That Soldier Wooing You Over Facebook Probably Isn’t Real

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That Soldier Wooing You Over Facebook Probably Isn’t Real

Max Read — Is a handsome young soldier currently professing his love to you on Facebook? He might be real! But probably, he's not. Especially if he's asking you to send him money. The AP reports that the fake-Facebook-soldier (or whatever the snappy conman name is) is "becoming an all-too-common ruse," in one case costing a victim $25,000. It is not a particularly sophisticated ruse, however:

The impersonator using [Army Sgt. James] Hursey's photos portrayed himself as a soldier named "Sergent (sic) Mark Johnson." The fake followed the same steps every time: Send a friend request, immediately express undying love and affection, and ask for money. The fake's cover was blown, though: Janice Robinson, 53, of Orlando, Fla., knew something wasn't right when the man professed his love to her and signed every message with, "Johnson cares." She had begun talking to him thinking he was one of several people named Mark Johnson that she knew.

"Many scams originate in foreign countries," according to an Army spokesman, which explains the "Johnson cares" thing. But don't be lulled into a false sense of security just because your military beau speaks perfect English!

[AP] Read more at gawker.com

 

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Good News: Global Warming Can Be Cured by ‘Small Nuclear War’

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good news

Global Warming Can Be Cured by ‘Small Nuclear War’

Max Read — How can we fix global warming? (Assuming it's not a plot hatched by public employee unions to force sharia law on the U.S.) One solution, promoted egghead "scientists," would be to stop driving cars and focus on renewable energy sources. But new computer models suggest a much easier, and far more fun, solution: A nuclear war!

It doesn't even need to be a big nuclear war. A "small" nuclear war (India and Pakistan, I'm looking at you!), according to NASA researchers, "could spark 'unprecedented' global cooling." Now, of course, "widespread famine and disease would likely follow, experts speculate," but, hey, you can't make a global-cooling omelette without breaking a few widespread-famine eggs, right?

According to the fancy science computer models, we'd be talking an average drop of 2.25 degrees Fahrenheit (and as much as 7.2 degrees in extreme locations). The cooling would continue for at least ten years—and when it starts warming up again, who says we can't throw another little nuclear holocaust? Plus, listen to how fun it sounds:

"Examples similar to the crop failures and famines experienced following the Mount Tambora eruption in 1815 could be widespread and last several years," [research physical scientist Luke Oman] added. That Indonesian volcano ushered in "the year without summer," a time of famines and unrest. All these changes would also alter circulation patterns in the tropical atmosphere, reducing precipitation by 10 percent globally for one to four years, the scientists said.... In addition, researcher Michael Mills, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, found large decreases in the protective ozone layer, leading to much more ultraviolet radiation reaching Earth's surface and harming the environment and people. "The main message from our work," NASA's Oman said, "would be that even a regional nuclear conflict would have global consequences."

Global consequences... for good! Where do we sign up?

[NatGeo via Drudge, who helpfully places "global warming" between quotation marks] Read more at gawker.com

 

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Guy Finds Out Online Girlfriend Doesn’t Exist After Sending Her $200,000

Adrian Chen — Over the past two years a 48-year-old guy in Naperville, Illinois sent $200,000 to his online girlfriend's bank accounts in Nigeria, Malaysia and the U.S. When the guy contacted the police to report she'd been kidnapped in London, the officer revealed that he'd been scammed. Never send money to Nigeria. Read more at gawker.com

 

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Arizona State Senator Gets immunity In Domestic Violence Case

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Arizona State Senator Gets immunity In Domestic Violence Case

Adrian Chen — Republican Arizona state senator Scott Bundgaard avoided a night in jail because of a law which grants lawmakers immunity while the legislature is in session. He and his girlfriend, Aubry Ballard, got in a fight in their car on the side of the road after a "Dancing with the Stars" fundraiser last weekend. According to Bundgaard, Ballard got upset after accusing him of "inappropriately touching" his partner in the event. Cops showed up and found marks suggesting violence on both Bundgaard and Ballard, but only arrested Ballard. Bungaard got to use his official state legislature Get Out of Jail Free card.

