis, the risk of cheating goes up. "You push the boundaries, as close as you can get, and sometimes people go over them either accidentally or deliberately."

He says some people have suggested putting a cap on spending on sports science, but that will be difficult. "Down that path you get to a completely centralised thing where each club has the same funding. There would be resistance to that."

Acknowledging that the fight against doping has become more about intelligence and police work than about testing, the government has introduced a bill into parliament that will give the state-run ASADA police-like powers, with the ability to compel suspects to cooperate.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

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WP's call to freeze foreign manpower growth will hurt S'poreans: Tan Chuan-Jin

SINGAPORE: Acting Manpower Minister Tan Chuan-Jin has said that the opposition Workers' Party's proposal for a zero-foreign manpower growth in this decade, when put in practice, will hurt Singaporeans.

Speaking in Parliament on Thursday on the Population White Paper, Mr Tan noted that in fact, the strategies outlined in the paper has opted for slower growth and a significant reduction in the foreign labour force numbers.

He noted Singapore cannot continue on the same growth trajectory as before but what it needs to decide on is the pace of growth that will bring benefits to citizens.

And in achieving this, he said the country will need to transit carefully.

Mr Tan said the Workers' Party's decision to freeze the foreign labour force growth rate immediately is an "alarming" one.

He also asked for details on how the opposition party proposes to keep the foreign workforce growth rate at 1 per cent for the next decade, especially when there are limits to how much the resident labour force participation rate can grow, with an ageing population.

Mr Tan also rejected the Workers' Party's proposal that the government could dip into the country's reserves to help fund the productivity efforts of businesses.

He said the government needs to be careful when dealing with the reserves and that this "is not a rainy day".

"Singaporeans have also indicated a desire to slow down because they feel that pace of growth, because we have crossed that physical and social threshold. We cannot continue on as before. We can't.

"And we are also at a stage, from a profile perspective, different stage of economic development. This is where we need to change in terms of the direction we are going. So the White Paper is the product of this desire to get it right and chart the course for the future," Mr Tan said.

- CNA/ck

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Alcatel-Lucent CEO Ben Verwaayen stepping down

Alcatel-Lucent CEO Ben Verwaayen.

(Credit:
Alcatel-Lucent)

Alcatel-Lucent announced today that Ben Verwaayen is resigning after serving four years as the Franco-American network equipment maker.

The imminent resignation of Verwaayen, who will stay on while the company's board searches for a replacement, was previously reported by the Wall Street Journal.

"Alcatel-Lucent has been an enormous part of my life," Verwaayen said in a company statement. "It was therefore a difficult decision to not seek a further term, but it was clear to me that now is an appropriate moment for the Board to seek fresh leadership to take the company forward."

Verwaayen, the former head of BT Group PLC, was tapped in September 2008 to be chief executive in a bid to turn around the fortunes of the company, which had lost more than half its value since the former rivals started operating as a single entity in December 2006.

The Paris-based telecommunications equipment maker soon embarked on a significant restructuring as it tried to position itself to dominate telecom infrastructure in a post-recession world. But the past six years have been tough on the networking-equipment sector, particularly for the combined company, which has struggled to compete with the likes of Sweden's Ericsson and Chinese manufacturers such as Huawei.

When the company reveals its 2012 financial results later today, analysts expect a decline in quarterly operating income of more than $1 billion -- its seventh consecutive year of negative cash flow, according to the Journal.

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Humans Swap DNA More Readily Than They Swap Stories

Jane J. Lee

Once upon a time, someone in 14th-century Europe told a tale of two girls—a kind one who was rewarded for her manners and willingness to work hard, and an unkind girl who was punished for her greed and selfishness.

This version was part of a long line of variations that eventually spread throughout Europe, finding their way into the Brothers Grimm fairytales as Frau Holle, and even into Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. (Watch a video of the Frau Holle fairytale.)

In a new study, evolutionary psychologist Quentin Atkinson is using the popular tale of the kind and unkind girls to study how human culture differs within and between groups, and how easily the story moved from one group to another.

Atkinson, of the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and his co-authors employed tools normally used to study genetic variation within a species, such as people, to look at variations in this folktale throughout Europe.

The researchers found that there were significant differences in the folktale between ethnolinguistic groups—or groups bound together by language and ethnicity. From this, the scientists concluded that it's much harder for cultural information to move between groups than it is for genes.

The study, published February 5 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found that about 9 percent of the variation in the tale of the two girls occurred between ethnolinguistic groups. Previous studies looking at the genetic diversity across groups in Europe found levels of variation less than one percent.

For example, there's a part of the story in which the girls meet a witch who asks them to perform some chores. In different renditions of the tale, the meeting took place by a river, at the bottom of a well, or in a cave. Other versions had the girls meeting with three old men or the Virgin Mary, said Atkinson.

Conformity

Researchers have viewed human culture through the lens of genetics for decades, said Atkinson. "It's a fair comparison in the sense that it's just variation across human groups."

But unlike genes, which move into a population relatively easily and can propagate randomly, it's harder for new ideas to take hold in a group, he said. Even if a tale can bridge the "ethnolinguistic boundary," there are still forces that might work against a new cultural variation that wouldn't necessarily affect genes.

"Humans don't copy the ideas they hear randomly," Atkinson said. "We don't just choose ... the first story we hear and pass it on.

"We show what's called a conformist bias—we'll tend to aggregate across what we think everyone else in the population is doing," he explained. If someone comes along and tells a story a little differently, most likely, people will ignore those differences and tell the story like everyone else is telling it.

"That makes it more difficult for new ideas to come in," Atkinson said.

Cultural Boundaries

Atkinson and his colleagues found that if two versions of the folktale were found only six miles (ten kilometers) away from each other but came from different ethnolinguistic groups, such as the French and the Germans, then those versions were as different from each other as two versions taken from within the same group—say just the Germans—located 62 miles (100 kilometers) away from each other.

"To me, the take-home message is that cultural groups strongly constrain the flow of information, and this enables them to develop highly local cultural traditions and norms," said Mark Pagel, of the University of Reading in the U.K., who wasn't involved in the new study.

Pagel, who studies the evolution of human behavior, said by email that he views cultural groups almost like biological species. But these groups, which he calls "cultural survival vehicles," are more powerful in some ways than our genes.

That's because when immigrants from a particular cultural group move into a new one, they bring genetic diversity that, if the immigrants have children, get mixed around, changing the new population's gene pool. But the new population's culture doesn't necessarily change.

Atkinson plans to keep using the tools of the population-genetics trade to see if the patterns he found in the variations of the kind and unkind girls hold true for other folktale variants in Europe and around the world.

Humans do a lot of interesting things, Atkinson said. "[And] the most interesting things aren't coded in our DNA."

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