This has got to be one of the craziest laws in the state of Arizona, which is known for many crazy laws! Why would they even have a law like this? Maybe it's some archaic frontier logic: "Ma'am, us legislators gotta break the law before we make the laws." (According to his campaign website, Bungaard is "endorsed by Sherriff Joe Arpaio," so this actually could be possible!) If I were an Arizona state legislator, I'd spend the majority of my time stealing packs of gum from gas stations, sticking my tongue out at the attendent while saying Neener neener neener. Whatchya gonna do about it? I got immunity, biyatch. Alas, this is why I will never be an Arizona state legislator. [CNN] Read more at gawker.com

 

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North Korea Threatens to Turn Seoul Into a ‘Sea of Flames’ (Again)

Adrian Chen — In advance of joint U.S.-South Korea military drills this week, North Korea has released a statement today threatening to 'mercilessly' attack both countries. But now they're just recycling their old threats:

It accused South Korea and the U.S. of plotting to topple the North's communist government. It said if provoked, North Korea would start a "full-scale" war, take "merciless counteraction" and turn Seoul into a "sea of flames."

Really? That old "sea of flames" chestnut, again? It was just a few months ago North Korea threatened to turn Seoul into a "sea of flames" if they didn't turn down the music they were blaring across the border in retaliation for the North sinking their Warship. It's like North Korea is just going through the motions of being unhinged. Time was, the whole world thrilled to hear what crazy shit North Korea had come up with now, but they've turned into the Stones absently playing "Sympathy for the Devil" for the 1,000,000th time.

[AP; Image via AP] Read more at gawker.com

 

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The Craigslist Congressman and the Crossdressing Prostitute

Remy Stern — Chris Lee's resignation from the House on Feb. 9 may be the quickest political downfall in history: It came just three hours after Gawker published a photo of Lee standing in the mirror shirtless, along with a story about how the married congressman dabbled in a little online dating on Craigslist.

Lee's sudden exit took many people by surprise. Hadn't other members of Congress admitted to worse than an unconsummated, PG-13 flirtation and managed to stay in office? It turns out Lee may have had good reason to step out of the spotlight so quickly: It wasn't just women that the Craigslist Congressman was hunting for on the Internet.

In the past two weeks, two D.C.-area transgender women contacted us, each with a separate story about exchanging emails with the ex-congressman. One sent us an ad that Lee allegedly posted on Craigslist in search of trans women; the other sent us a never-before-seen photo that she says Lee sent her after they started chatting by email. Taken together, they present a possible explanation to those who have wondered why such a tame "sex scandal" forced Lee's hand so quickly.

Fiona's Story

The first woman who reached out to us was a pre-op transgender woman from Arlington, Virginia who we'll call Fiona.

Fiona told us she replied to an ad that appeared in the "casual encounters" section of Craigslist in mid-January. She used Craigslist's "e-mail this posting to a friend" link to send the ad to herself, she explained, so even though the ad no longer appears on the site, she was able to forward us a copy:

Sexy Classy guy for passable TS/CD - m4t - 39 (Cap Hill) Date: 2011-01-14, 8:55PM EST New to area. Very fit classy, successful guy. 39, 6ft 190lbs, blond/blue. smooth hard body. Looking for a sexy ts/cd that i can spoil. I promise not to disappoint.

Craigslist personals are removed within seven days of posting, so there's no way to verify what the ad exactly looked like.

But Google does cache index pages on Craigslist, and we were able to confirm that an ad with precisely the same headline was posted on the evening of January 14, which is convincing evidence that the ad is genuine.

Revealingly, the headline and ad itself contain many elements from Lee's first known Craigslist flirtation, including the words "fit" and "classy." It dates to the same evening Lee exchanged emails with the woman we told you about two weeks ago. And it even featured Lee's infamous shirtless Blackberry picture, albeit cropped to hide Lee's face. Yes, that's right: a member of Congress posted a personal ad seeking transsexuals and crossdressers and even included a picture of himself, all without thinking twice, apparently.

Fiona's case was both similar to and utterly unlike Lee's first dalliance, the woman whose story we shared with you earlier this month. "It was quite interesting when I realized the other one was black and 34, because I am black and 34." Unlike the other subject of Lee's interest, however, Fiona was not born a woman.

When we spoke to Fiona by phone, she sounded entirely genuine. She told us that she'd corresponded with Lee by email several times and he told her that he'd dated a transsexual woman while "in college in California." (Lee went to business school at Chapman University in Orange, Calif.) Fiona said she found out who Lee was much the same way the other Craigslist correspondent did. "I copied and pasted his email into Facebook, and that's when his picture of him and his wife and his little boy showed up. Then I clicked on the link and realized he was a politician from New York, and I was like OMG."

She emailed him a few more times before telling him in an email on January 21 that she knew who he really was. He never replied, Fiona says.

Interestingly, it was late in the afternoon on Jan. 21 that Lee sent an email to his staff informing them that his Gmail account may have been hacked. A copy of the email was provided to Gawker by Lee's spokesman two weeks ago when we first started asking questions.

We pressed Fiona for more evidence of their online flirtation. She said she would retrieve her emails and forward them as soon as she had time. But as the days went by, Fiona grew increasingly nervous. She was worried about being unmasked. And after corresponding with us for more than a week, Fiona went silent.

Holly's Story

The other person who contacted us shortly after our story was published was a transvestite who lives and works in Washington, D.C. We'll call her Holly.

The first thing Holly sent us was a never-before-seen picture of Chris Lee's now-familiar torso and red Blackberry. She edited the picture to obscure the Congressman's face, however, and printed her email address over his chest. (We have covered up the address in the photo above.) If we wanted to publish the unedited image, Holly explained, we'd have to pay her for it.

It didn't take very long to determine that Holly was a prostitute. We found a profile for her on an escort website which featured the same email address that she'd used to contact us. When we asked about her chosen line of work, Holly confirmed it. She was a working girl, she explained, and a man using Lee's email address had responded to a "Trans for Men" ad she'd posted on Craigslist.

We exchanged emails with Holly for more than a week in an effort to get her to share the email exchanges she had with Lee as well as the photos he sent her, including an unedited version of the picture she sent us at the outset. But even after we agreed to pay her the amount she'd requested for the material, she had trouble deciding if she wanted to follow through. "I kinda feel sorry for him at the moment," she wrote in one of her last emails to us before disappearing much like Fiona.

But while we never had a chance to review her emails with Lee and the photos that Lee allegedly sent her, the one, obscured photo she did send clearly resembles the Craigslist Congressman. The man in the photo has the same physique and is standing in the same pose. And he's holding the same red Blackberry, although the photo was clearly taken in a different setting and he's wearing different pants.

How did this transvestite hooker get a picture of the shirtless Congressman? It's conceivable she misrepresented herself online to acquire the pictures, or that someone else sent them to her. But that wouldn't explain how two separate transwomen approached us with similar—but not identical—stories. And it wouldn't explain the Craiglist ad that was posted January, three weeks before news of Lee's Craigslist shenanigans first went public, which seems both authentic and written in Lee's style.

Lee has been in seclusion since images of him flexing his bicep in front of a bathroom mirror traveled across the world. He's yet to speak out publicly about the incident, except to say in his letter of resignation that he made "profound mistakes" and "regret[s] the harm that my actions have caused my family, my staff and my constituents."

But if Lee was using the Internet to meet up with transgender women, it now makes a lot more sense why he would have decided to resign so quickly: Lee may have thought if he quit the House immediately, he'd be able to avoid having his "secret" exposed and spare himself any further embarrassment. No such luck.

Previously

Married GOP Congressman Sent Sexy Pictures to Craigslist Babe Congressman Chris Lee Resigns Following Gawker Revelation Craigslist Congressman's Would-Be Lover Speaks Out Read more at gawker.com

 

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Religion’s role in politics discussed at symposium

Danny Summers When Air Force Academy Senior Staff Chaplain Col. Robert Bruno arrived at the base in 2009, he was surprised to discover that the crossroads between religion and politics was not being addressed among the 4,500 cadets and the faculty. So Bruno jumped at the chance to organize a panel for the academy’s 18th Annual National Character and Leadership Symposium. “I was the Joint Staff Chaplain at the Pentagon and this is an issue we began addressing back in 2006,” Bruno said. “We worked at the strategic level with the Army, Navy and Air Force. This can’t be ignored.”

Bruno facilitated the Religion, Respect and Global Security Panel Feb. 25 at Arnold Hall. More than 200 cadets were on hand, as well as other military personnel and a few local residents. The four-person panel included Dr. Chris Seiple, president for the institute for Global Engagement; Dr. Pauletta Otis, professor of security studies, Command and Staff College, U.S. Marine Corps University; Ms. Asra Nomani, author, women’s rights activist and Muslim; and Dr. Carlos Bertha, associate professor of philosophy at the academy and self-described atheist. The panel discussed their views on the implications of the religious-political dichotomy in relation to global security, the difference between tolerance and respect, the damage done by the perception of active disrespect, and how to navigate these challenging times. “It’s time to prepare our future officer corps to handle the issue of religion,” Bruno said. “We are here today to have a discussion that is robust and healthy, and with respect and civility.” The panel members spoke for about 30 minutes and then took questions from the audience. Most of what was said centered on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as issues involving radical Muslims and changes to the Koran, the respect of culture and laws in other countries, and the role Christians play. “We’re not a melting pot; we’re a salad bowl,” Seiple said. “I reject the idea of the clash of civilizations. That goes down the road of (political correctness). We have irreconcilable differences and we will just not tolerate each other, but we can respect each other.” Nomani spoke from a more personal standpoint and shared details about her upbringing in a “conservative Muslim Family” in West Virginia. She talked about the Koran and how its message spoke to her as a young girl and into her adulthood. However, she got a “personal wake-up call” with the events of Sept. 11, 2001. “I found a different Koran,” she said. “It was an interpretation of Islam that is being used to encourage and fuel the violence. And that saddens me. If we want to engage, we have to include the issues of religion and culture. Not in a Pollyanna way, but a pragmatic way.” The symposium finished on Friday and was themed “Strength Within … Leadership Throughout.” There were 33 speakers speaking on topics ranging from earning the Medal of Honor to the experience of wounded warriors to sports. “NCLS and our academic program — in fact, our entire Air Force Academy 4-year program — is really about learning and development,” said Brig. Gen. Dana Born, dean of faculty at the Air Force Academy in a statement. “There is a real strong link between NCLS and the academic program. We’re growing, we’re learning, we’re developing as future officers and citizens for our nation.” Read more at www.coloradocommunitynewspapers.com

 

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A case of athletes proboscis.

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Mosquito-Attacking Fungus Engineered to Block Malaria

By Ars Technica

By John Timmer, Ars Technica

Although public health efforts have eradicated some diseases and helped limit the impact of many others, malaria continues to present a massive public health issue. A large fraction of the world’s population lives in areas where the parasite poses a risk, and it kills a million people annually, most of them in the developing world.

The malarial parasite, Plasmodium, has proven tough to tackle for a variety of reasons. Once in a human, it manages to change the proteins that cover its surface often enough that our immune systems have trouble mounting a successful response. Unlike a bacteria or virus, the parasite is a eukaryote, just like humans, which means that it’s harder to find unique biochemical properties that would let us target it with drugs. Plasmodium has also been able to evolve resistance to the few drugs that we’ve been using to treat it. That evolution of resistance extends to its vectors, a few species of mosquitoes, which have also evolved resistance to many of the pesticides we have used to keep them in check.

All of that might seem to be enough to make tackling malaria seem like an intractable problem. But some researchers are reporting some success with a new approach to limiting its spread: engineering a mosquito parasite to attack it before it can reach humans.

The species of mosquitoes that transmit malaria are themselves vulnerable to parasites, including some forms of fungus. This has led to interest in using these fungi as a form of biological insecticide. But the fungus doesn’t always kill quickly enough, and if it did, it might end up facing the same sorts of problems that chemical insecticides do: the mosquitoes would simply evolve resistance to the fungus as well.

The solution the researchers arrived at is to use a form of fungus that doesn’t kill the mosquitoes until late in their lives, after they’ve had a chance to reproduce. This keeps them from evolving resistance, but wouldn’t keep them from spreading Plasmodium. To do that, they turned to a bit of genetic engineering, creating fungi that produce various proteins that attack the parasite.

The authors tried a variety of approaches. These parasites exit the mosquito through its salivary gland, so the authors created a modified protein that coated the glands, blocking Plasmodium’s attempts to latch on to them. They also used a fragment of an antibody that binds directly to Plasmodium’s, as well as a toxin present in scorpion venom that kills it.  They merged two of the approaches, fusing the venom protein to the one that coats the salivary gland.

To a degree, all of them worked. The fungus alone had a weak effect on the invasion of the salivary glands by Plasmodium, dropping it by 15 percent. But the engineered fungi dropped it by anywhere from 75 to 90 percent. Two of the combined approaches dropped it by 97 and 98 percent. Thus, in the presence of these modified parasites, Plasmodium had a hard time getting to where it could infect humans.

Depending on the precise timing of fungal infection, the authors estimate that it could reduce transmission by 75-90 percent if it reaches the mosquitoes within 11 days of their picking up the Plasmodium. And that’s a conservative estimate, given that this estimate was based simply on the presence or absence of the malarial parasite in the salivary glands. The levels in the fungus-infected animals were greatly reduced, which should limit transmission even further.

Although this shouldn’t select for resistant mosquitoes, it still has the potential to drive the evolution of Plasmodium that can resist the scorpion toxin. There are two reasons the authors think this might not be a huge problem. For one, the fungus can obviously express a number of toxins at the same time, which makes it much more difficult for Plasmodium to evolve a way around it. The other thing is that there are many proteins that could potentially be used to target it; this is especially appealing, given that an antibody fragment was one of the proteins used in this experiment, suggesting that it should be possible to create a large panel of interfering molecules.

The other nice thing about this approach is that this fungus (or its relatives) can attack other mosquito species, including the ones that spread Dengue fever. This is a very promising fungus.

The general approach holds promise as well, since we reported on another use of an engineered, disease-fighting pathogen already this month. There have been millions of years of evolution that help pathogens target specific species and tissues, something that we’re rarely able to do with drugs. If it’s possible to take advantage of that specificity, it can be a powerful tool.

Image: A mosquito drawing blood. (James Gathany/CDC)

Citation: “Development of Transgenic Fungi That Kill Human Malaria Parasites in Mosquitoes.” Weiguo Fang, Joel Vega-Rodríguez, Anil K. Ghosh, Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena, Angray Kang, and Raymond J. St. Leger.

Source: Ars Technica.

See Also: Malaria Jumped to Humans From Chimpanzees Malaria Gaining Resistance to Best Available Treatment Plant-Virus Tricks Teach Evolutionary Pest Management Diagnosing Parasite Infections With Dye and a Blacklight Green Mosquitoes Could Control Killer Disease DEET Mosquito Repellent Could Lose Its Bite Read more at www.wired.com

 

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How One Nuclear Skirmish Could Wreck the Planet

By Dave Mosher

Image: A nuclear bomb test. Nevada Division of Environmental Protection

WASHINGTON — Even a small nuclear exchange could ignite mega-firestorms and wreck the planet’s atmosphere.

New climatological simulations show 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs — relatively small warheads, compared to the arsenals military superpowers stow today — detonated by neighboring countries would destroy more than a quarter of the Earth’s ozone layer in about two years.

Regions closer to the poles would see even more precipitous drops in the protective gas, which absorbs harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. New York and Sydney, for example, would see declines rivaling the perpetual hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica. And it may take more than six years for the ozone layer to reach half of its former levels.

Researchers described the results during a panel Feb. 18 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, calling it “a real bummer” that such a localized nuclear war could bring the modern world to its knees.

“This is tremendously dangerous,” said environmental scientist Alan Robock of Rutgers University, one of the climate scientists presenting at the meeting. “The climate change would be unprecedented in human history, and you can imagine the world … would just shut down.”

To defuse the complexity involved in a nuclear climate catastrophe, Wired.com sat down with Michael Mills, an atmospheric chemist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who led some of the latest simulation efforts.

How Nukes Gobble Up Ozone When we talk about ozone, we’re talking about the odd oxygen family, which includes both ozone (O3) and atomic oxygen (O). Those two gases can interchange rapidly within hours. Ozone is produced naturally by the breakdown of molecules of oxygen, O2, which makes up 20 percent of the atmosphere. O2 breaks down from ultraviolet solar radiation and splits it into two molecules of O. Then the O, very quickly, runs into another O2 and forms O3. And the way O3 forms O again is by absorbing more UV light, so it’s actually more protective than O2. Ozone is always being created and destroyed by many reactions. Some of those are catalytic cycles that destroy ozone, and in those you have something like NO2 plus O to produce NO plus O2. In that case, you’ve gotten rid of a member of the odd oxygen family and converted it to O2. Well, then you’ve got an NO which can react with ozone and produce the NO2 back again and another O2. So the NO and NO2 can go back and forth and in the process one molecule can deplete thousands of molecules of ozone. It’s a similar process to chlorofluorocarbons, Those are the larger molecules that we’ve manufactured that don’t exist naturally. They break down into chlorine in the stratosphere, which has a powerful ozone-depleting ability. —Michael Mills

Wired.com: In your simulation, a war between India and Pakistan breaks out. Each country launches 50 nukes at their opponent’s cities. What happens after the first bomb goes off?

Michael Mills: The initial explosions ignite fires in the cities, and those fires would build up for hours. What you eventually get is a firestorm, something on the level we saw in World War II in cities like Dresden, in Tokyo, Hiroshima and so on.

Today we have larger cities than we did then — mega cities. And using 100 weapons on these different mega cities, like those in India and Pakistan, would cause these firestorms to build on themselves. They would create their own weather and start sucking air through bottom. People and objects would be sucked into buildings from the winds, basically burning everything in the city. It’ll burn concrete, the temperatures get so hot. It converts mega cities into black carbon smoke.

Atmospheric scientist Michael Mills of NCAR. Dave Mosher/Wired.com

Wired.com: I see — the firestorms push up the air, and ash, into the atmosphere?

Mills: Yeah. You sometimes see these firestorms in large forest fires in Canada, in Siberia. In those cases, you see a lot of this black carbon getting into the stratosphere, but not on the level we’re talking about in a nuclear exchange.

The primary cause of ozone loss is the heating of the stratosphere by that smoke. Temperatures initially increase by more than 100 degrees Celsius, and remain more than 30 degrees higher than normal for more than 3 years. The higher temperatures increase the rates of two reaction cycles that deplete ozone.

Wired.com: And the ozone layer is in the stratosphere, correct?

Mills: OK, so we live in the troposphere, which is about 8 kilometers [5 miles] thick at the poles, and 16 km [10 miles] at the equator.

At the top of the troposphere, you start to encounter the stratosphere. It’s defined by the presence of the ozone layer, with the densest ozone at the lowest part, then it tails off at the stratopause, where the stratosphere ends about 50 km [30 miles] up.

We have a lot of weather in the troposphere. That’s because energy is being absorbed at the Earth’s surface, so it’s warmest at the surface. As you go up in the atmosphere it gets colder. Well, that all turns around as you get to the ozone layer. It starts getting hotter because ozone is absorbing ultraviolet radiation, until you run out of ozone and it starts getting colder again. Then you’re at the mesosphere.

Wired.com: Where do the nukes come in? I mean, in eroding the ozone layer?

Mills: It’s not the explosions that do it, but the firestorms. Those push up gases that lead to oxides of nitrogen, which act like chlorofluorocarbons. But let’s back up a little.

There are two important elements that destroy ozone, or O3, which is made of three atoms of oxygen. One element involves oxides of nitrogen, including nitrogen dioxide, or NO2, which can be made from nitrous oxide, or N2O — laughing gas.

The other element is a self-destructive process that happens when ozone reacts with atomic oxygen, called O. When they react together, they form O2, which is the most common form of oxygen on the planet. This self-reaction is natural, but takes off the fastest in the first year after the nuclear war.

In years two, three and four, the NO2 builds up. It peaks in year two because the N2O, the stuff that’s abundant in the troposphere, rose so rapidly with the smoke that it’s pushed up into the stratosphere. There, it breaks down into the oxides like NO2, which deplete ozone.

Wired.com: So firestorms suck up the N2O, push it up into the stratosphere, and degrade the ozone layer. But where does this stuff come from?

Mills: N2O is among a wide class of what we call tracers that are emitted at the ground. It’s produced by bacterias in soil, and it’s been increasing due to human activities like nitrogen fertilizers used in farming. N2O is actually now the most significant human impact on the ozone, now that we’ve mostly taken care of CFCs.

Wired.com: You did similar computer simulations in the past few years and saw this ozone-depleting effect. What do the new simulations tell us?

Mills: Before, we couldn’t look at the ozone depletion’s effects on surface temperatures; we lacked a full ocean model that would respond realistically. The latest runs are ones I’ve done in the Community Earth System Model. It has an atmospheric model, a full-ocean model, full-land and sea-ice models, and even a glacier model.

We see significantly greater cooling than other studies, perhaps because of ozone loss . Instead of a globally averaged 1.3-degree–Celsius drop, which Robock’s atmospheric model produced, it’s more like 2 degrees. But we both see a 7 percent decrease in global average precipitation in both models. And in our model we see a much greater global average loss of ozone for many years, with even larger losses everywhere outside of the tropics.

I also gave this to my colleague Julia Lee-Taylor at NCAR. She calculated the UV indexes across the planet, and a lot of major cities and farming areas would be exposed to a UV index similar to the Himalayas, or the hole over the Antarctic. We’re starting to look at the response of sea ice and land ice in the model, and it seems to be heavily increasing in just a few years after the hypothetical war.

Massive global ozone loss predicted following regional nuclear conflict. Michael Mills/NCAR/NSF

Wired.com: What would all of this do to the planet, to civilization?

Mills: UV has big impacts on whole ecosystems. Plant height reduction, decreased shoot mass, reduction in foliage area. It can affect genetic stability of plants, increase susceptibility to attacks by insects and pathogens, and so on. It changes the whole competitive balance of plants and nutrients, and it can affect processes from which plants get their nitrogen.

Then there’s marine life, which depends heavily on phytoplankton. Phytoplankton are essential; they live in top layer of the ocean and they’re the plants of the ocean. They can go a little lower in the ocean if there’s UV, but then they can’t get as much sunlight and produce as much energy. As soon as you cut off plants in the ocean, the animals would die pretty quickly. You also get damage to larval development and reproduction in fish, shrimp, crabs and other animals. Amphibians are also very susceptible to UV.

A 16 percent ozone depletion could result in a 5 percent loss in phytoplankton, which could result in a 7 percent loss in fisheries and aquaculture. And in our model we see a much greater global average loss of ozone for many years; the global average hides a lot.

Wired.com: This doesn’t sound very good at all.

Mills: No, as we said it’s a real bummer. It’s pretty clear this would lead to a global nuclear famine.

You have the inability to grow crops due to severe, colder temperatures and also the severe increases in UV light. You have the loss of plants and proteins in the oceans, and that leads to widespread food shortages and famine (PDF).

The first three layers of the atmosphere. NOAA

Wired.com: There have been thousands of nuclear tests. Why hasn’t this already happened?

Mills: We’re not talking about direct impacts of the explosions themselves, but the firestorms that result when you detonate these in cities. Most tests were in deserts or atolls or space or underground.

Wired.com: When you talk nuclear reductions, you’re wading into political territory. As a scientist, how do you handle that?

Mills: The response to this from the policy community has been rather underwhelming. We know, from what both Gorbachev and Reagan have said in anecdotes, that these kinds of studies had a big impact on thinking at the time. People started realizing nuclear war was not something you can win. You’d just destroy the whole planet.

That led to some of the dramatic reductions we saw in the original START treaty, but we still have the ability to basically destroy the planet with one-tenth of 1 percent of the world’s current arsenals.

By the way, there’s nobody really funding these kinds of studies. All of us here are doing these on our own time. You can’t get grants to do this kind of research. It’s puzzling to me.

Wired.com: What would you like to see happen?

Mills: We’d all like to see much more dramatic reductions in the number of nuclear weapons we’re seeing proposed in the new START treaty, and the SORT treaty under the Bush administration. These just seem like refinements, in which the number of weapons is reduced, but each airplane counts as one weapon that can carry multiple bombs. So we might not be seeing any reductions.

Wired.com: Should nations have any nukes?

Mills: How many times do you need to explode a nuclear weapon in your enemy’s capital to deter them? I think just once. But given the consequences, I don’t think it’s reasonable to have any.

Ultraviolet radiation indexes before and after a simulated regional nuclear war, with compensation for black carbon (BC) soaking up some of the radiation. A level of 11 or higher is considered an extreme risk of harm from unprotected sun exposure. Julia Lee-Taylor/NCAR/NSF

See Also: 7 (Crazy) Civilian Uses for Nuclear Bombs ‘Regional’ Nuclear War Would Cause Worldwide Destruction Classified Recordings of First Fusion Bomb Test Found in Old Safe Google Maps Mashup Combines Your Address, Nuclear Blast Nukes Are Not the Best Way to Stop an Asteroid Read more at www.wired.com

 

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Creutzfeldt-Jakob and Mad Cow Disease: Brain-Wasting Prions Amass Before Dealing Deathblow

Amplify’d from www.wired.com

Brain-Wasting Prions Amass Before Dealing Deathblow

By Tina Hesman Saey, Science News

Infectious proteins that cause brain-wasting conditions like mad cow disease appear to build up in the brain long before initiating the cascade of deterioration that leads to dementia and death, a new study of mice finds.

The findings suggest that other factors besides the misshapen infectious proteins characteristic of prion diseases may control the lethality of the disease. If scientists can determine what those factors are, future treatments may be able to prevent the infectious protein diseases — which include mad cow disease, scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in people — from progressing to a fatal stage.

“We don’t know what’s going on here, but we do know there’s something interesting,” says John Collinge, director of the United Kingdom Medical Research Council Prion Unit in London, who headed the new study.

Findings reported by Collinge and his colleagues in the Feb. 24 Nature contradict the idea that infectious versions of a normal brain protein called PrP accumulate slowly, gradually twisting all of the healthy copies of the protein into a disease-causing form. Researchers have thought that the disease-causing prions slowly build up to toxic levels that spell the death of brain cells.

But the new study shows that the process is anything but gradual, and that infection and toxicity are independent stages of the disease. Prions quickly build up in the brains of mice over the course of a month or two, Collinge and his colleagues found, peaking at about 100 million infectious particles per brain.

That level remains constant for months with no evidence of disease.

“Whatever you do, it sort of stops at that level and remains there for the duration of the infection,” says Collinge.

Researchers had expected that if they increased the amount of the normal PrP protein in the mice’s brains, the number of infectious particles would increase as well. But instead, prion levels plateaued. No one knows what stops mice from making ever more infectious particles, but the researchers speculate that there may be some substance that puts a ceiling on the number of prions in the brain.

Although the number of infectious particles in the brain didn’t change, the length of the incubation period between the initial infection and the onset of disease was faster in mice that made more PrP in their brains. The result suggests that how fast an animal will get sick depends upon how much PrP is in the brain.

The lag time between prion buildup and disease suggests that infection is a separate process from toxicity. Collinge and his colleagues speculate that some other as-yet-unknown molecule or cellular process might be needed to make the switch between infectious and toxic prions.

“It’s provocative,” says Reed Wickner, a geneticist at the U.S. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, of the study. The idea that some other substance might be needed to convert the prion into a lethal form is “a reasonable suggestion, but there may be other explanations, too,” he says.

He speculates that number of prions in the brain may be limited, but the size of each particle is not. It could be that filaments of prion protein inside cells just keep getting bigger and bigger until they finally become lethal to the cell.

Collinge agrees that the size of the prion filament may matter, but says that the new research clearly shows that prions don’t directly kill brain cells. Another possibility is that the production of prions depletes some important factor from brain cells, he says. When that substance is used up, cells die.

He and his team are now trying to determine if the toxic form of the prion protein is biochemically distinct from the infectious form.

Image: A cow affected in 2003 by bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), a prion-based disease that degrades the nervous system. (Dr. Art Davis/CDC)

See Also: Airborne Prions Make for 100 Percent Lethal Whiff “Pig Brain Mist” Disease Mystery Concludes Swine Flu Ancestor Born on U.S. Factory Farms What Really Causes Mad Cow Disease? Violent Dreams May Precede Brain Disease Read more at www.wired.com

 

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